Tooting Your Own Horn

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

10.30.11; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 23:1-12

I’ve never been particularly good at tooting my own horn, and that’s something of a problem.  

As I look out at the world, and at the people who seem to shimmer and beam from the airbrushed pages of the magazines in the checkout aisle, it’s clear that social success and own-horn-honking go hand in hand.    And if people hear how amazing you are, surely, surely, the joy and fame and acclaim that everyone seems to aspire to in our culture will be yours.   In fact, there’s an entire industry dedicated to helping people proclaim to the world just how amazing they are.

I spent some time perusing the Public Relations Society of America’s web presence this week, in hopes of getting a few pointers.    The PRSA, in case you haven’t heard of it, is the association of people who professionally toot the horns of other people.  These are the folks who make sure that we know, against a background of swelling, patriotic music, that the People of America’s Oil and Natural Gas Industry are working hard to bring Americans the American energy we need, right here in America.  

These are the people who arranged the multi-city book tour for reality tv personality Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi’s novel  A Shore Thing, an exciting and imaginative romp through the cultural wonderland that is New Jersey.   I can’t speak for the book itself, but let me tell you: the reviews for the book on Amazon are really worth reading.

These are the people who recently got the word out that Can’t-Touch-This 1990s rapper M.C. Hammer is launching a search engine to compete with Google.   It’s called WireDoo.  Really.  It’s in “pre-Beta,” in pretty much the same way my career as the world’s premiere professional interpretive dancer is in “pre-Beta.”  I do not envy M.C. Hammer’s publicist.

What I found at the PRSA’s site were all kinds of conferences and webinars about how to generate buzz and how to stir interest in whatever it is you’re pitching.  This might come in handy in promoting my own recently self-published book, which rests proudly at number #280,279 on Amazon’s Kindle Store, precisely Two Hundred Fifty Five Thousand Seven Hundred and Sixty Seven positions behind Snooki’s magnum opus.

Self-promotion has become a central value in our culture of consumer celebrity, in which even everyday folks find themselves chasing the retweet on twitter or the repost on Facebook.  

If you don’t do it, if you don’t pitch and spin and try to stir buzz, you don’t exist.

This is a value that prangs awkwardly against the ethic laid out in Matthew’s Gospel today.  For the past several weeks, we’ve heard Matthew’s Gospel recount some of the challenges that Jesus faced from the Pharisees.   Pharisees, as you’ll recall, were among Jesus of Nazareth’s primary opponents, but for reasons that are a bit different than those we typically think of when we hear the word Pharisee.   

Someone who is a “Pharisee” is typically assumed to be a self-righteous hypocrite, the sort of person who claims to the purveyor of all things right and true and pure, and yet manages to be a totally unpleasant human being.  The term Pharisee, though, does not refer to hypocrisy.  That word derives from the Hebrew term perusim, which means “the ones set apart.”   These were the ones who defied the Greco-Roman cultural ethics of their day, and who were at least making the effort to define their identity in terms of the demands of Torah and covenant.  Because of this, they were the ones closest to Jesus.  Unlike the Sadducees, who ruled over the temple didn’t mingle with their inferiors, the Pharisees were interested in getting out and changing their communities for the better.

Which, quite frankly, is why Jesus begins this section of scripture by telling his listeners that there was nothing wrong with what the Pharisees had to say.   When he says that they “sit at Moses’ Seat,” he’s indicating that they are attentive to the teachings of Torah, which tradition held had been passed on down from Moses.  The issue for Jesus, however, was not that there was anything wrong with the covenant law.  He makes a point of specifically honoring the teachings of the Pharisees.  But where he gets a little less accepting is with those who taught it but had no desire to actually live out their teachings.

Instead, what mattered to the Pharisees Jesus condemned was the pride of place and honor that came from being regarded as a teacher.  In being set apart, they didn’t take that as a sign of additional responsibility.  It was, instead, a sign of just how wonderful they were.  The “being viewed by everyone as wonderful” became the priority, and the justice and grace of the covenant became secondary, and with that inversion of priorities, suddenly what should have been a blessing to the community became a curse.  

Instead of focusing on living out the covenant, they focused on the trappings of being viewed as special.  The focus became not what they were doing, but the social rewards, on the success, on the appearance.  The goal became being famous for the purposes of being famous, and for a sense of just how useless that is, I would ask you to do a mental google for the word Kardashian.

In place of that, Jesus instructs his listeners that they shouldn’t let themselves focus on titles, or on the things that bring worldly acclaim.  Instead, they are to strive to serve others, and to be humble.   

We have trouble with this.  How can we jibe what it takes to succeed in our culture with Christ’s relentless focus on humility and servanthood?   Honestly, it’s not an easy connection to make, but there are a couple of things we need to take away from this difficult mix of teachings.

First, the command to not seek and yearn for titles and importance is not a suggestion that everyone has the same gifts, or that there are none in a community worth following or learning from.  We’re not all the same, and movements that try to live as if all of us are the same have an tendency to collapse in on themselves, or chase their tails in endless circles.  The Occupy movement appears on the verge of learning this lesson yet again.

But turning particular gifts to the service of the community is a different thing than expecting the community to shower you with accolades.  The joy of teaching, for example, does not come in having an obedient and deferential student.  It comes when that student suddenly lights up with understanding, as they grasp a concept for the first time.   It’s not the title.  It’s the expression of the gift.

Second, avoiding self-promotion and self-righteousness is not the same thing as not talking about one’s faith and living out one’s faith.  Jesus was not telling us that we should be shrinking violets in the expression and living out of our walk along the Way.   Among the oldline denominations...and that’s us, the Methodists, the Episcopalians, and the like...there’s an almost compulsive drive to not talk about faith, and to not talk about the impact that the Nazarene has had on our day to day lives.  

It often feels inadequately humble, overly aggressive, and conjures up in our minds images of some loud red-faced guy in an ill-fitting suit, bellowing Hellfire and Brimstone through a megaphone at passing students on some college campus, while glazed-eyed followers hand out tracts.

But the way Jesus-followers live, both individually and in community, is something that should not be a place of complete silence.  It’s worth speaking of, and living out, in such a way that others will not be completely oblivious of its existence.  If we’re utterly silent, so self-effacingly humble that our faith and it’s fruits are functionally invisible, then we’re not fulfilling the call of our faith.

So yeah, maybe we’re not great at self-promotion.  Given how deeply our culture has become consumed by that drive, perhaps it’s not a bad thing to be bad at.  But that’s no excuse for us to be stifled in our joyous expression of the fundamental goodness of what the Gospel teachings.  It’s no excuse for us to hold back in reaching out into the world with both hands and voices, changing it for the better and proclaiming grace, love and justice to a world that needs to both hear those things and see them lived out.

Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN

Stripped Away

Poolesville Presbyterian Church
10.23.11; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lessons:  Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18 and Matthew 22:34-46

How can we know what is important?

It can be difficult to tell, particularly with all the competing demands and priorities in our society.  But there are little thought exercises we can do that tell us how close we are to getting things right, meaning right in a God sort of way.  One of my favorites is to wondering what my little suburb of Annandale would look like if it were stripped. 

Not stripped of clothing, mind you. First, that would be very unpastorly of me, and I'm afraid my own contribution to that collective event would be rather unsettling.  But rather, what it would look like if the two great powers that define and "clothe" our culture simply weren't there.

I talked a little bit about those powers last week, but in the event things are a little blurry right now, they are mammon and the sword. The sword is coercive power, the force wielded by the state to undergird the legal frameworks of our society. Mammon is symbolic power. It drives the market, and is itself dependent on the power of the sword to establish and enforce the value of currency.

So let’s take a little journey into the Twilight Zone for a moment.  Your bedside radio chirps to life at 6:45 am one bright and crisp fall morning, and you hear WTOP breathlessly announce that there is no longer any law enforcement. In fact, there are no longer any laws. No traffic cops. No courts. No law books.  Nothing. Not only that, all currency is no longer valid. Our plastic is just plastic with random data encoded into a magnetic strip. Our cash is just paper with some, like, serious trippy pictures on it, dude.  It all simply ceased to be meaningful or accepted.

Far fetched? Sure. A bit silly? Undoubtedly. But still interesting.

What would your community look like on the day of that announcement? The answer to that question, I think, is a measure of just how healthy a society is. If the first word that pops into your head is "looting," followed by the word "pillage" and the phrase "everything on fire," then perhaps the place you are is not spiritually healthy. If you immediately think of staging a raid on the nearest Apple Store, then perhaps the you that you are is not healthy.

If, on the other hand, a society could just dispense with those things without batting an eye, then I think it would be in a rather different moral position. Would we still do what we do to fill our days? Would our relationships within our communities remain the same? Would our patterns of consumption be changed? For most social groups, the answer is yes. The changes would be huge and shattering. But if we’re honest about it, the closer we get to modeling the Way that Jesus taught, the less impact this thought exercise would have.

The fundamental essence of that Way is laid out for us in the passage from Matthew this morning.   Matthew’s Gospel continues the story of Jesus being challenged and tested by the religious and cultural authorities.  Last week, the question was about taxes and Caesar.  This week finds the Pharisees again coming to Jesus with a challenge, this one about the nature of the law.

He’s approached by a lawyer, although it’s important to note that this “lawyer” isn’t the kind of lawyer we’re used to.  This isn’t some guy woodenly reading lines into a camera on late night TV about how you might be eligible for compensation if you’ve gotten brain-freeze after consuming a Slurpee due to 7-11‘s straw-design negligence.   This isn’t that $750 an hour litigator from Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer and Feld, the one you don’t dare talk to at parties because even saying hello to her will cost you forty-five bucks.  This is a theologian, a Bible scholar, a student of the sacred law of Torah.

That lawyer asks him a question, one that required a knowledge of the sacred law.  The question is simple:  which law is the most important.  This was a non-trivial question, as the law of Torah was not simple.  At the time of Jesus, the rabbis had identified 613 different laws which governed the life of an observant Jew.  These laws were generally assumed to all be of equivalent importance, each an essential piece of the covenant, with not one out of place or irrelevant or less important.  It was a tricky one.  Say none, and you aren’t showing that you know the law.  Choose one, and you set yourself up for an argument that could last for generations.

But Jesus again responded elegantly, providing his erudite and well trained interrogator with a teaching that is at the core of both ancient and modern Judaism.  He first quotes from Deuteronomy 6:4-5, a passage from Torah that lays out the essential duty of everyone who stands in covenant relationship with God.   That text, known as the Shema, reads:  “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”

This little chunklet of Torah lays out the basic responsibility of everyone who stands in relationship with God to prioritize that relationship, to allow it to be the thing which defines the character and purpose of your life.

The second response comes from elsewhere in Torah, from the Book of Leviticus, chapter six, in a section that lays out the fundamental ethical responsibilities of every human being towards every other human being.  We heard an excerpt from that section read earlier, but the baseline teaching is the one Jesus drew out from Leviticus 19:18.  “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

In this tight and well structured response, Jesus gets down to the essence of covenant.  If you ditch everything but these things, if you whittle down and strip away everything but the most vital and central elements of what it means to live as a faithful and ethical human being, you end up with this.  This is what counts.  This is where the rubber meets the spiritual road, where it is less about law and more about a way of living.

These two related teachings actually give us a pretty good metric for assessing how we’re doing, both as a culture and as individuals.

As a culture, the Great Commandment asks:  are we as a people looking past our own interests, and to our broader created purpose?  Are we as a community treating every member in a way that expresses our profound care for them?   If we are, or we’re at least trying, then things are probably going to be turning out OK.  If we’re not, if we’re distracted by process and politicking and pursuing power over one another...well...things will probably look a whole bunch like they look now.

As individuals, the Great Commandment challenges:  are we looking past our own biases and the filter of both macroculture and microculture, and instead focusing on the gracious and transcendent purpose towards which our Maker is calling us?  Are we caring for the last and the least and the lost among us, or is our day to day life so focused on our own needs that our neighbor might as well not exist at all?

This essence of our connection to God and to each other is a touchstone, a foundation, the clear and basic measure of the value of our every corporate and individual action.

If we’re followers of the Nazarene, we know what is important.  He can’t have made it any clearer.  Hear it, and live it.

Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

Taxing

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

10.16.11; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 22:15-22

Money is power.

This, to be quite frank, is a difficult thing for many Jesus people to choke out of their voicebox.    We’re not comfortable with either of these things on their own, and when you put them together, the discomfort gets magnified.   Money and power go together like peanut butter and chocolate, or like bacon and pretty much any other edible object, and many inedible objects.  

So they tell me, anyway.  

Christians fumble around when we talk about money, I think, because we know deep down how closely it is interwoven with power.   What is power?

It’s the ability to assert your will in the world to make something happen.  It’s a physical thing.   If I want to bench press 250 pounds, I apply force with my pectorals and triceps, and lo and behold, absolutely nothing happens.  Other than my turning beet red and grunting out some unpastorly words, that is.   The message from the engine room is clear: “We just don’t have the power, Captain.”  

Within human societies, power takes on other forms.  It’s the ability to not just do what you can physically do, but to get other human beings to do things that you want them to.    If your car breaks down, and you don’t have 10 strong guys riding the car with you, you can always hand some bills over to a tow truck driver, and lo and behold, that car moves.  Currency helps us get things done.   It buys us gas.  It gets us lunch.  

Money is power.

Money can get things done because underlying it is the raw coercive power of the state.  Human beings together have agreed that the way we’ll measure power between one another is by a means of exchange, be that greenbacks or conch shells, and we’ll enforce that exchange by the state.  Anyone who decides they’ll step outside of that system will get stomped on by that system.  

That peculiar, inescapable fusion between wealth and power is the reason for the stirrings and hummings at the heart of many American cities this Fall.  As the tents of the Occupy movement sprout up, in New York, and in DC, but for some reason not yet here in Poolesville, it can be hard to tell exactly what the folks there are demonstrating.   The drum circles and dances and handmade cardboards signs do say it, though it can be hard to parse out from the chants of “Hey hey, ho ho, something something has got to go.”  In essence, these...um...slightly chaotic protests are saying:

Power is out of balance.

So how do folks who have committed to following Jesus of Nazareth deal with this strange form of power?  

For an answer to that, let’s turn to today’s interesting little story from the Gospel of Matthew.   This is one of those stories that we get from three out of four Gospels, in pretty much identical form.  It also appears in Luke 20:20-26, and in what was likely its earliest form in Mark 12:13-17, what many scholars believe was the first Gospel to take written form.

No matter what the Gospel, Jesus is having another run-in with the Pharisees, who have determined that he posed a threat to their belief system, and are trying to get him into trouble with the law.  They start by flattering him a little bit.   “We know that you teach the way of God in accordance with truth,” they coo.  “You do not regard people with partiality.”  That’s a baseline for being just in Torah, one we see in Deuteronomy 1:16-17.  According to the covenant law, a truly just judge doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor.  It’s a genuine compliment.  

Then again, when people you know have an axe to grind with you show up and start buttering you up, it’s a sure sign they’re hoping to eat you alive.  Particularly if it’s butter flavored with bacon, although given that these were Pharisees, that wasn’t really a very kosher option.

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 Jesus answered yes, it meant that he was willing to use Roman money on which was inscribed assertions of the emperor’s divinity.  For many devout Jews at the time, this meant that you were assenting to the emperor as a god, and betraying the God of Israel.  It also meant you were supporting the hated occupiers of the Holy Land, accepting the power of Roman society as legitimate. 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, and they were stunned.  Jesus had evaded them.

That evasion is the primary purpose of this little snippet of scripture, but there are implications within it for our relationship with that odd form of power that comes from wealth.

First, the power of money is social.  It is not real, not in the way that the sun is real or you or I are real.  It has no objective reality.  It belongs, instead, to Caesar, to the structures of culture and nation, which we totally make up as we go along.  It’s like a game, or a dance.  In this passage, Jesus founds his response to the question of taxation in the distinction between what belongs to society, what belongs to the rules of the game we’ve made up, and what belongs to God.

The power of God is not like the power conferred by money.  It’s the power of existence, of life, of being, of everything that is and everything that we are.  It is not mediated by anything.  It is direct.  In that, we need to understand that our relationship to our Maker is nothing like that relationship we have with wealth.  It is far deeper, more central, and more defining.

Second, and related to number one, the power that comes from wealth has no relationship to your value as a human being, or as a child of God.   It may speak to your social standing, or the material success of your endeavors within the social sphere.  But when it comes to you, your heart, your soul, and your integrity as a person, wealth means nothing.

We’d like to think it does, particularly if we’re doing well for ourselves.  There are entire branches of popular theology that would tell us that we’re somehow superior spiritually if  we’re materially well off.  This is simply not so.  In our relationship with God, what matters is our commitment to integrity and grace and kindness.  We are not to be partial, after all.   Letting social power color our value of another being..or of ourselves...is a sign that we don’t understand God’s covenant justice.  

Third, money is not inherently evil.  Jesus does not say, “EEEEEW!  Money!   Don’t touch it!  Don’t touch it!”   Within the sphere of our social interactions, it can be useful, just as any expression of human power can be useful.  It can help us care for others.  It can feed the hungry, and clothe the naked.  It can be a tool for justice, just as our lives can be such a tool.  It can rebuild and restore.  But it can also be harmful.  

It becomes harmful when it creates division between us, when it becomes the thing that allows us to value one person more than another, or feel either inferior or superior to others around us.    It can become harmful when it becomes a means of control, or a source of resentment, throwing everything out of balance.  Then, it can tear apart relationships, shatter communities, and destroy societies.  

To tame that power, we have to to recognize the limitations of wealth.  Its power is something we create.  We have to recognize the limitations of wealth.  It does not define our integrity as human beings, and cannot be allowed to define our relationships with one another, and our relationship with God.

And as we assert our wills into the world, as we turn our whole hearts and minds and souls to loving God, and to loving neighbor as ourselves, we have to be sure that we’ve not forgotten that everything...even the things we’ve made up...needs to be a part of that.  That demands our all.

Let it be so, for you and for me,  AMEN.

Anxiety

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

10.09.11; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Reading:  Philippians 4:1-9

With the passing of Steve Jobs this last week, the world lost an amazingly creative, focused, and committed innovator and entrepreneur.   His relentless pursuit of excellent shiny new handsomely priced electronic gadgetry has had a measurable impact on my own life.  Were it not for Steve, my wife would not have to repeatedly remind me that it’s Thanksgiving dinner, and to just put my iPhone away already.   

Since I first got this odd little device, I’ve noticed that it really can become something of a compulsion.   Maybe that email I’ve been waiting for has arrived.  No...wait...not yet...hold on.  Maybe something is happening in the world, just a second, wait, let me check my CNN app.  Maybe that bike part I’ve set my Craigslist app to RSS update has finally been put up for sale.  Maybe I’ve gotten a text back from that guy about the thing.  You know, that thing that I was talking to that guy about.  Just a sec.  Maybe I can...finally...knock over...that stupid tower...with those stupid egg stealing pigs.  It’ll just take me a second.  Hold on.

Perhaps the worst of all of them, for those of us with retirement plans or investments, is that pesky little CNBC app.  Every day, minute to minute, we can tie in to the endless mosh pit of shouting panic on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.   We can watch the Dow soar 180 points because Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke sighed contentedly after finishing a large lunch.  We can watch it plummet 250 points just a few moments later, as the market realizes Bernanke was eating spanakopita at a Greek restaurant.  The market tears back and forth, a mad flock of trader pigeons spooked to exhaustion by the slightest movement, and we  stare at our little screens and take that in, fretting  about our futures and our retirement and our children.

That’s the problem with smartphones, and has been ever since Research in Motion introduced my wife to her own Crackberry.  On the one hand, they mean you’re plugged in.  You can know whatever you want.  The ‘net becomes your memory.  You can know anything anyone knows, whenever you need to.  

On the other, those shiny little touchscreens in your pocket gnaw and worry at the back of your subconscious mind.  It’s like being ten again, with that baby molar that’s not quite ready to come out.  It just dangles there, hanging by a thread of flesh, and you can’t help but fret and tease at it with your tongue.  It’s insistent, always there, whispering in your ear.

It’s a form of anxiety.   And we all know anxiety.   It’s that worry that something is happening, something we really should be doing something about, and we’re not.  It’s that feeling that we’ve missed something, that we’ve not gotten something right.  Our ability to reasonably assess what’s going on becomes clouded, and we begin to imagine every possible thing that might go wrong.  It can paralyze us, governing our lives with fear.  There’s a reason Anxiety Disorders have their own little corner of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual that clinicians use to assess mental illness.  They can consume a life.

You would think that having access to all the information in the world would reverse that fear.  You can know anything you want!  Whenever you want!  Wherever you want!  But it can have the opposite effect.  We know there’s more information out there, and we don’t know it.  It becomes too much, and we can just...seize up.

Being focused on the right thing makes all the difference when it comes to anxiety, and that’s a significant theme in today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi.    The section you heard today comes as Paul is wrapping up this letter to this well-loved Christian community.   As tends to be the case at the end of formal letters in the ancient world, this concluding section begins with a direct address to people known to the writer. 

Here, Paul addresses two women directly, with a request that they make some effort to get along.  He names Euodia and Syntyche directly, which means he held them in some regard.  It’s clear that he viewed them as co-workers and equals, but that somehow along the way they’d managed to start not getting along with each other.  It’s just a human thing, one that afflicts and has always afflicted humankind.

After commending a few other souls, Paul gets down to a few little key bits of advice for the Philippians.  He reminds them of the importance of celebration, of realizing that faith is a source of joy.  He reminds them to continue to be known for their welcoming, hospitable, compassionate, and kindly way of being together.   

And then, he talks a little bit about anxiety.

He reminds them not to worry, but to instead focus on joyous connection to God, from whom peace will come.   These are nice words, calm words, pleasant words.  They are only remarkable words when you consider that this don’t worry be happy message is being delivered from prison, and that Roman incarceration was not necessarily the most pleasant experience.

It’s easy to say “don’t be anxious” when you’re sitting with a fretting friend on your sofa in the living room of your twenty-first century home.  It is considerably harder to say it and mean it if you’re facing the real possibility of an unpleasantly first-century Roman execution.   Having a heart that is at peace in those circumstances is, as my 13 year old might say, kind of epic.

But that is precisely what Paul seems to manage, and what he commends to those who read his words.   He seems to manage this non-anxious attitude through a combination of factors, which are worth laying out.

He reminds the Philippians the importance of where we focus.  The essence of anxiety, after all, is being drawn inexorably towards the negative that you do not know, but that might be.   Are your children not home from school yet, and their bus should have been at the stop fifteen minutes ago?  Anxiety spools up visions of flaming, tumbling buses.  Do you have a particularly important presentation to give to a key client?  Anxiety spools up visions of you not only forgetting to load the presentation onto your laptop, but also forgetting to wear pants.  Anxiety whispers in your ear:  think what might go wrong!  

Paul, on the other hand, reminds us to focus...not on the worst that is not, but on the good that is and might be.  “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, is there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

It’s not the quantity of information, but that we have the wisdom to focus on that which is most conducive to joy.  That doesn’t mean being ignorant of the negative.  Paul is not asking us to be naive.  Rather, don’t be consumed by the negative.  Similarly, don’t be distracted by the irrelevant and meaningless.  

It couldn’t be easier, and yet...it’s remarkably easy to give in to the negative, the whispering, and the “what if something went wrong.”  If you’re an overthinker...and overthinking is the great Presbyterian plague...then getting your mind to focus on those things that are true and positive can be hard.   

Paul also reminds us that the path to Christ’s peace is in the doing of those things.  “Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me,” he writes.  Not just the thinking about them, or in the forming a committee to discuss them, or in the writing a memorandum to lay out the advantages of considering forming a task force to implement them.  If you want the God of peace to be with you, and to bless you with that peace that surpasses all understanding, then you have to act on that focus.

Focus your thoughts on the good that is God’s intent for your life.  Let your actions follow that focus.

It’s not always easy, because our fears and the endless whirlwind of distractions that pour at us can scatter us and shatter us.  But if we keep our hearts and minds turned towards the One who formed and keeps us, then we can both think it and do it.

Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

Credentials

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

10.02.11; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Text:  Philippians 4b-14

Hi there!  I’m David!  

I'm new around here, so let me tell you a little bit about where I'm from.  I've spent pretty much my whole life in a town about forty miles East-South-East of Poolesville.   I was born there, went to school there, and met my wife Rachel there when we were in high school.  We got married there, have both worked there, and are raising my kids there so they can be near both sets of grandparents.  I don't know if you've heard of it.  

It's a little South of Olney, pretty much due East from Centreville?  

Washington?  Washington DC?   You guys know where that is?   Cool.  You can never be sure.

Every town has it's own character, and Washington is no exception.  I don't know if y'all get this here in Poolesville, but as someone whose lived almost his entire life inside the Beltway, I come from a city where everyone seems to have an impossibly, intimidatingly stellar set of credentials.

Washingtonians are, as the Census Bureau’s most recent American Community Survey reveals, among the most educated people in the United States.  And Lord Have Mercy, are we going to let you know about it.  We have the most college educated folk, and the most people with advanced degrees.  You can't swing a cat in my home town without hitting someone with a Masters degree.   That's actually kind of a fun way to pass the time at DC parties, although in my experience it does make it less likely you'll be invited back.

We are deeply, deeply proud of our accomplishments, of our learning, and of our credentials.  Our children go to the best schools, and get the best grades.  If you spend more than twelve seconds in conversation with a Washington Parent, you'll be amazed at how tippity top notch our kids are, and how impossible it is to keep us from telling you about it.   If you talk to me, for instance, I'll probably start babbling about how my 13 year old Sam did such a great job in the lead role as MacBeth in his school's performance of MacBeth this last year, or about how my eleven year old Elijah's bongo stylings helped his group rip out a surprisingly tight and funkalicious rendition of "Play That Funky Music White Boy" in a recent battle of the bands.  

It's a universal parental compulsion, this bragging on our kids, but it feels particularly potent in the town where I grew up.  And don’t even get me started on how hard my wife works.  

We DC folk are so fixated on superlatives that we even take a perverse pride in our traffic.  A study by Texas A&M University released last week noted that Washingtonians spend more time in traffic than the denizens of any other metropolitan area.  We spend three entire days a year sitting on our tushies at a dead stop.  To be honest, I think there's a part of us that, upon hearing how appalling our traffic has become, smiles smugly and says, "Oh yeah.  We're number one."   If we dropped from the top of that list of woe, I think we'd actually be disappointed.  This may be a sign that we need to consider changing our meds.

We are all about our credentials, about our degrees, about our accomplishments.  We're proud that we got into the best schools, that we graduated summa cum laude, that our resume is one great soaring arc of attainment, from that very first White House pre-school internship to our current appointment as Vice Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Protocol in the Office of Widget Measurement and Enforcement.   

There's nothing wrong with attainment.  But in my home town, I think folks would have a bit of trouble hearing what the Apostle Paul has to say about his own attainment in his letter to the church at Philippi this morning.  

At 10,000 inhabitants, Philippi was a town roughly twice the size of Poolesville.  It sat on a major East-West thoroughfare in the Roman province of Macedonia, just about 10 miles from the seaport of Neapolis.  While it was not close to Rome, it was a Roman colony, and had deep connections to the center of Empire.  The language there was Latin, and the citizens there had the same privileges as full Roman citizens.

Paul really loved the church at Philippi.   It was a church that he himself had founded, likely in around the year 50 in the Common Era.   The letter he wrote to them was a manifestation of that love, an expression of the deep bond of affection that he felt for the community there, particularly as they supported him through times of challenge.  This letter was written during one of Paul's many imprisonments, most likely written from jail in Rome in the early 60s.

The letter is both warm and deeply personal, thanking the Philippians for both their material support of Paul in his time of imprisonment, but also thanking them for their prayers and care.  What makes this little missive so interesting theologically is its focus on expressing the nature of Jesus of Nazareth, and particularly the humility and self-giving nature of Christ.   That's the focus of the well known hymn to Christ in Philippians 2:5-11, in which Paul encourages his readers to empty themselves of themselves, and be humble even in the face of their newly found connection to God.

The purpose of today's reading is similar, but with a more pointed focus.  Paul frequently had run-ins with groups of Christians who were convinced they were superior to other Christians.  Some were the hyper-spiritual and some were the legalists, but both were convinced that they grasped Jesus in ways that rendered other Christians their inferior.  In the verses right before what you heard today, Paul is responding to some of the legalists.

Those folks argued that their adherence to the laws of the Torah made them better Christians than those who did not.  Paul’s response was taut and aggressive.  In his blood, his training, his passion, and his life, he was completely in obedience to Torah in every way.  And yet, he did not for a moment let himself succumb to the delusion that this meant diddly-squat to God.  

It was not his upbringing or his flawless credentials that mattered.  What mattered was the transformative relationship he had with that odd man from Nazareth.  Paul’s faith in the justice, grace, mercy, and love of Christ was what defined his life, and what gave him value.  It is that relationship that allowed Paul to endure, and to press on through the considerable trials and difficulties of his existence, certain that there was a purpose to his life.    The other stuff?  It was just...stuff.

As we move through our own lives, we need to keep this in focus.  There’s nothing wrong with all that effort we put into advancing ourselves, or in learning more.  It’s good stuff, up until the moment we allow it to be the thing that defines us and our value in this world.

If we have the boldness to claim ourselves as followers of Jesus, what defines us is our willingness to be humble, no matter what we know or who we are.  What defines us is our willingness to set aside place and station and training and credential, and to care those around us with the same grace Christ showed us.  It’s that heart and mind that lets us set aside our pride, and turns us to serving both one another and those who are most in need.

So...I’m David.  

I’m looking forward to working together, and moving forward together, and getting to know one another, and living out the love, justice and peace of Christ together.  That’s what lies ahead.  Let’s press on towards that goal.  Let it be so, for you, and for me.    AMEN.