Graduates: Go Out To Live

I attended one of those watershed events this weekend, the college graduation of our younger daughter. It was a big milestone for us because we are now officially empty-nesters, but I'm sure it was a bigger milestone for our daughter.

We actually attended two separate ceremonies, a commencement for the entire student body in the football stadium followed by a commencement the following day for her particular college where she crossed the stage and received her diploma. Thus we had the opportunity to hear a number of people attempting to send the graduates out into the world with appropriate advice and wisdom to guide them.

This advice was varied, but one theme popped up a number of times, that of passion. The grads were encouraged to pursue careers or activities they were passionate about as well as to develop passion for some aspect of whatever they found themselves doing. 

I suppose that one could be passionate about that are detrimental to self and others, but understood in a certain way, passion describe what Frederick Buechner says about call in a famous qoute. "The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."

In today's gospel reading, Jesus tells a parable about a fig tree that does not bear any fruit. The parable's notion that our lives are supposed to produce something of value is hardly confined to Christianity,or to religion for that matter. Commencement speakers regularly encourage graduates to go out and do something worthwhile with their lives. But exactly what is a worthwhile life? What thing of value should I or anyone else produce?

My own faith tradition has always placed a great emphasis on the idea of call or vocation, which is likely why Buechner, a fellow Presbyterian, feels the need to comment on it. We have long insisted that any passion which fails to take into account the needs of others, "the world's deep hunger" as Buechner calls it, is a false passion. 

I certainly hope that my daughter and her fellow graduates find careers and others things in their lives that they can be passionate about, but I hope that passion is of the sort Buechner speaks of. In this overly individualistic world of ours, we already have too many people who are passionate about making money, acquiring power and influence, or being top dog. We need people with a passion that blesses self and others. And whhen they find that, they will have discovered what it means truly to live.

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Falling in Love

Praise the Lord!
    How good it is to sing praises to our God.     Psalm 147:1

I must confess that I have often struggled to appreciate the Psalms, especially those that just go on and on praising God. A lot of them sound a lot alike, endlessly reciting all of God's wonderful qualities. It's a bit repetitive. And what's the point? What is to be gained from saying or singing such things?

One of the places where my faith gets distorted comes from this last question. All too often, I approach faith as a means to get something I want or need. And while it is true that I do need and want God in my life, it is easy to become quite utilitarian in this pursuit of something for myself. God easily becomes an object to my subject, to borrow a grammatical analogy. God is a resource for me to use or employ.

The psalms of praise are pretty good at keeping God subject. In that sense, they look a bit like songs or poems composed by a lover for a beloved. In such outpourings of love, it is the beloved who occupies the center, a sun around which the lover orbits. Love poems have no hesitation about counting the ways they love their beloved or going on and on about the beloved wonderful qualities. After all a lover's life becomes reoriented around the beloved.

I'm of the opinion that deep Christian faith only emerges as we fall deeply in love with God. That, of course, requires a vulnerability and openness to God that can be scary for some of us. But then again, that is pretty much the same that is required truly to fall in love with another person.

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Sermon video - Passionate Worship: How, Why, and the Heart of Worship

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Help Wanted

I was really struck by something Richard Rohr wrote for this morning's devotional. He spoke of how Christians have gotten caught up in arguments about the nature of Jesus without paying nearly so much attention to what he lives and teaches. Churches fight and split over trivial matters, neglecting the promise of God's kingdom breaking in here on earth as a present and future reality.

"Despite it all, we turned Jesus’ message into a reward-or-punishment contest that would hopefully come later—instead of a transformational experience that was verifiable here and now by the fruits of the Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23). Probably more than anything else, this huge misplacement of attention anesthetized and weakened the actual transformative power of Christianity."

I think it was these words, "anesthetized and weakened the actual transformative power of Christianity," that grabbed me and caused me to focus on a small part of today's gospel where Jesus says,  “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest."

I love theology. I enjoyed theology classes immensely in seminary, and I still get great pleasure from doing theological reflection. But I do worry that the church and therefore Christian faith are too much about words and not enough about actions. Words have transformative power, but only when we stop talking about them and start doing them.

One of the interesting dynamics that has evolved in churches over the years is that of talking and listening becoming the central activity for many. In the typical congregation there are paid talkers, pastors and such, who do a lot of talking in worship while others come to hear. For many, this defines church life, and as a result, the problem Jesus describes, a plentiful harvest with inadequate workers, continues to plague the church. Faith has become so much about believing the correct things that doing the correct things gets neglected. And though we call ourselves "the body of Christ," there is often little about us that proclaims what Jesus did. "Repent, turn, change how you live because God's new realm on earth has drawn near."

Now it certainly is true that people would not embrace some of Jesus' crazy ideas if they did not believe in him, if they did not believe he was the Messiah, the Son of God, etc. But you can also turn this logic around and say that if we do not do what Jesus says, we must not believe in him.

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Not That Kind of Book

The Lord is gracious and merciful,
   slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.  
The Lord is good to all,
   and his compassion is over all that he has made...

The Lord watches over all who love him,    
   but all the wicked he will destroy.   Psalm 145:8-9, 20

The last of these verses from Psalm 145 seems incompatible with some of those preceding it. Can God be good and compassionate to all and still destroy some? One of these must be wrong. But apparently that was not a problem for the psalmist who penned these verses.

I sometimes wonder if we modern people can ever fully appreciate the Bible, a suspicion I apply equally to the staunchest fundamentalist and the freest thinking liberal. Reading biblical texts less literally, liberals often think themselves able to embrace the text in ways unavailable to fundamentalists who insist on some literal meaning of the text. There may be some truth to this, but both liberals and conservatives are very much products of the modern, Enlightenment, scientific age.

All of share similar perspectives on notions of truth and veracity. While some fundamentalists might seem to be anti-science, the very notion that the Bible meant to provide a scientific or historic account of the cosmos' creation does not exist prior to the modern era. Science, logic, and rationality are the primary vehicles of truth in the modern world, and fundamentalists seek to make the Bible conform to those vehicles, thus requiring the texts to be accurate from a scientific standpoint.

More liberal Christians have charted a different course with regards to the truth of the Bible. But speaking more symbolically of truth does not free one of modern constraints. The God uncovered in the text still needs to abide by modern notions of rationality and logic. This entails deciding some texts are historical and others aren't; some texts should be read as actual events and others as symbolic interpretations that aren't true historically. Which is which gets measured against what we "know" to be true. And so thinks that "can't possibly have happened" are deemed metaphors, and the only miracle when Jesus feeds the multitudes is the miracle of sharing Jesus inspires the crowds to perform.

It seems to me that while we use very different approaches, both liberal and conservatives struggle to shoe-horn the biblical texts into the modern world. If some fundamentalists' insistence on the literal, historic and scientific truth of the text sometimes makes them look comical, some liberals' insistence that the text reveals some generic truth about the nature of divinity and spirituality - never mind the messy particularity of the text - looks less comical only to those who subscribe to such a view.

Good ole, pre-modern John Calvin sure knew what he was talking about when he said that we humans are remarkably productive factories for turning out idols. We keep insisting that god conform to our understandings, assumptions, and perceptions of truth. Whether liberal, conservative, or anywhere in between, I wonder if it wouldn't be incredibly helpful to wrestle with the notion that the Bible is a different sort of book that we think it to be.

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Sermon: Passionate Worship - How, Why, and the Heart of Worship

Luke 17:11-19

Passionate Worship: How, Why, and the Heart of Worship

James Sledge                                                                            May 12, 2013

Many of you are aware of the ongoing discussion about whether to have some sort of second worship service here at Falls Church Presbyterian. Any decision is a ways off, and I mention it only because of something I’ve observed whenever this topic arises at any church. Very often, the moment the subject comes up, people immediately zero in on style.

“We need a contemporary service,” say some. “The last thing we need is a contemporary service,” says others. And the debate over various styles is engaged. This has been played out in so many congregations in recent decades that the term “worship wars” was coined to speak of this battle over styles. And in such arguments, the entire focus seems to be on the “how” of worship.

When the friend and colleague, from whom I borrowed the idea for this sermon series, preached on “Passionate Worship,” he told the story of a new church that began in 2001. It was well funded with denominational grants and used an old, existing church building that cost them very little. And so they poured money into creating an incredible worship experience that rivaled a rock concert. They had top of the line, professional-grade audio and visual equipment, along with the same caliber of stage lighting.

The church opened with much fanfare, with videos and song lyrics projected onto three screens, including one at the back that was just for the members of the praise band. There were 50 members on the roster the day it opened, and it had doubled in size within the year.

My friend Steve was not directly involved in this church until recently. He was part of a denominational, administrative commission charged with closing the church. Following a final worship service attended by seven people, my friend and others packed the last remaining bits of all that fancy audio and video equipment and put them in storage.

No scandal or malfeasance had torn the place apart, no huge trauma or conflict. If there was an easy explanation for the church’s demise, it was likely to be found in its preoccupation with the “how” of worship.*

To the Church: Go and Do

When I was in seminary, my New Testament professors would not let us translate from the Greek in the manner of today's gospel reading. "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey..." We had to "resolve the participle" as they called it, meaning we couldn't just say "baptizing" or "teaching."

I once did a paper on today's gospel and resolved the participle thus. "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, by baptizing them... and by teaching them to obey..." Jesus was surely not saying to make disciples, and while we're at it, do a little baptizing and teaching as well. 

Jesus' command, often referred to as the "Great Commission," has a lot of doing in it. It involves going, making disciples, baptizing, and teaching folks to obey. Yet very often, the church acts as though Jesus' command says, "Go and make Christians by getting them to believe in me."

One of the unfortunate stereotypes that non-Christians sometimes have about us church folk is that the only going we do is going to church, and our only doing involves condemning those who do not believe or think the same as us. That's clearly a false stereotype, but it has enough bits of truth to it to make it viable. There are indeed a great many Christians who do not do anything that makes them at all different from the world around them other than go to church. And so non-church folks could be forgiven for thinking that our only real doing is showing up at Sunday worship.

Today's gospel reading comes from Matthew, and one of its distinct attributes features Jesus speaking directly to the Church via the disciples. Any time Jesus speaks to the disciples in general, he is speaking past them to all the faithful. And in the very last words recorded in Matthew's gospel, Jesus says to the Church, "Go and do and do and do." And he's not talking just about showing up on Sunday, but about obeying "everything that I have commanded you."

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Sermon video -- Radical Hospitality: Reaching Out - Welcoming In

Audios of sermons and worship available on church website.
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Kindly Disposed Toward Us

In today's gospel, Jesus is speaking on prayer, and he offers that no parent would give a child who asked for food a scorpion instead. Then he adds, "If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

Many Christians are familiar with the phrase from 1 John, "God is love."And yet Christians have often constrained God's love in significant ways. Over the centuries, a myriad of Christian doctrines have explained why this group or that group is outside of God's love. Some of these statements make God sound puny and weak, or else not very loving at all. God cannot save those who don't profess Jesus? Cannot? What is it that keeps God from doing so?

Most of us would not withhold love from a child who did not get the apology formula just right. Most of us would not withhold love from a child who did not apologize at all. We would continue to love him or her, hoping and working for reconciliation. Reconciliation might require the child to respond in certain ways, but our love would remain regardless. Are surely God is more loving than we are.

At the moment I'm not worrying about the details of reconciliation or salvation, as important as those are for living into God's love. I am simply remembering, as we all need to do from time to time, that God is more kindly disposed toward us than we have ever been toward anyone, even those we love the most. And that's pretty reassuring.

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Individualism, Partisan Politics, and Self-Denial

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me." Probably most people with some church background have heard these words. A version of them appears in the gospels of Matthew and Mark, along with Luke, each time connected to a critical passage concerning Jesus' true identity and the centrality of his own cross.

The notion of crosses and self-denial are well known to many church people, but that is not to say that crosses and self-denial are terribly popular. Crosses are often understood as the minor or major inconveniences people have in their lives. I once heard "My arthritis is my cross to bear,"from a person with a rather benign case. Arthritis can be a horrible and debilitating disease, but it's not a cross. Crosses are things you can put down, or never pick up in the first place. They are totally avoidable sufferings or difficulties that people undertake to further the ministry of Jesus.

And if we often trivialize crosses, we dismiss self-denial out of hand. It is not unknown to us, but it is relegated to special situations. Soldiers will suffer and even die for their comrades. Many parents are familiar with it. And some but by no means all athletes embrace the "There is no I in team" mantra, and do whatever is needed for the sake of that team. But America is very much about the individual, and the notion of willingly giving up something for the sake of the nation or community seems to diminish as that individualism grows more and more dominant.

I wonder if some of the partisan divide in our country isn't related to this. We struggle to trust those who don't think just like us. Even within political parties the infighting can become brutal as some measure political figures purely on the issues they deem important. In this individualizing of politics, national candidates sometimes ending up looking a bit ridiculous as they try to give each affinity group what they want. It's a wonder any candidate for president can articulate a coherent message or sound at all sincere. And no wonder attack ads are more effective than clearly stated positions.

If you've read this blog before, you likely know I don't think much of attempts to restore America as a "Christian nation." However that does not mean I don't think followers of Jesus could not help show our nation a better way. And resurrecting the notion of self-denial as central to the Christian life might go a long way in this effort. But first, we probably need to figure out how to do that in in our own congregations.

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Sermon - Radical Hospitality: Reaching Out-Welcoming In

Luke 10:25-37

Radical Hospitality: Reaching Out-Welcoming In

James Sledge                                                                                          May 5, 2013

Many of you know I had a previous career as a pilot. In the infancy of that career, I found a weekend job flying skydivers at a parachute center, prompting me to take up the sport myself. Contrary to some stereotypes, skydivers are not oblivious to risk. Most are quite cautious about equipment and who to let on a jump with them. A newcomer would have to prove his or her salt by occupying the simplest and easiest position in the smallest of free-fall formations before being allowed on larger or more difficult ones.

Free-fall formations can sometimes be hard to keep stable, and you don’t want people who don’t know what they’re doing running into them or knocking them askew. Because of this concern for stability, there’s a protocol for how to enter a formation when you arrive at it. Imagine a group of children holding hands in a circle on the playground, and a new child wants to join. In the skydiving version, the new person has to grab the people’s wrists where she wants to join the circle and try to pull their hands apart. Only when the other jumpers feel this tug, will they release their grips and allow that person in. We called it “breaking grips.”

This requirement literally to break into the formation protected it and kept it from flying apart if people had let go of their grips prematurely without insuring that the new arrival could be trusted to help hold the thing together. For those on the free-fall, this is a natural form of group self-preservation. And I’ve seen a similar practice in church congregations.

It’s often more prevalent in very small congregations that function almost like families, but it can occur to lesser degrees in large congregations. When a new person arrives, he may get a real sense of being an outsider, looking into a circle where everyone has a strong grip on the person next to them. Very often, it is a bit like a childhood game of Red Rover even to get noticed, much less to become a full-fledged part of the congregation.

Holiness and Imperfection

In Paul's letter to the Roman church he writes, "Welcome those who are weak in faith, but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions. Some believe in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables. Those who eat must not despise those who abstain, and those who abstain must not pass judgment on those who eat; for God has welcomed them. Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another? It is before their own lord that they stand or fall. And they will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make them stand."

In his devotion for today, Richard Rohr speaks of imperfection as "a clever place for God to hide holiness, so that only the humble and earnest will find it!" He goes on to say, "It becomes sort of obvious once you say it out loud. In fact, I would say that the demand for the perfect is often the greatest enemy of the good. Perfection is a mathematical or divine concept; goodness is a beautiful human concept. We see this illusionary perfectionism in ideologues and zealots on both the left and the right of church and state. They refuse to get their hands dirty, think compromise or subtlety are dirty words, and end up creating much more 'dirt' for the rest of us, while they remain totally 'clean' and quite comfortable in their cleanliness."

Both Paul and Richard Rohr prompted me to think about the partisan divides that are so much a part of our political as well as religious endeavors these days. In both cases the various sides often think that they have the truth, and good happens when their view of truth prevails. I think most of us tend to consider our version of truth as the best and most right one. Why would we embrace it as our truth if we thought other truths vastly superior. 

I suppose it is nigh impossible to live anything approaching a principled life without some truth that is "non-negotiable." Yet these had best be well chosen, and even then, they may turn out to be wrong. As Paul writes in another letter, "For now we see in a mirror, dimly, (mirrors in Paul's day produced a distorted, inexact image) but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known." And so, in the face of this dim, partial hold on truth, love is the one truth we can fully count on.

I have noticed that, for all their faults and failings, families tend not to get caught up in the same sort of partisan divides that seem to dominate both secular and religious politics. There are exceptions, to be sure, and there are plenty of fights and disagreements in families. But the kind of ideological zealotry that often makes political compromise difficult seems much less prevalent in families. Surely this is because we all know one another's imperfections too well for any of us to claim a monopoly on the truth. Even the very best of families are born of a myriad of imperfections and dysfunctions. And if there is anything that points to divine relationship in families, it is most certainly a holiness hidden in imperfection, to borrow from Fr. Rohr.

In healthy families, even when we are upset and angry with one another, there is this sense that we have to love one another. It is unavoidable. We may forget it in particularly heated moments, but without this sense, the family will fracture and disintegrate. I've often argued against using "family" as an image or metaphor for church congregations. I think the image is too limited and unhelpful in many circumstances. But no doubt the practices of the best families have much to teach us about living as children of God.

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