Chris Yaw

Welcome! I’m an Episcopal priest serving a congregation in Metro Detroit... With a passion for gun safety... A zest for online Christian formation... A zeal for video blogging... A budding writer... A heart for those who have unintentionally harmed... A commitment to workforce housing... A love for marrying people... And a wonderful wife, three kids, and a cat... If we have common interests or not, I'd love to connect with you.

Let God Talk to You

God is absolutely obsessed with us. God spends all day and all night thinking about us. There is not one moment in God’s day in which God is not 100% focused on us. God spends every waking moment contemplating what we’re doing and where we’re going.

And God’s awareness of our ups and downs has given us some of the most profound stories about how God, and the world, works. We call them parables.

This Sunday we’ll hear 5 of them. They’re anecdotes taken from everyday life that tell us how God’s deepest desire - to walk and talk with us – actually fulfills our deepest desires. Jesus’ story – about His desperate love for the world – is a story He longs to tell and re-tell through the average, the everyday, and the mundane.

What would our lives be like if we thought about God as much as God thinks about us? Or what would they be like if we looked at the everyday things all around us and let God talk to us through them? What would it be like if we understood that every arrival, departure, conversation, and interaction had a message?

Jesus found deep insight into God simply by looking around Him and letting God talk. I bet we can too.

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Reading

Radical – David Platt

God is Back – Micklethwaite and Wooldridge

A Place Called Freedom – Ken Follett

God Waits

Why doesn’t God do something?

Whether it’s about dictators who slaughter innocents, politicians who can’t find budget compromises, or media folk who condone dishonest newsgathering to pad the bottom line. Is the Almighty paying any attention? What is God waiting for?

We get some insight this Sunday when we hear Jesus tell a parable. It’s about God planting seeds during the day, then an enemy sneaking around at night and planting weeds on top of them. When the sabotage is discovered, we hear that the Lord doesn’t pull up all the plants, but allows the good plants and the weeds to grow side by side until the harvest. Judgment is not immediate. Harsh transgression is not met with instant chastisement. And that can really bother us.

How many of us yearn to see the backstabber at the office found out - and that sleazy acquaintance who’s sleeping around, finally discovered? And when it doesn’t happen we get angry, discouraged, and frustrated. But while Jesus may not offer a detailed explanation, He makes it clear that this won’t go on forever. There will be an end, a judgment, a reward for those who live for God.

To live for God, then, is to understand that God’s time is not our time. It is to be patient, faithful, and ever-mindful of the reality of God right beside us, right now. God is doing something. God is not absent. God is not missing. God waits. Can we?

Reading

Climb Higher – Kristine Miller

Beginner’s Grace – Kate Braestrup

A Place Called Freedom – Ken Follett

Cultivate Good Soil

Acre after acre of knee-high cornstalks, line up in attention like white crosses at Arlington, reaching for nutrients they know they will get. Both above and beneath, the soil-water-sunshine combo will nurture the genetically modified seed whose corporate inventor still reaps the royalties, at least that’s what that Monsanto sign up front probably means.

Massive wheeled watering systems will tentacle out over the plains to sprinkle just the right amount of water at just the right time, all according to the bioengineering department’s calculations. Meanwhile the multi-million dollar fleet of combines perches like lions behind coliseum gates, ready to pounce with precision on a fairly predictable abundance.

Modern agriculture has every reason to scoff at a biblical image of a Sower whose farming techniques lack such precision - a fist-full of precious seeds on the rocks, another on the hard path, how about some in the thorn patch? But the Sower cares not about the sowing, all that matters is the reaping! ‘Be good soil!’ goes the message, ‘Be one who hears, understands, and yields 30, 60, even 100 fold, for the fickle, worldly-minded, and easily distracted yield nothing.’

Cultivate the ‘good soil’ in ourselves is the message. But how do we do that? We suspect that raking out the hard path, clearing the rocks and removing thorns are what’s needed. It may mean dealing with the bitterness, laziness, and restlessness and lifting up a mindfulness, prayerfulness, and farmer’s work ethic that enrich and revitalize.

So in these quieter summer months, how might we cultivate good soil? What does good soil look like? What needs to be cleared away, what needs to be added? What do we need to hear and understand to yield 30, 60, even 100 fold?

Reading

God is Back – Micklethwait and Wooldridge

The Third Twin – Ken Follett

How to Build an Engaged Congregation - Winesman

Chris Yaw

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Chris Yaw

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Chris Yaw

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