November Texts (Sermon)

“November Texts”

1Thessalonians 5:1-11

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

11/19/17

         Along with April, October is one of my favorite months. A reckless gala of the summer’s richness and vitality, October hits us with a sensory overload: reds, yellows, oranges, cobalt skies – Christmas decorations. As the northern hemisphere tilts away from the sun, cooler air wicks away humidity. It’s not cold yet, but the sun feels a little kinder on our skin. It shines a little more gently in our eyes.

         Then comes November. The extravagant flame-out of October has been reduced, for the most part, to some tarnished gold high in the hickories and the darkening burgundy of white and red oaks. As the surrender to brown and gray quickens, November becomes a kind of circumstantial text calling us to prepare for even shorter, colder days. With heat pumps, electric blankets, and a warming atmosphere, we’re less vulnerable to winter than folks were a century ago. Still, while so much of the life around us turns dark and brittle, and sinks into the cold pillow of winter, wouldn’t it be nice, in worship, to hear brighter, more heart-warming texts than we’ve been hearing from Matthew and, now, from 1Thessalonians?

         Sure, I can pick any passage I want. There’s nothing obligatory or sacred about the lectionary. On the other hand, there is method to the lectionary’s madness. By design, November texts unsettle us. They call us to self-examination. They dare us to confess our personal, ecclesiastical, and cultural brokenness and our need for redemption.

I promise to get to 1Thessalonians, but bear with me through a kind of big-picture approach.

November texts prepare us for Advent texts, which prepare for the good news of the Incarnation. Central to Advent is the prophecy of Isaiah, the prophet to exiles in Babylon. Isaiah speaks such re-orienting words as, “Comfort, O comfort my people,” and “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord.” And Isaiah’s inspiring words have to push through a curious and disturbing phenomenon.

         The Israelites have been in exile for about three generations. So, many among the vanquished and displaced are forgetting their defining stories and rituals. Fewer and fewer Israelites are feeling like exiles, because more and more, Babylon feels like home. The modern psychological term for this is Stockholm Syndrome; captives identify with and even bond with their captors. And it’s easy to see why new generations of Israelites might adopt Babylon. It’s a place of wealth, abundance, and opportunity – a place that feels like it’s in a perpetual April-to-October loop. But the Hebrew’s story makes it clear that riches and power are not signs of God’s favor. Indeed, overabundance usually blinds us to true blessedness. It renders us too greedy and fearful to live as blessings for others.

         It’s no surprise, then, that Isaiah’s prophecy spans the careers of several prophets from Isaiah’s school. It takes a long time for his good news to burrow beneath the numbness and complacency of exile and to re-awaken spiritual memory.

Re-awakening to deep-time memory is not only a long process, it can be painful, too. It’s kind of like coming in on a bitterly cold day and running warm water over your icy fingers. The water hurts because your brain can’t handle the abrupt change of signal from cold to warm. The pain is necessary, though. Severe frostbite can cost us hands and feet, noses and ears.

For Israel, Jeremiah is the warm water being poured over their numbed memories. And his words hurt. “My anguish, my anguish!” cries Yahweh. “My heart is beating wildly’ I cannot keep silent…For my people do not know me, they are stupid children, they have no understanding.” (Jer. 4:19, 22)

         The psalmist’s lament also calls Israel to re-awakening: “By the water of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion…On the willows there we hung our harps…How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” (Ps. 137:1-2, 4)

         In the same way that Jeremiah and the psalmist prepare Israel for Isaiah’s hopeful prophecy, the November texts of Matthew and 1Thessalonians sting us. They call us to prepare for the re-awakening texts of Advent.

Like Jesus, Paul never shies away from truth-telling. And he seems to know how tempting it is to get comfortable with Babylon’s promises and creature comforts. Offering a Jeremiah-like warning to the Thessalonians, Paul writes: “When they say, ‘There is peace and security,’ then sudden destruction will come upon them.” For Paul, “they” refers to Rome, the next in a long line of Babylons and Egypts.

The apostle writes to the Thessalonians in about 50AD – right in the thick of the era known as the Pax Romana, the Roman Peace. Paul seems to know that the empire’s brand of peace and security can act like sub-freezing temperatures. It can cause spiritual frostbite. It can make us believe that if our material surroundings are benefiting us, then ‘God is in the heavens, and all is right with the world.’ Paul compares such self-centered thinking to thievery, darkness, drunkenness – actions for which there are inescapable consequences, at least in the short run.

Paul dares us to imagine something different. He dares us to imagine lasting peace and security, which is a gift from God, not empires. We experience lasting peace and security by consciously participating in God’s presence and activity in this world, here and now. True peace and security come not through conquest, not through intimidation, but through determined, even death-defying faith, hope, and love.

There you go again, Preacher, talking your pie-in-the-sky nonsense. You have no clue what it takes to win and keep security. You have to fight fire with fire!

I hear you. And I do understand that this is a frighteningly dangerous and uncertain world. I also know that Paul’s situation is even more tenuous than ours, and still he says, “Since we belong to the day, let us be sober and put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation.”

November texts challenge us to acknowledge all the signs of approaching winter – daylight diminishing, colors fading, cold hardening the ground, “wars and rumors of wars,” “nation…[rising] against nation…famines and earthquakes in various places” (Mt. 24:6), real fears pressuring us to live by the sword.

But even November texts come to us as gospel, as promises of spring, as witnesses to Easter. I trust that God intends these texts to awaken in us an irrepressible restlessness, a hunger and thirst for belonging as well as righteousness. They sting us with memories of our true home. And living at home, while in exile, means living in a kind of terrifying fearlessness. Home for us is following Jesus, “who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him.”

I suppose each of us has to decide for ourselves what Paul means when he says to “encourage one another and build up each other.” As for me, even if I sound tiresomely consistent, come what may, I can do no other – unless despair overcomes me – than to live, and die, and lead any congregation I serve by what I consider to be Jesus’ example: non-violent, welcoming, transforming love.

For those times when my encouragement of you fails to meet that standard, I ask God’s and your forgiveness. May the Spirit then challenge me with November texts and return me to a radical grace that I cannot create, but only experience and bear witness to.

And ultimately, from that love, and from that grace, there “will be no escape!”

The Constaninian Test (Sermon)

“The Constantinian Test”

Matthew 23:1-12

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

11/12/17

         In the fourth century, when Christianity was a mere toddler as a world religion, the Church began to face its supreme test. It started when Emperor Constantine won a battle over a stronger enemy and credited the Christian God. So, in 313, a victorious Constantine legalized Christianity. In 380, Emperor Theodosius I declared Rome to be a Christian nation.

What I’m calling a test occurs when political and martial power tempt the Church to confuse love and service of God with love and service of the state. The unwritten contract goes something like this: If you let us into your sanctuaries, if you tweak your theologies to justify our conquests and excesses, if you make faithfulness to your God synonymous with good citizenship, we will embrace your symbols and language. We will defer to your holy days. We, the State, will favor and exalt you, the Religion.

Since 380AD, Christianity has faced this Constantinian test continually, often unsuccessfully.

In fairness, virtually all major religions struggle with this test. When there’s enough fear and dis-ease in a culture, religions, especially fundamentalist factions within them, gain traction and scramble for exaltation. It seems to me that the three Abrahamic faiths – Christianity, Judaism, and Islam – are particularly susceptible to failing the Constantinian test. And within those religions, perhaps no one is more vulnerable to the temptation to conspire with power than clergy. When a religion holds favored status in a particular nation, its leaders often find the personal benefits of complicity irresistible.

In today’s text, Jesus calls his followers to do something difficult. With regard to the scribes and Pharisees, “Do whatever they teach you and follow it,” says Jesus, “but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach.” They’re religious gold diggers, says Jesus.

Jesus is saying that authority comes not from the office, not from the size of phylacteries, not from the length of fringes, not from the seats of honor, and not from whatever deference the priests enjoy in public. Authority comes from the Author of Creation.

         I think Jesus gets to meddling because he remembers facing precisely the same test after his baptism. Out in the wilderness, Jesus is tempted to collude with the clannish, manipulative, and violent ways and means of worldly power. And this goes on for forty days.

Now, there’s nothing literal about the number forty. Whether referring to days or years, forty is Bible-speak for a long time. The story of Jesus’ temptation tells us not only that Jesus has to endure a long, grueling test, it also tells us that even Jesus takes a long time to overcome the devil’s deal: that gut-wrenching and all-too-human temptation to use our unique gifts and potential toward selfish ends.

         After its humble beginnings in Jerusalem, the Church enters its own forty-day wilderness. And when Constantine and Theodosius offer the newly-baptized religion power and privilege alien to its identity in Christ, the Church quickly caves in. It accepts the unwritten contract of state exaltation.

When the Church bemoans its decreasing size and influence, we can blame externalities all we want, but for nearly two millennia, no one has given more people more reasons, and no one has given more people better reasons to turn their backs on Christianity, and even on God, than the Church itself. The institutional Church has been more intentional about reaching out for sake of political favor than for the sake of the gospel.

         Our history, though, is about more than any one of us, more than any one congregation or denomination, more than any one era of our existence. So, maybe, we’re still slogging through our own forty-day temptation. Maybe we’re still weathering our own forty-day flood, wandering in our own forty-year Exodus, weeping through our own forty-hour hell between Friday and Sunday. If so, then every day, every moment, every decision, every word, every action, and every one of us matters – really and truly and eternally matters!

         Successfully on the other side of temptation, Jesus commits himself to living humbly and peaceably on behalf of the Creation. He practices what he teaches. Now, he does “tie up burdens hard to bear, and lay them on [our] shoulders.” That’s what take up your cross and follow me is all about. But Jesus lifts more than a finger to help us. He helps us to understand and value our burdens by sharing them and helping each other to carry them.

         Every time we choose to share the burdens of others, every time we choose to serve rather than to be served, every time we choose to forgive rather than to hold onto anger and resentment, every time we choose to stand in awe of what God creates instead of trying to figure out how to monetize or profit from some “resource” – every time we choose these things we’re overcoming temptation. We’re following Jesus.

The Church has survived for two thousand years, longer than any state or nation. That tells me that along the way, at critical times, we have told the Tempter that we depend on more than bread, that we will not test God, and that we will not bow before some devious Caesar.

Sure, sometimes in our weariness and fear, we accept the tempter’s contract. Sometimes we settle for the external trappings of religion over the call of Jesus.

          I wear a robe on Sundays. I wear eye-catching stoles and sit in this tall chair. I stand high-and-lifted-up, and speak into a microphone. With the state’s blessing, I claim my housing allowance as non-taxable income. That’s not fair to you, and I certainly did nothing to deserve special treatment. But I don’t turn it down. And some point, someone – not me – decided that an entire month should be set aside for pastor appreciation. It’s like a liturgical season! I’m truly grateful for every expression of love and support. And pastor appreciation doesn’t include parades and furniture store sales. But a whole month? Doesn’t that tempt all of us, especially folks like me, to exalt pastors onto pedestals where we don’t belong?

         It grieves me to admit this, but I know that if I took another job tomorrow, before long, some of you would fall away from this congregation. I know the same is true if we lost our extraordinary music director or pianist. I know because – and this is as uncomfortable to say as it is to hear – I’ve heard folks say so. Then again, I trust that in spite of such self-serving loyalties, and even if this, or any congregation ends up closing its doors, the Church will survive. God is not dependent on our robes, sermons, anthems, instruments, or buildings. God chooses to be present through our love for one another, through our care for the poor and the forgotten, and through our stewardship of the earth.

         Pastors are to be most appreciated when their congregations embrace discipleship and mission the way they embrace potlucks and bake sales. When doing as Jesus does, we are all, without distinction, ministers in the priesthood of all believers. And in the long run, by the grace of God alone, what we teach transcends what we do.

What do you imagine people see in us? Self-exalting Pharisees or servant-hearted disciples of Jesus? Probably both. So, let’s be gracious with them and with ourselves. And may we trust that we belong to Jesus, and that by his grace, all of us will make it through our Constantinian test.

In forty days or so.

The God of Creative Tension (Sermon)

“The God of Creative Tension”

Matthew 22:15-22

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

11/5/17

         Jesus has been pushing the envelope with the Jewish leaders. In an effort to rein in this renegade rabbi, and to try to restore a sense of normalcy, at least in their own minds, some Pharisees hatch a scheme to ambush Jesus with a question.

         “Is it lawful,” they will ask, “to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?”

         The plan is for Yes and No to be equally dangerous for Jesus and equally expedient for the Pharisees. Depending on what gives them the most leverage over Jesus, the Pharisees are willing to position themselves as either loyal Jews first or loyal Roman subjects first. Now, the tax at issue has to do with harvests and personal property.¹ Like a sales tax, it’s regressive. It imposes a much heavier burden on the poor than on the rich. If Jesus says Yes, he will appear to be double-crossing the Jews in general, and the tax-oppressed poor in particular – the very people on whom Jesus’ ministry has focused.

On the other hand, if Jesus says No, the Pharisees can simply report him to the Roman authorities for sedition.

         It seems like a fool-proof plan, unless, of course, the plan has been hatched by fools – fools, in this case, being those who are motivated by fear and revenge, yet tell themselves that they’re champions of righteousness and justice. One aspect of Pharisaic foolishness is to separate the world into dualistic categories – Jew and Gentile, male and female, clean and unclean.

How many times have you heard someone say, “There’re two kinds of people in the world”? Those eight words almost always precede some kind of mind-closing statement of opposing absolutes. And such statements usually imply that one side is strong, or right, or good while the other side is weak, or wrong, or bad.

         The genius of Jesus is that he teaches attitudes and models actions which are righteous and just while living in such a way that he doesn’t bisect the world into opposing factions. It’s his followers who divide the world into saved and unsaved, lost and found, good and bad. And how can disciples justify polarized and polarizing living when the one whom we claim to follow goes out of his way to be not only in the presence of but in relationship with everyone, including those who oppose him?

         It seems to me that Christians often practice Pharisaism in order to maintain a sense of authority, security, and even supremacy in the world. And I think we’re tempted to do it all the more viciously when the world seems to be falling apart around us. Remember, the Jewish world is falling apart during the first century, too. Rome holds all of its territories in a kind of social, political, and economic choke hold. Caesar finances his continuing wars and conquests by emptying the pockets of the peoples he has vanquished. For the Jews in Palestine, everything familiar is ending. The future is unfolding toward something unknown and terrifying. Trying to regroup and to return to what was is futile. They’re in the midst of an all-encompassing death, and to the Pharisees, Jesus seems to be just another sign of the world’s demise.

         As an Easter community, the Church proclaims that Jesus is God’s sign and promise of all that’s new and hopeful, all that’s righteous and just. Even when familiar things are dying around us, following Jesus means following him into that death. The crazy and beautiful thing for Jesus-followers is that entering death means entering, at the same time, into resurrection. Not only does Jesus transcend all the fragmenting categories of opposites, he transcends all that appears to separate life and death.

         Looking at the coin used for the tax, Jesus asks, “Whose head is this, and whose title?”

         “The emperor’s,” they say.

         “Give…to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

         Stunned and speechless, the Pharisees leave Jesus alone.

         The Pharisees try to bait Jesus into to dividing the world into two kinds of people – those who collect taxes and those who pay taxes. And Jesus won’t bite. What’s more, he won’t even divide the world into spiritual and mundane. His answer reveals that the creation is a place in which holiness and worldliness are woven together into an indivisible wholeness.

         In his book Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, Richard Rohr observes that, in the first creation story, it isn’t until the third day that God begins to call the creation good. The first two days had been about making separations – light from dark, sky from earth, up from down. When water and land begin to coexist, when plants and animals begin to appear on the same ground and in the same waters, only then does God begin calling things good.²

In the story of Noah, the Hebrews weave the ancient Gilgamesh epic into their own story. And in the Hebrew version, an ark gets inhabited by all these opposites – male and female, clean and unclean, predator and prey, things that fly and things that creep. And God confines all these opposites together in one place. The ark is a magnificent metaphor. It’s a microcosm of the entire creation. The ark is the earth! And we all live in it, together!

“The…reason that Jesus is the icon of salvation for so many of us,” says Rohr, “is because he [holds opposites] together so beautifully.”³

Discipleship means doing what Jesus does. It means learning to live in the “paradox of incarnation,” holding within us “flesh and spirit, human and divine, joy and suffering.”³ To be fully human means living in that relentless but creative tension in which we encounter and embrace otherness. We cannot experience God as good, nor can we experience the creation as good outside of this tension. As the body of Christ, we are called, individually and corporately, to commit our time, our money, our very lives to bearing witness to the God of creative tension.

Jesus does make one clear distinction in today’s story. There’re two kinds of people in the world, he says: Those who think they’re God, and those who know they’re not. When Jesus says to give to the emperor that which is the emperor’s, and to God that which is God’s, he’s saying that, contrary to what the Caesars of the world believe, they are not God. That’s exactly what the signatories of The Barmen Declaration were saying back in the 1930’s. Jesus is Lord, not Hitler, not the Third Reich, and not the conspicuously pious, Christian Pharisees who were selling their souls to save their lives by colluding with those who were trying to use genocidal fear, prejudice, and violence to return their country to prominence, and to keep it pure and Aryan-nation white. God is never behind the easing of the tension of opposites. God is always right in the thick of it.

“Give…to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” We hold those things in the same two hands.

As human beings, our Sitz im Leben is the tension between holy and worldly opposites. We can deny that reality, but we can’t change it. We can’t legislate, preach, or bomb our way out of it. Nor should we try, because, for Jesus-followers, living in the tension means that every day, every moment, every encounter, and conversation presents us with opportunities to experience both our humbling, human limitations and the transcendent power of resurrection.

Look around you. Look across every aisle you can imagine. Giving to God that which is God’s means recognizing and giving thanks for the mystery and holiness that lives within every corner of the known and knowable creation – including your own life.

¹Susan Grove Eastman, Feasting on the Word, `(Year A, Volume 4), David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, Eds., Westminster/John Knox Press, Louisville, KY, 2011. P. 191.

²Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, Franciscan Media, Cincinnati, OH, 2008.

Pp. 32-33.

³Ibid. Pp. 36-37.

Irresisitble as Grace (Newsletter)

Irresistible as Grace

Over the last fifty years, the mountains of southern Appalachia have been a sanctuary for me. While I am more apt to explore them now with a camera, for a decade or more, I scoured maps and wandered back roads in search of high-country trout streams. Whether fishing or photographing, I find myself mesmerized by sunlight filtering down through a dense canopy of hardwoods and evergreens. Huddling close over cold, clear water and tumbles of smooth gray stones, the trees seem to be hiding secret treasures from those who would leave too much of self behind.

         Some twenty years ago, I set out one morning in search of water, trout, and solitude. From Little Switzerland, NC, I drove north on the Blue Ridge Parkway to Grandfather Mountain where I exited the Parkway. My car crunched and rattled along several miles of forest service roads to the upper reaches of a remote creek I saw on a map. I parked my car and got out. For a few minutes, I simply listened, and breathed.

Feeling welcomed by the forest, I began to rig my fly rod – a braided leader, tippet as thin as a strand of spider web, a tiny Adams parachute fly. I wrestled my feet into my wading shoes. Still wet from a previous excursion, they squished and wheezed like my nose does when I have a cold. I put on my vest which sagged and clattered with fishing gear, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and a water bottle.

The trail I followed led me steeply downward but near the creek. It crossed a small feeder stream – in fact no wider than my stride, and in truth no deeper that my understanding of the Mystery of which I have been called to speak. Across the stream, the forest began to close in on me. Exactly where and when I could not say, but the trail had delivered me to the forest. I was no longer on a traveled path. I was simply alive in the midst of towering hickories, oaks, and tulip poplars. Above me, spruce and fir trees spread their dark boughs above the forest floor like priests pronouncing blessing and benediction upon the Earth.

I stopped and listened, but either the stream or the trail had turned. My ears rang with a silence as irresistible as grace. So, I pressed on, squeezing through rhododendron thickets I would otherwise have considered impervious, crawling over fallen trees that were spongy and damp with decay, following not the stream’s voice, but the promise it had whispered in my ear.

         How like that stream is God who goads us onward. How like God it is to lead us into the silences of Heaven where faith and hope are born. How like the twelve we often are when we slash and tear our way through creation, hell-bent on seeing and hearing only that which is familiar, and mindless of how grace comes newly born in fresh experiences.

         The well-marked paths on which our journeys begin deliver us to transfigured and transfiguring trails of deeper relationship and purpose. And there we learn new ways, new possibilities. In the midst of all the change and all the silence, take heart. The one who stirs us forward can be trusted.

*A version of this article appeared in the September 27, 1999 issue of "The Presbyterian Outlook."

"Is Anything Too Wonderful for God?" (Sermon)

“Is Anything Too Wonderful for God?”

Genesis 18:1-15

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

10/22/17

         In Genesis 12, God calls Abram and Sarai to be the parents of a new nation. With God’s promise ringing in their ears, they set out in faith. By chapter 18, Abram, which means “Exalted Father,” has been renamed Abraham, “Father of a Multitude.” Sarai is now simply Sarah. Interestingly, these name changes are strong affirmations, yet they come on the heels of acts of faithlessness.

         Abraham and Sarah begin their journey with great confidence and hope. As the journey turns into wandering, that optimism wanes, and the aging couple grows desperate. Without a child, where will the great nation come from? Taking matters into their own hands, Sarah says to her husband, “Here. Have a child with Hagar, my servant girl. The new nation will have to come through your offspring with her.”

The situation is not unlike Eve offering forbidden fruit to Adam. Hopelessness makes Abraham and Sarah try to play God. The results are Ishmael, and a widening rift between Abraham and Sarah and God.

         Thirteen years later, God renews the covenant with a 99-year old Abraham. When he hears that Sarah will conceive and bear a son, Abraham “fell on his face and laughed.” Abraham’s laughter is not the laughter of joy. It’s the kind of laughter reserved for the absurd. It’s the kind of laughter you and I might experience in the grocery store when we learn, from the National Enquirer, that “scientists” have discovered that Stonehenge was built by aliens from the future, who built it as a monument to the earthlings who would invent Twinkies. And even now those aliens are hiding the shadow of Jupiter, teleporting enormous quantities of Twinkies to the mother ship.

Abraham’s laugh was that kind of laugh – even though such a story might explain the continuing demand for something as disgusting as a Twinkie.

         In today’s text, a flummoxed Abraham sits in the door of his tent peering through the blistering heat of the Palestinian sun. I imagine him wondering, “What happened? How did I end up this old and this far from home? Was it God who spoke to me? Or was it my inflated ego?”

         Abraham looks up and sees three men walking toward him in the heat of the day. In Abraham’s culture, the virtue of hospitality shares top honors with traits such as honesty and courage. So, when he sees these men traveling beneath the burning sun, he leaps into action. He runs out to welcome them. He urges them to sit in the shade while he fetches them some water and has food prepared for them. When they accept, Abraham tells Sarah to use the best flour for the cakes. He picks out “a calf, tender and good” for his servant to cook. And while they eat, Abraham, the man called by God to be the Father of a Multitude and a blessing to all nations, stands back and watches. He assumes the posture of a humble servant rather than a man of means and global purpose.

         The travelers, identified by the text as “the Lord,” witness a change in Abraham’s attitude and behavior. ‘In a year,’ says one traveler, reiterating the covenant, ‘I will return, and Sarah will have a son.’

Behind the tent flap, out of sight, Sarah laughs.

         ‘Laugh all you want,’ says the traveler. ‘But in a year, you will have a son.’

While Sarah’s laugh reveals the lingering skepticism in Abraham’s household, their hospitality declares the faith, hope, and love which run deeper than disappointment. Abraham and Sarah are coming of age as servants of God. After all the years and miles, they finally demonstrate true humility, and thus their readiness to be ones through whom God will act on behalf of others.

There’s a notable difference in God’s reactions to all this laughter. When Abraham falls on his face and laughs, God doesn’t bat an eye. But when Sarah chuckles, God takes offense. In both cases, the laughter expresses an understandable lack of faith. Abraham and Sarah are both asking, ‘How can we be parents? We’re so old our AARP memberships have expired!’ And both times God reassures them that the promise is safe. In Genesis 18, God takes a grandma’s paddle to Abraham and Sarah by asking, “Is anything too wonderful for God?”

Maybe God is merciful with Abraham and Sarah because God understands just how difficult the journey is.

         Listen, you are called to and gifted for something only you can do. But how often do you sense that the great promise within you is shriveling beneath the burden of life’s busyness and impermanence? It can often seem that God has all but disappeared. When we feel abandoned, it’s easy to think that the only way forward is to intervene, to force our will, regardless of its effect on others. But that force always distances us from God. The story of Abraham and Sarah illustrates that when we humble ourselves as servants, then do we begin to enter into the strength and freedom of God.

The difficulty is in understanding that God’s strength and freedom differ sharply from human strength and freedom. God’s is a humble strength. Jesus’ word for it is “meekness.” And to live in God’s freedom is to live for-the-sake-of-others. Jesus calls that losing one’s life in order to save it. Living in God’s strength and freedom is to occupy, here and now, the Promised Land.

When we associate weapons and domination with the word strength, and unfettered self-determination with the idea of freedom, the Promised Land becomes less and less promising for all. When sensing a threat to human strength and freedom, it’s easy to sit at the opening of our tents in the heat of our day deciding that if we just force our way back to the way things used to be, all will be well. But sometimes being stuck is exactly where we need to be. Watching. Expecting. Trusting. Ready to leap into servant-hearted action.

         Our present is laden with the searing heat of anxiety, meanness, and with aspersions of blame. There may even be a Friday on our horizon. And if that be so, then Sunday will follow. Because it belongs to God, the future is pregnant with promise. And because this sounds absurd to the Abrams and Sarais within us and around us, they will fall on their faces laughing. They will tell us that there’s a better chance of aliens from the future hiding behind Jupiter and eating Twinkies than there is of a fellow traveler named Jesus empowering us to live faithfully, hopefully, and lovingly. As long as we choose to associate the privileges of race, class, or a particular nationality, and the might of weaponry with God’s presence and favor, we may be proving them right, because ultimately, such things declare our fear and even contempt of the other.

Here is our question: “Is anything too wonderful for God?” We don’t answer that by uttering a “yes” or a “no.” As followers of Jesus, we answer to a new name, Christian – a name we take on in part, interestingly enough, when we acknowledge the faithlessness of our betrayal of Jesus. So, as Christians, we answer that question by committing ourselves to lives of hospitality, lives of justice, mercy, humility, and gratitude.

As followers of Jesus, we don’t just look forward to the Promised Land, we inhabit it here. We reveal it today.

And He Was Speechless (Sermon)

“And He Was Speechless”

Matthew 22:1-14

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

10/15/17

         I’m going to be honest with you. I don’t like Matthew’s rendering of the parable of the wedding banquet. I much prefer Luke’s kinder, gentler version. So, before reading the story, we’re going to spend some time understanding the context. Let’s back up to the middle of chapter 21.

         In Matthew 21:12-17 Jesus drives the moneychangers and merchants out of the temple. Holding the temple leaders responsible for the spiritual and ecclesiastical defilement of Israel, we Christians use a loaded word; we call it the “cleansing of the temple.” Choosing the word cleansing, opens the door not only to pride among Jesus’ disciples, but also to the insidious phobia of anti-Semitism.

         Jesus takes a profound risk in chasing these folks out of the temple. And while he’s clearly furious, it seems to me that his fury is the scream of his heart breaking. I don’t hear him saying, ‘All of you are bad people!’ I hear him saying, ‘This is not who you are! You’re better than this, and you know it!’

The people aren’t evil. The problem is the institution. It has become an organism with a life of its own. It consumes resources, like a fig tree, maybe – in particular, a fig tree that doesn’t produce fruit. Existing for itself, the institution no longer carries out the purpose of blessing that dates back to the call of Abraham.

         The morning after Jesus empties the temple of merchants and moneychangers, he curses a fig tree that has no fruit. It seems harsh, perhaps, but a figless fig tree is good for kindling and compost, and not much else. Similarly, a spiritless spiritual community is nothing but a building and a consumer of resources. It’s no different than any other social or civic club that collects dues and engages in a little conspicuous altruism. A spiritless spiritual community has given up on mystery, holiness, and its for-the-sake-of-others blessedness. It has also abandoned its prophetic voice.

         After cursing the fig tree, Jesus returns to the temple. Offended, the spiritual leaders confront Jesus. They question his authority, and Jesus ends up telling them that tax collectors and prostitutes have higher and holier standing than they do. Then Jesus tells them the parable of the wicked tenants. In this story, a landowner sends his servants then his son to collect a harvest. After the workers kill the servants and the son, the landowner executes all the workers.

“Therefore I tell you,” says Jesus to the spiritual leaders, “the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.” (Mt. 21:43) Do you hear the connection to the story of the fig tree, to the cleansing of the temple, and to the call of Abraham?

The spiritual leaders want to arrest Jesus, but they fear the crowds who love Jesus. Enslaved to their power within the institution, those spiritual leaders say nothing.

Jesus plows straight into his next parable, today’s text. It’s another strange and difficult story spoken into a rising tide of anxiety and emotion. Matthew is leading us toward a flashpoint in the conflict between Jesus and power. It will be called Friday.

Matthew 22:1-14

Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying: ²“The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. ³He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come.

⁴Again he sent other slaves, saying, ‘Tell those who have been invited: Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet.’

 ⁵But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, ⁶while the rest seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them.

⁷The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city.

⁸Then he said to his slaves, ‘The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. ⁹Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.’ ¹⁰Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.

¹¹“But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, ¹²and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’

And he was speechless.

¹³Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ ¹⁴For many are called, but few are chosen.”

Initially, the conservative Pharisee in me cringes because these stories are aimed at me. The progressive, 21^st century Christian rankles at the violent image of God. The only side of me that likes them is that smug, bigoted, first-world religionist who looks for any reason to fear and judge others for being different from me. For being Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, atheist, or in any other way non-Christian (at least relative to me), or for being un-American (at least relative to me), or for having a skin color darker than mine, or for posing what I interpret as a threat to everything that I hold dear. That smug, bigoted, first-world religionist in me always hears Jesus taking my side in his stories. That guy always assumes that God is as small, vindictive, and merciless as I can be.

I come face-to-face with that guy almost daily. Like those who have been invited to the wedding banquet, he makes light of the invitation. He’s more interested in looking busy in his office than he is in following Jesus. Like a shark who smells blood, he enters the feeding frenzy of acrimony and insult where neighbors attack each other with guns, clubs, automobiles, and most insidiously, with their words – often spoken through social media, which is becoming, in many ways, a fiercely anti-social force in our culture.

When I stand before that smug, bigoted, first-world religionist in me, and in others, when I see the carnage around me, I tend to lose my voice. I become a speechless wedding-crasher. Why? I tell myself that I’m just trying, in trying times, to hold together a congregation of disparate theological and political opinions. That’s not a bad goal – unless all I’m really trying to do is hold onto my job, my benefits. Then I choose speechlessness and call it pastoral sensitivity. But whom does a speechless disciple really serve? Whom do I really love and worship? Whom do I really trust?

When Jesus faces opposition, he never chooses speechlessness. At the risk of his life, Jesus speaks. And he inspires the adage that states, quite accurately, that “all tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.”¹

         When the king in the parable confronts the man who has no robe, the man is “speechless.” He says nothing about the selfishness of those who ignored the invitation. He says nothing about the injustices of all that bloody murder and revenge. He says nothing.

         Is it possible that the words he could have uttered – words of gratitude and congratulations for the bride and the groom, words of compassion for all who had been killed, words of solidarity with the guests – could it be that such words, spoken with conviction and love, weave the wedding robe?

         I’m not advocating any kind of works righteousness. We don’t earn our invitation to the banquet. The parable is not about who’s in and who’s out with regard to salvation. It’s about who accepts the call to live as “chosen” ones, bearers of visible and audible fruits of prophetic faith, even as Friday looms. It’s about living as embodied speech, declaring that the wedding banquet has been prepared and that all are welcome.

         Thomas Merton took a vow of silence. And when he did, he closed his mouth once and for all. But his spirited life was all about speaking, all about doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God.

Our words and actions are figs. They’re the fruit of our faithfulness. What we say and don’t say are not the difference between our being accepted and rejected by God. Only a god made in our image withholds grace. But speechlessness is not an option for disciples. Speaking truth and justice to power in the institution may get us in trouble, because power doesn’t want to hear “politics” in church. Power forgets how consistently political Jesus is. Our speech – our patient, humble, honest, challenging speech – is both our robe of righteousness to wear and our cross to bear. Our speech cries out to humankind, “We are better than this, and we know it!”

         If we have said Yes to the question, “Is Jesus Christ your Lord and Savior,” we have a new voice with which to proclaim our discipleship and to weave our wedding robes. If all we want is a Savior, someone to save us from personal sins, we’ll be satisfied with speechlessness, even in the face of injustice.

If Jesus is our Lord, however, Lord of our lives, we have spirited words to say and spirited work to do. Here. Now. Today.

¹https://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/all-tyranny-needs-gain-footholdspurious-quotation

The Healing of Wounds (Story Sermon)

The Healing of Wounds

Romans 8:18-30

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

10/8/17

         Years ago, I pulled into one of those gas station-truck stop-minute mart-fast food-donut shop places you find on major interstates. I needed gas, and by golly found it.

I got out of my car and looked over at all the transfer trucks lined up at the diesel pumps. And the truck nearest me caught my eye immediately, because on the side of the trailer in huge red and black, all capital lettering was the word “G.O.D.”

G.O.D. was an acronym. It stood for Guaranteed Overnight Delivery. Now that’s marketing. When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight, forget FedEx. Call G.O.D.!

And what trucker, regardless of creed, wouldn’t take some pleasure in saying, “Yeah, I drive for G.O.D.?”

         You know, I would bet my ordination certificate that underneath some of your smiles lies a desperate desire for God to box up and overnight an answer to some burning question, or a cure for a painful illness or experience. Laughter has lots of health benefits. It can relieve and even heal some of life’s deepest pain. It can also serve as camouflage for denial. And denial is kind of petri dish for resentment and despair. It allows us to ignore suffering – our own and that of other’s.

         As the body of Christ, we proclaim that God enters not only human history but the vulnerability of the human condition itself. And while Jesus reveals the deep woundedness within God, faith is not a cure for suffering. It’s not a bypass around it. In fact, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, faith calls us into the most profound human suffering. Paul says that through the sufferings of the present time, through the groaning of the entire creation, God is at work, transforming this world from brokenness toward wholeness. And shared wounds, be they curable or incurable, become transformed wounds. And transformed wounds become redeemed and redeeming wounds.

         Still, why do healthy and happy people get sick and suffer? Why are folks who are full of joy and promise driving down the road one minute and being airlifted to a trauma center the next? Why do people open fire on concert crowds, in night clubs, and, for God’s sake, why in schools? Why must Jesus cry out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” I don’t know. That question has been a hobgoblin of religious faith since the beginning of time. And as much as we might wish it were true, God is simply not in the overnight trucking business.

         Nonetheless, I do trust that God is with us. I trust that God is relentlessly present in human history through, oddly enough, human suffering. I look at Christ’s wounds as bottomless wells, flowing with the love of an attentive Creator. What might that look like?

         Michael was a 42-year-old husband, father, and pastor. One cold, February afternoon the family pediatrician called Michael and his wife, Abby, to his office for a private consult. Their only child, a twelve-year-old daughter named Hannah, had been suffering from terrible headaches. A check-up and an MRI had revealed an angry tumor making itself at home inside Hannah’s brain. Surgery would be in three weeks.

         At first it was all Michael and Abby could do to pull themselves up and out of the chairs to leave the doctor’s office. Violent waves of shock and fear broke over them. Their thoughts raced, but their bodies seemed to move in slow motion. The ground swelled and shifted beneath them. Feeling off balance, they held onto each other and drifted toward the parking lot.

         When they found their car, they sat down in the front seat. Michael gripped the steering wheel with both hands, and Abby pulled her seat belt across her body but didn’t fasten it.

         Michael reached into his pocket and pulled out his keys. He held them in the palm of his hand to find the car key. On top of that jagged heap of silver and bronze sat the key fob that held them together. Made of clear plastic, it was the kind of key fob that people put pictures of their children or grandchildren in, but inside Michael’s was a piece of plain white paper with a crayon drawing of a sunshine wearing sunglasses and a smile. It was shining down on two stick figures, one tall and one short. They held hands in a patch of blue and yellow flowers. On the other side, scribbled in red pencil, were the words, “God loves Daddy and me.” Hannah had made in Bible School when she was seven years old.

         Michael and Abby looked at the key chain, then at each other, and the dam broke. For twenty minutes they sat in the car, holding each other. They poured great, heaving sobs onto each other’s shoulders. They didn’t speak. They just wept and wept, until finally Abby looked up and noticed that a heavy film of condensation had formed on the inside of the car windows. The thought of rumors floating around about the pastor and his wife fogging up the car windows in a parking lot brought them back to the present about as gently as anything could.

         On the way home, Michael took a circuitous route. He drove through out-of-the-way neighborhoods so their tears could dry, and the redness in their eyes could clear. They talked and decided not to tell anyone just yet. They would let Hannah know that the doctors were going to help her with her headaches, but that it would be a few weeks before they could see her.

         A plan like that would never work, of course. Michael and Abby both began pulling away from work and friends. They smiled less. They asked fewer questions. They found excuses to end conversations sooner. Michael’s sermons began to show signs of carelessness, and his delivery became hollow and unconvincing.

         Just two weeks into their ruse, Michael muddled through a session meeting and closed with a quick, spiritless prayer. He said a general good-night to everyone at once and ducked into his study, pretending to be caught up in some urgent matter.

         Just when he thought he was safe for one more day, he heard a soft knock at his door, and in walked one of the elders and her husband.

         Connie Ayers was in her late fifties. She was tall and elegant, always dressed neatly, every hair in place. She spoke up infrequently in session meetings, but she was smart and insightful. When she did speak, she did so with grace and a playful sense of humor, especially when tensions began to rise. Her husband, Scott, taught high school English.

         “Michael, you got a minute?” said Connie.

         Michael had always been a poor liar, but he forced a smile and dug in deeper saying, “Sure! What can I do for you two?”

         “You can be honest with us,” said Connie. “Michael, something’s wrong with you and Abby, and Scott and I are concerned.”

         Michael stared at the floor and felt a lump rise in his throat. There was nowhere to turn, no busyness or formality to hide behind. He had told himself that it was the Christlike thing to do to set his struggles aside. But he’d been caught, like a possum in the headlights, and right then he felt that he had more in common with a possum than with Christ. Sinking back into his chair, he knew it was time to come clean.

         Michael motioned for Connie and Scott to sit down, and he began to talk. With each word of his story, a little bit of the weight of the last two weeks seemed to lift. Connie and Scott sat and listened. They didn’t interrupt, and they didn’t look away from his tears. When Michael finished, Scott reached over, took his pastor by the arm and said, “Michael, you’re our pastor. We know you love us. But we are your brothers and sisters in Christ. We can and will love you like you love us. If you’ll just let us.”

         The next Sunday, Michael stood up in the pulpit, and he read from Romans 8. He told everyone what was going on and how Connie and Scott had helped him to face his fears, his grief, his anger, his denial. He shared some of the conversations he and Abby had had with Hannah. It was the most difficult sermon he had ever preached, but it was the most sincere and cathartic.

         Late that evening, after putting Hannah to bed, Michael and Abby sat down together on the sofa and tried to relax with some quiet music and a glass of wine. The day had been exhausting, and the next morning they would take Hannah to the hospital for her first surgery. Just as they were beginning to feel that sleep might be possible, the doorbell rang.

         Michael groaned and got up to answer it. He turned on the porch light and looked through the window.

         “Connie!” he said in a sharp voice.

Alarmed, Abby jumped up and ran to the door. “What’s going on?” she said.

         Michael opened the door and Connie Ayers stepped into the foyer. She was wearing blue jeans and a faded pink sweatshirt. Her eyes were puffy and red, and her cheeks pale. Her hair was very neatly out of place.

         “Michael,” she said, “I had to come to tell you how much your sermon meant to me this morning.” She paused. Then she said, “I also came to tell you something.

         “Michael, I’ve never said anything to anyone about this before, except for Scott…but your story the other night…and the way you opened up in your sermon today. It forced me to go back many years.”

         Abby said, “Come on in, Connie. Sit down.”

         Connie sat in a maroon wingback chair. She took a deep breath and said, “So here it is. I was born a twin, but when my sister and I were eight years old, she contracted meningitis. We never knew how she got it. But in less than a week, she was dead. I never got over it, because I never dealt with it. Why did she get sick and not me? Why did she die and not me? Why did my parents look at me that way? And today, your sermon…I realized just how angry I’ve been at God all these years.

         “Since my sister’s – since Katie’s death, I’ve been plagued with doubts about just how much power God has and just how much God really loves and cares for us. I had to come to see you tonight to tell you this, because Hannah’s surgery is tomorrow. And I hoped that maybe I could do for you what you did for me.”

         “What exactly did I do for you,” said Michael.

         “You opened yourself up!” said Connie. “You opened up your broken heart and showed it to us. You showed us how God is present in your deepest and most intimate pain. And just as you were finishing your sermon, I looked up at the cross on the wall behind you, and before I knew it I had said out loud, ‘My Lord and my God!’”

         “My Lord and my God?” said Michael. He suddenly felt terribly uncomfortable.

         “No, no, no!” said Connie. “Don’t you see? It was like I was the disciple Thomas, and you were the wounded hands that Jesus held out to me after fifty years of doubt, and hurt, and anger. I reached out and touched your wounds, Michael. I felt them. And when I did, I was able not just to believe, but to trust, for the first time in my life, that Jesus really is alive! I was able to trust it because I finally understood that Jesus’ death is God’s wound for us to see and to touch.

“Michael, it’s something you say all the time, not just at Easter. And today I heard it. Resurrection is God’s promise that even when wounds can’t be healed, they can be redeemed. That’s what you tell us, Michael. And I finally got it.

         “So I came to open my wounds for the first time in fifty years. I came to share them with you.

“Michael, Abby, whenever you need to touch them. Here they are.”