Jesus — Andy James

The Pathway of New Life

September 7, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Matthew 16:13-28
preached on September 7, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Poor Peter. He just can’t figure out what Jesus is up to. One minute Jesus was celebrating him for being the first disciple to acknowledge that he was the Messiah, then the next he’s getting called Satan.

Peter had always been one of Jesus’ favorites, among the first disciples that Jesus called out from his daily work as a fisherman. I have this image of Peter listening intently to every word that Jesus spoke, waiting to soak up the latest morsel of new knowledge and instruction that Jesus would offer.

But the teacher’s message didn’t always get through to him very well. Peter was the one who decided it would be a good thing to look down when he started trying to walk on water. Peter was the one at the transfiguration of Jesus who suggested that they build houses on the mountain so everyone could stick around for a while. When Jesus told them that the way to the kingdom of heaven was leave behind all their worldly wealth, Peter was the first to remind him of everything that the disciples had left behind. And Peter was ultimately the one who denied even knowing Jesus after he had been arrested and as he was facing his death.

And then there is today’s story about Peter. Jesus started out by querying his disciples about what they had been hearing from other people about him: “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” It’s not immediately clear why Jesus was asking this question. Was he using the disciples as informants of some sort, trying to get information from them about what others were saying and thinking so that he could adjust his words and actions accordingly? Was he trying to figure out if his time had come, if people had really begun to understand what he was up to? Or was he quizzing the disciples to see if they themselves had shaped their own opinions of him based only on what they had heard from others?

All the responses that they shared were pretty timid. According to the disciples, the people were seeing Jesus as a messenger following after John the Baptist or a prophet in the line of Elijah or Jeremiah. It was clear from the disciples’ reports that the people were understanding a portion of Jesus’ message but were ultimately missing the bigger point.

But maybe in asking this question Jesus was just trying to set up his next question, for he then turned to the disciples and made it personal: “But who do you say that I am?”

Like the good teacher’s pet that he was, Peter immediately piped up with a response: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” This was a monumental moment. It is the first time in the Matthew’s gospel that any particular person beyond the narrator uses the word “Messiah” to describe Jesus.

Jesus was clearly excited by Peter’s confession. He offered accolades to Peter for his willingness to receive and share this truth. He made it very clear that this was not Peter’s own doing but God’s. And he promised that Peter would be the foundation of things to come.

But Peter must have let all this praise get to his head. It didn’t take long for him to show that he just didn’t understand anything at all about what this meant. After Peter’s confession, Jesus began to teach the disciples about what it meant for him to be the Messiah, about how he would need to face great suffering, about how he would ultimately die and be raised because of all that he said and did.

But Peter would have nothing of it. If his friend and teacher was the Messiah, then he should not have to suffer in any way. The honor and status of such a figure should never have to face such humiliation. He pulled Jesus aside and told him that this should not, even could not, happen. But then Jesus turned to Peter, the teacher’s pet who had sat at his feet listening intently from the very beginning, the disciple who had seemed to understand it best, the very one who had offered the first confession of Jesus as Messiah, and condemned him: “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

Jesus proceeded to make the implications of being the Messiah clear. It had nothing to do with status or position, and in fact it had everything to do with giving up those very things. The Messiah’s way to exaltation was not through recognition of kingship as the world knew it—it came instead through giving up everything, through suffering and death, through the foolishness and humiliation of the cross. Anyone who wanted to find this kind of glory in and through the Messiah would need to find this kind of suffering, too. A profession of mere words such as Peter’s would not be enough—such a confession required similar steps in actions to show a denial of self-interest and a taking-up of the interests of others, actions that set aside personal gain for the well-being of the world, actions that offered even the fullness of life itself so that others might live.

While we might say that Peter’s actions from confession to correction here are wholly unlike our own, I think they are probably more familiar to us than we care to admit. Following Jesus has two parts, belief and action, and Peter had gotten the belief part right but missed how that belief necessarily changes our actions. We are probably more like Peter than we can even begin to realize. How often do we set our minds on human things and ignore God’s new and different way? How often do we try to define what God says or thinks about others because we feel the need to defend God or make sure that God’s honor isn’t put at risk, as if God didn’t have enough power to do it? And how often do we offer a word of confession of what we believe about God and then leave it behind quickly when it doesn’t fit quite so well into our lives?

It is not easy to live out the full and real consequences of what we say we believe in this world. So many interpretations of Christianity have twisted Jesus’ message for purposes that have absolutely nothing to do with what he said he was about. So many people have claimed that Jesus is the Messiah while using that very declaration as the basis for condemning others. And so many times we make faithfulness as simple as wearing a cross around our neck, showing up at church on Sunday, or following a traditional moral code and miss that there might be more.

Claiming that Jesus is the Messiah and so taking up the cross in our world has real consequences. It means more than having to give up a relaxing Sunday morning drinking coffee in bed with the newspaper, more than claiming protection for ourselves and those we love amidst the perceived threats to our privileged lives, more than preparing to enjoy eternal life in a heaven where the streets are paved with gold and we are reunited with beloved spouses, friends, and pets. As nothing other than our Presbyterian Book of Order puts it, “We are persuaded that there is an inseparable connection between faith and practice, truth and duty. Otherwise it would be of no consequence either to discover truth or to embrace it.” (F-3.0104)

So what is the connection between your faith and practice? What is the consequence of confessing Jesus as the Messiah in these days? How are we called to live differently because we must take up our cross and follow Jesus? Over the next month, as we prepare to receive the Peacemaking Offering on the first Sunday in October, we’ll be thinking more about these very things.

In the meantime, though, I encourage you to examine your lives and our life together. Where can we make these things more real? Who around us is walking the way of the cross—not so much those who are subjecting themselves to difficulty but more those who face suffering each and every day at the hands of systems and structures that oppress? How can we walk this way in our lives—not so much so that we can be enjoy the glory that may come at the end but more that we can join God in making a new way for all creation?

So may God guide us as we offer our confession, as we acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah, as we make the connection between this confession and our daily lives, and as we take up the crosses of our lives and walk with Jesus on the pathway of new life. Thanks be to God! Amen.

The Stories That Define Us

March 9, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7 and Matthew 4:1-11
preached on March 9, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

When I was seven years old, my grandparents took me to Minnesota and North Dakota to meet their family that lived there. It was quite a memorable trip. Beyond meeting some people that my family talks about regularly but don’t often see, those two weeks together cemented an already-close relationship with my grandparents that continued until their death. We also visited some pretty incredible places, like the Lake of the Woods in northern Minnesota, the most northerly point in the lower 48 states, that you can only reach by land from Canada, and Lake Itasca, the headwaters of the Mississippi River. Near Lake Itasca, in Bemidji, Minnesota, we visited a giant statue of Paul Bunyan and Babe, his blue ox—supposedly the second-most photographed statue in the United States, after only Mount Rushmore! The myth of Paul Bunyan and Babe suggests that the 10,000 lakes of Minnesota were formed by Paul and Babe’s footprints as they wandered around during a nasty blizzard—and that the Great Lakes were created by Paul as a watering hole for Babe!

The stories of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox stand in a long line of human stories that intend to tell us how things came to be as they are—stories somewhat like what we heard in our reading from Genesis this morning. These biblical stories carry a very different kind of truth than fables like Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, for they tell us not how some natural phenomenon came to exist but how we came to be as we are with God and one another. The Old Testament stories that will serve as our primary Lenten texts over the next five weeks recount some of the great figures of the Bible who are important in our story as the people of God.

Adam, Abraham, Moses, David, Ezekiel—all these great figures tell us something about who we are and how God relates to us and help us connect more fully to the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. These stories, much like but even more than the story of my trip to North Dakota and Minnesota with my grandparents or the stories of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, ultimately are the stories that define who we are.

Today’s story of the temptation of Adam and Eve in the garden is quite possibly one of the best-known stories in the Bible. It carries so many important questions into our own time as it tries to explain not just how woman and man were forced out of the Garden of Eden and into the world, how pain appeared in childbirth, how women must be subject to men, or even how we came to wear clothes to cover our private parts. Most importantly, it tries to explain the origin of our human sin.

But wait a minute—did you ever hear the word “sin” in our reading this morning? Actually, that word doesn’t show up anywhere in this passage from Genesis! No—in these verses we simply hear about how God instructs Adam on what to eat in the garden and makes it clear that there is one tree whose fruit is forbidden. The story then turns to the woman’s temptation by the serpent, who tricks her into thinking that God’s instruction can be ignored for one reason or another, that the forbidden fruit was good, and that if she ate it, her eyes would be opened to “be like God, knowing good and evil.” The serpent was partially right: the fruit of that tree at the center of the garden was good, and their eyes were opened when they ate it, but he was very wrong in suggesting that God’s instruction could be ignored. Our reading this morning cuts off God’s extended statement of the consequences of this action, but it is still very clear that everything has changed for humanity through this one act of disobedience.

For centuries, Christians have used this story to define us as sinful people, to describe our so-called “original sin.” Sin is so deeply ingrained in us and our world, beginning with this story of Adam and Eve, that even the psalmist could write, “Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.” It is tempting to focus our energies in thinking about this topic by trying to figure out how this sin is transmitted from generation to generation, but I think it is more important to focus on what this “original sin” means, as Presbyterian minister and writer Frederick Buechner does in his definition:

‘Original Sin’ means we all originate out of a sinful world which taints us from the word go. We all tend to make ourselves the center of the universe, pushing away centrifugally from that center everything that seems to impede its freewheeling. More even than hunger, poverty, or disease, it is what Jesus said he came to save the world from. (Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, p. 89)

Another way of thinking about this original sin is to recognize that Adam and Eve’s story is our story, too. Over and over again, like Adam and Eve, we too ignore God’s instructions and forget that God is the source of all that we have and all that we are. Over and over again, we too put ourselves at the center of things and exclude God and others from our self-centered lives. And over and over again, we find new ways to live all this sin out in our world—or as John Calvin puts it,

This perversity never ceases in us, but continually bears new fruits—the works of the flesh…—just as a burning furnace gives forth flame and sparks, or water ceaselessly bubbles up from a spring. (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, II.1.8)

Adam and Eve’s story defines us more than we will ever fully understand, and there is clearly nothing we can do to change that.

But then Jesus enters the story. In three of the four gospel accounts, Jesus begins his ministry only after a strange period of testing and temptation as we heard about in our reading from the gospel according to Matthew. Just as the human story begins with the tempter winning, Jesus’ story begins with the tempter being defeated. After Jesus fasts and prays for forty days, the devil goes after him in three potent ways, appealing to Jesus’ physical hunger, his vulnerability in the wilderness, and a seemingly natural human desire for power and prestige. Jesus never buys the tempter’s wares, instead feasting on the word of God, trusting in the safety of God’s presence, and taking greater comfort in worshiping God alone.

In these three moves, Jesus turns the tables on sin and makes a new way forward possible for us. These are only three small victories, three initial moments where he manages to conquer the evil intent of the devil, but these three victories set the stage for everything to change as his story progresses. After these challenges, even Jesus still faces the temptations of life in the world, but in his death and resurrection God shifts things once and for all, showing us that the self-destruction we bring upon ourselves over and over again is not the end of the story, changing things not for those who are perfect but as theologian Shirley Guthrie says “precisely [for] people who are dead in and as a consequence of their sinfulness” (Christian Doctrine, p. 227).

When we put the temptations of our world alongside our natural propensity to sin, we have a truly horrid combination that can easily define us. We easily combine our very natural tendency to put ourselves at the center with the possibility of exploiting others for our own gain. We so easily take advantage of the freedom made possible for us in Christ by pushing the limits and ending up more distant from God and one another than we could ever imagine. And we so easily slip deeper and deeper into the possibilities of sin that we become mired in the brokenness that quickly spreads into all that we say and do—and into others around us.

Yet Jesus changes the story that defines us. He doesn’t take it away or give it an unnaturally happy ending—he gives us a new story to stand at the center of things. Because of his life, death, and resurrection, we do not have to be defined by the story of our original sin. While we still may not be able to escape our sin that keeps pushing us away from the center, we can trust that God has conquered sin once and for all in Jesus Christ and has sought us out to make us and our world different. While we may not be able to overcome the temptations of this world on our own, we can be certain that God gives us the possibility of repentance and hope. And while we may not be able to fully set aside this very human tendency toward sin, we can have faith that God will give us grace enough to face each day anew, to walk the Lenten road with a new bit of hope each day, to seek a new freedom in the new beginning we share with Christ as we too emerge from the wilderness into the world.

So may these stories that define us, that explain us, that tell us who we are, remind us of our need of God’s grace and show us the depth and breadth of God’s mercy so that we can live in this divine love shown so freely in Jesus Christ and share it with the world each and every day. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Follow the Leader

June 30, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 9:51-62
preached on June 30, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Are you a Christian, or do you follow Jesus? It seems that more and more people are making a distinction between the two. A lot of people are frustrated with the trappings of Christianity, angry with the way that many Christians are viewed in the world, and exhausted with having to explain that they aren’t that kind of Christian, whatever that kind is. They just want to focus on Jesus and leave behind the baggage that has built up over the years in and through the church.

Earlier this year, a British singer and songwriter named Marcus Mumford stunned some people by saying that he doesn’t call himself a Christian. His music, played by the band he leads called Mumford and Sons, is full of references to God, prayer, and openness to the divine, and he himself is the son of a leader in the evangelical Christian Vineyard movement. Yet when asked if he still considers himself a Christian, he told an interviewer, “I don’t really like that word. It comes with so much baggage. So, no, I wouldn’t call myself a Christian. I think the word just conjures up all these religious images that I don’t really like. I have my personal views about the person of Jesus and who he was… I’ve kind of separated myself from the culture of Christianity.”

Jesus would have understood Mumford’s perspective. He himself was not a Christian—he was Jewish by birth and by practice, and his whole ministry pushed back against the religious institutions and practices of his day. He went about his life and ministry inviting people to follow him and join in his proclamation of the kingdom of God, and he really didn’t seem to care about organizing something new.

In our reading this morning from the gospel according to Luke, we hear about three people who want to follow Jesus—and his response. The first one was excited to see Jesus and offered to join him without any prompting whatsoever: “I will follow you wherever you go.” But Jesus immediately issued him a warning, for this was not likely to be an easy journey. Just as he himself had faced many obstacles and been at the mercy of those who would or would not offer him hospitality, so anyone who followed him would similarly need to set aside the comforts of this world and be prepared for a very different way of life.

Then Jesus reached out to another person he encountered on the way and said, “Follow me.” This man was clearly intrigued by Jesus’ message, but he also wasn’t quite ready to make a full commitment. So he responded, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” It was a fair excuse, really—proper burial was a requirement of Jewish law. But why would anyone whose father had just died be out on the road to meet Jesus? Many commentators have suspected that this man’s father was alive and well, and that his postponement might be measured in months or years, not days. But all that is beside the point. Jesus didn’t take kindly to this man’s excuse: “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” For Jesus, nothing was more important than the work of proclaiming the kingdom of God, and those who chose to follow him needed to share this commitment.

Finally, a third man stepped up to offer to join the journey: “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” This man also didn’t need any prodding to join the throng following Jesus, but he still felt that he needed to obey the fifth of the Ten Commandments and honor his father and mother by saying farewell. He may have even been remembering the story of the call of the prophet Elisha that we heard in our first reading, where Elisha made a stop at home to kiss his father and mother goodbye before joining Elijah in his prophetic work. But Jesus would have none of this. Those who wanted to follow him needed to make an immediate commitment without conditions, to set aside their worldly attachments—even and perhaps especially to their families!—and place their full and proper focus on the work of proclaiming the kingdom of God. So Jesus turned to this man and responded, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

We don’t know what these men did after Jesus spoke to them. There is no record of whether or not they followed Jesus after these strong words. But because they are written here, it is clear that those who did follow him remembered these words and wanted others to hear them, for they set a high standard of how we are to respond to God’s call.

Nowadays, when I hear these words of Jesus, my mind goes in two directions. First, I tend to get frustrated because other people just aren’t living up to Jesus’ standards. Some who follow Jesus seem to miss his point that there is some self-sacrifice involved, that they will not enjoy the full comforts of this world and may have to become dependent upon the hospitality of strangers—and then I realize that I am as guilty of that as the next guy. Then there are others who claim to follow Jesus who back out of church meetings or say that they just can’t do anything more because of family obligations or some other very reasonable excuse, and I want to quote Jesus back to them, insisting that even family must be set aside for the work of the kingdom of God!—before I realize that I do the very same thing sometimes. And still others who want to follow Jesus put conditions on their response to their call, saying that they really intend to do what God wants them to do, but they seem to forget that “no one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God”—and then I realize that I do the very same thing. This is no easy path for me or anyone else!

Then there are other times when I get a little defensive about Jesus’ words here. “Am I really supposed to just drop everything and leave it behind to follow Jesus? That doesn’t seem very reasonable or possible these days! Come on, Jesus, you couldn’t really mean this in our day and age!” These are incredibly high standards that are difficult to meet. It is almost impossible nowadays to obey Jesus and set aside concern for our future and not worry about how we will make ends meet. Most followers of Jesus in this day and age place a very high value on family relationships because of their faith and would recoil at leaving them behind to join Jesus along the way. And I would be lying to you if I said that I have not at times looked back and wondered about the life that I might be living if I were not doing what I am doing.

But the reality is that Jesus still calls us to step out of our comfort zones and join him in his work of proclaiming a very new and very different way of life that he called the kingdom of God. He did exactly this in his own life and ministry. He left his hometown under duress because the people there were expecting a very different kind of message from their hometown boy. When asked to spend a little time with his mother and brothers, Jesus responded, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.” In his journeys of teaching and healing around Galilee, he left behind any wealth that he had and was totally dependent upon the hospitality of those who would receive him. And Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God was not about restoring a world of the past but about bringing in a new creation where all would have the fullness of life that God intended.

So when Jesus calls us to follow him, he speaks from his own heart, his own life, his own experience, inviting us to give up all that we have as we wander the road to new life together with him, trusting that we will gain far more than we have known before. This is no easy feat, and Jesus knew it better than anyone. He never actually condemned those who chose another path, for he knew the incredible challenges that his pathway would entail. He knew that following him would mean leaving behind family and friends, setting aside the comforts of a worldly life, even putting off the proper religious obligations of burying the dead. And most of all, he knew that following him would even require going to his death on the cross, for he trusted that God was doing something new even in death and that God and will continue to break into this world until all things can be made new.

And so from his life, his death, and his resurrection, Jesus invites us and challenges us and calls us to follow him, to set aside all the other things that pull us in so many different directions and make the work of proclaiming the kingdom of God as our first priority, to put even our lives on the line as we look ahead to the new life that can and will be ours as we follow him. So may we know the presence of Jesus Christ, our leader, who challenges us to follow him, not for our own glory but for the transformation of all creation through Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Temptation for Today

February 17, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 4:1-13 for the First Sunday in Lent
preached on February 17, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

It’s time again for Lent—that forty-day period when we are supposed to eat fish on Fridays, give up chocolate, alcohol, or Facebook, and generally reflect on how we are sinful and miserable human beings. As with so many things, we can blame it all on Jesus—he was the first, after all, to take a forty-day journey in the wilderness, and his story of temptation is clearly what Lent is all about, right? Since he suffered for forty days, we should too!

But I think our text from Luke this morning suggests that our Lenten journey should look a little different from Jesus’ sojourn in the wilderness. Jesus had just been baptized in the Jordan River, and he went to the wilderness led by the Spirit and yet to be tempted by the devil. His vision of temptation along the way was not of beef or chicken on Fridays, rich candy bars, wine and beer, or social networking sites—no, these temptations rattled at the core of his humanity.

First, after forty days without food, the devil suggested to the famished Jesus, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” Jesus had spent his entire time in the wilderness fasting completely, eating nothing—far more than just giving up chocolate or limiting ourselves to fish on Fridays during Lent! Giving up things that aren’t all that good for us to begin with for the 40 days of Lent isn’t really what this is all about! Although the devil tried to take advantage of Jesus’ hunger, Jesus didn’t take the bait. “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’”

But for Jesus, this was about more than food, and so it should be for us. We are not what we eat—no, we can be better measured by what we consume from the world around us, by the people who influence us, by the natural resources we use and abuse, by the relationships that enrich our lives, and by the faith that sustains us as we go along the journey together. Jesus knew this, and so he somehow battled through his hunger to avoid this real temptation upon him to fill himself with something that would not truly satisfy him.

But the devil was not done with Jesus. He next took Jesus on a quick but complete tour of the kingdoms of the world and offered them to him: “I will give their glory and all this authority to you, for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” Now Jesus had to be outraged right away—he surely knew that all the world belongs to God, and the devil had no authority whatsoever to give these kingdoms to anyone, especially Jesus, who already had such authority! But this temptation was about more than the power itself—this was about how to use and abuse that power, about shifting allegiance to a different way of thinking and working in the world and misusing the gifts of power in our lives. Jesus didn’t fall for the devil’s tricks, though. Again, he responded with words from scripture: “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’” Jesus would not give in so easily to the powers of evil in the world in order to gain some temporary power and glory, for his call was to challenge this evil and make it clear that the greatest power comes in weakness and the greatest glory from giving it all away.

While this temptation may not seem to be something of our world—surely the devil doesn’t dangle power and honor and glory before us all the time!—all too often we do look to take the easy way to power and glory. We look for the quickest path to achieve our goals, even if it means cutting some corners or hurting some people along the way. We are constantly tempted to bow to powers other than God to get what we want. And we even seek to build up honor and glory for ourselves, focusing on establishing ourselves and our ways and ideas with power and privilege rather than seeking to join in what God is doing around us.

But Jesus’ third temptation takes all this testing to a new level for Jesus and for us. The devil suggested that Jesus should throw himself down off the pinnacle of the temple and see what would happen. He even quoted a bit of the psalm that preceded our gospel reading this morning:

He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you…
On their hands they will bear you up,
so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.

As the devil saw it, if these promises are so real and good and important, if God really is present, Jesus should have checked out it just to be sure, and all would be well. But Jesus knew otherwise. He too could quote the words of Psalm 91, but he didn’t need to test them at that moment in order to trust them. As Bruce Benson puts it in a brief reflection on this temptation (from the February 21, 2010, edition of Sing for Joy), Jesus was tempted more than anything “to forget that trusting God with one’s life is not the same thing as being reckless with one’s life, that throwing himself off a high wall would be an act of foolishness and not of faith.” And so Jesus responded to this temptation to misuse scripture with another quote from scripture: “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

Now we surely don’t put God to the test! We surely don’t make little deals with God that if only such-and-so will happen, we will be more faithful or stop doing something we shouldn’t be doing anyway. We surely don’t ask God to prove God’s goodness before trusting God in our lives. We surely don’t get frustrated and angry when God doesn’t answer our prayers as we wish and so fails our test. But you know it is true—so often we do exactly this. We expect God to respond to our prayers on our timetable. We suggest that the bad things that happen in our world or in our lives are simply part of “God’s plan” and so will just be okay if we can only suffer through the immediate pain and move on in life. And we even try to “prove” what we believe by twisting around events around us instead of trusting that God is really at work beyond our knowledge and comprehension.

The level of faith and confidence in God’s presence that Jesus demonstrated in response to this temptation—and all these temptations—is something that will constantly evade us. Unlike Jesus, we will always fall short in responding to the real temptations around us. We will never be sustained completely by the right things, and we will always be hungry for something more. We will never be able to completely give up our thirst for power and trust that God’s power is enough for us. And we will always be looking for better proof that God is at work in our lives and our world.

Yet Jesus struggled with these same things. These temptations during those forty days in the wilderness and countless other times during Jesus’ life remind us that God knows the depth of the trials and temptations that we face. And just as he overcame those temptations, we can find a new and different way through them, slowly but surely, day by day, not because we become better people but because God’s new life in Jesus Christ takes deeper and fuller root in us and in our world each and every day. Lent is the gift of time to do just that—to clean out our closets of the dusty old things that get in the way of all that can be new, to cultivate new practices that help us to set aside faith in our own ways and instead trust God’s grace, to make our way through the temptations of our world trusting the presence of God all along the way.

So may we find God amidst all that we give up and all that we take up in these Lenten days so that we can walk the road of uncertainty and temptation with confidence as we seek the way to new life along the road of the cross and look for the hope of the resurrection in our midst through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Where’s Jesus?

December 24, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 2:1-20 and John 1:1-14
preached on December 24, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

One of my most memorable Christmas gifts growing up was the wonderful series of Where’s Waldo? books. They featured a tall, lanky, strange, bespectacled man named Waldo who popped up in a variety of very interesting scenes. The goal of the books was to find him amidst these very busy scenes. He was best distinguished by his bright red striped shirt, but sometimes when he hid behind a tree or something he was a little more difficult to spot. For several years, each Christmas brought a new book in the series, and I remember spending many hours looking carefully for Waldo and the many other things hidden in these scenes. It was a fun game and a great way to spend those lazy Christmas days with family and friends—and even a welcome break from all the toys that seemed to get a lot of attention too!

Sometimes, I feel like we are playing a bit of a game of “Where’s Jesus?” in our world at Christmas nowadays. Signs of the holidays are everywhere, but Jesus is a bit more hidden. Our streets and homes are decorated with trees, garland, Santas, and even nativity scenes, but too often for me at least it just feels obligatory and not all that real and meaningful. Religious celebrations that talk about Jesus take a back seat to family gatherings that focus on gift-giving and eating. Many people are now even saying “Merry Christmas,” but do they even know what that means? Even one of our own parents in the church told me the other day that her child had never made the connection between Jesus and Christmas—to this youngster, Christmas was all about Santa Claus and giving and receiving presents, and, based on our celebrations, I for one am not really all that surprised. Some in the church go on and on about the “War on Christmas”—all the supposed places in our civic culture where the seemingly more generic “holidays” have replaced a proper celebration of Christmas—but I think we have to answer for our own actions and reclaim Christmas for ourselves before we can point to anyone or anything else.

You see, regardless of how we might act or behave in the church or elsewhere, Christmas is not about Santa Claus, giving or receiving gifts, or even the glorious music that shapes these days. When we focus on these things, the world can so easily close in around us. The very shallow joy of this view of Christmas becomes insincere when things get hard or tragedy strikes as it has so often in recent months and years. Between the destruction of Superstorm Sandy and the highly-visible gun violence around us that culminated in Newtown and continued even earlier today, we need something more than the traditional holidays has to offer, a deeper, more real, more transformative joy that brings us new life.

At its core, Christmas should be exactly that. This is the day when we celebrate God’s presence in our world, Immanuel, God-with-us, God’s coming to us in human form, in the birth of Jesus. This is the day when we remember that God doesn’t ever give up on us but shows the greatest possible love for us: love in a simple babe in a manger, love in a wise and challenging teacher, love in a miraculous and astounding healer, love in a life-giving death, love in an astounding resurrection. This is the day when we see that God can’t be pinned only to the powerful, only to the religious, only to Christians, only to the church, for on this day we celebrate how God in Christ was born to Mary, a poor, unmarried girl, in a dark, dank, messy manger, with only strange shepherds to greet him.

So when we look around in these days and wonder, “Where’s Jesus?” the answer may surprise us. We might like to try to get Jesus more fully into our holiday celebrations. We might want to confine the religious element of this season to life in the church or to something that we can do when there is time. And we might even recognize that Jesus is the reason for the season. But when we ask “Where’s Jesus?” the answer may be more like those Waldo books than we could ever imagine, for he is dwelling in our world, not so much hiding as hanging out. He is very much present with us, even when we don’t know it, even when we least expect it. He is ready for us to watch and look and search for him, waiting for us to discover him when and where we least expect it. Our reading tonight from John puts it beautifully:

The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness did not overcome it.

The Word became flesh and lived among us,
and we have seen his glory,
the glory as of a father’s only son,
full of grace and truth.

And so our call this Christmas and every day is simple. Live like this all this has actually happened. Act like Christmas is not about giving gifts or gathering with family and friends but about celebrating God’s life in our midst in Christ. Make Christ’s presence real in our world. And keep asking “Where’s Jesus?” as we look for him to be at work in the expected and unexpected places in our world, for we will certainly encounter this baby boy, this radical teacher and preacher, this astonishing healer, this self-giving servant, this resurrected Christ, in our world.

Sometimes it will be easy, with joyful music and easy signs to point the way. And sometimes it will be hard, when we are lonely, when the walls seem to be closing in around us, when violence and war seem to have the last word. Yet in joy and in sorrow, when we ask “Where’s Jesus?” we know that he is among us. In our songs, in our words, in our celebrations, in our sacrament, we trust that Jesus is among us. In our sorrow, in our sighing, in our living, in our dying, Christ walks with us all the way to show us God’s love each and every day.

So may we seek Jesus and find him this Christmas and throughout the year to come so that our joy might be complete, our hope restored, and our world renewed for these days and always.

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to all, this night, this Christmas, and always. Amen.