the unlikely orange

note: i wrote these words back in 2017, after a series of tragedies.  you can see the original post here .  i have adapted these words to deal with the unthinkable gun violence perpetrated against people of color and children in our country in the last couple of weeks.  i share them here as a way to move us, as people of faith, to something more than just words, cynicism, or empty religious platitudes.    It has been a season of terrible tragedy.  And once again I have noticed in the news a trending phrase: thoughts and prayers.  It even has its own hashtag on twitter and other social media, but net necessarily in a good way.  People are understandably tired of hearing about others’ thoughts and prayers, when that is often only a thinly-veiled way of saying that our only obligation to those who suffer is a brief moment of silence, or nothing more than a tweet or public statement.  The truth is that, for those of us who follow Jesus, much is ...

i was recently asked to offer my compelling reasons for why i would want to remain in the united methodist church, even as there is division within, a new denomination forming, and an inevitable divorce coming at some point in the future.   here was my response: Why stay United Methodist?  My compelling reasons. It’s home.     For many of us, this is our home.  It is the legacy that was handed to us by our great-grandparents, our grandparents, or our parents.  It was the community who welcomed us into the world with casseroles on our kitchen tables, and baptism blankets.  It was the United Methodists who taught us flannel-board truths and showed us that Jesus loves all the little children: red, yellow, black and white.  It was the United Methodists who gave us our first Bibles, who journeyed with us as we learned what it means to confirm the promises of our baptism.  It was the United Methodists who affirmed our gifts, who let us as...

  "the broken path: station 8 - Jesus is placed in the tomb" gregory a. milinovich spray paint, broken glass, pottery, tiles, mirror on old farm window march, 2021 this year during lent, i was inspired to design a set of eight pieces of art for a "stations of the cross" installation, which is currently on display outside on the front lawn at St. Paul's UMC and Wesley Foundation at 230 E. College Ave. in State College, PA.  it will be there on display until april 3rd, 2021.  if you aren't able to see it in person, you can see the whole collection here.  i've also decided to write a bit about each one, so that you can find out a little "behind the scenes" information for each one, and hear a little about my inspiration.  here are the posts for station 1, station 2, station 3, station 4, station 5, station 6, and station 7. this brings us to the final station, in which we remember that the lifeless body was taken down from the cross, and then brou...

  during this season of lent, at the church i serve, we've been talking about brokenness.  we've been looking at the ways that our journey is often a broken journey, full of missteps, sidetracks, and dead ends.  and yet, we have been seeing, as clearly as ever, that those broken places are exactly the same places where grace grows.  the cracks are where the light shines through.   so, as a way to continue to reflect on this brokenness, the worship team thought we might do an art installation outside, on the church property, of the stations of the cross, but in a way that expressed not only the brokenness of Jesus' body and journey to the tomb, but also the brokenness of our world and our hearts.  using something i made several years ago, i thought we might be able to use old windows and broken glass to help tell the story.   so, in the end, i made eight separate stations of the cross, each one on an old window that came from an old farmhouse...

"ash wednesday 2020: where is God?" mixed media collage (acryclic paint, found papers, masking tape, glue on hardcover bookboard) gregory a. milinovich february 2020 where is God in all of this?  it's a question we've been asking for millenia.  just as we may look at intense beauty and see God as clear as the light of day, we may also look at tragedy and despair and see the absence of God like a dark fog.  in fact, it is this darkness like a fog that the prophet Joel writes about in Joel 2.  he writes of a darkness during the day.  like a blanket covering the land.  like an approaching army of death.  it's a stark image, but don't act like you can't relate.  from the atrocities of our human history to the sense of impending doom in our world today (mass shootings, natural disasters, violence, racial hatred, pandemic virus worries, and more), we have all felt like the darkness is an approaching army, a falling fog of hazy hopelessne...

"What if it doesn't hold me?" I didn't ask it out loud, but this was the question bouncing around my brain as I stood on top of the Fraser building a week ago, with the wind whipping furiously, my toes on the ledge, and my heels hanging off the edge. I stood there thirteen stories up, with a tangle of ropes and equipment attached both to me and, by an intricate web, to a network of pulleys and structures all intended to keep me completely safe. I listened carefully, with the wind whistling through the holes in my helmet, as my instructor said, "now just lean back, and it will hold you." Yeah, but what if it doesn't?!? This "what if" question has a great deal to do with trust. I recognize this question from my life. I find myself asking it, sometimes unconsciously, about all sorts of things. What if my kids get hurt? What if my loved one gets really sick? What if our safety net isn't substantial enough? What if we can't affo...

“Leftovers again?” It’s a refrain that is sometimes heard in our house, especially after Shannon has prepared several great meals in a row. In those times, we often have a collage of containers in the refrigerator, filled with various elements from the dinners of the last few days: broccoli in the glass container with the red lid, brown rice in the green tupperware, and some pork chops wrapped in foil, just to name a few. Sometimes there is enough of this mishmosh of food to last us for several meals, which is when the complaining usually begins, “Leftovers, again?” I was thinking about this on Sunday as we thought about God’s abundance. We remembered story after story in the Bible in which we discover a God of abundance and overflowing goodness. One of the stories was the feeding of the 5,000, in which a huge crowd (some estimate it was as many as 15,000, since women and children wouldn’t have made the count) was fed by a meager 2 fish and 5 loaves of bread. Perhaps the m...

back in early june, as part of an overall effort to get more healthy, i started jogging.  i was just kind of walking and running a couple of miles to start off, but over the last 4 months i've been staying consistent, which has helped me to run faster and further, lose some weight, and just generally be healthier.  on fridays, which are my day off, i try to run a longer distance, and i've been adding a mile every other week or so, which meant that today i ran 9 miles in about 99 minutes, which isn't great, but it isn't terrible, either.  mostly, it just feels good to be doing it, and to feel healthier in a general sense, physically, spiritually, emotionally, and so on.  but there is one area that i haven't felt great about.  professionally, these last 8 months have been, without doubt, some of the most difficult in my 21+ years of full-time ministry.  now don't get me wrong: i love my job.  i really do.  it is so much more than just a job f...

"democrats and republicans" mixed media collage (acryclic paint, found papers, ink) on hardcover bookboard january, 2019 gregory a. milinovich as i continue to preach about what it means to be 'better together' in a culture in which we are deeply fractured, i preached last sunday about the political divisions that riddle our country.  left and right, red and blue, urban and rural: there are countless fault-lines of division that live in some sort of fearful tension of the quakes that might result should they really bump up against one another. one issue i see is that rather than discuss the issues and problems that our nation (or our states, cities, churches, etc.) faces with differing opinions and various ideas, we have instead chained ourselves to political parties, and what they seem to represent to us.  we make it our identity.  so, if hannity says something, we either agree with it or despise it, before he opens his mouth really.  same with madd...

it's Christmas eve!  we have once again put together a little montage (our eleventh annual!) of some footage from our advent preparations for Christmas, this time to a song that i absolutely adore called "Lord, Remind Me" by Jon and Valerie Guerra. we hope you are reminded of the magic and the mystery of this unlikely story, and of the wonder of hope being born in your own heart again this year. 

well, friends, it is labor day, which is to say that the period of the year we call summer is now pretty much completely over.  school has started.  the nights are getting darker, sooner.  and we are taking our summer bucket list out of the frame and putting it into the "to be scrapbooked" pile, an ominous sign by any measurement.  when you are "to be scrapbooked" you are clearly just a memory.  your neighbors are torn ticket stubs, bent programs, receipts, and other two-dimensional obituaries to moments that have gone before.  such is summer, 2018:  a memory.  but it is a good memory.  you may remember that i was reluctant to even share our summer bucket list this year,  and i want to say that while we were able to put quite a few dry-erase x's on that sucker; and while we were able to make quite a few memories, what i hope we got out of it is more than mere scrapbook pages: i hope we continued to build something significant, some...

i remember watching the old cartoon “The Jetsons” as a kid, enjoying the idea of flying cars, and robots making your meals for you at the push of a button.   at some point i concluded that this was a vision of our future, and sometimes, i have to admit, i look around and wonder where the flying cars are, or why we haven’t figured out a way to have smell-a-vision.   i mean, it’s 2018, people!   if i cant taste it through the TV, i want to at least smell what they’re making on the Great British Bakeoff!   but today i read an amazing article by Avinash Kaushik about some of the technological advances that are happening in our world; things that will continue to unfold and evolve during our lifetimes.    he anticipates that by the time the next generation is reaching adulthood that we will have two categories of humans: organic and augmented.   he further suggests that by 2075 or 2100 all humans could be augmented.   augmented how?   wel...

every year our family makes a summer bucket list, a collection of things we'd like to experience/do/achieve/accomplish during the summer.  we don't always get all of them done, but we usually get through most of them.  some of the items are traditions that we do every year, and some are unique to each year.  and of course our graphic designer wife/mom makes it look super awesome, as a kind of family memoir.  here are some from previous years: but this year i felt kind of weird about sharing it.  i mean, my news feed is full of stories of kids being stowed in enclosures made of metal fencing (not cages, we are told); kids who have been ripped from their parents' arms.  children who probably don't have a summer bucket list, or if they do it just says, "get back to my parents," or "escape."  i cannot fathom a more fundamentally blunt symbol of our own privilege and blessing: that we will engage in a summer of camps and cream soda, ...

"ash wednesday, 2018" mixed media collage (paper, ash, glue on book cover) february, 2018 gregory a. milinovich wednesday was ash wednesday, the beginning of lent, and a day to remember that in the end, we all get dehydrated.  that's essentially what i preached about on wednesday: that the human body is around 60% water, but one day the water will all dry up from in our cells and between our cells, and we will dry up, like so many crumbling bones.   like the bones in the valley that ezekiel envisioned.  he went down into this valley, and said there so many bones, and they were very dry.  but the voice of the Lord asked zeke if those bones could live again.  and he wanted to believe it.  he really did.  he would have like to say, "yes!  make them live!  Lord, you can make these bones dance again.  you can rehydrate them.  you can restore my people to the way they once were.  you can reunited mother with chi...

"what shall i cry?" may seem like an odd advent question, but it really is an ancient question.  we hear it in the 40th chapter of isaiah, after God invited isaiah to cry out a word of comfort and peace.  can you imagine what that must be like?  to be given a word from the Lord to cry out?  i mean, what would it take to convince you that such a word was really from the Lord?  how would you use your voice and your talents and your life to share that word?  these are the same kinds of questions isaiah must have wrestled with, when he first felt compelled to cry out for God.  we are given a picture of this early in the book of isaiah, in chapter 6, as isaiah shares a vision in which he sees God high and lifted up, in the company of angels who are singing "holy, holy, holy," and God speaks and asks who will represent God - who will speak for God?   and isaiah is understandably overwhelmed.  he cries out, "i am a man of unclean lips, and i li...

lord, we are divided.  if the images on your tv screen of angry white men carrying tiki torches in charlottesville didn't demonstrate that to you, then the polarized response to it certainly did. not that this should come as a big surprise. after the election, we knew that there was a chasm between blue and red states and their corresponding voters. and while no oversimplified binary expression of extremes can ever fully paint the picture of who we are as individuals or groups, the way the extremes continue to attract movement to the polar caps of opinion shows just how divided we have become.  of course it doesn't help that we hear what we want to hear in news, social media, and even the marketplace (personalized ads online try to only show me what they know think i am already interested in).  further wedging the divide is the increasing inability to have civil discourse with those who believe/feel/live/love/look/vote differently than us.  when these factors con...

happy memorial day, a day we set apart to remember specifically that the freedoms and liberties we enjoy were bought at a price, and that price was paid in the currency of human lives.  even today, as we think about our way of life, we should recognize that when we abuse our freedoms, or take them for granted, we are devaluing that price and dishonoring that memory.  when we choose greed over commonwealth; when we choose comfort over justice for all; when we choose personal gain over public health; when we choose self over community and country; we forget the great gift we've been given and we shame ourselves. this land was never just for me.  it was always for us .  it was always about freedom from monarchy, freedom from legislated religion.  it left room for differences.  we seem to have forgotten that in our country today, when instead of welcoming the tired, the poor, and the hungry, we want to build walls and deport those who are different. ...