Sermon: Forsaking Tribal Gods

2 Kings 5:1-14
Forsaking Tribal Gods
James Sledge                                                                                     July 3, 2022

Naaman Bathing in the Jordon

Woodcut from the Cologne Bible, 1478-80

 I love July 4^th, patriotic music, and fireworks. I’ve always felt very fortunate to live in the US, and I love all the history that is so much a part of the Washington, DC area. But I’ve never been very comfortable with the intersection of worship and July 4^th. Even in this fairly liberal congregation, I’ve had people get upset that the worship around the 4^th wasn’t patriotic enough.

I once had a colleague who decided to confront such thinking head on. He chose the July 4^th weekend as the Sunday to remove the American flag from the sanctuary, and he preached a sermon on why. It did not go over all that well.

More common is some sort of nod to the holiday by singing a patriotic hymn, making sure to give thanks for the nation in prayer, or, my favorite, putting some 4^th of July illustrations in a sermon that isn’t about the 4^th at all.

My queasiness about bringing July 4^th into worship grows out of two very different ways in which patriotic worship tends to go astray. On the one hand, it easily devolves into worshiping the nation. Worship that it supposed to celebrate and glorify God ends up celebrating and glorifying various aspects of our country.

On the other hand, patriotic worship has a troubling tendency to recast God into to some sort of local, tribal deity who is especially concerned with America. It is all well and good to say, “God bless America,” but that too often carries with it the unspoken caveat, “over and above all others.”

My issues with patriotic worship have always made me deeply appreciative the lectionary’s Old Testament reading for today. Every three years, this passage shows up on the Sunday between July 3^rd and 9^th which means it’s always close to July 4^th. And this passage totally blows up the notion of God as a tribal deity. In fact, it undermines a lot of popular notions of divine power and access to that power.

Sermon video: Lottery Ticket Faith (Luke 9:51-62)

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

Sermon: Lottery Ticket Faith

 Luke 9:51-62
Lottery Ticket Faith
James Sledge                                                                                     June 26, 2022

It seems like something of a lost cause, but the Presbyterian Church has long taken a vigorous stand against gambling, including state sponsored gambling such as lotteries. Countless governing bodies of the Church have repeatedly stated that lotteries, usually approved with the promise of additional funding for schools, are the most irresponsible and regressive sorts of government fundraising. Rather than simply requiring the most well off in society to pay for essentials like a good education, the state preys on desperate people who see lotteries and gambling as their best hope out of poverty.

Nevertheless, state after state has passed a lottery, and the state gambling racket continues to grow and multiply. Lotteries have become a part of the American landscape, and even those Presbyterians who ardently worked against their continued spread probably can’t resist the temptation to buy a ticket now and then.

Official Presbyterian policy calls on church members to boycott lotteries and gambling as an article of faith, a matter of principle. Such action is unlikely to change anything, and not many of us are gambling addicts who are personally endangered by lotteries and such. At least I hope that most of you are not the sort of who fill the lottery coffers by buying hundreds of dollars in tickets. Surely not many of you think of the lottery as a good investment. Anyone counting on lottery winnings to get the kids through college, to pay for your retirement, to help you buy your first home, to pay off student loans?  It might be wonderful to win one, but most of us wouldn’t think of entrusting our future to the lottery. And if you do, you have a problem.

Not many of us are going to cash in the life insurance policy, empty the savings account, forego retirement planning or college savings, and bet it all on the lottery. Lottery tickets are something we buy with discretionary money. 

Sermon video: Identity Crisis (Galatians 3:23-29)

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

Sermon: Identity Crisis

 Galatians 3:23-29
Identity Crisis
James Sledge                                                                                                 June 19, 2022

The Apostle Paul
Andrei Rublev (1410-20)

 When Christian missionaries began to go to different parts of Africa in the late 1800s, they took more than the good news of Jesus. They also brought with them Western ways. When they started churches among their new converts, they made worship look as much like it did back home as they could manage. They sang Western hymns and imported pianos and pump organs. And they wore black robes regardless of the temperature.

For all intents and purposes, those missionaries said to the people they met, “If you want to be Christian, you must adopt Western ways. No using indigenous musical instruments or existing musical forms. Being Christian meant becoming Western, and of course the Jesus they took with them to Africa was white.

Jesus always gets contextualized and culturized. Christianity began as a Jewish messianic movement, but its forms shifted as it became more and more of a Greco-Roman, Gentile religion. And when the emperor Constantine made Christianity the Roman Empire’s official religion, that religion took on the trappings of empire and power.

So what does it actually mean to be a Christian? What are the identifying marks of a Christian? I know people for whom it isn’t really Christian if it doesn’t include a traditionally shaped sanctuary that includes an organ for the music. I know of colleagues who took positions at new churches and then nearly got run out of town because they decided not to wear a robe, or they preached sermons from somewhere other than the pulpit.

In recent weeks I’ve had more than one conversation where questions about what the church is here for or what it means to be church have been asked. In some of these conversations, there was a bit of frustration with church, with Christian faith. If church is mostly about a certain style of music or architecture or dress, why does church even matter? Does church matter? Perhaps it depends on how we define church or Christianity, on what their identifying marks are.

Sermon video: Set Afire (Acts 2:1-21)

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Set Afire

 Acts 2:1-21
Set Afire
James Sledge                                                                  June 5, 2022 – Pentecost

El Greco,
Decent of the Holy Spirit

I probably don’t need to tell you that the number of the religiously unaffiliated adults is growing rapidly in America. A recent Pew Research study said that nearly three out of ten Americans have no formal religious connection.[1] And younger Americans are even less likely to have a religious home.

Among the unaffiliated, a popular self-designation is SBNR, or spiritual but not religious. Different people mean somewhat different things by this, but a lot in this group think of organized religion as musty old institutions that aren’t really necessary for someone to find a connection to the divine.

I can sympathize with such thinking. Churches have at times gotten focused on things pretty far removed from following Jesus. Add in the hatred espoused by some churches and throw in some sexual misconduct and abuse by clergy, and it isn’t too hard to see why some folks are suspicious of institutional religion.

But when spirituality gets understood as distinct from religion, spirituality moves almost entirely into the private, personal sphere. The term spiritual even takes on a kind of ethereal sense, largely disconnected from the day to day. It’s about internal experience, feelings of well-being and contentment, a warm vibe from a connection to something beyond yourself.

Sermon video: If You Love Me

 Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: If You Love Me

 John 14:15-29
If You Love Me
James Sledge                                                                                                 May 22, 2022

Christ Taking Leave of His Disciples
Duccio di Buoninsegna, Maesta Altarpiece
Museo dell'Opera Metropolitana del Duomo
Siena, Italy

     When I was growing up, the Church was nestled much more comfortably into the culture than it is nowadays. Stores, movie theaters, and other activities all shut down on Sundays, ceding the day to churches. In the south, where I was raised, schools also wouldn’t schedule events on Wednesday evenings because many churches held suppers and Bible studies on those nights.

It was not unusual for a teacher to pray in my classrooms, and once a year, the Gideons came to my school and handed out their little pocket-sized Gideon’s Bibles. When I played on sports teams in junior and senior high school, we invariably said the Lord’s Prayer right before the game or match.

Billy Graham had a daily advice column in the local newspaper, and one of the local TV newscasts featured regular religious commentary from a prominent, local pastor. Christian faith was so intertwined with the culture it was at times difficult to tell when one ended and the other started. To a significant degree, the Church was propped up by this arrangement as the culture actively encouraged and even coerced church involvement.

To varying degrees, the Church had sold its soul in order to get this cushy arrangement, but nevertheless, it begin to disintegrate during the 1960s and 70s. For a variety of reasons, the culture decided it no longer needed to prop up the Church, and society started to become more and more secular. Many vestiges of that time still exist, things such as prayers to open sessions of Congress or prayers at presidential inaugurations, but by and large, the Church has been left to its own devices.

Sermon video: Transformed by Love

 Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Transformed by Love

 John 13:31-35
Transformed by Love
James Sledge                                                                                      May 15, 2022

Christ Washing the Feet of St. Peter
Sadao Watanabe, 1963

 Over the years, I’ve read a lot of books and been to more than a few conferences that were supposed to help a congregation become more effective, more missional, more welcoming, more generous, more something. Often these books and conferences had some helpful suggestions for evaluating how things were currently working so you could think about how to change things to achieve your desired results.

One suggestion that I appreciated recommended going into the neighborhood around your church and asking people, people who were not church members, to complete this sentence. “XYZ Church, they’re that church that…” The idea is that your neighbors may have some insights into who you are, or at least how you are perceived, that you could never get just by talking amongst yourselves.

We did this at one of the churches I served, and we got a variety of responses. They’re that church with the preschool. They’re that church with the pretty stone building. They’re that church with the nice playground. They’re that church with the block party every fall. They’re that church with the community garden. They’re that church with the tiny parking lot.

We’ve never done this exercise here, although I suppose we could if all of you talked to a few people who lived near you, assuming you live near the church. But since that can’t happen right this moment, I’ll imagine what some of the responses might be.

They’re that church with the pretty stone buildings. They’re that church where people stand along the street with Black Lives Matter signs. They’re that church that has some sort of free meal program. They’re that church where our kids went to learn to roller skate or ride a bike in their parking lot. They’re that church with a rainbow flag. Perhaps you can come up with a few more, although if we did this for real, I suspect there would be a couple of surprises none of us thought of.

Jesus seems to have some thoughts about what people should see when they look at us. Many of us are familiar with Jesus’ words saying, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” And most of us have heard the song whose refrain goes, “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love; yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.”

Sermon video: Hearing the Shepherd

 Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.