Sunday, December 28, 2014

Christmas Reality Check (Sermon)



“Christmas Reality Check”
Luke 2:22-38
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
12/28/14

          Simeon. He is often referred to as a priest – in fact the priest to whom Mary presents herself for the purification required of all Jewish women after giving birth. But all Luke says is that Simeon is a man who is “righteous and devout, [and] looking for the consolation of Israel.” Luke calls him holy, but not a priest.
          Anna. Like Elizabeth, Anna is a crone, a woman of great age, wisdom, spiritual discipline, and depth. But she is a woman. It is not likely that she has a theological education. And she has almost certainly not been ordained to priestly office. For decades, however, “fasting and prayer” have been this widow’s way of life. And such practices evoke and develop a person’s spiritual awareness more graciously and generously than any academic study or priestly rank ever can. Honoring her, Luke grants Anna the high status of prophet.
          So, we have Joseph and Mary. Then the shepherds. Now we meet Simeon and Anna. Soon enough the disciples will come. Jesus may have some rabbinical instruction, but as a carpenter’s son, his primary training is probably of the real-world variety. He knows the Torah, but his parables, and the other images he uses reveal first-hand knowledge of what it means to subsist. He knows what it means to be grateful just for having enough in the midst of the impoverishing excesses of both Rome and the Jewish elite. Jesus specializes in practical rather than systematic theology.
          The Jesus movement is like that, isn’t it? It’s a grass-roots movement. It is instigated by regular people, men and women without formal training, except in things like fishing, tax collecting, begging, and prostitution. Christmas, then, is all about the call of regular folks to be, to do, and to become remarkable things in and for the creation. Christmas dares us, just like Simeon, to stare both life and death in the face, and to do so with no less gratitude for one than the other. Christmas unleashes in all of us, just like Anna, a well spring of praise.
          It is a very familiar thing to extol the wisdom virtues of the very young and the very old. “From the mouths of babes,” we say. And how many stories depend on the active presence of some wise elder, male or female? The very young and the very old both have something going for them that the rest of us are old enough to have forgotten and too young to remember. At some early point we learn not just to use but to wield the pronoun “I.” At a much later point we begin to conquer our prejudiced fear of the pronoun “them.” Between these two critical moments, most of us struggle mightily with or capitulate entirely to the ego and its Black Friday appetite for self-aggrandizement. We muster our precious energies and cast these pearls before the ravenous swine of greedy competition, achievement, and most of all control.
          Now, we all need a healthy ego. It is part of what allows us to embrace the liberating good news that we are made in God’s image, and that we are loved beyond all failure and fault. Still, spiritual growth is virtually impossible when we are under the influence of a free-range ego. Without boundaries, ego does nothing but take – legally or illegally, gently or by force, but it takes. And like a wolf tasting blood, ego will take without ever entertaining the idea of enough. It always wants more.
          “And the child’s father and mother were amazed at what was being said about [Jesus].” Having heard such bright, wonderful things from Gabriel, Elizabeth, shepherds, and now Simeon and Anna, Joseph and Mary face a critical moment. How will these simple folks process all of this shiny affirmation? Just as Jesus is tempted to allow his own ego to make his life and everyone else’s all about him in the most inappropriate ways, Jesus’ parents are tempted to cash in on this child who is causing such a stir.
          In his wisdom, Simeon sees the presence and the promise of God in this infant. And he also sees the potential for the baby’s parents to let ego take over and to raise a celebrity rather than a son. So the wise elder turns to Joseph and Mary and says, Bless your hearts. Then, Simeon lowers the boom on Mary. In so many words he says, Watch out. This child is going to turn the world upside down. And he’s going to turn you, Mary, inside out. It will not be all roses. There will be thorns, and there will be nothing you can do about it.
          The story of Jesus’ presentation in the temple is a kind of Christmas reality check. Let’s face it. Much of our Christmas revelry is pure indulgence and excess. Simeon’s ominous blessing turns us back toward the steady, blue-collar, grass-roots work of faithful witness, and to the relentless flow of life and death, and life anew. We have seen God’s salvation yet again. We have been singing praises, and now we’re off to share the soul-piercing good news of who we are and who we can be as God’s people.
          Both here and at home, this has been a most memorable Christmas for me. Marianne, the kids, and I had a wonderful four days together. And I look forward to gathering with extended family tomorrow night in Augusta. And in all of this there are redemptive joys and revealing new beginnings. Revealed in all of this, too, have been inner thoughts that are full of heartache and even tears.
          Joy to the world, indeed. For joy really has nothing to do with the happiness we all want and expect from ribbons, bows, and wassail. Joy has to do with plodding forward faithfully into our new life, aware, like Simeon, that we are seeing only the beginning of the fulfillment of all that God promises. But we have seen, and we are seeing, in ourselves and in one another, the presence of God’s Christ.
          God is with us. Our temporary lives have eternal purpose and meaning. Even as this beautiful world suffers under violence, greed, poverty, and fear, faith, hope, and love not only survive; they thrive. And they will prevail. This is the promise of Christmas, and of Easter. And it is the message that is born and resurrected within us day, by day, by long, beautiful, weary day.
Joy to the world! The Lord is come.

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Christmas Jubilee (Christmas Eve 2014)



“Christmas Jubilee”
Luke 2:1-20
Christmas Eve, 2014
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

          It’s not just a familiar story. It’s a great story. But it’s a bit of a mess, too. For example, while scholars are not of one mind with regard to the precise details, they do agree – mostly – that Luke’s presentation of the historical context does not hold up to tests of accuracy. The records compiled by Josephus and other first-century historians do not support Luke’s particular confluence of imperial and local leaders around the time of Jesus’ birth. And yes, the Romans apparently had a fondness for census-taking, but we have no evidence to corroborate Luke’s account of a census requiring all everyone to return to their ancestral homes.1
          We can let such things bother us. Or, we can remember that Luke, like all gospel-writers, is telling a story. And his story is situated within a much deeper and wider Story. Luke understands that this larger Story is, has been, and will always be populated with real people in real social and political contexts. He also understands that the Story and all of its surrounding reality exist because of the gracious and creative initiative of God.
          The Story is both eternal and unfolding. Hardly bound to 30-some years around the time that the Julian calendar began, God’s Grand Narrative is layered, deeply and all at once, throughout past, present, and future. Each of the four gospels, then, is more complex than one man’s research and recording of another man’s life. The gospel accounts are themselves creative acts of the Story and the Storyteller. So it makes sense to say that the account of Jesus’ nativity finds Luke. And when Luke finds his place within it, the Story tells itself through Luke’s openness to it, and his passion for it.
          Because of all this, Luke takes far more interest in the saturating and timeless truth of the Story than in historical precision. Now, Luke does not fabricate characters. He simply makes it clear that these folks come and go. They succeed and fail, live and die. But The Story is a different matter. The Story continues. And this Story says stunning things like: “And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family.” (Leviticus 25:10)
          I think that in Luke’s telling of the birth of Jesus, we hear God announce not just a year of jubilee as described in Leviticus. We hear God announce Universal Jubilee. Whether Luke intends it or not, he lets us know that Jesus is a kind of fulcrum in history. With the birth of Jesus, the time has come, the Kairos has come for everyone and everything to return to its “property” and its “family.” Jubilee is the “year of the Lord’s favor” to which Isaiah refers. And only in Luke’s story of Jesus do we hear those very words on Jesus’ lips. He speaks them when he reads them from the scroll of Isaiah, and he does this when he himself comes home to his family in Nazareth.
          Theologically speaking, to come home to ancestral lands is to return to an eternal identity, a foundational purpose. And this metaphorical return re-orients us toward a future. Jeremiah calls it a “future with hope.” (Jer. 29:11) When we come home to the Story, the Story comes home within us.
          Christmas Eve is one of my favorite days of the year. For my family, it remains a time when we all return home – or try to. We have treasured traditions that include a hike or some other outing, candlelight worship, and a fantastic meal that Marianne engineers but to which we all contribute. (My particular culinary skill set usually lands me at the sink with piles of dirty dishes.) And that meal always ends with homemade peppermint ice cream. For me, Christmas Eve has become a time of uncanny wholeness and belonging. The mystic at-home-ness of Christmas Eve reminds me of the lines spoken by Marcellus in Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet. Out on the cold parapet Hamlet’s friend says:

Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long.
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad.
The nights are wholesome. Then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallowed and so gracious is that time.2

          Now, Jonesborough is not “home” for us in the same way that some other town in Georgia or North Carolina might be. But that isn’t the point of home for Luke. When Joseph goes home, he doesn’t necessarily return to the town in which he was born and raised. He goes to Bethlehem, and he goes to Bethlehem because, according to the way Luke storys The Story, Joseph traces his roots back to David.
          Home, then, has less to do with some physical location than it does with our truest identity. Home has to do with belonging at the most ancient depths and the most unrealized heights of who we are in God. To return home for God’s Jubilee is to return to the eternal Self from which, finally, none of us can be completely alienated.
          John understands that kind of home, too. His version of the nativity of Jesus us very brief and dense, but I find it theologically consistent with Luke’s account. John writes: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him…[And] what has come into being in him [is] life… (John 1:1-3a, 3c-4a)
          The fundamental energy of life itself is home for the one whose birth into human existence we celebrate tonight. The lives we live are expressions of that same life. Being itself, Life itself is home for us – regardless of where we lay down our sweet heads. To me, this means that home, real and everlasting home, can always – potentially anyway – be found in the presence of anyone, or even anything, created by God.
          In many churches, the words spoken over the Lord’s Supper build a fence around Christ’s table. I used to speak those exclusive words, as well. I can no longer do that. I can no longer demand that any of you, no matter who you are, say or do something to secure a place at the table from which you have, ultimately, come. This is the table of Christmas Jubilee. Yes, this is the table of remembrance and redemption. And it is also the table, and the stable, of holy reunion.
          So all of you, come to this table. Welcome home.
          And Merry Christmas.

1Lewis Donelson, Feasting on the Word, John Knox Press, 2008, pp,117-118.
2William Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” Act 1, Scene 1, lines 157-163. (Citation from: http://nfs.sparknotes.com/hamlet/page_16.html)

Sunday, December 21, 2014

Christmas: A Paradox of Love (Sermon - Advent 4)



“Christmas: A Paradox of Love”
Luke 1:46b-55
Advent 4 – 12/21/14
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

          Before reading our text, let’s remember the context in which these words are spoken.
          A teenaged Mary learns that she will soon feel and show the effects of a remarkable pregnancy. As the scene of the Annunciation closes, we hear Mary say, “Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”
          Most of us have been taught – and with good reason – to hear Mary’s words as her humble surrender to God. After tumbling around inside these words once again, however, I also begin to hear a young woman’s terrified submission to the demands of yet another male in a thoroughly patriarchal culture. Mary’s “Here I am” begins to sound like the gasping breath one takes before being plunged beneath the surface of the water.
          By no means do I want to diminish anyone’s appreciation of this part of the Christmas story. It’s just that our world and the world of a first-century Mary are incomprehensibly different from each other. Maybe that lack of understanding makes it inevitable that we romanticize the story of the Annunciation and gloss over the breath-taking scandal inherent to it.
          Think about it. The way Luke tells the story, Mary is a runaway teen. This young girl leaves home, in haste, and apparently alone. These are not the actions of a girl who is excited and grateful. These are the actions of a girl who feels overwhelmed, and not simply by an unplanned pregnancy, but by a pregnancy that has been imposed on her. She needs a loving, understanding, and non-condemning presence in her life, a presence no first-century male can provide – not even a patient and sympathetic fiancé. So she heads straight to Elizabeth, a relative, traveling as if running downhill all the way.
          In Judea, Mary falls into the arms of this crone. And I use the term “crone” in the ancient, archetypal sense of a woman not only of great age, but of deep spiritual wisdom. Remember, Elizabeth is enduring her own remarkable pregnancy. Because of that, she represents the fertility goddesses of an era that predates Father Abraham. Long before the patriarchy that characterizes first-century Rome, feminine images of God were the norm. God mothered humanity into spiritual awareness and healing.
          When Mary arrives at Elizabeth’s home, the Old Mother in Elizabeth awakens. With body, mind, and spirit fluttering to life, Elizabeth sings her own song of thanksgiving. Then she utters a crone’s blessing on Mary. Only now, at this moment of mystic sanction through this particular woman, does Mary accept Gabriel’s announcement as good news. And her heart sings:

            46b “My soul magnifies the Lord,
                   47and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
                   48for he has looked with favor
                             on the lowliness of his servant.
          Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
                   49for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
                             and holy is his name.
            50His mercy is for those who fear him
                   from generation to generation.
            51He has shown strength with his arm;
                   he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
            52He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
                   and lifted up the lowly;
                   53he has filled the hungry with good things,
                             and sent the rich away empty.
            54He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy,                          55according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
                             to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”
                                                                                      (Luke 146b-55)

           One can almost see Elizabeth as she listens to Mary. She casts an embarrassed gaze to the floor. Her wrinkled brow creases. She folds her old, thin-skinned hands in her lap. When Mary finishes, Elizabeth looks at the young woman with a tight-lipped, bless-your-heart smile.
          Mary’s song, you see, dives into territory reserved for men like Elijah and Elisha, Jeremiah and Isaiah. Mary’s song is full-blown prophecy. And such prophecy sounds out of place on the lips of a teenaged girl. But Mary has experienced a visitation, and now she is making a visit of her own. Everywhere Mary goes, God meets her there. From Heaven to Sheol, morning to evening, shore to shore, God is there for her and for the one being knitted together in her womb. To make peace with all of the thoughts and ways that lie so far from her own thoughts and ways, Mary must embrace Gabriel’s announcement and Elizabeth’s blessing.
          As she accepts this gift, which is only a gift when given, Mary speaks with clarity and authority. And like the child within her, that authority comes as a gift of grace. It comes through Mary’s willful struggle with and her willing acceptance of her call. Mary’s prophetic authority arrives on the back of that feathered fish called paradox.
          So it is with virtually all things spiritual. The last shall be first and the first shall be last...Whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all…God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise [and] what is weak in the world to shame the strong. Mary’s prophecy is all about the paradox of faith. It’s all about God’s ongoing work to displace violent power with transforming meekness. It’s all about God’s work to reveal the dingy darkness of shiny things, things that wealth may buy, but which inevitably end up owning us.
          Paradox is about God’s aggravating truth that only when a human being learns to die will he or she live.
          Paradox lies at the heart of all prophecy, because virtually all prophecy says, in one way or another, that things are not what they seem. Prophetic truth declares that eternal reality is almost always diametrically opposed to what appears to be physically real. Fundamentalist theism and fundamentalist a-theism cannot tolerate all the gray space of paradox. They demand that all things be exactly as they seem. There is no such thing as mystery then, only facts, some of which have yet to be verified. And these two fraternal twins, fundamentalist theism and fundamentalist a-theism, do so love to hate. They love to hate each other, and to hate just about everyone else, as well.
          Christmas, which cannot be divorced from Easter, declares the paradox of Love. Christmas and Easter declare, with earth-shaking gentleness, the enduring mystery of grace. There is no such thing as earning or escaping the Love of God. At Christmas, the powerful wealth and wisdom of the ages is born to a poor, uneducated, teenaged girl. Well-to-do, First-World Christians have tried to undo the scandalous paradox of Christmas by connecting it to Black Friday instead of Good Friday. In doing so, we have managed to flip the paradox in our favor. We have made Christmas a celebration of the wealth and power that God comes, in person, to judge. Still, even when we corrupt our observation of Christmas, Christmas itself remains, well, immaculate. As Mary’s prophecy reminds us, Christmas still delivers God’s commitment to justice for all creation.
          The paradox of Love: Just as something in Mary must die before she lives into the new life stirring within her, we, too, are called to embrace, over and over, life-renewing death. And we embrace that death by receiving with grace all that giving has to offer.
          Christmas is not under the trees in our homes. It’s under those trees out there, and in those wide-open spaces, and in the classrooms and cubicles. I do wish a Merry Christmas to you. And even more so, I wish to all the world a Merry Christmas through you.

Sunday, December 7, 2014

New Clothes for Christmas (Sermon - Advent 2)



“New Clothes for Christmas”
Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11
Advent 2 – 12/7/14
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

          According to Luke, when Jesus is asked to preach for the first time at the synagogue in Nazareth, he opens the scroll of Isaiah and reads the first one-and-a-half verses of Isaiah 61. Jesus follows the reading with a sermon that Luke sums up this way: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
          At first, the people stand in smug awe of Jesus. The hometown boy seems to have made good for sure. Things change quickly, though, when Jesus interprets Isaiah’s words. Recalling that two of God’s most memorable prophets, Elijah and Elisha, tended to Gentiles – one a widow and one a leper – before tending to Jews, Jesus exposes that which is most utterly true and offensive about God: When the Spirit of the Lord moves, the initial beneficiaries are not those who might consider themselves chosen or blessed, but rather those who are most vulnerable. God acts first on behalf of the poor, the captive, the blind, and the oppressed. Regardless of ethnicity, people in these categories of humanity are the ones whose “descendants shall be known among the nations.” They are the ones whom the world will acknowledge as “a people whom the Lord has blessed.”
          To the extent that Israel embodies God’s concern for the powerless and the marginalized of the world, she maintains her role as God’s chosen and communal witness. When Israel allies herself with injustice, however, when she gets in bed with violent power and exclusive privilege, she abandons her uniqueness. Israel may refer to a particular people and place, but even more does Israel refer to those who intentionally strive with God for the well-being of the creation.
          The same is true for the church, of course. When we do not follow Jesus with the same passion as we proclaim him Lord, are we truly the body of Christ?
          “I will bless you,” says Yahweh to Abram. I will “make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” (Genesis 12:2)
          The leadership of first-century Judaism has abandoned Israel’s uniqueness. The chosen people have chosen religious entitlement over spiritual purpose. Having grown comfortable in their somewhat privileged arrangements, the people who raised Jesus are shocked and horrified by his radical words. Turning from friendly to fiendish, they herd the Good Shepherd toward a nearby cliff intending to throw him off. Jesus manages to slip through their fingers, of course. And after that, instead of wilting away, Jesus commits his life to fulfilling Isaiah’s disruptive prophecy.
          There will be no fancy, gold-fringed robes for this anti-establishment rabbi. As one who loves the Lord who loves justice, Jesus wears a very different wardrobe. He wraps himself in “the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit,” because God has clothed him with “the garments of salvation…[and] the robe of righteousness.”
          Given these images from Isaiah, whose prophecy we Christians now connect to Jesus and his Christ-like way of Israelite life, there is little wonder that new clothes tend to be one of the most popular Christmas gifts. And to the extent that they may actually remind us of being clothed in Christ, the Lover of Justice Incarnate, new clothes may be entirely appropriate.
          To compare the life of faith to spiritual clothing hardly breaks new ground. The psalmist speaks even of God being “clothed with honor and wrapped in light as with a garment.” (Psalm 104:1b-2a)
          One of my favorite passages to read at weddings comes from Colossians 3: “As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and…forgive each other…And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts…And be thankful.”
          Compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, forgiveness, peace, gratitude – these are the bridegroom’s garlands and the bride’s jewels. They are Isaiah’s garments of salvation, and such garments assume relationship with the creation. That means that we cannot afford to reduce faith to underwear – that is, to something so personal that we hide it. Our Christmas clothing is a way of outer, visible life, life in relationship with and for others. This does not mean that we try to force our neighbors into some kind of uniform wardrobe. It means – at least it means to me – that we wear our Christmas hearts on our sleeve.
          Jesus declares the same thing when he says to his disciples, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:34-35)
          Returning to Colossians 3, we find these words: “Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.”
          Agape Love is the fabric of which the garments of salvation are made. To mix in the rest of Isaiah’s metaphors, Love is the eternal and irresistible energy and vigor God uses to grow the fragrant and healing gardens of faith. When our lives embody the Agape Love and the redeeming justice of God in Christ, we do not just look forward to salvation. We experience it. We share it.
          The promise of Christmas is this: When we offer ourselves to others, in gratitude to God, the Spirit comes upon us. And even through us, the very heart of scripture may be revealed and fulfilled.
          It is Advent, the season of getting dressed for the arrival of the bridegroom. The table before us is our dressing room, our place of renewal and transformation. All are welcome here.