Month: September 2011

The second sermon in a series on the basics of a belief that is marked as progressive, postmodern and Protestant.

In the year 451 of the common era, there was some serious fighting going on in the church. No mere whining about the the quality of coffee hour, these folks were arguing over the question “Was Jesus human or god?” and there wasn’t just cutting criticism, there was real cutting, with swords and all. The emperor was involved, as were the five traditional patriarchs of the church, with outright hostility existing between the sees of Rome, Constantinople and Alexandria. The Patriarch of Rome and the Emperor Marcian were determined to stop the fighting and restore unity in the church, so an ecumenical council, that is a meeting of all the bishops, was called and held in a  town named Chalcedon, in what is today Turkey. Under much duress, the 520 gathered bishops hammered out an agreement on how Jesus was both human and God. The council declared that Jesus was: Continue reading “Get Low”

Jesus, you are the one we name, in our fanciful pageants, in our solemn rites. You have become a commodity, an idea, a stock figure in the grand play that is our culture. You are used to justify nationalism, division, oppression.

Blessed Savior, we believe that this named Jesus, this Jesus of ceremony and grandeur, is false. And so we ask you this morning, be with us. Be real. Remind us of dirty aching feet that walked paths of love, of hardened hands that brought healing and hope, remind us that you ate and laughed and drank like us, that you lost your temper, like us.

Jesus, be present with us, be real with us, that we might be real with one another, might drop our masks and step out of the stories in which we pretend to live. As you were both messy human and Messiah, God-with-us and God-for-us, may we be in you and for you, made holy, sanctified, not by your myth, but by your reality. Amen.

This sermon is the first in a series designed to introduce some basic concepts of a theology that is progressive, postmodern and Protestant.

So first you go to the store… Home Depot maybe, or Father Nature, or some other nursery, and you buy the various things you need for the garden that season, lime and mulch and seeds, and in some cases flats of plants that have already been started. This was my first year gardening on my own, but I’ve seen my parents do this year after year, so I’m pretty confident about what happens next. For, you see, as you start putting in the plants, you realize you have more than you need, and some of the little tags that identify the plants have probably come out, and when it is all said and done, you have a handful of plants left over that may or may not be a mystery. Continue reading “Constructing God”

a sermon delivered on September 4, 2011

I realize that in this day and age, when marriage has failed as a consumer product because it requires attention to the other, is not sufficiently self-centered to meet the standards of our culture, it may seem a bit rude to complain about one’s own childhood. After all, when my father died eighteen months ago, he and my mother had been faithfully married to one another for fifty years. And he had lived a rather long time, for at seventy-five he was well past the sell-by date of most retired firefighters. So truly, it may look like bad form to complain. But I will anyways.

You see, when I was a child, Dad worked 24 hours on and 24 hours off. Well, sort of. Actually he worked 24 hours at the fire station, then he got off in the morning and went to another job, as partner in a painting and home improvement company. And when he got home, often well after sundown, he was exhausted. So my childhood experience of my father was largely limited to holidays and vacations, to every other Sunday when he wasn’t working in someone’s home. My grandfather was also a firefighter and served the same municipality. Continue reading “No, seriously; or, it’s not Dickens”