Big Time

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

11.18.12;  Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 13:1-8

Years ago, when I was working at my last secular job and had just started seminary, my boss told me that he needed me to travel with him to a meeting.  I was psyched.  Travel?  Adventure!  Excitement!  Where are we going to be going, I asked?

We needed to go and meet with the muckity mucks at the headquarters of a large foundation, he replied, one that would be supporting one of our projects to the tune of several million dollars.  Cool, I thought.  Where are we going, asked I.  Out to wine and dine our way around Napa Valley?  Or perhaps to some  private island in the West Indies?

As it turned out, we were going to Flint, Michigan.  In November.

Well, I’d never been there.  So it was still sort of an adventure.   I started looking for tickets.  There weren’t a whole bunch of flights to Flint, for some reason, and getting there and back was amazingly expensive, as expensive as flying to Paris.   Through the peculiar randomness of airline ticketing, I discovered that if I stayed two extra days, I would save my organization five hundred bucks, even with meals and hotel factored in.  Any opportunity to save money for any reason whatsoever just stirs my Scots blood, and I couldn’t resist.  I’d just bring a laptop, a stack of proposals to review for my job, and some seminary work to fill out my days, and I’d be fine.

When I shared that plan with my boss, he looked at me kind of funny.  You’re going to spend two extra days in Flint to save us money, he asked.   Have you ever been to Flint, he asked?  No, said I.   Ah, he said.

Flint used to be one of the centers of the American auto industry.  Back in the 1950s and 1960s, it was a bustling, prosperous industrial town, flush with the paychecks of the well-paid workers at the town’s crankin’ Buick plant.  That plant was part of a massive industrial complex nicknamed Buick City, which sprawled across 235 acres of towering smokestacks and whirring assembly lines.   The downtown was full of shiny shops and bustling restaurants and small businesses, and there were dozens of neat little suburban neighborhoods built up all around that downtown.  In those neighborhoods, there were row upon row of modest but comfortable houses with neat green lawns, filled up with families who were living the perfect vision of the Leave-It-To-Beaver American dream.

That downtown is still there.  Those neighborhoods are still there.  I know because in between working and studying, I left my hotel and walked through the streets of Flint on two cold and cloudy November days.  My longest walk was two hours late one afternoon, and it was one of the more memorable walks I’ve ever taken.   I meandered around the streets of the downtown.  I crisscrossed through neighborhoods.  In those two hours, I didn’t see another living soul.    I walked down streets on which there were nice little ramblers of the same vintage as my own home in Annandale.  Every single house was empty, every lawn overgrown, every window dirty and faded.  In the downtown, every storefront was shuttered, many long ago gutted by fire or collapsed by rot.  There was graffiti, but even that seemed tired and old and faded, as even the vandals had long since given up.

It felt like I’d somehow wandered onto a set for Season One of the Walking Dead.   There was nothing alive, nothing human, anyway.   I started looking over my shoulder now and again, half-convinced that some brains-hungry undead locals might be shambling my way.  It was eerie.

At the height of the life of this community, it would have bustled and thrummed with life.  It would have been filled with energy and dynamism, a town that built cars for a nation that lives most of its life in cars, and had been building cars since 1904.  It would have seemed unimaginable that it wouldn’t just always be that way.  How could it not last forever?   

Looking up at the grandeur of the towering temple in Jerusalem, the disciples were equally impressed.  This was not the temple built by Solomon, because the Solomonic temple had been torn to rubble when the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem in the year 586 BCE.    It wasn’t even the temple which was built on the site of Solomon’s Temple during the reconstruction of Jerusalem following the return from exile.   That temple, which was finished in 515 BCE, is what scholars call “the second temple.”  Because, well, it was built second.  

This was the Herodian Temple.   Herod the Great, in an effort to prove that his rule wasn’t the bizarre corrupt inbred mess that it actually was, decided to do a little bit of refurbishing to the Second Temple, which was getting a little rough around the edges.

So he rebuilt it in the first century before Christ, supersized and double extra-shiny.  The entrance was a vast arch in the style of Roman monuments.  The temple itself was built on a new and huge platform which measured almost 170,000 square yards.   And to top it off, having decided that the original temple just wasn’t quite fancy enough, Herod had much of the renovated temple covered in gold leaf, which I’m sure was tasteful by Las Vegas standards.

It was striking, vast, and imposing.   It was mean to impress, and it did.   One of the disciples was as overawed as a five-year-old in Times Square, and remarked on it to Jesus.

Jesus was rather less impressed, and offered up his own assessment.  None of it mattered.  None of it would remain standing.  On the most basic level, he was right.  When the uprising against Rome failed a few decades after Jesus, Roman legions would besiege Jerusalem, and would raze the temple to the ground and burn it completely.

But he was right on another level.  Nothing we make on earth will withstand the passing of time.  Nothing.  All those things we imagine to be cast in stone, permanent, unchanging, and everlasting?  They will one day crumble and fade.   We have trouble grasping it, trouble realizing it.  Surely something we make will stick around.   

We look to the spread of our culture around us, and imagine that it must always be as it is.  We look to the great edifices of our republic, just two hundred years young, and it seems impossible that they won’t endure.  We see the sprawling malls and the shine and the sparkle, and we can’t visualize that as impermanent.  How can anything that to us seems so vast not be sticking around?

But as impossible as it seems, it won’t be the case.  Not even Twinkies will be around forever.  Not. Even. Twinkies.  

Finding our ground, then, can be somewhat difficult.   It is particularly difficult in a society that values both the supersized and the immediate.   To us, and to us in particular, Jesus offers the reminder that clinging to that which appears the most impressive and spectacular does not serve our best purpose in the Kingdom.

In the heart of what Jesus taught us, we find something rather different.  Instead of allowing ourselves to be distracted by the great towering golden edifices of power and profit, Jesus asks us to look to very different things.  We are to attend to our relationships with those around us, showing care and grace and kindness to every soul we encounter.  We are to attend to our relationship with our Creator, whose presence is so vast we struggle to see it, and so subtle and quiet we have to hold very still to hear it.

These things might, to us, seem rather less impressive than superhighways and malls and the shine of the world around us.  But our encounter with time and space is not the same as our Maker’s, and our understanding of what is significant is not the same, either. 

So turn your attention from the distractions, from the large stones hewn by the Herods of our own time, and turn it instead towards what matters.  

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

Finding the Center

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

11.04.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 12:28-34

Just two more days, and it will end.  You’re probably getting a bit of it here in Maryland, but honestly?   Y’all aren’t even in the same league.  Across the river in Virginia, the former heart of the Confederacy, we’re a swing state, a battleground, with both our Senate seat and our electoral college votes in play.   

And that means political money pouring into the state in a great flash flood of Benjamins.   The Obama campaign and Democratic PACs have sunk sixty six million dollars into ad buys alone.  The Romney campaign, the Republican National Committee, and a half dozen conservative PACs have poured in eighty two million dollars in ad buys.  That’s close to $150 million dollars combined in Virginia just for commercials, and that means political ads.  Endless, endless ads, a great chugged Super Big Gulp of thirty second partisan agitprop, poured down our gullets like a waterboarding administered by the combined casts of Mad Men and West Wing.   

For most of the year, I’ve managed to avoid it, mostly by hiding in a carefully constructed media bunker.  That bunker involves never ever ever watching television or listening to commercial radio.  I get my information on  the world off the web, where I can ignore banner ads as just so much useless clutter.  I also get my info from old-school newspapers and from public radio.   But commercial television?  The interruptions make me crazy.  I just can’t stand advertising in normal times, but now?   That way lies madness.  

When Sandy tromped through the East Coast on Monday night, and the trees around Annandale fell crunching down onto powerlines, my family found ourselves without lights and net and cable.   So we powered up our trusty little Honda generator, and snaked extension cords to the fridge and to the television.  We settled together under blankets on the sofa downstairs in our sturdy cinderblock basement, as the trees outside rocked and shook.  For a short while, we watched local broadcast news coverage.

Or rather, we tried to.  Mostly, we watched commercial followed by commercial followed by commercial, with occasional snippets of some poor local reporter standing getting battered by howling winds and rain.  It was agonizing, and tedious, and on every channel.  After about twenty minutes, the family abandoned the news completely.   We already kinda sorta knew it was ferociously storming, and so we watched Monsters Incorporated for the forty-seventh time instead.

That barrage of ads, which we shut off as quickly as we were able, was mostly about extremes.  Threats and rumblings and fear were the rule of the day.   There was little sense of common purpose of interest, or hope, or much of anything but a relentless focus on difference and disagreement.   The amount of resource being poured into developing this sense of tension and opposition is absolutely immense this year.   

And where our energies and resources go matters.   If we focus on what divides, and pour our time and treasure into what divides...to the tune of five point eight billion dollars nationwide this election cycle...then why should it be surprising that we end up divided?  What we prioritize matters.  Where we set our focus matters.  Where we direct our resources matters.

Today’s passage from Mark’s Gospel is all about setting focus and directing energies.   This excerpt comes following a prolonged sequence of conflict passages, in which various different opponents of Jesus arrive and confront him with the intent of proving him wrong.  In Mark 12:13-17, a group of Pharisees...those early precursors of rabbinic Judaism...and supporters of Herod arrive and try to entrap Jesus with a question about taxes, showing that perhaps there’s more in common  between our era and that era than we’d like to think.   

Then, in Mark 12:18-27 a group of the  Sadducees arrive to challenge him.  There are the Tzaddikim, the “righteous ones,” those whose power was tied to their ritual holiness and their control over the temple.  They ask him a brain-bending mess of a gotcha question about spouses in the afterlife.   Jesus smacks that one down as totally irrelevant to anything having to do with anything.

Out on the margins of those arguments was a scribe.  The scribes were the literate class in ancient society, traditionally the ones who documented and maintained and administrated.  In a mostly illiterate and uneducated society, they were the informed and the aware.  Typically, they’re associated with the Pharisees, as both groups placed a great deal of value on study, knowledge of the law, and careful, learned argumentation.

That scribe approached Jesus, and watched the back and forth between Jesus and the ones who were trying to trip him up.  And so he entered into an exchange with Jesus, an exchange that involves a simple question: “Which is the most important commandment?”

Jesus responds with not just a single text, but three.   The first answer, “Hear, O Israel, The Lord our God, the Lord is One,” is from Deuteronomy 6:5-6.   It’s the great call to prayer of the Jewish people, the Shema.  The second answer follows on from Deuteronomy 6, and says “You should love God with your whole self in.”  More or less.  The final text calls for loving your neighbor as yourself, which is from Leviticus 19:18.

Jesus weaves each of these together into a single answer, a blended reply that the scribe would have recognized.  In many of the texts circulated in the Greek-speaking Jewish world, those core principles would have been repeated.   And so, hearing what for him is clearly the right answer, the scribe affirms that Jesus knew what he was talking about, restating what Jesus taught.  Jesus returns the favor, recognizing both the wisdom of the scribe and how close he was to connecting to the one deep truth of God’s kingdom.

That ends the discussion, but it also gives us the single most vital and central goal of all Christian faith.   In the radical focus on God and the love of neighbor, we are shown both the essence of the law and the living center of Christian faith.   As followers of Jesus of Nazareth, our primary responsibility is to use this living center as the focus of all of our energy.

Not, of course, that historical Christianity has always managed to pull that off.  But looking at how much our culture pours its resources into political power, it can be a challenge finding a place to put your energy that doesn’t leave you feeling...well...a bit off.     Here we are as a nation, spending five point eight billion dollars on an election.   Do we imagine for a moment that our national sense of division and conflict and paralysis will be helped in any way by that vast outpouring of resources?  It feels...well...like a waste.  And at least half of it will be.  

But there are other ways to direct our resources and our personal energies.  

That, quite frankly, is what stewardship is all about, and as our nation looks forward, so do we as a community.   Yup, it’s a stewardship sermon.  

As Poolesville Presbyterian Church stares 2013 in the eye, the resources we commit to that journey have a tremendous amount to do with what will actually happen here this next year.   So, assuming you’re earnestly thinking about it, here are a few things to throw into the mix.

First, as you’re looking at what you may be able to give this year, realize that this isn’t money that’s being poured into something that divides.   The resources you give to support and sustain it are resources that you are committing to your own community, to this church, to something that is a basic and fundamental part of your life.  If faith is faith, it is the most radically defining element of our existence, and this community is how we together live out and develop that faith.   

In that very real sense, giving to PPC involves putting your energies and hopes into something that is both tangible and unifying.  It’s not that we’re all exactly the same here, because although we’re small, we’re not a political monoculture.  There are conservatives and progressives, across every shade of the political spectrum.  By putting our time and our treasure into this fellowship, we strengthen what unites us.   We recognize that Jesus didn’t call us to hate those who aren’t like us, but instead challenged us to love the God whose love unites us all, even and especially those who’ve got different signs on their lawns than yours.   We’re then called to go and make that love real in our lives.  That’s what we do here, and that’s worth something.

Second, it’s not hard to see the impact of your giving here, both of time and treasure.  We’re not huge, and so what you do makes a difference.  Your giving makes the music possible.  It makes transformative youth missions possible.  It feeds and clothes those in need in our community.  It helps welcome in and show Christian hospitality to guests and visitors.  It supports the Connection Cafe, and it teaches our kids about the grace, mercy, and justice of Jesus of Nazareth.  It keeps our humble buildings usable by those in the community.  Those are real, solid tangible things, and they all contribute in their own simple way to making that First Commandment the center of our lives.

So consider what you can do to help prepare for the promise of this ministry in 2013.  How can we turn our spiritual and material gifts together towards that deep center of our faith?   What will insure that we are, as a community, focusing our shared resources in a way that deepens our awareness that we are not, with that scribe, so very far from the Kingdom?

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