Sermon: Radical Hospitality

 Matthew 9:9-13
Radical Hospitality
James Sledge                                                                            March 10, 2024 

I was a very young boy when it happened, so I don’t remember it, but in 1960, not too far from my hometown of Charlotte, a group of Black college students began a sit-in at the whites only lunch counter in a Greensboro, NC Woolworths, a store that is now the International Civil Rights Center and Museum. The lunch counter is on display there, although a portion of the counter is in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and some of the seats are in the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Even though this was the segregated south, Blacks were free to shop at Woolworths, and so they frequented the store, but the lunch counter was for whites only. Apparently it was okay for Blacks and whites to be together in the checkout line, but sitting together while eating was problematic.

There is something more intimate about eating with someone as compared to simply being in the vicinity of each other. In fact it was quite permissible for there to be Black servers, but not Black diners. That encroached too much on the intimacy of eating.

By the time I was middle school aged, the schools had been desegregated, but the cafeteria still displayed a form a segregation. Blacks sat at some tables and whites at others, and only rarely did anyone cross over that boundary.

That boundary was even less permeable when it came to inviting people over to one another’s homes for dinner. Despite its loss of legal standing, segregation remained in force socially at my home and the homes of most people I knew, in large part because friendships continued to be segregated.

The legacy of those days is still very much with us. Our largely white congregation is a testament to the resilience of segregation, of the difficulty of crossing over long established social and cultural boundaries. There often is no intent to maintain such boundaries, and yet they persist.

Jesus’ day was not so different from ours when it came to social boundaries and barriers. Good Jews typically didn’t socialize with Gentiles or Samaritans. Religious boundaries were much more prevalent than they are in our day. Certain illnesses made a person “unclean” and so off limits, although in the verses on either side of reading this morning Jesus touches a leper to heal him, touches and heals a woman with a continuous menstrual flow, and touches a corpse, all of which would have rendered Jesus “unclean.”

In our scripture verses, Jesus does some boundary crosses of another sort. To start off, Jesus calls Matthew as a disciple, and Matthew is a tax collector. This story is not all that unlike the calling of Simon Peter, Andrew, James, and John, except for Matthew’s profession.

I think I’ve mentioned before that tax collectors were generally regarded as traitors. They were Jewish but they collected tariffs and taxes for the Romans, sometimes using intimidation by Roman soldiers as an incentive. Tax collecting was a franchise operation. The Romans doled out the positions for a price, and the tax collectors had to bring in a certain amount of cash to the Romans in return, but they could keep any money they collected over that amount. It was a system designed to be corrupt, and tax collectors often got rich. They were despised by religious people and ordinary folks alike.

We’re told nothing about Matthew other than he is at work as a tax collector when Jesus calls him. Matthew immediately gets up and goes with Jesus, just as Simon Peter and his fellow fisherman had gotten up and left their nets and boats.

But here’s where the story gets really interesting. In the gospels of Mark and Luke, what seem to be different versions of this story are told, although the tax collector is there called Levi. Matthew’s gospel (the author is anonymous) uses Mark as his primary source material, but he makes an interesting change when he retells this story. Not only does he change Levi’s name to Matthew, but he seems to change the setting for the second part of our reading.

In Mark and Luke, we are told explicitly that Levi hosts a dinner where Jesus is in attendance, but Matthew completely leaves this detail out. Instead he says, And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. A lot of people simply assume that this is at Matthew’s house, perhaps borrowing from the similar stories in Mark and Luke, but if we don’t know those stories, Matthew’s telling and the grammar of the sentence both suggest that this is the house where Jesus stays in Capernaum.

I can’t help but think that the gospel writer decides to emphasize Jesus’ habit of socializing with tax collectors and sinners by having him invite them to his own house. This accentuates his conflict with the Pharisees. They are upset with him because he is actively cultivating relationships with people they think must be avoided, people they would never sit down to dinner with.

Many years ago, I visited a historic Presbyterian church, though I’ve forgotten its name and location. What I do recall was that they had a curio type cabinet that prominently displayed artifacts from the church’s history. There was an old pulpit Bible, old photos that showed the buildings at various times, old offering collection baskets, and a small number of what I later learned were communion tokens.

The idea of communion tokens goes all the way back to John Calvin who suggested them as a way of making sure nothing profaned the Lord’s table. During their use in American Presbyterian churches, communion was celebrated quite rarely, sometimes only a couple of times a year. Prior to such services, clergy and elders would visit the church members and question them on their understanding of church doctrine as well as determining if they were living good and upright lives. If they passed their examination, they were given tokens which had to be presented in order to receive communion.

I’ve never heard of a Presbyterian church that still uses such tokens, or that examines members in preparation for communion. In fact, our practices at the table have changed considerably during my lifetime. When I was growing up, only confirmed members could receive communion. When my children were young, that changed to say that baptized children who had received instruction in the meaning or communion were welcomed at the table. And in recent years the table has been opened to all.

The use of tokens and restrictions on who was allowed at the table were well intended. People wanted to make sure that the meaning of the Lord’s Supper didn’t get perverted or understood in a superstitious sort of way, but inevitably such restrictions made it seem like the table was open only to the worthy, which seems quite at odds with who Jesus invited to the table.

At the end of our scripture passage Jesus says, “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” Jesus quotes the prophet Hosea. I don’t know that Hosea is speaking against sacrifice per se or any of the other rituals connected to worship or faith, but he and Jesus seem to think that mercy is the most important element.

The book we’re using for our Lenten study makes the point that “Jesus is the mercy of God in human form, never more so than when he eats with outcasts and welcomes all of us in our brokenness.”[1]

Worship is important, and how we worship matters. But what matters even more is that we radiate the mercy of God that in Jesus invites tax collectors and sinner to the table, that in Jesus practices a radical sort of hospitality that completely ignores the boundaries and barriers that we humans and our societies devise.

Whoever you are, however good or bad your story, Jesus calls you to follow, to go with him as a disciple. And he calls you, calls us as a church, to model his radical hospitality that continues to break down barriers and boundaries and to share God’s mercy with the world.

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[1] Campbell, Cynthia M.; Coy Fohr, Christine. Meeting Jesus at the Table: A Lenten Study (p. 26). Presbyterian Publishing. Kindle Edition.

 

Sermon: Meeting Jesus at the Table

 Mark 6:30-44
Meeting Jesus as the Table
James Sledge                                                                            March 3, 2024 

Back before I went to seminary, I once sat in a pew of my church and listened to a sermon on the reading we just heard from Mark. The preacher told an intriguing story of what might have happened when Jesus fed a crowd of thousands out in the wilderness one evening.

“We have to assume,” he said, “that not everyone who wandered out into the wilderness to see Jesus came with no provisions. There were no McDonald’s or Burger Kings in those days. People could not expect to find a place to buy food. Surely many must have packed some food and carried it with them. They would have stashed it away under their long robes, so you might not have seen it, but many had a little supply of food and drink with them.”

“But it is also a good bet that not everyone brought food. Maybe they hadn’t planned on staying all day. Maybe time got away from them as they listened to Jesus. But as the day wore on, many of the people were beginning to get hungry. And they were regretting that they had not packed something to eat.”

“Those with food knew that many others didn’t have food. Some thought it impolite to eat in front of others, so they kept their food hidden away. Others were afraid that if they let on they had food, the people without any would demand that they share. They didn’t have enough to go around, and so they kept their food hidden out of fear that others would try to take it.”

The preacher continued. “But then something strange happened. Jesus took some bread that his disciples had, along with a couple of fish. He said a blessing, and he began to pass the food out into the crowd. As the bread made its way through the crowd, some people began to take loaves of bread they had beneath their robes and add them to the bread from the disciples. And as one person shared, another saw it and added her food to the growing supply. Before you knew it, there was more than enough food to go around. Jesus’ act of sharing when it seemed he had far too little had initiated a wave of sharing that fed the crowd with baskets full to spare. The crowd had the resources all along. They just needed Jesus to show them how to use them.”

I was struck by this interpretation of the story, and by its implications. We have more resources than we realize. It is merely our fears that keep us from putting them to use. But if we faithfully follow Jesus, our resources are far more than adequate to do whatever we are called to do, even something as seemingly impossible as feeding a crowd of thousands. Faith can release tremendous human potential.

My former pastor’s interpretation has stuck with me for many years. It was very appealing to me for some reason. But over those years I realized what an inadequate interpretation it was. Oh, I suppose it very well could have happened that way. It makes perfectly good sense that it might have. But it clearly is not the message the gospel writer intended for us.

This is a story about God’s incredible power to provide. There are clear parallels with the Old Testament story of the Israelites being miraculously fed by manna while in the wilderness, and even stronger parallels with the Lord’s Supper.

This story is not simply a story of Jesus teaching us to share by his example, any more than Jesus’ death on the cross is Jesus teaching us to practice self-sacrifice by his example. This story shows the same power of God that is revealed through the cross and the resurrection. It shows the power God unleashed in Jesus to reach out to and provide for humanity.

And as the first generations of Christians gathered to observe the Lord’s Supper, they were drawn to this story—this story where Jesus provided for the needs of those gathered around him. And as they ate the bread and drank from the cup, they knew that much more than symbolism was at work. Just as Jesus had miraculously provided food for thousands of people that day, so in the holy meal of the Lord’s Supper, he still provided for them.

And now we come to the Lord’s table. We come, and we remember. But do we expect anything? Do we really expect Jesus to reach out and feed us, to nourish us for lives as disciples? Do we really think that Jesus will come into our lives that way? Do we really want Jesus to come into our lives that way?

Or are we more comfortable with memories and examples? A Jesus who feeds the crowd through his example of sharing is less troublesome in a way. If it is only an example of sharing, then we are not confronted with the awesome power of God. And if the Lord’s Supper is just a remembrance, we need not worry about encountering the awesome presence and power of God here. We can simply hear about God and Jesus, and we can decide whether or not we want to act on what we hear. Just like people could have decided whether or not to contribute their hidden food if the feeding of the 5000 is only a frenzy of sharing.

Sometimes I think we prefer memories and examples. It allows us to keep God at a distance. It allows us to feel like we’re in control—to keep the power of God that might radically transform us into new people from getting too close. And so we explain how miracles might have happened. Or we try to restrict the miraculous power of God to the role of insurance policy, giving us eternal life when we die, or perhaps healing us from some disease if we get sick. But we do not want the power of God just hanging around, threatening to use us for its purposes, threatening to remake us into people who no longer worry about our own needs, who care only about loving God and loving others.

And yet, just as surely as Jesus fed thousands of hungry people all those years ago, he offers to feed us at this table. He offers us spiritual food which not only meets our deepest needs and hungers, but which also nourishes us for new life, reborn life in Christ.

The table is set before us. The words of scripture are read and preached for us to hear. And in them, the power of God to love us, to care for us, to nurture us, and yes, to change and transform us, is placed before us. Jesus reaches out to care for us, to change us into children of God, and to feed and nourish us for life as God’s children. 

Come to the table. Come, not only to remember, to hear, to see, to taste, but come to meet the risen Lord. Come to be touched by his power. Come to be fed, to be loved, to be healed, to be embraced, to be made anew in Christ Jesus.

Sermon: Strange Guest List

 Luke 14:7-14
Strange Guest List
James Sledge                                                                            February 18, 2024 

Back in January, a question about dinner parties ran in the Ms. Manners advice column in The Washington Post. It read, “Dear Miss Manners: I must admit I’ve never understood etiquette’s requirement to invite people to one’s home after being invited to theirs. When my spouse and I host, we feel that it’s our idea — nobody asked us to make a dinner and invite the group. We enjoy cooking and spending time with everyone.

“Is it not improper for hosts to expect that they will be ‘repaid’ with invitations from their guests?”[1]

Miss Manners was not at all sympathetic to the writer’s point of view. While she agreed that the response need not be another identical dinner party, she said that it is completely necessary for the recipient to respond in a way that says, “We were not just looking for a free night out. We enjoyed ourselves and want to see you again.”[2]

Jesus is at a dinner party thrown by a leader of the Pharisees in our scripture reading for this morning. Jesus has already caused something of a stir at this party by healing someone. That might not be a big deal except it happened to be the sabbath. The healing has just happened when Jesus decides to broach the topic of dinner party etiquette, reminding people that they should not grab the seat of honor and perhaps be later demoted when someone more important arrives, but to take a lower seat and perhaps be promoted to a better one.

Jesus isn’t saying anything new here. There a very similar words in the book of Proverbs where it says, Do not put yourself forward in the king’s presence or stand in the place of the great; it is better to be told, “Come up here,” than to be put lower in the presence of a noble.

I don’t expect anyone at the party was surprised or taken aback by what Jesus says, but Jesus’ conventional words about humility are just an opening to talk about a much more radical form of humility. “But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. It’s probably worth remembering that in Jesus’ day, there was no social safety net and no real accommodations for disabilities, and to be lame or blind typically relegated someone to a life of begging and depending on the kindness of others.

That means that the dinner party Jesus suggests would look quite different. It would not be made up of the beautiful people or the successful and well to do or the in crowd, quite the opposite. But I wonder if Jesus hasn’t moved past talking about dinner party etiquette. I wonder if he isn’t talking about something bigger.

In the verses immediately after our passage, Jesus tells those at the dinner party a parable about a Great Banquet. It is clearly a metaphor for God’s kingdom, and the quest list also includes the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind that Jesus tells his host to invite.

Hospitality and table fellowship were a crucial part of the culture in Jesus’ day. Wedding banquets and dinner parties were the primary social events. Such events had much greater social importance and significance than similar events in our day, but the process for coming up with the guest list seems not to have changed much. People tended to invite friends, relatives, people they wanted to impress, people who had invited them, and so on.

But the ways of God’s new day are vastly different. Conventional guest lists tend to conform to the status quo, tend to perpetuate the insider/outsider boundaries of a society. And so those who want to live by the ways of God’s new day must act differently.

 This issue of table fellowship is crucial for Luke’s gospel and its companion book, Acts. The risen Jesus is made known in the breaking of the bread, and his new community is to be a sign of God’s coming new day, and so it welcomes those once thought to be outsiders and not on the guest list.

In our denomination’s foundational documents there is a classic statement known as the Great Ends of the Church. The last of these six ends or purposes is “the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.”[3] In other words, when people look at the church they should get a glimpse of what God’s new day looks like, and one thing Jesus makes clear is that it will be made up of lots of people who might not seem to be prime candidates for the guest list.

Sometimes churches do a good job of this. My previous church had a twice a month supper program that was open to all comers. On the larger of the two nights, we would often have over 250 people there. Some were working poor, and some were homeless. There were many different nationalities and races. There were children and elderly, people in poor health and those with disabilities. They sat at tables and members of the church and community served them.

Open Table at this church does something similar, and in both cases I think the gathering looks a little like what Jesus says the Kingdom looks like, the sort of guest list Jesus says to invite to the party. On Thursday mornings at the Meeting House and Wednesday evenings at Falls Church Presbyterian, a glimpse of the Kingdom is on display at the church. Everyone is welcome at the table. Everyone has a place at the table.

But what didn’t happened at Falls Church was for Sunday morning to look like those Wednesday evenings. We sometimes made very deliberate attempts to invite our Wednesday guests to worship or other church activities, but those activities, worship especially, looked a lot less like the Kingdom.

Churches tend not to look like the guest list Jesus envisions for his banquet. There are wealthy churches and churches where the members are of more modest means. There are Black churches, white churches, Latino churches, Korean churches, and on and on. There are liberal churches and conservative churches. Just about any division you can find in our society you can see mirrored in the church.

Some of that may be understandable, even necessary. If your primary language is Korean or Spanish, it makes a lot of sense to attend a church where they speak that language. But I wonder how many of the divisions in churches are not necessary, are actually a way that we look more like the world than we look like the Kingdom of God, that we fail to be an “exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.”

Who is welcome here? Who has a seat at the table? In an increasingly fractured and polarized world, those seem to me important questions to ask. How can we be an “exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven” if we don’t think about what will help us look more like God’s new day, if we don’t think about the ways we, perhaps inadvertently, let people know they aren’t welcome here.

During the Sundays in Lent (Sundays technically are not a part of Lent) we are leaving the lectionary and preaching from scripture passages highlighted in the book Meeting Jesus at the Table. (We’ll also be using some of that book’s chapters for an adult education opportunity on Sunday mornings as well as Wednesday evenings and Thursday mornings.) One thing that both the book and the scriptures make clear, Jesus had some strange ideas about who was welcomed to the table, about what the quest list is supposed to look like. And we are called to build a community that mimics Jesus’ guest list.

That call to build a new sort of community is rooted in a bit of incredibly good news. In the guest list for God’s new day, in the guest list for the Lord’s Table, the things that might seem to be disqualifying aren’t. Whoever you are, whatever you’ve done or failed to do, whatever doubts or worries you have, you are on Jesus’ strange guest list and have a seat at the table. Welcomed at the table, let us welcome others, and create a community of love and welcome for all.

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[1] “Miss Manners” in The Washington Post, January 15, 2024

[2] Ibid

[3] Book of Order, F-1.0304

Ash Wednesday Reflection

 Joel 2:1-2, 12-17
Ash Wednesday Reflection
James Sledge                                                                            February 14, 2024 

Honk, honk, honk, honk. The car alarm drones on and on, and nobody pays it much attention. I’ve sometimes wondered how useful such alarms are if they don’t get anyone to do anything. Often people just want to get the alarm turned off, to get rid of the annoying honk, honk, honk.

Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy mountain! Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near. Honk, honk.

I’ve lost count of the school shootings, of the mass shootings. The carnage of gun violence is sickening, and no one does anything. Honk, honk, honk.

Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy mountain!  Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near. Honk, honk.

The evidence becomes more and more overwhelming that we’ve reached a tipping point on climate change. The storms in California were just the latest episode. And I read where some scientists say we need to add a Category 6 to the hurricane scale because they have gotten so much stronger. Honk, honk, honk.

Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy mountain!  Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near.  Honk, honk.

Sometimes the very foundations of our democracy seem to be threatened. If people won’t trust the outcome of elections, what happens next? Honk, honk, honk.

Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy mountain!  Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near.  Honk, honk.

We’re good at ignoring alarms. We shrug them off. Many alarms scream that something is amiss in our world. Yet other than a little hand wringing, many churches hardly seem to notice. Too often, we act like religion is a strictly personal, private thing, even though the Bible insists faith is about community, about God’s people working together to proclaim good news to the poor, release to the captives, freedom for the oppressed, justice for the weak. But we work on our spirituality and ignore the alarms. Honk, honk, honk.

The Bible and God’s prophets insist that we cannot ignore the alarms. Joel is typical. When the alarm of crisis fills the land, it is not someone else’s problem. It is a call for the community of faith to come together for soul searching, repentance, and renewal. 

Blow the trumpet in Zion; sanctify a fast; call a solemn assembly. Assemble the aged; gather the children, even infants at the breast. Let the bridegroom leave his room, and the bride her canopy. But this trumpet sound is not that of an alarm. It is the ringing of the church bell. Ding, dong, ding, dong. God calls the community of faith to respond. “But the children have a soccer game. I did my part at church when I was younger. I’m just too busy.” Ding, dong, ding, dong.

The biblical prophets insist that when the world is amiss, it is not the fault of other folk. It is the fault of the community of faith. Our culture celebrates greed and getting whatever you want right now. It says that happiness comes from having it all. And we in the church nod in agreement as we bow before the gods of consumerism. Honk, honk, honk. Sound the alarm.  Ding, dong, ding, dong. Call the church to action.

Our society allows there to be one justice for the rich and another for the poor despite the Bible command that this cannot be. And we in the church shrug because we’re not poor.  Honk, honk, honk. Sound the alarm. Ding, dong, ding, dong. Call the church to action.

The civilian death toll in Gaza, the number of children left orphans, the number maimed, is beyond appalling. And we in the church mostly shrug because Israel is an ally, and it’s all a long way away. Honk, honk, honk. Sound the alarm.  Ding, dong, ding, dong. Call the church to action.

The prophets say that when the alarm sounds, it is the community of faith that must respond because it is the community of faith which has not done its job. Jesus says that we must be willing to deny ourselves. We must be willing to lose ourselves for the sake of the gospel. Honk, honk, honk. Sound the alarm.  Ding, dong, ding, dong. Call the church to action.

I can think of no more appropriate place to answer the alarm, and to respond to the church bell, than at the beginning of Lent. Lent is a time to remember that in a sinful world, a Christian life looks like the life of Christ, a life that is willing to go the way of a cross. Lent is a time to heed Jesus’ call to quit worrying about earthly treasure and concentrate on what really matters. Lent is a time to remember that we can celebrate the joy of Easter only because Jesus walked the way of the cross. Lent is a time to remember how seldom we carry our own cross and follow Jesus.  Lent is a time to remember what Jesus did for us, and to show our thanksgiving by renewing and redoubling our efforts to follow him as faithful disciples.

In just a few moments we will invite you to come forward and be marked with the sign of the cross. This mark of ashes is a sign of our human frailty, of our dependence on God, a reminder of the price that was paid for our sakes, of our failures to live as Christ calls us, and our call to live as Christ did. Honk, honk, honk.  Ding, dong, ding, dong. The alarm is sounding. The church bell is ringing. Will we answer?

Sermon: Listen to Him

 Mark 9:2-9
Listen to Him
James Sledge                                     Transfiguration Sunday, February 11, 2024 

When we first began discussing whether to bring back an 8:30 worship service, the question of what sort of service it would be naturally arose. Prior to the pandemic, it was mostly a carbon copy of the 11:00 service. The choir didn’t sing, but paid section leaders did.

Many of you likely recall the online survey we did to gauge interest in an 8:30 service, and one of the findings was that only twenty-five or so people who attended the old 8:30 service planned to come to any new one. That was not enough people to make the service viable, so we needed to make the service attractive to additional people.

We also wanted any 8:30 service to have potential for growth, and the old 8:30 service had declining attendance prior to the pandemic. To me, all of this argued for doing a different sort of service, one that offered more than simply an earlier time slot. Perhaps we could come up with something that would attract people who weren’t enamored by the traditional, liturgical nature of our 11:00 service.

Once we began thinking in that direction, the subject of a contemporary service came up. This often features a band with words projected on a screen, but that seemed too big of a stretch for us. Where would we put a band or screens in the Meeting House, and was our congregation ready for something truly contemporary? So we ended up doing what we call “informal,” featuring less traditional liturgy and music from the hymnal that feels more like songs than hymns. The new service has been fairly well received, but it still remains to be seen whether this different service will be able to find its audience and begin to grow.

There’s nothing really edgy about this new service, but it shares things in common with contemporary worship. It tries to create a slightly different worship experience, one that may be more accessible for people who don’t really resonate with pipe organs, ancient liturgies, and three-hundred-year-old hymns.

Perhaps what we did was too tame. Maybe we should have gone a little more “out there.” I once read about a non-denominational church that meets in a strip mall, plays video clips to illustrate the sermon, and has its own tattoo parlor. Riverside Presbyterian in Sterling has co-pastors, one a Spanish speaker, and features contemporary worship with pastors in untucked shirts. They also have a large coffee shop on site that generates a great deal of traffic into the church building, a former office space.

We at the Meeting House could never duplicate that. Our physical space precludes a coffee shop or tattoo parlor, but that doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with electric guitars or strip mall churches. Some of us grew up with the idea that “real” worship had to have a pipe organ, but of course such instruments were unknown to the church for centuries. Pipe organs have only been around a little over 500 of the Churches nearly 2000 years. 

The fact is that Christian churches have been adapting to the culture around them from the beginning. Early Christian worship was virtually indistinguishable from Jewish worship, but that began to change as more and more Gentiles came on board. Martin Luther is said to have used popular music of his day, perhaps even borrowing from tavern drinking songs to make the hymns he wrote more accessible. 

African American spirituals are another example of worship and music that developed for a particular cultural setting. And the contemporary worship songs and coffee shop churches of our day are but one more attempt to make worship accessible to the prevailing culture.

But in all attempts to connect faith to the world we live in, both those with tattoo parlors and those with pipe organs, there is almost always a temptation to domesticate God, to make God user-friendly, if you will. I’m not sure that any religious group or institution exists, or has ever existed, that does not, on some level, seek to make the divine more manageable.

Even religious rituals originally designed for no purpose other than to open people to God’s presence eventually get twisted into tools for managing God. And I think that is why anytime God actually shows up, it scares the bejeebers out of people, no matter how religious they are. They hit the dirt, they cower in fear, they shout, “Woe is me.”

You can see that in this morning’s scripture. The disciples have been hanging out with Jesus for a while and seen him do some incredible, miraculous things. But when Jesus is “transfigured” before them on the mountaintop, they are terrified. Moses and Elijah, Jesus’ clothes whiter than earthly possible… This was God’s doing, and when God actually shows up, it’s not manageable or user-friendly.

Peter doesn’t know what to say or do, but it seems that his religious sensibilities kick in.  Let’s build some shrines, some memorials. Let’s turn this into Transfiguration Day and celebrate it. But Peter’s babbling is cut off by a cloud and a heavenly voice. “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” And then it’s all over. No religious mumbo jumbo, no new religious rituals or celebrations; just a simple command. “Listen to him!”

Then it’s down from the mountaintop, back to the run of the mill, the day to day, the mundane. “Listen to him!” still echoes as the disciples head back down to the regular world, but it won’t take long for the disciples, or for us, to put the emphasis elsewhere. We’ll focus on believing the right things, on doing baptism or the Lord’s Supper correctly, argue about who can be ordained, and we’ll push “Listen to him!” off to the side.

I don’t mean to pick on churches or religion. Unlike some people, I don’t think it’s really possible to be “spiritual but not religious.” Any spirituality or faith that is going to impact your life in a meaningful way is going to require some practices, some method of doing things, some ways of interpreting it to others, some expectations of those who want to be a part of it. When I complain about religion it is not because I would like to be rid of it. I do not want that, nor do I think it possible. 

It’s perhaps worth remembering that Jesus was a faithful practitioner of his Jewish religion. He kept the Sabbath, went to the synagogue, was well versed in the Jewish Scriptures, and quoted them frequently. I don’t think Jesus had any plans to abolish his religion or to start a new one. But he saw clearly how religious structures and habits get twisted so that they don’t help us as they should. Religion easily gets focused on the packaging rather than the core. It easily substitutes reverence or attendance or rituals for faith and obedience, and so it needs reforming on a regular basis. It needs what happens in our gospel today, an awesome encounter with the unmanageable, non user-friendly God. And it needs to hear, “Listen to him!”

I’m going to guess that many of us heard the command to listen when we were growing up. Parents or teachers or coaches said to us, “Listen to me when I’m talking!” or asked us, “Are you listening to me?!” And we learned that there was a difference between hearing and listening. We knew that when listening was invoked, we were supposed to pay attention. We were supposed to do what was said. We understood that listen meant serious business.

“This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” 

You’ve likely heard the quote, erroneously attributed to Gandhi, that says, “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.” I suppose that to varying degrees, this critique fits most of us. And this problem exists not because people don’t believe in Jesus or don’t come to church enough. No, the problem is we don’t do the one thing God explicitly commands followers of Jesus to do, “Listen to him!”

We each have our own reasons, but I suspect a lot of us are afraid of what he might say, afraid of what he might ask of us. And so we do the same thing I did as a kid when my parents called, we hear but we don’t listen. We hear Jesus speaking, but we remain oblivious; an “in one ear and out the other” sort of thing. 

I suppose on some level, this is a faith and belief issue. We’re not sure we can trust what Jesus tells us, not sure the call to follow him leads us where we want to go, so we don’t listen. We want to keep Jesus close but ignore what he says. We’re a lot like Peter, wanting to build shrines and have rituals. But then comes that heavenly voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” 

We’re about to enter another Lent, and some of us will want to come up with Lenten practices or activities we hope will draw us closer to God. We’ll get ashes on our foreheads and give up chocolate or even do a little fasting. But what if our Lenten practice was to listen, to listen to Jesus? I wonder what wonderful things might happen to us, might happen here at the Meeting House, if we really did what God commands.

“This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”

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