Sunday Sermon audio - How To Tell Them Apart

Spiritual Hiccups - For Me?

According to the gospels, Jesus frequently found himself in controversies over the Sabbath.  Sabbath had become critical for the Jews while they were in exile in Babylon.  It had been a mark that allowed them to maintain a distinctive identity when exile in a foreign land threatened to make them disappear.

Jesus is a Jew who clearly observes the Sabbath, but he heals on the Sabbath and says to those who accuse him and his followers of violating Sabbath regulations, “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.”  What strikes me most about this line is not Jesus' lordship over the Sabbath, but his insistence that the Sabbath was made for us.

When I was growing up in North and South Carolina, notions of Sabbath were still strong enough that it was extremely unusual to hear a lawn mower on a Sunday.  Such reluctance to "work" on Sunday has largely disappeared, but if the Sabbath was made for us, then it stands to reason that we still need Sabbath in some way. 

Sabbath keeping has often degenerated into petty rule keeping, both in Jesus' day and in the days of my youth.  But freedom from petty rules does not change our need for Sabbath, for rest, for acknowledging that the world will not fall apart if we cease our activities, for trusting that things are safe in God's hands, allowing us to stop.

I've told the story many times of a colleague who was at an ecumenical pastors' lunch.  At her table, a discussion ensued about what day the different pastors took off, with Friday and Monday being the favorites.  But one fellow got a little perturbed at the talk of days off and exclaimed, "I never take a day off.  The devil never takes a day off!"

To which my fried replied, "God does."

God surely has much more to worry about than we do.  But God is able to stop, to rest, to be free from anxiety and worry, to simply enjoy the wondrous Creation God has made.  And such rest was made for us as well.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Boutique Hospitals for Sinners

In many larger cities, more and more boutique hospitals are being built.  These are usually for-profit hospitals that specialize in certain sorts of practices or surgeries such as joint replacements.  These hospitals are usually very upscale, feeling more like a high end hotel than a hospital.  Their appeal is obvious.  For those with money or insurance that will cover the stay, the amenities and service are top rate, but I do worry that such enterprises exacerbate a growing divide between haves and have-nots in our country.

I have often heard the term "hospital for sinners" used to characterize congregations.  The phrase is drawn from verses like those of this morning's gospel where Jesus responds to those criticizing him for hanging out with tax collectors and sinners by saying, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” 

Hospital for sinners correctly tries to express that church congregations are places to be healed, not collections of perfect folks.  Thinking of ourselves this way may help us be open to the needs around us, to be welcoming to those who would like to discover what it means to follow Jesus.

But sometimes we tend to be more boutique hospitals than general ones.  We want to help "sick" folks but not those with difficult problems or those without the resources to help fund our little hospitals.  I realize that I am over generalizing here.  I have been in many congregations that have the feel of a hard-scrabble, downtown, non-profit hospital - a place filled with all sorts of people with all sorts of problems.  But I think it fair to say that many congregations, certainly many Presbyterian congregations, tend to look more like the boutique sort.

I don't know that boutique hospitals are necessarily bad things.  And perhaps congregations that have a boutique feel are not necessarily bad things either.  But I have this notion that Jesus calls us to be a little more of a general hospital and a bit less the boutique.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Illness, Denial, and Healing

I was reading my daily meditation from Richard Rohr this morning (click here to get these meditation via email), and I was struck by the closing line, "You cannot heal what you do not acknowledge."  That is certainly true from a medical standpoint.  Most of us know someone who has ignored a medical symptom for months or even years.  But denial is a poor medical practice, and often such folk have let an illness progress so far that it is no longer treatable.

Rohr was, of course, not talking about cancer or other maladies, he was talking about a different sort of healing.  He even used the phrase "defects of character."  And this was mulling around in my mind when I read today's gospel verses from Mark, where friends bring a paralyzed man to Jesus, lowering him through the roof to get him past the crowds.  Curiously, Jesus' first move is to forgive his sins.  Telling him to get up and walk seems to happen only as a way of validating Jesus authority to forgive sin.

Regardless, there is an interesting pairing of sin and illness in this story.  Perhaps that is simply because people in Jesus' day presumed that debilitating illnesses were brought about by sin.  The people who saw Jesus in action would have assumed a linkage between illness and sin, and hence healing and forgiveness.  Now personally I think it is a good thing that we no longer tend to blame people for their illnesses (though we're still learning on this one, with AIDS, alcoholism, and other addictions as cases in point).  But I wonder if we might not do well to think of sin, personal failings, greed, and such as sicknesses, as things that need healing.

And here I can be a lot like someone who ignores her medical symptoms.  My selfishness, my desire for the things a consumerist culture says I need, and the ease with which I can feel contempt for someone I disagree with don't seem all that bad to me.  I'm "normal" with regards to such things, not needing any treatment.  I don't need to go to the great healer and say, "Jesus, my captivity to a consumerist culture is keeping me from following you as I should.  Heal me!"

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Sunday Sermon video - Hope for the Harvest

Spiritual Hiccups - Losing My Religion

There have a been a couple of newspaper articles and a number of letters to the editor or late about billboards put up in Columbus by an atheist group.  The billboards are part of an "Out of the Closet, Nonbelievers" campaign meant to present local atheists as good, moral, contributing members of the community.  They feature pictures of an individual with a quote such as, "I can be good without God."

The ads have gotten extra attention thanks to one being placed on a billboard that was on a local church's property.  The outdoor advertising company moved it to another location after the church objected, and then had to move it yet again after the property owner at the new location objected as well.  Of course both moves brought more free advertising to the campaign with stories appearing each time in the news.

The news coverage sparked a just-what-you-might-expect run of dueling letters to the editor.  A couple were reasonable and well thought out, but most either noted all the bad things done in the name of religion or accused atheist of being relativists who by definition had no set standard (God) to fall back on.

Certainly Christians should know full well that religion does frequently have its dark side.  Our faith story features the execution of Jesus, brought about in part by religious leaders who wanted to squelch his message.  And today's reading from the book of Acts begins with a note about believers being "scattered because of the persecution that took place over Stephen..."  This persecution was a religious one, undertaken by religious people convinced that they were protecting the "true" worship of God.

Religious people can sometimes be the best possible advertisements for atheists.  Granted, atheist often ignore the huge amount of good that religious people do in the world because of their beliefs, but religious people just as often ignore the how problematic religion can be when it is used to justify hate, intolerance, a particular political agenda, and so on.

I wonder if this would be the case for Christians if we truly embraced Jesus' command to love one another, even to love our enemies.  I know plenty of Christians whose faith moves them to love others in ways that are truly remarkable.  But I also know quite a few whose faith seems to drive them to hate those who disagree with them.

I think this is why I have found myself drawn to the "emergent church movement."  Many of those in the movement have tried to move Christianity away from a "gospel of evacuation," faith that gets us into a heaven somewhere else, and move us toward preparing for the Kingdom Jesus proclaims is near.  And I am absolutely convinced that a focus on the Kingdom, on the transformation of this world, would do much to improve our image, not to mention make us more faithful.  Focusing on escape to heaven encourages us to see everyone in terms of in-or-out, to obsess about who is going to get promoted and who is not.  But while Jesus does speak of judgment, his most vicious critiques are for religious people.  And Jesus' last public teaching in the gospel of Matthew seems to depict a favorable judgment for non-religious folks who did the work of the Kingdom unawares (feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the prisoner, etc.).

One of the basic calling of all Christians is to be "witnesses."  Our lives, actions, words, efforts, and such are supposed to give evidence of Jesus and his coming transformed community.  In other words, we are supposed to be walking billboards for the faith and the Kingdom.  And in that sense, billboards put up by atheists are not our real advertising problem.  We need better ad campaigns broadcast by our lives.

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Sunday Sermon text - Hope for the Harvest

I Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Hope for the Harvest

James Sledge                                                         July 10, 2011

“A sower went out to sow.”  He scattered seed all about, rather indiscriminately.  It went everywhere, onto the pathway, into the brambles and weeds, onto rocky ground where nothing ever seems to grow.  When I put down some grass seed in my yard, sometimes a little bit gets on the sidewalk.  Some seed gets in the flower beds and other places it doesn’t belong.  But by and large, most of it stays in the yard where it does belong.  I’m not going to waste good seed.  But the sower in Jesus’ parable seems unconcerned with such waste.

As parables go, this one is fairly well known.  It’s one of the few that shows up in all four gospels, and to my ear, it’s not all that hard to understand.  I’m not sure we really need the explanation that goes with it.  This parable is true to life.  The message of Jesus is out there, but it doesn’t take hold everywhere.  And even when it does, sometimes it doesn’t last. 

We’ve seen it many times.  We all know people who grew up in the Church but want nothing to do with it as adults.  We’ve seen people join the Church and get involved for a while, but then gradually withdraw and finally disappear altogether.  We’ve seen other priorities take precedence, from work to hobbies to youth soccer.

Even though most of us know next to nothing about First Century, Middle Eastern agricultural practices, we can nod our heads in agreement with what Jesus says.  “Yes, yes, that is certainly true.”  But once we’re done nodding, what more is there to say?  Does this parable have anything to teach us?

The first hearers of this parable had a very different background from many of us, but I’m not talking about their familiarity with farming.  I’m talking about their experience of the Jesus movement as a small, marginalized affair.

The very early Church was an all Jewish operation that never managed to attract more than a small minority of fellow Jews.  And by the time that Matthew writes his gospel, while Gentiles were beginning to be welcomed into the Church, Jewish Christians were having to make a very difficult choice.  They were being forced out of many synagogues.  They still considered themselves Jewish and wanted to continue going to the synagogue and being a part of their own worshipping tradition, but the synagogue leaders insisted that to do so they would to have to stop saying, “Jesus is Lord.”

This parable is first heard by people who wonder why things are going as they are.  Why haven’t more people joined them?  And what is going to happen  if more and more believers decide to deny Jesus so they will be welcome at the synagogue?”

By contrast, we American Christians have long been a huge majority.  But the decline faced by many churches in 21^st Century America has begun to give us a small taste of what Matthew’s congregation must have experienced.  And as we move deeper into what some have called a post-Christian world, we may do well to listen to Jesus’ parable with ears more like those who first heard it. 

One thing the parable does not tell us is why the gospel bears fruit in some and not others.  The parable does not explain the mystery of why some soil is good and some is not.  But the parable does paint picture of faithful discipleship.  When we compare what happens in the different types of soil, an image of discipleship emerges marked by understanding, perseverance, and a single-minded focus on the work of the Kingdom.  This is not an “I’m a Christian because my parents were” sort of faith, but a faith that knows and understands the message of the faith.  It is a discipleship that perseveres and stays focused and committed in the face of both persecution and temptation. 

Now persecution is not something American Christians know much about.  But the temptations that draw us away from following Jesus are everywhere, and they most surely have grown more plentiful over the last 50 years or so.

I once read the book Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, both then professors at Duke Divinity School.  In the first chapter they write of this new world of increased temptations where Church now lives, saying half-jokingly that this world began one Sunday evening in 1963.  On that day, one of the authors was among seven members of the Methodist Youth Fellowship at Buncombe Street Church in Greenville, SC, who agreed to go in the front door of the church but then slip out the back to go see John Wayne at the Fox Theater.  “On that night,” they write, “Greenville, South Carolina –the last pocket of resistance to secularity in the Western world – served notice that it would no longer be a prop for the church.  There would be no more free passes for the church, no more free rides.  The Fox Theater went head to head with the church over who would provide the world view for the young.  That night in 1963, the Fox Theater won the opening skirmish.”[1]

Whatever the exact date, our culture has decided that it will no longer till, weed, and water for the church.  No longer will the culture funnel people our way so that we need only to open our doors on Sunday to fill the pews.  And when the culture decided it would no longer prop us up, discipleship stopped being the easy thing we had tried to make it, and it began to be what Jesus understood it to be, something requiring deep understanding, and real perseverance and commitment in the face of all sorts of temptations and inducements to live and act some other way.

Jesus understands discipleship as living and working for peace in a world that prefers violence and war.  Discipleship is seeing the face of Jesus in the poor, the vulnerable, and the oppressed in a world that says, “Look out for number one.”  It is seeking the good of others in a world that worries about my rights and preserving advantages for my group.  It is a willingness to sacrifice my good for the good of the other in a world where millionaires want and get tax breaks.  It is hungering and thirsting for righteousness, for things to be as God would have them in a world that simply accepts business as usual.

It is easy to look around at this world and despair for both the Church and the world.  Who will want to follow Jesus in a culture that assaults us non-stop with the message that what we really need is to be beautiful, rich, young, powerful, independent, tanned, cool, secure, with instant access to endless diversions and entertainment?  And how will we ever deal with the world’s problems when neither politicians nor voters can look beyond their short-term, selfish interests to do what is best for everyone?

It indeed is easy for those who hear Jesus’ call to despair and think it not worth all the effort.  Reasons for despair were even greater in the days of Matthew’s gospel, when both the religious establishment and the might of imperial Rome envisioned a very different world than the one Jesus called his followers to build.

But Jesus speaks his parable of the sower directly to these difficulties that threaten to draw his followers into despair.  This parable is, above all else, a parable of hope.  It describes a foolishly extravagant sower, who goes about in a world filled with rocky soil, hardened paths and hearts, choking weeds and thorns, and scatters seed everywhere.  This extravagant sower is not at all deterred by the knowledge that so little seed will make it to maturity, because the seed that does find good soil produces thirty, sixty, a hundredfold. 

Jesus tells the crowds, and tells us, that we should not be surprised that many choose not to follow him.  There is much in the world that draws people away from the commitment, single-mindedness, and perseverance that Jesus asks.  But from those who do steadfastly follow, the results are spectacular, thirty, sixty, a hundredfold. 

From those few who work tirelessly for the Kingdom, the promise of justice and peace, dignity and hope for the poor and oppressed, the triumph of love over hate, and a world where all have enough, can begin to be seen.  And if such a promise seems foolish in the face of how things are and the way the world works, remember; the world, the way things are, and the powers that be were all absolutely certain that Jesus was dead and gone on Good Friday, and that he would never trouble them again.

---

[1] Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens (Nashville: Abindgon Press, 1989) pp. 15-16.

Sunday Sermon audio - Hope for the Harvest

Spiritual Hiccups - Answer Me, God!

"I love the LORD, because he has heard my voice and my supplications."   So says the opening of Psalm 116.  So how do you love the LORD when God doesn't hear your voice or answer your cries?  This psalm is one of many that speak of loving God because of God's mercy, faithfulness, and steadfast love, because God helped or saved or rescued.  So what happens when God seems to have abandoned you, when the patterns and practices of faith that have sustained you stop working?

I suspect that most people for whom faith is a big part of their lives have times when God's absence is terrifyingly real.  Even Jesus cries out that God has forsaken him while on the cross.  At such times a happy, cheery faith is impossible, though several other options are available.  We could conclude that God is angry with us and has abandoned us because we deserve it.  We could conclude that our original faith was a mistake, that God doesn't do the things we thought God did or that God doesn't even exist.  We could conclude that we were wrong about the character of God, that God is not abounding in steadfast love and mercy.  We could conclude that God is simply forgetful or capricious.

Surely Christians experience God's absence as much as the people of the Old Testament did, yet we seem strangely unwilling to engage God as our ancient forebears did.  We seem curiously unwilling to call God to task, to beseech God to remember and act faithfully.  Even we Protestants, who speak so much of God's grace, seem happy to presume than any problem that we have in our relationship with God must be of our making, must be our fault.  Many people of faith seem so intent on protecting God's reputation that they will not hold God responsible for anything.  Or perhaps they are protecting their own fragile faith rather than God's reputation.

I have said many times that there is more honest faith in angrily shaking a fist at God than in a laundry list of pious platitudes.  And I am as mystified by church folk who claim never to doubt or question God as I am by married couples who claim to have never argued or uttered a harsh word to one another.

Now certainly the mystery of God, life, and creation is such that we will never fully comprehend it.  And so we will undoubtedly misread, misunderstand, and misconstrue God's actions.  But simply to keep smiling sweetly and say, "All is well," is dishonest.  And no relationship can be built on such dishonesty. 

God, I love you because.  Jesus, I follow you because.  I have entered into the faith relationship because.  And when I can't find or feel that because, things get a little shaky.  At such times, we need to be able to say to God, "Show us the because.  God, please, show us the because.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Trying To Get Home

Many Christians know the story of Jesus appearing to a pair of his followers as they walked the road to Emmaus on the evening of the Resurrection.  The term Emmaus has become synonymous with spiritual awaking or discovery.  But we know nothing about Emmaus.  We do not know where it is, nor do we know why these two were headed there.  Perhaps it was a stop on the way somewhere else.  Perhaps it was home.  Regardless, I'm inclined to think they were headed home, home to Emmaus or someplace beyond it.  They had heard the report from the women of the empty tomb and a vision of angels saying Jesus was alive.  But despite this report, they have left Jerusalem.  They are headed back somewhere, presumably home, going back to their old lives.

It is not unusual to yearn for home, especially when life has unraveled, when things are not as we would like them.  We would like to go back to a place where we are secure, where we understand how things work, where life makes sense.  Longing for "the good 'ole days" is a form of wanting to go home.

Yesterday I wrote about "Cemetery Churches," congregations where one is unlikely to find the living Christ.  But later in the day I was rereading the Walter Brueggemann book, Cadences of Home, which uses the metaphor of "exile" to speak of the church's loss of special status and influence in American culture.  He says that similar to Israel's exile to Babylon, this exile is only partially our doing.  Our exile is not entirely our fault.  We share some blame.  We have not always been a faithful church, but there are also cultural forces at work beyond our failings. 

Seen from this perspective, perhaps my cemetery churches might more charitably be understood as communities that have not come to terms with exile.  They have been cut loose from their moorings and find themselves in a land they do not really know.  And like the two disciples headed to Emmaus, they seek to return, to go back home.

But we cannot go back to how things once were any more that those two disciples could return to a pre-Easter world.  Like them, we are called forward to something new, but I suspect that moving forward requires mourning our loss, naming our exile. 

In my own denomination, accepting this exile is difficult for many.  Some conservatives, like Old Testament Deuteronomists, insist that our decline is entirely our own fault, a failing that can be corrected if only we will be more orthodox and less accommodating to the secular world.  But more moderate and liberal Presbyterians like myself often reject such a view, but we too suspect that if we only did things better, we could get back home.  We are unwilling to mourn and lament our exile.  We keep looking back, and so we miss the power of resurrection in our midst.

When the disciples on the Emmaus road meet the risen Jesus, all thoughts of getting home are forgotten.  They immediately return to Jerusalem and head toward an uncertain future.  It is something new that God will bring out of death and exile.  It is the new home of God's coming reign, the Kingdom.  This no pie in the sky when we die, but God's will enacted here on earth.  It is a dream, even an impossibility.  But it is the only home that lies ahead of us rather than behind.

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Sunday Sermon video - Who Are You Meant To Be?

Sermons with better video quality can be found on YouTube.

Sunday Sermon Video - Who Are You Meant To Be?

Sermons of better video quality can be found on YouTube.