Tuesday, December 6, 2022
Sermon - Trusting a Crazy Dream
Matthew 1:18-25
Trusting a Crazy
Dream
James Sledge December
4, 2022
Last Sunday we heard a bit of scripture
that I’ve not ever heard read in Sunday worship, the genealogy from Matthew’s
gospel. Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and
Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, and Judah the father of Perez and
Zerah by Tamar…” and on and on like this for forty-some generations. It’s a rather odd
genealogy in that in contains women, Gentiles, foreigners, scoundrels, and
others we might not expect to be highlighted in the genealogy of a Jewish king.
The Courageous Choice,
Rev. Lisle Gwynn Garrity,
A Sanctified Art LLC, sanctifiedart.org
This genealogy, with prefaces our scripture for this morning, seems to serve several purposes. It establishes Jesus as a descendant of David and so someone who could sit on the throne of David. It also foreshadows the diverse, inclusive new community that Jesus comes to inaugurate. And finally, it marks Jesus as something startlingly new in the story of God’s salvation history, something very different from those who came before him.
Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way, opens today’s scripture. And coming immediately on the heels of that long genealogy where someone fathered somebody and he fathered someone else, this way marks a striking change. It is something miraculous and new, a fresh start, a new creation. But this all depends on Joseph, something Matthew highlights by telling us nothing about Jesus’ birth itself, rather telling us about what Joseph did before and after it.
As critical as Joseph is to the story, we know next to nothing about him. He is the main character in this story and one other in Matthew; he is mentioned briefly in Luke’s gospel, and then he simply disappears. He is absent in all the stories of Jesus as an adult, leading many to find credence in the legend that says Joseph was much older than Mary, and he had died long before Jesus began his ministry. There’s even some uncertainty about his profession. Many of us learned that he was a carpenter, and he well may have been, but there seems to be some confusion in the Bible over whether it is Joseph or Jesus who is the carpenter.
Monday, November 28, 2022
An Interesting Family (Matthew 1:1-17)
Videos and audios of sermons and worship at the FCPC website.
Sermon - An Interesting Family
Matthew 1:1-17
An Interesting
Family
James Sledge November
27, 2022
Tree of Jesse from Capuchin's Bible, c. 1180
How would you answer if someone asked who
you are? What would you tell them? Perhaps you would say what you do for a
living. Very often when people meet someone for the first time they ask, “What
do you do?”
I grew up in what was then still out in “the country,” on land that had been a family farm a couple of generations earlier. There were lots of other people whose families had been in that area for generations, and if you met someone who didn’t know you, they didn’t typically ask what you did, they asked who you belonged to, who your family was.
No one ever asks me that any longer. We live in mobile society where people often don’t have deep roots in the area where they live. Who you belong to, who your people are, isn’t likely to be very helpful in telling anyone who you are. We’ll have to settle for, “What do you do?” or “Where did you go to school?” or “Where did you come from?”
In some ways, I miss that old connection to place and people. I have fond memories of sitting at the Sunday dinner table with my parents and paternal grandparents, listening to stories about my grandfather as a second grader picking up his teacher on the way to school in a little horse drawn sulky. I felt connected to something, part of something.
I think that people who didn’t grow up like I did still sometimes lament that lack of connection. The popularity of Ancestry.com and DNA tests speaks to a desire to connect with our stories, to discover something of who we are through our heritage.
Monday, November 14, 2022
Sermon: Joining the Cloud - Running the Race
Hebrews 11:39-12:2
Joining the Cloud – Running the Race
James Sledge November
13, 2022
 |
| Cloud of Witnesses Mike Moyers |
There were no lifeguards at this beach, and a large crowd gathered at the water’s edge, horrified but not knowing what to do. Someone wondered if they might be able to throw a rope out to them and pull them in, but who brings a rope with them to the beach? Besides, they were so far out.
Then someone got the idea to create their own line to those caught in the rip tide. They could form a human chain to pull the people back in. The crowd on the beach, most of them strangers to one another, began to link arms and move out toward the trapped people who were about a hundred yards from the shore. Eighty people joined together, stretching out to those children and would be rescuers who had been caught in the tide. And one by one they pulled every one of them to safety.
I think something similar is going on in the sermon that is the book of Hebrews. It speaks of a great cloud of witnesses that went before us, and over the recent weeks, you been hearing from church members about their witnesses, the ones who mentored them or guided them in some way in their faith journey. It strikes me that the witnesses who went before us, who founded this church, who introduced us to the faith, who taught us important faith lessons, form a kind of human chain that helps pull us forward on our walks of faith.
Monday, November 7, 2022
Sermon: Reflecting God's Upside-Down World
Luke 16:19-31
Reflecting
God’s Upside-Down World
James Sledge November
6, 2022
How many of you have ever given money to
your college for some sort of building campaign? I was thinking about that
topic, and I googled a map of a local school, George Mason. That map had lots
of buildings with people’s names on them, Carrow Hall, David King Hall, Fenwick
Library, Peterson Hall, and Harris Theater to name a few. There was also an
EagleBank Arena.
The Rich Man and Lazarus,
woodcut by Kreg Yingst
I know very little about George Mason, but if it is like many other universities some of these buildings were named because of money or after a benefactor. I’m certain that’s the case with EagleBank Arena.
Most of us don’t have our names on buildings at universities or hospitals, and that’s also because of money, the relatively smaller amounts that most of us give. You need to be truly wealthy, big time rich to get your name on a building.
That is why we should know something is out of whack in this parable Jesus tells before he is more than a line into it. “There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And there was a poor man named Lazarus…” There was a rich man and a poor man named Lazarus.
That’s not how it’s supposed to work. If Daniel Snyder got into an altercation with a homeless person named John Doe, I can assure you the headlines will not read, “John Doe Roughed Up in Altercation with Rich Man!” We all know the headline will say, “Daniel Snyder Accosted by Homeless Man!”
But Jesus’ parable gets this backwards because things are completely different in the Kingdom of God. Everything is turned upside down and inside out, letting us know that the things the world values are not the things God values, and warning all of us who have bought into the world’s way of doing things.
Monday, October 31, 2022
Sermon - What Salvation Looks Like
Luke 19:1-10
What
Salvation Looks Like
James Sledge October
30, 2022
Zacchaeus
was a wee little man, a wee little man was he; He climbed up in a sycamore
tree, for the Lord he wanted to see. Many of you are
likely familiar with these song lyrics. The song seems fascinated with
Zacchaeus’ size. I wonder why that is. Luke’s story does say that he was “short
in stature,” but it seems little more than a reason for him to climb a tree.
Zacchaeus by Ira Thomas
I wonder if calling Zacchaeus a wee little man makes him sound like a more palatable character. Wee little man sounds almost cute. What a nice little guy. I suppose it wouldn’t make a very good children’s song if it started, “Zacchaeus was a nasty crook, a nasty crook was he,” but it would perhaps be more accurate.
I mentioned in my sermon last week that tax collectors in Jesus’ day were no civil servants. They were key players in a corrupt system that filled Rome’s coffers and enriched those fortunate enough to buy into the position. By definition, tax collectors engaged in fraud. The only way they made money was to collect more tax than Rome required, keeping the excess. The more they could shake down from people, the richer they got. Chief tax collectors were even worse. They took a cut from all the collectors that worked under them.
It was a lucrative gig if you wanted to get rich, but it was also sure to get you hated and despised. Not only were you using the threat of Roman soldiers to extract money from your neighbors, but you were doing this for an occupying power in a land that longed to be rid of Roman control. When the crowd who sees Jesus go to Zacchaeus’ house complains saying, “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner,” neither Jesus not anyone else disputes that statement. If ever anyone could be labeled a sinner, it is Zacchaeus.
Monday, October 24, 2022
Sermon - How to Impress God
Luke 18:9-14
How to Impress God
James Sledge October
23, 2022
The Bible is so much a part of church
life, such a constant fixture in worship and Sunday School classes, that we
sometimes forget that it wasn’t written for us. It was written for people from
a completely different world and culture than our own, and so it can easily
lose something in translation.
John Everett Millais
Pharisee and the Publican
That may be the case with today’s scripture passage and the two characters in the parable Jesus tells. One is a Pharisee; the other is a tax collector, and the parable assumes that we are familiar with these two, even though that may well not be the case.
Growing up in the church I got the impression that Pharisees were the bad guys. The word pharisaic even means self-righteous and hypocritical. But the fact is that Pharisees were the good religious folks of their day. They were a Jewish reform movement that protested against the rituals, pomp, and sacrifices of Temple worship. They wanted people to “get back to the Bible,” as it were, to read the scriptures and do what it said there. In that sense they were very much like the reformers who led the Protestant Reformation, people like Martin Luther or John Calvin.
The Pharisees were also the inventors of rabbinical Judaism that is still around today. That means that the rabbis over at Temple Yodef Shalom are direct descendants of the Pharisees we see so often in the gospels.
The other character in the parable, the tax collector, poses a different interpretive problem. In his case, we may well not think badly enough of him. Americans may not enjoy interacting with someone from the IRS, but modern tax collectors have little in common with the tax collectors of Jesus’ day.
The Roman tax system awarded contracts to collect revenue, and they provided the support of soldiers for the process. Those with the contracts got to keep anything in excess of what was owed to Rome, and so tax collectors engaged in what was essentially a legal, shake-down racket. Under threat of arrest, they brutalized the population, especially those without any power or influence. In addition, Jewish tax collectors were collaborators with an occupying power, and they were hated and despised by the people.
There is really nothing comparable in our day, certainly no legal occupation that would be held in such universal contempt. In terms of reputation, they would probably fall somewhere between drug dealer and child abuser.
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