Sermon: Agents of the Gospel

Luke 21:5-19

Agents of the Gospel

James Sledge                                                                                       November 13, 2016

I attended what was then known as Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, now called Union Presbyterian Seminary. Like me, most of my classmates were Presbyterian, but a sizeable minority came from other traditions. One of these was a young pastor already serving on the staff of a large church in a denomination that didn’t require its pastors to have a seminary education, but encouraged it.

One day in class he shared something that was creating a faith crisis for many in his congregation.  A young child had a serious, life threatening disease. The congregation had rallied to support the family, providing meals, caring for the other children so the parents could spend time at the hospital, and so on. They had also organized a prayer campaign. People signed up to ensure that someone was praying for this child at all hours of the day.

The members of this church put a lot of stock in prayer. They used phrases like “prayer warriors,” a term you rarely hear in congregations such as ours. Many of them were convinced that if they prayed faithfully and diligently, truly believing and trusting in God, the child would be healed. But the child was getting worse.

When my classmate shared this, the church staff had begun to discuss how they were going to handle the child’s imminent death. What were they going to say to those who had responded to the call for prayer warriors, who had trusted that God would intervene? How were they as the pastoral staff going to help people hold onto faith when an article of that faith had let them down?

I suspect that most of us have had, or will have, moments where the things we count on fail us. Even for those who are not particularly religious, there are objects of trust that are presumed to provide happiness, meaning, fulfillment, hope, etc. People may or may not equate such things with God, but when they fail to produce what was promised or hoped for, it can create a kind of faith crisis.

I’m sure there are people here today who had hoped, even trusted, that America was on a path to becoming more tolerant and welcoming of diversity. We had elected our first black president, twice, and would soon have our first female president. Many were sure that America had made too much progress to elect someone who engaged in openly misogynist behavior and whose rhetoric inspired racists. But for those with such faith, Tuesday’s election was devastating, threatening deeply held articles of hope and faith.

Sermon video: Trick Questions

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

What the Day Reveals

I did not see that coming, "that" referring to last night's election results. Like many, I assumed that Donald Trump had too many negatives to overcome. I assumed that Trump's relatively open embrace of racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry would turn off too many voters. I have relatives in small-town South Carolina, so I'm well aware that racism is alive and well, but I did not think its appeal so broad.

I don't think that everyone who voted for Trump is a racist, misogynist, or bigot. There are many factors that influenced voters, but still, Mr. Trump's campaign seems to have awakened a more public form of bigotry. People are saying publicly things they've kept to themselves before. It turns out that we - speaking of America - are not who I thought we were.

This turn of events has exposed a myth too often trusted by liberals and liberal Christians, a belief in progress. We've hoped that racism, sexism, and other bigotries would gradually fade in the face of progress. Simply discourage overt acts of racism, sexism, etc. and they will eventually die off on their own. We need merely wait them out. But progress, like all idols, fails to keep its promises. Progress can never end racism, can never bring the kingdom.

In the end, only God can set the world fully right, but in the interim, followers of Jesus are called to live in ways that bear witness to God's new day. Our waiting for God is an active waiting that shows others the hope and the shape of that day. From the time of Jesus this has meant living in ways that reflect God's rule and so are in conflict with the rule of Caesar, empire, and every power that oppresses or exploits or fails to seek the good of the least and most vulnerable. Our waiting requires a willingness to take up crosses, to give ourselves, and even to suffer, in order to embody the ways of Christ in a world that lives by different rules.

Today, on this day I did not expect, I find myself wondering what it means to embrace the way of Jesus at such a moment. I'm just beginning this process, but I offer these provisional thoughts in hopes that they will be helpful to some.

Reach out to those who are filled with fear, dread, terror, uncertainty, and more in the wake of this election. Jesus was most often to be found among those who were on the receiving end of power, and we should be, too.

If your image of America has been shattered, grief, lament, and even anger are appropriate. The Psalms are filled with anguished and angry lament, and many of us need to name and own the loss that we are feeling. At the same time, anger cannot turn to hate. I will not imagine that Donald Trump or any political party is somehow the embodiment of evil, anymore than I will imagine that my politics are the embodiment of good. I will pray those who are hurting, and I will pray as well for President-elect Trump and for all those who govern.

For people like myself and churches like the one I serve, do some deep soul searching. How often have we preferred being comfortable to living the gospel? How often have we been content to enjoy positions of racial and economic privilege? How often have our stances against hate, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. been little more than opinions shared with the like minded, stances that cost us nothing, stances that trusted in progress or the passage of time and refused to go near a cross?

Finally, what does following Jesus look like at this moment? What steps does Jesus call us to take, what concrete actions does he require of us if we are to be his disciples in the world? How will we embody the hope of God's new day, a day ruled by love, in a moment when so many seem to be driven by fear?

I certainly have my own fears at the moment, but as a Christian, I also have hope that newness and life can arise out of loss and death. And so I will keep looking and listening for where and how Jesus is calling me and calling the church to live in ways that declares to the world the possibility and hope that God is indeed making all things new.

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A prayer for today from Father Richard Rohr:

All vulnerable and merciful God,
We do not know what is ours to do.
We feel scared and alone today.
We are tired of taking sides.
We cannot hold any more fear or anger or rejection.
And yet we know so many of our friends feel unheard and unwanted.
Help us trust that no feeling is final,
And that YOU will have the full and final word.
If You are indeed a Suffering God, may we hold this suffering with You for those who voted for Hillary Clinton, for those who voted for President-elect Donald Trump, and for the many who have felt excluded by our politics in the many ways that we do indeed exclude.
We offer ourselves as best we can to hold this Love outward and open toward all, just as You never cease to do toward us.
We believe You are praying this prayer through us.
Amen

The Kingdom and the Course of Human Events

Today and tomorrow will be anxiety filled for many people. As we await a final conclusion to the election campaign, will any new bombshells shake things up? Will our candidate, our party, prevail? Will we be rejoicing or cringing in horror when final outcomes are announced Tuesday night?

This particular campaign has occupied us in ways I don't recall previous ones doing, both captivating and horrifying us. Clearly there are important issues at stake. Still, I wonder if we don't sometimes overstate potential impacts. I wonder if we don't imagine the events that captivate and horrify us to have more earth shattering import than they truly do.

I have written previously of how I find it impossible to reconcile Christian faith with the stances taken by Donald Trump. I do think that those Christians who've made supporting Trump an article of their faith have done tremendous damage to the Christian "brand." But this does not mean that any sort of ultimate outcomes are riding on Tuesday's results. I think it unlikely that the apocalyptic scenarios imagined by some on the right or the left will materialize.

This is not to underestimate the human capacity to create genuinely terrible scenarios. Even a cursory study of history will reveal all manner of terrors that humans have wrought, but that doesn't mean that everything that scares us has such potential.

I will vote tomorrow and have my own worries about the consequences of the election results, as well as of the campaign itself. Yet as a Christian, I worry that we are overly fascinated with human capacity while nearly oblivious to that of the Divine. Surely there is some measure of myopia here.

In today's gospel reading, Jesus tells a parable that can be a little unnerving. Someone, clearly an important and powerful individual, sent out invitations to a fancy banquet, but when all was made ready, many of those invited has more pressing matters. Some of their excuses are pretty lame, but some sound legitimate. (I think my honeymoon would win out over anyone's party.) But the host makes no distinctions. People are herded in from the streets to fill the party, and the host vows that none of those originally invited will be allowed in.

This parable becomes especially problematic when we turn it into an allegory with the host playing the role of God, a God who is easily offended and remarkably unforgiving. But parables rarely work well as allegories, and this one isn't telling us anything about the character of God. Rather it is making a point about the all surpassing importance of the kingdom, of God's new day.

We humans tend to be caught up in our own events, some of them trivial and some of them  important. But followers of Jesus must always have an eye on something bigger. Just how this "something bigger" intersects with our daily living can be an interesting and difficult negotiation, but if we do not have some sense of what God is up to, we will end up attaching ultimate importance to what we are.

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Sermon: Trick Questions

Luke 20:27-38

Trick Questions

James Sledge                                                                                       November 6, 2016

When I was 13, my brother and I discovered the comedian, George Carlin. We laughed at his seven words you couldn't say on television, when our parents weren’t around to hear. But I was also intrigued by his take on growing up Catholic. I knew nothing about Catholics or Catholic schools, but Carlin's stories about questioning and challenging the teachings of the church resonated with my own, early teenage questions and doubts.

Carlin told of creating elaborate scenarios to trip up the priests and make them look foolish. One story involved the requirement that Catholics receive communion at least once between Ash Wednesday and Pentecost.  Not doing your “Easter duty” was a mortal sin.

“Father, suppose that you didn’t make your Easter duty, and it’s Pentecost Sunday, the last day. And you’re on a ship at sea, and the chaplain goes into a coma. But you wanted to receive. And then it’s Monday, too late. But then you cross the International Date Line.” No doubt the priests loved it when little George Carlin raised his hand in class.

The Sadducees in today’s gospel engage in something similar, though the stakes are a lot higher. They devise an elaborate scenario to trip up Jesus and make him look foolish, but this isn't a game. They see Jesus as a threat, and they desperately want to discredit him.

The Sadducees were a small, wealthy, conservative faction of Judaism. To them only Torah the Books of Moses – the first five books of our Bible – were scripture, and they found no evidence for resurrection there. By contrast, the Pharisees and Jesus considered most of what we call the Old Testament scripture, and they found support for resurrection in the prophets and other writings. However, this resurrection wasn’t about going to heaven. It was a hope for a new age when all would be made new, and the dead raised.

These Sadducees have watched as Jesus evades the traps set for him by other opponents, but now they take their turn. No doubt they are a little surprised that this country rabbi, an uneducated rube from the backwoods of Nazareth, has successfully matched wits with religious experts. But they have Moses on their side. They have Torah. I imagine that they are snickering a bit as they lay out a George Carlin like scenario.

Sermon video: Falling into God's Love

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Falling into God's Love

Luke 18:9-14

Falling into God’s Love

James Sledge                                                                                       October 23, 2016

Many years ago, I preached a sermon from today’s gospel reading where a couple of members helped me do a dramatic reading of the parable with just a little updating. The Pharisee became an upstanding church member and the tax collector was a drug dealer. The first change is obvious. Pharisees were the upstanding Protestants of their day. The second change perhaps needs more explanation.

Tax collectors in Jesus’ time were not civil service employees. They were part of a bizarre, corrupt system that permitted tax collectors to pry as much money as they could from those in their community. The Romans did not care how much they collected as long as Rome got the prescribed amount. Tax collectors could keep everything else for themselves. Tax collectors often used intimidation and threats to get as much as they could, often preying on the most vulnerable in society. And they became wealthy while helping out an occupying, foreign power. They made modern slum lords look charitable by comparison, and they were rightly despised.

And so in church that Sunday years ago, an upstanding church member thanked God that he was not like robbers and thieves and other sorts of low life. He certainly wasn’t anything like a drug dealer. He tithed and then some to his church. He served on committees and session and never missed a worship service if he was in town.

The drug dealer didn’t dare come up to the front of the church. He stayed off to the side and never looked up. He pulled at his clothes and hair as he said, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” And you’ve already heard the parable so you know what Jesus said next.

A few days later, I got a letter (email was still fairly new) from a church members not at all happy with my sermon. Who would keep the church running, or pay my salary, he asked, if not upstanding church members like the one I had substituted for the Pharisee? It certainly wasn’t going to be drug dealers or others of that ilk.

But I Don't Wanna Descend

We modern people use the Bible very differently than did early Christians. For starters, they didn't have a Bible other than what we call the Old Testament. And what would later become the New Testament was not meant to tell the story of Jesus. The letters and the gospels were written for Christians who already knew Jesus' story. They were written to help people understand those stories better, and often they were written to address concerns in a particular congregation.

That means that when people first read the section from Luke that is today's gospel, they knew very well what it meant that Jesus "set his face to go to Jerusalem." They knew exactly what awaited Jesus there. The author of the gospel is reminding them that all the events reported in the coming pages happen against the backdrop of Jesus purposely moving toward Jerusalem and the cross.

I take it from Luke's gospel, the letters of Paul, and much else in the New Testament, that those early Christians struggled as much with the cross as I do. That's especially true in light of Jesus calling us to embrace the way of the cross, even to take up our own.

In today's verses, we learn than a Samaritan village doesn't receive Jesus "because his face was set toward Jerusalem." I'm not 100 percent sure what this means, but I assume that Jesus' focus on Jerusalem and the cross makes them think Jesus won't be doing any neat tricks for them.

I know how they feel. I want Jesus to do stuff for me, and when he's all fixated on the cross, I don't really want to be around him. I don't much care for talk of needing to deny myself, lose myself, take up my cross, and so on.

In his meditation for today, Richard Rohr speaks of "the path of descent," of how we are transformed only through the act of dying and rising. He writes, "As a culture, we have to be taught the language of descent because we are by training capitalists and accumulators. Mature religion shows us how to enter willingly and trustingly into the dark periods of life. These dark periods are good teachers."

But I keep asking Jesus to make things better for me. And I think that Jesus has abandoned me when things are bad for very long. I guess when it comes to "the language of descent," I'm a pretty slow learner.

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Sermon video: Imagining Faith

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Imagining Faith

Luke 18:1-8

Imagining Faith

James Sledge                                                                                                   October 9, 2016

What is Christian faith? How do you know if you have it? These would seem to be central and crucial questions for Christianity, church, or whatever label you use to describe those who say they follow Jesus. Yet I’m not sure we how much agreement there is on the answers.

For some, faith is mostly about belief, belief about who Jesus is and what he accomplished, belief in the truth of his teachings, belief in the veracity of the Bible, and so on. For others faith seems to be about knowledge or information. People say, “I can’t share my faith with others because I don’t know it well enough.”

Some people think  of faith as hope or trust that God is somehow guiding things toward a good outcome. This hope may be vague or specific. It may be focused mostly on personal benefits such as wealth or health or getting into heaven. Or it may be focused on the flow of history, on the “arc of the moral universe.”

For some people faith includes specific forms of piety and practice. For others, it’s simply the notion that there is a God, some higher power. And there are other possibilities.

In the reading from Luke that we heard last Sunday, Jesus makes a connection between faith and gratitude to God. And in our reading this morning, Jesus again connects faith to concrete behaviors on the part of his followers.

Jesus tells a brief parable with two characters, a widow and an unjust judge. If Jesus were telling the parable in our day, the characters might be different. But in Jesus’ day of male dominated patriarchy, widows were among the most vulnerable. As females, they did not have full legal status, and without a husband or adult son, it was difficult for them to hold onto property or possessions. They could easily end up on the streets, reduced to begging. Presumably this widow’s opponent has taken advantage of this situation.

We may be unfamiliar with the precarious position of widows in Jesus’ day, but we know all about unjust judges or other office holders who utilize their position for personal gain, with no regard for basic morality or God’s concern for the weak and vulnerable. We know all about a world where innocents suffer, where raw power preempts justice.

Oct. 9 sermon video: Gratitude, Salvation, and Generosity

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Gratituded, Salvation, and Generosity

Luke 17:11-19

Gratitude, Salvation, and Generosity

James Sledge                                                                                       October 9, 2016

When we lived in Raleigh, NC, around twenty years ago, we often took our girls to the State Fair in the fall. One year, we parked, got out of the car, and joined the flow of humanity making its way toward the entrance. As we got close, the flow diverted like a creek parting around big rock. It wasn’t a rock, of course. It turned out to be a pair of street preachers. They were loud and animated, and everyone was giving them a wide berth while avoiding eye contact, looking back only after having passed by.

We stayed with the flow and did the same. I too turned once we passed and watched them shout at the crowd coming toward them. If I heard exactly what they were shouting, I don’t remember it, but I can make some pretty good guesses. Many of you probably can as well.

They might have been telling us we needed to repent. They might have asked if we knew what would happen to us when we died. They might have wanted to know, “Are you saved?” though in my experience, those last two are just different ways of asking the same thing. “Accept Jesus and you will be saved, meaning you’ll get into heaven.” They might even have had a sign quoting the Apostle Paul. “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

I recall this encounter at a fair because our gospel reading this morning also raises the issue of being saved. You likely missed it because the word translated “saved” in that quote from Paul gets translated differently in our gospel. Jesus says to the Samaritan, "Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well." But it could also be translated, “your faith has made you whole,” or “your faith has saved you.”