Dear Caldwell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a 19th-century poet, philsoper and essayist, said: “What lies behind us and ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” (Emphasis mine.) What a great expression of what we have been thinking about as a church family in regard to the “advent of the Holy Spirit” …
Dear Caldwell, On Sunday, we at Caldwell opened the unofficial liturgical season of the Advent of the Holy Spirit. We declared that we would take two weeks leading up to Pentecost Sunday on June 8 to reflect on the role of the Holy Spirit in our lives and in the world around us. In worship …
Dear Caldwell, This Sunday, I am declaring the opening of a season within a season. We’re officially in the church season Eastertide, the season of celebrating the Easter truth of the Risen Christ leading to Pentecost, when we remember the arrival of the Holy Spirit. But we Presbyterians can give short shrift to the Holy …
Dear Caldwell, It has been said that the life of faith is one that is carried out between “memory and hope.” We live with the grateful memory of what God has begun in Christ and the hope of what God will bring to completion in Christ. But the adage about memory and hope applies to …
Dear Caldwell, Well, it’s been two weeks, three days since Easter Sunday. How’s your Easter holding up? It’s startling sometimes how life rushes on, making us feel as idmore time has passed that actually has. The azalea and magnolia blooms are gone. Tomorrow it’s supposed to be in the 90s. School is winding toward its …
Dear Caldwell, In these days after Easter, we walk, in a sense, with the disciples in a world trying to make sense of the meaning of an empty tomb and a claim that Christ is Risen. On the beach, on the road to Emmaus and, as Abong Fankam preached Sunday, behind locked doors, the disciples …
John 20:1-18 20Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. 2So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, ‘They have taken …
Dear Caldwell, In our Maundy Thursday service (thanks to SO MANY people who prepared and contributed), I was struck by one word that we heard in two pieces of music. It was “wondrous.” We sang it in “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” and we heard Allie Eidson’s haunting gift of a few verses of …
Dear Caldwell, Do you remember when we observed an “Upside-Down Advent” in 2012? We took time in that season leading to Christ’s birth to remind ourselves, over and over again, just how upside-down the appearance of the Messiah really was. The world was expecting a royal prince who would sit on a gilded throne and …
Dear Caldwell, Through the prophet Isaiah, God told the children of Israel to “seek the welfare of the city,” adding that “in its welfare you will find your own welfare.” This command to covenant community comes from the heart of God and is the foundation of God’s design for society. Today begins a new chapter …
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