Sermon: Healing Spiritual Amnesia

 Isaiah 40:21-31
Healing Spiritual Amnesia
James Sledge                                                                            February 4, 2024 

It is not uncommon to hear calls for the Church to find its prophetic voice, to “speak truth to power.” At a time when some Christians are willing to excuse the most hateful, misogynist, racist behavior to gain or keep political power, it is incumbent on us to proclaim the way of Christ, a way that has special concern for the weak, the poor, the despised, the oppressed. Yes, we do need to speak God’s truth to power.

The biblical prophets often did exactly that, condemning kings and the ruling class for policies that benefited the wealthy and injured the poor. They blasted outward religious show that was uninterested in matters of justice and a rightly ordered society. But there is more to prophetic speech than this.

Prophets are about getting people aligned with God. Sometimes that means chastising them or warning them about what will happen if they don’t straighten up. That explains why some think that prophecy is about predicting the future, but such prophecy is rarely meant to be predictive in an absolute sense. It is, rather, a call to change and create a different future.

But prophecy need not be warning. Such is the case in our reading today. Here the prophet speaks to exiles in Babylon, people who’ve been defeated, Jerusalem and its great Temple destroyed. These exiles have struggled to maintain their religious traditions in a strange, foreign land. Some conclude that the Babylonian gods are stronger than their God. Or perhaps God has simply abandoned them. If only they had heeded the words of prophets in the past, but now it is too late. God pays no longer pays any attention to their prayers.

In this situation, the prophet’s job is not to call the people to straighten up. Rather it is to call them out of their spiritual amnesia. They have forgotten who this God called Yahweh is. Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Memory has failed them. They cannot see beyond their loss and suffering, and so faith and hope evaporate. Is such a moment, the prophet’s work is to help the people remember.

The prophet reminds them that it is Yahweh who stretched out the heavens and filled the cosmos with stars. To Yahweh, the most powerful Babylonian ruler is but grass that withers and is blown away in the desert heat. Do they not remember this God who brought them out of slavery in Egypt, brought them into a good and fertile land?

 Then the prophet addresses fears that God has abandoned them, has rejected them, once again seeking to jar Israel’s memory. Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, “My way is hidden from Yahweh, and my right is disregarded by my God?” Have you not known? Have you not heard? Yahweh is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. who does not faint or grow weary; whose understanding is unsearchable. God gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless. If Israel will only trust in Yahweh, they shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

If we continued reading, we would hear the prophet assuring Israel that God is about to stir, to rescue Israel. We would hear the prophet continue trying to jar Israel into remembering, to shake her from her spiritual amnesia.

A few years back, Brian McLaren wrote a book with the rather unwieldy title, Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World. In it, he suggests that many of us are suffering from something he calls Conflicted Religious Identity Syndrome, or CRIS.

McLaren says that Christian identity in America has traditionally operated on a continuum. At one end a strong, vigorous identity pairs with hostility toward those outside the faith. People with a Strong/Hostile identity can be kind and friendly to outsiders but only in hopes of converting them.

At the other end of this continuum, hostility is replaced by respect and tolerance for the outsider, but this is typically accomplished by watering down identity. Those with a Weak/Benign identity are happy to engage in interfaith activities and all manner of faith exploration and questioning, but exactly what they believe can get pretty fuzzy. Most Mainline churches such as ours are on the Weak/Benign end of the continuum, and if we can articulate our beliefs at all, we tend to profess a generic god who fits easily into our political beliefs. Just don’t ask us to give a lot of specifics about what this god expects or requires, how this god is present, or what this god is likely to do in the world.

McLaren’s book is a call for the church to find an identity that rejects the traditional continuum, to forge what he calls a Strong/Benevolent identity. And I wonder if his is not a prophetic call for us to shake off our own spiritual amnesia.

Over the past decades, a lot of Mainline and progressive Christians have struggled with the state of things in this country. On the one hand, many have a strong desire to do something, to effect change. Many progressive Christians have participated in more secular events such as the Women’s March. And there have been more explicitly church responses to issues like racism. I think of our own DRT or Dismantling Racism Team.

But at the same time, I’ve seen and heard a great deal of disbelief and despair. Many are genuinely worried about the fate of the nation, as well as that of the Church. And in part because we progressive Christians have not had nearly as strong an identity as our more conservative, evangelical cousins, they are much more the public face of the Church.

I wonder if all of us, conservative and progressive alike, aren’t suffering various forms of spiritual amnesia. Evangelicals seem to be pursuing political power and forgetting the ways of Jesus in the process. We progressive sorts seem to have created a faith that is more philosophy and vague spirituality than something centered on the person of Jesus, on the God to whom all human plans and schemes are passing fancy, who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing. Often we either think it all depends on us fixing things ourselves, or we despair that it’s all going to hell.

Recently I heard a progressive colleague say, “I think I’ve preached Jesus more in this last year than I have in all my years of ministry.” I wonder if that’s not the prophetic speech we need right now, a call to remember. Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? The Creator and ruler of the cosmos has taken on flesh and come for our sakes. Jesus gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless, and those who wait for and trust in him shall renew their strength.

And so we will hope and pray for God’s kingdom, for God’s new day. We will pray for and work for the day when God’s will is done on earth. And we will not despair, for we know that the future belongs to God who in Christ has broken the power of death itself. We remember; we remember who God is and what God has done, and so we know that we shall mount up with wings like eagles… shall run and not be weary… shall walk and not faint.

Sermon: What Kind of Witness

 1 Corinthians 8:1-13
What Kind of Witness
James Sledge                                                                            January 28, 2024 

Some years ago, I was attending a meeting of a presbytery committee that I served on. At some point in the meeting people shared prayer concerns, and one woman, noticeably upset, shared a concern about her daughter and family.

They lived in Houston and were trying to evacuate ahead of a hurricane, but now they were stuck on an interstate that had come to a standstill, running low on gas so that they had to turn the vehicle off in 100 degree heat. The traffic showed no signs of moving, and they were beginning to worry about what they would do with their pets and children if they did run out of gas.

As my fellow committee member shared more information about the situation, I learned that this family had taken two vehicles in order to load up as many possessions as possible. I wondered how many other families had done the same, helping to create the traffic nightmare in which they now found themselves.

I wondered what sort of thought process had gone into the decision to take both their SUVs. Surely they must have realized that this would contribute to traffic congestion. Did they simply dismiss such concerns in the face of their desire to save both of their cars along with as much as they could stash in them?

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that this couple acted as they did. In a way, they were simply living into our American culture of individualism and materialism. Back when Hummers had a moment of popularity as vehicles, I once heard a driver dismiss concerns about the amount of fuel they used by saying he could afford it, it was his money, and no one had any business saying otherwise.

I don’t know anything about that Houston couple’s faith life, but I was a little surprised that the mother on the presbytery committee shared the fact of the two vehicles as though it was a perfectly normal thing to do. Doesn’t Christian faith require one to consider their behavior’s impact on their neighbor? And here the impact was extremely detrimental.

Now perhaps all this seems little connected to a scripture passage about whether it’s permissible to eat meat that had been sacrificed to idols. For that matter, how can we relate to that subject at all? It’s a concern from another time, from a completely different world. It will never come up in any of our lives.

That is certainly true, but the issues that arise from the question of eating meat sacrificed to idols may well be issues that we must deal with, so perhaps we should take the time to understand what Paul is talking about.

A little background will probably help. Paul had founded the church in Corinth, and he kept in touch with them. He got first hand reports from others who visited there, and the members at Corinth would write him with concerns.

 The congregation seems to have been made up mostly of Gentiles and not Jewish converts, and there was a broad mix of wealthy and poor, educated and uneducated. From the earlier parts of the letter, it is clear that divisions have developed within the Corinthian church, sometimes along socio-economic lines.

Clearly some of the wealthier and more sophisticated members looked down on the members they saw as simpler and with less understanding. These well to do members had embraced their new faith with great enthusiasm, and they applied themselves to understanding the nuances of their newfound, monotheistic theology. And the question of food sacrificed to idols was simply one of the flash points around this.

Corinth was home to some prominent pagan temples, and these were central part of community life. There were regular festivals and gatherings there, attended by anyone who was anyone, and a great place to hobnob with other important people. These gatherings typically served meat that started out as animal sacrifices. For that matter, most of the meat at the local butcher shop had started out the same way.

The wealthy, learned members of the church had studied their faith carefully, and it seemed to them that if there was really only one God, then meat sacrificed to idols didn’t really have any association with other gods since there were no such things. And so they reasoned that they could continue to eat at the festivals and participate fully in Corinthian society.

But other members, those the wealthy regarded as less sophisticated, worried that eating meat sacrificed to idols brought them back into the pagan world they had left when they started following Jesus. If they simply participated in pagan life as though nothing had changed, had anything changed?

At issue here is something as pertinent to our day as it was to Paul’s. What boundaries and limits does Christian faith put on participation in a world that is not governed by the ways of Christ? The Corinthians have asked Paul to settle this dispute amongst the church members. Can they participate fully and completely in their non-Christian world, or are there boundaries they should not cross?

I suspect that the wealthy Corinthians expected Paul to agree with them. Paul was, after all, an incredibly sophisticated religious thinker. Surely he would appreciate the rightness of their position.

In the verses we heard, Paul seems to accept their rationale for going to the temple festivals, although he has more to say on that beyond the verses that we heard today. But even though, perhaps just for the sake of argument, Paul concedes their point about there really being no other gods and food is not what brings them close to God, he does not take their position. Paul consistently sides with the poor and the weak.

Paul tips his hand right from the start when he says, Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. For Paul, even the most sophisticated theology must be in service to the ethic of love. Knowledge not centered on love, that merely helps get the most good for the individual, is contrary to life in Christ. For Paul, whatever freedom he has must be tempered by any negative impact it may have on a neighbor.

For Paul, it is crucial that no church member, no matter how sophisticated and well thought out their theology, ever do anything that might injure the faith of a fellow member. The needs of the fellow believer take precedence over his own, and Paul would just as soon never eat meat if he thought it might compromise another’s faith.

I should add that Paul later warns the Corinthians to have nothing to do with idols. It seems he has used this dispute to emphasize his ethic of love, but later he argues that association with idol worship is incompatible with the faith.

But what does Paul have to say to our situation? I mentioned earlier that Paul is addressing the issue of boundaries for Christians living in a non-Christian society, and I would argue that we are living in precisely the same situation. Our culture still has a bit of Christian veneer about it, but the way it worships wealth, power, individual freedom, efficiency, and busyness are all at odds with Christian faith.

I wonder if those Christians, and I probably include myself in this group, who have made easy accommodations with living in a wealth centered, individualistic, consumerist society haven’t damaged the faith of others. We have made faith so indistinct from the culture that almost no one who observes us sees anything compelling about the faith. And if faith is about nothing more than believing in Jesus to get your ticket punched for heaven, we’ve tossed out the lion’s share of Jesus’ teachings.

In our day, a lot of people are, understandably, concerned about the future of the faith and the church. Church participation continues to decline in the US at an accelerating rate, and we’ve seen the impact of that here at the Meeting House. But I wonder if the issues Paul grapples with in his letter to the Corinthian Christians might not offer us some guidance and even hope.

What if we lived our faith with a careful eye as to how it is perceived by others, as well as carefully examining how it needs to be distinct from the culture? Might we not have a unique opportunity to bear witness to the way of Jesus, to show others a different way, an alternative way, one more in accord with Jesus’ vision of a transformed world?

Sermon: Repenting and Following Jesus

 Mark 1:14-20
Repenting and Following Jesus
James Sledge                                                                            January 21, 2024 

I once saw a cartoon that featured a white dog with black spots that was wearing a robe and standing in a pulpit, speaking to a congregation of similar looking dogs. This dog is a pointing finger into the air while waving a Bible like book, and yelling, “… and he said unto them: ‘Bad dogs! No, no!’” Below the cartoon the caption read, “Hellfire and Dalmatians.”

This cartoon came to mind as I read the opening of our gospel reading for this morning with its call to repent. I could easily imagine that preacher dog saying, “Bad dogs! No, no! Repent!”

Repent sounds like something a revival preacher would shout or that a street preacher would yell at passersby. It sounds like a call to turn from your evil ways and walk the straight and narrow, and it can mean just that. But that’s not the only meaning of the word our Bible translates, “Repent.”

The word translated repent means to change one’s mind or to have a change of heart, to turn from what one was doing. Often this is used in a negative sense as in repenting of one’s sins, but in the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures that was the Bible for the first Christians, including the gospel writers, God is said to repent about something God had planned to do. God had a change of heart about punishing and instead decided to show mercy. The issue wasn’t God’s initial plans being bad or sinful. The issue was God’s mercy eclipsing any desire to punish.

And so I wonder if perhaps we shouldn’t be thinking about repentance when we hear the story of Jesus calling the first disciples. After all, the calling of Simon and Andrew, James and John, are introduced with Jesus opening his ministry saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

It’s easy to imagine that Jesus’ words are not addressed to us. After all, we’re already believers, but I wonder if those first disciples may be instructive for us here. Following Jesus required them to change their plans, to turn from what they had been doing. In a very real sense, the had to repent of fishing. I’m pretty sure that is no indictment of fishing, but following Jesus was not possible for them without this change, this turn away from something else.

Every call invites us into something new, but that requires leaving something else behind.  Discovering something new, something better, something more meaningful, means moving away from something else. It does not mean that previous thing was bad. But the new, the better, the more meaningful cannot happen without this move, without repenting.

You cannot discover the joys of adulthood without leaving behind childhood. You cannot give yourself to another in marriage without, as the old wedding vow says, “forsaking all others.” Ties to parents and old flames must recede. Every new thing requires taking a chance, a leap of faith that this new thing is worth repenting and leaving behind the old.

Jesus says the coming kingdom, God’s new day, requires repenting, letting go of old ways. God’s new day doesn’t look like the societies or governments we humans devise, and Jesus says that becoming part of this new thing requires turning away from old things to embrace the wonderful newness of God.

Some years ago, I read a story about a boy riding a Miami city bus back in the days of segregation. He and his brother took the bus to their downtown church for children’s choir. The return trip home coincided with the workday’s end, and the bus would fill with domestic workers and day laborers returning home from a hard day’s work. The boy, William, noticed that many of these workers had to ride standing the entire way. This was the days when people of color had to ride in the back and give up their seats to whites.

Bothered by this, William felt called to do something. He was white, but he took a seat in the back of the bus and remained in it until all the seats in that section were occupied. Then, when a Black woman got on, he would get up and give her his seat.^[1]

William engaged in the sort of repenting that I think Jesus calls us all to do. The segregated bus system was not his doing. In a very real sense, this young boy could have simply ridden up front without doing anything wrong. But the call to move the world toward God’s new day requires turning away from the old and the comfortable. It requires a certain risk or leap of faith. William moved out of his comfort zone and toward something new, one small step toward a world a bit more like God’s coming new day.

Repenting, turning and moving toward God’s newness must have come naturally to William. Years later he would be instrumental in helping his downtown Miami church merge with another, becoming a multi-racial congregation known for its ministry to the downtown homeless at a time when many other congregations fled to the safety of the suburbs.

But what of us? How are we called to repent, as individuals and as a congregation? What are the things we must leave behind in order to move toward the newness of God? They needn’t be bad things but simply things that must be left behind in order to follow Jesus.

Jesus says that the kingdom of God has drawn near, but the world still looks very little like that new day Jesus proclaims. Most of us are deeply embedded in that world that isn’t as God intends, and I wonder what things each of us might turn away from in order to live more in accord with the ways of Jesus.

And what about this congregation? Presumably the day is not too far off when a new pastor will arrive, and I feel confident in saying that she or he will call the Meeting House to repent in the same way that those fishermen did.

Invariably, every congregation settles into patterns and rhythms and activities that have become comfortable and second nature. They feel good and right, but that does not mean that they assist the church in being the body of Christ, in calling individuals and the world to become something new, something more like what Jesus envisions.

When that new pastor arrives, she or he will bring a new perspective that may well recognize the need to turn away from some old, established ways in order to faithfully follow Jesus. That does not mean those old ways were evil or wrong any more than fishing was evil or wrong for Simon and Andrew, but it may be that following Jesus requires letting them go, requires leaving old comfort zones and beginning something new.

This sermon began with a cartoon, so I think I’ll share another one. This cartoon features a group of people seated around a table with a blackboard on the wall with the words “Pastoral Search Committee” written on it. The people have sheets of paper in their hands, perhaps résumés of prospective pastors.

One of the committee members is speaking and says, “Basically we’re looking for an innovative pastor with a fresh vision who will inspire our church to remain exactly the same.”

This cartoon bounces around online because of the kernel of truth found in it. Very often, the last thing a church wants to do is change, to repent. Churches do not change easily and not without a great deal of deliberation and hand wringing over all the possible ramifications of the change.

But our scripture says of those fishermen Jesus calls, And immediately they left their nets and followed him. If you ever sit down and read Mark’s gospel from start to finish, you might notice that one of his favorite words is “immediately.” He uses it so much that translators sometimes decide to leave it out. Lots of things happen immediately in Mark’s gospel, but almost nothing happens “immediately” in church congregations. Most of us church folks tend to be careful, cautious sorts. We do things deliberately, after much consideration and debate. We don’t like to be hurried or to do things immediately.

This sort of caution has a great deal to recommend. It keeps us from doing things impulsively or chasing after every new fad. But I wonder if it doesn’t make it very difficult for us to repent, to turn away from the familiar and move toward the newness Jesus calls us to be part of and to show to the world. I worry sometimes that if Jesus passed by and said, “Follow me,” I’d say, “Could you leave some material with me, and perhaps a link to your website. Let me look it over, consider the financial implications, and I’ll get back to you.” And Jesus would go on his way without me.

The world is not what God longs for it to be, what God dreams it will become. You and I are not what God longs for us to be, and the Meeting House is not what God dreams it will become. There is something better, more wonderful in God’s future, in our future. And Jesus calls us into that future saying, “Follow me.”  And immediately they left their nets (their past, their comfort zones, their carefully crafted budgets, the way they’d always done it, their tried and true) and followed him.

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[1] Cynthia Weems in “Reflections on the lectionary,” The Christian Century Vol. 129, No. 1 (January 11, 2012) p. 21

Sermon: Searching for God

 John 1:43-51
Searching for God
James Sledge                                                                            January 14, 2024 

When I first began to think about going to seminary, I contacted a career counseling service that was connected to the Charlotte Presbytery. The idea of seminary seemed pretty far fetched for a 35 year old with a wife and two kids, so I wanted to do what I could to confirm the idea. Among the battery of surveys and instruments they gave me was something known as the “Myers-Briggs Type Indicator,” a personality inventory used by lots of companies, counselors, colleges, and church governing boards to help people understand their own and other people’s style of doing things. I’ve saw an article a few years ago questioning the validity of this indicator, but I think it is still popular.

The Myers-Briggs information was interesting and helpful, but I didn’t need that test to tell me that I was an introvert. Myers-Briggs doesn’t use the terms introvert and extrovert in quite the same way most of us do in regular conversation, but to a significant degree, I fit what most people mean when they use the term introvert. I was shy growing up, and I would go broke if I had to make a living as a door to door salesperson.

And so it will likely not surprise you to learn that while I enjoy going to social events with friends and family, my idea of torture is to find myself at a large social function where I do not know a soul. I don’t think there is anything that can make me feel more alone than to be wandering about amongst people who are talking to one other, hoping that I will spot a familiar face.

Some of you know what I’m talking about. Even some extroverts don’t like to find themselves in such a situation. They will probably manage to make a connection with someone faster than I might, but I don’t know that many people like to find themselves in a situation where they know absolutely no one. Very few people can tolerate being alone all the time, and I think being by yourself amongst lots of people I don’t know is one of the worst kinds of alone, where there are others all around, but I am connected to none of them.

But all it takes to completely change my experience is for someone to spot me, pull me in, speak with me and introduce me to some people that she knows. Suddenly I am not alone. I am with people. I can relax. I can enjoy myself.

Being truly alone for extended periods is an intolerable experience for most people. There’s a reason that solitary confinement is considered a particularly cruel sort of punishment. We are social creatures. We need human contact. Even more, we need people who know us, who we feel comfortable enough around that we don’t have to try to impress them. We need people we can trust, who we can talk to, who we can relate to.

But this doesn’t seem to function just on a human, interpersonal level. Many people find it just as unnerving to contemplate being all alone in a larger sense. Many people seem intuitively to sense that there must be a divine presence of some sort in the vastness of the cosmos. And to some degree, all religions are an attempt to forge a connection with that presence, to know God and to be known by God.

But there are some inherent difficulties in this attempt. Unlike the person we see at a party but do not yet know, God is very often not nearly so obviously present. The search for God can often seem like a struggle. The Apostle Paul speaks of humans searching and groping for God despite God being near to us. 

Theologians say that one problem which comes between us and God is sin. Now by sin they don’t mean things the bad things we do. They are speaking of a more fundamental problem, sin as a condition. Think of sin along the lines of alcoholism. It is an orientation toward certain behavior, a tendency. The wrong things we do, the ways we live that are contrary to God’s ways are the result of this tendency in the same way abusing alcohol tends naturally to flow from being an alcoholic. 

In the case of sin, our natural tendency is to substitute things other than God for God. Sometimes our substitutes, our idols if you will, are obvious, things such as money or success valued above all else. Sometimes our idols are more subtle, especially when they are good things taken too far, family, nation, church, and so on. 

This tendency to create substitutes for God makes it difficult to recognize and know the true God. God usually turns out to be quite different than we envisioned, and so it is easy for us to miss God. God defies our assumptions about how God should act, what God should be like, and so we often embrace a god of our own creating rather than the God of all creation. It’s easy to reject the true God and the call to be God’s people when that call doesn’t fit with our assumptions, doesn’t cohere with the god we’ve created for ourselves.

The difficulty of knowing God is present to a degree in both of our scripture readings this morning. In the story about the boy Samuel, God seeks to be known. God already knows Samuel, and calls him by name. But Samuel does not know God, and he is unable to correctly perceive that it is God calling him. Only when someone who does know God helps Samuel understand the voice he hears, can he respond to the God who beckons him.

In our gospel reading, Jesus seeks out people and calls them to follow him. From its beginning, the Christian faith has spoken of Jesus as the way in which God seeks to deal with this problem of knowing God. Jesus becomes a way that God can be encountered, can be known. Through Jesus’ humanity, God reaches across the gulf that sin puts between us and God.

But the mere fact of Jesus’ coming does not completely undo all the difficulties of knowing God. Nathanael ends up recognizing Jesus only with Philip’s help, and only with the realization that he is already known by Jesus. Jesus’ humanity makes God more approachable, more knowable, but many who meet him still reject him. Nathanael nearly did.

For those of us who grew up in the church, for whom the life of faith has always surrounded us like air that we breathe, we may not always appreciate the difficulty of knowing God. Sometimes this is because a deep relationship with God has been so much a part of our lives that we scarcely remember life without it. Sometimes this is because we have grown so comfortable with an image of god that we have created for ourselves. 

Regardless, our comfort level with church often makes us oblivious to the struggle of others to connect, to know God. In a world where church is no longer an integral part of the culture, the norm is more and more the person who was not raised in church, who is unfamiliar with its rituals and patterns. For more and more people in our community, congregations are a social function they’re not likely to attend because they’re pretty sure that they will know no one, that they will be totally alone in the midst of a crowd of people. 

And the tragic thing is that often these people have heard God call. They’ve gotten some inkling that God desires a relationship. Sometimes that tug gets strong enough that they even consider trying church, assuming that the people there know something about God.  But if they come where they’ve heard that God is to be found, and no one makes a connection with them, no one draws them in, if their aloneness only seems heightened, they may well conclude that God is not to be found here.

God is here. The risen Christ is here. But people may need others’ help to recognize him, to introduce them or help them see. God knows everyone of us by name, and in Christ calls everyone saying, “Follow me.” When we answer, Christ dwells in us and together we are the living body of Christ in the world. We become the embodiment of God’s love, of God’s welcome, of God’s desire to reach out and be known by all. Our lives, our worship, our caring, our hospitality bear witness to the one who knows each of us fully, and who calls each of us to full and abundant life as disciples of Jesus.

You are not alone here. You are fully known by the one who would die for you. There is no need to impress or worry about hiding your flaws. You are known. You are embraced. You are loved. And that love dwells in us most fully when, like Eli who helped Samuel hear God, or Philip who brought Nathanael to Jesus, we share God’s welcome and love with those who might otherwise miss them.

Christmas Eve candle lighting meditation

Candle lighting
Christmas Eve 2023

 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. In the darkness… We gather this night in the darkness. For some of us, this is an annual tradition, gathering to light our candles in midst of a dark winter night. But the darkness seems more smothering to me this year. The bloody war in Ukraine continues to drag on, and the situation in Gaza is heartbreaking. The horrific terror and hostage taking perpetrated by Hamas has been followed by the wholesale slaughter of civilians by Israel.

Meanwhile, the signs that earth is reaching a tipping point on climate change are growing more and more ominous.

Throw in conflicts in Sudan, Myanmar, Cameroon, and other places too many to mention, a continuing epidemic of gun violence in this country, and the demonization that is so rampant in American politics, and it feels like a particularly dark time.

I once attended a Longest Night worship service where the leader reminded us that the Christmas story is a dark one. That easily gets lost in all the sentimentality, nostalgia, and celebration, but it is still there. A couple forced by an occupying, imperial power to travel, even though a birth is imminent. Images often depict Mary on a donkey, but she may well have had to walk. And then there was no proper place to give birth.

And if we follow the story on to Epiphany, which may have been a couple years later rather than 12 days, Herod tries to kill young Jesus, causes his family to flee and become refugees. The story starts out dark and the second chapter is even darker.

 In such a setting, to say that the light shines in the darkness is no exercise in sentimentality. Rather, it is a bold assertion that the light which comes as a vulnerable baby, the love of God that comes in weakness, is somehow stronger than all that darkness.

And so as we light our candles and bask in their warm glow, it is much more than an ooh-ahh moment. It is an act of defiance in the face of the world’s darkness, an act that says we trust and hope in the power of God’s weakness and vulnerability over all the terrors of the darkness.

(Tell congregation to shield candles.) In a land of deep darkness, light has shined. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not, cannot overcome it. (Lift candles high.)

The light, the vulnerable light of a newborn baby, shines in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it. Let us embrace that light and carry it with us as we leave this place tonight. And let us live as emissaries of the light, bringing the hope and promise of light wherever we can, sharing it with a broken world that desperately needs it.

Sermon: Doing Christmas Right

 Luke 2:8-20
Doing Christmas Right
James Sledge                                                                            December 24, 2023 

The fact that Christmas Eve coincides with a Sunday creates a busy day for choirs, volunteers, and church staff, and I suspect that most such folks prefer Christmas Eve to be on another day of the week. The only thing I prefer even less is for Christmas to be on a Sunday. That means being at the church late on Saturday evening, then running home for any sort of last minute Christmas Eve activities at the house before being back at church the next morning with the small group of hardy souls who will show up on a Christmas Sunday.

Many years ago, when I was serving a church in Columbus, Ohio, one of those Sunday Christmases appeared on the calendar, and the local paper did an article exploring the various practices of different churches on a Christmas Sunday. Catholics usually have well attended Christmas day services every year, so a Christmas Sunday isn’t much different. Protestants are another matter. I don’t think any church I’ve ever been associated with had Christmas day services unless Christmas fell on a Sunday.

In this newspaper article there was an interview with a megachurch pastor whose church planned not to have any services on Sunday that year. According to this pastor, Christmas was about family, and they didn’t want to hold services which might get in the way of family time and family traditions. The article also quoted a New York Times article where several megachurch pastors said pretty much the same thing.

It is true that many families gather at Christmas, that various traditions evolve around opening presents and enjoying a big, holiday meal. Often newly married couples have to make difficult decisions about whose family they will spend Christmas day with.

But were those megachurch pastors correct? Is Christmas about family? Or maybe a better question; what is Christmas about?

It’s not about only one thing, I suppose. It certainly is about shopping and presents. Many retailers are heavily dependent on the Christmas shopping season in order to turn a profit for the year. Of course that Christmas has little to do with the one we are here to talk about today. That Christmas isn’t even necessarily religious. People with no religious attachments at all still put up trees and celebrate Christmas.

In the days before I became a pastor, I once worked for a company that was owned by a Jewish family. They held their company Christmas party – that’s what they called it – at the Jewish community center complete with Christmas tree and Santa Claus.

But most of us here are Presbyterians, Protestant Christians whose tradition says that our ultimate guide to what really matters and what is really true comes from scripture. And so, while we know all about and celebrate a Christmas that includes trees and Santa Claus and presents, presumably the Bible is where we go to find out what Christmas is really about.

However we run into a bit of a problem here in that only one of the four gospels actually has a Christmas story, Luke. Matthew tells of an angel appearing to Joseph in a dream and convincing him to take the pregnant Mary as his wife but tells nothing of the birth itself.

Perhaps this paucity of Christmas information is what led people to take the story of the Magi and join it to Christmas. Now we can have a star over our creche and fancy presents delivered by eastern sages. However, the Magi story likely happens when Jesus is around two years old, certainly not at the manger, and I wonder if we don’t miss something of what Luke is trying to tell us when we combine the two stories.

If we can remove the star and the Magi and their presents from our mental image of Christmas, I wonder what we might see that we have missed. Luke has set his extended Christmas story in the context of two rulers, Herod and the Emperor Augustus. The latter was greeted with calls of “The emperor is lord!” Yet when Luke tells of the angel appearing to the shepherds, we hear that to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.

Savior, anointed one (which is what Messiah means), and Lord; all these are titles for the emperor. Luke’s Christmas story makes an explicitly political claim. Here is one who usurps the loyalty owed the emperor. No longer is Caesar lord. Jesus is Lord! All political loyalties have been superseded by loyalty to Jesus, and that is as true in our day is it was then. Jesus alone is Lord, and so his commands to love neighbor and even enemies apply to our politics as well.

But even though Jesus is the one owed ultimate loyalty, nothing about his birth comes with the trappings of wealth or power. There is not even a private room for him to be born in. In all likelihood he is born in a private home, in a portion of the house where the animals were brought in at night. You could not get much further from a palace.

And when the angel tells the shepherds about this very unroyal like birth, the signs that are given are just as mundane, a manger and bands of cloth. (Older Bible translations spoke of swaddling clothes.) This was the standard practice in that day. They wrapped cloth around newborns to make them lie straight and not curled up. So in essence the divine signs given to the shepherds speak of poverty and ordinariness. This baby will look just like every other baby.

And then there is the choice of shepherds to visit. In our only Christmas story, shepherds are the only ones told and the only ones who come to see Jesus besides other members of the household where Jesus is born. Shepherds were the rough, uncouth rednecks of their day, the very last people one would expect to attend a royal birth.

Luke’s Christmas story insists that when God enters decisively into human history, the divine presence is not found in the halls of power or grand homes of the wealthy, nor is the birth attended by anyone special. God is found in the most ordinary of circumstances, and that presence is most accessible to the lowly. This is the Jesus Mary sung of prior to his birth. “(God) has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

Perhaps you’ve seen the story of the Bethlehem church that set up a very untraditional nativity this year. The baby Jesus is lying in the midst of a pile of rubble. I’m not sure but what this West Bank church truly understands what Christmas is about. God comes into the midst of those who are lowly and forgotten. This Savior, this Lord is not to be found among the mighty and the powerful. This God is to be found in the midst of the pain and hurt and suffering of the world.

In just a few hours, many of us will gather here again. We will come for the children’s pageant, and we will come for the lessons and carols and candlelight. Brass will play and we will join our voices to those of the angelic host who sing to celebrate Jesus’ birth. We should join them. We must join them. If even the hosts of heaven could not help but sing, how can we?

Yet it can be easy to sing, go home to celebrate Christmas, including the one with trees and presents and Santa Claus, and then return to life as usual. It can be easy to celebrate and then be done with it all until next year, to catch our breath after the whirlwind of Christmas and enter another January like every January before.

But if we really want to do Christmas right, we need to follow the shepherds, too. We need to find Jesus in places like where the shepherds did, not in halls of power, not among the mighty or wealthy, but among the weak and lowly, in the midst of the everyday pain and hurt of the world.

And we need to let the weak and lowly, the hurting and forgotten, those amidst destruction and rubble, know that a Savior has been born for them. Yes, for us, but for them especially. And we cannot do Christmas right if it does not proclaim release to the captive and hope to the hopeless.

Christ is born! Glory to God in the highest heaven. God has come into our midst, and Christ is to be found at work in the pain of our world. Thanks be to God!

Sermon: The Christmas I Choose

 Isaiah 58:6-9a
The Christmas I Choose
James Sledge                                                                            December 17, 2023 

I don’t suppose I need to tell anyone that it’s Advent and that Christmas is just around the corner. You would be forgiven for not noticing some movements of the liturgical calendar. No one sends out Reign of Christ or Trinity Sunday cards, and those days can come and go with scarcely anyone being aware.

That’s certainly not the case with Advent and Christmas. We didn’t have Advent candles in the South Carolina Presbyterian church of my elementary school days, but I can’t imagine there is a Presbyterian church anywhere that doesn’t have them now.

As you might imagine, I follow lots of minister colleagues as well as some of the congregations they serve on Facebook and Instagram, and those feeds are replete with all the varied way people are welcoming in the season. There are a plethora of different themes for Advent. Some churches have a tree in the chancel area. Some utilize purple candles and banners while others go with blue, and some have one pink candle while others, us included, go with all the same color.

Like us, most churches pull out special music for the season. Some of the churches I’ve served always did an Advent/Christmas cantata, often taking over the sermon slot on the third Sunday of Advent. Here we had a wonderful performance of the Messiah last Sunday afternoon, and there will be brass on Christmas Eve to help us celebrate the birth of a Savior.

The coming of the Word made flesh certainly deserves our worship and celebration. Something world changing has happened. An old epoch closed and a new one began. The promise of God’s new day, of a world set right, became visibly present.

No doubt many of you have your own way of marking the season at home. Perhaps you read an Advent devotional or light your own Advent candle on the dining room table. And most all of us decorate our homes.

How many of you add fasting to your Advent activities? Raise your hand. Nobody? Me either. That probably doesn’t surprise anyone. I don’t know many people who use fasting as a significant part of their spiritual life. Perhaps it shows up here and there in some folk’s Lenten preparations, but not in Advent or Christmas.

That, and a little lack of context, may let us miss what the prophet is talking about in our scripture today when he says, Is not this the fast that I choose, to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thong of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? I think I know what is meant by loosing the bonds of injustice and letting the oppressed go free, but what does any of this have to do with fasting?

Unlike in our time, fasting played a significant role in religious practice in Israel. It apparently was still the same in Jesus’ day because he warns people not to look haggard and dismal when fasting so that others will notice. And just prior to the passage we heard from Isaiah, the prophet speaks of how religious Israel is but suggests that it does no good.

Yet day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways, says the prophet. He speaks of how they delight to draw near to God. Yet nonetheless, the prophet describes the people crying out God, “Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?”

The prophet describes a situation where the people point out their religiousness and then wonder why God does not seem to be there for them. Look they say, “We do all the religious things we’re supposed to do. We throw ourselves into religious activity with abandon. Our worship is top notch. Why does God not seem to take note?”

In this context, the fast spoken of in our reading today is a call to stop imagining that getting worship or religious rituals correct will impress God. Is not this the fast that I choose… or perhaps, is not this the worship that I choose, the spiritual discipline that I choose, to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thong of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?

The prophet warns Israel about a religiousness that fails to transform those who practice it. Getting all the details just so, trafficking in all the right symbols and rituals, practicing the best prayer techniques, none of these matter if their behaviors don’t align with God’s will, if they don’t construct the sort of world that God desires.

There is a quote that floats around on the internet which is purportedly from Father Richard Rohr, the popular Franciscan priest who runs the Center for Action and Contemplation. I’ve never been able to find the original source of the quote, but it certainly does sound very much like Father Rohr.

Christianity is a lifestyle - a way of being in the world that is simple, non-violent, shared, and loving. However, we made it into an established "religion" (and all that goes with that) and avoided the lifestyle change itself. One could be warlike, greedy, racist, selfish, and vain in most of Christian history, and still believe that Jesus is one's "personal Lord and Savior…" The world has no time for such silliness anymore. The suffering on Earth is too great.

It is incredibly easy to go through all our Advent and Christmas activity, to get caught up in the wonderful music and worship as we, rightfully, celebrate the birth of a Savior, and then return to life as usual in January, not renewed and energized to live Christ centered lives, but simply worn out. It is easy to do a stellar job of getting it all just right but to live as though nothing has changed.

Especially in times like these, with unimaginable cruelty and terror by Hamas, civilians being slaughtered in Gaza, and Christmas celebrations canceled in Bethlehem over the horror of it all, it can be tempting for Christmas to be an escape from reality, a retreat into the warmth of familiar rituals and beloved carols. We can have a sanctuary of cheer and goodwill that insulates us from the world, if only for a brief moment.

But then the prophet speaks. Is not this the fast that I choose, is not this the Christmas that I choose, to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thong of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?

In one of those beloved Christmas carols we sing every year, in the verse we use in place of the Kyrie during Advent and Christmas, it says, “O holy child of Bethlehem, descend to us we pray; cast out our sin and enter in; be born in us today.” What does that mean, for the holy child to be born in us? What does that look like?

The medieval mystic and theologian Meister Eckhart once reflected on Mary’s role in the Christmas story, how she was “the mother of God,” the one who bears God into the world. He writes,

We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly but does not take place within myself? And what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and culture? This then is the fulfillment of time: when the Son of God is begotten in us.[1]

I have a pretty good idea what that looks like. Mary sang about it on the first Sunday in Advent when she spoke of the powerful being brought down from their thrones, the lowly lifted up, the hungry filled with good things, and the rich sent away empty. We heard Zechariah prophesy about it last Sunday when he spoke of a Savior who would “guide our feet into the way of peace.”

And today Isaiah speaks for God saying, Is not this the fast that I choose, the Christmas celebration that I choose, to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thong of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?

We are called to join our voices with those of Mary, Zechariah, and Isaiah. We are to do more than just celebrate another Christmas, we are to embody it, to proclaim it, to do whatever we can to undo injustice, lift up the oppressed, and break the yoke. Then, as Meister Eckart says, “the Son of God is begotten in us.”

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[1] Quoted in Barbara Brown Taylor, “Mothers of God” in Gospel Medicine, (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1995) p. 153

Sermon: Embracing the Dream

 Luke 1:57-80
Embracing the Dream
James Sledge                                                                            December 10, 2023 

By now I assume that many of you have started to receive Christmas cards. I know we have at our house. Inevitably, at least one of those cards will feature the phrase, “Peace on earth.” It’s a Christmas standard lifted straight from the nativity story in Luke’s gospel, but particularly in this year, it strikes a strange note with me.

The war in Ukraine has been dragging on for nearly two years. The bloody Hamas attack on Israel in October has been met with the wholesale slaughter of civilians on the part of Israel. The war in Sudan is replete with atrocities and massacres. China continues to hint at an invasion of Taiwan. Iranian backed militias are attacking American forces in Syria, and I could go on and on. Peace on earth feels a long way away.

I’m reminded of the Christmas carol, I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day. The carol borrowed some of the verses from a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem “Christmas Bells” which was written during the Civil War. It opens,

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
and mild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

However, the carol left out some of the verses, those dealing explicitly with the Civil War.

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

The news of our day also mocks the song of peace on earth, and I wonder what response we in the church have. Do we have anything more than a cute baby in a manger, some warmth and nostalgia, or the promise of heaven when we die? The gospels insist that we do, that something more has happened than just the birth of a baby.

You can see that in our scripture for this morning. The story of John’s birth insists that God is up to something. God has remembered the covenant with Israel, the promises made all those years ago to Abraham and Sarah. God has looked with favor on Israel and redeemed them.

Curiously, when the story of John the Baptist begins with a visit to Zechariah by the angel Gabriel, the opening words of that story are, In the days of King Herod of Judea… In much the same way, the story of Jesus’ birth will open with, In those days a decree went out from the Emperor Augustus…

The story of God acting in history is set in the context of the cruel reign of Herod, and the power of the Roman empire, and empire that was always at war somewhere, and that subjugated Israel and would employ the worst sort of cruelty to maintain their rule. Jesus himself would feel the wrath of that cruelty.

The stories of John’s and Jesus’ births are not just a bit of warm nostalgia. They are set in the context of the often-ugly geopolitics of the day. I’m sure there were Israelites who looked out on the news and situation of their day and saw little reason to celebrate, little reason for hope, but it is in this very context that Luke has Zechariah offer his prophecy.

Speaking of hope, I once read something by Brian McLaren where he contrasted hopes and dreams with wishes.[1] It’s a bit of a semantics argument, but I think he has a point. When someone says, “I wish I could win the lottery,” they usually don’t have any real hope of doing so. It’s just a wish.

Sometimes I think we’ve turned Christmas into little more than a wish. We wish people a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, but it doesn’t have much more meaning that saying, “Have a good day.” There is no expectation that such a wish accomplishes something or that we plan on doing anything to make it happen. It’s little more than a pleasantry, a greeting.

That’s certainly not the sort of thing found in the biblical accounts associated with Jesus’ birth. When Zechariah is filled with the Spirit and begins to prophesy, there are no “I wish” statements or “Wouldn’t it be nice.” Instead it is “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them. He has raised up a mighty savior for us in the house of his servant David… Thus he has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors, and has remembered his holy covenant.”

Perhaps you noticed that prophets often get their tenses wrong. They speak of what is to come as though it has happened. That is because they’re not simply wishing. They have a vision of what is to be, a vivid hope and dream of what is to come.

I’ve seen something of that sort happen within my lifetime. When Martin Luther King, Jr. made his “I have a dream” speech, he was not simply wishing for things to be better. He had a vision, a vivid hope and dream of what would eventually be. And so he worked tirelessly for that vision, for that dream. The dreams of prophets work that way.

Unfortunately, Christendom domesticated Jesus and made him compatible with empire and the wealthy exploiting the poor. The radical dream of Jesus, of a world where God’s will is done, where love triumphs over hate, got pushed aside, and the dreams of prophets like Zechariah became so much pie in the sky by and by.

I wonder if what the world really needs right now isn’t for people of faith actually to take up the vision of Zechariah, to embrace the radical dream of Jesus. To recover the Christmas hope of God breaking into history in Jesus and setting something new and wonderful loose in the world, something that has the power to transform and make new.

I wonder if what the world really needs right now isn’t for people of faith boldly to proclaim something more than a cute baby in a manger, to proclaim the vision, the dream of a new day that the births of John and Jesus herald.

I wonder if what the world needs most of all isn’t for people of faith to embrace that vision, that dream of a new day, and to work tirelessly to create it, knowing that the world resists it, just as it resisted Jesus.

God has looked favorably upon us and has raised up a savior for us. So join in the dream the prophet Zechariah proclaims. “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

Thanks be to God!

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[1] McLaren, Brian D., We Make the Road by Walking: A Year-Long Quest for Spiritual Formation, Reorientation, and Activation (New York: Jericho Books, 2014), p. 63.