Grace, Glory, and Foolishness (Sermon)

“Grace, Glory, and Foolishness”

John 6:1-21

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

7/27/14

          If it’s just me, I’m not sure that I feed them.  What about you?

          Yeah, there’s a mess of them.  And sure, they’re hungry.  But after mingling with them even for a short time, we see that most of them are nothing but groupies and thrill seekers.  And they’ve been tagging along for weeks now.  But we understand that, too.  I mean Jesus really is an attention magnet, isn’t he?  Unlike most of the other prophets, miracle workers, and snake charmers drifting through the area, Jesus doesn’t seem to be grasping for celebrity.  He’s just as edgy and daring as the best of them, but he really seems to care.  He cares about, speaks to, touches the forgotten, the disabled, the women, the Gentiles, and anyone else whom the religious wheelers and dealers tell us to ignore.

          Still, most of this crowd is mindless sheep waiting on the next feed.  So, if it’s just me, I probably don’t feed them.  I keep score too closely.  Not Jesus, though.  His heart is high as the mountain, deep as the sea, so much more welcoming and gracious than mine.  All that matters to him is that people he loves are hungry.

          When worldly glory – being right, popular, and powerful – become our greatest ambitions, Jesus reminds us that true glory is found in the back of the crowd, in the humbling company of grace.

          Taking stock of the situation, Jesus turns to Philip and says, “It’s supper time.  How are we going to feed all these folks?”

          Now, Philip and the rest have just been watching Jesus do things that defy simple explanation.  But when he asks where they can find enough bread for all these folks, Philip seems to come down with a case of amnesia.

          “Well, I don’t know,” he answers.  “You’d have to work six months to make enough money to buy bread for this crowd.”

          Jesus shakes his head as if to say, “Is that the best you can do?”

          Deciding to play along, Andrew says with graceless sarcasm, “Oh look!  Here’s a lad who’s got some food for us.  Now, what have you got, young man?  Five loaves of bread and two fish?  That’ll do it!  Come on everybody, dig in!”

          Not at all amused, Jesus looks at Andrew and says quietly, “Tell everyone to sit down.  Go on.  Tell them.”  And the revelation begins.

          Glory and grace overflow.  People eat, and a surplus is collected.  But all the people see is another act of nature-bending power.  With their minds numbed by the bliss of momentary fullness, the people begin to murmur among themselves, “This guy is good!  He’s real good!  A guy like this ought to be king!”

          And so it begins.  The idea trickles innocently off of one person’s tongue, but it quickly gathers speed, energy, and danger.  Like an avalanche, it sweeps through the crowd.  “Yeah!  Yeah, let’s make Jesus our king!”

          All of a sudden the people forget what has happened.  Instead of responding with gratitude to the satisfaction of their hunger, the people become ravenous for more.  The crowd has taken this incredible gift of grace and twisted it to make Jesus fit into human categories of power and authority.  All it takes to be king, you see, is to garner enough votes or to create enough fear.  Always afraid of Caesars and Herods, the people mistake the miracle of enough for the promise of excess.  They overlook the presence of the gracious response of God and choose to see the arrival of a king who can lead them to victory over political enemies.

          Jesus is no politician, though.  Realizing what the crowds are plotting, he pulls away.  In another act of subversive grace, he refuses to allow anyone, crowd or disciple, to imagine him as a king like Caesar, or Herod, or even David.  Jesus desires to lead people of faith, people who can accept the uncertainties of a spiritual life without depending on the crutches of signs and wonders, of proofs and absolutes that make discipleship a safe option in a dangerous world.

          While in Mebane, NC, I served on the board of Allied Churches of Alamance County, whose purpose is to feed, shelter, educate and otherwise help the homeless and working poor of the area.  At a board retreat one weekend we found ourselves in the midst of a discussion about finances, always a source of anxiety for nonprofits.  One board member observed that we were approaching the problem entirely from a business standpoint.  It appeared that our trust lay almost exclusively in outward efforts: fundraisers, letters to churches, grants, and so forth.  She wondered out loud how we might approach that same work as a spiritual mission rather than as pure business.

          As she did, another board member interrupted.  “That doesn’t work!” he crowed.  “You can’t run an organization that way!  I mean sure, we trust God.  It’s right there on our money, ‘In God We Trust.’  But you still have to go out and get the money.  Just to sit back and trust God.  It’s foolishness.  It doesn’t work!”

          Trusting God doesn’t work.  It’s foolish.  That’s what he said.

          I think that like Philip, that board member missed the point.  It seems to me that this fellow might have believed in God, but he had never learned, and maybe he’d never been taught, that trust is a whole different net of fish.  Mere belief tends to leave us at a place of personal consent and self-satisfaction.  Trust, on the other hand, takes practice and lots of hard work.  Trusting God will work us to death – from life to death to life anew.  Trusting God is grace, glory, and foolishness all wrapped up together.  Just like Love.  Just like Jesus himself.

          For Jesus, grace and glory always come as a package deal.  When feeding the multitudes, his grace reveals his glory.  Late that same night, the disciples are huddled together in a boat on the Sea of Galilee.  Strong winds and high waves rock the little boat and threaten to capsize it.  Jesus appears, and the grace of his presence reveals his glory as he delivers his followers from chaos to calm.

          The presence of Christ in our midst does not promise the end of suffering, just the end of lonely and meaningless suffering.  Such talk always sounds foolish in a culture that associates blessing with health, beauty, wealth, popularity, and power.

          In the last thirty six hours, this part of Christ’s body has been immersed in suffering.  On Friday night we held a memorial service for a young man who met with such despair that he acted to end his own life.  I am grateful that this sanctuary was a place in which his friends and family could gather to grieve and to begin to heal.  Yesterday afternoon we gave thanks for a life that spanned more than nine decades, yet a life that included the death of a beloved son in the terrible insanity that is war.  In both services there were hearts hungry for assurance and hope.  And going into both services I prayed that there would be enough for everyone.  I could only trust that there would be.

          Immediately after Dr. Doane’s service, a number of us went straight to the Loaves and Fishes soup kitchen where people who were physically hungry lined up to be fed.  There weren’t five thousand people at Main Street Christian Church last night, but there are millions upon millions more like them in God’s creation.

          When we stop and think about it, it becomes all too easy to follow Philip’s lead, to throw our hands up and say, “There’s just not enough to go around, not enough hours in the day, not enough gas in my tank, not enough gift beneath my tree.  I can’t do it.  It doesn’t work.”

          It sounds foolish to say in this world, but yes, there is grace and glory to spare.  That’s why Jesus says to us, “Sit down.  Get ready to eat.  Get ready to share.  There is enough.  It’s right here.  Trust me.”

Visible Hope (Sermon)

“Visible Hope”

Romans 8:12-25

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

7/20/14

          The passage we just read lies right in the heart of the chapter in which Paul crafts some of his most memorable and influential writing.  One of my seminary professors said that because of the passion and depth of Romans 8, some scholars have suggested that Paul wrote this chapter while in the throes of some sort of spiritual ecstasy.

          That may be the case.  I wouldn’t know.  But I do know that this passage got the best of me for most of last week.  It took me longer than usual to make peace with it, longer than usual to find a place of belonging in this text.  Now, I must admit that Paul’s letters – his lectures really – often leave me feeling somewhat disconnected and uninspired.  Admitting something like that also evokes within me a real but short-lived guilt.  In the grand scheme of things, we Presbyterians are not that far removed from our Puritan forebears.

          Here’s the deal – for me anyway: Paul is writing a kind of neo-natal systematic theology.  With Christianity in its infancy, Paul handles new Christians as a parent might care for a newborn.  He feeds, dresses, changes diapers, and carries his new babies every step of the way.  Do this, he says.  Think that.  And avoid everything else.  Paul even confesses his paternalism.  To the Corinthians he says “I could not speak to you as spiritual people, but rather as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ.  I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food.  Even now you are not ready.” (1Cor. 3:1b-2)

          To me, systematic theology, even for all its grownup philosophy and studied argument, is kind of like skim milk, or plain yogurt.  It may have significant nutritional value, but to be interesting, systematic theology has to be mixed with something else.  (Now, I beg forgiveness from those of you who love skim milk and plain yogurt.  I also accept your disgust at my preference for unflavored soy milk.)  The point is that truly transforming theology is not systematic; it is systemic.  It happens within, it is affected by, and it has its effect on a deep, and wide, and complex configuration of relationships.  Good theology is not organized and argued.  Good theology is discovered in the messy, day-to-day realities of life.  Good theology is told and shared as narrative.  It is lived as story.

          I finally found my elusive foothold in today’s section of Romans 8 when I realized that my own “eager longing,” my own laborious groaning was for some way to feel and to speak of the “unseen” hope to which Paul refers.  Story makes that hope visible.  To turn Paul on his ear a little, story puts “flesh” on Paul’s theological arguments and his endless lists of do’s and don’ts.  Some of that flesh is beautiful, some of it not so much.  But if the story is to hold meaning and relevance, and if it is to transform us, all that flesh is necessary.

          To be fair and honest, I think Paul understands this.  Remember, he begins his letter to the Romans with a lament.  “For I am longing to see you,” he writes, “so that I may share with you some spiritual gift to strengthen you – or rather that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine.” (Romans 1:11-12)

          Paul knows that there is no substitute for face-to-face relationships.  There is no substitute for storying one another, especially in spiritual matters.  As human beings, we really do not experience and relate to God through systematic arguments, which almost always have winners and losers.  We experience and relate to God through the systemic processes of life.  We watch hope take shape and move through the stories we live and tell together, here-and-now.  Good theologians have dirt under their fingernails.

          Paul really does understand this.  I think he embraces his role as a kind of midwife, or doula, a birth coach for the new life which God is revealing through the story of Jesus.  Remember, Paul writes his letters before Mark, and Matthew, and Luke, and John have written their accounts of Jesus’ life.  So, Paul’s letters, as thick as they are with theological argument and wisdom, might be summed up in three very familiar words, “In the beginning…” or perhaps even the more compelling phrase, “Once upon a time…”

          Paul's work both assumes and prepares us for Jesus' story.  His letters provide valuable insight on that story, but their authority comes from his own faith story.  The Love Chapter of 1Corinthians 13 brings a bright clarity to the dim and hazy mirrors of life around us because we know the systemic, relational process through which God transforms Saul into Paul.  We know how God stories this man from a systematic persecutor of the first Christians into the first systematic theologian of the Christian faith.

          There is spiritual buoyancy in Paul’s words not simply because they have become biblical literature, but because Paul survives his own sufferings and groanings on a ship bounced around on the sea by a horrific storm.  Eventually shipwrecked, Paul swims ashore and finds new life and renewed hope on the island of Malta, where he and his fellow survivors are treated with kindness by people they have just met.  When these new friends light a fire to warm everyone, Paul gathers an armload of brush for the fire.  As he throws it toward the flames, a poisonous snake jumps out of the pile and bites Paul on the hand.  The Maltese people take a step back saying, ‘Uh oh, this one’s a goner.  He murdered someone for sure!’  Well, not only does Paul survive, he turns around and heals a man bedridden with fever and dysentery.

          Read Paul’s story in Acts.  By the time he writes to the Romans, he has lived and continues living a life which reveals  all manner of “unseen” hope.  Maybe he calls it unseen only because so many of his readers have yet to live into their own stories of adoption and redemption.

          When we look around us at a world scarred by violence, at wars in the middle east, hate between religions – and within them, children dying of preventable diseases and starvation, spiteful and divisive rhetoric in our own political process – with such things ever before us, we can hear enough discouraging news and see enough naked hopelessness to convince us that the only way to survive is to entomb ourselves in the lifeless, black-and-white religion called Despair.  When worshiping the god of Despair, our sanctuaries become bunkers of concrete and steel, mahogany and gold, certainty and fear.  When we worship Despair, we try to shelter ourselves and our children from suffering, from the labor pains of life.  We try to abort the birth of the new thing God is doing in the midst of all our groanings.  In the sanctuary of Despair, we remove ourselves from the enfleshed and enfleshing story of God’s continual work in, with, and for the creation.

          The irony of it all emerges when we discover that the deeper we allow our stories to intertwine with the present sufferings of the creation – the poverty, the seediness, the broken-heartedness around us – the more our “eager longings” become enfleshed with acts of visible and daring hope.  When we enter suffering with Love, we enter the gospel story, the saving story of Jesus.

          In one of his meditations last week, Richard Rohr says a similar thing: “Jesus clearly taught the twelve disciples about surrender, the necessity of suffering, humility, servant leadership, and nonviolence.  The men resisted him every time, and so he finally had to make the journey himself and tell them, ‘Follow me!’… The Gospel gives our suffering personal and cosmic meaning, by connecting our pain to the pain of others and, finally, by connecting us to the very pain of God.  Any form of contemplation is a gradual sinking into this fullness … which always produces a deep, irrational, and yet very certain hope.”¹

          To follow Jesus is to enter his story.  It is to enter suffering and hopelessness, and to do so with the guarantee of feeling the world’s pain and anguish as acutely as Jesus feels it throughout his own life, death, and resurrection.  But, it is at that point that our stories, that our own hope-revealing lives, really begin.

¹ http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Richard-Rohr-s-Meditation--Following-the-Shape-Shifter.html?soid=1103098668616&aid=9rfAlUEk3b0

From Weeds to Wheat (Sermon)

“From Weeds to Wheat”

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

7/13/14

          When my family and I lived in Statesboro, GA, we occasionally made trips to Alabama and Mississippi to visit extended family.  Our route took us on long stretches of two-lane roads through middle Georgia.  Middle Georgia is the peach belt of the Peach State, but peaches are not the sole cash crop in that region.  Driving by a wide open field you may think you’re passing an expanse of pastureland.  Then you begin to notice some conspicuous absences: no barbed wire fences, no galvanized metal gates, no small, dark heaps around which the grass grows noticeably greener and higher.  It may take a minute, but you soon realize, that’s not a pasture.  It’s a sod farm.  Many flat land farmers have found it more profitable to supply impatient property owners with instant yards than grocery stores with food.

          Sod production is a cut throat business, too.  We learned of one farmer who looked out over a carefully managed field of Bermuda grass one day and noticed something that made his heart sink and his blood boil.  In GA we call it bahaia grass.  It’s a variety of tough, weedy grass that grows very quickly and puts out long heads thick with little black seeds that cling to shoes and socks, pants legs and animal fur – virtually anything that touches it.  Bahaia grass breeds quicker than rabbits on a carrot farm, and it can become a neurotic obsession to lawn purists.  Trying to purge bahaia grass from a field of Bermuda, you see, is only slightly easier than me trying to get rid of these freckles.

          An investigation revealed that a local competitor had hired a pilot to fly over that field one night and dump just enough bahaia grass to destroy the crop of valuable Bermuda.

          When the disciples hear Jesus tell the parable of the wheat and the weeds, they ask him what it means.  And Jesus says, in effect, “Life is like that wheat field.  It’s mostly good wheat, but someone has sown weeds in it.  They’ve dumped bahaia in the Bermuda, kudzu in the cornfield.  It’s a headache, but for now there’s nothing to do but deal with it.  Let it all grow together – wheat and weeds alike.”

          Now, it is tempting to read this parable and immediately turn outward, to look at others and begin the very subjective and destructive process of making judgments and labeling those around us as “wheat” or “weed.”  And we all know what it’s like to deal with weeds – those choking, suffocating circumstances and people that can ruin a good day.  It’s a fact of life in our work places and neighborhoods, our homes and churches.For many of us, addictions, neuroses, and other demons often make being in our own presence a burden.

          In his parable, Jesus acknowledges the presence of weeds and weediness, but he also makes it clear that you and I are not the farmer.  God is the farmer, and God decides what the weeds are and how to deal with them.  Besides, Jesus’ interpretation makes it clear that this parable is an analogy.  And all analogies break down when carried too far.  The breakdown in this case comes when we realize that we cannot pigeonhole anyone as wheat or weed.  Because we are human beings, regression from wheat to weed is always a possibility for us.  By the same token, when we are weedy in spirit and action, we can all experience the grace that transforms us from weed back to wheat.  A person’s deep-sown weaknesses, fears, and other potentially destructive inclinations never tell his or her whole truth.  Indeed, very often, maybe even most of the time, some of our weediest tendencies reveal some new variety of wheat we have never acknowledged in ourselves.

          The great psychiatrist, Karl Jung, defined our weediness in such a way as to reveal its power for good.  He called it the shadow.  Simply put, the shadow is the “refused…unacceptable…[and] despised quarter of our being.”¹  Repressed and unacknowledged, shadow energy can have free-reign within a person, and when it does it is capable of profound evil.  Acknowledged, however, our shadow can be harnessed and transformed into some new and liberating strength or virtue.

          “Given the chance,” says David Ricoh in his book, Shadow Dance, the weedy, shadow energy of “an ugly aggressiveness might [be] trimmed to assertiveness, unwelcome controlling ways might [be] spruced up into efficient leadership, [and] fear might…even become love.”²

          This is not strictly psychology, either.  St. Augustine said that “everything is meant for good...even what is bad.”³  Paul says it succinctly when writes that “all things work together for good for those who love God.” (Romans 8:28)

          Now, this is not the same thing as saying that everything happens for a reason.  We are simply affirming that even the most destructive evil never has the last word.  Even those shadowy parts of ourselves that we are so used to calling corrupt can, when embraced, understood, and transformed, reveal acres of good wheat.

          Jesus’ parable makes it clear, too, that the process of transformation – which we also call resurrection – is no easy, painless process.  The weedy manifestations themselves, some of which we may really enjoy, must be culled, bound into bundles, and burned.  Yet even that process is an act of grace.  Through that process of repentance, we may weep and gnash our teeth, but on the other side of God’s weed-harvest lies new potential for growth and becoming.

          Back in Mebane, NC I developed a very close friendship with a man I will call Lewis.  Even though he was some twenty years my senior, we discovered a deep bond, a true spiritual brotherhood.  Lewis' personal story is a fascinating but often heart-wrenching tale that runs helter-skelter through deep pits of loneliness and sorrow, and then up to peaks of joyous deliverance.  Into Lewis' field of good wheat, you see, evil dumped an almost overwhelming measure of the destructive weed called alcoholism.

          After squeaking through high school, Lewis left home and drifted the delapidating seas of his addiction.  Those years included a short stint in the navy, various subsistence jobs, at one point even living hand-to-mouth as a street artist in New Orleans.  He eventually married and had a daughter, who became the light of his life.  And all the while, weeds and wheat kept growing together.

          One Sunday morning, about five years before I met him, Lewis put his last drink down.  The beer can was half empty, but his life was suddenly and gloriously half-full.  In spite of the grace of that moment, the weeping and gnashing of teeth began, because as we said, transformation is never easy.  As Lewis’ weed-fire gradually burned out, he began to discover possibilities and wholeness he had never experienced, and neither he nor his family knew how to live with his new-born sobriety.  On more than one occasion his wife even offered to go buy a case of beer for him, just so things would return to normal.

          Through the help of a local Presbyterian church and its pastor, Lewis discovered that in spite of himself, he had already grown fields and fields of healthy wheat.  He became a commissioned lay pastor and served a couple of small congregations.  He also found deep joy by participating in mission work in Latin America.

          All of Lewis’ involvement in ministry was good stuff, but in a phone conversation one day he revealed the true substance of his transformation, the resurrection of his once-destructive shadow energy.  I have no recollection of the specific issue, but Lewis had called to ask me about something new he wanted to get involved with.  I simply didn’t have the time at the moment, but I told him that if he could wait until later, I might be able to help.

          “No,” said Lewis quickly, “you know me and my addictive personality.  I’m too compulsive to wait that long.  I have to go ahead and get started.”

          The real wheat was not Lewis’ involvement in ministry.  That was just the wheat bread he had baked – and it was great bread.  The real wheat was his inner capacity to live into a passionate desire, his ability to embrace a consuming hope that seemed to lie beyond the moment.  Lewis occasionally needed someone to rein him in a little, but that which had surfaced as the desperate abandon of alcoholism had, by holy grace and human effort, become an enthusiastic commitment to expressions of Faith, Hope, and Love.

          Toward the end of his book Inner Gold, Robert Johnson has a compelling discussion about the Second Coming.  He speaks of it in terms of a relentless cultural yearning for growth and becoming.  And he identifies several poorly-directed efforts to engage Second Coming hope, addiction being one of those weedy misdirections.

          “When someone comes to me with [an addiction] problem,” writes Johnson, “I can often touch him by saying, 'What you are doing is right.  Your expectations and demands are valid.  But you're doing it the wrong way.'”⁴  Then he begins to help his client discover the potential for wheat that lies behind the weed of the particular addiction.  I am convinced that Lewis would say a loud Amen to that.

          All of us are fields of mostly good wheat.  To move beyond those unhealthy ways of being Christian, those unhealthy ways of being human, some weediness must be culled from within us.   The refiner's fire of God's grace is always at work transforming weeds into wheat, lead into gold.  As Christians, we use the symbol of baptism as the beginning this life-long process.  In baptism God claims and waters the wheat which God has already planted, and God promises to give it growth.  Our promise is to love and nourish the wheat, and to turn – consciously – from the weediness that threatens our relationships with God and with one another.

          Remember this, too: God loves us no less for our weediness, and no more for whatever faithfulness we can muster.  But through transformation, we love God more.  Through resurrection, we love one another and ourselves more.  All of us, then, live more grateful, more hopeful, and more Christlike lives.

¹Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche. Harper One, 1991, pp 4-5.

2David Ricoh, Shadow Dance: Liberating the Power and Creativity of Your Dark Side. Shambhala, 1999, p. 3.

³Ibid, p. 2.

⁴Robert A. Johnson, Inner Gold: Understanding Psychological Projection. Koa Books, 2008, p. 74.