A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — July 11, 2010
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Texts:  Deuteronomy 6:4-9;  Luke 10:25-37

[The lawyer said], “You shall love the Lord your God with
all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength,
and with all your mind;  and your neighbor as yourself.”
…[then he asked Jesus], “And who is my neighbor?” — Luke 10:23, 29

How can we hear this story with new ears?  We know it too well.  We’ve named it “The Good Samaritan,” and that name has become a watchword for care-giving.  We have Good Sam hospitals and civic awards, as well as Good Samaritan laws to protect people who offer first aid.  If you stop to give someone you don’t know a helping hand, you’re a Good Samaritan.  Now, there’s nothing wrong with doing that.  But we’ve watered down the story Jesus told when a lawyer asked him, “Who is my neighbor?”  Perhaps if Jesus were telling his story today, he might tell this true story from 2007 about a car accident in the Arizona desert.

While driving on a U.S. Forest Service Road, a 45-year-old mother lost control of her van, which went off a curve, rolled into a canyon, and ended up 300 feet off the road with the mother pinned inside.  Her 9-year-old son was unhurt and able to crawl back up to the road for help.  For several hours no one came by.  Finally someone came walking down the road.  His name was Jesus… Jesus Manuel Cordova, to be precise.  He’d come across the border from Mexico illegally and had been walking for two days.  It wasn’t in his best interest to linger or call attention to himself.  But the boy clearly needed help.  So Jesus stopped.  How did they communicate—a boy who knew no Spanish and a traveler from the wrong side of the border who knew almost no English?  Perhaps because both understood the language of need.  Unable to pull the mother out of the van, Jesus stayed with boy, giving him his jacket and building a bonfire as the temperature dropped with nightfall.  Sometime in the night, the mother died.  Finally in the morning some hunters came by and called for help.  The boy was airlifted to a hospital in Tucson, and Jesus Manuel Cordova was taken into custody by Border Patrol agents who were the first to respond to the call for help.  He was deported. ¹

 

A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — July 4, 2010
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Text:  2 Kings 5:1-19a  (read full text at end of sermon)

 

a grievous skin disease. — 2 Kings 5:1 (The Message)

Someone must have had a real sense of humor—most likely the Holy Spirit—for this text to show up in the lectionary on the 4th of July.  Here’s a story that calls into question all kinds of givens.  Boundary after boundary is crossed as God works in mysterious ways.  Power, position, privilege, pride, and patriotism—none of these matter.  Some 2000 years ago, Jesus stood up in his hometown synagogue to tell this story from roughly 1000 years earlier, “There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.”  People who’d known him as a child, friends of his parents who had watched him grow up, were so enraged that God might care for foreigners they tried to throw him off a cliff.  Actually the story is even more challenging.  It begins by declaring that God had used Naaman to give victory to the enemy armies of Aram (Syria) over Israel.  How can God side with the enemy?  Unthinkable!  Good thing Jesus didn’t point this out.

As it starts, the story seems to be about movers and shakers, the kind of people with power and privilege found in your typical high school history book.  Here’s the favorite general of the King of Aram, the mightiest country in the region.  Everyone knows who’s the big dog around here.  Our ears prick up.  We’ve heard a lot about generals recently—McChrystal and Petraeus.  And we all know there are movers and shakers in the world, and then there are… the rest of us.  The CEO of BP might get into trouble for referring to the rest of us “small people.”  But in the realm of the great and powerful, that’s who we are.

 

A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — June 27, 2010
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Text:  Luke 8:26-39

The man from whom the demons had gone begged that

the city how much Jesus had done for him. — Luke 8:38-39

I’ve spoken any number of times about how questions are an essential element of life in general and the church in particular.  Certainly this congregation declares just how much it values questions by referring to itself as a “community of inquiry, prayer, and action.”  When the Session asks new members what led them to join, many say something about finding this church, unlike some other churches they’ve encountered, to be a safe place to ask questions of faith.  So this Sunday as we prepare to ask questions to ordain and install church officers, I chose to build the worship service around questions.  I selected the three hymns because each is made up entirely of questions.  The first, “God of the Sparrow,” asks about our experiences of God, here in this world as created beings.  The second, “How Shall We Find You,” is a bit more explicitly theological, asking how we are to relate to God when all the human terms and concepts we use for the divine end up putting God in a box.  Finally our closing hymn, “If the War Goes On” by John Bell of the Iona Community, raises some of those uncomfortable, difficult questions we are led to ask in the world outside these walls as we begin to live out the shalom that lies at the heart of the kingdom of God.

Questions lie at the heart of how I approach any scripture, especially this morning’s story of the Geresene demoniac.  In nearly 18 years as a pastor, I’ve studied this story many times, but never preached on it.  So I came to it with my usual questions like: What grabs my attention? What puzzles me?  What do I shy away from hearing here?  What do I like hearing?  There are more detailed questions.  What are the demons, really?  Why is their name a Roman military term?  What’s with the swine?  Why raise pigs—Mark says there were 2000 of them—when Jews don’t eat pork?  Gradually a nagging question surfaced.  Why this man with demons?  Not why did Jesus heal him, but why, afterwards, did he tell him to go home and tell everyone what had happened?

 

A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — June 20, 2010
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Texts:  Romans 8:12-17;  1 John 3:1-3  —  Baptism

God’s Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we

Father and children.  —Romans 8:16 (The Message)

What marvelous love the Father has extended to us!

That’s who we really are. — 1 John 3:1 (The Message)

Children of God…  Both Paul and the writer of 1 John (and others) use this phrase to declare who we really are.  God is Abba… Father, Mother… Daddy, Mommy… our Parent.  The very Spirit of God touches our spirits to confirm in us that we are children of God.  God loves us so deeply and faithfully that right here and now (!) we live as God’s very children.  What an amazing concept!

I suppose this is glorious good news.  But I do recall just enough about being a child to wonder about that.  Our world puts such an incredible value on independence—especially independence in the sense of being “free to do anything you darn well please” without no one telling you what you have to do.  I think that’s what’s at work in the current Tea Party movement.  But childhood is another matter.  All kinds of people get go around telling children what they have to do.  So one of the main goals of childhood seems to be to grow up and become independent.  From early on there’s that cry, “No, I do it myself!”  I’d forgotten just how early on it happens until I had my own kids.  There’s just something within us all that seems to drive us to declare our independence.