Favored? (Sermon)

“Favored?”

Luke 1:26-38

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

12/23/18 – 4^th Sunday of Advent

²⁶In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, ²⁷to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary.

²⁸And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.”

²⁹But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.

³⁰The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. ³¹And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. ³²He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. ³³He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”

³⁴Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?”

³⁵The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. ³⁶And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. ³⁷For nothing will be impossible with God.”

³⁸Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her. (NRSV)

         The more I read the biblical story, the more it loses some things. And one thing it loses, something that needs to go, is its me-and-Jesus soppiness – all that unnatural sweetness responsible for things like shiny candy canes at Christmas and squishy yellow peeps at Easter.

This is no original idea. Many people complain about turning Christmas, and even Easter, into flurries of indulgence and consumption. And then there’s Mardi Gras – a Christian observance we’ve elevated to a level of commercialism and hedonism all its own. And yet, underneath the widespread grumbling, I sense a kind of twisted, lemming-like discipleship at work, because in one way or another, most of us continue to participate in the very thing to which we claim to object. That says to me that we continue to regard the means to obtain material possessions, and the freedom to engage in excess as signs of God’s favor. As much as we might say that we could be happy without our belongings around us, in our culture, even in our church culture, not to have these things tends to feel like personal failure, or even being judged by God. So, as much as anything else we say or do, leaping into the feeding frenzy surrounding our liturgical celebrations has become a creedal statement. For both individuals and institutions, owning and controlling assets has become a de facto affirmation of faith.

Biblical favor, God’s favor looks alarmingly different from the favor one assumes in competitive, consumeristic cultures. When someone in the biblical story finds favor with God, it’s almost guaranteed that they will rue the day that God showed up and said, ‘You. I pick you to do important work for me.’

Maybe that’s why Mary is “perplexed” when Gabriel shows up and says, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you…You have found favor with God.” If Mary has been told the stories of the Jewish faith, she knows what being favored by God meant for Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Ruth, David, Jeremiah, Hosea, Daniel, and on goes the list. At some point along the way, being favored by God means being inconvenienced, uncomfortable, and anything but favored by those around us.

Being favored by God means being chosen to do something meaningful and memorable, and something difficult and potentially dangerous – something that may feel impossible. It’s not the same as being sent into some war zone. God does not equip us with tools of violence and purposes that are temporal and temporary. God equips us with the means of mercy and purposes of redemption for all creation – even when the creation wants something entirely different. What the world seems to want – whether in the form of Pollyanna or Rambo – is Santa Claus; and what God gives us is Jesus – a man who engages all that is sinful and sinister in the world because he sees all that is beautiful, eternal, and beloved at the heart of it all.

In his grand announcement, Gabriel tells Mary that she will give birth to a boy who “will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and [will sit on] the throne of his ancestor David.” So, for Mary, being favored by God means something immediate and specific: She will have a child. And that means she’s being called to motherhood – something permanent and open-ended. Mary will love her child as boundlessly as he will love her. He will be the earth beneath her feet and the stars in her sky. He will also, as the old priest Simeon says, be “a sword to pierce [her] soul.” (Luke 2:35) For Mary, then, favored means a lifetime of labor, love, anxiety, and heartbreak.

Here at Christmastime, I don’t find satisfaction in feeling like a kill-joy, or what my daughter likes to call a fun-sucker. But think about Mary’s life, and Paul’s life, and Stephen’s life, and Peter’s life. The lives of ones who are favored by God have nothing in common with presents wrapped in glossy paper and tied neatly with bright red bows. That’s just not God’s way in the world. Favored status always means a summons to a journey of faith, a life of uncertainty, discovery, and trust. That’s precisely why God enters the creation in general and the human condition in particular in the person of Jesus of Nazareth – a man whose own favored life was a journey of service, struggle, and suffering.

We inhabit an imperfect, corporeal reality. By faith, we also affirm that it is God’s beloved, manger-delivered creation. And if we’re to accept our favored-ness, we need Jesus, because we need more than an example. We need someone to follow. We need someone who doesn’t sugar-coat the life of discipleship. We need someone who fully receives his own favored-ness, and who fully shares it – even unto death. (cf. Phil. 1:8)

 Mary does all of this. Before meeting Jesus, before hearing him speak, before watching him live and love, before feeling every wound that he feels, and before experiencing grief and loss as only a mother can – before all of this, Mary fully receives her favored-ness. “Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” From that point onward, Mary embodies the truth that being favored by God does not include being treated with favoritism. Favored-ness is a call to commit one’s life to compassion, gratitude, generosity, and reconciliation. It’s a call to commit one’s life to humble service. And through this commitment, we can experience a truly holy and human – a truly favored life.

I’m toying with the idea of instructing members of next year’s nominating committee, when they make phone calls to potential officers, to say, “Greetings favored one! The Lord is with you.” That should get interesting results, don’t you think? Serving as an elder is a significant honor. It can be tremendously rewarding. It’s also real service. It requires time, effort, prayer, humble honesty and humble restraint, and a great deal of patience. And faithful, servant-hearted leaders make all the difference in how well a given group of people functions as a community – especially as a Jesus-following community.

Advent prepares us for the giving and receiving of a gift that reveals our deepest gifts, gifts we’ve been given to share. To use holy gifts for selfish ends always leads us to mistake God’s favored-ness for privilege, and God’s blessing for whatever benefits us personally.

You may want to duck when you feel God favoring you with a call, but if you can, receive it, anyway. Let it be with you according to God’s word.

And remember Mary, who shows us that in the faithful receiving and sharing of our favored-ness, our heart, minds, bodies, and our living comes alive with the life of Jesus.

*All posts are now also appearing on my new blog site. Please visit at: www.jabbokinthefoothills.blog

The Nature of Joy (Homily)

The Nature of Joy

Service of Comfort and Contemplation¹

John 9:1-5 

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

12/16/18

^1-2 Walking down the street, Jesus saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked, “Rabbi, who sinned: this man or his parents, causing him to be born blind?”

^3-5 Jesus said, “You’re asking the wrong question. You’re looking for someone to blame. There is no such cause-effect here. Look instead for what God can do. We need to be energetically at work for the One who sent me here, working while the sun shines. When night falls, the workday is over. For as long as I am in the world, there is plenty of light. I am the world’s Light.”(The Message)

         To understand an experience of pain, any kind of pain, the ancient mind assumed guilt and judgment. Suffering came only to those who deserved it. Many contemporary minds continue to associate sin and suffering. To be sure, selfish or reckless decisions can lead to suffering for ourselves and others. I have certainly caused pain to myself and to others. And the lingering Calvinist in me tends to think I deserve to feel all of that suffering.

There is also more than enough random suffering out there for all of us. And the Christ in me knows that no one deserves to suffer a life-diminishing illness, the death of someone they love, depression, physical/sexual/emotional abuse, exclusion from community, or the ravages of natural disaster, random violence, or war. What we all deserve is people to walk with us through those experiences, people who will hold us, encourage us, sit quietly with us, weep with us.

Those people reveal the nature of true joy. Joy is not mere gladness and celebration. It isn’t having our wants satisfied. Nor does joy fall for the easy, everything-happens-for-a-reason platitude. That’s just another way to lay blame on those who suffer, or on God, and then to distance ourselves from suffering. Biblically speaking, joy is a fierce hope-in-the-midst-of-suffering. It’s that white-knuckled, red-faced trust that God can and does forge new wholeness and purpose out of even the fieriest of furnaces. 

Joy might even be described as the faith that throws us into suffering, our own and that of others, knowing that pain is not God’s will, and that God is in the midst of it, not causing it but redeeming it. That’s what Christmas is all about – God entering human suffering.

In his book The Magnificent Defeat, Frederick Buechner says this about Jesus: “He does not seem to have had much sense of humor, and unconsciously, I think, we cannot quite forgive him for that because for us it is one of the major virtues; but in order to laugh, it is necessary to step back from life a little, whereas he almost never steps back, but keeps moving deeper and deeper into the world’s pain, everyone’s pain, which becomes his own because this is the way love moves…”²

“God is love,” says John. So for us, Jesus – Emmanuel, God With Us – is himself Incarnate Love moving into our midst. To me, that makes Christmas more than a celebration. It’s our prophetic declaration that in Jesus of Nazareth, God enters the world in all its beauty and possibility, and all its frailty and brokenness. In Jesus, God immerses God’s own self in our midst fully, inextricably, and creatively. The Incarnation affirms our humanity and the goodness of the created order; and God reaffirms God’s commitment to be with us and for us. Now. Always.

I pray that some unexpected grace reveals to you where God is present in the midst of your own suffering. And I pray that in this season, and throughout your lives, you experience the redeeming and abiding presence of the Incarnate Christ – the true joy who is leading us into the light.

¹This homily was used in a service often called a “Blue Christmas Service.” Such services are held to acknowledge that the Christmas season is not one of happiness and laughter for everyone. The intent is to hold one another’s suffering and declare God’s whole-making presence in the world through the Incarnate Jesus.

²Frederick Buechner. From his sermon “The Tiger,” in The Magnificent Defeat. Harper/San Francisco, 1966; p. 94.

*All posts are now also appearing on my new blog site. Please visit at: www.jabbokinthefoothills.blog

Advent: A Way of Life (Sermon)

“Advent: A Way of Life”

Luke 21:25-36

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

12/2/18

Advent begins today. And while the sanctuary is decorated with greenery, garlands, and bright red poinsettias, we need to remind ourselves that Advent is not Christmas. Christmas Day begins the 12-day Christmas season, but Advent is the way of the Christian life. 

The early church didn’t celebrate Christmas at all. Focused on Easter, the first Christians gathered to pray, to serve the poor, and to share a communal meal which became the Eucharist. In doing so, they both prepared for and lived in Jesus’ presence. Reports of a Nativity feast didn’t even begin to surface until the third century.

Of the four canonical gospels, three seem relatively uninterested in Jesus’ nativity. Mark, the earliest gospel, opens his story with an adult John the Baptist calling people to respond to an adult Jesus who is already creeping around on the margins. Matthew tells us about Joseph’s dream, but then jumps straight to the visit of the Magi, who would have visited not an infant in a stable but a toddler in a carpenter’s modest home. John, the latest gospel, starts out with abstract theological musing: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…” Then John, like Mark, throws us straight into the presence of an adult John the Baptist.

Only Luke records a nativity story, and he prepares us very carefully. Before the “good news of great joy,” Luke forecasts the birth of John the Baptist by telling the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth. Then comes the story of the Annunciation and Mary’s consent. Next, Mary visits Elizabeth, and after Elizabeth’s prophecy, Mary sings her prophetic song of praise.

Elizabeth’s child is born and named John by a doubt-muted Zechariah who, when his voice is restored, makes his own prophecy about God sending a “mighty savior [to] guide our feet into the way of peace.” Zechariah’s and Elizabeth’s son will prepare the way for this savior.

At this point in Luke – chapter 1, verse 79 – John is an infant, and Jesus is not yet born. There are years of waiting, decades of hope-in-the-midst-of-hardship before these prophecies begin to stir once again in people’s imaginations. That is the feeling we’re after in Advent.

Advent asks us to stop and mull over all these prophecies. At its best, the peculiar Christian tradition of Advent humbly makes the audacious claim thatGod incarnates God’s own self in a particular human being, in a particular religious tradition, and in a particular place, time, and socio-political environment. These four weeks call us to examine our own hearts and minds, our own spiritual communities and fellowship, and our interactions with our own social, political, and economic circumstances. That’s why Advent begins with texts like Luke 21:

²⁵“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. ²⁶People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. ²⁷Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory. ²⁸Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

²⁹Then he told them a parable: “Look at the fig tree and all the trees; ³⁰as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. ³¹So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near.³²Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. ³³Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

³⁴“Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, ³⁵like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. ³⁶Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.” (NRSV)

         It helps to back up and look at this passage in the context of Luke’s wider story, which doesn’t end with the Ascension, but continues all the way through the book of Acts. Like Mary’s Magnificat and Zechariah’s prophecy preceding the births of their children, Jesus’ prophecy – his entire prophetic life – precedes his passion, his resurrection, and Pentecost. Always engaging political and economic as well as spiritual and religious realities, Jesus’ words can make us uneasy.¹And to be sure, Jesus speaks of political distress and confusion. He speaks of chaos in nature. And by calling such things signs of the coming of the Son of Man, Luke presents Jesus as an apocalyptic figure – someone speaking about the end times. But there are at least two voices at work in this passage: Jesus, the prophetic Word of God, and Luke, the first century narrative theologian.

As the first voice, Jesus – the Son of Man – points toward the completion of God’s redemption of the Creation, God’s gracious gathering up of all things into God’s Self. The apocalyptic tradition in Judaism describes a disruptive grace, dramatic and even tumultuous changes in the world.

A caution for us: Every human attempt to define or identify some culminating, apocalyptic event has proven wrong. (And we needn’t think only the Judeo-Christian tradition. Interpretations of a much-discussed Mayan Calendar predicted that the world would end on December 21, 2012.) Sometimes human effort has proven just plain silly. (Think of Harold Camping and his multiple failed predictions based on preposterous numerology.²) Occasionally, some have tried, with horrifying and deadly futility, to force the issue. (Think of the Crusades in Medieval times. Or currently, think of particular Christian Zionists who even now want to kindle all-out war in the Middle East because they believe it a prerequisite for Jesus’ return.)

As the second voice, Luke wrote in the early-to-mid 80’sCE – that means ten to fifteen years after the fall of Jerusalem in 70CE. The distress, confusion, and chaos of the Jewish rebellion and Rome’s over-powering response lingered like the smell of smoke around a fire-ravaged home. Having a long history of suffering conquest and occupation, those with Jewish roots would still feel that fresh wound and remember ancient ones. They would be wrestling with God’s goodness and providence as they squirmed under the heel of Roman rule, still waiting for good news, still preparing for deliverance.

Only Luke knows for sure, but maybe he was trying to say, in and through Jesus’ words, that he expected some imminent and apocalyptic act of redemption. And as followers of God the Son, we proclaim that in and through the Luke’s story (indeed, through the broader gospel story), God the Holy Spirit reveals to all with eyes to see and ears to hear, that God the Father’s deliverance has come. It has come in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who was born some 85 years earlier in the town of Bethlehem. And to process news like that we have to embrace a paradox. We prepare for the arrival of the Christ, for the fulfillment of God’s promise of redemption, by already living our lives in the realm of Incarnate love here and now.

Because Christmas proclaims the gift of God’s eternal presence in, with, and for the Creation, Advent, instead of being a time of busyness and acquisition, is best observed as a time of contemplation and release. It’s a time to create space to receive anew God’s ongoing apocalypse of grace in Jesus. The more we clutter our lives, the more “weighed down [and trapped] with…the worries of this life” we become, and the less “alert [and prayerful]” we will be. And the less able we are to recognize and welcome what God offers in Jesus.

Christmas is the moment, the headliner. But Advent is the way of life. Without Advent, this time of year is, even for Christians, nothing more than “The Holidays.”

As you come to the table this morning, may you come with open hearts and unclenched fists so that you may truly receive the signs of grace. And instead of helping you to escape creation’s suffering and struggles, may this sacrament send you out to live as sprouting fig leaves, as incarnate signs of God’s healing presence and redeeming love at work in a grieving and anguished, but beautiful and beloved world.

¹Like so much of scripture, especially prophetic and apocalyptic texts, Jesus’ words often get misused. Many people find grace a bit fluffy and fragile, and turn to fear (judgement, shame, etc.) as means of proclamation. The gospel, then, gets lost in human efforts to make grace a merited and measurable commodity rather than a gift. The gift of scripture comes with the endless challenge to handle them with care.

²https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/18/us/harold-camping-radio-entrepreneur-who-predicted-worlds-end-dies-at-92.html

*All posts are now also appearing on my new blog site. Please visit at: www.jabbokinthefoothills.blog