Fun Size Bytes

wifeoftj:

I really wish I could teleport y’all to our church on Sunday mornings so that you could hear Tj preach. This morning’s sermon was amazing, like woah! I got chills. It went from funny (relating Mary’s pregnancy with Jesus to mine with Ethan, thus causing The Boy to blush) to informative (the Magnificat may have actually been said by Elizabeth, not Mary) to “holy smokes he’s on fire with righteous anger” when he talked about how some so called “Christians” were responding to the Newtown tragedy. What I’ll take away from it most is this: ” instead of trying to place blame and pointing fingers, pray for those in pain and embrace with love.” Amen

First off: Gross. No one came here to listen to you talk about your feelings.

Secondly: I’m going to talk about mine now too. Feel free to ‘next’…

It occurred to me this week that the reading was about Mary (mother of Jesus) and Elizabeth (mother of John the Baptizer), two women who were not supposed to be pregnant (Mary, because she was young and unmarried, and Elizabeth because she was ‘old’).

Then it occurred to me that both of these mothers outlived these sons.

(John was beheaded after a king basically got turned on by a girl who danced in front of him, and offered her ‘anything, up to half of my kingdom’… the girl went to her mother, who told her to ask for John’s head on a platter.)

(Yes, Christians believe that Mary’s son was only dead for 3 days, but she was there, standing by the cross when he died.)

Barely a week after Newtown, it’s hard not to think about those parents who outlived their children.

Anyway, I ended up yelling a little bit about so-called Christians who would tell parents of dead children that it was their fault their children were dead because we don’t allow prayer in school. But it really was a sermon of mixed emotions, as I think is fitting for the day.

No manuscript today, so I can’t post the text, but we do record the service for the radio. If you wanted to listen to it you could download the mp3 here. I take great comfort in knowing that you probably won’t.

I also posted the audio of last week’s “On Newtown” in case you were feeling pretty good about the day and wanted to feel worse, I guess.