sermons — Page 2 — Andy James

The Children of God

July 10, 2016 By Andy James

a sermon on Psalm 84 and Acts 2:43-47
preached on July 10, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Alton Sterling, child of God.
Blane Salamoni, child of God.
Howie Lake II, child of God.
Philando Castile, child of God.
Jeronimo Yanez, child of God.
Brent Thompson, child of God.
Lorne Ahrens, child of God.
Michael Krol, child of God.
Michael J. Smith, child of God.
Patrick Zamarripa, child of God.
Micah Xavier Johnson, child of God.

These are but a few of the children of God in our world, but their names and stories have hung over our news and our lives this past week. Two of these children of God are black men who were killed at the hands of police officers this week, the troubling circumstances of their deaths recorded and shared widely, leaving many Americans wondering if some of us are more valued children of God than others because of the color of our skin. Three of these children of God are police officers, the public servants accused of these gruesome acts yet who should no more be defined by this act of violence than anyone else. Another five of these children of God were also police officers, murdered as they worked to make time and space safe for protestors who were raising their voices about the troubling actions of other police officers, shot by a sniper who “wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.” And finally the last person named “child of God” in that list was none other than the sniper himself, the perpetrator of a cowardly ambush who yet somehow still must bear the name “child of God.”

“The Shelter, Nurture, and Spiritual Fellowship of the Children of God,” from the banners of Bloomfield Presbyterian Church on the Green.

The children of God of every sort—those who have been in the headlines this week and those who have stood a long way away from the headlines—stand at the forefront of the second Great End of the Church: “the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God.” This second of six statements of the mission of the church first expressed by our Presbyterian forebears over 100 years ago seems particularly appropriate today, especially when you see the differently-hued hands representing all the children of God in the banner that celebrates this great end.

After a week like this past one, where so many of us have wondered about the presence of God in these times that are so divisive and divided, shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship all seem like incredibly important things—but first I think we have to be clear about exactly who is included in our definition of the children of God. It is so easy to put restrictions and exclusions on who can bear this label, limiting who is welcome in “the courts of the Lord,” according to the poet of our psalm this morning, controlling who can be a part of the beloved community described in our reading from Acts where “all who believed were together and had all things in common.” For too many centuries, we in the church made it our business to decide who is in and who is out, setting a strange example for our world that it is okay to exclude people from full personhood for whatever reason we might choose. But our ministry as God’s church will never bear the faith we are called to share—and our nation will never begin to heal from the wounds that keep driving us apart—so long as we limit those whom we are willing to embrace as children of God. Times columnist Charles M. Blow put it beautifully yesterday in his reflections on what he described as “a week from hell”:

The moment any person comes to accept as justifiable an act of violence upon another—whether physical, spiritual or otherwise—that person has already lost the moral battle, even if he is currently winning the somatic one. When we all can see clearly that the ultimate goal is harmony and not hate, rectification and not retribution, we have a chance to see our way forward. But we all need to start here and now, by doing this simple thing: Seeing every person as fully human, deserving every day to make it home to the people he loves.

In the face of our shared humanity, we can begin to live out the other parts of this call to offer shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship to God’s beloved children, setting a much-needed example for our nation and our world to follow.

When it comes to shelter, we can take our cues from the place of safety and hope described in Psalm 84. In the psalm, God’s lovely dwelling place is a place where all are welcome, where “even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young.” This dwelling place carries comfort, shelter, and peace for those who make it their home. And this sheltering place is filled with great joy and wonder, “for a day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere.”

So when we take up our mission of shelter for the children of God, we work to make this house—and all the world—a place where all can enjoy safety and comfort, peace and joy, wonder and hope. We offer shelter not just to those who come our way but to all who need a safe home, a restful nest, or a place to lay their young. And when we set out to offer shelter for the children of God, we cannot ignore those who are threatened for one reason or another, those who continue to suffer the effects of racism and violence, those for whom shelter is about safety from the dangers of this world and the strife of these days.

This call for the church to shelter the children of God, then, demands that we make this a place of broad and deep welcome, where no one leaves wondering if they qualify for God’s love, where we make amends for the ways we have turned people away from God’s embrace in our own lives and in the history of our church and world, where we commit ourselves not just to shelter the children of God we like or the children of God who do things like we want but to shelter all the children of God.

The nurture of all God’s children in and through the church is a similar challenge, and our reading from Acts describes how the early church responded to this call in their life together. The nurture of the children of God in the early church was a joint exercise. Everyone was concerned about the well-being of everyone else, so much so that they “had all things in common [and] would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. They spent time together in the temple, enjoying the wonder of God’s courts and learning together what it meant to live in this new way “with glad and generous hearts.” They shared thanksgiving and goodwill at every step of the way, nurturing the new and hopeful faith that had been planted in each of them through the death and resurrection of Jesus so that they might grow together into the joyful household of God.

The nurture demonstrated in this vision of the early church is still our call as God’s church today. We are invited to walk together in faith, bearing one another’s burdens, making space for trust in God and one another to grow. We are charged with helping those who join us on this way deepen their understanding of how God’s presence fills our lives, sharing the stories of the Bible and our lives with one another and making sure that everything we do embodies the all-encompassing grace of God. And we are called to nurture the seeds of faith everywhere, caring for our fellow travelers along the way as we draw attention to the bold and broad welcome of God in Jesus Christ.

All this shelter and nurture then culminate in what is described in the Great Ends of the Church as “spiritual fellowship.” The church is, then, a place where we come together to share the gifts of the journey of faith—the joys and the sorrows, the wonders and the challenges, the hopes and the uncertainties, the grace, the love, the mercy, the peace, all the things that make us human and yet holy. We are then united in a special spiritual way as the children of God—children who rejoice together and mourn together, children who seek to honor the image of God in one another, children who are unafraid to admit that they have strayed and need help getting back home, children who claim their acts of racism, violence, and privilege and act in repentance and transformation, children who do everything we can to remove the restrictions that we and our forebears have placed upon our friends in faith, children who work so that everyone can know and embrace the wonderful and hopeful gift of being named as children of God.

This spiritual fellowship does not excuse us from dealing with the challenges of this world as we journey together in faith, but it does mean that we do not face these challenges alone. We instead approach the difficult moments of our lives and the deep challenges of our world with other children of God by our side who are not afraid to walk this way with us—but most of all with the power and presence of God, who journeys every step of the way with all of us.

In our fractured world, offering “the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God” is not easy. It is easy to miss one of the four pieces of this, to leave out the shelter, the nurture, or the spiritual fellowship, or to intentionally or unintentionally limit the ways we live out the breadth of the children of God. Yet our religious institutions may be the only places that can offer this kind of space to our nation.

A couple weeks ago, our movie night featured the film Places in the Heart, a 1984 film set 50 years earlier in East Texas during the Great Depression. The film opens with the shooting of the town sheriff at the hands of a drunken black teenager, who is then promptly lynched and murdered by an angry mob. But that is not the end of the story. The last scene takes us to church, where we catch a glimpse of the congregation sharing communion. As the choir sings “And he walks with me and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own,” we see the congregation sharing the Lord’s Supper: all the children of God—women and men, old and young, blind and sighted, black and white, living and dead, even murderer and victim—united across every imaginable division, lifted up to walk and talk and share with Christ himself, and empowered to share the peace of God for this world and the next.

So in these days when it is easy to get caught up in the anger, violence, and hatred of our world, may God open our eyes to see all those we meet today and every day as children of God, as siblings who join us in longing for an end to violence and hurt, as friends united across every imaginable division to work together for harmony and hope in our world, so that we as God’s church might be a place of shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship for all the children of God, today and every day. May it be so. Amen.

A Proclamation for Today

July 3, 2016 By Andy James

a sermon on Isaiah 43:1-13 and Luke 4:14-21
preached on July 3, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

As we celebrate Independence Day tomorrow, there are many official proclamations floating around. Elected officials at every level use holidays like this one to affirm their support for the American experiment, claim that they are following in the line of our forebears, often more faithfully than their opponents, and remember the contributions of the military in getting us through the last 240 years as a nation.

“The Proclamation of the Gospel for the Salvation of Humankind,” from the banners of Bloomfield Presbyterian Church on the Green.

But today we turn to a different kind of proclamation in the church: “the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind.” These are the words of the first Great End of the Church, one of a series of six statements of the mission and purpose of the church first adopted by the United Presbyterian Church in North America in 1910 and lifted up with greater understanding and purpose over the last thirty years or so as we have lived into our identity as a reunited denomination after the reunion of the northern and southern branches of Presbyterians in 1983 following over 120 years of separation. We will spend the next few weeks looking at these Great Ends of the Church, celebrating the gifts that these words bring us as we live together in this congregation and beyond and looking afresh at the mission of God that these words call us to do as we live these words out in our life together.

Proclamation is an integral part of what we do as God’s people. In our Presbyterian tradition, we have lifted this proclamation up with particular importance. Each Sunday, our worship is centered around the proclamation of the word, usually (but not always) in a sermon like what you are hearing now. This time of proclamation is so important that we place it right in the middle, recognizing that everything that we do in worship leads up to or follows from this point. Even so, the sermon is only the beginning of our proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind—we proclaim the gospel in our everyday words and deeds, showing God’s love, mercy, and peace as we live in God’s world and act with kindness and grace toward all creation.

But what is this gospel that we proclaim? What exactly is the gospel, the “good news” that we can offer the world? What is the salvation that we lift up for the world to embrace? Our reading this morning from the gospel of Luke gives us some helpful insights into a biblical and faithful understanding of these questions. In this reading, we hear about the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, about the first chance he had to proclaim his ministry in his hometown. After making his way through the other nearby towns, he arrived back home in Nazareth and “went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom.” When Jesus stood up to read, he found this passage in the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and used it to proclaim what he understood as the core of his message. Presbyterian pastor Eugene Peterson paraphrases those words from Isaiah that Jesus quoted this way:

God’s Spirit is on me;
[God has] chosen me to preach the Message of good news to the poor,
sent me to announce pardon to prisoners
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to set the burdened and battered free,
to announce, “This is God’s year to act!”

This was a radical proclamation. The world was not all that favorable to such a message, after all. Such a day of peace, justice, and blessing stood in stark contrast to the carefully constructed way of Rome that insisted on putting the poor in their place and increasing the oppression of the oppressed. You’d have to be crazy to live in such a way. Everyone knew that Rome would quickly suppress any attempts to claim real power and control for anyone other than the emperor.

But even after this radical threat to the superiority of the emperor through a recognition that there was something greater than the way of Rome, Jesus kept on going. After reading these words, he began his interpretation of them with an even more radical claim:

Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.

Not only would God send God’s Spirit upon someone, sometime, that person was Jesus himself, and that time was then and there. This made Jesus’ proclamation all the more astounding. Luke continues the story after our reading today, indicating that Jesus’ words so bothered the people of his hometown that they chased him to the edge of a cliff!

But the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind is equally challenging for us today. Our world is not particularly interested in hearing good news for the poor, release for the captives, or freedom for the oppressed. More often than not, the systems and structures of our world are set up to shut down such news, to suppress this good news by claiming that it is a bad thing to name the powers that are destroying us, to insist that we should keep our focus on the spiritual life and not worry about its implications on everything else. We lift up the voices of hate and hurt, the continual rush of violence all around the world, and the little acts of oppression that make their way insidiously into our lives. Anyone who speaks up to offer “good news” today that goes beyond hope for something in a world still yet to come is so very unlikely to be heard above the din of the world.

Even so, as God’s church, we are still called to offer “the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind,” not because our words themselves will bring the salvation that we so desperately need, not because we expect or even demand a positive response to what we share, but because the world may need nothing more than simply to hear the good news of this gospel, this hope that there is something more beyond the uncertainty of our weary world, this promise that God has not forgotten us and is not done with us yet.

The church has traditionally called this work of proclamation “evangelism.” Evangelism can be a difficult word for many of us. For some, it conjures up images of forced conversations with strangers, bad street preaching, and even threats of eternal damnation. I know plenty of people who have ended up in the Presbyterian church because they don’t want to be a part of such things!

But the evangelism that comes in this proclamation for today is not so much about these things as it is about living out our faith in our everyday lives, about making it clear to all those we meet along the way that we carry good news and live it as best we know how. We let our words and actions bear witness to the saving love of God revealed in Jesus Christ. We recognize that the wonder of this gift is so great that we cannot hold it in or keep it just for ourselves. And we are so filled with the gratitude and joy that emerge from the depth of grace that we have received that we must invite others to join us on this journey of thanksgiving and hope.

In the midst of our broken and fearful world, we offer good news as we proclaim with boldness the words of the prophet Isaiah:

Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.

In our world filled with so much need, we can join our words and actions with Jesus to “bring good news to the poor… to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” And in a world so filled with the glory of God, we can join with heaven’s song of alleluia so that we are united in love and witness to God each and every day.

May God so strengthen us as we offer this proclamation of this gospel for today, that our world might know the wonder and joy that we share together here so that it can join in this song of grace and hope. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Responding to Grace

June 12, 2016 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 7:36-8:3
preached on June 12, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

We don’t know her story, but everyone there certainly did. The woman who showed up at the Pharisee’s house almost certainly had a history. People knew her story well enough for the gospel writer to describe her as “a sinner,” making her something of an unwanted presence in the home of one of the staunch religious officials of the day. But that day she set aside her past, her shame, her fear to take a chance on a new path. Even someone with a history like hers could hear about this teacher Jesus, and when she did, she put everything on the line to be thankful for his words, his actions, his presence. When she heard that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, she gathered up all the courage she could muster, bought a jar of alabaster ointment, and joined the guests of honor at dinner. Upon her arrival, she bathed Jesus’ feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. Once his feet were clean, she kissed them and anointed them with her ointment, showing incredible honor to this teacher even from her position of low estate.

This woman’s actions stood in sharp contrast to those of Jesus’ host. Just as we don’t know the woman’s whole story, we also don’t know why this Pharisee invited Jesus over for dinner in the first place. Didn’t the Pharisees realize that they would not look very good when they got involved with Jesus? When the Pharisee saw what was going on between his guest of honor and the uninvited guest, he got a little frustrated. Luke tells us that the Pharisee started saying something to himself, noting that if Jesus were really everything he said he was, he would know this woman’s whole story and would want nothing whatsoever to do with her.

Somehow Jesus got wind of all this. Maybe he was able to read the Pharisee’s mind and know things the Pharisee assumed he could not. Maybe the Pharisee had mumbled it under his breath just loud enough for Jesus to hear. Maybe the Pharisee was just showing his disgust at the situation in his body language or on his face. However Jesus figured out what his host felt, he immediately confronted him about it. First, Jesus asked his host who would be more grateful, a debtor who had had a five hundred denarii debt canceled or a debtor who had had a fifty denarii debt canceled. Once the Pharisee agreed that the one with the greater original debt would be more grateful when it was canceled, Jesus pointed out the strange situation that had greeted him upon his arrival at the Pharisee’s house. While Pharisee had offered basic hospitality to his guest, Jesus pointed out that the woman—an unwanted guest—had offered far more than the host himself. The host had left Jesus with dirty feet and treated him with little or no special honor. The woman, however, even with her dubious reputation, had shown Jesus great honor, washing his feet, honoring him with her care and concern, and even anointing his feet with ointment.

He closed his rebuke of his Pharisee host by indicating that her sin—the thing that had made her so unsuitable to the the Pharisee in the first place—had been forgiven, and that her gratitude for this had been the source of the great love that she had shown to Jesus along the way. Finally, Jesus addressed the woman directly and affirmed and confirmed what she seemed to already know in offering her extravagant gifts to him—her sins were forgiven, her faith had made things different for her, and she could finally go in peace.

The other guests responded with outrage. “Who is this who even forgives sins?” they asked. This is not how any reputable teacher was to behave! Inviting people to drop their nets and follow, interpreting the law and the prophets, even healing the sick and dealing kindly with a stranger—all that was expected of a teacher, but forgiveness of sins was something for God alone! They may have started out on the fence with this Jesus, figuring that he just didn’t know the woman’s history when he didn’t stop her from caring for his feet, giving him a little grace about showing his frustration with his less-than-perfect host, even accepting his words that showed deeper gratitude for the woman’s generosity than the Pharisee’s invitation to dine, but once Jesus began intervening to forgive sins as only God could, he had gone too far.

In this story as in so much of life, the thing that really matters is how we respond. The woman, the Pharisee, the other guests—all these characters in the story responded to the events before them in very different ways. Those responses were certainly informed by their experiences and the particular way of life that they had enjoyed, but their responses spoke even more to how they understood the grace of God at work in their lives and their world. Ultimately, the question that matters from this story for them—and for us—is, how do we respond to the grace of God revealed in our lives?

The Pharisee was pretty stingy in his response to God’s grace. He had everything that he needed, knew the way of God present in the law, and enjoyed wealth and status in the community enough to entertain Jesus in his home. And yet his response did not match the extravagance of grace that he himself enjoyed as one guest—the woman—was made to feel inferior and unwelcome and Jesus was left with dirty feet and nothing more than a meal.

The rest of the guests were a little less skeptical in their response to the grace shown here, at least at first. They certainly knew the woman who invited herself to this meal, yet they did not insist that she be sent away. They seemed to understand why Jesus would speak to their host the way he did because he had been a little less than welcoming of all of them. And yet, when Jesus offered the full extravagance of grace to the woman by forgiving her sins, they turned on him, afraid of the depth and breadth of grace that he offered, uncertain that anyone could grant such broad strokes of forgiveness and hope.

In stark contrast to the Pharisee and the other guests, the woman’s response to the grace shown here began long before she ever even saw any evidence of it. She came to wash and anoint Jesus’ feet not in hopes that her sins would be forgiven but because she had already received something from Jesus. She already knew that God was up to something new in his words and actions, and she wanted to respond. Her gracious and generous actions were not an attempt to buy her way into Jesus’ favor but rather an offering of thanks for the message that he had brought, coming long before he uttered any words of forgiveness in her hearing. She knew from everything that she had heard that Jesus’ message was one of generous hope for people like her, and so she had no choice but to respond with the same kind of generosity.

She was not alone in her generosity. Jesus had the things that he needed for his life and ministry because of the gifts of people like this woman. Luke recognizes a number of them, many themselves women, at the conclusion of our reading this morning. They too had encountered the wonder of God in Jesus, and they knew that they had to respond with the same kind of generous grace out of their lives to make a way for others to experience these things for themselves.

If we see in this story that the response is all that really matters, how then do we respond to God’s grace?

Are we like the Pharisee, meting out grace in stingy, small doses to those who deserve it, insisting that sin sticks indelibly to people who act badly even when they experience the fullness of God’s grace, only making room at the table for those who deserve it, showing no more care and concern than the basics of what is required to look good enough along the way?

Are we like the other guests at the meal with Jesus, excited to experience the grace for ourselves but pulling back out of fear when that grace starts to change how our world is ordered and organized?

Or are we like the woman, very well aware of where and how we fall short of God’s intentions, yet ready and willing to respond with extravagant gifts because we have experienced the extravagance of God’s grace?

May God open us to respond to all the gifts of God’s love, mercy, peace, and grace with the abundant hope and generous love of this woman and all who followed Jesus so that the world might know the depth and breadth of God’s love in Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Divine CPR

June 5, 2016 By Andy James

a sermon on 1 Kings 17:8-24 and Luke 7:11-17
preached on June 5, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

As many of you know, about a year and a half ago the session decided to invest in an automated external defibrillator. An automated external defibrillator, or AED, for those who don’t know, is an electronic device that can revive an unresponsive person by determining if the heart can be shocked back into proper functioning and then providing that sort of shock. In the last few years, the technology in these incredible life-saving devices has become much more widely available, and AEDs can now be found in almost any public space, not just in medical facilities. In addition to the cost of the device, we are required to have our staff and volunteers complete training, so I and several other folks completed both an online course and a limited “compressions-only CPR” class from the fire department that we hosted here last year.

Now, after helping install our AED and going through the training myself, I can’t help but notice AEDs in other places that I go. I walk past one pretty regularly in the presbytery’s office building, and I have paid perhaps too much attention to the one in the main hallway at the church in Manhattan where my chorus rehearses. Last weekend, as I traveled to Tennessee to participate in my cousin’s daughter’s baptism, I paid close attention to the AEDs in the airport! The goal of this sort of broad installation of these incredible life-saving devices is to make them widely available for easy access in an emergency, but when I see one of these devices, I keep finding myself wondering if I would be ready to step in myself to assist if I encountered such an emergency. If someone actually needed the resuscitation that the AED can offer, would I be able to make it work properly? Would I mess it up somehow? Even worse, would I be too afraid to act at all?

All this talk about AEDs and electronic resuscitation comes to mind because our two readings this morning are stories of divine, miraculous resuscitation. These two stories from 1 Kings and Luke were first told long before the development of any formal CPR techniques or the invention of the AED, but the concept of resuscitation here is just as strong as here we hear of how God managed to step in and bring two seemingly dead men back to life.

First, 1 Kings tells us about the prophet Elijah’s visit to a widow in Zarephath, setting the stage for the incredible miracle of divine resuscitation. When Elijah first met this woman and asked her for a little water and bread, she was preparing to share one last meal with her son as they suffered through drought and famine. They were almost out of meal and oil, and she was out gathering what few sticks she could find to start the fire to prepare their final meal. But Elijah assured her that if she shared a cake of this with him, God would provide for them all through the drought:

For thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the Lord sends rain on the earth.

And it was as Elijah said for them. Even though they survived the drought, the widow’s son soon fell ill and died. She was furious with Elijah: “What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to bring my sin to remembrance, and to cause the death of my son!”

Elijah then took the son’s body, laid it in his own bed, and cried out in prayer to God: “O Lord my God, let this child’s life come into him again.” God revived the son, and his mother was finally convinced that God had been at work in Elijah all along to bring them food in the days of famine and drought and restoration of life when her son was all but dead for good.

This story of Elijah’s involvement in divine resuscitation sounds very much like a moment in Jesus’ ministry described in our reading from Luke this morning. Jesus, like Elijah, encountered a woman whose only son had died, finding her as she journeyed alongside her son’s body with a large crowd from the town. First, Jesus had compassion on the woman, telling her, “Do not weep.” But these were not empty words. He then went up to the body, touched the stretcher on which the son lay as the pallbearers stopped, and told the son to get up. “The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother.”

Everyone around was amazed and a bit fearful, for Jesus had managed to overcome the seeming limitations of death. Not only this, Jesus had stepped into their world in a way not seen since the days of Elijah, for they surely remembered this older story of a widow and her son. So word quickly spread about Jesus “throughout Judea and all the surrounding country” as people began to wonder all the more who this Jesus was and what he was up to in his act of divine resuscitation.

These two acts of divine CPR through the actions of Elijah and Jesus are incredible moments of God’s intervention in the lives of people in the real world that we probably can’t expect to be repeated just like this today, but they can still tell us a few things about how God might be at work in our lives and world today.

First of all, these moments of divine CPR gives us a glimpse of God’s special care and concern for those who are traditionally ignored by the rest of the world. In ancient times, widows and orphans were the most vulnerable persons in society, the “poorest of the poor,” if you will, who were most likely to be ignored by those in positions of power. We hear over and over again in scripture about how God especially cares for just these sorts of people, so it is no surprise, really, that both these stories of resuscitation—two of only a handful in the entire Bible—are gifts of life back to those who would be made particularly vulnerable by these deaths. In the same way, then, when we wonder where God is at work in our world, we ought to look among the people who are most vulnerable today—the poor, the homeless, the outcast, the immigrant, the stranger, the excluded, the refugee, the vulnerable—for there God promises to be present and take action to open the way to new life.

Second, these two stories of divine CPR provide us an important reminder of the difference between resuscitation and resurrection. These stories from 1 Kings and Luke offer us visions of resuscitation, of God breathing life back into dead bodies, of a restoration of life back to the way it was just a little while earlier. These resuscitations stand in sharp contrast to the promise of resurrection, a way of new and transformed life first glimpsed as Jesus was raised from the dead and that is promised for us too as all things are made new in the wonder of God’s new creation at Christ’s return. By the miracles of modern medicine or divine power, a few of us may experience resuscitation to bring us back to the life we know now on this earth, but the promise in Christ is that we will all come to know a resurrection of transformation and new life in that day yet to come beyond this world and this life.

Finally, these stories of divine CPR ought to make us wonder about whether and how we are willing, able, and ready to participate in this kind of reviving work for ourselves. God is not just getting ready for one big massive resurrection at the end of time—God is constantly renewing and restoring things in our world, too, and God invites us to join in this challenging work each and every day. In light of all this, we ought to be asking ourselves questions like those I find myself asking when I see an AED hanging on the wall. Are we ready for the breath of God to come upon us to help restore and revive things in this world? Do we have the spiritual energy to join in God’s work of resuscitation and resurrection all around us? Are we ready to step in and act, or are we just going to stand back and watch? While it is quite unlikely that we will end up participating in actually bringing someone back to life, it is far more likely that we will have the opportunity to join in all that God is doing to bring life to the broken and fearful places of our world, to uncertain and downtrodden people who are the widows of our own time, even to the old and static places that need the fresh divine breath to revive them again.

So may God give us the wisdom and strength to join in this divine CPR, breathing new life into our weary world, sharing hope in every uncertain and challenging place, and reviving the wonder of the created order until all things are made new in Jesus Christ our Lord. Lord, come quickly! Alleluia! Amen.

What’s in a Name?

May 22, 2016 By Andy James

a sermon on Psalm 8
preached on Trinity Sunday, May 22, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

I spent the past few days with four hundred Lutherans at a hotel out on Long Island, serving as the parliamentarian for their annual synod assembly. While I’ve been Presbyterian all my life, I have a special place in my heart for Lutherans—my grandmother’s deep faith that continues to inspire me was grounded in her upbringing as a Lutheran, even though she spent the last fifty years of her life as a Presbyterian! So when I first began working with the Lutherans a couple years ago, I made it a point to let them know my more formal name, C. Anderson James. They even put it on my nametag that way! Everyone pretty quickly picked up that I go by “Andy,” but they also figured out that I have good Lutheran roots through my Norwegian family name!

As I stared at my nametag occasionally over the last few days, I was reminded of that age-old question: “What’s in a name?” For us, maybe it is family or ethnic identity, as it is for me, maybe some historical figure, maybe our parents’ favorite writer or artist or sports star, maybe an embrace of creation, maybe something we don’t even know about. While we may think carefully about the origins and meaning of our names, do we apply the same question to God?

Our psalm for this Trinity Sunday lifts up this concern loud and clear for us today: “O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” Nowadays, the name of God isn’t always that big of a deal, but in the psalmist’s day, this was a giant concern. One scholar remarks that in the ancient Near East of biblical times, names had unique power:

Names conveyed presence and the ‘nature, power, and reality’ of their bearers, especially in relation to their divine bearers. (Thomas W. Walker, “Trinity Sunday: Psalm 8: Exegetical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume III, p. 33, 35)

And for the Hebrew people, one of the divine names, Yahweh, was so holy that it was unspeakable. Even today, when it appears in scripture, faithful Jews replace it with another name for God so as to avoid saying it and compromising its holiness.

To a certain extent, Trinity Sunday as we celebrate it today is rooted in historic understandings of God’s name that had great importance in the culture and philosophy of the ancient world, but does that mean that we can pay less attention to the Trinitarian name of God today? I for one think that we can still learn a few things from this ancient and historic doctrine that we celebrate on this day.

For starters, in its very name this day reminds us of how complex God’s name has become in our Christian understanding—our Triune God, three in one and one in three, is made up of these three persons who each carry a different name, yet these three persons are interrelated in such a way that the works of one cannot be separated from the works of another. And the name of God in the Trinity is complicated further by the historic use of “Father” to refer to the first person of the Trinity. God does not have gender as we humans do, yet this historic name carries a connotation of maleness that disrupts that very understanding to its core.

God’s name gets even more complicated when we look at the incredible variety of names and characteristics attributed to God in scripture. Our last hymn gave us only a small taste of the different names scripture offers us for God, so it wisely reminds us “that no single holy name / but the truth that feeds them all / is the God whom we proclaim.” The issue of God’s name, particularly when thinking about the Trinity, is so incredibly complicated and confusing that it sometimes seems like it isn’t worth the trouble. And yet, amidst all this mystery and uncertainty and confusion, the psalmist demands that we confess the majesty of God’s name.

God’s glory is beyond all description, the psalmist declares, yet praises to it rise up from the mouths of babes and infants. God’s majesty is abundantly clear in the beauty and power of creation, and such incredible glory makes the limitations of our humanity stand out like a lump of coal in a field of diamonds. Even so, God still crowns us with glory and honor and entrusts us with the bounty of the earth so that we might share in the power of God’s name always. In all these ways, God’s name becomes real in the world—and we have the chance to bear it for ourselves, as we join in songs of praise.

But even the best human names for God can’t capture the fullness of who God is. Even our greatest attempts to capture God’s glory in human words will fall short. Yet we still must try. The Trinity is the best name we’ve been able to sort out based on God’s revelation in the Bible and prayerful reflection on this over the centuries, and it is still incredibly confusing, mysterious, and incomplete. And yet, we bear the name of the Triune God each and every day as we live in hope in our world. We bear the name of the Father, the eternal Parent, the first person of the Trinity, whenever we join in care for God’s creation, when we show God’s parental love in our relationships with one another, and when we cry out for justice for the fullness of God’s creation. We bear the name of the Son, a man named Jesus, fully human and fully God, whenever we work to understand God’s presence in the world, when we act to restore God’s intended wholeness to our world, and when we give of ourselves so that others might have the fullness of life. And we bear the name of the Holy Spirit, the eternal wind and fire, whenever we trust that God is present and at work in the world even now, when we embody God’s transformative presence in the midst of uncertainty or change or injustice, and when we step out in faith into the unknown wilderness yet with certainty that God will guide us along the journey.

But even beyond these incredible ways that we bear the work of the Holy Trinity into the world, we bear the name of the Triune God into the world whenever we live as the Triune God does. This living is at its clearest when we recognize that God is three and yet one and one and yet three—an incredible community of persons living and working together for the good of one another, three persons in an intricate dance that yet never gets out of step, three inseparable partners who do incredible work independently and yet for and with one another. And so we are called to bear this name of the Triune God into the world—not a God disconnected from other concerns or attuned to the needs of only a few but a God whose very being depends on being in relationship with others and joining with them to work for the transformation of the world.

This is an incredible and very different name to bear into the world. The complexity of this name can’t be spoken of or explained in only a few words. The community present in this name is difficult to live in our world where The wonder of this name can’t be whittled down to a checklist of steps to confirm our conformity to this doctrine in a matter of seconds. The mystery of this name can’t be figured out in a week, a month, a year, or even a lifetime. Instead, all that is in this name calls us to bear it differently. The complexity, wonder, and mystery of this name demand that we carry it with great care, with openness to different ways of encountering God because we ourselves have encountered God in so many different ways. The community in the triune name of God calls us to be people who aren’t about caring for ourselves so much as we care for others, focusing instead on how we live together as we embody God’s presence in the world. And the majesty in this name demands that in the midst of all this mystery and community we raise our songs of praise now and always. There is so much in God’s name—so much history and tradition, so much ahead for the future, so much reality, so much unknown, so much visible, so much still hidden, so much certainty, so much mystery. And thankfully, we don’t have to get the fullness of this name right all the time so long as we bear it into the world with us each and every day.

So may the majestic name of our Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, strengthen us and go with us as we bear this name into the world in word and in deed now and always. Amen.