The Important Things

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

09.15.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Luke 15:1-10

What’s important to us?  That can change But are we really able to hear the words that Jesus spoke in the same way that his audience did in first century Judea?

We don’t live in the same time, or the same culture.  Our idea as to what is important, what matters, what’s worth putting in the extra effort for?  That’s changed.  Our sense of what has value, what is deserving of our energy and focus?  That’s changed, too.

This week, the focus of attention for a day or so was a slightly disappointing Apple event, as fans of that particular brand awaited news of the next and latest and greatest.  Which, as we found out, wasn’t just another rectangular phone with a screen, but...drumroll, please...two of them.  The iPhone 5C and 5S, they are, which best I can figure out stands for iPhone 5 “Cheap” and iPhone 5“‘Spensive.”   

Which means, now, that my fragile glass telecommunications brick is even more worthless than it was at the beginning of last week.  If you drive a car that was made in 2007, it’s still basically a decent car.  But my iPhone, which still more or less works, except for the rackafrackin’ home button?  It’s drifted off into oblivion, buried somewhere in the towering mountain range of better and faster and shinier devil boxes that came after.  It’s worth less than nothing.  Actually less than nothing.  They give away better phones now as an upgrade.  You may as well just take all of those obsolete iPhones and see what you could build with them...like, say, paving two lanes of the Beltway with iPhones...not just the HOT lanes, but the entire way around. You could...really. I’ve done the calculations. You’d just need lots of epoxy and a whole bunch of free time.

But something else has happened in this era.  It isn’t just that things that come rushing at us.  Through those little screens and our larger ones pours an endless cornucopia of stimulations, a rushing fountain clamoring for our attention.  What you want right now is right there.  You can set out towards a goal, and then somehow an hour has passed, and you’ve managed to crush a whole bunch of candy or whatever it is you do in Candy Crush Saga along with 100 million of your best friends, but that report isn’t quite written.  And you’ve somehow managed to spend real money on something called a Lollipop Hammer.  You can be in a family gathering, surrounded by human beings who love you and cherish you, and yet your mind is not on their stories or their lives, but on buying those Lollipop Hammers and extra lives that will get you through that impossible level.

It becomes harder and harder to tell what is and is not important.  It becomes harder and harder to know what is valuable.

But then again, as we listen to Jesus this morning, maybe things aren’t so different.  We’ve always struggled to know that matters, what is truly important.  Jesus, of course, knew that there were people like that in his own time.  That’s particularly true when it comes to understanding the importance of our relationships with others.

As he taught a crowd that had gathered around him, he could hear people in groups around the edge of the crowd muttering and complaining about him under their breath.  And not just him.  More significantly, they were annoyed that Jesus didn’t seem to understand who was important.  Look at this rabble! Look at this mess...they’re the dregs of humanity! These people aren’t worth anyone’s time...I can’t believe he even bothers with them.

The ones who grumbled against him were the educated and the elite. The Pharisees were the literate suburbanites of first century Judea, the ones who read and studied the law. The scribes worked for the court of the king and in the houses of the wealthy, managing their affairs and keeping track of their business. They did well. They had possessions, all that they needed.

So when Jesus told his parable of the lost sheep to describe how earnestly God seeks out those who are broken and lost in this life, he knew those mutterers would be unable to hear.  Shepherds would understand exactly what Jesus was talking about, but shepherds were poor Galilean trash, and the mutterers weren’t...ugh...shepherds. Pharisees didn’t gather their flocks by night. They paid people to do that for them. Lost sheep? Who cares about one lost sheep? I’ve still got the 99...and I was planning on ordering a new one from isheep.com anyway. Why bother with that worthless thing? My time is more valuable than that.  The return on investment just isn’t there.

Then Jesus tells another little story, a story that only appears in Luke’s Gospel. Matthew tells the parable of the lost sheep in Matthew 18:12-14, but doesn’t give us this next one. Why? Why the difference? Remember, Luke was put together to be heard by an educated and elite audience of early Christians, and so it’s author wanted to make absolutely sure that they heard the next thing that Jesus said...because Luke’s readers were dangerously similar to the whisperers who sat around the outskirts of the gathered crowd.

I can hear him raising his voice a little, pitching it out a little further, out over the heads of the outcasts and tax collectors around him and towards the well-dressed little group beyond..making sure that they heard, making sure that they saw his eyes on them. Then he tells a story of a coin. Say...you had a stack of ten one hundred dollar bills.  A hundred bucks is close to what a drachma would be worth today, eight hours of work from a day laborer. Enough to be real money, something you can relate to. And you knew you had $1,000, it was right there the last time you counted it, but when you counted it up again, you came up fifty bucks short. You’re going to tear the house apart looking for that bill, now, aren’t you?

But Jesus wasn’t talking about sheep, and he wasn’t talking about the value of cash. He’s trying to get it through the thick skulls of human beings just how deeply God values each and every one of us, and how deeply God wants us to understand the goodness that God intends for us.

Jesus saw that we struggle to see the value that God sees, and that the richer and more powerful we become, the harder that struggle becomes. As you gather wealth and position in society, it isn’t just that you stop caring quite so much about things. It also begins to color your relationships with other human beings. 

The Pharisees and the scribes were sure that they were righteous, sure that they were chosen, sure that they were important. They were equally sure that those who had less, who didn’t measure up, who deserved less...the shepherds and the sinners and the tax collectors...they were just less important to God. We are the chosen! We are the saved! God just loves us more.

That was the trap of self-righteousness they’d fallen into, and it’s a trap that clamps shut on any number of Christians today. Our wealth makes the wealth of those scribes look like the allowance you might give to a five year old. A one bedroom apartment pretty much anywhere in MoCo has more luxuries than the palace of Herod...which, in new findings from recent archeological digs, may not even have had cable.

The temptation is there..strongly there for all of us...to succumb to the same selfishness that consumed the Pharisees. You look out into the world and you see it everywhere, the willingness to cast people aside, to discard them, to see them as somehow of less worth than ourselves.

In a society where we are choking on both an abundance of stuff and an abundance of things competing for our attention, Jesus reminds us of what is ultimately important.  Rebuilding relationships is important.  Turning your whole self towards the task of reaching out to the broken and the outcast is important.  

Does the struggle with addiction that has crushed the joy from that rank-smelling man we push our way past, eyes averted, matter less to God?  Too often, we act as if he is worth discarding, worth less than that chiclet phone that sits abandoned in the back of a kitchen drawer.  Does the gnawing in the belly of a seven year old Bangladeshi boy matter less to God because he is poor amidst a crowd of the poor? As we move through our lives, full of wealth and the pursuit of wealth, such people barely merit a second thought.

But each of those people deserve our love, deserve our concern, deserve to be told...and more significantly, shown...that God and those who follow Christ care for them.

Orienting our lives towards the restoration of what has been broken?  That’s the Gospel call, and that’s what is important.

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

A Time of Turning

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

09.08.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Jeremiah 18:1-11

It’s a funny time of year, this week is.  For most pastors, this is the week of Rally Day, as we try to get folks fired up for getting back into the swing of the whole Jesus thing after a summer lull.

Hey everybody, we say!  Going back to church should bring you that same joyous, excited feeling you got when you were a kid and the summer ended and you got to go back to school!  Yay Jesus!

For me, this week is a bit different.  It has different echoes, and a different flavor, because of the bizarre mutant faith-o-rama that is my family.  On Thursday, I spent almost the entire day in worship at Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church, only I wasn’t doing the Presbyterian thing.  I was there because Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church shares space with Bethesda Jewish Congregation.  I was there because of my Jewish wife and Jewish children, and we were there because this week represents the holiest week in all of Judaism.

Thursday we spent the day celebrating Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.  Rosh Hashanah means, literally, “the head of the year,” and in the Jewish annual cycle, we just started the year 5774.  it’s a busy time for everyone except all of the Gentile schoolchildren in Montgomery County, who give thanks for getting a super extra bonus holiday.  

My wife, who’s now the vice president of the board at the synagogue, was sporting a nifty name tag announcing that to the world.  My older son was singing with the adult choir.  My younger son, who was Bar Mitzvahed this spring, was a liturgist for the children’s service.  All of which meant I was in Rosh Hashanah services for about four consecutive hours.  At about hour three, my little guy lamented that he wasn’t Presbyterian.   I mean, you guys get out after only an hour, he said.

It was actually both pleasant and spiritually uplifting, because I get a tremendous amount out of the High Holy Days.   The entire event, with the meals and the fasting, the singing and the shuttling back and forth from Annandale to Bethesda, the whole thing is about change.   Not just any change, either.  If the week of the High Holy Days has one central theme, it is repentance.  

With the transition from one year to the next, the purpose of this holiday is to acknowledge the ways that you’ve managed to mess up in the previous year, and to commit yourself to improvement.  What begins on Rosh Hashanah ends on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when you commit yourself to changing those things that must be changed.

That call to personal transformation is a central part of both Judaism and Christianity.  “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand,” as Jesus put it.  It was also a major part of what the prophet Jeremiah proclaimed and preached.

And Jeremiah?  He knew from change.  Jeremiah’s time was a messy one, one in which every single thing in the world around him was in wild flux.  And by “wild flux,” I don’t mean the trivial change of our consumer culture, the stuff of new car model years or smartphones with huge screens.  

For Jeremiah, the entire world had changed.

Jeremiah lived and taught right on the edge of a vast and wrenching shift in the life of the Jewish people.  There’d been a brief period of hope, after the fall of the Assyrian Empire in the year 627 BCE.  Assyrian rule had been brutal, and that the empire had collapsed seemed like an opportunity.  Finally, finally, the Jewish people would have a chance to be free, and to live as they so chose.

But things just didn’t work out.  Though the Jewish people had placed their hope in a new ruler, the wise and noble King Josiah, his efforts to rebuild were smashed on the slopes of the mountain of Meggido when he died in battle.

With all of that chaos going on around them, the Jewish people struggled to find direction.  More often than not, the direction they found themselves going in was to play exactly the same political games that were played by every other nation around them.  Their political leaders did so with the backing of a cadre of prophets who affirmed the principle that God would always and invariably defend Jerusalem, no matter what.

It didn’t matter what Judah did, or how they acted.  God’s temple was in Jerusalem, and that was that.  With God on your side, no matter what, you can pretty much do anything.

That also tends to make the prophets involved rather popular with the folks in power.  

But Jeremiah just couldn’t do that.  His messages were consistent and difficult, drawn not from his desire to say what folks wanted to hear, but instead to tell them what he knew to be real.

We find a particularly challenging message coming from Jeremiah today, as he wanders through the streets of Jerusalem to the house of a potter.  He watches the work of that craftsman, seeing how they worked and reworked the clay, correcting flaws, starting again.

And in that moment of observation, Jeremiah found that it spoke pointedly to the dynamic of God’s relationship to God’s people.  What would have been most challenging to his listeners, I think, would have been that he ran straight at their assumption that they were automatically the most special, wonderful, and perfect creatures ever in the eyes of their Creator.

They weren’t.  If a people are just and kind and stand in good relationship with God and neighbor, sure, all is well.  But if not?  Well, then all was not.   The point of this whole teaching was pretty straightforward.  

It leaves space for a people to change their ways, to make themselves anew, to restore themselves and bring themselves into right relationship with God and neighbor.  This is a good thing, but as I meditated on this passage during this week in which transformation is banging on my door, one of the most striking things about it not our own changeability.

We all know we change.  Life is change.  Life is continual shift and flux for we human creatures.  But what seems striking about this passage is that it is not simply human beings that shift.  Nations can choose and change.  But wildly and unexpectedly, we hear also that God, the creator of the universe, is capable of change.  If you change, then I will change, or so God speaks through Jeremiah.

This feels, on the face of it, a tiny bit unsettling if we think about it theologically.  Here we have the Creator of the Universe, the Alpha and the Omega, the God that knows all, sees all.  How can God possibly change God’s mind?  Doesn’t everything that happens fit within a plan that’s already mapped out, already certain, already complete?  Everything happens for a reason, we say.  It’s all part of God’s plan, we say.

And yet there it is, said once, said again, just so we don’t miss it.  I will change my mind, speaks the text which conveys the prophet who conveyed God.  I will change my mind, we hear again.  It’s not a clumsy choice of words, to be interpreted around or skipped over, as my bible commentaries did this week.

What does this mean?  Here we generally like to think of God as knowing all things, and being in charge of all of creation, and yet there is this peculiar statement that God willing to think about doing something, and then say, Nah, you know what, I just don’t feel like it any more.

If God is in charge, and God is in control of all things at every moment, then how can God be about to do one thing, and then decide not do it because of something we do?  And yet we hear, from Jeremiah, that this is so.

Wrassling with this passage, I find that the best way to approach this headscratcher is by remembering that God is both loving and love itself.  I also apply multiverse cosmology to it, but as we don’t want to sit here for another hour while I ramble on about my book, let’s stick with the love angle.

Loving another being does not mean that you delimit them.  If all that we are is cogs in a great linear plan, then we cannot be meaningfully held responsible for our actions.  I didn’t mean to smack you just then, we could say to our little brother.  It was predestined.  I didn’t mean to bomb your village and kill your children, a nation could say to another.  It was just part of God’s plan from all eternity, so, hey, sorry about that.

But if that is true, then repentance is meaningless.  Our choosing to live differently, which is the entire point of the holiest season in the Jewish faith out of which Jesus sprang...that’s meaningless?

Instead, God stands in relationship to us, loving us, showing us what it is to live most joyfully and fully in creation.  And as we freely choose to live towards that reality, God’s love for us grows richer and stronger.  Where we choose to live against it, seeking power or control, allowing our addictions and hatreds and resentments to govern us, God’s love remains as a stark reminder of what could have been, had we so chosen it.

And even if you don’t celebrate the turning of the calendar year from the year 5773 to 5774 this week, it remains a new day, every day.  Remembering that, and acting on the truth of it, and changing for the better?  That’s the point of faith.

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

Of God and Lobsters

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

09.01.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lessons: Luke 14: 1, 7-24

It was years ago, and I was in Portland, Maine.  The reason?  A conference of scholars researching the dynamics of nonprofit organizations.  My organization provided research grants to those folks, and so I was moving from conference session to conference session, hearing the latest thinking.  And hearing it.  And hearing it.  And hearing it.

After a long day of sitting and listening to academics talking to one another, folks decamped from the hotel and wandered over to a nearby hotel for a great feast, the big meal of the conference.  Being Maine and all, this was to be a lobster feast.  Such a delicacy!  I’d actually been rather looking forward to it, as this was in a time before I’d given in to the siren song of tofu.

Folks gathered around, and settled in at tables, and although I was just a low level twenty-something admin flunky at my organization...the keeper of the files and the manager of the database...I found that there were no end of folks eager to sit with me.

Being affiliated with a giver-out of money often has that effect.

Everyone gathered, and a welcome was given, and the feast was brought before us.  On dining carts, piled high, were wheeled out hundreds of lobsters.  I’d always liked lobster, but that day, seeing those great piles of red carcasses, something snapped.  Maybe the long day of academic talk did something to my brain.  “The underlying semiotics of exchange in voluntaristic entities varies from that of profit-seeking enterprise in one hundred and twelve discrete ways, which I will now explicate in detail. As you will observe on slide 1.a...”  I don’t know.  Maybe that was it.

But those mounds looked to all the world like a heap of giant boiled insects, as appealing as a bowl full of pillbugs and centipedes.  It felt like I’d stepped into that feast scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, or like when we entered the restaurant we’d stepped through a wormhole that brought us from Maine to the planet Klingon.  But there are those for whom lobster is still a delicacy, so to each their own.  I’m sure those antennae and mandibles are delicious.

I was reminded of that awkward evening recently, as I read through a sequence of articles in the business press about the latest challenge facing lobstermen, the folks who ply the waters off of Maine, pulling the critters up from the depths.

What was struck me about the crisis for lobster fisheries was that it was exactly the opposite of much of the rest of the fishing industry.  For more fishermen, the problem is that the oceans are dying after a century of industrial overfishing.   But the issue wasn’t shortage, or that the sea beds were denuded of lobster.  Instead, the issue was that the catches were huge.   Stirred by unusually warm waters, there was a huge surge in the numbers of tasty young adolescent lobsters.  The traps were full, and every boat that went out came back with a bumper catch.

It was the best harvest in decades.  In other words, it was a total disaster.  The entire industry has been jeopardized because the harvest was so abundant. Those boatloads of delicious buttery sea bugs were worth less and less, and livelihoods were jeopardized.

On the one hand, this makes sense.  It’s the law of supply and demand at work.  If you’ve got a whole bunch of a thing, or if you make too much of a thing, it becomes worth less and less.  If, say, Chinese industrial interests build too many factories to produce solar panels, as happened a few years ago, then suddenly there are too many panels.  Overcapacity makes it impossible to recoup your investment costs, and things fail.   Nice and simple.  On the other, it strikes me as peculiar.   Here you have an abundance, a rich harvest from the bounty of creation, and it’s a problem.

An overbrimming groaning table means financial wreck and ruin.  Feast becomes famine.  It’s a strange inversion of what one might expect from a harvest bounty.  So much of our world is like that.  

It seems, sometimes, like we’ve set up our entire culture backwards.

It was perhaps because of that peculiar reversal that we get Jesus pitching out a mess of reversals in today’s passages from Luke’s Gospel.  

He’s been invited to a feast, a big sabbath shindig at the house of an important muckity muck at the synagogue.  We’re not exactly sure where the event took place, but it was part of his journeying as he moved towards Jerusalem.

It was a big to-do, an event that brought him into connection with the important people in the community.  It was a place to see and be seen.  Where you sat and how you ate and who you talked to would have said a whole bunch about where you fell in the social pecking order of that community.

It was an elaborate social construction, a carefully staged dance, and Jesus knew it.  And when Jesus charged through those conventions like a bull in a china shop, it made for enough storytelling moments to fill a large chunk of this chapter.

He begins by challenging their assumptions about what is and is not appropriate action on the sabbath, and then quickly moves on to the way the meal itself is organized.  There were places of honor, nearer to the host or others of importance.  Then there were other seats and other places.  Jesus is being watched, but he is also watching those around him and observing their behavior.

He’s seen them jockeying for position and power, and then calls them on it.  He calls out his fellow guests, suggesting that perhaps their entire attitude is wrong.  Seeking glory for yourself may be the way of the world, but it is not the way Jesus teaches.  Instead, he says, seek the humble things.   When you look for a seat at the table when you arrive at an event, take the last one.

On one hand, this is actually rather cunning advice.  If you try to push your way up to a place that’s beyond you, you might get knocked down a notch or two, which would be seriously embarrassing.  Better to get called out and moved up by your host.  

Oh yeah.  I’m sittin’ in the good chair.

Subtle and passive aggressive as that might seem, that’s OK, because it’s not the point Jesus is making.

He’s declaring the entire power dynamic of the society around him to be at odds with the ethic he’s teaching.  It’s not just that you shouldn’t seek that best seat at the table.  It’s that...to the best of your ability...you shouldn’t even desire it.

His messing with the way things are becomes even more obvious when he turns his attention to his host.  Here he’s talking to a man who has invited his friends and his neighbors and business associates he wants to impress to a gathering, and he tells him: This thing that you’ve done and everyone does?  Don’t.  Sure, it’s the way we do business and the way we get to know one another.  It always has been.  It certainly is now.  If we want it to count for anything, our goal is not gain, or even that back and forth that constitutes much of the way human beings interact and develop relationships with one another.

“Invite those who cannot return the favor.  Invite those who can’t pay you back,” says Jesus, somehow managing to undercut every dinner party and social engagement ever.

Finally, Jesus hits ‘em with a story.  You know Jesus and his stories.  It’s a story about a meal, a great feast prepared.  The person in question sends out invitations, and then follows them up on the day of the event, only to discover that guest after guest had come up with excuses not to follow through.  

His response?  To fill the party with all of those who are on the margins of society, those who were broken and struggling.  And when there weren’t enough of them to fill the house, they just packed in anyone they could find.

Again, a most peculiar way to approach a feast, but here, Jesus was presenting his listeners and us with a pungent little tale with a very sharp point.  That point is that the way we do things, the structures of economics and relationship that rule human society, those things profoundly off.

It’s the kind of message that I’m sure had the host of the party summoning over his majordomo and whispering, “That Jesus guy?  Make sure we don’t ever invite him back.”

Because that, ultimately, is one of the great challenges of really engaging with the message of Jesus of Nazareth.  The more time you spend with the Gospel, the harder it becomes to see the world in the same way you’ve always seen it.

We can look at the way power is used to create power, the way violence is and always has been used as a means to create was passes for peace, and suddenly it seems like a false dance.

We can look at the way wealth and privilege become self sustaining, and hard work often seems divorced from reward in the same way that an abundant harvest is cause for despair.

The message of Jesus, listened to and taken in, changes all of that.

So much of what the world calls a feast, seen through the eyes of the Gospel, suddenly starts looking like a table full of dead bugs.

And as much as I hate to end a sermon that way, let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.