Sermon: Strange Guest List

 Luke 14:7-14
Strange Guest List
James Sledge                                                                            February 18, 2024 

Back in January, a question about dinner parties ran in the Ms. Manners advice column in The Washington Post. It read, “Dear Miss Manners: I must admit I’ve never understood etiquette’s requirement to invite people to one’s home after being invited to theirs. When my spouse and I host, we feel that it’s our idea — nobody asked us to make a dinner and invite the group. We enjoy cooking and spending time with everyone.

“Is it not improper for hosts to expect that they will be ‘repaid’ with invitations from their guests?”[1]

Miss Manners was not at all sympathetic to the writer’s point of view. While she agreed that the response need not be another identical dinner party, she said that it is completely necessary for the recipient to respond in a way that says, “We were not just looking for a free night out. We enjoyed ourselves and want to see you again.”[2]

Jesus is at a dinner party thrown by a leader of the Pharisees in our scripture reading for this morning. Jesus has already caused something of a stir at this party by healing someone. That might not be a big deal except it happened to be the sabbath. The healing has just happened when Jesus decides to broach the topic of dinner party etiquette, reminding people that they should not grab the seat of honor and perhaps be later demoted when someone more important arrives, but to take a lower seat and perhaps be promoted to a better one.

Jesus isn’t saying anything new here. There a very similar words in the book of Proverbs where it says, Do not put yourself forward in the king’s presence or stand in the place of the great; it is better to be told, “Come up here,” than to be put lower in the presence of a noble.

I don’t expect anyone at the party was surprised or taken aback by what Jesus says, but Jesus’ conventional words about humility are just an opening to talk about a much more radical form of humility. “But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. It’s probably worth remembering that in Jesus’ day, there was no social safety net and no real accommodations for disabilities, and to be lame or blind typically relegated someone to a life of begging and depending on the kindness of others.

That means that the dinner party Jesus suggests would look quite different. It would not be made up of the beautiful people or the successful and well to do or the in crowd, quite the opposite. But I wonder if Jesus hasn’t moved past talking about dinner party etiquette. I wonder if he isn’t talking about something bigger.

In the verses immediately after our passage, Jesus tells those at the dinner party a parable about a Great Banquet. It is clearly a metaphor for God’s kingdom, and the quest list also includes the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind that Jesus tells his host to invite.

Hospitality and table fellowship were a crucial part of the culture in Jesus’ day. Wedding banquets and dinner parties were the primary social events. Such events had much greater social importance and significance than similar events in our day, but the process for coming up with the guest list seems not to have changed much. People tended to invite friends, relatives, people they wanted to impress, people who had invited them, and so on.

But the ways of God’s new day are vastly different. Conventional guest lists tend to conform to the status quo, tend to perpetuate the insider/outsider boundaries of a society. And so those who want to live by the ways of God’s new day must act differently.

 This issue of table fellowship is crucial for Luke’s gospel and its companion book, Acts. The risen Jesus is made known in the breaking of the bread, and his new community is to be a sign of God’s coming new day, and so it welcomes those once thought to be outsiders and not on the guest list.

In our denomination’s foundational documents there is a classic statement known as the Great Ends of the Church. The last of these six ends or purposes is “the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.”[3] In other words, when people look at the church they should get a glimpse of what God’s new day looks like, and one thing Jesus makes clear is that it will be made up of lots of people who might not seem to be prime candidates for the guest list.

Sometimes churches do a good job of this. My previous church had a twice a month supper program that was open to all comers. On the larger of the two nights, we would often have over 250 people there. Some were working poor, and some were homeless. There were many different nationalities and races. There were children and elderly, people in poor health and those with disabilities. They sat at tables and members of the church and community served them.

Open Table at this church does something similar, and in both cases I think the gathering looks a little like what Jesus says the Kingdom looks like, the sort of guest list Jesus says to invite to the party. On Thursday mornings at the Meeting House and Wednesday evenings at Falls Church Presbyterian, a glimpse of the Kingdom is on display at the church. Everyone is welcome at the table. Everyone has a place at the table.

But what didn’t happened at Falls Church was for Sunday morning to look like those Wednesday evenings. We sometimes made very deliberate attempts to invite our Wednesday guests to worship or other church activities, but those activities, worship especially, looked a lot less like the Kingdom.

Churches tend not to look like the guest list Jesus envisions for his banquet. There are wealthy churches and churches where the members are of more modest means. There are Black churches, white churches, Latino churches, Korean churches, and on and on. There are liberal churches and conservative churches. Just about any division you can find in our society you can see mirrored in the church.

Some of that may be understandable, even necessary. If your primary language is Korean or Spanish, it makes a lot of sense to attend a church where they speak that language. But I wonder how many of the divisions in churches are not necessary, are actually a way that we look more like the world than we look like the Kingdom of God, that we fail to be an “exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.”

Who is welcome here? Who has a seat at the table? In an increasingly fractured and polarized world, those seem to me important questions to ask. How can we be an “exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven” if we don’t think about what will help us look more like God’s new day, if we don’t think about the ways we, perhaps inadvertently, let people know they aren’t welcome here.

During the Sundays in Lent (Sundays technically are not a part of Lent) we are leaving the lectionary and preaching from scripture passages highlighted in the book Meeting Jesus at the Table. (We’ll also be using some of that book’s chapters for an adult education opportunity on Sunday mornings as well as Wednesday evenings and Thursday mornings.) One thing that both the book and the scriptures make clear, Jesus had some strange ideas about who was welcomed to the table, about what the quest list is supposed to look like. And we are called to build a community that mimics Jesus’ guest list.

That call to build a new sort of community is rooted in a bit of incredibly good news. In the guest list for God’s new day, in the guest list for the Lord’s Table, the things that might seem to be disqualifying aren’t. Whoever you are, whatever you’ve done or failed to do, whatever doubts or worries you have, you are on Jesus’ strange guest list and have a seat at the table. Welcomed at the table, let us welcome others, and create a community of love and welcome for all.

---

[1] “Miss Manners” in The Washington Post, January 15, 2024

[2] Ibid

[3] Book of Order, F-1.0304

Ash Wednesday Reflection

 Joel 2:1-2, 12-17
Ash Wednesday Reflection
James Sledge                                                                            February 14, 2024 

Honk, honk, honk, honk. The car alarm drones on and on, and nobody pays it much attention. I’ve sometimes wondered how useful such alarms are if they don’t get anyone to do anything. Often people just want to get the alarm turned off, to get rid of the annoying honk, honk, honk.

Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy mountain! Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near. Honk, honk.

I’ve lost count of the school shootings, of the mass shootings. The carnage of gun violence is sickening, and no one does anything. Honk, honk, honk.

Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy mountain!  Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near. Honk, honk.

The evidence becomes more and more overwhelming that we’ve reached a tipping point on climate change. The storms in California were just the latest episode. And I read where some scientists say we need to add a Category 6 to the hurricane scale because they have gotten so much stronger. Honk, honk, honk.

Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy mountain!  Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near.  Honk, honk.

Sometimes the very foundations of our democracy seem to be threatened. If people won’t trust the outcome of elections, what happens next? Honk, honk, honk.

Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy mountain!  Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near.  Honk, honk.

We’re good at ignoring alarms. We shrug them off. Many alarms scream that something is amiss in our world. Yet other than a little hand wringing, many churches hardly seem to notice. Too often, we act like religion is a strictly personal, private thing, even though the Bible insists faith is about community, about God’s people working together to proclaim good news to the poor, release to the captives, freedom for the oppressed, justice for the weak. But we work on our spirituality and ignore the alarms. Honk, honk, honk.

The Bible and God’s prophets insist that we cannot ignore the alarms. Joel is typical. When the alarm of crisis fills the land, it is not someone else’s problem. It is a call for the community of faith to come together for soul searching, repentance, and renewal. 

Blow the trumpet in Zion; sanctify a fast; call a solemn assembly. Assemble the aged; gather the children, even infants at the breast. Let the bridegroom leave his room, and the bride her canopy. But this trumpet sound is not that of an alarm. It is the ringing of the church bell. Ding, dong, ding, dong. God calls the community of faith to respond. “But the children have a soccer game. I did my part at church when I was younger. I’m just too busy.” Ding, dong, ding, dong.

The biblical prophets insist that when the world is amiss, it is not the fault of other folk. It is the fault of the community of faith. Our culture celebrates greed and getting whatever you want right now. It says that happiness comes from having it all. And we in the church nod in agreement as we bow before the gods of consumerism. Honk, honk, honk. Sound the alarm.  Ding, dong, ding, dong. Call the church to action.

Our society allows there to be one justice for the rich and another for the poor despite the Bible command that this cannot be. And we in the church shrug because we’re not poor.  Honk, honk, honk. Sound the alarm. Ding, dong, ding, dong. Call the church to action.

The civilian death toll in Gaza, the number of children left orphans, the number maimed, is beyond appalling. And we in the church mostly shrug because Israel is an ally, and it’s all a long way away. Honk, honk, honk. Sound the alarm.  Ding, dong, ding, dong. Call the church to action.

The prophets say that when the alarm sounds, it is the community of faith that must respond because it is the community of faith which has not done its job. Jesus says that we must be willing to deny ourselves. We must be willing to lose ourselves for the sake of the gospel. Honk, honk, honk. Sound the alarm.  Ding, dong, ding, dong. Call the church to action.

I can think of no more appropriate place to answer the alarm, and to respond to the church bell, than at the beginning of Lent. Lent is a time to remember that in a sinful world, a Christian life looks like the life of Christ, a life that is willing to go the way of a cross. Lent is a time to heed Jesus’ call to quit worrying about earthly treasure and concentrate on what really matters. Lent is a time to remember that we can celebrate the joy of Easter only because Jesus walked the way of the cross. Lent is a time to remember how seldom we carry our own cross and follow Jesus.  Lent is a time to remember what Jesus did for us, and to show our thanksgiving by renewing and redoubling our efforts to follow him as faithful disciples.

In just a few moments we will invite you to come forward and be marked with the sign of the cross. This mark of ashes is a sign of our human frailty, of our dependence on God, a reminder of the price that was paid for our sakes, of our failures to live as Christ calls us, and our call to live as Christ did. Honk, honk, honk.  Ding, dong, ding, dong. The alarm is sounding. The church bell is ringing. Will we answer?

Sermon: Listen to Him

 Mark 9:2-9
Listen to Him
James Sledge                                     Transfiguration Sunday, February 11, 2024 

When we first began discussing whether to bring back an 8:30 worship service, the question of what sort of service it would be naturally arose. Prior to the pandemic, it was mostly a carbon copy of the 11:00 service. The choir didn’t sing, but paid section leaders did.

Many of you likely recall the online survey we did to gauge interest in an 8:30 service, and one of the findings was that only twenty-five or so people who attended the old 8:30 service planned to come to any new one. That was not enough people to make the service viable, so we needed to make the service attractive to additional people.

We also wanted any 8:30 service to have potential for growth, and the old 8:30 service had declining attendance prior to the pandemic. To me, all of this argued for doing a different sort of service, one that offered more than simply an earlier time slot. Perhaps we could come up with something that would attract people who weren’t enamored by the traditional, liturgical nature of our 11:00 service.

Once we began thinking in that direction, the subject of a contemporary service came up. This often features a band with words projected on a screen, but that seemed too big of a stretch for us. Where would we put a band or screens in the Meeting House, and was our congregation ready for something truly contemporary? So we ended up doing what we call “informal,” featuring less traditional liturgy and music from the hymnal that feels more like songs than hymns. The new service has been fairly well received, but it still remains to be seen whether this different service will be able to find its audience and begin to grow.

There’s nothing really edgy about this new service, but it shares things in common with contemporary worship. It tries to create a slightly different worship experience, one that may be more accessible for people who don’t really resonate with pipe organs, ancient liturgies, and three-hundred-year-old hymns.

Perhaps what we did was too tame. Maybe we should have gone a little more “out there.” I once read about a non-denominational church that meets in a strip mall, plays video clips to illustrate the sermon, and has its own tattoo parlor. Riverside Presbyterian in Sterling has co-pastors, one a Spanish speaker, and features contemporary worship with pastors in untucked shirts. They also have a large coffee shop on site that generates a great deal of traffic into the church building, a former office space.

We at the Meeting House could never duplicate that. Our physical space precludes a coffee shop or tattoo parlor, but that doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with electric guitars or strip mall churches. Some of us grew up with the idea that “real” worship had to have a pipe organ, but of course such instruments were unknown to the church for centuries. Pipe organs have only been around a little over 500 of the Churches nearly 2000 years. 

The fact is that Christian churches have been adapting to the culture around them from the beginning. Early Christian worship was virtually indistinguishable from Jewish worship, but that began to change as more and more Gentiles came on board. Martin Luther is said to have used popular music of his day, perhaps even borrowing from tavern drinking songs to make the hymns he wrote more accessible. 

African American spirituals are another example of worship and music that developed for a particular cultural setting. And the contemporary worship songs and coffee shop churches of our day are but one more attempt to make worship accessible to the prevailing culture.

But in all attempts to connect faith to the world we live in, both those with tattoo parlors and those with pipe organs, there is almost always a temptation to domesticate God, to make God user-friendly, if you will. I’m not sure that any religious group or institution exists, or has ever existed, that does not, on some level, seek to make the divine more manageable.

Even religious rituals originally designed for no purpose other than to open people to God’s presence eventually get twisted into tools for managing God. And I think that is why anytime God actually shows up, it scares the bejeebers out of people, no matter how religious they are. They hit the dirt, they cower in fear, they shout, “Woe is me.”

You can see that in this morning’s scripture. The disciples have been hanging out with Jesus for a while and seen him do some incredible, miraculous things. But when Jesus is “transfigured” before them on the mountaintop, they are terrified. Moses and Elijah, Jesus’ clothes whiter than earthly possible… This was God’s doing, and when God actually shows up, it’s not manageable or user-friendly.

Peter doesn’t know what to say or do, but it seems that his religious sensibilities kick in.  Let’s build some shrines, some memorials. Let’s turn this into Transfiguration Day and celebrate it. But Peter’s babbling is cut off by a cloud and a heavenly voice. “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” And then it’s all over. No religious mumbo jumbo, no new religious rituals or celebrations; just a simple command. “Listen to him!”

Then it’s down from the mountaintop, back to the run of the mill, the day to day, the mundane. “Listen to him!” still echoes as the disciples head back down to the regular world, but it won’t take long for the disciples, or for us, to put the emphasis elsewhere. We’ll focus on believing the right things, on doing baptism or the Lord’s Supper correctly, argue about who can be ordained, and we’ll push “Listen to him!” off to the side.

I don’t mean to pick on churches or religion. Unlike some people, I don’t think it’s really possible to be “spiritual but not religious.” Any spirituality or faith that is going to impact your life in a meaningful way is going to require some practices, some method of doing things, some ways of interpreting it to others, some expectations of those who want to be a part of it. When I complain about religion it is not because I would like to be rid of it. I do not want that, nor do I think it possible. 

It’s perhaps worth remembering that Jesus was a faithful practitioner of his Jewish religion. He kept the Sabbath, went to the synagogue, was well versed in the Jewish Scriptures, and quoted them frequently. I don’t think Jesus had any plans to abolish his religion or to start a new one. But he saw clearly how religious structures and habits get twisted so that they don’t help us as they should. Religion easily gets focused on the packaging rather than the core. It easily substitutes reverence or attendance or rituals for faith and obedience, and so it needs reforming on a regular basis. It needs what happens in our gospel today, an awesome encounter with the unmanageable, non user-friendly God. And it needs to hear, “Listen to him!”

I’m going to guess that many of us heard the command to listen when we were growing up. Parents or teachers or coaches said to us, “Listen to me when I’m talking!” or asked us, “Are you listening to me?!” And we learned that there was a difference between hearing and listening. We knew that when listening was invoked, we were supposed to pay attention. We were supposed to do what was said. We understood that listen meant serious business.

“This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” 

You’ve likely heard the quote, erroneously attributed to Gandhi, that says, “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.” I suppose that to varying degrees, this critique fits most of us. And this problem exists not because people don’t believe in Jesus or don’t come to church enough. No, the problem is we don’t do the one thing God explicitly commands followers of Jesus to do, “Listen to him!”

We each have our own reasons, but I suspect a lot of us are afraid of what he might say, afraid of what he might ask of us. And so we do the same thing I did as a kid when my parents called, we hear but we don’t listen. We hear Jesus speaking, but we remain oblivious; an “in one ear and out the other” sort of thing. 

I suppose on some level, this is a faith and belief issue. We’re not sure we can trust what Jesus tells us, not sure the call to follow him leads us where we want to go, so we don’t listen. We want to keep Jesus close but ignore what he says. We’re a lot like Peter, wanting to build shrines and have rituals. But then comes that heavenly voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” 

We’re about to enter another Lent, and some of us will want to come up with Lenten practices or activities we hope will draw us closer to God. We’ll get ashes on our foreheads and give up chocolate or even do a little fasting. But what if our Lenten practice was to listen, to listen to Jesus? I wonder what wonderful things might happen to us, might happen here at the Meeting House, if we really did what God commands.

“This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”

Sermon: Healing Spiritual Amnesia

 Isaiah 40:21-31
Healing Spiritual Amnesia
James Sledge                                                                            February 4, 2024 

It is not uncommon to hear calls for the Church to find its prophetic voice, to “speak truth to power.” At a time when some Christians are willing to excuse the most hateful, misogynist, racist behavior to gain or keep political power, it is incumbent on us to proclaim the way of Christ, a way that has special concern for the weak, the poor, the despised, the oppressed. Yes, we do need to speak God’s truth to power.

The biblical prophets often did exactly that, condemning kings and the ruling class for policies that benefited the wealthy and injured the poor. They blasted outward religious show that was uninterested in matters of justice and a rightly ordered society. But there is more to prophetic speech than this.

Prophets are about getting people aligned with God. Sometimes that means chastising them or warning them about what will happen if they don’t straighten up. That explains why some think that prophecy is about predicting the future, but such prophecy is rarely meant to be predictive in an absolute sense. It is, rather, a call to change and create a different future.

But prophecy need not be warning. Such is the case in our reading today. Here the prophet speaks to exiles in Babylon, people who’ve been defeated, Jerusalem and its great Temple destroyed. These exiles have struggled to maintain their religious traditions in a strange, foreign land. Some conclude that the Babylonian gods are stronger than their God. Or perhaps God has simply abandoned them. If only they had heeded the words of prophets in the past, but now it is too late. God pays no longer pays any attention to their prayers.

In this situation, the prophet’s job is not to call the people to straighten up. Rather it is to call them out of their spiritual amnesia. They have forgotten who this God called Yahweh is. Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Memory has failed them. They cannot see beyond their loss and suffering, and so faith and hope evaporate. Is such a moment, the prophet’s work is to help the people remember.

The prophet reminds them that it is Yahweh who stretched out the heavens and filled the cosmos with stars. To Yahweh, the most powerful Babylonian ruler is but grass that withers and is blown away in the desert heat. Do they not remember this God who brought them out of slavery in Egypt, brought them into a good and fertile land?

 Then the prophet addresses fears that God has abandoned them, has rejected them, once again seeking to jar Israel’s memory. Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, “My way is hidden from Yahweh, and my right is disregarded by my God?” Have you not known? Have you not heard? Yahweh is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. who does not faint or grow weary; whose understanding is unsearchable. God gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless. If Israel will only trust in Yahweh, they shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

If we continued reading, we would hear the prophet assuring Israel that God is about to stir, to rescue Israel. We would hear the prophet continue trying to jar Israel into remembering, to shake her from her spiritual amnesia.

A few years back, Brian McLaren wrote a book with the rather unwieldy title, Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World. In it, he suggests that many of us are suffering from something he calls Conflicted Religious Identity Syndrome, or CRIS.

McLaren says that Christian identity in America has traditionally operated on a continuum. At one end a strong, vigorous identity pairs with hostility toward those outside the faith. People with a Strong/Hostile identity can be kind and friendly to outsiders but only in hopes of converting them.

At the other end of this continuum, hostility is replaced by respect and tolerance for the outsider, but this is typically accomplished by watering down identity. Those with a Weak/Benign identity are happy to engage in interfaith activities and all manner of faith exploration and questioning, but exactly what they believe can get pretty fuzzy. Most Mainline churches such as ours are on the Weak/Benign end of the continuum, and if we can articulate our beliefs at all, we tend to profess a generic god who fits easily into our political beliefs. Just don’t ask us to give a lot of specifics about what this god expects or requires, how this god is present, or what this god is likely to do in the world.

McLaren’s book is a call for the church to find an identity that rejects the traditional continuum, to forge what he calls a Strong/Benevolent identity. And I wonder if his is not a prophetic call for us to shake off our own spiritual amnesia.

Over the past decades, a lot of Mainline and progressive Christians have struggled with the state of things in this country. On the one hand, many have a strong desire to do something, to effect change. Many progressive Christians have participated in more secular events such as the Women’s March. And there have been more explicitly church responses to issues like racism. I think of our own DRT or Dismantling Racism Team.

But at the same time, I’ve seen and heard a great deal of disbelief and despair. Many are genuinely worried about the fate of the nation, as well as that of the Church. And in part because we progressive Christians have not had nearly as strong an identity as our more conservative, evangelical cousins, they are much more the public face of the Church.

I wonder if all of us, conservative and progressive alike, aren’t suffering various forms of spiritual amnesia. Evangelicals seem to be pursuing political power and forgetting the ways of Jesus in the process. We progressive sorts seem to have created a faith that is more philosophy and vague spirituality than something centered on the person of Jesus, on the God to whom all human plans and schemes are passing fancy, who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing. Often we either think it all depends on us fixing things ourselves, or we despair that it’s all going to hell.

Recently I heard a progressive colleague say, “I think I’ve preached Jesus more in this last year than I have in all my years of ministry.” I wonder if that’s not the prophetic speech we need right now, a call to remember. Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? The Creator and ruler of the cosmos has taken on flesh and come for our sakes. Jesus gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless, and those who wait for and trust in him shall renew their strength.

And so we will hope and pray for God’s kingdom, for God’s new day. We will pray for and work for the day when God’s will is done on earth. And we will not despair, for we know that the future belongs to God who in Christ has broken the power of death itself. We remember; we remember who God is and what God has done, and so we know that we shall mount up with wings like eagles… shall run and not be weary… shall walk and not faint.