Innerdriving

Ash Wednesday Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21 St. Matthias February 26, 2020 It is indeed a strange thing we do this day.   You come to Church and leave with a dirty forehead.   Normally people would point and make rather snide comments to their friends – except that today it is all OK.   Today is the only day when it is socially acceptable to have a dirty face.   Ash Wednesday is one of those REALLY OLD religious days.   It goes back to the first centuries and was a way that you got admitted OR re-admitted to the Church.   If you were a new convert, Ash Wednesday began your final period of preparation for Baptism on Easter Sunday morning.   On the other hand, IF you were a notorious sinner who had been excommunicated for all your notorious sins – well you came to the Ash Wednesday liturgy – confessed your sins – were covered in sack cloth and ashes – and then you would crawl through the streets begging forgiveness for your most grievous sins an...

Epiphany 6A Deuteronomy 30:15-20 St. Matthias 2/16/2020 I have recently discovered that my GPS does NOT believe that the shortest distance between 2 points is a straight line.   I was headed somewhere in Birmingham the other day and plugged in the address - and the voice INSIDE my phone - who has a British accent because I programmed it that way - told me to turn RIGHT when I knew that LEFT was the RIGHT way to go.   Where I was going was to the LEFT and it was the only way to get there and the only reason I had asked that woman with the British accent in my GPS on my phone was because I wasn’t sure about the cross streets near my destination.   But she told me to turn RIGHT and to get on Red Mountain Expressway and go I-59/20 to I-65 South with an exit on Green Springs Road.   And that meant going through the new Malfunction Junction and Heavens knows I didn’t want to do that.   It would take forever.   So, I turned LEFT – and thus began my adv...

Epiphany 5A Matthew 5:13-20 February 5, 2020 St. Matthias            This week I skied – DOWN a mountain – on the snow – and I went faster than I thought I probably should, and a couple of times almost didn’t stop when I thought the same thing.   We had this ski instructor whose name was Jim and he had been skiing down much larger mountains for many years.   For 3 days he tried to teach Stefanie, Josh, Phyllis and me how to do it.   We’d been skiing before.   We weren’t very good.   On the first day we skied on what they call the BUNNY slopes and we remembered things like how to go and stop and turn and get up when you fall down.   Skiing is backwards – you want to lean back when you are supposed to lean forward – lean left when everything feels like you should be leaning right – and at first it makes absolutely no sense to dig the edge of one ski into the snow while keeping the other one f...