Ash Wednesday Reflection: Pausing for God

 Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
Ash Wednesday Reflection: Pausing for God
James Sledge                                                                                                  February 17, 2021

I’ve always found it a little odd that the gospel reading for Ash Wednesday, a day when many Christians walk around with a cross marked on their foreheads, is a teaching about keeping one’s religious practices secret. No one is doing this in a pandemic, but normally I have colleagues who stand out on the sidewalk or at the entrance to a Metro station and offer to mark people with ashes who are coming and going.

I’ve never been entirely sure what the point of this is. Is it about trying to connect just a bit with unchurched folk? Or is it meant to offer the imposition of ashes to folks too busy to drop by the church for the service? Perhaps it’s something else entirely.

Whatever the reason, ashes at the Metro station seems an apt image for our society, always busy, always on the go, needing a little religion between stops. Perhaps some of those hurrying in or out of the station appreciate the chance to grab a little religion on the fly.

A little religion. What exactly is the point of a little religion, or a lot of religion for that matter? What is the purpose of religion? What are people supposed to get from it? What do we get from it?

Sermon video: Transformed for Service

 

Audios and videos of sermons and worship on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Transformed for Service

 Mark 1:29-39
Transformed for Service
James Sledge                                                                                     February 7, 2021

 I attended seminary in the early 1990s, when issues of inclusive language and gender bias
had become a big deal. In Greek class I learned that most of the time the word translated man or men in the New Testament really meant people. As I continued my studies it became more and more apparent that many Christian stereotypes about women didn’t so much come from the Bible as they did from the males who ran the church and interpreted the scriptures for much of Christian history.

When you consider that the Bible appears to have been written entirely by men, women actually fare quite well, depicted as being disciples alongside men and as being leaders of some early churches. Still, the biases of those male writers do make their way into scripture. Being inspired by the Spirit doesn’t eliminate bias, and sometimes it is necessary to separate the inspired word of God from a writer’s prejudices.

My knee-jerk, first reaction when I read today’s gospel passage saw gender bias on full display. Jesus has just begun his ministry, called a group of disciples, all male, and made his first preaching and healing appearance. Now, for the first time, a female character shows up.

We learn almost nothing about Simon’s mother-in-law other than she is sick with a fever. The setting is a private one, and when Jesus heals her, it doesn’t impress any crowds. What it does do, however, is enable this woman to get up and wait on the guys Simon has just brought home. She gets up and serves them, and that is the last we ever hear of Simon’s mother-in-law. Ugh, I cringed

Except knee-jerk reactions are not always correct. As I looked more deeply at this story, I began to realize that Mark may not have been depicting this woman as a stereotype at all.

I have frequently lamented the way we often look at scripture without sufficient context. We take brief snippets of the biblical story and use them for sermons, Bible studies, and devotionals, often acting as though everything we need to understand the passage is right there in front of us. Most often, that is not the case.

Our gospel passage for today comes from the Revised Common Lectionary, a three-year cycle of readings providing verses from Old Testament, Psalms, Epistles, and Gospels for each Sunday. These passages are typically rather short, chosen knowing that they will be used by preachers on Sundays. I assume some care goes into how passages are divided up, but sometimes important information gets left out.

Sermon video: Like Falling in Love

 

Videos of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Like Falling in Love

 Mark 1:21-28
Like Falling in Love

James Sledge                                                                                      January 31, 2021

 There’s an old adage in the pastor business sometimes offered to a person contemplating seminary. It says, if you can do anything else, do that. I suspect the origins of the adage were about making sure a call was genuine. It should be so compelling that there’s absolutely nothing else you could do. But in our day, I’ve sometimes heard the adage offered partly as a warning about the nature of this work.

The late Lyle Schaller, author and authority on congregations who was sometimes called the dean of church consultants, once noted that in the span of a few decades, the vocation of pastor went from a high status, low stress job to a low status, high stress job. The foibles of televangelists, the loss of prestige for traditional, mainline churches, the rise of religious consumers, and more have made pastoring an interesting way to make a living.

Suffice to say that many pastors would likely find something else to do if there weren’t things about the work that they loved. For me it’s a number of things. I wouldn’t quite say I enjoy it, yet hospital visitation is very fulfilling. But the two things I love the most are teaching and preaching. I briefly thought about being a professor, but I enjoyed preaching too much.

I knew I wanted to preach while still in seminary. It’s likely why I never became an associate pastor. Preaching is still one of my favorite things, both the preparation and the actual event, but my expectations of preaching and teaching have changed over the years.

When I came out of seminary, I was steeped in a Reformed understanding of preaching which holds that when scripture is read and proclaimed (meaning preached), that by the power of the Spirit it becomes the Word of God. And so I took preaching very seriously. It seemed an awesome responsibility to proclaim God’s Word, something that could build up or tear down, could inspire a congregation to go where God called, could change lives.

I still take preaching very seriously, but I’ve learned over the years what countless other pastors have learned. It’s quite rare that preaching actually does much. People may like it or dislike it, enjoy it or be troubled by it, find it thought provoking or not, but seldom does it inspire a congregation to do something or cause someone to drastically reorder their life. Very often, preaching is simply one more voice trying to persuade, and we’re bombarded with attempts to persuade us all the time. From advertising to politics to editorials to Facebook posts, such attempts inundates our lives, and we’ve grown quite numb to them.

Neither preaching nor teaching seem to have much in the way of authority, any intrinsic power to effect change, to alter people’s lives. Perhaps they once did, but I wonder.

Sermon video: Leaving Where We Are

 

Videos of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Leaving Where We Are

Mark 1:14-20
Leaving Where We Are

James Sledge                                                                                      January 24, 2021

 I used to do a bit of fly fishing, and I sometimes go shrimping with a casting net when I’m at the beach. Maybe some of you do a bit of fishing now and then. I bring this up because our gospel reading seems to speak of Jesus’ first disciples, Simon, Andrew, James, and John, repenting of fishing. Why would they need to repent of fishing?

Jesus begins his ministry by proclaiming, “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news.”  And the very first action associated with this call to repent and believe is inviting some fisherman to follow him. And immediately they (repented) and followed him. I know. It doesn’t actually say they repented, but that is what happened. They turned away from what they had been doing – fishing – left their nets, their boat, their father, and went with Jesus. There might not be anything evil or sinful about fishing, but they walked away from it, something that may well have been the only way of life they had ever known.

The word “repent” is not a word often used in general conversation. It’s not a word used often in Presbyterian churches other than when it shows up in the Bible. The word has taken on an almost totally religious sense and a negative one at that. “Repent!” comes from a bony fingered street preacher who’s pointing at someone he thinks will go to hell otherwise.  Repent has come to mean, “Stop being bad, and start being good” or, more frequently, “Stop not believing in Jesus and start believing.” But in the Bible, while the word does mean to stop one thing and start another, it does not always follow that the thing is bad.

There is some repenting in our Old Testament reading. You might think I’m talking about the people of Nineveh who heard of God’s judgment against them. But in the verses we read, the one who repents is God. Bible translators are a bit queasy about saying God repented, and so they write, And God changed his mind… But “repented” is the literal translation.

I suspect that when we hear Jesus say, “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news,” we assume it isn’t addressed to us. We already believe the good news, so we’re done. But that misses the fact that Jesus calls us to do more than believe. He calls us to follow him, and repenting is part of that. 

Sermon video: A Holy Wind

 

Videos of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: A Holy Wind

 Genesis 1:1-5; Mark 1:4-1
A Holy Wind

James Sledge                                                                                     January 10, 2021

Baptism of Jesus, Bazile Castera 

Mural in Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral, 

Port-au-Prince, Haiti

from Art in the Christian Tradition, 

a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library

My wife and I have not had the best luck with wind since we came to Falls Church. I can think of a couple of times when winds knocked the power out and it stayed off long enough that we lost the entire contents of the refrigerator. And the terrible derecho that came through Northern Virginia in 2012 struck the evening before the moving truck arrived at the church manse with all our stuff from Columbus, OH. The movers unloaded on a sweltering July day into a house without AC. It was out for most of the week that followed. Fond memories.

This past week, and ill wind blew through Washington, DC, bringing sights I had never imagined, a wind that embodied fear, hate, racism, and privilege. And this wind was driven, in part, by the voice and tweets of our president.

The wind blows and things change, sometimes in terrifying ways. But the wind also blows in our Old Testament reading this morning. Those of you who learned the Genesis creation account some years ago may recall it differently. Previous Bible translations said something like In the beginning… the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. But in the newer translation we heard this morning, a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

Sermon video: Unexpected, Embodied Love

 

Videos of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon video: Joining Mary in Her "Yes"

 

Videos of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Unexpected, Embodied Love

 John 1:1-18
Unexpected, Embodied Love

January 3, 2021                                                                                         James Sledge

 During our long pandemic, streaming shows and movies has become an even more popular pastime. People are watching The Crown or The Queen’s Gambit, or catching up on movies or shows they’ve missed or re-watching ones they loved.

Even though I’ve not done much binging myself, I did do a little thinking about what really good movies I wouldn’t mind going back and watching again. I enjoy movies that a purely fun. I’ve seen Independence Day more times than I can count. But when I say really good movies, I’m speaking of ones that wrestled with some major issue, that were poignant, that moved me or troubled me in some way. Movies such as One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Lion King, To Kill a Mockingbird, Spotlight, and Saving Private Ryan, although I’m not sure I want to watch the Normandy landing part of that one again.

One movie that both moved and troubled me, perhaps because of its religious themes, was the 1995 film, Dead Man Walking. For those who never saw it, the movie revolves primarily around two characters, Matthew, a death row inmate played by Sean Penn, and Sister Helen, a nun played by Susan Sarandon. Matthew is despicable man with no sense of guilt for his crimes, no concern or sympathy for his victims. He is a walking poster-boy for the death penalty and seems to have absolutely no redeeming qualities.

Sister Helen is not blind to this. In fact she is quite repulsed by Matthew. Yet she feels compelled to keep coming to see him, to try and somehow reach him, to find the image of God somewhere underneath all the evil and hate and viciousness.

Matthew realizes Sister Helen’s religious motivations, and so he toys with her, seeing how much he can shock and infuriate her, testing the limits of her faith convictions. At times she considers not returning, but she always comes back.

Somewhere along the way, Sister Helen’s presence starts to become a comfort to Matthew. He’s not really sure why, but he misses her when she isn’t there. He’s upset when he is unable to see her for any length of time. At the same time he still mistreats her, and seems to try to drive her off. It is as if her presence brings him both comfort and pain.