A Nice Treat

My professor and mentor, Dr. Alan Meyers, filled in for his pastor at Oak Hill Presbyterian Church yesterday. I knew that he preached every so often, so I've been asking for awhile for him to let me know when he would be doing so. He let me know last week, so after going to my normal church service (I needed to be there, since my usher team is ushering this month), I went further into the city and got to enjoy a service at Oak Hill.

Not surprisingly, it was a great sermon, and there were a number of interesting elements to the service as well (most out of the ordinary was an electronic oboe that one member played for the communion mediation). The sermon had a really interesting, thought provoking perspective on death and it simply being a “ceasing to be (something).” To freshen up the idea of the old self dying to the new self, Dr. Meyers used a number of metaphors of other changes in life — such as marriage — and how they represent a dying of one self and birth of a new one in much the same way.

Like most good sermons, it was interesting not so much in how many completely new ideas it brought out, but how it makes one look at ideas that have become too routine to really think about.