Sunday, March 4, 2018
Sermon: Mechanics, Logistics, and Deep Faith
John 2:13-22
Mechanics, Logistics, and Deep Faith
James Sledge March
4, 2018
I
assume that many of you have seen the QR code printed in the announcements section
of the bulletin. For those not familiar, these are a kind of barcode that can
be scanned with a smartphone app. Scan ours and it lets you use a credit card
to pay your pledge or make a contribution to the Hunger Ministries offering
that we do the first Sunday of each month.
We
added that QR code to address a problem that increasingly impacts church
giving. Many people no longer carry checkbooks and rarely carry much cash. If
they want to donate to our Welcome Table ministry, they have to use a credit
card, debit card, iPay, etc.
In
an increasingly cashless, paperless economy, offering plates passed down the
aisle may soon become relics replaced by new technologies. Some churches have
added kiosks so that worshippers can make a credit card contribution more
effortlessly than with QR codes.
Some
people do think that offering plates and a giving ritual are an important, but
not many think them absolutely central to Christian faith. They’re mechanics
and logistics, and the same could be said of the money changers and animal
sellers in today’s gospel.
Jewish
pilgrims journeyed long distances to celebrate Passover in Jerusalem. Many
traveled on foot, with no way to bring animals for sacrifice. And they carried
Roman coins which weren’t allowed in the Temple because they had images of emperors
on them, graven images considered idolatrous. They couldn’t be used for
offerings or to pay the Temple tax.
Booths for buying an animal or swapping
Roman coins for Jewish shekels addressed a practical problem. They were
necessary logistics for the Temple to operate, little different from offering
plates, QR codes, or payment kiosks.
Sunday, February 25, 2018
Sermon: Cross-Shaped Mindsets
Mark 8:31-38
Cross-Shaped Mindsets
James Sledge February
25, 2018
Imagine
for a moment that a political candidate has caught your eye. The office doesn’t
matter. It could be school board, state legislature, Congress, anything You’re
incredibly impressed, and the more you hear, the more you read, the more your
admiration grows.
You
decide to get involved in the campaign, and your tireless efforts are noticed.
You’re invited into meetings about strategy, policy, and advertising purchases.
You become a part of the inner circle and see things the public doesn’t, Yet
even here, you admiration only grows.
But
then one day in a strategy meeting, your candidate insists on taking a position
that everyone knows is political suicide, a position so unpopular with the
voters that defeat is inevitable. Everyone is stunned. Jaws drop, mouths hang
open, a pall descends on the room.
Something
similar happens in our gospel reading this morning. Up to this point, the
gospel of Mark has largely focused on the question of who Jesus is. The disciples
have heard teachings and seen healing and other miracles that witness to Jesus’
identity. Following one spectacular miracle, these disciples ask the very
question Mark is focused on. “Who then is this, that even the wind and
the sea obey him?”
In
Mark’s gospel, no human realizes that Jesus is Son of God prior to his death.
But the disciples have seen enough to know that Jesus is no ordinary guy.
Clearly God’s power is with him, and so when Jesus asks them directly, “But
who do you say that I am?” Peter quickly answers, “You are the Messiah,” a
term that means God’s anointed.
Peter
gives a correct if incomplete answer, and Jesus takes this as a cue to begin teaching
about what lies ahead. “The Son of Man must undergo great
suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes,
and be killed, and after three days rise again.”
Jaws
drop, mouths hang open, and a pall descends over the group. At first, no one speaks,
but finally Peter decides he had to do something, has to make Jesus rethink this.
Peter is discreet and pulls Jesus aside to rebuke him, to warn him what a huge
mistake he’s making. Jesus responds by making sure all the disciples are
listening when he calls Peter “Satan”
Then Jesus calls in the crowds. These
words aren’t just for disciples. They’re for anyone thinking about following
Jesus. “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take
up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose
it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel,
will save it.” The gospel does not say, but I would be surprised if
many in the crowd did not pick up and head home right there.
Sunday, February 18, 2018
Sermon: The Gospel of Noah
Genesis 9:8-17
The Gospel of Noah
James Sledge February
18, 2018
My
mother-in-law collects Noah’s arks, and she gave me a wooden one that sits on a
bookshelf in my office. The little animal pairs are typically lying on their
sides because children who accompany a parent into my office can rarely resist
playing with them. Like those animals on my bookshelf, the animals in the Noah story
have proved irresistible to people over the years. That’s just one of the
reasons the flood story in Genesis is so misunderstood, even by those in the
Church.
Many
know the broad strokes of the story: a wicked world, the good and faithful Noah,
and a plan to start over fresh. The whole idea seems rather primeval or
primitive. It’s an entertaining story in a way, but it has little to say to us,
or so many believe.
Many
cultures in the ancient Middle East had some sort of flood story. Some scholars
speculate that a catastrophic flood centuries earlier provided the raw material
for such myths, and it’s safe to say that people of ancient Israel were
familiar with more than one version of the story. If you read the story in
Genesis with any care, you will notice parts of at least two different accounts
included there.
The
writers and editors who pull together the book of Genesis are happy to include
these sometimes conflicting accounts because they are only peripherally
interested in reporting what happened. Their real interest is to use the story,
along with other stories in the first eleven chapters of Genesis, to address
deep, theological questions about the nature of God and about God’s
relationship to creation, especially the human creature. It is this primary
purpose of these stories that gets missed when we imagine them to be primitive,
ancient tales.
The
Noah story begins, some three chapters prior to our reading, with this comment.
Yahweh
saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every
inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And
Yahweh was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to
his heart. Or perhaps, it
grieved her to her heart. Men wrote down the stories after all.
A
heartbroken God may seem strange to us, but the Hebrew Bible has no problem
portraying a God emotionally impacted by humanity. And so the flood story
begins. You’ve surely heard it. A great ark is constructed and animals of every
sort are brought on board. Subterranean springs burst forth and rain falls for
forty days and nights. Creation returns to its pre-creation chaos where the
Spirit of God moved over the waters. But finally, after months, God
remembered, and the waters begin to subside. Now, as the story is often
understood, creation and humanity can start fresh.
Thursday, February 15, 2018
Self-Denial, Guns, and "My Rights"
This passage in Mark occurs immediately following Peter's confession of Jesus as Messiah. Jesus then begins to teach his disciples that he will suffer, be rejected, and finally be killed, but be raised on third day. This is too much for Peter, who pulls Jesus aside to straighten him out. In return, Jesus calls Peter "Satan" in front of all the disciples. Then he calls in the crowds and teaches them.
Jesus' words are deservedly famous in Christian circles. "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it."
Self-denial is not all that popular in our culture. We're all about acquisition and freedom, and we bristle at the notion of any curbs on those freedoms or our ability as consumers to acquire whatever we want. Many Americans are drowning in credit card debt because they cannot even deny themselves those things they cannot afford.
Yet Jesus insists that being his followers requires denying ourselves, and it requires a cross, a willingness to take up voluntary burdens and suffering for the sake of others. Jesus' words are at totally at odds with the American ethos, which perhaps explains why American Christians are so often raving hypocrites.
Nowhere is the hypocrisy greater than on the issue of gun rights. For reasons I cannot fathom, many Christians have somehow linked their faith to a love of guns and an absolute right to defend themselves, Jesus' pacifist teachings be damned. But the insistence that protecting "my rights" are more important than the lives of young children runs completely counter to Jesus' absolute demand for self denial and cross bearing. This core teaching of Jesus demands that as his follower, I must be ready and willing to give up things dear to me, no matter how costly to me, for the sake others.
I am perfectly willing to concede that it is easy for me to call out this particular hypocrisy because I am not a gun owner (although I did grow up hunting and shooting). And no doubt I am prone to other hypocrisies that are harder for me to see because impact me personally in a way that gun rights do not. But Jesus does not provide for any sort of "Everyone is doing it" loophole. If we cannot give up things dear to us for the sake Jesus' message, if we cannot endure suffering that could be avoided, then we cannot call ourselves followers of Jesus. And I'm quite sure that this is what it means to say "I'm a Christian."
It is popular in some circles to speak of America as a "Christian nation," a dubious claim at any point in our history. But as long as our knee-jerk reaction to any event is to worry about "my rights" and "my privileges," Jesus certainly won't claim us as his followers.
Click to learn more about the Sunday and daily lectionaries.
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
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