Spiritual Hiccups: December 2017

Sunday, December 24, 2017

Sermon: The View from Our Bubbles

Isaiah 9:2-7

The View from Our Bubbles

James Sledge December 24, 2017

Recently I was talking with someone about how we American increasingly live in little bubbles of our own making. Our Facebook and Twitter accounts are often echo chambers of like-minded people passing around articles and statements that nearly everyone there already agrees with. Because of the high cost of housing around here, many of our children attend schools filled with people just like them.

Churches often reflect these bubbles. Martin Luther King once said that 11:00 on Sunday mornings was the most segregated place in America. It’s changed, but only a little. And in the identity driven politics of our time, churches are increasingly segregated by where members fall on the political spectrum. One more echo chamber. We also tend to be financially homogeneous. Even churches that do a lot of social justice work and advocacy on behalf of the poor often have no poor members. They just don’t fit into the church’s bubble.

Many of us spend much of our time in an affluent, privileged bubble. We have contact with people who aren’t part of our bubble, but it tends to be sporadic and at the edges of our lives. We can volunteer at our Welcome Table meal program and spend part of our afternoon with people from a different world, but we can step back into our bubble whenever we wish.

Our Welcome Table guests aren’t part of our world, and can be easy to imagine that the bubble they occupy is at least partly of their own choosing. So too, we like to think we earned a spot in our comfortable, well-off bubble, our bubble that insulates us and makes it easier to ignore those outside it.

Inside our cozy, comfortable bubble, I wonder if we can really hear the Christmas story, hear it in the way the author intended. Neither the Christmas story nor our Isaiah prophecy are written for comfortable, secure people. Only shepherds attend Jesus’ birth. If these shepherds lived in our time, they would occupy a very different bubble from ours. Some of us would likely joke about their being from West Virginia or living in a double-wide. They would probably like hunting, love their guns, and consider us snobby elites.

Sermon: Savoring Old Stories

Isaiah 35:1-10

Savoring Old Stories

James Sledge December 17, 2017

I don’t know about you, but I sometimes find it hard to watch the news these days. O I’ll watch the network news if I’m home in the evening. And I’m one of those dinosaurs who still goes out to pick my newspaper from the driveway every morning. I look at every page most mornings, but I don’t always read all the articles. It’s too depressing.

I can only read so much about the latest shooting, or the terrible wildfires and devastating hurricanes and how both will likely become more common with climate change. I can only stomach so much information about racial hatred going mainstream, or about legislation that benefits the wealthy at the expense of the poor.

I see many online who respond to all this with a visceral anger. I can still feel anger, but I’m probably more inclined toward despair.

I’m reasonably certain that others are struggling with today’s news as well. Over the past year, I’ve frequently seen a cartoon from The New Yorker’s David Sipress posted on social media. A well-dressed man and woman walk on a city sidewalk, and the woman says, “My desire to be well informed is currently at odds with my desire to stay sane.”

I assumed that the cartoon was drawn for our current situation, but turns out it’s from the 1990s and Sipress can’t even remember what events inspired it. He did republish it in a New Yorker article earlier this year about how he’s trying to stay sane these days. A prominent strategy is rationing his intake of news.

Of course other people have more personal reasons for anger or despair, from those facing terrible disease or tragedy to those who constantly must navigate the institutional racism of our culture to those who’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted but felt they could do nothing for fear of losing their jobs, healthcare coverage, and respectability.

A time with the news being troubling and depressing, when people feel anger or despair, is the setting for the prophecy we just heard. So too, Mary’s Magnifcat is spoken into a time when Israel was under the thumb of Rome, when being poor or disabled or widowed or orphaned was often a death sentence, when hope for the future seemed grim.

Sermon: Countercultural Preparation

Isaiah 11:1-9

Countercultural Preparation

James Sledge December 10, 2017

How many Christmas shows have you seen so far? Many that I grew up with have already made their annual appearance. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and A Charlie Brown Christmas have all run at least once. It’s amazing their staying power. Rudolph first ran in 1964, and Charlie Brown the following year.

I’ve seen these programs so many times that I can easily recall scenes from them. In A Charlie Brown Christmas, Linus explains the true meaning of Christmas to Charlie Brown, reciting from the gospel of Luke. “And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.”

The story Linus tells is well known to many of us. Like the Christmas shows themselves, we encounter it every season. It is warm and familiar. For me it evokes memories of long ago Christmas pageants and my father reading it before bed on Christmas Eve.

The story is nostalgic for many of us, and so we may overlook how odd and subversive it is. In the midst of imperial Roman might, in the shadow of a Caesar called “Lord, Savior, Son of God,” a rival king is born, a different Savior and Son of God. Amidst the pageantry and royal finery of empire, the birth of a competing Lord is witnessed only by shepherds.

The contrast is absurd. Caesar, with all the might a of superpower at his disposal versus a baby, his parents, and a small entourage of dirty shepherds. What chance does this new king have? Why tell such a ridiculous story? Why would anyone choose to align themselves with Jesus rather than the emperor and all his vast wealth and power?

Our reading from Isaiah this morning has its own fanciful, absurd scenario. Wolf and lamb, leopard and kid, lion and calf, and children playing with poisonous snakes. It’s lovely and all. It makes for a great painting, but if anything, it is even more ridiculous than Jesus as an alternative to Caesar. It can’t really happen. It’s against the natural order of things.

But there is another scene in our reading that is much less absurd. It speaks of one from the house of David who will have God’s spirit, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. This one will truly discern the will of God and so bring justice for the poor and weak. Yes, the scene lapses into a bit of hyperbole at the end, but the core of it is not at all fanciful, not at all ridiculous. Indeed we claim these very things for those we baptize.