Archives for February 2013

Promises, Promises

February 24, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18 for the Second Sunday in Lent
preached on February 24, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Last Sunday was the first Sunday in Lent—but perhaps more importantly to some people, it was the last night of the third season of the British drama Downton Abbey. For those of you who don’t know the show, it tells the story of the Crawley family, great lords and ladies of the English countryside, all centered around their beautiful estate, Downton Abbey. The story begins with the sinking of the Titanic—and with it the closest heirs for the Crawley family fortune, title, and home. In those days, none of Robert Crawley’s three daughters could inherit the estate, so the family soon learned that the home and title would be passed on to a middle-class lawyer from Manchester. I won’t give away any more of the plot, but the plight of the Crawleys seems much like that faced by Abram in our reading from Genesis today.

Abram, too, was lacking a direct heir—but he and his wife Sarai had no daughters or sons, and his heir was set to be a slave born in his house. By the time of our story today, God had offered him two promises of something more that he already was. First, God told the childless Abram:

I will make of you a great nation.

Then later, God promised Abram,

All the land that you see I will give to you and your offspring forever.

These first two times, Abram believed God right away and followed God’s instructions. Still, though, he was childless. God again came to him with words of promise.

Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.

But after all that he had been through, after two promises that seemed no closer to reality after all this time, after confrontations with kings and rulers in the land that God had supposedly given to him, Abram was much more skeptical:

O Lord God, what will you give me,
for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?
You have given me no offspring,
and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir.

As the Dowager Countess of Downton Abbey might say, at least it wasn’t going to be a solicitor from Manchester!

Abram’s frustration made sense. He had done everything that God had asked of him. He had left his home and his family to wander around the desert, following God’s promise of land and offspring. All he had to show for it was a still-barren wife, some unpleasant encounters with rulers who didn’t welcome an outsider’s claims on their land, and one brief blessing from Melchizedek, a priest of “God Most High” of ancient Canaan.

After Abram voiced his frustration with God’s timetable for fulfilling these promises, God didn’t leave him out in the cold. Instead, God took him outside and told him,

Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.
So shall your descendants be.

God didn’t offer him any new sort of word, and Abram didn’t have any sort of grand epiphany. Yet when God addressed Abram’s frustrations directly, something shifted. Abram finally understood the nature of this promise, and God finally got through to Abram. As scholar Walter Brueggemann puts it:

The new promise for his life is not any expectation of flesh and blood. Rather, [Abram] has come to rely on the promise speaker. He has now permitted God to be not a hypothesis about the future, but the voice around which his life is organized… He did not move from protest to confession by knowledge or by persuasion but by the power of God who reveals and causes [this] revelation to be accepted. The new pilgrimage of [Abram] is not grounded in the old flesh of [his wife Sarai] nor the tired bones of [Abram], but in the disclosing word of God. (Genesis, Interpretation Commentary Series, p. 144, 145)

In this third promise, then, God recognizes how Abram is changing in response to all these promises, so God names Abram as pleasing in God’s sight.

Even with this critical turning point, this is not the end of this moment of God’s promise with Abram. God again promised land to Abram, and Abram again asked for a simple sign to make everything clear. Once again God responded with honesty and hope, telling Abram in the verses we skipped in our reading that his descendants would face trials amidst their rejoicing, while still assuring him that his descendants would possess a great land stretching across much of today’s Middle East.

These extravagant promises and Abram’s trusting response set the stage for the rest of the incredible story of God’s people that unfolds throughout the Old Testament into the life of Jesus and all the way into the church today. While these promises may seem to be many thousands of miles and many millennia away from us—even more distant than the world of Downton Abbey!—they are actually still pretty important today. This promise of land to Abram and his descendants has shaped millennia of conflict over the land now known as the Holy Land to three religious traditions. The difficulty of many couples to have children is an unspoken challenge for many families in this day and age, even if we long emphasize a male heir quite as much as Abram or the Crawley family did. And we Christians often rightly wonder how these promises first given to Abram make sense in our own tradition. So as we approach these words of promise, we carry all this history and hope with us—even as we too long for a new way of promise and new life.

Ultimately, though, God’s promises to Abram were less about the promises themselves but about the new life that promises can bring. Abram took up a new path in embracing these promises, not in doing something good and right and true but in embracing God’s call to a new and different way of life that affirmed that he was a righteous, beloved child of God and invited him to trust God’s future above anything that might have made him question the uncertainty around him. When Abram trusted God and gave up his confidence in and reliance on his own way, he stepped fully into the possibility of what we Christians have later named as the new creation, where we too give up control and trust that God will do something new and better and greater in us and through us and even sometimes in spite of us.

Ultimately, then, these promises are for us too—not the explicit promise of land and descendants but rather the promise of new life where we are beloved children of God and can trust that God will journey with us all along the way. Lent is as good a time as any to trust God’s promises so fully, so deeply, that we emerge as God’s new people, loving as God loves, trusting as God trusts, and living in faith as God lives in faith. Lent is a good time to look back on these promises anew, to ask good questions of God, to look for better signs and seals of these promises in our lives and our world, so that our faith might be deepened and we might, with Abram, have the depth of our faith reaffirmed by none less than God. It is a good time to wonder what these promises look like in our own time and place, to think together about what it means, as Walter Brueggemann again puts it, “to trust God’s future and to live assured of that future even in the deathly present.”

Next week, we will begin a series of conversations about just that as we welcome our congregational consultant Bill Weisenbach to preach and give us an overview of the assessment and discernment process that is before us in the next few months. So this Lent is a good time to work on letting go of the things that keep us from the way of life that God intends, to release the ties that keep us bound to the past, to trust the promises of God for the future, and to listen for the new word of promise for today and tomorrow and beyond so that we can be open to the new way that is emerging before us.

So as we walk these Lenten days together, as we remember all the promises of God to Abram and sort out the promises of God for our own day and time, may we know the presence of God with us on this journey and keep walking in faith, hope, and love until all things—even us!—are made new. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

Temptation for Today

February 17, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 4:1-13 for the First Sunday in Lent
preached on February 17, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

It’s time again for Lent—that forty-day period when we are supposed to eat fish on Fridays, give up chocolate, alcohol, or Facebook, and generally reflect on how we are sinful and miserable human beings. As with so many things, we can blame it all on Jesus—he was the first, after all, to take a forty-day journey in the wilderness, and his story of temptation is clearly what Lent is all about, right? Since he suffered for forty days, we should too!

But I think our text from Luke this morning suggests that our Lenten journey should look a little different from Jesus’ sojourn in the wilderness. Jesus had just been baptized in the Jordan River, and he went to the wilderness led by the Spirit and yet to be tempted by the devil. His vision of temptation along the way was not of beef or chicken on Fridays, rich candy bars, wine and beer, or social networking sites—no, these temptations rattled at the core of his humanity.

First, after forty days without food, the devil suggested to the famished Jesus, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” Jesus had spent his entire time in the wilderness fasting completely, eating nothing—far more than just giving up chocolate or limiting ourselves to fish on Fridays during Lent! Giving up things that aren’t all that good for us to begin with for the 40 days of Lent isn’t really what this is all about! Although the devil tried to take advantage of Jesus’ hunger, Jesus didn’t take the bait. “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’”

But for Jesus, this was about more than food, and so it should be for us. We are not what we eat—no, we can be better measured by what we consume from the world around us, by the people who influence us, by the natural resources we use and abuse, by the relationships that enrich our lives, and by the faith that sustains us as we go along the journey together. Jesus knew this, and so he somehow battled through his hunger to avoid this real temptation upon him to fill himself with something that would not truly satisfy him.

But the devil was not done with Jesus. He next took Jesus on a quick but complete tour of the kingdoms of the world and offered them to him: “I will give their glory and all this authority to you, for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” Now Jesus had to be outraged right away—he surely knew that all the world belongs to God, and the devil had no authority whatsoever to give these kingdoms to anyone, especially Jesus, who already had such authority! But this temptation was about more than the power itself—this was about how to use and abuse that power, about shifting allegiance to a different way of thinking and working in the world and misusing the gifts of power in our lives. Jesus didn’t fall for the devil’s tricks, though. Again, he responded with words from scripture: “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’” Jesus would not give in so easily to the powers of evil in the world in order to gain some temporary power and glory, for his call was to challenge this evil and make it clear that the greatest power comes in weakness and the greatest glory from giving it all away.

While this temptation may not seem to be something of our world—surely the devil doesn’t dangle power and honor and glory before us all the time!—all too often we do look to take the easy way to power and glory. We look for the quickest path to achieve our goals, even if it means cutting some corners or hurting some people along the way. We are constantly tempted to bow to powers other than God to get what we want. And we even seek to build up honor and glory for ourselves, focusing on establishing ourselves and our ways and ideas with power and privilege rather than seeking to join in what God is doing around us.

But Jesus’ third temptation takes all this testing to a new level for Jesus and for us. The devil suggested that Jesus should throw himself down off the pinnacle of the temple and see what would happen. He even quoted a bit of the psalm that preceded our gospel reading this morning:

He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you…
On their hands they will bear you up,
so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.

As the devil saw it, if these promises are so real and good and important, if God really is present, Jesus should have checked out it just to be sure, and all would be well. But Jesus knew otherwise. He too could quote the words of Psalm 91, but he didn’t need to test them at that moment in order to trust them. As Bruce Benson puts it in a brief reflection on this temptation (from the February 21, 2010, edition of Sing for Joy), Jesus was tempted more than anything “to forget that trusting God with one’s life is not the same thing as being reckless with one’s life, that throwing himself off a high wall would be an act of foolishness and not of faith.” And so Jesus responded to this temptation to misuse scripture with another quote from scripture: “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

Now we surely don’t put God to the test! We surely don’t make little deals with God that if only such-and-so will happen, we will be more faithful or stop doing something we shouldn’t be doing anyway. We surely don’t ask God to prove God’s goodness before trusting God in our lives. We surely don’t get frustrated and angry when God doesn’t answer our prayers as we wish and so fails our test. But you know it is true—so often we do exactly this. We expect God to respond to our prayers on our timetable. We suggest that the bad things that happen in our world or in our lives are simply part of “God’s plan” and so will just be okay if we can only suffer through the immediate pain and move on in life. And we even try to “prove” what we believe by twisting around events around us instead of trusting that God is really at work beyond our knowledge and comprehension.

The level of faith and confidence in God’s presence that Jesus demonstrated in response to this temptation—and all these temptations—is something that will constantly evade us. Unlike Jesus, we will always fall short in responding to the real temptations around us. We will never be sustained completely by the right things, and we will always be hungry for something more. We will never be able to completely give up our thirst for power and trust that God’s power is enough for us. And we will always be looking for better proof that God is at work in our lives and our world.

Yet Jesus struggled with these same things. These temptations during those forty days in the wilderness and countless other times during Jesus’ life remind us that God knows the depth of the trials and temptations that we face. And just as he overcame those temptations, we can find a new and different way through them, slowly but surely, day by day, not because we become better people but because God’s new life in Jesus Christ takes deeper and fuller root in us and in our world each and every day. Lent is the gift of time to do just that—to clean out our closets of the dusty old things that get in the way of all that can be new, to cultivate new practices that help us to set aside faith in our own ways and instead trust God’s grace, to make our way through the temptations of our world trusting the presence of God all along the way.

So may we find God amidst all that we give up and all that we take up in these Lenten days so that we can walk the road of uncertainty and temptation with confidence as we seek the way to new life along the road of the cross and look for the hope of the resurrection in our midst through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Glimpses of Glory

February 10, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 9:28-36 for Transfiguration
preached on February 10, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Please raise your hand (or write in the comments!) if you have used the word “transfiguration” at all outside the church in the last year. I didn’t think there would be many of you! Transfiguration is one of those very “churchy” words that just don’t mean much unless you’re well-connected to the life of the church. This strange day, Transfiguration, that comes up every year on the Sunday before Lent points us to a story told in all three of the synoptic gospels, where Jesus and several of his disciples go up on a mountain for an incredible spiritual encounter as Jesus meets up with Moses and Elijah and his face and clothes shine brightly.

Transfiguration is just not something we encounter every day. We just don’t see faces and clothes shining brightly or things almost magically changing before our very eyes. This is the stuff of fairy tales, not of real life. Now I think we actually have seen some transfiguration around us over the past couple days as our landscape took on a new and glorious brightness as things shifted from the general winter grays on Thursday to the dreariness of rain and snow on Friday and finally to the beauty and wonder of a bright snowy landscape yesterday and today. But we all know that this glory is only temporary. Already the snow is a little dirty and gray, and by Tuesday much of what is left will be nearly black, leaving us to wish for spring all the more.

The Transfiguration of Jesus parallels these patterns of snow quite well, I think—it gives us a beautiful glimpse of glory before we are forced back into the mundane of the everyday even as we long for something more. The story gets at so many of the recurring images that we have of Jesus and the disciples. Here we see the strange human person of Jesus who suddenly has divine power and presence. We see a connection to the life and history of the people of Israel as Moses and Elijah appear. We see three disciples along for the ride who want to “get it” so badly that they completely miss the point of what is happening. And we even hear another mysterious voice from the cloud reminding everyone of who this Jesus is.

The story is simple but compelling. Luke tells us that Jesus took three of his disciples up on the mountain with him to pray. Suddenly, as he was praying, his appearance changed. His face looked different, and his clothes turned a dazzling white. If all that wasn’t enough, two other figures appeared on the mountaintop and started talking to Jesus. They were talking about his departure and his journey to Jerusalem, and it soon became clear to the disciples that it was Moses and Elijah with him. Peter, James, and John were very tired, but somehow they stayed awake to witness all of this. As the conversation came to an end and Moses and Elijah were leaving, Peter stopped them and suggested that they should find a way to extend this moment. He even was willing to make it happen—he’d build three dwellings so that they could all stay as long as they wanted! But then a cloud appeared around them, and a voice spoke up: “This is my son, my Chosen; listen to him!” After the voice, Moses and Elijah were gone, and the disciples were alone with Jesus. When they went down from the mountain, they were speechless as they waited for what was next.

Like so many of the stories of Jesus’ power and glory from the gospels, I for one am left somewhat empty afterwards, wondering what all this means. We can pretty easily sort out what Jesus teachings mean even if we have to reinterpret them for today, and the crucifixion and resurrection stories have centuries of interpretation that give them an important role in our life of faith. We can even assign some meaning pretty easily to moments of transition in Jesus’ life, like his birth or his baptism.

But wonders and signs are much more difficult. Jesus’ miracles, for one, don’t always make sense to our ears that normally hear of the wonders of modern medicine. And while when Jesus casts out demons I recognize that there is some great power being shown in the person of Jesus, but I wonder what we ought to do today when we don’t recognize demonic activity in the same way or share this same power. And the Transfiguration leaves me scratching my head and wondering what this story might possibly inspire for us today. It doesn’t seem to be much more than a wonderful moment when we can discover the mystery of God’s presence among us.

Just as a snowstorm doesn’t carry a lot of meaning in our lives unless the effects go on for weeks or months, the Transfiguration too seems like a relatively forgettable moment in the life of Jesus, just another moment when we see Jesus’ power and glory revealed— and the disciples continuing their usual bungling and fumbling that seems to show up whenever they are faced with the reality of who Jesus is. To most people outside the church, people who see the Bible as a book of stories and not an authority on faith and life, people who are even more confused than I am about Jesus’ miracles and healings and casting out of demons, stories like the Transfiguration are mythical at best and just plain crazy at worst.

But there is something more going on here for us. Even if we don’t fully understand this strange moment, this glimpse of the glory of Jesus can help us to see him more clearly in his time and in ours. Everything that Jesus has done up to this point in Luke’s gospel—the preaching, teaching, and healing that has marked his ministry around Galilee—looks different now that Jesus has shone with this strange glorious light. He is not just a faith healer or an inspired teacher—he is one who has standing and status that comes from beyond himself and is more fully revealed little by little, with each new encounter.

But this glimpse of Jesus’ glory doesn’t just end here on the mountaintop. As his life and ministry continues, Jesus keeps showing his strange and wonderful way to everyone he meets. In his death, it is opened anew once again as we see that even God’s holiness is open to the depths of human pain, suffering, and sin. And most of all, in the resurrection, we see the greatest exposition of this glory as we learn that God’s power and glory extend over anything and everything—even death.

But the real gift of the glory of God revealed in Jesus’ Transfiguration atop that mountain comes as it shows up in our own time. There are countless ways to get a glimpse of this glory in our world. We can see it around us in the wonder of nature, in the beauty of a morning snowfall, in the joy of children, in so many things in our lives. But these glimpses of glory are exactly that: glimpses. They do not show us the full wonder, power, and love of God in our midst. We can’t see everything that we need to know about God just from opening our eyes to see a beautiful snowfall or vista or even by experiencing the wonder of relationship with our fellow human beings.

Yet when we gather as the community of faith, we get a deeper glimpse of that glory than we can have on our own. When we gather as the people of God, our united vision helps us to see things that we might have missed on our own. When we sing songs of praise or offer words of prayer and thanksgiving, we get a closer look at the new world that we also glimpse in the Transfiguration. When we come together to fight for justice, to intervene in the pervasive yet quiet hunger in our community, to step up and say that the poor will not be forgotten anymore, we start shining the glory of God out into our world all the more. And when we gather at this table, we gain not only a glimpse of the glory of the resurrected Christ but also some food for the journey so that we might live out this glory all the more.

So today, as we remember this great glimpse of glory on the mountaintop, as we gather here at this table hoping for our own glimpse of Jesus’ wonder and love, may we glimpse the full glory of God in Jesus Christ in our worship and our sharing so that we might go forth to shine his glory out into our world brighter than even a sunny post-snow day throughout these wintery, Lenten days and beyond until we shine brightly in the glory of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Lord, come quickly! Amen.

Love: The Way of Life

February 3, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on 1 Corinthians 13:1-13 for the Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
preached on February 3, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

No, you have not stumbled into a wedding this morning, but you wouldn’t know that from our scripture reading this morning! As a pastor, I’ve been a part of seven weddings, and four of them included some portion of these words from First Corinthians—and I think that is actually well below average! These beautiful words from Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth have become common descriptions of the kind of love that two people wish to share with each other in married life, but they actually come out of a very different context.

That original church in Corinth, you see, was more like a nasty and angry divorce court than a love-filled wedding day! They knew how to fight with each other very well and divided themselves on nearly every imaginable line. The rich people refused to sit with the poor people. Those of Jewish background refused to eat dinner with those who had been Gentiles. Members of the church took their disputes with one another to the civil courts rather than dealing with them among the people of the church. And some people tried to claim that their spiritual gifts were better than everyone else’s—and so they took advantage of the whole community in the process. In short, it was a huge mess—but into this mess Paul spoke these beautiful words about love.

These thirteen verses of the thirteen chapter of 1 Corinthians divide neatly into three parts that lift up the centrality of love, the definition of love, and the endurance of love. First, Paul suggests that love has to be a part of anything and everything that we do in the church. All the different spiritual gifts that come to us mean nothing unless they exhibit love in the end. Speaking in tongues, offering prophetic words, opening the mysteries of life, having faith, even giving up all our possessions—all these wonderful gifts actually gain their meaning only when they are accompanied by love. Without love, they are just empty acts, but with love, they take on new and deeper meaning to be enactments of something more.

But what is this something more? What is love anyway? There are plenty of ways to think about love in the world—one thesaurus suggests six different possible uses for the noun and two for the verb, and this doesn’t even count when “love” is used in tennis to note a score of zero! In the Greek of the New Testament, there are even four different words that get translated to our single English word “love.” So for his second point about love, Paul offers a definition of what it means for the life of faith. This love is not about sexual attraction, life with a spouse, or even familial bonds. No—according to Paul, love is a way of life. His beautiful words in our reading say it so well, I think:

Love is patient;
love is kind;
love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.

It does not insist on its own way;
it is not irritable or resentful;
it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.

It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

This way of life demands something more than just a basic attraction or even a lifelong commitment. At its core, it honors the inherent goodness and beauty of all members of a community and recognizes the importance of staying in relationship even when stress and strain would make it seem better to act otherwise. This way of life doesn’t seek something good for the one trying to live it but instead emphasizes the well-being and needs of others. And this way of life can handle anything that comes its way, for it is resilient, hopeful, joyful, and enduring, since it comes not from within any human being but from God.

Finally, Paul insists that love will never end. This is natural for something that finds its beginning in God, but it is no less important to remember. Plenty of other things will come to an end. So much of who we are and what we do will be different when it is completed. We grow up and change in time, and we will see differently, act differently, and live differently than we do now at some point. But love will stick around—in fact, it will only grow deeper. Because love never ends, we can always learn more about it. We can always sort out more ways for love to sink into our lives and our everyday living. And because love never ends, we can trust that we should put all our energy and effort into pursuing this way of life each and every day.

When we live out love, you see, we do our best to emulate and imitate God, for the ultimate exposition of love in the world is from God. One of the most ancient songs of the church is a beautiful and simple phrase in Latin:

Ubi caritas et amor, deus ibi est.
Where charity and love are, God is there.

These words remind us of this so well, even though Paul never explicitly mentions God in this text. I can’t even begin to imagine how we might ever live out this love in our lives with others if we didn’t have it first from God.

When we live out this love, when we take on this way of life that has the good of others at heart, we mirror what we have seen as we have walked with God. We embody God’s way of love with us as we live with one another, when we show care and concern for the fullness of life, when we prioritize relationships over rules and regulations, when we emphasize grace, mercy, and kindness even as we lift up what has gone wrong, and when we embody healthy enduring love as our human relationships come to natural ends. We embody God’s way of love with us as we love ourselves, when we remember that we are beloved children of God even when we don’t necessarily see it, when we have patience with ourselves when we go wrong, and when we challenge ourselves to always pursue this more excellent way of love. And we embody God’s way of love with us as we reach out into the world, when we offer words of comfort and consolation and challenge, not condemnation, when we share with others simply because we love them, not for any benefit of our own, and when we place the gift of love at the center of everything that we do.

Thankfully I don’t think we here at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone face anything like the situation in Corinth that brought Paul to write these words. I don’t say much about love because I think we have a pretty good grasp on it. We do not sit ready to attack each other with our words or actions, nor do we let ourselves be driven apart by our different backgrounds and ways of life. Even when we disagree with one another, we do so with great respect and care and concern. But today it feels right to be reminded of these words, to remember why we live together as we do, to recenter our life together in this way of love as we place our trust in God’s love and wonder where the days ahead will lead us.

And ultimately we witness and embody this love at its greatest at this table, at this place where Paul called out the Corinthians the most for their bickering and fighting and denying hospitality, at this gathering where we come together with the saints of all the ages—even those from Corinth!—to share a meal with Jesus himself as host. You see, it is at this great feast where we see love in its fullest form—love that is not afraid to face death, love that triumphs over even the worst death has to offer, love that ultimately will join all creation in an unending song of praise, gathered at a feast of love for all the ages.

So today and always, may this love—love that is patient and kind, not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude; love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things—may this love sustain us for our journey, guide our work and life with one another, and inspire us for our life in the world, today and always. Amen.