The Border

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 04.21.13

Scripture Lesson:  John 10:22-30

Where are our borders?

I’m not talking here about the boundaries of the United States of America, like our fiercely defended border with those dangerous socialists to the North.   Oh the People’s Republic of Canada seem mellow and easygoing, with their bilingual signs and their flannel and their “army.”   But one of these days, if we do not stay alert, we will awake one morning to find all of our road signs in kilometers, and our grocery store shelves stocked with liters of milk.  Such is the face of tyranny.  

Constant Vigilance.

I’m talking about our borders, our boundaries as living beings, the edges of ourselves.  What is it that is us, and what is it that is outside of us?  Where does the “I” that I am begin?   There’d seem to be an easy answer to that one. 

The boundaries of the self are the boundaries of our bodies, we might say.  Fingers and toes, flesh and bone, this is where we begin and end.  And that might be so.  

But when my older son was a toddler, we would go for walks in the neighborhood with his little brother safely ensconced in our vast, buslike double stroller.  He would run out ahead, tearing down a hill with the wild abandon of tiny obliviousness.  When he fell...as he often did...my bones would ache with the fall, as if I myself had fallen.

So maybe not.

Or perhaps it is our knowledge, the memories and the thoughts that are the tendons and sinews of our minds.  Or that indefinable thing we call our souls, that peculiar light behind our eyes.

And yet every single element of us comes from something else.  The proteins and minerals and ever-gathering fatty deposits that comprise us are drawn from the world around us.   Those thoughts in our minds?  Most of them come not from us, but from outside of us, from our teachers and our friends and family, from our observations of the world.  Even the language we use to frame our thoughts is not ours.

And this experience you are having now, right now?  Is this “me” you are encountering?  Is my voice in your ears me?   My vocal cords are vibrating the oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere of our tiny blue-green world, which is vibrating a complex set of structures in your inner ear, which is sending signals to your brain.

And the words we share, which let you understand what I am saying, is that part of me, or is that part of you?  We are distinct, but we are also deeply and fundamentally interconnected and interdependent.  We are all woven together into God’s astoundingly complex creation.

When we forget that, it is a terrible thing.

On Friday night, at the very same moment that SWAT teams descended on a neighborhood in Boston, I was scanning through a Twitter account.  It was @J_tsar, the account of the same the young man who lay bleeding in a boat in a Boston homeowner’s back yard.  Here, spoken into that cybernetic mediating space between us, were the thoughts of a man who had paralyzed a city, who had killed three and maimed hundreds.  

Reading Dzhokar Tsarnaev’s tweets was frightening, because it was not the raving of a madman.  He doesn’t talk about hatred, or ramble on about vast conspiracies or about how the CIA has planted a transmitter in his brain.

It was disturbingly, horribly normal.   He banters with friends.  He complains about studying.  He passes along humorous tweets and links.  He gets into a conversation about Game of Thrones.

Yet somewhere underneath that veneer of normalcy, something had horribly broken.  There was no change in tone, none at all, the day after the bombs he and his brother planted tore the flesh of hundreds.  It was an act he did as casually as a malicious child might pull the legs off of an insect.

How can human beings be so closed to how we are woven up together, so oblivious to the effect we have on one another?   And yet we are.  We do not see, or feel.  We do not get it.

Those around Jesus didn’t get it, either.  As John’s Gospel tells it, they had pretty much no idea what he was talking about.   The fourth Gospel is something of a paradox.  It is both the simplest and most straightforward story of Jesus, and the most theologically challenging.

It’s simple because the language used is remarkably basic, the kind of Greek that students of Greek are grateful to be reading.   But it is also remarkably complicated, because that language is used to cast a narrative of Jesus that wends and winds its way through some of the most difficult spiritual and theological concepts in all of the Bible.   

It’s like reading a paper on quantum waveform collapse written by Dr. Seuss.  

As is often the case with John, it’s also both abstract and strangely concrete.  John’s Gospel excels at offering up some specifics to place us in the scene.   We get a few little telling details about time and place.  When was it?  It’s winter, we hear, but not just that.    We narrow the window down.  We know that it’s a festival, the “Festival of Dedication.”  What was the Festival of Dedication?  That’s another way of saying it was Hanukkah, which at that point was a relatively recent celebration.

Jesus is in the temple, we hear, but again there is more detail to place us in the scene.  He is in the “Portico of Solomon.”   That was along the Eastern Wall inside the temple, but that doesn’t help the ninety-nine point-five percent of us who don’t have a clue what a Portico even is.  Having looked it up this week, I can share with you that it’s like a long covered walkway, with a roof supported by columns.

People are walking with him, and they ask him to clear up whether or not he is the Meschiach, the anointed one, the promised king of Israel.   “How long will you keep us in suspense,” goes the New Revised Standard Version, but what they say, translated literally, would be “Until when will you hold our souls?”  That was an idiom, or a saying of the day, and it most closely means: “When will you stop annoying us?”  It meant that they found what Jesus was saying tantalizing, teasing, frustrating, and maddening.

Jesus replies very simply, but perhaps in ways that didn’t clear things up much for his listeners.  It was back to talk about sheep, and eternal life, and that strange way that Jesus had of talking about himself and the God he called Father.

What is strangest and most challenging about the way Jesus describes his relationship with God the Father is that he seems to intentionally and repeatedly blur the distinction between himself, His creator, the Holy Spirit, and us.  You think you’ve got a handle on it, and then suddenly, you’re holding something utterly different.

Back in seminary, one of my professors, Dr. Sharon Ringe, had a way of describing this relationship.  Sharon called it the Johannine Knot.  John’s description of Jesus is knotted all up in John’s description of the Father, and with the Spirit that moved between them, and with us.  Everything is connected, and you think you’re following one strand and suddenly realize you’ve attached yourself to another.  

Jesus is holding something that can’t be snatched out of his hand, and so is his Father, and what does that mean?  It means that Jesus and God are so connected as to be essentially the same thing.   I and the Father are One, he says.  Two distinct things, and yet the same thing.  The boundaries between the two are completely blurred, which undoubtedly only deepened the annoyance of those around

They share the same will, the same purpose, the same essential nature.  You can find ways to distinguish them, of course.  Our language is great at serving up ways to define one thing over and against another.  Our capacity for creating neat categories for things helps us make sense of the world.   We create borders, tight lines of demarcation that frame us and structure the world.

But as we learn to compartmentalize and divide, we can lose sight of the bonds that hold us together.  We allow ourselves to fold in on ourselves, and from that place we view those around us not as part of that great story God is speaking into being, but as objects.  As nothing.

That dark bitterness defines the zealot and the absolutist, and it is one of the most consistent spiritual sicknesses.  We see its fruit in the actions of those who do not admit to the humanity of those around them, who are willing to bomb and kill, oblivious to the truth of what they are doing.

The Tsarnaev brothers did not see those connections.  And just as the works that Jesus did testified the truth of who he was, so too do their actions testify to who they had become.  Blinded by racist, or nationalism, by tribal identity or by simple selfish greed, human beings inflict all sorts of horror on one another.

Do we?  We do not murder, and we do not maim, God willing.  But as we live and move in the world, we must continually challenge ourselves to see those connections.   We must, if we are to be Christ’s flock, be always aware of how we are part of one another. 

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