posts — Page 35 — Andy James

Joy Abundant

December 16, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon on Philippians 4:4-7 for the Third Sunday of Advent
preached on December 16, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

The past two days have been an incredible mix of emotions for me. I spent Friday as a somewhat usual day off—until I heard of the horrific events of the school shooting in Newtown, when I then tried to follow the news as best I could without becoming engrossed in the sad and difficult news of the day. Then, as many of you know, I spent all day yesterday on a very quick trip to Washington, DC, where about thirty members of the choir I sing with sang at the White House to provide entertainment for the public holiday tours.

It was a strange mixture of two days. Friday, nothing seemed right. Christmas seemed an eternity away, with some twenty children killed mercilessly in yet another incident of gun violence that for some reason we are unable or unwilling to do anything about. Then yesterday, within seconds of walking into the White House, Christmas came into sharp view, with some of the most beautiful decorations I have ever seen and the scent of pine and fir all around. I told one of my fellow singers that I felt like Christmas had finally begun! Several of us noted how it seemed quite strange to sing about joy and happiness after Friday’s events, but the eventual decision was to set aside the horrific events of Friday and try to set a celebratory mood for the day, and I think it worked.

The past two days have felt very much like a strange mix of joy and sadness, but that’s also what we face today in our worship. Today is the third Sunday of Advent, the time each year where we light the pink candle of the Advent wreath and celebrate the joy that comes when Jesus is born. The texts appointed for this day talk about the joy and hope that comes in and through the birth of Jesus, and so we normally think about how this season is filled with great joy and hope and promise, and we finally get to sing one of the great Christmas carols, “Joy to the World,” because it fits with Advent as much as Christmas.

But today, the joy and hope and promise of Advent and Christmas seem to be left in the midst of the horrors at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Rejoice in the Lord always, even in the midst of this?? Paul couldn’t have meant that we have to rejoice today, could he? If we take our last song seriously, do we have to be thankful for this? In the face of such tragedy and death, what are we to do? Celebrate?

One option for rejoicing that I hear a lot in times like this is to be thankful that it wasn’t us, that no one we knew was killed, or that the violence didn’t get any worse. In the face of such suffering, I don’t think it is our place to rejoice that we aren’t as bad off as those people over there or to thank God that we haven’t faced such loss ourselves. As Christians, it is our call to stand with those who face this kind of immense, real, deep loss and pain and to do everything we can to embody the love, grace, mercy, and justice of God in Christ each and every day.

So in the midst of such a challenge, I am grateful that this text says that there is more for us to do. Some days we just can’t rejoice, but since there is more to do, we can move on for now and come back to rejoicing on another day—or maybe even later on in this sermon! So when Paul suggests that our gentleness be known to everyone, I think we might have something that seems doable in a moment like this. We can be gracious and understanding to those who approach these difficult days from very different perspectives. We can respond to such heinous violence in our world not with more violence but rather with a generous and gentle call to peace. And we can listen and hear in such a way that those who suffer pain and loss in the midst of this and so many other moments of violence know that we stand with them and will join in God’s work to make all things new.

After we start down the path to gentleness, Paul challenges us yet again to trust that the Lord is near. On days like yesterday for me, that felt entirely possible. Amidst the beautiful holiday decor of the White House, amidst the pageantry and majesty of Washington, DC, amidst the presence of my fellow singers and in the beautiful music we created together, God felt very near. But on Friday, God didn’t seem very near but in fact felt very much absent—not because there was no prayer in the school as some have suggested but because the horrific things that happened there were so far from what God intends for creation. Yet the Lord is still near. In the life and death of Jesus, we see that God has experienced the full breadth and depth of human life even as he conquered the fullness of death and destruction, and we can trust that he will return to make that victory full and complete and joyous for all. In moments like this, in joy and sorrow, we can be confident that the Lord is and will be near to make all things new for us and all creation.

But then Paul continues with another challenge: “Do not worry about anything.” Have you ever tried not to worry about anything? It’s not easy, and I’m not sure I know anyone who has been able to pull it off, because when I try, I all too soon start to worry about how much I worry! Paul certainly tempers this perspective with an instruction to be faithful in prayer, but it is nonetheless incredibly difficult to set aside all the things that make us worry even when we can turn to God in prayer.

And finally, Paul tells us to trust God’s peace: “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” If this peace can come, then send it our way, O God! It sure would be helpful in the Middle East these days, and Newtown could use some of it, too. But while this peace will guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, Paul says it also surpasses all understanding—so sometimes we may have it when we don’t even know it.

But amidst this peace that surpasses all understanding, alongside all the pain and sorrow and sighing of these days, along with the joyful expectation of Christmas, we might finally be ready to embrace the fullness of this joy. Real and true and complete joy comes not from imprisoning ourselves in deep sorrow, not from taking pleasure in the pain of others, not from always having everything that we need and want, but from a way of life that shows deep and real gratitude for the gifts we have from God, for God’s presence with us in the midst of every storm, and for God’s gift of new life that emerges in the face of death. This joy is not about us and our happiness, about smiling faces or simple laughter or even safety amidst great peril. Joy is not about escaping the pain of our world with a holiday that doesn’t deal in the real here and now, for if Christmas is anything, it is a celebration of our God who came into our midst to dwell in the dark and painful stuff of our world. This joy that is solely about our happiness, this joy that simply wants to escape the real things of life—these are the forced cheer and shallow celebration that we confessed earlier today, things that we too often claim are the fullness of what God intends.

Instead, the deep, real, true joy that God gives us may not always be cheerful or happy, but it does show us how God can transform us and our world through justice, mercy, and peace. It helps us to see how the world is about more than our own happiness. It reminds us that God has broken into our world in Jesus to feel the joy and sorrow of the human experience. And it promises us that there is something more in store for us than what we can see in the here and now.

So in these days when joy may seem so far off and yet so near, when our lives and our world are touched by pain, violence, sorrow, and confusion, may God open our eyes to the One who comes to bring us real and true and deep joy, to the One who transforms possibility into promise and pain and suffering into new life, to the One who breaks into our world to bring us wonder and peace and hope so that our joy might be all the more complete and real and deep and true when we welcome Jesus on Christmas morning and when he returns to make all things new.

Lord, come quickly! Amen.

Breaking the Silence

December 9, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 1:67-79 for the Second Sunday of Advent
preached on December 9, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Some years ago, back in seminary, I found myself silenced by laryngitis for nearly a week. It started as one of those late spring colds—you know, the gentle tickle in your throat when you wake up a little stuffy in the morning—but pretty soon I knew something else was going on. I kept on going through that day, speaking and singing normally, until that night after choir practice, when I knew something was really wrong. All of the sudden, the pitch of my voice dropped, but I tried not to be worried about it.

The next morning, I had something to worry about. I could not speak at all. Well, yes, I could talk briefly, but speaking for more than a minute was painful, and singing was certainly out of the question. I asked everyone I knew for their magic cures, and within twenty-four hours I had nursed my voice back to a softer version of “normal,” but my disregard for its tender state soon brought me back to silence.

During those four or five days that I had no voice, I was supposed to sing a solo on Saturday and then sing with the choir on Sunday for the last time before leaving for the summer. It was a pretty major inconvenience for me, but about a week later, I could talk without sounding like I was whispering all the time. Thankfully it’s been a long time since I felt like that, but I’m always afraid that I’m only one stuffy nose away from another week of silence.

In our scripture today, Zechariah had one major case of laryngitis. It all started one day when he drew the short straw among the priests and went into the sanctuary to offer incense to God. He took a bit longer than expected in there, and when he finally emerged, he couldn’t answer everyone’s questions about what had happened because he was entirely unable to speak. The people knew that something important had happened, but they had no way of knowing what, because Zechariah could not tell them. Zechariah went home when his term as priest was over—probably a bit earlier than expected because he couldn’t talk—and he and his wife Elizabeth were finally able to conceive a child after years of being barren.

While Zechariah was silenced, Elizabeth could speak about what she knew, for she had had her own visit from the angel Gabriel. She celebrated with her relative Mary who came to visit and share the news of her own miraculous conception and the coming birth of Mary’s son Jesus. They both cried out with great joy and amazement about what God was doing in their midst, about all the things that would soon come into being through the two children that they were carrying. Even through all of this commotion, Zechariah, the priest, the spokesman for God, the proud father, the one who normally would be first to speak, remained silent, watching and waiting in the midst of a moment of great joy, hoping for a moment when he could speak again.

The silences in our lives may not be cases of laryngitis—like my springtime affliction—or sudden muteness after encountering God—like Zechariah. We might be so stunned by something happening around us that we do not know how to respond. We might be ordered to remain silent to protect some sort of secret that cannot be revealed. We might be so bound by grief and loss that words cannot emerge from our mouths. We might be so constrained by the limitations of the world that we cannot speak what we really want—and need—to say. We might be called to speak words so dissonant with what we hear around us that they would fall upon deaf ears.

In these moments, sometimes silence may actually be the right thing to do. Sometimes we need to offer quiet space in the uncertainty of the moment. Sometimes we must allow others permission to be quiet so that they can be faithful to their experience and understanding of God. Sometimes we need silence to find safe places to express our deepest feelings. And sometimes we are called to conserve our voices so that they might be heard more completely in another moment. Nonetheless, even all these good silences must eventually be broken, for God calls us all to speak words of joy and praise and hope and love and peace.

After many months, Zechariah broke his forced silence with the words of our scripture today. His words were not his own—it was more than clear by then his words could only come from some other place—but these words came to him from the Holy Spirit. Suddenly, Zechariah moved from complete and utter silence to loud and joyful song:

Blessed be the Lord God of Israel!

He was finally able to speak all the words that he had been wanting to say ever since his encounter with the angel in the temple where he learned that he would be a father. All that had been promised to him had been realized, and since there was no longer any doubt about these things, his imposed silence was ended. Zechariah could finally offer praise to God and express all the ways in which God’s faithfulness would be realized in the world through the birth of his son John the Baptist and the coming Jesus.

When he finally spoke again, Zechariah could only give thanks to God for what he had finally seen—for his dreams of a child that had been realized, for his hopes for Israel’s future that would surely become reality in the life of Jesus, for the ability of the people to serve God faithfully and without fear. In the tradition of the great prophets, Zechariah claimed the promises of God for his own generation, speaking of certain salvation, great mercy, a faithful covenant, and fearless service as grateful response.

Although these words echo the prophets and the psalms, they also move beyond these promises of the past. They are more than fulfilled in the life of this “mighty savior” but also point toward the joyous future that surely lies ahead. No longer must the people sit in darkness or wait for God’s redemption to come. Such glorious redemption has come and can only bring new life to those in darkness and peace to those who remain at the hands of their enemies. Zechariah recognized the great joy of finally having a son, but this personal joy was far surpassed by his gratitude for what God was beginning to do throughout the world that would find expression in these two children.

So at this beginning of the story of Jesus’ life, we see its ending described already. In Zechariah’s song, the promises of God are laid out before us and called fulfilled long before we can even begin to imagine how they might take shape in our midst and form the new creation that is already moving toward us. Zechariah’s prophetic words speak to us out of his silence—and penetrate our own silence—as words of hope and promise of what is to come in this world and the next.

Now, we must ask, can we speak these words today? Can anyone today offer such prophetic calls to recognize God at work in our midst? Can anyone today recover from a case of laryngitis to immediately offer joyous and prophetic song? Can anyone today emerge from silence to claim this sort of God at work in the world today, a world where God seems absent from everyday concerns, a world where God seems simply used to support some political, economic, or religious agenda, a world where God seems inseparable from some people and entirely unavailable to others? Can anyone today hope to move beyond seemingly endless war to see God “[guiding] our feet into the way of peace”?

I believe that Advent is a wonderful time to break the silence around us and speak of the incredible grace and love of God that comes into our world at Christmas and is present with us every day. These are days when it becomes clear that we must break the silence even amidst everything that encourages us to keep quiet, even when it hard to be faithful in changing days, even when things around us make it hard for us to be heard, even when it seems best that we should simply be silent. Silence is probably the easier choice here—the choice Zechariah probably would have made were it all up to him, the choice we too probably would make if we could have it our way—but, just as during Zechariah’s time, the Holy Spirit continues to call us to speak out of our silence, to remember God’s great promises, to celebrate God’s good gifts, and to proclaim the continuing and coming reign of Jesus Christ our Lord in all that we say and do.

So blessed be the Lord God of Israel,
who has looked favorably upon us
and has redeemed us
and has shown us mercy,
that we might serve God without fear,
in holiness and righteousness all our days.

By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.

Thanks be to God! Amen.

Signs

December 2, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 21:25-36 for the First Sunday of Advent
preached on December 2, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

“There will be signs,” Jesus said. There are lots of signs around us these days. What signs of Christmas have you seen lately?

(Just as the congregation spoke of the signs they’ve seen, I hope you’ll add some in the comments.)

As wonderful as the signs of Christmas can be, these are not the only signs we hear about in these days. Our reading this morning from Luke’s gospel tells us about some other signs to watch for in these days—not the signs of Jesus’ first coming but rather his second. You see, even as we spend these Advent days preparing to celebrate Jesus’ birth, we also remember that he will come again. So today as Advent begins, we turn to these signs that he offered his disciples that point to his return, reminders of the new creation first glimpsed in the resurrected Christ, new marks of God’s kingdom taking hold in the world and everything being made new and real and whole and complete.

However, these signs don’t feel very Christmasy. These “signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars” seem to be filled with foreboding and doom. “Distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves” sounds a lot more like the destructive power of Superstorm Sandy than the happy coming of Christmas. Fainting and fear at the “powers of the heavens [being shaken]” seems like something that we ought to be afraid of, too!

Even though it might seem to quash the happy mood a bit, we start the Advent season with these kinds of words every year. We begin this season of preparation not with a sweet baby being born or of shepherds seeking a baby in a manger or of wise men journeying from a far land to pay homage to a newborn king but with these words of foreboding, with signs of “‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory.” The signs of this season point to an uncertain and maybe even unpleasant time of strife and change, to something uncertain and new and challenging and even destructive, to a great and wonderful thing that means that everything is changing and will be forever different because of God’s power and presence becoming all the more real around us.

“There will be signs,” Jesus said—and then what? Every sign points to something, warns us of something, and calls us to prepare, and so too these strange signs tell us that we need to get ready. “Now when these things begin to take place,” Jesus said, “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” It’s as our last hymn suggested:

Lift up your heads, eternal gates,
see how the King of glory waits,
The Lord of Hosts is drawing near,
the Savior of the world is here.

But what will this Savior look like? What will our redemption look like as it draws near? Jesus doesn’t tell us that—he only tells us of its signs! But the next verse of our hymn reminds us that Jesus’ own coming didn’t look anything like anyone expected it to. He was no traditional sort of king. Instead, we see that “God comes, a child amidst distress,” with “no mighty armies [to] shield the way” but “only coarse linen, wool, and hay.” (“Lift Up Your Heads,” adapted John Bell)

Our salvation, then, will quite likely look very different from what we expect or what we have seen before. Perhaps we must stand up because we won’t be able to see it from our usual seat, and maybe we must raise our heads because it won’t be in our obvious line of sight. Our redemption—our salvation—will come in glory and in wonder, in strange and powerful visions and in quiet and unadorned splendor. The things ahead are to be incredible and amazing, showing the fullness of God’s power in the most unexpected ways, transforming us and our world into something new as only God can do.

“There will be signs,” Jesus said—but they point to something that is coming, and so we are called to pay attention to them and take action. When we see the signs of Christmas going on all around us, we are reminded that there is so much to be done to get ready for the holiday. In the same way, these signs that Jesus speaks of should remind us that there is work to be done now to get ready for our redemption, for the all things that God is doing to make all things new. Jesus first suggests that we be on guard against anything that distracts us from the hope of what God is doing in us and through us and around us. He then instructs us to wait and watch and prepare for something new and powerful and wonderful coming into being. And finally, he calls us to stay awake and alert at all times so that we will have the strength to know that the mighty and powerful signs matter less than the new creation that they point to.

So like all good signs, these signs demand action on our part. Maybe these signs call us to step back and take a deep breath during these Advent days. Maybe these signs encourage us to turn our efforts of preparation for Christmas away from the gift-buying and commercial frenzy and toward a celebration of God’s amazing entrance into our world in the baby Jesus. And maybe these signs invite us to reassess our broader way of life to see how we can be more faithful as we wait for the fullness of God’s new creation to become real.

And so “there will be signs,” just as Jesus said—signs of a new and different and wonderful way of life breaking through into our world, signs of celebration as we remember the joyous birth of a child whose life among us changes everything, signs of a changing and challenging world that nonetheless gives us hope that God will make all things new. Amidst all these signs, it is our privilege and responsibility to take the time to get ready, to prepare our hearts and our lives for the one who comes at Christmas and who is coming again in power and glory to make all things new, to stand up and raise our heads, for our redemption is drawing near, in power and in quiet, in meekness and majesty, in a little babe and a mighty king, in Christ our Lord who has come and is coming to make all things new.

May we know this matchless and majestic strength, this power shown in weakness, this savior of the world who comes as a lowly baby in a manger and reigns as the mightiest king the world will ever know, as we prepare to welcome him now at Christmas and in the time still to come when all things are made new. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

The Widows and Us

November 11, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon on 1 Kings 17:8-16 and Mark 12:38-44 for the 32nd Sunday of Ordinary Time
preached on November 11, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

There are lots of ways to look at stewardship season. We can talk about things from a purely financial perspective, noting that we need a certain number of dollars to meet our budget and other financial commitments. We can take a biblical perspective and look at texts from the Old Testament that instruct us to give ten percent of everything we have to God. Or we can look wonder how to implement the New Testament’s description of the early Christian community where “those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.” We can focus on our humanity and encourage everyone to give according to their ability—“not equal gifts, but equal sacrifice,” as one church I know once described it. Or we can talk about how all things that we have come from God, and so our giving to the church is an expression of our gratitude for all that we have received. All of these approaches have their merits from practical and biblical standpoints, but our texts today suggest something different.

These two texts from 1 Kings and Mark tell us of two widows who are commended for their faithful stewardship of what God has given them. In biblical times, widows were among the most vulnerable people in society. Women of any sort had few rights, and they generally depended on their husbands and male relatives to care of them. Most widows, then, were left without anyone to stand up for their best interests, and in those days before a governmental safety net in Social Security or Medicare, they were often left to fend for themselves. Yet these two stories show us a dramatic portrait of generosity and hospitality—first of a widow who finds that her small supply of meal and oil is not depleted even when she adds a hungry prophet to her household, then of a woman who offers a gift to God even when it puts her own survival at risk.

These two women are certainly wonderful models for our own lives of generosity. We would be deeply blessed as individuals and as a community if we all took their example seriously and gave so deeply out of what we have. However, I don’t think that these texts are telling us that we are simply supposed to be like them. More importantly, I think they are offering an antidote to a more dangerous and all too common perspective on our world.

These two generous widows stand in stark contrast to seemingly righteous people around them who claim to be faithful but who are unable or unwilling to put their money where their mouth is. The religious leaders of Elijah’s time refused to provide any support to the prophet who was questioning their way of life that had little concern for the poor and powerless. The scribes of Jesus’ time liked to put on a show of their holiness and righteousness, but they could clearly care less about others along the way—instead they themselves bore the full benefit of their good deeds and obedience to the law.

While the specific actions of these religious leaders and scribes aren’t quite as common around us, I have to wonder how often we fall into similar traps. How often do we become so focused on taking care of ourselves that we miss the care and concern that we need to be showing to others? How often do we quiet those voices we don’t like by taking away their support network and dismissing or destroying their humanity? How often do we do the right thing not because we really want to but because we want to be seen and noticed by someone along the way? How often do we convince ourselves that our priorities are in order when the only possible result is one that places our own needs and desires above the good of the community? The kind of good stewardship we consider today, then, is not simply endless generosity but also attention to the needs of the whole of the community and especially the least of these among us.

So then, as we think about our stewardship commitment for the coming year today, we who have so much must think about more than imitating these widows who gave out of their limited resources—we must remember that we are responsible for the well-being of the communities entrusted to us. Good stewardship is not just about meeting the budget of the church or giving some percentage of our income—it is about offering ourselves to meet the needs of the community and caring for those around us

This year, as our stewardship task force looked at the needs of our community of faith and out beyond into the community around us, we saw that money wasn’t so much our problem. With the sale of the manse, our cash flow issues have eased substantially, and we are on target to meet our budgeted income and expense for this year and next as we plan to spend down a reasonable and measured amount from the proceeds of the manse sale. However, even though our finances look pretty good, the broader stewardship of our community is much more troubling. When we look at the various tasks that must be done for us to be church together, we see the same faces doing the same things they have done year after year. We look around on a Sunday morning and see fewer people in the pews, even as we know that we haven’t really lost all that many members lately. People who are asked to help out with projects or to serve in leadership roles often come back with reasonable excuses that nonetheless leave us with great needs for our life together. And even our best moments and most effective programs and projects are in jeopardy because we don’t have anyone to be a backup for the very effective but nonetheless limited leaders that we have. We can’t look beyond our doors to meet these needs. While we always must be living out the gospel of Jesus Christ in such a way that we hope that others will consider joining our community, we cannot depend on people who are not currently connected to us to meet these very practical needs. If we can’t do it ourselves, how can we ask people we don’t know to do it for us?

The stewardship we need in these days is not so much bottomless pockets or new people but a deeper commitment to our life together and to God’s work in the world like that demonstrated by these two widows. They show us both financial generosity and deep commitment, recognizing that they have something however small to offer that others deeply need. They show us that we can give amazing gifts even when our first assessment of our situation might suggest that we have nothing to share. And they help us to see that even the least of these among us can contribute something very meaningful and important to our life together.

So in this stewardship season, as you know, we are looking both for a financial commitment and something more, for a faithful and joyous response to the amazing grace that God has shared with us, showing both financial support and a commitment of time and talent to our life together. We desperately need this renewed and deepened commitment to the life we share in this place, a new recognition that we all must step up to offer something more if our community is going to thrive as it can, a more complete embodiment of our joyous and heartfelt response to the deep grace of God that we see at work in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

So as we bring our expressions of stewardship commitment today, in the coming weeks, and over the next year, may God’s grace be abundant among us, and may our response be filled with joy and hope for the life of this community and the remaking of our world until all things are made new in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Waiting for God

November 4, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon on Revelation 21:1-6a and Isaiah 25:6-9 for All Saints’ Sunday
preached on November 4, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

We’ve spent so much of this past week waiting: waiting for the storm to come, waiting for the winds to die down, waiting for the waters to recede, waiting for the lights to come back on, waiting for the bus and subway to start up again, waiting for heat, waiting for food, waiting for water, waiting for gas, waiting for word from our friends and family, waiting to get word to our friends and family, waiting for some sense of normal to return, waiting and waiting and waiting some more. In the midst of all that we have experienced this week, we’ve all spent some time waiting. To someone immersed in the life of the church like me, this is not the right time to wait—Advent, the season of waiting, is still a month away! But here we have it—Sandy made us wait, and we still have more waiting to do.

Then our texts today, two of the texts appointed in the lectionary for All Saints’ Day, also confront us with the challenge of waiting. All Saints’ Day this year comes at a perfect time—amidst everything that we’ve seen this week, a remembrance of the faithful who have died seems so very appropriate. But these texts don’t point us to a remembrance of the dead—rather, they talk about the things ahead for all of us, about the things we are all really waiting for.

They tell us of a new heaven and a new earth—not the reconstruction of a familiar place to its former glory, not the rebuilding of a flood-torn and fire-touched land, not the rebirth of a water-scarred world—but a new and different way of life and living, a changed world where God’s presence never goes away, where sorrow and pain are changed forever, where God steps in to wipe away all the tears from our eyes, where all things are made new. Our texts today tell us of a world where all people have everything that they need, where a great feast fills every emptiness, where the weariness of death and destruction itself will be destroyed, where all disgrace will be removed and every place will be made new.

But at the core of all these new things is what we have seen so well in our own world of late: waiting. There is no promise here that these things will come immediately, no guarantee that they will emerge on our timetable, no insistence that the pain at dusk today will be eased by dawn tomorrow. Instead, the promise is that the waiting will give God all the more glory!

It will be said on that day,
Lo, this is our God,
we have waited for him, so that he might save us.
This is the Lord for whom we have waited;
let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.

But on this All Saints’ Sunday, on this Sunday after Superstorm Sandy, we have the right to be ready to be done with our waiting. We’ve waited more than enough this past week, and we shouldn’t have to wait anymore. Those without power shouldn’t have to wait any more to get lights and heat and refrigerators and phone and television and internet. Those who haven’t been able to get to work because the trains weren’t running or work wasn’t open shouldn’t have to wait any more. Those who can’t yet get back home to see the damage and destruction of their neighborhoods shouldn’t have to wait any more. Those who don’t yet know if their friends and family survived the storm shouldn’t have to wait any more.

And yet we must wait. There’s nothing we can do at this point to get our lights on or the trains running or the islands made safe. So much of what must be done in these days is best left to those with the training, skills, and gifts to do it safely and efficiently. But even as we wait, there is something incredible going on. People are stepping up and saying that they want to help. Neighbors are stepping in to care for those in need, carrying water and fuel up many flights of stairs, opening their homes to those who have none, shouldering a bit of the burden in the midst of the storm. Women and men around the world are moved by what they have seen and want to respond—and by doing more than giving money to relief efforts. I suspect that one of the biggest unanticipated challenges for our civic leadership amidst this unprecedented disaster has been what to do with all those who are wanting to step in and help now, and I hope and pray that this spirit isn’t quashed by the necessary professional work of these days or the bureaucracy inherent in dealing with anything on a New York City scale!

But amidst the promises of something new and glorious ahead and the necessary pain and suffering of waiting, what are we to do? I think the waiting of these days calls us to do two things. First, we are called to put our trust in God, who waits with us. Not only is God preparing the new thing that is coming, God is waiting for it with us now. God is waiting with us in the presence of friends and family who listen to our complaints and hear our cries and remind us that we are not alone. God is waiting with us in neighbors who open their homes and clear the debris and share their tools and bear our burdens. God is waiting with us in strangers who show up in unexpected moments to offer us even a brief vision of grace. God is waiting with us in those who are working tirelessly to restore the networks of support that keep our community and our world running. God is waiting with us in the women and men who have gone before us and beside us and still bear witness to the way of life in faith. God is waiting with us in the communities that know us and love us and share the feast of faith with us. And so we have waited for God, with God, so that God might save us.

But also in the midst of our waiting, we are called to step up and act, to be the presence of God for others in the face of crisis, to journey with those who are also waiting, to support those who have the gifts and talents to step in all the more, to contribute to the well-being of all people who wait for the things of these days and more. The necessity of waiting, you see, is no excuse for inaction or complacency, for letting those who struggle every day struggle all the more, for allowing the usual order of things that prefers the powerful to go unquestioned, for suggesting that we can only help those who are able to help themselves.

I am glad to say that we as the church have already done some things to step up in the waiting of these days. Our church building was open this past week during the day for those who did not have power to have a warm place to sit and talk or work, charge their phones, and just get out of the house. But even before the storm, our annual offerings to the One Great Hour of Sharing collection helped pave the way for the very current response of Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, who are on the ground in New York and New Jersey right now assessing the damage and planning their next steps over the long term recovery. And every Sunday this month, we’ll be receiving a special collection to assist with this important work of meeting the needs of those in greatest need and who have the most to wait for.

So in these days of waiting, may we ourselves embody the witness of the saints, trusting that God is waiting with us, giving thanks for the faithful presence of brave and heroic friends, neighbors, family, civic leaders, police officers, firefighters, paramedics, nurses, doctors, transit workers, ConEd line workers, and countless others, even as we ourselves offer the presence of God in the midst of the waiting of this recovery and the hope and promise that all things will be made new, once and for all.

May we know God’s presence in the midst of all our waiting until we share the great feast of heaven and earth with all people everywhere and the day of peace that now shines so dimly shines brightly everywhere forevermore. Lord, come quickly! Amen.