Archives for 2011

a sermon on Matthew 25:14-30
preached on November 13, 2011, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

What does it mean to be entrusted with something? Has a friend ever asked you to take care of her plants or cat while she goes away? Have you ever been put in a position of authority over a large fund or a person’s estate?

There are good and bad things about being entrusted with something by someone else. It’s good because you know that they trust you, that they think you will do a good job, that they respect your wisdom. But it can also be a little scary, too, because then you have to be accountable for what you do with it. If something goes wrong, you actually might have to take responsibility.

The parable we heard this morning from the gospel according to Matthew talks a lot about responsibility, but there’s a lot more going on here. At this point in Matthew’s story, Jesus is encouraging his disciples to be ready for the kingdom of heaven to come at any time, and so he gives them this parable to inspire them.

A very rich man prepares to take a long trip and decides to entrust his fortune to three of his servants. He gives five talents to one servant, two talents to another, and one talent to a third, each according to his ability. These talents are not just some small gift, favorite pet, or beautiful houseplant, though. A talent here is a large sum of money, worth something like fifteen years of daily wages for the average worker. The servants are given these large sums and no other instructions about their use, and the rich man leaves on his trip. The servants who received five talents and two talents take their money and invest it, but the servant who received one talent buries his talent in the ground.

Then, after a long time, at an unexpected moment, the rich man returns home and calls in his servants to return what he left with them. The servant with five talents has made five more because of his wise investments. The rich man is happy with this good return and most of all with his servant’s wisdom, so he promises to put him in charge of much more. The second servant with two talents has also doubled his original trust, and the rich man is equally pleased.

Then the third servant returns, carrying his one talent and nothing more. He grovels in fear at the feet of his master:

Master, I know you have high standards and hate careless ways, that you demand the best and make no allowances for error. I was afraid I might disappoint you, so I found a good hiding place and secured your money. Here it is, safe and sound down to the last cent. (translation by Eugene Peterson, The Message)

But the master is furious at his servant.

That’s a terrible way to live! It’s criminal to live cautiously like that! If you knew I was after the best, why did you do less than the least? The least you could have done would have been to invest the sum with the bankers, where at least I would have gotten a little interest. (translation by Eugene Peterson, The Message)

So the master takes the talent away from him and gives it to the servant who has ten already, then he orders the servant to be thrown into the outer darkness.

This parable seems like the perfect kind of story to tell on Stewardship Sunday. It makes it easy for me to suggest that we all need to contribute to the well-being of this community through our faithful contributions. This story reinforces our American mindset that we can earn our way to the top with good investments. And this parable promotes risk in hope of receiving  reward somewhere along the way.

But I’m not sure all that is what Jesus was thinking about when he told this parable to his disciples. At least in Matthew’s telling, he grouped it in with parables that talk about being ready for the coming of the kingdom of God. He focused not on the two servants who made wise investments but rather on the servant who chose not to invest at all.

Now I always wish that Jesus had included a servant who had lost money on his investment. What would the master’s response have been? Would he have welcomed the servant’s risk even at the expense of his own wealth, or would he have decried the servant’s loss? But we don’t have that kind of servant in this story – we have two servants who invested and one who did not, two servants who took a chance on something new and one who did not, two servants who recognized that the time was right to step out on a limb and one who just stayed right where he was, two servants who embraced the possibility of something new and one who just buried a great treasure out of incredible fear.

And so it is fear that Jesus attacks head-on in the story. The safest investor ended up losing it all. The most responsible servant who did nothing, who risked nothing, actually served the master of fear, not the generous master of this story who entrusts even his least-trustworthy servant with something even though he knows that others will do a better job. Then, when the servant’s fear gets the best of him, the master’s fears are realized. As preacher John Buchanan puts it,

Jesus’ warning is that the outcome of playing it safe – not caring, not loving passionately, not investing yourself, not risking anything – is something akin to death, like being banished to the outer darkness. (Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 4, p. 312)

In the end, I think Jesus tells this parable less to urge his disciples to be good investors and to share their wealth wisely and more to encourage them to set aside their fears, take a chance, and be ready for the new thing that the kingdom of God was bringing to them. Jesus knows that the disciples are and will be afraid, but he trusts that the possibility of something greater ahead will inspire them to choose the wiser path, to use their gifts rather than sit on them, to be open to the uncertainty of something new rather than cowering in fear of getting it wrong.

I think these words should speak volumes to us. In these days – as this liturgical and calendar year comes to an end, as a chapter in our congregation’s life comes to an end as we sell our manse, as we wonder what the days ahead will hold for all of us – how will we live our lives? Which path will we choose?

Will we choose the way of fear, the way of burying what we have so that we won’t lose it, the way of squandering our gifts by not using them, the way of staying in the place we seem to know because we are afraid of the uncertainty that lies ahead?

Or will we choose the way of following Jesus, the way of taking risks so that the world might know the wonder and power of Jesus’ life in our midst, the way of investing the gifts we have into the life that we share in this place so that others can grow into faith here, the way of stepping out into the unknown and trusting that God will guide us in the days ahead?

I think John Buchanan puts this way into more beautiful words than I can manage:

Here Jesus invites us to be his disciples, to live our lives as fully as possible by investing them, by risking, by expanding the horizons of our responsibilities. To be his man or woman, he says, is not so much believing ideas about him as it is about following him. It is to experience renewed responsibility for the use and investment of these precious lives of ours. It is to be bold and brave, to reach high and care deeply. (Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 4, p. 312)

My friends, we have embodied that way of following Jesus for over 140 years in this place, and it is my prayer that we will choose our path for the days ahead not out of fear but out of responsibility and hope for the possibility that God might still be working in our midst, giving us talents beyond our wildest dreams to invest and use and share with all who need them and making us bold and brave as we embody the way of Jesus Christ in this place so that all the world might see.

So may God help us to set our fears aside and risk all that we have – and even more – for the way ahead, for the power and possibility and promise of new life for all creation in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

a sermon on 1 John 3:1-3 and Revelation 7:9-17 for All Saints Sunday
preached on November 6, 2011, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

“What will happen to me when I die?” People ask this question a lot, particularly as children or in facing a difficult illness or old age, and questions like this are very much on the minds of many people who make their way to church. The afterlife is a part of religious belief and practice around the world and across many centuries, and a great deal of our human thinking about religion and spirituality is centered on this question. The church culture in which I was raised also had a lot to say about these things. I remember hearing about an evangelism program at the church where I grew up that would start conversations about Jesus with the question, “If you died tonight, where would you go?”

While this is an important topic of faith for many people, there are others for whom the afterlife isn’t quite as important – the focus instead is on the ways in which our faith, belief, and practice can change and transform our current world as much as the next. The old gospel hymn “When We All Get to Heaven” doesn’t speak so clearly in this mindset – the traditional images of heavenly mansions, clouds in the sky, pearly gates, and streets of gold represent an incomplete vision of what lies ahead for us as people of faith in this mindset, for the important things lie in this world as much as in the next.

Nonetheless, after we have looked back over the past several weeks to our 140 years of life and ministry here and then with our remembrance of the Reformation last Sunday, our eyes turn heavenward today more than they do at any other time of year as we celebrate All Saints Day. Today we remember the generations of women and men who have gone before us in the life of faith and shown us how to live and love as Jesus did. Today we remember the saints, known and unknown, celebrated and ignored, dead and still very much alive, whose witness strengthens us to live the life of faith each and every day. Today we remember that there is an unnumbered multitude of the faithful who still sing God’s praise with us, but from another shore.

And so today our texts direct our attention to that place I so hesitate to go – to our understanding of what lies ahead for us in the world to come. These two texts are among many throughout the Bible that give small glimpses of the world to come. In the gospels, we hear Jesus describing the coming “kingdom of God” that looks very much unlike any of the kingdoms of this world and suggests a very different way of God at work in the world even today. The prophets of the Old and New Testaments speak words of longing for a world where justice is done for everyone and sorrow and pain are no more. In several letters in the New Testament, the apostles warn us not to inquire too much about the things that are ahead. Daniel and Revelation give us dark insights into the future for those who do not meet God’s approval. And John’s vision in Revelation offers us moments of great joy that come alongside the arrival of a new heaven and a new earth.

All these incredible words are too often merged into one single popular vision of “heaven” and “hell,” with angels and souls of faithful women and men floating around in the clouds of heaven and servants of the devil suffering in the eternal fires of hell. But the overall picture that emerges of the days ahead for us can’t be summed up so easily and wrapped up so neatly.

Our first reading from 1 John today reminds us so clearly of this, and it shows us the first of two really important principles I think we can keep in mind as we think about that day when we all get to heaven. The apostle tries to address the question of what is ahead for people of faith, for women and men who struggled with the challenges of living their faith in a time and place that didn’t welcome their different way of life, for people who knew the reality of persecution and struggle for their faith firsthand. So he reminds them that they are already children of God – an incredible and wonderful gift from God in and through Jesus Christ – even when the world doesn’t recognize it. Still, though, this status as children is not everything – “what we will be has not yet been revealed.” Things are not over, and there is something more to come that isn’t fully known yet – but we do know that “when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” In the midst of all that we don’t and can’t understand about the life of faith that is ahead, we can be sure of this much – that we are already children of God and that what is ahead will only make us more like God.

Our second reading tells us the second most important thing I think we can know about the time when we all get to heaven. In this portion of the book of Revelation, we have a brief interlude from John’s vision of great destruction to get a glimpse of the eternal praise that seems to one of the few other things we can be sure about for the days ahead. In this passage, John describes his vision of the new kind of life that lies ahead: a great unnumbered multitude robed in white from all nations and peoples singing God’s praise around God’s throne, an incredible gathering of people who have emerged from great trial and tribulation to celebrate and praise God, a new way of life and living that leaves hunger, thirst, and scorching heat behind for the wonder of life with God guiding and leading and caring for the people at every step of the journey. And so I think this is the second great image of the days ahead that we can take with us: that a multitude will praise God for all eternity because of the incredible ways in which God’s presence is finally and fully known in the world to come.

Beyond these two things, I don’t think we can say much more with certainty about the days ahead. When we all get to heaven, we can be sure that we will see God as God and be more like God and join the multitude praising God for all eternity for overcoming all the hardships and perils of our lives and this world. All this is reason for rejoicing here and now – for giving thanks to God for all the saints who already are making their way to this new way and place of life with God and for the possibility of new life for us and all creation in this world and the next.

But alongside our rejoicing, all this gives us the opportunity to join these faithful women and men in working with God to make all things new. We can embody the reality that we and all people are children of God now by standing up for those whose full humanity is not welcomed. We can show the wonder of God’s glory in our worship and praise and prayer every day. And we can work to make this world one where there is no more hunger, thirst, or scorching heat as we make our way to springs of the water of life. These are the things we should undertake to make our own in these days – the possibility and reality of God’s new thing taking hold in our lives and our world, in the here and now and not just in the world to come.

So until we all get to heaven, may God strengthen us for the living of these days by the memory and witness of all the saints and by the feast we share with them and all creation here as we look forward to the great feast that awaits us in the world to come.

Lord, come quickly! Amen.

a sermon for Reformation Sunday on Jeremiah 31:31-34 and Romans 3:19-28
preached on October 30, 2011, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

There’s something wonderful about remembering our history and celebrating where we have been. We had such a great day last Sunday as we celebrated 140 years of ministry in this congregation. Today we celebrate a milestone birthday for one of our members and think about the incredible gifts and lives that people bring to our community of faith. These and all the remembrances of our lives can and should inspire us to many, many more years of faithful life and living.

Today is actually another chance for us to remember our history as we celebrate Reformation Sunday. Today we especially remember that day in October 1517 when Martin Luther posted a list of his “95 theses” of complaint and petition to the doors of the church in Wittenburg, Germany. But Luther’s actions on that day were only a marker in a much larger movement that had begun before him and continued long after him. Luther himself didn’t walk away from the Roman Catholic church of his time but took many years to begin the branch of Christianity that now bears his name. With the rise of the printing press some years before, the text of the Bible had become more accessible to those who literate, and new ideas were more easily spread. Other church leaders of Luther’s time took advantage of a general sense of anger and frustration directed toward officials in Rome to build on the work of others who had been calling for a different way of being the church for centuries. Even some who remained in the Roman Catholic church sought to bring change to the institution that so many had rebelled and protested against.

All these saints encouraged the church to return to its roots, to clear out some of the accumulated baggage of 1500 years, to reclaim its identity in scripture, and to build the most faithful institution possible around these key tenets. And so new leaders emerged across Europe to give shape and form to this emerging way of faith and life in the particular contexts of that day and age. So today, nearly five hundred years later, as we celebrate this important shift in the history of the church – a shift that still shapes and forms our practice of life and faith today – I think we best remember these things by doing exactly what our forebears did and returning to the core principles of who we are by listening for the spirit of the Reformation.

Our two readings today do exactly that. First we heard the beautiful text describing the coming of the new covenant from the prophet Jeremiah. At their heart, these incredible words remind us that God is always seeking to be with God’s people in new ways. If one way of relationship doesn’t fit the need, God will keep trying until another one does. Jeremiah insists here that God changes minds and hearts and lives, that God breaks into our humanity to “be [our] God” so that we can be God’s people. To top it all off, God promises to be in relationship with each and every one of us – and all of us together – so that we can be renewed amidst our missteps and restored to life.

The apostle Paul picks up on much this same theme in our reading this morning from his letter to the church in Rome. Paul takes the prophet’s ideas of renewal and restoration and new life and connects them directly to the life and death of Jesus Christ. He suggests that the law of God cannot save but can only condemn, and so Jesus’ life revealed the full righteousness of God to sinful humanity. Paul declares that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” – and yet God’s grace becomes effective in us and through us in faith and brings us back into relationship with God. Paul insists that this is not any of our own doing – responsibility for all this belongs only to God.

These two texts bring us some of the key ideals of the great Reformation of the sixteenth century and bear the spirit of that time into our own, but they don’t always translate into our day and age right away. The spirit of the Reformation should always be before us, as one of the great principles that has emerged over the centuries reminds us: we are not just the church once reformed; we are also the church still being reformed according to God’s Word and Spirit. As we make our way into our 141st year of ministry in this congregation, we have to sort out what these things mean for us to make the spirit of the Reformation our own. What is it for us to reclaim these great ideals of relationship, self-sacrifice, and trust in God for the church and the world in 2011? How do we live out what we have learned about being in relationship with God in this changing time? How do we help others to see what we have seen and experience the presence of God in our world? Asking these kinds of questions is, I believe, the most faithful way we can be church together in this changing day and age.

Looking closely at what we are doing and how we are doing it to see how it fits into our new reality in Jesus Christ and our changing world is our greatest challenge – but also our greatest opportunity. Helping people sort out what it means to believe and have faith in 2011 and beyond ought to be at the center of our mission in these days. And all along the way, we must embrace the questions that will come up and honestly face the difficult decisions that come before us, for it is in those moments that we truly have the opportunity to embody the spirit of the Reformation in our own time and place.

So as we journey together in the coming months, as we face the change that is certainly coming our way, as we work to wind up some things that have occupied our minds too much lately, as we sell our beloved manse and purchase something new, as we make a new space for the work of the church in this building, may the spirit of the Reformation continue to call us to ask the tough questions, to sort out what it means to be the people of God in this time and place, to remain confident of God’s presence in the face of everything that changes around us, and to keep showing the face of God to everyone we meet throughout the good days and bad. Thanks be to God for this confidence, this hope, this challenge, and this way of life in faith together in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

a sermon for the 29th Sunday of Ordinary Time on Exodus 33:12-23
preached on October 16, 2011, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

If someone asked you to draw a picture of God, what would it look like? Would you draw some sort of human form? Would you make a picture of your favorite natural scene? Or would it be something else entirely, something more abstract, something more obscure, something more personal?

Humans have been trying to depict divine beings of all sorts for centuries. The Greeks and Romans of the ancient world built dramatic statues to show off their deities’ very human bodies. The Israelites got in big trouble with God for making a golden calf while Moses was receiving the Ten Commandment on Mount Sinai. And even in Christendom, artists have made countless depictions of Jesus, some hailed as beautiful additions to the history of art and our understanding of faith and others attacked and destroyed for attempting to paint what should not be painted. Nowadays we keep up our attempts to depict God. More than one blond-haired and blue-eyed man has been cast as Jesus on the big screen. James Earl Jones and Morgan Freeman, two black men with deep, resonant voices, have been cast to speak as God. And the recent unexpectedly bestselling novel The Shack depicted the Trinity as an African American woman, a Middle Eastern carpenter, and an Asian woman.

So it’s quite natural for us to want to know more about what God looks or sounds like, to catch a glimpse of God in human form, to have a God sighting every now and then. These God sightings have been a part of our world for longer than we can know, and even the great man of faith Moses wanted to catch a glimpse of the great glory of God. In our reading from the book of Exodus this morning, we hear about this moment when Moses asked to see God’s glory and ended up with his own God sighting. While he was up on the mountain with God to receive the Ten Commandments a second time, Moses had an incredible heart-to-heart conversation with God. The exchange was incredibly human, sounding much like inquisitive banter between old friends, with Moses recognizing God’s considerable steps in guiding him and the Israelites to this point in their journey while also stating his very human desire to have a greater sense of God’s presence with him along the way ahead. Upon hearing Moses’ request for God’s continued presence, God responded with grace and mercy, promising, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.”

But Moses kept up the conversation, noting that he and the people of Israel could not get to the promised land  on their own – they needed a very present and real God to go with them. They needed to know God’s favor and see how God made them distinct from others, and without this assurance, Moses felt it was silly for them to go at all. His concerns were well-founded – the Israelites had done little more than complain about the food and the water all along the way so far, and he was on the mountain again with God because the people had been worshiping an idol under the guidance of his own brother Aaron and had already broken the covenant that God made with them. But even so, God again assured Moses of God’s continued presence with them along their journey to the promised land: “I will do the very thing that you have asked; for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name.”

All this conversation, though, seemed to be a prelude to Moses’ real question, his desire for a God sighting: “Show me your glory, I pray.” God didn’t walk away but instead offered one final promise to Moses: “I will make all my goodness pass before you… But you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live… You shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.” So Moses followed God’s instruction and made his way out onto a rock, where he stood in a cleft of the rock. God covered Moses with God’s hand while God passed by, but then after God had passed, God’s hand was removed so that Moses could see God’s back.

This is truly such a great story – it’s not only great to know that at least one human being has had a real, honest-to-goodness God sighting, it’s also pretty incredible that Moses only saw God’s back side! Still, I can’t quite imagine a world where we see God in this very direct and human way. Sure, we say that we have seen God in Jesus Christ, but that was a one-time glimpse, and we only have the biblical witness to that God sighting and no eyewitnesses among us. The images of God that we do have leave so much to be desired – the old paintings of Jesus rarely speak to the contemporary world, and many people just don’t identify with any of the images and words of faith and belief at all. So the leap of faith involved in seeing God these days is pretty significant, and God doesn’t seem to show up quite so directly or often anymore anyway. But we are here in the church, either because we have experienced the presence of God before and want to experience it again or because we figure this is as good a place as any to have our first God sighting along the way.

I believe that we can reasonably expect to have that kind of encounter with God in our journey together in this place, but there is more to what we must do than just that. We need to be on the lookout for where God is present and at work in our world, for the places where God is already stepping in to change things and make things different, for the comfortable and uncomfortable places where God is embracing us or challenging us, for the dramatic and real presence of God not so much where we would most expect it but maybe where we would least expect it, maybe most in the longings of those in need, in cries of the poor, in the prophetic words calling out for justice. We also need to be ready to tell others about our experiences of God, to describe our God sightings in whatever form they take, to speak about how we have seen God at work in our lives and in our world, even to honestly speak about the times when we have doubted God’s presence in our midst. And most of all we need to be about showing God’s face to others, joining in those times and places where God’s presence is already visible and making it clearer, acting to embody the presence of God among those in greatest need, and living life in such a way that others might have a God sighting of their own in and through us. This is our greatest challenge but also our greatest hope – to keep our eyes open for God each and every day even as we embody God’s presence in our world so that others might also know the fullness of life that we have found along our journey.

So may God inspire us in our hearing and seeing and speaking and doing, that we might hear God’s voice directing us into the way ahead, we might see God’s presence in whatever way we need, we might speak of God’s presence so that others can hear, and we might join in doing and being and living in all the places where God is already present and at work to make all things new until he comes again.

Lord, come quickly! Amen.