Sermon video - Armed and Ready

Sermon audio - Armed and Ready

Sermon and worship audios also available on church website.

Did I Offend You?

In today's reading from John, Jesus has been engaging in some provocative teachings about eating his flesh and drinking his blood that upset some of his followers, leading Jesus to ask, "Does this offend you?"  Some of the language in this episode is peculiar to John's gospel, and its exact meaning is subject to much interpretation, but Jesus could be equally offensive in the other three gospels. In fact, Jesus is forever saying things that must have caused potential followers turn away in droves.

Fast forward a couple thousand years to a time when many churches are dealing with declining membership and declining participation.  While some congregations are doing just fine, the overall percentage of people connected to church in some way has been in a slow, steady drop for decades. In such a climate, it is no surprise that discussions on how to retain and attract members have a certain sense of urgency. And surely the last thing we would want to do at such a moment is offend anyone.

In our stewardship campaign this Fall, we are trying to focus less on dollar amounts and more on the spiritual side of giving. One part of this is to talk about percentage giving and encouraging people to make a small step toward tithing. The idea is that this is a lot more manageable, a lot less offensive, than just saying, "You need to give 10% of your income to God."  That is so far from an average of near 2% given by the typical Presbyterian that likely no one would respond well to such a call.

But as someone on the Stewardship committee rightly pointed out, even a small step toward a tithe could be a good chunk of change for someone making the kind of salary common in the DC area.  Do we really want to ask people to step up like that?  Do we really want to ask people to do something they may feel unable to do?

I think such questions go well beyond issues of stewardship.  They are basic faith questions.  Jesus had no trouble issuing very difficult charges to his followers, right up to demanding that they be willing to lose their lives.  But Jesus lived in a very different time.  We don't dare use his language today. We might offend.  Worse, we might scare people away.

Think about the groups, organizations, and relationships that have had the most meaning and impact in your life.  In my own life, and in conversations with others, these are most often entities that place significant demands on us.  Sports teams, fraternities and sororities, military units, Peace Corps and Teach for America, marriage and families, etc. all demand a large piece of us.  Those who can't give the required commitment never experience the camaraderie of the team or squad. Those unable to fully invest themselves find enduring marriage difficult if not impossible.  Those unable ever to let their own needs become secondary to cause or family miss out on something that can never be fully explained to those who've never experienced it.

The same dynamics apply to faith, to relationship with God in Christ, which is why Jesus can say that those who lose their lives for his sake and the sake of the gospel will find them.  So why are we so afraid we might offend someone if we ask much of them?  Why are we so afraid to do as Jesus said?  "Go, and make disciples of all peoples, baptizing them... and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you."

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Pray for Me

Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me,
    for in you my soul takes refuge; 
in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge,
    until the destroying storms pass by. I cry to God Most High,
    to God who fulfills his purpose for me.
He will send from heaven and save me.      from Ps. 57

 As a pastor, I frequently get "prayer requests."  People are going through some difficulty, or they know someone who is, and they ask me to pray for them.  I am more than happy to do so, and we also print people's names in our Sunday bulletin so that other church members can pray for them as well.  I do wonder, however, if our prayer patterns don't sometimes get a little off kilter.

We Presbyterians very intentionally do not have priests.  We believe in "the priesthood of all believers" and do not think pastors have any better access to God than other people. Because we pastors lead corporate worship, we often lead the congregation in prayer, often sharing prayer requests with the larger congregation in so doing, but that does not mean a prayer counts more when the pastor says it.

Another problem with our prayer patterns sometimes develops when it becomes primarily a divine request line.  Prayer should be a way that we draw close to God, the way we interact with God, engaging in kind of shared intimacy.  But sometimes it becomes little more than requests for favors, a formalized practice meant to get results. And this probably contributes to the idea that such requests are best left to the pros, the pastors.

But for me, the biggest issue with prayer is about trusting that it matters, that God is actually engaged in my life and the lives of others.  For me, prayer can become mostly inner soul searching.  All too often, I don't come to God with something concrete unless I'm at wits end and have no where else to turn.  Such prayers can have a "This probably won't help, but it can't hurt" sense about them, a little like buying a lottery ticket in the midst of a financial crisis.

I think I was so turned off by some Christians who seem to treat God as a genie in a bottle who always come through if you have enough faith, pray correctly, etc, that I avoid anything that sounds like them.  But when I cannot talk with God about what I feel that I need, what sort of relationship is that?  Perhaps God will have to help me realize that I don't need it after all, but such a conversation isn't likely to take place without my speaking up.

Perhaps this is where faith really comes in with regards to prayer.  It's not so much about God doing what we want if we have faith.  Rather it is about having enough faith truly to entrust our lives to God, to believe that God is intimately involved in them and impacts what happens in our lives.  Not that God is any sort of heavenly Santa Clause. Faith and prayer are about trusting that God acts to shape the trajectory of our lives and the events in them so that we begin to discover who we truly are and what our true purpose is.

And when I can trust that God acts in my life, then I can also trust that God acts in the lives of others, and so I will want to pray for them as well.  And so I'll pray for you, and I hope you'll pray for me.

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Update on sermon videos

Thanks to technical help from Bruce Gilbert and Christ Growney, the technical problems with recording sermon videos seem to have been overcome.  Last Sunday's video is now up on YouTube, and hopefully this week's will be available soon.

Sermon - Armed and Ready

Ephesians 6:10-20

Armed and Ready

James Sledge                                                                                       August 26, 2012

When I was a kid, a favorite hymn of many of the adults around me in church was “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”  And I don’t think the churches where I grew up were unusual in that regard.  As part of its Olympic coverage, NBC had a documentary on Great Britain during World War II, and in it they told of Winston Churchill’s attempts to woo President Roosevelt and get American support for Britain in that period when England was the last holdout against Hitler in Europe but American had not yet been drawn into the war.  During one of their meetings, Churchill had a military chorus sing several hymns, including “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and it apparently had a profound and moving impact on FDR.

And so in 1989, when the committee charged with producing a new Presbyterian Hymnal finished its work, culminating in the Blue hymnal that sits in the pews of this sanctuary, it was not long before a cry went up about the old favorites that had gone missing, notable among them, “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”

I was a pretty marginal member of the church in the late 1980s, and I had little knowledge of church politics or the work of hymnal committees.  But from what I’ve heard, the hymn had a couple of strikes against it.  There were music folks who didn’t think the tune anything all that great, and then there was the militaristic sound and theme.  If you’re not familiar with the hymn, it felt as though it could have been a military march. 

Any new hymnal has to drop some old hymns if it is to add any new ones, and it’s hardly surprising this one lost out.  In the post-Vietnam era, the last thing the Presbyterian Church wanted to do was sound militaristic.  In my imagination I can just see some hymnal committee member saying, “Let the Southern Baptists sing ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ if they want to, but not us.”

Now I can’t say that there have been many occasions when I wished the hymn was available to go with one of my sermons.  If I had been on that hymnal committee, I likely would have been happy to see it get kicked out.  But something Kathleen Norris wrote in her book, The Cloister Walk, made me wonder about how easily I disliked the hymn for its military imagery.  Norris was lamenting modern America’s literalism and difficulty with metaphor, and she writes, “Poets believe in metaphor, and that alone sets them apart from many Christians, particularly people educated to be pastors and church workers.  As one pastor of Spencer Memorial – by no means a conservative on theological or social issues – once said in a sermon, many Christians can no longer recognize that the most significant part of the first line of ‘Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,’ is the word ‘as.’  (The hymn has been censored out of our new hymnal by the literal-minded, but we sing it anyway.) ”[1]  

Not Enough Like Me

"Love your neighbor as yourself."  If you're Christian, and even if you're not, you're likely familiar with this command.  Jesus says that loving God with our entire being and loving our neighbor as ourselves pretty much covers it all.  Do these, and everything else falls into place.  And so as a pastor, I encourage people to love their neighbors, to love one another. But at the very same time, I have to admit that I often struggle to love some folks.

It's all their fault of course.  They are mean, or troublesome, or hateful, or manipulative, or controlling, or strange, or stupid, or hold political views I find repugnant, or some other thing that bothers me.  I'd be happy to love them, but they make it very difficult.  I'm all ready to love them, but their behavior, demeanor, beliefs, or plain oddness prevents me.

In today's passage from Acts, the Ethiopian eunuch asks a simple question.  "What is to prevent me from being baptized?" But in the time these words were written, most everyone who read them would have known precisely what. And they were huge barriers.  The man was a Gentile to begin with, a big obstacle though not necessarily an insurmountable one.  But he was also a eunuch, and Scripture was clear that eunuchs weren't allowed.

I have to think that the very first time the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch was read in a church gathering, some members got upset, maybe even thought about leaving. It had been one thing to hear about Jesus telling them to love their neighbor and even to love their enemy.  But that was all a bit esoteric.  This was a concrete example of reaching out to embrace someone who didn't fit, who didn't belong.  But the normal thinking that should have prevented Philip from loving this fellow didn't work as it was supposed to. Philip loved him even though he shouldn't have.

The other day I was thinking about the people I follow on Twitter, and the huge majority of the them are either folks I find entertaining, or that I find it easy to like. I don't follow many folks who are significantly different from me, whose politics I don't like, or who say things that upset me.  Nothing strange about that, I suppose. But this little, virtual community is a lot like real ones, a lot like many church  congregations.  Churches are often filled with people who find it easy to like or love one another.  And so churches are often segregated along political, economic, social, and racial lines.  Our unity is not in Christ, but in other things that make is easy for us to get along.  Often we form faith communities with people whose looks, politics, tastes, etc. don't prevent us from loving them.

American individualism combined with consumerism helps produce a religious climate where people of faith "church shop," looking of a community that fits their tastes, needs, wants, and desires.  We're so used to this that we scarcely think about it. But it is a bit hard to reconcile with "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus."

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Money Trouble

For those churches that conduct annual stewardship campaigns (this congregation among them) the season is fast approaching.  Falls Church Presbyterian is putting the final touches on our campaign for this year.  After all, running a church takes a good bit of money.  There are salaries to pay, utilities, and perhaps a mortgage.  There are music programs, educational programs, mission to the community and world, and these all cost money.

But the relationship of faith and money is often a troublesome one.  To disciples who assumed that great wealth was a sign of God's blessing, Jesus said, "How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!"  And today's reading from Acts raises another issue, thinking our money can buy us what we most want.

When a man named Simon saw the Holy Spirit enter people when Peter and John laid hands on them, he offered money that he might have the power to confer the Spirit as well.  But his request meets with harsh condemnation from Peter, who demands that Simon repent saying, "For I see that you are in the gall of bitterness and the chains of wickedness."

Most of us would never be so brazen as to ask to purchase power from God. For that matter, many of us realize that we cannot earn anything from God, that God loves us because that's how God is.  And yet when stewardship season rolls around, we often start sounding like one of those regular PBS fundraisers.  "If you enjoy the great programing on your PBS station, you need to support that station." "If you enjoy the great music program at Falls Church Presbyterian, you need to support that program." 

It's a considerably more nuanced approach that the one Simon employs, but there are similarities.  "If you enjoy the worship and like how it helps you experience God, you need to pay for it."

I do not think that churches need to make any apologies for needing money to pay salaries and operate facilities, programs, and mission.  But the relationship of faith any money creates real spiritual problems for both individuals and the church itself. 

Many are familiar with the statement that says, "Budgets are moral documents."  The way governments divide up the money they have speaks volumes about a people's moral priorities.  In the same way, church budgets and personal budgets are spiritual documents, speaking volumes about our faith priorities.  But when churches use the PBS approach - "If you like it, you ought to pay for it." - we reduce a spiritual issue to a practical one, and we fail to call members to the discipleship Jesus asks of us.  Jesus says we are to love God with all that we have and are, and to love our neighbor as ourself, and he insists that money is one of the biggest obstacle to faithful life with God.  But all too often, we undercut Jesus' call, instead saying, "If you like what we're doing here, please give us a tiny bit of your leftovers after you've made sure you and yours have all that you want and need."

I don't for a moment think that Jesus meant generosity toward God and neighbor is the same thing as giving to the local church.  I have absolutely no issues with those who have felt God calling them to give extravagantly to some cause that furthers the peace, justice, mercy, and hope of God's coming reign.  But in my experience, and in every study I've ever seen, people of faith who are extravagantly generous with causes and organizations that work to better community and world are equally generous with their place of worship.

In a way, I suppose it all comes back to how I view myself and thus my possessions.  Am I my own, or do I belong to God?  And if "I belong -- body and soul, in life and in death -- not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ," then it stands to reason that in some way, all that I have belongs to him as well.  Now Jesus is a great guy, and he is more than happy for us to use some of it to live, to meet our basic needs, to enjoy life, and to have a good time now and then.  After all, Jesus liked a good party and a little wine.  But he also said we had to lose ourselves in order to discover true life.  And I'm pretty sure you can't lose much when you're busy keeping your wallet tightly closed.

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Opposing the Spirit

"You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you are forever opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors used to do. Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute?"  So says Stephen as his "trial" concludes in today's reading from Acts.  Hardly the way to talk to people who have power over you. No wonder Stephen gets executed.  But I suppose Stephen knows the whole thing is a foregone conclusion.  However, it was not Stephen's plight that caught my attention.  It was the content of his statement, and I found myself wondering if things have changed very much since Stephen spoke. 

I think we all tend to look back on colossal bad judgements of the past and assume we wouldn't have acted so foolishly. We like to think we would have always been on the right side of history, but the witness of history makes that seem unlikely.  Prophets are almost always a lot more popular after the fact.  Martin Luther King, Jr. is celebrated with regularity now, but that was not the case 50 years ago.  Even "progressive," white pastors asked King to tone it down and go slower, a request he rebuffed eloquently in his, Why We Can't Wait. 

Even those who were on the right side of history with regards to Civil Rights or other movements should likely not fee too smug. There's a good chance of finding yourself on the wrong side of another movement.  I've had a number of young, progressive reformers tell me that "old progressives" are sometimes their biggest obstacle because of how encrusted they have become.

All of this makes me wonder when and where I might be working counter to the Spirit.  As a pastor, it stands to reason that there are times when I am called to be prophetic. But if prophets are uniformly persecuted, as Stephen suggests, that's no fun.  Perhaps I could just be prophetic about things that are distant and far off, with no implications for my congregation or community.  Maybe that would insulate me.

I think one of my biggest fears as a pastor is finding out after the fact that I was working against the Spirit's moving to reform my own denomination.  As a group, we're on the progressive side, but we are also on the encrusted side.  I hear a lot of young pastors and other Presbyterians who are very frustrated with the church.  They have my sympathies, but as our denomination plods along toward the future, I wonder sometimes if I'm not a little like some members of the Jewish council who had misgivings about the proceedings against Stephen, but who didn't want to call too much attention to themselves by standing up.

I am fortunate to serve in a wonderful, vibrant congregation that that is considerably younger than the typical Presbyterian church.  But in a world where fewer and fewer people grow up in church, I wonder how well situated we are to translate faith to coming generations.  The worship here is well done, and the music program is unbelievably good.  Yet if you somehow time warped one of our services back to the sanctuary where I was seated in 1968 (a place that also had a stellar music program), I don't know that I would have noticed very much difference.

To any FCPC folks reading this, don't get nervous.  I'm not suggesting anything. I'm just wondering.  I wondering what it means to be a faithful church in the vastly different religious landscape of 2012. I wondering what the Spirit is up to, and whether I am spiritually astute enough to notice.  I'm wondering what words Stephen would have for me.

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Sermon audio - Letting Go and Falling into God

Sermon and worship audios also available at Falls Church Presbyterian website.

Sermon - Letting Go and Falling into God

1 Kings 2:10-12, 3:3-14

Letting Go and Falling into God

James Sledge                                                                                       August 19, 2012

Several decades ago, Mac Davis had something of a hit song entitled “It’s Hard to Be Humble.”  The opening verse, which also serves at the chorus, goes, “Oh Lord, it’s hard to be humble when you’re perfect in every way.  I can’t wait to look in the mirror ‘cause I get better looking each day.  To know me is to love me. I must be a hell of a man.  Oh Lord, it’s hard to be humble, but I’m doing the best that I can.”

You can find countless T-shirts, coffee cups, and bumper stickers that play on this hard to be humble theme.  It’s hard to be humble when you’re Scottish, Irish, Scandinavian, or from Texas.  It’s hard to be humble when you go to (insert your school name here).  It’s hard to be humble when you own a Border collie, ride a Harley, or – I actually found this one – crochet. 

Whatever the reason, seems it’s hard to be humble.  We may not like it if you go too far and act like Donald Trump, but our culture associates humility with weakness and timidity.  We’re more likely to pad our résumés than to leave stuff out.  Employment experts will tell you that you need to “sell yourself” when you apply for a job, and sell of course means to make yourself look as good as possible.  The pressure in our society to be impressive is tremendous, and we regularly see people get caught because they felt they needed to lie on their résumé.

Humility is no easier to come by among church professionals.  Pastors compare how big their congregations are, and rare is the pastor who feels God’s call to a smaller congregation.  I suspect a lot of us would have a hard time encouraging our congregations to do something we were certain God wanted if it would cause attendance or giving to go down.

To make matters worse in the pastoral humility department, we pastors are sometimes prone to confuse our own agendas with God’s. When we have ideas that we think are great, we expect everyone else to think they are great, too.  Most of the things I’d like to take back or undo as a pastor happened when I was overly impressed with my own ideas and got adamant or defensive when Session, some committee, or some other group didn’t want to go along.

Of course, while it may be hard to be humble, Christian faith is quite big on humility, as are most of the world’s religions.  The Old Testament wisdom from Proverbs says, When pride comes, then comes disgrace; but wisdom is with the humble.  Jesus describes himself as humble and he says on more than one occasion, “All those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”  And the letter of James quotes the Old Testament in reminding readers, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”

King Solomon seems to have gotten the memo on humility.  When he encounters God in our reading today he says, “O Yahweh my God, you have made your servant king in place of my father David, although I am only a little child; I do not know how to go out or come in.”  Little child here does not refer to Solomon’s age but to his status before God.  The same is true with regards to saying he is God’s servant, or, more literally, God’s slave.

Finding Our Place in the Story

Stephen is on trial for his life, falsely accused of blaspheming God and the Jerusalem Temple. Once the charges against him are outlined, the chief priest asks him, "Are these things so?"  And Stephen answers by beginning to tell a story.  He goes all the way back to Abraham, and sketches out Israel's story from Abraham to Isaac to Joseph to Moses and Joshua to David and Solomon.  Finally, he locates Jesus in this story.

It's a rather odd way to answer the priest's question when you think about it.  But Jesus also tends to tell stories when asked questions.  Someone says, "Who is my neighbor?" and Jesus tells the story of the "Good Samaritan."  I suppose stories and parables helped people remember Jesus' teachings better than straight forward answers, but I also think that faith is more story based than we modern folks tend to be.

If you're in a business meeting or a committee meeting and someone says, "Let me tell you a story," there will likely be groans (unless the person is a very gifted story teller).  We don't have time to waste on stories.  We are about efficiency and getting things done.  But in our rush to be efficient and accomplish things, we often have little sense of context, of where we are in the story.

It's seems rather obvious that we are products of stories: family stories, community stories, school stories, national stories.  We are shaped and molded by the narrative in which we live, but for whatever reason, we tend to think of ourselves as free and independent agents who create our own stories.  Those born into privilege speak of creating their own success.  We talk easily of earning what we have, often oblivious to the fact that we might well have done nothing of the sort in another age or culture, without infrastructures and supports that others provided, without advantages provided by gender, race, academic or physical gifts, etc.

Our disconnection from our stories has a profound impact in the way we pursue and experience faith.  The notion of "going to church" rather than "being the church" is but one example.  In some congregations, there is no more sense of community on Sunday morning than there is in a movie theater.  People are there to get something they need, and they don't necessarily see that as connected to a larger story intertwined with those around them.

A big part of my Reformed/Presbyterian tradition is the idea of vocation or call.  A vocation is not what I happen to do for a living but what I am meant to do, an activity that benefits me and my community, as well as God's plans for Creation. Responding to God's call, discovering one's vocation, is about finding our place in a larger story, one that we do not write on our own.

It seems to me that at times America's worship of individualism rises to a level that is extremely hazardous to faith and relationship with God. If we presume that we are author, producer, and director of our own stories, then we have forgotten the lesson of that old catechism question.  "Q. What is your only comfort, in life and in death?  A. That I belong--body and soul, in life and in death--not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ..."

I am not my own.  In Christ, I belong to God. And I am who I am meant to be, I am truly and fully alive, only when I discover my calling and take my place in the story of which God is author, designer, producer, and director.  I uncover my truest and deepest identity, my true self, as I take my small part in God's great narrative.  "A wandering Aramean was my father..."

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