The Kingdom and the Course of Human Events

Today and tomorrow will be anxiety filled for many people. As we await a final conclusion to the election campaign, will any new bombshells shake things up? Will our candidate, our party, prevail? Will we be rejoicing or cringing in horror when final outcomes are announced Tuesday night?

This particular campaign has occupied us in ways I don't recall previous ones doing, both captivating and horrifying us. Clearly there are important issues at stake. Still, I wonder if we don't sometimes overstate potential impacts. I wonder if we don't imagine the events that captivate and horrify us to have more earth shattering import than they truly do.

I have written previously of how I find it impossible to reconcile Christian faith with the stances taken by Donald Trump. I do think that those Christians who've made supporting Trump an article of their faith have done tremendous damage to the Christian "brand." But this does not mean that any sort of ultimate outcomes are riding on Tuesday's results. I think it unlikely that the apocalyptic scenarios imagined by some on the right or the left will materialize.

This is not to underestimate the human capacity to create genuinely terrible scenarios. Even a cursory study of history will reveal all manner of terrors that humans have wrought, but that doesn't mean that everything that scares us has such potential.

I will vote tomorrow and have my own worries about the consequences of the election results, as well as of the campaign itself. Yet as a Christian, I worry that we are overly fascinated with human capacity while nearly oblivious to that of the Divine. Surely there is some measure of myopia here.

In today's gospel reading, Jesus tells a parable that can be a little unnerving. Someone, clearly an important and powerful individual, sent out invitations to a fancy banquet, but when all was made ready, many of those invited has more pressing matters. Some of their excuses are pretty lame, but some sound legitimate. (I think my honeymoon would win out over anyone's party.) But the host makes no distinctions. People are herded in from the streets to fill the party, and the host vows that none of those originally invited will be allowed in.

This parable becomes especially problematic when we turn it into an allegory with the host playing the role of God, a God who is easily offended and remarkably unforgiving. But parables rarely work well as allegories, and this one isn't telling us anything about the character of God. Rather it is making a point about the all surpassing importance of the kingdom, of God's new day.

We humans tend to be caught up in our own events, some of them trivial and some of them  important. But followers of Jesus must always have an eye on something bigger. Just how this "something bigger" intersects with our daily living can be an interesting and difficult negotiation, but if we do not have some sense of what God is up to, we will end up attaching ultimate importance to what we are.

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Sermon: Trick Questions

Luke 20:27-38

Trick Questions

James Sledge                                                                                       November 6, 2016

When I was 13, my brother and I discovered the comedian, George Carlin. We laughed at his seven words you couldn't say on television, when our parents weren’t around to hear. But I was also intrigued by his take on growing up Catholic. I knew nothing about Catholics or Catholic schools, but Carlin's stories about questioning and challenging the teachings of the church resonated with my own, early teenage questions and doubts.

Carlin told of creating elaborate scenarios to trip up the priests and make them look foolish. One story involved the requirement that Catholics receive communion at least once between Ash Wednesday and Pentecost.  Not doing your “Easter duty” was a mortal sin.

“Father, suppose that you didn’t make your Easter duty, and it’s Pentecost Sunday, the last day. And you’re on a ship at sea, and the chaplain goes into a coma. But you wanted to receive. And then it’s Monday, too late. But then you cross the International Date Line.” No doubt the priests loved it when little George Carlin raised his hand in class.

The Sadducees in today’s gospel engage in something similar, though the stakes are a lot higher. They devise an elaborate scenario to trip up Jesus and make him look foolish, but this isn't a game. They see Jesus as a threat, and they desperately want to discredit him.

The Sadducees were a small, wealthy, conservative faction of Judaism. To them only Torah the Books of Moses – the first five books of our Bible – were scripture, and they found no evidence for resurrection there. By contrast, the Pharisees and Jesus considered most of what we call the Old Testament scripture, and they found support for resurrection in the prophets and other writings. However, this resurrection wasn’t about going to heaven. It was a hope for a new age when all would be made new, and the dead raised.

These Sadducees have watched as Jesus evades the traps set for him by other opponents, but now they take their turn. No doubt they are a little surprised that this country rabbi, an uneducated rube from the backwoods of Nazareth, has successfully matched wits with religious experts. But they have Moses on their side. They have Torah. I imagine that they are snickering a bit as they lay out a George Carlin like scenario.

Sermon video: Falling into God's Love

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Falling into God's Love

Luke 18:9-14

Falling into God’s Love

James Sledge                                                                                       October 23, 2016

Many years ago, I preached a sermon from today’s gospel reading where a couple of members helped me do a dramatic reading of the parable with just a little updating. The Pharisee became an upstanding church member and the tax collector was a drug dealer. The first change is obvious. Pharisees were the upstanding Protestants of their day. The second change perhaps needs more explanation.

Tax collectors in Jesus’ time were not civil service employees. They were part of a bizarre, corrupt system that permitted tax collectors to pry as much money as they could from those in their community. The Romans did not care how much they collected as long as Rome got the prescribed amount. Tax collectors could keep everything else for themselves. Tax collectors often used intimidation and threats to get as much as they could, often preying on the most vulnerable in society. And they became wealthy while helping out an occupying, foreign power. They made modern slum lords look charitable by comparison, and they were rightly despised.

And so in church that Sunday years ago, an upstanding church member thanked God that he was not like robbers and thieves and other sorts of low life. He certainly wasn’t anything like a drug dealer. He tithed and then some to his church. He served on committees and session and never missed a worship service if he was in town.

The drug dealer didn’t dare come up to the front of the church. He stayed off to the side and never looked up. He pulled at his clothes and hair as he said, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” And you’ve already heard the parable so you know what Jesus said next.

A few days later, I got a letter (email was still fairly new) from a church members not at all happy with my sermon. Who would keep the church running, or pay my salary, he asked, if not upstanding church members like the one I had substituted for the Pharisee? It certainly wasn’t going to be drug dealers or others of that ilk.

But I Don't Wanna Descend

We modern people use the Bible very differently than did early Christians. For starters, they didn't have a Bible other than what we call the Old Testament. And what would later become the New Testament was not meant to tell the story of Jesus. The letters and the gospels were written for Christians who already knew Jesus' story. They were written to help people understand those stories better, and often they were written to address concerns in a particular congregation.

That means that when people first read the section from Luke that is today's gospel, they knew very well what it meant that Jesus "set his face to go to Jerusalem." They knew exactly what awaited Jesus there. The author of the gospel is reminding them that all the events reported in the coming pages happen against the backdrop of Jesus purposely moving toward Jerusalem and the cross.

I take it from Luke's gospel, the letters of Paul, and much else in the New Testament, that those early Christians struggled as much with the cross as I do. That's especially true in light of Jesus calling us to embrace the way of the cross, even to take up our own.

In today's verses, we learn than a Samaritan village doesn't receive Jesus "because his face was set toward Jerusalem." I'm not 100 percent sure what this means, but I assume that Jesus' focus on Jerusalem and the cross makes them think Jesus won't be doing any neat tricks for them.

I know how they feel. I want Jesus to do stuff for me, and when he's all fixated on the cross, I don't really want to be around him. I don't much care for talk of needing to deny myself, lose myself, take up my cross, and so on.

In his meditation for today, Richard Rohr speaks of "the path of descent," of how we are transformed only through the act of dying and rising. He writes, "As a culture, we have to be taught the language of descent because we are by training capitalists and accumulators. Mature religion shows us how to enter willingly and trustingly into the dark periods of life. These dark periods are good teachers."

But I keep asking Jesus to make things better for me. And I think that Jesus has abandoned me when things are bad for very long. I guess when it comes to "the language of descent," I'm a pretty slow learner.

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Sermon video: Imagining Faith

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Imagining Faith

Luke 18:1-8

Imagining Faith

James Sledge                                                                                                   October 9, 2016

What is Christian faith? How do you know if you have it? These would seem to be central and crucial questions for Christianity, church, or whatever label you use to describe those who say they follow Jesus. Yet I’m not sure we how much agreement there is on the answers.

For some, faith is mostly about belief, belief about who Jesus is and what he accomplished, belief in the truth of his teachings, belief in the veracity of the Bible, and so on. For others faith seems to be about knowledge or information. People say, “I can’t share my faith with others because I don’t know it well enough.”

Some people think  of faith as hope or trust that God is somehow guiding things toward a good outcome. This hope may be vague or specific. It may be focused mostly on personal benefits such as wealth or health or getting into heaven. Or it may be focused on the flow of history, on the “arc of the moral universe.”

For some people faith includes specific forms of piety and practice. For others, it’s simply the notion that there is a God, some higher power. And there are other possibilities.

In the reading from Luke that we heard last Sunday, Jesus makes a connection between faith and gratitude to God. And in our reading this morning, Jesus again connects faith to concrete behaviors on the part of his followers.

Jesus tells a brief parable with two characters, a widow and an unjust judge. If Jesus were telling the parable in our day, the characters might be different. But in Jesus’ day of male dominated patriarchy, widows were among the most vulnerable. As females, they did not have full legal status, and without a husband or adult son, it was difficult for them to hold onto property or possessions. They could easily end up on the streets, reduced to begging. Presumably this widow’s opponent has taken advantage of this situation.

We may be unfamiliar with the precarious position of widows in Jesus’ day, but we know all about unjust judges or other office holders who utilize their position for personal gain, with no regard for basic morality or God’s concern for the weak and vulnerable. We know all about a world where innocents suffer, where raw power preempts justice.

Oct. 9 sermon video: Gratitude, Salvation, and Generosity

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Gratituded, Salvation, and Generosity

Luke 17:11-19

Gratitude, Salvation, and Generosity

James Sledge                                                                                       October 9, 2016

When we lived in Raleigh, NC, around twenty years ago, we often took our girls to the State Fair in the fall. One year, we parked, got out of the car, and joined the flow of humanity making its way toward the entrance. As we got close, the flow diverted like a creek parting around big rock. It wasn’t a rock, of course. It turned out to be a pair of street preachers. They were loud and animated, and everyone was giving them a wide berth while avoiding eye contact, looking back only after having passed by.

We stayed with the flow and did the same. I too turned once we passed and watched them shout at the crowd coming toward them. If I heard exactly what they were shouting, I don’t remember it, but I can make some pretty good guesses. Many of you probably can as well.

They might have been telling us we needed to repent. They might have asked if we knew what would happen to us when we died. They might have wanted to know, “Are you saved?” though in my experience, those last two are just different ways of asking the same thing. “Accept Jesus and you will be saved, meaning you’ll get into heaven.” They might even have had a sign quoting the Apostle Paul. “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

I recall this encounter at a fair because our gospel reading this morning also raises the issue of being saved. You likely missed it because the word translated “saved” in that quote from Paul gets translated differently in our gospel. Jesus says to the Samaritan, "Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well." But it could also be translated, “your faith has made you whole,” or “your faith has saved you.”

Sermon: Job Description

Luke 17:1-10

Job Description

James Sledge                                                                                       October 2, 2016

Way back in my high school days, I had a wrestling coach who was something of a yeller and screamer. He had a well-deserved reputation for being tough, and for building tough, winning teams. Back in my day, high school coaches who yelled and screamed were not all that unusual, but even then, this coach had a reputation for being especially intense.

I loved this coach. He was the best coach I ever had in any sport. Most of my teammates felt the same. At practices near Christmas time, a steady stream of former wrestlers on college break would come back to work out with us. It was a special fraternity.

Coach really cared about his wrestlers despite all the yelling. Yelling was his way of pushing us to do our best, and he often said, “You don’t need to worry if I’m yelling at you. That means I love you and care about you. It’s when I don’t yell at you that you should worry.”  But I don’t recall that ever happening.

Most of us had a unique devotion to Coach, but there were those who didn’t feel that way. I recall a handful of teammates who didn’t respond well to Coach’s methods. I think that Coach’s intense manner, his yelling and screaming, only worked when you really knew that he loved you and cared about you. I had no doubt about this, but had I not felt that way, I suspect I would have experienced his yelling differently.

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When I hear Jesus speak about faith the size of a mustard seed and being like worthless slaves, I cringe a bit. But I suspect those first disciples heard Jesus differently. They’d come to know Jesus intimately in their journeys with him. They’d experienced first-hand his tender care and love for them.

But hearing Jesus more like I used to hear my wrestling coach is not the only reason that my initial cringe may not be warranted. The way we read scripture in worship, a few verses ripped out of their larger context, can be misleading. Too often we hear Jesus without much connection to the larger narrative, to the ongoing story of the gospel.

I think it’s important for us to try and put ourselves in the same place as those disciples if we are to hear Jesus correctly, and that includes more than simply appreciating their close, intimate relationship with him. These disciples have also begun to understand that Jesus will soon leave them. And as they draw near to Jerusalem, and Jesus speaks of the difficult work ahead, they freak out a little. They worry that they are not ready.

Reverence, Awe, and Call

"Go away from me, Lord!"  So says Simon Peter in yesterday's reading from Luke. A lot of us would love to meet Jesus in the flesh and can't imagine trying to shoo Jesus away if we ever did. Peter says it's because he is a "sinful man." He is a rough and tumble fisherman, an occupation assumed to be filled with irreverent, irreligious sorts. Perhaps that's why Peter says, "Go away."

Of course the prophet Isaiah says something similar when he encounters God in the Temple. "Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!" Isaiah is no uncouth fisherman, but he responds pretty much as Peter does.

In the Bible, there is a great deal of reverence, awe, even fear about encountering the Divine. People thought that God's holiness did not mix well with humans. There's even a story about a man struck dead when he reached out and touched the Ark of the Covenant, despite his only wanting to keep it from falling. The presence of God is a wild and dangerous thing.

Perhaps there is something primitive in this ancient reverence of God, one that insisted on special preparations before getting too close. For Jews, this meant not even speaking one of their most treasured possessions, the personal name of God, YHWH.

Most of us are much more casual in our approach to God. For some this may be because of a deep and abiding relationship. For others, could it be a sense of equality with God? Most of us create God in our own image at times, and why would we have much awe for such a God.

Still, Jesus' response to Peter is very different from what Isaiah experienced. Then a seraph took a coal from the altar and touched it to Isaiah's lips to purify him. But Jesus simply says to Peter, "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people." With Jesus, the "otherness" of God still exists, but it feels more easily bridged. There is no cleansing ritual, just a call to follow.

As a pastor, I've rarely witnessed the sort of awe and reverence shown by Isaiah or Peter when they encounter divine presence. I'm not sure what that means. Have we rarely encountered God? Is our experience too wispy and ethereal to seem real? Or, as some have suggested, have churches trafficked more in "talk about God" than actual "experience of God?"

One place that I do see a great deal of deference, of keeping God at a safe distance, is in the very topic of this gospel passage. Jesus' call to share the good new, to catch people, literally terrifies many Christians that I know. They don't know their faith well enough, some say. They are still exploring and figuring things out and not ready to speak to anyone about their faith. Similar objections are often raised when people are asked to teach or lead a project or guide some aspect of the church's work.

I wonder if there is not a connection between our caution about Jesus' call and our rare experience of awe and reverence for the divine. Has our tendency to think of faith in intellectual terms, ideas to learn and understand, shackled us in ways we don't realize?

In his book, The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, "For faith is only real when there is obedience, never without it, and faith only becomes faith in the act of obedience." Simon Peter has been wowed by Jesus' presence prior to his obedience, but that is not always the case in the gospels. Routinely Jesus simply calls as he passes by, and some drop everything and follow. They get wowed later.

I wonder if the call to follow Jesus is not the more typical opening for us to encounter God's presence and power, and we get to be wowed later. Of course that requires taking a chance. Or, as Bonhoeffer said, it has a cost.

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Preaching Thoughts on a Non-Preaching Sunday

Charlotte, NC is my hometown, and so I've watched the events unfolding there closely. I also have friends there, along with many more Facebook friends. That means I've seen a deluge of reactions on social media from people who live in or around Charlotte, as well as posts and comments from people all over the country.

There is much to be troubled by in the events of this past week, but I don't know that the conversations on social media are all that helpful. I would include my own contributions in that judgment. In fact, social media seem to be contributing to the divide around issues of race, police actions, and more.

There certainly are plenty of thoughtful posts online that do a good job of discussing the issues, but even these tend to prompt a stream of comments that frame everything as us versus them, good and bad. Individual people disappear into the group they are associated with, and then are labeled as good or bad with little in the way of nuance. Protesters, police officers, city officials, the media themselves, white, black, and more are depicted as monolithic entities. They are called thugs, biased, trigger-happy, untruthful, racist, and lots of other terms I won't repeat.

All of this makes me wonder if people, at least those of us waging dueling posts and comments on Facebook, really see one another. Or do we only see sides? And once we slot someone on a particular side, we simply assign to them all the behaviors we attribute to that side.

In today's gospel reading, the division of rich and poor is highlighted, but the parable Jesus tells runs counter to the way people typically talk about such groups. We are told the poor man's name while the rich man is anonymous. Not the way that usually works. And the rich man's wealth seems not to be a blessing, but rather a curse.

The parable also implies that the rich man never really noticed poor Lazarus. No doubt he saw him when he passed him in the street. But he was just another poor man. The rich man only notices Lazarus after they've both died, and then he sees Lazarus as someone who might assist him. The parable doesn't say whether the rich man simply assumes that that's what people like Lazarus are for. But I'm left wondering if the rich man ever really sees Lazarus, the person, at all.

The labels we use for each other are often excuses not to see. They make life easy and simple for us by allowing easy judgments and easy decisions. Which of course means that our judgments and decisions are very often wrong.

I wonder what could happen if we learned to see, really see, the other.