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.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
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?
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