The City That Kills

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 02.24.13

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 13:35-38

It’s hard living in a town with a bad reputation.  I’m not talking about Poolesville.  Y’all are cool, a nugget of creamy caramel small-town goodness wrapped in a crunchy exurban candy outer shell.  When people think of Poolesville, they think of great schools and quiet roads, of fields and horses and cows, the perfect place to raise a family.   But as much as I love this place, I don’t live here.  I’m a Washingtonian.

When I first came to live in Washington, I had no idea that it was the source of all the world’s problems.  In fact, I had no idea of anything at all.  On that January day in 1969, when I emerged squalling and crying into a delivery room at Sibley Hospital, the reputation of my hometown was the furthest thing from my mind.  I sort of knew that I was hungry, and that things were bright, and that those funny noises I’d been hearing in the darkness suddenly had sort arms and blurry faces.  That was about it.

When I arrived in the DC area for the second time, I was equally clueless.  It was the summer of 1975, and we were moving into our new house in Falls Church.  It was our new home, a humble little rambler, eight miles from the heart of the District of Columbia, conveniently located just inside the Beltway.  This being 1975, Falls Church was a pretty far-out suburb, the newly minted neighborhoods still surrounded by large stands of trees where I romped and wandered as a boy, back when we let our kids grow free-range instead of factory-farming them.

When it came time to settle down, to find a little place to raise my family, my wife and I searched and searched, putting in countless miles with our patient realtor.  When we finally found that nest, it was, amazingly enough, a little rambler, eight miles from the heart of the District of Columbia, conveniently located just inside the Beltway.  Really thinking outside the box, we were.

I was born inside the Beltway.  I met my wife inside the Beltway.  I’ve watched my boys grow inside the Beltway.  I’ve lived inside the Beltway my whole life long.  It’s a funny thing to say, because to many Americans, saying that is like saying “I’ve spent my whole life eating puppies.”  

Washington DC is the city America loves to hate.  It’s the city where the dreams of democracy go to die.  It’s the land of lobbyists, fat-cats and bureaucrats.  It’s out of touch.  It’s the problem, not the solution.  And so on, and so forth.

Having grown up in the DC Metro area, that strikes me as strange, for two primary reasons.  First, the DC suburbs look pretty much like the rest of America.  Our neighborhoods are little boxes, on a hillside, and they’re all made out of ticky tacky, and they all look just the same as every other community in America.  Life inside the Beltway can be hectic, and people are always working, but that’s pretty much how it is everywhere last time I checked.   Family life here is pretty much as it is everywhere else in the country.

The reason for that is reason number two.  Being a DC townie, born here, raised here, I’m a rare bird.  When I talk to most folks I meet?  Most aren’t from here.  Most adults who live in Washington are from somewhere else.  They’ve come from all corners of America, from every state and county, from sea to shining sea.  The people who live in Washington are America.  

So why do we as a nation hate my hometown so much?  It’s us, after all.   But maybe that’s it.  Maybe it’s the “us”-ness of it that’s the problem.

That was certainly a significant part of the problem the people of Israel had with Jerusalem, the problem that Jesus lays out in the pointed passage from Luke’s Gospel this morning.   At this point in Luke’s story of Jesus, we’re in the midst of a travelogue.  Like Matthew and Mark, Luke is spinning us a story of the teaching journey of Jesus, as he moves through Judah in a long march.  He passes through villages, he teaches in towns, each one a step bringing him closer to the city of Jerusalem.   He’s been healing, and working miracles, sure.  But mostly he’s teaching those he encounters about the Kingdom of God, through parables and stories and metaphor.  

He’s doing that in public, and he’s being taken into the homes of folks who are curious about this strange, challenging teacher.  As we read our way through chapter eleven, twelve, and the opening verses of chapter 13, Jesus engages in one fierce debate after another with the Pharisees.  The Pharisees were that group of Jews who took studying Scriptures seriously.  Like modern day rabbis or seminary students, discussion and debate were their bread and butter.

So even though we’re used to hearing Pharisees described as hypocrites and enemies of Jesus, it’s worth noting that this passage begins with a group of Pharisees arriving to warn Jesus of a threat against his life.   They’d heard that the powers that be...meaning the Roman puppet-king Herod...had an all points bulletin out on Jesus.   It’s a good reminder that one of the reasons we hear so much about Pharisees in the Gospels is that they were the ones who were actually talking and listening to Jesus.

Jesus responds to their concern by dissing Herod.  “Yeah, go tell him I’ll leave when I’m done.”  Not just “him,” but “that fox.”  “You’re a cunning, crafty predator,” suggests Jesus.  “You’re amazing at serving yourself to the chickens, but you can’t stop the trajectory of what I’m here to do.”  Jesus has a sense of the path he’s on, and he knows it leads to Jerusalem.  Having dismissed Herod, Jesus then offers a lament over the city that is his destination.  It’s peculiar mix of disdain and regret, of contempt and a sense of loss.

Jerusalem was the city that killed the prophets, and it had almost always been that city.  As a place, it was the concentrated and distilled essence of Israel’s power as a people.  The temple was the focus of the entire spiritual life of the people, but it went well beyond that.  Jerusalem was the focus of the military and economic power of the entire nation.  And power...be it military or economic...draws power to itself.   The Prophets have a pesky tendency to challenge power, and power tends to respond to that challenge by dropping a large rock on your head.

For generations, the people of the land had struggled with this.  On the one hand, they wanted the strength of a potent king.  They liked the trappings of power.  But they came to resent the disparity that comes when wealth flows one way, and largely to one place.  The people’s resentment stuck.  That resentment was there in the time of Isaiah, eight hundred years before Jesus.  It was there as Jerusalem fell to Babylon, five hundred years before Jesus.  And with the corruption of the Herodian dynasty, the love-hate relationship that Israel had with Jerusalem continued.  When Jesus laid into Jerusalem, the Pharisees and many around him would have nodded.

Yet the perspective Jesus has is that as much driven by a love for that city, and for the people it represents, as it is by any resentments.  Jerusalem signifies the people of Israel, their hopes, their aspirations, their failings, and their tendency to oppress one another.

Knowing how deeply in tension with that power he is, Jesus nonetheless articulates God’s intense desire to offer care and grace to his people.  Like a mother hen trying to take her chicks under her wings, says Jesus.  But that protection isn’t taken, as earnestly as it is offered.

That the shattering would come so soon after Jesus offered up this saying wouldn’t have escaped Luke.  Luke’s Gospel reached its final written form sometime in the latter portion of the first century.  That means that for both the author and the first readers of this text, Jerusalem had already been destroyed by Rome.  Four Roman legions, led by the future emperor Titus, had razed the city to the ground.  Anyone who heard these verses would have heard them with that destruction strong in their memories.

We who live in and around this peculiar modern Jerusalem may not be facing the advance of Canadian legions.   But that time of buffer between us and the economic hardship that has hammered the rest of this country seems to be coming to an end.  We've been making a killing, but that just can't last.  The same borrowing-and-debt-fueled false growth that failed the rest of America will fail here, too.

It’s going to be a hard run of it, these next few years.  I’ll freely admit I’m too much of a coward to put a “Thus Saith The Lord” behind that pronouncement.  Things might turn around suddenly.  I’m sure Congress will quickly and expediently come up with a solution, setting aside partisan differences to seek the economic well being of our nation.

Hey, it could happen.  It is within the realm of possibility, as is my being selected as the next Pope.  And then being named Pope Expelliarmus the First.  

It’s also possible that there’ll be a patch, a quick fix, but at some point, the garment we’re wearing becomes all patches, and it falls apart.  

What is most likely is that the very real impacts of the upcoming sequester will hit the hardest in my home town.  If hundreds of thousands of workers suddenly face twenty percent pay cuts, and a disproportionate number of those workers live in and around Washington, that’s going to have a significant effect.

That’ll impact families, and churches, and the broader community.  The splash-effect is not going to be small, as that loss of income plays out into the service and retail industries of this area.

In what may be a time of challenge, what we can take away from this is twofold.

First, just turning to the redoubt of partisan zealotry is not going to help us get through this one.  It didn’t turn out so well in the first century for Jerusalem, and it is highly unlikely that it’s going to do much good for us now.

Second, craftiness and cunning will fail us.  They always do.  We can try to come up with foxy fixes or convoluted accounting structures, but that’s what brought us here in the first place.  We need, as a city and as a nation, to be more grounded in the reality of the creation in which we find ourselves.

Third, God’s desire remains to care for us, and to care for each other.  That love goes as deep as a mother’s heart, and remains the real heart of our strength no matter how hard times get.

Remembering these things, we can make it through the time ahead.  Remembering to embrace the grace and compassion God offers us, and to share it with one another no matter what comes.

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

The Interpreter

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 02.17.13

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 4:1-13

We all live things just a little bit differently.    Two human beings can see the same thing, experience the same moment, and yet leave that encounter with totally different memories of the event.

Like, say, this week, when my wife and I celebrated Valentine’s Day.   I was in charge of figuring out what to do, and so my working concept was a replication of our first date.  That date involved going to a Vietnamese restaurant for dinner and then to the Multiplex in Merrifield for a movie.   But as I’m part-time and she’s looking for work, dinner turned into lunch...which is seriously cheaper.  Plus, it’s easier to get a table.  

And the Vietnamese place went out of business 15 years ago, we went to another Vietnamese restaurant, the nicest one of the dozens nearby.  Hey, I love Poolesville, but there are advantages to Annandale.   And the Multiplex that they tore down the old drive-in to build was itself torn down, and replaced by a swanky prefab Insta-City they’re calling “The Meridian District.”  Fortunately, there’s a theater there, the kind of theater that doesn't just serve popcorn, but mixes in nuts and bits of chocolate drizzled with fudge and caramel.  That, and you can get a beer.  I like that kind of theater.  When I looked,  that theater was still showing Les Mis.  

We’d not seen it, and although going to see a movie whose title means “The Miserable Ones” might seem a bit weird for Valentine’s Day, I’d heard good things from friends who share my taste.  

It was great.  Not perfect, but great.  The musical itself is more an opera, and really only has one memorable song, you know, that “I Dreamed a Dream” one Susan Boyle sang and that the impossibly perfect Anne Hathaway now owns.  But the performances were authentic and moving, so much so that by the end the coughing, snorting, and sniffling from the cold-season audience around us had been replaced by unrestrained sobbing.  

I’m a hard target that way, being a man and all.  Movies that try to manipulate me just cheese me off.  But this movie pressed all my buttons.  Here, a major release film,  and it's the most Christian film I've seen in years.  One act of mercy, done by a priest in the name of Jesus, and it changes the whole arc of the story?  Astounding.  And Victor Hugo’s great motifs of law and mercy, embodied by the relentless inquisitor Javert and the transformed, mercy-filled Jean Valjean?  The wrenching story of human suffering and redemption?   They had me and the missus sitting there with tears streaming down both of our faces.  Let it be said:  going to a good weepy movie makes for an excellent, excellent date.

Afterwards, I went to rottentomatoes.com, a movie review aggregator site, to check out their reviews.   Some reviewers loved it.  Some reviewers saw the flaws, but enjoyed it.  Others simply hated the movie.  What felt to me to be genuine and moving was to them forced and manipulative.  Russell Crowe’s on pitch, perfectly decent buttery baritone, which would make an excellent addition to any church choir, was panned.  The moving, intimate closeup shots of the principals as they sang, showing every pore and flaw of their humanity, well, those were distractingly stylized.   And the two hour and thirty seven minute run time, which may have tested my bladder but not my patience?  “I screamed a scream as time went by,” snarked the New Yorker reviewer. 

Human beings are that way.  We can encounter precisely the same thing, that same objective reality, and bear away totally different reactions.  It would be easy for me to say that the only reason they didn’t weep like a baby that movie was because they were bitter, cold empty-souled cynics.  But although I might like “Did you cry at Les Mis” to be one of those questions St. Peter has on his entry protocol checklist, I know we each encounter things differently.  So we’re cool, you heartless monster you.

That doesn’t mean, however, that every interpretation is equally accurate, and equally life-giving.  How we interpret something, how our desires shape and spin and shift it, that isn’t irrelevant.  Our interpretations and opinions give form to our relationship with creation.  They become part of it.  And just as they can heal and redeem and bind up, they can also break and shatter and drive the world into deeper unhappiness.

Like, say, the way scripture is interpreted today in scripture.  It’s the story of the temptation of Jesus, of his trial and challenge in the wilderness.  This story occurs in both Luke’s Gospel and Matthew’s story of Jesus.  It’s not in Mark, of course.  Mark doesn’t bother with details he views as irrelevant, so he gives us just one terse sentence: “Wilderness.  Forty Days.  Tempted by Satan.  Wild Beasts.  Move along.”

But Matthew and Luke share it in every detail.  What that tells us is that this story likely comes from what is called the “Q” source.  “Q,” which comes from the word “source” in German, is an ancient collection of sayings and stories about Jesus to which Matthew and Luke both had access. 

Q’s story of the temptation is three distinct vignettes, three little stories within a story.   Matthew and Luke tell them in slightly different order, but each has Jesus facing the Accuser, who tempts him three ways.  

In the first of the three stories, Jesus is tempted with his own power.  “You’re hungry.  Use your gifts for yourself,” comes the whisper.  But Jesus responds with a word of scripture from Torah, with Deuteronomy 8:3, which declares that our relationship with God is more important than anything else.  He refuses to be taken in.  In the second of the two stories, Jesus is tempted with political power, with control over all of the world.  “It’ll all be yours, if you just worship my power.”   Again, Jesus responds with a passage from Torah, from Deuteronomy 6:13.  And again, he affirms that his relationship with God is central, vital, and unshakeable.

The last of the stories in Luke has Jesus up on the highest point of the temple.  This was likely not a tower, which is how I’ve always visualized it.  Instead, it was likely a point on one of the outer walls, the southeast corner, which stood the furthest from the valley floor below.

The whispered suggestions to Jesus here are notable, because they’re not just Ol’ Scratch offering power.  “You say you trust in God above all else,” comes the sly suggestion.  “Then jump.  Surely God will protect you from harm.”  And then, well, then comes the kicker.  Twice Jesus has refuted the temptation with scripture.  And what we get with this third vignette is Jesus confronted with scripture.  Not just one verse, but two, both from the 91st Psalm.  “Angels will protect you,” he hears.  “They’ll bear you up.”

Jesus responds with a single verse, again from Deuteronomy 6.  “Don’t put God to the test.”  But what this final exchange illuminates is the way in which our perspective can change and redirect our encounter with almost anything, up to and including our encounter with the texts of scripture.  If we so choose, we can make almost any text about us, and about furthering our agenda.

So here we have competing interpretations of the Bible, and the Devil’s got twice the scripture that Jesus has.  Are we to listen to both interpretations, and to assume both are equally valid?  Or maybe we should listen to the Man of Wealth and Taste, because he’s got two verses of scripture to prove his point, and Jesus only has one.  

Hardly.   Where Jesus approaches scripture as a relationship, El Diablo approaches it as data to support his agenda.  Jesus lays open the likelihood for one future, and Beelzebub establishes another path.  One focuses, and another distracts.   One scatters and breaks and brings to ruin, another builds and deepens and strengthens.

As we approach and interpret the experiences that shape and form the foundations of our lives, these competing approaches to interpreting scripture give us a model for understanding the foundation of constructive interpretation.

In his recent book “The Signal and the Noise,” statistician Nate Silver describes the human tendency to interpret based on our biases and our preconceived understandings.  Silver made his name by coming up with complicated models that uncannily predicted both the 2008 and 2012 elections, models which more importantly also worked for baseball.  Silver’s book is based on an interesting premise.  We human beings don’t allow ourselves to see where a path is taking us, because we don’t want to focus on what is truly most important.  That truly important thing, the truth that underlies what we are doing, that’s what Silver calls “The Signal.”   

The other things, the distractions and the mess and the meaningless chaos, those things are just noise.  When we allow our interpretation of reality and the direction of our existence to be defined by the noise, we lose our way.  We find ourselves going down dead end after dead end.  We find ourselves in one broken place after another, as what we tell ourselves about reality becomes further and further from the reality in which God has placed us.  That comes when we follow the “Noise.”

What Jesus shows us, in his rebuttal to the Accuser, is that he is unerring, completely, totally focused on the Signal.  He gets what is important, and nothing will distract him from it.  He sees things both as they are and as they most likely will be.  And in Creation, this place where God has put us together?  Power is noise.  Greed is noise.  Selfishness is noise.

In this first Sunday in Lent, as we enter our own forty days of wilderness preparation, there’s plenty of noise out there.  There are plenty of temptations, old patterns of being and brokenness that rise out of the chaos.   There are plenty of hardened hatreds and closed-heartednessess that can turn us from mercy and grace.  Those can keep us from seeing the real, just as surely as the justice-obsessed Javert couldn’t see the reality of Jean Valjean’s kindness.

Let your interpretations be governed by the same relationship to the deepest truth that guided Jesus.

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

Shiny People

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 02.10.13

Scripture Lesson:  Exodus 34:29-35

Our world is filled with shiny people.  Or rather, it’s filled with images of people who are shinier and sparklier than the rest of us.  We know these folks, or we think we do.  They are the names and the faces that come pouring out at us from magazines and websites, whose lives are the carefully managed constructions of their agents and their PR firms.

These shiny people are part of our community.  They are the A-listers, the names that we all know, or that we’re all supposed to know.  They beam out at us from the magazines in the checkout lines at the grocery store.  They’re right there on the primary home-page of the news sites we frequent.  They are just people we know, because they’re part of the relentless bombardment of media inputs in our lives.  For some reason, information about their lives is part of who we are.  

Like, say, all that information about Taylor Swift’s dating life.  I mean, Jake Gyllenhaal?  Really?  After his relationship history?  Are you trippin’?   Donnie Darko was a great movie, but girl, you were two when that came out.

I ask myself, why in the name of the Sweet Lord Jesus do I know this?  What possible reason is there for me to know this?  And no, The Theology of Celebrity 922 was not part of my doctoral program.   I know this because they are lit up by the light of our mass attention.  They are the shiny people.

I find myself wondering, sometimes, if the bombardment of the names and faces of shiny people crowds out our ability to have a deep and genuine network of friends.  There’s a thing called Dunbar’s number, named after British anthropologist Robin Dunbar.  Dunbar’s number measures the number of human beings we seem able to keep in our network of actual relationships.   Throughout human history, that number appears to be roughly 150 souls.  We understand how they relate to one another.  We know their life stories, their backgrounds, what they’ve done and how they’ve done.  They are truly part of our social selves.

Get higher than that number, and we start losing the ability to keep track.  Oh, we might know a name or vaguely recognize a face.  But as that count of Facebook friends gets into the mid-two-thousands, the truth is that these are no longer people we know.   They are data, not relationships.   And perhaps, as more and more of the precious neurons we use to understand the web of interconnection we inhabit are consumed by media information about the glitterati, we start losing our ability to really be in relationship.  

Worse yet, we find ourselves wanting to be one of those shiny people.  We approach our relationships and our place in the world as if we are our own publicists, marketing ourselves, pitching ourselves through our posts and tweets and pins and updates and comments.  Our world becomes a blinding lens flare blur of all of our competing shine, and we can become so blinded by it that we see no-one.

This is not what we experience today in an old, strange Exodus story about Moses.   We’re deep into the tale of the flight of the people of Israel from Egypt.   They’re out of slavery, and have escaped from Pharoah’s armies across the Sea.  Into the wilderness they’ve gone, eating manna and quail, fighting off attackers, and complaining constantly, until they finally arrive at Mount Sinai.   That’s the story, more or less, of the first eighteen chapters of the book of Exodus.

When we get to the 19th chapter, the whole flow of the story changes.  Now, it’s about the receiving of God’s instructions on how to live in the land of the promise.  Moses heads up onto Mount Sinai, where he encounters his Maker.  The Ten Commandments are received, which is fascinating and relevant to our moral lives today.  We get six chapters about the schematics of the tabernacle and what priests are supposed to wear, which is a whole bunch less fascinating and relevant.   Did you know that worship leaders are supposed to add golden bells and pomegranates to their outfits, so that they make a tinkling sound as they walk?  It’s right there in Exodus 28.    A bit of flair never hurt, I suppose, but you are not ever going to get me to wear that.

By the time we’ve gotten to chapter 34, though, we encounter Moses as he returns with version two point oh of the ten commandments, as he’d gotten cheesed off with the Israelites and smashed the first set.

The reason for that smashing was simple.  The people of Israel had gotten bored and restless, waiting around for Moses to return from the mountain.  And so they had asked Aaron, the brother of Moses, to make them something.  Make us a god, they said.  Make us something that is golden and shiny and beautiful, so that we might worship it.

So Aaron did what the people asked, and made a golden calf, and then everyone had a dance party.   Moses, encountering this, got so mad that he smashed the tablets, and there was smiting, and finally chapter 34 gives us a do-over.

That chance for restoring the real connection between God and God’s people comes as a result of the relationship that Moses has with his Maker.  It’s an unmediated relationship, and that means nothing stands in between them.  In Exodus 33:11, we hear that God “...used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend.”

That connection sustains as he goes back up onto the mountain, and upon his return, he doesn’t just bring back another set of tablets.  He comes back changed.  What we hear is that he was “shining,” although the Hebrew word used is a strange one.  It seems to imply a shaft of light, or more literally, a “horn of light.”   It’s so bizarre and confusing to the people around him that he ends up covering his face with a veil...or something like it.  The Hebrew word used for “veil” only occurs one place in Torah...and that’s in this verse.

The exchange with God, direct and unmediated, has left him visibly and notably different.  He shines, but not in the way that light plays of a golden object.  That, people knew.  That form of brightness, they were comfortable with. 

They encountered something entirely different instead.

What we’re left with, in this image of Moses shining with the unsettling presence of God, is a question about what sort of radiance it is that we seek.  Are we primarily about the sparkle and radiance that our culture instills in us?  Fame and the cold golden shine of wealth and power are all about us, and it’s deeply tempting to surrender to the cold emptiness of that path.  

It’s also the danger that comes from relying too deeply on social media for our connections.  There, we are not “face to face,” as were God and Moses.  We are what we choose to put forward, and can make ourselves glitter as brightly as Edward from Twilight being dropped into the sun.

That’s a pretty image, actually.  But it’s not a real one.

If we’re going to be in authentic relationships, not relationships based on our need to impress others, we’ve got to be willing to do a couple of things.

The first is that we’ve got to be willing to develop that relationship with our Creator, because it...more than anything else...is what changes us.  Standing in relationship with God brings about transformation in ways that no other relationship can.  It puts us outside of the familiar expectations and biases of our culture.  It takes us out of the dysfunctions our immediate relationships, which can become their own self-perpetuating  mess.  

This is hard for us, particularly the extroverts.  Extroverts live in the world of relation around them, drawing energy from the social and the interpersonal.  That makes you connected, but it sometimes means you bring into yourself the worst spirit of the group in which you find yourself.

The relationship with God calls us to be our best self, the self that rests in the knowledge of God.  That best self?  Well, if you’ve known people who seem to be there, you know they’re a little radiant.  They’re full of God, not full of themselves, and that makes them a little bright, filled with compassion and gentleness, so much so that it can seem a little intimidating at times. 

The second is that we’re to be sure that we’re developing and attending to face to face opportunities, which offer the possibility of transformation.  This is hard for some of us, particularly the introverts.   Being around others can be draining, intimidating, and exhausting.   We’d rather stay in ourselves, silent and quiet and comfortable.  

But when we do this, we leave ourselves open to not being in relationship with others.  We close ourselves off, and that lets us develop our own places of devouring darkness.  Angers and resentments and self-hate can snuff out whatever joy we might have to offer the world, and we can easily disappear down that dismal rabbit hole.  

And we are not called to darkness, either inward or outward.

We are all called to be that brightness, to stand in our relationships with God and neighbor so that our light is unmistakable, a bright and present challenge to the lostness in the world around us.

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

The Fundamental

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 02.03.13

Scripture Lesson:  1 Corinthians 13

It’s cold again!  Dagflabbit, why is it cold again?   Just a few days ago, you could walk around in shorts and a short sleeved shirt.  And now?  Snow?  Wasn’t it just seventy degrees?  I liked the warm better.  The warm was nice.

So on this cold morning, I want to take you to a memory, an old one of mine, from long ago.  Lets stir the pensieve a bit, and draw it out like Dumbledore.  It’s a warm memory, a summer memory, of a golden-sandy beach on a perfect day in early August.  That day was not too hot but just hot enough, with the sun fat and yellow in the blue noonday sky.  Let’s call it an azure sky.  Oh, but that’s a nice color.

I was rail thin, so you know this isn’t a recent memory.  I was a little boy, maybe seven, maybe eight, and looking out at the Atlantic from the coastline of Fire Island.  Fire Island was where we summered at the beach, a little spit of a barrier island that stretches across the Great South Bay, thirty miles long and two blocks wide, just a few miles from Long Island.  And the day was hot, and the water was cool, and the surf was rolling, big breaking waves perfect for leaping and diving and play.

Into those waves I went, further and further out, ducking them, diving into them, fearless with that perfect second-grader fearlessness that stems from having absolutely no idea about the reality of the ocean’s power.   But the Atlantic doesn’t permit that kind of ignorance to last for long, and she’s a very strict teacher.

She waited until that moment I wasn’t paying attention, when I’d gotten in just a bit too deep.  And then she pulled me out with an outgoing wash, right into the path of a great crashing maelstrom of a wave.  And then my world became a whirl of sand and water, tumbling and tumbling, feet unable to find ground, my mind unable to figure out what was up and what was down.  For a moment I did, kicking wildly, and I surfaced, and tried to take a breath, but she walloped me again with a bigger wave.

This one knocked me shoreward, head over heels, and after what seemed like five rolling stretches of breathless forever, my feet found sand beneath them.  That was a good feeling.  It was a memorable feeling, to have found my footing.  I stumbled, coughing, towards the shore.  I understood the ocean a little better, and the need to respect her power a little more.  I also understood the importance of having real and solid ground under your feet.  

Last week, I talked about something I still just don’t quite understand.  The word “Frenemy,” I think it was.   But that got me looking through the List of Words I Don’t Understand that Begin with F, and that brought me to a term that really does confuse me.

That word is “fundamentalism.”  I’ve never quite figured out why that word means what it means.   The word “fundamental” would seem to be its root, and we know what that means.  If something is fundamental, it tends to be an important thing.  It’s the most basic foundation on which we stand.  It’s the source and the ground of a thing.  It’s the most vital, innate, and important way you can look at something.

Knowing what that is is an important thing. It tells you why you do a thing, why you live a certain way.   If you’re connected with what that is, then life makes sense, and things feel more secure.  It is the ground under your feet.  It is the air filling your lungs.  It your strength against the rolling chaos around you.

Fundamentalism tries to do that.  Historically, that word rises out of a Christian movement in the late 19th and early 20th century.  It was a time when faith was struggling to adapt to new findings about the history and process by which the Bible had come into being, and to find its place in a world increasingly governed by scientific understandings of the nature of humanity and the cosmos.  The world felt suddenly chaotic, and the certainty of faith seemed shaken and challenged.

Fundamentalism gets its name from a series of essays, all of which were written by conservative Christians between 1900 and 1915.  Those essays, called...surprisingly enough, “The Fundamentals”... tried to lay out an understanding of Christianity that would bring clarity and certainty to faith.  They pitched out a series of doctrines and dogmas that they viewed as absolutes, things like substitutionary atonement and the virgin birth.  And Lord, were there a bunch of those essays.  There were ninety in total, across twelve volumes, making for a stack of theology thousands of pages and several feet hight.  What they ended up boiling  down to, across the movement, was that the Bible was inerrant in all things, and that it was literally true.  That was "fundamental."

But what I’ve never quite understood is how that relates to what the Bible itself says is fundamental.   When the Apostle Paul was faced with a community full of confusion and misunderstanding, one that just couldn’t quite seem to grasp what was most essential and tended towards squabbling and fighting and carrying on, that’s not where he went.

Where he went was the soaring hymn to love we heard today, one that’s familiar from just about any wedding you’ve ever attended.

Paul has just finished up a conversation about the varying different gifts and abilities given to all of us by the Spirit of God.  He’s speaking that to a community that had a whole bunch of trouble figuring out what was important.  That’s not to say they didn’t talk about what they viewed as most significant.  There was apparently a great deal of conversation amongst the Corinthians about who was the bearer of the best truth, the greatest gifts, the deepest blessings.

It was a relentlessly divisive, compulsively competitive church.  Paul’s struggles with the mess that was the church at Corinth were nearly constant. Corinth was a trading hub in the Roman Empire, and was legendary for its dog-eat-dog, do anything to get ahead, I’m-gonna-get-me-mine mentality. Proving yourself a winner and back-stabbing your way up the ladder of prosperity was just expected. It’s what Corinthians did, to the point that Roman historians and social commentators at the time invariably mention what a heartless, money-grubbing, uncharitable, and self-absorbed city Corinth was.

Within the church, the question of what was most important was couched in terms of who was right and who was wrong, who had the deepest spirituality.  They took the gifts and blessings that they’d been given, and chose to make them a source of conflict and chaos.   So in response to that mess-making, what Paul offered up to them was to lay out what he viewed as the most essential and foundational characteristic of any Christian.

In doing so, he doesn’t pitch out dogma, or a set of rules.  He doesn’t prescribe a checklist.  Instead, he gives them a song, a hymn that sings the praises of what he views as the single highest value and purpose of all life.  “And I will show you a still more excellent way,” says the New Revised Standard Version.  “And now I will show you the most excellent way,” says the New International Version.

The New Revised Standard doesn’t quite catch the meaning of Paul’s language, to my ears.  The word for “excellent” he uses is the Greek word huperbolen.  And although I realize many of y’all are looking forward to the game tonight, that has nothing to do with “Superbowlin’”. Really.  Sounds like it, but it’s a totally different word.   

Instead, it’s where we get the word “hyperbole,” meaning something so astoundingly great that it seems impossible.  Hyperbole, you know, like “That warm Nutella and dark chocolate brownie with that little sprinkle of sea salt made my entire mouth explode.”  That’s how good this way is.  Better, even.

That way is the path of God’s love, the primary, essential, and most foundational gift of our Creator.  Paul makes it radiantly and unmistakably clear: this love is the defining feature of any authentic Christian faith.

And that’s what has always confused me so much about fundamentalism, because the Bible is radiantly clear about what our foundation must be.  If you listen to what it is the Bible asks us to actually do, it’s impossible to miss.  OK, not impossible.  People miss it all the time.  But it’s Jesus casts it in the form of the Great Commandment, the essence of all of the teachings of Torah.  Paul tells both the Corinthians and us what that most excellent way is.

What is most striking about this Way, this hyperbolically good thing, is that it is remarkably and perfectly practical.  It has to do with right now, in our every interaction and our every relationship.  It’s not esoteric, some carefully concocted construction of glassy-eyed overthinking Presbyterian theologians who really need to get out more.

As Paul describes it, he etches it into the real.  He describes the reality of his own community, of his own calling and gifts, and how none of them would matter without love.  He describes the reality of a love lived out fully, of patience, of forgiveness, of strength. Real things, all of them, part of the world we encounter every day, if we open our eyes to God’s working.

This is what is fundamental, what is most profoundly essential.  

In the midst of the chaos and craziness of life, in the face of all of the changes that tumble us and roll us, this is what we are offered as the single defining ground of life.

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