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In 2004, Pastor Brian was the recipient of the McConkey Award in Homiletics, a preaching prize through Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.
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The sermon is central in our worship because we believe that God speaks to us in a special way through preaching. Weekly sermons are published on this page, and each sermon will remain here for a period of two weeks. You can request transcripts of any sermon from the church office. Some writing is meant to be read, and other writing is meant to be heard. Sermons are definitely the latter; they're more for the ears than the eyes. But they are reprinted here in hopes that our e-parishioners, and others, might find inspiration and direction from them. Be sure to read the Scripture text that goes with each sermon.
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“The Politics of Jesus” / Matthew 5:38-47 / 13 June 2008 How do you like the sermon title this week, “The Politics of Jesus”? Is it just a little bit…unsettling? Well, most things about Jesus are at least a little bit troubling. But I assure you that we’ll be talking about the wise, timeless politics of Jesus, the 1st century mystic…not the reactive, emotional politics of Brian, the 21st century small town parson. As a teenager, back in the days when the old religious right was at its political zenith, with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson at the helm, I used to sit in church each week and hear unabashedly political preaching. The buzzwords back in those days were “family values.” Family values meant opposing abortion; trying to prevent gay couples from adopting children; making sure people didn’t burn the flag; and trying to reinstate prayer in schools. Ironically, “family values” also included a few things that have turned out badly for all the children of that era, this new generation. Specifically, supporting nuclear proliferation, the old so-called “arms race”; that was considered a family value. And its legacy today is the risk that terrorists might get their hands on one of the many old nuclear bombs floating around out there. And then there was the way “family values” supported warfare in Nicaragua and Afghanistan. As a result of that today, America has a whole host of well-trained enemies, Osama bin Laden among them. And, of course, “family values” cared nothing for protecting the environment. The politics of “family values” intensified global warming, leaving the people of today to pay the frighteningly high price for the luxuries and conveniences enjoyed so freely by folks 30 years ago. Once, long ago, I sat in church—not a Presbyterian church, I’m glad to say—and I listened to the political rant that passed for a sermon in that pulpit. The preacher was harping on “family values.” He was preaching right wing politics, and his issue that day was the “arms race.” The preacher bemoaned, “What right do these wacky draft-dodgers and hippies have? They come slinking back from Canada and they protest America’s privilege to develop nuclear weapons!” And then, the preacher aimed his diatribe against a well-known political figure of that time, Senator John Glenn. Glenn was a fighter pilot in World War II. Then he became an astronaut. But he didn’t attract the criticism of preachers until he became a senator, one who supported nuclear disarmament. You may recall a scandal that rocked Glenn’s career back in the Reagan/Bush I-era. Glenn was one of a group of senators known as “The Keating Five.” These were five senators, including a certain senator from Arizona, who were charged with inappropriately aiding a disgraced banker, Charles Keating. At the end of the investigation, the Senate Ethics Committee let John Glenn and the senator from Arizona (one John McCain) off the hook with a mere slap on the wrist for “poor judgment.” Ah, but “poor judgment” wasn’t the charge being leveled at Glenn by the preacher that Sunday morning. The preacher railed against John Glenn with charges that he was anti-American, even though Glenn was a World War II veteran and a US astronaut. John Glenn, the preacher said, was an enemy of America, because he opposed the development and proliferation of nuclear weapons. It was political preaching at its least inspired, its most imbalanced and vehement. And the preacher finished up his criticism of that peacenik John Glenn with this scathing indictment, and I’ve never forgotten it; he said: “And Senator John Glenn is an ordained elder in the Presbyterian Church!” Then, he said another thing I’ve never forgotten, perhaps because I’ve said it a few times myself since then. He said, “God save us from ordained elders in the Presbyterian Church!” You’ll remember that this summer we’re leaving the lectionary behind in order to study some of the sayings of Jesus. Two weeks ago, we looked at Jesus’ saying about the narrow gate and the wide gate. Last week, Glenda talked to you about Jesus’ claim that the last shall be first. And today we’ll talk about Jesus’ most political statements of all, namely those seemingly wimpy, gutless sayings found in Matthew 5: “Go the extra mile. Love your enemy. Turn the other cheek.” The politics not of Brian Snyder, not of John Glenn! The politics of Jesus! We think of the Bible as a purely religious book, our private guide and personal trainer, our guiding light in the spiritual life of secret devotions and bedtime prayer. For most of us, the Bible is a book about how to center our lives in the Holy, the Sacred, and thereby to have peace. And it is. The Bible is about all those things. It’s a book about personal peace, peace with God. That peace is indeed life’s greatest joy and treasure. But the Bible is also about politics, a book about world peace, peace with each other. And without that peace, you don’t have much else. The Bible is a book that tells and retells stories of God’s passion for our world, God’s vision of a new world where everyone has enough, where everyone lives in dignity and respect, a world where the domination systems of our day are all cast down and forgotten in favor of a new kingdom, Christ’s kingdom of equality, justice, peace. All throughout the pages of the Old Testament we see it: the kings and priests get drunk on power; the prophets come by and scold them, the prophets berate the powerful, put them in their place. Then the kings and priests come back and put the prophets to death. Including Jesus. For although much of Jesus’ message is personal; it’s about private renewal and personal transformation and new beginnings, much of it, too, is about politics. If he only ever preached about centering our lives in God, then there would have been no cross, for what empire would feel threatened enough to execute him? “Go the extra mile. Turn the other cheek.” I think in Sunday school many of us got the impression that these commands were a call to personal weakness. And maybe that’s part of the reason so many men never set foot inside a church: church seems to be emasculating, church with its candles, and flowers, and commands to let people push us around. We’ve seen this “turn the other cheek” thing as a call to helpless resignation in the face of mistreatment and abuse. Or, as the slogan of one local business puts it (a business that deals in floor coverings), “Come in and walk all over us.” But is this really what Jesus means? Is Jesus really telling us to allow ourselves to be taken advantage of, to be so kind and so meek that we never stand up for our own good, our own well-being, our own rights? ~No, quite the opposite! Look more closely at Jesus’ words! No. Untame these strange and wild words of Christ! Undomesticate them, and free them from their old Sunday school interpretations! For Jesus is an untame fellow, wild and urgent! And the churchy old world that tamed Christ’s words is fast passing away. Rethink Jesus. He’s not calling us to wimpy acceptance of violence and evil. Jesus is not speaking, here, about our personal lives; he’s speaking about the politics of his day. Here, couched away in a little cluster in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew has given us a few of Jesus’ sayings about politics. And as political words, they’re a call not to weakness and resignation, but to peaceful resistance! As political words, these sayings are a call for 1st century Jewish peasants, crushed by dehumanizing poverty, to stand up, claim their dignity, and resist. The politics of Jesus: Resist! Reclaim your human dignity and resist! ~And what do these words say to us today? Palestine in Jesus’ day was an occupied country, and the poor were cruelly taxed by Rome, and by their own kings, like Herod, and (most of all) by the priestly ruling class. In other words, the Temple—the church of the day—was the center of the worst tyranny and injustice against the Average Joes and Joannas. The Temple collaborated with the Roman occupiers. The priests benefited from the occupation. And the desperately poor people to whom Jesus preached were in the difficult position of loving their faith but hating and fearing…the clergy. (Some of us can relate to that!) Into this situation of betrayal and injustice, many people just tightened their belts and shrugged. Others advocated an uprising. But Jesus said, “Resist, but do it peacefully.” By the way, the verse that has Jesus saying, “Do not resist one who is evil”; that’s a mistranslation. A better translation is “do not resist with violence.” Jesus is saying, “Resist peacefully.” “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him also the other,” Jesus says. How can a right-handed person hit you on the right cheek? It can only be done if the aggressor uses a backhanded slap. The backhanded slap was the way a superior would strike a subordinate, the way a householder would strike a servant, or a landowner would strike a day laborer. (In Africa, where I lived, it’s the way a teacher would strike a student.) And if you get struck in that way, why “turn the other cheek”? You turn the other cheek in order to make your aggressor strike you with a full-fledged punch, as his equal. I don’t know when the last time was that you punched somebody, but it hurts your hand much worse than a backhanded slap. Jesus is not telling his listeners to be wimps, here. He is telling them to assert their human dignity in the face of crushing poverty and oppression. He’s not telling them to hit back, but he is telling them to use creative, peaceful means to resist the domination systems of that day. “If anyone forces you to go with him one mile, go with him two,” Jesus says. A Roman soldier, occupying Jesus’ country, was allowed to force civilian peasants to carry his heavy gear for him—his rucksack, and bedroll, and weapons, and supplies. But many soldiers abused the privilege, forcing a man to carry his gear all day, or longer. And so, the empire introduced a law, strictly enforced, that no Roman soldier could compel a person to carry his stuff any further than one mile. A soldier could get into trouble with his commanding officer if a peasant carried his gear more than one mile. And so Jesus says, “Carry it two miles.” The scene is almost comical: a worried Roman soldier trying to wrestle his backpack away from a Jewish peasant, who says, “Oh, no, it’s okay. Let me carry it another mile.” So what’s Jesus saying here? He’s saying, resist the empire! Assert your human dignity. Use peaceful means to harass the occupiers. “If anyone sues you and takes away your coat, let him have your cloak also,” Jesus says. Most people at that time lived in a state of indentured servitude and de facto slavery, a situation that was created by keeping people in debt. If debts weren’t repaid, then a person could be sued and deprived of everything, absolutely everything. At that time, a peasant had only two articles of clothing: a robe and a cloak. Imagine being so poor that all they could take from you, without leaving you naked, was your coat! Jesus is saying that if the greedy landholders or tax collectors sue you for non-payment of these outrageous debts, then fight back. If they sue you for your coat, then make a statement by giving them your robe, too. They’ve got all the power, but you can still shock and appall them. You can still shame them, and send a real message, by standing naked in the courtroom. They’ve got all the power, but you’ve still got your human dignity. Fight back peacefully, creatively. This is the politics of Jesus: Resist! Assert your human dignity. Stand up for yourself, but do it in a way that doesn’t diminish the humanity of your oppressor, in a way that doesn’t seek revenge. You’re above revenge. And even if your oppressor fails to recognize your humanity, you are still wise enough to recognize his or hers. This is a Jesus who tells us to love and respect ourselves, but not at the expense of another person, even a person who’s hurting us. This is not a wimpy Jesus with soft cocker spaniel eyes! This is a Jesus who hates injustice and bids us oppose it. What do these ancient words of Jesus say to us today? Well, think back on this past week. Has your human dignity been respected by most, or even many, of the people and systems that you’ve come in contact with? Probably not. In what ways have you been coerced, and corralled, and herded like cattle? In what ways has your human dignity been diminished by advertisers, and pundits, and institutions, and politicians? In what ways have you allowed yourself to be enslaved to a way of life that you never really chose? How has fear been used to control or manipulate you? If someone has controlled you by means of fear, then that person has dehumanized you. Have your rights been abused, and your humanity diminished? Oh, yes. Yes, they have! This Jesus hates injustice, and he teaches us to oppose it, all the while loving the one who inflicts it. And so I ask again, what do these words of Jesus say to us today? What do they say to you? Amen.
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“Nothing Hidden” / Mark 4:21-29 / 20 July 2008 “There is nothing hidden, except to be made manifest,” Jesus says. “Nor is anything secret, except to come to light.” And then Jesus adds a less than helpful little phrase. He says, “If anyone has ears to hear, let him—or her—hear.” (As a riddle-maker, Jesus liked to add that cryptic little slogan to the end of some of his sayings.) But this talk about “nothing being hidden,” it’s kind of disconcerting when you ponder it. “Nothing will remain hidden away forever; all our secrets will eventually be exposed, unveiled, unmasked, made manifest.” Do you believe it? If I didn’t know better, I’d say the Son of Man is trying to scare us here. I mean, is old Jimmy Hoffa finally going to turn up? Think for a moment about it: What would happen if all your secrets suddenly and finally found their way to the light? We’re talking about all your secrets here: the innocent ones, the tantalizing ones, the secrets that might make us look on you with pity, as well as the ones that might cause some to view you with blame, the secrets that you fear might make everybody laugh, as well as the ones that would very definitely not make us laugh. What would happen to you, to your job, to your marriage, to your social standing, if all your most closely guarded secrets escaped like goldfinches from an opened cage? “There is nothing hidden,” Jesus says, “except to be made manifest.” What secrets grip at you when Jesus utters those words? Well, let’s talk a little bit about the things we hide and why we hide them. It was a hot day at our little mission school at Elat, in Cameroon, Africa. I was learning to live with the heat, but one thing that still astounded me was the way the teachers were allowed to brutalize the students. Yes, the students could be unruly at times. We were deep in the African bush, surrounded by miles of dense rainforest; it’s not like “Miss Manners” wrote an article for the local daily newspaper. There was no newspaper, no Miss Manners. The students at our school were just impoverished villagers. They were just adolescents caught up in that adolescent struggle to define themselves and to become adults. But these particular teenagers were also caught up in another struggle: the ongoing culture wars between the old traditional African way of life and a far more glamorous way of life that they heard about in American rap music and in karate movies. I didn’t like the way the teachers were allowed to flog the students for the tiniest offenses. They were just kids, trying to find their place in the world, trying to grow up. And as such, a few of the boys began to experiment with beards. After all, this was the mid-90s, and Tupac Shakur, the well-known American rapper, had a nice beard. Why not give it a try? (Experimenting with facial hair! Some people outgrow it in their early 20s. Others do not.) One day, a certain teacher and I stood on the verandah of the school office as the kids came filing in for class. Out of the blue, the teacher beside me seized upon a certain student and flew into a fit of hysterics. “Ah, my son,” the teacher said, “you think you can wear a beard here?” It was true, the kid had a silly-looking little goatee on his chin. He looked like Snoop Dogg, another famous rapper of that era. Now, our school didn’t have any policy forbidding facial hair—even an ill-advised beard like that one. However, traditional African culture considered beards to be a badge of wisdom, and so beards were reserved exclusively for married men over the age of 50. (Nice criteria for wisdom, huh?) The teacher screamed, “Are you the wise man? Are you the teacher? How many wives do you have? How many sons?” I wanted to hide in my office because I knew the poor kid was going to get a brutal flogging for a rule that wasn’t even on the books. But that particular teacher knew how I felt about all the beatings. And he wanted to impress me with his open-mindedness. And so he called for an eraser out of one of the classrooms. Then he took the eraser and pounded chalk dust into the student’s hair. When he had finished, the student’s coal black hair was all white with chalk. “You want to look like a wise grandfather, I will make you look like a wise grandfather!” the teacher said. All the other students, who had been watching with excitement, suddenly started to harass the kid: “Ooh, grandpa! Ooh grandpa.” And the teacher declared, in triumph, “I have the only beard at this school.” And the bearded student, ashamed, dejected and embarrassed, slunk away to his classroom. Of course, I had mixed feelings about the whole thing. At least the kid didn’t undergo a cruel battering. At least I didn’t have to stand and wince through another 20 lashes inflicted on a student, and this time for the minor offense of sporting a wispy beard. But the chalk dust humiliation seemed almost as bad. And so I asked the teacher, “Why didn’t you just whip him?” And my colleague smiled back at me, very proud of his own cleverness. He said, “That boy is vain. Sometimes pain is the best teacher. But sometimes shame is a better teacher.” Shame. Shame. And shame is all too often our teacher, too, scraggly beards or not. And shame is the reason we hide what we hide. Shame is the great silencer that creates the veil of secrecy that shrouds so many truths about us. Ever since that fateful day when mom decided to take off our diapers and potty train us, we’ve been students sitting at the feet of that great teacher, shame! We feel shame when we realize, deep down in the quiet of our untamed souls, deep down in the wilderness places of the heart, that the world would disapprove if they ever found out certain things about us. We feel shame when we compare ourselves to others and find ourselves wanting. We feel shame when, like Adam and Eve, we realize that we’re naked. And so, like Adam and Eve, we hide. We hide our shame, all the while knowing that if “we are what we eat,” then surely too “we are what we hide.” We are what we hide. Yes, we’re more than that, but at least in part, we are our secrets. “There is nothing hidden, except to be made manifest; nor is anything secret, except to come to light. If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.” The problem with secrets, and with the shame that creates them, is that they take so much energy to hide. It’s exhausting. The problem with secrets, and the problem with shame, is that if we don’t deal with them in healthy ways, then they really do “come to light” in a myriad of unhealthy ways. Where do eating disorders in women come from, if not a deep and misguided sense of shame? And there are a whole host of shame issues that lead to drug and alcohol addiction, and sexual problems, and that crippling drive to excel. There are whole legions of shame issues that cause us to come across as arrogant, or overly confident, or smooth and composed. Shame is mingled with all our most glowing achievements. There are places deep down in our souls where a cruel word may have lodged long ago, in childhood, where a bizarre and senseless act may have gotten preserved in time, only to be replayed over and over for decades after the fact, still creating in us the profound belief that what we are is unacceptable, unlovable, wrong. And forever, we respond to that old familiar, destructive chorus by hiding what we are. And the hiding creates more shame. It drains us. The hiding requires us to don masks, disguises that we find more acceptable than the truth (or so-called truth), more loveable, more right. When we treat our secrets with denial or escape, then those secrets do come out in unhealthy ways, as facades in constant need of fresh paint. With time, hiding makes us forget who we are. With time, hiding can cause us to believe in those highly edited versions of ourselves that we present to the world. I’m related to a woman—and this time it’s not my mother—who has a secret. She’s a deeply religious woman. Even if her faith isn’t very insightful or profound, at least it’s got a lot of rules. And to her mind, keeping these rules brings her closer to God. (Folks, don’t try this kind of religion at home!) Her secret is the fact that her firstborn child, now in his 60s, was conceived out of wedlock. The thing is, everybody already knows her secret, and yet, she continues trying to conceal it, as if it isn’t there. Someone in the family once did the math and then gleefully published the tidings abroad. It’s irrefutable; the numbers don’t lie. But when asked, she continues to deny it, either changing the subject, or pretending not to hear you, or rejecting the facts outright. She claims that she can’t remember the exact date of her wedding day. Because to her, it’s better to be a persistent liar than to have conceived a child out of wedlock 60 years ago. And yet, somehow, I suspect that she really does believe her own lies. And she truly believes herself incapable of lying. Somehow, after all these years of fruitless hiding, I think she’s become thoroughly convinced that she’s telling the truth. I think she honestly believes that she can’t remember the exact date when she got married. I think she honestly believes that it all happened during the honeymoon. You know things have gotten serious when we hide even from ourselves! But we do it, refusing to accept blame, refusing to admit fault, insisting that we always had the best of intentions. That’s one of the problems with hiding; it makes us lose track of ourselves. And all too often, people see through it. “For there is nothing hidden, except to be made manifest; nor is anything secret, except to come to light.” To think that all the vaunting, all the gloating, all the boasting, and the posing, and preening, and primping, and prevaricating, all of it, all of it is an attempt to cover up some deep-seated shame, some old secret, perhaps long since forgotten, but which—we believe—makes us unacceptable, unlovable, wrong. Now, I’m not suggesting that everyone is 100% aware of what they’re hiding. And I’m not suggesting that everyone who is conscious of hiding a secret should run out and expose it for all the world to see. But I am suggesting that the most basic ingredient of a healthy soul is to accept oneself. I am suggesting that the healthiest thing of all is self-awareness. Or, as one wise man put it long ago, in his play “Hamlet”: “To thine own self be true, then as surely as night follows day, thou canst to no man be false.” Don’t lie to yourself. Be honest with yourself, about yourself, and then you will be honest with other people about other things. Self-awareness! The ability to see yourself with just a little bit of detachment, the ability to step back and say, “Oh, yeah, that needs work. Hmm, looks like I dropped the ball on that one.” Self-awareness is more than just the ability to admit fault, though it is that; it is also a commitment to honesty that strips away all the many lies we tell about ourselves, all the little excuses we make, all the creative adaptations that we make to our own personal histories. Self-awareness sits down in front of the mirror every once in a while and strips off the make-up to see the face underneath. In the “declaration of faith” that we’ll be reading just after the sermon, there is a line about sin that says, “We hide from our creator.” In shame, we try to conceal what we are from God, from each other, and most tragically, from ourselves. But, “There is nothing hidden, except to be made manifest; nor is anything secret, except to come to light.” If not dealt with honestly, secret shame comes to light in unhealthy ways. And so, what are your secrets? Not the ones you think might make folks giggle, but the ones you think might bring down universal cries of judgment and condemnation? What are they? Were you a bad parent? An unfaithful spouse? Did you commit a crime, or harm someone? Did you tell a lie that turned out badly for someone else? Maybe you secretly hate someone you’re supposed to love. And maybe in all your woundedness, you’ve done something else that made matters even worse, some addiction, some vice. You don’t have to tell them to me, although you are surely welcome to do that, and I will never breathe a word of it to anyone. No, you don’t have to spill your guts to the world. You only have to be honest with yourself. That is the prime ingredient to a healthy soul, self-awareness, self-honesty. Can you ever forgive yourself if you’ve never admitted fault? And can you ever forgive others until you’ve forgiven yourself? Can you love others without loving yourself? Can you be honest with them if you lie to yourself? Your secrets can fester inside you and cause every manner of anxiety and brokenness. Your secrets will indeed come to light in your broken behaviors, in your vain attempts to hide them, in your guilt-ridden life! Or…you could turn around and face them head on. Self-awareness! “To thine own self be true, then as surely as night follows day, thou canst to no man be false.” You see, the greatest secret of all, the secret to spiritual health, is to cast off the false edifices that we construct, to empty out all the shabby furniture of our minds, and to run our hands over the bare walls of our life, just as they are. See them, feel them for the real and imperfect things that they are. Run your hands over the rough surfaces, the cracked plaster, the crevices and uneven places of your life. Strip the walls of your soul bare, and look fully at the stains, and the gray spots, and little rodent holes around the baseboards. No more artifice. No more excuses or self-deception. Look honestly at your soul, and say, “This is me. This is part of who I am. It’s not all pretty. But it is all loved by God, cherished by God, and fully redeemable.” Then, instead of shame, instead of hiding, and making excuses, simply ask for grace. So those are your choices when it comes to secrets. You can try to hide them, and it’s an endless proposition. Or you can say, at least to yourself, “I messed up. But I’ll try to better in the future.” Choose self-awareness, “for there is nothing hidden, except to be made manifest; nor is anything secret, except to come to light”…one way or another. Amen.
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