Over twenty-seven years ago, in the very first worship service at St. Patrick, the very first day we went public, if I asked you to tell me what I preached on, those of you who know me would, without hesitation, answer, “Jim, that’s easy, you preach on the gospel.” And if you said that, you would be right. That was a statement and an announcement of what St. Patrick would be about! The reason is simple—the whole Bible is about the gospel. The word gospel actually means "good news.” 

This week, as we continue our exploration of the St. Patrick Lexicon, we are talking about a word you hear every Sunday, in every small group, or anytime we meet. The reason is simple: you never outgrow the gospel; you only grow deeper into its depths. To gather and not hear the gospel would make us no different than any other self-help or religion, because the gospel is the true story of the time when the true king of the world entered time/space history as one of us, and what he did in order to heal all the brokenness of the world. And what a time for us to hear this good news. If you are like me and our staff, we will gather as broken, weeping, angry people and ponder our posture and positions in the midst of the kingdoms of the world we find ourselves in—so yes, we need some good news! 

Thankfully, Jesus, though dead, has been raised from the dead and is still on this throne. He still rules and reigns through his broken children and is not ashamed to call us his own. I can’t wait to gather with you on Sunday and talk about it!

Have you ever walked into a place you are really excited to be, but also fearful because you really don’t know anyone? You look around and it seems everyone knows each other's name and are chatting amiably, and seems to know everyone. I remember the most alone I have ever felt was when I uprooted my family from Greenville, Mississippi, to come and plant a church in Collierville. I left a place where I was deeply embedded in a community of which, with God’s help, I had helped create, and it was the most life-giving thing I had ever experienced. There I was known and embraced, and my large and unwieldy family was taken in and loved.

When I came to Collierville, I really didn’t know a soul. I was at Second Presbyterian Church while I figured out what and how to go about planting a community of believers in Collierville. Staff meetings were lonely, and Sunday mornings were really lonely. I would walk into a Sunday School Class and everyone knew each other, in a sense belonged to each other, and I just stood and felt like a stranger. I was a novelty because I would be introduced as someone planting a church, so no one was really getting to know me beyond, “How is it going in Collierville?” 

I remember telling Teri, “What have I done? I am so lonely.” I realized, as I pondered this, that if you lose your community, you lose a part of yourself, and you lose your rhythm. But that same realization helped me see, if you don’t have a community, just how lost you feel. 

This week, we are talking about loneliness and how, because of the fall, we are all lonely. But loneliness really is a gift. As Chip Dodd says, “In truth, loneliness is the gift that speaks to how much is right with us while also pointing to how much has gone wrong.” (Voices of the Heart) We were built to know and be known, belong to a people and a place. We will talk about our condition of loneliness and also God’s gracious provision! 

Not only that, but we will conclude our worship in our backyard as we take a few moments to give thanks to God for his gracious provisions of helping us build space for real community to take place. The fence is up, an excavator is in the backyard, and we are about to break ground! Join us as we give thanks together for God’s goodness to us!

I remember well all seven of my children when they were infants. When they were born, they couldn’t really say anything, but that didn’t mean they were not communicating! It just sounded like gibberish, and yet these sounds that pass from parent to infant, though not articulate speech, are rich in meaning. There is no lexicon for this speech, and yet what is happening in these screams of frustration being answered by soothing words is incredibly profound—trust is established, faces are seen, and the foundation for a life of love is established.

Soon names are known, categories are learned, and slowly a child learns to make sense of the world through language—words and vocabulary. Each family will develop its own lexicon of formulary words that are particular to their little tribe, and what is important to the family will be established—the words will shape them and be shaped by them.

I use the word lexicon because that is the title of our new series starting this fall. A lexicon, simply put, is the set of words used in a particular language or field of knowledge, or profession, or subject—a vocabulary. This is true of the Bible and the story of redemption we find ourselves in. There is a vocabulary particular to the believer. These words have incredible meaning to shape our souls. This is true also of each particular family of God’s people, like St. Patrick. We use certain words often because they express our heartbeat and passion about the gospel and our mission in the world. 

They are so important that we will spend the next twelve weeks looking at 12 words that shape who we are as a community of faith. They are so important that our children will be looking at them in Sunday School and Sonshine—for them, we made twelve videos from our pastors. For our Community Groups, we have written questions that will be discussed and reflected upon at our scattered tables. This week, we will look at the word you hear all the time around here: Grace. We will ponder the question, “What is so amazing about grace?” 

Also, to aid in preparation for our worship time on Sunday, we have linked the songs that we will be singing in worship on Sunday. Check it out, it might be a new song you are unfamiliar with, and now you will have a chance to learn and rehearse it before worship. 

I hope you will join us this Sunday as we kick off a new semester of worship and ministry!

In the Soul Room this week, we’ve been wading through what I call the “Dirty Thirties.” The Psalmist is in the pit, and he wants God to hear about it. I have often found great refuge in these Psalms in my own seasons of distress. But one of the beauties of following a lectionary is that you often come up against a Psalm you wouldn’t ordinarily read on purpose in your current state of heart. I’m having a great time folding back into everyday embodiment at St. Patrick. I don’t feel attacked or abused (yet!). So, the thing that strikes me is how often in these moments David seems to fall back on treasured memories of thriving and the promises of future flourishing. He’s intentionally forgetting the forgetfulness his situation tempts him toward, and he’s using the good times as treasures of fodder for faith. 

It's that word “treasure” that has my attention at the moment. Twice in Luke 2, we hear that Mary was treasuring things in her heart. The first time is when she hears about her role in the gospel story, and then again when her twelve-year-old son expresses his messianic precociousness in the Temple. She doesn’t know what it means, but she knows it’s special, and she takes a sort of snapshot of it in her heart. No doubt in times of distress and despair she pulled out these little treasures and remembered with intentionality. 

As we close our series on Remembering from Psalm 105, we begin our portion of the text with more treasures. Israel leaves Egypt with the wealth of that nation in their knapsacks. They don’t know what we do: that it may have taken a night to get Israel out of Egypt, but it will be another 40 years of wandering before God gets Egypt out of Israel. In all their wandering, these treasures gave them the opportunity to reflect. Sometimes, they used them to make idols. Sometimes, they used them to grumble. But they were meant to adorn a future temple in a promised kingdom. Even the memories they collected in those 40 years, distilled and fermented by time and grace, lose all the dross of failure and become new treasures for these people to cling to in the years of exile that would follow hundreds of years later, when that first city and temple were in ashes and rubble. 

            In seasons of plenty, we must not forget to receive and safeguard treasures. Some stories of redemption and faithfulness. Tokens of his covenantal love. You never know when you might really need them! Let’s talk more about that this Sunday. 

The story of the Exodus is the central salvation event of the Old Testament. Exile and exodus are major motifs all over the Bible, not just in the Old Testament. Josh brilliantly plowed the field of Joseph’s story last week as we remember the wondrous words God has done. This week, we move to the exodus itself, the main event, if you will. But even then, if we fill in the gaps in our minds, we realize it was a long, long time from the exile into Egypt to the actual exodus itself and the journey on to the promised land. It is all so slow. God does plod along at three miles an hour, it seems. 

The question I kept asking myself as I read, and re-read this part of the Psalm is what are we supposed to feel when we read it? The account in Psalms is not a mere list of the 10 plagues; rather, some are omitted, and they are out of order. In other words, it is not a mechanical retelling of the story but a vivid re-imagining of the story set in verse, a song meant to be sung, almost like an epic poem. In other words, it is meant to stir the blood, knock you out of spiritual lethargy, and ignite passion.

We all need this because spiritual formation is a long obedience and much of it is incremental or just annoyingly slow… In a poem called Patient Trust, I came across this week, the writer captures this idea:

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.

We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.

We should like to skip the intermediate stages.

We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress

that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—

and that it may take a very long time. --Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Look forward to seeing you all on Sunday as we gather to worship and remember!

Earlier this year, I received the mind-bendingly generous offer of a couple of weeks “at sea” this summer to really drill down on writing my dissertation. It was the first time I was able to set aside every other beautiful burden in my life and focus my whole attention on turning tens of thousands of words on the Christian imagination into a single thesis. My soundtrack for those sabbatical weeks was the only Jeff Buckley album, entitled, appropriately, Grace. 

Memphians are usually vaguely aware of Buckley, primarily because of his tragic death by drowning where the Wolf River meets the Mississippi. These are the two rivers we are told not to swim, often with Buckley’s name added to the haunting testimonials. I myself was taught to fear the big waters by the invocation of his name. Jeff Buckley’s shocking death in 1997 was one of many stories of young, talented, beautiful people whose early promise was cut short. Critics and listeners had praised him as “the next truly great artist,” citing his soulful tone, soaring range, and out-of-the-box sensibilities. And then he was no more. 

I’ve thought about Jeff Buckley a lot this week, for a few reasons. As I transition back into life at St. Patrick, I still have the taste of that fruitful couple of weeks scored by his album. I will forever be transported back to St. George Island whenever I hear him. Also, this past week a new documentary on his life opened in theaters and I’ve been foaming at the mouth to go see it. There’s something about his album and story that touches “life eternal” for me. It’s somehow both a product of its time and also an echo of past and future. 

Most meaningfully, I’ve been immersed in Psalm 105’s brief coverage of Joseph this week in preparation for this Sunday’s sermon. From Israel’s perspective in Genesis, (at least for several decades), Joseph’s was another story like Jeff’s. A beloved young man, full of vision and promise and vitality, stolen from this world too soon. We could easily learn defensiveness and cynicism from such apparently senseless losses: “how to shoot someone who outdrew you.” The world doesn’t fight fair, so why should we?  Yet a wider perspective shows us that “it’s never (really) over.”  In fact, if we can see the whole picture, we might just take a posture in the mean-times that looks more like worship, even if “it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.”   

Can’t wait to be with you all!

Reminders are a big deal at my house. Teri has a list of all the things that need to be fixed or done in the house and yard. My mind is like a sieve; things go right through it, and if I don’t attend to something right that minute, it might be forgotten. It is so bad that she has left packages that need to be returned in front of the door, and on my way out, I will still just go around them without a thought and drive off. 

We all use calendars, sticky notes, and alarms to help us remember. In an age where we are flooded with information coming at us in every conceivable form, we are overwhelmed and thus enter reminders. These are needed and helpful, but there is a far deeper kind of remembering we desperately need. In fact, the assumption in the Bible must be that we have spiritual amnesia because from Genesis to Revelation, we are exhorted to remember. 

For the next four weeks, we are looking at a long song of remembering. Psalm 105 is an exhortation to the people of God to remember. Remembering is crucial for identity formation and knowing who you are. Remembering our shared stories gives us identity and shapes the way we live in the present and in the future. This is not the call to remember the good ole days, nor a longing for nostalgia. It is not a sentimental or maudlin pining for a different age, but a robust call to remember the past wonders of God’s love, and in doing so, remembering who you are and whose you are. 

I hope you will join us as we start settling into a fall rhythm. I felt a little of that on Wednesday when I took my daughter Addy to meet her teachers. It was a reminder that we are all about to enter a more structured existence, and for many, it will be a new kind of freedom. 

In the whimsy of youth and on a long winter break from college, some guy friends and I were looking for a last-minute adventure that wouldn’t cost us anything. I think we were mostly bored. We landed on spending the whole night around a campfire — in mid-January —  and then watching the sunrise over Big Hill Pond, about an hour east of Collierville. It was an epic time...until about 2 am, when the fire had died down and the s’mores sugar rush turned into the inevitable crash. Morale really went downhill as things started to lighten and we realized the entire sky was totally overcast. Surely the sunrise would scatter the clouds and still be glorious, right? We came all this way and we were so tired and so cold. Alas, we watched dark gray slowly turn to light gray and then drove home in silence, with me just trying not to nod off at the wheel. 

This Sunday, we come to the end of Mark’s gospel: the Resurrection. Without the Son’s rise at sunrise, promising the dawn of a new, eternal Day, all of human history and effort is watching gray turn to gray. But instead, in the words of Isaiah, “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.”

Is a hot dog a sandwich? Is cereal cold soup? Is pizza a pie? And if tomatoes are fruit, then is ketchup a fruit smoothie?

These are some fun classificatory paradoxes and boundary debates for your dinner table. They are a few examples of things that break our categories. These are the kinds of things we encounter every now and then that make us rethink our categories or rethink the thing in front of us. Sometimes, all we can do is watch our categories fall and stand back in wonder.

That's what our current series is all about in the Gospel of Mark. Story after story of Jesus annihilating people's categories. People have to rethink their categories or rethink Jesus, because something isn't fitting quite right.

This Sunday we'll look at a story of wonder from Mark 15 in which Jesus seems to do the opposite. He lets himself be fit into a category by his enemies so that He might redeem us from our categories. And even the way he does that leaves a powerful ruler flabbergasted. Hopefully we are as well.

From our guest preacher for this Sunday…

Over the last few weeks, various pastors at St. Patrick have preached on the profound messages of Jesus in the book of Mark. The thoughts are not shocking because they contain some wildly philosophical sayings…but they are amazing because they are true.  

Throughout the Book of Mark, the people that surrounded Jesus - his followers and his disciples - heard his words and their minds were blown. Many of Jesus’ sayings seemed complicated, and most didn’t really understand…why? Because they were working off an equation given to them by the world around them…and what was the equation? You only get what you give. You earn rewards for whatever you worked for. Even believers today – that get the good news of Christ – still think same way.

The rich, young ruler that we will be discussing this week is a prime example. He was confronted by Jesus in a way that not only challenged him to give up what was most valuable…but called for him to substitute it for something better.