Archives for March 2012

The Now Covenant

March 25, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon on Jeremiah 31:31-34 for the Fifth Sunday of Lent
preached on March 25, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Sometimes it is just best to start over. Some days when everything keeps going wrong it would be best to stop, go back to bed, and get up again – if we could. Some moments when things are messed up beyond belief, the best way out is to start from the beginning again. And with some situations, the best way to bring about change is to be patient and wait for something to come to an end so that a new thing can begin. No matter how you approach it, when things start going wrong or getting weird, sometimes you just need a new start.

Jeremiah was thinking about just this kind of fresh start in our reading today. His first listeners were faced with the challenges of life in a world that was literally crumbling around them. Their nation had been disintegrating under weak and uninspired leadership for many years, and finally they suffered a great siege at the hands of their largest enemy before surrendering to the armies of Babylon. The leaders and other important people had been carted away to Babylon so that the core of the society would be broken apart. And the beautiful and important temple that stood at the center of religious and civic life in Jerusalem lay in total ruin.

In the midst of all this, Jeremiah offered them this word from the Lord, the promise of a fresh start. A new covenant would bring the people back together and restore the war-torn land. A new way of living out the law would shape their life together. It hadn’t worked before, because there was always a little separation between the people and the law. Now, though, the law would be so integral to their being that it would be within them, written on their hearts. With this, they would a new connection to God that would be real and true and full and complete, linking them to one another and to God always. They needed this new way of life and living – they needed this fresh start – and the prophet promised that God would give it to them and make them whole again.

All this didn’t come into being overnight – it took a good forty years before the exiles returned home from Babylon, and even then it wasn’t a return to exactly what it had been before. Even so, God kept God’s promises and brought them a new covenant for a new day and age, a new way of life that would make things different and show God’s way again. They had a new covenant – a now covenant – as God welcomed them into fullness of life as only God could make possible.

For centuries, the church has read this text as part of its own story. We have connected the new covenant to Jesus and viewed him as the fulfillment of this prophecy, making it all about our own fresh start and often forgetting that God had already worked great restoration in Israel and Judah in bringing home the exiles and restoring the people there. While the new covenant that Jeremiah describes finds its greatest fulfillment in Jesus Christ, we are not the only heirs of this covenant.

Even so, we in the church have seen incredible things in this wonderful image of new life over the centuries. The new covenant reminds us that things were broken and Jesus made them whole. It reminds us that God is working with people all around the world, not just the chosen people of Israel. And the new covenant reminds us Christians that we too need to have a closer, more real relationship with God each and every step of the way.

However, this can seem so disconnected from us as the church today. This act of salvation and transformation took place nearly two thousand years ago. We haven’t broken the covenant, have we? This isn’t our problem, is it? Jesus is among us already, and there is not much for us to do other than to try to live all that out. But what if the prophet were speaking to us? What if these words were not only just fulfilled in the days after the exile or in the time of Jesus? What if we need a new day to start over, too? What if God is planning to make a new covenant with us just as God did with the people of Israel and Judah and with the church? What if God is putting the law within us and writing it on our hearts?

While we’re certainly not facing the difficulties of those who first heard these words, I think we could certainly stand to have a new way before us. The world is conflicted beyond what it ever seems to have been before. The ways of life and faith that we have known are just not working for people in the same way that they once did. People are longing for a new covenant – a now covenant – that is real and true and full and complete in these days, not just the days of old.

What would this look like? How would we like to see things different in the life of faith? How can we envision God at work among us today? How can we join in what God is doing now to remake us and our world?

Writer Diana Butler Bass has been dissecting the dramatic changes in the church in recent years. Her most recent book, Christianity After Religion, suggests that the old structures of the church are starting to fall apart – and not just our old buildings! People are not looking for the same sort of life of faith that they once sought. Churches of every sort are on the decline and have been for a surprisingly long time. While there is a substantial increase in people who say that they are “spiritual but not religious,” they find little point in being active in the community of faith as they see it.

She suggests, to borrow and apply the language of our scripture for today, that we need a new covenant – a new way of life with the world – for the church to be relevant in the twenty-first century and beyond. People are longing for a place where they can feel welcome and loved and known by others and by God. People are longing for communities that encourage them in intentional practices like prayer and engage them in action for justice and peace in the world. And people are longing for new language that more accurately reflects our historic way of a thoughtful, engaged, and trusting faith rather than intellectual assent to confusing doctrines.

While we need something dramatically new to take hold, it seems that we have the grounding of this in our past life together. Just as Jeremiah promised that the new covenant would be built upon the old, that the law would now be written on their hearts, Bass suggests that we too can reclaim much of what the church has been in ways that engage those who least expect it. And so the new covenant, the now covenant, becomes real in our midst, not necessarily in increasing the number of people in our pews but in recognizing how God’s presence is taking hold in our world and in our church – with the law within us, written on our hearts, and the full knowledge of God before us, beside us, and with us, ready to restore us and make all things new as we join in the work of justice, peace, and grace in these Lenten days and beyond.

So may God guide us in this new way, in this new covenant, in this now covenant, even as we walk the way of the cross and open us to the power and the possibility of God’s new life taking hold here and now and always until our Lord Jesus comes again to make all things new. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

By Grace, Through Faith

March 18, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon on Ephesians 2:1-10 for the Fourth Sunday of Lent
preached on March 18, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Today is a day of beloved things. We just read a favorite scripture that talks about salvation by grace through faith, easily my favorite theological concept. We just sang one of the most-beloved hymns of our faith that speaks so beautifully of grace. And as part of the response to the word today, we will soon share in one of of the beloved moments of our life together as we ordain and install new ruling elders and deacons.

Toward that end, to go along with our scripture reading today, I want to share an extended reading from a favorite theology book, Christian Doctrine by Shirley Guthrie. Shirley was one of my theology professors in seminary, and I don’t know of anyone who can talk about the meaning and importance of salvation by grace through faith better than he can. Thankfully, his words are easy to understand, written with people like you in mind, and though he does not speak directly of today’s text, its major point is also his major point, so I hope that his words illuminate the point of our scripture today better than I ever could.

Suppose we begin to understand what justification by grace means. “How can we have this assurance of God’s love that frees us from ourselves and for God, other people, and true self-fulfillment?” The church answers this question by speaking of justification [– salvation, making things right with God –] through faith.

…It is often said that instead of the idea that our good works make us acceptable to God, Protestantism teaches that all we have to do is have faith in order to win God’s approval and acceptance. This is a serious distortion, because it only substitutes another requirement that we must fulfill in order to earn salvation. In the last analysis it makes us just as insecure as does justification by other means. Instead of anxiously examining my life to discover whether it is good enough, now I must anxiously examine my faith to see whether it is sure and strong enough to earn God’s love. Justification by faith in this sense is only another means of self-justification and self-salvation.

According to scripture, neither our good works nor our faith justifies us – God alone does it by God’s free grace in Christ. It is not confidence in the goodness of our life or in the strength of our faith,but confidence in God that gives us the assurance that we are right with God. Robert McAfee Brown puts it this way: “The gospel does not say, ‘Trust God and he will love you;’ the gospel says, ‘God already loves you, so trust him.’ Faith is not a ‘work’ that saves us; it is our acknowledgement that we are saved.”

This does not mean that faith is unimportant. Although it is not the cause of God’s loving us, it is the indispensable means by which we accept and live from God’s love. Faith does not make us right with God, but no one is made right with God without faith.…

Our faith does not force or enable God to love us, but it is our way of acknowledging, receiving, enjoying – and returning – the love that God had for us long before we ever thought of loving God. We are not made right with God by our faith, but we are made right with God through our faith. Our faith does not change God from being against us into being for us, but it does change us from being closed to being open to receive the love God has always had for us.

What is this faith we have been talking about? …Very simply, faith is trust. It is not intellectual acceptance of biblical or theological doctrines, not even the doctrines of Christ or justification. It is confidence in God. Faith is not believing in the Bible; it is not, in Calvin’s words, “assent to the gospel history.” It is not believing in a book, but believing in the God we come to know in the book. Christian faith is not confidence in faith that saves, not a “saving faith,” but confidence in the God who saves. The faith we have been talking about, in other words, is a kind of personal relationship – a total commitment of ourselves to the living God whose trustworthiness has been proved by God’s powerful and loving action for us in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. John Calvin puts it this way: Faith is “a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”

How can we have such faith? How can we be so sure of God’s love that we are freed from the unnecessary, self-defeating attempt to justify ourselves? How can we trust God so completely that we do not have to trust our own goodness or faith? …Faith, trust, or assurance in God is a gift. We can no more simply decide to trust God than we can by sheer willpower decide to trust another human being. The faith that trusts in the love of God is itself the work of God’s love, “revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”

[Even though] we cannot give ourselves faith… there are some things we can do to put ourselves in situations in which the gift of faith is promised and received….

[First,] if we want a faith that trusts in the love of God that frees us from the necessity of trying to justify and save ourselves, we can admit honestly that none of us has such faith, at least not always. Even those who do not have intellectual doubts about the truth of biblical and Christian doctrines do not have so much confidence in God’s love that they are free from the fearful or proud compulsion to build themselves up in one way or another before God and other people, and in their own self-estimation. None us has [the kind of relaxed, anxiety-free trust in God that marks the faith that Jesus himself described in the gospel according to Matthew.] If we want real faith, therefore, we must paradoxically admit that we do not have it, and pray every new day that we may receive it. “I believe. Help my unbelief.”

[Second,] faith, trust in God’s love, becomes possible when we put ourselves in a situation in which we can hear about and experience God’s love over and over again. Such a situation is first of all the church, the community of God’s people. Just as a child, spouse, or friend needs to hear over and over again that he or she is loved, so we Christians need to hear over and over again the unbelievably good news that God loves, forgives, and accepts us despite everything that we have been and done – or not been and done. Trust in God becomes possible as we hear constantly anew how trustworthy God is. That happens in the church as [we are told and tell] over and over again, Sunday after Sunday, the story of God’s steadfast love for a sinful world and sinful human beings, each one of us included.

But hearing is not enough.… It is not enough simply to hear the words that God loves us; we need to experience God’s love. It is above all in the church that this happens. It happens when people are baptized… – when [we] see a visible demonstration of the assurance that God knows each one of us by name and has “adopted” us to be God’s dearly beloved children. It happens when it is not the good and worthy but precisely the needy, guilty sinners who are invited to the Lord’s Table to receive nourishment for the new life [we] cannot give [ourselves]. It happens when we experience God’s forgiveness, acceptance and love as we experience the forgiveness, acceptance, and love of other people in the life of the Christian community. The church is by definition the community of those who live by God’s forgiveness for guilty people, God’s acceptance of those who in themselves are unacceptable, God’s love for those who know they cannot earn the right to be loved. It is the place where people can risk putting aside all their defenses and masks, knowing that they will be accepted just as they are, with all their faults, whatever they have done, however unacceptable they are by the moral and social standards of the world.

[Now we may not always see these things here, yet the church] is still the body of Christ. God promises to make God’s justifying [and saving] grace real and effective in this all-too-human community of sinners who need it just as much as anyone else. We can recognize, experience, and trust God’s love everywhere when we first find it here.

Shirley Guthrie, Christian Doctrine, p. 322-325

My friends, this is my hope and my prayer, that this church can and will be the kind of community that shows God’s love and grace and so embodies this kind of faith, not faith to save anyone or anything, because God has already done that! – but the faith that inspires us and others to be a more complete part of the new life that God is bringing into being in our world.

May we know God’s amazing, saving grace through the faith that God alone can give us and embody it in our life together so that others might see God’s forgiveness, acceptance and love in us and so see it in God, now and always. Amen.

Angry Jesus

March 11, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon on Mark 11:15-19 for the Third Sunday in Lent
preached on March 11, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Over the last few years, we have seen the rise of a cultural phenomenon called Angry Birds. You may have seen some marks of it around – those strange-looking red and yellow birds now available as stuffed toys and all sorts of other products – but it all began as a game for the iPhone. The story behind the game is that a flock of birds is trying to retake their homeland from a mean and possessive group of pigs who have taken it over and built these very strange fortresses to protect it. To play the game, you fling these birds at the pigs in hopes of destroying the pigs and reclaiming the birds’ homeland. It’s a strange yet addictive game – if you haven’t seen it, we’ll have a brief demonstration after worship today! – but the anger of the title seems highly unexpected for any such flock of birds!

There’s a similar disconnect between Jesus and the anger we see in him in today’s reading from the gospel according to Mark. I suspect most of us have a pretty serene image of Jesus in our heads – the two images of him we have on our stained glass here at the front of the sanctuary are very pastoral, and the illustrations I remember from my Sunday school classes growing up always showed him in a very calm and loving pose, usually surrounded by children. But Mark here gives us a very different picture of Jesus, one “inspired by love and anger,” to borrow the words of our last hymn, but also one that challenges so many of our common assumptions about Jesus and demands that we think differently about his ministry and its implications for our lives today.

The story is pretty simple, really. On the Monday of what we now know as Holy Week, Jesus made his way into Jerusalem to visit the temple. What he saw there made him furiously angry. Merchants had set up shop in the courtyard of the temple, changing money and selling doves for sacrifices. Their presence was a matter of convenience as much as anything – the pilgrims who made their way from the countryside or from all across the empire could pick up the things they needed for their visit right there within the temple – but the temple authorities of the day also profited from this commerce in the courtyard. Jesus wasn’t so happy about it, and so he drove the merchants and moneychangers out of the temple. With a strange sense of authority for someone who had just come into the city from the countryside, he turned over their tables and ran them out of the courtyard. After all this, Jesus hung around and started teaching the temple, but if anyone tried to carry anything through the temple court, he would stop them with his one-man police force. His teachings that day quoted the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah: “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations – but you have made it a den of robbers.” Jesus had imagined this place as a place for prayer, open to everyone – but instead, on his first recorded visit here, he saw a secular marketplace dominated by merchants making a profit at the expense of those who simply sought to pray and follow the religious practice of the day.

As you might expect, Jesus’ anger didn’t go over so well with the temple authorities. They were furious with Jesus for claiming such authority – they were the ones in charge of the temple, not him. They had seen the procession fit for a king that had greeted him as he entered the city the day before, and they were worried that the the real ruling Roman authorities would get angry if it got any worse. And if all this wasn’t enough, Jesus was captivating the crowds with his teaching, too – but little did any of them know that the cheers of “Hosanna!” would soon turn to cries of “Crucify him!”

This vision of an “angry Jesus” is not quite like that strange game Angry Birds. He didn’t fling himself at the constructions of the people like those strange birds, and his anger doesn’t seem to be nearly as addictive, either! But there is something important going on here with this angry Jesus, and this brief glimpse of God’s frustration getting lived out is an important part of what is going on along the journey of Lent. Sure, plenty of people like to talk about God’s anger toward the world. They go on and on about how corrupt and evil something or other is in this day and age, blaming natural disasters and other such things on God’s frustration with human sin. But I think most of us prefer to think of God as “merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love,” as we hear multiple times in the Bible.

Yet the angry Jesus we see in our reading this morning reminds us that God’s mercy and grace bring a new way of life that require us to get rid of some things that aren’t so merciful and gracious. God’s love demands an end to the actions and systems that take advantage of others and declare anyone more or less human than anyone else. God’s grace welcomes us to name the places where we go wrong so that we can amend our lives and walk in a new and different way. And God’s mercy frees us from concern over the eternal consequences of our actions, while also insisting that the things we do that harm others are displeasing to God and must be changed. So the anger we see from Jesus here is rooted not in possessiveness, jealousy, or fear but rather in the very gifts of love, grace, and mercy that stand at the center of God’s amazing love for us.

The season of Lent is a good time to be challenged by our images of God and Jesus and to start thinking about life in a new and different way. These are good days to imagine an angry Jesus – a Jesus who was not satisfied with things being the way they were and so demanded that God’s loving and just kingdom become real. How can we be a part of insisting that the world be different? What practices do we need to cleanse from our temples so that we can be more faithful in our worship and work? What in our world gets in the way of our practice of faith and keeps us from responding to God’s call for a new and different way of life for all humanity?

We may rarely be able to speak out so clearly as Jesus did, with such directness and such boldness, but God nonetheless challenges us to speak up against oppression and injustice and give voice to peoples long silenced. God insists that we join in making God’s reign real in this world by proclaiming a new and different way amidst all the need and pain that we see so clearly. And God promises to work in and through normal people like us – not through the halls of power but rather among the “fishermen and fools” of our age – to transform the world into the new way of life that God intends.

Will we accept this challenge? Will we follow in the difficult way of Jesus during this Lent? Will we extend the reach of God’s mercy and grace to those who most need it – to the poor, the lonely, the “victims of heartless human greed,” the wronged – by insisting that God’s word and way will transform everything? Will we be open to the new road made possible by the journey to the cross? Are we willing to number ourselves among the fishermen and fools so that God might use us too as part of the transformation of the world?

May God give us the wisdom and strength to respond to this call, to challenge the things of this world so that all might know the fullness of God’s glory, to set aside all the advantage we have so that we might join in the coming of God’s kingdom, and to journey the self-giving way of the cross with Jesus himself so that we might know the fullness of resurrection life first glimpsed on that Easter morning and that lies ahead for us and all creation through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Taking Up the Cross

March 4, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon on Mark 8:31-38 for the Second Sunday of Lent
preached on March 4, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

The cross is an incredible mark of the faith of the church. In our worship, we see it all around us – on the wall here at the front of the sanctuary, on the table here in the chancel, on the pulpit and lectern, on the bulletin cover, and even normally on top of our steeple! Today’s children’s bulletin even has an activity for counting crosses – in its four pages, there are forty crosses, one for each day of the season of Lent!

When we see a cross in our world today, I suspect that most of us immediately think of Jesus and the Christian faith. But this simple symbol is not quite as universal as we might think. In some parts of the world, the cross is exclusively a Roman Catholic symbol. When I visited the Czech Republic and Hungary several years ago while in seminary, we learned that most Protestant churches there do not use the cross at all because they do not want to be confused with Catholics. This was quite strange for many of us Americans – one member of our group had cross jewelry of every sort and wore it often, and I can only wonder what the locals thought of this Presbyterian seminary student from America who was so Catholic in her attire!

Even so, in our context at least, the cross has become a clear symbol of Christians and Christianity. However, I suspect that most people of Jesus’ time would be quite surprised by the prevalence of this symbol in these days. In Jesus’ own time, the cross was much more a sign of death than new life. Crucifixion was the most severe and cruel form of capital punishment imaginable. To anyone under Roman rule, then, the cross was a symbol of torture and death, something to be avoided as much as possible, and certainly not something you’d wear around your neck every day!

And yet in the eight verses of our reading from the gospel of Mark this morning, Jesus suggests not only that he will face a cross, but that we should, too. These eight verses mark a major shift in Jesus’ emphasis with the disciples over the course of the whole gospel of Mark. This moment comes immediately after Jesus asked the disciples what other people were saying about him and who they said that he was. While Peter responded that Jesus was the Messiah, Jesus ordered them all to keep quiet about it.

But right after this, Jesus began to teach them a little more about what is required of the Messiah. Jesus said that he would need to “undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” The disciples were not happy with what Jesus said. Just as Peter had enthusiastically affirmed the emerging picture of Jesus as Messiah, he enthusiastically denied that he could face such things, so he pulled Jesus aside and gave him a stern talking-to.

While Peter thought that Jesus, with the stature and presence of a respected teacher and prophet and the one he believed to be the Messiah, could never suffer and die, Jesus insisted that this was the path ahead for him. He made sure that all the disciples could hear his own rebuke of Peter: “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

But this was not enough for Jesus. He wanted everyone who was listening to him to be aware of what he was facing. So he went to the crowd and spoke again to them, insisting that those who wanted to follow him had to deny themselves and take up a cross instead. He made it clear that no one should follow him for personal gain or with expectations of an immediate transformation of this world or a speedy coming of the next. Instead, everyone who follows him should be ready to give up everything they have and get nothing tangible in return. While this may seem to be a difficult, strange, and paradoxical word coming from one named as the Messiah, Jesus insisted that this was nothing to be ashamed of – those who were not happy with these things would find themselves struggling all the more in the days to come.

Taking up the cross is a difficult challenge. We can’t just put on a piece of jewelry or place a beautiful adornment in our sanctuary to receive its benefits, and we want to avoid the suffering and pain that we know, deep down, that it brings. We don’t want to give up the things of this world, and we want to stay in control at all costs. But taking up the cross requires letting go of all those things. We also have some good theological justifications developed over the centuries that give us pause, too, as we consider taking up the cross for ourselves. We say that Christ’s suffering was enough for all of us and that no one should have to endure that kind of suffering anymore. We Protestants intentionally have an empty cross rather than a crucifix to remind us that Jesus’ suffering there was not the end of the story. And we say that there is no reason to keep crucifying Christ over and over again in our actions or practices of faith.

So I think we’re incredibly good at avoiding this command to “take up our cross” for practical, personal, and theological reasons, yet Jesus’ words still ring in our ears: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Jesus challenges us to somehow balance our conviction that he suffered enough for all of us with his command to take up our cross and follow him, to walk the way of uncertainty, pain, and death, to give up the things of this world for the sake of something beyond ourselves, and to trust that God will not only make something greater of our pain but has already walked that way before us and walks that way alongside us too.

This suffering is quite likely something more than giving up chocolate or cigarettes or Facebook for forty days. It is quite different from the awful things we have seen in the aftermath of tornadoes in our nation in recent days, for these things are not suffering sent by God to test us or punishment doled out for some sin we have committed. And the suffering Jesus calls us to face as we take up our cross is far less than putting ourselves out there to be killed as he did.

Instead, I think this suffering is much more like reorienting our lives toward the way God wants things to be, shifting everything we say and do into a mode of self-giving love, adjusting our hearts to give up everything we have to make room for all that we can still receive, walking our own road to the cross not for the benefits we will find there but because we and all the world will be better for taking that journey.

All this is the challenge of Lent – to somehow find our way through this difficult path, to remember and respond to Jesus’ challenge to deny ourselves and take up the cross and follow him, to sort out what we must give up so that we can take up this new way, and to always keep in mind that the sufferings of these days are not the end of the journey, for there is even greater glory ahead.

May God give us the strength we need to walk this journey together and with Jesus, so that the suffering we share along the way of the cross with one another and with Jesus will bear joyous fruit with the dawn of Easter Day.

Thanks be to God.
Amen.