On Receiving a Scary Letter

Imagine that your congregation received a communication from a prophet who had just had a vision.  And that communication said, "Some of you are about to be put in prison on account of your faith. You will likely be tortured, and it will be terrible for 10 days.  But remain faithful until death, and you will conquer."

I'm not sure I can imagine such a thing.  It is so far outside any religious experience in our culture.  So if such a letter arrived at our church, no matter whom it came from, I would likely think the person a crackpot, some Tea Party sort who had gone completely off the deep end.

But what if, by some remarkable circumstance, I or you could be convinced that this communication was true?  Perhaps I'm wrong, but I feel reasonably certain that the vast majority of American congregations would lose over 90% of their members instantly.

The book of Revelation is a letter written to Christians facing just such difficult circumstances.  And unlike many modern Christians, they understood that this letter meant to assist them in remaining faithful under very trying circumstances.  It wasn't giving detailed predictions about the future or the end of the world.

Revelation was written in a very different time and to a very different Church.  Those Christians understood themselves to stand outside prevailing culture to some degree. They experienced a fair amount of tension between their new life in Christ and what it took to fit into Greco-Roman culture. 

When I was growing up, it was very difficult to separate Christian faith from the prevailing culture. There was a symbiotic relationship between the two, although I've often thought that the Church sold its soul in that bargain.  My Presbyterian/Reformed Tradition often spoke of Christ/Church as a transforming presence in the culture.  To be sure, some of that happened, but it cut both ways.

Over the years and centuries, Church became a very worldly institution, and like all institutions, it is often more fixated on preserving itself than anything else.  When the culture realized it no longer needed or wanted a symbiotic relationship with Church, the watered down thing we had become began to struggle without the stores and malls being closed on Sunday morning or religious indoctrination conducted by the public schools. (I think that the origins of the "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism" I mentioned yesterday emerge from this transition.)

In the last 50 years or so, membership in Mainline churches has dropped by half.  And most who left did not join other denominations or mega-churches.  They simply left.  This group of "Nones," as some have labeled them, is huge and growing. "Nones" make up an estimated 20% of American adults, and the percentage is surely much higher among young adults.  But church congregations often seem blissfully unaware unless they are experiencing a big loss in membership and therefore worrying about how to get more people to come so their congregation can survive. 

In the staff meeting at this church today, I asked folks an identity question. (I borrowed it from a book on church planning by Kenneth Callahan.)  How would our neighbors finish this sentence?  "Falls Church Presbyterian, it's that church that___________." It's hard to know for certain if their answers accurately reflect what non-member neighbors would say, but I suspect they are fairly accurate.  Suggestions included something about our nice buildings, the Scouts that meet here, community events that we host, our great music program, or our once a month "Welcome Table" where we offer a free meal along with gift cards for a local grocery store and other items to people in need. 

As I looked over the list, it struck me that many congregations might have prompted a very similar list.  It also struck me that only the last item - and it was one of the last suggestions from the staff - had a direct connection to anything Jesus called us to do.

There are times when I wonder if the "institutional church" can actually be the Church. Sometimes it seems the best it can do is to house and nurture occasional episodes of Church, of Christ's body present to the world.  But the bulk of its energy and resources get tied up by the institution and its edifices, regardless of whether those do much to further the work of Christ in the world.

Perhaps I'm just having "one of those days" and being too hard on this thing we call Church.  What do you think. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

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Pondering a Miracle

Upon reading today's gospel where Jesus turns water into wine, I have a profound sense that I am missing something. It seems a rather odd story for John's gospel, which is not all that big on miracles, instead featuring great speeches and teachings by Jesus.  But here is a spectacular miracle with no teaching at all.

More liberal types like myself sometimes get tied up in knots over readings such as today's gospel. We're troubled by the miraculous, especially a miracle so blatant as this one. It is so foreign to our scientific worldview, and there is no moral or spiritual lesson to be easily generalized from this episode. And so we have trouble taking this text seriously because to do so feels like fundamentalist literalism to us.
Banquets, wedding banquets in particular, get used in the Bible to speak of the abundance that God will provide, of the plenty and goodness that will mark God's coming reign. Surely today's gospel insists that even though Jesus' "hour has not yet come," God's abundance and provision are fully present in him. The steward in the reading remains blissfully unaware of this, attributing the abundance to some hyper-hospitality on the part of the groom.  But the disciples "believed in him." They saw God's abundance in Jesus, and so they could do nothing less.

But do we liberal and progressive Christians actually believe in God's abundance? (The question is probably valid for conservatives as well.) Can God provide in any real and tangible ways, or is God restricted to my interior life, and perhaps to something after death?

In her book, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church, Kenda Creasy Dean discusses the normative faith of American teens, something a huge national study labeled "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism."  This notion that there is a God, that we should be "good," that God sometimes bails us out of personal jams, and that we go to heaven when we die, is not something teenagers produced by perverting the teachings they learned at church, says Dean. Rather, this is precisely what they learned at church.

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism doesn't know what to do with Jesus changing water into wine, nor with God entering into and transforming history. These sorts of things simply have no place in the benign, innocuous, "Christian-ish" notions that teenagers have learned because that is what many churches have peddled.

Another finding of that national study is that teenagers, by and large, don't have much animosity toward religion. They don't reject church as something bad. They simply cannot fathom why they would invest much energy in it. After all, believing in God, trying to be good, and praying now and then don't require church membership or participation. And why would anyone worship and sing songs to a vague, distant, not-really-involved-involved-in-the-world God?

When people encounter our congregations, do they encounter anything of a God who is bending the arc of history toward God's purposes, whose providence sustains the universe, and whose grace intrudes into human life and history?  Or do they find some nice people trying hard to do some good things and enjoying a little spiritual boost from the rhythms of worship, but without much sense that God is there and up to something. (I realize that I'm making an either/or question out of something where there is a huge continuum of possibilities.)

I frequently cite a quote I believe to come from someone at the Alban Institute (Roy Oswald perhaps?). Speaking on the troubles of Mainline churches this person said something to the effect, "People come to us seeking an experience of God, but we give them information about God."

It is very hard to share an experience of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. It's a nice enough notion but not the sort of thing you would give yourself over to.  And if God cannot intrude into our lives and our world in ways that violate our expectations, that defy our notions of what is possible or plausible, if God cannot turn water to wine, then why are we church folk here? 

There's an old joke that goes, "What do you get when you cross a Jehovah's Witness with a Unitarian?" Answer: "Someone who knocks at your door but isn't sure why he's there."  And I sometimes wonder if many church congregations don't operate on a similar principle. We keep doing our thing, but we're not really sure why.

I know from serving three churches as pastor, and from working with a number of other congregations via denominational committees, that we often function as though God was not really part of the equation.  We say that we are doing what Jesus calls us to do, but we are no bolder in that work than we are at any other organization, from the workplace to PTA to Scouts to a local charity. We make decisions and undertake projects with absolutely no expectation that God/the Holy Spirit will add anything to the effort. If we have sufficient funding and volunteers and expertise, fine. Otherwise, it's just not possible.

But what if God's abundance and provision and grace really do enter into human experience in the person of Jesus?

I did not start out to write anything of the sort I just did. Strange where you end up when you stop to ponder a miracle.

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Sermon: Now What?

Matthew 2:1-12

Now What?

James Sledge                                                                           January 6, 2013, Epiphany

Our family went down to see relatives in South Carolina after Christmas.  We’ve always done Christmas at our house, and then traveled to the grandparents.  But now it’s over.  We made the drive back on Tuesday.  There are still remnants of Christmas morn lying around at the house, but more and more are being put away.  The tree is getting pretty dry.  Time to haul it out. When we had an artificial tree, we sometimes left it up till late January.  But no one acted like it was still Christmas.  Christmas is over, and we all know it.  Now what?

Although many of us like to attach the Wise Men to the Christmas story, adding them to our nativity scenes, they are a post-Christmas story.  The shepherds are all gone.  The angels are all gone.  In fact, they never even made an appearance in Matthew’s gospel.  There is no stable or manger.  Mary and Jesus live in a house, and Jesus is no longer a newborn.  He crawls or perhaps even walks around the house, getting into things like any toddler does.

 In his gospel, Matthew doesn’t say very much about Jesus’ actual birth.  It is noted only briefly in the story of the angel telling Joseph to wed the already pregnant Mary. He took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus. Jesus has been born and been named with a name meaning “he saves.”  God’s anointed is here.  Now what?

The story of the Wise Men is a “now what?” story, and so it may be a good thing that the story has gotten attached to Christmas.  As much as we may enjoy the Christmas season and as much as it may touch us, there is a tendency simply to bask in its warmth, to drink in its hope and promise without ever asking, “Now what?”  But the story of the Wise Men won’t allow that.  It alerts us to choices that must be made, to powers that do not want God’s new day.  It warns us of danger.

It Can't Be That Simple

The metaphors are flying in today's gospel. Jesus is the gate, while others are thieves and bandits. Then Jesus is the good shepherd as opposed to a hired hand.  And bouncing around within these metaphors is an "I AM" that gets lost in English translations.  This grammatical structure, one not really available to English, is a kind of divine marker.  And so these become more than metaphorical description. They are windows into the heart of God.

And those windows reveal a divine motivation that has been clearly stated in John's gospel from early on. God acts out of love, "For God so loved the world..."  God acts in order to give life. God is willing to go to incredible lengths, willing to die for the sake of the sheep.  And God is not concerned only with my particular flock. God longs for our petty divisions to disappear once and for all.

It's all right there, so clearly, so simply. But if I preached a sermon and said only this, I would feel like I hadn't done my job.  I wouldn't have unpacked the text enough.  I wouldn't have been creative enough.

God loves the world. In Christ, God would go so far as to die for us. It's so plain and simple, but it is so hard to accept. It can't be that simple.  There has to be some catch.  I have to believe the right things. I have to be good enough to deserve such love. And surely God isn't talking about loving "them," whoever we understand "them" to be.

"I AM," God, is the gate, an opening to abundant life.  "I AM", God, puts my and your well being over divine welfare.  God willingly undergoes great anguish within the heart of the divine self for my and your sake, simply because of who God is. 

It can't possibly be that simple, can it?

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Preaching Thoughts on a Non-Preaching Sunday

It is somewhat rare that I preach on the Sunday following Christmas.  Pastors often travel to visit family after Christmas day, and substitute preachers are in big demand on this first Sunday following the celebration of Jesus' birth.  And so I'm not sure if I've ever dealt with today's gospel in a sermon, and I'm not at all sure what I would say.

The first thing that comes to mind when I read these verses is the terror that Jesus' parents must have experienced. I once "lost" one of my daughters.  She was still preschool age and decided she would head on to the grocery store, our next stop, on her own.  I looked up from the shelves in the drug store to find she was no longer beside me. I looked on the adjacent aisle, and then the next, and then ran back and forth all through that store as a feeling of total panic began to rise up inside me.  For a brief moment I think I experienced the most terror I have ever felt. (In desperation I rushed over to the grocery store and found her getting the free cookie the bakery there gave to small children.) Jesus' parents must have felt what I did many times over. Rather than a few minutes, they could not locate Jesus for days. 

This is the only childhood story the Bible has about Jesus.  And while it does highlight the exceptional nature of Jesus, it also puts his parents through great agony. It's nowhere near so terrifying as Matthew's story of Jesus' family fleeing the slaughter of all the young boys in Bethlehem, but like it, Luke's account of Jesus' arrival quickly takes a troubling turn.  Maybe that is why our culture and our congregations, for all the attention we lavish on Christmas, turn away from it almost the moment the day arrives.  The Christmas story is not the saccharine sweet thing we want it to be. The story immediately encounters the world's enmity along with hints that following Jesus will demand loyalty exceeding that given to family, country, etc.

Our gospel says that Jesus' mother, Mary "treasured all these things in her heart."  I wonder what she found to treasure about this episode. I also wonder if this is the best translation.  Another possibility is that Mary "carefully remembered" all these things, and that seems more likely to me. She knew they were important, but I wonder if she would not have gladly given them up in order to prevent what would happen to her son.

I suspect that this sort of "treasuring" is an unavoidable part of faith. In a world that is out of step with God's ways, it is inevitable that taking up those ways will cause us pain and struggles over loyalties.  And if we do not realize this, we may have misunderstood the whole Jesus business. Maybe that is why Matthew and Luke (the only gospel writers who mention Jesus' birth) immediately attach dark and foreboding episodes to the story of Jesus' arrival.

It makes me wonder about the careful remembering that I need to be doing, the reflecting on things troubling and disturbing that I need to hold close if I am to understand what Jesus is asking of me.

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On Lighting Candles

I've never preached on Christmas Eve, but these were the "instructions" for the candle lighting at our service tonight.

"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it." In the darkness... On Christmas Eve we gather in the darkness. Some of us do so every year, but the darkness seems to press in a bit more this year.  Whether it is a dysfunctional Congress more bent on partisan bickering than actually helping the American people, or the terrible shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, or the horrible violence in places like Syria and the Congo, it is hard to deny the awful reality of the darkness.

If you were here last week for our Service of the Longest Night, you heard Diane remind us that the Christmas story is a dark story.  That sometimes gets lost in all the sentimentality and nostalgia and celebration, but it is still there. A couple forced by imperial power to travel, even though a birth is imminent. A birth far from home in a dirty and smelly place meant for farm animals. And as the story continues, this new family becomes refugees, fleeing those who would kill a newborn Messiah.

To say the light shines in the darkness is no act of sentimentality. Rather it is a bold assertion that the light that comes as a vulnerable baby, the love of God that comes in vulnerability and weakness, is somehow stronger than all that darkness.

And so as we light our candles and bask in their glow, it is much more than an ooh-and-aah moment. It is an act of defiance in the face of the darkness, an act that says we trust and hope in the power of God's weakness and vulnerability over all the terrors of the darkness.

The light, the vulnerable light of a newborn baby, shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it. Let us embrace that light, and carry it with us, that we might share it with a broken and hurting world that desperately needs it.

A Vulnerable God

We in the Church make far too much of Christmas, and far too little at the same time. We expend too much energy on Christmas extravaganzas and pageants that mirror the secular frenzy surrounding Christmas. Many seem to feel that Christmas-themed religious hoopla needs to keep up with the ever expanding secular hoopla.  I'm not sure why. Perhaps to hold on to some notion that all this energy is related to faith in some way.

But at the very same time, we sometimes get numbed to how remarkable the Christmas story is. The baby Jesus makes the briefest of appearances in the Bible, actually seen only in Luke's gospel. But the implications of that moment manifest themselves throughout the New Testament. God's love and power comes, not with earthquake and thunderbolts, but vulnerable and at risk.

What is more at risk than an infant? At Christmas God incarnate is totally dependent on others, just like all babies. Some Christians have always struggled with such notions, imagining that the baby Jesus wasn't like real babies. But nothing in Scripture would seem to support such a notion. A truly human baby, totally dependent on his parents, would grow to be a truly human adult who suffered and bled and died like other human beings.  He was, as the Apostle Paul wrote, God's power made perfect in weakness.

The notion of a vulnerable God seems to run counter to basic assumptions about God. God should be powerful, not vulnerable. So it's not surprising that the first big theological fight among early Christians was over the nature of Jesus' humanity.  Surely he only appeared human. God cannot be vulnerable or experience mortal jeopardy. And many modern Christians, living long after such debates were "settled," still struggle, picturing the biblical Jesus as some sort of aberration, a historical blip necessary to fulfill a salvation formula. But Jesus isn't like that anymore. And, they point out, when Jesus returns he will be just what you'd expect a god to be like, all powerful, no more meek and mild and vulnerable.

Expecting a returning Jesus who won't be such a disappointment in the godly power department seems to echo expectations of a conquering Messiah from 2000 years ago. But I think Christmas and the Incarnation reflect God's deepest nature. I see that nature on display in today's reading from the book of Revelation. Many presume Revelation to be violent predictions of God's coming wrath. But not only does Jesus still appear in it as one who is slain, but the closing of the book sounds much like the gospel Jesus.

"It is I, Jesus, who sent my angel to you with this testimony for the churches. I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning star." The Spirit and the bride say, "Come." And let everyone who hears say, "Come." And let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.

"Water of life as a gift" seems totally consistent with the vulnerable love we meet in the gospel Jesus, that story whose beginning we rehearse tonight. The story of a manger is the story of a God who enters fully into our vulnerabilities, who confronts the pain and brokenness of our world with a remarkably vulnerable love. We've still not fully embraced this love or this God. In many ways, we still prefer coercive power to vulnerable love.

Maybe it's just me, but sometimes the flash and pomp and magnificent displays of Christmas seem the sort of things that should accompany celebrations of worldly power such as coronations or inaugurations. There's a kind of dissonance between them and the story of a baby in a manger that reminds me of how I feel when I see the Pope, in all his royal finery, engaging in ritual foot-washing on Good Friday.

But even if the vulnerable baby gets lost amidst the bright lights and pageantry, he is still there. We just need to look beyond the pageantry and attend to the story itself. In the context of Rome's imperial might, a most vulnerable human act occurs, a birth. And this most vulnerable act occurs away from the safe confines of home, dependent on the hospitality of strangers who are able to provide only marginal accommodations. And there, God is.  There, with this act of remarkable vulnerability, God beckons us to become vulnerable ourselves, and to become bearers of God's love.

May you encounter the vulnerable God of Christmas as we remember and celebrate our Savior's birth.

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Sermon: A Strange Day in Zechariah's House

Luke 1:39-55

A Strange Day in Zechariah’s House

James Sledge                                                                                       December 23, 2012

It was a strange day in the house of Zechariah as two women, both pregnant, greet one another.  They are relatives of some sort.  I’d always heard that they were cousins.  The old King James translation says as much, but in fact, Luke doesn’t specify how they are related, only that they are.

They are a study in contrasts.  One is six months pregnant; the other hasn’t even begun to show.  One is old, too old to have children, so old that her pregnancy can only be described as a miracle.  The other is young, so young that she is not yet married in a culture where girls were often married by 14. 

As the door opens, the very pregnant, very old woman greets her very young, barely pregnant, barely out of childhood, niece or cousin or whatever she is. It must have been quite an encounter. They’ve not seen one another in a long time. Mary had just learned of Elizabeth’s pregnancy from the angel Gabriel.  Elizabeth has no way of knowing that Mary is pregnant, yet she knows.  Imagine the greeting, the screaming, the joy, the tears. 

Imagine poor Zechariah.  Two pregnant women in the house and he can’t even talk, struck mute by the angel Gabriel for not believing that he and Elizabeth would have a son so late in life.  I wonder if Zechariah headed out to the local tavern to escape the screaming and yelling and singing of these two pregnant women.

I also wonder why Mary went to see Elizabeth.  Is she seeking reassurance, going to confirm what Gabriel told her about Elizabeth and so confirm what Gabriel said about her own pregnancy?  Is Elizabeth is the one person who can understand, who she can talk with about these strange goings on?  Is Mary just scared, wondering why she ever said “Yes” to Gabriel, wondering what she will do when she starts to show?  Is she wondering how to tell Joseph?  Did she come to sort all of this out, or perhaps to borrow some maternity clothes.

As I said, it was a strange day in Zechariah’s house.  All these things going on.  All these unanswered questions, not to mention the more run of the mill questions about morning sickness and mood swings and midwives.  So much to discuss and talk about, yet we hear none of that.

Mary walks in, and Elizabeth’s baby jumps in her womb.  I still remember putting my hand on my wife’s abdomen and feeling a kick.  It’s an amazing thing, to feel that life moving.  You might even call it miraculous, but it’s a fairly routine miracle.  It happens all the time.  I’ve heard people try to interpret these fits of activity.  Some say that a loud noise can trigger it.  Some try to predict a child’s gender based on how vigorous the activity is.  Some claim that spicy food can send their child into all sorts of flip and flops. 

Elizabeth has a different take on her baby’s movement.  It’s a rather novel interpretation , but Luke tells us that she is filled with the Holy Spirit, so I suppose it is to be trusted.  Elizabeth fairly screams out to Mary, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.”   And she calls Mary “the mother of my Lord,” all because her baby jumped or kicked.  As I said, it was a strange day in Zechariah’s house.