Sermons

November 6, 2011

Getting Ready
Matthew 25:1-13
Heather Prince Doss

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It seems to me that most people fall into one of two categories: those who love to prepare and those who do not. I know exactly which category I am in – and I think that is why I do not love the parable of the ten bridesmaids. When traveling to someplace I have already been, I never think I will need directions to get there the second or third time, even if months have passed since the last visit. I can usually find my way, but sometimes my memory fails me. And I refuse to buy a GPS for my car. To me, it is no big deal to turn around a few times or stop and ask for directions. This drives my husband crazy. “Just look up the directions online and then print them,” he says. It is generally my mentality when packing for a trip that if I forget something I can either borrow it, make do without it, or buy it when I get there.

I think that makes me a foolish bridesmaid.

When I have been a bridesmaid in an actual wedding, I am generally reliable and on time and helpful, but I have never been the bridesmaid with the extra bobby pins or the sewing kit. You might ask me to stop and pick up snacks for the wedding party, but you would not assume I had already baked cookies.

If Eric had been right there watching me get ready for that first century wedding procession, he probably would have told me to pack a little extra oil, just in case. And I, undoubtedly, would have told him that he worries too much. Everything will go fine. If I really need more oil, I can borrow a little from one of the other bridesmaids. Or I can just run to CVS and pick some up. Yes, I am definitely a foolish bridesmaid.

I do not like think of it as foolish so much as . . . flexible. I generally do not get bogged down in the details. I do not mind some change in plans since I never made too many plans to begin with. And I do not mind working hard, even scrambling a little, to make sure things work out okay in the end. They usually do, after all.

So why does Jesus call me, and all those bridesmaids like me, “foolish?” One commentator suggests that to be foolish is to “assume a bright future but do little to prepare for it” (1). That seems fair to me. Assuming that everything will always be fine is not the same as having faith. Some might call it whistling in the dark. It is blind and naïve. When things do not go according to plan, when thing are not “fine,” foolish bridesmaids like me can sometimes panic or lose hope altogether. They have no physical, emotional, or spiritual resources to endure a long wait.

I suppose there is another kind of foolish bridesmaid, one who does not make it into the parable at all. You might call that person one who assumes a terrible future and does too much to prepare for it. You know the people I am talking about. Maybe you are one of them. They always assume something is going to go wrong, and they have every possible contingency covered. They probably would not like being called foolish, just well-prepared. If it rains, they always have an umbrella. If the road is closed, they know an alternate route. If the bridegroom is late in coming, they have a caterer on speed dial who can put together a substitute feast in no time. To some extent, our society values this kind of foolish bridesmaid. But this kind of over-preparation can be crippling. It is not carried out in hopeful optimism but in constant pessimism and nagging fear. Sometimes it is impossible to make any move at all for fear of all the things that could go wrong. For fellow travelers, these foolish bridesmaids stifle creativity and have little patience for mistakes.

Jesus’ parable in Matthew 25 offers us hope for a third way as we live our lives in a world that does not yet look like the promised kingdom of God. By the time Matthew is writing this story down, Jesus’ followers have already been waiting for the Messiah to return longer than they expected or imagined. No doubt, some foolishly thought he was coming soon but did nothing to make themselves ready. Other had probably been too ready for too long – predicting dates and then changing them when Jesus did not return according to schedule. The wise bridesmaids were not the ones whistling in the dark. Neither were they preparing an alternate feast when the bridegroom could not be found.

The wise bridesmaids, like the foolish ones, fell asleep when the evening shadows grew long. The wise bridesmaids, like the foolish ones, woke up to trim their lamps when at midnight the bridegroom could finally be seen on the horizon. All the bridesmaids grew weary of waiting and napped. All of the bridesmaids finally saw the one for whom they waited coming down the lane. What makes the wise bridesmaids different from the foolish ones is this: plenty of oil for their lamps.

I recently saw a first century Judean oil lamp, and it was much different than I expected. When I think of an oil lamp, I think of a glass bowl that holds twelve to sixteen ounces of oil with a metal cap, a wick, and a glass hurricane. A quick look around the internet told me that lamp like that could burn for at least 24 hours if filled. A first century Judean oil lamp, though, is much smaller. It is made of clay and is about the size of a half-dollar coin. It fits in the palm of your hand and probably holds two or three tablespoons of oil. I cannot imagine that it would burn for very long.

Even a foolish bridesmaid like me can see that it might be prudent to carry a little extra oil for a lamp like that.

Being a wise bridesmaid does not mean you have to bring everything with you for the feast. It also does not mean that you must predict every possible point of failure and prepare for it. Being a wise bridesmaid does mean recognizing that the future is unknown, but it also means trusting that the future is secure. The bridegroom is coming – Christ will come to complete the redemption of the world; this is not as good as it gets. There will be a party, and it will not start until he arrives. But after three millennia of waiting, we do not know when he shall come. Our call is neither to whistle naïvely in the dark nor to force God’s plan to fit our own.

Our call is to prepare for that “unknown but secure future” (2). As individuals, we are tiny little lamps. We cannot simply assume that we have enough physical, emotional, or spiritual resources to endure the long wait through personal hardship and global turmoil. We prepare for the coming bridegroom and the coming kingdom of God by gathering with other who also wait and then by living like the Kingdom is already here. Mending broken relationships, offering words of gratitude, loving our families, helping a stranger, teaching child, sharing our bread, and following through on all those Spirit-filled dreams – these are the ways that we pour oil in our lamps. They will not make the Savior come any sooner, but they will make the wait a little brighter.

Hopefully even a foolish bridesmaid can wait like that.

(1)Lindsay P. Armstrong. “Matthew 25:1-13, Homiletical Perspective” in Feasting On the Word, edited by David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor. Year A Vol. 4 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011) p.289.
(2) Ibid.
October 23, 2011

For the Love of God
Matthew 22:34-40
Heather Prince Doss

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Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind . . . and love your neighbor as yourself.

The words are so familiar we hardly know they belong anymore to Scripture. They are as much maxim as they are the Word of God. Christians and Jews alike can rattle the saying off without even a fleeting thought to its power. You don’t even really have to be religious to appreciate that last part. In popular culture we call it the Golden Rule: treat others as you wish to be treated. Even the most secular of our public schools teach it.

Speaking of public schools and commandments, it struck me that while we in the United States have had plenty of debates and lawsuits about where the Ten Commandments can be hung and taught, I have never heard anyone really argue that we should hang these two commandments anywhere.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind . . . and love your neighbor as yourself.

Well, almost never. The Lord actually instructed Israel to hang the first commandment – to love the Lord with all your heart, soul, and might – on their gates and on the doorposts of their homes (Deuteronomy 6:5-9). It is a practice that some Jews keep unto this day.

Why is it that we are willing to fight for the public display of the Ten Commandments but we politely ignore God’s call to hang the first and greatest commandment even in our own homes and then reduce the second greatest commandment (which is like the first one) to a neat and tidy secular maxim that we can teach even a toddler?

I suspect the answer to that troubling question has something to do with our preference for the visible and concrete, something to do with our desire to know, own, control, and judge. “Love your neighbor as yourself” or the more sanitary, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is about neighbors and others that we can see. We may not be very good at the loving, but at least we can see each other and look in one another’s faces. Even our far-away neighbors we can see through the eye of television and the internet. Love your neighbor is concrete.

The Ten Commandments are concrete, too – as heavy as the stones into which they were first carved. Of the ten commands, eight are prohibitions: “Thou shall not . . .” In our culture, at least, they read like a checklist. Did I lie today? Nope. Check. Did I commit adultery? Nope. Check. Did I covet my neighbor’s new boat? Ok, maybe a little. Work on jealousy issues tomorrow – after I leave the boat dealership. We like the Ten Commandments because we like the idea of standing with pride before the Lord and saying, as the rich young ruler once said, “All these I have kept since my youth” (Luke 18:21). And even if we know that we will never keep all Ten Commandments perfectly, at least we have something by which to measure ourselves and others.

So why do we hang the Ten Commandment but not the Greatest Commandment? Why do we recite the second commandment like a nursery rhyme? I think if we are honest it is because we are afraid. The call to love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength seems huge and vague and elusive. It is like a great fog that has settled over the marsh. You can see it, you can even feel its dampness on your skin; but you cannot, for the life of you, touch it or hold it. You cannot measure its volume or capture it in a jar as you could catch a jar of rain.

We are afraid because we know how often we fail at our human loves – how often we let down those who count on us; how many birthdays we have forgotten; how resentment can strangle love; how the warm, mushy feeling of love can wax and wane like the moon. If we cannot love our neighbor who we can see, how can we possibly love our God whom we cannot see?

How do we know if we love God well, anyway? Do we know we love God if we get a warm, fuzzy sensation when we pray? What about all those times we have heaped up prayers but the words fell flat and empty? Do we know we love God when material blessings abound? What about all the people who pray with great faith but stare into empty cupboards? Or all those whose cupboards are full but whose souls are empty?

Indeed we are afraid because the call to love God with everything we have is more like a morning fog then a stone tablet, more like a haiku than a nursery rhyme. It is not something we can know, own, control, or judge. It is not really even a feeling, as we are accustomed to thinking about love. The call to love God with everything is, first of all, a call to relationship. It is not so much about measuring, controlling, or even obeying as it is about openness: openness to receive God’s love for you, openness to be impacted by that love, and openness to return that love. We are afraid because we know that like any relationship worth having, this one requires all of us.

In that sense, loving God is perhaps a posture. Posture is the way you express with your body the truth of your soul. Posture is all of you - body and soul. When you are confident or proud you stand tall. When you are embarrassed, you look away. One who is broken sits with head bowed or maybe stiffened with resolve. There is one prayer that I know that expresses better than any other the posture of one who loves God. I can imagine the posture of the one who prays, but I cannot describe it. So I invite you to hear the prayer of St. Ignatius, to imagine his posture, and to feel it for yourself:

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, all I have and call my own. You have given all to me. To you, Lord, I return it. Everything is yours; do with it what you will. Give me only your love and your grace. That is enough for me.

That is the posture of love for God. It is a posture of total self-emptying. It is the same posture that God, in love with his people, takes toward us in the person of Jesus Christ. To love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength is to be in a relationship with the one who loves you more than life itself. This is not to say that loving God is easy. Relationships are usually not easy. It is still more morning fog than stone tablet. For we who like to know, own, measure, and control, it will not come easily to love God with all everything we have. "But to love God is not a goal we have to struggle toward on our own, because what, at its heart, the gospel is all about is that God himself moves us toward it even when" the morning fog is thick and "when we believe he as forsaken us. The final secret, I think, is that the words: 'You shall love the Lord your God' become in the end less a command than a promise."* You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.

When it really comes down to it, it is not important to me to display the Ten Commandments in schools or courthouses. Removed from the deep and abiding love of God and our loving response, they are just a checklist of moral standards - moral standards worth keeping, no doubt, but moral standards nonetheless. The Golden Rule is a good rule to teach our children and employees, a good rule to keep ourselves, but divorced from love of God and love for God is it simply good ethics.

What makes the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule particularly Christian in orientation is one thing: love - the self-sacrificing love of God for his people and the all-encompassing love of God's children for their Father. My invitation to you this morning is to put away your stone tablets, measuring sticks, and all the other tools that you have used for proving yourself before God. Put them down and let Christ lead you into the thick, sweet morning fog: love that requires nothing of you but everything.

Let us pray:
Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, all I have and call my own. You have given all to me. To you, Lord, I return it. Everything is yours; do with it what you will. Give me only your love and your grace. That is enough for me. Amen.

*Fredrich Buechner. "Love" in Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons. (San Francisco: Harpers, 2006) p.103.
October 16, 2011

God and Caesar
Matthew 22:15-22
Steve Keeler

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I had a very interesting dream the other night, a dream that didn’t even come close to any other dream I have ever had before and for some reason, unlike many of the dreams that I do not remember, I remember this one.

What I remember is accepting the invitation to share the gospel in a neighboring church. After the sermon, which was fairly even keel and normal, and not particularly dynamic when one might consider the level of charisma or lack thereof, I knelt on one knee in the chancel in order to lead the congregation in the prayers of the people.

I remember beginning the prayer and becoming so absorbed in the prayer that I lost all sense of self-awareness and sense of time. As I finished the prayer I opened my eyes and saw to my surprise and a little dismay that I had prayed for such a length of time that the majority of the congregation had actually gotten up from their respective places in the pews and left! Almost everyone had gone home and I didn’t even know it! As I scan the pews this morning, I am glad you are here and hope that nobody goes home early for I have something important that I want to say that is predicated and driven by the today’s gospel lesson from Matthew.

I begin by reminding us that several weeks ago, we heard a gospel story that Jesus used to imply that the religious authorities, especially those in Jerusalem, had mishandled their pastoral responsibilities in taking care of their respective flocks. The stories that Jesus used to communicate his charges of malpractice upset them. Severely! Now they are back with a plan to circumvent the popularity of Jesus and ultimately bring him to his knees. Jesus is challenged with three provocative questions that address the issues of taxation, the resurrection and what might constitute the greatest commandment.

The religious figures in Jerusalem wanted Jesus to go away, and if he did not go away they were going to take matters into their own hands to ensure that Jesus would disappear. Permanently! Jesus knew what was going on and regarded these religious conspirators to be crafty and shallow hypocrites, who acted with malice in their hearts and knew how to put on a good show for the people they had been called to serve. Sad commentary for people who were supposed to be religious, don’t you think?

In the face of all this Jesus said, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” Apart from the sub-plot by some of the Pharisees and their cohorts to publicly compromise and embarrass Jesus, what Jesus said regarding Caesar and God offers food for thought in terms of how we practice our Christian faith and live as citizens within the framework of politics and government. Jesus seems to imply that there is a place for the Caesar and for government as long as people are treated with dignity and respect, mercy and justice. Without civil order there is anarchy. The Apostle Paul would later write to the church in Rome, “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established.” Paul advocated the payment of taxes and the support of government officials, and regarded the people who practice a political vocation and profession as God’s servants.

Peter, too, understood the necessity of political authority. Peter argued that Christians should submit for the Lord’s sake to every authority instituted among men, whether to the kings or to the governors. As a free people in Jesus Christ, according to Peter, we are called to show respect to everyone: Love the brotherhood of believers, fear God, honor the king.

And Jesus said, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” There is a place for government when it governs justly, and a place for God as we live out our faith in a real world with real opportunities, challenges, and problems.

Following the lead of a John Neuhaus, a prominent Christian of the 20th century, who argued that there is place for religious dialogue and expressions of faith in the public square, I wish to raise the following question: With a new presidential race for the White House underway for 2012 and political leaders proclaiming that all is well in South Carolina, how might we as Christians look and evaluate the politic of our present situation?

Allow me a moment to share one Christian’s perspective.
There is merit, I believe, in how one described the difference between a politician and a statesman. A politician is a person who will tell us what we want to hear, a person who resists making the hard, difficult decisions that need to be made in the best interest of the people. A statesman, or stateswoman, however, embraces difficult issues with grace and humility, with no small measure of courage, and makes the hard decisions with a vision for the future knowing that such decisions may jeopardize their political future. Regarding the political races, we so desperately need candidates who have developed thoughtful positions regarding issues and have the ability to articulate them and stand by them with the conviction and passion of one’s mind and heart.

Thankful for businesses that have come to South Carolina and offered new jobs in a state with high unemployment, we can appreciate public statements out of Hilton Head Island and Bluffton that suggest there is progress with new business in our state, but we should also be aware of several counties and respective communities not far from here where people suffer from massive unemployment, extreme poverty, too many teenage pregnancies, and a general lack of hope. These same kind of troubles exist in pockets in our community.

I challenge the thought that all is well as a greater number of people enter these church doors every week to ask for help and assistance with food and medicine, rent and electricity, threatened with eviction or the loss of a home while they desperately wait for social security or a disability check, many who have worked hard but lost their jobs because of the adverse economy and downsizing. C. S. Lewis once said that people have always known the difference between right and wrong. The problem is we are not always inclined to do what is right.

Reinhold Neibuhr declared, “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” This sermon is about a responsible evangelical and Reformed theology as it relates to the gospel and real life. To be and remain faithful witnesses to the gospel, may we find ourselves in the position of reading Scripture, saying our prayers, sharing our gifts, constantly seeking the way that is right, and finding the way clear to be engaged in the public square.

May we be mindful and aware of political and economical realities. May our faith in Jesus Christ lead us not only in knowing the difference between right and wrong, but inspire us as well to do the right thing as we say “No!” to growing desperation and hopelessness. May we, in the name of Jesus Christ, be responsible citizens of government as we listen carefully to political candidates, as we expect them to cast a vision for tomorrow and lead us in ways of true justice as we register to vote and prepare to exercise the right to cast our vote.

May we, in the name of Jesus Christ, avoid the entrapment of political apathy that paralyzes government and its people. And may Jesus be proud of who we are and what we do. Amen.
October 9, 2011

You're Invited
Exodus 32:1-14
Matthew 22:1-14
Heather Prince Doss

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September 11, 2011

As We Forgive
Matthew 18:21-35
Heather Prince Doss

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August 14, 2011

Hope for Lean Times
Genesis 45:1-15
Heather Prince Doss

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July 17, 2011

In Your Dreams
Genesis 27:41-45, 28:10-19
Heather Prince Doss

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July 3, 2011

When You Just Can't Win
Matthew 11:16-30
Heather Prince Doss

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June 12, 2011

Who are Eldad and Medad?
Numbers 11:24-30
Acts 2:1-21
Heather Prince Doss

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May 8, 2011

The Promise Is For You
Acts 2:14, 36-42
Heather Prince Doss

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March 27, 2011

Living Water
John 4:4-42
Heather Prince Doss

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March 9, 2011

Ash Wednesday
Genesis 2:4-7, 15-17
2 Corinthians 5:17-21
Heather Prince Doss

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March 6, 2011

Transfiguration?
Matthew 17:1-12
Heather Prince Doss

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February 13, 2011

"Choose Life"
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Heather Prince Doss

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February 06, 2011

"Get Real!"
Matthew 5:14-16 and 6:1, 16-18
Heather Prince Doss

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