Andy James

Joy for the Journey

December 15, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 1:46-55 for the Third Sunday of Advent
preached on December 15, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

(This sermon begins with a wonderful video from Holy Moly! telling the story of Mary and Elizabeth. Due to copyright restrictions, I cannot show it here, but I nonetheless highly recommend it!)

I simply love this telling of this wonderful story of Mary and Elizabeth. It’s from the series that our children started using this fall in Sunday School called “Holy Moly!” that uses humor and animation—and surprising splashes of color—to tell familiar and formative stories of the Bible. I’ve heard some incredible musical settings of this story over the years, but there was something particularly special to me about this one. Maybe it was Mary’s journey from uncertainty to rejoicing that was so simply yet beautifully depicted. Maybe it was Elizabeth’s reaction to Mary’s arrival, her recognition of the spread of this child’s wonder across the whole earth even before his birth. Maybe it was the babies’ seeming recognition that something special was going on. Maybe it was Mary’s response of confidence amidst the criticism that she received from those she passed along the road. Or maybe it was the incredible color bursting into the land around Mary on her journey back home, echoing so beautifully the prophet’s promise that we heard in our reading from Isaiah this morning:

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,
the desert shall rejoice and blossom;
like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly,
and rejoice with joy and singing.

Whatever the reason for my love of this brief movie, ultimately I found it deeply compelling because of how beautifully it lifts up the theme of joy. Today, the third Sunday of Advent, is Gaudete Sunday. This Latin word for “rejoice” is the first word of one of the traditional lectionary readings for this day from Philippians—“Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, rejoice”—and so this whole Sunday has taken up this theme of rejoicing, from the celebratory music that means that we are getting very close to Christmas to our scripture readings that celebrate joy and even to the pink candle that symbolizes not Mary’s secret wish for a girl for her first child but rather the level of rejoicing that comes for all through the birth of this amazing child. Amidst all the darkness of our world, amidst all the gun violence, all the cold weather and snow and slush and gray days, amidst all the homelessness, all the pain, all the holiday blues, amidst all the brokenness, all the war and conflict, all the things that separate us from God and one another, amidst all the places where God’s presence seems so far away, there is still a light of joy because God is stepping in to make all things new in Jesus Christ.

That’s ultimately the point of this story of Mary and Elizabeth. These two women didn’t understand why—or especially even how!—they were pregnant.Mary was still a virgin, and Elizabeth was well beyond childbearing age. They were the subject of constant scorn and sadness from their friends and family and especially from those who didn’t know them. And in the face of all this external pressure they were enduring the usual pains and struggles of pregnancy in a time when the safety of mother and child were far less certain. Yet they still found reason to rejoice together, to look beyond the uncertainties and pain of their present circumstance to a time when God’s new life would be full and complete in the world. They found reason to share the joy that was promised to them in these children who were growing inside them. They recognized that what they were experiencing would not only be a gift to them and their families but to all people everywhere, so they could do nothing less than celebrate the incredible and transformative presence of God in the midst of this wonder in their lives and their world.

We may not have the kind of gift that Mary and Elizabeth shared that brought them to rejoice in this way, but as we make our way to God’s holy mountain along the journey of Advent, we too are called to look for places to rejoice as they did. People in this day and age aren’t as good at rejoicing as we might think. Most of my friends are as likely to throw a party to forget their troubles as they are to celebrate something good. Many of us are taught from an early age that we must be careful how and when we show off our achievements so that we can demonstrate proper humility and grace, stifling our joy for these good things in our lives. And it is too often the norm that one of us feels the need to hold back good news to avoid offending someone else.

Yet this song of Mary’s joy in our reading from Luke today tells us that our rejoicing is good and proper and right, not just because there is something good happening to her, but because there is good news for all creation that all things will be made new again. In Mary’s song, we see the amazing reality that rejoicing can change the world when God is at work in places near and far, when the hungry are filled with good things, when the powerful are set aside so that God’s power can shine through, when God’s mercy can be the driving force behind all good things, when the world can be turned upside down to make room for God to be at work making all things new.

As we join in this journey of Advent to this high and holy place on the mountain of God, as we set forth in these final days toward Christmas to remember the wondrous gift of God in Christ that comes to us, as we look for God’s new thing to become real in our world, too, I believe that we are called to open our eyes in new ways to God’s joyous work, to sort out how we can offer our own song proclaiming God’s justice and mercy, and to raise our voices with a joyful shout of thanksgiving and praise for the greatness and mercy of God who comes to us in Jesus at Christmas and who promises to come again to make all things new.

May our lives be songs of rejoicing for this new thing until all things are made new in Christ Jesus our Lord! Lord, come quickly! Amen.

The Holy Mountain

December 8, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19 and Isaiah 11:1-10
preached on December 8, 2013, the Second Sunday of Advent, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but somehow during the fall semester of my senior year of college I managed to get a very coveted ticket to a public address by Nelson Mandela. At the time, I had become active in a student group committed to discussing issues of race on campus, and I was just beginning to understand a bit of the history of apartheid in South Africa and the importance of Mandela in dismantling it. On a cool November morning, a couple friends and I drove an hour or so up to Memphis, Tennessee, to hear Mandela speak in hopes that it would help us understand a bit more of our own history. My home state of Mississippi has a very unpleasant history of its own on matters of race that can fairly be described as a slightly less severe version of the apartheid that marked South Africa, and in those days thirteen years ago it had only recently begun to come to terms with the violence that had marked the Civil Rights Movement in the state 40 years earlier as some of the perpetrators of murder and violence were finally being brought to justice.

Nelson Mandela in Memphis, 2000.

My friends and I arrived well in advance of the publicized start time, but the church that seated 5,000 was so full already that we ended up in the next to last row of the balcony! The room was filled with schoolchildren who had been raising money and collecting books to present to Mandela to support charities in South Africa, and everyone was waiting to hear from this beloved international icon and peacemaker who had come to Memphis to receive the Freedom Award from the National Civil Rights Museum there. After a glorious introduction appropriate for such a figure, Mandela offered a brief address—of which I remember nothing in particular—yet it was clear that the 5,000 of us in that church had just experienced something we would never forget simply because we had heard this incredible man speak.

Nelson Mandela has been on many minds over the last few days after his death on Thursday, and I’ve found it difficult not to associate him in some way with the words that we hear in our scripture readings for today. These readings give us another image of life on God’s holy mountain, the grand and glorious destination of our Advent journey this year, the place awaited by generations where the fullness of God’s new creation will be revealed. According to Psalm 72 and Isaiah 11, this place will be filled with justice and peace. Here the poor will be judged with righteousness. Here faithfulness will be the belt that holds everything together. And here creatures will set aside their enmity and dwell together in deep and real and full peace.

The psalmist and Isaiah both describe a special and unique leader—perhaps a man like Mandela—who brings God’s people together into this beloved community. This leader judges the poor with righteousness and decides with equity for the meek of the earth. She defends the cause of the poor of the people, gives deliverance to the needy, and crushes the oppressor through this new and different way of life. He speaks a word that captivates everyone and invites a new way of justice to prevail. And this leader is guided all along the way by the spirit of the Lord that brings wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, and knowledge for the good of all creation. Isaiah identifies this leader as “a shoot… from the stump of Jesse,” and for centuries Christians have identified this one with Jesus, yet there are certainly others like Nelson Mandela who have also embodied large parts of these words over the centuries, ranging from some of the better kings of Israel and Judah to quiet and humble leaders around us who embody God’s way of justice and peace. All these women and men, though, ultimately point us not to themselves but to the way of life that leads us to this holy mountain. They help us to live lives that point others to this place. They give us courage to bring about big or little changes in our midst that will be our part in God’s work of setting aside all hurt and destruction. And they show us the way of faith, hope, and love as we join the journey to this holy mountain.

You see, the holy mountain that stands as the goal of our Advent journey is not a clear and definite place. We won’t find it on any human map. We can’t stop at a gas station and ask for directions to it. And even the best GPS won’t know the way to get there. While we get little glimpses of what life might look like on God’s holy mountain from texts like ours today, we need generous, just, and righteous leaders like Nelson Mandela to help us on the journey to this holy place. Faithfulness and peace are at the core of this community, and so a new and different way of life emerges where there is nothing to fear and the danger and pain and hurt that have divided people for generations can be set aside. Here all people have the things that they need as leaders put their attention on those who are in need, and prosperity comes for all through this attention to justice and righteousness. Ultimately there is no hurt or pain or destruction in this place, for instead the focus is on building up the whole community so that God’s transformation can take hold.

As beautiful and simple as all this seems, this way of life on God’s holy mountain is incredibly difficult for us to pull off. Even the most talented leaders like Nelson Mandela are rarely successful in bringing together the disparate factions of humanity that mark so much of our world. The beloved community that takes these things seriously and seeks to embody God’s preference for the poor and the divine emphasis on peace and justice is a direct threat to those who seem to hold great power and build their livelihood on division and strife. And even the occasional glimpse of the peaceable kingdom described here, with the fears of children and the created order set aside, disappears all too quickly when someone speaks up to give voice to the uncertainty that everyone else has kept silent.

Yet as hard as it is, the journey to God’s holy mountain demands that we set aside our fear and uncertainty and start the journey toward this way of new life as best we can, right here and right now. Some steps on this journey are big and huge and substantial, requiring dramatic change in our hearts and minds or the action of government and leaders to stop marginalizing the poor, dehumanizing those who are different from us, and ignoring the needs of those whom we’d rather not see. Some of the changes that are needed to help us get to God’s holy mountain are certainly beyond our immediate individual or even congregational reach, and the sad reality of our polarized political system of these days makes it unlikely that any of them will take hold anytime soon.

Yet the difficulty of these bigger changes that confound us in these days does not excuse us from changing things in the smaller corners of the world where we can make a difference. We can insist on fair treatment for those closest to us and work to embody a new way of justice and righteousness in those places where we have control or influence. We can let mercy and grace prevail in our judgments of others and especially the poor. We can advocate for those who do not have a voice in the halls of power so that they might enjoy the privilege of life abundant. We can set aside our cries for vengeance and retribution in favor of a new way of peace. And we can refuse to let fear control our actions and keep us from living together with those whom we simply assume are different. And throughout it all, we can pray for the spirit of the Lord to rest on us too, to bring us wisdom and understanding, to offer us counsel, might, and insight, to reshape our priorities and focus our hearts and minds on God as we make our way to God’s holy mountain.

While we can’t make the holy mountain of God happen on our own or overnight, we certainly can look for these and other little ways to be a part of God’s transformation of our world each and every day, and we can join in the legacy of people like Nelson Mandela and so many others who have given us such wonderful examples of this kind of life and living in their witness before us. So as we go on this journey to God’s holy mountain, may God open our eyes to the destination of our journey so that we can join in the work of peace, justice, righteousness, faithfulness, and deliverance and be a part of God’s new creation, walking in the light of the Lord each and every day until all these things take hold in each of us and in all creation through Jesus Christ our Lord. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

Advent Photo Project #1: Go

December 1, 2013 By Andy James

I’m not usually one to do seasonal photo memes or things like that, but this year for Advent I decided to take the plunge and join the RethinkChurch Advent Photo-a-Day as a bit of a spiritual discipline. Each day during Advent, there’s an assigned word for photo reflection. Today’s word is “go.”

Go…

These are the shoes involved in all my “going” today: leading worship, getting some exercise, and making an excursion to Manhattan for Advent Lessons and Carols at St. Bart’s Church.

I’ll be posting these daily reflections on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter each day through Advent. Take a look at the instructions and consider joining in!

The Path to the Holy Mountain I: The Holy Mountain

December 1, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Psalm 122 and Isaiah 2:1-5
preached on the First Sunday of Advent, December 1, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

As many of you have figured out by now, I love Advent. This brief four-week season that starts out the church year and bridges that gap between Thanksgiving and Christmas is my favorite time of the church year. Some of that is because I think we too often forget about the importance of preparation in our world. I believe that it is essential to pause and get ready for the major milestones in our lives, to spend time intentionally getting our house in order so that the coming celebration can mean all the more.

But this year, I think there is something different in my thinking about Advent and Christmas. This year, it doesn’t seem like there is the same sort of preparation before us. I don’t see the kinds of substantial and uncertain change ahead in our church or our world that help make Advent more meaningful to me. The anxiety of this year’s Christmas season seems to be much more focused on the immediate stress of these busy days and not on something else. There is still plenty of war and strife and poverty and injustice in our world, but it seems to be touching us less and less, and so our longings for something new seem to be less dramatic and immediate than they have been.

And yet this season of preparation for radical change, this time called Advent, is still before us. It calls out that there is something new ahead. It insists that our preparations for Christmas be more than simply buying the perfect presents, setting out the perfect decorations, and getting all the other festivities of the season in exact order. It reminds us that Christmas is not a simple and sweet holiday about the birth of a baby but rather a radical intervention by God that changes everything.

This year, in preparing for this season, our readings from the prophet Isaiah stuck out to me. Isaiah has the wonderful ability to speak so meaningfully to so many different contexts. First it speaks to the prophet’s own time, when he was encouraging the people to amend their ways and return to the Lord after they had taken up different paths focused on their own prosperity and righteousness. Then it speaks again in the days of the assembly and editing of the Hebrew Bible, what we often refer to as the Old Testament, when these words offered great comfort and challenge to a people who were struggling to reestablish their relationship with God and one another without the independence that had defined their identity. Isaiah speaks again to a later day and age, the time when Jesus emerged, when these words gave these hearers hope of a Messiah who would make everything different once and for all. And even now, today, these words point us forward to a future time when God’s presence will be all the more real and complete, when all things will be made new and all creation will walk in the light of the Lord each and every day.

Our readings this morning from Isaiah and the Psalms point us to this kind of journey of walking in the light of the Lord and show us a bit of the destination that is before us. The goal of this journey, you see, is certainly a new and deeper celebration of Christmas, but it is also something more, something that is more deeply transformative of us and our world than just another baby being born, something that gives us a glimpse of God’s new thing that was begun but not finished in the birth, life, death, resurrection, and reign of Jesus. These readings point us to the holy mountain of God, to the sacred and holy place that stands at the center of all creation, to the great temple that stands as the highest of mountains, above all the hills. This holy mountain is the abiding place of God, the place where we know the fullness of God’s presence in our lives and our world, the place where instruction and wisdom flow forth each and every day, the place where swords are beat into plowshares, spears turned into pruning hooks, and the knowledge of war becomes the practice of peace. This year, as much as ever, I believe that the path from Advent to Christmas demands that make our way to the holy mountain of God.

But this vision from Isaiah only gives us a partial image of what we should expect to see at the end of this journey. We don’t have the same expectations and understanding of the temple that were prominent in Isaiah’s own time. The holy mountain of God that we need and expect for our own time is quite likely very different from what our parents and grandparents expected. And this holy mountain where we will know the transformation of our world is only now coming into view.

It’s quite like an incredible view of the city that I experienced on one of my several flights in recent weeks. It was a cloudy and foggy night, with low clouds hanging over almost all of the city—except for a small part of lower Manhattan and Battery Park City that was crystal clear all the way down to ground level and of course the spire of the Empire State Building, peeking its tip through the clouds. It was an eerie sight, with very familiar elements that were yet very different from the view that I know quite well. There was so much that was so familiar—and so much more that was still shrouded from view. This is what is before us as we approach the holy mountain of God this Advent—a glorious yet uncertain and incomplete view of something new, an astounding sight of God’s wonder and grace that is yet beyond our understanding until its full unveiling in the days to come.

Even though we don’t know the fullness of this new thing, exactly what this holy mountain will look like, or even when we might get there, we can still prepare ourselves to enter this holy place. Ultimately as much as Advent is about getting ourselves ready for Christmas, it is also about getting ready for this bigger thing, too, for the day that is to come when “the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills.” These preparations involve an honest look at our lives and our world, a careful assessment of the things that distract us from the journey to God’s holy mountain, and a hopeful view of the things ahead that will help open our eyes for a glimpse of God’s new thing that is ahead. And just like that strange night view of the city, we will likely have glimpses all the way to the surface of this new thing, too—little spots where peace suddenly prevails over the ways of war, brief moments when we begin to understand what God is up to in our lives and figure out how to join in, surprising opportunities to do something new and take a couple steps forward on the path to the holy mountain.

There is no better place to take our first steps on this journey, then, than at this table. This feast is the closest thing we can know in the here and now to God’s holy mountain, for this table sits at the intersection of heaven and earth. It brings together the meal shared by Jesus and his disciples before his death and after his resurrection with the glorious feast that we will share with him and all the faithful on God’s holy mountain. We are right in the middle, right here and right now, ready to experience this foretaste of something new, to welcome this strange feast that will give us sustenance for the journey.

So as we set out on this journey for God’s holy mountain, may you spend your days reflecting on what this strange and wonderful holy place might be in your life and in our world, and may the feast we share today sustain us along the way until we join with the faithful of all nations, of every time and place, to walk in the light of the Lord each and every day. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

Something’s Coming

November 10, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17 and Haggai 1:15b-2:9
preached on November 10, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Something is coming. That’s the clear message of these days in our world. Just with the coming of a new year, we’ve got a new mayor coming into office in our city, a new way of getting healthcare for many people in our country, and the inevitable parade of all sorts of other new things around us. Depending on who you ask, the degree of this change may vary, but it is clear that a number of things will be different around us on January 1.

Our two texts this morning reinforce this message that something new is coming into our world. First came Paul’s letter to the church in Thessalonica, with its words of comfort as they wait for a new thing to come into the world. Like most of the early church, Paul’s listeners were expecting Jesus to return practically any day, and if anything they were getting restless that things were not moving as quickly as they had been promised. If they were already that frustrated after twenty or thirty years, I can only imagine how much more unsettled they would feel if they knew that we would still be waiting nearly two thousand years later!

The Thessalonians knew that something was coming, something that would surprise everyone, something that would put the powers of evil and darkness in their place, something that would change things once and for all, and they were more than ready for it. And so Paul comforted the Thessalonians in their waiting, insisting that the things ahead would build on the things of this time and show something new and greater in the world.

In our other reading from the prophet Haggai, it was clear that something was coming into his world, too. In his day, the people of Judah had returned from exile in Babylon, but there was much that was out of order. The comforts of home that they had known before exile were gone. The temple where they had gathered for worship lay in ruins. All the institutions and structures that had held life together needed to be rebuilt. So God called Haggai to speak a different word to the people, a word that did not ignore the difficulty of their situation but yet recognized that there was a possibility for something greater and new.

God called Haggai to proclaim a message of courage, perseverance, and new life—new life that would transform, even shake, “the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land,” so that all nations would stream to Jerusalem and all people come to know and recognize God at work. And God called Haggai to proclaim a new promise: “The latter splendor of this house shall be greater than the former… and in this place I will give prosperity.” This was a great message of hope and promise that something new and different and great was coming, something that would establish God’s authority over the nations, that would cement God’s promise to Judah for all time, that would make things even better than they had ever been before.

These messages that something is coming resonate deeply for us today. Beyond the changes we know will come in the new year, we sit with the Thessalonians and the Judeans wondering what new thing God has in store for us. We wonder what God will do in our lives as the things that have become common will quite likely change. We wonder how God will respond to all the troubled moments of our world. And we wonder what God has in store for our congregation as we approach this new year, the first year in quite some time where we will not have a full-time pastor among us.

Over the eight years I have served as your pastor, I have heard many questions that sound like those raised here by Paul: When will the time come for something new to take hold? How much longer do we have to wait? What are we supposed to do in the meantime? And I’ve heard many here wonder much as Haggai did: “Is there anyone still among you who saw this house in its former glory? How does it appear to you now? To you does it not seem as if it were not there?” (Haggai 2:3, Revised English Bible) These are the kinds of questions that we tend to ask along the way, questions that have no easy answers, questions that leave us pining for a different way of life, questions that make us want a different order of things, questions that keep our eyes focused on the past or present and turned away from possibilities and promise of the future.

But on this stewardship Sunday, on this day when we bring our commitments to the life and mission of this congregation for the coming year, now might just be time to focus on something new, on the kind of shakeup that stands at the core of Paul and Haggai’s words, on the kind of transformation and new life that we know are coming and wish would come sooner. This is the time to think about what we really long for in this place. Are we looking for a return to the way things were? Are we looking for new life that can only look like what we’ve seen before? Are we looking simply to rebuild the temple exactly as it was? Or are we looking for a real shakeup, for a new and different way to take hold, for God to shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land, for the new thing ahead to be greater than what has come before?

The commitment we make today to the life of this place in the coming year must reflect what we really desire. We can keep doing what we’ve always done before, placing our commitments at the same level they’ve always been, letting our traditions become a memorial to the life we once knew but that will soon pass away. Or we can take these words from Paul and Haggai seriously, taking courage for the new things ahead, standing firm and holding fast to our tradition while embracing new ways for a new time, working to make God’s promise real in this time and this place that is different from what we have known before.

Ultimately, this is the stewardship commitment that is before us today—not so much how much we plan to give next year, as important as that is for our life together and even for the sense of commitment that it brings in our journeys of faith. No, what really matters is rather the commitment that we make today to join in God’s work of making all things new, work that has its roots in our life together here and that demands our money and our time our commitment, and our lives in every imaginable way, both within and beyond these walls. It’s not about rebuilding the temple, maintaining the church building, keeping a pastor around, or even just making it through until the something that is coming is realized—it’s about being faithful in these changing times, taking courage amidst all that pulls us away from this calling, and working to live these things out in faith, hope, and love.

And so today as we bring these marks of our commitment to this congregation and most especially to the hope we know in Jesus Christ, may God give us the strength to be faithful, may God help us to take courage, and may God give us a glimpse of the new glory beyond anything we have ever seen before but that is surely to come in Jesus Christ our Lord. Lord, come quickly! Alleluia! Amen.