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.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
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.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Really Living
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
09.30.07; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: 1 Timothy 6:6-19
The world is filled with people telling you what not to do. Pretty much every single day, there’s some new study or some new research sternly warning all of us that something we eat, drink, or wear is no longer permitted. How often does the desperately concerned anchor on News Center 5 at Seven look straight at the camera and say, “A new study reveals that a product you may have in your kitchen now might pose a significant danger to you and your family. We’ll tell you what that product is right after these messages.”
These warnings and alerts come at us from all angles. We get home after a long day and all we want to do is collapse on the sofa with a bag of pretzels and a cold frosty one. But when we turn on the mindsucker, we’re at CNN, and the anchor shouts: This evening it’s official: America is suffering under an epidemic of obesity! So you drag yourself up to go jogging, but getting out means exposure to the sun--and the anchor whispers that The American Institute of Dermatology today announced that exposure to ultraviolet radiation could increase your risk of several forms of skin cancer! So we’ll stay in to play calorie-burning games on our Wii. Nintendo has been forced to respond to concerns that the Wii controller can cause property damage or serious injury! OK..so.. we go to get into our SUV to drive to the gym. NASA satellites reveal more startling evidence that human carbon emissions are bringing about global warming! Alright, already...can I just wear a hat and long sleeves and walk there? A recent alert from the Department of Transportation warns that new traffic levels are causing an increased level of pedestrian fatalities..walk at your own risk!
So perhaps I should just stay home and have dinner. Can I have a hamburger? Johns Hopkins researchers released a new study this week showing the link between red meat consumption and colon cancer! How about a nice healthy salad? FDA investigators yesterday revealed that pre-made salads are possibly infected with salmonella! Maybe...a glass of milk? The effects of bovine growth hormone on human beings are worrying, scientists say! Can I please have just a little glass of water? Washington area officials today reported serious concerns with the local waste treatment facility. Maybe...maybe I’ll just lie down quietly on the floor and curl into a fetal ball. Have you recently tested the air in your home for radon? Radon, the silent killer returns...more after this.
How much preaching have you heard that seems designed to make you feel the same way, full of fear? Hopefully, not too much of MY preaching...I mean, sure, sometimes some of you look a little glazed out there, but I’m assuming that’s not because you’re paralyzed with fear.
There’s that horrific tendency of preachers to focus relentlessly on telling you what you shouldn’t do, on what you should avoid, on the horrors and terrors that await your soul the very moment you step outside of the sainted halls of their sanctuary and stop clinging to every word they say. Every action or failure to act could mean the difference between an eternity of euphoric delight and spending your infinity getting slowly and painfully pickled in a jar buried in Satan’s backyard. The life lived in faith can become a life lived on the defensive, constantly terrified that somehow, some way, you’re going to inadvertently do something wrong.
There are plenty of folks who carefully cultivate such fears. They warn their children that Halloween is Satan’s night. There’s nothing more terrifying and clearly evil in the sight of the Lord than a little cluster of first graders dressed up like ninjas. They tell them that Santa is a demonic tool to turn people from the love of Jesus. They stand up in front of their congregations and proclaim that allowing your children to play with Pokemon cards will turn them away from the true faith. “The Bible sez that Saitan fell from heaven like a flash of lightning...and Pikachu has lighting for a tail...cain’t you see the connexshun???!!!”
If you’ve been around Jesus people long enough, you’ll have heard every one of these assertions, spoken with absolute sincerity and a glint of fear in a trembling eye. According to some folks, if you set foot outside of the church, if you read something not written by a Christian, or hear a song that’s not Christian, for even one moment, you may as well just resign yourself to being a tasty side dish for Beelzebub’s dinner guests.
That’s like the madness that’s afflicted some corners of Christianity around the Harry Potter books. Here you have books written by a Christian. Those books praise the highest virtues of Christian faith, and in many ways intentionally mirror the stories of the Gospels. J.K. Rowling even sneaks in quotes of scripture. But for those for whom faith means fear, they must be evil...have to be evil!
That fear can paralyze Christians, and it can also make them clumsy witnesses in the world around them. If we spend too much time lamenting evil and too little time doing and speaking the good, then those around us will see and hear only evil. And who wants to be around that?
That, in large part, is what the author of 1 Timothy is warning against. Scholars are divided about who actually wrote this book. Some read it and are convinced that this letter is one of the later letters of Paul. Others…and I tend to agree with this second group…feel that it is a pseudonymous letter, written by a faithful disciple of Paul’s and in his name. In the ancient world, that wasn’t considered lying or plagiarism. To write a work under the name of your teacher or spiritual master was a way of honoring their name, and it also insured that the message of your teacher continued to be spread.
Whichever way you slice it, 1 Timothy is one of three letters...the other two are 2 Timothy and Titus...which are called the Pastoral Letters, because they’re most interested in telling the new church two things. First, they’re there to guide the church in running it’s own affairs. It talks about what elders and deacons do, for example. Second, and just as important, it tells the church that it needs to live in such a way that the outside world will clearly recognize it as something good. Yes, there are warnings about what not to do, but they are leavened with encouragement about what Christians should do.
This morning’s passage is no exception. With every spiritual danger that is highlighted...like the love of wealth and pursuing desires that crush the contentment from us...there are corresponding notes of grace and hope. He doesn’t just warn us, but gives an indication as to ways we can act that will both bring us more contentment and be a beacon of grace to the world around us.
When the letter warns of the spiritual danger of wealth, for instance, he doesn’t rant and rave about how very evil every one is who makes more money than he does. Instead, he points out the danger, but also makes it clear that there are ways to prevent the wealth you have received from dominating your life.
Do good. Be rich in good works. Be generous. Make sure that whether you are rich or poor, everything that you do in this life serves to build a solid foundation for your eternity. Don’t spend all of your time quaking or being guided by your fears or your anger against the world. Instead, take a hold of the life that really is life, because if those around you see that you are really living the full and joyous life to which God has called you.
09.30.07; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: 1 Timothy 6:6-19
The world is filled with people telling you what not to do. Pretty much every single day, there’s some new study or some new research sternly warning all of us that something we eat, drink, or wear is no longer permitted. How often does the desperately concerned anchor on News Center 5 at Seven look straight at the camera and say, “A new study reveals that a product you may have in your kitchen now might pose a significant danger to you and your family. We’ll tell you what that product is right after these messages.”
These warnings and alerts come at us from all angles. We get home after a long day and all we want to do is collapse on the sofa with a bag of pretzels and a cold frosty one. But when we turn on the mindsucker, we’re at CNN, and the anchor shouts: This evening it’s official: America is suffering under an epidemic of obesity! So you drag yourself up to go jogging, but getting out means exposure to the sun--and the anchor whispers that The American Institute of Dermatology today announced that exposure to ultraviolet radiation could increase your risk of several forms of skin cancer! So we’ll stay in to play calorie-burning games on our Wii. Nintendo has been forced to respond to concerns that the Wii controller can cause property damage or serious injury! OK..so.. we go to get into our SUV to drive to the gym. NASA satellites reveal more startling evidence that human carbon emissions are bringing about global warming! Alright, already...can I just wear a hat and long sleeves and walk there? A recent alert from the Department of Transportation warns that new traffic levels are causing an increased level of pedestrian fatalities..walk at your own risk!
So perhaps I should just stay home and have dinner. Can I have a hamburger? Johns Hopkins researchers released a new study this week showing the link between red meat consumption and colon cancer! How about a nice healthy salad? FDA investigators yesterday revealed that pre-made salads are possibly infected with salmonella! Maybe...a glass of milk? The effects of bovine growth hormone on human beings are worrying, scientists say! Can I please have just a little glass of water? Washington area officials today reported serious concerns with the local waste treatment facility. Maybe...maybe I’ll just lie down quietly on the floor and curl into a fetal ball. Have you recently tested the air in your home for radon? Radon, the silent killer returns...more after this.
How much preaching have you heard that seems designed to make you feel the same way, full of fear? Hopefully, not too much of MY preaching...I mean, sure, sometimes some of you look a little glazed out there, but I’m assuming that’s not because you’re paralyzed with fear.
There’s that horrific tendency of preachers to focus relentlessly on telling you what you shouldn’t do, on what you should avoid, on the horrors and terrors that await your soul the very moment you step outside of the sainted halls of their sanctuary and stop clinging to every word they say. Every action or failure to act could mean the difference between an eternity of euphoric delight and spending your infinity getting slowly and painfully pickled in a jar buried in Satan’s backyard. The life lived in faith can become a life lived on the defensive, constantly terrified that somehow, some way, you’re going to inadvertently do something wrong.
There are plenty of folks who carefully cultivate such fears. They warn their children that Halloween is Satan’s night. There’s nothing more terrifying and clearly evil in the sight of the Lord than a little cluster of first graders dressed up like ninjas. They tell them that Santa is a demonic tool to turn people from the love of Jesus. They stand up in front of their congregations and proclaim that allowing your children to play with Pokemon cards will turn them away from the true faith. “The Bible sez that Saitan fell from heaven like a flash of lightning...and Pikachu has lighting for a tail...cain’t you see the connexshun???!!!”
If you’ve been around Jesus people long enough, you’ll have heard every one of these assertions, spoken with absolute sincerity and a glint of fear in a trembling eye. According to some folks, if you set foot outside of the church, if you read something not written by a Christian, or hear a song that’s not Christian, for even one moment, you may as well just resign yourself to being a tasty side dish for Beelzebub’s dinner guests.
That’s like the madness that’s afflicted some corners of Christianity around the Harry Potter books. Here you have books written by a Christian. Those books praise the highest virtues of Christian faith, and in many ways intentionally mirror the stories of the Gospels. J.K. Rowling even sneaks in quotes of scripture. But for those for whom faith means fear, they must be evil...have to be evil!
That fear can paralyze Christians, and it can also make them clumsy witnesses in the world around them. If we spend too much time lamenting evil and too little time doing and speaking the good, then those around us will see and hear only evil. And who wants to be around that?
That, in large part, is what the author of 1 Timothy is warning against. Scholars are divided about who actually wrote this book. Some read it and are convinced that this letter is one of the later letters of Paul. Others…and I tend to agree with this second group…feel that it is a pseudonymous letter, written by a faithful disciple of Paul’s and in his name. In the ancient world, that wasn’t considered lying or plagiarism. To write a work under the name of your teacher or spiritual master was a way of honoring their name, and it also insured that the message of your teacher continued to be spread.
Whichever way you slice it, 1 Timothy is one of three letters...the other two are 2 Timothy and Titus...which are called the Pastoral Letters, because they’re most interested in telling the new church two things. First, they’re there to guide the church in running it’s own affairs. It talks about what elders and deacons do, for example. Second, and just as important, it tells the church that it needs to live in such a way that the outside world will clearly recognize it as something good. Yes, there are warnings about what not to do, but they are leavened with encouragement about what Christians should do.
This morning’s passage is no exception. With every spiritual danger that is highlighted...like the love of wealth and pursuing desires that crush the contentment from us...there are corresponding notes of grace and hope. He doesn’t just warn us, but gives an indication as to ways we can act that will both bring us more contentment and be a beacon of grace to the world around us.
When the letter warns of the spiritual danger of wealth, for instance, he doesn’t rant and rave about how very evil every one is who makes more money than he does. Instead, he points out the danger, but also makes it clear that there are ways to prevent the wealth you have received from dominating your life.
Do good. Be rich in good works. Be generous. Make sure that whether you are rich or poor, everything that you do in this life serves to build a solid foundation for your eternity. Don’t spend all of your time quaking or being guided by your fears or your anger against the world. Instead, take a hold of the life that really is life, because if those around you see that you are really living the full and joyous life to which God has called you.
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