The world could use another Counter-Culture, a Christian Counter-Culture, one which recognizes that where we are isn’t where we want to be, that the kind of world we have created is inimical to children and other humans, that if we continue on in the direction we have been following we will have guaranteed that only miracles will enable the world to be what God wants it to be.

In every community everywhere, the people who need the most help are often the ones who are the least likely to get it. People with the means to take care of themselves ordinarily, but not always, do so. They love to say, God helps those who help themselves.” Because lower income folks may simply lack the financial resources to do that adequately, they fall between the cracks of the fiscal floor necessary to live comfortably. Yesterday an Island Packet story said only 37% of our town employees live on the island. There are workers who reside in substandard housing on-and-off-island who are paying fifteen hundred dollars or more to rent those homes. We need to provide much more affordable housing to the thousands of people who work here but cannot afford to live here. In thus serving them, we also will be serving God.

What are we old folks going to do for the rest of our lives? Are we going to coast, or are there still things we can do to rise above the ordinary in our ordinary lives?

Christian people, the light during the eclipse was unearthly! It was the light of physics! Light was being bent around the sun’s corona. This was not sunlight; it was starlight! It was the light from zillions of stars, projected from the glowing corona! It was indescribably beautiful! It was serene! It was surreal! It was spiritual! It was light made possible only by a Power able to put every star in space into orbit, and all that light was lighting the earth when the sun itself was completely dark! I shall never forget that unearthly, singular light.

So it's Easter again. When that happens, as it does every year, many preachers ask themselves, "This year, should I try to make them simply feel good, or should I try to make them think?" In my head I hear a little voice that says, "Listen: 95% of them want to feel good on Easter, and only 5% want to think.  Why would you even think of thinking?"  So I ponder that, and I come to grips with the way I know the tide is running. But then I hear another little voice, a different one, and this one says, "So when did you ever just try to make them feel good, on Easter or any other Sunday?  Make them think, for heaven's sake!" So I say to myself, "You're right; when did I?  Okay," say I to The Second Little Voice, "we'll go for the second option."

For Jesus, Palm Sunday may have been personally the most edifying day of his life. It was probably the first time that a large crowd had ever responded to him with loud acclamations. Previously, crowds had listened to him, but they hadn’t collectively shouted praises to him. On Palm Sunday they did, and it must have felt very encouraging to him. But the excitement did not last long. The rest of Holy Week was a steep plummet downhill, as we all know.

What if you had great expectations for how your life was going to turn out, and it didn't turn out that way?  What if you imagined your children would certainly be headed in a certain direction, and they went off in the opposite direction?  What if you have always wanted something, a very worthwhile something, something which would benefit the whole world as well as yourself, but it hasn't happened, and neither you nor the world have had even a fleeting taste of it?  What if life just hasn't worked out as you thought it would --- or should?

Culture can do much damage to religion, and religion can do much damage to culture. Too many nineteenth-century missionaries in too many parts of the world were more concerned with cultural norms from back home than with the essence of Christianity for the peoples they were sent to convert. They believed it was necessary first to put sufficient amounts of cloth over the bodies of people who lived in the tropics and only after that to expose them to what they saw to be the eternal truths of what they saw to be the unalterable Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Although the human race had a very spotty record as creation custodians up until this century, there really were not enough of us around completely to botch our responsibility, nor did we have the technological or demographic capability of destroying the planet. Now, by means of excessive consumption and overpopulation, we do. We have acquired this odious ability only in the last fifty years or so. No generation has had the awesome burden on their shoulders which our generation has.

Listen very carefully, Christian people: God does not operate on the basis of popularity polls.  He goes on being God whatever we may think of Him.  But God rarely if ever magically straightens anything out. He doesn’t have an option to do that.  To be God is to be cosmically in charge, to exercise universal authority, but it is our responsibility to do whatever we can to improve the world.

The Chapel Without Walls held its first service on January 5, 2004. Today is January 7, 2024, and thus we are celebrating our twentieth anniversary as a congregation. In this sermon I want to refer to what my thoughts were regarding our future before we held our first service, what the realities turned out to be, and then to address a goal I have for our future from now on.

This sermon is about your children, grandchildren, and for those who have them, great-grandchildren. It also is a sermon for those people. If you feel so inclined, you might email it to them with a brief explanation of why you are doing so.  Those who are 50 or younger have grown up in a culture that has become increasingly secularized, but it has most affected younger folks. When I became a minister in the mid-1960s, many communities expected that “the best people” (however it was determined who they might be) were expected to attend church. Now that is the expectation almost nowhere in America or elsewhere where Christianity is the dominant religion.

Let us turn to the word "reconcile"; God wants to reconcile the world to Himself.  What is reconciliation?  A reconciliation means that two people who were at great odds with one another overcome their differences, and they return to a relationship of harmony and growth rather than one of discord and atrophy.  In just such a way, sin puts humanity and God at odds with one another.  Nevertheless, our trespasses, to use Paul's word, are no longer counted against us because of the reconciliation made possible for us through the life and especially the death by crucifixion of Jesus. 

No matter how good any of us might be, there is not sufficient goodness for the gap between us and God to be bridged by our own efforts.  We need a bridge builder, someone who knows who and what we are and who and what God is, and who is able somehow to get us from over here to over there.  That someone may be perceived in the man from Nazareth, born in Bethlehem, the man with the outstretched arms, welcoming everyone in. 

On the annual Jewish holiday of Passover, a lamb, called the pascal lamb, was sacrificed for every Pesach Passover) Seder dinner. Thus when John the Baptist declared, “Behold, the Lamb of God!”, he was purportedly suggesting three years ahead of time that Jesus himself would become a sacrifice, and that his death would occur on a Roman cross.

There are two narratives about Jesus’ birth, one in Matthew and one in Luke. Matthew focuses on King Herod and the Wise Men, and Luke’s portrait features the shepherds. In neither Gospel does it say much about the baby himself, because on his birthday, Jesus was like any other baby in behavior and looks.

This sermon is not a critique of traditional evangelicalism, which has been a very positive factor in Christianity as long as Christianity has existed. In general, evangelicals accomplish more for church growth than mainline Protestants. Instead, this sermon is a critique of a trend within evangelicalism that has been growing for the past half-century.   

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).