Archives for May 2013

The Path of Wisdom

May 26, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31 for Trinity Sunday
preached on May 26, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Wisdom seems to be a fading gift in our world. In recent years, the volume of knowledge around us has increased exponentially, and we can now quickly Google whatever we want to know from the palm of our hands and have the answer in a matter of moments, no matter where we are.

Yet with all this new information at our fingertips, our ability to process all this knowledge has not increased at quite the same speed. I for one think this is related to the great dearth of wisdom in our world. We just haven’t honed our abilities to sort out all the information that comes our way. Every day, we find new and different options for handling a particular situation and bringing about change, yet we seem to resist it more than ever before, perhaps in large part because we can’t quite process how life might be different if we were think about it differently. Even though there are plenty more people who carry plenty more knowledge around with them, the share of people who possess the wisdom to figure out what to do with that knowledge has not increased quite so quickly.

And yet we hear from Proverbs today:

Does not wisdom call,
and does not understanding raise her voice?

This voice of Woman Wisdom cries out from the hills, shouts from the crossroads, and clamors at the gates of the city for all people to heed her voice. This is good news in these days. We need someone stepping up and crying out, offering us a word of warning and hope when are overwhelmed with uncertain messages. We need a new way through the challenges of today. We need wisdom now more than ever before, so it is good to see her stepping up to offer her voice amidst the crowd.

Woman Wisdom then turns to establish her credentials for this kind of incredible action in the world. She doesn’t seem to exactly and directly be God, but it is clear that she is inseparable from God, perhaps embodying and living out an important part of how God interacts with the world or helping us to connect our lives with God’s ways. She has been around since the very beginning, created by God “at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago.”

Before all the other stuff came along, before everything that makes life complicated started getting in the way, even before creation began and things started coming together, Wisdom was there. Wisdom was there, waiting for the moment to raise her voice, watching for all the things going on in the world, taking it all in so that she could gain understanding to share with us. As everything took shape and God gave the world its form, Wisdom was there, “beside him, like a master worker,” learning about the world and preparing to share her guidance and understanding as the journey continued. She took delight in what God was doing and rejoiced in the depth and breadth and true wonder of all creation.

But where is she now? Where is Wisdom when we are so overwhelmed with information that we have no idea what to do with it all? Where is Wisdom amidst all the pain and sorrow in our world? Just this week we heard of incredible destruction and loss of life after a tornado in Oklahoma, a violent and gruesome murder in broad daylight on the streets of London designed to bring the terror of war closer to home, and the rise of violence against gay men on the streets of Greenwich Village in Manhattan. All this strange news threatens us with what some have termed “compassion fatigue,” for the more we know about the pain and sorrow in our world, the less that we feel we can do about it. Amidst all this, Wisdom seems to be far, far away, silently watching from the wings, not close at hand, not giving us guidance and wisdom for how to live in these strange times.

Yet if we listen closely, I think we can hear Wisdom crying out in these days. If she has been around since the beginning, Wisdom has seen it all before and can help us sort out what to do. If she has been a part of the creation of everything, Wisdom can give us new insight into how we can work to renew and restore it. If she walks and works beside God, Wisdom can help us join in the things that God is doing to transform our creation.

While it is always a comfort to learn that we are not alone as we try to sort out how to live in this world, this is nonetheless a challenging word for us. If we take Wisdom seriously here, we must let go of our search for truth and knowledge and instead take up the path of wisdom. This path of wisdom steps back from the sensationalism of our world, turning off a news cycle that makes everything “breaking news” and chatters incessantly about nothingness rather than recognizing that silence might be the best response to tragedy or that we may have to a wait a bit before we know the real and true consequences of this moment.

This path of wisdom leads us to encounter people right where they are, listening carefully to their stories, sharing their suffering, and acting with them to bring change to their lives and our world. This path of wisdom shows us that knowledge is not everything but rather than knowledge invites us to a new way of life rooted and grounded in wisdom to sustain us and support us and upbuild all of creation. And this path of wisdom gives us opportunities to cry out with Wisdom’s voice “on the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads…, at the entrance of the portals,” to invite others to join us in this way that points to deep peace in our lives and in our world as we set aside the path of anxiety and take up the road of hope.

Wisdom challenges us to put our knowledge and experience together in context so that we can share a new and different way of life and living with our world, not bound by any the expectations of the past or the institutions of the present but unbound to imagine a new and different way, to discern what God is doing and open ourselves to the creative possibilities of God’s voice of wisdom here and now. Ultimately, Wisdom is one of the great gifts of the triune God we celebrate today, a gift that comes from all three persons, initiated by our Divine Parent, lived out in our world in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and fulfilled in power and glory again and again in our lives and in our world by the power of the Holy Spirit. So Wisdom invites us to join in deep and great rejoicing, celebrating the depth and breadth of what God has created, delighting in the wonder of the whole world which God has redeemed, and giving thanks and praise to the one source of all good things, of all wisdom, which sustains every day.

So may wisdom’s path unfold before us, showing us the fullness of God’s gifts, opening us to the abundance of God’s grace, and helping us to rejoice anew in the gifts of our Triune God, now and always. Alleluia! Amen.

Scrambled

May 19, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Genesis 11:1-9 and Acts 2:1-21 for Pentecost
preached on May 19, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

It was quite an accomplishment, really—all the people of the world coming together, working to show off their best architectural and engineering skills, coordinating their labors in new ways to build a great city centered around a single monument, to “make a name for” themselves. As the bricks were made out of mud, as the stones were laid upon stones, the accomplishment became clear—humans could do anything they wanted to do if they put their minds to it. Divine limits meant nothing. The result was stunning—a great city, with a tower reaching high into the sky, showing off the greatest possibilities of human coordination and consultation, making it clear that humans could do anything and God didn’t have to get involved.

But then a slightly jealous God took a closer look at what was going on. The people shared common roots and a common language, and there were few limits on their communication and relationships. God saw this city under construction, the great tower as a monument to human possibility and ingenuity, and most of all their pride at what they had accomplished. God was not happy:

This is only the beginning of what they will do;
nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.

So God took action to preserve God’s role in the order of things. God scrambled their words and confused their language, forcing them to scatter from the city and abandon their great work of human ingenuity and creativity. So the people called the place Babel, a nonsense word signifying confusion and misunderstanding even to this day, for in this place everything that they understood about themselves and one another was scrambled once and for all.

In a world where our human accomplishment goes far beyond the wonder of Babel, where communication even across language barriers is nearly immediate, where we build towers reaching 1776 feet into the sky, where human pride for the world we have created for ourselves reaches far beyond the bounds of a small city in Mesopotamia, the scrambled world of Babel seems deeply distant from our experience. But when we look a little more closely, we know that the scrambledness of Babel is still very much with us. Even though we may be able to talk with those who use a different language, the cultural differences among different peoples still make it difficult to really understand one another. Even though we may be able to build skyscrapers that tower over this vertical city of ours, we can’t manage to relate to one another without resorting to violence and animosity. Even though we may be more mobile than ever before, more communicative than ever before, more a global village than we ever could have imagined, we don’t always recognize the byproducts of our accomplishment in the climate change and overpopulation that ultimately threaten our very existence as the human race.

Now I don’t imagine God looking down at us in quite the same way as we hear in this story of Babel. The sort of direct divine interaction described in this reading from Genesis just hasn’t been sustained over the course of the Bible, let alone in the days since. But I do suspect that there is nonetheless some divine disappointment with the way we have managed to unscramble ourselves since the days of Babel and yet scramble things up all the more.

Amidst all our best attempts to unscramble things for ourselves, the ultimate unscrambling of Babel came by the power of the Holy Spirit on a strange morning in Jerusalem fifty days after the resurrection of Jesus. That first Pentecost day, as the disciples of Jesus gathered to pray, a strange rushing wind blew over them, and divided tongues rested on them, then they began to speak in other languages—just in time to talk about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus with Jews from all around the world who had gathered in Jerusalem for a festival. It was a strange sight—uneducated country folk from Galilee speaking the languages of the nations of the world, sharing a strange story about a teacher who had been condemned for blasphemy, insisting that God was doing amazing new things to unscramble the mess that humanity had made of the world.

Some people seriously wondered what it was all about, but others just assumed that the disciples were drunk. It was only nine o’clock in the morning, though! Peter, for one, insisted that this strange event was God’s unscrambling finally at work, that God was pouring out the Spirit upon all flesh, to bring prophesies, visions, and dreams into the light, to draw attention to God’s presence and work, and to bring people back together in understanding and hope. In a moment when the disciples still didn’t quite understand life without Jesus, when things felt very much scrambled and the future still uncertain, God stepped in to unscramble it all in ways beyond their wildest dreams.

The gift of Pentecost today is that we too can experience God’s gift of understanding that unscrambles our world and our lives. While the languages that have historically divided us can be bridged both through technology and understanding; while the cultural differences that make it difficult to live and work with people who come from different backgrounds can be overcome through careful listening, respectful action, and openness to new ways of thinking and being; while even our great insistence upon the depth and breadth of our human accomplishment can be tempered by new recognition of our limitations and the need to care for the full breadth of creation; we ultimately need the Holy Spirit to step in and act if we are truly to be unscrambled. We need God’s transformative Spirit in our midst to show us how to live together in peace and harmony. We need God’s powerful Spirit to overcome our insistence on our own well-being at the expense of others. And we need God’s renewing Spirit to help us through all the moments of transition that come as we are unscrambled into the new creation that God intends for us.

So on this Pentecost Sunday, as we wait and watch and pray for the Holy Spirit to come upon us, as we look for signs of maybe a little less power but no less spirit as on that first Pentecost, as we look for renewal and rebirth in our lives and in our church, may we see the scrambled mess of our lives and our world more clearly, may we set aside all that keeps us from God’s presence and all that encourages us to think that we are responsible for the gifts surrounding us, and may the Holy Spirit step into our midst to unscramble us anew, now and always. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Call the Midwife

May 5, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5 and John 14: 23-29
preached on May 5, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

And in the spirit he carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God.

I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. But nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life.

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

—Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5 (NRSV)

Jesus answered him, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words; and the word that you hear is not mine, but is from the Father who sent me.

“I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. You heard me say to you, ‘I am going away, and I am coming to you.’ If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I. And now I have told you this before it occurs, so that when it does occur, you may believe.

—John 14:23-29 (NRSV)

For better or worse, I’ve recently taken to “binging” on TV shows via Netflix as part of my weekly routine. It all started a year or so ago with Downton Abbey, an addiction I understand I share with some of you, and it has progressed through a lot of other interesting shows that are notable on both sides of the Atlantic. My most recent find just this past week is a British series called Call the Midwife, a period drama set in a poor neighborhood of East London in the 1950s. It follows a group of nuns and nurses who work for the health of the whole community while giving their closest attention to women of childbearing age in the midst of the baby boom even as new medical practices and procedures begin to take hold in the community. It is an intense series, not for the faint of heart or stomach, as it provides a quite realistic view of the always-difficult circumstances surrounding childbirth while also dealing with the depth of emotion that naturally comes anytime birth and death are involved.

The work of a midwife, so common for millennia and yet so uncommon in our society today, deals with these in-between times: the time between pregnancy and birth, those pivotal moments when the life of mother and child are at greatest risk, the critical minutes when we know that great joy may lie ahead and yet the path to get there is filled with fear and uncertainty. The greatest gift of the midwives on Call the Midwife is not their medical training or ability to work in difficult conditions but rather their gift of calm and comfort as the storm of childbirth swirls. One of the characters, a tall and stocky woman who seems about as comfortable in her own skin as a platypus dining in a fine restaurant and who has been burdened with the unfortunate nickname “Chummy” for most of her life, walks into a bedroom to assist at a birth and summons an amazing calmness and steadiness that is entirely unlike her presence at any other moment. She was clearly born for this work. Her gentle, kind, and simple words to the mothers embody the best work of a midwife—to provide a loving and healing presence even as anxiety swirls and the things that are ahead seem so uncertain.

Our reading this morning from the book of Revelation points us ahead to a different time and place—to a time and place that seems a lot like the romanticized life we imagine after a baby is born, but it skips over the real and present challenges that are involved in getting to that point. In this reading, the midwife has come and gone, a new life has been born, and there is nothing but sheer joy. In John’s vision recounted here, the holy city, the new Jerusalem, is real and whole and complete. There is no need of a temple, because God is present there. God’s own light does away with sun and moon and night, and there is no gate to keep anyone out. Glory and honor stream into this city to bring praise to God. This city is full of new life, for the river of the water of life flows through the middle of it, by the throne of God, to sustain all things forever. The tree of life grows beside the river, with new fruit each month and leaves to bring healing to the nations. All things in our world that harm and hurt will be replaced here with things that build up and give life.

This new Jerusalem looks to be a wonderful and fulfilling place to live and be filled with new life, life grounded in our experiences of the here and now and yet new and different and whole and complete. Yet as much as we may long for it, as much as we certainly hope for it, this holy city, this new way of life, is not yet here. The vision of a new thing may be clear, but the path to get to it is uncertain, filled with potential for pain and suffering. We can see that there is something new before us—we can see a vision of the new creation, a distant view of the city of God, maybe even an outline of a new and different life ahead—but we can’t quite see how to get there from here. The journey is inevitably marked by anxiety and fear because we do not know if we will make it or if the things that we hold most dear will survive to the new day. These are the moments to call a midwife, to look for someone who can speak to us clearly and honestly, someone to give us kind and confident words to show us the way through our uncertainty to new life, someone to help us see that there is something more ahead that might be different from where we have been, someone to guide us through the seemingly uncharted waters as we seek the new life that we know is ahead.

This kind of presence is exactly what Jesus promised us in our reading from the gospel of John this morning. Not only does he promise that “the Advocate, the Holy Spirit… will teach [us] everything and remind [us] of all” that he has said to us, he assures us that peace is with us:

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you… Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.

This is just the thing we need to get through uncertain days, just the presence we need to navigate uncharted waters, just the kind of wisdom we need to see the new thing that is ahead, just the sort of thing that a midwife can bring.

My friends, we are at a critical moment in the life of our church—a moment where we need a promise of peace, a vision of something new, and a midwife to get us there. There are challenges swirling everywhere around us, ranging from the practicalities that we are spending a lot of money on a really small group of people to the bigger challenge that our community doesn’t seem to welcome what we are offering—if they even know about it and feel welcome here. Amidst all this, it is tough to imagine something new for us and our world—and even tougher to sort out how we might get there. It is in this moment that Jesus offers us peace, and it is in this moment that we must call a midwife to help us in that journey, to calm our nerves and ease our spirits, to guide us through to the new thing that is being born even now. Something new will happen here, and it is our opportunity to embrace the Spirit’s leading and journey into this new thing now or choose to wait until we have much less choice in and control of the new thing that is ahead.

John Lewis, a student leader in the Civil Rights Movement and now a congressman from Georgia, recently spoke about on his experiences along that way. In the Freedom Rides on buses from Washington, DC, into the deep South that began 52 years ago yesterday, Lewis was the first to be attacked. Alongside so many others, he faced incredible violence and responded with a real hope for peace and nonviolence. In a recent interview, he reflected on the journey and struggle that defined this journey toward justice and a new way of life:

I wanted to believe, and I did believe, that things would get better. But later I discovered, I guess, that you have to have this sense of faith that what you’re moving toward is already done. It’s already happened…

It’s the power to believe that you can see, that you visualize, that sense of community, that sense of family, that sense of one house…

And you live that you’re already there, that you’re already in that community, part of that sense of one family, one house. If you visualize it, if you can even have faith that it’s there, for you it is already there.

So as we wait and work and pray in these in-between times, as we make our way through these final Easter days and sort out what the resurrection means in the everyday, as we discern where God is calling us to move and go as a congregation, as we look for a vision of something new, may God guide us in all that we do, and may the midwife of the Holy Spirt move among us to help us through all our fear and uncertainty as we journey toward the new thing that is already done and join in offering our best to help make it real here and now and always. Thanks be to God. Amen.