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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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John 20:1-18

When did death first invade your life?

When I was ten and in the fifth grade at Pinchbeck Elementary, our teacher Miss Gill used to read to us after the chaos that was lunch to calm us down and re-center our attention for afternoon lessons. One of the books she chose to read to us was the Katherine Paterson novel Bridge to Terabithia.

The novel is set in rural Virginia and tells the story of Jess Aarons, a fifth-grade boy with four sisters who trains all summer with the goal of becoming the class’ fastest runner, only to be surpassed by Leslie Burke, the new girl who has just moved to town. Jess and Leslie soon become dear friends, spending their free time swinging on a rope across a local creek to an imaginary kingdom where they reign as king and queen called Terabithia. One morning, Jess leaves town on a trip to the Smithsonian with the school’s art teacher, Miss Edmunds without first telling Leslie and only telling his mother while she was half-asleep and unaware of what he was saying.

We had just returned from the cafeteria to the classroom like every other day. We took our seats and Miss Gill sat atop a stool center-left of the dark green chalkboard at the front of the class and opened the book to read chapter ten of Terabithia to us, a chapter titled “The Perfect Day.” In it, Jess returns from a joyous day studying art at the Smithsonian, and he is dropped off at the end of the road by Miss Edmunds.

Miss Gill continued reading:

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Palm Sunday – April 14, 2019 – Luke 19:28-40

For nine years, I served as the pastor of a United Methodist congregation in a small town that had a proud tradition known as the annual Fourth of July parade. Organized by the volunteer fire department, the parade welcomed anyone who wished to be a part, including fire trucks and ambulances with sirens blaring, tractors, simple floats made from flat-bed trailers pulled behind pickups, different community organizations marching while carrying signs indicating who they were, including churches advertising vacation bible schools, and the local chapter of the Lion’s Club in their yellow polos with the brooms they sold to raise money, sweeping the road and spinning their brooms in a carefully choreographed manner.

Of course, as though it were an unwritten rule, each group in the parade threw buckets of individually wrapped candy towards the crowds who lined the sidewalks along the roughly two-mile route, candy quickly grabbed and devoured by the local children before it melted on the hot asphalt. As adults have throughout history, we teach our children three cardinal rules: do not run into the street, do not eat things that have fallen on the ground, and do not take candy from strangers. Yet for one glorious day each year, children were permitted, if not encouraged, to do all three at the same time.

It was wonderful.

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Fifth Sunday of Lent – April 7, 2019

Philippians 3:4b-14

The Screwtape Letters is a Christian apologetics novel written by C. S. Lewis, and first published in book form in 1942. The story takes the form of a series of letters from a senior demon, Screwtape, to his nephew, a junior tempter named Wormwood, so as to advise him on methods of securing the damnation of a British man, known only as “the Patient.” The body of the letters that comprise the book has Screwtape giving Wormwood detailed advice on various methods of undermining faith and promoting sin in his Patient, interspersed with observations on human nature and Christian doctrine, and in doing so, the book provides a series of lessons in the importance of taking a deliberate role in living out Christian faith.

One of these letters depicts Screwtape, advising the apprentice devil Wormwood that moderation is one of the keys to avoiding the Christian faith: “Talk to him about ‘moderation in all things.’ If you can get him to the point of thinking that ‘religion is all very well up to a point,’ you can feel happy about his soul. A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all, and more amusing.”

This morning’s text would make Screwtape shudder. This is not a text about moderation.

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Second Sunday in Lent – March 17, 2019

Philippians 3:17-4:1

On Friday, my youngest daughter Claire, my ten-year-old, was not feeling well, so I kept her home from school. She was not terribly sick, so we decided to go for a drive in the country in the area where, a half-decade before she was born, I served my second pastoral appointment, a three-congregation circuit of churches called the Prince George Charge, located just east of Hopewell.

I was able to show her the outside of the two of the churches and the parsonage, the first church home we had lived in, and the inside of Salem United Methodist Church in Burrowsville. For some reason, it was important to me that Claire see this part of the history of her family of origin, and I was surprised by the number of memories this little trip brought back to me. When we moved there, Ellen, our oldest, had just turned one and had been walking for only a few months. It was in that home that she learned to speak, the first home where she was able to really experience the arrival of Santa and the Easter Bunny. It was the house where we used a yardstick to make marks on the wall as Ellen grew and grew.

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Transfiguration Sunday – March 3, 2019 – Luke 9:28-43a

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In 2016, the global gathering of United Methodist lay and clergy delegates known as the General Conference gathered in Oregon for their quadrennial meeting. While dealing with the business of the denomination, they reached an impasse on matters regarding the marriage and ordination to ministry of LGBTQ persons. The result was twofold: a special, called meeting of the General Conference was scheduled for February 2019, and the Council of Bishops created a task force to work towards a resolution to this issue, a task force called the Commission on A Way Forward.

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Seventh Sunday After the Epiphany—February 24, 2019 

1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50

“This is the greatest moral question now before our people…. Resolved, that the time has now come when the church, through its press and pulpit, its individual and organized agencies, should speak out in strong language and stronger action in favor of the total removal of this great evil.”1

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Fourth Sunday After the Epiphany (Year C) – February 3, 2019

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Monument Methodist Church, Richmond, Virginia, November, 1950

It was on a frigid night in late-February of 2019 when the fire ignited that would almost entirely burn Reveille United Methodist Church in Richmond, Virginia to the ground. The enormous fire started in the heating system and quickly spread through all three worship spaces and the education wing. By the time the first responders arrived, the building was engulfed in what would later be described as the largest church fire in Richmond’s history, perhaps one of the most significant fires in the area since the city burned near the end of the Civil War.

The fire was so profound and burned at such a high temperature that news crews were forced to stand on the opposite side of Cary Street, which was closed for a mile in both directions. Fire Companies were called from Richmond, Henrico, Chesterfield, and Hanover. Yet by the light of day, it was evident just how devastating the fire had been, and just how little there was left. The sanctuary windows, including the stained glass nativity window, were all gone, blown out when the roof collapsed.

The organ pipes were twisted, melted in the intense heat, the bellows filled with soot. In a desperate attempt to stop the fire from spreading to Malvern Manor next door, the fire companies had to pull their engines through the historic boxwoods so that they could set up their defenses in the Reveille Garden. The water dripping from the ceiling of the chapel was already beginning to freeze into icicles as a morning breeze blew through what was once the the tall windows that filled the worship space with natural light.

For most of its history, Reveille United Methodist Church had been breathtakingly beautiful. Yet now it stood in ruins, a husk of its former self surrounded by early morning frost and a mile of yellow police tape, the elegant signature brickwork in a pattern of Flemish bond covered in scorch marks and soot. They would call it a miracle that somehow no one was killed or injured.

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Baptism of the Lord Sunday – January 13, 2019
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Just down the road from my house, adjacent to a laundromat, there is a corner convenience store, the kind that sells gasoline and a little bit of everything inside at exorbitant prices, including colorfully constructed glass contraptions that are labeled in large block letters as TOBACCO PIPE, an obvious lie if I ever heard one.

From time to time when I stop there, to fill up my car or to get a snack or something to drink, I will see a man I do not know personally, a man around my age, standing near the cash registers scratching lottery tickets. When I see him, he is always wearing a an open black shirt with black trousers and black shoes, and as I see him, I can tell something about him that I suspect most people could not: that he is a priest. I know this because I have shirts like his, the black shirt has the short, narrow, standing collar that clergy shirts have, and the placket covering the buttons. I know he is a priest because I can see in his breast pocket the tip of the white clerical tab collar that he has removed to conceal, as much as possible, who he is.

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Reveille United Methodist Church
Epiphany Sunday – January 6, 2019
Matthew 2:1-12

King Herod was a paranoid and dangerous man, who even some in his own day thought was mentally unstable. Herod banished his first wife and three-year-old son in order to marry another woman and increase his political power. As Herod grew older, he became more and more paranoid, more and more afraid that someone was plotting to take his power from him, which led to Herod eventually executing his wife, mother-in-law, son-in-law, brother-in-law, and three sons. It was said in his own day that it was better to be Herod’s sow than his son.

So we can imagine how Herod must have thought and felt when he somehow heard this rumor that a new king had been born in his land, and we can imagine why Matthew tells us that “all Jerusalem was frightened with him.” They knew Herod did not receive bad news well.

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