Constructive Faith

Used as the Prayer of Confession on Advent 2

Our lives hum along,
the hum of dozens of electronic devices,
the capacitors of our lives holding us captive,
the hum of our tires on the road as we zip about,
free to drive and trapped in our driven-ness.
Our lives are musical,
the music of ringtones demanding,
interrupting our concentration,
the music of jingles designed to fuel our need,
the squawking heads of desire.

Amidst all this noice,
this captivity and squawking,
you come,
Our Savior and Our God.

Forgive us our willingness to be held captive,
and grant us your liberation,
grant us your peace,
for we know you still call,
still call,
always calling us to peace,
to freedom,
to reconciliation. Amen.

Sometimes life just sort of, well… sometimes life sucks. Let’s face it, the economy is in the toilet, people are going hungry. Any wealth that is produced gets re-directed to support the extravagant lifestyles of the elite, or worst, ends up overseas in the hands of our enemies, folks who suppress our religion. The bickering between various factions of our own religion is out of control, everyone claiming they are right and everyone else is condemned. Civil discourse is uncivil, and if you dare speak out against the ruling class, you’re likely to be beaten and tortured. The idea that we are somehow blessed by God is suspect… things around here sure don’t look blessed. And don’t get me started about the guy in charge. Quite a few question whether he is even legitimate. There are just far too many questions… I mean, who died and made him a god? Being posthumously adopted by his Uncle Julius does not really qualify. Can we impeach Augustus Caesar? Continue reading “Extreme Hoarders: Salvation Edition”

I am much too young to remember, of course, but some of you are, shall we say, chronologically-gifted, so you will remember when the Beatles released their Abbey Road album. On the cover of the album is a photograph of the band crossing the aforementioned road, and Paul McCartney alone is barefoot. This combined with a carefully planned hoax lead to rumors that McCartney was dead, replaced by a double. Of course, as we now know, he was not dead, still is not dead, has already outlived two of his bandmates and has accumulated a few extra wives along the way. He is not the first nor will he be the last celebrity to deal with premature rumors of his demise. In fact, the grandest premature death notice was issued in 1882, when Friedrich Nietzsche declared that God was dead. For the record, I believe that one was wrong too. Continue reading “Plunge”

Still Speaking God, you spoke the Word of creation, and being was. We see your wonders encoded in DNA, supernovas, sleeping infants. And as you spoke us into being, so we seek to speak of you, in praise and joy, using words, some ancient, some new. Forgive our sometimes stuttering attempts at praise, our clumsy language of love. Remind us always that we are a people of story, words shaping our praise, words shaped by our tradition. Bless our words, and move us beyond them, beyond the book we love, beyond our meetings and votes, move us into the still silence with which you speak us. Amen.

I can’t even imagine. One minute you’re doing what folks in Galilee, that remote outpost of the equally remote province at the edge of the empire, you’re doing what you do, which is just barely scraping by, and the next you’re following a man so charismatic that he is able to pull you away from everything you know with crazy promises. I can show you life in full. God’s just and caring realm is here. I will make you a fisher of people. And they did it, at least some did. Sure, some listened to him preach and then went back to serving the Romans, struggling to eat. But a small few made a decision to lead a radical itinerant lifestyle of preaching and healing. And that was exactly where things were when, suddenly, the charismatic man was gone, executed, and yet present, and then gone again, and he had given you no real clue how you were supposed to live in the world after he was gone. As much as they believed, and they did believe, the followers of Jesus must have been simply terrified in those first years. Jesus called them out of normal life, asked them to form a radical new community, and then, Holy Spirit or not, he left them in a world that didn’t work quite the way he asked them to live. Continue reading “In or Of?”

You are an awesome God
and there is power in this place.
Remind us of the perilous task we undertake
like the ancient priests
entering before holiness
drowning in blessing.
Remind us of the passion of that night in Jerusalem
terror and love co-mingling
at table
in a garden
during a trial.
Remind us of the dancing flames
of Pentecost ablaze
of prophecy and tongues.
We confess that we have made a routine of your work
have beat it into a familiar shape
sometimes dull.
Forgive us, renew us, transform us.
Amen.

Two weeks ago, at the start of our current sermon series, we attempted to speak of God the Creator, or more properly to un-speak of God, for we had to admit that we are at one end of three thousand years of God-talk going back at least to the earliest psalms, and that we humans have always struggled, when we try to make God accessible, with the risk of turning God into a false God, a version of ourselves writ cosmic, but at least we can locate ourselves on a theological trajectory, there is an ample body of scripture and tradition we can use to frame the conversation. Continue reading “Alchemy”

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”