Sermon - Are You Listening?

Mark 9:2-9

Are You Listening?

James Sledge                   Transfiguration Sunday - February 19, 2012

I recently saw an article in USA Today entitled “Churches Go Less Formal to Make People Comfortable.”   Nothing really earth shattering in that concept.  Our early service is called “informal,” and it doesn’t have much liturgy and most folks don’t dress up.  But the USA Today article was talking about taking this to another level.  It mentioned one Baptist congregation in Florida named “Church at the GYM” which, as the name implies, meets in a gym.  The pastor wears jeans and lots of folks wear shorts.  There’s no organ or stained glass, nothing that looks much like “church.”

Another less formal church is an interdenominational congregation called “The Bridge.”  This one meets in a strip mall, and like Church at the GYM, it seeks to connect with the under 40 crowd that is underrepresented in typical church congregations.  The Bridge sounds quite edgy.  Along with using video clips to illustrate the Sunday message, it recently opened its own tattoo parlor.

Now I feel confident that this doesn’t appeal to a lot of you, but that doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with it.  Some of us grew up with the idea that “real” worship had to have a pipe organ, but of course such instruments were unknown to the church for centuries.  Church pipe organs have only been around a little over 500 years. 

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

African American spirituals are another example of worship and music that developed for a particular cultural setting.  And the contemporary worship songs of our day are but one more attempt to make worship accessible to the prevailing culture.  Church at the GYM and The Bridge may be somewhat more extreme examples, but they exist within a long history of interpreting the faith into new settings and contexts.

But in all attempts to connect faith to the world we live in, both those with tattoo parlors and those with pipe organs, there is almost always a temptation to domesticate God, to make God user-friendly, if you will.

  I’m not sure that any religious group or institution exists, or has ever existed, that does not, on some level, seek to get God on our side, insure that God supports our activities, make sure that God is favorably disposed toward us.

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

You can see that in today’s reading.  The disciples have been hanging out with Jesus for a while, and though he has done some things that frightened them before, when Jesus is “transfigured” before three of them on the mountaintop, they are terrified.  Moses and Elijah, Jesus’ clothes whiter than earthly possible… This was God’s doing, and when God actually shows up, it’s not manageable or user-friendly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve shared with you before a quote from Mohandas Gandhi who said, “I like your Christ.  I do not like your Christians.  They are so unlike your Christ.”  I suppose that, to varying degrees, Gandhi’s critique fits most of us. And this problem exists not because we don’t believe in Jesus, aren’t devout, or don’t come to church enough.   No, the problem is that we don’t do the one thing God explicitly commands followers of Jesus to do, “Listen to Him!”

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

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

I imagine that most of you have heard the phrase leap of faith, as in, “Sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith.”  It sounds like a religious phrase, but I don’t often hear it used with regards to Christian faith, and least not the believe-in-Jesus kind.  It’s usually reserved for something that seems a bit more risky, for when you take a chance that things will end well if you, get married, quit your job and go back to school, or start a non-profit ministry of some sort.  There’s a chance for a big payoff, for a fuller and more rewarding life, but it does require taking that chance, that risk, that leap into the unknown.

“This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”  Can we do that?  Are we listening?

All praise and glory to the God who comes to us in Jesus, who speaks to us and calls us to follow him.  Thanks be to God!

Spiritual Hiccups - Making Sense of Jesus

Reading the gospels it's pretty clear that lots of people didn't know what to make of Jesus.  I'm not sure things have changed all that much, except perhaps that people now have to contend with lots of Christian versions of Jesus that don't necessarily look all that much like the Jesus of the Bible.

Today's reading in John tells us that people were arguing about Jesus, some saying he was crazy and others wanting to know how a crazy person could heal a blind man.  Finally, they ask Jesus to help them. "If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly."  But Jesus' answer is a bit indirect.  He says that he has already told them, but they haven't believed him, adding, "The works that I do in my Father's name testify to me."  I guess he means that healing a blind man is a pretty straightforward answer.

In our day trying to figure out who Jesus is can be even more difficult because of all us Christians who say so many contradictory things about him.  Depending on who you're listening to, Jesus hates gays, wants women to be subject to men, and thinks tax policies should favor "job creators," or he favors the poor, prefers the company of sinners, and won't allow his followers to use force or violence.

Maybe we'd do well to take Jesus' advice in today's gospel, to look at what he does and says letting these things testify to who he is.  This is sort of how we Protestants got started half a millennium ago.  Luther and Calvin and others looked at the Jesus they saw in the Bible and thought, "Hey, this isn't the same Jesus we've heard about from Christians, from the Church."

There's a chapter in Donald Miller's book Blue Like Jazz where he's talking about an atheist friend who has struggled with the idea of God and faith.  Apparently God has been pursuing her anyway, and after much wrestling with her emotions, this friend has spent the evening reading Matthew. Then, unable to stop, she read Mark's gospel, too.  Early in the morning, she emailed Miller, telling him about all this.  She concludes, "This Jesus of yours is either a madman or the Son of God.  Somewhere in the middle of Mark I realized he was the Son of God. I suppose this makes me a Christian.  I feel much better now.  Come to campus tonight and let's get coffee."

Either madman or Son of God; that sounds about right.  And I wonder if we don't all need to come to a moment like that.  If this Jesus business has never seemed a little bit crazy, I wonder if we've really met him.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Hating the World

From time to time an article appears in the news discussing how come Christians don't care about environmental issues because they're sure God will soon destroy the earth anyway.  I hope that's a small minority of Christians, but I know that such views exist.  In fact, a number of Christians cling to ideas that share much in common with the "Gnostic heresies" of the Church's early centuries.  For those not up on early Church history, Gnostics (from the Greek word for "knowledge") thought that we humans had been imprisoned by an evil deity on this earth in awful, fleshy bodies.  But secret gnosis or knowledge would allow us to escape and resume our natural, spiritual existence. 

These ideas saw everything that was bodily or carnal as part of our imprisonment, and therefore bad.  Some Gnostic ideas were easily incorporated into some Christians ones.  But Gnostic Christians rejected the idea that the God of Jesus was involved in the Creation stories of Genesis.  There was nothing good about earth or our bodies. 

The early Church repudiated Gnosticism, but many of its ideas persist.  Some Christians' discomfort with sexuality and bodily functions reflects this.  And the notion that God is just itching to destroy the earth feels more Gnostic than biblical.  After all the Bible speaks of a "new heaven and new earth," and Paul says that "creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay... that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now."  Hardly sounds like something evil God is bent on destroying.

So what to do with today's verses in 1 John which tell us, "Do not love the world or the things in the world. The love of the Father is not in those who love the world."  Is this telling us we should hate the world?  No tree-hugging allowed? 

Of course 1 John also tells us that "God is love," and it is associated with the same faith community that produced the Gospel of John with its famous line, "For God so loved the world..."  So should we hate the world or not?

One of the great difficulties of the Bible is that it is written by people at home with myth, story, parable, and metaphor.  We, on the other hand, are a very literal people.  To us, myths are, by definition, untrue.  And while we know how to use metaphors, they are not our default we or speaking, thinking or hearing.  We are from a scientific age, and truth for us is literal.  Debates about biblical literalism could only arise in the modern, scientific era, and even fundamentalist Christians approach the Bible from a scientific worldview.

But in John's gospel and in 1 John, "the world" is not the same thing as "the planet."  We know how to think this way.  We can say that someone is "worldly" and not mean to describe all people who live in the world.  Yet many people hear 1 John say, "the world and its desire are passing away," and assume that speaks of the end of the world.

I think that a great gift to the Church from post-modern and emergent Christians is the rediscovery of the mystical, the recovery of truth that is located somewhere other than in "the facts," systematic theologies, or the correct meaning of a Bible passage.  This post-modern faith is more comfortable with paradox, uncertainty, and ambiguity.  And so it can hear that "God so loved the world" right next to "Do not love the world" and not lapse into the mental equivalent of some sci-fi computer repeating, "That does not compute!" over and over.

The world is part of God's Creation, that wonderful enterprise of love that God declares "very good."  The world is a garden that the human creature is told to tend and care for.  The world is an arena filled with activity very much at odds with God's hopes for Creation and humanity.  The world (even the part that calls itself the Church) more often than not rejects the way of Jesus as too impractical and naive.  And the world is the recipient of God's fullest expression of love, the Incarnation.

Hate the world?  Love the world?  Transform the world?  Care for the World?..  Yes!

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Sermon video - Sharing What God Has Done

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Spiritual Hiccups - The Blame Game

"Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"  A + B = C.  There is cause and effect.  When things go wrong, there must be someone or something to blame.  There is a certain logic to such thinking. But from a logical standpoint, Jesus' answer this question of blame is unsatisfying.  "Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him."

Does that mean it's God's fault?  Did God cause this fellow to be blind his entire life just so Jesus could happen by and heal him one day.  If that were the case, why not render him blind in an accident a few days earlier?  At least he wouldn't have had to be blind all those years.

But I'm not sure Jesus is interested in the blame game, or in a logical coherent understanding of suffering.  The fact is, there is a tragic quality to all life.  Jesus himself cannot escape this, and he tells his followers that they cannot either.  They must take up their cross.  They must lose themselves.  If Jesus is our model, a willingness to suffer for the hope of a new day is required. It is how we discover our deepest and truest humanity.

This is not a call to suffer for the sake of suffering, nor is it meant to trivialize the suffering of others.  But Jesus does call us to enter into the tragic nature of life in ways that cost us.  Such a call does not always sit well with our culture.  After all, we want to "lose weight without exercise or diets" and to reduce deficits without raising my taxes or cutting any of my benefits.  Often it is easier to blame the poor for their own plight than it is to find ways to fight poverty, especially if those ways bring any cost or suffering to me.

Certainly there are many times when wrongs are done, people need to be held accountable, and situations rectified.  But very often, the blame game is about protecting me.  If the man is born blind because he or his parents sinned, then I don't have to feel bad for him.  His suffering doesn't necessarily demand a response from me.  The blame game is very often a way to insulate myself from the world and it's brokenness, to say that its suffering is not my concern.  But that is not the life Jesus lives, nor is it the life he wishes for us.  I think that's why Jesus says things like, "For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it."

It is tempting to turn away from the pain and suffering in the world, to say, "It's someone else's fault and not my problem."  But Jesus rejects such a move, instead seeing an opportunity to show God's hope, God's love, God's dream for a renewed creation.  And he enters fully into the brokenness of this world, reaching out in love even at the cost of his own life.  And he says to us, "Follow me."

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Sermon audio - Sharing What God Has Done

Sunday sermon - Sharing What God Has Done

Mark 1:40-45

Sharing What God Has Done

James Sledge                                                   February 12, 2012

When our Discipleship Ministry Team began to discuss having a “Bring a Friend Sunday” at Boulevard, I shared what happened when we did one in my previous congregation.  Some may have heard this story before; if so, please bear with me. 

Bring a Friend Sundays were dreamed up many years ago as a way to help congregations that weren’t very good at evangelism.  The idea is to designate a special Sunday to invite friends in the hopes that the idea of an event will make it easier to invite people.  With that in mind, Bring a Friend Sundays often include something such as a lunch after worship.

That’s what we did at the congregation in Raleigh, NC.  We only had one worship service, and so it was easy to have a lunch in the Fellowship Hall when the service ended.  And this lunch also made it easier for folks to say to their friend, “Hey, we’re having special Sunday at our church where all the members invite friends, and we’re having a big lunch afterward.  Would you join us?”

When we did the first of these, the turnout was amazing.  We may have had some Easter and Christmas Eve services with more people, but beyond those, I’d never seen that many people in the sanctuary.  And our Fellowship Hall was overflowing with people at the lunch.  Everyone involved in planning the day was all smiles.  It had exceeded our wildest expectations.

But our excitement began to fade a bit when we started going through the friendship pads from the pews. 

Not that people hadn’t signed them; by and large they had.  But along with their names, most of those friends had included another bit of information: the name of the church where they were members.

It soon became apparent that almost every single friend who joined us that Sunday was an active member of some other church.  It was a bit bewildering.  We had made clear in publicizing the event that it was for the purpose of evangelism, so why had it become simply a fellowship Sunday with people from other churches?  I really don’t know for sure.  I suspect that our members wanted to support the event.  We had talked it up for a couple of months in advance, and they wanted it to be a success.  And so the felt that they had to invite people.

Now here’s where I a bit unsure about what happened.  Perhaps most of our members didn’t have any good friends who weren’t church folks.  I imagine that could have been true for some.  But perhaps some of them did have friends who weren’t church members, but they just didn’t quite know how to invite them.  And so they only invited church friends.  Perhaps there was something else at work; I don’t really know.

However, there was clearly something going on that made it difficult for our members to invite non-church friends, even with a free lunch.  And this became abundantly clear when we held a second Bring a Friend Sunday the next year.  Remembering our previous experience, we asked people not to invite members of other churches to the event, but friends who weren’t active in a congregation.  Our members got the message.  They didn’t invite any church friends, and attendance that Sunday didn’t look any different from a typical Sunday.

Now if we did in fact have members with no non-Christian friends, that would fit with a misperception that some Christians have.  A number of Christians seem to have gotten the idea that they should not associate with non-church folks.  But when you think about the sort of folks Jesus hung out with, and when you remember that he told his followers to reach out to all people and help them become disciples, it’s a bit hard to reconcile being the body of Christ while avoiding those outside the church.

But I’m not convinced that this was the main reason no one invited a friend to the second Bring a Friend Sunday in Raleigh.  I think they were simply terrified at the idea of evangelism.  It wasn’t scary to invite a church friend to join them one Sunday, but sharing their faith with someone who didn’t do the church thing, that was another matter.

As a rule Presbyterians struggle with evangelism.  We worry about starting a conversation and getting in over our heads.  Perhaps you’ve heard people say, or even said yourself, “What if they ask me something I don’t know the answer to?  I don’t really understand my faith well enough to share it.  I can’t explain the Trinity.”  

I’m not sure where the idea came from that evangelism requires a firm grasp of Christian doctrine.  That’s certainly not the case with the leper in our gospel reading today.  He doesn’t know any Christian doctrine.  He doesn’t even know about the cross or resurrection since neither has yet happened.  But when Jesus heals him he began to proclaim it freely. Proclaim; that’s the same thing John the Baptist and Jesus have done, and the same thing Jesus will shortly charge the twelve disciples to do.  And this former leper proclaims even though Jesus has expressly told him not to do so.

If someone asks him exactly how Jesus healed him, he won’t be able to tell them.  If someone wants to know if Jesus is the only way you can be healed of leprosy, he won’t know that either.   If someone asks him what Jesus thinks about abortion or higher taxes on the rich, this former leper will likely have no idea.  But what he knows for sure is that Jesus has touched him and made him new, made him well, made him whole, saved him.  And he can’t stop telling folks what God has done for him through Jesus.

As part of the run-up to next week’s Bring a Friend Sunday, Discipleship Team members have been sharing experiences of when they were alone or afraid and someone reached out to connect with them.  A couple of weeks ago, Ginny Achtermann shared her story of how God’s love and care had touched her.  If you weren’t here, she spoke of a time when she had just come home from the hospital following surgery.  Her mother had come to help care for her, but shortly after arriving, her mother experienced such intense pain that she wanted to go to the hospital.  But Ginny was not feeling well enough to take her, and was not yet cleared to drive anyway. 

As Ginny wondered what she would do, the phone rang.  It was a woman from her church, someone Ginny barely knew.  The person said she had a feeling that Ginny could use some help, and this woman came to Ginny’s house, took her Mom to the ER, and waited several hours there as doctors attended to her.

Now certainly it doesn’t quite rise to the level of being cured of leprosy, but at that moment, the woman who called was a life-saver, a God-send.  And Ginny was able to share without hesitation this experience of God’s love that connected with her when she most needed it.  I don’t think Ginny mentioned any theological doctrines when she shared her story.  She did not weigh in on any hot button issues of the day.  She simply proclaimed what God had done for her through a disciple of Christ who ministered to her in a time of need.

Surely every one of us has a similar story to share, to proclaim.  Surely the love of God in Jesus has touched us in some way that has changed us, freed us for a better life, let us experience God’s love and compassion in some tangible way.  It seems to me that if we cannot proclaim a time that God’s love, care, or compassion touched us, then our Christianity is more philosophy than faith.  And if that is the case, no wonder the pews of America’s churches are less and less full.  Why would anyone want to come sing hymns to a philosophy?  Why would they want to offer prayers to an idea?

Has Jesus touched you in some way?  Has Jesus used you to share his touch with others?  Centuries ago, when a leper encountered Jesus’ healing touch, he couldn’t stop himself from letting others know.  Jesus says to him, “See that you say nothing to anyone…  But he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word.

Spiritual Hiccups - (Not So) Practical Advice

After Paul has shared something of his theology with the Christians in Rome, he begins to speak of what it looks like to live as one who is "in Christ."  My Bible has a heading over today's lectionary reading that says, "Marks of the True Christian."  And if you've spent much time in church, you probably heard some of these. 

Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; ¹⁰love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. ¹¹Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. ¹²Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. ¹³Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.

¹⁴Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. ¹⁵Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. ¹⁶Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. ¹⁷Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. ¹⁸If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. ¹⁹Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord." ²⁰No, "if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads." ²¹Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. 

It strikes me that when taken as advice, a lot of these are not terribly practical.  Feed my hungry enemy?  Surely not.  Never avenge myself?  Where's the fun in that?  Bless those who persecute me?  I don't think so.

The US presidential campaign speaks of Christian faith often.  Barack Obama spoke of his at a prayer breakfast last week, and the Republican candidates spend a great deal of time cultivating a conservative Christian base.  And yet American politics is about as mean and nasty an enterprise as there is.  The name calling and accusations are sometimes enough to make a sailor blush.  I suppose all the candidates missed that line about mutual affection, the call to "outdo one another in showing honor."  Imagine that, a political campaign where the candidates couldn't stop saying nice things about each other.

We all know that won't happen because you can't get elected that way.  (If we really needed proof that America has never been a "Christian nation" in any deep sense of the term, here it is.)  There are a lot of Jesus' teaches that don't generally lead to the things our culture says are important.  Loving enemies, forgiving people repeatedly, and happily suffering and sacrificing for others' sakes do not often lead to success, comfort, or prestige.

I don't think I've ever known a Christian who didn't modify the life Jesus recommends for practical considerations( though I've known some who did very little such accommodating).  Theological doctrines have been developed to allow some of this - the notion of "just war" for example.  But I suspect that most of it goes on with little theological thought.  We simply presume that Jesus doesn't object to our normal way of doing things.  How else could Christian politicians treat opponents the way they do, and how else could I be so attracted to money and the things it can buy me?

It's interesting that while we live in a time when politics increasingly demands ideological purity and sees compromise as a dirty word, most of us practice a faith born of many compromises.  We have all sorts of practical reasons why we can't do this thing or that thing Jesus says to do, even as we latch on to a few litmus test issues where we will not budge, insisting that they are required by our faith.

Perhaps if we all thought a bit more about our own compromises with Jesus' teachings, we'd be more understanding and forgiving.  Perhaps we'd find it harder to "see the speck in (our) neighbor's eye but... not notice the log in (our) own eye."  

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Spiritual Hiccups - Calls I Have Known

I have just accepted a call to become the pastor at another church.  It is a wonderful congregation filled with wonderful people, located in an exciting place to live.  By most any measure, I should be euphoric, but at the moment I am not.  If anything, I am feeling rather subdued and lethargic.  This is in no way because of doubts or second thoughts regarding my new call.  Rather it is partly because that new call does not actually begin for two months. And it is because I am currently trying to perform the regular duties of a pastor in my present call, even as I work with the leadership here to bring that call to an end.

Interesting how when Jesus calls people to follow him in the gospel accounts, they typically drop everything and go with him.  In Luke 9:61-62, this pattern is demanded.  A would be follower of Jesus says, "I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home."  To which Jesus replies, "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God." 

Jesus' remark is a clear reference to when the prophet Elijah called Elisha (see 1 Kings 19:19-21), and I'm hoping this is Luke's way of saying that following Jesus takes a commitment greater than that of Elisha rather than a literal description of how we should respond to any call from Jesus.

Further complicating things, my new call is hardly my original call to follow Jesus.  Jesus called me to the congregation I currently serve.  Jesus said, "Leave where you are and go to Boulevard Presbyterian." Here I have become part of a faith community also called by Christ.  But now Jesus says, "Leave them, and go." 

This new call certainly supersedes the former, but that doesn't mean it invalidates it.  And so for the moment I find myself with two calls.  This is hardly a unique experience.  Many of us are called to be partners in the covenant of marriage, also called to be parents, also called to some additional work in the world, and also called to serve in the ministry of a congregation as elders, deacons, teachers, mission volunteers, etc.  And these different calls do not always play well together.

And so, for the moment, I find myself living within a tension between calls.  It is a tension that will resolve in the near future as one call concludes and another begins in earnest, but for the moment it is a little difficult to focus.  Regardless, I am in no hurry to resolve this tension.  I have learned over the years that much creativity is born of living with a tension and not working too hard to resolve it.  One does not resolve the tension between calls as spouse and parent (at least not if one wishes to live both calls well), but grows and develops by living within that tension.

This strange place in which if currently find myself has me a bit off-balance, but I trust that this will provide openings for me to see something new, to become more deeply aware of God is at work, to grow in ways that better prepare me for my new call.  And I can only assume that a similar opportunity exist for both the congregations where I am called.  Somewhere in the tension between past and future, goodbyes and hellos, beginnings and ends, God seeks to create something new where both congregations can grow in faith and hear more clearly where Jesus is calling each of them.

Goodbye letter to Boulevard Presbyterian

February 6, 2012

Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ,

Yesterday at a congregational meeting, Falls Church Presbyterian Church in Falls Church, VA voted to call me as their next pastor.  I have accepted their call and will begin my ministry there April 10.  I am excited about this new opportunity, but deeply saddened at the thought of saying goodbye to all of you at Boulevard.  The excitement of a new call is accompanied by a deep sense of loss, but Shawn and I have spent a great deal of time in prayer and conversation trying to discern just what it is God has planned for us and for Boulevard.  And we both came to the conclusion that God is calling all of us to something new. 

It does not seem that long to me, but we came to Boulevard over 11 years ago, when Kendrick was in middle school and Emma in elementary.  That means that I have spent the vast majority of my 16 years as a pastor here at BPC.  My understanding of what it means to be a pastor has largely been forged through my relationship with you, and for that I am profoundly grateful.  We have been through our share of ups and downs, good and bad, and I have a great love and admiration for this remarkable faith community.  It will be very hard to leave.

But at the same time, I am convinced that my call to a new congregation is also a call for Boulevard.  God must have someone in mind who possesses different gifts and strengths, ones better suited to help lead this congregation into the future.  And so along with sadness, I also feel great confidence that God has plans for you.

There are many leaders of deep faith in this congregation who will work hard and listen carefully for the Spirit’s guidance during this time.  Still, I’m sure there will be anxieties as you move into the unknown.  And I will work with Session and Presbytery prior to my departure sometime in mid-March to help things go as smoothly as possible, making arrangements to fill the pulpit, insure ongoing pastoral care, moderate the Session, and so on.  These temporary arrangements will give Boulevard’s leaders time to find the right interim pastor, after which you will begin the process of searching for and calling that new pastor God has in mind.

You will be in my prayers all that time.  Boulevard will always have a special place in my heart, and I am thankful that Shawn and I will have plenty of time for personal goodbyes.  Thank you again for the privilege of serving you.  I pray that God’s love and grace will wash over you and keep you secure in the knowledge that Jesus is with you every step of the way.

Love and peace in Christ,

James Sledge