Author: jamescalvindavis

The Devil You Know

jamescalvindavis

Artwork: Satan Arousing the Fallen Angels, John Martin, 1824

A sermon delivered at Hebron United Presbyterian Church 10/8/23
Scriptures: Exodus 20:1–20; Matthew 4:1–11

When I was young, my mom had a record collection that included a couple of Flip Wilson’s comedy albums. Flip Wilson was a comedian popular in the 60s and 70s. For a period of time in my teenage years, I listened to those albums constantly. This was before the internet, before cable or satellite TV made it to the boondocks where I lived, so this was my entertainment. Listening to Mom’s Flip Wilson records over and over again.

Flip Wilson had one particular series of sketches I found absolutely hilarious. These sketches featured him telling stories about Geraldine, who he sometimes imagined as a preacher’s wife, who had a penchant for spending her husband’s money on things she didn’t need and blaming it on the devil—the devil made me do it, she would say. In his TV comedy skits, he dressed the part of Geraldine, which of course didn’t come through on the albums, but the voice he did for Geraldine was funny enough.

The sketches were hilarious because Geraldine would concoct elaborate stories for how the devil made her do things of which her husband disapproved. The devil made her buy that expensive dress, she protested. The devil made her go into the store and try it on. The devil told her how good she looked in that dress. She would put up a fight—“devil, no,” she would say—but ultimately, the devil made her sign her husband’s name to a check. The devil made her buy that dress.

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Why God Still Loves Football

jamescalvindavis

A sermon preached at Putnam Presbyterian Church, NY, February 11, 2024

Happy Super Bowl Sunday! Now, I know that the church calendar calls this Transfiguration Sunday, the Sunday before the beginning of Lent when we observe the story of Jesus climbing a mountain with three of his apostles, communing with great Hebrew prophets, and being revealed as the Messiah of God. But let’s be honest: you did not wake up this morning thinking, “Oh goody, it’s Transfiguration Sunday!” But many of us probably did wake up and say to ourselves, “Hey, the Super Bowl is on today!”

Super Bowl Sunday has become a ritual of American life. Even if your favorite team is not playing, even if you are not a regular football fanatic, chances are pretty good that you will sit down in front of the game tonight. Millions of Americans will do just that. And not just for the game: the hours-long pregame shows, the commercials, and the halftime show have become cultural events as well. The Super Bowl brings Americans together like few things do these days.

The Super Bowl is a religious event in some ways—a ritual of civil religion. About seven or eight years ago, I wrote a sermon called “Why God Loves Football.” A revision of that sermon ended up as a chapter in my most recent book, American Liturgy: Finding Theological Meaning in the Holy Days of US Culture. The point of that book was to say that many holidays in American culture can be understood as significant from a Christian point of view; Super Bowl Sunday is no exception. In that book chapter, I made a tongue-in-cheek case for why football was the holiest of all sports, and why I think it holds a special place in God’s heart. The real point of that sermon, though, was that football—and sports—can symbolize some good things about God and human life and culture, like the importance of family, community, and the gift of fun and leisure.

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Happy Day-of-the Prophets!

jamescalvindavis

A sermon preached at Putnam United Presbyterian Church
Labor Day 2023

Texts: Isaiah 32:1–8; Luke 1:46–55

This holiday weekend holds a lot of personal meaning for me, and I feel it acutely these days. My dad just passed away last year. My dad was a Pennsylvania coal miner, and although he stopped working in the mines due to injury when I was still a boy—or maybe because of that traumatic moment in my family’s life—I have always associated Labor Day with my father. Too many of us treat Labor Day now as just another federal holiday, just another three-day weekend, one more chance to grill some hot dogs before the summer is over and schools begin in earnest. But our celebration of labor and the labor movement in this country should be much more profound. Labor Day is a day set aside to celebrate the American worker, all people whose work maintains this country’s productivity and vitality, but especially those who do the hard work, the physical work, the essential work few people want to do but must be done, the work that is never glamorous and seldom celebrated. Labor Day should be a day to honor that American worker.

It’s also a moment for us to reflect on the history of the labor movement and give thanks for the benefits from that struggle that we now take for granted. In order to reflect on that history, though, we have to know it, which fewer and fewer of us do. We need to remember collectively the brutalizing working conditions in coal mines, steel mills, and factories 100 years or so ago, and remember the ways that wealthy industry barons controlled every aspect of their workers’ lives, on and off the job. We need to revisit the ways industrialists and government leaders actually conspired to keep laborers from organizing, often violently. We need to remember the years it took for major industries in this country to unionize and for workers to get their seat at the negotiating table. Most of all, we need to give thanks for the employment protections that those negotiations yielded, benefits many of us take for granted: a minimum wage, a reasonable work week, restrictions on child labor, overtime pay, health benefits, disability protections, and more.

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Christian Pro-Semitism

jamescalvindavis

A sermon preached in August 2023 at Hebron United and Putnam United Presbyterian Churches

Sermon Text: Romans 11:1–2, 25–36

Many of us probably noted in the news this summer the conclusion of the case involving the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in October 2018. Robert Bowers was convicted in June and sentenced to death earlier this month for killing eleven people gathered for worship at the synagogue. The sentence itself is worthy of a sermon, but not today. Today it is enough for the resolution of that case to remind us that antisemitism remains an acute problem in the United States. More than 3,600 acts of antisemitic hatred were committed in 2022, the largest number for a single year since the Anti-Defamation League started tracking such activity in 1979. Antisemitism is no more a relic of history than racism is. It is not something that plagued us in the past but that we have gotten over, an argument you hear with naïve frequency about racism. Racism remains a national problem, and so does antisemitism. In fact, both of these deeply rooted national sins have been given new permission in the caustic political culture in which we find ourselves.

And—like racism—something that Christian Americans need to wrestle honestly with is the complicity of our religious tradition in this national sin. Truth be told, antisemitism is a problem in the US because Christianity is so dominant in this country, and whether we like to admit it or not, antisemitism goes way back in our religious tradition.

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Cancel Culture and Christian Grace

jamescalvindavis

A sermon preached in Upstate New York, June 2023

Sermon text: Matthew 7:1–5, 12

A couple weeks ago, I saw a story in the news about the play-by-play announcer for the Oakland A’s being fired after more than twenty years of broadcasting for the team. Apparently, the afternoon before his last game, Glen Kuiper visited the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. He got an extensive tour of the place, and he was so impressed with the museum and the history of the barriers Black baseball players endured, and the depth to that history that he didn’t know—even though he worked in baseball—that he wanted to talk about it during the baseball game. Unfortunately, though, when he started talking about his experience, he fumbled the name of the museum, and it came out sounding an awful lot like the other N-word that no one should say in private, let alone over a broadcast.

The reaction was swift and furious, just as you’d expect, and in came the calls for Kuiper to be fired. Kuiper insisted that he did not mean to say the wrong word, he just got tongue-tied—an explanation that seems plausible to me, someone else who spends much of his profession in public speaking. Sometimes my brain and my mouth don’t communicate effectively, and what my brain wants to say does not come out the way I thought it. And sometimes, in situations less wrought than this one, in an effort to make sure I don’t say something a certain way, I get so focused on avoiding that construction that my brain sends that signal and I end up saying it precisely the way I was trying to avoid. (I do that with names all the time.) I can imagine that Kuiper, a White man, was already feeling a little funny saying the word “Negro,” because even though it’s in the name of the museum, in a lot of other contexts it is not a positive word to use to refer to Black persons. So even that hyper-sensitivity could have caused him to misspeak.

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