Sermon audio: In Line with Us

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Sermon: In Line with Us

Luke 3:15-22

In Line with Us

James Sledge                             January 13, 2013  -  Baptism of the Lord

John the Baptist gets a curtain call today.  We just heard from him during Advent, as we do every year. In fact, John gets two Sundays during Advent. He’s there to help us get ready, to prepare for the coming of a Savior.  But now here he is again.  This time the focus is on his ministry of baptizing as we remember Jesus being baptized.

As a result, we don’t hear all of John’s message this time, don’t get called a brood of vipers, and don’t hear about the ax at the root of the trees, but we still get some sense of that. John says of Jesus, “His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”  I’ve always gotten the impression that John expected Jesus to kick butt and take names.

I wonder if John thought the world was beyond hope. Did he expect Jesus to show up, clean house, and start over with some righteous remnant?  Was Jesus going to institute a fiery version of the Noah’s ark story, wiping out all the bad with unquenchable fire?

John the Baptist was probably a pretty strange guy.  Prophet types often are.  But despite all his strangeness, I know a lot of people whose thinking is a good deal like John’s.  Sometimes mine is, too.

A lot of Christians proclaim a slightly modified version of John’s message.  “The world’s horrible, filled with all sort of terrors and cruelties and exploitation and needless suffering.”  John could point to Herod and Roman occupation and corruption in the Jerusalem Temple hierarchy and the way the poor always got the short end of things while the rich got richer.  Herod and the Romans are gone, but other than that we know all about the exploitive dictators and military occupations and corrupt religious institutions and the poor getting the short end of things while the rich do just fine. 

John expected Jesus to show up and fix things somehow, and it wasn’t going to be pretty. In the Christian variation on John’s message, fixing things is still not going to be pretty.  But now it comes mostly via evacuation.  Jesus comes with his winnowing fork and carries the wheat off to heaven. But the not so good and creation itself, well nothing but fire will fix that.

Liberals Christians sometimes burn less stuff, less folks, but that doesn’t mean we can’t adhere to the basic formula where the world is in some way hopeless and beyond redemption.

Something to Eat

Reading today's gospel made me think about how often feeding miracles shows up in the gospels. All four contain one, and Matthew and Mark have two.  Six miraculous feedings.  No missing that Jesus provides food for the hungry.

So many occurrences suggests this was a very well known story. No matter what sources a gospel writer had, there it was.  And Mark had two different accounts (apparently replicated in Matthew). Perhaps they were the same event via different sources, or perhaps they were stories of different feeding miracles.  Either way, Jesus feeding the crowds features very prominently in the story the early Church told.

Our course meals figure prominently in other ways. Huge portions of the synoptic gospels are devoted to Jesus' last meal with  his followers. A banquet was a well worn metaphor for the coming of God's reign. And the early Church came together around a meal.  (The typical dry cubes and thimbles of juice in the Lord's Supper I grew up with bore scant resemblance to such meals, much less to a banquet.)

Eating a meal with someone is a significant act. Most of us are pretty picky about who we invite over for dinner.  In our day of fast and easy food, we may not spend much time reflecting on the act of eating, but we still have favorite foods and restaurants. And while going to the movies is a safe first date, dining together at a nice establishment is a much more intimate event.

Church suffers a huge loss when the experience of worship is more like the movies or a concert than like joining others for dinner.  Not that movies or concerts cannot be deeply moving, but they lack the intimacy of a meal.  They lack the sense of receiving something one cannot live without, nourishment and companionship, community if you will.

I suspect one reason so many young people find traditional worship unappealing is that it feels more like going to something than it feels like receiving something you deeply need.  The pendulum swing in my tradition back toward more frequent celebration of the Lord's Supper perhaps senses this lack. But I am not sure that simply doing communion more often, especially in services with lots of people, changes things very much.

I once new a church member who I liked a great deal. When he would leave Sunday worship, he often commented on my sermons.  If he had really liked one he would make a point of saying, "I really enjoyed the lecture today." I never objected.  I knew he meant it in the kindest possible way, but it always unnerved me a bit.

Jesus taught, he told stories, he healed, and he fed people and ate with them, and the early Church and the gospel writers seem quite captivated by the food part.  Jesus offers food for those who are hungry, and he gives it to his followers to distribute and share.

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Afraid

God is our refuge and strength,
     a very present help in trouble. 
Therefore we will not fear, 
          though the earth should change,
     though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea; 
though its waters roar and foam,
     though the mountains tremble with its tumult.

Psalm 46:1-3

"We will not fear." So says the psalmist.  But the fact is that most of us live with a fair amount of fear and anxiety. If you read newspapers or watch the news, there are plenty of reasons for fear and anxiety. But you would expect people of faith to have less trouble with fear, wouldn't you?  After all, God is on our side.  And so we won't be afraid even if the earth changes, the mountains shake, and the waters roar and foam. Right?

Yesterday I read Tom Ehrich's blog post, "Speaking of Fear." Tom is a writer, Episcopal priest, and church consultant, and he was speaking of fears that often impact Christians and their churches.  In particular, he listed "fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of losing control, fear of conflict, and fear of change." These fears often paralyze church congregations.

When Jesus promises the gift of the Holy Spirit, he tells his followers that the Spirit will abide with them and strengthen them and teach them all they need.  Therefore we should not have troubled hearts or be afraid. And yet the fears Tom Ehrich lists do afflict us and keep us from doing what Jesus calls us to do. Churches are often afraid to try anything new or different, sometimes out of fear of change and sometimes over fear of failure. There are remarkable exceptions, but churches are often some of the most timid organizations around, afraid to try anything they don't already know how to do.

And pastors' fears can be just as problematic.  If we're not control freaks afraid of delegating anything, we are needy and afraid people won't like us, not daring to speak what we think to be the truth. Or our messiah complexes make us afraid that our congregations will lose their way if we don't make sure everything is done in theological or ecclesiastical purity.

All of these fears, I fear, have a common denominator.  All of them have difficulty trusting God with anything of much significance.  If we can't think of it, control it, manage it, and accomplish it all on our own, we're pretty sure, or at least very afraid, that it can't happen. Practically speaking, we do not believe that God is with is us in any significant way, and we certainly don't believe in any power or assistance from God the Holy Spirit.

1 John says, "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear." Perhaps the timidity and fearfulness of congregations and pastors is less a faith problem and more a love problem. We've never quite encountered God's love in so vivid and tangible a way that it has cast out all fear. We're worried, even afraid, that God might not love us so much that our failings couldn't drive God away.

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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 video: Now What?

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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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