What To Do

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

12.16.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 3:7-18

On Tuesday, I had a sermon, or I thought I did.  It was called Bugs and Honey.  It was a little jokey, a little festive, a little challenging.  

But what seemed like a perfectly good message on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday when that bulletin got printed needed to be abandoned on Friday afternoon, as my social media feeds suddenly filled with grief and confusion.    It was so damn familiar, and I use that word advisedly.  That first breaking news headline felt just like the radio cutting in during the shootings at Tech.  But I was online, so I got to see the familiar aerial shots from the news choppers, the sea of first responder vehicles and the terrible beautiful Christmas tree flashing of their lightbars.

And there were the pictures, pictures of parents and relatives, at that place of loss where all they can see and feel is fear and panic and grief.  Those are hard, because although we know the feeling, we do not know that person, not really.  It feels like we are intruding, stepping into a moment of the most deep anguish a soul can feel.  It’s so intimate.  What right to I have to share this with you, I find myself thinking.   I don't even know your name.  And yet it would be more horrible still if we did not look, if we chose to turn away and close our eyes.

How do you process such a thing?  The word “litany of violence” kept leaping out at me, used to describe the repetition of these events in the life of our nation.  But a litany is a form of sacred language, recited or chanted.  It is a holy rhythm, a sacred restating.  But the staccato litany of children’s names from Sandy Hook is of a different sort.  Charlotte, 6; Daniel, 7; Olivia, 6; Josephine, 7; Ana, 6; Dylan, 6; Madeleine, 6; Catherine, 6; Chase, 7; Jesse, 6; James, 6; Grace, 7; Emilie, 6; Jack, 6; Noah, 6; Caroline, 6; Jessica, 6; Avielle, 6; Benjamin, 6; Allison, 6.  Names and numbers?  This is not about data.  I see a room full of little faces.  I see my own sons in their kindergarten classes, so small, so full of bright child magic, so very fragile.  

And still we try to come to terms with this pattern of horror.  We struggle to understand, because we are creatures that like answers.  We want clear and clean explanations.  We want to know.  But in the fog of terror and the conflicting stories, we do not have that clarity we desire, or the answers we seek.  The more you focus on it, the less sense it makes.  That goes beyond just the facts of it, which are obscured as the chaos of war obscures.  Some names are familiar.  Bushmaster.  Glock.  Sig Sauer.  But it is still so messy.  The rifle was left in the car, we hear.  The rifle was used to kill the children, we hear.   Where is reality in all of this?   But deeper still, where is the reality we want to see, but that seems hidden from us?

We want to hear that things are fine.  It’s Christmas-time, and we may be stressed, but the world around us is bright and lit and celebratory.  That’s the truth we want to know.

But we cannot tell ourselves that everything is just fine when the fruits of the culture we have made are so obvious.  It’s such a consistent harvest, producing this bitter fruit every four to six months, that we cannot honestly look at ourselves and say that this is a random event.  It is too consistent, too predictable, this litany of ours.   That peculiar admixture of weaponry and isolation breeds it, encourages it.  It makes a way straight for it, as John the Baptist might say.  It reminds us, though we do not want to be reminded, that there is something very wrong with a world in which these things happen, and happen so often that when we hear of such a horror, it no longer surprises us.  When my boys came home, and I thanked God for that, their response to hearing of this event was a simple, "Again?"  So young, they are.  And they already know that's the way of this world.

That sort of world is not a world that requires our complacency.  It aches and groans for change, but where is that change?  Where is that Christmas hope?  But it is not yet Christmas.  It is still Advent.

So here, this week, we have John the Baptist speaking.  Last week, we got the context and the runup to what he had to say.  John spread his message in a Judah that was a broken, corrupt ruin.  The sense of hope that but no amount of preparation can adequately set the stage for the intensity of John’s reaction to those who have come to hear him.

Generally, when people come to listen to what it is you have to say, you don’t immediately attack them.   John calls them vipers, which is not a great start, but his attack goes deeper.  Those who’ve gathered to listen to his words are Jews, and they understand themselves as part of a long spiritual lineage, a covenant of law and relationship that goes back thousands of years to Abraham.

Even this defining aspect of their identity is called into question.  What does that matter to God?  As far as God was concerned, even rocks and inanimate objects had as much standing.    What matters, as John proclaims it, is that they live their lives in such a way that they are clearly manifesting the form of life God has demanded of all of them.

It’s not an amorphous faith that John is demanding of them.  It’s a specific, concrete, manifested faith, one that articulates itself through action.

“Produce fruits worthy of repentance,” John says.   And in reply, the people ask, “What then should we do?”  That depended who they were.

So he tells them, but what he tells them is not what they wish to hear.  Allow no-one to go without, he says, demanding that those who have more than they need give up the comfort of excess.  But that was for everyone.  Then the tax collectors ask.  “What should we do?”

Who were they?  These weren’t Roman tax collectors, but were instead Judeans under contract with the Roman government.  Having paid for the privilege of collecting taxes, these contractors were then empowered to make profits from the fees and taxes and tolls they collected from the Judeans around them.  It was the nature of the business.  For them, the demand was simple.  Do not seek to profit from your position.

Then it’s soldiers who ask.  “What should we do?”  

Who were they?  These would not have been Romans, but Judeans working for the Herodians.  They would basically have been mercenaries, and as such would have been paid practically nothing.  Like so many soldiers and police in the developing world today, they would have expected to supplement their income by extorting it from those around them. 

To them, John says, simply, stop doing what you have been doing.  Stop taking advantage of your position, and realize that your actions make the lives of everyone around you more negative.

What John is telling those who have come to listen is that there is no magical, simple, easy fix for what ailed Judah.  That they had come hoping to be changed, hoping that the ritual of baptism would transform them and restore their broken nation, that was all well and good.  But what he told them, rather simply, was that if they wanted to change then they would have to actually change.  Each would have to set down something precious to them.  It would not be easy, but it would mean effort and sacrifice.

And with that, John lays out what it means to lean into any future hope.  The possibility of the messianic age that he declared, that reality of the Holy Spirit that Jesus would bring, that would come no matter what.  But in order to participate in it, people would have to turn away from their prior ways of acting and being.

How should we act?  I’m not going to lay out a five point policy agenda for reducing gun violence, or present draft legislation for making mental health care more accessible.   I’ll leave that for others.

I can only act, myself, because I bear personal responsibility for shaping the world around me.  As we all do.  In the face of the social isolation we inflict on the different and the isolated and the mentally ill, I press out against my preference not to deal with those around me who might not mesh with the world around them.  Like the neighbor whose life is a struggle, both physical and mental.  More mornings than not, he comes out of his house as I pass with my dog, filled with need and anger.  Some mornings, I don’t want to walk by that house.  I just don’t want to deal with it, with the anger, with the delusion, with the fruits of isolation.  But I know that that part of me must change.  So I linger by his house, in case he comes out.  Some days, I go down and knock on that door, because as tormented as his soul might be, he deserves to be heard.

And in the face of violence, I also need to act.  And act I did, years ago, when I set my gun aside.  It wasn’t much of one, just a Mossberg 20 gauge that I kept around because blasting targets was fun.  The boy in me liked the soft kick of it, the thunder of it, the chack-CHACK of the action, the splatter of exploding paint cans, the crash of shattering bottles.  It was also, or so I told myself, a way that I could defend myself and my home.  What if something happened?  It’s better to have a gun and not need it, than need a gun and not have it, or so the saying went.  I liked having a gun.  But then, well, Columbine happened.

I found that I could no longer justify having it around.  I did not hunt.  Birdshot ruins the texture of the tofu.  I was also not a citizen soldier, not a cop, not one of those whose sworn duty it is to protect and serve.  I did not want to move through the world full of fear, viewing every stranger as a possible enemy. 

My reasons for having it melted away with the litany of those kids who had died.  Sure, the gun was fun, and it made me feel powerful and dangerous.  But I couldn’t reconcile it with my place in reality, nor could I reconcile it with my faith.  Stop doing what you are doing, said John.  Live by the sword, die by the sword, said Jesus.

So I disassembled it, broke the action, and plugged the barrel.  And then, because it felt like the thing to do, I threw it on the back of my motorcycle and took it to the headquarters of the National Rifle Association.  I left it there on their doorstep along with a polite note, which said I did not want it any more.

It’s been a while.  I miss it sometimes.  I sometimes dabble with the idea of getting another one.  But then the world keeps reminding me of why I set it aside in the first place.  Lord, have mercy, I am so tired of those reminders.

What to do?  Well, who are you?  What defines you?  What world are you a part of?  Ask yourself, and then act. 

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

Making A Way

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

12.09.12;  Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 3: 1-6

Childhood feels different these days.  Maybe it isn’t, and maybe it’s just that the distance between myself and my kidlyness has stretched out.  I mean, I remember being in seventh grade.  That was me, or so I remember.  But my ability to recognize the reality that I was once a middle-schooler is challenged when the seventh graders come swirling out of my son’s middle school when I’m there to pick him up.  Did I ever have that much energy?  Was I ever part of such a babbling, churning cascade of youth?

But I must have been.  Maybe it isn’t that childhood is different.  The world that children inhabit is so different now, a mindbending cornucopia of flat-screens and and touch screens and apps that offer up anything and everything you might want to see, at the moment you want to see it.  It’s neat and marvelous, in it’s own way, but there are things that I used to do that I’m just not sure happen in childhood any more.

Like, say, the ways you’d pass a half-hour on a rainy day in summer.  Homework would be done.  Your room would be cleaned-ish, meaning you’d very carefully and methodically shoved everything under your bed.  There’d be nothing on any of the five channels of broadcast television, and you’d just finished reading a book.   Outside, the rain would be a light drizzle, cool and dreary.

The usual activities wouldn’t work.  Remember, this was back in those ancient days of yore when kids would be set loose to wander feral through the backwoods for a day, returning as darkness fell, scraped and mud-encrusted and expecting to be fed.

So...what to do?  That, O child, was for you to figure out.  And so figure it out we did.

One rainy day activity I remember doing regularly as a boy of maybe seven or eight involved going out to the screened in porch of our house.   It had a painted cement floor, and a slight slope leading towards the front of the house.   On a rainy day, the rain would spatter through the screens at the back of the house, and gather in pools on the painted cement.  In some places, little rivulets would be slowly, slowly moving down the incline from the top of the  porch to the bottom.

If you touched the edge of that cool pooled water with your finger, and then drew your finger across the cement floor, the water would follow the track of your touch.   It would move with the touch of your wet, dusty finger.  It would flow as you wanted it to flow, like you were drawing a line with a pen of rain.  It would go where you wanted it to go.  

Well, more or less.  There were limits.  You couldn’t make it flow upwards.  Gravity, she is a cruel mistress.  You also couldn’t get it to turn too sharply.  Then, it would pool at the bend in your line, until enough water had gathered that it would being sending out its own tendril.  You had to work with what the rain gave you.

I remember whiling away the rainy day time, creating pictures and patterns and networks of rain channels on that concrete floor, paths that would intersect and interconnect.  It was fun.

It was also, in its own simple way, a reflection of how we can prepare ourselves for the arrival of Christ in this advent season.   From Luke’s Gospel today, there’s a whole bunch of preparation-talk that sets the stage for the life and ministry of Jesus.  That talk takes two forms.

First, Luke’s Gospel, being in the form of a Greco-Roman history, needs to prepare us by establishing context.  The first two chapters start out as much of the history of the time started out.  Those chapters aren’t filled with dry dates and facts and statistics.  History in the ancient world was all about storytelling.  At its best, it was deep and rich and personal. So this “history” starts out with stories of angels and shepherds, miracles and songs.   But eventually, it needed to get to the nitty gritty context, and answer the question: When did this happen?

So verse one and verse two of chapter three of Luke’s Gospel give us exactly that context...sort of.   A whole bunch of names come at us all at once, a scattergun blast of mostly pronounceable names and places.  And as much detail as that seems to provide, it still frustrates historians because...well...things in the ancient world weren’t quite neat and tidy when it came to time.  Saying it was in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar seems to nail it down, but this was ancient Rome.   Emperors didn’t have clear inauguration or start dates.  And there was also the question of just exactly what a year was.  That period of time was variable in the ancient world, depending on whether you used the Julian, Jewish, Syrian, Macedonian, or Egyptian calendar.

Where that gets us is more or less to the somewhere between the year 25 and 34, but what the Gospel is mostly trying to say is: this is something that happened.  This was a real thing, part of the fabric of our history and our time and our space.

What was the thing that was happening right around this time?  What was happening was John the Baptist, whose prophetic challenge to corruption of the Herodian dynasty and proclamation of the coming of the messianic age were seen by all of the Gospel writers as setting the stage for Jesus.   At the core of that message was the demand for repentance through the living waters of baptism, the command to turn away from the dry and lifeless and towards the joyful and living promise of a life woven up with the will of the Creator.

Each of the four Gospel accounts links John’s message with the words from chapter 40 of the Book of the prophet Isaiah, about a voice crying in the wilderness, and about making the way of the Lord straight.  Matthew, Mark, and Luke describe John as fulfilling that declaration by Isaiah.  John places those words directly into the mouth of the baptizer.   However expressed, that command to prepare the world for the arrival of God is at the core of what Isaiah is teaching.

And that is the second form.  What we hear from Isaiah about the beginning of the time of God’s fulfillment comes to us from the time of the Jewish exile in Babylon, from sometime after the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BCE.  They were in a place of disgrace, surrounded by menacing mountains and perilous valleys, in which their very hope as a people had been crushed from them.   Isaiah’s promise to them was of restoration and renewal, that creation would make a way for their God to reconnect with them, even in their time of despair and slavery.

As creatures created at liberty to live...or not live...in keeping with the grace of our Creator, we are given the option of either creating paths in our lives that draw God further into our day to day existences or that preclude our Creator’s deeper engagement with us.  The baptism of repentance proclaimed by John and taught by Jesus requires us to make choices about how we will respond to the possibilities that God offers each and every one of us.

We can choose to live according to God’s grace.  We can, through our choosing to , allow God’s Spirit to move in us.  Those choices, day by day and moment by moment, bring us deeper joy, more hope, and closer connection with both God and neighbor.  When we make our way work with the Creator’s love, our lives fill and move with the flow of that Spirit.

Or we can choose instead to trace the lines of our life away from God.  We can choose distraction and bitterness and resentment and greed.  But God’s Spirit will not flow into and enliven those places in us where grace is absent.  God’s creative power will not dwell there.  That place is a dry and dusty dead end, futilely etched into being.

But whether we choose it or choose against it, we all return to our Creator, as inexorably and inescapably as water flows down a gently sloped slab of painted concrete.  In this season of preparation, and this season of beginnings, make that way in yourself.

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

It’s the End of the World As We Know It

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

12.02.12; Rev David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 21:25-36

It’s been quite a year.

Here we are once again at the end of a year, with only 2,157,324 shopping seconds left until Christmas, and 2012 is getting ready to draw to a close.  But even in the blinding tinsel sparkle-marketing of this season, we can’t miss the fact that it’s been an odd year.

We’ve seen a drought that began in the spring and which continues unabated today, as the Midwest dries up as crunchy as a fallen leaf.  We’ve had hurricanes and winter storms swirled up together like your two least-favorite flavors of meteorological soft-serv, doing the destruction do-si-do together all up and down the hunkered down East Coast.   We’ve been hammered by storms so unusual and rare that most of us hadn’t even heard of them before.  It’s the kind of year that makes many people wonder -- are these signs of something bigger?  Is this the beginning of the end?   

I mean, those Mayans, maybe they were onto something with that whole December 21st, 2012 thing.  That’s Samuel L. Jackson’s birthday, after all, and the day he turns sixty-four.  Surely, surely, that means something.

Then again, in 2011 we’d just experienced the most significant earthquake in East Coast history, and that felt very very pre-apocalyptic.   But if you rewind ten years, back to 2001 and 2002, what did it feel like then?  Remember when the Washington area was reeling from the September 11th attacks, which were followed by the anthrax attacks, which were followed by the relentless, gnawing fear that came with the sniper attacks?  Things then seemed so off-kilter, broken, and fear ridden that surely they must have been an indication that the end of all history was imminent.

But what about the Y2K Bug?  Remember that?  All of our computers were going to come crashing down at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999, bringing about the collapse of the global economy and the fall of civilization.   In an article in Christianity Today from January of 1999, the now-departed Jerry Falwell suggested that January 1, 2000 would be a day when God would “...confound our language, jam our communications, scatter our efforts, and judge us for our sin and rebellion...”

Go back another hundred and fifty years or so, and American was abuzz with excitement about the teachings of the Millerite movement, which taught that the world would end on October 22, 1844.  

Then there’s a tablet that was unearthed by archaeologists, one written by the ancient Assyrians.  Way back in the year 2800 BCE, almost five thousand years ago, an Assyrian looked around at the mess of the world and etched his prognosis into stone.  “Our earth is degenerate in these latter days,” he wrote.  “There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end.”

So...what does this have to do with Advent?  This is, after all, the first Sunday in the season of our preparation for Christmas?  Why all the talk about destruction and apocalypse?

What we have encountered in Luke’s Gospel today is a little apocalypse.  The word “apocalypse” in the Greek literally means to “remove the veil,” and what we’re hearing from Jesus are words that describe the coming into completion of God’s intent for creation.     Almost all of this passage is likely drawn from the Gospel of Mark, the earliest of the four Gospels, which the author of Luke clearly had available as a source-text.   The same passage can be found in Mark 13:24-32, and also in Matthew’s Gospel, from 24:29 to 24:36.

The imagery is striking.  There are signs in the heavens, which themselves tremble.  There is an angelic figure...the Son of Man...which is sometimes equated with Jesus in the Gospels, and sometimes not.

In all three versions of this story, Jesus then tells a short parable, about how we are to know the coming of the end of things.  It’s a simple metaphor of a fig tree.   When the leaves are budding, you know that summer is near.    So when you see what he’s talking about, then...well...the time is at hand.   So far, pretty straightforward.

And then Jesus says, in every single version of this story, “Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all has taken place.”

What?  What does that mean?  How can that possibly be true?  It’s something that Biblical interpreters have struggled with, because it seems to fly in the face of history.   Theories have included suggesting that “this generation” means Israel generically, or the generation that will actually experience the end of things.  But Jesus is talking to people, and the language he’s using is clear.  He’s talking to them.  

The point of Christ’s teaching in this season is to remind us that God is at work in creation, and that our expectation that God will make things right is to be fulfilled.  Despite what you may have heard, Advent’s primary purpose is not as a season for shopping.  It’s a season of expectation, anticipation, and preparation.   That’s NOT expectation and anticipation of the stuff you’re going to get on December the 25th.

It’s the expectation that God will transform our reality, just as the Gospel of Luke tells it.  It’s the anticipation that something significant has shifted in the lives of those who stand in relationship to Jesus of Nazareth.

Each and every year, there are those who look to the signs in the earth and the signs in the heavens, and shout out to the people that God’s fulfillment is at hand.  Everything will be destroyed and made anew.  And each and every year they are proven wrong.  The world didn’t end in 2011, or in 2000, or in 1844.  It just didn’t happen.

Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say, it just didn’t happen in the way that anyone expected.

When God does act--and God does act--how does God act?   God acts continually in ways that are difficult to miss, but that aren’t always quite what we’d anticipate.  Like that year, for example, when God did enter the world.   That arrival did not take the form that anyone would have anticipated.  There wasn’t the arrival of a mighty and divine warrior, but a tiny newborn child.  There wasn’t the descent of a vast conquering army dropping out of low earth orbit into the skies over Bethlehem, but a simple couple, bearing the miracle of a life.

Every single year, Advent begins with our own remembering of how God came into the world.  It was gloriously simple, it was powerfully humble, so much so that we can miss it.  As we enter this season of preparedness, though, we are challenged not to allow ourselves to become so distracted by the shine and sparkle of the season that we completely miss the purpose.

We can become so distracted, so consumed by the stress and the excess, that we can easily miss the subtle but inescapable signs of the kind of transformation that this season is all about.  As we enter into this season of new birth and transformation, it’s important that we not miss the powerful potential that is brought by each moment.  How has God shaped us?  Where in the grace of our Maker does the reality of our redemption lie?  

There will come that moment, for all of us, when God enters our world.  It will change.  It will be transformed, just as surely as a new shoot brings the coming summer, or that little child was born.  It will come, and we have to make ourselves ready every single day, because we really don’t want to miss it.  

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

Not From Around Here

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

11.25.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  John 18:33-37

As the Thanksgiving week passes, and four days of extra-high-density family time wrap up, it’s a time of reflecting on not just where we are in life, but also noticing where things have changed.  Every year is the same, or so it seems, until you realize it isn’t.  There are changes, subtle and slow, from year to year.  You notice them.

I used to sit next to my oldest son, I recall, and carefully spoonfeed him food.  Now, I watch with a mix of horror and admiration as he ingests a second mounded-high plateful of turkey as big as his head.  Things change, and there are things you miss after they pass.   

I miss storytime.  

For almost a decade when the kids were little, storytime was how we spent the ending of every evening.   With dinner eaten and homework done, the boys and Rache would curl up on the sofa and I’d curl up with a fermented beverage in Daddy’s chair.  Then, I’d start in with whatever book was on tap for that evening.  These were tales of far off places, places where the world was very different from the suburban world around us.

We read our way together through the Narnia books, and through the Harry Potter books.  We read the Hobbit, which was and is just about the perfect book for reading to your kids, one snippet at a time, night after night.   We read Eragon, and Stuart Little, and the Mouse and the Motorcycle, and the Little House on the Prairie books, and many, many others.    And every evening right before bedtime, the story would be told so the boys would be nice and calm and ready for bed.  That meant, honestly, that boys would listen quietly until we were done, and my wife would conk right out.

Storytime was such a hit that the boys began to demand stories at every possible moment.  Every day when they were little, and I was shuttling them to preschool or kindergarten, they’d hop into the van and before we were even twelve point five seconds out of the driveway, they’d ask, “Daddy, can you tell us a story?”  This happened Every. Single.  Day.

How could I say no?  I knew what was coming, that there’d come a day when that question was no longer asked, when childhood would vanish and I’d be in the company of tweens and teens who’d disappeared forever into their iPod Touches.   So I had to say yes, and that was a “yes” that really pushed me.  After I’d exhausted Bible stories, and retold the Harry Potter books, and retold the Lord of the Rings books and retold the Star Wars saga, I began to take requests.  I did that, right up until the prospect of having to make up another “Pikachu and Bulbasaur meet the Rescue Heroes” story made me break out in hives.

One day, as we were going God-knows-where in the van and I was grasping desperately around for an idea, an old story came rising up unbidden out of my subconscious.  From out of nowhere, I found myself telling them the story of King Arthur.  The version I served up was a mashup, a strange blended Arthurian tale that was equal parts of all of the tellings I had ever heard or seen.  It was Disney and Camelot and Excalibur...well, not that much Excalibur, given that I was telling it to small children.  Those bits and pieces were woven together with whatever I could remember of T.H. White’s wonderful and bittersweet novel The Once and Future King.  It was a sprawling mess of a tale I spun, one that filled three whole days of minivan shuttling.  They loved it.

There’s something compelling about the stories of kings, about the idea of a single leader who guides their people in peace and yet remains a noble warrior.   Even in our democratic republic, where we celebrate having thrown off the yoke of monarchy, there’s still this latent yearning.  Human beings seek an emblem, the impossibly perfect individual, someone who can completely express the ideals of a nation.

That person becomes the expression of the power of a people.  They represent power, the ability to control and to overpower.  It represents pomp and circumstance, shine and sparkle.  It manifests our own human yearnings for control over our lives.

The story told in John’s Gospel today is a story about kingship, and about power.   Here we are, one week out from the beginning of the Advent season, and we find ourselves in a strange place in the story of Jesus.  It’s not particularly Christmasy, frankly.  In John’s narrative, we’ve moved to the very beginning of the Passion narrative, which describes the events immediately leading up to the crucifixion.

Jesus is in conversation with Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, who had been assigned to lead the Judean province between 26 and 36 BCE.   There are many stories about Pilate, most of which come to us from various Jewish or Christian sources.    In the Jewish histories of that period, he’s viewed as insensitive at best, and brutal at worst, being willing to do whatever it took to maintain power over that restive region.

His time as governor was interspersed with moments of raw force, as he repeatedly brought the spears and the swords at his disposal into play to keep Rome’s authority unquestioned in the region.  While his brutality may have troubled the Jews who were under his control, it didn’t apparently bother Rome all that much, as Pilate was one of the longest serving governors of that region.  He was just doing his job.  He may have been a stranger in a strange land, but no matter where you were from, everyone spoke the language of power.  

And in his capacity as governor, John’s story of Jesus brings Pilate into a peculiar conversation with Jesus.   Jesus has just been brought to Pilate from the Sanhedrin, the  Jewish High Council.  What is being done is a political gesture, as the Sanhedrin acknowledges the power of Pilate, which is a projection of the power of Rome.  Here, they said, was a potential revolutionary, someone who is seeking to overthrow both our power and yours.  Here, they said, was someone who sought to be king, and to seek to be king was to subvert the power of both state and temple.

So Pilate finds himself confronted with this potential subversive, yet another in a long line of individuals who had declared themselves messiah, and he asks him a series of questions.   But in every one of the responses Jesus gives to Pilate’s questions leads further and further away from the place Pilate was familiar with.  Jesus refuses to enter into the kind of conversations about power that Pilate would have expected.

Instead of staking claim over land or over a people, asserting his right to defend or destroy, Jesus takes a completely different approach to kingship.

Pilate asks a pointed question.   Jesus replies, “Are you asking because you think that, or because you’re relying on the witness of others?”

Pilate asks another question, trying to draw Jesus out.  “My kingdom is not of this world,” Jesus says.  “If it were, my followers would be fighting to prevent my arrest.”

Jesus simply refuses to engage in the kind of leadership that would have been familiar to Pilate.  He is not a king, not as Pilate understood kingship.  He was not powerful, not in the way that Pilate understood power.   The story Jesus had been telling about himself and the role that he plays in the coming of the Kingdom of God was completely different.  

Jesus presents us with a way of living that is completely at odds with the dynamics of power that have always governed human society.  He was not the sort of leader who would take more power for himself, consolidating an iron grip on a nation for “the good of the people and their security.”   We’ve seen plenty of that in the world.  He was not the sort of leader who stirred violence for the sake of violence, motivating his people by turning them in hatred towards a demonized enemy.   We see plenty of that out there, too.

Those approaches to our life together are familiar, consistent, and have never, ever worked.   And while Christ’s strange and transformative teachings speak to how our leaders should live and act, they also speak directly to our own lives.

Jesus lived to speak the truth of God’s grace, mercy, and kindness into the world.  That truth is radically generous, open, and selfless.  Christ understood that as the root of his power, a power that bore no resemblance to the power of this world.   That, quite frankly, is how we are to live our lives out, moment by moment, day by day.

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

Big Time

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

11.18.12;  Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 13:1-8

Years ago, when I was working at my last secular job and had just started seminary, my boss told me that he needed me to travel with him to a meeting.  I was psyched.  Travel?  Adventure!  Excitement!  Where are we going to be going, I asked?

We needed to go and meet with the muckity mucks at the headquarters of a large foundation, he replied, one that would be supporting one of our projects to the tune of several million dollars.  Cool, I thought.  Where are we going, asked I.  Out to wine and dine our way around Napa Valley?  Or perhaps to some  private island in the West Indies?

As it turned out, we were going to Flint, Michigan.  In November.

Well, I’d never been there.  So it was still sort of an adventure.   I started looking for tickets.  There weren’t a whole bunch of flights to Flint, for some reason, and getting there and back was amazingly expensive, as expensive as flying to Paris.   Through the peculiar randomness of airline ticketing, I discovered that if I stayed two extra days, I would save my organization five hundred bucks, even with meals and hotel factored in.  Any opportunity to save money for any reason whatsoever just stirs my Scots blood, and I couldn’t resist.  I’d just bring a laptop, a stack of proposals to review for my job, and some seminary work to fill out my days, and I’d be fine.

When I shared that plan with my boss, he looked at me kind of funny.  You’re going to spend two extra days in Flint to save us money, he asked.   Have you ever been to Flint, he asked?  No, said I.   Ah, he said.

Flint used to be one of the centers of the American auto industry.  Back in the 1950s and 1960s, it was a bustling, prosperous industrial town, flush with the paychecks of the well-paid workers at the town’s crankin’ Buick plant.  That plant was part of a massive industrial complex nicknamed Buick City, which sprawled across 235 acres of towering smokestacks and whirring assembly lines.   The downtown was full of shiny shops and bustling restaurants and small businesses, and there were dozens of neat little suburban neighborhoods built up all around that downtown.  In those neighborhoods, there were row upon row of modest but comfortable houses with neat green lawns, filled up with families who were living the perfect vision of the Leave-It-To-Beaver American dream.

That downtown is still there.  Those neighborhoods are still there.  I know because in between working and studying, I left my hotel and walked through the streets of Flint on two cold and cloudy November days.  My longest walk was two hours late one afternoon, and it was one of the more memorable walks I’ve ever taken.   I meandered around the streets of the downtown.  I crisscrossed through neighborhoods.  In those two hours, I didn’t see another living soul.    I walked down streets on which there were nice little ramblers of the same vintage as my own home in Annandale.  Every single house was empty, every lawn overgrown, every window dirty and faded.  In the downtown, every storefront was shuttered, many long ago gutted by fire or collapsed by rot.  There was graffiti, but even that seemed tired and old and faded, as even the vandals had long since given up.

It felt like I’d somehow wandered onto a set for Season One of the Walking Dead.   There was nothing alive, nothing human, anyway.   I started looking over my shoulder now and again, half-convinced that some brains-hungry undead locals might be shambling my way.  It was eerie.

At the height of the life of this community, it would have bustled and thrummed with life.  It would have been filled with energy and dynamism, a town that built cars for a nation that lives most of its life in cars, and had been building cars since 1904.  It would have seemed unimaginable that it wouldn’t just always be that way.  How could it not last forever?   

Looking up at the grandeur of the towering temple in Jerusalem, the disciples were equally impressed.  This was not the temple built by Solomon, because the Solomonic temple had been torn to rubble when the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem in the year 586 BCE.    It wasn’t even the temple which was built on the site of Solomon’s Temple during the reconstruction of Jerusalem following the return from exile.   That temple, which was finished in 515 BCE, is what scholars call “the second temple.”  Because, well, it was built second.  

This was the Herodian Temple.   Herod the Great, in an effort to prove that his rule wasn’t the bizarre corrupt inbred mess that it actually was, decided to do a little bit of refurbishing to the Second Temple, which was getting a little rough around the edges.

So he rebuilt it in the first century before Christ, supersized and double extra-shiny.  The entrance was a vast arch in the style of Roman monuments.  The temple itself was built on a new and huge platform which measured almost 170,000 square yards.   And to top it off, having decided that the original temple just wasn’t quite fancy enough, Herod had much of the renovated temple covered in gold leaf, which I’m sure was tasteful by Las Vegas standards.

It was striking, vast, and imposing.   It was mean to impress, and it did.   One of the disciples was as overawed as a five-year-old in Times Square, and remarked on it to Jesus.

Jesus was rather less impressed, and offered up his own assessment.  None of it mattered.  None of it would remain standing.  On the most basic level, he was right.  When the uprising against Rome failed a few decades after Jesus, Roman legions would besiege Jerusalem, and would raze the temple to the ground and burn it completely.

But he was right on another level.  Nothing we make on earth will withstand the passing of time.  Nothing.  All those things we imagine to be cast in stone, permanent, unchanging, and everlasting?  They will one day crumble and fade.   We have trouble grasping it, trouble realizing it.  Surely something we make will stick around.   

We look to the spread of our culture around us, and imagine that it must always be as it is.  We look to the great edifices of our republic, just two hundred years young, and it seems impossible that they won’t endure.  We see the sprawling malls and the shine and the sparkle, and we can’t visualize that as impermanent.  How can anything that to us seems so vast not be sticking around?

But as impossible as it seems, it won’t be the case.  Not even Twinkies will be around forever.  Not. Even. Twinkies.  

Finding our ground, then, can be somewhat difficult.   It is particularly difficult in a society that values both the supersized and the immediate.   To us, and to us in particular, Jesus offers the reminder that clinging to that which appears the most impressive and spectacular does not serve our best purpose in the Kingdom.

In the heart of what Jesus taught us, we find something rather different.  Instead of allowing ourselves to be distracted by the great towering golden edifices of power and profit, Jesus asks us to look to very different things.  We are to attend to our relationships with those around us, showing care and grace and kindness to every soul we encounter.  We are to attend to our relationship with our Creator, whose presence is so vast we struggle to see it, and so subtle and quiet we have to hold very still to hear it.

These things might, to us, seem rather less impressive than superhighways and malls and the shine of the world around us.  But our encounter with time and space is not the same as our Maker’s, and our understanding of what is significant is not the same, either. 

So turn your attention from the distractions, from the large stones hewn by the Herods of our own time, and turn it instead towards what matters.  

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

Finding the Center

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

11.04.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 12:28-34

Just two more days, and it will end.  You’re probably getting a bit of it here in Maryland, but honestly?   Y’all aren’t even in the same league.  Across the river in Virginia, the former heart of the Confederacy, we’re a swing state, a battleground, with both our Senate seat and our electoral college votes in play.   

And that means political money pouring into the state in a great flash flood of Benjamins.   The Obama campaign and Democratic PACs have sunk sixty six million dollars into ad buys alone.  The Romney campaign, the Republican National Committee, and a half dozen conservative PACs have poured in eighty two million dollars in ad buys.  That’s close to $150 million dollars combined in Virginia just for commercials, and that means political ads.  Endless, endless ads, a great chugged Super Big Gulp of thirty second partisan agitprop, poured down our gullets like a waterboarding administered by the combined casts of Mad Men and West Wing.   

For most of the year, I’ve managed to avoid it, mostly by hiding in a carefully constructed media bunker.  That bunker involves never ever ever watching television or listening to commercial radio.  I get my information on  the world off the web, where I can ignore banner ads as just so much useless clutter.  I also get my info from old-school newspapers and from public radio.   But commercial television?  The interruptions make me crazy.  I just can’t stand advertising in normal times, but now?   That way lies madness.  

When Sandy tromped through the East Coast on Monday night, and the trees around Annandale fell crunching down onto powerlines, my family found ourselves without lights and net and cable.   So we powered up our trusty little Honda generator, and snaked extension cords to the fridge and to the television.  We settled together under blankets on the sofa downstairs in our sturdy cinderblock basement, as the trees outside rocked and shook.  For a short while, we watched local broadcast news coverage.

Or rather, we tried to.  Mostly, we watched commercial followed by commercial followed by commercial, with occasional snippets of some poor local reporter standing getting battered by howling winds and rain.  It was agonizing, and tedious, and on every channel.  After about twenty minutes, the family abandoned the news completely.   We already kinda sorta knew it was ferociously storming, and so we watched Monsters Incorporated for the forty-seventh time instead.

That barrage of ads, which we shut off as quickly as we were able, was mostly about extremes.  Threats and rumblings and fear were the rule of the day.   There was little sense of common purpose of interest, or hope, or much of anything but a relentless focus on difference and disagreement.   The amount of resource being poured into developing this sense of tension and opposition is absolutely immense this year.   

And where our energies and resources go matters.   If we focus on what divides, and pour our time and treasure into what divides...to the tune of five point eight billion dollars nationwide this election cycle...then why should it be surprising that we end up divided?  What we prioritize matters.  Where we set our focus matters.  Where we direct our resources matters.

Today’s passage from Mark’s Gospel is all about setting focus and directing energies.   This excerpt comes following a prolonged sequence of conflict passages, in which various different opponents of Jesus arrive and confront him with the intent of proving him wrong.  In Mark 12:13-17, a group of Pharisees...those early precursors of rabbinic Judaism...and supporters of Herod arrive and try to entrap Jesus with a question about taxes, showing that perhaps there’s more in common  between our era and that era than we’d like to think.   

Then, in Mark 12:18-27 a group of the  Sadducees arrive to challenge him.  There are the Tzaddikim, the “righteous ones,” those whose power was tied to their ritual holiness and their control over the temple.  They ask him a brain-bending mess of a gotcha question about spouses in the afterlife.   Jesus smacks that one down as totally irrelevant to anything having to do with anything.

Out on the margins of those arguments was a scribe.  The scribes were the literate class in ancient society, traditionally the ones who documented and maintained and administrated.  In a mostly illiterate and uneducated society, they were the informed and the aware.  Typically, they’re associated with the Pharisees, as both groups placed a great deal of value on study, knowledge of the law, and careful, learned argumentation.

That scribe approached Jesus, and watched the back and forth between Jesus and the ones who were trying to trip him up.  And so he entered into an exchange with Jesus, an exchange that involves a simple question: “Which is the most important commandment?”

Jesus responds with not just a single text, but three.   The first answer, “Hear, O Israel, The Lord our God, the Lord is One,” is from Deuteronomy 6:5-6.   It’s the great call to prayer of the Jewish people, the Shema.  The second answer follows on from Deuteronomy 6, and says “You should love God with your whole self in.”  More or less.  The final text calls for loving your neighbor as yourself, which is from Leviticus 19:18.

Jesus weaves each of these together into a single answer, a blended reply that the scribe would have recognized.  In many of the texts circulated in the Greek-speaking Jewish world, those core principles would have been repeated.   And so, hearing what for him is clearly the right answer, the scribe affirms that Jesus knew what he was talking about, restating what Jesus taught.  Jesus returns the favor, recognizing both the wisdom of the scribe and how close he was to connecting to the one deep truth of God’s kingdom.

That ends the discussion, but it also gives us the single most vital and central goal of all Christian faith.   In the radical focus on God and the love of neighbor, we are shown both the essence of the law and the living center of Christian faith.   As followers of Jesus of Nazareth, our primary responsibility is to use this living center as the focus of all of our energy.

Not, of course, that historical Christianity has always managed to pull that off.  But looking at how much our culture pours its resources into political power, it can be a challenge finding a place to put your energy that doesn’t leave you feeling...well...a bit off.     Here we are as a nation, spending five point eight billion dollars on an election.   Do we imagine for a moment that our national sense of division and conflict and paralysis will be helped in any way by that vast outpouring of resources?  It feels...well...like a waste.  And at least half of it will be.  

But there are other ways to direct our resources and our personal energies.  

That, quite frankly, is what stewardship is all about, and as our nation looks forward, so do we as a community.   Yup, it’s a stewardship sermon.  

As Poolesville Presbyterian Church stares 2013 in the eye, the resources we commit to that journey have a tremendous amount to do with what will actually happen here this next year.   So, assuming you’re earnestly thinking about it, here are a few things to throw into the mix.

First, as you’re looking at what you may be able to give this year, realize that this isn’t money that’s being poured into something that divides.   The resources you give to support and sustain it are resources that you are committing to your own community, to this church, to something that is a basic and fundamental part of your life.  If faith is faith, it is the most radically defining element of our existence, and this community is how we together live out and develop that faith.   

In that very real sense, giving to PPC involves putting your energies and hopes into something that is both tangible and unifying.  It’s not that we’re all exactly the same here, because although we’re small, we’re not a political monoculture.  There are conservatives and progressives, across every shade of the political spectrum.  By putting our time and our treasure into this fellowship, we strengthen what unites us.   We recognize that Jesus didn’t call us to hate those who aren’t like us, but instead challenged us to love the God whose love unites us all, even and especially those who’ve got different signs on their lawns than yours.   We’re then called to go and make that love real in our lives.  That’s what we do here, and that’s worth something.

Second, it’s not hard to see the impact of your giving here, both of time and treasure.  We’re not huge, and so what you do makes a difference.  Your giving makes the music possible.  It makes transformative youth missions possible.  It feeds and clothes those in need in our community.  It helps welcome in and show Christian hospitality to guests and visitors.  It supports the Connection Cafe, and it teaches our kids about the grace, mercy, and justice of Jesus of Nazareth.  It keeps our humble buildings usable by those in the community.  Those are real, solid tangible things, and they all contribute in their own simple way to making that First Commandment the center of our lives.

So consider what you can do to help prepare for the promise of this ministry in 2013.  How can we turn our spiritual and material gifts together towards that deep center of our faith?   What will insure that we are, as a community, focusing our shared resources in a way that deepens our awareness that we are not, with that scribe, so very far from the Kingdom?

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

Candy Coating

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

10.28.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Job 42:1-6; 10-17

It is candy season, that great festival of sweet-tooth gorging that we’ve come to know as All Hallows Eve.  The sheer volume of America’s Trick-or-Treat confection consumption just boggles the mind.  In the year of our Lord Two Thousand and Eleven, for instance, Americans bought six hundred million pounds of candy to celebrate the season.  Six.  Hundred.  Million.  Pounds.  

That’s the equivalent of 16 billion fun size Snickers bars.  I pulled together a few quick calculations, assuming one-point-five inches in length per fun size bar, and figured that if you mushed those together into one long Snickers bar, it would wrap all the way around the Earth at the equator, then stretch all the way up to the moon, and then wrap all the way around the moon with a few thousand miles of Snickers left over dangling in space for passing extraterrestrials.

We eat  a whole bunch of candy, we do, although this year we may be hunkered down in our basements as Sandy howls “Trick or Trick!  Trick or Trick!” through the trees outside.  So the rule for Halloween candy purchases on the East Coast this year is changed.  Instead of picking stuff you aren’t going to eat before the first kid comes to your door, pick candy you both like and can see yourself living on for a week.

I like candy, I do.  But too much candy, well, it’s just not good for you.  Take my very favorite candy in the world, which would be sour gummy cola bottles, particularly if they are very slightly stale, which makes them even more satisfyingly chewalicious.  I can put down a pack of sour gummy cola bottles in thirty seconds.  

But if that was what I had to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, each day and every day, I’d hate it.  And my teeth would implode, and I’d gain fifty pounds.  It would be horrible.

I feel sort of that way this political season when it comes to economics.  On the one hand, we have one political party telling us the same thing that they’ve been telling us for thirty years.  To balance the budget, they say, you just have to cut taxes and everything will magically fix itself through the miracle of Keynesian economics.  Of course, the promised budget cuts that would have need necessary to make that work?  They cut programs that people need, or that funnel money into your congressional district, so...let’s just put that off a bit, why don’t we?

On the other hand, we have a political party that is telling us that all we have to do is soak the rich, and once we’ve shaken down Daddy Warbucks for every penny he’s got, everything will be fine.  But most of the rest of us are asked for no sacrifice, no shared effort. Nothing significant is expected of us.  What we get is highfalutin’ talk, coupled with a diet of dessert, sweet sugary nothing.  The real meal is nowhere to be seen.

There are two stories, or the conclusion of two stories, in the passage we heard from the Book of Job today.   Job is a fascinating, challenging, and complicated book, one that includes some fascinating tensions.  Most significantly, Job is woven together out of two very distinct components.   The first component contains a story, told in simple prose.  That part of Job runs from chapter one verse one through to chapter two verse thirteen...and then stops, only to restart again in chapter forty four verse seventeen.

That’s the familiar tale.  Job, an honest, faithful, and successful man, gets tested by Satan.  He loses everything he has, his wealth and his children and his health.   But through all of his loss, he refuses to reject God.   Even confronted with three “friends” who challenge him, he remains steadfast.  Finally, after the test is complete, Job gets rewarded.  He gets back a better house, more wealth, a very large volume of sheep, and apparently, even better children.  ‘Cause you know, if you lose children, replacing them makes it all better.

He has seven sons, and three daughters, and it is the daughters who are particularly special, so special they get special names.  Jemimah means “dove,” which symbolizes gentleness.  Keziah means “cinnamon,” which is fragrant and valuable.  And Keren-happuch means “box of cosmetics.”   Seriously.  It literally means “container of eyeshadow,” which...I guess...means she was attentive to her appearance.  Better than naming her “Lipgloss,” I suppose.

 It’s an old story, likely a retelling of an ancient tale of a pious man that wasn’t even originally part of the Jewish tradition.  The name Job, scholars note, is not a Hebrew name, and neither are the names of his three friends.  But this story has cross-cultural legs, perhaps in part because it is relatively simple, easy, and straightforward.  Do right, and be steadfast, and you will be rewarded.  Couldn’t be easier.

But as it was brought into the telling of the Jewish people, it got richer and more complex.   Into this older tale was woven a related but different story, one that was considerably more complex than the simple story we’ve been taught.   It’s a dialog between Job, his friends, a young man named Elihu, and finally, the Creator of the universe.   It is told entirely in poetry, written in language that indicates it came from the pen of a scholar with a gift for the art of writing.   It relates Job’s faithful challenge to God, and God’s reply.

I have done nothing wrong, Job says.  I have served God all my life.  If I have held up my end of my commitment to God, why should God not protect me?  His friends challenge that assertion, insisting that Job must have done something to justify what he is experiencing.  Job refuses to cede the point.  Back and forth the conversation goes, until finally God himself arrives, and Job...having been heard...stands down.

That poetic center comprises thirty-nine and a half out of the forty-two chapters of the book.  It is theologically challenging, rich with meaning, and not the sort of thing that can be easily or simply encapsulated.   It’s the high-fiber existential core of the book, demanding sustained attention and focus.

But as this book is popularly presented, what we mostly get is nibbling away at the outer shell, the easily understood, straightforward tale of a righteous man rewarded.   We get the simpler part, the easy-to-digest fable, with the long heart of poetry and struggle and suffering and godforsaken loss taken out.

And that, as a people accustomed to immediate gratification, is kind of what we want to hear.  It was hard, says the story, briefly, but then he got riches beyond even his wildest avarice!   Things were bad, says the story, but he just stuck it out with his sticky stick-to-itiveness, and then it was extra-super-awesome, as pouring out of heaven’s bounty come fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand donkeys, and a lifetime supply of unusually effective air freshener.

If that’s the total of our takeaway, just the easy part, then we do not understand recovery or restoration, of either self or country.   If all we want is the candy, the sweet crunchy shell, then our encounter with the reality of what it takes to rebuild life and relationship after loss or collapse, after crushing failure or betrayal will be beyond us.  We will expect it not to reach deep into us, and not to change us.

A little sweetness in life is fine and dandy.  But if all we want is the candy, then we will not have the strength that real relationship with God gives us...both as a people and individually...to do what must be done to fix the broken things around and within us.