Poolesville Presbyterian Church
Rev. David Williams; 02.24.13
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.
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