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Sixth Sunday in Easter — May 26, 2019 – John 5:1-18

The sermon series that begins today is titled “The Visible Christian: Revealing Jesus to an  Unbelieving World.” It begins with today’s text for this reason: Christians today can be a more potent, more powerful witness to the world to our foundational belief in the presence of God in the midst of the word today when we cease to fear what God is doing in our midst, when we trust that God is with us in the midst of sometimes terrifying change, and when our witness to the world is a witness that attests to God’s power manifest in God’s mercy, God’s grace, and God’s love, and when that love is manifest in not only our relationships with one another, but in our proclamation to the world.

Before I read today’s text, I need to make something clear: one of the facets of John’s gospel is that he uses the term “the Jews” to describe the religious leaders who are in opposition to Jesus’ ministry on earth. John does not mean this as a blanket term for all Jewish people, in his day or ours. Jesus was Jewish. The man who he heals in today’s reading is Jewish. As such, today’s text is a critique of religious leadership, not a critique of Judaism.

I like to think of myself as a man who is somewhat unafraid of change, but years ago, just before Christmas, a man who was the relative of fifteen of the members of the church I was serving at the time died and was to be buried in Big Stone Gap, Virginia. When I learned the date and time of his funeral, I decided to go. I charted my course: route 460 west to Troutville, just outside of Roanoke. From there it was 81-south to Abingdon where I would turn north, and head to the little, snow-covered coal-mining town nestled in the mountains.

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Fifth Sunday After Easter – May 19, 2019

Jeremiah 1:1-10

“Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars… I will not forget thy word. Amen.”

On November 23, 1654, sometime between 10:30 p.m. and 12:30 a.m., a thirty-two-year-old Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Catholic theologian experienced an intense religious vision and immediately wrote those words. He carefully sewed them into his coat and transferred them whenever he changed his clothes, something accidentally discovered by a servant after his death.

In religious circles, Pascal is best known for an influential theological work published after his death at thirty-nine called the Pensées or “Thoughts” (he originally planned to title the work “Defense of the Christian Religion”). First published in 1670, Pensées is widely considered a masterpiece of French prose and is the work that gave us what is known as “Pascal’s wager,” which I would like to discuss this morning.[i]

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Fourth Sunday in Easter – May 12, 2019

Luke 5:17-26

The original working title for this sermon series “What the Bible Does Not Say” was actually “Bad Theology.” I thought that, in many ways, it would be fun to promote, as in “Come back to worship at Reveille after Easter for some bad theology!”

I perhaps could have gotten away from it were it not for this morning’s sermon, which engages the saying “God needed another angel.” In considering this series as a whole, I realized that much of what I was only half-seriously labeling “bad theology” are actually sayings that have brought people measures of comfort during exceedingly difficult days. It may have helped someone frame a painful time in life to tell themselves “Everything happens for a reason.” The saying “The Lord helps those who help themselves” may have provided just the right motivation for someone to do something important, and imagining a dearly departed loved one as an angel among the angels of the heavenly host may have been all that enabled you to survive an inexpressibly painful loss.

So then, if God has used these extra-biblical sayings to bless you in some important way, then I say, “Glory to God.” However, given what each of these platitudes articulates, were they true, about the nature of who our God truly is, I would strongly warn against saying them to someone else, and this is no truer about any of them than the one I am addressing this morning.

When I was twenty-four and in my second year of seminary, I was the student associate pastor of a small congregation in rural western North Carolina. One night, a couple in the church invited me to their home for dinner, and afterward we sat in the living room and talked. I was aware that this couple had, in the not too distant past, tragically lost an infant. I knew this because they were very open about it. Yet as we sat in the front room, with its white walls, white carpet, and white furniture, the mother looked me in the eyes and said, “The reason I am a Christian is so that when I die, I can walk through those heavenly gates to the heavenly nursery and get my daughter back.”

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