Hearing Creation's Song

The view last evening from the church's fellowship hall.

 The LORD is king! Let the earth rejoice;
     let the many coastlands be glad! Psalm 97:1

I wonder how many of us who grew up in the church give much thought to the oddity of lines like those in today's morning psalm. Can the earth rejoice? Can the coastlands have emotions? Seems a rather odd notion.

Earlier I read these words from famed naturalist John Muir, used by Brian McLaren in his book, Naked Spirituality.

Oh, these vast, calm measureless mountain days in whose light every thing seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God…. These blessed mountains are so compactly filled with God’s beauty [that] the whole body seems to feel beauty when exposed to it as it feels the campfire or sunshine, entering not by the eyes alone, but equally through all one’s flesh like radiant heat, making a passionate ecstatic pleasure-glow not explainable…. A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease. Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings, while incense is ever flowing from the balsam bells and leaves. No wonder the hills and groves were God’s first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself.

Right now I am looking out my office window at the deep blue sky that emerged following the earlier rains. The parking lot is littered with leaves tossed about by the wind, and vivid fall colors fill the horizon. I'm fortunate I can see it. My office has three large windows, each with four, over-sized panes. However, all but two of those twelve pains are opaque, offering only a hint of the grandeur of God just outside. I wonder if those two panes by my desk were a later modification. The other panes seem older.

Who thought it a good idea to hide my view of creation behind gauzy opaqueness? It is a question easily asked of many sanctuaries. I've marveled at my share of beautiful sanctuaries and found them invitations into God's transcendence, so I mean them no disrespect. Still...

We Presbyterians can be overly head focused at times. Valuing the mind and intellect is not a problem in and of itself, but sometimes this focus makes us suspicious of emotions, of experience, of things we can not explain or control. ...like a rejoicing planet, a gladsome beach, or, for that matter, like God.

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Anxiety, Addiction, and Gratitude

Sing to the Lord with thanksgiving;
     make melody to our God on the lyre.   Psalm 147:7

Here in Virginia, I and many others are thrilled that election day has come and gone. No more campaign commercials; no more political signs cluttering the roadside; no more annoying robo-calls. I don't think such feelings are more prevalent in one political party or the other. Regardless of political leanings, it's good that the election is over.

The ads in Virginia's gubernatorial race were particularly nasty. I greatly preferred one candidate over the other, but I found many of my own candidate's ads to be cringe-worthy. Indeed commentators of all stripes wondered if either candidate had anything positive to say.

Like clockwork, Americans complain about all the negative attack ads that fill the airwaves in election seasons. No one likes them, yet they won't go away. The reason is obvious. Such ads work, and they work because most people tend to be motivated by fear.

John Calvin wrote that the motivation for the Christian life is gratitude. An awareness of the incredibly extravagant way in which God comes to us, embraces us, cares for us, and longs for us, no matter what we do to drive God away, issues forth in a new quality of life that wants, most of all, to offer unending thanks to God.

Most of us have witnessed this sort of behavior, if only occasionally. People who have fallen in love will exhibit this toward their lover, becoming remarkably extravagant in trying to make happy and please that person. Sometimes a child will react to an unexpected gift with exuberant gratitude, bursting with joy and lavishing hugs and thanks over and over on the gift giver. But both these examples are more the exception than rule.

Our world is largely motivated by anxiety, by worries and fears that we don't have enough: enough money, things, experiences, faith, happiness, security etc. By and large the entire advertising industry exists to create and feed such anxieties. And when you don't think you have enough, it is difficult to be grateful.

Even worship is impacted by this. The common complaint about not being fed in worship presumes that one goes to worship in order to get something. It sees worship as one more place designed to feed my consumerist appetite, to give me some more of those things I don't yet have in adequate supply.

Worship certainly does uplift and feed. But according to Jesus, this happens primarily when we approach it - and indeed all of life - from a pose of letting go rather than grasping. When Jesus insists that his followers practice self-denial, he isn't calling us to some sort of hermit-like asceticism. Rather he is telling us one of the counter-intuitive secrets to full life. Striving for enough, for more and more, is deadly addiction and not a path to life.

The medieval theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart once wrote, "If the only prayer you said in your whole life was “thank you,” that would be sufficient." Imagine such a notion, that gratitude itself is enough. Then all our worship and singing would truly be "with thanksgiving."

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Sermon video: Oh, I Wish That I Could Be...

Audios of sermons and worship are on the FCPC website.

What's in a Name?

No doubt because I've been re-reading Brian McLaren's Naked Spirituality, I was struck by all the mentions of God's name in today's psalms. Not only were there repeated occurrences of LORD, the NRSV translation's reverential way of rendering the divine name so that it isn't actually said, but there were repeated calls to bless God's name and to praise God's name. There's a lot of fascination with names when it comes to God.

Jesus picks this up in the prayer he teaches his disciples. Not only does he speak of God as Father, but he also says "hallowed by your name" Modern Christians have perhaps over-embraced the term father while, at the same time, losing much sense of reverence or  hallowing of the sacred, divine name.

I don't fall into that group that may have over-embraced "Father" as a way of naming God. I've likely never begun a prayer with "Father God..."I have a different faith problem with it comes to God and names. I've tended to focus on God's otherness and transcendence to the point that God becomes so distant as to be unknowable. If some Christians seem to get so familiar that they invoke God like a personal genie, God can become for me more conceptual than real.

I don't know that the psalmists were worried about that sort of problem when they got so focused on God's name, but still I think they are on to something important. When you know a person's name, you can call them by name, and my faith insists that God has a name that has been shared with us. It's a bit of a slippery name, one closely related to the verb "to be" and to the story of Moses and the burning bush where God, at one point, gives the divine name as "I am who I am," or perhaps "I will be who I will be." It's a name that the tradition is very hesitant to speak aloud, but the name is known nonetheless, and there is something remarkable about that.

Does your god have a name? Too often, I fear, my God remains nameless and therefore unapproachable and distant to a remarkable degree. I'm acutely aware of the problem of making God overly familiar, a personal buddy who likes all the things I like and hates all the things I hate. But my solution to that problem creates a different one: a God who is too remote even to encounter.

O God, Holy One, YHWH, I AM, let me know you by name, even if no single name will quite do. Then with the psalmist, "I will extol you, my God and King, and bless your name forever and ever."

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Sermon: Oh, I Wish That I Could Be...

Luke 6:20-31

Oh, I Wish That I Could Be…

James Sledge                                                               November 3, 2013 – All Saints

There’s an old Simon and Garfunkel song, based on an even older poem, that some of you may know. It’s called “Richard Corey,” and here are some of the lyrics.

They say that Richard Cory owns one half of this whole town,

With political connections to spread his wealth around.

Born into society, a banker's only child,

He had everything a man could want: power, grace, and style.

But I work in his factory

And I curse the life I'm living

And I curse my poverty

And I wish that I could be,

Oh, I wish that I could be,

Oh, I wish that I could be Richard Cory.

A second verse speaks of the luxurious, even decadent lifestyle Cory leads. And then the song closes with this verse.

He freely gave to charity, he had the common touch,

And they were grateful for his patronage and thanked him very much,

So my mind was filled with wonder when the evening headlines read:

"Richard Cory went home last night and put a bullet through his head."

But I work in his factory

And I curse the life I'm living

And I curse my poverty

And I wish that I could be,

Oh, I wish that I could be,

Oh, I wish that I could be Richard Cory.

Who or what is it you wish you could be? Oh, I wish I could be richer, more beautiful, more accomplished, more athletic, more intelligent. Oh, I wish I could be more like so and so who seems to have it all. Oh I wish I had a better job. Oh, I wish I could get into such and such college. Oh, I wish I lived in such and such a town. Oh, I wish I had a better wardrobe. Oh, I wish I were thinner. I wish I were more popular. Oh, I wish…

What are your “Oh, I wish…” scenarios? What are those things, accomplishments, relationships, abilities, experiences, etc. that you think would make your life grand and wonderful, all you want and hope for it to be?

In our culture there are lots and lots of messages telling people that they don’t quite measure up, that they’d better work harder and smarter and longer or they will be down at the bottom, looking up at others and saying, “Oh, I wish…”

I saw a quote in The Washington Post the other day from a Dr. Richard Leahy, an anxiety specialist. He said, “The average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the early 1950s.” I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it wouldn’t surprise me. The pressure to perform and measure up, to be accomplished in academics and sports and arts, to go to a good college, get a great job, and make lots of money seems to grow with each passing year. And it is only more intense in areas such as our DC metro region.

These sorts of cultural messages find their way into the church as well. I wish I had a deeper prayer life. Oh, I wish that I could find a spirituality that really worked for me. Oh, I wish my faith was more like so and so’s.

A lot of pastors and other church leaders have a hard time going to something at another church without looking at the bulletin boards and lists of activities and then fretting about whether or not our congregation measures up. There’s almost always something to feed our anxieties, some event or mission or accomplishment that looks impressive and makes us say to ourselves, “Oh, how I wish we could…”

Busyness, Suffering, and Idolatry

For God alone my soul waits in silence;
     from him comes my salvation. He alone is my rock and my salvation,
     my fortress; I shall never be shaken.     Psalm 62:1-2

For God alone... Hardly. All sorts of things compete with God for my attention. And I don't do much waiting in silence. As I write there is a stump grinder growling outside my office window. But I'm contributing to the lack of silence as well. I've got Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground playing on Spotify. (He died yesterday, if you haven't heard.)  I do turn the music off when I pray, but there's not much I can do about the stump grinder. Sometimes I feel the same about all the thoughts and anxieties that bounce around in my head.

Sometimes I'm amazed at how hard it is for me to get centered on God. And I work in a church. At least I have regular moments in my day that would seem tailor made to draw me toward God. I regularly reflect on scripture passages in order to create sermons. I look at hymns in planning worship. I teach a Bible study and I lead and participate in devotionals during staff and committee meetings. How different from many who worship and serve here. How much more difficult it must be for them to be attentive to God in the course of their day.

It seems to me that two very different pitfalls can emerge here, one for religious professionals and one for those living and/or working in more secular places. Spirituality and religiousness can become a job for me. They become part of a professional persona that gets divorced from the rest of my life, making it easy for me to stop being spiritual on my days off. But for others, spirituality can become a recreational activity, something only done after work or on days off. I wonder if either is all that satisfying.

My own Reformed/Presbyterian tradition has long been concerned with a rather antiquated sounding problem: idolatry. But even John Calvin all those centuries ago wasn't worried about little statues or anything of that sort. He was worried about how hard it is really to do the "for God alone" thing. Too many other things seem more inviting, convenient, and easier to manage. However, in my experience all these things end up disappointing us. In the long run, they end up failing to provide what we expected of them, contentment, happiness, meaning, or whatever it was we were hoping for.

The psalmist doesn't say so specifically, but I get the impression he or she is in the midst of some terrible difficulty. Perhaps all the things she had hoped have failed her, and she is now forced to wait for "God alone."

Many spiritual greats insist that suffering is the greatest teacher. For some weeks now, Father Richard Rohr's daily devotionals have all been on the following theme. "The path of descent is the path of transformation. Darkness, failure, relapse, death, and woundedness are our primary teachers, rather than ideas or doctrines." We don't like the sound of that. We do all we can to avoid it and to rescue our children from it. But in the end, our teacher finds us.

Have you ever noticed that when people are going through a terrible time of grief, such as the loss of a dear, loved one, they tend to keep themselves busy. In the face of death, dealing with all the arrangements that have to be made can provide a welcome diversion, providing a bit of needed cushioning from the shock. But if busyness is helpful at first, eventually we must let go of such shields. People who can't ever bring themselves to slow down and face their grief will rightfully provoke concerns on the part of friends and family.

Or course our culture can make it very difficult to slow down. Time that isn't "productive" is wasted. Even our vacations must be filled with activities. When we do sit down we pull out our smartphones and engage in a different sort of busyness. Many of us think of Sabbath as an archaic relic of history.

I don't wish suffering on anyone. The notion that all suffering is somehow therapeutic is simply wrong. But there are plenty of times when only suffering or great difficulty seems to turn me to God in any deep and meaningful way. Now if I were only a better student...

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Sermon video: Information or Good News?

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Information or Good News?

Luke 18:9-14

Information or Good News?

James Sledge                                                                                       October 27, 2013

When I first looked at the gospel reading appointed for today, the day when we make our financial commitments to God, I wondered if divine providence might be at work. Tithing figures prominently in many church stewardship campaigns, and I think it a central spiritual discipline. Yet in today’s parable, the tither doesn’t come off so well, even though he’s an ideal church  member, a regular worshipper who engages in significant spiritual disciplines and is serious about living an ethical, moral life. Where can we get some more folks like him? But Jesus holds him up as a bad example, saying that a sleazy tax collector is right in the eyes of God rather than this fellow most churches would love as a member.

If you’ve read very much in the gospels, you’ve surely noticed that the Pharisees have a hard time embracing Jesus. There’s been a tendency over the years to think of these Pharisees as evil, bad guys, but in reality, they were the dedicated church folk of their day. They were a reform movement with much in common with our Protestant reformers of 500 years ago. They opposed what they saw as corrupt, priestly Judaism and its focus on ritual and sacrifice. They urged believers to get back to the scriptures and follow them. Some of their teachings were very similar to those of Jesus. So why did they end up in conflict with him? Why didn’t his good news sound good to them?

____________________________________________________________________________

Some decades ago, I encountered an essay by the great southern writer, Walker Percy. “The Message in the Bottle” is part of a book by the same name containing essays about  language and the human condition. This particular essay describes a fellow who is shipwrecked on an island with no memories of his life before he washed up there. This island has a quite advanced society, and the castaway is welcomed and cared for. He goes to school, gets married, has a family, and becomes a contributing member of society. Being a curious and educated fellow, he is intrigued by the large number of bottles he discovers washing up on the shore, each with a single, one sentence message corked inside.

These messages say all sorts of things. “Lead melts at 330 degrees. 2 + 2 = 4… The British are coming… The market for eggs in Bora Bora [a neighboring island] is very good… The pressure of a gas is a function of heat and volume… A war party is approaching from Bora Bora… Truth is beauty,”[1] and so on.

This scenario forms the basis of a long discussion about language and how we understand and make sense of all the information we receive. Percy discusses various ways we might classify and organize these messages, and how we might judge what’s true, important, or significant. But he says that many such schemes may not work for our castaway because they fail to acknowledge the difference between “a piece of knowledge and a piece of news.”

Oct. 20 Sermon video: Committed to God's New Day

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Where Is God? Better Sight Lines

Hear my prayer, O LORD;
    give ear to my supplications in your faithfulness;
    answer me in your righteousness.
Do not enter into judgment with your servant,
    for no one living is righteous before you.
For the enemy has pursued me,
    crushing my life to the ground,
    making me sit in darkness like those long dead. 
Therefore my spirit faints within me;
    my heart within me is appalled.         Psalm 143:1-4

You likely know this, but pastors go to lots of church meetings. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Many of the groups I meet with have great people in them, and we often have very enjoyable meetings. Yet even in enjoyable church meetings, it is often difficult to get much sense of God being a part of them.

Graham Standish, in his book Becoming a Blessed Church, describes how church meetings often begin by asking God to bless what is about to happen but then take place as though God has left to get a cup of coffee while the business is actually transacted. Later, God will be invited back in to bless whatever was decided during that time. There's nothing sinister going on here. We simply get focused on the tasks at hand. That and we aren't quite sure how to let God's presence impact the proceedings.

This only gets worse in times of conflict. I've been to my share of presbytery meetings over the years (That is the representative, regional governing body in our denomination.) where we were considering difficult issues that divide us theologically. In the last couple of decades this was most often around issues of ordination, sexual orientation, and biblical interpretation. And in our heated debates over whether or not to ordain people in same sex relationships, a casual observer might have been hard pressed to think God was present at all. To be certain, talk about God along with verses from the Bible were heard frequently. But Bible verses were wielded as weapons, and God was referred to but never inquired of. People on both sides already "knew" what God wanted.

If you asked pastors and elders at a presbytery meeting, or leaders in most Presbyterian churches, they would surely insist that God is present at their meetings and, indeed, everywhere. Our tradition insists that God is not only omnipresent but also directly available to all people without need of mediation via priests or other sorts of intermediaries. So why does God so often seem to be on break when we are in a meeting?

I wonder if the psalmist quoted above isn't also struggling to find God's presence in a difficult time. Perhaps the words simply plead for God to be understanding and merciful, but I hear a bit of desperation, someone calling on a God who seems absent at the moment. It's easy to see why the psalmist might feel this way. Caught up in some sort of great, perhaps mortal difficulty, all the psalmist can see is danger all around. Those troubles obscure any glimpse or sense of God.

If God is indeed wherever we are, what is it that gets in our sight lines and obscures God's presence from us? In moments of crisis or great danger, our focus on these may hide God from us. But what is the problem in a more run-of-the-mill meeting? Might not it be much the same thing, our focus on the business at hand?

Many of us have learned how to be attentive to God in certain circumstances. In the midst of worship, in a time of quiet retreat, or in a moment of private devotion, we may clearly sense something of the divine. But if God's presence evaporates the moment we are doing anything else, how are we to carry Christ into the world in some way?

Surely some of the disdain the Church encounters in our world, the charges of hypocrisy and such, are related to this. If we can't actually invite God into our discussions, debates, and meetings, then we will have a hard time showing God to others except in our worship and private devotion.

Think about that the next time you are in a church meeting, or any sort of meeting for that matter. How might things go differently if everyone there was aware of God present in that meeting? Would we make different decisions, listen to one another differently, even question our own certainties, if we could see and hear Jesus sitting at the table with us? And if we cannot see or sense him, what does that say?

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Baby Birds and Power

What does it mean to be powerful? Thinking of it a different way, who would you put on a list of powerful people in the world today, and what is it that qualifies them for that list?

One of today's morning psalms, Psalm 147, describes God as "abundant in power." There is mention of God controlling weather, and that's certainly sounds powerful to me. But most of the attributes in today's verses don't fit so neatly into the qualities I associate with power. God gathers outcasts, binds up wounds, lifts up the downtrodden, feeds animals, and hears baby birds when they cry. Sounds a little like St. Francis, and that's not a name that comes immediately to mind when I consider the topic of power.

I'm reasonably well versed in the Bible, and so I know that the Apostle Paul writes how the Lord said to him, "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness." But that doesn't quite fit into the understanding of power I learn from living in our world. Which I suppose is largely the point.

For some reason, I've never heard this morning's psalm in quite the manner I did today. Clearly God's strange notions about power are not some New Testament innovation that shows up with a cross. God's apparently had some rather odd notions about power for a long time.

Seems a strange way for a god to act. Of course that sentence might make a rather catchy title for the story of Jesus.

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God's Love and Performance Anxieties

Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me,
      for in you my soul takes refuge;
 in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge,
      until the destroying storms pass by.          (Psalm 57:1)

I was somewhat startled to read this quote in a column from the Washington Post's faith section, something said a few years ago by Dr. Richard Leahy, an anxiety specialist. “The average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the early 1950s.” The column went on to lament how the church too often creates the same sort of performance anxiety that is so pervasive in today's culture.

As a pastor, I've sometimes felt this way about all the "help" that is available to those in my field. I recently attended a very good conference from The Alban Institute, designed to help pastors become better at supervising and directing those on church staffs. I learned a great deal and hope to implement some of it. I do want to be a better leader in the church. Yet at the same time, I worry that all the books and conferences and resources devoted to helping me improve start to create an ethos that says, "Everything would be fine in our churches if we were just a little (perhaps a lot) better at what we do." Talk about performance anxiety, especially in a day when many church congregations are struggling.

As I reflect on this, I have little doubt that my own attempts to "help" folks with preaching, teaching, and so on produce a similar impact. As that Washington Post piece notes, I can make Christianity more about what we do, about our performance, than about what God does in Jesus. And if people think the church's primary message is, "Perform better," no wonder a generation already weighed down by performance anxieties is less than enthralled with our message.

I also wonder if this isn't especially problematic in progressive, Mainline congregations. Pastors and members in such churches are often highly educated, valuing creative scholarship, complexity, and nuance. That may make it easy to minimize the part of our faith's message that seems embarrassingly simple and un-complex. God love us. God is for us. God embraces us without regard to our level of performance. Period.

I hope to continue learning how to be a better pastor, and I also appreciate learning things that help me follow Jesus more faithfully. But in the midst of that, I dare not forget that how God views me and others has virtually nothing to do with the quality of our performance. It's pretty much all about the quality of God's love.

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