May 16th Sermon

One of the other things I thought about putting in this sermon, and didn't because I didn't really have time, is a reflection on a current debate going on in the child welfare community.

The American Pediatric Association came out with new guidelines around female genital cutting in America recently. For those of you who do not know, there is a tradition in many African countries of cutting off part of a woman's genitals, to varying degrees of severity, sometime between infancy and puberty (usually between 4 and 10 years old).  The operation is often immediately painful and dangerous, and usually permanently reduces or even eliminates sexual enjoyment.

In general, the APA's recommendations were uncontroversial-Female Genital Cutting is dangerous and unhealthy, and should not be done by American doctors, and families that want it for their daughters should be educated about its dangers.

However, at the end of these reflections, they mentioned the possibility that maybe a small ritual nick might serve as a replacement for more invasive surgery for families committed to following the cultural ritual, but aware of its dangers. 

This has sparked a great deal of controversy (some thoughts here) http://bigthink.com/ideas/20004, as you might imagine.

This is exactly the kind of question that I think it is most useful for Christians to talk about-are the potential benefits of exchanging a dangerous and painful operation for a purely symbolic action worth the dangers of increased social acceptance of what is a morally problematic action? How do we decide? Is this purely a cost/benefit analysis, that can be determined by testing if cutting increases or decreases with either course of action, or is it a philosophical question, best decided by our unwillingness to be complicit in a broken system?

What does it mean to demonstrate the love of Christ in this situation?

Discipleship discipline

One of the things that I often wrestle with as a pastor and a Christian is the challenges of efficiency as opposed to faithfulness. Not that these are contradictory values-far from it, really. I think its important to be effective in the good work of God, with an emphasis on both effective and good. But I think there is always this wrestling that we do, because we don't necessarily know the real consequences of our actions.

This week, my sermon is on the choices we get to make as Jesus' disciples, and what those choices say about how we interact with the world, and how important ethical purity and concrete progress are for our lives.

This is a living conversation in the congregation-when we studied incarceration this last year, one of the challenges is having some sense of what might be wise public policy (particularly around issues of mental illness and drug addiction, both of which are exacerbated by the current prison system) but feeling fairly powerless to offer superior solutions, and/or shape public policy.

As a way of engaging this conversation, here is a wonderful video about ways that we can in fact use data to shape our discipleship, focusing our Christian energies on programs that actually work.

This talk focuses on how to actually help Sub-Saharan Africa, and it is worth a couple minutes of your time.

The City of God

Here is my sermon for this week-
My favorite response was a gentleman who informed me afterwards that he certainly hoped that the city was just a metaphor, because he has no interest in spending eternity in a city. I see his point.

http://saintlouissports.homestead.com/
John 14:23-31
Revelation 21:10-22:5

Gathering in the city:
Good morning everyone, it is good to be with you this Sunday.

We’ve been working through Easter stories in this time before Pentecost (the celebration of the Holy Spirit that occurs on May 23rd, for those who are curious), as well as some visions of Christ to come, like the one from the book of Revelation that we have today.

Reading through the lectionary texts, I was struck by this image of the city of God. This is a story told with a tremendous amount of care-the image is stunning in its detail. Because of its length, we cut out some of the ornateness of the description, but the new Jerusalem has twelve gates, twelve foundations, its fifteen hundred miles per side, made of gold and jasper and sapphire and emerald and topaz and I could go on-but I won’t.