the unlikely orange

"why has this happened to me?"  that's the question that elizabeth asked, and it's the third question of my advent journey this year.  you may remember that zechariah and elizabeth were living in the hill country of judea; zechariah a priest and elizabeth his wife, unable to bear a child, and they were, as luke is careful to tell us, "getting on in years."  we find that one day in the course of his priestly duties, zechariah's turn to enter the sanctuary and offer incense turns into a moment he would never forget, as an angel of the Lord appeared to him and told him that elizabeth would bear a son, that they would name him john, and that he would prepare the people for the coming of the Lord.  unable to process this increadible unbelievable news, zechariah is made mute until the day of his son's birth.  the story moves ahead to elizabeth's sixth month of pregnancy.  zechariah is still unable to speak.  mary has had her own encounter with ...

as shannon and i prepare to go and see a favorite of ours in concert this weekend - emmylou harris - i was thinking about all the concerts i've been able to attend so far in my life.  and i've been to many!  you can see them in word cloud above, and here is a list of the ones i can remember:  Harrod and Funck (got to see 5 or 6 times) Over the Rhine (seen at least 10 times) Coldplay (amazing....viva la vida tour) Willie Nelson (legendary) Taylor Swift (fun) Shania Twain U2 (one of the most worshipful experiences of my life) MuteMath (best live show, hands down) OC Supertones (seen 4 or 5 times...always entertaining) The Myriad Carman (i'm not proud of it) Mylon Lefevre and Broken Heart (c'mon and crack the sky with me) Livingston Taylor (james taylor's brother.  sounds like him) Audio Adrenaline Newsboys (too many times) Phil Keaggy Jennifer Knapp Whiteheart David Crowder Band Hoi Polloi Ca...

it looks like one of the huts finally found han solo and had him frozen in carbonite (again).  how do we know this?  NASA has found him.  on mercury.  you can read about it .  also, if you're having trouble concentrating, you need more of the color orange in your life.  seriously.  further research has shown that if you are having trouble dealing with the awful beginning to the football season by the steelers, or the way the pirates are laying an egg againt the padres, or the sad last desperate moments of the yankees season, you need more agentorange in your life.  agent orange records, that is.  where we never stop.  we keep on hoping.  we never give up.  we die trying.  oh, and we change our name.  that's right.  i am getting rid of the agentorangerecords moniker.  it is long overdue.  it is too closely associated with a chemical and war and terrible cost to life, and i am no longer w...

    i don't want to miss anything.  that's part of the story of my life.  maybe it's part of the cost of being so wide-eyed with wonder at the width and breadth of this crazy creation, but, for better or worse, it would, at least at this point in my life so far be a suitable epitaph on my tombstone:  here lies greg milinovich who tried to make sure he never missed anything, and who died trying.  i don't know why this is even in the forefront of my mind right now, other than it just seems to keep coming up and showing itself to me in various ways, and perhaps even writing about it here is narcissistic, but, alas, i might as well just own up to that charge.  here are some examples of my condition: -i have terrible difficulty ordering at a restaurant, because to order one thing means to not order everything else.  i almost never decide what i am going to order until the words come out of my mouth.  it is as if i am only ordering be...

if i'm ever somewhere and the thought occurs to me, "hey, i should really sing a song right now."  whether it's just to pass the time or to put a baby to sleep or whatever, there is one song that always seems to be the first to pop into my mind, and it's this one:  what's yours?

this coming sunday i'll be preaching about the story told in the gospels (luke 17) where Jesus encounters a group of 10 lepers and tells them to go show themselves to the priest.  on their way (they must have been confused about such a strange order from this rabbi) they are made clean. did you catch that?  that's a big deal.  10 people who were considered wildly unclean; who were not permitted into the center of society; who were forced to live life on the margins; who were excluded not only from fun and casual situations, but also from living the life of faith, were made clean.  just like that.  this is a huge moment.  everything has just changed for them.  they've been healed and in an instant find themselves off the margins and back into the mainstream.  this is monumental. so what do they do? well, they go on with their lives.  they've been made clean.  so they go on living normal lives, as best ...

as a united methodist pastor, i have never been forced to think about buying a house.  part of our system is that the church where we are serving provides a home for us.  but we often think about where we will live when we retire, and how we would love to buy a house that we could vacation in for now until retirement.  but when we start looking around, i quickly become overwhelmed.  i get easily overwhelmed, actually (***warning: unnecessary tangent ahead***).  for example, one time shannon asked me to buy some paint at home depot.  this was a perfectly normal request and i handled perfectly normally until i actually entered the paint aisle(s).  then i was bombarded with words like latex, gloss, matte, eggshell, indoor, outdoor, indoor/outdoor, flat, satin, semi-gl...oh my flipping gosh!  there are too many options!  they found me curled up in the fetal position on the cement floor of aisle 37 at home depot, clutching hand fulls of paint ch...

as i prepare my sermon for this coming sunday, i am wondering what you might think about the role of the emotions in loving God, and in particular in our worship.  i have grown mostly being taught that you can't trust your emotions, that happiness is a red herring and we really ought to be looking for joy (which is no emotion at all, it seems).  as i have gotten older i have learned to be more at peace with my emotions at least in terms in recognizing them as a good an important part of who i am.  still, i'm wondering what your thoughts are on this issue: do our emotions have a place in worship?  if we come to church feeling angry or sad or confused or happy or ____________, does it hurt or enhance our worship experience?  is there a right or good way to somehow use that emotion in worship? or are we better served, in your opinion, if we sort of check our emotions at the door and worship the unchanging God who is great beyond the whim of our emotions? i have my...

"don't be so heavenly minded that you're no earthly good."  ever hear that expression?  i have been pondering it a bit recently, and wanted to know what you think about it.  i have been reading several bloggers and others who react negatively to that sentiment, and who argue that it is impossible to be too heavenly minded.  they say we are supposed to be heavenly minded, that scripture tells us to have the mind of Christ.  i certainly understand that, but i have always understood it a bit differently.  i always thought that the expression was literally talking about being "heavenly minded," that is, too preoccupied with heaven.  haven't you ever encountered a person of faith who was perhaps a bit too preoccupied with the afterlife?  or maybe you yourself have been?  i have. i remember a season of my faith journey, when i was in high school, which was consumed with where i would go when i died.  i had a very legalistic faith at tha...

raise your hand if you love waiting. *scanning the room* anyone? that's what i thought. --- let's be honest, no one really enjoys waiting. but as i've been researching my sermon for this coming sunday about living in expectation, i keep coming back to david who wrote over and over again in the psalms that he waited on God. "i wait for the Lord. my soul waits" (psalm 130:5). of course isaiah wrote poetically about the value of waiting on God, too. He wrote, "those who wait on the Lord will rise up like eagles." and so this begs the question: what is so good about waiting on the Lord? i'm curious about your thoughts here. --- i hate waiting. i'm really bad at it, actually. if i feel i am going to have to sit and wait for longer than 20 seconds, i will get out my crackberry and start surfing the internets. so what does it mean to wait on God? any ideas? any experiences? what do you hate waiting for? here are some of mine: --- i h...

"i am the good shepherd," says Jesus in john 10. and our minds naturally conjure up the familiar words of the 23rd psalm, remembering that our shepherd leads us to water and to green pastures. But what does it mean to us, if anything, that real shepherds lead their sheep not by walking in front of them, but from behind, letting the flock go where it will and only offering a correcting voice if it is wandering in the wrong direction? what if our shepherd is not pulling us somewhere, but reassuring us as we move forward, and calling us back to the right way when we get off track? what would that mean for our journeys of faith?

ed. note: i normally use this blog to write about movies that i love, but lest you think i love every movie i see, i thought i would include a review here of a film that i did not enjoy. last year someone who knows that i love movies got me this movie as a gift, presumably becuase it has a reputation among some as one of the great movies of american cinema, and among others as the greatest science fiction film of the 1980's. directed by ridley scott and starring harrison ford, i had heard of this film, but had never watched it or had any idea what it was about. i've tried watching it a couple of times over the last couple of months, but had great difficulty actually getting through it. the pace was slow, and while the visuals and effects may have been groundbreaking in the '80s, they were anything but to me. in the fast changing world of technology, particularly as it relates to film and cgi and all that hollywood is able to do to aid our imaginations, i will give this ...

this may seem somewhat macabre to some of you, but i have an absolute fascination with stories about religious cults, particularly the 'peoples temple' founded by jim jones, which eventually ended with the almost unbelievable tragedy of jonestown. i don't know exactly what it is, but something in me is inexplicably drawn to this story time and time again. i have watched films on it, read books about it, looked up the deceased online and anything else i can do. tonight cnn is showing a special by soledad o'brien featuring some of the stories of the few survivors of jonestown. i'm wondering, first of all, if anyone else shares my curiosity/interest in jim jones and the people's temple. is it just me? or does this story have something in it that draws us in? i'm curious to find out if any of my readers are interested... i think part of my interest lies in the fact that jim jones started off as a bible-pounding evangelical preacher. he was a bible-belt ...

let me draw your attention to the poll on the left hand side of my blog. over the last several weeks i have run many different polls and it appears that the majority of you feel that obama would be better than mccain at such things as wii, hungry hippos, hair-dressing, health-teaching, and so on. in part i have been running these polls just to bring some levity to an otherwise harsh and, at times, painful campaign season, as if asking which candidate is the better hungry hippos player has any meaning whatsoever. it doesn't. i don't need a president who can eat more hot dogs than the other guy. what we need, i think, is a president who can lead with clarity and conviction and integrity. we need a person who models a leadership that serves others rather than expecting to be served. we need a leader who is willing to take some risks, including the great risk of being honest. i don't know if either one of these men is that guy, but in less than a week we will elect one ...

Created by OnePlusYou - Free Dating

take a look at these images on the right. pretty normal little pieces of our culture, right? you've got your american idol, a piece of money (albeit a piece that most of us would never really see), and the logo for you tube, the increasingly popular web video site. you might be asking yourself, "what do these things have in common?" well, i found them in a church. let me explain... ... this summer i went on a mission trip with our young people to west virginia. we stayed at a non-denominational church out there, that was surprisingly big and fancified for rural west virginia. anyway, on a wall in the hallway leading into their gymnasium/auditorium were dozens of different kinds of cards, mostly business card size, with these kinds of logos on them. they certainly attracted the eye, as well as the hand. knowing that all the youth would want to take these, they asked us not to take them. oops. i couldn't resist. i knew that i wanted to write about these here...

as you may know, i am constantly interested in and drawn to the topic of faith and art, and i found a very interesting article about the quality of Christian fiction here . not only is the article a somewhat funny look at the issues around faith and art, but the discussion in the comments that follow is truly interesting. there are so many opinions about this subject, and just as many generalizations that are made, but i, for one, wish more christians would read stuff like this, just to understand how isolating ourselves from the world has had unintended consequences. in the name of being safe, or morally sound, or clean, or whatever the reason is, modern american christianity has created a subculture, also called a ghetto, of christianized stuff. this includes the arts. it also includes things like greeting cards, clothing, home decor, jewelry, and so on, but that's for another day's discussion. what i am interested in here is the idea (whether its true or not - i think...

as many of you know, i lead a monthly film discussion group at my church called reel life: discussions on film and faith. i am currently in the process of choosing the movies for the next 5 months. i was wondering if you had any suggestions. the criteria, quite simply, would be that the film be one that we can engage as people of faith and have a dialogue about. it doesn't necessarily need to about God or faith, promote a christian worldview, or even be uplifting. i would rather watch films that give us a lens through which to view this life, and to discuss that lens from the vantage point of faith. any suggestions?

best question i heard in an interview at jurisdictional conference: if every character in the Bible (except Jesus) was leading a Bible study, whose would you choose and why? how would you answer that?

at the aforementioned fourth of july parade, a float went by with this banner on it. then someone came by and handed me a couple of tootsie rolls and a flyer with the same information on it. JESUS POWER EXPLOSION!!!! i put the picture up on facebook, and someone commented, "I don't know if i should be excited or afraid." exactly. i mean, don't get me wrong, i'm all for evangelism in so far as evangelism means sharing Good News with people. i'm all for offering drink to the thirsty and food to the hungry and company to the lonely and orphaned and care to the sick and so forth. i'm all for sharing Jesus with people. but an explosion? is jesus an atom bomb or wmd? are we trying to infiltrate the elk county fairgrounds so we can blow the place up with God? i'm not trying to be cynical here, i just have my own doubts about this technique. when i hear that there's going to be a 'jesus power explosion' my first thought is to cover my face ...