Grateful

The picture on Facebook makes fun of Black Friday saying, "people trample other for sales exactly one day after being thankful for what they already have." Today's gospel reading tells of 10 lepers who were healed, but only one (and he was a Samaritan) came back to say "Thank you," prompting Jesus to ask, "Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?"

Tomorrow we will be grateful, or at least say that we are. Some of us will list things for which we are grateful. A good exercise, I suppose, if often perfunctory.  And I'm not sure that the things we are thankful for, the things we count as blessings, are always the best lists. Many of us are thankful for our stuff, our nice cars and clothes and houses. It makes sense in a way, but Jesus warns that our wealth can be a curse rather than a blessing.

I find myself in a weird place with regard to gratitude as I write. Not only is it the eve of Thanksgiving, but I've also just returned from a Presbyterian CREDO conference, a rather intense event for pastors where we examine our sense of identity and call including how that intersects with our physical and financial health.  One piece of this is how our church work and busyness can take us away from our actual call from God. The priorities of our work lives often get out of sync with God's priorities.

During my time at CREDO, as I explored my own faith and call, as I questioned my own priorities, I found myself feeling profoundly grateful for certain people, my wife especially.  And I found myself profoundly sad for how my life and its priorities often do not reflect such gratitude.

Today, I'm also doing some work on a sermon for the first Sunday in Advent. Each year the readings for this Sunday focus not on Jesus' arrival in a manger but on his still anticipated one.  And the scripture reading always contains some sort of call to be alert and ready for that arrival. It's not the scary or silly stuff of Left Behind novels, but rather a call to live now according to the priorities of God's coming new realm.  And different priorities make for different gratitude lists, and for different sorts of regrets and sadnesses.

For someone who did very well in seminary and has managed okay as a pastor, I can be really slow to catch on about faith. I had one of my "Aha" moments in the thick spiritual ether of a CREDO conference in the beauty of the NC mountains.  I encountered God's love in something other than a contractual or intellectual or judicial manner.  I encountered it as God's desire for me, and lots of things suddenly felt reoriented. It suddenly felt easier to be vulnerable and not worry about doing it just right.

One specific example was particularly illuminating for me. The notion of confession suddenly felt more like gratitude. Nothing like a child saying he's sorry after being caught doing something wrong, but rather a response to discovering how far a lover has gone to keep loving you regardless. And "Sorry" all of a sudden sounds like "Thank you."

It's Thanksgiving, and I have my list of things I'm grateful for, but the list feels a bit different this year. It feels fresh, and strange, and wonderful.  Thank you!

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Sermon video - New Clothes

Sermon audio - New Clothes

I've been away for a CREDO conference.  Here's the sermon audio from Nov. 11.


Audios of sermons and worship available on FCPC website.

Sermon - New Clothes

Mark 12:38-44

 New Clothes

James Sledge                                                                                       November 11, 2012

I have been to three high school reunions.  It makes me feel terribly old to say so, but I attended my 35^th a couple of years ago.  This one was a little different from a tenth or twentieth.  After 35 years, my classmates and I were a lot closer to the ends of careers than beginnings.  Quite a few have died, and some had or were just about to retire.  At a tenth reunion, so much lay ahead. Only provisional judgments could be made about how your life had gone.  But at a 35^th.

When you gather for a 35^th reunion it is difficult to look at people and not make judgments.  Some are fairly superficial. If you’ve been to such reunions you know what I’m talking about.  Some folks have aged better than others.  Some look little changed from their senior class picture.  Some you can’t figure out who they are.

Other judgments require a little more information, some catching up.  Graduate degrees, places they’d worked, where they now live, where their children go to college, and other such things let you begin to rate folks on some sort of success scale.  One is an Air Force general, others are doctors, some own businesses, some are fire fighters, some are teachers, and so on.  Of course not everyone uses the same success scale for their measuring. Some are impressed with Air Force general, and some are not.  Some are impressed with teacher; some are not. Some are impressed with pastor (not many); some are not.

Whether or not you’ve ever attended a high school reunion, you probably use some sort of success scale, some type of measures for making judgments or life choices.  Parents want their children to do well, so they worry about the school district they live in, and children learn at very young age that they will be measured.

Think about all those scales we use: grades, SAT or ACT scores, state school vs. Ivy League vs. community college.  And it keeps going after school: salary, car you drive, where you live, where you vacation, who you know, how important you are, and so on.

Numbers figure prominently in many of these success scales, and such scales show up at church as well. Successful pastor means one at a church with lots of members, and successful churches are ones with large membership and budgets. We’ve just completed a stewardship campaign that talked about giving as a spiritual discipline and the tithe as a way of gauging spiritual health, but we’ll still measure the success of the campaign in total dollars. 

There is a certain practical necessity to this I suppose, but it sure seems out of sync with what Jesus says to us today.  When he sees a widow drop a couple of pennies in the Temple treasury, he says, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury.”  He calls it “more.”

Sermon video - Lengths in the Chain

Sermon from November 4

Sermon video - Almost Ready

Sermon from October 28

Don't Sweat the Small Stuff

I love social media, but it has its downside. Somewhat like alcohol, it seems to lower inhibitions. People fire off tweets and Facebook posts in the heat of the moment, saying things that they must surely regret later. Or perhaps the lack of face to face contact simply removes the sense of propriety that might be there if the person were standing amongst a group of coworkers.

Today, post election, the venting is going full force. I suppose that Donald Trump had become such a caricature that people barely shrugged when he called the election a "sham" and "travesty" and called for a "revolution." Still, even Trump seemed to think better of it later, removing the tweet. (Social media 101; you can never really remove a tweet. It's still out there.) On Facebook this morning, some of my "friends" are overcome with doom and foreboding. "American is screwed," and "Goodbye America, it was nice knowing you," are prime examples. 

Hopefully such statements are heat-of-the-moment feelings that will subside, but no doubt they are real to those saying them. And I find myself wondering why so many folks feel the reelection of Obama is a death knell for America. And for that matter, why did so many of my liberal friends thing the election of Romney would have been much the same.

In his acceptance speech last night, Obama addressed the pettiness that so often seems to dominate politics, making them seem "small, even silly." He went on to address important and non-petty things he encountered on the campaign trail and then said, "It’s not small, it’s big. It’s important. Democracy in a nation of 300 million can be noisy and messy and complicated. We have our own opinions. Each of us has deeply held beliefs. And when we go through tough times, when we make big decisions as a country, it necessarily stirs passions, stirs up controversy."

I get what he's saying, and I agree to a point, but only to a point. I would never argue that fundamental issues of democracy or people's economic security are small things. But I will argue that in politics, as in all other areas of life, humans tend to overestimate the largeness of their cause, their issue, their concern, etc. I say this as a Christian with a fundamental belief in a human brokenness that issues forth in idolatry, giving ultimate status to things that are not. Idols can be quite good and important things. In fact the best idols always are. But when any cause or institution or idea or ism becomes ultimate for us, our sense of reality is distorted, and we act as if things are larger and more important than they actually are.

There seems to be an innate need for humans to attach to something larger than self. Some label this an innate religiosity. But O how this often leads us astray. From a Christian perspective, anything that gets in the way of loving God with my entire being and loving my neighbor as myself is an idol that distorts me and my life. It creates loyalties and passions that are out of kilter, and so I live in ways that are not true to who I really am.

You can see such out of kilter loyalty and passion at work in today's gospel. The synagogue leader's loyalties are misplaced. They are to doctrines and practices meant to encourage faithful life with God. But the leader has mistaken them for the ultimate. Similar things happen all the time in the Church when pastors and members confuse the success of their congregation with the work of Christ.

And I think that much of the partisan bitterness in our world today (in both secular and church politics), is because we have given ultimate loyalty to sub-ultimate things. And so my ideas for a better country are more important than the country itself. My country is more important than the world. My notions of how the church should act are more important than the church itself. And my notion of what God is like and how God should act replaces the living God who is beyond my full understanding.

There's a saying that became a book title which reads, "Don't sweat the small stuff, and it's all small stuff." Perhaps we would all do well to apply that adage to our loyalties and big things from time to time. A reminder of the universal human tendency to find subordinate substitutes for what should truly be ultimate.

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Voting against "Christian"

I'm trying not to pay much attention to the election today.  I'm not going to sit around and watch returns come in as I've done in past elections. I'll check in now and then and hope there's a decision before I go to bed.

Still, you can't be on social media and not hear some news about the election.  I already saw the results of one exit poll that claimed people who attend church weekly voted for Romney, 62-37 percent, while those who never attend broke 62-34 for Obama. I have no idea if this is accurate or if it portends anything about the final results. I am curious, however, about what this says about faith in Jesus and whether or not attending church has much to do with that.

As a follower of Jesus (admittedly not always a very good one), I have my problems with both candidates. Both went on and on about their concern for the middle class, presumably because that's where the most votes are. But neither said much about the poor, and that was one of the first things Jesus said his ministry was about, "good news for the poor."

In today's gospel, Jesus tells a parable about bearing fruit. He talks about a fig tree that has produced no figs for years. Unless you just happen to like the look of fig trees, one without fruit isn't worth much, and so this one is slated to be cut down.  In the parable, it gets a reprieve, but only a brief one.  It will get tender loving care, but it still needs to bear fruit, or it's a gonner.

It's hard to miss Jesus' point. We are expected to bear fruit. Attending church on Sunday is a good thing, but I don't think it's the fruit, or at least not the only fruit, that Jesus is talking about.  After all, his opponents were meticulous in their religious observance. Jesus expects us to worship God, but he expects more than that.  And I feel confident that the fruit he's looking for is not whether we voted for Romney or Obama.  Perhaps our understanding of how best to love our neighbor causes us to prefer one candidate over the other, but the notion that one candidate is the Christian candidate makes me think a lot of people have gotten confused about what that term means.

And so in the spirit of elections and voting, I'll make a motion to do away with the term "Christian." It's not an idea original to me nor is it the first time I've suggested it.  But I think it painfully obvious that the term, along with Sunday church attendance, often has little to do with following Jesus. And that is as much a problem for liberal Christians as it is for conservative ones. We both assume that Jesus is with us.  But very often, we need to be thinking about how we must change in order to go with him.

I went to my polling place today and voted for the candidates I prefer.  My faith figures prominently into my choices, but I don't think this means that people who vote opposite me are "un-Christian." And so I'm voting a second time today, this time against the label "Christian." (I know this is out of order from a parliamentary standpoint; no second, no discussion, but hey, it's all metaphor anyhow.) I'm still looking for a candidate that rolls off the tongue easier than "follower of Jesus," but I'm increasingly convinced it's time to give "Christian" the boot. 

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Partisan Jesus

As one who lives in a "swing state," tomorrow evening cannot arrive soon enough. I'm as tired of the commercials for my issues and candidates as I am for those of the other side. And I'm convinced that the local news programs are shortening their actual broadcasts to create more and more available ad time.

Maybe I'd feel less disgusted by it all if the commercials had much substance, but more often than not, they massage "facts" or tell straight out lies in order for one side to say that the other side's candidate hates babies, America, Jesus, and puppies.  And the partisan name-calling has invaded Twitter and Facebook with a vengeance. The distortions and name-calling there are only more outlandish and preposterous than on TV.

I thought about our partisan divisions today as I heard Jesus say, "Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three."  Sound familiar?

So is Jesus just one more dividing line in an already polarized world? I think I have something of a "yes and no" answer to such a question. Certainly Jesus is not the meek and mild sop who never offends anyone or creates any conflict. No one fitting such a description ever got executed for his trouble.  Clearly Jesus scared some people, and so it stands to reason that his followers might scare the same people. I might add that this provides a useful measure of whether your or my divisiveness is of a pair with Jesus'. Are the same sort of people upset with you? (If you aren't sure, you would do well to get to know you Bible a bit better and discover just who it was Jesus offended and who he embraced.)

But while Jesus scared people and even called them a few choice names on occasion, he did not seem intent on creating divisions. He did not go around looking for folks to label as bad or as outsiders.  If anything, he worked to pull outsiders in.  However, his very presence was a source of division. To encounter Jesus and his message created a kind of crisis moment. Could people accept, embrace, or go with Jesus and his message, or did they have to turn away.

Let me quickly add that I'm not talking about the stereotypical, evangelical choice to accept Jesus as your personal Savior or else. The positive judgment on the Gentiles in Matthew 25:31-46 clearly speaks of those who choose the way of Jesus unwittingly. Rather, the crisis Jesus' presence confronts us with is whether we will consider following Jesus and his ways over the ways honored by the world.

There's a famous quote from Mahatma Gandhi that speaks to this. He studied several faiths and was drawn toward Jesus' teachings. Yet he was repelled by what he experienced from those who called themselves Christian and said, "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."

To spend much time around someone who really does try to follow Jesus, who is not so unlike Christ, can be a little unnerving. Such people can be difficult to relate to because they don't function out of the world's norms, and their presence can be an uncomfortable critique of our lives. They are easy to admire from afar, but to get very close can provoke a crisis. It can demand that we acknowledge their Christ-like way or turn away from it. And they need not call us names or condemn us. Their presence itself is sufficient.

Such moments of crisis and division are rare. Like religious leaders in Jesus' day, religious leaders in the Church manage and domesticate Jesus so that our divisions are along much more trivial lines, lines that typically mirror the dividing lines active in our culture. More fundamental questions about true life, true community, true relationship with God and other, get lost amongst our petty differences. 

Despite claims to the contrary, our divisiveness is rarely about the future of our society or country. It is almost never about the hope of a new day that Jesus insists had drawn near. Perhaps that is why people have become so tired of our present day partisanship. After all, partisanship is a long-standing part of American political history. But our present divisiveness often seems to be for the sake of itself, rancor for rancor's sake, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Oh, for some divisiveness that was actually over Jesus and the Way he proclaims rather than the small and petty divisions that so often occupy us.

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Sermon - Lengths in the Chain

Hebrews 11:39-12:2

Lengths in the Chain

James Sledge                                                                                       November 4, 2012

I subscribe to a magazine called The Christian Century. It’s been around since the late 1800s, and long served as a prominent  voice for liberal, Mainline Protestantism.  But I mention the magazine today, simply because of its name, The Christian Century.

It took that name at the dawn of the Twentieth century as America and its churches entered a new era brimming with hope and optimism. The remarkable technological advances of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led many to believe that humankind was on the verge of solving all sorts of problems, from wiping out diseases to increasing agricultural production so that hunger might soon be a thing of the past.

The dawn of the Twentieth Century was accompanied by a nearly unshakable faith in human progress, a view shared by American Christianity. The missionary movement had grown exponentially in the late 1800s, and many in the church, both conservative and liberal, envisioned a fast approaching day when the gospel truly had been carried to all the world.  Along with utopian visions of a world without poverty, hunger or childhood diseases, there would be a parallel progress in the advancement of faith.  The world would progress and become Christian, and so it would be the Christian Century. And from that optimism, the magazine took its name.

Obviously things didn’t work out quite like people expected. Barely a decade into the new century, World War I broke out, demonstrating clearly that “progress” also meant progress in our ability to maim, kill, and terrorize on a scale that had previously seemed unimaginable.

And that was followed shortly after by a worldwide Great Depression that makes our current economic difficulties look like a party.  Then came World War II, the Holocaust, and nuclear weapons.  No one was any longer talking about the inexorable march of progress toward an ideal human society. 

At the same time, anti-colonialism movements were accompanied by a resurgence of indigenous faiths such as Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism, and talk of bringing the kingdom began to subside.  There was not going to be a Christian Century, and with the loss of such hope, faith took on a more personal focus.  Faith was about getting right with God personally. It was primarily about believing the right things, being moral, and getting a ticket to heaven, to a better place.

On Not Grieving the Spirit

On All Saints' Day, the gospel passage is not anything warm and fuzzy. Jesus' opponents seek to trap him, and he speaks of his followers not fearing death, of hell and judgment and unforgivable sin. It's the sort of passage that might prompt me to look at the other readings if this were one of the Sunday passages for use in preaching.

Many are familiar with Jesus' words saying, "even the hairs of your head are all counted." But I've most often heard them quoted to mean, "Don't worry, God won't let anything bad happen to you."  But Jesus uses them to reassure us about facing death, and not a natural death at that.  They're part of a warning to hold fast to faith when the going gets tough, even deadly, a reminder to trust God's care even when facing death, because, says Jesus, there are things worse than death.

It's a little unnerving to hear Jesus say that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is unforgivable. I must admit, however, I'm not entirely sure what that means. We can say all sorts of nasty things about Jesus and get a pass, but not the Holy Spirit?  What's that all about?

I'm not at all certain, but considering that the author of Luke is the same person who tells us in Acts about Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit, I wonder if this warning isn't only for people of faith.  Are only those who have received the Spirit able to blaspheme the Spirit?

Given the context, that seems to make sense. And so this would have nothing to do with typical discussions around "believe and be saved, don't and you're in trouble," but rather would be about how those who do feel the Spirit at work in their lives respond to that Spirit.

Understood this way, perhaps the tendency of Presbyterians to stay away from the Spirit is an unintentional act of self-preservation. If we're never aware of the Spirit's presence, perhaps we can't actually blaspheme her.

But all that aside, I have to think that part of what Jesus is saying is that once we really experience the Spirit's presence within us, granting us faith and strengthening us to follow Jesus into even the most difficult situation, it would require the most incredible act of willful and intentional disobedience to turn away that Jesus can't imagine us doing such a thing. That's why he concludes his warning about facing persecution, arrest, and even death this way. "Do not worry about how you are to defend yourselves or what you are to say; for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that very hour what you ought to say."

Do not worry.  So why is it so hard for me, and many like me, to entrust myself to the Spirit?

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Halloween and Other Costumes

Before long the trick-or-treaters will arrive.  I have no idea how many. The first Halloween in a new neighborhood, you don't know how much candy to buy.  Hopefully we have too much rather than too little. I'll be happy to polish it off.

I always enjoyed Halloween as a child.  It was fun to dress up as something you weren't. Once when I was around 10, I made myself a robot costume.  A couple of boxes, some silver spray paint, and some antennae fashioned from household utensils, and I had a crude, but serviceable facsimile of a robot inspired by the Lost in Space TV series showing back in those days.

But whether the costumes were crude, home-made jobs or fancy, store-bought ones, everyone understood that the masquerade was fleeting. Other than the occasional very young sibling or family pet, no one was really fooled by these remodeled exteriors. Under the costumes, we were still the same. Nothing had really changed.

Yet despite knowing this, most of us still worry a lot about our costumes.  Not our Halloween ones, but the costumes we put on every day. Sometimes these are literal, the clothes we wear to project just the right image.  Sometimes that are a persona that we don, hoping it will make us look more impressive, attractive, sexy, knowledgeable, powerful, datable, and so on. But often they are not much more effective than Halloween costumes. Who we really are inside still shows.

Jesus goes after the Pharisees in today's gospel over their concern with the outside rather than the inside.  Seems that nothing has change in 2000 years.  And this isn't simply a personal thing. We church folks worry a lot about the outside of our buildings and our worship, sometimes to the neglect of deeper, more important things.

We all know that the Church is people, a communion of saints who together constitute the living body of Christ in the world. Yet very often we we mention "church," we are talking about our costumes.

What's beneath the costumes your church wears? And what sort of Jesus does that show to the world?

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