Participants in the Kingdom (Christmas Eve Sermon)

"Participants in the Kingdom"

Isaiah 42:1-9,  Romans 8:18-25,  Luke 2:1-20

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

Christmas Eve 2020

 

Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations. ²He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; ³a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice. ⁴He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his teaching.

⁵Thus says God, the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk in it: ⁶I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations,⁷to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness. ⁸I am the Lord, that is my name; my glory I give to no other, nor my praise to idols. ⁹See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them. (Isaiah 42:1-9 – NRSV)

 

¹⁸I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. ¹⁹For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; ²⁰for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope ²¹that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

²²We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; ²³and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. ²⁴For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? ²⁵But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. (Romans 8:18-25 – NRSV)

 

In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. ²This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. ³All went to their own towns to be registered.

⁴Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. ⁵He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child.⁶While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. ⁷And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.

⁸In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. ⁹Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.¹⁰But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: ¹¹to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. ¹²This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.”

¹³And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, ¹⁴“Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”

¹⁵When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.”

¹⁶So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. ¹⁷When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; ¹⁸and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. ¹⁹But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. ²⁰The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them. (Luke 2:1-20 – NRSV)

 

         Isaiah prophesied to Hebrew exiles in Babylon. He shared a message of deliverance with Jews who had been displaced from Jerusalem for enough generations to be well past any kind of Stockholm syndrome. For many, Babylon had become home. However, if the very presence of prophets among the Hebrews says anything about their state of mind, they knew that they were not, nor would they ever be, Babylonians. They had been called into something far bigger than comfortable captivity in a wealthy, powerful, and even somewhat accommodating empire.

         Through Isaiah, God says, Don’t acclimate to this! I am raising a servant who will be saturated with my spirit. He will work for justice. He will reestablish you, Israel, as God’s chosen sign of the covenant with the Creation. He will lead you out of captivity so that you help to bring light to the nations, to open blind eyes, and set captives free.

         And God is working on this new thing right now, says Isaiah. Today.

         And the people gaze toward Jerusalem, wondering, Who is this servant?

         About 800 years later, Paul writes to Jewish Christians in Rome saying that while the present age is fraught with oppression and suffering, those things will not prevail. Indeed, such experiences are themselves the birth pangs of something new. The people, then, can live in hope because the same God who promised deliverance to Hebrews in Babylon is still at work creating and recreating, bringing the kind of light, justice, and freedom that the nations cannot deliver because they serve only themselves.

         Isaiah and Paul penned messages of great promise and hope. They’re Christmas messages because through them God does more than utter words. God creates incarnate expressions of healing grace in and for a suffering Creation.

While this is wonderful news, there’s a fly in all this healing ointment. Neither Isaiah, nor the servant, nor Paul act alone. So, the people to whom they speak cannot sit back and merely watch what happens because God doesn’t call spectators. Seeing isn’t believing in God’s realm. God calls and equips participantswho join in the faith-generating work of doing justice, showing compassion, and sharing joy.

         In Luke, the angels’ announcement to shepherds was not for a superhero who had come to save the day singlehandedly. No, they announced the arrival of a messiah, a leader, one who would walk with the people as together they overcame the challenges and obstacles of disorienting oppression and injustice. And that messiah had arrived as a child, an infant, one who would need to be held and nursed. His diapers would need to be changed. Long before he would be immersed in John’s baptism, he would need to be immersed in the scriptures and rituals of his people. And as savior, his salvation would be about far more than individual transgressions.

In his hometown synagogue in Nazareth, an adult Jesus, fresh from his baptism and temptation, reads from the scroll of Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” says Jesus, “because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” And when Jesus finishes reading that prophecy, he sits down and lets Isaiah’s words marinate in silence. Then he utters his own challenging and transforming words: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:16-21)

The child born this night is savior to a Creation in exile. And the salvation he brings liberates us from captivity to materialism, fear, and violence. Those foundational idolatries lead to all other transgressions. The “sins” from which we often claim deliverance through Jesus are merely symptoms of the deeper more destructive realities that enslave us. And our own culture is as materialistic, fear-driven, and violent as anything the ancients experienced. That’s precisely why faith matters, and why Christmas matters.

Jesus comes to do more than forgive our sins. As the Anointed One, he comes to lead us in the ways of faith, righteousness, justice, and peace. To me, Jesus seems far less interested in believers than he is in followers. His salvation comes not through dogma regurgitated but through love shared. And like Jesus, we inhabit God’s realm through our willing and determined participation in the kingdom of God. Here and now. Today.

We’ve all just experienced an extremely difficult year. We’ve endured a global pandemic, and even as vaccines are rolling out, some of the most difficult days still lie ahead. Like Rome, Covid is an occupying force. Like Babylon, it keeps us exiled from people and communities we love. But modern science, one of God’s shining stars, heralds good news, and it’s coming to us far more quickly than it would have just a decade ago. God is and has been at work through the minds of scientists and the hands of caregivers, as well as through the hearts of people who take precautions on behalf of their neighbors.

We’ve also experienced social and political upheaval this year. Across our country, we have recognized that the disease of racism still festers in our midst. Becoming aware of an institutional evil like racism is kind of like getting diagnosed with a life-threatening virus. And long before acceptance, parts of the body struggle with denial. And yet, throughout the generations, voices of grief have wailed, as the prophet Jeremiah says, like “Rachel…weeping for her children; [and] she refuses to be comforted…because they are no more.” (Jeremiah 31:15) Those were prophetic tears, tears which have been flowing for 400 years as prayers for deliverance, prayers for the very sort of kingdom-of-God justice that Isaiah promised.

All around us and within us, there are sufferings which may hold nothing when compared to “the glory about to be revealed,” but they’re sufferings nonetheless. Jesus, the Christ, comes to redeem that suffering by leading us in the ways of peace, justice, and love.

Friends, it’s Christmas, and the gift given to us in the child born in Bethlehem is the gift of freedom from exile, freedom from fear, freedom from greed and hopelessness. In Christ, God gives us one whom we may follow into lives and communities that are not only redeemed by grace, but that participate in God’s work of redemption in the Creation. Thus is this “good news of great joy for all people.”

Like Mary, let us treasure these words and ponder them in our hearts so that we nurture the new and renewing Christ Presence within us.

I give thanks to God for all of you. And I give thanks for the myriad ways in which you participate in God’s transforming work wherever you are, whoever you are.

Merry Christmas to you all, and Merry Christmas to others through you.

Advent: The Art of Letting Go (Sermon)

“Advent: The Art of Letting Go”

Mark 1:1-8

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

12/20/20

Fourth Sunday of Advent

 

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

²As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, 

“See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way;
³the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight,’”

⁴John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. ⁵And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.

⁶Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. ⁷He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. ⁸I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”  (NRSV)

 

         For people who watch sports, it’s a familiar scene: Ball-carriers, or base-runners, or shot-takers score and immediately assume postures of self-satisfied bravado. They hold their arms out and tense every muscle to absorb the world’s fawning adoration. In these displays, the athletes seem convinced, or seem to need to be convinced that their touchdown, or homerun, or basket, or goal, or knock-out punch was the first of its kind and the most significant individual achievement in the history of sport.

         Such egotism is hardly limited to the realm of athletics. People love stories of individuals picking themselves up by the bootstraps, overcoming the odds to become rich and “successful” through nothing but their own determination and hard work. 

Our culture has become so possessed and burdened by the principles of individualism and meritocracy—principles that idolize wealth, power, and fame—that we’re losing much of the fundamental human connection necessary for societies to thrive. We’re losing appreciation for those around us, those who came before us, and those who will come after us.

In such cultures, public service becomes self-service.

The debates necessary for communities to govern themselves devolve into pathetic outbursts of insults and judgment against “adversaries.”

Excess becomes a sign of God’s favor.

Poverty becomes a sign of personal weakness.

The poor and the earth become commodities to exploit.

Christmas becomes a commercial event.

The cross becomes jewelry.

And during a viral pandemic—a global crisis—the simple act of wearing a mask (or even acknowledging that the problem exists!) becomes not a way to love God and neighbor, but a touchstone for one’s loyalties.

On top of all this, in a culture in which everyone is responsible only for himself or herself, sin is a matter of individual failures to think pure thoughts or believe right dogma. Biblical justice, then, which is a matter of communal righteousness, becomes irrelevant; and to some it becomes a four-letter word. Even in the Church!

It’s into just such a twisted, self-obsessed culture that John the Baptist appears. He comes preaching and living a prophetic vision of faithfulness to God rather than to Caesar.

Mark doesn’t get specific about John’s preaching, but Luke does. And it’s evident that, for John, faithfulness means loving one’s neighbors, and repentance means helping to meet the needs of those who are poor or in crisis. 

It’s also evident that to the gospel writers, the good news of Jesus didn’t begin with John’s proclamation or Jesus’ birth. God’s kingdom, and a kingdom way of life, began long ago through the proclamations of prophets, through the actions of faithful leaders of Israel, and through the humble and willing trust of people like Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Joseph, Ruth, and Hannah. John’s gospel reaches back even further to say that the beginning of Jesus’ story began in the same beginningreferred to in Genesis.

The point in all this is that humankind lives in ongoing successions of both faithfulness and selfishness. None of us pick ourselves up by the bootstraps. None of us are islands. Not John the Baptist; not even Jesus, whose coming is an event for which God has always been preparing because the Christ presence is always unfolding, and it has been since before God said, Let there be light. (Genesis 1:3, John 1:1-5) So, for John, preparing the way of the Lord (Isaiah 40:3) means unburdening, letting go. It means committing oneself to a self-emptying and simple way of life shaped by the prophet’s call to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God. (Micah 6:8)

For us, then, Advent means realigning ourselves with the ways and means of Jesus. As repentance, Advent means recommitting ourselves to the work of God’s loving justice which creates that new equilibrium for all Creation which we call the kingdom of God. That’s what Mary declares when she says that God “has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly.” (Luke 1:52)

         It seems to me that Mark wants us to understand that John the Baptist embodies this kind of prophetic teaching. As an Essene, John’s wardrobe and his diet create a striking persona. In many ways, he’s even more countercultural than Jesus. Think about it, John isn’t the edgy but fashionable teacher who gets invited to Pharisees’ homes for dinner. No, John’s just edgy. He looks and smells like a walking compost pile. As one member of our Sunday school class said, while John’s message may be properly faithful and prophetic, he is “Emily Post’s worst nightmare.” In his feral faithfulness to God, John is as disquieting a biblical character as one can find.

         And maybe that’s the rub: Advent preparation is about sloughing off all seductive but self-serving pretense. It’s about emptying ourselves so that we make room for a holy presence that is as ancient as the beginning of time, and yet as fresh as this morning’s dew. God has spoken of such holiness since the very beginning. Creation bears witness to it. The prophets declared it. Saints of every age have lived in such a way as always to be ready to experience that presence and to allow it to be made manifest through them for others.

         While we deck the halls with holly and mistletoe, while we load fir trees with branch-sagging ornaments, and while we burden credit cards with debts Jesus will never pay, true Advent preparation means emptying ourselves of all the burdensome, first-world desires we have been assured are needs, but which are just the entitlements of privilege.

Through his passionate teaching, earthy appearance, and prophetic actions, John calls us to confess that those things that feel like gifts and affirmations are really self-inflicted wounds, symptoms of the diseases of selfishness, greed, and fear. He challenges us to renounce and let go of everything in our lives that would claim lordship ahead of Jesus. 

“The art of letting go is really the art of survival,” says Richard Rohr. “We have to let go so that as we age, we can [say,] Yes, we’ve been hurt. Yes, we’ve been talked about and betrayed by friends. Yes, our lives didn’t work out the way we thought they would.”¹

Our deliberate yes transforms our pain, says Rohr, and if it’s not transformed, we will inevitably transfer the burden. We’ll “hand it off to our family, to our children, to our neighborhood, to our nation.”²

Advent repentance, then, is the art of letting go of our hurts, our fears, our hopelessness. That art includes forgiveness. And forgiveness, says Rohr, “is simply the religious word for letting go.”³

         While we all want to be together, right now letting go includes staying in our Covid bubbles a bit longer.

         While we all have to care for ourselves and those we love, letting go means sharing more generously in a time when more of our neighbors are suffering.

         While we are constantly being provoked into hostility toward people with whom we disagree, letting go means seeking the God-imaged humanity in all people.

And while worldly anxieties plague our hearts and minds, for us, letting go means reaffirming the lordship of Jesus. It means turning from all bitterness and resentment, and following Jesus’ path of holy love and justice for all Creation.

Letting go is more easily said than done, but we don’t do it alone. We do it in community, with and for each other. And we find strength in the fact that communities of faith have succeeded in Advent living for countless generations, even as the world seemed to be falling apart around them.

Friends, Christ is not only coming; Christ is here. He always has been and always will be.

May we trust his lordship and embody his love.

 

¹https://email.cac.org/t/ViewEmail/d/3E98C73D589A25A72540EF23F30FEDED/A2AE94689C106E613D3F7F9A22A6E02E

^2-3Ibid.

An Incarnate Hope (Sermon)

 “An Incarnate Hope”

Service of Healing and Wholeness

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

Second Sunday of Advent — 12/6/20

 

Genesis 1:1-10

         In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, ²the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

         ³Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.

           ⁴And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.⁵God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. (NRSV)

 

 

John 1:1-5

         In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ²He was in the beginning with God. ³All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being ⁴in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.

         ⁵The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. (NRSV)

 

 

         In Genesis 1, when God began to create, the first rendering of God’s holiness is light. And according to the ancient storytellers, “God saw that the light was good.”

As for darkness, it seems neither good nor bad—at least not in the minds of those who first played with the notion that we are not alone in the universe. Those primordial mystics were most concerned with declaring their faith that, the lack of hard evidence notwithstanding, the mysterious presence they called God was as real as the difference between day and night.

John holds a slightly different view. While he refers to the same “beginning” to which Genesis refers, there’s not simply a contrast between light and darkness. The two stand in opposition to each other. The light, being good, becomes synonymous with life; and the darkness is, if not specifically evil, then certainly a realm in which evil and death hold sway.

It seems to me that, for us, the metaphors of light and darkness have fallen in line with John’s view more than with that of Genesis. Regardless of how theologically we may think, we tend to associate light with goodness, and darkness with things that frighten or anger us.

For people in the northern hemisphere, the Advent and Christmas seasons come at the darkest and coldest time of the year. So, when life seems most difficult—when light is scarce and darkness abounds—the primary religious tradition of our culture leaves many people struggling against, and resentful of a kind of soul-crushing demand to feel happiness, gratitude, generosity, and hope.

That tension is inevitable perhaps. At Christmas, Christians celebrate our foundational faith claim: The one whom we call God, is incarnate among us, and is constantly revealing God’s own Self to us. The mysterious Presence who is transcendent and unknowable is also fully present and available to us not only through scripture and prayer, but also through engaging the physical world through our five senses. The creation itself is not just a gift from God, but an intentional and grace-filled self-rendering of God. And light, being not something we see but that by which we see, is the seminal gift that illuminates God’s gift of the Creation, God’s presence in the Creation, and thus God’s desire that we experience and share the holiness of the created world.

At Christmas we proclaim the Incarnation of God which begins “in the beginning.” And while many of us do feel the joy and hope of the season, at least as many of us feel burdened by our creatureliness, especially when there are more hours of darkness than light each day, especially when our culture is experiencing the turmoil of rapid change, especially when a deadly pandemic keeps us breathing through masks and distanced from people we love, from communities that we need and that need us, and from many of the familiar activities, routines, and rituals that define us, comfort us, and renew us. And all of those things are on top of the normal beginnings and endings, sorrows and joys that human beings face regardless of the season or cultural context.

“In the beginning,” says John, God and the Word were intimately and equally involved in the act of creating. And he says that “the [true] light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

That’s the promise of Incarnation: That even in the darkest corners, God is present because the light and life of Creation do not and cannot exist apart from the Creator.

I wish this meant that we’d all be healthy and whole all the time, but we all know that such a fantasy only makes reality harder to face. Nonetheless, we proclaim that God is good because light is good, the firmament is good, the earth is good, the creatures are good, and, at our deep, light-drenched, incarnational essence, humankind is also good because, bearing God’s image, we can love and be loved regardless of the pain within us and around us.

      I have a suspicion, a thoroughly subjective suspicion, that the relentlessness and the depth of the anxiety and outright pain around us are making us newly aware of the presence of God’s good and unconquerable light—or maybe our shared suffering is at least making some of us more determined to seek it. Whatever the case, it seems to me that this year more people have decorated their homes for Christmas with curiously early and vivid displays. Unless my memory is just getting short, even the town of Jonesborough has decorated the trees along Main Street not only with brighter and more colorful lights, but with more lights altogether. Illuminating the darkness with a kind of defiant hope, they widen our faces into smiles. They dance and flicker in our tears. They reveal something more radiant within us than “holiday cheer,” something more gracious than piles of wadded-up wrapping paper on Christmas morning. The lights speak to us of the Creation’s deepest, truest beginning from which, as Paul says, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us.” (Romans 8:38-39)

      I know what specific darknesses a few of you are experiencing. And I know that none of us are exempt from loss, illness, anxiety, or fear. I also trust, with every fiber of my being, that we are not alone in the universe. When we open our eyes, the light by which we see proclaims that the Creation is not the handiwork of some freak accident of chemistry and physics, but a joyous, gracious, generous out-pouring of a loving and purposeful Creator—the One revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. And Jesus reveals to us that God comes to us not only as one of us, but also:

in the dependable turning of the seasons,

in the delicious fertility of the earth,

in the renewing warmth of fire,

in the refreshment of water,

in the loveliness of the lilies of the field,

in the scent of lilacs in the spring and the aroma of rich decay of fallen leaves in autumn,

in the near euphoria of the caress of a breeze on our cheeks,

in the frenzy-stopping sound of music, of human voices singing songs crafted to share beauty and truth that words alone seldom convey,

in the divine comfort of a human hand in a time of sorrow,

in the twin ecstasies of laughter and weeping,

and in the sacred beginnings and endings, in the hallowing joys and sufferings without which life would be so barren as to make it not worth living.

Whatever these days hold for you right now, may you experience God’s healing presence in them. May you know God’s wholeness. And may you be, in ways great and small, incarnate vessels of healing and wholeness for those familiar to you, for the stranger, and for this entire, glorious, suffering, God-soaked Creation in which we all live, upon which we all depend.