Ambushed by Resurrection (Sermon)

 “Ambushed by Resurrection”

Deuteronomy 6:1-9 Matthew 10:34-39

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

6/25/23

 

Now these are the commandments, the regulations, and the case laws that the Lord your God commanded me to teach you to follow in the land you are entering to possess, ² so that you will fear the Lord your God by keeping all his regulations and his commandments that I am commanding you—both you and your sons and daughters—all the days of your life and so that you will lengthen your life. ³ Listen to them, Israel! Follow them carefully so that things will go well for you and so that you will continue to multiply exactly as the Lord, your ancestors’ God, promised you, in a land full of milk and honey.

⁴ Israel, listen! Our God is the Lord! Only the Lord!

⁵ Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your being, and all your strength. ⁶ These words that I am commanding you today must always be on your minds.⁷ Recite them to your children. Talk about them when you are sitting around your house and when you are out and about, when you are lying down and when you are getting up. ⁸ Tie them on your hand as a sign. They should be on your forehead as a symbol. ⁹ Write them on your house’s doorframes and on your city’s gates. (Deuteronomy 6:1-9 - CEB)

 

³⁴ “Don’t think that I’ve come to bring peace to the earth. I haven’t come to bring peace but a sword. ³⁵ I’ve come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. ³⁶ People’s enemies are members of their own households.

³⁷ “Those who love father or mother more than me aren’t worthy of me. Those who love son or daughter more than me aren’t worthy of me. ³⁸ Those who don’t pick up their crosses and follow me aren’t worthy of me.³⁹ Those who find their lives will lose them, and those who lose their lives because of me will find them.”(Matthew 10:34-39 – CEB)

 

         The New Testament passage we just read appears in both Matthew and Luke. And to be honest, it always feels like an ambush.

         “I haven’t come to bring peace, but a sword.” What happened to the Prince of Peace?

         “Those who love father or mother more than me aren’t worthy of me.” What happened to Honor your father and mother?

         To be worthy of me, pick up your cross. Didn’t Rome use crucifixion to manipulate human behavior through that very public display of inhumanity?

         To really live your life, says Jesus, release your death grip on it.

With all this, he undermines some of the most fundamental tenets that powerful and affluent cultures celebrate and enshrine as inalienable rights. Things like: The world is your oyster, so grab all the gusto you can! Control your own destiny!

I think Jesus knows that self-serving mottos like these can lead to trouble. If I claim some divine right to grab all the gusto I can get, I inevitably keep grabbing, even when it means grabbing more than my fair share. And the more I consume, the more insatiable I become. Or as singer/songwriter Joe Pug says in one of his many insightful songs, “The more I buy the more I’m bought; and the more I’m bought, the less I cost.”¹

Materialism and consumption become drugs like any other. We just keep buying and chasing the unattainable high of lasting satisfaction. And all we really get is inebriated with entitlement. And that entitlement costs us connection to and compassion for the people and the earth around us.

Similarly, when I claim divine right to complete control of my own destiny, or my own narrative, I will have to control everyone else, because my life cannot be distanced from the lives around me. Trying to control my situation almost always results in me trying to force my desires, my fears, my power-hungry ego onto others. And if I get my way, by whatever means, only then do I believe that God is in the heavens, and all is right with the world.

         Into all my efforts to manipulate and rationalize advantages for myself, Jesus keeps saying, emphatically, Allen, stop it! To be as alive as you think you want to be, you’ll have to, in some way, lose your life.

         I’ve never much liked this passage, but bless my heart, the fact that it challenges me to self-emptying love is what makes it gospel for me. And because these words do feel stark at first, I have to stop and remember that Jesus offers them, as he does everything else, as an expression of love, not of exasperation or anger. After spending enough time with this text, and trusting that it does, in truth, convey grace, I begin to hear it revealing a purpose that aims to heal and make whole. So, instead of stark and diminishing, it becomes a source of light and life.

         When we open ourselves to the possibility of loving intent in Jesus’ telling us that he comes not “to bring peace, but a sword,” I think the Spirit reminds us of the wider witness of scripture. And we recall that, as the Christ, Jesus is not out to endrelationships. He aims to re-new and strengthen them.

When a broken bone doesn’t set correctly, an orthopedic surgeon may have to re-break the bone and set it properly. The intentional break and re-set allow the particular bone and, thus, the whole limb, or even the whole body to be restored to proper alignment and to full strength and function.

         So, Jesus is not talking about severing ties with the people we love. He’s talking about re-ordering all of our ties. He’s talking about loving all things, even the people closest to us, from an entirely new perspective.

In The Wisdom Jesus, the book our Monday night group is reading, author Cynthia Bourgeault encourages her readers to recognize Jesus as a kind of human ground-zero for wisdom teaching. The wisdom tradition had been around long before Jesus, and yet Jesus embodied, as no one before him, the depth and breadth of that tradition through which humankind learns to experience God—and not simply to experience, but, as Bourgeault says, to know God. Now, knowledge of God is not like one’s knowledge of an academic subject or of a skill or trade. We can’t fully know God any more than a barnacle can know us.

The wisdom tradition teaches the deep knowingness of awareness, of connection, of the com-passion of shared joy and shared suffering. And in the wisdom tradition, all relationship begins and ends with God. All true intimacy is, ultimately, with God because all true relationship is, ultimately, an expression ofGod.² To enter relationships with other human beings, and with the entire Creation, from a perspective of deep humility and mutuality is to live in a radically new way, and that re-ordering begins with the grateful surrender of the previous perspective.

Now, that previous perspective is neither useless nor wrong. It’s simply inadequate for a more mature faith. “When I was a child,” says Paul, “I used to speak like a child, reason like a child, think like a child. But now that I [am growing up], I’ve put an end to childish things.” (1Cor. 13:11) There’s no judgment of the previous perspective. We just reach the point at which we’re capable of deeper love and deeper trust.

When my children were born, I cut the umbilical cords. With each birth, the experience of pregnancy was complete, and a brand new set of relationships began. Relationships of unspeakable joy, gratitude, and heartache. Relationships of ongoing bewilderment and discovery. Relationships in which we began a continual process of coming together, pulling apart, and coming together anew. My relationships with my son and daughter haven’t always been easy, or even pleasant, and I’ve never known anyone for whom that wasn’t the case. Since our son became a dad, though, there’s been a new beginning, a new intimacy because we’re now sharing the experience of fatherhood and a love for this spellbinding new life that is growing, changing, and becoming, right before our eyes. I felt a similar joy just eight days ago when I got to marry my daughter to her now husband.

         Like all relationships, these new relationships will experience turmoil. Things as we know them now will end. And after each experience of change or loss, the Spirit lays us at our Mother’s breast, freshly re-formed, and capable of new depths of understanding and trust.

Resurrection is our tradition’s metaphor for the new life of intimacy, through Christ, with God and with all Creation. And Resurrection does ambush us. And with each ambush, it shines God’s unassailable light a little further into the darkness revealing the next steps in the path of wisdom, the path of holiness, and, yes, even the path of peace which Jesus may say he has not come to bring, but which he does, nonetheless, faithfully bring.

 

¹https://joepugmusic.com

²Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming the Heart and Mind—a New Perspective on Christ and His Message. Shambhala, Boulder. 2008.

Midwives of Hope (Sermon)

 “Midwives of Hope”

Exodus 1:8-2:10

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

6/11/23

 

Now a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph. ⁹ He said to his people, “Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we.¹⁰ Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.”

¹¹Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh. ¹² But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. ¹³ The Egyptians subjected the Israelites to hard servitude ¹⁴ and made their lives bitter with hard servitude in mortar and bricks and in every kind of field labor. They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them.

¹⁵ The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, ¹⁶ “When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women and see them on the birthstool, if it is a son, kill him, but if it is a daughter, she shall live.” ¹⁷ But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. ¹⁸ So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this and allowed the boys to live?” ¹⁹ The midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.” ²⁰ So God dealt well with the midwives, and the people multiplied and became very strong.²¹ And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families. ²² Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, “Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live.”

2 Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. ² The woman conceived and bore a son, and when she saw that he was a fine baby, she hid him three months. ³ When she could hide him no longer she got a papyrus basket for him and plastered it with bitumen and pitch; she put the child in it and placed it among the reeds on the bank of the river. ⁴ His sister stood at a distance, to see what would happen to him.

⁵ The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her attendants walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to bring it. ⁶ When she opened it, she saw the child. He was crying, and she took pity on him. “This must be one of the Hebrews’ children,” she said. ⁷ Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and get you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?” ⁸ Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Yes.” So the girl went and called the child’s mother. ⁹ Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child and nurse it for me, and I will give you your wages.” So the woman took the child and nursed it. ¹⁰ When the child grew up, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. She named him Moses, “because,” she said, “I drew him out of the water.” (Exodus 1:8-2:10 – NRSV)

 

         There’s a new Pharaoh in town, and he has amnesia. Or maybe he’s been poorly schooled in history. Or maybe he was cast upon the throne at an age too young for the responsibility. Or maybe he’s just willfully ignorant. Whatever the case, the new Pharaoh neither remembers nor appreciates Joseph, the former Hebrew prisoner turned resourceful bureaucrat whose spiritual insight and practical wisdom delivered Egypt during a catastrophic famine. To forgetful leaders like Pharaoh, the future is a realm to be conquered and dominated by any means, because to them, ultimately, it’s all about themselves.

         There is within me a worshiper of golden calves who understands that fear. There is also within me something more human and holy which understands why that always breeds devastation. When consumed by selfish fear, individuals and groups project that fear onto other individuals and groups that represent the weaknesses or the failures we most despise in ourselves. So rich and poor, black and white, male and female, this religion and that religion, old and young all battle and blame each other. We create the enmity and resentment that some future and more mature generation will have to learn to forgive and heal. What a devastating legacy to leave!

         Pharaoh chooses the growing immigrant population of the Hebrews as the source of everything personally abhorrent and politically threatening. Having focused his fear on the Hebrews, he tries to solve his problem by targeting them, by forcing them into submission.

         There are two very different kinds of fear that shape the thoughts and actions of the characters in today’s story. And those fears continue to affect our present and to shape our future. The first fear is Pharaoh’s fear. He’s afraid that the future really isn’t about him. Terrified at the prospect of losing a status quo beneficial to himself, the king tries to end something that God started. When the Hebrews only grow stronger under the duress of slavery, Pharaoh increases their workload and the brutality with which he drives them. Given permission to dehumanize the Hebrews, the Egyptian overseers beat them like beasts, and kill them with labor and the whip.

It’s important to note that when one group gives another a story like that to remember, a story of oppression and deliverance from which to draw identity, purpose, and faith, the oppressed group will have an eternal well from which to draw strength. And they will, in time, overcome and thrive. The memory of being owned, enslaved, exploited, and liberated lays the theological and existential groundwork for Hebrew poetry, prophecy, and hope. The memory of that shared experience gives durable authority to the psalms, the lamentations, and the prophetic words of people like David, Isaiah, and Jeremiah.

When facing the failure of his efforts to own that which belongs to God—namely the Hebrews and the future—Pharaoh does what madmen and despots do: He tries to create even more fear and a more violent disconnect between himself and his people and everyone else. To control the Hebrew population, Pharaoh calls for the systematic murder of their newborn boys. And adding insult to injury, he calls on Hebrew midwives to serve as his angels of death.

         “But,” says the storyteller, “the midwives feared God.”

         Here is the second fear. Maybe we can call it liberated or liberating fear. Every day, Shiphrah and Puah, the midwives, witness and participate in the gracious and inscrutable power that continues to create and to bring forth new life. Trusting that power, they defy Pharaoh and his powers of domination and destruction. In their civil-yet-holy disobedience, they declare their faith in God’s will to outmaneuver and outlast Pharaoh’s will.

         The midwives’ fear is not anxiety or dread. Precisely the opposite, their fear proclaims their complete trust in the presence and purposes of God. Remembering the past, rich with promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, these intrepid women, at great risk to themselves, freely embody Israel’s hope. And they cannot hide their defiance. Because of their subversive faith, Hebrew boys survive. And Pharaoh’s own daughter, who becomes an accidental midwife, will name one of them Moses.

         The world is rife with Pharaohs and Egypts. From east to west and north to south, anxiety and dread define much of humanity’s daily experience. And that’s especially true for those whose day-to-day experience includes the threats of poverty, injustice, and violence.

The Pharaoh’s fear within us enslaves us to anxiety and dread so that we become his unwitting and yet all-too willing servants. Imagining that we’re being consistent with history, loyal to nation, and faithful to God, human beings often build Pharaoh’s “supply cities.” And we yield to and participate in all the brutal political, economic, and social systems required to sustain them.

         Albert Einstein famously said that “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that created them.” To me, that echoes Paul’s admonition to the Romans: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God.” (Romans 12:2)

         It’s all-too-easy to make faith about conspicuous morality or subscribing to some orthodoxy. However, as people of biblical faith, of storied faith, we are called to the new-minded, liberating fear of the midwives. To follow their example is just another way to follow Jesus in lives of death-defying trust that God is real, and that God is the very source of all life, love, and transforming justice.

In our lifetimes, we may not witness the final revealing of God’s fullness, but every time we feed the hungry, show compassion to the suffering, empower the victim of injustice, care for the Creation, and rejoice in the love and goodness of God, we serve as midwives of grace, even as Pharaoh demands that we kill it. 

While our individual interpretations of today’s circumstances may differ, our text is calling us always to ask if our responses to those circumstances convey the self-serving fear that leads to suspicion, division, and, ultimately, to violence against others. Or do our lives proclaim the great nevertheless of faith, what the ancient prophets and poets called the “fear of God”?

Do our words and actions declare trust and gratitude that all human beings are children of God and that all of us belong to God?

Do we actively love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength?

Do we truly seek to love all of our neighbors as we love ourselves?

         None of us can answer those questions affirmatively all the time, but when we can, we participate in the birth and re-birth of hope into this world. And we declare our allegiance to God, who is faithful, and to whom the past, present, and future of all Creation always belongs.

Suffering into Hope (Sermon)

 “Suffering into Hope”

Genesis 50:15-21 and Romans 5:1-5

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

6/4/23

Trinity Sunday

 

¹⁵ When Joseph’s brothers realized that their father was now dead, they said, “What if Joseph bears a grudge against us, and wants to pay us back seriously for all of the terrible things we did to him?” ¹⁶ So they approached Joseph and said, “Your father gave orders before he died, telling us, ¹⁷ ‘This is what you should say to Joseph. “Please, forgive your brothers’ sins and misdeeds, for they did terrible things to you. Now, please forgive the sins of the servants of your father’s God.”’” Joseph wept when they spoke to him.

¹⁸ His brothers wept too, fell down in front of him, and said, “We’re here as your slaves.”

¹⁹ But Joseph said to them, “Don’t be afraid. Am I God? ²⁰ You planned something bad for me, but God produced something good from it, in order to save the lives of many people, just as he’s doing today. ²¹ Now, don’t be afraid. I will take care of you and your children.” So he put them at ease and spoke reassuringly to them. (Genesis 50:15-21 – CEB)

 

Therefore, since we have been made righteous through his faithfulness, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. ² We have access by faith into this grace in which we stand through him, and we boast in the hope of God’s glory. ³ But not only that! We even take pride in our problems, because we know that trouble produces endurance, ⁴ endurance produces character, and character produces hope. ⁵ This hope doesn’t put us to shame, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.(Romans 5:1-5 – CEB)

 

         All that business about confidently turning problems, or suffering, into endurance, character, and hope, how does that really set with you? One might understand how that’s true for someone experiencing vocational turmoil, or how we suffered through the pandemic. But how might that preach today in Ukraine, Syria, or Sudan? How would it preach to teenagers being trafficked for sex? How would it preach to sweat-shop workers in Bangladesh? How would it preach to parents who have lost children in school shootings and who must continue living in a culture that protects the weapons used killed their children more passionately than it protects the children themselves?

         Not all suffering is equal, and in Paul’s case, he’s writing to Christians in Rome who are suffering because, in a society that worships Caesar, they worship the God revealed in Jesus. So, that which gives them life could kill them.

Following Jesus can be dangerous because it means more than thinking right thoughts and acting nice. It means learning compassion, which translates, literally, to suffer with others—that is to practice solidarity with those who suffer. So, following Jesus means harnessing both grace and grit and challenging the powerful, speaking out for the voiceless, finding true value in something other than material wealth, and, then, suffering the consequences of embodying that kind of self-emptying, Christlike love for all things. Isn’t that how followers of Jesus witness to “the love of God…poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit”?

         To complicate things, in Paul’s day, to find oneself beset with illness, loss, or misfortune means that God—or the gods—are angry with you and are getting even. So, logically, if people are only getting what they deserve, then aren’t we meddling in God’s affairs to try to mitigate their pain? Aren’t we even judging God’s judgment?

         Through word and deed, Jesus declares that eye-for-an-eye retribution is not God’s response to anything. Jesus teaches that to share suffering—to show compassion—is to follow him and to love God. For Jesus-followers, then, to offer thoughts and prayers rings hollow. Mere thoughts and prayers almost always avoid the suffering of others because they fail to ask of us anything that will lead to endurance, character, or hope for anyone.

         Only through compassion, by entering the suffering of others, do we embody our prayers and participate in the incarnational ministry of Christ—his ministry of presence and empathy.

         Presence and empathy are what the work of the Missions and the Congregational Life and Membership ministry teams are about. That’s what much of the Shalom Circle is about. And given the unique struggles that children, youth, and families face in today’s environment of relentless busyness and detachment from relevant faith communities, that’s what much of the work of the Christian Education ministry team is about. 

         If a congregation is genuinely interested in preparing for a future, if it wants its material assets to provide more than an endowment and a venue, it will enter the suffering of the world around it. It will trust that, come what may, God has called them into suffering, that God is in the midst of it, and that, through the power of Resurrection, God is creating something new out of it. And through that trust, the people will discover something new, revealing, and empowering about the depth of their individual and corporate character. And through their surrender to grace, they will—they can, anyway—become a source of hope to people they don’t know, and to generations they can only imagine.

         Over the last 12-15 years, Arlington Presbyterian Church in Arlington, VA watched its numbers decline, and they felt their congregational story easing toward the same slow death facing many churches these days. So, the church leaders began a season of very honest and courageous discernment.

         Over a period of about ten years, they stepped back, looked at their beautiful stone church located in a municipality where higher and higher property values were making it impossible for people who weren’t doctors, lawyers, and Pentagon chiefs to live in that community. So, Arlington Presbyterian decided something unthinkable to most congregations—they decided that they didn’t need the beautiful stone landmark known as Arlington Presbyterian Church. What the community needed was affordable housing. So, the church sold its property to Arlington Partnership for Affordable Housing, and the old church was torn down. Pastor Ashley Goff says, As Jesus broke bread and gave it to his disciples, APC broke its church building and gave it to the community.

         In place of the old building, there now stands Gilliam Place, a 173-unit affordable-housing complex. And in it reside teachers, nurses, police officers, firefighters, people with disabilities—none of whom could afford decent housing in that suburb of Washington, DC. Still an active congregation, Arlington Presbyterian gathers and worships in a specially-designed space on the ground floor of Gilliam Place.

         While it is getting more and more expensive to live in Washington County, TN, I’m not at all recommending that Jonesborough Presbyterian do what Arlington Presbyterian did. My point is simply to illustrate what kind of Gospel-grounded ministry can happen when followers of Jesus really follow him into the suffering around them. Welcoming and trusting the Spirit’s guidance, they practice a visible, palpable hope that thoughts and prayers cannot deliver. They participate in God’s revelation of God’s household of grace on earth.

         No one knows what the future holds for this congregation. And in the very limited time that this 60-year-old pastor has left in the ministry, he’d like to see this congregation poised for a future of ever-deepening, Gospel-grounded faithfulness. And to him, that involves expanding ministries of welcome and empowerment in a society that is contracting in its understanding of what it means to be human, and a religious culture contracting in what it means to be a Child of God.

It involves creating space where seekers can ask mind-broadening and faith-deepening questions that many church leaders have found threatening and shut down.

It involves continuing to follow Jesus into the suffering around us by addressing issues like poverty, hunger, racial injustice, gun violence, and ecological emergency.

Preacher, those are political issues!

Are they? Jesus wasn’t stoned for religious sins. He was hanged on a Roman cross as a threat to the empire because he blurred the lines between theology and politics. In a vin diagram of theological issues and socio-political issues, there would be a huge overlap because they all deal with the health and well-being of individuals and communities. In my opinion, those allegedly unrelated issues are one just as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, just as Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer are all one in the Trinity.

And in Christ, we are one. When one of us suffers, all of us suffer. And while we can’t suffer in another person’s place, to whatever extent we are gifted for compassion and allowed to show it, we can walk alongside each other in our struggles, and through shared suffering build endurance, discover new character, and experience, as never before, the hope of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

*All information about Arlington Presbyterian Church can be found at: https://arlingtonpresbyterian.org.