Andy James

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Presbyterian minister in Atlanta.
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Found beer in seminary.

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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.

Filed Under: posts, sermons Tagged With: Adam and Eve, Frederick Buechner, Gen 2.15-17 3.1-7, Jesus, John Calvin, Lent 1A, Matt 4.1-11, original sin, Shirley Guthrie, temptation

By Grace, Through Faith

March 18, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon on Ephesians 2:1-10 for the Fourth Sunday of Lent
preached on March 18, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Today is a day of beloved things. We just read a favorite scripture that talks about salvation by grace through faith, easily my favorite theological concept. We just sang one of the most-beloved hymns of our faith that speaks so beautifully of grace. And as part of the response to the word today, we will soon share in one of of the beloved moments of our life together as we ordain and install new ruling elders and deacons.

Toward that end, to go along with our scripture reading today, I want to share an extended reading from a favorite theology book, Christian Doctrine by Shirley Guthrie. Shirley was one of my theology professors in seminary, and I don’t know of anyone who can talk about the meaning and importance of salvation by grace through faith better than he can. Thankfully, his words are easy to understand, written with people like you in mind, and though he does not speak directly of today’s text, its major point is also his major point, so I hope that his words illuminate the point of our scripture today better than I ever could.

Suppose we begin to understand what justification by grace means. “How can we have this assurance of God’s love that frees us from ourselves and for God, other people, and true self-fulfillment?” The church answers this question by speaking of justification [– salvation, making things right with God –] through faith.

…It is often said that instead of the idea that our good works make us acceptable to God, Protestantism teaches that all we have to do is have faith in order to win God’s approval and acceptance. This is a serious distortion, because it only substitutes another requirement that we must fulfill in order to earn salvation. In the last analysis it makes us just as insecure as does justification by other means. Instead of anxiously examining my life to discover whether it is good enough, now I must anxiously examine my faith to see whether it is sure and strong enough to earn God’s love. Justification by faith in this sense is only another means of self-justification and self-salvation.

According to scripture, neither our good works nor our faith justifies us – God alone does it by God’s free grace in Christ. It is not confidence in the goodness of our life or in the strength of our faith,but confidence in God that gives us the assurance that we are right with God. Robert McAfee Brown puts it this way: “The gospel does not say, ‘Trust God and he will love you;’ the gospel says, ‘God already loves you, so trust him.’ Faith is not a ‘work’ that saves us; it is our acknowledgement that we are saved.”

This does not mean that faith is unimportant. Although it is not the cause of God’s loving us, it is the indispensable means by which we accept and live from God’s love. Faith does not make us right with God, but no one is made right with God without faith.…

Our faith does not force or enable God to love us, but it is our way of acknowledging, receiving, enjoying – and returning – the love that God had for us long before we ever thought of loving God. We are not made right with God by our faith, but we are made right with God through our faith. Our faith does not change God from being against us into being for us, but it does change us from being closed to being open to receive the love God has always had for us.

What is this faith we have been talking about? …Very simply, faith is trust. It is not intellectual acceptance of biblical or theological doctrines, not even the doctrines of Christ or justification. It is confidence in God. Faith is not believing in the Bible; it is not, in Calvin’s words, “assent to the gospel history.” It is not believing in a book, but believing in the God we come to know in the book. Christian faith is not confidence in faith that saves, not a “saving faith,” but confidence in the God who saves. The faith we have been talking about, in other words, is a kind of personal relationship – a total commitment of ourselves to the living God whose trustworthiness has been proved by God’s powerful and loving action for us in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. John Calvin puts it this way: Faith is “a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”

How can we have such faith? How can we be so sure of God’s love that we are freed from the unnecessary, self-defeating attempt to justify ourselves? How can we trust God so completely that we do not have to trust our own goodness or faith? …Faith, trust, or assurance in God is a gift. We can no more simply decide to trust God than we can by sheer willpower decide to trust another human being. The faith that trusts in the love of God is itself the work of God’s love, “revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”

[Even though] we cannot give ourselves faith… there are some things we can do to put ourselves in situations in which the gift of faith is promised and received….

[First,] if we want a faith that trusts in the love of God that frees us from the necessity of trying to justify and save ourselves, we can admit honestly that none of us has such faith, at least not always. Even those who do not have intellectual doubts about the truth of biblical and Christian doctrines do not have so much confidence in God’s love that they are free from the fearful or proud compulsion to build themselves up in one way or another before God and other people, and in their own self-estimation. None us has [the kind of relaxed, anxiety-free trust in God that marks the faith that Jesus himself described in the gospel according to Matthew.] If we want real faith, therefore, we must paradoxically admit that we do not have it, and pray every new day that we may receive it. “I believe. Help my unbelief.”

[Second,] faith, trust in God’s love, becomes possible when we put ourselves in a situation in which we can hear about and experience God’s love over and over again. Such a situation is first of all the church, the community of God’s people. Just as a child, spouse, or friend needs to hear over and over again that he or she is loved, so we Christians need to hear over and over again the unbelievably good news that God loves, forgives, and accepts us despite everything that we have been and done – or not been and done. Trust in God becomes possible as we hear constantly anew how trustworthy God is. That happens in the church as [we are told and tell] over and over again, Sunday after Sunday, the story of God’s steadfast love for a sinful world and sinful human beings, each one of us included.

But hearing is not enough.… It is not enough simply to hear the words that God loves us; we need to experience God’s love. It is above all in the church that this happens. It happens when people are baptized… – when [we] see a visible demonstration of the assurance that God knows each one of us by name and has “adopted” us to be God’s dearly beloved children. It happens when it is not the good and worthy but precisely the needy, guilty sinners who are invited to the Lord’s Table to receive nourishment for the new life [we] cannot give [ourselves]. It happens when we experience God’s forgiveness, acceptance and love as we experience the forgiveness, acceptance, and love of other people in the life of the Christian community. The church is by definition the community of those who live by God’s forgiveness for guilty people, God’s acceptance of those who in themselves are unacceptable, God’s love for those who know they cannot earn the right to be loved. It is the place where people can risk putting aside all their defenses and masks, knowing that they will be accepted just as they are, with all their faults, whatever they have done, however unacceptable they are by the moral and social standards of the world.

[Now we may not always see these things here, yet the church] is still the body of Christ. God promises to make God’s justifying [and saving] grace real and effective in this all-too-human community of sinners who need it just as much as anyone else. We can recognize, experience, and trust God’s love everywhere when we first find it here.

Shirley Guthrie, Christian Doctrine, p. 322-325

My friends, this is my hope and my prayer, that this church can and will be the kind of community that shows God’s love and grace and so embodies this kind of faith, not faith to save anyone or anything, because God has already done that! – but the faith that inspires us and  others to be a more complete part of the new life that God is bringing into being in our world.

May we know God’s amazing, saving grace through the faith that God alone can give us and embody it in our life together so that others might see God’s forgiveness, acceptance and love in us and so see it in God, now and always. Amen.

Filed Under: posts, sermons Tagged With: faith, grace, Shirley Guthrie