Like and Love, Ramblings of a Theologian in Progress

Sermon for St. John the Evangelist, 17 January 2016. From Isaiah 62:1-5 How are your New Year’s resolutions going? We are halfway into the first month of January 2016 and, according to The Guardian, 43% of our New Year’s resolutions have fallen away already. By the end of January, roughly 2 Sundays from now, 66% of people who made a resolution will have broken it. Our plans to choose better and remake one or more areas of our lives will fail. Not that we don’t sincerely want to stick to those resolutions- life just gets in the way. The weather keeps us from going on that evening run. Work occupies our time and we don’t make time for that cup of coffee with a friend. Take away is faster than cooking a meal, with both our budget and our plans to eat healthier feeling the pain. The Dry January campaign more or less assumes that 31 days is the max amount of time they can encourage people to give up alcohol. We want change for the better, but consistently fail at

Northern Scotland missed the section in Genesis where God appointed the sun to rule over the day. Or at least that's what it has felt like for the last week here. We arrived on a Tuesday, just prior to New Year's Eve and the world was relatively sunny. Sure, Scotland only has roughly 6 hours of sunlight at this time of the year, but at 11 am we could see the sun peeking out behind the clouds. And then it went away. Since then our brief days have been filled with an almost consistent rain (varying from indiscernible to the eye mist to proper and hard rain), borderline freezing temperatures, and gale force winds. There's a gnawing sadness and inability to feel warm or awake permeating the world. I don't mind the short days, but I need it to be day . I need the sun to shine periodically. My days and nights are all mixed up. The sun lied when it said it would shine. I've stopped checking the weather forecasts because their gloominess is only adding to mine. Th