The First Healing

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

09.30.12;  Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  James 5:13-20

It’s Fall now, it is, as we stand at the doorstep of October.   And at this time of year, as sure as the darkness clings deeper into the morning and the trees start to speckle with gold, the children return to school.   

I can remember the first year both of my boys were in school.  Well, it was school in the sense that it was preschool, and even though they were four and two, it still felt like to our newbie parent sensibilities like they were going off to college.   Oh my gosh they’re growing up so fast, we said, while looking at children who barely came up to our midsections and had only recently managed to go to the bathroom by themselves.  Most of the time.    

We still have the picture of the both of them, seemingly impossibly tiny now, so small that they scarcely seem larger than their backpacks. 

Of course, there’s no similarity between college and preschool.  In preschool, they would learn things like how to use a hammer, how to read, how to appreciate the beauty of nature, and the importance of playing well with others.  This is very different from college, where they take courses that explore the Semiotics of Gender in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.   

You know, the classics.

The preschool we sent them to was a cooperative, which meant that it was a nonprofit run entirely by parents.  That meant that while we had teachers on staff, parents were the teacher-helpers.   With both boys in school, that meant that once a week, I was in class with one or other of them.   It was fun, generally, but there was one thing that came early in the school year that every parent dreaded.

It was that moment when you were scrambling around the classroom in the twos class. One of the boys would be sitting next to another little darling, sharing a container of delicious nutritious high-fiber lo-fat playdough, and that other little darling would cough.   And then they’d cough again.  

Being the good room parent, you’d go get a tissue, only to realize when you got there that one tissue wouldn’t cut it.   The other child’s face would totally coated in mucus, to the point where they were like one of those bizarre undersea sluglike creatures that ooze around in it’s own protective layer of viscous organic slime.

Which we do too, by the way!  Did you know that on average, human beings generate one liter of mucus every day?   As a Teaching Elder, I recognize that this may well be the only fact that I can guarantee you’ll remember from this sermon, but hey, we take what we can get.

When you moved the little snotty one away, and realized that not only were they gooier than a slimed Ghostbuster but a little bit warmer and a little more lethargic than they should be, that moment would be the moment your child would cough.   Then they’d cough again.   As you applied a half-gallon of Purell to your hands, realizing that you were in for another one of those weeks of passing an exciting new virus around at home, you’d grumble about those parents who always send their kids to school sick.

They should keep them away from everyone else.   They should be off in a hermetically sealed plastic bubble someplace, far away from those of us who want nothing to do with their illness.    While this makes sense when you’re dealing with infectious diseases, it has a tendency to spread to other forms of brokenness.   Isolating the ill and the broken is one of those things that social animals want to do, and because we’re social animals, it’s something that can get hardwired into our cultures.

That cultural tendency towards quarantine was strongly written into the societal dynamics of first century Judea.   Isolating the sick and the infectious and the menstruating was a way of maintaining the integrity of the community.   More often than not, illness and suffering was viewed as something that reflected the displeasure of God.  But as much as that was written into the legal codes of their culture, it was something that Jesus had nothing to do with.   Those who were “unclean,” ill and broken and isolated, were not turned away from Christ.

Of the books of the New Testament, James is one of the most grounded in the ethics and worldview of Judea.   Having likely been written by the brother of Christ, and clearly informed by Hebrew wisdom literature, this is one of the most Jewish of the Christian Epistles.   The focus James places on the implications of our actions is part of that.  If we’re to obey the One Law, the law of God’s love, then our obedience needs to define every action we take in the world.

Confronted by the reality that we get broken and we become ill, James makes a point of  explaining what appropriate practice is towards those who are experiencing physical or emotional or mental illness.   Unlike the codes of purity or the theologies of punishment, which demand the physical and spiritual isolation of the individual, James tells us those dogs don’t hunt in a Christian fellowship.

Instead, we hear from James some clear teaching about how both the afflicted and those around them should approach their connection to God and one another.   Those struggling with affliction are told to pray, meaning they are reminded that their connection with God has not been broken in their time of suffering.   They are also told that they should reach out to and ask for the presence of the church to bring about...well...what?

We hear about the application of oil, and the bringing of prayers.   But what is particularly interesting about how James approaches the response of the church is twofold. 

First, those who are afflicted and suffering are not separated or cast out.  Instead, they are empowered to ask for the presence of the community.  This flips the ethic of purity and punishment on it’s head.  To authentically live into the life the Jesus intended for those who follow his Way, the community is called to be sure that none are outside of the boundaries.  This action mirrors Christ’s willingness to be with lepers and the unclean and those suffering from affliction of mind and spirit.

This is important.  Because as shattering as illness is on a body, the social and spiritual isolation of those afflicted can act as a force magnifier, tearing the one in need from the community that could offer up sustaining grace and reassuring presence at the moment when it was needed most.  Again, James will have none of that.  He makes it clear that those connections cannot be severed, that walls and boundaries based on shame have to fall, and that a community grounded in grace can never step away from that grace.

Second, James seems to blur the difference between soul and flesh.  This isn’t a surprise, as Judaism never really makes much of a distinction between the two.   But here, this usually very simple and straightforward text starts to play around with meanings.   In James 5:15, read from the New Revised Standard Version, we heard that the prayer of faith can “save” those sick, but our English translations don’t all agree.   In the New International Version, that prayer “heals” the sick.   That’s because the word used by James means both salvation...being reconnected and made whole in God...and the return to physical wellbeing.

James talks about healing again, in verse 16, but also talks about a release from sin and spiritual brokenness both before and after.   He’s melding the two concepts, making it clear that the distinction between wholeness of soul and wholeness of body is not as total as we might make.

Taken together, this passage is a potent reminder of the first and most important healing.   Whatever the affliction, it is that sense of being embraced by both the love of God and the love of community that must be made whole.

This was a vital reminder to the Judean Christians who likely were the audience for James message, and it is doubly vital for us today.   Ours is a fragmented, distracted, shattered culture.   

We are fragmented because in 21st century America our sense of place and spatial connection to community is compromised by the endless churning of our society, as we move and move from place to place, uprooting ourselves, planting ourselves, and uprooting again.  And with physical distance can come spiritual distance and disengagement, as others can become abstractions, just one of our fourteen hundred Facebook friends.

We are distracted because in our consumerist hunger for immediate satisfaction, we are given the opportunity to look at whatever we want, whenever we want.   Our pleasure is just one click and our credit card information away.   We don’t like being reminded that the world does not exist solely to please us.   We don’t like being reminded that we are all mortal.  And if we so choose, we can choose not to encounter the reality of pain.     We can simply look back down into that little touchscreen, and let the reality of those who would be comforted by our presence disappear.

We are shattered because we have been separated from one another, and those who experience brokenness in life are too often warehoused or separated or squirreled away from the community.  We don’t encounter age, because the old-old are inconvenient.   We don’t encounter those with broken minds, because having their group homes in our community might reduce our property values.  And although death and dying are an inescapable part of life, it’s hidden from view.

So as much as we might feel the urge to separate ourselves from those who are broken, because they make us feel mortal and distract us from our Facebooking, James reminds us that we are all called to be agents of God’s wholeness in creation.   

Those who are suffering and broken are to be no more separate from us than our own children would be if they were the tiny snotty ones.  When you bring that little one home sick, you don’t think for a moment about isolating them or keeping away.  You brush their hot little foreheads with your lips to test their fever.  You hold them tight, even as they cough right into your face.  You stay by their side, gently pressing that cold compress to their forehead.   You do this because you love them.  The love God asks us to bear for those who suffer around us is no less deep.

As much as we might want to separate ourselves from things that remind us that we are  creatures of dust, and as hard as it can be sometimes to cast ourselves free of the bonds of distance and distraction, that’s what both James and Jesus challenge us to do.

Seek those places where healing of body and spirit are yearned for, and be present there. 

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

A Cup of Ambition

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

09.23.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a

I’m a terrible, terrible Apple fanboy.  I’m really just not good at it at all.

This last week, for instance, I think I was supposed to be excited about replacing my iPhone 4 with the long anticipated iPhone 5.   The Williams household runs on iOS.  We have an iMac, and a Macbook Air, and an iPad, and iPhones for the adults and iPod Touches for the kids.  If you’re one of those lucky souls who bought Apple stock ten years ago, well, you’re welcome.  In a closet in my study is a bag filled with a tangle of old outdated iPod and Apple connectors and dongles and widgets and doodads, all of which were once essential and now serve no purpose at all.   We’re consistent consumer of Apple products, and as such I suppose we should be joining the scores of other Apple fanboys and girls in long lines outside of Apple stores.

But as much as I use my phone, I just don’t feel any compulsion to replace it so long as it’s still working.  It already does a million things that are cool, but that I don’t really need it for in the first place.  Do I really need to read scripture from it?   No.  Do I even remember how to use a map?  I’m not sure.  

I want to be able to talk to people with it, not necessarily talk to it.  I don’t need it to do anything more than it does now.   So I’ll keep mine as long as it works. 

I tend to be that way with things.   Like, say, shoes.  I’ve recently come to the decision that I might need a new pair of schlumping shoes.  Schlumping shoes are those shoes you keep around for mowing and gardening and painting and walking the dog and puttering about.   I tend to wear mine until they have fallen apart, or, to be entirely honest, until well after they’ve fallen apart.  This last pair I wore pretty much every day around the house for two years, and as the sole gradually detached from the upper, I just reached for the epoxy.   And then, a few months later, I did it again.   And then again.

 Eventually, though, that stopped working, and as it’s hard to walk the dog with the soles of your shoes slapping against the fronts of your feet like backwards flipflops, I decided it was finally time to buy a new pair.   Or I had, until I looked at the previous pair of schlumping shoes, and realized they still might have six months of life in them.

That’s just no way to run an economy.   

Our entire consumer culture rests on the premise that we should never ever be satisfied with what we have.   We are supposed to be relentlessly ambitious, always seeking to have more and to be more and to do more.   On some levels, that serves us well.   Being deeply committed to deepening both the skills that inform our work tends to strengthen us personally and make us better at caring for others.   Recognizing that we can always grow as human beings is a vital part of our existence, and a central purpose of faith.

But while that basic human striving and aspiring can be deeply positive and life affirming, it can also become misdirected and deeply negative.   That is the essence of the wisdom James has to teach in this morning’s reading.

From this eminently practical book over the past several weeks, we’ve heard about how we need to let our faith govern our actions, and how we need to let grace govern our speech.   But from this portion, we hear from James that even those who received and engaged with his teachings have managed to muck things up.   They were still human, after all, so I suppose that’s not much of a surprise.

What James recognizes and asks his hearers to recognize is that there are some strivings and yearnings that do not build us up and do not strengthen the bonds of love and grace that define community.  James has told us what works over the last several weeks.   An ambition that is founded in what James calls alternately the “Royal Law” or the “Law of Liberty” will produce the good.   That law is nothing less than loving neighbor as yourself, and what it produces in us can be found in verse 13 of chapter 3.   

Letting that law govern our every action produces in us what the New Revised Standard Version translates as a “gentleness born of wisdom,” and the New International Version presents as “the humility that comes from wisdom.”   What is being described there is not knowing something.  It’s not data, but a state of being we should strive for.   It’s a “wise kindness.”

In opposition to that stand other forms of wisdom, other approaches to existence that drive human beings to living in ways that will make us stressed, hateful, and unhappy.   James identifies two particular ways of thinking that create “wickedness of every kind.”

The first is what is translated for us as “bitter envy and selfish ambition.”   The English spin on this seems to warn us of being ruled by jealousy, where we let our lives be defined by our resentment towards the guy with the nicer smartphone and larger car.   James gets to that, but not here.  

The key word here is the world that we hear as envy, which is zelon, the word that gives us “zeal.”   Understood in context, it’s social.   It’s political.   It’s sociopolitical.  It’s passion for partisanship, in the worst possible way.  It’s just not about wanting to make things better, but hating what the other guy believes and orienting ourselves to defeating them.

If our ambition is driven by that desire to defeat the other, James says, it will invariably mess things up.   We lose sight of truth.  We lose sight of grace.   Things fall apart.  Just one look at our political system is all the evidence you need for the truth of that.

The second comes from a word that is repeated several times in the Greek, but is hidden from us in the process of translation.   In chapter four verse one, the source of conflict is described as coming from our “cravings.”  In chapter four verse three, we hear that we misdirect our ambitions by using them to feed our “pleasures.”  Both the word craving and the word pleasure are the same word in Greek, hedonyn, a word which gives us the term hedonism.

If the thing we strive for is our own pleasure, and that governs how we direct our lives, then James tells us that this approach to life will invariably drive us into conflict and mess.

Honestly, this leaves us a little bit stuck.   To be wise and have wise ambition, James has just told us, you need to set aside the wisdom that tends to govern the life politic.  Defeating your opponent and proving yourself superior just can’t be why you strive.  If it is, then the thing that is governing your life may be wise, but it leaves you in perpetual struggle, always looking for a reason to oppose 

Even more challenging is his warning that our striving can’t be ruled by desire for our own pleasure.   That flies completely in the face of everything that streams at us from the marketplace.   It is the message of every ad, every banner, every clickable teaser on the side of our Facebook page.  We are told, consistently and relentlessly, that our happiness and our pleasure is just one product or purchase away.   So much of our lives can be turned towards that, as we let ourselves imagine that we will find happiness and our purpose in life fulfilled at the next firmware upgrade or in the next model year, in a larger home or in a faster processor.

That approach to life can create in us a dark pragmatism, as we turn our dreams and our aspirations and our energies towards feeding those hungers in us.   Our thoughts and our creativity and our efforts to grow into that dark, consuming self focus completely on what comes next, and we find ourselves continually unhappy, always discontent, as our hunger for personal pleasure displaces from one pleasure to the next, always seeking and striving to be fed.

And no, the iPhone 8’s direct neural interface will be cool, but it won’t solve that problem.

Not allowing ourselves to be guided by power and product is not easy.   But James reminds us that as we walk the Way Christ taught, it is essential.  Turning our ambitions and our hopes away from those false guides, and back towards the radically countercultural teachings of Christ, that’s what gets us to that place where we are purely peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and true to our best self.

Let that be our best hope and ambition, for you and for me, AMEN.

Licking Stick

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 09.16.12

Scripture Lesson:  James 3:1-12

It’s always enjoyable finding something you can appreciate about an opponent.   

This week, I found myself repeatedly coming across references to one of the most vociferous opponents of Christian faith in the modern world.  Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist and vigorous evangelist for atheism.   His book The God Delusion forwards the premise that faith is, in and of itself, inherently dangerous and evil.   So, like, he’s not my BFF. 

But that doesn’t mean I can’t find value or interest in some of what he has to say.   In fact, one of the concepts that Dawkins pitched out into the world is actually kind of interesting.  That idea is what he called a “meme.”   Anyone who has spent any time around teh interwebs over the last few years knows exactly what a meme is, or at least we think we do.   

Memes, as Dawkins described them, are self-replicating ideas and patterns of thought.  They move throughout a culture a bit like a virus, passed along from person to person.   Being a biologist, he conceptualized them as something like human genes.  Where genes pass on physical traits from generation to generation, memes pass on cultural information.

When Dawkins coined the phrase, he used it as a way to describe faith, which for him was a form of mind-virus.   But when denizens of the interwebs think about memes, it’s rather different.  I’m not quite sure he had in mind the kind of “meme” we encounter on Facebook or twitter.  

In fact, I’m almost entirely positive that when he coined the term “meme” he didn’t visualize it in the form of an eight-bit cat with the body of a cherry pop tart flying through outer space while impossibly annoying earworm music played in the background.   Nyancat memes and lolcat memes and trollface memes and ermahgerd herpaderp memes aren’t quite the conveyors of cultural meaning that Dawkins might have anticipated.   I’m not sure what he would think about a video of an obscure Korean rapper prancing like a pony being viewed almost 180 million times in a month, although visualizing Richard Dawkins doing it gangnam style is kind of amusing.  

These memes spread across the face of our culture, but to no great purpose.  We pass them along because they’re doofy.  They make us laugh.   And human beings like to laugh.

But I think that there’s considerably more to the meme concept than the endless combinations of images and text that worm their way through our social networks.   Ideas do have power, and as a concept or a way of understanding the world is passed from person to person, they do have the capacity to significantly transform the way we live.   While Dawkins might have given it a name, this is something that human beings have known for millennia. 

Over the last several weeks, we’ve been working our way through the Book of James, which is one of the most practical, action-oriented books of the New Testament.   Traditionally ascribed to James, the brother of Jesus, it is a book of Wisdom, and as such it is radically oriented to the type of “right action” that makes the difference between a real faith and a faith that is as dead and as lifeless as a stone.

Right action is a significant part of James, who demands that our actions match what we claim about our faith.   That’s an essential part of any Wisdom literature.  But equally important is the focus on how we speak, because grasping the deep connection between words and actions is an essential part of moving wisely through the world.

Language, James acknowledges, can be utterly empty.  We can speak platitudes, or talk about our faith in ways that our actions show to be completely false.   But that does not mean that James felt that words were meaningless.   He understood that language also bears the seeds of action.   Our sharing the symbols and sounds that allow us to communicate with one another is an essential part of being human together.   Language  knits us together, as we listen and act upon what we hear.

It’s a strange and marvelous thing.  I can speak the word “love,” and it’s just vibrations humming in the atmosphere around us, shaped by the air rushing past my vocal cords and by the movement of my tongue and my lips.  But that idea, that concept, that thought, that “love” conveys through that physical reality to each and every one of you, speaking into your understanding, shimmering through the air from my mind to yours across this little sanctuary.

The tongue is, as James said, like a fire.   It is an immensely potent thing, this ability to share knowledge, to speak a thought into another creature.   And with that potency, the wisdom literature of much of the ancient world counseled deep caution around the use of language.   In the Hebrew wisdom tradition, this is a strong and consistent thing.  To be wise, Proverbs 10:19 tells us, you need not to multiply words, but to hold your tongue.  To be wise, Proverbs 10: 8 tells us, you listen for instructions, instead of chattering on endlessly.  To be wise, Proverbs 11:12 tells us, you stay silent rather than mock your neighbor.   In the Greco-Roman world, teachers of wise living like Plutarch and Seneca taught the same thing.

Wisdom teaches that words burn like fire, and our ability to freely express ourselves can both bring joy and cause harm.   More often than not, our tongues become our lickin’ stick, which we use to abuse, belittle, and control those around us.

That truth has been intensely and tragically expressed this last week.  The power of misused self-expression to stir action was really, really driven home.   A “film” entitled “The Innocence of Muslims” was produced, edited, and put up onto YouTube.  This “film” directly and pointedly insulted Muhammed.

By “film” I mean it can only be described as a “film” with the consistent use of quotation marks.  I watched the video this week, and it was the most impossibly amateurish thing I’ve seen.  Over the summer, my twelve year old son made a 38 second movie for YouTube entitled “Raisin Bran Must Die,” a trenchant social commentary about our household’s selection of breakfast cereals.  “The Innocence of Muslims” is nowhere near as entertaining as Raisin Bran Must Die, and has only marginally better production values. 

But that it was amateurish and irrelevant to anything means nothing in the Arab world.  

Much has been made about the Arab Spring, about how the overthrow of governments in Egypt and Libya were popular uprisings filled with hope for democracy.  It’s hard for me to see them that way.   Instead, what happened in Libya and Egypt seems to have more to do with a population that is without hope, where young men look out at their lives and see no purpose, only the morass of poverty and frustrated meaninglessness.   From that frustration comes anger, anger at everything, anger that rages and surges at the slightest provocation.   Into that anger, demagogues rage and shout in the name of faith, stirring the hate.  

And so they rise up, striking out at anything, not caring.  And so even this incompetent, pointless, half-baked amateur video can stir mobs to violence, it’s influence magnified a hundredfold by the rage poured into angry men by other angry men.   

The tongue, as James says, is a fire.  Sometimes, poorly chosen or foolish words aren’t just like a fire.  They become fire.  Cities and embassies burn.  Innocent people die.

As we express ourselves into the world, our words don’t have quite the same effect.   Hopefully.  

But if we’re to listen to the wise counsel of James, we need to be aware of how deeply our words can effect those who are around us.  It’s easy to fall into whispering and gossip, easy to speak a cutting word to the one who has offended us, easy to casually insult someone as if they were a caricature and not a living and self-aware child of God.

James asks us to remember that our task as Christians is not to curse and tear down, but to bless and build up.   If we spread anything, if we pass on anything, those things should serve that blessed purpose.

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

A Cold Hard Truth

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

09.09.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  James 2: 1-17

It’s all good.

I’ve heard that saying many a time, pitched out into the churn of Facebook.   No matter what, that pattern of thought goes, things are fine.  Everything contributes.  Everything you say or believe or do contributes to the overall goodness of things, so...it’s all good.  Let’s just all get along, and be fine with everything, because really, what does it matter?   

The pesky thing is, that isn’t actually true.  It can’t all be good, because we don’t always quite agree on what good is.   For a resident of New Orleans, for example, a 47 point Saints blowout today, including administering an NFL record thirteen consecutive sacks torn through an offensive line with the consistency of wet tissue paper, that would be a good thing.  For some of my fellow Washingtonians, that might be considered not quite so good.

Goodness and the measure of what is best in life aren’t something we always agree upon.  Sometimes, those disagreements are trivial.  Sometimes, we can find a common good that we all agree upon.  But other times, they can’t be resolved.   Some ways of looking at the world simply can’t be reconciled with others.

Take the section of the Book of James we heard from this morning.  Last week, I talked about the significance of James as perhaps the most practical book of the New Testament, dedicated almost in its entirety to the moral and ethical “so what” of Christian faith.   It’s a book of wisdom, one that takes the essential teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and explains what that’s going to mean in your everyday life.

What is good for James is as straightforward as a two-by-four applied directly to your forehead.   In a nutshell, goodness is defined as actual, material, and physical obedience to what James describes as the “royal law.”  What is good is loving your neighbor as yourself.   Period.   By that, James does not mean love as an abstraction, or love as some distant, squishy, ethereal concept.

Throughout the letter of James, what is most significant is a compassion that directly acts, and a depth of valuing other human beings that shows no partiality.   This is, for James, for Paul, and for Christ, the essence of what it means to be good.

But there are other, competing value sets out there in the world.  

One significant case in point that’s surfaced in political conversations over the last few years has been the political and personal philosophy of Alisa Rosenbaum, better known as Ayn Rand.   I realize that in our current culture, even using the word “philosophy” has a tendency to make eyes glaze over.  This is not, after all, an era in which people gather on streetcorners to debate philosophy.   This is the era of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, which I’m sure would be charming if I could bring myself to stop blacking out whenever it comes on.   Pesky, pesky mental defenses.     

But the funny thing about philosophy is that it defines us.  The peculiar thing about believing something is that that belief tends to have direct, material, and very real consequences.  Ideas shape who we become, because they lay out the foundation which guides our actions.  And Rand, well, her ideas have gotten a whole lot of play lately.

For the better part of fifty years, Ayn Rand has had a significant influence over American political life, having had a significant influence over such folks as Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan and current Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan.  She was born in Russia in 1905, at the height of the rise of Soviet socialism.    Having been driven from her family home in St. Petersburg by the Russian Revolution, Ms. Rand took up and harbored a lifelong disgust for collectivism and communism, and a deep engagement with free market capitalism, one which would ultimately lead her to be a significant figure in American conservatism.   Her two most successful works are the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, both of which forward a philosophy she describes as objectivism.

What is objectivism?   The best way to understand objectivism is to read Ayn Rand’s very own equivalent of the Sermon on the Mount, the highest expression of her philosophy.  which can be found in Atlas Shrugged.   It’s a radio address spoken over hijacked airwaves through the voice of John Galt, the brilliant and elusive man of mystery who is mobilizing the flight of the best and the brightest from a world that only holds them back.   Having used super-secret technology developed in the Galt-Cave to take over every radio in the world, Galt then proceeds to tell people why he’s doing what he’s doing.

It’s an interesting speech.   First and foremost, it’s interesting because of how long it is.  This sermon is about one thousand five hundred words, give or take a few words I either throw in or edit out on the fly.   That comes to around fifteen minutes.   Galt’s speech runs for precisely thirty-three thousand, five hundred and seventy one words.  Meaning Galt talks, nonstop, for just about five hours.   Even Bill Clinton doesn’t ramble on for that long.   In the book, when Galt speaks, everyone sits and listens to the whole thing, which goes to show two things: 1) Ayn Rand may not quite have grasped the adult attention span, and 2) She didn’t have a solid sense of the capacity of the human bladder, either.

What’s more important, though, is what Galt is saying.   Objectivism is a celebration of the power of the individual, of the right of the best and most noble souls to do as they wish.  The heroes in Rand’s books tend to be rich and powerful industrialists.   Those who are poor or materially unsuccessful are, in the eyes of objectivism, failures.  As Rand describes them, they are parasites who only drain the life-energy of the great and the noble.  Their job is not to get in the way.

Galt focuses the heart of of his impossibly long speech against the moral and ethical code that he views as having enslaved and destroyed humanity. That dark and oppressive morality is, as he puts it, "...to serve God's purpose or your neighbor's welfare." For the entirety of this defining speech, Galt/Rand assails the "mystics" who would give themselves over to God, and those "moralists" who would give themselves over to neighbor. The enemy of human actualization is, for Rand, nothing less than the Great Commandment.   You shall love the Lord Your God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul, and your neighbor as yourself.   Any ethic of self-sacrifice and selflessness stands in the way of the power of the powerful, and that, for Rand, makes it evil.

Now, being a classical liberal and all, I do have this tendency to want to be open-minded about things.   It’s easy to see the appeal of Rand.  The yearning to be a fierce and independent individual is a strong one.  The desire to see yourself as among the noble few is natural.

But sounding her measure of goodness against the measure used by James creates an irreconcilable tension.  James tells us that wealth and power can be spiritually dangerous, and warns against using them as a measure of human value.  Jesus and Paul and the Torah and the Prophets say pretty much exactly the same thing.   Rand tells us that the poor are weak, and that their suffering comes because they are unworthy, and that they may as well not even exist at all.  Rand tells us that what matters is material success, period.

The choice between these two sets of values is stark and irreconcilable.  It isn’t a choice between conservative and liberal.   This isn’t a choice between individual liberty and collective responsibility.  It’s deeper than that. James says that the one law that governs our freedom...the law of liberty...is the law of love.  Rand says that no laws should govern freedom, period.   It is also not trivial, because our values...if they are actually our values...define our actions.  James taught that faith without works is dead.   But in saying so, he was not devaluing faith.  He was saying that for faith to be real, it must be real.  It has to live, and breathe, and act.

And just as a living faith in Jesus of Nazareth manifests itself as compassion for all of God’s creatures, the cold hard “truth” that Rand teaches tends to have a very different appearance.  It just plain ol’ looks different.  Living according to that set of values concentrates power in the powerful, and wealth in the hands of the few.  It expresses itself into the world as self-assured contempt, and as an entitled cruelty.

James says that the one law that governs our freedom...the law of liberty...is the law of love.  Rand says that no laws should govern freedom, period, especially compassion.   Both cannot be true.   Both cannot be good.   May we have the wisdom to choose the more excellent way.  Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

Mirror, Mirror

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

09.02.12;  Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  James 1:17-27

Mirrors, or so the saying goes, cannot lie.   

They are remarkably simple things, these reflective objects we find lying around our houses.  They are typically made of glass, onto which is coated something like silver or aluminum, which is mixed with various substances to help it cling to the glass.  What it does would seem quite straightforward.  It bounces back light, typically around eighty percent or so.

But outside of some light-loss, mirrors don’t lie.   They show us exactly what is reflected off of them, which should mean that what we see is exactly what is reflected.   Problem is, this just isn’t so.

Even if the mirror is an industrial grade mirror, capable of returning 99% of the light it receives, a mirror can do nothing about the eye and the mind that observe it.   If that eye and that mind are that of an animal, what the animal sees is another animal.   

Years ago, I’d helped organize a Very Important Meeting of the Very Important People who were gathered to talk about Very Important Things.  I don’t remember a single thing we did that day.  What I remember most about that meeting was not what was discussed, but that the windows of the conference room were reflective on the outside.  I remember this because for the entire afternoon of vital planning conversations, a male cardinal was crashing itself angrily into one of the windows, battling ferociously with a strangely identical other male cardinal that had suddenly arrived in its territory.  What that cardinal saw was both true and false.  The truth lay in the reflected light.  But there was no other surprisingly hard cardinal defying it.

As self-aware creatures, we aren’t supposed to be like that.  We..along with chimpanzees, whales, and elephants...know that what we see when we see our reflections is us.  And yet for humans, that’s not always true.   Human beings don’t just see things.  We interpret them.  We filter them through the lenses of our own identity.  We observe what we wish to observe.

Men are good at this.  When we inadvertently encounter our image in a reflective surface, there’s a tendency to notice what we want to notice.  I mean, look at those guns.  Just look at them.  We are, without question, in our physical prime, particularly viewed from just the...wait...suck it in a little bit, flex slightly...shift slightly to the right.   Perfect.   Over time, finding that perfect angle increasingly requires the use of Google Earth, but we are nonetheless convinced that it is there.

Our feminine counterparts, in my experience, seem to have the opposite problem.   Fed an endless media diet of abusively impossible photoshopped perfection, women often see only their imperfections.   Like right there, under the arm, that bit of skin that wasn’t there a few years ago.   It’s the beginnings of...bat wing.  And that becomes the only thing to see, that insignificant imperfection, although not another soul would even notice it.    If men were even aware of the concept of bat wings, we’d probably view it as an asset.  

“I.  Am.  Batman.”

Even faced with ourselves, we have trouble seeing who we actually are.   And from that difficulty seeing who we are, we have difficulty being who we need to be.

The Book of James is all about seeing, and being, and doing.    This “letter” is more an essay or sequence of essays that establish the most essential nature of the Christian ethical life.   It has been traditionally attributed to James, the brother of Jesus, and as it is perhaps the most theologically Jewish of the books of the New Testament, a majority of contemporary Biblical scholarship sees no reason to challenge that.  

James is one of the most practical, rubber-meets-the-road books in the New Testament, because it is essentially a book of Wisdom.  As wisdom literature, it concerns itself with how we human beings should act if we’re to get along in the world.

Wisdom teachings are found elsewhere in the Bible, in Proverbs, and in Ecclesiastes, and in Job, as well as in a number of the Psalms.   Those books teach the basics of how to live, and particularly how to live so that you are playing well with others and doing well for yourself.   They teach thrift, foresight, and patience.  They teach that life is to be enjoyed, and that sustained enjoyment is best found in moderation.    They teach that the wise do not speak without careful self-examination, first considering the impact of their words. They also teach about the balance between human power and human liberty.

That balance, as classical wisdom literature teaches it, lies in respecting the very real power of the king.  There’s a reason that being careful with your speech in the ancient world was important.  That reason was that if you were not careful and circumspect, and you offended the king, you could end up being executed in some surprisingly creative ways.

James takes that classical wisdom teaching about respecting the power of authority and puts a different spin on it.  Throughout his writing, he describes the relationship of the Christian to something he calls, alternately, the “royal law” and...as we heard in verse 25 today...the “law of liberty.”

That law is defined by James in verse eight of chapter two.   It is, simply, that we are to love our neighbors as ourselves.   The royal law, for those who claim God as the only authority, is the law of love.   The core of the Christ-centered practical wisdom in James is that you cannot claim to be truly compassionate unless that compassion manifests itself in your life.

And here we human beings encounter a challenge.  Our view of ourselves can be distorted by a narcissistic ego, or warped and poisoned by the dark narcissus of depression and self-loathing.  But we don’t just struggle with really seeing ourselves.  Those same interpretive lenses that make it so hard for us to come to terms with our identity also make it doubly hard to see the reality of the people around us.

I mean, there they are, right in front of us.  We can see them clear as day.  

And yet more often than not, what we see in them isn’t what they really are, but a something that has more to do with us than it has to do with them.  We see them as a projection, an idol formed with our own hands, and not as the actual being that was created by the same Maker who formed and shaped and loves us.

As self-aware as we claim to be, we often deal with the beings around us as clumsily and painfully as if we were a bird, spending all of its energy attacking itself, struggling all day long with something that it doesn’t really understand.

Into this awkwardly inescapable reality, James tells us that we should not be like those who are incapable of real self-examination.  The truth of a wise existence, he tells us, is that the deepest possible reality is love.  We need to see both ourselves and others in that reality.  More importantly, we need to insure that our every action is governed by that love.   We may struggle to see it.  But that requires us to look harder, to embrace the movement of the Spirit within us, and to let it guide us even when we find ourselves forgetting and struggling.

Human beings are great at self deception.  We are wonderful at looking right into a mirror and not seeing ourselves, and even better at looking at others and not seeing them at all.

But in the truth that is God’s nature, and the truth that is God’s love, we find both who we are, and who others are.  Let’s turn our hearts and our minds towards seeing that, and our hands towards living it.  Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.