Prophetic Grace (Sermon)

“Prophetic Grace”

Luke 4:21-30

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

1/24/16

         A while back, I sat with a group of pastors discussing challenges facing the church in our ever-changing world. One of them, feeling threatened by new realities, said something that was meant, I am sure, to express a determined faith, but to me it sounded a bit angry.

         The world may be changing, he said, but Jesus is still the only way to heaven. And if that’s not the case, we’re all wasting our time.

A quiet wave of nods and “Amens” circled the room. While appreciating the commitment, I felt like I was watching my friends standing with their toes on the rim of a high cliff, peering down at rocks below, and leaning into a strong wind pushing at their backs.

         Surely the Nazarenes feel the same way when Jesus reminds them of God’s gracious initiative toward the starving widow at Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian leper. Remember, ancient Jews attribute things like famine and illness to God’s judgment. And for them, deliverance from such things comes only through Torah-prescribed rituals of atonement. They are certain that God aligns exclusively with Jewish experiences of God, images of God, and language about God.

Not so fast, says Jesus. When even Jews were starving, and when even Jews suffered from leprosy, through the likes of Elijah and Elisha, God reaches out to Gentiles first.

         And the flood gates of rage burst open. ‘How dare Jesus presume to revise a thousand years of religious tradition!’

Their vision blurred by wolfish fury, the worshipers drive the shepherd up a hill. They intend to hurl him off and kill him. Then, standing with their toes on the rim of a high cliff, peering down at rocks below, and leaning into a strong wind pushing at their backs, the crowd seems to freeze. Their rage blinds them, and Jesus slips away.

Luke foreshadows this moment. In the third temptation, Satan dares Jesus to make a dramatic statement. ‘Jump from the top of the temple. Land on your feet, and no one will be able to do anything but believe.’

Jump, says Satan, and faith will be obsolete. You’ll give the people proof, he says. And proof is the only way to salvation. Without proof, Jesus, you’ll just be wasting your time.

I have to think that Jesus feels his own creeping rage. Standing with his toes on the rim of a high cliff, peering down at rocks below, and leaning into a strong wind pushing at his back, he is sorely tempted to jump – to escape the demands of grace. How dare God call him to such inhuman holiness! I would feel the same way. Would you?

         It seems to me that the Church has often presented itself more like the congregation in Nazareth than it has Jesus at his temptation. The prospect of living by faith in the extravagant grace of God challenges us beyond the limits of reason. Trying to accept and to be in relationship with a God who loves the people we cannot accept and cannot relate to just as much as God loves us – that can send us raging toward the cliff.

         If my understanding of grace doesn’t preclude all others, my friend was saying, then I’m wasting my time.

         If God’s kingdom is not something open to all humankind through the scandalously undomesticated grace of God, and if as Christians we do not share what we see, hear, taste, feel, and smell of God’s here-and-now kingdom as we witness it in Jesus’ unconstrained Love for Jew and Gentile alike, then maybe we are wasting our time. We are hindering grace, anyway.

         “Your image of God creates you,” says Richard Rohr. “One mistaken image of God that keeps us from receiving [and sharing]        grace is the idea that God is a cruel tyrant. People who have been raised in an atmosphere of threats of punishment and promises of reward are programmed to operate with this cheap image of God…Unfortunately,” says Rohr, “it's much easier to organize people around fear and hatred than around love…[and viewing] God as vindictive…validates their use of intimidation.”¹

         God’s prophets challenge us with some deeply unnerving demands – demands that cannot be satisfied with mere consent to theological formulas. God’s prophets challenge us to live a new and different life in relationship with our neighbors and with the earth. For us, this new life is shaped by the image of God made incarnate in an infuriatingly gracious, first-century rabbi from Nazareth.

         Extending grace as generously as Jesus, though – that prospect overwhelms us.

         There was a family in my first congregation – to share details would be one-sided, so suffice it to say that I felt pushed to one cliff after another by them.

“Don’t worry,” whispered other members, “they’ve never liked any minister.”

That didn’t help.

When the congregation nominated to a second term on session, the matriarch who seemed to want to use me as a lighting rod, I cobbled together a PIF and went job hunting.

“I’m so excited that God called me to Shelby,” I told my new

congregation. I said that, but hindsight tells me it was a convenient lie.

         First, I am convinced that God was not through with me in Mebane. I had more to offer and more to learn from those mostly wonderful people. My family wasn’t ready to move, either. I handled some aspects of leaving extremely poorly. Overall, I failed to be grateful and gracious.

Second, I really don’t believe that God called me to Shelby Presbyterian. It was never the best match for me. I simply landed there when, in a willful act of prideful cowardice, I jumped off a cliff.

That’s where grace took over.

The first act of grace was to discover folks every bit as difficult as that family back in Mebane. There are Nazarenes in any congregation; and a lively one in myself, as well.

Accept it, said God. You’ll never really receive or share grace until you do.

The nudges of grace kept coming, as did the challenges of being in a place that never felt right. Some things I did not intend or want to do became my focus in Shelby. And that led me to some fresh discoveries. And that was good, too.

Leaving intimidation to others, God uses grace in the most opportunistic ways. When we listen and respond in Love for the sake of others, God does, I think, call and send us to particular places.

Jonesborough comes to mind.

When in selfishness and fear, we jump, God uses us where we land – blesses us and makes us a blessing to others

Always with us and for us, God’s grace knows no bounds.

And it never wastes our time.

¹http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?ca=7056207f-0227-46b2-bc94-534d9bad5941&c=c98d6b50-eefa-11e3-853a-d4ae52754b78&ch=ca496850-eefa-11e3-8596-d4ae52754b78

Today! (Sermon)

“Today!”

Luke 4:14-21

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

1/17/16

         After asking the right person to take care of something, you might hear the phrase, “It’s as good as done!” That assurance is meant to give you the freedom to live in the present as if the thing is, in fact, done.

         When the thing to be done is straightforward, like asking a trusted neighbor to water your flowers, living in the realm of “as good as done” is fairly easy. But if the surgeon you have just met says, “Don’t worry. I’ve done this procedure hundreds of times! It’s as good as done,” you may feel more nervous rather than less.

         Hebrew prophets declared clearly and often: Prepare for the year of the Lord’s favor! God will deliver Israel and make all things right!

         Now, imagine yourself worshiping in Nazareth the Sabbath that Jesus comes home for a short stay. The attendant hands Jesus the scroll of Isaiah. He searches briefly, then begins to read God’s great promise of Jubilee – good news to the poor, release to the captives, and the oppressed, recovery of sight to the blind. Then he sits down, looks at the expectant congregation and says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

         It’s as good as done, he declares. Here and now. Today.

         “Such a smart boy,” say all the folks who remember Joseph and Mary’s boy when he was just a little thing.

         Hearing this ancient prophecy re-announced with such authority by one of their own flatters the Nazarenes. And while it reminds them of ancient expectations, it seems that Israel has, for generations, lived in a kind of suspended anticipation. Their storied hopes and reasonable prospects never agree. Israel has waited so long that the life of faith itself seems to have become one interminable, unconsummated wait.

         Then Jesus says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Forgiveness of debts, release from captivity, the end of blindness and oppression, these things are reality now. The kingdom of God is no longer the hope, but the new reality. But even we are still waiting, aren’t we?

         Aren’t folks still lining up at food pantries and homeless shelters? Aren’t people still grasping for hope in Powerball tickets? Aren’t bullies still manipulating the nations through greedy violence? Aren’t there still places, from Jonesborough to Johannesburg, where people of one group are being oppressed by another, more powerful group? And doesn’t spiritual blindness continue to encumber all of us?

In the face of such concrete and bitter realities, doesn't this glorious promise of Today ring hollow? Isn’t trying to live in the midst of the great Today proclaimed by Jesus just wishful thinking? It seems to me that we cannot answer such questions with theological arguments describing our hope. True hope lies in our willing acceptance of Jesus’ dare to put his as good as done promise into practice – Today.

         Living in Jesus’ Today does not mean that we no longer see, or experience the poverty, oppression, blindness, and enslavement which he proclaims defeated. Just the opposite: It means that we follow his example of engaging it. We deliberately live over against it, even when those realities seem to have the upper hand. We live boldly in the power of the Holy Spirit who anoints us to become inhabitants of and living witnesses to the kingdom of God.

         There are all sorts of examples of folks inhabiting heaven in the midst of hell. And as Jesus-followers, we are certainly called to oppose anything that encourages fear, prejudice, greed, and that does violence to God’s magnificent self-revelations of Humankind, the Earth, and the wildly varied communities within them both. But this morning I want to introduce you to Sharon Carr.

The Carr family were members of the same church my family attended in Augusta, GA. Sharon was about three years younger than me. A precocious student, she was also gifted with a thoughtful and exuberant faith, and blessed with remarkable literary talent. Together, Sharon’s writing and her faith empowered her to do something at a very young age that many far older people cannot do. It helped her to die with grace, dignity, hope, and even joy.

         One summer Sharon began to experience persistent and excruciating headaches. The diagnosis came quickly. An aggressive tumor had lodged itself in Sharon’s brain. This oppressive, blinding, impoverishing, enslaving cancer made the next four years very difficult and painful for Sharon and for those who loved her. And it would eventually kill her, but it never destroyed her.

         Through all the treatments, all the frustration, anger and grief, Sharon clung to her faith. She continued to write, and through that spiritual discipline she continued to live in the great promise of Today, knowing that her true healing was “as good as done.”

         Sharon wrote what I think is one of the most compelling witnesses to the power of the Holy Spirit to anoint us with faithful hope, to anoint us with gratitude and courage for living in the reality of God’s promised “Today” even when such a life would appear to be a denial of reality.

         I am going to read to you from a book published by Sharon’s family and her professors at Emory University after her death. Listen to a young woman’s witness to the power of Today in a poem she wrote for others to hear at her own funeral.

Epitaph

by Sharon M. Carr

I had to love today,

         because you couldn’t promise me tomorrow,

         and my wealth is in the glimpse of the beyond

that escapes the indifferent eye,

flashing, twinkling in the tease of sunlight

or the gray dewshine of raindrops…

I had to hold tightly to purpose,

         because you might not give me time for carelessness,

                  and lifeblood is too precious to spill on selfish whim;

I had to cherish hope,

         because you couldn’t guarantee light

                  amid despair and I was tired of hurting--

I am sustained by what I cannot see,

         and reassured by a comforting grasp that is all in all,

                  ever powerful, ever good.

Because I was forced to live life boldly,

                  thankfully, lovingly and joyfully,

                           death is tender,

and life was a triumph.¹

¹Sharon Carr, “Epitaph,” from Yet Life was a Triumph: Poems and Meditations. Oliver Nelson Publishers, Nashville. 1991. P. 160.

Joyful New Year (January 2016 Newsletter)

Dear Friends,

         2016.

An election year, with all its fractious rhetoric which does more to unite a base around fears than a country around a vision.

An Olympic year, with all its hype and hope, inspiring stories and shattered dreams.

And who knows what will happen right here in Jonesborough? Come what may, some of it will prove wonderfully energizing and renewing. Some of it will make us cringe, and grieve, and lose more faith in humankind. Maybe even in God.

Never have human beings known life in this world without both dark and light, hope and despair, happiness and sorrow. Never will we.

Joy (not the same as happiness!) comes as a gift of living gratefully and generously with and for one another and the earth in the relentless tensions of opposites. Joy does not allow us to surrender to despair or to fend off painful realities with blissful denial. We discover Joy by living graciously in the midst of gracelessness, peacefully in the midst of violence, and confidently in the midst of fear. Joy requires faith in more than our own efforts, and hope in more than what we might reasonably expect.

Without using the word, Paul describes Joy most memorably this way: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us…We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” (Romans 8:18, 22-25)

In 2016, may you experience more joy than ever before, and may you live as a sign of hope.

                                                      Joyful New Year,

                                                               Allen

Becoming the Beloved (Sermon)

“Becoming the Beloved”

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

1/10/16

         Luke 3 begins with John the Baptist roiling human hearts with prophecy and the Jordan River with baptisms.

“Repent!” he cries.

‘How?’ ask the crowds.

         While tailoring specific answers for specific groups, John remains consistent: Deal generously, fairly, justly, and gratefully with yourselves and everyone else. True repentance is as simple as it is complicated. Most of all it is concrete. It is active and hands-on. Love God. Love neighbor. Do justice. Steward the earth.

‘Could this be the Messiah?’ the crowds ask.

         ‘No,’ says John. ‘A different baptism awaits you at the hands of “one more powerful than I.”’

         Ironically, this Powerful One seeks John’s baptism like everyone else. And like everyone else in Luke’s version of the story, John does not recognize Jesus. Indeed, Luke suggests that not until Jesus sloshes back up on the riverbank and begins to pray does even he begin understand that he is the Beloved. And only in living that life does he fully become the Beloved.

         When people ask what they need to do, John gives practical instructions. But we need more than instructions, don’t we? And to the extent that rigid doctrine gets used to short-leash spiritual growth, we need far more than doctrine. We need a flesh-and-blood guide. And it seems to me that we need this guide to do more than exemplify the life of the Beloved. This guide does the greatest good by freeing us to recognize the Beloved living within us, within the people around us, and within the earth that sustains us. He redeems us by empowering us to begin living that life ourselves.

In the early 1980’s, the Dutch theologian, scholar, and mystic Henri Nouwen sat down with a young New York Times journalist named Fred Bratman. Bratman, a secular Jew, had been told that Dr. Nouwen might provide good material for an article. Thinking “potboiler,” but needing a story, the journalist traveled to Yale University where Nouwen served on the seminary faculty. Nouwen recalls a memorably tedious and uninspired interview.

         When Bratman stood to leave, Nouwen heard himself say, “Tell me, do you like your job?”

         “No, not really,” said Bratman, “but it’s a job.”¹

         What do you want to do, asked Nouwen?

Write a novel, said Bratman.

So do it.

I don’t have the talent.

Sure you do.

I have no time or money.

Excuses, said Nouwen.

No, said Bratman. Reality.

         Come here and write, said Nouwen. Yale loves artists-in-residence. I can make that happen.

         Eventually, Fred Bratman did go to Yale to write. He never finished his novel, but the two men became close friends. After Bratman’s residence, they visited each other back and forth between New Haven and New York. Nouwen remembers feeling overwhelmed by the noise, the pace, the angst of his friend’s harried and thoroughly secular big-city life. Bratman apparently felt something genuine in Nouwen, something he trusted and became willing to listen to.

         During one of Nouwen’s visits, Bratman said, “Why don’t you write something about the spiritual life for me and my friends?”

         Like Bratman earlier, Nouwen balked. He had heard this request before from friends and family members who had left the church or who had never been and never intended to be, associated with any religious tradition. But what could he possibly say into a context so radically different from his own? What authority did he have to speak with such broad and yet specific purpose?

“How [do I do that]?” Henri asked.

“‘Speak from that place in your heart where you are most yourself,” said Fred. “Speak directly, simply, lovingly, gently, and without any apologies. Tell us what you see and what you want us to see; what you hear and what you want us to hear…Trust your own heart. The words will come.’”²

Nouwen finally sat down and wrote what would become his brief but spacious book, Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World.

Nouwen recalls searching for a particular word, a word that would remain as a kind of gift to Bratman and his friends. Referencing the story of Jesus’ baptism, he settled on the word Beloved. He had read this word, studied it, preached it, lectured on it. But as he focused on it as a metaphor for spiritual practice, it took on new life.

The phrase “‘You are my Beloved,’” says Nouwen, “reveal[s] the most intimate truth about all human beings, whether they belong to any particular tradition or not…Fred…my only desire is to make these words reverberate in every corner of your being – ‘You are the Beloved…’ Being the Beloved is the origin and the fulfillment of the life of the Spirit.”³

It is a beautiful and gracious book. And it missed the mark.

While Bratman did appreciate that his friend had written honestly and lovingly, the language presumed things alien to him. We are the Beloved, says Nouwen. We are children of God. We are brothers and sisters. This is where he lost his audience. Nouwen realized that he had failed to appreciate just how far apart their worlds were. He had not addressed the most fundamental things like how God language itself affirms our faith in subjective things like sacredness in the world, like, purpose and hope.

Initially disappointed, Nouwen would learn that his book did have transforming effect on many who already spoke the language of Belovedness. In fact, this book helped Nouwen become a kind of guide to many who wanted to follow Jesus more closely into the challenges and possibilities of the life of The Beloved.

Even if we are the Beloved, if we are children of God, and brothers and sisters, writes Nouwen, we still have “to become” these things. “Becoming the Beloved means letting the truth of our Belovedness become enfleshed in everything we think, say, or do.”⁴

Belovedness happens in the often-messy, material, nitty-gritty of life. We become The Beloved by giving water to the thirsty, food to the hungry, shelter to the displaced, coats to those who are cold. We become The Beloved by living gracefully amid selfishness, and peacefully amid violence. We become The Beloved by following Jesus.

Brothers and sisters, may you be always aware of your own Belovedness, and the Belovedness of everyone around you.

And may you be aware of Jesus, The Beloved, guiding you from within and without.

¹Henri Nouwen, Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular Word. Crossroad Publishing, NY, NY, 1992. P. 10. (*All references to the relationship between Henri Nouwen and Fred Bratman come from this book. Only longer quotations are footnoted.)

²Ibid. p. 20.

³Ibid. pp. 26 and 37.

⁴Ibib. pp. 38-39.

The Miracle of Compassion (Sermon)

“The Miracle of Compassion”

Luke 7:11-17

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

1/3/16

As Jesus and his followers approach Nain, they converge with a funeral procession. A young man has he died before his time. Sadder still, he has died before his mother’s time. Already widowed, the woman now has no son. In the first century, a good horse or ox holds more value than a man-less woman beyond child-bearing years. Seeing this woman buried in a kind of living death, Jesus is helpless to feel anything but compassion for her.

         Now, a critical distinction: Compassion and pity are not the same thing. Pity just stands there wringing its hands saying, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Translation: “I sure am glad that’s not me.”

Pity distances us from suffering. Because compassion means to suffer with another, true compassion is pitiless.

Jesus incarnates God’s eternal compassion for the relentless suffering of humankind. In Jesus, God suffers with those who have had their voices silenced and their faces hidden, those who have had their very humanity stripped from them. God even suffers with those who, by their own foolishness, make life difficult for themselves and others. To show compassion is to follow Jesus. It is to Love neighbor, and so, by definition, it is to Love God.

         This story in Luke 7 is not about the resurrection of human flesh and bone. It is about the (and I use this word very carefully and deliberately during the Christmas season) re-incarnating miracle of compassion. Compassion reaffirms the holiness of a creature, and thus of the creation. Without compassion, communities become nothing more than crowds of self-serving competitors. When compassion dies, we all die; and our widowed, childless spirit mourns.

         In Jesus, God enters the living death of compassionless-ness. Jesus touches our coffins, lays a re-animating hand upon us, and calls us to new life. And when we rise, he returns us not just to our moms, but to that most creative and redeeming work of the Holy Feminine. He returns us to the Mothering work of compassion.

It was the summer of 2002. The youth mission trip to West Virginia was very much like the ASP trips we have taken the last few years. Most of the kids were from comfortable homes with families as stable as our fast-paced, over-committed, entertainment-driven society tends to allow. One of the kids, I’ll call him Brian, was a typical American church kid. He and his two younger sisters went to church as frequently as their parents had the energy and desire to get them there. And Brian found church tolerable enough because of a few friends. There was plenty of pizza, too. The adult advisors thought a couple of boxes of Domino’s made everything cool.

In West Virginia, things began to change for Brian.

         On this trip, each work crew was a random mix of kids from different churches. Brian’s group was assigned to work on a home that had been damaged by a flash flood. Brian knew only one of the kids in his group, but he quickly made friends with the others as they cleaned debris from the yard, dug post holes for a new deck, and splashed white paint on the old clapboard siding.

For lunch each day, the group gathered on the screened-in front porch and ate with Miss Vera, the woman who owned the house. Miss Vera was a widow of very modest means, and though all her children were still alive, her nearest child lived four hours away.

Miss Vera welcomed the work crew like she was welcoming her own children home. She showed deep and genuine interest in each of them. She asked about their families, their hobbies, their favorite subjects in school. When Brian told Miss Vera about his mom and dad, his sisters, and his life back in north Alabama, he felt this lady listening to him. It was like she intended to write his biography.

         At lunch on Thursday, the group gathered on the front porch. As they talked and laughed over their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, thunder began to roll across the mountain tops and tumble down through the narrow hollows. As it crept closer, the kids kept talking and laughing, but Brian noticed that Miss Vera had gotten silent. Her mind had drifted far beyond the front porch.

         “Miss Vera?” said Brian. “Are you okay?”

The others looked at the woman and saw the deep-creased tension on her face

         “I’m okay, Honey,” she said.

         Brian looked in the direction of the thunder and said, “Are you remembering the storm?”

         Miss Vera looked at Brian and smiled.

         “Yes, Baby,” she said. “It happens every time the sky clouds up.”

         Miss Vera opened the gates of her memory and shared her story. Deep in the tight folds of those steep, rugged mountains, the world had gone black. Then came the rain on the metal roof, the shearing wind, the creek out back swelling into an avalanche of water, rocks, trees, and earth. It all became one terrifying roar.

“The world was so dark and so loud,” she said. “It was like death. For a while, I felt all alone in this whole earth.”

When Miss Vera finished her story, Brian felt a bug crawling across his cheek. He reached up to brush it off and was stunned to discover not a bug, but a tear. Embarrassed at first, he began to realize something. He began to realize that he was actually feeling what someone else felt. Miss Vera’ story had drawn him into her experience, and her experience had drawn from his own heart, from his own sixteen-year-old eye, a tear. Brian also realized that when he felt this woman’s anguish, a new liveliness stirred within him.

         Some of the other kids looked like they were feeling what he felt. Others looked like they were trying to hide their own embarrassment. And Brian felt that, as well.

         What was happening? Why were all these people having this kind of effect on him?

         Jesus “came forward and touched the [coffin], and the bearers stood still. And he said, ‘Young man, I say to you, rise!’ The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother.”

         The miracle of compassion is the miracle of new life. It heals the death within us. It revives us that we might live in the invigorating grace of the kingdom of God even here, even now.