Of Demons and Idols (Sermon)

“Of Demons and Idols”

Luke 8:26-39

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

6/26/16

         The man is a mess. Like a troll he lives among the tombs, a danger to himself and others. When a seizure hits, he breaks his chains and runs screaming into the wilderness.

         Demon. Mental illness. Call it what you will. I can’t imagine how it feels to live as host to some vile parasite. Each sunrise must come as an assault and each sunset as a nightmare.

         For all of that, by the end of the story, the tables have turned. Hearing the report from the swineherds, the Gerasenes rush to the lakeshore to investigate. Sure enough, like slabs of fatback floating in a stewpot, their hogs float limply in the water. And the once-unhinged man sits before them clothed, calm, and aware.

         Let’s stand on that steep slope with the Gerasenes. Downhill, the water is littered with new death – too new to reek, too new to make sense. So, we cannot realize how our community up there on the hill has just become brighter, richer, and more complete because one of our own has been restored. We have all been restored, and we see nothing but ruin.

         Just as the man has suffered from seizures, we now suffer a seizure of our own. The Gerasenes, says Luke, are “seized with great fear.”

         Fear. Is there anything more dangerous, pervasive, and cherished than fear? In human history, only Love itself inspired more determination, ingenuity, and chaos than fear. Unfortunately, fear usually breeds a kind of regressive progress. From the chipping of flint, to the forging of steel, to the splitting of atoms, fear has revealed that its greatest impact comes when human beings fear their neighbors. That makes fear much more than a demon. It’s an idol. And it begets idols.

For their part, demons are somewhat limited. They’re kind of like old alley cats – opportunistic hunters of weaker species. They have no need to subdue the entire neighborhood. That one half-eaten chipmunk will do. For the moment. And like cats, demons often run for cover when someone approaches.

         Idols are different. Idols pose as friends and comrades, but they gather strength and momentum by deception. They are possessed by a rapacious appetite, a hunger that only grows when fed. And idols will do whatever necessary to preserve any advantage they gain. That’s why wealth and power make such popular idols. They masquerade as blessing while thriving on fear.

         Jesus rids one man of his demon, and in doing so he reveals to the Gerasenes their own beloved idol, an idol so powerfully subversive that the people don’t realize they live under its influence. When Jesus reveals the future as the dawn of new possibility and wholeness, the Gerasenes retreat.

Go away, they tell Jesus. We want things like they used to be. If this guy had a bum deal under the old arrangements, it wasn’t our fault. And we had our hogs.

In fairness to the Gerasenes, a livelihood can be difficult to establish and devastating to lose. Still, Jesus does more than drown hogs. He breathes new life in to the world. He establishes a new reality. His very presence proclaims the arrival of a future that renders the past over and done. Now of course, our histories will always shape and define us, but the past no longer controls us. As people of faith, we give thanks for our past while knowing that we cannot return to it. And the future, for all about it that seems more frightful than hopeful, is the realm of forgiveness and wonder, a territory in which God is already active.

A covetous desire for the past becomes a powerful idol. To succumb to this idol is to judge everything else – all current neighbors, all current moments, all current circumstances – according to a set of memories that we have sanitized, memories that we have whitewashed the past of its demons in order to uphold an illusion of purity and simplicity. To idolize the past is to lose awareness of the moment in which we live, to lose gratitude for the people with whom we occupy this moment, and to lose commitment to work here and now with vision and hope for people whose own present moments we will never experience.

Go away, the Gerasenes tell Jesus. You’ve messed things up, and now we have to try to re-create the past.

And with that, Jesus, like the demon itself, gets exorcised from the land of the Gerasenes. So he and his disciples walk down the hill, climb into their boat, and launch into the water. As they row – the corpses of hogs bobbing and rolling in their wake – it looks like everyone loses.

Remember the man, though. He runs after Jesus and begs to go with him. And why wouldn’t he? Who else would he want to be with? Jesus opens up a new future for him. He wants to leave his past behind.

Turning the man away, Jesus says, No. You need to stay. Since I’m not welcome here, you have to speak for me. Tell your story to anyone who will listen.

Do you see the distinction? When the past is something to preserve as if it were still a reality in which to live, it becomes an idol. Human beings will kill for that idol.

The past also confers upon us an identity, an identity that directs us toward a future beyond our control. William Faulkner was famous for saying, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”¹ While I don’t know about Faulkner’s personal spirituality, his words can help us understand how the past bears witness to God’s active presence in the world and in our own lives.

A past immersed in God-memories can exorcise the demons that chafe us with their paralyzing irritations – the grudges we hold, the jealousies we harbor, the superficial certainties and raptures we crave.

A past immersed in God-memories can also liberate us from the idols that deplete us of the energies we need for claiming and sharing our stories, and for living as people freed to bless the creation with compassion, justice, and peace.

         Much ink is being spilled about the decline of the Church. And the numbers are worrisome – especially when we idolize the past.

         What if we think of the cultural shifts around us as the aftermath of the healing of a demoniac? The healing of one who has lived in isolation, his mind a tempest of fear?

         It seems to me that in many ways the Church has been acting like the Gerasenes – a community that fears God’s new day because it looks so different from a past that feels so near and so desirable.

         What if we begin to think of the Church as one being healed? Healed of being possessed by idols and demons of what was. Healed not just from what has held us, but healed us from what awaits transformed hearts and minds.

         Jesus leaves us on shores that are both familiar and alien to us. Stay right here, he says, and keep telling your story.

         When we claim the past as the narrative of God’s organic presence in the world, and the future as a gift of God’s grace, the Gospel ceases to be a theological system to be defended, but a brand new way of life to be lived, and celebrated, and shared.

¹http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12124-the-past-is-never-dead-it-s-not-even-past

 

What Are We Waiting For? (Sermon)

“What Are We Waiting For?”

Luke 7:18-35

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

6/19/16

         By his words and actions, Jesus has been making a difference, and an impression.

John the Baptist’s disciples have been keeping an eye on Jesus for John, because John is in prison.

         John has had a rough time in ministry. He has boldly spoken truth to power. Most recently, he saw through Herod’s and Herodias’ transparent scheme to divorce their spouses and marry each other. Herodias was married to Phillip, Herod’s brother, and when they arranged for the ending of two marriages in order to pave the way for a third, John called them out. Herod returned the favor by imprisoning the busybody prophet.

         John idles in prison. Luke provides no details, but according to Matthew, Herod spares John because he fears the crowds who love John. According to Mark, Herod is “perplexed” by John. The king recognizes him as a holy and righteous man, and while he enjoys listening to John, Herod doesn’t know what to do with him.

For her part, Herodias does not appreciate John meddling in her private life. Holding a grudge, she manipulates a situation that allows her to teach the prophet a lesson he will never remember. Beheadings tend to do that.

         While their teacher wastes away in prison, John’s followers bring him reports of all that Jesus is doing and saying. So John sends two of his disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

         The more I think about this, the odder it seems. John’s disciples have seen and heard things about Jesus, apparently much of it firsthand. And they go and tell John what they have seen and heard. When they deliver John’s message, Jesus tells them, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard…”

         Is it just me, or does this sound like the beginning of some loop of absurd humor. Imagining myself as one of John’s disciples to whom Jesus has just said, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard,” I think I would say to Jesus, “Look, that’s why we’re here. We told John what we’ve seen and heard. He just wants you to confirm or deny what appears to be possible, or even probable. Are you the one, or do we keep waiting?”

         Jesus shakes his head and says, What are you waiting for?

         It can become numbingly comfortable to languish between all that is available for us to see and hear of Christ’s active presence in the world, and taking the leap of faith which empowers us to say, with Mary Magdalene, “I have seen the Lord,” and then to live differently.

         Even John the Baptist struggles with this leap. We cannot know how exactly how long John has been “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness.” But hasn’t it been long enough for him to recognize the arrival of the one whom he prophesied?

         One way to read this story is to read it as Jesus very gently nudging John toward fullness of faith. What do you see, John? What do you hear? What do you make of it all?

Still, who can blame John for grasping after certainty? He has remained true to his calling, and for his troubles, he gets thrown in jail. And what was it Jesus said just a little while ago when teaching in Nazareth? “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has [among other things]…sent me to proclaim release to the captives.” If Jesus is all he claims to be, shouldn’t he release John, of all people, and make of him a shimmering example of messianic authority?

         Jesus speaks well of John, in a sort of thoughts and prayers are with you kind of way, but he does nothing to liberate his cousin and partner in ministry.

         Or does he?

         “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard…” Jesus follows this command with a litany of wonders. I hear him inviting John, and all of us, to anticipate great things, and to do so with eyes wide open to the painful realities of life in this world. No one, not even Jesus, has immunity from those realities. The invitation, then, becomes an unnerving challenge, a challenge to embrace a freedom that cannot be measured in security and power but in a freely-chosen will to live gratefully and justly with and for all of creation.

         Jesus challenges us to recognize a healing that cannot be measured by lack of sick days, but by an abundance of forgiveness and compassion for all whom God loves.

         Jesus challenges us to stand on a confidence that cannot be measured in arguments won and decisions enforced, but in deliberate openness to wonder and hope.

         Jesus challenges us to live fully human lives, lives not only mindful of joy and pain but engaged with the whole spectrum of human experience. The longer we wait to accept that challenge the less human we become, and the more we distort the image of God within us. I think this is the point of Jesus’ memorable parable of a disengaged and anesthetized humanity sitting in the marketplace, imprisoned by their distractions and fears. “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not weep.”

         Life is happening, says Jesus, in all its splendor, tragedy, and monotony. And you’re missing it! What are you waiting for?

         Last Sunday morning, Jesus wailed as a hundred of his beloved were either killed or wounded in Orlando, FL. Millions more wept. The tragedy of that day broke many hearts, some beyond repair in this life. Like most other tragedies, this one fills many of us with a grief so deep that we will have to figure out how to incorporate it into our daily lives forever. It will not simply go away.

         The tragedy also hardened many hearts. Many of us scream the dry heaves of rage at one or another “them,” some group we do not understand and cannot abide. Whether that “them” is the LGBT community, or Muslims, or gun-control advocates, or gun-control opponents, or anything else matters less than the fact that all we feel is violated and endangered. And so we smolder and calculate.

         I think that for us as Jesus Followers, the way forward demands that we accept Jesus’ challenge to watch and listen for him moment by moment, day by day. He is challenging us to see him and hear him at work in the world, even in those who frighten, disgust, and bore us.

         Suffering and celebration always go hand-in-hand. Both can be life-giving. They cultivate humility, gratitude, community, and wisdom.

         Happy denial and ill-willed vengeance, now these things render us dangerous at first, and then, ultimately, irrelevant. The ancient book of Chinese wisdom called I Ching states that “Evil is not destructive to the good alone but inevitably destroys itself as well. For evil, which lives solely by negation, cannot continue to exist on its own strength alone.”¹

         Brothers and sisters, hear the Good News: The Christ lives. And as we follow him in trust and wonder, his life animates us to live our own lives according to his Love. And Love leads us toward a future of God’s own creation.

         Yes, it is a choice. What are we waiting for?

¹http://deoxy.org/iching/23

"A Successful Launch" (Sermon)

“A Successful Launch”

John 2:1-11

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

6/12/16

         Over the last couple of weeks, Marianne and I have been watching a robin’s nest in our yard. By the time we noticed the nest itself, it held three eggs. Cradled in that exquisite weave of grass and twigs, each half-inch by three-quarter-inch oval gleamed with all the blue brilliance of the earth in a photograph from space.

When I peeked in the nest a few days later, one egg had hatched. The tiny, still-blind hatchling raised its bald head until the translucent skin of its earthworm-thin neck was stretched taut. It opened its yellow beak, wobbled for a moment, then wilted into a heap across its unhatched siblings. Lying there, the little beast looked half bird, half rat, and half dead.

         All three babies have hatched now. Before long, their mother will ease them out of the nest. And – if we can keep our cat away from them – they will soon be foraging independently through lawns, fields, and blackberry thickets, and singing from tree limbs and rooftops.

         Most parents desire this for their children – a successful launch. They want to see the young people whom they have raised and nurtured move on to discover their identity and their place in the world.

         A successful launch requires many more years and much more heartache for humans than for birds, of course. Maybe birds do learn some things, but how to fly, how to find food, and how to build their unique nests, all of that is genetic knowledge. And that’s true for birds and bears, spiders and salmon. It’s a kind of ordinary miracle how particular species follow God-given imprints to keep their kind thriving and adapting.

         Miracles abound in the world, especially when it comes to beginnings. Then again, miracles are all about beginnings. They’re all about transformation. And it seems to me that for us, transforming miracles have little to do with defying nature. They have to do with helping us to live as authentic, God-imaged creatures, loving and beloved human beings.

         Mary, Jesus, and the disciples are at a wedding. At their best, weddings are testaments to a miracle – the miracle that occurs when two people recognize that by some holy, spirited touch they are being transformed into a loving and beloved wholeness. In that transformation they discover what is most completely and authentically human about themselves. Of course, fully realizing discovery requires the hard work of marriage. Marriage happens over time, as two people spread their wings and commit themselves to all the ordeals, failures, compromises, adaptations, forgiveness, successes, and joys within the concrete, mundane realities of relationship. Marriages are where water becomes wine. Still, even the simplest wedding can declare the most grateful joy and the brightest hope.

         Mary seems to understand this. So, when the lack of wine threatens to stall the celebration and humiliate the host, she turns to her son and says, “They have no wine.”

And Jesus says, “Mom! That’s not our concern. Besides, I’m not ready to go public yet.”

Unfazed, Mama Bird slips her beak into the nest and gives her fledgling a nudge. Mary turns to the servants and says, “Do whatever he tells you.”

         After Jesus responds to his mother’s irresistible prodding, everything changes. This transforming experience launches Jesus into the life of God’s Anointed One. It weds him to his purpose. And according to John, the marriage begins immediately.

         As soon as Jesus publicly embraces his identity and authority, he does something that not even the most respected rabbi would even consider. He thrashes his way through the temple, upsetting tables and chasing off those who had turned the miraculous, life-giving faith of Israel into just another organized religion based on wealth, power, and routine. The synoptic tradition of Jesus clearing the temple at the end of his public ministry is probably more historically accurate. Such reckless abandon would have been punished quickly and severely. It would have ended Jesus’ ministry, but John positions the event to demonstrate the radical effects of Jesus’ own successful launch.

         Think about it: Birds must leave the nest to live as birds. Wine must be poured out in order, as the psalmist says, “to gladden the human heart.” (Ps. 104:15) In the story of Jesus cleansing the temple, we see Jesus acting in a kind of mother-bird role, kicking his fledglings out of their all-too-comfortable nest, because only there will they learn to fly.

Now, we do need nests, don’t we? We need communities in which to grow and develop, and places to which we can return for rest and renewal. Still, neither Jesus’ Lordship nor our discipleship happens in the snug isolation of sanctuaries and fellowship halls – at least not in any way that makes a transforming difference in the world.

         When we wed ourselves to our own God-given imprint, to the purposes and potentials of creatures made in the image of God, we begin to experience the exciting implications of the truth that the miracles that really count are not about defying nature and ending all suffering. They are about becoming authentically human, here and now.

         If I could wave a wand and cure cancer, dementia, ALS, heart disease, and acne, I would do it. But I cannot.

I could tell you that God can, but then I’d have to add something like, If you just have enough faith, or, If God so chooses. And so, while claiming to declare God’s power, I absolve myself from responsibility by laying all potential disappointment on your failures or on God’s capricious whim.

         Still, when you are stressed, in whatever way, I will pray with you. Prayer pours me out. It connects me to you and makes me more human. And I pray that it does the same for you, that it helps you to recognize a fullness in yourselves, that it helps you to see your situation as a kind of nest, a launch pad for experiencing life as a miracle of grace, in all its suffering and all its gladness.

         Those stone water jars are kind of like nests. The water within them is unremarkable until Jesus pours it out for others. And there is not one of us here who, in the hands of Christ, cannot become a miracle poured out for others, as well.

It’s just so easy to get comfortable snuggling in nests and idling in stone jars. It’s easy to confuse discipleship with sitting in pews, committee meetings, and following protocols. The challenging, indeed the saving grace of Jesus is that he sees so much more in us than we see in ourselves and in each other.

What we may see as something weak and watery, Jesus sees as the makings of holy and spirited wine.

Blessedness: Life at the Limits (Sermon)

“Blessedness: Life at the Limits”

Luke 6:12-26

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

6/5/16

         In all kinds of literature, including scripture, when someone heads up a mountain, readers are being told, “Wait for it. Something’s coming!”

The ascent itself often proves grueling for climbers, and purposefully so. When they reach the summit spent and vulnerable, the thinness of air and shortness of breath mean that they no longer take anything for granted. They – and we – are about to learn something about our lives in particular and about existence in general. And this lesson comes at a cost.

Philosophers and psychologists often call this a “limit experience,” an experience at the stressful but emotionally and spiritually fertile edge of endurance. And at the limits, we often discover a very thin line between ecstasy and agony. Both can transform everything. Life as we’ve known it is over, and life as it will be has begun. Think of the climber standing atop Mt. Everest. The views from that altitude and that achievement open up whole new worlds. Think of the transplant recipient and the organ donor’s mother. They both know things about gratitude that the rest of us have never imagined. Think of the soldier who still hears his own heartbeat and breath when the guns fall silent. But when he looks beside him and realizes that he will never hear his buddy’s voice again, what will joy look like for him? After some limit experience, whether at height or depth, nothing remains the same.

         In the first five verses of today’s reading, Jesus prays on a mountain top. I don’t know about you, but I grew up with the impression that prayer was like rubbing an ancient oil lamp. If you did it right, the genie would come out and grant your wishes. I am so grateful to be learning just how mistaken I have been about prayer and God. When we truly enter prayer, like Daniel in the lion’s den, or Elijah in his cave, or Jesus in his tomb, it becomes a limit experience. Prayer doesn’t change circumstances. It changes us.

Up on that mountaintop, wrapped in the intimate, mystical embrace of prayer, Jesus’s sense of call refines and intensifies. Like most charismatic leaders, he has a slew of disciples, but he realizes that needs more than followers. He needs partners. So, Jesus selects twelve of his closest disciples and calls them “apostles.” The Greek word apostello means “to be sent.” As apostles, the twelve will do much more than witness Jesus’ words and works. They will enter his life, his transforming embrace with God. Jesus will empower them to participate fully in his work. Jesus calls and sends them out as personal expressions of his own presence in and Love for the Creation.

         The twelve disciples accept their commission, but they have no idea about the limit experiences that await them as apostles of Jesus. Back down the mountain, Jesus leads them to “a level place.” And here Jesus begins to reveal to his wide-eyed, wet-eared apostles the height, and depth, and holiness of the ground they now stand on.

         “Blessed are you,” says Jesus, “who are poor…hungry…weeping…hated…excluded…reviled.”

         But to all who are rich…full…laughing…and well-liked, “Woe to you.”

         Jesus reveals blessedness from the point of view of his limit experience of prayer, of intimacy with God. And it throws us into a state of cognitive dissonance. He identifies blessedness with the very kinds of things we have been taught to expect God to deliver us from. And the things that make us say, “I feel blessed,” Jesus says that those things condemn us.

         Now, this is the point at which first world pastors usually make some endearing equivocation to protect their salaries by absolving their first world congregations. Something like: Jesus isn’t saying don’t have nice things. He’s saying, ‘Drive a Ford.’ He’s saying, ‘Never spend more than $12 on a bottle of wine.’ Besides, if Jesus can turn water into wine, surely he can upgrade your monochromatic chardonnay to a nice, rich Bordeaux.’

         But no, Jesus does not allow such flippant dismissal. Down there at the foot of the mountain, he begins to guide us toward life at the limits, the life he calls The Kingdom of God.

         I hear Jesus saying that living as if comfort, power, and privilege are signs of God’s favor is to confess ultimate faith in something other than God. It is to avoid the life-transforming limit experiences that await us when we gratefully and lovingly follow Jesus – when we follow him into relationships with those who threaten us with their poverty, hunger, grief, and angry disdain.

         Spiritual discovery comes as the gift of risking journeys into the unknown. Jesus calls us to do more than talk about compassion and justice. He calls us to do compassion and justice. He calls us to seek, to embrace, and to Love God by seeking, embracing, and loving God’s beloved children who feel the sting of poverty, hunger, grief, and rage. Sure, it can be safer to sidestep desperate people who clamber for belonging, healing, and hope, but those relationships teach us what life in the Household of God, what blessed to be a blessing means, accomplishes, and costs.

         Shane Claiborne, who grew up in east Tennessee, now lives in an intentional Christian community that he helped to start in one of Philadelphia’s poorest neighborhoods. Claiborne is also affiliated with The Red Letter Christians, a formal but non-institutional community which embraces the limit experience-creating practices of prayer, simple living, and radical commitment to Jesus. On their website, The Red Letter Christians present their core values. Among their values are these statements: “All people are made in the likeness and image of God. Doing Jesus’ work leads to personal growth and greater understanding. Freedom comes through serving others – not power, politics or materialism. Wherever your power and influence might lie, it is magnified when shared and held by those who are poor, oppressed and looked over by society. We respect and fight for the well-being of all people as children of God – especially those with whom we differ.”¹

All of the stated values reflect ways of living at the limits of human experience where we grow closer to God and to God’s creation by entering into communion with and for those in deepest need.

In his book The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, Claiborne laments the fact that much of Christianity teaches us to “admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did…[to] applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things…[and to] adore his cross without taking up ours.”²

“Most good things have been said far too many times,” says Shane Claiborne, “and [now they] just need to be lived.”³

         May God give us the strength to desire life at the limits of human experience. And there may we discover the transforming ecstasies and agonies of true and eternal blessedness.

¹http://www.redletterchristians.org/start/

²http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/36103.Shane_Claiborne

³Ibid.