Archives for 2011

a sermon for Ordinary Time on Genesis 22:1-14 and Matthew 10:34-42
preached on June 26, 2011, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

As we gather on this beautiful day in this beautiful spot, our scripture readings aren’t quite so beautiful. Between Abraham’s obedience to God’s command that led him to nearly kill his beloved son Isaac and Jesus’ insistence that he came not to bring peace but a sword, I suspect that many folks would rather leave these texts out of the Bible – or at the very least not talk about them all that often! But nonetheless, here we have them, not one but two challenging texts put before us by the lectionary today.

I have to wonder what we do with them, then, if we can’t just ignore them or pretend like they aren’t there. What are we supposed to do with a word like this, where God seems to tell us to do something we not only do not want to do for no good reason but that seems incredibly insensitive and inhuman? In moments like these, with texts like these, I think it’s a reasonable question.

These two texts present us with stories where God’s instruction not only just doesn’t make sense but is also extremely divisive and troubling. It doesn’t make sense to Abraham for him to go and offer his long-sought son as a sacrifice to God, and this act certainly doesn’t fit at all within the broader picture we get from the whole Bible of how God works in the world. And Jesus’ words about his message tearing families apart don’t seem to make much sense either in our world that places such a high value on familial relationships – or even in the broader context of his story that shows how Jesus’ mother and brothers played an important role in supporting his ministry.

So what’s the right thing to do here? How should we respond when we hear God speaking, calling us to do something difficult? Do we just give in and do it, or do we somehow resist and find another way? What is the most faithful approach to responding to God in our lives and our world when it is hard?

Abraham demonstrates one approach to all this in his total, unquestioned obedience. His model of following God’s command to offer his son as a sacrifice is admirable, but I don’t think it is particularly commendable in our world. First of all, how could he have done this to the son whom he wanted and desired and plotted and prayed for for so long? In today’s world, Abraham would likely (and rightly) face some sort of criminal charge for endangering the life of his son even if he did not go through with it, and I think we have good reason to question Abraham’s actions based on so many other human encounters with God in the Bible that would suggest that this sort of message should not be followed.

But I don’t think Abraham’s approach of total, unquestioned obedience is all that wise for us today. In both Abraham’s story and Jesus’ instruction here, it just doesn’t seem wise to dive in right away and do what God says without questioning or limiting things somehow. We have to put God’s word in the moment in the context of the broader voice of God working in and with the world; otherwise, we risk bringing about great harm to others and ourselves by following what we only think God wants us to do.

The best way to do this, in my view, is to be thoughtful, faithful, and prayerful as we respond to what we think God is saying, and there’s no better way to do this than to turn to the Bible. As we read the Bible and interpret it for our lives and our world by the power of the Holy Spirit working in community, we hear God’s word to us the best we possibly can.

Again, this isn’t as easy as it would seem to be. We can find texts in the Bible to back up pretty much anything we want, and so we must remember that every reading of the Bible involves some level of interpretation as we take these ancient words and put them into our own language and our own cultural context. Along the way, something is bound to get mixed up or lost or confused, so we need some guidance.

Thankfully, my seminary theology professor Shirley Guthrie summarized how to interpret the Bible in six not-quite-simple rules (from his classic book Christian Doctrine), building on the historic confessions of the church to give guidance for our life today.

First, “scripture is to be interpreted in light of its own purpose.” Scripture was not written to be a scientific or historical document but instead to tell us who God is and how God has interacted with God’s people over the centuries, and we have to keep that purpose in mind as we use it and interpret it.

Then, “scripture interprets itself,” for we look first to other passages in the Bible to sort out the meaning of difficult or confusing texts.

Guthrie then suggests that we keep Jesus Christ at the center of all our reflections about scripture, because if we have the best vision of God that we will get in Jesus, we can certainly learn something from his words and actions that will help us to better understand other parts of the Bible.

Fourth, Guthrie says that we should follow “the rule of faith,” keeping the incredible grace of God in Jesus Christ at the center of our faith and practice and honoring the insights of those who have gone before us in the life of faith.

Then Guthrie insists that we also follow “the rule of love” as we recognize that God’s primary commandments are to love God and neighbor and that any interpretation of scripture that “shows indifference toward or contempt for any individual or group inside or outside the church” is wrong.

Finally, Guthrie calls us to look at the literary and historical context of scripture as we study it, recognizing that we learn a great deal when we think about scripture in the day and age and form in which it was written.

So in and through these specific steps, especially when we undertake them prayerfully as a community of faith rather than just on our own, we can learn a little more about what God is saying to us in scripture and in other revelations and figure out how best to apply these words in our daily lives. I say all this about interpreting scripture because the difficult things we hear from God are not just a thing of the past – people closer to our own time must sort out these things, too.

During the days of Nazi Germany, the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer – the author of our last hymn – struggled to sort out what God was calling him to do. Bonhoeffer had considered himself a pacifist, but over time he became a major leader of the church’s opposition to Hitler and the Nazi takeover of the church. Bonhoeffer struggled with what seemed to be mixed messages from God – not just deciding between a call to teach here in New York where he had studied at Union Seminary and enjoy the safety of life here or a call to be a part of a small group in the German church calling out the nationalism and racism of the church, but also sorting out his recognition of God’s consistent message of peace and nonviolence over against his need to stand up to the grave injustices of the Third Reich.

Bonhoeffer ended up staying in Germany, promoting a way of life that stood in stark opposition to the norm of the war years there, and eventually this peace-lover became involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler, deciding that the need to end the terrible rule of this tyrannical dictator was a part of God’s call to peace for him. After the plot failed, Bonhoeffer was arrested along with many of his co-conspirators, and he spent the last two years of the war in prison. As the outcome of the war became clear in April 1945, Hitler ordered the execution of Bonhoeffer and his compatriots. Today, Dietrich Bonhoeffer stands as an incredible example of one who struggled to sort all these things out for himself, and his difficult journey shows the complexity, power, and consequences of sorting out the difficult things that God calls us to do.

The difficult decisions that Bonhoeffer faced along the way, alongside the difficult words we hear posed to Abraham and the disciples, can and should inspire us to think about the difficult call of God upon us – the call to give up the things that we hold most dear for God’s better use, the call to link ourselves not to the things of the world but to the things of God, the call to love others and most especially God far more than we ever love ourselves, the call to show a deep and radical welcome to each and every person, and the call to listen carefully and discern wisely when faced with a difficult situation.

So may God strengthen us to respond to these calls, to sort out the difficult call of God upon us, so that we might always be faithful and demonstrate the incredible love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

a sermon for Pentecost on John 20:19-23 and Acts 2:1-21
preached on June 12, 2011, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone 

The day of Pentecost is truly one of the great moments in the life of the church. On this day we celebrate the birth of the church as we know it in the coming of the Holy Spirit, remembering how the followers of Jesus went from expecting God’s presence to be in bodily human form to our being comfortable with God showing up in more of a spiritual way.

There are many wonderful holidays in the Christian tradition, but I particularly like Pentecost because this is our day. Our society hasn’t co-opted Pentecost to be another marker in the cultural year like Christmas and Easter. We don’t find stores overrun with red banners, posters of flames, or other sorts of misunderstood symbols. And on this holiday, we usually don’t have family obligations to deal with, leaving this day for the church family to celebrate together. So each year, sometime in May or June, seven weeks after Easter, we pull out the red paraments, think about flaming tongues of fire, and remember the coming of the Holy Spirit into a crowd of Jewish pilgrims from around the world who were attending a festival in Jerusalem some fifty days after the Passover.

The story of Pentecost seems so familiar – but what was that that we read first? That didn’t seem all that much about Pentecost? But back in the gospel according to John, only hours after the disciples had first seen the risen Jesus on Easter Sunday, Jesus came among the disciples, breaking through their locked door and their great fear to come among them and wish them peace. If they didn’t quite know that it was him, he showed them his hands and his side, and again offered them his peace, with the added injunction, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” But Jesus didn’t leave things there – he didn’t send them on their own. After this, he breathed on them and told them, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” all on the night of his resurrection. Now this seems all well and good, but if we translate this schedule to our current calendar, the Holy Spirit came sometime on the evening of April 24, so we’re about seven weeks late celebrating Pentecost!

But in our reading from Acts, we remember that better-known moment when the early church saw the Holy Spirit coming among them, a moment that looks and sounds a lot more like what we usually think of we when we celebrate Pentecost and the coming of the Spirit. On an otherwise ordinary morning, as pilgrims gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate the annual festival fifty days after Passover, the disciples gathered in a house as was their custom, only to be joined by a loud sound of wind as tongues of fire rested on each of them and they began to speak in other languages. Then the disciples ventured out into the crowd and began speaking to the pilgrims from all around the world in their native languages, telling them about the surprising things that God had been up to in recent days in the life of a man named Jesus. Some people took it all very seriously, thinking that they might could learn something from this new thing happening in their midst, but others dismissed the disciples’ strange speech as nothing more than an early morning binge. Then Peter addressed the crowd, insisting that these strange events were not the product of alcoholic ramblings but rather the fulfillment of words spoken centuries earlier by the prophet Joel. On this day, the promise that the Spirit would come upon all flesh in the last days was fulfilled, for things were starting to change and the world was about to be made new.

Now these two moments of the coming of the Holy Spirit look very different. In John’s gospel, the Holy Spirit comes quietly, unexpectedly, with no visible or immediate sign or clear sight for others to see, and in Acts, the Spirit comes in a loud rush of wind, after much waiting, with a clear mark of something new happening right then and there for everyone around to see and hear. As much as we like to think of Pentecost and the Holy Spirit as coming with great power and glory, with celebrations of red everywhere and the witness of so many languages being spoken seemingly out of nowhere, I think we also can learn a lot from John’s vision of the Holy Spirit coming in quieter, less obvious, and yet equally powerful ways.

You see, the Spirit that transforms us doesn’t always work quickly, with great and visible glory and power, but that doesn’t mean that the Spirit isn’t at work. The Holy Spirit often works in ways beyond our imagination, quietly yet steadily shattering our expectations, speaking in silence and in loud speech to guide us into the way that God intends, and working in small and large moments and in dramatic and ordinary ways to transform our lives and our world.

So watching for the work of the Spirit isn’t always easy, since it truly can come in so many different ways. In recent weeks, our denomination has completed the approval of an amendment to our Book of Order that will permit sessions and presbyteries to ordain practicing gay and lesbian persons. Some in the church have celebrated this change as a sign of the Spirit at work in the church changing hearts and minds to make the love of God and the call of God for all people more visible. Others in the church have called this decision a moment when the church has departed from the clear wisdom of the Holy Spirit, and they insist that the Spirit could never be at work in such a move. People can and will see the movement of the Spirit in places that others do not, but I for one think we need to keep ourselves as open as we can to different expressions of the Spirit.

Just as the Spirit was clear in Jesus’ appearance to the disciples on that first Easter evening and to the crowd on the first Pentecost, so the Holy Spirit might just be at work around us, too, in different ways, in those folks who speak in tongues and in our slightly more staid worship, in televangelists who claim to bring healing by the Spirit and in our faithful and constant prayers for those who need God’s healing grace, and in those who welcome the broadest spectrum of leaders into the church and in those who feel that leadership must be more limited in some way. The Spirit can and will and does move and work in all these places and more, and we are called to open our eyes and our hearts to this work – and to join in where we can.

And so on this great day in the life of the church, I believe that we are called to listen for the movement of the Holy Spirit in the quiet proclamations of the everyday and in the midst of bold celebration, to trust that the same Spirit is at work in our midst when we understand it and agree and when we don’t, and to watch for the bold tongues of fire consuming what needs to be past and the nearly imperceptible movement of all things being made new.

So may the Holy Spirit of that quiet Easter evening and that powerful Pentecost come upon us anew today and help us to join in all that God is doing in our world now and always until all things are made new in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

a sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Easter on Acts 6:1-15; 7:54b-60
preached at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone on May 22, 2011 

There have been a lot of martyrs in the news lately, people dying for a cause bigger than themselves. Men, women, and children across the Middle East have died in the uprisings for democracy in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Syria. Some suggest that Usama Bin Laden died as a martyr for his cause, thought the muted reaction in the weeks since suggests that few support that assumption. Others closer to home are remembering those who died in the Civil War as we observe its 150th anniversary over the next few years. Still others this month are thinking back fifty years to the Freedom Rides, where blacks and whites attempted to integrate interstate buses and bus stations in the South and were met with persecution, arrest, assault, firebombing, and practically everything but death. Martyrs seem to be all around us, but what does it mean to be a martyr today?

The best place to start out such a conversation is likely the story of Stephen, the first Christian martyr. According to our reading from Acts this morning, incredible things were happening in the Christian community in those days. More and more people were becoming a part of the fellowships that gathered around the apostles, and as the work got to be too much for the twelve disciples to organize on their own, they chose seven others to join in the work of caring for the people.

One of these seven, Stephen, was especially articulate and faithful, and some in his synagogue were troubled by his wise interpretation of scripture and his passion for this new sect. Without warning, some of the religious leaders of the day seized him and brought him before the council of Jewish leaders on trumped-up charges, and false witnesses accused him of blasphemy in suggesting that Jesus would change the traditions and practices handed down by Moses.

Stephen kept a level head through all this, and “his face was like the face of an angel” even as these unsubstantiated charges were leveled against him. He answered them all with an eloquent retelling of the history of Israel and a passionate plea for openness to the work of the Holy Spirit, reminding them that while these leaders now tried to defend their tradition, they and their ancestors had spent generations dismissing the law and persecuting the prophets. The council did not receive Stephen’s criticism well, and he only made matters worse when he spoke of a his sudden vision of the heavens opening and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. With that, they had had enough, and they took him out of the city to stone him. He maintained his level head even as their stones began to kill him, and his last words conveyed his attitude toward everything that had happened: “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” And so Stephen became the first Christian martyr, the first to die for his faith and for his actions taken in response to Jesus’ own life.

Countless other martyrs have followed in the way of Stephen over the centuries, many under various rounds of Roman persecution, others at the hands of empires around the world, and some killed by fringe groups and deranged persons near and far. The great majority of martyrs died for their faith long ago, but there are Christians still facing persecution and death around the world – in Iraq and Egypt amidst a broader outbreak of violence and attacks on historic Christian communities, and in China where overflowing churches are shut down and leaders imprisoned because they worship without proper government permission. All these martyrs in Stephen’s time and our own are incredible witnesses to the work that God is doing in our world to break down injustice, to stand up to systemic oppression and hurt, to transform broken relationships into something new, and to come into our fearful world in Jesus Christ to make all things new.

While we may not have to put our life on the line to worship or defend what we believe, martyrdom can still happen here and now. Just as Stephen and countless others over the centuries put their lives on the line for their faith, so we too are called to step out and stand up to witness to God’s work in the world. This may not look like what we think it should or what it has always looked like before. We don’t have to demand moral purity or a return to the apparent values of old but rather should seek to help the church and world be more faithful to God’s intentions for all people. We’re not just out hoping to convince others that our beliefs are right but rather should long to make what we believe clear in our actions. We shouldn’t so much want to escape the pain and trouble of this world but rather should seek to join in God’s transformation of the world so that all things might be made new.

And so I believe that we are called to be martyrs too, martyrs for today – not to hold onto life so much that we forget how to live but rather to put something on the line so that God’s new way can be seen in and through us. We don’t go into this kind of life expecting to be killed for what we believe, but we also can’t expect to live faithfully as God intends without encountering some criticism for our actions. Some things we do in our attempts to be faithful will not win us friends along the way. Some things we do as we try our best to follow the way of Jesus might even turn people away from the church. And some things we do to live out the convictions of our faith may make the way before us harder than expected as some who have joined us on the journey choose to take another path.

Even so, we still have to wonder today if we are called to join the ranks of the martyrs in some way, to be like Stephen and so many others and give up some part of our lives to live more faithfully, to take an unpopular stand when it helps to embody the fullness of life that God intends for all people and not just for a few, to stand up for justice and peace and all that is right even when it might not be in our best interest, to remain unafraid of the powers of the world that seek to quash anything and everything that is new or that threatens the status quo, and all along to get out of the way of what God is doing in our world just a little more.

Like those women and men standing up for their rights in the Middle East, those brave people celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of their rides into the South on newly-integrated buses, that faithful deacon Stephen, and so many others who have died for their faith, may we too stand up for what we believe with great confidence and hope, unfazed by the powers that threaten to undo us and empowered by the Holy Spirit to join in the new things that God is beginning in our world even now.

Lord, come quickly! Amen.