Sermon for 02-07-10: “The Prayer Jesus Taught Us, Part 5: Deliver Us From Evil”

Sermon Text: Matthew 6:13

[Please note: Due to operator error (i.e., I forgot the recorder), there is no audio of the sermon this week. Sorry!]

A time of testing is in the air. Last week, one of you told me that your daughter is taking the Kaplan course for SAT preparation. I know the SAT has changed over the years, but the propaganda used to be that it’s not a test that you can study for. But of course you can study for it, and you ought to. How many of you are taking the SAT this spring? God bless you. Testing doesn’t end when you’re out of school, unfortunately. I might have mentioned this recently, but I would appreciate your prayers as I prepare to be “tested” by the Board of Ordained Ministry. I turn in all of my paperwork tomorrow for full ordination, and then I have to go defend myself before the Board in the spring.

I’ve mentioned this before, but my apprehension over the Board has manifested itself by these recurring nightmares I have about academic failure. I had two dreams last week about it. In one, I was back at Georgia Tech, taking a calculus exam. The test was being proctored by ministers on the Board of Ordained Ministry! In the other dream that I can remember, I was in a cooking competition, and the meal I was frantically preparing was being judged by these same ministers! Testing!

The ideology of the SAT

I mentioned in my sermon Sunday that when I took the SAT many years ago, we were discouraged from studying for it because, we were told, the SAT doesn’t measure knowledge; it measures aptitude. What is a student’s built-in capacity for learning?

We know better now, and I’m sure the SAT has changed a great deal since then. Still, here’s a fascinating New Yorker article published in 2001 on the history of the test and the man who inadvertently exposed its mistaken assumptions and ideology. Interesting fact: According to the author of the article, the first aptitude tests were developed early in the 20th century to keep Jews out of Harvard.

Enjoy!

New two-part sermon series starting February 21: “Does God Love Haiti?”

“Does God love Haiti?” To most people, certainly most Christians, that is a silly question. Of course God does! “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.” God is love, the author of 1 John writes. How do we reconcile this understanding of a God who is only loving with a world in which so many terrible, tragic things happen—like last month’s earthquake in Haiti, which killed tens of thousands of people?

What can we say about God and God’s good creation in the wake of disasters both natural and human-made? Inevitably, skeptics and atheists use these sorts of events to confirm their skepticism. Meanwhile, some believers, like Pat Robertson for instance, will “explain” these events in ways that contradict much of what Jesus Christ and scripture reveal about this loving God.

We will explore some of these issues in a two-part sermon series, entitled, “Does God Love Haiti?” on February 21 and 28. Brent will preach the first sermon, and Larisa will preach the second. Bring your questions. Everyone is welcome!

This Sunday in Vinebranch

Our sermon series on the Lord’s Prayer continues this Sunday, February 7, with Part 5, “Deliver Us From Evil.” Scripture will be Matthew 6:13.

Sermon 01-31-10: “The Prayer Jesus Taught Us, Part 4: Forgive Us Our Trespasses”

Sermon Text: Matthew 6:12

Click this link to download an .mp3 or press the play button below.

The following is my original manuscript of the sermon.

Ship-of-fools.com, a British Christian humor magazine, sponsored a contest asking its readers to compress the Lord’s Prayer into the size of a single text message. The regular Lord’s Prayer is 372 characters long; a text message is 160, so this takes some creativity. The winning entry was the following: [display on screen] “dad@hvn,ur spshl.we want wot u want&urth2b like hvn.giv us food&4giv r sins lyk we 4giv uvaz.don’t test us!save us!bcos we kno ur boss,ur tuf&ur cool 4 eva!ok?” [Read it aloud.] I like that. I also like the third place entry: God@heaven.org, You rule, up and down. We need grub and a break. Will pass it on. Keep us focused. You totally rule, long term. Amen.

God’s forgiveness and our own

When we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us,” we are in part acknowledging the connection between God’s forgiveness and our forgiveness of others. Jesus makes that connection even more explicit—and perhaps more distressing—a few verses later in Matthew 6:14: “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”

The Church proclaims that God’s gift of grace and forgiveness is a free, unmerited, unconditional gift of God, available to us through Jesus Christ—not on the basis of what we human beings do, but on the basis of what God has done. This is one overarching theme of all of the New Testament. Yet Jesus’ words, ripped out of context and taken very literally, seem to contradict this concept: If we forgive others, then (and only then) will God forgive us.

For Meth-heads

The following is an excerpt from a note I sent a friend about what Methodists are all about. I wrote it quickly then thought, “Hey, that’s not bad!” You may or may not find it helpful.

As for what I believe… What do you think I believe? I’m Methodist, in the very middle of the mainstream of orthodox Christian thought. God enacted a rescue plan in this good world that he created, which culminated in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We believe we are but one tiny part of the one holy, catholic, and apostolic church that Christ established. The Methodist Articles of Religion are mostly the same as the Church of England’s, minus some stuff about the monarch, etc. Methodists claim the Bible as their primary source of authority, although we recognize that our understanding of it is mediated through Christian tradition, reason, and experience. The Holy Spirit is at work through it all.

This Sunday in Vinebranch

This Sunday, January 31, we will continue our sermon series on the Lord’s Prayer, “The Prayer Jesus Taught Us, Part 4: Forgive Us Our Trespasses.” Our scripture is Matthew 6:12. What do you think is the connection between forgiving others and being forgiven ourselves? If we don’t forgive others, will we be forgiven? How can we know God has forgiven us? Do you think that forgiving others includes forgiving ourselves, too?

Sermon from 01-24-10, “The Prayer Jesus Taught Us, Part 3: Give Us This Day.”

Sermon Text: Matthew 6:11

Click this link to download the .mp3. Otherwise press the play button below. (Please note that due to a technical problem, the first minute of the sermon was cut off. Sorry!)

What follows is my original manuscript for this sermon. It includes a link to a wonderful Youtube video of Elvis Costello and the Attractions performing “New Lace Sleeves.”

There is so much about living in our world that is phony. Our political leaders lie—or at least fail to tell us the whole truth; fail to level with us; fail to be candid. Other people we look up to lie to us: Remember the first cover story that came out after the Tiger Woods scandal began? Did we believe that his wife was using that golf club to rescue him from his smashed-up vehicle? Or two weeks ago, when former slugger Mark McGwire broke the “news” that we already knew: He had indeed used performance-enhancing steroids that year he was chasing and surpassing Roger Maris’s single-season homerun record in 1998. Sort of anti-climactic, huh? In his interview with Bob Costas, his anguish and remorse seemed real enough, but he still maintains, against all logic, that the drugs didn’t contribute to his record-breaking year. Right.

Aftershocks

Busy week! Please pray for me as I finish writing, revising, and compiling my ordination papers, which are due in a couple of weeks. I will post last Sunday’s sermon in the next few days, but I wanted to first point out an op-ed article from the New York Times entitled, “Between God and a Hard Place,” written by James Wood.

This was going to be a short response, but it became longer than I intended. I don’t mean to suggest below that I know the answer to the problem Wood discusses. But—geez!—I know I’m closer than he is. He doesn’t even try to look for one.

Wood begins by giving a very brief history of theodicy—the “justification of God’s good government of the world in the face of evil and pain”—in the modern era. He makes the mistake of so many modern intellectuals, assuming that, prior to 1750 or so, gullible believers, in thrall as they were to the Church and superstitious religious beliefs, failed to notice that bad stuff inexplicably happened to good and innocent people. Apparently, we didn’t become “enlightened” to the reality of suffering and evil until then. People were so naive back in the Dark Ages!