A Weep of Faith (Fifth Sunday of Lent, 2014)

“A Weep of Faith”

John 11:1-44

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

4/6/14

          One can read the account of the death and resuscitation of Lazarus as a kind of summary of the Gospel according to John.  This story either recapitulates or foreshadows the basic affirmations and the overall proclamation of John’s entire work.

          To illustrate what I mean, back in the fourteenth verse of Chapter 1, John writes that “the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”

          In Chapter 11, Jesus echoes John’s early commentary when he says, “This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”

          In the story of Lazarus, John invites us to witness the Word Made Flesh striding toward two different tombs in the glorious grace of timeless resolve and perfect Love.  The first tomb does not belong to Jesus, but John connects the tombs intimately and inextricably.  And he connects them not only to each other, but also to the very beginning of the Father’s primordial intent, and to the Son’s experience along the way.

          Let’s walk back and forth with this story a little more.

          The very first words of John proclaim that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  All things came into being through him…What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.”

          When Jesus says to Lazarus’ grieving sister, Martha, “I am the resurrection,” he makes this claim because he is also the bright light of “the life” who is coming into the world, for the world.

          Another central concern of the fourth gospel has to do with acknowledging Jesus’ identity.  In John, believing that Jesus is the Word Made Flesh constitutes the essential tenet of the Christian faith.  So every moment of life, every experience of joy and pain is a chance to deepen in transforming belief.  However, for the fourth evangelist, belief is not a “knowledge is power” thing.  Belief reveals and connects us to the capacity to love as we are loved.

          “Just as I have loved you, you should love one another,” says Jesus in Chapter13.  “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples,” that is to say: ‘that you believe in me.’  So, for John, to believe is to love, and to love is to experience and to share the promise of “eternal life.”

          It is the entombed Love within all humankind that Jesus comes to resuscitate.  And Martha makes a valid observation.  When love dies and begins to decay, it turns foul with the stench of selfish apathy and fear.  So, Jesus invites her back into the liveliness of love.  “Did I not tell you,” he asks, “that if you believed, [if you loved me,] you would see the glory of God?”

          With the same compelling grace the risen Jesus calls Peter out of his own tomb.  Three times Jesus asks, “Peter, do you love me?”  This is Jesus’ vividly loving way of asking, ‘Peter do you believe in me?’

          In John’s gospel, when John the Baptist first lays eyes on Jesus, he surprises his own disciples by blurting out, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!”  Expecting a charismatic, political messiah who will recruit, motivate, train and lead rebel fighters against Rome, John’s followers whisper, “Where are you staying?”

          What they are asking is: ‘Where’s the camp?  Where do we meet to train the guerillas?’

          “Come and see,” answers Jesus.

          Nathanael asks Philip if anything worth paying attention to can come out of Nazareth.  And Philip replies, “Come and see.”

          When Jesus treats a Samaritan woman with the redeeming Love of kindness and respect, she hurries back to her town to tell her neighbors, “Come and see.”

          In John 11, Jesus asks where they have laid Lazarus’ body, and Mary and Martha turn to him and say, “Come and see.”

          Hearing those loaded words of invitation, Jesus realizes that he faces a turning point.  At this moment, as the misty genesis of creation opens toward a decisive revelation of eternity, Jesus stands on a kind of cosmic fulcrum when past, present, and future begin to coalesce.

          This “twinkling of an eye” moment happens within the limits of Jesus’ own natural life, and beside a stone tomb – a place of clock-stopping finality.  But it is a holy and eternal moment that happens outside of time, as well, because to enter that moment with full surrender and intent means to act with both pre-historic and apocalyptic creativity.  To come and see at this particular moment, to speak and act in the called-for manner of Love, will demand from him a leap of faith, and a commitment from which he cannot turn back.  To utter life-restoring words into Lazarus’ tomb will reveal that spirit and matter are one – just as the Word and Flesh are one – just as the Father and the Son are one.*

          Jesus knows that to take this step will seal the certainty of his own tomb, because the Caesars, Pilates, and Caiaphases of the world – those who separate matter and spirit, and who enjoy the wealth and the power defensible only by regarding matter as profane, as nothing more than material means to material ends – they will not tolerate anything or anyone who challenges their privileged authority.

          When Jesus speaks life into Lazarus’ tomb and shines the light of life into the vanquished darkness of the grave, he knows that Word will get out: Jesus is healing the wound that has separated Spirit and Matter.  And when that Word gets out, then things like poverty, epidemic disease, war, prejudice, pollution of earth, water and air, global climate change, these are not physical, political issues at all.  They are profound spiritual and moral challenges to the very heart of creation, because the damage being done is not simply to things of the world but to the very being of God, and to all that God loves.

          Power will react violently to such news because it cannot carry the responsibilities of Love with humility and grace.  Power will always choose the tomb, because Power mistakes the tomb for a fortress.

          Facing this defining moment of permanently altering, loving action with and for all of creation, Jesus weeps.

          Transformational moments are like that.  They are grief-stricken moments of surrender and commitment, moments of dying to self and being raised to a new life in which God overwhelms us with our capacity for the active and vocational Love of agape.

          When Jesus says to Lazarus, “Come out!” he is speaking to us.  He is inviting us to recognize that, in truth, there is nothing in life or death that can separate our physical, temporary, imperfect human existence from the eternal holiness and wholeness of God.

          Within every tomb there lies not merely a soul, but a body ready to rise.

          On the other side of every failure there stands a new person, newly animated and empowered to offer, to ask for, and to receive forgiveness.

          With every experience of grief we endure, we have the chance to realize and to embrace anew the earthen-jarred treasure of all relationships, of all Love given and received.

          Those first steps on new feet are hard, though.  Our legs remain bound and our faces covered.  We need help to shed the clingy clothes of death.  Part of the church’s prophetic work is to teach us to help one another to molt out of our rancid burial rags.  And as John reminds us, we do that not by casting condemnations, but by seeing through the pall of deathliness and into the shining image of God within self, neighbor, and earth, then offering the healing love of Christ to one another.

          John also reminds us that such love begins with tears.  To die to life as we knew it and to rise to life as God offers it begins with a purging weep of faith.  As I wrestled with all of this, I found myself remembering one of those blessed and excruciating weeps of faith.

          Marianne and I spent part of this last weekend at my dad’s mountain house in Little Switzerland, NC.  It was a pre-Alaska visit with our son, Ben.  His girlfriend, Elizabeth, and our daughter, Elizabeth, were there, as well.

          On Friday morning, April 4^th, as I sat alone in the main room of the house working on this sermon, a memory surfaced.  I recalled another day that I sat alone in that same room, in that same chair, and it was exactly ten days shy of eighteen years ago.

          Monday, April 15 of 1996 was my first day on the job as pastor of my first church.  Our family had spent the previous week moving into the Cross Roads manse, but had slipped away to the mountains for the weekend while my new congregation celebrated and said goodbye to their interim pastor.

          The afternoon of Sunday, the 14^th of April, we packed up, cleaned the house, and prepared to head back to Mebane.  There were a few house-closing chores left, so Marianne took the kids and the dog and walked them down the gravel road while I took care of those details.  I would pick them up at the bottom of the mountain.

          After completing the chores, I fell into the upholstered arms of that old swiveling rocker and stared through the big plate-glass windows.  The still-bare branches of hickory, poplar, and locust trees lay against the gray sky like an exquisite tatting.  As I sat in that chair in that still and darkened house, the reality of the new vocation to which I had been called, and to which I had committed myself and my family grabbed me.  It overwhelmed me.  And I wept.  Actually, that understates things.  I blubbered like a five-year-old on the first day of kindergarten.

          All the in-between-times had passed.  All the preparations were over.  The next morning, I would begin more than a new job.  I would begin a new life, a life about which I knew virtually nothing.

          ‘Allen, come on out!  It’s time to love like you’ve never loved before.  Believe me, you can do it.  Come and see.’

          The last thing I am saying is that you have to become a pastor to experience a weep of faith.  We all have our April 14ths when we face the implications of letting Caesar have what is his, and rendering to God what is fully and inalienably God’s.  In all things and with all people, our vocation is to leap into life-renewing, Lazarus-raising Love.

          Go ahead and shed your tears, because you and I, brothers and sisters, even you and I, are givers, receivers, and proclaimers of the Love that raises Lazarus.

*While I do not quote either Richard Rohr or Philip Newell directly, I am grateful to both of these teachers for helping me to understand the oneness of spirit and matter in the creation.

Grandma's Blackberry Jam

          In the heat of one of my adolescent summers, I made a solo visit to my paternal grandparents in Forest, MS.  One of the highlights of every Forest trip was going out to Deck’s farm to fish in the pond, to ride the horses and, if we hit the season right, to help bale hay.  Deck was a distant cousin who raised beef cattle on the gently rolling hills just outside town.  A sheer and constant delight, Deck epitomized the farmer persona.  He loved his farm, his cows, his neighbors, and he wore one of the broadest, most genuine smiles I have ever seen. 

          One morning during my visit, Grandpa decided that he and I were going to go pick blackberries out on the farm.  Before heading out to pick, we stopped by Deck’s simple red brick house.  He met us outside so his zealously protective border collie, Blaze, didn’t try to chew our trespassing legs to shreds.  We stood around the bed of Deck’s dingy green Chevrolet pickup, our elbows perched on the bed.  It was summer.  The day would be long and hot.  The morning air, thick with dew, lay moist against our skin.  There was no need to hurry.

          In his slow, garbled drawl, Deck said he had a tree to saw up not far from the blackberry bramble, and that if I wanted to come with him I could.  Before I could respond, Grandpa thanked him but declined the invitation for me.  As Grandpa drove us down through a pasture to the dense, sprawling blackberry thicket nestled in a patch of bottom land, I could think of only Deck and his chainsaw.

          As we started picking, Deck cranked up his saw and began his work.  As the sun rose higher, so did the temperature.  Flies and gnats feasted on us.  Hypodermic briars sliced my fingers, hands and forearms.  For a 13 year old boy, the choice between picking blackberries and hanging around a kindly old farmer with a chainsaw was a no-brainer, so I decided to venture out on a limb and take Deck up on his offer on my own. 

          Grandpa did not care for the idea.

          “You know,” he said, “there are stories about people getting lost in the woods and surviving on wild berries like this.  It’s important to get a feel for such things.” 

          The only thing lost that day was my mind in the high whine of Deck’s chainsaw.  So I mumbled some excuse and walked off to hitch my wagon to Deck and his chainsaw.

          When the berries were picked and the tree cut into firewood, Grandpa came to get me, and we returned to town.

          That afternoon, I lay down on the thick carpet in Grandpa's and Grandma's living room, reveling in the cool wash of the ceiling fan.  The air itself was awash in the sweet aroma of blackberries cooking down into jam in Grandma’s kitchen.

          The next morning when I came to breakfast, there, beside a stack of golden brown toast, sat a jar of store-bought grape jelly.

          “How about some of that blackberry jam?” I said.

          “Gotta save that for the winter,” Grandpa answered into crackle of his paper.

          I was stunned.  “Well, it sure would taste good,” I whimpered

          “Nooo,” Grandpa said.  “We need to save that for those cold winter mornings.”

          I knew better than to push any further.

          At the end of the week, my grandparents and I packed up for the long drive back home to Augusta, GA.  They stayed with us for a couple of nights, and we had a grand time, as usual.  After they left, my mother came into my room holding a small jar.  It contained something dark and purple, with tiny round seeds in it.

          “Grandma brought this for you,” Mom said.  “She said that Grandpa thought only those who picked the berries should eat the jam.  But she wanted you to have some, too.”

          Grandma had smuggled me a jar of her blackberry jam.

          The grace of God may have no greater witness among us than the love of grandmothers.  What mattered to Grandma was not what she thought I had or had not earned.  What mattered was what she thought of her grandson.  Her thoughts were always guided and shaped by unconditional love.  Even if she had to sneak it our way on occasion, she was going to follow the path of grace, that high-set light which cannot be hidden.

          Thanks be to God for Grandma, for grandmothers, and for their many jars of smuggled grace.*

*An earlier version of this story appeared in the July/August 2006 issue of an Upper Room publication called "Alive Now."  (Laura Huff Hileman, guest editor; pp. 20-22)

The Mockingbird (April/May 2014 Newsletter)

          It was nearly 11pm on a weeknight.  Marianne and I had been sitting on the sofa in our living room in Shelby, NC, chatting about one thing and another.  We wallowed in that groggy never land of too tired to sleep.  The window behind us was open, and the street was dark, still and quiet.

          After Marianne had wandered off to bed, I lingered on the sofa for a while.  About the time I had drifted off to sleep, the night sprang to life.  In the maple tree outside the window, a lone mockingbird unleashed a rare, nocturnal aria.  The hymn broke through the stillness with the kind of passion reserved for prophecy and grief.  The mockingbird sang as if it had only minutes left to live, only moments to pour out its last song as a glorious benediction upon the earth.

          Or could it have been an ancient song, a primordial refrain that I had just begun to hear?

          I turned out the light and sat back to listen.

          Like the first rays of dawn, the complex medley of birdsong pealed back the darkness.  The longer I listened, the more each perfect note revealed uncharted space for wonder.  How does a single, tiny throat have the capacity for such variety of phrase and strength of voice?  From what corner in so small a heart does such a song arise?  It seemed as though a hole had been punched in the floor of heaven and the liquid gold of angelsong had begun to spill into my yard.

          When the ecstasy tapered into silence, I sat still for a few moments, hoping that the bird was simply gathering new breath for new song.  The night remained still, but I continued both to hear and feel that music as it found a perch within my heart.

          Such moments of grace steal in to surprise, delight and renew us.  They are gifts of the Spirit that wing their way through all our days.  Sometimes they dart through like a nervous sparrow.  Other times, like that mockingbird, they roost outside the window and stun even our darkest nights with hope.

          May you be aware of those moments in your own life.  And may you claim your own voice to sing your verse of grace.

          The heavens are telling the glory of God;

          And the firmament proclaims his handiwork.

          Day to day pours forth speech,

          And night to night declares knowledge.

          There is no speech, nor are there words . . .

          Yet their voice goes out through all the earth,

          And their words to the end of the world.

                                                (Psalm 19:1-4)

At the Well (Third Sunday of Lent, 2014)

“At the Well”

John 4:5-42

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

3/23/14

          “For God so love[s] the world [that] God [does] not send the Son into the world to condemn the world” but for the sake of the world – for the sake of its wholeness, and for the sake of its deep, spiritual awareness that the creation, every cell and solar system in it, resonates with the voice and the heartbeat of God.

          The saving work of Jesus is the work of reuniting this beloved world which is being fragmented almost entirely by the human creature’s propensity to idolize itself, by our laziness in settling for, and even choosing prejudice, greed, violence, and pride over the higher callings of humility, gratitude, generosity, and neighboring.

          It is this broken and fragmented world that has taught a woman that one appropriate response to a request for water is to say: “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”

          Instead of acknowledging the common ground of thirst, and then gratefully receiving from the earth the elemental gift of water, the woman, out of submissive habit perhaps, simply regurgitates the boundaries that have, and as far as she is concerned, will always keep Jews separated from Samaritans, and males separated from females.

          It is easy to name all the “wrong” things we do and to label them “sins.”  It is another thing entirely, though, to begin to realize that most of those “wrong” things are nothing but petty distractions, and that the grand and honorable things we do to protect our visible “goodness,” which we protect with rigid, exclusionary boundaries, are very often the most dangerously sinful things we do.

          The actions and attitudes that distance us from God and from neighbor usually make us feel righteous and superior.  They make us feel other.  Jesus enters the fragmented world, however, to overcome otherness, to live a life that very deliberately exposes our tolerance for injustice, our collusion with brutal powers, and our pandering moralities that allow us to ignore God’s love for and presence in those whom we fear, or simply don’t understand.  Jesus lives his saving life for all creation’s sake, and for all creation’s sake he invites the human creature back into healthy relationship with the Creator, with one another, with self, and with the earth.

          The story in John 4 describes one of Jesus’ most memorable “for the sake of” moments, and it occurs at the lip of a storied well.  The Old Testament does not mention Jacob’s well, but a tradition that is probably more convenient that convincing remembers that Jacob digs this well.

          At the time of Jacob there is no Jewish nation, so there is no Samaritan offshoot to disdain and to live over against.  There is, of course, a hoodwinked twin brother, Esau.  In spite of his tendency to surrender to his appetites, the Hairy One eventually matures and demonstrates the strength and substance of his true self.  He forgives his deceitful brother.  And after Jacob wades the shallow Jabbok, the brothers embrace and at last, they drink from the deep well of reconciling grace – together.

          At the physical well, a legacy attributed to the forgiven Jacob, through whose lineage God molds the very face of Forgiveness, Jesus meets a forever-nameless Samaritan woman.  This well, like all oases, is a place where thirsty creatures, human and animal alike, gather to remember that their very existence depends on the life-giving offerings of the earth from which their bodies arise.  Such provision is the blessing of the Creator to and through the creation, and we all stand on equal footing at the lip of the Well.  To become aware of the realities of grace, of shared dependence, and of interdependence, and to receive such realities as holy gift, this is to begin to taste the living water that Jesus offers.

          It is hardly that easy, though.  When conditioned by a broken and fearful world to judge, to compete, and to “eat or be eaten,” we quickly overlook the face-to-face earthiness of a vulnerable Well-gathering.  And in our forgetfulness of grace, we can say the oddest things.

          “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

          I can’t tell what the woman is up to here.  Is she serious?  Does she genuinely believe that Jesus’ promise of living water is some kind of magic that will finally make her life all coziness and leisure?  Or is she just slapping what she considers to be some haughty Jerusalem Jew in the face with rude sarcasm?  Either way, she misses the point.

          “Go get your husband,” says Jesus.

          “I don’t have a husband,” snaps the woman.

          ‘I know,’ says Jesus.  ‘But that’s okay.  I understand.  I’m not here to condemn anyone.’

          Then, in so many words, Jesus says to her that she has been going to the well of marriage over and over, but for whatever reason she keeps drawing up one empty bucket after another.  She still has yet to drink the water of true relationship, the water of deep connection, of spiritual as well as physical oneness with another human being.  And now, perhaps because of an imprisoning patriarchy, she has more or less barnacled herself to some man so that she does not have to turn to begging or to prostitution in order to survive.

          Indeed!  How thirsty she must be!

          ‘Okay, Rabbi,’ she says.  ‘So, you’re a prophet.  I get it.  But you’re still a Jerusalem Jew.  Your people still refuse to recognize my people because we worship here, on Mt. Gerazim.’

          Jesus has successfully turned the conversation in the direction he wants to go.  And from his mouth, from the lips of this New Well, flow words that begin to soak the woman’s desert life in living water.  Jesus invites the woman to lean out over the well and to peer inside.

          ‘Look,’ he says. ‘This Well is so full you can see the water.  And in the water, you can see your reflection.  And in your reflection you can see the reflection of God.  So it is for all who come here.

          ‘God is not found any better on one mountain than another.  God is not reflected any more fully in one person’s face than another.  So, to see and to know God we need all faces, all reflections.’

          These words are fresh, living water, and like all water they seek the lowest, deepest place they can reach.  They tumble down into lonely valleys where darkness, sadness, and day-to-day weariness dry us out.  When we get dehydrated, all our efforts to know and to share God tend to petrify into idolatries – into the worship of worldly things, rigid structures and strictures that we experience and define in only the most limited and tangible terms.

          In these spiritual deserts we focus more on the place of worship than on the One whom we worship.

          In spiritual deserts we focus more on who we will allow to receive the sacrament than on the host who invites us to the table.

          In spiritual deserts we focus on what people do, wrong and right, rather than on who they are at the core of their God-imaged, human being.

          In spiritual deserts we allow ourselves to see ourselves according to confining dualities such as Jews and Samaritans (those who do the right thing in the right place versus those who do not), and as males and females ("stronger sex" versus "weaker sex").

          In spiritual deserts we even begin to accept the world’s view of us as mere consumers, tools whose chief end is to produce and to purchase as much as possible in order to keep an economy afloat.  And that opens to door to seeing ourselves and others as eye candy whose worth is tied to physical beauty rather than to our innate and intimate worth as children of God.

          And from the earliest of times, never has there been a clan, a tribe, a state, a kingdom, a nation, or an empire that has not told is young people, especially its young men, that they are renewable and thus expendable resources to be taught the science of killing and being killed for the betterment of their betters.

          To save this mixed up world, to reunite this fragmented creation, which God so loves, God makes a loud splash in the desert.

          “God is spirit,” cries Jesus, “and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

          Jesus' life is wringing wet with the prophecy of Isaiah: “The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly…They shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God. Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, ‘Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God.’” (Selected lines from Is. 35:1-4)

          “Here is your God,” says Isaiah

          “I am he,” says Jesus.

          And the ripples spread.

          Here is our challenge as followers of Jesus: As a people blessed to be a blessing, we are called to be crocuses in the desert, signs of God’s ongoing renewal.

          Our blessedness becomes blessing for others when we, out of love for the world, die the costly death of grace and embrace God’s freedom from the world’s condemning ways.

          Our blessedness becomes blessing for others when we respond humbly to God’s call to be an oasis, a “spring of water gushing up to eternal life,” a place of Well-Gatherings.

          Our blessedness becomes blessing for others when we, like Jesus, dare to enter forbidden and contemptible Samaritan lands.  For through such risky congregations, the living water washes our hearts, and minds, and eyes to reveal new brothers and sisters.  And when we trust Love to reveal Love, our new siblings in Christ will say, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard [and seen] for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”