Sermon: Slaves to Freedom

Matthew 4:12-23

Slaves to Freedom

James Sledge                                                                           January 26, 2020

I once saw a newspaper comic strip that depicted a teenager who was angry at his parents for not letting him do something he wanted to do. He yelled, “I’ll be glad when I’m 18 and no one can tell me what to do!” The final panel showed his parents doubled over in laughter.

As much as we celebrate freedom and individualism in this country, almost none of us ever reach the point where no one can tell us what to do.  It may be parents, a teacher, or professor; it may be our boss; it may be the speed limit and the police radar gun, but much of the time, we either do as others say or suffer the consequences.

We often wish it were otherwise. That starts early. Toddlers love the word “No!” Children and adults enjoy saying, “You can’t make me.”  Part of American mythology is that anyone can grow up to be whatever he or she wants to be. We know it’s not really true, even if it’s truer here than in many countries. But still, we love the idea that we’re free to become whatever we want, that we can simply decide, and if we try hard enough, we will make it.

In some countries, children are given aptitude tests and then slotted into certain academic or vocational tracks as early as elementary school.  That would never fly here.

Yet despite this, people often ask themselves the question, “What should I do with my life?” That’s a somewhat different question from “What do I want to do?” What I want to do is about preference, but what I should do speaks of something outside myself having a say.

Sometimes people go to career counseling services to help figure out what sort of thing they should do. Some colleges offer such services to their students. People who are thinking about changing careers sometimes use them. And our denomination requires people who want to become pastors to be evaluated by a reputable career center.

This career counseling usually includes tests that chart personality, interests, and aptitudes. The process assumes that certain traits are necessary for certain careers. When I was 12, I would have loved to become a rock and roll star, but it didn’t take all that many guitar lessons to make it obvious that would never happen.

So I’m wondering, what information would you consider in making a decision about what you should do with your life? Whose voice would you listen to; what authority would you recognize as having a say in that decision? 

And this isn’t limited to decisions about career. Life is full of should questions. Where should I go to college? Should I go to grad school? Should we get married? Should we have children? How should we raise our children? How should we spend our retirement?  What should we do with our estate? The list goes on and on. Perhaps you’re wrestling with such a question right now.

How do you answer such questions? Who and what get a say in answering the question, “What should I do?”

Sermon video: Good News, Total Depravity, and the Lamb of God

Audios of worship and sermons available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Good News, Total Depravity, and the Lamb of God

John 1:29-42

Good News, Total Depravity, and the Lamb of God

January 19, 2020                                                                                             James Sledge

A vaccine for polio was developed a couple of years before I was born. Prior to that half a million people were killed or paralyzed by it each year. In 1952 nearly 60,000 US children contracted polio. Over 3000 died and more than 20,000 were left with some sort of paralysis.

The vaccine was life-altering, front page news. Its developer, Jonas Salk, was a national hero. I have vague recollections of mass immunization drives at schools with public service announcements encouraging anyone who’d not yet been vaccinated to show up, but by the time I was a teenager, you rarely heard anything about polio. It became part of the normal routine, a required vaccination, and there wasn’t a lot of need to get the news out anymore.

Our gospel reading for today contains big, life-altering news from John the Baptist. At least it’s front page news for Andrew, Simon Peter and others. “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” John tells Andrew and he tells Simon Peter. If you keep reading more people get told, and it won’t be long before crowds start to appear.

Sharing good news is central to the biblical story of Jesus and the first Christians, so much so that the our word “gospel” is simply an archaic synonym for “good news.” And the word “evangelism” is just an anglicized version of the Greek word meaning gospel or good news.

When people met Jesus, when people encountered early Christian missionaries, were baptized and received the Holy Spirit, they told others. It was life changing news. How could they not. And so what started out a small, apocalyptic Jewish movement swept over the entire Mediterranean world in short order, drawing in both Jews and non-Jews.

But eventually, Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire. And then it came to be expected, even required. Before long, Jesus wasn’t front page news anymore. It was just one of those things you acquired by being a part of the empire.

Even after the Roman Empire fell, Christianity remained enmeshed in the empires and states that followed. For much of the Western world, this Christendom persisted into the 20^th century. With a few exceptions, being Italian or French or American meant you were expected to be Christian. And baptism was often seen as a bit like a vaccination given to children. It was on the checklist. Whooping cough, polio, measles, baptism.

A lot of people lament the demise of this Christendom, but I’m not one of them. In Christendom, faith often became just background noise. People blissfully imagined that faith and nation were perfectly compatible. Not surprisingly, this Christendom faith made wealth a virtue, supported slavery, was not much troubled by the genocide of indigenous Americans, and thought God created Africans inferior to serve whites.

Tomorrow we honor Martin Luther King, Jr. who challenged the vapid faith of Christendom. As part of the commemoration of his life and work, the television will show old, black and white news footage from the Civil Rights movement. We’ll see police dogs and fire hoses turned on peaceful marchers, and we’ll see police brutally, sometimes gleefully, beating them, police who were upstanding members of their local churches.

Occasionally when such events are being discussed, people – always white people – will explain such behavior as “a product of the time.” Similar arguments are made in opposition to removing statues of southern, Civil War generals. They weren’t bad people. They were good people. They were simply of their time. That was the problem. Not them, the time.

Sermon video: Remembering Who We Are

Audios of worship and sermons available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Remembering Who We Are

Matthew 3:13-17

Remembering Who We Are

James Sledge                                                            January 12, 2020 – Baptism of the Lord

It’s an old joke, one I’m sure I’ve told before, so if you’ve heard it, please bear with me. A group of pastors are meeting for lunch. As I assume happens with other professions, such lunches often include a fair amount of talking shop. There is some complaining and venting, some idea sharing. “What are y’all doing for Lent this year?” and other such discussions.

At this particular lunch, one of the pastors shared that they were having a problem with bats at the church she served. They had discovered a huge colony in the steeple and needed to get them out. She wondered if any of the other pastors had experience with this sort of thing. She didn’t want to hurt the bats but they were starting to make a pretty big mess.

One colleague shared the name of a local pest removal company. Another suggested an ultrasonic pest repeller, but the pastor said they’d already tried one of those with no success.

Finally another pastor said, “We had the same problem a few years ago and decided to enroll them all in confirmation class. When it was over, we never saw them again.”

For those of you from other religious traditions, confirmation is step two in a two-step process for becoming a full-fledged member of a Presbyterian church. Step one is baptism, something that typically happens when a child is still an infant. Confirmation, which includes making a public profession of faith, is the confirming of those baptismal vows, claiming the faith of one’s parents or guardians as one’s own.

Unfortunately, confirmation has a long history of becoming a graduation from church. Children are baptized, attend Sunday School as children, do confirmation as teens, and pretty much disappear after that. For much of the 20^th century, they often returned to church when they married and had children of their own, but that pattern has largely broken down. By the latter part of the 20^th century, many of those who graduated never came back.

I sometimes wonder if we in the church didn’t set ourselves up for this. In a variety of ways, we portrayed Christian faith as a status that one attains. Some evangelicals talk about being born again or saved. But what comes after that? We Presbyterians have rarely used the language of “born again” or being “saved,” but we still tended to treat Christianity as a status. In many congregations, Sunday School is seen as something for children. Presumably that means you are done at some point. You’ve finished, graduated, gotten your Christianity pin.

Some parents skip a step and just make infant baptism the graduation. They “get the baby done,” often at the urging of grandparents. And then they never go near church again.

Sermon video: Pharaoh and Herod vs God's Love

Audios of worship and sermons available on the FCPC website.