Feral Spirituality (Sermon)

“Feral Spirituality”

John 3:1-10

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

10/23/16

There’s a popular movie out where a very serious, ambitious man falls for a woman whose approach to life is quite different from his. His life is defined by complete and mercenary devotion to the corporate world. He lives out of suitcases. All his suits are dark, and his shirts white.

         The woman lives by more earthy, intuitive values. She personifies freedom of spirit and heart. In her funky little apartment, tassels and beads hang like Spanish moss from doorways, curtain rods, and light fixtures. An entire wall rejoices with a painting that appears to be the lovechild of a Sherwin Williams truck and a tornado.

         These two people meet on a subway. For him, the subway is a grim procession of caskets. For her, surrounded by all that beautiful, tragic humanity, it’s a sacred place where holiness whispers in her ear.

         Though unaware of it, the man is buckling beneath the pressures of his cutthroat world. Empathetic to the point of clairvoyance, the woman feels the man’s anguish. With angry compassion she challenges his conformity. But he can’t understand. Wealth, power, and stress define the only life he can imagine. Attempting to defend himself, he recites all the party-line clichés. When he realizes how ridiculous he sounds, he just gets angrier.

         The woman smiles at him sadly.

The train reaches her stop first. She stands up and says, “Maybe I’ll see you again.”

Confused by feelings of both defeat and gratitude, he says, “Maybe.”

And so it begins. Along the way they experience a series of adventures and culture clashes that make for a few belly laughs and some moments of poignant awakening.

Tension builds, and the couple reaches a crescendo of conflict in which they must either embrace each other and the new way of life created by their relationship, or they must let go. Finally choosing new life, they commit themselves to their new adventure.

         By now, some of you know that I’m messing with you. I didn’t describe any one movie. This story has been told a thousand times in a thousand ways. The Gospels offer several versions, because Jesus’ story is itself a defining version of that story.

         So, we meet Nicodemus, a Jewish leader steeped in rigid Pharisaism. Like the man captivated with the free-spirited woman, Nicodemus recognizes something both dangerous and compelling in Jesus. Curious, but fearful of his colleagues, Nicodemus skulks to Jesus under the cover of night. Avoiding an outright question, Nicodemus says, ‘Rabbi, you’re for real. Only God-sent prophets can do what you do.’

         He wants Jesus to answer his implied question with an unqualified claim to or indisputable proof of holiness. But Jesus teases him.

         ‘To experience the kingdom of God,” says Jesus, “one must experience a new birth.’

         John uses the word anothen. Birth from above. A second birth. However it gets translated, anothen means a brand new beginning.

         The couple in the movie experience a kind of anothen. For the man in particular, much is lost, but even more is gained as he discovers his new self – a self who will be more authentic and complete because of the infusion of the woman’s bright compassion and courageous joy.

         To live his new life, Nicodemus must tear himself loose from his legalistic moorings. He must set his sails to catch God’s Holy Spirit, the original Free Spirit.

         In ways both implicit and explicit, I was taught that following Jesus means walking a particularly safe and pure road, a road on which I earn my place through affirmation and through careful avoidance of unsuitable behaviors. But when I read Jesus’ words to Nicodemus, I hear a primal call to more intrepid living, and to a kind of feral spirituality.

         “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you [don’t] know where it comes from or where it goes.” This Wind – this untamable Spirit – frees us from a life so structured and predictable that it becomes sterile.

         Mystified, Nicodemus says, ‘This makes no sense.’

         ‘How does a teacher of Israel not know these things?’ says Jesus.

After this, Nicodemus all but disappears from the conversation, and Jesus monologues his way to those gracious words: “For God so loved the world...” And when we get to the part about not perishing but having “everlasting life,” don’t we tend to imagine a strictly future-oriented promise? Only after death do we experience “heaven.” But there is so much more to what Jesus calls heaven than the “sweet by-and-by.” For Jesus, “everlasting life” includes the everlasting frontier within each of us and among all of us – here and now.

         Our book group is reading Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward. Last Wednesday, we discussed the chapter entitled “Amnesia and the Big Picture.”

“Life is a matter of becoming fully and consciously who we already are,” says Rohr, “but it is a self we largely do not know.” He says that humankind suffers from “a giant case of amnesia.”¹ Having forgotten the life from which we come, we distort our conceptions of the lives we live, and the life to which our lives lead.

Authentic, Jesus-inspired spirituality releases us into aboriginal territory, into experiences often declared precarious and out-of-bounds by the institutional church. And this mystic outback mirrors the heaven from which we arrived into this world.

William Wordsworth wrote:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing boy

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy.²

            If “heaven lies about us in our infancy,” it lies about us now, in our joy. It seems to me that Nicodemus has not failed to understand these things. He has simply forgotten them. John Philip Newell refers to Jesus as our deepest and truest memory restored.³ His forgiving, saving act is to remind us who we are in God. To explore this truth about ourselves is to explore a flourishing wilderness that transcends the boundaries of doctrines and denominations, races and genders, and anything else that separates us from or pits us against one another. This ancient and eternal, feral spirituality redeems us from our forgetfulness, and so from our sinfulness. It frees us to love self and neighbor. It frees us to speak daring, challenging truth into and for the sake of God’s creation.

         Do blacklivesmatter protests bother you? They bother me. They bother me because no one should have to protest to have their God-imaged humanity valued.

No female or male, child or adult, should have to doubt the sanctity and dignity of their bodies because of the carnal appetites of amnesiacs.

From Flint to Los Angeles, from Aleppo to Calcutta, should anyone have to worry about the water they drink, the air they breathe, the healthcare they need? No! Those are basic human rights.

         That’s uncomfortable. The preacher shouldn’t say those things in church. Shouldn’t he? Are we followers of Jesus, and yet we do not understand these things?

         Claiming the gift of anothen, new birth in Christ, let’s travel together into the new frontier of feral spirituality where we no longer feel threatened by grace, where we no longer reduce God’s Incarnate Word to repeatable precepts and manageable dogmas.

Let’s listen for Jesus reminding us that we who struggle to love are always loved.

That we who are stingy with forgiveness are always forgiven.

That we who feel overwhelmed with anxiety are always accompanied by the Prince of Peace.

         Let us remember, and live our joy.

¹Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, Jossey-Bass, 2011. P. 97.

²Ibid. p. 99

³J. Philip Newell, Christ of the Celts: The Healing of Creation, Jossey-Bass, 2008. P. 9.

United in Suffering (Sermon)

“United in Suffering”

Luke 17:11-19

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

10/16/16

         It’s a proverb as old as humankind itself: Nothing brings people together like a common enemy. All a person has to do is to tap into latent fear, to convince enough people that some one, or group, or thing poses a threat, and that person can rise to power without any capacity for exercising authority responsibly. And when greed, resentment, and vengeance do ascend, the inevitable downfalls tend to be catastrophic. The need to remain diligently aware of this reality has kept Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer on required reading lists for some 400, 700, and 2300 years respectively.

         There’s another kind of enemy that draws people together. When caused not by malicious intent or ignorance but by the inevitable hazards of living in an imperfect world, suffering can bring people together in deep and long-lasting ways. A nuanced enemy, suffering can peel away pretense and prejudice. It frequently heals wounds and divisions that have seemed impervious to time, therapy, and even prayer. Cancer wards and ICU waiting rooms come to mind. 12-Step groups gather people for the specific purpose of sharing addiction-related suffering. It would be hard to find as broad a cross-section of human community as one finds suffering together at an AA meeting.

         On his way from Galilee to Jerusalem, “Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee.” Luke takes us into the in-between place that separates Jews from Samaritans. One of the things that unites each group is enmity with the other. First century Jews know who they are by knowing, among other things, that they are not Samaritans. By most accounts, Samaritans feel the same way. Having clear religious enemies helps to create what must feel like unpolluted identities. They guard their distinctiveness with sacrosanct boundaries.

         As Jesus traverses the liminal space between Jewish and Samaritan worlds, ten lepers approach him. When we learn that “one” is a Samaritan, by implication we learn that the other nine are, or at least include, Jews. Like some slapdash clot of sticks, Styrofoam, and fetid yellow froth on the Nolichucky River, these ten lepers have coalesced into an of eddy of human refuse. Isolated from their communities of origin, they have created a new community of shared suffering. Their union is much simpler and much more sublime than the rituals and dogmas of Mt. Zion and Mt. Gerazim. The ten cling to each other because human beings need, indeed we are created for, relationship.

         Genesis blesses and challenges us with two different creation stories. Neither is told to explain how God creates the universe, but to invite us to stand, together, in awe of the Creator and the Creation. These stories invite us to affirm that God creates all things to live in relationship with each other. The second version of creation makes this explicit when God says, “It is not good that the man should be alone.” The point is: No human being can know or love God without knowing and loving other human beings, other creatures. This holds true because relationship lies at the very core of God’s own self.

Relationship is the source and the goal of our own lives and of our life in God. This is the whole point of talking about God as a dynamic Trinity, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God is the energetic dance within and among all creation. So, whether we’re Presbyterian or Methodist, Christian or Muslim, theist or atheist, introvert or extrovert, straight or gay, hunter or gatherer, Bulldog or Volunteer, human beings, to one degree or another, seek community because that is who we are. It seems to me, then, that the truly ill are those who by some selfish or fearful intent objectify others and push them away.

         Remember Ebenezer Scrooge. Old Scrooge, untainted by the scourge of compassion and kindness, considers himself the sole non-leper in the world. Then, three ghosts remind him of where he comes from, where he is, and where, if things remain unchanged, his life will end – in utter loneliness, forgotten by everyone.

Finally acknowledging his resentment and greed, Scrooge realizes that he is the leper. And, with his business partner, Jacob Marley, gone, he has no one with whom to suffer anymore. Living in a dark, cold world of exile, the rich, old miser is in danger of experiencing complete and terminal isolation in the world.

         Remember, too, his giddy, childlike, effervescent joy when he awakes. Restored to community, Scrooge becomes awestruck by life. He’s grateful and generous in ways that he had forgotten were possible for human beings. Healed of his spiritual leprosy, Scrooge is the foreigner who returns to “give praise to God.”

         It has been well-documented that in the ancient Middle East, the term leprosy encompassed just about everything from diaper rash to actual leprosy, the serious but now-treatable bacterial infection we know as Hansen’s Disease. That broad umbrella allows us to expand the category outward to almost anything that causes us to isolate one person or group from another.

         It seems to me that we live in a terribly leprous world right now. We tend to focus much more energy on identifying enemies and uniting in opposition to them than we do on sharing one another’s suffering. But shared suffering is the whole point of the Incarnation. God deliberately enters the suffering of the beloved creation! God traverses the tragic, beautiful liminal space between birth and death called Life.

Carl Jung once said, “Life is a luminous pause between two great mysteries, which are themselves one.”¹ In this statement I hear Jung saying that God interrupts the uninterruptible. God stakes out boundaries within eternity. Taking an unimaginable risk of vulnerability, God creates space and time in which we are given the opportunity to traverse, consciously, the liminal realm of physicality, with all of its beauty and violence, with all of its joy and agony.

Human institutions tend to construct things like denominations, political parties, country clubs, dress codes, and other idols. Spiritual communities participate in the on-going self-revelation of God called Creation. Spiritual communities make space for healing mercy. They invite others into luminous experiences of reconciling Love. To live in spiritual community is to live in breathless awe and grateful praise of the One Who Creates, and in generous compassion toward all our fellow creatures.

If Jonesborough Presbyterian Church is a truly spiritual community, we know who we are not by trying to demean and disgrace some “enemy.” Nor is our faith making us well by curing leprosy, heart disease, or cancer. We are who we are, and we experience our hope for here, now, and tomorrow by determined witness, in a grotesquely distorted world, to the reconciling power of justice, kindness, humility, gratitude, and fearless dignity in our interactions with one another.

         The late Elie Wiesel said that “Someone who hates one group will end up hating everyone – and, ultimately, hating himself or herself.”²

Uniting around enemies only breeds enmity.

         God is different. Before joining with us in celebration and joy, God unites us with, and unites with us in, suffering. “Our tendency in the midst of suffering,” says Rob Bell, “is to turn on God. To…shake our fist at the sky and say, ‘God, you…have no idea what I'm going through.’

“[But the] cross is God’s way of…taking on flesh and blood and saying, ‘Me too.’”³

        

¹Carl Jung as quoted by Richard Rohr in Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, Jossey-Bass, 2011. P. 88.

²http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/e/elie_wiesel_2.htm

³http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/suffering?page=2

Magnum Opus (Newsletter)

         Last month, JPC had its first retreat in many years. The sixteen of us who attended had a wonderful day of being together at the spectacularly beautiful Holston Camp. Our day began with a slow, hour-long hike led by Dr. Stewart Skeate (skeet), a biology professor from Lee’s McCrae College. With good humor and obvious passion for the natural world, Dr. Skeate talked to us about various trees, ground plants, and one toad.

         When asked about the age of trees, Dr. Skeate said that some of the larger ones could be anywhere from 100-300 years old. Then he tugged gently at a small, spindly sapling next to him. “And this little tree could be as much as thirty to fifty years old itself.” (The towering ancients stunt the growth of younger trees.) “The small ones are waiting for the old ones to fall, and when the summer sun reaches the forest floor, they’ll grow much more efficiently.”

Grace can be a harsh reality. In order to make room for some new growth in ourselves, our communities, our institutions, something must give way, maybe even something magnificent. Life has always been this way. Each visible example of growth – each tree, shrub, weed, and mushroom – is rooted in and an expression of the Deep Mystery always at work beneath the surface. A tree is a kind of magnum opus of the Earth, and Mystery still requires even the mightiest oak to fall and nourish the process that sustained it, perhaps for untold hundreds of years. Trees flourish and die. The Earth remains.

Love is to us what the Earth is to a forest. Because we emerge from and return to the fertile Mystery of Love, Paul writes: “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. I pray that…Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (Eph. 3:14-19)

Each of us is a magnum opus of God. And each of us will die.

In your own short and irreplaceable life, may you be nurtured and humbled by Love.

From Emptiness to Fullness (Sermon)

“From Emptiness to Fullness”

The Book of Ruth

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

 10/2/16

         Famine has taken a grim hold on Judah. Bethlehem, literally “House of Bread,” has become an empty cupboard. Desperate, Elimelech packs up his wife, Naomi, their two sons, Mahlon and Chilion, and what’s left of their belongings, and moves to Moab.

Moab is a place of last resort, like Tarshish, or Samaria, or, I don’t know, Nebraska. Moving to Moab means crossing the tracks. It means trading one kind of empty for another. For Elimelech, though, Moab is the difference between feeding his children and watching them starve.

         Elimelech and family live in Moab for ten years. During that time Mahlon and Chilion reach marrying age, and each takes a Moabite bride. This may be their grandparents’ worst nightmare, but these two are at home in Moab as they never were in Bethlehem. The story doesn’t give us a timeline, but one day Naomi turns around and her life empties out, again. Elimelech, Mahlon, and Chilion have all died, leaving Naomi to care for herself and two daughter’s-in-law, Ruth and Orpah.

         Years ago I saw a bumper sticker that said, “A Woman Without a Man Is Like a Fish Without a Bicycle.” Naomi would not have laughed. In her culture, a woman without a man was more like a fish without gills. Lacking the provision and protection of some male, a woman had to rely on begging, prostitution, or random good luck in order to stay alive. Naomi’s only chance is to return to Judah and hope that some male family member will take her in.

         Gathering her daughters-in-law, Naomi says, “Okay, girls. I’m going back home. There’s nothing for me here. You two go back to your daddies, and try to find new husbands who will care for you. God bless you and all that.”

         Orpah leaks a few crocodile tears, but turns and flees for the safety of her father’s house. Cut from different cloth, Ruth clings to her mother-in-law, and when Naomi tries to dissuade her, Ruth offers one of the most moving vows of faithfulness in all of literature: “Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you!” she says. “Where you go, I will go. Where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die – there will I be buried. May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!”

         When you’re as empty as Naomi, words of unambiguous devotion like that hit the famished palate of your heart like home cooking.

         Overwhelmed by gratitude, Naomi silently agrees.

         When the two arrive in Bethlehem, the women of town come out to meet them. ‘Is that Naomi?’ they say.

         Naomi, whose name means pleasant, stops and says, ‘No. From now on call me Mara [which means bitter], because God has dealt bitterly with me. When I left, I was full, but God has brought me back empty. Why call me pleasant anymore?’

         In spite of appearances, Naomi’s restoration has begun. She finds welcome. And Ruth finds Boaz.

Boaz is kinfolk, and as such he feels some duty toward Naomi. When he discovers who Ruth is, and sees her out gleaning in his fields alongside the other widows, orphans and poor folk, he tells his men, ‘Leave her alone. She’s family.’

         Older and wiser, Naomi begins to see what Ruth does not. Boaz has not only taken pity on Ruth, he has taken a shine to her. Faith, initiative, and gratitude for opportunity being as intimately intertwined as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Naomi hatches a scheme. She tells Ruth to clean up, put on fresh clothes, and go find Boaz at the threshing floor late that night.

Now, this is a family church, but we’re studying the Bible which contains everything from Finding Nemo to Gladiator to Fatal Attraction. Naomi’s innuendo is R-rated. She tells Ruth to go, late at night and uncover Boaz's feet. If you want to know what the Old Testament often means when referring to a man’s “feet,” Google it. Ruth is to uncover Boaz’s feet, and then lie down and wait.

“He will tell you what to do,” says Naomi.

         ‘I bet he will,’ snorts Ruth. ‘But if you say so, I’ll do it.’

         Ruth follows Naomi’s instructions, and when Boaz’s wine wears off, he wakes up. It’s midnight. He feels a draft. He looks down and sees a woman lying beside him.

         “Who are you?” he asks.

         “I’m Ruth,” she says, “your servant. Spread your cloak over me, because you are next-of-kin.” Ruth is telling Boaz that he is bound by custom to marry her and make her a full-fledged member of the family.

         Boaz agrees, but there’s a hitch: There’s another man who is closer kin than he is.

‘Ruth,’ he says, ‘you can sleep here, but scoot over that way just a little bit. I’ll deal with this tomorrow.’

Early the next morning, before the gossip tree awakes, Boaz gets up, gives Ruth some food, and sends her home.

         That day, Boaz calls the other kinsman, and some witnesses, to the city gate. ‘Listen,’ he tells the kinsman. ‘Naomi is selling Elimelech’s farm, and you’re the closest kin. Will you do what’s right and buy the land?’

         Reaching for his checkbook the man says, ‘Sure thing!’

         ‘Hold on,’ says Boaz. ‘You need to know that in buying this land, you also take responsibility for Elimelech’s widow, Naomi, and for Ruth, their son’s widow. She’s a charming young Moabite.’

         Boaz can see prejudice and self-interest working their dark magic in the man’s head. ‘You know,’ says the man, ‘I’ve got enough land. No sense in being greedy. If you want it, it’s yours.’

So the two men swap sandals to seal the deal, and just like that, Naomi and Ruth have a brand new future.

         In time Ruth conceives and bears a son. And all the women of Bethlehem celebrate saying that now Naomi has a son. They even name the child – Obed.

         Throughout the story, God is mentioned, but only as a kind of formality. “May the Lord bless you” is about as close as God seems to get. To me, one of compelling features of this ancient story is God lurking quietly around the edges like some nagging awareness that won’t go away. Then, in chapter 4, we learn something revealing: the child Obed will become the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of David, the great king of Israel. David, Jesse, Obed, and Boaz are all named in the lineage of Jesus, the Bread of Life, born in Bethlehem, the House of Bread. In Jesus, fullness comes to an empty, suffering, and disoriented world. 

         Like Job, Ruth’s story says, Just when you think there’s no hope, no purpose in this life but emptiness, pay attention. Your life is not an end in itself! You are part of a story God is writing. Fear not, because God is with you, leading you, now and always.

Maybe emptiness is leading so many people to shoot their hopeless way through schools, malls, and workplaces. Maybe emptiness causes others of us to hold on to bigotries and fears that close our hearts toward neighbors who inhabit different color skin, who vote on different ballots, and who, if they worship at all, do so in ways unfamiliar to us. And when God feels like a quaint metaphor rather than creation’s lovingly-engaged Protagonist, emptiness can seem like the ultimate reality. But the rich and earthy story of Ruth illustrates that just as Boaz redeems and blesses Ruth and Naomi, God remains at work, redeeming emptiness and creating blessing and fullness for all creation.

Yes, life is hard, but your life is not an end in itself. Wherever you feel emptiness in your own life or in the world, instead of retreating from it, or trying to blame someone else for it, may you find strength to enter it and to live toward the new fullness for which that very emptiness is preparing you.

Striving for the Kingdom (Sermon)

“Striving for the Kingdom”

Luke 12:22-34

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

10/2/16

         Today’s passage often gets cited by people who want to connect with the beloved Hippie Jesus – the Jesus who sits in the middle of a Monet painting smelling flowers, watching birds, and saying, “Dude! It’s all good! Just chill!

         Jesus does say not to worry about physical things, but we’re human beings. Unlike ravens, lilies, and alfalfa whose consciousness happens almost entirely on instinctive and cellular levels, you and I must deliberately toil and spin. So it’s a matter of how we approach our lives. Do we live humbly and gratefully, creatively and generously, faithfully and hopefully? Or do we let selfish and prideful fear drive us? In this case, fear refers not to the fear of not having enough, but the fear of not having the excess which first-world denizens like us have learned to consider necessity.

         I think fear is the great wound of humankind. It always has been, perhaps, and the relentless spotlighting of violent realties from Tulsa to Charlotte to Paris to Aleppo to South Sudan to whatever hides in our closets and lurks under our beds – all of these things can make us terrified of living, terrified of those with whom we live.

It’s hard to say what poses the greatest terror threat – fundamentalism (whether religious, political, or otherwise), selfishness, or simple ignorance. Worldly kingdoms trust intimidation. They love coercion, manipulation, and every other Machiavellian means of the self-perpetuating currency of fear.

When living in fear, human beings concentrate on one thing – ourselves. We worry about what to eat, what to wear, who threatens our privilege, and when the next iPhone comes out. We strive not for gratitude or contentment, but for certainty and excess. We stockpile it, guard it, even kill for it, and all the while thanking God for “our many blessings.” Excess represents some fictitious storehouse that I expect will feed and clothe me forever, as if somehow I will last forever.

In one episode of the PBS series “Downton Abbey,” the Dowager Countess, played to exquisite perfection by Maggie Smith, stands before a splendid dinner table in the waning years of the old British aristocracy. The table is set to try to persuade a rich American to bail out the foundering estate. The ancient aristocrat looks at the table and says with gusto, “Nothing succeeds like excess!”

A spoiled and fearful Anglican, she has completely missed – or dismissed – Jesus’ point: In their time, ravens, lilies, and the grass of the field receive and thrive on God’s gracious provision. And in the fullness of their time, they go to seed and die - as did the Dowager Countess’ hopes.

         “Strive for [God’s] kingdom,” says Jesus. Strive to live differently here and now. Strive to live in the realm of grace, receiving that which you cannot hoard, because you cannot fully receive it except through sharing it.

In Luke 17, some Pharisees hound Jesus about the arrival of the kingdom. “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed,” says Jesus, “nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.” (Luke 17:20b-21) “Among you” can also be translated “within you.”

Striving for God’s kingdom entails infinitely more than trying to secure a spot in some post-mortem paradise. Striving for God’s kingdom means living the new life that Jesus reveals here and now. This kingdom cannot be measured in the ways we measure scarcity, adequacy, and excess. It’s not about gifts given to us for our individual benefit, but gifts given through us for the benefit of all. That means that it’s about relationship – Jesus-style relationship, face-to-face, concrete relationship that transcends the flighty, nebulous, Just Love Everybody philosophy, which, ironically, tends to distance us from real Justice, agape Love, and pretty much Everybody.

When Jesus says, “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,” he challenges us to treasure ourselves and the particular person or persons before us in a particular moment. He challenges us to open our hearts to them, to be present to them humbly, gratefully, and generously.

         We are thriving now, and just like the old British aristocracy, just like last summer’s crops, we are going to die. Will our lives have been worth living? Will we have received and shared with faith, hope, and Love? Or will we have striven in fear, judging our quality of our lives by the quantity of our consumption?

In a poem entitled “When Death Comes,” Mary Oliver writes:

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don't want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,

or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.¹

         We are more than visitors. We are treasured co-creators with God, ones in and through whom God’s kingdom dwells.

¹https://keeleymilne.com/

If You Knew the Gift (Sermon)

“If You Knew the Gift”

John 4:1-15

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

9/18/16

         “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world,” but to save, to heal, and to redeem the world. Because of that, the Son is constantly working his way into and through some sort of tension or conflict. Sometimes it’s petty and momentary, as when disciples jockey for designations of greatness. More often, though, Jesus wades into divisions wide as oceans and wounds deep as time itself.

         While in Judea, Jesus hears gossip that he and his disciples are rapidly gaining followers. Knowing that this will worry the Pharisees in Galilee, he turns north. He heads homeward, into the maw of the Pharisees’ indignation. Nothing says I love you like sitting calmly, gratefully, and generously in the midst of someone else’s anger or fear, even when they project all that anguish onto you.

         Jesus knows that the Pharisees will feel threatened by reports of his evangelical success. Competitive spiritualities have almost everything in common with competitive economies – jealousy, envy, resentment, greed, entitlement, lust for power. Remember Cain and Abel. While the wound is deep, the gift is deeper.

Along the way, Jesus stops at the Samaritan town of Sychar. For all who claim ancient Hebrew roots – and that means the Jews of Samaria and the Jews of Judea and Galilee – Sychar is a storied town. It claims the well that, according to the claims of various histories, was dug on land that tradition claims to have been Jacob’s gift to his favorite son, Joseph. Like centuries of sand layered over the ruins of an ancient synagogue, all those layers of conflicting claims seem to have buried the giftedness of the well and the very idea of gift itself.

         Jesus knows that the woman he meets at the well feels threatened by a lone man speaking to her in a public place. Remember Adam and Eve’s exit from the garden. Enmity between the snake and the woman is nothing compared to the way that story has been used to separate women from men. It’s been used to strip women of their basic humanity, of their innate giftedness as creatures made in the image of God. While that wound is still deep, the gift is deeper.

         The Samaritans and the Jews have been at odds for generations. Even in Jesus’ day there’s no consistent story as to why these spiritual siblings live in such animosity, but somewhere along the line, the Samaritans left or got removed. Now both groups teach their children to live in suspicion and fear of the other rather than sticking to the all-claiming commandment: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone…Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words…Recite them to your children and talk about them.” (Deut. 6:4-6a, 7a)

         Whenever and however it began, the wound separating the Jews of Mt. Zion from the Jews of Mt. Gerizim is deep. But the gift – the gift to them and the gift of them – runs deeper still. And the well at the Samaritan town of Sychar, that hole dug deep into the ground from which nourishing water has flowed for untold centuries, represents both wound and gift.

Isn’t it just like Jesus – to show up right in the middle of our and the world’s deepest wounds? And there, in one way or another, he says to us, “If you knew the gift of God” in this place, you would find living, healing, redeeming water.

That’s easy for a preacher to say from a comfortable pulpit in a comfortable town in a culture that’s about as comfortable as one can find on this planet. But when plagued by some kind of dis-comfort – grief, fear, physical pain, emotional turmoil, vocational upheaval, or simply the dull and dulling ache of existential drift – it is very difficult to accept that there can even be a gift. The presence of a gift would suggest that there is grace, meaning, and hope wrapped up in what feels like the arbitrary torment, relentless drudgery, and occasional pleasure of all this chaos into which we have been thrust by no choice of our own.

The Samaritan woman certainly doubts Jesus’ pie-in-the-sky optimism. Life has gifted her with everything but joy. She’s on her sixth husband, for heaven’s sake. And she’s a woman of Samaria. If she gets caught talking to a Galilean rabbi, she will be the one branded as morally suspect. Where could there possibly be grace, meaning, and hope in her life? What “gift of God” could there possibly be for her to know?

Last Wednesday night our book group read the fourth chapter of Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward. As the epigraph to that chapter, which he entitled “The Tragic Sense of Life,” Rohr quotes writer and feral mystic Annie Dillard. “In the deeps,” says Dillard, “are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our science cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest…” She calls it “the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together…This is given,” she says. “It is not learned.”¹

In place of “ocean or matrix or ether,” we can read the well, the gift of our “caring for each other, and for our life together.” Remember, the well beside which Jesus and the Samaritan woman talk is the well gifted to Joseph. And according to shared tradition, Joseph draws up buckets of Living Water from his brothers’ treachery. “Even though you intended to do harm to me,” he says, “God intended it for good.” (Gen. 50:20)

Joseph rides his monsters downward into “the deeps [of] violence and terror,” and there he discovers Living Water, a gift not only to receive, but to give in gratuitous measure, even and especially to those who had plotted violence against him and who had lied to cover it up.

Like Joseph’s brothers and the Samaritan woman, we are struggling with irksome individuals and distressing circumstances. What will we do? Will we follow anxious “messiahs” who separate us ever further from our neighbors and the creation by encouraging us to judge the sinners and to dismiss the sacredness of the earth? Hasn’t the Church has done more than enough of that over the millennia?

I think Jesus is calling us to the difficult but rewarding discipleship of riding today’s monsters down – like Joseph in Egypt, like Jacob at the Jabbok, like Jesus on Good Friday. A Jesus-life is all about riding monsters down into the depths and discovering there the Living Water that God is using to unite the creation in “complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together.” And when we come to know the gift of God, we know that we are both receivers and givers of God’s re-unifying gift of grace.

I agree with Annie Dillard. This gift is given, not learned. Still, to know the generous measure of this gift, God does more than give it to us. God calls us to do more than claim it and enjoy it. God calls us to be stewards of the gift, to nurture it, to practice it, to live as fountains of Living Water, grateful and generous sharers of Agape Love. Which is everywhere.^*

¹Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2011. p. xviii. (Quoting Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk.)

^*This sermon never felt finished to me. To acknowledge what I imagined others must have felt, I issued a charge at the end of the service saying that I felt like a tour guide who had led them to the front walkway of a house and said, “This is a really interesting house. Cool stuff is going on in there. But I’m not going to take you inside.” There is, indeed, fascinating and significant stuff going on in that house, and while it’s a universal reality, the experience is different for all of us. It’s a story that’s been told and lived thousands of times. It’s one version of the hero’s journey, and we all have to identify and ride our own monsters down. Then and there will we begin to discover the Living Water and the gifts it offers us to enjoy and to share.

Rejoice with Me (Sermon)

“Rejoice with Me”

Luke 15:1-10

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

9/11/16

        

“And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling…”

         Pharisees and scribes are always grumbling. Always complaining about someone. They always seem so sure that they have not only the ability to discern the sheep from the goats, but the right to judge between them. And they have no doubt that they are sheep – the ones to whom joy and blessedness belong. Being stingy with these gifts, the scribes and Pharisees must believe that to share something of value is to forfeit the benefit to which they feel entitled. Isn’t that a cold and joyless blessedness?

         “Margaret” was very bright, very well-read, and well-spoken. She and her husband had retired to North Carolina and brought their two grown, un-launched sons with them. Of the four, only Margaret participated in church. I loved to watch her while I preached. When I said something funny, she’d beam. If she found something challenging, she’d crease her brow in thoughtful reflection. And when I went on too long, or said something carelessly, or said something stupid, she would cringe with her whole body. She cringed a lot back then.

         Agreeing on many things, Margaret and I were pretty good friends. She was, however, a bit more broadminded than some in that congregation could appreciate. Moreover, she came from New Jersey.

One year the nominating committee asked Margaret to serve as an elder. She eagerly accepted the nomination. On the day of the vote, I was blindsided by a nomination from the floor. A long-time member of the congregation was added to the slate. When the vote was over, he was on session. Margaret was not.

I will never forget the profound disappointment and utter embarrassment that darkened Margaret’s face when the results were announced. I, too, felt surprised and betrayed by the entirely legal but flagrant piracy that cast Margaret to the margins of the church community. To her enduring credit, about a year later, she returned. Apparently, while the experience wounded and humiliated Margaret, it did not steal her joy – at least not permanently.

It seems to me now that Margaret does not represent the one lost sheep. No, she represents the ninety-nine sheep left in the wilderness while the shepherd goes in search of the one who is lost. While Margaret recovered from a kind of crucifixion carried out by an ignorance that followed the letter but not the spirit of the Book of Order, the congregation, like lost a sheep wandered willfully astray of grace. Like a lost coin, the congregation rolled haphazardly into some dark corner of the house.

The community, part of it, anyway, had been Judased by the illusion of living in wholeness without embracing the fullness of God’s presence. Looking back on that painful experience, I think Margaret’s return was her acceptance of God’s invitation to “Rejoice with me, for I have found [what was] lost.”

When she returned, Margaret brought a full complement of smiles, creases, and cringes with her. She brought her joy with her. And she brought it to share with, to bless once again the very people who had refused to recognize it as a gift from God.

In the west, the Church is shrinking. It is losing its privileged status. Even worse, having snuggled with wealth and power too closely and too long, the Church has virtually lost its identity in Christ. Until very recently, a majority of American Christians was taught, in ways both subtle and overt, that national citizenship and church membership were basically synonymous.

Many active Christians my age and older desperately miss the vibrancy of yesteryear. And while there was a vibrancy, it seems to me that we often equated numbers with liveliness and health. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to need folding chairs in the aisles on Sunday mornings. I would love for the youth room to need open windows on a Sunday night in January just to keep the inside air fresh. And indeed, this congregation is moving forward with plans to renovate and expand our building in response to an increasing need for space. Many of us find that encouraging and exciting. And I think that as Jonesborough Presbyterian moves forward in our effort, we would do well to imagine ourselves not as the flock to whom lost sheep are being returned, but as one of the lost sheep being restored.

If the Church is to experience renewal, I think we have to begin with confession. I think we have to admit that we have mistaken the height of steeples for depth of faith. We have mistaken cultural influence for spiritual vitality, budgetary abundance for communal wholeness. We have mistaken the commotion of busyness for the shimmering wonder of joy.

In many ways we have, I think, lost our capacity for joy. But remember, joy is so much more than happiness and contentment. Joy is the blessing borne of a circumstance-defying commitment to hope. The nature of both joy and blessedness is such that they cannot be experienced by anyone who would withhold them from others. Paradoxically, blessedness also comes as the gift of sharing sorrow, pain, and disappointment. Indeed, joy may never be so abundant as when sharing our tears and fears.

If the word joy gets misunderstood, the word blessed gets abused in our first-world context. We tend to claim blessedness when enjoying comfort and advantage, but we are never blessed simply by having something of value. Authentic blessedness comes as the gift of sharing that valuable thing. When and if we build an addition, Jonesborough Presbyterian cannot claim blessedness simply by the fact that it exists. Any true blessedness we experience will be in direct proportion to how we use and offer it for the well-being of the creation.

Brothers and sisters, in these trying, often scary days, we can circle our wagons. We can try to control things, or to retreat to a past that will never come again. To experience genuine and lasting renewal, however, I think we must listen first for God’s searching voice, calling us back to the way of Jesus. And to me that means the way of welcoming and risky grace, the way of healing mercy. It means following the way of holy mystery in a culture withered by fear of the unknown, a culture divided by angry condemnations of the other, a culture awash in simplistic, tweetable certainties.

But what if God is stirring about the dust and the mud once again? What if even now God is breathing into the creation brand new life and possibility? If this is happening, and I think it is, we are lost sheep being returned to the fold, and we are the fold being dared to hear God saying to us, “Rejoice with me!”

Re-joice! Recognize and share new joy!

This is our calling: To join Jesus, Margaret, and so many others in giving brand new thanks and praise to the ever new and renewing God.