During a recent visit to Roan Mountain, my wife and I hiked the short trail to Roan High Bluff. This trail begins just a few hundred yards down the gravel road from the rhododendron garden parking area. The day we visited, most of the trail was shrouded in a thin cloud cover that gave the woods an otherworldly feel. The deep greens of spruce and fir trees, mosses, and the waxy rhododendrons with their rich pink blossoms were all surrounded by a soft, gray exhale of the sky.

When we reached the wooden observation platform at the bluff, the clouds thickened and completely obscured the vista that looks out west over the valley and the tiny community of Buladean, NC. While we couldn’t “view the view,” we could just make out the spruce trees on either side of the platform. On that high, rocky bluff, prevailing westerly winds have had a remarkable effect on the trees. The west-facing side of the trees have very short, stubby limbs because strong and continuous breezes rising from the warmer valley have pushed and bent the trees on the windward side, prohibiting their limbs from growing as genetics would otherwise determine. This affects only the most exposed trees. Even the second-row trees grow more “normally” than those immediately in front of them.

         The front-row trees reminded me of parents huddling over children in a storm trying to protect them from sand and other flying debris, or simply trying to calm their fears.

         While there may well be life beyond the earth, for billions of years, this planet has been circling the sun, and for the last 300,000 years—give or take—it has been humankind’s only home and refuge. The atmosphere huddles over us, protecting us and providing breathable air. Oceans, rivers, streams, and lakes hydrate us. Plants and animals feed and clothe us. Forests shelter us. Beauty and wonders delight us. Natural phenomena terrify us and leave us in bewildered awe.

         Deeply rooted in scripture and in humanity’s connection to God through connection to one another and to the natural world, Celtic spirituality is fond of saying that the Creation (all of it!) is the “first incarnation of God.” In other words, we see, hear, and experience God in and through all that God made and called good. I think many psalmists would agree with that (Ps. 8 and 104). Isaiah and Paul would probably agree, as well. (Is. 55:12, Rom. 1:20) Unfortunately, the ancient stream of Christian spirituality that the Celts embraced was mostly forgotten as Empire co-opted the Church and coerced it to justify—theologically and morally—humankind’s exploitation of the earth and of humbler populations of human beings. God and righteousness became associated with wealth, power, and “winners.” Everyone else was fair game to be dominated and subjugated for further gain.

         It’s our turn to do the huddling. It’s our turn to take better care of the earth. As the climate deteriorates the conditions that have sustained life, we face more than mere political and social issues. We face a spiritual/theological reckoning, as well.

Just how grateful are we for the earth that God has made?

When Jesus calls us to love as he has loved us, doesn’t that love mean showing both gratitude for those who came before and preemptive care for those whom we will never know?

And even if one doesn’t accept the science of climate change, isn’t it the loving, indeed the Christlike, thing to do to care for the earth while we live here?

*This piece is an adaptation of a congregational newsletter article.

“Trust”

Psalm 104:1-6 and Matthew 14:22-33

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

8/13/23

 Let my whole being bless the Lord!
    Lord my God, how fantastic you are!
    You are clothed in glory and grandeur!
² You wear light like a robe;
    you open the skies like a curtain.
³ You build your lofty house on the waters;
    you make the clouds your chariot,
    going around on the wings of the wind.
⁴ You make the winds your messengers;
    you make fire and flame your ministers.
⁵ You established the earth on its foundations
    so that it will never ever fall.
⁶ You covered it with the watery deep like a piece of clothing;
    the waters were higher than the mountains!

(Psalm 104:1-6 – CEB)

²² Right then, Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go ahead to the other side of the lake while he dismissed the crowds. ²³ When he sent them away, he went up onto a mountain by himself to pray. Evening came and he was alone. ²⁴ Meanwhile, the boat, fighting a strong headwind, was being battered by the waves and was already far away from land. ²⁵ Very early in the morning he came to his disciples, walking on the lake.²⁶ When the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified and said, “It’s a ghost!” They were so frightened they screamed.

²⁷ Just then Jesus spoke to them, “Be encouraged! It’s me. Don’t be afraid.”

²⁸ Peter replied, “Lord, if it’s you, order me to come to you on the water.”

²⁹ And Jesus said, “Come.”

Then Peter got out of the boat and was walking on the water toward Jesus. ³⁰ But when Peter saw the strong wind, he became frightened. As he began to sink, he shouted, “Lord, rescue me!”

³¹ Jesus immediately reached out and grabbed him, saying, “You man of weak faith! Why did you begin to have doubts?” ³² When they got into the boat, the wind settled down.

³³ Then those in the boat worshipped Jesus and said, “You must be God’s Son!” (Matthew 14:22-33 – CEB)

         Jesus has been taking a lot of heat lately. The Pharisees and Sadducees don’t care for him, and they continually let him know it. And not long before the story we just read, Jesus is in Nazareth where even his own neighbors reject him.

         We know who your parents are, they say. So, don’t get uppity with us!

         And Jesus says, Prophets always get the coldest shoulder from those who think they know them best.

         That’s actually a rather loving expression of disappointment. In any age, living as a person of faith calls for embodying humility, compassion, and forgiveness toward those around us—and trust in the one who calls us to faithfulness.

         John the Baptist seems to have struggled with the idea of grace-full trust. Whether motivated by love and compassion or by anger and fear, he threw one prophetic brick after another. Finally, he threw a brick through the wrong window—Herod’s bedroom window. By targeting everyone, he made himself a target. And then it was too late for anyone to tell him that he’d lost his mind, because Herod saw to it that John lost his head.

         Hearing the news of his cousin’s brutal death, Jesus slips away, seeking solitude to grieve and to pray. And even there, crowds find him. Feeling their desperation, Jesus tends to them. He feeds them.

Afterward, he tells his disciples, We’re going to Gennesaret next. You guys take a boat across the lake and prepare things for us.

         After pronouncing a benediction on the crowd and sending them home, a grieving Jesus climbs a mountain, again in search of solitude. In biblical literature, mountains represent the ultimate “thin place,” the place where earth and sky meet, the place of confluence between time and eternity, and communion between Creator and Creation.

         While Jesus has just been a tangible, unmediated presence of divine love to the crowd, his quest for seclusion on that mountain suggests that a sense of God’s absence and the assurance of God’s presence often happen simultaneously. It’s a kind of knowing to feel a storm surge at the pit of our being, or an ache telling us that all is not right with the world. This deep knowing wells up from an ancient memory of the eternal wholeness from which we’ve come and toward which we live. The mystics teach us to receive that ache as God’s call to embrace the chaotic, complicated, and otherwise disappointing world with a heart for healing and hope. The only other options are to withdraw from the world as rather depressed and hopeless hermits, or to lash out violently, competing for security, attention, and control over so-called scarce resources in God’s Creation of abundance.

         We’re not new to that struggle. We hear it throughout God’s long story with Israel. Remember Elijah. Fleeing from the spiteful Jezebel, he hides in a cave. God sniffs him out and says, Elijah, what are you doing here?

         The prophet’s response is pure sulk: I’ve done everything right! Now I’m all alone, and everyone wants me dead.

         Elijah has sought solitude, but out of fear rather than trust. So, God invites the piteous prophet to stand outside the cave because God is about to pass by. Then come the rock-splitting winds, the earthquake, and the fire. And let the dooms-dayers within each of us take note: God is not in any of this loud, blustering, sensational stuff. God does not work that way. That’s why we can laugh it off as an absurdity when anyone wonders what God was trying to tell Jonesborough Presbyterian when our building got struck by lightning last month. Seriously, if that’s how God worked, who would survive?

         After the turmoil, Elijah finds himself all alone—again—not inside a cave, but inside “a sound of sheer silence,” and only then does he know that God is near.

         Many generations later, echoing Elijah’s experience, Peter cries out, “Lord, if it is you, order me to come to you on the water.”

         Let’s remember that, to many of the ancients, deep water symbolizes the darkness of chaos and the mystery of evil. When Peter demands a command to step out of the boat and onto the sea, he’s asking Jesus to call him out of the cave, like Elijah, and into the earthquake, wind, and fire. He’s asking Jesus to call him, like Moses, to confront Pharaoh and to tell him, Let my people go. He’s asking Jesus to send him, like David, out to face the Goliath storm threatening the boat and everyone in it. Peter is asking Jesus for proof of something one can experience only through faith.

         Jesus says to Peter, Well, come on. And the next thing Peter knows, Jesus is hauling him through the waves like a drag net.

         Peter discovers that following Jesus is about trust and risk rather than obedience and reward.

         Being “fearfully and wonderfully made,” (Psalm 139:14) we are gifted creatures. We’re capable of remarkable feats of memory and interpretation, of incisive analysis, and of heights and depths of creativity that are nothing short of holy. There comes a point, however, when our minds have done all they can. Even when a theory can be more clearly developed, a work of art further refined, or a field more evenly plowed, there comes a moment when trust is the only way forward, and trust looks a lot like letting go. At that moment, we have to step out of the boat, even if the water is troubled and terrifying. And sink or swim, we trust the way of the Christ—the way of compassion, justice, and peace.

         The life of faith is a life of trust. And while faith and doubt are often considered opposites, they are hardly mutually exclusive. As Frederick Buechner has so memorably said, “Doubt is the ants in the pants of faith. It keeps it awake and moving.”¹

         All the disciples see Jesus, but only Peter says, “Lord, if it is you.” Seeing may constitute believing, but believing, like obedience, often becomes an end in itself. Trust embraces all the doubt and dares to step forward into a future that lies beyond our sight, beyond our control, and way beyond the surface tension of mere belief.

All manner of waves are battering our boat: Wars and rumors of war all over the planet, more extremes in weather due to climate change, and an ever-deepening dependence on physical violence and violent speech as the only viable responses to opposition. And we can huddle together singing “Jesus Loves Me” so loud we never get quiet enough to hear the voice and feel the hand of the one who loves us.

         But God’s Christ is calling. And he calls us not away from the storm, but into it, and out onto the deep. He calls us there not to target those whom we don’t like and can’t understand. He calls us out to embrace all Creation, to target it with compassion and grace, and to receive those self- and community-restoring gifts, as well.

         Trust me, says Jesus. And follow me.

¹Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking A Theological ABC, Harper and Row Publishers, 1973. p. 20.

“The Richest Feast’

Isaiah 55:1-3, 8-11 and Matthew 14:13-21

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

8/6/23

All of you who are thirsty, come to the water!

Whoever has no money, come, buy food and eat!

Without money, at no cost, buy wine and milk!
²Why spend money for what isn’t food,
    and your earnings for what doesn’t satisfy?
Listen carefully to me and eat what is good;
    enjoy the richest of feasts.
³Listen and come to me;
    listen, and you will live.
I will make an everlasting covenant with you,
    my faithful loyalty to David.
⁸My plans aren’t your plans,

nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
⁹Just as the heavens are higher than the earth,
    so are my ways higher than your ways,
    and my plans than your plans.
¹⁰Just as the rain and the snow come down from the sky
        and don’t return there without watering the earth,
        making it conceive and yield plants
        and providing seed to the sower

and food to the eater,

¹¹so is my word that comes from my mouth;
        it does not return to me empty.
        Instead, it does what I want,
        and accomplishes what I intend. (Isaiah 55:1-3, 8-11 – CEB)

¹³ When Jesus heard about John, he withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself. When the crowds learned this, they followed him on foot from the cities. ¹⁴ When Jesus arrived and saw a large crowd, he had compassion for them and healed those who were sick. ¹⁵ That evening his disciples came and said to him, “This is an isolated place and it’s getting late. Send the crowds away so they can go into the villages and buy food for themselves.”

¹⁶ But Jesus said to them, “There’s no need to send them away. You give them something to eat.”

¹⁷ They replied, “We have nothing here except five loaves of bread and two fish.”

¹⁸ He said, “Bring them here to me.” ¹⁹ He ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. He took the five loaves of bread and the two fish, looked up to heaven, blessed them and broke the loaves apart and gave them to his disciples. Then the disciples gave them to the crowds.²⁰ Everyone ate until they were full, and they filled twelve baskets with the leftovers. ²¹ About five thousand men plus women and children had eaten. (Matthew 14:13-21 – CEB)

         Isaiah prophesied to Jewish exiles in Babylon. And when the Babylonians defeated another nation, they scattered all the ordinary folks, while tending to bring the wealthiest and most influential individuals and families to Babylon. Because business and community leaders had the potential to help Babylon grow, they were welcomed with relative warmth by their abductors.

By the time Isaiah began to call the descendants of the original captives back to Jerusalem, many in the Jewish community held significant standing in Babylon. And as far as they were concerned, the “richest of feasts” to which Isaiah refers was the bounty they were already enjoying as fully-assimilated citizens of Babylonian­—which had become their Stockholm-syndrome home.

In Matthew 14, Jesus offers a free and plentiful meal to a large crowd of ordinary people—hardly society’s elite. They follow Jesus to a place where there is nothing but Jesus himself. Overwhelmed with compassion for the suffering before him, Jesus feeds everyone who is desperate enough to follow him to this place that could not be more different from the opulence and extravagance of Babylon in the 6^th century BCE.

The poor and sick people following Jesus receive the meal as a sign of God’s gracious presence and mysterious abundance. While exiled from the culture of plenty around them, they have more in common with the Israelites during the Exodus than the Jews in Babylon. Utterly dependent on God’s moment-to-moment grace, they rely on whatever manna drops into their hands.

Back in Babylon, Isaiah seems aware that he’s inviting his audience to return to a lower link on the geopolitical food chain, and there’s going to be push-back. He’s going to have to reacclimate the people to the language of faith, the language of covenant with God. He’ll have to remind them that God chose them to live as a sign of God’s grace. And to remember will involve hearing a humbling truth.

Through the prophet, God says, “Just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my plans than your plans.”

You can’t comprehend me, says God. You can’t comprehend my plans, and all of you are included in them. You have been from the start. I’ve said so over and over. And my word, which I have spoken from my mouth, “does not return to me empty. It…accomplishes what I intend.”

Israel must keep God’s story going. And while God’s people in Babylon may think that they’ve arrived at greatness by living large in one of the world’s great cities, God reminds them that God has plans for them and for their descendants. They are to live as a perpetual witness to God’s creative and purpose-full presence. Through them, God is planting seeds, watering the earth, and revealing that the Creation itself is a feast at which all humankind is welcome.

         While it would hardly be fair to say that Isaiah’s prophecy about the richest feast refers specifically to Jesus feeding the multitudes, or that it foreshadows what we call the Lord’s Supper, scripture consistently uses the metaphor of a banquet to reveal God’s realm as a place where all people gather to be nourished with sharedfood, drink, and community.

         And it is in that sharing that we meet, face to face, the presence of God’s dynamic and transforming love. And we call that love the Christ.

         To finish out this sermon, I’ve written a song for you. It’s my attempt to paraphrase Isaiah 55—thus the presumptuous voice of God from the first person.*

*Because I have yet to copyright this song, I am not including the lyrics.

“Visible Hope”

Psalm 40:1-4 and Romans 8:12-25 

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

7/30/23

I put all my hope in the LORD. 

He leaned down to me; 

he listened to my cry for help. 

²He lifted me out of the pit of death, 

out of the mud and filth, 

and set my feet on solid rock. 

He steadied my legs. 

³He put a new song in my mouth, 

a song of praise for our God. 

Many people will learn of this and be amazed; 

they will trust the LORD.

⁴Those who put their trust in the LORD, 

who pay no attention to the proud 

or to those who follow lies, 

are truly happy!  (Psalm 40:1-4 – CEB)

¹² So then, brothers and sisters, we have an obligation, but it isn’t an obligation to ourselves to live our lives on the basis of selfishness. ¹³ If you live on the basis of selfishness, you are going to die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the actions of the body, you will live. ¹⁴ All who are led by God’s Spirit are God’s sons and daughters. ¹⁵ You didn’t receive a spirit of slavery to lead you back again into fear, but you received a Spirit that shows you are adopted as his children. With this Spirit, we cry, “Abba, Father.” ¹⁶ The same Spirit agrees with our spirit, that we are God’s children. ¹⁷ But if we are children, we are also heirs. We are God’s heirs and fellow heirs with Christ, if we really suffer with him so that we can also be glorified with him.

¹⁸ I believe that the present suffering is nothing compared to the coming glory that is going to be revealed to us. ¹⁹ The whole creation waits breathless with anticipation for the revelation of God’s sons and daughters. ²⁰ Creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice—it was the choice of the one who subjected it—but in the hope ²¹ that the creation itself will be set free from slavery to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of God’s children. ²² We know that the whole creation is groaning together and suffering labor pains up until now. ²³ And it’s not only the creation. We ourselves who have the Spirit as the first crop of the harvest also groan inside as we wait to be adopted and for our bodies to be set free. ²⁴ We were saved in hope. If we see what we hope for, that isn’t hope. Who hopes for what they already see? ²⁵ But if we hope for what we don’t see, we wait for it with patience. (Romans 8:12-25– CEB)

         In the eighth chapter of his letter to the Romans, Paul crafts some of his most memorable and influential writing. One of my seminary professors said that, because of the passion and depth of this chapter, some scholars wonder if Paul wrote it while in the throes of some sort of spiritual ecstasy.

         Whatever the case, a clearly inspired Paul is writing the first systematic theology. When he began writing to churches, Paul handled new Christians as a parent cares for a newborn. “I couldn’t talk to you like spiritual people,” he tells the Corinthians, “but like unspiritual people, like babies in Christ. I gave you milk to drink instead of solid food, because you weren’t up to it yet.” (1Cor. 3:1b-2 – CEB)

         In Romans, though, the apostle seems to expect more from his readers. Still, with all of its grownup philosophy and studied argument, systematic theology is, to me, kind of like plain yogurt. It has nutritional value, but to be interesting, systematic theology has to be mixed with something else because the most transforming theology is not systematic; it is systemic. Good theology is not organized and argued. It is discovered in the messy, day-to-day realities of life. It is told and shared as narrative. Good theology is lived, because it is story.

         Story puts “flesh” on theological arguments. And because that flesh is human flesh, much of it is imperfect. Nonetheless, if the story is to hold relevance, all that flawed flesh is necessary.

         I think Paul understands this. He begins his letter to the Romans lamenting that he can’t be with them in person. (See Romans 1:11-12) He knows that there is no substitute for face-to-face relationships, no substitute for storying one another, especially in spiritual matters. As human beings, we don’t experience and relate to God through systematic arguments, but by participating in the organic processes of life. The best theologians are like gardeners. They have dirt under their fingernails.

         Aware of this, Paul embraces his role as a kind of midwife for the new life which God is revealing through the story of Jesus. And while Paul’s letters provide valuable insight on Jesus, their real authority comes from Paul’s own story.

Think about 1Corinthians 13. The so-called Love Chapter brings a bright clarity to life’s dark mirror because we know the relational process through which God transforms Saul into Paul. We know how God stories this man from a systematic persecutor of Christians into a man of buoyant, infectious faith.

         Paul’s conversion from persecutor to preacher is only part of the story. Paul also suffers as he travels the Mediterranean world sharing the gospel.

On one voyage, while heading toward Italy, Paul endures deep sufferings and groanings because, for one, he’s among several state prisoners. Then a storm causes the boat to run aground. Washing up on the shores of Malta, Paul finds new life and renewed hope when he and his fellow survivors are greeted with kindness by the people they meet. As these new friends light a fire to warm the castaways, Paul gathers an armload of brush for the fire. When he throws it toward the flames, a poisonous snake rushes out of the fire and bites Paul on the hand. The Maltese people recoil saying, “This man must be a murderer! He was rescued from the sea, but the goddess Justice hasn’t let him live!” (Acts 28:6)

Ironically enough, Paul is, in fact, a murderer. However, since God’s justice is restorative rather than retributive, Paul not only survives, he turns around and heals someone else.

         By the time Paul writes to the Romans, he’s been living a life which reveals all manner of unseen hope. Maybe he calls it unseen because so many of his readers have yet to live into their own stories of adoption and redemption, and, through those experiences, to gain the new eyes of faith.

         Like Paul’s boat, our world is relentlessly rocked by violence, by war, by hate between religions (and within them), by children and adults dying of starvation and preventable diseases, by hateful rhetoric, by the degradation of climate and environment. Every day, we can hear enough discouraging news and see enough naked hopelessness to drive us into tombs of despair. And when the Church bows before despair, our buildings become bunkers of brick and mortar. We seek certainty and safety rather than faithfulness. In the sanctuary of despair, we remove ourselves from the ongoing story of God’s work in the creation—maybe because so much of it happens, as Paul says, in deep groaning. So, we retreat, trying to recreate all that we remember from days that are gone forever.

         An irony emerges when we discover that the more we allow our stories to intertwine with the present sufferings of the creation, the more we enflesh our “breathless anticipation” with acts of defiant love and daring hope. When we’re honest about our own suffering, and when we enter the suffering of others, we participate in God’s always creating and re-creating story.

         The irony deepens, because to embrace the good news requires a letting go. “By the Spirit,” Paul says, “put to death the actions of the body.” His word for this letting-go is kenosis. The fifth chapter of The Wisdom Jesus, our current Monday-night book, is entitled “Kenosis: The Path of Self-Emptying Love.” One of the points the author makes is that, through Jesus, we may enter and even welcome all things. Nothing is “renounced or resisted,” she says. The trick, however, is “to cling to nothing.”¹ For those living the Christian path, everything is about experiencing and sharing the love of God in Christ. While we may claim some things, in the eternal sense, we own nothing, because, ultimately, nothing is truly ours. To realize this is to enter a new freedom. When we are owned by nothing, we can commit all things, including ourselves, to ministries of God’s creative and unifying love.

This is no easy path. We get on it, then leave it, then back on it, and leave it, again. Richard Rohr observes that, “Jesus clearly taught the twelve disciples about [this kind of] surrender, the necessity of suffering, humility, servant leadership, and nonviolence. [But they] resisted him every time, and so he finally had to make the journey himself and tell them, ‘Follow me!’”²

         To follow Jesus is to enter his ongoing story. And as both Jesus and Paul reveal, that path leads us into deep suffering as well as great joy, because the two cannot be separated. And it is exactly there, in the tumult of life’s painful and glorious realities, that our stories, that our own love-redeemed and hope-revealing lives, really begin.

¹Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming the Heart and Mind—a New Perspective on Christ and His Message. Shambhala, Boulder. 2008. P. 70

²http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Richard-Rohr-s-Meditation–Following-the-Shape-Shifter.html?soid=1103098668616&aid=9rfAlUEk3b0

“Parable Living”

Psalm 126 and Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

7/9/23

³¹ He told another parable to them: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and planted in his field. ³² It’s the smallest of all seeds. But when it’s grown, it’s the largest of all 

³³ He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast, which a woman took and hid in a bushel of wheat flour until the yeast had worked its way through all the dough.”

⁴⁴ “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure that somebody hid in a field, which someone else found and covered up. Full of joy, the finder sold everything and bought that field.

⁴⁵ “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls. ⁴⁶ When he found one very precious pearl, he went and sold all that he owned and bought it.

⁴⁷ “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that people threw into the lake and gathered all kinds of fish.⁴⁸ When it was full, they pulled it to the shore, where they sat down and put the good fish together into containers. But the bad fish they threw away. ⁴⁹ That’s the way it will be at the end of the present age. The angels will go out and separate the evil people from the righteous people, ⁵⁰ and will throw the evil ones into a burning furnace. People there will be weeping and grinding their teeth.

⁵¹ “Have you understood all these things?” Jesus asked.

They said to him, “Yes.”

⁵² Then he said to them, “Therefore, every legal expert who has been trained as a disciple for the kingdom of heaven is like the head of a household who brings old and new things out of their treasure chest.” (Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52 – CEB)

         One reason Jesus teaches in parables is because signs pointing to the kingdom of heaven are all around us.

The image of the kingdom as a mustard seed brings to mind children walking out of church with paper cups filled with a slurry of dark earth. Somewhere inside that muddy cup lies a tiny, drowning seed. I don’t know how many of those cups might have held mustard seeds, but North American Sunday school teachers who wanted to make a point similar to Jesus’ point needed to send the kids home with kudzu or English Ivy. For farmers in first-century Palestine, mustard plants were invasive and unwelcome.

It’s interesting. The story immediately preceding today’s string of pithy kingdom parables is the parable of the wheat and the weeds. By juxtaposing the wheat-and-weeds and the mustard seed parables, Matthew asks us to think very carefully about what we write off as weeds. Remember, that mustard plant, so vexing for farmers, creates a home for birds who not only aid in the propagation of crops, but whose plumage and song nourish us with awareness, joy, and gratitude—attributes which become a kind of yeast that leavens us for fuller living.

         Yeast is another odd image for God’s household. Yeast is a fungus, a biochemical change agent that becomes part of the dough just as bread becomes part of the body that eats it. And while too little yeast has no effect, too much yeast causes food poisoning.

The yeast metaphor says that God is a subtle mystery transforming us from within. So, when even well-intentioned followers of Jesus try to impose rigid dogmas or ecclesiastical systems on other individuals or societies, it’s like too much yeast. It’s toxic.

         In the parables of the hidden treasure and the perfect pearl, Jesus seems to compare God’s household to worldly wealth. And while I wince at comparing God’s realm of grace to anything suggesting materialism or greed, thanks to Cynthia Bourgeault,^* I’m also beginning to understand Jesus as a wisdom teacher who is inviting us to listen with the ears of our heart—ears that hear beyond the limits of literal understanding and lead us toward not only deeper understanding, but toward the truer yearnings of the human heart. Those timeless and essential yearnings invite us to recognize and embrace our made-in-God’s-image selves. And that’s the treasure. That’s the pearl. When we begin to encounter that holy place deep within us—a place all human beings share—laying aside worldly and material distractions becomes possible.

“Again,” says Jesus “the kingdom of heaven is like a net.” In this parable—which is simply a recasting of the parable of the wheat and the weeds—only the good fish are kept. Of course, being a good fish means that you’ll be gutted, skewered on a spit, cooked over an open fire, and eaten. That kind of makes you re-think righteousness, doesn’t it?

         Let’s remember, though, the comparison is to the net, not the fish. God’s household of grace is that which gets cast into our depths in order to gather in the holy and community-building gifts that lie beneath the surface. And those parts of us that remain selfish, violent, exclusive, and otherwise unkind, that gets thrown away.

         Again, the invitation is to look within ourselves and to encounter God’s transforming presence and strength. That means that Jesus’ parables usually put us at odds with pride and individualism, at odds with the cultures and ideologies of the nations we love, and at odds with groups that give us identity. And that can include the Church.

         Many of us feel grave concern over the Church’s decline. And we can cast nets of blame into the waters and haul in all sorts of culprits, and yet the most liable “bad fish” is the Church itself. Far too often the Church has proved itself more concerned with constructing grand buildings than communities of welcome and belonging, more concerned with protecting wealth than committing it to ministry, more concerned with holding power than advocating for the powerless, and, especially, more concerned with trying to decide for God who’s “in” and who’s “out.” If the Church is struggling, I think it’s because we have gotten too accustomed to favored relationships with wealth and violent power to follow our calling to love as we are loved.

God calls and equips the Church to discover its inner treasure, and to become mustard seed, yeast, and net. And when we fail to embrace that vocation, then by the deepest, most radical and unsettling grace, God will use other means to reveal God’s kingdom. God will work through other people, many of whom “good” church folk fear and despise.

         Still, when the Church confesses and resists our addictions to entitlement and privilege, we can become the subversive weed Jesus plants in the creation. We can become the yeast the Spirit hides with carefully-measured breaths within the nations. We can become part of the wide net God casts into the world not to judge, but to gather in all whom God loves. And that leaves out no one.

         The Church is not God’s realm. It’s merely a witness to God’s new reality of peace, non-violent justice, and diverse community being revealed through life itself, and through human parables living lives of compassion and joy. Wherever householders reach into our storehouses of ancient spiritual wisdom, and of ongoing spiritual experience, we continue to reveal God’s re-freshing holiness even in that which appears old, tired, and irrelevant.

         I’m going to close with Psalm 126. Listen to the delight of the psalmist who describes God’s grace which has surprised him with abundance and hope in a world that had seemed to be defined by scarcity and fear. And as you listen, know that, even now, the same God cares for and calls us—the same God parables us—toward faithfulness and wholeness.

When the Lord changed Zion’s circumstances

for the better,
    it was like we had been dreaming.
² Our mouths were suddenly filled with laughter;
    our tongues were filled with joyful shouts.
It was even said, at that time, among the nations,
    “The Lord has done great things for them!”
³ Yes, the Lord has done great things for us,
    and we are overjoyed.

⁴ Lord, change our circumstances for the better,
    like dry streams in the desert waste!
⁵ Let those who plant with tears
    reap the harvest with joyful shouts.
⁶ Let those who go out,
    crying and carrying their seed,
    come home with joyful shouts,
    carrying bales of grain!

 (Psalm 126 – CEB)

¹Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind—a New Perspective on Christ and His Message.” Shambala, 2008.

“The Beast with Two Minds”

John 7:10-13, 37-43

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

7/2/23

But now hear this, Jacob my servant,
    and Israel, whom I have chosen.
² The Lord your maker,
    who formed you in the womb and will help you, says:
    Don’t fear, my servant Jacob,
    Jeshurun, whom I have chosen.
³ I will pour out water upon thirsty ground
    and streams upon dry land.
I will pour out my spirit upon your descendants
    and my blessing upon your offspring.
⁴ They will spring up from among the reeds
    like willows by flowing streams. (Isaiah 44:1-4 – CEB)

¹⁰ However, after [Jesus’] brothers left for the festival, he went too—not openly but in secret.

¹¹ The Jewish leaders were looking for Jesus at the festival. They kept asking, “Where is he?”

¹² The crowds were murmuring about him. “He’s a good man,” some said, but others were saying, “No, he tricks the people.” ¹³ No one spoke about him publicly, though, for fear of the Jewish authorities.

³⁷ On the last and most important day of the festival, Jesus stood up and shouted,

“All who are thirsty should come to me!
³⁸     All who believe in me should drink!
    As the scriptures said concerning me, 
        Rivers of living water will flow out from within him.”

³⁹ Jesus said this concerning the Spirit. Those who believed in him would soon receive the Spirit, but they hadn’t experienced the Spirit yet since Jesus hadn’t yet been glorified.

⁴⁰ When some in the crowd heard these words, they said, “This man is truly the prophet.” ⁴¹ Others said, “He’s the Christ.” But others said, “The Christ can’t come from Galilee, can he? ⁴² Didn’t the scripture say that the Christ comes from David’s family and from Bethlehem, David’s village?” ⁴³ So the crowd was divided over Jesus. (John 7:10-13, 37-43 – CEB)

         In best-case scenarios, the most influential people in our lives embody love and forgiveness. They speak challenging yet transforming truth to us. They evoke laughter and tears, humility and confidence, gratitude and awe. And if they’re truly influential, we can’t help sharing what they teach us. Both of my parents have been wonderful teachers. And while I’ve shared some of my dad’s wisdom, my mom has spoken some memorable words, too.

         I am the second of four children, and when any of us complained about something we had just received or experienced, something we had expected to be pleasing but which had been rather disappointing, Mom would say, “Things are almost always better while you anticipate them than when you actually get them.” I was too young to get the irony that she would say that while she was cooking for us, cleaning up after us, or breaking up some fight among us.

         Still, I didn’t want to hear it! I was a kid. I didn’t have a driver’s license yet. I hadn’t earned a paycheck yet. I hadn’t kissed a girl yet. I was looking forward to those things with great anticipation! So, I dismissed Mom’s advice as a symptom of her advanced age. She was in her thirties for crying out loud!

To my chagrin, Mom proved more right than wrong. Selfish anticipation tends to breed unrealistic expectations. When hit by enough disappointment, we often try to protect ourselves through suspicion or even full-on cynicism. When fear drives anticipation, the effects can be even worse. Fear devolves into impatience with and judgement of those whose desires and expectations seem different from ours. That impatience and judgment can create festering division in any society.

In John’s gospel, one of the main characters is the crowd. Following Jesus everywhere he goes, the crowd represents any of us and all of us. It represents our belief and disbelief, our hope and despair, our gratitude and disdain.

In John 7, Jesus is in Jerusalem for the Festival of Booths. This festival amounts to a kind of Thanksgiving meets Mardi Gras meets Holy Week. It’s a week-long, harvest celebration with parades, feasting, and solemn worship. Word is out that Jesus is in town. The Jews are looking for him, and the crowd is in an absolute lather.

Jesus is here? Where! He’s really something special, say some folks.

Nah! He’s just another fraud, say others.

The crowd has heard stories about Jesus, and rumors that he could be the Messiah, But coming in from north and south, east and west to gather at the table, they’ve listened to different storytellers. There are two basic camps of messianic expectations. Some see messianic hope in Jesus’ authoritative teaching, in his compassion for the poor, and in stories about things like turning water into wine, and five loaves and two fish into enough for everyone. Others expect the Messiah to bring both religious and political redemption. So, until Jesus leads the Jewish people in successful rebellion against Rome, he’s just one more charlatan hawking snake oil.

The crowd may be one literary character, but being of two minds, it is at its own throat. The tension we see and feel at the Festival of Booths exposes more than a momentary dilemma. It illustrates the way of life for people of faith.

All the gospels acknowledge that tension. Just last week we read the text in which Jesus says, “I haven’t come to bring peace but a sword.” (Matthew 10:34 – CEB)

We’re hardly strangers to tension. The last decade or so has been one of acute division in our own culture. Religiously, politically, socially, and economically we are the crowd. Divided and anxious, we’re at our own throat, like a beast with two minds.

Watching the crowd wrestling with their expectations, and with each other, Jesus says, “All who are thirsty should come to me! All who believe in me should drink! As the scriptures said concerning me, ‘Rivers of living water will flow out from within him.’”

Jesus is calling us to a sacred memory, and within that sacred memory are words from Isaiah, the prophet to exiles. Through Isaiah, God said: “For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour my spirit upon your descendants…” (Isaiah 44:3 – CEB)

The purpose of sacred memory is to re-connect us to holy community. One fly in the ointment is that, in both the first and the twenty-first centuries, some in the Judeo-Christian tradition hear different promises in those ancient words. Some hear a promise of a return to oneness in community with God, neighbor, and earth. And others hear God promising to return one particular community to religious freedom and political prominence—be that Israel, or America, or our party, or our race. And as a single character–as a community—the crowd hears both. And what can a divided body expect? “A house torn apart by divisions,” said Jesus, “will collapse.” (Mark 3:25 – CEB)

Being divided and of two minds, and having expected something very different, the crowd collapses and turns on the one who represents all that is kind, loving, faithful, peaceable, and true. Blaming Jesus for their disappointment, the crowd rejects him. And both religious and political leaders are only too happy to be rid of Jesus.

When he would not go away, though, when goodness, light, and truth persisted, the empire, with its armaments and influence, persecuted those who continued to follow Jesus.

When the suffering witnesses to the light continued to live humbly, graciously, and with courageous commitment to peace and justice, the empire, in the fourth century, did its deepest and most lasting damage. It co-opted Jesus and made him the mascot of the empire. To be a good citizen, then, one had to identify as Christian. And the symbols of the nation stood next to the symbols of the faith as if they were somehow equivalent.

So, the division continued; and it continues still.

Long before John wrote his version of the Gospel, Paul wrote to the Corinthians saying, “Christ is just like the human body—a body is a unit and has many parts; and all the parts of the body are one body…We were all baptized by one Spirit into one body…and we all were given one Spirit to drink.” (1Corinthians 12:12-13 – CEB)

As followers of Christ, our first priority is to live as members of his one body. And even when we experience division, even when that division precipitates one Friday after another, we are still the body of love. And love will, finally, have the last word.

This morning we come to re-unite at Christ’s table. We come to drink from the well of living water. And here we will receive and share the meal that reminds us to whom we belong and that our call is to live and serve as one body, demonstrating to the world the love, mercy, peace, welcome, and joy of Christ in whom we find our only true and lasting home.

“Ambushed by Resurrection”

Deuteronomy 6:1-9 Matthew 10:34-39

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

6/25/23

Now these are the commandments, the regulations, and the case laws that the Lord your God commanded me to teach you to follow in the land you are entering to possess, ² so that you will fear the Lord your God by keeping all his regulations and his commandments that I am commanding you—both you and your sons and daughters—all the days of your life and so that you will lengthen your life. ³ Listen to them, Israel! Follow them carefully so that things will go well for you and so that you will continue to multiply exactly as the Lord, your ancestors’ God, promised you, in a land full of milk and honey.

⁴ Israel, listen! Our God is the Lord! Only the Lord!

⁵ Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your being, and all your strength. ⁶ These words that I am commanding you today must always be on your minds.⁷ Recite them to your children. Talk about them when you are sitting around your house and when you are out and about, when you are lying down and when you are getting up. ⁸ Tie them on your hand as a sign. They should be on your forehead as a symbol. ⁹ Write them on your house’s doorframes and on your city’s gates. (Deuteronomy 6:1-9 – CEB)

³⁴ “Don’t think that I’ve come to bring peace to the earth. I haven’t come to bring peace but a sword. ³⁵ I’ve come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. ³⁶ People’s enemies are members of their own households.

³⁷ “Those who love father or mother more than me aren’t worthy of me. Those who love son or daughter more than me aren’t worthy of me. ³⁸ Those who don’t pick up their crosses and follow me aren’t worthy of me.³⁹ Those who find their lives will lose them, and those who lose their lives because of me will find them.”(Matthew 10:34-39 – CEB)

         The New Testament passage we just read appears in both Matthew and Luke. And to be honest, it always feels like an ambush.

         “I haven’t come to bring peace, but a sword.” What happened to the Prince of Peace?

         “Those who love father or mother more than me aren’t worthy of me.” What happened to Honor your father and mother?

         To be worthy of me, pick up your cross. Didn’t Rome use crucifixion to manipulate human behavior through that very public display of inhumanity?

         To really live your life, says Jesus, release your death grip on it.

With all this, he undermines some of the most fundamental tenets that powerful and affluent cultures celebrate and enshrine as inalienable rights. Things like: The world is your oyster, so grab all the gusto you can! Control your own destiny!

I think Jesus knows that self-serving mottos like these can lead to trouble. If I claim some divine right to grab all the gusto I can get, I inevitably keep grabbing, even when it means grabbing more than my fair share. And the more I consume, the more insatiable I become. Or as singer/songwriter Joe Pug says in one of his many insightful songs, “The more I buy the more I’m bought; and the more I’m bought, the less I cost.”¹

Materialism and consumption become drugs like any other. We just keep buying and chasing the unattainable high of lasting satisfaction. And all we really get is inebriated with entitlement. And that entitlement costs us connection to and compassion for the people and the earth around us.

Similarly, when I claim divine right to complete control of my own destiny, or my own narrative, I will have to control everyone else, because my life cannot be distanced from the lives around me. Trying to control my situation almost always results in me trying to force my desires, my fears, my power-hungry ego onto others. And if I get my way, by whatever means, only then do I believe that God is in the heavens, and all is right with the world.

         Into all my efforts to manipulate and rationalize advantages for myself, Jesus keeps saying, emphatically, Allen, stop it! To be as alive as you think you want to be, you’ll have to, in some way, lose your life.

         I’ve never much liked this passage, but bless my heart, the fact that it challenges me to self-emptying love is what makes it gospel for me. And because these words do feel stark at first, I have to stop and remember that Jesus offers them, as he does everything else, as an expression of love, not of exasperation or anger. After spending enough time with this text, and trusting that it does, in truth, convey grace, I begin to hear it revealing a purpose that aims to heal and make whole. So, instead of stark and diminishing, it becomes a source of light and life.

         When we open ourselves to the possibility of loving intent in Jesus’ telling us that he comes not “to bring peace, but a sword,” I think the Spirit reminds us of the wider witness of scripture. And we recall that, as the Christ, Jesus is not out to endrelationships. He aims to re-new and strengthen them.

When a broken bone doesn’t set correctly, an orthopedic surgeon may have to re-break the bone and set it properly. The intentional break and re-set allow the particular bone and, thus, the whole limb, or even the whole body to be restored to proper alignment and to full strength and function.

         So, Jesus is not talking about severing ties with the people we love. He’s talking about re-ordering all of our ties. He’s talking about loving all things, even the people closest to us, from an entirely new perspective.

In The Wisdom Jesus, the book our Monday night group is reading, author Cynthia Bourgeault encourages her readers to recognize Jesus as a kind of human ground-zero for wisdom teaching. The wisdom tradition had been around long before Jesus, and yet Jesus embodied, as no one before him, the depth and breadth of that tradition through which humankind learns to experience God—and not simply to experience, but, as Bourgeault says, to know God. Now, knowledge of God is not like one’s knowledge of an academic subject or of a skill or trade. We can’t fully know God any more than a barnacle can know us.

The wisdom tradition teaches the deep knowingness of awareness, of connection, of the com-passion of shared joy and shared suffering. And in the wisdom tradition, all relationship begins and ends with God. All true intimacy is, ultimately, with God because all true relationship is, ultimately, an expression ofGod.² To enter relationships with other human beings, and with the entire Creation, from a perspective of deep humility and mutuality is to live in a radically new way, and that re-ordering begins with the grateful surrender of the previous perspective.

Now, that previous perspective is neither useless nor wrong. It’s simply inadequate for a more mature faith. “When I was a child,” says Paul, “I used to speak like a child, reason like a child, think like a child. But now that I [am growing up], I’ve put an end to childish things.” (1Cor. 13:11) There’s no judgment of the previous perspective. We just reach the point at which we’re capable of deeper love and deeper trust.

When my children were born, I cut the umbilical cords. With each birth, the experience of pregnancy was complete, and a brand new set of relationships began. Relationships of unspeakable joy, gratitude, and heartache. Relationships of ongoing bewilderment and discovery. Relationships in which we began a continual process of coming together, pulling apart, and coming together anew. My relationships with my son and daughter haven’t always been easy, or even pleasant, and I’ve never known anyone for whom that wasn’t the case. Since our son became a dad, though, there’s been a new beginning, a new intimacy because we’re now sharing the experience of fatherhood and a love for this spellbinding new life that is growing, changing, and becoming, right before our eyes. I felt a similar joy just eight days ago when I got to marry my daughter to her now husband.

         Like all relationships, these new relationships will experience turmoil. Things as we know them now will end. And after each experience of change or loss, the Spirit lays us at our Mother’s breast, freshly re-formed, and capable of new depths of understanding and trust.

Resurrection is our tradition’s metaphor for the new life of intimacy, through Christ, with God and with all Creation. And Resurrection does ambush us. And with each ambush, it shines God’s unassailable light a little further into the darkness revealing the next steps in the path of wisdom, the path of holiness, and, yes, even the path of peace which Jesus may say he has not come to bring, but which he does, nonetheless, faithfully bring.

¹https://joepugmusic.com

²Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming the Heart and Mind—a New Perspective on Christ and His Message. Shambhala, Boulder. 2008.

“Midwives of Hope”

Exodus 1:8-2:10

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

6/11/23

Now a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph. ⁹ He said to his people, “Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we.¹⁰ Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.”

¹¹Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh. ¹² But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. ¹³ The Egyptians subjected the Israelites to hard servitude ¹⁴ and made their lives bitter with hard servitude in mortar and bricks and in every kind of field labor. They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them.

¹⁵ The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, ¹⁶ “When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women and see them on the birthstool, if it is a son, kill him, but if it is a daughter, she shall live.” ¹⁷ But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. ¹⁸ So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this and allowed the boys to live?” ¹⁹ The midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.” ²⁰ So God dealt well with the midwives, and the people multiplied and became very strong.²¹ And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families. ²² Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, “Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live.”

2 Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. ² The woman conceived and bore a son, and when she saw that he was a fine baby, she hid him three months. ³ When she could hide him no longer she got a papyrus basket for him and plastered it with bitumen and pitch; she put the child in it and placed it among the reeds on the bank of the river. ⁴ His sister stood at a distance, to see what would happen to him.

⁵ The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her attendants walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to bring it. ⁶ When she opened it, she saw the child. He was crying, and she took pity on him. “This must be one of the Hebrews’ children,” she said. ⁷ Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and get you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?” ⁸ Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Yes.” So the girl went and called the child’s mother. ⁹ Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child and nurse it for me, and I will give you your wages.” So the woman took the child and nursed it. ¹⁰ When the child grew up, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. She named him Moses, “because,” she said, “I drew him out of the water.” (Exodus 1:8-2:10 – NRSV)

         There’s a new Pharaoh in town, and he has amnesia. Or maybe he’s been poorly schooled in history. Or maybe he was cast upon the throne at an age too young for the responsibility. Or maybe he’s just willfully ignorant. Whatever the case, the new Pharaoh neither remembers nor appreciates Joseph, the former Hebrew prisoner turned resourceful bureaucrat whose spiritual insight and practical wisdom delivered Egypt during a catastrophic famine. To forgetful leaders like Pharaoh, the future is a realm to be conquered and dominated by any means, because to them, ultimately, it’s all about themselves.

         There is within me a worshiper of golden calves who understands that fear. There is also within me something more human and holy which understands why that always breeds devastation. When consumed by selfish fear, individuals and groups project that fear onto other individuals and groups that represent the weaknesses or the failures we most despise in ourselves. So rich and poor, black and white, male and female, this religion and that religion, old and young all battle and blame each other. We create the enmity and resentment that some future and more mature generation will have to learn to forgive and heal. What a devastating legacy to leave!

         Pharaoh chooses the growing immigrant population of the Hebrews as the source of everything personally abhorrent and politically threatening. Having focused his fear on the Hebrews, he tries to solve his problem by targeting them, by forcing them into submission.

         There are two very different kinds of fear that shape the thoughts and actions of the characters in today’s story. And those fears continue to affect our present and to shape our future. The first fear is Pharaoh’s fear. He’s afraid that the future really isn’t about him. Terrified at the prospect of losing a status quo beneficial to himself, the king tries to end something that God started. When the Hebrews only grow stronger under the duress of slavery, Pharaoh increases their workload and the brutality with which he drives them. Given permission to dehumanize the Hebrews, the Egyptian overseers beat them like beasts, and kill them with labor and the whip.

It’s important to note that when one group gives another a story like that to remember, a story of oppression and deliverance from which to draw identity, purpose, and faith, the oppressed group will have an eternal well from which to draw strength. And they will, in time, overcome and thrive. The memory of being owned, enslaved, exploited, and liberated lays the theological and existential groundwork for Hebrew poetry, prophecy, and hope. The memory of that shared experience gives durable authority to the psalms, the lamentations, and the prophetic words of people like David, Isaiah, and Jeremiah.

When facing the failure of his efforts to own that which belongs to God—namely the Hebrews and the future—Pharaoh does what madmen and despots do: He tries to create even more fear and a more violent disconnect between himself and his people and everyone else. To control the Hebrew population, Pharaoh calls for the systematic murder of their newborn boys. And adding insult to injury, he calls on Hebrew midwives to serve as his angels of death.

         “But,” says the storyteller, “the midwives feared God.”

         Here is the second fear. Maybe we can call it liberated or liberating fear. Every day, Shiphrah and Puah, the midwives, witness and participate in the gracious and inscrutable power that continues to create and to bring forth new life. Trusting that power, they defy Pharaoh and his powers of domination and destruction. In their civil-yet-holy disobedience, they declare their faith in God’s will to outmaneuver and outlast Pharaoh’s will.

         The midwives’ fear is not anxiety or dread. Precisely the opposite, their fear proclaims their complete trust in the presence and purposes of God. Remembering the past, rich with promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, these intrepid women, at great risk to themselves, freely embody Israel’s hope. And they cannot hide their defiance. Because of their subversive faith, Hebrew boys survive. And Pharaoh’s own daughter, who becomes an accidental midwife, will name one of them Moses.

         The world is rife with Pharaohs and Egypts. From east to west and north to south, anxiety and dread define much of humanity’s daily experience. And that’s especially true for those whose day-to-day experience includes the threats of poverty, injustice, and violence.

The Pharaoh’s fear within us enslaves us to anxiety and dread so that we become his unwitting and yet all-too willing servants. Imagining that we’re being consistent with history, loyal to nation, and faithful to God, human beings often build Pharaoh’s “supply cities.” And we yield to and participate in all the brutal political, economic, and social systems required to sustain them.

         Albert Einstein famously said that “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that created them.” To me, that echoes Paul’s admonition to the Romans: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God.” (Romans 12:2)

         It’s all-too-easy to make faith about conspicuous morality or subscribing to some orthodoxy. However, as people of biblical faith, of storied faith, we are called to the new-minded, liberating fear of the midwives. To follow their example is just another way to follow Jesus in lives of death-defying trust that God is real, and that God is the very source of all life, love, and transforming justice.

In our lifetimes, we may not witness the final revealing of God’s fullness, but every time we feed the hungry, show compassion to the suffering, empower the victim of injustice, care for the Creation, and rejoice in the love and goodness of God, we serve as midwives of grace, even as Pharaoh demands that we kill it. 

While our individual interpretations of today’s circumstances may differ, our text is calling us always to ask if our responses to those circumstances convey the self-serving fear that leads to suspicion, division, and, ultimately, to violence against others. Or do our lives proclaim the great nevertheless of faith, what the ancient prophets and poets called the “fear of God”?

Do our words and actions declare trust and gratitude that all human beings are children of God and that all of us belong to God?

Do we actively love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength?

Do we truly seek to love all of our neighbors as we love ourselves?

         None of us can answer those questions affirmatively all the time, but when we can, we participate in the birth and re-birth of hope into this world. And we declare our allegiance to God, who is faithful, and to whom the past, present, and future of all Creation always belongs.

“Suffering into Hope”

Genesis 50:15-21 and Romans 5:1-5

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

6/4/23

Trinity Sunday

¹⁵ When Joseph’s brothers realized that their father was now dead, they said, “What if Joseph bears a grudge against us, and wants to pay us back seriously for all of the terrible things we did to him?” ¹⁶ So they approached Joseph and said, “Your father gave orders before he died, telling us, ¹⁷ ‘This is what you should say to Joseph. “Please, forgive your brothers’ sins and misdeeds, for they did terrible things to you. Now, please forgive the sins of the servants of your father’s God.”’” Joseph wept when they spoke to him.

¹⁸ His brothers wept too, fell down in front of him, and said, “We’re here as your slaves.”

¹⁹ But Joseph said to them, “Don’t be afraid. Am I God? ²⁰ You planned something bad for me, but God produced something good from it, in order to save the lives of many people, just as he’s doing today. ²¹ Now, don’t be afraid. I will take care of you and your children.” So he put them at ease and spoke reassuringly to them. (Genesis 50:15-21 – CEB)

Therefore, since we have been made righteous through his faithfulness, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. ² We have access by faith into this grace in which we stand through him, and we boast in the hope of God’s glory. ³ But not only that! We even take pride in our problems, because we know that trouble produces endurance, ⁴ endurance produces character, and character produces hope. ⁵ This hope doesn’t put us to shame, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.(Romans 5:1-5 – CEB)

         All that business about confidently turning problems, or suffering, into endurance, character, and hope, how does that really set with you? One might understand how that’s true for someone experiencing vocational turmoil, or how we suffered through the pandemic. But how might that preach today in Ukraine, Syria, or Sudan? How would it preach to teenagers being trafficked for sex? How would it preach to sweat-shop workers in Bangladesh? How would it preach to parents who have lost children in school shootings and who must continue living in a culture that protects the weapons used killed their children more passionately than it protects the children themselves?

         Not all suffering is equal, and in Paul’s case, he’s writing to Christians in Rome who are suffering because, in a society that worships Caesar, they worship the God revealed in Jesus. So, that which gives them life could kill them.

Following Jesus can be dangerous because it means more than thinking right thoughts and acting nice. It means learning compassion, which translates, literally, to suffer with others—that is to practice solidarity with those who suffer. So, following Jesus means harnessing both grace and grit and challenging the powerful, speaking out for the voiceless, finding true value in something other than material wealth, and, then, suffering the consequences of embodying that kind of self-emptying, Christlike love for all things. Isn’t that how followers of Jesus witness to “the love of God…poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit”?

         To complicate things, in Paul’s day, to find oneself beset with illness, loss, or misfortune means that God—or the gods—are angry with you and are getting even. So, logically, if people are only getting what they deserve, then aren’t we meddling in God’s affairs to try to mitigate their pain? Aren’t we even judging God’s judgment?

         Through word and deed, Jesus declares that eye-for-an-eye retribution is not God’s response to anything. Jesus teaches that to share suffering—to show compassion—is to follow him and to love God. For Jesus-followers, then, to offer thoughts and prayers rings hollow. Mere thoughts and prayers almost always avoid the suffering of others because they fail to ask of us anything that will lead to endurance, character, or hope for anyone.

         Only through compassion, by entering the suffering of others, do we embody our prayers and participate in the incarnational ministry of Christ—his ministry of presence and empathy.

         Presence and empathy are what the work of the Missions and the Congregational Life and Membership ministry teams are about. That’s what much of the Shalom Circle is about. And given the unique struggles that children, youth, and families face in today’s environment of relentless busyness and detachment from relevant faith communities, that’s what much of the work of the Christian Education ministry team is about. 

         If a congregation is genuinely interested in preparing for a future, if it wants its material assets to provide more than an endowment and a venue, it will enter the suffering of the world around it. It will trust that, come what may, God has called them into suffering, that God is in the midst of it, and that, through the power of Resurrection, God is creating something new out of it. And through that trust, the people will discover something new, revealing, and empowering about the depth of their individual and corporate character. And through their surrender to grace, they will—they can, anyway—become a source of hope to people they don’t know, and to generations they can only imagine.

         Over the last 12-15 years, Arlington Presbyterian Church in Arlington, VA watched its numbers decline, and they felt their congregational story easing toward the same slow death facing many churches these days. So, the church leaders began a season of very honest and courageous discernment.

         Over a period of about ten years, they stepped back, looked at their beautiful stone church located in a municipality where higher and higher property values were making it impossible for people who weren’t doctors, lawyers, and Pentagon chiefs to live in that community. So, Arlington Presbyterian decided something unthinkable to most congregations—they decided that they didn’t need the beautiful stone landmark known as Arlington Presbyterian Church. What the community needed was affordable housing. So, the church sold its property to Arlington Partnership for Affordable Housing, and the old church was torn down. Pastor Ashley Goff says, As Jesus broke bread and gave it to his disciples, APC broke its church building and gave it to the community.

         In place of the old building, there now stands Gilliam Place, a 173-unit affordable-housing complex. And in it reside teachers, nurses, police officers, firefighters, people with disabilities—none of whom could afford decent housing in that suburb of Washington, DC. Still an active congregation, Arlington Presbyterian gathers and worships in a specially-designed space on the ground floor of Gilliam Place.

         While it is getting more and more expensive to live in Washington County, TN, I’m not at all recommending that Jonesborough Presbyterian do what Arlington Presbyterian did. My point is simply to illustrate what kind of Gospel-grounded ministry can happen when followers of Jesus really follow him into the suffering around them. Welcoming and trusting the Spirit’s guidance, they practice a visible, palpable hope that thoughts and prayers cannot deliver. They participate in God’s revelation of God’s household of grace on earth.

         No one knows what the future holds for this congregation. And in the very limited time that this 60-year-old pastor has left in the ministry, he’d like to see this congregation poised for a future of ever-deepening, Gospel-grounded faithfulness. And to him, that involves expanding ministries of welcome and empowerment in a society that is contracting in its understanding of what it means to be human, and a religious culture contracting in what it means to be a Child of God.

It involves creating space where seekers can ask mind-broadening and faith-deepening questions that many church leaders have found threatening and shut down.

It involves continuing to follow Jesus into the suffering around us by addressing issues like poverty, hunger, racial injustice, gun violence, and ecological emergency.

Preacher, those are political issues!

Are they? Jesus wasn’t stoned for religious sins. He was hanged on a Roman cross as a threat to the empire because he blurred the lines between theology and politics. In a vin diagram of theological issues and socio-political issues, there would be a huge overlap because they all deal with the health and well-being of individuals and communities. In my opinion, those allegedly unrelated issues are one just as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, just as Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer are all one in the Trinity.

And in Christ, we are one. When one of us suffers, all of us suffer. And while we can’t suffer in another person’s place, to whatever extent we are gifted for compassion and allowed to show it, we can walk alongside each other in our struggles, and through shared suffering build endurance, discover new character, and experience, as never before, the hope of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

*All information about Arlington Presbyterian Church can be found at: https://arlingtonpresbyterian.org.

“Pentecostal Prophecy”

Genesis 1:1-5 and Acts 2:1-18

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

5/28/23

When God began to create the heavens and the earth— ² the earth was without shape or form, it was dark over the deep sea, and God’s wind swept over the waters— ³ God said, “Let there be light.” And so light appeared. ⁴ God saw how good the light was. God separated the light from the darkness. ⁵ God named the light Day and the darkness Night.

There was evening and there was morning: the first day. (CEB)

When Pentecost Day arrived, they were all together in one place. ² Suddenly a sound from heaven like the howling of a fierce wind filled the entire house where they were sitting. ³ They saw what seemed to be individual flames of fire alighting on each one of them.⁴ They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages as the Spirit enabled them to speak.

⁵ There were pious Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. ⁶ When they heard this sound, a crowd gathered. They were mystified because everyone heard them speaking in their native languages.⁷ They were surprised and amazed, saying, “Look, aren’t all the people who are speaking Galileans, every one of them? ⁸ How then can each of us hear them speaking in our native language?

⁹ Parthians, Medes, and Elamites; as well as residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, ¹⁰ Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the regions of Libya bordering Cyrene; and visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism), ¹¹ Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the mighty works of God in our own languages!”

¹² They were all surprised and bewildered. Some asked each other, “What does this mean?”

¹³ Others jeered at them, saying, “They’re full of new wine!”

¹⁴ Peter stood with the other eleven apostles. He raised his voice and declared, “Judeans and everyone living in Jerusalem! Know this! Listen carefully to my words!¹⁵ These people aren’t drunk, as you suspect; after all, it’s only nine o’clock in the morning! ¹⁶ Rather, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:

^17 “In the last days, God says,
I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
    Your sons and daughters will prophesy.
    Your young will see visions.
    Your elders will dream dreams.
¹⁸     Even upon my servants, men and women,
        I will pour out my Spirit in those days,
        and they will prophesy.” (CEB)

         Pentecost. The spring harvest festival fifty days after Passover. What appears to be “individual flames of fire.” The litany of toungue-twisting names. The scoffing cynics saying, Who let Drunk Uncle in?

         No one’s drunk, says Peter. It’s only 9am. Then he quotes the prophet Joel who speaks of “the last days,” days when the gift of prophecy will enjoy a new beginning.

         And now, says Peter, God is revealing those last days.

The thing about those last days, though, is that they aren’t really last at all. They are, as with all “last things,” brand-new first days, a fresh start marked by a revitalizing re-emergence of God’s Spirit. And as that Spirit permeates the Creation—the same Creation over which it once merely hovered (Genesis 1:2)—prophecy breaks free from old confines. It’s no longer a rare gift. It’s a new way of life for “all flesh,” a new reality for sons and daughters, young and old, male and female.

Pentecost, then, marks not so much the arrival of something brand new, but of humankind’s re-awakening to the eternal mystery called the Holy Spirit. And we discover, sometimes to our chagrin, that the Spirit is slave to no one—not to any nation, or language, or even theology.

         “I will pour out my Spirit,” says God, “and they shall [all] prophesy.”

         My southern upbringing in church left with me with a rather cartoonish image of prophets—guys walking around in dark robes tied with rope, their heads hidden inside deep, drooping hoods, and each arm stuffed up the wide sleeve covering the opposite arm. These prophets knew God’s mind. They could read our minds, too. Obviously appalled at their reading material, they shouted judgment and hellfire to scare people into righteousness. All-in-all they seemed to have more in common with teachers of the dark arts at Hogwarts than anything that looked like Jesus. Since scripture describes prophecy as a gift given generally, generously, and graciously in the Creation, I have to wonder where all that fiction came from.

         Harper’s Bible Dictionary defines a prophet as “a person who serves as a channel of communication between the human and divine worlds.”¹ In terms of potential, that leaves no one out.

         If we are the Church, and if Pentecost is in some way the birthday of the Church, then Pentecost must reveal something of our call to­—and new birth into­—a prophetic life. Remember Paul’s words to the Romans: “We know that the whole creation is groaning together and suffering labor pains…And it’s not only the creation. We ourselves who have the Spirit as the first crop of the harvest also groan inside as we wait to be adopted…” (Romans 8:22-23) And to the Galatians Paul wrote, “God sent his Son…so that we could be adopted. Because [we] are sons and daughters, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba, Father!’” (Galatians 4:4ff)

Now THAT is prophecy!

Selfish and idolatrous motives often corrupt our intentions and turn us toward domination and self-aggrandizement rather than service. Still, if we’re called and equipped to serve as “channel[s] of communication,” then in some way God is choosing to see, to listen, to speak, and to act through us on behalf of the created order. And THAT, too, makes us prophets.

         I think that the big difference in this new, Pentecostal prophecy lies in what we look for and what we find at the very core of ourselves and others.

         For millennia, the church has taught that sin is the core reality of each of us and of all of us together. Sin is real, of course, and we need to name it and resist it, because it not only excuses but justifies violence, racism, sexism, materialism, and schism. I do, however, take issue with manipulating people by telling them that they were born depraved, that their fundamental identity is one of guilt before God. It also seems to me that this shame-fed understanding of self and of God almost always creates more sin. It creates communities of fear and enmity rather than faith. It also strips faith communities of their trust and vision and leads them to do more to try to maintain a status quo and guard material assets than to follow Jesus in transforming ministry. And while part of me understands that, especially in our increasingly unpredictable world, it’s still sin, or as the Greeks said, hamartia, which means missing the mark.

         Listen, we are people of Incarnation, Resurrection, and Pentecost. So, we are being led by God’s transforming Holy Spirit which is always in the process of creating and re-creating the world and our places in it. And as the story in Acts reveals, that re-creation is always toward wider inclusion and more far-reaching ministry.

         Because the essence of God is holy, dynamic, and creative relationship, and because God made us in God’s image, humankinds’ own fundamental essence is holy, dynamic, and creative relationship. Being created by relationship, for relationship, community is our true home. And a Christ-following community is one of trust, openness, and self-emptying discipleship.

On top of all that is the gloriously complicating wonder of our own uniqueness, our own gifts, capabilities, incompletions, and vulnerabilities. We bring all of these things to every relationship. So, just as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist as an inseparable whole, we need each other. We find our wholeness, our true selfhood when we enter relationships that nurture us by asking as much of us as they offer to us.

A distinction may be helpful here. I define individualism as the depleting and destructive belief that I am absolute, whole, and complete in and of myself. And that is true of no one. Even the most isolated hermits need the earth, don’t they?

Individuality is much different. True individuals express their individuality by recognizing, celebrating, and developing their unique set of gifts and experiences so that they might enjoy them and share them with others. True individuals also express their individuality by welcoming the gifts and experiences of others so that everyone might know a new depth of wholeness and joy.

Pentecost reveals that, through holy and spirited relationship, we draw closer to God even as we draw closer our neighbors and the earth. In relationship, we claim our blessedness. In relationship, we claim ourselves and one another as blessings. And in Christ-like relationship, we become prophets—“channels of communication between the human and divine worlds.”

The point of the prophecy unleashed at Pentecost transcends any personal salvation that merely makes the individual feel safe from hell.

 The point of the prophecy unleashed at Pentecost is a life of Holy-Spiritedfullness, mystery, and love. And this life is for everyone, of every language, everywhere, and all the time.

¹Robert. R. Wilson, Harper’s Bible Dictionary, Paul J. Achtemeier, General Editor. Harper & Row Publishers, San Francisco, 1985, p. 826.