Thursday, January 31, 2019
Sunday, January 27, 2019
Sermon: Discerning the Body
1 Corinthians 12:12-31a
Discerning the Body
James Sledge January
27, 2019
I
recently read about a study on why young
people leave church. The study surveyed a couple thousand people, ages 23 to 30,
who had attended Protestant churches regularly while in high school. Two thirds
of these had dropped out, and they were asked to say why, checking as many
items from a list of 55 that applied to them. Almost all checked one or more
boxes in a category labeled “life changes.” This included things such as going
away to college or work responsibilities that made attendance difficult.
Most
of those surveyed said their departure from church was more accidental than
planned. Only a tiny fraction cited a loss of belief. Most were not averse to a
possible return.
This
study got me wondering about the nature of these twenty-somethings connection
to the church. When they had attended, what was the connection? No doubt many
originally went because of parents, but some likely developed an attachment of
their own. Perhaps there were church programs they enjoyed, music, youth
mission trips, a service opportunity that became meaningful. But their
situation changed, and they moved on. They might come back some day. They might
not.
What about you? What is the nature of
your connection to the church? What binds you to the body of Christ? What sort
of thing could break that bond?
_____________________________________________________________________
The
Christians in Corinth are different from us. They didn’t grow up with Christian
faith, or Jewish faith for that matter. They were recent converts with a lot of
excitement about their new-found faith. It wasn’t routine to them. They didn’t
come out of habit or expectation. Still, Paul is concerned about their
connection to the body of Christ, about what binds them to the church.
Corinth
was nowhere near the individualistic, consumer culture that we live in, but it
was more so than the one Jesus had lived in or that the church had emerged in.
Perhaps that is why the Corinthians failed to grasp the extremely communal
sense of Christian faith.
Paul
has already addressed a couple of problems related to this, getting particularly
riled up about the Lord’s Supper. The Corinthians worship in the evening in
someone’s home, likely a wealthy member’s. The Lord’s Supper was part of a
full, fellowship meal, but the wealthier members, who were able to get there
earlier, began the meal before the poorer members could finish work and arrive.
At times they had eaten all the food and drunk all the wine before the poorer
members ever got there. Paul chastises them and says that those who
eat and drink without discerning the body eat and drink judgment against
themselves.
Sunday, January 20, 2019
Sermon: Spiritual Vitality Exam
1 Corinthians 12:1-11
Spiritual Vitality Exam
James Sledge January
20, 2019
Unless
you’re really new around here, you’ve probably heard something about the Renew process that we’ve been doing. There
have been a lot of steps along the way, but what really got the ball rolling
was the results of the Congregational Assessment Tool or CAT.
Two
years ago, representatives from our presbytery walked the Session through the
CAT report drawn from the survey that many of you took. The report was thirty
pages long, filled with all sorts of information and a slew of charts and
graphs. One page was a “Performance Dashboard.” It showed eight gauges that
each went from zero to one hundred. They had labels such as “Governance,
Conflict Management, Engagement in Education,” and so on.
Not
surprisingly, we scored higher in some areas than others, and much our
conversation that day focused on the lower scores. One low score was
“Hospitality,” and we talked about things we might do to address our weaknesses
in this area.
But
our lowest score sparked a different reaction. The needle on the “Spiritual
Vitality” gauge read two, but rather than discussing ways we might deal with this
area of weakness, we instead struggled to understand how this could be. Surely the
score was somehow wrong.
I should point out that these scores are
not absolute. They are percentile rankings that compare us to other
congregations who have taken the CAT survey. In addition, the CAT defines
spiritual vitality in a particular way, and when I looked at the raw data, it
didn’t seem all that bad. Significant majorities tended to agree, agreed, or
strongly agreed that their spiritual experiences impacted how they viewed life,
that they experienced the presence of God in their lives, and they tried to
connect their faith to other aspect of their lives. A minority thought that
while their faith was important other matters were more pressing. Clearly many
individuals here are spiritually vital and vibrant, yet as a community, such
folks make up a smaller percentage than is the case in most other
congregations.
______________________________________________________________
Sunday, January 13, 2019
Sermon: One of Them
Luke 3:15-22
One of Them
James Sledge January
13, 2019 – Baptism of the Lord
In one of her sermons, Barbara
Brown Taylor relates an episode from the novel, The Patron Saint of Liars. Much of the book takes place at Saint
Elizabeth’s Home for Unwed Mothers, located in Habit, Kentucky. The cook who
lives on site has a young daughter named Cecilia. Cecilia has always been doted
on and mothered by the young women who come there to give up a children for
adoption.
One day when
Cecilia is fifteen, she meets Lorraine, a new girl who has come to stay there.
Lorraine is terribly nervous and anxious as she waits to be interviewed by
Mother Corrine, the nun who runs the place. Cecilia tries to help Lorraine by
giving her some advice.
“The guy who got
you pregnant,” she tells Lorraine. “Don’t say he’s dead. Everybody does that.
It makes Mother Corinne crazy.”
Lorraine sits on
her hands and is quiet a moment. “I was going to say that,” she says.
“See?”
“So what do I
tell her?”
“I don’t know,”
Cecilia says. “Tell her the truth. Or tell her you don’t remember.”
“What did you tell her? Lorraine asks. Cecilia
is speechless. “I sat there, absolutely frozen,” she later wrote. “I felt like
I had just been mistaken for some escaped mass murderer. I felt like I was
going to be sick, but that would have only proved her assumption. No one had
ever, ever mistaken me for one of them, not even as a joke. The lobby felt
small and airless. I thought I was going to pass out.”[1]
Cecilia had always been around
these young women. She liked them and she tried to help them, but she was
horrified to be mistaken for one of them,
one of these people who had made such a mess of their lives that families sent
them away until that mess could be adopted and they could return home.
Jesus seems not to share Cecilia’s
worries. From what little Luke tells us about Jesus’ baptism, I get the
impression that Jesus must have simply gotten in line with all the other folks.
I take it that Luke says so little about Jesus’ baptism because he, along with
the other gospel writers, is a bit embarrassed by it. John’s baptism is, after
all, a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, and why would Jesus
need such a thing? The gospel writers all seem to have a little Cecilia in
them, and they would prefer that Jesus not be mistaken for one of them, for one of those sinners. But
Jesus obviously doesn’t mind being identified with them, with sinners, with us.
Luke’s version of Jesus’ baptism
features a kind of ordination, perhaps more a coronation. The Holy Spirit comes
over Jesus, and God speaks. “You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am
well pleased.” The language is
reminiscent of a psalm used when Israel’s kings were crowned and declared God’s
son. But this coronation happens in the context of baptism and prayer. Jesus
first aligns himself with sinful, broken humans, declaring himself one of them.
And then, as he draws near to God in prayer, his identity and vocation are
announced.
I once saw a quote about church
that said, “For a place that claims to be a hospital for sinners, the people
there sure go to a lot of trouble not to be mistaken for one.” Seems we all
have a little Cecilia in us. We don’t mind helping sinners, but we don’t like
to think of ourselves as one of them.
And yet, in our own baptisms, we
have aligned ourselves with the brokenness, the sinfulness of all humanity. Our
baptisms insist that we, like everyone else, need saving. We are all one of them, people who live with the residue
of the bad choices we have made, the hurt we have caused, and the pain of
others we have ignored.
I know that all too often I expend
a great deal of energy trying to maintain a façade that says, I’m not one of them. I want to be seen and to see
myself as highly competent, not needing other’s help. The difficulties I have
with others are more their fault than mine, and my failures are mostly because
of things beyond my control. Of course there’s always the nagging worry that I
will be found out, that the façade will crumble, and people will realize that I
am a fraud.
Still I cling to this façade, even
though life is actually much easier when I can let it go. It is so much easier
to be a partner with others, to let go of grudges and hurts, to truly be
myself, when I can let go of the fiction that I’m not one of them.
__________________________________________________________________________________
When we do an infant baptism here,
I always ask the parents the name of their child. I tell them ahead of time that
they aren’t supposed to say their last name, just the given names. That’s
because in baptism we all share a common last name, Christian, brothers and
sisters of Jesus, members of the household of God.
We don’t become part of that
household by separating ourselves from them
or by imagining ourselves better. We become part of Christ’s body because we’re
joined to the Jesus who stands with us, whoever we are, no matter how broken,
no matter how badly we fail to measure up to the façades we create for
ourselves, or the façades others create for us.
On those occasions when I can
claim my place as one of them, when I
can let go of the pretensions and the façades, I find that I am much closer to
God. I suppose this should be obvious. Jesus has already shown me the way. It
is precisely when he stands with humanity that he hears God speak his identity,
that he hears his call to the work God has for him, and he is able to begin his
ministry.
So too at the font, we are joined
in solidarity with all of broken humanity, and God speak to us. “You are my
daughter; you are my son. You are all one in Christ, one body, one community
called to continue his ministry in the world.”
In a moment, we will all have the
opportunity to remember that, to come to the waters once more and remember we
are one of them, those whom Jesus joined, those whom Jesus called to be his
body in the world.
[1]
Quoted by Barbara Brown Taylor, “The River of Life,” Home by Another Way (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1999) pp. 32-33.
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