We thought we were going to have a week to 48 hours of notice. Jan and I were actually talking about it on Tuesday morning. Then the phone call came that afternoon/evening. They were going to be here in the morning. Yikes! 110 gorgeous garnet and gold chairs needed to be off loaded from a…
The Winters family is trekking northward for vacation, and we stopped overnight on the 31st in a hotel for a break from the road. As such, Cricket and I (Jay) got up around 6:30am on January 1st to go get some hotel breakfast. Due to my normal travel schedule with District and such, I’m no…
Recently I was speaking with Father Jerome of FSU’s Oriental Orthodox campus ministry. I mentioned that the Orthodox have a different way of calculating the date for the celebration of Easter. If you want to get into it, the way that Easter is calculated is that Easter is always the first Sunday after the full…
Let me tell you a story of ancient history. Once upon a time, we watched television shows that were not on demand, but rather were set at a specific time of the evening. And if we missed them, unless we had some ancient technology called a VCR recorder, they were gone forever (or until they…
This Sunday is “Pink Candle Sunday!” The Sunday is named “Gaudete” Sunday which comes from the Latin word for “Rejoice” which was the first word in the historical first song of the mass for this Sunday (which quoted the Epistle lesson for the day, Philippians 4, “rejoice in the Lord always,”). Traditionally, the color of…
“Pastor Winters, would you be willing to give an invocation at our next event?” The first time that I heard this phraseology I thought it was a little silly. “Sure, that’s easy enough,” I though to myself, “I just say ‘In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,…
I remember being a kid and watching the seasons come and go in the Lutheran churches we attended, but nobody ever made sense of the seasons for me and certainly never answered the question what use they might be for me as a Christian. This was the case far too often in church for me…
Like a father of many children, I don’t think a pastor is supposed to have favorites. I’ve gotten flack about saying that I may or may not have a favorite Gospel, but that it certainly isn’t John. And I’m not sure that I’m allowed to have a favorite part of the worship service or liturgy,…
“Worship” “Liturgy” “Service(s)” “Eucharist” “Mass” “Gathering” “Church” “Meeting” – these are some of the words that Christians use to describe their Sunday morning experience. While none are terrible, some are preferred by some tribes. Our own Lutheran tribe has a preference toward “Service,” specifically “Divine Service” due to the German word “Gottesdienst” which literally means…
“We continue by singing ‘Simeon’s song‘” has been how I have introduced the Nunc Dimittis for the past couple of weeks now (Latin for the first line’s of Simeon’s song in Luke, “Now, You dimiss [me]”). This was because someone was talking to me about how we help people, especially students, understand what is going…