Sermons
Wilderness Experiences That Test (And Shape) Identity and Purpose | Sunday, February 21, 2010
[Reflections drawn from Deuteronomy 26:1-11 and Luke 4:1-13, First Sunday of Lent, 2010, St. James UCC, Lovettsville, Va]
WHO ARE WE & WHAT ARE WE IN THE WORLD FOR? Those are two questions we’ve asked ourselves again and again over the past seven years here at St. James UCC… and they remain central to what it means to be a united church of Christ… not in an institutional sense… but in terms of identity and purpose. We call ourselves a church… a community of Christ. Several years ago, when the UCC was celebrating its 50th Anniversary in an institutional sense, we culled our own statement of what it means to be a community of Christ….
THE UNITED CHURCH OF CHRIST, celebrating its 50th anniversary as a faith community, is pursuing important questions affecting our personal lives – in our communities, our nation and the world. The UCC and we at St. James feel that God is still speaking to us. We see statements of belief as testimonies of faith, never as tests of faith. So while we remain committed to truths that come to us out of the Christian tradition, we are open to truth as it comes to us from a variety of religious contexts and traditions.
What do we believe? Our beliefs are rooted in some words a man named Paul once wrote to early Christian communities:
Think of God’s mercy, sisters and brothers, and worship in a way that is worthy of thinking beings…. Do not model yourselves on the values of the world around you, but let your lives be modeled around a new way of thinking. This is the only way to discover the will of God and what it is that God wants . . . [From Romans 12:1,2]
It is this kind thinking that has led us as St. James United Church of Christ to an understanding of worship that is modeled and centered in the following…
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Defining Moments | Sunday, January 11, 2009 | Listen:
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Walking on Water | Sunday, August 10, 2008
[Some reflections based on Matthew 14:22-33]
…If our focus is on [Peter's] sinking, then we may miss what the story is all about. The essence of the story is not about his failure and lack of faith… but that Jesus actually invites him to walk on water… that it is possible to walk on water… but with an obvious caveat: not unless you get out of the boat…
One of the primary messages that comes through in many of the Gospel narratives is that people were always expecting great things from God… even miracles but what is often ignored is that it is God… through the invitation of Jesus… who expects great things from us. The narrative obviously relates to the story of a miracle with the loaves and fish that precedes it… and In Mark’s version we’re told that when Jesus got back in the boat and the wind died down… “they were dumbfounded because they had not understood the miracle of the loaves”… that they had not internalized the possibilities of doing miracles themselves.
True Confessions of St. James United Church of Christ… | Sunday, June 8, 2008
(A homily for our continuing faith journey for our Annual Meeting, June 22, 2008)
I want to begin by calling your attention to the last highlighted portion in the reading from Matthew: “So for anyone who identifies with me in public, I will certainly be there to identify with them in the presence of my Heavenly Father. But who ever disowns me in public, I will also disown before my Heavenly Father.” (Mt 10:32-33)
I lift that up because the reference to a ‘Heavenly Father’ takes me back to the very first time I ever shared some words with the St. James community. It was June, 2001, and your interim pastor was away at a conference and asked me to fill in. It was also ‘Father’s Day,’ so I checked back on some notes and discovered that the message I shared that day revolved around God as a loving and compassionate father. But I want you to look at those words highlighted above again, because they reflect the kinds of changes that happened in my life after I was being received into the life of the church as an ‘adult’ – although I was a very young adult of 14. It was a rite of passage the church calls ‘confirmation’ – and we all got a certificate and could choose a Bible passage on it… and it was this passage from Matthew 10:32-33 that I chose… but it was in words out of the old King James translation and they went like this:
“Whosoever shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven.” (I cite that ancient language to note a traditional patriarchal captivity in terms of the pronouns and the use of the word, Father.)
But what I want to really lift up out of that old translation is the word confess, and how I understood it as a 14-year-old. My conditioning, and perhaps some of you experienced something similar, was simply that to confess Jesus, to say that I believe Jesus is my Lord and Savior, was my entrance pass into heaven some day. So it’s around that word confess that I want to say a few words about our confession of faith here at St. James… and what I think of as The TRUE CONFESSIONS of St. James UCC.
Part of those confessions might recall that when you were in the search for a pastor and developed a congregational profile of St. James, someone filled in the blank about what you were looking for in a pastor as “someone who will think outrageously.” Now it is something that those of you who were around at that time signed off on, either by assent or silence… but it is something that I said at the time I would hold you accountable to… and I’m still doing that today…
Reclaiming Our Prophetic Voice | Sunday, January 27, 2008
[Some reflections taking note of Isaiah 49:1-7, Matthew 4:12-23, and 1 Corinthians 1:10-18]
When we are reflecting on who we are and what we are about as a community of faith identified with the United Church of Christ… and when we are taking seriously a tradition that has roots in the ancestral faith story of Jesus of Nazareth… it is inescapable that we will be relying heavily on what has come to be known as The Bible. But because one of the fundamental principles of being part of the United Church of Christ is that any part of our tradition that may also include some ancient creeds and confessions of faith – that none of these statements, as well as the Bible… should ever become a test of faith… but will be regarded as testimonies of faith. So with regard to The Bible… we will continue to take it seriously, but never literally.