Christmas Eve Candlelight Reflection

Christmas Eve Candle Lighting Reflection

I read a Christmas editorial in the Washington Post that talked about churches that are struggling with declining attendance and resources and yet still typically find their sanctuaries filled to overflowing on Christmas Eve. The column discussed the many reasons that people aren’t going to church like they once did. It mentioned that the fastest growing religion in America isn’t really a religion at all. It’s something called the “Nones,” those who are religiously disaffiliated and check “none of the above” on surveys about religion.

Yet despite this growing religious disaffiliation, despite the lack of cultural encouragement to be part of some faith community, despite the rapidly growing numbers in our society who view church as unnecessary, people show up in droves on Christmas Eve.

Many attribute this to nostalgia or the desire to maintain some family traditions around Christmas, but the columnist suggested that it could be something else. While the lure of church may be nonexistent for many, there still remains a longing, a hunger for the transcendent, for something more than “a society defined solely by self-interest and calculation, by the visible, the measurable and the tangible.”[1]

I can certainly see why Christmas would be especially alluring for those longing for the transcendent. Christmas insists that the God whose speech called forth the wonders of Creation is a God of life and light. Christmas speaks of a light, a goodness that cannot be overcome by the darkness, the pain, the selfishness, the hatred, the greed, the evil of the world. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.  

Christmas also insists that the transcendent, the light, the creative force of God, is not simply something far away out there. It moves toward us, seeking us. A child is born. The Word became flesh and lived among us. Emmanuel, God with us.

But God’s move toward us demands a response. God’s move is an invitation for us to move toward God. God has taken the first step in a divine dance we are invited to join, a dance of goodness, love, and self-giving; a dance of generosity, caring, and hope.

The God who comes toward us, who comes as a child born for us, invites us to become bearers of light and hope in a world too often filled with darkness and hopelessness. And the empty cross of the risen Christ reminds us that the deepest and most malevolent darkness cannot triumph over God’s love.

(Lower candles and shield the light.)

And so, in the midst of the world’s darkness, stand and hold your light high. Let it shine. Carry the light with you as you go. Bear the light of Christ into the world. Let it shine against all that is dark and frightening and hate-filled. Go to be light bearers in a world that is longing for light.

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[1] E.J. Dionne, Jr. “Churchgoers, cut the ‘Chreasters’ some slack” The Washington Post, December 23, 2018

Sermon video: Mixing Up Our Verb Tenses

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Mixing Up Our Verb Tenses

Luke 1:39-55

Mixing Up Our Verb Tenses

James Sledge                                                                                       December 23, 2018

Here we are on the Sunday before Christmas, and finally the scripture readings appointed for the day feel a little Christmassy. Three weeks ago we heard Jesus talk about his second coming, and the last two weeks we heard about John the Baptist. But today, finally, here is Mary, and she is pregnant with Jesus.

Of course the lectionary that lists the scripture readings for each Sunday isn’t trying to be a Grinch. In part it is letting Advent be Advent and not an extension of the Christmas season. But also, the Bible does not really share our fascination with Christmas. Of the four gospels, only Luke actually narrates Jesus’ birth. And Luke seems more focused on the events surrounding the birth, things like the prophetic speech we just heard, than on the birth itself.

It might help for me to go back and recall what has happened to get us to Mary’s prophetic song today. Luke is not only the sole narrator of Jesus’ birth, but he alone tells of John the Baptist’s birth, and he weaves the two stories together. John’s father, Zechariah, and Jesus’ mother, Mary, both receive visits from the angel Gabriel who tells them of miraculous births to come. And both Zechariah and Mary speak prophetically about these births.

Luke loves to use patterns and rhythms from the Old Testament as he tells the story of Jesus. Mary’s song is very much like the song offered by Hannah after she has given birth to Samuel. But more than that, the angel’s visits to Zechariah and Mary follow a formula for divine appearances that repeats throughout the Old Testament.

Sermon video: Repentance and Fruit for Christmas

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Repentance and Fruit for Christmas

Luke 3:7-18

Repentance and Fruit for Christmas

James Sledge                                                                                       December 16, 2018

John the Baptist shows up two weeks in a row in the Advent gospel readings, and so at the end of a recent staff meeting, I checked with Diane about her sermon on John’s first appearance. I did not want my sermon to duplicate hers. Could I preach on the “brood of vipers” or might she have already touched on that?

Diane said I could have the vipers, though she might touch a bit on John’s ministry during the children’s time. Then the conversation lapsed into silliness. I joked that she could greet children at the chancel steps with, “You brood of vipers! Who told you to come up here?” Then we imagined parents yanking their children out of the worship service, And come to think of it, maybe I shouldn’t share what goes on in staff meetings.

But that bit of silliness got me thinking about why those who came out to see John didn’t head for home the moment he started yelling. All they do is show up, and he calls them a family of snakes, a colorful way of implying that they are children of the devil. Yet these people do not run off. They ask for instructions. "What then should we do?" Clearly they think that something is about to happen, and they want to be ready.

As I thought about the crowds that gather around John despite how unpalatable he is, I found myself thinking about the gathering in the missional mandate the Session has discerned as our call from God. “Gathering those who fear they are not enough so we may experience grace, wholeness, and renewal as God’s beloved.” I thought about the strategies of Gather, Deepen, and Share that we think critical to this missional mandate, and I took a look at this story of John the Baptist using the lens of Gather, Deepen, and Share.

Sermon: Truth-Telling, Grief, and Hope

Luke 21:25-36

Truth-Telling, Grief, and Hope

James Sledge                                                                                       December 2, 2018

There is a social media meme that makes the rounds every so often. It has a picture of Walter Brueggemann at some speaking engagement. Brueggemann is professor emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, and one of the more respected and influential Old Testament scholars of our time.

On this picture of Dr. Brueggemann is a quote from him, the same one that is on the front of the bulletin. It reads, “The prophetic tasks of the church are to tell the truth in a society that lives in illusions, grieve in a society that practices denial, and express hope in a society that lives in despair.” Perhaps those are good words to keep in mind on the Sunday when we enter Advent, listening to the prophetic words of Jesus.

Truth-telling, grieving, and hope initially strike me as odd companions, perhaps even more so in this time of year. Advent has more and more been absorbed into the celebration of Christmas, and at Christmas many people do not want anything to distract them from the joy and spirit of the season. People who are grieving often find Christmas a very difficult time and church a difficult place to be.

A few years back I preached a sermon I called “Keeping Herod in Christmas.” I borrowed the title from a chapter in Brian McLaren’s book, We Make the Road by Walking. McLaren talks about how Matthew’s gospel tells of the slaughter of innocent children in reaction to Jesus’ birth, and he says that our celebration of Christmas gets off track when it forgets that Jesus comes into a broken world that resists the newness he brings.

My sermon shared the upset I unintentionally created in the Columbus church I served. I leaned a cross against the manger that sat in our sanctuary chancel during Advent and Christmas and learned that many did not want the cross to intrude on their Christmas cheer. Perhaps that’s what Brueggemann is talking about when he speaks of our society’s denial.

Of perhaps he’s talking about the 85,000 children in Yemen who have starved to death because of Saudi Arabia’s intervention there, a campaign supported by the US. You would think that such appalling, and totally preventable, killing of children would be front page news day after day. Surely is deserves to be told and should wrack us with grief, yet it scarcely gets noticed. And with the coming of Christmas, our society has even less interest in truth-telling or grief about such things.

But the gospel reading for the first Sunday in Advent won’t help us maintain a façade of Christmas cheer. It features no angel choirs or heavenly visitors to Mary or Joseph. Instead it finds Jesus in Jerusalem just days before his arrest and execution, and he clearly understands the sort of prophetic voice Dr. Brueggemann wishes for the church. Jesus speaks of hope, of redemption drawing near, but it does not come in the midst of Christmas cheer. It comes amidst warnings of Jerusalem’s eminent destruction, of wars and insurrections, persecution of Jesus’ followers, and frightening signs in the heavens.

Sermon video: Belonging to the Truth

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Belonging to the Truth

John 18:33-37

Belonging to the Truth

James Sledge                                                                                       November 25, 2018

“For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." That is how Jesus responds to Pilate’s question about whether or not he is a king. But Pilate is not much interested in truth. In the verse that follows our reading, Pilate responds, “What is truth?”

I think perhaps Pilate would fit right into our world of “alternative facts,” of “truth isn’t truth,” as Rudy Giuliani famously claimed. Pilate is a politician, and truth is often a problem for politicians. It has a nasty habit of getting in the way of plans and agendas, and so it often becomes casualty in election campaigns or political debates.

The gospel of John, more so than any other, portrays Pilate as a tragic figure, invited by Jesus into the truth but unable to enter. Pilate must scurry back and forth between the Jewish leaders outside and Jesus inside. He thinks he has power and control, but it is an illusion.

In our reading, Pilate comes inside after speaking with those leaders. He attempts to question Jesus, asking if he is King of the Jews. But rather than answer, Jesus questions him. “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” Pilate does not answer, but the question seems to have stung him. “I am not a Jew, am I?” he objects.

Now I need to pause here to clarify something about this word, “Jew.” The writer of John’s gospel is a Jew who follows Jesus. He writes to a congregation of Jews who follow Jesus and worship at the synagogue. Most of the time in John’s gospel, the term Jew refers, not to people who are Jewish, but to the Jewish leadership that opposed Jesus and is threatening to kick this congregation of Jewish, Jesus followers out of the synagogue. One of the great tragedies of history was the failure of later Christians to recognize this, and then to use the gospel of John as a weapon against their Jewish neighbors.

And so when Pilate insists that he is not a Jew – in the Greek, his question is not really a question – he is insisting that he is not like those Jewish leaders who stand in the way of what God is doing, or as Jesus describes it, those who do not belong to the truth.

It’s not that Pilate doesn’t know the truth. He knows that Jesus is innocent, but there are other things that matter more to Pilate than the truth. Jerusalem was hardly a prime posting for a Roman official, and no doubt Pilate wanted things to go smoothly there. No riots during the Passover festival on his watch. If an innocent man needed to die in order for things to stay calm, so be it. Never mind the truth.

Sermon video: Faithful Lament

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Faithful Lament

1 Samuel 1:4-20; 2:1-10

Faithful Lament

James Sledge                                                                                       November 18, 2018

In the wake of the horrific murders at a Pittsburgh synagogue, there have been many articles written about the rise in anti-Semitism and racism. Not so many years ago, people talked about moving into a post racial society. That seems naïve foolishness now. Recently I read an article in the Post that talked about how young Jews find themselves confronted with a reality they thought belonged to a distant past.

For many young Jews across the nation, last month’s mass shooting at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh was a jarring lesson. Many millennials who grew up hearing about anti-Semitism from their parents and grandparents think of the Holocaust, Eastern European pogroms and the Spanish Inquisition when they think about violence against Jews — stories they read in history books about events that happened well over half a century ago, and all in the old country, not the United States.

The Pittsburgh rampage, committed by a gunman who reportedly shouted “All Jews must die” as he fired, shattered what remained of that illusion.[1]

I rather doubt that black, millennial Americans ever shared such an illusion. Hate and violence against African Americans never was an old country problem relegated to history books. Still, the mainstreaming of racism in recent years, including its blatant use as political strategy, feels like a huge step backwards. And those who had hoped in some sort of inexorable progress toward a day when racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and so on were confined to history may now find such hope in short supply.

I confess that the last few years have at times left me struggling. When I talk with other clergy types about how they and their folks and managing, I hear of two very different responses. One sounds like the joke Stephen Colbert tells regarding Donald Trump’s claim to have done more for religion than any other president. “It’s true,” says Colbert. I’ve prayed more in the last two years than I ever have.” But others have respond differently, struggling to pray at all because of anger or despair. Me, I’ve gone back and forth between these two.

Sermon video: Big Rocks First

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Big Rocks First

Mark 12:28-34

Big Rocks First

James Sledge                                                                                       November 4, 2018

As seminary student, I did my summer internship at a small town church in eastern North Carolina. They provided housing for me in a mother-in-law suite attached to the home of a widowed, Jewish grandmother named Reba. As far as I know, Reba, her son, and his family constituted the entire Jewish population of that town.

Reba’s house and my suite shared an enclosed porch, and she and I would sometimes sit out there and chat. On one occasion she offered that differences between faiths didn’t really matter. As long as people believed in God and tried to be good, that was enough.

Now I don’t know that Reba actually thought there were no significant differences between Jews, Christians, Muslims, and so on. Her statement may have been a mixture of her being very hospitable to me combined with a tactic she had long used to blend in as a religious minority. I don’t really know. But there are many people who see the “All faiths are basically the same” idea as a good way to bridge religious differences.

Given the problems some religious folks cause, it’s tempting to think that blurring the distinctions between groups might help. But a vague, blurry, Christian identity turns out to be difficult to pass on new generations of believers. It doesn’t require liturgies, worship services, or institutions. And I wonder if the widely held notion of Christianity as intolerant, anti-gay, pro-Republican, and so on, isn’t partly the result of more liberal Christians having blurred our identity to the point that the Christian part isn’t really visible to others.

If someone who had not grown up in a church walked up to you and asked, “What does it mean to be a Christian? What’s non-negotiable?” how would you respond? What would you tell them beyond, “Believe in God and try to be good”?

When Jesus is asked about what is non-negotiable, he answers by quoting from Scripture, our Old Testament. He starts with the Shema from Deuteronomy. “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and will all your soul (or life), and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” 

But Jesus doesn’t stop there. He was asked for the commandment that is “first of all,” but he adds as second, from Leviticus, “You shall love our neighbor as yourself.”