Archives for March 2014

The Stories That Define Us: David

March 30, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on 1 Samuel 16:1-13 and Psalm 23
preached on March 30, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

It’s not all that unusual in this world to have friends and colleagues who share the same name. I have two good friends named Nate, and although they come from very different circles of my life, more than once some of my other friends have gotten them mixed up when I am talking about them! I’ve seen these kind of shared names in other places, too. A month or so ago, I visited the First Presbyterian Church in Jamaica, Queens, and met two of their staff who are working with Superstorm Sandy relief. Both are named Dora! But easily the strangest situation comes when I write an email to my friend Andy and the opening and closing names are identical!

Still, by far the most common single name in my address book is David. I looked it up last night—I have three Bettys, five Bills, five Brians (with two different spellings), four Jameses (not counting all the family who have that last name), seven Johns, four Sams—and nine Davids. This is really no surprise, since David is such an important name in the Bible and looms large in the Old Testament.

After a tumultuous start to his reign that required him to violently displace his predecessor Saul, David’s reign was remembered for being one of the more peaceful eras in the history of Israel, and it saw the beginning of substantial territorial growth than continued under his son Solomon. He was also known for his work as a poet and musician, strongly influencing the songs of the people of Israel even though we have no evidence that he actually wrote any of the psalms that are attributed to him through superscriptions in our Bible that were added much later. The memory of his reign over Israel towers over every page after his death. So often the stories of other kings and rulers and the laments of exile seem to say, “If only there were another king like David, we would be better off.” And the expectation of a Messiah to stand as a new king in the line of David is at the center of the Christian understanding of Jesus and his relationship to the people of Israel. In the end, David is a mighty figure—mightier even than the frequency of the name David in my address book!—who factors prominently into the story of Israel that defines us even today.

Yet the beginning of David’s story would not leave you expecting him to be such a major player. Our reading from 1 Samuel this morning makes it clear that nobody in his family thought that that David was all that important to them. It never even crossed their minds that he would be important enough to be a reasonable candidate to be king! When the prophet Samuel followed God’s instructions and went to select the new king from the sons of Jesse the Bethlehemite, Jesse didn’t even bring in David to meet Samuel. Now God had made it clear early on in that search that this decision should not have been based on the standards of the world, for when Eliab, the oldest, came in, Samuel had immediately figured he would be the best fit only to find God make it clear that the choice was not to be based on appearance, height, or any outward human characteristic.

But Samuel didn’t quite learn God’s lesson quickly enough here. He too did not expect David, the youngest son, the one left out in the fields to tend the flock of sheep, the one that could so easily be forgotten or overlooked, to be God’s choice. All human measures would have shown him to be the last possible son of Jesse to be the next king. But after all the other sons of Jesse had come before Samuel and none were chosen, David finally got called in to be considered by Samuel for this new position. Now the narrator seems to have missed something of what God had said earlier, for as soon as David appeared he tells us that David “was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome,” but in the end, that didn’t matter. God had looked on David’s heart and found it to be right and good, and so the Lord instructed Samuel to anoint David as king of Israel.

There was of course much, much more to David’s story that helps define who he is and why he is important to us in our own story of faith. Beyond the stories that I mentioned earlier, many look to his adultery with Bathsheba and his subsequent coverup that put her husband Uriah on the front lines of battle to be killed as a mark of our deep sinfulness, especially if we think of the words of Psalm 51 as David’s confession:

Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
blot out my transgressions.

Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin.
For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me.

Others remember the tale of the boy David’s defeat of the warrior Goliath with only a slingshot and five smooth stones as a mark of how God uses the small to overpower the weak. And still others look to the bond between David and his dear friend Jonathan for an image of holy friendship that can inform the relationships of our world and our lives today. But ultimately I think David’s story defines us not so much because of its importance in the life of Israel or the way that informs our understanding of Jesus but rather because it shows us yet again how God consistently looks beyond all the standards and expectations of our world and calls the forgotten, the overlooked, and the outsider to be bearers of the message of God’s love and faithfulness.

This is the same image of God that is portrayed so beautifully for us in the beloved words of Psalm 23. While so many images of God depict a mighty and powerful and dignified divine ruler, the image of God as a shepherd puts a very different spin on things. This psalm shows us a God who is willing to get down and dirty with us in the messiness of our lives: to show us places of comfort and care amidst pain and hurt, to guide us when we go astray, to walk with us through dark valleys, to offer us grace and mercy beyond our wildest dreams, and to give us a home worth dwelling in all our days. This God is willing and able to shepherd us and all of the forgotten, overlooked, and left-out people of the world “beyond our wants, beyond our fears, from death into life.” Just as God turns David’s life upside-down, from being the youngest son left out in the fields to being anointed as king of Israel, God flips all our images of a mighty and distant and powerful “Lord” and instead shows us this kind of present and gentle and humble shepherd.

This is the strange kind of God who is around us and before us and beside us—a Lord who is our shepherd, a powerful, mighty, and omnipotent God who cares so deeply about us that, as the Heidelberg Catechism says, “not a hair can fall from head without the will of my Father in heaven,” a God who chooses a leader who is not the one most likely to fit the standards of the world but who is most fit for the work and challenge ahead. And so God steps into our world and into our lives, insisting that we like David can step up beyond our limitations, calling the forgotten, the overlooked, and the outsider to act beyond our seeming limitations and do mighty and wonderful things, demanding that we join in the transformation of our world that comes as the lowly are given power and authority to step up and speak out and as the unexpected gifts of our lives are transformed by God’s grace, mercy, and power to be instruments of peace, justice, reconciliation, and new creation.

So may David’s story of being chosen despite all his weaknesses and limitations continue to define us as we trust God’s shepherding grace and love, seek God’s presence among us in those whom we might otherwise overlook or leave out, and look upon the hearts of others and ourselves to find the the hope and vision to embody something new as all things are made new in Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

The Stories That Define Us: Moses

March 23, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Exodus 3:1-15
preached on March 23, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

As we spend these forty days of Lent preparing for Easter, our Jewish friends and family are also getting ready for the holy celebration of Passover. Although they have different celebrations and preparations, these seasons share common roots. Jesus was tried and executed in Jerusalem during Passover celebrations, and from the earliest days of the church Easter has been viewed as the Christian Passover, for just as in the first Passover the Lord let the firstborn children of Israel live while the other firstborn in Egypt were killed, on Easter God again conquered death in the resurrection of Jesus.

So as we share this time of holy reflection and celebration, it is good and right that we look at the stories that define us all, not just remembering these things of the past but sorting out their relevance and meaning in our lives today.Today we turn to the figure who stands behind the Passover, Moses, and think about how his story continues to impact us and define us even now.

Our reading this morning from the book of Exodus takes us to a pivotal moment in his life, when God appeared to him in a burning bush and instructed him to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. Moses began his life in Egypt as the son of Hebrew slaves. He had been facing death along with all other male Hebrew infants born in his time, but Pharaoh’s daughter rescued him as a baby from a basket floating in the reeds and raised him in the household of the Pharaoh. He grew to be a strong and powerful man in the court of Egypt, but he fled this position for the safety of Midian after he killed an Egyptian who had mistreated a Hebrew slave.

After many years, as mistreatment of the Israelites deepened, our story today tells us how God appeared to Moses in this strange bush that “was blazing, yet… was not consumed.” God then spoke to Moses, instructing him to remove his sandals and recognize that this was holy ground. Once Moses understood who he was talking to, God told him of the plan to free the Israelites from their Egyptian oppressors:

I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt;
   I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters.
Indeed, I know their sufferings,
   and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians,
   and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land,
   a land flowing with milk and honey.…
So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.

Moses was understandably skeptical. He asked God quite directly, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” Even when God assured him that he nor the Israelites would be alone on the journey, even when God promised that they would worship God together on that very mountain, Moses was just not so sure about all this. He turned again to God with more questions: “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”

God responded with quite possibly the most important and yet the most confusing response in the entire Bible:

I Am Who I Am.
Thus you shall say to the Israelites,
‘I Am has sent me to you.’

Apparently that confusing bit of revelation was enough to convince Moses to make this trip, to put things on the line, to leave his new homeland and go back to Egypt to lead his people to the promised land.

The story of Moses continues well beyond these verses, as Moses returned to Egypt, declared God’s word of freedom to Pharaoh, gathered the confidence of the Israelites, led them out of Egypt and into the wilderness, engaged with God on their behalf, received the law to guide them, dealt with their disputes and frustrations, and took them to the edge of the Jordan River as they prepared to receive the fullness of God’s promise there.

Amidst all this, the center of this story that defines us is God’s revelation to Moses. While God had revealed God’s self to others before this, Moses’ encounter with God in the burning-but-not-consumed bush tells us more about God than we have known before. We learn here of God’s insistence upon justice and willingness to stand up for the people of Israel. We learn of God’s willingness not just to send someone on a journey but to go along too. And we learn God’s very strange but very informative name.

This name is easily the most important thing revealed about God in Moses’ encounter at the burning bush. God declared so clearly,

This is my name forever,
and this my title for all generations.

This name is quite unlikely any other name. In Hebrew, it is spelled YHWH, and we might say it as “Yahweh,” though an observant Jew would never pronounce such a holy name. Anytime an observant Jew sees these letters in a reading, she replaces it with another name for God, “Adonai.” We translate it as “Lord,” and it is always printed with those small capital letters so that you can immediately know that this is the most holy name of the most holy God. But in literal terms, this name means exactly what we heard: “I Am Who I Am,” or “I Will Be Who I Will Be,” as it says in a footnote in nearly every Bible.

In sharing this name here, God revealed to Moses—and to us—the very essence and core of God’s being. “I Am Who I Am,” God says—insisting that God’s way is the only way, telling us that God does what God does, demonstrating from this early place in God’s story with God’s people that God is sovereign and supreme. “I Will Be Who I Will Be,” God says—if “I Am” is not enough to make it clear, hearing this in the future tense shows us that this is not the end of this story, that God will not leave Moses or the Israelites alone as they make this journey out of Egypt, that God will continue to go with God’s people in all the days to come.

Alongside this holy name and its holy meaning, the revelation of God to Moses also shows us God’s insistence on justice for God’s people. In calling to Moses to go to Egypt and proclaim freedom for the people of Israel, God makes it clear that oppression will not have the final word. God saw the misery, injustice, and suffering that they faced and proclaimed,

I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters.…
I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians,
and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land,
a land flowing with milk and honey.”

In sending Moses to Egypt, God responds to these cries of the oppressed—and makes it clear that God hears the cries of all who are oppressed and so will consistently call God’s people to a new and different way of freedom and new life. By responding to this injustice in this way, God not only condemns those who would perpetuate suffering but insists that God will actively work to end oppression and call God’s people through the centuries to join in this work.

So this story about Moses not only shows us who God is but also gives us a glimpse of God’s call to us. We like Moses have glimpsed God, perhaps not in a bush that burns but is not consumed but in actions against injustice and for peace, in the wonder of nature and the joy of life, and most of all in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So with our own revelation of God, we like Moses are called to go and embody God’s freedom, justice, and new life in the midst of the oppression and misery of our world.

We do not go on this journey alone. Women and men like Moses go before us to remind us that God’s presence goes with us every step of the way. And others also go beside us now, lifting up the story of Moses to show us God’s insistence on the end of oppression and the rise of freedom and encouraging all who desire justice and peace for all people to join these ranks. But as much as we might like to leave this journey to other, God’s revelation to Moses and to us shows us that each of us must go and join in the cry to “let my people go,” to work to transform the brokenness and injustice around us into new life, to stand up and step in for those who cannot speak for themselves, to proclaim the day of the Lord’s favor for all creation. We do this not to further our own agenda, to promote a way of life for a select few, to gain freedom for others that looks exactly like the freedom we enjoy, or even to convince others of God’s presence, but we always seek to embody God’s love more deeply and broadly than it has been before as we live in peace and hope to build up all people along the way.

So may this story of God’s revelation to Moses strengthen us to join in the work of justice and peace so that all people might know the fullness of life that comes from this God who is who God is and will be who God will be now and always. Thanks be to God. Amen.

The Stories That Define Us: Abraham

March 16, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Genesis 12:1-9 and Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
preached on March 16, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

There’s an old song I learned back in Sunday school:

Father Abraham had many sons,
many sons had Father Abraham.
I am one of them, and so are you,
so let’s just praise the Lord.

Now we are clearly not all “sons” of Abraham—some of us are daughters of Abraham, after all!—but this simple song reminds us that Abraham is one of the most important characters in the Old Testament. His story is an important part of our story. His story defines us, too.

Abraham started out as the man named Abram in our reading from Genesis this morning. Abram seemed to be a pretty average older fellow, seventy-five years old, who had no children or grandchildren. For some unknown reason, God reached out to Abram at his advanced age and made him quite an offer:

Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing… In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

There’s no clear reason for why God chose Abram. He wasn’t exactly in the prime of life to make a long journey, let alone father a great nation. His family at that point consisted of a wife who was unable to bear children, a nephew who seemed to stand at the center of controversy wherever he went, and the women and men who were his property. And Abram was pretty well settled in his home and life at that point, with extensive possessions and people around him, so there was no reason for him to go anywhere. All in all, Abram wouldn’t have been my first choice to receive the great fullness of God’s blessing, so it’s almost as if several others had been approached and turned it all down! Yet for whatever reason, God chose Abram to receive this promise of something new.

But nearly as important as God’s choice in all this was Abram’s response. After God gave him this command, Abram picked up his possessions, his small family, his slaves, and his animals, and set out on this journey. It was a pretty crazy move. Nowadays, people think very little of moving across the country, away from family and friends, but even one hundred years ago, a journey of 400 miles as Abram made would have been very difficult. First off, long-distance travel was not easy. The roads were focused on commerce, so a family on the move would have been very much out of place and would have faced some real danger along the road. But once they got “to the place that [God showed them],” it didn’t get any easier. The place wasn’t empty— “the Canaanites were in the land,” and Abram and his family couldn’t just buy it up with the proceeds from the land they had left. But Abram didn’t turn back—he built an altar to the Lord there at his first stop, then traveled on further, pitched his tent, and built another altar to the Lord as he “journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb.”

That of course is not the end of Abram’s story. God continues to work in his life to keep changing things for him. His journeys take him a little further, into Egypt, before he finally settles back in Canaan. He receives a new name, Abraham, that indicates how God’s promises are taking hold in his life. And he and his beloved wife finally bear a son in their old age who is the firstborn of the promised great nation. In the end, Abraham’s journey covers hundreds of miles and many, many years, but it ultimately reflects the deep and wide promises that God offered to him and that carry through the centuries of Judaism and Christianity.

Abraham’s story matters for us in a wide variety of ways. Now there are certainly some elements of it that are more problematic, such as the promise of land in Genesis 14 that continues to inflame relations between Israelis and Palestinians today, the truly shameful way in which Abram tossed out his slave Hagar and their son Ishmael, and the disturbing tale of how Abraham followed God’s instructions so carefully and so far that very nearly he offered his beloved son as a human sacrifice to God. But the broader story of God’s promise to Abraham and Abraham’s subsequent response is one of the great defining stories of faith for us even today. It gives us three particular gifts for our own day and age, for our own walk of faith in this world.

First, God’s promise to Abraham shows us how God’s transformation can take hold in our world. Things do not have to remain as they are now, even if we don’t quite know how they will change or where we are going. We like Abraham can listen for God’s call and journey forth into a new and different way of life. We can encounter something deeper and greater than what we have known before. We can stop being defined by what has come before and instead trust that God will unfold a new future for us.

That new future holds the second great gift of Abraham for our lives of faith today, the gift of the journey. On this journey of Lent, I’ve been paying particular attention to the daily devotional that we’ve been sharing, Too Deep for Words. This past Tuesday, it offered a beautiful reflection on the gift of Abraham’s journey. First it lifted up the simple prayer of modern monk and mystic Thomas Merton:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself…. I hope that I will never do anything apart from [my] desire [to please you]. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. (Thoughts in Solitude)

Then the writer for the day looked further at this how this journey affects us:

However the Spirit spoke to Abraham, he followed the voice on an unlikely journey to a place he’d never seen, trusting God’s promise that blessing would come if he’d only follow. I doubt he saw many cairns, trail markers, as he trudged along looking for his new home, but his life is a cairn for us, showing us the right way, the way of faith. He did not know what each day would bring or where he was going. He simply put one foot ahead of the other, trusting that God was guiding him and would fulfill the promise, even on days it didn’t seem likely. (David L. Miller, Too Deep for Words: Reflections for Lent 2014, p. 17)

So Abraham gifts us with the possibility of a journey in our own lives, following God into unknown places, trusting a new and different way, looking for signs and markers of God’s presence, and filled with confidence that we are not the first to journey this new way.

But strangely and wonderfully, we are more than just people of promise and journey. Abraham’s third gift to us is family. We are people defined so well by that strange little song about Father Abraham, united by this common parent, linked with one another and all the families of the earth as we live out God’s blessing. Again, our Lenten devotional put it so beautifully:

Centuries separate us from Abraham, but we are all his children. Our situation is the same. We go our way trusting the great heart who launched us on life’s journey, joined with others who help us keep the faith when we waver. (David L. Miller, Too Deep for Words: Reflections for Lent 2014, p. 19)

All of these gifts are signified so well in today’s service as we ordain and install our ruling elders and deacons. In this strange and wonderful moment, we watch as God’s promises take hold in our midst as new leaders step forward and are set apart. Like Abraham, we trust that God’s call in our lives is enough to carry us through to places that we have not yet seen. And in this strange act of the laying on of hands, we are bound together with Abraham and so many other saints to know God’s continuing presence as we go forth on this journey of service and life together.

It is a gift and a challenge to walk in these ways, the gift of God’s grace and the challenge of God’s love to go forth into something new, but we can trust always that we will not journey this way alone, that Abraham and so many others have gone this way before us and that God will go with us just as God has gone with them. So may we trust the gift and challenge of God’s grace and mercy to be like Abraham, to trust that God’s promises for us are real, to step out and journey into that something new, and to remember that there are always companions with us on that journey. Thanks be to God! Amen.

The Stories That Define Us

March 9, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7 and Matthew 4:1-11
preached on March 9, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

When I was seven years old, my grandparents took me to Minnesota and North Dakota to meet their family that lived there. It was quite a memorable trip. Beyond meeting some people that my family talks about regularly but don’t often see, those two weeks together cemented an already-close relationship with my grandparents that continued until their death. We also visited some pretty incredible places, like the Lake of the Woods in northern Minnesota, the most northerly point in the lower 48 states, that you can only reach by land from Canada, and Lake Itasca, the headwaters of the Mississippi River. Near Lake Itasca, in Bemidji, Minnesota, we visited a giant statue of Paul Bunyan and Babe, his blue ox—supposedly the second-most photographed statue in the United States, after only Mount Rushmore! The myth of Paul Bunyan and Babe suggests that the 10,000 lakes of Minnesota were formed by Paul and Babe’s footprints as they wandered around during a nasty blizzard—and that the Great Lakes were created by Paul as a watering hole for Babe!

The stories of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox stand in a long line of human stories that intend to tell us how things came to be as they are—stories somewhat like what we heard in our reading from Genesis this morning. These biblical stories carry a very different kind of truth than fables like Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, for they tell us not how some natural phenomenon came to exist but how we came to be as we are with God and one another. The Old Testament stories that will serve as our primary Lenten texts over the next five weeks recount some of the great figures of the Bible who are important in our story as the people of God.

Adam, Abraham, Moses, David, Ezekiel—all these great figures tell us something about who we are and how God relates to us and help us connect more fully to the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. These stories, much like but even more than the story of my trip to North Dakota and Minnesota with my grandparents or the stories of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, ultimately are the stories that define who we are.

Today’s story of the temptation of Adam and Eve in the garden is quite possibly one of the best-known stories in the Bible. It carries so many important questions into our own time as it tries to explain not just how woman and man were forced out of the Garden of Eden and into the world, how pain appeared in childbirth, how women must be subject to men, or even how we came to wear clothes to cover our private parts. Most importantly, it tries to explain the origin of our human sin.

But wait a minute—did you ever hear the word “sin” in our reading this morning? Actually, that word doesn’t show up anywhere in this passage from Genesis! No—in these verses we simply hear about how God instructs Adam on what to eat in the garden and makes it clear that there is one tree whose fruit is forbidden. The story then turns to the woman’s temptation by the serpent, who tricks her into thinking that God’s instruction can be ignored for one reason or another, that the forbidden fruit was good, and that if she ate it, her eyes would be opened to “be like God, knowing good and evil.” The serpent was partially right: the fruit of that tree at the center of the garden was good, and their eyes were opened when they ate it, but he was very wrong in suggesting that God’s instruction could be ignored. Our reading this morning cuts off God’s extended statement of the consequences of this action, but it is still very clear that everything has changed for humanity through this one act of disobedience.

For centuries, Christians have used this story to define us as sinful people, to describe our so-called “original sin.” Sin is so deeply ingrained in us and our world, beginning with this story of Adam and Eve, that even the psalmist could write, “Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.” It is tempting to focus our energies in thinking about this topic by trying to figure out how this sin is transmitted from generation to generation, but I think it is more important to focus on what this “original sin” means, as Presbyterian minister and writer Frederick Buechner does in his definition:

‘Original Sin’ means we all originate out of a sinful world which taints us from the word go. We all tend to make ourselves the center of the universe, pushing away centrifugally from that center everything that seems to impede its freewheeling. More even than hunger, poverty, or disease, it is what Jesus said he came to save the world from. (Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, p. 89)

Another way of thinking about this original sin is to recognize that Adam and Eve’s story is our story, too. Over and over again, like Adam and Eve, we too ignore God’s instructions and forget that God is the source of all that we have and all that we are. Over and over again, we too put ourselves at the center of things and exclude God and others from our self-centered lives. And over and over again, we find new ways to live all this sin out in our world—or as John Calvin puts it,

This perversity never ceases in us, but continually bears new fruits—the works of the flesh…—just as a burning furnace gives forth flame and sparks, or water ceaselessly bubbles up from a spring. (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, II.1.8)

Adam and Eve’s story defines us more than we will ever fully understand, and there is clearly nothing we can do to change that.

But then Jesus enters the story. In three of the four gospel accounts, Jesus begins his ministry only after a strange period of testing and temptation as we heard about in our reading from the gospel according to Matthew. Just as the human story begins with the tempter winning, Jesus’ story begins with the tempter being defeated. After Jesus fasts and prays for forty days, the devil goes after him in three potent ways, appealing to Jesus’ physical hunger, his vulnerability in the wilderness, and a seemingly natural human desire for power and prestige. Jesus never buys the tempter’s wares, instead feasting on the word of God, trusting in the safety of God’s presence, and taking greater comfort in worshiping God alone.

In these three moves, Jesus turns the tables on sin and makes a new way forward possible for us. These are only three small victories, three initial moments where he manages to conquer the evil intent of the devil, but these three victories set the stage for everything to change as his story progresses. After these challenges, even Jesus still faces the temptations of life in the world, but in his death and resurrection God shifts things once and for all, showing us that the self-destruction we bring upon ourselves over and over again is not the end of the story, changing things not for those who are perfect but as theologian Shirley Guthrie says “precisely [for] people who are dead in and as a consequence of their sinfulness” (Christian Doctrine, p. 227).

When we put the temptations of our world alongside our natural propensity to sin, we have a truly horrid combination that can easily define us. We easily combine our very natural tendency to put ourselves at the center with the possibility of exploiting others for our own gain. We so easily take advantage of the freedom made possible for us in Christ by pushing the limits and ending up more distant from God and one another than we could ever imagine. And we so easily slip deeper and deeper into the possibilities of sin that we become mired in the brokenness that quickly spreads into all that we say and do—and into others around us.

Yet Jesus changes the story that defines us. He doesn’t take it away or give it an unnaturally happy ending—he gives us a new story to stand at the center of things. Because of his life, death, and resurrection, we do not have to be defined by the story of our original sin. While we still may not be able to escape our sin that keeps pushing us away from the center, we can trust that God has conquered sin once and for all in Jesus Christ and has sought us out to make us and our world different. While we may not be able to overcome the temptations of this world on our own, we can be certain that God gives us the possibility of repentance and hope. And while we may not be able to fully set aside this very human tendency toward sin, we can have faith that God will give us grace enough to face each day anew, to walk the Lenten road with a new bit of hope each day, to seek a new freedom in the new beginning we share with Christ as we too emerge from the wilderness into the world.

So may these stories that define us, that explain us, that tell us who we are, remind us of our need of God’s grace and show us the depth and breadth of God’s mercy so that we can live in this divine love shown so freely in Jesus Christ and share it with the world each and every day. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Empty

March 5, 2014 By Andy James

a meditation on 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10 for Ash Wednesday
offered on March 5, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

There are many joys of my life in ministry—the gift of celebrating together when there is good news in life or in church, the strange pleasure of preparing meaningful worship for each Sunday, the possibility of being a part of God’s new thing that is always emerging in every community of faith and the world.

But all that joy doesn’t mean that there aren’t some challenges, too. Sometimes my humanity is on full and complete display and I’m just empty. Sometimes there are challenges that leave us with no words to say or no action to take. Sometimes there simply isn’t an easy way to keep going forward. Sometimes there is nothing more to do than to turn to God and pray for a new way to open up.

Ultimately, that’s what Ash Wednesday is about: about recognizing our emptiness, about acknowledging our brokenness, about reaching out to God to seek and find a new way. On this holy day, we “remember that we are dust, and to dust we shall return.” We remember that our life is finite, with a beginning and an end. We remember that our capabilities in this life are even more limited. We remember that our brokenness exceeds our wholeness. And we remember that our lives are so often—too often—filled with emptiness.

Even amidst any desolation in our lives, this sacred day reminds us that the story does not end like this. In our reading from Second Corinthians tonight, Paul makes it clear that God fills our emptiness, that God brings us from the place of death into new life. This is an amazing gift, as Paul says:

We are treated as impostors, and yet are true;
as unknown, and yet are well known;
as dying, and see—we are alive;
as punished, and yet not killed;
as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing;
as poor, yet making many rich;
as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.

All that seems to us to be nothingness—all the sin that separates us from God and one another, all the darkness that tears us away from the light, all the brokenness that keeps us from being whole, all the emptiness that longs to be filled—God steps into all our nothingness and makes it something-ness. God fills our emptiness with the abiding presence of God’s love. God takes all our broken pieces and puts them back together more beautifully than they were before. God sends the light of Christ to shine on us and shake the darkness from around us. And God takes our sin in Christ and brings us back together with God and with one another. Paul says it so beautifully and so simply: “For our sake [God] made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” In Christ we find all that we need to be made whole, and in Christ we are reconciled with one another and with God.

So as we remember that we are dust tonight and go forth into the wilderness of these forty days of Lent, may God’s love fill all our emptiness, may God’s grace enter all our brokenness, and may God’s example in Christ show us the way forward through death and resurrection, this Lent and always. Amen.