Andy James

wandering the web since 1997

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

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A Tale of Two Feasts

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a sermon on Isaiah 25:6-10a and Mark 8:1-10
preached on October 4, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Charles Dickens was not the first to show off how perspectives of the world could change radically based on where you started looking, for even the prophet Isaiah knew how to paint a picture of radically different worlds. Our beautiful reading today, for example, with its exalted and joyful view of the future comes only a chapter after Isaiah proclaimed judgment upon the people of Israel:

Now the Lord is about to lay waste the earth and make it desolate,
and he will twist its surface and scatter its inhabitants.

This image of the worst of times is quickly replaced, though, with a vision of something new, a very clear word of hope for something different ahead.

On this mountain,
the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of rich food,
a feast of well-aged wines,
of rich food filled with marrow,
of well-aged wines strained clear.

The wonder and power of God will transform the desolation of destruction and exile into the wonder of new life. This feast on this mountain will be only the beginning of the transformation happening there, for this is the place where God will destroy “the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations,” and “swallow up death forever.” Mourning and sorrow and crying will find no home on this mountain, for “then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces and take away the disgrace of all people.” This mountain, then, will be the place where rejoicing begins, where the wonder of God’s justice will become real, where the promise of God’s peace takes hold. After many years of waiting, the people will rejoice, for God’s salvation will have come, and “the hand of the Lord will rest on this mountain.”

Isaiah’s words are filled with such incredible promise and hope for a world that needs to change, but these words of hope are rightfully tempered by the broader context of the prophet’s message—and the deep pain and sorrow that keeps emerging in our world. Even when we want to call forth rejoicing, we do not have to look far to see how violence and bloodshed tear our world apart. World powers step in to longstanding conflicts claiming that they are bringing peace, only to find that they have come to target places where they can drive people even further apart. Women, men, and children are displaced from their homes and lives in so many places by violence, forced to live in difficult and challenging conditions for months and years as they await a new home. Week after week, we hear reports of more and more mass shootings, as people who want to do others harm find easy ways to access guns and weapons and open fire on students, teachers, and others, and the rest of us wonder if our school, our workplace, our home may be next even as we become numb to the practices of our culture that allow these nightmares to continue to become reality. We can barely even begin to imagine for tomorrow a mountain like what Isaiah describes where peace and hope reign supreme, where a feast of rich food will overshadow the darkness of death, where tears and mourning will be a thing of the past, where God can and will make all things new.

But this is only the tale of one feast—a promised feast, a grand meal that still lies ahead, a dream of something more that has not yet been realized. Our reading from Mark this morning tells us of another incredible feast, a feast where the promises of something new became very real, a feast that has already made our world a different place.

By this point in his ministry, Jesus had become known for making things different for the people here and now. He offered words of power in his preaching and teaching, suggesting that a different way of life was taking hold in the here and now. He touched people with healing and hope, transforming lives that had been lived in shadows and uncertainty through the simple touch of his love for everyone. And he brought together fishermen, tax collectors, and others who would have never imagined that they would matter, telling them that they could be a part of all the things that God was doing to make the world a different and better place. At every step of the way, Jesus made it clear that making things different was not a matter for another day and age—he was the kind of person who made things change now.

When he looked out over the crowd who had followed him for three days, listening and learning from his words and actions, he realized that needed something to eat. He could have left himself only to worry about their spiritual well-being, but their physical needs were pretty important to him, too. He was faced with a no-win situation: if he had sent them home to eat, they would have just fainted along the way; and if he had suggested that they just stick around a little longer, they would have kept on being “hungry,” that strange and difficult combination of hunger and anger that is so very difficult to break! To top it all off, the options for feeding this crowd were limited: they had nothing to eat, there was no store nearby, and they couldn’t even call in a food truck or catering service to make a meal for everyone!

Still, Jesus insisted that he and the disciples could feed this crowd of four thousand people. He gathered the seven loaves of bread that the disciples had, instructed the crowd to sit down on the ground, gave thanks for the meal, and distributed the seven loaves to everyone there. As they shared the meal, they discovered a few small fish and distributed these to the crowd, too. By the miraculous power of God, this meal was enough to satisfy everyone. The four thousand people who shared this simple feast found themselves on a mountain much like Isaiah had promised, with a meal perhaps lacking in well-aged wines and marrow but filled with the wonder of an impromptu banquet. The cleanup from this feast was even of note—while they had started with practically nothing, the disciples picked up seven baskets full of leftovers! When it was all over, Jesus sent the crowd on its way as he and the disciples set out for another region, but they left this incredible feast forever changed by what they had shared.

The tales of these two feasts told on this World Communion Sunday can give us insight into how we approach the work of living in faithfulness and peace around our world. When we are tempted to live our lives of faith focused on transforming the present, Isaiah opens our eyes to a holy mountain yet to come with a feast of rich food and the full wonder of new life. And when we fall into the trap of focusing only on the new life that is yet to come, Jesus reminds us that we can and should and must do something about the hungers of this world, too. This tale of two feasts is the story of our lives of faith, lives lived in-between little glimpses of new life today and the fullness of the new creation to come, words and actions that bear the wonder of how God has already transformed our world in Jesus Christ even as that transformation is not yet complete.

So today as we gather at this table, remembering more than usual the millions, even billions, who gather at similar tables all around the world on days like today, we remember especially these two feasts even as we think of so many others: the meal Jesus shared with his disciples the night of his arrest, a gathering at table on the evening of the resurrection where the disciples’ eyes were opened and they recognized Jesus in the breaking of the bread, ordinary weeknight meals shared with friends and family where we have been surprised by the presence of God in our midst, incredible dinners with luscious spreads of grand fare that leave us giving thanks to God for the wonderful creation of food and the people who prepare it, even simple, uncomplicated meals that manage to give us more sustenance than we could ever imagine.

As we share this feast today, may we remember all these feasts so that we might join in God’s work of bringing hope and food and new life to our world today, tomorrow, and every day as we wait, watch, and work for the new creation to be made real among us until we join that feast of new life on God’s holy mountain. Lord, come quickly! Alleluia! Amen.

The Tweets of Jesus

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a sermon on Mark 9:38-50
preached on September 27, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

As some of you know, I’m a bit of an active Twitterer. I’ve been using this social networking site since 2008 or so, first to connect with some friends in church work, later expanding my network to include others who share similar interests in technology and faith concerns, and most recently starting to follow some new people who share my support of the New York Red Bulls!

It takes a bit of a special person to enjoy Twitter. While Facebook can be a great way to share pictures, experiences, insights, and websites with family and friends, Twitter is a bit more intense. You can choose who to follow—whose messages will show up when you go to the site—and generally those people don’t have to approve of you following them. Messages, known as tweets, can be no longer than 140 characters, and if you include a link or a picture, the message must be shorter still. Most messages end up being pretty pithy and occasionally witty—after all, if you only have 140 characters, you have to make each one count! But even though these messages are shorter, they come more frequently. I follow about 450 people, which is a pretty manageable number, but during busy news times, those 450 people can produce ten or twenty tweets per minute!

When I looked at our reading from the gospel of Mark this morning, I felt like I was following Jesus on Twitter. This text offers us a series of short, somewhat pithy messages that can sometimes make more sense on their own than together—and if you count it up, almost all of these are 140 characters or less! But unlike many Twitterers of our time, Jesus clearly knew that context matters. He was not speaking in little random tidbits of 140 characters that were disconnected from anything else he has ever said. Instead, he was responding to questions raised by the disciples, offering insights out of an encounter with a little child whom he had welcomed into their midst because they had become so focused on questions of status and privilege that they missed the real point of what he was up to.

So in these thirteen verses, we see a series of Twitter-ready sayings that give us a pretty thoughtful look at his approach to the world. These sayings can be reasonably divided into three sets. The first was a direct response to his disciple John, who expressed what seemed to be a broader concern among the disciples that there were people using Jesus’ name to cast out demons without subjecting themselves to his authority like they had done. John’s concern sounds a lot like a modern-day copyright or intellectual property claim: “Jesus, people might get the wrong idea about your brand if these folks do the wrong thing in the wrong way in your name.”

The disciples were ready to pounce on these message thieves to get them in line, but Jesus would have nothing of it. First of all, he was glad that they were using his name and carrying his message. The ministry of healing and transformation that they identified in those days as “casting out demons” made a real difference in many lives, and he seemed to welcome the chance for more people to be touched by the power of God in this way. Jesus was not worried about diluting his brand or getting things confused—he was just excited that people were interested in the work he was doing. So “don’t stop him,” Jesus said. “No one can use my name to do something good and powerful, and in the next breath cut me down. If he’s not an enemy, he’s an ally.” It mattered more to Jesus that good things were happening than that he got full and proper credit for them.

The second set of Jesus’ tweet-like sayings shifts gears a bit. As his disciples tried to limit access to him and his message, Jesus offered some pretty outrageous responses. Those who put stumbling blocks in the way of people who wanted to follow Jesus ought to tie those blocks to themselves and go for a swim in the sea. Those who let a hand or foot help them stumble or an eye to guide them in going astray would be better off to cut it off than to face the other consequences! This was a strong continuation of his previous sayings. Jesus wanted no part of anything his followers would do that would get in the way of welcoming others to hear and share his message. No boundary should be erected to keep people out of the sort of life that he could bring them. No one ought to stand in the way of building up the community of faith. None of our actions should keep others from finding the pathway to faithfulness. As one commentator put it well,

We need to ponder the risks for us if our failures of love, our distortions of the way of Christ, our too narrow understandings of the truth, our quickness to pronounce judgment cause others to stumble as they are trying to find the way of faithful living. (Harry B. Adams, “Pastoral Perspective on Mark 9:39-50,” Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 4, p. 120.)

Jesus closed his very tweetable words to his disciples with a third section, a strange coda about being “salted with fire” even as he instructed the disciples to “have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.” I for one am not quite sure what it means to be “salted with fire” or to “have salt in yourselves.” One commentator suggests that Jesus was telling the disciples to get ready to be tested, that there was something ahead that would challenge them and they needed to be prepared and protected as salt does, that they need a preservative as powerful as salt to protect them from the fires ahead. Another links this reference to the great value of salt in the ancient world, suggesting that Jesus was telling the disciples that they need to recognize how precious they were to the work that was going on so that they wouldn’t get in the way of it. And two others wonder if Jesus might have been thinking that the disciples just needed to keep up their distinctiveness, to find a way to bring a new and deeper flavor to the world as they shared Jesus’ message in the days beyond his own time.

I suspect that no one of these interpretations is right on its own, for each of them gives us a helpful angle on understanding how we can be more faithful as we bear the presence of Jesus into our world. Whatever he might have meant about salt here, Jesus concluded with yet another great tweetable line: “Be at peace with one another.” He knew that the temptation would be great to be divided from each other and set ourselves at odds with one another, so he made it clear that the real and deep and faithful witness to his healing presence would come through the way that his followers lived together.

All these very tweetable lines from Jesus may still leave us scratching our heads a bit, wondering what exactly he wants us to take with us from these words. Is he suggesting that we need to open up our community to a few more branches of the Jesus franchise? Is he saying that there are certain actions for which there may be, as it is said, “hell to pay”? Is he trying to tell us that we need to prepare ourselves for some sort of suffering? If you take any one of these tweetable moments out of the broader context, these explanations might make sense, but in the bigger picture here, I think Jesus is trying to help his disciples—and by extension us—open up the understanding of community that we apply to those who follow him.

Being a part of this community is not about showing proper deference to authority or being in the right group. It is instead about living in the way that Jesus himself did, about offering a message of healing and new life to everyone who needed it along the way. Membership in this community is not about trying to adhere to a particular strict interpretation of the way forward but rather about opening ourselves to different ways of thinking as we honor our sisters and brothers who journey with us along the way. And the marks of this community are less about who gets cast out or who manages to survive along the way and far more about helping others to experience the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. This community finds its meaning and definition in welcoming the stranger, staying with the sick, getting to know those who are different, and supporting those who are poor. As we do all this, we set aside our fears of being cast out or not having enough because we have been welcomed into this amazing relationship of grace, hope, and love in Jesus Christ, and we simply cannot be the same.

So as we continue on this journey of faith in community, may God guide us through the difficult moments when we are tempted to cast others out, may God help us when we think of getting in the way of those who might join us along the way, and may God support us as we seek to be at peace with one another until all things are made new in Jesus Christ our Lord. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

Words of Direction

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a sermon on Deuteronomy 30:11-20 and 1 Thessalonians 5:12-28
preached on September 13, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

At some point in recent months, I came to a startling realization about myself. As I listened carefully to myself speak, as I observed what I said to others along the way, I noticed something that gave me pause: apparently I like telling people what to do. Now this may come as no surprise to some of you—after all, I’ve been pastor here for ten years, so it is inevitable that I have told every one of you what to do at one point or another!

But I was startled and surprised by all this mostly when I realized how I seem to leave every conversation with some sort of imperative sentence. “Email me with the details.” “Let me know how it goes tomorrow.” “Call me later.” “Have a good trip.” “Take care.” In English grammar, we tend to use imperative sentences like these to tell someone what to do: “Take out the garbage.” “Call the plumber.” “Stop hitting your brother.” Somehow these seem a little more intense than those parting words that I catch myself saying all the time, but they are so very similar in grammatical structure that I sometimes wonder if they really feel any different, if my parting words intended to be gentle and graceful come across as more forceful and demanding. I don’t think I am saying all this so much because I like to tell people what to do—I just hope that others leave our encounters with a word of hope, a statement that has movement and motion for what is ahead in life, words of direction for the time and space ahead.

Words of direction like this are very common in the life of faith. The Bible is filled with passages where its writers try to tell us what to do, whether it be in the list of “Thou shalt not”s of the Ten Commandments, among the extensive holiness and purity laws of the Old Testament, or even in the New Testament’s suggestions of different ways of life for the early church. When it is at its best, the Bible’s words of direction are not so much laws laid out for us to follow but invitations for God’s people to lead the world into a new and different way of life. Each week, we embody this important tradition in our worship as we close with a charge and benediction, with words that remind us of how we are called to live out our faith in the world and that share God’s blessing in our lives.

Our two readings today show us two important examples of these parting words of direction from the history of Israel and the life of the early church. First, we heard the conclusion of Moses’ farewell address to the Israelites from the book of Deuteronomy. Moses had led the people out of Egypt, through the waters of the sea, into the wilderness, and to the edge of the promised land. As Joshua prepared to take over leadership of the final steps of the journey, Moses offered them these final words of hope and direction. These instructions were very clear and simple: choose life. The Israelites had chosen life before: they had found a way to survive the horrid conditions of their enslavement in Egypt, they found hope in God to carry them through a difficult journey in the wilderness, and they welcomed God’s commandments as they slowly but surely embraced the covenant of Sinai.

However, in this momentous time, as they approached the beginning of a radically different day in their life together, Moses reminded them that they needed to keep choosing life in the days ahead. For the Israelites, this meant recommitting themselves to the things that had sustained them in the wilderness: loving the Lord, walking in God’s ways, observing God’s commandments, decrees, and ordinances, and holding fast to God’s presence in their midst. Moses knew that other temptations would quickly swirl around them, that the religious practice of their new neighbors would loom large over them, that they would be distracted from attention to God by the challenges and possibilities of life in this new place, and so he reminded them from the very beginning to choose the way of life in God. As the promise of the promised land was revealed, as Moses’ leadership of the people came to an end, these words of direction gave them hope for the transformation that lie ahead.

The early church picked up on this tradition of offering such parting words of direction, too. Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians is actually considered by most scholars to be the oldest surviving writing in our New Testament, so these words of direction in our second reading give us a glimpse of how the early church understood their call to new life just twenty-five years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. In that moment, many believers thought that the end of time was very near. The gospel message was so imperative to them because they understood that Christ would be returning soon—if not in a year or two, almost certainly within their lifetimes. Some people took this as permission to live in total freedom, maybe to sit around and do nothing but wait, maybe to act without concern for any earthly consequences, maybe even to be angry with one another, because the things of this world would not matter when Jesus returned.

So when Paul closed his letter to the church with this string of imperatives, he gave them a very different direction for their life together. Even after nearly two thousand years, even when we no longer think that the end of things might come as soon as tomorrow, these words of direction give us an understanding of the ethic of life that we are called to live. Paul’s commands here are an incredible litany of transformational life that has stood the test of time and still are remarkable words of direction for us. Show respect and love to one another. Encourage those who struggle to find a different way. Be patient with everyone. “See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all.” “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances…”

Sometimes I wonder if the church had lived like Paul suggested all these years, if our actions had been clear enough for others to see and follow, then maybe the end of things would have come by now after all. No matter how much we might wish that things had already come to an end, regardless of how much has changed in our worldview and our belief since those early days of the church, Paul’s words of direction here can still shape our own lives in this changing age as we seek to live in hope, peace, and love with one another.

Each week, as we close worship in words of charge and blessing, we continue in this tradition of sharing words of direction for our lives. I certainly don’t think that I belong in a class anywhere near Moses and Paul in coming up with such words, so thankfully their words can often stand in for my own—and make me feel a little less like I am annoyingly telling everyone what to do once again! The words of direction that close our worship sometimes need to be specific to where we are as a congregation, maybe lifting up a part of the sermon, maybe even reusing a line of the last hymn, maybe fitting a particular time or moment in the church year. Other times, we need to hear something more familiar from scripture, perhaps something like these words from 1 Thessalonians, to remind us of the long line of faithful Christians who have sought to live in this way of hope, peace, and love. These words certainly call each of us individually to act in a new way, but they also call us as a community to live as God’s people, to seek the well-being of all God’s creation, to embody the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ with everyone we meet.

Ultimately, I think that the specific words of direction that we share with one another as our worship comes to an end matter less than the fact that we share them at all. When we offer any words of hope and promise to one another, we are given a reminder of how God calls us to live in new ways in our daily lives, to be God’s transformed and transformative people each and every day in our world that so very much needs new life. So each week, as we hear these words of direction, and each day, as we share these words of hope with one another, may God strengthen us to live in love, rejoice always, pray without ceasing, and live in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ that is with us today, tomorrow, and always. Thanks be to God! Amen.

A Meal to Bring Us Together

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a sermon on 1 Corinthians 11:17-34 and Luke 24:13-35
preached on September 6, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

There’s nothing quite like a meal to bring us together. When a new colleague comes to the neighborhood, when I want to get to know someone better, when an old friend comes to town and we need to catch up, when someone just needs a listening ear, I prefer not just to sit down for a chat—I do everything I can to find time to share a meal together. No matter the menu, regardless of the location, whether the service is bad or good, something special happens across that table. I can’t really explain why, but I do know that there’s nothing quite like a meal to bring us together.

Today as we look at the Lord’s Supper in our summer series exploring the parts of the worship service, our two texts give us some insights into how this meal that we share here brings us together. Both texts connect us to the origins of this feast. Paul gives us words that tell the story of a meal hosted by Jesus on the night of his arrest that we use every time we gather here, and Luke describes how a simple, unplanned evening meal on the day of resurrection became a place to meet Jesus. In their different settings and different stories, our two texts today show us a meal that brings us together.

First, in Paul’s record of what we know as the words of institution of the Lord’s Supper, we get a glimpse of some of the problems that the early church faced as they tried to share this meal. The church in Corinth clearly had a lot of issues, and we’ll be talking more about those in Bible study starting this week, but Paul was particularly frustrated at how the inclusion of a meal in the worship practice of the church was driving people apart. The early church considered the Lord’s Supper as a time for all the people to come together to share a substantial meal—with portions a good bit larger than even the largest chunks of bread and grape juice that has become the norm today—but in Corinth, the great variety of people in the church had made this meal a very disconnected affair. Some people brought plenty to eat for themselves but wouldn’t share with others, emerging from the feast bloated and drunk. Others were not able to bring anything and so were left to go hungry. This meal to bring people together across all their divisions was becoming highly effective at driving them apart!

In response to all this, Paul reminded them of the words of institution that were surely familiar to them, making it clear that this feast was not so much about the food itself but about the gathering of God’s people to share it. He went on to caution the Corinthians that they needed to be prepared to share this meal. “Examine yourselves,” he told them, “…for all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves.” As they sat down to eat, he wanted them to think about the whole body of Christ to which they were connected, to remember that they did not eat on their own but rather were brought together in the midst of this meal.

The church has thought much of this examination over the last two millennia. For many decades, Presbyterian churches required those who wished to receive communion to present a token at the table that had been given to them if they had been judged worthy to commune during a visit from elders of the church in the days before communion was served. And even today, some churches include a time of what they call “fencing the table” based directly on Paul’s words here during the introduction to the communion liturgy. But what seems to have mattered to Paul here was not one’s general sinfulness or status of forgiveness but rather one’s readiness to come together with others in this meal, for this table is not a place of personal devotion but a place to share a meal to bring us together.

Our second reading from the gospel according to Luke reminds us of this all the more. After a journey from Jerusalem to Emmaus, filled with an unexpected conversation with a stranger along the way about all that they had experienced in the death of Jesus and the reports of his resurrection, these two disciples settled down at table with their guest to share a meal. As their guest blessed and broke the bread that they are to share, their eyes were opened to discover that they had been walking and talking with Jesus all along the way! Their experience of joy was momentary as Jesus disappeared from their midst, but they quickly returned to Jerusalem to share their experience with the other disciples in hopes that they might encounter Jesus again very soon. Even though they saw him again, they knew that there was something special about this and every meal that could bring them together with Jesus.

In the many centuries since these original descriptions of this meal, the church has integrated the Lord’s Supper more clearly into our life of worship and thought long and hard about what it means. Along the way, we all too often have gotten lost in the details. We have given this meal so many different names—communion, the Lord’s Supper, agape feast, Eucharist, Mass—that we get lost in what we call it before we even think about why we do it. Even worse, wars have been fought, families divided, and lives lost over exactly what happens when we break this bread and share this cup. We have too often demanded that those who come to this table understand what is going on here, forgetting that ultimately this is a place of wonder we place our faith and trust and hope in God as we receive a sign and seal of God’s grace that we can see, touch, feel, smell, and taste for ourselves as we are mysteriously brought together with God and with innumerable saints to share this incredible meal. When we get too focused on the meaning, we miss the bigger point here, that this is a meal to bring us together.

Our intense focus on the meaning of what happens here has made it all the easier to resist the call to let this meal bring us together. The news of recent weeks has been filled with far too many stories of people pushed apart and away from this and other tables. Violence divides communities in our city and nation, and we prefer methods of punishment that insist on exchanging an eye for an eye rather than seeking a path of restoration, reconciliation, and transformation. Evidence continues to emerge that points to systematic mistreatment of the poor and minorities by the criminal justice system in our city, state, and nation, not to mention all too many places where they are very directly deprived of their rights. So many who are seeking to be president of our nation are using rhetoric that excludes immigrants, the poor, LGBT persons, and others, pushing people away from the common table of our land. And beyond our shores, European political leaders have responded to the growing refugee crisis there by turning away people who do not look or believe like them in ways that eerily echo words and actions before and during World War II that contributed to the mass murder of millions of Jews and others in Germany and beyond.

Amid all these loud cries around us telling us that we are better when we are apart, it is difficult to hear the call to sit down and share a meal like this one to bring us together. But this table reminds us that there is another way. At this table, we can glimpse the unity that we will have in the kingdom of God so that we can be strengthened to live a little more like that in the days ahead.

The incredible film Places in the Heart offers a little glimpse of a meal that can bring us together. The movie chronicles one family’s journey through the challenges of murder, racism, economic distress, and even natural disaster. In the end, only sheer endurance and an incredible portion of grace bring the people of Waxahachie, Texas, and especially widow Edna Spalding and her family through to see a new day. Time and again in the movie, we are taken to the table, first the many tables set for Sunday lunch that are interrupted by word of the town drunk on the loose with a gun who ends up shooting the sheriff, the Spalding’s table that shifts from hosting the family meal to offering a place for the dead sheriff’s body to be prepared for burial, even the simple tables under the trees where the sheriff’s widow constantly makes sure that the black migrant workers she employs are fed.

All these scenes at table culminate in a moving gathering at the Lord’s Table, where characters gather across all the lines that had divided them to share a simple meal of bread and grape juice. As the trays are passed along the pews, women and men, old and young, blind and sighted, black and white, living and dead, even murderer and victim—all share the bread of heaven, the cup of salvation, the peace of God that comes in this strange feast. I know of no better image that embodies the wonder of this great feast that brings together those who have been set against one another, that unites us across every imaginable division, that lifts us up to sit in the presence of Christ himself to share this incredible feast of heaven and earth.

So as we gather at this table today, may God’s presence surround us as we share this meal, so that every time we sit at this or any table, we might know the incredible gift of this meal that brings us together with one another and God until we sit at table together in the kingdom of God forever and ever. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Playing in the Water

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a sermon on Exodus 2:1-10 and Galatians 3:23-29
preached on August 30, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

In my ten years as pastor here, I have enjoyed bringing many new and different ideas to our worship, but any time I have done something new around baptism, I am certain to hear about it. When the time comes to baptize someone of whatever age, when someone realizes that Baptism of the Lord Sunday is coming up, or even when one of you notices that the cover is off the baptismal font before worship, I have this vision of someone rolling his eyes, saying, “There Andy goes again, playing in the water in church.” I guess you could say I have a bit of a reputation of playing in the water—and I must say that I am just a little bit proud of it!

Interest in remembering baptism is not everywhere in the church. In far too many churches, the baptismal font is shoved over to the side. We don’t use it all that much, the logic goes, so why should it get in the way of everything else that we are doing? After all, the only time this piece of furniture matters is when we are baptizing someone, and when that happens, we can put it where we need it. There’s no need to play in the water until then.

But baptism is where everything begins for us. These strange waters are where each of us begins our life of faith. This simple font is the place where we see God’s grace poured out for everyone. These wonderful waters give us confidence and hope for every step of our journey. If we take baptism seriously, we can’t push the baptismal font off to the side, because baptism becomes an integral part of our worship week after week, whether we are welcoming someone new to our community in this sacrament, remembering and recommitting ourselves to the covenant God makes with us in these waters, or simply living out our faith with confidence because we know that our journey has taken us through these waters. God calls us to be people who love to play in the water.

Our two scripture readings this morning remind us of how important it is to play in the water. First, our Old Testament lesson gives us a glimpse of what can happen when someone is drawn out of the water. This story about the birth of Moses recounts a time when Egypt’s frustration with the Israelites hit its highest point. The Pharaoh was so afraid of the Israelites’ increasing power that he ordered that all their sons  to be killed at birth, first by the midwives who delivered them and then by drowning them in the Nile. In the face of this edict, Moses’ mother hid him for as long as she could, but eventually she had to set him out on the river in a papyrus basket, hoping that someone would save him. The daughter of Pharaoh found the baby in the river as she went down to bathe in it, and she showed mercy to him. She asked her Hebrew maid—who just happened to be the baby’s sister!—to find a nurse for the boy, then when he was weaned, Pharaoh’s daughter raised Moses as her own son. “She named him Moses, ‘because,’ she said, ‘I drew him out of the water.”

Moses—the largest figure in the history of Judaism, the one to whom the first five books of the Bible are attributed, one of the only humans to speak directly to God and survive—Moses is drawn up out of the water, water that could have been the death of him but that in the end gave him a pathway to new life. This was just the first time that water mattered to Moses. The waters of the Nile were center stage as he gave voice to God’s plagues upon the people of Egypt. The waters of the sea parted at Moses’ command so that the Israelites could go through on dry land. Even the waters of another river, the Jordan, framed Moses’ first and last view of the promised land as his days came to an end. Moses knew as well as anyone the importance of playing in the water.

But Moses was not alone there. The apostle Paul, in our second reading from his letter to the churches of Galatia, shows us that the early church was also quite good at playing in the water. In Galatians, Paul set out to help this early church deal with some people who came to them to tell them that Gentile converts to Christianity needed to be circumcised—to become Jews—before they could be full members of the Christian community. Paul uses what was likely a familiar statement from the liturgy of the early church to make his point:

As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.
There is no longer Jew or Greek,
there is no longer slave or free,
there is no longer male and female;
for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

For Paul, baptism makes it clear that all the things that attempt to divide us in this world do not matter to God. These three divisions of ethnic background (“Jew or Greek”), socioeconomic status (“slave or free”), and gender (“male and female”) may not directly cover all the categories of the world that we use to divide ourselves, but in lifting up these three divisions, Paul shows that no other divisions carry any weight in light of the gift of God in Jesus Christ. In baptism, God places a sign and seal upon us so that we can remember that we are children of God, that we have been clothed with Christ, and that all our human divisions cannot and will not divide us from God. These are incredible and wondrous waters that change us and make us new—why would we choose not to play here?

We can and should play in the waters of baptism anytime, remembering our baptism each and every day, but these waters of baptism belong to the life of worship, and we are called to play in them here. Baptism is not a private rite of passage or confirmation of faith but a very public moment when we recognize that God is at work among us. In baptism, God gives us an outward sign of the very inward seal of grace that has touched us long before the first drop of water touches our bodies. In baptism, God offers us a way to touch and feel God’s love entering our lives. And in baptism, God grants us a very physical glimpse of the divine mercy that sustains us each and every day. When we welcome a new sister or brother into the community through baptism, we do it together, gathering at the same place where we came to see and hear and touch the grace of God so that we can give thanks for this incredible gift even as we pray that God will seal it anew on yet another who is seeking to know God’s promise in their lives. Everything that we do in worship connects to the love, grace, and mercy of God that we find every time we come and play in these waters.

Sometimes our little font isn’t the best at showing us the wonder of these waters. The other day, I had the chance to see the newly-renovated sanctuary at St. Luke’s Church here in Whitestone—and especially their new baptismal font. Their font is made of beautiful granite, featuring two levels, with a waterfall between them so that the sound of moving water echoes throughout the church. It is large enough that a baby can be fully immersed in it, or an adult can step in up to her ankles and then have water poured over her head. Now I don’t expect that we’ll be installing anything quite like that anytime soon, but whatever it looks like, however large or small it may be, the place where we share the waters of baptism reminds us of the gift that we enjoy anytime we can come to play in these waters.

While each one of us receives this sacrament only once, that should never keep us from playing in these waters again and again. When we play in the waters of baptism, we remember how God claims us as God’s own here. When we play in these waters, we are reminded of the abundance of God’s love. And when we play in these waters, we remember how much we need God’s amazing grace to continue to wash over us and make us new. So every time we gather, may we remember the joy and wonder of baptism as we are united with all our sisters and brothers who play in these waters as we celebrate God making all things new in Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.