Sunday Sermon video - Seeing What We're Missing

Sunday Sermon audio - Seeing What We're Missing

Seeing What We're Missing - Nov. 7 sermon.mp3

Text of Sunday Sermon - Seeing What We're Missing

Luke 20:27-38

Seeing What We’re Missing

James Sledge                                                            November 7, 2010

When I around 13, my brother came home with the comedy album, “George Carlin: Class Clown.”  This album contained the famous routine, “The Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” and so we had to be a bit careful about letting our parents overhear it.  But it also had a number of routines focusing on Carlin’s upbringing as an Irish Catholic.

Like many rebellious youth, Carlin had found the absurdities of religion, well, absurd, and he and his friends probably made life miserable for the nuns and priests who ran their parochial school. On the album he describes how they would try to trip up the priests by asking questions such as, “If God is all powerful can God make a rock so big God can’t pick it up?’ 

Or they would take a simple, straightforward rule, and then surround it with fantastic circumstances to confuse things.  As an example Carlin explains that Catholics were required to receive communion at least once between Ash Wednesday and Pentecost.  Not doing your “Easter duty” was a mortal sin.  And so the question for the priest goes, “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.”

I thought of Carlin when I read the trick question that the Sadducees pose to Jesus.  Just like Carlin, they take a simple, straightforward requirement of the law, and then place it into a set of bizarre circumstances.  The law in question is something called levirate marriage.  This law required the brother of a man who died without heirs to take his widow as a wife.  The purpose of this law was primarily to give that dead brother offspring so that his line would continue on.  But it also meant that these widows, who were extremely vulnerable in ancient times, would not simply be left to fend for themselves.

Now admittedly, levirate marriage is an odd concept to us, and so this whole discussion can be a bit hard for us to follow.  But just as people in that day had different understandings of marriage, of men and women, they also had different understandings of resurrection.

Luke points out that the Sadducees say there is no resurrection, but neither they nor Jesus understood resurrection to be about going to heaven when you die.  The Sadducees were what you might call fundamentalist traditionalists.  They said that if you couldn’t find it in the Law, in the five books of Moses, it just wasn’t so.  They tried to maintain beliefs that were the norm in Judaism back in King David’s time, one of those being that the only way you lived on after death was by having progeny, offspring who carried on your line.

But later Judaism drew on the prophets to envision a day when God did something wonderful and new, when a new age dawned.  When this new day came, when God created a new heaven and a new earth, there would no longer be the sound of weeping or the cry of distress.  And along with this hope grew a parallel hope that when God’s new day came, there would be a resurrection of the dead, and all the righteous dead would participate in the wonder of God’s new kingdom.  The Sadducees rejected these later “innovations,” but the rest of Judaism had embraced this idea of resurrection, this idea of resurrection as an event in history.  And this is what’s being discussed when the Sadducees try to trick Jesus.  On that day, when all the dead are raised, “whose wife will the woman be?”

But Jesus rejects their question outright.  All the layers of circumstance, the seven different husbands, don’t matter because resurrection is not at all what they imagine.  On that day, says Jesus, old categories won’t matter because nothing will be the same.  In that age they shall be “like angels,” which really tells us next to nothing.  Most of our images of angels are not found in the Bible.  And so we are left with Jesus saying that in the age to come, those who are raised will be nothing like they are now, but not really telling us exactly what that means.

Now since Sadducees don’t expect a resurrection to begin with, they presumably borrow a picture of resurrection from popular notions of that day, popular notions that Jesus dismisses out of hand.  And that makes me wonder.  Are our notions of resurrection and the age to come drawn from the good news Jesus proclaims, or are they popular notions that Jesus would dismiss?

Think about popular understandings of resurrection, about life after death and heaven.  Think about your own.  There are many possibilities.  There’s the ever popular getting your wings at the pearly gates and becoming an angel image.  There are various images of heavenly, pastoral bliss.  There is the gazing down on loved ones below image.  There are images of a vague spiritual well-being or bliss.  You perhaps have others.  Interestingly, none of these are in the Bible.  When the Bible speaks of resurrection or of the age to come, it resorts to simile and metaphor, to the wolf living with the lamb, to swords beaten into plowshares, to something so new and so wonderful that it cannot be accurately described.

I’m not trying to shatter any dreams here.  Rather, I’m wondering if we haven’t sold resurrection woefully short.  I’m wondering if Jesus’ vision of a new day, of God’s kingdom, of the age to come, boggles our minds so that we settle for something we have an easier time processing, things pretty much as they are now, but simply relocated to a better locale, to the nicer neighborhood of heaven.

I recently had a conversation with someone of deep faith, discussing how we seem to have replaced Jesus’ good news of the Kingdom with good news of going to heaven.  This person acknowledged my point, but went on to say that he did not see how even God could straighten out this world.  Yes, he said, the Bible does speak of a new heaven and new earth, of a New Jerusalem here on earth, of a redeemed creation.  But just look at the world.  It’s as messed up now as in Jesus’ day. So perhaps heaven is the best we can hope for.

Perhaps it is, that is unless we can see something that lets us hope for more.  And that is precisely what the prophets and Jesus do.  They see something other people cannot.  It’s in our reading from Haggai this morning.  Haggai says, “Look at the ruins of Jerusalem.  Aren’t they a dump?  But take courage for I see God at work!” 

You know, prophets are really strange dudes.  I know lots of people think that what makes a prophet a prophet is telling the future, but biblical prophets aren’t really about predicting the future.  Rather they glimpse a reality that other people aren’t able to see. 

When you think about it, Jesus is a pretty strange fellow, too.  And he sees things other people don’t, which is perhaps why Luke’s gospel calls him a prophet.  Jesus keeps saying, “Look, the kingdom of God has come near.”  And when they receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, his followers see it, too.  And they form a strange new community, the likes of which the world had never seen.  And Jesus invites us to join them, to see as they see. 

Lord, send your Spirit.  Let us see what we’re missing.

Spiritual Hiccups - Look at Me, Look at Me!

I've got the television on as I type, watching a college football game.  College rules don't allow the same sort of end zone celebrations seen in the NFL, but the players still strike poses, flex their muscles, and pat themselves on the chest.  Some of it is genuine celebration, but mostly it's a "grown up" version of "Look at me, look at me!"

Our culture is filled with variations of this.  People who quietly do their jobs without getting much notice rarely advance to the top of their company.  You have to call attention to yourself.  In my denomination, when pastors are looking for a new position, it works much like a secular job search.  We have to sell ourselves, trumpeting our strengths and minimizing our weaknesses so that a search committee will "Look at me!"

It's behavior that comes naturally to many, very similar to behavior in other animals.  Just watch a nature program that shows males posing and strutting as they seek to attract a mate.


So what do we do with Jesus' words in today's gospel?  "For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted."


Our culture doesn't value humility, probably because our culture is all about striving to make it, to get ahead.  At its very core, it is a culture of anxiety.  In our anxiety, we are perpetually worried about whether or not we've been noticed, about whether or not we're getting the credit we deserve.

Wouldn't it be nice to live life without worrying, without anxiety?  Wouldn't it me nice if we could simply focus on doing what God calls us to do, trusting that what we need would come to us?  That is, after all, what Jesus tells us when he says in another place in Luke, "Instead, strive for (God's) kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well."

We believe in Jesus, and we want to follow him.  But we sure have a hard time trusting him, don't we.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Relationship Problems

I have long thought that Jesus' lament over the city of David is one of the more poignant utterances in the Bible.  "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!"  The sadness that I hear in Jesus' voice is all the more striking given his description of "the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!"  Despite the city's long history of spurning God, Jesus wants only to drawn them to himself.

God's desire for us and our resistance...  Surely this is one of the great mysteries of our existence.  Oh, I know that there are theological formulations that can account for all these behaviors, but from a personal, experiential level, how is it that humanity, that I, can be so unyielding in the face of God's desire? 

For my own part, there are many times when I would appreciate God being a bit more obvious about longing to draw me in.  Frequently God seems far too subtle for me, and I feel that I must struggle to sense God's desire.

But at the same time, I seem to have an uncanny ability to dismiss and "forget" those moments when God's presence has been more dramatic, when God's desire for me has been palpable.  And when I try to remember and draw strength from those moments, too often they feel like someone else's memories, like stories of faith rather than my own experience of it.

What is it about this relationship dance with God that is so difficult for many of us?  Perhaps that is why some of us are content with some sort of institutional religion.  At least the rules are clear.  At least we know just what to do and to expect.  But a lot of people are saying this isn't enough.  I think that the struggles of traditional churches in our time grow in part from this.  People have a vague sense of the poignancy in Jesus' longing for us, and they want to feel it, to know it.

I saw  Twitter conversation yesterday that started with someone's speaking of joining a monastery and gradually evolved into talking about how congregations could be urban monasteries.  And if this means congregations as places where we all learn how to open ourselves to God's desire, where we learn the steps of the relationship dance with God, then that seems a pretty compelling image to me.


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Spiritual Hiccups - Straining to See

I just checked The Weather Channel homepage, and Tropical Storm Tomas is still headed for Haiti.  I suppose this might not be earth shattering news, especially as Tomas is no longer a hurricane, except that there are still thousands and thousands of Haitians living in tent cities in the aftermath of last year's earthquake.  And the winds and rain of Tomas come on the heels of a cholera outbreak in these tent cities.

It is easy to look at the situation in Haiti and fall into despair.  After all the attention, the donations, and the telethon following the earthquake, the situation is still so dire.  And of course Haiti is only one example.

Situations such as this make it easy to understand how the Church took only a few generations to move from talking about God's coming Kingdom to talking about heaven when you die.  Jesus spoke over and over about the Kingdom, God's new day that had drawn near, that was at hand.  He spoke of how it lifted up the poor and oppressed while pulling down the rich and powerful.  But as the years went by, and as the Church was embraced by the Emperor Constantine, by the rich and the powerful, hope for the Kingdom turned into hope for a better life when one died.

We've been talking this way for so many centuries that it is a bit hard even to glimpse the Kingdom that Jesus says is all around us.  In today's gospel, Jesus says that the Kingdom is like the tiniest seed or a bit of leaven, something scarcely visible that transforms its world. 

As I look at our world, straining to see some signs of the Kingdom, I sometimes wonder why it seems so hard to spot it.  Is God dallying in bringing the Kingdom?  Or are we blind to the Kingdom and so failing to be the seed and yeast we are supposed to be?  Or maybe I simply miss the seed and yeast because they are so small.  A little help here, God?

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Spiritual Hiccups - Come Back Later

I've probably written about this before so I apologize in advance if you've already heard this.  One Sunday as I was preaching, I observed an usher speaking to someone in the narthex.  (Glass windows in the back of the sanctuary give me a pretty good view.)  I recognized the fellow talking to the usher, though I doubt the usher knew who he was.  He stops by the church every now and then, looking for some food or a bus pass.  From what I could tell, the usher was polite and kind to the man, but pretty quickly he escorted the fellow out of my field of vision, headed toward one of our main doors which are located on either side of the narthex.

I learned later that the usher had told the man to come back later.  We were in the middle of worship and it was not the appropriate time.  The congregation never was never aware of any of this.  It happened, quite literally, behind their backs.  But I imagine that many of them would have approved.  We were in the middle of worship, and later would be a better time.

That's essentially the same argument offered by the synagogue leader in today's gospel.  He doesn't object to Jesus healing the woman, but her condition was chronic and not life threatening.  It could have waited.  "There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day."

At the heart of this conflict is how people of faith live appropriately before God.  What sort of things should we do to honor and please God?  What are the rules to live by if we want our ways to conform to God's ways?  What sort of things take precedence over others?

The Bible frequently encourages worshiping God.  It also speaks of refraining from work on the Sabbath.  Jewish rules in Jesus' time allowed exceptions to the work prohibition if a life was in danger or if it was a real emergency, but this woman had suffered for 18 years.  What would one more day hurt?  But Jesus seems to think that helping someone in need is sufficient cause to make a Sabbath exception. 

21st Century American Christians typically aren't all that big on Sabbath regulations, so the synagogue leader's actions look like arbitrary, religious legalism to us.  But I suspect that nearly all of us who are serious about our faith have our share of arbitrary, religious notions about what is appropriate, how things should be done, etc.  And I wonder how often I might find myself trying to prevent Jesus from offering someone healing and restoration, saying, "Come back later.  Now is not the appropriate time."

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Spiritual Hiccups - A Patient Gardener

Frost on the last two mornings in Columbus seems to have put an end to my gardening for the season.  I don't have space for a big garden, but I manage to plant some tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers each year.  And being from the South, I grow a bit of okra.  (If you've never had fried okra, you don't know what you're missing.)  I think I enjoy gardening because of the concrete results it produces.  Usually my efforts are rewarded with tasty vegetables, often so many that we share them with friends and neighbors.  It is a nice change of pace from my work as a pastor, where the impact of my work is often not so tangible.

However, I am not the most patient gardener.  In the spring, I watch anxiously for my seeds to sprout, or for the first tomatoes to show.  In my impatience, I've occasionally picked something before it was really ripe, or even knocked a tomato or pepper off with my constant examining of the plants.  And if I buy a variety of plant that doesn't produce, you can bet I won't buy it again the next year.

And so I understand the frustration of the landowner in Jesus' parable of the fig tree.  Year after year he comes to see if the tree has produced any figs, but each year it is barren.  Finally, he tells the one who tends his vineyard, "Cut it down!"  That seems a logical course of action.  But the gardener begs for more time, promising to give it tender care, hoping to coax it into blooming and producing fruit.

A lot of people look at parables and try to figure out who is who in them.  Is the landowner God and the gardener Jesus?  I suppose a certain amount of that is unavoidable, but I much prefer to simply look at the bigger picture the parable paints without turning it into an allegory. 

The elements of this painting are simple.  There is a tree that is supposed to bear fruit, but it does not.  Clearly fig trees without figs are faulty on a fundamental level, and cutting this one down and replacing it seems more than warranted.  But not in this garden.  Here every effort is made to allow the tree to become what it is meant to be.

This parable speaks of purpose, of judgment, and of grace.  And it ends with waiting.  Will grace and tender mercy help the tree become what it is created to be?  To frame the question larger, will God's creation be set right?  Sometimes religious folks want to hurry the parable along.  We want to end the waiting.  Some end it with judgment, others with grace, but either move seems to me to hurry the parable.  Thankfully the gardener in the parable is the patient sort.

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Sunday Sermon video - Secure in God's Love

Spiritual Hiccups - Longing for What?

Give ear to my words, O LORD;
         give heed to my sighing.
Listen to the sound of my cry,
         my King and my God,
         for to you I pray.  (Psalm 5:1-2)

Some people are surprised to learn that a huge number of the Psalms are cries for help.  These are often referred to as psalms of "lament," and according to many counts, they comprise the largest single group of psalms.  Some of these psalms sound desperate, some plead, and some are downright angry.  Some people are surprised by this as well because somewhere along the line they got the notion that railing at God, questioning God, or shaking a fist at God was either an act of disbelief or of disrespect.

And yet a recurring theme in the psalms and many other parts of the Bible is the longing of faithful people for things to be set right.  In the Beatitudes, Jesus speaks of those who "hunger and thirst for righteousness" being blessed by God.  This simply means that those who long for a broken world to become a place of goodness, peace, hope, and mercy, who experience pangs similar to thirst and hunger when they dream of an end to evil, hate, violence, and exploitation; these are among those God calls blessed.

Curiously, many Christians have exchanged this longing for a better world for a longing for heaven.  Indeed some Christians actively disparage people who work to care for the earth because "God's just going to destroy it some day soon anyway."  Yet Jesus calls us to pray for God's kingdom and God's ways to come here on earth, as they now are in heaven.  It is Jesus himself who holds out the hope of a world where God's will is done.  It is Jesus who holds out a vision of a redeemed and transformed world for us to long for, await, and work for.

What do you long for?  What does your faith call you to long for?  "Give ear to my words, O LORD;
give heed to my sighing.  Listen to the sound of my cry."

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Sunday Sermon audio - Secure in God's Love

Secure in God's Love - Oct. 31 sermon.mp3

Text of Sunday Sermon - Secure in God's Love

Luke 6:20-31

Secure in God’s Love

James Sledge                                                         October 30, 2010 (for All Saints)

“Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.”  What on earth for!?  What would possess anyone to do such a thing?  Did you pray for Osama bin Laden in the days after 9-11? 

George W. Bush, who probably wore his Christian faith on his sleeve more so than any president in more than half a century, argued quite forcibly for attacking our enemy before  he attacked us, creating the new American doctrine of preemptive war.

And on an individual level, we don’t celebrate the person who calmly “takes it,” who endures abuse.  We celebrate the one who stands up for himself.  I grew up when Westerns were still popular on TV and the big screen, and the hero was often an every day fellow who, when pushed to his limits by the bad guys, rose up gave them what they had coming.

Truth is, we just don’t know what to do with this love your enemy stuff.

In Luke’s gospel, Jesus’ Beatitudes flow right into his words on loving enemies and turning the other cheek.  Luke’s version of the Beatitudes is not as familiar to some of us as those found in Matthew.  Not only are the blessings more concrete in Luke – blessings on the poor rather than the poor in spirit – but they are paired with a corresponding list of woes. 

Those in the blessed category are the poor, the hungry, those who are weeping, and who are reviled.  On the other hand, the rich, those who go to great dinner parties, those who are laughing, and the popular folks are in the “woe to you” group.  But this doesn’t sound right.  It’s backwards, just like loving your enemies.  I don’t know many people who want to be poor, hungry, sad, or unpopular, and the reverse doesn’t sound like a curse to me, far from it.

When I was a kid, The Smothers Brothers were quite popular, with a string of records and a television show.  For those who don’t know of them, this musical comedy team involved one of the two brothers, Tommy, playing the fool.  In real life he was the one who had created the act, but on stage the comedy came from his misunderstandings and foul-ups played against his “smart,” straight-man brother.

A recurring bit in their act was Tommy’s feeling of inadequacy expressed in the line, “Mom always liked you best.”  They even had an album with that title.  The album cover featured the two brothers posed like children.  Dick stands there grinning as he wears a toy gun and holster, surrounded by a wagon, bicycle, scooter, beach-ball, and assorted and sundry toys as a dog gazes at him.  Tommy, on the other hand, is seated, gazing up at his smiling brother. He has not a single toy and is holding a rope, used as a leash for a chicken.  The album title is above him, depicted as his spoken words.  “Mom always liked you best.”

The “truth” of Tommy’s words is clear for everyone to see.  His smiling, happy brother is surrounded by good things while he has almost nothing.  Any fool can see that his Mom favors his brother and slights him.

We humans are quite sensitive to such things. “That’s not fair!” cries the young child whose sibling has gotten a slightly larger slice of cake.   Even if the Smothers Brothers stretch it for comic purposes, we are anxious about what others have, compared to what we have.  From an early age, we compare ourselves to those around us, noticing who is different, who seems to have more, who seems to have less. 

When you think about it, we humans are a rather insecure sort.  I suppose that there are biological, evolutionary advantages to this.  It could provide drive to gather or hunt for enough food to get through the winter.  It’s a good survival instinct to notice which potential mate might be likely to provide enough to raise children.  It makes sense to worry about whether or not a shelter is sufficient to keep out the elements.  From a survival standpoint, our insecurity makes sense.

But once we leave the realm of survival, our insecurities cause more problems than they solve.  It begins when we are small.  We clutch at what we have, worried we may lose it.  We don’t want to share.  And we worry about fitting in.  We will change our appearance, our clothes, so we can belong.  Worse, we will belittle others to make ourselves feel more secure. 

Many of us always feel that we are just short of having enough.  If we just made a little more money, just looked a little better, just had a little hotter boyfriend or girlfriend, just had that latest high tech gadget, we’d be happy.  But somehow we never quite get there.

And when things are going badly, our insecurities really kick in.  As we wind down the current political campaign, candidates on both sides play on our insecurities and fears.  They know that we worry about all sorts of things, and they seek to stoke those worries, telling us that their opponents don’t simply disagree with them, but they’re out to destroy our way of life, to take away our jobs, our things, our money, our happiness.

Even the Church has insecurity problems.  For years mainline churches have looked at mega-churches with a mixture of envy and loathing.  Presbyterians have lamented our loss of prestige and power.  Fortunately there is always some congregation that is much worse off than us, and we can feel better about ourselves when we realize that we look a lot more successful than that sorry congregation over there.

Often we draw God into our insecurities.  Some claim the Presbyterian Church’s woes are because we’ve failed to believe certain things or understand the Bible correctly.  Others say America’s woes are because we’ve abandoned certain religious values, taken prayer out of schools, or said “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas.” 

We seem to think God operates out of the same insecurities that we do.  Listening to some Christians you’d think God was worried that all creation could come unhinged.  I hear people say God will have to do this or have to do that if people don’t straighten up.  Wow, it must be awful being God and having to worry about all the things that could go wrong.

But Jesus presents a very different view of God.  Amidst our insecurities about having enough, being good enough, being popular enough, Jesus speaks of God’s blessings poured out especially on those who have next to nothing.  Jesus even speaks of those things our insecurities drive us to chase: wealth, popularity, and so on,  as being a curse.  As a 1^st Century, Palestinian Jew, Jesus was prone to speak in hyperbole, but still, he warns us that the insecurities that so motivate us, tend to drive us away from God

Tomorrow is All Saints Day, so we are celebrating it today in worship.  But over the years Christians have distorted the original meaning of “saint” so that it now describes a super Christian, someone who has out-Christianed the rest of us.  Out of our human insecurities, we have undermined the Bible’s insistence that each one of us is an integral a part of the body of Christ, and we’ve insisted that some are better and so more valued.

But the good news of Jesus is that God is not like us.  God has no insecurities.  God is not frightened of anyone or worried that someone could undermine God’s happiness or God’s plans.  And so God is totally free to love.  It upsets our human sensibilities sometimes, but God loves us, not because we are good enough or because we believe the right things or because we belong to the right group.  God simply loves us.  God loves you, whoever you are, whatever you’ve done or failed to do, and wants what’s best for you, even if God’s understanding of “best” looks quite different from what our fears and insecurities lead us to chase. 

On this day when we remember the saints of this congregation who have died, we also remember that Jesus calls us all to be saints.  Saints are simply those who have experienced God’s love embracing them, who have discovered that the security of God’s embrace liberates us from our fears and insecurities, and allows us to live as the children God longs for us to be.  And when God’s love frees us from our worries and insecurities, the transformation is remarkable.  Secure in God’s love, we are free to love, even something so foolish as loving our enemies.