Jesus

Who Are God’s People?

jamescalvindavis

A sermon preached at Putnam Presbyterian Church on September 8, 2024

Sermon text: Mark 7:24–30

Of all the stories of Jesus told to us by the Gospel writers, this one is—hands-down—the least flattering. In the first part of the Gospel of Mark, Jesus is wandering around, teaching and performing miracles, but largely staying out of the spotlight, for he has decided that the time has not yet come to reveal himself in full to the world. In that spirit, he sneaks into a house in the region of Tyre, presumably with a sympathetic follower, perhaps to catch a meal and some rest. But his reputation precedes him, and soon a woman intrudes and sits at his feet. This woman is a Gentile, which in biblical parlance means that she is not Jewish. And in case we didn’t catch that important detail, the storyteller emphasizes that she is Syrophoenician. She is not Jewish, but she comes to this Jewish healer with a dire need. Her daughter is ill. In that ancient worldview, the girl is considered to have a demon, and she needs help. So her mother falls at the feet of Jesus and begs him to come and lay hands on her daughter.

Jesus’ response is abrupt, and, to readers of this story ever since, very puzzling. He says to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Translation: I am here for the people of Israel, not for Gentiles. But not only does he refuse to help her because she is not Jewish, the way he puts it peddles in insults. Dogs he calls her kind. The Messiah of God refers to Gentiles as animals.

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Wondrous Love

jamescalvindavis

A sermon delivered at Putnam United Presbyterian Church (NY) 3/24/2024
Palm Sunday

Holy Week can be a particularly difficult week for Christians to focus, because there is a lot going liturgically and theologically. This one week puts before us the trajectory of Jesus’ final days, from popular hero to humiliated scapegoat. We witness the crowds hearing what they wanted to hear and seeing what they wanted to see in Jesus early in the week, only to reject him when they realized he was preaching a kingdom message that would challenge them, not placate them. They realized that he was unwilling to play the game that other would-be political leaders played. He would not promise to overthrow the Romans and their vermin sympathizers on day 1 of his rule. Instead, he talked on and on about a kingdom of love and righteousness and peace. And for this, the people’s chants of “Hosanna in the highest!” turned into mob taunts to hang him, and they abandoned him to the brutal devices of the Roman Empire.

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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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Palms and Pies

jamescalvindavis

A sermon preached at the Congregational Church of Middlebury, Vermont, on April 14, 2019

There is a movement within Christian worship in the last couple of decades to observe this day of the Christian year as Passion Sunday, or Palm/Passion Sunday, instead of just Palm Sunday. In other words, on this Sunday we observe in worship the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, but in the deliberate context of the rest of Holy Week. That often means including Scripture not only about the entry but also about the Passion of Christ, and to have the movement of our hymns go from “All Glory, Laud, and Honor” at the beginning of the hour to “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded” at the end. This tendency toward observing Passion Sunday has historical connections, but the main concern that motivates it is to ensure that churchgoers get the whole picture. The reality is that most Protestants don’t come to church between Sundays, so if we observe only the triumphal entry today, most churchgoers will go from happy day (Palm Sunday) to happy day (Easter) with no opportunity to reflect on the all-important moment of Christ on the cross. And without the cross, however we interpret it, we do not understand the significance of Christ.

I think there’s a lot of wisdom in the move toward Passion Sunday and the concerns that motivate it. And yet there is cost. The cost is that in our movement toward the cross we do only a quick run past the spectacle of Palm Sunday. In our effort to encapsulate the full meaning of Holy Week in a Sunday service, we risk spending very little time on the beginning. The triumphal entry disappears in the shadow of the cross, and we leave church wondering, “Why did we pass out those palms?”

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Witnesses of These Things

jamescalvindavis

A sermon preached at the Congregational Church of Middlebury, Vermont

April 15, 2018 (Third Sunday of Easter)
Text: Luke 24: 36-49

I was having breakfast with a friend of mine this week, a colleague at the college, and the subject of church came up. My friend grew up in the Roman Catholic Church, but he doesn’t associate with his religion anymore. “Someday you and I need to have a conversation about this church thing,” he said to me. “I have to admit that I’ve distanced myself from that stuff in my middle age. I guess I’m too much of a scientist; I need things to be empirically validated to believe them. I’d love to talk to you about how you keep religion and the life of the mind together.”

Many of us have had similar conversations; some of us have had them with ourselves. We’re not always sure we buy all of the things read and mentioned and claimed here at church. What do we do with the disconnect between the assertions of the faith and the requirements of the critical mind?

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