Sermon of the Week
No Insignificant Question: The Church’s Stand in this Political Climate.

A sermon preached at The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on September 22, 2019.
Part eight of a nine part sermon series on questions and topics submitted by listeners for consideration

#pcusa

Keywords: politics, partisanship, reconciliation, justice, stand where Jesus stands, Confession of Belhar.

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Matthew 4:12-17
and Luke 19:28-40

I once read a book about something or other
that began with a story about cartography.[1]

Cartography is the science of making maps
an illustration of the terrain and topography of a place
so that you can know where everything is,
and you can find out a way to get from here to there.

It wasn’t all that long ago that we didn’t know where everything on this planet was.

Well, we still don’t know.
Human beings haven’t been to every spot on the bottom of the ocean floor
but we’ve almost been everywhere else
and our maps have gotten pretty good, more or less.

As a kid, I used to hold the atlas and study it intently
as our family would drive for hours on a summer vacation.

With a good map, you can find anything, it seemed.
Everything was known, understood. Just follow the map.
But it isn’t that simple,
and even today we sometimes make mistakes.

In 2017, The Dallas News reported on a 24-year-old driver
who had embarked on a solo road trip to the Grand Canyon.
She was in the middle of the Arizona desert when she realized
she only had about 70 miles or so worth of gas left in the tank.
Not an issue, Google Maps assured her.
She was only 35 miles from the highway.
Well, Google was wrong,
and told her to turn down a non-existent road
which led to some non-existent spot on the map
and she ran out of gas, out in the middle of nowhere.

She was fortunate.

She had 18 days worth of food supplies with her—
water, dried fruit, goldfish crackers, apparently—
She put ramen noodles on her dash to cook them.
She made a giant ‘HELP’ sign out of rocks,
and she was eventually found and rescued…no thanks to her map.[2]

But stories like that are rather rare these days.
We generally know where things are, and can find a way to get there.

There was a time when that wasn’t so. When exploration was more mysterious.
And people, nevertheless,
ventured into territory where they didn’t quite know what they’d find.

The stories about this are often dominated, for good or for ill,
on European exploration, major voyages of the explorers
Vasco De Gama or John Cabot,
Lief Ericson and Ferdinand Magellan.
And they would set sail with a crew and some food supplies
but with no google maps to help them,
just the stars and a sextant,
and some rudimentary maps that showed what they knew at the time,
what they guessed was out there,
a northern passageway to India, perhaps,
and then some nebulous warning about the void.
Some of them thought that if you go far enough you’d fall off the edge of the earth.

My favorite description of the area that was unchartered territory
were the maps that would feature a drawing of some sea creature
with the words “thar be dragons”[3]
Or, at least, that’s how the story goes.

///
I was thinking about all of this as I was working on this sermon for today,
because a sermon explicitly about politics, at least for us,
is kind of like sailing into the unknown,
not knowing what we are going to find,
except for the apt warning “thar be dragons,”
suggesting that a wise and level-headed person
would just not go there, and stay at home where you know where everything is.

This is a somewhat peculiar thing for us, though: [Read more…]

Sermon of the Week
No Insignificant Question: Privilege and the Gospel.

A sermon preached at The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on September 8, 2019.
Part six of a nine part sermon series on questions and topics submitted by listeners for consideration

#pcusa

Keywords: privilege, widow’s mite, kenotic hymn, seat at the table, to whom much is given, not to be served but to serve, step aside.

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Matthew 20:20-28
and Philippians 2:1-11

There are a couple of different versions of a story,
but the general outlines are the same:
there’s a teacher lecturing in a public place—
the main school and civic building in the city
and the teacher has become famous.
He’s provocative, and edgy, and iconoclastic.

The teacher is talking about their country
their faith
their congregations and their communities.

He’s upset that people take advantage of one another,
using their positions of authority and responsibility to profit from them
instead of using that authority and that responsibility
to make the lives of ordinary people better.

How dare they? That’s not right.
That’s not what our rules, our laws say is supposed to happen.
It is not okay to take advantage of people.

One version of the story says his listeners were spellbound by his teaching,
the other says they listened to him with delight.

It’s enough to make any preacher jealous. Know what I mean?

And some other people too, apparently, were jealous, too,
those very people in positions of authority and responsibility.
They were not happy,
so they come up to him and started challenging him.

What gives you the right, man?
Who said you could come in here and talk about us like that…

And, so the story goes,
the teacher didn’t blink an eye.
He fends them off.

He says he’ll answer their questions if they can answer one of his first:
John, you know, that guy who baptized all those people in the desert,
was John doing that because God was with him, guiding him, empowering him,
or was he doing all that on his own…?

And they really couldn’t answer him,
you know,
because this was a public spectacle by now.
The bystanders all had their cell phones out
and they were recording video, ready to upload to facebook and twitter and insta
and the accusers were worried,
because the crowds loved John.

They loved him.

Dude lived in the desert and ate locusts and wild honey
and sought to serve people, love people, heal people, point them to God
and if they answered the way they truly felt
they didn’t like John, and didn’t think God was on HIS side, come on, really?
if they answered that way the crowds would turn on them for sure.
So they didn’t answer. They were silent.

And the teacher kind of smiled at that,
and told the crowds a little story
and kept right on teaching.

They tried again: they sent people to try to trap him in the same sort of question—
Hey Jesus, you teach the way of God and the truth.
Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?
They figured, hey, the people with their cell phones recording all this
they hate taxes, they hate the emperor,
the Romans are making their lives miserable
so we got him, just like he tried to get us with that painful question about John.

And the teacher reached for a coin,
and asked those around him: “Whose picture is on this thing”
“The Emperor’s mug is on that coin”, the crowd answered.
Give to the emperor what is the emperor.
Give to God what is God’s…

Oh, snap. Goes the crowd.
Did you see that?
And you can see why they were delighted by all of this.
And those people who tried to trap him,
the stories all say, they fell silent.

They didn’t try anything more after that,
not for a little while at least.

And the teacher kept on teaching…
and started digging in a bit more
on those people of power and authority
going so far, once, to say this:
“In the hearing of all the people, Jesus said to the disciples:
‘Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes
and love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces,
and to have the best seats in the synagogues
and places of honor at banquets.
They devour widows’ houses
and for the sake of appearances say long prayers.
They will receive the greater condemnation.”

Which was a quite astonishing thing to say
about the scribes, who were well respected
essential in everyday society
without whom business and education and daily life would kind of grind to a halt.

Most people didn’t know how to write, after all,
and the scribes kept the whole economy going.
And apparently, they knew it.
Or at least felt that they deserved to be treated well because of it.

And then the teacher is done, and he sits down,
over by the treasury,
where there is a large crowd just sitting there
and everyone is watching people come up and
make their tithes and offerings to the temple.

Can you imagine it?
Everyone sitting around for sport, watching the gifts that people make to charity?

And the story ends
with Jesus looking up
and seeing rich people striding up with their gifts,
proud and pretentious and loving it,
one by one by one.

But look, here is something different.
It is a widow. She looks, well, poor.
Her clothes, her gait, everything about her shows she’s out of place.
But she’s determined.

She walks up, and places two copper coins in the box
and they rattle around in there with a loud noise
like they don’t quite fit.

And the teacher is astonished.
Look! He says.
Truly, this poor widow has put in more than all of them;
for they have contributed out of their abundance,
but she out of poverty has put in all she had to live on…”

///
Some people call that last part of the story the Lesson of the Widow’s mite.

It is found in the Gospels of Mark and of Luke,
the end of a full day of teaching by Jesus.

A mite was the name of the coin that she put into the treasury box.

It was the smallest coin,
“the smallest and least valuable coin in circulation in Judea,
worth about six minutes of an average daily wage…”

That was all that she had to live on…

We refer to it sometimes when we sing the song Take my life and let it Be,
with the lyric: Take my silver and my gold; not a mite would I withhold
Take my intellect and use, every Power as thou shalt choose,
every power as thou shalt choose…

and

Take my love, my Lord, I pour
at Thy feet it’s Treasure Store.
Take myself and I will be
Ever Only All for Thee. Ever Only All for Thee…

One of the things that got Jesus into trouble
was how he was not afraid to take on powerful people,
their pride and their hubris
and their use of power to get what they want, at the expense of others..

But Jesus was an equal opportunity critic, it seems to me,
when you look more deeply into it.

It wasn’t just those scribes, or the pharisees,
or the wealthy who were watching each other’s charitable donations for sport.

Jesus also turned his flashlight to examine the hearts of those closest to him.

Karen read a story today about the disciples jockeying for power.
Worried about their seats at the table
wanting to sit at the right and the left hand of their beloved leader Jesus. [Read more…]