Poolesville Presbyterian Church
Rev. David Williams; 02.03.13
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.
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