Andy James

Truth to Preserve and Live

July 24, 2016 By Andy James

a sermon on Jeremiah 5:1-3 and 2 Timothy 2:8-15
preached on July 24, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” as we just did is a good reminder that we are in the midst of a hyperpolitical season, that time every four years right before the Summer Olympics when the attention of many in our country turns to the conventions of the Republican and Democratic parties. This has put journalists everywhere into overdrive, trying to report as many different stories from as many different angles as possible about the election. Over the last few years, a new angle of political journalism has built on the efforts of a few people on the internet to pay close attention to the claims made by candidates in their speeches. There are now several fact-checking websites that review these statements and report on the truth and lies present in them. My favorite, Politifact’s “Truth-O-Meter,” rates the truth or falsehood of each statement on a scale of true, mostly true, half true, mostly false, false, and “pants on fire”—described as “the statement is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim” even as it builds on that childhood taunt “Liar, liar, pants on fire!” The thinking of all these sites is that identifying the truth or falsehood of the claims of candidates will help voters make a more informed decision on Election Day—assuming of course that telling the truth counts for something.

But nowadays, such an assumption that the truth matters may not be so true. Various studies have examined whether or not telling a person that their preferred candidate had lied about a particular issue made any difference to how they intended to vote, and the conclusion seems to be that it does not. In fact, when statements are made in an atmosphere where two sides of an argument are placed on equal footing as they seem to be nowadays, people are far more likely “to resist or reject arguments and evidence contradicting their opinions,” as one study put it. It seems that truth is a major concern these days—but that in the end it doesn’t really matter all that much to the outcome.

banner4 In this kind of environment, then, it is curious that the fourth Great End of the Church is “the preservation of the truth.” What exactly does it mean for the church to be engaged in preserving the truth today? What does it mean to hold the truth in this way in a day and age when truth seems to be so easily manipulated by the assumptions that we bring to a particular situation? What does truth even mean in a world where an individual’s perspective seems to overrule any view of the bigger picture?

In light of all these things, it is incredibly difficult to say what this Great End means, let alone put it into a visual form as we find on this banner. The description for this banner states,

The banner represents the light of truth shining in the darkness. The dove reminds us that the truth we proclaim to the world is the gospel of Jesus Christ, God with us and for us. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).

That makes some sense to me, but I need more.

When I think of “the preservation of the truth,” I cannot help but think of the preservation of specimens for biological study—you know, those strange-looking creatures stored in glass jars of formaldehyde in your biology classroom in high school or in the older corners of the Natural History Museum. While these specimens may be preserved for some sort of study, they look very much unlike what they started out as in the first place—and of very limited use for study in the present and future. The same sort of thing can happen with the preservation of the truth in the church—if we are not careful, we can be so focused on the preservation of the truth that we forget that the truth is less important than what lies behind it and what emerges from it. As hymnwriter Thomas Troeger put it,

May the church at prayer recall
that no single holy name
but the truth behind them all
is the God whom we proclaim.

Our two scripture readings this morning offer us four insights into what it might mean for the church to be involved in “the preservation of the truth” in these days. First, these readings remind us that truth must be sought. Truth isn’t just sitting out there, clearly identifiable because it is holding up a giant sign that says TRUTH. That might actually be some of the deepest falsehood! Instead, the preservation of the truth demands that we seek out the truth for ourselves, to search the squares of the city “and see if you can find one person who acts justly and seeks truth,” as Jeremiah says, for it may not be so obvious in a world like our own. We may not need to establish fact-checking websites for everything that Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton or even your average pastor says, but we should not be afraid to stand up for the truth when God’s words and ways are twisted for human pursuits and purposes or when falsehood threatens the values of love, peace, hope, and justice that are the foundation of God’s message for our world.

In the same way, these scriptures also show us that truth always comes along the pathway of justice. The one sought by the prophet in Jeremiah does not just seek truth but also one who “acts justly,” one who puts truth into action in the world, for faithful living comes not just in our words but also in our actions. The truth we preserve as God’s church becomes real when we live out the words of the prophet Micah, doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God, as we will discuss more in a few weeks when we look at the fifth Great End of the Church, “the promotion of social righteousness.”

These scriptures today also show us that the preservation of the truth requires us to focus on proclaiming the truth along the way. The words from 2 Timothy summarize this truth that we proclaim so well:

Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David…

If we have died with him, we will also live with him;
if we endure, we will also reign with him;
if we deny him, he will also deny us;
if we are faithless, he remains faithful—

for he cannot deny himself.

When we proclaim the truth in this way, we must set aside the falsehoods of our world—the falsehood that we are the ones who draw lines that separate us or others from the salvation of Christ, the falsehood that we are better off on our own than in faithful relationship with others along the way, the falsehood that we have the final say in matters based on what we believe to be true, and most of all the falsehood that we can save ourselves and can make it on our own without God. This sort of proclamation of the truth makes preservation of the truth all the easier as the truth takes life in new places all round us and touches the lives of those we never could have imagined along the way.

Finally, these scriptures remind us that God is the ultimate arbiter and preserver of truth. Our actions of proclaiming and preserving the truth will ultimately be judged by God, and so we must never substitute our understanding of this divine gift for deeper understanding of God. This does not mean that we do not speak up when we hear falsehood, but it does call us to offer all our proclamation of truth and falsehood with humility and with hope, recognizing that God may be at work in our world in ways beyond our comprehension and through those we might least expect. And we can always trust that God’s judgment of truth and falsehood will be far more incisive, probing, honest—and yet merciful—than our own could ever be.

Being a people and a church charged with “the preservation of the truth” is more difficult now than ever before. If the political world is any indication, it is unlikely that our words will win over people to our cause. Our proclamation of the truth is so easily empty at best and outright falsehood at worst, filled with promises that we have no intention of actually fulfilling or with lies that deny the character and action of our gracious and merciful God as we join the chorus of criticism and even hate that fills our world. And it is easy to let our work of preserving the truth of the gospel of Christ be nothing more than encapsulating it in jars of formaldehyde, leaving it to decay slowly but surely, risking nothing for the future, leaving no chance of it making a difference in a world that longs for it so deeply.

And yet God’s call to the church for the preservation of the truth stands strong, guiding us to keep searching for the truth that God has shared with us, inspiring us to look for it and work for it along the pathway of justice, demanding that we set aside falsehood in our words and actions so that everything we do points to the One who judges and preserves—and who is—the truth, God alone, revealed to us in Jesus Christ.

So as we go forth as God’s church with this call for “the preservation of the truth,” may God strengthen us to live out this truth so that our world might know the power and wonder of this great gift as we preserve it in our words and actions that join in making God’s gift of new life real in Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Worship in Spirit and Truth

July 17, 2016 By Andy James

a sermon on John 4:5-24
preached on July 17, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Something special happens when God’s people gather for worship. We may do things very much the same week after week, following the same basic order of service, sharing very similar words, singing some of the same songs, greeting many of the same people, receiving the same offering, even hearing very similar words of dismissal, but there is something special going on each and every time we gather here.

The church has understood this since its earliest days. The disciples, after all, had gathered in the evening on the first day of the week when Jesus appeared to them after his resurrection, and the New Testament recounts several other instances of the early church gathered for worship, not to mention that much of the New Testament was written as letters to be read to the community gathered for worship. Debates over the nature and content of worship were an important part of the reformation impulses of Martin Luther, John Calvin, and others some five hundred years ago. And in a file cabinet downstairs, we have files upon files of worship bulletins, everything from last Sunday’s service to special anniversary celebrations and even from the first worship service of this congregation in 1871, reminding us that the first official act of this congregation was to worship God together.

In all these times and places, the church has gathered for worship, most often on the first day of the week, to give praise to God, hear the Word of God, offer prayers for God’s world, and experience the presence of God in one another and in sacrament. So it is no surprise that the third Great End of the Church as adopted by our Presbyterian forebears is “the maintenance of divine worship.” To a certain extent, it is surprising to me that this is the third Great End and not the first, because in many ways it is worship that sets the church apart from so many other institutions. Our worship is rooted in the rich praise of ancient Israel shared with us in the psalms and has grown through millennia of practice before and after the time of Jesus even as we continue to maintain and celebrate it today.

Our scripture reading this morning from the gospel according to John gives us a glimpse of the culture surrounding worship in the time of Jesus through the lens of an encounter between Jesus and a Samaritan woman. This encounter raises all sorts of interesting questions about interaction between people of different cultures, the impact of tradition and legend on present practice, and the role and status of women in New Testament times. As we examine the meaning of the mission of the church in “the maintenance of divine worship” today, though, it gives us a very helpful glimpse into how Jesus understood the meaning and purpose of worship.

This encounter took place in Samaria, a land between Galilee and Judea that was viewed by residents of both as dangerous and “other.” The people of Samaria were descended from those who had been sent into exile by Assyria in the eighth century BCE, and even though they had returned to their homeland, they were viewed as very different by their neighbors. Samaritans worshiped the same God as the Jews and shared many traditions, practices, and beliefs in common, but they worshiped at Mount Gerizim rather than in Jerusalem. Galileans and Judeans used this to justify treating Samaritans as second-class citizens—impure, foreign, and other—even though they lived well within the boundaries of historic Palestine.

The theme of worship therefore loomed very large in the context of this encounter between Jesus and a Samaritan woman at a well. They first exchanged words over Jesus’ desire to get a drink of water, ending with Jesus explaining to her that he could offer her living water that would quench her thirst forever, for it “will become in [everyone who drinks it] a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” When she expressed her desire to receive such a gift, Jesus then began to comment on her family situation, suggesting that she bring her husband back to him in order to receive this living water even as he knew that she had had five husbands and was currently living with a man who was not her husband!

In light of his seeing the truth about her, the woman named Jesus as a prophet and finally put the issue of worship that divided Jews and Samaritans on the table: Why do the Jews exclude the Samaritans because they do not worship in Jerusalem? Instead of trying to answer her question, Jesus suggested that bigger changes were afoot:

The hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.

He then moved on to offer her some deeper principles about this worship for the present and future:

The hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.

All the divisions that had led to such separation between Jews and Samaritans would no longer matter because the real unity of worship in spirit and truth would change it all for everyone. This new pathway that Jesus suggested was deeply compelling to the woman, so much so that beyond our story today she started telling others about her encounter with Jesus, and they believed his message for themselves.

Jesus’ words to the Samaritan woman about worshiping in spirit and truth ring loud and clear across the ages as we explore what it means to live out “the maintenance of divine worship” in the church today. What does worshiping in spirit and truth look like for us today? First, worship in spirit and truth reflects the wonder, grace and mercy of a God who comes to us in Jesus Christ. In worship, we encounter God in Christ just as the woman encountered Jesus at the well. In worship, we hear the Word of God proclaimed. In worship, we see the presence of God in our sisters and brothers who gather with us here. And in worship, we find God meeting us in the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper to give us the sign and seal of God’s presence in our midst. The spirit and truth of God are present in our midst as we worship because we encounter God here, offering us living water and amazing grace so that we might go forth in new pathways of life each and every day.

Second, worship in spirit and truth reorients us to the presence of God in our world. Worship is not just about getting together for an hour a week on Sundays. The things that we do here to experience, understand, and praise God do not simply stand on their own. Worship in spirit and truth helps us to see God more clearly in the everyday, to learn more about what God is doing in our lives and our world, to see God at work in ways beyond the assumptions we may have made along the way. When we leave this or any place where we worship, the spirit and truth that lie behind our acts guide us to think differently about the world beyond these doors, reminding us that God’s presence is not just trapped here but must also be visible to us and through us beyond any place of worship.

Finally, worship in spirit and truth means that we open ourselves to God’s transformation in our midst. In her encounter with Jesus, the Samaritan woman’s spirit and truth were both put on full view. The truth of her past was very much visible, but her spirit of hope for something different was also very clear. And so too in our worship, God reveals the truth about ourselves, showing us a new pathway of truth and hope and inviting us to live in ways that embody transformation and new life. Similarly, worship shows us the truth about our world—and even more what God is doing to transform it—so that we might be a part of showing a new and different spirit beyond what we have seen for so long.

Our call to “the maintenance of divine worship” suggests that we are to worship in spirit and truth, to trust that God is actually doing something through the things that we do when we gather Sunday after Sunday here, to proclaim the truth of the transformation that we have encountered and experienced through God in Christ, to let this time together be the beginning of the new thing that we proclaim as we live in the light of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

All these things begin in the sacrament of Baptism. In Baptism, we encounter Jesus at a well in our time, in our own lives, asking us questions, naming the truth about who we are, inviting us to share new life. In Baptism, we are washed and made new, transformed beyond a simple human form, claimed as God’s own once and for all. And in Baptism, God offers us the living waters of Christ so that we might go forth to share that new life each and every day with everyone we meet. In a few moments, as we remember and reclaim the promises of the baptismal covenant, I hope and pray that we will encounter God in our midst, worshiping in spirit and in truth as we are transformed once again for new life in the world.

So as we make our way into the world this week, may the worship we share here help us to live each day in spirit and in truth, participating in the wonder of transformation made possible in God’s world by the power of the Holy Spirit, encountering God in Jesus Christ anew each and every day. Thanks be to God! Amen.

The Children of God

July 10, 2016 By Andy James

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Proclamation for Today

July 3, 2016 By Andy James

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Responding to Grace

June 12, 2016 By Andy James

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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