Category: Sermon

The Lord said, “All right” he is in your power. Just don’t kill him.” He covered Job with boils, from his scalp to the soles of his feet. Job took a piece of broken pottery to scratch himself with and sat down in the dust. His wife said to him, “How long will you go on clinging to your innocence? Curse God and die.” – Job 2:6-9 (Translated by Stephen Mitchell)
It is often enough, and always with great surprise, intimated to me that there is something both ordinary and unusual in all my writings, from the “Birth of Tragedy” to the recently published “Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future:” they all contain, I have been told, snares and nets for short sighted birds, and something that is almost a constant, subtle, incitement to an overturning of habitual opinions and of approved customs. What!? Everything is merely human – all too human? With this exclamation my writings are gone through not without a certain dread and mistrust of ethic itself and not without a disposition to ask the exponent of evil things if those things be not simply misrepresented. – Nietzsche, Human, All too Human
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A few weeks ago, at Rutgers university, a young man named Tyler Clemnti, committed suicide, following an instance of cyberbullying.   Clementi was surreptitiously filmed and the video broadcast to the world having an intimate moment with another young man. Clementi was an 18 year-old freshman student and was just one of the many recent instances of bullying on campuses leading to suicide.
In another, ironically related piece of news, the Supreme Court opened session this week by hearing the case of a family traumatized by an anti-gay, anti-war chanting slogans at the military funeral of their son.
My thoughts this morning are only secondarily about bullying.  It is not that I think that a sermon about bullying is illegitimate or unhelpful — on the contrary, I suppose we need, more than ever, explicit help around the question of bullying.  We see bullying, not just in school yards or college dorms, but in so-called adult behavior.  One of the candidates for governor of New York, Jim Palladino, took a page out of the book of the television and radio talk show bully pulpit recently. In an  interview last Wednesday on NPR he yelled at the host that he’s taking out the trash and that that includes  the current speaker of the state Assembly, Sheldon Silver.
Yes, we need to be thinking about bullying.
It seems to me there are two basic approaches to doing this.  One approach might look at case studies so that we might see the effects of bullying and get a glimpse of what it looks like when it begins.
Another way might be for us to train our moral fiber so that we see in our enemy, not the object for bullying, but the subject of prayer.  The point cannot be that our behavior toward our enemies is to be a sudden departure from from our behavior in general.   Our moral fiber is just that which allows us to pursue, even given serious differences of opinion, the good.
Just what I mean by that pursuit of the good is precisely the purpose of my sermon this morning as we talk some about, what one mentor of mine called, the most sublime book in the bible, the Book of Job. Continue reading “Oct. 10 — Human, All Too Human”

“A relationship with God can be direct, naive, lively, not the kind adults have which usually takes place in the sphere of rumor.” – R. M. Rilke

Text: Revelation 10: 1-3, 8-9
In any sermon titled “Changing the Real Estate,” you would naturally expect me to talk about two things — the way the real estate was, and what the real estate is becoming.  And because this is a sermon you’d expect me to talk about how God’s changed real estate makes a difference and what that difference calls you to do.
Part I.
A little over 10 years ago, a pastor by the name of Scott Holland published an article  titled “Theology is a Kind of Writing,” that sparked a different way of thinking about theology. Rev. Holland had in mind that the language of faith should be more poetic — it should be marked by a desire to tell a story, to evoke drama, to suggest the barest outlines of the interior desire that enlivens life and resists complete description.  He writes in that article that with the demise of metaphyiscs, theology will need to attend to poetry for  inspiration and motivation and, more importantly, to carry the weight of its demands.
Despite the fact that I like the direction Holland wants to go, I think Holland makes a mistake that many people make by confusing the word theology, with the word witness.  It makes perfect sense to suggest that our witness language, the language of our church liturgies of sermons, even of certain kinds of religious texts, should be more poetic. Theology is simply a second order of criticism directed toward our witness.  We need both.  And if we need theology, it cannot be that metaphysics is dead, as Holland and many others claim, since metaphysics is the initial reflections on the necessary requirements to reflect at all.
In fact — you could argue that a new book out by two of our nations preeminent physicists, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, dip into metaphysics in a their new book  called The Grand Design.  The book begins with these words:

We each exist for but a short time, and in that time explore but a small part of the whole universe.  But humans are a curious species.  We wonder.  We seek answers.  Living in this vast world that is by turns kind and cruel, and gazing at the immense heavens above, people have always asked a multitude of questions.  How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality?  Where did all this come from?

The book, it is clear, will be about the very thing Holland proclaims is dead. But in a curious and ironic parallel, the physicists write in the very next paragraph that “these questions are traditionally questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead,” they say.
All of this dying off of favorite topics of mine had me a bit defensive this week.    But that wore off quite quickly.  I am convinced that neither philosophy nor metaphysics have met their demise despite the prognostications from these two quite different fronts.
Instead, I see that these fronts of physics and poetry are shifting  inquiry about these ultimate questions in a more fruitful direction than the Church has traditionally allowed.  These two fronts are doing exactly what Rainer Maria Rilke suggests in his later writing about his stories of God (of which the children heard the first, “God’s Hands” namely, moving God out of the realm of rumor — that is moving God from the realm of what you’ve heard said about God, into the realm of lively relationship. Continue reading “Sept. 26 – Changing the Real Estate”

Texts:

The pathos of modern theology is its false humility. For theology, this must be a fatal disease, because once theology surrenders its claim to be a metadiscourse, it cannot any longer articulate the word of the creator God, but is bound to turn into the oracular voice of some finite idol . . If theology no longer seeks  to position, qualify or criticize other discourses, then it is inevitable that these discourses will position theology:  for the necessity of an ultimate organizing logic cannot be wished away.   –p. 1, John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory
Luke 15:1-6

There’s an old joke I want to begin with, and I apologize if I’ve told it before —

One Sunday a pastor was using squirrels for an object lesson for the children. He started, “I’m going to describe something, and I want you to raise your hand when you know what it is.” The children nodded eagerly.
“This thing lives in trees (pause) and eats nuts (pause)…” No hands went up. “And it is gray (pause) and has a long bushy tail (pause)…” The children were looking at each other nervously, but still no hands raised. “It jumps from branch to branch (pause) and chatters and flips its tail when it’s excited (pause)…”
Finally one little boy tentatively raised his hand. The pastor quickly called on him. “Well,” said the boy, “I know the answer must be ‘Jesus’ … but it sure sounds like a squirrel!”

This sermon is particularly for the children in the congregation this morning.  And I told this story because long before I ever heard it, I knew it.  It was one of the things I disliked about going to church.  Those children’s stories.  I hope the one’s that we tell are usually more interesting — and that indeed the answer is not always ” Jesus.”
In fact, like many of you, I lost interest in the church, at the age when many children lose interest — sometime shortly after confirmation.  Why exactly I checked out is not entirely clear to me even now.  Some of it, I suspect had to do with the foolish idea that I was smarter than the thousands of years of thinking about questions that are far more complicated than many of us can manage.  I simply presumed since I thought I was a smart kid, and that since so much of what went on that seemed good did not require Jesus, the answer for everything, that I did not need all the other stuff that came with it. Continue reading “Sept 12 — I Won’t Call you a Sheep”

Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Luke 14:1-6
As much as it feels absolutely great to be back with you this morning in worship, and to feel healthy and engaged, more engaged than I’ve been in 6 months, I must say that time away from writing sermons has been really nice.  It’s been good to be a pew sitter and a sermon listener.
I’ve often thought that perhaps the task of writing sermons every week would be less onerous if I could preach extemporaneously. What a gift to be able to preach with a just a few notes.  A gift to my time, and from the way it seems to be venerated, perhaps a gift to you.
But, now that I’ve been away from the writing and now that I have heard, again,  some extemporaneous preaching, I’m not so sure I want anything to do with it.  I think we Christians deserve more, and need more, than the pabulum that is the likely result of trying to preach without a written script.  After all, we are not just talking about entertainment here — we’re talking about matters that should be of ultimate concern.  Big stuff.  In fact, it doesn’t get any bigger than this.
And not only that, but those elements in our society that we  call the Christian right, these proclivities toward a religion and politics of me, where religion is used to advance my position in society, where personal values take center stage and a wider awareness of the ways of others is steam-rolled, requires that we distinguish ourselves from that.
All Christians agree that God calls them to be honorable members of the wider community and to seek the good of all. The reason I point out the Christian Right in this context is that for the Christian Right, political purposes derive from their conviction that God’s will is focused on salvation through the church, and that God provides the world as a stage for the church’s distinctive mission.  I am concerned that we make careful thought about Christianity because that kind of political purpose is at cross purposes with a wider, more expansive conviction that God’s will directs concern to the human community as a whole, and God provides the church as a servant to the beloved community.
If we are to be servants and have as our aim concern for the community as a whole, then we will have to think beyond our own noses.
So, at least until I get a little wiser, or a little quicker on my feet, or a little smarter, I’ll try my best at writing sermons so that what is of ultimate concern remains a concern because it truly is ultimate, not merely interesting because it succeeds at the sound-byte level or the story level. Continue reading “Sept 5 — The Point of Worship”

As a ministry student at the University of Chicago Divinity School, I was  bombarded with the idea that theology should be public.  What exactly that meant was part of the great debate, which is still ongoing.  Nevertheless, it seems to me that a church in Michigan, (the Christ Community Church of Spring Lake) is actively part of the debate. I just read this morning about their decision to take down the cross from their steeple because they felt it was an inadequate public symbol of their faith.  The ensuing conversations were deeply in the vein of public theology.  I must say that as a member of a church that has no cross on its steeple, it strikes me as a reasonable thing to do.  By taking down that public symbol of capital punishment the church was indicating that it wanted to engage the community in a civil and open debate that would not be limited to the people of the cross, to a people comfortable with the doctrine of the church. (I will also say that just because something is uncomfortable, does not mean that it should be banished.  In fact, the cross as a piece of historical fact, does not require suspension of disbelief in order to understand it.  It may, however, and this is why it may not be a good public symbol, be too closely associated with mythology that is no longer appropriate or credible.) Continue reading “July 4 — The Spirit of Liberty”