Wise Friendships

St. Patrick Presbyterian

Wise Friendships

June 18, 2023 • Rev. Joshua Smith • 1 Kings 12:1–8

Earlier today our new youth pastor Greg quipped, “12 years ago I went from being a dog trainer to a youth pastor and honestly… not much changed.” That was just the reminder I needed as I’ve been preparing to join over forty of our middle schoolers and leaders in Chattanooga next week for a conference called The Edge. Before we head out, you’ll hear me talk on Sunday about a dear friend I made while learning the ropes of youth ministry 20 years ago, and the profound impact he made on my spiritual journey. Shepherding teens may be a frenetic firestorm, but there was something about that foxhole that forged a fast and formative friendship between otherwise night-and-day personalities.

That has me thinking about how things have changed since I was making friends in my teens and early twenties. We did have the internet, but it was still an amendment to our analog lives, not the all-encompassing platform it has become. Phones didn’t do much of anything but call, or sometimes text very slowly at a rate per character. Facebook arrived my senior year of college and was incredibly limited. If you wanted to make a friend, you still had to be somewhere, doing something.

Now, most kids spend an average of eight hours on screens per day. They regularly disclose their hearts to people they’ve never seen in person and may not even be who they present themselves to be. Pundits sometimes refer to the newer generations as the most “connected” in history, yet the psychological data shows quite the opposite. This is why it comes as no surprise to me that the featured seminars for our teens this week are on navigating social media and making good friends.

But that’s not at all to say that loneliness and isolation are just an issue for the young. The problem is as prominent among the older generations who pride themselves on self-sufficiency as they are among these very online young people. I regularly have pastoral conversations with middle aged and more seasoned folks whose woes can basically be boiled down to a lack of quality community. We all struggle with what it means to walk in the wisdom of a God who imagined rich companionship at the core of what it means to be human in His image.

So, let’s talk about that this Sunday.

- js

The Feast of Wisdom

July 30, 2023 • Rev. James M. Holland • Proverbs 9

Over and over in the Bible, the idea of a great banquet or feast is used as a metaphor of the blessing, joy, and abundance of salvation. However, as we close out Proverbs, there are two feasts set before us—a feast of wisdom and a feast of folly. Both the architecture and ethos of the feasts almost immerse us in the taste, texture, and outcome of the tables we inhabit. Solomon ends his primer on wisdom with an either/or proposition: two ways, two feasts, two outcomes. It is interesting that the invitation to both is the same to the simple and unlearned. This should not surprise us—we all start out as fools and are placed in the drama of life either by the wisdom or the foolishness of others. We are needy creatures, and everyone is inviting us to a way of life that offers satisfaction. But, as Solomon points out, the paths part; and we are asked to look beyond the surface of things into the deeper meaning of reality and what it means to be human. Join us Sunday as we wrap up, The Book of Suburbs, and seek to subvert fast food values for a feast of good things!

Wise Money

July 23, 2023 • Rev. James M. Holland • Proverbs 10:22

The church culture I grew up in was of the more legalistic branch. It is not that I am ungrateful —because of that experience, there has never been a day I didn’t know the gospel. However, it had its own set of proverbs and wisdom which could be summed up like this, “We don’t drink and we don’t chew and we don’t go with girls that do.” That is representative of how we tried to defeat sin in our lives. What we did was locate evil in a thing and abstain from it. We had long lists of them. As if lists and legalism can curb desire. The logic was simple—abused things like dancing, drinking, sex, money, and certain types of dress were put on a list of things that were sinful. You can see, we had no ascetic, no view of beauty or pleasure. Heck, if it was pleasurable, it must be sinful! But that was our view of holiness. Money was on the list. If you had too much, it must be ill-gotten gain. Which brings us to our subject matter for this Sunday—wealth and all things related to wealth. There are about 150 proverbs on money in book of Proverbs. About half the time money is spoken of in the negative, which means, the other half it is spoken of as a good thing. Money in the book of Proverbs is nuanced, and thus the need for wisdom. But yes, money in the book of Proverbs is called a blessing. In fact, when wisdom is personified in chapter 8 and is speaking of her blessings, wealth is one of them. However, money is also spoken of often as a bane, filled with temptations and the ability to blind you to larger issues in life, a corrupting influence that can ruin your life. There are reasons that money is singled out as fraught with pitfalls. So how do we live in this tension? How do we give thanks for wealth and yet not worship wealth? Good question, and one we will seek to answer this Sunday. I hope to see you there.

Wise Age

July 16, 2023 • Rev. Joshua Smith • Psalm 90

As I approach my fortieth birthday at the end of this summer, I’m haunted by Moses’ observation in Psalm 90, that a man is lucky to live to eighty. In the best scenario, that calculus puts me at midlife having officially missed my opportunity to get a tattoo without people assuming I’m suffering some sort of crisis. (Which I most certainly am, but I don’t want anyone to know, so please keep that between us.) It’s really not so much the tattoo. It’s that I ran out of time to outdo John Steinbeck’s writing The Grapes of Wrath before he was this age. I’ve been asking some friends and family at the more extreme ends of the journey a few questions as I reflect on what wisdom there is for folks contemplating their mortality. “What’s the best thing about being your age?” One teen said, “freedom and no bills” and I felt the envy rise in my increasingly lactose intolerant gut. From the more seasoned, I got answers like, “Seeing my kids become adults and getting to spoil grandkids. Finally having some perspective. Financial security. Not being afraid of what people think of me.” So, those are good things to look forward to. I also asked, “What’s the hardest thing about being your age?” My own eight-year-old said, “I’m too little to be on Wheel of Fortune.” Tragic injustice, indeed: another old soul imprisoned in the third grade. The elder participants shared things like, “Losing my physical endurance and metabolism. The urgency of the finish line. Watching my parents die. Fighting cynicism. Being treated like I’m irrelevant.” A much harder set of answers for meditation. So, this Sunday we’re going on a journey together, consulting Scripture and the wise counsel of others who’ve come before us on this path. We’ll consider the ways we might experience our own age gracefully, whatever the number happens to be.