The Harder Road

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

06.16.2013; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 7:36- 8:3

We generally prefer our lives to be easy.

My family knows this.  My boys know this.  Their Dad likes comfort.  I like kicking back, and relaxing, and taking it easy.  When things roll smoothly and naturally, when life just flows on by and everything works with everything else, I’ll freely confess that I’m far more satisfied.  It’s why I keep things simple.  The less fiddlyness you have, the easier life becomes.

As a Pastor Dad whose other job really is homemaker, that’s the way I prefer to structure my life.  I like things manageable.  I like things simple.  I like space to think, and space to breathe, meaning I lean hard against the crazy life that we’re all supposed to lead these days.

Our kids have stuff they do, but to the best of my ability, I push back against it in my role as Dadly dad.  There’s an activity here, and an activity there, but wherever we get to that place where life seems doublescheduled and stacked up, when our calendar runneth over, I pull back.

We make things hard, push them out to the edge, driven by our anxieties and the pressure of our culture.  That sits hard on our kids, and I take it as one of my primary jobs as a father to try to keep that at bay.  When we’ve wandered off that path, we’ve always corrected, like when that little firstgrader melts down after a day of school followed by after school language class followed by taekwondo, and when they say “Daddy I can’t I’m so tired” with eyes brimming over with tears you realize that they’re not just being lazy, they’re overwhelmed and a kid...well.  There, you realize it might be time to back away a bit.

I just like easier, for myself, but especially for those I love.  I like when things fall into place for others, nice and simple and straightforward to grasp.

But life is not always easy.  It can be immensely challenging.  It can become unmanageably complicated, reaching out beyond our ability to keep it simple.  Entire lives can become like that, cascading out of control.

The story we hear from Luke’s Gospel today sketches out two very different persons, living two very different lives.  One lived an easy life, one hard.

The first is that of a Pharisee.  What that specifically means is, unfortunately, a bit lost to history.  We now associate the word “Pharisee” with the idea of hypocrisy or being judgmental, but what it actually meant at the time is beyond us.  

Scholars have come up with a few theories to explain where that word came from.  Some suggest it comes from the Hebrew word parash, meaning to separate.  These might have been “the separate ones,” or the perushim, people who had removed themselves from unclean things by sticking intensely to the laws of Torah.

But then there are those other scholars who note that the Hebrew word parash also means to divide, and specifically means the act of dividing up Torah into sections.  When my son Elijah read for his bar mitzvah last week, for example, he was given a par’shah, meaning a section of Torah.  That’s the same root word, meaning a unit of tradition for study.  Those scholars have suggested that the perushim meant “interpreters,” that group of Jews who took the study of Hebrew seriously.

Others have suggested that it might have had something to do with being open to foreign influences, particularly from Persia.   Long and short of it, we don’t really have a clue. 

What we do know is that Pharisees were educated, engaged with Torah, and deeply faithful.   They were the ones interested in talking with Jesus, interested in engaging and debating...and thus the folks who most frequently get into conflict with Jesus.

We hear from Jesus that this Pharisee’s name is Simon, and his life?  It would have been easy.  Oh, sure, he’d have been very disciplined.  He’d have known everything he needed to do, at every moment.   His life would have been nice and neat and controlled.   He was comfortable, as comfortable as the couches on which he and his guests would have laid out to eat dinner.

That’s the first character.

Then there’s the second.  We don’t ever know this person’s name, but we know that her life would not have been easy.  We don’t know why she’s called a sinner, although the fact that she has her hair down implies she might not have had the best of reputations.  Interpreters suggest she was a harlot or a prostitute, and from the way the Pharisee peered disdainfully down his nose at her, that seems about right.

 And as a woman whose life had gone sour, by fate or ill advised decisions or some peculiar combination of the both, her life would have been hard.  Her culture would have rejected her, relegating her to a dark and difficult place.  She’d have struggled just to survive, and her relationships with others would have been difficult.  Complicated.  Messy.  But she’d heard about Jesus.  She’d heard what he was teaching, and it meant something to her.  So she crashes the party, and, emotionally overwhelmed, proceeds to anoint his feet with oil and wipe his feet with her hair.  Jesus does nothing to stop her.

And people notice.  The Pharisee hosting Jesus notices, and Jesus notices him noticing.  

As Jesus often does in such situations, he tells a story.  Or, rather, tells a little fragment of a story, just two sentences, followed by a question.   Two debtors, one who owes fifty days wages and another who owes five hundred.  The creditor forgives both debts.  The question: which debtor loves the creditor more?

It’s an obvious answer, and an obvious trap, and Simon knows it.  So there’s some reluctance in his response, as he’s drawn in.  “I suppose,” he begins his reply.  He knows the answer, and he knows why the question is being asked.

Jesus then makes the point that he’d intended to make.

He compares and contrasts the reaction of his host to that of the bad-reputation gate crasher.  Look at how she has responded to me, he says.  And you?  Well, not so much.

Here, it’s important to note what Jesus is not doing.  He is not saying that one of them is being forgiven because they’ve done more for him.  He’s not saying, “Look at just how NICE she’s being to me.  She’s being forgiven because she’s DOING more.”

Jesus is, instead, telling Simon the Pharisee that the intensity of the nameless woman’s response was because, from her place of hardship and brokenness, she was aware of what Jesus was teaching.  She’d grasped the meaning of the grace that he proclaimed.  She’d realized that he was offering her the possibility of reconciliation, affirming that God’s Kingdom was within her reach, and that she was as valued and beloved as any of God’s creatures.

And from the place in life she inhabited, from that difficult, terrible place, that word of grace was immensely powerful.

That, as someone who likes things easy and simple, is a truth that took me a while to understand.

Because we best understand grace when we are in a place of brokenness.  It might exist as a concept for us in easy times, shrouded in layers of comfort and the carefully structured patterns of life that we’ve come to take for granted.

But we come to know that Gospel message most intensely...and it becomes most real for us...when we find ourselves on a hard path.

For me, those times when things have felt hard and I’ve felt helpless and lost have been the places when my awareness of God’s love has been the most intense.

Like that moment, that difficult moment, when I was on the cusp of fatherhood.  It had been a long, long day, and I say that as the one who had the easy end of it.  

I stood in that delivery room, where on one side my wife lay pale and shuddering from the epidural.   And on the other side, blessedly out of my wife’s line of sight, my first born son, blue and not breathing, as the doctors massaged his body, saying “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.”

All the hopes of a long and difficult process of conception, the anticipation of a first child and grandchild, and there he was, limp and lifeless as a rubber doll.

That was not an easy moment.  It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, but those were seconds that felt like forever.  In that place, in that very first moment of fatherhood, I felt the hardness of it.  The hardness that comes because not everything is simple, not everything is controlled, and not everything is easy.  Not for us, and harder still, not for the ones most precious to us.

In that moment, I found myself leaning in on grace because I had to, praying and aware of God’s presence with me in a way that I rarely feel in those times of comfort.  You appreciate life, you appreciate grace, you appreciate...with tears and ointment, and without holding back...the miracle that we are both given life and the possibility of turning things towards the better.  No matter what comes.

If you’re in a place of hardness yourself, walking that difficult path, know that truth.  If you aren’t, then you surely have been.  From that place, or the memory of that place, we most deeply grasp what it means to rest in God’s presence and be transformed.

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

What Is Mine

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

05.26.13;  Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  John 16:12-15

We have such a strange way of connecting and communicating these days.

This last couple of weeks, I’ve been reconnecting with the blogosphere, that endlessly churning mess of words that come pouring out of countless eager writers in countless basement offices around the country.   Does anyone actually read these things?  As a regular blogger, I do wonder this, but for me, blogging is much more about keeping an online journal, writing for the purposes of writing.  It keeps the mental pump primed, and lets me record whatever random thought seems fascinating to me at the time.

I think of it like having extra memory, a big old shared external hard-drive of concepts and reflections.  This is unlike the journals that sit in a box downstairs, the ones I used to keep in high school that tell me everything I was thinking back in 1987.  I didn’t want anyone to read them then, and Lord have mercy, do I not want anyone to read them now.  Some things are better forgotten.

But as I write, I also read.

I’ve re-established my blog feed, which now daily assembles those writings for me as a neat and tidy set of articles, sorted by area and interest.  With a book...or at least an eBook...coming out, I’m trying to stay more or less current with what is the bleeding edge of Christian thought out there.  Who is thinking exciting things right now?  How is the great global conversation of faith moving right now?

What I find is, well, sometimes a bit disheartening.  

Like, say, this last week.  Following the tornado that tore it’s way through a suburb of Oklahoma City, the Christian blogosphere was filling my feedreader with...well...what?

There were prayers, of course.   But those got little traffic.   What got buzz and excitement was fighting.   In response to the disaster, a theologian and author posted a tweet, a one hundred and forty word quote from the Book of Job.  An hour later, a prominent blogger criticized the tweet, following which defenders of the theologian blogged their angry dismay at the blog that criticized the tweet, which then other bloggers then blogged about, and which was then tweeted.   

And the entire point...sympathizing with and supporting a community that has just been devastated by a terrible disaster...somehow gets lost in that tangled mess.  Hello?  People who lost their homes and lives and children?  Can we focus on that for just a little bit?  Maybe?   Lord have mercy.

What matters, it seems, is tension and conflict and disagreement.   The purpose of online writing is to draw attention to oneself in the right now, to pitch a challenge to the world as aggressively and intensely as possible.   Here we are, in an era when our ability stand in relationship with one another has been radically transformed by new technology, and we find ourselves consumed by thumbtyping angry missives at one another.  And I’m not even sure I can talk about it without becoming it.  

I mean, how can you criticize the act of being critical?   “You know, the problem with you is that you’re too critical” is the kind of sentence that should just self destruct before it even works its way out of your mouth.

But still.  This obsession with opposition feels off, inexplicably off, as if we have somehow failed as a species.  There’s not a single reason I can figure out why we shouldn’t be able to genuinely grasp the struggle and suffering of other human beings, to cut one another a bit of slack instead of cutting into one another, and to focus our energies on grace and reconciliation or at a bare minimum just not making the world more of a mess than it already is.  

It seems so simple, so easy, so very profoundly basic.  Now, we have these amazing tools, these ways of sharing knowledge and speaking about ourselves to one another, and yet we use them to howl at one another across the cybernetic void.

This is not how we are meant to be.   We fall so far short, and by “we,” I mean me too.

This inexplicable incapacity of ours, this failing to grasp the most basic way we human beings are meant to interact, this plays oddly across the core theme of today’s text from the Gospel of John.

It’s Trinity Sunday today, that day in the Christian calendar that most pastors dread.   Here we are obligated to make some effort to crunch our way through what is assumed to be the most impossibly convoluted theology in all of Christendom.   Three is one thing, and one is three?   That seems to violate some pretty fundamental kindergarten programming.   Do we deal with the complexities of Aristotelian categorical thinking that guided Athanasius and the Cappadocian Fathers in the third century Trinitarian disputes?  Do we talk about the concept of substance, which was the inverse conceptual reflection of Platonic formalism, as Aristotle radically inviduated being over and against Plato’s cascading hierarchy of forms?

Aaah.  These things made our heads hurt in seminary.  We really have to explain this?  Can we just hide?  Hiding is easy, and if you stay behind the pulpit long enough and make awkward squawking noises, eventually people will go away.

Some will argue that it’s best to just abandon the effort, to just set it aside as pointless blabbering.

But as complicated as the Trinity can get if we go deep into it, the essence of it is astoundingly simple.  John’s Gospel gets to that with simplicity, in its own way, as it always does.

The sixteenth chapter of John’s Gospel, like much of the rest of that Gospel, evokes a seemingly similar interweaving.   Words repeat and cycle and repeat again.   Concepts in the text swirl and connect and reconnect.   Chapter sixteen falls smack in the middle of John’s summary of everything Jesus has taught.  The sequence of seven signs that defines the heart of the narrative for John has been completed.  The teachings about the Holy Spirit and community that are Christ’s final summation to his disciples are underway.  That summation, which is called the “farewell discourse,” has fills chapters fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen, which chapter seventeen acting as one long benediction.

What is being offered up in today’s short excerpt from that much longer passage is something very different.  Jesus is in the midst of describing his relationship with God, and in doing so, he does it in terms that are radically and basically Trinitarian.  Here, in a handful of verses, we have a passage that presents God as Father, Jesus himself, and God as son.  He’s talking to his disciples about what it will mean to participate in that relationship too.

What that relationship is radically not is selfish.  In that way that John has of weaving things together and blurring the lines between things, we hear about how God has given everything to Jesus, and how Jesus is giving everything to the spirit, and how the spirit will offer everything up to us.  

It’s a deeply generous thing, this offering up.  And for all of the complex ways that we have come up with to try to describe it, it is most radically participatory.  Meaning, we are being given a gift by the Spirit, the gift of knowing God as Jesus knew God.

Jesus understood himself, particularly as John’s Gospel presents him, as being both different from and radically a part of the God he called Father.  Everything that comprised him as a person, all the matter, the flesh and the bone and the blood, all of that was part of Creation, which is God’s self expression.  And that self, that soul, that spirit, that life within him, that self knew that it was also a part of God’s self-expression.

What he asks of us, again, is to know that we share Christ’s calling.

But how?  How do we get anywhere near this?   Talking about it is fine.  But how do we make this real and a part of us?

The first and most essential step is listening.   That is also the hardest thing for us to manage.  In a culture of hyper-competitive self-promotion, just making ourselves still and letting ourselves hear goes against everything our gut has been taught to feel.  We tweet and we blog and we shout ourselves into the world, but if we’re shouting about ourselves and shouting at our neighbor, we’ll never for a moment hear that still small voice whispering God’s love into us.

And the second step on that listening path is to do so through prayer.   There are many forms, and many ways to pray, but some of the strongest are those that give us space to hear.   These are the prayers that turn us outward, the simple prayers for others and for illumination.   Prayers for others, because in our remembering others before the one who created us all, we open ourselves to loving them.   Prayers that ask not for God to give us this or to do that, but that recognize that in our times of deepest need, we often don’t even know what to ask for.  

Listen, and let your listening draw you up into connection with our Creator.

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