Offensive Jesus vs Cultural Christianity

Today's gospel reading is one of many places in the Bible where Jesus upsets and offends people. And it's not just his opponents. His own disciples were often taken aback by what Jesus said. In fact, if you read the entire episode which begins with today's gospel (the lectionary will do so over the next two days), you will see that many of Jesus' disciples abandon  him over today's difficult teaching.

Growing up in Presbyterian congregations, I somehow missed the fact that Jesus could be troubling and offensive to those who encountered him. I saw Jesus along the same lines that a lot of people see the late PBS icon, Mr. Rogers. And while I happen to think of Mr. Rogers as an exemplary Christian, he didn't make those in power so angry that they wanted to kill him. Jesus clearly did, though the thoroughly domesticated and saccharine-sweet image of him often peddled in church makes that hard to comprehend.

Still, some Christians reach a point where those Sunday School portraits of Jesus no longer work for them, and they look for something a bit more realistic. The dissonance between the churchy Jesus and some of the stories of him in the Bible has long sent people on quests for "the historical Jesus." I think the quest itself is usually well intended but often misguided. That's because people may suspect - not without reason - that the Church is presenting a less that accurate picture of Jesus. Feeling misled by the Church, they look for non-churchy insights into Jesus. And because they think of the Bible as the Church's book, they look outside scripture.

Unfortunately, this effort immediately encounters a problem. Aside from the biblical texts, there is very little information about Jesus, and what there is often appears further removed from the historical Jesus than what is in the Bible. This means that most quests for "the historical Jesus" are efforts to distill from the biblical texts a historical kernel, a most inexact exercise, to say the least.

The current best seller, Zealot, by Reza Aslan, is the latest in a long line of such historical quests. Some of its scholarship is a bit suspect, but it does invite people to meet a very undomesticated Jesus. I'm all for that. I only wish that the Church would help people find the very undomesticated Jesus who is right there in the Bible and readily available without any need for wild speculation or intellectual flights of fancy.

Admittedly, this is a problem of the Church's own making. We sold our soul all those centuries ago when Constantine made us the official faith of the empire. When Christ gets enlisted in propping up empires and cultures, domestication is a must. Faith gets watered down, relegated to a private, spiritual sphere. The Jesus who came to bring good news to the poor and release to the captives still shows up here and there at Church, but rarely as the centerpiece. When God and Jesus are supposed to bless America, Jesus can be offensive only in very small doses. That doesn't mean Jesus actually gets wrapped in the American flag. That's a bit too unsubtle for most churches. But the same flag at the front of the sanctuary is fine, and any attempt to remove it may get labeled sacrilegious.

However, recent decades have seen the culture call off its cozy relationship with Christianity. It's not as though faith is persecuted (unless you consider "Happy Holidays"somehow to be akin to imprisonment), but it has lost some of the highly favored status previously granted it in exchange for religious sanctioning of the culture. I see this as a tremendous gift. It is a gift that may well be squandered, but it is a gift nonetheless.

The Church now finds itself in a position where it must stand on its own merits. Freed from the job of blessing prevailing culture, we have a very real opportunity to hear an undomesticated Jesus inviting us to new life in the act of following him. We may well decide that Jesus' call is more than we can manage, more than we're willing to do, but if that happens, at least we will have encountered something of that first century Jew whose presence demanded people make such hard choices.

The days when church pews filled on Sundays because the culture expected and coerced people to be there are fast fading away. (Good riddance, I say.) Not surprisingly, young adults are a rapidly shrinking part of congregational life in America. But who can  blame them. If the only Jesus they find at church is a benign, domesticated figure who only wants us to believe in him and be good little boys and girls, why bother? If they simply meet a religious sanction for prevailing cultural mores, prejudices, or hatreds, why bother?

But if they meet a Jesus who challenges them, even rattles them to their very core by calling them to follow him on a path that is not easy, that might be different. But of course that would seem to require church folk who were shaped and formed by the patterns of a dying cultural-Christianity to discover that Jesus themselves.

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Sermon: Don't Worry, You Are Blessed

Matthew 5:1-12

Don’t Worry, You Are Blessed

James Sledge                                                                                       February 2, 2014

Are you familiar with the catchphrase, “First world problems?’ It’s something added to a complaint, a light hearted acknowledgement that someone’s whining or fussing is not about anything all that significant. It’s popular as a “hashtag” on Twitter. Here are some actual examples. “Trying to find a way to make my snow boots look cute with every outfit is getting really old #firstworldproblems. I think every town in America should have free Wi-Fi all throughout. Would make my life so much easier. #firstworldproblems.” And I love this one. I’m pretty sure it’s a joke. “My phone died and I can't tell the time from my wrist watch because of all the diamonds. #firstworldproblems.”

Even if you’re not familiar with the hashtag, you’re likely familiar with something similar. Many of us have said something such as, “I locked my keys in my car and had to call AAA to unlock it. So I missed my doctor’s appointment and have to reschedule. But then I came and volunteered at Welcome Table and realized that my problems aren’t all that big.”

When we agonize over our cable service going out just before our favorite show comes on, we know such issues are relatively minor and trivial. But our problems are our problems. They’re the things impacting us, and so they’re important to us. Nothing surprising about that. But when we worry about such things, there’s a tendency to think they are the things God should worry about as well.

We live in a very individualized and personalized culture. That has led to some very individualistic and personal notions about God and faith. The phrase “Jesus is my personal Lord and Savior,” isn’t part of my faith heritage so I’ve never been exactly sure what it means. Still, I’m reasonably certain that no one in biblical times would have said such a thing. They did not live in an individualistic culture.

Insomuch as speaking of a personal Savior means to convey that God is concerned about each individual person, I think that’s dead on. But that is different from thinking that God is especially worried about whatever I or my culture happens to be worried about. Indeed, such a notion can lead to the trivializing of God and faith.

I’ve seen that happen with the Beatitudes, the opening portion of the Sermon on the Mount that we just heard. There is a book by Robert Schuller called The Be (Happy) Attitudes: 8 Positive Attitudes That Can Transform Your Life. It distills from Jesus’ words a handful of practices that will bring the happiness that many Americans chase after. Blessed are those who mourn becomes “I’m really hurting—but I’m going to bounce back, and Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake becomes, “I can choose to be happy—anyway!”[1]

But this not only trivializes Jesus’ teaching, it misses the point entirely. Jesus is not giving some program for self-improvement. He isn’t telling people how to be happy. He isn’t even giving a list of commands to live by. There are no commands in today’s verses. We may be able to infer some “shoulds” from these verses, but they are primarily a statement of how things are, wildly counter-intuitive statements Jesus makes to those who are drawn to him.

These folks are not the upper tier or elite of society. Instead they are fishermen and sinners, people with diseases and infirmities, people suffering with what we would call mental illness, and desperate family members and friends who have nowhere else to turn. They are Jews who find themselves subject to the might, power and often cruel authority of Rome. There is little about them to suggest that they are blessed or fortunate. But Jesus insists that they are.

Matthew also has Jesus address the author’s first century church community . That Jewish Christian community is most certainly struggling. Some of them have gotten kicked out of their synagogue, their home church, the place they grew up and learned about faith, because they followed Jesus. No doubt this has led some, perhaps many, to question the wisdom of following him. The hoped for new day that Jesus’ resurrection seemed to herald is terribly slow in coming, and it is hard to find much evidence that says they are blessed or favored or fortunate. But Jesus insists that they are.

Jesus isn’t suggesting a way for them to feel fortunate. Rather he is making a statement that despite appearances, even when they find themselves in terrible circumstances, longing for something better, hungering and thirsting for a day when the world is set right, they are recipients of God’s favor and blessing.

Sermon video from Jan. 26: Transforming Love

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

When Life Gets Hectic, Whom Do You Serve?

Did you ever have one of those days or weeks that simply overwhelmed you? Of course you did. It's a near universal experience. So, when you have found yourself in a moment where life overwhelms you, what do you do? How do you respond when there is more to deal with than is possible, when the plate is too full and something has to fall off of it?

When life gets crazy, it often reveals something about the priorities that govern our lives. There's no easy and simple calculus here. Doing something in order to remain employed may require diminished time with loved ones who cannot be supported absent that employment. But success in one's career may simply be a higher priority than family, and it is remarkably easy to deceive oneself about such things.

A similar sort of self-deception often is at work in lives of faith. It is easy to fancy oneself faithful even when faith becomes one of those things that gets dropped when life is too busy or demanding. Pastors and other religious professionals have even more opportunities for self-deception because our "jobs" are connected to faith. However, that in no way means that doing our jobs is actually an act of faith or that serving God is even remotely connected to what we are busy doing.

Much of the Bible is about a covenant relationship between God and humans, a covenant relationship that is almost always understood to be communal or corporate in nature. This covenant relationship is there in the call to Abraham. It is there in Jesus' call to follow him. And it assumes significant responsibilities on both sides of the relationship. But as with human relationships, self-deception is often a problem.

Just as a career minded spouse may convince himself or herself that all that time at work is somehow about supporting a marriage relationship, people can delude themselves into thinking that their loyalties and passions are about their faith. How else to explain some people championing the right carry concealed weapons and "stand our ground" as Christian causes. This seems to me little more than projecting one's personal passions and causes onto one's God and faith. And the political right has no monopoly on such behavior. Liberal Christians often make liberalism their god.

That brings me back around to questions of what remains and what gets dropped when life gets too hectic to handle. Are the things remaining truly important things? Are they truly God's things? Or are they simply my things, things which may or may not really be faithful to the relationships and commitments I claim are priorities in my life?

There's an old Bob Dylan song with a line that says, "You gonna have to serve somebody. Well it may be the devil, or it may be the Lord, but you gonna have to serve somebody." When self-deception gets involved, I pretty sure it's usually the former.

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Sermon: Transforming Love

Matthew 4:12-23

Transforming Love

James Sledge                                                                                       January 26, 2014

How many of you think that everything in the world is just about as it should be, with no real problems to fix or issues to deal with? Everything is fine, right?

I suspect most anyone here could rattle off a long list of problems, troubles, horrors, and more that desperately need straightening out. Civil war continues unabated in Syria with an obscene death toll among civilians and refugees in the tens of thousands. Things are only slightly better in South Sudan, and Iraq seems to be descending into anarchy.

Brutal, gang rapes occur with staggering regularity in India, but the brutalization of women is hardly confined there. Sex trafficking and slavery, fed by crippling poverty, is a worldwide problem, including in our own country and in the DC area. Meanwhile income inequality continues to grow in this country. In a nation where everyone once claimed to be middle class, a smaller and smaller percentage of the population controls a larger and larger percentage of the wealth. And of course there was yet another shooting yesterday.

I’m sure we could add plenty of other examples of problems in our world, but let me shift the focus a bit. How many of you think that everything is fine, with no real problems to fix or issues to deal with in your own life?

Most of us have personal lists of things we’d like to change about ourselves. We want to exercise more or volunteer more. We need to lose weight or stop smoking. And many of us having bigger issues than self-improvement lists. We lead harried, hectic, and anxious lives that are good for neither our health nor our relationships. We hurt others, including those we love, far too often. We have been overly conformed to our culture’s narcissism and consumerism, and so we chase after stuff thinking it will make us happy, and we obsess about self and our need to be happy and fulfilled. It’s a stressed out environment that is toxic for us and for our children.

Of course there is much that is good about the world and about our lives. The world is God’s good creation, after all. But even the most Pollyanna among us know there is much that needs fixing and changing in our world and in our lives.

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” Jesus begins his ministry with words every bit as appropriate today as they were nearly 2000 years ago. It is a message about change, change for the world and change for us personally.

God Remembers

On Sunday I preached a sermon entitled "Faithful Remembering." As the title perhaps suggests, it was about remembering who we are in our baptisms, about recalling the new identity we receive when we are joined to Christ and given the Holy Spirit.

Today's Old Testament reading also speaks of remembering, but this remembering is not ours. It is God's. The reading comes from the conclusion of the Noah story. The flood has ended. The very real threat that creation might return to the pre-creation chaos of Genesis 1:1-2 is over. The blessings of creation have been reissued with the call to be fruitful and multiply. And God covenants with all creation, with humans and animals, never again to bring a flood to destroy. Human creatures may have gone their own way, rejecting who God created and called them to be, but God is committed to them.

As a seal on that commitment, God places a bow in the clouds. The sign is the rainbow, but it is also God's bow, a weapon of war. God has hung up God's bow. It will not be drawn in anger again.

I've often heard reference to the rainbow as a reminder to us of God's covenant, but that is not what the story says. In the story it is a reminder to God. "When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh." For good measure, God repeats this assertion almost verbatim. "When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth." Everything, it seems, hangs on God's remembering.

This is not isolated to the story of Noah. Repeatedly the Bible speaks of the need for us to remember, and of God's remembering. Because God remembers, Israel is rescued from slavery in Egypt. And as Mary says in her "Magnificat," Jesus is born because God remembers, because God will not forget or give up on creation, including those troublesome human creatures.

In his letter to the church in Rome, the apostle Paul writes of Jesus "who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us." (Rom. 8:34) Perhaps one way to understand Paul is to think of Jesus saying to God, "Remember, remember." Or, to put it in more Trinitarian terms, withing the divine, loving relationship that is God, the call to remember echos always.

God remembers. In today's gospel that is expressed as "For God so loved the world..." Amidst all the difficulties understanding how God works, what God is up to, and how we are called to be a part of it, it is good to stop and remember a central core of our faith. God is committed to all creation, and to us. God will remember; God will not forget us.

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Sermon video: Faithful Remembering

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Faithful Remembering

1 Corinthians 1:1-9

Faithful Remembering

James Sledge                                                                                     January 19, 2014

As a pastor, I have lots of “friends” on Facebook who are also pastors. The same goes for people I follow on Twitter. Some of these folks are always posting effusive, over-the-top praise of the churches they pastor, the committees they serve, and so on. “First Presbyterian’s Christian Education Committee rocks!!!” “So and so presbytery’s Committee on Ministry Committee is the best committee ever!” “I’m so incredibly lucky and blessed to serve here!”

Maybe it’s just my age or where I grew up, or maybe I’m just weird, but such praise sometimes feels a little bit much to me. I like an “Atta boy” as much as the next person, but when it goes way beyond that or goes on and on, I get a tad uncomfortable.

Of course it could be that these Facebook friends are actually serving in the best church that ever existed, where every member tithes or more, and every member volunteers in some ministry activity at least once a week. Maybe they are serving on a committee that puts every other committee in every other presbytery to shame. Who knows?

Speaking of over the top praise, if all I knew about the church that the apostle Paul founded in Corinth came from the verses we heard this morning, I might think Paul is a bit like some of my Facebook “friends.”  He gives thanks to God always for these folks who are not lacking in any knowledge or spiritual gift. He speaks of them as being “sanctified,” in other words, “made holy,” and of how they are called as “saints.” Wow, this must be some congregation. Either that or Paul is getting a little over the top with his praise.

But as it turns out, I’ve read the rest of Paul’s letter, and I know he doesn’t think they are the best congregation out there. Quite the opposite. He is upset and angry with them. He will call them immature, unspiritual, and still caught up “in the flesh.” In short, the church we meet in Paul’s letter looks like a total disaster with all sorts of divisions, arguments, fights, and messed up theology. Paul warns them they had better straighten up before he returns to deal with them. And yet, Paul opens his letter with these words about being made holy, called to be saints, given every necessary spiritual gift and all wisdom.

Maybe Paul is just following social convention and opening his letter with the expected pleasantries, but I don’t think so. Not only do we have another letter of Paul where he dispenses with such pleasantries, but there is something more. All of those wonderful things about being made holy and called to be saints are not specific to the Corinthian Christians. Rather, they express Paul’s understanding of what it means to be “in Christ.” It is not praise for anything they have done. It is their identity, who they are, the new thing they become through the grace of God in Jesus and the gift of the Spirit, even if they are currently living in ways that obscure their true identity.

Sermon video: Endings, Beginnings, and Pilgrim Journeys

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Able to Love

We humans struggle to entrust ourselves to others. Life teaches us to be wary. Most of us have walls that we can hide behind, and even those who know us most intimately may never see us fully exposed, all the walls and protections gone. "Will she still love me if she knows this about me?" "Will he still love me if he sees this ugliness that is part of me?"

We also struggle to entrust ourselves to others because we worry about their ugliness. "If I give my life over to him, will he abuse my love and trust?" "If I become totally vulnerable to her, will she take advantage of me and hurt me?" Many of us, perhaps most, overcome such trust issues; not entirely, but enough that we can participate in loving, intimate relationships.

Such trust issues carry over into relationship with God, with Jesus. No matter how much the Scriptures reassure us that God is our surest hope, a God who loves and protects us; no matter how much we read that Jesus is the one who can guide us to true life and love, we aren't quite sure. And so we need to protect ourselves. We dare not give ourselves entirely over to God.

For some reason, this trust issue, which causes enough trouble for our human relationships, is even more problematic in the human/divine relationship. God is unknown enough, distant enough, that we hesitate to go "all in." We keep guarding and protecting ourselves.

Insomuch as this is true, the fundamental faith problem is not about getting one's theology correct or about trying hard enough to believe in Jesus. The fundamental problem is not having experienced God's love sufficiently to trust it. "If I give my life over to God, will God abuse my love and trust?"

Religion often tries to turn faith into morality, keeping rules, and believing the right things. Nothing wrong with morality or getting our theology straight, but those are all best understood as attempts to love God back. They are responses to having been loved by God.

All this means that for many of us, our greatest need is not trying harder at faith. Rather it is becoming vulnerable and letting go. It is allowing ourselves to fall into God's love. I suppose this is that classic, leap of faith, something not unlike the letting go that must happen in order to fall in love with another person.

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Will God Give Up On Us?

The story of Cain and Abel is a familiar one to many, though I don't know that it is much appreciated. It is a very complicated story in which God precipitates a crisis between the two brothers by accepting one's offering and rejecting the other's. No reason is given. Both seem to have offered their best. But God does not act as one might expect, or even hope.

The crisis is of God's own making, but God offers Cain a way out. He can still do well. Sin may be lurking, but it can be mastered. As Walter Brueggemann has noted, God does not speak of Cain as under the curse of any "original sin." He still has the power to do well and master sin, but of course, he does not. And God's wonderful new creation seems to be spiraling out of control.

As had happened with his parents in the garden, Cain must now deal with God. He receives punishment for his crime, punishment he fears is too much to bear. His own life now seems in jeopardy.

At this point the story engages in a bit of absurdity. Cain fears others will kill him, but the story has told us the Cain and Abel are the first children born on earth. Exactly who is it that Cain fears? But the story uses this absurdity to speak beyond the issues of any primal humans, to wonder what happens when when we refuse to do the right, when we earn God's ire and threaten to engulf our world in conflict.

God puts a mark on Cain. The mark, no doubt, reminds him of his guilt, but it also serves to protect him. God will not allow Cain's crime to provide an excuse for others to do to him as he has done to his brother.

Will God give up on us? Will God finally leave us to sleep in the bed we have made and suffer the full consequences of living at odds with God's plans for us? The opening chapters of Genesis wrestle with such questions at some length. Cain receives a provisional answer, an answer that will become final following the Noah episode. God remains committed to Cain, to creation, and to the human creature.

That is something that needs recalling from time to time, perhaps most especially when we despair that things are spiraling out of control, that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. God is not done with us. God is not done with creation. God will bring this story to a good ending, even if we keep messing it up along the way.

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Distraught and Longing for God

I didn't attend seminary until I was 35 years old, and so I have a pretty good sense of how easy it is to feel disconnected for faith and from God in much of day to day life. Our culture encourages us to divide things up between the spiritual world and the real world, or as a theologian might say, between the sacred and the profane.

It's actually quite easy to maintain such a division while working in the church. A great deal of what pastors and other church professionals do can be understood as work without much of a spiritual connection. Even preparing a sermon can become simply an exercise that is part academic study and part creative writing. And should a pastor become so spiritually dry that even this becomes impossible, there are tons of sermons floating around on the internet, there for the taking. (I've always wondered how much of that happens with the sermons I post here. My blog site's statistics often show a small run on my three year old sermons just prior to their texts showing up again as a Sunday reading.)

One of those things they teach you in seminary is how Jesus sanctifies the mundane. In Jesus, God gets seen in the day to day, eating and drinking, walking along the road, talking to the people he meets, going to a dinner party. But we keep trying to put God back in select, special places and moments. Not that sanctuaries and retreats and special times of prayer aren't important. But when God is only at church or in set aside devotional times, very little of our lives are lived with God, or with much awareness of God.

Today's psalmist seems to have lost any sense of God's presence. The writer is nearly distraught, speaking of a cast down and disquieted soul..

   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?”

Is it possible that our neat separating of spiritual life from the rest of life helps insulate us from what the psalmist feels? If God is only at church or in those times we may set aside for prayer and devotion, then there is no reason to expect God in the day to day, and no reason to be upset when God cannot be found there. Perhaps we protect ourselves from the pain the psalmist feels if we confine God to a few spiritual or sacred venues. But in the process we quite likely insure a relationship with God lacking in any real depth and substance.

Anyone who has ever been in love with another person and had that relationship go awry likely has felt something akin to what the psalmist feels. I've known a few people who "protected" themselves from such suffering by never getting too close to anyone. But even though they may indeed avoid some of the suffering that afflicts others, I think that most people pity them.

Have you ever been distraught like the psalmist over your relationship with God? As strange as it may sound, I really hope so.

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