Identity and Belonging (Sermon)

“Identity and Belonging”

1Corinthians 3:1-9

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

2/20/22

 

And so, brothers and sisters, I could not speak to you as spiritual people, but rather as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. ² I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food. Even now you are still not ready, ³ for you are still of the flesh. For as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving according to human inclinations? ⁴ For when one says, “I belong to Paul,” and another, “I belong to Apollos,” are you not merely human?

⁵ What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each. ⁶ I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. ⁷ So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. ⁸ The one who plants and the one who waters have a common purpose, and each will receive wages according to the labor of each. ⁹ For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building.  (NRSV)

 

         Paul seems frustrated as he’s trying to help a young and conflicted Corinthian church. And listen to all the different images he reaches for in just nine verses: babies nursing, milk, meat, seeds, planting, watering, a field under cultivation, and a house under construction. Paul is doing more than mixing metaphors. He’s serving up a complete-meal casserole!

         In the first section of today’s reading, Paul explains, in a rather condescending way, that the Corinthians weren’t ready to be left alone to govern themselves. Spiritually, they were “infants” and needed support and guidance. Their immaturity was evidenced in the fact of ongoing “jealousy and quarreling.” A division in the house was distracting them from their common ground and shared purpose.

         What happened, was that after planting the church, Paul turned the watering,the nurture, over to Apollos, an Alexandrian Jew who, through the ministry of Priscilla and Aquilla, had become a Christian. (Acts 18:24-28) Paul entrusted this gifted new disciple with leading the Corinthian church. And now, one group in the church prefers Paul, and another prefers Apollos.

         Some things never change, do they? All-too-often we decide who we are based on whom we like and whom we don’t, whom we follow and whom we oppose, whom we love and whom we fear. Then we ferret out like-minded individuals because they make us feel right and comfortable inside our dualistic little kingdoms of us versus them.

         Paul’s message to the Corinthians boils down to a rather terse admonishment: Get over it! Neither he nor Apollos can claim the kind of authority that the contentious little cliques are assigning to their respective leaders. The message of Christ is self-emptying love, humility, compassion, grace, reconciliation, and justice. So, as long as a messenger is faithful to the message, it’s childish for the church to divide over human loyalties.

         The Corinthian church’s struggle recapitulates old divides between Pharisees and Sadducees, Hasmoneans and Hellenists, David and Saul, Jacob and Esau, Cain and Abel. And while it may look like just another power struggle, all of these struggles reveal the same deep, ancient, and common injury.

         One commentator on this passage identifies that injury as “loneliness…[which] is so much a part of our human condition that we cannot escape it.”¹

         The abyss of loneliness, he says, becomes the site within the human heart for an acute craving for belonging. The most readily available way for us to meet that profound need is to create and participate in communities: churches, clubs, fraternities, sororities, teams, causes. While such things may help, they eventually disappoint, at least to some degree.² No human organization can fully accommodate what is really a spiritual longing.

         There are two crucial things about this longing. For one, it bears witness to a profound spiritual wound, a wound that all of us carry from infancy.³ We seek belonging in order to heal from the wound of separation from our pre-existent identity in God. The psalmist sings about this: “My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed form me when none of them as yet existed.” (Psalm 139:15-16)

Our deepest and truest Self, the Self we were, are, and will always be is intimately attached to that Eternal Mystery, that Creative Energy we call God.

         Second, our longing also bears witness to our untapped aptitude for holiness. “Yes, we’re capable of the most awful atrocities,” said Desmond Tutu. “And God weeps until there are those who say I do want to try to do something. It is good also to remember,” said Tutu, “that we have a fantastic capacity for goodness.”⁴ The source of this capacity lies in the image of God within us. And, as the doctrine of the Trinity declares, God’s very essence is dynamic relationship.

         Relationship. Interdependence. This is our truth. Our longing for belonging speaks of an identity of relational holiness within each of us, and within all of us together. It’s a glorious mystery, and one touched only by things like love-wrought empathy and forgiveness, unbidden dreams and wonder, grateful responses in art and prayer, and even by our deepest pain and suffering. Within each of us, there remains a forgotten but authentic self, and it drives our desire for wholeness and for home. Jesus calls this a magnificent treasure hidden a field. This treasure, this hidden and true self is who we are, and it’s worth everything.⁵

         Who we are at the core of our human-being is rooted inextricably in God as a field is rooted in the earth herself. I think Paul and Jesus have the same field in mind, and we’re not simply some crop in it; we are the field that God cultivates.

         Now, a field doesn’t lose connection with the earth. However, as people, we do lose awareness of our connection with our environment—with the earth, with Heart, and Soul, and Breath. And when human beings lose awareness of our connection to the Creation, we tend to devolve into materialism. Everything becomes either a commodity to exploit or an enemy to defeat.

         When we lose connection, we imagine ourselves as separate fields, belonging only to what we agree with, or what we think we can prove. So, we choose to belong not to the same earth, but to the fencerows of things like creeds and laws, of skin color, power, status, or, as the Corinthians discover, to the fencerows of personalities.

         In faith, we claim that we are fields in the same holy Creation, and no amount of division will ever change the fundamental reality of our mutual belonging in God. And no other group or loyalty can permanently replace that belonging. So, even as we ally ourselves with transient fencerows, the inalienable gift of our shared image of God lies beneath us, as firm, as sure, and as perfectly identifying as the earth beneath a field. And just as fields as far from each other as Jonesborough and Johannesburg are connected by the same earth, every human being is connected to the same Ground of Being, the same Giver of Growth.

         One of Wendell Berry’s most memorable characters, Burley Coulter, says this about belonging: “The way we are, we’re members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.”⁶

         So, there’s no real belonging for anyone until there is belonging for all. And according to Paul, it’s only when we recognize that truth, and when we begin to live it, that we begin to live as mature, “spiritual” beings—beings who experience the image of God within ourselves, who see and embrace it in others, and who dig deep beneath all the transitory fencerows to share the healing miracles of belonging with those brothers and sisters who stand right beside us. And with that one, 7-billion-strong creature called Humankind.

 

¹Roger Gench, Feasting on the Word (Year A, Vol. 1), Westminster/John Knox Press, 2010, pp. 350ff.

²Ibid.

³Ibid.

⁴The Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, and Douglas Abrams, The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World. Avery, NY, 2016. p. 116.

⁵Ibid. (Without quoting Richard Rohr directly, I am using ideas that he develops in his discussion of the True Self throughout his book, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self.

⁶Wendell Berry, The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership, North Point Press, 1985, pp. 136-137.

A Blessed Gut-Punch (Sermon)

“A Blessed Gut-Punch”

Luke 6:17-26

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

2/13/22

 

¹⁷ He came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. ¹⁸ They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. ¹⁹ And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.

²⁰ Then he looked up at his disciples and said:

“Blessed are you who are poor,

for yours is the kingdom of God.
²¹ “Blessed are you who are hungry now,

for you will be filled.

“Blessed are you who weep now,

for you will laugh.

²² “Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. ²³ Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

²⁴ “But woe to you who are rich,

for you have received your consolation.
²⁵ “Woe to you who are full now,

for you will be hungry.

“Woe to you who are laughing now,

for you will mourn and weep.

²⁶ “Woe to you when all speak well of you,

for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets. (NRSV)

 

         When considering the Beatitudes, it seems to me that most of us think first of Matthew’s version—“Blessed are the poor in spirit…Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” and so on. Now, Matthew’s version is deeply instructive for us. And by extolling virtues like meekness, mercy, and peacemaking, it calls us to profoundly countercultural, transforming, and, therefore, Christ-like action. And I suppose that Matthew’s carefully spiritualized presentation can feel a bit more palatable for people who already feel, in some way, blessed.

That’s why, when Luke’s Jesus says, Blessed are those who are poor, hungry, weeping, and persecuted, and when he follows that by saying Woe to everyone who is rich, full, happy, safe, and well-liked we get a gospel wake-up call that hits like a gut-punch.

While no one can know which version may be closer to Jesus’ actual words, it is authentically Lukan to present blessedness in terms that are not just stark, but explicitly inclusive of people who feel left out, people who would accuse organized and formalized religious traditions of paying more attention to words about love and justice than they actually pay attention to people who need to be loved, people who need justice in the form of advocacy and activism as well as crisis assistance.

Another difference between Matthew’s and Luke’s accounts is that in Matthew, after Jesus welcomes and tends to the people, he takes only his disciples up a mountain. And there, in private, above everyone else, he utters his memorable teaching.

In Luke, Jesus does all the same welcoming and healing, but he doesn’t take the disciples away to teach them. He stays right there, on that “level place,” with the people. So, as he tells his disciples that blessedness is found in the midst of poverty, hunger, grief, and persecution, they’re looking right into the faces of people who are so desperate that they’re grabbing at Jesus like refugees clambering for the last boat out of a war zone.

Put yourself in a brand-new disciple’s shoes. Jesus hasn’t yet called even you blessed, and that’s what he calls people who are suffering through what anyone else would consider a cursed existence.

It's interesting. When Jesus faces the abject need of the neediest of the needy, he locates the source of their hope in their predicament itself: Blessed are you in your suffering.

You know, maybe we can look back and see how an unpleasant experience may have helped us to grow, to become more grateful, or to empathize with others who are suffering; but is Jesus actually saying that, to know what true blessedness feels like, one must welcome suffering?

The answer to that question would seem to be a qualified yes. And here’s the qualifier: The key to understanding the relationship between suffering and the blessedness Jesus talks about is to understand the parallel relationship he reveals when he connects more debilitating suffering with worldly privilege and comfort.

What most of us have been conditioned to call blessedness, Jesus calls woeful. And I hear him saying that the things that may make us feel content and comfortable often blind us to the fullness of our humanity, because they blind us to the humanity of people who suffer. He’s saying that reaching for, expecting, and feeling entitled to unexamined wealth, gratification, and human adoration is a recipe for creating hell on earth because an uncritical, self-indulgent life must be protected by ignoring, exploiting, and even condemning anyone “beneath” us. And no one, says Jesus, is beneath another.

The late Desmond Tutu wrote: “We are each a God-carrier, a tabernacle of the Holy Spirit, indwelt by God…

“To treat [anyone] as less than this is not just wrong…It is…blasphemous and sacrilegious…Consequently injustice, racism, exploitation, oppression are to be opposed not as a political task but as a response to a…spiritual imperative.”¹

Every single week, in the Lord’s Prayer we say, “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” And whatever it means for any of us to do God’s will on earth, doesn’t it mean for all of us to do more than offer lip service to some ideal? Doing God’s will on earth means inhabiting and cooperating with God’s realm in which all human beings have their fundamental worth and dignity affirmed through having adequate food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, and to have a community share in their tears and their laughter. To participate in providing such fundamental human rights to all people is to do justice, and, thus, to do God’s will.

The term “justice” often gets reduced to law enforcement, to the old eye-for-an-eye practice of retributive justice. And that same word—justice—can cause discomfort when applied more broadly to loving others as prophetically as Jesus did. As the Church, though, as the body of Christ, doing biblical justice—restorativejustice—is who we are. It’s what we do. Doing justice in the name of Christ proclaims, as Tutu said, that all human beings are God-carriers.

Doing justice in the manner of Jesus means that we start with those who might appear to be the furthest from blessedness. And that’s difficult for western cultures because we have been taught to see ourselves as independent, self-made people who have what we have because we earned it. Now, I’m not arguing with the value of goal-oriented hard work. However, if, as Christians, our goals are primarily to secure self-centered gains and accolades, then we miss something important. We miss grace.

Our book group is reading The Book of Joy which chronicles a week of insightful and delightful conversations between Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama. One comment that has spoken powerfully to me was made by the Dalai Lama’s right-hand-man, Jinpa. Jinpa said that “modern society has prioritized independence to such an extent that we are left on our own to try to manage lives that are increasingly out of control.”²

Right now, out-of-control seems to be the norm for our planet and everything on it. Right now, blessedness can feel like nothing more than just getting through the day. And one temptation in out-of-control times is to focus only on ourselves and those closest to us. I think that out-of-control life is exactly what Jesus addresses in his call to love in the midst of suffering.

The saving love Jesus embodies is about so much more than each individual’s post-mortem destination. It’s about caring for one another and for the earth. It’s about recognizing that as long as injustice continues to affect any of us, none of us can truly experience the peace and wholeness of God’s blessedness.

When Jesus declares the humblest of humanity blessed in their suffering, he is inviting us into the joy of here-and-now salvation. He invites us into the darkest and most painful corners of our lives and the lives of those around us, because there, by necessity, we learn to depend, mutually, and ultimately, on his presence, his strength, and his grace.

         Where do you feel, or where do you see others feeling broken, beleaguered, and afraid? In that place, we all stand on the same, level ground—in need of God’s Christ.

May you reach out for him. And may you experience the blessedness of his resurrecting love.

 

¹https://email.cac.org/t/ViewEmail/d/C00E753C68A605EF2540EF23F30FEDED/A2AE94689C106E613D3F7F9A22A6E02E?alternativeLink=False

²The Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, and Douglas Abrams, The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World. Avery, NY, 2016. p. 95.

Deep Water (Sermon)

  

“Deep Water”

Luke 5:1-11 

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

2/6/22

 

Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, ² he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. ³ He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat.

⁴ When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.”

⁵ Simon answered, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.”

⁶ When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. ⁷ So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. ⁸ But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” ⁹ For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; ¹⁰ and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon.

Then Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.”

¹¹ When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him. (NRSV)

 

       I remember—decades ago—watching my father-in-law train a horse. The more-than-two-year process began, of course, with the birth of a foal. Like her mother, she was a warm chestnut-brown. She had stockings on her forelegs and a thin, lightning-bolt snip on her muzzle. The first day of Gypsy’s life, my father-in-law, whom everyone in Screven County, GA knew as Bully, was there to watch her try to stand on her long, rubbery legs. They jerked about as if controlled by separate committees, each with its own agenda.

A delighted Bully watched and encouraged his minutes-old horse. “Aay, Gypsy Rosa Lee! Let me see you stand up! Atta girl!”

       As the days passed, Bully would ease closer and closer to Gypsy. Soon enough, she’d hear his voice and come running on her own. Bully would reach out and stroke his filly’s neck. He’d lean into her, drape an arm over her back, and eventually rub under her belly where the girth strap would go.

As the trust grew—and all the while with her mother, Ginger, nearby—Bully slipped a halter around Gypsy's face. A little later, he clipped a lead rope onto the halter and guided her around the sandy lot, the hot Georgia sun on their backs. When she no longer fought the rope, Bully would tie Gypsy to a post and brush her.

       Over the months, Gypsy got frequent chances to smell a saddle. Toward her second birthday, she learned the feel of a bridle, and a bit between her teeth.

Next, Bully laid thick blanket on Gypsy’s back and set an English saddle over it. He buckled it around Gypsy’s belly, and let her get used to that strange accessory.

In time, Bully would stand for a few moments in the left stirrup, then step back down. Then up and down again. When Gypsy tolerated that, Bully swung his right leg over her back and sat still in the saddle and spoke calmly to her.

When Gypsy seemed comfortable with someone on her back, Bully tugged on the reins, and let the skittish filly walk him around the 3-acre rye patch behind the small pole barn.

Then, one day, at long last, Bully shut Ginger in a stall, opened the main gate, saddled up Gypsy, and rode her out to explore the farm. As they rode away, mother and daughter whinnied excitedly to each other as the distance between them grew further and as the relationship between horse and rider grew closer.

       For a horse, having some demanding biped tie you up in leather, climb on your back and lead you out beyond the fence that has defined your world since the day you were born—that’s some pretty deep water.

       Simon, says Jesus, is this your boat? Will you take me out in it? Just offshore so I can talk to these people. You know how well sound travels over water.

       Thanks, Simon. That worked well. Hey, would you push out a little deeper?

Maybe even further? That’s great. Now, throw out your nets. Catch some fish.

       Really? All night and nothing? Well, would you try anyway? For me?

       When Simon returns to dry land, that’s when he goes outside the main gate. That’s when he enters the deepest water he’s ever experienced—the waters of discipleship. 

       Jesus’ call to disciples consistently comes as something both unexpected and unmerited. There’s nothing exceptional about Simon, Andrew, James, and John. Just think about Bully watching his new foal struggling to stand. How could he be confident that she would eventually carry him on her back? Well, it’s pretty simple: She was a horse. So, too, the fishermen meet Jesus’ criteria for discipleship—they’re human beings. Jesus will make them disciples.

       The story of Bully training his horse and that of Jesus calling and equipping disciples mirror each other. Neither process happens overnight. They take time, patience, understanding, forgiveness. Most of all, they take trust and love.

       While Jesus loves us into discipleship, his call may unsettle us. It changes things within us and around us. At first it may seem like a terrible burden is climbing onto our backs and spurring us out beyond familiar and comfortable boundaries. For Simon it begins with an abrupt but sharp awareness of the extraordinary. He doesn’t know who Jesus is when those fish nearly sink his boat, but he does recognize the presence of holiness. And it terrifies him.

       The metaphor of training a horse is falling apart down now. Discipleship doesn’t “break” us. It doesn’t reduce us to beasts of burden. Indeed, as we open ourselves to the Christ, we become more fully human. As we love God by sharing ourselves with others, our lives become both simplified and magnified. We experience an unburdening. Selfish millstones such as greed and pride begin to fall away. Discipleship also emancipates us from legalistic religion and turns us out onto the deep waters of Christ-centered, servant-hearted spirituality.

       Now, we may choose to follow Jesus, but we don’t necessarily choose where to go. One way to discern whether a direction is of holy origin is to check the water. If it feels shallow and safe, chances are good that we aren’t yet where Jesus wants us to be. He tends to lead his disciples toward deep water where we have to trust him more than we trust our boat. Deep water is the place where our faith is challenged and stretched like Simon’s nets—stretched to their limits, but not broken, just overflowing with unforeseen possibility and hope.

       David Wilcox is an Asheville singer-songwriter who’s been around for many years. He’s not a Christian artist, but he has Christian roots that shape many of his lyrics. In one of his earliest songs, entitled “Hold It Up to the Light,” he sings about facing a big decision having to do with his vocation as a musician. Like Jacob at the Jabbok, he wrestles with all the possibilities before finally committing himself, at which point he sings these lines:

I said God, will you bless this decision?
I’m scared; is my life at stake?
But I see if you gave me a vision,
Would I never have reason to use my faith?¹

       The “vision” to which Wilcox refers is not a vision of how a plan might unfold. He means a mystical experience that would “prove” all doubt away. It’s the singer’s way of accepting that he must act on pure trust.

       Think about it: When Jesus calls the fishermen, he does so in a boat. And we’re not talking a ship. We’re talking a very small craft. Have you ever stood up in a canoe? How’d that work out? In that tippy little boat, the men lack solid footing. They have to trust that Jesus will provide everything they’ll need as they learn to follow him into and through even deeper waters. And there they’ll learn to love him by loving and serving humankind.

It’s a frustrating paradox, but it’s the lack of certainty that often makes Christ’s call authentic.

As we gather at Christ’s table, I invite us to listen for his voice calling us to lay down old and shallow ways of living in and relating to the Creation. Hear him calling us to follow him into the deeper waters of faith, hope, and love. For there, as disciples, we become partners with Christ in revealing the unimagined abundance and grace of God which is always as present, just below the surface, as Christ himself is always present in bread, and wine, and neighbor.

 

¹David Wilcox, “Hold It Up to the Light,” from Big Horizon, A&M Records, 1994.