Archives for October 2013

Making Things Right

October 27, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 18:9-14
preached on October 27, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Back in high school, I spent a lot of time helping out my choir director with special projects. I designed the programs for our concerts, helped with data entry for our singers database, set up her computer for all sorts of other things, and even made the first website for the choir. I was in her office nearly every day for one reason or another, so she got to know me pretty well. One day, after a long conversation about something where I had been insisting that my answer was correct, we realized that I had not been right. Suddenly she stopped the conversation, pulled out her calendar, and made a note on that day: “Andy was wrong and admitted it.”b A lot of things have changed about me since that day back in high school, but I haven’t gotten a whole lot better at swallowing my pride and admitting when I am wrong!

When I hear this parable about the Pharisee and the tax collector that we heard this morning from Luke’s gospel, that part of me that insists that I am right immediately connects with the Pharisee. He’s quite a faithful and pious man. He follows the law and doesn’t steal, cheat, or sleep around. He fasts twice a week to help sharpen his spiritual practice and follow the requirements of his day. He gives the obligatory tithe of ten percent of his income to God. He does everything he is supposed to do, and he does it all right. While he is certainly a good man whose actions are upstanding and commendable, the attitude that emerges from them is not. He uses his confidence to look at others and place himself above them. In the parable, this gets played out very clearly. Jesus tells us that while this Pharisee was praying in the temple, another man, a tax collector, was also praying nearby. The Pharisee notices him and so opens his prayer with great confidence: “God, I thank you that I am not like other people… or like this tax collector.”

The Pharisee scorned the tax collector, and quite likely for good reason. As much as we dislike the IRS these days, tax collectors in Palestine were even more despised in Jesus’ time! These tax collectors were not just agents of the government—the whole system that engaged them was designed to be corrupt and unfair. One commentator explains the system like this:

[Tax collectors] are franchisees of a corrupt and byzantine system that gouges the poor and enriches the wealthy. The tax collector, by definition a wealthy man, pays the empire a set amount for the privilege of gathering whatever he can squeeze from his neighbors. Although he is personally responsible for the money owed by his district, he is free to collect that money any way he wants, and anything he collects above what he owes is his profit…. Tax collectors are frequently foreigners, and they often farm out their responsibilities to others. It is no wonder they are roundly despised. (E. Elizabeth Johnson, “Exegetical Perspective on Luke 18:9-14,” Feasting on the Word Year C Volume 4, p. 215, 217.)

A tax collector would be the last person you’d expect to see at the temple praying to God. Yet in the parable Jesus tells us that he was right there next to the Pharisee, kneeling fervently, looking down in sadness and hurt, crying out to God in anguish: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” While he doesn’t name the sins he was confessing in our hearing, it seems safe to assume that he was seeking to make amends for the exact sort of thing that the Pharisee was condemning him for. After describing these two characters, Jesus made his preference clear. He wasn’t interested in the Pharisee’s brand of religious piety and self-exaltation. He didn’t want much to do with anyone who put so much confidence in his own ability and refused to admit that he was not perfect. Jesus welcomed the tax collector’s honesty and humility. So he singled out the tax collector for his blessing: “I tell you,” he said, “this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

There are lots of ways to think about this wonderful parable, even more than its challenge to people like me to admit all the times and places when we are wrong! On this day when we celebrate the gift of the Reformation among us, we can’t miss one element of this story that connects us to the great reformer John Calvin. One the of the better-known elements of Calvin’s theology is a doctrine known as total depravity, meaning that all humans are completely and totally doomed to our sinful nature. It sounds like an awful thing, really—and to be honest, it kind of is. Under total depravity, there is no way that we humans can avoid taking up the ways of sin. We cannot not sin.

The tax collector seemed to understand this very well. He knew that the system that employed him was corrupt and unjust, and he recognized that it was easy for him to treat people unfairly and suffer no consequences of his actions. The Pharisee, though, thought that he could make things right on his own, through his actions of piety and obedience to the law. He couldn’t see that even his best actions were tainted by sin—especially the sin of pride and arrogance that led him to place himself above others but even also above God. He trusted in his own actions to make his life right rather than leaving room for God to act. And so this simple parable retells in its story this great emphasis of the Reformation, that our trust must be in God alone, that “our hope is in no other save in Thee,” as our first hymn put it so beautifully, that God’s grace alone makes things right for us and enables us to live the lives that God calls us to live.

Ultimately, this knowledge that we are not in charge, that our own actions do not save us, that God’s amazing grace is the empowering force of our lives, ought to affect more than just how we view our lives. It means first that we must look at others differently. We can’t behave as the Pharisee did in the parable, emphasizing our own right actions to the detriment of others, insisting that we are always right, and lifting up our own obedience and faithfulness in ways that put others down. If we take Jesus seriously here, we instead look at others with humility, not condemning them for their bad acts but seeking instead to embrace them as the beloved sinners that we all are. We recognize that we all have work to do in reordering the priorities of our lives, and so we shift and change and reorient our lives to God’s greater intentions along the way.

But when we hear Jesus clearly here, we also look at ourselves differently. We also must take an honest look at our own lives and ask ourselves, “Where do we put our trust, in ourselves or in God?” We have to ask if we are emphasizing our own actions of obedience and faithfulness or if we are truly welcoming the depth and breadth of God’s great grace. We must wonder if we are placing our confidence to make it through to something new in our own abilities or instead deepening our trust that God will lead us through to a new day. And we must transform our understanding from trying to justify ourselves and instead seek to be full participants in God’s work of bringing justice and peace to our whole world. We probably don’t need to beat ourselves up about our sins quite as much as the tax collector did, not because our sinfulness is any less than his but because we can be confident that God is working in us to guide us away from all the things that seem to separate us from God. As another commentator puts it,

The liberation of knowing that God is merciful and loving means that we can leave behind our reliance on our achievements in work or in our faith community. They have their place but not at the center of our relationship with the God of the cross and the Friend of the poor. (Laura S. Sugg, “Pastoral Perspective on Luke 18:9-14,” Feasting on the Word Year C Volume 4, p. 216)

Our ultimate confidence, then, lies not in our own ability to make things happen or even in our understanding of the depth of our sinfulness but rather in deepening our trust and understanding of God’s mercy and grace that ultimately makes the difference in us and in our world.

So may we set aside our confidence in ourselves and our abilities to make things right and place our trust in God alone so that we can be all the more free to join in what God is doing in us, through us, and in spite of us as all things are made new in Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Glory to God

October 20, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Psalm 100
preached on October 20, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

I can’t imagine life without music. I know this isn’t the case for everyone—maybe it just comes from being born into a family where music was important, from being surrounded by music in church from a very early age, or from all the piano lessons, band practices, and choir rehearsals that filled my childhood years! Whatever the reasons, the incredible gift of sound and song is an indelible part of my days.

I keep finding that when music is fully and completely in my life, something about me is different. I can’t tell you how many people have told me how much I am different over the last year since I joined the New Amsterdam Singers, and I myself can feel it. I can even feel it right now simply because I’ve had to miss two consecutive weeks of rehearsals! There is simply something very special about making music with other people, so much so that there is even scientific evidence that something changes in our brains when we sing together!

And so it is with the church, too. Something is different when we sing together. Even though we are not the largest congregation and don’t normally have a choir to lead us in song, we have an incredible gift of music in our life together—and not just because of Julie’s talents that she so willingly shares, my own love of music, or even our wonderful guests who enrich our celebration and hymnal dedication today. Something happens each and every time we lift our voices in response to the psalmist’s command: “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth.” As I say often, I’m very glad for this exhortation, for it doesn’t urge us to make a beautiful noise or sing a familiar song—it instructs us to make a joyful noise, whatever that may be.

This joyful noise is the beginning of our worship of God. We bring our songs of praise and thanksgiving, our recognitions of God’s wondrous creation in our lives, our hope of God’s continuing presence among us, and our confidence in God’s steadfast love and faithfulness. We “come into God’s presence with singing” and make it clear that all our praise is directed to God. All our songs—new and old, in languages familiar and unfamiliar, simple and complex, whatever the season or occasion—all our songs give thanks to God.

And so today we celebrate this gift of song, not just for those who love to sing but for all the earth, not just for those who can carry a tune beautifully but for those who think they can carry no tune at all, not just when we sing out of these new books but when we offer the songs of our hearts to God. The songs we share in this place can fill the role of nearly everything we do together: offering praise, expressing confession, sharing the word, showing concern for others, calling for justice and peace, gathering us at font and table, and sending us out to live out God’s new creation in the world. The songs we share in this place can express the depth and breadth of human emotion: the joy and excitement of new life, the challenges of difficult days, the laments of pain and suffering and death, and the hope of something more yet to come. And the songs we share in this place tell the great stories of our faith: the joy offered to the world in birth and life of Jesus, the wondrous love shown in his suffering and death, the joyous alleluias that emerge with in the light of the empty tomb, the amazing grace that shows us the depth of God’s mercy, and the love divine, all loves excelling, that sustains us each and every day.

So as we dedicate these new books of song today, as we lift up our voices to sing “glory to God,” may we not ever imagine life without music but instead make a joyful noise to the Lord and declare with heart and voice God’s goodness, steadfast love, and faithfulness as we raise our songs and hymns and spiritual songs to God in this place until we join with angels and saints and all creation to sing God’s praise forever and ever. Glory to God, now and always! Amen.

Rejoicing Along the Way

October 13, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 17:11-19
preached on October 13, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Some things are just thankless tasks. You know the sort of thing I’m describing: the work that no one notices if it gets done but that everyone will notice if it goes undone, the tough words that must be spoken even if no one wants to say them, the little things that seem to just happen behind the scenes because someone steps up quietly to do it without expecting anyone to say thank you. But beyond thankless tasks, I think there are also a lot of thankless people these days. These are the folks who walk right past you without saying a word if you hold the door open for them, those who don’t notice when you do something nice to make life easier for them, or even worse, the people who find something wrong with everything, even the most generous gift. The southern gentleman in me, ingrained in my spirit from my earliest days, resists this sort of thanklessness almost to a fault, so I say “thank you” for nearly everything, and many times I’m afraid that I end up saying thank you a bit too much!

An overabundance of thank yous is not the problem before us in our story from the gospel of Luke this morning—in fact it is quite the opposite! In one of the last healing stories of Luke’s gospel before the narrative turns to the events of Jesus’ last week before his crucifixion, we hear of how Jesus heals ten lepers of their brutal and awful disease by sending them to prove their cleanliness and healing to the priests, and they discover that it has happened as they go on the journey. But unlike so many of the healing stories in the gospels, there is little or no emphasis on the healing itself—we know almost nothing about it! The village where it happened is not identified but rather vaguely positioned as in the region between Samaria and Galilee. The ten individuals involved are not identified in any way at the beginning of the story. While the lepers cried out for healing saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” I suspect they probably had said similar things many times before to many other people. And the specific process by which Jesus granted them this gift of wholeness and healing is not described as it is in other stories.

Instead of giving us all these details, this story focuses on one of the lepers who took a different turn. Rather than making his way quickly to the priest with the rest of them to verify their new status as clean, when this now-former leper discovered that he had been healed, he cried out with praise to God. He turned around, returned to Jesus, and fell at his feet to thank him. Jesus was surprised, but not by this man’s actions. This kind of thanksgiving was what Jesus expected from everyone, so Jesus’ surprise here was actually that this one leper was the only one who responded in this way. He expressed his skeptical thoughts out loud: “Were not ten healed? Where are the nine? Can none be found to come back and give glory to God except this outsider?” Only when gratitude was expressed do we learn that this one who had been healed and returned to give thanks was not just anyone but a Samaritan—an outsider among outsiders, one assumed to be perpetually ungrateful, the last one anyone expected would stop and give thanks for anything. After noting his surprising thankfulness, Jesus sent him on his way, reminding him, “Your faith has made you well.”

This strange moment of thanks stands out even now. In our world where people just don’t stop to say thank you, it is notable to see this example of one who not only stops but goes out of his way to say thank you. As preacher John Buchanan puts it:

All we really know about him is that he recognized a gift when he saw and experienced it, that he returned to say ‘Thank you,’ and that Jesus said to him, ‘Your faith has made you well.’ (“Homiletical Perspective on Luke 17:11-19,” Feasting on the Word)

Luke makes it clear that this man’s life of gratitude is all that we really need to know about him. We don’t need to know anything more about his faith, his race, his cultural perspective, his religious practice, his ethics, his theology, his political ideas, or his moral values. What we need to know is that he has faith that gets lived out with gratitude. In her reflection on this text, Kim Long makes this abundantly clear:

In short, to ‘have faith’ is to live it, and to live it is to give thanks. It is living a life of gratitude that constitutes living a life of faith—this is the grateful sort of faith that has made this man from Samaria truly and deeply well. (“Pastoral Perspective on Luke 17:11-19,” Feasting on the Word)

He was healed of his awful skin condition before Jesus made this recognition, but his ultimate transformation came when he embraced this gracious gift for what it was and began to live it out in his expression of gratitude. Again, Kim Long puts it well:

Jesus reminds us that living out our faith—by revering God’s ways, by honoring one another, and by giving thanks in all things—we are given all the faith that we require.

In our world where there are so many thankless tasks and even more thankless people, what does this kind of deep gratitude that leads us to faith look like? It certainly has its roots in the kind of thanks that we offer to those who hold the door for us or that come out of our cultural exposure, but there is still something more. Deep gratitude takes “thank you” to the next level. Gratitude shows generosity beyond measure when others are in need. Gratitude sets aside our fears of the other and embraces those who are different from us as the beautiful children of God that they are. Gratitude gives first and asks questions later. Gratitude approaches others with kindness rather than suspicion. And gratitude looks ultimately for the good of the other rather than seeking our own self-interest. This deep gratitude emerges from the life of faith even as it enables the life of faith. Just as we don’t really know whether the chicken or the egg came first, we can never know whether faith or gratitude comes first, because they always come together.

Ultimately, though, this way of living with deep and real gratitude changes us. We stop noticing what we do not have but begin to embrace the gifts that we have been given. We set aside our concerns about what is in it for ourselves and begin to turn our hearts and minds to the gifts God has so graciously given. We stop giving thanks that we are not like those poor people over there and start to use the abundance that we have to transform all the world. We pray not just for healing and redemption and new life but to give thanks for all these things that we have already received, in whatever measure.

And when we do all these things, just like this healed leper, we walk away different. We are not afraid of what might come our way but thankful for all that has come our way and open to the things that God still has in store for us. We define our lives not by what belongs to us or what we wish belonged to us but by the recognition that we belong to God no matter what. We set aside our fears because we know that God has overcome our greatest fear—death itself—in Jesus Christ. And just like this healed leper, when we live lives of gratitude, we go on our way rejoicing, giving thanks for all that God has given us, offering our prayers for those places where we long for the fullness of God’s love and presence, and singing songs of praise wherever we go.

So may we go rejoicing all along the way, giving thanks to God for the incredible depth and breadth of healing, wholeness, and new life that is before us, and living lives of faithfulness and gratitude each and every day until we join with this healed man and all the heavenly choirs to rejoice all our days. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Visions of Peace

October 6, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Isaiah 2:1-5 and Romans 12:9-21
preached on October 6, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

There are two kinds of texts in the Bible that I especially love: texts that talk about the new and different thing that God is doing in the world and texts that urge us to live and walk in new and different ways in our life together. I like the first kind of text because I know that there is so much wrong with our world that is beyond our ability to fix. There are still so many places where things are just not like they should be. There is so much war and violence that distract us from living together in justice and peace. There are so many places where divine intervention seems to be the only way to extract ourselves from the mess around us. I like the second kind of texts that talk about a new and different thing that God is doing in our world because they remind me that there is hope even when things seem to be a giant mess. Even though we can’t fix it all ourselves, these texts make it clear that we have a responsibility to take action and live differently to make our broken world a better place.

Our two readings today are perfect examples of my favorite kinds of readings from the Bible, especially if we want to think more clearly and directly about God’s deep desire for peace in our world. Our first reading from the prophet Isaiah gives us a vivid vision of a new and different Jerusalem. This vision of the city shows us a place that stands as a monument of peace, justice, and integrity for all nations. It is a factory of transformation for the difficult but crucial work of turning swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. This Jerusalem is a center of instruction for following God’s ways and learning to live in peace.

Isaiah’s vision shows us the components that make this city such a place of peace, life, and health for all. First, it is centered around the gift of God’s teaching in the temple, where people can learn not just who God is but also what God is doing and how God is calling all people to be a part of the transformation of the world. It is a place where people look for new ways to explore God’s presence in the world and so walk in God’s ways each and every day. It is a place where God’s gracious judgment is lived out, not just for one nation or for a privileged few but for all people, everywhere. And most of all it is a place where war is finally set aside, where conflict is not settled by violent reaction but where peace is learned and practiced anew each and every day.

Sadly, this was only a vision. To this day, Jerusalem remains a city divided, torn apart by nearly every imaginable sort of conflict around religion, race, class, and history. It doesn’t have a good record of being a place to go to learn how to live in peace—unless the best way to learn about peace is to learn how it doesn’t happen. Yet the promise is clear: “In days to come” Jerusalem will be the city of peace, where people will stream to learn the ways of God and discover a way of life that does not learn war, and so all people are called to find this new path and walk in the light of the Lord.

This kind of challenge to “walk in the light of the Lord” is a great example of the second kind of my favorite texts from the Bible, the texts that invite us to a new and deeper faithfulness in our life and in our world. Our reading today from Paul’s letter to the church in Rome gives us deeper instructions on how to do this, and it too focuses squarely on issues of peace as it directs us into a new and different way of life. Many of these words are likely very familiar to us, as they have been adapted over the centuries into words that we use in the charge that often concludes our Sunday worship. There is still something important about hearing them in this context, for while they can seem like a long series of unrelated commands, they all point to a deeper and more genuine way of living in love and peace with all creation.

Paul begins by offering exhortations toward love, emphasizing that love should be real and mutual, that evil must be resisted, that honor belongs to all, and that serving God with all our hearts stands above everything else. He recognizes that life is not always easy, so he lifts up hope, patience, and perseverance as essential attributes of the life of faith and urges his listeners to support those who are in need and to extend hospitality to strangers. Then Paul turns more directly to describe how to live in peace with others. Repeatedly he demands that curses and vengeance toward those who have wronged us be set aside, that we take seriously the situations of our sisters and brothers and embrace both their celebration and their mourning. He demands that we recognize our limitations in all of life and living, and that we work to overcome evil, violence, and injustice not by responding with more of those things but by offering deeper and more real good in the world. This is not an old way of life but a new one, one that places the emphasis on right relationship over rules, one that sets aside old grudges for new possibilities, one that insists that peace really and truly can become real in our lives and in our world if we stop trying to defeat our enemies with the sword and instead seek to live with them in the same way we would like them to live with us. So rather than taking up the role of divine police officer, detective, judge, jury, and executioner for ourselves, Paul insists that that we leave vengeance for God and instead seek to overcome evil with good and so walk more closely in the way of peace.

These two kinds of readings that look ahead for us to give us visions of new and different things and invite us to do them ourselves are deeply challenging in our world today. When we look around this world, peace seems so distant—both in far-off lands like Syria, Israel and Palestine, North and South Korea, and all those other nations and places that we lift up in prayer each Sunday but also in places much closer to us where families are broken apart, gun violence spirals out of control, mental illness tears at the fabric of our communities, lesbian and gay youth are kicked out of their homes, and people are threatened by those they love the most. In our complex world, peace seems so impossible—so often, a compromise that seems to resolve one place of brokenness ends up driving others apart. And when we think about taking up the way of peace in our daily lives, the things we can do seem so insignificant, so tiny, so unimportant, so unable to actually make a difference amidst all the big things that pit us against one another.

Yet Isaiah and Paul insist that we must start somewhere. Following Paul’s charge to walk in a new and different way might actually help bring about the kind of transformation that God so deeply desires and Isaiah so beautifully described. Our hope of something new and different for our world can be made real even in tiny ways with simple actions of love, justice, and peace. And throughout it all, we can trust that God will work in all that we are doing to make even our seemingly insignificant actions important, transforming even the smallest actions for peace into a part of the new life for all creation, working in even our greatest brokenness to redeem the whole creation and guide us all to walk in the light of the Lord.

So as we gather at this table on this World Communion Sunday, as we remember our sisters and brothers in Christ around the globe who join us at this strange feast that looks back to Jesus’ last meal with his disciples and forward to the great feast of all creation in the years yet to come, as we make even a small offering to deepen the work of peace in our community, our denomination, and our world, may we trust that God’s vision of peace for our world is deeper and broader and wider and more possible than we could ever imagine, and may we then walk in the light of the Lord as we love one another, rejoice in hope, and live peaceably with all each and every day until all things are made new. Lord, come quickly! Amen.