Sermon: Remembering Who We Are

Matthew 3:13-17

Remembering Who We Are

James Sledge                                                            January 12, 2020 – Baptism of the Lord

It’s an old joke, one I’m sure I’ve told before, so if you’ve heard it, please bear with me. A group of pastors are meeting for lunch. As I assume happens with other professions, such lunches often include a fair amount of talking shop. There is some complaining and venting, some idea sharing. “What are y’all doing for Lent this year?” and other such discussions.

At this particular lunch, one of the pastors shared that they were having a problem with bats at the church she served. They had discovered a huge colony in the steeple and needed to get them out. She wondered if any of the other pastors had experience with this sort of thing. She didn’t want to hurt the bats but they were starting to make a pretty big mess.

One colleague shared the name of a local pest removal company. Another suggested an ultrasonic pest repeller, but the pastor said they’d already tried one of those with no success.

Finally another pastor said, “We had the same problem a few years ago and decided to enroll them all in confirmation class. When it was over, we never saw them again.”

For those of you from other religious traditions, confirmation is step two in a two-step process for becoming a full-fledged member of a Presbyterian church. Step one is baptism, something that typically happens when a child is still an infant. Confirmation, which includes making a public profession of faith, is the confirming of those baptismal vows, claiming the faith of one’s parents or guardians as one’s own.

Unfortunately, confirmation has a long history of becoming a graduation from church. Children are baptized, attend Sunday School as children, do confirmation as teens, and pretty much disappear after that. For much of the 20^th century, they often returned to church when they married and had children of their own, but that pattern has largely broken down. By the latter part of the 20^th century, many of those who graduated never came back.

I sometimes wonder if we in the church didn’t set ourselves up for this. In a variety of ways, we portrayed Christian faith as a status that one attains. Some evangelicals talk about being born again or saved. But what comes after that? We Presbyterians have rarely used the language of “born again” or being “saved,” but we still tended to treat Christianity as a status. In many congregations, Sunday School is seen as something for children. Presumably that means you are done at some point. You’ve finished, graduated, gotten your Christianity pin.

Some parents skip a step and just make infant baptism the graduation. They “get the baby done,” often at the urging of grandparents. And then they never go near church again.

Sermon video: Pharaoh and Herod vs God's Love

Audios of worship and sermons available on the FCPC website.

Sermon video: The Threat of Christmas

Audios of worship and sermons available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Pharaoh and Herod vs God's Love

Matthew 2:13-23

Pharaoh and Herod vs God’s Love

James Sledge                                                                           December 29, 2019

Every evening when I drive home at this time of year, I pass by a house with an elaborate nativity scene in the front yard. It’s not terribly realistic, but it is huge, covering half of the front yard. It has steps that go up to the floor where Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus are, along with wise men and some animals.

The holy family and their visitors are wooden, stylized figures, illuminated by strands of Christmas lights. But on those steps leading up to the floor are two more realistic figures. They are plastic, brightly colored, and glow from their own, interior lighting. One is Santa Claus and the other is a snowman, Frosty perhaps?

A little odd, I suppose, but it’s hardly the first time I’ve seen Santa and the manger side by side. I don’t suppose anyone actually thinks that Santa was there at Jesus’ birth, but I can understand why people might add Santa to the display. In popular imagination, the story of Jesus’ birth is a joyous, magical, miraculous story, often depicted as sweet and idyllic, something straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

Likewise the story of Santa is also joyous and miraculous. It is full of warmth and happiness and a sense of magic that even adults long for. It is easy to see why people would feel that the two stories go well together.

It may surprise some, considering all the attention we lavish on it, to realize how little coverage the Christmas story gets from the Bible. Of the four gospels, only Luke tells of Jesus in a manger. There’s no actual mention of a stable, and many scholars think this manger was inside a home, in the area where the animals were brought inside at night.

If the nativity display at your house is like the one at mine, the Wise Men are visiting the baby in the manger along with shepherds and angels. But the visit of the Magi doesn’t quite belong with Christmas. Young Jesus is likely a toddler in this story from Matthew’s gospel, a story that ends with the fearsome, frightening events from our scripture reading this morning. All the male children two years old and under in the little hamlet of Bethlehem are taken from their parents by government officials, and then killed.

The gospel writer borrows a line from the prophet Jeremiah to describe the scene. The words originally spoke metaphorically of the children of Israel carried off into exile while Rachel, one of Israel’s founding matriarchs, weeps for them. But now the metaphor has turned literal. “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”

Sermon: The Threat of Christmas

Matthew 1:18-25

The Threat of Christmas

James Sledge                                                                                       December 22, 2019

Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. “A righteous man.” Outside of the Bible, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone actually described that way. Have you? I can’t think of a single example. For that matter, I almost never hear the word righteous at all, other than to speak disparagingly of someone who is “self-righteous.”

Some Bible translations try something else: a just man, a man of honor, a noble man, a good man. Unlike righteous, I’ve heard people described as good, noble, honorable, or just, and meant in a complimentary way. Righteous, however, just isn’t part of our everyday vocabulary. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that any of those other words quite capture what the gospel writer is trying to say.

To say that Joseph is a righteous man is to say that he is faithful in keeping God’s law. He is more than simply good. He lives his life by God’s commandments. He is guided by the principles laid out in the Torah, and Torah says he should divorce Mary.

Divorce is required because Mary’s engagement to Joseph is something very different from engagement in our day. When two people get engaged in our culture, they have declared their intent to marry, but there’s no legal change of status. They are still single and, should they call off the engagement, the only issues to navigate depend on how far along things are. It could be a simple as letting friends and family know that the wedding is off. Or it could involve unbooking reception venues and dealing with angry members of the wedding party who’ve already bought bridesmaid dresses or non-refundable airline tickets. But regardless of how easy or complicated, calling the wedding off doesn’t require any legal action to undo the engagement.

Not the case for Joseph and Mary. Their engagement is as legally binding as marriage is for us. It cannot be called off. It can only end with a divorce.

I can only imagine what goes through Joseph’s mind when he learns that Mary is pregnant. He might feel betrayed, although if this is an arranged marriage, perhaps not. In the eyes of the Law, however, Joseph has been wronged. He has made Mary his wife, even if the final formalities are yet to come, but now that Joseph has learned of her presumed adultery, he must divorce her, regardless of what he does or doesn’t feel for her.

Sermon video: Needing John (and Accountability) for Advent

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Needing John (and Accountability) for Advent

Matthew 3:1-12

Needing John (and Accountability) for Advent

James Sledge                                                                                            December 8, 2019

Many of you are aware that the Scripture passages used in worship each week come from something called a lectionary, in our case the Revised Common Lectionary. This is a published list of readings for each Sunday, typically with a reading from the Old Testament, a psalm, a passage from an epistle or letter, and a gospel reading. We never use all the readings, but on most Sundays, we use some of them.

The lectionary follows a three year cycle, imaginatively titled years A, B, and C. Year A features the Gospel of Matthew, year B, Mark, and year C, Luke. The Gospel of John doesn’t get a year but gets woven into all three. As we entered into Advent last Sunday, we transitioned from Year C to A, and so we hear from Matthew today.

If you looked at all the passages listed in the lectionary for Advent, you might be surprised to discover that none sound very Christmassy until the gospel reading on December 22. And John the Baptist shows up on both the second and third Sunday in Advent. A person unfamiliar with church who happened to wander into our worship on those Sundays could be forgiven for suspecting that we didn’t realize what time of year it was. Do we really need to  hear from John so much and so close to Christmas?

Sermon video: Advent, Eschatology, and Moral Arcs

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website

Sermon: Advent, Eschatology, and Moral Arcs

Isaiah 2:1-5

Advent, Eschatology, and Moral Arcs

James Sledge                                                                                       December 1, 2019

Recently I’ve seen a number of articles and posts on social media commemorating thirty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. What a momentous time. The Soviet Union collapsed. East and West Germany became one country. Former puppet regimes began new lives as independent nations. And people heralded the end of the Cold War.

There was great hope for the future and talk of a “peace dividend.” America was the sole remaining superpower, and many hoped that military spending could be curtailed, allowing increased funding for social programs, education, infrastructure projects, and so on.

There were reductions in nuclear arsenals. Military spending remained flat for a few years, but no big peace dividend materialized. After 9/11, military spending increased dramatically, and we’ve been in an endless “war on terror” ever since. Now Russia’s war in Ukraine and interference in US elections feels a little like a return to Cold War days.

Through much of history, hopes for peace often seem to disappear like mist burned away by the morning sun. “Peace on Earth” will soon by plastered all over Christmas cards and Christmas displays, but our hopes for peace always seem to get overwhelmed by our tendency towards violence and war.

Back in 1928, France, the US, and Germany signed something called the “General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy,” better known as the “Kellogg-Briand Pact.” By the time the treaty went into effect a year later, the majority of the world’s nations had signed it, including all the major players in World War II, which would begin only ten years later.

Sermon video: Saying "Yes" to God's New Day

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Failing the Cowboy Test

Luke 23:33-43

Failing the Cowboy Test

James Sledge                                                               November 24, 2019

I was sitting on the couch watching television the other night. More accurately, I was looking for something to watch. I pulled up the channel guide and scrolled through it, but nothing really grabbed me. As I got to the very end, I saw a listing that read simply, “Cheyenne.”

I used to watch a show called Cheyenne when I was a little boy, and so I clicked on it to see if it was that. Sure enough, there, in beautiful black and white, was Clint Walker starring as Cheyenne Bodie.

Now I suspect that many of you have never heard of either Cheyenne Bodie or the actor who played him, but the show was a huge success when it aired from the mid-1950s to early 60s. According to Wikipedia, it was the first hour-long Western and the first hour-long dramatic series of any sort to last more than a single season.
Cheyenne was a large and muscular, but a gentle fellow, at least until someone needed justice. Then he was more than willing to use his brawn, or his gun, to set things right.

Cowboy heroes were all over the television when I was a boy, both in afternoon reruns and in primetime. There were many variations in the slew of Westerns that filled the airways, but in most all of them, the dramatic climax of the show came when good defeated evil in a fist fight or a gunfight. Good put evil in its place, and, for a moment at least, things were right with the world again.

My and many others’ notions of heroism and bravery and masculinity were shaped by Cheyenne and the Lone Ranger and Marshall Dillon and Roy Rogers and on and on and on. These heroes weren’t afraid to fight for what they believed in, even when the odds were against them. A real hero, a real man, might not want to fight, but he was more than ready to do so in order to defend himself or others.

I wonder if this isn’t one reason that so many of us Christians struggle with following Jesus. He asks us to live in ways that are contrary to accepted notions of strength, of bravery, of masculinity, of might and right. He tells us not to fight back. He tells us to love our enemy. He says not to seek restitution when someone takes something from us.

Jesus fails miserably at the cowboy test, the superhero test. Yes, he does best his opponents in verbal repartee on a regular basis, but when push comes to shove, he refuses to fight back. When he is arrested, he goes meekly. When people give false testimony at his trial, he makes no attempt to defend himself. When he is convicted for being a political threat to the empire, he raises no objection. No wonder that when the risen Jesus comes along a pair of his disciples on the afternoon of that first Easter, they say of him, “But we had hoped that he was the one…” They had hoped, but clearly he was not. If he had been, he would not have gone down without a fight. If he had been, it wouldn’t have ended like this.

Sermon: Saying "Yes" to God's New Day

Isaiah 65:17-25

Saying “Yes” to God’s New Day

James Sledge                                                                                  November 17, 2019

A few weeks ago, one of my Facebook “friends” posted this on her page. “When the time changes next weekend could we please go back to 1965 when life was simple!!!!! I think most will agree the 60’s were the best years of their life!!!” 

“Most”  here obviously doesn’t include anyone born after 1970. It might not include those who served or lost loved ones in Vietnam. It’s probably doesn’t include civil rights marchers who faced dogs, fire hoses, beatings, and death threats. But for many, including an eight year old me, it did seem a wonderful, simple time. We lived what I thought was the nearly idyllic life of a typical suburban family. Oh, for life to be that easy again.

Nostalgia is a way that many of us react when things are not going as well as we’d like. As with my Facebook “friend,” it usually involves some selective remembering that focuses on the good and forgets the bad. Those who want to make America great again, recall a time when American was in its ascendency, the preeminent superpower with a growing middle class, burgeoning suburbs, and an interstate highway system beginning to be built. Of course this nostalgia forgets the large numbers of people who were systemically excluded because of  race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on. It forgets the ecological damage being done without the least bit of concern.

There’s a lot of nostalgia in the church these days. Remember when the sanctuary was always full? Remember when the confirmation class had forty youth in it? Remember when we couldn’t find enough rooms for all the Sunday School classes? Remember?

Of course nostalgia forgets that 1950s Christianity often actively supported laws enforcing racial segregation and criminalizing sexual orientations or behaviors seen as “deviant,” The Church gave religious sanction to American society, speaking in biblical terms of a new Jerusalem, in exchange for the culture all but requiring people to participate in religion. But it was an easier time to be church, although Jesus did say that following him would be difficult.