Sermon: Humble Prayer

 1 Kings 2:10-12, 3:3-14
Humble Prayer
James Sledge                                                                                     August 15, 2021

Solomon's Prayer, illustration 
in the Luther Bible, 1522

 When you pray, what do you pray for? What do you ask of God? According to statistics I’ve seen, most of you likely pray. Surveys show that over half of Americans pray every day, and the vast majority pray occasionally. Prayer is quite popular, even among those with no religious affiliation. In fact, some who don’t believe in God report praying from time to time.

Prayer is considerably more popular than church participation, so presumably people find it helpful. Not surprisingly, most of those who pray report that God answers their prayers at least some of the time.

As to the content of those prayers, people’s needs and difficulties are popular topics, along with praying for friends and family. A fair number of people pray to win the lottery, and a smaller number pray to find a convenient parking space. But the surveys don’t say anything about what sort of prayers are more likely to get answered by God.[1]

I don’t know that our scripture reading this morning was written to provide general guidelines on prayer, but it does have a prayer that is favorably received by God. And so perhaps there are some pointers to be found here.

Sermon video: Who Are You?

 

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Sermon: Who Are You?

 Ephesians 4:25-5:2
Who Are You?
James Sledge                                                                                     James Sledge

Early baptism depicted in ancient fresco

My father was an electrical engineer who worked for the local power company until retirement. But he was also a man of deep faith who at one point in his life contemplated becoming a pastor. After I became a pastor, we would often engage in deep, theological discussions, perhaps some of the most significant such discussions I’ve ever had other than at seminary or with colleagues.

During one of our discussions, he told me about a woman he had dated as a young man who had no use for religion or the church. My father, who was very active as a youth in his church and had a very close relationship with his pastor, tried to communicate something of what he had experienced at church to this woman. She responded with a biting question that perhaps characterized her understanding of church. “Do they do anything besides tell you to be good little boys and girls?”

I’m met my share of people who would seem to share this woman’s view of church, although many saw it in more positive terms. I’ve known parents who brought their children to church even though they didn’t participate themselves because they thought a little moral formation would be good for them. They didn’t take their children to worship, but they viewed Sunday School as a moral companion to regular school, a place where children learned to be good little boys and girls.

I suspect there are a lot of adults, many of them church members, who view Christian faith primarily as a moral enterprise accompanied by divine carrot and stick incentives. Behave yourself and get a heavenly reward. Don’t and reap the consequences.

A cursory reading of our scripture for this morning might at first seem to support such a view. Tell the truth. Don’t steal. Take care with your anger. Be kind. Forgive people. In other words, be good little boys and girls. But the writer of Ephesians is not engaging in moralizing. Rather, he is describing what it looks like to shed an old identity and put on a new one.

Sermon video: Little Gods and True Life

 

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Sermon: Little Gods and True Life

 John 6:24-35
Little Gods and True Life
James Sledge                                                                                      August 1, 2021

I Am the Bread of Life, Joseph Matar, 2006

 I’m going to assume that most of you have heard of Joel Osteen, the televangelist and pastor of the Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas. The church occupies the renovated, former home of the Houston Rockets and pre-Covid hosted around 50,000 worshipers each week. On top of that, another ten million or so watch on television.

Osteen may be the most successful of the so-called prosperity gospel preachers, and along with millions of worshipers, he has a popular book, Your Best Life Now. According to him, God wants you to be happy, content, and have the best of everything, and the Christian life is about tapping into God’s goodness, God’s desire for you to have a nice house, a fancy car, and flush bank account.

From a biblical and theological standpoint, Osteen’s sort of Christianity is rather easy to critique. It ignores large portions of Jesus’ teachings. It is all about acquiring while Jesus speaks frequently of the need let go of the material and refocus our lives on doing God’s work in the world. In a very real sense, Osteen is heretical in that his teachings put God in service to us rather than us in service to God and God’s hopes for the world.

I’ve not noticed very many progressive Presbyterians who seem drawn to Osteen or the prosperity gospel in general. I’m not entirely sure why, but perhaps those raised in more traditional, mainline Christian traditions find him a bit on the crass side. He turns God into a sort of fairy godmother, a small god whose primary purpose is to improve your life, granting you everything from money and possessions to a parking spot right up by the store entrance.

Of course it is possible to create a less crass, more sophisticated version of a divine fairly godmother. We Americans have been well trained in consumerism, making it easy to think of God or religion as simply one more item we need to make our lives better. In this less crass version of a small god, making us feel better spiritually can become the good thing God exists to provide us. Perhaps we might call it a spiritual prosperity gospel.

Sermon video: More Than We Can Imagine

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Sermon video: Breaking Down Dividing Walls

 

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Sermon: More Than We Can Imagine

 John 6:1-21
More Than We Can Imagine
James Sledge                                                                                      July 25, 2021

 If you’re a regular to our worship services, you’ve no doubt heard me speak about Welcome Table, our program that provides people with a home cooked meal as well as a grocery store gift card. During much of the pandemic we expanded the gift card program to twice monthly, and at one point we were handing out $12,000 in gifts cards each month, something made possible by the incredible generosity of our members and others who donated to our hunger ministries.

What Welcome Table has done over the last fifteen months is nothing short of remarkable. But something Welcome Table does not do is address the underlying causes of hunger and food scarcity. That so many people will stand in line for a meal and ten dollars speaks to grave problems in our society. Many guests have full time jobs but still struggle to make ends meet.

As a pastor, I regularly talk to people who struggle with housing. From time to time, I provide a motel room for homeless individuals so they can get off the street for one night. I also occasionally help people who are late on their rent or utility bill. They work but their meager income frequently can’t be stretched far enough. I am happy to provide some small amount of assistance, but even if I can keep someone from being evicted, I’m doing nothing to address the lack of affordable housing or our society’s failure to ensure that hard working people earn a living wage.

Larger issues such as hunger, affordable housing, income equity, systemic racism, and more are daunting problems that can feel overwhelming. As a part of our recent Renew process, we separated our mission activities into a Mercy Ministry Team and a Justice Ministry Team, recognizing a need to focus some of our energy on these larger issues. Our congregation recently joined VOICE, Virginians Organized for Interfaith Community Engagement, as a part of this justice focus. Joining with other congregations and faith communities provides greater resources for grappling with larger, systemic issues. But even so, how can a handful of faith communities make a difference when the problems are so large and intractable?

Sermon: Breaking Down Dividing Walls

 Ephesians 2:11-22
Breaking Down Dividing Walls
James Sledge                                                                                                 July 18, 2021

Acts17v25.blogspot.com, January 3, 2013

 I recently finished reading Caste: The Origins of our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. For those who aren’t familiar with the book, Wilkerson argues that America’s persistent struggle with race is a more deeply ingrained problem that people realize because we aren’t simply dealing with the residue of slavery and Jim Crow legal segregation. We are dealing with a caste system where there is a dominant caste, whites, and a subordinate caste, Blacks.

This caste system, writes Wilkerson, is pervasive, shaping the worldview of all who live in it, both Black and white. It is the air we breathe, the water we swim in, and it does not go away because laws are changed or because a Black man was once elected president. Those in the dominant class benefit from it even when they are not “racists.” It is a resilient system that does not go away easily, that will not go away without a great deal of hard work and effort from those in the dominant caste.

I found the book a little depressing. It made the racial divisions in our country seem even more profound and intractable. But I also think the author paints a more realistic, accurate picture of race in America than many of us imagine.

For (Jesus) is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. The writer of Ephesians is not talking about Blacks and whites but about Jews and Gentiles, the defining us and them for the first Christians. I don’t know that this division amounted to a caste system, but there were certainly similarities.

Some Jews would not share a meal with Gentiles or invite them into their homes. Gentiles could not enter the Temple in Jerusalem but had to remain in one of the outer courtyards. The first Christians were all Jewish, and initially, they did not allow Gentiles to join. If a Gentile wanted to join the church, they would need to become a Jew first. Men would need to be circumcised, and they would need to abide by Jewish dietary restrictions.

The first big, knock-down, drag-out fights in the church were over Gentiles being able to join. People like the Apostle Paul argued that being baptized into Christ was what made one a Christian, regardless of whether or not the were Jewish or circumcised. But the leaders of the church in Jerusalem insisted that Paul was wrong. Only Jews were allowed in.

By the time our letter was written, likely be a disciple of Paul, Paul’s viewpoint has become more accepted, and the church was becoming more and more Gentile in its makeup. But the writer insists that the church has not left its connection to Israel behind. Instead, Gentiles have been joined to God’s covenant with Israel, and the two groups have become one. For (Jesus) is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.

Sermon video: Celebrating Newness

 

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Sermon: Celebrating Newness

 2 Samuel 6:1-19
Celebrating Newness
James Sledge                                                                                                 July 11, 2021

 The David we meet in our scripture reading this morning is a shrewd and astute politician. He is well aware that his kingdom is something daring and new. No one had ever united Israel into a nation before, and leaving the old, tribal ways behind would be difficult. David will need lots of things to go just right for this to work.

Perhaps it will help to recall what happened in previous episodes of the story. Until David’s time, Israel has been a loose confederation of tribes, tied together by language and their worship of Yahweh. The tribes sometimes cooperated and sometimes fought with one another. On occasion, a charismatic religious leader would unite some of the tribes to deal with an outside threat. But when the immediate threat waned, things returned to normal.

It seems likely that the growing military threat of the Philistines led to Israel’s first king, Saul. Saul was another of those charismatic leaders though he was not a religious figure. He united some of the tribes and scored some fairly impressive military victories. But Saul was not a great politician, and he eventually had a falling out with the religious establishment.

David had served in Saul’s army for a time, and one of Saul’s daughters, Michal, was married to David. But Saul and David eventually became rivals, a rivalry that ended when Saul was killed fighting the Philistines. After that, David’s tribe of Judah named him their king, and after defeating forces loyal to the house of Saul, David was named king of all Israel.

However, David still had doubters and detractors. His sort of king was a bigger break with the old tribal system than Saul had been, and religious conservatives were suspicious of this new king. Actually unifying the tribes into anything resembling a nation was going to be difficult, but David had a bold plan.

David chose to put his new capital in Jerusalem, a city that was not part of any tribe’s territory. David had captured the stronghold from the Jebusites, and now he proposed to establish the monarchy in something of a neutral location.

But that was only part of the plan. He also planned to make Jerusalem Israel’s religious center, giving his kingdom religious legitimacy and further unifying the tribes. And that brings us to today’s story, the story of the ark of the covenant.

Sermon video: Stumbling over the Jesus I Know

 

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