Grandma's Blackberry Jam

          In the heat of one of my adolescent summers, I made a solo visit to my paternal grandparents in Forest, MS.  One of the highlights of every Forest trip was going out to Deck’s farm to fish in the pond, to ride the horses and, if we hit the season right, to help bale hay.  Deck was a distant cousin who raised beef cattle on the gently rolling hills just outside town.  A sheer and constant delight, Deck epitomized the farmer persona.  He loved his farm, his cows, his neighbors, and he wore one of the broadest, most genuine smiles I have ever seen. 

          One morning during my visit, Grandpa decided that he and I were going to go pick blackberries out on the farm.  Before heading out to pick, we stopped by Deck’s simple red brick house.  He met us outside so his zealously protective border collie, Blaze, didn’t try to chew our trespassing legs to shreds.  We stood around the bed of Deck’s dingy green Chevrolet pickup, our elbows perched on the bed.  It was summer.  The day would be long and hot.  The morning air, thick with dew, lay moist against our skin.  There was no need to hurry.

          In his slow, garbled drawl, Deck said he had a tree to saw up not far from the blackberry bramble, and that if I wanted to come with him I could.  Before I could respond, Grandpa thanked him but declined the invitation for me.  As Grandpa drove us down through a pasture to the dense, sprawling blackberry thicket nestled in a patch of bottom land, I could think of only Deck and his chainsaw.

          As we started picking, Deck cranked up his saw and began his work.  As the sun rose higher, so did the temperature.  Flies and gnats feasted on us.  Hypodermic briars sliced my fingers, hands and forearms.  For a 13 year old boy, the choice between picking blackberries and hanging around a kindly old farmer with a chainsaw was a no-brainer, so I decided to venture out on a limb and take Deck up on his offer on my own. 

          Grandpa did not care for the idea.

          “You know,” he said, “there are stories about people getting lost in the woods and surviving on wild berries like this.  It’s important to get a feel for such things.” 

          The only thing lost that day was my mind in the high whine of Deck’s chainsaw.  So I mumbled some excuse and walked off to hitch my wagon to Deck and his chainsaw.

          When the berries were picked and the tree cut into firewood, Grandpa came to get me, and we returned to town.

          That afternoon, I lay down on the thick carpet in Grandpa's and Grandma's living room, reveling in the cool wash of the ceiling fan.  The air itself was awash in the sweet aroma of blackberries cooking down into jam in Grandma’s kitchen.

          The next morning when I came to breakfast, there, beside a stack of golden brown toast, sat a jar of store-bought grape jelly.

          “How about some of that blackberry jam?” I said.

          “Gotta save that for the winter,” Grandpa answered into crackle of his paper.

          I was stunned.  “Well, it sure would taste good,” I whimpered

          “Nooo,” Grandpa said.  “We need to save that for those cold winter mornings.”

          I knew better than to push any further.

          At the end of the week, my grandparents and I packed up for the long drive back home to Augusta, GA.  They stayed with us for a couple of nights, and we had a grand time, as usual.  After they left, my mother came into my room holding a small jar.  It contained something dark and purple, with tiny round seeds in it.

          “Grandma brought this for you,” Mom said.  “She said that Grandpa thought only those who picked the berries should eat the jam.  But she wanted you to have some, too.”

          Grandma had smuggled me a jar of her blackberry jam.

          The grace of God may have no greater witness among us than the love of grandmothers.  What mattered to Grandma was not what she thought I had or had not earned.  What mattered was what she thought of her grandson.  Her thoughts were always guided and shaped by unconditional love.  Even if she had to sneak it our way on occasion, she was going to follow the path of grace, that high-set light which cannot be hidden.

          Thanks be to God for Grandma, for grandmothers, and for their many jars of smuggled grace.*

*An earlier version of this story appeared in the July/August 2006 issue of an Upper Room publication called "Alive Now."  (Laura Huff Hileman, guest editor; pp. 20-22)

The Mockingbird (April/May 2014 Newsletter)

          It was nearly 11pm on a weeknight.  Marianne and I had been sitting on the sofa in our living room in Shelby, NC, chatting about one thing and another.  We wallowed in that groggy never land of too tired to sleep.  The window behind us was open, and the street was dark, still and quiet.

          After Marianne had wandered off to bed, I lingered on the sofa for a while.  About the time I had drifted off to sleep, the night sprang to life.  In the maple tree outside the window, a lone mockingbird unleashed a rare, nocturnal aria.  The hymn broke through the stillness with the kind of passion reserved for prophecy and grief.  The mockingbird sang as if it had only minutes left to live, only moments to pour out its last song as a glorious benediction upon the earth.

          Or could it have been an ancient song, a primordial refrain that I had just begun to hear?

          I turned out the light and sat back to listen.

          Like the first rays of dawn, the complex medley of birdsong pealed back the darkness.  The longer I listened, the more each perfect note revealed uncharted space for wonder.  How does a single, tiny throat have the capacity for such variety of phrase and strength of voice?  From what corner in so small a heart does such a song arise?  It seemed as though a hole had been punched in the floor of heaven and the liquid gold of angelsong had begun to spill into my yard.

          When the ecstasy tapered into silence, I sat still for a few moments, hoping that the bird was simply gathering new breath for new song.  The night remained still, but I continued both to hear and feel that music as it found a perch within my heart.

          Such moments of grace steal in to surprise, delight and renew us.  They are gifts of the Spirit that wing their way through all our days.  Sometimes they dart through like a nervous sparrow.  Other times, like that mockingbird, they roost outside the window and stun even our darkest nights with hope.

          May you be aware of those moments in your own life.  And may you claim your own voice to sing your verse of grace.

          The heavens are telling the glory of God;

          And the firmament proclaims his handiwork.

          Day to day pours forth speech,

          And night to night declares knowledge.

          There is no speech, nor are there words . . .

          Yet their voice goes out through all the earth,

          And their words to the end of the world.

                                                (Psalm 19:1-4)

At the Well (Third Sunday of Lent, 2014)

“At the Well”

John 4:5-42

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

3/23/14

          “For God so love[s] the world [that] God [does] not send the Son into the world to condemn the world” but for the sake of the world – for the sake of its wholeness, and for the sake of its deep, spiritual awareness that the creation, every cell and solar system in it, resonates with the voice and the heartbeat of God.

          The saving work of Jesus is the work of reuniting this beloved world which is being fragmented almost entirely by the human creature’s propensity to idolize itself, by our laziness in settling for, and even choosing prejudice, greed, violence, and pride over the higher callings of humility, gratitude, generosity, and neighboring.

          It is this broken and fragmented world that has taught a woman that one appropriate response to a request for water is to say: “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”

          Instead of acknowledging the common ground of thirst, and then gratefully receiving from the earth the elemental gift of water, the woman, out of submissive habit perhaps, simply regurgitates the boundaries that have, and as far as she is concerned, will always keep Jews separated from Samaritans, and males separated from females.

          It is easy to name all the “wrong” things we do and to label them “sins.”  It is another thing entirely, though, to begin to realize that most of those “wrong” things are nothing but petty distractions, and that the grand and honorable things we do to protect our visible “goodness,” which we protect with rigid, exclusionary boundaries, are very often the most dangerously sinful things we do.

          The actions and attitudes that distance us from God and from neighbor usually make us feel righteous and superior.  They make us feel other.  Jesus enters the fragmented world, however, to overcome otherness, to live a life that very deliberately exposes our tolerance for injustice, our collusion with brutal powers, and our pandering moralities that allow us to ignore God’s love for and presence in those whom we fear, or simply don’t understand.  Jesus lives his saving life for all creation’s sake, and for all creation’s sake he invites the human creature back into healthy relationship with the Creator, with one another, with self, and with the earth.

          The story in John 4 describes one of Jesus’ most memorable “for the sake of” moments, and it occurs at the lip of a storied well.  The Old Testament does not mention Jacob’s well, but a tradition that is probably more convenient that convincing remembers that Jacob digs this well.

          At the time of Jacob there is no Jewish nation, so there is no Samaritan offshoot to disdain and to live over against.  There is, of course, a hoodwinked twin brother, Esau.  In spite of his tendency to surrender to his appetites, the Hairy One eventually matures and demonstrates the strength and substance of his true self.  He forgives his deceitful brother.  And after Jacob wades the shallow Jabbok, the brothers embrace and at last, they drink from the deep well of reconciling grace – together.

          At the physical well, a legacy attributed to the forgiven Jacob, through whose lineage God molds the very face of Forgiveness, Jesus meets a forever-nameless Samaritan woman.  This well, like all oases, is a place where thirsty creatures, human and animal alike, gather to remember that their very existence depends on the life-giving offerings of the earth from which their bodies arise.  Such provision is the blessing of the Creator to and through the creation, and we all stand on equal footing at the lip of the Well.  To become aware of the realities of grace, of shared dependence, and of interdependence, and to receive such realities as holy gift, this is to begin to taste the living water that Jesus offers.

          It is hardly that easy, though.  When conditioned by a broken and fearful world to judge, to compete, and to “eat or be eaten,” we quickly overlook the face-to-face earthiness of a vulnerable Well-gathering.  And in our forgetfulness of grace, we can say the oddest things.

          “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

          I can’t tell what the woman is up to here.  Is she serious?  Does she genuinely believe that Jesus’ promise of living water is some kind of magic that will finally make her life all coziness and leisure?  Or is she just slapping what she considers to be some haughty Jerusalem Jew in the face with rude sarcasm?  Either way, she misses the point.

          “Go get your husband,” says Jesus.

          “I don’t have a husband,” snaps the woman.

          ‘I know,’ says Jesus.  ‘But that’s okay.  I understand.  I’m not here to condemn anyone.’

          Then, in so many words, Jesus says to her that she has been going to the well of marriage over and over, but for whatever reason she keeps drawing up one empty bucket after another.  She still has yet to drink the water of true relationship, the water of deep connection, of spiritual as well as physical oneness with another human being.  And now, perhaps because of an imprisoning patriarchy, she has more or less barnacled herself to some man so that she does not have to turn to begging or to prostitution in order to survive.

          Indeed!  How thirsty she must be!

          ‘Okay, Rabbi,’ she says.  ‘So, you’re a prophet.  I get it.  But you’re still a Jerusalem Jew.  Your people still refuse to recognize my people because we worship here, on Mt. Gerazim.’

          Jesus has successfully turned the conversation in the direction he wants to go.  And from his mouth, from the lips of this New Well, flow words that begin to soak the woman’s desert life in living water.  Jesus invites the woman to lean out over the well and to peer inside.

          ‘Look,’ he says. ‘This Well is so full you can see the water.  And in the water, you can see your reflection.  And in your reflection you can see the reflection of God.  So it is for all who come here.

          ‘God is not found any better on one mountain than another.  God is not reflected any more fully in one person’s face than another.  So, to see and to know God we need all faces, all reflections.’

          These words are fresh, living water, and like all water they seek the lowest, deepest place they can reach.  They tumble down into lonely valleys where darkness, sadness, and day-to-day weariness dry us out.  When we get dehydrated, all our efforts to know and to share God tend to petrify into idolatries – into the worship of worldly things, rigid structures and strictures that we experience and define in only the most limited and tangible terms.

          In these spiritual deserts we focus more on the place of worship than on the One whom we worship.

          In spiritual deserts we focus more on who we will allow to receive the sacrament than on the host who invites us to the table.

          In spiritual deserts we focus on what people do, wrong and right, rather than on who they are at the core of their God-imaged, human being.

          In spiritual deserts we allow ourselves to see ourselves according to confining dualities such as Jews and Samaritans (those who do the right thing in the right place versus those who do not), and as males and females ("stronger sex" versus "weaker sex").

          In spiritual deserts we even begin to accept the world’s view of us as mere consumers, tools whose chief end is to produce and to purchase as much as possible in order to keep an economy afloat.  And that opens to door to seeing ourselves and others as eye candy whose worth is tied to physical beauty rather than to our innate and intimate worth as children of God.

          And from the earliest of times, never has there been a clan, a tribe, a state, a kingdom, a nation, or an empire that has not told is young people, especially its young men, that they are renewable and thus expendable resources to be taught the science of killing and being killed for the betterment of their betters.

          To save this mixed up world, to reunite this fragmented creation, which God so loves, God makes a loud splash in the desert.

          “God is spirit,” cries Jesus, “and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

          Jesus' life is wringing wet with the prophecy of Isaiah: “The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly…They shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God. Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, ‘Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God.’” (Selected lines from Is. 35:1-4)

          “Here is your God,” says Isaiah

          “I am he,” says Jesus.

          And the ripples spread.

          Here is our challenge as followers of Jesus: As a people blessed to be a blessing, we are called to be crocuses in the desert, signs of God’s ongoing renewal.

          Our blessedness becomes blessing for others when we, out of love for the world, die the costly death of grace and embrace God’s freedom from the world’s condemning ways.

          Our blessedness becomes blessing for others when we respond humbly to God’s call to be an oasis, a “spring of water gushing up to eternal life,” a place of Well-Gatherings.

          Our blessedness becomes blessing for others when we, like Jesus, dare to enter forbidden and contemptible Samaritan lands.  For through such risky congregations, the living water washes our hearts, and minds, and eyes to reveal new brothers and sisters.  And when we trust Love to reveal Love, our new siblings in Christ will say, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard [and seen] for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”

From Haran to Canaan (Second Sunday of Lent, 2014)

“From Haran to Canann”

Gen 12:1-4a

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

3/16/14

          “Go,” God says to Abram.  “Just pack it all up, and go.  I’ll tell you where to stop.”

          As Abram makes preparations to go, he is not likely to be able to offer any reasonable explanation for his actions.  Living into the trust required to uproot and leave family and familiar surroundings is even more pristine territory than the land of Canaan itself.  Abram is a trailblazer.  He has no scripture or time-tested tradition in which to ground his journey.  All he has is a lump in the throat.  A churning in his belly.  A mysterious “Yes” that escapes from some hidden place in his heart that his mind had never known.  Yet, from within and without, Abram feels an irresistible sense of Go.

          Imagine what happens when Abram does have to tell others why he is leaving, and that he has no concrete destination in mind.

          “God told me to go,” he will say.

          “God?” they ask.  “Which god?”

          “Just God,” answers Abram.

          His family and friends probably look at each other thinking, “Well, reckon it's time to cull the herd.  Old Abe seems to be about one hump shy of a camel.  Bless his heart.”

          Abram lives in a place and time of competing, tribal gods.  The very idea that there is but one God whose sight, and breath, and hand extend further than the next clan’s property line is totally foreign to his contemporaries.  In fact, they probably feel threatened enough to help this poor but dangerously misguided soul pack up and be on his way.

          “So Abram [goes], as the Lord had told him.”

          Thus begins the journey that you and I still travel.

          It’s all about faith.  “Faith,” writes Frederick Buechner, “is better understood as a verb than as a noun, as a process than as a possession.  It is on-again-off-again rather than once-for-all.  Faith is not being sure where you’re going but going anyway.  A journey without maps.”¹

          Abram steps out into the bright darkness of uncertainty trusting that God will guide him toward a brand new future.  And for much of the journey he gropes along rather blindly, in some instances rather pitifully and faithlessly.  But we can understand that, too, can’t we?

          Have you ever seen a TV or movie depiction of firefighters inside a burning house?  Hollywood’s a crock when it comes to fire scenes.  They make it look as if flames actually light up the house so you can see, but inside a burning building it is pitch black dark.  Like a wolf devouring its prey, smoke swallows everything, including light.  That’s why firefighters, if they can help it, never enter a fire alone.  They enter at least in pairs, and in groups of three of four when they can.  They crawl on their knees, talking to one another, each of them keeping a hand on the hose so they can help to pull it through the house, and to spray water when they need to, but even more importantly, so they can find their way out when they have to.

          The first time I put on turnout gear and went into a burning house, I told the other guys, “I don’t see well without my glasses.” 

          “Trust me,” one of them said.  “It won’t make any difference.”

          It didn’t.  And I did have to trust him.  I had to follow him into an unfamiliar house, bumping into furniture and walls I couldn’t see, feeling and listening for the men ahead of me and behind me.  I also had to listen for a still, small voice of calm within me, because it would have been easy to have panicked and turned back.  I guess I heard something, though.  When you have to trust, you will discover ears you didn’t know you had.

          When familiar surroundings and familiar ways of life feel so safe and comfortable, God’s call to Go comes as an intrusive and even destructive word.  And to act on faith is risky business.  It is to trade what appears to be certainty for what is clearly uncertainty.  Writing on this passage, Walter Brueggemann says, “Faith is…the capacity to risk what is in hand for what is yet to be given by [God].”²

          There is a very interesting detail in Abram’s story.  The detail actually lies toward the end of Genesis 11.  In the 31^st verse we learn that Terah, Abram’s father, also packs up his family and all his possessions, leaves his home of Ur, and sets his sights on the land of Canaan.  When his caravan arrives in Haran, though, Terah stops.  We can’t know why Terah stops, but that’s the beauty of sacred story.  Like a night dream’s desire for continuing attention, a sacred narrative dares us to enter and to continue the action.  So Terah’s story asks us to ask ourselves why we stop when God calls and equips us to go so much further along the risky trust walk of faith.

          What do each of us have in hand that that God’s relentless call to Go deeper threatens?  What do we as a church family have in hand that God’s call to Go further demands that we turn loose?  What must we risk?

          Like most watershed characters in scripture and in collective memory, Abram becomes much more than the man himself could ever be.  Personifying faith, he becomes an archetype of the spiritual quest.  As the ancient patriarch of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, Abram represents the deepest stirrings of the human heart to go, to discover, and to become.  To use Brueggemann’s words again, Abram is “habitually restless [and] ready to dare.”³  As comfortable and content as he may be in Haran, he simply cannot stay there.  Something eats at him to move on, to Go.  That something Abram and his descendants begin to call God, God with a capital “G,” God who creates, inhabits, loves, and aims to unify all things.

          How do we listen for, recognize and respond to that same intrusive, disruptive voice?  It is always calling us to exercise our faith, to risk, and to go, but to go where?  Well, that’s always hard to say.  We only know that we can never stay put in Haran, because Canaan is our home.  And where is Canaan?  Well, I don’t think that we can know that in any final sense, because Canaan is not any one place.

          God’s call disrupts us into a liberating truth – the truth that virtually every Canaan becomes a Haran if we stay there long enough.  Canaan happens in blessed, memorable moments along the way.  And when we have learned what each Canaan has promised to teach us, that daring restlessness starts to churn, again.  It urges us to leave what is familiar, comfortable, and safe in search of that next place which may demand more of us, but which promises to reveal more to us.

          When we do walk the troubled path of transforming grace, we learn not only to endure, but to welcome and to trust the changes.  We learn how to become a part of the process of life, death, resurrection, and rebirth.  That is to say, of course, we learn to participate in God’s ongoing work of creation.

          We don’t always go, do we?  From time to time, all of us choose to stay in Haran where we convince ourselves that we have figured it all out, that we have gotten it right.  So we muster all the fellow Haranites we can find.  We fly the flag and beat the drums of Haran.  “Hail Haran!” we cry as we dig our heels in deep.  But that’s when things turn sour.  When we try to stunt the growth of a God-imaged heart, we get root bound, and we begin to die from the inside out.  At that point, we project all that inner turmoil outward onto others.  We blame and label the handiest and scariest them we can find for all that is wrong with the world, while at least half of the problem is that we are stuck in the rigid boundaries of Haran.  God dares us to become more fully human that we can ever be in any gated-community Haran.  If we are to know peace, the journey must continue.

          Yes, leaving Haran might mean a physical move, or a change of vocation.  More often, though, it may mean reaching across an old wound to forgive someone.  It could mean trying to listen humbly and without prejudice to some particular person or group of people with whom we passionately disagree.  Leaving Haran surely means naming our hand-made, store-bought, and hard-earned gods – those possessions, habits, and fears we worship – and then beginning to forsake them one by one.

          I will never, even for a moment, regret the six years I spent teaching school.  That difficult experience transformed me, and I gave it my best possible effort at the time.  But when that blessed Canaan became a Haran, I had to leave.  And when I did, I left with tears, gratitude, and hope.  The same is true for my time in Cross Roads and Shelby Presbyterian Churches.

          Along the way, my thoughts and ideas about who I am individually and who we are collectively in God have changed, and they are still changing.  But I will never regret having thought differently at an earlier time.  The journey into wholeness and authenticity requires change because it demands growth.  It demands that I take chances that may seem to some folks like foolishness, or maybe worse.  I will continue to experience failure and to make mistakes, but as long as I seek to love and participate in God by loving you and all my brothers and sisters, by loving myself, and by loving the earth that sustains us, I will have no regrets.

          What about you?  Where are you right now?  Canaan, Haran, or somewhere between?  And how does God stir you with blessed restlessness?  How does God call you higher and deeper into your own journey?  How do you listen for and hear God’s voice?

          It’s all about faith.  It’s a “journey without maps.”  We begin the journey from each Haran to the next Canaan by stepping out in daring faith. 

          And here is the promise:  As God is faithful to Abram, God will be faithful to you.  So may you follow in the dusty steps of Abram and Sarah, Moses, Ruth, David, Mary, and Jesus the Christ.

          May you be restlessly, gratefully, adventurously faithful to God.

¹Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC. Harper&Row, 1973, p. 25.

²Walter Brueggemann, Texts for Preaching: A Lectionary Commentary Based on the NRSV – Year A,  James D. Newsome, Ed.  Westminster John Knox Press, 1995, p. 193.

³Ibid. p. 193.