Joseph Awoke (Sermon for Advent 4)

“Joseph Awoke”

Matthew 1:18-25

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

12/18/16 – Advent 4

         When thinking of Joseph, many of us imagine him as upright, just, compassionate, and faithful. When our Sunday school class looked at this story, though, one person asked a question that cast some doubt on Joseph – not on his integrity so much, but on whether or not this carpenter was the sharpest chisel in the tool box.

         Obvious things are happening to Mary to whom Joseph is essentially married. In his shoes, any of us would feel betrayed. I think we’d fully understand his desire to divorce Mary, but it’s divorcing her in order to spare her “public disgrace” that gets troublesome.

         How, asked the person in the Sunday school class, could Joseph possibly think that divorcing Mary will save her from shame and humiliation?

         If Joseph divorces Mary, where can she go that will be safer than by his side? A poor, unwed, Jewish mother in first century Palestine has no attractive options. If the community does not execute her, then she may be able to survive – by begging or by, well, remunerative promiscuity. Joseph knows this, so how is even a “quiet” divorce righteousness?

         Still, who can blame Joseph for wanting to disappear into the shadows? Even God seems to understand Joseph’s quandary. So, “an angel of the Lord” visits Joseph in a dream and urges the cuckolded carpenter not to be afraid.

‘Go ahead and get married,’ says the angel. ‘Your wife will have a son, and you name him Jesus. He has important God-work to do.’

         How does Joseph process all of this? Where does he find the spiritual vigor to accept the bizarre counsel of his dream?

         Both Matthew and Luke include genealogies of Jesus. And while they differ significantly, they both affirm Joseph’s thoroughly Jewish ancestry. Among the implications of the genealogies is that Joseph knows the Hebrew scriptures. And among those writings is the relatively short but extraordinary prophecy of Hosea, who, like Joseph, gets married at God’s command.

         Hosea marries Gomer. The couple has a strained relationship at best, because Gomer was and continues to be a professional in the field of remunerative promiscuity. And she won’t allow something as trivial as a husband to threaten her career. But God calls the prophet to incarnate in his marriage to the unfaithful Gomer an example of God’s faithfulness to unfaithful Israel. Through all the frustration, anger, and hurt both God and Hosea remain steadfast.

         If it seems a stretch to bring Hosea into a meditation on Joseph, remember, in another dream, God tells Joseph to take Jesus and Mary to Egypt to escape the homicidal fear and vanity of King Herod. Learning to trust such things, Joseph does as he’s told. And in Matthew 2:15 we read, “This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt I have called my son.’”

         In the eleventh chapter of Hosea, God begins to declare forgiveness and restoration on Israel. The first verse of that pivotal chapter reads: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I have called my son.”

         The final chapter of Hosea includes this promise: “I will heal their disloyalty…They shall again live beneath my shadow, they shall flourish as a garden…Those who are wise understand these things; those who are discerning know them. For the ways of the Lord are right, and the upright walk in them.” (Hosea 14, selected verses beginning with v. 4)

         Raised not only with the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but also with the prophesies of Hosea and Isaiah, Joseph finds within himself a deep river of wisdom, discernment, righteousness, and trust.

Dreams can do that for us. They can awaken us to the transforming realities, understandings, and strength flowing deep within us. And that river is always there, always ready for us to be ready for it.

Joseph awakens not simply from sleep, but he awakens to new possibilities in and for his own life, for Mary’s life, for Jesus’ life, and for our lives.

         Awakening. Birth. New birth. These are all metaphors for the same act of grace that awakens us to a dimension of life that exists alongside and within all that appears to be real, all that appears to be decided and final. As Christians, we call that dimension of life the Kingdom of God. And at Christmas, we make the audacious, scandalous claim that God incarnates the Kingdom in the particular person, the particular life of Jesus of Nazareth.

         Now, this is pure gift, pure grace. And “Nothing,” John Wesley said, “is more repugnant to capable, reasonable people than grace.”¹ Grace offends and threatens our increasingly Herodian culture, whose true religion is a merit-based economy, and whose true worship requires consumption and violence.

When unable to process the absolute grace of Christmas, we go physically numb with excess. We eat too much. We spend too much. People who don’t know how to receive such a gift can only exchange presents. You got yours. I got mine. So, we’re even, right? In these exchanges, both generosity and gratitude are all but destroyed.

         An exchange-based Christmas may temporarily satisfy a few wants. True Christmas, however, declares God’s eternal presence in and reviving affirmation of the physical world. It rousts us from selfish nightmares and awakens us to God’s dream for all that God has made. Christmas challenges us to accept a giftedness that conceives a gratitude that gives birth to a generosity that bears witness to the Incarnate Love that heals, enlightens, and resurrects God’s Creation.

When God reminds Joseph of the life-giving river of his own storied faith, the mystified carpenter awakens to the gift of a new giftedness. He receives and begins to unwrap and claim his unchosen and unearned fatherhood.

True Christmas asks things of us that only the grace of God can deliver to us – a fearless trust, a commitment to compassion, and an active justice on behalf of neighbors and an earth under assault by the Herods of the world.

This Christmas, may we all awaken from whatever sugar-plum dreams have anesthetized us to the freeing call of grace. And may we awaken to the Holy Christ who is being born afresh within us even now, for we all have important God-work to do.

¹This quotation appears in the book Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas. The selection is entitled “The God We Hardly Knew” by William Willimon. Plough Publishing, 2001. Pp. 141-149.

Remove the Fuel (Sermon for Advent 2)

“Remove the Fuel”

Matthew 3:1-12

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

12/4/16 – Advent 2

         After weeks of choking on the gray haze of forest fires, and after watching videos of flames consuming Gatlinburg, Lake Lure, and precious woodlands close to home, I almost laid this text aside. John the Baptist ignites the early chapters of the synoptic Gospels with images of fire. And he appears to blister his audience with menacing, even vengeful proclamations.

Over the centuries, the Church seems to have taken its homiletical and evangelical cues from a corruption of John’s prophetic firestorm more than from an embrace of Jesus’ outpouring of Living Water. Jesus calls us to wade courageously into the darkness where the voiceless poor, despised, and forgotten cry for help. He calls the Church to be an eternal flame that reveals God’s creative presence and redeeming activity in and for the world.

Under the influence of wealth and power, though, the Church has built contiguous perimeter fires of self-preservation that shed more in the way of raging heat than guiding light. Inside this self-made hell, we’ve done far too much to point fingers at broods of vipers and to pronounce judgment on useless chaff. Much of the Church’s own fruit, then, has been preaching and practice that aims to terrify people into a scorched and withering conformity rather than to invite one another to gather at the fertile riverbank of shared gratitude, holiness, and wholeness.

         Thanks be to God for Advent, the preparatory season that reminds us that fire does more than destroy. Fire can purify – as you might purify a needle before digging a splinter out of your finger. Fire can refine – as gold is refined to remove baser metals and stone. Fire transforms, too. It takes many years to experience the full effect, of course, but forest fires tend to hit a kind of reset button on an ecosystem. And isn’t that what repentance is all about? Resetting hearts overgrown with deadfall and invasive species?

         Janisse Ray is an environmentalist and writer who inhabits – in body and spirit – the ecology of the longleaf pine forests of the deep south. In her book Wild Card Quilt: The Ecology of Home, she writes that the entire “intricate and intriguing ecosystem [of the longleaf pine] is…bound to fire…Periodic wildfires thwart the encroachment of hardwoods such as oak and sweetgum into the pinelands, so the trees have evolved not only to survive fire but to depend on it.”¹

Beneath the longleaf pines grows a particular kind of grass called wiregrass. “Wiregrass,” says Ray, “has evolved toward flammability to help push fire quickly through the forest, and it needs burning in order to reproduce well. Some of the [flowers] that grow with wiregrass won’t even seed unless they have been scored by fire.”²

         Now, I know that the fires on which longleaf pine forests depend have almost nothing in common with wildfires started by human ignorance and criminal intent. And I do not presume to say that those fires have the same “ancestor.” Nonetheless, from stones and ashes alike, God raises new life and new hope.

         Even in Advent, Sunday worship celebrates first and foremost the promise of Resurrection. And while John does seem to strike steel to flint with inflammatory warnings, I think he is really, whether he knows it or not, shining a light on the conflagration of grace. Speaking of the more powerful one who is on the verge of arrival, John says, “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

         Since the Exodus, flame has served as a symbol for the presence of God. Remember the burning bush. At Pentecost, flame becomes the specific symbol for the presence and the refining work of God the Holy Spirit. So, even if John holds the feet of Pharisees and Sadducees to the fire, frightening and shaming them – and others – toward repentance, his announcement of the coming of the Christ declares that God always intends healing and wholeness for the Creation.

For three years, I was a part-time firefighter down in Statesboro, GA. Don’t be impressed. I should have had a big sign on my turnout gear that said, “Hose Roller.” With few exceptions, that was the extent of my contribution. At one of our drills, the director of the local Forestry Commission came and talked to us about wildfire suppression. Things may have changed since then, but at the time, the principal strategy used in fighting wildfires was to remove the fuel. To stop the progression of a burn, firefighters would get ahead of the fire, cut trees, harrow fire breaks, and then start controlled burns that would burn back to the fire line where the two fires would simply extinguish each other for lack of fuel. In the absence of draught and 80 mile-per-hour winds, such tactics usually worked.

John’s baptism of repentance is an act of removing the fuel. In repentance, we deliberately burn away the attitudes and judgments that reduce us to arsonists. We singe off all our pride, greed, fear, vengeance, and despair. Such incendiary rubbish fuels today’s most devastating firestorms.

Having said that, we cannot earn God’s mercy. So, true repentance is always our grateful response to God’s unrelenting grace already at work in our lives.

In the baptism Jesus offers, we begin to agree with God. We agree that we are God’s Beloved. We agree that we are capable of giving and receiving more Love that we ever thought possible. We agree that we are more than we have given ourselves credit for being. We agree that this is true for the rest of God’s good Creation, as well. And we agree to live the new life to which these agreements give birth.

Jesus’ baptism by Spirit and fire refines us and transforms us. Jesus’ baptism resurrects us. It prepares us to receive and share with joy the good news of Christmas by lighting within us our light as prophets of and participants in God’s ever-arriving Christ.

¹Janisse Ray, Wildcard Quilt: The Ecology of Home. Milkweed Editions, 2003, pp. 36-37.

²Ibid. p. 37.

It's About Time (Sermon for Advent 1)

“It’s About Time”

Romans 13:8-14

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

11/27/16 – Advent 1

         In my limited travels around the globe, one thing I’ve learned is that when First-Worlders pack our bags, we tend to stuff our neuroses in with our underwear, toiletries, and anything else we try to keep hidden, but without which we feel lost. When traveling to less-developed nations, one neurosis that creates lots of headache is our addiction to timeliness. And I am not judging. I have never met anyone as enslaved to punctuality as myself. If I am supposed to be at someone’s house at 2:00pm, and I’m late, I’ll risk a speeding ticket to get there on time. If I’m early, I’ll ride a half mile, a mile, even two miles down the road and back so I don’t knock on the door at, God forbid, 1:56.

         Time is much more fluid in places like Mexico and Malawi. In cultures that thrive on relationships rather than business deals, telling folks that something begins at 7pm is like us telling a friend, “We should get together next spring.” The target is wide, and when everyone arrives, whenever that may be, that’s when the game, or the meeting, or the celebration begins.

         The Greeks held two understandings of time. First, they recognized chronos­ – time as determined by the position of the hands on the clock, or the sun in the sky, or the earth in its seasons.

In Romans 13, Paul writes, “You know what time is; it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep,” The word Paul uses is not chronos but Kairos.

         Chronos measures periods of progressive and observable change. Kairos refers to the quality of time – a fullness or even an emptiness. That’s why Paul’s image of awakening fits so appropriately. At the threshold between night and day, between darkness and light, at the continual confluence of past, present, and future, we awaken to the mystic realm of Kairos. Advent calls us to live in a state of perpetual awakening to the Good News of God delivering Kairos into chronos. Advent prepares us for the timeliness of Agape Love taking on flesh and blood, consciousness and clothing, a particular face and personality.

         According to Paul, Love is the character and substance of our preparation. “Love does no wrong to a neighbor,” he says, “therefore, love is the fulfilling of the Law.”

         Knowing that many of his readers will need something more concrete than “love your neighbor,” Paul says to “live honorably as in the day.” He clarifies that by contrasting daytime honor to night time dishonor. The common thread among dishonorable things is a short-sighted and selfish disregard for our neighbors, for the wider human community, and for our own bodies and selves.

         Paul mentions drunkenness, and I suppose he means pretty much what it sounds like. I also think he’s referring to more than the pathology of alcoholism. I think he means willfully losing self-control and defiantly labeling it “autonomy.” I do this because I want to, and I can. And if you don’t like it, leave.

When we don’t cherish and care for the unique and immediate chronos realities of who we are in our own physical bodies, we cannot cherish and care for the people next to us – or the earth itself, without which we do not exist. Failing in the call to love as we are loved by God, we will use our bodies and those of others, either through exploitation or annihilation, as means to superficial pleasures and momentary diversions. Paul calls such darkness “drunkenness, debauchery, and licentiousness.”

“Quarreling and jealousy” also expose a preference for chronos to the exclusion of Kairos. When enslaved to chronos, we create cultures of suspicion and resentment. We mark time by counting victories over competitors. We judge other people’s worth by calculating their potential benefit or threat to us rather than working gratefully to know them for who they are and to cooperate with them.

Advent reminds us that we live in an in-between time. We have one foot in chronos and the other in Kairos. Kairos is our true home, but we cannot ignore chronos. We live here, too. And right now, increasingly, people are suffering the effects of rampant “drunkenness, debauchery, and jealousy.” Trying to proclaim Kairos in the midst of our chronos-fixated culture can be wearisome. It creates a dissonance that can be easily dismissed.

Traveling home yesterday evening, Marianne and I stopped at the rest stop on I-26 between Hendersonville and Asheville. As we walked into the restrooms, Travis Tritt was on the radio belting out the final chorus of his 1991 hit: “Call someone who’ll listen and might give a damn/Maybe one of your sordid affairs/But don’t you come ‘round here handin’ me none of your lines/Here’s a quarter, call someone who cares/Yeah, here’s a quarter, call someone who cares.”¹

The very next song to play on that country radio station, another major hit, this one from 1818, ends with this verse: “Silent night, holy night, Son of God, love’s pure light; radiant beams from thy holy face with the dawn of redeeming grace, Jesus, Lord, at thy birth, Jesus, Lord, at thy birth.”

The Incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth is God’s embodied, spirited, and profoundly beautiful way of telling us that the created order is not some profane purgatory where souls are incarcerated in bodies and have to prove their worth before moving on to higher and holier things. For all its chronic brokenness and violent imperfection, the Creation does more than bear witness to God. It offers a tangible expression of God’s own Self. The Creation, humankind included, is the ongoing invitation to an organic experience of the Creator. As God’s spiritual act of physically kneading Kairos into chronos, the Incarnation affirms the fundamental goodness and the eternal holiness of all that God, in Love, has made.

While we walk this earth, our purpose is to wake up to “the dawn of redeeming grace.” We are here to be “someone who cares.”

Now, we need each other for Kairos living. No one of us can do it alone. So, when human beings and human institutions seem to go awry, hindering the way of Love with fear and loathing, that becomes our call. Paul says that we “owe” it to one another and to all creation to gather in communities of compassion to do the hard work of living all the more deliberately and visibly as incarnations of Love, Justice, and Peace.

This Advent, it is time to wake up from whatever dreams we’ve been having, and renew our commitment to being that community.

¹http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/travistritt/heresaquartercallsomeonewhocares.html

Jesus Is Lord (Sermon - Reign of Christ Sunday)

“Jesus Is Lord”

Ephesians 1:15-23

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

11/20/16

         A preacher climbed in the pulpit one Sunday morning and began repeating over and over, “Jesus is Lord. Jesus is Lord. Jesus is Lord”

After ninety seconds, a few folks realized that this wasn’t going to change, so they got up and left.

         “What’s with that fool preacher?” one said when they got outside. 

         “Don’t know,” said another, “but at least we get to the buffet ahead of the Baptists.”

         “Yeah,” said a third. “And God knows that fried chicken is to die for!”

And they all said, “Amen.”

         On Reign of Christ Sunday, Christians declare without apology that for us, Jesus is Lord. Not the individual. Not health, and wealth, and beauty. Not military or economic power. Not globalism or nationalism. Not baseball or apple pie. Not freedom, the flag, or the good old US-of-A. Not even the Bible or Christianity itself.

Jesus is our Lord. We follow Jesus.

         Acutely aware of the world’s anguish, Paul’s usual word on the kingdom is future-oriented. Writing to the church in Rome, Paul says, “I consider that the sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed…”

To the church at Corinth he says, “We will not all die, but we will all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.”

All is expectation and hope. And as Christians we are indeed called to expect and hope for the fulfillment of the kingdom. That’s what Advent, which begins next Sunday, is all about.

         Then we read Ephesians. In this letter, the Apostle begins to implore his readers to remember that Christ rules “in this age [as well as] the age to come.” This teaching reflects a dramatic shift in Paul’s theological understanding. He urges us to live in and to witness to our hope through an active spirituality that becomes real-time inhabitation of God’s kingdom on earth.

         Having said all that, who among us does not dabble in the kingdoms of other lords? To what or to whom do we often give the energies for worship and service that God has given to us to give back to God? Do we give them to a house, a car, a job? A family member, a friend, a lover? An athlete or a team? A political party or ideology? A prejudice or a fear? All too often, in churches a favorite lord-of-choice is The Almighty Way We’ve Always Done It. What other “lords” are out there?

         When our kids were in elementary school in Mebane, NC, some sort of school program sent them home with four tickets to go see Elon College host South Florida in a friendly game of football. Today, Elon is a university and their mascot is the Phoenix. But back then they were still the Elon College Fighting Christians. I don’t remember what S. Florida’s mascot was, but just for fun let’s call them the Lions.

When we arrived at the stadium, the game had already begun. The Christians and the Lions were going at it down there in the arena. The game itself was marginally interesting, but during the second quarter, the PA announcer came on and yelled, “Ladies and gentlemen, you are less than one minute away from the Domino’s Pizza Scream!”

         “What,” I wondered, “is the Domino’s Pizza Scream?”

After a few minutes longer than less-than-a-minute, five male cheerleaders – the loudest and beefiest of the Christians who weren’t actually out on the field of battle – each picked up a Domino’s Pizza box from the sidelines and headed for the stands.

         The cheerleaders mounted the steps like ancient priests ascending the stairs of some towering ziggurat. Each raised his sacred, cardboard ark over his head then lowered it again. At every elevation of the host, the worshipers stood up, raised their hands, and began to wail and shriek at the top of their lungs. They actually screamed louder for the pizza than they did for the Christians who, for our entertainment, were out there fighting for their lives against the Lions! A man in front of us pulled a dollar bill from his wallet and waved it at the pizza priest who passed nearest us.

         The holy men walked all the way to the top of the temple and turned around. Then in breathtaking unison, they raised their pizzas one last time before an ecstatic congregation. As the chiseled shamans descended the stairs, each bestowed his blessing upon someone in the crowd. If there were some liturgical purpose behind the decision of who received the pizzas, it was not clear to me. Their doctrine of election seemed different from ours. But the one person whom I saw chosen seemed genuinely moved as she reached and received her irresistible, life-transforming gift.

         Hallelujah! Pizza is Lord!

After the sacrament, the congregation settled back into football.

         “Preacher, get a grip! That was just folks having fun!”

Was it? I admit there was a time when I would have enjoyed it as much as anyone. And I guess I enjoyed it that time, too, but as grist for the mill. It’s hard for me to sit back and watch something like the Domino’s Pizza Scream and regard it as completely harmless. Such rituals serve as jarring reminders of how, in very seductive but seemingly innocent ways, we create, and offer ourselves to idols.

         It is hearing Scripture read and proclaimed, coming together in prayer, celebrating the sacraments, and working for justice and transformation in the world that makes us who we are as Christians. If pizza is Lord, then what good are we? We’ve been formed in the image of pepperoni and processed cheese. But if Jesus is Lord, we will acknowledge him in our worship of God.

If Jesus is Lord, we will participate in his life, death, and resurrection.

If Jesus is Lord, we will live in the midst of his kingdom of compassion, justice, and peace – here and now.

If Jesus is Lord, our lives will reveal the dynamic and eternal image of God within us and within all humanity. Even pizza worshipers.

I have good news. Pizza is not Lord. Jesus is Lord.

We’re not celebrating the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper today, but the table before us remains set as a reminder of Christ’s Lordship. At his table, we find a meal worth celebrating and sharing. We find a promise worth trusting.

         I hope all of you enjoy Thanksgiving this week, but let us always remember that for followers of Jesus, our lasting nourishment is found at this table. Our Lord is always present here. And every human being is and must always be welcome here.

For us, Jesus and Jesus alone is Lord!

Thanks be to God!

Premeditated Grace (Sermon)

“Premeditated Grace”

                                             Isaiah 65:17-25

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

11/13/16

         Most of Isaiah’s audience knows nothing but exile. For those Hebrews born and raised in Babylon, distinguishing between exile life and “normal” life is probably splitting hairs because Babylonians manage to be relatively progressive captors. After vanquishing and dispersing their enemies with a heavy hand, the Babylonians offer the vanquished at least the chance for a semblance of autonomy. Instead of treating the Hebrews like Pharaoh did in Egypt, or like our white ancestors treated slaves in the old South, and African-Americans in the new South, the Babylonians allow the Hebrews to practice their native religion and, to some extent, flourish economically and culturally. Such treatment both increases the benefit and diminishes the threat of keeping a conquered people around.

         So their stories remain. Stories about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Stories about another exile and an exodus. Stories about Moses, Joshua, Samuel, and David. Stories about Hebron and Jerusalem. These are stories about identity and redemption – and home. And in the pit of their collective stomach, the Hebrews know that Babylon is not home.

         Isaiah’s job in Babylon is to make the Hebrews homesick, to make them long for Israel. So God calls the prophet to plant seeds of both discontent and hope. Through Isaiah, God says to Israelite exiles, “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth.” And God will rejoice over and delight in this re-imagined creation, a place in which everyone has enough, and where no one “shall hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain.” The reference is to Mt. Zion. Jerusalem. Home. And remember, Israel represents more than herself. Being the specific people who represent God’s specific desire to be in relationship with all creation, Israel symbolizes all that God creates.

Given Israel’s current circumstances, the future proclaimed by Isaiah seems to lie beyond the realm of possibility. That’s why God says, “Before they call, I will answer.” The new thing God is doing will come as an act of unilateral, premeditated grace. Isaiah’s prophecy flies in the face of Solomon’s much earlier, conditional prophecy that has been so hallowed and so hollowed by revivalists: “If my people…pray, [if they] seek my face, and [if they] turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear…forgive...and heal.” (2 Chronicles 7:14)

No, says Isaiah. By definition, grace is unconditional. No ifs. God is already committing all that God is to redeeming Israel. God is filling out, signing, and turning in a pledge card on behalf of the creation.

In Babylon, things could be worse for Israel. But they’re still in exile. Surely, Isaiah’s beautiful day prophecy meets some sharp skepticism.

Since early last Wednesday morning, some of us feel exhilarated and hopeful. Others of us feel shattered and anxious. The truth is, had the national election gone differently, things would have been pretty much the same, just in reverse. We were not going to escape this brokenness. Either way, some of us were going to feel victorious and purposed, and in here, Isaiah’s words would feel descriptive of our experience. And some of us were going to feel exiled and apprehensive, making Isaiah’s prophecy feel rather empty.

Regardless of how we feel about the world right now, Isaiah challenges us to find our place in God’s vision. And God’s vision of grace – whether articulated in the words of Isaiah, or in the promise after the flood, or in the prayers of David, or in the life of Jesus, or in the groanings of all creation as we await our “adoption” and “redemption” – God’s vision declares a creation of shalom, a creation of peace, wholeness, and well-being for all. In God’s vision, you and I are aware of, in love with, and eager to celebrate God’s grace by choosing, each and every day, to live in harmony with our neighbors and the earth around us.

Like you, I’m hearing repeated calls to “unity” right now. That’s good. I’m all for unity. And it seems to me that the unity that matters, the unity that lasts comes not when we simply lay aside critical differences and try to make nice. The unity that matters and lasts comes when we take up our passion for God’s vision. The unity that matters and lasts is the gift of solidarity with those who suffer, those who have no voice, those who are marginalized and threatened by power.

In his first sermon, Jesus reads from Isaiah, the prophet to exiles. “‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’” Then Jesus says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:18-19, 21)

        The Gospel reveals that God’s vision eclipses any one town and any one nation. It transcends any one generation or religious tradition. It transcends our own species itself. According to Isaiah, God envisions a renewed Universe. So, smugness in victory and despair in defeat both lead to the same denial of this vision, because it is in process “Today.”

When committing ourselves to the work of a particular church, we commit ourselves to participating in God’s ongoing work of redeeming the world and re-creating it as a place in which God’s Shalom defines us and guides us.

I will be honest with you. Between the events of the last eighteen months and the events of last four days, I’m one of those who feels acutely anxious right now. And I won’t pretend to feel otherwise. Now, I’m no archetype of virtue, but my response to what I feel in my gut is to pledge myself to living as a more visible example of what I believe God’s vision in Isaiah calls me to do, and what God’s presence in Jesus empowers me to be. While Marianne and I will increase our financial pledge, I will increase the energy I commit to participating more boldly in God’s Love, and in advocacy for things I consider consistent with following Jesus in this world.

When you fill out your pledge form to support the mission of Jonesborough Presbyterian Church, I challenge you to look again at Isaiah 65. Remember, too, the Beatitudes and the rest of Jesus’ revolutionary Sermon on the Mount in Matthew. I challenge us all to commit ourselves to God’s vision for a whole and holy creation. When that vision is hard to see or imagine, perhaps our decisions and actions are masking God’s vision. Maybe we even impede it for a time by choosing to commit ourselves to things that run contrary to God’s call to us in Christ. In the end, however, as Rob Bell says, “Love Wins.” Love is our home.

Jonesborough Presbyterian needs your financial commitments to fulfill its own commitments and calling. So on behalf of the Session, I ask you to give generously.

I also ask you to consider deepening your personal Christian service in the coming year. The relational, hands-on mission to which God calls us is more important than ever. Writing to the Colossians, Paul reminds us that the success of our collective witness depends on how gratefully and fearlessly we, “As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe [ourselves] with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience…[and how we] bear with one another and…forgive each other.” (Colossians 3:12-13)

This morning we consecrate far more than money. We consecrate ourselves.

Resurrection Life: An Urgent Appeal (Sermon)

“Resurrection Life: An Urgent Appeal”

Luke 20:27-38

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

11/6/16

         Sadducees. Bless their hearts. Even more legalistic than the Pharisees, Sadducees exclude the writings of historians, prophets, sages, and psalmists from their scripture. Driven by a pathological desire for control, they honor only the Torah. And they give particular attention to laws regarding governance of the temple itself, in particular the privileges of the priesthood. The Sadducees become an instructive example of what happens when human beings fix our faith in material things, when we devote ourselves to ideas and understandings that we declare absolute for everyone. When the temple is destroyed in 66AD, the Sadducees, having laid the groundwork for their own demise, completely disappear. Without the temple building, they have no identity, no vision, no hope.

Some thirty years earlier, a Nazarene rabbi shows up. He exposes wiggle room in the law. He welcomes the unwanted and loves the unlovable. He uses story as an authoritative means of teaching God’s word. The Sadducees take profound offense at this. And it gets worse.

One day Jesus storms Jerusalem on a colt that’s not even green broke. Armed only with leafy branches, his militia declares not war but joy: “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!” (Luke 19:38)

After that, Jesus really throws Legos on the floor at night. He runs all the money changers out of the temple. How can you control people if you don’t keep them off balance with fear and grasping at you for help? This whole grace thing of Jesus is just too much. So, the Sadducees decide to give Jesus some of his own medicine. Jesus tells parables; they’ll do the same.

They run into a problem, though. Parables are both a pedagogy and an art form. They are told to create a kind of crisis for hearers by suggesting a broader reality, by revealing new territory and daring people to step out in faith. Only patient, compassionate teachers who are as willing to learn and grow as they are eager for their students to learn and grow can use parables effectively. The Sadducees don’t get this. Their preposterous story tries to ensnare Jesus in a legal quandary. A woman marries seven brothers in succession according to the law. She dies childless. Whose wife will she be in the resurrection?

It seems to me that both the character and substance of Jesus’ response can instruct all of us right now. The Sadducees intend to attack, embarrass, and tear down, but Jesus refuses to answer in kind. Taking their question seriously, he says, in effect, Ah, but you misunderstand. As a gift of this age, marriage witnesses to the fundamental character of God. God is relationship, faithfulness, and creativity. And Resurrection transcends all of our laws and rituals. In the kingdom of heaven, belonging and intimacy look nothing like marriage as we know it.

Then Jesus addresses the Sadducees’ real issue, the resurrection itself. Finding nothing to support resurrection and an afterlife in their literal reading of the law, they dismiss the idea altogether. That’s understandable, and Jesus is more than understanding. With deep compassion, he challenges the Sadducees and invites them into a different reality.

“And the fact that the dead are raised,” Jesus says. He calls it, “the fact.” Then he mentions Moses. Remember, Jewish tradition attributes the law itself to Moses’ own hand. Moses’ own experience of God, says Jesus, implies Resurrection. Standing before the burning bush, Moses hears Yahweh say, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” (Exodus 3:6)

Jesus reveals Yahweh to be the God of Moses’ ancestors, and not just when they were alive, but in that present moment. How, Jesus is saying, can God be the God of the living and the God of those who died, if those who died are not in some way alive in God?

         Throughout his ministry, Jesus has been revealing a great wonder: He is the Resurrected One even before the trials of Friday and the mystery of Sunday. Even as he visits the cities and towns, and walks the backroads of ancient Palestine, Jesus inhabits both this age and the next. He participates in the totality – past, present, and future – of God’s dynamic eternity.

Jesus continually invites us to play around in this gracious paradox. Remember what he tells the Pharisees: “For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.” (Luke 17:21b)

This is both good news and heavy responsibility. While the kingdom is, to use Jesus’ words, “in fact” here and now, our experience of it comes as the gift not of mere belief, but of our intentional participation in it. We can, “in fact,” choose to live in the kingdom, to “practice resurrection.”¹ We can also, “in fact,” choose death. We can choose to hold grudges, to nurse wounds, to spew our loathing of those we fear, and those we refuse to like – and those who refuse to like us.

At 53, I’m still helping to keep the average age of our congregation and our denomination low. And never in my “young” life have I experienced a zombie apocalypse like the one we’re living now. Never have I felt so much scathing judgment, so much fear, so much rhetoric of deadness. I feel our circles of trust constricting. We choose and even create heroes who do more to cheapen and end life than to reconcile and heal. Throughout our global, national, and local cultures, even in our families, we are stumbling at each other in grotesque decay. We are feasting on death.

Tuesday’s results do matter to me. But if Tuesday’s results matter to me more than you do, then my faith lies in something other than the God revealed in Jesus Christ. And like many of you, I am teetering on the edge. I have to face down that hideous and hateful zombie within me every single day, because I keep projecting my anxieties and prejudices onto people whose opinions differ from mine.

If we keep marrying ourselves to the seven brothers of death – lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, and those two favorite sons, envy, and pride – to whom will we belong in the resurrection?

Brothers and sisters, God calls and equips us to live as Resurrection people here and now. And we cannot afford to wait until it feels safe to do so. Today is the time, the Kairos time, the holy time to recognize and confess the deathliness within ourselves rather than looking for it and condemning it in our neighbors. Now, when seeking to reconcile with one another, we risk much. But when refusing to reconcile, we do, “in fact,” risk everything.

The Sadducees attack Jesus, and he loves them with an invitation to experience Resurrection in their own lives, to practice living as children of the living God, children of the God of the living.

You are a child of God, too. So are those around you, and across every aisle from you – all of them.

Within you, right now, lives a particular strength, a particular gratitude, and a particular Love. This is God’s gift to you to for experiencing and participating in Resurrection life. May you recognize, embrace, and share that gift. It’s a gift that only you can live. And without it neither you nor we are whole.

The peace of Christ be with us all.

¹Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” Collected Poems: 1957-1982. North Point Press: San Francisco, 1984. P.151-152.

Feral Spirituality (Sermon)

“Feral Spirituality”

John 3:1-10

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

10/23/16

There’s a popular movie out where a very serious, ambitious man falls for a woman whose approach to life is quite different from his. His life is defined by complete and mercenary devotion to the corporate world. He lives out of suitcases. All his suits are dark, and his shirts white.

         The woman lives by more earthy, intuitive values. She personifies freedom of spirit and heart. In her funky little apartment, tassels and beads hang like Spanish moss from doorways, curtain rods, and light fixtures. An entire wall rejoices with a painting that appears to be the lovechild of a Sherwin Williams truck and a tornado.

         These two people meet on a subway. For him, the subway is a grim procession of caskets. For her, surrounded by all that beautiful, tragic humanity, it’s a sacred place where holiness whispers in her ear.

         Though unaware of it, the man is buckling beneath the pressures of his cutthroat world. Empathetic to the point of clairvoyance, the woman feels the man’s anguish. With angry compassion she challenges his conformity. But he can’t understand. Wealth, power, and stress define the only life he can imagine. Attempting to defend himself, he recites all the party-line clichés. When he realizes how ridiculous he sounds, he just gets angrier.

         The woman smiles at him sadly.

The train reaches her stop first. She stands up and says, “Maybe I’ll see you again.”

Confused by feelings of both defeat and gratitude, he says, “Maybe.”

And so it begins. Along the way they experience a series of adventures and culture clashes that make for a few belly laughs and some moments of poignant awakening.

Tension builds, and the couple reaches a crescendo of conflict in which they must either embrace each other and the new way of life created by their relationship, or they must let go. Finally choosing new life, they commit themselves to their new adventure.

         By now, some of you know that I’m messing with you. I didn’t describe any one movie. This story has been told a thousand times in a thousand ways. The Gospels offer several versions, because Jesus’ story is itself a defining version of that story.

         So, we meet Nicodemus, a Jewish leader steeped in rigid Pharisaism. Like the man captivated with the free-spirited woman, Nicodemus recognizes something both dangerous and compelling in Jesus. Curious, but fearful of his colleagues, Nicodemus skulks to Jesus under the cover of night. Avoiding an outright question, Nicodemus says, ‘Rabbi, you’re for real. Only God-sent prophets can do what you do.’

         He wants Jesus to answer his implied question with an unqualified claim to or indisputable proof of holiness. But Jesus teases him.

         ‘To experience the kingdom of God,” says Jesus, “one must experience a new birth.’

         John uses the word anothen. Birth from above. A second birth. However it gets translated, anothen means a brand new beginning.

         The couple in the movie experience a kind of anothen. For the man in particular, much is lost, but even more is gained as he discovers his new self – a self who will be more authentic and complete because of the infusion of the woman’s bright compassion and courageous joy.

         To live his new life, Nicodemus must tear himself loose from his legalistic moorings. He must set his sails to catch God’s Holy Spirit, the original Free Spirit.

         In ways both implicit and explicit, I was taught that following Jesus means walking a particularly safe and pure road, a road on which I earn my place through affirmation and through careful avoidance of unsuitable behaviors. But when I read Jesus’ words to Nicodemus, I hear a primal call to more intrepid living, and to a kind of feral spirituality.

         “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you [don’t] know where it comes from or where it goes.” This Wind – this untamable Spirit – frees us from a life so structured and predictable that it becomes sterile.

         Mystified, Nicodemus says, ‘This makes no sense.’

         ‘How does a teacher of Israel not know these things?’ says Jesus.

After this, Nicodemus all but disappears from the conversation, and Jesus monologues his way to those gracious words: “For God so loved the world...” And when we get to the part about not perishing but having “everlasting life,” don’t we tend to imagine a strictly future-oriented promise? Only after death do we experience “heaven.” But there is so much more to what Jesus calls heaven than the “sweet by-and-by.” For Jesus, “everlasting life” includes the everlasting frontier within each of us and among all of us – here and now.

         Our book group is reading Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward. Last Wednesday, we discussed the chapter entitled “Amnesia and the Big Picture.”

“Life is a matter of becoming fully and consciously who we already are,” says Rohr, “but it is a self we largely do not know.” He says that humankind suffers from “a giant case of amnesia.”¹ Having forgotten the life from which we come, we distort our conceptions of the lives we live, and the life to which our lives lead.

Authentic, Jesus-inspired spirituality releases us into aboriginal territory, into experiences often declared precarious and out-of-bounds by the institutional church. And this mystic outback mirrors the heaven from which we arrived into this world.

William Wordsworth wrote:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing boy

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy.²

            If “heaven lies about us in our infancy,” it lies about us now, in our joy. It seems to me that Nicodemus has not failed to understand these things. He has simply forgotten them. John Philip Newell refers to Jesus as our deepest and truest memory restored.³ His forgiving, saving act is to remind us who we are in God. To explore this truth about ourselves is to explore a flourishing wilderness that transcends the boundaries of doctrines and denominations, races and genders, and anything else that separates us from or pits us against one another. This ancient and eternal, feral spirituality redeems us from our forgetfulness, and so from our sinfulness. It frees us to love self and neighbor. It frees us to speak daring, challenging truth into and for the sake of God’s creation.

         Do blacklivesmatter protests bother you? They bother me. They bother me because no one should have to protest to have their God-imaged humanity valued.

No female or male, child or adult, should have to doubt the sanctity and dignity of their bodies because of the carnal appetites of amnesiacs.

From Flint to Los Angeles, from Aleppo to Calcutta, should anyone have to worry about the water they drink, the air they breathe, the healthcare they need? No! Those are basic human rights.

         That’s uncomfortable. The preacher shouldn’t say those things in church. Shouldn’t he? Are we followers of Jesus, and yet we do not understand these things?

         Claiming the gift of anothen, new birth in Christ, let’s travel together into the new frontier of feral spirituality where we no longer feel threatened by grace, where we no longer reduce God’s Incarnate Word to repeatable precepts and manageable dogmas.

Let’s listen for Jesus reminding us that we who struggle to love are always loved.

That we who are stingy with forgiveness are always forgiven.

That we who feel overwhelmed with anxiety are always accompanied by the Prince of Peace.

         Let us remember, and live our joy.

¹Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, Jossey-Bass, 2011. P. 97.

²Ibid. p. 99

³J. Philip Newell, Christ of the Celts: The Healing of Creation, Jossey-Bass, 2008. P. 9.

United in Suffering (Sermon)

“United in Suffering”

Luke 17:11-19

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

10/16/16

         It’s a proverb as old as humankind itself: Nothing brings people together like a common enemy. All a person has to do is to tap into latent fear, to convince enough people that some one, or group, or thing poses a threat, and that person can rise to power without any capacity for exercising authority responsibly. And when greed, resentment, and vengeance do ascend, the inevitable downfalls tend to be catastrophic. The need to remain diligently aware of this reality has kept Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer on required reading lists for some 400, 700, and 2300 years respectively.

         There’s another kind of enemy that draws people together. When caused not by malicious intent or ignorance but by the inevitable hazards of living in an imperfect world, suffering can bring people together in deep and long-lasting ways. A nuanced enemy, suffering can peel away pretense and prejudice. It frequently heals wounds and divisions that have seemed impervious to time, therapy, and even prayer. Cancer wards and ICU waiting rooms come to mind. 12-Step groups gather people for the specific purpose of sharing addiction-related suffering. It would be hard to find as broad a cross-section of human community as one finds suffering together at an AA meeting.

         On his way from Galilee to Jerusalem, “Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee.” Luke takes us into the in-between place that separates Jews from Samaritans. One of the things that unites each group is enmity with the other. First century Jews know who they are by knowing, among other things, that they are not Samaritans. By most accounts, Samaritans feel the same way. Having clear religious enemies helps to create what must feel like unpolluted identities. They guard their distinctiveness with sacrosanct boundaries.

         As Jesus traverses the liminal space between Jewish and Samaritan worlds, ten lepers approach him. When we learn that “one” is a Samaritan, by implication we learn that the other nine are, or at least include, Jews. Like some slapdash clot of sticks, Styrofoam, and fetid yellow froth on the Nolichucky River, these ten lepers have coalesced into an of eddy of human refuse. Isolated from their communities of origin, they have created a new community of shared suffering. Their union is much simpler and much more sublime than the rituals and dogmas of Mt. Zion and Mt. Gerazim. The ten cling to each other because human beings need, indeed we are created for, relationship.

         Genesis blesses and challenges us with two different creation stories. Neither is told to explain how God creates the universe, but to invite us to stand, together, in awe of the Creator and the Creation. These stories invite us to affirm that God creates all things to live in relationship with each other. The second version of creation makes this explicit when God says, “It is not good that the man should be alone.” The point is: No human being can know or love God without knowing and loving other human beings, other creatures. This holds true because relationship lies at the very core of God’s own self.

Relationship is the source and the goal of our own lives and of our life in God. This is the whole point of talking about God as a dynamic Trinity, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God is the energetic dance within and among all creation. So, whether we’re Presbyterian or Methodist, Christian or Muslim, theist or atheist, introvert or extrovert, straight or gay, hunter or gatherer, Bulldog or Volunteer, human beings, to one degree or another, seek community because that is who we are. It seems to me, then, that the truly ill are those who by some selfish or fearful intent objectify others and push them away.

         Remember Ebenezer Scrooge. Old Scrooge, untainted by the scourge of compassion and kindness, considers himself the sole non-leper in the world. Then, three ghosts remind him of where he comes from, where he is, and where, if things remain unchanged, his life will end – in utter loneliness, forgotten by everyone.

Finally acknowledging his resentment and greed, Scrooge realizes that he is the leper. And, with his business partner, Jacob Marley, gone, he has no one with whom to suffer anymore. Living in a dark, cold world of exile, the rich, old miser is in danger of experiencing complete and terminal isolation in the world.

         Remember, too, his giddy, childlike, effervescent joy when he awakes. Restored to community, Scrooge becomes awestruck by life. He’s grateful and generous in ways that he had forgotten were possible for human beings. Healed of his spiritual leprosy, Scrooge is the foreigner who returns to “give praise to God.”

         It has been well-documented that in the ancient Middle East, the term leprosy encompassed just about everything from diaper rash to actual leprosy, the serious but now-treatable bacterial infection we know as Hansen’s Disease. That broad umbrella allows us to expand the category outward to almost anything that causes us to isolate one person or group from another.

         It seems to me that we live in a terribly leprous world right now. We tend to focus much more energy on identifying enemies and uniting in opposition to them than we do on sharing one another’s suffering. But shared suffering is the whole point of the Incarnation. God deliberately enters the suffering of the beloved creation! God traverses the tragic, beautiful liminal space between birth and death called Life.

Carl Jung once said, “Life is a luminous pause between two great mysteries, which are themselves one.”¹ In this statement I hear Jung saying that God interrupts the uninterruptible. God stakes out boundaries within eternity. Taking an unimaginable risk of vulnerability, God creates space and time in which we are given the opportunity to traverse, consciously, the liminal realm of physicality, with all of its beauty and violence, with all of its joy and agony.

Human institutions tend to construct things like denominations, political parties, country clubs, dress codes, and other idols. Spiritual communities participate in the on-going self-revelation of God called Creation. Spiritual communities make space for healing mercy. They invite others into luminous experiences of reconciling Love. To live in spiritual community is to live in breathless awe and grateful praise of the One Who Creates, and in generous compassion toward all our fellow creatures.

If Jonesborough Presbyterian Church is a truly spiritual community, we know who we are not by trying to demean and disgrace some “enemy.” Nor is our faith making us well by curing leprosy, heart disease, or cancer. We are who we are, and we experience our hope for here, now, and tomorrow by determined witness, in a grotesquely distorted world, to the reconciling power of justice, kindness, humility, gratitude, and fearless dignity in our interactions with one another.

         The late Elie Wiesel said that “Someone who hates one group will end up hating everyone – and, ultimately, hating himself or herself.”²

Uniting around enemies only breeds enmity.

         God is different. Before joining with us in celebration and joy, God unites us with, and unites with us in, suffering. “Our tendency in the midst of suffering,” says Rob Bell, “is to turn on God. To…shake our fist at the sky and say, ‘God, you…have no idea what I'm going through.’

“[But the] cross is God’s way of…taking on flesh and blood and saying, ‘Me too.’”³

        

¹Carl Jung as quoted by Richard Rohr in Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, Jossey-Bass, 2011. P. 88.

²http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/e/elie_wiesel_2.htm

³http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/suffering?page=2