@EUCC Sermons

If the North American Christian Church ever goes extinct—and I’m not saying it will, but just bear with me for a moment—it won’t be because of the rise of secularization or falling birthrates, or any of the other reasons scholars offer for its demise. No. If the church dies, it will be because of coffee creamer. The Reverend Erica MacCreaigh, a Presbyterian minister from Iowa, tells the story of the bitterest dispute she ever witnessed, which began over coffee and which might be apocryphal, but is certainly familiar. Reverend MacCreaigh recalls that, in a certain unnamed church, someone suggested to the pastor that the church should be buying fair-trade coffee for their after worship coffee hour and fellowship time. The pastor of this church, who was apparently too busy preaching the gospel and visiting the sick, didn’t really realize that the church had a veritable traditionalist “Coffee Mafia” in charge of coffee hour, nor did she ponder the consequences that would happen if someone went against them. The pastor thought the idea of fair-trade coffee sounded good and so she gave the change her blessing.

Without delay, a dozen pounds of fair-trade coffee arrived at the church and were placed prominently next to the Coffee Mafia’s two giant coffee urns in the fellowship hall kitchen. But, to the great disappointment of some hopeful coffee drinkers that Sunday, the Coffee Mafia refused to try out the new coffee. Later that week in the pastor’s office, the members of the Coffee Mafia complained with righteous indignation that, A) it was unfair that they had not been consulted about the change and B), the new coffee was extravagantly more expensive than the ordinary canned coffee they frugally purchased from the warehouse store. Soothing ruffled feathers, the pastor assured them that no offense had been intended by the fair-trade coffee lovers. Eager for the parties to have a Jesus-inspired teaching moment, she suggested that the group meet with those fair-trade coffe-loving “Carafe Crashers,” to work out their differences.

While I was preparing for my sermon this week, a memory floated up from nearly the bottom of my memory pool to the surface about a job that I had in college that I hadn’t thought about in years. Now, I’m not exactly sure why I remembered this college job this week. It might be because I have been pondering the faith journey of Peter this lent, but it’s probably more likely because this week Macy’s announced that they were closing 150 stores across the country, including the iconic anchor location at Union Square in San Francisco. During college, some 40-ish years ago, I worked for one summer as a part-time, floating sales associate at a department store. It wasn’t Macy’s, because we didn’t have Macy’s where I grew up in San Diego. I worked at the Southern California department store chain, called May Company. I was about 20, and I had no real interest in or aptitude for retail sales, but it was a job, and I needed some summer employment in between college semesters.

At some point during the summer I met another young woman about my age, whose name I cannot now remember. One slow afternoon in the junior clothing department, my young work colleague discovered that I was a Christian. Now, knowing who she was, I think she probably asked me if I was a Christian. When I said that I was, she asked me the next question, which was, “are you born again?” You don’t hear this term much today, but in the 80s, it was the way for an Evangelical Christian to find out if they were talking to another Evangelical or if they needed to evangelize the person they were talking to. I admitted that I was not “born again,” which gave her an opportunity to convince me that I needed to be. She insisted that in order to be a real Christian, a true follower of Jesus, I needed to be born again. 

Our scripture text this morning, from the first chapter of Mark’s gospel, happens immediately after the passage that we heard last week, when Pastor Arlene preached about Jesus casting out demons while he preached at the synagogue. And that text happened immediately after the text from Chapter 1 two weeks ago when Pastor Marvin preached about Jesus calling his disciples. In fact, if you had to pick a word that characterizes Chapter 1 of Mark’s gospel, it may very well be the word “immediately.” As Pastor Marvin pointed out, the word “immediately” or the phrases “at once” or “without delay” are used at least 12 times in Chapter 1 alone and at least 40 times in the entire Gospel According to Mark.

Mark is, most scholars agree, the earliest of the four canonical gospels, and it’s also the shortest. As I’ve been pondering Mark’s gospel this week in preparation for this sermon, I came to think of it as the gospel answer to the other TL;DR gospels. For those of you not hip to texting lingo, TL;DR stands for “too long; didn’t read.” If you want to get through the gospel story quickly, read the Gospel of Mark. If you want more meat on the bones, read John, the second shortest gospel, or Matthew, the third shortest gospel, or Luke, who, in 24 chapters has the highest word count of any of the gospels and is in the top twelve of all the biblical books for length. 

As we near the end of Chapter 1 in Mark’s gospel, we have already had Jesus’s baptism, his 40 days in the desert, which takes only two sentences to cover, his calling of the disciples, his preaching in the synagogue for the first time, and the casting out of demons and healing of many people, and the beginnings of his ministry throughout the area of Galilee. All in one chapter. It takes Luke five chapters to get to the calling of the disciples, and it takes Matthew eight chapters to tell us about the healing of Simon Peter’s mother-in-law.

The first Sunday after Epiphany has traditionally been reserved for celebrating the Baptism of Jesus. Originally, the baptism of Christ would be celebrated along with the arrival of the magi on Epiphany. At some point, the Catholic Church created a new feast day to focus solely on the baptism, and the Anglican and Lutheran denominations generally followed along. While we are not super “high church,” here at Eden, observing a traditional feast day gives us an opportunity to ponder the meaning of our faith practices, along with other Christians all over the world. Whether we were baptized as infants or as youth or as adults, whether we were baptized with a little water or a lot, or whether we have not yet been baptized at all, considering the history and practice of baptism helps us answer our own questions about what baptism is and why it matters.

That one of the primary rituals of our faith tradition involves water is not a surprise. As an element vital to the creation and sustaining of all life on earth, water was often seen by ancient peoples as divine, or having divine properties, and most ancient cultures explained the creation of life on earth as beginning in the water. And so water was vital in many early religious rituals.

The season of Advent and Christmas is the one time in the church year when we Protestants are, if not exactly enthusiastic, at least not too uncomfortable with talking about Mary, the mother of Jesus. Ever since Luther—or most likely Calvin—Protestants have had a problem with the Catholic devotion to Mary as the intercessor between sinners and God, choosing to see it as veneration bordering on idolatry, which takes away the proper focus on Christ. So we Protestants tend to keep her in a box for most of the year, taking her out like a favorite sparkly Christmas ornament at Advent and forgetting about her the rest of the time.

For centuries, Mary has been a favorite subject of artists, who have added to the image of sparkly Christmas-ornament Mary, or, as theologian Alyce McKenzie puts it, Mary as a “figure in a snow dome, silent, immobile, gazing at the manger.” The moment of God’s revelation to her that she would bear Jesus, called the Annunciation, has been of particular interest for painters. And there was a particular symbolism that grew up around her that artists used to communicate that this was a painting of the annunciation, particularly in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance paintings.

No sermon today, just a sweet pageant with the children and a fun puppet play with a Christmas message. Watch the video!

I am willing to guess that there are a number of you out there who have never heard a sermon about the biblical characters of Deborah and Jael, and probably a few who have never heard a sermon preached from the book of Judges. I grew up in the church, and among all the many sermons I’ve heard, I don’t remember a single one that focused on these fascinating, powerful women from the Hebrew Bible. And what a shame that is!

I think there are several possible reasons for this. First of all, there’s sexism and patriarchy. I bet you are familiar with one story from Judges: the story of Samson and Delilah. Patriarchy is accustomed to highlighting scandalous women as temptresses. But patriarchy often doesn’t quite know how to approach strong, competent women who take charge and leave their male counterparts in the dust—or, in this case, asleep with a tent peg hammered through the brain. 

Also, the book of Judges is totally problematic, especially to modern, mainline, progressive Christians. It is full of violence, with a God that seems judgmental and oppressive, rather than loving. It’s a hard work to read, and a hard one to preach. Since very few people, including most progressive mainline preachers, have studied the book much, it takes a lot of prep work and teaching to prepare a sermon on it. It’s hard to find the good news in a book that, by the end of it, devolves into chaos and depravity. 

Finally, and this is probably related to this problematic nature of Judges, the book barely appears in the Revised Common Lectionary, the three-year cycle of biblical readings that follows the seasonal liturgical calendar.  Many mainline protestant preachers preach from this lectionary; your preachers here at Eden usually do. But in the Revised Common Lectionary, a reading from the Book of Judges appears only once in the whole three-year cycle. That day is today. It is, at least, the story of Deborah, but it’s only the first seven verses of Chapter Four, which is only a teaser for the story and doesn’t complete the narrative. With such a brief appearance in the cycle—that doesn’t even tell the whole story—it’s no wonder that most preachers take a look at the lectionary, and choose to preach on the gospel reading instead, which is the story of the talents from Matthew. I know you’ve heard a few sermons on that one.