Sermon by Reverend Dr. John W. Mann | January 12, 2025

Luke 3:15-17 & 21-22

I’ve spent most of my life in and around church. I’ve been a church pastor since 1980. My first job in church was as the church custodian. You learn things about a place when you clean up after people. In Scotland I was a parish minister. That role came with a church congregation, chaplaincy at a high school, three primary schools and two special needs schools, and a parish of ten thousand people.  During the pandemic I worked as a hospice chaplain. Which is to say, I’ve seen some church in my time. Like that little hand game we show children, ‘here’s the church, here’s the steeple, and inside are all the people.’ Church is all about the people; or it should be.

My first memory of church is from the time I was three years old. One Sunday my parents sent me and my older brothers and sister to Sunday school at a church down the street. I don’t know what brand of church it was, but it had a Sunday school. My parents had a morning to themselves.

What I remember about it was that I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t know what they were talking about; it made no sense to me. At three years old the whole world tends to be a mystery anyway. I managed to leave the Sunday school room and I walked out of the church building. Home was probably the same direction we came from, so I went that way. We lived on a busy street called Capitol Highway. Somehow, I crossed the streets I needed to cross and made it home safely.

As for church, that was enough for me. Or so it seemed. When I was ten years old, a friend invited me to the boys club at a church. Now that was fun church. We did all sorts of fun stuff. It was about a mile away from home, so at ten years old I could walk there no problem. After a year or so in the boys club on Wednesday nights, I started going to the Sunday school. The people in that church were kind and loving. But kindness and love weren’t the whole message.

The central theme of the message there was that we’re all sinners. Though God loves us, God hates sin so much that he can’t stand it. So that was a problem, for God, but more so for us. Because if we didn’t deal with our sinfulness, God had no choice but to send us to hell when we die. No second chances after that, just burning in hell for ever and ever.

When you’re a child, you tend to believe what the grown-ups tell you; especially if they are the ones who are supposed to know what they’re talking about. Like the Sunday teachers, the club leaders and the preacher. My friends in those days might whisper to each other, “He said hell in church.” I didn’t want to go to hell when I died, or anytime for that matter. So I went along with it. I got saved; no more worries about the afterlife. 

At the time I couldn’t quite figure out what I was thinking or feeling about it all, but in looking back I understand that it was the idea that there had to be more to this religion than the afterlife. What about life here and now? But the point of here and now, according to the message, was to convince other people to get saved. Be a “soul winner.”

I tried to be a soul winner, but I wasn’t any good at it. Other people in church told of their soul winning success stories. Sometimes in the Sunday night service there would be testimony time and people would share their stories sin and salvation. The stories were sometimes encouraging, but mostly I found them disturbing.

Cautionary tales of what happens when people reject the grace of God. This is people telling stories during part of the worship service. One guy told the story of a woman who had a beautiful voice and she would sing solos in church; not our church, but a church somewhere. She was so gifted, that she was offered a position in an opera company. If she took the position, it would mean giving up her hymn singing. Would she sing for God, or would be singing for worldly glory. That’s prideful of course. But she took the opera job. And then she was in a fatal car accident. When they found her body, her throat had been torn out. I’m sitting there listening to this and I’m in 7^th grade by then and I thought, “Are you kidding me? Really?” The message was, if you don’t act right, God’s gonna get you. I didn’t want to think that was true, but I didn’t have much else to go on.

By the time I got to college I was still hanging around that church, mostly because a lot of my friends were there. There was one Sunday night when a girl of around 16 years old got up to testify. She told of how she was out in the neighborhood knocking on doors trying to round up kids for Sunday school and maybe share the good news with folks.  She met a family who happened to live a block from where I lived. They weren’t interested in what she had to sell. I think they were Catholic and probably good Catholics. Not long after she knocked on their door, tragedy struck and some of them were killed in a car crash.

So this girl is telling everyone this and her conclusion was that because they turned her away, they must have gone to hell when they died. That’s bad enough, but that wasn’t the whole story. According to her testimony, she said their blood was on her hands. She was crying bitterly when she told of this and she kept repeating, “Their blood is on my hands!”

I went into this ministry thinking there must be a better way. There must be a better truth than that, because I was certainly not going to base my whole life and work on the idea that you’re going to hell and if I don’t convince you of that, your blood might end up on my hands. I am 71 years old now and I started this work when I was 26 and I have been trying to tell the truth of God’s grace, mercy and love during these years within a religion that has been twisting the message grace into a shame and blame game for centuries.

The women’s guild in the Church of Scotland would hold an annual meeting and in some years the church I served would host it. My role as minister was to greet people at the beginning and say a prayer at some point. The women did all the other prayers and readings from materials provided by the Church of Scotland. One woman prayed, “O Lord, we are but dust, and disobedient dust at that.” I thought, it’s bad enough to think of yourself as dust, but how can dust be disobedient?

And just the other day I came across this post that someone I know put on Facebook. It reads – “You are not too dirty for God to cleanse. You are not too broken for God to fix. You are not too far gone for God to reach. You are not too guilty for God to forgive. And you are not too worthless for God to love.” So according to that line of thought, you are still dirty, you are still broken, you’re still far gone, you’re still guilty, and you are worthless; just not too much so. Or we are dust, and disobedient at even being dust.

Is that how we want to think of ourselves? Is that what we want to hear when we come to church, if we come to church? I say, no, no, no, a thousand times no.

“Gospel” is a word that means, “Good news.” Not good news and bad news, just good news. Everything Jesus did, everything Jesus said is God’s good news to the world. When Jesus went into the water to baptized, it was God’s way of fully immersing himself into humanity. When Jesus came up out of the water, he was filled with God’s Spirit and he heard the voice of God speaking to him. It was a word of good news that he took to heart and good news that he shared with everyone he met. God said to him, “You are my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.”

Jesus shared that truth with the able and the not so able, the rich and the poor, the religious and the atheist, the outcast and the insider, the hungry and the full, anyone and everyone. Anyone who believed that truth, who believes it now, God gives the power to become a child of God. That becoming is not as if we are turned into a child of God, it is that we simply realize who we already are, who God has created us to be. And according to what we read in the bible, there is nothing in all of creation that can ever separate us from God’s love.

When you need a word of encouragement, when you need truth that is unshakeable, if you ever doubt yourself, if anyone ever tries to put you down or make you feel bad about yourself, just remember and remind yourself of what God knows about you. Remind yourself of what God is telling you: “You are my beloved child in whom I am well pleased.”

Amen.