Archives for 2012

Did You See Him?

April 15, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 24:13-36 for the Second Sunday of Easter
preached on April 15, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Last Sunday, as you may remember, we heard a very tentative Easter proclamation from the gospel according to Mark. The faithful women who had gone to anoint Jesus’ body fled from the tomb in fear and amazement after finding it empty and hearing that Jesus had been raised. Last Sunday, I suggested that this Easter story at least is something of a divine game of “Where’s Waldo?” where we have to keep our eyes open for Jesus in the world – so I want to start out this week by checking in. Did anyone see Jesus this week? Does anyone have a story of encountering Jesus that they would like to share this morning? I hope you’ll share your observations in the comments.

I suspect that as many of us as saw Jesus right away had a really hard time finding him in our lives, and if we have struggled to see Jesus this week, we are not alone. In our reading this morning from the gospel according to Luke, we hear about two disciples who were struggling to see Jesus – until he actually showed up with them! After learning that Jesus was not in the tomb, the disciples weren’t quite sure what to do, so they kept on with their normal tasks for the first day of the week. Two of them began a brief journey to Emmaus, a village about seven miles from Jerusalem.

As they walked and talked about the events of that very saddening week, a stranger along the road joined in the conversation. He acted as if he knew nothing about the distressing things that they were discussing, but soon this seeming stranger jumped in with his own take on everything that had happened. He suggested that there was a lot more to Jesus’ death than they had originally understood. He told them that the Messiah would have to suffer as Jesus did if he was to receive the glory they wished for him, and he helped them to see how Jesus was connected to all the things that they had learned before from scripture.

As the two disciples reached Emmaus, the stranger who had joined them along the way said that he would keep going on the road, but they urged him to stop with them:

Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is nearly over.

When he joined them inside, they sat at table together and began to share a meal. He took the bread at dinner, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them, and then they realized that it was none other than the risen Jesus who had been with them all day long! Even though he disappeared right away, they knew who it was, and so they hurried back to Jerusalem – seven miles in the dark, along a dangerous road! – to tell the other disciples.

The stories of encountering Jesus continue all around us. We see Jesus in so many different ways, when we look in the eyes of a stranger, when we offer the gift of presence in the midst of despair, when we share time with beloved friends, when we seek to serve those who are in great need. All the stories of encountering Jesus we have heard this morning and experienced in our lives remind us that Christ is risen, that Jesus is still on the loose in our world, that death does not and will not have the last word, that God is not done with us yet. And every time we gather at this table to share even the simplest of meals, we trust that we will see Jesus again, that he will be made known to us too in the breaking of bread.

My friend Ben, a pastor in North Carolina, told me his own story this week about seeing Jesus. The church where he serves has supplied food to feed hungry students and their families at a local elementary school where his wife teaches. Over the years, they have realized that many children get their only good meals of the day at school, and the weekend for them means less a break from their studies and more the loss of healthy meals for two days. Before Easter, Ben’s wife told him about how Jesus had shown up along the way. The mother of a first grader who gets a bag of food each week came to the office one day to ask why her child was bringing a bag home each week. When the office explained the food was for the family for the whole weekend, the mother had a curious look on her face – the bag had been coming home nearly empty, just a bag of rice and one caned good. They discovered that her daughter had been giving the food away to her classmates on the bus ride home, because she thought they needed food, too, and that the gift she had been given was worth sharing.

The gift of the risen Jesus among us is like that. He shows up in unexpected places – in strange walks and talks with the disciples along that Emmaus road, in the experiences we have shared, at the table where we will soon gather, and in the wonderful simplicity and giving of a child who is as concerned about others as she is about herself.

May we keep seeing Jesus all around us in this Easter season and beyond. Alleluia! Amen.

Where’s Jesus?

April 8, 2012 By Andy James

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mandate

April 5, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon for Maundy Thursday on 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 and John 13:1-17, 31b-35
preached on April 5, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

There’s been a lot of talk about mandates lately, and between the Supreme Court and the presidential race talking about a health care mandate, we are sure to hear a lot more about mandates before this year is out! But today is all about mandates. The name for this day itself, Maundy Thursday, comes from the Latin word mandatum, the same as our word mandate. This name for this comes from the commandment that Jesus gives his disciples in our reading from John tonight:

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

This mandate that we celebrate tonight is Jesus’ last commandment: Love one another.

This love seems to be a pretty straightforward thing. Jesus talks about it in one form or another in all the gospels: Love God and love neighbor, he commands, and you will embody everything that is necessary along the way of faith. But these commands mean nothing in words alone. They find their greatest and most complete meaning in Jesus’ own actions that we remember tonight as well – the incredible gift of his presence in bread and wine and his self-giving service as he washed the feet of the disciples.

These actions describe the mandate of this night and the commitment of this Holy Week far better than any words ever can. In opening himself to his disciples and to us in the feast we will soon share, Jesus made it clear that anyone and everyone is welcome to share in the life that he offers. In offering himself in service to his disciples as he washed their feet, Jesus showed them that love cannot exist solely in words but must translate into radical, even unexpected action. In all these things, Jesus continued the acts of self-giving love that marked every moment of his life and ministry – and that shines through so clearly as he journeyed to his death on the cross.

And so what matters for us in these days is not so much the suffering that he endured but rather the attitude he brought to it all. The violence put upon him in his death matters far less than his gentle and humane response to it, for Jesus refused to allow even the threat of death to change how he lived. He didn’t respond in kind when insults were hurled at him. He didn’t see the need to defend his innocence at all costs. He didn’t find it necessary to condemn those who condemned him – but rather chose to forgive. All this was rooted in that final mandate of love that he gave his disciples – and that he lived out even through his last hours.

This is the call of this night, not to worry so much about exactly what we believe, to perfectly imitate what Jesus did, or to sort out who is in or out of the church or anything like that, but rather to live faithfully according to the mandate Jesus gave us, to embody this kind of incredible love in our lives so that others too might live in this way and know the fullness of God’s grace, love, justice, and mercy in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Now Covenant

March 25, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon on Jeremiah 31:31-34 for the Fifth Sunday of Lent
preached on March 25, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Sometimes it is just best to start over. Some days when everything keeps going wrong it would be best to stop, go back to bed, and get up again – if we could. Some moments when things are messed up beyond belief, the best way out is to start from the beginning again. And with some situations, the best way to bring about change is to be patient and wait for something to come to an end so that a new thing can begin. No matter how you approach it, when things start going wrong or getting weird, sometimes you just need a new start.

Jeremiah was thinking about just this kind of fresh start in our reading today. His first listeners were faced with the challenges of life in a world that was literally crumbling around them. Their nation had been disintegrating under weak and uninspired leadership for many years, and finally they suffered a great siege at the hands of their largest enemy before surrendering to the armies of Babylon. The leaders and other important people had been carted away to Babylon so that the core of the society would be broken apart. And the beautiful and important temple that stood at the center of religious and civic life in Jerusalem lay in total ruin.

In the midst of all this, Jeremiah offered them this word from the Lord, the promise of a fresh start. A new covenant would bring the people back together and restore the war-torn land. A new way of living out the law would shape their life together. It hadn’t worked before, because there was always a little separation between the people and the law. Now, though, the law would be so integral to their being that it would be within them, written on their hearts. With this, they would a new connection to God that would be real and true and full and complete, linking them to one another and to God always. They needed this new way of life and living – they needed this fresh start – and the prophet promised that God would give it to them and make them whole again.

All this didn’t come into being overnight – it took a good forty years before the exiles returned home from Babylon, and even then it wasn’t a return to exactly what it had been before. Even so, God kept God’s promises and brought them a new covenant for a new day and age, a new way of life that would make things different and show God’s way again. They had a new covenant – a now covenant – as God welcomed them into fullness of life as only God could make possible.

For centuries, the church has read this text as part of its own story. We have connected the new covenant to Jesus and viewed him as the fulfillment of this prophecy, making it all about our own fresh start and often forgetting that God had already worked great restoration in Israel and Judah in bringing home the exiles and restoring the people there. While the new covenant that Jeremiah describes finds its greatest fulfillment in Jesus Christ, we are not the only heirs of this covenant.

Even so, we in the church have seen incredible things in this wonderful image of new life over the centuries. The new covenant reminds us that things were broken and Jesus made them whole. It reminds us that God is working with people all around the world, not just the chosen people of Israel. And the new covenant reminds us Christians that we too need to have a closer, more real relationship with God each and every step of the way.

However, this can seem so disconnected from us as the church today. This act of salvation and transformation took place nearly two thousand years ago. We haven’t broken the covenant, have we? This isn’t our problem, is it? Jesus is among us already, and there is not much for us to do other than to try to live all that out. But what if the prophet were speaking to us? What if these words were not only just fulfilled in the days after the exile or in the time of Jesus? What if we need a new day to start over, too? What if God is planning to make a new covenant with us just as God did with the people of Israel and Judah and with the church? What if God is putting the law within us and writing it on our hearts?

While we’re certainly not facing the difficulties of those who first heard these words, I think we could certainly stand to have a new way before us. The world is conflicted beyond what it ever seems to have been before. The ways of life and faith that we have known are just not working for people in the same way that they once did. People are longing for a new covenant – a now covenant – that is real and true and full and complete in these days, not just the days of old.

What would this look like? How would we like to see things different in the life of faith? How can we envision God at work among us today? How can we join in what God is doing now to remake us and our world?

Writer Diana Butler Bass has been dissecting the dramatic changes in the church in recent years. Her most recent book, Christianity After Religion, suggests that the old structures of the church are starting to fall apart – and not just our old buildings! People are not looking for the same sort of life of faith that they once sought. Churches of every sort are on the decline and have been for a surprisingly long time. While there is a substantial increase in people who say that they are “spiritual but not religious,” they find little point in being active in the community of faith as they see it.

She suggests, to borrow and apply the language of our scripture for today, that we need a new covenant – a new way of life with the world – for the church to be relevant in the twenty-first century and beyond. People are longing for a place where they can feel welcome and loved and known by others and by God. People are longing for communities that encourage them in intentional practices like prayer and engage them in action for justice and peace in the world. And people are longing for new language that more accurately reflects our historic way of a thoughtful, engaged, and trusting faith rather than intellectual assent to confusing doctrines.

While we need something dramatically new to take hold, it seems that we have the grounding of this in our past life together. Just as Jeremiah promised that the new covenant would be built upon the old, that the law would now be written on their hearts, Bass suggests that we too can reclaim much of what the church has been in ways that engage those who least expect it. And so the new covenant, the now covenant, becomes real in our midst, not necessarily in increasing the number of people in our pews but in recognizing how God’s presence is taking hold in our world and in our church – with the law within us, written on our hearts, and the full knowledge of God before us, beside us, and with us, ready to restore us and make all things new as we join in the work of justice, peace, and grace in these Lenten days and beyond.

So may God guide us in this new way, in this new covenant, in this now covenant, even as we walk the way of the cross and open us to the power and the possibility of God’s new life taking hold here and now and always until our Lord Jesus comes again to make all things new. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

By Grace, Through Faith

March 18, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon on Ephesians 2:1-10 for the Fourth Sunday of Lent
preached on March 18, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Today is a day of beloved things. We just read a favorite scripture that talks about salvation by grace through faith, easily my favorite theological concept. We just sang one of the most-beloved hymns of our faith that speaks so beautifully of grace. And as part of the response to the word today, we will soon share in one of of the beloved moments of our life together as we ordain and install new ruling elders and deacons.

Toward that end, to go along with our scripture reading today, I want to share an extended reading from a favorite theology book, Christian Doctrine by Shirley Guthrie. Shirley was one of my theology professors in seminary, and I don’t know of anyone who can talk about the meaning and importance of salvation by grace through faith better than he can. Thankfully, his words are easy to understand, written with people like you in mind, and though he does not speak directly of today’s text, its major point is also his major point, so I hope that his words illuminate the point of our scripture today better than I ever could.

Suppose we begin to understand what justification by grace means. “How can we have this assurance of God’s love that frees us from ourselves and for God, other people, and true self-fulfillment?” The church answers this question by speaking of justification [– salvation, making things right with God –] through faith.

…It is often said that instead of the idea that our good works make us acceptable to God, Protestantism teaches that all we have to do is have faith in order to win God’s approval and acceptance. This is a serious distortion, because it only substitutes another requirement that we must fulfill in order to earn salvation. In the last analysis it makes us just as insecure as does justification by other means. Instead of anxiously examining my life to discover whether it is good enough, now I must anxiously examine my faith to see whether it is sure and strong enough to earn God’s love. Justification by faith in this sense is only another means of self-justification and self-salvation.

According to scripture, neither our good works nor our faith justifies us – God alone does it by God’s free grace in Christ. It is not confidence in the goodness of our life or in the strength of our faith,but confidence in God that gives us the assurance that we are right with God. Robert McAfee Brown puts it this way: “The gospel does not say, ‘Trust God and he will love you;’ the gospel says, ‘God already loves you, so trust him.’ Faith is not a ‘work’ that saves us; it is our acknowledgement that we are saved.”

This does not mean that faith is unimportant. Although it is not the cause of God’s loving us, it is the indispensable means by which we accept and live from God’s love. Faith does not make us right with God, but no one is made right with God without faith.…

Our faith does not force or enable God to love us, but it is our way of acknowledging, receiving, enjoying – and returning – the love that God had for us long before we ever thought of loving God. We are not made right with God by our faith, but we are made right with God through our faith. Our faith does not change God from being against us into being for us, but it does change us from being closed to being open to receive the love God has always had for us.

What is this faith we have been talking about? …Very simply, faith is trust. It is not intellectual acceptance of biblical or theological doctrines, not even the doctrines of Christ or justification. It is confidence in God. Faith is not believing in the Bible; it is not, in Calvin’s words, “assent to the gospel history.” It is not believing in a book, but believing in the God we come to know in the book. Christian faith is not confidence in faith that saves, not a “saving faith,” but confidence in the God who saves. The faith we have been talking about, in other words, is a kind of personal relationship – a total commitment of ourselves to the living God whose trustworthiness has been proved by God’s powerful and loving action for us in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. John Calvin puts it this way: Faith is “a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”

How can we have such faith? How can we be so sure of God’s love that we are freed from the unnecessary, self-defeating attempt to justify ourselves? How can we trust God so completely that we do not have to trust our own goodness or faith? …Faith, trust, or assurance in God is a gift. We can no more simply decide to trust God than we can by sheer willpower decide to trust another human being. The faith that trusts in the love of God is itself the work of God’s love, “revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”

[Even though] we cannot give ourselves faith… there are some things we can do to put ourselves in situations in which the gift of faith is promised and received….

[First,] if we want a faith that trusts in the love of God that frees us from the necessity of trying to justify and save ourselves, we can admit honestly that none of us has such faith, at least not always. Even those who do not have intellectual doubts about the truth of biblical and Christian doctrines do not have so much confidence in God’s love that they are free from the fearful or proud compulsion to build themselves up in one way or another before God and other people, and in their own self-estimation. None us has [the kind of relaxed, anxiety-free trust in God that marks the faith that Jesus himself described in the gospel according to Matthew.] If we want real faith, therefore, we must paradoxically admit that we do not have it, and pray every new day that we may receive it. “I believe. Help my unbelief.”

[Second,] faith, trust in God’s love, becomes possible when we put ourselves in a situation in which we can hear about and experience God’s love over and over again. Such a situation is first of all the church, the community of God’s people. Just as a child, spouse, or friend needs to hear over and over again that he or she is loved, so we Christians need to hear over and over again the unbelievably good news that God loves, forgives, and accepts us despite everything that we have been and done – or not been and done. Trust in God becomes possible as we hear constantly anew how trustworthy God is. That happens in the church as [we are told and tell] over and over again, Sunday after Sunday, the story of God’s steadfast love for a sinful world and sinful human beings, each one of us included.

But hearing is not enough.… It is not enough simply to hear the words that God loves us; we need to experience God’s love. It is above all in the church that this happens. It happens when people are baptized… – when [we] see a visible demonstration of the assurance that God knows each one of us by name and has “adopted” us to be God’s dearly beloved children. It happens when it is not the good and worthy but precisely the needy, guilty sinners who are invited to the Lord’s Table to receive nourishment for the new life [we] cannot give [ourselves]. It happens when we experience God’s forgiveness, acceptance and love as we experience the forgiveness, acceptance, and love of other people in the life of the Christian community. The church is by definition the community of those who live by God’s forgiveness for guilty people, God’s acceptance of those who in themselves are unacceptable, God’s love for those who know they cannot earn the right to be loved. It is the place where people can risk putting aside all their defenses and masks, knowing that they will be accepted just as they are, with all their faults, whatever they have done, however unacceptable they are by the moral and social standards of the world.

[Now we may not always see these things here, yet the church] is still the body of Christ. God promises to make God’s justifying [and saving] grace real and effective in this all-too-human community of sinners who need it just as much as anyone else. We can recognize, experience, and trust God’s love everywhere when we first find it here.

Shirley Guthrie, Christian Doctrine, p. 322-325

My friends, this is my hope and my prayer, that this church can and will be the kind of community that shows God’s love and grace and so embodies this kind of faith, not faith to save anyone or anything, because God has already done that! – but the faith that inspires us and others to be a more complete part of the new life that God is bringing into being in our world.

May we know God’s amazing, saving grace through the faith that God alone can give us and embody it in our life together so that others might see God’s forgiveness, acceptance and love in us and so see it in God, now and always. Amen.