Yoked to Love (Sermon)

“Yoked to Love”

Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

7/6/14

          Since John the Baptist casts a long shadow across today’s text, it is worth backing up and remembering John’s place in Matthew’s telling of Jesus’ story.

          Matthew introduces us to John immediately after the birth narratives in chapters 1 and 2.  And it is clear that Matthew wants to make an impression.  John bursts out of the wilderness like one of those dumbfounding and deadly thunderstorms on the Sea of Galilee.  Matthew describes him with a clarity of detail that is relatively uncommon in the New Testament.

          John the Baptist, says Matthew, wears a frock made of coarse hide of a camel.  He gathers it tight at his waist with a leather belt.  When he picks his teeth after a meal, out come the remains of locusts – bits of legs, wings, and antennae.  Flies buzz excitedly around the mats of crystallized honey that have formed in the thicket of his beard.

          When John preaches, it is no-holds-barred.  ‘You sons of snakes!’ he hisses.  ‘You think you’re all that, but God can do just as well with a pile of rocks as with the likes of you!  Keep up with all your shenanigans and the whole lot of you will be chopped down and sawn into firewood!’  (The word of the Lord, thanks be to God.)

          This is like creative writing 101.  Matthew wants us to see, hear, feel, taste, and smell John the Baptist.  Matthew even wants us to catch our breath as he dunks us in the ice cold water of John’s disturbing judgment.

          Matthew is setting us up, though.  He turns our heads way to one side only to jerk them back the other way, like a chiropractor popping a patient’s neck, loosening stiffness and restoring flexibility.

          By the time we arrive at chapter 11, you see, the indomitable spirit that is John the Baptist languishes in Herod’s jail.  He whose preaching had scrubbed with steel wool and bleach, he who had challenged Jesus saying, “I need to be baptized by you,” now sends his own disciples to that same Jesus and, in something of a whimper, asks, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait [yet again] for another?”¹

          “Go and tell John what you hear and see,” answers Jesus.  “The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.  And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” (Mt. 11:4-6)

          Jesus then turns to his disciples and affirms John.  ‘John is a good man,’ he says.  ‘One of the best.  But all who inhabit the kingdom of heaven here and now, all who neighbor one another and care for the earth according to the demanding rule of Love, all of these surpass John even on his best days.

          ‘Ever since John began his ministry,’ continues Jesus, “the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force.”  Another way to translate that first phrase is to say, “The kingdom of heaven has been coming violently.”

          Casting his own holy judgment on the ways that humankind tries to use violence to accomplish that which only Love can accomplish, Jesus compares his entire generation to a bunch of children loitering in the marketplaces, complaining to each other that no one is playing by the rules.  The problem is, of course, that no one has figured out the game.  So all they can do is argue about whose rules they must follow!

          ‘John came as an austere teatotaler,’ says Jesus, ‘and you decided that the poor guy had issues.  Bless his heart.  Now the Son of Man is here, feasting and enjoying spirits and spirited company, and you condemn him for being reckless and immoral.’

          “Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds,” says Jesus.  In those words I hear Jesus reiterating his answer to John’s earlier question.  ‘Pay attention to what you hear and see,’ he says.  ‘Those who could not, now they can.  And the astonishing things that are happening reveal that God’s kingdom of earth-inheriting meekness and peace is arriving – as we speak.’

          Jesus is so utterly and fearlessly consistent in his challenge to all violent power, be it the militant power of political empires, the crucifying power of graceless and literal religion, the marginalizing power of some illness, ethnicity, or other life situation, the seductive power of excess wealth, the blinding power of excess pride, or even what often appears to be the ultimate power of death itself.  As the recipient of “all things” from God, Jesus knows that violence, regardless of form, never achieves lasting good.  It only breeds more violence.

          The substance of Jesus’ life and ministry is to invite everyone who is “weary and carrying [the] heavy burden” of a violent world to a new way of life: The way of wisdom.  To live according to holy wisdom is to live in reconciling peace and humble gratitude even in the face of violent powers, who, says Jesus, may “kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” (Mt. 10:28)  And according to Jesus, the only way to do that is by living in the power of servant-hearted Love.

          Of all the powers we can know and engage, only Love is eternal.  To Love, then, is to live the eternal life that Jesus lives and proclaims.  Love opens the gates of the kingdom of heaven to all of us, and through all of us – today.

          Most of us have been taught that God’s kingdom is some sort of platonic ideal, a state of changeless perfection.  But Jesus invites us into something very different, something much more organic.  He invites us into life of relentless becoming.  It takes great deal of creativity, and even more gritty, earthy, and disciplined faith to embrace such a life, because it requires us to let go of so much of our dualistic, black-and-white thinking and reacting.  To inhabit the kingdom requires us to think metaphorically.  And metaphor is not some kind of wishful thinking.  Metaphor is the realm of confluence between outer and inner worlds, between spiritual and physical, between temporal and eternal – between experience and meaning.

          If not for a determined yet vulnerable understanding of metaphor, the giving a receiving of a cup of cold water never becomes a threshold of the kingdom, one of countless moments of salvation for us.  Instead, it is nothing more than some obligation to perform, a work one does as a way to earn God’s favor.  Without the deeper understanding available through metaphor, service to God only distances the servant and the one served.  And so the kingdom comes violently rather than graciously.

          At a communion table, around a baptismal font, in a sanctuary, and wherever two or more gather in Jesus’ name, we are citizens of the kingdom of God’s Love.  All other loyalties and belongings must fall away so that we belong exclusively to the One who is even now in the midst of creating, redeeming, and uniting all things.

          So today, when we gather around the sacrament prepared on the table before us, we are swimming in metaphor.  It is a Good Friday-to-Easter Sunday table.  No one is denied their place on Sunday, but no one is spared their Fridays, either.  While the Fridays through which we pass are real, the grace and the promise of Sunday proclaim that the brutal offenses of every Friday only reveal the futility of worldly powers.

          So, we take up Jesus’ Sunday yoke.  And to yoke ourselves to Sunday, to yoke ourselves to the resurrecting power of Love, is to break out of John’s prison cell – the cell of oppressive religion and of the violent politics of prejudice and fear.

          To yoke ourselves to Love is to declare that yes, Jesus is God’s Christ, and we need not wait for another.

          ¹For this insight on John the Baptist I am grateful to Dr. Lance Pape in his article, Homiletical Perspective. Feasting on the Word: Year A, Vol 3, Westminster John Knox Press, 2011. David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, eds. p. 213.

Promises, Promises (Sermon)

“Promises, Promises”

Genesis 21-8-21

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

6/22/14

          You know, if one were to stop and really consider God’s choices of people through whom to be known and through whom to bless the earth, one might quickly decide, indeed, in less than half of the first book of the Bible itself, that Yahweh is either terribly naïve, or struggling to figure out the learning curve of working with human creatures.

          Think about Adam and Eve.  In this wonderful story of divine purpose, God creates two human beings and calls them “good,” but in less time than it will take a fig leaf to wilt, the pair has become overwhelmed by a snakish hunger to taste for themselves knowledge and authority meant only for God.  Then, with their sons, that hunger devolves even further.  It becomes a ravenous jealousy that compels the elder son to lure the younger out into the wilderness for a scene straight out of Criminal Minds.

          In two generations, the goodness of God’s creation already begins to hide behind the scaly skin of pride, envy, fear, and the violence to which such things inevitably lead.

          Fast forward to Abram.  To this random, simple man, God says, “Go to the land that I will show you.  I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you…and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.  So Abram went, as the Lord had told him.” (from Gen. 12:1-4)       In time, Abram becomes “Abraham,” “Father of Many.”

          It all sounds so high and holy, but along the way Abraham keeps finding himself racked with challenges and controversy.  For the most part, his problems stem from the escalating tension between Sarah and Hagar.  Sarah is, of course, the elder, primary wife.  Though she is aware of God’s promise to her husband, she declares herself too old to figure into the blessing.  Convinced that God’s promise needs her help, Sarah offers to Abraham, her slave girl, Hagar, as a kind of surrogate.  As the emergency, back-up wife, the youthful Hagar can provide the children God promises, but whom Sarah decides the she must guarantee.

          Then, when Hagar does conceive, things get ugly.  She taunts and sneers at Sarah.  The arrangement may be Sarah’s idea, but suddenly threatened by that conniving, gloating little pregnant Jezebel, Sarah runs straight to Abraham and screams, “This is all your fault!”

          “What?” says a stunned Abraham.  “My fault?  But you…I mean… well, she’s your slave girl.  You handle it!”

          Go back and look at the stories – Adam, Abraham, Isaac and so many other patriarchs are masters at the art of conflict avoidance.  As we have seen, Sarah, like most of the matriarchs, is not.  She deliberately makes Hagar’s life miserable.  When the younger woman has endured enough abuse, she runs away.  The whole thing is pure drama.  It’s like Survivor, Desperate Housewives, and Jerry Springer all rolled into one.  It leaves you crying out for Dr. Phil!

          An angel finds Hagar, grieving loudly by a wilderness spring.  “Go on back to the family,” says the angel.  “Your child is going to be okay.  Oh, he’ll be a wild one.  He’ll live at odds with just about everyone, but he’ll be okay.  God will see to it.”

          Hagar returns, and she gives birth to a son.  Grateful to God for delivering her from the wilderness, she names her son Ishmael, which means “God hears.”

          After all this excitement, God turns and promises a child to Sarah.  She is old.  Abraham is older.  Sarah laughs off God’s promise the way she would laugh off a child’s promise to take full responsibility for the new puppy if he can just have one.

          Some months later, though, she laughs again.  And Abraham names their son, Isaac: “He Who Laughs.”

          All goes well until, at the celebration on the day that Isaac is weaned, Sarah sees Isaac playing with his older brother.  She knows what happens to younger sons in a patriarchal culture.  They get nothing.  And once again, snakish jealousy and fear coil up tight in her belly.  Her eyes narrow, and she strikes.

          “Abraham,” she hisses, “Get rid of this slave woman and her filthy son!  He will not take my son’s inheritance!”

          “Honey, let’s talk,” pleads Abraham.

          “We will talk when they are gone!” snaps Sarah.

          Abraham is wearied and crushed, but his actions say, ‘Yes, dear.’

          “It’s okay,” God tells Abraham.  “Do what Sarah says.  I got this.”

          It is only now that Abraham learns of God’s prenatal promise to Ishmael.  It sounds similar to the promise God makes to Abraham himself before he ever leaves the land of Ur.  It even has echoes of the promise God makes to him and Sarah, the promise at which Sarah laughs.

          Promises, promises.

          Abraham and his family are both tragic and comic in their all-too-familiar dysfunction.  And in the midst of their struggles we witness not so much the birth of something new, but maybe something more like the very first cell division within a fertilized egg.  Two promises emerge in this story.  God makes both promises.  And they are, at the same time, very different and inextricable from one another.  One promise bears witness to the reconstructive power of God’s responsive grace, and the other to creative purity God’s initiating grace.

          Walter Brueggemann describes the differences this way: “Ishmael is a child gotten by skillful determination and planning.  As oldest son, Ishmael is the child of ‘entitlement’ in possessing all natural rights…[while] Isaac is a gift to be explained in no other way than as a wonder…Hagar and Ishmael…are located in the kingdom of necessity, coercion, and fate,” says Brueggemann.  “Sarah and Isaac…are located in the kingdom of gift, freedom, and destiny.”¹

          The promise to Ishmael represents God’s loving and redemptive response to all of our determined, well-planned, and often well-intentioned efforts to control the present and to try to “coerce” out of it an agreeable future.  The story says to us that God surrounds all of our Ishmaels, all of our hard work, all of our test-tube babies, if you will, and says, ‘I hear you, but you have created this out of impatience and pride.  For you, though, I’ll make the best of it.  I promise.  And here, here’s a toothpick.  You’ve got some apple stuck in your teeth, again.’

          The promise is usually for some “great nation,” for some level of prosperity, perhaps even for a significant level of prosperity.  That prosperity, however, always comes at significant expense.  Cain finds that out.  Jacob finds that out, so does King David.  The more the climate changes, the more that violence entertains us, and the more that fundamentalism crowds out faith, humankind, if we pay attention, continues to learn that.

          Isaac represents the other promise.  He becomes the human symbol of the promise of God’s pristine grace – a gift that comes to us not only undeserved and unrequested, but unimagined.  Isaac, you see, is the gift that comes from the future of God’s own imagining.

          In his book A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren makes this keen observation about God’s promises and our relationship with them: “We do not conceive of our faith primarily as a promise to our ancestors, a vow to dutifully carry on something that was theirs and we have inherited.  No,” says McLaren, “it is more like God’s promise uttered to us from the future, toward which we reach an outstretched and hopeful hand – just as our ancestors did.  The gospel,” he says, “is for us a beckoning, a summons, always associated with…verbs like ‘leave,’ ‘come,’ ‘go,’ ‘follow.’…the gospel is for us a movement, a pioneering adventure.”²

          Perhaps it is fair to say that virtually every nation and institution in the world, including our nation and our church, are Ishmaels.  And many of them do, indeed, hold great blessing for us and others, so long as we tend them with humility, gratitude, love, and community.  But it is the nature of all Ishmaels to live and work over against each other like great tribes of Sarahs and Hagars – twin mothers of the same son – and like so many warring kingdoms of Jacobs and Esaus – twin sons of the same mother.  Desperate for assurance, we claim God’s particular blessings on our own nations, or denominations, or political parties, or whatever else.  And our claims often feel justified, because God, being endlessly gracious, does bless and work with our Ishmaelite efforts.  And God does so, I think, for our sake.  God blesses our Ishmaels to whatever extent God must in order to redeem and redirect them, and, thus, to transform them into lenses through which we recognize, receive, and share the greater promise.

          The promise of God’s initiative comes as a gift to all humankind, for all creation.  This promise still speaks to and beckons us from God’s future.  And regardless of which side of some Ishmaelite distinction we may occupy, God’s promise, personified in Isaac and in Jesus, the Christ, remains pristine and open to, for and through every one of us.  It is the animating promise of the entire universe.  It always comes as the command to “leave, come, go, or follow.”  It comes as the challenging call to love and to trust that which we can only see and know, as Paul says, “in a mirror, dimly.” (1Cor. 13:12a)

          And God's promise always comes as a disrupting wonder, as a gift, as something that we could and would never have imagined on our own.

         

¹Walter Brueggemann, Genesis, (From the Interpretation commentary series).  John Knox Press, Atlanta, 1982, p. 184.

²Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith. Harper One, p. 28.

A Reckless Faith (Sermon)

“A Reckless Faith”

Matthew 28:16-20

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

6/15/14

          According to Matthew, this is the first and only appearance of the resurrected Jesus to the disciples.  We notice immediately that in Matthew Jesus does not Star Trek his way through locked doors.  He does not munch on baked fish to prove himself more than an apparition.  He does not stroke Simon Peter’s guilt-ridden ego by asking him three times, “Simon, do you love me?”  In Matthew, Jesus appears to the disciples only once, on a Galilean mountaintop, and his only words are the three sentences of the “Great Commission.”

          Now, in between the announcements of Easter morning and the Great Commission, Matthew tells an interesting story.  This story, unique to Matthew, implicates the Jewish leadership in a kind of B-movie cover-up.  According to this account, the Roman guards, who become “like dead men” when the Easter angel appears at the tomb, scurry off to the chief priests to tell them what they have seen.  They are justifiably afraid because should the soldiers’ superiors find out what happened, they would surely execute the hapless guards.

          After mulling things over, the chief priests and elders give this instruction to the panicked soldiers, “Tell your commanding officers this: Tell them that Jesus’ disciples snuck in while you slept, and they stole his body.  And here, here’s some cash.  If you promise to tell that story, it’s yours.”

          If ever there were a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea, this is it.  These Roman soldiers can either tell their commanders that they fainted with terror at the sight of an angel, or that Jesus' disciples slipped in and stole Jesus’ body while they, the guards, all of them, slept through their duty assignment.  Either way, the guards will have their own crosses to bear – at least figuratively and probably literally.

          Apparently, this tale did circulate in the days and weeks following Easter.  And it illustrates how closed, how entombed we become in an imperial world of black-and-white dualism.  When the obedience demanded is simply to obey the commands of superiors for the preservation of an empire, violence reigns.  Then, when that earthly authority finds itself toe-to-toe with heavenly authority, it implodes.  On its own, earthly authority always resorts to violence, and over time violence always creates its own undoing.

          ‘All heavenly authority and all earthly authority are mine,’ says Jesus.  These are his very first words to the eleven remaining disciples, some of whom, says Matthew, “doubted.”

          Tom Long calls this scene one of “near-comic irony” because “nothing in the surroundings seems to support [Jesus’] claim.”¹  Yes, one who appears to be the same Jesus who was executed speaks these words.  And if he is the same person, then something extraordinary is afoot, though, for the moment, its means and purpose defy comprehension.  So, as the disciples stand on that mountaintop, the space for doubt stands as wide open as the yawning expanse of the creation around them.

          I’ll be honest: I am pretty sure that I would be among the doubters.  I am pretty sure that I would hear the word “authority” and immediately imagine Rome and her empire, her armies, her wealth, and her unflinching resolve to send her sons off to war to kill and to be killed for the sake of property, power, wealth, and the way of life such things in excess afford.

          Given all that has happened and all that I would probably expect to happen, I doubt that I would have the spiritual vision to see beyond this dizzying moment.  Herein lies the stumbling block: Jesus, if he is really there at all, challenges his disciples to go ahead and travel a path that has yet to be cleared.  He challenges them to inhabit a time and a place in which all heavenly and earthly authority have become one.  He challenges them – he challenges us – to live, to think, and to act as if we already live fully in the embrace of the household of God.

          To live as a disciple is to live a life of trail-blazing love, gratitude, and hope in a world addicted to fear and wallowing in despair.  Jesus challenges us to live in heaven as fully as we can stomach it while still walking the imperfect boundaries of earth.  Only by some spiritual authority can anyone live eternally in a time-bound context.  As Christians, we call that authority Resurrection, and we know that authority by name: The Living Jesus.  And when I say that we “know” that authority and that name, I do so embracing all of the doubt on that freshly Eastered mountaintop, as well as all of the awe, wonder, and speechless joy.

          So, how do we live as disciples of Resurrection?

          “Behold,” says Resurrection, “I am with you…always.”

          We are people of faith, not certainty.  We are animated by an abiding presence whom we trust but cannot prove.  That makes it a subjective trust, of course, and the one who is with us nourishes that trust and transforms it into hope by helping us to interpret both ancient testimony and personal experience.  Our trust always frustrates the careful and reasonable doubters around us, and within us.  Doubters demand explanations and justifications for a way of life that follows, above all else, the command to love one another as Jesus loves us – to love the whole of creation as the Creator loves it.  To live according to the love of the one who unites all heaven and earth, all gentiles and Jews, the one who unites every us and them that humanity creates, to live according to that kind of uniting, resurrecting love, we fly on the wings of a reckless faith.  We journey into the unknown “knowing” only that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Heb. 11:1)

          Aldo Leopold was a conservationist and a sold-out lover of the natural world.  In 1949 he published A Sand County Almanac, a collection of essays that has become a classic in the tradition of John Muir and Henry David Thoreau.  In Almanac, Leopold shares many of his favorite discoveries and timeless teachings from nature.  Reflecting on the return of spring to a cold and barren Wisconsin landscape, Leopold celebrates the return of the geese above all other creatures.

          “One swallow does not make a summer,” he writes, “but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.

          “A cardinal, whistling spring to a thaw but later finding himself mistaken,” says Leopold, “can retrieve his error by resuming his winter silence.  A chipmunk, emerging for a sunbath but finding a blizzard, has only to go back to bed.  But a migrating goose, staking two hundred miles of black night on the chance of finding a hole in the lake, has no easy chance for retreat.  His arrival carries the conviction of a prophet who has burned his bridges.”²

          The “Great Commission” which Jesus offers on that mountaintop is a disruptive call to declare our prophetic faith in a brand new spring, even as the ice still covers the water.  Indeed, his call is more than a friendly invitation.  It is an all-out dare.  Jesus dares us to live in courageous insubordination of the well-guarded tombs of Rome, Babylon, and Egypt.  He dares us to live in bridge-burning defiance of everything that legislates or preaches human dependence on those earthly dominions that claim the absolute authority to tell us what is good, faithful, and true, namely that in order to realize our full humanity we must earn, spend, and own, and that if we must subdue or even obliterate whole cultures to maintain a way of life, so be it.

          If we are The Church, however, if we are the body of the risen Christ in, with, and for the world, we must live differently.  When we equivocate ourselves out of obedience to Jesus’ command to adventurous, dangerous agape love, when we fail to live as disciples who follow the reckless power of Resurrection, we cannot make disciples of others.  We may make some “converts” to a particular way of thinking, but regurgitating some prescribed formula does not empower any of us to love as we are loved.

          “Go...and make disciples of all nations.”  This is a holy dare to live in the reckless authority of Resurrection, to inhabit the household of God, to inhabit the presence of the Living Jesus, here and now.

          Every week I am reminded that Jonesborough Presbyterian Church is a place where we can and must learn to experience and trust this reality – where we can and must learn to enflesh the command to love.  In this small congregation we have the full spectrum of ideas, hopes, and fears – theologically, politically, and everything else.  Depending on the question you ask, you may get every imaginable answer.  But we fly on together, fellow travelers, fellow geese.  Every day, God's new spring opens a hole in the ice, a place for us to land, a place of gratitude and respect for one another, especially when we don't agree.

           When you find yourself sitting on one side of an issue and the person in the pew next to you sitting on another, I hope and pray that you recognize that tension as our part of our strength.  For through that tension, all authority in heaven and on earth speaks to us, unites us, and continually transforms us into a body who recognizes its shared calling.  Standing in that mountaintop tension, where there is wide open space for doubt, our options are, by grace, reduced to one common call – the call to obey Christ’s command to trust the authority of Resurrection, to accept the dare to love.

          In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, thanks be to God.

¹Tom Long, “Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol. 3.  David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, editors.  Westminster John Knox Press, 2011. p. 47

²Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, Ballantine Book, NY, 1966. pp. 19-20.