Sunday, May 25, 2014

To an Unknown God (Sermon)



“To an Unknown God”
Acts 17:16-31
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
5/25/14

          A fine line separates the conviction that makes a disciple bold, and the certainty that makes a zealot dangerous.  Paul often appears to have one foot on either side of that line.  In his letter to the Romans, he even seems to confess as much: “For I do not do what I want,” he moans, “but I do the very thing I hate…I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.” (Romans 7:15, 18b)  And so the apostle is alternately a bull in a china shop stampeding over breakable treasures, and a humble mystic walking alongside fellow believers with patience and compassion.
          It is the bull in the china shop that usually gets our attention, because that Paul shouts louder.  Fully expecting God’s “fixed day” of judgment to happen at any moment, he seems to feel a neurotic urgency to change the world as soon as inhumanly possible.
          That’s Paul, though, isn’t it?  Paul has been a Jew, and not just any Jew.  He has been a Pharisee, and not just any Pharisee.  He has been a fundamentalist, militant Pharisee.  He has been a religious zealot, not only capable of committing unspeakable violence in God’s name, but actively involved in organizing and carrying out the arrest, torture, and murder of Christians.  No makeup or masquerade can hide the ugly truth: Before his Damascus Road experience, Paul was a terrorist.
          After his transforming experiences on the way to and in Damascus, Paul becomes a follower of Jesus, and he is still Paul.  He still has the capacity for launching into decisive speech and action fueled by the often blinding passion of religious certainty.  And because he is Paul, his actions are also fueled by the lingering burden of guilt, by knowing that he hindered the work of God in Christ, and inflicted horrifying pain on other human beings.
          “I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence,” he writes in his first letter to Timothy.  “But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief …The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance,” says Paul, ‘that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners – of whom I am the foremost.” (1Timothy 1:13, 15)
          Even if Paul gratefully claims forgiveness, forgiveness has never included forgetfulness.  He cannot shake those memories.  So, as we said earlier, in all things Paul struggles to balance his desire to love as Christ loves, and his single-minded passion as a zealot.
          Entering Athens, Paul immediately feels his zealot’s blood begin to heat up.  Everywhere he looks he sees idols.  So he heads straight to the synagogues and marketplaces to argue with whoever “happened to be there.” (Acts 17:17)  In ancient Athens, rhetorical debate is a spectator sport of sorts, kind of a cross between Sunday morning talk shows and minor-league hockey.  So Paul grabs the china-shop bull by the horns and leaps into the fray, arguing against idolatry.  And if it’s attention he wants, he gets it.
          “What does this babbler want to say?” ask the Athenians. (Acts 17:18)  To find out, they drag him to the Areopagus, the site of the most consequential debates in Athens.  In this well-known and very public place, a place of intellectual and cultural ferment, Paul has the ears of people whose opinions, and whose ability to champion those opinions, help to shape the mindset of an empire.  And Paul, learning and growing into the apostle God has called him to be, speaks as both disciple and zealot.  He walks with the hoof of a china-shop bull on one foot and the sandal of a holy mystic on the other.
          Revealing first his compassionate self, he says, ‘You Athenians really take your religion seriously.  And that’s good.  You even have a statue set aside to honor what you call An Unknown god.’
          At this point, Paul begins to paw the ground with that bull’s hoof.  He says that he knows who that unknown God is, namely, “God who made the world and everything in it…[the] Lord of heaven and earth…[who] does not live in shrines made by human hands.”
          In the midst of the pantheon of named and storied Greek gods, someone or some group in Athens has had the spiritual honesty to acknowledge the mystery of holiness.  Not all is known.  Not all can be explained.
          Having already dropped the gloves with sparring partners in lesser venues, Paul arrives at the Areopagus with the wisdom, patience, and the presence of mind to raise his game.  He focuses on the Unknown god as common ground.  And why not?  It resonates with a devout Jew who surely remembers passages that say things like “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways…For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8-9)
          Paul will remember, too, that to proclaim and preserve the inscrutable holiness of God, the Jewish people refuse to pronounce the name of God, Yahweh.  Instead, they say Adonai, which means “Lord,” or they mix the vowels from Adonai with the consonants of Yahweh to get the name Jehovah.
          Paul is channeling his best Christian mystic.  He knows that
God is not a created being.  God is not some perfect version of us.  As his fellow apostle, John, will write, “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” (1John 4:8)  God is the creative energy within and between all things.
          Paul beautifully presents the paradox of God: God is real and near enough to be the one in whom “we live and move and have our being,” the way fish live and move and have their being in water.  At the same time, this great and mysterious Presence, which even the Athenians acknowledge, transcends all the rhetoric, all the “art and imagination of mortals.”  That means God transcends any given religion, as well.  God simply remains beyond every effort to be defined or known in any complete, and therefore controlling, sense.
          If that paradox illustrates the truth of God, then building altars to God becomes one more way to grope for the kind of knowledge and control that creatures cannot have.  Our altars, even when well-intended and beautifully made, are still human creations.  Because they must be financed, protected, and maintained, they often do more to keep us distant from God rather than to bring us closer to God.
          Altars abound in our world, be they Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, atheist, political, economic, academic, or any other religion.  And they all have one thing in common.  Even if they are built in honor of God, or of some “Unknown god,” at some level, they assume a degree of certainty that claims to have solved mystery and overcome transcendence.  And so they reduce God to something that can be known.
          Our immediate concern as Christians is to ask ourselves some terribly uncomfortable questions:
          To what extent do we turn our churches, our sanctuaries, our committees, our doctrines into altars?
          How many different gods do we allow into our altars, saying that we need them in order to worship the God revealed in Jesus?
          What non-Christian symbols and powers do we snuggle up to in our houses of worship?
          What equivocations do we write into our theologies and polities that open the door to the kinds of selfishness, greed, fear, and faithlessness that Jesus, whom we claim to know so well, neither invites nor excuses?
          I do not have the authority, much less the wisdom to declare final answers to those questions.  I do think, though, that we are all very much like Paul.  We have the hooves of china-shop bulls on one foot and the sandals of humble mystics on the other.  We have the capacity to do things we cringe even to think of, and we can also act in ways of transforming faithfulness and world-healing compassion.  We are both capable of and culpable for worshiping hand-made idols whose strengths only reveal our weaknesses.  And like Paul we also have the capacity to speak the truth in love, and to bear witness to the ineffable mystery of God who lies both beyond our grasp and at the very core of our being.
          In the 14th century, an anonymous author wrote a book entitled The Cloud of Unknowing.  It is a guidebook for Christian contemplative prayer, and its basic premise states that there is only one way for human beings to “know” God, and that is to lay aside all of our assumptions, all of our codified beliefs and “knowledge” about God.  In an act of courageous surrender, we then turn our minds and egos over to what he calls “unknowingness,” and there we begin to encounter, to feel, to taste and see God’s true nature.  According to the author, God cannot be “thought.”  God can only be loved.1
          The very point of this thing called “religion,” you see, is not to know that which cannot be known.  It is to love the One who is love.  And we do that most effectively and most affectively when we boldly, faithfully, and joyfully love and care for one another and the earth.

Sunday, May 18, 2014

Gatekeepers and the Gate (Sermon)



“Gatekeepers and the Gate”
John 10:1-10
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
5/18/14

          I'll call her Martha.  Martha was a member of one of my previous congregations.  She and her husband had retired to North Carolina from New Jersey, and they brought with them two rather interesting sons.  One of them started a successful business after the move.  The other son, though very intelligent, could have been the poster child for “failure to launch” syndrome.  All four of them lived in the same house.
          Martha alone attended and participated in the church.  In faith and in life, she was herself extremely bright, curious, and bold.  She held great potential as a lay leader in that congregation, and one year she did receive a nomination to serve as elder.  On the Sunday when we were to vote on the nominating committee's proposed slate of officers, one gentleman rose and offered a nomination from the floor.  When it all shook out, Martha had been replaced by a man who had a long history at the church.
          Procedurally, nothing contrary to The Book of Order had happened.  However, through subsequent conversations, I was cut to the quick to learn of a carefully staged effort to replace the outsider with an insider.  Disappointed and humiliated, Martha stayed away from church for quite some time.  Eventually, she returned, and when she did, all of her wit, charm, and intelligence came with her – bearing vivid witness to the very sort of grace and character one would hope a congregation would desire in its leaders.
          Gatekeepers.  Families have them.  Businesses have them.  Volunteer organizations have them.  Political parties really have them.  And perhaps nowhere do gatekeepers wield their power more inappropriately, and to greater harm than in the church.
          Gatekeepers are those folks who possess something to which others always seem to defer, be it charisma, community influence, conspicuous wealth, or history in a particular place.  And it is not simply the charisma, the influence, the wealth, or the history that warps a person into a gatekeeper.  When an individual twists some personal asset into manipulative power, that is when giftedness gets reduced to something of a black art.
          With a subtle nod, or through quiet, backroom conversations, gatekeepers often determine who gets in and who does not.  The more pathological gatekeepers will even threaten the community by threatening their own relationship with it.
          “If that happens,” the gatekeeper says, “I'm leaving, and I will not come back.”  And those who live under the illusion of the indispensability of the gatekeeper will rally, using whatever means necessary, to protect some sacred but increasingly lifeless status quo.  Gatekeepers use their very presence, and the dis-ease of losing it, to manufacture a sense of anxiety.  When gatekeepers willingly use the willingness of others to leverage fear, they become Lord of their domains, and all the while appearing to be the benevolent ones, the linchpins who hold the community together.
          Jesus calls such folks “thieves and bandits.”
          Get ready for one confusing casserole of metaphors all stewed together into one cocktail: “I am the gate,” says the shepherd, who enters the sheepfold, when the gatekeeper opens the gate, who is also the shepherd, and who belongs in the fold, unlike the thieves and bandits, and strangers – all of whom Jesus is scolded for eating with, drinking with, and otherwise welcoming.
          Who can blame the Pharisees for failing to understand Jesus?  But this is the Johannine Jesus at his mystic shaman best.  He does not tell people what or how to think.  He dares them to think and imagine for themselves.  As John says, Jesus uses a “figure of speech with them.”  When Jesus speaks of the sheepfold, the gate, the gatekeeper, thieves, and bandits, he does not give us information to manage.  He hangs a picture on the wall.  He gives us symbols that ground us in a way of life, in a tangible arrangement of relationships.  This picture and its symbols place us in a story, an ancient and ongoing story.
          “In the beginning…God said…and it was so.” (Gen. 1)  The voice speaks, and the flock that is matter itself responds by creating the fold.
          ‘If they ask who sent me, and what your name is,’ quibbles Moses, “what shall I say to them?”  And Yahweh answers, “Say to the Israelites, ‘I AM [the God of your ancestors] has sent me to you.” (Ex. 3)  And so begins the great sheep drive of the Exodus.
          Awash in all the images of his vision, Isaiah’s response of commitment comes when he hears “the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send?”  And Isaiah cries out, “Here I am; send me!” (Is. 6)
          Then, when the stars align, that same, familiar voice cries out in the wilderness, quoting Isaiah: ‘It’s time!’  “Prepare the way of the Lord.” (Mt. 3)  And the one for whom the way is prepared says, “I am the gate…I am the good shepherd…[and] the sheep hear my voice.”
          This is not information.  This is art.  Jesus hangs a portrait on the wall to remind us that we have been spoken, that we have been storied into an identity and a purpose; and that story is far from complete.
          Jesus himself shows up as different elements of the picture.  As post-Easter followers, we do, too.  Yes, we have a role as sheep, but think about it.  To be of use, a gate must hang on something.  A gate needs fenceposts, doesn’t it?  That’s where you and I come in – again.
          Now, I know that this sounds like I am saying that God is somehow dependent on us.  But remember, from the very beginning of the story being recalled by the symbols in the portrait Jesus hangs on the wall, God chooses to be revealed in, with, and for the creation through relationships.
          We looked at one of the most memorable expressions of that truth last week when we pondered the story of Jesus appearing to two disciples on the road to Emmaus.  In the midst of that very normal, human exchange something mystical happens: “Their eyes [are] opened, and they [recognize] him.”  This story is itself another picture.  It illustrates what Jesus wants us to understand when he says that “where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” (Mt 18)
          As fenceposts, who live in relationship with one another, the words, the gestures, the laughter, the tears, every element of every moment of every relationship places us at the very threshold of the Kingdom of God, because every interaction we have holds the potential to reveal the Gate, which is the living Christ.
          It is not we who open the gate, of course.  That is the work of the mysterious Gatekeeper we call the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit’s role in opening the Gate is so vitally important to proclaiming hope in the story of creation, it is no wonder that the “thieves and bandits” try to usurp that role and to do that which only the Gatekeeper can do.
          Our calling, our vocation as creatures made in God’s image is to be in open, vulnerable, interdependent relationship with each other.  And when we do, when we stand face-to-face, heart-to-heart, grateful in each moment for each person with whom we interact, the Gatekeeper has another opportunity to reveal and open the Gate, the Christ in our midst, and to turn us out, deeper into God’s kingdom.
          We do not have to agree on issues that divide us.  We do not even have to like each other.  But until we make the effort to love each other as we are loved – with that sacred, vocational love called agape – until we make the effort to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God together, we will not fully experience or appreciate the presence of the Gate, the redeeming work of the Gatekeeper, or the abundant new life they promise.
          Here is our spiritual reality as I see it: When we even so much as stand next to other human beings, certainly when we make eye contact or speak to them, the space between us is never simply dead air.  It is a kind of energy field, teeming with presence and possibility.  It is, indeed, a gate to deeper and wider wholeness and holiness.  When we channel our inner thieves and bandits, we will treat those next to us with suspicion and fear.  We will keep them at whatever distance we need in order to feel safe.  And at times we all give in to the thieves and bandits within us.
          However, when we, like sheep, hear and trust the Shepherd’s voice, we will follow his lead.  When we stand grounded in love and hope, we stand like fenceposts, ready to serve as ones between whom the Gate himself hangs and may swing open at the Gatekeeper’s touch.  Every relationship we have holds the potential of revealing something new of the presence, the beauty, and the abundant life of heaven itself.
          I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: When we go downstairs for family lunch today, we will stand next to, look at, and speak with one another.  To a significant degree, we know and are somewhat comfortable with each other and the context.  Still, pay attention to yourself and to your brothers and sisters.  The Gate will be creaking and clanking like crazy down there.  Practice expecting to sense the presence of God’s kingdom between you those next to you, so that you may carry that awareness out into the rest of your life.
          Yes, the world can be a wild, mixed-up, and dangerous place.  It often frightens us into playing gatekeeper.  The idea of seeing strangers as fellow fenceposts, ones with whom we hold creative, kingdom-revealing potential, frequently seems like foolish, even reckless naiveté.  But doesn’t that just make our effort to bear witness to the presence of the Gate and to the redeeming activity of the Gatekeeper all the more important, all the more urgent, and all the more an act of Easter's resurrecting faith, hope, and love?

Friday, May 16, 2014

Moving Beyond Violence (An essay - just one more voice in the conversation.)



          About ten years ago, while preparing for a mission trip to Malawi, I learned of a very interesting local custom.  When two Malawians meet and grasp right hands to shake, they will often place their left hands on their own right wrists.  This subtle gesture delivers a soul-bearing message: I am not armed.

          Intrigued, I watched carefully to see how often Malawians added that vulnerable touch to a handshake.  It does not happen every time, of course.  And while aware that neither the presence nor the absence of the gesture guarantees anything, I greeted many people with that handshake in appreciation for its tangible witness to untold generations of wisdom.

          The ancient wisdom behind that handshake acknowledges at least two things.  First, it not only concedes that we live in a violent world, it confesses the undeniable truth that the most dangerous animal on the planet is humankind itself.  Fear of fellow human beings affects us the way gravity affects water.  We do not necessarily see it at work, but it pulls ceaselessly at all of our fluid emotions, and even at our reason.  It gathers these formidable resources at the lowest point possible within any given circumstance, and once pooled and stagnant, emotion and reason belong to fear.  When driven by fear, our decisions, individual and corporate, become fearsome and selfish themselves.

          Second, through that quick, silent gesture, ancient wisdom makes a loud and lasting proclamation:  In a culture of fear, there can be no truly human connection or cooperation, and there can be no reliable security for anyone.  When we conclude that we must expect the worst from our neighbors, we will mirror that distorted expectation.  We will project onto our neighbors our most acute fears, and we will meet distortion with distortion.  In surrendering ourselves to the least human instincts and urges within us, we mistake our worst for our best, and we have been vanquished by fear.

          The irony at play here is a thing of archetypal myth.  Through the simplest means, a more primitive people, who live on the Dark Continent, enlighten the more sophisticated and well-educated cultures of the earth with a fundamental truth: Humankind cannot achieve genuine peace and healthy community through violent means.  Governed as we are in the West by the grand illusions of wealth, celebrity, youth and deadly force, this truth comes as a threat.  It demands too much self-exposure and uncertainty, too much change.

          Admittedly, Malawi itself is hardly free of violence.  I simply find it profoundly compelling that they have a cultural symbol requiring, human touch in a face-to-face encounter, that says, “But we know better.”

          Yes, this point of view has implications for the issue of gun-control.  That matter, however, remains a constitutional/legal debate driven by intense fears.  That polarizing argument distracts us from more substantive conversations regarding the fundamental issues – our culture's suicidal love of violence and our worship of violent heroes.  Until we name our deepest fears and face our collective and individual shadows,1 the gun control struggle will remain a holy war between competing anxieties.  As such, it will never offer anything more than the temporary and uneasy truce of contentious legislation, whether permissive or restrictive.

          Besides, in order to dominate, human beings “arm” ourselves with far more than guns.  As a southerner, I have witnessed the practice of a bloodless, first-tier violence called “being nice.”  Skillfully wielded, this pleasant condescension is a poisoned cup capable of genocide.

          The cynic in me throws his hands up saying that over 500 millennia of brutal human history make the idea of a truly peaceful world a utopian fantasy which leads at best to disappointment, and at worst to irresponsible denial.

          The man of faith in me, however, resonates with Father Gabriel, the Jesuit priest in the movie “The Mission.”  When confronted by mercenary-turned-missionary, Rodrigo Mendoza, with the idea of meeting Spain’s violent challenge to their mission with violence of their own, Father Gabriel sighs and says, “If might is right, then love has no place in the world.  It may be so, it may be so.  But I don't have the strength to live in a world like that, Rodrigo.”2

          If we as human beings carry, or more accurately, if we are carried by the image of God within us, and I believe that we are, then I must affirm the place of Love in this world.  If Love creates us, Love can heal and transform us, but Love does not force healing on us.  Love will not overcome violence violently.

          Violence and its causes are too complex ever to “go away.”  But the more we touch ourselves on the wrist when we shake hands, that is to say, the more we remind ourselves that we do, indeed, know better, the more we will find constructive new ways to channel the energies in ourselves and in our cultures that we so lazily surrender to violence.

          Herein lies the paradox.  Moving beyond violence has nothing to do with letting go of the natural energies and passions from which violence arises.  It has to do with allowing those resources of fierce loyalty and courage to lead us toward a fearlessly loving embrace of the holy gifts of self, neighbor, and earth.   To move beyond violence, we must cooperate with Love’s ongoing work of transformation.  Even now, Love is acting to redeem the powerful human vigor we so often engage as fearful violence, into something that more faithfully reflects the God from whose heart if flows.

          My first move is to acknowledge my own fascination with violence.  I have a persistent tendency, even a visceral desire to be “entertained” by violence.  And I often imagine myself prevailing violently over someone else.  Something in me wants to defeat some foe by means of superior aggression and force.  All of this shadow-boxing forces me to face a number of vital questions.  What does this tendency in me reveal to me?

          Is there some matter of justice that needs my attention?  If so, who or what needs a courageous presence and a passionate voice?  And how do I offer myself lovingly, compassionately – and effectively?

          Or is something within me calling me to embark on a “hero's quest?”  That is, do I need to accept some needling spiritual/psychological invitation to delve deep into my own strengths and vulnerabilities?  And when I discover and face them, angels and demons alike, I may harness their Love-wrought vitality so that they redeem my past, refresh my present, and reveal direction for my future.

          Then again, do these violent fantasies just indicate defeat?  Have I given up on the transforming power of gratitude, compassion, and kindness – the transforming power of the Vocational Love we call agape?

          The questions are not easy to face.  The answers may prove to be even more difficult.  But if I truly have faith in Love, I cannot afford to ignore them.  Perhaps the first step toward new awareness is a handshake away.



1For an introduction to the psychological concept of the shadow, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_%28psychology%29 .  For a more in-depth, but very accessible discussion of the shadow, see: Owning Your Own Shadow by Robert A. Johnson (Harper Collins, 1991).

2From “The Mission,” 1986.  Original story/screenplay by Robert Bolt.  Directed by Roland Joffe.  Producers: Fernando Ghia and David Puttnam.  Production Companies: Warner Brothers., Goldcrest Films International, Kingsmere Productions Ltd., and Enigma Productions.