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.

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).