Rebuke and Repentance: A Personal Manifesto (Sermon)

“Rebuke and Repentance: A Personal Manifesto”

Luke 9:51-62

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

7/10/16

        

The anxiety of simply being alive has been surging since September 11, 2001. That anxiety reached a new level of intensity for me last week. Never have I felt my work as a preacher to be so vitally important and so utterly irrelevant at the same time. When considering the urgent need for transformation today, and the reality that nothing I say will change headlines tomorrow, I feel miniscule. Insignificant.

Honestly, if my 1200 words per week do make a difference, even when added to all the other words offered in Christ’s name, I don’t see it. All I see is more shootings and more to come. Some police will be shot. We will hear about them. Black males will be shot in far greater numbers. When they are shot by police, we will hear about them, but, if statistics are to be trusted, the majority will be shot by other black males. We will hear very little about them. I cannot imagine the stress of being a black male or a police officer today.

There will be more suicide bombings and massacres, too – many in the name of God.

There will be more toxic and vengeful words slung back and forth between candidates and their supporters in our land in which citizens are no longer free to disagree and political leaders are no longer brave enough to compromise. It seems to me that sides don’t even matter anymore. Tactics have become the same, so how can outcomes be different?

I will tell you my disheartening truth as I feel it today: I don’t think I make a difference.

“When the days drew near for him to be taken up, [Jesus] set his face to go to Jerusalem. [And] because his face was set toward Jerusalem,” Jesus gets rejected by a Samaritan village.

When the Samaritans reject Jesus, two disciples, James and John, The Sons of Thunder, say to Jesus, “Want us to light ‘em up for you?”

“But [Jesus] turned and rebuked them.”

When Jesus’ face is set toward Jerusalem, The City of Peace, he must live by Agape Love for all creation – even for those parts that reject him. Even for those parts that will kill him.

Agape is un-sentimentalized, no-holds-barred Love. It’s not for the faint of heart. It’s not for those who give in to self-preserving fears. Nor, says Paul, can it be experienced or shared by those who are “envious, or boastful, or arrogant, or rude, or irritable, or resentful.” (1Cor. 13:4-5) Agape Love makes sense only when we set our faces, deliberately and gratefully, toward Jerusalem, toward Shalom, toward the Household of God on earth. Agape Love is relevant beyond Sunday speech only when our actions reflect our words.

Here’s the rest of my truth: My face has not been set toward Jerusalem.

In the name of God, I have tolerated and even blessed injustice.

In the name of Christ, I have desired and even tried to “command fire to come down from heaven and consume” those Samaritans who will vote differently than me in November. Privately and publicly I have impugned the intelligence and integrity of people who have the nerve to see the world through their own eyes and not through mine. Have I felt the same stinging judgments? Of course. But today I feel Jesus’ rebuke.

         Allen, he says, even when you fail to understand your neighbor’s point of view, never fail to recognize my Love for both of you.

So I am setting my face toward Jerusalem. That does not mean that I will change my vote. It means I will seek to live more intentionally in the ways of Agape Love which seeks “liberty and justice for all” of God’s Creation.

My follow through on that may be uncomfortable, for me and perhaps for others. With my face newly set, however, I hope to be more patient with discomfort. You see, I’m too much like that first would-be follower. I like my comfort. I’m persnickety about it. Just ask my wife. When it comes to where I lay my head, I’m not comfortable unless I have my particular pillows – plural, two of them. And the right pillow has to be on top. I keep it in a different color pillowcase to guard against improper stacking, and pillow theft. Everybody loses when one of my pillows ends up on the wrong side of the bed!

Each night I lay my head and each morning I set my face just like I’ve always done it. And now, things must change. In days to come, with God’s help, I will try to live beyond habit and into the dis-comforting surprises of Agape Love.

Scripture has plenty to say about proper burial of the dead, about honoring parents, and about showing gratitude to the communities that raise us. The face-setting call of Jesus does not nullify such things. It does, however, re-arrange our motivations. “As for you,” says Jesus, when concerned with self, family, politics, race, religion, nationality, or anything else, “go and proclaim the Kingdom of God.” And don’t look back.

“Proclaiming the Kingdom of God” means inhabiting it. Here and now.

What pitiful foolishness! says the world.

Richard Rohr compares worldly reality to a kind of trap. It has become a norm so deeply ingrained that it feels safer to adapt to its violence and turmoil than to enter something new. Normalcy, writes Rohr, “revolves around problem-solving, fixing, explaining, and taking sides with winners and losers. To get out of this unending cycle,” he says, “we have to allow ourselves to be drawn into sacred space…where the old world is able to fall apart, and a bigger world is revealed.”¹

Allow[ing] ourselves to be drawn into a sacred space where…the old world is able to fall apart, and a bigger world is revealed. Luke calls that setting our faces toward Jerusalem.

I honestly do not know what transformation will look like, feel like, cost, or accomplish. I don’t even know if I can survive transformation. I do know – and here I speak only for myself – that I have lived as one who has silently enjoyed the entitlements of a culture that values white, straight, Protestant males with adequate means above all others. It has made me a mostly comfortable and mostly likeable guy, but a kind of Cheerios-for-breakfast follower of Jesus. I have kept an even keel by remaining tied at the dock. So I have participated in injustice.

God forgive me.

Nothing I say today will stop the next tragedy to swarm the internet with bloody videos and rabid judgments. But I can live differently. I can repent. I can set my face toward Jerusalem and follow Jesus into the sacred space of Agape Love where the unimagined fullness of God’s new world of Shalom is being revealed. I can try to, anyway. I have to. If nothing else, it will make a difference in me. And maybe, somehow, that will make a difference beyond me.

One day at a time.

One just and grateful action at a time.

God help me.

Where have you set your face?

¹http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?m=1103098668616&ca=23a366c3-93d4-453e-baf7-bcae57b3a6d6