Sermon - Traditions: Big "T" or Little "t"

Matthew 15:1-28

Traditions: Big “T” or Little “t”

James Sledge                                                                                       August 16, 2020

Some of you may recall that when I first became pastor here, the Lord’s Prayer concluded the prayers of the people on most Sundays. On communion Sundays, it moved, becoming part of the Great Thanksgiving in the Lord’s Supper liturgy. (We had no informal service then, only the one in the sanctuary.)

We Presbyterians don’t have a fixed, mandated liturgy, but we do have a Book of Common Worship which suggests an order of service rooted in our theological understanding of worship. The latest edition of that book says. “The norm of Christian worship is to celebrate the Lord’s Supper on each Lord’s Day. If the Lord’s Supper is omitted, the service may include a prayer of thanksgiving concluding with the Lord’s Prayer.” (p. 25)

At some point early in my time here, I brought this up in a staff meeting. We all agreed that it made sense for the prayer to be in the same relative place each week and so we began following the order in the Book of Common Worship.

When the change was made, I heard from a member who was upset, furious might be a better description. This person could not believe I moved the Lord’s Prayer from the place where it belonged and said I had ruined the integrity of the service. I did my best to explain the reasons, but to no avail. The conversation caught me a bit off guard. I’d not expected a change that I thought minor would be so offensive to someone.

All church congregations develop traditions around how they do things, and pastors violate those traditions at their own peril. There are big “T” traditions such as celebrating baptisms and the Lord’s Supper or reading Scripture and preaching from it. And there are little “t” traditions such as whether to use organ, piano, or guitars, or where the Lord’s Prayer should go in the service. But whether a tradition is a big “T” or a little one doesn’t always determine how important it is to people.

The issue of tradition runs all through our Scripture this morning, both in Jesus’ conflict with the Pharisees and his encounter with a Canaanite woman. And I feel certain that Matthew places these two stories next to one another so that they inform discussions about tradition that were surely taking place in the congregation Matthew writes for.

Sermon video. Testing Faith: Stepping Out of the Boat

Videos of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Testing Faith: Stepping Out of the Boat

Matthew 14:22-33

Testing Faith: Stepping Out of the Boat

James Sledge                                                                                                   August 9, 2020

Even in an age of biblical illiteracy, a great many people have heard of Jesus walking on the water. It’s a well-worn metaphor. The part about Peter walking on the water may not be as well known, but I heard the story enough growing up in the church that it’s familiar to me and, perhaps, to many of you.

If you are familiar with the story, what are your thoughts on Peter? How does he function in this story, as a heroic figure, an example to follow? Or is he a vivid illustration of the disciples’ regular failure to “get it,” their struggles with faith?

I don’t know if I came to this on my own or if I picked it up along the way from sermons and Sunday School, but I’ve long thought of Peter as a cautionary tale, a failure, the one you don’t want to be, soaking wet with Jesus wagging a finger at you. “You of little faith…”

I mentioned in last week’s sermon how my father read Bible stories to us as children. This helped me learn many of the major stories from the Bible, but it also oversimplified them, making them a bit like comic books. And that view of Scripture stuck with me well into adulthood.

I thought of the Bible as mostly a collection of simple, even crude stories with clear and obvious meanings. This thinking was encouraged by popular notions of the Bible as straightforward reports of “what happened.” It never occurred to me that much of the Bible was written by sophisticated theological thinkers who told carefully nuanced stories, filled with symbolism and multiple layers of meaning.

In my simple, comic book view, our gospel reading is a plain old miracle story, another fantastical account of the unbelievable stuff Jesus could do. The disciples are there just to provide terrified, awe-filled witnesses, and Peter, well Peter’s tendency to speak first and think later always got him into trouble. And here he goes again.

Sermon video: Assaulted by God

Videos of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Assaulted by God

Genesis 32:22-31

Assaulted by God

James Sledge                                                                                                   August 2, 2020

When I was a child, my father would read Bible stories to us before bed. I can still see the big Bible Story book he used. It had stories about Jesus, but as a child, the Old Testament stories stood out more. There were a lot of “hero” type stories: David fighting the giant Goliath with only a sling, Samson, the Hebrew version of Hercules. And then there were all those stories about Abraham and Sarah and their offspring: Isaac, Esau and Jacob, and then all of Jacob’s sons, including Joseph.

The characters in those Bible stories didn’t seem much like real people to me. Perhaps that was just how far removed they were historically and culturally. Or perhaps it was because the Bible stories themselves had a kind of comic book quality to them.

Whatever the reasons, I was well into adulthood before it dawned on me what a messed up, dysfunctional family Abraham and Sarah’s clan was. It starts with the half-brothers Ishmael and Isaac and only gets worse from there.

Rebekah and Isaac have twin boys, Esau and Jacob. Esau is the first born by a few seconds, and the sibling rivalry is off and running. Not that the parents help matters much. Dad likes Esau, and Mom likes Jacob. Esau is an outdoorsy, hunting and fishing sort of guy,  and Dad plans to pass on the family business to him. Jacob is a Momma’s boy who likes hanging out in the tent. He’s also sneaky and manipulative, a scoundrel who takes advantage of Esau’s tendency to act first and think later. And his mother is happy to assist.

Jacob and Esau are born when Isaac is quite old, and he is feeble and blind by the time the boys are fully grown. Sensing that his time is short, Isaac calls Esau and asks him to go out hunting and bring back some savory game they can enjoy together. After the meal, Isaac will formally sign over the family business. In the language of the Bible, he will bless Esau.

Sermon video: Red Socks - Dare We Be Christians?

Videos of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Red Socks: Dare We Be Christians?

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

Red Socks - Dare We Be Christians?

James Sledge                                                                                       July 26, 2020

Have you ever done a load of white laundry, and something dark got mixed in? A single, red item somehow went unnoticed, and you open the washer to discover that everything has turned pink. It’s amazing the way one, unseen thing can give you a new wardrobe.

Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven, the coming rule of God, is a little like that. Jesus speaks of yeast and mustard seeds rather than red socks, but the meaning is much the same. Mustard plants weren’t typically grown as crops in Palestine, but the tiny seeds did find their way into the grain farmers sowed. The minuscule, dust-like seeds were easy to miss amidst the grain. Only later would the farmer realize that a fast growing mustard plant was transforming his field into something quite other than he had intended.

And the yeast in Jesus’ parable is not the packaged product we buy in stores for baking. This leaven is dough that has soured, begun to go bad. Bread makers know it as starter. It is added to a new mix of dough to make it rise in baking.

In the Bible, leaven is almost always a symbol of corruption. Leavened bread could never be used as an offering to God. At Passover, not only was leavened bread forbidden, but no trace of leaven was allowed in people’s homes. And Jesus himself speaks of the teachings of the Pharisees as leaven, something that corrupts and distorts the good gift of God’s Law.

But in the parables we heard this morning, Jesus speaks of God’s hoped-for new day as like a mustard seed that unexpectedly sprang up in the field, like leaven that has transformed the bread into something that is no longer fit to be offered to God, like a red sock that has turned white dress shirts pink.

Sermon video: New Life as Exiles

Videos of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: New Life as Exiles

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

New Life as Exiles

James Sledge                                                                                                   July 19, 2020

Back in March when the stay-at-home order was first announced, I don’t think any of us could have imagined that we would be holding worship today in an empty sanctuary, live streaming it into people’s homes. And even now, in mid-July, we still don’t know when we might have anything resembling worship as it used to be.

COVID-19 has turned the church world upside down. No one knows exactly what church is going to look like in the coming years. No doubt, livestreaming is here to stay, even when we can have some sort of in person worship. But it also seems highly likely that many congregations will never recover. Unlike FCPC, many churches have no real financial reserves and operate on extremely tight budgets. Some who study religious institutions are predicting large scale church closings in the coming years.

But what about church in general? Will worshiping from home open church up to new people, or will it accelerate an already established trend of church decline? Will people start to treat church like Netflix, watching a little worship when they have time or the mood strikes them? Will church move further and further from the center of people’s lives and from the center of the culture, further diminishing the prominent place church once held?

Over twenty years ago, long before COVID-19, Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann suggested the metaphor of exile as a good way to describe where the Church finds itself in America.^[1] He said that we had been deported from our comfortable homeland of the mid-20^th Century into a world that no longer works in ways we fully understand. The stores stay open and youth sports teams play games during our sacred worship times. Neither public schools nor the culture at large encourages church participation as they once did. The landscape of America has changed dramatically since the 1950s, and institutions like the Presbyterian Church, which had their heyday then, find themselves aliens in a strange land.

If exile was an appropriate metaphor at the close of the 20^th century, surely it is even more so today. The forces that led Dr. Brueggemann to speak of the Church in exile are still with us, perhaps even stronger. And now COVID-19 could push church even further to the edges of society and daily life, increasing the sense of exile.

In the Bible, when Israel is carried off into literal exile in Babylon, it created a crisis. As exiles in a strange land, nothing supported their religious life. The Temple was gone, the Ark of the Covenant lost, and no altar existed where offerings could be made. The Babylonian culture around them had different ways, different gods, different religious practices. It would be easy, even tempting, simply to adopt the ways of the prevailing culture.

Exiles are always in danger of disappearing, of being absorbed into the culture where they find themselves. Countless cultures have simply disappeared over the centuries as a result. To prevent this, exiles must cultivate a distinctiveness, a peculiarity. They must live in ways that set them apart, allowing them to maintain a distinct identity different from the surrounding culture. For the Hebrews in Babylon, Sabbath keeping and synagogue emerged in exile as crucial elements that marked them as different and distinct. But what about us?

Sermon video: The Hard Work of Unity

Videos of sermons and worship available on the FCPC webpage.

Sermon: The Hard Work of Unity

Philippians 2:1-8

The Hard Work of Unity

James Sledge                                                                                                   July 12, 2020

Recently I was discussing our sermon series on the Confession of Belhar with Diane. I was wondering whether we should have a fourth installment or stop at three. Two of the primary themes from Belhar, reconciliation and justice, would get covered fairly thoroughly in the first three sermons. That left only the theme of unity.

I suspect I grimaced a little at the thought of preaching about unity. I think I said something to Diane along the lines of, “I don’t know. I hate to do something trite.” The phrase, “Can’t we all just get along?” popped into my head. Unity often gets spoken of as something that should be simple if only we all just worked together, if we all just realized that we’re basically the same, if we all just loved one another. Unity isn’t all that hard, such words seem to say. We just have to do this. We just have to do that.

Diane first suggested of a sermon series on Belhar in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Because Belhar addressed apartheid in South Africa, it seemed particularly well suited to the most profound and persistent source of division in our country, that of race.

Despite the intransience of racism in America, we still want to believe we could be rid of it if only we just did this or just did that. Despite decade after decade where corporate boardrooms remain largely white, where “better” neighborhoods and “better” schools are largely white, where everything from wealth to education to job opportunities to pay to home ownership to medical care and more are skewed in favor of whites, we want to believe that there is just one more little thing we need to do, and it will go away.

Sermon video: Justice at the Center?

Videos of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.