Monday, February 12, 2018
Sunday, February 4, 2018
Sermon: Healing Spiritual Amnesia
Isaiah 40:21-31
Healing Spiritual Amnesia
James Sledge February
4, 2018
Over
the past year, I have heard numerous
calls for the Church to find its prophetic voice, to “speak truth to power.” At
a time when some Christians are willing to excuse the most hateful, misogynist,
racist behavior to gain or keep political power, it is incumbent on us
to proclaim the way of Christ, a way that has special concern for the weak, the
poor, the despised, the oppressed. Yes, we do need to speak God’s truth to
power.
The
biblical prophets often did exactly that, condemning kings and ruling class for
policies that benefited the wealthy and injured the poor, blasting outward
religious show that was uninterested in matters of justice and a rightly
ordered society. But there is more to prophetic speech than this.
Prophets
are about getting people aligned with God. Sometimes that means chastising them
or warning what will happen if they don’t straighten up. That explains why some
think that prophecy is about predicting the future, but such prophecy is rarely
meant to be predictive in an absolute sense. It is, rather, a call to change
and create a different future.
But
prophecy need not be warning. Such is the case in our reading today. Here the
prophet speaks to exiles in Babylon, people who’ve been defeated, Jerusalem and
its great Temple have been destroyed, and these exiles struggle to maintain
their religious traditions in a strange, foreign land. Some conclude that the Babylonian
gods are stronger than their God. Or perhaps God has simply abandoned them. If only
they had heeded the words of prophets in the past, but now it is too late. God
pays no attention to their prayers any longer.
In
this situation, the prophet’s job is not to call the people to straighten up.
Rather it is to call them out of their spiritual amnesia. They have forgotten
who this God called Yahweh is. Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has
it not been told you from the beginning? Memory has failed them. They
cannot see beyond their loss and suffering, and so faith and hope evaporate. Is
such a moment, the prophet’s work is to help the people remember.
Thursday, February 1, 2018
Sunday, January 28, 2018
Sermon: LIfe Changing Words
Mark 1:21-28
Life Changing Words
James Sledge January
28, 2018
I’ve
been delivering Sunday sermons for over twenty years now. Some people like them;
some don’t. Now and then a sermon may touch folks, and I’ll hear more comments
than usual. Now and then one touches a nerve ,and I hear more complaints than
usual. But if I ever had any illusions to the contrary, one thing I’ve learned
over these twenty plus years is that preaching has limited power actually to
change people.
Even
when I preach a sermon that folks love, it doesn’t mean that it makes a great
difference in their lives. It has its moment, then it evaporates. Other pastors
tell me much the same. We have a scant examples of a sermon making a big
difference in someone’s life.
Perhaps
it wasn’t always so. A word from the pulpit likely carried more weight and
influence long ago, had more of “Thus sayeth the Lord” quality to it. But as
individualism grew stronger and trust in institutions grew weaker, messages
from the pulpit were taken with a grain of salt. People need to be convinced.
In one church I served there was a
member who would often say to me, “I enjoyed the lecture today.” He meant it as
a compliment, but I suspect the only authority my “lecture” had was found in
how good an argument it made. It had no intrinsic authority because it came
from a pastor or was based in Scripture.
The Bible itself has suffered a similar fate.
People will accept what it says if it makes sense to them, if it seems
reasonable, but it isn’t assumed to be correct, true, or life-giving just
because it’s the Bible.
Thursday, January 25, 2018
Monday, January 22, 2018
Sunday, January 21, 2018
Sermon: Insane Discipleship
Mark 1:14-20
Insane Discipleship
James Sledge January
21, 2018
At
our session meetings (Session is the discerning and governing council for a
Presbyterian church.) we always spend some time discussing a passage of
scripture. At the January meeting, we discussed our gospel passage for today.
For
this particular discussion, I had primed the pump a bit by including some discussion
questions in the agenda. “What differences do you see between the two sets of
brothers? Do those differences make it harder for some to follow Jesus? What
gets in the way of our following Jesus? In the way of the church following
Jesus?”
We
started with the first question, quickly noting what many of you may have also
noticed. The two sets of brothers appear to come from different circumstances.
Simon and Andrew have only casting nets to toss from the shore, meaning they
are likely subsistence fishermen. James and John, on the other hand, are part
of a family business that has employees. The gospel writer emphasizes this for
us by saying precisely what these two sets of brothers leave behind when the go
with Jesus. Simon and Andrew leave only their nets, but James and John leave
their father in the boat with the employees.
We
discussed the impact that having a little or having a lot has on being able to
follow Jesus. There were a variety of thoughts on this, but most of us agreed
that it gets harder to let go of what you have the more that you have. Jesus
says as much in his teachings, pointing out what a hindrance wealth is to
becoming part of God’s new day.
But
then one of our elders observed that for both sets of brothers, what happens is
“insane.” They drop everything and go off with this Jesus fellow who just
happens by and calls to them. As far as we know from the story Mark’s gospel
tells, they’ve never met Jesus, perhaps never even heard of him.
That is insane, and the relative wealth
of the different brothers seems not to make any difference at all. We might
have expected James and John to struggle a bit more. They were leaving a lot
more behind. The gospel writer has made a point of describing the different
circumstances of these sibling pairs, but then it plays no role in what
happens. Both pairs drop everything and go with Jesus. What on earth accounts
for such insane behavior?
Monday, January 15, 2018
Undomesticating Jesus and MLK
Yesterday
I preached a sermon from 1 Samuel 3 that wondered how prophets such as Martin
Luther King, Jr. are able to hear God speak, able to catch divine visions or
dreams. The sermon was written well before President Trump made his remarks
about immigrants from sh**hole countries.
Those
remarks made me contemplate a different sermon using the gospel reading for the
day instead, John 1:43-51, which includes a comment about how Jesus’ hometown
was considered a sh**hole country. “Can anything good come out of
Nazareth?” But in the end I decided I didn’t want to do an entire sermon on
Donald Trump’s racism.
Still,
the confluence of Trump’s comments, the MLK holiday, and the president’s own
proclamation honoring Dr. King on Friday, still has me feeling that I need to
say something more than I did in worship yesterday. (I did note the gospel
reading and its implications prior to the 1Samuel sermon.) I cannot imagine the
prophet Martin not speaking out when immigrants of color are disparaged while
ones from Scandinavia are lauded.
The
strange contrast of President Trump honoring Dr. King on the day after the president’s
racist remarks makes me worry about King’s legacy. That Trump could honor him
while consistently acting in ways that would have appalled King says something
about how King has become a revered image with much of his prophetic speech
conveniently removed. Increasingly Dr. King is known by a few pithy and
uplifting quotes. His scathing words against moderate whites, his resistance to
the Vietnam War, and his outcry against police brutality are rarely mentioned.
King has been sanitized and domesticated.
There
are too many photographs and too much TV footage for King to be stripped of his
blackness. Were that not the case, he could perhaps be made blonde and
blue-eyed, totally domesticated in the manner of Jesus. Have you ever seen a
depiction of Jesus as African and been jarred by it? But a fair-skinned, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jesus seems fine?
There
is no better way to rob prophets and Messiahs of their power than by
domesticating and honoring them. I fear that is happening to Dr. King, and I
know it has already happened to Jesus. That people can profess to be Christian,
followers of Jesus, and still loudly support Donald Trump, who so often stands
diametrically opposed to Jesus’ teachings, reveals a Christianity that honors
and celebrates Jesus without taking seriously anything he says.
Jesus
reserved his most scathing remarks for wealth and for smug, respectable
religious leaders. He came from a sh**hole part of Palestine and was happy
to spend much of his time hanging out with those whom respectable people thought
were sh**holes. He had special concern for the poor and oppressed, insisted
that his followers not defend themselves when struck, demanded love of enemies
as well as friends, and required disciples to give up their own good and
willingly embrace suffering for the sake of his ministry. That Christians so
seldom look like this is an indictment of the Church and of the religion that
claims the name Christ.
+++++++++++++++++++++
Last
year I saw the Oscar nominated, 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro, based on an unfinished manuscript by James
Baldwin. (If you’ve not seen it, it will be airing soon on PBS.) Baldwin has
never become enough of an icon that there’s been much need to domesticate him.
He remains a figure of his own telling, his own words, unlike King, who is
being transformed into a comfortable, benign Negro who is no threat to the white,
American status quo.
The
real Dr. King terrified much of white America, and many of his words would
terrify people still if they were spoken aloud and celebrated. So too Jesus terrified
the powers that be in his day. Jesus was no sweet, saccharine Savior interested
only in granting tickets to heaven for those who “believed in him.” He
proclaimed the coming reign of God, a new day when the poor and oppressed would
be lifted up and the rich and powerful pulled down. And he warned those who
would follow him about honoring him without doing as he said. “Not everyone who
says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one
who does the will of my Father in heaven.” (Matthew 7:21)
If
Christians are to wear that name in any meaningful way, and if America is to
honor Martin Luther King in any real sense, we will have to un-domesticate them.
We must listen to them speak. We must let them startle and challenge us. We
must let them change us, or they have become little more than empty symbols.
They are neither prophet nor Messiah. They are idols, pocket talismans we
expect to bless us on demand.
Sunday, January 14, 2018
Sermon: Listening for God
1 Samuel 3:1-10
Listening for God
James Sledge January
14, 2018
The word of the Lord
was rare in those days; visions were not widespread. When I was young, and even sometimes as
an adult, I’ve thought that it would be great to have lived in biblical times.
How much easier faith would I’d been
there to see God act, to hear Jesus teach, to encounter a prophet filled with
God’s Spirit and speaking directly to me.
But
the opening of our Scripture reading this morning doesn’t sound much like that. The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not
widespread. Sure, people knew
stories of God acting in the past, but there wasn’t much current activity. I
wonder if people at the time of our reading wished they had lived in an earlier
time, when God’s activity had been more vivid and obvious. But for them, God’s
word was rare. No dreams or visions to share. No prophets speaking God’s word
directly to them.
The
opening of our scripture doesn’t sound so different from today, although many
of us were alive when one of God’s prophets did speak. I was just a child, but
I remember. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a prophet if there ever was one. God
called him and gave him a vision to share. If Dr. King had lived in biblical
times, I suspect his famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial would have been written
down with an introduction something like, “The vision that the prophet Martin
was given about the things to come.”
Dr.
King used the term dream instead of vision Perhaps he thought that would work better
with both religious folks and more secular types who don’t think much of
prophetic visions.
Wednesday, January 3, 2018
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