Category: Sermons

Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on John 15:26-16:15, Acts 2:1-21.

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When I was in grad school, I took a course one semester titled, “A Differential Geometric Approach to Nonlinear Control.” The course started with a discussion of manifolds, diffeomorphisms, Lie brackets and Lie derivatives, and so forth. For about six weeks, I sat in the class and listened as if it were a foreign language. One day, it suddenly all made sense. Unfortunately, that experience didn’t stick with me, and when I’ve looked in that textbook, I can only read about a page before my eyes roll back in my head.

Many people have that same experience if they study theology. Probably even most people here today. If we were in a Sunday School class and I told you that I use a hermeneutic of love, you would probably miss the word “love” and get hung up on “hermeneutic.” Calvin taught us about predestination, but theologians have been untangling that concept ever since. Salvation, justification, sanctification—what do we mean? What does it mean to “be saved”? Saved from what? Justification—isn’t that something to do with typing and margins?

Then there are some more common words you might hear around a congregation—like the word “congregation,” instead of “crowd” or “audience.” Only church people use “fellowship” as a verb. We use the word “mission” to mean something different than in the corporate world, and for that matter, many congregations use it to mean something more like “charity.” Before I was asked to serve on it, I had never heard of a “session” as being a committee.

I am in the business of using precise language. I know how important it is to distinguish between, say, energy and power. But I also know that jargon and insider language have a way of erecting barriers. Language becomes a way to signal that “we,” whoever that “we” might be, are distinct from “they,” or from “you.” It’s a way to send a subtle signal of tribal membership. Like, we’re church people and if you can’t understand us, then you don’t belong here.

But how do these words and concepts bring us closer to God? More importantly, how do they speak to the world at large? If you read or watch the news, you will see endless stories of the troubles in our community, state, nation, and world. Poverty, homelessness, and crime. A raging pandemic that has resulted in millions of hospitalizations and deaths, and has led to loneliness and isolation for millions more. Political conflict that even creates barriers between friends and within families. Oppression based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation. Uneven wealth, both within our nation and among the nations of the world, where 9% of the world’s population survives on less than $2 per day. If you are homeless, what does salvation mean? If you have been marginalized because of who you are, rather than what you have done, what does justification mean?

Ancient Judea was also such a world. The once-mighty nation of Israel was an occupied province of the Roman empire. The Jews were oppressed because of their religion. There was continuous political unrest, with divisions between the zealots and those who worked to appease the Roman occupiers. The Holy Spirit was poured out upon this turmoil to erase these divisions. The disciples were empowered to preach “God’s deeds of power,” a message the gathered crowd was ready to hear. They spoke of God’s ability to change the world and to heal their nation. To unite everyone and welcome everyone into God’s family.

On the day of Pentecost, the disciples were all together. This was the birth of the Christian church, a single body of Christ. Ever since then, we have been finding reasons to split up. The most recent divisions have emerged over issues of social justice, women’s roles, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Some people respond by saying, “Teach tolerance.” That is grossly insufficient. Tolerance is to say that a person is wrong, but you will overlook their wrongness. Can you imagine saying to a close family member—a spouse, parent, or child—that you “tolerate” them? I hope I never reach that point. The next level up is “acceptance.” Acceptance is an acknowledgement of difference with just a hint of judgment. Kind of like saying, “I love you anyway.” There is still division and distinction. How about “welcome”? It has become somewhat common for churches to say, “All are welcome.” First of all, saying it doesn’t make it true. Secondly, what does that mean? “Welcome” to what? Welcome to sit in the sanctuary? I’m glad churches are saying that their ushers aren’t acting as bouncers. Welcome—but looked at as guests and outsiders? And who is “all”? For centuries, “all” has had an asterisk: all people who fit a certain demographic, who look and act a certain way. In modern churches, the usual distinctions are related to sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as age and class.

The Holy Spirit led the disciples to be not only welcoming, but also inclusive. The gathered crowd was divided by language, so the Holy Spirit enabled the disciples to speak to each person in the language they could understand. Peter quotes the prophet Joel’s apocalyptic vision of inclusion. The spirit would be poured out upon everyone, regardless of age, gender, or social class. In the same way, the Holy Spirit calls us to spread the Gospel to everyone and include them—truly include them—in Christ’s body, which is the church.

What does it mean to be inclusive? I found a good definition on a site called “Humor That Works.”

An organization is inclusive when everyone has a sense of belonging; feels respected, valued and seen for who they are as individuals; and feels a level of supportive energy and commitment from leaders, colleagues, and others so that all people–individually and collectively–can do their best work.

Humor That Works

Although describing a business or non-profit, this definition works pretty well for a church, too. An inclusive church values each person for who they are as an individual. People are not pigeonholed according to their demographic category, but are valued for the particular ways they have been blessed by God and the particular ways they are blessings to others. This is not to imply that their gender, ethnicity, age, or sexual orientation is meaningless. It is to acknowledge that those characteristics have influenced the experiences that person has had, but do not define their gifts or the ways they can be a part of Christ’s body.

Every church struggles with inclusion in some way. The evangelical movement is still struggling with the roles that women may take. Beth Moore has, for decades, led large-scale Bible studies, speaking at stadium-style events. As a Southern Baptist, though, she could never be called a preacher. Over the past few years, she has been pushing back against the culture within her denomination that treats women with disrespect. Finally in March, she broke ties with both her publisher, Lifeway, and the Southern Baptist Convention. She could no longer participate in a denomination and organization that seemed to value misogyny, nationalism, and partisan politics over the Gospel.

It’s easy for us, though, to say we’re not like that. We have a female pastor, right? Not only that, but our denomination officially allows for the ordination of gay pastors, elders, and deacons and for blessing gay marriages. Problem solved, right? Well, no. Remember, there is a spectrum from tolerance to acceptance to welcome to inclusion. Rules in the Book of Order are ultimately only the beginning. Those rules indicate tolerance or perhaps acceptance. There are plenty of PC(USA) churches out there that would struggle with calling a female pastor, and even more that wouldn’t call a gay pastor, no matter what their other gifts. I think our congregation does better than most, but there’s plenty of work to be done. There are plenty of people in our community who need to feel the love of God, who need a connection to Christ’s body, who need to hear the good news that the kingdom of God is at hand, and is available to them right here, right now.

Let me return to that day of Pentecost. In the passage, the gathered crowd lists all the places they came from. The list includes modern-day Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Libya, Italy, and Turkey. Considering that most people traveled by foot, that’s a pretty broad swath of land. I think that answers in part the question, “Why was Jesus born 2000 years ago?” I mean, I understand why Jesus was born, but why then? Well, between the Pax Romana, the expanding shipping industry, and the vast network of Roman roads, moving around the Near East was easier than ever. It had become possible, for example, for Parthians to move from modern-day Iran to Jerusalem. By the same token, it had become possible for the first apostles to travel throughout Syria, Turkey, Greece, and North Africa.

We live in an even more connected world today. Thanks to the Internet, people can access the Gospel all around the world. I recently heard an American speaker talking about her 80-year-old Catholic mother listening to homilies from parishes around the nation and even from far-away places like India. Every week, I post both a podcast of the sermon and a video of the worship service. While we were shut down, the videos regularly received 40 or more views. Since re-opening, the number has dropped to the teens. Still, that’s a dozen people who would not otherwise be able to worship God.

Of course, that raises an obvious question: Are the people who watch the videos online truly worshipping God with us? What “counts”? I was talking recently with a dear friend of mine who lives in Ohio. She had a falling out with her local church a few years ago. Since then, her family has been essentially unchurched. But an amazing thing happened. Her brother and sister attend a church in Baltimore that started livestreaming worship last summer. She started “attending” worship because of that connection. She has since joined in a monthly faith formation group that her sister leads. Now, she wouldn’t have been connected with that particular church without the family connection, but still, the pandemic enabled a church in Baltimore to reach someone in Ohio. I assert that she is no longer unchurched, that she is just as much a part of that worshipping community as if she lived in Baltimore.

What defines a church? What defines OUR church? The Great Ends of the Church in our Book of Order are:

1. The proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind.
2. The shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God.
3. The maintenance of divine worship.
4. The preservation of the truth.
5. The promotion of social righteousness.
6. The exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.

The closest this list comes to requiring us to gather in a sanctuary on a Sunday morning is “the maintenance of divine worship.” However, I have been in truly wonderful worship services in the chapel, in the fellowship hall, in a city park, and in the woods. This in-person gathering is helpful for “the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God,” but there are other ways for us to connect to one another. This gathering is certainly not essential to the promotion of social righteousness or the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world. Yes, we are, right here, right now, living in the Kingdom of Heaven, but I also experience God’s kingdom when I work at The Mission, or when I talk with a student about something in their personal life. I experienced it when I hosted a parents’ panel for LGBTQ+ Rolla, even though there was at least one atheist among us. I experience it when my family is gathered together. I experience it when I go elk hunting each year.

There are many ways to be Christ’s body, to pursue the six Great Ends of the Church. So long as we are proclaiming the gospel, preserving the truth, and promoting social righteousness, we are exhibiting God’s kingdom.

On that first Pentecost, Peter remembered the words of Joel: “your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.” Today as we once again celebrate that ancient outpouring of the Holy Spirit, let us all dream dreams. Together let’s pursue a vision where all people are included in Christ’s body, whether they are with us physically or online or in our hearts. Let’s pursue a vision where all people are included in Christ’s body, whether or not they look or dress or think or act like us. Let’s pursue a vision where all people are included in Christ’s body, knowing the good news of unity and reconciliation that we know by the power of the Holy Spirit. Come, Holy Spirit! Amen.

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See also the post with the video. Based on John 12:20-33.

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Every year when I go elk hunting, I disconnect from all email and voicemail for about a week. Last fall when I checked my messages, I discovered that I had missed a message from Mark, an engineer at Ameren’s Technology Applications Center in Champaign who was working with me on my electric vehicle charging project. His message said that he was leaving Ameren that Friday, with some vague reference to church; of course, I didn’t get the message until the weekend, which was too late to get in touch with him for more details.

Later, I had the opportunity to talk with his former supervisor, Rod, and asked what Mark was up to. Mark had decided to commit himself to a project in Africa. He is visiting a tribe with a language that does not exist in written form. What he is doing is recording people telling Bible stories in their language, which he can then distribute to other groups who speak the same language. In this way, even though written Bibles are not available, the African tribespeople can still hear the Gospel.

Rod and I talked about Mark’s commitment. We are both committed to our respective churches; I shared a bit about the Commissioned Ruling Elder program that I’m working through. But we both agreed that it would hard for us to do what Mark is doing. Kids in college, family to care for, and good jobs that are hard to walk away from. We both admire Mark, but are not yet ready to take that leap.

In today’s passage, we hear about a group of believers who, like the Africans that Mark is evangelizing, needed to hear the Gospel in their own language. At that time, there were Greeks who were referred to as “God-fearers.” I suppose a reasonable analogy in modern Christianity would be unbaptized worshippers. God-fearing Greeks could go to the Temple in the Court of the Gentiles and offer sacrifices, but they could not participate as fully as circumcised Jews. While Greeks were the dominant group in much of the Roman Empire, they were outsiders in Judea. They had come to worship God during the Passover festival. Apparently when they arrived, they heard about Jesus. This passage comes just after his triumphal entry on what we celebrate as Palm Sunday. Maybe they had also heard about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. Jesus was the big news in town, so they sought to encounter Jesus.

So they did what most people do: they found someone who spoke their language and knew their customs who could make the introduction. Philip had a Greek name and was one of Jesus’s closest disciples, so he was the perfect choice. When he and his hometown friend Andrew approached Jesus, Jesus realized that the time had come. He was not only drawing Jews to himself, but Greeks as well, and would soon draw all things to himself and reconcile the world.

Yet Jesus knew that life would not be easy, not for himself and not for his followers. He knew his own death was approaching and faced it with courage. But he also needed to warn his followers that if they chose his path, they would need to cast aside all of their other attachments. They—and we—would need to even hate their lives, that is, all the comforts of ordinary life.

Throughout history, and even today in some parts of the world, suffering for the Gospel includes paying the ultimate price of martyrdom. Early Christians were martyred; many schisms in church history have included martyrs. I read a story recently about Assyrian Christians, an ethnic minority in northern Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran. These are the same Assyrians we know from the Bible. They converted to Christianity in the first few centuries A.D. In the centuries since, they have been persecuted, even subjected to a genocide around World War I. Most recently, their population was decimated by ISIS. They remain a dwindling minority in the Middle East, with a small number living elsewhere around the world.

Meanwhile, in Myanmar, we hear mostly about the ruling Buddhists persecuting Rohingya Muslims, but the army has also imprisoned over 100,000 Christians in concentration camps. I met a pastor from Myanmar who was studying at Eden Seminary. He said that there were times when the army surrounded his church to prevent him from preaching something subversive, and he had to pivot to a sermon that supported the military dictatorship. He has since completed his studies and returned home, where he continues to lead his church despite the threats.

But we are not Assyrians, nor do we live in Myanmar. We live in a democracy where religious freedom is guaranteed. The so-called threats against our faith include such terrible things as not being allowed to lead communal prayer in public schools, or being forced to sell wedding cakes to gay couples.

Yet it is still true that Christians suffer in more subtle ways, or else compromise their faith. Many of us are fearful about sharing our faith in any public way, for fear of reprisal from our superiors at work or loss of friends. I know I need to be particularly careful on campus because of my position of authority. There can never be an implication that students are expected to profess what I believe in order to succeed in my class. I work with people of all different faiths—every sort of Christian, plus Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, atheists, and more—and our different beliefs can’t prevent us from working together.

For generations, we have been taught that it is impolite to discuss religion or politics. I understand that, to a certain point. The problem is that we have failed to learn how to politely discuss these sensitive issues. These are the things that really matter, that really touch who we are, and we never talk about them. Even among my friends at church, these last few years have been pretty hard on political conversations.

As a result, we end up discussing surface-level topics. We talk about the weather; we talk about sports. These days, we talk about COVID. I have a lot of conversations about my beard and about hunting. Such small talk smooths out our interpersonal interactions, but we never reach true understanding of each other. Just as the interstate highway system is a way to cross the country without seeing any of it, small talk is a way to talk at length with someone without knowing who they really are.

For the last few years, I have been active with the Campus Ministries Association. CMA includes Common Call, which is this church’s ministry, plus CCF, the Newman Center, Baptist Student Union, the First Methodist ministry called Ignite, and a few others. CMA’s flagship event is an Interfaith Dialogue every spring. Last year, of course it got canceled, and this year we have to pivot the format a bit, but here’s how it goes in a normal year. We try to get people to attend from a wide range of faith traditions: Christians of many types, from within our ministries and also from across campus, plus Muslims, Hindus, and whoever else we can think of. We mix them up at tables of six with a facilitator at each table. Then each group goes through questions like, “Have you ever been asked to do or say something that went against your faith or belief system? How did you respond?” Or, “How do you understand evil in persons and in our world? What do you think is the best way to deal with evil?” There are about twenty different questions, and none of them have a right answer. Most of them don’t even have an “approved” doctrinal answer. They are more about the practical realities of our spirituality. How does our religion or our spirituality impact our daily life? We are all trying to figure things out and live our faith as best we can.

The two keys to a successful interfaith dialogue are a willingness to share and a willingness to listen. The goal is to understand each other, not to win a debate. I have found that I have more in common with a Muslim than I ever imagined. We may all leave believing the same things as when we arrive, but we also leave with a memory of an experience of the Kingdom of God.

Because really, what is the kingdom of God? It is people living together in deep relationships. It is abundant life, not a life of abundance. It is seeing Jesus in each other. It is being guided by the Holy Spirit. It is setting aside our fears and anxieties and showing our true selves.

That is what Jesus is calling us to do. He asks us to set our lives aside—our false selves—and pursue Him and His Kingdom. That is not an easy road, but it leads us to a place of joy and peace.

Some people are called to literally set their lives aside, as Mark did to travel to Africa. Others find ways to live for Christ where they already are. Rev. Dr. Maria Evans is a pathologist in Kirksville who felt called to the priesthood a few years ago, and so is serving as the interim priest at Christ Episcopal here in Rolla. She continues in her practice as a pathologist while at the same time serving God through pastoral ministry. Rev. Steve Lawler, on the other hand, is a semi-retired Episcopal priest with an MBA who is the director of the Walker Leadership Institute at Eden Seminary. His goal is to help people who have had successful careers, who are perhaps at or near retirement, find ways to use their career skills to serve God through missional leadership, meaning leadership of organizations that are serving some specific mission towards establishing God’s kingdom. James Brown is a sportscaster, best known for being the host of the NFL Today on CBS, who is also ordained in a nondenominational church. He doesn’t preach much on TV, but he does radiate God’s love, and he’s not afraid to bring his faith into the discussion when it’s appropriate.

Maybe you’re not ready to become a preacher, ordained or otherwise. We are all differently gifted. Some are led to preach or teach, others to healing and compassion, others to a wide range of service to God’s Kingdom. But we all share one calling: to be witnesses of God’s grace at work in the world. We are all called to encounter God, to see God in all things, and to share with others how great is God’s love—for each one of us, and for everyone else, too. God’s love is greater than anything else any of us ever have or ever will experience. As followers of Christ, we should treasure that love above all else. It is a great gift, one that gets bigger the more we give it away.

Sharing God’s love means sharing our deepest joy, but sometimes means touching another person’s deepest pain. That pain can lead the person to lash out at us, as a proxy for the angry or spiteful or judgmental God they think they know. But if we’re willing to suffer through that pain, we have the promise of glory on the other side: the glory of entering God’s kingdom here and now, as God’s beloved children become our siblings in Christ.

Truly, that is the promise of the Gospel. Following Jesus isn’t easy. It is frequently a path to poverty, or to persecution, or to ostracism. But it is also a path to deeper, truer relationships. We go beyond the surface to those issues that touch our hearts. We connect to people we would otherwise never know. Let us each seek to set God’s priorities above our own, to open our true selves to our neighbors, and in so doing to experience the joy of God’s beloved community. Amen.

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I haven’t blogged much recently. Among other things, I have been busy with the course on preaching that I’m taking this semester. If you would like to provide anonymous feedback on the sermon, please visit: https://forms.gle/eEUkkFJmwzGCAGq98

Preached for December 27, 2020, at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on Galatians 4:4-7 and Luke 2:22-40.

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First Sunday of Advent. Based on Isaiah 64:1-9 and Mark 13:24-37.

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