Defensive Weapons

Defensive Weapons

Defensive Weapons
a sermon by Rev. J. Christy Ramsey

DOWNLOAD A LIVE RECORDING

Audio from worship at the 11 AM Worship Service September 18, 2022
via Zoom at Valley Presbyterian Church, Bishop,CA

edited from a flawless transcription made by edigitaltranscriptions all errors are mine.

 Luke 21:5-19

 

Sermons also available free on iTunes

Take a look at that cover of the bulletin. And I can see you on Zoom, whether you do it or not. There’s a beautiful temple with some beautiful stones. The key thing is, that does not exist. That was not even in the mind of a human. That was made by a computer. I told a computer to paint me a beautiful temple. And that’s what it did.

So this is an imaginary temple that’s beautiful that’s on the front of our cover, that never existed. What is our beautiful temple? What one would we point out to Jesus, or Jesus would see us honoring and say, look at the beautiful things, by the special gifts dedicated to God. What is your beautiful temple? We have the computers one. What would yours be? Would it be your home? Could it be your home? Do you have a wonderful home, perhaps passed down through the family? Would it be family and grandchildren? Would it be your marriage? Would it be those that you love, some that are here and some that have gone on? What would be your beautiful temple, your place of honor and respect and safety and admiration? Would it be your country? It could be your country. For some it’s the alma mater, at least the football team of the college they went to.

Or maybe it’s a church. Could it be a church? Some people live for the church. Does it help you to realize that when Luke is writing this, finishing up writing it, and when the people are reading it for the very first time, fresh off the parchment, does it help you to realize that at that time the temple was already destroyed? When people first read Luke, the temple was already destroyed. Stones were already disaster, and it’s already a ruin. So for them, for the first readers, and actually for Luke as he writes it, this is not – they would not experience this as a prediction of things to come, but rather as an explanation of things that just happened of the recent past.

What beautiful things have you lost? What do we idealize in the past that we wish were there, that we thought was there, that we thought was eternal and withstand the test of time, and we could put our hopes and our faith and our safety in, but is now gone? Like it would be for the people first hearing this scripture? If we can figure out what that is, we can figure out how the original hearers, the first readers, the intended audience would take this. That’s one part of it.

The next part of it talks about all the attacks on Christians. Or it doesn’t talk about attacks on Christians. It talks about how terrible things would come, and folks that have just experienced the destruction of the temple would certainly recognize this and certainly identify with it. But I want you to think about the phrasing that’s used. And maybe it’s not true to the test. But it certainly spoke to me very profoundly because it talks about attacks on people because of Christ’s name.

Now, what if it wasn’t the attacks on people bearing Christ’s name, and they got attacked because of it? What if we read it another way? What if we thought that people were using Christ’s name to attack others? What if because of Christ’s name, there was attacks taking place? That is easily read in the way, if you look through the scriptures, it says there’s attacks because of Christ’s name.

Well, who’s attacking whom? Is it the Christ name people attacking those without Christ’s name? Or is it others attacking those that had Christ’s name? We always assume the latter, that we’re the persecuted and the martyrs, the ones under attack. And people love to flock to this when a store says “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas,” and their beautiful temple is threatened with destruction. But what if it wasn’t that? What if the attacks were because of Christ’s name? Here’s a little clip. If technology likes us, we will be showing a little clip from the 2003 film called “Saved.” I hope it works well. Let’s see what we can do here.

The gospel is not a weapon. Or this is not a weapon. I wish they would have said the Bible’s not a weapon, or the gospel. That’s from “Saved” in 2003. It seems kind of prophetic to me for today. I mean, who is suffering from the Christians? Who’s being attacked by the Christians? I think I can find more examples of that than I can find examples of the horrible awful trauma imposed upon us by seeing “Happy Holidays” at some places.

Is it the immigrants? Do immigrants because of the CHINOs – I call them CHINOs, you know, Christians In Name Only. The immigrants got bussed up to Martha’s Vineyard, political pawns, with lies, and were registered in homeless shelters throughout the nation. And they had appointments in Texas and Washington D.C. and Georgia for Monday morning and were shipped up to Martha’s Vineyard for Saturday. By Christians. You know, immigrants, like Jesus. Is it white people or brown people? Brown people like Jesus. Is it people that have nice homes or the homeless that are swept off the streets like, you know, homeless, like Jesus, didn’t have a place to be born? Is it Christians that get attacked, or non-Americans? You know, like Jesus. Pretty scary. But scary for different ways.

I mean, I’m a martyr. That’s my spiritual gift. You know martyrdom is a spiritual gift? I think it’s a one-time use thing. I don’t know. But I, you know, I’ll suffer. And I kind of know about that and kind of being a pastor and a church leader and, you know, I kind of understand a little bit about suffering for your faith and heard about stories and inspirations and all that, and I understand that. But suffering because of your faith and then having other people use the faith so other people suffer. I don’t want to face that. I don’t like that. That’s worse to me than the other option, that folks are being attacked because of Christians.

I’m going to try to share the screen now. Put your – how’s that? Do you see a quote up there? Yeah.

This is Jamie Raskin. He’s Jewish and identifies as a Humanist, as well. This is from 2006. “Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.” That should give us pause as Christians.

You know, Jamie’s a Jew, and according to Jews or according to their tradition, they’re religious in the following of their faith. They are required, they are required by their religion to prioritize the life of the mother over the life of the fetus, of the unborn child, of the developing embryo, whatever names you choose. They are required that when the choice comes down to it, that they must prioritize the health and life of the mother. That’s against the law. They can go to jail now for practicing their religion. From Christians.

I mean, for 50 years it was fine. I mean, we had a – I read Roe v. Wade back when it was passed in the ‘80s, studied it, came to terms with it as a way the nation can go forward, accommodating all religions and not just imposing one understanding, a very narrow understanding, a biblical understanding of life on everybody else because freedom of religion is not the freedom of other people to practice my religion. That’s not freedom of religion.

When folks got so upset about this issue or that, and the Christians came after me and talked to me about, oh, my gosh, it’s against God’s will, that gay marriage, for example. And I’d tell them, you know, it’s okay if you do not participate in gay marriage. You can still keep your own marriage. You know you’re allowed to do that. But somehow freedom of religion has changed to freedom for other people to practice my religion. And that’s not good. And people are attacked because of Jesus’s name. But it’s not the Jesus’s name people. It’s the people with Jesus’s name that are attacking.

Did you know that insurance companies now are allowed, according to a recent court case, not to cover preventative medicine for HIV because the company does not approve of homosexuality? And said, well, that helps the homosexuals not die from doing things I don’t believe in, so I don’t want to pay for the not dying medicine. I want to let them die because they don’t believe the way I do. That is very troubling to me as a minister, and I’m going to trouble you with it because I’m troubled. I see that as an attack in Jesus’s name, on folks that are vulnerable. And I don’t like it, and I’m going to preach against it.

But I don’t want to leave you with that. I try not to be all terrible awful, even though I’m three hours away, if you got in the bar, really mad, got in the car, start down, it’d be three hours before you got here. But there are other good things in this scripture that you might have missed, as well. But let me point them out. There’s hope in this scripture, and endurance in this scripture, and even advice in this scripture. It’s so good that the disturbing parts kind of uncover it.

One of the advices there that is really good to me – remember I say my spiritual gift is martyrdom, and I always go looking for opportunities to practice my spiritual gift, which means I’m always on the defensive, always looking for someone attacking me, so I can be a martyr, so I can be defensive. And I’m not going to get into it. I pay someone to listen to me twice a month so you don’t have to listen. But what it talks about there is it talks about defense. Do not prepare a defense in advance.

Oh, my gosh, is that a hard one for me. I’m always preparing a defense in advance. I’m ready for all your objections to the sermon. Sometime last week I was ready in my head because I prepare a defense in advance. And God said don’t do that. Don’t prepare a defense in advance. Wow. Instead, it says I will give you words and wisdom. And it’s important those are both because wisdom, we think of wisdom as pithy sayings. We think of wisdom as little bon mots, little tiny little things to say that, oh, my gosh, I need to put that up on a poster and put it as my desktop background or something.

But that’s not wisdom in the Bible. Wisdom in the Bible is so much more than words. Wisdom is a way of being in the world. Wisdom is a way of being open to others, to God, and of course to the possibility that I might actually be wrong. Wisdom is listening to others. Wisdom is taking advice. Wisdom is listening to God, to the situation, and finding a way through it all, that mess. Wisdom is openness. Defense, on the other hand, if you’re being defensive, you’re going to shut down, shut out, build the gates around, build up the walls, reinforce your own beliefs, take away all the other advice, put down anybody else because you’re defending. And God said don’t do that.

Consider that defense is the opposite of wisdom. If you’re preparing your defense, you’re going away from wisdom. If you don’t allow other people in, if you do not see other folks living their lives, if you do not allow other people their pronouns, even though you don’t understand it, what’s the big deal? If you go in defensive about that, go, well, I’m not doing that, you’re going away from wisdom. Wisdom is openness. Wisdom is learning. Wisdom is listening to God. And wisdom is paying attention to others. Wisdom is paying attention to what God is doing in the world. Wisdom is listening to other people’s stories and their faith and their understanding. That’s wisdom, wisdom, wisdom. It’s a way of being in the world. And it’s not being defensive. If you know it all, you’re not going to learn anything.

I think the difference could be in the phrase of “that’s different.” Have you ever been told when you were talking to someone or arguing with someone, let’s be honest, and you said, well, what about this, you know, the what-abouters? And you say, “Well, that’s different.” Well, now, the thing between defense and wisdom is how that is used in the conversation. Is it that’s different, period, end of sentence, go away, you bother me, gates are shut, the walls are up, I’m defensive, you’re not going to get in here because, you know what, that’s different. So that stops everything. Okay, that’s defense.

But you know it could also be the beginning of wisdom. That same phrase with different ways of saying it could be the beginning of wisdom because you can say it with curiosity instead of condemnation. You can say it as, not as a curse, but as an invitation. You could say, well, that’s different. I never thought of that before. Let’s talk about that. I didn’t consider that point of view. There, there’s wisdom. So when someone says to you, “Well, that’s different,” you can say, “Thanks for noticing,” and continue the conversation about the differences we have in our faith, our life, our experience and where we go and how we live together. “That’s different.” “Well, thanks for noticing.” Let’s talk about that. Because as we talk and we learn, that is the beginning of wisdom.

And Jesus, in the scripture it says here that – and Jesus prompts us, is that how you will endure? And if we’re thinking the way I’m thinking, that you endure the attacks of Christians, or as I call them, CHINOs, which are not a comfy, cotton-based pant, but rather Christians In Name Only, what are you going to do? You can be defensive, and I want to be defensive. I mean, I’ve got a scripture and a commentary for every scripture they got, buddy boy. They come at me with some abortion scripture, I’m going to show them Numbers 5 because right there looks like a prescription for abortion according to God, right there in Numbers 5. Oh, you never read Numbers 5? I read the whole Bible. Go ahead. Try me. I can do that all day long.

But that’s not wise. What’s wise is to be open to other things and to live our lives according to respect, admiration, and to get along with other people, to realize that our freedom of religion does not mean everybody else has to follow our religion. That’s not what this America is for, not what the country’s for, not what Jesus desires for us. Jesus does not desire us to attack others in the name of Jesus. In the name of Jesus I’m passing this law, so you all have to be Christian. No, no. I reject that. I hope you do, too. Because the more that we are defensive about our faith, the more we’re going to retreat from wisdom.

Wisdom is what’s going on? What is God doing in the world? Where is God working in my life and in the lives of others? What could be the best for all the people, not just my people? That’s very difficult to do, especially for me when my spiritual gift is martyrdom, and I want to stop everybody from attacking me, and anyone who doesn’t live like me must be attacking me. But no. Jesus says no.

So I hope you consider flipping this scripture around and not look so much at checking off, oh, my gosh, here comes another attack against Christians, checkmark, checkmark. Because you can do that. You can be defensive. Don’t do that. You’re going to reduce your wisdom. Instead, flip it around and watch how we, Christians, in Christ’s name, attack others. How we turn families against one another in Jesus’s name. And how we prepare defenses when we should be preparing to listen and to be open to the wisdom of others.

Friends, you will endure. There is good news in this scripture today. It’s not just all about calamities and disasters. And remember that even then, if you remember that the temple was already destroyed when they were reading this, it wasn’t so much about let’s know the future and have a peek at what God’s doing in the future, and we can tell, and we have extra special knowledge that no one else does; but rather it was let’s try to understand where we are here and now and what we’re suffering here and now, and what our challenges are here and now, that we could be open to what God is doing in the world here and now with one another. Not gather our battlements around our beautiful temple and wonderful gifts and stones, but realizing that God is not there, and that it’s already gone, but what is left is not to be defensive, to be wise and listen to others and see God’s work in the world and know that we will endure if we follow God instead of our own defenses.

Thanks.

Amen.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Defensive Weapons

Believe

Believe

Believe
a sermon by Rev. J. Christy Ramsey

DOWNLOAD A LIVE RECORDING

Audio from worship at the 11 AM Worship Service August 14, 2022
at Valley Presbyterian Church, Bishop,CA

edited from a flawless transcription made by edigitaltranscriptions all errors are mine.

 Luke 16:19-31 

 

Sermons also available free on iTunes

I want to talk to you about truth. And why we can’t believe it. Why we have so much trouble with it. Now, again, I must warn you in these times that if you think truth and lie is political, you get another political sermon today. Hopefully it’s not as long. But if you think that truth is a good thing for Christians to consider when we follow the guy, the savior, the son of God that calls himself, what?, the way, the truth, and the life, well, then this is a faithful sermon. I mean, after all, truth is Jesus’s middle name. We should be able to talk about that as Christians.

What is going on in this scripture? Is this the weirdest scripture ever? Is it true? Ooh. That’s a tough one. If you’re saying, Christy, is it true, is this a transcript of a conversation between heaven and hell and between Abraham and the rich man who has no name, and Lazarus, who doesn’t say a word in the whole darn story, is that true? Is it a transcript? Did Fox News have a reporter there transcribing everything? Was it on a podcast? Was it captured by a secret recording device? Is there video? If there’s video, didn’t happen. If you say all that about being true, well, I don’t know. If you’re saying, Christy, is this a roadmap to heaven and hell? Is this a way to figure out how we could go with heaven and hell? Can we measure the actual chasm? How deep is it? How wide? Can we sing about it deep and wide or what? Is it true that way? I’m not so sure.

And maybe even step back further, and you say, Christy, Christy, is this all about heaven is a place where those who have a lot get tormented, the rich get tormented, and those that have suffered get comfortable, so it’s okey-doke, the great wealth inequality and divide today, because after all it’ll get all sorted out in the afterlife? Is that what this scripture’s about? Now, most preachers will tell you that the whole thing is on the last one, that even if someone would rise from the dead, they would not believe them. Jesus is kind of predicting what would happen when he comes back from the dead and people don’t believe him. But I don’t know if Jesus was really thinking about that when he told the story.

What is true in this story? Strangely, I think what is true is the last line, that people don’t believe based on evidence, based on what they see and what they know. They do it the other way around. We don’t take a whole bunch of little evidence and then come up with the truth. We don’t do that as a people, as a species, as human beings. We don’t do that. We’re not like a whole bunch of scientific instruments and measurements and rulers and spectrographs and that we figure out what is true. We’re not like the James Webb Telescope where we look out, we take those photons and assemble them into galaxy and the truth of the universe. We don’t do that.

There is a book called Noise that just came out, and it’s by a really big thinker named Daniel Kahneman. Here’s what he said on Science Friday in July.

We have the wrong idea about where beliefs come from, our own or those of others. We think we believe in whatever we believe because we have evidence for it. Because we have reasons for believing.

Reasons. When you ask people, why do you believe that, they are not going to stay silent. They’re going to speak. They’re going to give you reasons that they are convinced explain their beliefs.

But actually the correct way to think about this is to reverse it. People believe in reasons because they believe in the conclusion. The conclusion comes first for us humans. And the belief in the conclusion in many cases is largely determined by social factors. You believe that people you love and trust believe, and you find reasons to believe it. And they tell you your reasons for believing that, and you accept the reasons. For this larger social phenomenon it is not an error of reasoning because reasoning isn’t involved until after you’ve made your decision and conclusion.

And that, by the way, is true to your beliefs and my beliefs. Your beliefs and my beliefs reflect what we’ve been socialized. It reflects the company we keep. It reflects our belief in certain ways of reaching conclusion, like a belief in the scientific method. Other people just have different beliefs because they’ve been socialized differently. And because they have different beliefs, they accept different kinds of evidence. And the evidence that we think is overwhelming just doesn’t convince them of anything. And it’s only gotten worse. With social media and streaming services, you know, when I grew up there were three networks. Four if you counted UHF, but who watches news on that? There were three networks and the paper, the newspaper. That was it. That’s all you got.

But now you can fine-tune your reality down to the very last demographic got point. If you want to see only Trump news all the time, just switch on this channel. Or you get this Facebook feed. And Facebook tracks how long you watch things, and they’ll show you more like that. YouTube’s even worse, that the more you watch stuff, the more of that kind of stuff you get. So suddenly you’re in a very tight little bubble of social news and information that you are not exposed to anything else. And of course when you’re clicking on it, you’re clicking on stuff that interests you that already support your conclusions and what you think. And we’re just never going to get to the truth.

So in Twitter, I don’t know if anybody has Twitter. But on TweetDeck, if you click on an article that said, an article, whatever you wanted to call it. It’s terrible awful. You click on it and say I want to retweet this. I want to pass it on. Twitter will stop you now and say, uh, do you want to read that first, before you send it out to everybody? How do I know that? Oops. We come to a conclusion, and then we find reasons.

So you say to yourself, you see, so how can people believe the Big Lie? It’s obvious to me that the election was fair. I mean, they’ve had 60 court cases, and we’ll go after our reasons one after another. But it doesn’t matter because we went from conclusions to reasons, not reasons to conclusions. And the other people do the same way. Of course it was stolen because there was boat parades and Trump is the greatest ever and he told us that it was stolen. They have all these reasons, too. But it doesn’t really matter because they started, just like us, with the conclusions, and then went for the reasons afterwards.

What can you do if our whole life, our whole belief system, the way we live, the way we look at the world, the way we vote, the way we talk to another, is conclusion first, reasoning to support it after? What is there to do?

There’s a great movie, the video’s coming out. There’s a great movie called “Secondhand Lions” from 2003. I highly recommend it. It got a little punchy in places, but not so bad compared to today. And one of those things is there’s a mystery of the two men and where the heck they come from. They were gone for 40 years. They supposedly have a lot of money, like buried treasure money. And where they’ve been 40 years, supposedly they were in Africa and had these wild adventures. And they were telling them to their great-nephew Walter. And Walter confronts Hub about those stories in our clip today.

WALTER: Those stories about Africa, about you. They’re true, aren’t they.

HUB: Doesn’t matter.

WALTER: It does, too. Around my mom, all I hear is lies. I don’t know what to believe.

HUB: If you want to believe in something, then believe in it. Just because something isn’t true, that’s no reason you can’t believe in it. There’s a long speech I can give, and it sounds like you need to hear a piece of it. Sometimes things that may or may not be true are the things that man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good. They find courage and virtue in everything. The power and money, money and power mean nothing. The good always triumphs over evil. I want you to remember this. Love, true love never dies. Remember that, boy. Remember that. Doesn’t matter if it is true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things because those are the things worth believing in. Got that?

WALTER: That was a good speech.

HUB: Think so? Thanks.

Doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. You can still believe in it. Do we agree on that? If we choose what we believe, and then find reasons to come to that? Why do we believe? We can say, well, we’ve been socialized to believe the Bible and the scriptures and the Savior and the stories and Sunday school and all that stuff. But you know, that’s what our friend the author says. But you know he doesn’t go far enough because it’s not just what we believe and what we experience and what we figured out, what we socialized. I don’t think so. I don’t think it gives enough thought to it, too.

Because, you know, what we believe is partly what we talk about is what the received canon is, what the received faith is that goes, not just what we know, certainly hopefully not just the faith is based only on what we’ve experienced, but it’s through the history of the church and thousands of years, and experiences that go all the way back to those that actually knew Jesus and those that were with him and around him and around the witnesses that wrote the gospels. And it comes back through us through thousands of years. So it’s not just what we experience, but what the church has experienced, the people have experienced. You know, it’s like having blue checkmarks on Twitter, you know, these are verified sources that we believe in.

But I think he’s right in that we don’t believe things because we actually found Noah’s Ark and its preserved wood, and we did carbon dating, and we found all sorts of animal food, and all sorts of different debris from animals, and so we know that was Noah’s Ark, and so we know it – no, we don’t do that. That part’s true. We believe what we believe because of what we see in the lives of other people, not just social things, but how we see other people live out their lives.

There was a woman named Terry. Terry came to the church I served. Terry did not believe in God. She was right out front saying she did not believe in God. But oh my gosh, she was there every Sunday. So she was there every Sunday with her partner, who was a big God believer. And she came, and she listened. For years she listened to me yell at her. I mean preach, like I do. And she finally came in to be baptized – she was in her fifties – and accepted Jesus Christ, not because it was proven to her, but because she saw the difference in the life of her partner and the friends and the church. And she saw what it meant to others, people, what it prompted other – her partner was a great deacon, leader of the deacons, just always helping people everywhere, all the time.

And she was baptized, became a member, elected to Session, served on Session. And then when I left that church she was my reference. And it wasn’t because I proved Christianity to her by the four spiritual laws or anything else that led from reasoning to conclusion. It was because she had the conclusion, you know, this Christian thing seems to be working out pretty good for these people. They’re pretty good people that are around here. And she went that way.

You know Jesus doesn’t really give an entire theological course. The systematic theology of Jesus is not a thing in the Bible. He doesn’t say one after another, how does the trinity work. He doesn’t say how does salvation work. He doesn’t even say what effectual calling is, and we get tested on that in seminary, and there’s nothing from Jesus on it. He doesn’t say anything. What does he do? He tells stories about people and their lives and how they live and how they treated other people. And he says this is the way that people treat one another. This is the way the kingdom is. This is the way people work out.

He healed people. He healed the sick. He didn’t say “Give me your testimony, and also you’re going to have to be baptized. You’re going to have to do” – no, he healed the sick, whoever was brought to him. He healed the Roman servant, the Roman, the occupier, the military, the colonizer, the one that beat down and will eventually kill him. He healed the servants. Are we going to say “friend”? That’s another sermon. There’s no faith there. But he was showing them how we live in the kingdom.

So you’ve got some friends, one way or the other. I don’t know which way they are. We are not going to take a survey. I will be checking your cars for bumper stickers later and taking notes. But you’re not going to change one way or the other by arguing them with proof and conclusions. I mean, just look at the things going on. They go down to Mar-a-Lago and do an FBI raid. And there’s all, “Oh, a raid, it’s terrible, it’s awful, what the heck are you doing there? There’s nothing there.” And they go, “Well, okay, there were boxes of classified secrets.” Oh, yeah. “Oh, it was obviously planted. It’s not really that important.”

Evidence doesn’t matter because we’ve already come to a conclusion, and we’re just looking for reasons to support it. So what Hub tells us, and what Jesus tells us, and what I’m telling you, is that choose straight up what you’re going to believe. And then go around the world making that happen, making reasons for other people to believe that what you write is true.

If you believe all people are basically good, what are you going to be looking for? You’ve going to be looking at evidence that all people are basically good. That’s a pretty good way to spend your life. If you believe that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything, that is what you’re going to work on. You’re going to work on being honorable, being courageous, being virtuous. And you’re going to be looking for that in other people, and pointing that out, and lifting that up, and celebrating that.

If you believe that money and power, power and money mean nothing, you go live your life that way. And you go look for reasons why money and power, power and money mean nothing. If you believe good always triumphs over evil. I always like the saying

“In the end, everything will be okay. If it’s not okay, it’s not yet the end.

~Fernando Sabino, translated from Portuguese, popularized by John Lenon.

You’ve got to be looking to do that, looking for reasons to believe that, to celebrate that, to promote that, to pass it along. The same thing with true love. True love never dies.

And there are problems in the scripture. We could go on and on. I know you like long sermons, but what’s going on in that scripture. But, you know, even if you hear the sermon about oh, my gosh, he’s ordering Lazarus around even though Lazarus is dead and kind of not his servant anymore because, you know, dead. You know, and he doesn’t even treat him, he won’t even go himself, he doesn’t even ask himself, oh, Abraham, forgive me for being such a big jerk. That would be a whole different sermon there, if he did that. But it’s a story, and Jesus was telling us that people don’t come to faith by people telling them and arguing with them about how they’re wrong and how they should live different. It comes from us living different, from us choosing what we believe and living that way, of getting our conclusion and then making the reasons in world and in their lives to support that conclusion.

Wouldn’t that be wonderful, if we were the proof that faith and courage and virtue were the most important, that power and money mean nothing, and that true love is forever, never ends. Wouldn’t that be great if that was our conclusion, and we spent our life coming up with reasons why that’s true? Much better than arguing with other people about how that should be because, even if someone comes back from the dead, they’re not going to believe it. But they will not believe it. But we can live it, and we can pass it on by our lives.

Amen.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Believe

Barns

Barns

Barns
a sermon by Rev. J. Christy Ramsey

DOWNLOAD A LIVE RECORDING

Audio from worship at the 11 AM Worship Service July 10, 2022
at Valley Presbyterian Church, Bishop,CA

edited from a flawless transcription made by edigitaltranscriptions all errors are mine.

 Luke 12:13-21 

 

Sermons also available free on iTunes

If greed is your politics, this is a political sermon. I hope it’s not a political sermon, and that greed is not your politics. Because you may think from the beginning that the sermon is about or the scripture’s about Jesus said I’m not going to be a divider or an arbitrator. I’m not going to be your financial counselor or your family intervention specialist. I’m not, just like with Martha and Mary the last time I preached about telling the other sibling to do what I want, well, I’m not going to tell you and your brother how to get along with money. But later on Jesus says to everybody, he really knew what that was about. It wasn’t about fairness or judicial process or financial planning or any of that stuff. It was about greed. And he tells the story about a man with the land that produces very well, and what does he do about it.

Now, some people will hide their greed, not so much in dividing their inheritance among their brothers, but they will say this. Have you ever heard this? Have you said it? Don’t raise your hand if you did because it’s a bad thing. If you said “The church needs to run like a business.” You ever hear that? “We have to run the church like a business.” Or “We have to run the country like a business.” That is usually a cover-up for greed. Because what is the business, then, if you say the church, or the country, or the nonprofit, or the family has to run like a business? Who’s the customer? What’s the product? Who do you serve? Well, yeah, if you’re running a government like a business, well, then you have the product of governmental services and graft and corruption and all that. And you give it to the highest bidder, the one who will pay you the most, and the rest of you forget about it. You know, hey, if you want some government services, how about giving some money? You know, this is a business. I’m not in it for my health.

The same thing with the church. Running a church like a business, that usually means I’ve given a lot of money to this church, and I’m not getting a lot back. You’ve got to run like a business, you know, take care of your paying customers. That’s not with the church is about. The church is one of the only institutions that exist primarily for those outside the institution. And that’s not very business-y.

12 Step has this tradition, as well. 12 Step’s tradition, you probably wonder in a 12 Step group, any of the recovery groups, you may say to yourself, hey, what’s a recovery group for? Well, it’s for those folks that go, those poor folks that go to the recovery group to recover. That’s their purpose, their meaning, and their mission. I mean, they’re the paying customers; right? No. It says right in every recovery group the tradition is that their number one purpose is for those that are still suffering. That’s not very business-y. It’s for the other people, not the customers.

It’s not so much the problem with money or with riches. You say, oh, well, he’s just all against the riches. He’s all about terrible awful things. But no, it’s not about that. It’s about who does that serve? Who is it for? The little zing right at the end, you know, man, those things you have prepared, who will they be for? You know, that is a good question to ask before you die. All these things that I have prepared, who are they for? Who is my life for? Who are my riches for? What am I here for?

Warren Buffett, who we talk about, has a philosophy. He’s one of the world’s, I don’t know what number he is, he’s like eighth or something. He’s getting up to $100 billion. He says his money is not his. And he tells other billionaires and millionaires, the money is not theirs, it’s just entrusted to us while we’re here. He knows, and he thinks about the next generations, about what’s going on with the money.

And running things like a business doesn’t work for the government. The government does things that no one wants to do, that no one can find a profit in, that no one can find enough people to do it. And there’s all sorts of things that only the government could do. The interstate highway system is an absolute loser in terms of building projects and things. To have an interstate highway system that goes from coast to coast, up and down, north and south, maintained, is a government job no nonprofit business would ever take on because there’s no money in it. You can’t have enough tolls to keep backing the money. They keep trying to do that, and they keep failing. But, you know, once we got the interstate highway system, boy, trucking really took off. Shipping really turned out. Amazon would not be possible without the interstate highway system. And the government does that.

Ever heard of the Internet? Nobody wanted to do the Internet. It was ridiculous. Nobody wanted to do that. There was no money in there. I remember in 1990 they were saying, what’s the good of the Internet? Who’s going to look at this stuff? But the government saw something in it and put it in there. AT&T wouldn’t do it. There wasn’t any money in it. They had plenty of money in the telephone and in their leased lines. They’ve got plenty of money. And they had no interest in getting the Internet to everybody. Who wants that? There’s no money there.

The government did it, called Arpanet, and set it up and made the protocols and promoted it and did that. When I started using the Internet, imagine if you will how old I am. When I started using the Internet, you were not allowed to talk about money. You were not allowed to talk about products. You were not allowed to talk about prices or anything. It was like community radio. You couldn’t make money on the Internet because it belonged to the government.

ATTENDEE: So un-American.

REV. RAMSEY: I know. But then the government says, okay, we got it going. You see how great it is? We got it done. Go for it. And gave it over to private industry. But the private industry, the government as a business would not have done that because it was a big money loser to make it. Ever heard of Hoover Dam? Nobody wanted to do that project. Way too much money. The government did it and electrified the nation along with other projects. Rural electrification, no one wants to run electric line to little towns and little farms and everywhere. The government, in rural electrification and co-ops, they made electricity go out through the entire country.

The same thing we’re trying to do with telecommunications today, to go out through the entire country. There’s no money in it. There’s no profit in it. Who’s the customer? They can’t pay. If all the government had to do – Obama said this and got into so much trouble because he didn’t know what he was doing. Obama says, if I just had to make widgets or an app, that would be easy because I would just have to worry about satisfying my customer about whether they would buy the app or not. But when I make a widget or an app, I’m in the government, I have to worry about everybody. I have to worry about the poor people who can’t afford the widget and the app. What are they going to do? I have to worry about unintended consequences about the environment, about our society, about economics, about the next generations. I have to worry about a lot more than selling the widget at the store.

And I just can’t go bankrupt and walk away. It’s a lot harder to be good government than it is to be business because it’s not all about greed. It’s about asking the question, who is this for? Is it for the paying customers? The one that has the money? Or is it for everyone, for the next generation, for the greater good, for the culture, for all that. Look at what he said in that scripture. Back to scripture. I knew you never thought I’d get there. But look at all the scriptures he said, “What am I going to do?” How many times does he say “I” and “my”? What am I going to do? What am I going to do with all this? What am I going to do? Say to myself – he even talks to himself. He talks.

The only other person he talks to is himself. He says to Saul – now, I don’t know about economics and farming business back in Jesus’ time. But I’m thinking there’s a couple people working that land. I’m thinking maybe one or two. I’m thinking there were some people selling the stuff. I’m thinking there were some people keeping track of the ledgers and all that. I’m thinking there were some people driving the wagons to market. I’m thinking there’s a lot of people. How about those people? How about the people that built the barns, or tore them down and built bigger ones? What about them? What did they do? He didn’t say anything about them. You know, you fool. The things you have prepared, who would they come from us?

Now, if your politics are about greed, you’re going to say this is a politician story. But I want to tell you that the idea of what do we do with our wealth is very biblical. About person-wise and with society. What do we do with our wealth? Do we build bigger and bigger barns so that less and less people can have more and more? There’s all sorts of statistics. But the one I like is pretty close. It would be nice if it was exact. But it’s really close to 50% of the world’s wealth, 50% of the world’s wealth. You got a barn. 50% of the barn go to 1% of the people. All right? 50% of the world’s wealth goes to 1% of the people. Well, they earned it. Or I don’t know, whatever you want to say. But I don’t know. Is that the way we want it? Is that the way we want to do that?

Wonder how the other side, there’s another 51%. Did you know that? 1% of the world’s wealth. 1% of the world’s wealth. Remember that 1% of the people had 50% of the wealth. If you look at the other end, the 1% of the wealth pretty much goes to 50% of the world. So 50% of the world’s population is dividing up 1% of the wealth. while 1% of the people is putting in a big barn of 50%. Is that the way we want it? Is that the way Jesus wants it? Is that showing that we’re not into greed, that we’re thinking about that?

There’s a wonderful quote. And remember why did that guy build bigger barns? It was for security. Wasn’t it? He says, “What am I to do?” And he says at the end, goes “Whoa, I’m set now. I can eat, drink, and be merry. I’ve got all I want. That’s my security.” And what he feared was the loss of security.

But let’s take a look at the video. 

 Stored Locally: extrachristy.com/storage/video/Wealth_Inequality_in_America.mp4

There’s a chart I saw recently that I can’t get out of my head. A Harvard business professor and economist asked more than 5,000 Americans how they thought wealth was distributed within the United States. This is what they said they thought it was. Dividing the country into five rough groups at the top, bottom, and middle three 20% groups, they asked people how they thought the wealth in this country was divided.

Then he asked them what they thought was the ideal distribution. And 92%, that’s at least nine out of 10 of them, said it should be more like this. In other words, more equitable than they think it is. Now, that fact is telling, admittedly, the notion that most Americans know that the system is already skewed unfairly. But what’s most interesting to me is the reality compared to our perception. The ideal is as far removed from our perception of reality as the actual distribution is from what we think exists in this country. So ignore the ideal for a moment. Here’s what we think it is again.

And here is the actual distribution. Shockingly skewed. Not only do the bottom 20% and the next 20%, the bottom 40% of Americans barely have any of the wealth. I mean, it’s hard to even see them on the chart. But the top 1% has more of the country’s wealth than nine out of 10 Americans believe the entire top 20% should have. Mind-blowing.

But let’s look at it another way because I found this chart kind of difficult to wrap my head around. Instead, let’s reduce the 311 million Americans to just a representative 100 people. Make it simple. Here they are. Teachers, coaches, firefighters, construction workers, engineers, doctors, lawyers, some investment bankers, a CEO, maybe a celebrity. Now let’s line them up according to their wealth, poorest people on the left, wealthiest on the right, just a steady row of folks, based on their net worth. We’ll color code them like we did before, based on which 20% quintile they fall into. Now, let’s reduce the total wealth of the United States, which was roughly $54 trillion in 2009, to this symbolic pile of cash. And let’s distribute it among our 100 Americans. Well, here’s socialism, all the wealth of the country distributed equally.

We all know that won’t work. We need to encourage people to work, and work hard to achieve that good old American dream, keep our country moving forward. So here’s that ideal we asked everyone about. Something like this curve. This isn’t too bad. We’ve got some incentive, as the wealthiest folks are now about 10 to 20 times better off than the poorest Americans. But hey, even the poor folks aren’t actually poor since the poverty line stayed almost entirely off the chart. We have a super healthy middle-class with a smooth transition into wealth. And yes, Republicans and Democrats alike chose this curve. Nine out of 10 people, 90%, said this was a nice ideal distribution of America’s wealth.

But let’s move on. This is what people think America’s wealth distribution actually looks like. Not as equitable, clearly. But for me, even this still looks pretty great. Yes, the poorest 20 to 30% are starting to suffer quite a lot compared to the ideal. And the middle-class is certainly struggling more than they were, while the rich and wealthy are making roughly 100 times that of the poorest Americans and about 10 times that of the still-healthy middle-class.

Sadly, this isn’t even close to the reality. Here is the actual distribution of wealth in America. The poorest Americans don’t even register. They’re down to pocket change. And the middle-class is barely distinguishable from the poor. In fact, even the rich, between the top 10 and 20 percentile are worse off. Only the top 10% are better off. And how much better off? So much better off that the top 2 to 5% are actually off the chart at this scale. And the top 1%, this guy, well, his stack of money stretches 10 times higher than we can show. Here’s his stack of cash restacked, all by itself. This is the top 1% we’ve been hearing so much about. So much green in his pockets that I have to give him a whole new column of his own because he won’t fit on my chart.

1% of America has 40% of all the nation’s wealth. The bottom 80%, eight out of every 10 people, or 80 out of these hundred, only has 7% between them. This has only gotten worse in the last 20 to 30 years. While the richest 1% take home almost a quarter of the national income today, in 1976, they took home only 9%. Meaning their share of income has nearly tripled in the last 30 years. The top 1% own half the country’s stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. The bottom 50% of Americans own only 0.5% of these investments. Which means they aren’t investing. They’re just scraping by.

I’m sure many of these wealthy people have worked very hard for their money. But do you really believe that the CEO is working 380 times harder than his average employee? Not his lowest paid employee. Not the janitor. But the average earner in his company. The average worker needs to work more than a month to earn what the CEO makes in one hour.

We certainly don’t have to go all the way to socialism to find something that is fair for hard-working Americans. We don’t even have to achieve what most of us consider might be ideal. All we need to do is wake up and realize that the reality in this country is not at all what we think it is.

All right. That was, like, 10 years ago. And it’s worse now, if you can imagine. Now, is that political? Well, if your politics is greed, yeah. Yeah, it’s political. So what are we going to do? Remember that our guy in the scripture was about security, and worried about security, and he built bigger barns for security and said, “Eat, drink, and be merry.” I used to, when I was more annoying than I am now, I know it’s hard to imagine, but I used to go around and say, you know, “Eat, drink, and be merry” is in the Bible. It’s right there in the Bible. I’d tell everybody that, and they go, oh, yeah, really? I go, yeah. The next verse it says, “And then God said ‘You fool.’” Right after. So you’ve got to kind of read more than one verse in the Bible. That’d be good.

All right. But Ernst Bloch says this. In fact, he’s back early in the 1900s. “The most tragic form of loss isn’t the loss of security. It’s the loss of the capability, capacity to imagine that things could be different.” The most tragic form of loss is not what that guy felt in the story of Jesus, that loss of security. It’s a loss of the capability, the capacity to imagine that things could be different. Do we have that? Are we tragic, more tragic than the person in our story that had everything and then died the next day. We could even be more – it’s not Bible, but I think that’s true. We can imagine things.

How could things be different? Well, on an individual level, certainly, we can spread the wealth around. We can do things that are not concentrated. Maybe, just maybe, oh, my gosh, it’s so easy to order from Amazon, but maybe we don’t want Jeff Bezos to have traveling to Mars money when other people don’t have traveling to the grocery store money. Maybe we don’t want to buy everything on Amazon. Maybe. Maybe could do other things, too, about choosing where we spend our money, choosing who.

Maybe we tip more. You know? Tip used to be To Insure Promptitude. Did you know that’s what it stood for? To Insure Promptitude. I think that was a reverse engineer. I don’t think it started that. And it came out, well, it came out with Prohibition, and the bars quit selling drinks, and they figured out they weren’t making money, so they cut the wages of the workers, and the workers didn’t have any money, so they had to say everybody throw some money to the worker because we’re not paying them anymore.

But now I think tips are To Insure Poverty. Because if you’re working for tips, you’re going to be in poverty. So we were at a conference. All the big, big thinkers of the Presbyterian Church had a conference for training. And, you know, we were at a conference center, and they said, “Shall we leave something for the housekeeping staff when we check out?” And the person says, “Well, you know, the tip is included in your registration fee. And we do put on a gratuity. But I want to tell you, none of these people are making too much money. So if you want to leave something, go ahead.” Maybe you want to do that.

But how about some more specific examples, Christy? Well, there’s Warren Buffett. Have you heard of Warren Buffett? I talked about him earlier. That man is, even though he’s having so much trouble giving away his money, you know how much money Warren Buffett has given away in his lifetime? What do you think? What would be a lot of money to give away, if you were really rich? What do you think? How much?

ATTENDEE: One million.

REV. RAMSEY: One million. Do we have any – it’s higher. Anybody?

ATTENDEE: 10 million.

REV. RAMSEY: 10 million. Higher still.

ATTENDEE: 50 million.

REV. RAMSEY: 50 million. That’d be a lot.

ATTENDEE: Billion.

REV. RAMSEY: Million, yeah. He’s given 42 billion with a “b” dollars away in his lifetime. The man still has almost 100 million, can’t stop making money, poor guy. In fact, Warren Buffett has so much money that he’s hired Bill Gates, who’s a billionaire on his own, to spend his money. He actually gives money to Bill Gates, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to go ahead and spend it for him on things like Third World health and all that.

In fact, Warren Buffett is behind something called the Giving Pledge. And what that is, he invites millionaires and billionaires to pledge, it’s not a legal contract or anything like that, but they have a letter, and it’s all public and all that, you can look it up, GivingPledge.org. And these people pledge to give away half of their fortune during their lifetime or when they die. At least half. He’s getting a handful of billionaires and millionaires to sign up, you can look it up on the website, and they have a little letter about what they’re doing and how they’re giving away their money. So maybe…

But Christy, you say. We’re not billionaires. We’re not millionaires. We’re barely scraping by. Come on. What else can we do? Well, there’s a guy and his wife in Akron, Ohio – Akron, Ohio, where they shoot black people with 60 bullets if they run away from the police, my hometown – Duane and Lisa. Duane and Lisa just had a heart for ministry and decided they needed to do something for race relations and poor relations. And so they took their family of four – hello – and bought a house in the poorest, awful-est, most neglected neighborhood in Akron, Summit Lake. Summit Lake, during the 2008 when everything fell apart, money and all that, you could buy a house in Summit Lake for one dollar. They had one dollar houses at Summit Lake because no one wanted to live at Summit Lake. One dollar.

Well, I don’t know what he paid, but he got a pretty good deal. But that was later on. It was early, around 1998. He moved his family there and started working in the community. He started out with the bike shop and brought the neighborhood kids in, got some donated bikes, and says, hey, you work enough hours on fixing these bikes and learn how to use the bikes and being a good person, you can take the bike home with you. And he’s still doing this now, 25 years later.

But also it’s moved into, it’s higher, what they call reentry ministry, in that they take the people, and in fact they’ve got a little building, it’s called The Front Porch. It’s a café. It’s a coffee shop. It’s a rehabilitation center. It’s within walking distance of the jail. And a lot of folks come right out of the jail, they don’t have a job, they don’t have prospects, they don’t have anything, and go to The Front Porch. And The Front Porch finds them a job, gives them a job, puts them to work, does something. They have a recovery meeting on Sunday.

And that is his retirement. I mean, that’s what Duane and Lisa did with their money. They made The Front Porch. And they got the foundation, they got employees, and they’ve got things, they got the 501(c)(3) in about 10 years. But they started out the ministry, and they moved to the worst neighborhood in Akron. And, oh, they’re a couple good white people. And lived there, and gained the trust of the community, and worked with community, and bought a ministry. That’s a barn heat bill.

What about something a little closer to home? We’re not all from Akron, Ohio, Christy. Although everybody could be, should be, and it’s a sad thing you are not. But we have Carson City. 10 years. I’m in my 10th year at Computer Corps. Computer Corps is run by Ron Norton. Ron Norton is an amazing guy with great talents, former Army drill instructor, among other things. So he’s got a little of that sprinkled in there. And what he did when it was time for him to retire, he took his retirement, and he, if you will, founded Computer Corps. He got donations, and he got a house, and he started making computers available to senior citizens. Because back then seniors didn’t know about the mouse and graphics and back there 25 years ago. He started out with that.

He started refurbishing computers. He started saying, hey, give me your old computers. He got old computers, taught people how to refurbish them, and then sell them at a cheap rate to people that don’t have computers. Twenty-five years later, he’s got four different locations. He’s got over 1,000 computers a month coming in. They’re refurbished, and they’re sent out, and they’re sold, and people are rehabilitated. People, again, are coming out, even before, instead of jail, they get to go to community service at Computer Corps. He feeds them six hot meals a week, daily lunches. Has a food pantry runs there, rehabilitation things.

And I said, “Ron,” you know, the man’s getting old. I mean, I’m old. He, yeah, really there. And I said, “Ron, you know, what are you going to do? And how long are you going to do this?” You know, he’s there, six, seven days a week because on Sundays he’s up there rolling supplies in. I said, “Ron, Ron, what are you going to do?” And he goes, “Well, this is my retirement. I took all my retirement money, and that’s what you see around here. I got nowhere to go. This is what I’m retired from. This is what I’ve got to do.” He lives at the original house, along with other people in various modes of employee, volunteer, rehabilitation. And that’s how he built his barn, and how he invests, and how he answered the question: When you’re gone, whose would this be?

Maybe that’s all you need to do, you know, to overcome our propensity to greed and security and material things is to ask yourself, all these things I have prepared, if my life was gone today, whose would they be? What have I done for others? How am I rich toward God, as the commentators that wrote the Bible put in at the end. Those are good questions. Then you get yourself in the place where God calls you a fool. Never, never a good thing.

So what can you do? You can refinance. You can say I’m not like the billionaires and the millionaires. Anybody can do this. I mean, right now I’m in Valley Bishop, and I don’t want to say I’m a saint or nothing. I’m not. In fact, this is what I do because I’m not a saint. I’m here in Valley Bishop, and my church home is an Episcopal Church in Carson City, and I’m rarely there. In fact, it’s getting so they have to pay me to be there. They have to hire me for a Sunday. And I go, well, I got that Sunday, great. But every Sunday my tithe is there, my contribution is there.

And you can think about that. One of the cures, if you will, treatments for greed is to start percentage giving. It doesn’t have to be 10%. Doesn’t have to be a tithe. I haven’t done the math yet. I really need to do that. But if you can commit yourself to a certain percentage of your income going to other people, the church is fine, nonprofits, whatever, any of that would help your greed and your barn building. Just by thinking about percentage giving to something that will go on beyond you. You can reinvest. And like Warren Buffett says, and he should know, he’s got more money than most of us, than about everybody but seven people in the world, you could say, “This isn’t my money. I’m just holding on to it while I’m here.” And move it to other people. So you can set up automatic giving. You’ve got to watch out. There’s some dangers in that and some things.

And also, if you notice, that was in Episcopal Church, and I’m a little embarrassed because I am giving money to the Episcopal Church when I’m Presbyterian. So I also give money to the Presbyterian Church PC(USA) Mission. I have a missionary I support. And that’s not because I’m wonderful. It’s because I’m horrible. If I didn’t set that up automatically, I wouldn’t do it. And I didn’t do it. And I would go to the Episcopal Church, and I would look at Betty Lynn, I’d go, we haven’t been there in two months, and we owe this. Oh, my gosh, I’m not writing that check. Ow. So we do that.

So you can reinvest your money. And pledge to yourself, like even – you don’t have to be a billionaire. You can pledge to yourself. Pledge. It is not a legally binding contract. Oh, there it is again. You can say to yourself, you can even write yourself a little letter, don’t have a website, but you can say I’m going to give this much away. Doesn’t have to be 50% like the billionaires. But can it be 2%? Can it be 1%? The important thing is that it’s going to be regular, it’s going to be a percentage, and you’re going to commit. You know, if last year you gave to something $1000, maybe you’re going to go by percentage, and that turns out to be $800. I think that’s a better gift. Not just if you’re in the mood, just saying I’m committed, and I’m going to do that. Reinvest.

You can also rebuild. I didn’t say rebuild, but at Computer Corps they rebuild. And what they do, they take chances on all sorts of people. When I showed up there, imagine, if you will, I showed up there, minister without a church, coming to Nevada without a job. That is very suspect. Why were you kicked out of the church? Who hates you? What have you done? I mean, that is an obvious question. And they gave me a chance. And after a year I got the key to the place. I tried to not take it; but no, I still have it.

But rebuild. And they just don’t rebuild computers. They take people there who have never had a job, that have never been outside their home, and they take them in, and they show them how to work a time clock, and they show them how to show up and how to leave, they give them a lunch, and they show them how to clock out for lunch and clock in for lunch. And there’s a lot of people don’t know how to do these things. And then when they leave, they’ve got one line on their résumé. And they’ve got a reference from Ron. And so many people have gone through there. And our best volunteers we lose because they go out and get somebody to pay them for what we train them to do.

So you can refurbish. You can invest in other people. Invest in other people that don’t really – maybe not worth the investment. And we’ve had some bad things. That happens. You can also, oh, it’s kind of like reentry, as well, in that you let people back in to life, figure out how they to get back into life. That’s what they do at, I didn’t say it, Southside Ministries in Akron. They figure out how to get people back into things. Maybe you’re in recovery. Maybe you support someone in recovery. Maybe you host a recovery group at the church or somewhere. But maybe we can figure out how to get people back on their feet again, and what could be done to help people instead of blame them.

There’s a little program up in Carson City called Circles. And what the Circles does is not so much giving money to the poor people, but they have the poor people and the people that are struggling, the people that almost have the first and last month’s rent, almost, to come and to – they have dinner, and they have training, and they asked them, what do you need to do to get a job? One time they said, “Everybody wants us to know PowerPoint. We don’t know how to do that.” Or “We don’t have a computer.” So we had a class in PowerPoint. Everybody learned how to use PowerPoint, and they can have another thing on their resume. Reentry.

Where are you putting the stuff of your life? What barns are you building? When you leave, the things you have prepared, who will they be? Think about that, and God and Jesus will not call you a fool. You will not be a fool. You will be blessed. Amen.

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Barns

Choices

Choices

Choices
a sermon by Rev. J. Christy Ramsey

DOWNLOAD A LIVE RECORDING

Audio from worship at the 11 AM Worship Service June 12,2022
at Valley Presbyterian Church, Bishop,CA

edited from a flawless transcription made by edigitaltranscriptions all errors are mine.

 Luke 10:38-42 

 

Sermons also available free on iTunes

You know, it occurs to me that everybody is pro-choice, as long as it’s their choice. Everybody agree with me? I’m pro my choice all the time. It’s those other people with their choices that’s a problem, not me. We’ve got problems with being pro-choice. And I’m not talking about the political thing, although I could because if politicians can say “thoughts and prayers,” I can say “laws and policies.” It’s only fair. Stay in your lane, politicians. Go do some laws and policies, leave the thoughts and prayers to the professionals.

No, we have trouble with the pro-choice movement, not of our own choices, but of others’ choices. And today’s Juneteenth, and we’ll be talking about that in a little bit. And that’s a lot about choices. We look at all the choices that are coming up before us. Well, maybe. Folks will use the Lord, lies, and law to make their choices the choices for everyone. Lies, the Lord, and law. Look what Martha did. She comes right out, now, does she go to Mary saying, Mary, Sister Mary, how about giving me a hand? Give Mary the choice. No, she goes to the Lord and says, “Jesus, you make her do what I want.”

You know that’s the best kind of sermons, best kind of religion. What is that? The kind that make other people do what we want. I mean, it’s the next best thing to being God, if we can get Jesus on our side to make other people do what we want. And more and more people are saying that. You know, they want to take away choices of other people and say there’s only one way to heaven, and that’s my way. That’s a narrow road, and I’m at the head of the line. The rest of you, get back there in single file. We have so much trouble with choice now. And when people make choices, no, we don’t choose his choice, we like our own. We’re have trouble with other people’s choices. Huge issues and troubles with some choices and some with not.

Do you know there’s people that – all the kids have left, mostly. I think there’s one back there sleeping. But you know, the big thing now is supposedly drag queens are a threat to our children. Suppose that. Well, I want to tell you, I don’t know, I haven’t done a particular scientific study, but I am pretty sure that, comparatively, men in dresses are a lot safer for children than men in camo. Why don’t we outlaw dressing in camouflage and carrying guns instead of outlawing high heels and sparkly nice dresses? How many drag queens have gone into a school and killed children? And I’m saying zero.

You know, we’re only talking about the old trans- and not all drag queens are transsexual, but we’re only talking about 0.6 of the population. 0.6, and we’re all bent out of shape. What do we care what somebody else wears? I’ll tell you why. We don’t know how to treat them. I mean, should we oppress them? I mean, they look like a woman. They should be oppressed, then; right? Well, but they’re a man. We’re just all confused, us men, us white lorded-over men. I mean, that’s the real problem. We don’t know whether or not to oppress them. So we go ahead and do it anyway. Choices. You can’t choose to dress that way. Can’t choose. I’m old enough to remember the big deal about long hair on men. Can’t tell whether it’s a boy or a girl. I go, why is that so important to you? What are you planning? What does that mean? I don’t know. It’s a little strange. Choices.

Now, there’s a lot of folks that will tell you about this scripture. It is a little confusing scripture. Jesus is kind of cryptic here. He’s talking about debtors’ choice and best part. What does that mean? You know, some people will tell you it is about a commentary on the traditional role of women in the home. Some people will tell you that. And there’s other people that will tell you that it’s putting down, and this is big-time, this is like Calvin and Mr. Eckhart, those are big thinkers in the church, they don’t like this because they think that somehow that Jesus is putting down service.

And that is the official word for service right there in scripture, the old deacon word, you know, that one, the one we get deacon for for service, that’s right there. And some people, it’s like Calvin and commentators and Mr. Eckhart, who was a big thinker, says we don’t like that. He sounds like he’s putting down service and lifting up study, and we don’t like that. Some people say that. Some people will tell you that it is about a distraction. Oh, my, that’s a great sermon on this scripture about distraction, you know, about – because it says in there distraction is actually the Greek word for concerned about many things, a lot of things.

And I tell you, last night at Bishop – you know I wander around Bishop at night, lock up your children, warn your neighbors. But I’m at, you know, you’ve got a lot of crosswalks and signals on that main street there, you know. And so I’m standing there, being like a good California people, obeying crosswalks and pedestrians and things and all that. And across from me are eight people, eight people, various ages. And every one of them to a person is [mimicking smartphone use] waiting on the crosswalk; you know?

So okay, so the crosswalk changes, the little trucking guy comes up, and they’re all [mimicking smartphone use]. And I go, I mean, they pushed the button. So anyhow, so I start walking across. And finally one of them looks up from their phone and goes, oh. You know, by then it’s the countdown, you know, the race clock, is that what that is? And they all – and so none of them cross the street. You know, they go, oh, that’s our bad. And they [mimicking smartphone use]. Back to the phone.

Well, we got a little distracted from the sermon. You see what I did there? The distraction. Ooh. Ah, and then so you can choose to find many sermons on this scripture if you want. So, and I will not take away your choice. That’s so many meta jokes in this sermon. Yeah, okay. So, but today, I choose, and it will not be taken away from me, to talk about choice here. Because that’s what Jesus says. Says Mary has made a choice, and I’m not going to take it away from her. And he also points out that Martha made a choice, as well. And he’s not going to take away from Martha. This suggests to me that the important thing in this scripture is about people’s choices, and that Jesus, not in the narrow political way, is pro choice. There’s more than one way to serve or to be with Jesus. And he preserves our choices.

So if we’re about what Jesus is about, we’re about enabling people to make choices. And that is a danger in our country, where some people don’t want to hear about other people’s choices. Have you heard about the election? Elections are great. Elections have consequences. So, yeah, we heard all about that. But when election doesn’t go to our boy, oh, it doesn’t count. It’s fake. Got to be recounted till we get the right word, the right one, till we get my own choice. We’re okay with votes and choices as long as it all agrees with us. But if somehow it agrees with someone else, oh, my gosh, it shouldn’t be allowed, it’s fraud, oh, my gosh. How disgusting. How anti-Christian. Choice shall be not taken away from them.

And then today is June 19th, a most extreme part of not having choices, taking away choice from people. Slavery. June 19th, 1865, the end-ish of the Civil War. Back then they didn’t have Twitter and Internet and all that. So when a war was over it took a while for people to get the word. But two years before this, President Lincoln said all the people in the places that aren’t listening to me anymore, your slaves are free. What? Does that help anything? I don’t know, you know. But it was there, the Emancipation Proclamation. All those states in a rebellion against the United States, the slaves are here forever free. But Lee was defeated in April of 1865. That was kind of the end of the Civil War, the war between the states. And that was supposed to be the end of slavery because, you know, they’re gone now.

But Texas didn’t get the word, didn’t want the word, and wasn’t listening. And it took the troops to go down there and to go to Texas and tell them, hey, we’ve got the Army here, and we say there’s no more slavery. That was on June 19th, 1865. And last year President Joe Biden made that a federal holiday. Today is a federal holiday with proclamations and all that for Juneteenth. They put together the June and the 19th. A second day of freedom, when folks of African ancestry, our Black Americans got their freedom. Kinda sorta. At least got a promise of it. June 19th, 1865.

And if you think about it, the opposite of having free choice, free will in determining what’s going on with your life and where you’re going and how you’re going to be, the opposite of that is slavery. Slavery doesn’t have choice. Slavery is different. Slavery says I make all the choices for you. You have to do what I say, what I want, what I want done. That’s the opposite of choice. That’s anti-choice.

Now, some people say this scripture’s about hospitality, and we kind of think of hospitality as, you know, tea and cookies and all the – I don’t know if we’ve got anything today, but coffee, those kind of things. But hospitality really is making somebody else’s choices your own. So it’s kind of like reverse slavery; isn’t it? Not as bad or extreme, I don’t want to equate the two, but I want to say it’s a different mindset where you’re concerned about what the other people chose, and you want to go with them. And so that’s kind of like being a servant, and that’s kind of what Jesus is saying. The one who wants to be first among all must be servant of all. That’s what Jesus was saying. So it’s sort of anti-slavery, pro-choice, and not only just pro-choice of everybody gets their own, but I am going to honor other people’s choice, and I’m going to listen to them, and I’ve got a choice.

Last night, you know, don’t you just love me giving you my itinerary of Bishop? I know you enjoy that. So I go to Giggle Springs. It’s a ritual there. I think I should have a little cart or something because my dear wife likes to have milk with her evening pills. And she doesn’t have to, but it makes her happier. So, and a cashier says, “Is that all you want?” And I go, “I don’t want this at all.” I go, “This is for my wife. You know, happy wife, happy life.” And she goes, “Oh, yeah.” And I get my milk, and I go home. It’s not about hospitality. It’s not about my choice, my desires, but about paying attention to other people’s desires and choices and making them happen if you can.

What did Jesus want, do you think, when he came to the house? I wonder what Jesus wanted. I wonder if Martha or Mary asked Jesus, saying, “Hi, thanks for coming. Why did you come? What can we do? What can we do for you?” What would Jesus say? Jesus say, “Well, I would like a nice meal.” Maybe. He’s been known, everywhere you go in Luke, Jesus is going to a meal, having a meal, or just left a meal. One of those three. Everywhere you go, he’s on the way, eating. So maybe. But you think maybe he said, well, I came to talk to you. I came to talk to you about faith and life. And maybe that’s what – so maybe Mary was honoring Jesus’s choices. What would the world look like if we actually honored and listened to one another, choices. We have a video. It might work. Can we do the video?

Listen, or arrange yourself as you will. This is from the movie “St. Vincent.”

Our Mr. Eckhart said that if the only prayer you ever said was thank you, that would be enough. Maybe he’s a student of the mystics there, Mr. Eckhart. You see what went on there. How many choices were in that room? There was a lot of choices. And still they were able to say a prayer, and said that does not excuse you from saying a prayer, and they said a prayer.

All right. So that’s what it might look like if we honored one another’s choices, and we honored one another’s ways to God. And we honor one another instead of trying to regulate the other person, to regulate the other, to put him in this special dress code, or to be restroom police. Who in the world wants that job? You know what you do? Oh, I’ve got a tip for you. You know what you do if you’re in a restroom and you think someone’s using the wrong restroom? You know what you do? Do you know? Anybody? Anybody? You know? I’ll tell you. Nothing. You do nothing. They know where they’re supposed to be. That’s the answer. Their choice shall not be taken away from them.

I love certain people, I won’t say who they are, but certain people say, “Well, we can’t have that because women will get assaulted.” I go, yeah, you care about women getting assaulted. You know they get beat up everywhere, including their own home. They don’t have to go to a special little room to get beat up. They get beat up everywhere. Why don’t you do something about that? Ohh. Ohh. Those people are so clueless. They might get beat up.

Where the heck were we? Okay. So, choices. Anything you can do to expand people’s choices, to honor the choices, and to be hospitable in the most truest radical sense of the word, to figure out what is your choice, what is your need, what are you doing, and then listen and consider them, the better off we’ll be and the more like Christ would be. Now, you know, you’re going to say, well, everyone. Well, all the time. Not everything. Not everything. Well, that then is just – that’s just always true, but that’s just more choices. Not everything’s going to be that. We’re going to have to keep working and listening and working and listening to each other. We’ve got to quit thinking that we’re the only ones that know what to do. And that includes me.

I have a tech camp this week for the first time in two years. I get to have 11 middle-schoolers for an afternoon. Anyone a teacher here? Oh, my gosh. Yeah, they’re home resting, that’s where they are. Yeah, they’ll be back in September. But oh, my gosh, you know, the middle schoolers are really big on fair. Anybody a parent, anybody hear their kids talk about fairness? Did you hear about this? Yeah, maybe once or twice? It’s not fair. It’s not fair. It’s the worst thing in the world. Oh. We put a stop to that. Christy had enough of that.

And I tell the story now, this is from Louis C.K. Talk about bad choices. Louis, he’s got some bad choices in his history. And I tell them a story that Louis C.K., he got fed up with cereal bowls. The kids got down to the, I think the gram of how much cereal each of them got. I mean, I think they may have had electron microscopes to look into that. And they would look over and see if the other one’s got a little bit more of the sugary pop or whatever, and then yell, and fair, and you know, oh, my gosh. And he said it finally stopped. He goes, okay, from now on the only time you look in your neighbor’s bowl is to make sure they have enough.

And I tell my kids, the only time you talk to me about fair is if you don’t think the other person has enough. And they think I’m kidding. And so they try me on it because they’re kids. That’s what they do. And they come up, and they say, “It’s not fair.” I go, “Oh, thank you so much for bringing that up. How much of your stuff do you want to give to him to equal it out? Because you are talking that they don’t have enough because remember the rule. If you say it’s fair, it’s about another person not having enough, or that you have too much, and you want to share. Is that true?” “No, it’s okay, I’m good, I’m good. All right.” Wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing if we went around yelling it’s not fair, but it was about the other person? It was about their choices and their ways of doing things?

My daughter’s a teacher. Hope so. I mean, she’s between jobs right now. I hope she’s a teacher soon again. But, oh, I forgot what I was going to say. I was so upset about that previous, I forgot about that. Oh, I know, I know. What do you call people in jail? Do you call them criminals? Do you call them bad people? You know what she calls them? She calls them “people that made poor choices.” Why is so-and-so in jail? People that made poor choices. That’s what they are. And you guys make choices every day, and some people make – adults make poor choices, and they go to jail, and that’s what happens. And she got a note, a tearful note, or a call or something, that said thank you so much for that, from a parent. “My child’s father’s in prison. And we’ve been so ashamed, and he never knew what to say, and I never know what to say to him. And now we have something to say. He made a poor choice, and we hope he chooses better in the future.”

So, yeah, there are poor choices. There are choices that aren’t good, yeah. But it doesn’t mean we take it away and that we know best for everyone else. I hope that we can look at one another’s choices and make sure there’s enough for everyone, and together we can get together and pray and say “Thank you, God. Thank you for all this.”

Amen.

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Choices

Christmas Parking

 Making Room for Christmas People

Christmas Parking
a sermon by Rev. J. Christy Ramsey

DOWNLOAD A LIVE RECORDING

Audio from worship at 9:30 AM Worship Service November 7,2021
at Christ Presbyterian Church in Gardnerville, Nevada

I am wearing a mask so the deep breathing is not a sign of illness
but a sign of caring for others.

edited from a flawless transcription made by edigitaltranscriptions all errors are mine.

Luke 3:1-6

 

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Well, it’s infrastructure week in the Lectionary. That was a joke. Thank you. Thank you very much. You know, mountains made low, valleys filled up, crooked made straight. Infrastructure; right? And just like real-life infrastructure, you’ve got problems. I mean, we might say it’s bad, but it’s not that bad. We’ve got problems. They say it’s too expensive. We don’t like it when things are disrupted. We’ve got detours and construction. Who’s all this for? Who needs a roundabout? I love them. Some people hate them. Infrastructure week.

In Carson City they’ve got a couple million dollars to continue their complete street program. I don’t know if you know about this. Maybe some of you are old enough to remember. Probably not. But back before there were automobiles, the streets were for everyone. Did you know that? It was for walking, and horses and carriages, and vendors and carts, and everybody would use a street. But when the cars came along, there’s a whole campaign talking about, you know, jaywalkers. “Jay” was a slang and derogatory term for somebody that didn’t know how city lives lived. And soon the streets went back just for cars. You’d better get out of their way. You know, pedestrians, pedestrians were getting killed in New York City, and their solution was

“Get out of the way.” Streets are just for cars.

Some of that’s changed over the years. You know, that Complete Streets program, that is to actually make streets for everyone again. There are going to be walking paths, bicycle paths, you know, actual bicycle lanes that are more than a paint and a prayer. Yeah, it’s all bicycle lanes are; you know? They’re just a, [indiscernible], oh, Lord, don’t keep the car [indiscernible]. Actual curbs and things. For people to walk, crosswalks and those curb cuts with the annoying bumps for, you know, the blind and the hard sighted. Maybe little beeps with the crosswalk so people can hear if they can’t see. Actual signs to stop the cars. Crosswalks where pedestrians have the right of way. Maybe flashing lights so they could actually stop traffic to walk across. Prepare the way of the Lord where all flesh will see salvation.

It’s been a huge change in our lives. The thoughts about what streets are for, from just adding more and more lanes so more and more cars could get where they’re going faster and faster, which just brings more cars, more traffic, more jams, more problems. Infrastructure week.

How about that handicap parking? You probably remember when that came up. Remember handicap parking when it first started? It was a request, a polite thing. Please, please keep this for handicapped folks. You know? And then, you know, everybody was parking there. So they got these handicap placards in license plates and things; you know? And then people still parked there. So then now you look at it, they have humungous fines, and they’ll tow your car. And we finally were able to make way for handicapped folks to park.

Have you been to Home Depot? Have you seen there’s vet parking there? There is. There’s special parking for vets. Some places there’s stork parking for people that are expecting a child and maybe aren’t walking or running as well as they’re supposed to. You’ve got a 10-pounder coming on the way, every step counts, buddy. You know.

What would be Christmas parking? Have you thought about that? What would be a sign for Christmas parking? I kind of get it on the front. And it’s actually, this is a legit sign that says “Handicap ramp ahead,” in case you were wondering. But I kind of thought that, you know, in the mountains and the valleys and making them accessible, I kind of thought that might be the sign for Christmas parking. You know? We’re making mountains low, raising up valleys, making a crooked way straight.

Who would Christmas parking be for? We hear that the good news, it’s not for the able-bodied young white male, but for those who dwell in deep darkness, for those with sadness. Imagine if we had Christmas parking for those that were facing the mountains in the way, or those that were in the valleys, even the pits of despair. What if we made the way straight for them, or flat for them? Even though it wasn’t our mountain. Even though we weren’t in a valley. What would it be like? Too often I see people fix the problems that are out there, the people that are in the deep dip bits of valleys, and people that are facing mountains of problems and challenges, and just say, “Well, they’re not there.” Or “They should know better.”

You ever been – it’s not quite yet, but later on in the winter, you ever been driving around town, and then you see a car parked, and it’s got like a foot of snow on the roof? Have you ever seen that? There’s no snow anywhere in town, but the car has a foot of snow. You know, first of all you think, you know, you could brush that off. That’d be a good idea. But, you know, you have a foot of snow, but there’s no snow anywhere else. And I’m thinking people would say, “Well, that’s just fake snow because I didn’t experience, I don’t have any problem with snow. That’s just fake snow. That’s weather crisis actors. Can’t have problems. I don’t have problems. They don’t have problems.”

Well, I try to think, oh, my gosh, someone had a lot of snow where they’re at. They probably had a hard time getting down here. What would it be like if we had Christmas parking for all flesh? You know, that’s what it says. It says all flesh will see salvation. Not the deserving, thank God. Not the ones who work for it. All flesh. And you see how you prepare for this. John went out, and he didn’t say, let me affirm your [ware] and give you thanks and gratefulness for the life you’ve been living. John went out and said, “I’m preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”

Oh, my gosh. Would he be in trouble today. Because we all know that if you dare to suggest that there is something wrong with the life that we live, we’re very angry. We want it banned. We want it out of here. You are teaching hatred to our children. You can’t possibly say anything we have done in our lives is wrong. We’ve done nothing wrong. That was all in the past, John. Don’t you dare come out here and say we have anything to repent for. You see what happens if you don’t repent. You can’t get forgiveness. It’s repentance for forgiveness, according to John. It’s only then that the mountains can be made low, the valleys raised up, the crooked paths made straight. And only then is there Christmas parking for all salvation, for all flesh. Wow, huh?

What are some of the mountains and valleys that are in the way of Christ coming? Have you ever thought about here we are, 2021, you think you’re tired of the pandemic and the mask. How about tired of waiting for Jesus? I mean, every year we throw a big party, and every year he doesn’t show up. We spend a whole month getting ready for him. Preparation, advent, he’s coming, he’s coming, and nothing. Why doesn’t he come? Why doesn’t Jesus come? Well, are there still mountains? Are there still valleys? Are there still crooked paths? Yeah. Yeah, there still is. I think Jesus might be saying, why haven’t they got that ready for me?

I mean, when Rachel came to visit, you know, oh, my gosh, every piece of furniture in the living room and most in the other rooms were put out to the garage. We had the carpets scrubbed and clean. We’re getting ready for the advent of the girlfriend. We were ready. I hope. I think. My adult daughter Rachel was whispering tips to me over the first weekend. God bless, you know how well that goes over when your kid tells you how you should, you know.

But, you know, just like those John the Baptist, I do have some things to repent for, some things I do need forgiveness. And it’s not their fault they call that up. What are some mountains that we have? How about the mountain of student debt? Let’s just pick that one. No one here has got student debt. Maybe? Anybody? No? All right. I went to college in 1977. Now it’s 2021. What percentage increase in college has happened since I went to college? Anybody got a guess how much more it is now than then?

A percentage, let’s go percentage increase.

ATTENDEE: Probably three times.

REV. CHRISTY: Three times, 300%, would be 300%, yeah, yeah. Now, strangely enough, the minimum wage nationwide has gone about 300% up. Nevada, 400% up since then. California, 500% since then. Okay. So those are that. College, thanks for answering, Jim. College has gone up 1,424.23%. 1,424.23%. Now, I don’t think that all that expense is an additional 40 years of history. I don’t think you can put that in there. So if it was 20,000 back then, it’d be $304,846.53 now. That’s from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s a mountain. That’s a mountain. And then the minimum wage, I think it’s a valley. People are in the pit. Do you know that the minimum wage – how many, anybody, Jim, you want another one? How much was the first minimum wage? That was going to ruin business, destroy the economy? Anybody remember? What?

ATTENDEE: I think it was $5, wasn’t it?

REV. CHRISTY: No, no, it was 25 cents, 25 cents an hour. That was going to ruin the country.

ATTENDEE: That’s what I got for babysitting.

REV. CHRISTY: Oh, yeah? Yeah. Yeah, back in Roosevelt, FDR? No? No, okay. So 25 cents an hour. No, that 25 cents is a little bit different now. And since then it’s only – since ‘77 it’s only gone up – it’s gone up. It’s gone up three, 400% depending on the state you were, 500. But that’s a valley. Can’t afford college. Can’t afford a house. My kids don’t have a house. They don’t plan on having a house. They don’t see how. They’re hard workers. They’re good people. My daughter’s a teacher. My son works for BMW. That’s a valley. That’s a pit. We mostly didn’t avoid it.

How about the valley of medical debt? Some of you might relate to that. How about that? Do you know we’re the only industrial civilized nation in the world, you know, we’re the greatest in the world. We’re the only ones you can go bankrupt with a major illness. My friend Eric, they don’t know how he’s going to pay his hospital bill. The longer he lives, the more he’s going to wish he didn’t, I think. That’s a pit. That’s a valley. That’s a dark place.

And on the other hand there’s a mountain. You know, you look at the pit of how much medical debt comes, you know, you don’t have – people don’t understand there’s no medical debt in any other country. Nobody has a GoFundMe in Canada to pay for their cancer treatment. Why can’t we figure that out? We’re great. We’re rich. We’re smart. We’ve got great hospitals, doctors, medicines. We could figure it out. We could move that mountain. Maybe one is because – we could raise that valley. Excuse me.

The mountain I’m thinking about is the mountain of profits from drugs. Have you been following the drug crisis? That’s a mountain. Raising the price of insulin through the roof. And how about all the Oxycontin and the painkiller and the drugs? Millions and billions of dollars. Get people hooked legally by prescription. That’s obscene. And why is it okay and accepted that the seniors get on buses and drive to Canada – before pandemic – to buy their drugs? Why is that okay? Why do we think, oh, that’s a great idea, great thing to do?

The world is dying of pandemics. And we’ve got drugs to fight it. Oh, but the patents. We can’t let other countries make it for their people. We’ve got patents. Just because the government paid for the research doesn’t mean the companies shouldn’t have their dollar. And so now we’re wearing masks. And we’re going to continue to wear masks because there’s going to be all sorts of craziness going on all over the world because they’re not going to get vaccinated, and it’s going to mutate, and we’re going to go through the Greek alphabet, the Hebrew alphabet, all the alphabets. That’s a pit. That’s a valley. And according to our scripture, Christ is saying, when you going to get that fixed? It’s infrastructure week, friends. Fix up the road so I can come.

Aren’t you glad this is my last sermon here? Whew. But you know what? We’ve done mountains. I don’t want to tell you that we can’t do stuff as a people, as a nation. We can do stuff. We set our mind to it, we can do it. How many people have polio? That used to be horrible. That used to take down a President. That used to be lifelong affliction. You used to never recover, used to be in an iron lung, which is now, you know, a ventilator. But back then you had a big old tank that you lived in. You were struggling to breathe. Finally they closed swimming pools, drained pools. They didn’t know what to do.

The vaccine came out, and every child in America sent dimes to the White House to get rid of polio. Chipping away that horrible, horrible, horrible disease. The vaccine was mandated, and people were glad to get it. And polio’s gone. People don’t have to be stumbling on the road because they have polio. That road is made straight. We can do that.

Remember drunk driving? Remember that? There used to not be any laws against drunk driving. It was pretty recent. Used to be able to get sober by driving, by just saying, “I’m good to drive,” and then you’re good. And you drive. Wasn’t any laws against driving drunk. It was accepted. I credit mostly MADD, you know, Mothers Against Drunk Driving? They banded together, said enough. There’s too many people dying. Enough of this. And they started shadowing politicians and judges and made it impossible for them to ignore that great deep pit of drunk drivers killing their loved ones, their children. Whatever you think about laws or enforcement or all that, it’s gone way down. Maybe it’ll be gone sometime. And I dare say that it’s no longer socially acceptable to drink and drive.

What about smoking? Remember smoking? Remember smoking in public places and restaurants and theaters? In planes? I remember being on a plane, I couldn’t see the plane. I couldn’t see who was sitting in the plane. It was just a big cloud in the back. My dad went to a restaurant, he was pretty sensitive to the smells of cigarettes, asked for the nonsmoking table. And so here it was. It was like all these tables were smoking, and then there was one right here that was nonsmoking, and they sat him here. And he goes, what was that? I want the table downwind of the nonsmoking table. Remember that?

I remember going with some people to a theater, to a movie, and we went in, they go, where do you want to sit? And he looked around and says, where’s the nonsmoking section? I was so thrown by that because by then there was nonsmoking in our state for theaters. We got rid of that. Whatever you think about laws and government and all that, we moved that mountain. The servers and workers that were in that space eight, 12, 10 hours a day, whatever, they don’t have to breathe that smoke anymore. Oh, yeah, people talk about their rights and freedoms and all that. Just like they talk about how upsetting it is to have a detour when there’s a perfectly good street there they tore up for some improvements. Infrastructure week is not without cost, not without inconvenience, not without actual problems in trying to get things better for most people.

Remember the seniors buying dog food, in the store anyhow? The cashier says, “Oh, what’s the name of your dog?” And they couldn’t tell her because the dog food was for them. I think that story helped make Social Security a little bit more secure. Used to be okay. Hey, don’t have money, you know, you’re old, I guess you just die somewhere. But we moved that mountain. Whatever you think about, is it adequate, did they [indiscernible], we worked on that, made room for folks.

So we can do that. It’s painful. It’s difficult. It’s controversial. It requires this inconvenience and problems as we have to go around detours as the infrastructure’s being upgraded. But you know what comes, you know, if we can move those mountains, if we can fill in those pits, if we can make the paths straight, it will be Christmas parking for all flesh to see salvation. And Christ will come. Finally. You moved everything out. You got everything ready for me. I’ll come in.

Advent is getting ready for Jesus to come. Friends, we’ve got a lot to do. Let’s hope he comes. Stays. Maybe even buys us dinner. You know. Because we’ve made the path straight for all flesh to see salvation. We’ve taken down mountains so all people can live without crushing debt, medical or college. We’ve raised up the valleys and the pits so people aren’t killed again when the medical bills come. When they look at their paycheck, realize, oh, I have to get the third job.

Thank you all for all that you’ve done. Thank you for being a witness that there’s a different way of living in the world by being here today, and by living your life as you are. By doing things that don’t profit you personally as much as they help others. For all that I’m very thankful, and I am blessed to know you, and know that you’re down here doing good work in Gardnerville and the world. So friends, keep moving them mountains, keep filling them valleys, keep straightening those paths. And we will welcome all flesh to salvation and make Christmas parking available for all. Amen.

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