Sermon: Long Journey to Something New

Mark 9:30-37

Long Journey to Something New

James Sledge                                                                                       September 20, 2015

How many of you remember having to write essays or papers in high school or college of a certain word number? Some of you are no doubt enjoying this experience right now, and some of our younger worshipers have this to look forward to as you get a bit older. What word count would you expect for a modest, high school essay? What about a term paper for a college class? How about a Ph.D. dissertation? Anyone here who’s done one and can say? Forty or fifty thousand words sound reasonable?

I ask because I want us to think for a moment about what is required to cover a major topic in a fair amount of detail and in a good deal of depth. For example, if you were going to write something that thoroughly covered what someone would need to know to live a life of deep Christian faith and discipleship, how many words would suffice?

Of course we do have a book that Presbyterians say is the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus and for life and faith. But if anyone had ever submitted the Bible as a dissertation or as any other sort of publication, surely some academic advisor or editor would have quickly returned it saying, “Get back to me when you’ve done some serious trimming and editing.”

The Bible weighs in at somewhere near 800,000 words. By comparison, Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a bit over 500,000. If you were God and wanted to explain this faith thing to folks, don’t you think you could have come up with a nice pamphlet, or at least something you could read in a few afternoons? Why on earth have something of this magnitude, a text that gets squeezed into a single book only because of tiny print and ridiculously thin sheets of paper?

The Bible is an unbelievably complex mix of stories and myths and poems and songs and rules and advice and letters and theology and teachings. Yet we Christians often examine a few verses here or there and then attempt to distill great theological truths or axioms from them. I engage is something of this sort most Sundays when I deliver a sermon rooted in a tiny handful of the Bible’s 800,000 words, 175 words in the case of today’s gospel reading.

Without some care and restraint, there is a danger of such efforts being akin to carefully examining the earlobe of the Mona Lisa with a microscope and then proclaiming to understand the significance of the entire painting.

When you think about it, the Bible is a strange and wonderful way to make God known to us, to draw us into relationship with this God. It isn’t a bit of empirical information to be learned. Rather it is an amazing array of experiences and stories that share how God has been encountered in a variety of contexts. It is not unlike getting to know another person, and without understanding context and circumstances, without knowing to whom certain words were spoken, it is easy to misconstrue or misunderstand.

Sermon video: Helping Each Other See

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Helping Each Other See

Mark 8:27-38

Helping Each Other See

James Sledge                                                                           September 13, 2015

I’m going to ask you to imagine a scenario that may terrify some of you. Imagine that there is someone seated near you that you have never met or seen before. That’s not the terrifying part… I hope. Worship comes to an end and she turns to you and says, “I’ve really never done the church thing. Could you tell me what your church believes about Jesus?”

Let that sink in for a moment. How would you respond? What would you say to this person? Really think about it. What would your first words be?

Countless authors have noted that Mainline Christians, especially those who think of themselves as more “progressive,” struggle to answer such questions. More often than not, we instead began to explain what we don’t believe. “We’re not like that county clerk in Kentucky who won’t give a marriage license to gay couples. We don’t believe that Jews and Muslims are going to hell. We’re not fundamentalists who take every word of the Bible literally.” And so on.

Now some of this may be helpful, even welcome information, but none of it actually answers her question about what we actually do believe.

In our gospel reading this morning, Jesus asks a “What do you believe?” sort of question. He starts with, “What are other folks saying?” Then he moves to, “But who do you say that I am?” Not so different from someone asking, “What do you believe about Jesus?”

I wonder how long it took Peter to answer? Peter seems to be one of those folks who talks first and thinks later, so I’m betting pretty quickly. I wonder about the other disciples. If Peter had been quiet for once, what would they have said? Or were they relieved that Peter had taken the risk and blurted out something?

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The gospels were written to help Christians with “What do you believe?” questions, especially “What do you believe about Jesus?” Because people in our day sometimes hand out Bibles as a way of introducing Jesus, it’s easy to forget that the gospels were written, not for people who had yet to hear the story of Jesus, but for people who already knew it, who were already in a church. They’re written to help Christians better understand who Jesus is and what difference that is supposed to make in their lives.

Like Peter, these folks correctly could identify Jesus. So can most of us. If pressed, most of us could share a bit of his story, could identify him as Messiah, or Christ, or Son of God.

But it turns out that being able to Jesus doesn’t really mean Peter, or any of us, understand who he is or what it means to follow him. Peter is clearly expecting a different sort of Messiah than what Jesus describes with his words about suffering and death, and I’m not so sure that has changed very much in our day.

Probably all of us have ways in which we would like Jesus to be something or someone other than he says he is. We want Jesus to help us get where we want to go, but he insists that following him means letting go of our agendas and connecting to God’s.

Something More Than Writer's Block

I've not been writing here very much of late. I like to humor myself by imagining that I am a writer, and I've read that genuine writers suffer through times when they cannot find words. I wonder if the term "writer's block" adequately describes that experience. It seems too pedestrian for something that robs a person, however temporarily, of a significant piece of her identity.

My own identity is not much rooted in the musings that show up in this blog, but it is rooted in the faith and spiritual life that lies behind many of my posts. There are times when not writing a blog is simply a matter of too much going on. Some days fill up with events and commitments and activities of a higher priority than blog posts. Still, when my posts become as sporadic as they have in recent months, something more is at work, and "writer's block" feels too pedestrian to describe it.

I read a piece in The Washington Post by Jen Hatmaker where she worried about us pastors. ("How a consumer culture threatens to destroy pastors") Drawing on recent polling data she writes that pastors

suffer in private and struggle in shame: 77 percent of you believe your marriage is unwell, 72 percent only read your Bible when studying for a sermon, 30 percent have had affairs and 70 percent of you are completely lonely.
    You are a mess! Which makes sense because you are human, like every person in your church. You are so incredibly human but afraid to admit it. So few of you do.

She has a good point. And while I've largely avoided the particular statistics mentioned above, I'm my own sort of mess, one I generally prefer to keep hidden.

When I was in seminary, a pastor nearing retirement shared with me his plan not to darken the door of any church facility upon leaving the pulpit. His best guess was he'd not do church for a year or so. Being an enthusiastic seminary student, I found this strange, bordering on bizarre. Twenty years later, I can better appreciate his plans. Yet I can still get annoyed over church members who don't take their faith "seriously," something generally measured by their level of attendance, giving, or volunteering.

When I encounter a writer's/spiritual block time in my life, I wonder how it would manifest if I were not a professional Christian. (I can't really stop attending on Sundays and still draw a paycheck.) Would I sleep in for a season?

I've frequently heard that non-church folks feel intimidated at the thought of attending worship with church-people who have the faith thing all figured out. They worry that they will stand out and feel lost or out of place. Most church members likely marvel at the idea of their faith intimidating anyone, and I wonder if a similar dynamic might not be at work between many pastors and those in the pews. Perhaps the dynamic is even worse.

Robes and titles and ordination and salary all serve to divide pastors from members, providing means for pastors to hide all those ways that we are a big, human mess. Sometimes members, who pay those salaries, may expect pastors to be "better" Christians than themselves, but the division between pastor and parishioner is detrimental to both. It encourages pastors to keep up an image that is most often far from true, and it robs pastors and parishioners of of the support and companionship they could give one another as they face the inevitable "blocks" that get in the way of full aliveness.

When pastors get together, they sometimes talk, even vent, about their congregations. During full fledged venting, the congregation almost always gets described as "they," or "them." Rarely is it "we" or "us." I would be surprised if church members don't sometimes engage in similar venting about their pastor, with a similar "her and us" or "him and us" divide.

There is something about us humans that looks for a "them" when things are going badly. How different that is from God, who in Christ responds to broken relationship with humanity by becoming fully involved in the pain and suffering of human existence. Strange that we followers of this Christ so often move away from one another when we go through times that challenge, threaten, or frighten us, times when our true selves and identities feel hidden or blocked. Surely Jesus shows us a better way.

Sermon video: Welcomed to the Table

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

August 30 sermon video: Transformative Religion

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Welcomed to the Table

Mark 7:24-37

Welcomed to the Table

James Sledge                                                                                     September 6, 2015

There are numerous pictures on the internet of black and white toddlers holding hands or hugging with a caption saying “No one is born racist.” I like the sentiment, though I wonder if it’s a bit optimistic. Hatred and racism may indeed be cultural and learned, but we humans seem to have a tribal nature, a tendency to coalesce into groups and create boundaries separating us and them. Culture teaches the norms that grow up around such boundaries, but the tendency seems to be innate.

How many of you ever had the childhood experience of moving and attending a new school? My family moved several times over my elementary and middle school years, and while this felt exciting and adventurous, it was also terrifying. Walking into an elementary classroom where you know no one, or worse, walking into a school cafeteria… At least in elementary school the teacher took you to the cafeteria as a class, but in middle school, you were on your own.

Where do I sit? Will I be welcome at that table, or maybe that one? I certainly wasn’t going to go sit at the table with all girls, and being new, it was hard to tell which tables had which sort of students. The athlete’s table was sometimes easy to spot. Easiest of all were the tables populated by those who didn’t really fit in at any of the other tables. Pushing aside those who are different may be learned behavior, but we start learning it awfully early.

If humans had no tendency to be tribal, I wonder if there would be political parties or politics as we know it. I wonder if there would simply be varying ideas about the best way to deal with this or that problem. But we are tribal, and so our varying ideas get turned into boundaries between us and them.

The surprising success of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign seems almost inexplicable, and many have speculated on what makes him appealing. One suggestion is that he loudly proclaims us and them boundaries that are already there but not spoken aloud in polite conversation. Some suggest that Trump has tapped into tribal fears of them, immigrants, the Chinese, and so on. He’s given voice to an us versus them fear that makes some think, “He’s on my side, unlike those regular politicians.” Perhaps Bernie Sanders appeal is not so different, just aimed at different tribes.

Us versus them tribalism was an issue for Christian faith almost as soon as it got started. It’s easy to forget in our time, but all the first followers of Jesus were Jewish. That did not change after Jesus was raised from the dead. It did not change as new followers began to join the Jesus movement. Jesus was a Jewish Messiah who remained firmly in the Jewish tradition all his life, and as the Church began to grow, no one thought of it as anything but Jewish.

When non-Jews began to come into the movement, that meant becoming Jewish first. Males had to be circumcised, and everyone had to adopt Jewish dietary and purity restrictions. But as the number of non-Jewish converts grew, so did the tensions. And people like the Apostle Paul began arguing that the Jesus movement was open to non-Jews without them becoming Jewish. It was the first really big church fight. Read Paul’s letters and you’ll get some idea of how heated and nasty things became.

Sermon: Transformative Religion

James 1:17-27

Transformative Religion

James Sledge                                                                                       August 30, 2015

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this… Religion… The term could use some PR help. Most of the stories associated with it are negative. Article after article has chronicled the dramatic rise of the “Nones” those folks who check “none of the above” when asked to list a religious preference. They and many others sometimes say they are  “spiritual but not religious,” SBNR for short.

The exact distinction between “spiritual” and “religious” is a bit fuzzy. One dictionary says that “spiritual” has to do with sacred things, with religion, with supernatural deities, but the definition of “religious” mentions many of the same things. However “religious” feels more connected to the corporate and institutional: congregations, denominations, churches.

In her delightful, witty, snarky, and insightful book, When “Spiritual But Not Religious” Is Not Enough: Seeing God in Surprising Places, Even the Church, UCC pastor Lilian Daniel challenges SBNR thinking about church. She complains about such folks needing to share their spiritual insights with her upon learning she is a pastor. Writing of one such encounter she says, “Everybody loves to tell a minister what’s wrong with the church.”

This particular fellow had started out Roman Catholic but had left for a variety of church “failures.” After college he become part of a conservative Baptist church, drawn by relationships with the people there. But he chafed under a long list of prohibitions and eventually drifted away. Later he married and became part of his wife’s Mainline congregation. It fit him rather well, but then they divorced and it felt like her church, so he drifted away again. Now he spent his Sunday mornings sleeping late, reading the New York Times, and going for runs through the woods.

This was his religion today, he explained. “I worship nature. I see myself in the trees and in the butterflies. I am one with the great outdoors. I find God there. And I realized that I am deeply spiritual but no longer religious.”

He dumped the news in my lap as if it were a controversial hot potato, something that would shock a mild-mannered minister never before exposed to ideas so brave and different and daring. But of course, to me, none of this was different in the least.

This kind and well-meaning Sunday jogger fits right into mainstream American culture. He is perhaps by now in the majority— all those people who have stepped away from the church in favor of …what? Running, newspaper reading, Sunday yoga, or whatever they put together to construct a more convenient religion of their own making.[1]

Daniel shares a good bit more of this fellow’s story and his attempts to enlighten her before concluding, “It finally hit me what was bothering me about this self-styled religion he had invented— he hadn’t invented it at all. It was as boring and predictable as the rest of our self-centered consumer culture, and his very conceit, that this outlook was somehow original, daring, or edgy, was evidence of that very self-centeredness.”[2]

Guns, Tribalism, Mustard Seeds, and Hope

There are days when I find it depressing to be a pastor. This isn't because of anything going on in my congregation or any personal faith crisis. Rather it's because I am seeing fellow Christians cheer on Donald Trump as he denigrates immigrants, Latinos, and women. It's because I hear fellow Christians go on and on about the sanctity of gun ownership, and I can't understand how this can be.

I am a pastor, a designated leader in the Christian movement. Our movement is rooted in the God of the Bible who demanded welcome and concern for the poor, the alien, and the outsider. Our movement follows a pacifist Messiah who calls us to deny ourselves and love our enemies, who dies willingly for his enemies, whose most fundamental command is to love. Yet many "Christian" voices spew hatred toward the neighbor who is different. They are obsessed with their "right to defend themselves." Everyone else be damned. How did we get following Jesus so horribly wrong? It's depressing.

No doubt some of Christianity's decline in America is because so many of us look so appallingly little like our religious namesake. And this problem is not restricted to conservatives, liberals, or any particular group. We all have our methods choosing a few Christian attributes that suit us and ignoring the rest.

Of course this is nothing new. Jesus' disciples struggled to make sense of him or follow his teachings. Peter "rebuked" him over his willingness to die, and Judas eventually decided to turn him in. One follower drew his sword - the open carry of his day - when they came to arrest Jesus, but Jesus stopped him. In Matthew's gospel, Jesus gives a chilling indictment of those who use weapons to serve their ends. "For all who take the sword will perish by the sword."

After the resurrection, the disciples (minus Judas) understand Jesus a lot better, yet the Church they start almost immediately starts fighting about whether or not to allow those dirty, non-Jews to be a part of their little movement. Welcoming the Gentiles eventually became the norm, but not before a lot of nasty fights and, apparently, a few martyrs.

Jesus goes to incredible lengths to drag us out of our "us versus them" ways of viewing the world. But we keep trying to drag Jesus back into our tribal view of things, hoping to make him captain of our team and so the enemy of theirs. (Of course Jesus loves his enemies, but we forget that.)

And yet... And yet Jesus, the real, biblical Jesus, keeps breaking loose from our tribal boundaries. In New Testament times it happened with the Apostle Paul, who, at no small risk to his own life, welcomed in those dirty Gentiles without requiring them to become Jewish first. (Paul's arrest and imprisonment in Rome may well have been orchestrated by Christians opposed to his non-tribal understanding of Jesus.) And Jesus keeps breaking loose in small, mustard seed moments down through history. In our own US history this happens when some Christians began to see African slaves as full human beings loved by God, and they agitate for an end to slavery. It happens a hundred years later when white and black Christians march peacefully for civil rights, sometimes at the cost of their lives.

In recent days, a non-tribal Jesus has been visible in the faith of Jimmy Carter who, facing his own battle with cancer, is focused not on himself but on helping others all over the world and teaching others about Christ-like love.

Thinking of these and many other "mustard seeds," I feel less depressed... and a lot more hopeful.

Sermon video: In the End, Beloved Community

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: In the End, Beloved Community

Luke 15:11-32

In the End, Beloved Community

James Sledge                                                                                       August 23, 2015

Just over a year ago, Shawn and I traveled to Austin, Texas for the wedding of our daughter Kendrick and now son-in-law Ryan. In many ways, it was like a lot of weddings, with bridesmaids and groomsmen, tuxes and dresses, and friends and family gathered from here and there. If you’ve been involved in many weddings, you know that they have their share of family dynamics, tuxes that don’t fit, and frayed nerves. Here again, this wedding was probably typical, although it all came together beautifully. But when my father of the bride duties had all been completed, this wedding, in my admittedly biased opinion, did become distinctive.

I can’t say exactly why. It was a reception like many other receptions with a band and a bar and dinner, but this one worked better than most others I’ve been to. Perhaps it was just the right combination of food that was good, drink that was good, a band that was good, a venue that was good, and a great mix of family and friends from the various places we’ve lived over the years. Whatever the reason, I can’t remember when I’ve enjoyed myself more. I ate, drank, mingled, talked, laughed, danced (I rarely dance), and I did not want it all to end.

I think that experience gave me a greater appreciation for Jesus’ and the Bible’s use of wedding banquets as metaphor for the kingdom, the reign of God. Weddings were huge deals in that time, feasts and celebrations that went on for a week. People pulled out all the stops for a wedding. When the father in our parable today kills the fatted calf to celebrate his younger son’s return, he throws a wedding banquet type party. No wonder the elder son is so upset, giving this party its own family dynamics and drama. “I’m not going if he’s going.”

I’ve long loved the exchange between father and elder son that concludes the parable, leaving the situation unresolved. The Presbyterian son – in the Greek he is the “presbuteros” (presbu/teroj) son, root word of our denominational name – has disowned his younger sibling. He is no longer his brother, and so he yells at his father, “When this son of yours came back…” But the father will not let the family disintegrate so easily. “But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life…”

The elder brother might have been happy for his sibling to return in the manner the younger had imagined, a hired hand and not a son. But the father’s love makes that impossible and leaves him in anguish at parable’s end, longing for reconciliation among his children.

Presence, a Shared Smile, and Selfie Sticks

I normally keep "office hours" late each Monday afternoons at the Starbucks just down the street. Yesterday I was sipping my coffee and reading when I heard an infant who wasn't quite crying but was making a good bit of noise. I looked around and saw the mother bouncing the child on her shoulder, trying to calm him. She had a nervous expression on her face as she looked around.

Her eyes caught mine. Another time I might have been perturbed or frustrated by this interruption, but yesterday I was simply taking it in and even enjoying myself as I watched this small slice of life play out. I smiled at her and laughed a bit to myself. She smiled broadly back at me. After a moment I looked back down at my book. My mother taught me it is impolite to stare. But I looked up at her again a few moments later, and she smiled at me once more.

We were on opposite sides of the Starbucks, and we never spoke. Soon the child settled down, and I eventually got back to my book, but not before ruminating a bit on how alive I had felt in those brief moments of shared smiles. I also reflected on how that might not have happened had I glared at her, indicating my displeasure at being disturbed.

The reason I responded with a smile rather than a glare likely has to do with the book I was reading, The Naked Now by Richard Rohr. (I should say re-reading. I'm slow to learn Rohr's lessons.) The subtitle of the book is Learning to See as the Mystics See, and Rohr was talking about learning a different way of seeing, one that is truly and fully present to the moment.

It happens whenever, by some wondrous "coincidence," our heart space, our mind space, and our body awareness are all simultaneously open and nonresistant. I like to call it presence. It is experienced as a moment of deep inner connection, and it always pulls you, intensely satisfied, into the naked and undefended now, which can involve both profound joy and profound sadness. At that point, you either want to write poetry, pray, or be utterly silent. (p. 28)

I'm not much of a poet, so I did the last two.

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On my recent trip to Turkey, my companions and I were struck by the large numbers of people carrying around selfie sticks and spending much of their time with backs turned to the breathtaking churches and mosques and ruins that drawn millions of tourists. How odd to experience such wonders "over your shoulder." 

I don't own a selfie stick, but that hardly means I don't miss plenty myself. More often than not, I'm in a hurry or in the middle of something or lost in thought or concerned with defending my position, and so I'm unable simply to take in what is around me. The miracle of that shared smile in Starbucks was that it happened at all, that I did not miss it.

Think of how rarely we simply take things in, simply experience the moment without making a judgment, without worrying about how to respond, without thinking about what we have to do next, without any need to defend a point of view. For many of us, what a rare gift it is to be absolutely and only in the moment.

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In today's gospel reading, Jesus refuses to answer a question about the source of his "authority." His refusal has nothing to do with a need to hide the source or to be secretive. Rather Jesus knows (and demonstrates) that his opponents are not really interested in his answer. They will not roll it over in the minds, considering it and wondering about it. They will hear Jesus only in order to find something to use against him. 

How like me they are, already knowing what the answer is, needing only to protect and defend that. But for a brief moment yesterday, I experienced the world differently, and it was lovely and beautiful.

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