Sunday, March 22, 2015

The Hour Has Come (Sermon - Following the passage of Amendment 14-F)


“The Hour Has Come”
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
John 12:20-33
3/22/15

         Last Friday was the first day of spring. One could know that by looking at a calendar, of course, but a calendar only confirms what we already knew. Scorekeeping may begin with the vernal equinox, but spring has already begun. There is no denying that the days have been lengthening and brightening with sunshine and birdsong. Daffodils and crocuses bloom in gardens and ditches. Ducks and geese have paired off on pondshore and creek bank. And as their buds appear, maple trees have been blushing a deep, shameless red. The “telltale signs of spring” we call them.
Spring is more than a calendar event. Spring is an unfolding. It progresses, develops, and in time gives way to yet another unfolding – the hot, earth-swell of summer.
         As Jesus’ third Passover approaches, signs of change have begun to break through. The Jews reject Jesus. He weeps publicly at Lazarus’ grave. In a surreal moment fraught with the tension of things to come, Mary anoints Jesus’ feet with a pound of expensive perfume, and wipes them clean with her hair. Jesus enters the great City of David to choruses of “Hosanna!” And now, among the pilgrims who have made their way to Jerusalem, a contingent of Greeks makes a bold appearance. Finding the disciple Philip, they say, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.”
John calls them Greeks, but his point is that Gentiles have come looking for Jesus by name. They want to see and talk with this Jewish anomaly for whom neither age, nor gender, nor race, nor class, nor any other life condition prevents inclusion in God’s household of grace.
This has been a stumbling block for the Pharisees, of course. In chapter 7 of John, talk of Jesus of Nazareth being the long-awaited Messiah heats up. Unable to accept that a man like Jesus could fulfill God’s promise, the leaders of the temple send their police to arrest and silence the rabbi. When they find him, Jesus says to them, You may know where I come from, but you don’t know where I’m going. And you’re not going to be able to follow me there, either.
Stunned, the temple leaders reveal both their outrage and their deep prejudice: Where does this guy think he’s going that WE can’t find him? Is he going to go among the Greeks?
Imagine everyone’s surprise when Greeks show up at Passover, in Jerusalem, asking for help to find Jesus. When Andrew and Philip tell Jesus that Greeks are at the door, he says, “The hour has come.”
Whether we observe signs of the coming spring or signs of the coming kingdom of God, some moment will arrive that says to us, ‘the hour has come.’ It will be a moment of great and glorious promise, as Jesus says. And, as he also says, it will be a moment when something must die – a grain of wheat, the dark obsession with power and self-concern that John calls worldliness, or even the death of our own living and breathing selves. Death does not come easy, not even for Jesus.
“My soul is troubled,” he moans.
In this moment, John’s version of the agony in Gethsemane, God Incarnate wonders if he should pray his way out of his calling when things turn challenging and threatening. Should he pull away from the community when it seems to have turned against him – and against God? Who would blame him if he did?
Then Jesus seems to ask himself, But if I leave, what blessing will come for those I love? What would I reveal of God that way?
“No,” he says again, this is my hour.
We glorify God in the midst of arrival, and presence, and change. And change always involves some sort of death. Even when we use the phrase “change for the better,” something dies. Something that was is no more – some condition, or relationship, or arrangement. And not all changes happen for the better, of course. But when we find reason and strength to say, The hour has come, we are seeking Jesus. We are seeking God’s presence and purpose in that trying moment itself, and in the signs that led us there, and in the future toward which we travel.
         In his spiritual memoir, The Sacred Journey, Frederick Buechner looks back on his life. He remembers the influences that led him in particular directions so that he could make this observation: “Nothing,” writes Buechner, “was more remote from my thought…than theological speculation…but certain patterns were set, certain rooms were made ready, so that when, years later, I came upon Saint Paul for the first time and heard him say, ‘God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are,’ I had the feeling that I knew something of what he was talking about… Something of grace.”1
         Frederick Buechner’s hour had been coming for a long time, and when it arrived, he claimed it. His hour changed him. It changed his voice, and his new voice began to glorify God in fresh ways, ways that have continued for decades to enlighten and invite others into the realm of faith, hope, and Love that is God’s kingdom.
The prophecy in all this is that God choses “things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are.” (1Cor. 1:28) Buechner and Paul both know that the new life toward which the coming hour leads us, is a life animated by the power of resurrection. That means, of course, we enter new life through some kind of death.
         Have you ever had a dream in which you or someone else dies, or is dying? If you have such a dream, pay attention to what is happening in your waking life. Karl Jung and others tell us that death in dreams almost always represents some kind of change. Death dreams are often scary, because change can be scary. Change often seems to threaten everything that has felt stable, trustworthy, and true in the world.
         And what isn’t changing? If you’re sitting at your computer, a friend in Australia can know as quickly as the friend sitting next to you what’s on your mind. And how many lives have been changed forever by thoughtless venting, bullying, or bragging on social media?
In the 19 years that I have been a pastor, technology has shortened the length of hospital stays, and diminished the discomfort of many treatments. For all that change, healthcare seems to have gotten far more expensive, complicated, and impersonal.
         Our denomination, like the Church Universal, looks different now than it did a generation ago. Last week’s passage of the amendment allowing PC(USA) churches and pastors to decide for themselves, within the bounds of state law, how to handle the issue of same-sex marriage has once again laid the reality of change squarely on our chancels. Some of us are singing praises to God about that, and some of us are crying prayers of passionate lament. And as we bow shoulder to shoulder, glorifying God, many of us are saying, “The hour has come.” While we mean quite different things, we are all dealing with the realities of death.
         Millions of us feel that the church has traded death for life. She has sold her Christ once again, and such a change bodes only the crucifying pain of Friday. Then again, millions of us have died death upon death, having been told by family, neighbor, church, and culture that we, or ones we love are abhorrent to God for who we are or for what we think. The present changes, then, cry out the scarred but speechless joy of Sunday.
We occupy the same place. We see and hear the same things. But we are not of one mind as we interpret the signs.
I think this invites us as a congregational family to step out of our Friday or Sunday mindsets and to sit together in the quiet stillness of Saturday. On Saturday we look backward and forward. We pay attention to all that has led us to this moment. For our sake, God speaks, and for our sake, the Christ is lifted up – again – to draw all people to himself. That is the “kind of death” he dies – a death that heals, reveals, and reconciles. For us, as followers of Jesus Christ, this is our sure and certain hope.
As I have said before, Jesus comes not to prepare us to be dead, but to be alive. It may be difficult to feel this, but regardless of which side of some death we are on, no death can be the end for us. When we seek Jesus together, all signs bode for us the promise and the aliveness of God’s kingdom.
So yes, the hour has come. And come what may, there is, finally, one destination for the troubled, Saturday soul of humankind. For Jew and Greek alike, for us and them alike, God thunders the message of springtime itself: Welcome to the life Resurrection!


Charge:
Resurrection: What it looks like for us right now, and when we will recognize it, I don’t know.
But I do think that it will be most real and timely, and it will glorify God most fully when we seek and find the will to share our differences in honest Love for those with whom we disagree.
In this hour, and it all hours, let us be guided by those bold Greeks. Let us say to one another, Brothers and Sisters, “we wish to see Jesus.”
And let us also say, whether we are in the midst of a dying or a rising, Brothers and Sisters, I see Jesus in you, and I wish to be one through whom you see Jesus, as well.
May the risen Jesus be with us all.

Sunday, March 15, 2015

Astounded Beyond Measure (Sermon)


“Astounded Beyond Measure”
Mark 7:24-37
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
3/15/15

         Jesus has left the familiar surroundings of home and made his way to the city of Tyre. What may sound like a rather ho-hum detail represents a scandalous break from protocol. Tyre is Gentile territory, and any Jews who live there are as reviled as the Gentiles themselves. For Jesus to go looking for them is more than bold; it is prodigal. But Jesus is no ordinary, line-toeing Jew. He stretches almost every boundary. In today’s text he even says something that none of us polite southern folk would dare to say – at least not to anyone’s face.
A Gentile woman comes to him begging that he heal her daughter, and Jesus says, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
For many of us, Jesus’ response to the woman is nothing short of racist. Hard-shell, Bible-believing Pharisees may applaud Jesus for this, but I can’t quote any less Christ-like words attributed to Jesus.
         Apparently embarrassed by this passage, many Christian scholars have run to Jesus’ rescue, saying things like, ‘Jesus isn’t being mean. It’s just his way of testing the woman’s faith.’ William Barclay goes so far as to say that “the woman saw at once that Jesus was speaking with a smile.”1 How does Barclay know that? He then says that the woman demonstrates a “sunny faith that would not take no for an answer.”2
Seriously? Does this desperate mother of a tormented child really brighten the page with “sunny faith?”
What kind of Savior needs saving? Why rush to cover up the possibility that Jesus is not manipulating the situation?
This may be uncomfortable for many of us, but what if Jesus speaks this way because he really believes that Gentiles lie, if not beyond the hope of salvation, at least beyond the limits of full participation in the family? You are free to reject this idea, but I’m going to challenge us to entertain for the moment the possibility that in this story we witness a moment when the boundaries of the kingdom are clarified even to the boundary-defying Jesus himself.
         Now, preacher, are you questioning the divinity of Christ?
No. I am trying to avoid missing – out of my own, all-too-human desire to protect Jesus – an invitation to see Jesus struggling with his full humanity. Remember, in the wilderness he faces three temptations to reduce the organic process of faith to dead-ended certainty by working Machiavellian spectacles that would erase all doubt and wonder. So a human Jesus, strengthened by divine vision, resists these temptations because he wants faithful disciples who participate in spiritual transformation rather than fearful zealots who manage religious information.
Jesus enters the struggle between the human and the divine for our sake. As fully God-imaged creatures, we engage that same struggle every day.
         When God Incarnate at first refuses to throw “the children's food…to the dogs,” the woman replies, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs.” Two things about her answer demand attention.
All I ask for is a crumb, she says, because that’s all my daughter needs.  Humbly, and most likely deeply humiliated, this nameless, Gentile mother who is passionately in love with her daughter, risks the scorn of a celebrated healer and his entire tribe because she trusts the Giver of the gift. Treated as something less than human, the woman claims the fullness of her own humanity, which includes her divine belovedness. She knows that she deserves the same compassion as any Hebrew, and her boldness becomes a tenacious prayer.
Jesus tells the woman to go home. Her daughter is well. This story jars us with both the full humanity and the full divinity of Jesus.
         “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Jesus has a thing for those who live under the table. In Tyre, he is under the table with the forgotten people of his own faith as well as those whom his people treat like common house pets. But down there, under the table, even those whom scripture has labeled sub-human live with all the faith, hope, love, and divine humanity of any Jew in Jerusalem or Christian in Jonesborough, TN.
         It gets better. From Tyre Jesus goes to the Decapolis, more Gentile territory. There, some people bring to him a man who is deaf and mute. Jesus takes the man away from the crowd and performs a rather bizarre healing ritual. When Jesus says, “Be opened!” the splendid symphony of everyday sound fills the man’s ears. Intelligible speech flows from his mouth. And the witnesses, says Mark, are “astounded beyond measure.”
         When was the last time you experienced the joy of the presence and the grace of God so deeply and gratefully that you were beside yourself with wonder? What I often wonder is whether we, who live for the most part at the table, we who tend to have everything we need and most of what we want, do we really remember what it’s like to feel “astounded beyond measure?” If this doesn’t apply to you personally, it certainly applies to us culturally. Abundance blesses us with enough, and therefore with gratitude. Excess curses us with entitlement, and thus with the loss of the ability to feel truly astonished by grace, and then mobilized to share with those who languish under the table.
         The Gospel calls us to claim the miracle of abundance, not to wallow in the sin of excess. Think about it: When healed of her demon, the girl doesn’t get rich and sail across the Mediterranean to holiday on the French Riviera. She is able, once again, to help gather firewood, cook, sew and in time get married and have children – maybe. The deaf man doesn’t suddenly go on a speaking tour making money hand-over-fist. He is simply able to work, to bargain in the marketplace, and if he has children to tell them who they are by telling them his story. The likelihood of either of these first-century Gentiles ever living anywhere but under the table is remote.
         The most astounding things happen under the table, though. Under the table is wherever we are brought to our knees in open-handed need, where we cannot provide for ourselves something basic to our humanity, something that separates us from dogs and cats, gerbils, and goldfish. Revelations of God, awakenings of spirit, calls to ministry happen under the table.
         When out-of-balance, we tend to belly up at the table and ignore Jesus’ invitation to dive beneath it into the Holy Land of immeasurable astonishment. How do you get there? Well, where is the great need to which you are drawn? What hurt in the world hurts you? You do not have to have big ideas, deep pockets, or eloquent speech. Crumbs will do. Offer your crumbs to the food pantry, to Family Promise, to the neighbor who lives alone, to the friend in the hospital, to an abused creation.
         Now, will I promise that you will be astounded beyond measure if you show up one Thursday morning at the food pantry? Of course not. Jesus calls us to an entirely new way of life, not to the quick thrill of some amusement park ride. The astounding thing is that venturing under the table to share the crumbs of holy abundance with those who need the most offers the richest and most liberating life.
         May we all make ready to cross whatever boundaries and to die whatever deaths we must. And on the other side, may we experience, in this life, the astounding new life to which Jesus calls and leads all of us.

1Willam Barclay, The Gospel of Mark: The Daily Bible Study, The St. Andrew Press, Edinburgh, 1964. p. 182.
2Ibid.

Sunday, March 1, 2015

Faith - Our Divine DNA (Sermon)


“Faith – Our Divine DNA”
Romans 4:13-18
(Using J.B Phillips NT Translation – See Below)
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
3/1/15

         For the embattled church in Rome, one fundamental question lies at the heart of ongoing conflicts: Who are we? In a growing and becoming body like the early church, the struggle for identity presents with questions about who belongs in the family and who does not. And in a world marinating in anxiety, such questions tend to create a wide range of often-violent arguments about control. Those in control get to determine the criteria for belonging. They get to decide all the community arrangements – how men and women relate, how leaders are chosen, groomed, and empowered, how strangers are treated, and how those who threaten the community will be stopped, and punished or rehabilitated. Within all of that, those who define a community’s identity usually find it prudent to decide how, if at all, that community understands and relates to God.
Once the agents of power have gained control over a community’s politics and economics, over its vision for the future, and once they have fixed the nature of religion’s role in public and personal life, they must, if they want to maintain control, also decide how the community will remember, interpret, and appropriate the past. What stories, and whose stories will be told? How will defining individuals and events be taught and ritually remembered?
The government-mandated councils that wrote the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds were shaping theology, but they were doing so to maintain political order. While bringing religious integrity to the table, they were deciding how, for the sake of the empire, to remember, interpret, and appropriate the enigma of Jesus, who was not going away.
Setting up and maintaining a community is a kind of a cultural genome project. It seeks to determine how the collective character of a community will be inseminated with the political, social, economic, and theological attributes of venerated forebears. Forgive the somewhat graphic nature of that image, but we are talking about personal and communal identity at the level of DNA. Who ARE we?
Every culture does this, and one of the most vivid examples in our own culture is the story of George Washington confessing to his father that he cut down the cherry tree. I was in college before I learned who Parson Weems was, and how he created and propagated that outright lie in order to teach children the virtues of telling the truth.
My, my. How far we have not come.
As the early Church’s most influential apostle, Paul ventures across the threshold of a brand new spiritual, political, social, economic, and even physical identity. In doing so, he assumes the authority to shape the community’s memory not only of Jesus, but of the ancient, yet continually compelling stories of the Jewish faith. Of particular concern to Paul is the person of Abraham. And at the heart of Abraham’s story, says Paul, lies the fundamental characteristic of faith.
According to Paul, faith is the divine DNA that defines us. And by faith Paul means more than “believing in” God. He means both trusting the God in whom we claim to believe, and he means loving that God by loving our neighbors with steadfast and non-sentimental resolve.
In making his point, Paul clearly encourages the faith community to alter its thousand-year-old understanding of the law, and of the faith community itself. And while Paul’s teachings do change things, I think he would say that he is not really changing anything at all. He is restoring the community to its deepest and truest self. That’s why he uses Abraham rather than Moses as the standard.
To restore the people to their chromosomal faith, Paul must scrape away all the legalism that has become a kind of fungus on their spiritual practices. Inside and out, score keeping obscures and distorts their God-imaged character of trust and love.
In an effort to pry the law from the people’s dead and dying fingers, Paul says, “The Law can produce no promise, only the threat of wrath to come…The whole thing, then, is a matter of faith on [our] part and generosity on God’s…[And] faith is valid because of the existence of God…who can make the dead live…Abraham, when hope was dead within him, went on hoping in faith…He relied on the word of God…”
Because the community’s identity hinges on faith – that is, on trust and Love – Paul demotes the law, and holds it in service to faith.
Having said that, we must also acknowledge that every religion, and every sect within those religions, creates structures of theology and governance. We do that because all communities need such things to thrive. Without the rule of some sort of law, there can be no effective gathering and cooperation of individuals. Even the laws of nature affirm this. Where would we be, for example, if gravity were not a dependable law? What if we had to live with the anxiety of coming untethered from the earth without warning, and floating away until gravity kicked in again, and yanked us back to earth with a deadly splat?
I think Paul understands all of this. Still, when writing into Rome’s argument over who belongs and who doesn’t, the apostle makes the point that when we live as if the law represents our fundamental DNA, we inevitably do more to destroy the beauty and the wholeness of God’s creation than we do to give thanks for it, and to steward it. Wherever people seek to trust God and love neighbor, there is the community of faith. And if people cannot find that community in the Roman church, or in any church, they will leave it. And the only ones who can blame them are those who live by law rather than faith.
Jesus himself systematically dismantles the DNA of law-based religion. He does reckless things like heal and pick grain on the Sabbath. He calls Yahweh “Abba.” He fraternizes with Gentiles, prostitutes, tax collectors, and lepers. Five times in Matthew he launches into a teaching saying, “You have heard it said,” then turns some holy law inside out saying, “but I say to you.”
Jesus’ very life is the giving of a new law: The law for living in the kingdom of God, the law of grace.
Paul is doing exactly the same thing. In Romans 13 he writes these earth-shaking words, The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder…[or] steal…[or] covet’; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.” (Romans 13:9-10)
Here’s the trick, though: The law of Love cannot be followed by mere obedience. To abide by a law that says things like “love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you,” that requires the steel-toed trust and the leather-gloved agape Love made real by resurrection. To abide by Jesus’ law is to embark on Abraham’s journey. It is simply to go when God says, “Go,” even when a cost-benefit analysis proves the risk unjustified.
Nonetheless, on that journey, through our faith and God’s generosity, we do rediscover our true selves and our true home as we relate to one another in holy Trust and Love.
So, come to the table. The journey begins and continues right here.





Romans 4:13-18
(J. B. Phillips New Testament)

13-14 The ancient promise made to Abraham and his descendants, that they should eventually possess the world, was given not because of any achievements made through obedience to the Law, but because of the righteousness which had its root in faith. For if, after all, they who pin their faith to keeping the Law were to inherit God’s world, it would make nonsense of faith in God himself, and destroy the whole point of the promise.
15 For we have already noted that the Law can produce no promise, only the threat of wrath to come. And, indeed if there were no Law the question of sin would not arise.
16-17 The whole thing, then, is a matter of faith on  man's part and generosity on God’s. He gives the security of his own promise to all men who can be called “children of Abraham”, i.e. both those who have lived in faith by the Law, and those who have exhibited a faith like that of Abraham. To whichever group we belong, Abraham is in a real sense our father, as the scripture says: ‘I have made you a father of many nations’. This faith is valid because of the existence of God himself, who can make the dead live, and speak his Word to those who are yet unborn.
18 Abraham, when hope was dead within him, went on hoping in faith, believing that he would become “the father of many nations”. He relied on the word of God which definitely referred to ‘your descendants’.