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Rian Adams
Why Spiritual Self-Care? I bet you’re a lot like me; you’re feeling some spiritual cabin fever. In this blog entry, I want to suggest a few ideas that can provide spiritual self-care during the coronavirus isolation. We’ve been cooped up for a few weeks thanks to coronavirus, and it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a healthy spiritual life. COVID-19 has shaken up our spiritual lives, and taken away many of the systems we rely on to keep us centered and grounded. There’s a lot of information and creative…
What does it mean to be born again Sermon by Fr. Rian Adams There’s been a lot of fighting about this passage over the centuries. Churches have even split based on how to interpret John 3:16. So I decided to stay away from the theological debate. I decided to preach one of the many points found in the text and avoid the “born again” theology. I wanted to preach that Nicodemus was a religious leader, a scholar of the Law, yet he didn’t understand the Law of Love. That’s a good sermon…
Matthew: 5:20-37 Counterfeiters make over a billion dollars a year, making fake designer clothes and handbags. That billion is from the United States, not the rest of the world. These are not cheap knock offs from street vendors; they are well-made fakes. There’s an underground black market where you can pay $450 for a well-made handbag that’s impersonating a $6k Chanel. In 2018 The New York Times ran an article about customs seizing enough counterfeit handbags, shoes, and belts to fill 22 shipping containers. They estimated the loss to American retailers to…
Sermon from the Fifth Sunday after Ephiphany I Saw the Light The man was drunk and out of his mind when his mother led him to the car. She knew he’d pass out in the back seat like he did every other time. She helped him in the car and set out to drive him home. It wasn’t an isolated occurrence, it always happened when he traveled. He would sleep most of the way home. Then she would wake him when they were about fifteen mins away from his house so he would wake up enough to…
Patience and Perseverance When I was a kid, my least favorite Church service of the year occurred on this day. You see, I grew up in a pastor’s home, and my grandfather’s church had a Sunday night service every week. I wanted to watch the Super Bowl instead of going to church. So I concocted a plan, we could have a church party and watch the super bowl together. That idea crashed as gloriously as it burned. We refused to “compromise and worship at the altar of a football.” I was twelve, and in…
Fishing and Fighting: Leave Your Saftey Net Behind “We all have one thing in common,” says Brene Brown, “we’re sick of feeling afraid. We’re tired of the national conversation centering on “What we should fear” and “Who we should blame.” She points out a spiritual problem; fear is everywhere. With every change of the TV channel, every click of a mouse, every swipe of a smartphone, or scroll of an iPad something or someone tells us to be afraid. But fear is nothing new, the disciples even dealt with it in the Gospel lesson; Jesus asked…