Holding the Mirror (Sermon)

“Holding the Mirror”

John 10:22-30

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

4/17/16

         “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”

         The metaphor of God as shepherd is familiar to the Jews who gather around Jesus, in the portico of Solomon, the son of the Shepherd King to whom tradition ascribes the words of Psalm 23.

         I think it unlikely that the wisdom and gratitude of Psalm 23 belong to a young King David. David has to live into his kingship, and he does not do so cleanly. His rise to the throne is followed by a devastating, ego-driven fall from grace that includes adultery, deception, and murder.

         Psalm 23 reflects the heartrending process of discovering shalom. That process takes a human being through the maturing wake of disappointments and failures which may be redeemable but which linger. David’s awareness of God’s shepherding grace, his gratitude for the wantless abundance of God’s steadfast Love and faithfulness follow years of spiritual discernment and growth – and divine patience.

         In that process, David discovers that God saddles the kings of Israel with disarming power and servant leadership. Living into such paradoxical authority requires and creates the kind of earthy spirituality we encounter in Psalm 23.

         It seems to me that the Jews who confront Jesus on that winter day have been conditioned – by their teachers, or by Rome’s oppression, or both – to dismiss the wholeness of faith and its mystery. They seem to prefer the measurable certainties of totality, of the Law.

         In this context, I consider wholeness synonymous with shalom, that broad and hospitable spiritual landscape of gratitude, generosity, and hope. By contrast, I define totality as terminal conclusion.¹ Yes, that’s redundant, but I think it describes the anxiety lying behind the Jew’s insistence: “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.”

         Release us from all doubt, they say. Set us on a track from which we cannot deviate. Give us more law. Build a palace. Win a war. End the discussion.

         “Tell us plainly.”

         The Jews, like the young David, want the final victory of totality, but Jesus is offering the eternal journey of wholeness.

         “My sheep hear my voice,” says Jesus. “I know them and they follow me.”

         Listening. Intimate knowing. Trustful and transforming following. It seems to me that such things constitute the process of living into the wholeness Jesus calls “eternal life.”

         I think we are wired to hear and recognize a holy voice. And that voice speaks into our heart of hearts, the heart we all share in common and from which we cannot, finally, be estranged. Our metaphor for that heart is the Imago Dei – the Image of God.

         The Imago Dei lies behind such voicings as Yahweh’s instruction to Moses: “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” (Exodus 2:14b)

The Imago Dei is the fundamental and eternal intimacy behind Jesus’ de-cluttering promises that: “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed…For, in fact, the kingdom of God is [within] you.” (Luke 17:20b, 21b) And: “…just as you did it to one of the least of these…you did it to me.” (Matthew 26:40)

Reflecting on the depth of spiritual intimacy in the Holy One-to-Holiness conversation within each of us and within humankind as a whole, Paul condenses the entire Law to: “Love your neighbor.” (Romans 13:9-10

         While this spiritual intimacy finds many expressions within our scriptures, insights of wholeness are hardly limited to Christian spirituality. One of the most gifted celebrants of what I call the Sacrament of Divine Indwelling is Rumi, a 13^th century Sufi mystic. Before quoting him, how often have you heard people say that they feel closest to God in nature? Feeling that intimacy, and connecting natural beauty to the Divine Beauty within himself, Rumi writes: “That which God said to the rose, and caused it to laugh in full-blown beauty, He said to my heart, and made it a hundred times more beautiful.”²

Rumi expresses similar intimacy and wholeness in human relationships. “The minute I heard my first love story,” he says, “I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.”³

         The 20^th century Christian theologian, philosopher, scientist, and mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, says, “Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them [to make them whole!], for [love] alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.”⁴

         I have elaborated on all of this because I think that such insights reveal the deep truth of what it means to follow Jesus. Following Jesus means so much more than churchy behavior. Following Jesus means holding up the mirror of our lives. It means reflecting the Holy One living within us, giving us life, and connecting us to eternity within the moment, and within each other. My dad calls that “the primary relationship,” the relationship that animates us, humanizes us, and sanctifies us. The primary relationship mirrors God’s presence in and Love for the creation.

         “Perhaps,” says Dad, “the purest human example of the primary relation is that between infant and mother, especially in play, where the delight in giving and receiving is not so much reciprocal as palindromic – each initiates the play on her own, each responds on her own, as though they were saying the same word to each other from both ends at once.”⁵

         I love the image of a palindrome – a word, a sentence, an image or a voice that is the same forward and backward. This palindromic delight is the grateful joy of mirroring God’s presence within us and Love for us as we mirror God’s presence and Love in each other.

         “We…become the God we connect with,” says Richard Rohr. “That’s why it’s so important to know the true God, and not some little, punitive, toxic god, because then [we] don’t grow up, but live in fear and pretense…We know God and we know ourselves by inner prayer journeys and not by merely believing in doctrines or living inside of church structures. God’s way of dealing with us becomes our way of dealing with life and others. We eventually love others, quite simply, as we have allowed God to love us…”⁶

         “The Father and I are one,” Jesus tells the Jews. And the grace of his words warms their hearts – with fury. They make ready to stone him for blasphemy. But he is saying that he and they, he and we, you and I, we are all eternally one with each other and with God. We discover our true joy as human beings by living in the palindromic delight of relationship with the Holy One who dwells within all things.

“If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly,” say the Jews.

And Jesus holds up a mirror saying, Look! You’re so beautiful

Now, follow me by Loving one another as I Love you.

¹I infer these definitions from Joseph R. Myers’ discussion of the same in his book Organic Community: Creating a Place Where People Naturally Connect, Baker Books, Grand Rapids, MI, 2007. pp. 29ff.

²https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/875661.Rumi?page=3

³https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/875661.Rumi?page=1

⁴http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/p/pierreteil142112.html

⁵From an unpublished article by Dr. Thomas A. Huff, M.D.: “The Politics of Resentment vs. The Politics of Gratitude.”

⁶http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Richard-Rohr-s-Meditation--The-Mirroring-Gaze.html?soid=1103098668616&aid=WQVEgAw8Cgg%29

Fresh Breath (Sermon)

“Fresh Breath”

Acts 9:1-9

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

4/10/16

         Last week we looked at John’s account of Jesus’ first post-resurrection appearance to the disciples. In that story, Jesus breathes on the disciples saying, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

         That scene echoes the second creation story in Genesis when God breathes the “breath of life” into the form God has scraped together from dust. I hear scripture proclaiming Creation and Resurrection as two metaphors for the same God-revealing, dust-animating initiative of grace.

         In 1Corinthians 15, Paul says this overtly when referring to the first and last Adams: “The first man, Adam, became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.” (1Corinthians 15:45)

         Spirit. Ruach. Pneuma. Breath is a symbol of God’s active presence in the creation. So, Jesus breathing the Holy Spirit and peace on the disciples stands in stark contrast to Saul, who for love of God and Torah, is “breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord.”

         Talk about your bad breath…

         The thing I find encouraging and redeeming in this story is that even in the very midst of Saul’s deliberate and violent hostility toward those who follow Jesus, God sees in Saul the fundamentals of integrity and faithfulness. God chooses this brutal jihadist to serve as the first and most influential single evangelist of the new spiritual movement arising from the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, and on the forever mystifying story of Jesus having somehow outlived his own death.

         Luke narrates Saul’s Damascus Road experience in Acts 9. In Acts 26 Paul recalls it himself before King Agrippa in Caesarea. It is interesting, in neither telling of the story does God ask for, or does Saul/Paul offer repentance.

         Think back: Jesus does not ask the eleven remaining disciples to repent after having abandoned and doubted him. He simply breathes the Holy Spirit on them. For that matter, when Jesus calls the twelve, he does not demand that they qualify themselves by declaring repentance. He just says, “Follow me.”

         Given such precedent, why has the church decided that true conversion requires public admission of and retreat from not only personally memorable sins but also pre-natal guilt?

Now, hold that question. Let it simmer.

         When we continue reading in Acts 9, we meet Ananias, a disciple of Jesus living in Damascus. God tells Ananias where to find Saul.

         ‘Go, lay hands on him,’ says God, ‘so he can see, again.’

         Ananias says, ‘What? Lord, I know this guy, and he is pure evil.’

         Once again, fear raises its serpent head and tempts a freshly-minted New Creation to embrace the authority to judge and condemn. Ananias and Saul now have that in common.

         Fear. Does anything create more evil in the world than the spiritual halitosis of fear? Fear leads humankind into politics of vengeance and economics of scarcity and envy. Behind such philosophies lies the selfish anxiety that I will not get my share – more accurately, the anxiety that you may get more than me. This is particularly true in First World cultures, and ours may be one of the most fearful on the planet right now. Listen to the political and economic rhetoric. Watch as one piece of legislative panic after another gets passed in statehouses across the nation. It is like watching a fish lying on the bank gasping for air. The fish cannot breathe when there is too much of a good and necessary thing.

         Yes, things are changing, too fast in some cases. And I understand lament. Even here, I feel the pressures of changing realities. In this gathering of disciples called Jonesborough Presbyterian Church, we have folks who Feel the Bern and folks who are ready to Play the Trump Card. I try my best to empathize with everyone while also trying to remain true to my own convictions. And my foundational conviction affirms our shared discipleship. We are all God-imaged human beings. Each of us has our own minds, strengths, weaknesses, opinions, and histories. When I fail to love you for who you are, all I really care about is feeling safe and secure in the unchallenged rightness of my own mind.

What will Saul eventually say about Love? Something about being patient, kind, grateful, humble, and hopeful. Something about the lack of Love reducing us to “noisy gong[s] or…clanging symbol[s].” (1Corithinans 13:1-7)

 Un-love is to fear what stagnant water is to amoebic dysentery.

         Sometimes I give fear that kind of power, and when I do, I have terrible breath – threatening, murderous breath, hiding behind a smile and beneath a robe.

         ‘I know all about Saul,’ God says to Ananias. ‘And yeah, he’s caused a lot of suffering. But he can take it, too. And he will do that for Jesus. I choose Saul. You, go help him.’

         The difference between faith as the church often teaches it and faith as Jesus demonstrates it is Jesus’ utter lack of fear. Fear always looks back. It always retreats, abandons, closes doors, and builds obstacles. Fear holds its breath expecting the worst.

Jesus’ faith always looks forward. And while hardly naïve, it always sees potential.

         When looking for a new king of Israel, Samuel has something particular in mind; so, he dismisses a young shepherd named David.

‘Not so fast,’ says Yahweh, “[I do] not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” (1Samuel 16:7)

‘I choose David,’ says God. ‘He’s got a strong, wise heart.’

         This kind of thing happens all the time.

Moses says he has no authority, no voice. And God says, ‘You have a bold heart. I choose you.’

         ‘I’m just a boy,’ says Jeremiah. ‘I can’t do this.’

         ‘You have a perceptive heart,’ says God. ‘I choose you.’

         ‘How can this be?” asks Mary.

         ‘You have the perfect heart for this,’ says Gabriel. ‘Like God’s own heart. Trusting, mothering, faithful. God chooses you, Favored One.’

         Within each one of us there stirs the heart of a fresh-breathed New Creation. Knowing that heart, God calls us to fearless discipleship. And that is as true for the person sitting next to you, and the person sitting across the aisle from you, as it is for you.

         God warns us when we develop bad breath. Our job is to serve as each other’s Ananias – the New Creature who takes the profound risk of trusting God’s will and power to re-breathe even our foulest breath. When we fully trust Resurrection, we know that nothing and no one lies beyond the grace of God.

To suffer with and for one another is to trust the indwelling intimacy between the First and Last Adams living within us, purging us of selfish fear. Breathing that Holy, Spirited breath transforms us, day by day, two steps forward and one step back, into signs of and participants in the Household of God.

Now, isn’t that the point, and even the very process of repentance?

Grateful Trepidation (Newsletter)

         April 15, 1996. Tax Day. My first day as pastor of Cross Roads Presbyterian Church in Mebane, NC.

         That afternoon, to help me get started Miss Edith and her brother Henry B. drove me to the local hospital to visit Ms. Mitchell. I wore a tie and a coat. Except for funerals and weddings, that may have been the last time I did that.

         I delivered my first Sunday sermon on April 21. But the day before, I did my first funeral. I never met the 42-year-old woman. Who had just been released from prison. Who died when her Ford Probe hit a telephone pole at 100mph. With police in pursuit. A few of us gathered around her grave. The woman’s mother sat in a folding chair in the shade of a green canvas tent, on green indoor/outdoor carpet that the funeral home spread over the green grass next to the brown dirt. To bury her only child.

I didn’t say much. “Perhaps the great witness of her life was that she was so fully and eternally loved by her mother.” That was the core of it. I had never done a funeral before. And to have to start that way…wow. But life and death don’t tend to respect a given person’s preparation for tragedy.

Or joy, for that matter. More than once I’ve visited with a family watching a loved one take his or her last, slow breaths in this life, then walked down the hospital stairs to the maternity ward where another family was watching in awe as another loved one was taking his or her first breaths. There is more sadness in one of those rooms and more rejoicing in the other. But there is usually trepidation in both.

Trepidation – as I use the word – is endemic to faith. Unlike fear, trepidation is simply the indication that we’re moving forward with something important to us and to others, in spite of the inevitable uncertainties.

         Trepidation, uncertainty, self-doubt, outright failures, you name it, all of these things and more have been daily companions in this journey. In twenty years of ministry, I’ve questioned my call only once. Per day. Looking back, would I do anything differently? You bet. The one thing I would not have done differently is simply to have started. I cannot imagine doing anything else. (Sure, my wife will corroborate that. You don’t have to ask her. Please.) Serving as a pastor in the Household of God has granted me opportunities to grow spiritually, intellectually, creatively, personally…and circumferentially (Love those potlucks!).

I am more grateful than words can express to the wonderful folks at Jonesborough, Shelby, and Cross Roads Presbyterian Churches. You’ve welcomed me and encouraged me. You’ve been patient with me and taught me so many things. Thank you.

I love every one of you.

                                                               Peace,

                                                                        Allen

Out of Control (Sermon)

“Out of Control”

John 20:19-29

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

April 3, 2016

Immediately prior to this morning’s text, Mary Magdalene bursts through the the disciples’ grief and announces, “I have seen the Lord!” 

         Just prior to that, “the disciple whom Jesus loved” sees empty grave clothes lying in an empty tomb. Both the disciple and Mary now “believe,” but I bet that if you asked them, both would struggle for adequate words to define what they believe and, more importantly, to describe what believing means.

         Believing does not come easy for any of the disciples. Even Peter, the Rock, has trouble accepting this whole unlikely, untidy mess. He eventually shrugs it off saying, “I am going [back to] fishing.”

         ‘Life before Jesus made more sense, anyway.’

         Then we have Thomas. I think Thomas gets a bad wrap in being called The Doubter. Remember the story of the raising of Lazarus. Jesus learns that Lazarus is dying, but he dies before Jesus gets to him. Jesus says that he is glad that Lazarus is undoubtedly dead. He is glad because he can now do what he will do “so you may believe.”

Thomas may be the most spiritually aware and honest of the disciples, because when he realizes what Jesus is about to do to Lazarus, he shakes his head and says, “Well, let’s go, too, so we can die with him.”

         Doubtless, Thomas knows that to raise the dead will do more to threaten than to inspire people. There will be consequences for this. After Jesus’ resurrection, Thomas seems to know that to affirm as trustworthy that which experience has, with one unique exception, proven impossible is not some great victory of the human spirit. It is the total commitment of the believer to a presence and a power at work beyond our control.

When Thomas hears that Jesus is, in some fashion, alive, if he really doubts, I think that what he doubts is his own ability and willingness to travel the open-ended path that believing will demand.

         Fully aware of what he is asking his disciples to believe and do, Jesus must empower them to enter the out-of-control reality which is the here-and-now mystery of Resurrection. In the synoptic gospels, Pentecost comes after some weeks of Jesus popping in and out of the disciples’ lives. In John, however, Pentecost occurs Easter evening, during Jesus’ first appearance to the disciples, as they cower behind a locked door, hiding from Jews, Romans, and anyone else who might target them next. Unexpected and unbidden, Jesus leaks through the closed door and stands among them.

“Peace be with you,” he says. And when he opens his hands to identify himself, the disciples rejoice. Like Mary, they, too, have seen the Lord.

“Peace be with you,” he says, again.

         Put yourself in the disciples’ place. Standing in your midst is an un-dead guy. He urges you to be at peace. How do you respond? Believing that kind of thing happens not by our own strength of faith or character. Believing is itself a gift of grace. So, in order for the disciples, and for us, to begin to believe, Jesus breathes the breath of life upon us, saying, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” He offers that which is uncontrollably alive and free, that which which empowers us to carry on the work that Jesus begins.¹

In the formless void of a locked room, filled with hearts tossed about by chaos, Jesus broods and breathes over us. He calls forth new life so that we might not merely believe, but trust, and follow, and grow into Christ-imaged disciples. Easter is the first day of the New Creation.

I want all of us to feel caught up in what I will call the feralizing power of the Holy Spirit who calls and leads us to places and relationships we have not imagined. I want all of us to know the terrifying joy of being swept up into the work of Resurrection, a work that breaks through the closed doors of committee meetings where many disciples hide not for fear of Jews or Romans, but for fear of being called to live like Jesus in the world. A Jesus life – a Resurrection life – is a life of gratitude, generosity, forgiveness, and bold justice. These virtues are what Love looks like when enfleshed in a life of discipleship.² This is what it means to “believe.”

         The grave cannot hold Jesus, so why would anyone think that conspicuous piety and stone-sealed doctrines do? But danged if we don’t try to put a rheostat on the Light of the World. Danged if we don’t try to domesticate Jesus in the church by busying ourselves with meetings, programs, and possessions, by fussing over inevitable differences in who believes what and how they express it.

Of course, meetings are important to intentional communities like the church. But when meetings become the substance of ministry, when institutional process becomes the habit of discipleship, the church becomes a place to hide, a place where we intentionally avoid face-to-face encounters with the dis-orienting and re-orienting life of a newly- and differently-alive Jesus.

Here is the rub: Doubt does not lock the doors of our hearts and churches. Fear does – the fear of being carried away in the uncontrollable aliveness of Resurrection. In many ways our doors are rusted shut. We need Jesus to walk through them. We need him to breath his re-creating peace on us.

         The film “Mass Appeal” memorably illustrates what facing the resurrected Jesus can look like. In the movie, Jack Lemmon plays the charming but vocationally lifeless Father Farley. After falling out of favor with his bishop, Father Farley has to mentor Mark Dolson, a non-conforming young seminary student. At first Mark appears to represent all that is wrong with the church and the world, but the story begins to reveal Mark as a disciple who has “seen the Lord,” a disciple who has no patience for the self-serving capitulations of the church to power, wealth, and convention.

         In time, Father Farley realizes this, as well. And in a scene I consider Farley’s own terrifying Easter evening, we see the elder pleading with the younger not to leave the church. Confessing his own complicity with the entombing fears of a comfortable, entitled institution, Father Farley, at last feels Jesus breathing on him.

You can’t leave, he says to Mark. “You’re one of those crazy, beautiful lunatics who keep the church alive!”

In the concluding scene, a changed and changing Father Farley stands before his congregation preparing to say the Mass. He begins, gets flustered, throws his hands into the air and says, “I can’t do this anymore.”

Father Farley comes out from behind the altar. He comes out from his hiding place, and makes a courageous and disrupting declaration of faith in a living Christ who calls the church to a work and a hope in which we cannot participate while hiding behind the locked doors of the way we’ve always done it, or what will others think?, or I’m just not comfortable around those people.

To claim to have seen the Lord is to do more than “believe.” It is to commit ourselves to the power of Resurrection at work in the world.

Doubt is welcome. But fear? We must learn to manage our fear and to Love like our lives depend on it. And, in truth, they do.

We are, after all, Easter people.

¹R. Alan Culpepper, “The Gospel of John,” The New Interpreter’s Bible, Abingdon Press, Nashville, 1995. P. 848.

2This reflects an insight from an interview in Sojourners magazine. In the interview, Shane Claiborne quotes Cornel West. “Cornel West is right,” says Claiborne, “when he says that ‘justice is what love looks like in public.’” Sojourners: Faith in Action for Social Justice. “We set out to start a community, and how we have a village.” Interview conducted by Jim Wallis. February 2016, p. 35.