Andy James

wandering the web since 1997

Presbyterian minister in Atlanta.
Music lover.
Found beer in seminary.

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An Offering of Thanks and Praise

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a sermon on Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Acts 4:32-37
preached on August 23, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

I suspect that the offering might be one of the least-liked parts of the worship service. I’m not talking about the wonderful and beautiful music that Julie blesses us with week after week but rather the act of gathering the gifts of the people as we worship, the strange process of passing offering plates back and forth across our pews to collect the monetary gifts of those who come to worship. Any dislike of this part of the service is probably not even about the process of passing the offering plates either but rather rooted in a general discomfort that many people feel around giving money—especially when we know that other people might be watching.

I think most everyone probably agrees that it is a good thing to bring our gifts to God, but there has not always been clear agreement about the best way to do this. We have biblical records like both of our readings this morning that describe a physical act of bringing gifts to God, of sharing very physical items with the religious institutions or the church community to show a measure of devotion to God and the community. As the early church developed its liturgy and practice further, it shifted away from bringing the monetary gifts of its members in the offering to instead bring the bread and wine that would be shared in communion. In the medieval church, though, as the people’s participation in communion became less frequent, the bringing of bread and wine in the offering was replaced by a procession of the people’s monetary gifts. In the Reformation, many liturgies did away with all this formality entirely, attempting to take a bit of the show out of giving so that our financial gifts would be offered in a way that was less about flaunting wealth and more about a gracious response to God’s grace in our lives. At some point in the centuries since, the public collection of the offering returned, though in some places this trend is starting to shift a bit nowadays with the rise of online giving to churches—one even we have joined in in recent months!

However church practice may change with emerging technologies or frustrations with flaunting wealth, bringing offerings is likely to remain an important part of our worship for a long time to come. But why? Why not just put an offering plate or a locked box at the exit and ask that people drop something in on their way in or out? Why not try convincing everyone to move to online giving and gain back the three or four minutes that we take to collect the offering and hear the offertory? Why not find some other way to collect the gifts of worshipers so that we can remember that the whole of worship is offering the gifts of our whole lives to God?

First of all, bringing offerings as part of worship goes back many, many centuries. Both of our readings this morning describe how bringing offerings were part of worship in the life of ancient Israel and in the early church. In our reading from Deuteronomy, as the Israelites prepared to enter the promised land, they were given instructions to take the first fruits of the harvest for the worship of God. The people were to give thanks for for God’s gift of land, God’s gift of freedom in the exodus, and God’s provision for the people in the wilderness. This thanksgiving was important enough that it came as part of worship, in the place where the people gathered to show their praise to God, as all the people, regardless of religious practice or ethnic origin, began their worship by celebrating “with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house.” The first fruits offered in this moment were enough for everyone to share as they gathered to give thanks for all that God had given.

The Jewish tradition of bringing offerings in worship carried over into the early church. The letters of Paul and others and the book of Acts give us insight into the early church’s tradition and practice of bringing offerings that shows how the church connected offerings in worship to the life of the community. The offering was the source of the community’s common support for one another as they held all their possessions in common and used the wealth of the privileged to meet the needs of the poor. By gathering offerings in worship, they came together with one heart and soul to share the grace that they came to know together in Christ.

Beyond honoring these past practices, gathering the offering as part of worship makes it clear that offering these gifts is an integral part of how we praise God together. We do not just give out of obligation—we give because we want to offer praise to God for all that we have received. Our financial gifts are just one part of all of our offerings that we bring in worship. Our songs of praise, our prayers of thanksgiving and intercession, even our proclamation and hearing of God’s Word come together with our finanical gifts and so much more so that the whole of our worship might reflect our gratitude for all that we have received from God.

In the same way, our individual gifts do not stand on their own—instead, the gathered offering reminds us that our individual gifts come together with the offerings of our sisters and brothers in the faith to be a part of God’s work in the world. The offering is a communal task, where ultimately the amount of our individual gifts matters far less than our collective commitment that shows our gratitude for God’s many gifts and our commitment to join in God’s work of transformation in the world.

Interestingly, the collection of the offering is one of the most carefully choreographed moments in our worship. Our instructions for our greeters who collect the offering are surprisingly specific about how it should be done—and having experienced worship in a number of other churches over the years, I think it is fair to say that our practices are actually quite simple compared to many others! Still, some of these practices for receiving the offering can easily confuse what we are really doing here. We do not bring our gifts as a sacrifice to God, hoping to appease God in some way by giving enough money to hold off divine retribution for our sinfulness. We do not collect the offering in worship so that we can place the monetary gifts of the people on some sort of divine altar, giving them special treatment that sets them apart from all the other gifts that we bring to worship and offer to God in the fullness of our lives. And we do not bring our gifts forward to show off what we have given, hoping that everyone along the way will notice how these plates are overflowing with envelopes and checks and cash and even coins to support the institutional operations or even mission of the church.

Instead, the offering—the monetary gifts we bring, the way we collect and recognize those gifts in worship,  and the many other gifts of our lives that we present to God—the whole offering that we offer throughout our worship is ultimately about showing our deep gratitude to God each and every day, in our financial giving and in the giving of our whole lives.

Many years ago, one of the advisors to the national collegiate ministry team I served on told us about how she embodied her gratitude to God through the offering in worship. She had a personal commitment—a spiritual practice, even—that she would always put something, the smallest bill in her purse, in the offering plate every time it was passed as a mark of her deep gratitude and thanks to God. If God could never stop caring for us, then she could never stop showing her thanks in her life—and from her pocketbook. Sometimes this was easy, she told us—especially when she had a $1 or $5 bill in her purse. But if the smallest bill was a $20, it was a good bit harder to keep her commitment, though she did it anyway.

Over the years, I have tried to follow her thoughtful and considered practice myself. I don’t do it here—it is a bit awkward to fish out my wallet and drop in a bill when I am leading worship!—but when I am worshiping elsewhere and the time comes for the offering, I embody my deep gratitude for God’s grace by putting something in the offering plate if at all possible, sometimes even asking a friend who is with me if I can join in her offering and pay her back later if my wallet is empty or the smallest bill a bit too large for the moment! Even if this practice isn’t feasible for some of us, even if we faithfully give what we can to the church once a month or online or through some other method, the act of sharing the offering in worship reminds us to pause in this moment and give thanks to God in some tangible way for the incredible gifts that we have received.

So as we bring our gifts to God week after week, may we always be united with one another in sharing not only our abundance but even more our gratitude for God’s amazing grace so that our whole lives might reflect our thanks and praise for the God who gives us life and invites us to share that life with the world. Thanks be to God! Amen.

A Prayer for All Peoples

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a sermon on Nehemiah 1:1-11; 1 Timothy 2:1-7
preached on August 16, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

A few weeks ago, when we were talking about the passing of the peace, I mentioned that it was one of the parts of worship that I was told by the pastor nominating committee that was non-negotiable in worship here. The other part of worship I was told that I could not get rid of was the prayers of the people!

The First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone has quite a reputation when it comes to the prayers of the people. One of my colleagues who preached here regularly before my arrival as pastor still tells the story of how someone many years ago once told her that she was a little sad that she had not managed to let Whitestone know about a particular prayer request. Still, she assured my colleague, “I’m not worried about it. The Whitestone church prays for everyone, so even if I don’t tell them, I’m sure they have prayed for my friend anyway!”

Our reputation regarding the prayers of the people is a very good thing. While the Word may stand at the center of our worship, the prayers of the people stand at its heart, embodying in this hour we spend together the deep reality that we are people who must look beyond this gathering, reminding us that there is much joy and sorrow in our lives and our world that we have to keep before us even as we gather for worship, and helping us to remember those who our world—and even us sometimes—might rather forget.

Even in a place where we understand the importance of praying for one another and our world, it is often useful to step back as we do today to think about how and why we do these things that are so important for us. Our readings this morning from Nehemiah and 1 Timothy give us a good sense of why the prayers of the people stand at the heart of our worship.

First, Nehemiah shows us what it is like to bear the prayers of the people before God. He was quite experienced at carrying things of great value and immense importance—his day job was serving as cupbearer to the king of Persia, the nation where he and other Jews were in exile. As cupbearer to the king, he was responsible for making sure that the king’s wine and food were safe for his consumption. But his role and position changed quite dramatically as his brother brought him the concerns of the people who remained at their former home in Judah, for he took these concerns before God in his prayer that forms the core of this reading today.

While I don’t want us to emulate Nehemiah’s prayer every week, we can still learn a few things from looking at how he prayed to God in this moment. He opened with extended praise and adoration of God and continued with an admission of his own sinfulness and the sinfulness of his people. Then Nehemiah called upon God to remember God’s previous promises, to recall the hope of the exodus and bring the people back together. Finally, Nehemiah asked that God be attentive to this prayer and grant the people the mercy that they need.

While we may not be praying for these exact things in our life together, we should certainly take note of how Nehemiah’s prayer focused not on his own situation but on that of others very much removed from his situation. The cupbearer to the king of the empire that ruled over his homeland was praying for the people who were suffering back home. This man who had accomplished much and made his way to a position of such power and importance took time out to remember others. If Nehemiah’s prayer teaches us nothing else, we can learn the importance of making space in our prayer for others, of remembering before God those whom we too easily forget, of praying for peace and reconciliation in ways that go beyond our expectations and open us to new possibilities in our world, of taking the opportunity in prayer to look beyond those immediately before us to consider those who might not have the words and space to pray for themselves.

The instructions for prayer in First Timothy give us a little further guidance about what we might include in our prayers. In giving his instructions to his pupil regarding proper worship, the writer here opens with directions for prayer, most notably that “everyone” should be included in those prayers, with special attention to “kings and all who are in high positions.” For this writer, prayer helps to move the world toward “a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity.”

The church has taken his word seriously over the centuries, for John Calvin’s model prayers of the people include two paragraphs of prayers for government and civic leaders, one paragraph of prayers for church leaders, one paragraph asking God to turn all hearts to God, and one paragraph calling for mercy on the sick, ill, and those in prison. While our emphases in prayer have shifted a bit to include a little more for those in need and a little less for the civic powers of the world, we certainly keep this writer’s emphasis on prayer for civic leaders before us, too—and we here in Whitestone have certainly done our best to pray for everyone along the way, as my colleague so fondly remembers!

Our prayers of the people each week in worship build on these scriptural prayers to help connect us to one another and to God. As the Directory for Worship in our Presbyterian Book of Order describes so well,

Prayer is at the heart of worship. In prayer, through the Holy Spirit, people seek after and are found by the one true God who has been revealed in Jesus Christ. They listen and wait upon God, call God by name, remember God’s gracious acts, and offer themselves to God. (W-2.1001)

While I may be the one saying these prayers out loud as we gather for worship each week, the prayers of the people are exactly that, the prayers of all of us, the joys and concerns that we carry with us into our time together, the sorrow and the rejoicing that define our humanity and our world, the prayers that we bear forth from our lives to God. This time of prayer is a time for remembering: remembering the people and places where we have seen God’s love at work, remembering those times and places and people we are tempted to forget as we journey through the everyday, remembering how God’s wisdom comes in unexpected times and ways to show us a new way forward in our lives and our world. And the prayers of the people helps us to remember to pray for the world in our knowing yet beyond our control, when we remember those places in our lives and our world where we need God’s reconciling presence, when we pray for wisdom for leaders in government and society to live in the peace that God invites us to share, when we express our longings and seek God’s guidance for the fullness of the new creation to become real.

So this time of prayer that stands at the heart of our worship is truly the prayer of all people, a prayer for something more than what there is now, a prayer for a new and different way to take hold, a prayer for comfort and healing and hope amid anything and everything that comes our way. This prayer does not replace the prayers that we offer on our own, but it gathers up all that we bear to God in a prayer of this whole community, recognizing that so many of the joys and burdens that I carry with me are so much like the joys and burdens that you carry with you.

The opening and closing lines of the sung prayers of the people that we will offer in a few moments express so very well all that we do in this time:

There is a longing in our hearts, O Lord, for you to reveal yourself to us.
There is a longing in our hearts for love we only find in you, our God.

So may our prayers in worship this day gather up the prayers of all God’s people, that in this time of sacred sharing and this offering from the depths of our hearts we might know the comfort that comes from God amid all that comes our way, share the wondrous love of God that shines into every moment of our lives, and walk in the peace that God is making in our world as we join in God’s work of reconciliation and new life. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Affirming Our Faith Together

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a sermon on Deuteronomy 6:1-9 and Philippians 2:1-11
preached on August 9, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Over the last twenty years, researchers have been watching a sea change in our American society. We have gone from a nation of organizations to a nation of individuals. Think for a moment about it: what organizations are you a part of other than the church? Sixty years ago, most people could have immediately identified several different groups that they were a part of, not just a church or religious organization but likely a civic improvement group, maybe a fraternal organization like the Masons, perhaps the Lions or Rotary clubs, maybe even a musical group, a sports team, or a bowling league. But as a noted researcher on these topics described it, we have gone from a nation of bowling leagues to a nation that goes bowling alone—with friends or family, not with strangers.

The time we share in worship, then, is especially unique. In our increasingly individualistic society, are there really all that many opportunities to gather with a group of people and do something together? At my choir’s annual meeting, we close by singing a song together, and it is not unusual for other gatherings of like-minded people to have a similar ritual to mark our gatherings in one way or another. When our friends at Alcoholics Anonymous gather in the basement here four nights each week, they greet one another very distinctively by name and close the gathering with the Lord’s Prayer or the Serenity Prayer. At a sporting event, we might stand and sing (or hear someone else sing) the national anthem or some other song, and there are the occasional whole-crowd cheers and the all-too-inevitable wave that emerges when things get a little boring. And at a public meeting or in a school classroom we might recite the pledge of allegiance to the flag. Beyond those rare occasions, though, we pretty rarely get together with other people, let alone do things as a group—so reciting a set of words about what believe as we do in the affirmation of faith is doubly unusual!

Affirmations of faith have been important in the life of the church since its earliest years, but I’m not sure when they became something to be recited week after week in worship. Maybe it is a Presbyterian thing—after all, we do have an entire book devoted to the official affirmations of faith of our denomination! Our first reading this morning from the book of Deuteronomy reaches into the origins of this tradition in the Jewish roots of Christianity. These words are known as the Shema and recited regularly by faithful Jews everywhere. After the introduction that instructs that these words be heard and taught and observed and kept, the affirmation is clear:

The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.

This affirmation stands at the core of Judaism, shaping belief and practice even in this tradition that does not understand faith in quite the same way that much of Christianity does. Still, even with the distinctiveness of Jewish thought, this affirmation of faith immediately makes it clear that who God is has immediate consequences for our lives, too:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.

God’s presence and mere being is not enough—those who claim this are called immediately to faithful action.

It is no surprise that the early church, emerging as it did from the traditions of Judaism, quickly found itself affirming its faith. In hymns and sayings, the church described what it had come to understand about the man Jesus, and some of these have been captured in the writings collected in our New Testament. The portion of Paul’s letter to the Philippians we read this morning includes one of the most famous of these, a beautiful hymn describing the early church’s beliefs about Jesus—and the desired outcome of that belief. Paul directs the Philippians to what they likely knew as an early creed of the church that describes the attitude that Jesus took in his life, death, and resurrection—an attitude of humility, grounded in his divine nature yet lived out in his humanity, that resulted in his execution and ultimately his exaltation. This creed expressed, then, not only what Paul felt that the church ought to believe but how it should act, for we should “be of [that] same mind” and live “in [that] same love,” demonstrating in our lives the ways the same way of life that we first saw lived in the life of Christ.

The affirmation of faith in our worship, then, is not an academic exercise. It is not an opportunity to quiz one another and check up on the status of our conformity with the orthodoxy of our tradition or frame beautiful and perfect words that offer the most accurate human description of God possible. Instead, the affirmation of faith in worship is the first chance we have to live out the Word we have heard proclaimed, the moment to rise and begin to proclaim that Word for ourselves in our lives and our world, the opportunity to stand in community with others to declare how we intend to go forth to live the Word in our lives and bear it into our world.

While the creeds we use in the affirmation of faith often come from the approved traditions of the church, the point is not to check up on one another’s faithfulness to them or make sure that we all agree with their every word. Instead, affirming our faith together reminds us that we do not go bowling alone in our faith in this world. When the circumstances of our lives or our world make some portion of our affirmation difficult, one gift of living and worshiping in community is that others can claim those words for us, raising their voices to claim and live these things even if we cannot do so for ourselves at this time. Other times, the community may challenge us to think differently about these words, opening us to different understandings of faithfulness in our lives and our world so that we might all grow in our faith and understanding together. And even when we do have our differences with these words that are before us, even when we cannot claim them as our own in this particular moment, even when our hearts are too heavy to bear our faith into the world in this way, this affirmation of faith belongs not to any one of us but to the whole church, to believers in every time and place, to those who come before us, those who live and walk beside us, and those who are yet to follow us.

Whatever we may feel about the particulars of the words we might share along the way, however the circumstances of our lives or our world may affect our ability to join the community in this affirmation at this moment, the affirmation of faith ultimately is a moment of beginning for us—the beginning of responding to the Word proclaimed. As we join our voices to proclaim this particular understanding of our faith, whether its words date to the earliest years of our Christian tradition or come from a more contemporary time and setting, whether we know its words by heart or must carefully think of each and every word, these words are a springboard for us to begin living out the Word we have heard proclaimed in our worship. When we stand and say our affirmation of faith, we take our first steps toward living out what we believe not on our own but as a community, trusting that we journey better together, acknowledging that we are stronger in our individual lives because we share this time each week, honoring our sisters and brothers in the faith who have walked before us, who journey beside us, and who will follow after us, and recognizing that we can know more of those places where God is at work—and where we are called to join in—if we have more eyes and ears and minds and hearts attuned to finding the place where we can join in.

So may God strengthen us to join our voices to proclaim the words of our affirmation and live our lives to offer actions of faith, hope, and love in our world, joining these words and actions with those of the saints before us, beside us, and after us to share God’s song of love and joy with all creation until all things are made new in Jesus Christ our Lord and we sing God’s glory for eternity. Lord, come quickly! Alleluia! Amen.

A Sermon About Sermons

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a sermon on Jonah 3:1-10 and Acts 20:7-12
preached on August 2, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

In our wanderings through the parts of the worship service this summer, we’ve finally made it to the center of everything about Presbyterian worship: the sermon. If you look at our bulletin each Sunday, you will see headings that show us that everything has something to do with “the Word:” gathering around the Word, proclaiming the Word, responding to the Word, sealing the Word in baptism and communion, and bearing and following the Word into the world. Since worship stands at the center of all that we do as a community of faith and the Word stands at the center of our worship, the Word of God is very much at the center of everything that defines us as God’s people. So as we think about all the various parts of our worship each week, it seems very important to spend some time thinking and talking about the sermon—but it does seem a little bit strange to have a sermon about sermons!

All this isn’t quite as surprising if we remember that the Bible itself describes a number of sermons as it tells the story of God’s life with God’s people. A lot of these sermons show up in the New Testament. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is probably the best-known sermon of all time, though I wonder if people have ever really heard what it says, because we very often end up doing exactly what Jesus says we should not in it! Before any of Jesus’ sermons, though, let alone the Sermon on the Mount, John the Baptist offered his own words of proclamation, calling the people to repent and prepare the way for one who was coming to open a new and different way. The book of Acts contains a number of sermons by Peter, Paul, and the other early apostles of the church, and it seems reasonable to think of the epistles of Paul and others as written sermons intended for oral proclamation when they were read to the communities that received them.

But even before this time, the Old Testament prophets and others also delivered messages that are quite reasonably also considered sermons. Much of the book of Deuteronomy is cast as a farewell message—a sermon—from Moses to the Israelites as they prepared to journey without him into the promised land. The message of many of the prophets in calling God’s people back to God’s ways is very much like what might be shared in a sermon today. And even God seems to offer Job a bit of a sermon at the end of the story of Job’s encounter of trial and testing at God’s hand.

But even with all these interesting sermons in the Bible, it is hard to forget the two stories of sermons that we heard this morning once we have heard. First, we hear of the prophet Jonah, who so famously avoided God’s call to preach a word of repentance in the great Gentile city of Nineveh and ended up spending three days in the belly of a big fish, and then was astonished when the city actually listened to his message and changed their ways! In a day and age when the audience for sermons seems to be shrinking a bit, when fewer people in our country make their ways to a pew on Sunday mornings to hear the Word proclaimed, when sermons seem to be getting shorter and their content less notable, it is good to know that at least a few people over the years have listened and taken what we preachers offer seriously! And our second story today from the book of Acts is a little-known but very surprising story about the consequences of falling asleep during the sermon! Even in the early church it seems like preachers tended to drone on a little longer than they should have and leave their hearers to nod off, though the primary lesson here seems to be, “don’t sit in an open window if you’re sleepy during the sermon!”

But these two stories mostly provide a jumping-off point for us to think about why it is important to take time out each week as we gather to hear God’s Word proclaimed in our life together. After all, wouldn’t it be good enough if we just read the Bible each week and endured a little less commentary from people like me? Can’t we get everything we need to respond to God’s Word in faith, hope, and love simply by reciting a portion of these ancient words? Wouldn’t it work just as well to finish worship ten or fifteen minutes earlier and give me three or six or eight hours of my time back during the week to just make things a little simpler and let our readings, songs, and prayers speak for themselves? The consensus of the church over the centuries has been that such simple reading is not enough—we need someone to proclaim the Word of God to us and help us connect it to our lives in this world.

From its very roots in the work of John Calvin, our Reformed tradition has made it clear that the true church is first and foremost marked by the proclamation of the Word. In our tradition, from its earliest days in Switzerland and Scotland, the first mark of the true and faithful church has been the true preaching of the Word of God. As it is well-put in our most recent revisions of this nearly 500-year-old statement,

The Church is faithful to the mission of Christ as it proclaims and hears the Word of God, responding to the promise of God’s new creation in Christ, and inviting all people to participate in that new creation. (Book of Order F-1.0303)

And so the proclamation of the Word still stands as central to our faith and life together.

So what exactly is this Word that we hear proclaimed each week? The great twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth helped us to see that there are actually three different meanings of the phrase “Word of God.” First, Barth reminded us that the gospel of John identifies the Word of God as Jesus Christ, the “Word made flesh,” as John describes, “the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death,” as Barth and others put it in the Theological Declaration of Barmen (Book of Confessions, 8.11).

Then, we know the Word of God by the power of the Holy Spirit as we read and hear and seek to understand the words of scripture. Scripture is the Word of God shared with us in our human words, inspired and revealed by God to point us to Jesus Christ. Our reading of scripture relies upon prayer and discernment, grounded in the prayer for illumination that asks for God to light our way as we read together, so that we might see the wonder and grace of Jesus Christ in these words.

And the Word of God finally and perhaps most surprisingly comes in the sermon itself, where the Holy Spirit is at work in these most human words to help us to hear and understand and believe and act in our lives and our world, where the words of mouths like mine are transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit to become the Word of God in and for this day and age.

So in our worship, the sermon offers us the proclamation of God’s Word in and for this time and place. Sometimes it will include the call to repentance that Jonah so reluctantly yet effectively offered to the people of Nineveh, and occasionally it needs to go on a little longer than might be comfortable for all of us, as it did with Paul in Acts, though I certainly hope that no one gets hurt along the way! But what I think really and truly matters about the sermon in worship is that it is always only the beginning of our proclamation. We do not hear God’s Word and leave what we have learned within these walls. Instead, we go forth from our time of hearing and sharing in this place to live out this divine Word in our lives. We act differently as we encounter others along the way, joining in the work that God is already doing in our world to bring transformation, renewal, peace, hope, and love to reality. And we continue the proclamation of the Word begun here as we live in justice, peace, and reconciliation with all creation.

So as we hear God’s Word proclaimed here this week and every week, may the Holy Spirit send us out to live and proclaim it in our lives so that all the world might know the fullness of God’s glory in Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Illuminating Illumination

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a sermon on Psalm 19 and John 16:12-14
preached on July 26, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

As you probably know, this summer we have been taking a journey through the worship service to explore how all its elements connect with one another and help us to offer our worship and praise with a little more understanding. Today, we turn to an easily-overlooked element of the service, the prayer for illumination, a very brief prayer that might last ten or twelve seconds each week just prior to our reading of scripture. You might miss this brief prayer if you blink twice or haven’t quite reassembled yourself from the passing of the peace, but this little prayer and pause before we turn to scripture is almost certainly one of the most important things that we do when we gather together.

Illumination is, after all, such a wonderful and varied word. In a different day and age, where light was more precious than in our own, I think earlier generations though more carefully about illumination and likely appreciated it a bit more for its gift of brightening the night. Nowadays, we still turn to this wonderful word illumination to describe how light shines into the darkened spaces of our lives and our world, a process still so desperately needed even in our world where light is so much easier to find at any time of day or night. Illumination is also used to describe manuscripts of the Middle Ages that opened the biblical text in new ways through incredible illustrations of the concepts, principles, and even simply the letters of the text. There is nothing quite like the beauty and wonder of a text lit up by illustrations like this—I cannot resist stopping in awe and wonder to gaze a bit whenever I encounter such books in a museum or library. Even the modern-day illuminated text of the St. John’s Bible that I will place out at refreshments today also shows the incredible glory of the text with a more modern illumination of these biblical words and stories. Alongside all this illumination, the clarification and new light that comes to us as these ancient words are illuminated and opened to us for our own time brings deep and wonderful insight into the meaning and application of words in our lives.

When we think of the prayer for illumination, all these different meanings come into play. In this prayer, we ask God to shine light into our lives and onto our reading of scripture so that we might connect these things for greater understanding as we seek to live in faithfulness. The importance of bringing illumination to the gift of reading and hearing scripture has deep roots in our Reformed tradition. The great theologian John Calvin put this so well:

Without the illumination of the Holy Spirit, the Word can do nothing. (Institutes of the Christian Religion, III.ii.33)

In other words, if we do not surround our reading of the Bible with prayer, if we do not recognize how God is involved in opening it and illuminating it, it will mean nothing more to us than any other book. And so as we approach the reading of scripture in worship, we pause to pray, recognizing that we need God’s light to shine on these words so that we can understand, asking the Holy Spirit to guide us in interpreting these ancient words for our lives and our world, seeking God’s help to show us the way through through all the questions and uncertainties that come up along the way so that we might live in the glow of this incredible light as it shines on scripture, our lives, and our world.

The prayer for illumination also reminds us of three very important things to remember as we read scripture. First, we believe that we read scripture best in community. This doesn’t mean that we only read scripture with other people—it simply reminds us that we read it better together, when our individual biases, blind spots, and preferences can be corrected and adjusted by the wisdom and insight of others. Reading scripture in community also reminds us that we necessarily and rightfully build our reading and interpretation on the tradition of the past. So when we surround our reading of scripture with prayer, we come together to ask God’s guidance upon this continuing process and work of the church and its faithful people as we read and think and understand and discern together.

In the prayer for illumination, we are also reminded of our human humility before God’s word. Our psalm today closes with this very prayer that is often quoted by many preachers as the opening of their sermons:

Let the words of my mouth
and the meditation of my heart
be acceptable to you, O Lord,
my rock and my redeemer.

We cannot say that we have the last word on the interpretation of scripture or that God will not continue to illumine it in new ways. Even the leader of the Pilgrims, John Robinson, told them just before they set sail to what would become Massachusetts that “he was very confident the Lord had more truth and light yet to break forth out of his holy word.” (John Robinson’s Farewell Sermon) Offering a prayer for illumination helps us to set aside our confidence in our own abilities and focus our attention on God so that we might receive the gifts that God can offer us as we hear the word.

And finally, in the prayer for illumination, we are reminded that the Holy Spirit must be among us whenever we read and hear scripture. Jesus gave us the initial direction for this when he told his disciples in our reading this morning,

When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.

We embody this even more in the confessions of our church. The 16th-century Scots Confession states, “The interpretation of Scripture, we confess… pertains to the Spirit of God by whom the Scriptures were written.” (Chapter XVIII, 3.18) Then, in the 17th century the Westminster Confession added, “Our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority [of Scripture] is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts.” (Chapter 1, 6.005) And as we will confess in worship later today from the Confession of 1967, “God’s word is spoken to the church today where the Scriptures are faithfully preached and attentively read in dependence on the illumination of the Holy Spirit and with readiness to receive their truth and direction.” (I.C.2, 9.30) All the best rational, logical, and critical tools that we might use to read, translate, and interpret scripture amount to nothing if they are not surrounded by the wisdom and power of the Holy Spirit, and so we pray that the Spirit might guide us and direct us and enable us rightly to hear and believe and obey.

For such a simple prayer that takes up only mere seconds of worship, the prayer for illumination is an incredibly important expression of what we believe about God and scripture and our humanity. Even in this day and age when light is so easy to get for so many of us, when we have so many tools of translation, interpretation, and understanding available to us, when we can be confident of so much based on our human knowledge, we need the illumination of God in our reading of scripture more than ever. One of my favorite prayers for illumination sums all of this up pretty well, I think:

God of light,
by the power of your Word,
shine on us far enough ahead
that we may move into the future
that you have prepared for all of us. (Cam Murchison, inspired by a sermon by Fred Craddock)

One of my seminary professors who composed this prayer described to me how it emerged for him out of a wonderful image from a sermon by the preacher Fred Craddock, who recalled driving along a winding mountain road on a pitch dark night, only able to see as far ahead as the headlights could light. But Craddock observed that we don’t have to see everything to make the journey—we simply must see just enough to make the path ahead plain, and amazingly, we can make the whole trip that way. And so when we offer the prayer for illumination we ask God not to open the full meaning of every scripture to us but instead to give us enough light to see enough for this little bit of the journey as we trust that that light will keep shining on us all along the way.

So may the Holy Spirit light the path before us by the gift of God’s holy word, that it might show us enough of the road ahead to live in faith, hope, and love and offer our praise and worship with deeper confidence and hope each and every day until God’s glory is known in its fullness in every place. Lord, come quickly! Alleluia! Amen.