June 13, 2019
A hearty congratulations to the Maggie Walker Governor’s School Class of 2019. I pray God’s richest blessings upon each of you as you reach this tremendous milestone in your lives. All of the work, the late nights, the tests, quizzes, exams, homework, projects, classes, and lectures are finally and gloriously done. No more pencils, no more books, etc., etc., etc.,
I would like to begin my remarks this evening by acknowledging that our gathering is smaller in number that we hoped and prayed it would be with the passing of your classmate Eli Greer two years ago. In his honor, I would like to share a poem with you. I had already planned to read one stanza and discuss it, but tonight it seems fitting to read it in its entirety. The poem is one of my favorites, a poem titled “To an Athlete Dying Young,” composed by the English poet A.E. Housman.
No audio this week.
I once read a time-management related weblog where I encountered an article about the danger of wasting time. The author’s premise was this: the worst kind of time-wasting trap that we can fall into is not goofing off. It is doing fake work. When we are goofing off, we know you are goofing off. However, when we are doing fake work, we are doing things that seem like real work, except for the fact that they aren’t. So, for example, when I should be writing my sermon and I am instead filing papers on my desk, re-shelving my books, and checking e-mail and Facebook, I may be in my office, I may feel like I am working. If you were to peek through my window, I may even look like I am working, but I am not working. What I am doing is using fake work to assuage my conscience because what I am really doing is avoiding what truly needs to be done. I do it all the time. The reason the bushes at my house are pruned is because I do it when I really should be raking the leaves, and so on.
On Sunday, June 16, 2013, I had just finished attending a district United Methodist Annual Conference orientation session in Charlottesville and was halfway home to the parsonage in Crozet, driving through the tiny village of Ivy, when my phone rang. It was my wife Tracy who informed me that I needed to come directly home, that her father had called with devastating news, and that she needed to immediately leave for Baltimore. 
Ten months later, I was baptized in a small congregation, where the pastor ascended to the top of a high mountain and presented me to God, like Simba in The Lion King, and everyone in the congregation remarked how it was at that exact moment that they knew for certain that I was destined for service in Christ’s church, even before they heard the voice from heaven proclaim “This is my Doug, the beloved, with whom I am well-pleased.”
This is sermon two in this series. The audio is 
Early one Sunday morning in July just after breakfast, Pastor Carl Blackburn invited us to answer a simple question. “Why are you doing this?” The night before, his church, St. John UMC in Chattanooga, TN had hosted fifty-seven Reveille members en route to our New Orleans area mission trip.
Mary Evans is a member of Reveille United Methodist Church who participated in this year’s medical mission to rural Honduras with the Friends of Barnabas.
An update on the ongoing progress of resolving matters of human sexuality was released today by the Council of Bishops of the United Methodist Church.
I only had 5-6 minutes, or I would have said more. Reveille was blessed to host this baccalaureate, and it was fun to be a part of it. A special thanks to Susan Creasy for arranging it.