Archives for May 2012

Good for Nothing, Good for Something

May 27, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon on Ezekiel 37:1-14 for Pentecost Sunday
preached on May 27, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

What do you do with dry bones? There seems to be so little purpose in them – while living bones are an integral part of our human bodies, giving shape and form to our being and holding us up so that we are more than just a pile of muscle and skin on the ground, dry bones are no good to anyone. They just sit there, waiting for their end to come, decaying into nothingness, taking what that which was once very much alive and making it very clearly and very permanently dead. Dry bones are good for nothing.

So when Ezekiel found himself in a valley of dry bones, there was not much more to do than to listen to what God was up to. There weren’t just a few bones there, there were bones all around – and the bones weren’t just dry, they were very dry. But God was up to something with these bones. “Mortal, can these bones live?” God asked Ezekiel. Ezekiel couldn’t have been inspired by this question. Of course these bones couldn’t live! These were just pieces of deadness, dry bones in a dry valley decaying into nothingness, just waiting for the day when they would simply disappear. After all, dry bones are good for nothing.

Sometimes I feel like I’m surrounded by dry bones – the now-lifeless pieces of things that once felt very much alive, the remnant of a past that seems so far away, the scattered and disconnected pieces of life that just don’t seem to fit together when you need them to actually make sense for once. I feel like we’ve been there together, too, wandering around that valley of dry bones – trying to sort out how even the best pieces of who we are as a community of faith sometimes just don’t fit together as well as we’d like, longing for some new life to emerge in our midst and set aside the worn-out ways of the past and the deep frustrations of the present, wondering where God is in the midst of this dark valley and all these dry bones. Sure, the building blocks of life may be out here in this valley, but it sure seems like something is missing, and there is no clear way to find it. You see, dry bones are good for nothing.

But God asked Ezekiel, “Mortal, can these bones live?” and Ezekiel couldn’t say no to God, right? So he suppressed his snarky attitude and questioning spirit and responded to God’s question with the best possible human answer in a moment like this: “O Lord God, you know.” Yes, God did know. God was up to something with these bones. So God instructed Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones, to call out to them so that they would live:

O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.

Well, maybe dry bones are good for something?

What Ezekiel saw proved that God was right. When he offered God’s words to the bones, there was a great rattling sound, the noise of death emerging into something new, a cacophony of sound in that dry, desolate, once-silent valley as “the bones came together, bone to its bone.” But the wonder of the moment didn’t stop there. Suddenly the bones were more than bones – they took on tendons and ligaments and muscles and flesh and skin. Yet something was missing. These bodies were standing still, not moving, not breathing, not fully alive, waiting for something more to happen. The bones may have become something more – the dry bones were good for something! – but something was still missing.

I’m in the midst of one of those strange moments in life where everything seems to be coming together just like those dry bones out in the valley. After what seems like years of waiting and planning and preparing, my dry bones seem to be coming together. This week, I’m moving into a new apartment. Within the next month, hopefully, I’ll be moving into a new office. In just five weeks, I’ll be leaving on a two-month sabbatical. And dry bones seem to be coming together in our church life, too. Over a year of work in preparing to sell the manse will hopefully come to an end sometime in July. My sabbatical time, our new office, and my new housing arrangement are the fruits of much common labor over the past year. And after many years of wondering about the presence of children in our life together, we will be talking with our parents in a couple weeks about how to expand our programs with them because there is something happening here. It feels like so many things are coming together, like something new and different might be happening – but because we’re still on this side of it, because the breath of the Spirit is still blowing life into them, there’s still something missing. Even our dry bones are good for something – but God is up to something more.

God had one more word for Ezekiel to prophesy in the valley of dry bones:

Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.

The breath came upon them as God instructed, and there was new life in the whole multitude of the dry bones of the valley. They began to live and walk and breathe and move because God gave them new life. They took inspiration from the wind of the Spirit, just as the early church was energized and empowered by their experiences on the day of Pentecost. Those dry bones were good for something after all.

So on this day of Pentecost, when we remember the wonderful wind of the Holy Spirit blowing among the disciples and the pilgrims gathered in Jerusalem after Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension, when we think of all the times and places and ways that the Spirit has shaped and formed and led and moved and even drug our church and our world into being more like what God intends for us, and when we celebrate the continued renewal of the Spirit among us now, on this day of Pentecost we can hope and pray that our dry bones will be good for something, too, by the power of that same Holy Spirit.

The work we are doing, the plans we have made, even the plans God still has for us will come into being as the Spirit breathes on us. Just as Ezekiel saw the bones coming together in that valley, so the bones of our lives and our world will come together as we trust God to lead us in these days. Just as the breath of God blew new life into those lifeless bodies in the valley of dry bones, God can and will blow new life into us. And just as Jesus Christ rose to new life on that resurrection morning, so we too can be made new by the power of God working in us and through us and even in spite of us.

So on this Pentecost day, we remember and we pray for the coming of the Holy Spirit once again, to fully bring the pieces together and to make new life real and whole and complete as the Spirit breathes life upon us once again to make us the good and faithful people God intends for us to be. The dry bones that were good for nothing will be good for something by the power of the Holy Spirit. May it be so for us and our church and our world.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s… Jesus?

May 20, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon on Acts 1:1-11 and Ephesians 1:15-23
preached on Ascension Sunday, May 20, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

There are plenty of things up in the air these days, but Jesus is the last thing you expect to see when you look up. Flying in general today is incredibly simpler than it was 100 years ago. Even though the space shuttle never quite worked out to make going into space as common as some had hoped, it’s still incredibly easy to go up. There are hundreds if not thousands of flights out of our city every day. When the winds and the location are right, you can take a more leisurely hot-air balloon flight across the countryside. And if you have enough money, these days you can reserve a spot on a brief flight to the edge of space. When we look up, you never quite know what it is you will see. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Or could it be Jesus??

In biblical times, it might have actually been Jesus, according to our readings today from Acts and Ephesians. Today we’re celebrating the great Christian feast of the Ascension, so we are rightly looking upward to think about how Jesus ascended into heaven forty days after his resurrection from the dead. The book of Acts starts out with this important story in our reading this morning of how Jesus disappeared from the disciples’ sight by rising into heaven. After his resurrection, he had been teaching them about the coming kingdom of God and giving them instructions for what to do when he left them, and they kept asking him questions about when God would restore Israel to its former glory. He responded with a reminder that no one could know about the restoration of Israel, but more importantly, he told them to be ready to receive power from the Holy Spirit so that they could be his witnesses in Israel and beyond. Then, as they were talking with him, he was lifted up into the sky, and a cloud took him out of their sight. Was it a bird? Was it a plane? No, it really was Jesus!

The wonder of all this is lost in our days when we find it so much easier to become airborne. The disciples were reasonably astonished at what they were seeing – human flight was not something any of them had seen before! The air was the exclusive domain of birds, insects, and other flying things, and Jesus needed to be down here with them. Gradually, though, after Jesus rose up into the air, this event began to take on great meaning for the disciples. They took the words of the two men who suddenly appeared with them seriously and stopped staring idly into the sky. They began to do as Jesus had told them and expected to see him return just as he had left. They got ready to welcome the promised Spirit to be with them in the days ahead.

By the time the letter to the Ephesians was composed some thirty or forty years later, the Ascension had taken on new and incredible meaning for those who followed Jesus. As this letter opens, we get a glimpse of how the early church understood this revelation of God’s power in Jesus’ ascension. The writer here offers his prayers for the Ephesians so that they might know the hope that emerges from Christ, the riches that he shares with all the saints, and the “immeasurable greatness of his power.” This power comes from God and was put to work first in Christ’s resurrection and then in his ascension and exaltation to the heavenly places. His rise into glory is above all earthly rulers, power, authority, and dominion; his name is above every other name for all time; and he is head over all things for the church and the world. It is clear, then, that the ascension seals the deal for the followers of Jesus so that we can know the fullness of his power and glory and honor and hope, now and always. That thing up in the sky is not a bird or a plane but Jesus, ascending to reign and rule in all power, glory, honor, wisdom, and joy, now and forever.

I for one think the Ascension of Jesus gets short shrift in our world today. While our opening hymn celebrating the ascension dates back to the seventh century, in our own time, about the only way you’d know that this past Thursday was a church holy day is that alternate side parking rules were suspended for the day! We’ve become so consumed with the commercialism of Christmas and Easter that we rarely note these lesser feasts of our church calendar where we remember these important biblical events and in this case celebrate the continuing reign of Jesus Christ as Lord of all creation. But even more than all this, I think we consciously or unconsciously avoid this day of celebration at least in part because we resist the real implications of these great words. What would it mean for us to live like Jesus Christ is Lord of heaven and earth each and every day? How would life be different if we took the Ascension claims of God’s power and reign more seriously?

I think there are several important ways that we can respond faithfully to the gift and challenge of the Ascension in this time when its meaning is less clear and anyone anywhere can go up for the right price. In our society that resists accountability at all costs, the Ascension reminds us that we always remain accountable to the one who died and rose and ascended into heaven to reign. In our world where the almighty dollar and yen and yuan and Euro is at the center of nearly everything, the Ascension reminds us that God’s power and dominion extend to every corner of our lives and call us to faithful stewardship of everything that we have and just treatment of those who are in need. In our lives where we think we are in control and can answer to no one but ourselves, the Ascension shows us that Christ reigns over us with justice, grace, and mercy even amidst our resistance. And in the moments when we question God’s care and concern for us, whether in matters of the moment or of eternity, the Ascension gives us hope and confidence that we will share with Jesus the joy of resurrection life.

Lest we get confused about the things that go up or forget about this seemingly lesser feast day, the Ascension still stands before us, year after year, forty days after Easter, as we await the coming of the Holy Spirit. We can try to ignore it, but Jesus still reigns and calls us to recognize him and follow him, not so much in his journey to power but in his journey to greater love for ourselves, for one another, and for all creation.

So may we trust the good news of this special day, not so much wondering if we are seeing a bird or a plane or Jesus rising up before us – because we know that it is Jesus! – but always confident that Jesus ascends into heaven to go before us to reign in power, glory, mercy, justice, grace, and peace, so that we might know the fullness of God’s power in Jesus Christ our Lord until he comes again. Lord, come quickly!! Alleluia! Amen.

Love All Around

May 13, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon on John 15:9-17 for the Sixth Sunday of Easter
preached on May 13, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Love is all around us these days. We’ve heard lots about love in the news this week, with much conversation about same-gender marriage first from North Carolina and then from our president. People of faith disagree strongly on these matters, and I’m not going to wade into the conversation today! We’re talking about love a whole lot these days, but I’m not sure that the conversation is all that productive. We seem to focus so much on who is allowed to have their love recognized and never talk about what love really is and how we can best live it out.

In our reading this morning from the gospel according to John, Jesus talks at length about what love is and how best we can live it out, and throughout the gospels, he seems far more concerned about these things than about any restrictions on whose love should be recognized by the church or state. So Jesus begins here by telling us a little more about what love is. As is often the case in John, though, he isn’t particularly direct about it – he speaks less in words and more in comparisons. He points us to his own way of life: “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.” He calls us to keep his commandments and so remain in his love. And he invites us to allow joy to be a byproduct of this kind of love, suggesting that when love is clear and real, his joy and our joy will be complete.

While this joy may be complete with love, Jesus is not yet done describing love until he can help us understand a bit more about how to live it out. In the second half of our text today, even as he continues to define and describe love, Jesus talks more about what happens when this love gets lived out. First, this love gets shared. Just as Jesus loved us, we love one another, and so this sharing continues. But simple sharing is not enough – this love is best lived out when it gives up everything for the sake of the other. And things change when this love gets lived out. We speak to each other differently. We stop viewing each other as servants or masters, and we treat one another equally, without regard for worldly status, because the status we now share with Jesus and one another is that of friends. And most of all, when love is lived out, it is contagious – we bear the fruit of love, and others can’t help but join in!

As this kind of love is set before us and we see more clearly what it is and how we are to live it out, we can start to look around and see countless examples of this kind of love in our lives. On this particular day we are likely to think of those who likely first loved us: our mothers. Mothers are a wonderful embodiment of this kind of love. Since we cannot look directly upon Christ himself, we can look to the love of a mother for her child to help us see more clearly what love is. And when we get confused about how to live out this love, we can look at the wonderful ways that women and men offer motherly care for children of all ages to see how we can live out God’s love for us. The great 14th century English mystic Julian of Norwich recognized this so well:

Our saviour is our true Mother, in whom we are endlessly born and out of whom we shall never come.… We have our being from him, where the foundation of motherhood begins, with all the sweet protection of love which endlessly follows. (Showings, trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh)

The motherly love we celebrate today is not just something offered by those who have brought children into this world – it is embodied first and foremost by Jesus Christ himself and is the beginning of the love that all of us, mothers or motherly or whatever, are called to live out each and every day. So this motherly love gives us an incredible and beautiful vision of what love is and how it can be lived out.

However, the love of a mother for her child is not the only kind of love that can help us see how we are called to live out Jesus’ words from John in our world today. The love that has been taking hold over the last two thousand years in our all-too-human institution of the church can also help us as we live out this love. Now we don’t show love in ordering our church government correctly, in how we own property, in having certain kinds of staff, or even in organizing the right programs or creating beautiful worship. As the church, we embody Jesus’ words of love in our life together as we care for one another and then reach out to care for all the world.

I am grateful that I see this love in a lot of what we do together here. There is a wonderful and gentle spirit in this place that shows how much we love one another and how much we all care about the things that matter to each one of us. We reach out to those in need, most recently gathering school supplies to show a bit of God’s love to children facing disaster or distress, and soon we’ll start gathering canned goods for the Grace Church food pantry on the first Sunday of every month. We teach our own children about God’s love in word and in deed and in action. We offer financial support to embody God’s love in times of crisis and injustice. But most of all, we embody God’s love whenever we gather around this table, the table where we see how Jesus poured out his great love for his disciples, the table where we gather with those we love – and those we struggle to love – to share a great feast, the table where God’s grace is not always clear but is always present, the table where the Spirit invites us into the presence of none less than Christ himself, so that love might be shared and our joy can be complete. When we share this holy meal, we remember and celebrate and embody this great love for us as we are made stronger for the work of love in our lives and in our world.

So may love be all around us today – in our celebrations of this Mother’s Day, in our everyday walk of life in the world, in the great call of life together in the church, in our outreach to this community and our world, and most of all in our gathering at this table – so that we may love one another as Jesus has loved us, now and always. Thanks be to God. Amen.

The Spirit of Something New

May 6, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Easter on Acts 8:26-40
preached on May 6, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

I hope it had been a quiet day for Philip, because the interruption was a pretty big deal. In the midst of his prayers and study in the early days of the apostles’ work in Jerusalem, Philip heard the Holy Spirit calling him to take a little trip on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza. He set out on the journey, not quite sure what he would find, but pretty quickly he came upon a very fancy chariot, clearly belonging to someone who had money and status, and surprisingly he heard what sounded like the words of scripture coming from inside. When he listened more closely, he could hear a man reading familiar words from the prophet Isaiah, and so he gently asked him what was going on. “Do you understand what you are reading?” The occupant of the chariot quickly invited him aboard to talk about the scripture with him.

Along the way, Philip learned a bit more about this man. He served in the court of the queen of Ethiopia and was returning home after worshiping in Jerusalem. More importantly, this man was a eunuch, a servant of the royal court who had been castrated before puberty so that he would be able to serve the royal family without getting into trouble or bed with any of them. He was entrusted by the queen with the entire treasury, and his fine chariot and beautiful clothes made it clear that he was quite well-off.

Philip and the Ethiopian man had more on their minds than their history and status in life. The conversation turned to that scripture that Philip had heard the man reading along the way. The Ethiopian man was clearly no stranger to these texts – he started asking Philip questions, and Philip began offering an interpretation of these ancient texts. Soon the conversation turned to Jesus, and Philip explained the life, death, and resurrection of his friend in light of these older words from the prophet. The Ethiopian man was amazed at what he heard, and his next question for Philip was a little more practical: “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?”

Philip had to be stunned by all this. While the Spirit had led him to this place, to this man, to this conversation, I doubt that he expected anything like this to come of this chance encounter on the road. But once he started thinking about it, there had to be some doubt in Philip’s mind – there was plenty to keep this man from being baptized! First off, the church was centered in Jerusalem. The apostles had made no decisions by this time about how they would expand their message or if it was open in any way to people beyond their new home. And it had to be a concern that this man would be so far away from the rest of the community as he tried to follow Jesus, too. And what about his service to the queen of Ethiopia? How could he be such an important official in her court and also fulfill his responsibilities as a Christian? These were certainly good reasons for Philip not to baptize the Ethiopian man, but I doubt that either of them were really all that compelling in the end.

But then there was the matter of his sexuality. This Ethiopian man was a eunuch, and eunuchs were specifically and explicitly excluded from the life of the covenant people of Israel because something had quite literally been cut off. He was viewed as sexually immoral not because of any action of his own but because someone else thought he would be a valuable servant. This very part of Isaiah that Philip and the man had been reading suggests that eunuchs might be restored to the community of faith, but not everyone in the Jewish community had embraced this change, and some people of the day would still have rejected him because of his castration.

Somehow, though, Philip quickly sorted through all these issues in his head and heard the Spirit speaking: there was nothing to keep him from baptizing this man. So they stopped the chariot and found some water, and Philip baptized the Ethiopian man right then and there. Even though Philip somehow disappeared right away after all this, the Ethiopian man “went on his way rejoicing,” keeping up this new way of life and telling others the story of what he had experienced when the Spirit moved and something new happened to even him.

Now we Christians don’t get invited into many chariots these days to talk about the Bible, and those who take up such an invitation don’t always demonstrate the level of grace and mercy that we see from Philip here. One commentator suggested that a modern-day parallel for this story might be a diplomat “inviting a street preacher to join him in his late model Lexus for a little Bible study,” and even this seems a bit improbable! Philip’s move, though, is a masterpiece of evangelism, if you ask me. Somehow Philip doesn’t keep his faith to himself, but he doesn’t go too far, either. He’s not out randomly knocking on doors or keeping his confidence in God to himself. Instead, he’s listening for the Spirit to call him into the right moment to say the right thing and responding when he hears someone who seems to be interested and receptive to what he might say. And what he says is filled with incredible openness and grace. He welcomes the Ethiopian eunuch into the family of the baptized. He puts no restrictions on God’s love, and he trusts that the Ethiopian man will find a way to live out this newfound path on his own.

Far too many Christians these days would have found a good reason to say no to the Ethiopian man – or at the very least demanded that he somehow change what he could not change before or immediately after welcoming him into the family of faith. All too often we talk a good game that we are open to all people, but then our intentions become clear that we only want people who look like us, act like us, or live like us. Sure, sometimes we’ve been burned along the way by people who didn’t have the best of intentions, so there is a reasonable place for asking good questions of those who seek to join us on our journey, but this story reminds us that the Spirit’s call overpowers all our human boundaries and uncertainties. When the Spirit speaks, we can do nothing but respond in faith, hope, and love, trusting that God’s power to link us to the true vine of Jesus Christ is far greater than anything that we might try to put in the way.

With Philip, we are called to embody this radical, amazing welcome of the Spirit in our life together. We are called to set aside all our practices that separate and exclude so that all might be free to respond to the call of the Spirit. We are called to be the new and resurrected people of God, emerging from the newness that we see first on Easter morn to be marks of the resurrection in our world that needs to know it so very much.

So may our hearts and minds be open to the movement of the Spirit in our midst, so that all might be fully and wholly and completely welcome in the life of faith through Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.