When I was a kid, my great aunt Mildred owned a cabin on the lake with her friend, Polly. I loved visiting them because I could spend all day, sitting on the dock, fishing. I remember one time, not much was going on, then, bam! I’d hooked a mighty catfish and had it within feet of the slippery bank when my cane pole snapped clean in half, and that monster disappeared back into the troubled waters.

So, this is a weird time of the year for me. It always has been. As a kid, I was coming up during the time when the commercialism of the holidays was really taking off. Holidays would start when “It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” came on TV, leading to Halloween. Then right on its heels was Thanksgiving which was sort of pre-Christmas because the family would get together, but without the presents. After that, the whole thing kicked into overdrive. Lawn ornaments went up everywhere. There were trips downtown to see the department store windows with live-action characters from the North Pole. Rudolph and the Grinch were on TV. Then back again with the family, this time for real because they brought gifts. Then the big day, Christmas Day, with all the presents, and the annual French Toast casserole.

Well, here we are again. Folks, family, festivities, waiting for things to begin, waiting for them to be over. Smiling and loving and sharing joy and love and we sum it up every year when we turn to each other and substitute a simple “hello” with a much anticipated “Merry Christmas!” So, let me be the first: Merry Christmas!

So, I am not an artist or painter, and I don't have a great deal of understanding of colors and perspective and all those things that make art...well, art. I was just getting out of college when paintings began to hold any sort of interest. And even then it was by accident.

So, true fact – I wish John the Baptist were either more fleshed out in the Gospels, or absent all together. I mean, here we have Gospels all about Jesus, and just when we settle in to read about him, John pops up, yelling, waving his arms around, eating locusts, and generally being a wild man out in the wilderness. But the crux of the matter is, I want to know what motivates John. What caused him to take this turn in his life? Did he and Jesus hang out as cousins? What's the backstory?

          So, here we are at the beginning of the church year, and I always love that line from Isaiah.  It’s so fitting.  And fits right in with today’s Gospel reading.  Both are loud and ponderous, filled with omens and warnings.

So, we are getting closer to the end of Matthew, and as a result, closer to the end of Jesus' life here on Earth. And he's trying so desperately to knock a little sense into his disciples and followers. How are they going to carry on without him? He wants them to know that it's going to be hard. . . but at the same time, it's going to be ok. They will have his example; they will have each other; they will have God's spirit. It's going to be ok. But they can't just sit and wait. There's work to be done.

I think of my granddaddy every year as we approach All Saints' Day because that's the day he died. Oh, by now his name joins a whole host of others who have marked and made me who I am, but he is the one who inevitably comes to mind first. He'll have been gone around forty year now.

So, y'all know I have occasional bouts of sciatica. Most of the time it is the result of me being stupid. Lifting more than I should or twisting wrong. And every time I do these things, I think to myself, this is going to end up with back pain. But I do it anyway and sure enough...

So, a passage from Song of Songs comes to mind:

Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm;

for love is strong as death,

passion fierce as the grave.

Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame.

So, I remember when I was a little kid, my grandmother seemed to always be in the kitchen. Which was good because I picked up a lot of tips. She always enjoyed having me help with whatever she was doing when I was done with all my outside playing. And by enjoyed, I mean she probably dreaded it, because I was sort of a Tasmanian Devil in the kitchen.

So, The University of the South: Sewanee, where my residential seminary was, is located in Middle Tennessee, on top of a mountain at the very southern tip of the Cumberland Plateau. I don't know what it is about the confluence of weather patterns there, but as often as not, it was foggy. Now, we get fog here in this area, but, y'all, the fog there was FOG! I mean it was where San Francisco came to take fog lessons. It was actually just clouds, but when you are in the middle of a cloud, that's some serious fog. In fact, I still have a tee shirt somewhere in one of my drawers from my seminary days that says, “Fog Happens.” That's how famous this area is for fog.

So, the other day, I had a conversation with a guy who was working around the church that has been noodling around in the back of my mind ever since. He asked me what I thought happened after we die and what heaven was like. Now, I'm a priest, and he assumed at seminary we have had these conversations. But honestly, y'all, we never did.

One summer, before my grandaddy died, he got me and my friend, Randy, jobs with a farmer friend of his. I had decided I was done with competitive swimming the year before, so I had time on my hands. And I had a new (read “used”) car that needed gas and insurance and lots of work, so I needed the money. Man, oh, man, I had no idea what I was in for.

So, I went into that summer expecting days full of air conditioning and tv and hours wasted away s, but my mom had different plans. We had moved into a new house after the divorce, and she decided she wanted a garden. So, with the slow boil of summer beginning, we got to work, and the memories of AC and TV faded into the realm of what could've been. The first project was an enormous vegetable garden with wildflowers interspersed. Cone flowers will grow just about anywhere, and zucchini squash’ll fake it, at least for a season or two. Where I grew up, you’d have about an inch of chirt, that mixture of dirt and small rock, before hitting thick, hard clay that went down about six feet. You couldn’t dig a hole without a maddock, and that summer, I dug some holes.

So, for a while there, I was an avid reader of the Harry Potter series. The books were interesting, complex, adventuresome, AND it gave me a natural ‘in’ with my customers at the coffee shop, which was by a college campus, and everyone there was reading them. I can’t remember which book it was when I finally had to put it down. It was the one with the evil Delores Umbridge.

So, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a scientist. Now I'm sure I didn't now what that meant given that that's such a broad word, but that's what I wanted to be. I was born when President Kennedy was alive, and I was fully on board with every thing “moon landing.” So, science was cool.

So, when I was in seminary, they loved to make us take various and sundry personality tests, like the Myers-Briggs or the Minnesota Multiphasic Assessment. Most of the time, I did these with a small bit of grumbling. I mean, so, I end up being an INTJ or something, what am I supposed to do? Tattoo it on my head? But there was one test that I kinda was intrigued by. It was a Strengths Finder Test.

But, y'all, here's the thing. Here's what I want to talk about today. While I was there, the Tennessee State Legislature lost it's collective mind.

So, if you ever decide you want to take a road trip, to just pack the car and go, in any direction to anywhere, I want to suggest you consider South Dakota. It is an amazing place; you won’t go wrong.