Sermon video: Lottery Ticket Faith (Luke 9:51-62)

Audios and videos of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Lottery Ticket Faith

 Luke 9:51-62
Lottery Ticket Faith
James Sledge                                                                                     June 26, 2022

It seems like something of a lost cause, but the Presbyterian Church has long taken a vigorous stand against gambling, including state sponsored gambling such as lotteries. Countless governing bodies of the Church have repeatedly stated that lotteries, usually approved with the promise of additional funding for schools, are the most irresponsible and regressive sorts of government fundraising. Rather than simply requiring the most well off in society to pay for essentials like a good education, the state preys on desperate people who see lotteries and gambling as their best hope out of poverty.

Nevertheless, state after state has passed a lottery, and the state gambling racket continues to grow and multiply. Lotteries have become a part of the American landscape, and even those Presbyterians who ardently worked against their continued spread probably can’t resist the temptation to buy a ticket now and then.

Official Presbyterian policy calls on church members to boycott lotteries and gambling as an article of faith, a matter of principle. Such action is unlikely to change anything, and not many of us are gambling addicts who are personally endangered by lotteries and such. At least I hope that most of you are not the sort of who fill the lottery coffers by buying hundreds of dollars in tickets. Surely not many of you think of the lottery as a good investment. Anyone counting on lottery winnings to get the kids through college, to pay for your retirement, to help you buy your first home, to pay off student loans?  It might be wonderful to win one, but most of us wouldn’t think of entrusting our future to the lottery. And if you do, you have a problem.

Not many of us are going to cash in the life insurance policy, empty the savings account, forego retirement planning or college savings, and bet it all on the lottery. Lottery tickets are something we buy with discretionary money. 

Sermon video: Identity Crisis (Galatians 3:23-29)

Audios and videos of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Identity Crisis

 Galatians 3:23-29
Identity Crisis
James Sledge                                                                                                 June 19, 2022

The Apostle Paul
Andrei Rublev (1410-20)

 When Christian missionaries began to go to different parts of Africa in the late 1800s, they took more than the good news of Jesus. They also brought with them Western ways. When they started churches among their new converts, they made worship look as much like it did back home as they could manage. They sang Western hymns and imported pianos and pump organs. And they wore black robes regardless of the temperature.

For all intents and purposes, those missionaries said to the people they met, “If you want to be Christian, you must adopt Western ways. No using indigenous musical instruments or existing musical forms. Being Christian meant becoming Western, and of course the Jesus they took with them to Africa was white.

Jesus always gets contextualized and culturized. Christianity began as a Jewish messianic movement, but its forms shifted as it became more and more of a Greco-Roman, Gentile religion. And when the emperor Constantine made Christianity the Roman Empire’s official religion, that religion took on the trappings of empire and power.

So what does it actually mean to be a Christian? What are the identifying marks of a Christian? I know people for whom it isn’t really Christian if it doesn’t include a traditionally shaped sanctuary that includes an organ for the music. I know of colleagues who took positions at new churches and then nearly got run out of town because they decided not to wear a robe, or they preached sermons from somewhere other than the pulpit.

In recent weeks I’ve had more than one conversation where questions about what the church is here for or what it means to be church have been asked. In some of these conversations, there was a bit of frustration with church, with Christian faith. If church is mostly about a certain style of music or architecture or dress, why does church even matter? Does church matter? Perhaps it depends on how we define church or Christianity, on what their identifying marks are.

Sermon video: Set Afire (Acts 2:1-21)

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Set Afire

 Acts 2:1-21
Set Afire
James Sledge                                                                  June 5, 2022 – Pentecost

El Greco,
Decent of the Holy Spirit

I probably don’t need to tell you that the number of the religiously unaffiliated adults is growing rapidly in America. A recent Pew Research study said that nearly three out of ten Americans have no formal religious connection.[1] And younger Americans are even less likely to have a religious home.

Among the unaffiliated, a popular self-designation is SBNR, or spiritual but not religious. Different people mean somewhat different things by this, but a lot in this group think of organized religion as musty old institutions that aren’t really necessary for someone to find a connection to the divine.

I can sympathize with such thinking. Churches have at times gotten focused on things pretty far removed from following Jesus. Add in the hatred espoused by some churches and throw in some sexual misconduct and abuse by clergy, and it isn’t too hard to see why some folks are suspicious of institutional religion.

But when spirituality gets understood as distinct from religion, spirituality moves almost entirely into the private, personal sphere. The term spiritual even takes on a kind of ethereal sense, largely disconnected from the day to day. It’s about internal experience, feelings of well-being and contentment, a warm vibe from a connection to something beyond yourself.