Sermon video: If Only I Had a Cowboy Hat

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Sermon: If Only I Had a Cowboy Hat

Today's worship included the Lord's Supper and the ordination and installation of Elders and Deacons, making for this rather brief sermon.

Isaiah 55:1-9

If Only I Had a Cowboy Hat

James Sledge                                                                                       March 3, 2013

There’s been a lot in the news lately about changing the offensive name of the Washington  NFL team. I try not to say the nickname, but the discussion recalls my childhood, a different time when cowboys and Indians were movie and TV staples.

Cowboys were everywhere in the 1950s and 60s, and my brother and friends and I all had holsters and plastic six-shooters. I also had a pair of pointy-toed cowboy boots, and at some point decided I needed to complete the look with a cowboy hat. I had a toy cowboy hat, but I wanted the real thing, and they had them in the Sears, Roebuck & Company catalog.

For those too young to recall such things, the Sears catalog was the closest thing we had to internet shopping. It was a huge book. You could find almost anything in the Sears catalog, and they had genuine cowboy hats, right there in the section with saddles and bridles and barbed wire and other things that real cowboys might need.

My parents wouldn’t buy it for me though, and so I began saving my money. With a 25 cents a week allowance, it took a long time save the $8.00 or so, but I saved and saved, and finally had enough. My mother ordered it for me from the catalog, and then I waited. It seemed to take forever. I’m not sure I ever anticipated something so intently. O how different and grand my life was going to be when I got that real, genuine, cowboy hat.

Reluctant Prophets and Cheap Grace

When I first arrived at seminary in 1992, the school did many typical, orientation-type activities to help incoming students get to know one another and learn about life at that seminary. We had a picnic and other social events. We got a tour of the campus and met some of the professors and administrators.  And we did some "ice-breakers," those social interaction exercises that force you to move around and tell others something about yourself.

One of these exercises was to pick the biblical character you most identified with, and then to gather in small groups where you all shared something about your choice. After a few minutes everyone had to find a new group and share the same information, a dance that went on for several rotations.

Nothing particularly memorable about the activity itself. In fact, I doubt I would even recall it but for one fact. It seemed like nearly everyone had picked Jeremiah, the prophet who occupies the daily lectionary's Old Testament readings for the moment.

I suspect that this arose mostly from the opening of the book of Jeremiah where God calls the prophet but he objects. "Ah, Lord GOD! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy." (This complaint probably refers not to Jeremiah's being an actual child but to his being young and inexperienced.) Presumably many of us new seminarians thought of ourselves as called to something we weren't ready for, something for which we felt ill-equipped.

Of course there is another piece to Jeremiah. There is a lot of doom and gloom from this prophet. At one point Jeremiah is actually arrested as a traitor for telling the folks in Jerusalem to accept their defeat at the hands of Babylon as punishment from God. I don't know how much identification with this facet of Jeremiah was present in that seminary ice-breaker, but a lot of us had some sense that the church did need some reforming, rejuvenating, and rediscovering of its call. Few, if any of us, saw the situation in the dire terms of Jeremiah, but a lot of us probably felt a little kinship with the change agent part of a prophet's call.

Today's reading in Jeremiah is a curious mix of oracles of judgement along with anguish over what will happen. At one moment the anguish seems to be that of the prophet, but then God seems to feel the anguish as well. And there is only a hint of hope. "Yet I will not make a full end."

I think that many who love God and love the Church struggle with how to call the church to turn toward greater faithfulness without falling into the anguish found in Jeremiah. How does one call the Church away from its idolatry to consumerism, its captivity to giving its members what they want regardless of whether it is what God wants, without becoming Jeremiah? Or are there times when pastors are called to be Jeremiah?

I once had a wrestling coach who yelled a lot. He could be quite intimidating, but he would regularly remind us not to despair when he yelled at us. We should despair if he didn't yell at us because that meant he had given up.  Yelling meant he saw hope that we could become something better.

Now I'm not sure this translates very well beyond athletic endeavors, and even there my old coach belongs largely to a different time. But still there is this quandary of how to call people and religious institutions to repentance. (I use the word "repentance" here in its biblical sense of changing direction, of turning toward the direction of God's call.) And when it came to repentance and religious institutions, even Jesus had a hard time staying positive.

I think I struggle most in my ministry with how to balance God's love that in Jesus dies for us, with God's call to repent and follow Jesus, to learn a new way of living from him. Many years ago, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about this in terms of "cheap grace," which he defined in part as "the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance."

Socrates had his own take on this. "The unexamined life is not worth living for a human." But we often do not want to take the critical look at ourselves that might lead to change, to repentance. We often prefer cheap grace. So how do we call people to change, to lives reshaped by God's love and grace, while still holding tight to the love and grace part? I'd lile to know your answer.

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In Need of Healing

The line has long struck me. Jesus encounters an invalid who is lying by a pool purported to have healing powers when its waters are "disturbed" by an angel. Presumably the man is there because he seeks healing, yet Jesus asks him, “Do you want to be made well?” What an odd question. We are told that Jesus knew he had been there a long time, but if he knows that, surely he knows what the man tells him next, that with no friends to help him, others always beat him to the waters when they are "disturbed."

"Do you want to be made well?" Sometimes "made well" is a translation of the same word meaning "to save," but not here. Here Jesus literally says, "Do you want to become healthy?" Surely he does, so why does Jesus ask?

I'm not going to attempt to plumb the psychological state of this poor fellow. Perhaps Jesus' question is no more than a literary device. However, most all of us occasionally know what we need to do to get healthy, but for some reason do not take such steps. Sometimes what we need to do seems too difficult, and we don't have sufficient willpower to stick with the diet or exercise plan.

But other times willpower seems less the issue. At times we seem to be attracted to unhealthiness. Many of us complain about our over-scheduled, too-busy, over-stressed lives, yet we continue to add and schedule more for ourselves and our children. Here the cure would seem to be easy. We need only slow down, stop occasionally, and relax. No need to join a fitness center or Weight Watchers, but many of us find this impossible.

If Jesus found us, harried, stressed, about ready to scream and pull our hair out, might not he be justified in asking us, “Do you want to become healthy?”

Any doctor can tell you of patients who come to her seeking a cure, but who seem to do everything in their power to prevent a cure. With alcoholism and eating disorders, we recognize a sickness that drives people to do that which leads to unhealthiness and even death. People suffering from these may say they want to be made well, yet often they seem compelled to act otherwise.

"Do you want to become healthy?" There is a sense in which a genuine "Yes" requires the acknowledgment of our compulsion - large or small - toward unhealthiness. For those in 12 step programs, it is the acknowledgment of being an alcoholic or addict. For the wholeness and health Jesus offers, it is about acknowledging a problem we cannot fix on our own. Whether we label the problem sin, brokenness, distortion, or something else, we cannot cure ourselves. We need to be helped, to be saved, to be rescued.

But we struggle to admit this. Especially in America, with our worship of individualism, we are loathe to admit we cannot do it on our own.

"Do you want to become healthy?" The invalid at the pool doesn't really answer Jesus, instead giving Jesus reasons he has not been able to get into the pool on his own. Fortunately for him, and us, Jesus offers help, healing, saving, even when our asking is half-hearted. “Stand up, take your mat and walk.”

Thanks be to God!

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Give Me a Sign

"Now this was the second sign that Jesus did after coming from Judea to Galilee." So ends today's gospel reading.  This sign was the healing of a boy near death. The first sign was the turning of water into wine at a wedding in Cana. A sign of prodigious abundance followed by a sign of healing. Signs play a curious role in John's gospel with a complicated relationship to believing. But regardless of the complex nature of signs in John, I am struck by their concrete substance - abundance and healing.

Such signs surely reveal a God concerned with human life; not merely with some life to come, but with the lives we are living now. Jesus is in some way is about God's concern and care for us, God's desire that we live life in the fullness that God intends for us.

By nature I am a somewhat restless and impatient person, sometimes unhelpful traits for a pastor. I desperately want the church to live into the fullness shown to us and offered to us in Jesus. And I can too easily grow frustrated at the ways church sometimes prefers to be a conventional, religious institution rather than experience the new life Jesus offers. In that frustration, I can become shrill and harsh, focused mostly on our failings, with little sense of a hope or promise for something new and better, without any invitation to healing and abundance.

Sometimes I suspect that it becomes difficult for me to see signs of God's healing and abundance breaking into my life and the church's life because I am looking too much at myself and too little at Jesus. When my frustration is at its highest, it is usually related to worries that I do not have what it takes, that I do not have the requisite abilities or gifts to renew and transform those things in the church that need renewal and transformation. But of course I have no real ability to grant true healing and abundance. Such things come from God in Jesus. They come in the work of the Spirit.

Those pastors like myself, who can get frustrated with the stodginess of a Mainline Church that seems trapped in its past, sometimes betray a remarkable lack of faith in one of our own core beliefs of resurrection. We can speak of decline as inevitable and hopeless, a hurtling unto death that not even God cannot undo.

I do not suggest that God must resuscitate the Oldline/Mainline Church. But neither is it for me to declare dead what God would give life. And so perhaps the task for me, and for others who love the Church, is to look for signs. Perhaps more than needing to improve our skills or develop our leadership abilities, we need to look for what Jesus is doing, to acknowledge that that the Church does not ultimately rise of fall on our efforts, but on the life giving presence of the one who comes with signs of abundance and healing.

What signs do you see? Lord, show us clear signs that you are at work in us.

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Astonished by Jesus

In today's gospel, we hear the tail end of the story of Jesus' encounter with a Samaritan woman at a well. We enter the story as the disciples return to Jesus and see him speaking with this woman just prior to her leaving. "They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman," not to mention that she was Samaritan.

They were astonished. Clearly this was not behavior they expected from Jesus. Now if this were the only time the disciples were surprised by Jesus' behavior, we might not be able to make much of it. But Jesus regularly surprises and confounds his followers. The very people who knew him best and who spent more time with him than anyone were often taken aback by the things he did, the people he hung out with, the things he insisted his followers must do.

How often does Jesus astound you? Perhaps that seems an odd question given that Jesus makes fewer personal appearances these days. But over the years I have occasionally been struck by the ways I have domesticated Jesus, fitting him in to very conventional slots that he rarely challenges, mostly because I never give him the chance.

It is amazing how, once we settle on an image of Jesus that works for us, we can keep Jesus shoe-horned into that image. I mentioned yesterday how we in the church have sometimes reduced following Jesus to faithfully attending worship. The discontinuity between the ways we live and act and what Jesus calls his followers to do can be quite striking, yet we often seem immune to being astonished by such discontinuity.

I suppose that those first disciples would have done the same thing if they had been able, but Jesus was too present to them and too new to them for such easy domestication. Perhaps that means it is more incumbent on us to seek out those moments where Jesus astonishes us, although we do not seem much inclined to do this.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the typical church-goer's lack of serious engagement with the Bible. Nothing is quite so challenging to the notions of Jesus and God that we construct for ourselves as the witness of Scripture. To hear Jesus or God speaking directly against notions that are dear to us can be a profoundly challenging experience.

Church doctrine can also be helpful here. Admittedly, Church doctrine can sometimes become nothing more than certain things you have to believe in order to be sufficiently "orthodox,"but it can also remind us of how our images of Jesus and church have strayed from any solid, biblically-based standard. I think of my own Reformed tradition's statement recommending "A faithful stewardship that shuns ostentation and seeks proper use of the gifts of God's creation." (See the Presbyterian Book of Order, F-2.05) This call to live simply for the sake of others is a faithful attempt to to do what Jesus asks of us, although looking at many church buildings I suspect the members would be a bit "astounded" to hear Jesus say anything of the sort.

So where has Jesus astounded you? How often does it happen at your congregation if you are part of one? I take it to be a given that if we are not astounded, surprised, and redirected by Jesus from time to time, the Jesus we are following is one of our own creating.

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Preaching Thoughts on a Non-Preaching Sunday

It's a line filled with angst. "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!" Jesus speaks of a maternal longing for the children of Jerusalem, a longing for those who push away from his loving embrace.

I wonder if we should count ourselves among the children of Jerusalem. Those of us who claim to be Christians are surely her descendants in some way. The Church has often spoken of being heirs of God's promises to Israel. That seems to me a claim to be children of Jerusalem.

We certainly seem to have the "were not willing" part down pat.

I've been thinking a lot lately (and writing some as well) about how we in church congregations fail to incarnate Jesus and his ministry to the world. If someone unfamiliar with Christianity were to read the biblical gospels and write down a synopsis of what Jesus calls his followers to do, he would surly struggle to connect that with the primary activity of many congregations. 

Not that we never help the needy, the oppressed, the broken, or the poor. But often you have to look hard to find those things. The more obvious things we do are build buildings and hold worship services. Indeed many long time church folks speak of their church activity as "going to church," a phrase that accurately describes the primary primary focus of many church folk. Perhaps it is here, as much as anywhere, that we live out our heritage as children of Jerusalem.

"Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!" Presumably, Jesus' angst filled longing extends to us as well. He longs to gather us in and show us the true way. Here his longing for us seems much like that of the father in the parable of the prodigal. Our failures do not turn Jesus against us. They simply pain him and cause his heart to ache with longing.

That, of course, means that reconciliation and joy are never more than a turn away. The moment we move toward Jesus and his priorities, he reaches out to embrace us in the heartfelt passion of lovers reunited.

So why do we keep insisting on our way rather than his?

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Light, Truth, and Roaches

I can never read today's gospel without thinking of roaches. The rainbow haired guy with the John 3:16 sign may occur to me as well, but my first thought is roaches scurrying off a kitchen counter when someone comes in for a late night snack and flips on the lights. If you've ever lived somewhere with a roach problem, you surely know what I'm talking about.

The same passage that talks about God so loving the world also speaks of a self inflicted judgment that reminds me of roaches fleeing the light. The Gospel of John loves the metaphors of light and darkness. It speaks of Jesus as the light that has come into the world, and today Jesus notes that people often prefer the darkness, fleeing the light lest it expose them for what they really are.

I find this to be true, both individually and corporately. We all have those parts of us we don't want revealed, that we hide and do not want light illuminating them. Sometimes there is nothing more difficult for us than to stand in the bright light of truth. We prefer the images we construct to the realities of who we actually are.

I thinks this becomes magnified in groups and organizations. Groups do not like to face their failings and shortcomings. We do not like the harsh light of truth, even on events of long ago. My own native South often chooses the remember the Civil War as a war between states, and it tells the story so as to minimize the role of slavery. We struggle with the notion that the South was wrong to start the war and fought it to preserve an evil institution that denied full humanity to people because of their race. Some even insist that the reasons for the war were good and noble. We just  happened to lose.

But this is not a problem peculiar to the South. People in the North have often pointed a wagging finger at southern racism while conveniently ignoring their own history of racism.  Some people in Japan still honor the war heroes from WWII while denying horrible atrocities committed by those same heroes. And churches, well we engage in this sort of behavior, too.

Not only do we like to forget the way our churches once participated in the ills of racism, slavery, sexism, etc. (we still participate in some), but we are often very good at avoiding any significant and deep self-examination in the present. We seem content to imagine that we are in some way doing God's work, and so it must be fine. And we often get very upset if someone points out our hypocrisies or the ways we fail to incarnate Jesus to the world.

The same Jesus who is the light that people avoid because they prefer darkness, also says he comes to testify to the truth.  But light and truth scare us. Better not to look too carefully. Better not to discover that Jesus' call to repent, to turn and move in a new direction, applies to us in the church as well.

This is strange when you think about it. Jesus comes because of God's great love for us, comes to call us to the life that God hopes and dreams for us. Surely we would want the bright light of God's truth to shine on us, that we might see clearly where we have gone astray, and see clearly where Jesus is calling us to go.

Wouldn't we?

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Sequestration, Church, and Call

Perhaps it's because I live "inside the Beltway" near DC, but sequestration is big, front-page news around here. The newspapers and newscasts are filled with stories about what may happen if this sequester actually happens. Some seem unconcerned, but a lot of folks use "the sky is falling" language.

If you're not familiar with this issue, it refers to big, automatic, across-the-board budget cuts that will kick in on March 1. The whole thing was dreamed up back in 2011 as part of a budget compromise. The idea was to create a threat of automatic cuts that were so draconian, so terrifying, that it would force Congress to make some difficult choices to head it off.  But with an extremely partisan, extremely dysfunctional Congress, apparently no threat is sufficient to produce results.

People on the right and the left can point to the foolishness of a sequester. The idea that the most well-run and essential programs will see reductions of exactly the same percentage as the most wasteful and non-essential programs is clearly ridiculous. But Congress seems incapable of making decisions about what is essential and what is wasteful, what should be preserved and what might be pared. It is a remarkable failure of leadership.

It is also exactly what many churches do when they create annual budgets. Many congregations have no list of priorities, no way of determining which budget items are critical and which are less so. And so when budgets get tight, we simply employ our own version of sequestration. It may be a bit less onerous to tell everyone to cut 2 or 3% compared to the larger cuts facing the US budget, but sequestration is sequestration.  And all versions strike me as a failure of leadership.

Actually, the leadership failure in churches strikes me as the larger one, even if the percentages are smaller, even if there are no cuts in a given year. That is because Jesus has given his followers a pretty clear list of his priorities. But church congregations are often very invested in a different set of priorities. And so using a sequester to make budget decisions not only avoids wrestling with hard decisions, it also keeps us from examining our skewed budget priorities.

The core of this problem is one of call, or more precisely, the lack of one. We leaders in churches have become much more adept at managing religious institutions than we are at hearing Jesus' call. Absent any real call, keeping things going replaces it. And truth be told, we often prefer it that way. In the Bible, calls are almost always frightening, risky things that take people from where they are to some place glimpsed only by faith. It's much safer just to keep the religious operation going, at least in the short term.

The old, King James rendering of Proverbs 29:18 reads, "Where there is no vision, the people perish." That's actually a bad translation, but it is true nonetheless. When there is no vision, no clear sense of where God is calling us, we will meander and eventually waste away. The more accurate translation of the NRSV still hints at this. "Where there is no prophecy, the people cast off restraint." Where there is no voice guiding us, we will go our own way, unlike those in the second half of the verse, "but happy are those who keep the law."

"How we've always done it" is not the law, nor is it a vision or a call. What keeps the members happy is not a prophetic vision that keeps people on the right path. So how do we let vision, call, the Spirit invade our little religious operations?

Religious Marketplaces

Today's gospel story of Jesus "cleansing the Temple" is often understood in simplistic, black and white terms. Those selling animals and changing money were crass, commercial interlopers, intent only on making a little money off religion. They clearly violated any reasonable standards regarding what was and wasn't appropriate in "God's house." Actually, probably not.

First of all, these folks are not in the Temple proper.  They are in the courtyard, and they are providing a real service. Pilgrims who journeyed long distances to the Temple usually did not have the Jewish coins required for making offerings. The money changers allowed them to convert the money used in the regular commerce of their homeland into that accepted at the Temple. Congregations that offer credit card giving or online giving provide a similar "service" to their members.

So too the animals being sold allowed pilgrims from far away to travel without needing to carry with them an animal for sacrifice. This even allowed poorer pilgrims to partner and purchase an animal together. Churches today often offer books for sale that will be used in a class or small group or hold fellowship meals which can be purchased at reasonable cost. How different are these from allowing pilgrims to purchase their sacrifice?

(In all this, it may help to remember that the Temple did not function quite like our churches. People did not "go to Temple" on a regular basis.  Many might go there only once in their lives, and these animals and money changers helped insure that such pilgrims could navigate the Temple's rituals.)

But if money changers and animals for sale were reasonable allowances to help pilgrims, why does Jesus get so upset? Various answers have been suggested. Perhaps Jesus is rejecting the sacrificial system itself, or maybe Jesus wants to reform a system that had become overly ritualistic and not focused enough on relationship and encounter with God. Whatever the precise answer, Jesus clearly thinks the Temple apparatus has gotten sidetracked from its core purpose.

So what might Jesus say on a visit to our church buildings and sanctuaries?  After all, we do have a lot that comes from the marketplace. We have yard sales and car washes at the church to fund the youth mission trip. We pass the plates each week to collect offerings of money. We have annual "Stewardship Campaigns" which more often than not are pleas for people to "give more so we can fund those programs that you enjoy." What could be more marketplace than expecting people to pay for what they like and use?

And if Jesus is upset over things that distract people from the core purpose of encounter and relationship with a parental God, what would he think of worship services that a reasonable person might mistake for a show, a concert, or a performance. And such performances even come complete with a tip jar, a pretty brass one with a velvet bottom, but a tip jar nonetheless.

Worship services are obviously not the only thing congregations do, but worship is by far and away the event with the most member participation. It is also the event that outsiders are most likely to encounter, and so it is often the event that most defines who we are. And so if the church is supposed to incarnate Christ to and for the world, it seems fair to ask if someone attending one of our worship services is likely to encounter anything resembling the biblical Jesus.

I happen to think that regular worship is an integral part of following Jesus. He did, after all, call us to love the Lord our God with all our being.  But Jesus also demanded that we love our neighbor, with a special emphasis on the poor, the marginalized, the weak, the outsider, and the afflicted. And you don't need to look very carefully at the typical church budget to figure out that we expend the vast majority of our resources on the loving God side, or more precisely, on worship. Whether our worship actually "loves God" is a question in its on right. (See Amos 5:21-24 for a scathing critique of worship that God does not like at all.)

We live in a consumer culture, one where people who are the churchy sort will speak of "church shopping." It is not uncommon to hear church leaders speak of "catering to our customers." So how do we make sure we don't or haven't become little more than a religious marketplace?

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Sermon video: Since You Are a Child of God...

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Sermon: Since You Are a Child of God...

Luke 4:1-13

Since You Are a Child of God…

James Sledge          Service of Healing and Wholeness          February 17, 2013

I don’t have much experience with services of healing and wholeness. This is my first. And I suspect some of you may find such events a little new age or trendy.  And yet… most all of us have those parts of us, those pieces of our lives that are broken, tattered, that get in the way of living fully. Most all of us have areas where we struggle to be whole, even if we don’t think of it as a religious or spiritual problem.

Sometimes the church hasn’t been much help, speaking of faith as purely a belief thing and confining the spiritual to a narrow little slice of life, divorced from work, physical health, politics, and so on. Sometimes we’ve even acted as though physical bodies are a spiritual problem. If we could just shed these bodies and our base, carnal humanity, becoming purely spiritual beings… But then Jesus comes along, quite content with a human body, quite content to be human, and he comes offering wholeness.

Actually, if you were to flip through the four gospels in our pew Bibles, you will not find the word “wholeness.” For that matter, you won’t find the word anywhere in those Bibles, but wholeness is in there.

Have you ever noticed how Jesus sometimes says, “Your faith has saved you,” and other times, “Your faith has made you well”? In fact, Jesus says exactly the same thing in both cases, but translators feel the need to make a distinction when Jesus is physically healing someone. In our worldview, saving and healing are different, even unrelated things. In our un-integrated, some might say dis-integrated lives, sometimes Jesus is playing doctor; sometimes he’s playing priest. 

But Jesus will not separate the spiritual from the physical, and so healing and salvation are simply different sides of the same coin.  And very often, our Bibles would do well to translate all of those verses, “You faith has made you whole.”

Jesus comes offering us salvation, healing, wholeness, but in our broken, divided, dis-integrated ways, we struggle to combine these things. Salvation is a future thing, we think.  Healing is about now. So what is wholeness? I think there are some insights into wholeness in today’s well-worn story of Jesus tempted by the devil.