Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on January 5, 2025, in celebration of Epiphany. Based on Matthew 2:1-12.
Today, I am preaching about Epiphany, which is technically tomorrow. Today is technically the twelfth day of Christmas. No, I don’t have twelve drummers drumming for us, as much as I’d like to.
But since it is still the season of Christmas, we can talk about Christmas carols and hymns. I bet everyone has a favorite carol, or at least a short list that they would choose from depending on their mood. Some carols have great tunes or great lyrics, and some have both. My personal favorite Christmas carol is “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” mostly because the bass line is fantastic. Unfortunately, there is no good way to make its language inclusive, so it hasn’t been included in hymnals in the last fifty years. Of the carols we still use in worship, my favorite is probably “Joy to the World.” It also has a pretty good bass line, and the lyrics and tune fit together nicely. When I was growing up, we used it as the closing hymn for our candlelight service on Christmas Eve, just as we do in this church, so there are those memories associated with it as well.
My mother’s favorite is “In the Bleak Midwinter,” which is #36 in the blue hymnals in the pews. It’s a setting by Gustav Holst of a poem by Christina Rossetti. The poetry is as beautiful as the melancholy tune. Especially the last verse:
What can I give Him, Poor as I am? If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb; If I were a wise man, I would do my part; Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.
Christina Rosetti, In the Bleak Midwinter
In today’s lesson, we read about the magi coming to visit baby Jesus. The magi were most likely members of a priestly caste in Persia, at least that’s where the word comes from. Magi studied the stars; at the time, there wasn’t a clear distinction between astronomy and astrology. They were well known for reading portents in the stars. So it would make sense that they would see something new in the heavens and interpret it as heralding a new king.
After they saw the sign, they set off on a long journey. If they were Persians who came from, say, Tehran, they had to travel perhaps 1100 miles. That’s a long way to go. Perhaps they were wealthy enough to travel on camels or horses, but a good portion of their retinue would have to walk. It would have taken them months. Such was their commitment to honoring a newborn king that they were willing to travel an enormous distance with valuable gifts that would have been targeted by bandits.
The gifts they brought are full of symbolism. Gold—well, that’s pretty obvious. If you’re visiting a king, you should give him money, I suppose. I have also read that gold is supposed to symbolize virtue. Perhaps. Regardless, gold reflects Jesus’s kingship.
Myrrh is used as an embalming oil and as an anointing oil. If we consider its use as an anointing oil, we are reminded that Jesus was the Messiah or the Christ, Hebrew and Greek words respectively that mean “anointed one.” Jesus was anointed by God to lead God’s people and bring salvation to all humanity. If we consider its use as an embalming oil, our thoughts in this second chapter of Matthew flash forward to the twenty-seventh chapter, in which Jesus is crucified and buried. We are reminded that he was anointed to obey God’s will, even to death on a cross, for the sake of the world that God loves.
Frankincense is used in perfume, so it would have been a perfectly ordinary gift to offer a king. But it is also used as incense. Let me read to you from Revelation, chapter 8, verses 3 and 4:
Another angel with a golden censer came and stood at the altar; he was given a great quantity of incense to offer with the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar that is before the throne. And the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, rose before God from the hand of the angel.
Incense is used throughout the Bible to symbolize prayer. When the high priest entered the Holy of Holies, he would carry a censer to fill the room with the scent of the incense. Many churches still use incense today to remind the congregation of God’s presence and to symbolize our prayers rising up to God. So the frankincense can be seen as a symbol of prayer, as a symbol of divinity, as a symbol of the magi offering their prayers to Emmanuel, God With Us.
Let’s talk a bit about prayer. How does prayer “work”? In the popular imagination, it’s something like, if you pray the right prayers, then God will grant you what you ask. That’s a very dangerous theology. That opens the door to blaming the sick and dying for their fates because they must not have prayed enough or correctly. Let me tell you how I approach prayer and what I believe about it.
First, prayer is about laying my burdens down and accepting that there are many things outside my control that only God can do. When I know someone who is going through hard times—financially, medically, emotionally, or relationally—I’m usually unable to actually do anything to help them. Through prayer, I ask God to do what no human can, and release myself from the burden of doing the impossible.
Next, prayer is about transforming myself. It’s about attuning to the leading of the Holy Spirit. It’s taking time to let God change me from within. When I pray for peace, I am more able to see violence and see the ways that I can work for peace. When I offer prayers of thanksgiving, I am gently transformed into a more grateful person who can show gratitude to the people in my life who mean so much to me. When I ask for forgiveness, I guide myself away from repeating my sinful behaviors.
Finally, prayer is about connecting with God. Let me tell you about a practice I began sporadically a few months ago and that I intend to make my nightly spiritual practice this year. Here is a picture of a couple of rosaries:
The one with wooden beads is special to me because Jesse bought it in Jerusalem and brought it home to me. That doesn’t make it magic or extra holy, but a little more personal. So because it’s special to me, I normally leave it at home. I made the other one with about $3 in supplies from Walmart and Etsy. It’s my travel rosary. Since it’s cheap and homemade, I can replace it when I inevitably lose it, which has already happened once.
Anyway, a rosary has a cross on the end, then a first bead, a group of three beads called antiphon beads, and then another major bead. The loop has five sets of ten beads called decades, each divided by another bead. What you do is say a prayer of some sort for each bead. You use the beads to keep track of your place. Catholics use the rosary for prayers involving Mary, but I have a different technique. On the cross, I pray the Prayer of St. Francis. Then on the first bead I say the Glory Be, then on the three antiphon beads the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Then on the major beads, I say the Lord’s Prayer, and on each bead of the decades, I pray this: “Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu, melekh ha ‘olam,” which is Hebrew meaning, “Blessed be the Lord our God, Sovereign of all Creation.” It’s the opening line of a Jewish prayer that Jesse taught me.
Anyway, you start at the cross, go through the first few beads, then the five decades, then back out the first few beads, and end at the cross. Often, as I pray through the decades, I feel something in my solar plexus. It’s like a yearning of my soul reaching out to God. As I wrap up, I end in a contemplative state where I am open to God’s leading and I feel my burdens lifted.
This is the form of contemplative prayer that works for me, that helps me connect with God. It’s a complement to my morning prayers in which I offer confession, thanksgiving, supplication, and intercessory prayers. My morning prayer keeps me grounded while my evening prayer seeks transcendence.
“If I were a wise man, I would do my part; yet what I can I give him, give my heart.” The task before us this day and every day is to seek God’s will, as individuals and as a congregation. One of my hopes for 2025 is that this church will become a Matthew 25 church. PC(USA) has a whole program centered on the story in Matthew 25 about the judgment of the nations. The sheep will be separated from the goats based on whether or not they welcome the stranger, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and free the prisoner. That’s a HUGE task. We need to find our place in it. The PC(USA) program starts with congregational vitality.
In our baptismal vows and our membership vows, we agree to give ourselves to God and to God’s church. We agree to pursue the Great Commandment: to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. The second is empowered by the first. Only with the strength of God’s love can we hope to truly love our neighbors. We can best tap into the endless fountain of God’s love through prayer.
So I have a task for us all in 2025. Regardless of your current or planned spiritual practices, I want you to add one more. I want everyone to have a prayer partner. Here’s how I envision it. You and your partner will connect at least once a week in person, for five minutes or an hour or anything in-between. You’ll talk about something that is true and meaningful to you. You can talk about the church, or the community, or the world, or your family, or your work, or your hobbies, or anything. Whatever is on your heart. Then pray together or pray for one another when you are apart. Pray for one another every day.
I want everyone to have at least one partner, no more than three. Your partner must be outside your family. I mean, you should pray with and for your family members, too, but I want you to specifically seek someone outside of your family to partner with. If you are an officer, find someone who doesn’t hold the same office.
I want everyone to find a prayer partner soon. Today would be nice. This week would be OK. If you are struggling to find someone, let me know and I’ll help you out. It doesn’t have to be someone you are already close to—in fact, this might work better if it’s someone you don’t know so well. As long as you are both committed to serving God through this congregation, Jesus Christ will be there with you.
Too often, Christians are functional atheists. We say that we believe in God’s power, but then we act as if everything relies on our own efforts. We say that we cannot do more for our community because we don’t have enough time, money, or people. Yet nothing is impossible for God. Through prayer, let us turn our cares over to God and walk with Christ on the next phase of our journey together. Through prayer, let us give our hearts to Christ, so that we might better follow the path He has shown us. Let us give Christ all that we have and all that we are, so that we might truly become the body of Christ. Amen.
Published in Phelps County Focus on November 14, 2024. A meditation on Jonah after the presidential election.
We all know the story about Jonah—or at least we think we do. Something about spending three days in the belly of a whale, right? Well, there’s a lot more to the story.
At the time, the Assyrian Empire was the bully in the neighborhood, perhaps like the Soviet Union in its heyday. They pioneered the practice of exiling the leaders of conquered nations. They were not nice people. So, God decided to destroy their capital, Nineveh.
But of course, God is merciful, so God called Jonah and told him to preach repentance in Nineveh. Jonah absolutely did not want to do that! So he fled, sailing fast in the opposite direction. But after a miraculous journey in a great fish, he ended up back on land and on the road to Nineveh. He realized that he had no choice but to go where God had sent him. When he arrived, he half-heartedly told the people of Ninevah what God had planned.
Jonah was BY FAR the most successful prophet after Moses. All the other prophets were ignored, killed, tortured, exiled, etc. But Nineveh heard Jonah’s warnings and immediately repented. It’s kind of a comical story—even the cattle wore sackcloth and ashes! As a result, God relented and showed them mercy.
Jonah was extremely successful—and that upset him. He did not want Nineveh to repent. He wanted God to destroy them. When God showed mercy, Jonah sat down and wished to die.
So often, we are like Jonah. We may say that we want people to change their hearts and minds, but our actions show our true feelings. We don’t really want to change our opponents into our allies—we want to destroy our enemies.
But God reminded Jonah that all of us are made in God’s image. All of us are God’s beloved children. All of us belong in God’s kingdom.
Article published in the Phelps County Focus on August 1, 2024. Here’s just the start of it; please visit and support my publisher!
Gatekeeping. If you poke around on the internet, you’ll see plenty of examples, where someone tries to determine when someone else’s accomplishments or tastes or interests or suffering are “sufficient” or “authentic.”
Statements like, “Stop claiming you love sushi when all you do is eat a California roll with a fork!”
There’s something fundamental in human nature that wants to draw boundaries between who is in and who is out. Many of the “gatekeeping fails” memes are updated versions of the old joke, “You think you have it so hard? I had to walk 10 miles to school in the snow, uphill both ways!”
As if one person’s likes, dislikes, challenges, pain or desires are only valid if they are more extreme or more authentic than someone else’s.
Unfortunately, gatekeeping is well-known in the church, too.
We simply cannot resist the urge to make rules, formal and informal, about who is worthy. We have hundreds of denominations in America, thousands worldwide, because of disagreements over those rules.
This article appeared in the Phelps County Focus print edition on April 18, 2024, and is now available online. Please visit their site to support my publisher!
Have you read the Bible? There’s some strange stuff in there. In Numbers 21, the LORD sends poisonous serpents among the Israelites, and then commands Moses to make a bronze serpent and set it on a pole. Anyone bitten by a poisonous serpent was healed by simply looking at the bronze serpent. Huh. I missed that first aid lesson in my Boy Scout training.
The Bible is also full of factual contradictions. Who killed Goliath? Well, in 1 Samuel 17, David did. That’s the story we all know. But in 2 Samuel 21, Elhanan son of Jaare-oregim did. Huh.
The more I read the Bible, the more strange stuff and contradictions I find. I grew up in the church, but then as I reached adulthood, my doubts began to grow. How could the sun stand still for Joshua? How could Elijah call down fire from heaven? How could a dead man come back to life? Doubts upon doubts upon doubts. The Gospel seemed like a house of cards. Some of those cards were pretty flimsy—concepts and events that I just couldn’t accept—and so the whole thing collapsed.
A lot of people have a faith like that. Some people claim that there are only two choices: take the Bible literally and accept everything in it as factually true, or take the Bible literally and reject it in its entirety because of its internal contradictions and its contradictions with science and known historical facts. Yet there is a third option.
Doubts are real, and are the natural result of taking the Bible seriously. If you start with a literal reading and use the inherent contradictions to reject it all, then you don’t have to seriously consider its teachings and its insights into the way to live with one another. But if you do take it seriously, you can see that God pervades the text from Genesis right through to Revelation. You can see that God’s messengers taught the Israelites what they needed to know in order to become a priestly nation. You can see that the major and minor prophets gave piercing commentaries on their own societies that still ring true today. And you can see that Jesus revealed the best way to live.
You can accept all of that without believing that Jesus was raised from the dead. I’ve heard people say that Jesus was a great prophet, or their role model. But he was more than that. He was the Son of the living God, the Source of our being, the Word made flesh. He showed us how to live, and how to die. He showed us that there is always hope. He showed us that he has conquered sin and death forever, and he invited us to live into his eternal kingdom now.
It’s OK to doubt what you have been taught. God can handle it. God is strong enough. In doubting, we find the flaws in our house of cards, and in seeking answers to our questions, we end up with a more flexible and resilient relationship with our risen Lord.
The Greek word in the Bible we translate as “faith” means something more like faithfulness or fidelity. Jesus doesn’t ask us to abandon our intellect or to stop seeking answers. Rather, he asks us to stay faithful to our calling despite our doubts. And that calling is to build God’s kingdom, to live into God’s kingdom, to forgive and to be forgiven, to work for the reconciliation of all, to create a community where everyone can thrive.
Doubt your beliefs. Doubt what you’ve been taught. Doubt the Bible, doubt all of the creeds from throughout the centuries, doubt everything. But never doubt that God loves you—you personally, each person, all of us together. Never doubt that God seeks a future where we can all bask in the glory of his love. And go and live as if you and everyone you meet are on a path that leads to that glory in Christ’s eternal kingdom. Amen.
Below is a lightly edited announcement that I made at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on February 11, 2024, regarding our Ash Wednesday service.
The Stoics have a saying, “Memento mori,” which means, “Remember death.” It’s their way of remembering that death is inevitable, so we need to appreciate the present. This week, Lent begins with Ash Wednesday. We will have a short service in the back of the sanctuary where I will impose ashes with words drawn from Genesis, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you will return.” This is our way of remembering that death is inevitable and to spend the next six weeks in penitence and prayer. We’ve had a few reminders of death lately. Last week, we learned that the Reads lost their daughter, Karen. Then on Friday two days ago, we learned that the Looks lost DC. Yesterday, I found out that my aunt passed away. I won’t pretend to remember or even know all of the loved ones that we have all lost recently, and nobody can ever truly know the grief another person is experiencing.
However, we end this season of Epiphany with a vision of Jesus glorified, shining radiantly on a mountaintop. We will also end the season of Lent with an even more glorious vision, of our risen Lord who conquered sin and death. Unlike the Stoics, we have faith that this world is not the end. We have a hope that in this life we see as through a glass darkly, but one day, we will see God face to face.
So join us this Wednesday to enter the season of Lent with the proper respect for the sinfulness, brokenness, and pain of this world, and our own sinfulness. But at the same time, remember that the things of this world are passing away as God reconciles and restores all things. And remember that we can experience a foretaste of the kingdom of God right here and now, but will one day enjoy God’s reign in all of its fullness.
For about a decade, I have gone elk hunting every year with my friend Wayne, who has been hunting elk for probably 30 years.
In his early days, Wayne used a topographical map and a compass. Topo maps are great, at least if you know where you are on them. In the area where we hunt, near Durango, Colorado, the original maps were made about 100 years ago and revised in 1973. Their details are reasonably good, but, of course, they don’t reflect any changes in the last 50 years, and the resolution isn’t super fine.
We all still carry a map and a compass, as backup.
Not long before I started hunting with him, though, Wayne started using a GPS….
Last week was my rotation on the Faith page of the Phelps County Focus. I didn’t really consider the juxtaposition of the title of my article and my photo! Please read the article here:
A common belief in modern society is that there is no objective Truth, only “your truth” and “my truth.” All truth is relative, and morals are socially constructed. While this sounds like a path to freedom, with nobody to tell you what you should believe, moral relativism has been a tool of authoritarians throughout the past century or so. If truth is flexible, then it might as well be the truth as determined by the strongest.
As Christians, we assert that there is an objective Truth. There is some divine ordering purpose to the world. There is some absolute moral code that is common to all humanity. So, the goal is to discover this Truth and apply it to your life.
The Phelps County Focus has a Faith page that features a variety of voices from the community. I have joined the rotation, which is now about every four months. Here is my first article, which was inspired by my study of Matthew 9:35-10:23:
The other day, I had coffee with my dear friend Ashley. She is the executive director of The Mission, a position she took just a few months before I started volunteering regularly there. She and I are a mutual admiration society—we both see things in each other that we wish we could be.
She recently started using a Monk Manual, after hearing me talk about it. I’ve been using a Monk Manual for about three years now, I think, and just finished “Find Your Inner Monk.” So we were talking about the process and what we get out of it. The Monk Manual is not a lightweight day planner. It’s a heavy process, built on a plan-act-reflect loop with daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual cycles. The reflection piece is critical. The goal is not to get more done or to be more productive. Rather, the goal is to do the right things and to include both doing and being in your goals.
Ashley commented that I’m the most balanced person she knows. Now, perhaps that’s just because she knows all the things I do because they’re pretty public, but I do feel like I’m a well-balanced person. I run, I hunt, I preach, I volunteer. I started a nonprofit, I teach, I do research, and now I’m department chair. How and why do I do so much?
Part of the answer is that I’m not really that unusual among my peers. As I write this, I’m at the annual conference of the ECE Department Heads Association. Yesterday, there was a panel of deans. Of the five of them, two are also serving as presidents of their technical societies. People like me want to give. Everyone I’ve talked to here seems focused on the success of other people—faculty, staff, students—and wants to make the world a better place. We have all achieved certain things for ourselves, and now we want to see other people achieve great things.
The other main part of the answer is that I enjoy the process. That’s a significant teaching of the Monk Manual. If you are fundamentally driven to achieve some particular goal, your life will not be satisfying. Many junior faculty want to achieve tenure, but once they earn it, they find it to be good but not ultimately satisfying. Every mountain you summit just reveals the next one to climb. Goals are good, but they should be big goals, life goals that you know you won’t achieve but that serve as distant targets.
The reality is that life is lived one day at a time. Earning tenure, or achieving any other specific goal, happens on a specific day, which will be a good day perhaps. But the next day, you still have to get up and go to work. The better approach to life is to use your distant goals to determine which processes to put in your life, and then learn to enjoy the process. Find meaning in the mundane.
Take as an example my passion for running. Well, passion is too strong a word, much too strong. I have goals, but ultimately, I enjoy the process. I enjoy how my body feels after I run. I enjoy running on the roads and trails around my house. I enjoy listening to audiobooks while I run, to nurture my mind and soul while I’m strengthening my body. I find hills to be rewarding once I get up them. I run races (5k, 10k) not to win a prize, but for the joy of running with other people. I just enjoy the process.
The same can be said of my teaching, my research, my preaching, my volunteer work, and now my work as department chair. I find meaning in the day-to-day process, the routine. I have sought a variety of activities to nurture the different parts of my mind, soul, and body.
Where Ashley is different is that she has one big thing that she does. She wants to be more balanced; some days, I want to be more focused. There isn’t a right or wrong answer, as long as you are finding meaning in the process.
One challenge for me is travel. As I said, I am currently at a conference, and will be gone from home for about a week. It’s hard for me to maintain my daily processes while I’m out of my normal environment. So I must go now and do my weekly cycle in my Monk Manual, to keep myself grounded in the present.
Recently, I posted a list of “Edge of the Bed Advice.” One critique from my kids was that yes, they had heard much of it before and knew the stories behind many items, but without that context, they seemed like bromides or proverbs with no real depth. So here’s my first attempt to put some flesh to those bones.
I am currently going through a so-called pilgrimage, Find Your Inner Monk, from the creators of the Monk Manual. Much of the process is about decisions. How to make the right decision, how to make sure you are intentional about decision-making, how to decide out of love instead of fear. I’m also a fan of Jesuit spirituality. In The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, Father James Martin, SJ, describes several methods within the Jesuit tradition for discerning the right decision.
That’s all fine, but mostly, all decision-making literature and methods address the decisive moment. What happens before? What happens after?
In 1996, I was in graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, finishing up my MSEE. I had every intention of continuing on with doctoral studies and had even passed the qualifying exam. I pulled out of one job search, too. But then, my relationship with my advisor went through one of those down phases common to every graduate student’s academic career. I applied for a job at Motorola in Phoenix and received an offer ($46,400, above my minimum threshold for consideration of $45k). Now what?
I talked with my dad about it. He counseled me to stay for my Ph.D., but more importantly, he gave me these two pieces of advice:
Beware of making a series of small decisions that add up to a big one.
Make a choice, then do what’s necessary to make it the right one.
Bill Kimball, 1996
The first piece of advice relates to what happens before the decision. It’s easy to drift along, semi-consciously choosing what seems right all the time, and then look back and discover that you’re on a path that you would never have chosen had you fully considered all of the options. In 1996, I had not actually made an inadvertent decision, but was close to it. I think my dad was trying to get me to see the magnitude of the decision I was facing. If I left grad school, would I ever go back? How would it impact my relationship with my girlfriend at the time? What kind of life was I choosing?
Ultimately, I did decide to take the job at Motorola. Now the second piece of advice came into play. Once I left UIUC and moved to Arizona, I couldn’t go back. I had to fully inhabit that life, and do what was necessary to make that the right decision. I discovered life without my girlfriend was not good, so I proposed to her. (We now have two grown kids.) I embraced the challenges of my job and learned as much as I could—not only about MOSFETs, IGBTs, diodes, and semiconductor packaging, but also about professionalism and business practices.
That wasn’t such a good time to be working for Motorola. They completely owned the analog cellphone market, but bet heavily on satellite telephony (Iridium) instead of digital cellphone technology. Bad move. They ultimately spun off two companies out of the Semiconductor Products Sector, Freescale (now part of NXP) and ON Semi. So, here was a time when the first piece of advice came back into play.
My product group was eliminated, and ultimately sold off to a company in Tucson. I could have moved with it; if I were an Arizonan, that might have been a compelling opportunity. I had an offer to move over to the part of Motorola that made communication satellites, but the work sounded incredibly boring. A colleague and I had an offer to move together to a Motorola semiconductor group in Austin, which was really tempting. But then I received an offer from Baldor in Arkansas (now part of ABB), with work that seemed more aligned with my future.
The easiest choice would have been the communication satellite business. My wife could have kept her job; we could have kept our house, which was beautiful (if a little excessive for a family of two). But that would have been a case of making a small decision that would set us on a path we didn’t necessarily want. I ultimately took the job at Baldor, which set me on a path that, a few years later, took me back to UIUC.
The reason I had that opportunity at Baldor, and the reason I ended up back at UIUC and eventually Missouri S&T as a professor and chair, is because at each step of the way, I made the most of the opportunity. While I was at Motorola, I was inexperienced, but learning every day, working hard, and doing my very best. When I was at Baldor, I quickly became one of the best engineers, at least in the middle power range. When I returned to UIUC as a research engineer, I made sure that I met and exceeded all of the expectations of the job, so I had the flexibility to join a startup company and get my Ph.D.
Two weeks ago, I officially became the chair of my department. I don’t know if it was the right decision, but I went through some discernment and ultimately decided to apply and then to accept the offer. Now, there’s no going back. I am the chair, for better or worse. So, I plan to do whatever it takes to be the best chair I can be. I’ll take advantage of opportunities to learn and grow, and to lead our department to be the best it can be. And in the end, it will have been the right decision because of my commitment to making the most of it.
