Andy James

wandering the web since 1997

Presbyterian minister in Atlanta.
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Found beer in seminary.

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More Than Meets the Eye

April 4, 2011 By Andy James

a sermon for the fourth Sunday in Lent on John 9:1-41
preached at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone on April 3, 2011

Sometimes Jesus is just weird. He spent forty days in the wilderness, after all, to get ready for a ministry of three years among the people of Galilee. He felt it important to start out that ministry with a visit to an itinerant preacher who hung out near a muddy stream and “washed” people there. And as he continued his work, he often spoke in strange parables that made little sense to anyone until he explained their meaning and purpose.

In our story today from the gospel according to John, Jesus embodies his weirdness in all its fullness. As he walks along the road with his disciples on the Sabbath, they discover a man who had been born blind. The disciples ask him one of those tough questions that every pastor dreads: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” As he responds about the origin of this man’s sufferings, Jesus gets weird: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” Jesus continues with a strange and unprovoked philosophical declaration of who he is and what he is doing, but then things take one final unexpected, weird turn. Jesus bends down, spits into the dirt along the road to make a little mud, and without asking permission rubs the mud into the blind man’s eyes. He then instructs him to wash in the pool of Siloam, and afterward the man is able to see.

The rest of the long reading we heard this morning is all about what happens after this strange miracle – the puzzled response of the man born blind who can finally see the world in which he lives, the leering response of the Pharisees to this strange healer and his powers that seem to be free from any Sabbath regulations, the questioning of the blind man, not Jesus, as some leaders in the community wonder whether he had actually been born blind, the unexpected transformation of the man born blind as he experience Jesus’ power for himself and gradually turns to follow him as well, and Jesus’ final declaration that the real blindness here was not in the one who had been healed but in those who could not see the power of God working in this time and place.

Throughout it all, the blind man is confused and hurt and bewildered by everything happening around him, but he maintains one simple thing: “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” He doesn’t understand it, he can’t pinpoint how it happened, and people just won’t believe him – but somehow he is finally able to see the things around him and gradually becomes able to see that God had done this work in and through him.

But in the midst of all these strange things and this one important claim, I just can’t let go of how weird Jesus seems – his strange response to the questions asked of him, his healing of someone who didn’t ask for it, and especially this strange mix of saliva and dirt that somehow mixed with the water of Siloam to become a miraculous healing balm for this man born blind. Part of this surely stems from the reality that Jesus worked and lived in a world very different from our own. The healing arts of Jesus’ time were not rooted in medical knowledge like our own but rather in a strange mix of the supernatural and the traditional. The now-obvious recognition that sharing bodily fluids like saliva can transmit sickness and disease was not something that was understood in Jesus’ time. The simple assumption that sin of some sort, from some source, was responsible for all illness was rarely doubted or even questioned. And the recognition that sight is something we all can lose even if our vision tests at 20/20 doesn’t seem to make sense in our world today where even a computer can seemingly see so many things.

But throughout this story, Jesus’ greatest weirdness comes through when he insists that the worldview of his time – and of ours too – leaves something out. When his disciples ask him who sinned in order to make this man blind, he proposes an interesting new way, that sin was not responsible but rather that God was so that God would be glorified in his healing. It’s an astounding idea, that God makes people suffer in order to be glorified, and I don’t think it can go unquestioned, even though Jesus himself utters it. Some might explain away this suffering by saying that the man born blind didn’t suffer since he never knew what it was like to see, but that’s a copout if you ask me – God certainly gives us eyes for a reason, and when they do not work as God intends, we certainly suffer. Others have argued over the centuries that God’s providence is responsible for everything, good and bad, suffering and joy, and we certainly hear echoes of this in our own day too. Between our everyday thank-yous to God for providing a good parking place and the too-common assertion that bad things that happen in our lives and in our world are simply a part of “God’s plan,” we put a lot of emphasis on what God provides us, and if we do it well in the framework that Jesus provides here, it potentially provides glory to God.

But some in our day have taken this perspective to its logical end and pointed to God’s providence and glory as the explanation for nearly everything that happens in our world. I’m not speaking of the Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells of our world who blame natural disaster on human sin – that’s actually the perspective Jesus explicitly denies here! – but rather of some of those quieter voices who imply that God sends disaster to open new mission fields. Yes, in recent weeks, some have actually suggested that God sent the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster upon Japan so that the church can show off its care for people there and bring them to believe. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I would be compelled to believe in a God who sent a disaster that killed my neighbors, friends, and even family so that I can see what he is up to. But thankfully that’s not at all what Jesus says here – he simply makes it clear that in this specific individual, in this particular healing, God’s work of healing providence was made clear. This story can’t explain how and why everything happens, and God’s glory is not the reason for every child born blind, but here, in this time and this place, Jesus invites us to see more than meets the eye and watch as God breaks through our expectations to do the unexpected.

At the core, that’s the real weirdness that Jesus gets at here, not so much the healing without permission, not his strange and evasive answers about who did or did not sin here, not even the dirt and saliva that he uses to make the healing happen. The real weirdness here is that Jesus calls us to put aside our assumptions about how things happen, to set aside the ways that everything has worked before, to stop trying to see as we have always seen before, for the reality is that we have been, are now, and will forever be blind if we keep trying to see as we have always seen. Even the man born blind who suddenly was able to see has to keep working through things two and three times to sort out the new reality of his sight, but eventually the power of his simple transformation story overcomes all the questions as blindness fades into sight and confusion becomes understanding.

Jesus’ strange new worldview challenges us to look at things anew, to pay attention to what is really going on around us, to make sure that we aren’t just seeing what we have seen before or what we want to see now, and then to respond, recognizing where God is at work and stepping in ourselves to work where work is still needed. Jesus casts aside the way we have always thought things should be and insists that there is more than meets the eye here, that we need to think anew about how can be and should live together in our changing world. We can’t just assume that every problem can be attributed to our own actions or the actions of others, and God doesn’t set us up to fail or face suffering, yet somehow God still puts these things before us – the struggles that make us who we are, the strange and different things that are inherent in our birth, maybe blindness, deafness, shortness, red-headed-ness, baldness, left-handed-ness, gayness – these things that the world too often discounts and that make our lives hard – and yet God insists they can show God’s glory.

There is more than meets the eye in these things and in everything that God gifts us in the fullness of our humanity. We may not immediately understand it, we may not always see it right away, we may certainly be angered and frustrated by our different reality, but we nonetheless can trust that God can and will use everything about us for the fullness of God’s glory. So may God open our eyes to see God’s glory in all the strange and wonderful things around us in these days – and inspire us to respond to this new and different and wonderful and weird world with new hope and life now and always. Lord, come quickly! Amen.


Filed Under: sermons

The Wilderness Way

March 13, 2011 By Andy James

a sermon for the First Sunday in Lent on Matthew 4:1-11
preached at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone on March 13, 2011

Jesus didn’t set out seeking the wilderness, but that’s where he ended up. John the Baptist, his cousin, was known for dragging people out into the wilderness, where he called them to repent and be baptized, and Jesus too began his ministry as the Spirit led him too out into the wilderness. This wasn’t just any old Boy Scout weekend camping trip – this was an intense forty-day journey filled with fasting and prayer as the final preparation for his ministry. It had to be a pretty intense experience for Jesus out in the wilderness, with daily worries about finding water to sustain his life, nightly fears of attacks by wild animals, and the constant perils of the extremes of rain and heat and cold.

After those forty days and forty nights, though, Matthew tells us that Jesus’ journey in the wilderness had actually only just begun. The temptations of the wilderness for Jesus came to a head at the end of these forty days, just when Jesus’ hunger was at its greatest and his resolve was at its lowest. The tempter came at him three times, each time seeking to break Jesus’ resolve and faith from a different angle. First the devil suggested that he turn stones to bread and ease his hunger pains, but Jesus would have nothing of it, remembering that he needed no bread to live but rather could be sustained by the faithful word of God. Then the devil took Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple, encouraging him to jump down and test the psalmist’s promise of God’s salvation, but Jesus instead chose to follow another scripture: “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” Finally the tempter showed Jesus all the splendor of the nations from the top of a mountain, promising that all this would be his if he only chose to worship the devil, but Jesus insisted that he would worship only God the Lord. After all this, Jesus’ wilderness way came to an end as angels came to care for him and meet his needs after his long sojourn in the wilderness.

The wilderness way that Jesus himself faced is the inspiration for our season of Lent. The length of these days, the penitential focus of these days, and even the long-standing practice of fasting or giving up something for Lent is rooted in Jesus’ own time in the wilderness. Our journey of Lent too is rooted in a season and attitude of self-examination and self-discovery that were certainly a central part of Jesus’ own journey in the wilderness. And just as the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness and stayed with him through those forty days, the Spirit also guides us into these days and goes with us along the way so that we do not walk this road alone. But as important as this season is, the wilderness is not somehow magically over for us on Easter morning. The journey of Lent does not bring us immediately out of wilderness and may even leave us in a darker and more uncertain place than we were before. The resurrection dawn on Easter morning does not bring us automatic and immediate relief from all our pain and struggle even though it is the decisive victory over the power of sin and death. And the self-examination and self-discovery we undertake in these days invariably will force us to confront issues in our lives well beyond the things we can sort in these forty days.

Even so, Jesus’ wilderness way that we walk for ourselves in these Lenten days gives us some deeper insights into our own journey through the wilderness that we walk each and every day. The wilderness of our changing world is before us constantly, and the wildernesses of each of our lives confound and confuse us. Things in our world are startlingly different from what we have known in the past, and we face the challenge and difficulty of sorting out how to live in a seemingly new and different time. Obstacles and uncertainties appear in the road before us, and we are forced to sort out how to live amidst these difficulties. Options and possibilities for us abound in this wilderness, and it so often becomes difficult to sort out the temptations from the opportunities.

And so as we wander in the wilderness, we see that Jesus’ journey is the model for our own. Jesus persevered through the uncertainty and difficulty to emerge to a new day, and he came forth from the wilderness strengthened to live very differently than he had ever done before. Jesus looked at the various options that the wilderness offered him and sought a faithful response to temptation, and he emerged from the twists and turns with confidence and hope not in his own ability but in God’s transforming presence. And just as the Spirit had guided him into the wilderness, Jesus trusted the Spirit’s presence throughout his journey there and so was able to walk in new paths of life.

The wilderness of Lent is before us. Turns and twists and curves will inevitably come on our road. Uncertainty will seem to reign, and we will be confused and turned around time and time again. Yet the Spirit still goes with us, standing by our side as we walk the road of penitence and passion, journeying with us no matter what our struggle or joy, facing our sorrow and pain with us, and always embodying the presence of God each and every day. And most of all, even amidst all the twists and turns of our pain and suffering, even in a dark and uncertain path through sorrow and sighing, we know where this road ends – with the deep suffering of Jesus transformed into the glory of the resurrection, with even death no longer having the final word for Jesus and for us. The wilderness way has been conquered already, and we simply must seek his signposts to guide us as we seek to follow his path.

Because Jesus walks this road before us, we can approach this wilderness way without fear, walking whatever road we face in these days with faithfulness and hope, accompanied by that same Spirit who led Jesus into the wilderness and led him out with confidence and hope. So as we journey through these forty days together, may we know the presence of the Spirit in this wilderness and prepare anew for the passion and resurrection of our Lord so that our faith might be strengthened and our life renewed. Amen.

Filed Under: sermons Tagged With: Lent, temptation, wilderness

Up on the Mountain: Glimpses of Glory

March 6, 2011 By Andy James

a sermon for Transfiguration of the Lord on Exodus 24:12-18, Matthew 7:24-27, and Matthew 17:1-9, the last in a series on the Sermon on the Mount
preached at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone on on March 6, 2011

It’s time to come down from the mountain. We’ve spent much of the last two months – nearly every Sunday since Christmas! – up on the mountain with Jesus, hearing his vision of the kingdom of heaven from the Sermon on the Mount and exploring how it gets lived out in our world today. Today our time on the mountain comes to an end, but not without a pretty spectacular ending, for as we prepare to walk the road of Lent over the next six weeks, we find other mountaintops before us as well that also take things to a different level.

In our readings from Exodus and later in Matthew, we have more than just a glimpse of something new or instructions on how to be a part of the kingdom of God. Here we finally glimpse the fullness of the glory of God, the way things would be if we were actually able to live out all those instructions that Jesus gave in his teaching up on the mountain. In our reading from Exodus, Moses received the law and commandment from God atop the mountain, standing very, very close to the fullness of the glory of God as God shone so bright with glory on top of the mountain that the people down in the valley could see it. Then in the second of our two readings from Matthew, Jesus too went up on the mountain with Peter, James, and John, where he suddenly began to shine with light as he joined in a strange conversation with Moses and Elijah and a voice called out from the cloud, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!”

In these glimpses of glory, the view from the mountaintop is transformed once again as the glory of God shines brightly in the world and we see how we can live in this new way, too. We don’t always understand what is going on here – the devouring fire of the presence of the Lord in Exodus is incredible, especially since it somehow does not claim Moses’ life, and the transfiguration of Jesus is one of those stories that truly defies explanation, understanding, and even sometimes application, to the point that I know colleagues who find a way to avoid preaching it each and every year! But somehow, these mountaintop moments must translate into our world.

We can’t leave the transformative glory of God on the mountaintop – Jesus himself made that clear in his own parable that concludes the Sermon on the Mount, where a wise man builds his house on rock but a foolish man builds his house on sand and watches it wash away. For this vision of the kingdom of heaven or this glimpse of the fullness of God’s glory to have any real meaning, it has to go beyond Sunday, beyond the days when we have a visual reminder of the mountain here around the pulpit, beyond the mountaintop moments where our faith is strengthened and our eyes glimpse God’s glory. We must bring these words and these experiences down from the mountain and make their glory real in the world.

This glory can’t just reside up on the mountain, waiting for us to return there and fill up again from its endless store of grace and hope when we need a dose of spiritual energy. We can’t leave this glory someplace where we won’t see it and think about it every day. We are reasonably tempted to pull a Vegas moment and let what we have seen up on the mountain stay on the mountain – but what we have seen on the mountain demands to be shared and most of all lived. And sadly, we also can’t live up on the mountain, either – but what we see and hear and experience there must transform life down on the plain and in the valley.

When we start to live in the way we’ve seen up on the mountain, we build on a solid foundation and find the beginning of God’s new way taking hold in our lives and our world. Or, to put it another way, if we live down in the valley or on the plain in the same way we have seen up on the mountaintop, God is not only revealed to us but through us as the transfiguration becomes real in us who have been transformed by God and made citizens of the kingdom of heaven.

Living in the valley or on the plain in the way of God’s glory as we have seen up on the mountain is not easy, but it is truly our greatest privilege and call to live in this way. We can’t just be happy experiencing these things from time to time when we find ourselves atop one mountain or another but instead must make them real in our lives as we join in the work God is doing in our world. Later in worship today, we have two opportunities to follow in this way. First, we ordain and install our church officers, setting a few among us apart for particular service in our midst and recognizing that they have a special role in leading us to translate our glimpses of glory on the mountaintop into the everyday life of this community. Then, we celebrate communion, the eucharist, the joyful feast of the people of God, where we get yet another little glimpse of God’s glory and of what God is up to all around us as we share a simple feast with the great company of all the faithful and look for God to do something more in our lives and our world.

As we walk this road together today and come down from this mountaintop one last time, may God show us how we can be a part of making what we have seen from this mountain real in the world, and may God use us to reflect the incredible glory we see here beyond ourselves and beyond these walls into all the world.

Lord, come quickly! Alleluia! Amen.

Filed Under: sermons

Up on the Mountain: Seeing Ourselves Anew

February 27, 2011 By Andy James

a sermon on Matthew 7:1-12, the sixth in a series on the Sermon on the Mount
preached at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone on February 27, 2011

Preacher’s note: A significant portion of this sermon is highly dependent on two items of copyrighted material. Nonetheless, I will share the framework for the sermon and point you to the resources used. Thanks for your understanding as I seek to respect the hard and creative work of others and yet still want to share!

We’ve been up on the mountain for the last several weeks – with a little break for my vacation last week! – hearing Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount anew, and by and large he’s offered us a new view of the world even from this early place in his ministry. Up on the mountain, Jesus insists that blessing is not a gift to be counted but rather a call to embody a new way of life. Jesus suggests that we need to be both seen and unseen in our work to show and be a part of what God is doing in our world. Jesus makes it clear here that relationship and reconciliation count for far more than exacting adherence to legal codes. In this sermon, Jesus demands that our actions match up with our words – and that everything we do deepen our life of faith on the inside at least as much as it invites others to join us in that way on the outside. And Jesus maintains up on the mountain that God’s economy calls us to live in a different way that counts not the cost but the potential for something new.

So much of the Sermon on the Mount is about how to live in a way that embodies the kingdom of God for others, but in our reading from this famous sermon today, Jesus turns a little more inward. He isn’t addressing the church, per se – such an institution did not exist in his time – but in this section of his sermon he nonetheless seems to be talking a little more about how to live with each other on the mountain as we must do in the church rather than just looking out to the world beyond this place.

First we hear a very familiar verse: “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged.” It’s an incredible verse – an important reminder of our limitations as human beings and our inability to understand and see things as God sees, for judgment is, in the end, reserved for God. But that simple view doesn’t capture everything he wants to say. While Jesus certainly wants us to refrain from harsh or inappropriate judgment, I doubt that he would say that we should not serve on a jury or that someone should escape punishment for wrongdoing because no one is willing or able to bring down judgment. For Jesus, judgment is not so much prohibited as it is reframed – each of us must submit ourselves to the same sort of judgment we ourselves would offer. And so judgment is more about how we see things – not just seeing what others have done but also seeing one another in new ways, seeing our own actions through others’ eyes, and seeing the new thing that God is doing in our midst.

So that we can see things in this way and be honest about how we see  others and ourselves as we begin living out this command, I invite you now to join me in a brief meditation on this text, originally used in the Iona Community in Scotland.

In summary, this meditation invites a blinded listener to hear others speaking the truth about their lives, concluding with an invitation to remove the log that the listener does not even realize is in her eye. This portion of the sermon concludes with a symbolic action as worshipers are invited to come forward, remove a piece of wood from atop a mirror to discover that they can see a little more of themselves as the logs are removed. The meditation and action are adapted from “The log in your eye” in Present on Earth, The Iona Community/Wild Goose Worship Group/GIA Publications, p. 219-221.)

Following the symbolic action, the sermon continues with the following prayer:

Let us pray. God of judgment and grace, we have ignored Jesus’ command: “Do not judge.” We have pointed out the splinters in others’ eyes without recognizing the planks of our own. Remove these specks from our sight, and help us to see with new light. Open our eyes, our ears, and our hearts to ourselves and those around us, that we might be aware of our own shortcomings and know the fullness of your grace even as we offer it to others as Christ has offered it to us. Amen.

Now Jesus doesn’t leave things there, though – there is a little more to today’s vision from up on the mountain. From this place, he insists that his listeners will receive all that they ask for, find all that they search for, and have all doors on which they knock opened, even as he demands that they offer others the same respect, love, and grace that they seek for themselves. This is not an open promise to receive all things without question – rather, it suggests that God offers us all that we truly need in graciousness and love even as we too are called and expected to show that same sort of grace and love in our asking of God and our living with and for others.

Living like this is not easy. Jesus’ vision from up on the mountain is rarely in line with our self-interest. We don’t like being honest with ourselves about the planks in our eyes or the ways we constantly fall short, and we demand everything that God can offer us without being willing to make that same offer to others. But this is the vision set before us, a vision we will surely question and maybe even mock or criticize, yet it is nonetheless God’s vision for our world to be made new.

And so we ask so that this way will be given to us. We search so that we might find this something new. We knock so that God will open the door of new life before us and all the world. May then this song be our prayer for this vision to be real among us.

The sermon concludes with the singing of “Lord, can this really be?” (words by William Rutherford, music by John L. Bell) as found in Church Hymnary 4 of the Church of Scotland, #205.

Filed Under: sermons Tagged With: judgment, sermon, sermon on the mount

Up on the Mountain: The Difficult New Way

February 13, 2011 By Andy James

a sermon on Matthew 6:19-34, the fifth in a series on the Sermon on the Mount
preached at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone on February 13, 2011

We’ve been up on the mountain with Jesus for the past four weeks listening again to the familiar Sermon on the Mount, so with three weeks left to go, it seems like a good time to stop and take a quick look back. As he offered the crowd his vision of what God is doing in bringing a new way from up on this mountain, Jesus started out with simple, seemingly harmless statements of blessing, but on closer examination they proved to be a dramatic challenge to the status quo. Then he reminded his listeners of the importance of being both salt and light in the world, the call to work in seen and unseen ways to be a part of what God is doing all around us. He then explored the importance and role of the law in God’s new way, insisting that the details of the law do not make things right but instead suggesting that the law should promote this new way of righteousness through relationship and reconciliation. And then last week, we heard Jesus talk about the practices of giving to those in need, prayer, and fasting, insisting that they be done not just to be seen but really to embody a full and new way of life. All along the way, Jesus has been offering us an alternative vision of life from up here on the mountain, suggesting that God is up to something that needs to be seen and lived, breaking into the world with a new way of life and inviting us to join in.

This alternative vision becomes even clearer in our reading from the Sermon on the Mount this morning. In this section, Jesus seems to be far more prescriptive than he has been up until this point – while he has certainly been direct in confronting problems with the system of his day and age throughout the sermon, something seems to have changed here. Jesus’ encouragement to live in this new way here seems to shift to things that hit closer to home, directly addressing our tendency to accumulate stuff, our difficulty in seeing a new way, our struggles to define where we place our emphasis, and our worry about how things will work out in the midst of uncertainty. Jesus is very straightforward here:

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth… but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven.”

“If your eye is healthy [and you can see what is going on around you], your whole body will be full of light.”

“No one can serve two masters…. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

“Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear…. Indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

“So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”

These are the kinds of things that seem easy for us to talk about doing, but we struggle to take the real steps toward them for ourselves, mostly because we usually don’t have to. We’re fine suggesting them for someone else or resorting to these claims when we would rather not deal honestly with telling someone “no,” but we struggle how to even imagine making them real for ourselves when we have everything we need already. When we get down to the tough work of making these things real, they are much, much more difficult if not even seemingly impossible and irresponsible to live out, especially when we are the ones who “have,” yet Jesus’ original audience was probably more a group of the “have nots” than most American churches will ever see. So in all these directions here, Jesus tries to instill in his listeners in every age, of whatever economic or social standing, that we need no longer look to ourselves to meet all our needs. We instead are called to trust that God will supply all that we need as a new way of life and living comes into being in our world, sharing our abundance and living in trustworthy relationship as we seek to be a part of God’s transformed and transforming world.

The specifics of this way of life that Jesus describes are exceedingly difficult in today’s world.

  • Avoiding building up treasures on earth – these days known as savings accounts! – can bring disaster in catastrophic moments or even when there is a slightly larger bill to pay than usual.
  • Keeping our eyes open to new things is difficult when we can so easily retreat into the way of life that we know.
  • The concern of money looms so large over us that it is tough to imagine a time when we don’t have to make it our primary concern.
  • And worry is so deeply ingrained in us as we are told to avoid so many things in order to make our life longer, live more healthily, or be better stewards of the world around us – not to mention the worry and concern and fear that seem to naturally develop just from living in New York City!

So just as Jesus suggested in our reading a couple weeks ago that Jewish law needed to be reinterpreted for his own time and to take into account a primary concern of righteousness through relationship and reconciliation, so we too have to think about how we make Jesus’ marks of kingdom living work in our very different world. Even if we can’t give up all our possessions right here and right now or stop worrying once and for all about how we will meet our basic needs for ourselves and those we love, we can and indeed must sort out how to live out the radical trust in God that stands at the center of this difficult new way.

  • Perhaps Jesus’ admonition to “store up for yourselves treasures in heaven” is best understood in these days as an encouragement to make sure that we use all the resources we have at hand to be a part of God’s transformation in the world. As you heard earlier, we will be talking about some concrete ways to do this very thing after worship today.
  • Maybe Jesus’ call to fill our eyes with light is a reminder to open our eyes more fully and completely to see what God is doing all around us and how we can join in. Beyond the conversation that will begin today, in the upcoming season of Lent we will be looking at how congregations in New York City are responding to significant issues in our world so that we might have a better vision for our own life together.
  • In making it clear that we cannot serve both God and wealth, Jesus insists that even in our world where the “almighty dollar” may be in charge for many, we should operate in a different mindset that puts God’s intentions for wholeness and fullness of life first. It is this commitment that drives our actions as a church of paying our staff fairly and providing for their full welfare even when it brings strain on our finances.
  • And perhaps Jesus’ call not to worry about the things of life is exactly the instruction we need in a world preoccupied with possessions and things and filled with concern about what might happen tomorrow. This call forces us to move beyond just trying to make ends meet and demands that we seek to be the people God is calling us to be together in these days, not just trying to survive as a congregation in this place and holding on to everything we have now but rather sorting out how we are to truly live as God’s people in the days ahead so that we can be a bigger part of the vision that Jesus offers us from up on the mountain. As our Book of Order reminds us, the church is called to do its mission at the risk of losing its own life, for living out our mission is far more important than institutional survival.

As difficult as it may seem at times, living out this new way of life proclaimed by Jesus up on the mountain that brings forth the kingdom is our greatest call and our greatest responsibility as Christians, not so that we can gain our salvation or have extra wealth and privilege in heaven but rather so that we can join in what God is already doing to make that kingdom of heaven real, not just in the world to come but right here and right now, not just for a few who accept it but for all creation. Jesus’ own words that we just sang sum up this way better than I could ever do myself: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you.”

May we have vision to see and wisdom to live this difficult new way, seeking and striving for all that God is doing now and forever to make all things new even now so that all the world might share in the new life we know in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Filed Under: sermons

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