Jesus

Easter Perspective

jamescalvindavis

An Easter sermon preached at Putnam and Hebron Presbyterian Churches in NY in April 2026

Text: 1 Peter 1:3–9

Friends, here we are once again, celebrating the greatest season of the year. Easter! The resurrection of the Lord. In the Easter good news, we not only revel in God’s intention to save us from ourselves, to save us to God’s love, but we also bask in the confidence that God can accomplish our salvation. How do we know this? Because God raised Jesus from the dead.

This is the heart of the Gospel, that the whole world—including us—is subject to the powerful grace of God in Jesus Christ. That Gospel was accomplished at Easter, and it is what makes this the greatest season in the Christian year.

We can affirm the goodness and wonder in Easter, though, and still struggle to revel in it as much as we should. The joy and goodness of this season can be hard to sustain in our present moment, when so many of us are weighed down with anxiety over the world, our nation, our families, our friends, ourselves.

The economy brings us worry, as basic necessities get harder to afford, despite politicians trying to convince us otherwise. The hubris of technocrats threatens to overturn what it means to be human—with machines to drive our cars, do our thinking, and tell us right and wrong.

Illness haunts us, exacerbated by the struggle millions of Americans have securing health insurance, our nation having decided that health is a commodity we are comfortable letting corporations put a price tag on. The airports are a mess, the world thinks we’ve gone nuts, and many of our neighbors have learned to dislike each other because they don’t share each other’s politics.

With all that’s going on in the world, we might be excused if we struggle to appreciate the Easter good news. Where’s the good news in all that surrounds us? Well, in a word, nowhere, and that’s kind of the point of Easter. The good news of Easter isn’t to be found in economic prosperity, technological advances, or the brilliant minds governing us from Washington DC. The good news that saves us is to be found in God. The good news is in the truth declared to us in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ: that our economy and our politics and our health and our spiritual lives and our families and our local communities and our world are all caught up in the saving grace of God in Jesus Christ. Whether the signs of that grace are obvious to us or seem scarce, God’s grace is here—triumphantly here—working in all of us by the Spirit of the living Christ and moving us along an arc toward the kingdom of God.

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IRS just removed limits on church involvement in politics

jamescalvindavis

Why that’s great news for liberal Christianity

Church and State: A sermon preached at the Congregational Church of Middlebury (VT) on July 13, 2025

Texts: 1 Samuel 8:4–22a; Romans 13:1–7

Friends, I would like to think with you this morning about two things that the aphorism tells us we should never discuss in polite company, certainly not together: religion and politics. You may have seen that the IRS released a policy change this past week on churches and other tax-exempt charitable organizations engaging in partisan politics. For decades, churches have been barred from endorsing particular candidates for public office, at risk of losing their tax-exempt status. This is a result of the so-called Johnson Amendment of 1954, and it has been the policy of the IRS ever since: churches cannot endorse specific partisan candidates for public office. But that prohibition has been skirted and violated by churches without much repercussion, sometimes creatively and more recently rather boldly. Conservative evangelical organizations have sued to change the policy, and this week, the IRS said OK. Churches can engage in partisan politics with no penalty.

It will surely come as a surprise to some of you that I think this is a remarkably good development. I will make the argument this morning for why I think it is a good development—more precisely, I will make four arguments: a theological argument, a historical argument, a practical argument, and, finally, a moral argument.

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Christian Faith Sometimes Calls for Political Dissent

jamescalvindavis

As a Presbyterian clergyperson, I belong to a regional judicatory called Albany Presbytery, and this spring Albany Presbytery released a statement objecting—as a matter of Christian principle—to destructive developments in US politics around immigration, social services, public discourse, and other parts of the common good. I was honored to participate in drafting that statement, and I am proud to see that it’s getting some attention on the national stage.

Birth Pangs

jamescalvindavis

A sermon preached at Putnam United Presbyterian Church November 17, 2024

Text: Mark 13:1–27

Well, we can say this much: another presidential election is over. Roughly half of the country is pumped and feeling bullish about the future, while the other half is collecting canned foods and researching bomb shelters online. But we can say this pretty confidently: no matter who you were rooting for, this election cycle was brutal to endure. I made the comment last month during the concerns and joys that the only thing that seems to unite Americans these days is the nausea we all were feeling about the election.

A cloud of doom settled in over this election and the perception many of us have about the health of our country and state of the world, and this pessimism really was a nonpartisan experience. We saw it in Republican TV ads that depicted the US as being overrun by marauders from the south and cast into a new Great Depression by an economy allegedly driven into the ground. Democrats matched those doom-and-gloom pictures of the country with their own predictions of the end of democracy and Western civilization if they lost. And since the Democrats lost (in spectacular fashion), the anguish has only intensified with Democratic leaders and voters wearing black, crying openly, packing go bags, and either doomscrolling addictively or retreating from social media as if it were the comforting days of the 1990s.

Wherever you are on the political spectrum, if you’ve been paying attention to politics, our reality has felt ominous to you at some point recently. Today’s Gospel reading fits right into our current collective mood, because there is a lot of doom in this story, too.

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