Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Humbled again

Two in one day. Must be the enormous amounts of coffee.

So I'm sitting in a place called the Hardback Cafe. I'm working on a sermon about vision from one of my favorite passages, one of my favorite stories of scripture, Genesis 28. Jacob's Ladder. Jacob's vision. I'm tying strings together with what I've heard and possibly learned at a clergy retreat with what I believe my churches need to admit to themselves.

So there are two fairly young folks sitting next to me as I write this. I thought they were on what might pass as a date, as best I remember what that sounds like. They're drinking coffee and talking about what they like and don't like and their differences and their similarities and getting jobs and losing jobs and on and on as I write what will change the way church is viewed in modern America and, of course, save Christianity as we know it.

This goes on for 30 minutes or so as I pour my heart and a bit of blood into this sermon, and this woman's laugh begins to tear out my eardrums. It's like a poodle that has had its nails torn out by a slamming door, or something akin to that. It is taking skin off my fingers it is so irritating.

Does she not know that I'm reinventing Methodism as we have hoped it could become?

The speaker above my head is playing every Michael Jackson song ever recorded, when I pause from my exercise in greatness to notice the couple is playing with music on an I-pad.

And from the I-pad comes searing into my heart, Phillips, Craig and Dean. Mercy Came A Running, one of the first contemporary Christian songs I ever heard. I notice they're discussing being filled with the Spirit. They're talking about the need to know Jesus, really know Jesus. And Phillips, Craig and Dean are just a singing away.

And I store the greatest sermon ever written, once again knowing that God humbles the proud and sets them to thinking before they re-invent.

We need vision in our church. We desperately need vision in our church.

Perhaps we might find it in a coffee house, with teased hair, a tight shirt and a hoarse, nail-less poodle laugh.

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