Believe it or not, sometimes we miss the point.

Carey and I watched The Shoes of the Fisherman the other week. It's a movie about (spoilers ahead, if it's possible to have spoilers for a 41-year-old movie) a Russian archbishop who is elected pope during a time of extreme famine in China. The Chinese get increasingly belligerent, the Soviet and American superpowers get edgy, and everybody's trigger finger gets itchy. The movie ends with the new pope's coronation, during which the pope announces that he is selling all the lands and resources and artwork owned by the Catholic church to be used for the relief of the Chinese people, even if it means bankrupting the church. Problem solved.

I had watched this movie some years ago with my Dad, and when we got to the end of the movie I asked him if this was based on a true story. I was more than a little disappointed to find out that it is not. No such thing has ever happened, to the great shame of every Christian.

Part of what disturbs me is that The Shoes of the Fisherman is not a particularly Christian movie; it was directed by a not-especially-Christian director and distributed by MGM, and yet it gets the point of our religion better than most Christians seem to. Or take another example: this article from The Onion (note that I'm not endorsing The Onion, hilarious though it can be -- it's got occasional vulgar and offensive content, so consider yourself warned). The Onion is very definitely not Christian, and yet in their sarcasm they show that they have a pretty good idea of what a Christian should be.

So why are we surprised that the church in the US is struggling? If we spend more time and energy drawing up petitions about things we're against than we do, say, feeding the hungry,* does our church really deserve to live? Maybe we should try listening to some atheists and secularists, rather than yelling at sinners to do what we want them to do.

Oh, now I've done it...

*Note: I'm pretty sure Jesus had a lot more to say about taking care of the poor than he did about keeping evolution out of textbooks...

A New Old World

Reading: 1 John 1:1-2:2

Last Sunday was the Sunday after Easter, so we used the bulk of our morning worship for reading and responding to the nine passages telling of Jesus' post-resurrection appearances to his disciples. Therefore the words of the Gospel were our sermon, or most of it, and the actual sermon I preached was fairly short.

Click here to view a manuscript of this sermon.

Preached on April 19, 2009 at PLWC.

Holy Week Sermons: "The Hospitality of God" and "On The Move"

Last week being Holy Week, things ran a little differently than normal for us. We held a Maundy Thursday communion service this year in place of our normal midweek prayer meeting, so the first sermon below was written for that service. The second sermon below was our Easter Sunday sermon, dealing with the apparently open-ended way Mark ends his account of the resurrection.

"The Hospitality of God"
Reading: Mark 14:12-31
Click here to view a manuscript of this sermon.
Preached on April 9, 2009 (Maundy Thursday) at PLWC.

"On The Move"
Reading: 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Mark 16:1-8
Click here to view a manuscript of this sermon.
Preached on April 12, 2009 (Easter Sunday) at PLWC.

Engage: Confrontation

Reading: Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29; Mark 11:1-11

This is the last sermon in our "Engage" series. This last Sunday was, of course, Palm Sunday, and so we wrapped up our discussion of how to engage our faith and actions by seeing how Jesus chose to confront the authorities of the world. Hopefully we're not too surprised to find out that for the time being, at least, confrontation must be a part of living in God's kingdom.

Click here to view a manuscript of this sermon.

Preached on April 5, 2009 at PLWC.