Talking about Hunger to Hungry People

Today's gospel reading is Mark's account of the Transfiguration, where Jesus' appearance is transformed and Moses and Elijah join him for a little conversation, all in front of an awestruck Peter, James, and John. The three disciples are terrified and unsure what they should do. That must be why Peter grasps for something from the religious playbook. “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”

These "dwellings" or booths would have likely been some sort of religious memorial to commemorate the event. Had Peter actually constructed them, they undoubtedly would have become shrines at some later date, and people would have come to worship there.

There is a religious tendency that wants to mark things and label them as significant. Then we can venerate them, meditate on them, talk about them, explain their significance, and so on. Sometimes this sort of tendency gets in the way of simply experiencing the thing. That seems to be the case for Peter. His desire to do something religious interrupts and gets in the way of the actual event. Fortunately Jesus, Moses, Elijah, and God all seem to ignore him.

I thought about the way our religious stuff sometimes gets in the way when I read Richard Rohr's meditation today. (I hate for this blog to sound like an ad for Fr. Rohr, but he has become a real spiritual guide for me.) He speaks of about the Lord's Supper or Eucharist and how we spend so much time trying "to 'understand' and explain presence. As if we could." He goes on to add, "Despite all our attempts to define who is worthy and who is not worthy to receive communion, our only ticket or prerequisite for coming to Eucharist is hunger. And most often sinners are much hungrier than the so-called saints."

The world is full of hungry people, both literally as well as figuratively or spiritually. And sometimes we religious sorts are more practiced at talking about  hunger than actually doing anything about it. I wonder if those who say they are "spiritual but not religious" are saying something about being hungry but not interested in talking about it.

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So When Did You Receive the Holy Spirit?

Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you first joined the church? That's a question no one has ever asked me, nor have I ever heard it asked of anyone else. But Paul asks such a question in today's reading from Acts.

I'm not sure what prompts Paul to ask. The persons in question are called both "disciples" and "believers." We are told nothing about them that would indicate any sort of deficiency. Did Paul ask this a lot, or was there something about these particular believers that gave Paul concerns?

If you went around and asked this of everyone in a church congregation, what sort of response would you expect? In my own church experience, I can't imagine people saying they had never heard of the Holy Spirit, as those believers tell Paul. The congregations I've been a part of used the Apostles' Creed with some regularity, and so people hear about the Spirit frequently. But I would not be at all surprised if quite a few people answered with the same "No" that Paul heard.

I have heard the Spirit mentioned in Trinitarian formulas all my life. I've heard the story of the Spirit coming at Pentecost countless times. But as I was growing up in the church, I heard very little about the Spirit connected to the personal experience of anyone I knew. In the brand of Presbyterianism I grew up with, we pretty much left the Spirit to Pentecostals and other more "enthusiastic" sorts.

I'm not sure that the Enlightenment and the Holy Spirit play very well together. The Enlightenment is all about logic and reason, and Enlightenment forms of Christianity tend to explain and make sense of Christian faith. It isn't clear what to do with the unpredictable wind of the Spirit, swirling around where it may, stirring things up and prodding people to do things that don't always seem very reasonable or logical.

I think one of the inherent problems with liberal Christianity, a child of the Enlightenment if there ever was one, is a tendency to proclaim a belief system that is sometimes more philosophy than faith. It is a well thought out and helpful philosophy in many ways, but it may not really be alive. It may not be inhabited by the breath of God.

Did you receive the living breath of God when you became part of the church? If not, when did you? And if you didn't receive the Spirit, or if you just aren't sure, what does that mean?

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Sermon video: Trembling Home

Audios of worship and sermon available on FCPC website.

False Selves and Slamming Doors

Today's meditation from Richard Rohr begins with this. "We don’t teach meditation to the young monks. They are not ready for it until they stop slamming doors. — Thich Nhat Hanh to Thomas Merton in 1966"

Rohr is talking about how religion and spiritual practices can be places where the "false self" our egos construct can hide. All faiths and spiritualities are misused and abused by people who employ them to justify and support who they already are and what they want. One of the reason religion and faith is responsible for so much trouble in the world is that its adherents have very often not experienced the move Rohr is recommending, the experience the Apostle Paul describes as, "our old self was crucified with (Jesus)."

I know that in my own attempts at spirituality, very often I'm after spiritual validation and reassurance. Less often am I looking to be transformed, to have my true self uncovered. Despite the fact that Jesus insists on the need to deny oneself (I assume he's speaking of that false self),  I and many others vigorously protect and defend that self. And we who are practiced in the arts of faith and the church have learned how to use these in this project.

This morning's psalm opens, "For God alone my soul waits in silence." Perhaps I might restate this, "For God alone my self waits in silence," but in truth that's more rarely the case than I like to admit. More often, I want to enlist God in supporting and blessing what my self has decided. And on the corporate level, this tendency is even more problematic. God gets enlisted in the self-protective impulses of groups, organizations, movements, and nations. And there is little more dangerous than an ego-driven group, movement or nation that thinks God is on its side.

For God alone... Perhaps I could use this as a corrective mantra, spoken anytime I am feeling anxious about plans or ambitions I have, anytime I feel tempted to slam a door.

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Sermon: Trembling Home

Hosea 11:1-11

Trembling Home

James Sledge                                                                                       August 4, 2013

Nowadays they’re as likely to be on our smartphones or tablets as they are to be in an actual album with real pages, but wherever it is they’re located, most of us have had the experience of thumbing through a photo album. We’ve done a little reminiscing via photographs, have looked back and remembered a time when things were different, when we looked different, when the future perhaps looked different.

Now that both of my children are officially adults, having finished college and gotten jobs, it’s a bit more poignant for me to view pictures of them as babies, toddlers, or children. Different photos can evoke very different feelings, feelings of warmth, joy, and  happiness, as well as feelings of sadness and regret. On the child rearing front, Shawn and I were quite fortunate. We experienced the typical difficulties, but our daughters arrived at adulthood without a huge number of missteps on their part our ours. There were ups and downs, but still, things seem to have turned out pretty well.

On that count I feel quite lucky because I know that is not always the case. Things can and do go horribly awry in the course of raising a child. For those who’ve had such an experience, thumbing through those photos must be a great deal more difficult than it is for me. And when a child or parent has gotten caught up in their bad choices, and when this has led to estrangement, looking back at pictures from before all that, at a time of happiness, of great hope and promise for the future, must be terribly painful.

When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son… it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in my arms… I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them.

God thumbs through the divine photo album and is distraught. God has loved and tenderly cared for Israel. The picture Hosea paints seems feminine and mothering. God has lavished Israel with affection and done everything a parent possibly could, but Israel has been a rebellions child from the beginning. The more God called, the more they went the other direction. They seemed hell bent on self-destruction and oblivious to all that God had done for them.

How Things Got Like This

Save me, O LORD, from my enemies;
       I have fled to you for refuge. Teach me to do your will,
       for you are my God. 
Let your good spirit lead me
       on a level path.                 Psalm 143:9-10

Though I've not lived there in over a decade, I think of myself as a North Carolinian. So I have been distressed at some of the goings on in my homes state as the legislature has sought to curtail funding for education and make voting more difficult, along with other things that have greatly damaged NC's reputation as a "progressive southern state."

I try to make room in my worldview for a wide range of political ideas, and I have often times discovered some treasured position of my own to be ill-informed or incorrect. Yet I find myself dumbfounded by the mean-spirited tone, the outright lies, and the seeming lack of concern for others that has been spewed by some NC politicians. And as probably happens with anyone who worries about the state of the world, I wonder how it is things get this way. How is it that people can act in such ways without even a hint of remorse or self-doubt?

Such a question can be extended to all sort of areas. Just this week an FBI sweep arrested 150 pimps and rescued over 100 children used as prostitutes. The FBI called child prostitution as "persistent threat" in our country. How can this be? How can so  many seemingly normal people be involved in such reprehensible behavior?

I'm not comparing NC politicians to people involved in prostitution. These are two very different things. The only commonality I'm thinking about is one that all humans seem to share, a capacity for excusing the unsavory things we are inclined to do. Those engaged in child prostitution obviously have this capacity in grotesque proportions, but the capacity itself is regularly on display in all sorts of smaller ways. The amount of hate and violence that has been perpetuated over the centuries by those professing Christian motivations is an all too common, and often all too grotesque, example.

All of this may seem totally unrelated to the verses of Psalm 143 that open this post, but it was those verses, along with a little prod from Jesus in today's gospel reading, that got me thinking about NC legislators and pimps.

The psalmist seems to expect a couple of things from Yahweh because Yahweh is God. The first is salvation. No surprise there. We religious sorts are forever asking God to rescue us for all manner of things, some major, some minor, some beyond trivial. But the psalmist expects something else because God is God. "Teach me to do your will, for you are my God."

In my experience, we Christians are often more inclined toward trying to convince God to do our will than we are at wanting to be conformed to God's. And so we more liberal sorts expect God to have liberal leanings while conservatives assume God is a conservative sort. This of course means that we think fixing the world is about enough people seeing things the way we do.

But the psalmist wants to be taught God's will. This would seem to presume we don't simply know it on our own. We need to be taught it and led into it. Jesus says much the same thing, and he cautions us about how easily religious traditions substitute our own will for God's. According to Jesus, that's because we all have a "defiling" capacity within us. Yet most of us would like to think that such a capacity is only a problem for those other folks.

"Teach me your will, O God. Show me your ways." Surely a prayer that all of us should pray, as well as a reminder that our own ways need adjusting if they are to conform to God's. As the late cartoonist Walt Kelly said all too well, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

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That Could Never Happen

In yesterday's gospel, Jesus fed thousands with five loaves and two fish. Today he walks on water, and I love how nonchalantly the narrator reports this. "When he saw that they (the disciples) were straining at the oars against an adverse wind, he came towards them early in the morning, walking on the sea." Well of course. How else would he have done so?

Some years ago I recall reading a Bible commentary that suggested this episode might be a misplaced resurrection story. I don't recall details, but this scholar seemed to think that such an event couldn't have actually happened with the actual person Jesus.

Scholars have given similar treatment to the feeding of the 5000, with that miracle cast as one of sharing. Jesus got all those folks to share what they had hidden under their robes in something akin to the folk tale, "Stone Soup."

Such biblical scholarship has largely fallen out of vogue in recent decades, but it is easy to see its attraction. Most all of us have notions regarding what is and isn't possible, along with ideas about what God is like and how God does or doesn't act. Most all of us have some sort of boundaries which we don't expect even God to violate.

Perhaps your or my boundaries are fairly accurate, but perhaps they are not. And I can't help wondering what sort of God it is who is fixed by my boundaries, who is not free to surprise me or act contrary to my assumptions.

I suspect this is particularly a problem for people like me who like to figure things out and understand how they work. I like things to be explained with a fair amount of precision and clarity. I'm very much a product of and comfortable with Enlightenment logic. Only in recent years have I begun to get more comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty, and it is still easy for me to slip into old patterns of right and wrong, possible and impossible.

I'm not suggesting that one must read everything in the Bible as a real, historical occurrence, far from it. But I do wonder how much we constrain God from being at work in our lives and in our congregations by our certainties about what can and can't happen.

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The Gospel We Live

In the gospels, Jesus is often portrayed as needing to get away, to spend time in retreat and prayer. In today's gospel reading, he sees that his disciples need some time to rest as well, and he takes them to "a deserted place by themselves." The ministry that Jesus calls each of us to does require times of rest along with times of personal, spiritual nourishment. We cannot be the body of Christ without sabbath, without rest and retreat and prayer.

But neither can we be the body of Christ without giving ourselves to others. When Jesus and his disciples head out on for sabbath and retreat crowds discover them, and Jesus "had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things." And before he is done, Jesus will also feed the thousands who have gathered around him.

Yesterday on my Facebook page, I shared a status from James Kim, a colleague and seminary classmate. It read, "To be about Christ's mission, get your eyes off your church and make your neighborhood the focus of the gospel." I'm pretty sure James was not saying that the life of discipleship requires no attention to self, no attention to the spiritual needs of the congregation. But it is all too easy, and all too common, for church congregations to become so focused on self that ministry to others receives scant attention. "Mission" too often becomes small acts of charity that comprise a minimal part of a congregation's life. The gospel proclaimed by the lives of some congregations looks like today's gospel reading, but without teaching or feeding the crowds.

What gospel do people who aren't a part of your congregation encounter because of the life of your congregation? To what degree is James Kim's Facebook status helpful advice for your congregation?

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Strange Rewards

Even in denominations like my own Presbyterian Church, which emphasizes salvation by God's grace and not human effort, it is hard to get away from the notion of punishment or reward based on how we live our lives. The phrase, "There's a special place in hell for people who..." speaks to this expectation that people should get what they deserve.

Despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, we like to think this about the success and good fortune in our daily lives. People who are successful tend to think they earned it. And there is a companion tendency to think people are responsible for their own bad predicaments. Not that personal initiative and effort don't count, but they are hardly the only variables involved. Working hard and doing the right thing do not always lead to rewards as we tend to think of them.

Take John the baptizer (that's what Mark's gospel calls him) in today's gospel reading. John's reward for doing just as God wants him to do is arrest and then execution. In Mark's gospel, this clearly foreshadows what will happen with Jesus, and no doubt there were people who said of both men, "Well when you go around challenging powerful people all the time, you can't be too surprised when they take offense and do something about it."

Jesus expects that those who follow him will run into many of the same problems he and John did. We will be rejected, hated, and will suffer. But that is the rarest of experiences for American Christians. If anything, we tend to think that church membership gives us an air of respectability. And though not as common as it once was, politicians and business people still join churches to gain contacts and project the right image.

The interesting question for me is, "What changed?" Did the world change so much that Jesus' message is no longer problematic or offensive? Or did we change Jesus' message to make it more compatible with the world? The answer likely includes some of both, but clearly there's been a great deal of domesticating and ignoring some things Jesus said. We keep trying to squeeze Jesus into our view of how the world works or should work. We keep trying to squeeze Jesus into our notions of reward and punishment. To lesser or greater degrees, we all do this because, to lesser or greater degrees, we all put ourselves and our direct interests at the very center of our lives.

Jesus puts God there, and he calls us to do the same. But look where that got Jesus.

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Sermon video for 7/21: Martha and Mary Problems

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Preaching Thoughts on a Non-Preaching Sunday

I confess that I've often struggled with the whole prayer thing. Not only am I terrible about letting other things crowd out time for prayer, but I also wrestle with the very notion of prayer. Or perhaps my wrestling is with notions of prayer I've picked up over the years.

I've long been troubled when I hear people tell of how God answered their prayer and let them survive or their house be spared when nearly everyone else perished or had their house destroyed. Did no one else pray for the same thing? Was something wrong with their prayers so that God didn't listen to them.

Very often I've heard praying described in ways that sound much like a child asking Santa for presents at Christmas. And at first glance, Jesus seems to be encouraging such a thing when he encourages persistence in prayer saying, "For everyone who asks receives.."

But perhaps it matters that the gospel reading brackets this call for persistence with the Lord's Prayer and with the image of God as a good parent who gives good gifts to children. Good parents don't always give children what they ask for, and indeed, the only gift actually promised by Jesus is the gift of the  Holy Spirit. I assume that those who receive the Holy Spirit learn to pray as Jesus does, "Not my will but yours be done."

I suppose there are ways in which I'll always struggle with prayer, but there are two things I feel fairly confident about regarding it. One is that prayer has to do with the reality of God. Prayer, especially the non-Santa Clause sort, is conversation with another, connecting with the Other in whom my life becomes fuller and more complete. The second is that prayer, at least the sort Jesus teachings in his model prayer, forms me in ways that are quite different from the ways of the world around me. Praying for God's rule to govern all the world, that I would be totally dependent on God for my daily needs, and that I would forgive as freely as Jesus does; that is not our culture's model of how to get ahead.

A thought just occurred to me. Perhaps one of the reason I so often let other things crowd out prayer is that I realize deep in my bones that prayer can change me, and some of the changes Jesus asks of me are just a bit scary.

Not my will but yours, Lord.

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Confining Jesus to Heaven

One of the things I greatly appreciate about the emergent church movement is a reemphasis on the kingdom of God, the rule or reign of God. Somewhere along the way, Christianity got so focused on personal salvation that it developed a very other worldly tint. God's reign and heaven began to be thought of as synonyms, and salvation was about being there in heaven rather than here on earth. Brian McLaren calls this a "gospel of evacuation." But Jesus speaks of God's kingdom drawing near, and he instructs us to pray for its coming, that time when God's will is done here as it is in heaven. In other words, we are to pray for salvation coming to earth.

It's easy to see how heaven got substituted for the kingdom. It's hard to imagine the world getting straightened out and becoming an ideal place. It's simpler to locate an ideal world somewhere else, some place totally unlike here.

I also wonder if placing the kingdom beyond our lives on earth doesn't allow us to keep our distance from Jesus and his call for radical change in anticipation of a new day drawing near. Jesus tells his followers to turn, to live now by the ways of God's coming dominion. But those ways are very different from the ways that govern  much of our daily lives. They call us to live out of synch with much that the world values, and almost all of us are significantly captive to the values of the world.

I started thinking along these lines after reading today's gospel where Jesus heals the Gerasene demoniac, allowing the spirits that possess him to go into a herd of pigs which then charge into the sea and are drowned. After this amazing event, people come out to see what has happened, and they respond in rather odd fashion. "Those who had seen what had happened to the demoniac and to the swine reported it. Then they began to beg Jesus to leave their neighborhood."

Strange that when people encounter the power of God at work in their midst that they want it gone. It's certainly true that modern people often underplay the frightening aspect of God's presence, but I think the story speaks of more than that. I think the people in the story correctly realize that God's presence will radically reorder things in ways they do not want. So best to send Jesus on his way.

I wonder if we don't do much the same thing when we try to keep him cooped up in heaven, the changed life that he calls us to safely delayed until after we are dead.

In the gospel reading, only the former demoniac wants to stay with Jesus. Perhaps it is necessary to experience Jesus' healing and transforming power in our lives before we are quite ready to let him tell us how we are to live.

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