No Earthly Good

Today is The Ascension of the Lord, a feast day I was totally unaware of for much of my life.  (I barely knew about Advent and Lent as a child in a small, Southern, Presbyterian church.)  The reading from Acts for this day naturally features Jesus' ascension into heaven.  This occurs after he has instructed the disciples to wait in Jerusalem for the coming of the Holy Spirit.  When that happened, they would be his witnesses to all the earth.

And then Jesus elevators up into the clouds, leaving the disciples standing there, staring up at the sky.  I can only imagine that their mouths were hanging open and they looked incredibly stunned and confused.  In my imagination this must have gone on for a long time.  That explains the appearance of "two men in white robes."  These men or angels presumably show up both to end the heavenly gawking and to let the reader know something important.  They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

As a Southerner, I am rather fond of the comedy routines of the now deceased Jerry Clower.  If you're not Southern he is an acquired taste, but his stories of rural life in Mississippi are hilarious.  He was also a Southern Baptist who was very serious about his faith, a faith was also quite nuanced and exhibited a great deal of self-reflection.

I know Clower from his recordings, but I have a book of his that was given to me, a gift from my brother if I recall.  The book is a mix of his stories along with reflections and thoughts.  In one chapter, he recalls being taken to task by fellow Baptists for working in a nightclub that served alcohol. (That it was for an AA Convention had apparently escaped them.)  The title of the chapter is "Some People are so Heavenly Minded, They Ain't No Earthly Good."

I think Clower's title might be a very loose paraphrase of what the men in white robes tell those disciples staring up at the sky.  Jesus will return when he returns, they say.  In the meantime, your work is here, on earth.

One of the great failings of the Christian Church was losing sight of this.  All too often, we have acted like the work of the Church was getting people to heaven (or at least failed to correct this idea).  But Jesus says nothing of the sort to his followers.  They are to be his witnesses, to continue his work so that all the world experiences his healing and hope, his call to a new way of life, his dream of a world where God's will is done. 

Followers of Jesus, why do you dream of heaven?  You have earthly good you are called to do.

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A Dangerous God

The LORD is king; let the peoples tremble!
     He sits enthroned upon the cherubim; 
         let the earth quake!     (Psalm 99:1)
 
 Those of us wearing the label "progressive Christian" are sometimes a bit squeamish at the notion of God making folks tremble.  "God is love," we say.  Jesus loved people and helped them.  He didn't try to scare them.  And plus there are enough people running around talking about a God who has it out for anyone who doesn't have her beliefs nailed down just so.

However, as true as all this may be, we sometimes end up with a very safe, user-friendly, manageable God.  And even sweet, loving Jesus scared folks badly enough that they thought it necessary to kill him.

One a those paradoxes inherent to a deep, mature faith is the experience of a God who is loving, merciful, and filled with endless grace, and yet is awe inspiring, wild, dangerous, and not the least bit manageable.  No wonder Jesus said that following him meant losing yourself, allowing your life to be taken over by this strange new thing that begins to happen in Jesus.

In my own spiritual life, I'm often more than happy with a hint of God.  A wisp of spiritual warmth will do.  I'm not sure I want to meet a God with the power to transform me, to spin me around and drive me in some direction I'd prefer to avoid at all costs.  God is supposed to grease the skids of my comfortable, middle-class, pastoral enterprise, not startle me or unnerve me or demand that I change.

Yahweh is king; let the peoples tremble!  Actually, just the thought that God is actually in charge, rather than me, is enough to make me tremble just a bit.

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A Feminine God

In his meditation for today, Fr. Richard Rohr speaks of salvation depicted in feminine form.  (see Revelation 12)  Pregnant and in labor, this woman escapes "into the desert until her time."  He writes,

Could this be the time? It is always the time! The world is tired of Pentagons and pyramids, empires and corporations that only abort God’s child. This women-stuff is very important, and it has always been important, more than this white male priest ever imagined or desired! My God was too small and too male.

Do not put your trust in princes,
        in mortals, in whom there is no help.
When their breath departs, they return to the earth;
        on that very day their plans perish.  (Psalm 146:3-4)

Princes, Pentagons, pyramids, corporations, denominations, theologies, our ways of doing things, our ideologies, our heroes, ourselves; we have endless things to trust other than God.  I wonder if Rohr is right, and some of this problem is a male thing.  As he also notes in his meditation, Jesus came not exercising power in typical, male ways.  He was meek and lowly, come "to undo the male addiction to power."

 I wonder how much damage we do to faith, to the Church, because we imagine God in the form of princes, of Pentagons and generals and presidents, largely muscle-flexing, male images.  I wonder how often our faith and trust is in plans and institutions that we devise around such muscle-flexing images rather than in the Living God "who keeps faith forever," who comes meek and lowly, as a servant, in Jesus.


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Who Am I?

Last week I wondered, "Why Faith?" and I mentioned some rather self-serving motivations that sometimes motivate religious participation.  But today I'm approaching the "Why Faith?" question from a slightly different perspective.  I'm less focused on what motivated someone to begin on such a path and more concerned with where faith is headed.  This may still entail a "What's in it for me?" question, but in a less cynical fashion.

One piece of the faith journey is a voyage of self discovery.  In the encounter with God (through revelation if you will) I begin to recognize who I really am.  This process reveals a mix of good and bad, and it also challenges some deeply held assumptions about what it means to be human.

In today's reading from the letter to the Colossians, the author prays that the readers would be "filled with the knowledge of God's will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God."  The writer clearly thinks that as we grow in spiritual wisdom and understanding, this will shape our sense of who we are.  We will want to lead lives that please God, that draw us closer to God, and that manifest themselves in the fruit of good works.  Behind such notions is a clear sense that, to paraphrase the Heidelberg Catechism, we are not our own; we belong to God.

That is a challenging concept for many of us.  We were raised in a highly individualistic culture that says we are each autonomous agents, free to choose our own path.  But Jesus invites us to walk a path we would likely never have chosen on our own.  And Christian faith insists that when we follow this path, we discover who we truly are.

I am fond of quoting a line by John Calvin, the founder of my theological tradition.  “Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.”  And a basic assumption of Christian faith is that on our own, we will never fully realize this knowledge of ourselves.  This requires accepting the limitation of our human condition, that God is God, and we are not, that our Creator knows things about us that we do not.


There is an oft quoted remark by Gandhi that says, "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."  To be Christian is to say we are followers of the way Jesus shows us, that he is the true image of what it means to be human.  But as Gandhi so well points out, most of us are still prefer our own ideas about this over those of Jesus.


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John 15:9-17

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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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