The problem of living at any time in human history is that you can’t know for sure everything that was going on in every other period of history. Is climate change a reality, or is it simply a conspiracy theory, a hoax perpetrated on people who are gullible enough to believe the doom-sayers? We know that there have been other climate anomalies at various points in meteorological time. Who can say for certain that what we are experiencing now is truly unique?

An idol may be defined as a false god. These foreign divinities could exist either in people’s minds or in their hands, in the form of deities carved or crafted from stone, wood, gold, silver, or other metals. All the other peoples of the Middle East in early biblical times were polytheists. They believed that each god or goddess had a particular divine job description: gods of the seas or mountains or farmland or desert, gods of wind, fire, sun, moon, and stars, powerful gods and also-rans, male and female. Even beyond the New Testament period, the Greeks and Romans were still polytheists, although they were not as observant as their classical forebears had been in previous centuries.

Seldom did Isaiah write happy words. Usually he was raking someone or something over the coals. He was a surgeon, using his quill as his scalpel to try to cut out the cancer, so that the sinful being might survive. But he was not always severe. “It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; and all the nations shall flow to it, and many peoples shall come and say: ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways, and that we may walk in his paths” (2:2-3).

The old song says, “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” It isn’t true that the poor always get poorer, but without some kind of government help not many can escape their poverty. And unless those who have millions of dollars in income each year are either very unwise in their investments or are very ill-advised by their investment advisors, they cannot escape getting richer, unless they give away great amounts of their income.

Drop-outs still feel connected to a denomination, but Nones are those who have no affiliation to any religion and are happy in that status. They are disaffected with religion altogether. Now, with increasing frequency when asked what is their religious affiliation, they say, “None.” “Nones” are the fastest-growing sociological stratum in religious research. When a None marries a None, their children will almost certainly become lifelong Nones themselves. They may or may not be spiritual, but they are self-avowed non-participants in any religion.

Sixty years ago, I read a statement while in seminary about providence. I never committed to memory who wrote it, but I never forgot it. It said that providence is the means by which God uses our decisions for his own purposes. God doesn’t cause us to do what He wants, but He uses human actions, even bad actions, to accomplish His will. If we don’t do what He wants, God apparently overlooks it, but if we do His will, it is because His spirit touched our spirits. 

No one has the luxury of being able to teeter forever on the brink of spiritual truth. Either we leap across to the other side, where there is faith, but no longer any positive knowledge, or we stay on this side, where there is plenty of positive knowledge, but no faith.

Some people meet and fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after. We can rejoice with them and for them. However, few marriages are completely easy and carefree. Most of us have personal rough edges, and it is hard, and usually impossible, for a spouse to try to hone them down. Adjustments need to be made, and often it takes a long time, if it ever successfully occurs.

Millions of people say they believe every word of the Bible. It is understandable why they do that, but it is also intellectually disingenuous to say it. To put that thought into more ordinary words, those who say they believe that have deceived themselves. They aren’t liars, really, but they do consciously choose to deceive themselves. ... However, that doesn’t mean the Bible is untrustworthy. And here is where I will quote Paul from our New Testament passage. “All scripture is inspired by God and profitable foe teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God” (let’s say ‘believer’ rather than to use the sexist term ‘man of God’) “may be complete, equipped for every good work” (II Timothy 3:16&17).

The desire to get away from it all is an ancient inclination. Many passages in the Bible allude to it, especially in the Psalms. There God is frequently referred to as “a refuge,” who always welcomes people into His presence when the cares of the world become too much for them. Psalm 62, a Psalm of David, says, “On God rests my deliverance and my honor; my mighty rock, my refuge is God. Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us” (62:7-8).

God doesn’t make deals. He is not a quid pro quo God, a tit-for-tat deity. He does not promise a “this” if we do a “that.” The Prosperity Gospel is the misnomer of misbegotten theology that unusually convincing preachers try to sell to easily duped listeners. No one can make deals with God, nor does God make any deals with anybody. Not only does God not shower riches on people, but He also can’t be bought by anyone.

Many who currently fancy themselves Christian nationalists suppose the Founding Fathers were all Christians. They were not. Many of them were deists, people who believed in a distant kind of God who created the world and then left the world to its own devices. Relatively few of them were active church members. They were convinced that religion had been more harmful than helpful in the Old World, and though they made no attempts to suppress it in America, neither did they want to give it any government encouragement. They wanted what Thomas Jefferson described as a wall of separation between church and state.

The kingdom of God is not where people know what to do for God; it is rather where people first know what God has done for them.  Unworldly Christian worldliness means to live in the world without either selling out to the world or buying into it.  Since it is God's world anyway, we should let Him do with it whatever He wants, and just go along with His program as best we can.

Why do we think that life should always be fair for those who believe, or that troubles will miraculously disappear for us, or that nothing and no one will ever get us down?  We might forget God, or we might forget or misunderstand certain crucial things about God, but does the forgotten God forget?  Because we feel forgotten by God, are we forgotten?  Are we?  We ask ourselves how long must we bear physical  pain or pain in our soul and sorrow in our heart, and if it should last all day long, or for weeks or months or maybe years, does our sorrow indicate that God has forgotten us?

What is the basis of this lethal American opposition to migrants? In a word, it is xenophobia, fear of foreigners, or strangers, or sojourners. On the lower end of the economic scale, there are many native-born Americans who fear their jobs will be taken away by the outsiders. Other xenophobes are white supremacists, who object to anyone with brown or black skin. In addition, there is a particular aversion among some Americans to Spanish- speakers, and those people insist that only English should be spoken here. Most younger immigrants want to learn English, and do so relatively quickly, but it is true that older ones have a harder time picking up a new language. Within a generation, however, the majority of migrants, especially those who arrived here as children, are quite fluent in English. Furthermore, tens of millions of native-born Americans had foreign forebears who learned English. Therefore should they not encourage those who want to enter our nation now to have the same opportunity?

King David faced a challenge to his faith in his perception that there were no more godly people left in the kingdom of Israel.  To his way of thinking, they had all disappeared, if indeed there were ever any of them to begin with.  "Help, Lord," he pleaded to God, "for there is no longer any who is godly.... Everyone utters lies to his neighbor; with flattering lips and a double heart they speak" (Ps. 12:1-2).

If God judged all of us as we deserve, especially in our judgments of one another, we would all feel like hopeless misfits who should be banished to Antarctica for our various sins and peccadilloes…. Happily for everyone, God is able to take everything into account regarding the actions of everyone, and thus, by His sympathy and empathy, we are spared being shipped off to the South Pole. Still, we must always try to do the right in everything, even if sometimes we do not succeed in doing it.

What happened on Good Friday? What did it mean back then when Jesus was crucified? What does it mean now? We say that Christ died for our sins, but what, really, does that mean? Does it mean He died in our place, that his was a vicarious death? In dying, did he atone for our sins; did he take upon himself the price that presumably had to be paid to somebody for our misdoings, maybe to God, maybe to Satan? If God had to be appeased for the sins of the human race, did the crucifixion represent that appeasement? What was -- and is -- Good Friday all about?

The title of this sermon may seem odd: Is Prayer Necessary? If we don’t pray to God, asking  for certain things to happen, will they happen? Does God depend on us to pray the right kind of prayers for Him to do what we request Him to do? Surely prayer is not a requirement to initiate divine action. It is debatable whether God does anything directly or if instead He uses other agents to accomplish His will.