Sermon: Like Falling in Love

 Philippians 3:4b-14
Like Falling in Love
James Sledge                                                                            October 8, 2023 

It isn’t the case with all denominations, but Presbyterian seminaries require classes in Greek and Hebrew, along with Old and New Testament courses where translating texts from their original language is part of the class. For reasons that will soon become obvious, I vividly remember translating our Philippians reading at seminary.

When Paul writes, For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish… the Greek word translated rubbish is skubala. (I love the sound of that.) But when we went to our Greek dictionaries to look up skubala, we also saw definitions like dung, filth, and excrement. And so naturally when students were asked to read their translations in class, more than one had rendered the term with a word I won’t repeat today, to requisite snickers and laughs. The professor smiled as well and said something about our translations being more accurate than our Bible’s.

But sophomoric translation jokes aside, what on earth would cause Paul to view his former life in such a thoroughly negative light? One possible answer was that his faith had helped Paul escape some horrible past, and indeed that is how Protestant interpreters read Paul for nearly 500 years, following the template laid out be Martin Luther.

When Luther was a Catholic priest, he was tormented by guilt. He used to drive his confessor crazy with endless confessions, often returning repeatedly when he’d thought of something he’d forgotten. Luther was also terrified that he hadn’t remembered all his sins and feared that they wouldn’t be forgiven. Luther lived with an overwhelming sense of dread.

Then the Apostle Paul came to Luther’s rescue. Reading Paul’s letters with their emphasis on being saved not by works but by grace through faith, Luther felt as though thousands of pounds had been lifted off him. He no longer worried about whether he had confessed every sin because he had been set right with God by grace.

That would be nothing but Luther’s interesting, personal story except that he assumed that Paul had had a similar experience. Paul must have despaired of not being able to keep every tiny bit of Torah perfectly and so lived in terror of God’s inevitable judgment. Thankfully, he had discovered grace in Jesus.

Protestant interpreters largely repeated Luther’s views until late in the 20^th century. Then scholarship on 1^st century Judaism began to question such thinking. A growing scholarly consensus now suggests that Jews in Paul’s day did not despair at all about being able to keep Torah. Rather they thought of themselves as being right with God if they tried to obey the Law and renewed their efforts when they realized they had failed.

Such a view seems to fit much better with Paul’s own words in our scripture. When Paul describes his life as a Hebrew from the tribe of Benjamin and so on, he says that he was as to righteousness under the law, blameless. Blameless. That doesn’t sound at all like Paul despaired of keeping Torah. He seemed to think he had been doing just fine.

So if Paul didn’t view his former life as something that had brought him to despair, as something that was a failure, why did he now speak of that former life as rubbish, dung, excrement? I think the answer is obvious. He had found something so wonderful that it made his old life pale by comparison. Throw in the typical Middle Easter penchant for hyperbole, and we have Paul saying that life with Jesus is so incredible that nothing else even compares.

Most of us come from very different circumstances than Paul did. If we grew up Christian, it’s hard for us to compare a pre-Jesus life to a new one in Christ. But that does not mean that we can’t experience something of what Paul felt. In fact, I suspect that many of us have had an experience that feels quite similar.

I think there’s a very good chance that many of you here have had the experience of falling in love. For some of you that may be a recent event, and some of you may have to think back a bit, but try to recall how life changed when you first fell in love.

When people fall in love it typically reorients their lives. Priorities shift dramatically. Time once reserved for other things is now consumed by time with the beloved. Often people who fall in love become extravagant in spending money on the object of their affection, willingly going without things that were once important.

Paul has had a similar experience. In Jesus he has encountered a love so wonderful that he is caught up in it, longing to love back in return. This experience of divine love had shifted his priorities. Time once reserved for other things is now consumed with Jesus. Paul has completely altered his life because of this love, and this is not a burden or an obligation. It is now his greatest joy.

While many of us have had the experience of falling in love, I wonder how many have had the experience Paul did, the experience of a divine love so wonderful that it reorients one’s life. Presbyterians and others like us have been especially suspicious of faith that is passionate and enthusiastic, preferring to keep things in the head rather than the heart. Yet John Calvin, the founder of our tradition who is often depicted as dour and scholarly, said, “The Word of God is not received by faith if it flits about in the top of the brain, but when it takes root in the depth of the heart…”[1]

When we are rooted in God’s love, it wells up in us and overflows in love toward God and neighbor. It takes shape as a grateful generosity driven by love. People who are rooted in God’s love are generous with their time, talents, and money in much the same way people who’ve fallen in love are. And as we enter into the stewardship season, a time that is too often more about fundraising and deciding how much we’ll contribute to keep the place running, I’d like you to think about God’s love for you and your love for God and neighbor.

In fact, stewardship season can be a time to take stock of your spiritual health. At its core Christian faith is about love, and if you’ve experienced God’s love so that you long to love God with heart, soul, and mind, and your neighbor as yourself, it will get lived out and become concrete. It will show up in a generosity to God and neighbor, and the biblical measure of this is the tithe, or the first ten percent.

If you’re like most Presbyterians, you are nowhere near this, and I would never want to claim that if you upped your pledge or giving to organizations that do God’s work you would suddenly be spiritually mature and fulfilled. But I will suggest that moving toward a tithe would not be unlike what happens when a marriage counselor urges a couple to spend more time together, take vacations together, and do date nights, spending money on each other.

If you do move toward a tithe, I doubt that you will regard your prior life as skubala, but you may well see it in a different light. You may even discover that your priorities have shifted, becoming a little more like those of Jesus.

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[1] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, John T. McNeill, editor, translated by Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960) III, II, 36, page 583.

Daring to Follow Jesus

 Matthew 21:23-32
Daring to Follow Jesus
James Sledge                                                                                     October 1, 2023 

By now almost anyone associated with the church world has heard the troubling trends in church attendance and affiliation. According to one poll, the number of religiously unaffiliated has increased with every recent generation. In the Silent Generation, 9% are unaffiliated. With Baby Boomers, it’s 18%; with Generation X it’s 25%; with Millennials it’s 29%; and with Generation Z, those born between mid-to-late 1990s and the early 2010s, it’s 34%.[1] You don’t need to be a statistician to recognize that this trend spells real trouble.

The reasons for this ever-growing group of religiously unaffiliated are many, and some are outside the church’s control. But the church shares a significant responsibility. Too often we have embodied the quote, sometimes erroneously attributed to Gandhi, that says, "I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." 

Christian activist and author Shane Claiborne has offered his thoughts on the demographic decline facing the church, saying, “If we lose a generation in the church, that loss won’t be because we failed to entertain them, but because we failed to dare them — to take the words of Jesus seriously and to do something about the things that are wrong in the world.”[2]

If you know Claiborne at all, you likely know that he is quite disenchanted with the sort of Christianity trafficked by the typical church. Very often this Christianity is focused mostly on what people believe, and what few demands it puts on members are largely internal, focused on keeping the institution going. Only rarely does it reflect the radical teachings Jesus.

People like Claiborne can be a thorn in the side of the traditional church, questioning whether this Christianity actually follows Jesus. But if Claiborne is a pain in the you know what, he’s in good company. Jesus has similar questions about the church of his day.

When modern people look at Jesus’ ministry, his conflicts with religious authorities are often seen as a fight with cartoon bad guys. They were so corrupt that Jesus needed to start a whole new religion to take their place.

Except cartoon bad guys are a rarity. Much more common are people of faith who have gotten off track. Indeed the image of Jesus cleansing the Temple the day before our reading takes place is often depicted as Jesus attacking a gross commercialization of the Temple with money changers and animal sellers setting up shop there.

In reality, the money changers and animal sellers were an honest attempt to assist the pilgrims who had made the long journey to Jerusalem. Money changers allowed people to exchange coins with blasphemous images on them for imageless Jewish coins appropriate for an offering at the Temple. Similarly, animal sellers allowed pilgrims who couldn’t bring animals with them on the trip to Jerusalem to make a sacrifice. On top of that, neither money changers nor animal sellers were actually in the Temple. They were in the courtyard outside.

To be honest, I’ve never been exactly sure what got Jesus so worked up that he turned over tables and chased vendors away, but it seems likely that it was judgment on a theology that imagined Temple worship somehow guaranteed God’s presence in Israel’s midst. In that sense Jesus may well be as upset by the worshippers as by the vendors.

Regardless, Jesus’ actions are more than a little upsetting to worshippers and authorities alike. Jesus had also brought the blind in the lame into the Temple, people who were ritually unclean and not supposed to be there. So it’s no surprise that when Jesus reenters the Temple the next day, the leaders demand to know what gives him the authority to do such things.

Jesus evades their question by asking whether they recognized divine authority in John the Baptizer. John was a difficult subject for them because he had been a thorn in the side of religion that was mostly about belief and rituals. He had called people to repent, which is less about feeling bad for what one has done and more about changing one’s behavior. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near,” cried John, and he said this was about bearing fruit.

Interestingly, when Jesus began his ministry, he picked up John’s cry, repeating it word for word. And throughout his ministry Jesus laid out what sort of changes this entailed, the fruits he expected people to bear, things like mercy, longing for a rightly ordered society, loving all, even enemies, caring for the least of these, and having a life not focused on wealth.

After deflecting the religious leaders’ question about where his authority came from, Jesus engages them with an easily understood parable. Two sons are asked to work in the vineyard, the first says “No” but then goes while the second says “Yes” but then does not go.

The parable has a clear allusion to an earlier teaching of Jesus that gets lost in English translations. When the second son says, “I go, sir,” and then doesn’t go, the word translated sir is the same word translated lord in other places, notable when Jesus says, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.” It seems that Jesus expects people to bear fruit just like John did.

I think people like Shane Claiborne are modern day prophets calling us to repent, to change what we are doing, to bear fruit. “If we lose a generation in the church, that loss won’t be because we failed to entertain them, but because we failed to dare them — to take the words of Jesus seriously and to do something about the things that are wrong in the world.”

But before we can dare others to take the words of Jesus seriously, perhaps we need to dare ourselves. Dare we trust that the way of Jesus is the way to life in all its fullness? Dare we long for and work for a world set right, a world where there is good news to the poor and release to the captive? Dare we let Jesus’ dream for a new sort of world become our own?

I think God is longing for that sort of Christian and that sort of church, and I think the world is longing for that sort of Christian and that sort of church. Dare we be the Christians and the church that God and the world are longing for?

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[1] https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/generation-z-future-of-faith/

[2] Foreword to nuChristian: Finding Faith in a New Generation by Russell E. D. Rathbun (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 2009), vi.

A Subversive Vision

Matthew 20:1-16
A Subversive Vision
James Sledge                                                                            September 24, 2023 

Many years ago, I saw a news report about a local fellow who had filed a lawsuit against some of his coworkers over a lottery ticket that had won 99 million dollars. It seems that there was a group of workers who went in together to buy tickets on a regular basis, agreeing to split the winnings should they ever win.

The fellow who filed the lawsuit was a member of this group, and he claimed that there was an unwritten agreement that they covered for each other when someone was out sick as he had been when the winning ticket was purchased. The person from the group they interviewed for the news contradicted that, insisting that it was purely a put up your money and you’re in, don’t and you’re not.

The lawsuit was a hot topic for local conversation, and the TV reporter interviewed a number of people about their thoughts on the case. Nearly all of them thought the suit had no merit. He didn’t put any money in, so he doesn’t deserve any of the winnings. “Fair is fair,” one of them said.

Most of us have a pretty strong sense about what is and isn’t fair. It starts when we are very young. Small children will object when a friend or sibling gets a bigger slice of cake than them, complaining that it’s not fair.

The people interviewed by that news reporter seemed to assume that the man who filed suit was trying to get something he didn’t deserve, but if it could have been proven that there was indeed an agreement to cover for coworkers out sick, then opinions likely would have changed. Then the coworkers would be the unfair ones, greedily trying to hold onto the money that had been promised to another.

I never did hear the outcome of the lawsuit, but I assume that any jurors would have done what they thought was fair.

Jesus’ parable today seems to raise issues of fairness. Is it fair that people who barely broke a sweat get paid as much as people who worked hard all day? Surely not, but then again, Jesus is not suggesting how to handle payroll at the workplace. Jesus is telling a parable that he knows offends our sensibilities in order to get us to think differently about the world and God’s kingdom.

It may help to realize what prompts Jesus to tell this parable. In the verses prior to our reading, a wealthy young man has gone away grieving after Jesus tells him to sell all he has, give the money to the poor, and come with Jesus. As he goes away, Jesus says, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

This astounds the disciples who, like many of us, think of wealth as a blessing. But Jesus speaks of it as a curse.

Peter then reminds Jesus that the disciples have left everything to follow him, asking what sort of reward they will receive. Jesus assures him that they will be well rewarded, but then he adds, “But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.” And then Jesus tells the parable we heard today.

No doubt Matthew has Jesus address this parable to his mostly Jewish audience. Matthew’s community is made up of good, law-abiding Jews who have embraced Jesus as their Jewish Messiah, but Gentiles are beginning to be drawn to the Jesus movement, people who’ve never followed the Jewish law like most of the members have all their lives. The parable is in part a call for Jewish Christian to welcome Gentiles as equals.

But I think there is more to the parable, although hearing that may require us to expand our understanding of parables. There’s a tendency to think of Jesus’ parables as a kind of Christian fables, catchy stories with clear morals or lessons, but they are much more. Unlike fables, Jesus’ parables often turn the world on its head.

 Walter Brueggemann writes that Jesus’ parables are “revolutionary activities.” They are “subversive reimaginings of reality.”^[1] In the “realities” created by human societies, there is not enough for everyone. Scarcity is the norm, and so we must strive and be diligent, lest we find ourselves without. This reality is so dominant, so unquestioned, that toddlers have already picked it up and incorporated it into their worldview. And so young children in homes overflowing with food of every sort, at no risk of ever going hungry, are troubled when their slice of cake doesn’t measure up to their sibling’s or friend’s.

Have you ever noticed that questions of fairness often deal with winners and losers? We are upset if an athletic competition isn’t fair because all the contestants deserve an equal opportunity to win. When someone gets the job because they know the right person or because of nepotism, it seems unfair because other people lost out as a result. When men are paid more than women for the same work, it is patently unfair because the women lose income they should have had. And Jesus’ parable about the workers in the field seems unfair because those who worked all day didn’t come out ahead of the latecomers. Their extra effort should have put them ahead, should have made them the winners.

All of this assumes that life is a competition with winners and losers, and in our culture, money and possessions are the trophies that go to the winners. Our consumerist society teaches that fulfillment comes from having more, and this requires relentless striving and competition. There’s not enough for everyone, and so there will be winners and losers. And if something games the outcome of this competition, well that’s just not fair.

But Jesus imagines a world completely at odds with ours. His term for this new world is the kingdom of God, a phrase that probably doesn’t work as well in our day as it did in his. Numerous updates have been suggested, the commonwealth of God, the dream of God, the God movement, the revolution of God. But whatever you call it, Jesus says it has come near, and he calls his followers to begin living by its ways now.

In this new world, the competition is called off. The poor are lifted up and the rich are pulled down. Love rather than violence is what brings this new day, a day when all neighbors matter as much as I do, when people trust in God to provide and so do not need to hoard resources for themselves, when there is enough for all, and no one needs to get ahead.

Jesus’ reimagining of reality is beyond radical. There are no winners and losers, and fulfilment doesn’t come from having more and more. It comes from a life motivated by love, a life that is not full and complete if a neighbor, even an enemy, is hurting or in need.

Jesus’ vision of a new reality is so counter-cultural, so radical, that even the church has largely ignored it and made faith about personal salvation or private spirituality. We have seen Jesus’ vision as too impractical, too radical, and have made faith about other things. We have made faith fit easily into cultures of greed, domination, exploitation and violence.

But the vision is still there. Jesus’ “subversive reimaginings of reality” are still there, jarring in us in parables like the one we heard this morning, and Jesus invites us to let that vision reshape our lives. He invites us to be a community that lets his vision bubble up in our lives, both our individual lives and our life together as community.

Perhaps that feels like tilting at windmills and naïve foolishness. What impact can we possibly have in the face a world that looks nothing like Jesus’ vision and has little use for those who too aggressively challenge the status quo?

Then again, Jesus’ first disciples must have asked that same question in a world that was even crueler and more violent and less tolerant of dissent than ours. Yet their witness, their living out the way of Jesus’ drew in more and more people and began to transform the world.

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[1] Walter Brueggemann, “The Liturgy of Abundance, the Myth of Scarcity,” an essay in The Christian Century, March 24-31, 1999. 

Absurd Community

 Matthew 18:21-35
Absurd Community
James Sledge                                                                            September 17, 2023

 

When I served a church in Columbus, OH, I was the chair of our presbytery’s Committee on Ministry or COM. The COM oversees the relationship between pastors and churches. This includes everything from searching for a new pastor to approving the call of a new pastor to dealing with conflict that sometimes arises between churches and their pastor.

As a part of my duties as chair, I was one of several people notified when the presbytery received an allegation about an inappropriate relationship between a pastor and a church member. Making matters worse, this adult member was someone with a significant developmental disability with limited capacity to enter into a consensual relationship. The mother still provided a significant level of care to this individual, and she was the one who had brought the allegation.

As things began to go forward, good communication with this individual proved difficult. Meanwhile the pastor was adamant that nothing inappropriate had occurred, but there was enough to warrant appointing an investigative committee. Per presbytery protocols, a lawyer was provided for the pastor in question at the denomination’s expense. At this point there was no involvement from police or the courts, and the investigation was strictly to see if there was grounds to remove this pastor, revoke his ordination, and so on.

The investigation went on for some time with the pastor regularly insisting on his innocence and expressing anger toward the presbytery for the way his good name was being damaged. In the meantime, COM had greatly overrun its budget for legal help.

Then, at the last possible moment, the pastor suddenly changed his tune and confessed. At this point I was not directly involved in process, so I don’t know details, but suffice to say there was a great deal of anger toward this pastor over how he had wasted so much energy, time, and money, not to mention the behavior that spurred the investigation. I shared in this anger and frustration, and I was glad this individual would no longer be allowed to pastor any church in our denomination.

This case popped into my mind as I read today’s passage from Matthew. When Peter asks Jesus how many times he should forgive a church member, suggesting seven times, Jesus responds, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” I should add that it’s also possible to translate Jesus’ response as seventy times seven. Either way it’s a whole lot.

So how does this apply to that pastor in Columbus? His sins were particularly bad ones and they were many. In addition to the abuse itself, he had lied over and over and cost the presbytery lots of money. But I don’t know that if you added them all up you’d get to seventy-seven and certainly not to seventy times seven. So we’re simply to forgive him. That seems almost absurd.

Of course Jesus tells a pretty absurd parable to illustrate his big numbers, although the absurdity of it may be lost on us because of a monetary amount that is totally foreign to us. According to some scholars, a talent was worth fifteen year’s wages for the typical worker in Jesus’ day, so let’s update that to our day.

The minimum wage in Virginia is $11.00 an hour which works out to $22,880 per year for someone who is full time. So we could say that a talent was worth $343,200, and the parable Jesus tells says the slave has somehow run up a debt of 10,000 talents or around 3.4 billion dollars. I can’t imagine how anyone could incur that level of debt, but I think the parable is supposed to contain an absurd, impossible level of debt. That makes the slave’s plea, “Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything,” beyond absurd. He would need to live 150,000 years to make that much. Yet the master forgives the debt.

But the parable is not done with absurdities. The one who has been forgiven a 3.4-billion-dollar debt then encounters a fellow slave who owes him 100 denarii, or around $6000. But even thought he has been forgiven an impossibly large debt, he won’t show the least bit of leniency to his fellow slave who would likely be able to repay him in time.

The parable seems to put the hearer in the position of the first slave. It reminds us that we have received love and grace and forgiveness in absurd, extravagant amounts, and so we are expected be extravagant in our own forgiveness of others. The Lord’s Prayer says as much. “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Or perhaps better translated, “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.”

But at this point I need to say that there is something missing from this sermon. It is missing from our scripture reading as well, and that is context. When Peter asks his question about how many times to forgive, he is responding to Jesus’ teachings on correcting members of the church.

Jesus has just explained that when a member sins against you, you are to go to that person privately and point out what they’ve done. If that doesn’t work, you are to take two or three other members with you to talk to the person. If that fails, you should bring the matter before the entire church, and if that doesn’t work, the church is to shun the person, presumably in the hope that the person will eventually repent and ask for forgiveness. Peter is responding to this teaching when he asks about how often to forgive.

Jesus’ words on absurd levels of forgiveness are connected to an expectation of accountability and repentance. When someone has been admonished and then asked for forgiveness, they are to receive it repeatedly. This is not blanket forgiveness that is simply offered no matter what. Instead Jesus is describing a community of believers where there is real accountability and correction, but endless grace as well.

I’m not sure we in the church do a very good job of this. Faith has become so privatized in the modern US that any notion of correction and accountability is largely absent. Even so, one of the responsibilities of the Session outlined in the Presbyterian Book of Order is “reviewing the roll of active members at least annually and counseling with those who have neglected the responsibilities of membership.”[1] (I imagine some elders are getting a little nervous.)

It was once common for churches to speak of themselves as a family. That metaphor has its liabilities, but to some degree, what Jesus describes looks like family when it functions as it should. Love and grace are always there. A child is never beyond the love of family. But there are expectations that a child behave in certain ways and consequences when they don’t. What if church looked more like that?

I wonder what it might take, and what it might look like, to become the sort of community Jesus envisions the church to be. What would it mean to be a congregation where all were welcome, where being a part of the community had nothing to do with being good enough or accomplished enough, but at the very same time there were clear expectations that everyone would engage in work and study and ministry that deepened their faith, that helped them become more committed disciples, and helped give the world a glimpse of the new day Jesus envisioned when he spoke of the Kingdom? And there was correction, even loving discipline, when people failed to do so.

Perhaps that seems an absurd fantasy, even more difficult than forgiving from the heart over and over and over, seventy times seven. But then again, the scriptures insist that the Holy Spirit can empower the church to do miraculous, even absurd, impossible things.

Come, Holy Spirit, come.

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[1] Book of Order, G-3.201c

Putting on Jesus

 Romans 13:8-14
Putting on Jesus
James Sledge                                                                            September 10, 2023

 

If you watch television at all, you likely have encountered advertisements for the supplement Prevagen. The ads typically feature someone talking about how they noticed they weren’t as sharp as they once were, but after they began taking Prevagen, they saw a marked improvement in their memory and mental acuity.

The ads also tout that such results are clinically proven. What they don’t tell you is that this clinical study was just 10 individuals, that the study was done by the company that owns Prevagen. They’ve also been sued by the FTC over the claims and agreed to put in a small disclaimer.

Numerous scientific and medical authorities have stated categorically that there is no way for Prevagen to work as it’s advertised. Apparently the active ingredient has to make it into the brain intact to have any effect, but this ingredient is easily digested and broken down by the body and so never reaches the brain.

I’ve noticed in some of the more recent commercials that they’ve added the phrase, “available without a prescription.” This clearly implies some sort of significant medical value to the product, despite the fact that this disclaimer is on the package. “These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.”

The advertising for Prevagen borders on deceptive, and no doubt the company has an army of lawyers who research just how far the company can go without actually breaking the law.

I have little doubt that some of these lawyers, and certainly some of the people who work for the company, are church goers who think of themselves as good and faithful people. If anyone were to challenge them on that they would surely say they weren’t doing anything illegal, and besides, faith is a private thing between them and God.

Donald Trump used this last defense when Pope Francis publicly stated that some of Trump’s inklings were not Christian. Said Trump, “For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful. I am proud to be a Christian. No leader, especially a religious leader, should have the right to question another man’s religion or faith,”^[1]

I have a feeling that both the Apostle Paul, as well as Jesus, would disagree with that statement. In our gospel reading today Jesus speaks of the church correcting members who sin, and Paul is clear that his understanding of the faith calls for people to love one another. He even says that love is the fulfillment of the law because Love does no wrong to a neighbor.

For Paul, to be in Christ transforms one from conforming to the ways of the world, what Paul typically labels “the flesh,” to the way of Jesus. This is above all the way of love. The person who has put on the Lord Jesus Christ, as Paul exhorts his readers to do, will no longer measure their actions by whether or not they can say they are legal. Instead they will only do what does no wrong to a neighbor.

It is most unfortunate that Paul’s words on being saved by grace through faith have been distorted to mean that it only matters what you believe, not what you do. Despite his insistence that we are saved by God’s grace and not our works, Paul nonetheless, in all of his letters, exhorts people to very specific sorts of behavior, just as he does in our reading today.

To be in Christ is to become a new creation who acts out the grace and love received from God. I think Paul would agree with Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount that says, “Thus you will know them by their fruits.”

There has been a quote bouncing around on Facebook of late which I also shared on my page. It’s from Kurt Struckmeyer’s book A Conspiracy of Love, and it says this.

At the heart of Christianity is a powerful ethic. It is what the first followers of Jesus call The Way – a way of living based on love and compassion, reconciliation and forgiveness, inclusion and acceptance, generosity and justice. This ethic is what makes Christianity good. Without it, Christians can become rigid and intolerant, self-righteous and condemning, hate filled and violent, selfish and unjust. In other words, without the ethic of Jesus, Christians can represent the worst humanity has to offer.[2]

That’s a rather stunning statement. Christians can represent the worst humanity has to offer if they are not guided by the way of Jesus. Believing in Jesus does not necessitate following the way of Jesus. Even having a relationship with Jesus does not necessarily mean walking in the way of Jesus, and I think Paul is speaking of the way of Jesus when he calls his readers to put on the Lord Jesus Christ.

To be honest, I do not understand why so many people who are adamant in their declarations of Christian faith seem to have missed the part about putting on Christ. To put on Jesus, to wear Jesus like clothing, is to manifest Jesus with one’s life. Wearing Jesus means that other people will see Jesus when they look at you, and that means they will see love. They will see a pattern of behavior that does no wrong to a neighbor.

I wonder what would happen if those working at the advertising agency creating commercials for Prevagen put on Christ and so asked themselves whether or not what they were doing did any wrong to a neighbor. I wonder the same about all sorts of companies that make their money off a tricking people into signing up for paid membership that they thought was free. I wonder about legal advice that helps a company skirt the law. What would happen if all these people cared and asked, does this injure my neighbor?

It seems to me that there are occupations that would be off limits for those who are in Christ, who put on Christ. But the question of whether something harms my neighbor is bigger than just jobs. Does how I spend or invest my money harm my neighbor? Does how I vote harm my neighbor? Does how I live my life harm my neighbor. Paul says that for the Christian, the answer needs to be, ‘No,” for Love does no wrong to a neighbor.

Of course it’s a pipe dream to think that people who run deceptive businesses, who worry about profits above all else, who care only for themselves, will suddenly start to worry about whether their actions harm their neighbor. And when the Apostle Paul writes to the church in Rome, he has no expectation that the world will suddenly be motivated and guided primarily by love, but he does fully expect that to be the way things are in the church.

In the Presbyterian Book of Order there is a hundred-year-old statement labeled “The Great Ends of the Church.” Ends here refers to the church’s primary reasons for existing. The last in the list of six reads, “the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.”[3] In other words, it is our job as the church to show the world what things look like when we put on the Lord Jesus Christ, when we wear Jesus and so are guided by love of God and neighbor.

But Paul doesn’t expect this to happen just because we are trying hard to please God. Rather Paul expects this to flow naturally from encountering the incredible love, the amazing grace, the unexpected embrace of God in Jesus that would go so far as a cross to reach out to us.

A famous theologian, when asked to sum up his life’s work in a single sentence, supposedly replied with the words of a song he learned as a child. “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”[4] To know that fully, to realize that God’s love in Christ is there for us with no ifs, ands, or buts, is to be held securely in something that frees us to live differently, to live out the way of Jesus. And oh, how the world needs more people, and especially needs more Christians, whose lives show Christ to the world.

---

[1] “Pope Francis Questions Donald Trump’s Christianity,” BBC.com, February 16, 2016

[2] Kurt Struckmeyer, A Conspiracy of Love: Following Jesus in a Postmodern World (p. 202). (Eugene OR: Resource Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2016), Kindle Edition, p. 202

[3] Book of Order, F-1.0304

[4] Attributed to Karl Barth, see www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2013/01/did-karl-barth-really-say-jesus-loves-me-this-i-know/

Baptism as Beginning (Matthew 3:13-17)

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Baptism and Beginning

Matthew 3:13-17
Baptism as Beginning
James Sledge                                                                                     January 8, 2023

Liz Valente, Baptism of Jesus, 2021

 Beyond Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, there are not too many events in Jesus’ life that make it into all four gospels. Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist is one of those events, even if the reference to it is rather elliptical in John’s gospel. Jesus’ baptism by John posed something of a difficulty for the early church and for the gospel writers. John’s baptism was one of repentance for sin, so why would Jesus need this? And each gospel has its own way of making sure the reader knows that Jesus is greater than John.

In the reading we heard this morning, John objects to Jesus’ request for baptism. “I need to be baptized by you,” says the Baptist. “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness,” replies Jesus. To be honest, I’ve never been entirely certain what this means, but it implies that this is God’s will. God’s plans have Jesus connected to the problem of human sinfulness.

It is interesting that John is the one who tries to get in the way of God’s will. He is the one who is sent to prepare the way of the Lord, but when Jesus comes to him, he tries to prevent Jesus from being baptized. It does seem a little strange, the Messiah being baptized with the same baptism as all those people who came out because they heard John’s cry, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

John, even though he is God’s prophet, thinks he knows how the Messiah should act. Like most everyone, he is a little surprised by the sort of Messiah Jesus turns out to be. Thankfully, he’s willing to listen to Jesus. A lot of people aren’t. When Jesus surprises or disappoints them, they turn away.

Video of Christmas Day Meditation (Luke 2:1-20)

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Video of meditation on the Annunciation to Mary

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Sermon video - Trusting a Crazy Dream (Matthew 1:18-25)

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Sermon - Trusting a Crazy Dream

Matthew 1:18-25
Trusting a Crazy Dream
James Sledge                                                                                     December 4, 2022

The Courageous Choice,
Rev. Lisle Gwynn Garrity,
A Sanctified Art LLC, sanctifiedart.org

Last Sunday we heard a bit of scripture that I’ve not ever heard read in Sunday worship, the genealogy from Matthew’s gospel. Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, and Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar…” and on and on like this for forty-some generations. It’s a rather odd genealogy in that in contains women, Gentiles, foreigners, scoundrels, and others we might not expect to be highlighted in the genealogy of a Jewish king.

This genealogy, with prefaces our scripture for this morning, seems to serve several purposes. It establishes Jesus as a descendant of David and so someone who could sit on the throne of David. It also foreshadows the diverse, inclusive new community that Jesus comes to inaugurate. And finally, it marks Jesus as something startlingly new in the story of God’s salvation history, something very different from those who came before him.

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way, opens today’s scripture. And coming immediately on the heels of that long genealogy where someone fathered somebody and he fathered someone else, this way marks a striking change. It is something miraculous and new, a fresh start, a new creation. But this all depends on Joseph, something Matthew highlights by telling us nothing about Jesus’ birth itself, rather telling us about what Joseph did before and after it.

As critical as Joseph is to the story, we know next to nothing about him. He is the main character in this story and one other in Matthew; he is mentioned briefly in Luke’s gospel, and then he simply disappears. He is absent in all the stories of Jesus as an adult, leading many to find credence in the legend that says Joseph was much older than Mary, and he had died long before Jesus began his ministry. There’s even some uncertainty about his profession. Many of us learned that he was a carpenter, and he well may have been, but there seems to be some confusion in the Bible over whether it is Joseph or Jesus who is the carpenter.

An Interesting Family (Matthew 1:1-17)

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Sermon - An Interesting Family

Matthew 1:1-17
An Interesting Family
James Sledge                                                                                     November 27, 2022

Tree of Jesse from Capuchin's Bible, c. 1180

 How would you answer if someone asked who you are? What would you tell them? Perhaps you would say what you do for a living. Very often when people meet someone for the first time they ask, “What do you do?”

I grew up in what was then still out in “the country,” on land that had been a family farm a couple of generations earlier. There were lots of other people whose families had been in that area for generations, and if you met someone who didn’t know you, they didn’t typically ask what you did, they asked who you belonged to, who your family was.

No one ever asks me that any longer. We live in mobile society where people often don’t have deep roots in the area where they live. Who you belong to, who your people are, isn’t likely to be very helpful in telling anyone who you are. We’ll have to settle for, “What do you do?” or “Where did you go to school?” or “Where did you come from?”

In some ways, I miss that old connection to place and people. I have fond memories of sitting at the Sunday dinner table with my parents and paternal grandparents, listening to stories about my grandfather as a second grader picking up his teacher on the way to school in a little horse drawn sulky. I felt connected to something, part of something.

I think that people who didn’t grow up like I did still sometimes lament that lack of connection. The popularity of Ancestry.com and DNA tests speaks to a desire to connect with our stories, to discover something of who we are through our heritage.

Joining the Cloud - Running the Race (Hebrews 11:39-12:1)

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Sermon: Joining the Cloud - Running the Race

Hebrews 11:39-12:2
Joining the Cloud – Running the Race
James Sledge                                                                            November 13, 2022

Cloud of Witnesses
Mike Moyers

In July of 2017, at Panama City Beach in Florida, two children got caught in a rip tide and could not make their way back to shore. Their mother went out to help, and she too was caught in the tide. Several more people attempted to help, only to find themselves trapped.

There were no lifeguards at this beach, and a large crowd gathered at the water’s edge, horrified but not knowing what to do. Someone wondered if they might be able to throw a rope out to them and pull them in, but who brings a rope with them to the beach? Besides, they were so far out.

Then someone got the idea to create their own line to those caught in the rip tide. They could form a human chain to pull the people back in. The crowd on the beach, most of them strangers to one another, began to link arms and move out toward the trapped people who were about a hundred yards from the shore. Eighty people joined together, stretching out to those children and would be rescuers who had been caught in the tide. And one by one they pulled every one of them to safety.

I think something similar is going on in the sermon that is the book of Hebrews. It speaks of a great cloud of witnesses that went before us, and over the recent weeks, you been hearing from church members about their witnesses, the ones who mentored them or guided them in some way in their faith journey. It strikes me that the witnesses who went before us, who founded this church, who introduced us to the faith, who taught us important faith lessons, form a kind of human chain that helps pull us forward on our walks of faith.

Sermon video - Reflecting God's Upside-Down World (Luke 16:19-31)

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Sermon: Reflecting God's Upside-Down World

Luke 16:19-31
Reflecting God’s Upside-Down World
James Sledge                                                                                                 November 6, 2022

The Rich Man and Lazarus,
woodcut by Kreg Yingst

 How many of you have ever given money to your college for some sort of building campaign? I was thinking about that topic, and I googled a map of a local school, George Mason. That map had lots of buildings with people’s names on them, Carrow Hall, David King Hall, Fenwick Library, Peterson Hall, and Harris Theater to name a few. There was also an EagleBank Arena.

I know very little about George Mason, but if it is like many other universities some of these buildings were named because of money or after a benefactor. I’m certain that’s the case with EagleBank Arena.

Most of us don’t have our names on buildings at universities or hospitals, and that’s also because of money, the relatively smaller amounts that most of us give. You need to be truly wealthy, big time rich to get your name on a building.

That is why we should know something is out of whack in this parable Jesus tells before he is more than a line into it. “There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day.  And there was a poor man named Lazarus…” There was a rich man and a poor man named Lazarus. 

That’s not how it’s supposed to work. If Daniel Snyder got into an altercation with a homeless person named John Doe, I can assure you the headlines will not read, “John Doe Roughed Up in Altercation with Rich Man!” We all know the headline will say, “Daniel Snyder Accosted by Homeless Man!”

But Jesus’ parable gets this backwards because things are completely different in the Kingdom of God. Everything is turned upside down and inside out, letting us know that the things the world values are not the things God values, and warning all of us who have bought into the world’s way of doing things.

Sermon video - What Salvation Looks Like (Luke 19:1-10)

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Sermon - What Salvation Looks Like

Luke 19:1-10
What Salvation Looks Like
James Sledge                                                                                                 October 30, 2022

Zacchaeus by Ira Thomas

Zacchaeus was a wee little man, a wee little man was he; He climbed up in a sycamore tree, for the Lord he wanted to see. Many of you are likely familiar with these song lyrics. The song seems fascinated with Zacchaeus’ size. I wonder why that is. Luke’s story does say that he was “short in stature,” but it seems little more than a reason for him to climb a tree.

I wonder if calling Zacchaeus a wee little man makes him sound like a more palatable character. Wee little man sounds almost cute. What a nice little guy. I suppose it wouldn’t make a very good children’s song if it started, “Zacchaeus was a nasty crook, a nasty crook was he,” but it would perhaps be more accurate.

I mentioned in my sermon last week that tax collectors in Jesus’ day were no civil servants. They were key players in a corrupt system that filled Rome’s coffers and enriched those fortunate enough to buy into the position. By definition, tax collectors engaged in fraud. The only way they made money was to collect more tax than Rome required, keeping the excess. The more they could shake down from people, the richer they got. Chief tax collectors were even worse. They took a cut from all the collectors that worked under them.

It was a lucrative gig if you wanted to get rich, but it was also sure to get you hated and despised. Not only were you using the threat of Roman soldiers to extract money from your neighbors, but you were doing this for an occupying power in a land that longed to be rid of Roman control. When the crowd who sees Jesus go to Zacchaeus’ house complains saying, “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner,” neither Jesus not anyone else disputes that statement. If ever anyone could be labeled a sinner, it is Zacchaeus.

Sermon video - How to Impress God (Luke 18:9-14)

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Sermon - How to Impress God

Luke 18:9-14
How to Impress God
James Sledge                                                                            October 23, 2022

John Everett Millais
Pharisee and the Publican

The Bible is so much a part of church life, such a constant fixture in worship and Sunday School classes, that we sometimes forget that it wasn’t written for us. It was written for people from a completely different world and culture than our own, and so it can easily lose something in translation.

That may be the case with today’s scripture passage and the two characters in the parable Jesus tells. One is a Pharisee; the other is a tax collector, and the parable assumes that we are familiar with these two, even though that may well not be the case.

Growing up in the church I got the impression that Pharisees were the bad guys. The word pharisaic even means self-righteous and hypocritical. But the fact is that Pharisees were the good religious folks of their day. They were a Jewish reform movement that protested against the rituals, pomp, and sacrifices of Temple worship. They wanted people to “get back to the Bible,” as it were, to read the scriptures and do what it said there. In that sense they were very much like the reformers who led the Protestant Reformation, people like Martin Luther or John Calvin.

The Pharisees were also the inventors of rabbinical Judaism that is still around today. That means that the rabbis over at Temple Yodef Shalom are direct descendants of the Pharisees we see so often in the gospels.

The other character in the parable, the tax collector, poses a different interpretive problem. In his case, we may well not think badly enough of him. Americans may not enjoy interacting with someone from the IRS, but modern tax collectors have little in common with the tax collectors of Jesus’ day.

The Roman tax system awarded contracts to collect revenue, and they provided the support of soldiers for the process. Those with the contracts got to keep anything in excess of what was owed to Rome, and so tax collectors engaged in what was essentially a legal, shake-down racket. Under threat of arrest, they brutalized the population, especially those without any power or influence. In addition, Jewish tax collectors were collaborators with an occupying power, and they were hated and despised by the people.

There is really nothing comparable in our day, certainly no legal occupation that would be held in such universal contempt. In terms of reputation, they would probably fall somewhere between drug dealer and child abuser.