Promises, Promises (Sermon)

“Promises, Promises”

Genesis 21-8-21

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

6/22/14

          You know, if one were to stop and really consider God’s choices of people through whom to be known and through whom to bless the earth, one might quickly decide, indeed, in less than half of the first book of the Bible itself, that Yahweh is either terribly naïve, or struggling to figure out the learning curve of working with human creatures.

          Think about Adam and Eve.  In this wonderful story of divine purpose, God creates two human beings and calls them “good,” but in less time than it will take a fig leaf to wilt, the pair has become overwhelmed by a snakish hunger to taste for themselves knowledge and authority meant only for God.  Then, with their sons, that hunger devolves even further.  It becomes a ravenous jealousy that compels the elder son to lure the younger out into the wilderness for a scene straight out of Criminal Minds.

          In two generations, the goodness of God’s creation already begins to hide behind the scaly skin of pride, envy, fear, and the violence to which such things inevitably lead.

          Fast forward to Abram.  To this random, simple man, God says, “Go to the land that I will show you.  I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you…and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.  So Abram went, as the Lord had told him.” (from Gen. 12:1-4)       In time, Abram becomes “Abraham,” “Father of Many.”

          It all sounds so high and holy, but along the way Abraham keeps finding himself racked with challenges and controversy.  For the most part, his problems stem from the escalating tension between Sarah and Hagar.  Sarah is, of course, the elder, primary wife.  Though she is aware of God’s promise to her husband, she declares herself too old to figure into the blessing.  Convinced that God’s promise needs her help, Sarah offers to Abraham, her slave girl, Hagar, as a kind of surrogate.  As the emergency, back-up wife, the youthful Hagar can provide the children God promises, but whom Sarah decides the she must guarantee.

          Then, when Hagar does conceive, things get ugly.  She taunts and sneers at Sarah.  The arrangement may be Sarah’s idea, but suddenly threatened by that conniving, gloating little pregnant Jezebel, Sarah runs straight to Abraham and screams, “This is all your fault!”

          “What?” says a stunned Abraham.  “My fault?  But you…I mean… well, she’s your slave girl.  You handle it!”

          Go back and look at the stories – Adam, Abraham, Isaac and so many other patriarchs are masters at the art of conflict avoidance.  As we have seen, Sarah, like most of the matriarchs, is not.  She deliberately makes Hagar’s life miserable.  When the younger woman has endured enough abuse, she runs away.  The whole thing is pure drama.  It’s like Survivor, Desperate Housewives, and Jerry Springer all rolled into one.  It leaves you crying out for Dr. Phil!

          An angel finds Hagar, grieving loudly by a wilderness spring.  “Go on back to the family,” says the angel.  “Your child is going to be okay.  Oh, he’ll be a wild one.  He’ll live at odds with just about everyone, but he’ll be okay.  God will see to it.”

          Hagar returns, and she gives birth to a son.  Grateful to God for delivering her from the wilderness, she names her son Ishmael, which means “God hears.”

          After all this excitement, God turns and promises a child to Sarah.  She is old.  Abraham is older.  Sarah laughs off God’s promise the way she would laugh off a child’s promise to take full responsibility for the new puppy if he can just have one.

          Some months later, though, she laughs again.  And Abraham names their son, Isaac: “He Who Laughs.”

          All goes well until, at the celebration on the day that Isaac is weaned, Sarah sees Isaac playing with his older brother.  She knows what happens to younger sons in a patriarchal culture.  They get nothing.  And once again, snakish jealousy and fear coil up tight in her belly.  Her eyes narrow, and she strikes.

          “Abraham,” she hisses, “Get rid of this slave woman and her filthy son!  He will not take my son’s inheritance!”

          “Honey, let’s talk,” pleads Abraham.

          “We will talk when they are gone!” snaps Sarah.

          Abraham is wearied and crushed, but his actions say, ‘Yes, dear.’

          “It’s okay,” God tells Abraham.  “Do what Sarah says.  I got this.”

          It is only now that Abraham learns of God’s prenatal promise to Ishmael.  It sounds similar to the promise God makes to Abraham himself before he ever leaves the land of Ur.  It even has echoes of the promise God makes to him and Sarah, the promise at which Sarah laughs.

          Promises, promises.

          Abraham and his family are both tragic and comic in their all-too-familiar dysfunction.  And in the midst of their struggles we witness not so much the birth of something new, but maybe something more like the very first cell division within a fertilized egg.  Two promises emerge in this story.  God makes both promises.  And they are, at the same time, very different and inextricable from one another.  One promise bears witness to the reconstructive power of God’s responsive grace, and the other to creative purity God’s initiating grace.

          Walter Brueggemann describes the differences this way: “Ishmael is a child gotten by skillful determination and planning.  As oldest son, Ishmael is the child of ‘entitlement’ in possessing all natural rights…[while] Isaac is a gift to be explained in no other way than as a wonder…Hagar and Ishmael…are located in the kingdom of necessity, coercion, and fate,” says Brueggemann.  “Sarah and Isaac…are located in the kingdom of gift, freedom, and destiny.”¹

          The promise to Ishmael represents God’s loving and redemptive response to all of our determined, well-planned, and often well-intentioned efforts to control the present and to try to “coerce” out of it an agreeable future.  The story says to us that God surrounds all of our Ishmaels, all of our hard work, all of our test-tube babies, if you will, and says, ‘I hear you, but you have created this out of impatience and pride.  For you, though, I’ll make the best of it.  I promise.  And here, here’s a toothpick.  You’ve got some apple stuck in your teeth, again.’

          The promise is usually for some “great nation,” for some level of prosperity, perhaps even for a significant level of prosperity.  That prosperity, however, always comes at significant expense.  Cain finds that out.  Jacob finds that out, so does King David.  The more the climate changes, the more that violence entertains us, and the more that fundamentalism crowds out faith, humankind, if we pay attention, continues to learn that.

          Isaac represents the other promise.  He becomes the human symbol of the promise of God’s pristine grace – a gift that comes to us not only undeserved and unrequested, but unimagined.  Isaac, you see, is the gift that comes from the future of God’s own imagining.

          In his book A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren makes this keen observation about God’s promises and our relationship with them: “We do not conceive of our faith primarily as a promise to our ancestors, a vow to dutifully carry on something that was theirs and we have inherited.  No,” says McLaren, “it is more like God’s promise uttered to us from the future, toward which we reach an outstretched and hopeful hand – just as our ancestors did.  The gospel,” he says, “is for us a beckoning, a summons, always associated with…verbs like ‘leave,’ ‘come,’ ‘go,’ ‘follow.’…the gospel is for us a movement, a pioneering adventure.”²

          Perhaps it is fair to say that virtually every nation and institution in the world, including our nation and our church, are Ishmaels.  And many of them do, indeed, hold great blessing for us and others, so long as we tend them with humility, gratitude, love, and community.  But it is the nature of all Ishmaels to live and work over against each other like great tribes of Sarahs and Hagars – twin mothers of the same son – and like so many warring kingdoms of Jacobs and Esaus – twin sons of the same mother.  Desperate for assurance, we claim God’s particular blessings on our own nations, or denominations, or political parties, or whatever else.  And our claims often feel justified, because God, being endlessly gracious, does bless and work with our Ishmaelite efforts.  And God does so, I think, for our sake.  God blesses our Ishmaels to whatever extent God must in order to redeem and redirect them, and, thus, to transform them into lenses through which we recognize, receive, and share the greater promise.

          The promise of God’s initiative comes as a gift to all humankind, for all creation.  This promise still speaks to and beckons us from God’s future.  And regardless of which side of some Ishmaelite distinction we may occupy, God’s promise, personified in Isaac and in Jesus, the Christ, remains pristine and open to, for and through every one of us.  It is the animating promise of the entire universe.  It always comes as the command to “leave, come, go, or follow.”  It comes as the challenging call to love and to trust that which we can only see and know, as Paul says, “in a mirror, dimly.” (1Cor. 13:12a)

          And God's promise always comes as a disrupting wonder, as a gift, as something that we could and would never have imagined on our own.

         

¹Walter Brueggemann, Genesis, (From the Interpretation commentary series).  John Knox Press, Atlanta, 1982, p. 184.

²Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith. Harper One, p. 28.

A Reckless Faith (Sermon)

“A Reckless Faith”

Matthew 28:16-20

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

6/15/14

          According to Matthew, this is the first and only appearance of the resurrected Jesus to the disciples.  We notice immediately that in Matthew Jesus does not Star Trek his way through locked doors.  He does not munch on baked fish to prove himself more than an apparition.  He does not stroke Simon Peter’s guilt-ridden ego by asking him three times, “Simon, do you love me?”  In Matthew, Jesus appears to the disciples only once, on a Galilean mountaintop, and his only words are the three sentences of the “Great Commission.”

          Now, in between the announcements of Easter morning and the Great Commission, Matthew tells an interesting story.  This story, unique to Matthew, implicates the Jewish leadership in a kind of B-movie cover-up.  According to this account, the Roman guards, who become “like dead men” when the Easter angel appears at the tomb, scurry off to the chief priests to tell them what they have seen.  They are justifiably afraid because should the soldiers’ superiors find out what happened, they would surely execute the hapless guards.

          After mulling things over, the chief priests and elders give this instruction to the panicked soldiers, “Tell your commanding officers this: Tell them that Jesus’ disciples snuck in while you slept, and they stole his body.  And here, here’s some cash.  If you promise to tell that story, it’s yours.”

          If ever there were a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea, this is it.  These Roman soldiers can either tell their commanders that they fainted with terror at the sight of an angel, or that Jesus' disciples slipped in and stole Jesus’ body while they, the guards, all of them, slept through their duty assignment.  Either way, the guards will have their own crosses to bear – at least figuratively and probably literally.

          Apparently, this tale did circulate in the days and weeks following Easter.  And it illustrates how closed, how entombed we become in an imperial world of black-and-white dualism.  When the obedience demanded is simply to obey the commands of superiors for the preservation of an empire, violence reigns.  Then, when that earthly authority finds itself toe-to-toe with heavenly authority, it implodes.  On its own, earthly authority always resorts to violence, and over time violence always creates its own undoing.

          ‘All heavenly authority and all earthly authority are mine,’ says Jesus.  These are his very first words to the eleven remaining disciples, some of whom, says Matthew, “doubted.”

          Tom Long calls this scene one of “near-comic irony” because “nothing in the surroundings seems to support [Jesus’] claim.”¹  Yes, one who appears to be the same Jesus who was executed speaks these words.  And if he is the same person, then something extraordinary is afoot, though, for the moment, its means and purpose defy comprehension.  So, as the disciples stand on that mountaintop, the space for doubt stands as wide open as the yawning expanse of the creation around them.

          I’ll be honest: I am pretty sure that I would be among the doubters.  I am pretty sure that I would hear the word “authority” and immediately imagine Rome and her empire, her armies, her wealth, and her unflinching resolve to send her sons off to war to kill and to be killed for the sake of property, power, wealth, and the way of life such things in excess afford.

          Given all that has happened and all that I would probably expect to happen, I doubt that I would have the spiritual vision to see beyond this dizzying moment.  Herein lies the stumbling block: Jesus, if he is really there at all, challenges his disciples to go ahead and travel a path that has yet to be cleared.  He challenges them to inhabit a time and a place in which all heavenly and earthly authority have become one.  He challenges them – he challenges us – to live, to think, and to act as if we already live fully in the embrace of the household of God.

          To live as a disciple is to live a life of trail-blazing love, gratitude, and hope in a world addicted to fear and wallowing in despair.  Jesus challenges us to live in heaven as fully as we can stomach it while still walking the imperfect boundaries of earth.  Only by some spiritual authority can anyone live eternally in a time-bound context.  As Christians, we call that authority Resurrection, and we know that authority by name: The Living Jesus.  And when I say that we “know” that authority and that name, I do so embracing all of the doubt on that freshly Eastered mountaintop, as well as all of the awe, wonder, and speechless joy.

          So, how do we live as disciples of Resurrection?

          “Behold,” says Resurrection, “I am with you…always.”

          We are people of faith, not certainty.  We are animated by an abiding presence whom we trust but cannot prove.  That makes it a subjective trust, of course, and the one who is with us nourishes that trust and transforms it into hope by helping us to interpret both ancient testimony and personal experience.  Our trust always frustrates the careful and reasonable doubters around us, and within us.  Doubters demand explanations and justifications for a way of life that follows, above all else, the command to love one another as Jesus loves us – to love the whole of creation as the Creator loves it.  To live according to the love of the one who unites all heaven and earth, all gentiles and Jews, the one who unites every us and them that humanity creates, to live according to that kind of uniting, resurrecting love, we fly on the wings of a reckless faith.  We journey into the unknown “knowing” only that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Heb. 11:1)

          Aldo Leopold was a conservationist and a sold-out lover of the natural world.  In 1949 he published A Sand County Almanac, a collection of essays that has become a classic in the tradition of John Muir and Henry David Thoreau.  In Almanac, Leopold shares many of his favorite discoveries and timeless teachings from nature.  Reflecting on the return of spring to a cold and barren Wisconsin landscape, Leopold celebrates the return of the geese above all other creatures.

          “One swallow does not make a summer,” he writes, “but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.

          “A cardinal, whistling spring to a thaw but later finding himself mistaken,” says Leopold, “can retrieve his error by resuming his winter silence.  A chipmunk, emerging for a sunbath but finding a blizzard, has only to go back to bed.  But a migrating goose, staking two hundred miles of black night on the chance of finding a hole in the lake, has no easy chance for retreat.  His arrival carries the conviction of a prophet who has burned his bridges.”²

          The “Great Commission” which Jesus offers on that mountaintop is a disruptive call to declare our prophetic faith in a brand new spring, even as the ice still covers the water.  Indeed, his call is more than a friendly invitation.  It is an all-out dare.  Jesus dares us to live in courageous insubordination of the well-guarded tombs of Rome, Babylon, and Egypt.  He dares us to live in bridge-burning defiance of everything that legislates or preaches human dependence on those earthly dominions that claim the absolute authority to tell us what is good, faithful, and true, namely that in order to realize our full humanity we must earn, spend, and own, and that if we must subdue or even obliterate whole cultures to maintain a way of life, so be it.

          If we are The Church, however, if we are the body of the risen Christ in, with, and for the world, we must live differently.  When we equivocate ourselves out of obedience to Jesus’ command to adventurous, dangerous agape love, when we fail to live as disciples who follow the reckless power of Resurrection, we cannot make disciples of others.  We may make some “converts” to a particular way of thinking, but regurgitating some prescribed formula does not empower any of us to love as we are loved.

          “Go...and make disciples of all nations.”  This is a holy dare to live in the reckless authority of Resurrection, to inhabit the household of God, to inhabit the presence of the Living Jesus, here and now.

          Every week I am reminded that Jonesborough Presbyterian Church is a place where we can and must learn to experience and trust this reality – where we can and must learn to enflesh the command to love.  In this small congregation we have the full spectrum of ideas, hopes, and fears – theologically, politically, and everything else.  Depending on the question you ask, you may get every imaginable answer.  But we fly on together, fellow travelers, fellow geese.  Every day, God's new spring opens a hole in the ice, a place for us to land, a place of gratitude and respect for one another, especially when we don't agree.

           When you find yourself sitting on one side of an issue and the person in the pew next to you sitting on another, I hope and pray that you recognize that tension as our part of our strength.  For through that tension, all authority in heaven and on earth speaks to us, unites us, and continually transforms us into a body who recognizes its shared calling.  Standing in that mountaintop tension, where there is wide open space for doubt, our options are, by grace, reduced to one common call – the call to obey Christ’s command to trust the authority of Resurrection, to accept the dare to love.

          In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, thanks be to God.

¹Tom Long, “Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol. 3.  David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, editors.  Westminster John Knox Press, 2011. p. 47

²Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, Ballantine Book, NY, 1966. pp. 19-20.

Cedar: Paneling or Pandering? (Sermon)

“Cedar: Paneling or Pandering?”

2 Samuel 7:1-14a

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

6/1/14

          “Before long, [David] made himself at home, and God gave him peace from all his enemies.”

          With all being as well as it has ever been for Israel, their fledgling king, intoxicated by success, jumps into a kind of hyper-drive.  Taking note of his own fine cedar home, he decides that he should get busy and build a splendid house for Yahweh, too.  It would express gratitude, but David views it as an act of practical prudence, as well.  Publicly credit God with victory, and maybe “peace” will linger.

          David recognizes a timeless truth: War never achieves real peace.  I don’t mean to sound grim or ungrateful, but the witness of history has been relentlessly consistent.  Violent triumph never accomplishes true peace.  It may bring much-needed ceasefire, maybe even some sort of treaty – but never shalom.  Somewhere, somehow, some group who is not powerful at the moment is going to rise up and make a play for independence or domination.  And those who succeed often attribute their newly-won power to the particular favor of some deity.

          David and Israel serve as a fine case in point.  Having defeated the Philistines, David nestles into his throne.  Looking at his home, he inhales the sharp, clean fragrance of cedar.  Now, Versailles or Buckingham Palace this is not.  In fact, it may have been a corn crib compared to the little house on the prairie.  But David’s home is as fine as anything his situation has to offer.  That’s when he remembers Yahweh.  Here he is in his new royal digs, and Yahweh, whom David credits for his success, remains packed up in a chest?

          The king stews on this for a while before calling in his court prophet and saying, “Nathan, look at this.  Here I am, comfortable in my cedar home, and God is cooped up in a footlocker in a pup tent.”

          Now, hold that thought for a moment, and let’s consider Nathan.  Nathan is a prophet and a priest, but he’s a cabinet member, too.  That makes him part of the establishment.  He knows that while David the man looks to him for spiritual guidance, David the king expects him to be sensitive to political realities.  Nathan knows that, at times, the administration expects him to play the loyal “yes man.”  And he knows that David’s matter-of-fact statement about the housing situation is a backhanded request to build a temple.  The request, however, has more to do with politics than spirituality.

          Royal logic says, “Our God should be housed and enthroned with grandeur at least to match that of the king.  If the nations of the earth happen by and see the ark of God still camped out in a travel kennel, what kind of press will that get?  Would-be enemies will see us and think that poorly god-ed means poorly guarded.  The majesty of the presence of our God, Jehovah, ought to be unmistakably splendid, and even intimidating.”

          Nathan understands the royal logic.  I imagine, too, that he wants to help his king protect Israel's new-found autonomy.  And, as prophet and priest, surely he feels the inner conflict building.  Nathan knows that the king wants to flex his new muscles so all the world can see him and hear him roar.  But Nathan also knows that Yahweh wants king and country to humble themselves in grateful praise and trust.

          In his heart of hearts, Nathan knows all of this.  And weighing one side against the other he finally says to David, “Go ahead with what you’ve got in mind.  God is with you.”

          ‘God is with you?’  In context, those words basically mean that God is on board, and that raises a bright red flag.  To claim that God is “on board” with our plans reveals a blindly arrogant, self-serving religion, not a humble faith.  David’s house-building initiative seeks to ensure that God gets on board and stays there.  On the surface, his motives may appear faithful, but underneath lies the assumption that a well-housed God means a happy God.  And a happy God means a loyal God.  And a loyal God means a nation that is safe from every enemy.

          Do you see the irony?  Israel is in danger of becoming her own worst enemy.  The story gets more troubling when we acknowledge that David’s concerns reflect our own.  Haven’t we, too, associated military victory with God’s particular blessings on us?  At King’s Mountain Battlefield in South Carolina the central monument bears the revolutionary battle cry: “In God and our guns we trust!”  Had England prevailed, they would have claimed the same blessing of the same God.  It happens in virtually every conflict.

          I think it should grieve and convict us that to a deep extent, people of faith have yet to confess that we often trade the God who creates the world and all that is in it, the God who not only hears but who initiates prayer, the God who inspires scriptures, the God who is, to us, revealed in Jesus of Nazareth, the God who is LOVE – we often trade this God for gods who can be molded according to human fears and needs for affirmation.

          “God save the Queen!”  “Allah Akbar!”  “For God and country, Geronimo is dead!”  Virtually all of us make that trade.  And it has been that way for eons.

          Since being used as a political tool counts as a breach of at least the first three commandments, Yahweh steps in to help David set a faithful example.

          ‘Nathan,’ God says, ‘go back to David and say this.  Say, David, this is about me, not you.  I’ve never lived in or asked for a house, and I don’t want one now.  So, here’s how this is going to go:  I brought you up from the sheep pens and made you king in place of Saul, and now, from your descendants I will build for you a house, an everlasting kingship.  I’m going to lay the foundation, raise the walls, and spread the roof.  I’m going to plant Israel deep in this soil.  I will allow myself a place among you soon enough, but it won’t be your doing.  You just keep worshiping, trusting, and leading.  That’s your job.  I’ll do mine.  Trust me.’

          This promise is a watershed moment.  Like the Exodus and the covenant at Sinai, it is a hinge pin of the Old Testament story.  From this point on, God, who is carpenter, farmer and Lord of Israel, lays eternal claim to the throne of David.  As king, David is important, but he is not God.  Nor is he God’s protector, benefactor, or even God’s executive secretary.  Yahweh is wildly and extravagantly free.  Israel will be planted and tended in Yahweh’s vineyard, not the other way around.  And let’s remember: God’s promise is to all the world through Israel.  God is not “on board” with any one nation, tradition, or individual.  God calls us to the work of spiritual discernment so that in getting on board with God, we may bear witness to God’s initiative and grace in, with, and for the creation.

          In our spiritual confusion, we often miss God’s newness.  We may even find ourselves working against God, because the royal il-logic usually tries to guarantee a future by preserving some past.  To us Nathan says, ‘Stop!  No more pandering!  Don't build a thing.  You'll just dam up the flow of God's purpose, and that dam will break.  God, who is building and planting even now, does not want your pandering.  You’re scrambling for success, and success in this world is measured in houses of cedar.  It’s measured in numbers of dollars in the budget and people in the pews.  Trust and follow God.  Expect wondrous new things from God.’

          What is God up to in our midst?  Lots of things: Sending Mallory to Haiti for the third time.  Calling new officers to serve this congregation.  Involving us in Family Promise, Appalachian Service Project, and other mission efforts.  Deepening our sense of community and our desire to love and care for one another.  Hosting us, in person, at this table today.  The list goes on.

          It’s a funny thing, though.  Any of these worthwhile efforts become houses of cedar when we approach them from self-serving angles.  But when we empty and humble ourselves, when we lay our hands on the hammers and plows that God sets before us, we build and plant not for ourselves, but for God.  We build and plant for the betterment of our neighbors and for future generations.  That's how we not only proclaim but inhabit the kingdom of God.

          The kingdom of God is the house, the house God builds and opens to all of us in our midst.  Today.