sermons — Page 14 — Andy James

Food, Freedom, and Faithfulness

February 1, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on 1 Corinthians 8:1-13
preached on February 1, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

About ten years ago, author A.J. Jacobs set out on an interesting journey to, as he puts it, “live the ultimate biblical life, or more precisely, to follow the Bible as literally as possible.” He is not a religious person at all—he grew up in a culturally Jewish home here in New York with “a Star of David on top of our Christmas tree,” lived next door to a Lutheran minister, and attended some bar mitzvahs and funerals. Still, when he decided to learn more about religion, he decided to do more than just study it. He decided to take the whole thing seriously as best he could imagine, by spending a year “living biblically.” He set out to follow the various biblical commandments and laws as best he could, everything from loving his neighbor to avoiding shaving his beard to keeping his distance from his wife at certain times of the month! It led to some interesting trips all around the world, a number of very funny stories about other people who weren’t quite as enthusiastic about his project, and a lot of thoughtful reflection on what it means to live in a modern-day context while following an ancient book.

I’m not exactly sure what A.J. Jacobs would do with our text this morning from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. It seems very much like the kind of outdated instruction that we so easily ignore and that would be great material for a comedian—from the moment it opens talking about “food sacrificed to idols,” you know it is not going to be easy to connect to our own time! And one commentator I read on this even said, “In all my years of listening to sermons, including my own, I don’t believe that I have ever heard one based on this text.” (V. Bruce Rigdon, “Pastoral Perspective on 1 Corinthians 8:1-13,” Feasting on the Word: Year B, Volume 1) Still, I think there is something here for us to hear today.

The church in Corinth to which these words were originally addressed was an incredible group of people facing the questions of faithfulness to Christ in a very distinctive culture. The Christian church in Corinth welcomed a cross-section of people from the city. Some had experience in the broader religious community of Corinth where animal sacrifices were common and so sought to eliminate these past practices completely, but others had no connection to these temples and so carried no mental baggage with the sacrifices that were made there. Some were well-off and could easily afford to include meat, usually from the temples, as part of their diet, but others were less affluent and so were more accustomed to a simple, mostly vegetarian diet. Some were outspoken and very much ready to instruct their fellow believers in exactly what they believed was the right thing to do in light of the death and resurrection of Jesus, but others were less confident in their voices and beliefs and so remained more quiet. In addressing the issue of food sacrificed to idols, Paul was not just looking at what to do with a particular food—he was encouraging the Corinthians to think more deeply and broadly about the nature of their community of faith and how their commitment to one another ought to be expressed in things as mundane as food.

Paul actually sets aside the issue of meat sacrificed to idols pretty quickly. He makes it clear that idols really don’t exist, for God is so great and one that there is no other god worth paying any attention to, even to the extent of spending time to deny its existence! For us, he says, “there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.” The matter of eating meat sacrificed to idols, then, is ultimately a matter of personal decision, he says: “We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do.”

While there is no direct theological reason to eat or not to eat, Paul makes it clear that there still may be good reason for the Corinthians to avoid this meat, not because the meat itself is bad but because some others might not fully understand this. The freedom to enjoy this meat, Paul insists, is not freedom to get in the way of the faithfulness of others:

Take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block.

For Paul, it seems that the rightness of the act of eating meat—or obeying any law, in fact—is beyond a simple determination of theological correctness and instead rooted in understanding how attentiveness to that law impacts others’ lives and grounded in the deep relationships that emerge among those who encounter one another as sisters and brothers in faith.

This is where these words about food sacrificed to idols start to touch our lives. We may not emerge from this chapter of 1 Corinthians with a clear rule about whether or not Jesus demands that we all be vegetarians, but we do learn here a few deeper truths about what it means to be in Christian community. First, we are reminded that our actions impact others. Everything we do, right or wrong, has an impact on others, for good or for ill. We cannot so disconnect ourselves from the community around us that we will not have an effect on those who journey with us. And so from this text we are called to consider the impact of our actions on others at every step of the way. This does not mean that we avoid doing things out of fear that we will offend or discourage the faithfulness of another. However, it does mean that we approach the freedom that we have with care, considering at every step of the way whether what we do will encourage or discourage others in their walk of faith.

Finally, this reflection on food, freedom, and faithfulness reminds us that relationships truly do matter. We cannot know how others will respond to a particular exercise of freedom if we do not know them. In calling the Corinthians to consider the ways that their exercise of liberty might become a stumbling block for others, Paul calls them as well to something that was likely even more challenging, to reach across all the lines of difference and division and get to know one another. This was not easy—the Corinthians’ primary community for worship and fellowship was in neighborhood house churches, and they only occasionally came together from these smaller gatherings to a big feast involving the entire community of Christians in the city. In our day and age at least, in situations like this, the tendency is to stick together with the people we already know, who likely share similar lives and stories and backgrounds. But Paul’s deeper point here is that they were not excused from getting to know one another in the broader group and shaped beyond their natural communities of life and faithfulness.

So we too face the difficulty of getting to know people who are different from us as we determine whether or not our actions taken out of freedom will get in the way of their faithfulness. And this call to relationship is truly two-way. One side cannot demand that the other must come fully around to their side, for the commitment of life in Christian community is that we learn from each other and are informed by the other’s experiences along the way.

We in this place are not quite as divided by geography and circumstance as the church in Corinth, but there are plenty of places and ways that we need to get to know one another better. There are relationships that we could develop better within this congregation, reaching beyond the natural connections that we have and the people that we like to learn more about one another and seek to support each other in our walk of faith. And there are relationships that we could develop beyond the community of this congregation, discovering more about our sisters and brothers in the faith in our local community, across our city, and around the world to learn about the things that get in the way of our mutual faithfulness and seek a new way of life together.

In these conversations and through these relationships, our eyes are opened to new experiences, our ears exposed to different voices, and our hearts transformed by the stories that we share. We will certainly hear of places where we need to think differently about the implications of our faith and action. We will be challenged in our thinking that our relationships with people who are different from us are just fine. And we will quite likely be called to a new embodiment of justice for the poor, a new understanding of what oppression and privilege mean, and a different pathway to peace in those places where conflict endures.

When we’ve begun this, though, we will gather around this table hearing the call to food, freedom, and faithfulness in a new way, joining together with all our sisters and brothers, those who agree with us and those who disagree with us, those who eat meat and those who abstain, those who follow the Bible as literally as possible and those who are a little more loose about it, as we seek to recognize the presence of Christ among us. When we gather here, at this table, we remember God’s welcome to all people and recommit ourselves to sharing it in words and actions, to listening to and learning from one another, to giving everyone who joins us here the space they need to walk the journey of faith in their own way so that we can all share the joyful feast of this table as we gather to meet the risen Christ here.

So my friends, may we find food, freedom, and faithfulness as we take this journey together, building up one another in love each and every step of the way as we follow Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

A Day on the Lakeshore

January 25, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on Mark 1:14-20
preached on January 25, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

They were just ordinary fishermen doing their jobs on an ordinary day by the lakeshore, but before this day was over Simon and Andrew and James and John would be taking quite a new and different path. Jesus had just begun his work of proclamation and teaching in Galilee, and right away he invited Simon and Andrew—and soon also James and John—to join him along the way.

This was not all that unusual in that day and age. A lot of teachers and preachers wandered the countryside with bands of followers in those first century days, and even some prophets of earlier times had developed similar groups of devotees as they offered their words of comfort and challenge. These groups would wander the towns and villages of Palestine, sharing their varied messages and inviting others to join them along the way.

I suspect that most of these disciples chose who to follow somewhat carefully. Some of them might have had family connections to their teachers, and others probably were had been among the audience for the teacher’s teaching before setting out to roam the countryside. But Mark’s record of the call of Simon, Andrew, James, and John to be Jesus’ disciples implies that there is no such “trial period.” The way Mark tells the story, the disciples had no idea what they might be getting into when they set out to follow Jesus except that something was so compelling about the way he invited them to join him on the journey that they could do nothing other than follow.

Jesus’ message that he had begun to proclaim around Galilee was a curious and strong one:

The time is fulfilled,
and the kingdom of God has come near;
repent, and believe in the good news.

These fishermen on the lakeshore don’t seem to have heard this message, had any history with Jesus or any other similar teacher, or even seemed to have been tired of fishing and looking for a change of pace for a while. Mark simply tells us that Jesus called out to them as he passed by and invited them to join him on his journey:

Follow me and I will make you fish for people.

Then, “immediately they left their nets and followed him.” Why did they do this? What was so compelling about this man, his message, or even the way he talked with them that they would leave their nets and follow? How did Jesus so easily convince these two sets of brothers to leave behind their nets, their boats, their careers, their families—everything, really—to join him in wandering around the countryside to proclaim a message that they had barely even heard that might get them in trouble with nearly everyone?

We can’t know the real answers—Mark simply keeps the story too brief—but even this silence speaks volumes about what was going on. It matches up very well with the general mood of Mark’s gospel, where everyone—especially Jesus—seems to be in a big hurry, for the kingdom of God is coming, not just someday far ahead but soon. I think somehow this immediacy and urgency was clear to Simon, Andrew, James, and John when Jesus spoke to them, and they knew that it was the right thing to follow him right away. So these four fishermen responded to Jesus’ urgent call to join him in fishing for people and proclaiming the coming of the kingdom of God.

Just as Jesus’ call settled on the lives of these ordinary fishermen on an ordinary day by the lakeshore some two thousand years ago, so it echoes among us too today. I suspect that we don’t hear it with quite the same ears, though. We likely don’t share the same sense of urgency that things need to change as seemed to permeate the world that Mark describes for us. Many of us today struggle to change little bits of our lives to follow Jesus, let alone drop the nets of our lives and leave behind our families and livelihoods to go into an unknown future with him. And so many today are far less open to the kind of radically transformative message that marked Jesus’ proclamation.

Yet Jesus’ call to follow him and join in his proclamation of a time fulfilled, the kingdom of God come near, and the urgency of repentance and new life is still so very strong in our world. It is not easy to figure out what this call means in our lives. It took Simon, Andrew, James, and John three years with Jesus to figure much of anything out about it, and even then they weren’t particularly good at it!

As we struggle to respond individually to this call in our lives, I wonder if it is time for us to think differently about Jesus’ proclamation and invitation, to listen to it less one by one, independent of one another, and to consider how Jesus might be calling all of us together to follow him from the lakeshores of our common life out into the world. There is still of course an imperative for each of us to follow Jesus along the way, to respond to his call out to each one of us on the lakeshore, but the possibilities of transformation that emerge when we collectively respond to Jesus’ call to follow can be far greater. So Jesus calls out to us as his church on the lakeshore, inviting us to put down the nets of our tradition and routine, summoning us to join him in proclaiming that the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near, and calling us to follow him beyond these walls and out into the world to proclaim and embody the way of repentance and new life each and every day.

Today is a wonderful day to hear this call again as we join together for our annual congregational meeting after worship. When we gather every January to hear reports and take a few votes as we do, we are doing the sort of institutional work that looks a lot more like the routines of fishing that these new disciples left behind. Too often we can pay so much attention to our traditions and institutions that we miss the opportunities to proclaim and be a part of the kingdom of God. But when we are at our best, this meeting today can also propel us forward into something new as we join with those first disciples and countless others since to proclaim the new thing that God is doing.

We have struggled to figure out exactly how to do this over the years. Sometimes we have become distracted by the challenges of maintaining a church building or keeping up the basic elements of our life together. Many times we have scratched our heads wondering how we can find enough people to make the journey worth our while. And other times we have looked so hard for a common missional focus that we have become frustrated when one did not emerge for us.

Yet all along the way, we have kept our eyes and ears open for ways that we could join in the work of proclaiming and embodying the kingdom of God in our midst. We have joined others from around the presbytery in rebuilding homes destroyed during Superstorm Sandy. We have been a consistent support and presence in the work of the Grace Church Food Pantry. And we have reached out to others through other projects brought to us by members and friends who need our support in living out their call to follow Jesus.

In recent months, as we prepared to move into this new year and respond to God’s call to follow Jesus in this time and place, the session looked at all this mission we are already doing with fresh eyes, and rather than trying to replace it all with a unified vision or a single magic project, we decided to embrace the places where we are already working, to recommit ourselves to supporting the emergence of the kingdom of God by supporting this mission in new ways and to work toward deepening and broadening our missional commitments as we look for new places to use our limited resources most effectively. We can’t support anything and everything that comes forward—we have a group already working on setting up some criteria to help guide us in the choices that we make—but when a project helps us to better proclaim the coming of the kingdom of God together, we can support one another in living it out along the way.

So as we journey along the lakeshores of our lives, as we hear Jesus inviting us to follow him, may we leave the nets of our lives behind and join him in proclaiming and embodying the coming of the kingdom of God in this world until he comes to make all things new. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

Over the Face of the Waters

January 11, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on Genesis 1:1-5 and Mark 1:4-14
preached on January 11, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Beginnings are important moments. How you tell the beginning of a story changes how the rest of it is heard. If I start with “Once upon a time,” it will be really hard for you to hear anything I say as much more than a fairy tale. If I start with “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” you’ll expect me to launch into Charles Dickens. And if I start with “So-and-so was born on such-and-such date,” then you’ll be ready for me to give you a full biography.

The beginnings of moments in our lives are important, too. First impressions can make a huge difference in how we interact with one another over the long term. The first time we do something, we set a pattern for how it is done that is often very hard to shake later on. And more and more we are learning how the things we do in the earliest months and years of our lives make a difference throughout all our days.

So today, our texts point us to two beginnings in the Bible—first the beginning of the beginning, the opening words of Genesis that tell of God’s creation of the world, and then the beginning of the story of Jesus, the dramatic shift of a relatively ordinary guy from a relatively ordinary town in the backwaters of the Roman empire to being the one who proclaimed the coming of the kingdom of God and was executed for doing so. More than anything, these beginnings set the stage for how the rest of the story is told and heard, and we do well to let them shape our thinking and understanding of everything that follows.

The beginning of the creation story in Genesis sets the stage for the rest of the Bible. This story seems far less concerned with the exact details or process of creation and far more concerned with making it clear that God is at work in all of it. In this beginning, God creates light where there was none, the first step in the process of transforming the formless void of the earth into something new. And that is the real point of this beginning, to show how God acts to make something out of nothing, how God is in the business of transformation from the very beginning, how the world begins when the voice of God sweeps over the face of the waters.

And so the beginning of the story of Jesus in Mark also sets the stage for everything else that follows in the story of Jesus’ life. This beginning is much like the beginning of Genesis, as both point us to the transformative power of God that becomes so very clear when the voice of God sweeps over the face of the waters.

As he begins his story, Mark skips over so much of the stuff that we usually associate with the beginning of the Jesus story. There’s no mention of angels, shepherds, kings, or even Mary and Joseph. Jesus’ background and upbringing are unimportant and perhaps even distracting to Mark’s version of this story. Instead, in Mark’s telling, Jesus just sort of appears out of nowhere to be baptized by John the Baptist in the Jordan River. John himself had just appeared in the wilderness to proclaim a message of baptism for the forgiveness of sins. People quickly identified him as a prophet, but John knew that his biggest role was to point forward to another who was still to come:

The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.

And so when Jesus was baptized by John, God’s transformative power was revealed once again. The heavens were torn apart, and the Spirit descended like a dove upon Jesus. Then a voice moved over the face of the waters, announcing to Jesus,

You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

Jesus’ beginning was not quite over yet, either. After a brief interlude of forty days of temptation in the wilderness that we’ll hear more about in a few weeks, Mark continues setting the stage for everything else in his story of Jesus. “After John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God,” bringing a message of transformation:

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.

As the one whom John said was coming after him, Jesus took John’s message of repentance one step further. There was more than an individual change of heart going on here—God’s transformative power was coming into its fullness in Jesus’ presence, and everyone was called to join in. All this became clear for Jesus in the waters of his baptism, in that moment when John held him under waters of the muddy Jordan River to symbolize repentance and new life. It was then, as he came up out of the water, that all the dots of his life connected for the first time. When Jesus experienced the heavens torn apart, the Spirit descending like a dove upon him, and a voice proclaiming his identity once and for all, he understood his mission and call in a new and complete way. This was not a total surprise to him, but as that voice called out over the face of those waters, he entered fully and completely into the work of fulfilling the time and embodying the kingdom of God.

In the waters of our baptism, we see much the same thing emerging around us. There is certainly nothing magical in those waters even as they mark the beginning of our lives of faith, and we are very unlikely to have a vision of heavens torn apart and a dive-bombing Spirit dove, let alone a heavenly voice offering a loud and clear declaration of our beloved status. But when our very human voices move over these waters to affirm the vows of repentance and new life for ourselves and to pray for God’s presence, the heavens are torn apart as God joins us here, the Spirit descends upon us to seal God’s love and grace upon us in a new and different way, and a voice moves over the waters to tell us that we too are beloved children of God. And so we too are called with Jesus to join in fulfilling the time and embodying the kingdom of God.

From his baptism, as the voice moved over those waters, Jesus was called to live this kind of life of transformation, to declare and embody God’s reign. This was not an entirely new thing. Jesus followed after a long line of those who had prepared the way. Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Miriam, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and countless other women and men carried God’s message across the generations. And Jesus followed very much in the footsteps of John the Baptist and even other similar, now-unknown prophets of his own day who were setting the stage for this message and this life. From the beginning, Jesus was called to proclaim and live the fullness of God’s new thing that already had been taking hold for generations, guiding others to the light of this new day so that they too could live in justice, peace, love, hope, and grace each and every day.

And so we also are called by the voice of God over the waters of our baptism to live lives of transformation as we declare and embody God’s reign in our lives and our world. We too follow in a long line of prophets and saints who have gone before us to prepare the way and make it clear that we are not doing this all alone. We too have companions on this journey who set the stage for the message and life of transformation that stand at the center of the coming reign of God. And ultimately, as our story begins at this font, we too are called to proclaim and live the fullness of God’s new thing that had been taking hold for generations, guiding others to the light of this new day so that they too could live in justice, peace, love, hope, and grace each and every day.

So today as we remember Jesus’ baptism and reaffirm the promises made in our own baptisms, may God’s voice move over these waters once again to remind us that we are God’s beloved children and to encourage us to continue proclaiming and living the reign of God until all things are made new in Jesus Christ our Lord. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

Containing Christmas

January 4, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on Matthew 2:1-12
preached on January 4, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

It feels like Christmas ought to be over by now. Sure, I still have my tree up at home, and our decorations are still up here in the church, but by next Sunday nearly all the visible signs of Christmas will be gone. Of course, that will be a good two weeks after our world has left Christmas behind. The old traditional twelve days of Christmas beginning on Christmas Day have instead become about two months of Christmas beginning as soon as the stores can shift Halloween candy and picked-over costumes into the clearance bins! But whether it be twelve days or two months, the time and seasons of this world can’t contain Christmas.

This uncontainable Christmas was the case from the very beginning. Even the four gospels that carry the stories of Jesus’ life to our own time tell us two somewhat different versions of the Christmas story, with different timetables for the parents’ travel and different visitors coming to pay homage to the newborn Jesus, not to mention different audiences for the news of his conception and birth. It is clear that a single telling of this story cannot capture all that this important event contains for us.

Matthew’s telling of it brings us several people who do everything they can to contain the meaning and message of this transformative event. First, the wise men from the East who have seen a star indicating the birth of the King of the Jews head directly to the capital city, Jerusalem, expecting that they would find a royal child there, never imagining that they might find him anywhere else. Everyone at the palace of King Herod has a similar response when these foreign visitors arrive, never thinking that God might be doing something outside the approved and endorsed channels of the puppet king placed in power by Roman authority. King Herod himself seeks to contain and control the meaning of this birth that might potentially undermine his very tenuous and limited authority by instructing the wise men to report back to him about the whereabouts of the child. Even beyond our story today, in the next few verses of Matthew, we hear the horrible story of how King Herod tried to contain the impact of the birth of Jesus by killing all the male children under age two in Bethlehem once he heard that some thought someone else had been born King of the Jews.

But all who would try to contain even this first Christmas were unsuccessful. The wise men were put back on their way to follow the star all the way to the place where it was guiding them by none other than King Herod. The halls of power in Jerusalem were released from their fear of the sinister King Herod by the wisdom of the chief priests and scribes as they sought the counsel of the prophets. And King Herod was thwarted in his attempts to destroy the child by dreams that sent the wise men home by another road and Jesus and his parents off to the safety of Egypt until they could safely settle back closer to their native land in their new hometown Nazareth. From the beginning, as hard as many might try, amidst so many misunderstandings and threats, the gift of Christmas simply could not be contained.

As this Christmas season comes to an end over the next few days, as we put away the decorations that mark this holiday for us, as we try to move on from the celebrations and holidays of this time of year and back into the normal pace of life, our temptation is to pack up the meaning of this season in those boxes alongside our ornaments and other marks of the season. But the deeper call of Christmas is not done once we pass the celebrations of Epiphany on Tuesday. We are not done with this season just because we have taken down the decorations from the church or our homes. And we must resist the temptation to contain Christmas to a brief season marked mostly by Christian attempts to co-opt pagan winter solstice festivals in late December. Poet Linda Felver puts the consequences of this beautifully, I think:

Let me not wrap, stack, box, bag, tie, tag, bundle, seal, keep Christmas.
Christmas kept is liable to mold.
Let me give Christmas away, unwrapped, by exuberant armfuls.
Let me share, dance, live Christmas unpretentiously, merrily, responsibly,
with overflowing hands, tireless steps and sparkling eyes.
Christmas given away will stay fresh—even until it comes again.

—“Let Me Not Keep Christmas,” from A Book of Christmas

When we try to contain Christmas to this brief season or limit the message that this birth brings to us, we always find that God has other ideas, suggesting that we must do more to live out God’s preference for the poor and oppressed, to stand with those who are hungry or in need, and to find Jesus among us where we would least expect to meet him. Pastor and activist Howard Thurman put this challenge of Christmas best, I think:

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.

—“The Work of Christmas,” in The Mood of Christmas & Other Celebrations

In his life among us that began that first Christmas, Jesus brings all these challenges into clearer view for us, reminding us that while we are not alone in doing this work, we are never excused from being the hands and feet and voice of Jesus in our world. In his birth amidst controversy and confusion, Jesus reminds us that the fullness of God’s presence is rarely found in the halls of power but far more often among the poor. In the myriad ways that he manages to avoid being contained by the ways of the world, Jesus reminds us that God’s power reaches far beyond our dreams and imagination. And in his message of a new way that begins to take hold at Christmas, he reminds us constantly that we are called to continue bearing this message of new life into the world, looking for openings to join in the transformation of those lost, broken, hungry, imprisoned, ruined, war-torn, and empty places where the light of Christ can shine into our world through people like us.

So when we finally give up on our attempts to contain Christmas, we find that we have no choice but to let the light of Christ shine through us. This light illumines our lives and makes us whole and complete, but when we are tempted to make this light our own and hoard it for ourselves and our own good feelings, we are called to let our light shine. We are called to share God’s glory with all those who come our way and to bear this transformative light into a world where darkness has far too often been allowed to rule the day. The work of Christmas for us beyond these days is to continue to bear this light into the world so that we can join in finding the lost, healing the broken, feeding the hungry, releasing the prisoner, rebuilding the nations, bringing peace among people, and making music in the heart.

So may we go forth from these Christmas days, not boxing it up for another year or containing it within a few days or weeks of this season, but instead bearing the epiphanies that burst forth into our world through the fullness of our lives, always shining the bright light of Christ into the world each and every day until all things are made new in Jesus Christ our Lord. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

Light in the Darkness

December 24, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Isaiah 9:2-7
preached on Christmas Eve 2014 at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

These are strange days to be talking so much about light. We’ve just journeyed through the shortest day of the year, but there’s plenty of other darkness in our world, too. Turn on the television or radio any day and you can hear it right away—darkness is all around us. Wars and conflicts rage around the world, and there are refugees and displaced persons everywhere who have been forced out of their homes to live in refugee camps for years on end. Violence and injustice keep inching closer and closer to home, not to mention all of the people in need of a warm and dry place to sleep. Those chosen to lead us in so many different places and ways toss about harsh words of blame that ignore the way we all participate in the difficulties of our world and so get in the way of the possibilities of reconciliation and new life. Peace and light just seem far off, dreams surely not to be realized in our lifetime if ever at all. So when Isaiah talks about “the people who walk in darkness,” we have a pretty good idea of what the darkness he might be talking about.

But even amidst all the struggles and pain of our world, we have nonetheless seen a great light. The prophet speaks of three great marks of light shining in his own day: joy rising in the nation as it grows and reflects more and more the fullness of God’s mercy, freedom finding expression and hope as all the marks of oppression and pain are torn away, and the fullness of peace coming as the garments of war are burned up as fuel for the fire of hope.

These great marks of light find their greatest expression in the child born “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” His authority is taking hold to show new and different ways in all the world. He will reign with justice and righteousness “from this time onward and forevermore.” And God’s power and promise will bring all these things to fruition even in those times when it seems so completely impossible and improbable.

In our time, the light comes to us, too. Just as Jesus was born on that Christmas two millennia ago, so Jesus is born anew in us and in our world each year in this celebration. So on this night when we hear the familiar words of Jesus’ birth again, when we wonder with Mary and Joseph about the gift of this newborn Jesus, when we join our voices with the angels to proclaim the birth of a baby who changes the world, when we welcome the presence of God into human flesh as Jesus is born of Mary, when we experience the promise of light shining into the darkest corners of our world, we see the light coming to us.

But we cannot simply sit still—we must respond. How are we to live now that we are people who have walked in darkness but now seen a great light? This light shines so brightly that it not only illumines our lives but also guides us as we seek the transformation and renewal of all things and energizes us as we seek the peace and wholeness that can come only from the Prince of Peace. This light shines forth from the strange event we celebrate tonight. Writer and radio host Krista Tippett reminds us well of the mystery and wonder of this night:

There is something audacious and mysterious and reality-affirming in the assertion that has stayed alive for two thousand years that God took on eyes and ears and hands and feet, hunger and tears and laughter and the flu, joy and pain and gratitude and our terrible, redemptive human need for each other.

In the midst of all that troubles us and our world, Christmas shows us that God’s light shines through in the way that God comes to know our human condition so very personally and then seeks to transform it. And this light shines forth when we carry the light that we have shared in this gathering tonight into our lives, honoring the humanity of all as Jesus did in his life and ministry and working for justice, peace, and reconciliation in every corner of our world.

Who better can share the light of life than people who have known darkness all too well? Who better knows the depth of struggle that must be addressed in our world than the people who have faced it directly and emerged to bear even greater light? Who better to make God’s presence real in the everyday than the very people like us who have seen him here, who have shared this great feast and been fed in this holy meal? Who better than us to help bring God’s light into the darkness? And if we don’t join in this work, who will?

So as we go forth from this Christmas Eve, as we bear the light of this night into the darkness and uncertainty of our world, may God strengthen us to shine this light in the darkness each and every day until it shines so brightly that all things are made new in Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.