To refer to The Lost Cause in glowing, romanticized terms is to imagine that the Civil War was primarily an attempt by the Confederacy to perpetuate traditional agrarian southern culture. That meant an imagined chivalric code, a fierce spirit of independence, an abiding aversion to a strong federal government, and above all, the maintenance of what had been known for generations as “the peculiar institution.” The peculiar institution, of course, was slavery.

For all the years I have been preaching, I have had my sermon themes planned ahead for at least two or more months at a time. Because that is the case, had I known all that was coming, I would have called this sermon Harvey, Irma, Jose, Maria, Climate Change, and Flood Insurance. This has been the worst year in history for Atlantic hurricanes, and it isn’t even over yet. Incidentally, if you think “Flood Insurance” was thrown in just for laughs, it is the most alarming part of this sermon for people living on a fragile barrier island on the coast of South Carolina.

“The kingdom of God” is a term that is used by Jesus dozens of times in the Gospels of Mark and Luke. It is used only a couple of times in Matthew and John. Why, I don’t know. On the other hand, Matthew tells us that Jesus used the term “the kingdom of heaven” many times. But in every context in Matthew in which Jesus used those particular words, Matthew seems to have meant exactly what Jesus meant when he was quoted using “the kingdom of God” in Mark and Luke.

Jesus was a deliberate biblical-law-breaker. He observed most laws of the Torah, but not all. Therefore he was considered a sinner by most contemporary religious leaders. We don’t use the word “sinners” very much anymore. At least most Mainline Protestants and most Roman Catholics do not. Many fundamentalist and evangelical Christians still refer to certain people as sinners, but the rest of us are so acculturated into the larger society that we don’t use that terminology very often, even among ourselves. However, “sin” was big in Jesus’ time. The Pharisees, Sadducees, priests, and scribes talked about sin a lot. It was their religious “stock-in-trade.”

We are constantly judging people. We do it out of necessity. When a stranger tells us something, we intuitively judge whether what he says is correct or not. When we go to buy a used car, and the salesman tells us the price of a 2012 Toyota Corolla with 16,000 miles is $6,200, and that it’s a steal. Thus we wonder whether it was stolen, if it is a steal, and if it really has only 16,000 miles on it. When our best friend says, “Trust me; I won’t lead you astray,” we have to judge whether what she or he says is really valid, even if that person is our best friend.

If you had been able to see the sun in total eclipse last Monday, you would have noticed that around its darkened circumference there was a ring of light. On May 24, 1919, British astronomer Arthur Addington was in South America to witness a total solar eclipse. As a result, he postulated that the corona around the darkened sun was light from distant stars that was bent around the edge of the sun, so to speak, by the sun’s gravitation. In making that hypothesis, he gave “proof” of Einstein’s theory of relativity before Einstein had even published his theory. The gravitation of stars and planets causes light to bend. That is amazing. Astronomy is amazing. Space is amazing. But to say that is not the point this sermon is trying to make. The point comes later.

Being anxious about anything doesn’t change anything! It only makes the problem worse, whether the problem is a severely depleted bank account, or a child whose marriage is falling apart, or a diagnosis last week that you or someone close to you has stage three pancreatic cancer. Anxiety changes none of those things, and it is certain to make it worse for how we deal with them. There is no point in becoming unstrung by what we cannot change if we can’t change it. And if we can change it, we need to figure out how to do that rather than throw ourselves into an even deeper hole by obsessing about it rather than changing it.

Let us be honest. It may seem very hard to love certain people from whom we have become estranged for whatever reason. Who can easily love someone who constantly rubs you the wrong way, or stabbed you in the back, or cheated you or cheated on you or fired you without justification or betrayed you in a professional or business relationship? Is Jesus asking the impossible of us? Is it realistic to suppose that normal human beings can truly love their personal enemies?

The first saying is Matthew 5:39, “Do not resist one who is evil.” Here are the five verses which provide the entire context for our text. "You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. For if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also, and if anyone would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go a mile, go with him two miles. Give to him who begs from you, and do not refuse from him who would borrow from you” (Mt. 5:38-42).

It takes a lot of chutzpah to try to draw three sermons out of a New Testament letter that almost no one has ever heard of and over whose title there is no unanimity of pronunciation and that also has only twenty-five verses. Furthermore, if a preacher were going to try to pull this off, why would he wait fifty-two years before attempting it?

This is the second of a series of three sermons based on Paul’s letter to Philemon. Philemon was a leader of the church in Colossae in what now is Asian Turkey. He owned a slave named Onesimus. Onesimus ran away from his master, fleeing to Rome, where Onesimus located Paul, who was under house arrest. (There is more to this story than just that, but that’s all the time I have to repeat the background for those who were not here last Sunday to hear the first sermon.)

Paul’s letter to Philemon is the third-shortest book in the New Testament. It isn’t a book, really; it’s a letter, an epistle, a mere email, if you will, two thousand years before there were emails. Philemon is so short that there are no chapters. There are only verses, twenty-five of them, to be exact. When I announced that I would be reading “Philemon 1-10,” your heart may have skipped a beat, or three, imagining that you would be subjected to listening to ten full chapters of holy writ. Holy cow! But since there are no chapters, only verses, you just heard 40% of an entire New Testament “book.” And you survived it, no less.

Toward the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is an open question as to whether religion is losing or gaining influence in America. One fact is undeniable: Most mainline Protestant denominations have been slowly but steadily losing members for the past half century. For the past several years, even the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination, has been slightly shrinking each year. Though the nation’s population has doubled since 1950, there are fewer people on the membership rolls of many denominations now than there were back then.

Whatever else the notion of hell may be, it is ultimately based on the concept of everlasting punishment. It is that fatally flawed idea which cannot truly be affirmed by anyone seeking a reasonable and reasoned belief-system. There are no sins or crimes that could possibly justify hellfire forever. Juries convict people of terrible crimes, and judges consign those convicted criminals to judicial sentences of varying lengths, including life in prison without the opportunity of parole. But surely no fair-minded judge, if they had it within their power, would ever consign anyone to everlasting torture in everlasting flames, no matter how terrible the crime may have been. Such a punishment does not fit any crime.

The purpose of this sermon is to suggest that as imperfect as we may be, humanity nonetheless is a marvelous species by countless measures. To ignore our terrible shortcomings is fruitless and willful. But nothing is to be gained by continuously disparaging humanity, either.

In America, Mothers Day is usually a sentimental event, and with good reason. Most of us feel a great deal of emotion and sentiment for our mothers. The mothers in China Witness are very strong women. But, like the best mothers everywhere, they are dedicated to their children, and to paving the way in life for them as best they can against severe obstacles. No one exhibited that more than Mrs. Xie, the Shoe-Mender Mother. She had nothing, but she gave her children everything she could.

The cross does not save us. God saves us. God alone can and does save us. The cross was historically, but absolutely not theologically, inevitable. That is the essential message of this sermon. The ironic circuitous result of the cross is that it demonstrates God’s love for us, although not in an immediately apparent manner.

Roughly half a century ago, I read a definition of the providence of God. I don’t know who wrote it, or exactly when I read it, but the definition has stuck with me ever since. It is what I believe the doctrine of providence means. Providence means that ultimately God can use whatever happens and whatever choices human beings make for His own purposes. God doesn’t cause any of these things to occur, because since the dawn of creation or the Big Bang or however you want to describe it, God causes NOTHING. We certainly are not on our own, but we’re not under God’s thumb, either, not by any definition or description.

When Jesus went off by himself to pray, what was the purpose of his prayer? The Fourth Gospel does not tell us that Jesus prayed at all, only that he went to Gethsemane with the disciples. But Matthew, Mark, and Luke all say Jesus said essentially the same thing, and they all give us almost verbatim the prayer that is our sermon text for today. According to Mark, Jesus began his prayer with the word Abba.

What is the truth here? Is Jesus a king, or isn’t he? All four of the Evangelists want to force us to answer that question for ourselves, to discover its truth for ourselves. But in John, after acknowledging that Pilate said Jesus was a king (which Jesus really didn’t say, at least not technically), Jesus says, “For this reason I was born, and for this reason I came into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice” (18:37-8). Pilate, by now even more positively disposed toward Jesus, but feeling the great weight of the office he holds, with its necessity of maintaining law and order, plaintively asks Jesus, “What is truth?”