Sermon: Fake Questions and Kingdom Ways

Mark 10:2-16

Fake Questions and Kingdom Ways

James Sledge                                                                                       October 7, 2018

I don’t think we’ve done it here during my time as pastor, but both of my previous congregations did a stewardship program called the “Grow One Challenge.” This challenge was based on the fact that very few church members tithe. Never mind how often a pastor calls for the offering with “Let us bring our tithes and offerings…” statistics show that tithers are as rare as liberal Republicans.

And so the “Grow One Challenge” is a plan both to help church members move toward the biblical notion of the tithe, giving the first ten percent, the first fruits, to God. Recognizing that the typical Presbyterian gives something closer to two percent, this challenge knew that asking people to jump from one or two percent to ten was an impossible task. And so people were encouraged to grow one, one percentage point that is, toward the tithe. The pledge cards accompanying the program even had little charts on the back that would help you do the math.

The program seemed to work pretty well. We had some pretty big jumps in giving when we first used it. But I also had a rather experience. It happened in both churches and it happened repeatedly.  People asked me, “Am I supposed give ten percent of my income before or after taxes?” They almost always grinned as they asked.

I don’t think there was ever I time where this was a real question. They weren’t filling out their pledge card and wanting to know if it was this amount or that. More often it was just a joke, but sometimes it was a way of muddying the waters, of charting loopholes.

The Pharisees in our scripture aren’t making a joke, but they may well be grinning. Their question is not a real one. They already know what the law says. They’re merely hoping Jesus’ answer will make some folks angry. There were disagreements in Jesus’ day, not about whether divorce was legal, but about valid reasons for it. The Pharisees hope Jesus will come down on one side and upset those on the other.

Sermon video: Getting Our Mojo Back

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon video: Answering (and Living) the Jesus Question

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Getting Our Mojo Back

Mark 9:30-37

Getting Our Mojo Back

September 23, 2018                                                                                        James Sledge

I spent much of my childhood and youth in Charlotte, NC, back in the days when TV had a total of six or seven channels. Of these, the CBS affiliate dominated the local market and also owned the largest radio station. It had a number of high profile, charity events each year, but the one I recall the most vividly was an annual on air blood drive.

They advertised it heavily. Corporate sponsors provided food, refreshments, and gifts. Radio and TV personalities worked the event. CBS sent in stars from various shows, and all during the day they would have live broadcasts interviewing donors, talking about how easy is was, how almost painless it was.

The event was always a huge success with more than a thousand people donating blood. The Red Cross blood bank would be as full as it ever got, but this blood drive never seemed to convert many into regular donors. Year after year, most of those interviewed were first time donors, and year after year, it wasn’t long before the Red Cross was making pleas to the public about critically short blood supplies. The gifts, glitz, celebrities, and chance to be on TV drew in lots of people, but when it was all over, they went back to old patterns, ones that didn’t include giving blood.

A similar pattern showed up in the early Jesus movement. The gospels report huge crowds coming out to see this miracle working, charismatic, teacher-prophet-messiah. But by and large, the crowds saw the show, perhaps got a healing, and then went home to their old lives.

The early reflected this. It was a small movement, and you see that in the New Testament. In his letters, the Apostle Paul deals with questions about what parts of normal, civic participation are out of bounds for followers of Jesus, questions that arise because the Christians are a tiny minority. So too some of the gospels address communities struggling to remain faithful when doing so may get them ostracized from polite society.

We tend to think of the Bible as a public book, but the individual components of the New Testament – which didn’t really exist as we know it for a few hundred years after Jesus – were not understood that way. They were not used to spread the Christian message but to help existing Christian communities deal with issues that they faced. The books that would become the New Testament weren’t for the masses, but for the dedicated few.

It’s easy to see why the early Jesus movement tended to be small. While Jesus might have made a big splash and attracted a lot of gawkers, people hoping for a healing, or a political messiah to take on the Romans, many of Jesus’ teachings were not real crowd pleasers. The teachings we heard this morning are no exception.

Sermon video: Tribalism Meets God's Love and Grace

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Answering (and Living) the Jesus Question

Mark 8:27-38

Answering (and Living) the Jesus Question

James Sledge                                                                           September 16, 2018

The other day I stopped into the grocery store to grab a couple of items. As I looked for them, I happened down an aisle that was filled with Halloween candy and paraphernalia. I shouldn’t have  been surprised – it’s September after all, but I was. It was one of those sultry, ninety degree days, and it didn’t feel anything like fall.

But fall is almost here, which means the election is just around the corner. I’ve been something of a political junkie for much of my life, but I confess that I’ve grown tired of it. I don’t want to see all the political ads. I don’t want to see candidates who wrap themselves in a Christian mantle while spouting hatred and intolerance and outright racist ideas. I especially don’t want to watch another round of church leaders doing irreparable damage to the image of the faith by insisting that candidates who show not the tiniest inclination to follow the teachings of Jesus are somehow God’s candidate. Wake me when it’s over.

Of course then the Christmas shopping season will be almost upon us, complete with culture war skirmishes. Some of the same folks who touted God’s candidates will insist that we “put Christ back in Christmas,” and they’ll get angry if someone says “Happy Holidays.” Sigh… Wake me when it’s over.

It’s amazing all the ways that Jesus or Christ or God or Christian faith gets invoked to support all manner of things. There are churches that celebrate the Second Amendment in worship and encourage members to bring their guns. There are churches that loudly proclaim, “God Hates Fags.” There are churches that say Donald Trump is God’s man in the White House, and there are churches that stage protests against Donald Trump. There are churches that see same sex relationships as an abomination and sin, and there are churches that marry same sex couples. And all these churches, at least all that call themselves Christian, claim Christ in some way.

When people insist that we put Christ back in Christmas, which one do they mean? Is it the one who blesses same sex marriages? Is it the one who says to love your enemy and not to resist the one who strikes you? Or is it a different Christ? How many of them are there? Sometimes it seems that we Christians have been given the answer to the question, but we’re not at all sure what that answer means.

Sermon: Tribalism Meets God's Love and Grace

Mark 7:24-37

Tribalism Meets God’s Love and Grace

James Sledge                                                                                       September 9, 2018

A great deal has been written and discussed of late on how tribal we’ve become in America. I read something the other day following the death of John McCain that said although Senator McCain was widely admired, he had become something of a political pariah in his home state of Arizona. All three Republican candidates in the recent Arizona senate primary either distanced themselves from McCain or outright disparaged him.

McCain’s hostility to President Trump is certainly one reason for this, but tribalism is involved as well. Tribalism draws very clear us and them boundaries and tends to view “them” as the enemy. Someone like McCain, who would work with members of the other party and even work against his own party when his principles required it, looks very suspicious to those who view the world from a tribal perspective.

We humans seem to have an innate tendency towards tribalism. We may not be born racists or homophobes or sexists or elitists or any other sort of ists, but we seek comfort and security and purpose by coalescing into groups with others who are like us in some way. It starts at a very young age. School children often form cliques that can be hostile and cruel to those who don’t fit into their group.

This is not a recent phenomenon. In Jesus’ day there were numerous divisions and groups. The Pharisees were a reform movement centered on synagogue and following scripture, opposed to what they saw as the corrupt, priestly Judaism of the Jerusalem Temple. The Essenes withdraw entirely into their own, separatist community in reaction to perceived Temple corruption and a world too accommodating to Greco-Roman culture. Then there was the Jewish – Gentile divide, the biggest tribal division of Jesus’ day.

These divisions are different than those of our day, and some may strike us as odd. But they functioned much the same as the divisions we hardly notice. We gather here for worship each week and frequently hear Paul’s words that say, There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all are one in Christ Jesus. But we hardly represent the diversity and inclusiveness these words suggest. We’re not a representative sampling of America or even our immediate community. We’re whiter, wealthier, more liberal, more likely to be cultural elitists, and so on.

Sermon video: Stained by the World

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Stained by the World

James 1:17-27

Stained by the World

James Sledge                                                                                                   September 2, 2018

There was an article in The Washington Post recently entitled, “Are rich people more likely to lie, cheat, steal? Science explains the world of Manafort and Gates.”[1] If you followed Paul Manafort’s recent trial, you know about the $15,000 ostrich and python jackets, the exorbitant lifestyle and the lengths he was willing to go to maintain that lifestyle.

And of course Manafort is but one example in a litany of cases involving insider trading, misuse of campaign contributions, and so on. According to the Post article, a growing body of scientific evidence finds that wealth, power, and privilege “makes you feel like you’re above the law… allows you to treat others like they don’t exist.”

Among the scientific studies was one where researchers watched four-way stop intersections. Expensive cars were significantly less likely to wait their turn than older and cheaper cars. The same researchers sent pedestrians into crosswalks and observed which cars obeyed the law and stopped when someone was in the crosswalk. Every single one of the older, cheaper cars stopped, but only half of the expensive cars did.

Drawing on many different research studies the Post article said, “That research has shown the rich cheat more on their taxes. They cheat more on their romantic partners. The wealthy and better-educated are more likely to shoplift. They are more likely to cheat at games of chance. They are often less empathetic. In studies of charitable giving, it is often the lower-income households that donate higher proportions of their income than middle-class and many upper-income folk.”

This sort of research is relatively new, and so there is a lot it cannot say about why or how this all works. But the evidence is pretty compelling that being wealthy and/or powerful has a tendency to make you an awful person. And perhaps that’s exactly the sort of thing our scripture is worried about when it to keep oneself unstained by the world.

Sermon video: More Than What We Know

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon video: Fauxpologies and Acknowledging the Truth

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: More Than What We Know

John 6:35, 41-51

More Than What We Know

August 12, 2018                                                                                                         James Sledge

The bread of life; the bread that came down from heaven; the living bread that came down from heaven. If you’ve been around the church for much of your life, these sayings may not register as particularly problematic. But think about what odd statements they are. Jesus says he is bread, living bread at that, and bread that came down from heaven. It’s hardly surprising that “the Jews” complain about this.

(Jews, by the way, is a term used in John’s gospel to designate Jesus’ opponents and not all those who follow the traditions of Moses. Jesus and his disciples are Jews after all.)

I would think that many Jews who heard Jesus talk about bread that came down from heaven – and I include Jesus’ own followers here – would immediately have thought about the manna that the Israelites ate in the wilderness when Moses led them out of Egypt. That was truly bread that came down from heaven. And Jesus clearly wasn’t manna.

Then there is the whole “came down from heaven” thing. Unlike manna, Jesus wasn’t found out of the ground early in the morning. He showed up just like any of us did, born as a helpless little baby. Some listening to Jesus knew his family. They knew without a doubt that he had not come down from heaven.

Many of Jesus’ opponents were religious leaders, and they “knew” lots of things about scripture and God and how to be a good member of God’s chosen people. And along with obvious things such as knowing Jesus’ mom and dad, there were religious problems with what Jesus said. For Jews, and for early Christians, heaven was God’s home. People, living or dead, didn’t go there. To be from heaven was to be divine, and scripture clearly said that God was one. Jesus couldn’t be from heaven.