Andy James

We Want to See Jesus

March 22, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on John 12:20-33
preached on March 22, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

“We want to see Jesus.”

These pilgrims had come a long way to celebrate the Passover in Jerusalem, traveling from their homes in an entirely different part of the empire to join thousands of other faithful Jews in remembering the main event of liberation that shaped their religious identity and practice. Yet somewhere along this long journey these pilgrims had heard about Jesus, and they started seeking him out. I suspect they started asking around town for him, checking in with anyone they suspected might know this Galilean prophet and teacher in hopes of encountering him for themselves.

Who knows how long it took them to find Philip, one of Jesus’ disciples, who finally could make the connection to Jesus for them, but when they found him, I can only imagine their excitement. They were finally in the same town with the teacher that they had sought, and they could finally learn directly from him. They might finally meet this prophet who had an incredible reputation for his signs of power and healing. And they could finally encounter the one who some had begun to wonder might be the Messiah.

“Sir, we wish to see Jesus,” they told the disciple Philip. But Philip clearly wasn’t quite sure what to do. Jesus was quite well known around Palestine, but I suspect he and his disciples were a bit surprised that these people from a little further afield were looking for him. Now I imagine that by this point, after three years of his ministry, the disciples had a bit of a protocol when it came to people who wanted to meet Jesus, trying to manage the crowds a bit, give Jesus some time away for spiritual reflection that he so often needed and wanted, and just generally keep the whole thing from getting out of hand. So rather than taking these Greeks to meet Jesus right away, Philip went and told Andrew, and then after their consultation they went and told Jesus.

Somewhat surprisingly, though, when Jesus heard that these pilgrims wanted to see him, he wasn’t at all interested in actually meeting them. Rather than going out to meet these pilgrims, he turned to his disciples and began teaching them again, now explaining to them why it was so important that these Greeks had come looking for him—even though it seems that their interest wasn’t important or interesting enough to him for John to record any actual meeting with them.

“We want to see Jesus.”

Like most people, when I turn to the gospels, that’s my feeling—I want to see Jesus. I want to get a better picture of this man who launched an incredible movement that against all odds has so deeply shaped western civilization for the last two thousand years. I want to learn about Jesus through the stories of those who were far closer to him and passed down their encounters with him through the generations. And I want to see the Jesus who took the difficult path when he could have just taken the easy road. I want to see the Jesus who set aside his honor and glory to open the pathway for God’s honor and glory to spread wider and further throughout creation. I want to see the Jesus who journeyed to his death to show us how to live.

But John doesn’t seem to be particularly concerned about seeing Jesus in the end. He doesn’t tell us if those Greeks who came looking for Jesus ever actually saw him. Instead, John shifts gears entirely, using these searching Greeks to get Jesus to start talking about the things that are ahead for him and the ways in which he is fulfilling the mission set for the Messiah long before this encounter at the beginning of Jesus’ third Passover in Jerusalem.

I suspect that John’s focus on this more theological understanding of Jesus is one of the reasons I am so often frustrated when I read John’s gospel. But today’s reading leaves me especially frustrated. The Jesus I know and have seen in the other stories of the gospels wouldn’t have completely ignored these pilgrims’ request to meet with him. The Jesus I believe cared enough to step up and die for the sins of the world also cared enough to get to know the people around him and engage with the crowds who were beginning to see a new vision of God in and through him, not just a small, select circle of disciples. And the Jesus I follow would have stepped away from his theological lectures and concerns long enough to meet those Greeks who were the sign of the beginning of a new thing for him as he approached such an important moment in his life.

“We want to see Jesus.”

Those Greeks in Jerusalem during the festival were surely only some of the first to offer this inquiry, and even our last hymn picked up on this request to offer it as a prayer for our own time and place. Nowadays, I get the sense that people are asking that question again of us, and far too often we too leave them wanting a glimpse of Jesus when we too talk about other things instead. In a world where death and destruction lurk around nearly every corner, where news reports focus primarily if not exclusively on the bad things that are happening around us, where peace seems far off on our best days and a total pipe dream on our worst, people want to see Jesus bringing us hope amidst all this despair. In a world where expectations of family stand strong yet people still so often feel so very alone, where love is either defined so broadly that it loses its meaning or so narrowly that it isn’t open to everyone, where relationships are so difficult to build and so easy to destroy, people want to see Jesus connecting us to one another as sisters and brothers in the family of God. And in a world where we can listen to so-called authorities on one subject or another drone on for hours and hours without really saying anything new, where we so often assume that the problems of our world can be fixed most easily by greater personal freedom, where justice for all takes a back seat to personal fulfillment, people want to see Jesus working to bring real change for all to our broken and fearful world.

“We want to see Jesus.”

So what would they see if those Greeks, those seekers of our own time, or even the disciples came here to see him? Would they see a dying institution gasping in its final breaths, or would they see a vibrant and hopeful group of people who are trying to show Jesus to the world beginning on one little corner of 149th Street and 15th Drive? Would they see a small congregation longing and begging for more people to do work, or would they see a community of people who themselves are longing to see Jesus and looking for ways to show his presence to others? Would they see a few dozen “frozen chosen” dead-set on their own path, or would they see a faithful group who are joining Jesus on his journey to the cross?

“We want to see Jesus.”

Ultimately, as much as we know that others are asking this question, we too are seeking him out in our own lives. Last month, as part of our youth gathering, we each decorated a cutout figure of Jesus like this one to carry with us into the world. We’ve spent the last month looking for Jesus in the strange and wonderful and challenging and even dark moments of our lives, and I for one am looking forward to the pictures of all the places that we’ve seen Jesus in our lives over the last month that we will share later today. It has been an incredible exercise for me at least to encounter Jesus in the everyday when I have least expected it, maybe in the surprise call from an old friend, in the unusual beauty of one last winter morning even amidst the first full day of spring yesterday, or even in the simple space of a deep breath amidst a difficult moment of life.

“We want to see Jesus.”

May we go into these final Lenten days with that request on our lips and our hearts, offering an encounter with Jesus to all those who come our way as we too carry this deep and beautiful desire to see Jesus with us until we see him face to face as all things are made new. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

Returning to Grace

March 15, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on Ephesians 2:1-10
preached on March 15, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

On Ash Wednesday, the calls come loud and clear: “Return to the Lord your God.” Find your center again. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Do not forget who you are. “Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit.” God brings you back to where you have been and makes a new way. This season of Lent is an important time for this kind of restoration of what we have known, for remembering who and whose we are, for returning to our roots in God’s grace.

And there are few texts that get us closer to our roots of grace than this morning’s readings from John and Ephesians. The familiar words of John 3:16 are so well known that they can be recited by people who have no church or faith background at all. And the perhaps less familiar but equally insightful words from our reading in Ephesians approach our roots in a slightly different way while keeping the focus on the depth and breadth of God’s love and grace as revealed in Jesus Christ.

As I’ve considered this return to grace over the past week, our text from Ephesians really stands out. In these ten verses, we hear wonderful reminders of so much that is fit for this Lenten season: the depth of our sinfulness, the reality of evil and the powers of disobedience that keep us mired in the ways of this world, the mercy of God that steps into the messiness of our lives and our world to bring us transformation, the grace of God in Jesus Christ that saves us, and the challenge of this gift to be more and more like the beloved creations of God that we are.

Paul starts out here by declaring the state of things before God got involved. The life we thought we had was a false life—the things of this world that seemed to make us live actually were proof that we were dead. Even more than this, the world was and still is filled with powers and rulers and spirits that place their own existence and preservation above the well-being of all, and we once lived among them, following our own whims and desires and ignoring the intentions of God.

But this is not the end of the story. Paul quickly turns to connect our sinful condition to God’s action to change it. Even before we could do anything about all this, God got involved. Even before we knew the depths of our brokenness, God stepped in to raise us up. “Even when were dead through our trespasses,” God gave us new life in Christ.

This is a radical claim. God’s care for humankind is greater than our propensity to sin. God’s love for us comes before any action of our own. God’s mercy is from everlasting to everlasting, from the beginning of time until the end. God’s grace extends beyond our human attempts to place limits on it. In the end, our sin is not the story—God’s grace is.

If we were tempted to miss this point or if we got confused in any way, Paul will not let us forget this. Three times he makes it clear that God’s grace is at the center of our salvation. If we missed it the first time, he doesn’t want us to miss it the second or third! Our salvation, our understanding of God’s mercy, our new life in Christ—all this comes into being because of God’s grace. All this is summed up beautifully just one verse that ought to be as memorable as John 3:16:

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.

This stands at the center of everything for us as Christians. The life we share in Christ comes to us not through our own actions of good works, not through our historic relationships to one church or another, and not even through our own acceptance of this amazing gift. Instead, here Paul reminds us that grace comes first and last and everywhere in between in our lives of faith. God’s grace comes to us before we can even begin to know about it. God’s grace is present at every turn of our lives, and especially when we think we can do it all on our own. God’s grace accompanies us as we return to dust. And God’s grace extends through all time to bring us to new life in the age to come.

Even more than this, God’s grace makes us more alive that we could ever imagine. In it, we are raised up with Christ and seated with him in the heavenly places, gifted with “the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us.” As one commentator puts it, “Christ does more than bring us out of death to life; Christ makes us royalty.” (Jeff Paschal, “Homiletical Perspective on Ephesians 2:1-10,” Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 2, p. 113)

God’s grace is an incredible gift that helps us to see ourselves and others in new ways. We need not worry about what is in store for us—God has bigger plans for us than we could ever imagine. We need not worry if we have enough faith to be saved—God’s grace is enough for us all. We need not worry if we have accepted this in the right way at the right time—God’s love and power are not dependent upon our acceptance, permission, and support to be effective and real. And we need not worry if we have done enough to seal God’s grace in our lives—God has already done that in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Freed from our worries and wonderings, we are freed to respond in joy and hope to this gracious and amazing gift. The very good works that we would think bring us salvation are not so much required of us as welcomed of us. Paul makes this abundantly clear:

For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.

The good works that emerge from us because of God’s grace are the reason why we are created, not the source of our salvation, and this allows us to live so much more freely, to deeply and truly embody God’s grace in our lives and our world, not because we have to but because we want to, not because we are forced to but because it is part of who we are.

If we truly welcome this amazing gift of grace into our midst, why would we live any other way? Grace inspires us to be the people God created us to be, to be beacons of light and hope in our broken and fearful world. Grace invites us to join in Christ’s ministry of love and justice to all, as it open our eyes to the poor, the friendless, the oppressed, the hurting, the outcast, and the hopeless, to bear this mercy and grace and love to them, too. And grace helps us to embody now the incredible, immeasurable gifts of God, the new reality for our world that all things will be transformed by God’s mercy and the amazing grace that stands at the center of everything.

So as we recenter our lives in the gift of God’s grace this Lent, may we know God’s amazing grace all the more, and may we be the people God is creating us to be, people made for good works of transformation and new life, in this world and the next, so that we might always keep returning to grace. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Spring Cleaning in God’s House

March 8, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on John 2:13-22
preached on March 8, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

It may be what you call an occupational hazard, but I go to a lot of churches. My work as Stated Clerk takes me to ten or so different Presbyterian churches around the city each year for our bimonthly presbytery meetings and other gatherings. On my vacations to England, Scotland, and Iceland over the last few years, I probably visited fifteen or more churches—and I actually worshiped in at least half of those! And even the chorus I sing in takes me to four more churches around New York City every year.

Many of the churches I visit, particularly beyond New York City, have a donation box for visitors to leave a contribution to help with the upkeep of the building, and a lot of them even charge admission to visit at times when there was no worship. Some even have gift shops for buying religious books, magnets, postcards, and other souvenirs. There was a lot of money changing hands in those churches, but based on the many appeals for money that I saw, all indications were that what they earn through these ventures is not even enough to keep these beautiful buildings open, let alone bring them up to modern standards. Nearly every one of the churches I go in is advertising some sort of campaign to fund more significant repairs that can’t be paid for out of their regular operating budget.

In this day and age, the expense of maintaining church buildings can easily consume the church’s time and attention—but I must wonder what Jesus would say about it all in light of his actions in our reading this morning from the gospel of John. In John’s telling of this incident that he places at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, Jesus ventures into the temple in Jerusalem and finds a first-century version of donation boxes and gift shops and embarks on what could be called some spring cleaning in God’s house. When he arrives in the outer court of the temple, he sees salesmen everywhere—some selling cattle and sheep for those who could afford a substantial sacrifice, others hawking doves as a more affordable option, and still others changing money for those who were preparing to enter the inner courts of the temple.

Now there were actually many good reasons for all these things to be sold in the court of the temple. The pilgrims who made their way to the temple from all around the empire could have brought animals to sacrifice from home, but there was a slim chance that they would make it all the way to the temple without a blemish that would make them worthless as offerings in the temple. Those who were preparing to enter the inner courts of the temple would have been expected to pay a fee, much like the admission charges of our own time, but Roman coins bearing the image of the emperor had to be exchanged somewhere for blank coins that could be used to pay the temple entry tax.

Even though all this commerce in the outer court may have been a necessary arrangement for conducting worship at the temple, Jesus was not happy about it and embarked on a bit of spring cleaning in God’s house. He made a whip of cords and drove the sheep and the cattle out of the temple. He poured out all the moneychangers’ coins and turned their tables upside down. And he ordered the dove hawkers to get their birds out of the temple. The result surely was quite a sight—sheep and cattle all mixed together, suddenly wandering the court and escaping into the streets that led up to the temple; unblemished sacrificial animals suddenly touched by the whip of this amateur cowboy Jesus; and coins of all denominations, for the temple tax and secular use, from all different moneychangers, mixed up beyond distinction in the chaotic courtyard. When Jesus was done, the temple courtyard looked nothing like it did before—his spring cleaning had done its job.

John’s telling of this story goes on to deal with the response of the religious leaders and Jesus’ subsequent proclamation, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” but I think there is plenty here for us to think about in our day and age without even getting into Jesus’ prediction of his crucifixion and resurrection. Jesus clearly had strong opinions about the way that religious life had evolved in first-century Jerusalem, and his actions in the temple on that day early in his ministry as recorded by John can speak to us in our own time, too, as we embark on the spring cleaning work that is our responsibility during these Lenten days.

On this day when we set apart new leaders for our congregation for the coming year, Jesus’ message from the temple can inspire us to think differently about this kind of leadership. In scattering the animals for sacrifice and overturning the tables of the moneychangers, Jesus criticized the ways in which the temple had shifted away from its spiritual focus. As we hear Jesus’ message for ourselves, we must keep our spiritual focus that is so very clear in the way that we will set our leaders apart for their service later today. While our leaders here certainly must do some of the same work as leaders in other community or nonprofit organizations, the spirituality that lies behind their work must shine through all their leadership, for they are ultimately not part of a board of directors but the spiritual leaders of our congregation. While we must manage our life together, particularly our money, staff, and property, with attention to civil law and best modern practices, we must not do these things to preserve our earthly wealth but rather to bear witness to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. And while our leaders here have been elected by a democratic vote of the congregation and further approved for this service by the session, their call to serve comes not from any of these human voices but rather from the Holy Spirit.

Beyond this challenge for our leaders and all of us to keep a spiritual focus in all that we do, Jesus’ actions in cleansing the temple point us to the importance of looking at all we do with fresh eyes. The sales of cattle, sheep, and doves and the exchange of coins in the temple courts likely did not begin with the intention of spoiling the spiritual experience of those who gathered there and in fact were very likely intend to facilitate the spiritual practices of the faithful in this holy place. Yet by the time Jesus arrived in the temple courts, the trade there existed not to support the spiritual life but for its own sake, so by scattering the animals and overturning the tables, he called the religious leaders and the people to reexamine their belief and their practice to make sure that they were in alignment.

In the same way, when we hear this story, we are called to take a closer look at our own practices in our lives and in the church to see how they align with our beliefs and the blowing winds of the Spirit in our world. Are there things that we are doing in our church or our lives that need changing? Are we open to the kind of reformation and revolution that come with following a man who is not afraid to confront even faithful religious practice when it goes awry of its original intent? Where would Jesus step into the temples of our lives, shape a new whip, drive out the things that we have come to love more than him, and overturn the tables that we have so carefully set?

In this cleansing of the temple, we are called to remember the many ways in which God continues to guide and direct us to reassess and reform our religious life so that it might conform more to God’s own intentions. But as theologian Joseph Small rightly reminds us,

The reform of the church is not simply a cherished sixteenth-century memory, but neither is it a contemporary stream of managerial fixes to organizational woes or easy acquiescence to cultural trends. (Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 2, p. 94)

Instead, in our Reformed and Presbyterian tradition, we have come to describe this continuing work through a seventeenth-century motto that translates,

“The church reformed, always to be reformed according to the Word of God” in the power of the Spirit. (Foundations of Presbyterian Polity, F-2.02)

And so Jesus’ cleansing of the temple reminds us that we have some spring cleaning to do ourselves this Lent, that God’s house still needs a check of its practices every now and then, that everything is up for review and reconsideration based upon the Word of God in Christ Jesus and the blowing winds of the Holy Spirit so that we might be more faithful along this pathway to the cross.

So as we gather in a few moments to set these leaders apart for their special service in our church in the coming years, as we look around us for those places where Jesus might want to drive some things out and turn some tables over, and as we continue walking this road to the cross with Jesus, may God give us wisdom to see the places that need some spring cleaning, guidance to reshape and reform these things in a new and right direction, and hope for the renewal and resurrection of all things that is sealed for us in the resurrection that is before us on Easter Day. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

The Path to Follow

March 1, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on Mark 8:27-38
preached on March 1, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

He had talked about the importance of following him from the very beginning. The first time Jesus saw his first disciples Peter and Andrew fishing by the sea, he invited them to follow him and start fishing for people. Over time, he accumulated a notable little band of followers—tax collectors and sinners, among others—soon joined those first fishermen, and others came and went from the large crowds who gathered to witness his healing and hear his teaching in his ministry across Galilee. By the time of our story from Mark this morning, they were quite experienced at following him. They had become accustomed to his strange detours across the lake and his sudden departures from the beaten path so that he could find a quiet place away from it all, though they never quite could figure out what all he was up to.

So it wasn’t a total surprise when one day Jesus addressed the disciples and the crowd who had gathered with them and began to tell them what it meant to follow him. He had just talked with the disciples about his identity, and for the first time one of them—Peter—had identified him as the Messiah, leading him to describe what this would mean for him along the way. Jesus had planted the seeds then with the disciples that this would not be an easy path: he would undergo great suffering, be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, all before he would rise again three days later. But the disciples didn’t seem to understand this, and Peter even confronted him to vow that this should never happen. However, Peter’s insistence that Jesus should never suffer like this only seems to have made him want to help others understand what he meant even more.

Jesus’ instruction to the crowd was a bold response to Peter’s attempts to sanitize his message:

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

He took the core idea of following him that he had been talking about since the very beginning and used it to shape his teaching to a new place. No longer could they think that wandering around the Galilean countryside was enough—even though many of them had already left behind their homes and families to follow him, they needed to deny themselves completely. No longer was it enough to just carry a knapsack worth of belongings along the way—they had to carry a cross, the ultimate sign of disrepute assigned to the greatest criminals who had threatened the Roman empire itself. And no longer could they come and go, following Jesus when they wanted—they were to follow everywhere he went, even to death.

If that wasn’t enough to sort out the imposters from the real followers, Jesus continued to explain things a bit more. Next he explained that their attempts to save themselves would be futile:

For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.

If they were following him just to be saved, then they weren’t denying themselves after all—they were seeking their own well-being rather than truly following to join in Jesus’ mission and ministry.

So Jesus insisted that the real profit came from giving everything up, from the biggest loss imaginable, as the great hymn writer Isaac Watts declared so well:

My richest gain I count but loss
and pour contempt on all my pride.

And finally Jesus made it clear that acceptance of this seemingly-disgraceful path was not optional—those who were ashamed of it would find even more shame directed at themselves “when [the Son of Man] comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

As much as Jesus talked about following with his disciples, you’d think that we would take it just as seriously. The Christians of the early church probably thought about it quite a bit, for they faced many challenges from the culture around them and struggled even more with a government that didn’t welcome any group claiming any other way than the Roman way. But over the centuries, the idea of following Jesus put forth so clearly by Jesus in the gospel of Mark has largely been replaced in the church with a focus on belief that builds largely on the word of Jesus as told in the gospel of John. The sort of radical, self-giving action proposed and lived out by Jesus has become a much less demanding challenge, for it is far easier to affirm a creed and accept belief than to take action that has the potential for consequences as it did for those who first journeyed with Jesus. In our day and age, following Jesus has become about as difficult as following someone on Twitter, where all it takes is to click a button to start getting status updates and keep up with what is going on.

So what does it look like for us to follow Jesus in our world today? What is required of us if we are to truly deny ourselves and find a new way? How can we take up the cross of Christ in our own lives today? Following Jesus today is not about wearing a cross around our neck every day, about showing up to church on Sunday, about writing a check to show our financial support of the work of this congregation or some other good group, or even about getting others to join us on the journey. Instead, following Jesus today means taking his words seriously in our lives and standing up in our world as he did for the poor, the oppressed, and the marginalized.

When he tells the crowd to deny themselves, he is speaking to us too. He is not telling us to deny who we are or set aside the gifts that we have been given to share. Instead, he is encouraging us to place our hope and trust in God, not in ourselves. He is calling us to set aside any personal benefit that might come from the work that we do or the things that we believe, for we cannot do these things out of hope for a better life for ourselves or our children or even the promise of eternal life but rather for the sake of God’s reign to be realized in our world.

When he tells the crowd to take up their cross, he is speaking to us too. He is not telling us that we must carry a cross everywhere that we go or display it in a way that shows off our faithfulness, for the goal here is not so much to make those around us aware of our faith but to commit ourselves to a path that we do not fully understand. And so in calling us to take up our cross, Jesus is encouraging us to go where he goes, to sacrifice the things of this world so that the world might be different, to walk and talk and live each day in a way that points not to ourselves, our human government, or our particular culture, to place the transformation of this world at the forefront of all things, not our hopes to be around in the next.

And when he tells the crowd to follow him, he is speaking to us too. He is not telling us that we must live exactly as he did or spend our days worrying about the number of people who will join us along the way. Instead, he is calling us to get on the move, to step out of the ways that we have lived for so long and seek people along the road, to make our way into the world where the great need stands ready and waiting for God’s presence to be realized in people like us.

In these Lenten days, it seems incredibly important to recommit ourselves to following Jesus in our changing world, but we can’t approach this following in the same way that we have approached it before. We can’t just do what we’ve always done and say that that is enough. We can’t simply acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and go on about our lives as if nothing has changed. And we can’t leave ourselves or our world the same as before we set out on this journey.

The specifics of this path are not mine to set before you. The specific path for each of our individual lives to follow Jesus will emerge as we spend these days in prayer, penitence, and exploration. The path before us as a congregation as we seek to follow Jesus will only become clear when we commit to this individual exploration and begin to share what we learn along the way. Even so, what is clear to me is that we are called to follow Jesus in the same way as those who first heard him, denying ourselves and the things of this world that get in the way of our relationship with God and taking up the challenge of whatever cross we must bear in our lives and in our world.

So as we journey this Lent together, may God open the path to follow all the more so that we might join Jesus in both the challenges and the glory that lie ahead. Thanks be to God! Amen.

A Strange Celebration

February 22, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on Mark 1:9-15
preached on February 22, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

What do you do after a marquee moment in life? How do you celebrate a major accomplishment before moving on to what is next? Athletes and others used to proclaim that they would be going to Disney World, but what do you do?

Our reading from Mark today tells us about one of Jesus’ most incredible moments, after all, so I wonder a bit about what we think he might best do next to celebrate. When he went out to the Jordan to be baptized by John, he knew that he would submit to John’s baptism for the repentance of sins, but he didn’t necessarily know that he would hear the voice of God speaking to him so loudly and boldly, declaring from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

So after this marquee moment, what did Jesus do? As Mark tells it, “the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness… for forty days.” That was quite a strange celebration! Mark doesn’t tell us all that much more about these forty days for Jesus. Matthew and Luke, the two gospels who built their own accounts of Jesus’ life, ministry, and death on Mark’s telling of the story, both go into great detail about these forty days, explaining very carefully the particular temptations that Jesus faced and sharing his responses to them with us. But Mark simply tells us that after his baptism and the words of affirmation from heaven, Jesus was “tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him” before he emerged from the wilderness to begin his ministry and proclaim his message in Galilee.

For Mark, this time in the wilderness matters less for the specific temptations that Jesus faced and more for the ways in which these forty days enabled him to explore and understand his call to ministry. This is the beginning of everything we know about Jesus from Mark, after all—there’s no virgin birth, angel visitations, or boyhood antics described here—and everything that follows from this for Jesus in Mark builds on this time of temptation and exploration in the wilderness.

When he emerges from the wilderness, Jesus is definitely not the same as he was when he went in. Mark tells us that after his forty days in the wilderness, Jesus set out to Galilee to proclaim the good news of God:

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.

Jesus is a changed man after his sojourn in the wilderness with Satan, the wild beasts, and the angels. This man who approached John without reservation to receive a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins now has a message of repentance of his own to share that cleanses the heart, not just the body. This man who entered the waters of the Jordan as something of a blank slate emerges from his time in the wilderness insisting that there is something more to his life than what there was before. This beloved son came to understand his status and his calling in a new way after these forty days and so set out to proclaim and live a new message that called all people to trust that God’s kingdom was coming into being in the world and that all things would be made new once and for all.

For centuries, Christians have used this story of Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness as the basis for a time of penitence and preparation for Easter. The emphasis for this season of Lent has traditionally been on giving something up—on building up spiritual strength to overcome the temptations of everyday life, on fasting from food or other earthly things as a way of embodying in our physical bodies the sort of spiritual change that we desire in these days, on setting aside things that we can control that impede our spiritual growth. But when I look carefully at Mark’s version of this story, the tradition of giving something up for Lent doesn’t seem all that connected to Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. We hear so little here about the temptations that he faces that we can’t build a season of practice around them. And the wilderness mentioned in Mark doesn’t look very much like our world.

This wilderness is a strange place. It can bring the danger of encounters with Satan and wild beasts or the safe comfort of angels ready to serve and care. In the first thirteen verses of Mark’s gospel, we hear about the wilderness four different times. It is the place where John the Baptist comes from and the place where Jesus is driven by the Spirit after his encounter with John. On the whole, it is a place of hostility and conflict that emerge not from the pains of giving up coffee, chocolate, or alcohol for six weeks but from the ongoing conflict between the forces of good and evil that stand at the center of Mark’s understanding of the world.

So when Jesus was driven out into this wilderness, amidst all the real challenges that he faced, I think he took up far more than he gave up. In his time in the wilderness, Jesus came to truly understand what the voice had said to him in his baptism. In the midst of his temptation by Satan, he sorted out what true repentance meant. As he journeyed through the wilderness of conflict between good and evil, Jesus discovered what it meant to live faithfully in the day and age when the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near so that he could share that message with others. And as he emerged from the wilderness, the time was right and ripe for his proclamation of the new thing that God was doing in the world in him, through him, and because of him.

In these forty days of Lent, we too are faced with the challenges of discovering a way through the wilderness of life in our increasingly complex and challenging world. We hear how God has claimed us and promises to make us and all things new, and we have to sort out what that might look like. We encounter the challenges of temptation and uncertainty in the wilderness of these days and must decide how we will respond. And as we seek a way through this wilderness, we must still be ready to share what we have encountered and learned along the way with others when we emerge into the new life on the other side.

This year, in our life together as the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone, we’ll be taking this approach of taking up something new during these Lenten days as we explore a few of the possibilities for mission and ministry in our midst. We have discovered quite well that we are active and engaged with our community and our world in ways that speak to our varied interests and passions, and the session is hopeful that we can continue to deepen and broaden our commitments to mission in our life together. Beginning today and continuing for the next four weeks, each Sunday you will hear about some of the mission work that we are already doing—and some possibilities for you to get more involved. As we make our way through this Lenten season, it is my hope and prayer that you will find some new place to participate in our work of reaching out beyond these walls and being a part of the kingdom of God coming near in our world.

Even if you’ve already given up something for this Lent, I hope that you will take up something new for this season that will continue well beyond it, for the journey of penitence and renewal that we share in these days is not so much about the things that we give up for forty days but about the ways that we continue to grow in faith, hope, and love each and every day so that we too might proclaim that message that Jesus offered to those who would hear:

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.

So as we journey these forty days together, wandering the wilderness of our world, may we discover the pathway to live in the time that is fulfilled and the kingdom of God that has come near so that our Easter celebration may be filled with faith, hope, and love enough to enjoy and share. Thanks be to God! Amen.