Sermons from Trinity Presbyterian Church of Charlotte

Steve Lindsley
(Mark 1: 21-28)

Let me ask you something: if you were launching a new initiative – a business venture, a new years resolution, or, I don’t know, three years of ministry as the son of God – if you were beginning something new, what would you want to be your first act, your inaugural speech, your debut?

It’s interesting, the different ways each gospel does this with Jesus. In Matthew, a gospel that highlights Jesus as instructor, his public ministry understandably begins with the Sermon on the Mount. Luke’s justice-minded Jesus inaugurates his ministry with a clear mission statement of good news to the poor, release to the captives, and freedom for the oppressed. John, the most mystical of the gospel siblings, kicks things off with Jesus at a wedding where vast quantities of wine are created and, one would assume, consumed.

And what about Mark – how does Mark have Jesus starting off? Well, in Mark, Jesus begins his public ministry by wowing the temple authorities and getting into a screaming match with a demon. Talk about leaving an impression!

Our passage today comes fast and furious, as most things in Mark do. As the shortest of the gospels, it is known for cutting to the chase. Our story today begins at the 21st verse of the very first chapter; and in the 20 preceding verses Jesus has been baptized, tempted, and called his disciples. Mark does not waste a second getting to the heart of the matter

And what is that heart, exactly? There is no deep secret what Mark wants to focus on here: it is authority. Or, if you want to get technical about the actual Greek, “new authority.” This “new authority” will be a theme throughout the gospel, with references to Jesus’ teaching authority mentioned some 26 times. In our passage alone he brings it up twice, although they come from very different sources.

The first source were those in the temple that day who heard Jesus preach and teach. They were astounded at his teaching, Mark tells us, for he taught as one having authority, and not as the scribes. It’s interesting the way Mark phrases it; that it’s not what Jesus teaches that exudes authority but how he teaches it. It’s not the content that leaves an impression, it’s something else. More on that later.

It’s also worth noting that Mark throws more than a little shade here in the direction of the scribes. Scribes were trained, educated professionals in the religious order, entrusted with specific responsibilities of the temple. And yet it’s a carpenter from Nazareth who exhibits the greater authority.

Now this may not sound like a big deal to us now – it is Jesus, after all. But it might be worth looking at it from a more contemporary angle to see what our reaction might be. Imagine someone visiting a church that’s been around for a hundred years, very established; and after just a few weeks starts showing up at session meetings and the pastor’s study on a weekly basis, offering unsolicited advice on everything from hymn selection to staffing to restructuring committees. After worship every Sunday he’s telling anyone who will listen that he has all the answers and everything would be better if folks would just listen to him. How do you think that’d go over? That sort of misplaced authority rarely goes over well in the church!

And while it’s not an exact parallel, I imagine it’s along the lines of what those scribes and other temple hands felt about this “new guy.” When Mark tells us Jesus presents himself in a way that supersedes the Scribes, he is making a pretty radical statement about Jesus. And again, we’re only 21 verses in!

And if there was any lingering doubt still about the authority of Jesus, it’s certainly put to rest with the other source Mark mentions – this “man with an unclean spirit” who comes bursting into the temple shouting up a storm. Other translations refer to him as a “demon.” We don’t know what to do with this sort of thing in our Presbyterian piety; demons are seen as the stuff of horror movies and Halloween get-ups. What we do know is this man had been overcome by something outside of himself that was not of God. Which makes the fact that he calls Jesus “Holy One of God” all the more profound.

Holy One of God. We tend to skip over that part and cut straight to the convulsing demon coming out of the man because that is the stuff of horror movies. But let’s not forget that it is an unclean spirit – something not of God – that recognizes Jesus’ new authority. Authority greater than the ones typically seen as speaking for God. Authority great enough to be recognized even by something not of God.

That is the kind of a...

Rebecca Heilman
(Jonah 3: 1-10)

It was a summer day, I was probably around seven or eight years old, and I had had enough of my older siblings bickering and picking on me. They were driving me nuts and apparently my mom too. While they were sent to their rooms as punishment, I hid in my closet listening and infuriated by everyone! Why couldn’t they just leave me alone? So, I grabbed a duffel bag and packed up a few important items – my beanie babies and my blanket. I peeked around the corner of my room. The coast was clear, and I snuck out the back door. I remember opening my arms wide, feeling the warm, humid breeze on my face. I was running away, and no one was going to stop me! I made it as far as our giant magnolia tree around 200 yards from our house. I climbed to the branch shaped enough as a recliner, hung my duffel on the branch and thought, yes, I could make a life for myself here. No siblings, no bickering, no nuh-uh I won’t be bothered here. I closed my eyes, reclined back and the guilt started to sink in. I didn’t last 10 mins before I was dragging my duffel behind me back up our driveway and into my room. Until now, my parents never knew. I’m sure we all have our stories of running away from or towards something. Maybe your story also comes from your childhood, maybe it’s a story from your adulthood, maybe it’s a story you’d rather not talk about. Whatever it is about running away, we’ve all been there in some shape or fashion, notes written or leaving the door hanging wide open behind us. Jonah is a classic example of a beloved child of God, running as far away from God and God’s call as humanly possible.

Now, we might expect more from Jonah if we knew the meaning of his name and his father’s name. Jonah means dove and throughout the Hebrew Bible, a dove is a sign of God’s peace. Jonah’s father’s name is Ami-ttai, which means faithfulness.[1] So, the first line of Jonah reads, “Now the word of the Lord came to dove, son of faithfulness...”[2] With these names and their meanings, we might expect an eager and willing prophet ready to go and do God’s work... that’s exactly what we do not get. Jonah is called as a, one tiny prophet to go to Nineveh, the most powerful, militant, full of wickedness metropolis of the Ancient Near East. And Jonah is supposed to tell them to turn towards God for change or risk destruction. Jonah instead flees and boards a ship in the opposite direction of Nineveh. While he is fleeing, a severe and dangerous storm crashes into his means of transportation. As Jonah sleeps through the raging storm, the captain desperately shakes Jonah awake and says, “Perhaps, your god will spare us a thought so that we do not perish.”[3] At this moment, Jonah still does not speak, Jonah still does not act. So, the crew cast lots and it fell on Jonah. They interrogated him, asking him question after question about what he has done to cause this storm and although, Jonah has been called as a prophet to speak God’s words, it’s not until this point that Jonah, the dove, speaks. He says, “I am a Hebrew. I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land...Pick me up and throw me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you; for I know it is because of me that this great storm has come upon you.”[4] So, they picked Jonah up and threw him into the sea, yet, another opportunity for Jonah to escape God. This is when our children’s Bible storybooks show us that God used a large fish to swallow Jonah from the depths of the sea. And Jonah sits in the belly of the fish for three days bellowing out his prayer to God, “I called out to the Lord in my distress, and YHWH answered me. From the belly of the underworld I cried out for help; you have heard my voice.”[5]

If we are not challenged by Jonah’s story yet, more is still to come. The Lord spoke to the fish and it spewed Jonah out upon dry land. So God spoke to Jonah for the second time, saying, “Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city....”[6]

Covered in sand, dirt, fish guts, and probably embarrassment and guilt, Jonah trucks the three days to Nineveh, preparing with shaking knees to face the wicked Assyrians. One theologian writes about the great city, “Nineveh would have evoked powerful impressions of the Assyrian empire that dominated the ancient Near East as the ruling superpower...Nineveh remained for centuries a powerful symbol of an evil empire.”[7]So, no wonder, no wonder, Jonah, a small prophet, call by God was reluctant to go t...

Steve Lindsley
(1 Samuel 3: 1-20)

I find myself drawn this morning to the very last verse of our passage today:

And all Israel knew that Samuel was a prophet of the Lord.

I think there are a couple of reasons why I’m drawn to this. For one, this isn’t a passage I read all that much, at least the second half of it. I’m betting I’m not alone in this. When we think of the story of young Samuel in the temple, we think of the part Rebecca read, because that is the part that makes for great storytelling and preaching. This back-and-forth between God and young Samuel, who had lived in the temple since he was a baby, left there by a grateful mother who was just glad to give birth to him in the first place; left there to be trained by the head priest Eli to one day be a priest himself.

I’m drawn to the narrative that unfolds in the middle of the night; of a young boy hearing the voice of God and assuming it is Eli doing the speaking. And Eli thinking it’s just a boy’s sleepy imagination running wild, until three times in when it hits him where this voice is really coming from. And so he sends Samuel back to bed with a directive to respond next time by saying, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”

As a preacher and teacher I’ve tended to focus on just that first part of the story because the sermon or lesson plan that comes from it practically writes itself: the need for us to recognize God’s voice when we hear it, and to respond ourselves with “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”

I’ve just never paid much attention to what comes after it. And truth be told, the way the lectionary presents it on this Second Sunday of Ordinary Time, it gives the preacher a bit of a pass. That second half of the passage, verses 11-20, it’s listed in parenthesis, which is a lectionary way of saying, “you don’t need to bother with this if you don’t want to.” So, I haven’t. Until this Sunday.

It’s certainly not the fun part of the story. Samuel does as Eli commands and God speaks to Samuel about things to come for Eli and his family. And it is not good. Eli, as wonderful a man as he was, as highly thought of as he was, is not unlike most of us whose families are far from perfect. Over the years, Eli’s sons had routinely abused their priestly power and privilege for personal gain. They took for themselves what they could simply because they could. Eli had long struggled with how to deal with his scoundrel sons because he loved them. And as we know, when we don’t hold people accountable for their actions, things only tend to get worse.

So the message God commands Samuel to tell Eli the next morning is one of reckoning for his sons. Justice will be served. I can only imagine the embarrassment this must have been for the old priest. It wasn’t like his sons’ behavior was some big secret. But to have your family’s dirty laundry acknowledged by God and voiced to you by your young protege could not have felt very good. And the reckoning – the knowledge that his sons, and family by extension, were facing consequences for their actions. This was not the best news to wake up to after a night of interrupted sleep.

Which brings us back to that final verse again:

And all Israel knew that Samuel was a prophet of the Lord.

I’ve been thinking about that verse in light of the complete story because what I’m curious about is what exactly it was that led “all of Israel” to know that Samuel was a prophet. Make no mistake, Samuel was indeed a great prophet; the first one, actually, and one of the best, as far as speaking God’s word to God’s people. The great prophetic tradition with giants like Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah, you can draw a line through them all the way back to Samuel.

But check out the language here: it’s not saying that they all knew he would be, one day a prophet. It says they knew he already was. In that moment. And that’s what has me wondering, because in that moment Samuel was a kid. Just a kid. How could all of Israel look at this kid and go, “now there’s a prophet right there, lemme tell ya!” I mean, he didn’t even have facial hair yet. Isn’t that like a prophet requirement or something? And he wasn’t yelling or screaming or railing like we think prophets do. What was it that made it so obvious to everyone in Israel that young Samuel was a prophet?

Could it be that he spoke the word of God? I mean, prophets certainly do that. He gave voice to what God has commanded him to speak. Is that what made everyone see him as a prophet? Or could it be that God came to him and spoke his name in the middle of the night and woke him up, three t...

Steve Lindsley
(Genesis 1:1-2:4a – selected verses)

One of my minister colleagues this past week shared that the first line of his sermon today was going to be, “I suspect I might make some of you mad today.” And when someone replied how that was an ominous way to begin a sermon, he assured them there was a second sentence following it that said, “If I do, it’s not my intent, but rather to speak to important things for us as people of faith, because I love you enough to talk with you about them.”

Even after eight years of us being in ministry together, I still feel the need to offer a similar preface this morning. Even though you and I know each other and trust each other, even if we don’t always agree with each other. I’m grateful for that trust. So I can tell you that, while I had a perfectly good sermon in the works for today, sometimes the world does its thing and requires a different word. I wasn’t sure what that word needed to be; so on Thursday Rebecca and I met to talk about it – we actually brought our walking shoes and took a few laps around the campus. And the question that guided our conversation – that guides all of our conversations about what comes from this pulpit – was what do we think our people most need to hear in this moment?

And by the end of that walk, we felt compelled to lift up a different word. Because, as our General Presbyter Jan Edmiston captured in her Friday blog post, “Jesus never said: ‘Let’s pretend this didn’t happen.’” We simply could not pretend this week didn’t happen. We love you too much to do that.

When it comes to our prayers and our preaching, your pastors subscribe to the understanding that it is possible, and in fact necessary, to talk about political things without being political; to dig deep into the complicated nuances of society and culture from a theological, biblical, and spiritual perspective.

And so even though it’s weird doing this virtually, even though it’s strange to say what I’m going to say and have no idea what’s happening on the other side of the screen, I trust you will hear this with the love in which it’s given. And if it makes you uncomfortable or mad, let’s talk about that. Seriously, reach out to me and let’s chat about it on the phone this week. And if you like the sermon, if you’re moved by Rebecca’s prayer, instead of telling us that, tell us what you are going to do because of it. Tell us what actions you’re going to take, what steps you will make, to be a more faithful witness to the love of Jesus Christ in the world.

So, with that, would you pray with me?

Almighty God, uphold me that I may uplift you, AMEN.

*******************

This past December, my wife hit the jackpot with a Christmas gift for our niece. Riley is every bit of 2 years and 10 months old; boundless energy and an inquisitive mind. She is, in this uncle’s unbiased opinion, exceedingly awesome. We ordered online and shipped to her Raleigh address these magnet tiles – flat plastic squares and triangles of all colors and sizes with magnets around the edges so you can stick them together in three-dimensions. And so on our Christmas Day family Zoom, when multiple Lindsleys were checking in and celebrating, Riley could barely be bothered with the distraction of human interaction. Throughout the zoom, she sat at the table, immersed in her construction work, occasionally pausing to show us her masterpiece before going right back to it. Her mother later asked where we got them so they could order some more.

There is something in the human spirit that drives us to create – to take what the world gives us and make use of it in such a way as to bring into being something that was not there before. Magnet tile houses. Music, poetry, art. A four-course meal. Ministries and programs. Even life itself. There is something deep in us that longs to create.

Our scripture today is the very first scripture, the story of creation, of how everything that is came to be. It is beautifully presented; the language reaching for something beyond. It is, obviously, not an eye-witness account. It was written long after the fact looking back and, in one of those grand moments of inspiration, finding just the right words in the same way an artist matches the perfect colors with the best canvas.

It is not by accident that the story of creation appears first – and it has little to do with chronology and everything to do with theology. The first four words of the entire Bible: In. The. Beginning. God. The authors of scripture were making a theological proclamation here. Before water and sky, before sun and stars, before plants and creature...

Steve Lindsley
(Matthew 2: 1-12)

I am fascinated by the idea of the belated birthday card. It’s rare I have to use them anymore, should circumstances require one. Much easier to send a quick text or short video: oops, forgot your big day, hope it was a good one! But in those instances when an actual card is in order, there are some good ones I’ve seen in the racks. One had a tortoise on front who said, “So I’m a little slow...” When you open it up, the inside read: “What? Are you in a hurry to get old?” There’s also one with a cute puppy: “I missed your birthday...” Inside: “Do I still get cake?” And then there’s my favorite. On the outside it reads: “Sorry I forgot your birthday, but I have this problem with short term memory loss....” You open it up and it says: “Sorry I forgot your birthday, but I have this problem with short term memory loss....”

I wonder if the Wise Men in our story today might’ve brought their own belated birthday card with their gifts for baby Jesus. Because despite our tendency to lump them in with our other manger scene participants – the shepherds and angels, the barnyard animals, baby Jesus and parents – despite all that, most scholars agree that the Wise Men’s arrival happened long after the others – weeks at least, and in some traditions even a year. I wonder what their belated birthday card would’ve said? Sorry about the delay, but there was this bright light in the sky, and we couldn’t see a thing! Or, Yeah, we’re late, but we brought gold and frankincense and myrrh – so we’re good, right?

More on those gifts later. This coming Wednesday is Epiphany. We don’t talk a lot about Epiphany in the church, and that may have something to do with it falling on a calendar day – January 6^th – rather than a particular Sunday. It also has the disadvantage of following closely on the heels of Christmas and New Years, getting lost in the seasonal shadow.

Even so, Epiphany is the day we typically recognize the arrival of the Wise Men. So, a few things about that. First, contrary to popular opinion and a hymn we’ll sing in a few minutes, there’s no hard evidence that these visitors from the East were actually “kings.” Nor is there any indication that there were just three of them – that’s something we’ve probably just deduced from there being three gifts.

Something else that doesn’t get a lot of attention is the role that King Herod plays. He, too, wasn’t actually a king, although apparently he liked calling himself that. Herod was the Roman ruler of Judea at the time of Jesus’ birth and was known for being mighty protective of his power. So it’s no surprise, his reaction, when these wise men from the East show up and start asking questions about a “king of the Jews” who’d recently been born. Right under Herod’s nose.

It’s no surprise that Herod receives this news as a grave threat and something to be reckoned with. He’s a crafty guy, so he asks the visitors to return to him after finding this new king so he can worship him too – yeah, right. And when they don’t return, Herod has every boy age two and under put to death. It is an unspeakable horror, and it is certainly the reason Jesus and his parents flee to Egypt.

So we have the three kings who aren’t kings, we have Herod with a major insecurity complex and violent streak. And we have the star that shone in the night sky. A couple of weeks ago the “Christmas star” made all the news, even though it wasn’t really a star. The “great conjunction” of Jupiter and Saturn, something that hasn’t happened for 800 years and won’t happen again until 2080. Right at sunset, it looked like a bright star, and just a few days before Christmas it was hard not to think of the Wise Men looking up at that light in the sky, guiding them to Jesus, leading the way so they could bring their gifts and worship him.

The word “epiphany” means “a moment of sudden revelation or insight.” That revelation, that light, came to these men from the East in the form of a bright star – a sign that something had happened, that something had changed. That revelation was confirmed when they traveled to see the reason for the star – and in doing so became the first non-Jews to see Jesus and recognize him as the son of God. An epiphany.

That is our story on this first Sunday of January, as we begin a new year – a cause for reflection of what has been and what is yet to come. A time making resolutions, if that’s your thing, or at least taking stock. A season for pondering, thinking, praying.

And so it is appropriate for us to ponder and think and pray about what our epiphany might be as we approach January 6th, as we enter a new ye...