Muddling Toward Messiah
Holding, Folding, and Going All In
January 30, 2022 • Rev. James M. Holland • Ezra 4:24—5:4
Years ago, Kenny Rogers had a song called “The Gambler”. It was about a young man riding on a train, bound for nowhere, and meeting up with a gambler. The gambler decided after looking at the young man that he needed some advice. He basically told him, every hand is a winner and every hand is a loser, so you have to know when you hold, when to fold, or when to walk away. Israel found themselves in a situation where they were looking at the hand they were dealt and decided to fold and walk away. They read their hand through the eyes of the opposition they faced and the odds against them looked bad, so they stopped working on the temple. They started with great zeal but, when local pressure and political pressure mounted, they folded. For fifteen years, they folded. We learn, however, that it wasn’t just political pressure; it was just not a priority. Finally, Haggai the prophet takes them to task for neglecting the temple and urges them to “go all in.” In fact, he suggests that the reason they work hard but have no satisfaction is because they have relegated God to the side. This is the subject we’ll consider this Sunday. What does it look like to be “all in”? How do we sustain passion? How do we stay committed over the long haul? Tough questions in a day of infinite browsing and little commitments. But it should be eye-opening and will suggest a way towards real freedom. I hope to see you Sunday! Remember, if you are new to St. Patrick and would like to know more about our vision, values, mission and ministries, join me at 9:15am in the Adult Sunday School area for our Inquirers’ Class. Just make it to the coffee machines, and we will find you and get you in the right classroom. Blessings, Jim
The Shape of Kingdom Story
April 3, 2022 • Rev. James M. Holland • Nehemiah 4—7
The Shape of Kingdom Story Every year in the early spring, anger starts to build. I look out over my garden and it is fallow; yet weeds are starting to sprout everywhere. I survey my yard and the brown dormant grass is sprinkled with spring weeds. Teri’s beds are a mess, as well. For months this has been okay, but now it is not okay. My vineyard is also a depressing sight—it looks like a bee hive of branches, in no particular order. So, I am ticked. For this to be beautiful, something has to be roused from lethargy; priorities will have to shift—what I want is on the other side of hard! I belong to this place—that is why I feel anger. For it to bloom, I will have to push back the weeds that threaten to overrun everything. Anger is not enough. Anger just gets me going. The real work is in inventorying the needs for weed control in my yard, followed by trips to TSS and Russell’s Farm Supply. Cleaning out my sprayer, mulching leaves, picking up sticks. I have just a few Saturdays to get this done and other good things will have to wait, while hours upon hours are spent in back-breaking labor. Everything is out to wreck what I am trying to achieve—weeds, moles, raccoons, deer, bugs beyond reckoning, and weather. Not to mention, my own laziness and desire to do other things. Trouble without! Trouble within! Last week we saw Nehemiah set his people’s hair on fire. With the exception of the Tekoian nobles, everyone showed up to do work they were not good at, sacrificing personal glory for God’s glory. They were angry for God’s glory and so they came to work. This Sunday we see it takes much more than anger to get things done. Without anger, I suppose nothing worthwhile gets started, but what it takes to keep going is more like virtue. All kingdom building has a similar shape. There will be trouble without and trouble within, and it is so discouraging you want to quit. And yet, real kingdom-building perseveres. That is the part of the story we enter into this Sunday. I hope you will join us. We also have a bunch of new family members to introduce you to as well. Speaking of perseverance, I don’t know about you but I am ready for the dog days of Lent to give way to resurrection. It is coming––hang on! Blessings, Jim
Remember Me For Good
May 1, 2022 • Rev. Joshua Smith • Nehemiah 13:1–14
Remember Me for Good I ran into an acquaintance today who asked what I plan to preach this summer. When I told him we’re going to be exploring the Messianic Psalms, he lit up. “I’ve been asking this question and no one knows: why do the Jews want a Messiah when they don’t believe in Hell?” I was a bit taken aback at first, because, while I do earnestly believe that salvation from Hell is a primary eternal benefit, it’s been a long time since I assumed that Jesus’ only earthly objective was securing a heavenly afterlife. As a Cordovan, I grew up in the shadow of Bellevue Baptist Church, whose be-sainted Dr. Adrian Rogers famously said, “Some people just want to make the world a better place to go to hell from.” He was rightly pushing back against the idea of a social agenda without respect to the eternal state of souls before God. Indeed, “for what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” And yet, Jesus also teaches us to pray that God’s “will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven,” and to reduce his insistence on love of neighbor to perpetual altar calls would be a tragic violation of the text. So, what is the relationship between eternal salvation and social reform? As we finally wrap up our semester-long series, Nehemiah seems to be wrestling with this tension, too. He doesn’t have our separation-of-church-and-state baggage, which, as we will see, really muddies the waters for him when it comes to the use of force. (Ezra pulls out his own hair; Nehemiah will pull out yours!) Still, his position as governor of a theocratic region gives him perhaps a better vantage point from which to explore the relationship between eternity and the here-and-now. Does he get it right? No. But, as it turns out, an anticlimax at the end of the Old Testament does exactly what it’s designed to do! And "the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him. For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust." So, join us for one more week of Muddling Toward Messiah before we turn our attention to a summer of Psalms that speak with much more clarity and comfort about the God-Man, Lord and Savior of Heaven and Earth. - j
Renewal
April 24, 2022 • Rev. James M. Holland • Nehemiah 9, Nehemiah 10
Renewal We simply are not the people we want to be. Whether you are a Christian or a pagan, if we are honest, we know this. I really wish I was like nature and knew that, when spring hit and the sun warmed the days and the soil temperature heated up, I would burst out in a renewal of color and fruit. But alas, it is not so; and since we are fallen creatures who continually fall short of what we were designed for—we need renewal. This Sunday we will meet a people who need renewal. This becomes abundantly clear as they read from the Torah and have the Levites explain it to them. As more light gets in, it exposes how far they have missed the mark and reveals that human thriving will not happen apart from their design. This sets off a whole chain of events which we will unpack on Sunday. I can’t wait to share it with you. Also, this is my last Sunday before I leave on Sabbatical and will unplug for four months. Every day, as the time draws closer, I ponder what a gift this is, and I am so thankful for St. Patrick and that I can be your pastor. Blessings, Jim
Hungry Is Better Than Sorry
April 10, 2022 • Rev. Joshua Smith • Nehemiah 8:1–12
Hungry Is Better than Sorry This weekend we celebrate Palm Sunday, a tradition tied to the triumphal entry of Christ into Jerusalem and the beginning of his Passion. Jesus is welcomed through the gates of Zion as their long-awaited Savior-king, but by the end of the week he’s being executed as a criminal outside its walls. These are, by the way, the same city walls (massive improvements notwithstanding) that we just saw Nehemiah and company rebuild over just 52 days despite “decay from within and from without.” Who could have imagined that the city built (at great cost!) to be a dwelling place for God and man would ultimately reject the perfect God-man? After decades of celebrating this series of events, I am still amazed by the reversal. Which is weird, because it’s not like my heart isn’t just as fickle. I’m like Paul in Romans 7: I do what I don’t want to do, and I don’t do what I do want to do. (Who will deliver me from this body of death!?) Scripture is a faithful mirror to the soul. It reminds me of the young man who tried to order his steak well done at a fancy-schmancy Manhattan restaurant. When the waiter refused to fulfill that request, the man protested, “But that’s how I like it!” To which the server deadpanned, “With all due respect, sir, you don’t know what you like.” It really does come down to desires, and how our crooked affections must be trained to love the lovely. In our passage this week, we find Ezra and Nehemiah tag-teaming the remnant, lovingly reminding them that they suffer from something far worse and yet somehow also mercifully better than guilt. Humanity’s great shame is that we have a tragically unsophisticated palate! We settle for and even learn to crave things that simply do not satisfy the hunger with which we were created, which was intended to drive us to the One for whom we were made. Their surprising solution? Less weeping; more feasting. I can’t wait to show you! - josh
Bit Players in a Bigger Story
March 27, 2022 • Rev. James M. Holland • Nehemiah 3
A Bit Player in a Bigger Story I have done mission work where I was put in charge of the roofers. Though it is not my vocation, at one time it was. I roofed houses with my dad for a few years, then worked for my uncle through high school in the summers. There isn’t much I can’t roof. So, of course, they put me in charge of the roofing crew. There I was with a bunch of youth, eager to roof this house and full of dreams and aspirations of how I would turn these teens into roofers. It didn’t turn out that way. It was more like a monkey with a football, and I found out I had less virtue than I thought. Something like that is happening in Nehemiah 3, except we are dealing with adults who have professional vocations that don’t look anything like masonry and carpentry. There are professionals that lead these crews of people, and they are tasked with rebuilding 10 gates and 2.5 miles of wall. I had PTSD reading this, imagining what this must have looked like. However, it worked! It worked in the same way it has always worked when God is building his kingdom. He takes people very competent in their professional life and asks them to do jobs and ministry they are totally unequipped for. How is that possible? You will have to join us on Sunday to find out! Here is to a great Crawfish Boil on Saturday! Hope you’re planning to join us! Blessings, Jim
Let Us Rise Up and Build
March 20, 2022 • Rev. Joshua Smith • Nehemiah 2:9–20
Let Us Rise Up and Build Was Spring Break even a thing when I was a kid? Maybe it was, but that should tell you how little emphasis was placed on it in my circles. I think maybe Easter break was a bigger deal, but I suppose a movable feast becomes a moving target for year-over-year planning. So possibly there came a point where the emphasis shifted. Or perhaps, like Chinese food, it was always there and just made very little impression on me as a youth. Either way, by the time I became a teenager, Spring Break was really only a thing we shouldn’t be curious about, which happened on MTV, a channel we didn’t even have. (And I had it on good authority that it would probably melt my soul out of my eyeballs if I tried to watch it at a friend’s house). So, the fact that I now live in a world where virtually one quarter of the year is built around this week is astounding to me. Who even knows how government people make decisions? This is not to say I’m not grateful that most of the local school boards have finally coordinated their Spring Breaks. It’s now far easier for the church to organize our calendar around our people, a large portion of whom organize their lives around their schools. For a few years there, we had three weekends each semester hit with cascading breaks, which made it impossible to schedule anything for the months of March or October! And it seems to be the right week, since it also softens the blow of Daylight Savings (another governmental decision I can’t wrap my head around). Yet, by far the most piteous casualty to our having anchored Spring Break to the 3rd week of March is that the entire community is shut down on March 17th, of all days. Of course, I will take this misfortune personally, considering that my maternal clan’s name is Patrick. But I am also a pastor at a feasting church named St. Patrick. This should be a massive blowout day for us all! We should be glorying at the center of festivities to rival the town's fireworks display! There should be a festooned parade down a river of green beer, ending at 710 West White Road!!! But instead… it’s not really on our radar at all. Our own namesake feast day came and went yesterday without much ado, like Harry Potter wishing himself a happy birthday in the cupboard under the stairs. Tragic. Still, we believe grace is everything in this complicated world. Even though my dreams of tater cookoffs and various lepre-chauntests will probably never come to pass, we are still a people who feast well and often, and who honor our namesake’s passion for gospel ministry by making sure there’s a place at the table for those who need to hear a better story. And looking ahead, Easter falls on March 25 in 2035, so Spring Break and Holy Week would be back-to-back. Maybe the school board will swap it for Shark Week and we can finally have our corned beef and eat it too! Until then, I hope to see you and yours at next weekend’s Crawfish Boil. We’ll have shrimp and hot dogs too, for the less adventurous among us, and you might even see me in a shamrock t-shirt, pretending it’s still St. Patrick’s Day. - josh
When You are the Answer to Your Prayers
March 13, 2022 • Rev. James M. Holland • Nehemiah 2:1–8
When You are the Answer to Your Prayers Have you ever been angry? I mean really ticked off. The kind of anger that makes you want to go western on someone or thing, or pull out the black flag and start turning over tables or mopping the floor? The kind of anger that bleeds over easily into your prayers, and you are like the Psalmist saying, “God, why don’t you do something about this injustice or wrong?” Have you been there? I have. Oh, and I really hope you have because the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. I mean, when something you love or God loves is threatened, you ought to feel anger. And, as we see in the prayer book of the Bible, the place we take our anger first is to God. But what if, after praying your anger to God and pleading with him to do something, God looks back at you and says, “Why aren’t you doing something?” Last week we saw the beginning of a calling to act. This week we see that Nehemiah is the answer to the prayers he prayed! I was surprised as I contemplated this, how often in the Bible the prayers of one of God’s people are answered in their own humanity. I think God is still doing this, but we haven’t really been listening—praying, yes; listening, well maybe not. This week we actually see this happen in the life of a man in the Secret Service to the king who is the oppressor of his people. How does that grab you? I know you are thinking, “Man, I am glad I will be on Spring Break; that might plow a bit close to the corn, as my forebears in Mississippi would say." Anyway, I hope to see you if you are not traveling; and if you are, safe travels. But even if you are away, I have a recommendation for you. Our denomination has published resources on how to aid the people in the Ukraine through strategic ministry partners we have in the area. Please take the time to look this over and see how God might be calling you to be the answer to your own prayers there. Here is the link to the page on the EPC website: https://epc.org/donate/internationaldisasterrelief/ Blessings, Jim
Still Looking For A Better Story
February 27, 2022 • Rev. James M. Holland • Ezra 9—10
Still Looking for a Better Story We come to the end of the book of Ezra this Sunday, and it’s a very sad ending. I suppose the sadness is enhanced because it started with such promise…God miraculously working in the heart of the very kings that drove them into exile to actually send them home and finance the rebuilding. So here we are, eighty years later and what do we have? A renewed people? An obedient people? A people who are living out the prophetic promise that their lives will tell a better story that the nations will want to be a part of? I wish it were so, but the book ends in sadness and another exile. We see a people broken and still muddling towards a Messiah. It really is a Lenten text! A text with lots of sin, lots of lamentation, lots of brokenness, lots of hope for a new reform. So, I suppose Lent comes early this year! Next week we kick off the season of Lent on Wednesday night with a service of ashes. A service in which, in the words of the ancient liturgy, to “remember you are dust and to dust you will return.” A service that has the audacity to rub dirt in your face and then turn around and tell you how loved you are. Which is the gospel, of course, but at no other time of the year is it this sacramental in a service. But before we enter into this new rhythm, tonight we will feast! I have been reminded in Ezra that we are formed by celebration as much as we are by suffering. While on this coming Wednesday, things will be dark (as they should be), tonight it will be all yellow and purple; and we will feast and dance and experience a little bit of the millennium. It seems strange, but we really are always experiencing these extremes if we live a robust Christian life, aren’t we? The cross is big enough that we neither shy away from suffering or from being with suffering people, nor do we discount the goodness of God when we see his mercies that are new every morning. Hope to see you tonight and also this Sunday. Usually I don’t do this, but I suggest you read Ezra 9-10 before Sunday. It is a long text and the conclusion of the book. I won’t read every verse on Sunday, so it might help to familiarize yourselves with the text as we ponder God’s word together and celebrate the God who throws a weekly party at St. Patrick for all his wandering sheep who come home. Blessing, Jim
Man of Burdens
February 20, 2022 • Rev. Joshua Smith • Ezra 8:15–29
Man of Burdens I had the privilege of joining our middle schoolers on their winter retreat last weekend. It’s been a long time since I was a middle school pastor - well before I had kids of my own. It’s been an even longer time since I was a middle schooler myself (Bill Clinton was president). Those three years are always a significant season in a life: not many of us walked away unscathed; nor would we be quick to want to revisit! Yet, now that one of my own kids is in 7th grade, I’ve returned to that sacred purgatory of hormones, insecurities, and the world coming to an end every day-and-a-half. The week prior, I had reached out to my fellow parents and asked, is there anything I need to know about your child that might help me care for them well this weekend? I did not expect that the majority of them would respond, but the calls and texts and emails kept coming. Being a middle schooler on a good day is overwhelming, and the majority of our kids have not been having very good days lately. So, I was honored and humbled to get a weekend to hopefully help create a space for them where they could retreat from the cares of the world and feel cared for by Jesus and his people. It’s not just pastors who walk alongside others in their seasons of pain and hardship. It’s part of the human vocation to bear one another’s burdens. To be in a relationship with another person is to graciously reckon with the unique ways this life weighs on them and, if not to alleviate it, at least be present with them in the bearing of it. Living out this calling requires a kind of health and wisdom that does not come quickly or easily, but is the result of our muddling toward the Messiah whose yoke is easy. So, I hope you’ll join us this Sunday as we consider this aspect of our life together. And don’t forget to register for the Mardi Gras Feast! We need the tastes and sights of a big celebration in our recent memory if we’re going to make it to the finish line of that long Lenten fast! - josh
Formed for Mission
February 13, 2022 • Rev. James M. Holland • Ezra 7
Formed for Mission Thomas Cahill wrote a series of books called, “The Hinges of History.” He calls these different points in human history this because they are places in the drama of human history where what happened––usually orchestrated by unlikely people in unlikely places––affected the history we know today. In other words, he could talk about, How the Irish Saved Civilization. Talk about unlikely! Patrick was an illiterate priest. At least, in his day he missed much training for the priesthood as he had been taken captive by the Celts, a totally pagan tribe in Ireland. And then this group, after they were converted by the gospel, literally went all over Europe reconnecting it with the gospel. Chapter 7 of Ezra is a hinge point in the history of God’s people. Out of the seed bed of a pagan court, God raised up a “scribe,” who would literally shape Judaism in ways that reach all the way to the coming of Jesus. The story of his formation and mission are what we will talk about on Sunday. It is as unlikely as it is compelling. And the lesson learned here echoes down through history; and anywhere we see God’s people take on a real Christian identity, you can be sure it has deep roots in a reformer, scribe, and priest named Ezra. Interested? I hope so! Join us Sunday at St. Patrick. I encourage you, come an hour or so before worship, drop off the chill’en in Sunday School, grab a cup of good coffee (God’s most noble bean) and then come to our Inquirer’s Class to learn more about St. Patrick. Or join Josh as he opens up more of this period of the Bible that we are in, known as the Post Exilic Period. Blessings, Jim
Celebration!
February 6, 2022 • Rev. James M. Holland • Ezra 6
Celebration! It seems like Christians have a difficult time living at the extremes. The emotional extreme, that is. Maybe it is being part of a stoical South––where you just rub dirt on it, stuff your feelings, and move on. On the other end of the spectrum, what do we do with ecstatic joy? We just seem to be uncomfortable with these highs and lows and, because of that, we are diminished as a people. If the Psalms teach us anything, it is that we have to feel our feelings and shape them either in unabashed celebration or in gut-wrenching lament. We have been in lament around here recently, and we have done our best to shape it into a larger family reality because we believe that is both biblical and healthy. But the same Bible that teaches us to weep loudly also teaches us to celebrate boldly. In Ezra 6, we see an ongoing story of about 21 years resolve in ways that are breathtaking, and it calls from God’s ancient people unabashed wonder and festal joy. Sometimes God gives us shafts of the uncreated light to shine on us and remind us of his goodness and mercy. To dismiss this gift or gloss over it is more than rude; it shines a light on an unthankful heart. Join me on Sunday as we look at God’s people lost in wonder, love and joy. And may we be caught up in it, as well. May we have eyes to see glory and be so reshaped by it so that we respond like Israel did and throw parties for the lonely. I can’t wait! Blessings, Jim