November Texts (Sermon)

“November Texts”

1Thessalonians 5:1-11

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

11/19/17

         Along with April, October is one of my favorite months. A reckless gala of the summer’s richness and vitality, October hits us with a sensory overload: reds, yellows, oranges, cobalt skies – Christmas decorations. As the northern hemisphere tilts away from the sun, cooler air wicks away humidity. It’s not cold yet, but the sun feels a little kinder on our skin. It shines a little more gently in our eyes.

         Then comes November. The extravagant flame-out of October has been reduced, for the most part, to some tarnished gold high in the hickories and the darkening burgundy of white and red oaks. As the surrender to brown and gray quickens, November becomes a kind of circumstantial text calling us to prepare for even shorter, colder days. With heat pumps, electric blankets, and a warming atmosphere, we’re less vulnerable to winter than folks were a century ago. Still, while so much of the life around us turns dark and brittle, and sinks into the cold pillow of winter, wouldn’t it be nice, in worship, to hear brighter, more heart-warming texts than we’ve been hearing from Matthew and, now, from 1Thessalonians?

         Sure, I can pick any passage I want. There’s nothing obligatory or sacred about the lectionary. On the other hand, there is method to the lectionary’s madness. By design, November texts unsettle us. They call us to self-examination. They dare us to confess our personal, ecclesiastical, and cultural brokenness and our need for redemption.

I promise to get to 1Thessalonians, but bear with me through a kind of big-picture approach.

November texts prepare us for Advent texts, which prepare for the good news of the Incarnation. Central to Advent is the prophecy of Isaiah, the prophet to exiles in Babylon. Isaiah speaks such re-orienting words as, “Comfort, O comfort my people,” and “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord.” And Isaiah’s inspiring words have to push through a curious and disturbing phenomenon.

         The Israelites have been in exile for about three generations. So, many among the vanquished and displaced are forgetting their defining stories and rituals. Fewer and fewer Israelites are feeling like exiles, because more and more, Babylon feels like home. The modern psychological term for this is Stockholm Syndrome; captives identify with and even bond with their captors. And it’s easy to see why new generations of Israelites might adopt Babylon. It’s a place of wealth, abundance, and opportunity – a place that feels like it’s in a perpetual April-to-October loop. But the Hebrew’s story makes it clear that riches and power are not signs of God’s favor. Indeed, overabundance usually blinds us to true blessedness. It renders us too greedy and fearful to live as blessings for others.

         It’s no surprise, then, that Isaiah’s prophecy spans the careers of several prophets from Isaiah’s school. It takes a long time for his good news to burrow beneath the numbness and complacency of exile and to re-awaken spiritual memory.

Re-awakening to deep-time memory is not only a long process, it can be painful, too. It’s kind of like coming in on a bitterly cold day and running warm water over your icy fingers. The water hurts because your brain can’t handle the abrupt change of signal from cold to warm. The pain is necessary, though. Severe frostbite can cost us hands and feet, noses and ears.

For Israel, Jeremiah is the warm water being poured over their numbed memories. And his words hurt. “My anguish, my anguish!” cries Yahweh. “My heart is beating wildly’ I cannot keep silent…For my people do not know me, they are stupid children, they have no understanding.” (Jer. 4:19, 22)

         The psalmist’s lament also calls Israel to re-awakening: “By the water of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion…On the willows there we hung our harps…How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” (Ps. 137:1-2, 4)

         In the same way that Jeremiah and the psalmist prepare Israel for Isaiah’s hopeful prophecy, the November texts of Matthew and 1Thessalonians sting us. They call us to prepare for the re-awakening texts of Advent.

Like Jesus, Paul never shies away from truth-telling. And he seems to know how tempting it is to get comfortable with Babylon’s promises and creature comforts. Offering a Jeremiah-like warning to the Thessalonians, Paul writes: “When they say, ‘There is peace and security,’ then sudden destruction will come upon them.” For Paul, “they” refers to Rome, the next in a long line of Babylons and Egypts.

The apostle writes to the Thessalonians in about 50AD – right in the thick of the era known as the Pax Romana, the Roman Peace. Paul seems to know that the empire’s brand of peace and security can act like sub-freezing temperatures. It can cause spiritual frostbite. It can make us believe that if our material surroundings are benefiting us, then ‘God is in the heavens, and all is right with the world.’ Paul compares such self-centered thinking to thievery, darkness, drunkenness – actions for which there are inescapable consequences, at least in the short run.

Paul dares us to imagine something different. He dares us to imagine lasting peace and security, which is a gift from God, not empires. We experience lasting peace and security by consciously participating in God’s presence and activity in this world, here and now. True peace and security come not through conquest, not through intimidation, but through determined, even death-defying faith, hope, and love.

There you go again, Preacher, talking your pie-in-the-sky nonsense. You have no clue what it takes to win and keep security. You have to fight fire with fire!

I hear you. And I do understand that this is a frighteningly dangerous and uncertain world. I also know that Paul’s situation is even more tenuous than ours, and still he says, “Since we belong to the day, let us be sober and put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation.”

November texts challenge us to acknowledge all the signs of approaching winter – daylight diminishing, colors fading, cold hardening the ground, “wars and rumors of wars,” “nation…[rising] against nation…famines and earthquakes in various places” (Mt. 24:6), real fears pressuring us to live by the sword.

But even November texts come to us as gospel, as promises of spring, as witnesses to Easter. I trust that God intends these texts to awaken in us an irrepressible restlessness, a hunger and thirst for belonging as well as righteousness. They sting us with memories of our true home. And living at home, while in exile, means living in a kind of terrifying fearlessness. Home for us is following Jesus, “who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him.”

I suppose each of us has to decide for ourselves what Paul means when he says to “encourage one another and build up each other.” As for me, even if I sound tiresomely consistent, come what may, I can do no other – unless despair overcomes me – than to live, and die, and lead any congregation I serve by what I consider to be Jesus’ example: non-violent, welcoming, transforming love.

For those times when my encouragement of you fails to meet that standard, I ask God’s and your forgiveness. May the Spirit then challenge me with November texts and return me to a radical grace that I cannot create, but only experience and bear witness to.

And ultimately, from that love, and from that grace, there “will be no escape!”

The Constaninian Test (Sermon)

“The Constantinian Test”

Matthew 23:1-12

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

11/12/17

         In the fourth century, when Christianity was a mere toddler as a world religion, the Church began to face its supreme test. It started when Emperor Constantine won a battle over a stronger enemy and credited the Christian God. So, in 313, a victorious Constantine legalized Christianity. In 380, Emperor Theodosius I declared Rome to be a Christian nation.

What I’m calling a test occurs when political and martial power tempt the Church to confuse love and service of God with love and service of the state. The unwritten contract goes something like this: If you let us into your sanctuaries, if you tweak your theologies to justify our conquests and excesses, if you make faithfulness to your God synonymous with good citizenship, we will embrace your symbols and language. We will defer to your holy days. We, the State, will favor and exalt you, the Religion.

Since 380AD, Christianity has faced this Constantinian test continually, often unsuccessfully.

In fairness, virtually all major religions struggle with this test. When there’s enough fear and dis-ease in a culture, religions, especially fundamentalist factions within them, gain traction and scramble for exaltation. It seems to me that the three Abrahamic faiths – Christianity, Judaism, and Islam – are particularly susceptible to failing the Constantinian test. And within those religions, perhaps no one is more vulnerable to the temptation to conspire with power than clergy. When a religion holds favored status in a particular nation, its leaders often find the personal benefits of complicity irresistible.

In today’s text, Jesus calls his followers to do something difficult. With regard to the scribes and Pharisees, “Do whatever they teach you and follow it,” says Jesus, “but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach.” They’re religious gold diggers, says Jesus.

Jesus is saying that authority comes not from the office, not from the size of phylacteries, not from the length of fringes, not from the seats of honor, and not from whatever deference the priests enjoy in public. Authority comes from the Author of Creation.

         I think Jesus gets to meddling because he remembers facing precisely the same test after his baptism. Out in the wilderness, Jesus is tempted to collude with the clannish, manipulative, and violent ways and means of worldly power. And this goes on for forty days.

Now, there’s nothing literal about the number forty. Whether referring to days or years, forty is Bible-speak for a long time. The story of Jesus’ temptation tells us not only that Jesus has to endure a long, grueling test, it also tells us that even Jesus takes a long time to overcome the devil’s deal: that gut-wrenching and all-too-human temptation to use our unique gifts and potential toward selfish ends.

         After its humble beginnings in Jerusalem, the Church enters its own forty-day wilderness. And when Constantine and Theodosius offer the newly-baptized religion power and privilege alien to its identity in Christ, the Church quickly caves in. It accepts the unwritten contract of state exaltation.

When the Church bemoans its decreasing size and influence, we can blame externalities all we want, but for nearly two millennia, no one has given more people more reasons, and no one has given more people better reasons to turn their backs on Christianity, and even on God, than the Church itself. The institutional Church has been more intentional about reaching out for sake of political favor than for the sake of the gospel.

         Our history, though, is about more than any one of us, more than any one congregation or denomination, more than any one era of our existence. So, maybe, we’re still slogging through our own forty-day temptation. Maybe we’re still weathering our own forty-day flood, wandering in our own forty-year Exodus, weeping through our own forty-hour hell between Friday and Sunday. If so, then every day, every moment, every decision, every word, every action, and every one of us matters – really and truly and eternally matters!

         Successfully on the other side of temptation, Jesus commits himself to living humbly and peaceably on behalf of the Creation. He practices what he teaches. Now, he does “tie up burdens hard to bear, and lay them on [our] shoulders.” That’s what take up your cross and follow me is all about. But Jesus lifts more than a finger to help us. He helps us to understand and value our burdens by sharing them and helping each other to carry them.

         Every time we choose to share the burdens of others, every time we choose to serve rather than to be served, every time we choose to forgive rather than to hold onto anger and resentment, every time we choose to stand in awe of what God creates instead of trying to figure out how to monetize or profit from some “resource” – every time we choose these things we’re overcoming temptation. We’re following Jesus.

The Church has survived for two thousand years, longer than any state or nation. That tells me that along the way, at critical times, we have told the Tempter that we depend on more than bread, that we will not test God, and that we will not bow before some devious Caesar.

Sure, sometimes in our weariness and fear, we accept the tempter’s contract. Sometimes we settle for the external trappings of religion over the call of Jesus.

          I wear a robe on Sundays. I wear eye-catching stoles and sit in this tall chair. I stand high-and-lifted-up, and speak into a microphone. With the state’s blessing, I claim my housing allowance as non-taxable income. That’s not fair to you, and I certainly did nothing to deserve special treatment. But I don’t turn it down. And some point, someone – not me – decided that an entire month should be set aside for pastor appreciation. It’s like a liturgical season! I’m truly grateful for every expression of love and support. And pastor appreciation doesn’t include parades and furniture store sales. But a whole month? Doesn’t that tempt all of us, especially folks like me, to exalt pastors onto pedestals where we don’t belong?

         It grieves me to admit this, but I know that if I took another job tomorrow, before long, some of you would fall away from this congregation. I know the same is true if we lost our extraordinary music director or pianist. I know because – and this is as uncomfortable to say as it is to hear – I’ve heard folks say so. Then again, I trust that in spite of such self-serving loyalties, and even if this, or any congregation ends up closing its doors, the Church will survive. God is not dependent on our robes, sermons, anthems, instruments, or buildings. God chooses to be present through our love for one another, through our care for the poor and the forgotten, and through our stewardship of the earth.

         Pastors are to be most appreciated when their congregations embrace discipleship and mission the way they embrace potlucks and bake sales. When doing as Jesus does, we are all, without distinction, ministers in the priesthood of all believers. And in the long run, by the grace of God alone, what we teach transcends what we do.

What do you imagine people see in us? Self-exalting Pharisees or servant-hearted disciples of Jesus? Probably both. So, let’s be gracious with them and with ourselves. And may we trust that we belong to Jesus, and that by his grace, all of us will make it through our Constantinian test.

In forty days or so.

The God of Creative Tension (Sermon)

“The God of Creative Tension”

Matthew 22:15-22

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

11/5/17

         Jesus has been pushing the envelope with the Jewish leaders. In an effort to rein in this renegade rabbi, and to try to restore a sense of normalcy, at least in their own minds, some Pharisees hatch a scheme to ambush Jesus with a question.

         “Is it lawful,” they will ask, “to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?”

         The plan is for Yes and No to be equally dangerous for Jesus and equally expedient for the Pharisees. Depending on what gives them the most leverage over Jesus, the Pharisees are willing to position themselves as either loyal Jews first or loyal Roman subjects first. Now, the tax at issue has to do with harvests and personal property.¹ Like a sales tax, it’s regressive. It imposes a much heavier burden on the poor than on the rich. If Jesus says Yes, he will appear to be double-crossing the Jews in general, and the tax-oppressed poor in particular – the very people on whom Jesus’ ministry has focused.

On the other hand, if Jesus says No, the Pharisees can simply report him to the Roman authorities for sedition.

         It seems like a fool-proof plan, unless, of course, the plan has been hatched by fools – fools, in this case, being those who are motivated by fear and revenge, yet tell themselves that they’re champions of righteousness and justice. One aspect of Pharisaic foolishness is to separate the world into dualistic categories – Jew and Gentile, male and female, clean and unclean.

How many times have you heard someone say, “There’re two kinds of people in the world”? Those eight words almost always precede some kind of mind-closing statement of opposing absolutes. And such statements usually imply that one side is strong, or right, or good while the other side is weak, or wrong, or bad.

         The genius of Jesus is that he teaches attitudes and models actions which are righteous and just while living in such a way that he doesn’t bisect the world into opposing factions. It’s his followers who divide the world into saved and unsaved, lost and found, good and bad. And how can disciples justify polarized and polarizing living when the one whom we claim to follow goes out of his way to be not only in the presence of but in relationship with everyone, including those who oppose him?

         It seems to me that Christians often practice Pharisaism in order to maintain a sense of authority, security, and even supremacy in the world. And I think we’re tempted to do it all the more viciously when the world seems to be falling apart around us. Remember, the Jewish world is falling apart during the first century, too. Rome holds all of its territories in a kind of social, political, and economic choke hold. Caesar finances his continuing wars and conquests by emptying the pockets of the peoples he has vanquished. For the Jews in Palestine, everything familiar is ending. The future is unfolding toward something unknown and terrifying. Trying to regroup and to return to what was is futile. They’re in the midst of an all-encompassing death, and to the Pharisees, Jesus seems to be just another sign of the world’s demise.

         As an Easter community, the Church proclaims that Jesus is God’s sign and promise of all that’s new and hopeful, all that’s righteous and just. Even when familiar things are dying around us, following Jesus means following him into that death. The crazy and beautiful thing for Jesus-followers is that entering death means entering, at the same time, into resurrection. Not only does Jesus transcend all the fragmenting categories of opposites, he transcends all that appears to separate life and death.

         Looking at the coin used for the tax, Jesus asks, “Whose head is this, and whose title?”

         “The emperor’s,” they say.

         “Give…to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

         Stunned and speechless, the Pharisees leave Jesus alone.

         The Pharisees try to bait Jesus into to dividing the world into two kinds of people – those who collect taxes and those who pay taxes. And Jesus won’t bite. What’s more, he won’t even divide the world into spiritual and mundane. His answer reveals that the creation is a place in which holiness and worldliness are woven together into an indivisible wholeness.

         In his book Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, Richard Rohr observes that, in the first creation story, it isn’t until the third day that God begins to call the creation good. The first two days had been about making separations – light from dark, sky from earth, up from down. When water and land begin to coexist, when plants and animals begin to appear on the same ground and in the same waters, only then does God begin calling things good.²

In the story of Noah, the Hebrews weave the ancient Gilgamesh epic into their own story. And in the Hebrew version, an ark gets inhabited by all these opposites – male and female, clean and unclean, predator and prey, things that fly and things that creep. And God confines all these opposites together in one place. The ark is a magnificent metaphor. It’s a microcosm of the entire creation. The ark is the earth! And we all live in it, together!

“The…reason that Jesus is the icon of salvation for so many of us,” says Rohr, “is because he [holds opposites] together so beautifully.”³

Discipleship means doing what Jesus does. It means learning to live in the “paradox of incarnation,” holding within us “flesh and spirit, human and divine, joy and suffering.”³ To be fully human means living in that relentless but creative tension in which we encounter and embrace otherness. We cannot experience God as good, nor can we experience the creation as good outside of this tension. As the body of Christ, we are called, individually and corporately, to commit our time, our money, our very lives to bearing witness to the God of creative tension.

Jesus does make one clear distinction in today’s story. There’re two kinds of people in the world, he says: Those who think they’re God, and those who know they’re not. When Jesus says to give to the emperor that which is the emperor’s, and to God that which is God’s, he’s saying that, contrary to what the Caesars of the world believe, they are not God. That’s exactly what the signatories of The Barmen Declaration were saying back in the 1930’s. Jesus is Lord, not Hitler, not the Third Reich, and not the conspicuously pious, Christian Pharisees who were selling their souls to save their lives by colluding with those who were trying to use genocidal fear, prejudice, and violence to return their country to prominence, and to keep it pure and Aryan-nation white. God is never behind the easing of the tension of opposites. God is always right in the thick of it.

“Give…to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” We hold those things in the same two hands.

As human beings, our Sitz im Leben is the tension between holy and worldly opposites. We can deny that reality, but we can’t change it. We can’t legislate, preach, or bomb our way out of it. Nor should we try, because, for Jesus-followers, living in the tension means that every day, every moment, every encounter, and conversation presents us with opportunities to experience both our humbling, human limitations and the transcendent power of resurrection.

Look around you. Look across every aisle you can imagine. Giving to God that which is God’s means recognizing and giving thanks for the mystery and holiness that lives within every corner of the known and knowable creation – including your own life.

¹Susan Grove Eastman, Feasting on the Word, `(Year A, Volume 4), David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, Eds., Westminster/John Knox Press, Louisville, KY, 2011. P. 191.

²Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, Franciscan Media, Cincinnati, OH, 2008.

Pp. 32-33.

³Ibid. Pp. 36-37.