Incarnation (Christmas Eve Meditation)

“Incarnation”

John 1:1-5, 10-14

Christmas Eve – 2015

         In the course of nineteen-and-one-half years of ministry – plus the prior three years of seminary – I have often said that Christmas has no lasting meaning apart from Easter. Easter, I said, held the more sacred space. While still recognizing the inseparability of the two, I feel my perspective shifting. I am beginning to see Easter as a kind of lens through which Christmas comes into clearer focus. More accurately, I am beginning to see Resurrection as a kind of lens through which Incarnation comes into focus. Maybe we can think of Resurrection as a prism, a three-sided optic which bends the bright mystery of Incarnation into all of its stunning beauty, variety, and possibility.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…All things came into being through him…what has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.”

         Ancient Celtic Christians drew heavily from the witness of the Gospel of John. They felt that Johannine writings offered far more than doctrine to believe. John invites humankind into the living and transforming presence of God – a presence that is continually being born into the creation. Indeed, the Celts affirmed that the Creator’s presence is the very essence of the created order, so they entered into relationship with God by entering into relationship with self, with neighbor, and with the earth itself.

How freeing, how empowering, how resurrecting to encounter Incarnation in ways so much more real than some intellectual effort to think rightly about the One who defies all thinking. And how appropriate, artful, and inspiring for Christians to embrace the birth of a specific child, Jesus of Nazareth, as God’s unique self-disclosure.

         Christmas is about the Word becoming flesh. It is about the material quickening of Light into Life. We use so many metaphors that we forget we are using them. In the confusion, we can become rigid when speaking of God. We can allow our words to become inflexible and absolute. But while Incarnation is earthy and corporeal as childbirth, understanding it depends on suggestion, imagination, and interpretation. Incarnation is most faithfully celebrated through story, poetry and song. That is why we read again Luke’s familiar birth narrative with its shepherds and their gamey pits and crude jokes, with its drafty stable where unimpressed farm animals munch on sweet hay next to a young woman groaning and sweating her way through her first experience of childbirth. That is why we, along with “heaven and nature,” sing and listen to so much music at this time of year. That is why we celebrate the mystery of Holy Communion tonight.

It is a gracious irony: All of our words fail to convey the fullness of the Word. The Word always stands the best chance of being heard when articulated incarnationally – through our being present with and for one another and the creation. And as often as not, even silence expresses the Word better than words.

         Nonetheless, words are gifts, too. Mary Oliver has a unique gift for experiencing the Incarnate Word in the world and for sharing what she sees through lovingly chosen and carefully crafted words. Tonight I share with you one of her poems. It is entitled simply “Poem.” I take that as an artist’s nod toward the humbling reality that what she creates cannot adequately express the fullness, the gratitude, and the enlivening hope she feels when experiencing God Incarnate in the creation.

So on this Christmas Eve, may you hear, see, and feel in these words The Word. And may you sense that ancient and ongoing Word being born, being Incarnated anew in you. For all of us, like the Christ himself, bear in our lives the Light, the Love, the very essence of God.

Poem

by Mary Oliver

The spirit
  likes to dress up like this:
    ten fingers,
        ten toes,

shoulders, and all the rest
  at night
    in the black branches,
        in the morning

in the blue branches
  of the world.
    It could float, of course,
        but would rather

plumb rough matter.
  Airy and shapeless thing,
    it needs
        the metaphor of the body,

lime and appetite,
  the oceanic fluids;
    it needs the body’s world,
        instinct

and imagination
  and the dark hug of time,
    sweetness
        and tangibility,

to be understood,
  to be more than pure light
    that burns
        where no one is –

so it enters us –
  in the morning
    shines from brute comfort
        like a stitch of lightning;

and at night
  lights up the deep and wondrous
    drownings of the body
        like a star.¹

         Merry Christmas to all of you – you beautiful, gifted, imperfect custodians of Incarnation.

¹http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/mary_oliver/poems/15803

Christmas Prophecy (Sermon)

“Christmas Prophecy”

Micah 5:2-5a

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

12/20/15

         The book of Micah is a short but illuminating read. The prophet begins by decrying the injustices perpetrated by wealthy landowners against poor laborers.

“Alas for those who devise wickedness and evil deeds on their beds,” says Micah. “When the morning dawns, they perform it, because it is in their power. They covet fields, and seize them; houses, and take them away; they oppress householder and house, people and their inheritance.” (Micah 2:1-2)

It is an old, old story: The powerful king, the wealthy corporation, the “civilized” society, the institutional church – all of these have benefitted from some version of a Jezebel murdering some version of a Naboth in order to steal some version of a vineyard. The most destructive evil, says Micah, occurs when a privileged few, acting out of selfish and predatory entitlement, covet, seize, and oppress simply “because it is in their power” to do so.

Micah knows that such imbalance cannot last. Even if left on its own, the creation will, by whatever means necessary, seek a new equilibrium. But the biblical witness does not imagine a lonely creation. When the rich and powerful run roughshod over the poor and voiceless, God sends prophets to set things right. Micah accepts his prophetic call, and he feels the backlash of truth-telling. Taking in all stride, he even makes fun of the oppressors’ denials: “‘Do not preach’ – thus they preach – ‘one should not preach of such things; disgrace will not overtake us.’” (Micah 2:6)

“We’re not doing anything illegal,” they say. “It’s just business. And God helps those who help themselves. Right?”

Even today there are some extraordinarily popular preachers who say so. But Micah does not recognize them as prophets of Yahweh. “Thus says the Lord concerning the prophets who lead my people astray,” says Micah. “[prophets] who cry ‘Peace’ when they have something to eat, but declare war on those who put nothing in their mouths…[these] seers shall be disgraced…and put to shame.” (Micah 3:5, 7a)

While Micah and other biblical prophets rail against those who have been pocketed by muscle and money, their rebukes are punctuated with promises of renewal. And here is where Yahweh’s prophets diverge from the prophets of privilege. Willfully segregating the sufferings of the many from the injustices which benefit a few, prophets of privilege tend to meet the evils of the world with calls to return not so much to the Lord as to some romanticized past.

Follow us, they say, and we’ll make things like they used to be.

Prophets of Yahweh seem to know that the “good ol’ days” of our memory never really existed. The days of well-ordered tranquility for some were horrifying and humiliating days of Jim Crow for others, weren’t they?

Yahweh’s prophets declare something different: “Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old,” says Isaiah. “I am about to do a new thing…From this time forward I make you hear new things, hidden things that you have not known.” (Isaiah 43:18-19a, 48:6b) Now, according to Micah, God’s brand “new” thing has primordial roots. “But you, O Bethlehem…from you shall come forth for me one…whose origin is from old, from ancient days.”

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” (John 1:1-3a)

This Word, who is in the beginning with God, this creative Word through whom all things are made is Micah’s “one of peace.” This Timeless One is re-creating and reuniting all things. It seems to me that if we are to claim and proclaim God’s Peace, which is both ancient and future, we will not succeed by trying to get back to it, or by trying to make it happen by our own efforts. Following Jesus, on an entirely new path, we rediscover the hope of the primordial life of Peace by living it – by living it here and now.

At 3:00pm today there will be a vigil at the courthouse. The organizers are calling it “A Vigil for Muslims and Refugees.” I understand why they are calling it that. Muslim hate crimes have spiked in our country because a small but very loud and dangerous minority of Muslims have managed to detonate a mushroom cloud of fear. And refugees of the violence are having to drag that stigma around like millstones tied to their necks.

I understand the fear, too. Due diligence means something entirely different than it meant just a few years ago. To ignore that reality is naïveté at best and foolishness at worst. I get all of that. But now is the time for neither submission to fear nor exclusivity in prayer – particularity yes, but not exclusivity. Particularity helps us to recognize the full humanity of the other. It helps us to discover our own place in the world, and to enter it with compassion and purpose. Exclusivity usually leads us down paths of entitlement and paternalism.

As we pray this afternoon, I hope we will pray for Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, and atheists alike, for refugees, for wanderers and homeowners, for presidents and prime ministers, soldiers and civilians, friends and enemies, young and old.

Personally, I will also give thanks to God for the prophetic witness of Jesus of Nazareth, the “one of peace,” whose birth reminds us that God is with us, here and now, materially present in the out-of-balance sufferings of all creation.

If eternity has a touchstone in time-bound existence, it is the concrete moment in which we live. Out of love for God and for God’s creation, faithful prophets reveal God’s Love by refusing to allow us to get comfortable with sin, that is to say with ignoring, imposing, or benefitting from prejudice, fear, violence, greed, or any other idolatry that distances us from our neighbors or allows us to abuse the one planet God gives us. Advent prepares us for God’s decisive prophecy, the here-and-now embodiment of God’s ancient and future Word.

The African-American educator and author Howard Thurman wrote a pithy poem entitled “The Mood of Christmas.” Echoing Micah’s memorable call “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God,” Thurman’s unadorned phrases call us and carry us deep into the ancient, approaching, and present peace of God’s Kingdom.

“The Mood of Christmas”

by Howard Thurman

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.¹

¹http://stgregoryschurch.typepad.com/stblogorys/2011/12/the-mood-of-christmas-by-howard-thurm.html

December 2015 (Newsletter)

Dear Friends,

         Much has been said about the excessive commercialism of Christmas. And most of it is true. For the next few weeks everything will be red and green, tinseled and frosted, and smelling of peppermint and apple spice. Storeowners will be happier to see you while fellow shoppers may not. In the malls, peace and goodwill are likely to be in shorter supply than this year’s hottest-selling smart phone. And watch out for all those delivery drivers delirious with sleeplessness and stress.

         During this season, as wants and expectations expand and magnify, people focus on “achieving satisfaction.” On Christmas Day, the spoils will be laid out for evaluation and consumption. And on December 26, those who have yet to be satisfied will swarm the stores, again.

         What does it mean to be satisfied? To have a sense of victory in an economic transaction? To silence the voice of one desire crying out in the vast wilderness of our wants in order to prepare the way for one which appears to have become more crucial?

         The Holy Spirit promises an old holy man named Simeon that he will not die without laying eyes on the Messiah. Just when Simeon is about to resign himself to interminable life, a young couple comes and bothers him with another eight-day-old boy to be circumcised. But when these common folk hand him their son, the old man’s eyes brighten. His heart quickens. The fulfillment of the Spirit’s promise squirms in his arms. Both he and the world will begin to trade interminable for eternal. At long last Simeon is satisfied, and in a trembling voice he says so.

         But the old priest sees more. In addition to salvation and glory, he says, this child will bring a lot of people to their knees and a sword to pierce his mother’s soul. Now, that’s a fairly safe prophecy. What child doesn’t? Simeon’s point, of course, is that, at first, the arrival of heaven will hurt like hell.

         The long-awaited gift is given at Christmas is a package that includes Good Friday and Easter. The infatuation with stuff in December is simply a vain attempt to be satisfied with Christmas alone.

         The gift we celebrate at Christmas is a gift to be shared among all of us. It will not go on sale December 26. It cannot be exchanged for a different size or style. Nor will it satisfy us if we keep it to ourselves. In truth, it takes a lifetime of sharing this gift even to begin to receive it.

         Thank you, Jonesborough Presbyterian, for sharing so much Christmas with my family and me over the last five years. I pray that we have shared some of it with you, as well.

         May God bless all of us with a most joyful, memorable, and merry Christmas!

Absurdity: Our Only Hope (Sermon)

“Absurdity: Our Only Hope”

Luke 1:68-79

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

12/6/15

         Zechariah has been a priest for a lifetime. He knows and teaches the newness-from-emptiness wonders of Sarah, Rachel, and Hannah. He knows and teaches the redeeming prophecies of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and Hosea. In spite of that well-storied faith, when Gabriel tells Zechariah that his wife will have a child, the old priest says, Prove it.

         You preachers, says Gabriel. When you declare it, you expect everyone to believe it. But when it is declared to you, suddenly you’re all scientists and critics. But I’ll play your game. For the next nine months, you will have no voice. That mouth of yours will be a dry well. Be ready, though. After nine months, you’re going to speak differently. You will use words more gratefully and generously. You will regard your new voice and your new son the same way – as holy gifts, gifts that reflect and reveal God, gifts to be shared on behalf of the world.

         May you never forget this lesson, Zechariah: Wherever you see emptiness, God sees potential.

         The first words Luke attributes to Zechariah after the birth of John are words of praise, thanksgiving, and promise.

         “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel,” says Zechariah, “for he has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them…By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high [is breaking] upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death, to guide our feet in the way of peace.”

         With his new voice, Zechariah speaks of promises made, but promises still unfolding. And he does not sugar-coat reality. God’s creation still sits “in darkness and in the shadow of death” longing for peace – for the holy Shalom of God.

         While first century Rome is a place of remarkable achievements and great wonders, it is also a place of darkness and death, violence and turmoil. The Pax Romana, the great “Roman Peace,” is, like every other political “peace,” wrought and sustained by brutal violence and relentless fear. Jesus is hardly the first or last person to be executed on a cross. And Rome means for every crucifixion to serve as an example of her murderous resolve to control the masses and protect her power.

         Into such all-consuming starvations prophets are born - or, as Walter Brueggemann might say, the “prophetic imagination” is born. While prophets “are characteristically immersed in public crises, they are not,” says Brueggemann, “political agents in any direct sense and rarely urge specific policy. Nor are they [merely] social activists. They are most characteristically ‘utterers’…[who] speak most often with all of the elusiveness and imaginative power of poetry…they speak in images and metaphors that aim to disrupt, destabilize, and invite [us into] alternative perceptions of reality.”¹

         If Brueggeman’s long-studied observations hold credence, they emancipate the word “prophet” from contemporary caricatures of gypsy fortunetellers, fear-mongering street preachers, and what I consider to be the sadly misguided comments of a certain Christian university president.²

         I know that fear is an undeniable reality in our day and age. I have never felt it more or been more affected by it myself. And I am not saying that terrorism does not warrant a decisive response. But I hear Brueggemann reminding us that biblical prophets offer more than predictions of disaster and demand far more than “eye for an eye” retribution. Biblical prophets invite us into new understandings of what seems to be emptiness and hopelessness. True prophetic crises reveal the creation as the canvas of God’s ongoing work of self-revelation. They declare humankind and the earth itself as incarnate expressions of God’s reality, and as the very reason for and object of gratitude and generosity.

         Now, how does all that positive affirmation hold up against the realities of ISIS and Abu Ghraib, of San Bernardino and Colorado Springs, of Sandy Hook and Columbine, of cancer and Parkinson’s, and on and on and on? With headlines like these, is it not absurd to imagine the earth as a place of potential and promise?

         It seems to me that by the transforming grace of God, the Church is created and called to be a community of the absurd. We are called to be a prophetic presence in and for the world. We are called to be a place in which human beings are equipped for living lives of infectious faith, willful hope, and transforming Love. An authentic, Jesus-following witness embraces absurdity and declares that the violent dis-ease that surrounds us, the asphyxiating fear that inhabits us – these things, as real as they are, are not our defining realities. To give in and accept violent despair as the only reliable perception of reality is to wither into a faithless quest for self-preservation. And along that path, our feet will never find “the way of peace.” We must be delivered into it. Advent prepares us for that gloriously absurd deliverance.

         Jesus can be himself through us, but only Jesus can be Jesus. And he empowers us to channel our inner prophet and live Advent lives – “crying out in the wilderness” lives.

         Condemned for his resistance to Hitler, and for refusing to renounce his Jesuit vows, Father Alfred Delp wrote the following words shortly before being hanged: “Not for an hour can life dispense with these John-the-Baptist characters, these original individuals, struck by the lightning of mission and vocation. Their heart goes before them, and that is why their eye is so clear-sighted, their judgment [discernment] so incorruptible. They do not cry out for the sake of crying. They cry for blessing and salvation…They summon us to the opportunity of warding off, by the power of a converted heart, the shifting desert that will pounce upon us and bury us.”³

         Do you hear Father Delp’s prophetic poetry? Do you feel his absurd invitation into a fresh perception of reality?

         Like John the Baptist crying out in the wilderness of first century Rome, Father Delp cries out into the wilderness of Nazi Germany. And both prophets call for “converted hearts.” The repentance to which they call us guides our feet into the way of peace, but not by drowning us in the emptiness of guilt. Prophetic repentance baptizes us with new and overflowing abundance.

         As Frederick Buechner says in gracious, poetic absurdity: “To repent is to come to your senses. It is not so much something you do as something that happens. True repentance spends less time looking at the past and saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ than to the future and saying, ‘Wow!’”⁴

         Into which future will our feet be guided? The calculated and reasonable future of fear? Or will we live into the absurd future of converted hearts? The absurd future of prophetic promise and hope?

         It is a toss up most days. But I pray that we all choose to be guided toward a future of hope and peace.

         Amen.

¹Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament Theology: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy, Fortress Press, 1997, p. 625.

²I was deeply grieved this morning to read of the comments of Jerry Falwell, Jr. president of Liberty University in Lynchburg, VA. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/12/05/liberty-university-president-if-more-good-people-had-concealed-guns-we-could-end-those-muslims/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_aof-libertyuniversity%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

³Watch for the Light Readings for Advent and Christmas, The Plough Publishing House of the Bruderhof Foundation, INC, Farmington, PA (editors not named), pp. 92-93.

⁴http://www.frederickbuechner.com/content/repentance

A Missional Kingdom (Sermon)

“A Missional Kingdom”

John 18:33-38a

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

11/22/15

         Folks who spend more time with John’s gospel than I do are not of one mind about Pilate’s mind. Is he a tragic-comic figure, hustling anxiously back and forth, wavering between the rabid crowd outside and the calm, inscrutable Jesus inside? Would he really prefer let Jesus go?

         Or is Pilate a devious despot, manipulating emotions in order to get what he wants while making the masses think they are getting what they want?

         Regardless of Pilate’s intentions, John wants to make it clear that the Roman governor is outmatched. With the wisdom of a serpent and the innocence of a dove (Matthew 10:16), Jesus controls this situation.

         Why do your own people want you dead? Pilate asks. Are you some kind of king?

         “If you say so,” answers Jesus. 

         How frustrating is that? It is like Moses standing at the burning bush and asking for some name to drop when he confronts Pharaoh.

         ‘Just tell them that I AM WHO I AM sent you,’ says Yahweh.

         I imagine Moses thinking, ‘Gee. Thanks. That’s really gonna spook the old boy, isn’t it?’

         Pilate asks a direct question, and when Jesus could claim and proclaim his Lordship, he gets all mysterious. How does that help him? How does that further the work of his kingdom?

         The very idea of a kingdom creates problems. When I hear the word king, iconic images come to mind – over-the-top displays of power and wealth, castles, feasts, robes, and such. And these things were defended not just by armies of knights but by the principle of the divine right of kings, as well. Many believed that kings held their offices by God’s decree and with God’s blessing. So, they could do no wrong. Power funded by fear can keep even large groups of people in check – at least for a time.

         Maybe that is the truth Pilate does not want to hear. A new kind of king, one who leads by grace, one who not only has but who consistently leads with a heart for the people governed, will, in the long run, have far greater power than a king who leads by threat of violence. I think this truth points to the eternal heart of our humanity. Truth grounded in creative Love is the kind of truth on which sustainable, holy community depends. And for Caesar, Pharaoh, and other violence-dependent rulers, such truth escapes understanding.

         Jesus understands it, though. “My kingdom is not of this world,” he says. If it were, he adds, “my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews.”

         Jesus’ kingdom cannot be established and maintained through the means of worldly kingdoms – through sword, and shield, rifle and bomb, pride and fear. Indeed, trying to force Jesus’ kingdom on anyone inevitably destroys their desire to enter it. One enters Jesus’ kingdom, the here-and-now kingdom of God, by intentionally of living for the well-being of neighbor and earth.

         Kingdom living is a day-to-day thing, moment-to-moment even. We can live in Love for God’s creation one minute and cast stones at a neighbor the next. That is the challenge and the beauty of the Kingdom: It is not subject to our whims. We cannot rule it or change it. We can only live in it or outside it. And all of us constantly slip in and out of it. And even when we have been out of it for some time, it is always as close as our next act of compassion toward another.

         Jesus began his ministry where he is now ending it – with a proclamation of and an invitation to the kingdom of God. After his baptism and trials in the wilderness, Jesus reappears preaching, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.”

         Turn, he says, and see your neighbor and the earth through my eyes. See through the eyes of fear-shattering Love, and you will live a different life, because you will inhabit an altogether different place. It is right here. It is within you, within the people around you, and within the good earth itself.

         A small group of us are reading Brian McLaren’s book, A Generous Orthodoxy. In the early chapters of the book McLaren separates himself from every mode of Christianity that accommodates itself to Caesar. Last Sunday night we looked at the first chapter of McLaren’s positive, Why I Am… chapters. It is entitled, “Why I Am Missional.” All of us found ideas in that chapter that excited us. To me, the most compelling sentence in that chapter, and in the book so far, comes from one of McLaren mentors, whom he does not name. This person defines “missional” this way: “Remember, in a pluralistic world, a religion is valued based on the benefit it brings to its nonadherents.”¹

         Abraham is called to a dynamically missional life. God says to Abraham: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing…and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Gen 12:1-3)

         Inasmuch as God’s creatures, wherever and whoever we are, regardless of the particulars of doctrine, strive to live as blessings on the rest of the creation, we inhabit and reveal the kingdom of God. This is what it means for us to live under the reign of Christ the King.

         Do you see the irony at play here? While we do not find our true home in any worldly kingdom, finding our home in the kingdom of God does indeed happen in this world. It happens, as we have acknowledged, in our everyday relationships with the creation – relationships in which we choose to live as blessings.

         This Thursday we celebrate Thanksgiving. Giving thanks is only half of recognizing and receiving blessings from God. The other half of full-fledged gratitude is sharing the benefits of God’s goodness with God’s good creation.

         For our Christian proclamation to be whole, for us to experience the full potential of gratitude, for our other-worldly path to ring true in this world, it seems to me that we have to embrace the missional nature of our Christian faith and community. A missional church lives for the sake of others and the earth. And to live missionally is to live under the gracious, trustworthy, eternal Reign of Christ.

¹A Generous Orthodoxy, Brian McLaren, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, MI, 2004, p. 121.

Endings and Beginnings (Sermon)

“Endings and Beginnings”

Mark 13:1-8

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

11/15/15

         The Jerusalem temple makes a lasting impression on an impressionable disciple. With a kind of quaint, Gomer Pyle innocence, he says, ‘Gaw-lee, Jesus. Just look at all them big ol’ rocks, and them big ol’ buildin’s!’

         ‘Bless your heart,’ says Jesus. ‘Yeah, they’re big all right, but enjoy them while you can. They won’t last forever.’

         Mark, like Luke, precedes Jesus’ teaching about the destruction of the temple with the story of the widow’s two-cent gift to the temple. I feel a deep disconnect at work in the pairing of these stories. In one breath Jesus commends a widow for her financial sacrifice, and in the next breath he says that the temple’s days are numbered. The woman’s tiny gift toward that large but condemned budget seems indefensible. Why doesn’t Jesus just slip up to the woman and say quietly, ‘Ma’am, keep your money. You’ll need it more than the temple will.’

         Shortly after Jesus reveals the stunning news about the fall of the temple, Peter, James, John, and Andrew come to Jesus in private and ask when all of this will happen. And Jesus opens up about would-be messiahs, about wars and military posturing, about tensions between nations, and about earthquakes and famines.

         I do not know about you, but had I been with those disciples and heard Jesus’ predictions, I would have been thoroughly underwhelmed. Think about it, all Jesus does is to describe life on planet earth as it has pretty much always been. When has the world ever been free of misguided prophets claiming divine authority? When has the world ever known even a day without war and international tension? When has the world ever had even a moment when someone somewhere was not experiencing some sort of devastating storm, drought, or seismic upheaval?

         Doomsdayers, and particularly Christian doomsdayers (“Christian doomsdayers” – shouldn’t that be an oxymoron for resurrection people?) thrive on predictions of utter and final destruction. I can speak only for myself, but if I were to preach such things, I would be ascribing to God my own shallow fears and judgments. I would be confessing my utter and final lack of faith in God to redeem the creation. Most insidiously, I would be trying, with all my terrified might, to take as many people down with me as I could.

         Jesus has a little surprise in store. After he predicts the fall of the temple, and after he speaks of “wars and rumors of wars,” Jesus turns to his disciples and says, “This is but the beginning of the birthpangs.”

         That subtle phrase sits in a grim shadow. But it sits there as a kind of ember, and Jesus is the ruach, the pneuma, the Holy Spirit of God. His life, his words and actions, are the very Breath of God on that smoldering, two-cent ember of hope.

         What gives a poor widow and God’s disenfranchised Messiah faith to give their all to an institution and, indeed, to a creation that appear on the verge of implosion? Trusting that an ending is simply a God-initiated beginning, and then living that trust, takes spirited and creative vision. It takes determined optimism. It requires us to join in the fearless confession of Paul who says, “Everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Corinthians 2:17b)

         Identifying and moving toward God’s new thing throws us into the very birthpang-turmoil Jesus portends. It awakens in us the awareness that the “wars and rumors of wars” themselves are not our first concern. When we turn heart, soul, mind, and strength toward the root causes of all the threatening and frightening realities around us, what appear to be signs of catastrophic endings have the potential to become birthpangs of a new and unimagined future.

         Fear usually feels like a sure thing, but it is the sterile delivery room of reasonable despair, and of every selfish idolatry.

         Faith is the stable, the compost-rich barn of God’s new creation.

         Jesus demonstrates perfect trust in God. And it seems to me that he trusts God to be a verb rather than some static, bearded, white-robed noun. I think it healthier for us to imagine God as more than a “Being,” more than simply the “One” who oversees all the comings and goings of fresh and constructive change. I think we get a truer sense of God by beholding God as the very energy behind, before, and within all things. God is the very activity of creation and re-creation at work in the universe.

         As creatures we will never really understand that Energy and Activity. We cannot “harness” it, not even for good. What understanding we gain, we gain of ourselves – of the God-work within us. What good we do, we do for our neighbors and for the earth. But as we deepen in self-understanding, and as we tend to and build up our neighbors, we begin to realize that we are in relationship with so much more than meets the eye. We are in dynamic relationship with that creative Energy and mysterious Activity we call God.

         “God is love,” says First John (1John 4:8b) God is not a stagnant thing. God is the flow of the river, the rush of the wind, the sound of the laugh, the fall of the tear.

         In his essay, “Another Turn of the Crank,” Wendell Berry writes, “I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe,” says Berry, “that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement…with God.”¹

         Love allows even the holiest institutions to crumble like sand castles at high tide. But they fall because their familiar, comfortable ways, as sound and as constructive as they have been, now do more to conceal than to reveal a new, emerging God-work.

         Marianne and I both have wonderful families whom we enjoy. And as happens in all families, the parents around whom we have revolved for more than a half-century are now beginning to revolve around our siblings and us. The strong and gracious gravity by which they have held us is shifting into our hands. The new thing happening in our lives has happened for eons, of course. And in the shift itself, in the fall of the old and the rise of the new – that is where we dance the dance of gratitude, and grief, and awestruck hope.

         God is not simply in that dance. God is that dance.

         Love is most nearly itself, writes T.S. Eliot,

         When here and now cease to matter.

         Old men ought to be explorers

         Here or there does not matter

         We must be still and still moving

         Into another intensity

         For a further union, a deeper communion

         Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

         The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

         Of the petrel and the porpoise.

                  In my end is my beginning.²

¹http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?ca=e3b49ff9-9ba0-4b63-8716-d78c8e3c02db&c=c98d6b50-eefa-11e3-853a-d4ae52754b78&ch=ca496850-eefa-11e3-8596-d4ae52754b78

²These are the closing lines from T.S. Eliot’s “The Four Quartets (II, 5); http://www.philoctetes.org/documents/Eliot%20Poems.pdf

Hannah's Prayer (Sermon)

“Hannah’s Prayer”

1 Samuel 1:1-20

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

11/8/15

         Some years ago I listened to an iconographer – a painter of religious icons – talk about his art. The most interesting thing I learned was that iconographers do not pick their own subjects. They have a very specific canon of images. These artists simply create new expressions of the ancient visual texts. One of the most popular icons to artists and beholders alike is The Madonna and Child.

         As with any work of art, what one sees and experiences while viewing a religious icon is purely subjective. But a visual representation of the gaze between mother and child can take us where words cannot. To me, the vortex of Love, wonder, gratitude, and hope that surrounds so many mothers and newborns creates its own gravity. In the meeting of their eyes, the rest of us have the opportunity to get pulled into the love-at-first-sight experience of God looking upon the shimmering stillness of a new creation and saying, ‘Oh, this is good.’

         Many theologians, Christian and otherwise, regard the creation as God’s most personal self-revelation. This is certainly the view within the ancient Celtic tradition. Through the centuries, a host of thinkers, writers, and mystics have made similar associations. Few have been as direct as Julian of Norwich who, after years of prayer, service and ecstatic visions came to the conclusion that the creation is not simply made by God, [but] made of God.

         When human beings create, they participate in the divine act of becoming a fully God-imaged creatures. And the desire to create can be understood as God within us seeking relationship, seeking to be known, loved, and shared. Acting on that desire and creating something new – a painting, a garden, music, children, laughter, community, pound cake (there are as many ways to create as there are people) – is to open oneself up to exciting transformation and terrifying vulnerability. To create something that will have a life of its own, something we will freely turn loose of for the sake of the creation, this is the excruciating euphoria of God’s incarnation in Jesus. And in her heart of hearts, this is the experience Hannah desires.

         Hannah is married to Elkanah. He is a nice guy. He is stable, dependable, church-going. He keeps his grass mowed, pays his bills, tithes, and drives the kids to soccer practice and swimming lessons when Mom cannot. The story tells us very little about Elkanah, but he seems creative enough, even if in a rather artificially-flavored-vanilla kind of way.

         Peninnah, Hannah’s wife-in-law, has the capacity for physiological creativity. But because Elkanah loves Hannah, Peninnah treats her children like trophies on a shelf. She rubs Hannah’s nose in them. Personifying selfishness, and congested by envy, Peninnah may never even desire the kind of relationship with her children that creates transforming blessing for everyone. She may never learn to live gratefully and generously.

         Hannah is different. Her barrenness becomes openness, openness to a fullness that Elkanah’s second helpings cannot fill, and to a hope that Peninnah’s cruelty cannot extinguish.

         “Lord of hosts,” she prays, ‘if you’ll give me a son, he will be yours. Let me give birth to him. Let me nurse him. Let the two of us gaze into each other’s eyes. That’s all I want. I want my life changed by a child, and when he’s old enough, I’ll turn him loose. He’ll be yours.’

         Hannah moves us with her prayer. The creation process includes, and perhaps necessarily so, the anguish of emptiness. Like a painter staring at a blank canvas, like a gardener standing over unbroken ground, Hannah bargains with the primordial source of the very desire to create. She wrestles with the teeming emptiness inside her.

         One problem with tapping that deeply into our creativity is that some folks may think we are completely nuts, or at least under the influence of something. As a priest, Eli should know better, but when he sees Hannah on the ground, lip-synching to some inaudible song, he sneers at her.

         ‘Sober up,’ he says. ‘You look pitiful.’

         ‘I’m not drunk,’ says Hannah. ‘I’m down here duking it out with Yahweh. Like Jacob at the Jabbok. So bless me or leave me alone.’

         A stunned Eli says, ‘Peace be with you. Bless your heart…and the rest of you, as well.’

         I have never met a mom who would give up her child as Hannah does. But every parent worth their salt knows that no child finally belongs to them any more than they want to belong to their parents. All human beings need to be raised, of course. We must be loved and cared for, educated and empowered. And we must be appropriately disciplined and affirmed.

         But first, we must be gazed upon in speechless, grateful awe.

         Hannah’s story does not promise that God will answer all of our prayers in happy accord with all of our wants. Her story does give us courage to pray as ferociously as a psalmist, to wrestle the angels like Jacob, and to implore God as Jesus does in his Thursday night garden. Hannah dares us to discover our fullness by plumbing the depths of our emptiness. And through such life-altering labor we often deliver into the world some new expression of God’s presence, Love, and purpose for all creation.

         A human being is a stunning, sacred, God-revealing work of art. You are such a work of art. So are the people next to you. So is the candidate you cannot stomach, and the terrorist you fear – all of us are stunning, sacred, God-revealing works of art. And as co-creators with God, we are capable of adding to the beauty and the wonder of God’s creation in some way, even if only by recognizing, calling attention to, and giving thanks for all of the feral beauty that still shines through the smog of human idolatries.

         I think the Church’s legacy of evangelism has, in many ways, borne greater witness to idols than to God. We have elevated conformity to static doctrines above a dynamic relationship with a living God. In so doing, the Church has shifted its gaze from the vortex of Love, wonder, gratitude, and hope to sterilizing screens of selfishness, fear, and despair.

         This is a somewhat simple thing, but look at these prayer shawls.*

         I have a stack of them in my study. I take them to folks who are in the hospital or confined to home. The knitters and quilters who create these shawls occasionally ask for help in purchasing materials, but they do not ask to be paid. God only knows how many years all their collective minutes of labor would make. Behind and within these shawls live the artists’ desires – desires for people who are sick, grieving, and lonely to remember that they are remembered. They want them to feel the warm, embracing love of this congregation.

         But first, these Hannahs gather around their new creations, and gaze upon them. They hold them in their hands and pray over them.

         Then they turn them loose – for the sake of others.

*Regretably, the pictures of the prayer shawls would not load onto blog.
**For a little more on the holy gaze, and for a couple of references, see Fr. Richard Rohr’s mediation from August 10, 2014: http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Richard-Rohr-s-Meditation--Mirroring.html?soid=1103098668616&aid=RQDkCmXdGwQ

Here and Now (Newsletter)

         Looking back, most of my growing-up Thanksgivings seemed pretty much the same. There was, however, the time that Dad’s schedule forced us, at the last moment, to cancel our usual trip to Montgomery, AL. We stayed in Augusta. Mom broiled some steak. I’m not complaining about steak, but we missed Grandmother’s turkey and dressing, her mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans (with fatback), apple pie, and poppy seed cake.

We didn’t get to go feral with our Montgomery cousins, either. We didn’t climb the sprawling pecan tree in my grandparents’ back yard. We didn’t step back in time by sifting through treasures in Granddaddy’s shed – his old Black&Decker electric mowers, thumb-pump oil cans, ancient leather gloves coarse and stiff as tree bark, and wooden tool boxes with handles smoother than the armrests of his rocking chair.

Our family Thanksgivings have changed significantly in recent years. I give thanks for change, though. Nostalgia tends to gloss over the painful realities of yesteryear. It would have us judge the past as idyllic and the future as hellish nightmare. Either way we fall into despair, and despair prevents us from engaging the Here and Now with gratitude and Love. And Here and Now is where creation-relevant human beings inhabit the Kingdom of God.

It seems to me that a truly memorable Thanksgiving involves acknowledging that we live, and move, and have our being in the relentless progress of time. Our lives become touchstones of a past we can only interpret and a future we can only imagine. To live gratefully and hopefully, we live Here and Now, generously present to each other, and fully aware of the world in all of its withering anguish and restoring beauty.

So give thanks. And may you find reason to live gratefully and hopefully each day of your precious, gifted, fleeting lives.

Peace,

         Allen

Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations.

Before the mountains were brought forth,

or ever you had formed the earth and the world,

from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past.

         You sweep them away;

         they are like a dream,

         like grass that is renewed in the morning;

         in the morning it flourishes and is renewed;

         in the evening it fades and withers.

The days of our life are seventy years,

or perhaps eighty,

if we are strong;

So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart.

Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love,

so that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.

                           (Psalm 90 Selected Verses)

Prophetic Stewardship (Sermon)

“Prophetic Stewardship”

Luke 21:1-4

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

Consecration Sunday: 11/1/15

         Consecration Sunday. I imagine that some pastors like it. I have yet to meet one, though. It feels too much like meddling. We know that not everyone makes a formal pledge, and that that those who do usually prefer to pledge the same way that Jesus urges us to pray: In private. That is not the way of Christian stewardship, though.

         What we do today is a defining act of communal and sacramental faith. One of our role models is a nameless widow who makes a four-verse appearance in Luke and the same in Mark. As a widow in first century Jerusalem, this woman’s presence in the temple stirs the air about as much as a falling leaf. But she wades into the clutter and ruckus of Passover, and whispers her two-cent blessing.

         Giving out of poverty is very different from giving out of abundance. All-too-often, giving out of abundance becomes a conspicuous display, but giving out of poverty is a prophetic act. It expresses a purer sense of gratitude, and a more humble trust in a generous God who says, “my word…shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose.” (Isaiah 55:11)

         The widow’s story is thick with irony. Two cents will mean little against the temple’s budget. And if temple leaders are faithful stewards, they will commit a large portion of their resources to caring for people in need. Like widows!

         The story is tragedy, as well. Over time, the religious community has developed a rapacious appetite for wealth and power. Its leaders will collude with worldly power and its violent ways to protect their hold on privilege. So instead of caring for those who are vulnerable, the temple uses its considerable influence to make people feel vulnerable. It wields an angry god in order to exist, rather than existing by the grace of God’s Love, compassion, and justice.

         How very Lukan. In this story, the one whom the community is supposed to protect and care for becomes the one who teaches the teachers about the nature of true gratitude and generosity. Jesus makes an enduring example of a woman who gives all she has to a broken institution, an institution who ignores her.

         ‘Look at this poor widow,’ says Jesus. ‘She gives all she has to the temple in spite of its failures. She offers all she has to the community, not because of their faithfulness to God, but because of God’s faithfulness to us.’

         While the widow gives out of the scarcity of her pocketbook, even more does she give out out of the abundance of her hope. Through some uncommon grace, she sees the presence of holiness in the creation, and in spite of human failures, she can give with prophetic generosity because she does not give up on God.

         Another compelling thing about this story is that Jesus sees his own life reflected in the actions of the widow. Her gift to the temple anticipates Jesus’ gift to the creation.¹ You and I, and our church can all be as selfish, power-hungry, and hurtful to one another as the Pharisees and the temple are to first century Jews. But for them and for us – a broken and beloved humanity – Jesus drops the two cents of his life into the offering plate of time. Knowing that even those closest to him will abandon him, Jesus does not withhold his fullness. He empties himself in praise of God and out of love for God’s creation. And this is the work not only of the cross. His entire life is an act of prophetic stewardship.

         Jesus and the widow invite us to pledge our entire lives to that same prophetic adventure. To live in their grace is to live an “in spite of faith.” In spite of all that is broken about us and about our church, we live and give in such a way as to proclaim God trustworthy and holiness possible. Jesus even declares this “in spite of” poverty to be our true wealth: “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” he says, “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:3)

         The great teacher and preacher Fred Craddock tells a story about his father, a man who saw nothing interesting, much less redeeming about the church. Fred’s mother saw that he and his siblings went to church. Whenever the pastor came to the house, Fred’s father kept him at arm’s length insisting that all the church wanted was more names on the roll and more money in the bank.

“‘Another name and another pledge.’ I guess I heard it a thousand times,” said Craddock.

         “One time he didn’t say it. He was in the veteran’s hospital, and he was down to seventy-three pounds. They’d taken out his throat, and said, ‘It’s too late.’ They put in a metal tube, and X rays burned him to pieces. I flew in to see him. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t eat. I looked around the room, potted plants and cut flowers on all the windowsills, a stack of cards twenty inches deep beside his bed…And…every card, every blossom, were from persons or groups in the church.

         “He saw me read a card. He could not speak, so he took a Kleenex box and wrote on the side of it a line from Shakespeare. If he had not written this line,” says Craddock, “I would not tell you this story. He wrote, ‘In this harsh world, draw your breath in pain to tell my story.’

         “I said, ‘What is your story, Daddy?’

         “And he wrote, ‘I was wrong.’”²

         It didn’t matter how selfishly old man Craddock had reacted against the brokenness of the church. What mattered was how much God loved old man Craddock. In the end, the church managed a prophetic stewardship of Love, and it made a difference. 

         The Session is not asking anyone to respond to all that is right with Jonesborough Presbyterian Church, or to react against all that is not so right about it. We are trying to encourage all of us to live prophetic lives, lives that proclaim the holy “in spite of” of faith.

         Whatever you pledge today, may you pledge it bold, generous, and prophetic hope, to the broken people next to you, to the broken church around you, and to the faithful God within us all.

¹Pete Peery, Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year B, Vol. 4, Westminster John Knox Press, 2009. “Homiletical Perspective,” pp.  285-289.

²Craddock Stories, Fred B. Craddock, eds. Mike Graves and Richard F. Ward, Chalice Press, St. Louis, MO, 2001. Pg.14.