Sheeple

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

07.21.2012; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

Of all of the animals we hear talked about in the Bible, perhaps the most common is the sheep.  Of the exactly two hundred references to sheep in scripture, things start out at the beginning of the Bible being pretty basic.  

When the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, talks about sheep, ninety-nine times out of one-hundred, it just plain old means sheep.  It’s just providing details about those quadrupedal, ruminant mammals, which means they walk on four legs and chew and rechew their food.  They are Ovis ares, members of the order Artiodayctla, the even toed ungulates, which means they put most of their weight on their third and fourth toes, tippy-toeing around in the fields like four-legged ballerinas.   Female sheep are ewes, the males called rams or, more archaically, tups.  We call male sheep wethers if we’ve...um...un-maled them.   

We’ve raised these critters as livestock for thousands of years, for their fleece and for their meat, which we call lamb when we roast them young and tender with rosemary, garlic, and a side of mint jelly.  We call it mutton or hogget when we eat it later, which confuses me a bit.  Generally, we call meat by names designed to distract us from the reality of what we’re eating...like beef or bacon or pork or hasenpfeffer or Soylent Green.   

But lamb?  Why isn’t that like calf or little baby bunny?  Well, in the case of lamb, evidently tender trumps cute.  Whichever way, sheep have been a part of human identity for millennia.

But a funny thing happens the further we read through the Bible.  After we pass through the stories about sheep as plunder from battle in Torah, and the details about what sort of animals should be sacrificed, suddenly the term sheep stops being mainly used to describe sheep.  Instead, sheep become almost entirely a metaphor.  But...for what?

Well, in Song of Songs 4:2, sheep are a poetic metaphor you use to describe the teeth of a girl you’re flirting with, although I will not be recommending this to my boys should they ever write poems to women.  In my experience, no matter how good the poem, women don’t like to be told that their teeth are fluffy and smell like a barn.  

This may have been different in fifth century Judah.  

But mostly, sheep are used in the Bible as a metaphor for human beings.  That’s certainly the intent of the familiar Psalm 23, or the reading from the book of Jeremiah.  The people of Israel are described as a flock, over and over again.  The psalms and the prophets use the term almost exclusively to describe human beings, as does Jesus.   They are the sheep of the pasture,  sheep without a good shepherd.  We get lost, and we need a shepherd.

Unfortunately, I think we have a problem with that.   Sheep?  We don’t want to be sheep!  Here in the You Ess of Ay in particular, we have no desire to be thought of, considered, or imagined as sheep.   In fact, the term “sheeple” has come to be a popular way of collectively insulting folks who disagree with us.  Clearly, “sheeple” are just following along with the crowd, unlike us and the crowd we happen to find ourselves in.  

We Americans are ferocious, mighty, independent, and free.  We want to be thought of as some sort of noble animal standing backlit in silhouette against the setting sun, like mighty eagles or dangerous bears or the majestic moose.  But not a herd animal!   We are nothing at all like a herd animal, spending our lives penned up in small cubicles and being moved around every day in vast slow-moving flocks...um...wait.  For some reason, that makes me think of the Beltway.

As much as we’d prefer not to affix that label to ourselves, it does still stick a bit.  There’s a reason Jesus used the image repeatedly in his teaching.  We hear it seventeen times in John’s Gospel, fourteen in Matthew, and four in Luke.  Mark, being short and blunt as always, just tells us of two uses of the image, here and in Mark 14:27.

What is perhaps most striking about the way Jesus uses this image is how radically it contrasts with our understanding of what it means to be sheep, and how sheep are treated.   We tend to assume that sheep are easily manipulated and controlled, and that the only reason to keep them around is to either fleece them or eat them.   But as Mark’s Gospel uses the term, it is woven up with two things.  First, compassion, and second, teaching.

Jesus expresses these two reactions to the people at a point of fatigue.  The disciples have just returned from being sent out to spread the message of the Kingdom of God, and their movement out into the world has born fruit.  It’s gotten really busy, as more and more people have responded to the message of transformation they preached.   So busy, in fact, that Jesus tries to get the disciples away for a retreat to catch their breath.   But even as he does so, they are noticed, and as people come running to see this person they’ve heard tell about, suddenly their isolated retreat is filled with Judeans.

What Jesus encountered as he moved through Judah were a people who were broken, divided, and confused.   Politically, they were sheep without a shepherd.   Their leadership was a mess, a divided and corrupt disaster.   Spiritually, they were even more divided.  Their leadership was divided between Sadducee and Pharisee, between the hierarchical power of the temple and the arguments in the local synagogue.  Amid the tensions and uncertainty that their lack of collective direction created, they were a lost people.

So as he encounters them, he is moved to teach them about the Kingdom.  What’s important here is the nature of that motivation.   It isn’t the desire for power or control.  It isn’t the desire to profit from their weakness.  His motivation is compassion.  He sees and feels their shatteredness and their confusion as a people, and from his awareness of their broken state, uses his teaching to empower them.  With the giving of the Gospel, he’s showing them how to live in a way that will end that confusion.

From the heart of his own compassion, he is offering them the power of that compassion.  What he teaches, they can teach.  As he heals, they can heal.  His disciples, after all, have just returned from doing just that.   The story moves on, beyond these verses, but the essence Christ’s compassion for a scattered and broken flock shouldn’t be lost on us.

It particularly shouldn’t be lost because we struggle to embrace the reality of our togetherness.  We are a people divided, driven in a thousand different directions.  Our binary political system tears us from one another, setting us into adversarial relationships that don’t allow us to recognize even the most basic things we share.  Our economic system fragments us into countless demographic microcategories, until we are so broken apart that there’s little room to interact with one another.  From that division, we find ourselves more and more isolated, and less and less able to look out at other human beings with the same compassion that Christ felt for us.

And our inability to see our fundamental interconnectedness takes our society down some very dark paths.  Those places of fear and anger and madness are all too familiar.

We are not sheep.  We’re not.  But we were, as human beings, created to be in community with one another.  We’re created to be connected, to family, to friends, to neighbors, and even and especially to those who are not like us.

We are not sheep.  We’re human.  But in Christ, we are called to be human together.  Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

A Man of His Word

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

07.15.2012; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 6:14-29

 I wish we could look forward to election season.  You’d think, what with the future of a country that we all purport to love at stake, that we’d manage to focus ourselves on the issues at hand, and that we’d recognize our mutual and common interest in insuring that these United States don’t come apart at the seams.

But instead, we find ourselves engaged in a political process that seems to most closely resemble my boys...um...”discussing”...who gets to use the Playstation 3, only substantially less polite and mature.   Arguments, accusations, and mockery are the rule of the day, as the airwaves shimmer with attack ads and negativity.   It’s frustrating.  We’d like a return to civility, or so we say.  We want things to go back to when politicians treated one another and us like mature adults, respecting each other and the principles of our great democracy.

Problem is, there’s been pretty much no time ever when that’s been the case.  Take, for example, the election of 1800, which featured founding father John Adams running against founding father Thomas Jefferson.   You just can't get more founding-fathery than that.  And yet it was a remarkably knock-down, drag-out brawl of an election, as the nation chose between the Federalist party on the one hand and the Democratic-Republican party on the other.  Although both Adams and Jefferson were key figures in the founding of our country, who’d both worked to draft the Declaration of Independence, each a genuine patriot in their own right, you’d never have been able to tell that from the rhetoric that poured from their blogger..I mean, pamphleteers.

Supporters of Adams suggested that if the “ragingly atheistic” Jefferson was elected as the third president of the United States, the results would not just be a less centralized government.  Instead, a Jefferson victory would mean that, and I quote, “..the air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, and the soil will be soaked with blood and the nation black with crimes.”    Adams, a Federalist, was variously attacked in the pro-Jefferson press as being not just a supporter of a stronger central government, but also for being blind, bald, crippled, and toothless, for having imported both French and German mistresses, and I again quote, “..a hideous hermaphroditical character, with neither the force or firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”   

That’s not one we’ve heard yet this election season, but there’s probably another half-billion dollars worth of attack ads and oppo research to go, so let’s not rule it out.  

The real issue, I think, is not that we’re getting less civil.  It’s that there’s something about the human condition that has always driven us to say and do remarkably negative things to one another when power and social standing is involved.   

This is particularly true when we’re confronted with someone who opposes us, and yet find ourselves surrounded by those who are technically in our camp.  If we don’t attack, or don’t show ourselves as strongly part of the “us,” our legitimacy can be questioned.  We can be seen as weak, or as unreliable.  The pressure from those around us can drive us to do things that we know aren’t the right thing to do...but we do them anyway.

Herod did just that in the passage we heard from Mark’s Gospel this morning.   The Herod we hear described was not Herod the Great, who founded the Herodian dynasty in 40 BC.  Instead, we’re encountering his son, Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Perea, as opposed to his brother Herod Philip, Tetrarch of Batanea, Trachonitis, and Auranitis.  It must have been hard running regions that sounded like upper respiratory tract infections, but so it went in the ancient world.

Herod Antipas was one of the more colorful figures of the first century, perhaps because he came out of one of the most epically dysfunctional families imaginable.  His father had executed one of his wives and three of Herod Antipas’s half-brothers.  Herod Antipas himself was regarded with some suspicion by many in Galilee for a variety of reasons, among which was that he’d married his brother’s wife Herodias, who also happened to be his niece.  I’m not sure I even want to know how that works.

It was that peculiar relationship that got Herod into some ultimately mortal trouble with John the Baptist, as the story is told by Mark.   John had been challenging Herod’s somewhat messy approach to marriage, and...peculiarly enough...the story presents Herod in a not-entirely-negative light.

Despite John’s direct attacks on Herod, we’re told that Herod found him fascinating, both fearing his connection to the people and “liking to listen to him.”   John, or so the story is told by Mark, was protected by Herod.

But that protection proved relatively flimsy, as Herod found himself being trapped into giving the order to kill John the Baptist.  As king, his power was his word.  If he promised something, and promised it publicly, he was obligated to follow through with that promise.   To those who’d hitched their wagon to the power of the Herodian  dynasty, that form of consistency was foundational.  You always knew where you stood, so long as the king remained consistent in his intent.

And so when Herodias’ daughter...Herod’s grandstep-daughterniece, I suppose...danced for the royal court, and Herod told her she could have whatever she wanted with a grand flourish, Herodias took the opportunity.

The request came back for the head of John the Baptist on a platter, and Herod was caught.  He’d given his word, the word of a king, in front of everyone who was anyone in Galilee.  To turn back would have been interpreted as a sign of weakness, that the king’s word couldn’t be taken seriously.

As the story goes, even though Herod was completely aware that serving up John the Baptist’s head would be fundamentally unjust, he was compelled to follow through and fulfill the request.   Driven by his relationship to the community in whose power his power lay, Herod acted in a way that both preserved his integrity and shattered his integrity.

Each of us faces similar pressures as we both participate in society and encounter those who oppose us.  As we participate in groups that share our basic worldview or interest, our integrity relative to the group can become defined by the degree to which we articulate the party line.  The more clearly we express the party line, the more trustworthy we are.  The more vigorously we show our willingness to attack those who do not hold our position, the more our authority within the group wanes.  

It’s how human political and social systems work.  Unfortunately, it’s not how God works.  Our integrity as created beings, as sentient living and aware parts of God’s creation, that integrity rests on an entirely different foundation.  That foundation is our capacity to be just, even if it is to our detriment.  That foundation is our willingness to be gracious and kind and fair, even and particularly if that grace and kindness and fairness is being shown to someone who opposes us.

The argument could be made, of course, that this is unrealistic.  The only way to get anything done is to cling with a deathgrip to the beliefs of your group, and to never for a moment waver in your commitment to your social and political identity.  If you do otherwise, you’re obviously weak.  And none of us want to seem weak.

But sometimes, as the Apostle Paul said during our reading last week, our weakness is our strength.  And as monkey-gut satisfying as partisanship is, this is one of those times.  That doesn’t mean that we’re obligated to believe nothing.  That does not mean we cannot advocate for what we hold to be best and most just path in our culture.  But it does mean that...if we claim to be Christian...that we have to leaven that with grace, no matter what the cost to our standing or our desire for anger.

So remember this as we move through the cash-fueled attack-ad partisan fever-frenzy of this season.  Don’t let the fires of political anger diminish your capacity for grace, or the pressures of expectation reduce your ability to be just.

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

The Dust on Your Feet

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

07.08.2012; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 6:1-13

We have a whole bunch of trouble letting go of things.  That’s a strange thing to say for a culture so obsessed with the new, but as a people, we really do struggle to let things go.

That’s a basic element of the human condition, one that has been explored and recognized by researchers who study human beings and how we live together.   This next week, the results of a multi-year study by a team of UCLA research anthropologists will be published in book form.  For this study, the anthropologists chose to journey to a strange and alien culture for their research: 32 native families living in the jungle wilds of dual-income, middle-class Los Angeles suburbia.  They followed them for five years, observing all of their strange behavior and peculiar habits, and infrequently sampling their spit.  Yes, this is what advanced degrees get you:  dozens and dozens of vials of soccer mom spit.  

The reason for the spit-sampling was to measure the levels of a particular stress hormone in the residents of those homes.  Not one of these families were struggling financially.  In fact, they were all doing well, so well that their homes were absolutely overflowing with the fruits of their labors. 

This was a result of what the research team called the “hyperabundance” of suburban culture.  While scarcity is typically the cause of stress in societies, what they discovered was that these aboriginal Angelenos had so much that it had started to cause an actual, physical stress response.  Of the 32 families studied, for example, all had garages.  But only eight out of the 32 families could actually park a car in their garage, because the overflow volume of possessions had completely filled them.

On average, there were 55 discrete objects intentionally attached to the average family refrigerator.  I find this troubling, primarily because that’s waaaay less than the count I did on my own fridge.  And the statistics around the number of Barbies in homes with girls are simply too disturbing to repeat.  Despite feeling overwhelmed by the clutter, the researchers found that there was still this yearning to both add to it and to hold on to the countless objects that filled every last nook and cranny of their homes.  Clinging to those things gave them comfort, gave them a sense that all was as it should be...while at the same time making life almost unmanageable.

We’re familiar with that clutter, I think, but we don’t realize that our human urge to cling to things extends well beyond our rec-room debris fields and deep into our own souls.  It’s not just the physical objects that surround us that we grasp, but also the countless moments and encounters and memories that form our identity as human beings.  We accumulate them, gather them in, and cling to them, because they form and shape our understanding of who we are.     We hold on to them all, as they become the story of our lives.

But sometimes, there are things we need to release.  Sometimes, there are things we need to let go.

That, at least in part, is what we are meant to take away from the story we hear this morning from Mark’s Gospel.  Mark is the oldest and bluntest of the Gospels, serving up the story of Jesus and his teachings with as little muss and fuss as humanly possible.  If Mark is going to serve up a detail about what Jesus taught, it isn’t going to bandy around.  That detail has to have meaning.  It has to have purpose.

And today, from Mark, there are details.  We hear Jesus talking to his disciples about how challenging it is for someone deeply engaged with God’s presence to get that across to those who know them.  But mostly, what we’re hearing is instructions to his disciples on how to get on out there in the world and teach about God’s kingdom.  

What is perhaps most striking about what Jesus teaches his disciples is the relationship between their spreading the message and what they need to have to do it.  Having been given authority, they are told to take...well...basically nothing.  Take the clothes on your back and a walking stick, and that is all that you’ll need, says Jesus.   This is a little hard for us to hear.

It’s a little hard for me to hear.  Take...nothing?   That’s what Jesus is suggesting.  When Jesus says not even to take an extra tunic, what he’s really saying is this: you’re not going to be sleeping out on your own.  You’re going to need to find a place to stay, a place that will show you hospitality.  

And I think, what?  How can you possibly go anywhere without an entire minivan full of stuff?  I don’t know that my own family can go on any trip lasting more than 24 hours without several cubic yards of carefully packed stuff.  And yet here Jesus is, suggesting that not only should disciples not pack so that we’re utterly independent, but we should go out into the world so that we have to connect.  He’s forcing us to, as Blanche Dubois might have put it, depend on the kindness of strangers.

And we don’t like that.  We’re Americans.  We don’t want to be vulnerable.  We’re fierce, we’re strong, we’re independent...and we’ve got the basement full of bulk food to prove it.  But that’s not the story of ourselves that Jesus asks us to live out if we’re to declare his message.  “No bread, no bag, no money in our belts.”  What a peculiar demand, so very alien to our culture of materialist self-reliance.

But Jesus goes further.  First, he asks that his disciples force themselves to seek out hospitality, which means not taking possessions with them so that they must find the care of others.  Then, he tells them what they’re obligated to do if they encounter resistance or hostility or dismissiveness.  They are to “shake off the dust on their feet” as they depart.

It’s easy for us to see this as just a way to show anger, as some impolite finger gesture directed as a final so-there towards those who haven’t received us.  But that, quite frankly, is not the purpose of what Jesus is asking his disciples to do.  He’s not asking them to offer up one last curse as they storm off.  He’s asking them to let go, and to truly leave the inhospitable behind.

We human beings don’t do this well.  We cling to slights, and we cling to offenses.  We remember the times our voices were dismissed as irrelevant, or that we were mocked, or that we were made to feel unwelcome.  We make those moments a part of us.  We cherish them.  We mount them, by the tens of dozens, on the refrigerator of our soul, so that we can see them every single time we wander through the kitchen.

If we’re trying to live our lives in alignment with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, though, the practice “shaking the dust off your feet” is absolutely essential.  Moving on from an inhospitable place is not enough, because if we carry the dust of that place with us, we’ve not gotten beyond it.  It’ll carry along with us, marking our every step, reminding us of how things didn’t work, and blocking out room for an encounter with real newness and real transformation.

And if there’s no space left in our souls for that, we cannot encounter God in the way that Jesus calls us to.  If there’s no room left in us, we cannot find space to rejoice in an encounter with someone new, or to have a different and healing encounter with someone who has done us harm.

So shake off that dust.  Let Christ clean the clutter from the garage of your soul.  Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

Life Isn't Fair

Poolesville Presbyterian Church
07.01.12; Rev. David Williams


Scripture Lesson:  2 Corinthians 8:7-15

The following preached on the Sunday after a massive storm wiped out power to the whole D.C. metropolitan area, and a reminder that there's a reason we type up our sermons.  Lord, have mercy on my handwriting.   Just click on the first image below if you want to attempt to read it.