Kick off your Advent and Christmas season with Josh Bales and friends as Josh leads a concert and hymn sing version of Advent Lessons and Carols. It’s Sunday night, December 3rd 6pm, at The Cathedral Church of Saint Luke in Orlando, FL. There’s no cost and a light reception will follow. You can find parking details and more at www.ccslorlando.org..
Sunday Homily: God's Power is Different (Exodus)
A Podcast Interview Part 1 | What Inspired The Weight of Glory EP?
Shane Morris has a fantastic podcast called Upstream where he interviews folks like Os Guinness, Frederica Matthewes-Green, Hans Boersma, and Jeremy Begbie. Check it out!
In this episode Shane and I talk about the people and ideas that inspired the songwriting for The Weight of Glory EP (Fall 2023).
Sunday Homily : The Exodus Event, Israel's Deliverance & Ours
To Wilberforce Weekend Orlando Friends!
Hi! If you are currently attending the Colson Center’s Wilberforce Weekend in Orlando, this is a message for you!
Orlando is where I live and each Sunday night I lead worship at The Cathedral Church of Saint Luke (about 20min away from the Rosen in downtown Orlando).
Please join me this Sunday night, May 15, after Wilberforce Weekend. It would be an honor to have you worship with us.
You can find out more here.
There is free parking around the church and the service begins at 6pm.
Hope for Holy Saturday | The Easter Vigil
Hope is a hard thing. It’s hard because we all need it but we all lose it.
So, when did you first lose it?
“Yeah, I used to hope,” you might say, “back when I was a child. But that was before the abuse.” Or, “I used to hope before corporate used me for 20 years, chewed me up and spit me out...before the divorce...before the cancer...before...”
And so most of us hate hope. It makes us angry. It feels like a farce, like a lie. Without realizing it, we’ve inherited the worldview of philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche or Albert Camus for whom hope is absurd. Nietzsche wrote in Human, All Too Human that hope is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of humanity. And Camus saw religious hope as no different than Sisyphus pushing his boulder up that hill every day.
Not many years after Nietzsche died, one of his fans, Adolph Hitler, put this same hopeless worldview into practice, killing millions in the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel, a
holocaust survivor, wrote about his experience in the concentration camp in his book, Night:
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.
Literary students would have us note the way Wiesel uses a rhetorical device, called an anaphora, a sequence of words repeated again and again, “Never shall I forget! Never shall I forget.” What is it Wiesel won’t forget? Night. Hitler’s Night. Evil’s Night.
In the Easter Vigil, the opening liturgy of Easter, Christians also encounter an anaphora in the text of the Exsultet. Again and again, we proclaim “This is the night!” But it’s a very different night.
This is the night! When God rescued Israel from bondage to Egypt through the Red Sea.
This is the night! “When all who believe in Christ are delivered form the gloom of sin, and are restored to grace and holiness of life.”
This is the night! “When Christ broke the bonds of death and hell, and rose victorious from the grave...how holy is this night...how blessed is this night.”
To be clear, none of us have experienced a night like the holocaust. But in our own profound ways we each know something of Wiesel’s night in our own sufferings.
Easter is when Christ’s Night conquers Evil’s Night. In his death and resurrection Jesus reaches into our nights and pulls us out of our hells. Jesus kills our hopelessness. He takes the worst nights of our lives (even the night of our death) and redeems them.
THIS IS THE NIGHT! When our Lord is risen, indeed! Alleluia!
A Video Devotion: The Stations of The Cross
I love praying the Stations Of The Cross, especially during the Season of Lent . Growing up, I was not familiar with this ancient devotion and have come to value its focus (Christ’s Passion), its rhythm, its images, and its prayers.
I recorded this version of the Stations devotion for Holy Week, 2020, at my church in Orlando.