parables — Andy James

Unfinished Business

August 21, 2016 By Andy James

a sermon on Isaiah 64:1-9 and Matthew 13:31-35, 44-50
preached on August 21, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

As I’ve been preparing to leave New York over the past month or so, I’ve been doing everything I can to tie up all the loose ends swirling around in my life. But with less than two weeks remaining before the moving van comes to move me to North Carolina, I am realizing that there are some things that are just going to be left undone—there will be some unfinished business in my life and work as I move on to the new things ahead.

The biggest bit of unfinished business I will leave behind in the church is going on right on the other side of this wall in the space once known as the auditorium. As construction began a few weeks on our project to enhance the accessibility of our building and create new space for our children to learn, I got excited—it looked like I might actually get to see this work finished! This work is a major achievement in the life of this congregation. We have been talking about doing some sort of accessibility project for basically the entire eleven years that I have been pastor here—and I know that the conversation actually probably began eleven years or more before that!

But as the weeks have worn on and the work went slower than expected, it became clear that this too would be unfinished business for me. There are too many things still to be finished for all the work to be complete before my last day in the office on Thursday! And yet as I was talking with Lena Ronde about this the other day, I realized that this is like so much of my ministry in this place. I am not going to see things finished in the way I would like. The projects and work that we have begun together here to live out the mission of God in our midst will take new shape and form and direction in the days after I leave, and I cannot control that. I am leaving a lot of unfinished business—more than I would like—for you and your next pastor—and for God!—to keep doing in this place.

“The Exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the World,” banner from Bloomfield Presbyterian Church on the Green

The sixth and final Great End of the Church that comes before us today leaves me thinking about a lot of unfinished business. While a number of the things contained in these Great Ends can be quantified into achievable tasks—things like “the maintenance of divine worship” that we can clearly see when we gather here each Sunday or “the promotion of social righteousness” that we can assign to a number of specific actions that we can take as a church—this last Great End, “the exhibition of the kingdom of heaven to the world,” is a much less defined thing. We cannot complete this task in an hour on Sunday, over the course of one job in life, or even in the lifetime of a person or a congregation. The exhibition of the kingdom of heaven to the world is always unfinished business—something that we must always be working on as God’s people.

Our scripture readings this morning give us incredible images of what this kingdom might look like in our world. First, the prophet Isaiah gives us a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven breaking in to this current world. “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!” the prophet cries. O that things would be different here and now, that everything would be finished and the church’s exhibition of the kingdom of heaven would be clear and complete!

After all, the prophet says, this has happened before: “When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.” God’s people have seen the kingdom of heaven before—maybe in a day past when more people were engaged in the life of the church, maybe when things were more hopeful in the world around us, maybe when we were more able to make a difference amid all the challenges of our world.

But the prophet is not calling on God to turn the clock back in time to fix all this. No, he insists that it is the people who must change, for we have gone astray, separating ourselves from the way that God intends: “We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.” Yet God still has unfinished business with God’s people:

Yet, O Lord, you are our Father;
we are the clay, and you are our potter;
we are all the work of your hand.

The kingdom of heaven, then, is revealed in the powerful appearance of something new that shatters the expectations and realities of the old, in the recognition of the ways that the things of this world must be transformed to make way for something new, and most of all in the present promise and ongoing hope of God’s care, concern, and creating love that shift and shape us and our world each and every day.

Then Jesus also offers us several visions of the kingdom of heaven in his parables from our reading from Matthew. In these five parables, a selection of a broader group in Matthew’s gospel that open with “the kingdom of heaven is like,” Jesus gave his disciples a picture of the kind of transformation and challenge that come with the kingdom of heaven. In these parables, Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed planted in a field, to yeast that leavens bread, to treasure hidden in a field, to a merchant seeking a fine and beautiful pearl, and to a net filled with good and bad fish.

All these different images of the kingdom of heaven help us to understand four things about the kingdom of heaven that can help us as we exhibit it to the world. First, the kingdom of heaven starts small. Mustard seeds, yeast, and pearls all begin as small and unremarkable things, but they end up bringing an incredible and overwhelming gift. In these parables, the kingdom of heaven also can go unnoticed until it is discovered. Every way that Jesus describes the kingdom of heaven coming into being can so very easily be missed if we are not paying attention and looking for it to become real. Third, the kingdom of heaven is incredibly valuable and cannot be bought without a substantial price. Acquiring the treasure in the field and the pearl of great value both require giving up everything else. Finally, these parables show us that there are some things that look like the kingdom of heaven that really aren’t, so we must always sort out exactly what among us and beyond us is the kingdom of heaven and what is not.

Between these parables of Jesus about the kingdom of heaven and the images of unfinished business from the prophet Isaiah, I think we have some pretty good guidance about exactly what it is we are called to do in “the exhibition of the kingdom of heaven to the world.” We can recognize the incredible creation of God present in all people and honor it as best we can in the church and in every element of our lives—that is the exhibition of the kingdom of heaven to the world. We can look for ways to claim the lordship of Jesus Christ in our world that demands that we name so many others as lord—that is the exhibition of the kingdom of heaven to the world. We can take even the tiniest steps to work for an end to systems of injustice, inequality, oppression, and violence that go against the image of God in all creation—that is the exhibition of the kingdom of heaven to the world. We can strengthen our lives of faith by walking together in worship, learning, and service so that when any one of us falls, the rest of us are willing and able and ready to lift her up—that is the exhibition of the kingdom of heaven to the world. We can gather at this table where all are welcome and no one is turned away—that is the exhibition of the kingdom of heaven to the world. And we can raise our voices in song, joining with all creation to proclaim God’s wonderful name in all we say and do—that is the exhibition of the kingdom of heaven to the world. Our actions along this way may be as small as planting a mustard seed, mixing in a little bit of yeast, or finding a treasure or a fine pearl, but whatever we do, we offer one little step toward finishing all the unfinished business that is before us in our world.

We will never get this work done. It will always be unfinished business. We as the very human institution of the church will never offer a perfect vision of the things that God is doing to those around us. We will not be able to finish all the projects that need to be finished so that the world can see the transformation that God has in store for this world. And we will always leave unfinished business wherever we go because God will keep working to make us and all things new. Just because we can’t do this work perfectly or completely does not free us to set it aside altogether, but in light of all this unfinished business, we can deepen our trust and our faith in God as we pray that God will keep changing us and continue renewing us so that others can see in us the kind of world that God has promised for all creation.

So as our journeys diverge after eleven years of traveling together, may God continue the exhibition of the kingdom of heaven to the world in all of us, working through us and in us and even in spite of us, finishing our unfinished business as we prepare to share the joyous feast of this table again with one another and with all the saints in the kingdom of heaven, united in new life by Jesus Christ our risen Lord. Lord, come quickly! Alleluia! Amen.

Sow What?

July 13, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
preached on July 13, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

The parable in this morning’s reading is quite likely one of the most familiar of all the different parables that Jesus taught to his disciples. While some of Jesus’ parables defied interpretation in his own time and continue to confuse us today, this one clearly has simplicity on its side—and if we have any difficulties in understanding it, we can resolve them by reading just a few verses further on to hear Jesus’ own explanation of it! The parable’s simplicity certainly helps with its familiarity. I remember first hearing this parable as a child in Sunday school, and I suspect that it remains a staple of such classes even today because it is so accessible—and because it almost immediately leads to a fun activity involving seeds and dirt!

This parable of the sower showed up while Jesus was teaching an ever-growing crowd, for he had just climbed into a boat to speak to a crowd that had gathered on the lakeshore. They were anxiously awaiting his next teaching, so he offered them this story. A farmer set out to plant his seeds, and he sowed them all over his land. Some fell on the path, some on rocky ground, some among thorns, and some on good soil.

The seeds bore fruit based on where they were sown. The seeds on the path didn’t have enough time to take root before birds came along and ate them. The seeds on rocky ground sprang up quickly in the shallow dirt, but they never grew deep roots and so withered away. The seeds among the thorns started out okay, but they had no chance to get the sunlight and nutrients they needed because the thorns took over all around them. And the seeds on good soil took root and grew well, building up toward a plentiful harvest.

After he had told the parable to the crowd, Jesus’ disciples came to him and asked him why he spoke in parables—and by extension, what this one meant. Our reading this morning skips over his explanation for teaching and speaking in parables, I think in part because Jesus’ words confuse as much as they clarify, but Jesus’ description of the meaning of this parable that follows is incredibly familiar and understandable.

Jesus cast this parable of sowing seed as the sharing of “the word of the kingdom,” placing God in the role of the sower and the hearer of this word as the soil. According to Jesus, the varied receptions of this word by those who hear it are the different types of soil. The path is those who do not understand it and so find the word snatched away before it takes root. The rocky ground is those who respond quickly but who struggle to keep going for the long term. The soil surrounded by thorns is those whose response is held back by the things of the world. And the good soil is those who hear the word and understand it and so bear fruit abundantly.

Now as Jesus tells it and explains it, this is a beautiful and simple parable, but when he is done talking about this sower I still find myself asking, “So what?” The pun for us is as intentional as it is bad, because I think the parable’s recognition of different soils is not as helpful for us as it was for those who first heard it. I think most of us here fall in that final category, in that space known as the good soil, for we have heard the word of the kingdom and done our best to understand it and let it take root in our lives. Now our fruits may be less visible at times, we may have shoots that sprout too quickly and wither faster than they should, we may have some roots that struggle to take hold for one reason or another, but on the whole I think we are far more like the soil where seeds yield fruit than any of the other options.

So if we are already among those bearing fruit many times over, the biggest question that emerges from this parable for us really does seem to be “so what?” It might be worth our while, then, to step back from our traditional viewpoint in this story and imagine ourselves not just as the soil but maybe as the sower or the seed. What is the seed which we sow? And how do we sow and spread it?

The seed, as Jesus described it, is “the word of the kingdom.” This is not just any word, not just a part of the Bible that we pick and choose as our favorite or as strangely essential, not just the word that we imagine God wants us or others to hear. This word that we sow is the word of the kingdom of God, a word that by its very name challenges every earthly kingdom and nation, a word that upends all our human expectations and transforms our desires, a word that focuses on the well-being of all creation and not just the success of a few, a word that demands more than a response in words or belief but also a response in action.

Sowing this seed, then, is more than hitting someone repeatedly over the head with the Bible, more than standing on a street corner shouting scriptures of love or condemnation at the top of our lungs, more than suggesting that it might be a good idea to let this seed take root and bear fruit. Instead, when we take on the role of the sower in our lives and our world, we are called to boldly proclaim this word of the kingdom of God in word and in deed, to shape and mold our own lives to this transformative vision of something new, to call our world to radical ways of valuing all human life, to work toward full expression of God’s mercy, justice, and peace in our world, to cry out for peace when war and strife seem to reign and calls for vengeance overtake any sense of reasonableness, and to turn away from all the things that keep us from placing our ultimate and real trust in God alone.

All this talk about sowing seed is important and thoughtful and good, but when we ask the question “so what?” we might just see that Jesus left out of his parable one of the most important parts of good farming: the hard work of cultivation. In his parables, Jesus often made his focus very intentional and immediate, recognizing that his own time to spread this message and plant these seeds was short and that the immediacy of God’s coming kingdom would outweigh a long season of planning, preparation, and waiting. It is not surprising, then, that his message here might miss some of the ways in which longer-term care and nurture might help these seeds to grow even more fruitfully.

Yet I think it is foolish to think that any reasonable farmer in this day and age would ever throw seeds so indiscriminately, let alone leave them to sprout on their own without any additional care. Even if Jesus leaves out this important part of the growing process, it still falls to us to be good stewards of the seeds of God’s kingdom that we sow and nurture. We may have to to till some soil a bit to make it ready for seeds to grow. We may need to examine where we are sowing our seeds to choose places that are ripe for the growth of the kingdom. We may need to keep the birds and weeds of our world away as these seeds sprout forth. And we may find ourselves doing less planting and more watering and fertilizing of seeds as they take root and begin to bear fruit.

So as we consider the impact of this familiar parable, may we keep asking “So what?”—wondering what exactly we are to sow, exploring all the different times and places where God is calling us to join in this work of sowing seed, sharing the seeds of the wonder of God’s kingdom far and wide, and nurturing all the seeds that God has planted in us and around us and in spite of us so that we all might bear much fruit as all things are made new in Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

A Seeking, Rejoicing God

September 15, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 15:1-10
preached on September 15, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Many churches these days spend a lot of time, energy, and money talking about “seekers.” According to their research and approach, there are a lot of “spiritual seekers” out there who are looking for a church of one sort or another. These seekers usually fit a very specific demographic: white, usually married men and women, with one or two children and middle-class suburban values and sensibilities. They use this focus on seekers as the guiding principle behind all the other things that they do, establishing small groups that meet in people’s homes and talk about the problems brought on by our intense and busy culture, designing worship and choosing music to support the individual’s life of faith, and setting up other programs that meet specific perceived needs of this population. There are people who are very much seeking this kind of community, but increasingly I wonder if there are as many people who don’t fit this model as those who do.

This morning’s reading from Luke gives us two parables about seekers, but these folks seem to be quite different from the seekers these churches are expecting. When he told these stories, Jesus was talking with “tax collectors and sinners,” although they were not his intended audience! They were not the seekers he was referring to. Instead, he directed these stories more at the hyper-religious Pharisees and scribes who were criticizing Jesus for the company he was keeping.

First he told the story of a man who had lost one sheep out of a hundred. This strange shepherd leaves the rest of the flock behind to go seek out this one sheep who is lost, then he returns with it on his shoulders. This seeking shepherd rejoices because his one lost sheep has been found, and he feels it worthy of a celebration for everyone! So Jesus connects this rejoicing back to his audience of Pharisees and scribes—and the tax collectors and sinners who were certainly also listening in!—by noting that “there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.”

Then Jesus repeats the same model and outline with a second story of a different seeker, this time a woman who has lost one of her ten silver coins. She is so intent on seeking it out and finding it that she lights a lamp, uses precious oil, sweeps the house clean, and turns the house upside down until she finds it. Then she too invites her friends and neighbors to join her rejoicing, just as “there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

If we take a closer look at these parables, we have to notice the characters here. Who is doing the seeking? What is actually being sought? Unlike the seekers so many churches desire, the seekers here are not people but God. The ones doing the seeking and the subsequent rejoicing are stand-ins not for humans but for the divine, and it is surely worth noting that the second story puts a woman into this role, the only time in the New Testament when a parable “presents a woman as a metaphor or allegory for God.” (Charles Cousar, “Exegetical Perspective on Luke 15:1-10,” Feasting on the Word Year C Volume 4, p. 71) The things being sought out are also notable, as the lost sheep and lost coin are deeply precious and yet have little or no control over being lost.

The scribes and Pharisees in Jesus’ day—and some of the more legalistic among us in our own—would not particularly like this, preferring to keep the emphasis on repentance and encouraging a sense of personal responsibility for sinfulness. But Jesus will have none of this today. His emphasis here is on joy, for these stories do not call sinners to find a new way but rather invite everyone, especially those who consider themselves particularly righteous, to join in God’s celebration of new life.

In reflecting on the joy in these parables in Luke 15, Henri Nouwen offers a beautiful word:

God rejoices. Not because the problems of the world have been solved, not because all human pain and suffering have come to an end, nor because thousands of people have been converted and are now praising [God] for [all] goodness. No, God rejoices because one of [God’s] children who was lost has been found. What I am called to is to enter into that joy. It is God’s joy, not the joy that the world offers. It is the joy that comes from seeing a child walk home amid all the destruction, devastation, and anguish of the world. It is a hidden joy, [an] inconspicuous [minute detail]….

But God rejoices when one repentant sinner returns. Statistically that is not very interesting. But for God, numbers never seem to matter…. From God’s perspective, one hidden act of repentance, one little gesture of selfless love, one moment of true forgiveness is all that is needed to bring God from [the] throne to run to [a] returning son and to fill the heavens with sounds of divine joy. (Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son, p. 114, 116)

So today’s kickoff celebration seems like an appropriate time to hear these parables anew and spend our time rejoicing. We can use a moment to stop and celebrate and enjoy a crisp fall day at the end of a long and hot summer. We can appreciate a new and different word in the midst of so many other words in our world. And we need a reminder to rejoice as we begin a new time in our life together as my hours shift and change in my service to this congregation.

At our core, I think we are pretty good at this kind of celebration, at welcoming those who might have been called “tax collectors and sinners” back in Jesus’ time, at leaving room for our faith to deepen and our seeking God to find us in the midst of the strange and confusing wilderness of our world, at putting our focus on the rejoicing that God calls us to do each and every day. When I think about the seekers here, though, I am challenged by these images of this seeking God—a shepherd who is not afraid to leave ninety-nine sheep behind to find the one who is lost, a woman who is willing to burn a extra oil in her lamp and get dirty from stirring up all the dust around the house just to find one lost coin.

We can certainly be grateful that we have a God who will do this for us and for anyone, but I don’t think that mere gratitude is enough. Beyond joining in the rejoicing, I believe that we are also challenged to join God in the search, to leave behind the familiar and certain so that we can discover the deeper and greater pleasure of something new, to use the gifts that we have been given in new and different ways, maybe even to get a little dirty and put a few things at risk as we look to recover the lost coins and lost sheep of our world today. We are invited not just to set aside our uncertainties about those who are different from us but in fact to join God in seeking out those very kinds of people who are lost and cannot even cry out for help. We are encouraged not just to throw open our doors and see who shows up in our life together but to go out and seek not just those who are already seeking us but even more those who are not even able to know that they need to seek something, those who cannot even begin to cry out for new life.

This might mean giving up things that are dear to us: a little extra time, maybe some beloved traditions, almost certainly some money, and maybe even a whole lot more. Yet the rejoicing that can emerge from this search can be so much more rewarding. We can transform our understanding of our lives and our relationships, recognizing that they are not grounded in the merit of what we or others do but rather in the deep and wide mercy of God for us and all creation. We can seek out others, not just to increase the numbers in our midst or address their eternal fate but to invite them to share in the kind of rejoicing that gives us life. And in giving up something of what we have been, we might discover that God is seeking us too, that God is working to find the things within us that seem to be lost, that God is diligently searching our hearts and our lives to help us to lift up the times and places and ways that we too can made new, and that God is inviting us to rejoice as these new things take hold in us.

So may God open our hearts and our minds and our lives to this new and deeper rejoicing, that we might welcome the God who seeks us, join God in diligently and hopefully seeking out those who are lost, and share in rejoicing with God and all creation until all that is lost is found and all things are made new. Lord, come quickly! Amen.