sermons — Page 4 — Andy James

A Strange and Wonderful Meal

April 3, 2016 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 24:13-35
preached on April 3, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone
There are a multitude of ways to spend time with people you enjoy. You might go to dinner and a movie—in a theater or in someone’s home. If you happen to live in New York City and have the budget for it, you might go see a Broadway show, a ballet, an opera, or some other cultural event. You might get together at someone’s house for a meal, some conversation, and maybe a game of some sort. And depending on your interests, you might go to a sporting event of some sort or wander around a museum together.

My two favorite options, though, are a little different. For me, there’s nothing quite like taking a walk or sharing a meal. The conversation that comes even in quiet as you wander the streets or parks of our city connects us with one another. Conversation flows, ideas are exchanged, and something special happens as we spend time together. Then, in those times when we sit at table together, we find a strange presence in our midst, as walls of division are broken down and the connection among those present deepens all the more.

Rembrandt?, The Walk to Emmaus

Maybe my appreciation of shared walks and meals with friends is rooted in our resurrection story from Luke this morning. The story of Easter morning that we heard last Sunday offers us a clear proclamation of the resurrection, but we never actually see Jesus alive again. The only evidence of the resurrection is an empty tomb, and that could be caused by so many things other than resurrection. So with the proof of this strange event limited to a missing body, Jesus’ disciples start to move on with their lives, scattering from Jerusalem in disbelief as they start to figure out what they will do without their beloved teacher and friend.

Two of them then set out on the road to the village Emmaus, a seven-mile journey from Jerusalem, easily reachable on foot in a somewhat leisurely afternoon journey. The conversation naturally turned to everything that they had experienced together over the last week—the triumphant arrival of Jesus into Jerusalem as the people cried out “Hosanna,” the challenging teachings that Jesus had offered in the temple, the Passover meal that they had shared, the arrest and trial of their friend, the chants of the crowd to “crucify him,” the sentence of death urged on by religious leaders and proclaimed by the Roman governor, the strange events at Golgotha as Jesus was crucified, the placement of his body in a simple, new tomb, and now the reports that his body had gone missing so quickly.

As they walked and talked, another man joined them on the road, joining in their surely animated conversation, asking them, “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” His question stopped them in their tracks as it all soaked in. Their journey with Jesus had begun somewhat unexpectedly as they stepped away from their families and homes and livelihoods because there was something compelling about his message. They had taken him seriously when he invited them—maybe even insisted to them—to set everything aside and follow him. Their worlds had been turned upside down by this journey, this message, this man. And now, after an eventful week, they found their world turned upside down once again because he was no longer with them. So this strange man’s question came as a real surprise. He forced them to take stock of their emotions and lives for the first time in light of everything that had happened—and they quite literally stopped in their tracks.

As they began to answer this stranger’s question and walk along together again, the disciples told this stranger about their friend Jesus, about their hopes for him, about the death that he had experienced, and about the empty tomb that the women had found that very morning. Even though the stranger said he had not heard anything about what had happened to Jesus, he soon began to explain everything that they had told him about, interpreting everything that had happened in light of the scriptures that they all knew so very well. The conversation flowed, and the disciples came to a deeper understanding of everything that they had experienced.

He Qi, The Road to Emmaus

When the afternoon came to an end and the disciples reached their destination in Emmaus, the stranger “walked ahead as if he were going on.” But they were insistent:

Stay with us,
because it is almost evening
and the day is now nearly over.

Convinced by the logic of their argument and the lengthening shadows all around them, the stranger joined the disciples for the night. When they sat down at the table to share the evening meal, though, everything shifted once again. The guest became the host, blessing and breaking the bread, inviting them to share in a feast beyond their knowing. Suddenly the disciples recognized that the stranger who had been with them all afternoon was none other than the risen and living Jesus himself!

Just as quickly as they had recognized him, he vanished from their sight. They began to wonder and question and ask,“Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” They immediately set out for Jerusalem again, ignoring their own advice to the stranger that it was too late to be traveling—their joy was too great, and they had to share this news with the other disciples! When they arrived there, they learned that Peter had also seen Jesus alive again, and “they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.”

This incredible, life-changing, world-shattering walk and meal marked a dramatic shift for the disciples as they went from skeptics to witnesses of the resurrection in the time it took for an afternoon walk and an evening meal. We can join in this walk, this meal, and this transformation for ourselves as we make our way through these Easter days.

Fritz von Uhde, Road to Emmaus

First, we are invited to join the disciples in sharing the stories of our walks with Jesus in the journeys of our lives. We can bear witness to the ways that we have been changed by our encounters with the story of Jesus’ life and ministry as we walk with others along the way. We can talk with one another about how the experiences of Christ in our world have changed us and opened us to new and different ways of seeing and living in the world. And we can explore how the stories of Jesus’ life and ministry connect us with one another and with Christ as we walk this way together.

Then, we can gather at table for this meal as we look for the presence of Christ in our midst. We can open the doors to this feast wide so that all may know the kind of welcome that God offers here. We can come here expecting that Christ will meet us and be made known to us in the breaking of the bread, just as he was to the disciples on that first Easter evening. And we can trust that the feast we share here opens us to a great feast yet to come, to the feast on God’s holy mountain, “a feast of rich food, a feast of well- aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well- aged wines strained clear.”

These journeys and these meals are then the openings for us of the deeper, broader, wider transformation of the world. Just like the disciples, our worlds are turned upside down by the journeys and the meals that show us the resurrection. We cannot meet the risen Christ along the road or at the table and be the same. We cannot claim the resurrection as our own and live as if Jesus’ death matters more than his new life. We cannot claim a meal of new life here at this table and live as if nothing has changed. And we cannot go forth into the world to hear and see and witness the resurrection for ourselves if all that we are looking for is life beyond death for ourselves.

So as we make our way to this strange and wonderful meal today, as we journey forth into the world to walk with one another and quite likely with Jesus himself, may we know the presence of the risen Christ among us so that we can be a part of his work of transformation in our world and as all things are being made new.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia! Amen.

Looking for the Living Among the Living

March 27, 2016 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 24:1-12
preached on Easter Sunday, March 27, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Why do you look for the living among the dead?

This strange question surely startled the women who had come to the tomb on that first Easter morning. After all, they were looking for a dead man. They had watched with their own eyes as Jesus had been executed just two days earlier. They had seen the tomb and how his body was laid there by Joseph of Arimathea. They knew that Jesus, their friend and teacher, was dead. So when they showed up on that Sunday morning to find the stone rolled away and his body missing, they knew that something was up, but nothing was resolved by two men telling them that they were looking in the wrong place!

Why do you look for the living among the dead?

This strange question from two men in dazzling clothes at the tomb set the stage for everything that followed. “He is not here, but has risen,” they announced. This was strange, unexpected news—while Jesus had told them that this would be coming, even these very faithful women had forgotten about it. Their sabbath day had been filled with mourning for their friend, with preparing spices and ointments for the time when they would offer their final respects to his body, with all the other things that needed to be done when a good friend dies, and they had forgotten that this might not have been the end of the story for Jesus after all. It took these two men in dazzling clothes to jog their memory a bit, to remind them that Jesus had told them “that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” But as soon as they remembered, they saw only that their search for Jesus had just begun.

Why do you look for the living among the dead?

After being confronted with this strange question and reminded that Jesus had told them that this would not be the end of the story, the women started to think about where Jesus might be. So they made their way back to the other disciples, to the core group of men who had journeyed with him along the way, hoping that these other friends might join them in sorting out what was next. But the disciples thought all this an “idle tale” and dismissed this word outright. Jesus was dead, and they knew it. They had seen it for themselves, and the strange rantings of some women about a missing body were nothing more than rumors of grave robbers. Peter was the only one who even thought this report was worthy of investigation, but even when he found the tomb empty except for the linen cloths that had wrapped Jesus’ body, he went home in amazement.

This first proclamation of the resurrection ends with no report of Jesus actually being seen alive and only a vague hope that this story would end with anything more than an empty tomb and a missing body. The search for Jesus ended before it ever really began—it seems that they really did know only how to look for the living among the dead.

Why do you look for the living among the dead?

This strange question first posed to the women on that Easter morning echoes across the ages to us, too. It is quite fitting that one of the abiding traditions of this day is the Easter egg hunt, when we seek out hidden things, for the good news of the resurrection on this Easter Day demands that we seek the risen Christ in our world.

But this search inevitably leads us to the same places as the women and the disciples, looking for the living among the dead. Have we gone to the tombs of our world—the old ways of doing things, the memories of past glory, the preserved remains of days long since gone—expecting to find new life? Who have we met when we have gone there? Have any “men in dazzling clothes” helped to point us in a different direction? Or have the main people we have encountered along the way told us that our reports of new life are nothing more than an “idle tale?” Some days we may be better at seeking Jesus out in our world than others—some Easter egg hunts are easier than others, after all!—but it is so easy to end up with the women and the disciples, looking for the living among the dead.

Why do you look for the living among the dead?

The search for the living Christ in our midst isn’t always easy, after all. First, we have to get past the death and destruction and darkness that surround us. We certainly must mourn the pain and hurt of our lives and our world. We cannot ignore the realities of fear and anxiety that creep insidiously into our lives day after day, building up as reports of terrorism and death swirl around us, taking hold as too many who lead us or seek to lead us seize on our fears to exclude some of God’s beloved children from the fullness of God’s care and protection. And we cannot ignore the tragedies that strike our lives in ways and times that we least expect that force us to reorient ourselves to a different way of life.

Faced with all these moments of death, surrounded by destruction and darkness, it is difficult to imagine where we might look for new life. So when we do decide that we want to set out on the journey to find the risen Jesus, we tend to go looking for him in the places we know best, where we have seen him before, where life is comfortable and simple, where new life bursts forth in grand and glorious moments with loud trumpets and bold proclamations.

But if the experience of the women and the disciples is any guide, we are likely to be left wandering if we look only here. Instead, our search for Jesus must take us to some different kinds of places along the way. We might need to go some places we have not been before. We might need to seek out places where there is life abundant, places where people are showing care and love for one another, places where the barriers of this world are being broken down and we are invited to live together in new ways, places where light quietly and slowly—yet surely—streams into darkness to make it clear that death will never have the final word. We might need to seek out Jesus among those he called “the least of these”—among the poor and outcast, among the hungry and thirsty, among strangers and refugees and prisoners, among all who are rejected and despised by the world and so are especially made welcome by God. And in our search for the risen Christ in our world, we might need to make our way to this table, to this place where Luke tells us the disciples finally met him alive again, where their eyes were opened and they recognized him in the breaking of bread.

Why do you look for the living among the dead?

Friends, as we seek the risen Christ in these Easter days, may God guide us to look for the living among the living, to open our eyes to the places and ways that Jesus is alive in our world where we might least expect it, to walk in our world in ways that show that death does not and will not have the final word, and to serve in love so that all can see the risen Christ among us as we offer his hope to those in greatest need, until he comes again in glory and all creation joins in his resurrection life forever and ever.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia! Amen.

Filled with Grace

March 6, 2016 By Andy James

a sermon on 2 Corinthians 5:16-21 and Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
preached on March 6, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

James B. Janknegt, 2 Sons

One of the most amazing things about the Bible is the way the same stories manage to slip into our lives over and over again. Somehow this great collection of writings manages to carry some sort of meaning in every generation. When things in the world are changing, these ancient stories still speak to our present realities. When the situations in our lives shift for one reason or another, these same stories take on new meaning for us. And when we need comfort amid turmoil in our lives, these stories give us hope for God’s presence through it all.

We need look no further than our reading from Luke this morning for a perfect example of all these things. The parable of the prodigal son told by Jesus in Luke 15 manages to use the same words to speak volumes of meaning into radically different times and places. Every time I turn to this text, I am reminded of something different about who God is. Each time I hear these words, I get a glimpse of the many different ways God loves us. And each time I hear this story, I find myself entering into the parable from a different perspective—some days it is as the younger son, some days as the older, some days as some other minor character around the edges of it all, some days even the father.

Wherever we enter this incredible story, though, from whichever viewpoint seems clearest to us in this particular moment, we gain a glimpse of the grace of God streaming into our world in all time. Grace permeates every moment of this parable. Even the setting for its telling is a moment for grace—Jesus had stirred up trouble with the Pharisees and scribes because of the company he kept, because he welcomed tax collectors and sinners and ate with them, so he wanted to help them understand why he responded to their gracelessness with compassion.

The story, like the setting of its telling, is filled with moments of gracelessness. It opens with the younger son showing no grace whatsoever as he asks to receive his inheritance while his father is still alive. It is as if the son told his father that he was as good as dead to him, that he was worth nothing more to him than the value of the things that he owned. The father had the opportunity to respond with the same lack of grace that was shown him, but he chose to give his son what he asked for.

Andrei Rabodzeenko, Prodigal son

As the son wandered the surrounding lands and squandered his inheritance, he experienced a similar lack of grace like what he offered to his father from those he encountered. The people of his new homeland saw no reason to show this stranger in their midst any sort of grace. They treated him solely as a hired hand, leaving him to fend for himself in the midst of a severe famine, not even suggesting that he ought to take some of the food that he was feeding to the pigs to sustain himself. The son showed so little grace to himself along the way, too. He counted himself so worthless that he would not even be treated as a son by his father, that his father’s grace toward him had long run out, that he was so deeply undeserving of any care other than as a hired hand.

Amid all the gracelessness of this story, the younger son’s return home was filled with great grace. His father’s grace upon his return was so abundant and so much at the ready that he seemed to be on the lookout for his son’s return each and every day, and so he ran to greet him when he saw him from far away. This greeting was not one of stern rebuke but rather warm welcome. Before the son could even finish his carefully rehearsed speech begging for mercy, his father called for a robe, ring, and sandals, then he made plans for a great feast and celebration to welcome the lost son home.

Rembrandt van Rijn, The Return of the Prodigal Son

Amid all the grace shown in this story, the older brother was not particularly excited about his father’s generous welcome to his deadbeat younger brother—it seems that the deep grace of the father had not been passed down to either one of his sons! But the father would not let his older son’s gracelessness undo the grace that defined his life and he was so willing to share. When the older son protested that he had remained at home, working faithfully and diligently while his brother had “devoured [the] property with prostitutes,” and had enjoyed none of these gifts that had suddenly been showered upon him, the father reminded him that the kind of grace shared with his brother was also shared with him, too, but that this moment was worthy of celebration, for “this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.” No matter how much the older son might try to derail it, no matter how badly the circumstances were set with gracelessness, even no matter how difficult it might be for the younger son to accept it, the father insisted in his words and actions that grace would shine through.

In the end, Jesus’ parable is about grace—grace that gives more than we think we can receive, grace that opens us to a radically different way of relating to God and one another, grace that fills even the most graceless places of our world with God’s mercy, compassion, peace, and life—and this parable helps us to see how that grace can take hold in our lives and our world. When it does, we can do what Paul suggests in our first reading, from now on to “regard no one from a human point of view,” to embrace the new creation that comes to us in Christ, to make our lives marks of reconciliation and grace each and every day.

I suspect none of this made much sense to Jesus’ disciples as he told this parable as he made his way to Jerusalem. They probably grumbled about the kind of people who showed up when Jesus welcomed tax collectors and sinners. The disciples may even have found themselves more in line with the devoted older son, complaining about all the people who managed to join the crowd along the way when they had been with Jesus from the beginning. And while they may have appreciated his pointed criticism of the Pharisees and the scribes, we know that in the end they weren’t quite ready to put their own lives on the line to join him in this message. But as time went on, as the light of the resurrection shone upon them, it all finally began to make sense, for the resurrection of Jesus showed them that his death brought a new meaning of grace to everyone. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus ultimately made it clear that his parables about God’s generosity and grace were not just pipe dreams. No—the grace that the father embodied in this parable was the very same grace that was possible and real for everyone because of the reconciliation made possible in Christ.

As hard as it was for the disciples, living such grace is not easy for us, either. It is so much easier to choose to exclude those people who look or act or live differently than we do, to join the Pharisees and scribes in their grumbling about who gets welcomed in and who gets fed, to be so tightly bound by our rules that we end up like the older son and miss the joy that comes when transformation takes root and hold in our world. As hard as it is to show this grace to others, it can just as difficult to show this grace to ourselves. It is all too easy to end up like these brothers, so stuck in assumptions that we do not merit the generosity of God’s grace because of the depth of our wrongdoing or so mired in the despair of legalism as we focus on our own understanding of doing what is right that we miss the opportunity to share the joyous celebration offered when others come to know God’s grace in new ways. Our humanity makes it all too easy to exclude others and even ourselves from the abundance of this grace, but Jesus’ parable and Paul’s words remind us that this is no longer the way we are to live. We are called to set aside the gracelessness that comes to us so naturally and embrace the abundant grace of God in our lives as we become a part of God’s new creation.

So as we journey through these Lenten days, as we walk with Jesus on the way to the cross, may God show us how to welcome this grace more deeply in our own lives, may God help us to set aside our fears of those who might join us in benefiting from this incredible gift, and may God fill us with grace anew as we see others from this new point of view of mercy, peace, hope, and grace, as together we wait, watch, and work for the new creation to be revealed in our midst by the power of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Lord, come quickly! Amen.

Tragedy, Repentance, and New Life

February 28, 2016 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 13:1-9
preached on February 28, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

It seems that most every generation experiences some sort of tragedy that makes us aware of the fragility of life. For some people here, I suspect this moment was the assassination of John F. Kennedy. For an earlier generation, this moment might have been the attack on Pearl Harbor. For another, later generation, it might have been the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11. For my generation, though, it was the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986.

By that time, launches of the space shuttle were becoming more routine, as had been hoped, but that launch was special for many because it included the first teacher-astronaut, who was scheduled to present a live lesson from space to schools across the country. That teacher never made it to space—she and her six fellow astronauts were killed 73 seconds after launch in a massive explosion. I was in first grade at the time, and while we were not watching the launch on TV at school, I vividly remember hearing about the disaster in the van on my way from school to my after-school program.

It was a strangely important moment in my life. I don’t recall having much interest in space exploration before that time, but I know that afterward I started to pay much more attention to such things, and some of my favorite family and school trips throughout my younger years were to space-themed spots. But even more than this, I think it was the first moment that I realized that something bad could happen in the world. While I don’t recall being particularly traumatized, I certainly left that moment of my life recognizing that something was different—and that my view of the world would never be the same.

Our reading from the gospel of Luke this morning recounts Jesus’ response to two of these sorts of tragic moments in New Testament times. First, some people in the crowd told Jesus about some Galileans who had been killed in the temple by Pilate, then had their blood mingled with the sacrifices that they had brought with them. Then, Jesus himself brought up another incident in which the tower of Siloam had fallen on a crowd and killed eighteen people. Both of these horrible incidents provoked Jesus to ask if the crowd thought that these terrible disasters were caused by the sinfulness of the persons who had been killed.

This sort of mindset was pretty common in Jesus’ time—although plenty of people today offer similar explanations for bad things, too. Blaming the sinfulness of the victim when bad things happen is deeply rooted in some parts of the Bible, but Jesus was not comfortable with such a simple answer to this longstanding human conundrum. Rather than blaming the victim, he insisted that the victims’ sinfulness was not to blame for their deaths in these moments, yet he also refused to make this a moment of comfort for those who would listen to him. While these people did not die because of their sinfulness, Jesus still told the crowd that their actions mattered. After recounting each of these incidents, Jesus offered the same words to the crowd: “Unless you repent, you will perish just as they did.” This had to be a stark realization. As one commentator puts it, “The arbitrary cases of tragic death, while not owing to any particular wrongdoing by the victims, should alert all to the necessary destructive consequences of universal human sinfulness.” (F. Scott Spencer, “Exegetical Perspective on Luke 13:1-9,” Feasting on the Gospels: Luke, Volume 2, p. 29)

But Jesus did not let this strange realization stand on its own—as he did so frequently, he offered them even deeper meaning for it by sharing a parable about God’s approach to repentance. In the parable, a man approaches his gardener after finding a fig tree empty of fruit for a third consecutive year. The man is ready to have the tree cut down, assuming that it is doing nothing more than wasting space in the ground. The gardener, though, is not quite ready to do this. He knows that this tree may still bear fruit again if it is only given the attention and care that it needs, so he suggests that they turn the soil over around it and add some manure to it, then give it another season to start bearing fruit again before cutting it down. In telling this parable, Jesus seemed to make it clear that the need for repentance is always balanced with an extra dose of mercy, that the connection between sinfulness and suffering is best seen not at the individual level but rather through a much larger lens, that the bad things that happen to us are clearly not a direct result of our sinfulness along the way and yet we need to change those things, too.

As much as Jesus tried to shift the crowd’s understanding of the impact of sinfulness on the tragedies of our world, so much of this mindset carries over to our world today. After every tragedy, some televangelist or street preacher or other similar eccentric will inevitably place the blame for this terrible event on some group of sinful people. But even beyond this, people closer in to these difficult situations get sucked in to a mindset that their errors make them personally responsible for such horrors.

In the recent looks back at the 30th anniversary of the space shuttle Challenger disaster I mentioned earlier, NPR interviewed engineer Bob Ebeling, who worked for a NASA contractor at the time of the disaster. Ebeling and several of his colleagues had told NASA back in 1986 that it would not be safe to launch the shuttle that day, that the cold temperatures the night before the launch would render the o-ring seals in the rocket boosters ineffective and allow flammable gases to escape, resulting in a massive explosion, but higher-level management at their company and at NASA overruled their advice. On the day of the launch, they watched the launch and subsequent explosion unfold from their offices in Utah, and they immediately knew what an investigation would soon reveal about the cause of this disaster.

For 30 years, Ebeling felt deep pain and guilt for not doing more to stop the launch of Challenger. He told NPR last month, “I think that was one of the mistakes that God made. He shouldn’t have picked me for the job. But next time I talk to him, I’m gonna ask him, ‘Why me? You picked a loser.’” The record of this story is clear, though: Ebeling could not have stopped the launch himself. His superiors and NASA managers heard these warnings from the engineers’ lips, then ignored their safety recommendations. Still Ebeling carried guilt and grief over his role in this disaster—not all that unlike what was being expressed around Jesus about the victims of these tragedies in New Testament times.

Thankfully for Bob Ebeling, though, the anniversary of this terrible incident brought an outpouring of support for him. He had retired soon after the Challenger disaster and suffered from deep depression from this memory over the last 30 years, caught up in guilt and grief that he could have done more to prevent the death of those seven astronauts. When his current situation came to light, though, people started to reach out with words of support, insisting that his long-held feelings of guilt were misplaced and that he should not blame himself for this tragedy as he had.

He was only somewhat comforted, though. He appreciated these good, well-meaning words but insisted that he needed to hear something from NASA or his employer before he could shift his mindset. Soon he received a call from his boss at the time, a letter from a former NASA official who had argued with him at the time, and an official statement from the press spokesperson for the current NASA administrator. All of them insisted that Ebeling had spoken up with courage and done everything that he could to protect the safety of the astronauts, and his guilt and grief began to ease. NASA had changed dramatically in the 30 years since Challenger, and their recognition that problems could not be blamed on any one person and yet needed a real and systemic fix was an important reminder of the importance of the kind of change that repentance requires.

So often, repentance is not so much some sort of personally-focused cataloging of individual moral missteps but rather a deeper accounting of the ways in which we prop up systems and structures that get in the way of God’s intentions for the world. Bob Ebeling’s story reminds us that blame is an incredibly potent weapon, that Jesus’ insistence that sinfulness has consequences that may be far beyond our control sometimes doesn’t sink in very well in our lives, that systemic change comes only from the real examination not of personal flaws but rather of our participation in injustice.

So as we live in a world filled with plenty of tragedy and just as much sinfulness, may God guide us to this kind of repentance not so that we can insulate ourselves from the next disaster or overcome our guilt from the last one but so that we can be ready for God’s completion of the transformation of our world begun in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Politics, Religion, and Jesus

February 21, 2016 By Andy James

a sermon on Psalm 27 and Luke 13:31-35
preached on February 21, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Jesus, Donald Trump, and Pope Francis walked into a bar, and a huge fight broke out. The bartender said, “When I saw them coming I thought this was a joke, but it sure seems to be real!”

With the events of the last week on the national stage, with Pope Francis suggesting that some of the policy ideas of Donald Trump are not consistent with Christian values and then Donald Trump suggesting that the pope ought not to question his Christianity and would wish that he was president when the Vatican gets attacked by ISIS, the collision of religion and politics seems to be more real than ever before—except than in the story of Jesus himself.

Our reading this morning from the gospel of Luke shows us one of the great examples of how Jesus got involved in both religion and politics in his own life and ministry. As he was teaching and healing in the villages of Judea and making his way to Jerusalem to proclaim his message there, Jesus was confronted by some Pharisees. The Pharisees had caused plenty of trouble for Jesus before, but this time they came to him with something of a warning about what Herod was up to: “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.”

Now Herod was not a particularly powerful ruler—Rome ultimately exercised full authority over Judea and Palestine in those days, and they used puppets like Herod to give a false sense of some local control and influence in government. This Herod actually had even less power and authority than his father, that familiar figure from Matthew’s story of the birth of Jesus, who received the magi upon their arrival to celebrate the birth of the king of the Jews and then was so desperate to find and kill this newborn child that he killed all the boys under age two in the entire town of Bethlehem. While the Herod of Luke’s story certainly shared his father’s murderous disposition, the Romans did not allow him to use the title “king,” and he was clearly subordinate at every turn to the Roman authorities who were really in charge and didn’t seem quite so interested in getting rid of Jesus.

Still, the Pharisees bore this message from Herod to Jesus, but Jesus wanted nothing of it. He responded by inviting them to go back to “that fox” Herod and tell him that he would not get in the way of Jesus’ work. Herod’s threats would not pull Jesus away from “casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow.” And their plotting and planning would not distract him from his journey to Jerusalem, for even if he was to suffer and die there, he would stand in a long line of prophets and others who had done exactly that.

In this brief encounter with the Pharisees, Jesus made it clear that he had not come to appease the religious leaders, prop up the political establishment, or even promote independence from Rome. His mission in the world was not to blindly identify with others’ agendas or support earthly governments—and in fact his actions along the way would quite likely challenge the powers that be at every turn. Instead, Jesus insisted that his was a mission of transformation and care, grounded in his work of healing and continued in his “gathering [Jerusalem’s] children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.” Amid all the foxes of the world like Herod who sought to preserve their own power and position at the expense of the poor and outcast, Jesus set out to protect this brood who may have struggled from time to time but who were ultimately deeply loved by God and so deserved real and true protection from those who were out to exploit them, both spiritually and politically.

This incredible commitment of Jesus to stand against the powers that be and protect those who were left to fend for themselves was grounded in far more than just his own chutzpah. Navigating the journey that was ahead for him required far more than just an internal sense of doing what was right—it required a deep relationship with God that recognized how God would go with him along this difficult way. So I imagine Jesus carrying the words of Psalm 27 with him along this journey, grounding him in the tradition of his ancestors and supporting him as he faced the difficulties of the journey to the cross:

The LORD is my light and my salvation;
whom then shall I fear?

The LORD is the strength of my life;
of whom then shall I be afraid?

In these words, the psalmist offers assurance to Jesus and to us that there is nothing to fear when we place our confidence and trust in the Lord. The trust and fearlessness that the psalmist proclaims here stands behind Jesus’ response to the Pharisees—and his journey to Jerusalem to face the powers of death.

Even as the words of Psalm 27 gave him confidence for his own journey, Jesus embodied the words of the psalmist in his mission of teaching, healing, and protecting God’s people from harm. So in the same way, we are called not just to enjoy this protection but to protect others along this way as well, embodying the kind of love and justice that Jesus offered in his ministry in our daily lives, caring for the people that Jesus set out to protect—the poor and outcast, those typically neglected—joining in what God is doing to stand up to the work of the powers that be in our world and make it clear that our human politics and institutional religion are no match for God’s great transformation.

Living out this sort of thing has never been easy, but I suspect it is about as difficult as it has ever been right now. We do not have to look very far or listen all that carefully to discover places where politics and religion are getting all mixed up in ways that make it clear that the kingdom of God is the last thing on our minds. Too many political candidates use religion as a tool to build support and momentum without recognizing that Jesus came to inaugurate a different way entirely, setting aside such confidence in human institutions and instead affirming the power of God to make all things new. Too many churches put their confidence in political solutions to the problems that we face, ignoring the real and important steps that we must take to bring about change and the ways that our religious institutions are themselves complicit in oppression and injustice. And too often politics and religion become those things that we refuse to discuss in polite company like the church, assuming that they will inevitably result in conflict when in fact they really do matter as we figure out how we will participate in God’s new creation that is taking hold in our world.

In this day and age, I completely understand the dual temptations that Christians have faced in politics and religion over the centuries. Too often our ancestors have thought that we could just fix everything if we made it all Christian, if everyone shared the same creed and everyone lived out their spirituality in the same way. And plenty of other ancestors in the faith have suggested that the better way would be to step out of the political world entirely, to let this world crumble to its inevitable end sooner rather than later so that we can take up the glorious perfection of the kingdom of God.

But neither of these temptations were good enough for Jesus. These were the easy way out, for they refused to engage the world as it really is, with all its religious and political complexity, for these are very much part of who we are as human beings created in the image of God. So when the world threatened to do him in, Jesus did not ignore these challenges but instead kept his focus on his mission, staying the course in his interactions with the religious and political authorities of his time, engaging the people in his prophetic teaching, touching them with healing for physical, emotional, and spiritual ills, doing his best to protect them from the evils that threatened them, and finally even offering his life so that the whole world could live in the new kingdom that he had announced even from the beginning of his ministry.

So when we are tempted to depart from joining in God’s new way, when we are afraid of the Herods and Pharisees of our world who threaten us with their sham authority, when we wonder how we can keep the faith amid the rocky world around us, when we get lost trying to sort out all the challenges of politics and religion in these days, when we lose sight of the call to participate in God’s new creation, may the witness of Christ give us confidence, and may the words of the psalmist give us hope, for the Lord is our light and our salvation and the strength of our life, and we have no reason to fear as we join in God’s work in Christ to make all things new. Thanks be to God! Amen.