The king and we are intimately related to one another. We are all cut from the same cloth. Our being has the potential to be flawless, but in fact it inevitably becomes flawed. Not to recognize that is to do a great disservice to God as well as to ourselves, but to let it destroy us is to do a greater disservice to both God and us.

Let me begin with a deliberately provocative statement. We shall destroy our planet. Allow me to repeat it: We SHALL destroy the earth. There is no question that it will happen; the only question is when. Will it be in fifty or a hundred or two hundred years, or maybe a thousand years? Surely it won’t occur after that. However, at this point no one can accurately predict when the last cockroaches or one-celled animals and the last inanimate lichens or mosses shall disappear into oblivion. It will be well after all humans have become extinct, and all the other “lower” animals, if indeed there are any animals lower than the species Homo sapiens (“wise humans”: what a joke!). We in our vaunted wisdom are the only species capable of destroying the world in which we find ourselves. Lions and tigers and bears won’t do it; Oh, no. But human beings will destroy the planet; of that there can be almost no doubt.

Two weeks ago we encountered David in his first appearance in I Samuel as the boy warrior who killed Goliath, the Philistine giant. Last week we learned that David became a favored member of King Saul’s court when he was still a boy, playing the harp to soothe the tortured psyche of the increasingly erratic first monarch of Israel. Then, over time, Saul came to be jealous of David, who was more popular with the people than Saul. Saul tried several times to kill David. Nevertheless, even though David had a few easy opportunities to kill Saul in self defense, he refused to do so, on the grounds that Saul was the Lord’s anointed, and it would be politically, ethically and religiously unacceptable to commit regicide. As it turned out, Saul was killed in a battle with the Philistines, and thus did David become the next king.

There is one man in the Bible who has more written about his personal life than anyone else in holy writ. He is not Jesus, as Christians might expect, or Moses, as Jews might expect. There is certainly far more in the Bible written about Moses in general, but not about his personal life. As for Jesus, we know very little about his personal life. But the man of whom I speak is David, Dovid ha-Melech, David, the second king of Israel.

If you were to write a narrative of what you considered to be “the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” what would you include in your Gospel? Would you carefully study all four Gospels, and put in only those things you were absolutely convinced were authentic? Would you do what Thomas Jefferson did, take all four Gospels and cut out everything you thought was inaccurate or inauthentic? What would be your narrative about Jesus, were you to write one?

Years ago, however, when I thought this would not be my pen-ultimate but my ultimate (my last) sermon, I started a file called “Last Sermon.” Anything I thought would apply to a last sermon I carefully stashed away in the file. Well, dear hearts, even if this isn’t the last, it is going to have a lot of those perfectly pithy perusings about this and that and the other. If I used all of them, we would be here till next Sunday. As it is, we will likely be finished by 6:00 PM or so.

The liturgical season of Advent is always the four Sundays prior to Christmas. Because I was ordained as a minister fifty years ago on Friday, and because I have been concentrating for two Sundays on my thoughts regarding a half-century of preaching, I have not had truly Advent themes this Advent until today. But even now we shall not be looking at the birth of Jesus per se, but rather at his life and public ministry, and especially at his death and resurrection.

No preacher in the history of homiletics has been more greatly blessed by the quality of the minds in the congregations he has served than I. Purely by the grace of God, I have been associated with congregants, the majority of whom were eager and able thinkers. Through the past fifty years the most common comment about my preaching has been something on this order: “I didn’t necessarily agree with what you said, but you made me think.” Only people who can and do think would ever say, “You made me think.” Those who don’t think wouldn’t say that, because it would never occur to them to think to say it.

Today is the first Sunday in Advent. Normally during Advent preachers talk about various aspects of the coming of Jesus Christ into the world as Lord and Savior. The word Advent literally means Coming, so that centuries-old pattern is very understandable. However, for us this Advent will be mainly a Non-Advent Advent. I shall be preaching three sermons during Advent itself, but only one of them will have a traditional Advent theme. The other two sermons, and the sermon on the Sunday after Christmas, will be a brief summary of my thoughts regarding preaching as a major factor in worship, as well as a primary vocational responsibility of parish ministers.

The account of Jesus walking on water is problematic for the kind of people who are skeptical of anything that runs counter to ordinary experience, or which seems to contradict the laws of nature. A human being walking on the surface of the Sea of Galilee is a good example.

From the time I preached my first sermon as a high school student in Christ Presbyterian Church of Madison, Wisconsin (my home congregation growing up), I have written out every word of every sermon I ever preached. I might alter what I wrote a little bit during the delivery of some of those sermons on the spur of the moment, but not much. So the real issue I am addressing here is this: In that fifty-year span of sermons, to whom was I preaching: to the parishioners, or to me? To myself, or to you?

There would be no Church of Jesus Christ had there been no Jesus Christ. That is obvious, but it’s the first thing to say. The second thing is to say that there would be no Church of Jesus Christ had there been no Apostle Paul. That is less obvious to most people. The third thing to say, and one which almost no one, other than those who attended seminary, would observe, is that there would be no Church of Jesus Christ had there been no council of the New Testament church leaders as it was recorded in Acts 15.

There are many issues we may deliberately prevent ourselves from seeing: malaria or ebola in tropical countries, rapidly advancing desertification in the American West and sub-Saharan Africa, physical abuse of women and children, a steadily if also slowly rising sea level. What we don’t like to think about we can conveniently erase from our vision and our minds.

Every branch of Christianity and every denomination originated because an individual or a group of individuals believed that they had discovered the best way, or perhaps they thought the only way, to be a proper Christian. The New Testament was completed about the year 120 in the Christian calendar. It is obvious, especially from reading the Book of the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of the apostle Paul, that the New Testament Church was not a solidly unified institutional entity. It was, in fact, already splintered, as the New Testament itself asserts.

A couple of weeks ago, I announced in the sermon that today I would preach the last of a 10+-year series of sermons on the Book of Psalms. I realize that may have little or no significance to you folks, because every Sunday you are stuck with listening to whatever sermon I preach from whatever text in whatever book of the Bible, and therefore you need give the matter no thought whatever ahead of time. I, on the other hand, obsessively ponder these issues, and since The Chapel Without Walls started nearly eleven years ago, I set a goal for myself to preach from nearly all of the 150 Psalms. Today is my last hurrah to the Psalms as your full-time-part-time parson.

Words have immense power. They also can pose grave dangers. I suppose that even as a teenager I realized both of those truths. For that reason, throughout my ministry I have always written out every word of what I intended to say in a sermon. On occasion I will insert something that pops into my addled brain when I am delivering a sermon, but it doesn’t happen often. I am amazed at the increasing number of preachers, especially younger ones, who preach without a complete manuscript, or indeed in many instances without even any notes. I would go into cardiac arrest were I to attempt to preach like that. Kudos to those who preach extemporaneously excellently, but as for me, give me a complete text, or the lack of same will give me death.

The first eighteen verses of the 139th Psalm are the clearest and most compelling passage of scripture in the entire Bible for describing what theologians have long called “the omnipresence of God.” You don’t need a doctorate in linguistics to know that the word “omnipresence” suggests that God is everywhere, that He is in all (“omni”) places.

Labor Day is one of several annual national holidays. It always signals the beginning of the school year, or at least it did in the school districts in which many of us lived for much of our lives. Back in the day, there were Labor Day parades and public gatherings in which labor union leaders and others, including the clergy, spoke out in recognition of the importance of work. Now, labor unions are hard pressed to find jobs for their members or members for those jobs, especially in a state like South Carolina, which is not thrilled with unions and which, during one very memorable period, was not thrilled with The Union, either.

Psalm 136 is like no other Psalm in the entire book of 150 Psalms. It has 26 verses, and every one of those verses contains this proclamation about God: “For his steadfast love endures forever.” Twenty-six verses, and twenty-six times the phrase is repeated about God, “For his steadfast love endures forever.”

Sometimes dictionaries are helpful in defining words, and sometimes they aren’t. My Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, which I have had since college and which thus isn’t very new anymore, defines the word “Christendom” with two definitions. The first is that Christendom is Christianity. The two words, this implies, are synonymous. No church historian or sociologist of religion would ever accept that as a proper definition, and I also firmly reject it. The second definition comes closer to being satisfactory, although even it does not describe what most academics would think is a valid explanation of Christendom. It says that Christendom is “the portion of the world in which Christianity prevails.”