The Heart’s Law

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

03.25.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Jeremiah 31:31-34

Few things are more exhausting as a parental unit than having to lay down the law, again and again and again.  There’s a basic order to things in a functioning household, you say.  There are just certain requirements and obligations if we’re to keep things running smoothly and together.

You try to teach some of these basic principles to your progeny.  Socks do not belong on the kitchen table.  Towels do not live in a moist pile on the floor of  your room.  Getting out more-or-less on time is of more importance than racking up another three-thousand points in Battlefield Three.  College admissions officers aren’t particularly impressed by how many virtual MVP ribbons you’ve racked up, last time I checked.

And yet the socks still seem to spontaneously generate in the living room, appearing from out of nowhere like stinky white tube sock tribbles beamed onto a Klingon warbird.  The towels sit in moist piles, and sometimes seem to have been sitting there so long that they might evolve into their own form of life.  At least then they might start crawling their way back to the bathroom under their own power.

But then there are the days it works.  You awake to a tween cheerily making his own breakfast, and a teen taking a shower without you so much as having to mention it.  Not even once.  Teeth are getting brushed.  Hair is getting brushed.   Clothing that hasn’t been worn five days in a row is being put on.  Homework is done and more-or-less in the place it needs to be so it’ll get turned in.   Life is flowing smoothly.  Things are as they should be, not because you’re micromanaging every last moment, but because things are just...well...as they should be.

Like when my teenage son went out on a long afternoon walk to a nearby collector card store this Friday afternoon.  About twenty minutes after he’d left, the phone rings, and it’s him, calling to let me know he’d decided to chill at a coffeeshop for a few minutes while he sipped a root beer on a warm spring day.  But he didn’t want me to worry.  I’ll be a few more minutes.  Is that cool?  And as you say, yeah, sure, you think to yourself, what?  I didn’t even have to ask?

When those patterns of life that make life good aren’t something external, but are written into the heart of a person, that’s when you know things are really working.

The prophet Jeremiah knew all about what worked and what didn’t work. He knew all about the place of rules and law.

Following the destruction of the Assyrian empire in 627 BCE and the death of it’s last emperor, Ashurbanipal, the people of Judah had hoped that they would finally be free of imperial oppression.  Judah and all of the other nations that had been enslaved by Assyria rose up in revolution.  Led by the wise and noble King Josiah, the people of Judah re-established worship of the God of Israel, and hoped for independence. But it was not to be. In 609 BCE, Josiah was killed by the Egyptians at the battle of Har-Meggido, as the Pharoah’s army raced up to aid what was left of Assyria in it’s struggle against the new power that was rising in the region.

That power was the Babylonian Empire. Judah found itself enslaved again, under a more brutal master than before. All of it’s efforts to rise again were brutally crushed, until in the year 587 BCE the Babylonians finally destroyed Jerusalem completely, tearing down the temple and scattering the people to the four winds.

Jeremiah lived and preached in those last, terrible days before the destruction of Judah. He was not a popular man in Judah, because he proclaimed that to resist Babylon out of national pride would result in complete destruction.   The visions he received from God were relentlessly negative and challenging.   At best, he was seen as a prophet of doom, a weeping prophet, a proclaimer of despair.  At worst, his fellow Judeans saw him as a traitor.  How dare you undercut us?  How dare you tell us that God will not always support us no matter what we do!?  He was imprisoned. He was thrown into pits, actually and physically. His life was threatened. 

But a funny thing happens to Jeremiah’s preaching as he was proven right.  Before the destruction of Judah began to finally unfold, Jeremiah’s teachings were all about challenge, warning, and wrath.  As soon as the horrible things the Lord had proclaimed through him began to happen, though, Jeremiah’s whole tone changes. Instead of shouting out rebukes, or telling the people “Hah! I told you you deserved this, booyah, in yo’ face!” Jeremiah suddenly starts speaking words of comfort and reassurance, and challenging the despair that overcame his inevitably defeated people.

In the face of hopelessness, Jeremiah assured the people that even though temple and king and the instruments of the power of the state were crumbling, there would come a day when none of that mattered.   That was never, and is never, a source of real and meaningful power.

In today’s passage, Jeremiah tells the people that even though the power of king and temple and nation that enforced the law has crumbled, God’s intent for his people goes deeper than that.   The law that connects us to God, Jeremiah declared, was not going to be rooted in an external covenant.  God’s best intent for us goes deeper than that, into the heart of who we are as people.  If we embrace the law of God, it’s not something outside of us.  It’s woven into our persons.  It’s an essential part of our identity.   The knowledge of the right and the good isn’t a question of outside forces and powers.  It needs to be an integral part of us.

I was thinking about that as I stood in my kitchen, and out the window watched my teenage son returning from his Friday walk.  As he came loping down the hill, long legs and easy strides, a shaggy mop of hair over sharp blue eyes, all on top of a broadening, ever-growing frame, I thought how much he’s internalized the things I’ve taught him.   But I also thought about another teen, and another walk, and the law.

My teenage son can walk my neighborhood without fear.   Sure, the world tells us to be afraid, that there is terror all around, but this is just because frightened, anxious people are more likely to watch ad-driven news.   I’m not afraid for him.  I have not needed to teach him to be paranoid as he moves through the world.

But if you look different, if that difference is a look that we’ve been trained to fear, then things become very different.   Things go very wrong.  The story of Trayvon Martin has been all over our national consciousness this last week, as well it should be.   He was a teenager, like any other teen.  His only mistake, and it wasn’t really a mistake, was to walk through a neighborhood in which an armed man prowled the streets.   For that, for the crime of being black and walking home with a bag of Skittles and an iced-tea, he paid with his life.  My son is not black.  But that does not mean I lack the capacity to see what occurred that day, or the capacity to feel a father’s pain at the pointless death of a son.

Two laws failed Trayvon that day in late February.  The first was the law of the state of Florida, as understood and enforced.  No law can ever justify the preemptive killing of an innocent.  Even if the now-infamous “stand your ground” law was not meant to allow you to stalk, approach, and gun down someone who stirs your fears, that it could be construed that way is a legislative failing.   But honestly, that misbegotten law was not the deepest failing.   The law that failed when Trayvon Martin was killed was the law written in the heart of George Zimmerman.  

I will not pretend to know the fullness of that human being.  From what is public record, it seems clear enough that all was not well.  In ways that mattered, George Zimmerman carried within him beliefs that laid the groundwork for the death of an unarmed young man.  

Because not everything we make a part of us speaks into God’s love or God’s justice.  We can be guided by biased assumptions about race.  We can be governed by fear and paranoia and the desire to prove our worth through power.   A heart ruled by those things will act in ways that diminish life and cause harm.  

Seeing another pointless killing might lead to despair.  Has nothing changed, we might ask?   In some ways, it hasn’t.  We still cling to laws and to the power of force, imagining that it will make everything better.  It never has.

But the days are surely coming, says the Lord through Jeremiah, when we’ll live differently.  The days are surely coming, we hear, when what is written on us isn’t power and fear, but the heart of grace and forbearance and love that is the essence of covenant.    And like the best of possible parents, God will lay down that law for us, over and over again, until we have finally really heard.

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

Snakebite

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

03.18.12;  Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lessons:  Numbers 21:4-9;  John 3:14-21

Back when I was a little kid, I had a pretty intense aversion to anything that might in any way cause pain.  This would seem to be a fairly normal thing, if you think about it, but then again, I was a boy.   In my experience boys are typically far more oblivious to this than they should be.  

Riding your Razr scooter full-tilt down a hill and right into a curb to see if you can pull off a ninja tumble?  Sure, what could possibly go wrong?  Sticking your finger into a hole on the side of a machine to see how fast those gears are actually moving?  Give it a go!  It’s in the interests of science!   And why would the Good Lord have made that stick all nice and pointy if He didn’t intend in His Gracious Providence for us to chase our brother around with it at the bus stop? 

As the parent of boys, you just have to learn to take those things in stride, and it helps to live within five minutes of a good E.R.  

But as a child, I was small spindly bookish critter, allergic to what the doctor determined was, and this was his informed medical opinion after extensive testing, “pretty much everything.”   More significantly, as a young pup I was utterly terrified of pain.  For example, I played soccer, in that I stood on field for as little time as league rules allowed and hoped against hope that the ball would stay as far away as possible.  Because even though I shuffled tentatively around midfield wearing giant armored maxipads stuffed under my 1970s tube socks, I was convinced that one stray kick might crunch through my twiglike shins.  And that would hurt.

Even worse, though, was my fear of injections.  As the progeny of a foreign service family, this didn’t work out so well.  If you’re planning on spending time in the Southern Hemisphere, a battery of shots was pretty much necessary to avoid some impressively unpleasant illnesses.    I lived in mortal terror of shots, not because they actually hurt so much, but because of the anticipation of the pain.   Few things are less pleasant than the anticipation of pain.    

I can remember, although it’s an old and not often retold story in the Williams household, one particular trip to get a series of shots back when I couldn’t have been more than seven or eight.  We arrived, and I was nervous, and we waited, and I got more nervous, and then the nurse came in with a tray with some objects on it and said, “Alright, young man, are you ready for us to drop you into a giant bucket full of rattlesnakes?”

I don’t think that’s what she actually said.  I think she actually said something like, “Alright, young man, are you going to be brave for me?”  But I think what I heard must have involved a large pit full of snakes, because my next memories of that event involve total, abject flight from the room, as if I were a small cat who’d suddenly encountered a snarling rabid brindle mastiff.  Following a period of squealing, which I think was coming from me, I vaguely recall being under a table and people trying to coax me out with candy.

I am not prone to that kind of response now, except when someone asks me to serve on a Presbytery committee.   None of us like suffering, after all.

And yet suffering is inevitable in life.  It is just not possible to go through the whole of a life and not experience it.  The connected stories in today’s reading from the Book of Numbers and chapter three of John’s Gospel reflect that reality, and the response we’re meant to have to the deep challenges of our lives.

We don’t often read the book of Numbers, in large part because the name itself has a tendency to drive us away.  The book gets that name from the creators of the ancient Latin version of the Bible, known as the Vulgate, which calls it Numeri.   The Vulgate got it from the even older Greek version of the Hebrew bible, which was called the Septuagint.  That version calls it Arithmoi.  

The reason for that name becomes obvious when you start reading it.  It starts with a census, as the author begins carefully counting off the numbers of all of the members of all of the tribes of Israel.  This goes on for about five absolutely riveting chapters.  This is followed by obscure purity law code, followed by a few chapters where people weigh different objects.  Again, riveting stuff.  If you’ve ever tried to read the Bible cover to cover, this is one of those books that stops you in your tracks.

But in chapter 10, the book takes a different turn.  The Hebrew version of this book is called Ba Midbar, which means “In the Wilderness,” because that’s precisely where the Jewish people are.  That’s a much more interesting title, and a better description of the far-better second half of the book.  They are wandering through the 40 years in the desert, experiencing hardship, encountering famine and opposition and challenge, and once the lists are out of it’s system, the stories of that time of trial become the focus of the book.   They include talking donkeys, earthquakes, miracles, battles, and fire from the sky.

It also includes today’s story, in which the people of Israel are once again anxious, impatient, and complaining.  “We don’t have any food,” they complain in verse five.  “And the food is terrible!”   And so, for the sin of sounding remarkably like a moody teenager inspecting the contents of the family refrigerator, the Lord sends a plague of poisonous serpents.  These are the seraphim, and the word “poisonous” is actually the Hebrew word for “fiery.”   

After some unpleasantness, the people decide they’ve had enough, and Moses is instructed to create a bronze serpent, which is placed on a pole.  To be healed of a snake bite, all the people need to do is look at the serpent, and they’d be fine.

Without getting into the mechanics of that, what is worth noting is that the thing they looked to for healing is the emblem of suffering itself.  That was the point being made in John’s Gospel, as it recalled the story of Jesus and his conversation with the curious but confused Pharisee Nicodemus.  

This is a remarkably rich conversation, as the Pharisee asks question after question of Jesus, and Jesus responds.  Nicodemus is particularly confused by the idea of being born from above...which is what John 3 verse seven literally reads.  In explaining what this means, Jesus references the Book of Numbers.   “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up...”

Here, Jesus is using the words “lifted up” to mean both “exalted” and “raised up on the cross.”   It’s a strange conjunction, the fusion of these two images, seemingly so at odds with one another.   The image of power on high gets conceptually woven together with the broken body on a particularly cruel and unusual instrument of execution.

That latter image messes with us, and we might prefer not to think about it.

But understanding suffering and understanding how we are to respond to suffering are absolutely essential to overcoming it.   It’s a bit like a vaccine that way.  Just as our bodies need to know a disease before they can effectively respond to it, our hearts and minds and souls need to understand how to respond to the broken things in our lives.  And while we might rather not know and experience suffering, we will.  It is an inescapable part of mortality.

The question is how we approach and understand that suffering.  If we approach suffering with grasping, selfish hearts, it will be made worse.  If we approach it from a position of anxiety or fear, we magnify its power over us.  Our terror feeds it, and amplifies it, and that fear can completely devour us.

If our attitude is one of faith, things change.  We change.  If we recognize that the Creator stands in complete solidarity with us, when we suffer but also in our joys, our experience of life is tranformed.  We no longer live in terror.  That doesn’t mean being as oblivious as a seven year old boy up on the roof with a makeshift parachute.  It doesn’t mean seeking out pain as a way of proving our faith.  

But it does mean no longer being afraid.  And that matters.

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

On Your Fingers

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

03.11.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Exodus 20:1-17

As we roll further into what looks like it will be a really entertaining election year, one of the most striking things about the public mood is that we all hate Congress.  This is a bit bizarre, frankly.  We elect our Senators and Representatives.  Most of us feel that the person who we elected is doing a good job.   And yet, taken together, we hate them with a big hatey hate.   Just how big is that hatey hate?  Well, let’s look at the numbers.  

The latest poll results on the polling data aggregation site Real Clear Politics show that 11.3% of Americans think that Congress is doing a good job, and 82.5 percent think they’re stinking up the place.  Just to put that into context:  A recent poll by the Zogby survey firm asked Americans what they thought of former head of the KGB and autocratic Russian despot Vladimir Putin, a man who routinely has his opponents killed and imprisoned and who hands out political power to his many lovers.  Putin scores ten points higher among Americans than our own Congress. This is not a good sign for Congress.  It’s not a good sign for Americans, either, honestly.

Some have argued that this is because Congress is “do-nothing,” and that they’re always deadlocked, and they just don’t do anything.  But being a contrarian, I’m compelled to suggest: what if the problem is that they do too much?   They are, after all, primarily lawmakers.  What they do is make laws.  Do we have enough laws?

Let’s take a look at the United States Code. I can’t claim to fully understand it, but here’s what little I managed to pluck off the internet so I can make it seem like I know what I’m talking about. Every law passed by Congress gets plugged into one of 50 “Titles,” which logically sort American laws into different categories. Those titles are divided into subtitles, which are divided into chapters, which are divided into subchapters, which are divided into parts, which are divided into sections. 

As a Presbyterian, I find that all strangely exciting.

For example, Title 26 has to do with revenue and taxation, which many of us are thinking about this time of year.  So if you had this deep and burning desire to know when you have to file a special return, you could look to Title 26, Subtitle F, Chapter 61, Subchapter A, Part I, Section 6001, which tells you everything you need to know. Or is that Section 6002? I always muddle those two.

How many laws are there? Well, Title 26...which is one of the 50 Titles...is about 7,500 pages long. Fortunately, it’s a real page turner. When you get to Title 26, Subtitle V, Chapter 37, Subchapter B, Part I, Sec. 7042, you’re just not going to believe the plot twist it serves up. Man. I was shaking my head after that one. Never saw it coming. It seriously sets you up for the sequel in Title 27. Don’t worry. I won’t ruin the ending.

The sheer volume of American law is truly dizzying. Hundreds of thousands of pages of code are simply more than any one human being...or even a roomful of human beings...can come to terms with. 

I know they say that ignorance of the law is no excuse, but you couldn’t be aware of the fullness of the laws that govern our country if you spent your entire lifetime studying them and every single neuron in your brain was dedicated to learning them, including the neurons that you currently use to figure out how to eat, breathe, and figure out most universal remotes. When regulations and requirements reach that level of complexity, it becomes harder and harder for us to keep track of them.  They stack up one on top of the other, until the tower of laws grows so high we can’t look at them without feeling dizzy.

One of the most striking things about the Ten Commandments we encounter in today’s passage from the book of Exodus is how simple and non-complex they are.  This listing of the most essential elements of God’s covenant with the people of Israel can be found in two places in the Torah, both here and in a slightly modified form in Deuteronomy 5:6-21.   In both locations, the basic structure and essence of the commandments remains the same.

The Mosaic Decalogue, which is what bible scholars call the 10 Commandments when they want to seem smarter than you, is divided up into two separate primary sections.   The first of those sections incorporates the first four commandments, all of which describe the relationship we’re supposed to have with God.   Those are, first, I am your God, second, don’t watch American Idol, third, don’t use my name unless you really mean it, and fourth, remember to chill on the Sabbath.   

The fourth commandment tells us to remember to take time to both worship and be at ease, but it also represents the transition between the first section of the covenant and the second.  We’re not just to take Sabbath for ourselves, after all.  It’s not just about us and God, although it is that.  What this commandment says is that we are to view Sabbath as a moral imperative, part of our commitment to other creatures as well.  We will not endlessly demand.  We will permit rest and reflection.   As such, this sets the stage for the remaining six commandments, in which our obligations towards other human beings are established.

There, we’re told to honor our parents, not to kill, not to cheat on our spouses, not to steal, not to lie about those around us, and not to be governed by greed.   Then, of course, the Book of Exodus continues, going into more complexity and detail.   But the essence remains intact and clearly discernable, easy to recall at the most elemental level.   How many are there?  Just take a look at your fingers, and count them off.   

Or your toes, if you’re so inclined.  This little piggy didn’t steal, this little piggy didn’t cheat on his wife, and this little piggy went wee wee wee all the way past his neighbor’s brand new car without even the slightest twinge of jealousy.

The world, of course, is a complex place, and we often struggle with the application of simple principles to the whirling sea of variant challenges that face us in our day-to-day existences.  It’s a whole bunch easier, on a certain level, if we have directions about what to do that are clearly and precisely applicable to the specific instance that we’re experiencing.

But where that begins to fall apart is in the nearly infinite complexity of the world in which we live.  Moment for moment, instance for instance, we just can’t match it.   Where it becomes even more challenging is in the growing complexities of our society.  If you’re a bronze age agrarian culture, you might be able to get away with several hundred laws.  Life was relatively simple.  But as a pluralist, semi-post-industrial culture, things for us are hugely more complicated, and our legal system reflects that.    The ethical and social dynamics of our societies are mindbogglingly complex.

From that intricacy, we arrive at a legal system that is equally intricate, and equally difficult to comprehend.  While I understand the value of our system of jurisprudence, and the reason for the structures of our laws, I can also understand how when a system gets more demanding, it can also become more frustrating.  If the scales of justice measure down to the picogram...that’s a trillionth of a gram, kids...then getting them to balance can make us crazy.

There is value in higher order laws, in ways of understanding our ethical responsibilities towards one another and to our Creator.   Those basic principles need to be interpreted and adapted to every particular situation, and that requires both wisdom and grace.  That is true for any framework of laws, no matter how complex.  What matters is our judgment, our capacity for mercy, our ability to look at the law as not just cogs and gears in a machine, but as an opportunity to manifest justice, mercy, and the best promise of our Creator in every moment we encounter.

Perhaps that’s a reason for our frustration, as we see how little grace abounds in our culture, and how we seek to use the law to punish rather than to build up.  But that’s not the fault of Congress.  It’s the fault of the folks who elect them.

It is those people, us, who need to be more deeply rooted in the gracious love of God.   Whether ten laws or ten thousand, it is that one law that must govern them all, and that one law that must govern us.  

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

Profit Margin

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

03.04.2012; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 8:31-38

I am not, truth be told, much of a businessman.  I’ve worked for businesses, far back across the long span of my working life.  I dished out popcorn and movie tickets as a teen, in a floundering little independent theatre, the kind of place that showed badly dubbed Italian horror films and ran Karate Kid 2 for four straight months to empty houses.  Even as a teenager, I wondered at the managerial wisdom of continuing to show a movie that was bringing in three patrons a week, as the endless repetitions of Mr. Miyagi’s muffled voice haunted my dreams.   I washed dishes in academic dining halls and a little Indian restaurant, drove cabs, schlepped auto parts around on a forklift in a warehouse, and stocked shelves in a little specialty store.  

I worked in a patent law firm as a clerk for a few months, but quickly realized that while 80 hour weeks and constant stress might be justified in some professions, I just couldn’t quite see it.  How much of the short flicker of my mortal life did I want to dedicate to maintaining intellectual property rights on intricate japanese toilets?   The answer to that question was: as little as possible.  That way lies madness.

But most of my adult working life has been in nonprofit organizations and churches.  The entrepreneurial dynamics of business just don’t appear to be in my genetic makeup.  I look out across the landscape of my immediate family, and I see teachers and social workers and professors and government scientists and nonprofit executives...but not a whole bunch of those git-out-there-and-make-it-happen small business job creators.

I can appreciate those folk.  It takes a whole bunch of courage and energy to start and run your own business.  You have to be focused, and disciplined, and aware of market dynamics.  You also have to be creative.   And if you do all of those things, and do them with passion, you can still watch a business fail.    The marketplace is red of tooth and claw, as ruthlessly Darwinian as the African savannah at dusk.  Just one look across the empty storefronts in this little town speaks the truth of that.  Plenty of dreams have been separated from the herd, run down, and devoured in the savage wilds of the Poolesville economy.

Some do succeed, of course.  And others are wildly successful.  That desire to win, to succeed, and to get as much as you can lies at the heart of our economic system.  According to Nobel-prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, the entire purpose of the marketplace is to maximize profit for shareholder return.  If that is the ethic that defines our whole economic life, though, what does that do to us?   What effect does that have on us as persons?

This last week, a group of psychologists lead by a team at UC Berkeley released some of the results of an ongoing multi-year study of altruism, one that examines the impact of material success on giving and compassion towards others.  Through a series of experiments, what this showed was that the more wealthy and materially successful you were, the less likely you were to show compassion towards others.  Those self-reporting incomes over $150,000 year were more likely to use deception to “win” a game, and less likely to reveal a truth if it would impact their success. Whether this means that getting wealth makes you less moral or that less moral folks tend to be wealthy isn’t clear.   Having recently done my taxes and looked at my household’s adjusted gross income, it also makes me a little concerned for my own spiritual health.

Being ruled by the desire for gain and personal benefit seems, well, to have some pretty negative consequences on who we are as a person.  

Selflessness and the quest for material success are at the core of the teachings we’re receiving from Mark’s Gospel today.    This collection of teachings is shared with both Matthew’s Gospel and Luke’s, although Mark presents it in a very slightly different way. 

Even though Mark tends to be more hush-hush and quiet about Jesus than the other gospels, in this section both Matthew and Luke have Jesus only talking to his immediate circle of followers.   Mark, on the other hand, puts this teaching out in the world, with Jesus gathering both his disciples and “the multitudes” to listen.  

What he’s teaching about is how his Gospel speaks into the lives that we all lead, and how his proclamation meshes with the way we exist.   As Mark took Christ’s words and shifted them into Greek for the Greek speaking world, one key term is repeated over and over again in the text, particularly verses 35 through 37.  

We hear about saving life, but losing it.  We hear about losing life, but saving it.   We hear about getting the whole world...in the original language, gaining the whole kosmos...but losing life.   And what can you give, if you’ve lost your life?

Bibles that have been translated into English don’t all agree on how to translate the word we hear rendered as “life.”  The Greek term that we hear presented as life is the term psyche, and the reason that some bibles translate it as “soul” and others “life” is that this word means all of those things.  It can mean the process of life, but it means more than that. 

It is our person, our self, our identity, our existence, our being.  

Heard in this way, it’s a bit different than the way we hear it in our language.   What Jesus is challenging his listeners to do is to set aside self, and to be willing to do so in as radical a way as Jesus himself did.   This came as something of a challenge for those who heard him.  If your yearning was for a messiah who followed the apocalyptic model, then what Jesus was saying went radically against the expectations of the day.  

It’s for that reason that Peter takes Jesus aside, because suddenly, what Jesus was saying was starting to be troubling.   Teaching that the Son of man was going to die meant that those who were gathering around Jesus in the hopes that he was there to kick some Roman behind were suddenly aware that what Jesus was offering wasn’t what they’d anticipated.  And as their cultural expectations were suddenly unsatisfied, they became less motivated.  I’m not sure if Peter used the phrase “paying better attention to our messaging” or warned Jesus about how the optics of crucifixion-language might downmarket the brand.  If he were alive today, sure, but I’m not sure marketing consultants were quite as common back in the first century.   Whichever way, Jesus would have none of it.  

What he warned, instead, was that a life lived in service to itself is not in keeping with the message he had come to live and teach.   And this message rings as dissonant in our culture of attainment today as his rejection of the messianic warrior-mantle would have been back in his own time.

Jesus is telling us that if we’re taking what he says seriously, our identity will be woven together by the Gospel.  It becomes the essence of what we are, the golden thread of grace that unifies our actions and makes us a cohesive human being.  It is, personally and spiritually, the source of our integrity, and I mean that in the most literal sense of the word.  It holds us together.

And when that integrity is challenged by the hunger for more, we’re required to resist it.  If we yield to the desire to gain at another’s expense, then sure, we’ve gained.  But we’ve lost our selves.

That doesn’t mean we can’t be entrepreneurial, or driven, or pour our hearts into making something work.  Those are good things, for both businesses and...quite frankly...churches.

But the point at which we realize that our efforts have taken us away from the essence of what Christ taught, when our desire to succeed has folded in on itself and closed us off to compassion, when other human beings become adversaries to be overcome and not other children of God to be loved, that’s when we have to be prepared to ask ourselves the price of what we’re about.

Because if we we lose ourselves, what are we?  All the gain in the world means nothing if we have vanished in the effort to attain it.  

So here, in this second week of Lent, let’s keep ourselves about the business we’ve all been called to pursue.  Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.