The 26.4 kilowatt solar voltaic generating plant at First Presbyterian Church of Tallahassee, Florida. It produces about 25% of the electricity we use.

In Presbyterian-speak, a “session” is the governing body of a local congregation.

In 2006 the session of First Presbyterian Church of Tallahassee launched a long-term effort to become a “carbon neutral” congregation. The renovations to the Education Building and sanctuary and the installation of our 26.4 kilowatt solar voltaic system were key elements of that effort. For the past several years we have contributed to local carbon-reduction projects to offset our remaining carbon use.

In December of 2013 the Session endorsed Overture 25, which called on the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to direct the Board of Pensions and the Presbyterian Foundation to divest, over a five-year period, from fossil fuel companies. That Overture was endorsed by the Presbytery of Florida, but failed to be approved by the General Assembly. It is now being studied by the Assembly’s Mission Responsibility Through Investment Committee (MRTI).

Assignment to the MRTI means we won’t see any real action for several years.  The only thing slower than molasses on a cold morning is a Presbyterian study committee.

The Session has decided that we can’t wait for the slow cogs of our denomination’s machine to turn before we take action regarding First Church’s $1.6 million endowment, which is invested through the Presbyterian Foundation.

Last Sunday the session approved a motion to divest First Presbyterian Church’s endowment funds from fossil fuels and to set up a joint meeting with the Presbyterian Foundation, the Session, and the Endowment Management Committee, as well as any interested church members.

We’re waiting to hear from the Foundation about a good time to meet. As soon as we know the time and date, we’ll let everybody know. The Foundation is willing to offer a “sleeve” of investments that will meet our resolve not to support the 200 companies identified by the Carbon Tracker Initiative as the “worst offenders” of the environment. (See carbontracker.org.)

I will be writing the denominational leadership, including the Mission Responsibility Through Investment Committee, the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy, and all the presbyteries in the PC(USA) to inform them of our action and to share the theological and ethical rationale for divestment.

I am not so naïve as think that Old First Church will sway the boards of “Big Oil.” Nor do I think that taking this action makes us “holier (or greener) than thou.” This is not about moral superiority, it’s about aligning our investments with our values. These values arise from a theological commitment to the stewardship of creation.

We Christians can’t, on the one hand, proclaim a gospel which affirms that God loves the world while, on the other hand, profit from the world’s devastation through carbon-fueled climate change. Our corporate lifestyle should be consistent with the faith we proclaim. In other words, we should practice what we preach.

By unanimous vote, the session agrees. What an honor it is to serve a congregation that practices what it preaches.

Archbishop Thomas Wenski’s editorial in the August 12, 2014 edition of the Democrat Democrat (“’Marriage Equality’ can change words but not facts” ) makes some serious charges against anyone who favors marriage equality. With sweeping and (to my mind, uncharitable) generalizations, he characterizes those who favor marriage equality as “progressive elites” who can’t tolerate “their fellow citizens who oppose the erosion of democratic self-governance by aggressively activist judges legislating from the bench, and the further erosion of their freedoms of conscience and religion.”

Not only that, Thomas, my brother in Christ, accuses inclusive marriage proponents of reducing sexual activity to “merely a recreational activity without any moral significance.” According to the good Archbishop, even to think in terms of inclusive marriage “renders the idea of all marriages meaningless.”

I respect the deeply held conviction behind my brother’s words, but I urge him to argue his case without impugning the motivation of those who disagree and without the thick veneer of moral condescension. As a Christian pastor who favors inclusive marriage, I assure by brother that I do not wish to render marriage meaningless or to reduce the divine gift of sexuality to “merely a recreational activity.” Nor do I promote, as he accuses me of promoting, “a radical autonomy that believes that anyone can essentially create his or her reality by one’s individual will without reference to the truth of things.”

Regarding the “truth of things,” let us acknowledge that, through the centuries, ideas about marriage and sexuality have changed. The Hebrew and Christian scriptures attest to a time when marriage was essentially a contract for the transfer of female property from one male to another male, when men were encouraged to take multiple wives, and a man whose brother had died was obliged to take his brother’s widow as his own wife. It is simply not the case that marriage has always been defined as “a union of one man and one woman.”

I favor inclusive marriage because I favor marriage as a life-long covenant, because there is far more to marriage and sexuality than procreation, and because “the truth of things” is that nurturing, loving, families can come in many shapes and sizes.

Just as it is true that some passages of ancient scripture condemn what we now call “homosexual” behaviors, it is also true that other passages condone slavery, the subjugation of women, the killing of children for disobedience, and mass murder. The “truth of things” is that even scripture is a lot less monolithic and a good deal more nuanced than my brother Thomas lets on.

Given the spate of recent headlines concerning the abuse of children at the hands of Christian pastors and the reluctance of Christian leaders to repent and reform the institutions they oversee, pastors both Protestant and Roman Catholic would do well to follow our Lord’s admonition to tend to the log in our own eye before pointing out the speck in our neighbor’s eye. It is possible to argue moral issues without impugning the morality of one’s opponents.

We who stand in the pulpit every Sunday would do well to come down from that lofty height and exercise a bit more humility. If we need a good example, I’d say Pope Francis fits the bill.

Prompted by Adam Copeland’s blog, I preached this sermon on Christmas Eve.  I hope the readers of this blog will forgive me for posting a sermon.

            Our sons Adam and Ian used to love this midnight service.  Ian is in Boston tonight where they really are having a white Christmas, and Adam is in Adams, North Dakota, which invented the “bleak midwinter.”  “Snow on snow” is one thing.  Twenty-one degrees below zero is quite another.

I don’t remember exactly how old Adam and Ian were when we decided they were old enough to stay up late enough to take part in this service.  I do remember what a relief it was not to have to find a baby sitter on Christmas Eve. 

            Both of the boys liked to ring the bell after the last hymn – and for a while it took both of them to pull that off.  And then there was the night Martha Bishop gave Ian a guinea pig for Christmas.  She spent the whole service in a cardboard box under a pew right back there.  (The guinea pig, I mean.  Not Martha.  Martha sang in the choir.) 

            That guinea pig lived to a ripe old age.  Her name, of course, was Noel.  

            Perhaps you have similar memories of Christmases past.  Perhaps you are making new memories tonight. It’s hard to think of a better way to usher in Christmastide than to celebrate the Feast of the Incarnation. 

            That’s what Christmas is, of course.  Christ’s mass – the Feast of the Incarnation.  It’s easy to get the impression that Christmas is something else.  Although our culture has absolutely no concept of Advent, there is a kind of cultural lead-in to tonight.  It begins with Black Friday and continues with Cyber Monday –or it used to. 

This year, bargain-hungry shoppers were out the door and hitting the box stores and malls before the Thanksgiving turkey had grown cold.  I shudder to think what it will be like next year.  Bing Crosby will be crooning “White Christmas” as costumed goblins chant “Trick or Treat.” 

            One of those two sons of ours served on the committee that put together that lovely purple hymnal you can find in your pew tonight.  The task was a labor of love, but not necessarily an easy one.  Not everyone appreciates the opportunity to sing new hymns, psalms, and spiritual songs.  And God help the committee that dares to mess with Christmas carols.

            One of the best things the committee did with the beloved hymn, “What Child is This?” is to restore the original text penned by William Chatterton Dix back in 1871, when this sanctuary was only 35 years old. 

            All my life I have been singing the same chorus to each verse of that hymn:

             This, this is Christ the King, whom shepherds guard and angels sing:
haste, haste to bring him laud, the babe the son of Mary.

In my younger days I wasn’t sure what “laud” was.  For a while I thought it was the white stuff my grandmother put in biscuits.  Then I figured out that was “lard,” not “laud.”  Whatever it was, I was sure that if “laud” was good enough for the baby Jesus, it was good enough for me. 

            Apparently hymnal editors thought so to, so they kept those words as the refrain to all three verses.

            I wonder if the hymn would have caught on so well if the editors had not made that change.  I wonder if, now that the original text has been restored, the hymn will cease to so popular, for this is what William Chatterton Dix intended us to sing:

       Why lies he in such mean estate where ox and ass are feeding?
Good Christians, fear; for sinners here the silent Word is pleading.
Nails, spear, shall pierce him through; the cross be borne for me, for you.
Hail, hail, the Word made flesh, the babe, the son of Mary.

            It rankles, does it not, to sing of nails and spear on Christmas Eve?  What could Mr. Dix have been thinking?  Why must the cross rear its head tonight? 

            Because without the cross, Christmas is a Currier and Ives print, a rerun of a Charlie Brown Special, a CD of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” a walk down memory lane.  It’s a guinea pig under the pew and an Amazon.com gift card under the tree.  It’s the bottle of wine your brother-in-law gives you every year and the bottle of wine you give him every year.  It’s the credit card bill in January and the let-down you feel when everything didn’t go just right.

            Christmas without the cross is a sugar-fix, a temporary high, and the inevitable crash back to reality.  Without the cross, Christmas is not about Emmanuel, God with us.  It’s about us without God, trying our best to be of good cheer as we concoct a world that’s isn’t broken and doesn’t need a Savior.  Year after year we try, and year after year we fail. 

            Earlier tonight we enacted a service of Lessons and Carols.  The first scripture reading in that service, which was designed back in 1880, is always the story from the Book of Genesis – the one about Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit, which plunged the world into chaos.  “The Fall” it’s called by old fashioned theologians.

            The idea behind starting with that story is that,  if you’re going to celebrate the birth of the Savior, you need to establish that somebody needs saving. 

            I sing in the Community Chorus with a fellow who attends a neighboring church.  He told me they do a Lessons and Carols Service as well, but this year they’re leaving out the “Fall.”  It’s too much of a downer, apparently.  Not appropriate for Christmas. 

            What’s not appropriate for Christmas is pretending that the world isn’t fallen and doesn’t need a Savior who becomes one of us, who shares our brokenness and longing, who bears both God’s love and our failure to love on his own shoulders, and carries them up the hill to Calvary. 

What’s not appropriate is a cross-less Christmas.    

The cross is the sign that God is in Christmas for keeps.  Mary’s child will grow up and he will not be content for shepherds to abide in the fields without a fair wage and access to medical care.  He’ll ask if the gold brought by the Magi was mined by slaves, and if the frankincense is fair-trade.  He’ll immigrate to Egypt for a while, and when he comes back, he’ll push for immigration reform.

            Jesus won’t stay in the manger.  He won’t stay wrapped in tissue paper, sitting on a shelf in the garage for another year. 

He’ll call for justice, he’ll set people free, and he’ll invite you and me to join him.  His love for us will be so intense, and his zeal to bring in God’s kingdom will be so fierce, that we will find him both repulsive and irresistible.  He will die and he will be raised, and only then will we know him for the Savior he was born to be, the Savior of which the angels sing tonight.

            The “silent Word” became the word made flesh, and in the shadow of the cross, that same Word sets this Table before us. 

Word made flesh.  Word of welcome.  Word of grace.  Christ’s mass.

            For you.  For me.  In love for all the world. 

As I write it seems very likely that for the first time in almost 18 years, the United States government will be shutting down.  Unless some kind of agreement is reached between the House and the Senate, a good number of services will cease, national parks will close, and thousands of federal employees will be furloughed.  The last time we saw this kind of brinksmanship was back when Mr. Gingrich was Speaker of the House.

I am not qualified to speak authoritatively on this impasse.  I’m just an ordinary citizen.  From my perspective, however, the problem seems to be with a small group within one party who are holding their own party and the rest of the country hostage until the get their way.  These folks seem convinced that Health Reform, despite the fact that it is the law of the land, must be stopped – apparently at all costs.  According to their public statements, they are sure the majority of Americans agree.

Pardon me if I have missed something, but I thought our government was supposed to function as a democratic republic, not as a parliamentary democracy.  In Great Britain a small group within a coalition government can behave this way because they are needed to maintain a majority in the House of Commons.  It’s not supposed to work that way in the American system.

I’m old enough to remember how Lyndon Johnson managed to get the Civil Rights Act passed (and funded) despite resistance from Southern Democrats.  As stubborn as Strom Thurmond and his ilk were, even they couldn’t manage to shut down the government.  Back then, the rest of our elected leaders wouldn’t put up with that kind of behavior.

I was already concerned that my own representative, Mr. Southerland, has been championing cuts in food stamps (SNAP) as a moral imperative.  He seems to think that the $4.50 a day in benefits that children in low-income families, the disabled, the elderly and a few single people receive is morally corrosive.  For the life of me, I can’t see what’s moral about increasing hunger in a nation of plenty.  When I call his office, the staff is courteous and gracious.  They seem to listen, but I doubt my objections are making much difference.

It’s hard to offer a coherent word about behavior that seems so incoherent.  I could quote the myriad passages of scripture which refer to justice and hunger, but the passage that keeps coming back to me is the story of Sampson.  He defeated his opponents by bring the entire temple crashing down on them.  Unfortunately, he also brought the temple crashing down on himself.

When the rubble clears from this imbroglio, nobody will be the winner.

Living with homelessness is hard enough.  Try getting out of homelessness without an ID.  Recent changes to the rules for acquiring a Social Security card have made it almost impossible for people who don’t already have a Florida ID to acquire one.  It’s a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, and those of us who have homes to live in should insist that the rules be changed.

Imagine that you are homeless.  As often happens to people in your situation, your Social Security card has been stolen along with all your other possessions.  To get a job or to apply for housing or other benefits, you’ll need an ID issued by the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.  How do you get one?

Well, first you’ll need to prove your identity.  For most folks, that means a certified copy of your birth certificate.  You’ll also need two proofs of Florida residence.  Let’s say you manage to acquire these documents (no easy task if you’re unemployed and living in a shelter).  You’ll also need acceptable proof of your Social Security number.  In theory, you could present a W-2 form, a pay stub, or a10-90 form, but you haven’t got any of those documents. It would be great if you could present a re-issued Social Security card, but you can’t get one of those without more documentation. So you need something from the SSA that proves you have a Social Security number.

Until recently, you could go to the Social Security Administration and, after answering several questions to verify your identity, you could be issued a “Social Security Number Printout.”  With that printout and the other required documents in hand, you could pay the appropriate fee and acquire a Florida ID card from the DMV.

Not any more.  Beginning in July, the Social Security Administration no longer issues Social Security Number Printouts.  To get that Social Security card, you now need to present a an ID or driver’s license.  Of course, you could also present a U.S. passport, US Military ID (not Veteran’s Administration), official government ID, Employee ID, Certificate of Citizenship, life insurance policy, school ID, Medicaid card (not Medicare), certified class transcripts from current year, or a certified copy of medical records – all of which the SSA would accept in lieu of an ID or driver’s license.

Did I mention that you’re homeless?  The average person coping with homelessness doesn’t have any of these alternate forms of ID.  And try getting your own medical records without a valid ID.  Hospitals will not release your records without one.

So you’re stuck in a classic Catch 22.  Federal law requires ID for the issuance of a Social Security card, and Florida law requires a Social Security card for the issuance of an ID.  The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, and it’s our homeless neighbors who suffer the consequences.

Several Tallahassee communities of faith, including the one I serve, are working with the Renaissance Community Center and ECHO to cover the fees for homeless neighbors who are trying to get ID’s.  We call the effort “Operation ID.” We’re frustrated by the rules changes, but our frustration is nothing compared to the frustration faced by homeless neighbors.

Common sense and human decency suggest that we should make it easier – not well nigh impossible – for someone coping with homelessness to climb out.  In this post 9/11 era, no one can make that first step without an ID.  Our Federal and State elected officials might not be able to balance the budget or agree on health care reform, but surely they can remove this nonsensical burden from the backs of  homeless neighbors.