The Traitor

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

01.27.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 4:14-21; 22-40

Of all the peculiar blended words that seem to move in and out of our collective consciousness, one that I’ve always been at a loss to figure out is the “frenemy.”  

That word wasn’t around when I was a kid, it really wasn’t.  According to the online Websters, frenemy entered the English language at some point in the late 1970s, which, having lived through the 1970s, I guess I can understand.  What with gas shortages, malaise, cocaine, Corvettes that got 15 to the gallon and only put out 140 horsepower, and trying cram into those jeans, that decade could seriously make you mean.

But the existence of the concept itself just sort of eludes me.  Why would one have a frenemy?  I mean, friends I get.  Enemies I understand.   Friends are a blessing, folks with whom we share a bond. What greater love, than to lay one’s life down for friends, as a buddy of mine once said.

And enemies?  Being human, I’ve had a few, despite my very best efforts.   I know what that feels like, and though I’ve done my darnedest to love them and forgive them, I don’t mistake them for friends.  But frenemies?  I don’t get that.  Why would you stay socially connected to someone who was actively and committedly cruel to you?  It just doesn’t process.   

Maybe it’s my XY chromosome.  I don’t know.

What I do know, though, is that it is far easier to inflict pain and damage on a soul if you really and truly know that soul.  When someone knows us, really knows us, and has been part of our lives long enough, there is in them the potential to cause pain far deeper than the person who simply hated us from the very beginning.

Those kinds of hurts, the ones that catch us in the vulnerability of our connection to another, those are the hardest to forget and overcome.  That’s true for us as individuals, and it grows even more deeply true for us as groups.   

Groups of human beings, our cliques and clans and tribes and parties and nations, are a natural part of our identity as social creatures.  We form up, we gather, and we begin to share a common identity and purpose.   And when someone who is part of that group starts challenging our understanding of ourselves, we recoil and resist.   Sometimes, that betrayal is just a betrayal.  That’s why we still remember the name Benedict Arnold as an epithet, even if the specifics of what he did back during the American Revolution are lost to us in the haze of our memories of third grade. 

That’s why the history books still mark the name Epialtes, from waaaay back in the year 480 BCE.   What, the name doesn’t ring a bell?   Ever see the movie 300, or better yet read the graphic novel by Frank Miller, arguably one of the most influential and gifted comic artists of our era?  Hmmm.  Without Epialtes legendary betrayal, the Persians would never have overcome the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae.   Two and a half millennia have passed, over sixty generations of human beings, and still, that name is there in our collective consciousness.  Or at least on Wikipedia.

When you act in ways that defy your standing within a group, when you tear at what some may have mistakenly determined is the heart of what unites you, folks don’t tend to appreciate it.

Which is why, in our two readings this morning from Luke, things turn so sour so fast for Jesus.   The story starts well enough, as the hometown boy returns following a successful tour of Capernaum.  Capernaum was a little fishing community on the shore of the sea of Galilee, with a population of around 1,500 souls.  Kfer Nahum, which is how you’d say it in the Hebrew of that era, just means “The Village of Nahum,” which was named after some guy named Nahum.  Putting that into the context of right here, this place would be Kfer Poole, and if you go down the road a ways, you get to Kfer Beale.   

So Jesus gets back from teaching and preaching in Nahumsville, and there’s buzz in the air.   He gets into the synagogue, and he reads from Isaiah 61, hitting those who have gathered with powerful words about the fulfillment of all of God’s promises for the people of Israel.  Those words, written as Israel was struggling to rebuilt itself after returning from captivity in Babylon, those words still resonated with the hopes Judaism had for itself.  We’re going to be healed!  We’re going to be set free!

Preach it, brother!

And then it all goes south.  After laying out those hopes, he challenges a fundamental assumption.  Those expecting him to perform in the same way as he did down in Nahumsville?  They were going to be disappointed.   He wasn’t there for that reason.

Instead, he challenges them, going after a fundamental assumption they had about themselves.   That quote from Isaiah?  It wasn’t just about them.  It had to do with the liberation of the entire world.

And because Jesus knew the history and tradition of his people, he reached back into the stories that they all knew to make that connection.   He tells the story of a time of great famine, when the prophet Elijah went and miraculously fed a widow in Zarephath, a widow who was not Jewish.  Then he tells a story of Naaman the Syrian, a powerful military leader afflicted with leprosy, who is healed by the prophet Elisha.

What these stories do is remind the people of Nazareth of something they’d rather not hear...that the fulfillment of God’s promise means more than just the fulfillment of their own hopes for themselves.  It does that, but it does much much more.   It means God will also work with those who are not them, who are not part of their story.   That wasn’t what they wanted to be hearing.

And so the response that comes when they are told this is anger, and not a little bit of anger, either.   How dare you betray our understanding of ourselves?  You, who should know better?  You who are a part of us?

Things get ugly then, as the group becomes a mob, and the mob tries to pitch him off a cliff.  Jesus slips away, somehow, although how you’d move like a ninja through an angry mob is beyond me.

That’s the story, at least as Luke tells it to us.  And that this recounting comes from Luke is not meaningless.  

Our two other synoptic Gospels also tell the story, but Mark and Matthew give us far less detail, and remember the event in a different way.  In Mark 6:1-6 and Matthew 13:53-58, the accounts are identical to one another.  Jesus comes to Nazareth, and teaches in the synagogue, although what he says is not remembered.  People remember he’s a hometown boy, and think this whole prophet thing just means he’s gotten too big for his britches.   Then, they’re just grumpy and offended.   That’s a slightly different spin than Luke offers.

Part of that may come from the remembering of Luke’s community.  Unlike Mark and Matthew, which were deeply embedded in the broader world of Judaism, Luke’s community was likely Greek-speaking, and comprised of either Hellenized Jews or Greek-speaking Gentile converts.   They weren’t part of the people of Israel, not in the same sense that the Nazarenes would have seen themselves.

They would have heard what Jesus was saying as an affirmation of their inclusion, just as surely as the angry Galileans in Nazareth would have heard it as a rejection of their special status with God.  Remembering that tradition was absolutely essential for them, and it may well have been why Luke goes out of his way to tell the story.

And that, more than anything, is the challenge that the Gospel lays at our own feet.  Because we as human beings are just as prone to letting our identities...how we understand ourselves from the community and the culture that we spring...get in the way of us seeing the depth of the transforming grace of our Creator.

Because culture defends itself.  Culture resists changes that might force it to deepen it’s identity.  So we resist those among us who challenge us to look at others differently, to find deeper graces, or to consider another way to live more deeply in harmony with one another.  Just as the people of Nazareth didn’t want to hear the difficult truth that their claim on God’s promise was not exclusive or unique, we find ways to close ourselves off from that still small voice which speaks to us from the deepest place in ourselves.

So remember, as you move in the world, that you will encounter those voices that call you to greater grace than you’d imagined possible, greater justice that you’d thought possible, and greater mercy than you’ve considered possible.  Those voices aren’t treasonous.  They’re transformative.

Don’t shout them down, don’t take offense, don’t take them out to the edge of the village and throw them off of a cliff. 

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

Until Now

Poolesville Presbyterian Church of Bethesda

01.20.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  John 2:1-11

How do you know when a new thing has begun?   How can you tell when a new phase of life has started?

Oh, there are moments when things seem to change, or places we go where things are supposed to be different.  Like yesterday, when I turned forty four, one of those birthdays that isn’t exactly an earth-shaking milestone.  Ten?  Yay!  Double digits!  Thirteen?  Yay! You’re a teen.  Eighteen?  Yay!  You’re an adult.  Twenty one?  Yay!  You’re going to need some ibuprofen.  But forty four?  It means you’re sort of but not quite in your mid forties.  If forty four was a car, forty four would be a rental Chevy Cobalt.  But there are marks and moments of real change, signs that let you know without a shadow of a doubt that the life you lived before is not the life you’re living now.

One such moment came for me while watching Mystery Science Theatre 3000.  That show, in the event you’ve not had the pleasure to encounter it, was a product of the 1990s.  The core concept behind MST3K is pretty basic.  

A hapless guy and his robot pals are trapped on an orbiting space station, where a group of diabolical scientists force them to watch the worst movies in the history of film-making.   And so the show involves you watching them as they watch terrible movies and make merciless fun of them.

It’s been a favorite in my household for years, as my boys have watched Mike and Joel and Crow T. Robot and Tom Servo...also a robot...make endless and hysterical wisecracks about whatever stupid thing it is they’re watching.  This, of course, trained my boys to make endless and hysterical wisecracks about whatever stupid thing it is I’m saying, which in retrospect might not have been the best parenting strategy.  

But before children, Rache and I would watch MST3K together in our apartment in the evening, every time it came on in that pre-DVR era.   It was just a part of our regular pattern of life.

And then, well, then we went to the hospital early one morning.   When we came back, we had with us a remarkably large baby.   We rode home in our green Saturn wagon, carseat firmly ensconced in the back, and the whole thing felt vaguely surreal.  We returned to that little apartment, and though it had been carefully prepared for that nine pound fifteen ounce bundle of Sam, it was hard to come home and feel things were different.  Here we were.  Here was our home.

For a while, it felt normal, just like every other day in our home.  We fed him, and changed him, and he went right to sleep in his bassinet.  We ate dinner.  We cleaned up after dinner.  We sat on our sofa.  And when we clicked on the Tee Vee, what was on but Mystery Science Theater 3000?   It was just as life had been before, we thought, as we settled in to watch the show.  As we settled back in to watch, it was almost like nothing had changed.

That lasted about five minutes.   That evening, that moment of MST3K, that was the mark and the sign that what had been our life was forever changed.

Of course, my wife might argue that the birth itself was probably more significant, but still.

Signs matter.  And one such moment of marking and definition comes from John’s Gospel today.   This should come as no surprise, because John’s Gospel is all about signs.  Each of the other three Gospels see the story of Jesus as a chronology, playing out the message of Jesus across time and space.  Mark and Luke and Matthew see things in pretty much the same way, which is why they’re called the “synoptic” Gospels.  They “see together.”

John approaches the message of Jesus differently.  The Gospel of John is divided up into two sections.  The second section runs from chapter thirteen through to the end of the book, and is known as the Book of Glory.  While this section includes the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection, it focuses on the intimate teachings of Jesus, teachings that describe his relationship with God, into which he invites us all.  It’s full of poetry and mystery.

The first section of John’s Gospel is called the Book of Signs.   It includes chapters one through twelve, and is defined by seven events in the life of Jesus.  These events are semeion, moments in the story of Jesus that are important not just because of what they are, but because they point to something deeper and greater than themselves.   Today’s reading includes the first of those signs, the changing of the water into wine at Cana.   The other signs in John include the 2) healing of a royal official’s child in John 4:46-54, 3) the healing of a paralytic in John 5:1-18, 4) the feeding of the 5000 in John 6:5-14, 5) Jesus walking on water in John 6:16-24, 6) healing the man born without sight in John 9:1-7, and finally the cycle concludes with 7) the raising of Lazarus from the dead in John 11:1-45.

I hope you got all of those down, because next week there may be a pop quiz.

What today’s story gives us on the surface is the story of a wedding, and of a mother, and of the beginning of a new phase in the life of Jesus.    The wedding is at Cana, about twenty klicks to the north of Nazareth.  We don’t hear whose.  What we do hear is that at some point during the festivities, they run out of wine.

Mary comes to Jesus, and tells him, simply, that they’ve run out.  The response of Jesus... “Woman, what concern is it to you and me?  My hour has not yet come,” might seem a little mouthy, even if you are the Messiah.  But she makes it clear that she isn’t telling him exactly what to do.  She’s simply informing him, and then opening the way for him to restore the celebration.

The story we then hear is a miraculous one, as Jesus takes what was at least one hundred and twenty gallons of water and turns it into one hundred and twenty gallons of exceptionally good wine.   John doesn’t tell us much about what happened to the party after that, but that’s probably for the best.

What John does tell us is that this event was a sign, something that indicated the importance of the message of Jesus.  The wedding at Cana is, first and foremost, a sign pointing to the change involved following the path taught and lived out by Jesus.   It’s not the fulfillment of that path, although it does evoke it.   The jars used for purification and the wine that would fill them remind us of the Eucharist, pointing us towards the change and transformation that all of us seek in Christ.

This story points us towards a reality that...as of it’s place in the story spoken by John...had not yet occurred.  It’s hour had not yet come.  But it was coming.  It would soon be there.

In our own lives, there are events and moments like that.  Keep your eyes open.  Stay aware of them.  And when you encounter them, let yourself be guided.

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

The Church With A Thousand Doors

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams 01.13.13

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 3:15-22; Acts 8:14-17

How many ways are there to get into this church?  It’s not a particularly hard question to answer, on the surface of it.  This old building is a sweet little historic brick breadbox, the doors out front giving the church the “mouth” on it’s face, with that Celtic cross as the nose, and those two windows to either side giving it a big set of eyes.  There’s just the one way in, right in and out of that mouth.  This is something we pay attention to during Christmas Eve candlelight services or if there’s a brigade of Confederate calvary massed outside.

The last church building I served in was different.  It a great faceless warehouse of a place, a bizarre mess of a structure that had apparently been designed to confuse and befuddle visitors, possibly by the same architect who designed that building in the first Ghostbusters movie.

But Lord have mercy, did it have doors.  The sanctuary was literally ringed with doors, doors at every corner, doors behind the pulpit, and one entire wall that was nothing but glass doors leading to the main entrance hall, perfect for sneaking in late or disappearing quietly when the sermon got too boring.  You could enter or leave it from pretty much any which way you chose.  The building itself was exactly the same.  There were doors absolutely everywhere.  There were thirteen different ways to enter and exit the building, something that may have had something to do with the unlucky feng shui of that peculiar structure.

Pretty much every room that had a connection to the outside had a door leading outside, something we tried in vain to explain to the County when they demanded an emergency exit plan.

“What will the preschool children do if there’s a fire,” they’d ask.  “Well, the teachers will open the door that’s in every single classroom, and out they’ll go, and then they’ll muster in the parking lot.”  But somehow that wasn’t enough.  It didn’t fit with the established protocols for departure.  Instead, there had to be a plan that involved lines.  Kids had to be lined up, and marched through those smoke filled burning hallways in an orderly fashion.

“What will the congregants do if there’s a fire,” they’d ask.  “Well, they’ll walk through one of the eight glass doors that lead outside,” we’d say.  But somehow, we needed to put illuminated “Exit” signs on one of those doors, even though it’s glow wasn’t visible by the light that would pour into the building through the doors even on the cloudiest of days.

Even though there were doors aplenty, and there were more ways in and out of that building than you could shake a stick at, somehow there was still only one right way to do it.  

The entryway to Christian faith has always been baptism, since even before the beginning.  It’s the way you begin your journey of participation in this fellowship.  It’s the point of access, the way we claim one another as part of this blessed journey.

Baptism itself predates Christian practice.  It’s rooted in the mikvah, an ancient Jewish practice of self-purification and cleansing that was used, you know, when women were, you know, um, how to put this, having that time of the month that male pastors get awkward about when trying to describe them from the pulpit.   Or something like that.

That practice...the desire to be ritually and personally clean so that you could be part of the sacred community...had spread and changed by the time of Jesus.  Baptism had become a way to symbolically mark the renewal of a commitment to the foundational covenant of Judaism.  With the temple now fundamentally corrupt, the people wanted some way to affirm that connection.

And so the ritual of baptism evolved into a way to recommit yourself to faith, symbolically representing the washing away of sin through the washing of the body.   In Christianity, that evolved into something different.  It became the gateway into the Way that Jesus taught, a sign that we have turned away from the way of life defined by sin and brokenness, and instead turned ourselves in joy to the good news and the new life it proclaims.

Of course, being human and all, we’ve turned that into something else, something we always seem to need.  It has, historically, become one of those things we feel obligated to argue about.  

Some Christians baptize both adults and infants.  It’s a way of saying that what matters most is God’s love for all of us, and that coming to understand the depth of our connection to God requires us to be in relationship with a caring, Spirit-led community.  When we baptize our little ones, that’s what we’re saying.

Some Christians baptize only those who make that decision on their own, as a way of honoring that moment when you realize you’ve made that choice to live a life governed by the love of God.  When Baptists and others baptize, they’re honoring that commitment.

Two good things, each springing from a yearning for God’s love, so of course we’ve felt the need to fight about it.  Oy. 

But what both of these are are entryways, that place where we cross the threshold into being part of community.  And what is most striking about the way we hear about baptism in the passage from Luke and the later passage in Acts today is the way that it is woven up with the presence and gift of the Spirit.   Luke and Acts are all parts of the same carefully woven story, and what they have to say about baptism is...well...strange.

The usually detail-oriented historian Luke gives us almost no details about the baptism of Jesus, blazing through the event with only the barest minimum of information.  Though it would become the way in which every Christian would enter into fellowship, most of what we hear is about the arrival of the Spirit.  Part of that is likely Luke’s desire to de-emphasize the baptism of John, which called Judeans to restore their relationship with their faith.  Instead, he wanted to focus more on the transformed life that Jesus brought, which was a much bigger door, one that included and valued that covenant but went beyond it.  That’s part of it.  But it’s probably not all.

As Luke continues on beyond the Gospel and into the story of the early church in Acts, we hear the strange balancing between being “baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus,” which is apparently the bit that involves the water, and the “baptism by the Holy Spirit,” which was something very different.   Luke rather pointedly does not tell us what that distinction means.  They’d been baptized...but they weren’t baptized.  They’d entered the church, but only sort of.

Perhaps that vagueness about baptism in Luke is there because where God’s Spirit does work in and through the church, it does so in ways that are always a bit difficult to nail down to a precise place or a precise moment.  How to you nail down fire?  Where does that start?  With water running down the sleeping face of a child?  Or with the love and care of the one that holds them?  Does that start with that moment the cool of the water runs down your face, or in that peculiar and ineffable moment when you decided to give church a try again?  The Spirit is at work in all of those moments, some subtle, some as vast and knee-buckling as the yawning sky. 

So the question remains, how many doors does a church have?  The answer to that question is that it has as many doors as it has faces.  It has as many doors as the Spirit gives connection.  The Spirit of God is God’s love, and we find it expressed in the gifts and potential in each of us.  Those doors are in the relationships we each have in the world around us, and in the ways we find to use our Spirit-given gifts within this fellowship.

This church, though it might seem only to have that one little entrance, has many.  In each of the ways we express ourselves into the world, there is a sign of welcome, a place of entry.

This worship?  Our music and and our singing together?  That’s a way in.  Our service the community, as we put hands and hearts into remaking homes through Rebuilding Together?  That’s a way in.  When we feed the hungry among us through WUMCO on the Lord’s Table?  That’s a way in.  When we take joy in teaching and guiding our kids, showing them how to live a grace filled, Gospel guided life?  That’s a way in.  

When we together learn and explore and deepen our faith?  When we try new things, like the Connection Cafe or the budding Community Garden, that’s a way in.  

There are as many doors to this church, as many opportunities for welcome, as there are joys and gifts among us.  What remains is for us to know that joy, to live that joy out, and to remind ourselves to invite others to share it.

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

High Resolution

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 01.06.12

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 2:1-12

Here we are, just under a week past the New Year, which is just under a week past Christmas.  And on Christmas, all around America, we unwrapped the latest and greatest bits of electronic gimcrackery.  Into our homes flowed screen after screen after screen, each brighter and shinier than the last.  Our old electronics, so shiny shiny and magicalicious just last year, are now consigned to the Island of Misfit Toys, also known as the garage.  Their now-useless cords and adapters and plugs now sit in bags in our closets like a growing ball of hibernating garter snakes.

And two days from now, just under a week past the New Year, just under a week past Christmas, the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show will start up in Las Vegas.   Two days from now, the industry that just sold you that screen will happily tell you that every last screen in your home is now obsolete.  Got a 1080p HDTV?  Thought your high-def iphone Retina Display was good enough?  Hah!  That’s old news, boring, stone-age.  According to the folks at Gizmodo and Engadget who tell us what we don't yet know we want, this year at CES, the big news may be the 4320p8KUHDTV.  This begs three questions.  First, what does that crazy mess of letters and numbers even mean, and second, if our eyes can’t even perceive the additional pixels, how will we know they’re not just PRETENDING to put them there, and third, how can we get one?

We’ve been at this game for a while, this endless march of pixels, of ever increasing refinement and resolution.  Yet we often feel more scattered, less refined, and less defined.  We feel more chaotic and indistinct.  It doesn’t focus us.  It doesn’t do anything.

Why not?  Well, wind back a few years, to a cutting edge electronic toy from thirty years ago, one I once bought with all of my Christmas and birthday money.  This was the Pixelvision PXL-2000, a digital video camera produced by Fisher Price.  This being the 1980s, it could record 11 minutes of video on a old-school audio tape.  Black and white video, it was, at a resolution of 120 by 98.  It’s blocky and chunky and indistinct, with thirty times less definition than the camera on your phone, and two hundred times less definition than the TV that may well dwell in your rec room.  You look at them, and sometimes it’s not even clear exactly what you’re seeing.  Your brain has to work to figure out exactly what it is you’re looking at.

And yet the resolution of those pixels means very little.  Those old grainy videos seem strangely more real than the hyperrealism of our televisions or the peculiar over-sharpness of that SuperduperExtra 3D version of the Hobbit that some of you may have shelled out four extra bucks per ticket to see.   They are real because they demand our focus and our attention.  They derive their definition from our minds and our imaginations, which are called upon to help shape them and bring them alive.

That’s also how we define ourselves, and guide ourselves towards our futures.  We’re at a point in the year, in these weeks after the new year, when many of us will have committed ourselves to something different in our lives.  Something in our physical well-being or our souls may need to change.  A relationship may need to be made or mended, bitterness in our hearts may need to be replaced by forgiveness and kindness.

We can see what that will look like, sort of, in our minds eye.  But the reality of it remains unclear.  We don’t know what it will feel like to be changed, to be that person in that place that now rests only in our hope and vision for ourselves.

As we chase that vision of ourselves, we find ourselves today encountering a story of chasing a vision, the old tale from Matthew’s Gospel of the wise men pursuing a star in the East.  

This is the story that the Western church historically has told every sixth of January, on the day we call Epiphany.  Yet every year as it arrives it feels like...well...didn’t we just do that?  Christmas is over, and suddenly here are the wise men arriving all over again, just as they did in countless pageants all over the country with their fake beards, surrounded by little shepherds surreptitiously hitting each other with their staffs and toddlers dressed like sheep.

But the story we tell ourselves most Christmases is a mashup, a blending of the different stories of two different Gospels.  Christmas is mostly drawn out of Luke’s Gospel for us, of angels on high and shepherds watching their flocks by night.   Why don’t we use Matthew on Christmas?  Well, because Matthew’s story of the birth of Jesus goes like this:  “...she gave birth to a son.  And he gave him the name Jesus.”  The events of the birth itself in Matthew occupy one half of one verse.   While that might make for a shorter Christmas Eve service, I’m not sure we’d find it quite as satisfying.

Matthew has other fish to fry, other priorities as a storyteller.  He was drawing from a totally different tradition than Luke, one that was rooted much more deeply in Jewish tradition.  Whenever Matthew tells us of Jesus, he always puts it into the context of the Hebrew Bible.   He makes a point in verse 4, for example, of remembering for us that the priests and the scribes Yet bizarrely enough, what we get out of Matthew in today’s text isn’t the arrival of a group of rabbis.  We get Persian sorcerers arriving from the east, a group of diviners and soothsayers and sorcerers.

Speaking of which, just how many magi does Matthew’s story tell us there are?  Oh, we know they brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and those are three things.  But that those are three presents does not necessarily mean each king brought one box.  Blowing a giant hole our Christmas pageant memories, Matthew doesn’t actually ever say there are three kings in the Bible.  That’s something that arose in later Christian tradition.  Sure, there could have been three.  But as far as the Bible is concerned,  there could have been two.  There could have been twelve.  This is something that we need to forget before we sing the last hymn, because “We Twelve Kings of Orient Are” would start dragging by the ninth verse.

So as we journey towards that best self that God has set before us in 2013, the journey of the magi has much to teach us.   What their seeking has to teach us takes many forms, and there are many lessons to learn from their journey from the East to that manger in Bethlehem.  It teaches us that our pursuit of the thing that will transform us will be harder than we think, and will be different than we think.

As we move forward on our own journeys, we  need to be willing to press on towards it, realizing as we do that it's not going to be the exact thing we thought it was.  If we've got a vision, and are moving towards that vision, we can become completely blinded by the thing we think it's supposed to be.  When the magi came Westward following yonder star, the first place they went was to Jerusalem.  If you're seeking a king over Israel, what better place to be than Jerusalem? That city is the seat of kings, the sacred city, the holy of holies, the city of David and Solomon and the temple.   

What they encountered in Jerusalem was not what they were seeking.  What they found there was the sort of power that masquerades as something strong and good, but was simply more of the same sort of corrupt and coercive darkness that had always devoured the hopes of the Jewish people.  The bright light of God’s promise that had guided them did not rest there.

They were going to have to move on, and they were going to have to keep their eyes open for something that they didn’t expect.  This is particularly true of any transformation that is formed and shaped by our faith.   And if we are to push past the expectation, and into the joyous reality of God-driven transformation, whatever we do needs to be shaped by that faith.

So here we are, just under a week past New Years, just a little past Christmas.  We’ve heard that story of vision and commitment, of the magi willing to pursue that vision.  Right now, that resolution may not be resolved.  The reality of that fulfilled commitment may be pixelated and dim right now.  Remember, as you move towards it, not to be distracted by your own certainty that you know the exact shape of what the future holds.  Be open to the guiding of what God has to offer you.

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

New Eyes

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

12.24.12;  Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lessons:  Luke 2:1-20; Isaiah 9:2-7

How we see things changes.  They don’t change, but our way of seeing them does.

Oh, I know we like to think they’ve changed, in the way that when we reach a certain age we notice that for some reason publishers seem to have started using smaller and smaller fonts, and everything we look at is for some reason printed in eight point Times New Blurry.   But that’s us changing, not the text.

And it isn’t just our eyes that change.  We do.  And that changes the way that we see.

Just the other day, I was wandering through an exhibit at one of the museums downtown, and I found myself standing in front of a painting.  It was a pop art painting by Roy Lichtenstein, a recreation of a comic book image blown up large.  And suddenly, I was feeling the strangest sense of deja vu, most because I had deja vue’d that exact object before.  I realized that I had stood before that exact same painting thirty one years ago and three thousand seven hundred miles away, as eleven-year-old me wandered with a small herd of other sixth graders through the National Gallery in London.  

Then, I remember encountering the painting and seeing it differently.  I saw the fighter jets in it, and my eleven-year-old boy brain flagged them as a F-86 Sabre and a MiG 15.  I thought, cool picture and I’d love to have it in our house, but c’mon.  Art?  It’s just a copy of a comic book picture.  I remember that.  That was me, thinking that, standing there in front of that image.

And there it was in front of me again, the same image, on the same scale, although I was a few inches taller.  But it was different, because I was seeing it through different eyes, ones connected to a soul that has thirty one years more life.  I saw how much painstaking work had gone into painting each of the dizzying field of tiny dots that mimicked the background color of a pulp comic.  I saw the sharpness and boldness of the brushstrokes, and felt the deep patience that would have guided the hand that created them.  It was exactly the same painting, but it was a different painting.

But I still thought, cool picture.  I’d love to have it in our house.

What we encounter in life changes how we experience things, and how we experience things changes, even as those things themselves remain the same.  So here we are on Christmas Eve, encountering something familiar, an old story of angels and Mary and shepherds keeping watch by night.  

As we retell Luke’s wonderful story of that birth, the essence of it remains familiar and unchanged through the years.  Year after year, we hear of a young family journeying to Bethlehem, of the humble birth in the lowliest of circumstances, of the vision and message that came to the shepherds in the hills, we remember the possibilities that were born into that manger.  That moment brought hopes that would have gone well beyond the hopes of Mary and Joseph and the hopes of the shepherds.

And when we retell that story, we retell it along with some older stories, echoing it out across some deeper memories that sing in harmony with it.   Over seven hundred years before this humble birth, the prophet Isaiah spoke to those hopes.  When Isaiah proclaimed, war raged.  The poor of the world were oppressed and struggling.  War and loss and sorrow were all around, and yet he looked out into that darkness he was able to declare that there was a great light, the light of the dawn of hope.

Seven hundred years later, in that manger, the need for hope was much the same.  And if you’ve looked around lately, it’s much the same two thousand and twelve years after that.

Still, the intensity of that hope lingers, and it’s the intensity of our hunger for a particular sort of newness.  We tire of that old story of a world full of hatred, that old story of hunger and weeping and failure and sorrow.   We have always been tired of it.

In the story we recounted tonight, in the firelight flickering over the manger, in the impossible softness of those first breaths, we proclaim that a new thing has happened.  In the life of that tiny infant, we see things differently.  We see the promise of a human being would would give themselves over fully to the cause of God’s love.  We see how that child will change and grow into adulthood.  And in that man, we see the promise of our Creator.  In that child that has been born for us, in that life given to us, we can see hope for justice, and hope for righteousness, and for peace without end.  We encounter that in him, no matter where we are in life.

And because we are always new, the story is always new.

And that changes how we see the world, because if we hear it and embrace it, it becomes a vital part of the change in each of us.  We become different people when we stand in relationship to it.  It shifts the arc of our lives.  

In that change, the change in each of our hearts, lies the hope of this night, and tomorrow, and all of our days.

Let that Christmas hope live in you.  See the world through its eyes.   Let it be a Merry Christmas, for you and for me, AMEN.

The Scattered Proud

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 12.23.12

Scripture Lesson: Luke 1:39-55

Pride goes before a fall, or so that old saying from the Book of Proverbs goes.  As memory serves me, this was the season in life, just about now, when I had learned that lesson best.   Because this is the season in life when many souls return from their freshman year at whatever college or university they’ve attended.  They return with minds brimming over with new knowledge, a few extra pounds from all those...um...protein shakes...they’ve been drinking on their formerly trim midsections, and four cubic yards of laundry.

In my case, that first return from College included coming back with a significant and much-needed dent in my eighteen year old male pride.  As I’d left high-school, I’d left convinced of two things.  First, that there was pretty much nothing I couldn’t do if I put my mind to it.  If I was doing badly in a class, that had nothing to do with the elegant, carefully wrought, and existentially meaningful poem I submitted.  Ok, sure, it was a math class.  That my math teacher returned it not with a grade but just with the words “You Idiot” written in large red letters was a sign that he had understood the underlying subtext of the poem’s articulation of the absurdity of being.  Had I actually studied, I would have nailed it.  I was sure of this.

Then, I encountered first semester Russian, eager to read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in the original language.   It was a blisteringly-paced class designed to identify naturally gifted linguists, CIA analysts, and potential foreign servants, and to weed out the weak and the slow-witted and pretentious eighteen year olds who wanted to read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in the original language.  No amount of study, no amount of effort, no amount of working with the TA, none of it seemed to make a difference.  I wanted to do well, I did, and I poured effort into it.   It mattered.  But it was as futile as trying to bang out a dent in your bumper with your forehead, and only slightly less painful.  I just couldn’t do it.

The second thing that I was sure of was that if I was actually good at something, and I knew it, I just couldn’t flail.  Philosophy, or so I thought, was where I excelled.  And in a class that the professor actually managed to call the “Meaning of Life,”  I was sure my inherent amazingness would carry me through.  And I did great in class discussions, and nailed every last one of the papers, and managed to come out of the class with a C...getting a “C” in the Meaning of Life, Lord, how that stings...because I’d forgotten to turn in the short writeups that were required prior to every class.  You don’t do the grunt work?  You don’t get the grade, no matter how brilliant you imagine yourself to be, Mr. Smarty Pants.

Pride is almost always like that.  It’s a strange thing, because in some ways it would seem to be good.  It’s good to have confidence in our abilities, and to know that there are some areas in life where we have been given gifts.  But pride does real damage, at least as much damage as uncertainty and anxiety and self doubt.   It messes with our lives.  It tears apart communities and cultures.  But why?

In today’s scripture, we hear a little bit about why.   We are told the story of two Judean women at a time of rejoicing in both of their lives.  One was six months pregnant, the other...well...she’d just had a strange encounter with an angel, and was also expecting.   It’s an intimate, vibrant, earthy passage, filled with poetry and song, which is why it might seem weird to find it in Luke’s Gospel.  Luke, after all, was the historian and the scholar, the one who begins his Gospel by telling his audience that what he was doing was producing an “orderly account,” after careful investigation and research.

But as you heard in the sermon last week, history in the ancient world was a very different thing.  It’s not a list, and it’s not data.  It was storytelling, deep and personal and rich with life.  And what Luke gives us is just that.  Mary goes to see her relative, finally pregnant, and it’s a moment full of promise and life.  It’s a familiar promise, too, one that has been part of the human experience for pretty much ever.  

On the sound of Mary’s voice, that growing child in Elizabeth’s womb does one of those tumble-kicks that my wife used to describe for me, as our boys practiced in-utero tae kwon do inside her.  It’s a feeling that I can only imagine.  It’s a feeling that is also deeply shared across humanity, a joy that all can feel, no matter who they are and where they are.

Mary and Elizabeth were certainly not in positions to feel powerful.  As women living in a rural area of Judah, they wouldn’t have been anyone.  Not anyone at all.  What would the source of their pride have been?  They would have had no wealth.  They would have had no right to study Torah, or to learn, or to study and debate the sacred alongside men.  They would not have had the right to access the temple, or to amass worldly wealth.

They were just two women, one six months pregnant, one only recently realizing that something wonderful was happening inside her.  But what we get from them is not a lament about how little they have, or words of sorrow about how oppressed they are.  

Instead, Elizabeth shouts out with joy, sharing a blessing with Mary.  And Mary then offers up her rejoicing, which Luke remembers for us in verses 46 through 55.  That passage is called the Magnificat.  Even though Mary’s just received a celebratory blessing from Elizabeth, the focus of the celebratory poetry we hear from Mary doesn’t show any signs of her ego being inflated by what she’s just heard.

I mean, seriously, here your relative has just called you the “mother of her Lord.”  If anything might go to your head, that would be it.

What the Magnificat from Mary celebrates is not herself, or even her role.  Instead, what we get from Mary is an affirmation of her position.  She is simply a servant, and a lowly one, at that.   What she rejoices in is not power, and not wealth, none of the things that stir human beings to feel they’re better one than the other.  She rejoices in the gift of life she has received from her Creator, and the promise of God’s setting-things-right for all of humanity.

The Magnificat reinforces a potent truth about the human encounter with the divine.  It takes apart the things that we think make us more significant or more important than any other creature.  Here a young no-one from nowhere bears within her the gift of the living promise of God.  

The Rich?  Sent away empty.  The powerful?  Cast down from their thrones.  And the proud?  Scattered.

Pride always does that.  It is a scattering, shattering thing.  It scatters us, one from another.   It rises in us when we view those gifts that we have been given as belonging to us, as something that makes us better than others.  Whatever gifts and skills we have only draw their value from how they deepen our connection to one another.  Whenever we view those things as ours alone, we close ourself off from the reality of how we connect to and care for one another.

Pride shatters us, because seeing only the image of ourselves that we’ve created, we can lose sight of the reality we inhabit.  We become lost in our own thoughts and our own story about how very perfect and right we are.  Then, well, reality does have a pesky tendency of catching up with us.  

If we allow ourselves to be closed off from real relationship to the reality around us, it doesn’t matter how skilled we are or how much potential we have.  Those gifts will do nothing, nothing besides causing us to look like fools.

That does not mean God wants us to hate ourselves, or to despise the life and the gifts all of us have been given.  Right here on the cusp of Christmas, we are reminded that we are all called to use the lives that God has given us in ways not guided by pride.  Though we aren’t much more than dust and ashes, God has placed within each of us the gift of God’s own love.   It’s that gift that we are called to share, fully and wholly, with the world around us. 

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