Promises, Promises

February 24, 2013 By Leave a Comment

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.

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Temptation for Today

February 17, 2013 By Leave a Comment

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.

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Glimpses of Glory

February 10, 2013 By Leave a Comment

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.

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Love: The Way of Life

February 3, 2013 By Leave a Comment

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.

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The Past, Present, and Future Word

January 27, 2013 By Leave a Comment

a sermon on Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10 for the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
preached on January 27, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

I started off my holiday Monday this week as I suspect many of you did, settling in front of the TV for a bit to watch the second—or fourth, depending on how you count it!—inauguration of President Barack Obama. I try very hard not to inject my politics into this pulpit—though over a cup of coffee, a meal, or a beer I am quite willing to tell you who I vote for and why I do it!—but I will say that I have been a fan of President Obama since he first appeared on the national scene at the 2004 Democratic Convention, back when he was a state senator from Illinois who was running for the US Senate. Still, I believe that the inauguration is not so much a political moment as a national one, a time when we come together to be surprised yet again by our strange ability to transfer the most powerful office in the world peacefully from one person to another.

In this second inaugural address, I most appreciated how President Obama connected his goals for his second term to the founding principles of our nation. He quoted the Declaration of Independence

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Then he made our challenge clear:

Today we continue a never-ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time.

Over and over again in his speech, he linked these principles of the past with the realities of the present:

We have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.

While we all may disagree on exactly which actions are required to make these past ideals reality in the present and future, this challenge to connect who we have been with who we are now is our great call in this changing age.

This is the same challenge addressed in our reading from Nehemiah today. Nehemiah was governor of Judah in a time when the people had just returned from exile in Babylon and were seeking to rebuild Jerusalem and reestablish their common life and identity. Today’s reading tells of an early gathering of the people as they prepared to rebuild Jerusalem. In the face of uncertain days, they gathered to hear the Torah, the books of the law, read by the priest and scribe Ezra so that they might be reconnected to their past and sort out how they ought to live in the present and future. They listened intently as Ezra read from early morning until midday. Along the way, other priests and scribes—whose difficult-to-pronounce names fill the verses of our reading that we skipped!—helped the people to understand the law, offering interpretation of what was being read and helping them to see what these words—several hundred years old even then!—might mean for them.

The people of Judah couldn’t just listen to the old words and immediately act as their ancestors had— they needed guidance and wisdom to figure out how the old things applied to those new days. As commentator Kathleen O’Connor puts it

To rebuild their faith and their cultural life requires recovery of their pre-Babylonian worldview, yet they must reimagine it for the new situation, because their history has undermined their faith. (Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 1, p. 267)

The ancient words were still there, still offering deep wisdom and hope, but without some sort of interpretation, they would mean mean nothing. Again, Kathleen O’Connor puts it beautifully:

This reading about the reading of [the law] does not inflict the rigid orthodoxy of the past on the gathered people but urges them to meet God anew in the changing times in which they find themselves. (p. 271)

Just as Ezra and Nehemiah gathered the people to hear the ancient scripture and interpret it anew for their time, just as our president challenged our nation at the beginning of his second term to hear anew our core values and sort out what they should look like for us today, so I believe that we in the church are invited to do this same thing, to sort out how we are to understand the Bible in our own day and how to live out our faith in the midst of our own changing times.

Even though God is always faithful and does not change, as our last hymn reminded us, sometimes we must change. Just as the people of Judah heard the word and interpreted it anew for their world after exile, so we may have to live out the Bible differently now than we did fifty or one hundred or 141 years ago. Just as our nation is challenged to make its founding principles applicable to new and different days, so we may have to find new pathways for our church in a changing world.

And so today as we journey into our annual meeting of this congregation, I think we are called to remember these ancient moments of reinterpretation and sort out how we might do the same thing—how we are to listen for what God is calling us to do in this time and this place, and respond in faith, hope, and love as we journey together along the way. We are called to consider real change in this place, not just a willingness to wait long enough for things to change, to hope and pray that we will magically return to what we once thought we were, or even to pray fervently yet simply that God will act in our midst. In these days, we need real and concrete action by us for a new and different way of embodying God’s presence in this congregation and for this community. I don’t have clear guidance for what we must do differently or what must change in order for us to survive and thrive again as a congregation, but I do know that simply doing what we have done before and expecting different results is a recipe for failure.

Now our congregational meeting today is only the beginning of this process. We will certainly hear reports and consider a few small actions like electing new leaders for the coming years in our midst, but there is little else that we can do today. Instead, the real work comes in the everyday life of this congregation and our world, the places where the rubber meets the road, the moments when we sort out how what actions we will take in response to God’s Word and the situation of our world. Toward that end, you’ll hear more in the meeting today about a discernment and conversation process over the next few months that I and the session hope will help us to see where we are and where we are going. I hope that you will make a commitment to participate in this process, to add your voice to those who long for something new to take hold in this place, to step up and take action to be a part of God doing something new in and through this First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone. We need your presence, your voices, your commitment, and your action in the days ahead, for just as the people of Judah did not live out the words of the law on their own, just as President Obama cannot fix what ails our nation on his own so we too gather in community to sort out what God is calling us to do, to hear the Spirit speaking in our midst again and again, and to be restored and made new for the joy of the days ahead.

So may God’s presence be among us as we gather, God’s Word be loud and clear and understandable in our ears, and God’s new creation be our goal as we live and work together for the days ahead. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

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Radical Hospitality, Extravagant Grace

January 20, 2013 By Leave a Comment

a sermon on John 2:1-11 for the Second Sunday of Ordinary Time
preached on January 20, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Over my seven and a half years in Whitestone, I have developed some habits and routines. Some of them have changed since I moved out of the manse last year, but others remain constant.

Saturday night is the most routine part of my routine. Because I have to work on Sunday morning and be at my best, I very rarely make plans to go out to a concert or show or even to visit with friends, and if I do, I’m almost always home by 9:00! So I have a standing dinner date with myself at the same restaurant every week, where I sit at the bar and enjoy a quiet dinner as the world speeds by all around me. I’ve been doing this for four or five years now, and I am definitely a regular in every sense of the word—all the staff there know me by name and make sure that I am taken care of!

About a year after I started this routine, I noticed a strange thing happening. One night, the glass of water that appeared upon my arrival turned into wine! Not actually the same glass, of course, but wine also appeared alongside the water! Was it a Saturday night miracle? Or was it just a turn of hospitality? Or maybe a bit of both?

Today’s gospel reading from John recounts Jesus’ first miracle, a wedding night miracle with a turn of hospitality that tells us a lot about who Jesus is and how he approaches his life and ministry. This wedding must have been a big deal—Jesus and his disciples and his mother were all there. But apparently this wedding wasn’t a big enough deal for the host to keep extra wine on hand, and they ran out. When Jesus’ mother got wind of it, she went to Jesus and told him about it. I’m not quite sure why she went to him with this news, much as I have sometimes wondered why my own mother tells me some things, and I don’t think Jesus got it, either. Confused, he asked her directly, “What concern is that to you and me?”

Jesus didn’t want anything to do with the situation, but his mother clearly thought he could step in and make a difference. He disagreed. “My hour has not yet come,” he proclaimed. It was not yet time for him to perform a miracle and make his real identity known. While the party may have needed more wine, Jesus needed more time. Still, Jesus’ mother would not take no for an answer. Without even responding to Jesus, she went to the servants and told them to follow Jesus’ instructions.

So Jesus, probably still mumbling under his breath about his overbearing mother, got involved in the crisis at the wedding. He told the servants to fill some water jugs that would have normally been used for ritual washings, but they were empty by this time of the night. After they had been filled, Jesus told the servants to draw some water out of them and take it to the chief steward. The steward was very impressed with this new wine, so he called the groom over to tell him of his surprise, for most hosts serve the good wine first and save the worst for last, but in an act of strange and wonderful hospitality he seemed to have saved the best wine for the end of the party. Little did either of them know that one of the guests had saved the day through a little nudging from his mother, pulling off both a miracle and a radical turn of hospitality.

I think this miracle is a fitting beginning for John’s gospel—or for any story of the life and ministry of Jesus. First, this story shows us a Jesus who is humble and reluctant to use his powers when the time is not right. He does not seek to show off his miraculous abilities but rather wants and needs to wait until the time is right. His goal is not for people to believe in him—although his disciples certainly do—but instead to fulfill God’s purposes all along the way. He is afraid that if he acts too soon or in the wrong way, he might not be able to live out God’s intentions, so he keeps quiet about what he can do until he believes that the time is right.

This story also shows us a Jesus who can do amazing things with something that everyone else just assumed was getting in the way. Those huge empty pots seemed to be useless until Jesus got hold of them, but somehow something incredible happened when they were filled again. Not only was there suddenly more wine—it was better than what they had had before! Jesus makes this a pattern throughout his life and ministry, constantly pushing the people around him to reimagine what they can do with their lives and moving beyond expectations to do new things with the gifts that God has given us.

And most of all, it is fitting that John begins his story of Jesus’ life and ministry with a sign that ultimately points to radical hospitality and unlimited grace. Jesus overturns the cultural expectation—and common-sense determination!—that you start with the best wine and move toward the worst, thinking that the guests will be drunk enough not to notice the bad wine at the end of the party. But when Jesus’ act brings new wine that is better at the end of the party, he suggests that hospitality really matters, that even when something might not be understood or appreciated it should still be given, that everything we do to make people feel welcome is a part of showing God’s love. And this seemingly simple act shows us that Jesus will be working to express this new and different and radical way of living in all that he says and does, that he will not be afraid to welcome all people or to do things that seem strange or uncertain if they ultimately show God’s love and care for all people.

In the end, Jesus’ reluctance to perform this miracle, his ability to transform even the emptiest of barrels, and his radical hospitality help us to see a glimpse of everything that he will be up to in his ministry even as it is just beginning. This is an incredible challenge for us. We can’t turn water into wine—unless you happen to own or operate a restaurant where you want to care for your regular customers! Even so, this story challenges us to look for other ways that we can embody God’s radical hospitality and unlimited grace.

After Hurricane Sandy, Stony Point Center did just this. While there was little or no damage at the Center itself, hundreds of people who lived in nearby low-lying areas along the Hudson River found their homes flooded or washed away. Most of these people didn’t have a lot to begin with, and many were immigrants who do not speak English or who lack proper documentation. After the storm, many of these people started showing up at the Center looking for a place to stay. No one was turned away because of inability to pay or any other reason, and word of this open-door policy spread quickly among those whose homes were damaged or destroyed by the storm.

This was an amazing moment of hospitality for everyone. The Center had a number of empty beds because of cancellations related to the storm, so they had plenty of space to offer. They became certified by FEMA as official disaster housing, so the government paid for many of these guests, and other donations to disaster relief through Presbyterian Disaster Assistance helped cover additional expenses. And the people who made their way to the Center had found quite possibly the best place they could. Not only did they have a bed and meals for as long as they needed it, the Center staff’s ability to speak Spanish and experience working in immigrant communities helped make connections to other social support systems that would have been far more difficult to find otherwise. Simply by doing what seemed right and opening their doors to everyone in need, Stony Point Center became a place of refuge for those in greatest need and embodied the same radical hospitality and extravagant grace that Jesus showed at the wedding at Cana and throughout his ministry.

So maybe we don’t have any empty jugs laying around, maybe we don’t have storm victims waiting on our doorstep wondering if they can have a place to stay, and maybe we can’t even turn one man’s glass of water at dinner into wine without him asking for it, but maybe we can offer others even a little glimpse of the depth and breadth of God’s hospitality for us so that we might extend that welcome to everyone through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

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A New Beginning

January 13, 2013 By Leave a Comment

a sermon on Isaiah 43:1-7 and Luke 3:15-17, 21-23 for Baptism of the Lord Sunday
preached on January 13, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Sometimes you just have to go back to the beginning. In the midst of our very complicated and complex world, it is easy to forget where we began. In the face of changing times and places, we can easily end up someplace that isn’t where we intended to be—and that just isn’t faithful to to the original intentions of our journey. So sometimes we need to remember where it all began and do what we can do to reclaim that beginning once again.

For us as Christians, going back to the beginning means going back to baptism. Now baptism may not actually be the beginning of the story for us—just like Jesus, all of us lived some part of our lives before we were baptized, and some of us may have even begun our Christian lives before our baptisms—but baptism is the official, formal mark of new beginning for us as Christians, the time when we see how God claims us and makes us new, the moment when we are given a sign and seal of how we are made one with Christ in his death and resurrection. So when we think of Jesus’ baptism as we do today, we go back to the beginning of our stories and remember our lives of faith as we remember how the beginning of Jesus’ story in his baptism connects to the beginning of our story in our baptism.

Each of the gospels tells this story of Jesus’ baptism, but the version we heard from Luke this morning is a little different. First, unlike any of the other tellings of Jesus’ baptism, Luke puts this story much later in his narrative of Jesus’ life because of the detail he offers about Jesus’ birth and childhood. Like many of us, then, the Jesus of Luke’s gospel has some history of life and even of faith before he is baptized, so this moment in the water is the culmination of many things that come before it even as it suggests an incredible journey ahead.

But even with this extra detail on the front end, Luke brings the story in line with all the other accounts of Jesus’ baptism by dealing with John the Baptist. Based on the amount of attention that John gets at the beginning of the gospel story, John must have been important to early Christians, and most scholars think that John’s followers were around for quite a while after his death. But John’s message is not easily appreciated these days. He didn’t have much positive to say to anyone and demanded repentance from everyone. He attracted a lot of followers, but I’m not quite sure how. John’s first words according to Luke don’t exactly make people welcome. Would you appreciate being called first “You brood of vipers!”?! Even so, many of his first listeners wondered out loud if he was the Messiah, but John made it clear that there was something and someone greater on the way.

But Luke’s story does make John seem a little different. Only Luke tells us that John and Jesus were relatives of some sort, most likely distant cousins. But Luke also notes that John was put in prison by Herod before he tells us that Jesus had been baptized by him. This all happened in the two verses that were left out of our lectionary reading this morning, because it doesn’t make for particularly good storytelling and complicates an easy passage from John to Jesus. According to Luke, then, Jesus was baptized along with others in the crowd, but strangely enough Luke doesn’t directly identify John as the one who did it.

Amidst all these interesting twists in Luke’s telling of Jesus’ baptism, what really seems to matter here for us as we consider our own baptisms is not who did the the baptizing or the proper order of the story but what happened after Jesus’ baptism. First, after Jesus was baptized, “the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove.” What a dramatic moment for Jesus, to have this clear appearance of God in his life at the very beginning of his ministry! Now I suspect that our baptisms were considerably less dramatic than this one, but even so, the Holy Spirit was present and active in our baptisms, too. And just as Luke gets John the Baptist out of the picture of Jesus’ baptism, so it should be with us too, for in the end, God is the primary agent in baptism for Jesus and for us. Baptism is not about the pastor or priest who applies the water, the denomination in which the sacrament is celebrated, the amount of water involved, or even the time in life when it happens—baptism is about how God breaks into our world and steps into our lives to mark us and claim us as God’s own even with a little bit of water.

But after this movement of the Holy Spirit, Jesus heard a voice from God: “You are my Son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Even though he surely knew it beforehand, Jesus’ baptism showed him once again who he was and gave him the strength and hope to face the challenges of the journey ahead. And so it is with our baptisms, too. Just as Jesus began his life of ministry with this assurance of love and grace from God, so we too begin our lives as Christians with the sign and seal of water that shows us that God loves us. Just as God’s claim and call on Jesus’ life was made clear in these words, so we in our baptisms also learn that God claims us and calls us to walk in new life. And just as Jesus found strength and hope in this moment at the beginning of a long and difficult ministry that would eventually lead to nothing less than his death, so we emerge from the waters of our baptisms with the confidence that we are God’s beloved children who are called out of the water and sent into the world to join in what God is already doing to make us and all things new.

In our baptism, just like Jesus, we hear the words of the prophet Isaiah loud and clear, directed at us:

Don’t fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name; you are mine.

When you pass through the waters,
I will be with you;

when [you go] through the rivers,
they won’t sweep over you.

When you walk through the fire,
you won’t be scorched
and flame won’t burn you.

I am the Lord your God,
the holy one of Israel, your savior.

Because you are precious in my eyes,
you are honored, and I love you.

I give people in your place,
and nations in exchange for your life.

These are powerful words, worthy of the power of baptism that begins the Christian life. We rarely realize it when we stand at this font at whatever age, but the waters in this bowl are far more powerful than even the strongest waves of Hurricane Sandy. We hesitate to affirm it when we welcome our children into our common life with this sacrament, but even the smallest bit of water on our heads in baptism means that we no longer belong to ourselves, to our families, or even to our church—but to God. And we may not always recognize it or remember it, but God’s claim on us in baptism never leaves us. We can do nothing to wash off this indelible mark. Even when we try our best to deny God’s place in our world or God’s claim on our lives, baptism shows us that “God loves us too deeply and too completely to ever let us go.”

And so as we remember and celebrate the baptism of Jesus today, moving from a season of celebrating his birth into more ordinary days, may the baptism of Jesus remind us of our own baptisms, of our beginnings in this life of faith, where we are claimed as God’s own forever and shown that God will go with us through the waters, the rivers, the fire, and everything else that is before us. And so today may we go forth sustained by this unforgettable sign and seal, remembering our beginnings once again, living out this unconditional love from God as we live with others and make it clear to everyone we meet that they too are claimed and loved by God now and always.

So remember you baptism, your beginning, and be thankful, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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Light for the Journey

January 6, 2013 By Leave a Comment

a sermon on Matthew 2:1-12 for Epiphany
preached on January 6, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Several years ago, the computer company Microsoft ran an ad campaign that asked a simple question: “Where do you want to go today?” While their way of thinking about computers may drive me crazy, I think Microsoft was on to something in picking up this theme of journeys.

Journeys are everywhere around us, and we take them constantly. Whether our commute is a couple minutes or a full hour, the workers among us make a journey to work every day. We take longer journeys sometimes when we set out on vacation or to visit family or friends who do not live nearby. And when we get down to it, our whole lives are a journey, as one of our most dear departed saints often said, with wonderful and challenging twists and turns and exciting and surprising stops all along the way. And so every day, we ask that question, “Where do you want to go today?”, not because Microsoft insists on answering it for us but because life is a journey that will take us to countless interesting places that will make us different from when we started.

Journeys are a very important part of our faith tradition, too. The Old Testament begins its focus on the great patriarch of Judaism Abraham by recounting his journey to Canaan at God’s command. The Israelites defined themselves as a people by their journey from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the promised land—with a forty-year detour in the wilderness along the way! And both Matthew and Luke include journeys as they tell their different stories of Jesus’ birth.

Our reading today as we celebrate Epiphany tells Matthew’s version of events, recounting the journey of the magi as they made their way to Bethlehem to meet Jesus. It had to have been a pretty memorable journey, although probably not as much like what we think. We don’t know exactly where they came from or even how many of them there were, regardless of the certainty of our opening hymn today (“We Three Kings”) but these magi set out for Palestine knowing nothing more than that they were looking to welcome the newborn King of the Jews. They didn’t meet up with shepherds or angels along the way, but they did find their way to King Herod, who was so deeply troubled at this apparent newborn threat to his carefully-constructed power that he ended up killing all the male infants of Bethlehem. After this strange encounter, when the magi finally found the newborn king, he didn’t look a lot like most kings would, but they nonetheless showed him honor with their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And as these magi prepared to return home, it became clear that their journey had sparked something more in their world, but their journey to meet this newborn king was not complete until they could return home by another road.

With the story of the journey of the magi fresh in our minds, Epiphany is a good time to think about the journeys that shape our lives. It comes very quickly after our American culture celebrates New Year’s, so many of us have already been thinking about what we will do differently in 2013—and if your life is anything like mine, many of those different intentions have already been missed! Epiphany comes after we have spent time preparing for and celebrating God’s incarnation in our midst, and we can hopefully remember the lessons of these days as we consider the journey ahead. And Epiphany is at the perfect time of the year, right when the days start to get longer, right when the light starts to come back into our world, for us to begin to see more clearly the road ahead.

So as another Christmas comes to an end, as another year begins, as another Epiphany gives us light and inspiration for the journey, where will our journey lead us? Will we see a star and follow it as the magi did? Will we embark on a journey that looks a bit different from what we have known before because of what we see going on around us? Will we welcome the opportunity to journey in faith or just focus on making the best of what we have in the here and now?

Whatever our intentions, the journey of Epiphany is not easy. It doesn’t come with a clear road map—the magi can certainly tell us that. We may have a star to guide us along the way, but there are still likely to be unexpected and unwanted twists and turns for us, just as there were for the magi. We may be asked to do unexpected things, to go to unexpected places, to meet people who don’t look like we expect them to look, to stand up to those in power to say that there is something bigger going on here. And sometimes we may even get so confused or distracted or discouraged that we forget why we are on this journey in the first place—but we too have seen something that keeps us wondering, something that insists that we ask questions, something that guides us all along the way.

The same star that guided the magi to Bethlehem still shines in our world today. It may not shine in the night sky guiding us to a house in a small town in Palestine, but it’s still there. The star still shines among those who take God’s invitation to live in justice, mercy, and peace seriously. The star still shines where the divisions of this world are set aside, where racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia are not tolerated, where people let go of the ways of the past and embrace new hope for the future. The star still shines where people work to make the lives of others different, where God’s presence is fearlessly offered, where peace is made possible and real. And the star shines where people gather together in trust and in hope that God is still at work in our world.

So if the star is shining, we can follow it—even if we ourselves are part of that light sometimes! We can ignore the other stars that tempt us and distract us and keep focused instead on the light of the world that gives us life. We can walk in the way of the magi, journeying toward something we don’t fully understand, opening ourselves to the possibilities of something new, continuing on our way amidst all the unexpected moments of the journey so that we too can welcome the Christ child, offer our own gifts, and pay him homage before we go on our way home transformed by what we have seen and experienced. And all along the way, we can help make the light of this star bright so that others can see it and join us along the way.

Writer Anna Briggs offers us a wonderful exhortation for this Epiphany that you saw some part of as our prayer of preparation today. Now hear her whole call to this journey of Epiphany:

Once a small star led wise seekers to Bethlehem,
Now bright lights dazzle and lead us astray;
Worldlywise people, seduced by prosperity,
How can we hope to find Jesus today?

Seek out the family who circle their precious one,
Body or mind needing care night and day;
See the star shining where costly love’s pouring out;
How can we hope to find Jesus today?

Turn to the neighbours who stand by the outcast one,
Labelled, rejected, with nowhere to stay;
See the star lighting the exiled one’s homecoming;
How can we hope to find Jesus today?

Watch for the country that welcomes the stranger in,
Fleeing from hunger, from tyranny’s sway;
See the star shine where the door’s ever opening;
How can we hope to find Jesus today?

Mark where a nation renounces its weaponry,
Sharing wealth round to provide work and play;
See the star shine where the earth finds new cherishing;
How can we hope to find Jesus today?

Offer your gifts where the seeking ones yearn for them,
Welcome the love which they more than repay;
Healing comes swiftly where human hearts turn again;
Turn to the star and find Jesus today.

May it be so for us. Amen.

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A 2012 Recap

January 1, 2013 By Leave a Comment

There’s a family tradition for us to send out Christmas letters. So far, I’ve resisted the temptation—until this year. This one has been eventful enough, I suppose! So I share it here as well as by mail…

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

While I am sending cards incredibly late this year, I hope this letter still reaches you before the Christmas season comes to an end. It has been a busy and eventful year, and I figured I would share a few things about it with all of you!

apartment scene

my new apartment, decorated for Christmas

First, on June 1 I moved to a new apartment in Queens as part of the church’s decision to sell its manse. I’m still serving as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone, and my new home is still less than a mile from the church. I love my new place, although I’m not quite as able to welcome visitors as I once was. However, as a one-bedroom apartment, it is much more my size than the five-bedroom manse!

Iona Abbey

Iona Abbey in Scotland

Then, in July and August, I took a wonderful and much-appreciated sabbatical. I traveled first to Pittsburgh to attend the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), then in August I spent a week with family and friends in Mississippi and Alabama. But the real highlight of this time was twenty-five days in Scotland and Iceland! In Scotland, I visited friends in Portmahomack, then joined up with a group on pilgrimage to church sites in Edinburgh, St. Andrews, Stirling, and Glasgow. I concluded my time there with a week on the Isle of Iona, an absolutely incredible spiritual site with history dating to the sixth century. On the way back to the US, I spent four days enjoying the incredible natural beauty of Iceland. It was a trip of a lifetime! The most lasting piece of my sabbatical persists even now, though: I grew a sabbatical beard!

Andy at the White House

identified as “talent” at the White House

This fall, after completing several major leadership responsibilities in the church and presbytery, I took up singing with the New Amsterdam Singers. We are a group of about seventy gifted and committed singers who rehearse weekly in Manhattan and take on challenging music for our three concerts each year. In December, I was part of a smaller group who were invited to sing at the White House as part of the holiday tours. It was another once-in-a-lifetime experience!

It has been good to hear from many of you during the holidays this year. I hope and pray that your Christmas was joyous and your New Year is filled with much love! Look me up whenever you are in New York City—it is always wonderful to see friends!

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Where’s Jesus?

December 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment

a sermon on Luke 2:1-20 and John 1:1-14
preached on December 24, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

One of my most memorable Christmas gifts growing up was the wonderful series of Where’s Waldo? books. They featured a tall, lanky, strange, bespectacled man named Waldo who popped up in a variety of very interesting scenes. The goal of the books was to find him amidst these very busy scenes. He was best distinguished by his bright red striped shirt, but sometimes when he hid behind a tree or something he was a little more difficult to spot. For several years, each Christmas brought a new book in the series, and I remember spending many hours looking carefully for Waldo and the many other things hidden in these scenes. It was a fun game and a great way to spend those lazy Christmas days with family and friends—and even a welcome break from all the toys that seemed to get a lot of attention too!

Sometimes, I feel like we are playing a bit of a game of “Where’s Jesus?” in our world at Christmas nowadays. Signs of the holidays are everywhere, but Jesus is a bit more hidden. Our streets and homes are decorated with trees, garland, Santas, and even nativity scenes, but too often for me at least it just feels obligatory and not all that real and meaningful. Religious celebrations that talk about Jesus take a back seat to family gatherings that focus on gift-giving and eating. Many people are now even saying “Merry Christmas,” but do they even know what that means? Even one of our own parents in the church told me the other day that her child had never made the connection between Jesus and Christmas—to this youngster, Christmas was all about Santa Claus and giving and receiving presents, and, based on our celebrations, I for one am not really all that surprised. Some in the church go on and on about the “War on Christmas”—all the supposed places in our civic culture where the seemingly more generic “holidays” have replaced a proper celebration of Christmas—but I think we have to answer for our own actions and reclaim Christmas for ourselves before we can point to anyone or anything else.

You see, regardless of how we might act or behave in the church or elsewhere, Christmas is not about Santa Claus, giving or receiving gifts, or even the glorious music that shapes these days. When we focus on these things, the world can so easily close in around us. The very shallow joy of this view of Christmas becomes insincere when things get hard or tragedy strikes as it has so often in recent months and years. Between the destruction of Superstorm Sandy and the highly-visible gun violence around us that culminated in Newtown and continued even earlier today, we need something more than the traditional holidays has to offer, a deeper, more real, more transformative joy that brings us new life.

At its core, Christmas should be exactly that. This is the day when we celebrate God’s presence in our world, Immanuel, God-with-us, God’s coming to us in human form, in the birth of Jesus. This is the day when we remember that God doesn’t ever give up on us but shows the greatest possible love for us: love in a simple babe in a manger, love in a wise and challenging teacher, love in a miraculous and astounding healer, love in a life-giving death, love in an astounding resurrection. This is the day when we see that God can’t be pinned only to the powerful, only to the religious, only to Christians, only to the church, for on this day we celebrate how God in Christ was born to Mary, a poor, unmarried girl, in a dark, dank, messy manger, with only strange shepherds to greet him.

So when we look around in these days and wonder, “Where’s Jesus?” the answer may surprise us. We might like to try to get Jesus more fully into our holiday celebrations. We might want to confine the religious element of this season to life in the church or to something that we can do when there is time. And we might even recognize that Jesus is the reason for the season. But when we ask “Where’s Jesus?” the answer may be more like those Waldo books than we could ever imagine, for he is dwelling in our world, not so much hiding as hanging out. He is very much present with us, even when we don’t know it, even when we least expect it. He is ready for us to watch and look and search for him, waiting for us to discover him when and where we least expect it. Our reading tonight from John puts it beautifully:

The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness did not overcome it.

The Word became flesh and lived among us,
and we have seen his glory,
the glory as of a father’s only son,
full of grace and truth.

And so our call this Christmas and every day is simple. Live like this all this has actually happened. Act like Christmas is not about giving gifts or gathering with family and friends but about celebrating God’s life in our midst in Christ. Make Christ’s presence real in our world. And keep asking “Where’s Jesus?” as we look for him to be at work in the expected and unexpected places in our world, for we will certainly encounter this baby boy, this radical teacher and preacher, this astonishing healer, this self-giving servant, this resurrected Christ, in our world.

Sometimes it will be easy, with joyful music and easy signs to point the way. And sometimes it will be hard, when we are lonely, when the walls seem to be closing in around us, when violence and war seem to have the last word. Yet in joy and in sorrow, when we ask “Where’s Jesus?” we know that he is among us. In our songs, in our words, in our celebrations, in our sacrament, we trust that Jesus is among us. In our sorrow, in our sighing, in our living, in our dying, Christ walks with us all the way to show us God’s love each and every day.

So may we seek Jesus and find him this Christmas and throughout the year to come so that our joy might be complete, our hope restored, and our world renewed for these days and always.

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to all, this night, this Christmas, and always. Amen.

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