sermons — Page 3 — Andy James

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.

Unscattered and Unscrambled

May 15, 2016 By Andy James

a sermon on Genesis 11:1-9 and Acts 2:1-21
preached on Pentecost, May 15, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

One of my less-well-known and newer hobbies is crossword puzzles. Many nights, as I lay on the couch catching up on the latest episodes of my favorite TV shows or watching a soccer match, I pull up a crossword puzzle on my iPad and do my best to complete the grid based on the pithy clues. At this point, a couple years into this new hobby, I’ve gotten reasonably proficient at the New York Times’ Monday and Tuesday puzzles. I struggle a bit but usually try and occasionally finish a Wednesday puzzle, but I gave up even trying Thursday through Sunday when I could only fill in one or two blanks on a good day! I suspect I’ll never be a really amazing crossword puzzle solver, but I find it strangely relaxing and a great brain exercise to spend some time unscrambling the letters and words that make up our language in this way.

On this Pentecost Sunday, as we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit in power upon the disciples in Jerusalem fifty days after Jesus’ resurrection, we get two visions of scrambled and unscrambled words that speak to a whole different kind of approach to language and words in our world. First we hear from Genesis about how everything got scrambled in the first place, of the strange city and tower that were under construction on a plain in the land of Shinar, where desire for human achievement clashed with the depth and breadth of divine sovereignty. On this plain, the people realized that they could build “a tower with its top in the heavens,” a monument to what they could pull off as human beings and a link connecting them to one another that would survive any attempt to scatter and separate them.

With each new level of bricks added, God became more concerned. Their intentions at the beginning were small, limited to one tower in one town on one obscure plain, but God felt that they would have little difficulty taking up an even greater creative project because it was so easy to communicate with each other. “Look… this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.” So God decided to confuse their language and scatter them away from this great city. Unable to communicate effectively with one another, they were forced to abandon the tower that they had set out to build. They called the place Babel, recognizing the “babble” of languages that had come as God had scrambled their language and scattered them across the face of the earth.

The scattering and scrambling begun at Babel persisted for generations. The story of God’s people throughout the ages was built upon the confusion first created at Babel. Not only were God’s people spread all around the world with different languages from this initial time of scattering and scrambling, the people of Israel had been further dispersed by the fall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel to Assyria, sending them all around the Mediterranean region and giving them many different local languages even as they shared a common religious tradition.

So on that first Pentecost morning, after the disciples had gathered “together in one place,” the Holy Spirit came upon them in “a sound like the rush of a violent wind” as “divided tongues, as of fire… rested on each of them.” In this moment, they began “to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.” Now this was perfect timing—not only was this fifty days after Jesus had risen from the dead, but there was a festival going on in Jerusalem fifty days after Passover, bringing some of those scattered, faithful Jews from all around the world to join in the celebration and pilgrimage. On that first Pentecost, though, these faithful Jews suddenly heard not Hebrew or Greek but their own native languages, spoken not by linguists or educated translators but by a bunch of country bumpkins from Galilee, the backwater of the backwaters of the empire.

Even before they started to make sense of any of the words, the message to these scattered and scrambled people of God was clear: God was ready to unscramble everything that had been scrambled so many generations before at Babel. Slowly but surely, as faithful Jews from all around the world heard the proclamation of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection in their own language and as Peter reminded them of the words of the prophet Joel that claimed that something new would be coming in the last days, the deeper message became clear to everyone: God was up to something new, and everyone was invited to join in. In Jesus, God unscrambled everything that had been scrambled before and brought together everyone that had been so scattered for so long.

Now things still seem scattered and scrambled a lot of the time. The various different versions of English that we hear in our daily lives, marked with the inflections of our homelands and first languages, are only the beginning! Even when we can understand each other’s words in shared language, there are so many other things that so easily scatter and scramble us. We struggle to recognize the differences of life and station that separate us simply because we have been born in different times and places. We intentionally and unintentionally affirm the privileges that come with our power and position along the way, dividing God’s people based on these very human things. We separate ourselves from those who appear to be different from us by the color of their skin, their ethnic or national origin, their understanding of gender and sexuality, or any number of countless other factors. And we scatter and scramble God’s intentions for our life together as those who lead us pursue policies and strategies that drive us apart from one another and even deny the image of God in some members of our human family.

But by the power of the Holy Spirit seen in such glory on Pentecost, God unscatters and unscrambles us along the way to show us that all things can and will be made new by the power of God in Jesus Christ. God works in ways beyond our comprehension to unite us across our differences and transform our lives so that we recognize the many things we share in our humanity. God shows us that the greatest service we can offer to God and humanity comes as we reach out to those in greatest need, speaking up for those who are victims of systems of greed and privilege, insisting that division on these very human grounds is unacceptable at every turn, and linking our future to the lives of those who have been scattered and scrambled by the difficulty and challenge of this world. And God comes to us in Jesus Christ to bridge the gaps that we create with one another and with God when we go astray from what God intends.

The gift of the Holy Spirit shows us that we can participate in God’s work of transformation in this world, that we are not left alone to face the challenges that confront us along the way, that we can only be divided from one another by the many assumptions of our world or the boundaries of this age. Just as the Holy Spirit breathed on the disciples on the first day of Pentecost, so the Spirit still blows in our midst. The Spirit opens us to new ways of living with one another that recognize the value in each and every human being and enable us to speak up amid the systems and structures of our world that try to deny this value over and over again. The Spirit helps us to recognize our complicity in the pain and struggle of the poor and suffering of our world so that we might live in ways that show hope and dismantle the systems and structures that get in the way of justice and peace. And the Spirit empowers us to be a part of God’s new creation taking hold in our world, sharing good news in our words and even more in our deeds so that the wonder of new life might take hold ever more deeply around us.

So as we celebrate this Pentecost day, may the Holy Spirit unscramble and unscatter us anew, guiding us beyond our assumptions to listen and act for the good of the whole creation as we walk together into the new life that emerges in the new things that God is doing in Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Looking Up

May 8, 2016 By Andy James

a sermon on Acts 1:1-11
preached on May 8, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

The Ascension of Christ, Hans Süss von Kulmbach, 1513. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The moment of Jesus’ ascension is probably unlike most any other in human experience. Artists and writers have tried to depict this moment in various ways over the centuries. The ascension is a very common theme in religious art, including the very interesting image on the cover of our bulletin today that leaves our focus on Jesus’ feet hanging down from the heavens. In more recent years, a commentator has suggested—and rejected—two more modern images: Jesus rising into heaven like a rocket launch or being “beamed up” as in Star Trek (Ronald Cole Turner, “Theological Perspective on Acts 1:1-11,” Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 2, p. 498). No matter what image we might use, the ascension is strange and unexpected enough that human words and images just can’t capture the wonder of this strange event.

The strange and unexpected wonder of this day is nothing new—even the disciples had to be confused and uncertain when Jesus ascended into heaven. They had enjoyed the presence of the resurrected Jesus for some forty days after his resurrection, and they went with him to the mount not at all expecting that this journey would be their last with Jesus. Sure, he had repeatedly warned them that he would be leaving them and sending the Holy Spirit to be with them, but their lack of understanding culminated in those uncertain and puzzled looks that we see in the painting on our bulletin cover.

Their act of blankly looking up encapsulated everything that they had experienced in all their following of Jesus. Their many expectations of what Jesus would do and especially how he would do it had been upended at every turn from the very beginning. They had repeatedly been forced to change their understanding of what God was doing and how God would do it in the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. And time and time again they had been left dumbfounded by Jesus’ words and actions as they struggled to figure out what it all would mean for their lives and their world.

As they looked up in those moments after Jesus disappeared from their eyes, the disciples’ conversation with Jesus atop the mountain only moments before had to be echoing in their ears. He had given them three clear points for their consideration—perhaps introducing in that moment the form that would dominate Christian proclamation many centuries later!

First, Jesus had told them that they needed to wait in Jerusalem for what would happen next. I suspect that this is not what they had been planning to do. The disciples were not city folks, after all—they had followed Jesus to Jerusalem from the countryside of Galilee, and they couldn’t have been particularly comfortable with the idea that they needed to stay there. To date, the whole Jesus movement had been pretty much confined to the countryside, and this would indicate the beginnings of a major shift ahead. Still, Jesus assured them that the things soon to follow would be worth it:

You will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.

As they waited for this upcoming baptism and transformation of their lives, Jesus continued with his second point that destroyed some of their expectations about the things that were ahead. The disciples were anxious and ready for him to “restore the kingdom to Israel” and lead a more complete transformation of their community and nation, but Jesus would have nothing of it. “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority,” he told them. Beyond all this uncertainty in timing, the sort of drastic, dramatic transformation that the disciples seemed to want here—and so many times before, too—was not in the cards for Jesus. He had not come to overthrow the powers of the world through traditional means of waging war or political revolution, for by defeating death itself, he transformed the world by defeating the deeper powers of evil and destruction that separate us from God.

The conversation on the mountaintop between Jesus and the disciples concluded with Jesus’ third point reminding them of the things ahead. They were to “receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon” them, and they would be given new and greater ability to engage Jesus’ message of freedom and new life. But even more, they would become his “witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” The disciples would be more than a band of students united by the teachings of their teacher—they would start a movement that would change the course of history all around the world as they told about their experiences with Jesus and invited others to join them in living as he invited them to.

As the disciples stood looking up to heaven, pondering these words and their experiences along the way, they received one final message to direct their way ahead. Two men in white robes suddenly joined them on the mountaintop, reminiscent of the two men in dazzling clothes who had appeared to the women at Jesus’ tomb on the day of resurrection. Just as they had on Easter morning, these messengers spoke amid the uncertainty and confusion of a strange moment, this time inviting them to take a different perspective as they gazed up into the sky.

Why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.

In these words, the two men sought to recenter the disciples in their experiences with Jesus, remind them of his promises to them, and focus their attention on the real things that were ahead for their witness to Jesus in the world. It was easy, you see, for the disciples to stare at Jesus’ feet dangling in the sky, to spend all their time looking up, to mourn the departure of their friend and teacher for the last time, rather than to confront the real possibility and challenge of the mission that Jesus had placed before them.

We so easily fall victim to this ourselves, too. It is easy to spend our time looking up, looking ahead to a promise of a different world that we might enjoy for ourselves, and miss Jesus’ call to make God’s new life real in this world, too. It is easy to put our time and energy into wondering where Jesus is in our lives and so forget to bear witness to him in ways that reveal him to others. And it is easy to pause in joy and amazement at the moments of glory that sneak into our lives and miss that these are the very moments that should lead us into words and actions that join in God’s transformation of the world.

As commentator Richard Landers puts it,

Ascensions and moments of divine encounter can dazzle us so that we forget the surrounding world. We glory in the moment, only to find that God has moved on, and so must we. (“Homiletical Perspective on Acts 1:1-11,” Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 2, p. 501)

The ascension of Jesus calls the disciples and us to do more than spend our days looking up. The ascension invites us to explore together how Jesus’ reign with God in power, sealed for us by this vision of his ascension into heaven, gives us hope for the transformation of our world. The ascension gives us assurance in the promise of the Holy Spirit that we will not be left to offer our witness to the wonder of Christ alone. And the ascension shows that God empowers us for our own lives of faith and work, for just as God has moved on from the glory of this moment, so we too must move forward and join in God’s work to reveal that glory again and again in the church and the world.

So as we celebrate the ascension of Jesus this day, as we remember how the disciples spent so much time looking up, as we are tempted to draw our eyes heavenward and miss the call of God around us, may God give us hope that there is something more than what we have seen before, confidence that are not left alone to bear witness to the wonder and glory of Jesus in the days ahead, and power to be faithful witnesses of all the things that God has done, is doing, and will do in this world and the next until the one who reigns in glory now is revealed in all fullness and hope as all things are made new in Jesus Christ our risen and ascended Lord.

Lord, come quickly! Alleluia! Amen.

An Unexpected Journey

May 1, 2016 By Andy James

a sermon on Acts 16:9-15
preached on May 1, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Whenever I’m in an airport, I dream about the other places I might go if I could only just get on a flight at another gate. My ticket usually has some sort of average destination—most recently they’ve been places like Louisville, Nashville, or Jackson—but all too often I manage to end up one or two gates over from a flight to more glamorous spot or a place where I have good friends whom I haven’t seen in far too long. These dreams of alternative exciting destinations are almost impossible to fulfill, particularly by air, as I almost always must carefully plan my itinerary and destination, and I cannot even begin to imagine the additional cost of making such a chance on a whim!

It gets a little easier when traveling by car or on foot to make an unexpected extra stop at someplace that just looks interesting. For years and years, the trip between New York and Florida was well-marked by endless billboards that culminated in a giant sombrero at South of the Border, a roadside attraction in the midst of the swamplands of the Pee Dee River just south of the North Carolina border featuring gas stations, restaurants, an amusement park, a motel, and multiple stores that sell nearly everything you could ever imagine emblazoned with the “South of the Border” name and logo. I can’t imagine very many people who would put such a place on their formal itinerary, particularly one that is so very campy and even borderline offensive in its portrayal of Latino people and culture, but it is certainly a spot that is odd enough that it is difficult not to stop once! But even in this exceedingly mobile age, I suspect that most of us don’t have the luxury of stepping away from our carefully-planned itineraries to explore many new possibilities along the way.

Our reading this morning from Acts puts us in the midst of an unexpected journey that opened Paul and his companions to so many new things along the way. Paul had been making his way around modern-day Turkey with the goal of proclaiming the gospel there, but his attempts were thwarted at every turn, not by any human authority but because they had “been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia.” Forced to go in a different direction by “the Spirit of Jesus,” he and his party ended up at Troas, a port city on the Aegean Sea.

As they tried to sort out where to go next, Paul had a vision during the night. He saw a man of Macedonia,the Roman province of mainland Europe across the Aegean from Troas, standing there, and this man was pleading with Paul: “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” Trusting that this vision carried the wisdom and call of God, Paul and his party quickly turned from their intended destination of Asia Minor to the new possibilities across the Aegean Sea in Europe—a similar journey seen by so many refugees not so far from Troas who too seek a different path of life from Turkey across the Aegean to the island of Lesbos on Greek territory in Europe. Paul and his companions made several brief stops on their unexpected journey to Macedonia, but they ended up staying “for some days” in the city of Philippi as Paul’s missionary journeys turned to Europe for the first time as part of this unexpected journey.

As was his custom, in Philippi Paul first sought out faithful Jews who might be particularly receptive to his message about Jesus. So on the Sabbath, he and his party went to a place near a river outside the city gate where they expected people might be gathering for prayer, and they found a group of women gathered there who welcomed conversation with them.

One woman named Lydia was particularly interested in what Paul and his companions were sharing. She was “a worshiper of God,” likely not a Jew, perhaps intrigued by what she had heard before about God but perhaps not particularly interested in going through the process of becoming Jewish herself. She was a woman of substantial position in that time and place, a dealer in purple cloth who had made her way to Philippi from Asia Minor. As a businesswoman and merchant, Lydia had surely overcome great odds to build the networks she needed to do her work and run her own household—an unusual and incredible feat for a woman in that day and age!

Lydia’s interest in Paul’s message about Jesus quickly turned to deep engagement. She and her household were baptized, and then she invited Paul and his companions to stay in her home, extending incredible hospitality to these new companions on her journey of faithfulness and life. Paul and his party enjoyed Lydia’s support and presence throughout their stay in Philippi, even as Paul and Silas found themselves imprisoned there and were then freed from jail in one of the most memorable stories of the entire book of Acts. Lydia is remembered even now for her role in establishing this early church, and Paul remembered his days in Philippi with great fondness throughout his ministry, culminating in his most jubilant letter to them in the book of Philippians.

Paul’s trip to Philippi and encounter with Lydia are the sorts of stories that make it clear how meaningful unexpected journeys can be to us. We may not find stores filled with strange kitsch in the middle of a swamp like at South of the Border, the clarity of a vision to guide us along the way as Paul experienced in Troas, the wonderful possibility of a new continent and broader destination for our work as they found in Macedonia, or the gift of generous hospitality from those we meet along the way as Paul experienced with Lydia. But the unexpected—and maybe even expected—journeys of our lives can nonetheless be times of transformation and hope as we welcome the wonder of the Holy Spirit into our midst.

We need look no further than Paul’s journey to Macedonia and Philippi to give us a few ideas about how to be open to these possibilities in our lives. First, good conversation can open our lives to the new things of the Spirit. Just as Paul and his friends gathered with the group of women “outside the gate by the river” in Philippi, so we can sit with those we know and love—and those we would like to know and love more—to share good conversation and listen for God’s voice together. When we can’t get a direct word from God in the gift of a nighttime vision or a voice from the cloud, I have found that one of the clearest ways to hear the Spirit speaking is in conversation with one another, whether it be with a good friend over a simple meal, with a group of the committed faithful who struggle together with the implications of scripture or the experiences of common life, or even with a passing acquaintance who offers the presence of God at a time when we least expected it.

We can also experience God’s transformation and hope in the gift of shared service and faith with one another. Paul and Lydia connected in amazing and unexpected ways across boundaries of gender, culture, wealth, and place, and yet God spoke in and through their relationship to guide their lives of faith together. When we experience the gift of time together in faith and service, we are united to one another and to God in new ways that open us for deeper possibilities in the future. I am still inspired for my own service by the connections and possibilities that I experienced almost ten years ago as several of us from Whitestone joined a group of twenty Presbyterians from New York City in mission and recovery work on the Mississippi Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. While I had met some of those on the trip before we traveled together, the work and experiences that we shared united us with one another and God in new ways that still inspire me nearly ten years later.

Finally, our unexpected journeys take their most powerful turn in the wonder and possibility of hospitality. In welcoming Paul and his party to her home, Lydia offered a powerful witness to the wonder of the gospel to break down barriers and bring people together. In the same way, when we offer God’s welcome to people in our life together in our homes, in our church, and beyond, we open ourselves to the gift of God’s presence in those in whom we might least expect it. And when we gather at the Lord’s table the welcome we have known from God with one another, we are lifted up into the presence of Christ himself, and we experience the power of hospitality as we share it with others and find it so broadly shared with us.

So may God open us to unexpected journeys, to places, times and ways that we will encounter the presence of the Holy Spirit in ways we would have never imagined, so that we might join God in the work of proclaiming the gospel of love and life in Jesus Christ our risen Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

A New Vision of Eternal Life

April 24, 2016 By Andy James

a sermon on Revelation 21:1-6
preached on April 24, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

As most of you know, I spend most Tuesday evenings singing with the New Amsterdam Singers. At one level, this is not a particularly surprising extracurricular activity for a pastor. The church has been involved in singing since before its beginning, and the choral repertoire was built on the music of the church almost exclusively until the last couple centuries, so even in our secular chorus we sing a lot of music that is built on the same topics and themes that I deal with in my day job!

A few weeks ago, as we began rehearsing the music for our May concert, I noted that one of our pieces had a surprising religious content. As I looked at it more closely, I discovered that its words were written by the great hymnodist Charles Wesley, the author of some of the great hymns of our faith such as “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,” “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus,” “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing,” and “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing.” As a nonsectarian chorus with many nonreligious members, we certainly aren’t singing this piece for the meaning of its words—yet as I read and sang along, the pastor in me couldn’t help but cringe a bit at the theology in them. The words focus on the promise of new life in a world yet to come, insisting over and over:

I’ll sing hallelujah
And you’ll sing hallelujah
And we’ll all sing hallelujah
When we arrive at home.

I wasn’t particularly excited about calling life in the world to come “home,” but then we came to the last verse:

Give joy or grief, give ease or pain,
Take life or friends away,
But let me find them all again
In that eternal day.

This idea of “going home” to be reunited with long-lost friends and loved ones when we die has bothered me for a long time. For all the emphasis that we put on the afterlife as Christians, the Bible is surprisingly unclear about exactly what will happen when we die. In what it does say, I can find little or no suggestion that we will be reunited with loved ones or given a more perfect version of the life we have known in this world, with exactly the same relationships and way of life we have enjoyed here.

Our reading this morning from Revelation gives us one of the clearest biblical views of what is ahead, insisting that there is an entirely different kind of world yet to come, “a new heaven and a new earth,” that is not about meeting our own individual needs, giving us a happy heavenly home, or restoring our individual lives to the way we might imagine them to be perfect. Instead, Revelation insists that our hope for life beyond what we know now is rooted in God bringing about a new creation where the things that make for destruction in the world are themselves destroyed.

For a book that is filled with mystery and uncertainty, this vision from Revelation is surprisingly clear. There is a new and different heaven and earth, for the old ones have been destroyed to make way for something entirely new. The capstone of this new creation, the holy city Jerusalem, comes down out of the new heaven to the new earth, ready and waiting to be made one with God. And not only does this holy city emerge from heaven, it also becomes the home of God and humanity, the common dwelling place of the Creator and the Created.

As these things come together to live in new ways, they take on new qualities. God will wipe every tear from the eyes of God’s people. “Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more,” for the ways of life that have enabled these things of death to persist will themselves die. If all that were not enough to convince us of the hope and wonder of this vision of John, this moment closes with confident and hopeful words offered by none less than the one on the throne:

See, I am making all things new….
To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.

This vision of a new heaven and new earth seems a good bit different from the sort of thing promised to us in the world to come by Charles Wesley and so many others. There’s no mention of reunification with long-dead friends and family, no chance for conversation with philosophers, theologians, and notable persons of different eras, no place for personal rejoicing about all the individual afflictions that no longer mark our days. Instead, there is a simple new creation marked by the absence of death, mourning, crying, and pain—but even more by the presence of God in everything.

This vision is further marked by the reality that these things are not about individual happiness but rather the transformation of the world. The things ahead offer us the world as God intends, setting aside the human destruction of sinfulness that has taken hold of things, reclaiming the way of life in wholeness, hope, and peace for all people that God set forth from the very beginning. The deep relationships of the world ahead come not from being reunited with people that we have known before but from the fullness of life that comes when we can finally dwell without fear in the closeness of God. And the wonder of things ahead will not be built on some foreign, distant understanding of things but on the very creation that we know and love now, restored and transformed with love and hope to be as God intends.

So what does all this mean? Why is it important to set aside a popular understanding of heaven for this more biblical way of looking at things? What difference does it make for us to get what we believe in line with what scripture promises us is ahead? After all, if we recognize that all these things are a mystery to begin with, doesn’t that mean that it is okay for us to go on believing the wrong things about them since it doesn’t matter anyway?

Maybe so. Maybe it really isn’t all that important to worry a lot about what we believe will come in the days after we die. Maybe the differences here really aren’t that big of a deal. Maybe all this is just a question of theology that doesn’t really matter for our everyday lives.

But I am not convinced that we can set this question aside so easily. The reality is that what we believe about the days to come affects how we live here and now. For far too long, Christians used the promise of a better world to come as an excuse for not doing anything about the problems of this world. Slaveholders justified claiming ownership of other human beings by claiming that they were introducing their slaves to a way of life that would enable them to enjoy eternal life in the next world even as they were treated like nothing more than property in this world. The rich and powerful have over and over written off their responsibility for the poor in this world by proclaiming a gospel of hope grounded in the next—with no change in the ways of this one. And Christians have used fear of missing out of the glories of eternal life to destroy the fullness of the image of God in far too many people who live and love differently from what seems to be the norm. If the focus of our hope for the world to come is on our individual lives, on “find[ing] [life or friends] all again / in that eternal day,” then our hope for God’s future is centered in our own desires rather than being rooted in the mutual flourishing of all creation.

Those different ways of thinking bring very different ways of living. If we are focused only on ourselves and the things we want to be different in our eternal life, we ignore the consequences of our actions in the lives of others. We miss the many signs of brokenness in our world that go beyond the immediacy of our individual lives. And we dishonor God’s clear instruction to love our neighbors as ourselves, in this world and the next.

But when we recognize that the things ahead are about the transformation of all creation, we join God in living the resurrection of Christ today, in declaring that evil has been defeated once and for all in Christ, in welcoming others to share the wondrous gift of life that is promised for us in this world and the next, and in proclaiming in our words, in our deeds, and in our lives that God is making all things new.

So may God give us a new vision of eternal life, marked not so much by the things ahead for each one of us but by the wonder of the kingdom of God that includes all creation, that we might celebrate at this table as people who will share this even greater feast even as we join God in working in these days to make all things new in Jesus Christ our risen Lord. Lord, come quickly! Alleluia! Amen.