Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
12.16.07; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Reading: John 1:1-14
I know we’re all busy preparing for all of our holiday parties, and many of us are behind on our gift giving . We’re also stressed out at work as we move towards the end of the year, or stressed out at school as finals come crashing down on top of us, but there’s something I’m not sure many of us remember.
We’re moving towards a time in the Christian worship year when we celebrate of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Yeah, I know, I know, it’s easy to forget with all the twinkling lights and the stress that shimmers bright as sun-struck tinsel in our lives. But somewhere in the frenzy, there’s supposed to be a remembrance of the birth of a real live person, Yeshua ben Yoseph, Joshua son of Joseph.
So who was this person? Today, as we together have read and sung our way through the great story of Scripture, we’ve moved from those first stories of creation through the proclamations of the prophets, through to the Gospel’s telling of the story of Christ’s birth. But...just who is he? Who is this tiny little child, born to a humble family in the boondocks of an ancient empire?
People struggle with how to grasp Jesus, how to understand who he was and what he did. If you saw the movie Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, you might remember a short scene in which Ricky Bobby, a talented but impossibly stupid driver on the NASCAR circuit, attempts to bless a family meal in the name of the Baby Jesus. This starts up a discussion at the table about how you can pray to...and think about..Jesus. Ricky, in his epic simplicity, preferred to pray in the name of the little baby Jesus, because not only was the little eight-pound six ounce Baby Jesus tiny and cuddly, but he was also simultaneously omnipotent. His best friend and sidekick, the equally daft NASCAR driver Cal Naughton, Jr., had other ideas about Jesus:
We all have different ways of grasping who Jesus is and what he meant to the world. Some of those ways are...more different than others.
At the end of today’s readings, though, there came that soaring and poetic excerpt from the opening chapter of the Gospel of John. That tells us something different about who he was, something that goes well beyond the images of mangers and donkeys and wise men and flocks by night that tend to have the lock on our mental image of Jesus this holiday season.
John’s story goes back to the beginning. Not to the beginning of Jesus’s ministry in Judea, which is where the Gospel of Mark begins. Not to the story of the beginning of his life, which is where the Gospels of Matthew and Luke open their story. For his opening of the tale, John goes way back, back, back to the dawning of time and creation itself.
Jesus is there described not as a prophet or an infant or even as a future king. The first verse of John’s prologue lays it all out. You’ve heard it read in the English, but hear it in it’s original language, the Greek in which it was written:
En arche en ho logos, kai ho logos en pros ton theon, kai theos en ho logos.
He’s described as the Word, not just the kind of word you speak or write, but the logos, the creative power and living Word of God, God’s own self-expression, the power that made the universe and that sustains all things. When you go back to that prologue, to that first verse, it read a little differently in the language in which it was first written. If you read it literally, it proclaims: “And the Word was with God, and God was the Word.” The Word and God are woven up together, different yet the same.
In that simple but challenging opening is the sum of all of John’s story of Jesus. In Christ, in this basic act, in this tiny child, the One who created all things is entering into our world. Changing it. Changing us. For over 2000 years we have struggled to understand him. For two millenia we have found countless stumbling and sometimes silly ways of hiding who he was under the darkness of our own selfishness, our own cultural bias, our own hatreds.
But that truth, that world transforming truth, that truth will not be overcome, no matter how deep the darkness might seem.
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
In Virtual Darkness
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
12.02.07; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Romans 13:11-14
Watch it here: part 1; part 2; part 3
Has everyone started their Christmas shopping yet?
Last Friday was, as we all know, Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, when we’re all supposed to dutifully sit in our cars in a great trudging line to crowd into the malls. There, we can move through huge crowds of other bargain shoppers. We can stand in big lines, and commiserate with all of the other cattle...sorry...consumers who are suddenly realizing that it would have been more fun spending the day relaxing at home with the kids. Black Friday has become a tradition in America, but it’s suddenly got competition. That competition comes from what retailers are now calling “Cyber Monday.”
Cyber Monday is the Monday after the Friday after Thanksgiving, the day when hard-working Americans go back to the office, look at that big stack of work that needs to get done, and proceed to spend as much of the day shopping online as possible...when the boss isn’t looking, that is. It’s a new American tradition! And it works great, unless you happen to have a Facebook account.
Facebook is, as some of you know, a web location where you can go and put up a little information about yourself and then proceed to gather several thousand “friends.” It’s super extra popular plus...at least, it is this year. Next year, well, the herd will probably have moved on. Like most internet businesses, Facebook has been trying to figure out a way to actually make money. When you let everyone post for free, it’s a little bit difficult to turn that into cash. The solution, of course, is advertising. If you put up ads on everyone’s page, businesses will pay for those ads.
This last month, with the consumer Christmas feeding frenzy approaching, someone at Facebook thought it would be a good idea to add a new feature called Beacon. That feature was a program that would turn your every purchase at online retailers affiliated with Facebook into a product endorsement. If you bought something...anything... this program would send an ad for that product all of your Facebook friends. Hey! Check out the nifty new thing that Mike just bought! It ties advertising in with your spending! What a great idea!
Does anyone see the problem with that?
Well, 50,000 Facebook subscribers did...but only after the program had notified every one of their Facebook friends and family of their gift purchases. Guess that ring won’t be a surprise after all. Facebook has abandoned that project, but it tells us something about the Internet Age. Suddenly, there’s more information about us out there than ever before. Every action on the web is data. Our world is an open book. That can be a bit scary, but at least it means that we as human beings are now more connected to each other than ever before. Right? In this internet age, at least people are suddenly able to communicate freely and openly with each other...and that means we’re entering a new era of peace and mutual understanding. Right?
But a funny thing has happened. Even though we’re supposedly more connected than ever, something seems to have gone wrong. Instead of bringing people closer together, the internet seems to have polarized people. Conversations on the internet quickly descend into shouting matches, as opposing sides hurl insults and obscenities at one another, firing long ranting monologues at one another across the ether. The more outrageous you are, the more creatively offensive you are, the more people come to your site, to cheer and howl along at the fray like the crowd that gathers whenever a fight breaks out in the school cafeteria. But at least on the internet no-one gets hurt. Right?
Earlier this year, a couple of YouTube video bloggers got into one of those internet shouting matches with each other. One was an unusually combative YouTuber who calls himself the Amazing Atheist, whose idea of creative videomaking is to let loose with a long profanity-laced diatribe against anyone who he feels is an idiot. There is, apparently, an entire world full of people worthy of his hatred. The other was a disturbed young man from Finland, who was clearly delusional, clearly mentally ill. The two had at it for quite a while, trading insults over the web and spewing video bile at each other. The disturbed kid grew more agitated, and started brandishing guns in his videos. Shortly afterwards, he took one of those guns to a school, where he killed seven kids, and took his own life. It was the worst mass shooting in the history of that country.
What did the Amazing Atheist do? Well, the day after the shooting, he put up a video saying “I knew he was going to do that. What an idiot!” Only he used much more pungent language, language that I’ll not repeat here in this sanctuary. Though God has probably heard those words before, I wouldn’t want to get in trouble with the Presbytery. That same day, he put up a video congratulating himself for an increase in people watching his videos...and got right back into insulting people. There was no sign, none, that he cared about the impact of the hatred that he poured into that disturbed soul. No sense of regret. No sense of remorse. No sense of responsibility. As if those human beings weren’t real at all.
The internet has made it very easy...terribly easy...for us to live in a darkness of isolation from one another, and from what is real. Though it connects us, that connection can become a way to depersonalize and dehumanize others. It is easy for you to type hatred into their laptops in the darkness of their basement, or to shout profanities into the dark unfeeling eye of their webcam. The damage on the other end...who cares about that? It’s separate from us. We are hidden in the shadows of cyberspace.
But that is a falsehood, a lie, and an illusion. As the Apostle Paul implies in the little section we’ve heard today from the Book of Romans, the time is past for darkness. In this letter to the church in Rome, Paul does several very important things. This is the letter that gives us the foundation for how we understand God’s grace and salvation. But it also teaches us how we are to act. In the verses that just preceded today’s passage, Paul has taught about the responsibility of Christians towards the state, and about the essence of the law. Right before this passage began, in verses nine and ten, Paul affirms that the very heart of the Christian life is the this one rule: Love your neighbor as yourself. That’s pretty familiar...or at least, it should be if you’ve gone to church more than twice.
But then Paul takes it further. Why are we supposed to act this way? What makes living a life governed by love so important for the Christian life? Paul uses these words: “The night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.” Paul believed, as we as Christians are called to believe, that in the coming of Christ we are no longer separated from one another. The divisions that tear us darkness in which we as human beings can so easily hide from one another is fading. The dawn of Christ is coming.
Here in the first Sunday of the season of Advent, we’re called upon to remember the birth of Christ. Through simple things like the lighting of the candle this morning, we remember the light that He brought into the world.
But as Christians, we’re called upon to not just remember this light through our worship and our rituals. When Paul asks us to put on the armor of light, it means to live in openness to the reality of Christ’s presence. It also means that we must avoid all of the temptations to live and act in darkness.
Is the internet a place of darkness? It certainly can be, if we allow ourselves to believe that we can act out there in a way that reflects darkness. For those of us who use the web for work or for play, it’s essential for us to keep true to the central moral teaching of the Gospel...to express love towards those around us.
Too often Christians are just another shrill voice on the web, presenting themselves in ways that don’t reflect the light that we claim is dawning in our world. That’s a shame, because it really does have the potential to allow us to reach out in new and exciting ways. There’s no reason...no reason in the world...that we as Christians can’t use this powerful new medium as a way to reach out with Christ’s love. Through blogging and video blogging, we can speak goodness into this increasingly angry and divisive shadow land. Because the truth is that the light of Advent can and does shine, even in the seeming darkness of the virtual world.
12.02.07; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Romans 13:11-14
Watch it here: part 1; part 2; part 3
Has everyone started their Christmas shopping yet?
Last Friday was, as we all know, Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, when we’re all supposed to dutifully sit in our cars in a great trudging line to crowd into the malls. There, we can move through huge crowds of other bargain shoppers. We can stand in big lines, and commiserate with all of the other cattle...sorry...consumers who are suddenly realizing that it would have been more fun spending the day relaxing at home with the kids. Black Friday has become a tradition in America, but it’s suddenly got competition. That competition comes from what retailers are now calling “Cyber Monday.”
Cyber Monday is the Monday after the Friday after Thanksgiving, the day when hard-working Americans go back to the office, look at that big stack of work that needs to get done, and proceed to spend as much of the day shopping online as possible...when the boss isn’t looking, that is. It’s a new American tradition! And it works great, unless you happen to have a Facebook account.
Facebook is, as some of you know, a web location where you can go and put up a little information about yourself and then proceed to gather several thousand “friends.” It’s super extra popular plus...at least, it is this year. Next year, well, the herd will probably have moved on. Like most internet businesses, Facebook has been trying to figure out a way to actually make money. When you let everyone post for free, it’s a little bit difficult to turn that into cash. The solution, of course, is advertising. If you put up ads on everyone’s page, businesses will pay for those ads.
This last month, with the consumer Christmas feeding frenzy approaching, someone at Facebook thought it would be a good idea to add a new feature called Beacon. That feature was a program that would turn your every purchase at online retailers affiliated with Facebook into a product endorsement. If you bought something...anything... this program would send an ad for that product all of your Facebook friends. Hey! Check out the nifty new thing that Mike just bought! It ties advertising in with your spending! What a great idea!
Does anyone see the problem with that?
Well, 50,000 Facebook subscribers did...but only after the program had notified every one of their Facebook friends and family of their gift purchases. Guess that ring won’t be a surprise after all. Facebook has abandoned that project, but it tells us something about the Internet Age. Suddenly, there’s more information about us out there than ever before. Every action on the web is data. Our world is an open book. That can be a bit scary, but at least it means that we as human beings are now more connected to each other than ever before. Right? In this internet age, at least people are suddenly able to communicate freely and openly with each other...and that means we’re entering a new era of peace and mutual understanding. Right?
But a funny thing has happened. Even though we’re supposedly more connected than ever, something seems to have gone wrong. Instead of bringing people closer together, the internet seems to have polarized people. Conversations on the internet quickly descend into shouting matches, as opposing sides hurl insults and obscenities at one another, firing long ranting monologues at one another across the ether. The more outrageous you are, the more creatively offensive you are, the more people come to your site, to cheer and howl along at the fray like the crowd that gathers whenever a fight breaks out in the school cafeteria. But at least on the internet no-one gets hurt. Right?
Earlier this year, a couple of YouTube video bloggers got into one of those internet shouting matches with each other. One was an unusually combative YouTuber who calls himself the Amazing Atheist, whose idea of creative videomaking is to let loose with a long profanity-laced diatribe against anyone who he feels is an idiot. There is, apparently, an entire world full of people worthy of his hatred. The other was a disturbed young man from Finland, who was clearly delusional, clearly mentally ill. The two had at it for quite a while, trading insults over the web and spewing video bile at each other. The disturbed kid grew more agitated, and started brandishing guns in his videos. Shortly afterwards, he took one of those guns to a school, where he killed seven kids, and took his own life. It was the worst mass shooting in the history of that country.
What did the Amazing Atheist do? Well, the day after the shooting, he put up a video saying “I knew he was going to do that. What an idiot!” Only he used much more pungent language, language that I’ll not repeat here in this sanctuary. Though God has probably heard those words before, I wouldn’t want to get in trouble with the Presbytery. That same day, he put up a video congratulating himself for an increase in people watching his videos...and got right back into insulting people. There was no sign, none, that he cared about the impact of the hatred that he poured into that disturbed soul. No sense of regret. No sense of remorse. No sense of responsibility. As if those human beings weren’t real at all.
The internet has made it very easy...terribly easy...for us to live in a darkness of isolation from one another, and from what is real. Though it connects us, that connection can become a way to depersonalize and dehumanize others. It is easy for you to type hatred into their laptops in the darkness of their basement, or to shout profanities into the dark unfeeling eye of their webcam. The damage on the other end...who cares about that? It’s separate from us. We are hidden in the shadows of cyberspace.
But that is a falsehood, a lie, and an illusion. As the Apostle Paul implies in the little section we’ve heard today from the Book of Romans, the time is past for darkness. In this letter to the church in Rome, Paul does several very important things. This is the letter that gives us the foundation for how we understand God’s grace and salvation. But it also teaches us how we are to act. In the verses that just preceded today’s passage, Paul has taught about the responsibility of Christians towards the state, and about the essence of the law. Right before this passage began, in verses nine and ten, Paul affirms that the very heart of the Christian life is the this one rule: Love your neighbor as yourself. That’s pretty familiar...or at least, it should be if you’ve gone to church more than twice.
But then Paul takes it further. Why are we supposed to act this way? What makes living a life governed by love so important for the Christian life? Paul uses these words: “The night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.” Paul believed, as we as Christians are called to believe, that in the coming of Christ we are no longer separated from one another. The divisions that tear us darkness in which we as human beings can so easily hide from one another is fading. The dawn of Christ is coming.
Here in the first Sunday of the season of Advent, we’re called upon to remember the birth of Christ. Through simple things like the lighting of the candle this morning, we remember the light that He brought into the world.
But as Christians, we’re called upon to not just remember this light through our worship and our rituals. When Paul asks us to put on the armor of light, it means to live in openness to the reality of Christ’s presence. It also means that we must avoid all of the temptations to live and act in darkness.
Is the internet a place of darkness? It certainly can be, if we allow ourselves to believe that we can act out there in a way that reflects darkness. For those of us who use the web for work or for play, it’s essential for us to keep true to the central moral teaching of the Gospel...to express love towards those around us.
Too often Christians are just another shrill voice on the web, presenting themselves in ways that don’t reflect the light that we claim is dawning in our world. That’s a shame, because it really does have the potential to allow us to reach out in new and exciting ways. There’s no reason...no reason in the world...that we as Christians can’t use this powerful new medium as a way to reach out with Christ’s love. Through blogging and video blogging, we can speak goodness into this increasingly angry and divisive shadow land. Because the truth is that the light of Advent can and does shine, even in the seeming darkness of the virtual world.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Eat My Sheep
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
11.25.07; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Jeremiah 23:1-6
watch it here: part 1; part 2
In October or November of every year, as we Presbyterians dig our way into the joyous budget season, an e-mail pops into the inbox of pastors and treasurers at each of the over 100 Presbyterian churches in our presbytery. The powers that be are sending us a number, a number that every church needs, the number that sets up the base salary of every Presbyterian minister in the Washington metropolitan area for the upcoming year.
Being Presbyterians, of course, we don’t just pick that number out of the air. That number is based on a highly complex series of equations that includes national level data on ministerial wages, information on the regional housing market, and cost of living projections for the area, which are then multiplied by the percentage of games the Redskins have won this year. Let me tell you, it’s been a very, very disappointing season.
At the end of the day, the base salary of a Presbyterian minister in the DC area ends up being pretty much equivalent to the average salary paid to a Metrobus driver. Most pastors think this is fine. It’s as it should be. Pastors shouldn’t be raking in the big bucks.
Or…should we?
Apparently, there’s a contingent of pastors out there who think that the ministry isn’t for the meek and the lowly. It’s for those who are willing to set a standard of success for their gathered flock. Among many pastors of larger churches, particularly pastors of big churches with massive media ministries, the argument is that a pastor should be paid what he or she is worth. If you’ve gathered a flock in the thousands or the tens of thousands, if you’re watched by millions on T.V., you’re basically like the CEO of a successful corporation. If you’re the CEO of a major subsidiary of AmeriChrist, Inc., then by cracky, you need to be living like a CEO.
In fact, it’s gotten so intense that earlier this month, Senator Charles Grassley launched an investigation of several big name television ministries. Why, you may ask? Well, for some reason, the Senator was miffed by a few things he’d heard.
Like, for instance, when Kenneth Copeland Ministries celebrated their 40th anniversary, they apparently thought it might be nice to give a little present to Ken. I mean, c’mon, it was just a little two-million dollar token of their esteem. Presents are apparently very popular among the pastoral elite. Another ministry, Paula White Ministries, is in trouble for giving Bishop T.D. Jakes a Bentley for his birthday. A Bentley? He got a Bentley for his birthday? Schwing low, schweet chariot! I hope Rev. An takes note of that...my birthday is next month! I never realized that when the Apostle Paul talked about spiritual gifts, he meant luxury automobiles.
Paula White Ministries is also under investigation for, among other things, charging the costs of cosmetic surgery to the ministry. That’s hardly fair, though, is it? How can Paula White Ministries bring people to Jesus if Paula White doesn’t look like she’s 21 again?
All of the pastors in question seem to have a taste for travel in private jets. One of them, Joyce Meyer, also bought a $23 thousand dollar marble toilet for her headquarters. Hey…people have needs. Don’t go hatin’. And anyway, if you’re the shepherd of a big enough flock, where in the Bible does it say you can’t live like that?
Well…gee…where to begin? I suspect that the prophet Jeremiah would have something to contribute on that subject. Jeremiah was a notoriously grumpy prophet, who lived and preached six hundred years before Christ, during the time of the fall of Jerusalem in the face of the might of the Babylonian Empire. Most of his teaching and proclamation was aimed directly at the wealthy and the powerful of Judah, those in the royal court and the priests of the temple.
Today’s passage was a challenge to the “shepherds” of Israel. By shepherds, Jeremiah was referring to those in power, those charged with guiding the lives of the people. According to the passage we’ve just heard, the folks in positions of power have misled the people, and have caused the flock to be scattered. In their place, God is going to find other leaders, ones who will help bring the flock back together.
But as we listen to this little passage, we have to ask ourselves: what…specifically…have the current batch of shepherds done? The metaphor of herdsmen and their flocks is great, but it doesn’t tell us very much about what the leadership had done or failed to do.
For that, we have to look to the broader context of Jeremiah, to the passages that come before and after this little chunklet of verses.
Before today’s passage, in Jeremiah 22:13-17, the prophet lays into the royal household of Judah. Why? Because those leaders enriched themselves at the expense of their people. They built themselves huge houses made of only the finest materials, taking from those in need and giving to themselves. Justice and righteousness were put second. Their personal prosperity was put first.
After today’s passage, in Jeremiah 23:16-17, Jeremiah goes after the false prophets of his age. What was the message that those prophets were bearing? It was a message of well-being. It was a message of prosperity. Everything is going to be just fine. It shall be well with you. Just keep giving to the temple. No calamity shall come upon you.
In both instances, what was proclaimed and what was lived was a prosperity based in falsehood. Leaders used their power to amass great wealth for themselves. Leaders convinced people that all they needed to do to be doing well in the world was to give and give and give to the temple....which, conveniently enough, meant that the priests and prophets would do well.
But those kinds of shepherds aren’t the sort of folks that God entrusted with his flocks, and the modern purveyors of the Gospel of prosperity are perilously close to meeting that dark standard.
In last Sunday’s Washington Post, finance columnist Michelle Singletary, whose advice is usually sound and wise, took a little issue with Grassley’s challenge to these ministers. She made the CEO argument, saying that if these pastors are running a large organization that has revenue equivalent to that of a big for profit enterprise, they should be compensated accordingly. If that means they’re living large, well, that’s their right. “They haven’t taken a vow of poverty,” she said.
On one level, that may be true. But the standards to which Christian leaders should aspire aren’t the standards of the for profit world. They aren’t even the standards of the nonprofit world. Those who are called to leadership in the body of Christ shouldn’t starve, sure. But neither should they live in a way that doesn’t reflect the community they serve. The heart of the Gospel message that Christ brought to us is not that we are called to serve ourselves and our own needs. The self-serving approach to the world and to how we live and work may play well with the ethics of our culture...but those aren’t the values that define the Christian life.
As Presbyterians, our task as members of the church and leaders of the church is to hold one another accountable to the servant ethic that Christ himself embodied. It’s why we’re so open about how we pay our pastors, and why we strongly...strongly...encourage all of our members to be engaged in and aware of how our congregations act as stewards over our resources. Each of us, in our own way, is called to be a shepherd over the flock. That means stepping away from the me-first value that defines the consumer culture around us. Why?
Because a shepherd that looks out for number one isn’t one who cares for the sheep. At the end of the Gospel of John, the great command given to Peter isn’t eat my sheep.
It’s feed my sheep.
There is a difference.
11.25.07; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Jeremiah 23:1-6
watch it here: part 1; part 2
In October or November of every year, as we Presbyterians dig our way into the joyous budget season, an e-mail pops into the inbox of pastors and treasurers at each of the over 100 Presbyterian churches in our presbytery. The powers that be are sending us a number, a number that every church needs, the number that sets up the base salary of every Presbyterian minister in the Washington metropolitan area for the upcoming year.
Being Presbyterians, of course, we don’t just pick that number out of the air. That number is based on a highly complex series of equations that includes national level data on ministerial wages, information on the regional housing market, and cost of living projections for the area, which are then multiplied by the percentage of games the Redskins have won this year. Let me tell you, it’s been a very, very disappointing season.
At the end of the day, the base salary of a Presbyterian minister in the DC area ends up being pretty much equivalent to the average salary paid to a Metrobus driver. Most pastors think this is fine. It’s as it should be. Pastors shouldn’t be raking in the big bucks.
Or…should we?
Apparently, there’s a contingent of pastors out there who think that the ministry isn’t for the meek and the lowly. It’s for those who are willing to set a standard of success for their gathered flock. Among many pastors of larger churches, particularly pastors of big churches with massive media ministries, the argument is that a pastor should be paid what he or she is worth. If you’ve gathered a flock in the thousands or the tens of thousands, if you’re watched by millions on T.V., you’re basically like the CEO of a successful corporation. If you’re the CEO of a major subsidiary of AmeriChrist, Inc., then by cracky, you need to be living like a CEO.
In fact, it’s gotten so intense that earlier this month, Senator Charles Grassley launched an investigation of several big name television ministries. Why, you may ask? Well, for some reason, the Senator was miffed by a few things he’d heard.
Like, for instance, when Kenneth Copeland Ministries celebrated their 40th anniversary, they apparently thought it might be nice to give a little present to Ken. I mean, c’mon, it was just a little two-million dollar token of their esteem. Presents are apparently very popular among the pastoral elite. Another ministry, Paula White Ministries, is in trouble for giving Bishop T.D. Jakes a Bentley for his birthday. A Bentley? He got a Bentley for his birthday? Schwing low, schweet chariot! I hope Rev. An takes note of that...my birthday is next month! I never realized that when the Apostle Paul talked about spiritual gifts, he meant luxury automobiles.
Paula White Ministries is also under investigation for, among other things, charging the costs of cosmetic surgery to the ministry. That’s hardly fair, though, is it? How can Paula White Ministries bring people to Jesus if Paula White doesn’t look like she’s 21 again?
All of the pastors in question seem to have a taste for travel in private jets. One of them, Joyce Meyer, also bought a $23 thousand dollar marble toilet for her headquarters. Hey…people have needs. Don’t go hatin’. And anyway, if you’re the shepherd of a big enough flock, where in the Bible does it say you can’t live like that?
Well…gee…where to begin? I suspect that the prophet Jeremiah would have something to contribute on that subject. Jeremiah was a notoriously grumpy prophet, who lived and preached six hundred years before Christ, during the time of the fall of Jerusalem in the face of the might of the Babylonian Empire. Most of his teaching and proclamation was aimed directly at the wealthy and the powerful of Judah, those in the royal court and the priests of the temple.
Today’s passage was a challenge to the “shepherds” of Israel. By shepherds, Jeremiah was referring to those in power, those charged with guiding the lives of the people. According to the passage we’ve just heard, the folks in positions of power have misled the people, and have caused the flock to be scattered. In their place, God is going to find other leaders, ones who will help bring the flock back together.
But as we listen to this little passage, we have to ask ourselves: what…specifically…have the current batch of shepherds done? The metaphor of herdsmen and their flocks is great, but it doesn’t tell us very much about what the leadership had done or failed to do.
For that, we have to look to the broader context of Jeremiah, to the passages that come before and after this little chunklet of verses.
Before today’s passage, in Jeremiah 22:13-17, the prophet lays into the royal household of Judah. Why? Because those leaders enriched themselves at the expense of their people. They built themselves huge houses made of only the finest materials, taking from those in need and giving to themselves. Justice and righteousness were put second. Their personal prosperity was put first.
After today’s passage, in Jeremiah 23:16-17, Jeremiah goes after the false prophets of his age. What was the message that those prophets were bearing? It was a message of well-being. It was a message of prosperity. Everything is going to be just fine. It shall be well with you. Just keep giving to the temple. No calamity shall come upon you.
In both instances, what was proclaimed and what was lived was a prosperity based in falsehood. Leaders used their power to amass great wealth for themselves. Leaders convinced people that all they needed to do to be doing well in the world was to give and give and give to the temple....which, conveniently enough, meant that the priests and prophets would do well.
But those kinds of shepherds aren’t the sort of folks that God entrusted with his flocks, and the modern purveyors of the Gospel of prosperity are perilously close to meeting that dark standard.
In last Sunday’s Washington Post, finance columnist Michelle Singletary, whose advice is usually sound and wise, took a little issue with Grassley’s challenge to these ministers. She made the CEO argument, saying that if these pastors are running a large organization that has revenue equivalent to that of a big for profit enterprise, they should be compensated accordingly. If that means they’re living large, well, that’s their right. “They haven’t taken a vow of poverty,” she said.
On one level, that may be true. But the standards to which Christian leaders should aspire aren’t the standards of the for profit world. They aren’t even the standards of the nonprofit world. Those who are called to leadership in the body of Christ shouldn’t starve, sure. But neither should they live in a way that doesn’t reflect the community they serve. The heart of the Gospel message that Christ brought to us is not that we are called to serve ourselves and our own needs. The self-serving approach to the world and to how we live and work may play well with the ethics of our culture...but those aren’t the values that define the Christian life.
As Presbyterians, our task as members of the church and leaders of the church is to hold one another accountable to the servant ethic that Christ himself embodied. It’s why we’re so open about how we pay our pastors, and why we strongly...strongly...encourage all of our members to be engaged in and aware of how our congregations act as stewards over our resources. Each of us, in our own way, is called to be a shepherd over the flock. That means stepping away from the me-first value that defines the consumer culture around us. Why?
Because a shepherd that looks out for number one isn’t one who cares for the sheep. At the end of the Gospel of John, the great command given to Peter isn’t eat my sheep.
It’s feed my sheep.
There is a difference.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
After the Wilderness
United Korean Presbyterian Church/Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
11.18.07; Rev. John An and Rev. David Williams
11.18.07; Rev. John An and Rev. David Williams
Delivered in English and Korean; Watch it here: Part 1; Part 2
Did you listen to the beginning of that passage from John’s Gospel?
Is it our own glory that causes us to celebrate
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
What We Owe
Trinity Presbyterian Church of
11.11.07; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Luke 20:20-26
Last Tuesday morning started out busy. The kids were running a little behind schedule, my wife had a meeting downtown, and the day began in even more of a whirlwind than usual. I had to get the kids fed, clothing choices vetoed...no, you can’t wear shorts. It’s November. No, even boys don’t wear underwear three days in a row. Then it was off to a variety of church duties and calls and errands. It was a typically busy day, with one major difference.
It was election day this last Tuesday, both across that wide wide river in the far off
For all the sound and fury and star power of our billion-dollar national election industry, state and local elections are where the choices get made about how we’re going to run our schools. About how we’re going to keep our communities policed. About where our priorities lie.
As I sidled off my motorcycle and walked into the little white Episcopal church on a hill that serves as my neighborhood polling place, it became obvious that our priorities lie elsewhere. There was the usual diligent cadre of retiree volunteers. There were two party volunteers parked out front, handing out voting guides. There were the voting machines, their touchscreens glowing softly behind their privacy shields.
But there was no line. In fact, there wasn’t a single other citizen in there to vote. Not one. I breezed right in. I breezed right out. Wow! That was so convenient! That was so...wrong.
After conferring with my wife, I learned that it wasn’t quite as effortless and empty in the morning, but there was still only a very short line. It was less crowded than a candy store the day after Halloween. How many people bothered to vote? Wednesday morning, I went online, to the Virginia State Board of Elections website. I looked through all of the statistics. Now,
Now, there are lots of reasons why. Maybe you’re too busy. Maybe you didn’t have time to decide. Maybe you don’t really like the political position of either of the parties. Maybe aliens from the planet M’tang took you from your bed on Tuesday morning, and despite your protests weren’t done with their experiments until after the polls closed. But are those really reasons? Or are they just...excuses? But elections aren’t important, you might say. They don’t really change anything. It’s all just those fat-cats lining their own pockets. Again, those aren’t really reasons not to be engaged. Excuses, yes. Reasons, no.
Well, you might say, fishing a bit, Jesus never told me I needed to vote. Oooh! You’re on to something! Jesus never voted at all! Find me the word vote in the Bible! Ah-hah!
Today, we heard what Jesus said about how we should respond to government. The leadership in
So rather than arrest him themselves, they tried to get him in trouble. Their agents asked him about whether Jews should pay taxes to
On the other hand, if you answered no, it meant that you were a dangerous revolutionary, a threat to the Empire. The Roman authorities didn’t look kindly on people who refused to pay their taxes. So you couldn’t answer no, or you were a threat to
Jesus was not so easily taken in. He didn’t say yes. He didn’t say no. He just told everyone to look at the coin, and see who was on it. It was the emperor, of course. So give him what belongs to him, and give God what belongs to God. It was a perfect answer, both yes and no, neither yes nor no, and the trap they had set for him snapped closed on empty air.
But as we hear his answer, we have to ask ourselves: what it is that we owe the emperor today? What do we owe? What do we owe to the emperor when we the people are the emperor? Not just our giving. This is a democracy, and what a democracy needs from it’s citizens in order to thrive is participation. What our democracy needs from us is for us to pay attention, for us to be engaged. When we fail to do that, we fail to give to Caesar what Christ told us is his due. We need to hear that passage in that way in our lives as citizens of our counties, of our states, of our nation.
We also need to take that learning about what makes a nation run, and know that it speaks to what we as Christians owe to God and to our gathering here in God’s name.
Give to the emperor what is the emperor’s, Christ said, and give to God what is God’s. If we as citizens of this great democracy need to give it our engagement and our participation for it to thrive, do we owe less to God? Do we owe less to this little cluster of Christ’s people?
Today we’re blessing the gifts and offerings that we’ve all been asked to commit to this church in the coming year. Those pledges of support are what make it possible for us to plan and prepare for all of the activities we need to undertake in the coming months. But in addition to committing ourselves to giving this church the financial support it needs to thrive, we also need to commit ourselves to participate and engage in the life of the church, to be aware of how it works, and to contribute our time and our energy to building it up.
Many of us are are already doing just that. Through music and study and teaching, through mission and fellowship, through making sure that the bills get paid and the building is maintained, so many of you are committing your time and your engagement to the church. But all of you will have gotten...along with your financial pledge form...a sheet that shows you all of the different ways that God could use your gifts in the service of the church. If you know you have something in you that you to contribute to our life together, something that could build it up, then use it. Let that gift light up the church.
If this new thing we’re trying to do for God is to flourish and grow, we owe it to Him to give him what he’s due.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Not Gambling With Your Future
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
11.04.07; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Luke 19:1-10
So who was this Zacchaeus guy? Back when I was a Sunday-school going kid, the story of Zacchaeus seemed to surface all of the time. As a child, you have an image in your mind of this little rich guy, a tiny little gnome of a man with his fine linen robes and a beard fragrant with scented oil and his Gucci sandals. He’s scampering around behind the throngs gathered to see Jesus, running back and forth frantically like a seven year old who’s downed half a case of Red Bull. But he can’t see a thing, so he hikes up his skirts and clambers up a tree. There, Jesus sees him, perched up there, looking ridiculous and completely undignified.
11.04.07; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Luke 19:1-10
So who was this Zacchaeus guy? Back when I was a Sunday-school going kid, the story of Zacchaeus seemed to surface all of the time. As a child, you have an image in your mind of this little rich guy, a tiny little gnome of a man with his fine linen robes and a beard fragrant with scented oil and his Gucci sandals. He’s scampering around behind the throngs gathered to see Jesus, running back and forth frantically like a seven year old who’s downed half a case of Red Bull. But he can’t see a thing, so he hikes up his skirts and clambers up a tree. There, Jesus sees him, perched up there, looking ridiculous and completely undignified.
Kids love anything in which adults look silly, and Zacchaeus certainly looks silly here...although if Jesus had then hit him in the face with a pie and given him a wedgie, it’d have been even better. But when you grow up, and you learn what Zacchaeus really did for a living, this story starts seeming a little less silly.
He was a tax collector, and that doesn’t mean anything like what we would visualize today. When we think of a tax collector, we see in our mind’s eye a mid-level Internal Revenue Service employee. They spend most of their day in a dismal cubicle in a large windowless room with a hundred other IRS employees, managing the inflow of revenue from the citizens of our republic. As much as no-one enjoys paying taxes, the folks who collect our revenue get paid modest salaries, and are as honest and hardworking as the rest of us.
That was not the case back in the first century. To build it’s roads and it’s public works and to pay it’s well trained legions, the Romans needed cash. To gather that revenue, they relied on local networks of entrepreneurs to collect taxes. Those tax collectors were expected to operate as subcontractors, and were given wide latitude in how they gathered the revenue. All Rome expected was that those contractors would pass along the correct amount of money from each citizen or resident. Rome also told the tax collectors that if they wanted to have any income, that would need to be on top of the tax..and they were free to set that rate themselves. So Roman tax collectors only took what they absolutely needed...right? Suuuure they did.
Tax collectors made sure they did very well for themselves, tacking on as high a percentage as they possibly could. You couldn’t say no to them, either. IRS audits may be unpleasant, but if you refused to pay your Roman taxes the penalties were...well, let’s just say they made Guantanamo Bay look like a vacation on the French Riviera.
So tax collectors took whatever they could, and as much as they could. They were universally despised in Judah as traitors and profiteers...but they did really, really well for themselves. Rome didn’t care. Why should it? So what if the poor suffered? So what if it wasn’t really fair or just? As long as the revenue was raised, it didn’t matter how you raised it.
Now, I’m a Virginian. My home state has plenty of it’s own “issues.” But as I look across the river at Maryland, I find myself baffled at how a version that same peculiar Imperial mindset seems to have wormed it’s way into every single administration, be they Republican or Democrat. Revenues need to be raised to pay good teachers and competent law enforcement professionals, to build roads and schools and libraries.
For some reason, though, Americans respond to politicians who honestly tell them what it costs to have all of those things by throwing them out of office. We’d rather elect a shambling zombie with a taste for brains than someone who raises taxes. In Virginia, in fact, I think we’ve done just that at least twice in recent memory.
So instead of committing political hara-kiri, Maryland leaders keep coming back to the same magical solution to all of the state’s funding woes. Slot machines! They’ll miraculously fix everything! It’ll renew the horse-racing industry, which, as we know, is the primary engine driving any vibrant 21st century economy. It’ll fund our schools! It’ll pay our cops! It’ll magically fix all of our problems...and we’ll have soooo much fun doing it!
Of course, anyone who’s spent more than 35 seconds inside a casino knows that slot machines are not necessarily the most soul-enriching way to spend your time. You put in your money...and then you press the button. And you press the button. And you press the button. And you press the button. And you put in more money. And you press the button. And you press the button. Wow. That’s. So. Exciting. Whee.
But for many people, gambling is exciting. The prospect of those winnings, the anticipation of beating the odds, those things get our brains all fired up and excited, pumping out opiates and making us forget the outside world for a while. Some folks can handle that buzz....but many cannot. It can become an addiction. For people on a limited income, or people who are struggling financially, or people who are trying to start out in life, gambling can become a destructive and consuming obsession.
Sure, it’s a tax. It’s a tax on the poor. It’s a tax on the addicted. It shatters families. It tears apart relationships. But for the modern day tax collectors-for-hire of the “gaming industry,” that doesn’t matter. They get a huge bite off the top. What does it matter what broader impacts it has? The money’s getting raised, isn’t it?
For some reason, there’s been a consistent resistance on the part of churches to this approach to revenue. We resist it, but in state after state, our opposition has been rolled back. The desire for that easy money is simply too strong.
But it’s an important desire to resist. Because that’s just not how funds should be raised in a democracy that cares about it’s citizens. It’s also not how we should go about raising revenue in God’s Kingdom.
We’re in the middle of revenue-raising season ourselves. Our congregation, this little church in Bethesda, is in the midst of encouraging all of you to give to our stewardship campaign for 2008. That means it’s money-raising time...and as much as I hate doing it, we need to talk about it.
Every one of you should have gotten a letter this last week asking you to prayerfully consider giving to support the ministries of this church. It also asked you to consider how you can apply the gifts that God has given you to the life of the church in the coming year. And, no, you don’t need to give away half of your income like Zacchaeus did. But you do need to think realistically about our life together in this church, and how you can really support it.
A great deal has changed here in the last four years. Back in the 1990s, this church was blessed with a modest endowment, which has enabled us to make some necessary upgrades to the building and keep our doors open. But that endowment is tied to the markets, and every single year we’ve cut into the principal of that endowment to keep the heat on and to make sure your pastor has a nice shiny new Beemer parked out front. Well..not so much that second one.
The fact is that we’ve used less of that endowment every single year. Where it once was over 90% of budget, it is now just a tick under 80%. This year, we reduced our reliance on those funds for the first time in a decade. If we can increase our giving for 2008 by the same percentage we did in 2007, then we’ll need that crutch even less. That still means, though, that we’ve got a long way to go before we’re self-sufficient.
If we believed in gambling, we’d take a look at that endowment and give very little. Everything will be fine. The stock market will just keep on going up forever. We don’t have to contribute a thing. But the truth of the matter is far different. If there’s a mild downturn in the market...and if our giving doesn’t continue to grow...we could easily be flat broke in five or six years. That’s the reality of it. The fantasy that we can just keep going forever as we are is a gambler’s delusion. Really building anything...as we are striving to build this church...does not come easy.
It takes time. It takes commitment. It takes effort. It takes prayer. If we are to be good stewards over our life together, we have to understand that it’s never wise to gamble with the future of anything you care about.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Pouring Down
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
10.28.07; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Joel 2: 23-32
This was the year I’d decided to do something different with my back yard. I had a vision, a vision of no more marching back and forth behind a self-propelled Honda mower every single Saturday afternoon, spitting out racket and greenhouse gases. The grass never seemed to like it back there anyway. Most of what I was mowing was just grass-like weeds.
Every spring since I moved into our house I’ve been forced to weed and lay down seed, like I was growing orchids or some other impossibly high maintenance flower and not grass. I mean...sweet Mary and Joseph..it’s grass. Without me doing a thing, it’ll grow up like wildfire in the cracks in my driveway. If you’d sent Kentucky Bluegrass seeds across 50 million miles of space with the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, I’m sure those diligent little bots could’ve planted it on the Martian equator and it’d have done just fine. Surely it shouldn’t be that hard to grow. But year after year, it’s been nearly impossible, and I’d gotten tired of it. It isn’t like we actually used the back yard, anyway...the mosquitos had claimed it years ago.
This year, I was going to do something different. In the late spring, I walked out into the middle of my back yard, took up a sharp bladed shovel, and turned the earth. Not over all the yard, but in strategically placed sites throughout the yard, I planted wildflowers. My hope was that I’d end up with a little field of waving grasses speckled with a riot of daisies and cornflowers and bluebells and poppies. It would be magnificent, a little spot of Eden right there behind my flagstone patio.
And then it stopped raining. Well, pretty much stopped raining. We’d get a drop here and a drop there. An August storm might pass tantalizingly in the distance, rumbling with the promise of possible moisture and driving grumbling children from the pool. The sky might grow grey one September morning, only to have all of that life-giving water vapor disappear before noon. And underfoot, the grass grew as crunchy and brown as toast.
In my back yard, the flowers...and these weren’t flowers that require even the tiniest little bit of human attention...grew feebly, putting out a little bud here or there. For the most part, they just looked as sad and wilted as the rest of my yard. But for those who need rain for their livelihoods, this was a harder season. The summer’s yield of crops in Maryland was paltry, as drought struck county after county. Driving out to the beaches, you could see acre after acre of stunted brown corn, struggling it’s way out of the ground.
Man, was it dry. Thirty eight days the sky gave us nothing, nothing but clear blue and wisps of tantalizing cloud. All the streams in the woods near my house had run dry. When I went out to the deserts of New Mexico to do a wedding this last month, I saw rain there....but not here. That’s never a good sign.
It began to seem that we might never see rain again. Then, this last week, the skies finally grew heavy...and it rained.
That first afternoon, as the rain began to patter down on the green metal roof above the church office, I just had to go outside. I stood there with my head tilted back, and savored each and every precious drop as they splapped against my face. You could almost hear the thirsty earth as it gulped that sweet, sweet water. It’s hard to believe, after a long drought, after the rain has been gone, that it’ll ever return.
Yet hope returns, even when it seems impossible. That was the point of the prophet Joel’s proclamation, recorded for us in this little book. We don’t know much about Joel himself. There’s not much in his writings to clue us in to when they were written. They could come to us from anywhere between three hundred and eight hundred years before Christ. The primary thrust of his book is pretty simple. There’s been a plague on the land, which Joel describes as a massive swarm of locusts. Locusts were the bane of agriculture in the ancient world, as great clouds of these migratory insects would sweep across entire nations, and could devastate an entire harvest.
Bible scholars aren’t quite sure what to make of the descriptions that Joel provides of this ravenous army. Some think that the “locusts” are actually one of the armies that invaded Judah, and that Joel was using images of an insect plague to refer indirectly to Assyria or Babylon. Then again, he seems to also use army imagery to describe the bugs, so some Bible scholars think...well..he might just talking about plain ol’ grasshoppers.
Whichever way you slice it, most of the first two chapters of this three-chapter book describe devastation befalling the people of Israel. At least, that’s what they say through the eleventh verse of chapter two, and then things change. This morning’s reading comes to us after Joel calls out to Israel to renew their commitment to their God. Even after their land has been turned into a desolate wilderness, God does not forget his people...and the promise of his renewal is played out all over these nine verses.
To a people who had experienced loss and devastation, Joel offers images of abundant rain, rain coming and renewing the land, turning ravaged fields into bountiful harvests. Where the larders had been empty, now they would be full. The rain will pour down from the skies, and wine will pour from the wine jars, and everything will be just as good as it was before.
Well, actually, no. That’s not what Joel says. Sure, it looks like he’s going in that direction, but he ends up taking it a bit further. He’s not just promising copious precipitation and all the cases of Trader Joel’s three-buck Chuck you can carry. After the renewal will come another pouring out, one that is different than the simple earthy harvest that has come before.
Suddenly we get this: “Then afterward I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; you sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female slaves, in those days, I shall our out my spirit.”
What we’re hearing is the promise of a fulfillment that goes well beyond renewal. It’s not just restoring the thing that came before, going back to exactly the way things were before the plague year hit. It’s about God giving something better still. At some point in the future as vague as the dating of Joel’s letter...afterward...God will give his own self, his own spirit, to everyone who has sought it. Doesn’t matter their age. Doesn’t matter where they stand in the social pecking order. It’ll be given to all.
And that, as the verses that follow so bluntly illustrate, is a frightening thing. The idea that God’s spirit could move outside of the temple would have been terrifying to Hebrew people. Remember, the temple wasn’t viewed just a place of worship, a place where you went to get your God-fix and hand the priests a few shekels. From the perspective of that ancient people, that temple was a divine containment field, a hard perimeter cast around the terrifying power of God’s presence. If you let God loose...who knows what might happen?
Because we’re happy to receive back the harvest we expected. We’re happy to embrace the return of the thing we knew before. We want to be back to business as usual, church as usual, life as usual. When we’re struggling with the cutters and hoppers and devourers that chomp their way through our lives, it’s hard for us to imagine anything more.
But what Joel tells each of us is two things. First, he tells us that in the midst of those times when things have been taken away, when everything around us seems shattered and devoured and hopelessly ruined..there is always hope. When we’re struggling in our relationships, or can’t seem to find work that fulfills us, there is hope. When we’re struggling with illness or loss or despair, there is hope. That desert time will pass. God will bring the lifegiving rain.
But afterward comes the second thing...after the struggle, after the hardship is past, God may bring something more, a change in us that we didn’t expect, that we couldn’t see coming. That transformation...that truly new thing...is something that we have to be willing to embrace. When the Spirit of the Living God is poured out, the harvest that will bring in us is...well...we’ll just have to leave our minds and our hearts open, and see for ourselves.
10.28.07; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Joel 2: 23-32
This was the year I’d decided to do something different with my back yard. I had a vision, a vision of no more marching back and forth behind a self-propelled Honda mower every single Saturday afternoon, spitting out racket and greenhouse gases. The grass never seemed to like it back there anyway. Most of what I was mowing was just grass-like weeds.
Every spring since I moved into our house I’ve been forced to weed and lay down seed, like I was growing orchids or some other impossibly high maintenance flower and not grass. I mean...sweet Mary and Joseph..it’s grass. Without me doing a thing, it’ll grow up like wildfire in the cracks in my driveway. If you’d sent Kentucky Bluegrass seeds across 50 million miles of space with the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, I’m sure those diligent little bots could’ve planted it on the Martian equator and it’d have done just fine. Surely it shouldn’t be that hard to grow. But year after year, it’s been nearly impossible, and I’d gotten tired of it. It isn’t like we actually used the back yard, anyway...the mosquitos had claimed it years ago.
This year, I was going to do something different. In the late spring, I walked out into the middle of my back yard, took up a sharp bladed shovel, and turned the earth. Not over all the yard, but in strategically placed sites throughout the yard, I planted wildflowers. My hope was that I’d end up with a little field of waving grasses speckled with a riot of daisies and cornflowers and bluebells and poppies. It would be magnificent, a little spot of Eden right there behind my flagstone patio.
And then it stopped raining. Well, pretty much stopped raining. We’d get a drop here and a drop there. An August storm might pass tantalizingly in the distance, rumbling with the promise of possible moisture and driving grumbling children from the pool. The sky might grow grey one September morning, only to have all of that life-giving water vapor disappear before noon. And underfoot, the grass grew as crunchy and brown as toast.
In my back yard, the flowers...and these weren’t flowers that require even the tiniest little bit of human attention...grew feebly, putting out a little bud here or there. For the most part, they just looked as sad and wilted as the rest of my yard. But for those who need rain for their livelihoods, this was a harder season. The summer’s yield of crops in Maryland was paltry, as drought struck county after county. Driving out to the beaches, you could see acre after acre of stunted brown corn, struggling it’s way out of the ground.
Man, was it dry. Thirty eight days the sky gave us nothing, nothing but clear blue and wisps of tantalizing cloud. All the streams in the woods near my house had run dry. When I went out to the deserts of New Mexico to do a wedding this last month, I saw rain there....but not here. That’s never a good sign.
It began to seem that we might never see rain again. Then, this last week, the skies finally grew heavy...and it rained.
That first afternoon, as the rain began to patter down on the green metal roof above the church office, I just had to go outside. I stood there with my head tilted back, and savored each and every precious drop as they splapped against my face. You could almost hear the thirsty earth as it gulped that sweet, sweet water. It’s hard to believe, after a long drought, after the rain has been gone, that it’ll ever return.
Yet hope returns, even when it seems impossible. That was the point of the prophet Joel’s proclamation, recorded for us in this little book. We don’t know much about Joel himself. There’s not much in his writings to clue us in to when they were written. They could come to us from anywhere between three hundred and eight hundred years before Christ. The primary thrust of his book is pretty simple. There’s been a plague on the land, which Joel describes as a massive swarm of locusts. Locusts were the bane of agriculture in the ancient world, as great clouds of these migratory insects would sweep across entire nations, and could devastate an entire harvest.
Bible scholars aren’t quite sure what to make of the descriptions that Joel provides of this ravenous army. Some think that the “locusts” are actually one of the armies that invaded Judah, and that Joel was using images of an insect plague to refer indirectly to Assyria or Babylon. Then again, he seems to also use army imagery to describe the bugs, so some Bible scholars think...well..he might just talking about plain ol’ grasshoppers.
Whichever way you slice it, most of the first two chapters of this three-chapter book describe devastation befalling the people of Israel. At least, that’s what they say through the eleventh verse of chapter two, and then things change. This morning’s reading comes to us after Joel calls out to Israel to renew their commitment to their God. Even after their land has been turned into a desolate wilderness, God does not forget his people...and the promise of his renewal is played out all over these nine verses.
To a people who had experienced loss and devastation, Joel offers images of abundant rain, rain coming and renewing the land, turning ravaged fields into bountiful harvests. Where the larders had been empty, now they would be full. The rain will pour down from the skies, and wine will pour from the wine jars, and everything will be just as good as it was before.
Well, actually, no. That’s not what Joel says. Sure, it looks like he’s going in that direction, but he ends up taking it a bit further. He’s not just promising copious precipitation and all the cases of Trader Joel’s three-buck Chuck you can carry. After the renewal will come another pouring out, one that is different than the simple earthy harvest that has come before.
Suddenly we get this: “Then afterward I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; you sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female slaves, in those days, I shall our out my spirit.”
What we’re hearing is the promise of a fulfillment that goes well beyond renewal. It’s not just restoring the thing that came before, going back to exactly the way things were before the plague year hit. It’s about God giving something better still. At some point in the future as vague as the dating of Joel’s letter...afterward...God will give his own self, his own spirit, to everyone who has sought it. Doesn’t matter their age. Doesn’t matter where they stand in the social pecking order. It’ll be given to all.
And that, as the verses that follow so bluntly illustrate, is a frightening thing. The idea that God’s spirit could move outside of the temple would have been terrifying to Hebrew people. Remember, the temple wasn’t viewed just a place of worship, a place where you went to get your God-fix and hand the priests a few shekels. From the perspective of that ancient people, that temple was a divine containment field, a hard perimeter cast around the terrifying power of God’s presence. If you let God loose...who knows what might happen?
Because we’re happy to receive back the harvest we expected. We’re happy to embrace the return of the thing we knew before. We want to be back to business as usual, church as usual, life as usual. When we’re struggling with the cutters and hoppers and devourers that chomp their way through our lives, it’s hard for us to imagine anything more.
But what Joel tells each of us is two things. First, he tells us that in the midst of those times when things have been taken away, when everything around us seems shattered and devoured and hopelessly ruined..there is always hope. When we’re struggling in our relationships, or can’t seem to find work that fulfills us, there is hope. When we’re struggling with illness or loss or despair, there is hope. That desert time will pass. God will bring the lifegiving rain.
But afterward comes the second thing...after the struggle, after the hardship is past, God may bring something more, a change in us that we didn’t expect, that we couldn’t see coming. That transformation...that truly new thing...is something that we have to be willing to embrace. When the Spirit of the Living God is poured out, the harvest that will bring in us is...well...we’ll just have to leave our minds and our hearts open, and see for ourselves.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
A Bad Taste In Your Mouth
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
10.21.07; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Jeremiah 31:27-34
It’s been one of those days. We all have those days. It’s late one evening and you come home from a day that’s left you utterly spent, feeling like a cell phone on it’s last hopeless red bar of battery juice, feeling like you were the only donor to show up at the blood drive of the Transylvanian Red Cross. You fumble with your keys, your mind a blurry haze. When you finally get into the house, just shambling to the sofa and collapsing is more than you’re sure you can manage. You drop your stuff on the floor, and then you realize...oh...I’m really, really hungry. Did you even eat lunch? You were so busy today, you can’t even remember. Maybe you did. Or maybe that was yesterday. You’re too tired to tell. But you haven’t been shopping in over a week. Is there even any food in the house? It’s not like you were planning to whip up some crepe suzette, but you don’t even have the energy to get on the phone and order pizza. And you’re hungry right now. In 45 minutes, you might not even be awake to answer the door.
There’s gotta be something in the fridge.
So to the fridge you go. You open up the icebox, and a stale rush of cold air pours over you. The freezer’s pretty much empty, the last of the frozen meals having been the last thing you can remember eating. There’s a half a tub of generic Rocky Road, and an ancient bag of frostbitten peas that looks like it might have been found buried next to the ice-hardened body of a mummified Siberian mammoth. You open up the fridge. There’s a random assortment of tupperware containers. Hmmm. How old is that soup? You think back. Well...how long have you lived there? Better pass on that one. Near the rear of the top shelf, though, there’s a Chinese carryout container. It looks pretty recent. Was that last week you got Chinese? Or was that last month? Must have been last week.
You pop open the container. It’s three-quarters full. What was this again? Special Kung Pao Big Happy Family Shrimp? Something like that. Is it still any good? You give it a sniff. You’re not sure. You drop it in the microwave, nuke it for a minute, and take a taste. Hmm. Still not sure. You keep eating. Still not sure.
But when you wake up at three that morning, you’re sure. Whatever microorganisms had made that shrimp their Big Happy Family home are now blissfully reproducing in your digestive tract. Your entire gut feels distended, bloated, like it’s filled with a solid churning mass of undead shrimp, wriggling and poking about with their little sharp legs and fluttering their tails. And the taste in your mouth seems to rise up from deep within, filling your throat and your sinuses with a heady cocktail of decay and mealy white crustacean flesh. It’s going to be a fun night.
When you finally come out on the far side, even after gargling your way through a bathtub’s worth of Listerine, that...taste...will be with you for days. The sense memory of that taste will last far longer. You may never even be able to look at a shrimp again.
The prophet Jeremiah knew all about bad tastes that lingered. He lived at a time when everything that the Hebrew people had hoped and dreamed for had gone sour, turning to bitter foulness in their mouths.
After the collapse of the Assyrian empire in 627 BCE and the death of it’s last emperor, Ashurbanipal, the people of Judah had hoped that they would finally be free. Judah and all of the other nations that had been enslaved by Assyria rose up in revolution. Led by the wise and noble King Josiah, the people of Judah re-established worship of the God of Israel, and hoped for independence. But it was not to be. In 609 BCE, Josiah was killed by the Egyptians at the battle of Har-Meggido, as the Pharoah’s army raced up to aid what was left of Assyria in it’s struggle against the new power that was rising in the region.
That power was the Babylonian Empire. Judah found itself enslaved again, under a more brutal master than before. All of it’s efforts to rise again were brutally crushed, until in the year 587 BCE the Babylonians finally destroyed Jerusalem completely, tearing down the temple and scattering the people to the four winds.
Jeremiah lived and preached in those last, terrible days before the collapse. He was not a popular man in Judah, because he proclaimed that to resist Babylon out of national pride would result in complete destruction. At best, he was seen as a prophet of doom, a weeping prophet, a proclaimer of despair. At worst, his fellow Judeans saw him as a collaborator and a traitor. How dare you undercut us? How dare you subvert the will of the king and say we shouldn’t fight!? He was imprisoned. He was thrown into pits. His life was threatened.
But a funny thing happens to Jeremiah’s preaching. Before the destruction of Judah began to finally unfold, Jeremiah’s teachings were all about challenge, warning, and wrath. As soon as the horrible things the Lord had proclaimed through him began to happen, though, Jeremiah’s whole tone changes. Instead of shouting out rebukes, or telling the people “Hah! I told you you deserved this,” Jeremiah suddenly starts speaking words of comfort and reassurance, and challenging the despair that overcame his defeated people.
The common saying that Jeremiah challenged in this morning’s passage was a fine example of how far the spirits of the Hebrew people had fallen. The saying went like this: “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” The people of Judah had utterly lost hope, and believed that they were doomed to be punished for the failures of those who had come before them. They were convinced that the suffering they were going through was God’s punishment for all that Judah had done before. What was the point? There could be no escape for them. They were trapped by what had gone before. The taste of inherited sin lingered in their mouths.
Jeremiah challenged this hopelessness. Yes, there’d been destruction. Yes, the people hadn’t listened. But Jeremiah proclaimed God’s word that sin is not something that lingers, not something that God holds against a people in perpetuity. The people of Judah couldn’t allow themselves to imagine that God would condemn them for things they hadn’t done, or snare them in a trap that was not of their own making. Other prophets shared Jeremiah’s proclamation of hope. The entire 18th chapter of the Book of Ezekiel ..who lived at the same time as Jeremiah...is dedicated to attacking this hopeless saying.
That sense of hopelessness that Jeremiah and Ezekiel battled wasn’t just restricted to ancient Judah. Many of us bear within us that same despair...either consciously or subconsciously. We feel trapped by our past, trapped and condemned by things that have come before.
This happens in so many ways. In an era when so many children have watched parents struggle through the collapse of their marriages, there is a sense of being trapped by the past. How can I ever make it work? We can feel trapped by the expectations of our culture, channeled into broken ways of living that we know are wrong but feel we cannot escape. This isn’t the life I wanted...but there’s nothing I can do.
It isn’t just our ancestry or our culture that traps us. It can be our own past, the sour chapters in the story of our own lives. We feel we can’t break out of old patterns of doing things, that we’re forced to live our future based on the ways we have fallen short in the past. “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” How many have watched a relationship filled with hope and love go sour, and then yielded to the despair that whispers in your ear, ”It can never work for you again. You’re too flawed, too broken, too poisoned.” Old angers, old biases, old jealousies and conflicts and bitterness, those things in our past can become that sinful parent, and it is too easy for us to imagine our future as that doomed child of bitterness, trapped forever by the way things were.
But that is not God’s desire for us. That flavor of bitterness, that sense of being pinned under the weight of your past, that is not what God seeks for any of us. We are each called instead to cast aside that saying, to refuse to let the past turn us from the future that we are each called to discover. Ask yourself...what sour flavors color your life now, what bitter taste poisons your hope? What stands in your past that prevents you from moving towards your future? None of those things...not one of them...are from God. There is a feast of hope set before you, a table open to anyone willing to step forward and partake. Hear Jeremiah. Take heart, and taste the goodness of a new life.
10.21.07; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Jeremiah 31:27-34
It’s been one of those days. We all have those days. It’s late one evening and you come home from a day that’s left you utterly spent, feeling like a cell phone on it’s last hopeless red bar of battery juice, feeling like you were the only donor to show up at the blood drive of the Transylvanian Red Cross. You fumble with your keys, your mind a blurry haze. When you finally get into the house, just shambling to the sofa and collapsing is more than you’re sure you can manage. You drop your stuff on the floor, and then you realize...oh...I’m really, really hungry. Did you even eat lunch? You were so busy today, you can’t even remember. Maybe you did. Or maybe that was yesterday. You’re too tired to tell. But you haven’t been shopping in over a week. Is there even any food in the house? It’s not like you were planning to whip up some crepe suzette, but you don’t even have the energy to get on the phone and order pizza. And you’re hungry right now. In 45 minutes, you might not even be awake to answer the door.
There’s gotta be something in the fridge.
So to the fridge you go. You open up the icebox, and a stale rush of cold air pours over you. The freezer’s pretty much empty, the last of the frozen meals having been the last thing you can remember eating. There’s a half a tub of generic Rocky Road, and an ancient bag of frostbitten peas that looks like it might have been found buried next to the ice-hardened body of a mummified Siberian mammoth. You open up the fridge. There’s a random assortment of tupperware containers. Hmmm. How old is that soup? You think back. Well...how long have you lived there? Better pass on that one. Near the rear of the top shelf, though, there’s a Chinese carryout container. It looks pretty recent. Was that last week you got Chinese? Or was that last month? Must have been last week.
You pop open the container. It’s three-quarters full. What was this again? Special Kung Pao Big Happy Family Shrimp? Something like that. Is it still any good? You give it a sniff. You’re not sure. You drop it in the microwave, nuke it for a minute, and take a taste. Hmm. Still not sure. You keep eating. Still not sure.
But when you wake up at three that morning, you’re sure. Whatever microorganisms had made that shrimp their Big Happy Family home are now blissfully reproducing in your digestive tract. Your entire gut feels distended, bloated, like it’s filled with a solid churning mass of undead shrimp, wriggling and poking about with their little sharp legs and fluttering their tails. And the taste in your mouth seems to rise up from deep within, filling your throat and your sinuses with a heady cocktail of decay and mealy white crustacean flesh. It’s going to be a fun night.
When you finally come out on the far side, even after gargling your way through a bathtub’s worth of Listerine, that...taste...will be with you for days. The sense memory of that taste will last far longer. You may never even be able to look at a shrimp again.
The prophet Jeremiah knew all about bad tastes that lingered. He lived at a time when everything that the Hebrew people had hoped and dreamed for had gone sour, turning to bitter foulness in their mouths.
After the collapse of the Assyrian empire in 627 BCE and the death of it’s last emperor, Ashurbanipal, the people of Judah had hoped that they would finally be free. Judah and all of the other nations that had been enslaved by Assyria rose up in revolution. Led by the wise and noble King Josiah, the people of Judah re-established worship of the God of Israel, and hoped for independence. But it was not to be. In 609 BCE, Josiah was killed by the Egyptians at the battle of Har-Meggido, as the Pharoah’s army raced up to aid what was left of Assyria in it’s struggle against the new power that was rising in the region.
That power was the Babylonian Empire. Judah found itself enslaved again, under a more brutal master than before. All of it’s efforts to rise again were brutally crushed, until in the year 587 BCE the Babylonians finally destroyed Jerusalem completely, tearing down the temple and scattering the people to the four winds.
Jeremiah lived and preached in those last, terrible days before the collapse. He was not a popular man in Judah, because he proclaimed that to resist Babylon out of national pride would result in complete destruction. At best, he was seen as a prophet of doom, a weeping prophet, a proclaimer of despair. At worst, his fellow Judeans saw him as a collaborator and a traitor. How dare you undercut us? How dare you subvert the will of the king and say we shouldn’t fight!? He was imprisoned. He was thrown into pits. His life was threatened.
But a funny thing happens to Jeremiah’s preaching. Before the destruction of Judah began to finally unfold, Jeremiah’s teachings were all about challenge, warning, and wrath. As soon as the horrible things the Lord had proclaimed through him began to happen, though, Jeremiah’s whole tone changes. Instead of shouting out rebukes, or telling the people “Hah! I told you you deserved this,” Jeremiah suddenly starts speaking words of comfort and reassurance, and challenging the despair that overcame his defeated people.
The common saying that Jeremiah challenged in this morning’s passage was a fine example of how far the spirits of the Hebrew people had fallen. The saying went like this: “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” The people of Judah had utterly lost hope, and believed that they were doomed to be punished for the failures of those who had come before them. They were convinced that the suffering they were going through was God’s punishment for all that Judah had done before. What was the point? There could be no escape for them. They were trapped by what had gone before. The taste of inherited sin lingered in their mouths.
Jeremiah challenged this hopelessness. Yes, there’d been destruction. Yes, the people hadn’t listened. But Jeremiah proclaimed God’s word that sin is not something that lingers, not something that God holds against a people in perpetuity. The people of Judah couldn’t allow themselves to imagine that God would condemn them for things they hadn’t done, or snare them in a trap that was not of their own making. Other prophets shared Jeremiah’s proclamation of hope. The entire 18th chapter of the Book of Ezekiel ..who lived at the same time as Jeremiah...is dedicated to attacking this hopeless saying.
That sense of hopelessness that Jeremiah and Ezekiel battled wasn’t just restricted to ancient Judah. Many of us bear within us that same despair...either consciously or subconsciously. We feel trapped by our past, trapped and condemned by things that have come before.
This happens in so many ways. In an era when so many children have watched parents struggle through the collapse of their marriages, there is a sense of being trapped by the past. How can I ever make it work? We can feel trapped by the expectations of our culture, channeled into broken ways of living that we know are wrong but feel we cannot escape. This isn’t the life I wanted...but there’s nothing I can do.
It isn’t just our ancestry or our culture that traps us. It can be our own past, the sour chapters in the story of our own lives. We feel we can’t break out of old patterns of doing things, that we’re forced to live our future based on the ways we have fallen short in the past. “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” How many have watched a relationship filled with hope and love go sour, and then yielded to the despair that whispers in your ear, ”It can never work for you again. You’re too flawed, too broken, too poisoned.” Old angers, old biases, old jealousies and conflicts and bitterness, those things in our past can become that sinful parent, and it is too easy for us to imagine our future as that doomed child of bitterness, trapped forever by the way things were.
But that is not God’s desire for us. That flavor of bitterness, that sense of being pinned under the weight of your past, that is not what God seeks for any of us. We are each called instead to cast aside that saying, to refuse to let the past turn us from the future that we are each called to discover. Ask yourself...what sour flavors color your life now, what bitter taste poisons your hope? What stands in your past that prevents you from moving towards your future? None of those things...not one of them...are from God. There is a feast of hope set before you, a table open to anyone willing to step forward and partake. Hear Jeremiah. Take heart, and taste the goodness of a new life.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Donor’s Choice
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
10.14.07; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: 2 Kings 5: 1-15
There were some good things about my old job, you know, the one I had before God grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and tossed me into the ministry. But one of my very least favorite things was...well...having to explain to people exactly what it was I did. You’re at a party, and talking to this guy, and he says, “I’m an accountant at a firm in DC. What do you do?”
“Well, I manage a research grantmaking program that solicits funds from private foundations so that we can engage in a multi-stage peer-reviewed grant competition to support and disseminate the findings of social science research into the dynamics of voluntarism, philanthropy, and the nonprofit sector both domestically and internationally.”
And suddenly, there’d be silence, and my conversation partner’s eyes were glazed and unresponsive, and he’s involuntarily drooling and twitching slightly. After having repeatedly witnessed that same result, I’m convinced that law enforcement officers could use a weaponized version my old job description to harmlessly bring down suspects.
But there were good things about that job, particularly some of the things that I learned about how and why people give to support causes. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that giving to charity would be one of the most selfless things you could do. But increasingly, people are expecting their charity to work for them. You don’t just give. You give expecting to receive something in return. The more powerful you are, the truer that is. Like, for instance, those alumni who give money to schools. The more you give, the more recognition you get. If you’re really, really committed, you get the single highest honor any university donor can achieve--your very own building, named after you. Just walk across the University of Maryland - College Park Campus and look at all the buildings.
The Mitchell Building. McKeldin Library. The Lee Building. McKeldin Mall. Shriver Lab. The McKeldin Institute for Applied Business Puppetry. The Montgomery Burns Center for Gerontology. The Hannibal Lecter School for the Culinary Arts. The list goes on and on.
But getting recognition is only the beginning. In the 1990s, a trend began that is continuing today. People aren’t willing to just give to a charity any more. They want to give only to that part of the charity that does exactly what they want. It’s called “donor choice,” and it means bringing the consumer mentality to our giving. It’s like saying, “Well, does your charity help the blind? That’s great, but I’m only interested in giving money to you if you have a project to give audiobook versions of Steven Colbert’s new book to blind kids in Borneo. Sure, maybe those kids were hoping for an operation to restore their sight. I know that’s what you usually do. But Colbert is such a funny guy, and who doesn’t like to laugh? You DO want my MONEY, don’t you?”
We expect to give in the way that we choose, and only in the way that we choose. Our giving should reflect us, and what we want. After all, the world revolves around us, doesn’t it? We should have the right to decide exactly what we give, and everything we receive, for that matter.
Though the story we heard from 2 Kings this morning comes to us from deep in the middle Iron Age, 2800 years ago, Naaman was just such a person. He was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the Aramean army...that’s the folks who lived modern day Syria. By all accounts, he was a crafty and successful military commander. He may have led the Arameans to victory over both Israel and Judah combined, delivering a decisive defeat at the battle of Ramoth-Gilead. He was a powerful man, but he also had a powerful problem. In most English translations, it says that he had leprosy, that blight of the ancient world in which your skin rots away while you’re still alive. The actual word in the Hebrew, though, is a catch-all term that just means “skin disease.” Whichever way you slice it, he had something pretty nasty, and all of the Clearasil in the ancient world wasn’t going to do the trick.
One of the slaves he’d captured in a raid into Israel, however, passed the word along that there might be a solution for Naaman. The prophet Elisha, the disciple of the great prophet Elijah, was renowned for his healing powers...why not go there. So Naaman talked to the Syrian king, who, eager to help his trusted warrior, gave him a donation to bring to the king of Israel. In today’s measurements, that comes out to seven hundred and fifty pounds of silver, 150 pounds of gold, and 10 Armani suits. There’s no way you’re going to fit that into a carry on bag.
Naaman trucked down to Israel, and handed a letter to King Jehoram of Israel...along with the boatload of cash. The letter, written by the Syrian king, said, basically, “Heal my servant.” This was understandably upsetting to Jehoram, who assumed it was just a trick, a way of giving the Syrian army an excuse to come storming down into Israel again.
Then Elisha got word of this, and the next thing you know, Naaman and his entire entourage rolls up with their shiny chariots at Elisha’s door. Naaman, of course, expected Elisha to come out like an eager little lap dog, and to do exactly what Naaman wanted. He was Naaman! He was powerful! He was rich!
But Elisha does none of that. He doesn’t even bother to come out to greet him. He sends a message: “Go wash in the Jordan seven times.”
Naaman is outraged. It’s plain in the English and even more clear in Hebrew that Naaman’s ego was seriously pricked. Hey, I’m Naaman. Naaman! I come all this way, with all this cash, and he’s not going to greet me? Me? And all he has to say is ‘Go bathe seven times?’ Where are the magical words? The ancient incantations and invocations of this God of theirs? Our court magicians put on a much better show than this! This isn’t anything like what I expected! If I wanted to just take a bath, I could have done it at home.” And he stormed off in a snit.
But his staff caught up with him, and pointed out that if Elisha had asked him to stand on his head and spin while playing HavaNaGila on a kazoo, he’d have done that. We’ve come all this way. It’s just a bath. So Naaman relented, and was washed, and was healed. Just...not the way he’d expected.
When we ask things of God...and we all do ask things from God...there’s a real danger that we’re going to show up at his door like Naaman. With our prayers we bring our own egos and desires, our own sense of self and our place in the world. We’ve been taught to expect everything to act like a transaction--our purchases, our giving, and our relationships.
But when you ask things of God, when you seek healing or guidance in your life, all of those expectations need to be set aside. When prayers are answered...and they are answered...it is only very rarely that we are given the things we anticipate.
Take, for instance, the smug ramblings of the author of a little website called whydoesn’tGodhealamputees.com. He’s convinced that because limbs don’t tend regrow when you pray over them, that’s a sure sign that God isn’t real. Though I have my own reactions to this, what’s most impressive are the responses of some Christians who’ve lost their limbs in accidents or in war. Most of them had been dealing with considerable anguish, both physical and spiritual, over the loss of their limb. Those who have faith, though, have found that they are healed. No, their limbs haven’t regrown like an amphibian. Instead, they’ve found that where once there was struggle, now they can cope. Where they were once overwhelmed, they found themselves at peace. Unlike Naaman, who expected both healing and the process of healing to happen in the way he desired, they’d opened themselves to how God might act in them...and recognized the gift of strength and peace for what it was. A gift of healing.
That openness needs to define our every prayer and our every faithful yearning, everything that we bring to God. Because if you are only going to be satisfied by the very thing you desire, then you’re going to completely miss what God intends for you.
10.14.07; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: 2 Kings 5: 1-15
There were some good things about my old job, you know, the one I had before God grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and tossed me into the ministry. But one of my very least favorite things was...well...having to explain to people exactly what it was I did. You’re at a party, and talking to this guy, and he says, “I’m an accountant at a firm in DC. What do you do?”
“Well, I manage a research grantmaking program that solicits funds from private foundations so that we can engage in a multi-stage peer-reviewed grant competition to support and disseminate the findings of social science research into the dynamics of voluntarism, philanthropy, and the nonprofit sector both domestically and internationally.”
And suddenly, there’d be silence, and my conversation partner’s eyes were glazed and unresponsive, and he’s involuntarily drooling and twitching slightly. After having repeatedly witnessed that same result, I’m convinced that law enforcement officers could use a weaponized version my old job description to harmlessly bring down suspects.
But there were good things about that job, particularly some of the things that I learned about how and why people give to support causes. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that giving to charity would be one of the most selfless things you could do. But increasingly, people are expecting their charity to work for them. You don’t just give. You give expecting to receive something in return. The more powerful you are, the truer that is. Like, for instance, those alumni who give money to schools. The more you give, the more recognition you get. If you’re really, really committed, you get the single highest honor any university donor can achieve--your very own building, named after you. Just walk across the University of Maryland - College Park Campus and look at all the buildings.
The Mitchell Building. McKeldin Library. The Lee Building. McKeldin Mall. Shriver Lab. The McKeldin Institute for Applied Business Puppetry. The Montgomery Burns Center for Gerontology. The Hannibal Lecter School for the Culinary Arts. The list goes on and on.
But getting recognition is only the beginning. In the 1990s, a trend began that is continuing today. People aren’t willing to just give to a charity any more. They want to give only to that part of the charity that does exactly what they want. It’s called “donor choice,” and it means bringing the consumer mentality to our giving. It’s like saying, “Well, does your charity help the blind? That’s great, but I’m only interested in giving money to you if you have a project to give audiobook versions of Steven Colbert’s new book to blind kids in Borneo. Sure, maybe those kids were hoping for an operation to restore their sight. I know that’s what you usually do. But Colbert is such a funny guy, and who doesn’t like to laugh? You DO want my MONEY, don’t you?”
We expect to give in the way that we choose, and only in the way that we choose. Our giving should reflect us, and what we want. After all, the world revolves around us, doesn’t it? We should have the right to decide exactly what we give, and everything we receive, for that matter.
Though the story we heard from 2 Kings this morning comes to us from deep in the middle Iron Age, 2800 years ago, Naaman was just such a person. He was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the Aramean army...that’s the folks who lived modern day Syria. By all accounts, he was a crafty and successful military commander. He may have led the Arameans to victory over both Israel and Judah combined, delivering a decisive defeat at the battle of Ramoth-Gilead. He was a powerful man, but he also had a powerful problem. In most English translations, it says that he had leprosy, that blight of the ancient world in which your skin rots away while you’re still alive. The actual word in the Hebrew, though, is a catch-all term that just means “skin disease.” Whichever way you slice it, he had something pretty nasty, and all of the Clearasil in the ancient world wasn’t going to do the trick.
One of the slaves he’d captured in a raid into Israel, however, passed the word along that there might be a solution for Naaman. The prophet Elisha, the disciple of the great prophet Elijah, was renowned for his healing powers...why not go there. So Naaman talked to the Syrian king, who, eager to help his trusted warrior, gave him a donation to bring to the king of Israel. In today’s measurements, that comes out to seven hundred and fifty pounds of silver, 150 pounds of gold, and 10 Armani suits. There’s no way you’re going to fit that into a carry on bag.
Naaman trucked down to Israel, and handed a letter to King Jehoram of Israel...along with the boatload of cash. The letter, written by the Syrian king, said, basically, “Heal my servant.” This was understandably upsetting to Jehoram, who assumed it was just a trick, a way of giving the Syrian army an excuse to come storming down into Israel again.
Then Elisha got word of this, and the next thing you know, Naaman and his entire entourage rolls up with their shiny chariots at Elisha’s door. Naaman, of course, expected Elisha to come out like an eager little lap dog, and to do exactly what Naaman wanted. He was Naaman! He was powerful! He was rich!
But Elisha does none of that. He doesn’t even bother to come out to greet him. He sends a message: “Go wash in the Jordan seven times.”
Naaman is outraged. It’s plain in the English and even more clear in Hebrew that Naaman’s ego was seriously pricked. Hey, I’m Naaman. Naaman! I come all this way, with all this cash, and he’s not going to greet me? Me? And all he has to say is ‘Go bathe seven times?’ Where are the magical words? The ancient incantations and invocations of this God of theirs? Our court magicians put on a much better show than this! This isn’t anything like what I expected! If I wanted to just take a bath, I could have done it at home.” And he stormed off in a snit.
But his staff caught up with him, and pointed out that if Elisha had asked him to stand on his head and spin while playing HavaNaGila on a kazoo, he’d have done that. We’ve come all this way. It’s just a bath. So Naaman relented, and was washed, and was healed. Just...not the way he’d expected.
When we ask things of God...and we all do ask things from God...there’s a real danger that we’re going to show up at his door like Naaman. With our prayers we bring our own egos and desires, our own sense of self and our place in the world. We’ve been taught to expect everything to act like a transaction--our purchases, our giving, and our relationships.
But when you ask things of God, when you seek healing or guidance in your life, all of those expectations need to be set aside. When prayers are answered...and they are answered...it is only very rarely that we are given the things we anticipate.
Take, for instance, the smug ramblings of the author of a little website called whydoesn’tGodhealamputees.com. He’s convinced that because limbs don’t tend regrow when you pray over them, that’s a sure sign that God isn’t real. Though I have my own reactions to this, what’s most impressive are the responses of some Christians who’ve lost their limbs in accidents or in war. Most of them had been dealing with considerable anguish, both physical and spiritual, over the loss of their limb. Those who have faith, though, have found that they are healed. No, their limbs haven’t regrown like an amphibian. Instead, they’ve found that where once there was struggle, now they can cope. Where they were once overwhelmed, they found themselves at peace. Unlike Naaman, who expected both healing and the process of healing to happen in the way he desired, they’d opened themselves to how God might act in them...and recognized the gift of strength and peace for what it was. A gift of healing.
That openness needs to define our every prayer and our every faithful yearning, everything that we bring to God. Because if you are only going to be satisfied by the very thing you desire, then you’re going to completely miss what God intends for you.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Taking It Seriously
10.07.07; Rev. John An and Michael Kim
(Written by me after collaborative exegesis between John, Mike, and myself, and subsequently edited by the three of us to be preached alternately in English and Korean. Sermon by committee...how very Presbyterian!)
Everything in this country seems to get more and more casual.
It used to be that when you went to work, you’d dress for work.
It was work!
If you showed up wearing jeans and a t-shirt
Your colleagues and your customers would think that you didn’t take them seriously.
What?
You can’t even bother putting on the proper clothes?
So you’d put on that stern business suit
You’d wear a collar shirt and a bright red tie
Which wrapped around your neck like a silk boa constrictor.
You’d have on a dark jacket
That jacket meant you were freezing in winter
And in summer you’d show up for meetings soaked in sweat.
But you had to wear it.
It meant you were at work.
But something changed.
Suddenly, wearing the suit meant you weren’t “being real.”
Being formal meant being false.
Taking things seriously meant that you were joyless.
So suddenly in businesses everywhere, you have casual Friday at work.
Then Relaxed Monday.
And informal Tuesday.
And Baseball Cap Wednesday.
Fortunately, Wear-Your-Pants-On-Your-Head Thursday never caught on.
It becomes hard to tell whether someone’s at work at all.
That casualness is everywhere.
At work, we’re casual.
In our relationships, we’re casual.
Even here at church, we’re supposed to be casual.
It gets harder and harder to find churches with traditionally dressed pastors.
Why wear a robe?
Why wear a stole?
It’s too formal!
It’ll make people feel uncomfortable.
And why should anyone dress up for church?
People should come as they are.
It’s more real.
There is some truth in that.
But there is also a danger.
Is what we’re doing here today the same as every other moment of our life?
Is the service of the Lord’s Supper just like going to Burger King?
Today is World Communion Sunday.
All around the world today,
Hundreds of millions of Christians are sharing in this meal.
They’re breaking the bread
They’re drinking from the cup.
And though it doesn’t matter whether you’re wearing a suit
Or jeans and a t-shirt
A light floral dress
Or a hanbok
It does matter that you take it seriously.
Why?
Because some things are worth treasuring.
Some things are worth setting aside as precious.
That’s the message that we hear today from 2 Timothy.
This letter was written to guide the ancient church.
It’s purpose was to explain how to be a church.
And to help deepen our appreciation for what Christ has done for us.
It comes from a time when Christians had to stand up for their faith.
It comes from a time when following Jesus meant sacrifice.
For some, it meant death.
It wasn’t something that you took casually.
In this letter, we hear two very important things.
In verse eight of chapter one, we hear the following:
“Do not be ashamed, then, of the testimony about our Lord”
“Or of me his prisoner”
“But join with me in suffering for the Gospel”
“Relying on the power of God.”
As we tell the world about Jesus Christ
In our words
In our lives
The way that we endure trials and hardships tells much about our faith.
Can we speak blessings, even as Christ did from the cross?
That’s certainly something worth taking seriously
Because we know that suffering is not a casual thing.
Have you endured the suffering of a loved one?
It’s not a casual thing.
Have you struggled with illness?
It’s not a casual thing
Have you known loneliness and rejection?
It’s not a casual thing.
Have you known real hunger or thirst?
It’s not a casual thing.
Here in this meal today, we’re remembering the suffering of one who loved us.
Loved us enough to forgive us from the cross.
In the bread, we have his body.
In the cup, we have his blood.
If we are really taking it seriously
If we really remember what it means
We know that this act cannot be casual.
The second thing that 2 Timothy teaches us
Is in verse 10 of chapter 1.
In that verse we are told that Jesus Christ did this for us:
He “abolished death.”
He “brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.”
This is a great gift.
This a blessing of impossible worth.
If your best friend in the world came to you
And gave you a gift of breathtaking value.
Like a new house in
Which was yours completely, bought and paid for.
You’d know that it was worth every penny they had.
Would you say to them,
Well, yeah. Whatever.
No big deal.
No, because you’d know how much they’d sacrificed.
You’d know that everything they had went in to that overwhelming present.
You couldn’t be casual about it.
It’s that kind of gift that we have here in front of us.
It is eternal life and joy with God forever.
It is ours completely, bought and paid for.
2 Timothy reminds us that we’ve been given a good treasure.
Here in this meal
And in the sacrifice that lives within it.
From generation to generation, that gift has been passed down.
Through the power of the Holy Spirit
Christ has entrusted his greatest gift to us
In this simple bread
And in this simple cup.
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