Sermons from Eastminster United Presbyterian Church in Toledo, Ohio

No time for paitence? (Revelation 22.12-21)

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No Time for Patience? (Revelation 22.12-21)

Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, Easter 7C/May 8, 2016
Tom James


About ten years ago, there was a video clip that went viral. It was of a woman who had come out of her house, I believe because of a fire. In the course of her telling about her experience, she said a line that would become internet-famous. She said, “Ain’t nobody got time for that!” I can’t remember much about the original context, but the expression caught fire because there are so, so many contexts in which those words are perfect, especially for kids. Homework? “Ain’t nobody got time for that.” Chores? Ain’t nobody got time for that!
The sage of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes famously writes that there are times and seasons for every kind of thing. You may remember the words from Ecclesiastes, or you may remember them from the Byrds’ song, “Turn Turn Turn,” from 1965. The song was actually written by Pete Seeger in the late 1950’s. To quote Seeger and the Byrds,
To everything, turn, turn, turn.
There is a season, turn, turn, turn.
And a time to every purpose under heaven.
A time to be born, a time to die.
A time to plant, a time to reap.
A time to kill, a time to heal.
A time to laugh, a time to weep.

To everything, turn, turn, turn.
There is a season, turn, turn, turn.
And a time to every purpose under heaven.
A time to build up, a time to break down.
A time to dance, a time to mourn.
A time to cast away stones.
A time to gather stones together.

But this rather accepting and tolerant view of time, and of life under the rule of time, sometimes gives way to something else. Sometimes, we find that we cannot accept the wheel of time that puts everything in its place as it “turns, turns, turns,” and we cannot accept the so-called wisdom of waiting for the wheel to turn, bringing perhaps more favorable circumstances. A situation can become intolerable and even unsurvivable—a fire in your home, to take an obvious example—and patient waiting is not the order of the day. And then we don’t hum the Byrds—instead, we say something very much like, “Ain’t nobody got time for that!”
I think it can be uncomfortable for those of us with some measure of means and creature comforts to admit that things have reached that pitch. Patience, for us, is often the easier course, because for the most part things are not really that bad. So when we hear words like those from the book of Revelation, they strike us as a note from another world altogether. It is interesting that the church-approved reading for today actually skips over some of the more evocative verses in our passage—the ones about the “sorcerers” and “idolators” and “murderers” and even “dogs” on the outside, for example. The ramped-up rhetoric seems perhaps too divisive, too intolerant, too angry, for our mainline, moderate, well-to-do, polite sensibilities.
But these verses that would rather not have to deal with are actually crucial to the meaning of the text because their context has to do with a desperate struggle for survival in the face of a cruel and oppressive empire. The promise of Jesus to come quickly, and the cries of the faithful for the Lord to come, and the angry condemnations of the pagan world empire, are words that come out of a situation of intense persecution and deeply felt fragility. They come from an experience of having no more time for patience. Suffering can reach a pitch where waiting doesn’t teach us patience, but only fuels the fire for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “fierce urgency of now.”
Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was written to fellow clergy members who were counseling patience in the struggle for civil rights in the South. Many of these who were calling for patience were progressively minded white clergy. They agreed with Dr. King’s message about equality, for the most part. They were preachers and teachers of the gospel who heard in the words of Jesus and read in the New Testament a message of hope for the marginalized, and who, with Dr. King, longed for a world of racial reconciliation. But we have to be patient, they said, and allow the culture to evolve slowly and without too much acrimony or discord. We have to let our politicians and our courts do their jobs, bringing the best of our American democratic traditions to bear on the legacy of segregation and Jim Crow.
But the theme of Dr. King’s letter is that we cannot wait. One is tempted to say that, for these white clergy, patience may have made a lot of sense because, for them, life wasn’t all that bad. Sure, they hated to see what was going on in the South. It was depressing and morally offensive to see so many of their neighbors being deprived of civil rights. But there is perhaps a great gulf between being morally offended and being abused and pushed to the limit by forces that you cannot control. And perhaps that gulf is “patience.” We can afford to be patient when we are morally offended. But can we be patient, or should we be, if we are being pushed to the limit?
The greatest saints of the early church, the legendary heroes whose memory was treated with such reverence, were the martyrs. “Martyr” is from a Greek word meaning “witness.” The church’s “witnesses” were those who died confessing that Jesus’ imperial reign had come and thus that there was no more room for Caesar. They were giving witness that God had weighed the empire in the balance of justice and found it wanting. They were giving witness to the face an imperial domination system that favored aristocratic elites and used military power to crush opposition, that enforced crippling requirements for tribute that robbed peasants and small landowners of their security and their livelihood, could not stand. They are the ones who had no time for waiting for the empire to crumble under its own weight, as surely it would, because it was already crushing them, now. Ain’t nobody got time for that. In other words, Come, Lord Jesus.
What about our “now?” Is there a “fierce urgency” to it? I suggest that we can only experience time the way it is so often experienced in the Bible, as an urgent call to faithfulness—we can only experience it that way when we make ourselves neighbors and friends of those who are being crushed by the wheel of time, those most vulnerable, who are the losers in our society. Unless we do that, we are too complacent, too patience, to feel the urgency of the moment. Unless we do that, we are like the well-intentioned clergy Dr. King wrote who were putting themselves on the wrong side of the civil rights struggle in the name of patience. Or worse, we are like those who were too comfortable in the Empire, too awash in its prerogatives, not to fall into Revelation’s condemnations of the “outsiders” in relation to the reign of God. Goodness, can we be the “dogs?”
As much as I like dogs, as much as I’m a “dog person,” I don’t believe God is consigning us to the “dogs.” Rather, I believe that God is calling us in this moment to hear Jesus’ invitation to discipleship with new ears and to give witness. The challenges our communities face in this moment create a fierce urgency for many, and therefore for us who are their neighbors. Two and half million Americans are in prison. That’s more than any other industrialized nation by far. There are kids in our schools who cannot read  and will grow up to face a job market that demands diplomas and degrees. People are drowning in debt. Infrastructure is crumbling. Local governments are cutting staff and services, throwing the needy upon the care of churches.
We’re small, so I don’t believe that for us giving faithful witness means solving all these problems. But it does mean confessing Jesus, giving witness to his reign in these circumstances. It means refusing to wait for someone else to help or for the wheel of history to turn, but instead to help where we are able. There are prisoners to visit. There are kids who need tutors. There are families who need a bag or two of groceries. There are debts to forgive. What all of these things amount to is that there are people who need people: people to march with them, to eat with them, to pray with them, to stand with them, to be with them.
I’ll go further. Jesus said that where two or three are gathered together in his name, he is there. What could this mean but that it is when we become allied with our neighbor in his or her struggle for a decent life, our prayer for the coming of the Lord is answered? For what is reign of God, if not the beloved community? “The Spirit and the bride say, “Come.” And let everyone who hears say, “Come.” And let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.” Even so, come Lord Jesus. Amen.

EASTMINSTER UNITED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

June 2, 2019 – 10:00-A.M.
Reverend Thomas James
7th Sunday of Easter
As we join together today to offer worship to God, we welcome all who share this worship with us.  If you are here for the first time we invite you to return again.  Please take a moment to fill out a welcome card that may be found in the cardholder at the back of the pew.
CONCERNS OF THE CONGREGATION          
If you have concerns, prayer requests, or need to convey information to the Session or Deacons please use welcome card in the pew.
PASSING OF THE PEACE
Now, let us greet each other saying: “The Peace of the Lord be with you” and Response: “And also with you.”
PRELUDE  
*CALL TO WORSHIP
Leader:       The Spirit and the bride say, “Come.”
People:     Let everyone who is thirsty come.
Leader:      Let everyone who hears say, “Come.”
People:     Let everyone who is thirsty come.
Leader:      Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.
People:     Let everyone who is thirsty come.
Leader:      Come to the tree of life, the Alpha and the Omega.
People:     Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.
*HYMN…………………..…….”Come, Thou Almighty King”…….….…………..……2
*PRAYER OF CONFESSION
Gracious Power, you call us to your everlasting springs to be drenched and reformed, but we fail to heed you. We do not turn with love to our neighbors to ourselves, or to you, Forgive us for our failings, shield us from our due, and guide us into unity with all for the sake of the whole world. AMEN.
*ASSURANCE OF GOD’S FORGIVENESS
*GLORIA PATRI (#581)
NEW TESTAMENT (Pg. 1086)…..………..Revelation 22:12-14, 15-17, 20-21                              Response: “Thanks be to God”
MUSICAL MESSAGE
GOSPEL (Pg. 941)……………………………………………..…….………..John 17: 20-26
                                    Response:“Thanks be to God”
SERMON.  .  .  .  .  .  .   .   .   .   .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .    “No time for patience”
*THE APOSTLES’ CREED (Pg. 35)
*HYMN.……………………”Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken”……………….81
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE & THE LORD’S PRAYER
OFFERTORY
*DOXOLOGY (#606)
*PRAYER OF DEDICATION
*HYMN……….…….….……”Will You Come and Follow Me”………..……..……726
*PASTORAL BENEDICTION
*CONGREGATIONAL BENEDICTION.  .   .   .   .   .   .   . “Tune of Edelweiss”
Lord of life, Lord of love walk forever beside us.                         Day by day, show the way with your vision to guide us.
Striving to follow your will and way nothing can divide us.              Lord of life, Lord of love walk forever beside us.

UPCOMING DATES AND INFORMATION:
June 2 – June 9
 Sunday June 2 ………………………………………………….………….Worship @ 10am
Session Meeting after service.
                              
 Sunday June 9………………………………………………………………Worship @ 10am
Communion
Wednesday June 12………….………………………………PW Luncheon @ noon.
____________________________________________________________
Flowers on the Altar are in memory of Sadie Bossler from the Holzhauer family.
SAVE THE DATE
Eastminster’s 125th Anniversary Homecoming on Sunday,           September 29, 2019.  More details will be forthcoming.
Counters for May/June
        THIS WEEK – June 2
          Sutphin Team
   NEXT WEEK – June 9
         Holzhauer Team
                              HEAD GREETER FOR JUNE
                                          CRAIG GALE                                                                                                                                                                            
         CHURCH FAMILY                                  PRAYER CHAIN
Looking for a church family?  
We would love to have you here at Eastminster. Please call our Secretary Jenny, and she will be happy to help.  419-691-4867.
Are You in Need of prayer? Please call our Secretary Jenny, and she will see your “Prayer Requests” are answered. 419-691-4867
Rev. James has started a blog with sermons and other
information from the church. You can check out the information at https://eastminstertoledosermons.blogspot.com
If you need to contact Rev. James you can do so by either e-mail (tomjames811@gmail.com) or his cell 1-248-990-3041.

The gospel railroad (John 5.1-9)

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One of our favorite Christmas movies is The Polar Express. It is the story of a group of kids of very diverse backgrounds and personalities, each of whom goes to bed one Christmas Eve, only to find that a train has stopped in their front yard, in the middle of the night, and seems to be waiting for them. Of course, this is no ordinary train. This train is headed to the North Pole, picking up selected children along the way for an adventure that they will never forget. As the story unfolds, we find out that each of the kids has something that they are supposed to learn from their adventure, and the main character, an unnamed boy, is a bit of a skeptic whose task it is to learn how to believe. The movie in many ways is a celebration of belief. “You have everything you need,” sings Josh Groban in one of the songs in the movie’s soundtrack, “if you just believe.”
It is interesting that in the gospel stories Jesus seems to heal and to perform miracles in response to the faith of his hearers. In fact, there are times when Jesus either can’t or won’t perform healings when the people refuse to believe. Without belief, it seems, the Jesus-story falls apart. His power is removed, his story loses interest and fades into the mundane. He becomes, like Superman in the presence of kryptonite, an ordinary mortal. His gospel unravels.
But here, in our text, there is not a single hint that the man beside the pool had even a shred of belief, or at least not in Jesus. He does have some belief, of course, or he wouldn’t be sitting around a pool that people believed had healing properties. He seems at least to believe in that. The legend was that, from time to time, an angel would stir the waters of that pool, and if you could get yourself into the water while it was still agitated, you would receive some blessing, possibly even healing.
But what does this manreally believe? Jesus’ simple question, “do you want to be healed?” brings what he believes to light. Because, in response, he doesn’t say, “yes” or “please,” indicating that he really believes that he can be healed and that Jesus can have something to do with it. Rather, he immediately falls back on his own disability—he says that, because he is unable to move, he is unable to get to the waters that would heal him. The irony of his situation is unmistakable—these faceless, anonymous waters, these magical waters dispensing grace to those who can get themselves in, waters that would heal him, will only be able to work if he can get himself to them—the very thing that, as an invalid who has no social network, no allies, no advocates, he is powerless to make happen. Healing for those who are not too broken. Empowerment for those who are not completely without power.
We have been hearing a lot in recent years about rising inequality in the United States, and we have seen families and neighborhoods and even whole cities slip into poverty over the last few decades. It was French economist Thomas Piketty who called our attention to the fact that the level of wealth inequality now is as high as it has been since the 1920s. And indeed some of the statistics are striking. The top ten percent in accumulated wealth have about nine times as much as the bottom ninety percent combined. The top one percent has more than doubled its share of U.S. income since the mid-twentieth century. Meanwhile, the neighborhood where we sit is among the poorest one percent of neighborhoods in the nation. The violent crime rate on these streets is in the top two percent nationwide. Some forty percent of houses are vacant. There is a drug crisis. Unemployment is high. There are people who are sick who can’t get good care. There are people who are hungry who have to visit soup kitchens and food pantries just to get something to eat. Economic recoveries, such as they are, tend to leave these people and these neighborhoods behind. Rentiers and landlords try to extract every last possible penny of value from these houses, leaving them in poor repair to keep their costs low. Money is being made here, but it is going somewhere else, to benefit others in sometimes distant places.
Most of us here have our magical pools. There are means that our society has set up for us to receive healing grace for our afflictions. There are educational programs that train us, hospitals and clinics that make us well. There is even a safety net, a support network, that can help us if things go wrong. If we can only lift ourselves off our mats, or get someone to take us over to the waters. There are ways that we can be empowered if only we have enough power to get ourselves in position for it.
We believe in these things. We trust them. We take comfort in the fact that they are there, not just for us, but for others who need them.
But for some, as for the disabled man in our text, the pools don’t do any good, do they? The brutal truth is that some simply can’t get there. They can’t put themselves in position. They are too far away, or no one can take them, or the costs are too high. The brutal truth is that, often, there is no empowerment for the utterly powerless. There is no grace for the destitute, the forgotten, the nobodies of the world. Their suffering goes unnoticed and unregistered.
And that is nothing new. In Jesus’ time, as in ours, belief in the systems of support sometimes fails. For many, there is no one to help. There is no magical rescue. The unclean and the infirm in ancient Palestine, the untouchables in Kolkata, the children laborers in Peru, the unhoused and the mentally ill in the streets of U.S. cities. We can devise policies to make things better, but always, it seems, there are those who fall through the cracks. And so this nameless man’s lack of belief, his refusal to believe that anyone will help him, speaks volumes of truth about his world and ours.
But what happens in this gospel story? The message of Jesus throughout the gospels is that the kingdom of God has come to you. It is, you might say, an objective fact. It is not a perspective. It is not an interesting angle or twist or spin. His preaching is not a series of suggestions about how we might look at life a little differently, how we might have a more positive attitude about it, about how we might wring a little more personal meaning out of it. No. Jesus’ preaching announces exactly what his healings enact—the reign of a just and loving God has begun to take root, here and now, and it has material consequences that are utterly surprising. It really doesn’t matter what perspective you take up about it—what personal meaning you find in it, what your attitude toward it is. Jesus creates something new. He makes a new reality in which sinners and scandalous people are welcome to the feast, in which lives and livelihoods are shared, in which nobodies, nameless persons, are featured in miraculous stories of healing. These things are happening, Jesus says. The train is in your front yard, and on its way to the North Pole, whether you believe in it or not.
And, so, this destitute man, this nobody with no allies, with no insurance, with no support, and no belief, is healed. The system of support in Jerusalem, such as it was, was short-circuited. The system of prerequisites and requirements that we put in place in order to be considered members of Jesus’ company, is side-stepped.  In the kingdom that Jesus brings, no degree of power is a prerequisite to empowerment. No level of social recognition is necessary in order to be recognized in the kingdom of God. No acceptance of doctrines and no degree of trust is required.
This is the gospel: Jesus announces that the reign of a just and loving God has come. There are no more untouchables or unreachables. There are no longer any prerequisites to Christ’s mercy, Christ’s healing and forgiveness. That’s great news for the most vulnerable in our society, and we have a duty to reach out to them—first to see them, and to hear their voices, but also to stand with them, because we know that Jesus’ kingdom of nobodies encompasses us, too. Many of us are among the relatively comfortable. We are teachers, and executives, homemakers, and professionals of all kinds. We are nobly retired. We have admirably raised successful children. We are members of social groups, have names that are known, voices that are recognized, faces that are familiar. And yet the unnamed man stands in for all of us, because the good news comes to us, too, in the midst of our needy humanity, a humanity that we all share, a humanity that is frequently plagued by weakness and unbelief, a humanity that is broken by greed and war and by sickness and fear, and unable to get itself to the healing pool.
The gospel train comes through our front lawns, and we may never really believe in where it is taking us. We may not see it coming nor even believe our eyes when we see it. We may never have paid the fare or made ourselves worthy of the ride. But, nevertheless, it is here; it has come for us; and it is taking us toward the kingdom. And we are bound for an adventure along the way. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.

EASTMINSTER UNITED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

May 26, 2019 – 10:45 A.M.
Reverend Thomas James
6th Sunday of Easter
As we join together today to offer worship to God, we welcome all who share this worship with us.  If you are here for the first time we invite you to return again.  Please take a moment to fill out a welcome card that may be found in the cardholder at the back of the pew.
CONCERNS OF THE CONGREGATION          
If you have concerns, prayer requests, or need to convey information to the Session or Deacons please use welcome card in the pew.
PASSING OF THE PEACE
Now, let us greet each other saying: “The Peace of the Lord be with you” and Response: “And also with you.”
PRELUDE  
*CALL TO WORSHIP
Leader:       Alleluia, Christ is risen.
People:     The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia.
Leader:      Let the peoples praise you, O God.
People:     Let all the peoples praise you.
*HYMN…………….”God of the Ages, Whose Almighty hand”………..……331
*PRAYER OF CONFESSION
Loving God, we confess that we are an anxious people who deny your  blessing and fail to keep your word. Forgive us, we pray, for these and all our sins, that we might live in peace and reflect you love in the world; through Jesus Christ we pray. AMEN.
*ASSURANCE OF GOD’S FORGIVENESS
*GLORIA PATRI (#581)
NEW TESTAMENT (Pg. 1086)…..………….……Revelation 21: 10, 21: 22-22:5                              Response: “Thanks be to God”
MUSICAL MESSAGE
GOSPEL (Pg. 926)……………………………………………………….………..John 5: 1-9
                                    Response:“Thanks be to God”
SERMON.  .  .  .  .  .  .   .   .   .   .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .   “The gospel railroad”
*THE APOSTLES’ CREED (Pg. 35)
*HYMN.………………………..…..…….”Christ Is Alive”………..……..……….……….….246
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE & THE LORD’S PRAYER
OFFERTORY
*DOXOLOGY (#606)
*PRAYER OF DEDICATION
*HYMN………………………..….……”For All the Saints”………………………………326
*PASTORAL BENEDICTION
*CONGREGATIONAL BENEDICTION.  .   .   .   .   .   .   . “Tune of Edelweiss”
Lord of life, Lord of love walk forever beside us.                         Day by day, show the way with your vision to guide us.
Striving to follow your will and way nothing can divide us.              Lord of life, Lord of love walk forever beside us.
UPCOMING DATES AND INFORMATION:
May 26 – June 2
 Sunday May 26 ……………………….            9:30 am……………..Sunday School 
                                                                   10:45 am……..……..…………Worship
Monday May 27…………………………….Memorial Day….Office will be closed
PWCT Meeting will be held May30th at 6pm. with Ruth Circle to follow.
 Just a reminder-starting June 2nd Worship will begin at 10AM 
Wednesday May 29……………………………………….…………………….Office closed Sunday June 2……………..……..…………………………………………Worship @ 10am                                                             
Flowers on the Altar are in memory of Bernice Holzhauer from the Holzhauer family.
SAVE THE DATE
Eastminster’s 125th Anniversary Homecoming on Sunday,           September 29, 2019.  More details will be forthcoming.
Counters for May/June
        THIS WEEK – May 26
          Thayer Team
   NEXT WEEK – June 2
         Sutphin Team
                              HEAD GREETER FOR MAY/JUNE
                            JACKIE HOLZHAUER/CRAIG GALE                                                                                                                                                                            
         CHURCH FAMILY                                  PRAYER CHAIN
Looking for a church family?  
We would love to have you here at Eastminster. Please call our Secretary Jenny, and she will be happy to help.  419-691-4867.
Are You in Need of prayer? Please call our Secretary Jenny, and she will see your “Prayer Requests” are answered. 419-691-4867
Rev. James has started a blog with sermons and other
information from the church. You can check out the information at https://eastminstertoledosermons.blogspot.com
If you need to contact Rev. James you can do so by either e-mail (tomjames811@gmail.com) or his cell 1-248-990-3041.

God insists (John 13.31-35)

/in , /by

Rarely do I do any kind of shopping with my whole family, and almost never on purpose. But, occasionally, circumstances will put us together in a Meijer, or a Target, usually on the way home from somewhere when we suddenly realize that one of us needs something for tomorrow. Often this realization takes the form of one the kids saying, “Oh, by the way, I need khaki pants for the band concert tomorrow night.” “What about pair we bought a few months ago?” “They don’t fit anymore.” “When were you going to tell us about this.” “I just did.” A few years ago, we stopped at a Meijer on the way home from a Wednesday evening dinner at the church Michelle used to serve. I can’t remember what the reason was—somebody obviously needed something for the next day—but what happened was what tends to happen on these rare occasions.
There are five of us in my family, and each of us seems to have their own agenda as it pertains to a given store. My agenda, on this occasion, was shoes. And so I wandered over to the men’s shoe department. Years ago, I had scored a serious deal on some running shoes—I paid twenty bucks for a pair that ordinary ran about sixty or seventy. I was beginning to realize that my old Fila’s were quickly wearing out, and so I thought, maybe Meijer will have something for me—maybe even a deal like I got last time. So, I got caught up in looking at every shoe of the type that they had, agonizing over prices—none of them were anywhere near as good as the twenty dollars from a few years before—and trying to convince myself that forty dollars would still be well worth the investment.
And, suddenly, I realized that twenty or thirty minutes had passed, and, realizing that the four others in my family had their own separate agendas, I had a pang of anxiety about where they might be, and I even had the somewhat unrealistic worry that they might be suffering from a reciprocal anxiety—wondering where I might be. So I grabbed the forty dollar shoes, feeling a little guilty about giving in to that price, and went looking.
That feeling of looking for someone and not knowing exactly where to look. Of knowing that they might be moving around, and so as soon as you get to where they are likely to be, they might have already moved on, possibly looking for you. By then I’d learned how not to panic in these situations, but, still, it always made me feel uncomfortable.
These are some of the thoughts I have as I try and put myself in the place of Jesus’ disciples as they listen to him on this last evening with him. Jesus says that they will look for him, but he will already have moved on. He will be gone, and they will not be able to follow him where he goes. The reference here is to the cross, and to the great barrier of death beyond which they cannot go to find him. And this is the heartbreak of this passage. Throughout the gospel of John, and indeed in all the gospels, we find Jesus announcing that the kingdom of God has come, it has arrived in his person, in his presence. Throughout, we find Jesus performing miracles and signs, and offering blessings, and healing and teaching, and it is the vitality and the strength of his physical presence with them, his words, his touch, the appearance of his face and the sound of his voice, that empowers their discipleship, and their witness.
And so, of course they will seek him, or at least feel lost in his absence. I don’t know if my kids felt lost at all without me. As I say, by then I had learned not to panic when separated from them in the store. I had ways of reassuring myself that they are more than likely just fine—they were getting a bit older now, after all, and more independent; the store was a self-contained space and eventually they would be found in it. So, as I reminded myself of these things, I was able calmly to go looking for them, and for Michelle. I found her first because I knew exactly where she would be. She was lost, as I had been, in what she was looking for, and didn’t have a clear idea where the kids would be. So, I walked around and found each of them, one by one, and found that there were not worried, either, because each of them was lost in what shewas looking for.
Sometimes we can be lost without knowing it. We can become so distracted, as I was looking at those shoes, that our hearts and minds settle into a kind of forgetfulness about our loved ones, or about things that are genuinely important. The disciples may or not have had that problem after Jesus had gone, but I think that for the modern-day disciple, that is more and more of an issue. We can get so caught up in the tasks at hand, in our day to day interests, the shoes that we need, or the dress, or the mechanical pencil; the bills that need to be paid or the yard that needs to be mowed or the vacation that we are planning, that we are distracted from the more pervasive questions that haunt our lives, the more basic longings and hopes that call to us to a better life.
But sometimes we look away from the rows of shoes in front of us because we are struck with a thought or a feeling. We notice that we are alone. Something happens—an illness, a loss, a broken relationship, a crisis. The disciples’ leader and friend was crucified, and that for them meant nothing less than that the very presence of the kingdom of God had evaporated, left them wandering around in the store, forty dollar shoes in hand, wondering why they had thought that shoes, of all things, were so important after all.
Throughout Scripture, and especially in the New Testament, we find promises of God’s presence, so often given in the face of such powerful signs of God’s absence. Enslavement. Exile. Oppression. Injustice. Imperial domination. Appropriation of wealth and the fruits of labor by the wealthy. Crucifixion. Persecution. Martyrdom. Flooding. Illness. Loss. In all of these situations and circumstances of life for the people of God, the forces of evil seem relentlessly to win. The prophets announce the coming of God’s reign of justice, wholeness, and peace, and yet the words are continually ground up in the teeth of reality, in the machinery of raw, inhuman power.
The disciples will not be able to find Jesus. The absence of God, so palpable throughout human history, again makes itself felt.
But we shouldn’t forget the immediate context of this passage. Right before, Jesus has served what we have come to call the last supper with his disciples and has washed their dirty, shoeless feet. Among them were two disciples, Judas and Peter, who would repay his kindness with betrayal and denial. As the Roman swords drew near, they would either collude with them or run away from them. None would face up to them, except Jesus alone. Still, what manner of love is this, that Jesus, who must face death alone, still serves, still feeds, still loves. Even as he is being left in solitude, Jesus reaches out in love.

Philosopher Jack Caputo recently wrote a book about God, called by the interesting title “The Insistence of God.” God, Caputo tells us, doesn’t so much “exist” as “insist.” That is to say, we need to understand God not as a power in the world that determines how everything will be, kind of like a Caesar writ very large, but as the relentless insistence, the irrepressible call, the unending beckoning to the people of God to live into the ways of love. God is real for us not as a controlling power, Caputo says, but as an insistent love, a love that continues to serve, and to feed, to empower, to liberate, to embrace.

Part of what calmed my anxiety when my kids were running loose in a Meier is my assurance that I would not stop looking for them. And, in turn, if Michelle should have found them first, I knew that she would not take them and leave me alone. Even as I felt their absence as I woke up from my revelry among the shoes, I knew that I was connected to them through love.
And so, God is connected to us. We cannot search for and find Jesus, because we cannot go where he has gone. But no matter. Jesus is present with us as the one who still feeds at the table, and in so doing enables us to feed each other. Jesus is still present with us as one who serves, and in so doing enables us to serve each other.
God is known, God’s presence is felt, God’s reality is demonstrated, not by miracles or by deeds of power or by mechanisms of control or by signs of success. God is known as that which God really is—love. By this, they will know that we are Christ’s disciples—by the love that insists on finding us, by the love that insists that it be shared.  In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.


EASTMNSTER UNITED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

May 19, 2019 – 10:45 A.M.
Reverend Thomas James
5th Sunday of Easter
As we join together today to offer worship to God, we welcome all who share this worship with us.  If you are here for the first time we invite you to return again.  Please take a moment to fill out a welcome card that may be found in the cardholder at the back of the pew.
CONCERNS OF THE CONGREGATION          
If you have concerns, prayer requests, or need to convey information to the Session or Deacons please use welcome card in the pew.
PASSING OF THE PEACE
Now, let us greet each other saying: “The Peace of the Lord be with you” and Response: “And also with you.”
PRELUDE  
*CALL TO WORSHIP
Leader:       Alleluia! Christ is alive; let all the people praise him.
People:     Let all creation sing with joy. Alleluia!
*HYMN……….”All Creatures of Our God and King (verses 1-4)……………15
*PRAYER OF CONFESSION
God of mercy, your command to love one another across all differences opens us to new horizons, yet we often respond with fear and judgment that hinders your goal for humanity. Forgive our sins, we pray, and give us a true repentance that leads to life for all creation. We pray in Jesus’ name. AMEN.
*ASSURANCE OF GOD’S FORGIVENESS
*GLORIA PATRI (#581)
NEW TESTAMENT (Pg. 1085)…………..…………………………Revelation 21: 1-6                              Response: “Thanks be to God”
MUSICAL MESSAGE………………………………………………………………Skyelar Raiti
GOSPEL (Pg. 938)………………………………………….…….…………..John 13: 31-35
                                    Response:“Thanks be to God”
SERMON.  .  .  .  .  .  .   .   .   .   .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .   “God Insists”
*THE APOSTLES’ CREED (Pg. 35)
*HYMN.……………..…..…….”Live in Charity (4 times)”……..………….……….….205
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE & THE LORD’S PRAYER
OFFERTORY
*DOXOLOGY (#606)
*PRAYER OF DEDICATION
*HYMN……………….……”In Christ There is No East or West”…………………318
*PASTORAL BENEDICTION
*CONGREGATIONAL BENEDICTION.  .   .   .   .   .   .   . “Tune of Edelweiss”
Lord of life, Lord of love walk forever beside us.                         Day by day, show the way with your vision to guide us.
Striving to follow your will and way nothing can divide us.              Lord of life, Lord of love walk forever beside us.
UPCOMING DATES AND INFORMATION:
May 19 – May 26
                                     
Sunday May 19 ……………………….            9:30 am……………..Sunday School
                                                                 10:45 am…………..…………Worship
Wednesday May 22………………..        11:30am………….Martha Circle Meeting
   
Sunday May 26                                        9:30am……………Sunday School
                                                                10:45am……………Worship
PWCT Meeting will be held May30th at 6pm. with Ruth Circle to follow.
 Just a reminder-starting June 2nd Worship will begin at 10AM
SAVE THE DATE
Eastminster’s 125th Anniversary Homecoming on Sunday,           September 29, 2019.  More details will be forthcoming.
Counters for May
        THIS WEEK – May 19
           Kirk Team
   NEXT WEEK – May 26
          Thayer Team
                              HEAD GREETER FOR MAY
                                   JACKIE HOLZHAUER                                                                                                                                                                            
         CHURCH FAMILY                                  PRAYER CHAIN
Looking for a church family?  
We would love to have you here at Eastminster. Please call our Secretary Jenny, and she will be happy to help.  419-691-4867.
Are You in Need of prayer? Please call our Secretary Jenny, and she will see your “Prayer Requests” are answered. 419-691-4867
Rev. James has started a blog with sermons and other
information from the church. You can check out the information at https://eastminstertoledosermons.blogspot.com
If you need to contact Rev. James you can do so by either e-mail (tomjames811@gmail.com) or his cell 1-248-990-3041.

Who rules? (Revelation 5.11-14)

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Who rules? (Revelation 5.11-14)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, Easter 3C (May 5, 2019)
Tom James
Our family just grew by about two pounds this weekend, and it had nothing to do with the delayed effects of Easter candy. We adopted a chinchilla, at my youngest’s request (and pleading!). So now, we have two fish, two dogs, and a rather large rodent. That’s inside our doors, of course. Outside, where the animals that are not our pets live, there are deer (sometimes standing around in the dark after nightfall, bravely indifferent to our human noises and lights), possums, raccoons, and skunks lurking around in the shadows, an actual warren of rabbits, several kinds of squirrel, lots of birds, and probably a coyote or two that we thankfully haven’t been forced to notice yet. None of this is unusual, of course, but just stopping to try and list all the creatures around us pricks the illusion of our yard being only our own yard, of the lot boundaries meaning anything to most of the creatures who cross them.
Because we human beings are so obsessed with ourselves, we hardly notice a theme in Scripture that crops up fairly often. We find it today in our passage from the book of Revelation. John of Patmos, the visionary author, gets a glimpse into the throne room of heaven, and what he sees there are not just a king and a few people like himself, perhaps advising him or maybe petitioning him for something, obsessing over some aspect of human affairs, of plans and ambitions and grievances. What he sees is much more like church—it is a worship service. Since it is heaven we are talking about, that’s not really a surprise, but there is something about this worship service that isn’t much like church as we know it. The gathered community is not merely human—in fact, it isn’t even mostly human. There are, of course, many angels, as you would expect in heaven, but there are also countless “living creatures” of seemingly every description—every creature on the earth or under the surface of the seas is there somehow, singing loudly, “To the one who is seated on the throne and to the lamb all blessing and honor and might forever and ever!”
Apparently, giving praise to God isn’t something that we humans alone do. We do it in our own way, with the gifts we have to offer, but it seems it isn’t the only way. Now, this vision is just a vision, a series of metaphors. The book of Revelation is not meant to be taken literally but is filled with symbolism. Perhaps it is only humans who literally sing, at least with lyrics—we are the ones who use words, after all. But all creatures of our God and King, apparently, have their own way of giving praise. All creatures are included within the reach of God’s blessing and care; all are included in the joy of God’s abundant provision, and so all participate in joyful thanksgiving. And, good news for many of us: it seems that all dogs go to heaven.
Throne rooms are the stuff of dreams, for most people. Very few people in the ancient world would have had access to the imperial throne—they would have never seen it, and so John’s depiction of the throne room of heaven would not likely have been inspired by his own memory of seeing the emperor in all his majesty. And, of course, we don’t even have them in our country because we don’t have a monarchy. But we still dream about them. Throne rooms are not uncommon sets in movies and TV shows that invite viewers to imagine some European court or perhaps some make-believe world where there are kings and queens and princes and knights. Over the last few weeks, a lot of people have been anxiously watching the final season of the HBO series, Game of Thrones, wondering who will end up on “the iron throne” by series’ end.
An interesting question is whether there is much significance whether one person wins the “game of thrones,” the seasons-long struggle over who’s going to sit on the throne next as ruler, or whether another wins it. Will it be Danaerys Storm-born or John Snow or Sansa Stark, or Cersei Lannister, or someone else? Please excuse the inside baseball, for those of you who don’t watch the show: the names don’t really matter. In any case, it seems, there’s still going to be an “iron throne.” In other words, someone will claim all the rights and privileges of a monarchy, enforce whatever “iron” discipline on the realm is needed to protect their power, fight whatever wars strike them as lucrative or necessary, exploit the labor of the “low born” in order to enrich the castle—in other words, whoever sits on the throne will likely do what a ruler does, no matter what face they wear. That’s how the system works. I’m tempted to believe the series should end with The Who song, “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and its line, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss!”
Of course, it matters in a monarchy who the monarch is. In our system, it matters who the president is, and who members of Congress are. But, I wonder if we tend to exaggerate how much it matters? There were some emperors who were more vicious and cruel than others—some were legendary in that respect. But the empire itself was vicious and cruel, and so whoever sat upon the throne was obliged in one way or another, if he was going to keep the empire as an empire, to carry on that program of viciousness and cruelty, conquering nations, expanding land holdings, collecting tributes. And, dare I say, is an American president, no matter what their campaign rhetoric might suggest, more or less fated to administer the same basic program of American military and economic influence across the globe—in other words, fulfill the same basic requirements of our empire? Presidential administrations change; wars continue. Trade deals get tweaked, rewritten, thrown out; capital accumulation in the hands of a smaller and smaller few goes on. That’s how the system works; that is how it is set up to work. And, so, we can fairly ask, How much does it really matter who wins, in any given election cycle? There’s a lot of build-up, and breathless commentary, and probably billions of dollars spent to get us psyched up for the game. But does our real live “game of thrones” amount to anything much more than entertainment, like a sports contest between two rival teams playing a game that never changes?
I’m not really this cynical. I vote, and I think we all should participate however we can in our democracy. But I do wonder whether we often appreciate how narrow our choices are, how the requirements of the throne, if you will, already pre-determine to a large extent what a person who sits on it can actually do.
People in the ancient world where John was writing certainly appreciated how limited the effects of their choices were. There wasn’t even in the pretension of democracy. No one expected to have any influence on the empire. Nor did they expect any change. The imperial system they lived under had been in place for hundreds if not thousands of years: before Rome, Greece; before Greece, Persia; before Persia, Babylon; before Babylon, Assyria; before Assyria, Egypt. Empires and emperors had been pillaging the Mediterranean basin for longer than memory could recall. It was, it seemed, the natural and inevitable state of things.
But John of Patmos throws a visionary wrench into the wheels that had been turning since the beginnings of civilization. He pictures a throne room, surrounded by all the living creatures. But either on the throne or right beside it is a lamb. The most, well, sheepish creature of them all—the least likely to be at the heart of the throne room, at the center of power. Not only that, this was a lamb that had been ritually slaughtered. A sacrificial lamb. The implication here is that this lamb has somehow survived its slaughter, or, to be more precise, has been raised from the dead, and is now at the right hand of majesty, ruling from heaven. And, therefore, demystifying, challenging, even exploding the pretensions of an empire which claims to rule everything on its own terms. Indeed, the slain lamb in the throne room explodes the meaning of the throne itself. If the requirements of empire, the nature of the imperial throne, imposed iron requirements on the one who sat on it, here is one who sits on it who shatters those requirements. And, so, the realm of God under the sovereignty of the lamb reveals itself to be a very different kind of realm, the rule of heaven a very different kind of rule than the rule of the Caesars.  
What does it mean to be ruled by a slain lamb? All the contrasts between such a ruler, humble and self-giving and motivated above all else by love, and our present-day politicians are much too easy. The real question for is, how do we live our lives if, not Caesar, but the crucified and risen Christ, is on the throne? What does it mean for our priorities? For how we view our neighbors? Or are enemies?
John’s vision was driven by Easter faith. The empire imposed death. It was a parasite on the land and the people. It was beginning a horrific reign of terror over Christians who offered even the meekest resistance to its cult of emperor worship. But John caught a glimpse of the throne room of heaven and saw there an image of the living Christ, Christ who was executed by Rome and who now reigned from heaven. It was a vision of Easter, of love triumphing over power, of life triumphing over death. And the implication was that Christians could live courageously and without fear. They could cling to their faith with confidence, for they staked their lives not on what can be seen, but on what cannot be seen.
We live in a world where the virtues of the crucified are shunned, where power without purpose is celebrated, where domination for its own sake is revered, where winning the game of thrones, even at the expense of the realm, is the purpose that everyone seems to accept. We live in a world in which the empire tramples over countless crucifieds, where people all over the world are being starved, abandoned, or killed, crushed under the wheels of so-called “civilization.” We live in a world of perhaps unprecedented concentration of wealth and power, of wars that could last a lifetime, of the destruction of the very conditions of human life on this planet. We are at the heart of an empire of death. And yet, if the story we tell is true, the crucified has risen, Christ is alive, and the power of the throne is shattered. The winter of death is thawing. The sun is shining. The Spring of souls is here. Love has arrived, and we can begin, step by patient step, building a world in its image. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.
EASTMINSTER UNITED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
May 5, 2019 – 10:45 A.M.
Reverend Thomas James
3rd Sunday of Easter
As we join together today to offer worship to God, we welcome all who share this worship with us.  If you are here for the first time we invite you to return again.  Please take a moment to fill out a welcome card that may be found in the cardholder at the back of the pew.
CONCERNS OF THE CONGREGATION          
If you have concerns, prayer requests, or need to convey information to the Session or Deacons please use welcome card in the pew.
PASSING OF THE PEACE
Now, let us greet each other saying: “The Peace of the Lord be with you” and Response: “And also with you.”
PRELUDE  
*CALL TO WORSHIP
Leader:     O Lord our God, we praise you.
People:    We cried to you for help and you answered us.
Leader:     You have restored our lives;
People:    you have rescued us from the grave.
*HYMN……….……..………..…”Great Are You, Lord”……….….……….…………614
*PRAYER OF CONFESSION
Lord God, in the light of your glory we see the evil we have done, the suffering we have caused, the good we have refused, and the truth we have denied. Heal us of our sin, wash us in your mercy, and feed us with your grace, so that we may follow your way and tell the good news of the gospel. AMEN.
*ASSURANCE OF GOD’S FORGIVENESS
*GLORIA PATRI (#581)
NEW TESTAMENT (Pg. 1075)…….………………..….………..Revelation 5: 11-14                             Response:“Thanks be to God”
MUSICAL MESSAGE
GOSPEL (Pg. 946)………………………………………..….…….…………..John 21: 1-19
                                    Response:“Thanks be to God”
SERMON.  .  .  .  .  .  .   .   .   .   .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .    “Who rules?”
*THE APOSTLES’ CREED (Pg. 35)
*HYMN.……………………..…….”Blessing and Honor”……..…………….……….….369
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE & THE LORD’S PRAYER
OFFERTORY
*DOXOLOGY (#606)
*PRAYER OF DEDICATION
*HYMN………….….……”All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name”……………………263
*PASTORAL BENEDICTION
*CONGREGATIONAL BENEDICTION.  .   .   .   .   .   .   . “Tune of Edelweiss”
Lord of life, Lord of love walk forever beside us.                         Day by day, show the way with your vision to guide us.
Striving to follow your will and way nothing can divide us.              Lord of life, Lord of love walk forever beside us.

UPCOMING DATES AND INFORMATION:
May 5 – May 12
                                          
Sunday May 5 ……………………….            9:30 am……………..Sunday School
                                                                 10:45 am…………..…………Worship  
  Session Meeting after service                                                              
Sunday May 12                                      9:30am……………Sunday School
                                                                10:45am……………Worship
Counters for May
        THIS WEEK – May 5
           VanGorder Team
   NEXT WEEK – May 12
           Gale Team
                              HEAD GREETER FOR MAY
                                   JACKIE HOLZHAUER                                                                                                                                                                           
         CHURCH FAMILY                                  PRAYER CHAIN
Looking for a church family? 
We would love to have you here at Eastminster. Please call our Secretary Jenny, and she will be happy to help.  419-691-4867.
Are You in Need of prayer? Please call our Secretary Jenny, and she will see your “Prayer Requests” are answered. 419-691-4867
Rev. James has started a blog with sermons and other
information from the church. You can check out the information at https://eastminstertoledosermons.blogspot.com
If you need to contact Rev. James you can do so by either e-mail (tomjames811@gmail.com) or his cell 1-248-990-3041.
EASTMINSTER UNITED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
725 Navarre Ave. Toledo OH 43605
Reverend Thomas James
 

It’s empty! (Luke 24.1-12)

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Luke 24.1-12 (It’s empty!)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, Easter C, April 21, 2019
Tom James

One of my pet peeves is opening a pantry door in the kitchen, reaching for that box of my favorite snacks, and finding that the box is empty. Why would someone leave an empty box in the pantry?! It’s one of the enduring mysteries at my house.
More than just empty boxes, though: things being empty is usually a bad thing. An empty gas tank is no fun, especially when it’s cold and rainy outside like it was yesterday. I hope not too many of you had to fill up in that blowing rain. An empty fridge is not good, at least when you’re hungry. And empty wallet or bank account isn’t great either, though sometimes we have to deal with that. Emptiness is also something that we at times find hostile and even forbidding. Being alone in a large empty space can make us feel even more alone. Being surrounded by emptiness can even make us afraid, unprotected and vulnerable. Sometimes, when we feel depressed, or when we feel like what we are doing is meaningless or pointless, we say that we feel empty inside, as if the abyss that surrounds us can become part of us.
It’s interesting though, that the greatest good news we Christians proclaim is that something is empty. He is not here. He has gone. This place you have come to in order to find him is empty.
Ancient tombs were sealed shut by a large stone, and the air inside would have been thick. The body in the tomb would fill the space with its fragrance. It wasn’t an empty space at all inside the tomb–it was filled with the heaviness of death. Of course, it was also filled with loss and grief. A death meant that someone was harshly removed from the dense network of human relationships in which we are all embedded. Losing a loved one, as many of us know, is losing a part of ourselves. In the case of Jesus, the tomb was also filled with disappointment and disillusionment–Jesus’ disciples were feeling lost and confused, defeated, afraid, and maybe humiliated. So, the tomb was filled, and its stone would have held in all the fulness, all the density, all the weight, of human suffering and loss. I always think about that on Holy Saturday, the day before Easter: “he descended into hell.”
The women who came to the tomb were playing the roles that women often played in ancient cultures–they were coming to the tomb to attend to a body, to make sure it was cared for. In life and death, women took care of the needs of people and their bodies. But these women, like all women, were more than whatever roles their communities expected them to play. They were disciples of Jesus—even, if the truth be told, apostles, since what an apostle did was announce the good news of Jesus’ resurrection. Indeed, by that definition, these women were the firstapostles. The gospels are very shy about the centrality of women in Jesus’ circle of followers. The gospels were written in part to put a public face on the church, and the Roman world tended to be scandalized by the thought of women taking positions of leadership in any group. But these women were leaders. They were there as women, doing the thing that women were expected to do, but they came with Jesus’ teaching in their hearts, and they left with fire in their bones and a word of salvation on their lips.
These women, these first apostles, came to do battle with all the heaviness of the grave. They came with spices to beat back the ugliness of death. But what they found was the freshness of cool, empty air. It must have been confounding. Perhaps even frightening. In the Gospel of Mark’s telling of the story, in fact, those who found the tomb empty were terrified: the emptiness of the tomb was the emptying out of their sense of normalcy: tombs aren’t supposed to be empty. It was as if everything they knew had fallen into that abyss where they had expected to find Jesus’ body. Nothing made sense anymore.
The women’s first reaction was that they were perplexed. They were, we can imagine, disoriented by the emptiness. It wasn’t what they expected. When they saw two angelic figures standing there, they were afraid. But the emptiness itself didn’t make them afraid—only confused. He is not here. The tomb is empty. What now?
I don’t know if I’m remembering the story correctly—it was a long time ago. When I graduated from college, a friend and I decided to travel to Europe together for part of the summer. So, we got plane tickets, lined up a car rental in Paris, and then drove around several countries, not always sure where we were going or why we were going there. At some point, we found ourselves in Brussels. The traffic was thick, but as we were driving through the city, we found ourselves pushed out suddenly into a huge roundabout with no center. It was just a very large, wide-open circular space near what looked like the heart of the city. Now, I basically know how roundabouts work, but in the vast emptiness in that unfamiliar city I had no idea quite what to do—except keep to the right and hope for the best. It seemed like we could go anywhere, and yet the space wasn’t quite empty, either. There were cars diving in and out, and I knew that there would be wrong ways to navigate this traffic circle. But the problem was that I didn’t know exactly what the right ways were. I was disoriented by the sheer number of possibilities.
I have wondered if this traffic circle in Belgium isn’t a metaphor for many moments of transition in our lives. Being pushed by the flow of events in our experience out of our comfortable lanes with their reassuring solid lines into a wide-open space, sometimes we feel like we have no idea of what to do or how to be. Maybe it’s a move or a new job. Or maybe it’s a graduation or the birth of a new child. In our disorientation we become confused: the emptiness before us may feel like a loss, even a kind of death. But it is actually just the opposite. Sometimes, the times of transition that make us uncomfortable or even afraid are the very times when experience life at its fullest—we learn that our horizons are wider than we imagined, that our possibilities reach further than we thought.
When the disciples learned about the empty tomb, their confusion, the empty space they found themselves trying to navigate, was filled with memories. They remembered what Jesus had taught them. New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan has described the death of Jesus as an initial embarrassment for Jesus’ followers. They had expected him to continue to grow more popular, to gain more and more followers until the Jesus movement would become an irresistible force, and Jesus would be able to make real change, perhaps even liberating Israel from its bondage to Rome. The fact that Jesus died, crucified as a criminal and a rebel, was a shocking defeat. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way!
It was only as his followers began to search the scriptures, looking for the meaning of Christ’s death, Crossan says, that they began to realize that being crucified as a criminal and a rebel was written into his job description as the Messiah! It’s a grim picture: God’s chosen one is the one is to be rejected by God’s people.
And, yet, in the emptiness of the tomb, in the stillness of the cool air, the women feel something that will change the world. They don’t understand it yet. And, some two thousand years later, we are still struggling to understand it. But, like the women on the first Easter, we feel it. God’s choice of Jesus as the savior for humanity is not defeated by humanity’s choice to crucify him. God’s choice of the way of love is not destroyed by all the armed militancy of the forces of hate. God’s desire to claim us as God’s own people, to remake our lives, to rebuild our humanity, is not thwarted by our death-wish. God’s dream lives.
No spices are needed. The fragrance of death is dissipated. The air is fresh and cool. The tomb is empty. He is not here. Alleluia! Amen.

WWJR? (Luke 19.28-40)

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“WWJR (What would Jesus ride)?” (Luke 19.28-40)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, Palm Sunday C/March 20, 2016

Tom James

Imagine the scene in any great American city. You have city residents, the poor and the wealthy and the many in between. You have city officials, and police officers, and first responders. Perhaps, in an unlikely confluence of events, you have the visit of a high national official, a representative, an agent of American power, perhaps the President, coming to the city with great fanfare, and you also have Jesus, coming through the back door, as it were, amid fervent hopes for change. Jesus comes not with blaring trumpets and scurrying secret service agents, and motorcades, but he comes with…  Well, what does he come with? In the gospel, he comes on a colt—in some versions on a donkey—but what does he come with in our imagined scenario today? What would Jesus ride?
Well. I’ve lived in Metro Detroit over the last several years, and, if Jesus were to come riding into that area, all I can say is that he better not be driving a Camry!
But the question is not a trivial one. Because it is not a trivial matter that Jesus rides a colt, or a donkey, in the biblical story of Palm Sunday. By the way, did you notice that there are no palms in Luke’s version? Perhaps this year we ought to call it “cloak Sunday,” because it was their outer garments that the hopeful lay in Jesus’ path in our text for today. But all versions of the story are careful to point out that Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a humble animal, perhaps a rather small, stubborn one, an unruly and untrained one.
We shouldn’t miss the larger context. This is the time of the Passover, a time in which the nationalistic fears and hopes of Israel would be stoked, and the empire would be on guard. Pilate came to town also, the agent of empire, to firmly place a heavy lid on the proceedings. New Testament scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan describe this unlikely confluence of events like this:
“One was a peasant procession, the other an imperial procession. From the east, Jesus rode a donkey down from the Mount of Olives, cheered by his followers. Jesus was from the peasant village of Nazareth, his message was about the kingdom of God, and his followers from the peasant class…
On the opposite side of the city, from the west, Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Idumea, Judea, and Samaria, entered Jerusalem at the head of a column of imperial cavalry and soldiers. Jesus’ procession proclaimed the kingdom of God; Pilate’s proclaimed the power of empire. The two processions embody the central conflict of the week that led to Jesus’s crucifixion. (p. 2)
Imagine the imperial procession’s arrival in the city. A visual panoply of imperial power: cavalry on horses, foot soldiers, leather armor, helmets, weapons, banners, golden eagle mounted on poles, sun glinting on metal and gold. Sounds; the marching of feet, the creaking of leather, the clinking of bridles, the beating of drums. the swirling of dust. The eyes of the silent onlookers, some curious, some awed, some resentful.”[1]
The contradiction between these two scenes, in the same city, at roughly the same time, is not to be missed. One, you might say, a kind of forced entry, an awesome expression of imperial power. The other, a drawn entry: Jesus has come because he has been drawn there by his sense of mission, by his own passion, and by the hopes of his people. Jesus comes as a kind of popular or even populist leader, you might say, riding a colt, or a donkey, but also riding the crest of a wave of national enthusiasm, being welcomed with shouts that give voice to excited resistance, a counter-parade on the opposite end of the city, and of the people, as Pilate.
In the middle of the twentieth century, during World War II, there was a pastor in France named André Trocmé. He served a church in a town called Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in south-central France. Trocmé and his wife became famous for sheltering refugees, especially Jews. To his congregation, he told stories about Jesus’ life, drawing from Scripture. In one of them, he characterizes the donkey that Jesus rode into Jerusalem as an animal possessed of the “spirit of contradiction.”[2]
Given Trocmé’s life, it is not hard to see what he meant. The “spirit of contradiction” is easy to observe in a stubborn animal like a donkey: sometimes, it doesn’t want to do what the rider wants. And if it doesn’t want to do something, it is not going to do it. Of course, if we are the rider, we aren’t necessarily going to like that. But it is easy to understand and appreciate the “spirit of contradiction” when you are living under the brutal occupation of an empire. Stubbornness, resistance, take on a new value in the face of oppression, and violence. Trocmé’s own life was the embodiment of a “spirit of contradiction.” Like a donkey, his actions subverted the will of those who thought they should be in charge. Like a donkey, he refused to play along in the rider’s game—in this case, the game of genocide.
Jesus, Trocmé tells his congregation, rides symbol of resistance. He, too, refuses to play the imperial game. But what would such resistance look like for us? What, to return to our original question, would Jesus ride? I actually have no idea. But maybe the question can be reformulated slightly: how would Jesus arrive? Who would he show up with? And who would welcome him? And, maybe much more importantly, how would we respond to him?
Whenever we remember Palm Sunday, or “cloak Sunday,” we should not forget that it is part of Holy Week. Jesus says, as he comes through the city gate, that if the people do not lift up a shout for him then the rocks themselves will cry out. It is a theme from Old Testament Scripture—when the people are under threat and under the heel of tyranny, the landscape itself cries out for liberation. The trees of the field clap their hands, the rocks roar with songs of deliverance.
But we know what happens next. Jesus passes through the crowds and into the heart of Jerusalem. He leaves the peasants and makes his way toward the halls of power. And the closer he gets, from the outer gate to the inner courts where Pilate broods and frets over the security of the city and over his reputation as one who either can or cannot keep the people in line, the less shouting of joy is heard, and the more frequently are heard murmurs and whispers of threats and intimidation.
We know what happens next.
So, when we ask what it would be like for Jesus to come to our home town, we have to ask where in the city we find ourselves—near the city gate, if you will, with those who praise him and shout “Hosanna!”? Or in the halls of power, hushed, with vested interests in normalcy and routine? Are we sheltering the weak and the vulnerable, the refugees, the poor, the overlooked, the grieving, the ill, the dying? Is that what we busy ourselves with as we wait for Christ to come? Are we risking our comfort and security that we might be neighbors to those who need us? Or are we holding on to comfort and security for dear life, hiding behind the shields and swords of prestige, reputation, or privilege?
As I say, I have no idea what Jesus would drive. Or whether he would drive at all. But he does indeed come into our city. As it was when he entered Jerusalem to shouts of praise, he comes bringing wholeness to us. He comes bringing words of hope and of healing.
The tragedy of Jesus’ entrance into any human city, of course, is that those words and that hope are continually snuffed out. No matter how much the needy welcome him, the human community as a whole has a way of crucifying him. Even if we are among his admiring throng, somehow we keep getting caught up in the imperial system. We keep getting ourselves invested in the way things are. We keep resisting him, choosing Pilate and his gilded shields and swords. We keep holding on to our comfort and security and privilege and saying “no” to a commonwealth in which those things are shared. And, as always, it is Jesus and his people who keep paying the price. This is the truth that confronts us during holy week. And, so, into the heart of the city we go.
In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.

[1]Quoted by Janet Hunt, http://words.dancingwiththeword.com/2016/03/the-donkey-subversive-choice.html
[2]Ibid.

Extravagant care (John 12.1-8)

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Extravagant care (John 12.1-8)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church/Lent 5C (April 7, 2019)
Tom James

What’s the most important thing about human beings? What is it that makes us human? Twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger said that perhaps the most important thing about us is that we care. “Caring” is more than what we do for other people, or for our pets. Caring is the basic pattern of our lives. We care not only for our loved ones, our animals, our friends—we also care for ourselves, for our bodies, for our projects, for our cars, for our yards, for our futures. Why do we care? We care because life is short, Heidegger believed. We care because things in our lives are valuable to us, and they are valuable to us because we know we cannot enjoy them forever. Care is related to our mortality, to the fact that we must die, and to the fact that we know it.
Have you ever had a brush with death? Maybe a bad car accident or a near miss? Perhaps you have struggled with an illness or have been concerned about the results of a medical test? I don’t listen to country music very often, but there was a crossover hit a few years ago about the singer’s wish that everyone could learn to live as if they were dying. Because it is only when we are faced with our mortality that we can truly experience the rare value, the treasure, that even the simplest details of life embody. It is also, perhaps, only when we know that we are dying that we are willing to take the risks that can truly make us alive.
In the movie, “The Bucket List,” two old men from very different situations in life but united by a terminal diagnosis of cancer discover together how they might truly be alive in a way that they had not been before. It involves wild things like sky-diving and mountain-climbing, of course (what would a “bucket list” be without those things, right?), but it also includes much riskier and harder things like mending relationships with estranged family members, and learning how to be open and vulnerable, when they had taught themselves to be invincible, and independent.
In other words, even though it takes terminal illness to do it, they learn how to care. In our gospel text for today, though, we witness an act of care that is inspired by someone else’s impending death. We read this passage during Lent because it is clear in the Gospel of John that Jesus drops by his friends’ house with full knowledge that he is making one of his last stops. Mary, because she seems to know it, too, pours out an amount of expensive perfume that might have cost her the equivalent of a year’s wages. This would have been a kind of burial preparation. She really cares! She cares enough to spend an extravagant amount, some might say a ridiculous amount, an amount all out of proportion with the good that it might do. After all, anointing someone for burial is not going to be able to fend off the stench of death for long when Jesus is killed. These kinds of acts, as impressive as they are, are not going to reverse the processes of nature. She can’t save Jesus by her act of love. So why expend so much of her wealth for the sake of such a futile cause?
Judas is a realist, it seems. Judas knows the value of a dollar. He realizes that extravagant acts of love are not going to save Jesus from his fate; he knows Jesus’ death is inevitable. In fact, a little later in the story, Judas sees no reason not to hasten it by betraying him to the authorities. In light of such inevitability, in light of such futility, wouldn’t it make much better sense to cut your losses and use your resources for something more useful? Couldn’t a year’s wages do a lot more good serving the very pressing needs of the poor? In fact, isn’t that the only sane strategy?
For a follower of Jesus, it’s pretty hard to argue with Judas’ logic. We think of Judas as the bad guy, but here he wasn’t far off from what Jesus had preached hundreds of times. In a world of haves and have-nots, in a world in which the rich regularly trample the poor, how can a Christian, a follower of Jesus, justify using her money on such a hopeless and even trivial cause, when the needs of the people are so screamingly evident? In other words, Judas cared.
But we all remember Jesus’ famous response. “The poor you will always have with you.” Now, we have struggled to understand these words over the centuries. Often, we have used them to justify our own indifference to the presence of the poor in our cities and towns. In that way, we have been probably worse than Judas, who was, apparently, not indifferent. Giving to the poor would not release them from the conditions that have made them poor, but it would make life just a little better, at least for a while. But I worry that we today quote Jesus from this text, and when we as North American Christians use his words to throw up our hands at the inevitability of poverty in our society, we do so in bad faith because it turns out that we have the power to do something about it. In a world where productivity is so high and technology is so advanced, there is no reason why anyone should go hungry, why anyone should not have a roof over their heads. So, when we say that there will always be poor people, I wonder if we are not excusing ourselves for our unwillingness to do something about it?
Why did Jesus say it, then? Perhaps he wasn’t making a prediction about what kinds of macro-economic conditions we should expect in the future so much as making a more fundamental point about the kind of world we live in. In fact, in Greek, he doesn’t say, “You will always have the poor with you.” Rather, he says, “The poor you always have with you.” Not a prediction, but a present statement of fact.
But what does it mean? In a zero-sum world, a world of scarcity, you have to act fast, or forever have missed your opportunity. But the real world, Jesus seems to be saying, isn’t scarce in that way. The real world is abundant and full. Mary’s offering of expensive perfume, her extravagant outpouring, gives witness to an abundance, a grace, that Jesus himself has been announcing and enacting in his three years of public ministry. And, though it may seem odd to say it, the poor themselves are abundant, too. That is to say, the poverty of the poor cannot be dispensed with by means of a year’s wages. Selling the perfume and giving it to the poor would not have changed anything. Judas seems to forget that the calling to faithfulness issued by the realities of poverty and other kinds of human need is constant and persistent. We cannot escape the moral and spiritual claims the poor put on us. We can’t hide from their presence. We can’t get around the fact that they are here, with us in the world, in our communities. Poverty is not necessary—we really could end it—but as long as we have it, the poor are always with us. Philanthropy like the kind Judas is trying to advocate is often a way to separate ourselves from the poor, to satisfy our conscience that we have done what we can. Philanthropy can be of making ourselves feel better, of shifting responsibility for a society that allows poverty away from ourselves. Jesus wasn’t going to let Judas do that—and I don’t believe he will let us do that, either. The poor are always with us.
In contrast to Judas’ carefully measured philanthropy, in contrast to his desire to be useful and pragmatic, Mary’s gift is extravagant. But it is only an echo of the extravagant love of God, poured out in the life of Jesus, flowing out to embrace her. This kind of extravagance is not a sign of carelessness, but of care with no bounds, a care that believes in God’s abundance, a care that is not afraid of death, a care that is prepared to give everything. This kind of care is not the anxious, fearful care that Heidegger found when examined human experience, but a kind of care that joyfully believes in the kingdom of God—a kingdom in which community is possible among enemies, in which togetherness and care between all kinds of people begins to take shape, in which being a neighbor is not something you are because of where you happen to live but is instead something you do.
We live in a time in which anxieties over scarcity are probably higher than Judas’. We hear it in political debates of all kinds at the national level. We hear it in conversations about the fate of our congregation and its assets here. We care. But scarcity is not the truth. The truth is that our lives are filled with treasure just because we are embraced by a love that is insistent and persistent. We are graced with abundance because we are connected with God and with each other, and the resources of energy, imagination, and love that are available to us are therefore almost unending. The truth is that we are wealthy, not because of our bank accounts, but because of each other, because of our relationships that have lasted decades or even generations, because of the persistent calling of the poor among us, because of those who walk the sidewalks of East Toledo, because of the ceaseless presence of those who invite us to faithfulness in our midst, because of the endless capacity to be neighbor.
Judas is not the realist of the story, actually. Judas lives in a fantasy world, a world that isn’t real at all, a world of separation and segregation, a world of alienation and distance, a world where relationships are optional and easily dismissed. It turns out that Mary, with her extravagant gift, is the true realist. And not because Mary knows that Jesus is going to die—Judas knows that, too. No, Mary is a realist because Mary knows what it means for Jesus to live. Mary is in touch with the deepest reality of Jesus’ life, and ours; and that reality is grace, the grace of expensive perfume, the grace of costly time, the grace of insistent love. And so may we be also. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.

Lost (Luke 15)

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Lost (Luke 15)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, Lent 4C (March 31, 2019)

Tom James
What is it like to be lost? Coins don’t have any feelings, and so they’re not bothered by it, but I’m guessing sheep are. Animals that are accustomed to being in flocks like to be in flocks. There’s security in being part of a flock—when wolves are around, there’s “safety in numbers” of a more than metaphorical kind. Jesus tells these three parables about lost coins, lost sheep, and a lost son from the perspective of the one who has lost them. But what is it like to be lost?
It’s hardly worth asking the question, in a way, because we all know very much what it feels like. We’ve been lost in stores as children, lost in unfamiliar cities. We’ve felt lost in the middle of the night sleeping in unfamiliar places. We’ve been lost in our thoughts. Lost in our anger. Lost in our grief. We have many experiences of lots of ways of being lost. You might say that it is the most familiar thing in the world, one of the commonest feelings that human beings have.
Sigmund Freud taught that our feelings of anxiety are rooted in earliest childhood memories. As infants and small children, we feared separation from our mothers because they provided for our comfort and our nourishment, and we felt utterly helpless without them. If Freud was right, feeling lost goes back to our earliest days, and is one of the deepest, most abiding sources of the anxiety we feel today.
So, at a very deep level, we know what it feels like to be lost. Does the shepherd know, then, what it is like for the lost sheep? Can the shepherd empathize? Part of what makes the shepherd want to go after the lost sheep, maybe most of it, is purely economic: a lot of time, energy, and money are invested in the sheep, and so the shepherd doesn’t want it to fall into danger because it would mean a loss of investment. But part of it, I’m sure, is that the shepherd knows that a sheep is anxious; the shepherd knows that it feels helpless when it is alone. We mammals are equipped with the ability to feel and experience another’s pain, or joy, or grief. Have you ever had a dog nestle up to you a little bit closer after a bad day? Every pet owner knows that compassion across the species barrier is real. And so perhaps the shepherd knows what it is like for the sheep to feel isolated and alone, and maybe that is at least of part of why they leave the ninety-nine and go and search for the lost one.
We don’t know whether Jesus told these parables together or not, or whether he told them in the setting described by Luke or in some other. Perhaps he told them many times. The gospels collect Jesus’ sayings from several sources, and we often don’t know where they originally come from. But Luke situates these parables of lost things, as he often does, in a conflict with Jesus’ critics. The critics are denouncing Jesus for hanging around bad types: “tax collectors and sinners.” Tax collectors were really collectors of tolls or tributes that didn’t go to provide services for the people but to pay for the military occupation of their country. And those who collected to the tolls were not government officials, but private contractors who made their living by skimming a little off the top of their collections. Most often, these toll collectors were fellow Jews who therefore profited from their country’s oppression so you might imagine that there we viewed very negatively. “Sinners” is a word that could have meant lots of things. For a lot of reasons having to do with our Western culture, we tend to think of sexual sin when we hear the word “sinners”—or at least some kind of moral offense. But the word “sinners” could have been meant simply to indicate people in a permanently unclean condition—perhaps because of what they did to earn a living, handling unclean animals or dealing with materials that caused ritual defilement—these were the kinds of jobs that nobody wanted, the kinds that today only immigrants with limited opportunities will take. Whatever these words, toll-collectors and sinners, referred to, it is obvious that they are the ones who bear shame. They are those who are outcast from polite company. They didn’t belong to their communities. They are the ones who are “lost.”
These parables teach us that God has compassion of just such people—that God empathizes with them, that God rejoices when they are gathered into the fold. A question for us might be, do we feel anything for those who are the outcast, the despised, today? Can we empathize with them; can we feel their pain? Or, are we so caught up in our anger at them or the in the offense that they cause us, are we so focused on the stigma that is attached to them, that they are no longer people we can feel any empathy for? Have they become something less than persons—objects to be scorned, rejected, mocked, but certainly not people with whom we might share things in common, like a meal, or a home, or a life.
The interesting thing about these “lost” stories in the fifteenth chapter of the gospel of Luke is that if we read them often enough, over time we begin to envy those who are lost. Why? Because so much attention is paid to them. Those who already found, we begin to suspect, are, like the older brother, those who set themselves against Jesus’ mission—indeed, they seem to set themselves against everything that Jesus stands for. They are the ones who are judgmental and overly confident in their own goodness. We may even begin to feel a little judged if we are among the found. We may get the idea that Jesus is searching us out in these stories, and finding that our foundness is actually a problem. We may not ever stop to ask, what is it like to be among these lost, but we perhaps we may wish a little that we were among them, because they are the ones that inspire so much effort, and, when they are finally found, so much rejoicing.
Michelle and I have become fascinated with British cop shows. I don’t know how this came to be exactly, but we are sure that the British are just better than us at that particular type of show. One of the ones we binge-watched a year or two ago is called “Happy Valley,” and it follows the late stages of a policewoman’s career while she battles her grief over the death of her daughter. The drama is that the person whom she believes murdered her daughter is just out of prison and is wreaking further havoc in her town. At any rate, we find that her life has really been torn apart by her grief. Her marriage fell apart, and she has been on barely speaking terms with her son. In a particularly emotional scene, her son confronts her with the way she has idealized her daughter’s memory, and it is only then that we find out that her daughter had been a troubled young woman with a long history of bad behavior, while her son had been a model citizen. Sound familiar? Somehow, in spite of this, perhaps because of this, this troubled young woman was her mother’s favorite, and we learn that the reason the policewoman fell out with her son after her daughter’s death is because she had said aloud to him that she wished he could have been the one to die instead of her.
It’s a dark twist of the same dramatic arc that we find in the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of Luke. Somehow the lost are favored, somehow they evoke empathy from us, or at least from some of us, like mothers, like Jesus, like the prodigal father, though in real life it seems that it does not always turn out that they are found in the end.
But I wonder if we have got this right, we who have divided up the world between the lost and the found. Are there really people who are found? Are there people who are secure and stable, self-sufficient and responsible, worthy of admiration and respect? By outward appearances, of course, there are. From what I can tell, most of us in this sanctuary fit that description. But are outward appearances all there are to the matter? Freud’s researches suggested that all of us are plagued from time to time with separation anxiety. We have deep fears of being isolated and alone because we know in the end that we are helpless creatures, all. No matter how self-sufficient we have become, no matter how successful; no matter what empires we have built, deep down we are vulnerable, and perhaps a little fearful. And you don’t have to be a psychoanalyst to see Freud’s point. All you have to do is be a reader of Scripture, and you will learn that all of us are fragile, weak, limited in our capacities to sustain ourselves. All of us are sinners, worthy of scorn to the scornful, worthy to be judged to the judgmental. But where are the judges, in the end?
In these stories, the kingdom of God seems to be made up of the lost, not of the found. But the good news is that none of us is really among the found. We pretend to be all the time, and sometimes in our pretending we separate ourselves from those who don’t make the grade, who are judged to be bad company, people we should shun, avoid, perhaps lock up, or somehow punish. And in our pretense we bring these stories from the Gospel down on ourselves; we invite judgment on our self-righteousness. But the good news is that the lost coin and the lost sheep are not representations of the bad behaving daughter who gets all the attention, but of all of us. The lost sheep, the lost coin, is humanity itself. God’s love is like the grieving cop, the mother whose heart went out to her wayward daughter, but the truth is that all of us are the wayward daughter. If you have ever been lost, you know that you don’t always know that you are lost. So, just because we sometimes forget our fragility, just because, like Jesus’ critics, we forget that we are judged with the same judgment that we sometimes put on others, doesn’t mean that God isn’t still seeking to gather us in, ending judgment once and for all.
The reign of God means the solidarity of all God’s creatures, all God’s children. Solidarity as beloved creatures of God, solidarity in vulnerability, solidarity in sin, and solidarity in grace. We all belong to a God of grace, and thus we share in the destiny of being found in the end. In the name of God, our creator, and our redeemer. Amen.

The faithfulness of “why?” (Isaiah 55.1-9)

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The faithfulness of “why?” (Isaiah 55.1-9)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, Lent 3C (March 24, 2018)
Tom James
My dad was in the grocery business, and so was his dad. One of the many things I learned from my father that has shaped my life as a consumer of groceries is a little trick that grocery store managers learn during their training. My dad called it “merchandising,” and it was a way of strategically placing items on display in places they might not ordinarily be to get the customer to notice and take an interest that they might not otherwise have had. The goal is to get people to make what he called “impulse buys.” I’m a bit of pushover for Oreo cookies, so I’m an easy target for a well-placed display even when I’m looking for something healthy. You could probably put it the produce section, and I’d think, “Yeah, I’ll pick up some Oreos to eat while I’m making my salad.” I’m sure we have all noticed this, so it’s no big secret, but apparently, there’s both a science and an art to merchandising.
Several years ago, Michelle and I were lucky to be able to take our family on a cruise. We decided to purchase guided tours to fill our days on shore. The tours were mostly interesting if a bit tiring, but one of the things that every tour guide was sure to do was to take us through a gauntlet of small merchants selling trinkets and souvenirs. It’s interesting how easy it is to get people to buy cheap stuff that probably won’t last very long to try and hold on to memories of a vacation that we’re probably going to remember anyway. I wondered about what the guides received in return for bringing vulnerable customers to these markets. Was that merchandising, too?
Our passage from Isaiah this morning takes up the imagery of a probably open-air market. “Why do you spend your money on what doesn’t satisfy?” It’s as if one vendor is calling out to someone who’s eye is caught by another vendor’s flashy display. “Hey, don’t look over there! He doesn’t have the good stuff. It’s not going to make you happy. Why spend your money there, when I have the best you’ll find anywhere, and it’s practically free!”
This passage comes at the end of a major section of Isaiah, written to the people of Judah who were in exile in Babylon, and speaks of the renewal of God’s covenant with Judah. Isaiah is using the image of an open-air market to call attention to the fact that we are easily distracted from what is important by things that are bright and shiny. Not just the people of Judah, who might have been tempted by easy shortcuts or positions of power and influence instead of the important work of rebuilding the nation. But us, today. We’re all too easily manipulated by what is attractively presented, what is trendy and popular.
I want to focus our attention on this one little word that we hear in this imaginary open-air market. “Why?” I suggest that, even though “Why” can be one of the most annoying words in the world if you are a parent of a pre-school child, it is also one of the most powerful for people of any age. One of the worst slogans of my formative years was “Why ask why?” It was as if to say that asking “Why” was pointless, because very often it can’t be answered and, anyway, any answer we might get wouldn’t change anything. But “Why ask why?” is cynical—it’s a way of saying we have to accept things as they are and not expect anything ever to get better.
Most of the time, when the question “Why” comes to mind, we are looking for an explanation, some kind of reason or rationale behind things that happen, especially when those things are bad or hurtful. Why did he treat me that way? Why are there so many potholes that never get filled? Why are the hymns so hard to sing? Or, here’s one: why is there so much poverty in East Toledo? Or, why is there still such a gap in pay between women and men? “Why” is what we ask when we wish to press the issue—to demand that circumstances justify themselves, and to signal that, if they can’t, they need to be changed. To ask “Why” means that we still believe in history, that we still believe in the power of human beings to make things better. Why ask why? Faith, that’s why.
But I suggest that there’s an even deeper, more important kind of “Why?” Sometimes, in moments of clarity, we turn that question back on ourselves. Why do I keep getting tricked and manipulated by slick merchandising? Why do I keep spending my money on what does not satisfy? Why do I continue to act in a way that is highly profitable for other people, people who do the merchandising, but not at all beneficial for me? Why do I quite literally buy into a lifestyle that popular culture puts before me as the key to happiness when all it does is make me feel inadequate because I can’t quite pull off the look, can’t quite measure up to the standard? The merchandisers always want us to want more, to feel empty. Why do I keep obliging them, when feeling empty makes me miserable?
Isaiah wanted Judah to ask those questions of itself, and I believe God wants us to ask those questions of ourselves today. The question is hard. The bread that doesn’t satisfy is all around us, isn’t it? The cheap trinkets of culture that we so mindlessly consume, their supply chains hidden beneath the manufactured veneer of shared wealth and success. So much of what we are taught to want is made in horrible working conditions, sweatshops in places like Turkey, Bangladesh, and Cambodia, places far removed from our awareness, and so as we consume them, we put ourselves in an alienating relationship, an exploitative relationship, with suffering peoples of the world without even knowing it. It’s bread that cannot satisfy because it hollows us out. As we consume without being able to have a relationship with where things come from or to understand how they got to us, the human connection with what we consume is lost, and not only do we feel empty, but we become empty.
Why do we spend our money on what is not bread, on things that can’t satisfy? Meanwhile, trash builds up. North of the state line, we have a proliferation of what we all “Michigan mountains,” large landfills that you could probably use for skiing. Other places, there are rivers of plastics; there is a collection of garbage that is as large as a large state floating in the Pacific; there is so much carbon in the atmosphere that the climate is actually changing in our lifetimes and droughts, fires and floods rage. Mozambique and Nebraska today are partially underwater because of devastating storms and floods.
Why are we so invested in what does not satisfy?
 It seems to me that what we need in our time is some spiritual discipline, some focused attention on what is important and what gives life. And part of that involves looking inward and probing our own hearts. As I said before, to ask “why?” is to demand justification. If can’t justify our wants—if they don’t really serve our interests, or if they do harm to our souls—then maybe we should reconsider them.
Our passage from Isaiah ends with some of the loftiest and, I believe, most hopeful lines in all of Scripture. “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways, says the Lord. Just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” These are hopeful words because they tell us that we are in a relationship with a God who is not bound by our wants, nor by our understanding. God has better plans for us that we can know or even desire. If we find ourselves caught up in a cycle of ignorance and guilt—and, as human beings, we will find ourselves there all too often—we can nevertheless trust God to keep nudging us, keep pressing us to ask the “Why” question of ourselves. The spirit of God is within us, and, though the voice of God is not always the loudest in the marketplace, it is far more insistent than any merchandizer’s gimmicks. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.

City of peace (Luke 13.31-35

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City of Peace (Luke 13.31-35)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church/Lent 2 (February 21, 2016)

Tom James

The most important word in the Christian faith, says one prominent theologian, is “with.”[1]You’d think it’d be a longer word or a more impressive one! But the most astounding claim Christians make is that God is with us. In Jesus Christ, the power and presence of the God who made a vast universe comes to dwell—with. And yet, as incredible as this is, it falls directly in line with the whole, long tradition of Hebrew Scripture, in which God is painfully and hopefully with God’s people, in bondage, in exile, in the wilderness, in battle, and in miraculous crossings of seas and rivers. God is with the people wherever they go. God is not attached to a place, where people must come if they want to be with God. No, God is a God who goes with, who is to be found everywhere, who leaves no place profane and unhallowed.
But there is something about Jerusalem. Perhaps no place has been fought over as much as Jerusalem. It goes back thousands of years. It was brutally sacked in ancient times—many times over, in fact. It was taken and re-taken by Christian crusaders in the middle ages. It is riven in two by disputes between Jews and Arabs today, a dispute which in many ways is the continuation of the crusader wars. And that conflict over a few square miles, as we know, has implications for the global order itself: our own foreign policy in this nation has been shaped profoundly by it. A new round of fights has recently broken out over it. I’ve often wondered in recent years, in fact, whether the “global war on terror” begun in 2001 will be remembered by historians as a third world war, and how central the occupation of Jerusalem by European settlers will prove to have been in setting that war in motion. In any case, Jerusalem has been, in one way or another, a seat of power and a focus of political conflict virtually from the time of its founding, shrouded in the fog of ancient history.
But Jerusalem means, city of “peace.” It is the place of “shalom,” in Hebrew, of “salaam,” in Arabic. It is where God’s togetherness with the peoples of the world is symbolized most richly and with the most elevated hopes. If there is any one place that makes God’ “with us” the clearest, where human togetherness is supposed to be the most profoundly transformed by God’s togetherness with us, it is Jerusalem. Here, God shelters God’s people. Here, according to rabbinic legend, heaven and earth come close enough to touch.
Here is also where Jesus will go, and this is why he is not afraid of “that fox,” Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee who killed John the Baptist and who know seems to be gunning for Jesus. The Pharisees come and warn Jesus that he is a marked man as he long as he remains in Galilee, and the reader wonders whether they do so out of genuine concern for him, or to make Jesus afraid or to put him in his place. In any case, whatever their motivations, Jesus is undeterred by their warning. It won’t be a puppet ruler of Galilee, put there by the Roman empire, that will decide Jesus’ fate. Jesus will not die in Galilee but will go to Jerusalem, the city of peace where prophets are always killed.
This short passage is full of ominous foreshadowing. If we fast-forward in the story, it is interesting to find that Jesus does end up before Herod with his life on the line. This is during what William Herzog calls Jesus’ “show trial,” when he is hauled before Pilate, and sent to Herod, and then back to Pilate, and also before a group of elders in Jerusalem who scrutinize and condemn him. Herzog points out that to call these events a “trial” is probably anachronistic because the word suggests for us an attempt to ascertain whether a person is innocent or guilty. A “show trial” of the kind Jesus underwent, however, was not a juridical or judicial event but a political one. It was an effort publically to humiliate a person who has been determined to be an enemy of the state, much as in Stalin’s Russia. The outcome was not in doubt. No evidence was sifted, no cross-examinations by a defense were allowed. Witnesses were brought forward not to aid in determining the facts of the case, but simply to give voice to the state’s pre-determined condemnation of its enemy. That is why Jesus knew that he went to Jerusalem to die. He knew he was to enter the city, among throngs of palm waivers, as a man condemned.
So, in reality, Herod has no power of him, after all. Whether or not Herod wants him dead is immaterial. He will be killed because he is an enemy of the state, and the rulers of Jerusalem, in league with the state as they are, will kill him, just as they killed the prophets in generations past.
And still, Jesus goes to Jerusalem, to be with the people during the Passover. Why does he go? Is it because he thinks he has to die to satisfy God’s wrath at sinners? This is a later interpretation of the Jesus story that we cannot attribute to Jesus himself. Is it because he wanted to confront injustice there, to go straight to the heart of the powers that be in Israel and to call them out? Maybe. But he could do that in Galilee, just as John the Baptist did. There’s a really simple reason why Jesus wanted to go to Jerusalem, actually. It was Passover, and that is where the people would be, praying and longing for deliverance, faithfully remembering their traditions and rehearsing their hopes. Jesus wants to go and be with them in the midst of their occupation by the Roman empire. He wants to be with them as they are subjected to corrupt rulers who want to preserve the so-called peace of Rome because they have learned how to benefit from it. Jesus wants to go and be with the people as he calls out injustice, as he resists the reign of Caesar, and as he announces the kingdom of God in their midst. Just as he is with them in the Galilee, as he heals, casts out demons, counsels Jews to give Caesar back his dirty coins, sends out disciples two by two, aligns himself with those on the lowest rungs of the social ladder. These are all ways that he lives out his desire to be “with.”
Commentators note about this passage that is heavily laced with human desire. Herod wants Jesus dead. Jesus wants to gather the people of Jerusalem like a mother hen gathers her chicks. The people don’t want to be so gathered. The same Greek word is used in each instance. And the overall picture puts the wants of Jesus, God’s Messiah, and the people of God, both ruler and ruled, in opposition. And, in many ways, this opposition isn’t just about what Jesus stands for. It is about who he is.
Not just who he was in the first century, but who he is today. Jesus wants to be with us. We, so often, don’t want to be with him. That’s the heartbreak of this passage if we would hear it as a message for us. Now, to be fair, I don’t think that there is any doubt that we are “for” Jesus, just as the Palm Sunday crowds would be, especially when he stands up against those who wrong us or others that we care about. And, of course, we would “vote” for him if given the opportunity. We would root for him in a heated primary. We’d like him on facebook. We’d speak up for him on social media, and maybe even troll his opponents. We’d even canvass for him, going door to door, if it came to it. Well, maybe not! But, anyway, it’s not as if we aren’t committed to the cause.
But “for” isn’t the most important word in Christianity, remember? Being Christian isn’t a matter, primarily, of being for something. It’s not a matter of being partisan. There is certainly a place for partisanship. After all, throughout Scripture God seems to be forthe outcast, the rejected, the poor. The Good Samaritan is for a Jewish stranger who has been robbed, beaten, and left for dead. Jesus himself is for the woman caught adultery when the blamers seek to end her life in a torrent of stones. But God’s being for is not the cold willfulness of choosing “a” instead of “b,” blue instead of red, or red instead of blue. It is, rather, that God is for those whom God wants to be with. The God we see in the flaming pillar that leads Israel through the desert, that we see even more brightly reflected in Jesus, is a God of passionate involvement, a God whose most powerful act is not to create, nor to manage, but to dwell with, to inhabit. “God with us” is an even greater truth than “in the beginning, God created…” God’s partisanship, God’s being forus, is really just an aspect of the fact that God wants to be with us.
Being with is what God is. God is the one who wants to be with, who does not choose to be alone, isolated in divine splendor. God is the one whose very life consists in choosing community, of being together. And so, as we are aligned with God—if we feel that we must take a stand for God, let us never forget that being for God can only mean being with God’s creatures in their joys and in their sufferings. To be for God means to be with the victims of shootings and other violent attacks, in our own neighborhood or in New Zealand, whether they are like us or whether they are not. Being for God means being with those who are excluded from community or who are oppressed or exploited. Being for God, in fact, means acknowledging no boundaries to the call to be with. It means that no circle can be drawn around our love, that the human togetherness that we are for can’t be limited by the bounds of race, or nation, or religion. It’s daring and it’s dangerous to take that stand, because the powers of our world are all about breaking people up, keeping people isolated from each other, all about protecting and maintaining walls of division and hostility. But the object of our faith, the divine mother hen we know in Jesus Christ, is all about gathering the chicks, all about including everyone, all about with, even it kills her.
And, as grim as it sounds, that’s good news for us. For you and I are gathered, like chicks under the loving protection of a mother hen. And no matter how much we squirm, no matter how loud squawk, no matter how much we may seek to be isolated from God, God is steadfastly with us. God doesn’t abandon us. And because of that, we insist on being with each other, and on being withthe world, even if it kills us. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.

[1]Sam Wells, Nazareth Manifesto: Being With God (Wiley, 2015).