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.

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.

a sermon on Luke 24:36b-48 for the Third Sunday of Easter
preached on April 22, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

There’s a wonderful word that every Presbyterian needs to know: presbyopia. It’s a strange word, closely related to Presbyterian and presbytery and presbyter, but it doesn’t mean that you’ve been afflicted with being Presbyterian – that’s just general craziness! Presbyopia is also known as farsightedness – the condition where you can’t see things clearly up close even though you can see far away just fine. Presbyterian and presbyopia both come from the same root meaning “elder” – just as we Presbyterians are governed by so-called elders, so presbyopia – farsightedness – sets in with age. But since as of tomorrow we will have four 90-year-olds among us, I don’t dare talk about age today!

I bring up presbyopia because of what it does to us – we can see far away just fine, but everything right in front of us is fuzzy. It’s a bit like what we hear about happening to the disciples in our gospel reading this morning from Luke. The disciples had walked with Jesus for three years, but it took Jesus’ death and resurrection – and a lot of distance from those events – for them to really clearly see what was going on. They were still pretty close to it all on the night of the resurrection that is the stage for this story, but by then they had started to get enough distance to get a sense that something special was going on. They had heard several reports of the resurrection, and according to Luke, at least three people had seen Jesus. So as they all gathered together and started exchanging their stories of that first Easter day, Jesus appeared among them and proclaimed, “Peace be with you.”

This was not what anyone expected. They might have known that something special was going on, but they didn’t have enough distance from things to have clear heads. They knew that some people had seen Jesus that day, but they hadn’t had enough time to really begin to figure out what a resurrected Jesus might look like. And they were understandably a bit afraid of what the consequences of all this might be – Jesus had been executed because at least some people thought that he thought that he was the King of the Jews and posed a threat to the Jewish leadership and Roman rule, and those parties would not respond well to news that somehow the crucifixion didn’t “take.”

So when Jesus showed up among them that first night, they were understandably afraid. They thought they were seeing a ghost and had no idea what to do next. But Jesus didn’t run away in fear. He invited them to set aside their fears and to embrace his new presence among them. He showed them his hands and his feet and suggested that such a presence could not be a ghost. The disciples were becoming joyful as everything that they had heard about the resurrection was shown to be real, but they still didn’t see clearly what was right in front of them. They didn’t connect everything that he had taught them along the way with everything that had happened over the last few days. They didn’t know what to do with the experience of watching their friend suffer and die – and then suddenly reappear in their midst.

But Jesus knew just what to do to help them bring things into focus. He kept things pretty ordinary. He asked them for something to eat and had a piece of broiled fish for dinner. And then he started teaching them, just as he had done so many times before. This time as he taught, he tried to help them see things more clearly. He recounted what he had told them before, “that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.” He explained how scripture called for the Messiah “to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day.” He called for them to proclaim this new way to all the nations beginning from Jerusalem. And he instructed them to always bear witness to everything that they had seen in his life, death, and resurrection.

Finally, as they got further away from all that they had experienced, the disciples began to see clearly everything that had been fuzzy and uncertain in the midst of the moment. Their presbyopia finally kicked in, and they could start to understand what they had seen in the resurrection of their friend.

Presbyopia is not usually viewed as a good thing. Nobody likes wearing reading glasses or bifocals! However, a little distance opened up the story of Jesus for the disciples – could it be the same for our own experiences of faith and life? Sometimes distance helps us to see and understand things better, to put different parts of the puzzle into the bigger picture over time, to bring things into better focus just like we do when we move something away from us to see it more clearly.

Now this is not always the case. Sometimes distance can actually make things less clear for us. Sometimes our memory fails us and we aren’t able to remember well enough to see when we get too far away from what we have experienced. Sometimes we are deceived by something that looks like something entirely different when we see it at a distance. And sometimes the past becomes less clear as we move away from it because we prefer to see it all through rose-colored glasses and remember only the joys we have experienced and not the sorrows that were also with us along the way.

Nonetheless, when we find that right distance from our past experience, just the right amount of presbyopia, we can see things more clearly with greater distance, let time bring understanding, and step back and look at how everything fits together.

At some level, I think this is our call as a church – to get far enough away from what we are seeing so that we can see it clearly. It’s all too easy to look back and only see what we want to see, to remember a past that was very different but not necessarily better, to think that the numbers that once defined us should be our mark once again, even to get caught up in the less-than-pleasant details of the present and let them bring us down. But in the resurrection Jesus calls us to take a step back and see more clearly, to look closely at where we have been so that we can see the possibilities for where we can go, to trust that what is ahead can be as joyful as the past we remember, and always to keep the big picture in view whenever things are changing all around us. So I think Jesus calls us to a bit of presbyopia sometimes, to demonstrate the wisdom of the elders that keeps the bigger picture in view, to not be afraid to look a good bit away from ourselves so that we can see all the things that God has done and is doing, and to be open to the possibility that we might just have to step back or even wait a little while longer to see things more clearly.

So may we always be able to look back and see the risen Christ clearly among us so that we can be ready to open our eyes to everything that is ahead and see him journeying with us and going before us to make all things new. Thanks be to God. Alleluia! Amen.

a sermon on Mark 16:1-8 for Easter Sunday
preached on April 8, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

As a child, I was a big fan of a series of books called Where’s Waldo? The goal of each book was to locate a figure named Waldo in the midst of the strange and varied scenes on each page. While he was always wearing his trademark red-and-white-striped shirt and blue pants, Waldo often blended into the world amazingly well. Sometimes he would be hiding just behind a tree so that you could only see his face and maybe just a bit of his shirt. Other times his trademark colors would somehow blend in to a very different background so that it was hard to spot him. Every now and then he would be strangely smaller than everything else around him so that you couldn’t see him so well. And the most difficult scene was when he ended up in a world of Waldos, where everyone looked exactly the same as he did and there was only one very small mark that revealed the real Waldo. When you finally found him amidst whatever scene, it was so obvious – and you could certainly easily find him again! – and yet that process of looking for him was incredibly fun and addictive and frustrating.

When we read this morning’s gospel proclamation of the resurrection from Mark, sometimes I feel like we have the beginning of another book series: Where’s Jesus? If you look in the pew Bible, you might notice that there are two other endings to Mark, but the oldest and most reliable manuscripts of this earliest gospel end the Easter story exactly where we did, with the women fleeing the empty tomb in fear – and no sign of Jesus.

These women, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, were the last faithful ones in Mark’s story. All of Jesus’ other followers had deserted him along his way to be crucified, so they were the only ones left to prepare his body for a proper burial after they had kept the Sabbath. As they went to tomb on Easter morning, they were worried about how they would get in, because they knew it had been gently sealed with a large stone, but soon they found that getting in was the least of their fears and worries.

When they arrived at the tomb, the stone had already been rolled away, and they were able to walk inside without any trouble. But just where they expected to find the dead body of Jesus, they found instead the very alive presence of a young man, dressed in a white robe and sitting to the right of where the body should have been. They were alarmed, Mark says – though I suspect that this is a bit of an understatement. When you go to a tomb, you expect to find a body there – nothing less, nothing more. Instead, though, these three faithful women found a whole lot less and a whole lot more.

The young man, knowing that the first question on their minds was, “Where’s Jesus?” spoke to them in hopes of calming their fears and anxiety:

Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.

Now the young man’s words may seem reasonable to us, but the women didn’t seem to be comforted by them. This was the last straw for them. They had watched their friend and teacher be condemned by the religious authorities of Jerusalem and executed at the hands of the Roman Empire. They had seen all his other disciples run away in fear, uncertain of what might happen to them. And now they were confronted by a strangely empty tomb and an unusual young man who met them there – and so they too fled in terror and amazement, “and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” They weren’t in the mood to play a game of “Where’s Jesus?” on that first Easter morning – they wanted to complete their obligations, anoint the body, and move on, so when Jesus wasn’t where he was supposed to be, dead and in the tomb, they gave up, went on their way, and said nothing to anyone.

Even though the women didn’t want to play, it seems like Mark’s gospel demands that Easter begin with a game of “Where’s Jesus?” For some people, this is an incredibly dissatisfying end to the story – there’s no proof here that Jesus was actually resurrected, no sight of his living body, no sign that he appeared again to his disciples, no final commission to his followers to carry his message out into the world. For me, though, I think there’s something wonderful about this ending – and not just because it leaves me asking “Where’s Jesus?” and so reminds me of those Where’s Waldo? books I loved as a child! Instead of offering a clear and distinct picture of exactly what the resurrected Jesus looks like in the world, Mark leaves us with the promise that Jesus has gone ahead of us and the command to go and seek him out. The tomb is empty – Jesus is not there, he’s on the loose! – but exactly where and how we will encounter the risen Christ is a mystery.

It’s something like a divine game of Where’s Waldo? We may have an idea of what Jesus might look like along the journey, and we know that he is not in the tomb, but we aren’t always sure exactly where he is and so must pay very close attention to all the signs that he leaves us along the way in hopes that we might catch a glimpse of him. Sometimes it is easy to find Jesus in the crowd, and sometimes we may have to keep looking for a long time, but the promise is that he is always there, going before us into the Galilees of our world to make all things new.

So if we’re going out from this Easter morn to look for the risen Christ in our world, what will he look like? Will he be wearing some trademark white robe, with long flowing hair and a halo? I honestly doubt it! The risen Christ is far more likely to appear to us in much more everyday attire, in a brief moment of grace offered by an ordinary person on the street, in the presence of friends and family who help make us more completely who God has created us to be, in the cries of those who long for someone to walk even a little way with them, in food and drink shared with friends old and new, and even in the most routine and mundane moments of our lives. We are likely to find him in expected and unexpected places, on Easter Day and into the Easter season and far beyond, walking before us and beside us, comforting us in the face of joy and sorrow, transforming our world in ways beyond our understanding and comprehension, and inviting us to imagine a world defined not by death but by the power of God that makes all things new. And even when we struggle to see the risen Jesus, we are compelled to keep looking everywhere we go until we catch even a glimpse of him, because even the briefest sight of our risen Lord reminds us that he continues to go before us to make all things new in our world.

So as you celebrate this Easter, may you know the presence of the risen Christ, and may you find him in the midst of your world each and every day, transforming death into life as only he can do, until he comes again in glory to make all things new. Alleluia! Amen.