“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” - 1 Corinthians 13:12

Maybe you remember with me how that phrase in King James was, “through a glass darkly.”  As a child I always imagined myself peering into a glass orb at some magical world, (maybe even Heaven), but not quite making out the shapes. That held some real mystique for me. I had no idea nor care what this could have to do with love, which was still an icky concept to me anyway. Alas, that was when I was a child. When I became a man, I put away childish things and got back to fairy tales. 

I have since learned that it was ‘glass,’ as in Alice’s ‘looking glass.’ The mirror mix-up reminds me of the astronomer Percival Lowell, who was convinced that he was seeing spoke-like features on the surface of Venus, yet unable to replicate the findings for other observers. As it happens, the ambitious stargazer had unwittingly turned his telescope into an ophthalmoscope and was actually just seeing the blood vessels in his own eyeballs reflected back onto his vision. Alice, too, thought she was peering into an alien world, when it turns out she was only learning about herself. 

But how does focusing on yourself help you love God and others? Isn’t love about self-denial? Well, we often cause hurt to others merely by being ourselves around them. They need us to be better, and love demands we try. So, I'm starting with the man in the mirror, and I'm asking him to change his ways. 

Squint with me this Sunday and we’ll see what we can see about all that. 

I love children—Heaven knows, Teri and I have a passel of them. They do say the funniest things and they are cute, but they are also hard. I remember when they were all young in the house, and it seemed like most of my time at home was spent just trying to keep them alive and safe. The endless work, much of it tedious and mundane, thankless even. Night after night, the same thing—bath, bedtime, stories, cleaning up the messes. When they are little, this is as it should be. They come out of the womb all “need.” We must serve their needs or they will die. 

When babies are born, they live life “my life for me.” They don’t know this, of course, but if they’re hungry, they cry. If they’re not fed them immediately, they don’t patiently wait for their mother to finish what she is doing—they cry louder. And we attend lovingly and diligently to their needs. But after a few months, we begin introducing them to the School of Charity, and it is a departure from what they are used too! We may not call it that formally but, essentially, that is what it is. So, when they cry in the night, at a certain point, we let them cry. It is hard to do, but we do it because they have to slowly learn they are not the center of the universe. We pick up their endless messes until they get to a place where we make them pick up their own mess. They really hate this; they would much prefer to do their own thing and let everyone else navigate the carnage. They are in the School of Charity. They are learning that real life, a life of thriving, is not “my life for me” but “my life for yours.” We are teaching them to regard others better than themselves. It is hard, frustrating, and messy. And yet, if they are to find real joy and happiness in life, this must be done.

Paul says, in the gospel realm (that is, the realm of becoming a disciple of Jesus) when we are born again, we are born into a whole new realm, and we start off as spiritual infants. Again, that is as it should be, but to remain infants would be a tragedy. Paul likens this gifted, knowledgeable, miracle-working church in Corinth to a bunch of spiritual children; and so, this week we are going with Paul into the School of Charity. How do we learn the steps to the dance of the Divine Charity? Love is a virtue and, as with all virtues, it is hard—it is actually death. To learn this lesson, it is actually shaped like a cross. But learn we must, if we are to know the great joy, thriving, and abundant life Jesus offers in the gospel. 

Hope to see you Sunday, I can’t wait. 

There is this great scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Indiana Jones has a glorious epiphany. He is trying to find the lost Ark of the Covenant before the Nazis find it and use it as a talisman, a thing of power. The key to finding it is inscribed on a long-lost medallion. One of the Nazi agents grabs the medallion and, because it is white hot, has the inscriptions burned into his hand. Thinking they have the cipher to unlock the location of the ark, they send their teams to Egypt to dig.

When Indiana Jones takes the medallion to see an old friend, they find someone who can read it. Suddenly they realize that they have only one-half of the cipher and exclaim together, “They are digging in the wrong place!” That might be a good descriptor of what Paul is teaching us in I Corinthians. It seems, then and now, most of our best energy and investments are in the showy, flashy, even spectacular, rather than investing in the virtue of love. Of course, it is easy to see why. Compared to Jesus' kind of love—love that ends on a cross—the more visible gifts of the spirit are easy and they also draw attention to ourselves. 

This week, Paul connects love to what our future destination is and basically says, “Heaven is a world of love.” All the flashy stuff we thought was the real thing was just like scaffolding, or training wheels, to get us to the heart of the dance—love. If that is true, then, as N.T. Wright says, “the point of [I Corinthians 13:8-13] is that the church must be working in the present on the things that will last into God’s future. Faith, hope and love will do this; prophecy, tongues and knowledge, so highly prized in Corinth, will not.” (N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God.) 

Our problem is not that we have found love wanting, but that we have found love hard. It’s a burden that, without God’s grace, we cannot bear. And yet bear it we must, if the world will see and sense that there is a better story to be had than the loneliness where our cultural emphasis on expressive individualism has left us. 

That, or something like that, is what we will talk about Sunday. I hope to see you here. Come early if you are new to St. Patrick; we have a class for people interested in knowing more about our vision and values. We also have adult classes on Genesis and Parenting, as well. Just drop your children off at the nursery or Sunday School, grab a cup of delicious coffee or tea, and find a place at the table. We have set it just for you!

There is more written about the love of God in the Bible than just about anything else, and the crazy thing is, it is hardly ever simply defined. It is, however, illustrated a lot! The same is true in our passage this week in 1 Corinthians 13. Love is not so much defined as a few attributes are credited to it, but mostly we are told what love is not. Of course, what makes Christianity unique among religions is the great claim that love itself (that is, the very essence of love) peeled back the veil and lived among us. Not just an idea of love but love personified in flesh and blood. 

That is really good news, because the old maudlin song, “What the world needs now is love, sweet love” is true. The real truth about the human condition is that we were built to be loved. In fact, we demand it of other people who are incapable of loving us perfectly and then, when they fail, all kinds of untoward things begin to happen to the human soul. Interestingly enough, though, we demand unconditional love from others when we can’t really give it back. 

Add to this frustration the fact that you can’t truly love others until you have been loved—really experienced love—and then you can see why people, out of loneliness, seek to stuff their empty souls with trinkets, novelty, and anything else to get a sense in their hearts that they matter. 

This Sunday we are talking about what love is and what love is not. It is pretty painful, convicting, and condemning. And yet, to paraphrase Paul, without love the rest of what you do is just window dressing—it might look good, but it has no power, draw or beauty to it. Even more, it is rather off-putting. So, this week we continue in the School of Charity. It is a long, painful journey because love is essentially laying down your life for others. 

Remember, if you are new, join us during the Sunday School hour for St. Patrick 101, which is a place to get acquainted with our vision and values, and why we do what we do. There are classes for adults on Genesis and Parenting, as well as classes for your children and youth. So, if you haven’t checked it out, I hope you will. 

Some years ago, I was coaching a church planter. I told him from the get-go, for you to be successful in planting a church, you need three things: people need to love the vision, people need to love you, and people need to love each other. These are all essential. If you miss one of these, it won’t work. This was a gifted guy but the church plant was rocky; he would get a group of people together and they would sort of dwindle, and then it would build up again, then dwindle. At one point he called me up and said, “Do I really need a core group to plant this church?” I about lost it on him. When I stopped railing on him, I calmly said, “You are missing one of the essential things, a thing that if not present your church will fail. You have to connect this group not just to you, but, more importantly, to each other—they have to love each other.” 

Essential things. That is what we are talking about this Sunday as we start a brand new series called The Greatest of These. For the next six weeks, we are looking at a chapter in the Bible that is perhaps in the top five most recognizable passages in the whole Bible—Paul’s treatise on Love from I Corinthians 13. So many things go into what we might call a God-formed life, but the tendency even in Paul’s day was to favor the flashy over the mundane, the quick over the slow and steady, the one-off over the long obedience. This was happening to the church in Corinth. This is perhaps the most gifted church Paul planted, abounding in spiritual gifts, resources and abilities, and yet Paul tells them they are missing one essential thing—love. 

So as we embark on a new season of ministry, where we are using our gifts, resources and abilities to further the kingdom of Jesus in a place, it is wise to check our hearts and motives. God gives gifts and abilities unevenly to his body; but he gives his Spirit to all of us without measure, the chief fruit of which is love. Hope you’ll join us Sunday as we talk about it.

Also remember, Sunday School starts back for all ages this week. If you are new and want to know more about St. Patrick, we have a place for you to inquire in a class called “St. Patrick 101”. If you are interested in a deep dive into Genesis, we continue our study there from last year. Or if you need to be in a community that is wrestling with parenting, we also have that. Just show up, check your children in, make your way to the East wing of the building, grab a cup of delicious coffee, and join us. 

Gen Z kids view selfies very differently than do the Millenials who purportedly invented them. I first noticed this while being instructed by my niece on a (then) new social media app called SnapChat. It was basically the anti-Instagram. Whereas I had grown accustomed to carefully curated and filtered digital galleries, these kids were producing and posting hundreds of thoughtless images that would disappear within the day. Terrible lighting, angles, and framing; all of it disastrous! This was so obviously one of those generational pendulum swings. Young people were (rightly) unimpressed with the gulf between online image and reality, and so they were primed and ready for its antithesis: unfiltered, unflattering, and ultimately ephemeral. 

The Impressionist painter Vincent Van Gough mastered the art of the selfie long before this century’s influencers, and he managed to strike a synthesis. Of his over forty self-portraits, perhaps the most famous is one displaying his bandaged (lack of an) ear. He had cut the ear off himself after a fight with his roommate and then delivered it to a local prostitute as a gift. As one does. This was the same year Vincent painted his masterpiece The Starry Night, just before admitting himself to an asylum and eventually taking his own life. The troubled soul had somehow found the (un)happy medium between the idealistic aesthetic sensibilities of a master painter and a brutal commitment to transparency that would display his most profound struggles for all the world to see. The tension was just too much to hold. 

That disparity between how we appear and what we long for others to see has haunted mankind since our first parents hid and covered themselves in the Garden all those years ago. We were made to be wise, but we don’t know everything. We were made to be righteous, but we fall short. We were made to be glorious, but we’re blemished. To make it worse, some of the same technologies that enable us to improve ourselves also allow us to cover over and obscure these deficiencies, living the deceptive lifestyle of “prosthetic gods.” How can we instead recover a right-sized image of ourselves that trusts in Christ alone to transform us into his likeness? Behold with us this Sunday. 

For me, the biggest unintended consequence of talking about “prosthetic gods” has been a sort of reawakening, as I dusted off staid old theological categories like God’s infinity, his aseity, his immutability, and, this week, his simplicity. God is simply the best, and he didn’t work out or scheme to be the best—he is, in his very being, greatness that is incomprehensible. This is where we find the psalmist this week, and he is lost in wonder. In Psalm 139, the psalmist is in the Soul Room, praying to God for vindication, a plight we humans find ourselves in quite often. He considers who God is and who he is in light of who God is. He ponders that God knows his deepest thoughts, knows his comings and goings. God was there forming him in the womb and knows all his days before he even was a glimmer in the mind and bodies of his parents. 

He can only wonder at the vastness of God, and when he contemplates Divinity, he can’t get to the bottom of who God is. The finite can’t comprehend the infinite. It sort of puts him in his place: on his best day, his posture before God is one of submission and love. Or, to use another Psalm, a creature, any creature, even at the height of their power and glory is like a child, a weaned child, before God. (Psalm 131) The picture is one of contentedness in his lowly state, assuming that his mother will take care of him.

Our problem is, we have always wanted more than that, and technology, especially digital technology, has given us the illusion of god-like power. However, the verdict is in; the promise of what technology could allow us to become has fallen short, and we are actually more frustrated. This week we will examine the glory of technology and look at all the ways it can and has made life better, while also seeking wisdom in how to put technology in its proper place. 

Hope to see you Sunday! Check the website to see what training classes are available this Sunday morning at 9:15. Also, remember Sonshine kicks off next Wednesday and Community Groups are cranking back up. It is a good time to plug in and find a place at one of the many tables of abundance at St. Patrick. 

It feels strange to write something like “learning to be human” but, alas, this is where we find ourselves. If the defining characteristic of our advanced technological state has left us more anxious and alienated—lonely—then we have to ask why. Ironically, it seems the push with our digital screens is to make us less human, trans-human, or to denigrate our embodied state, as if our bodies are a hindrance and are holding us back. Our quest for glory and immutability has left us less human and wondering where the promised land is that technology promised us.

We serve an immutable God who, as one writer says, “[is]without any new nature, new thought, new will, new purpose or new place…God is a necessary being; he is necessarily what he is, and therefore is unchangeably what he is.” (Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God) We, on the other hand, are finite and live in time; we are totally mutable and must change and grow in order to become the persons God meant us to be. Biblically speaking, there is no sin or shame in that. God made us this way, and it is part of the glory and limits of being human. Nothing demonstrates this like the first miracle of Jesus, which happened at a wedding feast! This is fresh in my mind as I am about to cook almost two hundred pounds of goodness for the feast. 

But the question that I am asking of our text, or of the wedding I will cook for tonight is, how did this unnamed couple in John 2 get to this place? How did Luke and Savannah get to this place, and why are they throwing a celebration that is the most embodied thing we might ever participate in? Is it a waste of time? Or is it the culmination of years and years of growth, change and development—physical, mental and spiritual—to even get to the place of wanting to be part of an institution that at its very center is love, knowing and being known. 

Yes, we grow and change; that is what it means to be human. Our screens have not helped what is our uncritical adoption of the new and the novel. There is a better way, and Sunday we will talk about it. 

Also, we are kicking off our fall ministries at the church with a huge feast this Sunday at 5pm. It will involve a lot of kids playing and getting wet. It will involve a lot of people “wasting time” talking and joking and lots of food. Make no mistake, it will be formative, as play is formative, and it can’t be enjoyed through a screen. It will be one of the truly human things. I hope you will join us for the fun and laughter.

All tools and technology come with their own inherent requirements for wisdom, some more than others. It’s the classic myth of Prometheus who stole fire from the gods, thus giving humanity technology. He is punished for this by Zeus who had him bound to a rock, with his liver being eaten out every day. The myth says a lot about the ancient gods who were forever withholding from creatures they tolerated at best and exploited for their own amusement at worst. It also signals that there are inherent dangers with any new technology or tool, and we often have the technology long before we acquire the wisdom to use it.

God, on the other hand, created us in his image and, because we share in God’s nature in ways theologians called the “communicable attributes” of God, God made us to advance civilization and human thriving by making tools that make life both easier and better. However, the problem with an unfettered adoption of any and all technology as a positive good is that our tools also reshape our sensibilities. I am an early adopter of new technology. My yard and garden bear witness; a 52-inch zero-turn mower, weed-eater, and blower all testify to the fact that I don’t want to go back to what I was doing in my yard when I was 9 years old. My garden is also in raised beds and watered by micro-irrigation. As result, I have way more time now to pursue other things. So it is not that technology is bad per se, but we do need wisdom.

When we come to talk about digital technology, as has come about in the past twenty years or so, we are talking about technology that gives us the illusion of being our own gods. We can be anywhere we want and totally not present where our body actually is. We have access to unlimited knowledge by pulling out our devices and asking Google or our AI app. We can have connections with people all over the world and yet be connected to no one. 

This Sunday, we are talking about how our digital technology has a tremendous capacity to make us less human, not more human. It is not just Christians writing about this; most of the things I read about concerning the exponential rise in loneliness, suicide, anxiety, and fear are from folk who are not of the Christian persuasion. Yes, we were built by God for glory—human beings are actually a reflection of his glory—but when we try to grasp at glory through the illusion of technology, as we will see, the wheels fall off. 

That, or something like that, is what we will talk about this week at St. Patrick. Hope to see you there!

If you're like me, then you're exiting summer with plenty of regrets. Did you accomplish everything you put on your to do list? Did you go everywhere? Did you see everyone? Did you stop time around a bonfire with family or learn everything you could from your summer reading list? No, no, no, and double no for me. Spring Greg has a lot of summer hopes; Fall Greg comes back to earth. And that's when I learn to be human again. Our August sermon series aims to meet us in the mundane and find the glory God shares with His creation.

"Men ought not to play God before they learn to be men, and after they have learned to be men, they will not play God." Paul Ramsey was a theologian and bioethicist at Princeton when he coined this saying. He used it to guide much of his teaching on how we use science and medicine in our modern age. Since then, many arguments have been made against it, but the principle remains.

God is God; we are not. The storyline of Scripture is built on this truth. The Gospel would not be good news without this truth. And joy would quickly disappear from our world if we completely deny this truth. Because the glory of being human is not found in grasping at the divine; we can't be everything, everywhere, all at once. The glory we crave is received when we return to earth and settle into the present time and place. Let God be God—that is the better story we'll explore this Sunday. I hope you'll join us.