Just Words

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

04.29.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson - 1 John 3:16-24

As we get deeper and deeper into yet another election year, things are starting to heat up.  In either corner of the ring, the contenders are stretching and bouncing and sucking on a mentholated lozenge, as their coaches carefully massage their voiceboxes and whisper an endless stream of alarming poll data into their ears.

Candidate X will get up on that stump, and as the teleprompters spool up, they’ll begin to speak.   What will that sound like?  Well, for your convenience, I’ve read stump speeches from candidates in the last several elections, and have endeavored to assemble a speech that should just about capture everything you might possibly hear in three minutes or less.

Candidate X will tell you about how much they believe in America, how we all deeply believe in America, and about the importance of defending the fundamentally American freedoms that make the You Ess of Ay such a beacon of liberty and promise and hope.   We’ll hear about how the God-given liberties enshrined by the wisdom of our founding fathers in our constitution stand as a great bulwark against the forces of oppression and injustice, and about how patriotic Americans should look hopefully towards a hopeful future filled with jobs and opportunity, a shining city on a hill called Hope, where our children and our children’s children can look forward to a life of liberty and safety, peace and prosperity, in which they will live free together in just and hopeful and hardworking American freedom.  This is the time to stand proud and free on the liberties won by the patriots of yesterday, to look beyond the challenges of today and on to our bright and hopeful tomorrow, fearlessly moving forward into the joyful promise of the American dream.

Unless we vote for Candidate Y, in which case we all are totally doomed.  The American dream will go straight to hell in a handbasket, because every single thing Candidate Y believes in will completely destroy America, and we’ll all be jobless and living in the trunk of a burnt out 1993 Hyundai and eating scraps of roadkill squirrel jerky.  Is that the America we want for our children?  Candidate Y’s abandoned-Hyundai-trunk-squirrel-jerky-America is not the America we believe in!

If we just vote for Candidate X, we’ll be taking that next fearless step towards that bright, free and liberty-filled future of proud prosperous and promising hope, hope for all our children, and oh how we love our children, our American children, with their bright shining dimpled American faces and their big American eyes filled with hope for the change we need to bring about the promising future that is the birthright of every hard-working freedom-loving American.  Their future, the future of our children, that future is filled with opportunity, as together Americans work to make our beloved America the America we all know God meant America to be.

That sound vaguely familiar?  It should, except for the squirrel-jerky part.  That never polled well in the key battleground states.  

The tension between rhetoric and reality is the greatest challenge of any political season.   And I say that as someone who uses rhetoric all the time, like, say, right now.  A sermon is rhetoric, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.  Rhetoric is just the classical art of using speech to persuade, and there’s nothing wrong with that.  Well-crafted words and soaring purple prose are staples of all political speech, as is the need to present a clear contrast between your position and others.  But the realities of living together as a people are often far removed from the binary rhetoric of ideology and the buzzword-filled red-meat stump speech.  The challenges of actually governing require us to be grounded in the world around us. 

That’s true of our life together as a nation, but it is also particularly true of our lives together as followers of Jesus.   We get a sense of what that life looks like from the First Letter of John this morning, which is an interesting letter for a variety of reasons.

First and foremost, First John isn’t actually a letter.   If you scan back to the beginning of it in 1 John 1:1, you’ll find that it doesn’t have any greetings or salutations.  If you scan to the end at 1 John 5:12, you find that it ends abruptly.  No “Goodbye,” no “Look forward to seeing you soon, please send money.”  There’s just a sentence about not worshipping idols and then the letter just...stops.  It’s more like a portion of an essay than a letter, more a treatise than a communication from one person to another.

Secondly, First John is, like the other Epistles of John, remarkably similar to the Gospel of John.  The language used is almost identical to the language of that Gospel, with the same circling, elegantly simple writing.  It is so closely linked that it clearly either comes from the same author or from someone in the same community who was so steeped in that style and theology that they couldn’t help but write that way.

Finally, First John is a letter that has clearly been written from out of a context of conflict.   From earlier chapters of this...um...essay...there is some wrestling going on in the early church.   What exactly that’s about is a bit hard to say, but it seems to have something to do with the very same struggle that we heard a bit about last week from Luke’s Gospel.

Both the community that first received this writing and the community that received Luke’s Gospel and Acts were likely Greek-speaking congregations, and from context bible scholars believe these texts were written around the turn of the first century.   From that understanding, it appears that both Luke and John were responding to the same Christian movement.  That movement, in case for some reason last week’s sermon has slipped your minds, was called Gnosticism.

Rather than just repeat what I said last week about this peculiar strain of Christian faith, I’ll introduce a new word.  Many of you knew some of the key details about Gnosticism, but the theological vocabulary word of the day is Docetism.

That’s Docetism, as in “Doe,” as in “Doe, a Deer, A female deer” or “Doh,” as in the sound that Homer Simpson makes.  Add that to “Set,” as in “down, set, hike,” and “ism,” as in, well... “ism,” and you have some idea how to pronounce it.  

It comes from the Greek word dokein, which means “to appear,” or dokesis, which means a phantom or an apparition.  This was a key theological concept for some of the Gnostics, and essentially meant that the physical existence of Jesus wasn’t really important.  Instead, what mattered was the Christ spirit, which was totally different from the man.

Docetic faith rejected the flesh as weak, and rejected suffering as something that only weak people did.  The true, the powerful, and the spiritually strong did not have to deal with such things.  It’s for that reason that 1 John 4:2 suggests that those who reject Jesus as having come in the flesh were dangerous.

Why?  Because this way of thinking suggested that the point of faith was personal spiritual power, and from that foundation, there was little motivation to be connected to those who lacked the secret knowledge of the spiritual elite.    There was also little motivation to care for them.  Why bother?  They were spiritual inferiors, weaker and less powerful.

From the texts of 1 John, we hear that for all of the high-sounding and important words that came out of the mouths of the Gnostics, one of the things they may not have been so good at was caring for those around them.  Their beautiful speeches and complex symbolic theologies were utterly disconnected from the reality in which they found themselves.

As last week’s passage from Luke indicated, that reality demands that we live out our faith in a way that can be touched.  Today’s passage argues that in order to be able to call yourself a disciple of Jesus, the way you express yourself in this reality must be...must be...radically defined by God’s love.  That didn’t mean talking about God’s love, no matter how pretty those words might be.  It meant living it in the flesh, as radically as Jesus lived it in the flesh.  In 1 John 3:16, we hear that we’re to lay down our lives for one another, just as Jesus laid down his life for us.   This is an intentional echo of a passage in John 15:13, when Jesus tells us that “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

That means that talk about the love of Jesus has to go beyond being “just words.”  It has to be talk that is embodied, visibly and actively witnessed in the life of those who claim to follow him.   In our everyday lives, that means manifesting grace and kindness to those who oppose us, showing forbearance and mercy.   It means being willing to forgive, and to move past the sense of superiority over others that comes from self-righteousness.  It means being very careful around ideologies and theologies that seem to encourage that behavior in us, because they’re moving us away from the essence of the Gospel.

If we can do that, then we can talk meaningfully...and, hopefully, persuasively...about our faith.   Because there’s nothing wrong with rhetoric, so long as it is not empty rhetoric.  There’s nothing wrong with words, so long as they describe the reality into which we are called as Christians to live.

As we live, and as we speak, let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

Flesh and Bone

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

04.22.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 24:36b-48

One of my favorite cult classic films dates from the mid 1980s, that strange far-off era when the hair was big, the shoulderpads were even bigger, and some bible scholars were convinced that the wearing of pastel parachute pants might have marked the coming of the end times.  This mostly came from a literal interpretation of Matthew 24:15, because pastel parachute pants come so very close to what Matthew meant when he used the term “desolating sacrilege.” 

Many of us old enough to remember that time may have taken some care to insure that all of the hard copies of all of the pictures ever taken of us between the years 1983 and 1990 have mysteriously disappeared.  “Gosh, honey, I just don’t know what happened to that album.  And could you please empty the shredder?”

Anyhoo, one of my favorite films as a youngling in that era was a oddment called The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension.  The protagonist is a guy by the name of Buckaroo Banzai, who is a rock-star/physicist/neurosurgeon/secret agent...of course, I mean, aren’t we all?  In his spare time, Buckaroo is also he leader of a motley band of adventurers called the Hong Kong Cavaliers, who find themselves in a race against time to save the earth from a group of Red Lectroids from Planet 10.   So it’s not exactly Citizen Kane or Schindler’s List.  But it’s endearingly goofy, and filled with delightfully pithy semi-random one-liners and catch-phrases.

One that sticks in my head was delivered by Banzai to comfort the long-lost identical twin of his deceased girlfriend, who he encounters in a club that he’s playing after a day of brain surgery and extra-dimensional travel in his rocket-powered pickup truck.  Again, really, really really not Citizen Kane or Schindler’s List.  As Buckaroo gets ready to sing her a really depressing song to cheer her up, he reminds her of one of his philosophical touchstones:  

“No matter where you go, there you are.”  

That felt both daftly obvious and oddly zen-profound back then, but I wonder if it’s still true.  More and more, we’re not where we are.  That we’re in a place does not mean that we’re present there.  That we’re encountering another person does not mean that we’re really engaging with them.  We are, perhaps more than in any other time in human history, able to abstract ourselves from the place we find ourselves.

Our ability to carry the stored memories and knowledge of our entire culture around with us in our pockets is an amazing thing.  We can know seemingly anything, at any time.  We can find our way from any one place to another.  We can remember the name of that guy, you know, the one who starred in that thing with what’s her name.  We can know how our friends are feeling, or what they’re eating.  

But we can also find ourselves dwelling with one foot in meatspace reality and the other foot in virtual space.  We are sort of where we are.  But we are also not.  We are also removed from the reality in which we find ourselves.   Our attention, our mindfulness, our focus, and ourselves are elsewhere, diverted to the immediate gratification of whatever we happen to desire at that very moment.  And that can distance us from those around us.

In today’s passage from the Gospel of Luke, we hear a story of the importance of presence.   In this final chapter, Luke’s narrative of the Gospel is winding down, in preparation for the continuance of the story in the Book of Acts.  In the opening verses of chapter 24, we’ve heard how women arrived at the tomb and found it empty.  They tried to report that angels had told them that Jesus was risen, but the apostles wouldn’t listen.  We’ve heard about how two disciples were walking the road to Emmaus, and on that journey encountered a stranger who turned out to be Jesus. 

With these stories humming in their ears, Jesus is suddenly among them, which just scares the bejabbers out of them.  He offers them a greeting, a simple “Peace be with you,” no more than the Hebrew greeting shalom aleichem that you’d say in encountering a friend.  They remain fearful and doubtful.

At this point in Luke’s story, Jesus takes three specific actions. In verse 39, he offers them his hands and feet, to see and to hold, as evidence that he is really and truly with them.  In verse 41, he also takes a bit of fish and eats it, again, a marker of his physical, actual, material presence among them.

These actions are mirrored in the post-resurrection story told in John’s Gospel.  Even though John and Luke are drawing on very different oral and written traditions about Jesus, they both contain nearly identical reminders of Christ’s physical presence.  In John 20:20-28 passage we heard last week, Jesus also offers up his tangible self, his hands and his side, as proof that he truly is risen.  In John 21:14-15, Jesus shares a meal of bread and fish with the disciples.

Some scholarship has suggested that Luke and John recounted these similar tales because their communities were responding to an ancient Christian struggle about the identity of Jesus.   Luke and John were among the latest Gospels to reach final written form, and that meant that the communities that received them would have encountered the teachings of a Christian movement called Gnosticism. 

The Gnostics got their name from the Greek word gnosis, or knowledge.  They understood the Gospel as secret knowledge, a set of mysterious teachings that Jesus brought to teach a chosen few.   Gnostic Gospels, like the Gospel of Thomas or the recently discovered Gospel of Judas, were circulated widely in the early Christian world, and they were notably bizarre, filled with intentionally obscure symbolism and an occasionally intense, almost fever-dream spirituality.  Only a select few were permitted to participate, as the secret knowledge was passed on to the best, brightest, and most spiritually elite.

The Gnostics were also dualists.  That’s dualists with an “A,” not “duelists” with an “E.”  They didn’t line up at forty paces with flintlocks and shoot at each other.  Instead, they argued that our world and the spiritual realm were totally separate.   Jesus was, they said, a creature of the heavenly realm, who did not really exist in the world.  According to the gnostics, the world was completely and utterly evil.  The whole purpose of Gnostic Jesus was to help us escape the world, in which he didn’t really and actually exist.

The Gnostic Jesus was utterly separate from the world, a creature of light who neither knew suffering nor could know suffering.  That disengagement was the whole point of Gnosticism, in which the spiritually strong sought power to escape this world.  

But spiritual disengagement and distance are diametrically opposed to the teachings, life, and purpose of Jesus of Nazareth.  What Jesus taught and lived was radically a part of this world, deeply connected, and fundamentally engaged.  Those early stories of Jesus told by Luke and John are a counterpoint to that hyper-spiritual, otherworldly, distant faith.  They remind us of the importance of flesh and bone, of life and breath and the process of living.   Being present, in the real and in the now, this matters if you’re following Jesus.  Ours is an incarnate faith, written into the fabric of existence, guided by the same spirit that filled Christ, who could be touched and held, who walked and ate and wept with us.

And that’s an increasingly countercultural stance.  Our culture drives us to be more and more deeply distracted and separated from meaningful encounters with others.  Falling into that silo of self-absorption has never been easier.  We can become siloed in our social network cocoon of tightly woven relationships, hearing only friends, seeing only what we wish to see.   Those screens before our eyes can become something to be checked compulsively, demanding more of our attention than the person nearest to us.   But it goes beyond that recent addiction.   

The political and social viewpoints that are reinforced by our ability to choose our own echo chamber mean that we often exist at a remove from those around us.  The theological issues we permit to divide us cast us even further from one another.  We don’t connect with them.  We are not present for them.  We do not allow ourselves to be touched, or held.  We do not sit down at table.  And that’s not how we’re meant to live.  We need to be present. 

We do that by being there.   Our physical presence for those in need matters.  We most clearly show others that we are Christ followers by being with them, by listening when they need an ear, by binding up their brokenness with caring hands, by standing with them and rebuilding what has fallen apart, and by insuring that when they sit at table, they do not go hungry.

That is an incarnate faith.  That is a faith made real in flesh and bone, that can touch and be touched.   When we in faith go down that path, well, there we are.  

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

Commie Jesus

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

04.15.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Acts 4:32-35

Despite the somewhat bizarre claim of Florida House Representative Allen West this week that somewhere between 78 and 81 members of Congress are Communists, things aren’t looking nearly that good for the Reds these days.  In fact, this hasn’t been the best few decades for communism.

Back when I was a lad, just a bit younger than my boys, communism was a major force in the world.    The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics still sat like a great red blot on most maps, sprawled across a huge swath of the Northern Hemisphere.  The nations of the Warsaw Pact were a significant presence in Europe, which bristled with deep thickets of tanks and strike fighters and mid range nuclear missiles.   China, North Korea and Vietnam were a potent presence in Asia.   Cuba sat just below Florida, which I guess it still...um...does.  But back then, it was supplied and connected deeply with the global network of socialist states.  

As the capitalist democracies squared off against the Red Menace, it wasn’t hard to pick a side.   The autocratic oppression of the socialist states didn’t exactly make them particularly appealing.  They seemed grim and joyless places, and that was in their own propaganda.   When I was a teen, I’d go down to Georgetown on weekend nights to hang out and people watch, and would sometimes pick up the English language version of Pravda..the mouthpiece of the Supreme Soviet...to read with friends.    It was like entering bizarro world.  Sometimes it was just sentence after sentence of flowery praise for the glorious glories of the revolution, which were as embarrassingly overpositive as that big trophy your second grader got for almost getting that first word right in the spelling bee.   Who’d have thought the USSR needed so much help with it’s self-esteem?  

But mostly, Pravda was crushingly dull.   Take, for instance, an actual front page Pravda headline from 1985.  The breaking news of the day in Soviet Russia on August 17, 1985?  “Four rotors for centrifugal compressors were sent to oil drillers by the Borislavski Experimental Foundry-Mechanical Factory Collective.”  Wow.  That’s...yawn...um...what?   Frankly, though, would we rather be told about the Borislavski Experimental Foundry-Mechanical Factory Collective or be bombarded with information about Kim and Kanye?  

Why do I even know about Kim and Kanye?  I don’t want to know about Kim and Kanye.  I keep pressing delete, but I can’t seem to get rid of that data, which worms it’s way into my mind like a virus I got in the supermarket checkout line.  When MacAfee comes out with a program that will delete everything having to do with the Kardashians from my memory, I’m so there.

Then there was Communist moviemaking, which would typically involve musical numbers in which hale and hearty red-cheeked peasantry sang about how they’d successfully attained their harvest quota.  I think an early draft of the book for West Side Story had a song about harvest quotas, but Bernstein convinced Sondheim to change it.  Probably for the best.  “Maria, we just met our quota, Maria” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

And now?   Global communism is nothing.  Oh, there are still communist states.  China seems to be doing well for itself by becoming more or less capitalist.    Cuba still makes do with 1952 Buicks.  North Korea is mostly just hungry and insane.  Communism itself has mostly crumbled to nothing as a global movement, no matter what Representative West might think.

Reading through the odd passage in today’s selection from the Book of Acts is particularly strange for those of us who lived through the failure of 20th century communism.   Here we are, the week after Easter, reflecting with Luke on the very earliest days of the Jesus Movement following the resurrection and the fires of Pentecost.   

The Book of Acts is the second part of a single narrative, with the first being Luke’s Gospel.   Of all of the Gospels, Luke’s is the one that most highlights the spiritual challenges of wealth.   In Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount, for example, the Beatitudes are followed by the Woes, all of which are directed at those who were doing well in this life.  

That’s reinforced by parables unique to Luke, many of which recount the tension between faith and wealth.   Luke gives us the parable of the two debtors in 7:41-43.  We get the parable of the Rich Fool in 12:16-21.   The Unrighteous Manager?   That’s 16:1-9.   The Rich Man and Lazarus?  Luke 16:19-31.    This Gospel focuses intently on the economic stories told by Jesus, which is likely a factor of the educated community into which these stories were originally written.  It’s just a consistent and sustained feature of Luke, one which still echoes in our ears as we come to the Acts of the Apostles.

From that context, the description of the character of the primal church is in direct opposition to the ethics of self-seeking wealth.   It does, however, sound more than a little tiny bit pinko, the sort of gathering that might freak out Rep. West or his inspiration, the legendary Red Scare Senator Joe McCarthy.

Acts tells us that this early church involved no-one who claimed private ownership.  Everything was held in common, and to each was given according to their need.   That last part was actually a Karl Marx quote, which makes it even more bizarre.  Here we have the church at the height of the church, with the passion and energy of the movement at a high peak.  Here we have the most essential church, before it had absorbed the values of Greco-Roman culture and become co-opted by Empire, and it looks...well...very very different from the way that we experience church.

How are we meant to process this rather fundamental difference?   We don’t approach our lives together as a church this way.  Because if we did, I’m just not sure how well it would be received.   If the next time Poolesville Presbyterian Church talked about a stewardship campaign, I just told everyone to dump their entire income and the full contents of their bank accounts and their 401Ks into the church accounts, I’m reasonably sure that 1) we’d miss that goal and 2) I’d find myself having to consider an exciting new calling to a career in retail.

And even if we all decided to go that route, what experiments in collective living have shown us over the millennia is that as great as it might seem in principle, actually making it happen is considerably harder.  Trying it on a grand scale clearly failed in the 20th century, as the natural human inclination to seek power over one another turned communist idealism into the cold hard power of the centralized state.

Even trying it on a smaller scale is hard.  This little building we find ourselves worshipping in today was a product of the mid 19th century, and in the mid 19th century, there was a surge of efforts to create utopian communities where everyone shared everything.

Some of these efforts, like the Amana Colonies of Iowa and the Shaker Christian communities, lasted for nearly a century.   Others, like the Fruitland community founded by New England Transcendentalist and radical vegetarian Amos Bronson Alcott, lasted from June 1844 to January of 1845, which is barely longer than a typical middle school relationship.   Utopian dreams fade quickly when confronted with the reality of actual human beings.  That’s why the word “utopia” literally means “nowhere.”   If you share everything in common, it’s hard to get past the problem of what to do about folks who’d just rather take it easy.

So what are we to do with this passage?  Does it have nothing to teach us about life together in the right here and the right now, in a culture and a context that couldn’t be more different?   It does, of course, although less as a schematic for how to organize community than as a value-set that can govern the direction of any community.

It is in verse 32 that we find that essential ethic:  that they were “...of one heart and soul.”  This state of being models the most essential value of human relationship as taught by Jesus.  We are to love our neighbors...meaning all those around us...as ourselves.  It is that way of approaching life that is the measure of any healthy gathering of human beings, no matter how they choose to organize their life together.

It is true for towns, and for nations, and it is particularly true for gatherings of Jesus folk.  Whether we’re Presbyterian or Methodist, Episcopalian or Baptist, Catholic or nondenominational, the mechanisms of how we make decisions are of less importance than the Spirit that governs that togetherness.   Systems and rules can be really remarkably helpful as we work our way through our walk with Him.  

But what matters in life together is that willingness to recognize our fundamental connectedness to one another, and that this connectedness goes deeper than rules and systems.  Our Creator has woven us together into the fabric of existence.  Though we can at times struggle to see it through eyes clouded with self-absorbed hungers and tribal prejudices, we do share the creation in which we find ourselves.   

And in this life, which we hold in common, the gift of recognizing that basic unity is one of the greatest blessings of the Spirit.   It is the essential bond of any healthy community.  That’s not communist, certainly not in the Marxist-Leninist sense of the word.  Nor does it have to involve everyone owning everything.  But that life of mutual care and mutual support is the purpose of every Christian fellowship.

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

A New Thing

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; Easter Sunday, April 8, 2012

Scripture Lesson:  Isaiah 25:6-9; John 20:1-18

We really think we’re open to new things.  

We do.  Here in the second decade of the first century of the third millennia after all that Jesus stuff went down, we’re convinced that we human beings are really open to getting some change on.  Our whole world is change, after all.  Everything around us seems new and different, and we’re sort of used to it.

We like new stuff, the bright and the shiny and the glistening.  We’ve learned to expect new stuff, and new stuff we get, quaffing from the continuously cascading cornucopia of capitalist consumerism.  That form of alarmingly alliterative newness sometimes seems so inescapable that  we want to flee from it, to hide under the bed as the ghost of Steve Jobs hovers in the hallway, his turtleneck faintly glowing.

But Steve, you say.  I don’t really need a phone that can beat me at Jeopardy, Steve.  “What is Siri for 1,000,” he intones.  I don’t need a phone with a screen so refined that I need an electron microscope to see the pixels, Steve.  “But it’s MAGICAL,” he whispers. So we walk right through him and his magical screens, and bump right into the Spirit of Google Future offering us big super happy fun augmented reality glasses.  Those are, as of last week, the latest and newest thing, so new that they technically don't even exist outside of a few "you-know-you'll-wanna-buy-'em" prototypes.

Really.  Have you seen these things?  In a few years, our apps won’t just be on a screen in our hand.  The screens will be before our faces, and they’ll seem to float in the air in front of us, like visions of sugarplums directing us to the nearest Starbucks, although given how easy it is to clutter up our desktops and smartphones, I can see augmented reality mostly augmenting my ability to walk directly into streetsigns and parked cars.  

Still, we’ve gotten used to that kind of change, the bright sparkly shine of next year’s model and version two point oh.

Because for all of the constant ever-surging rush of progress, humankind has stayed more or less the same.  

Where we struggle is with real change, the change that comes as the things we take as the fundamental constants of our lives shift beneath our feet.  Those changes are much, much harder to adapt to.  

Like that moment when our knees inform us in no uncertain terms that we are not 18 any more.  

Or when we realize that the tiny little baby who used to squeal delightedly in a tiny little voice as he pulled out chunks of our beard with his tiny little hands now is a man a voice deeper than our own.   Or when we realize that a relationship that seemed like the very bedrock of our lives has crumbled into ruin.  Or when we awake the morning after a surreally hard day and realize that that other human being, that soul that was so much a part of us,  is really and truly gone.

Those new things, the new things that shake our foundations and assumptions, those really new things are hard.  We have difficulty processing such things, have trouble wrapping our minds around them.  Even if that change is sitting right in front of our faces, we have so much trouble grasping it that sometimes we can’t even see it.

From chapter 25 in the Book of Isaiah today we hear a story of new things.  It’s a lovely little story about a meal, and the end of suffering.  It’s the promise that tears will be wiped away, and that God will make everything alright for the people of Israel.  What we have not heard is chapter that came right before it, because that’s a bit harder on our ears.

Chapter 24 of Isaiah is one of that 8th century prophet’s many oracles against the people of Israel.  Speaking from the comfort of royal Jerusalem, where he was well regarded by all and had the willing ear of the king, Isaiah doesn’t spin out pretty words that will keep people liking him.  Instead, he tells out a story of how the whole world will be ended.  What gets broken?  Everything gets broken.  Everything is ended.   Ever see the movie 2012?  Well, it’s not quite as over the top as that, as no limos are driven straight through collapsing buildings, but it’s pretty close.   Isaiah tells of the terrible newness that comes with the end of all that we know.

Following this comes a Psalm, a poetic song of praise that fills the 25th chapter.  In this, Isaiah proclaims that with the collapse of the life we had known, something truly new and more gracious and more promising will arise.  All will not forever be wreck and ruin.

It’s God who truly makes things new.   It’s God who rebuilds temples. It’s God who creates new cities.  It’s God who recreates each of us, every day, every moment.

That message is the same as the Easter message we’ve heard in John’s Gospel this morning.  The message is one of a powerful transformation, of a shift from brokenness to grace, from ruins to a new being.  It’s a hard thing to see and move towards, because it seems beyond even our most impossible yearnings.  

Even if it’s right there in front of us, we struggle to see it and understand what it means.  Faced with the return of Mary Magdalene, shouting out that the tomb was empty, Peter and the beloved disciple ran to the tomb.  They found it empty, but had no idea what it meant, not really.

Mary, who stays, knows only the newness of loss.  When angels appear, she can’t see them, feeling only loss.  When Jesus himself is suddenly with her, she can’t see him.  There seems to be so little room in her reality for such a thing.  She’s still struggling to come to terms with the death-newness and the broken-newness.  Even seeing the possibility of resurrection, of new life, of hope, well, that’s beyond her.

Until she hears her name, spoken in a familiar voice.

And then, suddenly, see can see.  That impossibility becomes real, and things are different, new in the way that God intends, new in the way that we can only faintly comprehend.

Where there had been death, there was suddenly life and a restoration.   Where there had been weeping and sorrow, there was incredulous joy.  In the resurrection promise we proclaim this morning we bear witness that things can be made new.

That change is not something we can build ourselves.  It doesn’t come to us from the secular culture around us, which offers us whirl and sparkle and next years model but nothing deep and lasting and really new.

Instead, our renewal in body and spirit comes from God, who we know through Christ and his teachings.  It comes from God’s own Son, living a life filled with God’s own Spirit.  In the hopeful wonder felt by the Beloved Disciple, and in the joy felt by Mary we have a taste of what that truly new life is like.

It’s not just a materially successful life, not as the world defines it.   It’s not wealth.  It’s not power.  It’s real newness.  It’s change that transforms our view of the past, alters our  actions in the present, and sets a bright hope to guide us towards our future

It’s a recommitment to newness of joy, and a renewal of our life, every day.  It is the hope of restoration, of a city that rises from the ruins in which the only tears are tears of joy.  It is the hope of transformation, of a stone rolled away and a life made new.

On this Easter morning, hear this joy with new ears.

On this Easter morning, live this joy with a new heart.

He is risen.  Alleluia, AMEN.

Opening the Door

Easter Sunrise Service - Sugarloaf Mountain

Easter Sunday 2012; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 16:1-8

There’s nothing more frightening than the unknown.  There’s nothing scarier than the unexpected.

Like, say, those time when you’re curled up on the sofa late in the evening.  You’ve got the bag of microwave popcorn and a nice cozy blanket, and Netflix is all spooled up, and you’re ready to be scared.

The movie you’re watching serves that right up, because you just know that scene will come.  It’ll come in that scene when she’s walking slowly down a dark and shadowed hallway towards a door.  There’s someone at the door, and she moves slowly towards it, as softly menacing violins make alarming, tension-building noises on the soundtrack.  The doorbell rings again, and she moves even closer.  The violins grow louder, and you bury yourself deeper in the blanket.  Don’t do it!  Don’t open that door!

But of course she pays no attention to you at all, and stretches her hand out to the doorknob.  She hesitates, uncertain, her hand hovering right at the knob as the film’s director messes with you.  

“Hello?  Who is it?”  she asks.  There’s no reply, but the doorbell rings again.  I mean, c’mon!  You’ve got to be kidding me!  There’s no way she should open it.  No sane person would open it!  No-one you know would open it.

So of course, she starts to open it.  

Her hand touches the knob, and she turns it, and the door swings open as the music screeches raw terror.  You cower back into the sofa, trying to burrow away from the terrifying, inevitable reveal.   It’s...it’s...its’...

Oh look!  Jehovah’s Witnesses!  

This is going to be a scarier film than you thought.

But as frightening as that sight might be, what really makes us tremble is not knowing what will happen next.  Of everything that frightens us, there’s little that is more disturbing than the unknown, than a closed door in darkness.  

So that brings up a question.  As we heard the story of the Easter event from the Gospel of Mark today, why do we end today’s reading at verse eight.  It seems like such a fearful and grim place to stop.  On this morning when we celebrate the most important event in our faith, a celebration of the resurrection of Christ, why do we end with a reading that says, “...terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

That’s not a happy ending.  That doesn’t even begin to evoke big family meals, egg hunts and chocolate bunnies.

To understand that, it helps to know a little bit about Mark’s Gospel.  Mark is the very earliest of the Gospels, having been put into final form between 60 and 70 AD.   In most Bibles, Mark keeps on crankin’ through verse 19.  Jesus appears again to the disciples, miracles are performed, Jesus ascends into heaven, and the Gospel message is proclaimed everywhere.  That’s a much better ending.

But those verses only came into the Bible later, tacked on in the late second century.  The oldest versions don’t have them at all.

There’s also another, shorter ending.  It’s just two sentences tacked on to the end of verse eight, with Jesus sending out a proclamation of salvation.  But that little snippet comes to us from nearly 300 years later.

So the oldest text about Easter ends with those who have come to mourn Jesus at his tomb fleeing in fear and then maintaining a quivering, terrified silence.  As difficult as that might be to read, Mark tells us something very real about how human beings deal with the unknown and the unexpected.  

The followers of Jesus had just experienced a huge and crushing loss.  Their beloved teacher and rabbi, the one they thought might just be the messiah they’d been hoping for, had died.  He had shared the terrible fate of countless others, a public crucifixion.  They knew they had to mourn.  They knew--they were certain--that they were headed into a dark and lonely time.  They knew that their little movement was going to fail, just as countless others had been snuffed out.  That was just how things worked.

As those three women approached the stone door to the tomb, this is what they were sure that they knew.  But when they came to the stone, it was rolled away.  A man dressed in shining white was there waiting for them.  In the world of the ancient Hebrews, white clothing was usually understood as a sign of a heavenly being.  Remember, this was 2000 years before detergent.  Only angelic power could possible get a shirt *that* sparkly white.  

The message conveyed by that man left them truly terrified.  “He has been raised.”  Suddenly, they were faced with a future that was truly unknown.

What did that even mean?   He had risen?   What was happening?

As bleak and dark as they had thought their future was, at least it was something they understood.  Now, suddenly, they were facing an incomprehensible event, one that would transform their lives in ways they couldn’t even imagine.  

That’s what the hope of Easter is all about.  That’s what Christian faith is all about.  If you really think about it, and if you really feel it, it’s more than a little bit scary.

We’re being asked to participate in a hope that transcends death, and in a faith that will change our lives completely.

That hope is a joyful thing, but it can also fill us with fear.

We’re afraid to let go of what we know, and to let ourselves be changed.  We can become as unable to speak as those women fleeing the tomb, our voices silenced by the sheer magnitude of how our lives might be changed.  

But though Mark’s story stops with fear and silence, we know that this isn’t where the story ends.  Fear became excitement, which became joy.  Silence became proclamation.

On this morning with the rising of the sun, we also know that the story of Easter still has not ended.  We’re a part of it, and it is still being told.

As we tell that story through our lives, moving towards our own future, we have to be willing to embrace that change, and to move beyond our fear of what is to come and into the best and greatest joy that awaits us.

Because the door has been opened.   The stone has been rolled away.  It’s Easter morning, and He is risen!

Alleluia, AMEN.

Hoshia-Na

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

04.01.12;  Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29;  Mark 11:1-11

So I’ve got a little sign here, with one word scrawled on the back of a poster for the Easter Sunrise service that I hope some of you will be able to attend.

Can you see the word?  Cool.  Can you say the word?  Maybe a little louder? 

We hear it used aplenty around this time of year, as we gather for Palm Sunday to celebrate the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem.  Fronds are distributed, and we sing hymns, and we wave ‘em around in the air like we just don’t care.   Afterwards, if my recollection of being a boy on Palm Sunday is correct, the fronds become something that you can use to whack your little brother.  

Not that I’m suggesting that.  No siree.  Didn’t hear that from me.  Nothing to see.  Move along.

Hosanna shows up a whole bunch today.

As Jesus arrives in Jerusalem, the gathered throngs cast down palm branches, and cry out “Hosanna!”  Hosanna just isn’t one of those words we regularly use in conversation, and it’s one of those words in the Bible that shows up almost totally unchanged.  

We don’t translate it.  We don’t transliterate it.  It’s just a word in Hebrew, and we say it, but we don’t have a clue what it means.

We think we know, of course.  When you encounter a new word for the first time, you can gather all sorts of clues from context.  Like, let's say, the word "daplinka."  If I say, in my best Jabba the Hutt voice, “Meh ganna go dwampa manna ma daplinka,” you’d have no idea what I’m talking about, and you might have concern for my sanity.  

But if I say “I’m going to go for a drive in my daplinka,” you’d have some idea what I mean, although you might suggest that I drive my daplinka to the library and please please please get some books that aren’t Star Wars fan fiction.  It’s good to branch out.  It really is.

From the context of the songs we’ve sung this morning and the stories of Jesus coming into Jerusalem, we think we know what that word means.  Hosanna seems to mean something like “Woo Hoo,” or “Yay” or “Booyah.”   It feels celebratory, sort of happy and excited, a thing you shout out in a crowd as a parade passes by.   

If we’ve been exposed to the hippie Jesus-fest that is the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, we might also add “hey-zanna-zanna-zanna-ho,”  but this doesn’t really help us get to the meaning of the word, though, because , like, “zanna-zanna-ho” isn’t in any of the ancient Hebrew texts, man, which is, like, a serious drag, man.  

If asked to match Hosanna up with another word that comes to us untranslated from the Hebrew, we might say, well, it’s like “Hallelujah,” which in Hebrew literally means “Praise God!”

So what does this word actually mean?   For that, we’re going to watch the first three minutes and five seconds of a movie that’s one of my favorite retellings of a Bible story.  The movie is Prince of Egypt, an animated retelling by DreamWorks of the story of Moses.   It’s an excellent film, one that’s creative, entertaining and totally respectful of the Biblical narrative.  If you haven’t seen it, see it.

The word hosanna recurs repeatedly in a song in the opening sequence of the film.  In fact, the name of the song in Hebrew is hoshia-na, which is exactly the same word, syllable for syllable, sound for sound, that would have been shouted at Jesus as he passed that day in Jerusalem.   

To get a sense of what that word means, we’re going to watch the version of the movie that was translated into Hebrew for distribution in Israel.  What we’re looking for is context, because context helps us get at meaning.  What is happening as the word is sung?  What is occurring?   I’ll hold up my little Hosanna sign, just so y’all don’t miss it.  So...here we go:

(Watching this at home?  It’s at 1:26, 1:29, 2:28, 2:41; and at the conclusion at 6:57)

That wasn’t exactly a celebration, now, was it?  The opening sequence to this film recounts the story of slavery in Egypt, and the story of the killing of the male children of the Israelites.  When the word hoshia-na was sung, what did we see?  Slaves terrified by oppression and brutality.  Soldiers killing the innocent.  A family fleeing in fear, desperate to save the life of a newborn child.

There was no zanna-zanna-ho in evidence there, which is, like, a total downer, man.

“Hoshia-na” is what you cry out in those moments when you are in need of help.  In Hebrew, hosanna means “Save us.”  In Hebrew, it means “Deliver us,” which is the name of the song you’ve just heard when you sing it in English.

That word in Hebrew occurs in two of the scripture readings today. It’s hard to miss as it’s repeated in Mark’s Gospel, but we probably missed it in the Psalm.   Now that we know what it means, it’s harder to miss.  In Psalm 118, it’s in verse 25, where it says “Save Us!”   That Psalm was part of a festival liturgy, one that would have been sung as part of a celebration, most likely some sort of procession up to either the temple or the altar.   Though it is a cry to God to save, it is entirely possible that at the time of Jesus, the word would have been used so often in times of common worship that the original meaning of the word had been almost forgotten.  It may have become that thing you say just because you know it’s what you say, a rote prayer that you repeat with your voice while your mind is 1,000 miles away.

And yet, still, “save us” is the cry as Jesus enters Jerusalem, even if the voices crying it out didn’t realize what they were saying, any more than they really understood what Jesus represented.  That undercurrent of meaning meshes with the undercurrent of his purpose, which is to liberate us from the oppression of human brokenness, and to place in us the transforming grace of God’s own Spirit.  It is also the cry that remains unspoken if we view this day only as a day of festival and celebration.  It is the cry that remains unspoken if we don't acknowledge that the deliverance we receive does not come from today, but through the course of this long and holy week.   We shouldn't forget the meaning of that word, because our need now is no less.

We live in a world where hatred towards the stranger and the different comes easily, and from that place, we cry hoshia-na.  We live in a world where the blood of innocents still stains the ground, and from that place, we still cry hoshia-na.  We struggle through life unable to understand, unable to find the self we were created to be, unable to find meaning, and from that place, we still cry hoshia-na.

But as we move towards Easter, what we remember this year and every year is that he does.  All we have to do is let him.

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