Andy James

wandering the web since 1997

Presbyterian minister in Atlanta.
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Found beer in seminary.

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Confession Is Good for the Soul?

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a sermon on Isaiah 53:4-12; Psalm 51; Romans 5:6-11
preached on July 12, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

An old Scottish proverb says that confession is good for the soul, and there’s a lot of truth to that statement. There’s nothing quite like clearing your head of something that is bothering you. There’s a real gift in letting go of those burdens that unknowingly weigh us down. And there’s something wonderful about seeking God’s pardon so that we can be made new and whole again.

But when we gather for worship each week and offer a prayer of confession, is this really what is going through our minds? Are we really trying to clear our heads and get our souls in order, or is there something more going on here?

Our readings today suggest that there is more than just something good for the soul happening when we confess our sins together in worship. Confession and pardon not only open us to what we have done wrong—they show us how God changes us long before we even think of confessing our sins and assure us of the depth of God’s amazing grace each and every day.

The beautiful reflective words of Psalm 51 that we read responsively this morning are the most direct in their thinking about sin and pardon. These words are traditionally attributed to David, seemingly serving as his response after he is confronted with evidence of his adulterous affair with Bathsheba and David’s inexcusable actions to get her husband Uriah out of the picture by sending him to fight at the front of the Israelite army.

From this place, the psalm speaks directly to the depth of pain, hurt, and brokenness in all souls that comes when we are confronted with the reality of our sin. These words reveal the depth and breadth of our wrongdoing:

In my birth and my beginnings were the seeds of my distress.
In the womb, from my conception, my brokenness began.

These words expose how all our sinfulness is an affront against God’s holiness:

Against you, you alone, have I sinned.
I have done what is evil before your very eyes.

And these words express how deeply we need to be changed, sharing our continual cry:

Create a pure heart in me, O God;
put a new and right spirit within me.

This psalm, then, is quite likely one of the first recorded prayers of confession. It is no wonder that we use it each year on Ash Wednesday, when we reflect at length on the depth of our sinfulness and the pain that it causes God, our world, and ourselves. Building on the example of this psalm, our prayers of confession cover the full gamut of our sin—the things we have done that go against God’s intentions, the things we have left undone that God has called us to do, the ways that we have violated the image of God in others and ourselves, the harm that we have done to God’s creation, the myriad ways in which we have broken relationships and abused others, the pride that has driven us to think of ourselves as better than what we actually are, the self-deprecation that leads us to think less of ourselves than we actually are, and the brokenness that results from all the ways we rebel against God’s intentions for our lives and our world.

Confession opens us to the full reality of who we are so that we can live in the new and different and changed way that God intends for us and opens for us by the mercy and power and grace of Christ. Even with our sin laid bare in this way, we actually don’t start with our sinfulness when we consider it in worship—we begin instead with God’s grace. The wonderful Baptist preacher and southern writer Will Campbell put this about as well as anyone: “We’re no damn good, but God loves us anyway.” (Brother to a Dragonfly, p. 220)

The apostle Paul makes this abundantly clear in our reading from his letter to the Romans when he says,

While we still were sinners, Christ died for us.

God’s grace comes first—before our confession, before our knowledge of our sin, before even our sin itself. Paul goes on to assure us of this:

For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.

So when we confess our sin in worship we begin not with the depth of our sin but the breadth of God’s love and grace. We do not have to offer our confession in order to receive this. God’s love and grace for us is not dependent upon the accuracy or even presence of our confession. And God’s mercy is sealed upon us even before we can understand it and make it our own. And so before we confess our sin, we are called to confession with words that reveal this depth of grace:

While we still were sinners, Christ died for us.

Our confession comes not from any fear but rather from deep hope—hope for restoration of brokenness, hope for changed selves, hope for a different way of life, hope for deep and real newness of life.

If the deep hope that inspires our confession weren’t enough, we receive more assurance in the words that proclaim God’s pardon. Since the earliest years of the church, we have associated the words of our reading from the prophet Isaiah with Jesus:

Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases…
he was wounded for our transgressions [and] crushed for our iniquities.

These and so many other words give us confidence that God in Christ has transformed our sinfulness and made our brokenness whole. These words show us that God understands the causes and effects of sin better than anyone else ever could and seeks a new and different way that transforms us and our world. And these words assure us that God’s response to sin is not retribution or punishment but grace and mercy, enabling us to approach one another with those same gifts. So the assurance of pardon reminds us that even amid our brokenness, God loves us so much that we are freed to love others, that we can find a way to a new and different way of life, that we can embody God’s love and grace and mercy in our lives, our church, our community, and our world.

Confession is certainly good for the soul, but it is good for so much more, too. It helps us to understand and experience the depth of God’s amazing love in our lives all the more. It opens us to the ways that we can be changed by the gift of God’s mercy and so live in deeper and greater hope. It models a different way for us to respond to the pain and hurt and sorrow of our world so that we do not offer retribution or retaliation when we are wronged but instead seek the path of reconciliation. And confession shows us how God makes brokenness whole, how God brings grace out of pain and struggle, and how God changes hurt into new life.

So may we know the depth and breadth of God’s amazing love every time we confess our sin so that we can offer and share it with others each and every day as all things are made new in Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Songs I Can’t Get Out of My Head

By

a sermon on Isaiah 42:10-12; Acts 16:16-34; Psalm 98
preached on June 28, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

If I had to guess, I think I walk around with a song stuck in my head at least half the time. Sometimes it is a hymn from Sunday that manages to stick around through Wednesday or Thursday, sneaking up on me when I least I expect it. Other times it is a song that we’ve been singing in the New Amsterdam Singers, where one song once got stuck in our heads so easily that several of my friends and I dubbed it “The Song That Shall Not Be Named” because even the name would get it started! And other times it is something I hear on the radio or from the computer that I end up listening to over and over again because it is in my head anyway!

When songs get stuck in our heads like this, I am reminded that song is one of the main pathways to the depths of our being and at the core of what makes us human. So it is no surprise, then, that the Bible talks a lot about singing, and that singing has been at the center of the worship of God since the beginning. There are a lot of interesting and different perspectives about singing in the Bible, and our Bible readings and psalm this morning are ones worth getting stuck in our heads in some way!

The prophet Isaiah gives us a vision of what it might look like if all creation broke forth into song, with sea and coastland and desert and town singing God’s praise in a new and joyous song. The story of Paul and Silas singing in jail shows us the power of song to break down barriers and inspire people to a new and different way of life. And the beautiful words of Psalm 98 give us yet another version of the repeated call to “sing a new song to the Lord” and offer our praise to God in so many different times and places and ways.

As lovely as it is to talk about singing, it is even more beautiful to actually do it! Now some people say that they simply can’t sing, but I am convinced that a good number of those people have either never tried or never been taught by the right people! One of my favorite teachers of congregational singing, the Scottish pastor and hymnwriter John Bell, blames this fear of singing on a culture that overvalues performance and so easily tells people that they can’t sing.

When people are told they can’t sing, they feel that there is a label round their neck or a mark on their file indicating a permanent disability. What they need to do is move from that negative assumption or label to a positive one. And this transition is a very biblical thing, because God is in the renaming business…. People who have been told in front of others that they can’t sing have to be encouraged, in the presence of others, to sing. (The Singing Thing, p. 103, 106)

We have been truly blessed over the last year and a half by the presence of Sandy Babb, who not only offers her beautiful voice in our worship but also teaches other people how to sing every day. As part of our time together today thinking about singing, I’ve asked her to give us some simple and practical advice about how we can sing better and offer our voices in praise to God in our worship together.

(Unfortunately Sandy’s thoughts on singing are not included in the manuscript for this sermon.)

So today I have two songs I can’t get out of my head that are worth sharing with you. The first one got stuck on Friday night, when I settled in to watch President Obama’s eulogy for the murdered pastor of Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, Clementa Pinckney. If you didn’t get a chance to hear it, go home this afternoon and watch it online—it is a far better sermon that what I am offering you from this pulpit today! But the song that stuck in my head from that incredible sermon is the very familiar hymn “Amazing Grace.” Our president used the incredible imagery of those words to call us all to a new way of thinking about and acting out the grace we have received. He reminded us that the shift from blindness to sight is more than just a spiritual shift, for God’s grace transforms how we see one another and our world, how we act in relationship with one another, and especially how we see the sins of our past and work to make the world different as we live out that grace in new ways. Then he made that vision of God’s grace so very, very clear as he broke out into song, using his remarkable baritone to lead that arena full of mourners in that beloved song of confidence and hope. I sure hope that song—and that incredible challenge that it offers us—stays stuck in my head for a long, long time.

The second song I just can’t get out of my head is a little newer and likely a little less familiar to many of you, though I’ve probably been singing it for longer than I have sung “Amazing Grace”! As a member of the Sesame Street generation, many of the early songs I learned were from that great children’s show, but the classic “Sing, Sing a Song” never seems to be able to escape my head. Its words gave voice to the philosophy and theology of singing for me long before I ever could:

Sing, sing a song,
sing out loud, sing out strong.
Sing of good things, not bad;
sing of happy, not sad.

Sing, sing a song,
make it simple to last your whole life long.
Don’t worry that it’s not good enough
for anyone else to hear;
just sing, sing a song.

Sing, sing a song, let the world sing along.
Sing of love there could be,
sing for you and for me.

Sing, sing a song,
Make it simple to last your whole life long
Don’t worry that it’s not good enough
for anyone else to hear;
just sing, sing a song.

So may these songs of grace and hope never get out of your heads so that you might sing praise and thanks to God and live out God’s hope in these joyous tones until all things are made new in Jesus Christ our Lord. Alleluia! Amen.

Gathered

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a sermon on Micah 6:1-8; John 4:19-24; Psalm 100
preached on June 21, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Come all you people, come and praise your Maker;
come all you people, come and praise your Maker;
come all you people, come and praise your Maker;
come now and worship the Lord. (Alexander Gondo, transcrb. I-to Loh)

For countless generations, women and men of all ages, all around the world, have gathered to praise our Maker and worship the Lord. The shape and form of worship has changed and shifted in a variety of ways, adapting to local customs of words and songs, adjusting as we have come to think in new and deeper ways about God, and guiding us to more faithful and hopeful ways of living out our faith and our worship in the world. So over the next several weeks, we will take a step back from the lectionary readings and begin pulling apart the worship service, looking at the meaning of its various parts, thinking more carefully about why we do what we do, and trying to sort out how we embody in our worship God’s call to gather in this place and go out to serve.

Just as our worship begins with the gathering of God’s people, so too this journey begins as all God’s people come together to praise our Maker. Our readings today lift up different elements of why and how we gather: the command from the prophet Micah to bring a different kind of offering of justice and kindness and humility to our worship; the instruction from Jesus to gather for worship in spirit and in truth; and our sung psalm that directs us to “sing to the Lord with cheerful voice” and “enter then his gates with praise.” But whatever the reason for our being here, whatever we bring with us, whatever we do when we arrive, when we gather for worship we come together in the presence of God.

Come all you people, come and praise your Maker;
come all you people, come and praise your Maker;
come all you people, come and praise your Maker;
come now and worship the Lord.

Coming together is an important thing these days. Our world is an increasingly lonely place, and coming together seems less and less important. We live in a day and age when we can limit our interactions with others by doing things online with a few clicks rather than by phone or in person. Especially in this large city, we can easily avoid the sorts of social interaction that were once the norm and make it just fine, it seems, on our own. We so easily become consumed with our own affairs that we miss the ways in which we can and should interact with others along the way. We allow ourselves to become comfortable with the way things that we become afraid of the differences we might experience with others. And all this culminates in the attitude shared by so many that it is just fine to worship on our own on Sunday mornings, maybe with a cup of coffee and a copy of the Times, maybe with a leisurely and relaxing morning without the stress of getting ready by a certain hour, maybe with time shared by choice with our favorite family or friends.

But the core of our worship of God begins as we come together across all our boundaries, beyond our families of origin and choice, stepping outside our comfort zones, to worship as God’s one people. Coming together to worship shakes us out of our complacency in thinking that we can make it through anything and everything on our own. Coming together to worship reminds us that we gain strength for living our faith as we gather together. And coming together for worship gives us the energy and courage we need to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.

Come all you people, come and praise your Maker;
come all you people, come and praise your Maker;
come all you people, come and praise your Maker;
come now and worship the Lord.

Coming together for worship might seem to be an easy thing, but this isn’t always the case. Just ask Jesus’ disciples, who even on the night of the resurrection gathered together under cover of darkness in locked rooms for fear of who might find them out. Just ask the early church, who were gathered for worship underground, in secret, for decades in the face of persecution. Just ask those who sought reform in the church over the centuries, who were challenged and even killed for trying to shape worship as they saw fit. Just ask the slaves of nineteenth-century America, who gathered under cover of darkness when their human owners told them that they could not worship as they pleased. Just ask our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers, who were looked upon with suspicion in our own country for centuries because of their commitment to a particular way of worship and leadership that seemed unusual to others. Just ask the victims of the Holocaust, who were forced into gas chambers because of their heritage of prayer and worship. Just ask our Muslim friends, who gathered to pray alongside suspicion and spies for years after 9/11 because others were afraid of what might be said there. And just ask our sisters and brothers at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, who gathered for prayer and study this week and even welcomed a guest into their midst only to have him murder nine of them after their conversation.

Come all you people, come and praise your Maker;
come all you people, come and praise your Maker;
come all you people, come and praise your Maker;
come now and worship the Lord.

In the face of all these challenges, confronted with all these fears, we keep coming together for worship, trusting that God will be present in our midst. It’s not that this is the only place where we see God at work; it’s not that we think that God lives here in the church, nesting somewhere in these rafters or bunking next to the boiler in the basement; it’s not even that we find that something special happens when we gather here. We gather to worship because we know of no better way to be in full and deep and real relationship with our sisters and brothers and no better way to show our gratitude and thanksgiving for all that God gives us along the way.

So just have you have come to worship today, keep gathering here in this place, trusting that God will be here with us and that in sharing this time with one another we can worship in Spirit and in truth, offering our praise and thanks to the God who made us and who makes all things new. Thanks be to God!

Come all you people, come and praise your Maker;
come all you people, come and praise your Maker;
come all you people, come and praise your Maker;
come now and worship the Lord.

Death and Life

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a sermon on 2 Corinthians 5:14-21
preached on June 14, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

As a pastor, I have a bit of a strange relationship with death. I am occasionally given the privilege of being present with someone as they die, and I do my best to approach this holy moment in the same way as I do for any other event of life even amidst the understandable difficulty for me and others. A little more frequently, I am asked to preside at funerals or memorial services, where death is the unfortunate occasion that brings us together even as we often find a unique bond of life to link us to one another and to God. And then there are the times when I walk with you all or other friends through days of grief, sorting out how the death of family, friends, colleagues, or even others beyond those circles changes our lives. In thinking about all these moments, I see the incredible transformation that death brings—even as I know that it is yet another moment of life and living.

So when Paul starts talking about death in our reading from 2 Corinthians this morning, I know exactly what he is talking about. For Paul, death—specifically, the death of Christ—changes everything even as it is yet another moment in the life of the world. In the wonder of this unjust death, we are convinced that all have died. In the light of this amazing love, we are shown that he died for all, regardless of belief or practice. And in the face of this transformative moment, we are shown how this death invites “those who live [to] live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.”

Christ’s death shows us the depth and breadth of God’s love for us, and that love “urges us on,” Paul says, guiding us into new life in this world and the next. This love, Paul says, gives us a new point of view: “From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view.” First, we received a new vision of Christ himself, for we once knew him as we know our human companions on the journey, but now we know that he is more than this, that in his death and resurrection he has overcome all the challenges of this world and entered into new life.

Since we know Christ in this new way, we also have to look at our human companions from a new perspective. Everything is different from this new vantage point. The assumptions we have made about others no longer apply, because we know that all are beloved children of God. The outside appearance and visible actions that have been the basis of all our judgments before now must be set aside so that we can focus on knowing one another in the way that God knows us. And the death that seems like it brought things to an end is actually the beginning of new life. One commentator summarizes this change beautifully:

Believers are not simply offered a new perspective they may or may not adopt as and when they see fit; rather, something so fundamental has changed in such a profound fashion that the old ways of looking, perceiving, understanding, and, more profoundly, evaluating, have to be let go and replaced with a new way of seeing and understanding. (J. Paul Sample, New Interpreter’s Bible)

He goes even one step further:

People have value because Christ has died for them. People, whoever they are, whether they have responded to Christ or not… are treasured by God.

In the same way that the death of Christ changes our view of death, when we look at one another from this new perspective, everything is different. We see those whom we once named as our enemies and approach them as friends. We replace our way of assessing one another based on the things of this world with assessments of one another as beloved children of God. And we stop looking at death as the end of something for one of us and approach it as the beginning of everything for all of us. Paul names this new perspective as the new creation:

If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!

The new creation stands at the center of everything that Paul proclaims. The new creation calls forth a different way of living and loving that takes into account the love of God demonstrated in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The new creation makes it clear for us how faith is to be expressed through love of our fellow human beings and by extension all of the created order. The new creation shows us that redemption is expressed “as a kind of creation renewed, made over… a new thing that recaptures, not jettisons, the old.” (J. Paul Sample) And the new creation reminds us that death is not the end of the story for any of us, for one death began the process of transformation that invites us into this new life, and so death opens the possibility of something new.

This new creation begun in Christ opens us to, calls us to, even demands of us participation in, the transformation of the world. Because we have been reconciled to God in Christ, we are called to be reconciled to one another and the whole world. Because we have this new relationship with God, we need to have a new relationship with others as we appeal to them as ambassadors on God’s behalf. And because we have for our own sake been united with one “who knew no sin,” we “become the righteousness of God” as we demonstrate the new way of Christ to the world.

As participants in this new creation, we not only look at the world around us differently but also interact with it differently. We treat everyone with deeper reverence and love as we recognize the myriad ways that all are treasured by God. We live with our focus on others and especially those for whom God has particular concern: the poor, the oppressed, the victims of war and violence, the unloved and unloveable, and those like all of these. And we do our best to embody the wholeness that we long to know for ourselves and all the world.

As I journey through this life, facing the interesting challenges of life as a pastor, walking through death and life with people like all of you, seeking to offer the presence of God in Christ to all I meet, I am convinced over and over again that this idea of the new creation is what we need in our world. We do not need to turn back the clock to a day and age that are now past but rather need to hope and pray and work for God’s new way to be revealed in our midst, a way that is far better than anything we have known before.

In this new creation, we are shown that God has more in store for our world that what we know now. Through this new creation, we are called to live differently ourselves so that we can join in what God is doing all around us. And because of this new creation, we ourselves are made new as we recognize again and again that Christ has changed everything for everyone.

So may we live in this new creation even now as we wait for God to finish it in the days ahead, so that we might be God’s ambassadors of new life and reconciliation in our broken and fearful world, journeying in life and in death in the path that Christ opens for us, now and always. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Succession Planning

By

a sermon on 1 Samuel 8:4-20
preached on June 7, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

I spent a good part of the day yesterday with about thirty clerks of session from all across the Presbytery of New York City. These good folks are the people who, like Lisa here among us, keep the official records of our congregations and assist in a lot of other very important tasks to support the ministry and mission that happen in the ninety-six Presbyterian churches across our city. As we went around the room introducing ourselves and sharing what we were looking forward to doing this summer, there was a recurring theme in even these brief two-minute introductions. At least half of the clerks in the room talked about how they were looking to start training someone to take over for them. In some sense, they were very concerned about succession planning—about figuring out who would pick up their responsibilities when they could no longer do them themselves, about making sure that the hard work that they had begun would continue, about laying the groundwork for a smooth transition to the next generation.

Our reading from 1 Samuel this morning begins with a very similar state of affairs, with the elders of Israel approaching the prophet and leader Samuel to ask him to put a new succession plan in place by appointing a king over them. The people had been led for several generations by judges like Samuel, leaders with the power to guide decisions and sort out disputes but whose authority did not extend to raising up an army, imposing taxes, or building a nation-state that looked like Israel’s imposing neighbors. While they had these substantial limitations, these judges still used their power to establish family dynasties based on bloodline more than righteousness. Like his predecessor Eli before him, Samuel’s sons didn’t quite take after their father, and instead of trying to find yet another family to take up the role of judge, the other leaders around him wanted to take a more traditional approach and appoint a king to succeed him.

Samuel was frustrated by all this, but when he took that frustration to God, God reminded him that this wasn’t about him:

They have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.

They were just repeating a longstanding pattern, after all—ever since leaving Egypt, the Israelites had found lots to complain about and rarely seemed to be happy with what God had given them, whether it was leadership, food, or guidance. So Samuel reluctantly did as God told him, warning the people about what their request for a king would bring to them: all the conflict and strife that would follow them, all that would be required of their families and property, all that would be taken away from them and placed in the service of the king. And most of all, he warned them that God would not listen when they inevitably complained about it!

But still they did not listen.

No! We are determined to have a king over us, so that we also may be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles.

Their complaints were all about succession planning—and being like everyone else.

If I have learned anything from reading and studying the Bible over the years, it is that God rarely if ever wants us to be like everyone else. Every time the Israelites cried out to God to be like everyone else, with military might, giant territories, and powerful leaders, God made it clear that God had other plans for them. After all, we know a good bit about the history of the empires of Egypt and Assyria and Babylon and Persia, but their cultural and religious legacy is tiny now compared to that of the tiny nation of Israel. Every time people came to Jesus as they did in our reading from Mark this morning asking him to honor his family and behave like the rest of the world, he responded with something like he did here:

Who are my mother and my brothers? Here are my mother and my brothers [sitting around me]! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.

After all, the human ties that bind us are far more easily broken than the ties that bind us to God. And every time we think that we have figured out how to claim God’s grace and mercy only for ourselves, we are reminded of how God in Jesus Christ offered that grace and mercy in ways that reached beyond the wildest imaginations of those around him. After all, he dined with tax collectors and sinners, touched those who were deemed untouchable around him, and proclaimed a new and different kingdom of justice, peace, and love.

Rather than taking up the ways of the world, God instead insists that we are called to trust God to show us a new and different and better way, prioritizing justice for all over the privilege of a few, preferring mercy over retribution, living in love rather than stewing in hate, living in the radical possibilities of grace when we prefer the seeming simplicity of the law, insisting on reconciliation when we just want to stay apart, and seeking new life when we would rather be happy with the status quo. God calls us to seek these divine ways rather than the human way, to place our focus and trust and hope in God alone.

It is not easy to place all our hopes and prayers for succession planning—or anything else, for that matter!—on God alone. Whether we’re trying to figure out how we might organize ourselves for this or the next generation, how to relate to our families and friends, or how to respond to those in need in our lives and our world, we do not easily keep our focus on how God remains at the center of our lives and our world.

The difficulty of this is no surprise, really. Placing God at the center and trusting that God really is sovereign raises a lot of questions for us. In our nation where we have thoughtfully disconnected church and state, how do we relate our civic responsibilities with our faith commitments? In our church where we can so easily become focused on keeping the doors open and maintaining our connection to the past, how is God inviting us to recenter and refocus on living out God’s call to new life in our world? And in our lives where it can be difficult to see God guiding us in the day-to-day, how can we connect the challenges of our lives to the limited ways that we can see God in our midst?

Our Reformed tradition, in its great emphasis on the sovereignty of God, responds to these age-old questions with continual reaffirmations of the limitations of human power and authority and the new way that God is setting before us in the world. It points us back to all those scriptures that insist that God’s ways are very different from our own. It insists that we recognize the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, who showed “power in the form of a servant, wisdom in the folly of the cross, and goodness in receiving sinful men and women.” (Confession of 1967, 9.15) And it invites us to give up our confidence in any power we might claim for ourselves so that our hope and trust rest squarely in God alone.

Now let me be clear: placing our hope and trust in God does not excuse us from action in our world,
nor does it take away from the pain and hurt we may experience when things are difficult. It does not mean that we do not plan for the days ahead or can be excused from responsibility for the work we are called to do. Instead, placing our hope and trust in God gives us a grounding for our lives of mission and ministry in the world, a starting point for living out the hope that God will make things different and use us in that work. Our Confession of 1967 puts our task well:

The life, death, resurrection, and promised coming of Jesus Christ has set the pattern for the church’s  mission. His human life involves the church in the common life of all people. His service to men and women commits the church to work for every form of human well-being. His suffering makes the church sensitive to all human suffering so that it sees the face of Christ in the faces of persons in every kind of need. His crucifixion discloses to the church God’s judgment on the inhumanity that marks human relations, and the awful consequences of the church’s own complicity in injustice. In the power of the risen Christ and the hope of his coming, the church sees the promise of God’s renewal of human life in society and of God’s victory over all wrong. The church follows this pattern in the form of its life and in the method of its action. So to live and serve is to confess Christ as Lord. (9.32-.33)

So may we confess that Jesus Christ is Lord in our words and our actions, with confidence that God has a succession plan set out for us that invites us to join in God’s work of making all things new, so that we might proclaim the eternal reign of our God in all that we say and do, each and every day. Thanks be to God! Amen.