Sermon - Risk-Taking Mission and Service: Use Your Talents Foolishly

Matthew 25:14-30 (Romans 5:1-5)

Risking-Taking Mission and Service: Use Your Talents Foolishly

James Sledge                                                          May 26, 2013 – Trinity Sunday

There’s a TV commercial for a bank where someone with a brief case full of money goes up to strangers and asks them to hold it for a while. The commercial shows a man sitting next to the brief case, nervously touching it and looking around. Imagine someone asked you to take care of his brief case full of money. What would you do? How about if he asked you to watch it for six months, or a year, or five years?

If we eliminate “I’d just keep it for myself”–let’s say the person who gave it to you is a mobster – what are your options? You could take it to the bank and put the cash there, or perhaps put it in a money market account where it would earn a little interest. But I doubt many of you would do any speculative investing with a mobster’s money. No way I would risk losing a big chunk of that money and having to tell him, “I tried to make you some big money, but it didn’t work out, and most of it’s gone.”

If you’re like me and not inclined to speculate with a mobster’s money, then you should have no trouble relating to the third slave in Jesus’ parable. He did just what we would do. In Jesus’ day there were no banks as we know them, no investments that were really safe, and if you wanted to be certain you wouldn’t risk losing it, you hid money, which is exactly what the third slave did.

The first two slaves, on the other hand, managed to double their master’s money. Even today, with regulators and laws to protect investors, you don’t double your money without taking some significant risks. In Jesus’ day, the risks would have been phenomenal. 

In popular thought, and often in sermons, today’s parable gets treated as a fable with a moral that says, “Use your talents wisely.” Trouble is, the third slave does what most folks considered wise and prudent, while the first two slaves do what is risky and foolish.

Isn't That Special

I don't think I'd ever noticed this line from today's reading in 1 Timothy. "For to this end we toil and struggle, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe." I'm not exactly sure what it means for God to be Savior of all people and especially of believers. Can someone be especially saved? If God's saving activity with believers is somehow different than the saving of people in general, what is it that makes Christians special?

These words on God as Savior of all and especially of believers occur in the context of a call to godliness and as motivation to toil and struggle. So perhaps our specialness is supposed to be there, in the rigorous work of godliness that others can see.

 Such a notion would certainly fit into the idea that the Church is the body of Christ in the world, and there are  many ways that church congregations show Christ/God to the world. Once a month this church welcomes 200 or so of our poor or homeless neighbors for a delicious home-cooked meal, to receive gifts cards for the local grocery store, and more. It is admittedly a drop in the bucket compared to the magnitude of the hunger, poverty, and homelessness problems of this region, but it is also an activity that is largely restricted to shelters and other faith communities. And it strikes me as an act of godliness, a moment where we show God and the saving nature of God to others.

When we show God to the world, in many a varied ways, we live into a specialness that is our calling as believers. Unfortunately, there is much in our culture that tries to draw us away from this. Our culture of consumerism has done a good job of turning Americans into religious consumers. People often come to churches looking for something to make them happy, perk them up, help them through the week, and so on. I don't think there is anything wrong we that per se, but when church members began to see themselves primarily as consumers, judging pretty much everything in their congregation based on how well it suits them or impacts them, our special godliness can get obscured.

I realize this is a complex and nuanced question, but I'll ask it anyhow. Are the things that make your faith community special things that show God to others or things that you enjoy and make you happy? Of perhaps better, how do the things that make your congregation special balance out between these two poles? Is it more about nurturing a special godliness for the sake of the world or about providing the religious goods members like and want?

So what is it that makes your group of believers special?

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Insiders, Outsiders, Judgment, and the Kingdom

I often don't quite know what to make of a Scripture passage when I first read it, and that is the case with today's gospel reading. I don't do any research or study with my devotional readings, and so sometimes I simply tumble things around in my head without any precise meaning. Today I'm thinking about the kingdom, mustard seeds, leaven, narrow gates, insiders who are locked out, and the last who become first. It's quite a mixture.

An uncomfortable piece to this reading is the notion of judgment. Like a lot of people, I'm much bigger on forgiveness, grace, and unconditional divine love than I am on judgment. But today's reading clearly speaks of a narrow gate and people who thought they had an invitation to the party but were told, "I do not know where you come from; go away from me, all you evildoers!"

I've read Dietrich Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship, and I'm familiar with his warnings against "cheap grace," forgiveness without repentance and grace without obedience. But I still have trouble reconciling notions of love and grace that nonetheless insist we be changed by that grace.

Perhaps part of my struggle with judgment arises from the Church's all too common practice of speaking judgment against outsiders, those who aren't Christian or not the right kind of Christian. But Jesus' words of judgment are most often aimed at religious insiders, not outsiders. And that seems to be the case today where insiders are locked out and watch as all manner of folks " from east and west, from north and south," get welcomed into the party. It is insiders, it seems, who most need to be reminded of the requirements of obedience and discipleship.

I'm not about to make any clear-cut doctrinal statements about judgment based on my brief, devotional meditation on today's gospel. I'm not entirely clear whether Jesus is speaking of an ultimate, final judgment, or simply doing what prophets have long done, warn people that they need to change. Regardless, it is abundantly clear that the call of Jesus is to a very particular way of living in the world, one that requires faith, obedience, and assistance from the Spirit. And I can always stand to be reminded of that.

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Questions, Anger, and Hope

As a deer longs for flowing streams,
    so my soul longs for you, O God. 
My soul thirsts for God,
    for the living God.
When shall I come and behold
    the face of God? 
My tears have been my food
    day and night,
 while people say to me continually,
    “Where is your God?”        Psalm 42:1-3

There are a lot of "Where is God?" type questions floating around today in the aftermath of the tornado in Moore, OK. And as troubling as it is to admit, there are times when the best answers we have are not very satisfying. Quite often, the cheap platitudes offered by some people of faith are as unhelpful as the absurd comments of those who blame such events on toleration of gays or some other presumed sin.

Some church folk are terrified at the prospect of questioning God's role in yesterday's events. They view questioning God as a lapse in faith, as evidence of doubt that they will not admit to. But the psalmists have no such qualms. That's true of today's psalm and of many other psalms of lament. Jesus borrowed one while on the cross. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

I've always thought that a fist shaken at God is more an act of faith than is found in any act of stoic resignation. Certainly the psalmists are acting on faith when they question God, even demand of God. And they most often proclaim hope in the midst of their upset. Today's psalm ends with the psalmist counseling himself.

Why are you cast down, O my soul,
    and why are you disquieted within me? 
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
    my help and my God.

Sometimes the best thing we can do in moments of hurt and pain that cannot be explained is to cry out, yet somehow still hope. This moment is not one for complex theologies. It is a time to weep, to pray, even to shake a fist. It is a time to remember that Jesus experienced this, too. He felt abandoned and wondered where God was. And it is a time to recall the promise that God brings life out of death, that even in the face of death, we can still hope.

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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

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