Archives for 2013

Advent Photo Project #1: Go

December 1, 2013 By Andy James

I’m not usually one to do seasonal photo memes or things like that, but this year for Advent I decided to take the plunge and join the RethinkChurch Advent Photo-a-Day as a bit of a spiritual discipline. Each day during Advent, there’s an assigned word for photo reflection. Today’s word is “go.”

Go…

These are the shoes involved in all my “going” today: leading worship, getting some exercise, and making an excursion to Manhattan for Advent Lessons and Carols at St. Bart’s Church.

I’ll be posting these daily reflections on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter each day through Advent. Take a look at the instructions and consider joining in!

The Path to the Holy Mountain I: The Holy Mountain

December 1, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Psalm 122 and Isaiah 2:1-5
preached on the First Sunday of Advent, December 1, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

As many of you have figured out by now, I love Advent. This brief four-week season that starts out the church year and bridges that gap between Thanksgiving and Christmas is my favorite time of the church year. Some of that is because I think we too often forget about the importance of preparation in our world. I believe that it is essential to pause and get ready for the major milestones in our lives, to spend time intentionally getting our house in order so that the coming celebration can mean all the more.

But this year, I think there is something different in my thinking about Advent and Christmas. This year, it doesn’t seem like there is the same sort of preparation before us. I don’t see the kinds of substantial and uncertain change ahead in our church or our world that help make Advent more meaningful to me. The anxiety of this year’s Christmas season seems to be much more focused on the immediate stress of these busy days and not on something else. There is still plenty of war and strife and poverty and injustice in our world, but it seems to be touching us less and less, and so our longings for something new seem to be less dramatic and immediate than they have been.

And yet this season of preparation for radical change, this time called Advent, is still before us. It calls out that there is something new ahead. It insists that our preparations for Christmas be more than simply buying the perfect presents, setting out the perfect decorations, and getting all the other festivities of the season in exact order. It reminds us that Christmas is not a simple and sweet holiday about the birth of a baby but rather a radical intervention by God that changes everything.

This year, in preparing for this season, our readings from the prophet Isaiah stuck out to me. Isaiah has the wonderful ability to speak so meaningfully to so many different contexts. First it speaks to the prophet’s own time, when he was encouraging the people to amend their ways and return to the Lord after they had taken up different paths focused on their own prosperity and righteousness. Then it speaks again in the days of the assembly and editing of the Hebrew Bible, what we often refer to as the Old Testament, when these words offered great comfort and challenge to a people who were struggling to reestablish their relationship with God and one another without the independence that had defined their identity. Isaiah speaks again to a later day and age, the time when Jesus emerged, when these words gave these hearers hope of a Messiah who would make everything different once and for all. And even now, today, these words point us forward to a future time when God’s presence will be all the more real and complete, when all things will be made new and all creation will walk in the light of the Lord each and every day.

Our readings this morning from Isaiah and the Psalms point us to this kind of journey of walking in the light of the Lord and show us a bit of the destination that is before us. The goal of this journey, you see, is certainly a new and deeper celebration of Christmas, but it is also something more, something that is more deeply transformative of us and our world than just another baby being born, something that gives us a glimpse of God’s new thing that was begun but not finished in the birth, life, death, resurrection, and reign of Jesus. These readings point us to the holy mountain of God, to the sacred and holy place that stands at the center of all creation, to the great temple that stands as the highest of mountains, above all the hills. This holy mountain is the abiding place of God, the place where we know the fullness of God’s presence in our lives and our world, the place where instruction and wisdom flow forth each and every day, the place where swords are beat into plowshares, spears turned into pruning hooks, and the knowledge of war becomes the practice of peace. This year, as much as ever, I believe that the path from Advent to Christmas demands that make our way to the holy mountain of God.

But this vision from Isaiah only gives us a partial image of what we should expect to see at the end of this journey. We don’t have the same expectations and understanding of the temple that were prominent in Isaiah’s own time. The holy mountain of God that we need and expect for our own time is quite likely very different from what our parents and grandparents expected. And this holy mountain where we will know the transformation of our world is only now coming into view.

It’s quite like an incredible view of the city that I experienced on one of my several flights in recent weeks. It was a cloudy and foggy night, with low clouds hanging over almost all of the city—except for a small part of lower Manhattan and Battery Park City that was crystal clear all the way down to ground level and of course the spire of the Empire State Building, peeking its tip through the clouds. It was an eerie sight, with very familiar elements that were yet very different from the view that I know quite well. There was so much that was so familiar—and so much more that was still shrouded from view. This is what is before us as we approach the holy mountain of God this Advent—a glorious yet uncertain and incomplete view of something new, an astounding sight of God’s wonder and grace that is yet beyond our understanding until its full unveiling in the days to come.

Even though we don’t know the fullness of this new thing, exactly what this holy mountain will look like, or even when we might get there, we can still prepare ourselves to enter this holy place. Ultimately as much as Advent is about getting ourselves ready for Christmas, it is also about getting ready for this bigger thing, too, for the day that is to come when “the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills.” These preparations involve an honest look at our lives and our world, a careful assessment of the things that distract us from the journey to God’s holy mountain, and a hopeful view of the things ahead that will help open our eyes for a glimpse of God’s new thing that is ahead. And just like that strange night view of the city, we will likely have glimpses all the way to the surface of this new thing, too—little spots where peace suddenly prevails over the ways of war, brief moments when we begin to understand what God is up to in our lives and figure out how to join in, surprising opportunities to do something new and take a couple steps forward on the path to the holy mountain.

There is no better place to take our first steps on this journey, then, than at this table. This feast is the closest thing we can know in the here and now to God’s holy mountain, for this table sits at the intersection of heaven and earth. It brings together the meal shared by Jesus and his disciples before his death and after his resurrection with the glorious feast that we will share with him and all the faithful on God’s holy mountain. We are right in the middle, right here and right now, ready to experience this foretaste of something new, to welcome this strange feast that will give us sustenance for the journey.

So as we set out on this journey for God’s holy mountain, may you spend your days reflecting on what this strange and wonderful holy place might be in your life and in our world, and may the feast we share today sustain us along the way until we join with the faithful of all nations, of every time and place, to walk in the light of the Lord each and every day. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

Something’s Coming

November 10, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17 and Haggai 1:15b-2:9
preached on November 10, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Something is coming. That’s the clear message of these days in our world. Just with the coming of a new year, we’ve got a new mayor coming into office in our city, a new way of getting healthcare for many people in our country, and the inevitable parade of all sorts of other new things around us. Depending on who you ask, the degree of this change may vary, but it is clear that a number of things will be different around us on January 1.

Our two texts this morning reinforce this message that something new is coming into our world. First came Paul’s letter to the church in Thessalonica, with its words of comfort as they wait for a new thing to come into the world. Like most of the early church, Paul’s listeners were expecting Jesus to return practically any day, and if anything they were getting restless that things were not moving as quickly as they had been promised. If they were already that frustrated after twenty or thirty years, I can only imagine how much more unsettled they would feel if they knew that we would still be waiting nearly two thousand years later!

The Thessalonians knew that something was coming, something that would surprise everyone, something that would put the powers of evil and darkness in their place, something that would change things once and for all, and they were more than ready for it. And so Paul comforted the Thessalonians in their waiting, insisting that the things ahead would build on the things of this time and show something new and greater in the world.

In our other reading from the prophet Haggai, it was clear that something was coming into his world, too. In his day, the people of Judah had returned from exile in Babylon, but there was much that was out of order. The comforts of home that they had known before exile were gone. The temple where they had gathered for worship lay in ruins. All the institutions and structures that had held life together needed to be rebuilt. So God called Haggai to speak a different word to the people, a word that did not ignore the difficulty of their situation but yet recognized that there was a possibility for something greater and new.

God called Haggai to proclaim a message of courage, perseverance, and new life—new life that would transform, even shake, “the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land,” so that all nations would stream to Jerusalem and all people come to know and recognize God at work. And God called Haggai to proclaim a new promise: “The latter splendor of this house shall be greater than the former… and in this place I will give prosperity.” This was a great message of hope and promise that something new and different and great was coming, something that would establish God’s authority over the nations, that would cement God’s promise to Judah for all time, that would make things even better than they had ever been before.

These messages that something is coming resonate deeply for us today. Beyond the changes we know will come in the new year, we sit with the Thessalonians and the Judeans wondering what new thing God has in store for us. We wonder what God will do in our lives as the things that have become common will quite likely change. We wonder how God will respond to all the troubled moments of our world. And we wonder what God has in store for our congregation as we approach this new year, the first year in quite some time where we will not have a full-time pastor among us.

Over the eight years I have served as your pastor, I have heard many questions that sound like those raised here by Paul: When will the time come for something new to take hold? How much longer do we have to wait? What are we supposed to do in the meantime? And I’ve heard many here wonder much as Haggai did: “Is there anyone still among you who saw this house in its former glory? How does it appear to you now? To you does it not seem as if it were not there?” (Haggai 2:3, Revised English Bible) These are the kinds of questions that we tend to ask along the way, questions that have no easy answers, questions that leave us pining for a different way of life, questions that make us want a different order of things, questions that keep our eyes focused on the past or present and turned away from possibilities and promise of the future.

But on this stewardship Sunday, on this day when we bring our commitments to the life and mission of this congregation for the coming year, now might just be time to focus on something new, on the kind of shakeup that stands at the core of Paul and Haggai’s words, on the kind of transformation and new life that we know are coming and wish would come sooner. This is the time to think about what we really long for in this place. Are we looking for a return to the way things were? Are we looking for new life that can only look like what we’ve seen before? Are we looking simply to rebuild the temple exactly as it was? Or are we looking for a real shakeup, for a new and different way to take hold, for God to shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land, for the new thing ahead to be greater than what has come before?

The commitment we make today to the life of this place in the coming year must reflect what we really desire. We can keep doing what we’ve always done before, placing our commitments at the same level they’ve always been, letting our traditions become a memorial to the life we once knew but that will soon pass away. Or we can take these words from Paul and Haggai seriously, taking courage for the new things ahead, standing firm and holding fast to our tradition while embracing new ways for a new time, working to make God’s promise real in this time and this place that is different from what we have known before.

Ultimately, this is the stewardship commitment that is before us today—not so much how much we plan to give next year, as important as that is for our life together and even for the sense of commitment that it brings in our journeys of faith. No, what really matters is rather the commitment that we make today to join in God’s work of making all things new, work that has its roots in our life together here and that demands our money and our time our commitment, and our lives in every imaginable way, both within and beyond these walls. It’s not about rebuilding the temple, maintaining the church building, keeping a pastor around, or even just making it through until the something that is coming is realized—it’s about being faithful in these changing times, taking courage amidst all that pulls us away from this calling, and working to live these things out in faith, hope, and love.

And so today as we bring these marks of our commitment to this congregation and most especially to the hope we know in Jesus Christ, may God give us the strength to be faithful, may God help us to take courage, and may God give us a glimpse of the new glory beyond anything we have ever seen before but that is surely to come in Jesus Christ our Lord. Lord, come quickly! Alleluia! Amen.

Making Things Right

October 27, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 18:9-14
preached on October 27, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Back in high school, I spent a lot of time helping out my choir director with special projects. I designed the programs for our concerts, helped with data entry for our singers database, set up her computer for all sorts of other things, and even made the first website for the choir. I was in her office nearly every day for one reason or another, so she got to know me pretty well. One day, after a long conversation about something where I had been insisting that my answer was correct, we realized that I had not been right. Suddenly she stopped the conversation, pulled out her calendar, and made a note on that day: “Andy was wrong and admitted it.”b A lot of things have changed about me since that day back in high school, but I haven’t gotten a whole lot better at swallowing my pride and admitting when I am wrong!

When I hear this parable about the Pharisee and the tax collector that we heard this morning from Luke’s gospel, that part of me that insists that I am right immediately connects with the Pharisee. He’s quite a faithful and pious man. He follows the law and doesn’t steal, cheat, or sleep around. He fasts twice a week to help sharpen his spiritual practice and follow the requirements of his day. He gives the obligatory tithe of ten percent of his income to God. He does everything he is supposed to do, and he does it all right. While he is certainly a good man whose actions are upstanding and commendable, the attitude that emerges from them is not. He uses his confidence to look at others and place himself above them. In the parable, this gets played out very clearly. Jesus tells us that while this Pharisee was praying in the temple, another man, a tax collector, was also praying nearby. The Pharisee notices him and so opens his prayer with great confidence: “God, I thank you that I am not like other people… or like this tax collector.”

The Pharisee scorned the tax collector, and quite likely for good reason. As much as we dislike the IRS these days, tax collectors in Palestine were even more despised in Jesus’ time! These tax collectors were not just agents of the government—the whole system that engaged them was designed to be corrupt and unfair. One commentator explains the system like this:

[Tax collectors] are franchisees of a corrupt and byzantine system that gouges the poor and enriches the wealthy. The tax collector, by definition a wealthy man, pays the empire a set amount for the privilege of gathering whatever he can squeeze from his neighbors. Although he is personally responsible for the money owed by his district, he is free to collect that money any way he wants, and anything he collects above what he owes is his profit…. Tax collectors are frequently foreigners, and they often farm out their responsibilities to others. It is no wonder they are roundly despised. (E. Elizabeth Johnson, “Exegetical Perspective on Luke 18:9-14,” Feasting on the Word Year C Volume 4, p. 215, 217.)

A tax collector would be the last person you’d expect to see at the temple praying to God. Yet in the parable Jesus tells us that he was right there next to the Pharisee, kneeling fervently, looking down in sadness and hurt, crying out to God in anguish: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” While he doesn’t name the sins he was confessing in our hearing, it seems safe to assume that he was seeking to make amends for the exact sort of thing that the Pharisee was condemning him for. After describing these two characters, Jesus made his preference clear. He wasn’t interested in the Pharisee’s brand of religious piety and self-exaltation. He didn’t want much to do with anyone who put so much confidence in his own ability and refused to admit that he was not perfect. Jesus welcomed the tax collector’s honesty and humility. So he singled out the tax collector for his blessing: “I tell you,” he said, “this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

There are lots of ways to think about this wonderful parable, even more than its challenge to people like me to admit all the times and places when we are wrong! On this day when we celebrate the gift of the Reformation among us, we can’t miss one element of this story that connects us to the great reformer John Calvin. One the of the better-known elements of Calvin’s theology is a doctrine known as total depravity, meaning that all humans are completely and totally doomed to our sinful nature. It sounds like an awful thing, really—and to be honest, it kind of is. Under total depravity, there is no way that we humans can avoid taking up the ways of sin. We cannot not sin.

The tax collector seemed to understand this very well. He knew that the system that employed him was corrupt and unjust, and he recognized that it was easy for him to treat people unfairly and suffer no consequences of his actions. The Pharisee, though, thought that he could make things right on his own, through his actions of piety and obedience to the law. He couldn’t see that even his best actions were tainted by sin—especially the sin of pride and arrogance that led him to place himself above others but even also above God. He trusted in his own actions to make his life right rather than leaving room for God to act. And so this simple parable retells in its story this great emphasis of the Reformation, that our trust must be in God alone, that “our hope is in no other save in Thee,” as our first hymn put it so beautifully, that God’s grace alone makes things right for us and enables us to live the lives that God calls us to live.

Ultimately, this knowledge that we are not in charge, that our own actions do not save us, that God’s amazing grace is the empowering force of our lives, ought to affect more than just how we view our lives. It means first that we must look at others differently. We can’t behave as the Pharisee did in the parable, emphasizing our own right actions to the detriment of others, insisting that we are always right, and lifting up our own obedience and faithfulness in ways that put others down. If we take Jesus seriously here, we instead look at others with humility, not condemning them for their bad acts but seeking instead to embrace them as the beloved sinners that we all are. We recognize that we all have work to do in reordering the priorities of our lives, and so we shift and change and reorient our lives to God’s greater intentions along the way.

But when we hear Jesus clearly here, we also look at ourselves differently. We also must take an honest look at our own lives and ask ourselves, “Where do we put our trust, in ourselves or in God?” We have to ask if we are emphasizing our own actions of obedience and faithfulness or if we are truly welcoming the depth and breadth of God’s great grace. We must wonder if we are placing our confidence to make it through to something new in our own abilities or instead deepening our trust that God will lead us through to a new day. And we must transform our understanding from trying to justify ourselves and instead seek to be full participants in God’s work of bringing justice and peace to our whole world. We probably don’t need to beat ourselves up about our sins quite as much as the tax collector did, not because our sinfulness is any less than his but because we can be confident that God is working in us to guide us away from all the things that seem to separate us from God. As another commentator puts it,

The liberation of knowing that God is merciful and loving means that we can leave behind our reliance on our achievements in work or in our faith community. They have their place but not at the center of our relationship with the God of the cross and the Friend of the poor. (Laura S. Sugg, “Pastoral Perspective on Luke 18:9-14,” Feasting on the Word Year C Volume 4, p. 216)

Our ultimate confidence, then, lies not in our own ability to make things happen or even in our understanding of the depth of our sinfulness but rather in deepening our trust and understanding of God’s mercy and grace that ultimately makes the difference in us and in our world.

So may we set aside our confidence in ourselves and our abilities to make things right and place our trust in God alone so that we can be all the more free to join in what God is doing in us, through us, and in spite of us as all things are made new in Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Glory to God

October 20, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Psalm 100
preached on October 20, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

I can’t imagine life without music. I know this isn’t the case for everyone—maybe it just comes from being born into a family where music was important, from being surrounded by music in church from a very early age, or from all the piano lessons, band practices, and choir rehearsals that filled my childhood years! Whatever the reasons, the incredible gift of sound and song is an indelible part of my days.

I keep finding that when music is fully and completely in my life, something about me is different. I can’t tell you how many people have told me how much I am different over the last year since I joined the New Amsterdam Singers, and I myself can feel it. I can even feel it right now simply because I’ve had to miss two consecutive weeks of rehearsals! There is simply something very special about making music with other people, so much so that there is even scientific evidence that something changes in our brains when we sing together!

And so it is with the church, too. Something is different when we sing together. Even though we are not the largest congregation and don’t normally have a choir to lead us in song, we have an incredible gift of music in our life together—and not just because of Julie’s talents that she so willingly shares, my own love of music, or even our wonderful guests who enrich our celebration and hymnal dedication today. Something happens each and every time we lift our voices in response to the psalmist’s command: “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth.” As I say often, I’m very glad for this exhortation, for it doesn’t urge us to make a beautiful noise or sing a familiar song—it instructs us to make a joyful noise, whatever that may be.

This joyful noise is the beginning of our worship of God. We bring our songs of praise and thanksgiving, our recognitions of God’s wondrous creation in our lives, our hope of God’s continuing presence among us, and our confidence in God’s steadfast love and faithfulness. We “come into God’s presence with singing” and make it clear that all our praise is directed to God. All our songs—new and old, in languages familiar and unfamiliar, simple and complex, whatever the season or occasion—all our songs give thanks to God.

And so today we celebrate this gift of song, not just for those who love to sing but for all the earth, not just for those who can carry a tune beautifully but for those who think they can carry no tune at all, not just when we sing out of these new books but when we offer the songs of our hearts to God. The songs we share in this place can fill the role of nearly everything we do together: offering praise, expressing confession, sharing the word, showing concern for others, calling for justice and peace, gathering us at font and table, and sending us out to live out God’s new creation in the world. The songs we share in this place can express the depth and breadth of human emotion: the joy and excitement of new life, the challenges of difficult days, the laments of pain and suffering and death, and the hope of something more yet to come. And the songs we share in this place tell the great stories of our faith: the joy offered to the world in birth and life of Jesus, the wondrous love shown in his suffering and death, the joyous alleluias that emerge with in the light of the empty tomb, the amazing grace that shows us the depth of God’s mercy, and the love divine, all loves excelling, that sustains us each and every day.

So as we dedicate these new books of song today, as we lift up our voices to sing “glory to God,” may we not ever imagine life without music but instead make a joyful noise to the Lord and declare with heart and voice God’s goodness, steadfast love, and faithfulness as we raise our songs and hymns and spiritual songs to God in this place until we join with angels and saints and all creation to sing God’s praise forever and ever. Glory to God, now and always! Amen.