A Sacred Menagerie (Sermon)

“A Sacred Menagerie”

Luke 13:31-35

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

2/28/16

         Herod Antipas is the son of Herod the Great. And he is something of a fox. Cold-hearted. Predatory. He binges on political executions. It is his way of feasting on the herd. Remember, Herod Antipas has John the Baptist for an afternoon snack

         The image of a fox also reaches back into the collective memory of the Jewish people. In the book of Judges, Samson uses a huge skulk of foxes to exact a very creative and destructive revenge.

         Samson marries a Philistine woman, but not for love. He uses her to infiltrate the enemy. During the week of his wedding, Samson deliberately creates such a ruckus that he and his blushing bride separate before they even consummate their marriage.

         Eventually, Samson returns and asks to have his wife back. His father-in-law, in a revealing display of biblical marriage and family values, says, and I quote, “I was sure that you had rejected her; so I gave her to your companion. Is not her younger sister prettier than she? Why not take her instead?” (Judges 15:2)

         The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

         Having manipulated the desired offense, Samson says, “‘This time, when I do mischief to the Philistines, I will be without blame.’

         “⁴So Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took some torches; and he turned the foxes tail to tail, and put a torch between each pair of tails. ⁵When he had set fire to the torches, he let the foxes go into the standing grain of the Philistines, and burned up the shocks and the standing grain, as well as the vineyards and olive groves.”

         When the Philistines learn who is responsible for the attack, they round up Samson’s ex-wife and her father and burn them alive. (Judges 15:4-6)

         The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

         As a fitting metaphor for Herod, a fox represents the status quo of political, social, economic, and religious structures who kill to maintain control of a herd.

         “You must leave immediately,” warn the Pharisees. “Herod has a torch tied to his tail and he’s coming to burn you out!”

         And the Good Shepherd says, ‘Bless his heart, but I must keep doing what I’m doing.’

         Then Jesus, his face already set toward Jerusalem, turns his heart toward the holy city and rips it open in passionate lament.

         “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!”

         Jesus grieves the blindness and the deafness of the people with whom he is so helplessly in love. And then, mixing metaphors, he says, in effect, ‘The fox is in the hen house! And how I wish I could gather you beneath my wings like a mother hen. But you have fallen for the charms of the fox. You have become his willing food, and some of you are even turning into foxes yourselves!’

         Prophetic words and actions often feel like the work of a skulk of foxes. They threaten to disrupt our safety and comfort. The Hebrews learned this long ago. When feeling outfoxed by Moses, they cry out, Why did you lead us into this desert death trap? We would rather have died with full bellies around the fleshpots in Egypt!

         I have to stop and confront a painful reality at this point. When carefully considering my own fears and imperfections, I have to admit to having a lot more fox in me than I want to acknowledge. I am much quicker to find fault, to judge, and even condemn than I am to listen, understand, and forgive. And sometimes I feel that most acutely when I zip myself into this robe and climb into this pulpit.

         So, when I get all turned around and sound like a fox, please forgive me. I really do want to live into, and I want to live out of a much more grateful and generous place. I want that for all of us. And Jesus calls us to this holiness.

         “I tell you,” he says, “you will not see me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’”

         Is Jesus talking about his entry into Jerusalem? Does he refer to Easter? Maybe. Someone in our Sunday School class suggested that to see Christ in one another is to experience the blessed arrival of “the one who comes in the name of the Lord.”

         Matthew’s Jesus says, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

         Can there be any purer, any more prophetic work than learning to see God, to recognize the Eternal Sacred in self, neighbor, stranger, enemy, and earth?

         Like all prophetic texts, the Gospel is not offered to create anxiety about “sins.” No, it invites us to see what can only be seen through repentant and open hearts: The ever-present beauty and the ever-available grace of the Kingdom of God.

God’s kingdom is a kind of menagerie – a menagerie of redemption where Gentile and Jew, rich and poor, male and female, fox and hen are being reconciled. And in the midst of that fragile menagerie, holding it together, the Holy Spirit, the Mother Bird, spreads her wings. She opens our eyes and hearts to the Lord’s Coming One who lives within all things.

         The 19^th century English priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins penned one of my favorite poems, God’s Grandeur. To me, these prophetic, mystical words reveal God’s ongoing work of reconciliation and healing in the Creation. They reveal the peaceable kingdom of God living at the heart of the world’s brokenness.

In closing, and in new beginning, “God’s Grandeur,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

God’s Grandeur

Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.¹

¹http://www.bartleby.com/122/7.html

A Commercial Miracle (Sermon)

“A Commercial Miracle?”

Luke 5:17-26

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

2/21/16

         One of the cultural phenomena surrounding a Super Bowl is the Super Bowl commercial. This year, advertisers willingly paid $5 million per 30-second spot. That’s $166,666.67 per second to hawk beer, cell phones, insurance, or corn chips. Not only are advertisers willing to pay any price, they are willing to exploit just about anyone or anything in the process.

         Fifteen years ago, they tapped into national mourning by having their draft horses kneel before a forever-changed Manhattan skyline.

         This year they hit us with a parade of faces of American veterans – faces that bear the scars of bullets and bombs, flames and fear. They used these faces to suggest that their SUVs can endure similar violence and still keep going. They want us to believe that there is heart and soul beneath those metal hoods to equal the heart and soul behind those war-ravaged, human faces.

         In one of those “Super Bowl Ads You Didn’t See,” a little girl holds a corn chip. She is in a gym watching several men exercise. As in the SUV commercial, all of these men are physically scarred. Each lacks at least one limb, but they are rugged, determined, and driven. The little girl offers a single corn chip to one of the men. He receives it and takes a bite. He stares at the girl with fierce, humorless eyes. The commercial ends with a shot of the child, her face bright and eager. She begins to run – on one crooked leg and one artificial leg.

         All compensation aside, do we comprehend the extent of our economic exploitation of human suffering? Do not battle scars and birth defects mean more than SUVs and snack foods?

         While working with the story of Jesus healing the paralyzed man in Luke 5, I began to wonder how the man himself might feel. He seems to get kind of forgotten. He goes from being a burden carried by friends, to the beneficiary of their efforts, to a source of conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees. I suppose the man, when back on his feet, does not care what we think. Still, we never hear his voice. The story never asks us to empathize with his brokenness. He becomes a kind of commercial for Jesus’ authority over sin and suffering. Or maybe he is a PSA encouraging determined hope. Or maybe a negative ad condemning petty legalism.

Is this just a commercial miracle?

Last week, I came across an interesting voice in the conversation on suffering and purpose. In 2013, Dr. Kate Bowler of Duke Divinity School published a book entitled Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel. A week ago, in a NY Times opinion piece entitled Death, the Prosperity Gospel and Me, Dr. Bowler reflects on her recent, stage 4 cancer diagnosis.

“Blessed,” says Kate Bowler has become a mantra in American religious culture, a culture, she says, “where there are no setbacks, just setups. [And where] Tragedies are simply tests of character.”¹

Shortly after Bowler’s news broke, a neighbor knocked on the door. She had come to say, “Everything happens for a reason.”

“I’d love to hear it,” said Bowler’s husband.

“Pardon?” said the neighbor.

“I’d love to hear the reason my wife is dying,” he said.²

Everything happens for a reason becomes the beer, the cell phone, the SUV, and the bag of life-changing corn chips for sale. It becomes the product we have all been waiting for. And the individual’s suffering becomes the advertisement.

“One of the most endearing and saddest things about being sick,” writes Dr. Bowler, “is watching people’s attempts to make sense of your problem. My academic friends did what researchers do and Googled the hell out of it. When did you start noticing pain? What exactly were the symptoms, again? Is it hereditary? I can out-know my cancer using the Mayo Clinic website. Buried in all their concern is the unspoken question: Do I have any control?

“I can also hear it,” she says, “in all my hippie friends’ attempts to find the most healing kale salad for me. I can eat my way out of cancer. Or, if I were to follow my prosperity gospel friends’ advice, I can positively declare that it has no power over me and set myself free.”³

Like the friends and the Pharisees in Luke 5, Kate Bowler’s friends are trying to manipulate someone else’s narrative by trying to

control perceptions and to force outcomes. One of our favorite means of manipulating control is trying to sell to ourselves and others some reasonable and palatable narrative to make sense of suffering. But such bargaining only distances us from healing.

         In today’s story, I hear Jesus saying, Look, if there is purpose to this man’s condition, it has nothing to do with his friends’ noble efforts or the Pharisees’ theological judgments. It has to do with recognizing God in the midst of suffering.

Walter Bruggemann says that suffering bestows unique authority on those who suffer. This spiritual authority claims the wounds and brokenness and offers them to the world as sources of healing. Jesus embodies authoritative suffering. In Jesus, God does more than suffer for us. God eternally enters human suffering, not to end it, but to redeem it by suffering with us. Shared suffering – com-passion – is God’s healing narrative in, with, and for the creation. And we understand that narrative only to the extent that we enter each other’s suffering – with com-passion.

         When viewed individualistically, suffering becomes a kind of currency. We use it to purchase advantage or to leverage guilt. (Think of how we use words like “heroes” and “martyrs.”) We also use suffering to sell corn chips. When reduced to currency, suffering loses its spiritual and moral authority. It loses its power to heal.

         “If one member [of the body] suffers,” writes Paul, “all suffer with it; [and] if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.” (1Corinthians 12:26)

         Isn’t that what Jesus is after?

“The power of the Lord was with him to heal,” says Luke. And the story truly becomes a healing story not when one man celebrates, but when “amazement” overcomes “all of them, and they glorified God and were filled with awe.”

         I wish I could wave a magic wand and cure cancer, mental illness, bigotry, and poverty. But no one can do that. And even when someone boldly declares that God can, it is hard to argue with someone else who says, “Well, apparently God just doesn’t want to.”

We are not advertisers selling admission to some mythical Shangri-La. We are living witnesses to the paradox of God’s kingdom, that realm where God continually overwhelms us with presence and grace even in the turmoil of the creation’s ongoing suffering.

         According to the prosperity gospel, I am blessed when I have wealth, health, and first-world freedoms. The Gospel of Jesus says we are blessed when no one suffers alone anymore.

         Preachers like to end sermons leaving congregations awestruck at God’s grace. But this story necessarily leaves us thinking, “We have seen strange things today.”

¹www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/opinion/sunday/death-the-prosperity-gospel-and-me.html?_r=1

²Ibid.

³Ibid.

Living into Love (Sermon)

“Living into Love”

2 Corinthians 3

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

2/14/16

         Before reading today’s text, let’s widen our lens for a few moments.

In the final chapter of First Corinthians, Paul promises to make a return visit to Corinth. In the first chapter of Second Corinthians, he tries to explain why that visit never happened. He mentions some trauma in Asia, an “affliction” so dire that Paul and his companions “despaired of life itself.” (2Cor. 1:8) More likely, the missed visit has something to do with a conflict between Paul and a person or a group in the Corinthian church. He stays away to let wounds heal.

         Whatever the case, many in the young church feel hurt and angry. They think Paul is avoiding or even abandoning them. So, Paul writes words of encouragement and healing, words that re-call the Corinthians to the journey of discipleship.

         “Thanks be to God,” says Paul, “who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads to every place the fragrance that comes from knowing him…For we are not peddlers of God’s word like so many; but in Christ we speak as persons of sincerity, as persons sent from God and standing in his presence.” (2Cor. 2:14, 17a, b)

         “Standing in his presence” means trusting the revelations of Incarnation and Resurrection as eternally-spoken affirmations from God.

Remember, after hearing God say, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased,” (Luke 3:22c) Jesus begins to live as God’s fragrant, physically-embodied “I Love You” to the entire Creation. Because we are “joint heirs with Christ,” (Romans 8:17) to stand in his presence is to stand with one another proclaiming God’s 14-billion-year love affair with all that is seen and unseen.

         Affirming the holiness inherent in all things represents a brand new reality, brand new ground that must be traversed with courageous humility. When entered selfishly, holiness becomes the kind of soulless, flag-waving religion preferred by cruel tyrants, well-intentioned kings, and graceless priests alike.

Still, God dares to entrust us with this new ground. As an apostle, Paul recognizes God calling him to hand the stewardship of a patch of that ground, of that dangerously liberating Gospel of Grace, over to the frightened young Christians in Corinth. They may fail, but until they live it, they will never believe it.

         Paul understands the heady affirmation and the overwhelming challenge he is laying on the Corinthians. You can almost see and feel his hands still helping to hold that gospel as he offers it. Something so powerfully transforming can be so easily misused. It is like a mom handing the car keys to her brand new 16-year-old.

         As I read the words of 2Corinthians 3, imagine yourself holding out your hands as if receiving a precious gift. Feel Paul’s hands on your hands, and know that you are standing in Christ’s presence, that God is entrusting you with the Gospel of Grace and with the new life it creates.

2 Corinthians 3

         Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Surely we do not need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you or from you, do we? You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all; and you show that you are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.

Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God. Not that we are competent of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

Now if the ministry of death, chiseled in letters on stone tablets, came in glory so that the people of Israel could not gaze at Moses’ face because of the glory of his face, a glory now set aside, how much more will the ministry of the Spirit come in glory? For if there was glory in the ministry of condemnation, much more does the ministry of justification abound in glory! Indeed, what once had glory has lost its glory because of the greater glory; for if what was set aside came through glory, much more has the permanent come in glory!

Since, then, we have such a hope, we act with great boldness, not like Moses, who put a veil over his face to keep the people of Israel from gazing at the end of the glory that was being set aside. But their minds were hardened. Indeed, to this very day, when they hear the reading of the old covenant, that same veil is still there, since only in Christ is it set aside. Indeed, to this very day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds; but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed.

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.

On his way to Damascus to persecute, in God’s name, that new religious minority called Christians, Saul, the murderous peddler of old words, and ways, and means, receives the gift of enlightenment so suddenly and dramatically it knocks him down and blinds him. Overwhelmed by the presence of Christ, he must be led to Damascus, where the still-skeptical Ananias affirms and challenges Saul. Gingerly handing to the once-vicious Pharisee words of primordial Grace, Ananias says, “Brother Saul,” God has sent me to tell you that you are loved and forgiven. You are called to live and serve as a sign of the presence of Christ in, with and for the world.

Yes, Saul. Even you.

“And immediately,” says Luke, “something like scales fell from [Saul’s] eyes, and his sight was restored.’ (Acts 9:18)

With the veil removed, Saul, now Paul, can read what was written on his own heart long, long ago. He begins to acknowledge that he is indeed “a letter of Christ…written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God.”

In recognizing the Spirit-written holiness in himself, Paul begins to discover it in the rest of the Creation. Part of his gift to the Corinthian church is his un-veiled, clear-eyed vision of their own holiness before God. The Spirit inks that holiness onto all human hearts. The dark days of chiseled, stone-bound absolutes end with the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

Now, this really does not reflect the change that so much of the Church has preached for centuries. Coming from a much longer and deeper tradition than Reformed theology, St. Francis of Assisi taught that Jesus comes not to change God’s mind about humankind. No, Jesus comes to change our minds about God. Good Friday does nothing to appease a furious god, a god so offended by human sin as to be unable to forgive unless someone gets brutally executed. Good Friday reveals God’s presence as active, suffering Love living at the very heart of the world’s violent brokenness.¹

When we distill the gospel into a sacrifice on Calvary that mollifies a creator who has become so distorted by the creation as to be incapable of Love, all that matters, says Richard Rohr, is “the last three days or three hours of [Jesus’] life.”² Friday, then, is all about transforming that god. Only when that god changes do we get our tickets to heaven punched.

Jesus life is far more important than that. That makes our lives more important than verbalizing intellectual assent to a theology before and being “good” until we die. Jesus calls us to experience and to proclaim the Kingdom of God by living as he lived, by living for the sake of the Christ within self, neighbor, enemy, and earth.

If the ancient legends hold any truth, the third century Roman emperor, Claudius, being convinced that unattached men made better soldiers, banned all marriages for the sake of the empire. Convinced that Love and loving commitment to other human beings made for a better world, a Roman bishop named Valentine kept on marrying young men and women. This vile treason stopped only when Claudius had Valentine arrested, stoned, and beheaded.³

Happy Valentine’s Day?

Now, please, do enjoy sharing all those chocolates, roses, and Hallmark haikus today.

Please remember, too, that we cannot confront the world’s brutality, selfishness, greed, and hopelessness by proclaiming an individualistic, “heaven when we die” theology. We confront these evils by trusting that, in the presence of God, whose Spirit has inked Love onto our heart of hearts, we stand on the new ground of God’s here-and-now kingdom.

Trusting this good news teaches us to journey with Christ, to live as he lives; gratefully, generously, compassionately, and with, as one friend of mine says, “radical, scandalous Love.”

Now, Happy Valentine’s Day.

¹ http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?ca=2b0f5eaf-df1a-4470-9670-852ead1104bd&c=c98d6b50-eefa-11e3-853a-d4ae52754b78&ch=ca496850-eefa-11e3-8596-d4ae52754b78

²Ibid.

³http://www.novareinna.com/festive/saintval.html

The Farm (Sermon)

“The Farm”

Psalm 19

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

2/7/16

         One of my favorite places on earth is The Farm. For me, The Farm is about 260 acres of sandy fields and thick pine forest down in Screven County, GA. Most of The Farm, which has been in my wife’s family for about sixty years, sits on the north side of Captola Road about two miles from Double Heads and four miles from Ditch Pond – if that helps. Now, if you rode by The Farm today, you would be underwhelmed. Like so many places and people, it becomes remarkable only through relationship.

         I am wannabe progeny of The Farm, but for those who actually call The Farm home, those two words can reach deep into your being. When two Farm-raised strangers meet, they often share an immediate bond. They see, feel, and understand things that folks like me, who grew up in The Subdivision, will never fully appreciate. The Farm speaks and teaches a language for which there are words, but for which words are not always necessary.

          “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims [God’s] handiwork…There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth.” (Psalm 19:1, 3-4)

         The psalmist declares that the creation itself is The Farm. The earth speaks a language of invitation and admonition, of celebration and lament. And like the sun, faithful in its “rising…from the end of the heavens, and its circuit to the end of them,” this Earth Farm speaks a dependable, durable truth. It leaves nothing out of its enlightening reach.

         For the psalmist, that language is also heard in the perfect, soul-reviving “law of the Lord.” It seems to me that the Church has often treated the law like corporate farming has treated the land – not as a gift to be stewarded but as a resource to be exploited as a means to wealth and power. But God does not give the law to Israel so that the people might claim exclusive rights to the One who “set a tent for the sun” in the heavens. God gives the law for the same reason God calls Abram: So that “in you all families of the earth will be blessed.” (Genesis 12:3c)

         During the exile in Egypt, the Hebrews begin to forget their unique vocation. God calls Moses to lead them back toward blessing – back to The Farm. God does not intend the law to serve as a fence to separate sheep from goats, but as the topsoil of blessing. From this fertile loam God feeds them both on the rich harvests of relationship. Forgiving all its rigidity and even brutality, the Mosaic law becomes God’s structured declaration that the experience of being blessed is inseparable from the act of living as a blessing for friend, enemy, and earth alike.

Humankind demonstrates a short memory for blessedness. The psalmist’s “fear of the Lord” refers to a creature’s response of awe before the Creator. But this holy fear often gets replaced with the treacherous fear of neighbor, a fear that reduces us from a blessing to a scourge slashing and burning its way not to relationship, but to power. And power is not a farmer and a neighbor. Power is a slave owner and a competitor.

In his NY Times bestseller, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, Stephen Ambrose describes the agricultural practices of Lewis’ and Jefferson’s home state of Virginia. His stark picture destroys any romantic images we may have left of plantation life at the turn of the 19^th century.

“No member of the Virginia gentry [stooped to] plant or harvest with their own hands,” says Ambrose.¹ Their principal concern was to get more land, not to care for what they had. In many cases, trees were not even harvested. They were girded and left to die in place. This allowed sunlight to reach through the lifeless, leafless branches to the shallow plantings of tobacco below. Within three years, tobacco’s demands depleted the soil, and the land was abandoned.

“Tobacco culture,” says Ambrose, “represented an all-out assault on the environment for the sake of a crop that did no good and much harm to people’s health as well as to the land, not to mention the political and moral effects of relying on slavery for a labor force.”²

Suddenly, westward expansion becomes a kind of mudslide, the dis-graceful, improvident, and inevitable result of greed and excess.

Even the learned Jefferson remained blind – perhaps willfully so – to the alternative that lay right under his nose.

Again, quoting Ambrose: “German immigrants, farming in the Shenandoah Valley, had a much different relationship with the land...[Not having been granted land by England], they had bought their land, in relatively small holdings. Coming from a country with a tradition of keeping the farm in the same family for generations…they were in it for the long haul, not for quick profit. They cleared their fields of all trees and stumps, plowed deep to arrest erosion…used manure as fertilizer, and practiced…crop rotation. They worked with their own hands, and their help came from [family]…No overseer, indentured servant, or slave – men with little interest in the precious undertaking of making a family farm – was allowed near their fields.”³

Having come to Virginia by way of Quaker and Amish communities in Pennsylvania, these Germans farmed by following a much more gracious “law.” Their love of neighbor and respect for the land illustrate the difference between “blessed to be a blessing” and “to the victor go the spoils.”

Not all of us have experienced farm life as such. And I imagine that many of us feel grateful for that. But we are all family on The Farm, God’s here-and-now Kingdom being revealed through spirited relationship with this earth, this soil, this water, this sky, this town, these neighbors sitting with us in this moment.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” says Proverbs. (Prov. 9:10) Four verses earlier we read this: “Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity, and live.” (Prov. 9:5-6a)

Long before Bethlehem, the table of grace was being set. And now the Harvest, the gifts of of unfettered grace, lie on this table before us.

“More to be desired are they than gold…sweeter also than honey.”

¹Stephen E. Ambrose, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, Simon and Schuster, 1996. p. 32.

²Ibid., p. 33.

³Ibid., p. 33.