This sermon was snowed out… maybe for the best!For the last two weeks, our Advent bible study group has been looking at the stories of miracle babies in the Hebrew scriptures and in the New Testament. We have asked ourselves again and again, what do these stories tell us about the Israelite faith? About the faith that Jesus lived? About the faith of Jesus’ followers? If we are going to call ourselves disciples of Jesus, and I can think of no better title, then we had better all ask these questions, ask them again and again… or maybe I’m wrong. If you have it worked out, if you understand what Jesus meant and means, if you understand God’s will, if you can pick up that pew Bible and read a consistent and coherent message, please raise your hand.
No takers? I’m not surprised. You might be here in a UCC congregation because you were born in this tradition, either the UCC or one of its antecedents. But many of us are here as refugees. We couldn’t make sense of our own traditions, could not find the same meaning in that book as those around us. We could find prosperity theology in some portions of the Hebrew scriptures, but we could not find it in the prophets, in the teachings of Jesus, not even in the teachings of Paul. We were told to have a personal relationship with Jesus, a relationship of righteousness grounded in faith that would guarantee immortality, we were told that Jesus came to cleanse us from the stain placed on us by a treacherous woman, a weak lesser human who had succumbed to supernatural temptation. We were told that personal morality and some abstract concept of faith was all that mattered, that Christians must fight abortion rights and homosexual rights.
Many were raised in a pick and choose Christianity that used Jesus as a weapon, that freely mixed passages to justify the dark desires of the human heart, the fear of strangers, self-righteousness, legalism, greed… though these were in fact exactly the topics about which Jesus preached, he spoke of the evils of self-righteousness, of legalism, of greed, not about sexual conduct. The record of the teachings of Jesus and the stories of the first Christians are often combined with selected passages of the Scripture of Jesus, that is the Hebrew Scripture, and twisted to make a monster of the gospel. Good news? I think not! And like so many others, I fled from that empty faith that contained nothing of Jesus. I was a refugee seeking a home… and I found one in the United Church of Christ. Continue reading “Undelivered sermon”