Monday, May 25, 2015

A Prayer on Memorial Day


Heartbroken God,

Today, many of us will break from routine
and its responsibilities.
We’ll fire up barbeques and lawn mowers.
We’ll hike the cool woods
or swing lazily in hammocks.
We’ll splash about in swimming pools
or lakes,
or rivers,
or oceans.
We will not intend it,
but by effect, much of our play
on Memorial Day
will be
to forget.

Help us to remember, O God.
And help us to remember
with the heart and mind of your Christ,
the Prince of Peace.

Help us to remember
that you did not create human beings
to perform or behold
the brutalities of war.
Yet, for countless years,
across the globe,
our proud denials have reduced
your holy names to battle cries,
your cross to flagpoles,
your church to Caesars’ outposts,
and your beloved children to
(Dear God, forgive us)
         renewable,
         expendable,
resources.

Help us to remember
those who have,
by requirement or resolve,
been thrown into
realities unimaginable
to the rest of us.
Help us to remember all of
the husbands,
the fathers,
the wives,
the mothers,
the daughters,
the sons,
the sisters,
the brothers,
the grandparents,
the grandchildren,
the aunts,
the uncles,
the friends,
the enemies…
All
who have perished
physically
spiritually
emotionally
         (and all of the above)
in war,
the near-perfect affront
to Perfect Love.

Help all humankind to remember
those who’ve died
and killed,
so that in remembering we begin to die
to our despair and fears,
such staunch veracities,
even here,
                           in the midst of your Creation
your magnificent Self-Disclosure.

Help us to remember,
and to heal those come home broken.
Help us to remember,
and to comfort those whose apple’s eyes
do not come home at all.

Help us, God.
Help us to remember
         with lives of fearless peace.
Lord, in your mercy,
hear our prayer.
Amen.

Sunday, May 24, 2015

Overflowing Absence (Sermon)


“Overflowing Absence”
John 15:26-27 – 16:4b-15
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
5/24/15

         Before diving into John 15, let’s remember a couple more ancient memories.
         In the closing verses of the book of Exodus, Moses completes the original tabernacle, and the Shekinah, the glory of the Lord, settles upon the tabernacle as cloud and fire. In the very last verse of Exodus we read that “38…the cloud of the Lord was on the tabernacle by day, and fire was in the cloud by night.” (Ex. 40:38)
         Remember, the tabernacle is a moveable feast. God’s dwelling is made to get packed up and hauled from place to place like a family’s tent. This radical theological evolution declares that Yahweh is no idol. The Holy One of Israel is not bound to one place. Indeed, there is no place where Yahweh is not.
         Many generations later, King David wants to build a permanent home for Yahweh. But God says, Not now. I’m still working to establish your house.
Several years after David dies, his son Solomon orders the building of the first Jerusalem temple. Upon its completion, the priests enter the sanctuary to consecrate themselves. When they come out, the shekinah exhales upon the new temple, and “…the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord.” (1 Kings 8:11)
         In time, things fall apart, as they always do. In 587BC, the Babylonians seize Jerusalem and destroy the temple. Imagine the spiritual turmoil. Yahweh who? laugh Israel’s enemies. ‘Deliverer? King of the Universe? Not any more.
         Eventually, the exile ends, as well. And when it does, Ezra, Nehemiah, and others build a second temple in Jerusalem. The dedication is a happy enough affair, but Anglican theologian N.T. Wright calls attention to the fact that the expected and coveted Shekinah is conspicuously absent from this dedication service.1 Wright suggests that the absence of this critical presence may have helped give rise to Pharisaism.
By Jesus’ day, Pharisaism controls Jewish faith and life. It has become a system of rigorous and ruthless piety, but it is just a cover for the self-serving lust for a new demonstration of God’s glory. True religion for the Pharisees means trying, by whatever means necessary, to trigger the Shekinah of God to shine.2 Such faithlessness, however, only results in widespread amnesia of the shema – God’s foundational command which renders all other laws redundant by pointing the way to genuine holiness.
We find the shema in Deuteronomy 6:4-9. It begins with: “4Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. 5You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” Adding Love of neighbor to this command, Jesus declares that Love God and Love Neighbor are the hooks on which “hang all the law and the prophets.” (Mt. 23:40)3
We begin to understand what the Shekinah of God is about, don’t we?
         The fourth Gospel is written no earlier than seventy years after Jesus’ ministry. John writes for followers of Jesus who have begun to feel like that second temple – an empty, God-forgotten shell, a community of faith with nothing in which to have faith. Addressing the community’s anxiety head-on, John presents a Jesus who says very bluntly: “I’m leaving now. You see me today, but tomorrow you won’t. If you had listened to me, you’d have some idea of where I’m going. But you haven’t really paid close attention. So you’re just sad and empty. And if all you feel is empty, get used to living like a pack of Pharisees, living just to make each other miserable.”
         Betrayal. Denial. Fear. And above all, self-righteousness. These are symptoms of emptiness. Friday and Saturday are about emptiness. In John, however, Thursday and Sunday bear witness to the advantage of Jesus’ absence. On Thursday, Jesus tickles his disciples’ imaginations with that absence and the promise of a new kind of presence. On Sunday it happens. On Sunday, the Shekinah returns, and the shema is restored.
In John, Pentecost does not happen forty days after Easter. In John, Pentecost happens on Easter. In John 20 we read: “19When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you...’22When he had said this, he breathed on them and said…, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’”
         By the power of the Advocate, the mystery that is the Risen Christ transforms terrified, locked-room emptiness into overflowing absence – that deep and wide space breathing with holiness and promise.
         I love and appreciate our house in Jonesborough; but it often feels like excess for just Marianne and me. When bothered by that, I remember that our home reflects the overflowing absence in Marianne’s heart. “I want room for the kids to come home,” she says, “and to bring families when they have them.” Our children’s absence does create in us a kind of bittersweet joy, and we nurture both the memoried absence and the hopeful joy.
Overflowing absence serves as a testament to both remembered and expected presence. It is a promised presence, and it drives us joyfully onward in faith, hope, and Love.
         Two of our young people are formally joining the church today. Elliott and Avery, I want you to be aware that you are committing yourselves to a spiritual life in which absence, doubt, and frustration remain as common as fullness, assurance, and gladness.
When absence gathers itself around you or in you, remember that the early church struggled with exactly the same feelings. Remember that absence often becomes the realm of the richest experiences of faith. Into the maw of apparent emptiness, Jesus breathes his peace, his promise. He breathes his Love for you and for all creation. And in such overflowing absences we tend to rely most completely on God.
         Pentecost declares that Spirit-mystery is always at work. We will never get our minds around this mystery. The best we will ever get is our hearts open to it. As Paul says over and over to the Easter/Pentecost community of the early church, We are the new temple. The Shekinah of God shines in the Love of God, and Resurrection is even now breathing this glorious Love through us deep into the world’s emptiness.
When we seek awareness of Mystery in ourselves, we begin to see it in others, and in all of creation. The presence of Pentecost Mystery holds the power to transform every absence into a temple overflowing with the glory of God.


2Ibid.
3See also Mark 12:31, Luke 10:25ff., and John 31:34-35

Sunday, May 17, 2015

The Gift of Ministry (Sermon)


“The Gift of Ministry”
John 17:6-19
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
5/17/15

         In the Gospel of John, there is no Last Supper scene, at least no final Passover. At the beginning of chapter 13, Jesus and the twelve do eat together for the last time before Friday, but it is just Thursday night supper. In John the memorable ritual is foot washing. Afterward, Jesus launches into 4½ more chapters of discourse and prayer for his disciples.
         The prayer in today’s reading from John 17 reminds me of last week’s text from 1 John 5. It seems to go around and around, saying the same things. Then again, what I hear Jesus trying to tell the disciples is something that cannot be laid out all neat and tidy. John is painting a picture of Jesus handing off his ministry to his followers.1 And this handoff entails far more than passing along a notebook of minutes and a set of keys. Jesus is handing off responsibility for proclaiming, revealing, and consciously inhabiting and enjoying the kingdom of God in and for the world. And he is bequeathing this job to eleven guys who seem to want to intend to appear to understand and trust, but whose responses expose their sad sack confusion and half-hearted courage.
         And therein lies the dramatic grace of Jesus.
         Even as he faces death, Jesus lives in a freedom that no bold declaration of liberty and no national constitution can conceive, much less promise. He lives in the realm of holy communion with the creation. His native habitat is a plane of consciousness that sees through all the pretense of vanity, all the numbing layers of worldly loyalties, and all the blinding and asphyxiating smoke of fear.
As Jesus sits at the table with his disciples, worldly power has him in the cross hairs. He feels that sinister eye watching, yet he sees clearly and breathes deeply into the moment. His upcoming ordeal will be excruciatingly real. His disciples have just about accepted that their Messiah will disappoint them militarily, so on the fight-or-flight continuum all but Peter have one foot out the door. And Peter’s lone attempt at a preemptive strike will expose his own lack of resolve. He will slice off an ear, but not from an armed soldier, and not from some religiously significant Pharisee, but from a by-standing slave named Malchus.
This is a rather stomach-turning example of John’s famous irony. When Peter cuts off the slave’s ear, Jesus’ calm response says, in effect, ‘Peter, bless your heart. Why in God’s name did you lop off this man’s ear? It’s you who hasn’t heard a word I’ve said!’
Come what may on Friday and Saturday, Jesus maintains his sacred vision. He still views the creation through the lens of God-revealing mystery. Regardless of events around him, God’s Christ continues to follow and to announce the radical freedom of wide-armed, agape Love. He continues to regard and engage every person he encounters as God-imaged creatures
This is the ministry Jesus is leaving to his sleepy followers.
         Last week I read a description of Love that made me feel as if I had learned a wonderful new word. The author is Canadian Catholic philosopher Jean Vanier. Vanier’s opus is L’Arche, a global alliance of communities for people with disabilities.2 I imagine that many folks would say that it takes a “special person” to live and work with the residents of a L’Arche community. I also suspect that Jean Vanier would say that what it takes is Love.
         “Communion,” writes Vanier, “means accepting people just as they are, with all of their limits and inner pain, but also with their gifts and their beauty and their capacity to grow: to see the beauty inside all of the pain. To love someone is not first of all to do things for them, but to reveal to them their beauty and value, to say to them through our attitude: ‘You are beautiful. You are important. I trust you. You can trust yourself.” We all know well,” says Vanier, ‘that we can do things for others and in the process crush them, making them feel that they are incapable of doing things for themselves. To love someone is to reveal to them their capacities for life, the light that is shining in them.”3
         Those words are becoming yeast rising in the dough of my heart. I don’t know where they will lead, but only in the freedom of Love can I embrace and follow the often painful transformations of Love. This is the ministry with which I wish to be associated, and toward which I wish to lead any church that calls me Pastor.
         When praying for his disciples, Jesus says, “I have given them your word...they do not belong to the world.”
         You are free, he is saying to his disciples. You are free to see every human being, every inch of the creation as a place teeming with God light.
         This is difficult for us because the world enslaves us to attitudes so competitive that they become predatory. Humankind seems to have bought the lie that the smartest and most trustworthy opinions belong to those who can criticize their foes with the loudest contempt. In the public square talking heads have given themselves over to scream-fests of insults and disrespect. Liberal and conservative commentators point at each other and shout, ‘Crucify him!’ Then they smile and say, ‘Now, a word from our sponsor.’
In the religious square, theology and piety are littered with phrases like, “all that God does for us” and “all that God gives to us.” When we associate God’s Love of us primarily with things God does for us and gives to us, our faith practice turns into an economic scramble for scarce resources and political grabs for power. So even conversations among the people of God begin to sound like prison riots.
Is there any wonder that fewer and fewer people identify with any spiritual tradition? Focusing on what we get as evidence of God’s Love has distracted us from the most dauntingly gracious gift from God: Our call to give. Our call to do the ministry of Jesus Christ.
We are not celebrating the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper today, but we are having communion. In just a few moments we will gather for lunch in the fellowship hall. As always, I urge you to sit with someone whose story you don’t know as well. Look into each other’s eyes, listen deeply into each other’s words. Allow yourself to be someone through whom God Loves them, someone through whom God reveals to them their own stunning beauty. They, in turn, will be ones through whom God may reveal something bright and new about you.
         Friends, this is ministry. This is sanctification. This is Heaven on earth. This is true freedom.
This is salvation!


1George W. Ramsey, “Exegetical Perspective” in Feasting on the Word. Westminster John Knox Press, Westminster/John Knox Press, 2008, p. 545.
2http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Vanier
3This quotation appears in Vanier’s book, From Brokenness to Community. I found it online at: http://john13verse34.blogspot.com/2012/09/divisions-in-church-and-need-for.html

Sunday, May 10, 2015

The Conquest of Love (Sermon)


“The Conquest of Love”
1 John 5:1-6
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
5/10/15

         As part of my sermon preparation this week, I paced around my living room reading all of First John out loud. It was an interesting exercise. I kept losing my place because, quite frankly, the writer repeats himself about every third line. He goes around and around saying: Love God. Love one another. Love is the sure sign of God abiding in us and us abiding in God. Believe in Jesus as the Christ. Not believing in Jesus is pretty much the only sin that matters.
While that leaves out most of the details, it retains most of the substance. John takes five chapters to say what can be expressed in five sentences.
         There are several presumptions lying behind all of this, of course. John states the basic presumption in chapter one, verse one: “We declare to you what was from the beginning.” That line echoes the opening verse of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” And that verse in turn harks back to the foundational assumption of both scripture and faith: “In the beginning God created…”
As Creator, God is not simply above and beyond all things. God is a congenital presence in all things. God is the origin, the objective, and the essence of the creation. And since, as John says, “God is love,” Love is the origin, objective, and essence of the creation.
For both the gospel and the epistle of John, the greatest good and deepest hope for humankind is to “believe” in Jesus as the fullest expression of the aboriginal Love which is God. Having said that, in Johannine literature, “belief” encompasses far more than saying, ‘Yes, I believe.’ True belief cannot be separated from obedience to Love. And obedience is less an act of self-subjugation to God than the adventure of a willing and disciplined leap of faith into the great Mystery of Love.
Peter finds this out, doesn’t he? On the lakeshore after the resurrection, Jesus does not ask, ‘Peter, do you believe in me now?’ He asks him, three times, “Peter, do you love me?”
For John, to believe is to begin living an entirely new way of life. To believe is to inhabit a world which is being “conquered” by Love.
Conquered. Now there is a word we have to handle with care. In worldly culture, ‘conquer’ usually dredges up images of aggressive or even violent action in which there are winners and losers, victors and vanquished. Such images create not only polarities of us-and-them, of right-and-wrong, they also create a sense of entitlement among victors. God “blessed” us with all this stuff. It is ours. God favors us. Our conquests must be righteous.
The fourth-century emperor, Constantine the Great, had been just as pagan as his predecessors. Then, on the eve of a battle against a stronger foe, he had a dream in which he sees the chi-rho cross of Christ. Along with the symbol comes the message, “By this sign you will conquer.” The worldly emperor interprets this in purely selfish and temporal terms. He decides that if he conquers his enemy, the Christian God must be real.
Constantine does win. Shortly afterward, in 313AD, the emperor issued the Edict of Milan and legalized the Christian faith. Legalization paved the way for Christianity to become the official religion of the empire. And that allowed Christianity to devolve into the official religion of economic wealth and military power, whoever happens to wield it in whatever age. Worldly power and wealth are a constant reality. Throughout the millennia, they never change. They just change hands.
With Constantine’s actions, the church, though called to a much different kind of authority and richness, found itself in league with the very powers that killed Jesus. As the followers of Jesus got a taste for wealthy power, as they begin to share in it, and to benefit from it, they – we – began to turn a blind eye to its corrupt and corrupting ways. We began to protect it, bless it, and even worship it.
The archetypal fall of Adam and Eve has nothing on the Christian church’s very specific fall into the ways and means of worldly empire. This fall dropped us on our heads, and we lost our memory. The word “conquest,” then, began to mean the same thing for the church that it means for every Caesar, Nebuchadnezzar, and Pharaoh of the earth.
But John had said, “Whatever is born of God conquers the world.” He also says that Jesus is the one “born of God.” And he conquers the world through his execution by Rome. Brothers and sisters in Christ, if we are going to claim Christian authority for conquest, our conquest must look like Jesus’ conquest, not Rome’s.
Believing this is a stretch, isn’t it? Some of us cannot believe it at all. We remain comfortably immersed in the worldly waters of rationality and certainty. Part of me swims there now, and I imagine it always will. But the longer I live, the more spacious, God-born part of me finds the oxygen and the visibility beneath those waters insufficient for sustaining God’s abundant life and Love. It is like I had gills, and they are beginning to turn into lungs that crave Spirit and Mystery.
Herein lies the conquest: For Love of God, and in the power of the Spirit, we gulp the air of Resurrection and live lives of faith in Jesus, whom God bore from the very beginning. When we follow Jesus, conquest is not measured in battles won, lands occupied, wealth amassed, and pews filled – indeed, when following Jesus, such things usually become idols to avoid.
Following Jesus teaches us that conquest of the world means living by grace in freedom from the world. And only when freed from the world do we discover true Love for the world. For John, the earth is God’s good creation, and the world is the creation’s rebellion against God. But from the very beginning, all things belong to God.
The psalmist describes it this way: “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.” (Psalm 24:1)
Through faith, we, too, are born of God. We are called to share the fearlessly gracious conquest of Jesus’ life, death and Resurrection. His conquest restores healthy relationships between Creator and creation, and between creatures – between you and me. Jesus’ conquest redeems a frightened and violent world, transforming it into a realm of revelation, healing, and hope.
The world of Caesar and the realm of Jesus stand side-by-side. Only one will last. When you pass back through these doors, may you leap gratefully and joyfully into the Mystery, into God’s New Creation, who’s conquest of Love is still just beginning.

Sunday, May 3, 2015

Sacred Memory (Sermon)


“Sacred Memory”
Psalm 66
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
5/3/15

         I’m Presbyterian through-and-through, and gratefully so. But we “frozen chosen” can certainly learn from our spiritual kindred who embrace the idea of testimony a little more warmly. Now, living in a storytelling atmosphere, Jonesborough Presbyterians may have a slight edge because at its heart, that is exactly what testimony is – storytelling.
         “Come and see what God has done!” cries the psalmist.
He calls specific attention to the Exodus, but Psalm 66 is not directed toward Israel’s story alone. The psalmist turns outward, toward the nations and declares to anyone who will listen the wonderful story of what God has done and is doing for him, for Israel, and for all creation.
         Like much of the storytelling we hear from professional tellers, testimony is more than entertainment. At the heart of testimony lies an intimate and sacred memory of God’s active presence in the world.
         Here’s the rub, though: It is a biased memory. As a library of testimonies, scripture is the collective memory of countless generations of people who claim to have experienced God through all manner of heroes and villains, joys and sorrows, teachings and dreams, things that many people dismiss as wishful thinking, superstition, or even neuroses. It achieves nothing to argue about who is right or wrong on this. Testimonies are faith statements that can no more be proved than disproved, and sharing them can be a little risky. Telling a personal memory in which we claim to have experienced the presence and Love of God can leave us vulnerable to ridicule and self-doubt. Among other things, the psalms affirm those who claim a sacred memory, and they encourage all of us to keep hearts and minds open to the often-hidden but always reliable Yahweh.
         The writer of Psalm 66 praises God for faithfulness and goodness, but his praise does not deny that even the most blessed of lives include experiences of heartbreak, torment even. He praises God for delivering Israel from Pharaoh and shepherding the Hebrews through the wilderness. And he does this with candid but poetic passion because experiences of slavery and exodus are not only painfully real, they are continually real. Each generation of Hebrews learns this for itself, and each generation then learns to sing the words of Psalm 66 for itself.
         “You have tested us. You brought us into the net; you laid burdens on our backs; you let people ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water.”
         The psalmist does not get specific, and that’s intentional. His generalities invite both individuals and communities to remember all their own shadowed and deathly valleys. None of us need reminding that life includes suffering. But we all need reminding that faith is the holy “in spite of” through which we remember and claim God’s presence even when we all we remember feeling is God’s absence. Lament and praise, says the psalmist, are two sides of the same coin.
         Years ago Marianne and I watched a documentary on PBS. The title had hooked us. It was called God Grew Tired of Us, and it tells the story – the nightmare – of the Lost Boys of Sudan. The Lost Boys spent several years wandering the wilderness of east Africa trying to escape their country’s brutal civil war. Their journey from Sudan was part Hebrew Exodus and part Bataan Death March. After some four or five years of wandering, the boys ended up in the Kakuma refugee camp in northern Kenya. Life there was only marginally better, but they were not being tortured and killed.
         In 2001, the US government agreed to help 3600 of the young men relocate to various places in America. The film focuses on three of the Lost Boys, and takes us into their hearts and minds as they wrestle with the profound challenges of transitioning from an impoverished but very community-oriented culture to an environment of individualism and excess. One of the most daunting tasks for many of the Lost Boys was to try to make peace with their new life while remembering both the life they had left behind and their brothers who were still living it.
One of the young men featured in the film is named John Dau. John Dau stands just shy of seven feet tall. He is beanpole thin. He remembers that while the boys were making their horrifying passage, despair caused them feel as if God had grown tired of them, and of all humanity. They felt as if God were just allowing the world to grind to a dark and violent halt.
         John’s height thrust him into a leadership role among the wandering brotherhood. One of his jobs was arranging burials for those who died along the way.
“Imagine,” he says, “Learning to bury at 13. It was very bad. It was very bad.” By the time the boys reached Kenya, their numbers had fallen from 27,000 to 12,000. They buried 15,000 boys, an average of 8 per day.
         “You brought us into the net; you laid burdens on our backs; you let people ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water.”
         The psalmist and the Lost Boys have drunk deeply from the same well of suffering. But suffering is not all they share.
John Dau looks back now and says, “God was with us, anyway.”
The psalmist says, “Yet you have brought us out to a spacious place.”
“A place of abundance,” says the NIV.
“A well-watered place,” says The Message.
         It is not likely that the writer of Psalm 66 experienced the Exodus, but he lived through his own “toils and snares.” Just as the Lost Boys did.  Just as each of us does. We cannot avoid soul-crushing burdens, the confines of nets, the struggles of “fire and water.” Such things are endemic to the human story. And yet, through the holy, “in spite of” lens of faith, we look back and recognize God’s presence even when apparent evidence to the contrary would tempt us to deny it. Faith is the container for our sacred memory. It inspires our testimony, our sacred storytelling.
         “Come and see what God has done; he is awesome in his deeds among mortals. For you have tested us; you have tried us as silver…yet you have brought us out to a spacious place.”
In that spacious place, we have the opportunity to see that trials do not defeat us. Indeed, they may strengthen us, deepen our faith, and make us whole.
         The table before us is set with a foretaste of God’s most spacious and abundant place. It is a place of lament and praise. A place of sacred memory. It is a place where we claim the holy “in spite of” of faith because it is a place of Resurrection. And in the spacious eternity of Christ’s table, there is and will always be room for everyone.