The Light within All Things (Sermon)

“The Light with All Things”

Ephesians 5:8-14

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

3/26/17

         Let’s take a walk. It’s an afternoon like last Thursday, a quintessential spring day. We’re at Persimmon Ridge – you, me, and Todd, my energetic border collie. We park under the pines in front of the Head Start building. Walking uphill past the playground, Todd stops to sniff the fence. He gives it a canine salute.

We climb the winding path of Luke’s Trail up to the ridge where golden sunlight pours from a white-hot spout in a crystal pitcher sky. At four o’clock the light angles down through the still-bare branches of oaks, hickories, maples, and tulip poplars. It pools on the brown remnants of last year’s luxuriant foliage. As the sun warms the moist soil beneath the brittle leaves, the earthy fragrance of decay rises into the cool air. We can almost feel the rich darkness underfoot receiving and relishing the warmth.

         We cross the power line above the water park and begin the serpentine descent toward the creek. In the shady dampness on the other side of the water, trout lilies spread their waxy leaves dappled with shades of green. They do resemble trout holding in a lazy stream, while sunlight plays in the mottled designs on their backs. On a fragile stem above the leaves, soft yellow blooms bow toward the earth as if self-conscious of their own tender beauty. Nearby, bloodroot and rue anemone flaunt their white brilliance with shameless delight.

Working our way up the steep backside of Walter’s Trail, we throw a stick for Todd. He may bring it back to us, or he may wait for us catch up with him, then dare us to wrestle it from his mouth.

At the upper end of Walter’s Trail, we take the gravel road up toward the water tower. Wine berry brambles, thick with tiny thorns, burst from the hillside. With the sun behind them, the canes glow a translucent burgundy. In another six weeks, we’ll go back and pick the sweet, red berries. Marianne will make us a pie.

Before reaching the water tower, we turn onto John’s Trail and follow that ridge. We duck under and step over fallen branches. After crossing the power line, again, we drop back to the gravel road behind the ball fields. Here and there along the way, purple violets, periwinkle, and sprouts of new green in the understory declare winter a memory.

         On our walk, new life is a testimony of the light’s continual work. I receive it as a promise that a holy and creative radiance burns at the heart of all things, a reminder that light, not darkness, is the ultimate reality.

Reflecting on the creation stories in Genesis, Philip Newell writes, “To say that light is created on the first day is to say that light is at the heart of life. It is the beginning of creation in the sense that it is the essence or centre from which life proceeds. At the heart of all that has life,” says Newell, “is the light of God.”¹

         Redemption, then, is not the giving of light to that which had been hopelessly dark. It’s the washing away of a darkening pall. Redemption reveals that which has always been our truth, but which we have forgotten, ignored, or refused. Much Christian teaching has declared something quite different, namely that condemning darkness is our fundamental reality. Theologians have called it “total depravity.” We deserve eternal punishment, and unless we say this and do that, God will abandon us to hell.

         One denomination declares it somewhat gently: “God…will bring the world to its appropriate end…and Christ will judge all men in righteousness. The unrighteous will be consigned to Hell…The righteous…will receive their reward and will dwell forever in Heaven.”³

Jonathan Edwards, the eighteenth-century guru of “revivalist” theology, declares it less gently. In his long, terrifying, and often-quoted sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Edwards says:

         “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire…you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours…O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit…that you are held over in the hand of that God…

“Therefore, let every one that is out of Christ, now awake and fly from the wrath to come…‘Haste and…escape to the mountain, lest you be consumed.’”²

         If not always in that tone, that is still the message of much Christian preaching. It seems to me that when evangelism starts to feel like blackmail, we’ve crossed a dangerous line. We are assuming that loathsome darkness is our essence, and that God loves only those who, by terrified conformity to a narrow and controlling dogma, earn the light. If that’s how a person views God, how will he or she treat others?

         “Everything that becomes visible is light,” says Paul. He calls us to “live as children of light” because that is who we are. It’s who we have been from birth. It’s who we will be in whatever it is that eternity may look like.

         Because life is not all sweetness and happiness, God comes to us in Christ. The nineteenth century Scottish author George McDonald spoke of the Incarnation as “the coming of a ‘real man’ to those who are ‘half-unreal’, to show them the light that is hidden in the depths of [all things]”⁴

All things: Including the earth, which sustains us and will outlive us, but which requires our grateful, loving, and cooperative stewardship today if future generations are to eat, and drink, and breathe.

All things: Including our neighbors – no matter where they come from or what they believe or don’t believe. If we dare to claim to be fashioned in God’s image, and fail to look for and honor that same image in all others, our claim means nothing.

All things: Including, and may be the hardest one, ourselves. The less gracious we are to ourselves, the more we try to deserve God’s love, and the less kind we are to neighbor, stranger, and the earth itself.

         The closing words of today’s passage remind us that not even death darkens our deepest heart. “Sleeper awake!” says Paul. “Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” On Easter, the grave will reveal to all things that in all things shines the everlasting light of God.

More cold, dark, and painful nights will come for all of us. But the light of Christ is revealing our sinfulness as a hunger for belonging and a thirst for wholeness. The light of Christ within us reveals our despair as a burdened love for this world. A bright, new beginning is the destiny of all creation. It’s not ours alone to claim or to enjoy.

As trout lilies, bloodroot, and violets are to springtime, may we live as grateful witnesses to resurrection, testaments to the light that surrounds us, fills us, enlivens us, and claims us as its own.

        

¹John Philip Newell, The Book of Creation: An Introduction to Celtic Spirituality. Paulist Press, New York, 1999. p. 3.

²http://www.ccel.org/ccel/edwards/sermons.sinners.html

³http://www.sbc.net/aboutus/basicbeliefs.asp

 ⁴Newell, p. 14.

The Beast with Two Minds (Sermon)

“The Beast with Two Minds”

John 7:10-13, 37-43

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

3/19/17

         In best-case scenarios, the most influential people in our lives embody Love and forgiveness. They speak challenging yet transforming truths to us. They evoke both laughter and tears. And if they are truly influential, we can’t help sharing what they teach us. I’m more grateful than words can express that both of my parents are such people for me. While I’ve shared with you some things my dad has said, my mom has spoken some memorable words, too.

         I am the second of four children, and when any of us complained about something we had just received or experienced, something we had expected to be wonderful, Mom, as she continued cleaning up after us, cooking for us, or perusing the paper to escape us, would say, “Remember, things are always better while you’re anticipating them than when you actually get them.”

         I didn’t want to hear that! I was a kid. I didn’t have a driver’s license yet. I hadn’t earned a paycheck yet. I hadn’t kissed a girl yet. I hadn’t left home yet. I was looking forward to those things – with great anticipation! So, I dismissed Mom’s advice as a symptom of the foolishness of her advanced age. She was in her thirties, for crying out loud. Her late thirties!

To my chagrin, Mom proved more right than wrong. Because anticipation is often fueled by a desire for personal benefit, it tends to breed unrealistic expectations. When hit by enough disappointment, we try to protect ourselves through suspicion or even full-on cynicism. The same is true, and even more so, when fear drives our anticipation. Fear devolves into impatience with and judgement of those whose own desires and expectations differ from ours. It seems to me that the suspicion and cynicism of fear creates the festering rancor in which we now live.

In John’s gospel, one of the main characters is The Crowd who follows Jesus everywhere he goes. The crowd represents any of us and all of us. The crowd believes and disbelieves. They hope and despair. They receive in grateful wonder, and they scoff in ill-tempered disdain.

In John 7, Jesus is in Jerusalem for the Festival of Booths. This festival amounts to a kind of Thanksgiving meets Mardi Gras meets Holy Week. It’s a week-long, harvest celebration with parades, feasting, and solemn worship. Word is out that Jesus of Nazareth is in town. The Jews are looking for him, and The Crowd is in an absolute lather.

“Jesus is here? Fantastic! He’s really something special!”

“The heck he is! He’s a wannabe! A fraud!”

The crowd has heard stories about the Messiah, but coming in from north and south, east and west to gather at the table, they’ve listened to different storytellers. So, there are at least two camps of messianic expectations. Some see messianic hope in Jesus’ compassion for the poor, in his authoritative teaching, and in stories about things like the transformation of water into wine and a mystifying abundance in five loaves and two fish. Others expect religious and political redemption to go hand-in-hand. So, until Jesus leads the Jewish people in successful rebellion against Rome, he’s just one more quack hawking snake oil.

The crowd may be one literary character, but being of two minds, it is at its own throat. Throughout John’s gospel, the crowd encounters Jesus but struggles to recognize him. The tension we see and feel at the Festival of Booths exposes more than a momentary dilemma. It illustrates the way of life for people of faith.

The synoptic gospels acknowledge that tension, as well. “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth,” says Jesus. “For I have come to...” then he names all the divisions he will cause. (Matthew 10:34a-35ff)

We are hardly strangers to that tension, are we? Never in my lifetime have I felt such division in my immediate surroundings. Never have I felt as obliged to define and act on an opinion as I do now. And never have I felt that differing opinions held such potential for damaging relationships that mean so much to me. Religiously, politically, socially, and economically we are the crowd. We are a beast with two minds.

Watching the crowd wrestling with their expectations, and with each other, Jesus says, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’”

Who among us doesn’t crave living water right now?

By referring to scripture, Jesus calls us to our sacred memory and to sacred community. Know who you are, says Jesus, by remembering your shared story.

Within that sacred memory are words from Isaiah, the prophet who declares redemption to exiles who have been defeated and dispersed. Through Isaiah, God says: “For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour my spirit upon your descendants…” (Isaiah 44:3)

The trouble is that in both the first and the twenty-first centuries, some in the Judeo-Christian tradition hear in those ancient words a promise of a return to wholeness, to oneness in community with God, neighbor, and earth. And others hear God’s promise to return a particular community to religious freedom and political eminence. And I suppose some try to hear both. And there’s the rub! The Crowd, that one character, hears both. What will a divergent entity expect? How will it respond when reality doesn’t live up to all the anticipatory hype?

We are in the season of Lent because The Crowd eventually decides to reject Jesus. We are on our way to Friday and Saturday because before Jesus reveals the fullness of his promise, we seethe with disappointment. We expected so much more.

When Jesus says, Come to me and drink, he offers us the living water of the Holy Spirit. And he challenges us to remember and to anticipate ourselves as a community becoming one in God’s Spirit.

Long before John wrote his version of the Gospel, Paul wrote to the Corinthians. There is rich harmony in their voices: “For just as the body is one and has many members,” writes Paul, “and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body…and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. (1Corinthians 12:12-13)

We are members of one, painfully divided body. So Friday is coming – again. In one way or another, we are going to kill the one who loves us unconditionally, because we are going to feel disappointed by him.

Sunday’s coming, too. And once again, Jesus will call us, he will dare us to see ourselves as part of an outpouring, part of a flow that reveals the seminal, continual, and eternally renewing utterance of God into the chaos, into the brokenness.

On Sunday will be reminded – again – that God is still creating us, still redeeming us by Love, for Love.

Charge/Benediction

In this life, oneness in the Spirit does not and will not mean uniformity of religion, politics, race, sexual orientation, lifestyle, or anything else. I’m learning this, but I’m learning it slowly because I anticipated something quite different. Indeed, something within me must die and be renewed before I fully accept it. I’m a work in progress.

Life can be tense, even dangerous, when all the beasts gather at the watering hole. But none of us can live without water. God is the water where we gather to drink. Oneness in the Spirit means, I think, entering the tension and embracing it as the only possible place to find the presence and peace of God.

Go, and may you, and we together, live as signs of God’s oneness, wholeness, and promise. Amen.

Faith Before Physics (Sermon)

“Faith Before Physics”

Romans 4:1-5, 13-17  3/12/17

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

3/12/17

         Sitting with this passage last week reminded me of sitting in my high school physics class. And that was not a pleasant memory. Now, I realize that understanding and applying all those numbers, letters, and formulas have led to things like bridges, cars, moon landings, and yard darts. As a teenager, though, I had the attention span of a squirrel. Physics never captured my imagination. It never felt like home to me.

Forty years later, I’ve realized that in response to all my teacher’s actions, I managed an equally opposite reaction. I flunked my one and only physics class with such speed and efficiency that I made failure look, well, effortless.

         In his epistles, Paul’s calculated theological and philosophical arguments often make my eyes glaze over like they did in physics or trigonometry. He takes four chapters to say what can be said in three sentences.

Having said that, I’m beginning to appreciate that when reading Paul, it helps to step back, like one does when viewing a pointillist or impressionistic painting. The individual dots or brush strokes have meaning and purpose only in relationship to the rest of the dots and brush strokes. Paul uses lots of words to say that God deals with humankind on the basis of that unconditional Love called grace.

Grace is hard for us, though. It’s just too gracious. Even Paul wrestles with it, but he knows that to profess Christianity, and to qualify grace, leads us to a deconstructing legalism. Legalism, aka fundamentalism, renders a person sanctimoniously fearful of God. One decides that one must, deserve God’s favor. And when I decide that I have worked hard enough to achieve favor, I will inevitably claim the right to judge who else deserves God’s favor – and disfavor. Formulas tell me who’s in and who’s out. I insist that every one of us, every dot and brush stroke must earn its place in the painting – in the outpouring of God. When belonging in God must be deserved, grace no longer refers to God’s radical gift of Love. It refers to God’s withholding of revenge. If we have to activate God’s Love, as if it were a credit card, we are redeemed by works, not by grace.

Now, Paul knows his audience. The Romans are experts at dialectic debate, and Paul speaks their language. So, using complicated argument, the Apostle invites them into a faith that has more in common with the artistic process than with generating mathematical proofs. He invites all of us into a story – the story of Abraham.

Eyewitnesses to Abraham’s story disappeared millennia before Paul ever took up a pen. So, no amount of argument will verify the story. Abraham’s story is a spiritual portrait, a mural, a collage. It’s a gift of grace. We enter and experience it the same way Abraham begins his journey – on faith.

“Go,” says God to Abram. “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.

“So Abram went, as the Lord had told him.” (Genesis 12:1-2, 4a)

When Paul speaks of “faith…reckoned as righteousness,” he’s not referring to a characteristic of a law-abiding citizen. He’s talking about the spiritual gift of trust, a gift that cannot be earned. It’s already there. We learn to live into it. A well-reasoned discourse may grab the Romans’ attention, but because spiritual passion wells up not through arguments won, but through a journey experienced, Paul offers the story of Abraham as the archetype of trust. Read this story, he says to the Romans. Enter it. Experience it. Follow it.

Paul tells his own story, too. His spiritual passion wells up from his experience as a sadistic legalist who, on his way to waterboard Christians, gets knocked from his horse, blinded, and compelled to trust where he cannot see.

The writer of Hebrews echoes and expands on Paul’s appeal to story. “Faith,” he writes, “is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen…By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.” Then, using a kind of litany, he recalls the story.

“By faith Noah, warned by God about events as yet unseen, respected the warning and built an ark to save his household…

“By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance…

“By faith Isaac invoked blessings for the future on Jacob and Esau.

“By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called a son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to share ill-treatment with the people of God…

“By faith the people passed through the Red Sea as if it were dry land…” (Selected verses from Hebrews 11)

It’s all about the story. The story stories us toward righteousness, understanding, and belonging that formulas and arguments cannot offer.

During officer training last fall, the most interesting and energizing discussion we had occurred during our blitz of Church history. What makes us Christian is not nearly so much the doctrines we profess, but the story we share. That story goes all the way back to Abraham. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all go back to that story. We all take different trajectories. And we all have to name and confess the errors and brutalities that our stories commit in the name of God. Interestingly, most errors and brutalities occur when we try to make righteousness a matter of principle and process, that is, a matter of law rather than faith. And faith is a matter of grace, a matter of untethered Love.

A lawyer asks Jesus, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” [Jesus] said to him, “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and…soul, and…mind…And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Mt. 22:36-40)

Paul will say the same thing to the Romans: “The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder…steal…[or] covet’; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love…is the fulfilling of the law.” (Romans 13:9-10)

Neither righteousness nor Love can be argued and proved. Righteousness and Love are not courses for us to pass or fail. Ready or not, we are called into the journey of Love. Because righteousness is about relationship, God stories us into righteousness. The story is far from over. And these are days when followers of Jesus must recommit ourselves to the story. We cannot collude with Herod’s calculated vengeance and physical violence. We must recommit ourselves to the kind of trust, righteousness, and Love that overcomes fear, that defies division, and breaks down walls.

Each of us is a dot or brush stroke on the canvas. Together we are Christ’s body, continuing his story in this particular time and place. His story transcends any place or time, so like those before us, righteousness is our call. Love is our means. And faith is our story.

A Demanding Life (Sermon)

“A Demanding Life”

Matthew 4:1-11

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

3/5/17

The story of Jesus’ temptation is a classic coming-of-age story. In it, a young man faces a decision between two great potentials. Choose one way, and, through a kind of shock-and-awe coercion, he will own the world. That path, however, will reveal that the cost of certainty is one’s own soul. Choose the other way, and he will live with and for all creation by living gratefully and generously with friends and enemies alike, and by living in solidarity with the poor, strangers, and the earth. He’ll have to trust God, which means trusting people he doesn’t know and outcomes he can’t see. This path will reveal that the cost of living by faith is one’s own life. As with all such stories, not choosing is not an option.

         Because absolute certainty in this life is an illusion, it must be protected at all costs. Certainty dismisses all opinions but its own. It abhors dissent. It cannot stomach selfless Love. If it gets powerful enough, certainty inevitably requires us to live by vengeance and violence. And why not? All things considered, brutality is easy. When my opponent is destroyed, I get to write the history.

Faith demands far more of us. Faith requires us to live vulnerably in a dangerous world. Living by faith and Love puts the one who trusts and loves at odds with power and the powerful. Faith doesn’t seek confrontation; it simply accepts scripture’s admonition not to be afraid. Now, fearlessness is more than a choice. It’s a spiritual discipline. Fearlessness is trust embodied. And trust begins with being trusted.

Immediately prior to today’s reading, God says of the freshly baptized Jesus, “This is my son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” In the next breath, the Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness, alone and hungry, to face the seductive wiles of Cruella DeVil.

         “If you are the Son of God,” says the tempter, “command these stones to become loaves of bread.”

         The first temptation a starving Jesus faces isn’t really about food. It’s about allowing in himself a sense of entitlement – the entitlement not to feel want or need. He is tempted to tell himself, God’s beloved son shouldn’t have to feel the squeeze of scarcity or dependence. I deserve to have all I want and more!

         We’re watching Jesus struggle with the inconvenient demands of mutual relationship with God, with other people, and with the earth itself. Introverts and extroverts may differ in our relationship needs, but without mutuality, we starve. The bread of wholeness is available to us only through the dis-covering struggles of giving and receiving Love and forgiveness.

         So, the first temptation is the temptation to avoid the demands of relationship and agape Love.

         “If you are the Son of God,” says the tempter, “throw yourself down…” and let the angels take care of you, in front of all Jerusalem.

         To leap from a great height and land in the hands of angels, is the temptation to project oneself as uniquely and powerfully blessed. It’s the ego’s deep-seated lust for a persona based on the shiny but flimsy veneer of celebrity. In a world starving for wholeness, why do we look to mollycoddled celebrities for images of what we should be, and do, and have, and look like? The appetite for stardom is an addiction. You can never consume enough of that which is consuming you.

         It seems to me that social media has become a kind of temple pinnacle, a platform for one self-referential leap after another. Much of it has become a competitive, often vengeful, and consuming quest for attention, importance, and certainty. And I’m not claiming high ground. To get a bunch of ego-stroking “Likes” becomes a kind of drug for me. But when it’s all about me, my capacity to love and to be loved atrophies like a muscle that never gets used.

         So, the second temptation is the temptation to avoid the demands of relationship and agape Love.

         “Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; and he said to him, ‘All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.’”

         The tempter offers not just power in the world, but over the world. It’s the temptation not only to get one’s way, but to force one’s will. This appetite leads to the institutionalizing of a system, a status quo that benefits only a specific few. No institution is immune from such Love-less arrogance – not the Church, not democracy, not corporations. An individual family can even become a dynasty that controls and consumes more resources and wields more influence than many nations.

         Institutions that refuse to think critically of themselves inevitably become parasites, life-diminishing organisms that exist only for themselves. And they depend on our worship of the many but truly devilish deities of power.

         Recognizing the unique capacities of humankind within the creation, the ancient Hebrews embraced their calling with the language of dominion. The dominion God grants, however, is not about domination. It’s about the Love of God expressed through servant-hearted stewardship of self, neighbor, and earth.

         So, the third temptation is the temptation to avoid the demands of relationship and agape Love.

         Lent began last Wednesday. And while this journey leads us to Sunday, we must pass through Friday, the day which bears witness to the defiant triumph of God, who, in Christ, lives in loving relationship with the creation. Love triumphs not because an angry, spiteful idol kills Jesus instead of us. That’s not reconciling Love. That’s just retaliation. Love triumphs and saves because the cross and the life that leads to it reveal the eternal Love of God and the ultimate impotence of brutality.

         Violence, greed, and fear remain ever-so tempting. They seem powerful and decisive, especially in the face of the relentless and terrifying consequences of human sin. But regardless of its declared purposes, violence only breeds more violence. Human history has proven over and over that, in time, even just war just leads to more war.

         Pharaoh, Caesar, and Herod have populated the world with swords and guns, coliseums and casinos, crosses and death chambers, but all of these will fail. In the end, as at the beginning, Love wins.¹

         The living Christ meets us at this table to nourish us with his fearless, redeeming Love. As the bread and cup are passed, I challenge you to resist the temptation to make this sacrament a private experience. Make it about relationship. Make it about Love. Look your neighbor in the eye and say, “The Love of Christ given to you, that it may be shared through you.”

         Regardless of the words you use, look at the brother or sister next to you, and give and receive the demanding and resurrecting Love of Christ.

¹Some years ago, Rob Bell wrote a book entitled Love Wins. Though I do not quote anything from the text of the book, I do acknowledge that the phrase “Love Wins” belongs to Mr. Bell.