Sermon - Facebook Faith

John 15:9-17

Facebook Faith

James Sledge                                                                     May 13, 2012

I’m guessing that I don’t have to tell anyone it’s Mother’s Day.  Whether you think this is a great idea or a manipulative conspiracy devised by the greeting card and florist industries, you’d have to be really tuned out not to know. 

As the new pastor here, I suppose I should let you know that I don’t really preach Mother’s Day sermons.  Nothing against Mother’s Day or mothers, it’s just that I like to keep worship focused on God.  Our worship is something we offer to God.  It is about drawing close to God.  But there are constant temptations to turn worship into something else.

Some of you may be familiar with the critique of worship by Soren Kierkegaard, 19^th century philosopher and theologian.  Kierkegaard said that worship is drama, but he thought that churches often got confused about who played what roles.  He complained that worship was too often understood as a drama where God was a kind of director, while preachers, liturgists, and musicians were actors, and the congregation was audience.

Kierkegaard thought this entirely wrong.  Rather, he said, preachers, musicians, and such are prompters within this drama, and they and the congregation are actors.  But it is God who is the audience. 

I’m with Kierkegaard on this which is why I tend to stay away from honoring mothers on Mother’s Day, or America on the Fourth of July, or, for that matter, Presbyterian heritage on Presbyterian Heritage Sunday, which is next Sunday if anyone’s interested.

But that is not to say that I never speak of America on the Fourth of July or mothers today.  In fact, mothers and, in particular the love that many mothers give, may be instructive in understanding what Jesus says to us this morning.

Politics Based Faith

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the LORD your God.  Leviticus 19:9-10

If someone suggested this as the basis for some new business regulations in the US, the outcry would be swift.  How could businesses compete if they were required to embrace such inefficiencies?  What possible right does the government have to require businesses to set aside some of their potential profits for the poor and immigrants?

Rarely do legislators suggest laws hostile to business or our capitalist economic system because of the Bible.  In fact, it is quite rare for anyone to suggest that the Bible is hostile to, or a bit suspect of, capitalism.  Yet there are a huge numbers of biblical passages that would suggest such, quite a few more passages than those addressing same sex relationships.  And yet legislators regularly mine those few texts to support proposed laws.  Just yesterday, my home state of NC passed a constitutional amendment banning recognition of same sex marriage or civil unions.

A column by Aaron Graham in last week's Washington Post began this way.

It breaks my heart today to see how often politics shapes our faith, rather than faith shaping our politics. Over the years the church in America has become so biblically illiterate that we are often being more influenced by cultural and political trends than we are by the Word of God.
As a result when we do come to church or read Scripture, we come with our minds already made up. We interpret the Bible through our own ideological lenses, picking and choosing what we want to believe and leaving the rest. This is dangerous, not only spiritually but politically as well.

There is no escaping significant cultural influence on our understanding and interpreting Scripture, but I believe Graham is correct that cultural sources are no longer an influence.  Rather they are our primary source for who we think God is and what we think faithfulness is.  Less and less is the divide between conservative and liberal Christians about different interpretations of Scripture.  It is about political differences that then inform our faith stances. 

I see no easy way out of this.  Aside from the biblical literacy problem, it likely requires a level of humility that does not come easily to things rooted in political ideologies or religious convictions.  Many of us feel a significant amount of pride regarding our faith positions, proudly waving our conservative or progressive banners.

Even though I tend to fall solidly within the liberal church camp, I'm not sure we are true to our calling when we define ourselves this way.  And I suspect that a hopeful future belongs to the Church that figures out how to faithfully struggle to follow Jesus without starting on the left or the right.

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Invaded by Heaven

I have no way of knowing for sure, but the Lord's Prayer may be the best known prayer in American culture.  When I was growing up, it got repeated before the game with every football team I ever played on.  I'm not quite sure why this prayer got attached to such events, but I suppose it was a "religious" counterpart to playing the national anthem.

Growing up in the church, I don't think I ever took part in a worship service that didn't have the Lord's Prayer.  How deeply ingrained this prayer is in church folk can be see by people's habit of adhering to their way of saying it, (debts or trespasses) even when they are with a group that says it the other way.

Given how integral this prayer has been to generations of Christians, you would think it might have shaped our Christian life more than it seems to have done.  The prayer's first petitions (from the version in today's Matthew reading) say to God, "Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."  In other words, "Your reign appear on earth.  May your will be done here on earth as it currently is in heaven where you live."

This prayer basically asks that God's reign, a world where things operate as they do in heaven, would be born.  Yet despite praying these words over and over, many of us have somehow reduced the good news to what some have labeled a "gospel of evacuation."  This gospel says, "Believe the right things; have faith in Jesus, and you will get taken somewhere better."  But the model prayer Jesus gives us says nothing about going to heaven.  Rather it asks that heaven invade earth.

 Prodded by those in the Emergent Christian movement, I have wondered a great deal in recent years about why and how the Church traded talk of God's Kingdom coming to earth for us going to heaven.  No doubt some of this was simply a way of dealing with the delay.  The early Church could expect Jesus to come back soon.  But as years and centuries went by, hope for that waned and was replaced with dead believers going to God's abode.  If the Kingdom wouldn't come to us, we would go to it.  But somewhere along the way, an essential piece of the gospel got lost.  We kept praying the prayer, but forgot what it meant. 

And this relocation of God's reign to heaven also goes hand in hand with a tendency to separate "the spiritual" off from the real world.  It allows the gospel to be relegated to our interior lives.  After all, its culmination has nothing to do with earth, but our evacuation from it.  (A fascination with a Rapture seems inevitable with such a gospel.)

Confining God to "the spiritual realm" does not, of course, confine God in any way.  It does, however, confine our faith and understanding of God.  The God of our imaginations cannot transform earthly life.  The world is beyond hope.  That is an impossible project, even for God. 

I wonder how we might live out our faith lives differently if we actually embraced the prayer we say so frequently, if we actually thought is possible that heaven might invade earth.

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Why Faith?

As a pastor, it is sometimes interesting to speculate about what motivates people to participate in churches and other forms of religious activity.  (Such speculation should generally not be shared except in the most generic form.)  At times I have the opportunity to ask people directly.  Some folks can answer off the top of their head, but most find this a difficult question.

Sometimes this may be because their participation is a deeply ingrained habit that simply is.  I have known dedicated and intensely loyal church members who seemed to be not so much religious or spiritual as institutional.  They viewed the church as a worthwhile institution - not unlike a university or civic club - and they believed in working hard to support the particular church they had chosen to affiliate with.  But I should add that folks I presumed to be of this sort have regularly surprised me and revealed a deep faith I had never suspected.  (This surprise is not unlike discovering that the cranky old couple who barely seem to tolerate each other are in fact deeply in love.)

Figuring out what motivates faith turns out to be every bit as complicated as figuring out what motivates human relationships.  In both cases, it's usually a pretty mixed bag, a concoction that has elements of altruism and self-sacrifice along with self interest and a desire to "have my needs met."  I'm not sure relationships with no self-serving element exist, and so faith is bound to have its "what's in it for me" side.

Today's New Testament readings speak to things often associated with the self-serving side of faith.  There is the blatant religious hypocrisy that Jesus condemns, and then there is the issue of life after death.  In Paul's letter, the worry is for family and friends who have died rather than anything about going to heaven.  But the question, "What happens when I die?" has motivated more than a few folks to profess their faith.  (It's difficult for some modern Christians to imagine this, but many in Paul's day presumed that only those who were alive at Jesus' return would participate in the Kingdom.) 

I think the reason faith sometimes gets a bad rap is because it too often looks like a shallow relationship that is all about the self-serving side.  The "faithful" look like they are after something, but don't seem to have given themselves to the relationship in significant ways.

All relationship have a self-serving side, but those relationships where deep love emerges are never dominated by this.  In relationships with a spouse, a partner, a child, most of us discover a capacity to give ourselves, even to lose ourselves in the relationship.  The self-serving side is still there, but it is balanced by and even subsumed into a self-giving love.

The relationship of faith is not so different, although I suspect that a lot fewer people go as deeply into relationship with God as they do with spouse or child.  Many of us get stuck in superficial, self-serving relationships with God.  That is why we find it so difficult to be extravagant, or even simply generous, in giving ourselves to God.  We are stingy with our time and money and affection because we are still doing the calculations of a immature, self-serving, superficial relationship.

At some point in our lives, most of us find it nearly impossible to resist the allure of love.  It draws us in and we find ourselves giving without calculation, lavishing another person with all we are and have.  I sometimes wonder if we didn't do such a good job of institutionalizing religion and church that we've created an edifice that insulates us from the allure of God's love.  It certainly seems there is something that prevents us from knowing the joy of falling deeply into the love of Christ.

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Sermon audio - Walls and Fences

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Sermon - Walls and Fences

Acts 8:26-40

Walls and Fences

James Sledge                                                                                     May 6, 2012

I wish I knew why I can remember lots of useless, trivial information, but so easily forget important things that I really need to remember.  I forget an important meeting and struggle to remember your names, but recall some stray episode from twenty or more years ago such as an ad I once saw for a fence company.  It was a full-page magazine ad, and it had a photograph of a quite substantial brick wall.  Right beside the wall, it said, “‘Good fences make good neighbors.’  - Robert Frost.”

I knew who Robert Frost was and had read a few of his poems in school.  I had heard of this one, but not actually read it, and so I took the fence company’s quote at face value, assuming that Robert Frost thought good fences to be a good idea.  Only later did I learn that the statement is a quote spoken within the poem, and it is a sentiment with which the poem wrestles.

The poem is entitled “Mending Wall,” and it describes two neighbors walking on either side of the stone wall that separates their properties, picking up and replacing the stones that have fallen down over the winter.  It is the narrator’s neighbor who speaks of good fences, but the poem is not so sure. 

The poem opens, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”  And after the neighbor makes his famous quote, the narrator wonders if he might challenge such thinking, wonders if might somehow plant this idea in his neighbor’s head.  "Why do they make good neighbors?  Isn't it where there are cows?  But here there are no cows.  Before I built a wall I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out, and to whom I was like to give offence.  Something there is that doesn't love a wall, that wants it down!"

You may have never noticed it, but there is a wall, a fence around the communion table. 

Heart Problems

On more than one occasion the gospels report where Jesus says, "You have heard it said... but I say to you."  Jesus takes something from Scripture or his religious tradition and does something surprising with it.  That happens in today's gospel reading. He says, "You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, 'You shall not murder'; and 'whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.' But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment."  Jesus says that being angry is the same as murder.  I'm guessing that nearly all of us are in big trouble.

Of course Jesus himself seems to have gotten angry once or twice, so I'm not sure how literally to take this.  Hyperbole was also a key component of speech in Jesus' culture, and that probably figures in, too.  But Jesus clearly does say that what's in our hearts matters a great deal, perhaps as much as what we actually do.

Nearly everyone has seen a young child being forced to apologize to someone.  The child clearly does not think an apology appropriate or warranted.  The "I'm sorry" is clearly coerced, spoken only under the threat of something worse than having to utter the words.  It is probably a good thing for parents to enforce such behavior, but everyone can tell that the child is not sorry.  The action of saying I'm sorry is clearly not genuine.  It does not really indicate much significant other than the parent thinks the child should be sorry.

As we become adults, we get much better at publicly following the rules in ways that don't give away what we really think or feel.  Most of us have been trained well enough that we abide by a great many rules, social conventions, laws, and such without letting everyone know how disgusted we are at having to do so.  And so our proper actions may say no more about our hearts than the "I'm sorry" of that small child.

I do think that practicing certain habits over and over can indeed change our hearts, modify our inward orientation toward that habit.  People can begin to engage in a discipline of helping others for selfish motives yet be transformed in the process so that serving becomes something they want to do.  But Jesus seems to say that until that transformation happens, we have a serious heart problem. Even though we may be infinitely better at keeping our genuine feelings and motives hidden compared with a little boy or girl forced to apologize, until our hearts change we only look better. 

And so the song goes, "Change my heart, O God."

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Lines in the Sand

If someone tells me that he has no trouble understanding what the Bible tells us to do, I know instantly that I do not want that person as a spiritual guide.  If God had wanted us to have a clear and unambiguous set of rules to follow, God would have provided "The Holy Pamphlet" rather than the Bible that we have.  (And it bears recalling that Christians can't even agree what books belong in said Bible.)  As it stands, we have a dizzying array of stories, rules, poems, songs, letters, and literary genres, some parts nearly impossible to reconcile with others.

Today's gospel immediately confronts us with this.  Jesus says, "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished."  Not one letter of the law passes away, so let's try one.  "Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy... you shall not do any work."  Hopefully you see the problem.  For starters, the Sabbath is Saturday, and even if you justify relocating it to Sunday, we still ignore the command.

I'm not saying anything you probably don't already know.  No one, not even the most ardent fundamentalist-literalist, actually does all that Scripture says.  Everyone picks and chooses.  And yet, even though most everyone acknowledges this, we still draw scriptural lines in the sand, saying, "Break this commandment from Scripture and you've gone too far."

In my own denomination, issues around gay ordination and gay marriage have become theological lines in the sand.  Given Scriptures sparse treatment of homosexuality, this might seem a strange place to draw such a line, but given its hot-button status in our society, perhaps this in unavoidable.  Regardless, many believe that you have or haven't abandoned the Bible based on where you come down on this topic.

Given that none of us fully embrace Jesus' call to follow him, that all of us are implicated in things that Jesus and the Bible explicitly condemn, perhaps all of us would do well to consider how it is we go about determining where lines in the sand should be drawn.  What is it that makes us want to drawn ours here rather than there?

I'm not arguing for no lines.  If we have no clear way of saying, "This is what a disciple of Jesus looks like," then we end up with Christian faith so vague and nondescript as to be meaningless.  And indeed this is a problem for mainline congregations in a post Christendom world.  There sometimes isn't enough distinct and meaningful about joining us for folks not already in the habit to bother. 

So then, if we need lines, where shall we put them?  I think this is a critical question facing mainline congregations.  How are we to define ourselves?  What is it that identifies us as followers of Jesus?  Who decides which issues are crucial and which are less important?  There's no avoiding an engagement with the culture here.  Think back to the Church and slavery, the Church and the problems of industrialization 100 years ago, or the Church and the Civil Rights movement.  The Church could not avoid those issues, and it cannot avoid engagement in the issues of our day.  But how do we know when such issues demand lines in the sand?

What informs where you place your lines?  How do you decide what is non-negotiable and what is optional?  Did you inherit lines that you need to reevaluate?  Or could you use a few lines to guide you in your faith walk?  How do you finish this sentence?  If you're going to get serious about following Jesus, you really need to... 

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Salt, Light, and Introverted Congregations

For a variety of reasons, Christian faith in America tends to be a private and personal thing.  Faith is what we believe, and that can be safely tucked away in our brain somewhere.  In the faith understanding I grew up with, you can be a faithful Christian if you go to church on Sunday and abide by societal norms for morality.  So, in essence, if people don't check the church parking lot on Sundays, nothing about your faith would distinguish you from anyone else who functioned as a good citizen.

Jesus clearly didn't anticipate such a development.  In the "Sermon on the Mount," a portion of which shows up in today's gospel, Jesus refers to us as salt and light.  The obvious idea is that we impact the world we live in.  And given that the world does not yet look all that much like the Kingdom of God, Jesus fully expected that our impacting the world around us would cause problems, that we would be persecuted like prophets of old.

It's worth noting that prophets generally were not persecuted for what they believed.  The people who persecuted them were fellow members of their faith, fellow worshipers of Yahweh.  They were persecuted because they insisted that being God's people demanded that they live differently than they were doing.  The prophets insisted that they could not claim to be God's people while exploiting the poor, worrying about their personal fortunes more than God's commands, and so on.

I regularly hear the term "introverted" used to describe church congregations.  Often this happens in the context of not doing evangelism.  But I think the issue is much larger, going well beyond our not telling others about our faith.  Our introversion thinks that we can be "good Christians" without being noticed.  It thinks we can blend in with the prevailing culture, acting no different from anyone else beyond believing in Jesus and going to worship on occasion. 

I sometimes think that the demise of Christendom, of a culture that enforces some basic Christians practices, is a huge gift to the Church Jesus envisions.  When the culture stopped being overtly Christian, being a good citizen could no longer be synonymous with being a follower of Jesus.  This has been bad news for the institutional church, hurting attendance on Sunday and shrinking the collections in offering plates.  But it does force us to re-define ourselves.  If we aren't simply good citizens who believe a few peculiar things, then who are we?

Increasingly, non-church folk who decide to do some spiritual exploring, who visit congregations wondering if there is anything significant going on there, are embracing or rejecting Christian faith according to the answers they see us giving to such questions.  If they drop by on Sunday, and nothing they see or hear suggests that the worshipers are any different from the other, non-church folks they know, why would they bother to become a part of such an enterprise?

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God on Our Terms

Today's story in Exodus, where the Israelites make a golden calf and Moses shatters the two tablets written by God's own hand, might be considered a "primitive" story.  God's behavior is very human-like, and Yahweh threatens to wipe out the Israelites in a fit of anger.  Fortunately Moses begs for God to remember the promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. "And Yahweh changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people."

But if the story contains some "primitive" notions of God, it also speaks directly to issues that impact faith communities in our day, although people often seem to miss this.  They read the story as an account of fickle Israelites turning from God the moment God isn't there for them.  In the standard telling, the Israelites trade Yahweh, the living God, for a golden calf.  But I think this misunderstands the events.

After Aaron has created the calf and an altar to go with it, he declares, "Tomorrow shall be a festival to Yahweh."  To Yahweh.  Not to some invented god, but to Yahweh.  The Israelites seem less interested in replacing Yahweh than in making God more reliable and available.  This unpictureable Yahweh is a bit too slippery.  They want a god who is available on demand.  They need manageable access to God.  Moses has been their only source of access, and he's gone missing.  They need something that can't run off on them.

It is the perennial religious problem.  We want God on our terms, available on demand, amenable to our requests, sympathetic to our agendas.  We aren't "primitive" enough to cast golden calves, but we have more "sophisticated" methods for creating a god who does as we wish.  And so our idols are more sophisticated, but they are idols nonetheless.

What methods do you use to get God on your side, to make sure God agrees with you, to keep God in your camp?  And more importantly, what methods do you have for letting God shatter your idols?  How are we to open ourselves to God's transforming presence that breaks through our idolatries and recreates us more and more in the image of Jesus?

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Sermon audio - Following Along Behind

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Sermon - Following Along Behind

John 10:11-18

Following Along Behind

James Sledge                                                                          April 29, 2012

When I was in seminary, I had the opportunity to take a three week trip to the Middle East and Greece.  It was a remarkable experience, and I got to see all sorts of wonderful historical, archeological, and religious sites.  There was much on the trip that was memorable, but one of the more vivid memories for me was not one of these sites but something I saw along the way.

I'm not sure which site we were headed to or coming from.  I think maybe it was the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.  Our group was on a charter bus, and we were driving along a winding road through the undulating hills of the region. 

As I looked out my window, I spotted something moving across the rocky terrain, headed down into a valley.  Focusing on it, I realized that it was a young Palestinian boy.  He looked to be around twelve years old, and he was walking along a well-worn path.  And right behind him, in a single fill line, followed twelve or fifteen sheep.  He was not even looking back at them.  He simply walked along the path, and the sheep walked right along behind.  It looked a little like a teacher leading a group of elementary students to the cafeteria.

I've since learned that this is fairly typical of Middle Eastern shepherding practices, both nowadays and in biblical times.  I suppose that my notions of herding were shaped by cowboy scenes with huge numbers of cattle being driven.  But with sheep, in biblical lands at least, it is a more relational activity.  The sheep learn to trust the shepherd, and so they will follow where he or she leads.  I could not hear anything as I gazed out the bus window that day, but I suppose that the young boy must have called his little flock and then headed down that trail with them following along behind.                       

"I am the good shepherd.  I know my own and my own know me."  This is one of a number of I AM sayings in the gospel of John.