To the Boats! (Sermon)

“To the Boats!”

Mark 4:35-41

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

5/28/17

In Mark 4, Jesus has been teaching in parables – those wonderful stories that illustrate timeless and transforming truths about who God is and who we are as God’s creatures. Then, Jesus says, “To the boats! We’re going to the other side.”

Now, that should make the disciples wary. In biblical stories, when people cross a bodies of water things tend to get interesting. But at Jesus’ word, the disciples pile in like a bunch of lemmings. Before long, they’re not hearing another parable. They’re living one. A powerful storm sweeps in. It reaches its foamy fingers over the sides of the boat and tries to swallow them whole. Jesus, however, is curled up in the back, asleep.

Teacher! cry the disciples. Wake up, and help us! We’re dying here! Or don’t you even care?

         Don’t you even care? I imagine that, in one way or another, most of us have asked God that uncomfortable question. Most of us have felt the cold, wet hands of fear pounding against our boats, threatening to take us under. We look for signs of that loving, powerful, ever-present God that preachers and Sunday School teachers talk about, and if we find Jesus at all, he’s sawing logs in the back of the boat. If we do find him, we probably don’t want to hear him ask, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”

Last week we talked about trust as indispensable not only to faith, but also to Love. Trust allows us to embrace life’s challenges, and to let go of the fear that keeps us bogged down in comfortable sameness, in selfish judgment of others, and in Love-choking apathy toward suffering.

The disciples face something a bit more immediate, though. Their fears aren’t tied to anything abstract, but to the powerful forces of nature trying to kill them! In their situation, letting go may seem like denial or giving up. And we can understand that. Whether we’re talking about one particular storm, like last night, or hurricane season, or climate change, or famine, or terrorism, or nuclear saber-rattling, or anything else, we have more than enough madness to make us want to keep paddles in hand, bailing buckets at the ready, and swimmies on both arms.

When the storms are bigger than our boat, we can’t just shut our eyes and let go of all that worries us. But today’s story suggests that Jesus does exactly that. He lets go, and even finds rest in the midst of the storm. That suggests to me that a truly Christlike faith has nothing to do with escaping the storms. Instead, faith is the art of Christlike letting go and finding rest even in the midst of them. Resting in the midst of a storm means entering the present turmoil as the pathway to a peace that can be experienced in no other way than by navigating that urgent reality.

Remember the psalmist’s testimony: “The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?…Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear…I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living…be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!” (Selected from Psalm 27)

Remember Paul’s teaching: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For…We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves…groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.” (Selected from Romans 8)

         Between Genesis and Revelation, the phrase “Fear not” appears, in one form or another, 365 times – once for every day of the year.

Throughout scripture, God’s Spirit is saying to us, “Peace! Be still!”

All too often, God gets disfigured by testimonies portraying God as a Santa Claus who exists to grant happiness to good people. Faithful living has nothing to do with avoiding the reality of brokenness and outright chaos in the world. No, I think Jesus sends us into the world’s raging brokenness and capsizing chaos. And he doesn’t send us as warriors armed for violent conquest over enemies and evil. Jesus sends us out as witnesses who are trying to learn the art of loving and trusting God’s peace-crafting, stillness-breathing holiness, even in the midst of the storms.

If I went around and asked each of you who has made the greatest difference in your life of faith, many of you would tell stories of people who entered some storm and helped you to find peace in the midst of it; and that peace helped you find passage through it. That’s why we invite people actually to get involved with Family Promise guests, and with the recipients of food at JAMA and Loaves and Fishes. That’s why ASP asked us to make lunches for the families we helped, and to eat with them. That’s why we do youth ministry. We hire someone to jump in the storm-tossed boat of adolescence with the kids we love and on whom we depend.

The final verse of this story quietly proclaims Resurrection. After Jesus calms the storm, the disciples are “filled with great awe.”

“‘Who is this,’ they ask, ‘that even the wind and the sea obey him?’”

As the body of Christ, do we inspire awe?

I consider Shane Claiborne a modern-day prophet. He makes a meager but extraordinary living in inner-city Philadelphia by jumping into all kinds of boats rocked with grief and fear. In 2009, the very secular Esquire magazine asked Shane to write a letter to “those who don’t believe.”¹ He opens his letter with a parable about walking through downtown Philly with some out-of-town friends. They watched “street performers, artists, [and] musicians.” Next to a magician doing some “pretty sweet tricks,” says Claiborne, “a preacher…[was] yelling into a microphone.” Next to him lay “a coffin with a fake dead body inside.” The preacher’s message: Believe in Jesus or go to hell.

“He wasn’t as captivating as the magician,” says Shane, who wanted to “jump up on a box beside [the preacher] and yell…‘God is not a monster.’”

“The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus,” says Shane Claiborne, “the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination.” He laments the Church’s increasingly un-fascinating presence in the world. “We have given [non-believers] less and less to disbelieve,” he says.

I have to agree. How fascinated and fascinating are we? We proclaim Incarnation and Resurrection, for God’s sake! What kind of awe do we really feel and inspire? The disciples who make the greatest difference are those who are truly stirred, awakened, and maybe even surprised by their own fearless actions on behalf of others. And it seems to me that such “fascinating” witness almost never occurs without genuinely trusting God in the midst of some storm, some new adventure, or some immediate new need. And that means letting go. It means being present with and for the people and the creation around us. And while that means trusting outcomes to God, it also means working toward outcomes that are consistent with the Jesus of scripture – that revolutionary, restful, fascinating, incarnation of divine Love, without whom we are nothing, without whom we have decent, orderly, respectable, and lifeless churches.

Let’s be one of the many hands that Jesus, God Incarnate, waves over the world’s suffering in redeeming Love. In the process, we may find redemption in the midst of our own chaos.

Clouds are gathering.

Things are getting interesting.

Let’s go to the boats!

¹This and all following quotations come from: http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a6646/shane-claiborne-1209/

From Belief to Trust (Sermon)

“From Belief to Trust”

John 14:1-14

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

5/14/17

         When our kids were little, more often than not, a family outing consisted of a trip to the woods. When we lived in Statesboro, GA, that usually meant going to the farm, where we’d walk along the edges of sandy fields or down to the gas line on a road that, at the time, was a shady tunnel of tall pine trees and of live oaks with Spanish moss hanging from the branches like the corpses of ghosts.

         When we lived in Atlanta, that often meant a trip out to that magnificent granite dome called Stone Mountain. In Mebane, we enjoyed the Eno River State Park near Durham where we hiked, fished for blue gill, and watched water snakes sunning on warm rocks. Or we just walked down the dirt road across from the church and wandered through the pastures and woods of the Stanfield farm.

         On these outings, Ben and I had a running game we’d play. It wasn’t an organized activity. It was more of a game of opportunity. When Ben climbed on a fence, a tall stump, a rock, or a fallen tree trunk, I would stand below him and hold out my arms. Without hesitation, he would throw his arms forward like Superman and leap into the air. He laid himself out flat, vulnerable to whatever sticks, rocks, poison ivy, or hard ground lay below. The pure joy for me in this was that I knew that Ben knew that I knew that he was going to trust me, and that I was going to prove trustworthy. And the next time he climbed on something, we’d do it again.

Our game allowed the son to sail, however briefly, through the air and to feel his body’s lightness in freefall. It was a chance to see his father smile and to trust his father’s strength. It allowed the father to demonstrate his playful yet serious love for his son, and to feel that almost perfect delight of being trusted by his child. Such a game had natural limits. Ben eventually got too big for me to catch him. While I know Ben remembers taking those leaps, I’m not sure what, if anything, it still means to him. To me, though, each leap and catch became a 2x4 in a load-bearing wall in the structure of our always-under-construction relationship.

“Believe in God,” says Jesus; “believe also in me.” Believe. Believing has its place in the life of faith. Believing involves a conscious choice for an individual to acknowledge God as a reality, even if a thoroughly mysterious one. But any human decisions we make about God are neither the origin nor the fulfillment of faith. This is what makes a relationship with God and relationships with other human beings so different.

Ben and Elizabeth believed in me because I was right there doing all the normal things that parents do. They could see, hear, and touch me. I could make them feel happy, or angry, or hurt, or embarrassed. (Given the right circumstances, that last one could be a lot of fun!) Using the same criteria, however, they also believed in rocks and pine trees, water snakes and blue gills. In all of those things, seeing was believing. The only choice to make was whether and how to interact with them.

The disciples struggled with this very choice. Immediately before the section of John we read today, the always impetuous Peter declares his absolute loyalty to Jesus saying, “I will lay down my life for you.” But when the cock crows, Peter discovers, to his heartbreaking shame, that all he really believes in is what he sees before him. At that moment, Peter still lacks a larger and vastly more important aspect of faith.

Just before Peter’s empty declaration of loyalty, Jesus says that the thing he really wants from his disciples is for them to love him by loving each other. And that requires more than belief. It requires trust. Trust is that larger and more important thing, because without trust, real Love, particularly agape Love, well, it just doesn’t exist.

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” says Jesus. Trust is the path to the way. Trust is the steadfastness of the truth. Trust is the very breath of the life. The ancient Hebrews called it batach, and we see it embodied in Abraham, Moses, Hannah, and the prophets. In the east it’s called, among other things, saddahati, and it describes the daring faith that allows one to leap into relationships of transparent and vulnerable mutuality.¹ May Native American traditions speak of The Great Spirit from whom all things come, to whom all things go, and in which all things exist. In Celtic Christianity it’s called the Cosmic Christ, the Christ who was “in the beginning with God,” the Christ through whom “all things came into being,” the Christ who was, and is, and always will be one with God – the God who, says First John, “is Love.”

Through its first two millennia, the Church has often used Jesus’ way, truth, and life statement to try to shackle God to exclusively Christian perceptions and opinions. And while I don’t think that we can claim to be the only ones to see that which we call the Christ, I do think that we can claim, with confident yet humble gratitude, that, in Jesus, we do experience the Son whose entire life, death, and rising again consist of one great leap after another into the Father’s arms. As Christians, we discover the way, the truth, and the life by trusting and following Jesus, the one who embodies world-transforming Love.

Just as the Father calls Abram to go, Moses to lead, Hannah to surrender her child, and David to repent, the Son calls Peter, and all of us, to trust. He calls us to the disciplined practice of leaping into the unknown, knowing that no matter what happens, through our experiences of trust, God is declaring God’s presence to us.

Our leaping trust stirs the rich compost of our lives and creates opportunities for us to witness to God’s presence and faithfulness by living in greater dependence on God’s Love, compassion, and justice in and for the world.

These are the “greater works” to which Jesus refers.

This is the promise of an incarnational faith.

Believe it or not, but trust it with all your heart, and soul, and mind, and strength.

¹http://www.buddhisma2z.com/content.php?id=426

The Purple Bubblegum House (Sermon)

“The Purple Bubblegum House

John 2:13-22

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

5/14/17

         With your indulgence, I’d like to take you on a trip to LA this morning. And by LA I mean Lower Alabama, which is, for better and worse, everything Los Angeles is not.

Every three years, since the late 1940’s, on the weekend nearest July 4^th, the Salter/Lawson clan has held a reunion. My mother’s mother was a Salter, and this is her extended family – so extended, in fact, that like Jeff Foxworthy’s old redneck joke, it would actually be a fine place to look for a date.

         The reunion takes place in a community called Josie, Alabama. If you need help placing it, Josie is on US Highway 29 just south of Perote, not far from Blues Old Stand and Smut Eye. There’s a crossroads at Josie. Well, crossroads is a little generous, but a county road does turn east off the highway right there.

Josie got its name from my great-grandmother, Josie Lawson. Back in the early 1880’s, folks in that community decided to give their little corner of the world a name. They took suggestions and put them in a hat.  Josie had just been born, so her parents threw in their new daughter’s name. And by the luck of the draw, literally, the people named their community Josie.

About a tenth of a mile north of the crossroads, on the east side of the highway, and maybe 20 feet off the blacktop, stands the now-uninhabitable shell of the old Salter house. During reunions, the Salter clan used to gather in that house. Now we just gather around it in the shade of the oak trees, while the Lawsons gather across the road under a tall pole barn where everyone comes together to eat.

My grandmother, one of twelve children, was born in the Salter house 115 years ago. Beneath the ugly, scalloped siding lies the original heart-pine clapboard, but no one under 80 has ever seen it.

         When built, the house had three large bedrooms coming off of the wide hallway down the middle. During the reunion, sacred artifacts were brought out and laid with care on the beds. They included clothing and jewelry worn by the Salters. There were yellowed letters and faded pictures. There was even a gnarled, wooden cane which, family legend holds, was used by a great-great-grandfather when he walked back to Pike County, AL after being wounded in the Battle of Atlanta.

         Just off the left side of the front porch, next to the door was an addition. Built around 1910, it was, and is, still called the “new room.” Three or four reunions ago, Marianne and I stayed in the new room, and I almost fell through a rotting floorboard and into the heaven-knows-what of a crawl space below.

On the back of the house was the spacious kitchen. Being places of gathering and nurturing, kitchens used to share holy-of-holies status with the front porch. During reunions, the kitchen and the front porch were still the most-used areas of the house.

         If you took the path down the hill behind the house, and followed the rich aroma of moisture and earthy rot, in about 50 yards you’d find the natural spring from which the Salter’s drew their drinking, cooking, and bathing water before deep wells and plumbing came along. The last time I was there, the spring was still running.

         At one reunion back in the late 1960’s, my sister, Laura, and I found a glass jar on a kitchen counter. In the jar were little purple balls of bubblegum, individually wrapped in crinkly cellophane. For some reason, happening upon that purple bubblegum became a defining event.

         That house has stood in that place for over 100 years. Ernest Salter, my great-grandfather, was a country doctor. He lived in and worked out of that house, caring for people in the surrounding counties. Not long after the birth of Edwin, child #12, Josie died of cancer in that house. On numerous occasions after Ernest’s death, members of the family stayed there while in some sort of transition, especially after World War II. The Salter house has been a home, a way station, a refuge, and a place to gather and remember. But time has a way of creating distance, even if you’re not all that far away.

When my mother was a child in Montgomery, about an hour up the road, her mother called every trip to Josie “going down home.” Descendants who had moved to southwest Georgia called it the “Alabama Home.” Illinois and Michigan relatives called it the “Josie Home.” When I was young, a trip to Josie was called “going to the country.” Since the discovery my sister and I made nearly 50 years ago, our family has called it “The Purple Bubblegum House.” Do you feel the progression of distance?

While I always loved going to the Salter house, and in spite of having deep and identifying roots there, it was never my home. When I arrived, I expected someone to have gotten it ready. When I left, I straightened up anything I put out of place, but I left the real cleanup and maintenance to others. During reunions, I sat in the shade of oak trees and nostalgia, but not in the light of immediate belonging to and personal responsibility for that place.

         The temple is Israel’s old home place. Through the temple, Yahweh lived with the people and the people lived with Yahweh. By Jesus’ day, distance has taken a toll. And while it wasn’t any one person’s fault, that which had been built as a place for worship has become an object of worship. Its rich, spiritual traditions have dimmed into mere religion. Israel’s old home place is disappearing beneath the kudzu of self-serving piety. Its priests and prophets and have become administrators of a large, wealthy, and powerful business. Like the Purple Bubblegum House, it’s a well-visited, but rather un-lived-in relic.

         When Jesus enters the temple, the Jews are preparing for a reunion of sorts. They’re preparing for Passover, the ritualized remembrance of the formative experience of Exodus. And Jesus doesn’t just enter the temple; he makes an entrance. Grabbing a handful of ropes and slinging them around like a whip, he drives moneychangers and livestock salesmen out of the temple the way he drives demons out of people.

         Over the centuries, the intensity of Jesus’ reaction has caused lots of embarrassment and equivocation. It’s also been used to justify all manner of un-Christlike violence.

Well, I started wondering: Could Jesus’ disruptive zeal be an intentional reenactment of Passover? Could he be re-membering more than just the preparations to leave Egypt? Could he be trying to remind the Jewish people that just as they fled the enslaving whip of Pharaoh, now they must flee the enslaving whip of a religion that has become an institution that exists for its own sake? Is this the beginning of a new Passover and a new Exodus? A new journey of discovery with Jesus, the new Moses, saying, Let my people go! Let this deathliness die and new life arise!

         Facing changes and challenges of our own, we can understand why the temple leaders opposed Jesus with such panicked fury. He is threatening everything that has become sacred, dependable, and comfortable to them. So, said Fred Craddock, “in the throes of death, and in a move toward self-preservation, the temple keepers…destroy the One in whom God and humankind meet.”¹

         For eons, human beings have been manipulating, intimidating, and even killing in order to control and maintain beloved institutions. The Church participates in that carnage, and sometimes, that so discourages me that I want to hang this robe on a hook and walk away for good.

But where would I go? Josie, Alabama? I don’t live there. I don’t live in Shelby, or Mebane, or Statesboro, or Augusta, either. For now, I live in Jonesborough – with you.

         As the Church and a church, we are Christ’s body, a place of transforming worship, fellowship, and witness. When we forget that, we live as an aging and irrelevant institution in love with itself rather than with God. But when we clear this place of its forgetfulness, of its rigor mortis, when we really come alive here through the power of God’s Holy Spirit, this is a well-lived-in house – a mansion with many rooms, and porches, and shade trees, and well-springs, and memories, and a big kitchen where we all eat together.

         Every Sunday can be a family reunion, and the more new and unfamiliar faces there are, the more like God’s family we look.

Whether you have come here all your life, or whether you are here for the first time today, Welcome Home!

¹Fred B. Craddock, Preaching Through the Christian Year, Craddock, et al. 1993, Trinity Press International. Pg. 155.

The Gate (Sermon)

“The Gate”

John 10:1-10

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

5/7/17

         When our Sunday school class discussed this passage two weeks ago, one member of the group enlightened all of us on first-century sheepfolds. He told us that, as the name implies, a sheepfold is an enclosed space in which sheep are kept, usually overnight when predators prowl the darkness. He also said that sheepfolds were essentially commons areas. So, my sheep would have been mixed in with your sheep, and all of them entrusted to the care of the shepherds on graveyard shift.

         Now, sheep aren’t known for being particularly smart animals, but they apparently have the capacity to distinguish voices, and to trust that one familiar voice when it speaks. So, in the morning, my flock would follow me, and your flock would follow you as we each lead our own sheep to green pastures and still waters.

         The gate, then, was more than a passageway to be opened, closed, and guarded. It was a gathering place – the place we congregated to lay our flock by for the night, and where we met again to call our flock out at the dawn of each new day. This reminds me of the last verse of Psalm 121: “The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore.”

When Jesus calls himself the gate, he lays claim to that same welcoming and commissioning lordship. He is the gathering place where we are received, watched over, and sent back out.

It seems to me that one of the most consistent sins of the Church has been its willing, and often deliberate confusion regarding its place in the sheepfold. The Church has assumed for itself the role of the gate, rather than the witness to it. Now, by necessity, all human communities, including the Church, create statements of identity and purpose, as well as procedural guidelines. The Church’s blunder begins when it forgets that it’s a community of intentional and transformational witness to Mystery, to Incarnation and Resurrection.

It’s hard to be that kind of community, though. Religiously speaking, we’re not the only game in town. And it’s all-too-easy to adopt the exclusive ways and violent means of nations and other worldly institutions. In an effort to survive, we – and that’s a very broad, 2000-year-old we – have frequently gotten in bed with worldly power in order to protect and enhance our status. The medieval Roman Catholic Church got so politically powerful that it frequently bullied political leaders with the threat of excommunication. Make these policies, and issue these statements, said popes to emperors and kings, or we will condemn you to hell.

Now, fear does motivate, but it does not redeem. It doesn’t welcome, heal, and renew. Fear does not and cannot bear witness to Christ. But God knows the Church has tried to use fear as a tool for ministry.

Today we will celebrate the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. If we were Jonesborough Presbyterian Church 200 years ago, some of you would have little metal tokens in your pocket. And when it came time for communion, only those with tokens would be able to receive the sacrament. In the days prior to the sacrament, you see, the pastor would visit with each member who was eligible to take communion, and he would examine you. He would ask you questions about what you believe, and how you’ve been behaving since the last time you took communion. And if you didn’t pass muster, you didn’t get a token. You had to sit there, excluded and afraid, watching others more deserving than you partake in the reminder of God’s unconditional grace in and for the creation.

I am unspeakably grateful that my job does not include that kind of gatekeeping. I am not the gate. We are not the gate. Jesus is the gate. He is the place where we gather to be reminded that we are members of his own beloved fold. He calls us in. He surrounds us with himself. And he sends us out to live as witnesses to his gracious Love in and for the world.

No, the world is not a safe and comfortable place. There will always be threats and challenges to the well-being of all things under the sun. That being said, if there are “thieves and bandits” who warrant our vigilant attention, I think they are, first and foremost, those voices in our own midst that seek to limit grace, to guard the gate, and to make it a place to which one must earn access. Thieves and bandits seek to control rather than contribute. They seek to investigate rather than invite. They tear down and destroy by abusing and abandoning peacemakers, those who demonstrate poverty of spirit, meekness, mercy, purity of heart, and who, in the face of violence and persecution, remain at the gate, that place of kindness and compassion.

Striving to enter the fold wielding power and peddling influence, thieves, bandits, and gatekeepers may, for a time, sustain a status quo that benefits a privileged few. Unlike the true gate, however, they are helpless to lead anyone to abundant life.

When I, as a minister of Word and Sacrament, stand at Christ’s table to speak the invitation, to pray the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving, and to recite the words of institution, I make it my mission to open this table to everyone. I don’t ask anyone to profess anything in particular or to act any certain way. Some may find that irresponsible, and I can appreciate that. A certain degree of understanding does help a person to engage meaningfully in the sacrament. But, remember, when Jesus celebrates Passover with his disciples, he institutes this sacrament. And he shares that most significant meal with people who do not understand him, men who will abandon him. He even dips bread into the dish with Judas, his betrayer. Jesus receives all of them at the table.

In place of the Passover meal, the Gospel of John includes the profoundly intimate scene of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. During that holy moment, Jesus says, “You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” (John 13:7)

Through all things, Jesus trusts that his words and actions will, as God says through Isaiah, “not return to me empty, but…shall accomplish that which I purpose. (Isaiah 55:11)

As the gate, Jesus offers himself as the place to gather, to be welcomed, embraced, fed, nurtured. He offers himself as the one through whom we are sent out to live as those who have been healed of fear, judgment, ingratitude, and death in all its forms.

In return, Jesus asks of us both far less and far more than submission to well-argued dogmas and commitment to quantifiable behaviors. He asks us, for the sake of others, to trust his voice, to follow him, and to live the new and abundant life of holy Love.

Emptied into Fullness (May 2017 Newsletter)

         In her book, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, comparative religions scholar Karen Armstrong says that Gandhi, by the end of his life, “claimed that he no longer hated anybody. He might have hated the oppressive system of British colonialism, but he could not hate the people who implemented it.

‘Mine is not an exclusive love,’” said Gandhi. “‘For…a love that is based on the goodness of those whom you love is a mercenary affair.’”¹

         Linger with that phrase: A love that is based on the goodness of those whom you love is a mercenary affair.

         Gandhi, a Hindu, lived what I would call a Gospel faith so much more faithfully than I have ever dared to live it. Embracing Jesus throws us into a paradox. He invites us to commit our entire being – heart, soul, mind, and strength – to the disciplines of agape Love. The paradox mystifies us when we realize that committing our whole selves to Love means emptying ourselves as completely as Jesus “emptied” and “humbled” himself (Philippians 2:7-8). To love as we are loved means both denying and claiming the fullness of our God-imaged humanity.

         This is extraordinarily difficult for us. Always rewarding competition over compassion, fear over gratitude, greed over generosity, and pride over humility, first-world cultures reduce faithfulness to a narrow set of broad loyalties. It comes across as a kind of God and country syndrome in which the regurgitation of certain dogmas and slogans are all one needs to give the appearance of devotion. That veneer allows the individual to claim entitlement to a degree of excess that robs the disadvantaged of their opportunity to thrive and the privileged of their deeper and truer humanity. The “Christian nation” of Great Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw nothing inconsistent with combining Jesus-speak and imperialism. That same social/religious paradigm leads many of us to confuse excess and well-being with God’s blessing and, therefore, poverty and hardship with God’s judgment. (Thus, a US congressman can dismiss the majority of those with pre-existing medical conditions as bad people.²)

         It seems to me that, Jesus, not to be undone by the frailties of his followers, often goes underground. He relentlessly seeks alternative ways and means of doing Love’s transforming work in the world. Now, I do trust that God always abides in and for the Church, and loves the creation in and through the Church. I also trust that God acts through any one or any institution who, at any given time, has the capacity for enduring the paradox of the fulfilling emptiness of grace. But oh, what a joy it is when the Church finds the grace to be truly faithful to Love!

Richard Rohr writes these words of assurance and summons: “The great thing about God’s love is that it’s not determined by the object. God does not love us because we are good. God loves us because God is good.”³

When following Jesus, we are not mercenaries. We are enfleshed expressions of the presence of God’s transforming and resurrecting Love in and for the world.

May we all be emptied into the fullness of that promise.

                                                      Peace,

                                                               Allen

¹Karen Armstrong, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2010. Pp. 181-182.

²http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2017/05/rep_mo_brooks_people_who_live.html

³http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Daily-Meditation--God-Does-Not-Love-You-Because-You-Are-Good--You-Are-Good-Because-God-Loves-You----Foundation----Fourth-Sunday-.html?soid=1103098668616&aid=iMxyC8HyqGE

Bartholomew's Story (A Story Sermon)

“Bartholomew’s Story”

John 20:19-29

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

4/23/17

         My name is Bartholomew. Literally, that means Son of Talmai. Bartholomew also means hill or furrow. So, as Bartholomew, I am a mountain and a ditch, a rise and a fall. I’m neither here nor there. The irony isn’t lost on me. I’m a charter member of one of the most famous groups of men in the history of the world, the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, and if any of you know anything about me, it probably begins with: “According to legend…”

         So, that’s me, Bartholomew: a great mystery in which no one is interested.

But I was there. I was there the night following the morning when the women came saying that they had seen Jesus who had died. Peter and the disciple we called Yadid, The Beloved, said that they had also seen the tomb, and it was empty. That left us with a kind of terrified hope. If what they said were true, what happened? Would we see also Jesus? What could all this mean?

Matthew, ever the dispassionate tax collector, calmed us down. He said that, by itself, an empty grave proved nothing – especially since Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. None of us ever trusted those two. They skulked around the edges of things afraid of what might happen if the Jewish leadership saw them with Jesus.

Then again, on Friday, the rest of us fled into the shadows for that very reason. Except for Yadid. Yadid, along with Jesus’ mother, saw the whole sad matter through to the end.

On Saturday night, when things were returning to business as usual in Jerusalem, we regrouped in the garden where Jesus had been arrested – and abandoned. We crept around the city, trying to find a safe place to hide and figure out what to do next. We felt like homeless children, sneaking around, scared, indecisive.

We all looked at Simon Peter. He knew we were looking at him, watching him, waiting to take our cue from him. But Peter, The Rock, seemed to be crumbling.

Finally, Simon led us down a dark side street and sat down on an empty rain barrel. A waxing moon leaked just enough pale light for us to see each other’s faces. Peter hung his head and said, “Had I been the man I thought I was, I’d have died yesterday, too. My death would have helped you more than my pitiful life ever will.” Then he raised his head and looked at each of us individually. We all stared back at him.

After a few moments, the old fisherman stood up slowly. He quit making eye contact with each of us, and he cast his gaze over all of us at once. I don’t know what he was seeing. It wasn’t apparent that he knew, either. But I’d seen that look before, when he was fishing, when he was reading the water, smelling the wind, feeling the energy beneath the boat. All the fishermen had that look, but none wore it more intensely Simon.

Peter’s demeanor began to change, as if something inside him was shifting, or turning. He seemed to be looking at something, or for something in the small but deep sea of our faces. I suppose it’s no trifling thing to have a group of nervous, exhausted, silently-pleading faces focus on you all at once. Especially when you love them. And for all his bluster and bravado, Peter was, we knew, driven by love.

“Ok,” said Peter. “We can’t get far tonight. So, let’s get safe. We’re going where no Jewish leader will come looking for us.”

That’s how we ended up in that room above a butcher shop. Fishermen and butchers tended to know each other, and Peter knew this butcher well. His name – and I’m not making this up – was Porcius. A Gentile butcher named pig. Peter was right. The Jews would not look for us at Porcius’ shop.

As we entered the room, James lit a candle and moved to set it on a small table, the lone piece of furniture in that space. In wordless haste, Peter blew the candle out. Our quick glance into the room revealed that it was large enough for the twelve – eleven – of us, and that no one lived there. Our first breath told us why. You could purge only so much of the stench of rotten flesh and blood out of those porous, mud walls. In dark silence, we locked the door and shuttered the window.

We stayed inside all night, and all the next day. Knowing where we were, the women brought some food and water to us soon after we settled in on Saturday night. But we ate nothing. It was hard enough just to breathe that rancid, venomous air. Interred in that room, we not only smelled death; we smelled of death. We yearned to escape, to get outside, back into the light and into clean, moving air. But our memories of Friday smothered our spirits and kept us sitting there in a lifeless heap.

Except for Thomas. Thomas, well, he never seemed to be all there. He was always restless, always missing something and having to go fetch it. He often came back with nothing but stories of having been in some dangerous place searching for God knows what. “You’re going to get killed going places like that,” we’d say. But Thomas would just shrug us off. So, we were only mildly surprised to wake up on Sunday morning and discover that he had slipped out in the middle of the night.

Sunday morning. That’s when the women came telling the news I mentioned earlier. When Peter and Yadid told us their story, none of us had anything but questions and outright doubts. Between sunrise and sunset on Sunday, we were all Bartholomews. We all wavered between joy and fear, belief and unbelief, yes and no.

Then. Then came Sunday night.

         Peter’s voice startled me.

         “Who opened the window?” he said with an angry hiss. “Do you want us to be found out?”

         “The window is closed, Brother,” said Andrew.

And, it was. But we did feel and smell fresh air move through the room. Not knowing or, at the moment, even caring where it came from, we all inhaled deeply. The unsullied air revived us, renewed us.

“Peace be with you,” said someone.

To hear of something is one thing. To experience it is altogether different. In this case, however, neither was particularly comforting at first. I can’t explain any of this, but when we turned toward the voice, we saw him. We saw outstretched hands, and ragged wounds.

At first, we just looked, and blinked, and looked again. As for me, Bartholomew, while my mind leapt forward to embrace him, my body inched backward and cowered behind the others.

“Peace be with you,” he said, again. “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

Then Jesus opened inhaled deeply. He pursed his lips, and blew on us. I felt and heard a wind rush through the room. It rustled our cloaks and tousled our hair.

 Now, it took me a while to make peace with the next thing Jesus said because it sounded like he was telling us to forgive some people and to withhold forgiveness from others, and that it was up to us to choose. It sounded so unlike him, that it made me think that wasn’t Jesus at all, but some cruel hallucination induced by fear, guilt, fatigue, and the unyielding stench of our hideout. As soon as he spoke those peculiar words, he was gone.

Thomas returned not long after this…encounter. We told him what had happened, what we had, indeed, seen and heard. When he refused to believe us, I got angry with him. Over the last three years, we had learned to trust each other. It’s how we faced all our ordeals and still managed to stay together, to stay focused and committed. Who was Thomas to doubt our word, to judge our experience?

         So, the first time I saw Jesus on Sunday ended up making me mad at Thomas for the rest of the week. Isn’t that just like me?

         After that, we started to venture out, carefully. A week later, all of us were back in that room. “Peace be with you.” And there he was, again.

         The first thing he did was to show his wounds to Thomas. You know, at first I wanted Jesus to rebuke Thomas. I wanted to watch him cringe and apologize. But when he saw Jesus with his own eyes, when he touched him, Thomas said, “My Lord and my God!”

At that moment, something opened inside me. I began to understand that being a disciple meant, and means, living a life through which Jesus sneaks up on others and breathes his shalom upon them. It means practicing forgiveness and compassion. In a world where so many of us hole up behind locked doors, terrified of others, or of ourselves, withholding the grace and forgiveness of Christ within us can be to deny that same holiness in others. The work of a disciple is to claim and to share Christ’s love within us, and to seek and to evoke that love in others, regardless of the cost.

         You know, “according to legend,” I was responsible for the most underwhelming miracles, feats having to do with how much certain things weighed, and when they weighed it. When I died, I was either beaten and drowned, or crucified upside down, or skinned alive. Regardless of the lore around my unremarkable life and death, the only thing I care about is whether even one story remains of me introducing other people to the Christ within them. While legend seems to have forgotten such things, apparently, at some point between climbing hills and digging furrows, I loved others as Jesus loved me.

If, as Bartholomew, I ran hot and cold, well, that’s a human thing. I bet you’ve done it, too. But as Bartholomew, I was also a height and a depth, just like holiness. The great and glorious, Christ-taught truth is that in life and in death, seeking shalom, seeking oneness with God through giving and receiving love, this is the search that leads us toward authentic human life. Surely, this is to know and to proclaim salvation.

         I pray that whatever you see or do not see, you not only believe what I’ve told you, but that you trust that you bear God’s image, that the love within you is Christ’s presence, and that the peace stirring your heart is Holy Spirit’s breath.

May you believe and trust that this is true not for yourself alone, but for everyone you meet. And may you share your faith with unbroken gratitude and fearless generosity.

         Know this, too: With the Love of Christ, I love you all.

Galilee: The Nursery of Discipleship (Easter Sermon)

“Galilee: The Nursery of Discipleship”

Matthew 28:1-10

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

Easter Sunday – April 16, 2017

         It is dawn, on the first day of a new week. Without saying it explicitly, the Easter story seems to be singing: Fresh start! Do over! It may be more accurate, however, to hear the gospel taking a deep breath and saying: Here we go. Back to square one.

         Think about it. The disciples had enough trouble trying to follow Jesus in the first place. Now the women are telling them that Jesus – whom they all abandoned, and who died a criminal’s death – is alive. And that he still wants them to follow him.

‘Galilee,’ the women said. ‘Jesus will meet us in Galilee.’

         Galilee, remember, is where it all began. Galilee is where Jesus trolled the lakefront for followers. Galilee is where Peter, Andrew, James, and John all abandoned their fathers and their livelihoods for the sake of a rabbi with lots of charisma but no resume. And now they are being called to return. Jesus calls them back to Galilee because it’s time to start over, from a brand new square one.

         It seems to me that the challenging thing about both Incarnation and Resurrection is not that they ask us to believe the implausible. On the whole, it’s easy enough to choose to say “Yes” to both of those miracles and leave it at that – especially if one has been taught to imagine God as more wrathful than grief-stricken at the world’s suffering. But isn’t that just hedging bets?

We face the real challenge of faith when we grow into the realization that Incarnation and Resurrection dare us to entrust our lives to something beyond our comprehension. If the birth of Jesus reveals that the Creator chooses to be made manifest in and through the material Creation, and if the resurrection of Jesus reveals that God transcends and transforms human arrogance and violence, that makes us participants in and witnesses to the mysteries of God’s creative and re-creative Love. When we not only choose to believe, but intentionally pledge ourselves to God’s provocative truth, our lives move in entirely new directions. But what does that look like for us, here and now?

Our story says that we have to go to Galilee to find out. Galilee becomes more than just the place where Jesus called his first disciples. Galilee now represents the place where true discipleship begins, and begins anew. It’s the launch pad into the unexplored territory of ever-deepening discovery and trust. Galilee is the nursery of new discipleship.

         In Matthew, it was on a hill in Galilee that Jesus preached his ground-breaking Sermon on the Mount. We spent time with the Beatitudes on the last Sunday of January this year. And I made the point that these nine statements rise beyond commandments. The Beatitudes describe a flow of spiritual growth that begins with poverty of spirit. Each step builds on the previous step until, at the end, one can face persecution with a sense of purpose. But facing that suffering places the disciple right back at square one. It delivers us to a new poverty of spirit, because regardless of the purpose, physical and emotional injury hurts.

Returning to the nursery of newness, we begin the spiritual journey all over, again. And we soon discover that our new journey demands more of us. But we’re ready for more. The new journey’s increased intensity leads us to ever deepening maturity. Encountering some new aspect of the image of God within us, we find ourselves able to share that holiness more freely and to see it in others more clearly.

The humbling and exciting mystery in all this is that the more our understanding of God expands, the more we see God expanding beyond our understanding. That realization that God exceeds human comprehension and categories often comes to us through some sort of painful, Friday experience that sends us right back to the lakeshore in Galilee. And there Jesus meets us, saying, Welcome back. Now, follow me some more. And get ready. We’re going a little further this time.

Corrie and Betsie Ten Boom were sisters, Dutch Christians who went to Ravensbruck concentration camp during World War II for hiding Jewish neighbors from the Nazis. Betsie would die in the concentration camp, and Corrie would be released. Through a clerical error. One week before all women her age were executed in gas chambers.¹

In her book, The Hiding Place, Corrie describes the moment she saw one the guards from Ravensbruck for the first time after the war.

“It was at a church service in Munich that I saw him,” she says, “a former S.S. man who had stood guard at the shower room door in the processing center…And suddenly it was all there – the roomful of mocking men, the heaps of clothing, Betsie’s pain-blanched face.

“He came up to me as the church was emptying, beaming and bowing. ‘How grateful I am for your message, Fraulein…To think that, as you say, He has washed my sins away!’ His hand was thrust out to shake mine. And I, who had preached so often…the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side.

“Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more?…I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity. And so…I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I prayed, I cannot forgive him. Give me Your forgiveness.

“As I took his hand,” says Corrie Ten Boom, “the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me. And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on [God’s]. When [God] tells us to love our enemies, [God] gives, along with the command, the love itself.”

         I pray fervently that none of you ever experiences trauma as dramatic as Corrie Ten Boom’s. But do you see how she survived persecution, only to find herself at a place of brand new poverty of spirit? And in that church in Munich, she found herself back in Galilee, facing a call to enter a brand new journey of discipleship. At first that discipleship felt too deep and too challenging to enter.

Nonetheless, having learned to follow, Corrie trusted and followed the risen Christ. She followed him into a most unexpected moment of redemption, one that enriches us with an enduring witness to the power of Resurrection to heal and make new.

¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrie_ten_Boom

²http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/102203.Corrie_ten_Boom?page=2