The Pastor Is In

I recently started the practice of keeping Monday afternoon office hours at the local Starbucks. I've even made myself a little sign in the manner of the one Lucy used in old Peanuts cartoons. Mine reads, "The Pastor Is In."

These new office hours are supposed to get me out where I'll bump into folks, both church members and others. I have seen quite a few members who I would not have seen had I been in my church office. It hasn't yet happened, but I envision someone asking me a theological question, wanting to know about the church and same sex marriage, or having some other spiritual issue to explore.

I suppose I think it would be a bit cool to be the "Starbucks pastor," and so I found it somewhat irritating when all the non members who approached me today were people looking for financial assistance. Some already knew me, another didn't, but regardless, they were interrupting my chance for someone to ask me a stimulating theological question.

I suppose I would have been among those who told the blind man to be quiet in today's gospel reading. Jesus was headed to Jerusalem, to the important events about to take place there. He didn't have time for a blind beggar. Or so everyone but Jesus seemed to think.

What exactly does it mean to be a pastor? For that matter, what exactly does it mean to be a Christian? Sometimes my notions get interrupted by God's.

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Acting like Foreigners

Then Jesus asked, "Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?"

I'm certainly no foreigner. I'm a native. I was baptized as an infant, brought up in the church, had Bible stories read to me by my Father, and rarely missed worship on Sunday until heading off for college.

I had my away time, but it's not like I every forgot my native tongue. For a time I was quite content without going to church on Sunday, but I never renounced my citizenship. In time, I became active at church again. At some point in my mid 30s, I even felt a "call" to attend seminary and become a pastor. And for the entire time, from birth to this moment, I've been Presbyterian.

Natives have a different perspective than do foreigners. We know things they don't, but they notice things we miss. And in the story of Jesus healing 10 lepers, being a native seems to be a negative. The foreigner returns to give thanks and praise God, but the other 9, presumably natives, continued on to get their certificates of cleanliness from the priests. (That's required somewhere in the rules of Leviticus.) Either that or they just went home.

You have to think those natives were happy, even grateful, with how things turned out. But Jesus had sent them to the priests and the rules required the priest to certify them as clean and they ought to do as the rules said. Besides, Jesus was likely to have moved on by the time they could have returned to say thank you.

And just look at the way that foreigner came back yelling and screaming and throwing himself on the ground. Natives have a little better sense of decorum. We know how to keep this faith thing presentable and respectable, "decently and in order" as we Presbyterians like to say. No yelling or flopping on the ground.

I've occasionally spoken with religious foreigners who've told me how intimidating it can be to attend a worship service populated mostly by natives, people who know all that stuff they don't know.  We do have a facility with the language that foreigners don't, but we may not really know all that much. (It's not unlike how people applying to become US citizens learn a lot more about American civics and government that most natives ever knew.)

But we natives don't dare act like foreigners. Pastors can be the worst. We don't dare act like we don't know what's going on, like we don't have it figured out. I rarely hear church members being open about their doubts and faith struggles, but I almost never hear it from pastors. That makes it difficult to make comparisons, but I dare say I have as many doubts and as many days when I question the wisdom of even believing in God as the next person. But I'm a native and a leader of natives. I'm not supposed to act that way.

If things get bad enough in my life, I can cry out for help, just as the native lepers did in the story. But once things get back to normal, I part company with the foreigners and act like a native again. I don't know if that's what happened with the lepers, but it makes sense to me.

I read this recently in Rachel Held Evan's latest book. "I often wonder if the role of the clergy in this age is not to dispense information or guard the prestige of their authority, but rather to go first, to volunteer the truth about their sins, their dreams, their failures, and their fears in order to free others to do the same. Such an approach may repel the masses looking for easy answers from flawless leaders, but I think it might make more disciples of Jesus, and I think it might make healthier, happier pastors."

I wonder if we don't need to start acting more like foreigners.

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Sermon video: Vine and Branches

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.\

Sermon video from Pentecost: Unboxing the Wind

Audios and sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Vine and Branches

John 15:1-11

Vine and Branches 

Moving with the Spirit

James Sledge                                                                                                   May 31, 2015

Back in the early 1990s, before going to seminary, I lived in Charlotte, NC, not too far from my grandparents’ home. The city was beginning to surround them, but they still had seven acres of land, a barn, a pond, and a big garden plot. And there were grape vines.

As a child I ate muscadines and scuppernongs from those vines and helped my grandmother make jelly from them. But by the early 90s there hadn't been grapes in a while. Some vines had been lost to a road widening. Other vines still grew on the metal and wire trellises my grandfather had constructed years earlier, but no grapes.

Our daughter Kendrick was a toddler then, and I often took her to visit her great grandparents. On one visit, I reminisced about grapes and making jelly. Too bad there we no grapes any more, and Kendrick would never get to do that, but my grandfather quickly corrected me. “Nothing wrong with the grapes,” he said. “They just haven’t been tended in recent years.”

Grandad had suffered a mild stroke that affected the vision processing part of the brain, leaving him nearly blind. He could no longer do gardening or yard work, but he told me that if I pruned the vines early next spring, there would be grapes.

So it was that he and I went out to the vines one day with pruning shears. He sat down in an old, metal lawn chair as I began to prune branches. He couldn’t see much, but he quickly realized that I was being far too timid. “You’ve got to cut them back hard,” he said.  “Get rid of all that growth from last year, all the way back to the main vine.” That seemed extreme to me, cutting off lots of perfectly healthy growth. But with his encouragement, I pruned them way back, leaving what seemed to me very little. 

Time passed, and just as Granddad promised, the wires supports filled with branches.  Then tiny grape clusters began to form.  Later that year, Kendrick and I ate grapes and made a batch of jelly with my grandmother’s supervision.

It’s a special memory for me. I don’t know if Kendrick remembers it, but I cherish that she got to make jelly with my Grandmother, just as I had once done. It’s a small link to a rural past that has vanished. A drug store now sits where my grandparents’ home once was.

That memory also helps me understand when Jesus says he is the vine and his Father the vinegrower who prunes the healthy branches so they will bear more fruit. And I have to admit, I find that image both comforting and disturbing at the same time.

God Hates Bankers?

O LORD, who may abide in your tent?
     Who may dwell on your holy hill? Those who walk blamelessly, and do what is right,
     and speak the truth from their heart...
...who do not lend money at interest, 

Psalm 15:1-2, 5a

If you use the same logic that leads the Westboro Baptist folks (along with many others) to think God hates gays, then bankers are in a lot of trouble as well. The Bible is full of prohibitions on lending money at interest. That is why this morning's psalm includes those who keep that rule as part of its list typifying those whom God loves.

A lot of modern Christians are surprised to learn that Christians weren't supposed to be bankers until fairly recently. The Protestant reformer John Calvin was largely responsible for crafting a theological justification for Christian lenders. He recognized he was permitting something the Bible prohibited, but his approval was narrow, restricted to lending that would benefit the poor. He understood the Bible's prohibition as protecting the poor from wealthy who trapped them in debts. Thus he justified lending that created capital to create businesses which in turn gave poor people more income. He saw this as fulfilling the original intent of the biblical prohibition.

Calvin's constraints on lending have been largely forgotten over the centuries. Certainly there is lending that would still meet his approval, that creates businesses or allows people to lead better lives than they might otherwise. But of course much lending is exactly the sort the Bible forbids.

The core problem with lending at interest, as well as a host of other activities, is that is views people as a resource to be exploited. Those with little are a chance for those with more to make money. Making money isn't a problem in and of itself, but viewing the other as a means to an end is.

Consider the very different sort of lending that sometimes goes on in families. A parent, grandparent, or some other family member with excess funds may well loan money to a less well-off family member. Some interest might even be charged. But rarely is the motivation to make money. The relative in need is not seen as a business opportunity but as someone needing help.

The book of Acts describes the early church as a radical community where everyone shared what they had so that no one was in need. Because everyone was made family, brothers and sisters in Christ, strangers suddenly were seen as kin, creating a strange and wonderful sort of community.

That community in Acts may be a utopian ideal, but our culture has gone to the other extreme. People are "human resources," something to be utilized to the greatest possible efficiency and productivity at as low a compensation as the market will allow. And in our hyper-competitive world, those who are not potential resources are often viewed as obstacles to be pushed aside.

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I once heard a professor describe sin as a problem that constricted and distorted us. It gives us a myopic view of the world where the needs of me and mine matter much more than those of you and yours. Fixing this requires restoring our sight and helping us see more as God does. The Old Testament's concern for the poor, the weak, and the vulnerable emerges from godly vision that does not share the world's preference for the rich and powerful.

Of course no human religion is immune to the vision problems of sin. People of faith too often imagine God only likes folk who believe what they do or follow their rules. Jesus faced much opposition from the good, religious people of his day who could not imagine God looking so lovingly on those they despised. But Jesus, very much in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets, sought to expand people's vision, to help them discover how small their view was and how big God's love is.

And that brings me back round to the problem with bankers, and coaches, and pastors, and employers, and on and on. Whenever any of us view others as resources, as means to our ends, as obstacles, as anything other than those we are called to care for and love, then we are caught up in problem that Jesus came to overcome. Fortunately, God doesn't hate bankers, or any of the rest of us. However God would like to restore our vision and help us to see others as God does.

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Unboxing the Wind

Genesis 1:1-5; Acts 2:1-13; John 3:1-8

Unboxing the Wind

James Sledge                                                                                       May 24, 2015

There’s an old joke about the UCC. The United Church of Christ is a close theological cousin of Presbyterians, so the joke could probably be told about us or a number of other “liberal” denominations… expect the joke only works with those letters, UCC. Anyway, the joke goes like this. “What does UCC stand for? – Unitarians considering Christ.”

The joke refers to modern day Unitarians who believe in God but not the Trinity or the notion that Jesus was divine. Of course that also describes Nicodemus. He believes in God. He knows a lot about God. He is well versed in the Scriptures, what we would call the Old Testament, and he is a deeply religious man.

All this has helped him to conclude that Jesus is someone special. He calls Jesus a teacher who has come from God. Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night, under the cover of darkness, hoping to make some sense of Jesus, but he never really gets the chance. Jesus befuddles him before he can ask his first question, and Nicodemus never really recovers. If you read a little further in John’s gospel, Nicodemus simply fades from view, never grasping what Jesus says.

His confusion turns on a word play that can’t be done in English. Jesus speaks of being born “anothen” (a/)nwqen), a Greek word that can refer to location, meaning “from above,” or to timing, meaning “again” or “anew.” English translations must go with one way or the other, and so some have born again, which is what Nicodemus hears, while others, including our pew Bibles, have born from above, which is what Jesus means.

No doubt Nicodemus hears again because from above is even harder for him to comprehend. He can understand what again means, even if it seems impossible. But to be born from above, of the Spirit, caught in a divine wind whose source is unseen. What on earth is that about?

The notion of being transformed and reanimated by the Spirit is as puzzling to many modern Christians as it was to Nicodemus, yet clearly this experience was a hallmark of the early Church. In the letters of Paul, the gospels, and the book of Acts, the Spirit births the Church, propels it, and sustains it. The Church doesn’t burst into being and spread like wildfire over the Mediterranean world simply because followers of Jesus share his teachings, but because the power of God, the presence of the risen Christ, is palpably present in those followers.

Not that it was the easiest thing to explain or describe. Paul speaks of being “in Christ” through the Spirit. The Pentecost story in Acts tells of a violent wind and of divided tongues, as of fire. At Jesus’ own baptism the Spirit is described as a dove, and in the gospel of John the Spirit is received by the disciples when Jesus breathed on them. In both Hebrew and Greek, the word for Spirit is also the word for wind and for breath. And like the wind/Spirit/breath of God that moves over the waters at creation, the Spirit moves in the lives of Jesus’ followers, and everything gets stirred up and changed and made new.

But as the years and centuries go by, slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, the dynamism of the wind/breath/fire/Spirit gets tamed. As the Church becomes more and more an institution, less and less an uprising, the Spirit gets talked about more than experienced. Writes Brian McLaren, “In the millennia since Christ walked with us on this Earth, we’ve often tried to box up the “wind” in manageable doctrines. We’ve exchanged the fire of the Spirit for the ice of religious pride. We’ve turned the wine back into water, and then let the water go stagnant and lukewarm. We’ve traded the gentle dove of peace for the predatory hawk or eagle of empire. When we have done so, we have ended up with just another religious system, as problematic as any other: too often petty, argumentative, judgmental, cold, hostile, bureaucratic, self-seeking, an enemy of aliveness.”[1]
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Safe But Uncomfortable

Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob...
     who executes justice for the oppressed;
     who gives food to the hungry.
The LORD sets the prisoners free;
     the LORD opens the eyes of the blind.
The LORD lifts up those who are bowed down;
     the LORD loves the righteous.
The LORD watches over the strangers;
     he upholds the orphan and the widow...          

from Psalm 146

I'm reading Rachel Held Evans' book, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church. Beneath the chapter title, "Dirty Laundry," sits this quote from Walter Brueggemann. "Churches should be the most honest place in town, not the happiest place in town." The chapter describes AA meetings that create fellowship and intimacy and church that the congregations whose buildings they use would love to experience. 

If you've never been to an AA meeting, they feel very different from most church services I've attended. They are usually much more diverse. Rich and poor, lawyers and factory workers, young and old, liberal and conservative, all bound deeply together by a shared disease and a shared way out. "Hi, I'm Joe, and I'm an alcoholic" goes the introduction. No putting the best possible face on it, just brutal honesty that is a crucial step out of a shared brokenness.

As Rachel Held Evans points out, actual churches often look much more like country clubs by comparison. We dress up nice and do our best to look like we have it all together. As a pastor, people let me in on some of their struggles, but only because they know I won't share it with anyone. Quite often, people don't even want me to let others know when their problem is something perfectly respectable such as surgery or an illness. 

Pastors can get caught up in the "country club" mentality. Rare is the pastor who airs the dirty laundry of her faith struggles or his doubts and feelings of inadequacy. After all, we're leaders of this place where we dress nice and do our best to look like we have it all together. 

I've often read accounts of church novices being intimidated by being in the company of all these people who have faith all figured out. They're afraid to ask a question or speak up in a class for fear of being found out. And I've heard more than a few long time church members say that they keep quiet and turn down leadership positions because of similar fears. Never mind how often we've heard that the church is a hospital for sinners, we're all afraid someone might find out we're sick.

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The oppressed, hungry, prisoners, blind folks, those who are bowed down, strangers, orphans, and widows. Psalm 146 lists all of these, along with the righteous, who enjoy God and God's favor. It's a pretty rag tag sounding congregation, made up largely of folks from society's margins, people who would feel out of place at a country club, but maybe not an AA meeting.

The "Dirty Laundry" chapter of Evans' book concludes talking about a very different sort of "church," one called The Refuge. Founded by Kathy Escobar, who left a life of religious success for what she labels "downward mobility," it is rooted in the Beatitudes and AA's twelve steps. It doesn't have creed but it does have this invitation. 

The Refuge is a mission center and Christian community dedicated to helping hurting and hungry people find faith, hope, and dignity alongside each other. 

     We love to throw parties, tell stories, find hope, and practice the ways of Jesus as best we can. 

     We’re all hurt or hungry in our own ways. 

     We’re at different places on our journey but we share a guiding story, a sweeping epic drama called the Bible. 

      We find faith as we follow Jesus and share a willingness to honestly wrestle with God and our questions and doubts. 

      We find dignity as God’s image-bearers and strive to call out that dignity in one another. We all receive, we all give. 

      We are old, young, poor, rich, conservative, liberal, single, married, gay, straight, evangelicals, progressives, overeducated, undereducated, certain, doubting, hurting, thriving. 

      Yet Christ’s love binds our differences together in unity. 

      At The Refuge, everyone is safe, but no one is comfortable.

Rachel Held Evans adds, "Imagine if every church became a place where everyone is safe, but no one is comfortable. Imagine if every church became a place where we told one another the truth. We might just create sanctuary." We just might indeed.

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Church Decline, The Great Commission, and Christian Optimism

Today's gospel reading comes from the last five verses of Matthew, a passage often labeled "The Great Commission." The remaining eleven disciples are sent "to make disciples of all nations" (or "all Gentiles," depending on how you translate the Greek). This is accomplished by baptizing and by "teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you."

Just over 100 years ago, many people thought the Great Commission was about to be fulfilled. The missionary movement would soon reach every corner and recess of the world, and the 20th Century would indeed be the Christian Century. A magazine by that name still exists. Not so the dreams of a fulfilled Great Commission. This week The Washington Post published a story entitled, "Christianity Faces Sharp Decline as Americans are Becoming Even Less Affiliated with Religion." And the certainty of a century ago erodes a bit more.

For some this simply reinforces the angst that is already prominent in American Christianity, one more bit of confirmation that the sky is falling. But I suspect that this angst is as overblown as the confidence of a hundred years previous. Both the confidence and the angst emerged more from the perceived strength or weakness of the nation than from any promise of divine presence and help.

Old notions of a Christian Century were closely connected to American confidence and hubris. Expectations that the 20th Century would be an American Century buttressed hope for a Christian one, and at times it was nearly impossible to separate American hopes of expansion and empire from missionary zeal. Similarly, America's current, shaky self-confidence gets mirrored in today's religious angst. But just because Christendom folded wedded faith to culture doesn't mean God ever did.

In fact, if by "Christianity" that article in The Washington Post means to speak of discipleship, the sort Jesus commands in his Great Commission, then the headline may even be a factual error. By measuring Christianity largely on the basis of participation in institutional churches, the statistics in the article may actually chart a decline of cultural expectations rather than a decline in faith of any real significance. For decades, the culture propped up church participation, meaning church affiliation was never an accurate measure of the Great Commission's fulfillment.

I have long felt that the demise of "cultural Christianity" was a great opportunity for the Church. (By Church I mean the body of Christ and not any particular denomination or congregation.) We have the chance to consider whether what we do is about following Jesus and his counter-cultural Way, or whether it is a remnant of days when we had been co-opted by the culture for its purposes. And here the measure is not adherents or the number of folks who "believe" in God or Jesus. The measure is discipleship which Jesus describes as obeying "everything I have commanded you."

Congregations are always a messy amalgam of discipleship and culture. This is necessarily the case because we exist in the world. It is quite appropriate for a congregation to use its culture's styles of communication and interpretation in teaching and living out its discipleship. But this cultural connection becomes a problem when the congregation or denomination starts to exist to propagate its culture. This happened in the missionary movement a hundred years ago when converts in sub-Saharan Africa were told they needed to adopt Western clergy attire and Western music and instruments in order to be Christian. And it happens today when congregations imagine that part of their calling is to ensure that their cultural ways of being church survive.

This is not a call for churches to junk their pipe organs or embrace whatever the latest fad for attracting people to faith is, far from it. It is a call for us to step back and wonder WHY we do the things we do. Are our activities about faithfully striving to become disciples who obey Jesus and about helping other to become disciples, too? Or do they primarily serve some other purpose? This is critical information because when our efforts are about making disciples, it is hard not to be optimistic. After all, Jesus promises to be with us, and what could be better than that?

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Sermon video: Liturgy of Abundance - The Uprising of Stewardship

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Don't Be So Negative

Over the years I've heard my share of complaints regarding the "prayer of confession" in weekly worship. Not  everyone feels this way, but it's not unusual to get a critique regarding such prayers' negativity. "Why do I need to say I'm no good week after week?" people ask.

I sometimes remind folks that many alcoholics find the mantra, "I'm Joe, and I'm an alcoholic" to be anything but negative. It is instead a truth-telling statement that opens them to new possibilities, and prayers of confession can be understood in much the same way.

However, I do think the Church has overplayed the sin hand at times. We've spoken of sin as making us so appalling that God can't possibly love us without resorting to some sort of trickery to remove our stench, namely the cross. God so loved the world, but apparently, this involves holding her nose while looking the other way until Jesus has done his magic.

I blame Greek philosophy for some of the problem here. When an Eastern, Jewish, apocalyptic faith met Western thought, there were bound to be some problems. The God of Israel got re-imaged through Western eyes. Narratives got turned into doctrines and a dynamic and multifaceted God morphed into static perfection. To make matters worse, sin became an inherited problem traced back to Adam and Eve. The devil tempted them and we've been living with that baggage ever since. Never mind that there is no devil in the Genesis creation stories.

And so we in the Church deserve some of the bad press we get about sin. However, that doesn't mean sin is some terrible, negative idea in contrast to the rosy views of the prevailing culture. While the typical America probably does think of herself as reasonably "good" as opposed to evil, our culture actually bombards us with images that are decidedly negative. "There is something wrong with you," says much of the advertising we see daily.

We are not pretty enough, successful enough, smart enough, rich enough, popular enough, and the list goes on and on. Our TV screens are too small and our smartphones are outdated. Our retirement portfolio is insufficient and our clothes are out of style. Much of life is a harried, stressful struggle to ensure we don't turn into the miserable wretches we're sure to become if we don't get good enough grades, attend a good college, make the right connections, get the right job, and on and on. And we are only as good as our latest performance. Our worth is about what we can produce and accomplish and achieve.

By contrast, a biblical understanding of sin is positively uplifting. The Bible says we are good at our core. What's more, God loves us and is committed to us. There's no denying that something is amiss. We are remarkably good at messing things up and engaging in self-destructive behavior. We are prone to be so worried about ourselves that we hurt others. But you don't need a Bible to tell you that, to realize that something (what the Bible calls sin) distorts us from being who we truly are (what the Bible calls salvation).

Prayers of confession are part of this process. They are not about unlovable humans becoming lovable because Jesus somehow sanitizes us sufficiently for God to be able to touch us. God's love simply is. God cannot hate or despise us. And as we come to realize this, we are free to drop the masks and facades we all construct. Trusting in God's remarkable love, we have no need for spin or image control. What is more, God's love can begin to transform us. We can begin to see others as God sees us, those who are loved and longed for. And all that sounds pretty positive to me.

Sermon: Liturgy of Abundance - The Uprising of Stewardship

2 Corinthians 8:1-15

Liturgy of Abundance

The Uprising of Stewardship

James Sledge                                                                                       May 10, 2015

From time to time I’ve turned on my local PBS station hoping to watch Frontline or Nova only to discover some well-worn show featuring over the hill folk musicians. Instantly I realize it’s a PBS fundraising campaign. If I give $50 I will receive a lovely tote bag. And if I give more, I will get an autographed CD featuring some of the music.

I’ve never really understood the strategy of putting on tired reruns rather than the programming I’d like to watch to entice me to give. I can appreciate the need for financial support. I just find the process a little distasteful.

I suspect a lot of people have similar feelings regarding church stewardship campaigns. They often feel a little contrived. If you’ve been around church long enough you know what I’m talking about. You’ve seen the campaigns with cutesy names such as The Pony Express. Everyone realizes that the church can’t operate if people don’t give, but the process sometimes leaves something to be desired.

It doesn’t help that stewardship is often just a churchy word for fund raising. I wonder if we don’t need to separate the two, to fundraise unapologetically and then, quite separately, to help people grow into the joyful, life-giving practice of stewardship, generosity born of  new life in Christ.

Getting better at church fundraising is a pretty straight forward project. I’m not saying it’s easy but it is mostly a matter of learning best practices. Stewardship is another issue altogether because some of the basic tenets of Christian stewardship are fundamentally at odds with the cultural and economic world we live in.