Wednesday, May 24, 2017
"What me, be ordained?" said Louisa Groce, Ordained at 80 and still celebrating at 100...and counting...
Louisa Groce is the third interview. With Louisa not being ordained until 80 we had a lot to talk about as she was raised in a Missouri Synod Mission church in Philadelphia. I consciously audio and video taped the interview, and as the audio recorded malfunctioned. I still am able to use the audio track of the video. It is nearly an hour long and is unedited, She had a lot to share.https://soundcloud.com/tigerowl/louisagroce
Interview: Gary Costa, First Upsala/LTSP Program graduate.
Interview with Gary Costa is much more structured and focused on the leading questions. Gary is in New Jersey and the first Upsala/LTSP student, still serving in his first church 20+ years later https://soundcloud.com/tigerowl/rev-gary-costa
Interviews: Michael Guy, retired Navy medic, said to the Field Ed. Dir., "I take liturgy seriously," An introduction to Father Guy.
Interview with Michael Guy was the first and it is unedited. So you can see that I'm learning in the process as we meet and greet before beginning the questions that you have seen in previous documents. https://soundcloud.com/tigerowl/michael-guy-interview
Sunday, May 7, 2017
Thursday, December 22, 2016
Yes it's that time of year Again... Just Remember there are multiple religious holidays even on the days we do not celebrate...
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December Religious Holidays: It’s The Most Wonderfully Holy Time Of The Year
You might want to look at:
Sunday, October 23, 2016
Pentecost 23 C Sermon at Christ Lutheran - Upper Darby, PA
On my way to church I listen to "On Being" and today's offering of Tippet, E.J. Dionne and David Brooks I found exceptional. http://www.onbeing.org/…/david-brooks-and-ej-di…/9001/audio…
Then there is my sermon. https://soundcloud.com/tigerowl/pentecost-23c-2016
The text follows:
We may no
longer read headlines, but way too often we hear the phrase “Leading off in the
News”. Everyday KWY has the news on all
day, 24/7, NPR has news in the first 5 minutes of every hour. I would suspect that when a new and exciting
rabbi came to town, it would lead the news of the town crier. It would be the event that caused people to
lay down their work and make sure that they got to synagogue.
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News junky
that I am, over a period of time, I’ve come to love the Parables in Luke. These pointed short stories seem to capture
everyday life in the believing community in Palestine. Let’s do a bit of review
going back to chapter 15.
Welcome to
the Town Crier of the Villages that Jesus visited.
Chapter 15 of Luke, has three parables strung
back to back. In the first story to tax
collectors and sinners and the leaders of temple were all wondering about this
Jesus [ I guess that would include most of us. ] First he tells a story about a
man who has a lost sheep. Leaving 99
this shepherd leaves to find the lost one.
Finding it there is great joy, and an illusion to finding and saving
just one sinner. It raises an
interesting internal question, are we the lost who was saved or one of the 99
who awaited the return of the shepherd?
Either way there is joy.
A woman
knows that she has 10 coins, but in counting, she is one short. She cleans that house from top to bottom
before Halloween or Thanksgiving or Christmas, just to find the coin, and when
found again there is great rejoicing.
Then there
is the frustrated millennial. He knows
he’s not going to inherit the farm, so he asks for his portion of the estate,
gets it from his dad, lives on the border of the wild side and blow his inheritance. Suddenly living on the outside isn’t as
exciting as he thought. So swallowing his pride, working for his dad as an
employee is better than being left out in the cold. There is fatherly celebration upon his
return, a feast to celebrate the lost, now found. Yet this story has a hanging
edge, of a dutiful child for which there is no celebration but a sense of being
taken for granted. Can he had his status affirmed,,, and still love his
brother???
16. Then
there is the episode of the continuing story of BUSTED. Caught not keeping track of the assets of the
household, the manager is sacked. Not yet thrown out on his ear, a way is found
to soften his landing, but cutting the debts of his boss’s debtors. He is considered shrewd for preparing a soft
landing when he is thrown out. This is
not a lesson taught at the Wharton School of Business. The lesson to be learned is one cannot serve
God and Money, we can only handle one Master.
Jesus
follows with a series of warnings about the everyday living that people
do… People are known to justify public
actions… Pick a headline, attorney general asks for house arrest….Governor was
informed of tunnel closing…. Didn’t know the critical nature of a wall falling
in Downtown Philly… That still doesn’t
make it right in the sight of God… Scripture might call it detestable.
17. A couple of weeks ago, we found Jesus meeting
10 men outside a village. They couldn’t
go in… They had leprosy…Jesus did his thing… a prayer, a command that they go
see the priest in the temple.. While
walking they didn’t seem to notice that healing had begun to take place and by
the time the priests saw them, They were CLEAN.
ONE, ONE, a Samaritan noticed and went back to Jesus. Jesus always asks the hard questions…weren’t
there 10 you??? So Jesus, surprised that
only a foreigner returns to praise God, says to the Samaritan, go, Your
faith has made you whole.
18. Now last
week, the lesson featured a woman, a widow who sought justice from an
adversary. We are never informed about
the nature of the dispute, but it is apparent that the Judge ‘neither feared
God nor respected the people.’ [and that’s a quote from scripture.] The judge notes that he is has little choice
in in granting her judgement, or….. she will wear him out. Persistence sometimes is needed to get the
job done, even in the life a Child of God.
Then there
is today’s parable. Jesus notes that he
is telling this Story to and about … two people who were going to worship confident
that they were children of God [ I beg you not to turn your heads to see who is
sitting next to you, for my prayer is that we are not talking about anyone
sitting here today….] These two are
called the Pharisee and the tax collector. One is a strict keeper of religious
law and the other, a worker for the IRS of his time. [Given that starting point, as a seminary
professor I could be in serious trouble of being on the wrong side of the end
of this story…]
The Pharisee
had a firm grip on his religious assets.
Kneeling before the altar, He says out loud—“I am not like other people:
extortionists, unrighteous people, adulterers, or even like this tax
collector.” He has the audacity to even
point out his attributes: “I fast twice a week and I give a tenth of everything
I get.” Modesty does not seem to be a
part of his self-description.
While
scripture says that the tax collector “stood afar off and beat his breast”, I
can imagine him or her sitting about two thirds back next to the wall and
gazing out at the stained glass window and whispering almost under his
breath…God be merciful to me, sinner that I am.”
Scripture
indicates that the tax collector went home justified. The Pharisee???? Not so much… Jesus gives an adage to be a primary part of
the lesson for the day. “ For everyone
who exalts himself will be humbled, but he or she who humbles themselves will
be exalted.”
These
lessons are for us even today. These
lessons lift up for us the question of how and when and how often we read
scriptures. Do we take the bulletin home
and reread the lessons for this Sunday/this week?
It may not
be the easiest thing to place ourselves under our own investigation of who we
are and whose we are as children of God.
But I firmly believe that we reflect that relationship in each and every
step of our everyday life. That is both
the News of the Day and the Good News as well as the continual presence of God
in our lives, for remember This is our Father we are talking with and talking
about.
AMEN.
Wednesday, October 19, 2016
To Leilani, To Joel, To Jordyn, To Devon, and to all we have inadvertently failed:
Fifty years ago I was a student at Wittenberg University, a Lutheran University. We used to joke about it being a "small Christian College, for exceedingly small Christians." It formed me in many ways to be a minister in the Lutheran Church. It taught me well about "Having Light and Passing it on to Others."
There were Professors and Administrators who encouraged me, nurtured me, and in retrospect - protected me as a student from 1962-67 as an undergraduate and from 1967-71 as a graduate student. In many instances- not all - my fellow students were my protectors. I learned to navigate during a time of racial turmoil and the last draft-able war.
In many ways we thought that we had Overcome and that Some Day was now, with a few hiccups along the way. We raised our children to be in a world where Civil Rights were a right granted by law. Voting was guaranteed, equal opportunity was on the horizon. Social mobility was a real possibility. Our children were raised without the same warnings of foreboding that were routine in my childhood.
It is without suitable critique of Society and status in America that we sent our son off to the same institution from which my wife and I had graduated. In the intervening 26 years we ASS-U-ME -D that all would be right for our second generation college student. Schools change, people change, buildings look the same. My son's fellow students were his antagonists. The administrators sought witnesses to mete out justice. Pastoral care oblivious, while custodial staff were able to diagnose the problem as I gathered my transferring student's belongings, when they recognized me from my time on campus.
As I move into observing the third generation of Jordyn and Devon who bear my name and to Leilani, whose post catalyzed this post, I ask for your forgiveness. In the 60's we thought we gained our rights by law. What we gained was limited to behavioral modification. We did not achieve Attitudinal Adjustment. If anything, the attitudes have hardened and achieved more demonstrable, visual expression. Civility has become a lost art form. Words more severe than those uttered by Emmett Till, which caused his death, have become part of the news and a political campaign, and no longer hidden away, or choked down, but loudly proclaimed.
To my child, my grandchildren, to all of their cohorts, please accept my deep apologies for not being honest about the "progress" we thought we had made. For you living with portions of generations, who have assumed, learned, or been taught that equality is not for all. But that is the Law. That we can hold up to our fellow citizens. With partners, we will continually have to work on attitudes that truncate equality.
Rich Stewart
Fifty years ago I was a student at Wittenberg University, a Lutheran University. We used to joke about it being a "small Christian College, for exceedingly small Christians." It formed me in many ways to be a minister in the Lutheran Church. It taught me well about "Having Light and Passing it on to Others."
There were Professors and Administrators who encouraged me, nurtured me, and in retrospect - protected me as a student from 1962-67 as an undergraduate and from 1967-71 as a graduate student. In many instances- not all - my fellow students were my protectors. I learned to navigate during a time of racial turmoil and the last draft-able war.
In many ways we thought that we had Overcome and that Some Day was now, with a few hiccups along the way. We raised our children to be in a world where Civil Rights were a right granted by law. Voting was guaranteed, equal opportunity was on the horizon. Social mobility was a real possibility. Our children were raised without the same warnings of foreboding that were routine in my childhood.
It is without suitable critique of Society and status in America that we sent our son off to the same institution from which my wife and I had graduated. In the intervening 26 years we ASS-U-ME -D that all would be right for our second generation college student. Schools change, people change, buildings look the same. My son's fellow students were his antagonists. The administrators sought witnesses to mete out justice. Pastoral care oblivious, while custodial staff were able to diagnose the problem as I gathered my transferring student's belongings, when they recognized me from my time on campus.
As I move into observing the third generation of Jordyn and Devon who bear my name and to Leilani, whose post catalyzed this post, I ask for your forgiveness. In the 60's we thought we gained our rights by law. What we gained was limited to behavioral modification. We did not achieve Attitudinal Adjustment. If anything, the attitudes have hardened and achieved more demonstrable, visual expression. Civility has become a lost art form. Words more severe than those uttered by Emmett Till, which caused his death, have become part of the news and a political campaign, and no longer hidden away, or choked down, but loudly proclaimed.
To my child, my grandchildren, to all of their cohorts, please accept my deep apologies for not being honest about the "progress" we thought we had made. For you living with portions of generations, who have assumed, learned, or been taught that equality is not for all. But that is the Law. That we can hold up to our fellow citizens. With partners, we will continually have to work on attitudes that truncate equality.
Rich Stewart
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