sermons — Page 26 — Andy James

Visions of Peace

October 6, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Isaiah 2:1-5 and Romans 12:9-21
preached on October 6, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

There are two kinds of texts in the Bible that I especially love: texts that talk about the new and different thing that God is doing in the world and texts that urge us to live and walk in new and different ways in our life together. I like the first kind of text because I know that there is so much wrong with our world that is beyond our ability to fix. There are still so many places where things are just not like they should be. There is so much war and violence that distract us from living together in justice and peace. There are so many places where divine intervention seems to be the only way to extract ourselves from the mess around us. I like the second kind of texts that talk about a new and different thing that God is doing in our world because they remind me that there is hope even when things seem to be a giant mess. Even though we can’t fix it all ourselves, these texts make it clear that we have a responsibility to take action and live differently to make our broken world a better place.

Our two readings today are perfect examples of my favorite kinds of readings from the Bible, especially if we want to think more clearly and directly about God’s deep desire for peace in our world. Our first reading from the prophet Isaiah gives us a vivid vision of a new and different Jerusalem. This vision of the city shows us a place that stands as a monument of peace, justice, and integrity for all nations. It is a factory of transformation for the difficult but crucial work of turning swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. This Jerusalem is a center of instruction for following God’s ways and learning to live in peace.

Isaiah’s vision shows us the components that make this city such a place of peace, life, and health for all. First, it is centered around the gift of God’s teaching in the temple, where people can learn not just who God is but also what God is doing and how God is calling all people to be a part of the transformation of the world. It is a place where people look for new ways to explore God’s presence in the world and so walk in God’s ways each and every day. It is a place where God’s gracious judgment is lived out, not just for one nation or for a privileged few but for all people, everywhere. And most of all it is a place where war is finally set aside, where conflict is not settled by violent reaction but where peace is learned and practiced anew each and every day.

Sadly, this was only a vision. To this day, Jerusalem remains a city divided, torn apart by nearly every imaginable sort of conflict around religion, race, class, and history. It doesn’t have a good record of being a place to go to learn how to live in peace—unless the best way to learn about peace is to learn how it doesn’t happen. Yet the promise is clear: “In days to come” Jerusalem will be the city of peace, where people will stream to learn the ways of God and discover a way of life that does not learn war, and so all people are called to find this new path and walk in the light of the Lord.

This kind of challenge to “walk in the light of the Lord” is a great example of the second kind of my favorite texts from the Bible, the texts that invite us to a new and deeper faithfulness in our life and in our world. Our reading today from Paul’s letter to the church in Rome gives us deeper instructions on how to do this, and it too focuses squarely on issues of peace as it directs us into a new and different way of life. Many of these words are likely very familiar to us, as they have been adapted over the centuries into words that we use in the charge that often concludes our Sunday worship. There is still something important about hearing them in this context, for while they can seem like a long series of unrelated commands, they all point to a deeper and more genuine way of living in love and peace with all creation.

Paul begins by offering exhortations toward love, emphasizing that love should be real and mutual, that evil must be resisted, that honor belongs to all, and that serving God with all our hearts stands above everything else. He recognizes that life is not always easy, so he lifts up hope, patience, and perseverance as essential attributes of the life of faith and urges his listeners to support those who are in need and to extend hospitality to strangers. Then Paul turns more directly to describe how to live in peace with others. Repeatedly he demands that curses and vengeance toward those who have wronged us be set aside, that we take seriously the situations of our sisters and brothers and embrace both their celebration and their mourning. He demands that we recognize our limitations in all of life and living, and that we work to overcome evil, violence, and injustice not by responding with more of those things but by offering deeper and more real good in the world. This is not an old way of life but a new one, one that places the emphasis on right relationship over rules, one that sets aside old grudges for new possibilities, one that insists that peace really and truly can become real in our lives and in our world if we stop trying to defeat our enemies with the sword and instead seek to live with them in the same way we would like them to live with us. So rather than taking up the role of divine police officer, detective, judge, jury, and executioner for ourselves, Paul insists that that we leave vengeance for God and instead seek to overcome evil with good and so walk more closely in the way of peace.

These two kinds of readings that look ahead for us to give us visions of new and different things and invite us to do them ourselves are deeply challenging in our world today. When we look around this world, peace seems so distant—both in far-off lands like Syria, Israel and Palestine, North and South Korea, and all those other nations and places that we lift up in prayer each Sunday but also in places much closer to us where families are broken apart, gun violence spirals out of control, mental illness tears at the fabric of our communities, lesbian and gay youth are kicked out of their homes, and people are threatened by those they love the most. In our complex world, peace seems so impossible—so often, a compromise that seems to resolve one place of brokenness ends up driving others apart. And when we think about taking up the way of peace in our daily lives, the things we can do seem so insignificant, so tiny, so unimportant, so unable to actually make a difference amidst all the big things that pit us against one another.

Yet Isaiah and Paul insist that we must start somewhere. Following Paul’s charge to walk in a new and different way might actually help bring about the kind of transformation that God so deeply desires and Isaiah so beautifully described. Our hope of something new and different for our world can be made real even in tiny ways with simple actions of love, justice, and peace. And throughout it all, we can trust that God will work in all that we are doing to make even our seemingly insignificant actions important, transforming even the smallest actions for peace into a part of the new life for all creation, working in even our greatest brokenness to redeem the whole creation and guide us all to walk in the light of the Lord.

So as we gather at this table on this World Communion Sunday, as we remember our sisters and brothers in Christ around the globe who join us at this strange feast that looks back to Jesus’ last meal with his disciples and forward to the great feast of all creation in the years yet to come, as we make even a small offering to deepen the work of peace in our community, our denomination, and our world, may we trust that God’s vision of peace for our world is deeper and broader and wider and more possible than we could ever imagine, and may we then walk in the light of the Lord as we love one another, rejoice in hope, and live peaceably with all each and every day until all things are made new. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

Signs of Hope

September 29, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15
preached on September 29, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

I took a major step of hopefulness recently: I bought some new clothes. Now this might seem like a rather normal thing to do as summer changes to fall, but this decision was a bit more involved for me. Not only did I buy some new clothes, I bought some new clothes that wouldn’t have fit me just a few months ago. As several of you have noticed, I’ve been paying closer attention to what I eat and doing my best to exercise more regularly, and I’ve lost a few pounds over the last couple months. I still have plenty more to go before I get back to where I’d like to be, but my decision to buy some new clothes was a sign of hope that I actually intend to stay in shape—and a reminder that if I don’t I will have spent a lot of money on things that don’t fit me anymore!

This morning’s reading from the prophet Jeremiah tells us of a moment of deeper hopefulness about the future that had its roots in a much more troubling time. Things with Jeremiah and the whole nation of Judah were not good. The city of Jerusalem was under siege, and the people were weary of the continual assaults of the Babylonian army. Jeremiah took a large share of the blame. Beyond his prophetic words that ruffled the feathers of the people and the leaders of Judah, Jeremiah had tried to leave Jerusalem and go to Anathoth when the siege had briefly lifted, and so they thought he was deserting to the enemy. Eventually the king imprisoned Jeremiah in the palace to keep an eye on him and make sure that he didn’t get any more out of hand. The siege was actually nearly over, but the things that followed were much, more worse, as the leadership class of Judah would be taken away into exile, and city would stand in ruins and despair for forty years.

But in the midst of all this, our reading this morning tells us that Jeremiah bought a field. Any other time, this would have been a routine property transaction, with little or no meaning, but in this case, this purchase meant so much more. The reading today goes into great detail about the process of the transaction. We hear about how Jeremiah was next in line in the family to buy this piece of property, how Jeremiah’s cousin Hanamel sought out the imprisoned Jeremiah in the palace to make this transaction, how he weighed out the seventeen shekels of silver to pay for it all, how he sealed the deed of purchase and made sure that it was properly registered, even about how Jeremiah gave instructions that the deed should be preserved to last for a long time.

But all these details aren’t the point of the story. The specifics of measuring out silver and sealing a deed and storing it in a jar instead all point us to a deeper meaning here suggested in the opening and closing verses of our reading. First, Jeremiah said that he had gotten the initial instructions to buy this field as the word of the Lord. God had told him that his cousin was going to come to him and ask him to buy this field, and when it actually happened, Jeremiah knew that he had to do it. But ultimately the purchase of the field meant very little on its own. Jeremiah was not hoping to take advantage of a good real estate market or even just trying to keep the keeper of deeds busy in a quiet time! Even though he was certainly fulfilling the requirements of Jewish law to buy family property so that it wouldn’t get passed along to a stranger or foreigner, that wasn’t the main thing he was thinking about here. The end of the reading makes Jeremiah’s broader purpose clear:

For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel:
Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.

Just when everyone had given up all hope, just when the siege had tightened and everything looked bleak, just when everyone expected Judah to be swallowed up by Babylon forever, in buying this field Jeremiah insisted that there was a future for the people of Judah. Jeremiah insisted that there was good reason to keep doing the basic things of life together in community—to keep buying and selling property, raising crops, preserving records for perpetuity—to do all the sorts of things that suggested that the story of the people of Judah was not yet over. In this simple transaction of buying a field, Jeremiah insisted that he at least would not give up hope yet because God had not given up yet either.

Giving up hope is often the easy way out, even and especially in times like ours. It’s easy to just assume that there is no way out of a difficult situation and so we just throw in the towel. It’s easy to set aside our hopes and dreams when it looks like pursuing them might be more difficult than we expected. Like we are seeing in our Congress in these days, it’s easy to try to put off change when we are afraid of its consequences rather than taking the risk of trying something new that might actually make life better for so many people. It’s easy to assume that when our immediate and obvious options are exhausted that there is nothing more that God can do.

But taking little steps like buying new clothes while still losing weight or buying a field while a city is under siege are signs of hope in our world. These little things point us to God’s transformative presence in our midst. They remind us that life goes on, that the struggles of the moment should not overwhelm our desire for deeper and greater living, that God’s presence and action in our midst will guide us through any and every challenge we might face. If I can decide to buy new clothes in the face of uncertainty about whether they’ll still fit in six months, then we might be able to embrace a new hopefulness about some other things in our lives. If God can convince the prophet Jeremiah to buy a field right when the land is under siege, then we can be convinced that there is more to our story than what we ourselves expect or know. And ultimately, if God can turn the death of Jesus Christ at the hands of the authorities of his day into the promise of resurrection life for all, then we can be encouraged to set aside our own fear of death—in our lives and in our church—so that we might actually embrace something new.

This way of living out the signs of hope in our lives and our world is described well in a hymn by pastor and poet David Beebe:

Let us hope when hope seems hopeless,
when the dream we dreamed has died.
When the morning breaks in brightness,
hunger shall be satisfied.
One who sows the fields with weeping
shall retrace the sorrowing way
and rejoice in harvest bounty
at the breaking of the day.

Ultimately the word of God’s hope is the one word that matters for us. Our confidence cannot be in our own ability to redeem our troubled world. We cannot expect to find our hopes realized in the work that we do to change things for the better. Our own actions will not give us the promise that sustains us. No—the hope that enabled Jeremiah to buy that field while Jerusalem was under siege and enables all of our own signs of hope does not come from you or me or even the church but from God. This is not a hope that nothing will go wrong—Jerusalem ultimately did fall to Babylon, after all—but it is a hope that God will be in the midst of it all, that God will redeem even the darkest hour, that dawn will break even after the longest night because God is still in the midst of us. This hope is rooted in nothing less than the experience and encounter we have with God in Jesus Christ, where we have seen that we can and we will experience deep pain and even death—and yet there is always more to the story because God is in it. This hope does not come in putting off all resolution of the troubles of our world and our lives until we move into eternal life but rather embraces the work that God is doing among us here and now to make all things new.

So may we hope when hope seem hopeless, may we trust God enough to carry us through the darkest hour into the dawn of new day, and may God’s hope break into our lives and our world each and every day to inspire us to deeper faith and love until all things are made new through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Lord, come quickly! Amen.

No Joy in Mudville

September 22, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Jeremiah 8:17-9:1
preached on September 22, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

This has not been a good summer for baseball fans in New York. The Mets fans among us are pretty well adjusted to the season coming to an end in mid-September, but Yankees fans just aren’t quite as prepared for the way the Bronx Bombers haven’t lived up to expectations this summer—though apparently from the little I’ve heard it’s not quite over yet!! All in all, there is so little joy among baseball fans in New York this year that you’d think Casey had just struck out in Mudville!

But baseball is only the beginning of the things that are dragging down our hearts and minds these days. With each passing day, there seem to be more reasons to join the prophet Jeremiah in his lament:

My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick.

It has been a tough few months in our world. We narrowly escaped what would have likely been a nasty and long entry into the ongoing civil war in Syria, and I’m not sure we’re fully out of the woods yet. We’ve had little option other than to just watch as incredible floods in Colorado and fires in California have left thousands displaced from their homes. Terrorist attacks continue around the world, as at least 39 people were killed by an armed attack on a mall in Nairobi yesterday that continues even now and at least 75 more people were killed today when two explosions rocked a church in Pakistan. Closer to home, women and men and children keep getting attacked by shooters armed with guns that seem to have little place among us except to bring deeper and broader violence, this first on Monday in the midst of a busy military office building in Washington, DC, as 13 people were killed, then on Thursday in a city park in Chicago as another 13 were wounded, including a three-year-old boy, not to mention the countless other violent crimes involving guns that aren’t quite spectacular enough to merit mention on the nightly news. And if that weren’t enough to make your hearts heavy, this week the House of Representatives voted to cut $40 billion a year from the basic programs that help feed the poor in our country, removing four million people from those eligible to receive these benefits in a time when we still have the highest poverty levels in two decades. All these things leave me crying out with Jeremiah, “My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick.”

Jeremiah’s cry went well beyond this, though. His original lament in our reading this morning was rooted in a world under attack. Just before these verses, the prophet describes the arrival of troops from the north as the people hear “the snorting of their horses” and “the neighing of their stallions,” and yet the prophet’s cries here make it clear that the people still have not responded to God’s invitation to find a new and different way. “Is the Lord not in Zion?” he asks. “Is her King not in her?” Everyone assumes that the destruction about to be let loose upon Israel can be blamed on the absence of God in their midst, and even God does not deny this, responding by saying, “Why have they provoked me to anger with their images, with their foreign idols?” The people seem to have it coming, yet they also assume that God will step up and save them, even though the seasons shift and turn and nothing has changed.

But this seeming anger is not the only divine emotion expressed here. The people of Israel are not just “sinners in the hands of an angry God,” to quote the famous sermon title of Jonathan Edwards, great preacher of the First Great Awakening. The prophet here insists that God is up to something more and very much interested in finding a new way:

For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt;
I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me.
Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician there?
Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?
O that my head were a spring of water,
and my eyes a fountain of tears,
so that I might weep day and night
for the slain of my poor people!

God clearly does not take joy in bringing down those who go astray but instead cries out with deep and real lamentation because things have taken such a nasty turn. God is not happy to pursue vengeance or restitution for the ways the people have offended but rather desires to restore the full health and wholeness of God’s people. God does not seek to kill the people who have so deeply offended but rather weeps day and night for the slain of the people of Israel.

These are incredibly different words than those we heard only a week ago. Last Sunday we heard about how God rejoices when one sinner comes to repentance, about how God’s rejoicing is so deep and broad and wide that it gives us room to transform our own words and actions in our world so filled with pain and hurt. Yet these words of lamentation from Jeremiah this morning do not describe a different God but the same God. The same God who rejoices when humanity lives into God’s new way also weeps when we make a huge mess of things enough to put a whole people or nation or world at risk. The same God who rejoices like a shepherd finding a lost sheep or a woman locating a lost coin falls into mourning and dismay when any of God’s people are hurting. The same God who invites us to join in rejoicing because of God’s deep and wide grace for all creation also invites us to join in lamentation not only when there is no joy in Mudville, Flushing Meadows, or the Bronx, but also in Damascus, Nairobi, Peshawar, Chicago, Washington, or the homes of the hungry and hurting around us.

If we take all these words seriously and wish to join the full divine embrace of joy and lamentation, we may have to think differently about some things. We must take care when we claim God’s blessing upon us for the joy that comes our way, for if this divine blessing so fleeting that it becomes easy to question the presence of God in times of trouble, we have misunderstood the depth of God’s grace. We must not give thanks to God that we aren’t quite as bad off as that person over there, in whatever form that thanksgiving takes, for God does not rejoice in our good state but rather longs for justice and peace and relief for those who are in greatest need. And we must not feel the immediate and constant need to embrace some nugget of good in every situation, as we might do in trying—always ineffectively, I might add!—to comfort the family of one who has died with trite words that their loved one has “gone to a better place” or that untimely death is “part of God’s plan.” God does not offer words like these but instead cries out as we hear from the prophet today:

My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick….
For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt;
I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me.

With each passing day, I am more and more convinced that God ultimately desires our deepest and greatest honesty—our true, deep, heartfelt rejoicing when there is life to be celebrated and our honest and true lamentation when pain and hurt and strife are the real marks of the day. When we deal with others, then, the best we can offer them is time and space to make these same expressions of joy and sorrow, of thanksgiving and lament, for we know and trust that God is present with us and joins us wherever we are, in our joy and in our sorrow.

This amazing gift of God’s presence in joy and sorrow also calls us to transform our own lamentation for the pain and hurt of our lives and our world into action. We are called to cry out and work for peace in the midst of the wars of our world. We are called to respond with compassion and hope to those whose homes and lives have been touched by natural disasters. We are called not just to root out those who instigate horrible acts of terrorism but to enter into new ways of relationship with others in our world so that the anger and hurt that make such fertile ground for these things can finally be set aside. We are called to demand full enforcement of our current laws around gun control and to speak out for new, reasonable measures to prevent the kinds of massacres that keep happening, not just in dramatic incidents every couple months but every single day in so many places around our country. And we are called not just to make a difference for the hungry in our own community as we have done so well in our work with the Grace Church Food Pantry but to work on a broader scale to ensure that all people have access to the healthy food that they need to be well.

So may we join Jeremiah and God in the lamentations of our days, not just because there is no joy in Mudville or the baseball season hasn’t gone as we hoped but because there is yet more pain and sorrow in our lives and our world. And even as we lift our voices with cries of pain and hurt and dismay, may we join in God’s work of transforming this sadness into joy, of melting down the weapons of war to become the instruments of peace, of making a new and different way for all God’s people, for there is a balm in Gilead,the health of all people will be restored, and the sorrow of all will be washed away. Thanks be to God. Amen.

A Seeking, Rejoicing God

September 15, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 15:1-10
preached on September 15, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Many churches these days spend a lot of time, energy, and money talking about “seekers.” According to their research and approach, there are a lot of “spiritual seekers” out there who are looking for a church of one sort or another. These seekers usually fit a very specific demographic: white, usually married men and women, with one or two children and middle-class suburban values and sensibilities. They use this focus on seekers as the guiding principle behind all the other things that they do, establishing small groups that meet in people’s homes and talk about the problems brought on by our intense and busy culture, designing worship and choosing music to support the individual’s life of faith, and setting up other programs that meet specific perceived needs of this population. There are people who are very much seeking this kind of community, but increasingly I wonder if there are as many people who don’t fit this model as those who do.

This morning’s reading from Luke gives us two parables about seekers, but these folks seem to be quite different from the seekers these churches are expecting. When he told these stories, Jesus was talking with “tax collectors and sinners,” although they were not his intended audience! They were not the seekers he was referring to. Instead, he directed these stories more at the hyper-religious Pharisees and scribes who were criticizing Jesus for the company he was keeping.

First he told the story of a man who had lost one sheep out of a hundred. This strange shepherd leaves the rest of the flock behind to go seek out this one sheep who is lost, then he returns with it on his shoulders. This seeking shepherd rejoices because his one lost sheep has been found, and he feels it worthy of a celebration for everyone! So Jesus connects this rejoicing back to his audience of Pharisees and scribes—and the tax collectors and sinners who were certainly also listening in!—by noting that “there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.”

Then Jesus repeats the same model and outline with a second story of a different seeker, this time a woman who has lost one of her ten silver coins. She is so intent on seeking it out and finding it that she lights a lamp, uses precious oil, sweeps the house clean, and turns the house upside down until she finds it. Then she too invites her friends and neighbors to join her rejoicing, just as “there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

If we take a closer look at these parables, we have to notice the characters here. Who is doing the seeking? What is actually being sought? Unlike the seekers so many churches desire, the seekers here are not people but God. The ones doing the seeking and the subsequent rejoicing are stand-ins not for humans but for the divine, and it is surely worth noting that the second story puts a woman into this role, the only time in the New Testament when a parable “presents a woman as a metaphor or allegory for God.” (Charles Cousar, “Exegetical Perspective on Luke 15:1-10,” Feasting on the Word Year C Volume 4, p. 71) The things being sought out are also notable, as the lost sheep and lost coin are deeply precious and yet have little or no control over being lost.

The scribes and Pharisees in Jesus’ day—and some of the more legalistic among us in our own—would not particularly like this, preferring to keep the emphasis on repentance and encouraging a sense of personal responsibility for sinfulness. But Jesus will have none of this today. His emphasis here is on joy, for these stories do not call sinners to find a new way but rather invite everyone, especially those who consider themselves particularly righteous, to join in God’s celebration of new life.

In reflecting on the joy in these parables in Luke 15, Henri Nouwen offers a beautiful word:

God rejoices. Not because the problems of the world have been solved, not because all human pain and suffering have come to an end, nor because thousands of people have been converted and are now praising [God] for [all] goodness. No, God rejoices because one of [God’s] children who was lost has been found. What I am called to is to enter into that joy. It is God’s joy, not the joy that the world offers. It is the joy that comes from seeing a child walk home amid all the destruction, devastation, and anguish of the world. It is a hidden joy, [an] inconspicuous [minute detail]….

But God rejoices when one repentant sinner returns. Statistically that is not very interesting. But for God, numbers never seem to matter…. From God’s perspective, one hidden act of repentance, one little gesture of selfless love, one moment of true forgiveness is all that is needed to bring God from [the] throne to run to [a] returning son and to fill the heavens with sounds of divine joy. (Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son, p. 114, 116)

So today’s kickoff celebration seems like an appropriate time to hear these parables anew and spend our time rejoicing. We can use a moment to stop and celebrate and enjoy a crisp fall day at the end of a long and hot summer. We can appreciate a new and different word in the midst of so many other words in our world. And we need a reminder to rejoice as we begin a new time in our life together as my hours shift and change in my service to this congregation.

At our core, I think we are pretty good at this kind of celebration, at welcoming those who might have been called “tax collectors and sinners” back in Jesus’ time, at leaving room for our faith to deepen and our seeking God to find us in the midst of the strange and confusing wilderness of our world, at putting our focus on the rejoicing that God calls us to do each and every day. When I think about the seekers here, though, I am challenged by these images of this seeking God—a shepherd who is not afraid to leave ninety-nine sheep behind to find the one who is lost, a woman who is willing to burn a extra oil in her lamp and get dirty from stirring up all the dust around the house just to find one lost coin.

We can certainly be grateful that we have a God who will do this for us and for anyone, but I don’t think that mere gratitude is enough. Beyond joining in the rejoicing, I believe that we are also challenged to join God in the search, to leave behind the familiar and certain so that we can discover the deeper and greater pleasure of something new, to use the gifts that we have been given in new and different ways, maybe even to get a little dirty and put a few things at risk as we look to recover the lost coins and lost sheep of our world today. We are invited not just to set aside our uncertainties about those who are different from us but in fact to join God in seeking out those very kinds of people who are lost and cannot even cry out for help. We are encouraged not just to throw open our doors and see who shows up in our life together but to go out and seek not just those who are already seeking us but even more those who are not even able to know that they need to seek something, those who cannot even begin to cry out for new life.

This might mean giving up things that are dear to us: a little extra time, maybe some beloved traditions, almost certainly some money, and maybe even a whole lot more. Yet the rejoicing that can emerge from this search can be so much more rewarding. We can transform our understanding of our lives and our relationships, recognizing that they are not grounded in the merit of what we or others do but rather in the deep and wide mercy of God for us and all creation. We can seek out others, not just to increase the numbers in our midst or address their eternal fate but to invite them to share in the kind of rejoicing that gives us life. And in giving up something of what we have been, we might discover that God is seeking us too, that God is working to find the things within us that seem to be lost, that God is diligently searching our hearts and our lives to help us to lift up the times and places and ways that we too can made new, and that God is inviting us to rejoice as these new things take hold in us.

So may God open our hearts and our minds and our lives to this new and deeper rejoicing, that we might welcome the God who seeks us, join God in diligently and hopefully seeking out those who are lost, and share in rejoicing with God and all creation until all that is lost is found and all things are made new. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

A Friendly Challenge

September 8, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Paul’s letter to Philemon
preached on September 8, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

It’s hard to be angry with a friend. Well, actually, let me a bit clearer: being angry with a friend is hard! It’s not that our friends and family—those we care about and who care about us, regardless of the relationship—don’t make us angry; it’s more that when we do get angry at them, it’s hard to figure out what to do with it.

I learned all this the hard way, as I suspect many of you have, too. Once or twice or maybe even three times—no more of course!—I made the mistake of actually expressing the anger I was feeling toward a friend, which made me feel better but just made my friend angry at me. It usually just became a vicious cycle that ended only when we took a long time to talk about it or one of us just gave up entirely on the relationship. So over time, I’ve learned that there are ways that I can express my anger and frustration with my friends in small and gentle ways, appealing to their better nature from my own better nature so that we can be honest with one another while also showing grace and generosity as we deal with our flaws together.

Paul’s letter to Philemon that we heard this morning is one of those strange places where we see this kind of honesty and gracious confrontation. Philemon is a very personal letter, unusual in the New Testament because it is not just written from one person to a community but written from one person to another person. While Paul certainly mentioned others, Apphia and Archippus and “the church in [Philemon’s] house,” they were just the carbon copies on this note. Paul was writing first and foremost to Philemon himself, sending a very personal and passionate appeal that we have the privilege to eavesdrop on nearly two thousand years later!

It couldn’t have been an easy letter for Paul to write. He clearly respected Philemon a great deal. Philemon was an important figure in the life of the early church in his community—he was the host of their gatherings, after all!—and he was wise and wealthy. But Paul was just as much an important figure in Philemon’s life. He had been the one to present the gospel to him, and Paul’s continuing leadership in the church was clearly important to Philemon even though Paul was now in prison. Beyond this relationship, though, their lives collided beyond the church when Onesimus arrived on the scene. Onesimus had been Philemon’s slave, and for whatever reason he had left him and become a friend and companion and servant to Paul.

In the Roman world, slavery was a pretty common institution, and Onesimus was certainly not the only early Christian who was a slave. While nowadays almost all Christians condemn slavery outright, the leaders of the early church refused to do so, and it took far too long for our forebears in the faith to step up and condemn this horrific institution in its many forms, so we still must seek God’s forgiveness of our continuing complicity in this great injustice. The slavery practiced in these Roman times was much like what is likely familiar to many of us from our own nation’s history. While the dehumanizing practices of chattel slavery in the Americas took millions of women, men, and children from Africa and forcibly transplanted them to North and South America without their consent, Roman slavery was not built on these ideas of racial superiority and importation of labor but rather on the power relationship between the master and the slave. The master had ultimate, final, and unquestioned control over the slave’s whole life. In a technical sense, slaves remained human beings, but they were ultimately property. While slaves might work in fields as varied as agriculture, household service, artisinal crafts, and even medicine, historian Paul Veyne notes, “personal ties were highly unequal, and it was this inequality that was common to all slaves… Whether powerful or wretched, all slaves were spoken to in the tone and terms used in speaking to children and inferior beings.” (A History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, p. 58) Ultimately, the institution of slavery in Roman times and in all times since makes it clear that slaves are first and foremost property, and their relationships to their masters are rooted in the ultimate power of masters to buy and sell them.

So when Paul writes to Philemon here suggesting that he release his slave Onesimus, Paul is challenging his friend to take up a very different way. Paul doesn’t attack the institution of slavery here or elsewhere—it would take another 1800 years for most Christians to insist that it is not appropriate for one human being to claim to own another, and even now some who share our faith aren’t fully on board with the implications of this! Instead of attacking this institution, Paul confronts his friend directly and asks him to do what might have actually been harder: he asks Philemon to release Onesimus so that Onesimus can continue to assist Paul in his life and ministry. But Paul doesn’t just leave it there. He not only tells Philemon that he should release Onesimus but goes on to insist that Philemon should show Onesimus the same welcome that he would show Paul, that he should offer him the humanity, respect, and love that befit a brother in Christ, not an item of property.

Paul’s brutal and direct honesty and deep ethical appeal here could not have been easy to make. He, a poor prisoner of the Roman empire, was writing to someone who had great power and wealth, yet he had the gumption to suggest that Philemon swallow his pride and treat a disobedient runaway slave as a full-fledged relation in Christ, not just in some world yet to come but in the here and now. Paul insisted that the power his friend had over another of his friends was inappropriate and had no place in their lives as followers of Jesus Christ, and he challenged to Philemon to change things so that they would all have a deeper experience of God’s grace.

We don’t know how Philemon responded. There’s no record of whether he freed Onesimus or not. We don’t know if he threw a fit and never spoke to Paul again or if he welcomed his friend’s advice and found a new and deeper relationship with his former slave based on their common faith. Whatever the outcome of this initial appeal, Paul’s challenge extends across the ages into our own time. While we do not claim to own slaves who need to be freed, I suspect we do have a few relationships where the power dynamic needs some adjustment. There are most likely some places in our lives where we could stand to be more generous to those who are in need. There are certainly opportunities for us to give up the power and privilege that we have so that others can experience the fullness of God’s grace. And there are almost certainly times and places when we say that we are sisters and brothers in Christ and yet don’t take the deep and real consequences of those words seriously.

In these places and in others, we are called to say the difficult words and initiate the difficult conversations, to be honest with our friends when their words make us angry or their actions don’t embody the faith we know they have, to speak up when no one else is saying what everyone knows someone is thinking, to step up and insist that we all are responsible for caring for the least of these among us, even to demand that our nation and our world live out a new different way that doesn’t presume that more violence will bring us peace. Yet we can’t rush in like a bulldozer with these challenges—even Paul’s challenge to Philemon was rooted in their deep relationship and grounded in the faith that they shared. Like those places where we need to express our frustration with our friends, we are usually more likely to be heard if we approach these conversations with grace and generosity, not letting grace mean that others get a free pass but standing up with gentle yet firm insistence that justice for the least of these must prevail.

So when we become frustrated with our friends or our world, when we long for injustice to be righted and hope restored, when we look for a new way of life to take hold here and now, may we share words of justice and hope with our friends and our world, speaking out of our care and concern for one another, offering a friendly challenge to respond to injustice, and seeking a deeper peace in our lives and our world until Christ comes to make all things new. Lord, come quickly! Amen.