Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
Rev. David Williams; 12.14.08
Scripture Lesson: Isaiah 61:1-4; 8-11
Several months ago, anyone traveling across the Washington metropolitan area on our painfully inadequate public transportation system would have begun to notice some rather striking advertisements posted in Metro stations.
They weren’t the usual fare of metro maps or Macys ads or charities begging for you to remember them during a United Way campaign. They didn’t involve rail thin models looking at each other poutily while crammed into boot-cut jeans sized to provide a relaxed fit for skeletons. They weren’t pitching the latest Omnia touch screen phone from Samsung, with 3G browsing, an HD camcorder, and optional surgically implanted neural dock.
These ads showed stark images of a bleak Washington landscape after a nuclear attack. In the background of one ad, the Capitol building stands as a shattered ruin, nestled on a National Mall now painted with a mix matte grey ash and blast-black. In the foreground, a faceless warfighter stares out at you through the lenses of a bio-chem armored helmet. In another ad, the Washington Monument stood silhouetted like a broken, bony finger against a similarly grey sky, great gashes torn from it’s sides.
These ads got noticed. For those who have lived in the Washington Area long enough to remember the Cold War, such pictures of destruction are enough to stir up memories of the nuclear nightmares of childhood. For those who were in this area during the horrific moments of September 11, and felt the fear that held the whole region in a chokehold of anxiety after the anthrax and sniper attacks, this vision of WMD effects wasn’t particularly welcome either. People complained to the metro board. People wrote angry letters about the ads the Post and the Washington Times. Articles discussing the propriety of the ads and the product they were pitching appeared in the media. The ads themselves became news.
In other words, this was an insanely, wildly, gloriously successful marketing campaign.
What was being pitched was a game called Fallout 3, the latest from a well regarded Bethesda software publisher. The game is set in the post-apocalyptic remains of the Washington Metro Area, generations after a nuclear exchange between the United States and China leaves the world in ruins. Reviewers describe it as an absolutely haunting game, filled with a level of primal violence and survival-of-the-fittest moral ambiguity that makes Lord of the Flies look like good storytime reading for preschoolers.
So, of course, I’m playing it...for purposes of sermon research, of course, and only well after my boys have gone to sleep. It is relentlessly grim, both spare and tense, and filled with intelligent writing and voice acting. It completely engrosses you in it’s world, giving a profoundly realistic sense of the depths to which human beings will go to survive after everything they’ve known and the whole framework of their society has been obliterated. The struggles to rebuild something, to live something resembling a worthwhile life...well...they feel painfully real.
From the Book of the Prophet Isaiah today we hear a message from a time in which the struggle to rebuild from the ashes of a society was front and center. In our Bible studies over the last few weeks, we’ve discussed how most Bible scholars worth their salt see the Book of Isaiah divided up into three clear sections, each of which has it’s own particular focus.
Today’s section comes from what is known as Third Isaiah, which was written and preached perhaps 510-515 years before Christ by a prophet who followed the tradition of Isaiah. It’s visions and proclamations do not describe a Hebrew people comfortably ensconced in Jerusalem and the temple, as do the first thirty-nine chapters. They also do not assume that the Jewish people are shattered in the Babylonian exile, like chapters forty through fifty-five. The context of the last ten chapters is clear: the Hebrew people are struggling to rebuild.
What they’re struggling to rebuild is their whole society, wiped from the face of the earth in by the relatively low-tech but nonetheless effective implements of the Babylonian Empire. After Babylon was defeated by Persia, the Hebrew people were encouraged to return to their ancestral lands. They were filled with hope at the prospect of return, but what they came back to was the ancient equivalent of stepping out of a fallout shelter. There was pretty much nothing left.
The walls of Jerusalem had fallen, and the temple had been razed. Everything had to be rebuilt from the ground up. The people returned thinking that things were going to be easy, and things were the farthest thing from easy. Life was hardscrabble, a serious struggle from day to day. The bricks that had been part of the walls of Jerusalem did not leap up on their own and autonomously reassemble themselves into Zion Gardens Condos and Suites.
It was hard. It seemed hopeless. People began to despair.
But the word from God that Isaiah proclaimed defied that despair. It was a word of intense hope, a word that comes directly from the prophet’s sense of being anointed with the Spirit of the Living God. It’s a word of intense confidence in the power of God to work through his people to bring about restoration.
For the oppressed and the brokenhearted and the captives who had returned to the land and still despaired, the prophet affirmed the devastation that they were experiencing and the ruins in which they found themselves. Yet in the face of their suffering...and in some way because of their suffering...the prophet declares that God’s love for justice and covenant presence will make his people an instrument with which he will rebuild the brokenness of their land.
It’s a word that they needed to hear, and a word without which their hearts would have been too broken to continue. It’s also a word that many of us need to hear right now, as many of us look fearfully out at the seeming chaos and confusion of our economy.
With banks and businesses both small and large failing, families struggling with foreclosure and job loss, and retirees reading their investment reports with trembling hands, it is easy for us to fall into the same kind of despair that seems to have afflicted those Hebrews upon their return. With the media humming with hysteria, every headline and talking head warning of a new depression, it’s easy to give in. We feel an uncertainty that can paralyze us, allowing us to turn from the task of rebuilding. We become overwhelmed. We hunker down.
In his reaffirmation of God’s essential justice and care for his people, the prophet is telling those who despaired that no matter what happens, God will show grace to a covenant people. If we’re willing to accept that grace, and to practice it, those places of ruin will be rebuilt.
It won’t be easy, and it won’t come quick. Nothing good does. But if we turn our will towards righteousness...meaning care for one another...and praise...meaning care that glorifies God...then the garden will spring forth.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Water in the Desert
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
12.07.08; Rev. David Williams
Scripture: Mark 1:1-8
A while back, I had the great pleasure of presiding over the wedding of a friend. I’d known her since high school, when she and my wife were part of a circle BFFs before the word BFF even existed. It was a complete joy officiating over her union with her husband, but as I prepared for the service, I got a little bit concerned about the location.
Her parents had left the Washington metro area years back, and now lived in Las Cruces, New Mexico. It’s an absolutely gorgeous place, smack out in the middle of the desert in the Rio Grande Valley and surrounded by mountains. The plan for the wedding ceremony was to have it in a park at the base of the mountains, at an amphitheater that had towering and glorious peaks as a backdrop. When the couple showed me pictures of where they wanted to have the event, I had to agree. It was a perfect place, just radiant with the glory of God’s creation.
That didn’t make me any less nervous. I tend to be a total wuss when it comes to outdoor weddings, because as complicated and challenging as organizing a service can be, adding the randomness of weather into the mix is just more than I can stand. What if it rains? What if one of those sudden storms pop up, and the wedding party has to flee from driving winds and torrential rain?
When I arrived to check out the site the day before and to do the wedding rehearsal prep, I realized that my worry about rain was totally off. This was really and truly desert. The sun was brilliant and intense, and the light pressed down like a physical presence. But the heat you felt was totally different. It was the complete opposite of the Washington August heat, which is like getting into a jacuzzi while wearing a sleeping bag. This heat was totally dry, and the strong winds that blew off of the desert and up the sides of the mountains had not a single molecule of H2O in them. As I stared into that wind, I felt it greedily pull the moisture from my mouth and throat. After five minutes, my tongue felt like sandstone, and my eyes were like sand-crusted marbles. It’s a good thing I wasn’t going to have to do any public speaking there. Oh. Wait. I was.
The only option was water. I had to drink, and drink both regularly and constantly. Without that, my vocal cords would have dried out like parchment in a matter of minutes. Fortunately, the wedding party had provided this aplenty.
They knew, as anyone with a lick of sense knows, that there is nothing more precious in the desert than water. We kinda sorta know how important water is, but it’s easy to forget it as we trundle about our day to day lives, our Big Gulps in hand. Water is everywhere. But in the intense scarcity of the desert, our appreciation of the humble liquid that makes up around 70% of our physical forms is heightened. We need it more, and we become aware of how deeply we need it.
The desert and those wilderness places in the world have always been central to the lives of those who wanted to get down to the most essential, the most necessary, the most vital parts of their faith. Throughout the history of the people of Israel, desert places had always been the ones that had provided refuge from the distractions of the world. It was into the wilderness that monks had fled seeking escape, and it was from the wilderness that prophets came with proclamations of truths that were beyond the grasp of those who had forgotten what was truly necessary in the world.
As Mark’s Gospel begins, we heard today of a prophet who came from the wilderness, of John the Baptist. Mark’s book of the story of Christ begins by first declaring itself good news, and then gets right into a reference from the prophet Isaiah. That prophet’s poetic cry of the arrival of a messenger in the wilderness is declared a reference to John the Baptist. What John did was not too uncommon among the Hebrew people. Rituals of cleansing in water were part of the way in which Jews in the first century reclaimed themselves and recommitted themselves to their faith. In order to be ritually pure for worship in the temple, the Torah requires ritual bathing. While the process of being baptized was not quite the same, it had the same spiritual foundation.
But while there were similarities between what John did by the banks of the Jordan and what others had done before, there were some real and significant differences. What was striking about John was how intensely he pointed beyond the act that he was engaged in. While he was engaging in a ritual that had deep symbolic roots, the one who was to follow on afterwards, and who John himself was to baptize...that one would engage in an act far more potent and transforming than the ritual and symbolic cleansing of baptism by water.
The baptism by the Holy Spirit described by involves a far deeper transformation, a changing of the will through the presence of the grace of God. That sense of the presence of God, and the awareness that in some strange way God is working through you to change you...that’s the very heart and essence of the Gospel message that Jesus proclaimed.
But, you may ask, how does this work for us, today? To get a sense of the powerful presence of God’s Spirit, the prophets wandered out into the wildernesses of Judea. To know the working of God’s grace in themselves, the monks of the early Christian church isolated themselves in the deserts of North Africa. How can we get that same sense of God’s presence?
We are far closer to the desert than we might think. Not a desert as defined by the absence of water, but a desert as defined by the absence of the Spirit. Just as water brings green life and blooms and fruit, the fruits that come from the presence of the Spirit are grace and comfort and forgiveness. All of us experience areas in our lives in which those things are as hard to find as an orange tree in Death Valley.
Those broken and barren places may be a friendship that has soured. It might be a relationship where once there was love and now there is only hurt. It might be a place that should bring direction and hope, but brings only anger and confusion. It might be a season that should bring comfort and joy, but instead yields only stress and greed. Our lives do not lack for deserts, and they test us as truly as the burning sun tested the prophets. How we respond to those times and places is the measure of our faith.
We all have our deserts. And just like we need to take every opportunity to drink in the desert to keep it from drying us out like a stone, we need to take every opportunity to both seek and express the fruits of the Spirit in those desert places in our lives. There is no moment or place in your life where that cannot be expressed, where the Spirit cannot work change. It comes when you offer a word of grace instead of a cutting remark. It comes when you choose to reach out to someone who is different, or who seems to stand in opposition to you. It comes when you choose to help someone grow, instead of ignoring them or allowing them to continue to fail.
That Spirit is always there, always present, always waiting to rain down upon the dead places and to bring life to them again.
Know that truth, and drink deep.
12.07.08; Rev. David Williams
Scripture: Mark 1:1-8
A while back, I had the great pleasure of presiding over the wedding of a friend. I’d known her since high school, when she and my wife were part of a circle BFFs before the word BFF even existed. It was a complete joy officiating over her union with her husband, but as I prepared for the service, I got a little bit concerned about the location.
Her parents had left the Washington metro area years back, and now lived in Las Cruces, New Mexico. It’s an absolutely gorgeous place, smack out in the middle of the desert in the Rio Grande Valley and surrounded by mountains. The plan for the wedding ceremony was to have it in a park at the base of the mountains, at an amphitheater that had towering and glorious peaks as a backdrop. When the couple showed me pictures of where they wanted to have the event, I had to agree. It was a perfect place, just radiant with the glory of God’s creation.
That didn’t make me any less nervous. I tend to be a total wuss when it comes to outdoor weddings, because as complicated and challenging as organizing a service can be, adding the randomness of weather into the mix is just more than I can stand. What if it rains? What if one of those sudden storms pop up, and the wedding party has to flee from driving winds and torrential rain?
When I arrived to check out the site the day before and to do the wedding rehearsal prep, I realized that my worry about rain was totally off. This was really and truly desert. The sun was brilliant and intense, and the light pressed down like a physical presence. But the heat you felt was totally different. It was the complete opposite of the Washington August heat, which is like getting into a jacuzzi while wearing a sleeping bag. This heat was totally dry, and the strong winds that blew off of the desert and up the sides of the mountains had not a single molecule of H2O in them. As I stared into that wind, I felt it greedily pull the moisture from my mouth and throat. After five minutes, my tongue felt like sandstone, and my eyes were like sand-crusted marbles. It’s a good thing I wasn’t going to have to do any public speaking there. Oh. Wait. I was.
The only option was water. I had to drink, and drink both regularly and constantly. Without that, my vocal cords would have dried out like parchment in a matter of minutes. Fortunately, the wedding party had provided this aplenty.
They knew, as anyone with a lick of sense knows, that there is nothing more precious in the desert than water. We kinda sorta know how important water is, but it’s easy to forget it as we trundle about our day to day lives, our Big Gulps in hand. Water is everywhere. But in the intense scarcity of the desert, our appreciation of the humble liquid that makes up around 70% of our physical forms is heightened. We need it more, and we become aware of how deeply we need it.
The desert and those wilderness places in the world have always been central to the lives of those who wanted to get down to the most essential, the most necessary, the most vital parts of their faith. Throughout the history of the people of Israel, desert places had always been the ones that had provided refuge from the distractions of the world. It was into the wilderness that monks had fled seeking escape, and it was from the wilderness that prophets came with proclamations of truths that were beyond the grasp of those who had forgotten what was truly necessary in the world.
As Mark’s Gospel begins, we heard today of a prophet who came from the wilderness, of John the Baptist. Mark’s book of the story of Christ begins by first declaring itself good news, and then gets right into a reference from the prophet Isaiah. That prophet’s poetic cry of the arrival of a messenger in the wilderness is declared a reference to John the Baptist. What John did was not too uncommon among the Hebrew people. Rituals of cleansing in water were part of the way in which Jews in the first century reclaimed themselves and recommitted themselves to their faith. In order to be ritually pure for worship in the temple, the Torah requires ritual bathing. While the process of being baptized was not quite the same, it had the same spiritual foundation.
But while there were similarities between what John did by the banks of the Jordan and what others had done before, there were some real and significant differences. What was striking about John was how intensely he pointed beyond the act that he was engaged in. While he was engaging in a ritual that had deep symbolic roots, the one who was to follow on afterwards, and who John himself was to baptize...that one would engage in an act far more potent and transforming than the ritual and symbolic cleansing of baptism by water.
The baptism by the Holy Spirit described by involves a far deeper transformation, a changing of the will through the presence of the grace of God. That sense of the presence of God, and the awareness that in some strange way God is working through you to change you...that’s the very heart and essence of the Gospel message that Jesus proclaimed.
But, you may ask, how does this work for us, today? To get a sense of the powerful presence of God’s Spirit, the prophets wandered out into the wildernesses of Judea. To know the working of God’s grace in themselves, the monks of the early Christian church isolated themselves in the deserts of North Africa. How can we get that same sense of God’s presence?
We are far closer to the desert than we might think. Not a desert as defined by the absence of water, but a desert as defined by the absence of the Spirit. Just as water brings green life and blooms and fruit, the fruits that come from the presence of the Spirit are grace and comfort and forgiveness. All of us experience areas in our lives in which those things are as hard to find as an orange tree in Death Valley.
Those broken and barren places may be a friendship that has soured. It might be a relationship where once there was love and now there is only hurt. It might be a place that should bring direction and hope, but brings only anger and confusion. It might be a season that should bring comfort and joy, but instead yields only stress and greed. Our lives do not lack for deserts, and they test us as truly as the burning sun tested the prophets. How we respond to those times and places is the measure of our faith.
We all have our deserts. And just like we need to take every opportunity to drink in the desert to keep it from drying us out like a stone, we need to take every opportunity to both seek and express the fruits of the Spirit in those desert places in our lives. There is no moment or place in your life where that cannot be expressed, where the Spirit cannot work change. It comes when you offer a word of grace instead of a cutting remark. It comes when you choose to reach out to someone who is different, or who seems to stand in opposition to you. It comes when you choose to help someone grow, instead of ignoring them or allowing them to continue to fail.
That Spirit is always there, always present, always waiting to rain down upon the dead places and to bring life to them again.
Know that truth, and drink deep.
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Generation Now
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
11.30.08; Rev. David Williams
Scriptures: Mark 13: 24-37
Over the past couple of months, I’ve been watching the activity in the marketplace with a considerable amount of interest. As my retirement investments ditch tens of thousands of dollars, and this church loses hundreds of thousands of dollars from it’s endowment, it’s hard not to be paying attention.
It’s strangely fascinating, and for some reason reminds me of this last summer, when I and the family were vacationing up at Hershey Park in Pennsylvania. A couple of the coasters there were just too intense, even for my coaster-happy 10 year old, so we’d sit and watch them as they went howling by, laden with screaming, happy, terrified park-goers.
Watching the markets lately is a bit like that, only you have to imagine that all of the coaster riders are carrying their life savings with them in big open buckets filled loose hundred dollar bills. As the ride soars by, the air is filled with their lost money, fluttering down and filling the air like dry leaves in a strong autumn wind. The screaming of the riders is still plenty, though.
For some reason this week, I found myself thinking back to a book that did extremely well waaaay back in the year 2000. It was written by James Glassman, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the current Undersecretary for Something Something Something in the outgoing administration. Mr. Glassman suggested that stocks were hugely undervalued, and that the Dow Jones Industrial Average was going to soar high up into the heavens, more than tripling in value in the near future. The book was entitled: Dow 36,000. Glassman was not alone in this prediction. There were books calling for the Dow to be at 40,000. There were books calling for the Dow to be at 100,000. An investment advisor by the name of Robert Zuccaro was pitching a much more specifically dated book back in 2001. It was entitled: Dow 30,000 by 2008.
It’s easy to be cynical. Sure, the market has plunged wildly this last year, dropping from close to 14,000 to under 9,000. But we have, what...still a bit over a month left in the year! You never know!
For Glassman and Zuccaro and others like them, those totally incorrect predictions are likely to make most of us rather skeptical about taking their advice in the future. Any future they might have had as a market prophet is shot. That’s fine, though. There are plenty of other jobs out there in retail. Oh...wait...not any more. Ooopsie.
Our reluctance to take the these self-declared market gurus seriously anymore actually follows a biblical rule about prophecy. How do you tell whether or not a prophet is truly from God? In the Torah, those first five books of scripture that are the highest law of the Hebrew Bible, the measure is pretty clear. In Deuteronomy 18:21-22, we hear that the measure of a prophetic truth is...whether it comes true or not. From those verses we hear this:
"How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the LORD ? If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the LORD does not take place or come true, that is a message the LORD has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously. Do not be afraid of him.”
Pretty easy to remember. While this law works well for weeding out delusional prophets of God and crackhead financial advisors alike, it also leads us to a great fuddling question. If you were listening to today’s scripture from the Gospel of Mark, one verse should have whacked you straight in the forehead.
Beginning at the start of chapter 13, Jesus has begun to describe the things that will happen as the end-times come. We hear of trials and tribulations that will be endured. We hear that Judea will undergo all manner of bad things, and that people will flee to the hills. In today’s passage, which follows on all of this talk of apocalypse, we hear that the Son of Man will come in his glory, and gather up the chosen. It’s pretty standard “Left Behind” book fare.
But then things get odd. In verse thirty of chapter 13, as he wraps up his we hear Jesus say this: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.” To which any of us who are actually listening might say...what? Huh? Ex-squeeze me?
Jesus is talking to his innermost circle of disciples. He is telling Peter, James, John and Andrew about the fulfillment of the Kingdom and the coming of the Son of Man, and saying that it will happen in their generation. That generation, of course, lived 2,000 years ago. So...um...how does this teaching of Jesus...which is as clear and as straightforward as could be...fit within the measure of truth laid out within Scripture itself?
To put it more plainly...is Jesus wrong? I mean, we’re happy to snicker at the dolt who claimed that the Dow would hit 30,000 this year. Are we equally happy to laugh at this nutjob from Nazareth who claimed that the Kingdom of God would come 2,000 years ago? If you talk to many atheists...as I do...this is one of their very favoritest passages. Look, they say, parading around triumphantly. Jesus said the end time would come, and it didn’t. Naany Naany Noo Nooo!
Yet I think that approach to what Jesus is saying misses several vitally important things about his teachings. The first...quite frankly...is that most of what was described in chapter 13 of Mark’s Gospel did occur. Within the lives of most of his listeners, Judea was completely destroyed by the Roman Empire. The city of Jerusalem fell, burned into nothing in the year 70 by the combined assault of three Roman legions. The second temple was razed, and Israel as a nation was shattered for nearly 2,000 years.
Yet though that “suffering” which is described earlier in the chapter and is referred to in verse 24 seem certain to have happened within a generation of Christ’s saying it, the passage seems to go further. Jesus suggests strongly that somehow Christ’s kingdom may be something that the disciples will experience...and yet it clearly hasn’t happened yet. The Son of Man descending? Has he? Angels gathering the elect? They can’t have. Can they?
It is that tension between the arrival of the fullness of the Kingdom and the anticipation of it’s arrival that is why this passage gets served up on the first Sunday of Advent. What Jesus is saying is not to be understood as being true only for the generation that heard him first. The reality he is describing isn’t something that occurs at one moment in time, or at one place. The arrival of God’s Kingdom does not belong to one particular generation...it belongs to all of them. It’s not a reality that happens at one moment, and then passes on. As Christ says, though Heaven and Earth will pass away, my words will not pass away.
What Jesus is doing is not predicting a future, for this generation or some future generation. He is declaring something that is happening, right now, for you and for me and for those who came before us and for those who will come after.
As we move towards the celebration of the coming of the Christ child, let’s do all that we can to live into that moment.
11.30.08; Rev. David Williams
Scriptures: Mark 13: 24-37
Over the past couple of months, I’ve been watching the activity in the marketplace with a considerable amount of interest. As my retirement investments ditch tens of thousands of dollars, and this church loses hundreds of thousands of dollars from it’s endowment, it’s hard not to be paying attention.
It’s strangely fascinating, and for some reason reminds me of this last summer, when I and the family were vacationing up at Hershey Park in Pennsylvania. A couple of the coasters there were just too intense, even for my coaster-happy 10 year old, so we’d sit and watch them as they went howling by, laden with screaming, happy, terrified park-goers.
Watching the markets lately is a bit like that, only you have to imagine that all of the coaster riders are carrying their life savings with them in big open buckets filled loose hundred dollar bills. As the ride soars by, the air is filled with their lost money, fluttering down and filling the air like dry leaves in a strong autumn wind. The screaming of the riders is still plenty, though.
For some reason this week, I found myself thinking back to a book that did extremely well waaaay back in the year 2000. It was written by James Glassman, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the current Undersecretary for Something Something Something in the outgoing administration. Mr. Glassman suggested that stocks were hugely undervalued, and that the Dow Jones Industrial Average was going to soar high up into the heavens, more than tripling in value in the near future. The book was entitled: Dow 36,000. Glassman was not alone in this prediction. There were books calling for the Dow to be at 40,000. There were books calling for the Dow to be at 100,000. An investment advisor by the name of Robert Zuccaro was pitching a much more specifically dated book back in 2001. It was entitled: Dow 30,000 by 2008.
It’s easy to be cynical. Sure, the market has plunged wildly this last year, dropping from close to 14,000 to under 9,000. But we have, what...still a bit over a month left in the year! You never know!
For Glassman and Zuccaro and others like them, those totally incorrect predictions are likely to make most of us rather skeptical about taking their advice in the future. Any future they might have had as a market prophet is shot. That’s fine, though. There are plenty of other jobs out there in retail. Oh...wait...not any more. Ooopsie.
Our reluctance to take the these self-declared market gurus seriously anymore actually follows a biblical rule about prophecy. How do you tell whether or not a prophet is truly from God? In the Torah, those first five books of scripture that are the highest law of the Hebrew Bible, the measure is pretty clear. In Deuteronomy 18:21-22, we hear that the measure of a prophetic truth is...whether it comes true or not. From those verses we hear this:
"How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the LORD ? If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the LORD does not take place or come true, that is a message the LORD has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously. Do not be afraid of him.”
Pretty easy to remember. While this law works well for weeding out delusional prophets of God and crackhead financial advisors alike, it also leads us to a great fuddling question. If you were listening to today’s scripture from the Gospel of Mark, one verse should have whacked you straight in the forehead.
Beginning at the start of chapter 13, Jesus has begun to describe the things that will happen as the end-times come. We hear of trials and tribulations that will be endured. We hear that Judea will undergo all manner of bad things, and that people will flee to the hills. In today’s passage, which follows on all of this talk of apocalypse, we hear that the Son of Man will come in his glory, and gather up the chosen. It’s pretty standard “Left Behind” book fare.
But then things get odd. In verse thirty of chapter 13, as he wraps up his we hear Jesus say this: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.” To which any of us who are actually listening might say...what? Huh? Ex-squeeze me?
Jesus is talking to his innermost circle of disciples. He is telling Peter, James, John and Andrew about the fulfillment of the Kingdom and the coming of the Son of Man, and saying that it will happen in their generation. That generation, of course, lived 2,000 years ago. So...um...how does this teaching of Jesus...which is as clear and as straightforward as could be...fit within the measure of truth laid out within Scripture itself?
To put it more plainly...is Jesus wrong? I mean, we’re happy to snicker at the dolt who claimed that the Dow would hit 30,000 this year. Are we equally happy to laugh at this nutjob from Nazareth who claimed that the Kingdom of God would come 2,000 years ago? If you talk to many atheists...as I do...this is one of their very favoritest passages. Look, they say, parading around triumphantly. Jesus said the end time would come, and it didn’t. Naany Naany Noo Nooo!
Yet I think that approach to what Jesus is saying misses several vitally important things about his teachings. The first...quite frankly...is that most of what was described in chapter 13 of Mark’s Gospel did occur. Within the lives of most of his listeners, Judea was completely destroyed by the Roman Empire. The city of Jerusalem fell, burned into nothing in the year 70 by the combined assault of three Roman legions. The second temple was razed, and Israel as a nation was shattered for nearly 2,000 years.
Yet though that “suffering” which is described earlier in the chapter and is referred to in verse 24 seem certain to have happened within a generation of Christ’s saying it, the passage seems to go further. Jesus suggests strongly that somehow Christ’s kingdom may be something that the disciples will experience...and yet it clearly hasn’t happened yet. The Son of Man descending? Has he? Angels gathering the elect? They can’t have. Can they?
It is that tension between the arrival of the fullness of the Kingdom and the anticipation of it’s arrival that is why this passage gets served up on the first Sunday of Advent. What Jesus is saying is not to be understood as being true only for the generation that heard him first. The reality he is describing isn’t something that occurs at one moment in time, or at one place. The arrival of God’s Kingdom does not belong to one particular generation...it belongs to all of them. It’s not a reality that happens at one moment, and then passes on. As Christ says, though Heaven and Earth will pass away, my words will not pass away.
What Jesus is doing is not predicting a future, for this generation or some future generation. He is declaring something that is happening, right now, for you and for me and for those who came before us and for those who will come after.
As we move towards the celebration of the coming of the Christ child, let’s do all that we can to live into that moment.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Judgment Call
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
11.23.08; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Matthew 25:31-46
I’ve always loved bloopers.
When I was a kid, nothing struck me as funnier than watching someone make a highly entertaining error in judgment. I always thought that as I got older and more jaded I would stop finding America’s Funniest Videos quite as amusing. I’ve got a degree in Religious Studies from Mr. Jefferson’s University. I spent ten years working for the Aspen Institute, which is one of the most muckity muckity organizations in the Western Hemisphere, if it does say so itself. I graduated from theological seminary magna cum laude, and am now a Minister of Word and Sacrament with all of the rights and privileges thereunto bestowed.
But for some reason, watching a video of a guy knocking himself out while showing off with nunchucks still makes me laugh uncontrollably. Got a short video of someone dancing on top of an obviously too-flimsy table at a wedding? It works on me every single time. Show me a YouTube clip of that overeager amateur theater performer who’s great at belting out the mostly-on-key show tunes but not so good at knowing where the edge of the stage is? I’ll giggle till I just about pee. I just can’t help myself. About the giggling part, at least.
I know I shouldn’t. I’m not eight years old any more. I should be better than that, more mature, more dignified. But I’m not, and at the rate I’m going, I don’t think I ever will be. There is something about those essentially harmless errors that is fundamentally delightful. Why is that? I think we like those entertaining mistakes for a couple of reasons.
First, because they represent the unexpected. Human beings take joy in things that don’t turn out quite like we anticipate. If you know exactly how something will turn out, it doesn’t delight you, doesn’t stir you to rejoicing or infectious giggles. It’s what makes a good joke funny. The unanticipated, the wacky, and the absurd are the heart of comedy.
Second, because they show us how flawed we are. If we’re really getting it, we’re not laughing because we’re enjoying the embarrassment or discomfort of others. The Germans call that dark enjoyment shadenfreude, and while that might be a factor for some, it isn’t a factor for me. I’m not laughing because I enjoy the suffering of others. I’m laughing out of sympathy. I’m laughing because I’m feeling it myself. All of us have messed up. All of us have...with the best of intentions...managed to totally mess up on at least a dozen occasions, possibly even over the last week. For all of our efforts to be dignified and in control, we aren’t. We just aren’t...and often it shows. For all of our conviction that we know exactly what we’re doing, more often than not, we’re the one who loses control of those nunchucks or walks too close to the edge of that pool. Our judgment fails us, and unexpected hilarity ensues.
Yet for some reason, the deeply unexpected moment of judgment we hear from Matthew’s Gospel today doesn’t strike us as particularly funny. It isn’t funny at all, actually, even though it is one of the most intensely unanticipated moments in all of Scripture. Throughout the Gospels, in all of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, he speaks a great deal about the Kingdom of God. He tells us what it means to live and act according to that Kingdom. But in how many places does he teach about how the final determination? In how many places does he teach exactly what will happen on that final Day of Judgment?
Just one.
It’s right here, at the end of twenty-fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. Unlike the stories that have come before, which told about the need to prepare for the coming kingdom, this story is not a parable. It is not a story told as a symbol. It is not a story that holds within it a message that you have to think about or puzzle over as you work your way through what it means. Though most of Christ’s storytelling was through parables, here he sets aside that way of teaching and does something completely different. Here, he tells it as it is. Or, rather, as it will be.
It’s a classical image, of the Son of Man on the throne of God, separating out all of the peoples of the world. It’s the big judgment call, the final moment when the lives of all of those who have lived are measured against the only standard that counts, the standard of Christ Jesus Himself, who is the Way, and the Truth, and the Life.
That should be a simple process. All the Son of Man needs to do is check whether you’re a member in good standing in the Presbyterian Church (USA). Right? But when all those nervous Methodists and Pentecostals get to the front of the line, we find that the nature of the judgment call being made is...well...surprising to them.
When the Son of Man congratulates the righteous for making the cut, he thanks them for showing him care, for feeding him and clothing him and visiting him when he was sick or imprisoned. And the righteous are...well...surprised. Um...when did I do that? I don’t remember doing that. I remember praying. I remember going to church...um...sometimes. I sorta got through reading the Bible, at least up until those long lists of names put me to sleep. But when did do any of those other things? When did I do any of those things for God?
The answer is a surprise. It’s unexpected. It’s unanticipated. You did those things for me when you did those things for the least of my brothers and sisters. For those who inadvertently made the right call, it’s a moment worth of joy and laughter. For those who didn’t...well...things aren’t so good.
But it’s that first group that really are the ones doing what we don’t expect. If you are a student of human nature, as we all become as the years go by, you quickly come to expect human beings to mess things up. Our basic instinct is to serve ourselves, is to seek our own interest, is to make sure that we come out on top and that the other guy is goin’ down. That’s human nature. It’s what we do.
Our judgment call, time after time, is in favor of ourselves and our buddies. It is in favor of our wealth and our pride and our comfort. It is what stirs wars. It is why human beings turn against each other and tear at each other, why they shout and scream and whisper, why they hate and hurt and lie. Honestly, it isn’t particularly delightful. It is certainly not unexpected.
What is unexpected is when we are surprised by our own grace, when we stumble into goodness, when we inadvertently fumble our own selfishness and surprise ourselves. By the standards of the world, it might seem like bad judgment. By the standards of the world, it’s like a mistake or an error, like the thing that wasn’t part of the plan and wasn’t supposed to happen.
[Where's the conclusion? Well...you had to be there.]
11.23.08; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Matthew 25:31-46
I’ve always loved bloopers.
When I was a kid, nothing struck me as funnier than watching someone make a highly entertaining error in judgment. I always thought that as I got older and more jaded I would stop finding America’s Funniest Videos quite as amusing. I’ve got a degree in Religious Studies from Mr. Jefferson’s University. I spent ten years working for the Aspen Institute, which is one of the most muckity muckity organizations in the Western Hemisphere, if it does say so itself. I graduated from theological seminary magna cum laude, and am now a Minister of Word and Sacrament with all of the rights and privileges thereunto bestowed.
But for some reason, watching a video of a guy knocking himself out while showing off with nunchucks still makes me laugh uncontrollably. Got a short video of someone dancing on top of an obviously too-flimsy table at a wedding? It works on me every single time. Show me a YouTube clip of that overeager amateur theater performer who’s great at belting out the mostly-on-key show tunes but not so good at knowing where the edge of the stage is? I’ll giggle till I just about pee. I just can’t help myself. About the giggling part, at least.
I know I shouldn’t. I’m not eight years old any more. I should be better than that, more mature, more dignified. But I’m not, and at the rate I’m going, I don’t think I ever will be. There is something about those essentially harmless errors that is fundamentally delightful. Why is that? I think we like those entertaining mistakes for a couple of reasons.
First, because they represent the unexpected. Human beings take joy in things that don’t turn out quite like we anticipate. If you know exactly how something will turn out, it doesn’t delight you, doesn’t stir you to rejoicing or infectious giggles. It’s what makes a good joke funny. The unanticipated, the wacky, and the absurd are the heart of comedy.
Second, because they show us how flawed we are. If we’re really getting it, we’re not laughing because we’re enjoying the embarrassment or discomfort of others. The Germans call that dark enjoyment shadenfreude, and while that might be a factor for some, it isn’t a factor for me. I’m not laughing because I enjoy the suffering of others. I’m laughing out of sympathy. I’m laughing because I’m feeling it myself. All of us have messed up. All of us have...with the best of intentions...managed to totally mess up on at least a dozen occasions, possibly even over the last week. For all of our efforts to be dignified and in control, we aren’t. We just aren’t...and often it shows. For all of our conviction that we know exactly what we’re doing, more often than not, we’re the one who loses control of those nunchucks or walks too close to the edge of that pool. Our judgment fails us, and unexpected hilarity ensues.
Yet for some reason, the deeply unexpected moment of judgment we hear from Matthew’s Gospel today doesn’t strike us as particularly funny. It isn’t funny at all, actually, even though it is one of the most intensely unanticipated moments in all of Scripture. Throughout the Gospels, in all of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, he speaks a great deal about the Kingdom of God. He tells us what it means to live and act according to that Kingdom. But in how many places does he teach about how the final determination? In how many places does he teach exactly what will happen on that final Day of Judgment?
Just one.
It’s right here, at the end of twenty-fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. Unlike the stories that have come before, which told about the need to prepare for the coming kingdom, this story is not a parable. It is not a story told as a symbol. It is not a story that holds within it a message that you have to think about or puzzle over as you work your way through what it means. Though most of Christ’s storytelling was through parables, here he sets aside that way of teaching and does something completely different. Here, he tells it as it is. Or, rather, as it will be.
It’s a classical image, of the Son of Man on the throne of God, separating out all of the peoples of the world. It’s the big judgment call, the final moment when the lives of all of those who have lived are measured against the only standard that counts, the standard of Christ Jesus Himself, who is the Way, and the Truth, and the Life.
That should be a simple process. All the Son of Man needs to do is check whether you’re a member in good standing in the Presbyterian Church (USA). Right? But when all those nervous Methodists and Pentecostals get to the front of the line, we find that the nature of the judgment call being made is...well...surprising to them.
When the Son of Man congratulates the righteous for making the cut, he thanks them for showing him care, for feeding him and clothing him and visiting him when he was sick or imprisoned. And the righteous are...well...surprised. Um...when did I do that? I don’t remember doing that. I remember praying. I remember going to church...um...sometimes. I sorta got through reading the Bible, at least up until those long lists of names put me to sleep. But when did do any of those other things? When did I do any of those things for God?
The answer is a surprise. It’s unexpected. It’s unanticipated. You did those things for me when you did those things for the least of my brothers and sisters. For those who inadvertently made the right call, it’s a moment worth of joy and laughter. For those who didn’t...well...things aren’t so good.
But it’s that first group that really are the ones doing what we don’t expect. If you are a student of human nature, as we all become as the years go by, you quickly come to expect human beings to mess things up. Our basic instinct is to serve ourselves, is to seek our own interest, is to make sure that we come out on top and that the other guy is goin’ down. That’s human nature. It’s what we do.
Our judgment call, time after time, is in favor of ourselves and our buddies. It is in favor of our wealth and our pride and our comfort. It is what stirs wars. It is why human beings turn against each other and tear at each other, why they shout and scream and whisper, why they hate and hurt and lie. Honestly, it isn’t particularly delightful. It is certainly not unexpected.
What is unexpected is when we are surprised by our own grace, when we stumble into goodness, when we inadvertently fumble our own selfishness and surprise ourselves. By the standards of the world, it might seem like bad judgment. By the standards of the world, it’s like a mistake or an error, like the thing that wasn’t part of the plan and wasn’t supposed to happen.
[Where's the conclusion? Well...you had to be there.]
12 Months To Live
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
11.16.08; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Matthew 25:14-30
It’s a scenario that has launched a thousand Hallmark Movies of the Week. The main character has been feeling a bit under the weather. They finally get themselves around to going to the doctor, who administers some tests. The tests come back...well...they come back indicating that they need to do more tests. So off our protagonist goes to a specialist, who administers the additional tests.
There’s much sitting around in an examination room. As time goes by, the character starts feeling more and more annoyed. What could possibly be taking so long? They’ve got other things to do that day. There’s the laundry that needs doing, and then there’s that new client they need to call and set up a meeting with. And today was the day that you’d scheduled in time to research a new data plan for your cellphone. I mean, c’mon! What’s taking so long! There’s important stuff that needs to get done!
It is at this moment that the doctor comes through the door, and they’ve got a grim look on their face. They look right at the Hallmark Movie of the Week main character, and, swallowing, say, “We’ve gotten back the test results. I’m afraid you have asymmetric uvular fargulomitis. It’s very rare...but it means you only have twelve months to live. I’m so sorry.”
Now, if you’ve seen one of these movies before, you know what happens. At first, there is stunned silence. This is followed by much screaming and weeping. That is followed by disbelief. “Die! I can’t die! Who will take care of little Timmy?” That is followed by anger, usually expressed by shouting up at the heavens while a camera pans away. “How can this happen to me? Noooooooo!!!!!” I’ve heard that shouting it loudly enough will invariably get you an Emmy. Then...well...then what?
Does the hero of the story just curl up into a whimpering fetal ball in a dark corner of their attic for eleven months, three weeks, and two days, waiting for the clock to run out?
Well, they probably do the fetal ball thing for at least a week. Then suddenly they realize: “Hey...I need to do all the things I’ve always wanted to do. I don’t have much time.” Getting that reminder that you are, in fact, mortal is something that has a tendency to focus the mind. So before asymmetric uvular fargulomitis takes it’s terrible toll, there’s a whole bunch of life to be lived. You have unfinished business, and you need to get busy with it. Every moment becomes utterly precious.
Have you always wanted to travel to India and see the Taj Mahal? Then now is the time to do it. Is there that one great idea for a novel that’s been pinging about in your head for years? Well, you’d better start writing it. Always wanted to learn to ride a motorcycle? Hey...no time like the present, and I know just the pastor who could teach you. Have you always wanted to run down one of those long smooth slopes near Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina, until the hang glider you’re running with bites into the breeze and the ground falls away and you rise up like an eagle? You have...let’s see...eleven months, three weeks, one day, twenty three hours and...um..54 minutes to get that done. So get on the stick.
Because there’s going to come a moment when the clock runs down to zero, and you’ve got no more time. The things you’ve left undone will remain undone.
Today’s parable from the Gospel of Matthew is all about things not getting done. It is a bit of a harsh one. In it, a rich man goes on a journey, and entrusts his property to three of his slaves. Upon his return, he discovers that the one who’d received the most had invested it in business ventures, and doubled it. The one who’d received half that amount had invested it in business ventures, and doubled it. The last one...well...he’d hidden it away from the world, making absolutely sure that there was no chance that any of it was lost.
The rich man gets seriously annoyed. How dare the slave fail to invest? He takes back the money, gives it to the first slave, and fires the guy with a flourish worthy of Donald Trump, casting him into the outer darkness of weeping and gnashing of teeth that comes when you fail to make it in reality tv.
it’s a difficult story to hear. It tends to strike us as a little unfair. Hey...didn’t the slave just do what they were supposed to do? It isn’t like they went to Atlantic City and lost it. It tends to strike us as perhaps a little unrealistic. What if that first slave had gone out and invested the ten talents in a nice solid business with a historic trend of solid return on investment...you know, like Lehman Brothers? How happy would the boss have been then?
That is, of course, not the point that Jesus was trying to make. This story comes to us in a section of Matthew that is dedicated to preparedness and setting ourselves right with God. This section begins back in Matthew 24:3, as the disciples gather on the Mount of Olives to listen to Jesus teach them in private. These teachings run through the end of chapter 25, and it’s the last sustained message from Jesus before the story of his betrayal and death begins. For that reason, the teachings have a consistent urgency and intensity about them, reminding us again and again of the importance of our actions in the now.
What we hear strongly in this morning’s parable builds upon the passage that Pastor Mike read to us last week. While the five bridesmaids managed not to get done what needed to get done, it isn’t just being unprepared that is the danger. It is the way in which we are unprepared. You certainly can’t say that this third servant wasn’t preparing for his master’s return. He knew what was coming...but chose to be passive and fearful in his response to that coming reality. His form of preparation for the inevitable was to refuse to take any risk, to retreat into the comfort of what was known. He hunkered down and sheltered in place.
But in our lives of faith, that approach doesn’t recognize a central part of what it means to live as a faithful Christian, that thing that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called “the fierce urgency of the now.” It is that “fierce urgency” that speaks to our need to act, and not simply remain passive and inert in our faith lives.
Every moment of our lives calls for that depth of commitment, because this life is far shorter than we’d like to admit. Every moment is infinitely precious, and we need to look to our unfinished business..and get busy.
11.16.08; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Matthew 25:14-30
It’s a scenario that has launched a thousand Hallmark Movies of the Week. The main character has been feeling a bit under the weather. They finally get themselves around to going to the doctor, who administers some tests. The tests come back...well...they come back indicating that they need to do more tests. So off our protagonist goes to a specialist, who administers the additional tests.
There’s much sitting around in an examination room. As time goes by, the character starts feeling more and more annoyed. What could possibly be taking so long? They’ve got other things to do that day. There’s the laundry that needs doing, and then there’s that new client they need to call and set up a meeting with. And today was the day that you’d scheduled in time to research a new data plan for your cellphone. I mean, c’mon! What’s taking so long! There’s important stuff that needs to get done!
It is at this moment that the doctor comes through the door, and they’ve got a grim look on their face. They look right at the Hallmark Movie of the Week main character, and, swallowing, say, “We’ve gotten back the test results. I’m afraid you have asymmetric uvular fargulomitis. It’s very rare...but it means you only have twelve months to live. I’m so sorry.”
Now, if you’ve seen one of these movies before, you know what happens. At first, there is stunned silence. This is followed by much screaming and weeping. That is followed by disbelief. “Die! I can’t die! Who will take care of little Timmy?” That is followed by anger, usually expressed by shouting up at the heavens while a camera pans away. “How can this happen to me? Noooooooo!!!!!” I’ve heard that shouting it loudly enough will invariably get you an Emmy. Then...well...then what?
Does the hero of the story just curl up into a whimpering fetal ball in a dark corner of their attic for eleven months, three weeks, and two days, waiting for the clock to run out?
Well, they probably do the fetal ball thing for at least a week. Then suddenly they realize: “Hey...I need to do all the things I’ve always wanted to do. I don’t have much time.” Getting that reminder that you are, in fact, mortal is something that has a tendency to focus the mind. So before asymmetric uvular fargulomitis takes it’s terrible toll, there’s a whole bunch of life to be lived. You have unfinished business, and you need to get busy with it. Every moment becomes utterly precious.
Have you always wanted to travel to India and see the Taj Mahal? Then now is the time to do it. Is there that one great idea for a novel that’s been pinging about in your head for years? Well, you’d better start writing it. Always wanted to learn to ride a motorcycle? Hey...no time like the present, and I know just the pastor who could teach you. Have you always wanted to run down one of those long smooth slopes near Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina, until the hang glider you’re running with bites into the breeze and the ground falls away and you rise up like an eagle? You have...let’s see...eleven months, three weeks, one day, twenty three hours and...um..54 minutes to get that done. So get on the stick.
Because there’s going to come a moment when the clock runs down to zero, and you’ve got no more time. The things you’ve left undone will remain undone.
Today’s parable from the Gospel of Matthew is all about things not getting done. It is a bit of a harsh one. In it, a rich man goes on a journey, and entrusts his property to three of his slaves. Upon his return, he discovers that the one who’d received the most had invested it in business ventures, and doubled it. The one who’d received half that amount had invested it in business ventures, and doubled it. The last one...well...he’d hidden it away from the world, making absolutely sure that there was no chance that any of it was lost.
The rich man gets seriously annoyed. How dare the slave fail to invest? He takes back the money, gives it to the first slave, and fires the guy with a flourish worthy of Donald Trump, casting him into the outer darkness of weeping and gnashing of teeth that comes when you fail to make it in reality tv.
it’s a difficult story to hear. It tends to strike us as a little unfair. Hey...didn’t the slave just do what they were supposed to do? It isn’t like they went to Atlantic City and lost it. It tends to strike us as perhaps a little unrealistic. What if that first slave had gone out and invested the ten talents in a nice solid business with a historic trend of solid return on investment...you know, like Lehman Brothers? How happy would the boss have been then?
That is, of course, not the point that Jesus was trying to make. This story comes to us in a section of Matthew that is dedicated to preparedness and setting ourselves right with God. This section begins back in Matthew 24:3, as the disciples gather on the Mount of Olives to listen to Jesus teach them in private. These teachings run through the end of chapter 25, and it’s the last sustained message from Jesus before the story of his betrayal and death begins. For that reason, the teachings have a consistent urgency and intensity about them, reminding us again and again of the importance of our actions in the now.
What we hear strongly in this morning’s parable builds upon the passage that Pastor Mike read to us last week. While the five bridesmaids managed not to get done what needed to get done, it isn’t just being unprepared that is the danger. It is the way in which we are unprepared. You certainly can’t say that this third servant wasn’t preparing for his master’s return. He knew what was coming...but chose to be passive and fearful in his response to that coming reality. His form of preparation for the inevitable was to refuse to take any risk, to retreat into the comfort of what was known. He hunkered down and sheltered in place.
But in our lives of faith, that approach doesn’t recognize a central part of what it means to live as a faithful Christian, that thing that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called “the fierce urgency of the now.” It is that “fierce urgency” that speaks to our need to act, and not simply remain passive and inert in our faith lives.
Every moment of our lives calls for that depth of commitment, because this life is far shorter than we’d like to admit. Every moment is infinitely precious, and we need to look to our unfinished business..and get busy.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
The One Law
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
10.26.08; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Matthew 22:34-46
There’s a reason there are so many lawyers in America. No, it has very little to do with the fact that many parents view it as the only acceptable alternative after you don’t manage to make it into medical school.
There are so many lawyers because there are just so many laws.
Let’s take the United States Code as an example. I can’t claim to fully understand it, but here’s what little I managed to pluck off the internet this last week. Every law passed by Congress gets plugged into one of 50 “Titles,” which logically sort American laws into different categories. Those titles are divided into subtitles, which are divided into chapters, which are divided into subchapters, which are divided into parts, which are divided into sections.
As a Presbyterian, I find that all strangely exciting.
For example, Title 26 has to do with revenue and taxation, so if you had this deep and burning desire to know when you have to file a special return, you could look to Title 26, Subtitle F, Chapter 61, Subchapter A, Part I, Section 6001, which tells you everything you need to know. Or is that Section 6002? I always muddle those two.
How many laws are there? Well, Title 26...which is one of the 50 Titles...is about 7,500 pages long. Fortunately, it’s a page turner. When you get to Title 26, Subtitle V, Chapter 37, Subchapter B, Part I, Sec. 7042, you’re just not going to believe the plot twist it serves up. Man. I was shaking my head after that one. Never saw it coming. It seriously sets you up for the sequel in Title 27. Don’t worry. I won’t ruin the ending.
The sheer volume of American law is truly dizzying. Hundreds of thousands of pages of code are simply more than any one human being...or even a roomful of human beings...can come to terms with.
I know they say that ignorance of the law is no excuse, but you couldn’t be aware of the fullness of the laws that govern our country if you spent your entire lifetime studying them and every single neuron in your brain was dedicated to learning them, including the neurons that you currently use to figure out how to eat, breathe, and use most universal remotes. When regulations and requirements reach that level of complexity, it becomes harder and harder for us to know how we relate to them. It becomes harder for us to know how to apply them to our lives.
For the ancient Hebrews, the law was also a big deal, although it was considerably less complex. As the scholars of Torah figured it, there were 613 total laws. 248 of them were things you had to do, and 365 of them were things you were supposed to not do. Compared to the United States Code, this was a cakewalk.
Still, though, the complexities of Torah were such that they consumed the thoughts of those who took it seriously. In the time of Jesus, those folks were called the Pharisees, and today we hear about how one of them asks him a question. It’s a lawyer, but by “lawyer,” we need to understand that Matthew means someone who would be more like a bible scholar ...challenges Jesus to make a judgement call about the law. It’s an interesting question: “Which is the greatest commandment in the law?”
Jesus, of course, knows his stuff. He responds with a quotation from Deuteronomy 6:5...”You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all of your soul, and with all of your mind.” It’s a good answer, as that verse is the second part of the Shema, the holiest prayer of the Jewish people. So...that’s the commandment, right?
Jesus doesn’t stop there, though. Sure, he’s given the guy his “greatest commandment.” But he’s not finished with his response. While this is the first and greatest commandment in his book, he feels compelled to take it a step further. He makes sure to add in a second commandment, which he pulls from another book of the Torah...the book of Leviticus. From Leviticus 19:18, he says: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Having presented his questioner with this reply, he makes it clear...both of these commandments seem to be part of one single law. When he declares that the two laws are similar, he’s not really setting one up as above the other. They are to be understood as somehow part of the same single unitary thing. It is on the combination of both of these that the entire law...meaning the law given to the Jewish people by God...finds its foundation.
Our lives are not simple things. We have to figure out how to make moral choices in countless different situations. How do we act in the workplace? How do we respond to those around us in school? How do we deal with our families, and our friends? How do we deal with that annoying neighbor who cranks his music up at 3 in the morning when we’ve got important things to do the next day?
If you’re living your life in accordance with the faith that Christ brought to us, the answer to that question does not lie in having memorized a whole slew of different laws, each one designed to deal with every single specialized circumstance. You don’t need to dig down to find exactly which chapter and subchapter and part and section speaks directly to where you find yourself at that very moment.
Those things are very useful for organizing a society, and for trying to make sure things go more-or-less smoothly as we human beings bump and jostle against one another in the world. But faith governs us very differently. Faith is not about nattering over each tiny detail. Faith is about purpose. Faith is about direction. Faith is the thing that gives life depth and meaning.
For that reason, followers of Jesus Christ have a single law that gives just that sense of purpose. It is a remarkably simple thing. It is a thing that most of us can grasp without having to spend our entire lives studying some highly complicated ethics. Yet if we look hard at how most Christians seem to live their lives, it is something that we seem to struggle to come to terms with. We’d almost rather lose ourselves in studying and legalistic dickering over tiny little details. We’d almost rather throw up our arms and declare that it’s just all too much for us to possibly understand.
When there are laws enough to fill a thousand books, it’s hard to grasp them all. But when there is just one law, it is harder for us still. How can we find a way to apply that law to everything we do? How is it even possible?
Christ wants all of us to spend the rest of our lives finding that out.
10.26.08; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Matthew 22:34-46
There’s a reason there are so many lawyers in America. No, it has very little to do with the fact that many parents view it as the only acceptable alternative after you don’t manage to make it into medical school.
There are so many lawyers because there are just so many laws.
Let’s take the United States Code as an example. I can’t claim to fully understand it, but here’s what little I managed to pluck off the internet this last week. Every law passed by Congress gets plugged into one of 50 “Titles,” which logically sort American laws into different categories. Those titles are divided into subtitles, which are divided into chapters, which are divided into subchapters, which are divided into parts, which are divided into sections.
As a Presbyterian, I find that all strangely exciting.
For example, Title 26 has to do with revenue and taxation, so if you had this deep and burning desire to know when you have to file a special return, you could look to Title 26, Subtitle F, Chapter 61, Subchapter A, Part I, Section 6001, which tells you everything you need to know. Or is that Section 6002? I always muddle those two.
How many laws are there? Well, Title 26...which is one of the 50 Titles...is about 7,500 pages long. Fortunately, it’s a page turner. When you get to Title 26, Subtitle V, Chapter 37, Subchapter B, Part I, Sec. 7042, you’re just not going to believe the plot twist it serves up. Man. I was shaking my head after that one. Never saw it coming. It seriously sets you up for the sequel in Title 27. Don’t worry. I won’t ruin the ending.
The sheer volume of American law is truly dizzying. Hundreds of thousands of pages of code are simply more than any one human being...or even a roomful of human beings...can come to terms with.
I know they say that ignorance of the law is no excuse, but you couldn’t be aware of the fullness of the laws that govern our country if you spent your entire lifetime studying them and every single neuron in your brain was dedicated to learning them, including the neurons that you currently use to figure out how to eat, breathe, and use most universal remotes. When regulations and requirements reach that level of complexity, it becomes harder and harder for us to know how we relate to them. It becomes harder for us to know how to apply them to our lives.
For the ancient Hebrews, the law was also a big deal, although it was considerably less complex. As the scholars of Torah figured it, there were 613 total laws. 248 of them were things you had to do, and 365 of them were things you were supposed to not do. Compared to the United States Code, this was a cakewalk.
Still, though, the complexities of Torah were such that they consumed the thoughts of those who took it seriously. In the time of Jesus, those folks were called the Pharisees, and today we hear about how one of them asks him a question. It’s a lawyer, but by “lawyer,” we need to understand that Matthew means someone who would be more like a bible scholar ...challenges Jesus to make a judgement call about the law. It’s an interesting question: “Which is the greatest commandment in the law?”
Jesus, of course, knows his stuff. He responds with a quotation from Deuteronomy 6:5...”You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all of your soul, and with all of your mind.” It’s a good answer, as that verse is the second part of the Shema, the holiest prayer of the Jewish people. So...that’s the commandment, right?
Jesus doesn’t stop there, though. Sure, he’s given the guy his “greatest commandment.” But he’s not finished with his response. While this is the first and greatest commandment in his book, he feels compelled to take it a step further. He makes sure to add in a second commandment, which he pulls from another book of the Torah...the book of Leviticus. From Leviticus 19:18, he says: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Having presented his questioner with this reply, he makes it clear...both of these commandments seem to be part of one single law. When he declares that the two laws are similar, he’s not really setting one up as above the other. They are to be understood as somehow part of the same single unitary thing. It is on the combination of both of these that the entire law...meaning the law given to the Jewish people by God...finds its foundation.
Our lives are not simple things. We have to figure out how to make moral choices in countless different situations. How do we act in the workplace? How do we respond to those around us in school? How do we deal with our families, and our friends? How do we deal with that annoying neighbor who cranks his music up at 3 in the morning when we’ve got important things to do the next day?
If you’re living your life in accordance with the faith that Christ brought to us, the answer to that question does not lie in having memorized a whole slew of different laws, each one designed to deal with every single specialized circumstance. You don’t need to dig down to find exactly which chapter and subchapter and part and section speaks directly to where you find yourself at that very moment.
Those things are very useful for organizing a society, and for trying to make sure things go more-or-less smoothly as we human beings bump and jostle against one another in the world. But faith governs us very differently. Faith is not about nattering over each tiny detail. Faith is about purpose. Faith is about direction. Faith is the thing that gives life depth and meaning.
For that reason, followers of Jesus Christ have a single law that gives just that sense of purpose. It is a remarkably simple thing. It is a thing that most of us can grasp without having to spend our entire lives studying some highly complicated ethics. Yet if we look hard at how most Christians seem to live their lives, it is something that we seem to struggle to come to terms with. We’d almost rather lose ourselves in studying and legalistic dickering over tiny little details. We’d almost rather throw up our arms and declare that it’s just all too much for us to possibly understand.
When there are laws enough to fill a thousand books, it’s hard to grasp them all. But when there is just one law, it is harder for us still. How can we find a way to apply that law to everything we do? How is it even possible?
Christ wants all of us to spend the rest of our lives finding that out.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Republic and Responsibility
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
10.19.08; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Matthew 22:15-22
I enjoy blogging. I am, as many of you folks know, a fairly compulsive blogger, and it’s not for the fame and the glory. There are now over 100 million blogs in the world, and the way I figure it by my dismal technorati numbers, I’m probably number seventy-five million, four hundred and thirty seven thousand, nine hundred and twenty two. Not that I’m keeping track or anything.
Still and all, there are many good reasons to put myself out there.
First, I like to write. It’s good mental exercise. Keeping an online journal of my meditations and reflections on life helps me to explore ideas that are too random to make their way here on Sunday. This helps me avoid the pastoral temptation to just ramble on and on and on about everything I’ve thought about this week. That keeps most of my sermons under that magic twenty minute adult attention span mark, and for that, I’m sure you’re all truly grateful.
Second, I think that if pastors are going to study scripture and society and reflect on it as part of a daily discipline, they should do so publicly...so that everyone and anyone who has the inclination can see the results of those reflections. Pastors are supposed to be public thinkers. And, yes, it’s just a tiny drop in the great global slopbucket of blogorreah, but it’s still worth doing.
Third, and most important, it means that when I write, I’m going to be called on what I write. People who don’t agree and who stumble across my page are going to let me know about it. Sometimes, the folks who comment are just trolls, small hairy beings who live under bridges who couldn’t care less about getting into a real exchange. They just want to spell badly at you and snap angrily at your ankles. But other times, those disagreements develop into fascinating conversations about the tensions within our society. Even though the disagreement is intense, you find yourself getting to know that person. Even though the disagreement may seem irreconcilable, you find yourself liking and caring for the soul that hides behind their cartoonish avatar.
Over the last year or so, I’ve engaged in some intense but almost invariably civil disagreements with a deeply conservative young woman. She’s a navy officer, fervently Christian, and as sharp as a tack. While we’re on the opposite sides of the political spectrum, I respect her formidable intellect and her writing ability. Though I’m often frustrated at her inability to see the world as I do (which as we all know, is correct 142% of the time), I still appreciate her as a daughter of Eve. Though I wish she bore less anger in her heart, I know she’s a basically decent and honorable soul.
I keep track of her writings through my feed reader, and when I took a look at what she’d posted this week, I was compelled to challenge her.
She’s given up on the election this year. She’s convinced that neither major party candidate reflects her profound conservatism, and isn’t going to vote at all. Now you might think I’d be pleased at this. Y’all know where I stand politically, and might assume I would be pleased with this. Booyah! Another one bites the dust! But hearing her cast aside her vote in cynical resignation, I felt that I had to do a little witnessing. Why?
Because a significant majority of Americans do exactly the same thing. In this great democracy, most of our citizens have allowed cynicism or apathy to stand between them and fulfilling that basic duty at the polling booth. Some might say: why is that bad? Isn’t it our right to not vote if we so choose?
For a partial answer to that, let’s turn to today’s interesting little story from the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus is having another run-in with the Pharisees, who are trying to get him into trouble with the law. After buttering him up a little bit with flattery, they ask him a question that they think can have no correct answer. That question is simply this: Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar?
It was a very well conceived trap.
On the one hand, if you answered yes, it meant that you were willing to use Roman money on which was inscribed assertions of the emperor’s divinity. It meant that you were assenting to him as a god, and betraying the God of Israel. It also meant you were supporting the hated occupiers of the Holy Land. So you couldn’t answer yes, or you were a traitor to the Jewish people.
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 Rome.
Jesus was not so easily taken in. Given the choice of saying yes or now, he didn’t say either. 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. I’m not sure any modern day politicians could have done better. The trap his enemies 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? Both in this passage and in the Apostle Paul’s discussion of Christian citizenship in Romans 13, we know that we do have a duty to the government of the nations we inhabit. We don’t have an emperor, of course. We’re not an Empire or a Kingdom. Here in America, we’re a Republic. What do we owe, when the “emperor” is us? What do we owe to the emperor when we the people are the emperor? We don’t just owe just our taxes. All that an empire needs is for people to think of themselves primarily as taxpayers. But this is a democracy, and what a democracy needs from it’s citizens in order to thrive is participation.
Our duty in a democracy is to pay attention. It is 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 this passage in that way in our lives as citizens of our counties, of our states, of our nation.
But if we fuse that with what we owe Christ, it becomes a different thing. If we recognize that rendering unto God what is God’s means living a life of gracious forgiveness, showing lovingkindness and mercy and forbearance even to those who oppose us, we have to be citizens in a different way. We can stand firm on our political beliefs, but only if we are - first - standing firm on our faith.
It was that fundamental duty that I reaffirmed to my conservative blog-friend. No matter where we stand as Christians, no matter what our political orientation, we are each of us required to view our participation in the processes of the republic as a central and fundamental duty. It’s our task to remind each other of this, and support one another in this.
It’s what we owe.
We’re just a few short weeks away...so remember what it is you owe.
10.19.08; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Matthew 22:15-22
I enjoy blogging. I am, as many of you folks know, a fairly compulsive blogger, and it’s not for the fame and the glory. There are now over 100 million blogs in the world, and the way I figure it by my dismal technorati numbers, I’m probably number seventy-five million, four hundred and thirty seven thousand, nine hundred and twenty two. Not that I’m keeping track or anything.
Still and all, there are many good reasons to put myself out there.
First, I like to write. It’s good mental exercise. Keeping an online journal of my meditations and reflections on life helps me to explore ideas that are too random to make their way here on Sunday. This helps me avoid the pastoral temptation to just ramble on and on and on about everything I’ve thought about this week. That keeps most of my sermons under that magic twenty minute adult attention span mark, and for that, I’m sure you’re all truly grateful.
Second, I think that if pastors are going to study scripture and society and reflect on it as part of a daily discipline, they should do so publicly...so that everyone and anyone who has the inclination can see the results of those reflections. Pastors are supposed to be public thinkers. And, yes, it’s just a tiny drop in the great global slopbucket of blogorreah, but it’s still worth doing.
Third, and most important, it means that when I write, I’m going to be called on what I write. People who don’t agree and who stumble across my page are going to let me know about it. Sometimes, the folks who comment are just trolls, small hairy beings who live under bridges who couldn’t care less about getting into a real exchange. They just want to spell badly at you and snap angrily at your ankles. But other times, those disagreements develop into fascinating conversations about the tensions within our society. Even though the disagreement is intense, you find yourself getting to know that person. Even though the disagreement may seem irreconcilable, you find yourself liking and caring for the soul that hides behind their cartoonish avatar.
Over the last year or so, I’ve engaged in some intense but almost invariably civil disagreements with a deeply conservative young woman. She’s a navy officer, fervently Christian, and as sharp as a tack. While we’re on the opposite sides of the political spectrum, I respect her formidable intellect and her writing ability. Though I’m often frustrated at her inability to see the world as I do (which as we all know, is correct 142% of the time), I still appreciate her as a daughter of Eve. Though I wish she bore less anger in her heart, I know she’s a basically decent and honorable soul.
I keep track of her writings through my feed reader, and when I took a look at what she’d posted this week, I was compelled to challenge her.
She’s given up on the election this year. She’s convinced that neither major party candidate reflects her profound conservatism, and isn’t going to vote at all. Now you might think I’d be pleased at this. Y’all know where I stand politically, and might assume I would be pleased with this. Booyah! Another one bites the dust! But hearing her cast aside her vote in cynical resignation, I felt that I had to do a little witnessing. Why?
Because a significant majority of Americans do exactly the same thing. In this great democracy, most of our citizens have allowed cynicism or apathy to stand between them and fulfilling that basic duty at the polling booth. Some might say: why is that bad? Isn’t it our right to not vote if we so choose?
For a partial answer to that, let’s turn to today’s interesting little story from the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus is having another run-in with the Pharisees, who are trying to get him into trouble with the law. After buttering him up a little bit with flattery, they ask him a question that they think can have no correct answer. That question is simply this: Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar?
It was a very well conceived trap.
On the one hand, if you answered yes, it meant that you were willing to use Roman money on which was inscribed assertions of the emperor’s divinity. It meant that you were assenting to him as a god, and betraying the God of Israel. It also meant you were supporting the hated occupiers of the Holy Land. So you couldn’t answer yes, or you were a traitor to the Jewish people.
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 Rome.
Jesus was not so easily taken in. Given the choice of saying yes or now, he didn’t say either. 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. I’m not sure any modern day politicians could have done better. The trap his enemies 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? Both in this passage and in the Apostle Paul’s discussion of Christian citizenship in Romans 13, we know that we do have a duty to the government of the nations we inhabit. We don’t have an emperor, of course. We’re not an Empire or a Kingdom. Here in America, we’re a Republic. What do we owe, when the “emperor” is us? What do we owe to the emperor when we the people are the emperor? We don’t just owe just our taxes. All that an empire needs is for people to think of themselves primarily as taxpayers. But this is a democracy, and what a democracy needs from it’s citizens in order to thrive is participation.
Our duty in a democracy is to pay attention. It is 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 this passage in that way in our lives as citizens of our counties, of our states, of our nation.
But if we fuse that with what we owe Christ, it becomes a different thing. If we recognize that rendering unto God what is God’s means living a life of gracious forgiveness, showing lovingkindness and mercy and forbearance even to those who oppose us, we have to be citizens in a different way. We can stand firm on our political beliefs, but only if we are - first - standing firm on our faith.
It was that fundamental duty that I reaffirmed to my conservative blog-friend. No matter where we stand as Christians, no matter what our political orientation, we are each of us required to view our participation in the processes of the republic as a central and fundamental duty. It’s our task to remind each other of this, and support one another in this.
It’s what we owe.
We’re just a few short weeks away...so remember what it is you owe.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Wild Vines
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda/United Korean Presbyterian Church
World Communion Sunday 2008; Rev. John An and Rev. David Williams
(preached in English and Korean)
Scripture Lesson: Isaiah 5:1-7
Sometimes a bright idea just doesn’t turn out the way you hoped.
Take, for example, the introduction of kudzu into the United States.
It’s a lovely flowering vine, brought to America in 1876.
It could be used as an ornamental plant.
The blossoms are rich and purple and vibrant.
And it’s really, really easy to grow.
Even I could probably grow it.
It has lush, broad leaves and deep taproots.
For that reason, Americans thought that it could prevent erosion.
So in the 1930s until the mid 1950s, farmers were encouraged to plant it.
Then they noticed something.
It really, really liked to grow.
And it grew a lot.
In it’s native Japan, where it was called kuzu, it had natural predators.
It was also limited by Japanese winters.
But in America’s South, growth conditions were perfect.
There was nothing to stop it.
At the height of a Virginia summer, kudzu vines grow a foot a day.
One.
Foot.
Every Day.
Kudzu now covers over seven million square acres of the South.
It strangles trees.
It smothers fields.
It covers crops.
It’ll overrun houses if you’ll let it.
Where once it was planted, now farmers fight against it.
They spray it and root it out.
It is the most invasive of the wild vines.
If you don’t fight it, starve it, or poison it
It will consume everything around it.
The prophet Isaiah also preached a great deal about wild vines.
Today, we heard his proclamation to the people of Judah.
Isaiah was preaching from Jerusalem, and to Jerusalem.
He had the ears of leaders.
He had the attention and respect of kings.
Many people in that position would have spoken easy platitudes.
They would have insured their position and spoken nothing hard.
But it was the time of the rise of Assyria.
Eight hundred years before Christ
Isaiah saw around him the flaws of his people.
He saw their complacence
He saw how the powerful in Jerusalem celebrated
Even though great threats faced them from the outside.
He saw how the wealthy in Jerusalem helped themselves to riches
Even when the poor scrabbled for a living.
He saw how everyone in Judah was utterly convinced that they could do no wrong.
They were God’s people!
God would protect them.
It didn’t matter how they lived.
It didn’t matter how they acted.
God would protect them.
In the face of that, Isaiah heard God’s challenge to the people and conveyed it.
Today’s passage expresses that challenge.
Isaiah spoke it in terms that all his listeners, rich and poor, would understand.
He spoke of a vineyard owned by a ruler.
That vineyard, though carefully prepared, was overrun with wild vines.
It yielded nothing of worth.
In the face of their injustice and unrighteousness,
Isaiah warned Judah of how land that wouldn’t yield would be treated.
That pleasant planting would be given over to ruin.
It would be an arid waste.
Because what growth there was was bitter and worthless and wild
The garden would be yielded to desolation.
It did not matter that the people were sure they were God’s people.
They had supplanted the harvest of righteousness
With a harvest of bloodshed.
They had supplanted a harvest of justice
With cries of despair and conflict.
Soon, with Assyria’s armies storming down from the north
Much of what Isaiah proclaimed would come to pass.
God would not stand by while his garden was overrun with wild vines.
He would tear down the walls that protected it.
He would make the garden a ruin.
As we each look to our own lives
We have to ask ourselves how deeply our hearts are overgrown.
We are all God’s gracious planting.
It is easy for us to personally assume, like those in Jerusalem, that God is always on our side.
We naturally believe that no matter what we do
God must be on our side.
But, like those whom Isaiah challenged, we have to always think:
Do our lives bear the fruit of God’s goodness?
Each and every one of us is called upon to show God’s grace in all we do.
How deeply do we show our Creator’s care to those around us?
How eagerly do we bear the fruit of righteousness?
How richly do we show God’s justice to the world?
How deeply do we manifest that highest fruit of the Holy Spirit
The self-sacrificing love that Christ showed to all?
Or are we overgrown?
Do our own desires tangle as heavy as kudzu on our souls?
Does our own pride
Pride in our position
Pride in our job
Pride in our spiritual superiority
Pride in our worldly wealth
Blind us to God’s love for others?
Does it try to strangle the good and gracious Gospel planting in us?
It is not the pride of others that should be our concern.
It is our own.
When we ask those questions, we must answer:
Of course it does.
None of us escape that temptation.
None of us.
Not a single person here today.
We all struggle with it.
So hear Isaiah, as Jerusalem heard and repented.
Hear that prophet’s word.
Bear good fruit, and be that pleasant planting.
World Communion Sunday 2008; Rev. John An and Rev. David Williams
(preached in English and Korean)
Scripture Lesson: Isaiah 5:1-7
Sometimes a bright idea just doesn’t turn out the way you hoped.
Take, for example, the introduction of kudzu into the United States.
It’s a lovely flowering vine, brought to America in 1876.
It could be used as an ornamental plant.
The blossoms are rich and purple and vibrant.
And it’s really, really easy to grow.
Even I could probably grow it.
It has lush, broad leaves and deep taproots.
For that reason, Americans thought that it could prevent erosion.
So in the 1930s until the mid 1950s, farmers were encouraged to plant it.
Then they noticed something.
It really, really liked to grow.
And it grew a lot.
In it’s native Japan, where it was called kuzu, it had natural predators.
It was also limited by Japanese winters.
But in America’s South, growth conditions were perfect.
There was nothing to stop it.
At the height of a Virginia summer, kudzu vines grow a foot a day.
One.
Foot.
Every Day.
Kudzu now covers over seven million square acres of the South.
It strangles trees.
It smothers fields.
It covers crops.
It’ll overrun houses if you’ll let it.
Where once it was planted, now farmers fight against it.
They spray it and root it out.
It is the most invasive of the wild vines.
If you don’t fight it, starve it, or poison it
It will consume everything around it.
The prophet Isaiah also preached a great deal about wild vines.
Today, we heard his proclamation to the people of Judah.
Isaiah was preaching from Jerusalem, and to Jerusalem.
He had the ears of leaders.
He had the attention and respect of kings.
Many people in that position would have spoken easy platitudes.
They would have insured their position and spoken nothing hard.
But it was the time of the rise of Assyria.
Eight hundred years before Christ
Isaiah saw around him the flaws of his people.
He saw their complacence
He saw how the powerful in Jerusalem celebrated
Even though great threats faced them from the outside.
He saw how the wealthy in Jerusalem helped themselves to riches
Even when the poor scrabbled for a living.
He saw how everyone in Judah was utterly convinced that they could do no wrong.
They were God’s people!
God would protect them.
It didn’t matter how they lived.
It didn’t matter how they acted.
God would protect them.
In the face of that, Isaiah heard God’s challenge to the people and conveyed it.
Today’s passage expresses that challenge.
Isaiah spoke it in terms that all his listeners, rich and poor, would understand.
He spoke of a vineyard owned by a ruler.
That vineyard, though carefully prepared, was overrun with wild vines.
It yielded nothing of worth.
In the face of their injustice and unrighteousness,
Isaiah warned Judah of how land that wouldn’t yield would be treated.
That pleasant planting would be given over to ruin.
It would be an arid waste.
Because what growth there was was bitter and worthless and wild
The garden would be yielded to desolation.
It did not matter that the people were sure they were God’s people.
They had supplanted the harvest of righteousness
With a harvest of bloodshed.
They had supplanted a harvest of justice
With cries of despair and conflict.
Soon, with Assyria’s armies storming down from the north
Much of what Isaiah proclaimed would come to pass.
God would not stand by while his garden was overrun with wild vines.
He would tear down the walls that protected it.
He would make the garden a ruin.
As we each look to our own lives
We have to ask ourselves how deeply our hearts are overgrown.
We are all God’s gracious planting.
It is easy for us to personally assume, like those in Jerusalem, that God is always on our side.
We naturally believe that no matter what we do
God must be on our side.
But, like those whom Isaiah challenged, we have to always think:
Do our lives bear the fruit of God’s goodness?
Each and every one of us is called upon to show God’s grace in all we do.
How deeply do we show our Creator’s care to those around us?
How eagerly do we bear the fruit of righteousness?
How richly do we show God’s justice to the world?
How deeply do we manifest that highest fruit of the Holy Spirit
The self-sacrificing love that Christ showed to all?
Or are we overgrown?
Do our own desires tangle as heavy as kudzu on our souls?
Does our own pride
Pride in our position
Pride in our job
Pride in our spiritual superiority
Pride in our worldly wealth
Blind us to God’s love for others?
Does it try to strangle the good and gracious Gospel planting in us?
It is not the pride of others that should be our concern.
It is our own.
When we ask those questions, we must answer:
Of course it does.
None of us escape that temptation.
None of us.
Not a single person here today.
We all struggle with it.
So hear Isaiah, as Jerusalem heard and repented.
Hear that prophet’s word.
Bear good fruit, and be that pleasant planting.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Aftermath
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
09.14.08; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Matthew 18:21-35
You can tell a whole bunch about a collision by what comes afterwards. This week, we’ve watched a few different sorts of impacts, some that have created something possibly amazing, and some that have left devastation in their wake.
Midway through the week, scientists at the CERN facility in Switzerland powered up the Large Hadron Collider. This huge ring-shaped particle accelerator exists for one reason and one reason alone: to smash stuff into other stuff. It’s a bit like demolition derby, only using subatomic particles going at near light speeds. Why are scientists doing this? Well, I think part if it is the same reason that back in college me and some friends took my 20 gauge shotgun, a bunch of rotten watermelons and a stack of half-full paint cans to an abandoned lot. It’s cool to watch things go boom. Hey...it was Charlottesville. That’s what fratboys like me did for fun in the South. Well, it’s one of the things, but I’m not going to go there.
But the main reason is that the nice satisfying bang that the large subatomic particles they’re using will make creates an interesting result. It’s not just a little bang. It’s a little Big Bang. For a brief moment, they’re going to generate a tiny version of the energies that may have existed at the beginning of the universe.
Some folks are afraid that might have destroyed the earth, creating tiny black holes that would suck us all up, or unleashing an army of the undead to devour the brains of the living. Well, not so many people besides me are worried about that last one. When they turned the thing on this week, it appears that those worries aren’t justified. What scientists hope for, as they carefully watch the aftermath of those collisions, is the discovery of the new, of new ways to harness energies and matter that might change the direction of technology. These are hopeful, constructive collisions.
Yesterday, we watched as another huge storm in the Gulf hurled itself against our shores. Hurricane Ike hammered away at the sea wall of the city of Galveston and howled through Houston, as millions of Americans either fled or huddled in their homes. In Galveston, the storm may have done near catastrophic damage to large portions of that city, as the ocean rose up and consumed the east side of the town. Such collisions aren’t nearly as promising. Lives are shattered. Homes and the hopes of countless families are broken. Yet even after such horrors, there exists the possibility of healing. Even now, all around this nation, churches and governments and relief agencies stand at the ready, poised to give care and to help people rebuild their shattered lives. The aftermath of such disasters tells a great deal about a people and their spirit, and I’m sure we will do all we can to help with the recovery.
Life is full of collisions. Last week, I talked about the collisions that come inside human relationships, about the conflicts and struggles and tensions and fights that come into each of our lives. Those fights are inevitable. But the measure of them is not just in how they are conducted. We know them, as this smart guy I know once said, by their fruits. We know them by their aftermath.
Last week, we heard Christ’s teaching in the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 18:15-20) about how to show Christian graciousness in the midst of conflict. Today’s reading continues Christ’s teaching on fighting. He’s just told his disciples how we’re to constantly work towards reconciliation during a conflict. Once he’s finished, Peter asks him a perfectly sensible question about what happens afterwards. “How often should I forgive? As many as seven times?”
That shows that Peter has understood that forgiveness is the goal of Christian conflict. What he’s struggling with is how deep that goes. Jesus responds that Peter is going in the right direction, but that he needs to multiply that level of forgiveness by at least 10. And then, to make his point, Jesus does what Jesus does so often: he tells a story.
It’s a story of a powerful king and his slaves, and of what happens when the king decides to settle up who owes what. One of his slaves owes him 10,000 talents. That’s a crazy number, an impossible debt. A talent was 6,000 denarius. A denarius is an average day’s wages. It is, if you want to think in terms of American currency, like owing someone 6 billion dollars. If you paid off that debt at a rate of a million dollars a year, it’d only take you 6,000 years to do it. It ain’t gonna happen. And that’s the point Jesus is making. This is a debt that can never be paid off, not in a hundred lifetimes.
Yet when that slave begs forgiveness, falling on his knees and asking for just the chance to pay back the impossible debt, what does the king do? He has pity and compassion, and he forgives the debt. Amazingly, impossibly, the guy gets off.
But as the story goes on, we find our newly liberated debtor running across a guy who owes him money. It’s not a small sum, around 10,000 dollars, but it’s easily payable in monthly installments over four years at 5 and three quarters percent. But when the second guy begs for a small portion of the same forgiveness he was just shown, the first guy...well...he refuses. The guy who owed 10K gets tossed into prison.
Then the king hears about it, and he is seriously cheesed. Faced with such a graceless, unforgiving soul, he goes all medieval on his behind. Bad things happen, things that you only see in the Saw movies, things that are worse than being subjected to a thousand years of nonstop Hanna Montana concert videos. End of story.
And then Jesus turns to his disciples and says: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
So what is a Christian aftermath? When we’ve fought with another person, the aftermath is this: we have to forgive them. We have to forgive them whether we’ve won or lost or if the whole thing seems to grind out to a irreconcilable stalemate.
And the truth is, while we can listen to Jesus and say, gosh and golly, that sounds nice...we don’t want to hear this. Even though we’ve been baptized and we’ve sung the praise songs and we’ve prayed the prayers, we don’t want to hear him. We want to cherish that fight, to hold it close to our hearts and sustain it forever. We want to hate them for beating us, or to hate them for opposing us in the first place. We want to cherish our bitterness, or revel in our gloating.
So when we hear Jesus say that we must forgive seventy seven times, we want to smile and say, “Oh, that Jesus. He’s just such a softy. Of course he’d think that. And that’s fine for him. I mean, he’s Jesus. But that’s not the way things are in my life. Because of what [fill in the name of your enemy here] did to me, I have every right to still be angry.”
We want to think that way. But if we do, we don’t have ears to hear, and this is a teaching we need to hear down deep, because this isn’t a Big Happy Warm Fuzzy Huggy Bear Jesus teaching. It’s a teaching with teeth.
And then Jesus turns to his disciples and says: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
When we fail to forgive others, something in our relationship with our Creator is shattered, something that when broken is not fixable. We must trust....we must...fear...that God watches the aftermath of our life’s conflicts with all of the intensity of the scientists who pore over the traces from those colossal hadron impacts, and all of the intensity of those who watch to see how America will respond to the destruction in the Gulf.
You can tell a whole bunch about a collision by what comes afterwards.
09.14.08; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Matthew 18:21-35
You can tell a whole bunch about a collision by what comes afterwards. This week, we’ve watched a few different sorts of impacts, some that have created something possibly amazing, and some that have left devastation in their wake.
Midway through the week, scientists at the CERN facility in Switzerland powered up the Large Hadron Collider. This huge ring-shaped particle accelerator exists for one reason and one reason alone: to smash stuff into other stuff. It’s a bit like demolition derby, only using subatomic particles going at near light speeds. Why are scientists doing this? Well, I think part if it is the same reason that back in college me and some friends took my 20 gauge shotgun, a bunch of rotten watermelons and a stack of half-full paint cans to an abandoned lot. It’s cool to watch things go boom. Hey...it was Charlottesville. That’s what fratboys like me did for fun in the South. Well, it’s one of the things, but I’m not going to go there.
But the main reason is that the nice satisfying bang that the large subatomic particles they’re using will make creates an interesting result. It’s not just a little bang. It’s a little Big Bang. For a brief moment, they’re going to generate a tiny version of the energies that may have existed at the beginning of the universe.
Some folks are afraid that might have destroyed the earth, creating tiny black holes that would suck us all up, or unleashing an army of the undead to devour the brains of the living. Well, not so many people besides me are worried about that last one. When they turned the thing on this week, it appears that those worries aren’t justified. What scientists hope for, as they carefully watch the aftermath of those collisions, is the discovery of the new, of new ways to harness energies and matter that might change the direction of technology. These are hopeful, constructive collisions.
Yesterday, we watched as another huge storm in the Gulf hurled itself against our shores. Hurricane Ike hammered away at the sea wall of the city of Galveston and howled through Houston, as millions of Americans either fled or huddled in their homes. In Galveston, the storm may have done near catastrophic damage to large portions of that city, as the ocean rose up and consumed the east side of the town. Such collisions aren’t nearly as promising. Lives are shattered. Homes and the hopes of countless families are broken. Yet even after such horrors, there exists the possibility of healing. Even now, all around this nation, churches and governments and relief agencies stand at the ready, poised to give care and to help people rebuild their shattered lives. The aftermath of such disasters tells a great deal about a people and their spirit, and I’m sure we will do all we can to help with the recovery.
Life is full of collisions. Last week, I talked about the collisions that come inside human relationships, about the conflicts and struggles and tensions and fights that come into each of our lives. Those fights are inevitable. But the measure of them is not just in how they are conducted. We know them, as this smart guy I know once said, by their fruits. We know them by their aftermath.
Last week, we heard Christ’s teaching in the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 18:15-20) about how to show Christian graciousness in the midst of conflict. Today’s reading continues Christ’s teaching on fighting. He’s just told his disciples how we’re to constantly work towards reconciliation during a conflict. Once he’s finished, Peter asks him a perfectly sensible question about what happens afterwards. “How often should I forgive? As many as seven times?”
That shows that Peter has understood that forgiveness is the goal of Christian conflict. What he’s struggling with is how deep that goes. Jesus responds that Peter is going in the right direction, but that he needs to multiply that level of forgiveness by at least 10. And then, to make his point, Jesus does what Jesus does so often: he tells a story.
It’s a story of a powerful king and his slaves, and of what happens when the king decides to settle up who owes what. One of his slaves owes him 10,000 talents. That’s a crazy number, an impossible debt. A talent was 6,000 denarius. A denarius is an average day’s wages. It is, if you want to think in terms of American currency, like owing someone 6 billion dollars. If you paid off that debt at a rate of a million dollars a year, it’d only take you 6,000 years to do it. It ain’t gonna happen. And that’s the point Jesus is making. This is a debt that can never be paid off, not in a hundred lifetimes.
Yet when that slave begs forgiveness, falling on his knees and asking for just the chance to pay back the impossible debt, what does the king do? He has pity and compassion, and he forgives the debt. Amazingly, impossibly, the guy gets off.
But as the story goes on, we find our newly liberated debtor running across a guy who owes him money. It’s not a small sum, around 10,000 dollars, but it’s easily payable in monthly installments over four years at 5 and three quarters percent. But when the second guy begs for a small portion of the same forgiveness he was just shown, the first guy...well...he refuses. The guy who owed 10K gets tossed into prison.
Then the king hears about it, and he is seriously cheesed. Faced with such a graceless, unforgiving soul, he goes all medieval on his behind. Bad things happen, things that you only see in the Saw movies, things that are worse than being subjected to a thousand years of nonstop Hanna Montana concert videos. End of story.
And then Jesus turns to his disciples and says: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
So what is a Christian aftermath? When we’ve fought with another person, the aftermath is this: we have to forgive them. We have to forgive them whether we’ve won or lost or if the whole thing seems to grind out to a irreconcilable stalemate.
And the truth is, while we can listen to Jesus and say, gosh and golly, that sounds nice...we don’t want to hear this. Even though we’ve been baptized and we’ve sung the praise songs and we’ve prayed the prayers, we don’t want to hear him. We want to cherish that fight, to hold it close to our hearts and sustain it forever. We want to hate them for beating us, or to hate them for opposing us in the first place. We want to cherish our bitterness, or revel in our gloating.
So when we hear Jesus say that we must forgive seventy seven times, we want to smile and say, “Oh, that Jesus. He’s just such a softy. Of course he’d think that. And that’s fine for him. I mean, he’s Jesus. But that’s not the way things are in my life. Because of what [fill in the name of your enemy here] did to me, I have every right to still be angry.”
We want to think that way. But if we do, we don’t have ears to hear, and this is a teaching we need to hear down deep, because this isn’t a Big Happy Warm Fuzzy Huggy Bear Jesus teaching. It’s a teaching with teeth.
And then Jesus turns to his disciples and says: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
When we fail to forgive others, something in our relationship with our Creator is shattered, something that when broken is not fixable. We must trust....we must...fear...that God watches the aftermath of our life’s conflicts with all of the intensity of the scientists who pore over the traces from those colossal hadron impacts, and all of the intensity of those who watch to see how America will respond to the destruction in the Gulf.
You can tell a whole bunch about a collision by what comes afterwards.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
How To Fight
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
09.07.08; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lessons: Romans 13:8-14 ; Matthew 18:15-20
I really enjoy the company of my wife, and have ever since I first worked up the courage to cold-call her and ask her out. She’s one of my best friends in the whole world. She’s fun to talk to, fun to go out with, and a great mom. She keeps me honest, and she laughs at at least a reasonable percentage of my jokes. It’s been 19 years this summer since we started going out...and it’s still great.
But to be honest, one of the best things about being in our relationship is that I’ve had to learn how to fight. Now, you might think that’s not a good thing. Fighting comes easy to human beings. We fight just fine with our enemies and people we dislike. Why should we have any desire to learn how to fight with people we love?
The reason is simple. When you hate someone, you don’t care about what happens to them, so long as whatever happens involves emergency dental surgery while they’re on vacation in some far off corner of Baja Mexico. But when you love them, what happens after the conflict matters. If you do the fight wrong, you can shatter or poison something very important to you. So...you have to learn how to fight.
I’m personally very conflict-averse, so I had a bunch of learning to do. I had a very particular fighting style as a young man, which I like to describe as Armadillo Style. At the first whiff of trouble, you drop to the floor and curl into a non-responsive fetal ball. You lie there for as long as it takes. Is it over yet? Can I come out now? The problem with this technique, beyond the fact that it looks very silly, is that when there’s an actual disagreement that needs to be resolved, it doesn’t resolve it. It just festers, or spreads.
There are other fighting styles. There’s the opposite of the Armadillo Style, which in honor of yesterday we’ll the Tropical Storm Style, in which you just bluster and rage without stopping for hours and hours and hours. You are right, and your opponent might as well not exist. Your goal is to wear them down by simply never for a moment actually listening. Though it seems exactly the opposite from Armadillo Style, the two are basically mirror images of each other...and neither is a loving way to fight.
There’s the Poison the Water Hole Style. There, you don’t go after the person directly. When you’re in their presence, you smile and nod. When you’re outside of that person’s presence, you go around whispering to all of your mutual friends about how wrong they are and how important it is that everyone show them how right you are. If you have incriminating pictures, even ones that are heavily Photoshopped, this is when you show them. All this approach does is spread the conflict.
There’s the Call Them A Nazi Style, which is very popular in political circles. That’s when your opponent is the Epitome of All Evil, a Villain, a genocidal monster, the destroyer of all that’s good and right in the world. In a relationship, this approach becomes “Everything Wrong In My Life Is Because of You and Your Failure to Put the Toilet Seat in the Correct Position.” In the church, this approach usually involves naming your opponent the “Servant of Satan” or “Enemy of God.” This style is very common, but it also means that the relationship has been destroyed.
None of these approaches brings the healing that comes when you approach conflict in way governed by Christian faith. Today, from the Gospel of Matthew, we hear Matthew’s remembrance of Christ’s teaching about how Christians should handle conflict. Of all of the Gospels, it is only Matthew who brings us this teaching. Why?
Of all of the early churches that received these first written records of Christ’s teaching, the one that received the Gospel of Matthew appears to have been in the midst of a struggle. That struggle was the wrenching withdrawal of the early church from the synagogue, as the Jesus Movement went from being a part of Judaism to an entirely new faith.
This was a church that knew about the nature of struggle, and about the deeply personal ways in which that struggle could manifest itself even within the life of the church. So they reached back into the teachings they had of Jesus, and remembered this one. What does Jesus tell us when it comes to conflict? What are the ways we should handle it when the relationship is one that matters? There are three general principles of Christian conflict here. The first is directness. The second is witness. The third and most important is healing. Directness and Witness and Healing.
Directness is what Christ counsels as an essential part of conflict. You don’t fight or argue with another Christian unless you’re willing to be up front and direct about it. That means you don’t ignore the problem or try to hide from it. You bring it up. And when you bring it up, you bring it up to them directly. It’s one on one, openly and honestly. This isn’t easy. It’s easier to hide away in passive aggression or in bluster and bravado. But what Christ calls for is for us to focus on the relationship itself, and to be direct.
Witness builds upon directness. If healing and restoration don’t come out of a direct conversation with the person you’re fighting with, then we are to trust that Christ’s spirit will speak more strongly in the witness of others. Those in conflict are to seek out others, and to bring them into the conversation as witnesses.
Notice what this is not. This is nothing like the Poison the Water Hole Style. You’re not going around behind the back of an enemy, seeking to subvert and undercut them at every turn by turning everyone against them. This also ain’t a posse. Jesus isn’t telling us to bring along some extra muscle to hold ‘em while you pound ‘em to a pulp. The purpose of their presence is to reinforce that message through common bonds of friendship and faith. You’re bringing folks with you to bear witness to the brokenness between you and another person. If that doesn’t work....bring more folks.
Why all this work? Because you want reconciliation. You’re seeking to fight in a way that upholds that central principle of Christian faith...that we are to love one another and care for one another and that this doesn’t change in the slightest just because we’re in conflict.
Which leads us to...healing. Now, it’s easy to read the ending of this little passage as giving us permission to cast aside our opponents. Look at Christ’s statement that we’re to treat those who don’t respond to our directness and our witnesses as Gentiles and tax collectors. You can easily take that to mean that we’re to hate ‘em and never have anything to do with them ever ever again. They become the “other.”
Problem is, when Matthew says that, we have to remember how Jesus treated tax collectors. He was, Matthew tells us in Matthew 11:19, often criticized for being a friend to tax collectors and sinners. How did Matthew know this? Well, according to Matthew 9:9, it’s because Matthew himself was a tax collector.
So when Jesus says to treat them that way, he’s not saying to give up on them, or give up on the love that we have for them. He’s saying that we have to treat them with the same earnest care we are to show to any child of God.
We are to be direct. We are to seek witnesses. But we are also to remember that the whole purpose of conflict...if it’s done as Christ taught us...is reconciliation and healing.
That is how to fight.
09.07.08; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lessons: Romans 13:8-14 ; Matthew 18:15-20
I really enjoy the company of my wife, and have ever since I first worked up the courage to cold-call her and ask her out. She’s one of my best friends in the whole world. She’s fun to talk to, fun to go out with, and a great mom. She keeps me honest, and she laughs at at least a reasonable percentage of my jokes. It’s been 19 years this summer since we started going out...and it’s still great.
But to be honest, one of the best things about being in our relationship is that I’ve had to learn how to fight. Now, you might think that’s not a good thing. Fighting comes easy to human beings. We fight just fine with our enemies and people we dislike. Why should we have any desire to learn how to fight with people we love?
The reason is simple. When you hate someone, you don’t care about what happens to them, so long as whatever happens involves emergency dental surgery while they’re on vacation in some far off corner of Baja Mexico. But when you love them, what happens after the conflict matters. If you do the fight wrong, you can shatter or poison something very important to you. So...you have to learn how to fight.
I’m personally very conflict-averse, so I had a bunch of learning to do. I had a very particular fighting style as a young man, which I like to describe as Armadillo Style. At the first whiff of trouble, you drop to the floor and curl into a non-responsive fetal ball. You lie there for as long as it takes. Is it over yet? Can I come out now? The problem with this technique, beyond the fact that it looks very silly, is that when there’s an actual disagreement that needs to be resolved, it doesn’t resolve it. It just festers, or spreads.
There are other fighting styles. There’s the opposite of the Armadillo Style, which in honor of yesterday we’ll the Tropical Storm Style, in which you just bluster and rage without stopping for hours and hours and hours. You are right, and your opponent might as well not exist. Your goal is to wear them down by simply never for a moment actually listening. Though it seems exactly the opposite from Armadillo Style, the two are basically mirror images of each other...and neither is a loving way to fight.
There’s the Poison the Water Hole Style. There, you don’t go after the person directly. When you’re in their presence, you smile and nod. When you’re outside of that person’s presence, you go around whispering to all of your mutual friends about how wrong they are and how important it is that everyone show them how right you are. If you have incriminating pictures, even ones that are heavily Photoshopped, this is when you show them. All this approach does is spread the conflict.
There’s the Call Them A Nazi Style, which is very popular in political circles. That’s when your opponent is the Epitome of All Evil, a Villain, a genocidal monster, the destroyer of all that’s good and right in the world. In a relationship, this approach becomes “Everything Wrong In My Life Is Because of You and Your Failure to Put the Toilet Seat in the Correct Position.” In the church, this approach usually involves naming your opponent the “Servant of Satan” or “Enemy of God.” This style is very common, but it also means that the relationship has been destroyed.
None of these approaches brings the healing that comes when you approach conflict in way governed by Christian faith. Today, from the Gospel of Matthew, we hear Matthew’s remembrance of Christ’s teaching about how Christians should handle conflict. Of all of the Gospels, it is only Matthew who brings us this teaching. Why?
Of all of the early churches that received these first written records of Christ’s teaching, the one that received the Gospel of Matthew appears to have been in the midst of a struggle. That struggle was the wrenching withdrawal of the early church from the synagogue, as the Jesus Movement went from being a part of Judaism to an entirely new faith.
This was a church that knew about the nature of struggle, and about the deeply personal ways in which that struggle could manifest itself even within the life of the church. So they reached back into the teachings they had of Jesus, and remembered this one. What does Jesus tell us when it comes to conflict? What are the ways we should handle it when the relationship is one that matters? There are three general principles of Christian conflict here. The first is directness. The second is witness. The third and most important is healing. Directness and Witness and Healing.
Directness is what Christ counsels as an essential part of conflict. You don’t fight or argue with another Christian unless you’re willing to be up front and direct about it. That means you don’t ignore the problem or try to hide from it. You bring it up. And when you bring it up, you bring it up to them directly. It’s one on one, openly and honestly. This isn’t easy. It’s easier to hide away in passive aggression or in bluster and bravado. But what Christ calls for is for us to focus on the relationship itself, and to be direct.
Witness builds upon directness. If healing and restoration don’t come out of a direct conversation with the person you’re fighting with, then we are to trust that Christ’s spirit will speak more strongly in the witness of others. Those in conflict are to seek out others, and to bring them into the conversation as witnesses.
Notice what this is not. This is nothing like the Poison the Water Hole Style. You’re not going around behind the back of an enemy, seeking to subvert and undercut them at every turn by turning everyone against them. This also ain’t a posse. Jesus isn’t telling us to bring along some extra muscle to hold ‘em while you pound ‘em to a pulp. The purpose of their presence is to reinforce that message through common bonds of friendship and faith. You’re bringing folks with you to bear witness to the brokenness between you and another person. If that doesn’t work....bring more folks.
Why all this work? Because you want reconciliation. You’re seeking to fight in a way that upholds that central principle of Christian faith...that we are to love one another and care for one another and that this doesn’t change in the slightest just because we’re in conflict.
Which leads us to...healing. Now, it’s easy to read the ending of this little passage as giving us permission to cast aside our opponents. Look at Christ’s statement that we’re to treat those who don’t respond to our directness and our witnesses as Gentiles and tax collectors. You can easily take that to mean that we’re to hate ‘em and never have anything to do with them ever ever again. They become the “other.”
Problem is, when Matthew says that, we have to remember how Jesus treated tax collectors. He was, Matthew tells us in Matthew 11:19, often criticized for being a friend to tax collectors and sinners. How did Matthew know this? Well, according to Matthew 9:9, it’s because Matthew himself was a tax collector.
So when Jesus says to treat them that way, he’s not saying to give up on them, or give up on the love that we have for them. He’s saying that we have to treat them with the same earnest care we are to show to any child of God.
We are to be direct. We are to seek witnesses. But we are also to remember that the whole purpose of conflict...if it’s done as Christ taught us...is reconciliation and healing.
That is how to fight.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Perspective
Trinity Presbyterian Church of
08.31.08; Rev. John An and Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lessons: Psalm 90; Romans 12: 9-21
How long did this summer seem to you?
It seems like only yesterday that school was getting out.
Kids were feeling happy.
Kids were finally free!
No school!
Yay!
Parents were trying to figure out how to juggle them and work.
Parents were trying to get kids to summer programs and into camps.
No school!
Boo!
And now another summer is over.
When you’re an adult, those few months of summer are gone like the blink of an eye.
For that, we are truly grateful.
But when you’re young, a summer can seem like forever.
Those few months stretch out to the far horizon.
The distance between June and August is unimaginably large.
But when you’re young, your sense of time is very different.
Even a single afternoon can seem like an eternity.
Especially if you don’t have cable.
It is a matter of perspective.
As you become older, every day represents a slightly smaller fraction of your life.
Because of this, they seem to pass more quickly.
When you’ve seen more of life, time itself seems to grow smaller.
It’s a bit like looking down at this church.
It seems like a big place when you’re standing on the roof clearing the gutters.
It’s less so when you’re at 10,000 feet.
It so tiny as not to be visible at all when you’re in orbit.
It’s a matter of perspective.
Today’s reading from the 90th Psalm is all about perspective
It’s an interesting Psalm for many reasons.
The Book of Psalms is a collection of 150 individual praise songs.
Those 150 songs are divided up into five separate collections.
Some scholars believe this is to match the five books of the Torah.
Psalm 90 begins the fourth collection of Psalms.
Of all of the Psalms, the 90th is the only one to be attributed to Moses.
It describes human life, but not from our viewpoint.
This song, this prayer, is about how God sees us and all we do.
For God, a thousand years are as “yesterday when it is past.”
“Yesterday when it is past” is another way of saying no time at all.
Even the rise and fall of great nations, of whole civilizations, are less than a blinking of an eye to God.
The Psalmist tells us.
This will give us wisdom.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Decay and Transformation
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
08.24.08; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Romans 12:1-8
There are just so many things to love about going to the beach. There are the waves that pound youth pastors and there’s the sand that makes amazing castles and the cleanness of air that has swept thousands of miles across open water. There are those great buckets of salty greasy fries as big as your head, each bucket containing enough empty carbohydrate calories to add at least a full half-inch to the diameter of your midsection.
But of all of the reasons that I enjoy going to the beach every year, one of the most significant has very little to do with the beach at all. It’s time to read. Yeah, I can read just about anytime during the year, and I do. When the family gets down to the beach, though, suddenly there’s the time to just disappear into a book. I can lay down hour after hour of nonconstructive downtime to travel deep down that wormhole of a good novel, only resurfacing to go get a big bucket of fries.
Every year at the beach, I read pretty much at random, and this year, I picked out a nice little bit of beach fluff written by a woman named Mary Roach. The book was entitled Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. The entire focus of this strange little nonfiction piece was a journalistic exploration of all of the interesting things that happen to our bodies after we die. It was a celebration of all the many ways corpses spend their time, from the process of decaying underground to how cremation works to organ transplantation and medical experimentation and practice surgeries and crash testing. There was also, as I recall, a lovely chapter on the history of cannibalism. Though my family often will read books together in the evenings for story time, for some reason I kept this book to myself.
Of all of the entertaining facts about the recently deceased that were described in the book, one of the things that struck me as most interesting was a chapter in which the author tagged along with a forensic scientist whose entire job was determining time of death by the degree to which a body had begun to decay. The author witnesses the human form in all stages of maggoty rot and collapse, and while I’d love to describe all the various oozings and outgassings and other narstyness from the book, they seem..well...not very churchy. Maybe for my sermon at Halloween...
What was striking, though, is this: After life has left us, all of those things that keep us from just becoming part of the world around us shut down. We no longer excrete. We no longer digest. We no longer breathe. Our body ceases to defend itself against the bazillion teeny little critters that live in our guts. At death, the world around a body rushes in and reclaims it. In fact, that’s not a bad way to understand death...it’s that point at which a body stops trying to define itself as something separate from the world, and instead yields to everything else.
It’s been said that life is change and death is not. But that isn’t true. A dead body is not inert. It doesn’t just become stiff and unchanging like a rock or another inanimate object. The reality is that dead bodies change a great deal. That change is driven not by the drives of the life within, but by everything outside. Having lost it’s life, it’s purpose, it’s self, a cadaver just gives in to the world around it. It’s change is driven by devouring bacteria and chomping larvae, by heat and sun and water. Or it yields passively to the dissecting blades of surgeons as they learn their art, separating the bones and organs from the top round and tenderloin, opened up layer by layer, until there’s nothing left but a meticulously disassembled mess of human being bits.
Whichever way, the body is consumed by the world. It doesn’t care. It has no purpose of it’s own.
This is exactly the opposite sort of of transformation the Apostle Paul was describing as he wrote his letter to the Church at Rome. As we roll in to the twelfth chapter of Romans, Paul is talking about bodies, and he’s talking about change. When Paul refers to bodies, he’s talking about two things.
First, as we get to Romans 12:4-8, talking about the body as a deep metaphor for the nature of how we participate in Christ, with each of us contributing our gifts towards the good of the church. Our purpose as Christians is to serve the broader good, just as every part of the body serves the good of the whole. Some lead, some praise, some give, some show mercy and kindness. But all Christians have as their purpose the business of contributing to the joy of all, each part of the other, each serving in their own way as agents of God’s love. This is an important image for Paul, because he presents exactly the same image of the church as the body of Christ at for two whole chapters of another letter, in 1 Corinthians 12 and 13.
But before we reach Romans 12:4-8, the Apostle makes another statement about the body. He suggests that we need to present ourselves as “living sacrifices,” giving ourselves over to the reason for which God created us. Our minds are to be transformed, and the purpose given to our lives is not one that comes from the pattern of this world, but from the pattern of the love that is the Holy Spirit of the living God.
Throughout the letter to the Romans, this is a important distinction. Paul makes constant reference to the battle within us between the Spirit of God and our desire to conform ourselves to the world around us. All of Romans chapter eight is dedicated to this battle between the Spirit and the flesh.
But how does that struggle play out in our day to day lives? What are the patterns of this world that try to turn us from our purpose? Those patterns are many, but they’re all the same. Most familiar to us is the pattern of consumption, where we allow ourselves to look at everything outside of us as an object to be devoured. Our lives revolve around the pursuit of fast cars and cute shoes, as we are overtaken with a hunger for things that can never be satisfied, a hunger that consumes us as we consume. That desire to consume is also a desire for power, as we seek to control or possess. It defines our relationships with other children of God, who become objects to be used or means to an end.
When we let our lives be ruled by that desire for power or consumption, we might think we’re livin’ large and in charge. But Paul would argue that in the eyes of God, we are no longer living at all. We are little more a maggot-filled corpse or a decaying cadaver. Unlike a living being, we no longer live according to our God-given purpose. We no longer are defined by the gifts God has given us. We are, instead, consumed by the world that we seek to consume. We may move and our lives may seem to change. But for all intents and purposes, we are already dead.
So look at the thing that you call life. Every day of that life brings something new. Every day of your life brings change. What each of us has to ask ourselves is what kind of change it is. Are you transforming, growing and changing, every day made new and alive for the purpose for which you were made? Or are you already decaying away, devoured by the very world you seek to devour?
Live as the living, not as the dead. Don’t decay. Be transformed.
08.24.08; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Romans 12:1-8
There are just so many things to love about going to the beach. There are the waves that pound youth pastors and there’s the sand that makes amazing castles and the cleanness of air that has swept thousands of miles across open water. There are those great buckets of salty greasy fries as big as your head, each bucket containing enough empty carbohydrate calories to add at least a full half-inch to the diameter of your midsection.
But of all of the reasons that I enjoy going to the beach every year, one of the most significant has very little to do with the beach at all. It’s time to read. Yeah, I can read just about anytime during the year, and I do. When the family gets down to the beach, though, suddenly there’s the time to just disappear into a book. I can lay down hour after hour of nonconstructive downtime to travel deep down that wormhole of a good novel, only resurfacing to go get a big bucket of fries.
Every year at the beach, I read pretty much at random, and this year, I picked out a nice little bit of beach fluff written by a woman named Mary Roach. The book was entitled Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. The entire focus of this strange little nonfiction piece was a journalistic exploration of all of the interesting things that happen to our bodies after we die. It was a celebration of all the many ways corpses spend their time, from the process of decaying underground to how cremation works to organ transplantation and medical experimentation and practice surgeries and crash testing. There was also, as I recall, a lovely chapter on the history of cannibalism. Though my family often will read books together in the evenings for story time, for some reason I kept this book to myself.
Of all of the entertaining facts about the recently deceased that were described in the book, one of the things that struck me as most interesting was a chapter in which the author tagged along with a forensic scientist whose entire job was determining time of death by the degree to which a body had begun to decay. The author witnesses the human form in all stages of maggoty rot and collapse, and while I’d love to describe all the various oozings and outgassings and other narstyness from the book, they seem..well...not very churchy. Maybe for my sermon at Halloween...
What was striking, though, is this: After life has left us, all of those things that keep us from just becoming part of the world around us shut down. We no longer excrete. We no longer digest. We no longer breathe. Our body ceases to defend itself against the bazillion teeny little critters that live in our guts. At death, the world around a body rushes in and reclaims it. In fact, that’s not a bad way to understand death...it’s that point at which a body stops trying to define itself as something separate from the world, and instead yields to everything else.
It’s been said that life is change and death is not. But that isn’t true. A dead body is not inert. It doesn’t just become stiff and unchanging like a rock or another inanimate object. The reality is that dead bodies change a great deal. That change is driven not by the drives of the life within, but by everything outside. Having lost it’s life, it’s purpose, it’s self, a cadaver just gives in to the world around it. It’s change is driven by devouring bacteria and chomping larvae, by heat and sun and water. Or it yields passively to the dissecting blades of surgeons as they learn their art, separating the bones and organs from the top round and tenderloin, opened up layer by layer, until there’s nothing left but a meticulously disassembled mess of human being bits.
Whichever way, the body is consumed by the world. It doesn’t care. It has no purpose of it’s own.
This is exactly the opposite sort of of transformation the Apostle Paul was describing as he wrote his letter to the Church at Rome. As we roll in to the twelfth chapter of Romans, Paul is talking about bodies, and he’s talking about change. When Paul refers to bodies, he’s talking about two things.
First, as we get to Romans 12:4-8, talking about the body as a deep metaphor for the nature of how we participate in Christ, with each of us contributing our gifts towards the good of the church. Our purpose as Christians is to serve the broader good, just as every part of the body serves the good of the whole. Some lead, some praise, some give, some show mercy and kindness. But all Christians have as their purpose the business of contributing to the joy of all, each part of the other, each serving in their own way as agents of God’s love. This is an important image for Paul, because he presents exactly the same image of the church as the body of Christ at for two whole chapters of another letter, in 1 Corinthians 12 and 13.
But before we reach Romans 12:4-8, the Apostle makes another statement about the body. He suggests that we need to present ourselves as “living sacrifices,” giving ourselves over to the reason for which God created us. Our minds are to be transformed, and the purpose given to our lives is not one that comes from the pattern of this world, but from the pattern of the love that is the Holy Spirit of the living God.
Throughout the letter to the Romans, this is a important distinction. Paul makes constant reference to the battle within us between the Spirit of God and our desire to conform ourselves to the world around us. All of Romans chapter eight is dedicated to this battle between the Spirit and the flesh.
But how does that struggle play out in our day to day lives? What are the patterns of this world that try to turn us from our purpose? Those patterns are many, but they’re all the same. Most familiar to us is the pattern of consumption, where we allow ourselves to look at everything outside of us as an object to be devoured. Our lives revolve around the pursuit of fast cars and cute shoes, as we are overtaken with a hunger for things that can never be satisfied, a hunger that consumes us as we consume. That desire to consume is also a desire for power, as we seek to control or possess. It defines our relationships with other children of God, who become objects to be used or means to an end.
When we let our lives be ruled by that desire for power or consumption, we might think we’re livin’ large and in charge. But Paul would argue that in the eyes of God, we are no longer living at all. We are little more a maggot-filled corpse or a decaying cadaver. Unlike a living being, we no longer live according to our God-given purpose. We no longer are defined by the gifts God has given us. We are, instead, consumed by the world that we seek to consume. We may move and our lives may seem to change. But for all intents and purposes, we are already dead.
So look at the thing that you call life. Every day of that life brings something new. Every day of your life brings change. What each of us has to ask ourselves is what kind of change it is. Are you transforming, growing and changing, every day made new and alive for the purpose for which you were made? Or are you already decaying away, devoured by the very world you seek to devour?
Live as the living, not as the dead. Don’t decay. Be transformed.
Boys Against The Girls
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
08.17.08; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Matthew 15:10-28
With the arrival of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games this last week, I’ve watched far more sports than I can recall watching for years. Not only is the volume different, but it’s stuff that I can’t remember ever feeling motivated to watch in non-Olympic moments. How often do you gather your friends together with a big bowl of nachos and a fridge full of cold beverages to hoot and holler at synchronized diving? Or water polo? Or beach volleyball? When was the last time you tuned in to beach volleyball?
It seems like there are all manner of games that just aren’t run of the mill stuff. The Olympics is full of unusual events, yet even in the face of this broad assemblage of every game and sport-like event the world has yet known, it struck me this week that there was at least one missing.
It’s one of the oldest games in the book, one older than chess or Go or any of the classic board games. I can recall playing it as a kid out on the playground in elementary school with my fellow first graders. It’s also one of the simplest games around. Someone would yell, “Boys Against the Girls!” Then boys would chase girls around, or girls would chase boys around, or some combination of the two. You didn’t need to even worry about dividing up teams. That selection had already been made on a genetic level. You just ran around screaming and hollering.
When I was a kid, that game could also morph into all sorts of other games. It had soccer variants, and basketball variants. You just made sure that one team was all XY chromosomed kids, and another team was XX chromosomed kids. There was something about those games that always got kids fired up, as you shouted across the defining line of sex and talked gender smack, crowing about the basic stupidity of everyone on the other half of the human equation. And even though as a kid I knew that many girls were pretty cool and were also in significant ways far more entertaining to spend time around than my male brethren, I still enjoyed those games. They seemed so elemental. So basic. After all, it was just a game. It was just for fun.
The problem, as the children of the world grow up, is that after a while it stops being a game, and it gets to be much less fun. Should I give out a booyah big man smackdown shout that on average, women who work full-time in the United States make around 25% less than their male counterparts? Am I to be filled with the thrill of victory that comes with the knowledge that over two-thirds of the world’s illiterates are women, most of whom are kept that way because their cultures have decided that they’re not worth educating?
Boys rock. Woohoo.
That “game” becomes something very...unpleasant...when it becomes a way to keep essentially half of the human race eternally subordinated to the other. Unfortunately, in much of Christianity, the leaders...all men...take a few prooftexts from the later writings of Paul’s disciples and decide that all women are eternally and forever subordinate to men. No Christian woman is to give instruction to a Christian man. No Christian man is to take instruction or learn from a Christian woman. Oddly enough, the cultures that insist that that’s just exactly what Jesus wants are all cultures that traditionally place women in subordinate or submissive roles, no matter who they are or what gifts God has given them to contribute.
Very few of the Christian leaders from those cultures spend much time studying today’s passage from the Gospel of Matthew. It’s a strange passage about a woman who just wouldn’t back down, a woman who was not just subordinate because she was a woman, but also because she was a Canaanite, a Syrophoenician, to be exact. She was as other as other could be, and was treated as such by both the disciples and by Jesus himself.
First, she is ignored, as she cries out in faith for the healing of her daughter. She’s not an Israelite. But she won’t stop, and the disciples finally get so sick of her persistence that they ask Jesus to send her packing. As the woman comes and kneels at Christ’s side, Jesus drops a surprisingly cutting metaphor. “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” He’s the food, the children are Israel, and the dogs...well...she and her daughter are the dogs.
But her faith and her wit drives her to come back with an even better line, and Jesus...impressed by both her faith and her grace...backs down, and changes his mind. His resistance to her falls away, and she is given what she has so persistently sought. Her daughter is healed.
Now...if Jesus is willing to hear a woman out, and to learn from her faith...remind me again why a significant portion of the church that claims to follow Him is unwilling to do the same?
08.17.08; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Matthew 15:10-28
With the arrival of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games this last week, I’ve watched far more sports than I can recall watching for years. Not only is the volume different, but it’s stuff that I can’t remember ever feeling motivated to watch in non-Olympic moments. How often do you gather your friends together with a big bowl of nachos and a fridge full of cold beverages to hoot and holler at synchronized diving? Or water polo? Or beach volleyball? When was the last time you tuned in to beach volleyball?
It seems like there are all manner of games that just aren’t run of the mill stuff. The Olympics is full of unusual events, yet even in the face of this broad assemblage of every game and sport-like event the world has yet known, it struck me this week that there was at least one missing.
It’s one of the oldest games in the book, one older than chess or Go or any of the classic board games. I can recall playing it as a kid out on the playground in elementary school with my fellow first graders. It’s also one of the simplest games around. Someone would yell, “Boys Against the Girls!” Then boys would chase girls around, or girls would chase boys around, or some combination of the two. You didn’t need to even worry about dividing up teams. That selection had already been made on a genetic level. You just ran around screaming and hollering.
When I was a kid, that game could also morph into all sorts of other games. It had soccer variants, and basketball variants. You just made sure that one team was all XY chromosomed kids, and another team was XX chromosomed kids. There was something about those games that always got kids fired up, as you shouted across the defining line of sex and talked gender smack, crowing about the basic stupidity of everyone on the other half of the human equation. And even though as a kid I knew that many girls were pretty cool and were also in significant ways far more entertaining to spend time around than my male brethren, I still enjoyed those games. They seemed so elemental. So basic. After all, it was just a game. It was just for fun.
The problem, as the children of the world grow up, is that after a while it stops being a game, and it gets to be much less fun. Should I give out a booyah big man smackdown shout that on average, women who work full-time in the United States make around 25% less than their male counterparts? Am I to be filled with the thrill of victory that comes with the knowledge that over two-thirds of the world’s illiterates are women, most of whom are kept that way because their cultures have decided that they’re not worth educating?
Boys rock. Woohoo.
That “game” becomes something very...unpleasant...when it becomes a way to keep essentially half of the human race eternally subordinated to the other. Unfortunately, in much of Christianity, the leaders...all men...take a few prooftexts from the later writings of Paul’s disciples and decide that all women are eternally and forever subordinate to men. No Christian woman is to give instruction to a Christian man. No Christian man is to take instruction or learn from a Christian woman. Oddly enough, the cultures that insist that that’s just exactly what Jesus wants are all cultures that traditionally place women in subordinate or submissive roles, no matter who they are or what gifts God has given them to contribute.
Very few of the Christian leaders from those cultures spend much time studying today’s passage from the Gospel of Matthew. It’s a strange passage about a woman who just wouldn’t back down, a woman who was not just subordinate because she was a woman, but also because she was a Canaanite, a Syrophoenician, to be exact. She was as other as other could be, and was treated as such by both the disciples and by Jesus himself.
First, she is ignored, as she cries out in faith for the healing of her daughter. She’s not an Israelite. But she won’t stop, and the disciples finally get so sick of her persistence that they ask Jesus to send her packing. As the woman comes and kneels at Christ’s side, Jesus drops a surprisingly cutting metaphor. “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” He’s the food, the children are Israel, and the dogs...well...she and her daughter are the dogs.
But her faith and her wit drives her to come back with an even better line, and Jesus...impressed by both her faith and her grace...backs down, and changes his mind. His resistance to her falls away, and she is given what she has so persistently sought. Her daughter is healed.
Now...if Jesus is willing to hear a woman out, and to learn from her faith...remind me again why a significant portion of the church that claims to follow Him is unwilling to do the same?
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Secret Ballot
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
07.27.08; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Romans 8:26-39
I’m an fairly engaged politics fan, and follow politics in much the same way that some fans follow football or baseball or professional team foosball. Even for me, though, I find myself asking the question: how long has this Presidential Election season been going on again? After a nearly endless primary season, it seems like we’ve going through the high drama of election year politics for the past three years.
And it is drama. It is, although so many Americans seem unable to get into it, choosing instead to focus their mental energies on whatever mean remarks Miley Cyrus is making on YouTube about her ex-boyfriend. Any competition is drama, and unlike the mindless catty nothingness of celebro-tainment, American politics has behind it control of the most powerful nation on earth. Every election year, we have no idea how things are going to work out, and with so much at stake and an uncertain outcome, how could it not be engaging. You watch the polls and the polls of polls, see the candidates rise and fall in favor, and one is almost never entirely sure at the end of the day who’s going to come out on top. The results are as secret, as hidden from our eyes, as the ballots that we all cast on election day.
It’s that mystery, that uncertainty about what might happen at the end of the day, that makes life seem interesting, and that makes participating in the democratic process such a vital and important things for hobbyist policy geeks like me.
Elections aren’t always that way. Take, for instance, another election that will take place in the next month. On August 5, 2008, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea will hold it’s parliamentary elections. The citizens of North Korea will flow to the polls to vote for members of their Supreme People’s Assembly. Following that election, members of the Supreme People’s Assembly will themselves elect the Chairman of the National Defense Commission, the country’s chief executive.
When the people of North Korea vote, they do get a choice. They can either vote for a member of the Democratic Front for the Reunification of the Fatherland, or...not. There are no other choices. There is no drama, any more than there is any drama in the “election” of Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il. Everything is already decided, which means the election comes across as...well...neither fair nor real. That’s mostly because it’s not. It’s a farce.
We know that democracy, real democracy, looks absolutely nothing like the elections in North Korea, and that just putting “democratic” and “republic” in the name of your country don’t mean either of those things is true. How can an election be real if there’s no choice involved?
That, in a roundabout way, brings us to today’s snippet from the Book of Romans. It’s an unusually rich passage, full of soaring language and passion. Here Paul tells us about the role the Holy Spirit plays when we ourselves can’t pray, interceding for us with sighs too deep for words.
It also serves up perhaps the most challenging teaching ever to whup us Christians upside the head: Paul’s oh-so-brief “teaching” about the elect and predestination. In the event that you’ve not had the good pleasure to be exposed to this before, let me play it out there for you.
Who are the elect? They’re the folks chosen by God to be in relationship with God. Generally, most churches and most Christians interpret this to mean “themselves,” and then assume that pretty much everyone else...and especially the people we’ve decided we don’t like...are the “unelect.” We know who those people are, and we’re sure God doesn’t like ‘em.
What does predestination mean? Well, it basically means God's foreknowledge of all of our actions, of all action, of everything and anything that has occurred or will occur. We've got this image of God carefully writing out all of the code for the universe before installing it on His Almighty Laptop and clicking on the Install Button. But that way of thinking is silly. Time is meaningless to God. All of time rests before God as an Eternal Now.
We generally don’t like this idea at all. It messes with our desire to be the master of our own domain. We want to be the ones making choices. We want to be the ones who control our own destiny, who get to make the decisions that will determine whether we’re down wit’ Jesus or way down in Satan’s Authentic Country Style Hickory Pit Barbecue. It’s Sinnerlicious!
We also tend to get cheesed off at the idea that God might somehow know who’s on the naughty and nice list even before we’ve had a chance to be bad or good. Why would God make people, knowing they’re going to mess up? That’s not fair! What would be the point of doing anything? It makes all of life seem like a fix, as false and unreal as the upcoming election in North Korea.
Though we might respond that way to some of the language Paul uses, that would be missing the point Paul is making. Before he uses those tricky words, in verse 28 Paul tells his audience that all things work together for good for those who love God. After he’s finished using those tricky words, Paul’s speech soars up to rhythmic heights...and he says basically the same thing. Nothing...nothing...can separate you from the love of God if you truly seek him.
All Paul is talking about here is God's limitlessness. Well, actually, that’s not true. Paul is speaking of God’s limitless power *and* God’s limitless love. And all Paul is asking his listeners to do in response to that love is have faith in it. Sure, your life is hard. Sure, things have gotten difficult. But none of those things can separate you from God.
For those who use “predestination” to be judgmental about others, they miss the point. God’s desire for all of our futures and for all of our nows is love, joy, and justice. It is up to us to live into that grace.
For those who can’t stand the loss of choice that it seems to entail, it’s a little more difficult. On the one hand, we have been created as free beings, made in the image of God and fully able to choose God freely. On the other, God knows what those choices are before they are even made. If we say we aren’t free, then we’re nothing more than robots, going through the motions. If we say that God lacks awareness of creation, then God ceases to be God. Somehow, the two must exist together. How? Well, when I learn how to see past, present and future all together as one moment, I’ll be sure to let you know. Till then, what we have is faith.
The point and purpose of predestination is trust. The reason behind election is trust. You have to trust that in the secrecy of that time before time, God has chosen you to play a role in His Kingdom. Doesn’t matter who you were. Doesn’t matter if the world declared you lost or chosen.
In Christ, that vote has been cast in your favor.
07.27.08; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Romans 8:26-39
I’m an fairly engaged politics fan, and follow politics in much the same way that some fans follow football or baseball or professional team foosball. Even for me, though, I find myself asking the question: how long has this Presidential Election season been going on again? After a nearly endless primary season, it seems like we’ve going through the high drama of election year politics for the past three years.
And it is drama. It is, although so many Americans seem unable to get into it, choosing instead to focus their mental energies on whatever mean remarks Miley Cyrus is making on YouTube about her ex-boyfriend. Any competition is drama, and unlike the mindless catty nothingness of celebro-tainment, American politics has behind it control of the most powerful nation on earth. Every election year, we have no idea how things are going to work out, and with so much at stake and an uncertain outcome, how could it not be engaging. You watch the polls and the polls of polls, see the candidates rise and fall in favor, and one is almost never entirely sure at the end of the day who’s going to come out on top. The results are as secret, as hidden from our eyes, as the ballots that we all cast on election day.
It’s that mystery, that uncertainty about what might happen at the end of the day, that makes life seem interesting, and that makes participating in the democratic process such a vital and important things for hobbyist policy geeks like me.
Elections aren’t always that way. Take, for instance, another election that will take place in the next month. On August 5, 2008, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea will hold it’s parliamentary elections. The citizens of North Korea will flow to the polls to vote for members of their Supreme People’s Assembly. Following that election, members of the Supreme People’s Assembly will themselves elect the Chairman of the National Defense Commission, the country’s chief executive.
When the people of North Korea vote, they do get a choice. They can either vote for a member of the Democratic Front for the Reunification of the Fatherland, or...not. There are no other choices. There is no drama, any more than there is any drama in the “election” of Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il. Everything is already decided, which means the election comes across as...well...neither fair nor real. That’s mostly because it’s not. It’s a farce.
We know that democracy, real democracy, looks absolutely nothing like the elections in North Korea, and that just putting “democratic” and “republic” in the name of your country don’t mean either of those things is true. How can an election be real if there’s no choice involved?
That, in a roundabout way, brings us to today’s snippet from the Book of Romans. It’s an unusually rich passage, full of soaring language and passion. Here Paul tells us about the role the Holy Spirit plays when we ourselves can’t pray, interceding for us with sighs too deep for words.
It also serves up perhaps the most challenging teaching ever to whup us Christians upside the head: Paul’s oh-so-brief “teaching” about the elect and predestination. In the event that you’ve not had the good pleasure to be exposed to this before, let me play it out there for you.
Who are the elect? They’re the folks chosen by God to be in relationship with God. Generally, most churches and most Christians interpret this to mean “themselves,” and then assume that pretty much everyone else...and especially the people we’ve decided we don’t like...are the “unelect.” We know who those people are, and we’re sure God doesn’t like ‘em.
What does predestination mean? Well, it basically means God's foreknowledge of all of our actions, of all action, of everything and anything that has occurred or will occur. We've got this image of God carefully writing out all of the code for the universe before installing it on His Almighty Laptop and clicking on the Install Button. But that way of thinking is silly. Time is meaningless to God. All of time rests before God as an Eternal Now.
We generally don’t like this idea at all. It messes with our desire to be the master of our own domain. We want to be the ones making choices. We want to be the ones who control our own destiny, who get to make the decisions that will determine whether we’re down wit’ Jesus or way down in Satan’s Authentic Country Style Hickory Pit Barbecue. It’s Sinnerlicious!
We also tend to get cheesed off at the idea that God might somehow know who’s on the naughty and nice list even before we’ve had a chance to be bad or good. Why would God make people, knowing they’re going to mess up? That’s not fair! What would be the point of doing anything? It makes all of life seem like a fix, as false and unreal as the upcoming election in North Korea.
Though we might respond that way to some of the language Paul uses, that would be missing the point Paul is making. Before he uses those tricky words, in verse 28 Paul tells his audience that all things work together for good for those who love God. After he’s finished using those tricky words, Paul’s speech soars up to rhythmic heights...and he says basically the same thing. Nothing...nothing...can separate you from the love of God if you truly seek him.
All Paul is talking about here is God's limitlessness. Well, actually, that’s not true. Paul is speaking of God’s limitless power *and* God’s limitless love. And all Paul is asking his listeners to do in response to that love is have faith in it. Sure, your life is hard. Sure, things have gotten difficult. But none of those things can separate you from God.
For those who use “predestination” to be judgmental about others, they miss the point. God’s desire for all of our futures and for all of our nows is love, joy, and justice. It is up to us to live into that grace.
For those who can’t stand the loss of choice that it seems to entail, it’s a little more difficult. On the one hand, we have been created as free beings, made in the image of God and fully able to choose God freely. On the other, God knows what those choices are before they are even made. If we say we aren’t free, then we’re nothing more than robots, going through the motions. If we say that God lacks awareness of creation, then God ceases to be God. Somehow, the two must exist together. How? Well, when I learn how to see past, present and future all together as one moment, I’ll be sure to let you know. Till then, what we have is faith.
The point and purpose of predestination is trust. The reason behind election is trust. You have to trust that in the secrecy of that time before time, God has chosen you to play a role in His Kingdom. Doesn’t matter who you were. Doesn’t matter if the world declared you lost or chosen.
In Christ, that vote has been cast in your favor.
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