a sermon on Romans 8:1-11 for the Fifteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time
preached at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone on July 10, 2011

One of the great joys of preaching is the opportunity to revisit favorite texts every so often, and today is one of those moments. Romans 8 is quite possibly my favorite chapter in the Bible. It begins with some incredibly concise and meaningful statements of the work of salvation in Jesus Christ and ends with the incredible and powerful affirmation that nothing in life or in death will be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. Thankfully, the Lectionary leads us to this chapter once every three years, offering us three weeks of readings to delve into its radical claims as we sort out what all these wonderful words mean for us today.

The first eleven verses of this great chapter that we hear today get at the core of the apostle Paul’s message in all of his letters and put it in relatively simple terms in the very first verse: “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Everything else he says in the verses that follow elaborates on this central claim as Paul declares his understanding of what God has done to make this happen. While traditional understandings of Jewish law placed great restrictions on life and living, Paul insists that there is a new law – the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus – and this law sets us free from the law of sin and death. The old law couldn’t do what it set out to do, so God did it in the end, condemning sin in the flesh and fulfilling all the requirements of the old law once and for all in and through Jesus Christ, making the new law in him complete and real for us and all humanity. In this new law, then, Paul says we have the gift of the Spirit, and so we live in the Spirit because the Spirit of God dwells in us.

Everything else doesn’t matter because of this – the righteousness of the Spirit gives life to us, and so our mortal bodies receive that life too. This new life in the Spirit stands at the core of who we are as children of God and followers of Jesus, for our concern no longer must be with making things right for ourselves or sorting out where we stand with God, but instead we can spend our time and energy on making things in the world new and different beyond what we have known before.

As wonderful and beautiful and important as this text is, I think that what we most often miss is the importance of transforming what it means into our daily living. We’d like for this text to tell us theological, eternal things, but that’s not really its goal – there is nothing whatsoever said here about gaining eternal life through the righteousness of the Spirit, and Paul never directly mentions the promise of life in a world to come anywhere in this great chapter.

Instead, I think Paul is more concerned with how all this new life that we have in and through and because of Christ changes our daily living, how knowing the reality that we have no condemnation in Christ makes a difference for us and our world every day. This is the bigger challenge here – not to figure out the full meaning of this for us but rather to sort out how to live in the light of this new knowledge, how to respond to the incredible love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.

I think we have better grounding for doing this than we might think, though. In many ways, we live this life of response in other parts of our lives. After our celebrations of independence on July 4th, we ought to be pretty good at living into the freedom we have as United States citizens, and I’d say we certainly have some good moments. On July 5th, I stopped by the Whitestone post office to check the church’s mail, and as I rounded the corner onto 150th Street, I saw one of the great freedoms of our nation being lived out. Two women had a table set up in front of the post office representing the Lyndon LaRouche movement. Their posters were troubling if not offensive, calling for the impeachment of President Obama, among various and sundry other strange political moves. As I entered and exited the post office, they called out to me in hopes that I might sign their petition for impeachment, but I walked on after offering a firm and angry “no,” deeply frustrated that anyone could feel so abused by the politics of these days as to suggest such a move. As angry and frustrated as I was, I reminded myself as I walked on that their unpleasant and frankly weird politics and even their frustrating tactics stand at the core of who we are as a nation – we don’t just shut down speech because we don’t like it but rather insist that all perspectives have a right to be heard. So the core principles of our nation are at their best in moments like these, in moments when they get lived out in unexpected and even slightly unpleasant ways.

And so it is also with our life of faith. We must to find similar ways where our commitment to this life in the Spirit can shine through even when we aren’t sure what is going on. Because of the joy of life in the Spirit, we don’t have to worry about that life itself for ourselves or others but rather can turn our focus toward promoting that life in the broader world. What does that look like? What does it mean to put our attention on the things of the Spirit rather than the things of the flesh? What does it look like to be free from the pressure of condemnation through the grace of God in Jesus Christ?

First of all, I think this means that we have to turn our worries and focus away from salvation. Not only do we have comfort in these things because of the promise we hear here, a primary or exclusive focus on our own salvation or even on our own eternal life is antithetical to the life of the Spirit. The life of the Spirit is not about what is best for me for all eternity, but it is rooted instead in the here and now. The life of the Spirit is built not on what we do but on how we join in what God is doing in the world. The life of the Spirit is centered not in greedily seeking what is best for me but rather in finding what God is doing that is best for the whole world.

Then, after we shift our focus from getting something out of all this to offering ourselves in this, we can see things in new ways. We can work in the world without fear that what we are doing will not be right or will surely fail, and if it doesn’t succeed as we expect, we can still trust that God is at work to redeem where we fall short. We can take thoughtful and hopeful risks because we know that the success or failure of anything we do does not rest upon us and does not reflect upon our salvation. And because of the freedom from condemnation we have in Christ, we can step out in faith in new and different ventures that enable and support the life of the Spirit in us and in others.

Living in the life of the Spirit also means that we turn away from the things that pull us away from this kind of life, not simply condemning sin in the forms we most easily recognize but stepping away from all the things that separate us from life as God intends and keep us from focusing on what we can do to join in God’s transformation of the world here and now.

This life in the Spirit will look different for each one of us, and it will certainly look different for our community of faith today than it did some years ago, but if we are to make this new way we have in Christ something more than just another belief we talk about just once a week on Sunday, we must figure out how to make this new life in the Spirit visible to others and ourselves in the days to come.

So may the Spirit of new life that we have in Christ Jesus our Lord inspire us to a new way here and now, living without fear and with great hope, focusing not on our salvation but on the possibilities and potential that it brings us so that we might join in what God is doing even now to make all things new. Amen.

a sermon for the Fourteenth Sermon in Ordinary Time on Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67
preached on July 3, 2011 at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone 

This summer, part of the Lectionary is leading us through some of the familiar stories of the Old Testament, reminding us again about the great women and men who started out our human journey with God. After the general tales of creation and a great flood that sound a lot like stories from other traditions of the Mesopotamian region, the Hebrew Bible’s stories finally turn their focus to one particular man, Abraham, and his family, whom God chose to bless out of all the families of the earth.

God instructed Abraham to travel from his homeland of Haran to the land of Canaan that God promised to give to him and his descendants – though the descendants part seemed a bit uncertain until he and his wife were seemingly beyond childbearing age, but God finally gave them their beloved son Isaac.

Today’s story comes at the end of Abraham’s life, long after Isaac’s birth and only a short time after the death of Abraham’s wife Sarah. Concerned about continuing the family line and maintaining its ethnic purity in the generations to come, Abraham sent his most trusted servant back to Haran to find a wife for his beloved son Isaac.

Upon his arrival in Haran, Abraham’s servant prayed to God for assistance in pulling off this mission for his master, asking God to join in on a pretty specific plan to identify a young woman for Isaac as one who would come to draw water at the well and respond favorably to this stranger’s request for water – and to offer some for his camels too.

Sure enough, just as Abraham’s servant finished his prayer, a young woman was making her way to the spring. When the servant asked her for some water, she responded exactly as he wanted, offering the servant and his camels some water in what should be known as one of the Bible’s great pick-up lines: “Drink, and I will also water your camels.”

As it turned out, this woman was Abraham’s great niece, and so the servant seemed to have hit the jackpot – a generous, helpful, beautiful woman named Rebekah who was not only from Abraham’s homeland but was one of the family. Negotiations proceeded from there, and Rebekah’s family ultimately agreed to send her with Abraham’s servant to marry her second cousin who lived in a distant land. The other details got sorted out pretty quickly from there, and eventually they asked Rebekah if she would be willing to leave for Canaan right away or if she wanted to wait the customary ten days. Rebekah agreed to leave right away, and so they set off for Canaan.

When the journey ended, Isaac was quite glad to welcome her, for he had grieved much since his mother’s death and needed someone to comfort him. Rebekah fit the bill perfectly, so Isaac took Rebekah to be his wife and made a home for her in his dead mother’s tent.

From a 21st century point of view, we have to recognize that this story is fraught with great issues. Psychologists and students of the human condition everywhere surely cringe when Isaac’s new wife is depicted as replacing the lost affection of his dead mother. Abraham’s insistence that his son’s wife be from his own family and homeland ought to concern us a bit too, as it has been used more than once in arguments against interracial marriage and cross-cultural mixing. And just as Abraham in our story last week might be subject to criminal charges of child endangerment today were he nearly to sacrifice his son as he did, the sizable dowry offered by Abraham’s servant to Rebekah’s family surely would raise reasonable concerns today about the possibility of sex slavery and the trafficking of young women for illicit purposes that is dangerously common in our world today.

It’s clear that this is no ordinary marriage between Isaac and Rebekah – it is quite likely very different from much of our experience today in North America, although this kind of arranged marriage with close kin or at least within the primary ethnic group remains quite common in other parts of the world. It is clear to me from this text that the Bible has a very different view of marriage than we do today – even without considering the coming changes around same-sex marriage recently approved here in New York State.

So just as we saw last Sunday, the Bible presents us with unclear, incomplete guidance about something we wish it would just answer for us. Wouldn’t it be great if the Bible just directly told us how to deal with questions of marriage and laid out a clear, straightforward, unchanging pattern for us? Some people think that it does, but unfortunately it does not – on marriage or most any other issue.

The reality is that we can find biblical texts to back up almost any moral position. There are texts that support capital punishment and texts that suggest otherwise. There are texts that seem to speak against abortion and texts that support the right of a woman to choose to end her pregnancy. There are texts that prohibit the eating of shellfish and pork and texts that invite us to give up those restrictions. There are texts that speak against same-sex practice and texts that speak of a broad welcome for all. So amidst all this, we can’t pretend that the Bible is easy and straightforward – we have to look at it in all its complexity, in its strange and different context, with our eyes of faith, hope, and love, seeking to understand what all this really means for us and our world.

Last Sunday, I talked about six guidelines for interpreting the Bible laid out by my seminary theology professor Shirley Guthrie, and I think they’re worth hearing again today in briefer form as we think about yet another strange text. First, “scripture is to be interpreted in light of its own purpose” to tell us who God is and how God is in relationship with the world. Then, “scripture interprets itself” as we look to other passages in the Bible to sort out the meaning of difficult or confusing texts. Third, we must keep Jesus Christ, the best vision of God that we have, at the center of all our readings of scripture. Then, we must follow the “rule of faith” and keep the grace of God in Jesus Christ in mind when we read. Fifth, Guthrie insists that we follow “the rule of love” and keep God’s central commandments to love God and love neighbor at the center of our reading of the Bible. And finally, we have to put what we read in its literary and historical context, remembering that our world and our knowledge are quite different from that of the Bible’s era.

If we look at this text in this way, I think we can look beyond our concerns and our preconceived notions and learn something more from this strange arranged marriage between Isaac and Rebekah. Amidst all the problematic realities here, we see God’s continued concern for all humanity in and through this small family. Just as God promised Abraham at the beginning of this story, God remains with him as his life ends, and God’s promise to make a great nation of his family does not disappear. Just as Abraham journeyed to Canaan, so too Rebekah journeys far from her home to join in this new line. And just as God worked through Abraham and his wife Sarah, God worked in Rebekah as she joined this blessed family and encouraged her favored son in his deception to gain his father’s blessing so as to fulfill the seeming intention of God to honor the second-born rather than the first.

Rather than being an instructional text about the proper process and place for marriage or the way to deal with grief and pain, perhaps these words about no ordinary marriage can speak to us about God’s claim upon and concern for our lives, too, reminding us that it is not up to us to sort everything out for ourselves and showing us that we can trust that God will work in old and new ways to transform our lives and our world.

So may we hear of no ordinary marriage not as instruction for our own family life and social order but rather as encouragement for the journey through this strange and unusual and wonderful witness to God’s power and work so that we too might know the power of God in our lives and the presence of something far beyond our wildest imaginations as we journey near or far. Amen.

a sermon for Ordinary Time on Genesis 22:1-14 and Matthew 10:34-42
preached on June 26, 2011, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

As we gather on this beautiful day in this beautiful spot, our scripture readings aren’t quite so beautiful. Between Abraham’s obedience to God’s command that led him to nearly kill his beloved son Isaac and Jesus’ insistence that he came not to bring peace but a sword, I suspect that many folks would rather leave these texts out of the Bible – or at the very least not talk about them all that often! But nonetheless, here we have them, not one but two challenging texts put before us by the lectionary today.

I have to wonder what we do with them, then, if we can’t just ignore them or pretend like they aren’t there. What are we supposed to do with a word like this, where God seems to tell us to do something we not only do not want to do for no good reason but that seems incredibly insensitive and inhuman? In moments like these, with texts like these, I think it’s a reasonable question.

These two texts present us with stories where God’s instruction not only just doesn’t make sense but is also extremely divisive and troubling. It doesn’t make sense to Abraham for him to go and offer his long-sought son as a sacrifice to God, and this act certainly doesn’t fit at all within the broader picture we get from the whole Bible of how God works in the world. And Jesus’ words about his message tearing families apart don’t seem to make much sense either in our world that places such a high value on familial relationships – or even in the broader context of his story that shows how Jesus’ mother and brothers played an important role in supporting his ministry.

So what’s the right thing to do here? How should we respond when we hear God speaking, calling us to do something difficult? Do we just give in and do it, or do we somehow resist and find another way? What is the most faithful approach to responding to God in our lives and our world when it is hard?

Abraham demonstrates one approach to all this in his total, unquestioned obedience. His model of following God’s command to offer his son as a sacrifice is admirable, but I don’t think it is particularly commendable in our world. First of all, how could he have done this to the son whom he wanted and desired and plotted and prayed for for so long? In today’s world, Abraham would likely (and rightly) face some sort of criminal charge for endangering the life of his son even if he did not go through with it, and I think we have good reason to question Abraham’s actions based on so many other human encounters with God in the Bible that would suggest that this sort of message should not be followed.

But I don’t think Abraham’s approach of total, unquestioned obedience is all that wise for us today. In both Abraham’s story and Jesus’ instruction here, it just doesn’t seem wise to dive in right away and do what God says without questioning or limiting things somehow. We have to put God’s word in the moment in the context of the broader voice of God working in and with the world; otherwise, we risk bringing about great harm to others and ourselves by following what we only think God wants us to do.

The best way to do this, in my view, is to be thoughtful, faithful, and prayerful as we respond to what we think God is saying, and there’s no better way to do this than to turn to the Bible. As we read the Bible and interpret it for our lives and our world by the power of the Holy Spirit working in community, we hear God’s word to us the best we possibly can.

Again, this isn’t as easy as it would seem to be. We can find texts in the Bible to back up pretty much anything we want, and so we must remember that every reading of the Bible involves some level of interpretation as we take these ancient words and put them into our own language and our own cultural context. Along the way, something is bound to get mixed up or lost or confused, so we need some guidance.

Thankfully, my seminary theology professor Shirley Guthrie summarized how to interpret the Bible in six not-quite-simple rules (from his classic book Christian Doctrine), building on the historic confessions of the church to give guidance for our life today.

First, “scripture is to be interpreted in light of its own purpose.” Scripture was not written to be a scientific or historical document but instead to tell us who God is and how God has interacted with God’s people over the centuries, and we have to keep that purpose in mind as we use it and interpret it.

Then, “scripture interprets itself,” for we look first to other passages in the Bible to sort out the meaning of difficult or confusing texts.

Guthrie then suggests that we keep Jesus Christ at the center of all our reflections about scripture, because if we have the best vision of God that we will get in Jesus, we can certainly learn something from his words and actions that will help us to better understand other parts of the Bible.

Fourth, Guthrie says that we should follow “the rule of faith,” keeping the incredible grace of God in Jesus Christ at the center of our faith and practice and honoring the insights of those who have gone before us in the life of faith.

Then Guthrie insists that we also follow “the rule of love” as we recognize that God’s primary commandments are to love God and neighbor and that any interpretation of scripture that “shows indifference toward or contempt for any individual or group inside or outside the church” is wrong.

Finally, Guthrie calls us to look at the literary and historical context of scripture as we study it, recognizing that we learn a great deal when we think about scripture in the day and age and form in which it was written.

So in and through these specific steps, especially when we undertake them prayerfully as a community of faith rather than just on our own, we can learn a little more about what God is saying to us in scripture and in other revelations and figure out how best to apply these words in our daily lives. I say all this about interpreting scripture because the difficult things we hear from God are not just a thing of the past – people closer to our own time must sort out these things, too.

During the days of Nazi Germany, the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer – the author of our last hymn – struggled to sort out what God was calling him to do. Bonhoeffer had considered himself a pacifist, but over time he became a major leader of the church’s opposition to Hitler and the Nazi takeover of the church. Bonhoeffer struggled with what seemed to be mixed messages from God – not just deciding between a call to teach here in New York where he had studied at Union Seminary and enjoy the safety of life here or a call to be a part of a small group in the German church calling out the nationalism and racism of the church, but also sorting out his recognition of God’s consistent message of peace and nonviolence over against his need to stand up to the grave injustices of the Third Reich.

Bonhoeffer ended up staying in Germany, promoting a way of life that stood in stark opposition to the norm of the war years there, and eventually this peace-lover became involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler, deciding that the need to end the terrible rule of this tyrannical dictator was a part of God’s call to peace for him. After the plot failed, Bonhoeffer was arrested along with many of his co-conspirators, and he spent the last two years of the war in prison. As the outcome of the war became clear in April 1945, Hitler ordered the execution of Bonhoeffer and his compatriots. Today, Dietrich Bonhoeffer stands as an incredible example of one who struggled to sort all these things out for himself, and his difficult journey shows the complexity, power, and consequences of sorting out the difficult things that God calls us to do.

The difficult decisions that Bonhoeffer faced along the way, alongside the difficult words we hear posed to Abraham and the disciples, can and should inspire us to think about the difficult call of God upon us – the call to give up the things that we hold most dear for God’s better use, the call to link ourselves not to the things of the world but to the things of God, the call to love others and most especially God far more than we ever love ourselves, the call to show a deep and radical welcome to each and every person, and the call to listen carefully and discern wisely when faced with a difficult situation.

So may God strengthen us to respond to these calls, to sort out the difficult call of God upon us, so that we might always be faithful and demonstrate the incredible love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

a sermon for Pentecost on John 20:19-23 and Acts 2:1-21
preached on June 12, 2011, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone 

The day of Pentecost is truly one of the great moments in the life of the church. On this day we celebrate the birth of the church as we know it in the coming of the Holy Spirit, remembering how the followers of Jesus went from expecting God’s presence to be in bodily human form to our being comfortable with God showing up in more of a spiritual way.

There are many wonderful holidays in the Christian tradition, but I particularly like Pentecost because this is our day. Our society hasn’t co-opted Pentecost to be another marker in the cultural year like Christmas and Easter. We don’t find stores overrun with red banners, posters of flames, or other sorts of misunderstood symbols. And on this holiday, we usually don’t have family obligations to deal with, leaving this day for the church family to celebrate together. So each year, sometime in May or June, seven weeks after Easter, we pull out the red paraments, think about flaming tongues of fire, and remember the coming of the Holy Spirit into a crowd of Jewish pilgrims from around the world who were attending a festival in Jerusalem some fifty days after the Passover.

The story of Pentecost seems so familiar – but what was that that we read first? That didn’t seem all that much about Pentecost? But back in the gospel according to John, only hours after the disciples had first seen the risen Jesus on Easter Sunday, Jesus came among the disciples, breaking through their locked door and their great fear to come among them and wish them peace. If they didn’t quite know that it was him, he showed them his hands and his side, and again offered them his peace, with the added injunction, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” But Jesus didn’t leave things there – he didn’t send them on their own. After this, he breathed on them and told them, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” all on the night of his resurrection. Now this seems all well and good, but if we translate this schedule to our current calendar, the Holy Spirit came sometime on the evening of April 24, so we’re about seven weeks late celebrating Pentecost!

But in our reading from Acts, we remember that better-known moment when the early church saw the Holy Spirit coming among them, a moment that looks and sounds a lot more like what we usually think of we when we celebrate Pentecost and the coming of the Spirit. On an otherwise ordinary morning, as pilgrims gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate the annual festival fifty days after Passover, the disciples gathered in a house as was their custom, only to be joined by a loud sound of wind as tongues of fire rested on each of them and they began to speak in other languages. Then the disciples ventured out into the crowd and began speaking to the pilgrims from all around the world in their native languages, telling them about the surprising things that God had been up to in recent days in the life of a man named Jesus. Some people took it all very seriously, thinking that they might could learn something from this new thing happening in their midst, but others dismissed the disciples’ strange speech as nothing more than an early morning binge. Then Peter addressed the crowd, insisting that these strange events were not the product of alcoholic ramblings but rather the fulfillment of words spoken centuries earlier by the prophet Joel. On this day, the promise that the Spirit would come upon all flesh in the last days was fulfilled, for things were starting to change and the world was about to be made new.

Now these two moments of the coming of the Holy Spirit look very different. In John’s gospel, the Holy Spirit comes quietly, unexpectedly, with no visible or immediate sign or clear sight for others to see, and in Acts, the Spirit comes in a loud rush of wind, after much waiting, with a clear mark of something new happening right then and there for everyone around to see and hear. As much as we like to think of Pentecost and the Holy Spirit as coming with great power and glory, with celebrations of red everywhere and the witness of so many languages being spoken seemingly out of nowhere, I think we also can learn a lot from John’s vision of the Holy Spirit coming in quieter, less obvious, and yet equally powerful ways.

You see, the Spirit that transforms us doesn’t always work quickly, with great and visible glory and power, but that doesn’t mean that the Spirit isn’t at work. The Holy Spirit often works in ways beyond our imagination, quietly yet steadily shattering our expectations, speaking in silence and in loud speech to guide us into the way that God intends, and working in small and large moments and in dramatic and ordinary ways to transform our lives and our world.

So watching for the work of the Spirit isn’t always easy, since it truly can come in so many different ways. In recent weeks, our denomination has completed the approval of an amendment to our Book of Order that will permit sessions and presbyteries to ordain practicing gay and lesbian persons. Some in the church have celebrated this change as a sign of the Spirit at work in the church changing hearts and minds to make the love of God and the call of God for all people more visible. Others in the church have called this decision a moment when the church has departed from the clear wisdom of the Holy Spirit, and they insist that the Spirit could never be at work in such a move. People can and will see the movement of the Spirit in places that others do not, but I for one think we need to keep ourselves as open as we can to different expressions of the Spirit.

Just as the Spirit was clear in Jesus’ appearance to the disciples on that first Easter evening and to the crowd on the first Pentecost, so the Holy Spirit might just be at work around us, too, in different ways, in those folks who speak in tongues and in our slightly more staid worship, in televangelists who claim to bring healing by the Spirit and in our faithful and constant prayers for those who need God’s healing grace, and in those who welcome the broadest spectrum of leaders into the church and in those who feel that leadership must be more limited in some way. The Spirit can and will and does move and work in all these places and more, and we are called to open our eyes and our hearts to this work – and to join in where we can.

And so on this great day in the life of the church, I believe that we are called to listen for the movement of the Holy Spirit in the quiet proclamations of the everyday and in the midst of bold celebration, to trust that the same Spirit is at work in our midst when we understand it and agree and when we don’t, and to watch for the bold tongues of fire consuming what needs to be past and the nearly imperceptible movement of all things being made new.

So may the Holy Spirit of that quiet Easter evening and that powerful Pentecost come upon us anew today and help us to join in all that God is doing in our world now and always until all things are made new in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.