What's Your Angle? (Sermon)

“What’s Your Angle”

Acts 2:1-21 

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

5/20/18

Pentecost Sunday

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. ²And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. ³Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. ⁴All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

⁵Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. ⁶And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. ⁷Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? ⁸And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? ⁹Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, ¹⁰Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, ¹¹Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.”

¹²All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” ¹³But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

¹⁴But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. ¹⁵Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. ¹⁶No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: ¹⁷‘In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. ¹⁸Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. ¹⁹And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. ²⁰The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day. ²¹Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’ (Acts 2:1-21 NRSV)

         “In the last days,” God declares, the heavens will open, as for a drenching rain, and all flesh will be soaked in the rising waters of the Holy Spirit. Then, all that wrinkled flesh will prophesy that love is our native tongue. Love is the language by which God proclaims the Good News that all things are being redeemed and united in Christ. One difficulty is that all flesh may see it together, but not all flesh will see it the same. What constitutes holiness to some will appear as drunken foolishness to others.

Years ago, Shelby Presbyterian held an evening prayer service for a member named Sherry. Sherry had developed a very rare and aggressive form of lung cancer. She had a husband and two daughters, one in high school, one in middle school. Folks from all over the community came to the church to pray for that family. As Sherry lay in ICU, sedated and intubated, we gathered around her husband and laid hands on him on her behalf.

It was a moving and heart-wrenching scene. And some might have looked at it and thought it kind of quaint and sentimental, or maybe desperate and grasping. A sympathetic heart would have seen at least an act of solidarity with a family in crisis. Because most of us in the sanctuary that night found our hearts angling toward the Mystery of holiness and love, we witnessed an act of prophecy. Now, we weren’t naïve. We knew Sherry wouldn’t survive. Nonetheless, there we were, in the power of the Holy Spirit, singing, speaking, and wailing our prayers to God who is real, present, and, come what may, more powerful than any illness or loss we might suffer.

         Paul says that there are many gifts but one Spirit who gives them. What each of us does with our gifts – or rather, what the Spirit does with each of us – will often appear very different. And that diversity of perspective reveals the wide spectrum of the Holy Spirit’s beauty and work.

         Did you know that a rainbow – for us a symbol of God’s promises – is caused by sunlight refracting through individual droplets of water at angles between 40 and 42 degrees? And those small differences in the bending of the sun’s light reveal the spectacular array of colors within light itself. To appear, a rainbow requires those precise angles and billions of water droplets.

         At Pentecost, inebriated on the Holy Spirit, the disciples find themselves bending holy light. They proclaim the love of God in Jesus in every color of the linguistic spectrum. The event in Jerusalem is not glossolalia, speaking in tongues. Luke describes an event when the gospel is proclaimed in all languages, for all people. It’s a moment when, through the Holy Spirit, God reveals that God’s love reaches beyond any boundary that humankind creates.

         You may be a single droplet, but what happens when the Holy Spirit bends the light of God through you? What’s your angle? What’s your unique color? This is the Pentecost question. And because it has to do with the Light of the World refracting through you, it has to do with vocation.

In her book, An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor writes about wrestling with her sense of call, even as she studied in seminary. “I did not have a single clue what I would do when I graduated,” she says. “I did not even belong to a church. So I began asking God to tell me what I was supposed to do. What was my designated purpose on this earth?”¹

         She began to experiment more intentionally with prayer. Her first efforts left her feeling more empty than full. Then she discovered a fire escape on the side of an abandoned Victorian home next to the Yale Divinity School. It was one of those ancient structures clinging precariously on the side of the building. A “Danger: Keep Off” sign warned would-be climbers that the steps could prove more of a stairway to heaven than an escape from fire. “The fire escape turned out to be an excellent place to pray,” says Taylor. Up there on the fire escape, she learned to pray, she says, “the way a wolf howls.” Up there on that fire escape, she encountered the fire of the Holy Spirit.

         “[One] night,” she says, “when my whole heart was open to hearing from God what I was supposed to do with my life, God said, ‘Anything that pleases you.’”

         “‘What kind of answer is that?’” wondered Taylor.

         “‘Do anything that pleases you,’ said the voice in my head, ‘and belong to me.’”

         Initially bewildered by the experience, Taylor began to understand that “it was not what [she] did but how [she] did it that mattered.” She discovered that when the Holy Spirit bent through her preaching and writing, beautiful things happened for her and for many others. In 1996, Baylor University named Barbara Brown Taylor one of the most influential preachers in the English-speaking world.² To illustrate that the Holy Spirit never finishes with us, in the late 1990’s, Taylor left the parish ministry to join the faculty of Piedmont College in Demorest, GA. Because of Barbara Brown Taylor’s preaching, writing, and now teaching, in 2014, TIME Magazine named this Episcopal priest and teacher at a small college in a backwater town in northeast Georgia, one of the world’s 100 most influential people.³

Pentecost lives are lived with purpose, passion, and openness to change. They require constant self-examination and critique so that we discover the new ways God is bending our holiness into beautiful colors and voices that bless and build up the creation. And everyone participates in this great bending of holy light. God pours Spirit out on “all flesh,” says the Joel, men and women, young and old, slaves and free.

Pentecost is about so much more than getting saved. Indeed, if Pentecost is about “getting” anything, it’s about getting out of the way so that God can reveal God’s love in us and through us for the sake of others.

The epigraph of the chapter to which I referred in Barbara Brown Taylor’s book is a quotation by Henry David Thoreau. In a letter to a friend, Thoreau says, “Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of too much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.”³

Your goodness, like your inherent holiness, comes as a gift of the out-pouring of the Holy Spirit. You did nothing, nor could have done anything to deserve much less create your giftedness. You are simply a steward of the gift – chosen, called, and sent.

What’s your angle? What will you do with your Pentecost gift?

¹All references to Barbara Brown Taylor’s story come from: An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith. HarperOne, 2009. Pp. 109-110.

²https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Brown_Taylor

³Taylor, p. 107.

"In Life and in Death We Belong to God" (Sermon)

“In Life and in Death We Belong to God”

John 17:6-19

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

5/13/18

         The more time I spend with John’s gospel, the more I really feel John’s desperate love for the desperate community to whom he writes. They’re in crisis, because by the end of the first century, the young church is having to absorb some gut-wrenching realities.

For one, they’re realizing that Paul’s testimony concerning Jesus’ immediate return appears to have been wishful thinking. Life as the Christian community won’t be about waiting for Jesus. It’ll be about participating in his ongoing work. While it will be about spiritual growth, it’ll also be about engaging the world, just like Jesus did.

As the years separate them further and further from first-hand remembrances of Jesus, the Church is also learning that not everyone remembers the same things, and not everyone processes Jesus’ story the same way. So, Jesus’ followers have begun to splinter into factions based on differing emphases and opinions. And divisions cause tension.

Perhaps most disturbing is the fact that worldly powers are not warming up to the new faith community. Threatened by the Church’s loyalty to Jesus before to Caesar, the powers-that-be treat Christians as subversive and dangerous.

In a couple of centuries, Constantine will gather the Church under his wing and begin to domesticate Christian theology and practice. He will effectively say the same thing Jesus is saying to his disciples: I am yours, and you are mine. By casting Rome as the benefactor and protector of the Church, emperors will strip Christians of their spiritual fierceness. Constantine will pave the way for the misconception that to belong to the Church is to belong to the state. The misconception that what Jesus calls “the world” is as much savior as Jesus himself.

Maybe both Jesus and John see this coming. When reading John’s account of Jesus’ last night with his disciples, one can feel the anguish. Jesus is preparing his followers to live in a world in which they will face tribulation without benefit of his physical presence. The tone is not “gentle Jesus meek and mild.” A defiant Jesus goes toe-to-toe with the world in general, and thus with Rome in particular in claiming the Church as his own. The Son says to the Father:

⁶“I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. ⁷Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; ⁸for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me

 ⁹I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. ¹⁰All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them.

¹¹And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.

¹²While I was with them, I protected them in your name that you have given me. I guarded them, and not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost, so that the scripture might be fulfilled. ¹³But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves.

¹⁴I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. ¹⁵I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. ¹⁶They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.

¹⁷Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. ¹⁸As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. ¹⁹And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth.” (Jn. 17:6-19 NRSV)

Jesus’ prayer reminds the disciples and the early Church that their experience of God and witness to God depend on maintaining their identity in God. That’s not to say that God abandons them to punish them when they’re not faithful. It’s just to say that only by remaining connected to God through prayer, fellowship, and Christlike service do they continue to experience God as real, relevant, and powerful. That’s a tall order when the world is breathing down your neck. And that’s why Jesus prays for them. And his prayer illustrates what Paul meant when he said, “the Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” (Rom. 8:26)

John wants his readers to see that their overwhelming sense of dis-orientation in a hostile world mirrors that of Jesus’ disciples on the eve of the crucifixion. He wants the community to remember that, come what may, God is faithful, and that they are beloved and gifted. And like all who are blessed by God, they’re not blessed for their own sake or because they’re more deserving than anyone else. Blessedness is the God-given capacity to serve as a sign and source of blessing for others.

Blessed to be a blessing describes our identity as servants who belong to God and who are sent out by God. And to believe what Jesus teaches means far more than signing on to some theological proposition. Identifying ourselves as children of God and followers of Jesus means accepting the call to live as signs of the presence and love of God at work in the world – which God so loves.

As the Ecclesia, the Called-Out Ones, we are not removed from the world. “I have sent them into the world,” says Jesus.

Throughout the Farewell Discourse and the High Priestly Prayer, Jesus is charging and commissioning his disciples to turn their hearts and minds toward the demanding task of discipleship. He’s challenging them to lead the community in continuing his gospel work of healing the sick, reaching out to the outcast, speaking up for the voiceless, loving the unlovable, rejoicing in the creation, and confronting worldly systems of violence, domination, and exploitation. And they – WE – must do all this holy, kingdom-of-God work in a sanctified spirit, a spirit of penitence, gratitude, vision, and humble courage.

Jesus’ prayer sounds a lot like an ordination prayer, doesn’t it? He lays a very specific claim and identity upon the disciples. He also offers comfort and hope, because throughout this section of John, Jesus keeps mentioning, and, indeed, promising, the gift of The Advocate, the Holy Spirit. Apart from the Holy Spirit, the Church simply doesn’t exist. The Spirit not only fills us, the Spirit fills the spaces in-between us with the empowering gifts stated in our ordination vows: “energy, intelligence, imagination, and love.” As we continue to discern who we are and what God is calling us to be and empowering us to do at any given moment, the Spirit is holding us together like surface tension. As contexts change, the specifics of our calling evolve. We either respond, “walk[ing] by faith, not by sight” (2Cor. 5:7), or we blind ourselves with superficial distractions. And when we forsake vision and risk, we fade into irrelevance.

“We don’t understand why our youth aren’t coming to church,” say the elders. “We give them pizza!” Doesn’t the world offer the same?

I’ve said this before: Jesus does not come in order to prepare us to be dead. In John 10 he says, “I have come that [you] may have life, and have it abundantly.” That’s a here-and-now promise. Life after this life is in the hands of God who is more gracious, forgiving, and trustworthy than any of us can imagine. As participants in and stewards of this life, we are caretakers of one another and the earth. Most of all, we’re caretakers of those who have no caretakers – whoever they may be. Discipleship is a long-haul commitment to be handed down, generation to generation.

“As for prophecies,” says Paul, “they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end.” (1Cor. 13:8)

“It is he,” says Isaiah, “who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.” (Is. 40:22a, 23)

Scripture is not subtle in affirming that sanctification means, as the opening line of A Brief Statement of Faith declares, “In life and in death we belong to God.” That is, we do not belong to Pharaoh or Caesar. And for those who find our God-given identity in Jesus, that means carrying on his mission in the world, fearlessly proclaiming in word and deed that God is Love, and that Love, and only Love, has no end.

The Holy In-Betweens (Newsletter)

Fire. Light. Wind. Breath. Water. We find all of these images, and others, in Christianity’s lexicon of symbols for the Holy Spirit. To varying degrees, all of these things share the characteristic of being able to seep into the nooks and crannies of the world, thus revealing what I call the invasive grace of God. Through the Holy Spirit, God seeps in to be present and active where God is neither expected, nor welcome, nor acknowledged. I find God’s capacity to percolate indiscriminately in the world most upsetting when I catch myself imagining God confined to some container of my own making.

         “We are threatened by anything that we cannot control,” says Richard Rohr, “that part of God ‘which blows where it will’ (John 3:8)…We look for God ‘out there,’ and the Spirit is always ‘in here’ and ‘in between’ everything…Now even science is revealing to us that the energy of the universe is not in the particles or planets—but in the relational space between them! And we are having a hard time measuring it, controlling it, predicting it, or inhibiting it. It sounds an awful lot like Spirit.”¹

         Our culture finds itself in a time of increasing division and enmity, and not simply between opposing views but between opponents. Like everyone else, I have my own opinions, and one way to begin paying attention to the holy “relational space between” disparate opinions is to acknowledge the differences. Rather than calling us to judgment, this invites us to stand in humble reverence of the spaces – the realm of the Holy Spirit’s energy and work. And that can be a painful place to stand, because right now the spaces can feel like chasms.

When treating a significant laceration, a doctor doesn’t begin by immediately sewing it up just to hold the skin together. She irrigates the wound first, clearing it of visible and invisible debris that could cause infection, and, thus, more serious trouble. She looks carefully at the damaged tissue lining that new and tender in-between place. She imagines how the raw and jagged edges can be reintroduced. She wants the site of healing, the forever-apparent scar, to be strong.

Pentecost is May 20^th. This celebration marks more than “the birthday of the Church.” It reminds us that all those in-between spaces within the Creation are alive with fire, and water, and light. They are alive with God’s redeeming Spirit. The body of Christ is called to be intentionally and patiently present in those spaces, each of us humbly honest with our thoughts and feelings, and gratefully aware of the thoughts and feelings of others. To do so is to hold one another in prayer. After beginning with a prayerful posture, humbly, compassionately, and gratefully, then and only then might our actions flow among us like the dynamic and eternal flow of love among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

                                                      Peace,

                                                               Allen

¹http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Daily-Meditation--Holy-Spirit----Foundation----Spring-Equinox--Northern-Hemisphere---March-20--2013.html?soid=1103098668616&aid=MkoY5VSh190

Unhindered Grace (Sermon)

“Unhindered Grace”

Acts 8:26-38

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

5/6/18

²⁶Then an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Get up and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” (This is a wilderness road.) ²⁷So he got up and went.

Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship ²⁸and was returning home; seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah.

²⁹Then the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over to this chariot and join it.” ³⁰So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah.

He asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?

 ³¹He replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him.

³²Now the passage of the scripture that he was reading was this: “Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth. ³³In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth.”

³⁴The eunuch asked Philip, “About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?”

³⁵Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus.

³⁶As they were going along the road, they came to some water; and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?”

³⁸He commanded the chariot to stop, and both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down into the water, and Philip baptized him.

       On Easter morning, Jesus isn’t all that gets raised. Questions and concerns get raised. As the Christian community grows, hackles get raised. The Jesus-followers not only preach and practice a message of radical welcome, they pool their wealth and share it. Threatened by such uncensored grace, the secular and religious powers-that-be in Jerusalem begin to persecute the new community.

       Some Christians flee, and when they take the gospel with them, we’re reminded of the parable of the sower. Scattered by persecution, followers of Jesus are seeds carrying the germ of the gospel. While I don’t believe that God causes or celebrates any sort of persecution, I do believe, that as the creative and defining force within the universe, God is known through God’s inclination to redeem even the most unholy and inhuman actions. God’s magic is to use them for good. But positive results arise from painful events. They come as gifts of resurrection. That’s what Easter is all about – God creating something so unexpected and transforming out of the atrocities of Friday that we actually remember that day as Good.

       The disciple Philip has just returned to Jerusalem from Samaria. Ministry is making him open and available to the Holy Spirit in ways he never imagined. As Philip travels southward, into the wilderness, the Holy Spirit, ever the opportunist, makes the disciple aware of a nearby chariot carrying a high-ranking official in the Ethiopian government.

Things get a little PG-13 here. But let’s face it; the Bible is not a G-rated book. This official is a eunuch. He’s been castrated, probably at a very young age.

Widely practiced in ancient cultures, intentional castration created a pool of male servants who lacked the hormones that could lead to willfulness and aggression. Eunuchs could be trusted to care for kings, and queens, and harems, and money.

       In Acts, the Ethiopian eunuch is a Jewish proselyte – a convert. He’s been to Jerusalem to worship. Think about that: The Queen of Ethiopia allows the keeper of her country’s wealth to travel to Jerusalem to worship Yahweh. She allows him to ride a thousand miles away to worship the one who makes barren wombs fruitful, the one who heals the sick and the blind, the one who resuscitates the dead. She sees no threat in allowing her emasculated servant to engage the power of the one who makes somebodies out of nobodies.

       Seeing that the man is reading Isaiah, Philip says, “Do you understand what you are reading?”

       ‘I could use some help,’ says the man, and he invites Philip to join him in the chariot.

       The eunuch is reading Isaiah 53, the prophecy concerning the Suffering Servant. “Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter…like a lamb silent before its shearer…In his humiliation justice was denied him.”

The eunuch, who has been physically mutilated in order to be trusted, finds a scripture that gives voice to his own humiliation and to his sense of injustice. His involuntary sterilization not only robbed him of the possibility of a normal life, it makes him unclean. According to the Mosaic law in Deuteronomy 23, eunuchs are ineligible for full participation in the community.

It begs the question, Why would he even want to become Jewish? It also clears the way for him to receive the gospel when Philip offers it to him. The eunuch hears the gospel as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy – and not just the suffering servant part. As the Ethiopian continues to read Isaiah, he gets to chapter 56. “Do not,” says the prophet, “let the foreigner joined to the Lord say, ‘The Lord will surely separate me from his people;’ and do not let the eunuch say, ‘I am just a dry tree.’ For thus says the Lord: To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters.”

Isaiah’s next verse is a wonderful line that was Freudian long before Freud. “I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.” (Is. 56:3-5)

       Isaiah shaped Jesus’ own theology. So, Philip accepts the man where he is, as he is, because that’s Jesus’ way. As the Church, though, we often make some self-serving presumptions. We often assume that when someone hears and receives the gospel, they will think and act like us. Homogeneity makes us feel safe. It makes us buy into the fiction that sameness equals rightness.

It used to be the practice that all men came to church in coats and ties, and all women wore dresses, hats, and gloves. The “Sunday best” dress code was imposed, and to fail to comply was to show contempt for God. Those who defied the code represented something dark and foreign, something spiritually suspect and impotent.

Liberated by the gospel, Philip shares the good news with one who is both a eunuch and a foreigner. And being welcomed and affirmed, the man recognizes his own humanity, his own worth, and his own powerful potential.

       “Look!” he says, ‘There’s some water! What’s to prevent me from getting baptized?’

       The law says, Everything. People like you can’t belong.

       The Gospel says, Nothing. Nothing can hinder your inclusion in the body of Christ!

       The gospel declares to the eunuch that he has been created in God’s image. His life is bright and pregnant with possibility.

Listen: Before the Church can be a place for all people, we have to learn to be a place for all of ourselves – even those parts that we have learned to deny, repress, and exile to some distant desert. Those dark and foreign parts of us belong to God, too. They’re holy and full of promise.

Some of us may wrestle with a deep-seated urge toward violence and control. And as harmful as that urge can be, simply to label it sin and repress it is to reject a potential gift. If we harness that energy and incorporate it onto a foundation of compassion and humility, it can be resurrected into decisive and prophetic leadership.

       Conversely, to judge oneself for feeling indecisive and non-committal may be to ignore a call to ministries of discernment, a holy work that requires hearing and considering many voices.

       I think God wants us to accept, to make peace with, and to assimilate even those parts of ourselves we have tried, in effect, to castrate. God wants us to love all of ourselves as we are loved by God. With that in mind, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself” takes on new significance, doesn’t it?

       Recognizing the power and potential of his own life, the Ethiopian eunuch sees the sparkle of water and asks, What is to stop me from claiming my wholeness and my Belovedness in Christ?

And Philip’s says, Nothing. Nothing can hinder you from your full humanity in Jesus.

As we gather around the Lord’s table, God meets us where we are, and loves us as we are. But God doesn’t seem satisfied to leave us there, either. At this table, we don’t shamefully cast off sin nearly so much as we gratefully take on and take in God’s redeeming grace.

       And no one will be hindered from God’s table of grace.