Sunday Sermon audio - Dare We Be Christians?

Spiritual Hiccups - Saturated with God

Because I am a "second career" pastor, I had an normal life until I was in my mid 30s.  I had regular jobs and I was a regular church member who listened to sermons, served on a committee or two, and slept in on Sunday morning if I felt like it.  I was probably as religious as the average church person, which is to say that God did not really saturate my life all that much.  God did not have a great deal to do with my work life, or even with how my wife and I were raising our young children. 

But when God started to become more important in my life, when God started to occupy my thoughts on a more regular basis (why and how this happened is another story and not entirely certain to me), it wasn't all that long before I began to think about seminary and ordained ministry.  If God was going to be around all the time then obviously you need to be doing a job that was about God.

I am quite convinced that God did call me to go to seminary and become a Presbyterian pastor, but over the years I have come to understand a piece of advice that as given to me when I first announced I was thinking of attending seminary.  "Don't confuse God's call to an active life of faith with a call to become a pastor."

I think there is a tendency to assume that church and God's presence are close to the same thing.  And it is easy for pastors to consider church involvement as an accurate faith indicator.  After all, the way we responded to God's presence was to spend all our time at church.  Pastors and seminary students will even talk about our "call stories" as though we are the only ones who have them.  As a result we don't always recognize that some churchy things don't necessarily help folks live in God's presence.

Many of the Psalms are saturated with God's presence.  God's steadfast love is everywhere, and God's activity can be seen in everything from a wheat field to frost on a winter's morning (something that sounds quite refreshing during this heatwave).  For Israel and for Jesus, God is mixed into every facet of life, which is why Jesus cannot turn away from anyone in need.

There is an adage in the church business that when new members join they need to become involved in something more than worship or they are very likely not to stay members for long.  In many of the churches I have known the first thought in addressing this problem is, "Let's see if they'll serve on a committee."  Now I'm not badmouthing committees.  They do a lot of important work and some of them are very spiritual places, but this inclination to put folks on committees seems to me an echo of that trap we pastors fall into: thinking that lots of church activity is a sign of deep faith.

I wonder how churches might to a better job of helping members live lives that are saturated with God.  Obviously congregations would need programs (and likely committees) to organize such learnings and practices, but what if we focused less on our congregations and more on how we could help each other live out our faith beyond the church walls?  And perhaps this starts with pastors realizing that being saturated with Church and being saturated with God are not necessarily the same thing.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Christ Shaped Lives

 O LORD, who may abide in your tent?
          Who may dwell on your holy hill?
 Those who walk blamelessly, and do what is right,
          and speak the truth from their heart;
 who do not slander with their tongue,
          and do no evil to their friends,
          nor take up a reproach against their neighbors; 

The opening of Psalm 15 strikes a common biblical theme, that Yahweh desires "righteousness" or right living from those who would claim relationship with this God.  We Christians are sometimes prone to think that our belief or faith negates this need for righteousness.  But although Jesus brings God's love and forgiveness to sinners, he also calls them to new life.


Jesus models that new life for his followers, and it is much more than "being moral" or "being good citizens."  Jesus calls us to life with God at its center, a life animated by the love of neighbor, even when that neighbor is an enemy.  This is much more than adherence to basic community standards.  It is the radical reorientation of every facet of life.

Some wonderful theological discussions can be had around how God's love, grace, and forgiveness offered freely to all coexist with Jesus saying things such as, "Not everyone who calls me 'Lord, Lord' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven."  Is it possible to fully experience God's love and grace without being transformed so as to live differently?  Can one truly love God and not live in ways that seek to please God?

Regardless, the life of faith cannot be lived entirely in one's mind.  It must be fleshed out in Christ-like action.  And that suggests that the label "Christian" should not be used with too much ease.  I frequently hear someone labeled a "good Christian fellow" when all that is meant is the person wasn't a scoundrel.  And when we say that America is a "Christian nation," do we really mean that our country embodies the radical reorientation of all life that Jesus models? 

When I grew up, part of the Christian, cultural veneer was saying the "Lord's Prayer" before sporting events.  All the footballs teams I ever played on huddled up and said this prayer before taking the field.  We prayed that God's kingdom would arrive, that God's will would be done on earth.  But I never got much sense that anyone really thought this needed to happen, that things needed to change and God's will needed to be enacted. 

O Lord, who may abide in your presence?  Who may be a part of the new day you promise to bring?  Mold me and make me fit for your Kingdom.

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Spiritual Hiccups - God Intrudes

Graham Standish wrote in one of his books about the typical church meeting.  The committee or governing board gathers.  Someone offers a prayer asking God to bless the work they are about to do.  And then God is asked to wait outside, perhaps go get a cup of coffee, while they do their work.  After they are done, they will invite God back in as they pray for God's blessing on what just transpired.

In our staff meetings here, we try to avoid this pattern by spending a good bit of our time in reflection and discussion of Scripture.  This is not a quick devotion, but an extended time of seeking to hear what a text says to us and how this calls us to act or change or respond.  We then try to let this discussion flow into the items we need to cover.  But we can still manage in subtle ways to invite God out of the meeting as we begin to discuss some event, program, or activity in the life of the congregation.  Thankfully, God does not always oblige.

Today we were discussing this Sunday's gospel reading.  We spent a great deal of time listening to and discussing the first two parables of the reading comparing the Kingdom to a mustard seed and to yeast or leaven.  But as we made the transition from talking about God's sometimes imperceptible and even subversive activity the bring about the kingdom to talking about program logistics, God did not leave.

Somehow our programmatic discussions turned back onto our gospel discussions, and we ended up talking about how often in the life of the church we operate without much sense that God is at work to bring about the Kingdom.  Often we act as if the congregation is simply the result of our combined efforts, talents, activities, plans and strategies, etc.  In the operation of the church, in its programs, even in its worship, God can be nearly as absent as God is from many of our meetings.

As God refused to be absent from this morning's meeting, I became acutely aware of how easy it is for us to operate as if God was at the margins of our lives, or perhaps better, how hard it is for us to live as though God was the central character of our life stories, the essential actor without whom the entire story falls apart.  And we as a staff recalled how important it is for us to live in ways that model a different worldview than the primary one in our culture, one where humans and market forces and money and power are not the primary agents moving history forward.  Rather, God is.

It is easy to miss the mustard seed, to fail to notice the yeast doing its work.  It is easy to imagine that we humans are totally free and autonomous, masters of our own destinies, the most important characters in our own personal narratives, and the narrative of history.  Thank goodness that God occasionally intrudes and shatters such illusions.

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Sunday Sermon video - How To Tell Them Apart

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Spiritual Hiccups - Messy Pictures of God

Regardless of whether we are religious fundamentalists or secular humanists, we all have a worldview that was shaped by Enlightenment notions of logic and rational thought.  We share notions of larger truths and concepts even if we disagree over what those larger truths are.  And we who are the religious sort tend to fit our religious beliefs into a framework of larger truths and concepts.  Yet the biblical picture of God is not nearly so neat.  Its picture of God refuses to be confined to our neat, theological constructs, or to early creeds written by those with a Greek philosophical worldview.

Today's psalm is a good case in point.  It celebrates the greatness of God
who struck down the firstborn of Egypt,
          both human beings and animals;
he sent signs and wonders
          into your midst, O Egypt,
          against Pharaoh and all his servants.
He struck down many nations
          and killed mighty kings —
Sihon, king of the Amorites,
          and Og, king of Bashan,
          and all the kingdoms of Canaan —
  and gave their land as a heritage,
          a heritage to his people Israel.

Describing a deity who strikes down - that is kills - infants, calves, lambs, foals, and so on, paints a deeply troubling picture of God.  Yet that is the picture of God found in the Bible's foundational salvation story, the Exodus.  The God of the Bible is known through this special commitment to this insignificant people, Israel.  And while we may manage to construct grander pictures of God that smooth off the rough edges, when we go back to the stories of the Bible itself, we are faced with a God who refuses to be bound by our constructs, a God who is wilder, more unpredictable, perhaps even more frightening than we would prefer.

And the person of Jesus does not solve this problem for us.  Jesus is a maddeningly particular, historical figure.  He is a First Century Palestinian Jew with First Century notions of how the world works.  Western Europeans have tried to make Jesus "one of them."  Blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jesus is familiar to most of us.  But of course Jesus is not some generic everyman who is all things to all people.  He is a dark-skinned, male Jew who gathers around him a band of working folks, outcasts, women, and sinners, managing to upset both the religious authorities of his own faith and the Roman imperial apparatus that controlled the region.  Yet still we insist that we meet God in this person who is born, who grows and learns, who remains Jewish for his entire life, and who causes enough trouble to get himself executed.

The Bible's picture of God is messy and particular, not generic and universal.  Yet in my own faith life, as I've noted here before, I have been inclined to understand God more as concept and premise than a messy, particular personality.  I wonder if I can let God out of the theological, doctrinal molds and constraints I have inherited and/or constructed.  I wonder if that God might not be a lot more real, a lot more alive.

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Sunday Sermon text - How To Tell Them Apart

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43 (Jeremiah 29:1-7)

How To Tell Them Apart

James Sledge                                                       July 17, 2011

Most of you have seen the raised beds that we put in this spring, beds that are now filled with beans, tomatoes, peppers, squash, and –just to humor my southern roots – okra.  People show up faithfully each week to weed the beds, to water it, and to pick the produce.  Our small efforts are part of a growing army of community garden plots all over the city, and like us, many are taking their harvest to food pantries so they have some fresh produce.

Now imagine for a moment that some devious soul went around to all these community gardens sowing them with weeds.  And worse, imagine that these weeds somehow mimicked the good plants, appearing to be vegetables themselves until they reached maturity, only then becoming distinguishable from the genuine vegetables.  .

That’s the situation in the parable Jesus tells this morning.  Our Bible simply says that an enemy sowed weeds, and I understand why.  Most of us wouldn’t know what zizanium was, though that’s what the parable actually says.  And even if translators used its common name, “bearded darnel,” that wouldn’t help much either.  But in fact, bearded darnel is a weed that looks very much like wheat and is difficult to distinguish from wheat until the grain heads form.  To make matters worse, darnel is mildly poisonous.  And so you can understand the desire to pull these weeds right away.  But the landowner says, “No.  Wait for the harvest.”

Over the years, this parable has often been used to say that the Church is a mixed bag, that we can’t worry too much about purity, but should leave that problem to God.  This interpretation goes all the way back to St. Augustine himself, and I’m perfectly fine with it to a point.  But when Jesus explains the parable, he doesn’t say that the field is the Church.  He says it is the world.  Now clearly the world, like the Church, is a mixed bag.  There are good, not so good, and really horrible people, and there is enough hate, violence and war to convince most people that evil is real.  But is Jesus saying that we are simply to accept this fact, that we are simply to let God sort it all out in the end?

I think such questions become more and more important for the American church as we find ourselves increasingly pushed to the margins of culture.  The days when Mainline theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr advised presidents and helped shape public policy are long gone.  Nowadays, even though our denomination still makes statements that Congress should do this or do that, stop this or stop that, no one really listens.

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann has suggested that the metaphor of exile is appropriate to describe where the Church finds itself in America.[1]  We have been deported from our comfortable homeland of the mid-20^th Century into a world that no longer works in ways we fully understand.  The stores stay open and the youth sports teams play games during our sacred worship times.  Public schools no longer serve as our agents or shape our children for Christian faith.  The landscape of America has changed dramatically since the 1950s.  And institutions such as the Presbyterian Church, which had their heyday in that time, find themselves aliens in a strange land.

When Israel is carried off into exile in Babylon, the people literally find themselves strangers in a strange land.  Exile produced a profound faith crisis.  How could this have happened.  Why had God abandoned them?  How would they survive? 

But into this anguish, the prophet Jeremiah writes to the exiles in Babylon.  “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”  And I wonder if there are not parallels between the prophet’s words and the parable Jesus tells.

The Hebrew exiles in Babylon had to figure out what it looked like to be faithful in a world where there was no longer a Temple, where the Ark of the Covenant and the promise of God’s presence had vanished.  And in ways less dramatic, we find ourselves needing to discover what it means to be faithful in a world that is much less "for us" than it once was. But Jeremiah says that the Israelites must be faithful within their new context.  Their future is bound to that world that is not “for them.”  And I think Jesus says something similar.  We must be faithful and bear fruit in a world not for us, amidst the weeds.

Exiles are always in danger of disappearing, of being absorbed into the culture in which they find themselves.  To keep this from happening, they must cultivate a distinctiveness, a peculiarity.  They must live in ways that set them apart, allowing them to maintain an identity the prevailing culture does not support.  For the Hebrews in Babylon, Sabbath keeping and the synagogue became crucial elements that marked them as different.  But what about us?

I think those ancient Hebrews may actually have had an advantage over us.  There was no denying they were in exile, no denying that they now lived in a world that was corrosive to their faith practices.  But we can deny our exile.  We can still speak of being a “Christian nation,” even if many of those people we count as Christian engage in no discernible activity, bear no fruit that would mark them as such.  We can say, “If only they would put prayer back in school.  If only our denomination got serious about evangelism.  If only… If only…”

But however much we might want to deny it, we no longer live in a Christian world; if by Christian we mean anything more than a little window dressing.  We now live in exile.  The people around us may not look all that different from ourselves, but fewer and fewer of them see any need to follow Jesus.  I’m not making distinctions of good and bad but simply between disciples, people who try to follow Jesus, and those who don’t.  And in this sense, we live in a field filled with a great variety of plants and flowers and weeds.

Fifty some years ago, before we found ourselves in exile, we looked at the American landscape and imagined it one vast sea of wheat.  We saw no need to be different or distinct or unique.  But if that was ever true, it surely is not now.  And in the very mixed bag of plants and flowers and weeds that we now find ourselves, the only thing that will distinguish us is the grain we produce, fruit that we bear.    

And that is what Jesus calls us to do.  He does not ask us to pull weeds.  Rather, he calls us to distinguish ourselves by the fruit we bear.  And that means seeking the good of all people, even the weeds.  We bear fruit by embodying God’s coming new day for the world to see, by loving our neighbor, by longing for and working for a better world.  We bear fruit by losing ourselves for the sake of that new world, and by taking up the cross, by not insisting on my own rights but instead being willing to give them up, even being willing to suffer, for the sake of others and for the hope of God’s new day.

In case you’ve somehow missed it, there is a huge fight in Washington over whether or not to raise the debt ceiling in time for the Federal government to borrow enough money to pay the debts we already owe.  As often happens, this deadline makes a great place to play a monumental game of chicken where each side waits to see who will flinch first.  And in this game, the question is whether America’s growing debt should be fixed entirely by reducing spending, or if there should be tax increases for the wealthiest or the end of some tax breaks.

Now almost no one wants his or her taxes raised.  But I'm suspicious that the Jesus who says he comes to bring good news to the poor, who tells a rich man to sell all his possessions and give to the poor, would say to someone like me who may not be really rich but can afford a home, cars, TVs, computers, a motorcycle, that I should be more than willing to give a bit more in taxes so that the poor would have healthcare and we would not pass down too much debt to future generations.  And considering that Jesus said, "From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required," I imagine that he would call those wealthy enough to live extravagantly to contribute extravagantly to help the poor, the community, and the future.

I’m not saying spending shouldn’t be cut.  I’m not talking about any particular tax structure.  But I am saying that bearing fruit for the Kingdom, distinguishing ourselves from the weeds, means living in ways that are at odds with the prevailing culture, that does not ask first, “What’s in it for me,” but rather asks first, "How will this impact the other, the neighbor?  How will this make the world a tiny bit more like God's dream for the world?" 

Those who are serious about following Jesus, about living the life of disciples, increasingly find ourselves aliens in a strange land, exiles surrounded by ways that are contrary to Jesus' call to follow him.  We may rail against this culture, but it is easy, even tempting, simply to fade into the world around us, a world that thinks Sabbath, and worship, and self-sacrifice, and loving our enemies, and taking up crosses to be pure foolishness.

But we are supposed to know better.

---

[1] See Walter Brueggemann, Cadences of Home: Preaching Among Exiles (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997)

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