Family History

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

12.22.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 1:1-17

So we’ve wandered away from the pre-assigned readings a little bit this morning, into the section that begins Matthew’s story of the birth of Jesus.  Why?  Why, you may ask, would I have subjected you to seventeen verses of that?  

C’mon, please, something Christmasy, anything Christmasy, but please, not another list, because Lord have mercy, you already have lists waiting for you at home.  Those lists weigh on your minds as the minutes click away to Christmas day with the tension-building relentlessness of a self-destruct sequence in some sci fi flick.  “An Alien versus Predator Christmas Special,” perhaps.  Just don’t open that large egg shaped package, unless you’re planning on having Christmas dinner end unpleasantly.

And still, in the back of our minds, that list of things we haven’t done clicks down in Siri’s voice.  “Seasonal autodestruct failsafe has been passed.  Your Christmas will be a complete failure and your children will hate you forever in nineteen.  Eighteen.  Seventeen.  Sixteen.”  

But it’s Advent, and as we’ve said for the last four Sundays as we’ve lit those candles, Advent means arrival, and arrivals are beginnings.  Given that we’re talking about the birth of Jesus in just over a day and a half, you’d think starting at the beginning would be a good thing, but here?  Here at the first verse of the first chapter of the first book of the New Testament?  Hoo boy.

As a writer who struggles with only occasional to come up with the best possible start to my stories, that hook, that sentence that draws you in?  Wow.  The greatest story ever told kinda doesn’t exactly get off to a riveting start.  

It’s a list, one that you can easily imagine being read by Ben Stein in a class once he’s stopped saying “Bueller?  Bueller?  Bueller?”  And if the Gospels are our greatest tool for evangelism, the best way to teach a broken world about the joyous message of Jesus Christ, why for the love of Pete would we start them this way?

That the wise Christian souls who select our readings every year have chosen to skip over this passage makes a ton of sense, not least because it’s the sort of text that makes most readers break down and weep openly in front of the whole congregation. Shealtiel?  Who names their kids Shealtiel?  Probably the same kind of folks who name their sons Salmon.  Not the fish.  Not sahmohn. SaL - Mon, like Poh-Keh-Mon.  There’s nothing like publicly reading seventeen verses of one barely pronounceable name after another to reinforce your fear of public speaking.  

Instead, they start with our second passage from today, as Joseph the father of Jesus struggles to come to terms with the reality that his new bride is pregnant and he’s not the father.  That passage, and Joseph’s acceptance of this child, that feels like Christmas.  But this one?  It gets skipped for a reason.

So why did Matthew start his story that way?  Why is a long list of names the way we begin?

Because to understand Jesus, it helps to know the family he was born into.  That’s what Matthew’s doing here, because each of these names isn’t just a name, stuck onto the equivalent of an ancient Judean organizational chart.  These are people with stories, part of a web of relationships that went back thousands of years.

And when Matthew writes this list, he’s writing it to people who would have known exactly what he was talking about.  Matthew’s Gospel was written to a community of Christians who were still deeply connected to their Jewish heritage, and every single name on that list would have echoed with a personal story.  These were old family tales, each name opening up like a flower with a rich narrative all it’s own.

Oh, Abraham we know, because that’s where the story of the family begins.   And we know Isaac his son.  We know Isaac’s tricksy son Jacob, who wheeled and dealed his way through life, stealing blessings and always with some scheme up his sleeve.  There are women, too, on this list Matthew has slapped together.   They tend to be the...well...how to put this...the “interesting” women.  

There’s Rahab, who worked as a foreign prostitute before she married into the family.  There’s Ruth, who even though she came from a people who were enemies managed to prove her faithfulness, so much so that Rahab’s son couldn’t help but fall in love with her.  

Like father, like son, those folks listening would have thought.

There’s Bathsheba, when David saw her bathing on the roof, and her beauty and the moonlight overthrew him.  Matthew’s still a little unfairly cheesed at her, to the point that he won’t even speak her name.  You know, that woman.  The wife of Uriah.  But the kid that came out of that sordid mess was Solomon the wise.  Can’t leave him out, now, can you?

Name after name, and mixed in with the names, the times of family triumph and disaster are whispering echoes.  “King David,” says Matthew, the only time in this long list he uses a title.  King David.  Remember when he was King.  We had a real King, once, a weeping, singing, a beautiful and flawed poet-warrior.

And in the list, too, a little note...remember when we were forced to move, when everything we had was torn away from us and we found ourselves owned by the man, struggling to get by in a strange land?  And heads would nod.  Yeah, we all know what that feels like.

It’s a list, sure, and lists are boring, but churning just under the surface of the list is the story of a family going forty-two generations back.

And Lord have mercy, families are many things, but boring is rarely one of them.  Families are messy and complicated and alive, so much so that maybe a little bit of boring might be welcome for a change.

This time of year, we feel that strongly.  Because this season is the time when families gather and reconvene.  Or they don’t, and we feel that too.  It’s a time of year when those memories of our family life mix and bubble to the surface, when old patterns of life seems to rise back up and claim our souls, for good or ill.

It’s a time to sing and laugh and reconnect.  It’s the time when we remember the laughter of voices that are now passed, and old wounds of loss and misunderstanding and betrayal reopen just enough to sting.

It’s the mess of family, and that, I think, is why Matthew brings up those stories.  This is who we are, he’s saying.  This is where we came from.  

And now into this mess, we’ve brought something new.  We’ve chosen to let it in, just as Joseph chose to claim that child as his own.  That’s the promise of this Season, that into the mess and flesh and chaos of human story, something new has entered in.  And that new thing has the promise of changing the whole feel of the story.

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

Stale Expectations

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 12.15.13

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 11:2-11

It’s that time of year, when the days have grown as short and cold as Napoleon’s corpse, when every day brings the possibility of winter banging down your plans for the day.

Oh, there are times we try to push past our relationship with the reality of Washington area Decembers and Januaries.  We stay late to get that memo done, even though the rest of the office has piled out early.  It’s just gotta get done, we tell ourselves.  I can make it to the daycare on time if I factor in an extra...ten minutes.  Surely that’ll be enough.  We fling ourselves out onto the highway, convinced that maybe, just maybe, every driver in the Washington Metropolitan Region will have remembered everything they were taught about driving in inclement weather.

Hope springs eternal.

Here we have a sprawling urban megaplex designed around the car, a transportation network which barely works in the best of times.  A little rain, a light dusting, wild and crazy things like the sun setting, these events turn the entire overcomplex system into an unworkable mess. We should know better.

We do that a few times, times that involve us sitting in traffic for six and a half hours, increasingly regretting the large bucket of coffee we drank right before leaving.  The snarl of cars inches and slides forward, a dying serpent wriggling through the slush.  Night falls, and we’re still in our cars grows later and later and we become more and more terrified that the daycare center will sell our toddlers to organ harvesters.  Those late fees do pile up after all.

We learn, pretty quickly, that there are times when the patterns of our everyday life just have to change.  We leave early.  We stay home.  We adjust, because we’ve encountered something that demands an adjustment.  We can’t just do what we do, because suddenly right in front of us is something that makes those expectations and patterns of life completely meaningless.

Those huge events, those major moments when reality comes and whups us upside the head, sometimes we have trouble wrapping our minds around them.  We still expect, in our simple human way, that we’ll be able to just stumble onwards with our lives as they always have been, no matter what new things we encounter.

But sometimes, we encounter things that so challenge our expectations that we find ourselves forced to adapt.

And here, defying our expectations for this season, we find ourselves flung far forward into the story of Jesus.  It’s only the third Sunday in Advent, as those candles tell us, and we’ve leapt ahead smack into the middle of Matthew’s story. Jesus isn’t gurgling and cooing cherubically in the stench and smell of the Manger.  Forget wise men and stars in the East.  Forget Bethlehem and the manger.  

We’re thirty years ahead now.  He’s already preached the Sermon on the Mount, and shared his message with thousands. So why here, why now in the story?  

Because, again, this is the Advent season.

These passages from Matthew’s Gospel lay out the details of what is a complex relationship between John the Baptist and Jesus, and are chosen for this season because they speak to two separate things, each of which is essential for grasping the purpose of this season.

First, in talking to the crowds that had gathered to listen to him teach, Jesus affirms again that John the Baptist bore a message that was fundamentally similar to the one that he himself preached.  He does not come to replace or to challenge John, but instead bears a message that honors his teaching.

That Matthew intentionally includes this story here is a testament to the ongoing reputation of John the Baptist in the Jewish community, even during the time of the early church.  He’d been a pretty big deal, with some very passionate and dedicated followers, and for the early church, establishing that John and Jesus were both in communication and on the same page was intensely important.

He goes so far as to equate John the Baptist with Elijah the prophet, who in Jewish tradition had never died, and would return to announce the fulfillment of the messianic age.

Second, Jesus...assuming that many who have come to listen to him also went out to listen to John as he preached and proclaimed in the wilderness...pitches them a couple of pointed rhetorical questions.

Why did you go out into the wilderness?  What did you expect to encounter there?

It seems a simple enough question, but Jesus gives them answers.  Did you expect to see a reed shaken by the wind?  Did you expect to see someone dressed in soft robes?

The first answer may suggest tall grasses growing in the wilderness, but it might also be intended to evoke an image on the coins circulated by Herod, which included a reed.   The second answer was mean to evoke wealth and opulence, the garb worn by the hangers on around the court of Herod and the priests who helped themselves to the riches that poured into the cities.

To which his listeners would undoubtedly say, well, of course we weren’t!  Why would we go out into the desert to see someone dressed up, or to look for coins?  I mean, c’mon.  Why would we do that?

And then Jesus reminded them of just what it was that John came into the world to preach.  Which, of course, pressed his listeners to come to terms with the reality that they claimed to understand about why they’d gone to listen to John in the first place, and why they came to hear Jesus.

“You know,” Jesus says, “that you were going to see a prophet.  But did you really listen to what that prophet was saying?”  Because the implications of what John the Baptist taught from his place out there in the wilderness weren’t just that he paid no attention to his own comfort and his own needs.  

They weren’t just going out there to spectate.  They were there to stand in encounter with the message that John bore...and by extension, the message that Jesus was soon to live out and embody.

It was a message that bore such potency that for all of John the Baptist’s fame, and for all of his sacred reputation, Jesus could say with confidence that even the most incompetent and stumbling member of the Kingdom of God would be “greater” than John.

That’s the experience that Jesus was teaching.  That’s the point and purpose of all of his parables, which draw us as listeners into relationship with the Kingdom that he proclaimed.  That’s the reason underlying these days, and we have to ask ourselves if we really grasp what we’re in encounter with as we gather here to celebrate the season.

What is the nature of the encounter we’re seeking here?  As we gather every Sunday, do we really grasp the depth of what it is we are intentionally stepping into?  Even standing here, with my comfy robe, I find myself struggling with the implications of what it is that Jesus taught, because to truly stand in engaged relationship with it is a tiny bit staggering.

It’s easier, far easier, just to drift along through this Advent season without realizing what it is we are being called into relationship with.  It’s not the expected, not the shine of your Harvest Reed Mastercard, not the remarkable comfort of your Land’s End Goretex Liturgical Garments.

It is the season of Immanuel, of God with us, of a time of justice when what we hear and see changes.

How, in this season, are we being transformed towards that purpose?  Because when you encounter something as radical as what Jesus describes, it has an impact on who we are.  It defines who we are, shaping our responses not just to that event, but to everything.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN

Different Deserts

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

12.08.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 3:1-12

The story we hear today is a story of a desert faith, a story of a human being whose life was formed and shaped by the dry desolation of the wilderness, and that’s a bit of a hurdle.  Because here on the East Coast, we don’t really have a feel for the whole desert thing.

This area of the mid-Atlantic is green and moist and seasonal.  Today couldn’t feel less like desert, to be frank.  From what the Super Doppler Storm Center Nerve Center Weather Alert Action Team was telling me on the eights this morning, the official forecast for this afternoon is “Slurpee.”  I’m hoping for a mix of Berry Citrus Slam and Coca Cola Classic, although I’ll admit that cleanup could get a little bit sticky.  

Few things could seem further away than the hot arid brightness of Arizona or the Sahara.  

Earlier in the week, it did sort of feel like summer, which was bizarre given what today is like, but even at the very height of a Washington summer, it’s nothing at all like what you’d encounter in New Mexico.  Here, summer is like getting into a jacuzzi while wearing a sleeping bag. Take yourself out into the wastes, and the heat is totally dry, with strong winds that howl across the flatlands and up the sides of the arroyos with not a single molecule of H2O in them. It’s the kind of dry that greedily pulls the moisture from your mouth and throat, leaving your throat like sandstone, and your eyes like sand-crusted marbles.

Desert is a dead place, barren and empty and devoid of water, and nothing could be farther from our experience.  What little potential you find for life there holds on by the skin of the teeth of its nails, or something like that. It is the farthest thing from a place of abundance.

And our world, the world we inhabit, is a land of remarkable abundance.  Everything is big, everything is copious and bountiful and supersized.  Our food is large, our houses are large, and the vehicles we drive to go get our large food to eat in our large house as we sit in front of our large screen?  Well, they’re large too.

If deserts are dry places, our abundance is perhaps best measured in water, and we Americans really do have plenty of water.  How much water we use on a daily basis has always hornswoggled me.  The average American household uses...according to EPA data... around 300 gallons per day.  When you factor in all of the water used to create all of the food and products we consume, that translates into...per person...over seven hundred and fifty thousand gallons of water per person per year.  I can’t quite process this.

Americans do not have a desert mentality.  And yet in all of this abundance, the great river of water and product that flows through our lives, we still feel that there is something missing.  It’s a peculiar thing.  We can still feel that absence, like our lives are an empty and dry wilderness.

The desert and those wilderness places in the world have always been central to the lives of those who wanted to get down to the most essential, the most necessary, the most vital parts of their faith. Throughout the history of the people of Israel, desert places had always been the ones that had provided refuge from the distractions of the world. It was into the wilderness that monks had fled seeking escape, and it was from the wilderness that prophets came with proclamations of truths that were beyond the grasp of those who had forgotten what was truly necessary in the world.

As Matthew’s Gospel begins, we heard today of a prophet who came from the wilderness, of John the Baptist. Mark’s book of the story of Christ begins by first declaring itself good news, and then gets right into a reference from the prophet Isaiah. That prophet’s poetic cry of the arrival of a messenger in the wilderness is declared a reference to John the Baptist. What John did was not too uncommon among the Hebrew people. Rituals of cleansing in water were part of the way in which Jews in the first century reclaimed themselves and recommitted themselves to their faith. In order to be ritually pure for worship in the temple, the Torah requires ritual bathing. It’s the ritual of the mikvah, and it’s still practiced today.  While the process of being baptized was not quite the same, it had the same spiritual foundation.

But while there were similarities between what John did by the banks of the Jordan and what others had done before, there were some real and significant differences. What was striking about John was how intensely he pointed beyond the act that he was engaged in. While he was engaging in a ritual that had deep symbolic roots, the one who was to follow on afterwards, and who John himself was to baptize...that one would engage in an act far more potent and transforming than the ritual and symbolic cleansing of baptism by water.

The baptism by the Holy Spirit described by involves a far deeper transformation, a changing of the will through the presence of the grace of God. That sense of the presence of God, and the awareness that in some strange way God is working through you to change you, that was the point of that moment of baptism.  God’s kingdom is present, right here, so close you can touch it.  This was at the core of what John the Baptist taught.  We hear it in chapter three, verse one, when he says “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

In Matthew’s story, this message is also the heart of the message proclaimed by Jesus, who...after being baptized by John, goes out into the desert for a time of testing and preparation.  When he returns, we hear in Matthew 4:17 that he picks up that very same cry: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

But, you may ask, how does this work for us, today? To get a sense of the powerful presence of God’s Spirit, the prophets wandered out into the wildernesses of Judea. To know the working of God’s grace in themselves, the monks of the early Christian church isolated themselves in the deserts of North Africa, seeking out places where life was whittled down to its most essential.  Nothing extra, just enough to sustain the process of life.

We live in a very different place.  We live in a land where in many of the thousands of catalogs that seem to show up at my door every day, one hot selling product this year appears to be a hat with a fake knit face beard attached.  I realize that beards are awesome, obviously, but is this really a thing we need.  We live in a land where we pour our real money into virtual things, like, say, an app that was banned from the iTunes store earlier this year.  It was called “I Am Rich,” and all it did was cause a single red gem to glow in the center of your device.  Cost: Nine Hundred and Ninety Nine Dollars and Ninety Nine Cents.  Evidently, the app name “I Have More Money Than Sense” was already taken.

For all of our abundance, for all of the choking, crushing cornucopia of materialism, we are far closer to the desert than we might think.  It feels, sometimes, as if all of the stuff that pours out of the maw of consumer culture is as relentless and inhospitable as a Death Valley sun at the middle of the day.  Those possessions and the expectations they create beat down upon us, and shrivel us, and leave us parched and spiritless and dry as antelope bone.

So perhaps, perhaps we do know the desert experience.  We all have our wilderness places.

Those broken and barren places may be a friendship that has soured. It might be a relationship where once there was love and now there is only hurt. It might be a time of struggle with illness and mortal frailty.  It might be a place that should bring direction and hope, but brings only anger and confusion. It might be a season that should bring comfort and joy, but instead yields only stress and grasping and an absurd sense of inadequacy. 

So I’ll take back what I said about how we don’t know the wilderness.  Our lives do not lack for deserts.  They’re just different deserts.  They test us as truly as the burning sun tested the prophets. How we respond to those times and places is the measure of our faith.

We all have our deserts. And just like we need to take every opportunity to drink in the desert to keep it from drying us out like a stone, we need to take every opportunity to both seek and express the fruits of the Spirit in those desert places in our lives. There is no moment or place in your life where that cannot be expressed, where the Spirit cannot work change. It comes when you offer a word of grace instead of a cutting remark. It comes when you choose to reach out to someone who is different, or who seems to stand in opposition to you. It comes when you choose to help someone grow, instead of ignoring them or allowing them to continue to fail.

Whereever your desert is, however it tests you, remember:  From that time of testing comes the possibility of deeper graces, and a stronger relation with our Creator, whose Kingdom is, truly, at hand.

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

The Day and the Hour

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 12.01.13

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 24:36-44

Here we’ve come out of the great feast of Thanksgiving, and the impact of every last one of those gravy-ladled carbs can be felt as we try to cram ourselves back into those pants...that must...oof...have shrunk the last time...urgh...we did a wash.

I’m particularly sensitive to that this year, because over the last few months, I’ve been trying to push back the inexorable sprawl of my mid-forties midsection.   

It was largely inspired, I think, by the pictures posted on Facebook after the water-balloon fight.  I’d just gotten back from the beach and some time in Hawaii, during which I’d managed to slather on more pounds than sunscreen, and seeing those images up on social media was a wee bit difficult.  

Those pictures pranged up against my internalized images of myself, to the point that it suddenly struck me that I no longer matched my concept of myself.  Lord have mercy, I look like that now?  It was like someone slapped an Amish beard and a t-shirt onto a lightly moistened manatee.  

With the scale showing just a tick shy of my goodness I’ve never seen that number before, I was fully thirty pounds heavier than I’d been when my oldest son was born, and he’s not *that* old.  I was feeling it.

I could feel it as I moved, feel it as I tried to run.  It was clear that I was in a pattern that was slowly and permanently adding to my mass.  I’d never paid much attention to it, honestly, but that time of inattention just needed to come to an end.  I was going to have to make some changes.

And the real challenge to those changes was that those couldn’t be fleeting.  Oh, but we want them to be.  We want to be able to just drink a bunch of protein shakes, or buy into some product or program or pill, and then...bam...we’ll suddenly be just like we were when we were twenty.  Or maybe there’s just an app.

But the reality is very different.  You have to make a change, and then you have to make it stick. It has to be every day, or it isn’t going to accomplish anything.  It’s meant, for me, smaller meal portions, consistently and every day.  It’s meant avoiding the urge to snack.  It’s meant...and this is the painful one...ratcheting waaay back on the tasty hoppy and highly caloric India Pale Ales.  It has meant that longstanding habits have had to shift, and be replaced by habits that involve more exercise and fewer calories.

That sustained, day-in, day-out pattern is the nature of intentional change, and the only way we really transition ourselves. It’s not one day, or one moment, or one instant.  It takes work and focus and sustained effort.  If we want anything truly new to happen for us, it happens only when we make the difficult choice that comes from choosing differently every single day.

But we really don’t want to hear that.  We want it right now.

Which I think is why for over two thousand years, Christians have struggled to interpret and engage with the passage that launches our season this Advent.  It’s kind of a funny way to start out the Advent season, actually.  We’re prepping ourselves for a season of celebration, as our neighborhoods begin to fill with lights and wreaths, and what we hear from the lectionary is this?  Talk about the flood, and then end of things?  I mean, shoot, things can’t end yet.  There’s still shopping to do!

This section from Matthew’s Gospel is one that is echoed in Luke 21, with both Matthew and Luke drawing from the original text of Mark in Mark 13.  It’s Mark’s Little Apocalypse, which was picked up by and expanded upon by Matthew.  In that expansion, we have a text that has been used in some rather interesting ways over the last coupla thousand years.

This text and its mirror in Luke, perhaps more than any others, have been used to justify a Christian teaching called the Rapture.  If you’re not familiar with this peculiar doctrine, it’s the idea that at some point before the end of all things, everyone who’s gotten themselves in right with God will be suddenly whisked off into heaven.  When things get rough, folks will just vanish into thin air, because, you know, that’s what Jesus says.  Two men in a field, one gets left.  Two women grinding at the mill, one gets left.  It’s become something of a “get out of jail free” theological card for the faithful, promising that when God finally gets into that smiting mood, no faithful person will actually have to suffer.

That premise was the entire point of those Left Behind books, which sold like hotcakes just a decade ago, and which were made into some of the most marginally watchable films ever to arrive on a screen back in the year 2000.   For cinephiles, take note: they’re trying a reboot of the franchise, with the Kirk Cameron role now played by Nicolas Cage.

The idea of the Rapture feeds into a peculiar fascination that so many people have about how things will end, and that they come from this passage seems the deepest of ironies.  What people hear is that one is taken and another is left, and somehow suddenly we’ve got Jesus standing next to Scottie in the transporter room beaming up the righteous while leaving the unrighteous stranded on Ceti Alpha Five.

It’s what leads so many folks to make wild predictions about when things will end, to be tragically consumed by an obsession with the end times.  That, as evidenced by the fate of Family Radio broadcaster Harold Camping this last year, only ends in sorrow.

In fact, the point Jesus is making in these stories is precisely and diametrically opposed to the idea of the Rapture.  As a doctrine the Rapture, does three things.  First, it distracts us. It becomes an object over which Christians speculate and debate, even though the very passages that supposedly justify this teaching tell us that we shouldn’t.  It’s been predicted countless times over human history, most recently and famously by Harold Camping.  Camping was a Christian radio broadcaster.  He seemed a decent guy, actually, if you got to know him, but he became obsessed with finding the date and the time of the Rapture.  He figured he’d cracked the code, and got the word out through his radio network.  That date, if you’ll recall, was October 21, 2011.  That was not a happy day for Camping and his followers, and honestly?  The relentless media attention was a bit of an embarrassment for Christianity.  

Second, the very idea of the Rapture makes the assumption that being Christian means escaping times of trial and suffering.  This is not true, and it has never been true. Looking out over the course of human history, Christians have struggled and weathered their way through not just personal hardships, but disasters and famines and the collapses of entire societies.  The faith remained when Rome fell, and the faith endured when storms raged and the earth shook.  

Our faith gives us the strength to cope with trial, and to do so with as much grace as possible.  But what it is not is an escape.  We endure, and we transcend, but we do not flee from suffering.  That’s why we have this symbol hanging in most of our sanctuaries.

Third, the Rapture puts more emphasis on a single moment than it does on the lifelong process of being transformed.  Instead of focusing on the manner of life that should define every moment of a Christian’s journey, the misreading of this passage as indicating a “rapture” completely distracts from the entire purpose of the teaching.  It’s about preparation in the right now, about living your whole existence in such a way that it reflects your end purpose.

The purpose of faith is not to distract us. It is to give us something that cements our integrity, that focuses our lives every day on a new way of living. That’s what transforms us, slowly but surely, in ways that go well beyond dropping extra pounds.  

And for all of the joyousness of this season, that’s the entire point of Advent.  It is a reminder that God’s most gracious intent for us does not exist as an abstraction.  It was and is incarnate. It was born, and lived among us. It breathed and ate and grew, and in every moment, was fulfilling its purpose.

Being aware of that, and living into it, that’s the entire purpose of this Advent season.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN

The Scattering

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

11.24.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Jeremiah 23:1-6

Thanksgiving is almost upon us, and it’s a day that requires a great deal from all of us.  We’re a nation made up of people on the go, people who find that making our way to that day tends to involve traveling across crowded highways and byways to find our way to that table.

Which, frankly, is one of the reasons why its been worth it to stay close to home.  There’s only so much life you want to spend stuck in vacation traffic on I95.  

We drive for a day, and we prepare for hours, and the meal seems to last for seven and a half minutes.  Or maybe it just seems that way because I have teen sons.  If you’re not careful near my fifteen year old at the table, you can seriously lose a finger.  

And afterwards, after the work of the better part of a day has been inhaled and a vast stack of dishes awaits, most of the gathered family scatters, drifting off in a triptophan haze to disappear into their various screens.  What a peculiar thing, the holiday that this holiday has become, a day when we travel thousands of miles not to spend time together. 

And there are so many new options for escape this year, so many different ways that we can choose not to spend this holiday actually getting reacquainted with our far-flung families.  There are our iPhones and our Galaxies, filled with apps.  There are the five hundred and forty three Facebook friends we sort of kind of know, with whom we can share artfully retouched pictures of the meal that we just recently inhaled.  Right after we share it on Instagram, and tweet it, and pitch out a Vine of Uncle Don snoring gapemouthed in the Barcalounger.  We can disappear into our PS4 or our XBox One, gaming or watching the Breaking Bad Thanksgiving Special on Netflix.  

There are the traditional distractions.  There’s the game, of course.  There’s always a game, in front of which relatives who probably should be doing the dishes can be found completely asleep.

And for those who prefer to avoid the prep work for the meal, there’s been the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.  Every year since 1924, there’s been a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.  It’s a tradition, this parade of vast overinflated cartoon floats bobbing along above the road, a tradition that tends to remind us that maybe we should think about going for a walk after the meal.  It was, or so the ancient fable of it’s creation goes on wikipedia, the idea of Macy’s employees.  They were mostly recent immigrants, and they were so proud of their newfound country that they were happy to march in a parade on the morning of Thanksgiving.  What better way to celebrate before the evening meal they’d all share that night, as a nation together took time to remember the bounty of this land?

But that was 1924, and this is 2013.  This year, for the first time, Macy’s is offering another distraction, a new distraction that takes you out of the rec room and into your SUV to go hang out at the Mall.  It’s opening all of its stores on Thanksgiving Day.  At 8PM on Thanksgiving Day, they’ll be offering all kinds of exciting doorbuster opportunities to their loyal consumers, giving them a chance to leave the house and wait in long lines to buy stuff that they could just as easily buy next week at just as steep a discount.   

As will Best Buy, and Toys R Us, and WalMart, and scores of other major retailers, who’ll be opening themselves up for a festival of buying on the afternoon of Thanksgiving Day.  KMart, not to be outdone, will open up all of its stores at six am on Thanksgiving Day, and will stay open for forty one hours straight.  

And they’ll be giving their employees an opportunity for a little overtime away from their families.

It feels like yet another way in which our culture grows more and more scattered, as we’re driven from one another into the waiting arms of wolves.

Today’s passage from Jeremiah  talked about scattering, and was a direct challenge to the “shepherds” of Israel. By shepherds, Jeremiah was referring to those in power, those charged with guiding the lives of the people. According to the passage we’ve just heard, the folks in positions of power have misled the people, and have caused the flock to be scattered. In their place, God is going to find other leaders, ones who will help bring the flock back together.

The metaphor of herdsmen and their flocks is great, but it doesn’t tell us very much about what the leadership had done or failed to do.

For that, we have to look to the broader context of Jeremiah, to both historical and textual context.  

Historically, this was the sixth century BCE, in the time of the Babylonian diaspora.  What does “diaspora” mean?  Well, it comes from the Greek word diaspora, which means “scattering.”  It was the official policy of the Babylonian empire towards the nations that they conquered.  Those people were scattered and divided, with some left on the land, and others dragged away into slavery.  

Textually, the passages that come before and after this little chunklet of verses give us deeper handles on who Jeremiah was speaking about. 

Before today’s passage, in Jeremiah 22:13-17, the prophet lays into the royal household of Judah. Why? Because those leaders enriched themselves at the expense of their people. They built themselves huge houses made of only the finest materials, taking from those in need and giving to themselves. Justice and righteousness were put second. Their personal prosperity was put first.

After today’s passage, in Jeremiah 23:16-17, Jeremiah goes after the leaders of his age. What was the message that those leaders were bearing? It was a message of well-being. It was a message of prosperity. Everything is going to be just fine. It shall be well with you. Just keep pouring your wealth into the system. No calamity shall come upon you. 

In both instances, what was proclaimed and what was lived was a prosperity based in falsehood. Leaders used their power to amass great wealth for themselves. Leaders convinced people that all they needed to do to be doing well in the world was to give and give and give to feed king and temple....which, conveniently enough, meant that the king and temple would do well.

But those kinds of shepherds aren’t the sort of folks that God likes to entrust with his flocks, because their interest goes no deeper than their own hungers.

And so this year, as we approach Thanksgiving, we find ourselves in a peculiar place.  Progress, one might say, but a peculiar progress.  Just two years ago, on my first sermon before my first Thanksgiving here, I preached on something very similar...and joked about how Black Friday was becoming Black Friday Weekend, and joked that Thanksgiving itself would be next.

That was just two years ago, just a flicker of time, and the march of progress goes forward.

Now, it’s becoming the norm, as a day of national reflection and sabbath becomes just another reason to sit in lines to buy things that we don’t need from people who’d rather be home with their families.

It feels like a regression, like we are getting weaker, like we are forgetting the best graces of who we are as a people, driven further and further from one another as the products and stressors of consumerism drive us one from another.  And we are getting weaker, just as a scattered flock is weak and vulnerable.

“We’re just being more flexible to accommodate the desires of consumers,” say the executives making these decisions.  “We’re just responding to demand,” they say.  To which I say, balderdash, or other words beginning with B that aren’t quite as sanctuary friendly.

If you’re creating the demand in the first place, spending billions upon billions of dollars on advertising to stir desire in the hearts of consumers, then that dog don’t hunt.

Turning away from that path, though, is not hard.  You have to choose, choose not to be broken and torn, one from another.  Hearing that call to shop as the disingenuous thing that it is is a beginning.

And then do not follow the lead of this culture, not on that day.

Meaning, don’t.  Don’t do it.  Take the time, take the space, and be together with family and friends and loved ones.  Share space together.  Talk.  Reconnect, and use the time to be thankful for life.

Because that’s not just the purpose of Thanksgiving, but the purpose of every day.

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

A Little Short

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

11.02.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 19:1-10

Do you remember the first time you ever bought something?  Can you remember the first time you ever used money?

It’s a tough thing, stretching your mind so far back, because so many grownups are struggling to remember all of their deadlines and their teenager’s insane schedule and when their two year old has playgroup.  Even with our magic devil boxes there to tell us what to do, it’s hard enough to keep track of all of that, without accidentally dropping your teen off at Gymboree and your toddler off at dive practice.

But remembering who we’ve been is a vital thing, and if you follow back through the deep dark thickets of growing up and go back to that bright little self you once were, you might find an echo of a whisper of that moment.

My first memory of money is a fragment, old and faded like parchment in my mind.  It’s so old that I’m not even sure it’s real, or if it’s a mingling of memories and dreams, blurred together by my subconscious mind over a lifetime.

I was four years old, and I was living in Nairobi.  My grandparents had come to visit, and Grandfather was going to take me to go get ice cream.  This, I think, is why I remember it.   Amazing, how the human brain prioritizes a memory when there’s ice cream involved.  

What was also important about this outing was that I was going to buy it myself.  I’d been given change over the course of my grandparents visit, in part to teach me about how money worked.

Because as when you’re a very little one, money just doesn’t quite process.  Things show up.  Toys just appear.  Food is there because it’s there.  And at some point, we start having to learn about this peculiar system we’ve created for managing exchange in our society.

I remember, frankly, finding the whole money thing a little bizarre.  That was probably because I was living in Kenya, which approached money in a way that seemed designed to be as hard to understand as possible.  You had a shilling, which was made up of pence, which may or may not have been made up of hapennies.  The hapenny was the subatomic particle of the old British monetary system, meaning it was kind of crazy money.  Here’s a penny, the smallest possible unit.  A hapenny is...half of the smallest possible unit.  Alrighty then.   

Above a shilling, there were crowns and gold pieces and bitcoins and doubloons and krugerrands.  Or something like that. It was all very intimidating.

I can remember how awkward it felt, the whole experience of trying figure out what to do with the money.  What if I didn’t have enough?  What if I didn’t do it quite right?  What if I didn’t end up getting ice cream?  What if I lost those shillings and they fell out of my pocket?  I remember checking my pockets regularly for the reassurance of those round hunks of metal.

But I also remember how it felt vaguely magical.  I give you this little circle of metal with a picture of Jomo Kenyatta, and you give me ice cream?  Wow.

Wealth has that peculiar dichotomy.  While it makes exchange possible, and it makes it possible for us to do things in our culture, it quickly becomes a source of anxiety and personal struggle.

Luke’s Gospel struggles and wrestles with the spiritual implications of wealth more than perhaps any other of the books of the Bible.  It is Luke who retains most of the stories of Jesus that deal with wealth, and today’s story of Zacchaeus is no exception.  Like many of the stories we’ve been hearing from him over the last few weeks, this recounting of the actions of a tax collector is unique to Luke.

And quite a story it is, too.  It’s a fun one, one of those stories that I remember from Sunday School, because the images that it produces tend to stick in a kids head.  We hear about Zacchaeus.  He’s a man of some importance, and he’s rich, and while those are the details that were key to the story that Jesus was telling, they aren’t the details that stick in your mind.

Zacchaeus was a little guy.  He was small and scrappy.  He was...well...not particularly tall.  Maybe not quite in the Wizard of Oz Mayor of Munchkinland way, not quite in the Randy Newman Short People kind of way, but enough so that when the crowds gathered around this remarkable traveling rabbi, Zacchaeus just couldn’t see.  It was a forest of torsos and shoulders, and he couldn’t quite get a view.

This detail makes this story stick in the heads of kids.  Because if there’s one think a kid knows, it’s that feeling, of being small and lost in a sea of towering adults.  And the other detail that makes it cling is that this adult, this little man, he hasn’t lost his childlike willingness to express himself.  He’ll clamber wildly up a tree just to get a view, as if the opinions and expectations of everyone around him didn’t exist at all.

But beyond the shortness, beyond the silliness of imagining a little grown up clambering up a tree, the heart of this story has to do with wealth and the way we struggle with it.   Because just as Zacchaeus was a tax collector, and thus despised by everyone around him, he was also rich...and Jesus has a peculiar relationship with wealth.

What we do with our wealth, and how we function in a society where wealth allows us to act and to get things done, those things are often a challenge, even for those of us who are supposedly all grown up.  

Wealth and the dynamics of wealth tend to induce all kinds of anxieties and tensions in adult human beings.  We know, because it is the culture in which we live, that being a little short of stature is something we can get over.  Being a little short on cash, on the other hand, tends to cause a whole bunch more tension.  It gives us a sense of powerlessness.  It can paralyze us, leaving us unable to act.  Or we can find ourselves so anxious about wealth that we do not turn it towards a positive purpose in the world.  We hold it, we cling to it, and it does nothing.

In this story, Zacchaeus finds himself in a position to play host to Jesus.  Short though he may have been, his actions show that though he was a wealthy man who’d gained his wealth in a hated profession, somewhere, he hadn’t lost a part of his childlike exuberance.

Now as sermons about stewardship go, I’ll admit that using the story of Zacchaeus can seem like quite a stretch.  Particularly the “I’ll give half of everything I have to the poor part.  Yeah, sure, the IRS limit on deductibility is fifty percent of income, but c’mon.  That’s a pretty huge chunk of change there.  And generally, the pastors who get up there and tell you that they want to talk about cinctupletithing don’t make it through the next Sesion meeting.

I think what is more important for us to hear in this is the combination of purpose and attitude, as this tiny tax collector manages to deal with his wealth in a way that shows he understands its purpose.  The purpose of wealth, as Jesus presents it throughout the Gospels, is not wealth itself.  

He asks us instead to turn that wealth towards another purpose, in much the same way that we are all called to turn your life towards particular purpose.  And he asks us to do it in a way that reflects both exuberance and childlike hopefulness.

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

The Masks We Wear

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

10.27.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Luke 18:9-14

This is a week for masks.  On Thursday, on All Hallows Eve, my neighborhood fills with people pretending to be things that they are not.  Ninjas and princesses and pirates, Jedi and clones and astronauts, all of them come moving in little clusters through the early evening darkness.  It’s a time for community, as neighbors circulate and talk and remind each other that there are really other human beings living around them.

For children, it’s also a time of sweet magic, a evening in which every neighbor’s house is a fountain of candy, when you heave that bag back to your room and dump a cubic yard of Twizzlers and Snickers onto the floor.  “I’ll save some for later,” you said when you were a kid, and you meant it, because the volume of your stomach even at full capacity wasn’t a match for that mighty mound of corn-syrup and sugar.

As the boys drift into their teens, that time is increasingly fading into my past.   They’re busy now, with school and life.  My eight grader, in the last year when trick-or-treating would be not-awkward, has a rehearsal that evening.  So it will go.  I miss it already.

But it’s not just the candy and the community.  It’s a time to pretend we are something else, to wear a mask that for one evening makes us seem like another thing.  What that is depends on our aspirations, on our sense of what is interesting or frightening or powerful or beautiful, on what is meaningful to us as a person.

Like, say, the first costume either of our children picked out themselves.  On that first All Hallows Eve, when my oldest son wasn’t a sophomore in high school but a bright-eyed member of the twos class at his preschool, he had a very very specific costume request.  “What do you want to be for Halloween,” we asked.  “Harry Potter?  Ron Weasley?”  “I want to be a tuna,” he said.   “A what?”  “I want to be a tuna!”  “A can of tuna?”  “No, Daddy, a tuna!”

The mighty tuna is, for some reason, not one of those costumes you can buy at Toys R Us or Party City.  Suffice it to say, this ended up being a home-made costume.  The tiny guy was delighted with it, although he grew increasingly frustrated with all of the clueless grownups around him as the evening wore on.  “What a scary shark costume!”  “I’m not a shark.  I’m a tuna!”

It took a little while to figure out precisely why he wanted to be a tuna.  It was, my wife and I finally realized, because of a Magic Schoolbus book we’d read to him, and that he’d begun to read on his own.  He wanted to be the tuna he read about in the book, the Atlantic Bluefin, which in its natural form does not come packed in a small can.  It’s fifteen feet long and over a thousand pounds, a ferocious pack hunter, an apex predator, huge and fierce.

So maybe being a tuna makes sense.  We want to think of ourselves that way.  We want to have a sense of ourselves as powerful and mighty and important, and we want the whole world to see that same person that we desire to project.

Playing that role is a big part of what this week’s festivities will be about, but it can also be a significant part of the way we live our lives on days we’re not dressed up like someone else.

That can be fine, in so far as it makes us more confident and certain of ourselves.  That’s a good thing, right?  We’re constantly told that it’s a good thing.  Be the person you want to be, right?  

And yet here, in today’s passage from Luke, we have Jesus telling us a story about two individuals, both of whom have gone up to the temple to pray.  It’s a story told with a purpose, or so the author of Luke’s Gospel tells us.

The two characters inhabit entirely different portions of the human spectrum.  On the one hand, we’re shown a Pharisee.  The Pharisees inevitably get a bad rap in the Gospels, but there’s every evidence that the reason for this wasn’t because they were automatically terrible, impossible people.  Instead, they were the ones who were most interested in talking with and debating with Jesus.

What we encounter in the story, though, is the Pharisee who made Pharisee a bad name.  It’s an individual who has complete confidence in himself and in who he is.  The Pharisee is praying, and his prayer is that of a content and confident individual.  He looks out at the world around him, and he is utterly confident in himself and in his goodness.

What makes him particularly confident in his own goodness is looking at a world that is filled with people who just don’t make the grade.  His list isn’t exhaustive, but he knows he’s better than others.  Thieves, rogues, and adulterers?  He’s nothing like them.

He looks around, and he sees a tax collector.  “Even this guy,” he whispers in his fervent prayer.  “Thank you so much that I’m not that guy.”  Then, like you’d need to tell God this, he lays out the reasons why he’s so amazing.  He fasts, and he gives a full ten percent of his income to the temple.  He’s righteous, and he knows it, clap your hands.

Jesus then presents us with another soul, this one standing rather father off and away from the temple.  It’s a tax collector, and that means in all likelihood we’re talking about a guy who is not exactly in good standing with the community.   If he was responsible for taking taxes to support the power of the Roman Empire, then he was the next thing to a traitor in most folks books.

Worse still, most tax collectors had the reputation for lining their own pockets by tacking on an extra percentage here or there.  If you didn’t pay up, you could expect a visit from some nice men in Roman uniforms.  It was a remarkably negatively viewed profession, and for good reason.  Tax collectors were not like the civil servants charged with gathering revenue in a constitutional republic, held accountable by both the law and civil servants.  They were, in many ways, just plain ol’ predators.  Their business was extortion, and charging excessive fees was their business.  

This is an important thing for us to grasp.  We’re not being presented with a simple, binary equation, as much as we like to think of the world in that way.  Jesus is not saying to his listeners, “Here’s a good guy and here’s a bad guy.”  He’s saying, both of these guys are a mess.  Neither of them is good.

But only the tax collector seems to know it.   He’s a wreck and a ruin.  Here he is at the temple, and what we hear is that his interaction with God is one of lament and sorrow.  There’s no confidence, there’s no naming it and claiming it.  He’s just a mess, and everyone around him holds him in contempt, including himself.  

Jesus calls these two characters out, and establishes them as examples of how we are and are not to stand in right relationship with our Creator.

The tax collector is aware of himself, deeply aware of how he and his profession have impacted those around him.  He hides behind nothing, and knows that he and his life are broken.  He knows how deep and wide that chasm between his reality and God’s call on his life truly is.  He has no masks, and he sits there, raw and broken and honest. 

The Pharisee, on the other hand, is deeply focused on his image.  He is the righteous one, and he knows it, and everyone around him knows it.  He wears that identity as proudly as if it were a Dolce and Gabbana suit.  He is utterly confident in it.

The Pharisee in this story is typically presented as a hypocrite, someone who says one thing and does another.  This ain’t quite so.  There is nothing in this story that Jesus is telling to suggest that he does not fulfill the requirements of righteous religious practice.  He checks every box, every box but one.

That “box” is the one where you understand that who you are depends not on your own estimation of yourself, but on how you express yourself towards the world around you. 

It’s just a mask, though, just a role he plays.  But it is not the world that he is deceiving, as he prays there smugly to himself.  What this parable shows us is that the most dangerous masks are not the ones that hide our identity from others.  The most dangerous masks are those that hide our identity from ourselves.

They allow us to imagine that our contempt for others is justified.  They allow us to tear others down.  They allow us to hate, and to express even our faith as bitterness.

Each of us has such a mask, sometimes more than one.  We present them to the world, and in so doing, are as dishonest to ourselves as that Pharisee.  And worse yet, we can turn those masks inward, allowing them to justify all sorts of darkness, allowing our image of ourselves to be as disconnected from reality as if we really and truly believed we were the mighty tuna.

God knows us better than that, and so should we.

Wherever those falsehoods lie, wherever you’ve allowed yourself to cast up a mask of contempt towards others that prevents you from showing love to those around you, set it aside.  

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