by Guy Sayles | Feb 8, 2013 | Uncategorized
Think of the hours we spend on food and drink: going to the grocery store, perusing cookbooks and magazines for recipes, being sure the kids have lunch money, grabbing a bottle of water on the way to work, and stopping midmorning for a coffee break. We eat and...
by Guy Sayles | Jan 23, 2013 | Uncategorized
Unless you’re a painter, roofer, or fire-fighter, you’re probably not on a ladder very often. From time to time, you use a step stool to reach the top shelf of a tall cabinet or a step-ladder to change a light bulb. A couple of times of year, you get out the...
by Guy Sayles | Jan 19, 2013 | Uncategorized
At First Baptist Church of Asheville, we’ve been taking a close and hopeful look at the challenges and opportunities we face. That crucial work continues, and I’ve suggested that, as we do it, we need to keep in mind some pervasive trends which characterize our...
by Guy Sayles | Jan 6, 2013 | Uncategorized
My father believed the old proverb “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” He didn’t like to see me sitting still, unless it was at the dinner table or in church. Otherwise, he wanted me to be doing something constructive. If he didn’t think I was...
by Guy Sayles | Dec 24, 2012 | Uncategorized
In his compelling and controversial novel, The Testament of Mary, Colm Toibin, imagines how Mary felt while carrying Jesus in her womb: I know that my own happiness in those first months, when I was with child, felt strange and special, that I lived in a...
by Guy Sayles | Dec 18, 2012 | Uncategorized
Like many other preachers, my sermon yesterday drew, in part, on the terrible story of Herod’s “slaughter of the innocents,” as I attempted to speak about the unspeakable shootings in Newtown, CT. A young family was decorating their home for...
by Guy Sayles | Dec 5, 2012 | Uncategorized
Writer Sue Monk Kidd grew up among Baptists in the south and, like most of the rest of us who did, she learned to pay very little attention to Mary, the mother of Jesus. Kidd says that she was “virtually unaware of Mary, except at Christmas, when she turned up...
by Guy Sayles | Nov 30, 2012 | Uncategorized
Years ago, I attended a tedious and boring conference which I was delighted to see come to an end. I was ready to get back home; but, as bad luck would have it, my flight was delayed for a couple of hours as we waited for violent thunderstorms to subside. ...
by Guy Sayles | Nov 19, 2012 | Uncategorized
In 1991, Van Morrison released Hymns to the Silence, a two-CD tour de force that seems at least party autobiographical. Morrison’s folk-tinged and bluesy rock and roll, on this album, as across his whole career, has an indefinable “something” that carries him...
by Guy Sayles | Oct 26, 2012 | Uncategorized
I agree with theologian Robert McAfee Brown who said: “There has not been a moment in the church’s life when it has not stood in need of reformation, redirection, and renewal at the hand of God” (The Spirit of Protestantism, p. 21). That was true 495 years...
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