The Test

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

06.24.2012; Rev. David Williams

Scripture:  2 Corinthians 6:1-13

Vacation is such a strange time.  Vacation gives us that time away from the bustle and thrum and normal processes of life.  It’s not hard.  It doesn’t test or try us, beyond perhaps testing the elasticity of our stomachs.  We can do whatever we want, whenever we want, and it’s all wonderful and free and delightfully liberating...at least right up until the next month’s credit card bill arrives.

One of the highlights of this last week’s vacation for my family was our two day visit to Monterey California, where the winds blew cool of the Pacific, and clear blue skies mirrored clear blue waters.  It was seventy two perfect degrees, and totally lacking in humidity, the kind of day that makes Washingtonians grumble resentfully about.  Monterey has an amazing Aquarium, and my family spent a long and highly edutaining morning there.  

We wandered through exhibits about reef life, about anemones and mussels that wave their tendrils and tentacles through the nutrient-rich waters in the nearby Monterey Bay kelp forests, snatching up every passing morsel.  From there, we wandered out into a strip of t-shirt emporiums and gift shops and the inescapable Dippin’ Dots, all of which seemed to approach us with the same basic filter-feeding principles as the mussels and the anemones.

We wanted to steer clear of the the typical tourista food dispensaries, so a little web-research on the Yelp social-review app lead us to a tasty little local Indian curry house right near the water.  The staff were remarkably friendly, and the vegetarian options were plentiful, and the huge clay tandoori oven yielded some really amazingly fresh and delicious naan.  Over the audio system played music that was equal parts New Age and Bollywood crooning.

Off in one corner of the restaurant was a statue, a three-foot-high golden multiarmed elephant-headed dude.  On the arms and on the tusks were strewn dollar bills, and at the base burned three little candles.  When my little guy asked about it, I told him that the owners were likely Hindu, and that this was a shrine to the Hindu god Ganesha.  In the convoluted Hindu pantheon, elephant-headed Ganesha has many complex meanings, but is popularly considered the god of the kitchen, the god of business endeavors, the god of prosperity, and given all of the positive reviews, apparently also the god of Yelp.

It was a nice little splash of authentic Indian color in a lovely little place, but I was struck by two things as I mused about it.  First, that there are some strains of Jesus folk who might be bothered by it, though I’m not among them.   And second, that a prosperity-focused faith is remarkably successful belief system, one that is hardly unique to polytheistic religions.  Worshipping the god of prosperity and business endeavors is actually the way a surprisingly large number of Christians approach their faith.

That version of the gospel..the name-it-and-claim-it, Word Faith, to-meet-your-need-gotta-plant-a-seed movement...is perhaps best known for it's tendency to emphasize material rewards as the fruits of faith.  If you have faith, you will prosper.  Your car will be large.  Your shoes will be fancy.  You will have all the very best toys.

That desire is strong enough that it has spawned functionally identical versions of the prosperity gospel across world religious traditions.  It exists in basically the same form and with entirely the same purpose in Buddhist, Hindu, pagan, and neopagan traditions.

That emphasis resonates with a pretty basic higher primate desire.   We want the tastiest fruit for our young.  We want that female to be so awed by our abundantly padded nest that she can't help but approach us with the cooing sounds that mean we're going to get some serious...nitpicking...on.  Ooooh. Yeah.  Right there...

But that primal urge is alien to the Gospel, and totally opposed to the passage we heard from the Apostle Paul’s second letter to the church at Corinth this morning.  Second Corinthians is an interesting mess of a letter.   Unlike first Corinthians, which develops arguments logically and segues neatly from one concept to another, Second Corinthians wanders wildly all over the place.    The tone of the letter changes suddenly 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 competent critical 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. It’s a bit like a best-of-Paul playlist strung together by Spotify after the servers have been infiltrated by Stuxnet, as jarring as blending the Brandenburg Concerti, Death Metal, and the best hits of one of those 64 member J-pop girl bands.

In his dealings with the Corinthians, Paul repeatedly had to deal with that community’s obsession with the trappings of success, and to cast a vision before them that upended their view of the world.  As a highly dynamic port city, Corinth rewarded those who rewarded themselves, and your place within the culture was measured by your status, wealth, and power.  They were all about prospering.

And yet Paul, in asserting that the time to respond to God’s goodness, and challenging the Corinthians to be reconciled to one another, well...he chooses to tack hard against that worldview.  His authority...what commends him...is not a list of achievements, not a resume packed with one triumph after another.  Instead, for the second time in this letter, Paul hits the Corinthians with what’s called a hardship list.

A hardship list is, well, exactly what it sounds like.  Both here and in 2 Corinthians 4:7-12, Paul sings out a rhythmic cadence of woes, a catalog of sorrows and injustices that he had himself endured in his efforts to spread the message of Jesus of Nazareth.   The theme underlying this message is fundamentally simple:  faith is something that inhabits an entirely different category of reality than our quest for material well-being and physical ease.  That’s not to say that being faithful can’t sometimes lead to prosperity.  Kindness and thrift and diligence and honesty and patience...values which may seem alien in this era but rise out of faith...those values have a tendency to result in both well-being and contentment.   Instead, it’s important not to conflate faith with the quest for gain because of what that does to faith.

Of all the many problems with thinking that way, the greatest comes when you actually get past all your daydreams about God finally getting you all the wealth you’re sure will make you happy. Because if having faith means having your dreams all come true, then if you suffer...it must be because you just don’t have enough faith. 

If you pray and you pray and you pray over someone you love...and they die anyway...it must mean you don’t have enough faith. If you pray and hope over someone who just can’t seem to get their lives together...and they never do...it must mean you don’t have enough faith. If you try your hardest to do what’s right, and that relationship just comes apart anyway, it must mean you didn’t have enough faith. If you put in long hours at work, and do your best, and don’t get ahead...it must mean you didn’t have enough faith. Just believe a little harder, they say. Just pull yourself up by your Jesus bootstraps, they say.

But faith doesn’t work like that. It’s not measured in the same way as worldly power. It’s not social. It’s not economic. It’s not a question of being able to do whatever you want, and impressing people with your power.

Instead, it is what deepens your joy in times of celebration, and what keeps you from unravelling in times of hardship.  Faith is the thing towards which we orient ourselves, and that keeps us oriented no matter what we encounter.  It governs our actions, whether we are deep in the fat of the world’s sweetness or in a place of bones and ruin and tears.

The measure of faith is not whether it stands when the world seems to pour out affirmation.   The test and the purpose of our faith lies in the fullness of a life, in ill repute and good repute.  Let's live out our every moment, no matter what it be, guided by that fundamental grace.   Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

The Secret Power

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

06.10.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  1 Samuel 8:4-20

If you spend more than a short while interacting with other Americans, you’ll encounter one of them.  They are the conspiracy theorists, the folks who are utterly convinced that things are not as they seem, and that somewhere, someone is secretly manipulating everything to some unspeakable and nefarious purpose.  Nothing is as it seems.  

These are folks who might well seem bright and capable, like the perfectly normal seeming person in the cubicle next to you.  He seems so busy and so capable, right up until you realize that he spends most of his work day researching his 1,500 page unpublished manuscript, which reveals that the United States is actually run by the disembodied brain of Walt Disney, which controls both political parties and the military industrial complex from its jar in a deep vault under the Masonic Temple in Alexandria.

This might perhaps explain why he spends his every lunch hour watching iCarly online at one-tenth normal speed while taking furious notes.  Although now that you’ve figured out why, you just don’t have the heart to tell him it’s not actually a Disney show.

About a week ago, things were conspiracy-theory central in the D.C. suburbs.  In Chantilly, Virginia, the annual meeting of something called the Bilderberg Group was held.  It’s a private, informal conference, one that’s been run since the 1950’s for high level political leaders and operatives, captains of industry, and other assorted muckity mucks.   It’s invite only, and the goings on within are confidential, so of course conspiracy theorists swarm around it like moths to a porchlight.

According to the Bilderberger conspiracists, this gathering of some of the world’s most powerful and influential people is actually a cabal that is secretly controlling the entire global economy, manipulating everything from behind the scenes.   

Here, I confess to being a little bit baffled.  This conspiracy theory...if I’m getting this right...hopes to reveal that the world’s most powerful, connected, and influential people are controlling the world.  Huh.  

Alrighty then.  

That, I think, is one of the things I’ve never quite gotten about the whole secret-cabal-conspiracy thing.  Powerful people don’t hide their power.  They don’t need to.  Billionaires and old landed money and political powerhouses tend not to live on secret bases just under the surface of private islands.  They do their thing right out there where everyone can see them.  Why?  Because they’re powerful, and power can do whatever power wants.  You want to pour four hundred million dollars into an election to sway the country in a direction that favors your business?   You just do it, right out there where everyone can see you.

That’s certainly true now, but it has always been true.  Whenever human beings have created societies, there have always been those with power and those without.  And those with power?  You just can’t miss them.

As we hear the reading from 1 Samuel 8 this morning, that was clearly the case a little over 3,000 years ago.  This was a period of considerable change for the Hebrew people, a time during which they found themselves transitioning from one way of being community together to another.

This story comes to us from somewhere between one thousand and eleven-hundred years BCE, a time when the loose tribal federation that had comprised the people of Israel was under considerable pressure.  The world around them was changing, both technologically and sociologically.  Technologically, the ancient near east was moving from the bronze age to the iron age.  Israel was on the bronze side of that exchange, and it was costing them dearly whenever they encountered more advanced iron on the field of battle.  The Philistines, for example, had mastered that metal, and that made them scary no matter how many giants they might have with them.

But of equal significance was the shift among the peoples of that region to more and more centralized systems of government.   The people of Israel were not yet in that category.  Instead of having a central state, they lived without a significant locus of power.  The tribes operated more or less on their own, and when an external threat arose, they relied on whatever charismatic or talented leader might arise to help them resist that threat.  Those leaders, called “judges,” weren’t of any particular lineage, and their power tended not to convey beyond their own personal authority.  They were an odd blend of leader and prophet, and their leadership was part and parcel with the idea that only God was ultimately sovereign.

When all Israel faced were surrounding peoples who were increasingly organized around consolidated, central authority.  Individual tribes or city-states were merging into kingdoms, which could leverage that consolidated power into more and more organized military systems.  Their armies were better equipped.

And so the pressure was on, and the struggled to come to terms with their seeming lack of power.  The solution was simple.  In order to provide the unifying and concentrated power that would permit the Israelites to compete with other nations, the elders of all of the tribes approached Samuel.  “Give us a king like the other nations.”  

This was, for Samuel, frustrating, but as he sought the counsel of God, he receives an odd response.  

Faced with what appears to be a rejection of the balance that has maintained the integrity of the covenant people, God tells Samuel in verse 7:  “Listen to the voice of the people,” and again in verse 9, “Listen to their voice.”  For all of Samuel’s frustration, he is told, listen...and then told to just tell them precisely what will happen if he does what they ask.  

What the leaders of Israel hope is that the king will serve them.  Samuel predicts is what always happens when human power concentrates in the hands of a few.  The powerful will take what they need to maintain power.  The king will take sons as soldiers and daughters for his courts.  He will take taxes and take land, which will be distributed to those who hover around the riches of power.  The king will serve the people, alright, but not quite in the way they’d hoped.

It’s not quite like that old classic Twilight Zone, but it’s pretty close.

But the yearning for national power was too strong, and Samuel acceded to the demands of the people.  He listened, as he had been told to listen.  That’s not necessarily what was most striking.  What is more striking is the way God responds to the request of his people.  Despite the seeming move away from covenant, there is no smiting.  There are no pillars of fire or plagues or sudden arrivals of the YHWH Death Star in low earth orbit.

What appears to matter most significantly is the free embrace of covenant.  If the people choose not to focus on the justice of covenant with God, and instead seek the justice that comes with the balance of human power, then they are free to do so.  They’ll receive the truth about the nature of their choice, as Samuel conveyed it.  That truth played out across the history of the kingdom, as within two generations, Solomon’s son Rehoboam would so oppress the people of the North that the kingdom would split clean in half.

The misuse of power always produces the same result.  When power concentrates, the result is always the same.  It is hardly a secret, and hardly a mystery.  Throughout the three thousand or so years of human history, power is always it’s own downfall.   Wherever human beings have drawn power to a few, be it political or economic, that culture has always and without fail collapsed.

In that, though, we miss the power that quietly but inescapably underlies all things.  That power is a subtle part of the structure of all being, as present as the air we breathe or the gravity that keeps us from drifting off the surface of this world.  That power is the grace and justice of our Creator, and it’s easy to miss.   It’s a form of power that does not demand, that does not coerce or oppress, but instead permits us the freedom to either stand in covenant or not.

Whenever we find ourselves in positions of authority, we need to recall this.  Whether at work on in family life, there will be times when we find others in our charge. There is always a temptation to use power like a king, or like a tycoon.  It can maintain order, sure.  But it too often becomes the means by which we force our wills upon others, to no other purpose than to affirm ourselves.  When we do that, our power turns into a feedback loop, feeding only itself.   God’s power is not like that.  It is infinitely generous, not controlling.  It is truly giving, not grasping and self-oriented. 

And though it’s as subtle as a sunset, and as quiet as the breath of a newborn child, it’s not really a secret.   Not really.   It just gets drowned out in the din of our shouting.

Live, in whatever power has been given you, so that truth might be more clearly heard.  Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

The Disembodied

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

06.03.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Romans 8:12-17

It’s been odd, watching that transition from the physical to the virtual.  I’ve been there, and it’s been peculiar.

There was a time, not so long ago, when getting a video involved a physical trip to something called a video store.   I know this might be hard to conceptualize, but let me attempt it.  Ever seen one of those Redbox automated DVD rental kiosks, the ones that sit outside of grocery stores and pharmacies?   Imagine one of those, only the size of a whole store, with a much better selection and actual human beings who know stuff about movies who can make recommendations and help you find things.   It was like that.

But now?  We just stream things, or get them on demand.  We don’t need to go anywhere, or see anyone, or do anything other than point a remote at the screen.   Every last part of the transaction is virtual, to the point at which we start feeling annoyed that we have to move to the microwave to get popcorn.  Isn’t there some way to automate that, we think, as we noodle through the Netflix menu wasteland?  Nope.  Seen it.  Nope.  Seen it.  Nope.  Seen it.   Oooh, look!  Rutger Hauer in Hobo with a Shotgun!  That looks perfect for family movie night.

That movement towards a disembodied reality has also played its way across the floor of my rec-room.  Back when they were smaller pups, the kids accrued vast piles of plastic toys, to the point at which our basement looked like a Toys-R-Us right after it had been hit by an F3 Tornado.   At some points, a tornado might actually have made it a bit cleaner, sort of like the “Voooom” at the end of The Cat in the Hat Comes Back.   I hope I’m not spoiling the ending of that classic for anyone.

There was a time when you couldn’t walk across a surface in my house without worrying about encountering some tiny plastic object, specifically the dreaded one by two standard thickness Lego brick.  For years, these pernicious little critters seemed to be everywhere, or...to be more accurate, not everywhere.   Just in the places you were stepping with your bare feet on your way to the bathroom in the middle of the night.  

But then things began to shift.  Instead of saving up their hard-won allowance to get things, the lads began to save for Dee El See, or downloadable content.  The things they wanted weren’t real anymore, but were instead part of the virtual world.   Slowly but surely, the material objects have begun to disappear, and more and more of life has become peculiarly intangible.   Instead of toys, there were costumes and plugins for Little Big Planet.  Instead of books crowding shelves, there was data that filled the drive of Kindles.  Instead of piles of records or boxes of tapes or stacks of CDs, there came music that sits invisible in the cloud and on portable drives.   And yet still the house seems cluttered.

Our movement away from meatspace reality and into the realm of the virtual has been remarkably abrupt, spanning half of a generation.  But for all of that transition, for all of the shift we’ve made from things you own and can touch to things you own yet don’t materially exist, we still might have some trouble grasping just exactly what the Apostle Paul was talking about in this morning’s reading from the Letter to the church at Rome.

As we reach the middle of chapter eight of this highly complex letter, Paul has just finished giving us an explanation the role of the law and the role of faith in our salvation. Romans is the farthest thing from a soundbite letter.   You can’t break Romans down into single verses or sections and be able to fully grasp its meaning, because that’s not how it was written.  From Paul’s rock-solid foundation as a brilliant rhetorician, he’s crafted an extended exploration of what it means to be reconciled to God’s grace through faith.  It’s a long and convoluted argument that he begins in chapter one, and that ends at the end of this chapter. 

When the Apostle Paul starts describing the end results of faith, the results of our struggle to embrace and serve God in this life, what’s interesting is the degree to which he managed to couch the end result of that struggle in terms that aren’t matter of fact. His writing here isn’t about the specifics. The struggle is deeply there, the groaning and the effort of faith, but the reward...well...Paul there gets a little coy.

He speaks about life governed by the Holy Spirit, but that’s in the now and not in the fulfillment of God’s time. He speaks about a glory to be revealed, but then he doesn’t actually reveal it. Paul speaks instead in soaring and rhythmic cadences, but when it gets right down to the nitty gritty of what awaits us in glory...we don’t hear a whole bunch of details. 

We do, however, hear that our lives must be lived in a particular way if our relationship with God is to be a healthy one.  Paul says in verse 13 that “...if you live according to the flesh, you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.”  We hear that...but what does it mean?  How can we do something, if we don’t do it with our bodies?   Is Paul here somehow suggesting that any action of the body is wrong?   Is Paul maybe saying that we’re to live out faith in such a way that it’s separate from our meatspace reality, as unconnected from real life as virtual space is from the flesh and bones of being?

No, of course not.  What Paul is absolutely not suggesting is that faith is a disembodied thing, or something that exists separate from the way in which we live.   Paul focuses a great deal on the manner in which Jesus followers are to spend their day-to-day lives.  Our ethical and moral behavior...meaning the stuff we actually do with ourselves...matters tremendously to Paul.   We need to pay attention to what we do with these bodies we seem to inhabit.

When Paul says that we should not “live according to the flesh,” and that we need to “put to death the deeds of the body,” he is talking about how we need to orient ourselves.  Faith is the thing that defines the trajectory of our lives, and so the focus of disciples of Jesus can’t be themselves.  

Our hungers, our wants, and all of the collateral yearnings of our physical and cultural selves cannot be the end towards which we focus and orient our being.  This is Paul’s intent when he warns us not to live kata sarka, or according to the flesh.   That manner of life is diametrically opposed to the ethic of self-giving love that defines both the teachings or Christ and the central ethical teachings of Paul himself.   

Paradoxically, our culture’s move away from the physical and into the virtual hasn’t reduced our tendency to be self-oriented.   If anything, we now face the challenge that our immediate desires can be met immediately, as the virtual world serves up exactly what we want to see and experience, right now...or at least as quickly as it takes us to punch in our credit card information.   Living kata sarka can easily be done in the virtual world, because what we want is just an instant away, almost as close as the neurochemical twitch of a synapse.   But that life is a life of isolation, in which we exist in a world filled with objects...real and virtual...instead of a world filled with other souls.  In that world, there is no life.  It’s a dead place, in which we ourselves die spiritually.

Instead, Paul asks us to reorient ourselves towards the Spirit, whose nature and highest gift to us is love.  If we orient our being not towards our own hungers, but towards spirit-led relationships with those around us, then those basic hungers will not consume us.  Governed by that as our defining value, our every action and every deed of our body, becomes a part of what Christ was working in the world.  That is the very nature and purpose of faith.

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