Striving for the Kingdom (Sermon)

“Striving for the Kingdom”

Luke 12:22-34

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

10/2/16

         Today’s passage often gets cited by people who want to connect with the beloved Hippie Jesus – the Jesus who sits in the middle of a Monet painting smelling flowers, watching birds, and saying, “Dude! It’s all good! Just chill!

         Jesus does say not to worry about physical things, but we’re human beings. Unlike ravens, lilies, and alfalfa whose consciousness happens almost entirely on instinctive and cellular levels, you and I must deliberately toil and spin. So it’s a matter of how we approach our lives. Do we live humbly and gratefully, creatively and generously, faithfully and hopefully? Or do we let selfish and prideful fear drive us? In this case, fear refers not to the fear of not having enough, but the fear of not having the excess which first-world denizens like us have learned to consider necessity.

         I think fear is the great wound of humankind. It always has been, perhaps, and the relentless spotlighting of violent realties from Tulsa to Charlotte to Paris to Aleppo to South Sudan to whatever hides in our closets and lurks under our beds – all of these things can make us terrified of living, terrified of those with whom we live.

It’s hard to say what poses the greatest terror threat – fundamentalism (whether religious, political, or otherwise), selfishness, or simple ignorance. Worldly kingdoms trust intimidation. They love coercion, manipulation, and every other Machiavellian means of the self-perpetuating currency of fear.

When living in fear, human beings concentrate on one thing – ourselves. We worry about what to eat, what to wear, who threatens our privilege, and when the next iPhone comes out. We strive not for gratitude or contentment, but for certainty and excess. We stockpile it, guard it, even kill for it, and all the while thanking God for “our many blessings.” Excess represents some fictitious storehouse that I expect will feed and clothe me forever, as if somehow I will last forever.

In one episode of the PBS series “Downton Abbey,” the Dowager Countess, played to exquisite perfection by Maggie Smith, stands before a splendid dinner table in the waning years of the old British aristocracy. The table is set to try to persuade a rich American to bail out the foundering estate. The ancient aristocrat looks at the table and says with gusto, “Nothing succeeds like excess!”

A spoiled and fearful Anglican, she has completely missed – or dismissed – Jesus’ point: In their time, ravens, lilies, and the grass of the field receive and thrive on God’s gracious provision. And in the fullness of their time, they go to seed and die - as did the Dowager Countess’ hopes.

         “Strive for [God’s] kingdom,” says Jesus. Strive to live differently here and now. Strive to live in the realm of grace, receiving that which you cannot hoard, because you cannot fully receive it except through sharing it.

In Luke 17, some Pharisees hound Jesus about the arrival of the kingdom. “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed,” says Jesus, “nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.” (Luke 17:20b-21) “Among you” can also be translated “within you.”

Striving for God’s kingdom entails infinitely more than trying to secure a spot in some post-mortem paradise. Striving for God’s kingdom means living the new life that Jesus reveals here and now. This kingdom cannot be measured in the ways we measure scarcity, adequacy, and excess. It’s not about gifts given to us for our individual benefit, but gifts given through us for the benefit of all. That means that it’s about relationship – Jesus-style relationship, face-to-face, concrete relationship that transcends the flighty, nebulous, Just Love Everybody philosophy, which, ironically, tends to distance us from real Justice, agape Love, and pretty much Everybody.

When Jesus says, “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,” he challenges us to treasure ourselves and the particular person or persons before us in a particular moment. He challenges us to open our hearts to them, to be present to them humbly, gratefully, and generously.

         We are thriving now, and just like the old British aristocracy, just like last summer’s crops, we are going to die. Will our lives have been worth living? Will we have received and shared with faith, hope, and Love? Or will we have striven in fear, judging our quality of our lives by the quantity of our consumption?

In a poem entitled “When Death Comes,” Mary Oliver writes:

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don't want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,

or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.¹

         We are more than visitors. We are treasured co-creators with God, ones in and through whom God’s kingdom dwells.

¹https://keeleymilne.com/

If You Knew the Gift (Sermon)

“If You Knew the Gift”

John 4:1-15

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

9/18/16

         “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world,” but to save, to heal, and to redeem the world. Because of that, the Son is constantly working his way into and through some sort of tension or conflict. Sometimes it’s petty and momentary, as when disciples jockey for designations of greatness. More often, though, Jesus wades into divisions wide as oceans and wounds deep as time itself.

         While in Judea, Jesus hears gossip that he and his disciples are rapidly gaining followers. Knowing that this will worry the Pharisees in Galilee, he turns north. He heads homeward, into the maw of the Pharisees’ indignation. Nothing says I love you like sitting calmly, gratefully, and generously in the midst of someone else’s anger or fear, even when they project all that anguish onto you.

         Jesus knows that the Pharisees will feel threatened by reports of his evangelical success. Competitive spiritualities have almost everything in common with competitive economies – jealousy, envy, resentment, greed, entitlement, lust for power. Remember Cain and Abel. While the wound is deep, the gift is deeper.

Along the way, Jesus stops at the Samaritan town of Sychar. For all who claim ancient Hebrew roots – and that means the Jews of Samaria and the Jews of Judea and Galilee – Sychar is a storied town. It claims the well that, according to the claims of various histories, was dug on land that tradition claims to have been Jacob’s gift to his favorite son, Joseph. Like centuries of sand layered over the ruins of an ancient synagogue, all those layers of conflicting claims seem to have buried the giftedness of the well and the very idea of gift itself.

         Jesus knows that the woman he meets at the well feels threatened by a lone man speaking to her in a public place. Remember Adam and Eve’s exit from the garden. Enmity between the snake and the woman is nothing compared to the way that story has been used to separate women from men. It’s been used to strip women of their basic humanity, of their innate giftedness as creatures made in the image of God. While that wound is still deep, the gift is deeper.

         The Samaritans and the Jews have been at odds for generations. Even in Jesus’ day there’s no consistent story as to why these spiritual siblings live in such animosity, but somewhere along the line, the Samaritans left or got removed. Now both groups teach their children to live in suspicion and fear of the other rather than sticking to the all-claiming commandment: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone…Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words…Recite them to your children and talk about them.” (Deut. 6:4-6a, 7a)

         Whenever and however it began, the wound separating the Jews of Mt. Zion from the Jews of Mt. Gerizim is deep. But the gift – the gift to them and the gift of them – runs deeper still. And the well at the Samaritan town of Sychar, that hole dug deep into the ground from which nourishing water has flowed for untold centuries, represents both wound and gift.

Isn’t it just like Jesus – to show up right in the middle of our and the world’s deepest wounds? And there, in one way or another, he says to us, “If you knew the gift of God” in this place, you would find living, healing, redeeming water.

That’s easy for a preacher to say from a comfortable pulpit in a comfortable town in a culture that’s about as comfortable as one can find on this planet. But when plagued by some kind of dis-comfort – grief, fear, physical pain, emotional turmoil, vocational upheaval, or simply the dull and dulling ache of existential drift – it is very difficult to accept that there can even be a gift. The presence of a gift would suggest that there is grace, meaning, and hope wrapped up in what feels like the arbitrary torment, relentless drudgery, and occasional pleasure of all this chaos into which we have been thrust by no choice of our own.

The Samaritan woman certainly doubts Jesus’ pie-in-the-sky optimism. Life has gifted her with everything but joy. She’s on her sixth husband, for heaven’s sake. And she’s a woman of Samaria. If she gets caught talking to a Galilean rabbi, she will be the one branded as morally suspect. Where could there possibly be grace, meaning, and hope in her life? What “gift of God” could there possibly be for her to know?

Last Wednesday night our book group read the fourth chapter of Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward. As the epigraph to that chapter, which he entitled “The Tragic Sense of Life,” Rohr quotes writer and feral mystic Annie Dillard. “In the deeps,” says Dillard, “are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our science cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest…” She calls it “the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together…This is given,” she says. “It is not learned.”¹

In place of “ocean or matrix or ether,” we can read the well, the gift of our “caring for each other, and for our life together.” Remember, the well beside which Jesus and the Samaritan woman talk is the well gifted to Joseph. And according to shared tradition, Joseph draws up buckets of Living Water from his brothers’ treachery. “Even though you intended to do harm to me,” he says, “God intended it for good.” (Gen. 50:20)

Joseph rides his monsters downward into “the deeps [of] violence and terror,” and there he discovers Living Water, a gift not only to receive, but to give in gratuitous measure, even and especially to those who had plotted violence against him and who had lied to cover it up.

Like Joseph’s brothers and the Samaritan woman, we are struggling with irksome individuals and distressing circumstances. What will we do? Will we follow anxious “messiahs” who separate us ever further from our neighbors and the creation by encouraging us to judge the sinners and to dismiss the sacredness of the earth? Hasn’t the Church has done more than enough of that over the millennia?

I think Jesus is calling us to the difficult but rewarding discipleship of riding today’s monsters down – like Joseph in Egypt, like Jacob at the Jabbok, like Jesus on Good Friday. A Jesus-life is all about riding monsters down into the depths and discovering there the Living Water that God is using to unite the creation in “complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together.” And when we come to know the gift of God, we know that we are both receivers and givers of God’s re-unifying gift of grace.

I agree with Annie Dillard. This gift is given, not learned. Still, to know the generous measure of this gift, God does more than give it to us. God calls us to do more than claim it and enjoy it. God calls us to be stewards of the gift, to nurture it, to practice it, to live as fountains of Living Water, grateful and generous sharers of Agape Love. Which is everywhere.^*

¹Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2011. p. xviii. (Quoting Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk.)

^*This sermon never felt finished to me. To acknowledge what I imagined others must have felt, I issued a charge at the end of the service saying that I felt like a tour guide who had led them to the front walkway of a house and said, “This is a really interesting house. Cool stuff is going on in there. But I’m not going to take you inside.” There is, indeed, fascinating and significant stuff going on in that house, and while it’s a universal reality, the experience is different for all of us. It’s a story that’s been told and lived thousands of times. It’s one version of the hero’s journey, and we all have to identify and ride our own monsters down. Then and there will we begin to discover the Living Water and the gifts it offers us to enjoy and to share.

Rejoice with Me (Sermon)

“Rejoice with Me”

Luke 15:1-10

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

9/11/16

        

“And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling…”

         Pharisees and scribes are always grumbling. Always complaining about someone. They always seem so sure that they have not only the ability to discern the sheep from the goats, but the right to judge between them. And they have no doubt that they are sheep – the ones to whom joy and blessedness belong. Being stingy with these gifts, the scribes and Pharisees must believe that to share something of value is to forfeit the benefit to which they feel entitled. Isn’t that a cold and joyless blessedness?

         “Margaret” was very bright, very well-read, and well-spoken. She and her husband had retired to North Carolina and brought their two grown, un-launched sons with them. Of the four, only Margaret participated in church. I loved to watch her while I preached. When I said something funny, she’d beam. If she found something challenging, she’d crease her brow in thoughtful reflection. And when I went on too long, or said something carelessly, or said something stupid, she would cringe with her whole body. She cringed a lot back then.

         Agreeing on many things, Margaret and I were pretty good friends. She was, however, a bit more broadminded than some in that congregation could appreciate. Moreover, she came from New Jersey.

One year the nominating committee asked Margaret to serve as an elder. She eagerly accepted the nomination. On the day of the vote, I was blindsided by a nomination from the floor. A long-time member of the congregation was added to the slate. When the vote was over, he was on session. Margaret was not.

I will never forget the profound disappointment and utter embarrassment that darkened Margaret’s face when the results were announced. I, too, felt surprised and betrayed by the entirely legal but flagrant piracy that cast Margaret to the margins of the church community. To her enduring credit, about a year later, she returned. Apparently, while the experience wounded and humiliated Margaret, it did not steal her joy – at least not permanently.

It seems to me now that Margaret does not represent the one lost sheep. No, she represents the ninety-nine sheep left in the wilderness while the shepherd goes in search of the one who is lost. While Margaret recovered from a kind of crucifixion carried out by an ignorance that followed the letter but not the spirit of the Book of Order, the congregation, like lost a sheep wandered willfully astray of grace. Like a lost coin, the congregation rolled haphazardly into some dark corner of the house.

The community, part of it, anyway, had been Judased by the illusion of living in wholeness without embracing the fullness of God’s presence. Looking back on that painful experience, I think Margaret’s return was her acceptance of God’s invitation to “Rejoice with me, for I have found [what was] lost.”

When she returned, Margaret brought a full complement of smiles, creases, and cringes with her. She brought her joy with her. And she brought it to share with, to bless once again the very people who had refused to recognize it as a gift from God.

In the west, the Church is shrinking. It is losing its privileged status. Even worse, having snuggled with wealth and power too closely and too long, the Church has virtually lost its identity in Christ. Until very recently, a majority of American Christians was taught, in ways both subtle and overt, that national citizenship and church membership were basically synonymous.

Many active Christians my age and older desperately miss the vibrancy of yesteryear. And while there was a vibrancy, it seems to me that we often equated numbers with liveliness and health. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to need folding chairs in the aisles on Sunday mornings. I would love for the youth room to need open windows on a Sunday night in January just to keep the inside air fresh. And indeed, this congregation is moving forward with plans to renovate and expand our building in response to an increasing need for space. Many of us find that encouraging and exciting. And I think that as Jonesborough Presbyterian moves forward in our effort, we would do well to imagine ourselves not as the flock to whom lost sheep are being returned, but as one of the lost sheep being restored.

If the Church is to experience renewal, I think we have to begin with confession. I think we have to admit that we have mistaken the height of steeples for depth of faith. We have mistaken cultural influence for spiritual vitality, budgetary abundance for communal wholeness. We have mistaken the commotion of busyness for the shimmering wonder of joy.

In many ways we have, I think, lost our capacity for joy. But remember, joy is so much more than happiness and contentment. Joy is the blessing borne of a circumstance-defying commitment to hope. The nature of both joy and blessedness is such that they cannot be experienced by anyone who would withhold them from others. Paradoxically, blessedness also comes as the gift of sharing sorrow, pain, and disappointment. Indeed, joy may never be so abundant as when sharing our tears and fears.

If the word joy gets misunderstood, the word blessed gets abused in our first-world context. We tend to claim blessedness when enjoying comfort and advantage, but we are never blessed simply by having something of value. Authentic blessedness comes as the gift of sharing that valuable thing. When and if we build an addition, Jonesborough Presbyterian cannot claim blessedness simply by the fact that it exists. Any true blessedness we experience will be in direct proportion to how we use and offer it for the well-being of the creation.

Brothers and sisters, in these trying, often scary days, we can circle our wagons. We can try to control things, or to retreat to a past that will never come again. To experience genuine and lasting renewal, however, I think we must listen first for God’s searching voice, calling us back to the way of Jesus. And to me that means the way of welcoming and risky grace, the way of healing mercy. It means following the way of holy mystery in a culture withered by fear of the unknown, a culture divided by angry condemnations of the other, a culture awash in simplistic, tweetable certainties.

But what if God is stirring about the dust and the mud once again? What if even now God is breathing into the creation brand new life and possibility? If this is happening, and I think it is, we are lost sheep being returned to the fold, and we are the fold being dared to hear God saying to us, “Rejoice with me!”

Re-joice! Recognize and share new joy!

This is our calling: To join Jesus, Margaret, and so many others in giving brand new thanks and praise to the ever new and renewing God.

The Knowledge of Love (Sermon)

“The Knowledge of Love”

Psalm 139:1-18

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

9/4/16

         Almost every teacher who has ever stood in front of a classroom has been interrupted only to hear that most disheartening question: “Is this going to be on the test?” I both asked it and heard it.

I wonder. Did we doom ourselves to this question by failing to answer convincingly the more fundamental question: What is the point of learning? Why do we have to learn about ancient Rome and contemporary America? Why do we have to learn algebra and the Pythagorean Theorem? Why do we have to learn Homer, Shakespeare, and Faulkner? Why do we need to know the difference between DNA and GDP?

         When middle and high schoolers asked me such questions, I just regurgitated the party line with all the mind-numbing dullness with which it had been regurgitated to me. “You need to learn this information in order to learn how to learn,” I said. “You need an education to get a good job.” And while these answers are not altogether wrong, they’re just nebulous and oh, so uninspired – and uninspiring. It seems that a teacher would fare no worse for having said, “Learn it because I’m the teacher, and I said so. Besides, if you don’t, you fail.”

         In his book To Know as We Are Known: A Spirituality of Education, Parker J. Palmer says that two principal things have driven humankind’s quest for knowledge. First, simple curiosity motivates much learning. Palmer calls curiosity “an amoral passion”¹ because by itself, curiosity leads us toward knowledge for its own sake and leaves us disconnected from deeper and wider purpose.

         The second and more powerful driver is control. “Control,” says Palmer, “is simply another word for power, a passion notorious not only for its amorality but for its tendency toward corruption.”² Reducing knowledge to power inevitably reduces both that knowledge and the entire created order to means to an end. So, all things, animate and inanimate, become assets to be exploited or competitors to be defeated.

         When not grounded in something deeper, curiosity compels us to do nothing more than to “learn how to learn.” And control only prepares us to make money at any cost. Such learning diminishes and dis-integrates everyone and everything around us. And when we diminish and dis-integrate our world, we destroy ourselves, as well.

         Palmer suggests a third source of knowledge, a source “that begins in a different passion and is drawn toward other ends.” This differently-acquired knowledge does not lack for hard information and playful theory. It does, however, guide us toward truth and wholeness that curiosity and control cannot offer.³

         “Our spiritual tradition,” says Palmer, claims that “the origin of knowledge is love. The deepest wellspring of our desire to know is the passion to recreate the organic community in which the world was first created.”⁴

         When guided by Love, the goal of learning and knowing is healing and restoration. It is to re-connect ourselves to the deepest truths within and about us, and to re-connect to those same truths within and about the rest of humanity, and the rest of the creation. To experience that reconnection is to Know and to Love God.

         Such Love, says Palmer, “is not a soft and sentimental virtue.” It’s the tough, sinewy, “connective tissue of reality.” It lays permanent claim to us and often makes disturbing demands on us. It calls and equips us to be known and knowable Love in and for the sake of the world.⁵

         Parker Palmer is not the first to connect Knowledge and Love. Indeed, the title of his book comes from Paul’s observation, “Now I know only in part, then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” (1Cor. 13:12b) Paul includes this insight in the same chapter in which he writes, “If I have…all knowledge…but have not love, I am nothing.”

         It’s useless to argue it, but it’s easy to imagine Paul writing 1Corinthians 13 after having just mediated on Psalm 139: “O Lord, you have searched me and known me.” God learns and knows the psalmist. God’s knowledge is deeper than time itself. “My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being…intricately woven in the depths of the earth.”

         The psalmist knows that God knows that there is more to each of us than meets any human eye. God knowingly loves us before we are physical realities to encounter in the world. The psalmist knows that in God, then and there get swept up in here and now. Heaven and Sheol, daylight and darkness, yesterday and tomorrow – God is not simply present to us in all of this, we are present in God in all of this. To “know fully, even as we have been fully known” is to inhabit the timeless consciousness that is God – who is Love.

         The psalmist bears witness to the Love Knowledge God not only has for us, but the kind of Love Knowledge God has in store for us as we begin learning to love the Love that loves us and to know the Knowledge that knows us.

Doug Elliott is one of my favorite storytellers to come to Jonesborough. Doug lives with his wife and son on a small, off-the-grid farm in the Western NC foothills where every day he continues his relentless, joyous, and impassioned study of and interaction with the natural world. Quiet and unpretentious, Doug radiates the kind of humility, gentleness, awareness, and patience I associate with a community elder, one who learns out of wonderstruck Love for the creation and who shares that knowledge out of grateful and hopeful Love for his neighbors. And Doug Elliott’s neighborhood is truly all-inclusive.

         “We’re all part of this miracle of creation,” he says. “And sometimes I think that my desire to know about all these creatures is part of wanting to know myself…I’m looking for the stories that connect those critters to us…Part of my passion is trying to find more points of contact.”⁶

         I hear Doug saying: My passion is learning for the sake of loving, because true Knowledge and true Love are inseparable.

It seems to me that the church has reduced God’s omniscience, God’s all-knowingness into mere prescience, into God’s present awareness of future events. I think the psalmist reveals a much more transforming Knowledge. Seeing to the eternal core of the creation, God knows the wholeness, the fullness of who we are. And we discover that wholeness and fullness by Knowing and Loving our communion with people, animals, plants, water, the soil, and even the rocks themselves, who, Jesus says, “will shout out” if his followers don’t.

In Christ, God reveals that while not all is perfect, all is being redeemed in God’s Knowledge and Love.

         In a few minutes we’ll gather around Christ’s table to commune with him and with each other. As you pass the bread and the cup, I invite you to say to the person next to you: Know that you are Loved.

¹To Know as We Are Known: A Spirituality of Education, Harper Collins, San Francisco, 1983. p. 8.

²Ibid. p 8.

³Ibid. p.8

⁴Ibid. p.8

⁵Ibid. p.9

⁶https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PeJFbC-_KI

⁷Ibid.