Andy James

wandering the web since 1997

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

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Going Home for Christmas

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This is not a sermon but rather a real blog post! Who knew!!

As a single person, my best bet for spending time with other people during the holidays is with my parents, and since I’m an only child, that makes it all the more important that I be home for Christmas. As a pastor, though, I have responsibilities on Christmas Eve, so over the last several years I have grown accustomed to traveling on Christmas Day. My first Christmas as a pastor, Christmas Day was also a Sunday, and I ended up spending Christmas night 2005 in a hotel near the Cincinnati airport by myself – an experience I do not care to repeat. This year, the crazy weather up and down the East Coast threw a small wrench into my travel plans, but for once I was grateful for the travel difficulties. Along the way, I experienced two new ways of being home for Christmas.

First, on a quick flight from JFK to Washington, DC, I found myself sharing a row at the back of the plane, directly next to the engine and across from the lavatory, with a flight attendant commuting home after her shift had ended. She had just returned from a round-trip to Senegal, one of several west African routes that she works regularly. I mentioned very briefly my travel troubles around Christmas, and she certainly understood my experiences – she herself had been working as a flight attendant on international routes since 1971 and had spent many Christmases away from home. We shared many wonderful stories about travel strangeness like this, but her stories were incredible moments of finding some sort of “home for Christmas.” She recounted two experiences of being welcomed into homes in Italy and Austria – places where Christmas celebrations are often limited to immediate family, with even significant others of family members asked not to attend – where she was welcomed as one of the family. Even as a guest who looked very different and came from an entirely different culture, she received gifts from others in the family and was at one of the gatherings even seated at the place of honor next to the host! Her stories were incredible, and I will never forget the time we shared on that brief flight, fellow travelers from very different places and backgrounds who nonetheless found a little bit of home for Christmas together.

If that weren’t enough of a home for Christmas, I then had the privilege of sharing a couple hours with a Twitter friend and colleague in ministry, Leslianne Braunstein. Although we had conversed a bit on Twitter and discovered some mutual friends and experiences, we had never met in person until Christmas Day. My new itinerary called for a four-and-a-half-hour layover in Washington, and Leslianne graciously volunteered to spend some of it with me. So we sat in a virtually-empty restaurant at Reagan Airport and shared appetizers and incredible conversation for nearly two hours. Though we too came from different places even amidst our shared experiences, in that time together we found another glimpse of home for Christmas.

I eventually made it home with far less travel drama than I had anticipated – and I walked away with two wonderful stories. But even more, over the twelve days of Christmas this year, I have carried these moments with me as reminders that the home we find for Christmas may come when we least expect it, around people with very different experiences, in the midst of frustration and anxiety and uncertainty. Though I was very glad to make it home for Christmas this year, I was even more grateful to see some other visions of home along the way and to share them with wonderful people each and every step of the way.

As this Christmas season comes to an end, I hope that you found some glimpse of this kind of home somewhere along the way too. Thanks for letting me share my story of going home for Christmas.

on campus ministry

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Today is April Fool’s Day, and there are some great things happening on the web, as usual. The best I’ve seen so far is today’s Brian Lehrer Show from WNYC on GM’s New Plan (hopefully audio is coming later).

Presbyterian Bloggers Unite - Campus Ministry

Today is also the first event for Presbyterian Bloggers Unite – on campus ministry. It’s honestly hard for me to write on this right now, as the PCUSA’s support for campus ministry is changing very quickly because of staff cutbacks that merged the campus ministry office with the youth ministry office and cut the staff who had been working in campus ministry. I’ve worked with both offices over the years, and I’m trying to be hopeful about the merger even though I have some concerns.

That said, I’m not going to dwell on the uncertainties of the future here. For me, campus ministry was a time of full engagement with the life of the church. In high school, I was very active in youth ministry programs, but toward the end of those days things changed in my home church and I felt left out. However, when I went to college, I resolved from the beginning that I would try to get involved differently, so I set out for church that first Sunday morning even before classes started. I was alone in the bathroom that morning, even in the Deep South, but I quickly found a home in that wonderful congregation.

Soon I discovered that there was more going on for college students and got involved in the Westminster Fellowship sponsored out of the church. We were never a large group, but something special was happening in our midst that could not be measured by numbers. Through time spent together, Bible study, and special trips, we got to know one another and provided a place for people to gather who were looking for someplace to call home in the midst of a campus filled with Greek letter societies, other religious organizations, and affinity groups that in some way were more about exclusion than inclusion.

During my sophomore year, I was brought on board as a campus peer minister, paid a small stipend simply to maintain the email list, make announcements, help organize events, and show up when we met. My junior year, we welcomed an associate pastor to the church who was responsible in part for campus ministry, and she helped us grow in faith even more. We even organized the first statewide gathering of Presbyterian campus ministries in Mississippi.

I also got involved in campus ministry nationally with the Presbyterian Student Strategy Team, where we organized national gatherings of Presbyterian college students for the first time in a number of years. The numbers were often small, but the things happening across the denomination, in ecumenical ministries and in congregations, always surprised and encouraged me. I also traveled to several regional events across the country to represent the team and engage with other college students about their experiences in the church.

I could write much, much more about my days in campus ministry, but I’m amazed these days by how the connections I made in those four years continue to sustain me in my ministry today. Imagine my surprise three years ago when I walked into my room at an event for new pastors and discovered that my roommate was an old friend who had served with me on PSST! I count others from conferences and events during my college years among my best friends even today.

I believe that the college years were a formative time for my ministry, and I can’t imagine engaging that sense of call without campus ministry. I pray that all of us across the PCUSA will work to meet college students where they are and make a place for them to be welcome in the church during these formative years, not so much out of fear of losing them but because we know that they have gifts to share and need a place where they can feel at home.

thanksgiving

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It’s been a while since I’ve posted, perhaps long enough to make some people (including me) wonder if I’ve abandoned this venture…. but today I have several things to offer up in thanksgiving that I’d like to share. I just returned from eight incredible days of travel, and there is much to be thankful for…

  • I’m thankful for candidates for the ministry of Word and Sacrament who inspire and show incredible insight into the life of faith even as they do difficult work on ordination exams.
  • I’m thankful for ministers and elders who take time out to evaluate and assist those who are journeying into ministry with honesty and grace.
  • I’m thankful for friends whose presence can be meaningful and grace-filled even when words are not spoken.
  • I’m thankful for the connectional church that binds us together across the miles.
  • I’m thankful for friends who show hospitality, grace, and generosity.
  • I’m thankful for the beauty of God’s creation in nature and in human creativity.
  • I’m thankful for moments when reconciliation gets lived out.
  • I’m thankful for an approach to LaGuardia that gives an incredible grand tour of NYC and everything around!
  • I’m thankful for safe travels, including four flights with no significant delays or lost baggage!
It’s been a long eight days. Today is a holiday, but there is of course a meeting tonight!

Romans 8

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So, over the past two Sundays, I’ve been preaching on Romans 8. It’s been fun to approach these things as a series. This Sunday, the Lectionary takes us to Romans 8:26-39 to finish the chapter. Trygve David Johnson has a nice look at this text at Theolog’s Blogging toward Sunday.

The end of Romans 8 is definitely in my top three favorite biblical texts. It’s just incredible stuff. Now normally I don’t turn to commentaries, especially this early in the week, but today I figured I might as well use that investment known as the New Interpreter’s Bible that sits on my bookshelf. I’m glad I did. This is quite possibly the longest commentary on fourteen verses in the whole twelve-volume set — in sum, this section covers about twenty pages.

As I read, though, I found the text illuminated in such an incredible way. There’s nothing quite like this — so many passages to fill so many sermons, so many inspiring words that illuminate a text that was already inspiring to begin with. Still, the end almost had me in tears.

We paraphrase, in conclusion, the final two verses of the section. Paul has spoken, and we must speak, of the love of the one true God. This love of God calls across the dark intervals of meaning, reaches into the depths of human despair, embraces those who live in the shadow of death or the overbright light of present life, challenges the rulers of the world and shows them up as a sham, looks at the present with clear faith and and the future with sure hope, overpowers all powers that might get in the way, fills the outer dimensions of the cosmos, and declares to the world that God is God, that Jesus the Messiah is the world’s true Lord, and that in him love has won the victory. This powerful, overmastering love grasps Paul, and sustains him in his praying, his preaching, his journeying, his writing, his pastoring, and his suffering, with the strong sense of the presence of the God who had loved him from the beginning and had put that love into action in Jesus. This is the love because of which there is no condemnation. This is the love because of which those justified are surely glorified. And this is the love, seen surpremely in the death of the Messiah, which reaches out to the whole world with the exodus message, the freedom message, the word of joy and justice, the word of the gospel of Jesus.

— N.T. Wright, “Romans,” The New Interpreter’s Bible

With that said, I’m not sure that there’s much more to be said. But anything you’d like to offer would still be appreciated!

Wall-E: close to home?

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I finally ventured out last night with a couple friends to see Wall-E. As usual, Pixar brings us a great movie, and I suspect I’ll be back to see it again in the theater. It was that good. And I’m not at all a movie person!

There are so many possibilities for thinking about allegory with Wall-E: the concern of global warming, the need for personal connection, even how the world pushes off the sacred. However, there’s something striking me about Wall-E’s commitment that bears some reflection.

Wall-E is, at his core, a faithful robot. He keeps doing what he was programmed to do (and no surprise, since he seems to be running some variant of Mac OS!) Even when all the other Wall-Es on Earth stop functioning properly, he keeps going. He scavenges parts off of other broken-down robots to keep himself running, and his ingenuity is something surely beyond his original design.

But Wall-E is something more than a faithful automaton, working beyond his scheduled useful life span. He recognizes that there is more to his world than just compacting the leftover trash of Earth. He is unafraid to collect things that strike him as interesting. You might say that Wall-E has a heart (as only Pixar can give). In the end, this ability to think outside the box leads him to incredible discoveries of love and life.

I have to wonder: Is Wall-E a good model for the life of a disciple? Is Wall-E’s faithfulness to his task while recognizing the things of beauty around him something we can learn from? Does Wall-E give us a little bit of the path toward a new creation that we so desperately long for?

There are surely countless other discussions that could emerge from watching Wall-E, but this is what struck me close to home.