Traveling in Place

Lighting Is the Answer?

If only I had known this 30 years earlier…

I was flipping through one of the many monthly mailings that come to our church. It’s a magazine about worship filled mostly with advertisements for companies peddling all sorts of worship-related “equipment,” from soundboards to digital screens to new sanctuary architecture.

One ad caught my attention.

Lighting is your answer!

The importance of lighting in a sermon is often forgotten or overlooked. With the right lighting and the right lighting console, your sermon can INSPIRE, MOVE, and encourage your audience to BELIEVE in your message! Our lighting consoles are feature packed, easy to operate, and priced to fit your budget!

How stupid I have been all these years to pour hours of prayer and preparation into sermons – what a waste of time! All I really needed was the right lighting to create a sort of halo effect around me, and then, perhaps when I’m warming to my theme, to add drama and excitement. All these years I’ve trusted the Holy Spirit to take my best efforts, bless them, and shape how they are received. What an oaf! What I really needed was good lighting!

Why, with the money we fritter away on mission work, education, and staff to lead our ministry, we could have purchased world-class lighting consoles that would actually INSPIRE, MOVE, and encourage people to BELIEVE!

All sarcasm aside, I’ve been exposed to the theology implicit in ads like this all my life. It traces back to the work of evangelist Charles Finney nearly 200 years ago.

Birds and Lilies

The fall equinox brings a chill to the air. The leaves on the deciduous trees are just beginning their annual colorfest before falling to the ground to nourish the soil. I welcome the change of seasons, not only because I love autumn, but also because I’m weary of the season of divisiveness and violence our nation has been suffering. I guess the cooler air makes me hopeful that the overheated rhetoric on the campaign trail, on Facebook and twitter, and in local diners and barbershops, will begin to subside.

Intellectually, I know this hope is not realistic. It’s going go get worse before it gets better. However this year’s presidential election turns out, it is likely to produce historic “gaps” – gender gaps, racial and ethnic gaps, and religious gaps. And the news about errant, often fatal police shootings and the riots that follow them seem to have no end. The same, of course, can be said for terrorist violence, which is becoming frighteningly common, and now seems to have less to do with ideology than personal and professional vendettas hiding behind angry, apocalyptic on-line religion.

Meanwhile, Syria – where Paul was converted and Gentiles were first welcomed into the church – is burning to the ground, a caldron of competing tribal interests where alliances are always fragile and impermanent. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people have been killed, and millions flee looking for some place, any place, to live a normal life.

And the son of a presidential candidate publicly compares these refugees to poisoned candy. Yuck.

How tempting it is to be consumed with worry. When I recognize that I am giving in to this temptation, I recall the clear words of Jesus spoken in an earlier time of great trouble: “Do not be anxious.” His reflection about how the birds of the air