Running the Race

If you are at all conversant in church-speak, you have probably heard some version of this. "Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses... let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us" It's part of a famous quote from "The Letter to the Hebrews," which is more of a sermon than a letter.

The writer has just finished rattling off a long list of impressive accomplishments that biblical heroes managed "through faith." But then the writer addresses the reader saying, "Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect." It seems God has an ongoing, long-term project that joins Jesus followers to the work of Abraham and Sarah, David and Solomon, Isaiah and Jeremiah, and so on. Presumably present day Jesus followers are also joined to this long line of the faithful, our work building on the faithful of the past and somehow pulling the whole, long line forward into God's wonderful future.

However, I'm not quite sure how to fit this idea into some notions of Christian faith. In some of the very individualized and personalized understandings of faith popular in America, the entire operation seems to be about getting my name on the right list: heaven or hell, salvation or damnation. But how does my being on the heavenly guest list help Abraham in any way? If faith is about whether or not I'm saved, what difference does that make to King David?

Jesus talked a lot about a kingdom that had drawn near, something tiny and nearly invisible that would, with our faithful participation, grow into something wonderful. That seems to fit well with what the writer of Hebrews is saying, but I'm not sure it does with some current versions of faith and church.

Some evangelical versions of personal salvation as escape from this rotten world to wonderful heaven are easy targets, but personal, immediate gratification versions of faith are everywhere. They're prominent in therapeutic versions of Christianity where faith and church are about making me feel better about myself, and they're sometimes featured in popular forms of Christian spirituality where faith and church are primarily about feeding my soul and warming my spirit.

I'll admit to being a rather impatient person. I'm very much a part of our immediate gratification culture. Still, one of my great frustrations with church in general is that it so seldom seems connected to God's big, long-term, grand project for all creation. It is too busy "meeting members' needs" to actually work on the kingdom project, the dream of God's new day.

Very often, church congregations are most heavily invested in maintenance, in "how we've always done it." And when churches do have bigger and grander visions of the future, these are often about bigger buildings and facilities, about grander futures for themselves.

Not that church congregations don't do a great deal of good in the world, but all too often, this is simply a slightly enlarged version of the charity practiced by many Americans regardless of faith. It is great that individuals volunteer at soup kitchens and homeless shelters, and it is wonderful that churches run food pantries and operate tutoring programs for needy children. But these things often aren't really central to the lives of individual volunteers or to the lives of congregations. They are a little something extra that we do, but not what we are primarily about. But if a church isn't primarily about God's big project, is it really the body of Christ it claims to be.

Figuring out exactly where the line is that divides those engaged in the call to be Christ to the world from those simply wanting to get into heaven, be made happy, or have their needs met, is no easy task. Transforming individuals so that they become new in Christ and follow where he leads requires inward work, both as an individual person of faith and as a congregation. Still, there must be some tipping point beyond which "serving the members" largely obscures a church's true call.

This problem has no doubt existed as long as the Church has existed. But I can't help wondering if our age of immediate gratification hasn't greatly magnified it. The simple fact is that Jesus' message does not fit well into an immediate gratification mindset. But that's actually true of a lot of things such as raising children, building a successful company, or running a marathon.

People don't train for marathons just to get the tee shirt, and according to today's reading from Hebrews, faith is more like a marathon than it is dropping into Starbucks for a quick caffeine fix. Sometimes I wonder if one of the big problems facing the church in our time isn't that we folks who are running churches are trying to be a Starbucks rather than a training club for marathoners.

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Lost in Praise

  O sing to the LORD a new song;
     sing to the LORD, all the earth.   Psalm 96:1


I admit it. I'm not overly good at praise. Not that I don't sing in worship or anything like that. I enjoy singing hymns on Sunday, but I'm not sure that's the sort of revelry that the psalms so often speak of. The "joyful noise" of Psalm 66 seems to suggest a bit more abandon than is typical of traditional Presbyterians. And today's morning psalm gets so carried away that it expects nature itself to join in.

  Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice;
     let the sea roar, and all that fills it;
     let the field exult, and everything in it.
  Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy
     before the LORD

 (Just as an aside, a lot of worshipers seem worse at praise than me, at least the sung kind. As a pastor, I look out at the congregation while we're singing, and I've always marveled at the number of people who never sing at all, who don't even mouth the words.)

When I think about praise and adulation that gets carried away and lost it the effort, sports fans come to mind. Joyful noise is an apt description of what comes from the stands when our team is winning. The other place I've seen and experienced this is at a political rally. Strange to think that it is easier for me to get all fired up about my team or my candidate than it is to get excited about God.

I'm not sure I would ever want to turn worship into a pep rally or a political one, but I still wonder about the difficulty of actually offering myself to God in worship. (There's a striking picture of King David totally losing himself in worship from 2 Samuel 6. He gets so carried way that he not only leaps and dances, but he strips down to only a little ceremonial apron.) I've mentioned before how God can sometimes seem more a concept than a real entity who is encountered. Perhaps that is why we tend to measure our worship by how well we like it. Strange that we would do worship to please ourselves rather than God if we really thought God was the audience for our worship.

The closing verse of the hymn, "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling" speaks of the final consummation of our lives, anticipating the day when "we cast our crowns before Thee, lost in wonder, love, and praise." It's an old Charles Wesley hymn, the sort I associate with the rather staid worship I grew up with. But it surely speaks of what worship should be, as well as what the psalmist describes.

Oh, to be lost in wonder, love and praise.

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Sermon video: Don't Worry, You Are Blessed

Audios of sermons and worship can be found on the FCPC website.

Offensive Jesus vs Cultural Christianity

Today's gospel reading is one of many places in the Bible where Jesus upsets and offends people. And it's not just his opponents. His own disciples were often taken aback by what Jesus said. In fact, if you read the entire episode which begins with today's gospel (the lectionary will do so over the next two days), you will see that many of Jesus' disciples abandon  him over today's difficult teaching.

Growing up in Presbyterian congregations, I somehow missed the fact that Jesus could be troubling and offensive to those who encountered him. I saw Jesus along the same lines that a lot of people see the late PBS icon, Mr. Rogers. And while I happen to think of Mr. Rogers as an exemplary Christian, he didn't make those in power so angry that they wanted to kill him. Jesus clearly did, though the thoroughly domesticated and saccharine-sweet image of him often peddled in church makes that hard to comprehend.

Still, some Christians reach a point where those Sunday School portraits of Jesus no longer work for them, and they look for something a bit more realistic. The dissonance between the churchy Jesus and some of the stories of him in the Bible has long sent people on quests for "the historical Jesus." I think the quest itself is usually well intended but often misguided. That's because people may suspect - not without reason - that the Church is presenting a less that accurate picture of Jesus. Feeling misled by the Church, they look for non-churchy insights into Jesus. And because they think of the Bible as the Church's book, they look outside scripture.

Unfortunately, this effort immediately encounters a problem. Aside from the biblical texts, there is very little information about Jesus, and what there is often appears further removed from the historical Jesus than what is in the Bible. This means that most quests for "the historical Jesus" are efforts to distill from the biblical texts a historical kernel, a most inexact exercise, to say the least.

The current best seller, Zealot, by Reza Aslan, is the latest in a long line of such historical quests. Some of its scholarship is a bit suspect, but it does invite people to meet a very undomesticated Jesus. I'm all for that. I only wish that the Church would help people find the very undomesticated Jesus who is right there in the Bible and readily available without any need for wild speculation or intellectual flights of fancy.

Admittedly, this is a problem of the Church's own making. We sold our soul all those centuries ago when Constantine made us the official faith of the empire. When Christ gets enlisted in propping up empires and cultures, domestication is a must. Faith gets watered down, relegated to a private, spiritual sphere. The Jesus who came to bring good news to the poor and release to the captives still shows up here and there at Church, but rarely as the centerpiece. When God and Jesus are supposed to bless America, Jesus can be offensive only in very small doses. That doesn't mean Jesus actually gets wrapped in the American flag. That's a bit too unsubtle for most churches. But the same flag at the front of the sanctuary is fine, and any attempt to remove it may get labeled sacrilegious.

However, recent decades have seen the culture call off its cozy relationship with Christianity. It's not as though faith is persecuted (unless you consider "Happy Holidays"somehow to be akin to imprisonment), but it has lost some of the highly favored status previously granted it in exchange for religious sanctioning of the culture. I see this as a tremendous gift. It is a gift that may well be squandered, but it is a gift nonetheless.

The Church now finds itself in a position where it must stand on its own merits. Freed from the job of blessing prevailing culture, we have a very real opportunity to hear an undomesticated Jesus inviting us to new life in the act of following him. We may well decide that Jesus' call is more than we can manage, more than we're willing to do, but if that happens, at least we will have encountered something of that first century Jew whose presence demanded people make such hard choices.

The days when church pews filled on Sundays because the culture expected and coerced people to be there are fast fading away. (Good riddance, I say.) Not surprisingly, young adults are a rapidly shrinking part of congregational life in America. But who can  blame them. If the only Jesus they find at church is a benign, domesticated figure who only wants us to believe in him and be good little boys and girls, why bother? If they simply meet a religious sanction for prevailing cultural mores, prejudices, or hatreds, why bother?

But if they meet a Jesus who challenges them, even rattles them to their very core by calling them to follow him on a path that is not easy, that might be different. But of course that would seem to require church folk who were shaped and formed by the patterns of a dying cultural-Christianity to discover that Jesus themselves.

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Sermon: Don't Worry, You Are Blessed

Matthew 5:1-12

Don’t Worry, You Are Blessed

James Sledge                                                                                       February 2, 2014

Are you familiar with the catchphrase, “First world problems?’ It’s something added to a complaint, a light hearted acknowledgement that someone’s whining or fussing is not about anything all that significant. It’s popular as a “hashtag” on Twitter. Here are some actual examples. “Trying to find a way to make my snow boots look cute with every outfit is getting really old #firstworldproblems. I think every town in America should have free Wi-Fi all throughout. Would make my life so much easier. #firstworldproblems.” And I love this one. I’m pretty sure it’s a joke. “My phone died and I can't tell the time from my wrist watch because of all the diamonds. #firstworldproblems.”

Even if you’re not familiar with the hashtag, you’re likely familiar with something similar. Many of us have said something such as, “I locked my keys in my car and had to call AAA to unlock it. So I missed my doctor’s appointment and have to reschedule. But then I came and volunteered at Welcome Table and realized that my problems aren’t all that big.”

When we agonize over our cable service going out just before our favorite show comes on, we know such issues are relatively minor and trivial. But our problems are our problems. They’re the things impacting us, and so they’re important to us. Nothing surprising about that. But when we worry about such things, there’s a tendency to think they are the things God should worry about as well.

We live in a very individualized and personalized culture. That has led to some very individualistic and personal notions about God and faith. The phrase “Jesus is my personal Lord and Savior,” isn’t part of my faith heritage so I’ve never been exactly sure what it means. Still, I’m reasonably certain that no one in biblical times would have said such a thing. They did not live in an individualistic culture.

Insomuch as speaking of a personal Savior means to convey that God is concerned about each individual person, I think that’s dead on. But that is different from thinking that God is especially worried about whatever I or my culture happens to be worried about. Indeed, such a notion can lead to the trivializing of God and faith.

I’ve seen that happen with the Beatitudes, the opening portion of the Sermon on the Mount that we just heard. There is a book by Robert Schuller called The Be (Happy) Attitudes: 8 Positive Attitudes That Can Transform Your Life. It distills from Jesus’ words a handful of practices that will bring the happiness that many Americans chase after. Blessed are those who mourn becomes “I’m really hurting—but I’m going to bounce back, and Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake becomes, “I can choose to be happy—anyway!”[1]

But this not only trivializes Jesus’ teaching, it misses the point entirely. Jesus is not giving some program for self-improvement. He isn’t telling people how to be happy. He isn’t even giving a list of commands to live by. There are no commands in today’s verses. We may be able to infer some “shoulds” from these verses, but they are primarily a statement of how things are, wildly counter-intuitive statements Jesus makes to those who are drawn to him.

These folks are not the upper tier or elite of society. Instead they are fishermen and sinners, people with diseases and infirmities, people suffering with what we would call mental illness, and desperate family members and friends who have nowhere else to turn. They are Jews who find themselves subject to the might, power and often cruel authority of Rome. There is little about them to suggest that they are blessed or fortunate. But Jesus insists that they are.

Matthew also has Jesus address the author’s first century church community . That Jewish Christian community is most certainly struggling. Some of them have gotten kicked out of their synagogue, their home church, the place they grew up and learned about faith, because they followed Jesus. No doubt this has led some, perhaps many, to question the wisdom of following him. The hoped for new day that Jesus’ resurrection seemed to herald is terribly slow in coming, and it is hard to find much evidence that says they are blessed or favored or fortunate. But Jesus insists that they are.

Jesus isn’t suggesting a way for them to feel fortunate. Rather he is making a statement that despite appearances, even when they find themselves in terrible circumstances, longing for something better, hungering and thirsting for a day when the world is set right, they are recipients of God’s favor and blessing.

Sermon video from Jan. 26: Transforming Love

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

When Life Gets Hectic, Whom Do You Serve?

Did you ever have one of those days or weeks that simply overwhelmed you? Of course you did. It's a near universal experience. So, when you have found yourself in a moment where life overwhelms you, what do you do? How do you respond when there is more to deal with than is possible, when the plate is too full and something has to fall off of it?

When life gets crazy, it often reveals something about the priorities that govern our lives. There's no easy and simple calculus here. Doing something in order to remain employed may require diminished time with loved ones who cannot be supported absent that employment. But success in one's career may simply be a higher priority than family, and it is remarkably easy to deceive oneself about such things.

A similar sort of self-deception often is at work in lives of faith. It is easy to fancy oneself faithful even when faith becomes one of those things that gets dropped when life is too busy or demanding. Pastors and other religious professionals have even more opportunities for self-deception because our "jobs" are connected to faith. However, that in no way means that doing our jobs is actually an act of faith or that serving God is even remotely connected to what we are busy doing.

Much of the Bible is about a covenant relationship between God and humans, a covenant relationship that is almost always understood to be communal or corporate in nature. This covenant relationship is there in the call to Abraham. It is there in Jesus' call to follow him. And it assumes significant responsibilities on both sides of the relationship. But as with human relationships, self-deception is often a problem.

Just as a career minded spouse may convince himself or herself that all that time at work is somehow about supporting a marriage relationship, people can delude themselves into thinking that their loyalties and passions are about their faith. How else to explain some people championing the right carry concealed weapons and "stand our ground" as Christian causes. This seems to me little more than projecting one's personal passions and causes onto one's God and faith. And the political right has no monopoly on such behavior. Liberal Christians often make liberalism their god.

That brings me back around to questions of what remains and what gets dropped when life gets too hectic to handle. Are the things remaining truly important things? Are they truly God's things? Or are they simply my things, things which may or may not really be faithful to the relationships and commitments I claim are priorities in my life?

There's an old Bob Dylan song with a line that says, "You gonna have to serve somebody. Well it may be the devil, or it may be the Lord, but you gonna have to serve somebody." When self-deception gets involved, I pretty sure it's usually the former.

Click to learn more about the lectionary.

Sermon: Transforming Love

Matthew 4:12-23

Transforming Love

James Sledge                                                                                       January 26, 2014

How many of you think that everything in the world is just about as it should be, with no real problems to fix or issues to deal with? Everything is fine, right?

I suspect most anyone here could rattle off a long list of problems, troubles, horrors, and more that desperately need straightening out. Civil war continues unabated in Syria with an obscene death toll among civilians and refugees in the tens of thousands. Things are only slightly better in South Sudan, and Iraq seems to be descending into anarchy.

Brutal, gang rapes occur with staggering regularity in India, but the brutalization of women is hardly confined there. Sex trafficking and slavery, fed by crippling poverty, is a worldwide problem, including in our own country and in the DC area. Meanwhile income inequality continues to grow in this country. In a nation where everyone once claimed to be middle class, a smaller and smaller percentage of the population controls a larger and larger percentage of the wealth. And of course there was yet another shooting yesterday.

I’m sure we could add plenty of other examples of problems in our world, but let me shift the focus a bit. How many of you think that everything is fine, with no real problems to fix or issues to deal with in your own life?

Most of us have personal lists of things we’d like to change about ourselves. We want to exercise more or volunteer more. We need to lose weight or stop smoking. And many of us having bigger issues than self-improvement lists. We lead harried, hectic, and anxious lives that are good for neither our health nor our relationships. We hurt others, including those we love, far too often. We have been overly conformed to our culture’s narcissism and consumerism, and so we chase after stuff thinking it will make us happy, and we obsess about self and our need to be happy and fulfilled. It’s a stressed out environment that is toxic for us and for our children.

Of course there is much that is good about the world and about our lives. The world is God’s good creation, after all. But even the most Pollyanna among us know there is much that needs fixing and changing in our world and in our lives.

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” Jesus begins his ministry with words every bit as appropriate today as they were nearly 2000 years ago. It is a message about change, change for the world and change for us personally.

God Remembers

On Sunday I preached a sermon entitled "Faithful Remembering." As the title perhaps suggests, it was about remembering who we are in our baptisms, about recalling the new identity we receive when we are joined to Christ and given the Holy Spirit.

Today's Old Testament reading also speaks of remembering, but this remembering is not ours. It is God's. The reading comes from the conclusion of the Noah story. The flood has ended. The very real threat that creation might return to the pre-creation chaos of Genesis 1:1-2 is over. The blessings of creation have been reissued with the call to be fruitful and multiply. And God covenants with all creation, with humans and animals, never again to bring a flood to destroy. Human creatures may have gone their own way, rejecting who God created and called them to be, but God is committed to them.

As a seal on that commitment, God places a bow in the clouds. The sign is the rainbow, but it is also God's bow, a weapon of war. God has hung up God's bow. It will not be drawn in anger again.

I've often heard reference to the rainbow as a reminder to us of God's covenant, but that is not what the story says. In the story it is a reminder to God. "When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh." For good measure, God repeats this assertion almost verbatim. "When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth." Everything, it seems, hangs on God's remembering.

This is not isolated to the story of Noah. Repeatedly the Bible speaks of the need for us to remember, and of God's remembering. Because God remembers, Israel is rescued from slavery in Egypt. And as Mary says in her "Magnificat," Jesus is born because God remembers, because God will not forget or give up on creation, including those troublesome human creatures.

In his letter to the church in Rome, the apostle Paul writes of Jesus "who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us." (Rom. 8:34) Perhaps one way to understand Paul is to think of Jesus saying to God, "Remember, remember." Or, to put it in more Trinitarian terms, withing the divine, loving relationship that is God, the call to remember echos always.

God remembers. In today's gospel that is expressed as "For God so loved the world..." Amidst all the difficulties understanding how God works, what God is up to, and how we are called to be a part of it, it is good to stop and remember a central core of our faith. God is committed to all creation, and to us. God will remember; God will not forget us.

Click to learn more about the lectionary.

Sermon video: Faithful Remembering

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Faithful Remembering

1 Corinthians 1:1-9

Faithful Remembering

James Sledge                                                                                     January 19, 2014

As a pastor, I have lots of “friends” on Facebook who are also pastors. The same goes for people I follow on Twitter. Some of these folks are always posting effusive, over-the-top praise of the churches they pastor, the committees they serve, and so on. “First Presbyterian’s Christian Education Committee rocks!!!” “So and so presbytery’s Committee on Ministry Committee is the best committee ever!” “I’m so incredibly lucky and blessed to serve here!”

Maybe it’s just my age or where I grew up, or maybe I’m just weird, but such praise sometimes feels a little bit much to me. I like an “Atta boy” as much as the next person, but when it goes way beyond that or goes on and on, I get a tad uncomfortable.

Of course it could be that these Facebook friends are actually serving in the best church that ever existed, where every member tithes or more, and every member volunteers in some ministry activity at least once a week. Maybe they are serving on a committee that puts every other committee in every other presbytery to shame. Who knows?

Speaking of over the top praise, if all I knew about the church that the apostle Paul founded in Corinth came from the verses we heard this morning, I might think Paul is a bit like some of my Facebook “friends.”  He gives thanks to God always for these folks who are not lacking in any knowledge or spiritual gift. He speaks of them as being “sanctified,” in other words, “made holy,” and of how they are called as “saints.” Wow, this must be some congregation. Either that or Paul is getting a little over the top with his praise.

But as it turns out, I’ve read the rest of Paul’s letter, and I know he doesn’t think they are the best congregation out there. Quite the opposite. He is upset and angry with them. He will call them immature, unspiritual, and still caught up “in the flesh.” In short, the church we meet in Paul’s letter looks like a total disaster with all sorts of divisions, arguments, fights, and messed up theology. Paul warns them they had better straighten up before he returns to deal with them. And yet, Paul opens his letter with these words about being made holy, called to be saints, given every necessary spiritual gift and all wisdom.

Maybe Paul is just following social convention and opening his letter with the expected pleasantries, but I don’t think so. Not only do we have another letter of Paul where he dispenses with such pleasantries, but there is something more. All of those wonderful things about being made holy and called to be saints are not specific to the Corinthian Christians. Rather, they express Paul’s understanding of what it means to be “in Christ.” It is not praise for anything they have done. It is their identity, who they are, the new thing they become through the grace of God in Jesus and the gift of the Spirit, even if they are currently living in ways that obscure their true identity.

Sermon video: Endings, Beginnings, and Pilgrim Journeys

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.