Fear Not!

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda; United Korean Presbyterian Church
Easter Sunday, March 23, 2008
Rev. John An; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 28:1-10

(delivered concurrently in English and Korean)

Many wise souls throughout history have talked about fear.

President Franklin Roosevelt said

“We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

Civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks said:

“Knowing what must be done does away with fear.”

Philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson said:

“Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you.

All of these great souls had one thing in common:

None of them had anything invested in today’s stock market.

If you have anything invested in the markets, you’ve probably seen it.

Watching the reactions of investors over these past few weeks

As the market surges and retreats like waves at a high tide

Makes many of us feel like a child that first time on a diving board.

Maybe you’ve seen that moment.

They’ve never jumped before.

It’s totally new and frightening.

They go out to the end of the board.

They look waaay down at the water.

And then they freeze.

They’re too scared to move.

“Jump!” shout their friends from the side of the pool.

But it looks so far!

“Climb off the board!” shout the people behind them.

But then they’d be embarrassed.

So they just stand there,

Just listening to the yelling.

What to do?

Many of us feel that way whenever we’re confronted with change.

There’s the terrifying possibility we might lose.

We might lose money.

We might lose face.

We might lose ourselves.

In the face of something we do not know,

We do not act.

From the Gospel of Matthew today we hear such a story.

It’s the story of the first ones to learn of Christ’s resurrection.

We hear that Mary Madgalene and the other Mary are on their way to the tomb.

They go to mourn the friend and the rabbi that they loved.

But people are already there.

It’s a detachment of guards, sent from Pilate to insure no mischief takes place.

Then there’s a sudden and terrifying presence.

Something unlike anything any of them had known before.

The stone rolled back

But the bright presence remained.

Every single person there felt afraid.

Of course they did.

But how did they express their fear?

Those guards “were like dead men.”

Fear overcame them.

Fear consumed them.

They could not move.

They were frozen and trembling.

The women felt that fear, too.

But they also had faith.

That faith meant that their fear did not control them.

At first, it was a fear mingled with joy.

What was happening was terrifying, but it was also good.

They saw the joy of that first Easter moment.

They felt fear and uncertainty in their hearts at this new thing.

But it did not consume them.

Even though they felt that fear, they were able to respond.

They heard that message, and left with “fear and great joy.”

Though fear was still in their hearts, they weren’t frozen.

They moved.

They acted.

And from faith, they left the empty tomb.

They didn’t leave slowly, either.

Hearing that message became the starting point of a new journey of faith.

It was, at first, a mixed and disorganized thing.

They still struggled.

They still felt uncertainty and fear.

But as they rushed down that path

Driven by equal parts terror and elation

They encountered Christ

And he drove their fears away.

All living faith is like that encounter.

All Easter faith is like that encounter.

It begins with the hearing.

But then comes the response.

Sure, there can be uncertainty.

Sure, there can be fears.

But despite those fears, you must be moving.

Despite those fears, you must be acting.

You can’t let yourself be paralyzed by doubt.

You can’t let yourself be frozen by overanalysis.

In that Easter moment, great and pure joy is offered up by God for your life.

Anything and everything can become new again.

Just set yourself down that path.

Let the joy begin to overcome your fears.

Trust that as you act and as you move

You’ll reach that point on the journey when your fears will be cast aside.

You’ll hear that welcome voice.

You’ll hear that welcome greeting.

“Do not be afraid.

Go, and tell what you’ve seen.”

He is risen.

He is risen indeed.

blowback

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
03.16.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lessons: Isaiah 50: 4-9a; Philippians 2: 5-11

There are all kinds of joys that come from having children. Kids remind you of your own childhood, of the joys of discovering life anew, of the deep swirling wonder of imagination and the way the world itself seems to shimmer with possibility. It’s a delight.

But there are, shall we say, tradeoffs. I’ve been deeply into movies as an art form since I was in high school...films that use the medium not just to entertain, but to say something worth saying. I like films with deep and subtle social commentary, movies that force you to think about philosophy or politics or history. And, no, “Meet the Spartans” does not count as historical commentary.

When you’ve got two young boys, though, your opportunities for moviegoing are a little different. I enjoy jokes about bodily functions as much as the next guy, but for some reason movies that view burping and flatulence as their whole reason for being aren’t life-changing experiences. Every now and then, on those evenings when the haze of parental fatigue briefly lifts enough for my wife and I actually go out, we do see movies.

One that Rache and I managed to catch over the winter break was one called Charlie Wilson’s War. This was a film about a Texas congressman...played by Tom Hanks...who had a notoriously undistinguished career. He was best known for having a very well stocked bar in his office, and for the fact that his entire office staff was, as they say, hot with two “T”s. But then things changed. Rep. Wilson had hung around long enough to get onto congressional committees that controlled covert operations and military funding, right around the time that the Soviet Union was invading Afghanistan. The Soviet Army had more or less rolled over the Afghans, and the small groups of local mujahideen fighters that remained were getting crushed by Soviet armor, air power, and heavily armored helicopter gunships.

So Congressman Wilson, after requests from the CIA, began to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars secret government funding to the Afghan tribesmen...along with new, man-portable surface-to-air missiles. The newly strengthened Afghans began to make inroads against Soviet power, and eventually forced them to withdraw, one of the many crises that eventually caused Soviet Communism to collapse. It was classic Cold War stuff..and it’s a great film, both accurate historically and well acted. Towards the end of the movie, though, the primary CIA operative working with Congressman Wilson (brilliantly played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) gives him a warning. If you only arm the Afghans, and don’t give them the education and resources they need to develop an open democracy, then there’s the real threat of blowback.

What is “blowback?” It’s a covert ops term, used within the American intelligence community to describe the unanticipated consequences of both covert actions and the use of military power. Like, for instance, when the United States and Great Britain overthrew the democratically elected but socialist government of Iran in the 1950s and replaced it with a monarch who was friendly to our oil interests. Unfortunately, that made Iranians more receptive to the message of radical Islam, which overthrew the Shah, and is now..surprise surprise...the greatest threat we face in the Middle East. That’s blowback. Or, for instance, when the Afghan mujahideen, abandoned by America once they’d served their purpose, become the fundamentalist, jihadist Taliban, and the Taliban become the primary base of support for Osama Bin Laden. That’s blowback. Whenever you use human power to accomplish what you want, you’re risking blowback. You can try to think your way around it, and to anticipate every possibility, but there’s always that one thing you didn’t expect.

Today is Palm/Passion Sunday, the day that we remember the “triumphal” procession of Christ into Jerusalem. We have our little bits of Palm Fronds. We put ‘em up in the air, and wave ‘em like we just don’t care. We have our celebration. Jesus is entering the city with celebrations and with power, just like a great king or a revered leader. With the celebrating throngs around him, it might seem to anyone watching like Jesus was using a classic power play, riding the passions of an enthusiastic mob to shore up his own power. Go Jesus! Yay Jesus! Throw the corrupt leadership out! Many of his disciples and those who shouted Hosanna by the Jerusalem Road surely thought that. This is it! This is when it all changes!

But Jesus saw further, saw through God’s eyes that this kind of power never stands. There is always, always, always blowback. Whenever you use human power to destroy or subvert, it might seem to work...at first. Throughout history, empire after empire has risen to power, crushing those around them with an iron fist, and playing other nations against one another. But all of those empires lie in ruins, as the false foundation of their power became the storm-driven sands that consumed them. Christ Jesus knew as he walked that road that it was taking him not to priestly power in the temple, or to the king’s throne in Jerusalem. Those who saw him as a threat to their power would react. There would be blowback, and it would take the form of a cross.

Christ also knew that the source of his power was not what people thought. He was not a king like other kings. What sort of king was he? We heard it affirmed today from both a prophet and an apostle. In the reading from the book of the prophet Isaiah that Pastor Mike shared with us today, we heard Isaiah tell us about the Suffering Servant. The prophet Isaiah proclaimed a vision of God’s true servant...of God’s messiah...that was nothing like the image of a mighty warrior. It was one who endured hardship, who faced opponents firmly but without malice, relying on God and God’s grace to see them through.

In the reading from Paul’s letter to the church at Philippians, we hear Paul’s proclamation of how Jesus viewed power. Again, the imagery is not of one who uses power to their own advantage. Christ is the servant, the one who empties himself of himself and turns over all control and direction to God.

It’s an entirely different approach than the one that relies on worldly power. It’s not power, but love. It’s not power, but a servant’s heart, one that values the spread of the Good News of God’s redemptive love more than life itself.

Think about your own lives, about the way that you live and work and play with those around you. When any of us try to use our power or personal authority to get what we want, when we place our our personal interests above those of other children of God, what tends to be the outcome? Sometimes it works...or seems to work. Sometimes we get what we want, defeating our “enemies” and rising to victory. There are very few cubicle farms in this world that don’t contain the whispers of office politics, as people strive and connive against one another to be the one to get that slightly larger cubicle. In the back rooms of automobile dealerships, salesmen struggle to be the guy up top of that weekly sales whiteboard...and if that means talking smack about another salesman in front of the manager, for some, that’s fine and dandy. By whatever means necessary, as Malcolm X used to say.

That’s the way of the flesh, the way of the world, and it contains within it the seeds of it’s own destruction. Acting in your own self-interest and not being guided by the love that Christ proclaimed will cause unanticipated and deeply destructive consequences. But if you don’t look out for number one, what’s going to happen? People are going to step all over you! You can’t do that!

But that is what Christ Jesus did. He gave himself up. He allowed himself to suffer. He allowed himself to die.

Strangely enough, there was blowback from that choice, which we would not anticipate, but which God knew would be the outcome of His covert operation.

We call it “salvation.”

Bones and Breath

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
03.09.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lessons: Ezekiel 37:1-14; Romans 8:6 -11

Of all the Hebrew prophets, Ezekiel is the most unusual.

He needed to be, because he lived in strange times. He was a member of the priesthood, trained from his youth to be a leader in the temple in Jerusalem. As he’d grown up, he would have learned all of the rituals, all of the complicated prayers and songs and sacrificial techniques. He would have learned how to dress, how to eat, and how to follow the law to keep himself pure for the temple. His whole life, he prepared himself for one thing: the Temple.

And then that thing was destroyed. Ezekiel shared his visions with a people who had watched Jerusalem burn. They had seen their leaders butchered. They had been driven from the land that had belonged to their ancestors for generation that stretched back into legend. The temple, the Holy of Holies, the footstool of the God of Israel, that temple lay as a ruin, battered and burned, all of it’s sacred and holy objects looted or scattered to the four winds.

His people were lost. Their hopes were dead. Their future was dead, shattered by the military might of Babylon and blowing like aimless and lifeless ashes throughout the empire. Ezekiel himself had been taken with them, and he found suddenly that all of the tools of his trade, all of the rituals that made him a priest over the people, were now meaningless. What does it matter if you know how to do a perfect temple worship if the temple has been crushed to rubble? How do you speak to a people who have given up, who declare that they might as well be dead...no, more than that....they say they ARE dead. As they sat and wept by the rivers of Babylon, the people of Israel were dead to hope, dead to a future, and worst of all, convinced that they were dead to God.

How does a priest talk to a people when he has no temple and no sacrifice? Every tool in his priestly toolbox was gone. He had nothing. But Ezekiel wasn’t just a priest. He wasn’t just a temple functionary. Having been torn from the foundations of the past, he suddenly found himself connecting to God in ways that he hadn’t planned for and hadn’t trained for and didn’t expect.

Ezekiel suddenly finds himself connecting to God in ways that go beyond rites and sacrifices. Throughout this book, we see him moved by visions and impulses that stem from God himself. Those passages always begin “The hand of the Lord came upon me,” or, if you’re using the New International Version, “The hand of the Lord was upon me.” That doesn’t mean that a great big hand came out of a cloud and grabbed him. It means he was caught up in a vision, swept up into a different kind of awareness, into an awareness of what God needed to share with his people. Those same words begin his life as a prophet, in Ezekiel 1:3. They occur again in 3:14, and again in 8:1, and will come again in verse 40:1. Each time, it’s a vision. Each time, he is being grasped by God’s Spirit, and shown something that an ordinary way of understanding can’t express.

Whenever I read and study this passage, I always think back to the beginning of my ministry here at Trinity. Four years ago, I was looking at a church that had been written off. It had been declared a hopeless case, not even worth trying to revive. “This is a church that crushes the life out of it’s pastors,” I was told. “This is a church that is dead,” I was told. “We don’t want you to go there,” they said. “It’s for your own good.” Who’d want to do ministry in a valley of dry bones?

I heard what they were saying, and saw how hard the whole thing was going to be, and I honestly struggled with it. Was I called to a ministry that would require me to set myself...a newly minted, wet-behind-the-ears, first church I’ve ever had pastor...into a church that was dead? Not only that, was I called to gently refuse to obey the Presbytery, and to stand firm even though it might cost me the ministry I’d worked for seven years to enter? Honestly, I struggled. I prayed for guidance, anything that would show me what God wanted me to do.

And then I had a dream. Now, we Presbyterians aren’t supposed to listen to our dreams, mostly because they’re not process-oriented enough. I heard somewhere that the Book of Order does make an exception for the dreams we have while falling asleep in meetings, but I’ve never been able to find the citation. It was an unusually vivid and intense dream, and not at all like one of those confused messes of imagery that fill our R.E.M. sleep. It wasn’t like my usual pastor-stress dreams, when the church is filled with new visitors and I can’t find my sermon and suddenly I have to play lead guitar for the praise team and I’m not wearing any pants. This was different.

I was flying, high up, soaring through a clear perfect late spring day. I love the dreams when I can fly, that sense of joyful, effortless lightness that fills you, unlike any feeling you ever have in your waking life. Down below me was the Beltway, clear as could be. I passed Tysons, passed the toll road, gliding through the warm air over trees and traffic. As I saw the American Legion Bridge ahead, a shadow fell over me, and a great hand rested on my shoulder. I turned, and saw what could only be described as an image of the angel of death, right out of some medieval woodblock print. The hand on my shoulder was bones and ribbons of rotting flesh, the great black robes worn and flying tattered in the wind, the face nothing more than a skull. It turned it’s head and faced me, and the great dark hollows of it’s eyes were gentle. Then it silently extended a great arm, and pointed with a long finger of bone to where I knew Trinity lay, just beyond the trees on the other side of the Potomac, and in the dream I began to weep, and I woke.

Now you can take that as you wish. It could very well just have been the symbolic stirrings of a struggling subconscious or some Jungian manifestation. At the time, I chose not to share it with the folks on the session. Why? Well, let’s just say that when you’re interviewing for a job, when your interviewer asks you “So...why do you want this job,” answering “The Angel of Death sent me” is usually not the best answer. But however you interpret it, I took it as marching orders. Four years ago, the death of this church was already here. Hope..to a rational person...seemed little more than a delusion. To an objective observer, looking at demographics and statistics and probabilities, this church was already dead.

But in the passage we heard today, God showed Ezekiel something important about death. He knew, and I know, and you should know that death means very little to God. Death in any of its forms is just change, and no barrier to the one who offers breath and eternal life to all.

Right now, this church is in a very different place than it was four years ago. The bones have come together. The sinews and flesh have gathered. But has the breath come? As we heard from the Apostle Paul’s message from the Book of Romans today, we fail only when we look at the flesh, at what is, and not at the change that God’s Spirit seeks to work in each us.

If we look at the church...our church...and say, like the Jews in Babylon, that the church is finished and nothing can change for the better, then we need to hear Ezekiel’s call. If we look at ourselves, at how we stumble and struggle and squabble, and imagine that the deadness we feel inside means things are over for us forever, then we need to hear God as he speaks through Ezekiel.

Two weeks shy of Easter, two weeks before we remember that death brings resurrection and triumph, we need to hear him say, “I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live.”

Of Age

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
03.02.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Reading: John 9:1-41

What does it mean to “come of age?”

All around the world, human beings have coming of age rituals, times when people move from their childhood and the hellfire that is adolescence into the joys of being a grownup. This is that moment when you cease being a junior member of society and become an equal among equals. You’re no longer sitting at the kids table. You don’t always have to get the kids meal. While ancient societies usually had one ritual that formally declared you to be an adult, our buffet American culture has a whole bunch of different ways of marking the transition to adulthood.

Take that moment, for example, when you walk out of the front door of the Department of Motor Vehicles with your shiny new license in hand. For the past fifty years, that little card has been a sign of entry into the adult world, and the moment when your parents aren’t sure whether to sigh in relief or begin to pray without ceasing. Usually, it’s a bit of both.

Then there’s your eighteenth birthday, when you become a full-fledged citizen of the United States of America, able to vote and to serve your country. You’re officially adult, one hundred percent a citizen of this great nation, able to do everything that every other adult in the country can do so long as it doesn’t involve beverages that have been fermented.

Then there’s your twenty-first birthday. The less we say about that, the better.

There are so many moments, so many events, so many times that we seem to be transitioning into adulthood. But even with all those events and all those moments, there’s a strange phenomenon creeping through our culture, one that has grown more and more intense as the years have progressed. It seems like we’re not really ever supposed to grow up. If you watch people these days, if you look out at how most of America seems to live, adolescence seems to have developed an almost inescapable gravitational pull. We become teenagers earlier and earlier, and we become adults later and later. Seven year olds try to act like they’re thirteen. Thirty-seven year olds try to act like they’re eighteen.

For some incomprehensible reason, we’ve decided that the most awkward and intense and challenging years of our lives should stick around for as long as possible. Perhaps it’s our compulsive human tendency to cling to youth, or our fear of mortality, or the siren song sung by marketers who know that the longer we stay stuck in that teenage identity crisis the more likely we’ll be to buy stuff to make ourselves feel better.

That can be a challenge, because it means that we struggle to find our identities and our voices...often deep into our adulthood.

In the passage that Mike and I read this morning from John’s Gospel, we hear a story about someone whose whole life had been a struggle, a man who had been born without sight. It’s a striking tale, for several reasons. It’s a healing, of course, a miracle, one of the series of seven signs that Jesus performs in John’s retelling of his story. Like all of the stories that John’s Gospel tells, it’s deeply, personally human. It doesn’t have the grand scale of the Sermon on the Mount, and is instead a deeply intimate portrait of a human being and the communities that respond to his healing. Strangely, though, we never learn this guy’s name.

Here’s another thing you might not immediately notice listening to it...this guy is on his own. He’s been healed, and his whole life is transformed, such a radical change that people who’ve seen him every day aren’t even sure it’s him. But he’s not surrounded by other disciples. He’s not sitting at the feet of Jesus. Jesus is nowhere to be found for most of this story. This is worth noting, because John’s Gospel is all about Jesus and who he is and what he does. If that’s the point of the story, and suddenly Jesus can’t be found...what’s going on? In the entire Gospel of John, in fact, the section from John 9:8 to John 9:35...most of what we heard today...is the longest Jesus-free patch in this Gospel.

He’s on his own.

And he’s not having an easy time of it. It isn’t just that people can’t believe it’s him. It’s that suddenly he’s being challenged by some of the Pharisees. They can’t believe that Jesus has done this thing, even after he tells them himself. So the Pharisees, who are getting increasingly annoyed at how much this Jesus guy is stirring up their world, confront his parents. The parents...well...what do they say? Being a little intimidated, they give as little information as possible, and send their questioners right back to our protagonist, saying “He is of age...ask him!” He’s not a child. He’s old enough to speak for himself.

And they grill him again, and he answers, holding his own against their questioning...in fact, doing so well that they can’t rebut him, and toss him out of the synagogue. Where is Jesus during all of this? He’s moved on...although he returns to tell this man more about who he is and why he’s there.

Through this entire story, we see someone who takes a stand. He faces off against the crowds. He gets grilled twice. And throughout it all, he has the confidence...the simple straight-up strength...to stand on his own and reaffirm what he knows about Jesus and how his experience of Jesus changed his life.

The challenge, of course, is that pretty much anyone with the audacity to call themselves a Christian has to do the same thing. It’s a vital part of being a disciple. While we all have to mutually support one another, we’re also each called to take responsibility for bearing witness to our own lives. Where too often we fall short is in the absence of that witness. We don’t expect to have to do any of the heavy lifting of faith ourselves. We’re more than happy to hear about servant callings and ministries and missions. But we’re less happy with the idea that we have to do some of that ourselves. Isn’t that the pastor’s job? Isn’t that the youth pastor’s job, or anyone else’s job but mine?

At a certain point, yes. If you’re a fledgling in the faith, sure. But I’ve got something to show y’all.

[Text of Sermon Concluded Here...description of what followed is on my primary blog]