Sermon: Resurrection Shaped Community

 Acts 4:32-35
Resurrection Shaped Community
James Sledge                                                                                     April 7, 2024 

That couldn’t actually happen, could it? Would people ever willingly pool all their possessions so that no one went without? Could it happen here? I once heard a sermon at a presbytery meeting where the preacher said that it never really happened. His proof didn’t come from any scriptural or historical research. His proof was that his presbytery work had taken him to a great many churches over the years, and it had never happened there.

Biblical scholars sometimes wonder if it were quite so wonderful as what we just heard in the book of Acts, and they point to Acts itself. Just a few verses after our passage, it tells of a couple who sold their property and claimed to give all the proceeds to the community but in fact held some of it back for themselves.

The biblical scholar’s answer to the question of whether the community described in Acts could have happened is a little less absolute than that preacher I heard years ago. It might have partly happened, but it wasn’t nearly so perfect as reported.

What do you think? Could it have happened, even partly? Could it happen now, even partly? Or does your experience with the human condition suggest even that would be impossible?

Let me ask you a completely different question. Do you believe in the resurrection? Perhaps that seems a strange question to ask on the second Sunday in Easter. Just last week we proclaimed, “Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed!” Of course we believe in the resurrection. But is resurrection any less outlandish a claim than one about a community of radical sharing where everyone held everything in common and everyone had enough?

Imagine that you met someone who had never heard the first thing about Christianity. Imagine you told this person about the first Christian community where everyone shared things in common and people sold what they had so that everyone had plenty.

Then imagine that you gave this person a thumbnail sketch of the Jesus story. You explained that Jesus preached and taught and performed miracles and proclaimed that the kingdom of God was drawing near, a day when God’s will would be done on earth as it is in heaven. But Jesus stirred up trouble. The Roman authorities didn’t appreciate talk about a new kingdom, and the religious leaders worried that Jesus was rocking the boat too much. And so the Romans arrested and executed Jesus after a sham trial. But to his followers’ amazement, Jesus did not stay buried. God raised him from the dead, and this risen Jesus appeared to many of those followers who then went on to found the Christian movement.

If this person you were talking to had never heard anything about Christian faith, which story would be harder to believe, one about a community of radical sharing and caring, or one where a revolutionary leader was executed but was then raised from the dead?

I have to think the sharing community would be a lot easier to swallow. Yet we don’t bat an eye when we say, “Christ is risen!” while doubting that a community like the one described in Acts could really happen, certainly not in our day. Does the community in Acts really seem that much more impossible, or have we simply heard the Easter story so often that we’ve become numb to how astonishing and impossible it is? Or have we, perhaps, never quite realized what resurrection means?

Sometimes I hear people talk about resurrection as though it were part of the natural order of things, bulbs emerging in spring or caterpillars turning into butterflies, death just a passage to something new. But that’s not what the Bible or Jesus mean by resurrection.

For Jesus and the Bible, resurrection belonged to the end of time. It was expected to be a one-time event at the end of the age, but then Jesus was raised from the dead, a resurrection of one. In the aftermath of that first Easter, Jesus’ followers had to rethink resurrection. Clearly it was not yet the end of the age. No one else who was dead had been raised. What did that mean?

Gradually, the Church came to understand that Jesus’ resurrection did indeed mark the end of an age, but the new age was still yet to come, a day the apostle Paul described this way. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we (referring to those alive at that time) will be changed.

In the meantime, the presence of the Holy Spirit allows people to experience the power of resurrection in the here and now. Joined to Christ, we become new creations who belong, not that old age, but to the new age to come. In essence, we live in a time between the times, and the shape of our lives reveals the age to which we most belong.

The story of that remarkable community in the book of Acts is a story about resurrection power. That power was the lifeblood of the community, transforming it so that it looked nothing like the world around it. Instead, it looked like the age to come, like God’s new day.

If I do not believe that the Acts community could really exist, that it is some sort of utopian pipe dream, what does that say about resurrection power? Does it say that no real newness is possible? Does it say that God can’t or won’t do anything to transform the world, to make it what it could be, what it should be?

No doubt you’ve seen news reports about the decline of the church, something we are not immune to here at the Meeting House. There are many reasons for this decline, but I fear that one of the bigger reasons is that the Church shows so little resurrection power. It does not exhibit new or different possibilities. It looks very much like the world, like the old age, not the one to come, and so any claims of newness in Christ ring hollow. Its liturgies and practices may be nurturing and comforting to those long accustomed to them, but often there is little to suggest any real hope of something wonderful and new.

But once a year, the world is fascinated by Easter. Once a year people who have no church affiliation or involvement make their way to Easter worship even though there is no Christmas-like, secular frenzy pumping up the season. There is simply Easter with its incredible, impossible claim that Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed!

For one day the Church loudly proclaims that what no one thought possible is possible, that there is a power loose in the world stronger than death and corruption and emptiness. There is hope beyond what we humans can muster on our own.

And if that power and hope actually begin to live in us, we cannot help but look and act differently. Maybe we won’t match the radical nature of that community in Acts, but if resurrection power truly dwells in us, we cannot help being more generous, more compassionate, more loving, more committed to justice. We cannot help being different from the world around us. And when that happens the world can catch a glimpse of resurrection in us. It may even be tempted to believe that an impossible story is true.

Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia! Thanks be to God!

Sermon: As Good as Dead

 Mark 16:1-8
As Good as Dead
James Sledge                                                                                     March 31, 2024 

“Jesus Christ is risen today, Alleluia!” The tomb is empty! Christ is alive! It is the day of resurrection! Tell all the good news. Easter is here, the biggest day on the Church calendar.

As a result, most of us know well the story of Easter morning. Jesus had been executed, dying late on Friday, which was just before the Sabbath day began at sundown. And so his burial was accomplished in a hurry. There was little time for putting spices and perfumes on his body as was the practice. It was almost Sabbath, when all work and unnecessary activity ceased. What a strange Sabbath it must have been for Jesus’ followers.

When the Sabbath ended on Saturday evening, some of the women who followed Jesus began thinking about what they could do to give Jesus a decent burial when it got light enough to go out. They bought some spices so that they could anoint his body. They wanted to do what little they could for him.

As soon as the sun was up on Sunday morning, they headed to the tomb with their spices. Now they would have their chance to properly mourn their loss, to properly prepare Jesus’ body, and to pay their last respects. As they went, they wondered how they would get into the tomb. (The stones that covered tombs were not the large boulders that we sometimes see in paintings. They were more like carved wheels, sometimes as tall as a person. They sat in a groove running along the face of the tomb, and workmen could roll them in it like a wheel. There was a depression in front of the entrance so that once the stone was in place, it took a great deal of effort to get it rolling.) The women had seen the tomb late on Friday, and they knew the stone was too large for them to move. But they were determined to do this last thing for Jesus. They didn’t know how they would get in, but they would.

To their surprise they arrived at the tomb and found the stone already rolled back. This was most fortunate but was also a little disturbing. Why was the tomb standing open? And when they stepped into the tomb they were startled and frightened to see a young, robed man sitting there, like he had been waiting for them. Perhaps he was an angel for he said, “Do not be alarmed.” That’s the sort of things angels always say when they encounter people in the Bible, though it doesn’t seem to have calmed the women all that much.

Then the man tells them the incredible news. “You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” 

What wonderful, wonderful news. Jesus is risen! And we know how the story goes from here. The women run out to tell the others, to tell everyone, “He has been raised and we will see him in Galilee just as he said would happen.”

But our scripture reading says something quite different. So they went out and fled the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. As hard as it is to fathom, that is how Mark’s gospel ends.

It’s a terribly unsatisfying ending, which likely explains why the Bible contains a couple of endings added later. Many Bibles mark them with the imaginative titles, “The Shorter Ending of Mark” and “The Longer Ending of Mark.” Scholars of all stripes agree that these two endings don’t belong with the original gospel. The only debate is over whether Mark intended to end his gospel this way or the ending was somehow lost. It’s a debate that can’t really be settled. The only thing that can be said for sure is that in God’s providence, the gospel the Church received ends this way: So they went out and fled the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

In Mark’s gospel, there is no joy on Easter morning, no shouts of “He is risen!” only terror, shock, fear, and silence. Not all that surprising when you think about it. Centuries insulate us from the drama of that morning, the raw emotions of going to a friend’s grave and finding it open and empty, a strange man sitting there, saying your friend has been raised.

On top of that, we aren’t much worried about meeting our now risen friend. Jesus is not going to be there when we get back home. No chance he’ll say anything to us about our behavior or ask if we denied him. We’ve got Jesus safely confined to heaven, not running around loose where we might bump into him.

For many of us, Jesus might as well be dead. We’ve heard about him, learned stories about him, are perhaps impressed by some of his teachings, but he doesn’t really intrude into our daily lives. Jesus is no more alive to us than family, friends, and loved ones who’ve died. He’s gone to heaven, unseen by us. In a sense, he’s as good as dead.

I’ve lived my entire life in the Presbyterian Church. That’s less and less common, so I can’t assume that all of you know the stereotypes about Presbyterians, our obsession with doing things “decently and in order,” or of our nickname, “the frozen chosen.” Suffice to say that we have a long history as staid, buttoned-down, well-educated, neck up Christians.

That’s made us suspicious of things that seem overly spontaneous or enthusiastic. We’re uneasy with people doing crazy things because of the Holy Spirit, and we’ve made sure such things don’t happen in our congregations.

Some of our caution is appropriate. We do need to “test the spirits,” as the Apostle Paul wrote, to see which are from God. We do need to confirm that some fit of inspiration does indeed align with the God we meet in Jesus. But we’ve rarely stopped there.

The Holy Spirit didn’t really come up all that often in the churches where I grew up, and decently and in order was usually about maintaining control, making sure nothing happened that we couldn’t manage. No letting the Spirit hijack our worship or other church programs. No danger of bumping into the risen Jesus.

For the very first Christians, meeting the risen Christ was not restricted to those few who were around in the days following the resurrection. By the power of the Holy Spirit, the risen Christ continued to be present to the community of faith. The Apostle Paul goes so far as to say, “Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.” For Paul and the other early Christians, there was new life in Christ because Christ dwelled in them through the Spirit. Christ was alive, not safely sequestered off in heaven for all eternity. He was present in the here and now, really and truly alive.

I wonder if Annie Dillard, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, was thinking of such things when she wrote,

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.^[1]

I think the women at the tomb understood this better than we do, and so they had the good sense to be a little frightened. If Jesus was alive, God had indeed stirred. This had never happened before. Resurrection is not reanimation. It is not going to heaven when you die. It is the raising of the dead at the end of time. If Jesus had truly been resurrected, then a new age was breaking in. Everything had changed. Of course the women experienced terror and fear. Life would never be the same again.

Christ is risen! Not he died and went to heaven, but he IS risen! IS. And in our baptisms we are joined to the risen Christ, and he dwells in us. Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! And the risen Christ calls us to follow him, to be his body in the world, so that the world may know that he lives.

Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia! Thanks be to God.

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[1] Dillard, Annie. Teaching a Stone to Talk: “Expeditions and Encounters,” (New York: HarperCollins, 2007) Kindle Edition p. 49.

 

Sermon: Not the Last Supper

 Matthew 26:17-30
Not the Last Supper
James Sledge                                                                            March 24, 2024 

When I was a child in the Presbyterian church, we have never heard of anything called Palm/Passion Sunday, which is the proper name of today. It was just Palm Sunday, and it was a day of celebration. Some years we paraded around the church property waving palm branches during the Sunday School hour, and we always processed into the sanctuary for worship, joyfully singing and waving our branches.

As I recall it, the mood never much changed for the rest of the service. The scripture readings were all about Palm Sunday and the sermon was about it, too. And we were still waving our palm branches when the service came to a close.

I don’t remember much about what happened during Holy Week. I don’t recall any sort of Good Friday service, and I only have the vaguest notions of something on Maundy Thursday. Perhaps there was a service and we didn’t regularly attend it. Regardless, for me we went from one parade to the next at Easter. We celebrated on Palm Sunday, and we celebrated even bigger on Easter. I learned the story of Jesus being crucified somewhere along the way, but for me, Holy week was one celebration followed by another.

By contrast, the gospels spend an inordinate about of time going through the details of Holy Week and Jesus’ passion. And indeed, in ancient practice, worship focused on the Passion both on Palm Sunday and the Sunday before.

Thankfully, from my viewpoint, the liturgical calendar tried to recover some of the ancient practices of Lent and began to include the Passion as a part of the readings for Palm Sunday. This had the added benefit of keeping us from rushing from one parade to the next, especially considering the slim turnouts for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services.

And so here we are. Jesus has entered into Jerusalem in what is almost a parody of the typical royal procession, but that entry marks the beginning of a struggle with authorities and rulers that will eventually lead to his crucifixion and death. With his arrest imminent, we gather with Jesus and the disciples at table.

As we’ve been doing throughout Lent, we are using a scripture passage from the book, Meeting Jesus at the Table: A Lenten Study. Today we are focused on what is often called the Last Supper. I’m not entirely sure why it’s called that considering that Luke’s gospel reports the risen Jesus eating supper with disciples on the evening of the first Easter. And in our scripture Jesus points forward to a day when they shall all once again gather together in God’s kingdom.

The institution of the Lord’s Supper takes place in the midst of failure on the part of the disciples. We heard the prediction of Judas’ betrayal of Jesus, and immediately following our reading Jesus predicts that all the disciples will desert him, and Peter will deny him. The giving of a meal of remembrance is bracketed by the harsh reality that those closest to Jesus will turn on him and desert him and deny him.

The setting for this meal is the Passover, the celebration of God’s saving act that frees the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. The synoptic gospel writers clearly see Jesus’ passion as a sort of new Passover, a new saving act that will also be celebrated at table just as Passover is. And Jesus speaking of blood being poured out seems to reflect both the slaying of the Passover lamb as well as a covenant ceremony like the one Moses performs with the Israelites in the wilderness after God gives the Law at Mt. Sinai.

The first Christians clearly embraced this idea of celebrating at table. Our Lenten study book says in the chapter on today’s verses, “It is not too much to say that Christian identity was formed around the table, in the breaking and sharing of bread, all the while telling the stories of Jesus.”[1] Early Christian worship was not unlike a covered dish supper, with the participants bringing items for a meal at which the Lord’s Supper would be celebrated.

Presumably this covered dish supper looked a little like a Passover meal. That meal is a meal of remembrance, recalling Israel’s time as slaves and Egypt and their miraculous rescue by God. But even though the Passover looks back and remembers, it also looks forward. The liturgy for the service typically ends with messianic hope as the people say, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

Part of the traditional liturgy for the Lord’s Supper contains something similar. The celebrant says, “Great is the mystery of faith,” and the congregation joins in singing or saying, “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”

But even though the Lord’s Supper is called the “joyful feast of the people of God,” very often there is not much joy in it. Despite the fact that my childhood worship experience mostly avoided Jesus’ passion, rushing from one parade to the next, the Lord’s Supper seemed to be the one time that we did focus on the passion. In fact, the tone during communion was somber, melancholy, even gloomy. It almost seemed to say that this was indeed Jesus’ last supper. There was no anticipation of Easter, no joy at all.

In the North Carolina presbytery where I was ordained as a pastor, it was standard practice to examine all pastors coming into the presbytery during a presbytery meeting. Even if you were retired and just moving your membership there from where you previously lived, you had to stand up front and answer any questions that the members directed your way.

Often the questions were few and rather perfunctory, but we did have a pastor or two who thought that if it was an examination someone should ask real questions. And they were happy to oblige.

One of the questions they sometimes asked was this. “Do you understand the Lord’s Supper as joyful feast or somber reflection?” There were clear generational differences among pastors. Younger ones were likely to lean toward a joyful feast, but older ministers almost always said it was a somber reflection. It was Maundy Thursday reenacted.

The line, “Do this in remembrance of me” is not in Matthew’s gospel account of Maundy Thursday, but I think it likely that Matthew’s community was familiar with those words. The Supper was a meal of remembrance, a meal in which Jesus was recalled. So how was it that the church of my youth seemed only to recall Maundy Thursday? Why did we not recall other things about Jesus when we gathered for the Supper? Why were our memories only somber and gloomy?

Perhaps such somberness is appropriate for today, as we recall the dark events of Holy Week, but for every time we celebrate communion? When the bread and cup evoke memories, why do we not recall other times Jesus broke bread, from the feeding of the 5000 to the risen Jesus’ meal with disciples at Emmaus? Why do we not recall all those times when Jesus broke bread with tax collectors and sinners?

And why do we not make the connection to Passover, to God’s saving act? Why do we not see this as the beginning of a story of liberation, not unlike the Israelites’ preparations for leaving slavery in Egypt?

I think that one of the problems with preaching, especially in an age when many people only encounter scripture when they attend church, is that it trains us to focus on short little snippets of the Bible. As a result, we’re like people who go to an art museum and inspect one corner of a painting, observing all the details and brushstrokes, but rarely stepping back to view the entire painting.

Including the Passion with Palm Sunday helps ensure that we realize where the triumphal entry into Jerusalem leads. It reminds us that the way of Jesus is the way of the cross, of giving oneself for others. It reminds us that there is no Easter without the cross and the grave.

But the Passion is a part of a much larger story, and so when we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, it is much bigger than a reenactment of Maundy Thursday, than a reminder of Jesus’ suffering. It is a remembrance of Jesus, and when we remember someone, we don’t focus on their death. When we gather together when a friend or loved one has died, a lot of remembering goes on, and most of that is not about the events of the death itself.

So even as he goes to his death, Jesus calls us to gather at table and remember. Remember that time Jesus ticked off the Pharisees because he dined with tax collectors and sinners? Remember that time Jesus fed thousands? Remember those stories Jesus told? Remember the cross and the tomb? Remember the empty tomb?

Jesus broke bread and called us to remember. Remember it all.

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[1] Campbell, Cynthia M.; Coy Fohr, Christine. Meeting Jesus at the Table: A Lenten Study, Kindle Edition (Louisville: Presbyterian Publishing, 2023) 74.

Sermon: Who Gets Invited?

 Luke 14:15-24
Who Gets Invited?
James Sledge                                                                            March 17, 2023 

Imagine for a moment that you have planned a big swanky event, perhaps a big wedding with an elaborate reception at a gorgeous venue. (Some of you likely don’t need to imagine because you’ve had the experience.) You’ve sent out save the date cards well in advance, and then you’ve sent out lovely invitations which included pre-stamped RSVP cards where guests could make their dinner selections.

The RSVPs have come in and it looks like it will be a good turnout. Most all the people you hoped would be there have said they’re coming. It’s going to be a splendid occasion.

Once you get a good handle on the numbers, you let the venue and caterer know how many to prepare for. Everything is coming together splendidly. Sure, it’s going to be a little expensive, but it will be worth it. You can’t wait to gather with everyone to celebrate and have a great time.

But just a few days before the wedding, you start to get phone calls. “We’re so sorry,” the voice says, “but our son’s team has advanced to the next round and we have to go.”

“My mother is in the hospital, and I have to be there,” says another voice. Yet another says something about relatives arriving unexpectedly from out of town.

Some of the excuses seem reasonable. Others are pretty lame, but regardless, the number of guests who will attend dwindles rapidly. Pretty soon less than half of the people you were expecting plan to attend, but it’s way too late to change the catering order. You’re on the hook for all that food and for a venue far bigger than is now needed.

Hopefully nothing like this has ever happened or will ever happen to you. Oh sure, there’s always someone who cancels last minute, but not so many that the reception hall is now going to look empty.

But if this did happen to you, what would you do? What could you do?

Jesus tells a story of something similar in our scripture reading today. Jesus has just advised his host not to invite friends, family, or wealthy neighbors when he holds a dinner but to invite “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind,” saying that the host will be rewarded at the resurrection.

This is hardly the sort of friendly banter one might expect at a dinner party which perhaps explains why one of the guests tries to change the subject by saying, "Blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!" Whatever the reason for the guest’s remark, it prompts Jesus to tell his story about a great banquet.

The story starts out not so differently from the planning for that big wedding we imagined a moment ago. We’re not told what the occasion is, but Jesus says, "Someone gave a great dinner and invited many.” Most of us aren’t familiar with first century, Middle Eastern party etiquette, so we may not realize exactly what Jesus is describing here. Standard practice would be to invite the guests ahead of time and get their RSVP. Then, when the banquet was ready, a servant would go to everyone and tell them the feast was prepared.

That is what is going on in the story Jesus tells. This well-to-do host sends for the guests, guests who have already said they will attend, only to have people cancel. According to Jesus, all of them made excuses.

I read various commentaries on this passage, and they disagreed about whether the excuses were valid ones. A majority said they were not, and considering that these guests had already said they would attend, their poor planning certainly suggests that this party was not all that high on their priority list.

This would have been a major embarrassment for the host, having everyone cancel on him, leaving him with all that food and drink and no one to enjoy it with him. Under such circumstances, the best way to save face would be to quickly come up with a new guest list, presumably more people from the upper crust of society like the host. But the host does something much more surprising and dramatic.

Instead of the sort of people we might expect, he ushers in “the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame,” the very same list Jesus had recommended inviting to dinner parties just moments earlier. He even goes so far as to go outside the town itself and compel the people there to attend so that his grand party can be filled.

Jesus often tell stories that are thought provoking, that invite people to think differently about things. Here it’s hard to avoid concluding that Jesus is metaphorically speaking about aspects of God’s coming day, the Kingdom of God as Jesus referred to it. Jesus, like prophets before him, often used a great banquet as an image for the Kingdom, so presumably he wants to provoke his listeners into thinking differently about it.

But by the time the gospel writers retell Jesus’ stories and parables, they are addressing a particular audience, not at all the one Jesus originally spoke to. The author of Luke is writing to a Christian congregation, a community that is largely Gentile. They are outsiders who have been welcomed in late in the game, well after the Jewish people who originally founded the Christian movement, and I wonder how Luke expects them to hear this parable. Perhaps he even expects different members of the congregation to hear it differently.

Given that Luke’s congregation has come into the Church after the original invitations to the people of Israel, perhaps they see themselves as those brought in from the “roads and the lanes,” from outside the boundaries of the original guest list. Perhaps this makes them realize how fortunate they are, how they are the recipients of the host’s surprising grace. Perhaps for them the parable evokes a profound sense of gratitude.

However, there are no doubt some members of Luke’s congregation who are many years removed from their conversion experience. Their original excitement about following Jesus has begun to wane, and their faith has become just one more element of their often-busy lives. Perhaps faith has even dropped low on their priority list, and they hear the parable and wonder if they might give an excuse should Jesus call them. Might they be more like the original guests in the parable, and hearing it feels more like a warning?

Or perhaps some of those who hear this parable are quite wealthy, and they hear the parable as an invitation to use their wealth differently.

One thing that is clear in the parable, this is yet one more place in Luke’s gospel where Jesus’ ministry speaks of a momentous reversal. Over and over in Luke we hear of the lowly lifted up and the powerful brought low. In Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, Jesus says, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God… But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.” Perhaps some of the wealthy members of Luke’s congregation hear the parable and wonder if they are on the right side of things.

And what about us? We’re a very different audience that than those the gospel was originally written for, but surely this parable can speak to us, too. So where do we see ourselves in this story?

Do we think of ourselves as those fortunate enough to receive unexpected invitations? Perhaps there are things about us that we’re not proud of, that we’d just as soon not share, that we expect would make God think less of us. Perhaps we’ve spent much of our lives far away from God and God’s ways and imagine that we are not A-listers for the big party. Yet we’ve been invited anyway.

Perhaps we’re very cozy in our religiousness. We’ve attended church all our lives and kept our noses clean, walked the straight and narrow. Perhaps we’re those who have always assumed we’ll be on the guest list, but then comes this story where the expected guests end up missing the party.

Or perhaps we’re those who have a lot invested in the status quo, people for whom Jesus’ words of reversal don’t necessarily sound like good news. Perhaps this story makes us wonder if we’re on the right side of things.

Maybe Jesus’ parable strikes you in some other way, but however it hits you, there are some things that seem clear to me. The great banquet is filled with people I might not have invited to my party, and the only people who miss out are those who choose not to come. I wonder. Would I have been there?

Sermon: Radical Hospitality

 Matthew 9:9-13
Radical Hospitality
James Sledge                                                                            March 10, 2024 

I was a very young boy when it happened, so I don’t remember it, but in 1960, not too far from my hometown of Charlotte, a group of Black college students began a sit-in at the whites only lunch counter in a Greensboro, NC Woolworths, a store that is now the International Civil Rights Center and Museum. The lunch counter is on display there, although a portion of the counter is in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and some of the seats are in the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Even though this was the segregated south, Blacks were free to shop at Woolworths, and so they frequented the store, but the lunch counter was for whites only. Apparently it was okay for Blacks and whites to be together in the checkout line, but sitting together while eating was problematic.

There is something more intimate about eating with someone as compared to simply being in the vicinity of each other. In fact it was quite permissible for there to be Black servers, but not Black diners. That encroached too much on the intimacy of eating.

By the time I was middle school aged, the schools had been desegregated, but the cafeteria still displayed a form a segregation. Blacks sat at some tables and whites at others, and only rarely did anyone cross over that boundary.

That boundary was even less permeable when it came to inviting people over to one another’s homes for dinner. Despite its loss of legal standing, segregation remained in force socially at my home and the homes of most people I knew, in large part because friendships continued to be segregated.

The legacy of those days is still very much with us. Our largely white congregation is a testament to the resilience of segregation, of the difficulty of crossing over long established social and cultural boundaries. There often is no intent to maintain such boundaries, and yet they persist.

Jesus’ day was not so different from ours when it came to social boundaries and barriers. Good Jews typically didn’t socialize with Gentiles or Samaritans. Religious boundaries were much more prevalent than they are in our day. Certain illnesses made a person “unclean” and so off limits, although in the verses on either side of reading this morning Jesus touches a leper to heal him, touches and heals a woman with a continuous menstrual flow, and touches a corpse, all of which would have rendered Jesus “unclean.”

In our scripture verses, Jesus does some boundary crosses of another sort. To start off, Jesus calls Matthew as a disciple, and Matthew is a tax collector. This story is not all that unlike the calling of Simon Peter, Andrew, James, and John, except for Matthew’s profession.

I think I’ve mentioned before that tax collectors were generally regarded as traitors. They were Jewish but they collected tariffs and taxes for the Romans, sometimes using intimidation by Roman soldiers as an incentive. Tax collecting was a franchise operation. The Romans doled out the positions for a price, and the tax collectors had to bring in a certain amount of cash to the Romans in return, but they could keep any money they collected over that amount. It was a system designed to be corrupt, and tax collectors often got rich. They were despised by religious people and ordinary folks alike.

We’re told nothing about Matthew other than he is at work as a tax collector when Jesus calls him. Matthew immediately gets up and goes with Jesus, just as Simon Peter and his fellow fisherman had gotten up and left their nets and boats.

But here’s where the story gets really interesting. In the gospels of Mark and Luke, what seem to be different versions of this story are told, although the tax collector is there called Levi. Matthew’s gospel (the author is anonymous) uses Mark as his primary source material, but he makes an interesting change when he retells this story. Not only does he change Levi’s name to Matthew, but he seems to change the setting for the second part of our reading.

In Mark and Luke, we are told explicitly that Levi hosts a dinner where Jesus is in attendance, but Matthew completely leaves this detail out. Instead he says, And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. A lot of people simply assume that this is at Matthew’s house, perhaps borrowing from the similar stories in Mark and Luke, but if we don’t know those stories, Matthew’s telling and the grammar of the sentence both suggest that this is the house where Jesus stays in Capernaum.

I can’t help but think that the gospel writer decides to emphasize Jesus’ habit of socializing with tax collectors and sinners by having him invite them to his own house. This accentuates his conflict with the Pharisees. They are upset with him because he is actively cultivating relationships with people they think must be avoided, people they would never sit down to dinner with.

Many years ago, I visited a historic Presbyterian church, though I’ve forgotten its name and location. What I do recall was that they had a curio type cabinet that prominently displayed artifacts from the church’s history. There was an old pulpit Bible, old photos that showed the buildings at various times, old offering collection baskets, and a small number of what I later learned were communion tokens.

The idea of communion tokens goes all the way back to John Calvin who suggested them as a way of making sure nothing profaned the Lord’s table. During their use in American Presbyterian churches, communion was celebrated quite rarely, sometimes only a couple of times a year. Prior to such services, clergy and elders would visit the church members and question them on their understanding of church doctrine as well as determining if they were living good and upright lives. If they passed their examination, they were given tokens which had to be presented in order to receive communion.

I’ve never heard of a Presbyterian church that still uses such tokens, or that examines members in preparation for communion. In fact, our practices at the table have changed considerably during my lifetime. When I was growing up, only confirmed members could receive communion. When my children were young, that changed to say that baptized children who had received instruction in the meaning or communion were welcomed at the table. And in recent years the table has been opened to all.

The use of tokens and restrictions on who was allowed at the table were well intended. People wanted to make sure that the meaning of the Lord’s Supper didn’t get perverted or understood in a superstitious sort of way, but inevitably such restrictions made it seem like the table was open only to the worthy, which seems quite at odds with who Jesus invited to the table.

At the end of our scripture passage Jesus says, “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” Jesus quotes the prophet Hosea. I don’t know that Hosea is speaking against sacrifice per se or any of the other rituals connected to worship or faith, but he and Jesus seem to think that mercy is the most important element.

The book we’re using for our Lenten study makes the point that “Jesus is the mercy of God in human form, never more so than when he eats with outcasts and welcomes all of us in our brokenness.”[1]

Worship is important, and how we worship matters. But what matters even more is that we radiate the mercy of God that in Jesus invites tax collectors and sinner to the table, that in Jesus practices a radical sort of hospitality that completely ignores the boundaries and barriers that we humans and our societies devise.

Whoever you are, however good or bad your story, Jesus calls you to follow, to go with him as a disciple. And he calls you, calls us as a church, to model his radical hospitality that continues to break down barriers and boundaries and to share God’s mercy with the world.

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[1] Campbell, Cynthia M.; Coy Fohr, Christine. Meeting Jesus at the Table: A Lenten Study (p. 26). Presbyterian Publishing. Kindle Edition.

 

Sermon: Meeting Jesus at the Table

 Mark 6:30-44
Meeting Jesus as the Table
James Sledge                                                                            March 3, 2024 

Back before I went to seminary, I once sat in a pew of my church and listened to a sermon on the reading we just heard from Mark. The preacher told an intriguing story of what might have happened when Jesus fed a crowd of thousands out in the wilderness one evening.

“We have to assume,” he said, “that not everyone who wandered out into the wilderness to see Jesus came with no provisions. There were no McDonald’s or Burger Kings in those days. People could not expect to find a place to buy food. Surely many must have packed some food and carried it with them. They would have stashed it away under their long robes, so you might not have seen it, but many had a little supply of food and drink with them.”

“But it is also a good bet that not everyone brought food. Maybe they hadn’t planned on staying all day. Maybe time got away from them as they listened to Jesus. But as the day wore on, many of the people were beginning to get hungry. And they were regretting that they had not packed something to eat.”

“Those with food knew that many others didn’t have food. Some thought it impolite to eat in front of others, so they kept their food hidden away. Others were afraid that if they let on they had food, the people without any would demand that they share. They didn’t have enough to go around, and so they kept their food hidden out of fear that others would try to take it.”

The preacher continued. “But then something strange happened. Jesus took some bread that his disciples had, along with a couple of fish. He said a blessing, and he began to pass the food out into the crowd. As the bread made its way through the crowd, some people began to take loaves of bread they had beneath their robes and add them to the bread from the disciples. And as one person shared, another saw it and added her food to the growing supply. Before you knew it, there was more than enough food to go around. Jesus’ act of sharing when it seemed he had far too little had initiated a wave of sharing that fed the crowd with baskets full to spare. The crowd had the resources all along. They just needed Jesus to show them how to use them.”

I was struck by this interpretation of the story, and by its implications. We have more resources than we realize. It is merely our fears that keep us from putting them to use. But if we faithfully follow Jesus, our resources are far more than adequate to do whatever we are called to do, even something as seemingly impossible as feeding a crowd of thousands. Faith can release tremendous human potential.

My former pastor’s interpretation has stuck with me for many years. It was very appealing to me for some reason. But over those years I realized what an inadequate interpretation it was. Oh, I suppose it very well could have happened that way. It makes perfectly good sense that it might have. But it clearly is not the message the gospel writer intended for us.

This is a story about God’s incredible power to provide. There are clear parallels with the Old Testament story of the Israelites being miraculously fed by manna while in the wilderness, and even stronger parallels with the Lord’s Supper.

This story is not simply a story of Jesus teaching us to share by his example, any more than Jesus’ death on the cross is Jesus teaching us to practice self-sacrifice by his example. This story shows the same power of God that is revealed through the cross and the resurrection. It shows the power God unleashed in Jesus to reach out to and provide for humanity.

And as the first generations of Christians gathered to observe the Lord’s Supper, they were drawn to this story—this story where Jesus provided for the needs of those gathered around him. And as they ate the bread and drank from the cup, they knew that much more than symbolism was at work. Just as Jesus had miraculously provided food for thousands of people that day, so in the holy meal of the Lord’s Supper, he still provided for them.

And now we come to the Lord’s table. We come, and we remember. But do we expect anything? Do we really expect Jesus to reach out and feed us, to nourish us for lives as disciples? Do we really think that Jesus will come into our lives that way? Do we really want Jesus to come into our lives that way?

Or are we more comfortable with memories and examples? A Jesus who feeds the crowd through his example of sharing is less troublesome in a way. If it is only an example of sharing, then we are not confronted with the awesome power of God. And if the Lord’s Supper is just a remembrance, we need not worry about encountering the awesome presence and power of God here. We can simply hear about God and Jesus, and we can decide whether or not we want to act on what we hear. Just like people could have decided whether or not to contribute their hidden food if the feeding of the 5000 is only a frenzy of sharing.

Sometimes I think we prefer memories and examples. It allows us to keep God at a distance. It allows us to feel like we’re in control—to keep the power of God that might radically transform us into new people from getting too close. And so we explain how miracles might have happened. Or we try to restrict the miraculous power of God to the role of insurance policy, giving us eternal life when we die, or perhaps healing us from some disease if we get sick. But we do not want the power of God just hanging around, threatening to use us for its purposes, threatening to remake us into people who no longer worry about our own needs, who care only about loving God and loving others.

And yet, just as surely as Jesus fed thousands of hungry people all those years ago, he offers to feed us at this table. He offers us spiritual food which not only meets our deepest needs and hungers, but which also nourishes us for new life, reborn life in Christ.

The table is set before us. The words of scripture are read and preached for us to hear. And in them, the power of God to love us, to care for us, to nurture us, and yes, to change and transform us, is placed before us. Jesus reaches out to care for us, to change us into children of God, and to feed and nourish us for life as God’s children. 

Come to the table. Come, not only to remember, to hear, to see, to taste, but come to meet the risen Lord. Come to be touched by his power. Come to be fed, to be loved, to be healed, to be embraced, to be made anew in Christ Jesus.

Sermon: Strange Guest List

 Luke 14:7-14
Strange Guest List
James Sledge                                                                            February 18, 2024 

Back in January, a question about dinner parties ran in the Ms. Manners advice column in The Washington Post. It read, “Dear Miss Manners: I must admit I’ve never understood etiquette’s requirement to invite people to one’s home after being invited to theirs. When my spouse and I host, we feel that it’s our idea — nobody asked us to make a dinner and invite the group. We enjoy cooking and spending time with everyone.

“Is it not improper for hosts to expect that they will be ‘repaid’ with invitations from their guests?”[1]

Miss Manners was not at all sympathetic to the writer’s point of view. While she agreed that the response need not be another identical dinner party, she said that it is completely necessary for the recipient to respond in a way that says, “We were not just looking for a free night out. We enjoyed ourselves and want to see you again.”[2]

Jesus is at a dinner party thrown by a leader of the Pharisees in our scripture reading for this morning. Jesus has already caused something of a stir at this party by healing someone. That might not be a big deal except it happened to be the sabbath. The healing has just happened when Jesus decides to broach the topic of dinner party etiquette, reminding people that they should not grab the seat of honor and perhaps be later demoted when someone more important arrives, but to take a lower seat and perhaps be promoted to a better one.

Jesus isn’t saying anything new here. There a very similar words in the book of Proverbs where it says, Do not put yourself forward in the king’s presence or stand in the place of the great; it is better to be told, “Come up here,” than to be put lower in the presence of a noble.

I don’t expect anyone at the party was surprised or taken aback by what Jesus says, but Jesus’ conventional words about humility are just an opening to talk about a much more radical form of humility. “But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. It’s probably worth remembering that in Jesus’ day, there was no social safety net and no real accommodations for disabilities, and to be lame or blind typically relegated someone to a life of begging and depending on the kindness of others.

That means that the dinner party Jesus suggests would look quite different. It would not be made up of the beautiful people or the successful and well to do or the in crowd, quite the opposite. But I wonder if Jesus hasn’t moved past talking about dinner party etiquette. I wonder if he isn’t talking about something bigger.

In the verses immediately after our passage, Jesus tells those at the dinner party a parable about a Great Banquet. It is clearly a metaphor for God’s kingdom, and the quest list also includes the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind that Jesus tells his host to invite.

Hospitality and table fellowship were a crucial part of the culture in Jesus’ day. Wedding banquets and dinner parties were the primary social events. Such events had much greater social importance and significance than similar events in our day, but the process for coming up with the guest list seems not to have changed much. People tended to invite friends, relatives, people they wanted to impress, people who had invited them, and so on.

But the ways of God’s new day are vastly different. Conventional guest lists tend to conform to the status quo, tend to perpetuate the insider/outsider boundaries of a society. And so those who want to live by the ways of God’s new day must act differently.

 This issue of table fellowship is crucial for Luke’s gospel and its companion book, Acts. The risen Jesus is made known in the breaking of the bread, and his new community is to be a sign of God’s coming new day, and so it welcomes those once thought to be outsiders and not on the guest list.

In our denomination’s foundational documents there is a classic statement known as the Great Ends of the Church. The last of these six ends or purposes is “the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.”[3] In other words, when people look at the church they should get a glimpse of what God’s new day looks like, and one thing Jesus makes clear is that it will be made up of lots of people who might not seem to be prime candidates for the guest list.

Sometimes churches do a good job of this. My previous church had a twice a month supper program that was open to all comers. On the larger of the two nights, we would often have over 250 people there. Some were working poor, and some were homeless. There were many different nationalities and races. There were children and elderly, people in poor health and those with disabilities. They sat at tables and members of the church and community served them.

Open Table at this church does something similar, and in both cases I think the gathering looks a little like what Jesus says the Kingdom looks like, the sort of guest list Jesus says to invite to the party. On Thursday mornings at the Meeting House and Wednesday evenings at Falls Church Presbyterian, a glimpse of the Kingdom is on display at the church. Everyone is welcome at the table. Everyone has a place at the table.

But what didn’t happened at Falls Church was for Sunday morning to look like those Wednesday evenings. We sometimes made very deliberate attempts to invite our Wednesday guests to worship or other church activities, but those activities, worship especially, looked a lot less like the Kingdom.

Churches tend not to look like the guest list Jesus envisions for his banquet. There are wealthy churches and churches where the members are of more modest means. There are Black churches, white churches, Latino churches, Korean churches, and on and on. There are liberal churches and conservative churches. Just about any division you can find in our society you can see mirrored in the church.

Some of that may be understandable, even necessary. If your primary language is Korean or Spanish, it makes a lot of sense to attend a church where they speak that language. But I wonder how many of the divisions in churches are not necessary, are actually a way that we look more like the world than we look like the Kingdom of God, that we fail to be an “exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.”

Who is welcome here? Who has a seat at the table? In an increasingly fractured and polarized world, those seem to me important questions to ask. How can we be an “exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven” if we don’t think about what will help us look more like God’s new day, if we don’t think about the ways we, perhaps inadvertently, let people know they aren’t welcome here.

During the Sundays in Lent (Sundays technically are not a part of Lent) we are leaving the lectionary and preaching from scripture passages highlighted in the book Meeting Jesus at the Table. (We’ll also be using some of that book’s chapters for an adult education opportunity on Sunday mornings as well as Wednesday evenings and Thursday mornings.) One thing that both the book and the scriptures make clear, Jesus had some strange ideas about who was welcomed to the table, about what the quest list is supposed to look like. And we are called to build a community that mimics Jesus’ guest list.

That call to build a new sort of community is rooted in a bit of incredibly good news. In the guest list for God’s new day, in the guest list for the Lord’s Table, the things that might seem to be disqualifying aren’t. Whoever you are, whatever you’ve done or failed to do, whatever doubts or worries you have, you are on Jesus’ strange guest list and have a seat at the table. Welcomed at the table, let us welcome others, and create a community of love and welcome for all.

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[1] “Miss Manners” in The Washington Post, January 15, 2024

[2] Ibid

[3] Book of Order, F-1.0304

Ash Wednesday Reflection

 Joel 2:1-2, 12-17
Ash Wednesday Reflection
James Sledge                                                                            February 14, 2024 

Honk, honk, honk, honk. The car alarm drones on and on, and nobody pays it much attention. I’ve sometimes wondered how useful such alarms are if they don’t get anyone to do anything. Often people just want to get the alarm turned off, to get rid of the annoying honk, honk, honk.

Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy mountain! Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near. Honk, honk.

I’ve lost count of the school shootings, of the mass shootings. The carnage of gun violence is sickening, and no one does anything. Honk, honk, honk.

Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy mountain!  Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near. Honk, honk.

The evidence becomes more and more overwhelming that we’ve reached a tipping point on climate change. The storms in California were just the latest episode. And I read where some scientists say we need to add a Category 6 to the hurricane scale because they have gotten so much stronger. Honk, honk, honk.

Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy mountain!  Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near.  Honk, honk.

Sometimes the very foundations of our democracy seem to be threatened. If people won’t trust the outcome of elections, what happens next? Honk, honk, honk.

Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy mountain!  Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near.  Honk, honk.

We’re good at ignoring alarms. We shrug them off. Many alarms scream that something is amiss in our world. Yet other than a little hand wringing, many churches hardly seem to notice. Too often, we act like religion is a strictly personal, private thing, even though the Bible insists faith is about community, about God’s people working together to proclaim good news to the poor, release to the captives, freedom for the oppressed, justice for the weak. But we work on our spirituality and ignore the alarms. Honk, honk, honk.

The Bible and God’s prophets insist that we cannot ignore the alarms. Joel is typical. When the alarm of crisis fills the land, it is not someone else’s problem. It is a call for the community of faith to come together for soul searching, repentance, and renewal. 

Blow the trumpet in Zion; sanctify a fast; call a solemn assembly. Assemble the aged; gather the children, even infants at the breast. Let the bridegroom leave his room, and the bride her canopy. But this trumpet sound is not that of an alarm. It is the ringing of the church bell. Ding, dong, ding, dong. God calls the community of faith to respond. “But the children have a soccer game. I did my part at church when I was younger. I’m just too busy.” Ding, dong, ding, dong.

The biblical prophets insist that when the world is amiss, it is not the fault of other folk. It is the fault of the community of faith. Our culture celebrates greed and getting whatever you want right now. It says that happiness comes from having it all. And we in the church nod in agreement as we bow before the gods of consumerism. Honk, honk, honk. Sound the alarm.  Ding, dong, ding, dong. Call the church to action.

Our society allows there to be one justice for the rich and another for the poor despite the Bible command that this cannot be. And we in the church shrug because we’re not poor.  Honk, honk, honk. Sound the alarm. Ding, dong, ding, dong. Call the church to action.

The civilian death toll in Gaza, the number of children left orphans, the number maimed, is beyond appalling. And we in the church mostly shrug because Israel is an ally, and it’s all a long way away. Honk, honk, honk. Sound the alarm.  Ding, dong, ding, dong. Call the church to action.

The prophets say that when the alarm sounds, it is the community of faith that must respond because it is the community of faith which has not done its job. Jesus says that we must be willing to deny ourselves. We must be willing to lose ourselves for the sake of the gospel. Honk, honk, honk. Sound the alarm.  Ding, dong, ding, dong. Call the church to action.

I can think of no more appropriate place to answer the alarm, and to respond to the church bell, than at the beginning of Lent. Lent is a time to remember that in a sinful world, a Christian life looks like the life of Christ, a life that is willing to go the way of a cross. Lent is a time to heed Jesus’ call to quit worrying about earthly treasure and concentrate on what really matters. Lent is a time to remember that we can celebrate the joy of Easter only because Jesus walked the way of the cross. Lent is a time to remember how seldom we carry our own cross and follow Jesus.  Lent is a time to remember what Jesus did for us, and to show our thanksgiving by renewing and redoubling our efforts to follow him as faithful disciples.

In just a few moments we will invite you to come forward and be marked with the sign of the cross. This mark of ashes is a sign of our human frailty, of our dependence on God, a reminder of the price that was paid for our sakes, of our failures to live as Christ calls us, and our call to live as Christ did. Honk, honk, honk.  Ding, dong, ding, dong. The alarm is sounding. The church bell is ringing. Will we answer?