peace — Andy James

Speaking Up

January 17, 2016 By Andy James

a sermon on Isaiah 62:1-5
preached on January 17, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

“For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent…”

These days, it feels like there are lots of people who are taking this word from the Lord very seriously! As we approach the presidential primaries this spring and the national elections this fall, candidates and pundits and regular people are speaking up constantly! But even beyond this moment, people are raising their voices more than ever before. Sometimes reading on Facebook or Twitter or other social media makes me wonder if some people ever have a thought that they do not say out loud! The comments section of many online news articles is even worse, as hate and vitriol pour forth unchecked. And the constant call all around us to speak up about one thing or another by posting on Facebook, signing a petition, writing a representative or senator, or even sending smoke signals just leaves me wondering if any words I choose to offer will ever be heard above the din of the world in these days.

The biggest issue about all this noise for me, though, is that it is so often about the wrong things. Who are those who refuse to keep silent speaking for? Are they raising their voices for themselves or for others? Are the issues being lifted up for the benefit of a few or the many? Are these people speaking up on behalf of the well-off or of the poor and downtrodden? So often in these days, those who refuse to keep silent are concerned only about themselves and not others. They so often seek the well-being of a few at the expense of the many. So many who speak up in these days seem to be working for the safety of those who are quite safe already while endangering those who have no way of protecting themselves.

While so many loud voices around us today are focused on self-preservation and permitting injustice, the prophet Isaiah here declares that God will raise God’s voice on behalf of those who might not otherwise be heard, of the people of Israel and Judah who were struggling to find their voice—and a way to raise it up—following their exile to Babylon. While many of the exiles had returned to their homeland, they could not forget the trauma that they had experienced. Their story was deeply and directly marked by the experience of their exiled refugee ancestors, and they were still suffering the effects of this experience. They may have been back home, with reconstruction of the buildings and institutions of their homeland taking place all around them, but they were still filled with the signs and markers of deep brokenness, of long-term defeat, and of a feeling of abandonment by God. And God may have offered them deep promises of comfort and hope for generations, but they still bore the scars of a people violated by siege and invasion that divided them from one another and from their God who had seemingly left them alone to suffer.

In response to all these things, the prophet offers the people the words of God in poetry that, as commentator Kathleen O’Connor describes it,

takes historical circumstances and transposes them into the small story of a couple and their household. The poetry moves between language about an ancient city and the life of a bride. It attends to and gathers up the suffering of generations by using imagery of a women cast off and abandoned. In ancient Israel such a woman faced life-threatening peril, because she could not survive without family to support and protect her. (Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 1, p. 247)

But God’s proclamation here makes it clear that such peril is not the last word for this woman—or for the people. God will speak up to make it clear to all the world that this woman—and these people—are not only protected but beloved and celebrated. God will make it clear that these whom others may deride as devoid of beauty and wonder “shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.” God will transform these who once were desolate and forsaken into a joyous, hopeful, and beloved people. Amid all their conflicts, all their fears, all their uncertainties, all their as-yet-unfulfilled promises, God’s light will break forth in their midst, making it clear that they are beautiful, beloved, and special. All the harm that they have endured, all the dishonor that has been poured upon them, all the fear that has surrounded them—all these things will be vindicated as the world is shown that this harm, this dishonor, this fear is not the last word, for the glorious transformation of new life will shine brightly as God rejoices in these new things.

In our day and age, when there are so many who will not keep silent about the wrong things, when there are plenty of people who are attacked or left without support and protection, when there are so many in our midst who struggle to find a hopeful way to interact with one another, these words still echo loudly among us. These words are not so much addressed to us for ourselves—after all, if we are truly honest with ourselves, most of us are not the kind of downtrodden people God is addressing here—but rather these words are shared with us so that we might offer God’s love and light to those who might not otherwise know it. In our world, there are plenty of people who need to know that they are chosen and singled out and gifted as God’s beloved. As Kathleen O’Connor puts it so well,

Isaiah’s passage supports divine election not to buttress the contented, to uphold the secure, the confident, or the arrogant. Isaiah’s theology of election is rhetoric of immense power because it tells the poor, the second-class nation, the excluded and cast-off women of this world, that God takes immense delight in them. (Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 1, p. 247)

As God’s people, then, we are called to share this kind of new life and light with exactly these people—these who are dismissed by the world as “illegal” because they fled across human borders seeking hope for their families and themselves; these who are caught up in the violence of systemic racism and sexism and homophobia and religious preference because they do not look or act or believe like others; these who long for a safe place to escape violence against their bodies and spirits because they have been hurt in body, mind, and spirit by those who say that they love them; even these who find themselves mixed up in anxiety and fear over an uncertain future and so lash out against others who seem to be so different from them. We are called to remember that God’s care is first and foremost for those who are not cared for by the world—and that we join in God’s work when we reach out in mercy, grace, and love to make God’s presence real.

There is no better time to remember all these things and return to this pathway of hope and justice than on this weekend when we celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. More than any other figure in our history, Dr. King embodied the fullness of these words in his life and work. He refused to keep silent and did not rest in his pursuit of the case of justice and righteousness for all of God’s people and especially for the downtrodden and excluded among us. He insisted that God’s vindication and glory would be revealed among those who had been cast down, that their lives would be “a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord.” And he made it clear that God delights in all people and will bring us all to a new day of equality, justice, and peace, fulfilling not just our national commitment to care for our people but our human responsibility to embrace the wonder of God’s love in ways beyond our immediate understanding and outside of our usual knowledge. Martin Luther King, Jr., insisted that we as a people could be more than we were and can be more than we are, carrying the potential of great wonder, hope, and restoration for ourselves and all the world, for God’s liberating glory invites us to shine God’s light into every dark and uncertain place.

So, my friends, it is time for us too to follow these prophets’ proclamation, to set aside our silence and to take up a new voice, to shine God’s vindication of the poor and outcast before all the nations to broadcast God’s salvation of the excluded and cast-off to the ends of the earth, to join the faithful saints of the ages who have shared this message of transformation and hope with our actions in solidarity with God and others so that it will be clear to us and the downtrodden and all the world that we are all God’s beloved and that we are called to celebrate all the ways that God rejoices in us and all our sisters and brothers until the whole creation is made new in the power of Jesus Christ our Lord. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

Peace Enough to Share

July 19, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on Psalm 85 and Luke 24:28-43
preached on July 19, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

It’s hard to believe that ten years ago I was in my final interviews and negotiations to become your pastor—I’m actually pretty sure that exactly ten years ago today we met with the presbytery’s Committee on Ministry—and it is maybe even harder to believe that I remember anything at all about that whirlwind experience! Still, I recall very clearly talking with the pastor nominating committee about worship—what was important to you, what you might be open to doing differently, and especially what was distinctive in worship here.

One thing that the committee talked about at length was the passing of the peace. They told me with great enthusiasm about who it involved everyone greeting everyone else with the warmth of God’s love and how the service would just not be the same without it. Over ten years, I have discovered that the committee was very much correct: the passing of the peace is a very important part of our worship here. Still, I must break some difficult news to you, and after ten years I hope you are able to hear it with the honesty and love that I intend: passing the peace is a very important part of worship for a lot of small churches, not just this one!

We do something right here in making the passing of the peace an important part of the service. As you know so well, this is not just a perfunctory greeting—it is the embodiment of God’s love and peace and hope that we are privileged to share with one another. This time of greeting one another is not about saying hello to the people we haven’t seen since last Sunday but rather about extending God’s welcome to all who join us for worship. This time of sharing peace assures us of God’s peace with each one of us in a way that opens us to live out that peace in and with our world.

All these things are embodied in our scripture readings today that give us a deeper perspective of God’s peace and so inform this practice of our worship. Each text brings a different perspective on what this peace is and how it spreads in the world, but both make it very clear that the peace that we share in this weekly ritual comes from God.

First, Psalm 85 describes how God’s peace is offered to us in words so that it can be lived out. Amid the brokenness and pain of our world, with the memory of past salvation and reconciliation close at hand, the psalmist describes how God’s people await a word of peace that will show God’s salvation and glory for the whole earth. But this peace is not just some wonderful and hopeful concept, offered only in beautiful flowing words. This peace actually gets lived out as “steadfast love and faithfulness… meet” and “righteousness and peace… kiss each other.”

This strange and wonderful imagery of peace had to stand out in the world of its first hearers. As contentious and fractured as our world so often seems to be, ancient Israel was touched even more regularly by war. I suspect that peace was far more often a dream than a reality in that day and age, for Israel stood at the crossroads of world culture and commerce and was always under attack by some outside culture or empire. So to hear a proclamation of peace like this had to be quite startling.

If that wasn’t enough, the meaning of the word used for peace here, shalom, went far beyond a description of the absence of conflict. This shalom points to not just the absence of conflict but also the presence of wholeness, completeness, and safety—the deeper elements of peace that come from God and are offered to us to share. Shalom is a transformative way of life that makes the world a different place, emerging from the ashes of human conflict to bring hope, stepping out of changed relationships so that we can live differently, in harmony with one another and all creation. And so each week we are invited to share this peace, not just a peace of greeting one another in the usual way at the usual time but a transformative peace that breaks down the barriers that divide us and demonstrates how we can live and share God’s peace in the world.

One of the best examples of sharing God’s peace in this way is on display in our New testament reading for today from the gospel according to Luke. This story of Easter evening presents us with a situation filled with fear and excitement as Jesus appeared to his disciples on the night of his resurrection. Jesus had been revealed to several of them earlier in the day, including to two of them who had walked with him on the road and not recognized him until they sat down to share a meal. But when he showed up as all eleven of the disciples were gathering on that Easter Sunday evening, they were “startled and terrified.” They didn’t quite know what to do—they “thought they were seeing a ghost” because they just had not figured out how their beloved teacher who had been executed and buried just three days earlier was now alive again. So Jesus’ first words to them set the stage for our sharing each Sunday: “Peace be with you.” These were not magical words to automatically fix everything, for Luke reports that “in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering,” but in sharing this peace, Jesus invited them to take comfort in the gift of his presence so that they might share it with others.

The peace Jesus shared with his disciples continues to be shared in these days. When we pass the peace each Sunday, we bear this kind of wholeness and new life into our lives and our world. In worship, we pass the peace following the confession and pardon so that we can celebrate the ways our forgiveness enables us to walk in newness of life. But when we pass the peace in worship, it is not so much about receiving something to bring us comfort for our own lives but rather about sharing this confidence of new life so that we can live in new and different relationship with one another and the world. What good is God’s peace, after all, if it does not transform how we live with one another? Why is this peace worth passing and sharing if we do not try to make it real with others and our world? How can we expect to be reconciled with God if we do not find reconciliation with one another?

Our world needs this kind of peace now more than ever. We have not had to look far in our news this week to see the need for changed relationships of wholeness and peace to take hold. When months of diplomacy resulted in a new agreement with Iran around limits on nuclear and conventional weapons and an end to extensive sanctions, some people said that continued conflict and even potential war was preferable to a pathway towards peace. When the nation of Greece found themselves in the midst of deep economic depression and went to their neighbors and partners in the European Union for assistance, some people labeled Greeks as lazy and incompetent, demanding deeper suffering and continued austerity without any real help to open up new possibilities for wholeness and redevelopment. And when a young Muslim shot and killed five people at two military recruiting stations in Chattanooga, some people immediately labeled him a terrorist, even in the absence of conclusive evidence for such, and Franklin Graham, a minister and son of the beloved evangelist Billy Graham, even called for an end to all Muslim immigration to the United States, continuing a history of xenophobia and racism against our faithful Muslim friends just as their holy month of Ramadan came to an end.

Amid all these seeds and sprouts and full-grown conflicts, God calls us to live out the peace that we pass and share each Sunday in our worship. The psalmist calls us to listen for the peace that God speaks to us so that we might be a part of what is sure and certain to be ahead:

Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.

And Jesus calls us to set aside our fears and live in reconciliation and peace with one another, recognizing how his resurrection brings new life into being here and now for all the world. If this peace is good enough to share among one another, then it is good enough to share with all the world. It is good enough to inspire us to live in a new way with those who are different from us. And it is good enough to offer to the world as even a glimpse of God’s steadfast love, faithfulness, and righteousness in our actions and beyond.

So may God continue to inspire our worship as we share the peace with one another and give us strength to share that peace with all the world so that we might stand as a witness to new life and hope in our broken and fearful world until all things are made new in the peace and joy of Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Making the Story Our Own

December 21, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 1:26-56
preached on December 21, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

As some of you know, I am a collector of nativity scenes. Over the past seven or eight years, I’ve managed to assemble a collection that includes a depiction of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus from every continent except Australia and Antarctica. I’m still trying to complete those last two, though I suspect that anything from Antarctica might be nothing more than a puddle of water by the time it gets to me!

The incredible thing about all these nativity scenes is the variety of different ways that they depict the same story. The materials vary based on the things common to that part of the world, and there are cultural differences in dress, look, and even skin color. Even beyond this, though, these different nativities show Mary, Joseph, Jesus, and others with a variety of different expressions and feelings. Sometimes they are shown with great seriousness and piety, other times with a bit of happiness and satisfaction. One setting has nothing more than the name of each character in a simple typeface on a block of wood, and there’s even one where Mary looks so peaceful and prayerful that I think she may be asleep!

All these different depictions of the nativity remind me that this is ultimately the story of God coming into our world, taking human form just like us, coming to us to relate to us as one of us. While Jesus was certainly born into a particular time and place, bearing the cultural, religious, and personal markers of his human identity, all these different depictions of the nativity remind us that we are constantly called to make this story our own.

The pre-birth story that marks our reading this morning is filled with so many wonderful moments that can touch our lives: the visit of the angel Gabriel to Mary, the news that the young virgin Mary will bear a child by the power of the Holy Spirit, the visit of Mary to her relative Elizabeth, the songs offered by Elizabeth and Mary as they sort out what these strange events mean for one another and the world, and the extended conversations between these two very blessed women about the children they are bearing into the world. All these different elements of this story connect to our lives in different ways based on our individual experiences, our cultural backgrounds, the circumstances of our time, and even our varied spiritual experiences. As we sort out what all these things mean for us, all those different nativities might help us a bit, for just as they give us so many different depictions of the same story, so we can remember that we will carry even among us gathered here today many different connections to this story behind the birth of Jesus.

Even with our varied interpretations and connections, there are I think two particularly important elements of this story for us to carry with us in these final days on the journey to Christmas and beyond. The first is the vision of holy friendship that we see in the encounter between Elizabeth and Mary. Our Advent Bible study lifted up this theme beautifully, and so some of you have talked about this with me before, but there is something truly incredible that we see in the encounter between these two pregnant women. Elizabeth and Mary are connected by many things. They both thought that they could not bear children—Mary because she was too young, Elizabeth because she was too old. They both were wandering through the uncertainties of pregnancy in a day and age when the health of mother and child were at far greater risk than today. And they both knew through an encounter with the divine that the child each was bearing would be special and set apart for God’s incredible purposes.

These common experiences brought Elizabeth and Mary together in a bond that only they could understand. In reflecting on this connection, author Enuma Okoro observes, “It is a testament to God’s care and provision that each woman has someone to journey with as she navigates the peculiar seasons in which she finds herself.” (Silence and Other Surprising Invitations of Advent, p. 67) As we reflect on this story and make it our own, we can think about the holy companions that we have on our journeys. Who can open our eyes to a deeper understanding of how God is at work in our lives and our world? What sorts of people are among us—or should we seek to be among us—who can remind us of our blessedness and challenge us to help others to embrace their blessedness? How can we be ready to welcome people into our lives—and into the life we share in this place—to be the kinds of companions that we need to journey with us?

The holy friendship that Mary and Elizabeth shared can take so many different forms in our world. For some, it may come in the relationships of marriage and lifelong commitment. Others may find it in friends who can walk together amidst the many changes of life. Some may find it within their families, with siblings or even between parents and children. And some holy friendships may even last for an extremely short season of life and yet still show the kind of divine presence and holy imagination that emerged so beautifully between Elizabeth and Mary. Whatever form these holy friendships may take, they all can build on the kind of connection that Mary and Elizabeth shared, for just as they found support in one another as they waited to welcome their children into the world, we too can deepen our faith and find new hope as we share our joys and struggles with one another along the way.

Just as holy friendship can open us to one way of making this story our own as we find a new and different way to live together, the great song of Mary that follows in their encounter can show us to a new way of being in the world. Mary offers this great song known as the Magnificat after her initial encounter with Elizabeth, as the impact of their shared joy settles in all the more. Mary’s Magnificat, so named because of its first word in the Latin that was the primary language of the church and Bible for so many years, builds on the tradition of the psalms and canticles of the Old Testament, especially the Song of Hannah, mother of Samuel, to give praise for God’s great works and the promise of justice and righteousness for all creation that is being fulfilled in Mary’s life as she bears Jesus into the world.

But this is more than any old song. Mary’s song here is the song of a mother who realizes that her child will change the world, of a woman who recognizes the deep blessing that has come to her and the world through her because of the child she is bearing, of a person who can see the transformation that God is making real in the world. Mary gives praise to God for the things that she is experiencing and the blessing that she is finding, but she clearly knows that this is ultimately not about her. She continues her song beyond this personal understanding of blessing to give praise to a God who brings favor when the world would never dream of such, shows mercy from generation to generation, scatters the proud from their places of privilege, turns the tables of power upside down, offers a strange but real preference for those who are poor or in need, fills the hungry with good things, and remembers promises of mercy and hope.

Empowered by the gift of holy friendship with one who understands the challenge and blessing of her life, Mary proclaims the greatness of a God who turns the world upside down, and we can echo her words of praise not just in the gift of our next hymn based on her song but also by living our lives in ways that further God’s justice, peace, mercy, and grace in our world. The incarnation of Jesus that we celebrate at Christmas becomes real when we find ways to make this story our own, when we discover how God has not just broken into the world of first-century Palestine but twenty-first century New York City, when God’s presence is not just something that we experience in our hearts but that we see taking root around us in the transformation of our world.

In the holy friendships of our lives that give us space for fear and hope amidst uncertainty, in the joyful songs that challenge us to make God’s work more real in our world, we encounter the one who comes in these days, the one who turns everything upside down in a baby born in the most humble of circumstances who yet reigns over all the earth, the one who makes all things new through death and resurrection to new life. So as we journey these final days toward Christmas, may we find ways to make this story our own, whether it be in nativity scenes that help us to see these characters as people like us, in seeking holy friendships that open us to God’s presence in our lives in new ways, or in the ways we join all that God is doing in our world to live out the joys of Mary’s song. And as we go along this way, may we be ready to welcome the fullness of Christ’s gift into our lives and our world both this Christmas and when he comes in power to finish making all things new. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

A Vision of Peace

October 5, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Psalm 85 and Isaiah 32:16-20
preached on October 5, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

There’s been a lot of talk lately about peace, although these days it seems like that the more we talk about it, the more difficult it is to actually find any.

The Global Peace Index, which “measures peace in 162 countries according to 22 indicators that gauge the absence of violence or the fear of violence,” finds that 111 countries have increased in their levels of conflict over the last year, versus only 51 where peacefulness has increased. The whole report is pretty depressing. 500 million people live in countries at risk of instability and conflict, with 200 million of those live below the poverty line. Since 2008, only four indicators reviewed in the index have improved worldwide, while eighteen have deteriorated. And all this conflict costs us an incredible amount. They estimate that the global economic impact of violence reached $9.8 trillion dollars last year—the equivalent of two times the total economy of the entire continent of Africa or $1,350 per person around the world.

With this incredible impact of conflict in our world, it is incredibly surprising to me that we don’t spend more of our time, energy, and money sorting out a way of life that will bring peace to our world. However, our scripture readings today point us to a different way. As we receive the Peacemaking Offering to support the efforts of this congregation and our broader church in the global witness to peacemaking, these two wonderful texts from the Old Testament give us a vision of peace in our world.

As Christians, we tend to examine the question of peace from two perspectives—the internal and the external. When we think about internal peace, we focus on the peace that comes within our lives, “peace like a river in my soul,” as the old spiritual puts it, peace that comes from God to displace our fears, set aside our worries, and give us internal comfort and hope for our own individual lives. But we cannot think only about this kind of peace. We must also consider external peace, the peace that emerges between people and in communities and among the nations of the world, the peace that comes only with hard work, difficult listening, and tremendous amounts of trust built up over time.

Both of these kinds of peace are summed up in a single great Hebrew word that is found in both of our texts this morning: shalom. Shalom is the Hebrew word that always gets translated into English as “peace,” but there’s a lot more contained in that word than is implied in our simple translation. The Hebrew word shalom pulls together a wide variety of understanding related to peace that is more than simply the absence of conflict. Shalom is more about presence than absence—the presence of social justice that enables all to have the things that they need for life and living, the presence of wholeness that offers an understanding of completeness and new life, the presence of hope for something beyond the present reality that is yet still very much achievable in our lives and our world.

This kind of peace, then, filled with wholeness and justice, is exactly the peace that the prophet Isaiah focuses on in our second reading this morning. As he writes to a people who have known little more than conflict for generations and who will end up facing even greater conflict and finally exile in the years ahead, Isaiah pauses from rehearsing all their wrongs to tell them how things will start to go right.

Justice will dwell in the wilderness,
and righteousness abide in the fruitful field.

What stranger place to make things right than the wilderness! What more unusual home for righteousness than the field at the center of the harvest! The prophet knows that God’s way of bringing change and hope will be transformative, that God will challenge the expectations of our world and upend the understandings of our lives that have become the norm.

And then this justice and righteousness will bear even more fruit: peace. Shalom will be “the result of righteousness, quietness, and trust forever.” Peace will come when order is restored, when quiet listening is at the center of all relationships, when trust in God stands at the center of all things. This peace will take root and bear fruit in so many different ways. The people “will abide in a peaceful habitation, in secure dwellings, and in quiet resting places.” The wild forest, filled with terrors and destruction, will be tamed into something new. The city where conflicts rage will find comfort. God’s people will be connected to the land and find comfort in the waters of every stream.

These visions of peace from Isaiah go right along with the words of our psalm for today. Toward the end of these thirteen beautiful verses, we find some of the most unusual imagery of peace in the bible.

Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.

Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,
and righteousness will look down from the sky.

If only this vision could be real! If only we could find this sort of peace in our lives! If only our world could settle into such ways! These things may seem impossible, difficult, and even far off, but it is our call and challenge as followers of Jesus Christ to bear this vision of peace into the world. This vision seeks not simply to eliminate conflict but to promote a way of life in our lives and our world where justice and righteousness will flourish for all people. This vision of peace doesn’t seek to squash conflict here so that it later emerges over there, like a perpetual high-stakes game of “whack-a-mole,” but works to change the structures and systems that allow conflict to flourish and replace them with a way of life that promotes social justice and peace. And this vision of peace doesn’t proclaim peace when things aren’t actually whole and complete and calm but instead gives us a vision of something more so that we can be encouraged in the work of making peace each and every day.

The vision of peace we have in these words from Isaiah and the psalms is one that is still a long way away from being known in its fullness, but that doesn’t mean that we are freed from doing this work in the world now. God’s shalom is still very much distant from us in its fullness, but there are yet little glimpses of it here and now. We see God’s shalom whenever a broken relationship is mended or a new start emerges amidst uncertainty and challenge. We see God’s shalom when we welcome the presence of the Holy Spirit into our lives to feed our hearts with new life. And we see God’s shalom when we work to bring justice and righteousness into the relationships of our lives and our world.

It is not easy to live lives that show this vision of peace. A lot of people will object to the pathway that we offer along the way. Some want an easy peace, simply declared by someone in power without any real consequences for that person—and so without any real consequence in general. And some will say that peace just needs to be put off until some bigger conflict gets worked out. But the work of bringing peace and justice and righteousness to our world begins with each one of us every day, with honest assessments of the relationships in our lives and the things that we do to foster or limit peace, with simple steps to increase communication and build trust when there is uncertainty and fear, with openness to a new and different way that we find first here at this table, where the one with great power and privilege emptied it all to share it more abundantly.

Each Sunday, as we did earlier today, this community passes the peace with one another. I was told when I came to be your pastor nine years ago that we could change most anything in the order of service—except for the passing of the peace! That time of connection and sharing peace with one another is one of the great visions of peace in our life together. The Iona Community of Scotland, in one of its communion liturgies, has taken that ritual and given it new and deeper meaning by introducing it with these words:

not an easy peace,
not an insignificant peace,
not a half-hearted peace,
but the peace of the Lord Jesus Christ
is with us now.

May the vision of this peace be with us every day, and may God guide us as we share it with one another and all the world until all things are made new in Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

A Blessing for All

July 20, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Genesis 28:10-19a
preached on July 20, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Forty-five years ago today, a tremendous journey for humankind reached its pinnacle with the arrival of Apollo 11 on the surface of the moon. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s journey to the surface of the moon was an incredible mark of human achievement, not so much because of their bravery or personal action or even because Aldrin was a Presbyterian ruling elder who took along communion to share on the surface of another planetary body but because it was the culmination of more than a decade of intense work by thousands of people who did everything from design the spacecraft to sew the uniforms and everything in between. Neil Armstrong, the first of those two astronauts to step out of the lunar module and onto the moon’s surface, made this so abundantly clear in his famous words as he took that first step: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Now in our story from Genesis this morning, I think Jacob manages to flip that line around completely, for every one of his small steps on the journey recounted here seems to be a giant leap focused on himself. Jacob is quite an incredible figure in the stories of Genesis, and his outsized personality towers over one part or another of half of the book. Here, though, we see him relatively early in his life, but still after his trickster tendencies were fully revealed when he bought the family birthright from his slightly older twin brother Esau with a bowl of food and then deceived his father into offering him the blessing intended for Esau. Here Jacob had just set out on a journey to his mother’s homeland, where he was to marry one of his cousins. Esau was furiously angry with him for stealing the birthright and his father’s blessing. And Jacob had no idea what would really be coming next for him in his life.

So amidst all these things, after a long day’s journey, Jacob settled down to sleep. It’s hard to tell whether the sleepless night that ensued was brought on by all that change that was swirling around him or the rock-hard pillow that he found for himself, but either way he had a vivid dream that night. He saw a ladder on the earth, probably a lot like the temple that marked the town where he had stopped to sleep, reaching up into heaven, with angels ascending and descending on it. But then suddenly the Lord came and stood beside him and offered him a strange blessing for his journey and promise for his life:

I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.

This promise and blessing was largely a repeat of what the Lord had promised Jacob’s grandfather Abraham in a large family and a generous gift of land, but it went further to speak to Jacob’s situation, too. He was not yet married, but God promised him a large family. He was leaving the land of his birth, but God promised to bring him back. He was journeying out on his own, but God promised to go with him.

When you think about it, this was an astonishing promise. By our human standards, God had no reason whatsoever to deal with Jacob. He was on this journey for himself and no one else. He had little or no concept of how the lives of others would connect to his own, no sense that any of his steps mattered for anyone else but himself. He was even willing to deceive his own father so that he could receive a special blessing after he had already won his brother’s birthright with a bowl of food for an empty stomach. By even the most generous ethical standards, we would call Jacob a liar, a cheat, and a fraud. Yet God made it clear that there was more to Jacob’s story. He would not be defined by his homeland or his brother or his lineage. He would carry his own story of life and living. And he didn’t have to deceive anyone to receive God’s blessing that would surround him all his days.

God’s blessing of Jacob here is important for the development of the story of God’s people in Genesis. Jacob eventually was given a second name “Israel,” for he fathered twelve sons who were the ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel that figured prominently into the later stories of God’s people. And the story of Jacob’s most beloved son Joseph being sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers and yet opening the door for them to survive and thrive there in new ways remains the greatest biblical witness to God’s providence in our world.

But what does this story mean for us today? I hope and pray that we are people who recognize our connectedness to one another better than Jacob did, who like Neil Armstrong understand how even one person’s seeming achievement is built upon the intensive and careful work of others. So when we hear God’s promises of presence and blessing to Jacob, they extend to us, too. We may not be directly linked to these promises to Jacob, but we do believe that our common heritage of faith through Jesus links us to the gifts and responsibilities that these things bring, not as a replacement of the Jewish people of any time or place but for the flourishing of all humanity in our common witness. Ultimately the gift and responsibility that flows from this blessing is at the center of all the blessing that we enjoy from God, for we are not gifted anything for our own sake but so that “all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring.”

Even Jacob knew this. After he awoke from his encounter with God at Bethel, in the verses beyond our reading this morning he offered his own response, promising that if God took care of him along this journey, then he would be faithful to God, make that rock-hard pillow the foundation of a temple, and give ten percent of everything to God there. Now this response was far more conditional than God’s original blessing, but Jacob offered it nonetheless, for he knew that he had no choice but to respond to the abundance of God’s gifts to him along this journey.

In the midst of the sad and difficult events of this week in Israel and Palestine and Russia and the Ukraine and the crisis of child refugees unfolding in our own country, I believe that responding to this blessing in these days requires special attention to God’s call to bring and bear peace. In today’s reading, God promises Jacob and his descendants the land where he had this dream, a place he named Bethel, meaning “house of God” in Hebrew, because of the incredible encounter with God that he had there but now known as Beitin, a Palestinian town under Israeli occupation in the West Bank. While I can’t do justice to the complexities of this conflict in one sermon, it is still very interesting to note that God’s promise of land here is linked with a promise that Jacob’s descendants will be a blessing for all the families of the earth. In light of this blessing, I for one struggle to see how the escalating crisis in the Holy Land in recent days can so highly prioritize the safety and security of land for one group of people above this gift of blessing for all people in such a way that over three hundred people have been killed, many if not most of them innocent Palestinian civilians. God’s promise to Jacob here is less about any benefits for him or his descendants, and far more about how he and all his descendants, including us who are grafted into this family through the love of God in Jesus Christ, can be a blessing to all the earth by bringing a new and different way of life into all our encounters with one another.

So like Jacob we too are called to respond with gratitude and hope, to set aside our tight grasp on using God’s abundance and blessing for our good and instead to join in God’s work of blessing of all creation so that all people may live in peace. May our encounters with God, then, be filled with this kind of love, joy, peace, and hope, so that we and all the people of the earth may be blessed as Jacob was every step of the way. Thanks be to God! Amen.

In light of this word, we offered the prayers for all of God’s people shared by the elected leadership of the Presbyterian Church (USA) as the Prayers of the People in worship.