Poolesville Presbyterian Church
02.19.12; Rev. David Williams
Our world is filled with folks with different perspectives. None of us stand in the same place, or view the world through the same set of eyes. From those different perspectives, we can struggle to see the value in what others believe about the world. We see something, and think to ourselves, huh. How does that possibly work for you?
This last week, for instance, I was doing background work for the Ash Wednesday service we’re going to have here at PPC this upcoming Wednesday. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the Lenten Season, and is the neglected sister of Fat Tuesday. We’re big into Fat Tuesday, because Fat Tuesday is fun. On Mardi Gras Americans get to go down to N’walins and do stupid things. Americans continue to do this despite the fact that while what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, what happens in N’walins tends to require stitches, antibiotics and six months of court mandated community service.
But Ash Wednesday, the Mercredi des Cendres, well, that one we don’t celebrate so much. The day gets its name not from the greyish skin-tone you encounter in post-Mardi Gras Louisiana State University frat boys, but from the ritual application of oil and ash to remind us of our mortality.
As I looked into ways we might celebrate Ash Wednesday, I encountered all kinds of liturgies, from all sorts of different traditions. There were Episcopalian services, Methodist services, and Catholic services. But the oddest service I encountered was a Presbyterian service, one that I...well...I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. It was a service of the First Presbyterian Church of Second Life. This is a gathering of Presbyterians in a virtual world in which virtual representations wander around and...well...do stuff. Including, apparently, go to church. The bulletin for that service, well, um, included phrases like this:
After a prayer is offered, each person will come forward to receive the imposition of ashes. When you receive the ashes, go into your inventory, find the ashes (type "ashes" in your inventory search) right click on them, and select "wear."
This Wednesday at PPC will not be like that. I just can’t even find my way to seeing how that would feel like worship. Second Life is a place you go to pretend to be something you’re not...so what does that say about worship there? But that may just be me. I’ll often encounter folks who just can’t see my own faith as I see it.
The atheists I sometimes encounter, for example, have an experience of the Christian faith that bears no resemblance to my own.
Seen through the eyes of atheism, even the most basic things about Christianity seem totally different. I can understand the struggle to grasp faith, or to believe in God. But what I can’t get is the way that Jesus is seen. When I look at Jesus, as objectively as I can, I see teachings that revolve around love, grace, and mercy. I see a theology that is rooted in a loving relationship with our Creator, and an interpersonal ethic that requires radical compassion for every human being around us. Then I encounter seemingly intelligent human beings who’d describe Jesus totally differently.
In my office, I have a book that was given to me as a gift. It’s a Brick Testament book, one of a series of books in which scenes from the Bible are recreated using Lego people. I find them amusing, because 1) I love the Bible and 2) Lego is awesome. But when I went to buy an anthology of the books, one that included some Jesus teachings, I made a difficult discovery. The books themselves are produced by someone who sees faith through the eyes of atheism. When you get to the Brick Testament spin on his teachings, it’s hard to read them. Jesus is presented as a glazed eye warmonger, a hate-filled psychopathic zealot, and a rigid legalistic hypocrite. And try as I might, I just can’t see it. I cannot see how the author of those books sees, see or feel how he feels, no matter how mightily I try to empathize.
Being able to see people through the eyes of compassion was a skillset in short supply in the congregation that had gathered in Corinth. The last few weeks, we’ve been digging our way through Paul’s correspondence to this benighted community. First Corinthians is, in all likelihood, not the first letter Paul wrote to Corinth at all. Given the evidence in the text, it is probably the second is a series of letters to a church that seemed to need every little bit of help it could get.
Second Corinthians continues Paul’s correspondence, but very few scholars now believe that this is just a single letter. Where 1 Corinthians develops naturally, with each section following logically after the next, 2 Corinthians wanders all over the place. The tone of the letter changes wildly and abruptly, with odd transitions and shifts of emphasis that just make no sense whatsoever. One moment Paul will be waxing eloquent about love, and then suddenly he’s attacking someone, and then he’s right back to being positive again.
Given the clear gifts of rhetoric that Paul shows in his other letters, most objective scholars believe that this text is a mashup, a cut-and-paste job that weaves together three or more free-standing letters into one single text. Think of it as a K-Tel medley of Paul’s greatest hits, if you will, or if you’re old enough to even know what that means.
In this section, which begins at the start of chapter 3, Paul is dealing once again with the tendency of the Corinthians to categorize human beings according to their worth in the social pecking order. The Corinthians were big fans of shiny people. If you had impressive credentials or showed the outward signs of wealth, you did well in Corinth. If you had big impressive spiritual gifts, or could preach a firebrand sermon, you did well in Corinth.
And, as was the case in much of the rest of the Greco-Roman world, if you had a rich and powerful person vouching for you with a strong letter of recommendation, you’d do well in Corinth. Doors would open. People would see you as a more important and more valuable human being. Two thousand years have passed, and not much is different.
As Paul argues against this rather basic human tendency to value one person more than another, he expands his argument to talk about the fundamental challenge many human beings had grasping the purpose of what Jesus was doing in the world. The radical character of what he taught is just too much to grasp. In 2 Corinthians 3:15, he describes those who live with “veiled minds,” and in 2 Corinthians 4:4, he talks of those for whom “the god of this world has blinded their minds.”
That veiling and hiding from sight takes two forms, according to Paul. The first comes with rigid legalism, when human beings get so caught up in the letter of the law that they lose the movement of the Spirit in their hearts. As he writes in 2 Corinthians 3:6, we are called to be “..ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit, for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”
The second thing that blinds us is the pride social power, status, and otherness. We’re not to proclaim ourselves and our superiority over others. If we are to be the lights shining in the darkness, then our task is not to let ourselves be deluded into thinking that wealth or intelligence or any human condition matters. What matters is letting the light of grace and the Spirit shine from us. That’s pretty much it.
How does that look? It requires us to look at those who are not us, and who we struggle to grasp, through the lenses of grace. If there are souls who gather virtually to worship, though it might seem a bit silly to me, my job is not to assume they’re somehow getting it wrong just because their approach to faith is...um...different. Here, the practice of compassion requires that you see the grace in what they are doing. Sure, worship is better enfleshed, and feeling the touch of ashes on your forehead is arguable better than selecting “Ashes” from a dropdown menu. But if that some folks choose to be Christian even in their places of play isn’t a bad thing.
And if someone has convinced themselves that Jesus is hateful, legalistic, and warlike, the response that is guided by the light of Christ is not one that mirrors that presumption back at them. Instead, the response is grace, to live a life that is an “open statement of the truth.” Not any truth, but the reality that is formed and shaped when we let ourselves be governed by the Spirit of grace, and see our world through the lenses of grace. So I can disagree, and I can say so, but I can do that graciously. You may be wrong about Jesus, as wrong as you can be, but Lego is still awesome.
That is the purpose of the Lenten season that begins on Wednesday. It is to remind us, through the discipline of 40 days of self-denial and renewed commitment, that being the light of the world is not only Christ’s calling. If we walk with him, it is our calling as well.
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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