One-Anothering (Sermon)

“One-Anothering”

Philippians 2:1-11

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

8/26/18

         ^1-4If then our common life in Christ yields anything to stir the heart, any loving consolation, any sharing of the Spirit, any warmth of affection, or compassion, fill up my cup of happiness by thinking and feeling alike, with the same love for one another, the same turn of mind, and a common care for unity. There must be no room for rivalry and personal vanity among you, but you must humbly reckon others better than yourselves. Look to each other’s interests and not merely to your own.

         ^5-11Let your bearing towards one another arise out of your life in Christ Jesus. For the divine nature was his from the first; yet he did not think to snatch at equality with God, but made himself nothing, assuming the nature of a slave. Bearing the human likeness, revealed in human shape, he humbled himself, and in obedience accepted even death—death on a cross. Therefore God raised him to the heights and bestowed on him the name above all names, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow—in heaven, on earth, and in the depths—and every tongue confess, ‘Jesus Christ is Lord’, to the glory of God the Father.  (The New English Bible)

         Two things become evident when reading Paul’s letter to the Philippians. First, we realize that Paul loves this congregation and has invested himself deeply in the Philippian church.

          We also realize that the Philippians are caught up in some sort of struggle. While Paul doesn’t get specific, throughout the letter he offers words of encouragement and affirmation. Wanting the Philippians to recognize their crucial role in the ever-expanding gospel community, Paul’s epistle is an appeal for unity.

         The hinge-pin in today’s reading is verse 5. And I chose to read from the New English Bible specifically because of its translation of that verse. “Let your bearing towards one another arise out of your life in Christ Jesus.” To allow our “bearing towards one another [to] arise out of [our] life in Christ” is to embody our new reality in Jesus. For us, the kingdom of God is the new realm of human interaction. And Godcreates this community. Weparticipate in it and bear witness to it. We may even put our mark on it in some way, but the community itself is a gift of grace, not a human accomplishment.

         The marks of the new community include worship and the celebration of the sacraments. Those marks also include relationships of mutual care, forgiveness, and admonishment according to the loving example of Jesus. I call such relationships “one-anothering.” As followers of Jesus, we one-anothereach other as visible signs of the new kingdom we inhabit and the new life we live in it. Like the sacraments themselves, one-anothering is saturated with the real and mysterious presence of Christ.

          Jonesborough Presbyterian is very good at one-anothering. When families and individuals experience illness, death, job loss, crises with children, you’re there to cry with and comfort each other. That was beautifully evident yesterday as you all gathered around Conrad Crow’s family to lift them up, to grieve with them, and to give thanks to God for a truly remarkable man. When experiencing births, gradutions, weddings, or recovery, you’re there to laugh and celebrate with each other, too. And because you’re Presbyterians, casseroles figure in heavily on both sides.

         Let’s confess an uncomfortable truth, as well. And by no means does this apply to only one congregation, but the blessings of one-anothering often get poured out in greater measure on some folks than others. Unlike Christ, whose body we are, churches occasionally play favorites in their one-anothering. We tend to offer our most abundant grace to those who seem to “deserve” it, or to those who think, act, and look like ourselves. And while human beings have the freedom to practice selective response, as the community of Christ, we don’t have the right. We don’t exist for ourselves alone. God calls us to extend the fullness of one-anothering grace in Christlike abundance.

         Jesus’s first disciples struggled with this call. When they wanted to circle the wagons and keep the good news wrapped up in their comfortable little clique, Jesus said, ‘What good does that do? Don’t the tax collectors do the same thing?’ (Mt. 5:46) Followers of Jesus are different – and not just can be or should be. Jesus-followers aredifferent. “You will know them by their fruits,” he said. (Mt. 7:20)

         Paul echoes that: “If…our common life in Christ yields anything to stir the heart, any loving consolation, fill up my cup of happiness by thinking and feeling alike with the same love for one another…and a common care for unity.”

         When Paul says “if our common life in Christ yields anything” stirring and consoling, he means that a shared life in Christ does in fact yield the blessings of welcome, forgiveness, care for the poor and forgotten, and the exaltation of Christ. Without these marks, we’re just another business or club concerned about bottom lines and power arrangements. But when we faithfully share Christ’s mind, our life together reveals the kingdom of God.

          Now, when Paul asks the Philippians to “fill [his] cup of happiness by thinking and feeling alike,” he’s not asking everyone to agree on everything. No one can make everyone happy. He’s challenging them to practice one-anothering, with Christ-saturated hearts and minds, even in their differences, thus living as an unmistakable reflection of Jesus.

         This is where the preacher is supposed to tell some inspiring story to illustrate the point. You know the kind of thing: A disaster happens, and people of all stripes come together to help those who’ve been thrown into chaos by some war, storm, earthquake, or flood. And there are some really good stories like that. I’m certain that those stories are being played out right now in Hawaii in the wake of Hurricane Lane and in Indonesia after last week’s earthquake.

         The far more difficult – and familiar – scenario is that of Christians living and working day-by-day next to people in our families, neighborhoods, congregations, denominations, and in other faith traditions, or people who neither have nor want any religious faith, and find that many of these folks think completely differently than we do on crucial issues. So, what then? How do we reflect the heart and mind of Christ in those immediate and routine realities?

         Well, maybe we start with something we acknowledged a few minutes ago: Godcreates the new community. We participate in it, but it’s not our accomplishment. To me, that means that we approach the one-anothering relationships of spiritual community like we do a creative endeavor. When a sculptor sits down with a lump of clay, she considers the size of the lump, how willingly it yields to her touch. Her fingers begin to knead and pinch. Remaining open to her heart and to the clay itself, the sculptor begins to develop a relationship with what is otherwise a lifeless chunk of moist earth. And together they create something beautiful.

In the new community, we sit down with each other, intentionally and humbly. We yield ourselves to the presence of the Spirit between us. The clay, the gift, is the relationship itself. God is the sculptor – or, as Isaiah said, God is the potter. A Christlike “bearing towards one another” allows us – in time, anyway – to see across from us a brother or a sister, and to see that between us, God is creating something beautiful.

         We may disagree with that person on important theological, social, and political issues. And as long as we see him or her as an adversary who must be defeated, we’ll be like Adam in the garden. We’ll mistake ourselves for God. We’ll decide it’s ourjob to mold thatperson into something that suits us. And the whole community will suffer.

         Paul doesn’t sugar coat the new reality. Living into a Christlike “bearing towards one another” requires nothing less than self-emptying humility. It requires dying and rising with Christ, day after day, dying to the old and rising to the new.

         During Conrad Crow’s memorial service, I quoted a few of his sermons. And in one of them Conrad said that “the basic mission and purpose of the church is to be found in call[ing] the dead back to life. You see,” he said, “we have such a limited definition of death that we associate it always with the obituary column and the funeral. The Bible also recognizes death [that way],” he said. “But the Bible is also filled with the names and stories of those who, though they are alive, have never lived, who possessing many things are empty within, for whom the cessation of breathing is a minor calamity compared to a soul which has no pulse.”

“Through us,” he said, “weak earthen vessels that we are, God continues the vocation of our Lord, who said, ‘I come that you might have life and have it more abundantly.’ Through us,” said Conrad, “God continues [the] miracle.”

May we always humble ourselves to God, to the presence of Christ in one another, and to the miracle of the Holy Spirit’s one-anothering community at work in our midst.

More Than Comfort Food (Sermon)

“More Than Comfort Food”

John 6:51-58

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

8/19/18

⁵¹I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

⁵²The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

⁵³So Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. ⁵⁴Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day;⁵⁵for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. ⁵⁶Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. ⁵⁷Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. ⁵⁸This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.”

Bread. The staff of life. Like wine, bread holds a mythical place in visual art, song, literature, and liturgy. Some people call bread “comfort food.” Personally, I feel that way about ice cream more than bread, but who doesn’t enjoy at least the idea of golden-brown biscuits, still hot from the oven, butter melting all the way through. There’s something eternal and archetypal about bread.

On one of my mission trips to Malawi, I watched a woman eating bread. She sat on the ground just outside the hospital. It was morning. She was wrapped in dark cloth that wound upward from her ankles, around her waist, her torso, and chest, then covered her head. In her deeply-creased hands, she had a chunk of bread no larger than a votive candle. Staring off into a distance only she could see, she tore off a small piece of the bread and put it in her mouth, and chewed slowly, deliberately. She seemed intent on making each bite of bread last as long as it possibly could. And that little chunk of bread may have been the only food she had that day. At Nkhoma, Malawi, food service was beyond the means of the hospital. So, family was responsible for feeding their loved ones. If that woman were there for a family member, she was saving the larger portion of what she had as life-giving bread for a sick husband, or sibling, or child. In the meantime, that piece of bread was helping to keep her alive so that she could care for the one she loved.

         Chapter 6 of John is a veritable bakery of bread imagery. And it culminates in today’s passage in which Jesus becomes so graphic that he almost destroys one’s appetite for bread. And his teaching clearly destroys the appetite for discipleship in some of his followers. In verse 60, “many disciples” say, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” And in verse 66 we learn that “Because of this [teaching] many disciples turned back and no longer went about with [Jesus].”

They left him! And who can blame them? When Jesus says, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them,” it’s easy to understand why the early church faced condemnation as a cannibalistic cult.

Let’s remember this about the Fourth Gospel: John is the only canonical gospel that does not tell the story of the Last Supper. In John, Jesus’ sacramental act on the night before he died, was a call to humility and service. He washed the disciples’ feet. In writing the last gospel, John is interpreting Jesus for a church facing much more difficult circumstances than the churches to whom Paul, Mark, Matthew, and Luke wrote. He’s also writing from more years of theological reflection and ecclesiastical experience. By positioning the Bread Chapterearly in his telling of Jesus’ story, John gives his readers the chance to wrestle with just how demanding discipleship can be. And this unforgettable image – eating flesh and drinking blood – helps us to understand the sacrament as more than a liturgical ritual. It’s a way of life. Discipleship isa sacramental life, a life of total co-emersion in and with Jesus.

If we want to understand what it means to be one with Jesus, says John, think about how we are one with what we eat and drink. Food and drink are tangible images. They involve all five senses; and being signs of life, our senses requirefood and drink. Like good food, healthy food, Jesus is that which we ingest with delight, especially in community. He is that without which we will die, even as we live. Apart from the eternal Christ, we will, as individuals and as communities, develop a taste for selfishness, fear, ingratitude, and violence. The antidote to this living death, is to eat the body and drink the blood of Jesus, whose “flesh is true food and [whose] blood is true drink.” (Jn. 6:55)

Jesus’ instruction, and the uncomfortable image he uses, can become just another rule. And in the history of the Christian faith, many have been the theologians, popes, preachers, Sunday school teachers, and denominations who have taught it as such. And maybe they’re like the disciples who left Jesus. Imposing and enforcing rules is much easier than following Jesus in sacramental, kingdom-of-God-living here and now. But reducing Jesus’ disturbing image into a finite precept sanitizes it. It becomes a pill to swallow rather than a meal to celebrate, consume, and by which to beconsumed, and thus transformed.

Will Willimon shines some light on this text. “Ah, would the Christian faith be easier,” he says, “if it were a matter of mere belief or intellectual assent! No, today’s rather scandalously carnal, incarnational gospel reminds us that Jesus intends to have all of us, body and soul. His truth wants to burrow deep within us, to consume us as we consume him, to flow through our veins, to be digested, to nourish every nook and cranny of our being.”¹

 Willimon’s point is that Jesus’ “difficult teaching” doesn’t make some cold, legalistic demand. It reveals Jesus’ deep and determined hunger to be utterly and eternally one with us. It reveals his thirst to fill us inside and out. Jesus’ words are an impassioned plea for us to realize that he’s already close to us, at the most essential, cellular level. Jesus is the energy that animates us, the tissue that connects us, the impulses that move us, the thoughts that guide us. As beloved children, made in God’s image, Jesus is our existential reality. The ritual of eating bread and drinking wine and seeing in them the body and blood of Jesus reminds us and declares to the world that Jesus is our “all in all,” and quite literally so.

The disciples who left Jesus may have understood that better than anyone. They, along with the likes of Herod, Pilate, and the Pharisees didn’t wantto be set free from their smorgasbord of comfort foods – things like military might, economic privilege, political advantage, and distracting entertainments.

Willimon concludes his article on today’s text by mentioning a friend who teaches theology at Oxford in England. The professor asks his students what they think theology is about. And they usually say “that theology is about spiritual matters, or about religion, or deeper meaning in life…No, says the teacher, theology (at least Christian, incarnational theology…in the mode of the sixth chapter of the Fourth Gospel) is about everything. Jesus has come down from heaven with the intention of taking it all back. He wants all of us, and he wants us to have all of him.

“This God is so scandalously, intimately available to us,” says Willimon. And “whoever knows this, knows how to live forever.”²

¹Will Willimon in his article, “Homiletical Perspective,” in Feasting on the Word: Year B, Vol. 3. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, eds. Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville. 2009. p. 361.

²Ibid. p. 361.

A Community of Love (Sermon)

“A Community of Love”

Ephesians 4:21-5:2

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

8/12/18

         While the epistle to the Ephesians is definitely Pauline, almost no biblical scholars attribute the letter to Paul himself. The Apostle did go to Ephesus, but the writer of Ephesians doesn’t drop names at the beginning as Paul does to verify relationship and authority. He actually indicates personal distance from Ephesus, saying, “I have heard ofyour faith…and your love.” (Eph. 1:15)

And because most early manuscripts of this letter don’t even mention the Ephesians in the greeting, some scholars believe that a Pauline disciple wrote this letter well after Paul’s death and used it as a kind of general prologue to a circulating collection of Paul’s work.¹

Ephesians begins with a long string of pious clichés. Like water seeking its level, the words of chapter 1 just sort of puddle up on the page and go nowhere. In chapter 2, we begin to sense something of a flow. “By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God…so that no one may boast.” (Eph. 2:8-9) Works matter, says the author, but our works witness to God. They’re not a means to curry favor with one who already loves us unconditionally.

“So then,” he says, “you are no longer strangers and aliens, but…members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord.” (Eph. 2:19-21)

The author encourages his readers to understand that God’s gracious initiative is making them one withChrist. And the purpose for being one with Christ is to make them one in Christ. Individually, they’re created in the image of God. And as a community, they’re the body of Christ. It’s always both/and for the Church, beloved disciples coming together as a holy community bound by God’s love for them and their love for God – which is demonstrated in their for one another, and for all that God creates.

Transcending mere belief in religious precepts, discipleship means following a Jesus way of life. It means forsaking the world’s individualism, greed, and fear. It also means honest confession of our sinfulness. And in confession we don’t condemn ourselves, we humble ourselves. When we confuse being chosen and called by God for special privilege, we smugly ignore all the brokenness and pain around us – especially beyond the church doors.

After exposing human self-centeredness, the author of Ephesians offers advice on what following Jesus looks like:

²¹For surely you have heard about him and were taught in him, as truth is in Jesus. ²²You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, ²³and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, ²⁴and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

²⁵So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another.

²⁶Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, ²⁷and do not make room for the devil.

²⁸Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy.

²⁹Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear.

³⁰And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption.

³¹Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, ³²and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.

5Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, ²and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. (Ephesians 4:21-5:2 NRSV)

         It may be tempting to read this passage as nothing more than a list of superficial morality statements, ending with the impossible command to “be imitators of God.” But such a narrow reading mistakes discipleship for an individualistic means of “getting to heaven when we die.” And if we proclaim that Jesus comes to save us from God’s eternal vengeance, then, at some level, we’re saying that he comes to save us from God. Any god who cannot forgive unless something dies a violent, sacrificial death – that’s not the God revealed in the life of Jesus. And a life of fearful submission to rules for the purpose of saving our individual skins from a god on whose anger the sun rises and sets day after day – that’s certainly not the Christian life Ephesians talks about.

         “Be renewed in the spirit of your minds,” he says, “…clothe yourselves with the new self, created in accordance with the likeness of God.”(Eph. 4:23-24)This is the “true righteousness and holiness” through which we live not as ones who fear some vengeful deity, but as ones who are responding in grateful witness to God. In Jesus, God reveals the height, and depth, and breadth of agape love from which nothingcan separate us.

That love empowers us for new life here and now.

         That love empowers us to speak the truth in love, because to deal dishonestly with others is to deal dishonestly with ourselves.

Selfish anger has the same effect on the community. Pitting one person against another almost always ends up pitting one side against another. It leads to “evil talk” that tears down the community by tearing down individuals within it.

Like termites in the foundation and the walls of the “holy temple” of the faith community, mercenary and fearful actions breed everything named by the author of Ephesians: “bitterness, wrath, wrangling, slander [and] malice,” along with a ravenouslust for retribution. When we nurture those feelings in ourselves, we inevitably project them onto God. That’s when God becomes angry, vengeful, violent, and everything else Jesus is not. And isn’t that when we “grieve the Holy Spirit of God” most deeply?

         Perhaps the most illuminating part of today’s reading is verse 28. The instruction to thieves is oddly straightforward, as if thievery were some kind of recognized but second-tier vocation. Oh, and all you thieves, don’t steal. Do honest labor.And, the stated purpose of this instruction, “…so as to have something to give to the needy,” clarifies things not only for thieves, but for everyone.

The purpose of discipleship and Christian community is not maintaining budgets, buildings, and doctrines. Our purpose as a body and as particular members of it is to bear witness to God’s love and grace in the world by caring for those who suffer from poverty, illness, neglect, abuse, and grief. That includes human beings, animals, and the very earth itself.

I know that we live in an anxious, dangerous world. I know that the most dependable god often seems to be Constantine’s god of conquest and domination. And I do know that worldly entities must consider practical questions of how to protect themselves.

I also know that Christian scripture says implicitly and explicitly, “God is Love.”

As a community of faith, do we trust that God is love?

As a community of the Christian faith, do we trust that this God of love is revealed in Jesus Christ whose love for all things is revealed in his willingness to love us until we can’t stand it anymore, until we can’t stand himanymore, until we nail him to a Roman cross, and still we hear him cry, Father forgive them! They don’t know what they’re doing!

Do we trust that God’s love is revealed to us when, after we have denied and killed Jesus, he returns in resurrection “righteousness and holiness” to ask us, as he asks Peter, Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? He asks us this question over and over. He asks it until we realize that for every time we demonstrate our fearful self-obsessions, he is there to give us the chance to profess our love for him all over again, the chance to be resurrected with him all over again.

ThatGod, the one revealed in Jesus of Nazareth, is the one whom we are to imitate “as beloved children.”

We belong to and worship that God, and that God alone.

The table is set with the sacrament this morning. You will serve one another a mustard seed portion of Christ himself. And since you truly are what you eat and drink, may this meal transform you, may it transform us, into some truer, bolder, and more gracious revelation of God who is Love, who is real and trustworthy, and who is even now making all things new.

¹C. Milo Connick, The New Testament: An Introduction to Its Thoughts History, Literature, and Thought. Duxbury Press, North Scituate, MA, 1978. p. 334.