Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
03.20.11; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lessons: Romans 4:1-5; 13-17
Winter is finally giving up. Spring is shoving it aside in a great wash of buds and warmth and pollen. If you step outside and into the no longer bitter air, and breathe deep in the lingering light of evening, you can smell the first few pioneers slapping firing up their grills, as the sweet heady smell of meat and barbeque mingles with the first flowered fragrances of the season.
For those of us who prefer not to spend our whole lives sitting in little metal boxes, this is also the time of year when we can finally fire up our motorcycles, get our motors running, and head out on the highway. I used to do that 12 months a year, riding in driving rain or in sub-freezing temperatures. I had the kit and the skills to handle it.
But with my boys to drop off at religious school or swimming or drum lessons, that got a bit dicey. My boys are too smart to buy the line that frostbite builds character, and “Honey, I froze the kid” is not something you ever say to your wife if you expect your next date night to go the way you want it to. And if you have to bring your magic devil box to church to project the slides for praise and worship, it really helps if that magic devil box isn’t exposed to 20-degree temperatures and 75 mile an hour winds. That’s a minus 5 fahrenheit with windchill, kids.
I’ve already lost one MacBook that way, and I’m not making that same mistake twice.
Now, though, with the passing of winter, I’ve coughed the bike to life again. Those first few rides in the air of spring are always enough to remind you why you bothered getting into motorcycling in the first place. As that motor clears it’s throat, and you hear the snarl of the inline four, and the hungry rasp of the intake when it gets on the pipe, it’s tempting to let ‘er rip. It’s tempting to just go wide open throttle and howl like a Bat out of Aitch-EE-Double--Toothpicks, slicing and dicing through traffic like a five terawatt laser through Jello. I’ll freely admit that I do open the old girl up now and again. I did manage to get from Annandale to downtown DC in 18 minutes for this week’s Presbytery meeting, at the height of rush hour. And I found a parking space instantly in Northwest DC at 5:40 pm on a Tuesday. A free parking space, no less. Man, I love my bike.
But I never, ever ride in a way ride in a way that would startle, trouble, or panic those around me. This is not because I’m afraid of the law. It’s not because I’m worried about blue and white and flashing lights. I’m not worried about being pulled over or ticketed. It’s because I’m concerned about not just my own well being, but also the well being of the car-trapped souls around me who’ve been consigned to the asphalt and steel circle of Dante’s Inferno.
I don’t want to offend them. I don’t want to freak them out, or have them brake suddenly, or swerve and curse and hate those inconsiderate bikers. Life is stressful enough without me adding to it. I do not do this because it’s the law. I don’t do that because I’m afraid I’ll get in trouble. I do that because that’s just the right thing to do.
The Apostle Paul thought and taught a great deal about the place of the law in the life of Christians, and nowhere does he go deeper into that thought than in his letter to the church at Rome. It is, as you heard last week, a powerfully complicated and convoluted letter. It does not read easily or simply, because it wasn’t meant to. This letter was written as the height of Paul’s theology, and is intended to open his readers up to the continuum between the traditions of the people of Israel and the non-Jewish people who found themselves drawn to follow Jesus. This week’s passage is also not easy, a circling and often challenging text.
The issue, for Paul, is how we get into right relationship with God. What connects us to God? What allows us to find our purpose, and to know the how and the why of our lives? For that, Paul goes back to Abraham, back to the most ancient ancestor of the Hebrew people, the one from whom the whole covenant people sprang.
How, asks Paul, was Abraham connected to God? Was that relationship a relationship defined by a set of rules, measured by the requirements of the Torah? No. How could it have been? There wasn’t the Law. Torah did not yet exist.
Instead, what Paul suggests is that what mattered in the relationship between Abraham and God was not that Abraham did one thing or refrained from doing another. It was not because Abraham followed a particular set of rules to keep from offending God. It was not because he followed the law.
Laws, after all, are the way that we keep order in the world. They exist to keep things in balance, and to keep people from doing harm to one another. If we break a law, then we can expect to get punished. You speed, you get a ticket. You really really speed, and you lose your license. You hurt someone, you go to jail. You kill someone, and your own life may be taken away. As Paul says in verse 15, the law brings wrath. If you fear the wrath, you act to avoid it. That is the relationship we often have with the law, particularly on a big straight stretch of road on a beautiful spring day.
But faith, the kind of faith that saves, is not that kind of relationship. Faith is not based on fear of punishment. It is based on our willingness to receive the gift of God’s grace. What did Abraham do to merit God’s grace? Nothing. He did nothing. Well, that’s not true, entirely.
He did have faith. Faith is not an action among other actions, but a way of defining yourself in relation to God. It’s a bit like trust, but it goes deeper. It’s trust in the same way that you trust that your heart will beat, or you trust that you’ll remember to breathe when you sleep, or the way that you trust that your hand is just a part of you. Faith is the orientation of your whole self, of your whole being, towards God. In that state, God’s gracious love is far easier to receive...because we’re already turned towards it.
Living like that puts us outside of the law. It makes us anarchists, in a way, but not in the angry black clad radical Molotov cocktail throwing way. It makes us anarchists, but not in the goony V-for-Vendetta-Guy-Fawkes-mask-wearing way. Those so-called anarchists who think their freedom gives them the right to hate and destroy are just as caught in the trap of worldly power as dictators and despots. If you are a true anarchist the way that the Apostle Paul was an anarchist, that just means that the law no longer matters, as, in fact, it really doesn’t matter if you are a truly moral person.
If you don’t do something that effects other people only because you’re afraid of getting busted, then you aren’t really moral. If you see someone fall, you don’t stop to check to see if they’re OK because you’re afraid they might sue you otherwise. When the leadership of this church makes sure that we deal effectively with damaged ceilings so that the asbestos they contain doesn’t harm folks here, they aren’t doing it because regulations and laws say so.
You do those things, if you are a person of faith, because you want to.
What matters in our relationship with God is not that we do what God wants of us, but why we do what God wants of us. What matters is our heart. First and foremost, we are to love God. And love is not something you can legislate or regulate. It can’t be coerced or forced and remain love. The God we know most fully in Jesus Christ does not do that.
Really loving God, and through that loving neighbor, fulfills all of the requirements of both the sacred law of Torah and the laws of whatever nation we find ourselves in. At the end of Romans 13, in verses 8-10, after talking of the laws of the state, the Apostle Paul says his final word on this:
“Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.”
Such a radical, that Paul. But that’s the rallying cry of the revolution that Christ began. It might be fun to join the two of them, and in joining them, change the world. AMEN.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Monday, March 7, 2011
Afraid of Our Light
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
03.06.11; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Matthew 17:1-9
Why is it that it is so very hard for us to embrace what is good? Or, to put it another way, why are we so frightened of the good?
We have no problem at all getting excited about things that are completely messed up. Think, if you will, to our tendency to hunger for juicy gossip. Do we want to hear the news about the couple that is happily married, that is doing great, that has kids who are doing fine?
Or do we want to dish about the stuff that is dripping with dysfunction and intrigue? Would we rather hear about the conflicts and the betrayals and the “Oh my God that is SO like her” and the “Of course that’s EXACTLY what he always does?” Human beings like the dirt and the darkness, the trainwrecks and the spectacular failures.
We do. It’s clear. And if ever anything made it more clear, the recent stratospheric rise of Charlie Sheen’s star is incontrovertible proof that we loves us some mess. Charlie Sheen, in the event that you live on a mountaintop and have a life untainted by the madness of popular culture, has been acting since before many of y’all were born. He got his first major roles in the 1980s. He took up a rifle in the glorious hoo-hah NRA fantasy “Red Dawn.” He had a significant bit part in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” He starred alongside Willem DaFoe in the Vietnam flick “Platoon,” the movie I watched on my very first date with my very first serious high school girlfriend.
I don’t remember his role on Platoon so much, for some reason. I think something must have been distracting me.
And then, well, it was straight to the B-list. In 2003, he started starring in Two and a Half Men, a decent but run-of-the-mill CBS sitcom. Making lots of money, but still, not really famous. Still, basically B-list.
Until addiction and partying and total collapse, that is. And instead of going into rehab, Sheen chose the Red Pill. He just let himself completely flagrantly descend into complete splattery personal disaster. To revel in his meltdown. To bliss out on neglecting his kids and pouring as many intoxicants into his body as possible. To use his newfound fame to curry the favor of young women from a particular corner of the entertainment industry. To spew out his crazy all over the internet and on as many shows as his publicist can get him on.
And we’re eating it up with a spoon. This last Thursday, Sheen set a new record on the ADHD micro-blogging site Twitter. In just over 25 hours, over one million people subscribed to his increasingly bizarre and delusional ranting. One. Million. In a day. Because we love collapse. We love failure. The more spectacular, the better. We’re cool with glorious failure.
But what makes us uncomfortable and uncertain is actual winning.
Take, for instance, the peculiar scene that occurs in today’s scripture from the Gospel of Matthew. This passage finds us following along with Jesus, Peter, James and John as they go off on a retreat together. They remove themselves to a place described only as a “high mountain,” where things suddenly get a little bit intense.
This story within the scriptures is called “The Transfiguration,” because that’s precisely what happens to Jesus. He suddenly appears completely different. We hear, in Matthew 17:2, and in the mirror passages in Mark 9:3 and Luke 9:29, that Jesus is suddenly too bright to look at. This “brightness,” both of clothing and of his face, is a consistent marker throughout the Bible of holiness. Where the divine is present, be it God or an angelic figure, it is consistently described as being suffused in light.
This is followed by the arrival of two individuals, who are described as Moses and Elijah. The disciples see Jesus speaking with both of them. Why Moses? Why Elijah? Those two figures are absolutely central to Judaism. Moses was the one who led the people to the promised land, the liberator from slavery, the receiver of the Commandments and the Law. Elijah, was the most potent of the prophets, who stories told had never died, but would return to proclaim the coming of the Messiah. One is linked with the covenant, the other with the final fulfillment of covenant.
Peter starts suggesting that they might build something, in this case, “booths,” or “sukkot,” which are ritual shelters used during Jewish festivals. But before he can set to building, there is more brightness, this time from a radiant cloud, and the words “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” are spoken for the second time in Matthew’s Gospel.
The first time is during Christ’s baptism in the Jordan, in Matthew 3:17. There, it seems more personal, more about the connection between Jesus and God, and less about others hearing. Here in Matthew 17, it’s something directed to the disciples, and reinforced with the admonition: “Listen to him!” The appearance of a cloud is not random, either, not just an indication of fog at higher altitudes. It’s an event which is mirrored in Exodus 24, when Moses went up the mountain to receive the Law. The bright consuming cloud is a sign and mark of the presence of the Creator.
If you are Peter and James and John, this is without question all really good stuff. All of these things couldn’t possibly be any better. First, they get a clear and unmistakable sign that Jesus is holy. Then, they see a vision of Jesus with the two most significant historical figures for first century Jews. Finally, they hear a voice from a cloud, affirming Jesus as being something...well...extraordinarily good.
That moment of transfiguration acts serves a real purpose in Matthew’s Gospel. It’s the stamp and official seal of approval on who Jesus is. The marks of Holiness, fulfillment of Torah and the Covenant, and the voice and presence of God, these are all powerful affirmations of Christ’s identity and his Kingdom proclamations.
It couldn’t get any better than that. That’s winning. So are they excited? Are they all pumped up? Hardly. They’re terrified. Their knees buckle, and they fall flat on their faces. That’s because there’s something in getting things right that we find terrifying.
Because as deeply as Jesus embraced his transformation, the point and purpose of following Jesus of Nazareth is to be similarly transformed. And that scares the bejabbers out of us. It just seems so impossible. We’re afraid to even set foot down that path.
It’s far easier to get nice and comfortable with our personal demons, the array of failings that claim to define us. It’s easier to let ourselves be judgmental and condescending towards those we deem to be our social or spiritual inferiors. It’s easier to be bitter towards our enemies. It’s easier to whisper and complain and subvert, until every word that comes out of our mouth is poison. It’s easier to take pride in our frighteningly high alcohol tolerance, or our ability to ingest mass quantities of illicit substances, until the wonderfully made body in which we live begins to fail, and our mind goes to gibbering ruin.
But though we may find the crazy that comes with self-destruction fascinating, self-immolation is not the same thing as being transformed.
From faith, we know that that the truth of our transformation...the movement towards the self that we are not but desire to be...rests in our connection to our Creator. The person that you desire to be but are not, the just, kind, centered, constantly loving and grace-radiant person that you struggle to become...that person is known to your Maker as surely as you are. They are as real as you are. Getting there is not easy, any more than climbing is easy. But effort...some effort...is needed. Just ‘cause it flows easy doesn’t make it right.
There is nothing easier than falling. Climbing that mountain, and finding the self that God has in store for you, well, that’s hard. You have to trust that it is there. And you have to dedicate yourself, day by day by day, in a hundred tiny actions, to moving towards it.
But that’s what it means to be winning. Let that be our goal. AMEN.
03.06.11; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Matthew 17:1-9
Why is it that it is so very hard for us to embrace what is good? Or, to put it another way, why are we so frightened of the good?
We have no problem at all getting excited about things that are completely messed up. Think, if you will, to our tendency to hunger for juicy gossip. Do we want to hear the news about the couple that is happily married, that is doing great, that has kids who are doing fine?
Or do we want to dish about the stuff that is dripping with dysfunction and intrigue? Would we rather hear about the conflicts and the betrayals and the “Oh my God that is SO like her” and the “Of course that’s EXACTLY what he always does?” Human beings like the dirt and the darkness, the trainwrecks and the spectacular failures.
We do. It’s clear. And if ever anything made it more clear, the recent stratospheric rise of Charlie Sheen’s star is incontrovertible proof that we loves us some mess. Charlie Sheen, in the event that you live on a mountaintop and have a life untainted by the madness of popular culture, has been acting since before many of y’all were born. He got his first major roles in the 1980s. He took up a rifle in the glorious hoo-hah NRA fantasy “Red Dawn.” He had a significant bit part in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” He starred alongside Willem DaFoe in the Vietnam flick “Platoon,” the movie I watched on my very first date with my very first serious high school girlfriend.
I don’t remember his role on Platoon so much, for some reason. I think something must have been distracting me.
And then, well, it was straight to the B-list. In 2003, he started starring in Two and a Half Men, a decent but run-of-the-mill CBS sitcom. Making lots of money, but still, not really famous. Still, basically B-list.
Until addiction and partying and total collapse, that is. And instead of going into rehab, Sheen chose the Red Pill. He just let himself completely flagrantly descend into complete splattery personal disaster. To revel in his meltdown. To bliss out on neglecting his kids and pouring as many intoxicants into his body as possible. To use his newfound fame to curry the favor of young women from a particular corner of the entertainment industry. To spew out his crazy all over the internet and on as many shows as his publicist can get him on.
And we’re eating it up with a spoon. This last Thursday, Sheen set a new record on the ADHD micro-blogging site Twitter. In just over 25 hours, over one million people subscribed to his increasingly bizarre and delusional ranting. One. Million. In a day. Because we love collapse. We love failure. The more spectacular, the better. We’re cool with glorious failure.
But what makes us uncomfortable and uncertain is actual winning.
Take, for instance, the peculiar scene that occurs in today’s scripture from the Gospel of Matthew. This passage finds us following along with Jesus, Peter, James and John as they go off on a retreat together. They remove themselves to a place described only as a “high mountain,” where things suddenly get a little bit intense.
This story within the scriptures is called “The Transfiguration,” because that’s precisely what happens to Jesus. He suddenly appears completely different. We hear, in Matthew 17:2, and in the mirror passages in Mark 9:3 and Luke 9:29, that Jesus is suddenly too bright to look at. This “brightness,” both of clothing and of his face, is a consistent marker throughout the Bible of holiness. Where the divine is present, be it God or an angelic figure, it is consistently described as being suffused in light.
This is followed by the arrival of two individuals, who are described as Moses and Elijah. The disciples see Jesus speaking with both of them. Why Moses? Why Elijah? Those two figures are absolutely central to Judaism. Moses was the one who led the people to the promised land, the liberator from slavery, the receiver of the Commandments and the Law. Elijah, was the most potent of the prophets, who stories told had never died, but would return to proclaim the coming of the Messiah. One is linked with the covenant, the other with the final fulfillment of covenant.
Peter starts suggesting that they might build something, in this case, “booths,” or “sukkot,” which are ritual shelters used during Jewish festivals. But before he can set to building, there is more brightness, this time from a radiant cloud, and the words “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” are spoken for the second time in Matthew’s Gospel.
The first time is during Christ’s baptism in the Jordan, in Matthew 3:17. There, it seems more personal, more about the connection between Jesus and God, and less about others hearing. Here in Matthew 17, it’s something directed to the disciples, and reinforced with the admonition: “Listen to him!” The appearance of a cloud is not random, either, not just an indication of fog at higher altitudes. It’s an event which is mirrored in Exodus 24, when Moses went up the mountain to receive the Law. The bright consuming cloud is a sign and mark of the presence of the Creator.
If you are Peter and James and John, this is without question all really good stuff. All of these things couldn’t possibly be any better. First, they get a clear and unmistakable sign that Jesus is holy. Then, they see a vision of Jesus with the two most significant historical figures for first century Jews. Finally, they hear a voice from a cloud, affirming Jesus as being something...well...extraordinarily good.
That moment of transfiguration acts serves a real purpose in Matthew’s Gospel. It’s the stamp and official seal of approval on who Jesus is. The marks of Holiness, fulfillment of Torah and the Covenant, and the voice and presence of God, these are all powerful affirmations of Christ’s identity and his Kingdom proclamations.
It couldn’t get any better than that. That’s winning. So are they excited? Are they all pumped up? Hardly. They’re terrified. Their knees buckle, and they fall flat on their faces. That’s because there’s something in getting things right that we find terrifying.
Because as deeply as Jesus embraced his transformation, the point and purpose of following Jesus of Nazareth is to be similarly transformed. And that scares the bejabbers out of us. It just seems so impossible. We’re afraid to even set foot down that path.
It’s far easier to get nice and comfortable with our personal demons, the array of failings that claim to define us. It’s easier to let ourselves be judgmental and condescending towards those we deem to be our social or spiritual inferiors. It’s easier to be bitter towards our enemies. It’s easier to whisper and complain and subvert, until every word that comes out of our mouth is poison. It’s easier to take pride in our frighteningly high alcohol tolerance, or our ability to ingest mass quantities of illicit substances, until the wonderfully made body in which we live begins to fail, and our mind goes to gibbering ruin.
But though we may find the crazy that comes with self-destruction fascinating, self-immolation is not the same thing as being transformed.
From faith, we know that that the truth of our transformation...the movement towards the self that we are not but desire to be...rests in our connection to our Creator. The person that you desire to be but are not, the just, kind, centered, constantly loving and grace-radiant person that you struggle to become...that person is known to your Maker as surely as you are. They are as real as you are. Getting there is not easy, any more than climbing is easy. But effort...some effort...is needed. Just ‘cause it flows easy doesn’t make it right.
There is nothing easier than falling. Climbing that mountain, and finding the self that God has in store for you, well, that’s hard. You have to trust that it is there. And you have to dedicate yourself, day by day by day, in a hundred tiny actions, to moving towards it.
But that’s what it means to be winning. Let that be our goal. AMEN.
Friday, March 4, 2011
Anxiety
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
02.27.11; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Matthew 6:24-34
If you are a practically minded person, the words from Jesus today can be a little frustrating. Here we are in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount. We’re in the midst of the heart of Christ’s teaching, the essence of the Gospel, where Jesus lays out for us the core teachings of the Bible.
This may, in fact be a teaching that Jesus delivered many times. In the Gospel of Luke, Luke 6:17-49 contains many of the same teachings, in basically the same order. That version is known, generally, as the Sermon on the Plain. It’s only 30 verses, instead of the just-over 100 verses we find in Matthew. So in Luke’s retelling, the essence and the heart of the teachings is there. Just not the passage we heard this morning. That gets taught elsewhere, in Luke 12:22-32.
But whether it’s in Matthew or in Luke, it’s most certainly from Jesus...and it makes us a bit crazy. Just what is Jesus saying here? Don’t worry, be happy? Don’t worry about it? Don’t worry about your life? To the ears of folks who are out there working and organizing and planning for their lives, this slacker Jesus sounds way too much like the Dude from the Big Lebowski.
“Like, dude, just, like, don’t sweat it, man. It’ll, like, take care of itself, if, you know, you just, like, abide.”
If you’re a practical person, this kind of thinking makes you crazy. You know that things need to be planned. You need to work hard. You need to keep your eyes on the prize. You need to constantly be thinking ahead. You need to get ready for tomorrow. The food doesn’t just buy itself. The mortgage doesn’t just pay itself. People who don’t plan and don’t prepare end up eating out of dumpsters. And not even the nice dumpsters.
But what Jesus is talking about here is not being practical and prepared and prudent. Life requires those things. He’s talking about anxiety.
There are few things that can tear apart a life more completely and totally than anxiety. Please note...we’re not talking about being stressed here. Being anxious is a very different thing than being stressed.
Stress is when you have ten million things demanding your attention. The house is a mess, and the laundry is piled up like the Rockies, only stinkier, and you’ve got a test tomorrow for school, and the baby is crying, and your boss just sent you a text saying that you’ve got to meet with a client in Uzbekistan next Thursday.
That’s stress. It’s the Washingtonian way, and it’s a problem if you want to live a sane and balanced life. But it’s not anxiety.
Anxiety is different. Anxiety has very little to do with what is real, and a whole bunch to do with the things that are not real. Not yet. Anxiety is the gnawing uncertainty about the future, the fear of those things that are not, but may be. It’s that sense of consuming, all encompassing panic about “what if.”
Those “what if’s” can consume our personal lives. We all feel them.
What if I don’t get little Tyler into the right tutoring program and he/she doesn’t get into college and ends up living in the basement until he/she is forty seven? What if someone steals little Tyler and sells their body parts, just like they’re always on about on the tee-vee? What if I tell him I love him, and he just laughs? What if she falls in love with someone else and leaves me? What if that isn’t a zit, but a rare form of cancer? What if I can’t get another job here and I end up hungry, strung-out, and preaching semicoherent fire and brimstone out of the back of a beat-up 1972 Chevy pickup to a bunch of bikers in some small Alabama town?
That last one is probably just me.
We obsess about the what ifs, and not just in our personal lives. Spend a few moments watching the fevered panic on CNBC and CNN.
What if the government shuts down and they stop paying their contractors and the whole national economy grinds to a halt? What if the uprising in Egypt and Libya spreads to Saudi Arabia? That could drive up gas prices to five or six bucks a gallon, which would mean we’d have to drive less and conserve more and do all the things we know we’re supposed to do to be good stewards of God’s creation that we can’t quite get around to now.
Oh, the horror!
Fear of what the future might bring is absolutely paralyzing. It can consume us. It will, if we let us destroy us. Why? Because a life lived without hope goes nowhere, and anxiety is the precise and exact opposite of hope. Just as hope is the anticipation of something better, anxiety is the fear that the future brings with it something far worse.
That anxiety, within the context of Christ’s teachings, comes from focusing so much on your needs and your desires that the whole world revolves around you. If all you think about is what you need and what you desire, then of course you’ll be anxious. Focusing on the things of this world is a sure way to be sure that you’ll be filled with worry. If your whole live revolves around material things, you’ll find that they give you no ground, no foundation, no basis for anything other than fretting about existence.
If we let ourselves be grounded in the day-to-day, then we’re grounded in nothing. We’re grounded in endless, cycling change. Yeah, every day is same-ol’, same-ol’, but the truth of it is that every day brings it’s own needs, it’s own worries, it’s own new and different concerns.
What Jesus tells us to do instead is to move beyond our own desires for self. Self seeking leads to anxiety. Instead, we are told to seek first the Kingdom of God and it’s righteousness. That means...in case y’all have somehow missed it...loving God with all our hearts and all our minds and pretty much everything we’ve got, and loving our neighbors as ourselves.
That means a couple of things, practically speaking.
First, as we move through our day to day lives, we have to take a hard look at what it is we’re focusing on and thinking about. Take a look at, oh, I don’t know, yesterday. Or the day before. How much of your energy, your time, your passion, and your effort was put into making this world a teensy bit more like the Kingdom Jesus proclaimed? How much of your thought yesterday revolved around the ways you could...right in that moment...make your life and the lives of those around you more gracious. More just. Compare that with how much thought went into picking out your outfit. Or prepping for your taxes. Or modding your car. Or wishing you had another job. Or just a job.
Are you focused on the things that matter to God? Or just the thousand trivial anxieties that consume us? It makes a difference. If so, be aware, and change.
Second, as we together, meaning all of us here in this particular room, call ourselves some sort of church...how much of our energies and passions are focused on the anxieties of churchy life? Do we worry about how many people are here? Or, rather, are not here? Do we fret about how much time and energy and effort are required to keep this huge honking mess of a building going? Do we figure out what it is that someone else is doing wrong, and use that as an excuse to wring our hands and shake our heads sadly and not do what it is that God wants us to do right now?
Then we are distracted. Then we are not focusing on what needs to be focused on.
If you have your priorities straight, then your actions are what they need to be, and things will take care of themselves. If you seek first what you need to be seeking, anxiety dies, and hope abides. Let it be so. AMEN.
02.27.11; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Matthew 6:24-34
If you are a practically minded person, the words from Jesus today can be a little frustrating. Here we are in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount. We’re in the midst of the heart of Christ’s teaching, the essence of the Gospel, where Jesus lays out for us the core teachings of the Bible.
This may, in fact be a teaching that Jesus delivered many times. In the Gospel of Luke, Luke 6:17-49 contains many of the same teachings, in basically the same order. That version is known, generally, as the Sermon on the Plain. It’s only 30 verses, instead of the just-over 100 verses we find in Matthew. So in Luke’s retelling, the essence and the heart of the teachings is there. Just not the passage we heard this morning. That gets taught elsewhere, in Luke 12:22-32.
But whether it’s in Matthew or in Luke, it’s most certainly from Jesus...and it makes us a bit crazy. Just what is Jesus saying here? Don’t worry, be happy? Don’t worry about it? Don’t worry about your life? To the ears of folks who are out there working and organizing and planning for their lives, this slacker Jesus sounds way too much like the Dude from the Big Lebowski.
“Like, dude, just, like, don’t sweat it, man. It’ll, like, take care of itself, if, you know, you just, like, abide.”
If you’re a practical person, this kind of thinking makes you crazy. You know that things need to be planned. You need to work hard. You need to keep your eyes on the prize. You need to constantly be thinking ahead. You need to get ready for tomorrow. The food doesn’t just buy itself. The mortgage doesn’t just pay itself. People who don’t plan and don’t prepare end up eating out of dumpsters. And not even the nice dumpsters.
But what Jesus is talking about here is not being practical and prepared and prudent. Life requires those things. He’s talking about anxiety.
There are few things that can tear apart a life more completely and totally than anxiety. Please note...we’re not talking about being stressed here. Being anxious is a very different thing than being stressed.
Stress is when you have ten million things demanding your attention. The house is a mess, and the laundry is piled up like the Rockies, only stinkier, and you’ve got a test tomorrow for school, and the baby is crying, and your boss just sent you a text saying that you’ve got to meet with a client in Uzbekistan next Thursday.
That’s stress. It’s the Washingtonian way, and it’s a problem if you want to live a sane and balanced life. But it’s not anxiety.
Anxiety is different. Anxiety has very little to do with what is real, and a whole bunch to do with the things that are not real. Not yet. Anxiety is the gnawing uncertainty about the future, the fear of those things that are not, but may be. It’s that sense of consuming, all encompassing panic about “what if.”
Those “what if’s” can consume our personal lives. We all feel them.
What if I don’t get little Tyler into the right tutoring program and he/she doesn’t get into college and ends up living in the basement until he/she is forty seven? What if someone steals little Tyler and sells their body parts, just like they’re always on about on the tee-vee? What if I tell him I love him, and he just laughs? What if she falls in love with someone else and leaves me? What if that isn’t a zit, but a rare form of cancer? What if I can’t get another job here and I end up hungry, strung-out, and preaching semicoherent fire and brimstone out of the back of a beat-up 1972 Chevy pickup to a bunch of bikers in some small Alabama town?
That last one is probably just me.
We obsess about the what ifs, and not just in our personal lives. Spend a few moments watching the fevered panic on CNBC and CNN.
What if the government shuts down and they stop paying their contractors and the whole national economy grinds to a halt? What if the uprising in Egypt and Libya spreads to Saudi Arabia? That could drive up gas prices to five or six bucks a gallon, which would mean we’d have to drive less and conserve more and do all the things we know we’re supposed to do to be good stewards of God’s creation that we can’t quite get around to now.
Oh, the horror!
Fear of what the future might bring is absolutely paralyzing. It can consume us. It will, if we let us destroy us. Why? Because a life lived without hope goes nowhere, and anxiety is the precise and exact opposite of hope. Just as hope is the anticipation of something better, anxiety is the fear that the future brings with it something far worse.
That anxiety, within the context of Christ’s teachings, comes from focusing so much on your needs and your desires that the whole world revolves around you. If all you think about is what you need and what you desire, then of course you’ll be anxious. Focusing on the things of this world is a sure way to be sure that you’ll be filled with worry. If your whole live revolves around material things, you’ll find that they give you no ground, no foundation, no basis for anything other than fretting about existence.
If we let ourselves be grounded in the day-to-day, then we’re grounded in nothing. We’re grounded in endless, cycling change. Yeah, every day is same-ol’, same-ol’, but the truth of it is that every day brings it’s own needs, it’s own worries, it’s own new and different concerns.
What Jesus tells us to do instead is to move beyond our own desires for self. Self seeking leads to anxiety. Instead, we are told to seek first the Kingdom of God and it’s righteousness. That means...in case y’all have somehow missed it...loving God with all our hearts and all our minds and pretty much everything we’ve got, and loving our neighbors as ourselves.
That means a couple of things, practically speaking.
First, as we move through our day to day lives, we have to take a hard look at what it is we’re focusing on and thinking about. Take a look at, oh, I don’t know, yesterday. Or the day before. How much of your energy, your time, your passion, and your effort was put into making this world a teensy bit more like the Kingdom Jesus proclaimed? How much of your thought yesterday revolved around the ways you could...right in that moment...make your life and the lives of those around you more gracious. More just. Compare that with how much thought went into picking out your outfit. Or prepping for your taxes. Or modding your car. Or wishing you had another job. Or just a job.
Are you focused on the things that matter to God? Or just the thousand trivial anxieties that consume us? It makes a difference. If so, be aware, and change.
Second, as we together, meaning all of us here in this particular room, call ourselves some sort of church...how much of our energies and passions are focused on the anxieties of churchy life? Do we worry about how many people are here? Or, rather, are not here? Do we fret about how much time and energy and effort are required to keep this huge honking mess of a building going? Do we figure out what it is that someone else is doing wrong, and use that as an excuse to wring our hands and shake our heads sadly and not do what it is that God wants us to do right now?
Then we are distracted. Then we are not focusing on what needs to be focused on.
If you have your priorities straight, then your actions are what they need to be, and things will take care of themselves. If you seek first what you need to be seeking, anxiety dies, and hope abides. Let it be so. AMEN.
With Friends Like These
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
02.20.11; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Matthew 5:38-48
We all enjoy having friends. Heck, we don’t just enjoy it. We need it. It’s a baseline necessity of the human experience. We’re social animals, creatures that really enjoy the company of others of our kind.
That’s why solitary confinement is such a terrible, difficult, horrible punishment, something that breaks the mind and the spirit. One of the hardest things you can do to a human being is to isolate them, to force them into a little box where real human relationships are nearly impossible to develop. You know, like spending forty hours a week in a telemarketing call-center cubicle, where the only voices you hear really don’t want to be talking to you.
There are some things we just shouldn’t inflict on other human beings.
Having a healthy network of people with whom we play and laugh and socialize is something that most of us need to be happy and healthy. We like having a group of people around us who will always have our backs, who will always be there for us, who will do pretty much anything to help us out when the going gets tough. Wherever you are, and whatever you’re doing, friendships make life...better.
School without the friendships you’ve made would be just brutal. No one wants to be the guy sitting alone at the table in the far corner of the cafeteria. Friendships in the workplace make the day to day of our working lives far more tolerable. If you can get together with your buddies after work and laugh at the boss over a few cold ones, it makes work almost tolerable. And yes, even here, even in church, friendships seem to be vital to our happiness.
Study after study has shown that churchgoing folks are happier and more content in life. Take the findings of a recent book by sociology professors Chaeyoon Lim and Robert Putnam entitled Amazing Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. That book reviewed results from thousands of interviews with church going folks. What they found was that going to church didn’t necessarily make you a happier person. What makes folks really content in life was if they not only went to church, but they developed meaningful relationships in church.
People who went to church regularly but had no close friends in the church were less than half as likely to say they were very satisfied with their lives. This comes as no surprise. Isolated people just don’t tend to be happy people.
So the data is clear. What’s best and most happiness-making about church is having church friends.
And here, we encounter a problem. The name of that problem is, as it so often is, Jesus.
We heard Jesus today, once again, from the Sermon on the Mount. Running from Matthew chapter 5 to Matthew chapter 7, this collection of teachings is the heart and soul of the Gospel, the essence of what Jesus taught, and how Jesus expected us to live.
Today’s passage continues the pattern we’ve seen earlier in the Sermon. In each of the two sections presented, Jesus starts by saying “You have heard that it was said,” and then takes it to the next level by saying, “But I tell you...” He begins by presenting us with the Biblical teaching on revenge in Matthew 38 through 42.
We’ve all heard the saying, an “Eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” It comes from Exodus 21:24, and Leviticus 24:20, and Deuteronomy 19:21. We tend to interpret it as meaning revenge pure and simple and sweet, in the “You hit me, I take you out” kind of way.
But the real meaning of that saying is different. The intent and purpose of that saying is not revenge. It’s measured justice. It means, if someone harms you, you are only to seek balance. That means you don’t take more than you are due. You don’t poke out both of their eyes, then sue them and take their house. Justice, as presented by the Torah, is balance and fairness.
But Jesus goes further. If you want more than simple justice, if you actually want healing and reconciliation and not just balance, if you want to aggressively and intentionally make things better and tip the balance to the side of grace, then you need to press it. You need to pour out your grace, even to those who seem to be taking more from you than is their right.
Then, in verses 43 through 48, Jesus talks about friendship. Throughout Torah, the commandment to love those near to you is made clear. You are to care for your kin, and for those close to you, and for those in need. But Jesus takes it further, because he knows what human beings are like.
We all have friends. We all have people who we like, and who like us, and who are like us. Everyone does. It’s the nature of human beings. We all look out for each other, particularly if the “each other” means “people like us who like us.” It’s the nature of friendship.
But that isn’t the standard and measure of the Christian walk, because standing by your friends can be morally meaningless. Take, for instance, the difficult story that just came to light out of the University of Virginia, my alma mater. In an article in Marie Claire...my wife subscribes, and I read whatever is in front of me because you never know what you might encounter...a woman described being drugged and sexually assaulted by a brother at one of the big fraternities on fraternity row, three years before I attended. Her efforts to find out who had attacked her...and those of the police...met a brick wall of silence at the fraternity. No-one was talking. No-one knew anything.
Years later, a guilty conscience led her assailant to reveal himself, and to submit himself to justice. But at the time...well...he got by with a little help from his friends.
Looking out for the folks who are right around us, and who are part of us, well, that’s easy. Even the Taliban do that.
But caring for and showing grace to and being moved by Christ’s love for those who are different, who we do not like, who are not “us,” or who are actually our enemy...that’s a much harder challenge. It’s much easier just to fight them.
But when we do so, we are not acting as God would have us act. What Jesus is demanding of us is the same sort of transforming, powerful, relentless love that he offered up to us, even as we crucified him.
He asks us to be that person, moved by and changed by the same Spirit that led him to ask forgiveness for those who took him.
And that is just not easy.
Still. It’s what he asks of us. And if we want to be disciples, then we have to take that seriously. It’s what shows the world we have a clue what he was talking about. We have to live it. Let it be so. AMEN.
02.20.11; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Matthew 5:38-48
We all enjoy having friends. Heck, we don’t just enjoy it. We need it. It’s a baseline necessity of the human experience. We’re social animals, creatures that really enjoy the company of others of our kind.
That’s why solitary confinement is such a terrible, difficult, horrible punishment, something that breaks the mind and the spirit. One of the hardest things you can do to a human being is to isolate them, to force them into a little box where real human relationships are nearly impossible to develop. You know, like spending forty hours a week in a telemarketing call-center cubicle, where the only voices you hear really don’t want to be talking to you.
There are some things we just shouldn’t inflict on other human beings.
Having a healthy network of people with whom we play and laugh and socialize is something that most of us need to be happy and healthy. We like having a group of people around us who will always have our backs, who will always be there for us, who will do pretty much anything to help us out when the going gets tough. Wherever you are, and whatever you’re doing, friendships make life...better.
School without the friendships you’ve made would be just brutal. No one wants to be the guy sitting alone at the table in the far corner of the cafeteria. Friendships in the workplace make the day to day of our working lives far more tolerable. If you can get together with your buddies after work and laugh at the boss over a few cold ones, it makes work almost tolerable. And yes, even here, even in church, friendships seem to be vital to our happiness.
Study after study has shown that churchgoing folks are happier and more content in life. Take the findings of a recent book by sociology professors Chaeyoon Lim and Robert Putnam entitled Amazing Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. That book reviewed results from thousands of interviews with church going folks. What they found was that going to church didn’t necessarily make you a happier person. What makes folks really content in life was if they not only went to church, but they developed meaningful relationships in church.
People who went to church regularly but had no close friends in the church were less than half as likely to say they were very satisfied with their lives. This comes as no surprise. Isolated people just don’t tend to be happy people.
So the data is clear. What’s best and most happiness-making about church is having church friends.
And here, we encounter a problem. The name of that problem is, as it so often is, Jesus.
We heard Jesus today, once again, from the Sermon on the Mount. Running from Matthew chapter 5 to Matthew chapter 7, this collection of teachings is the heart and soul of the Gospel, the essence of what Jesus taught, and how Jesus expected us to live.
Today’s passage continues the pattern we’ve seen earlier in the Sermon. In each of the two sections presented, Jesus starts by saying “You have heard that it was said,” and then takes it to the next level by saying, “But I tell you...” He begins by presenting us with the Biblical teaching on revenge in Matthew 38 through 42.
We’ve all heard the saying, an “Eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” It comes from Exodus 21:24, and Leviticus 24:20, and Deuteronomy 19:21. We tend to interpret it as meaning revenge pure and simple and sweet, in the “You hit me, I take you out” kind of way.
But the real meaning of that saying is different. The intent and purpose of that saying is not revenge. It’s measured justice. It means, if someone harms you, you are only to seek balance. That means you don’t take more than you are due. You don’t poke out both of their eyes, then sue them and take their house. Justice, as presented by the Torah, is balance and fairness.
But Jesus goes further. If you want more than simple justice, if you actually want healing and reconciliation and not just balance, if you want to aggressively and intentionally make things better and tip the balance to the side of grace, then you need to press it. You need to pour out your grace, even to those who seem to be taking more from you than is their right.
Then, in verses 43 through 48, Jesus talks about friendship. Throughout Torah, the commandment to love those near to you is made clear. You are to care for your kin, and for those close to you, and for those in need. But Jesus takes it further, because he knows what human beings are like.
We all have friends. We all have people who we like, and who like us, and who are like us. Everyone does. It’s the nature of human beings. We all look out for each other, particularly if the “each other” means “people like us who like us.” It’s the nature of friendship.
But that isn’t the standard and measure of the Christian walk, because standing by your friends can be morally meaningless. Take, for instance, the difficult story that just came to light out of the University of Virginia, my alma mater. In an article in Marie Claire...my wife subscribes, and I read whatever is in front of me because you never know what you might encounter...a woman described being drugged and sexually assaulted by a brother at one of the big fraternities on fraternity row, three years before I attended. Her efforts to find out who had attacked her...and those of the police...met a brick wall of silence at the fraternity. No-one was talking. No-one knew anything.
Years later, a guilty conscience led her assailant to reveal himself, and to submit himself to justice. But at the time...well...he got by with a little help from his friends.
Looking out for the folks who are right around us, and who are part of us, well, that’s easy. Even the Taliban do that.
But caring for and showing grace to and being moved by Christ’s love for those who are different, who we do not like, who are not “us,” or who are actually our enemy...that’s a much harder challenge. It’s much easier just to fight them.
But when we do so, we are not acting as God would have us act. What Jesus is demanding of us is the same sort of transforming, powerful, relentless love that he offered up to us, even as we crucified him.
He asks us to be that person, moved by and changed by the same Spirit that led him to ask forgiveness for those who took him.
And that is just not easy.
Still. It’s what he asks of us. And if we want to be disciples, then we have to take that seriously. It’s what shows the world we have a clue what he was talking about. We have to live it. Let it be so. AMEN.
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