Sunday, April 20, 2014

Threshold (Easter Sunday)



“Threshold”

Matthew 28:1-10

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

Easter 2014



          The women approach the tomb of Jesus.  As the sun crowns a bright and lively orange on the eastern horizon, the bruise-dark purples and blues of night fade in the west.  It is not just a new day.  It is a new week.  And as the women are about to begin learning, it is not just a new week, either.  They, and all of creation, stand on a brand new threshold.  On this threshold, not only are present and future uncharted territory, even the past is new ground to explore.  Even the past comes alive as never before because of this dawn.

          The women are the first to receive this revealing news: For those with eyes to see and hears to hear, time itself has begun to bend.  Even today, you and I are trying to make sense of this ongoing event.  And this creation-redeeming, holiness-revealing work is far from complete, but the kingdom of God on earth has begun.

          It happens in the midst of earthquakes and angels.  It always does.

          This heaven-wrought moment, though, is scary as hell – at least at first.  So, the Roman guards, though armed and dangerous with permission to kill if necessary, quake like the earth itself.  They fall down and play possum.  Perhaps minds that trust only swords and spears, minds that find their comfort in logic and certainty, perhaps they don't even know how to be alive at moments like this.

          And the angel speaks: “Don't be afraid...He is not here...He is going ahead of you to Galilee...there you will see him.”

          “So...quickly with fear and great joy,” the women hurry away on their new and utterly open-ended mission.  Along the way, as a kind of teasing wink from God that says, 'This is how things are going to work from now on,' Jesus stops the women in their tracks.

          'Hi,' he says.  'I AM.  And the angel told you truth.  Now, go on to tell the disciples that they will see me in Galilee.'

          Galilee.  Galilee is home to Nazareth, and Capernaum, and Cana, and the entire western shore of the Sea of Galilee.  Galilee is not an address.  It is a region, comparable in size to what we would consider a large county.  When the women tell the disciples to go to Galilee and that they will see Jesus there, they will probably roll their eyes and say, “In Galilee?  Mary, you're going to have to be a little more specific.  Where in Galilee?”

          And Jesus' answer remains the same: “In Galilee.”

          Patient as ever, Jesus lets us begin to figure it out.  He points in a direction, not to a particular spot.  Galilee is life itself.  The presence of the risen Jesus and the Kingdom of the Living God transcend time and space.  They make life itself a threshold of resurrection.  Every moment is a threshold moment when past, present, and future are held in the time-bending mystery of eternity we call Now.

          Now.  Today.  Here on this beautiful, glorious, heart-breaking earth.  God invites you, and me, and all things seen and unseen into the promise and experience of resurrection.  And we experience this promise not by simply “passing through” the threshold, but by living intentionally, gratefully, and expectantly in the threshold of Galilee.

          Galilee does not allow us to live apart from world.  In truth, when Jesus calls us to Galilee, he binds us intimately to all of creation – to its cultures, its climates, its geography, its history, and its hope.  He binds us, then, to all that is beautiful and healing, and to all that is painful and that causes suffering.

          Easter, you see, is both a physical and spiritual reality.  It affirms not just the presence and power of the great mystery we call God, but it affirms that God is present and powerful through and throughout the created order.  To live in the threshold of resurrection means to live as one who are gratefully aware that we are as dependent upon soil, and air, and water, and neighbor as we are on the Creator whose image animates every atom and cell in creation.

          All of this means, of course, that the Easter threshold is not a place where all is sweetness and light.  To live in the threshold of resurrection means that we cannot avoid the brokenness, the violence, the poverty, the pain of the world.  Indeed, it means that God calls us into the midst of it, boldly trusting that we will not only see Jesus there, but that we will reveal him to others through our love for them, for ourselves, and for the holy ground upon which we walk.

          Friday exposes the futility of our sin.  It gives us the opportunity to recognize that in our addictions to comfort, control, and certainty, we turn again and again to the ways and means of fear.  We turn to greed, to brutality, and to religion that preaches gods who bless the same.  Out of love for the creation, the Creator endures Friday, not to say, “This should be happening to you,” but to say, “Look!  This is what you are doing to yourselves, to your neighbors, and to the earth!  And it is pointlessly destructive vanity!”

          Sunday proclaims God's healing, God's transformation of all that is abusive and being abused.  Sunday says that God inhabits and is even now reuniting all things seen and unseen – both Matter and Spirit.  Easter reveals that ALL creation is Galilee – the very threshold of Grace.

          Back in March, our congregation was responsible for two evenings of Family Promise support.  I signed up to help serve the Thursday meal, so I joined the others who were there, and we readied the food for the arrival of the families.  Among the guests that month was a young mother with four children, all under 6 years old.  I don't know her story, but her present is heavy with immediate and relentless demands.  And her future does not promise easy days ahead.  For her the earth is quaking, and she is desperate for an angel who will move her stone and proclaim good news to her.

          Her youngest is a baby girl, not yet on her own feet.  But her three boys were on theirs, and everyone else's.  They crawled, jumped, and raced around the fellowship hall of the Methodist church like a bunch of squirrels ramped up on Mt. Dew and driving a rental car.  Simply unable to sit still, the interaction to which they were obviously accustomed, and to which they were obviously oblivious, was to be yelled at by loud adults.  It was disturbing and heart-breaking.

          While the kitchen crew cleaned up after supper, Mark McCalman, who, along with Glenn Walker, had come to pull the overnight duty, took the boys into the family room to try to entertain them.  After cleaning up, I walked downstairs to see what was going on.  It was quite a scene.

          Have you ever tried to read Curious George to a roomful of caffeinated squirrels?  It's easier to get a consensus in congress.  I quickly realized that the best thing I could do was to take one of the boys out of the room.  Divide and conquer.

          I decided to try to take the oldest boy, the alpha squirrel, out of the equation and see if that helped.  I'll call him Joe.  Grabbing a deck of playing cards, I said, “Joe, do you want to play cards?”  He agreed, so we went back into the fellowship hall and sat down at a table.  Glenn came and joined us.

          My plan was to play “match,” the game where you lay all the cards down and turn over two at a time and try to get matching pairs.  It flexes memory muscles, and when my kids were that age, they beat me mercilessly time after time.  I wasn't prepared for Joe's lack of preparedness to play that simple game.

          I began to lay the cards down and to explain the rules.  I figured we'd even play it together, as a team, rather than compete, but Joe would have none of it.  He wanted to play, but “match” was a game that lay far beyond his capability.  Neither numbers nor letters were in his wheelhouse of recognition.  The best we could do was to deal with shapes.  So Joe stacked the cards and began to flip them over one at the time.  He'd identify each one the best he could.  He knew hearts.  He needed help almost every time to say diamonds.  And as for the other two suits, he just stuck with fish and puppy toads.

          Joe would flash a card on the table and say victoriously, “Hearts!”  He'd flip the next one and ask, “What's that again?”  “Diamonds,” Glenn and I would say.  “Oh, yeah,” he'd answer.  Then “Fish!”  And then, “More puppy toads.”  On and on went the game.  He went through the deck four times, while Glenn and I celebrated with him on nearly every card.

          Eventually, Joe got enough.  So we gathered the cards and put them in the box.  Joe headed back toward the stairs leading down into the family room, but just at the top of the stairs he stopped and turned around.  And with his hands in his pockets, his little ears standing out wide from his crew-cut head, Joe kind of leaned to one side and said, with a grown-up sincerity that blindside me, “Thank you for playing cards with me.”

          Using what little breath Joe's “Thank you” left inside me, I said “You're welcome.”

          It could not have been the first time someone played cards with Joe.  He recognized hearts when he saw them.  But twenty minutes of personal and positive attention was not something he received every day, either.

          I cannot know what the coming years hold for Joe.  He and his family have an extremely difficult path ahead.  For their sake and the sake of many others, you and I must be personally involved in their individual lives and stories while addressing the systemic, big picture issues, as well.

          Then again, you and I don't have to end homelessness and hunger.  We do not have to cure cancer or solve the problem of evil to experience and to bear witness to resurrection, because resurrection is not some doctrine to be argued.  Resurrection is a new life to be embodied.  We experience and bear witness to resurrection by living gratefully, intentionally, and expectantly in the threshold of Galilee, by living in the great gift of Now by living with and for one another in kindness, humility, justice, and love.

          God moves the stones.  And, to borrow a line from singer/songwriter Chuck Brodsky, “We are each other's angels.”1

1“We Are Each Other's Angels” from the CD, “The Fingerpainter's Murals,” 1995, produced by Brian Dozer.

Quite Suddenly (Easter Sunrise Sermon - Using the J.B. Phillips NT)



“Quite Suddenly”

Matthew 28:1-10

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

Easter Sunrise Service – 2014



          There is no more appropriate place to worship – especially on Easter – than out here in the swaddling embrace of new spring growth, beneath the natural light of the heavens, whether they shimmer with that light, silky blue that heralds a clear, bright day, or whether they hang low and gray, heavy with the promise of rain.

          I love the sound of human voices singing Alleluias, too, but if there exists more unfettered joy and gratitude than birdsong, I have yet to hear it.

          Out here there are no doors that must be locked, no pews to claim as our own.  Out here, our feet rest on the earth herself, and our faces feel the unfiltered cool of morning air.  Perhaps that same air, carrying tiny pollen spores, irritates eyes and noses, but its perfume cannot be bought.  It is grace.  And what perfume we do buy draws to our skin all manner of curious insects wondering what strange blooms we are, and what help we might offer to them in the quick and harried dance that is their life.

          Inside a church building we walk through hallways and doors.  We traipse back and forth on aisles.

          Out here we travel far more open pathways.  We wind our way from place to place, from town to town, realm to realm at the beckoning of beauty, at the demands of danger, by the necessities of appetite and season, and by the urging of our dreams.

          Inside a church building we expect to be expected to feel the expectations of holiness in rooms that have been set aside as holy space for worship.  But out here, mystery, as it does most graciously and naturally, slips up on us in the most unexpected ways.

          “Quite suddenly, Jesus stood before them in their path.”

          Out here, perhaps far more memorably and more often than in there, the risen Christ invades our paths.  And I say that not to diminish the ways in which we do encounter the risen Christ “in there,” in our worship, fellowship, and work.  But even those of us who spend many of our waking hours inside those walls, we still spend more time out here, don’t we?  So, if what we do in there fails to connect with who we are and what we do out here, we may never recognize that the risen and rising Jesus is more than some theological doctrine about which to argue, or worse, some convenient tool for moral and political control.  That's exactly what Constantine saw in Jesus, and Christianity is just now beginning to recover from – to be resurrected from – its 1700-year bender as the most powerful, state-sponsored religion on the planet.

          If what we do in there fails to connect with who we are and what we do out here, then that place becomes a well-sealed tomb, and we the lifeless guards.

          Out here, along unguarded paths, Jesus stands before us.  He gets in our way.  Long before Matthew writes his telling of Jesus’ story, Paul discovers this firsthand.  At a time when he still knows himself as Saul, this fiercely devout Pharisee, his breath fouled with murderous intent, makes his way to Damascus.  His mission is to stalk and torment those whose paths spark and shudder with the playful presence of the risen Christ.

          Then, ‘quite suddenly, Jesus stands before [Saul in his] path.’

          Knocking the human plague to the ground, Jesus says, 'Saul, what are you doing?'

          “Who ARE you?” asks Saul.

          ‘I’m Jesus.  You know, the one whose followers you’re picking off like barn rats.  It’s me you’re after.  And now I’m after you.  I want you.  I can really use your passion, your conviction, your tireless energy.

          ‘But here’s the deal,’ says Jesus, ‘there’s a whole lot of me in you – in fact, there’s more of me than ever, now.  You just haven’t acknowledged that yet.  You have yet to appreciate my side of you.  So, instead of feeling empowered, you're scared.  You've scared yourself into a blind rage.

          'Here, this is what blindness looks like.  Try that on for a while, but don’t worry, it won’t last too long.  And when your eyes open again, you’ll see everything and everyone very differently.  Now, get up, and tell your comrades to take you to Damascus.  You'll see me there, and I’ll let you know what to do next.’

          Jesus stands in our way, too.  And he doesn’t just get in our paths, he puts us on new paths, Easter paths, paths of redemption.

          I remember one such sudden, in-my-path moment.  Before telling my story, though, I need to tell you one that Frederick Buechner tells.

          When one of Buechner’s daughters was a young woman, she went through a nearly-fatal bout with anorexia.  One day, while she was in a hospital, Buechner found himself driving the back roads near his home in rural Vermont.  Depressed and exhausted, he parked by the road to consider all that was happening, and “quite suddenly, Jesus stood before [him in his] path.”  Buechner describes his experience this way:



          “Out of nowhere a car came along down the highway with a license plate that bore on it the one word out of all the words in the dictionary that I needed most to see exactly then.  The word was TRUST.

          “What do you call a moment like that?” asks Buechner.  “Something to laugh off as the kind of joke life plays on us every once in a while?  The word of God?  I am willing to believe that maybe it was something of both, but for me it was an epiphany.

          “The owner of the car turned out to be, as I'd suspected, a trust officer in a bank, and not long ago, having read an account I wrote of the incident somewhere, he found out where I lived and one afternoon brought me the license plate itself, which sits propped up on a bookshelf in my house to this day.  It is rusty around the edges and a little battered, and it is also as holy a relic as I have ever seen.”1



          Trust.

          I had been at Cross Roads for several years when I left town by myself one Sunday afternoon for the first few days of a two-week vacation.  I was excited because I was going up to the mountain house alone – or mostly alone.  I did take one dog, Bandit, with me.  Marianne and the kids and the other dog would join me later in the week.  On my way out of town that Sunday afternoon, I stopped by the hospital because a woman who was very loosely associated with the church lay close to death.  I’ll call her Miss Nita.

          This part of the story is confession.  I did not want Miss Nita to die, but not because I would miss her when she was gone.  The truth was, you see, that Miss Nita could be utterly selfish, even mean, and if someone were going to interrupt my long-awaited Sabbath time, please God, don’t let it be her.

          On Tuesday morning, Miss Nita died.

          Wasn’t there someone else who could do her funeral?

          It was really for her sister-in-law, a church member and very dear friend that I came back.  But my path back was not a peaceful one, because, Brothers and Sisters, I was being consumed by a selfish rage.  I repacked my stuff and began the three-hour trek back to Mebane.  And as I came down that mountain, for every foot of elevation I lost, I lost a little more control.  By the time I was on I-40, every safety valve I had was blown.  I’ll say only this: It is a good thing dogs can’t talk.  I would not have wanted Bandit repeating what he heard.

          Now, I’m not one bit proud of this, believe me.  But you need to picture a young pastor screaming his way down the path back home, because in the midst of one of my outbursts a car passed me.  It was a small station wagon.  Mounted on the back of the station wagon was a bike rack, and a single bicycle hung on the rack.  Perfectly centered in the triangular frame of the bicycle was the car’s license plate.  It was a Vermont license plate.  It was a vanity plate, and there against that solid green plate, in white capital letters was “the one word out of all the words in the dictionary that I needed most to see exactly then:”2 SILENCE.

          That license plate looked as big as a billboard to me.  And that one word shouted louder than anything that had tumbled off of my careless, reckless lips.

          “And immediately, something like scales” (Acts 9:18) began to fall from my tiny, angry heart.  And “quite suddenly, Jesus stood before [me in my] path.

          Every time I remember that experience, Jesus says something new to me.  This time I remember him saying, “Allen, listen to yourself!  You are channeling your worst Miss Nita.  Look, there’s a whole lot of me in you – in fact, there’s more of me than ever now.  You just haven’t acknowledged that yet.  You have yet to appreciate my side of you.  So, instead of feeling empowered, you are deaf with unjustified fury.

          “I love you, Preacher, but you just need to shut your mouth right now.  You really need to be silent – and to listen.  If you will live through the Living Me in you, you will look back on this as a moment of powerful, stone-moving, tomb-emptying grace.

          “Now, you and I,” said Jesus, “we’re going back to Mebane, and we’re going to go celebrate Miss Nita’s life, because regardless of what you think, I love her.  You can go back home and seethe your way through all of this if you want to.  But if you choose that path, you’ll just gather all those other people, people that I love just as much as you and Miss Nita, around a hole in the ground, and you’ll leave a hole in everyone’s hearts.

          “Or you can go back home, and realize that you are in Galilee.  You'll see me there.  And you can help all your brothers and sisters to see me, too.  You can help them understand that I AM bigger than Miss Nita’s aggravating bitterness ever was.  And you can tell them to look for me even at her funeral, because I AM deeper, broader, more mysterious, and more permanent than death itself.

          “Do you hear me now, Allen?  Miss Nita's funeral will be a perfect place for you to tell everyone that I AM alive!”

          And so he is.  Alleluia!


1This quotation comes from Frederick Buechner’s book, Telling Secrets.  I do not currently own a copy, but I found the quotation on this website: http://frederickbuechner.com/page-group/landing/quote/QoD-Trust
2Ibid.

Friday, April 18, 2014

Risk and Revelation (A Good Friday sermon with a little different angle on the meaning of Friday.)



“Risk and Revelation”

Luke 23:1-5, 13-25

Good Friday 2014

Allen Huff





          In Luke’s gospel, Pilate says it three times:

          “I find no basis for an accusation against this man…

          “I have examined him…and have not found this man guilty of any of your charges…

          “I have found in him no ground for the sentence of death…”

          It’s a remarkable thing, isn’t it?  Not only can Pilate find no threat in this Galilean rabbi being accused by his peers of political subversion, but according to gospel accounts, he actually makes the effort to look.

          Not a great deal is known about Pontius Pilate, except that during his ten-year term as the emperor’s procurator of Judea he developed a reputation for taking pathological delight in inflicting violence against the Jews.  Apparently, Pilate even created opportunities to persecute and execute as many Jews as possible, and all in the name of Caesar.  In fact, one of the things we do know about Pilate is that he so flagrantly bullied and baited the Jews, that in the year 36 or 37 Caesar not only fired him but exiled him.1  The job of a procurator was to maintain Roman law and order, but it seems that earlier procurators and the emperor himself were aware that one cannot effectively keep order through abuse – not for long, anyway.

          By the time of Jesus’ trial, a brutal Pilate has executed countless would-be messiahs, and most of them without benefit of trial.  So, it would be most uncharacteristic of him to argue on behalf of yet another Jew claiming to be the long-awaited Messiah.

          Why, then, why do all four canonical gospels portray Pilate as somewhat conflicted over what to do with Jesus?  The most familiar answers to that question are summed up in Jesus’ comment to Pilate in John 19: “You would have no power over me unless it had been given to you from above.”

          ‘Rome has nothing on God,’ says Jesus.  ‘Your empire may intimidate, torture, and kill God’s people.  You may cause irreparable damage to many bodies and minds.  And you may flatter yourselves saying, See how quickly the Jews will abandon their God and put their faith in sword and spear like the rest of us.

          ‘But,’ says Jesus, ‘the arc of history does not belong to power and wealth.  It belongs to Love.'

          ‘Pay attention,’ say both Jesus and the gospel writers.  ‘On Friday, God is at work, revealing to all with eyes to see and ears to hear that human violence cannot hinder Love.  God is not some kind of human construct who can become so overcome with anger and offense as to lose the will and power to be God – to be Love.’

          The entire life and witness of Jesus says to us that nothing in heaven or on earth can sink God into our obsession with violence, indeed, our love of violence.

          God cannot be rendered so impotent as to be forced to resort to sadistic revenge as a means of grace.

          Friday is not about satisfying some adolescent deity with innocent blood.  It is about God entering humanity’s inhumanity in vulnerable, self-emptying Love.

          Friday is about God entering our brokenness to reveal the pitiful futility of our addiction to the brutal ways and means upon which principalities and powers depend.

          Friday is Good because it reveals to us that God does not share our loveless fear.

          Friday is Good because it reveals to us that, indeed, nothing at all can separate us from the Love not just of God, but from the Love that is God in Christ Jesus.

          Friday, then, is a day of confession.  Today we confess that we are not only much quicker to trust power and wealth, we are even quick to credit God with our idolatry of those things.  Yes, God desires our well-being, but in deliberate fear we choose to mistake all of our creation-polluting and neighbor-starving excesses for holy blessing.  And we are even quicker to judge and condemn all who threaten our comfortable certainty with the disarming truth of grace.

          “Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” wails Jesus, “the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!” (Matthew 23:37a)

          For two thousand years, many who have called themselves followers of Jesus have turned the gospel accounts of Friday into sanction for persecuting the Jews – Jesus’ own people.  But the point of these stories is to say that most often it is from within the family of faith that the deepest faithlessness arises.  When we distort the unsettling Love of God, we crucify God’s image within us and God's presence among us.

          Think of the people to whom we shut our doors saying, ‘Come back when you look, or think, or act like us.’

          Think of the ways the Church has been silent or even complicit in the face of sins such as human slavery, genocide, war, poverty, and pollution of the creation.

          Friday reminds us that there is no them to blame or condemn.    Friday reminds us that it is our own rabid shouts of selfish and impatient fear that send Jesus to the cross.

          Most importantly, Friday reminds us that the God embodied in Jesus does not need violence or call for innocent blood.  Any god who must kill those whom that god loves in order to have his capacity to love restored isn't much of a god.  Or perhaps we should say that he is nothing more than a god, an all-too-human idol.

          “All who make idols are nothing,” laments Isaiah, “and the things they delight in do not profit...Who would fashion a god or cast an image that can do no good?  Look, all its devotees shall be put to shame; the artisans [themselves] are merely human.” (Isaiah 44:9a, 10-11a)

          No, we cannot pin Friday's cruelty on an angry God.  We make that demand.  So it is in truly radical grace that Jesus follows through with a life of love and peace that we, who would prefer a militant messiah, cannot abide.  He goes willingly into Friday.  He bears through with purposed intent to reveal to us, to reveal for us, that our unnatural craving for violence will never satisfy the Creator or redeem the Creation.2

          In Jesus, the Christ, God takes the terrible and gracious risk of Friday to expose the slothful vanity of our self-worshiping, our neighbor-crushing, and our creation-abusing sin.

          And then – and then to save us from all of that, God follows the risk of Friday with the glorifying and gracious revelation of Sunday.


2While I don't quote either author directly, I am grateful to Philip Newell and Richard Rohr for helping to reshape my theology of the cross.A