A Stranger in These Parts

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 10.13.13

Scripture Lesson: Luke 17:11-19, Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7

One of the more fascinating things about my bi-weekly visits to Poolesville has been encountering a community that has a sense of history.  That goes beyond having ancient bottles of Guinness stuffed into the walls of church buildings.  It’s a personal thing.  It’s a community thing.  There are families that have been here for generations, and that’s something rather different than I’m used to.  

That is in large part because I’m “from” a place that no-one’s actually from.  When you live inside the Beltway, in that suburban moonscape that sprawls as far as the eye can see, you’re in a place where pretty much everyone comes from somewhere else.  My home town of Annandale, for example, is a place without history.  

Folks can’t go back that far there, because the there that is there wasn’t there a hundred years ago.   It was a few farms, a few estates, and a whole bunch of woodland.  There was a little Methodist church a crossroads, one that had the misfortune to be burned to the ground during the Civil War.  Annandale was more of a place than a town.

There was nothing, and then there was something.  It stayed that way until a great tide of ramblers and asphalt swept across the land in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and suddenly there were people there.  Whatever sense of history existed in Annandale now rests under a strata of asphalt, tract homes, and stubbornly struggling Korean businesses.  Here and there, you’ll find a sign or a historical marker, sitting rusting on a patch of pavement by the place they’re building the Walgreens.  

There used to be something here, that sign will say.  But it isn’t here any more.

I think that’s the Annandale community motto.

You can’t really be rooted in a place that has no living roots.  You’re just another transient, drifting through for a year or two before your next assignment or your next posting or when another job calls you on to another place.  Everyone is a stranger, and just about when they stop being a stranger, they move.  We’ve been ensconced in our little slice of suburban paradise for just over 13 years.  Our neighbors to the right?  Different.  Our neighbor to the left?  Different.  The guy across the street?  Different.  We’re starting to be among the old timers, and we’ve been there only a quarter of a generation.  

Annandale’s most famous resident is sort of a poster boy for our transience. Who is that?  It’s Mark Hamill.  Yes, Luke Skywalker himself lived in Annandale, and went to Annandale High School, but for Mark, his time in Annandale was as fleeting as Luke’s time on Tatooine.  He lived there for a few years, but his dad was a military officer, and Mark Hamill found himself having to move around a whole bunch.  Having to constantly move because of your father’s job was yet another reason he was selected for that role, I think.

Annandale is increasingly the face of America.  It’s what everyone’s lives are like, everywhere in the United States.  Almost no-one is “from here.”  

Transience is a basic part of our culture.  We’re forever churning and cycling, chasing off after one thing or another.  Our society roils relentlessly, like ripples on the surface of a bathtub, bouncing from coast to coast now that we’ve filled up our allotted portion of the North American continent.

Both today's passage from the Prophet Jeremiah and the reading from Luke you just heard speak to how we are To live when we find ourselves strangers in a strange land.  Hundreds of years separate them,  just as they aree departed from us by millennia, but the basic nature of the human condition has not changed.

When you're in a place you don't belong, it influences how you think and act.  It can drive you to isolation.  It can draw you to fold in on yourself, or to resent those around you.

That was particularly true for the folks who heard Jeremiah's counsel.   Jeremiah was speaking specifically to a people who had been uprooted, and uprooted in a way that was a tiny bit more wrenching than having to go to a new school midway through your junior year 'cause your Dad has a new posting on the Death Star.

The people of Judah had relocated to a strange land because they'd been forced to.  As part of the Babylonian Empire's strategy to shatter and subvert the nations it had subjugated, official policy was to force leaders from those nations to come and serve Babylon in exile.  This was the beginning of what was called the diaspora, the scattering of the Jewish people throughout the world.

This diaspora was not exactly a move they'd desired.  Powerless, oppressed, and torn from their land, it would have been easy to succumb to resentment.

Almost as easy as it would have been for that one member of a band of lepers to be resentful.  In the ancient world, contracting Hansen's disease wasn't just something that would ruin you physically.  Because it could not be treated and was highly contagious, it also consigned you to a life as a social outcast.

By law, lepers were required to stay away from the rest of humanity.  If afflicted, you could beg...from a distance.  But the joys and celebrations of life,  the friendships and family, the rituals of meaning and belonging, those were forbidden to you.

You were a person without a place or a people.  Which is perhaps why, among a group of ten lepers who cried out to Jesus for help, there was a single Samaritan.  He wasn't among his own people, but really, he had no people.

For such an isolated soul, it would have been easy to succumb to bitterness or fear or resentment.

And yet in both of these instances, in these two utterly different tales from different times, we hear of a very different response.

From Jeremiah, we get exactly the opposite of what we  might expect.  Here we have the isolated prophet whose name gives us Jeremiad, which means to to shout and rant and rage like you're hoping for a career in talk radio...and what we get is not a prophecy of fury.  Instead, an incongruous word of grace and forbearance.  live your lives.  And while youre at it, pray for those who've oppressed you.

From Luke's Gospel, the only one of the four Gospels to remember this story for us, we hear that the one who was doubly isolated, the one who even when healed didn't belong, that one was the only one who thought to return to Jesus and give thanks for being released from that prison of illness.

It's a striking reversal, one that Jesus found worth calling to the attention of everyone around him.   All a y'all are Jews, and this guy, this foreigner, is the only one who thinks maybe a word of gratitude is in order?

And in each of these stories, a word to those of us who dwell as stranger in a land of endless diaspora.  Yes, even some of y'all in Poolesville, because of the nearly six thousand souls who live here in the year of our Lord two thousand and thirteen, most aren't related to the five hundred souls who were here in 1960.  It's a prolific town, but not THAT prolific.  The crunchy exurban shell that has formed around Poolesville's caramel small town center is filled with souls who live lives of wandering.

First, there's the call to be a blessing to whatever community you find yourself in.  That call, expressed by Jeremiah, establishes a positive and gracious attitude towards neighbors as the fundamental call of anyone who finds themselves a stranger.  Do all of those things that define you as a healthy and joyful person, and then hope that health for all those around you.

Allowing isolation to form, or casting up walls of distrust, hatred, and otherness?  That’s not the message that comes from Jeremiah, which is both practical and prophetic.

Second, and related to the first, there’s the call to connect with those who show kindness to us when we find ourselves as strangers.  If we have an attitude of blessing towards those around us, we will be more connected.  The Samaritan leper shows that attitude twice.  We know very little about this soul, but we do know some things.  Though this nameless man was a hated stranger in Judea, he is not alone.  He sought the fellowship of others who share his struggle, even those who aren’t quite like him.  And when he encounters someone who is willing to show him an impossible grace, he is willing to show gratitude.

The third is the flip side of the second.  For those times when we find ourselves on the other side of that coin, when we’re the ones with deeper roots, we are given the example of Jesus himself when presented with those who are outside the boundaries of the familiar and the acceptable.  The Jesus we hear in Luke’s Gospel is powerfully interested in the care for the stranger, the outcast, and the oppressed.

The foreigner is not someone to be feared or hated, or used as a scapegoat for our own failings.  The foreigner is our neighbor, a human being worthy of our care, and worthy of healing.  Two thousand years later, there are still a surprisingly large number of human beings who’ve missed this fundamental Christian truth.

When you are a stranger in a strange land, have a heart of blessing to those around you.  From that heart, find connection and community.  And when you are connected in community, remember that the stranger is your sister or brother.

Eyes Up

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

10.06.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Habakkuk  (it's short. read the whole thing.)

When I was a youngling, in second and third grade, my mom and I would conclude most days by sitting and reading stories together.  This was aeons ago, of course, back before we knew the joys of everyone sitting alone in a different room with their very own screen.  

Hey, we made do with what we had.  For a couple of years, what we did right before sleep was read aloud through the Narnia books, one after another, cover to cover.  Rich books they are, and full of memorable characters and subtle, gentle hints at the best and greatest purposes of Christian faith.  From those pages, there came a character I loved, one that I identified with so very much that my mom started calling me by his name.  A marshwiggle he was, an amphibious flipper-toed humanoid, tall and lean and sallow.  Puddleglum was relentlessly certain that the worst would come of everything, which was just the way of the world, which he endured with a wry stoicism. 

As a child, I was that marshwiggle.  Not because my toes were webbed, which they aren’t, at least the last time I checked.  It’s that I was consistently and insistently pessimistic.  

My assumption, no matter what, was that the one great law governing the universe was Murphy’s law.  If something can go wrong, it will.  

If I had a test the next day?  I was going to fail it, as I’d suddenly forget everything I’d been studying for over the last week and my pencils would all break.   Just got an awesome new flying gas-powered toy plane that I’d bought with all of my birthday and Christmas money?  It would never start.  Ever.  It was just my operating assumption about the nature of things, and I was content with it.

Whenever I would make some pronouncement along those lines, which I did often, my mom would say, “Oh, Puddleglum.”  

There was a logic to that approach to existence, as I reasoned it.  Being a pessimist means that if things go wrong, at least you knew it was coming.  And if your grim assessment proves incorrect, and the world comes up roses, and you ace that test?  Well, then you’re happy.  So the pessimist is either right or happy, which means you’re pretty much never disappointed.  Ah, the seamless logic of the eight year old mind.

And feeling grim about the world has been easy lately.  It seems like an increasingly safe bet.  Human beings are always just a wee bit on the difficult side, as a species, but lately we’re not exactly rocking it.   

This week around here in particular, it was a festival for pessimists.  Watching as our government pointlessly, meaninglessly was ground to a semi-halt was difficult enough in the abstract.  For some reason I have a fondness for this country, and watching as even the most basic processes of our Constitutional governance became mired in pointless, unconstructive gamesmanship was not easy.

That it seemed both so easy to avoid and inescapable didn’t make that any easier.

This went a little bit beyond the usual media grimness, the relentless toll of negativity that can often consume us as we compulsively check the news apps on our pocketscreens.  Those you can shut out or turn off, retreating to your garden or to your work.  It was different because this was going on all around.  Seeing neighbors and friends out for walks with their kids in the middle of the day is usually a pleasant thing.   When traffic is notably lighter than usual as you go pick up your kids at around 5:15 in the afternoon, you usually marvel at the Good Lord’s blessings.  This week, those things had a different feel.  Fighting and stalemate, grandstanding, blood, gunfire and madness, dead mothers and weeping children.  It was a mess, even by Washington standards.

When bad news is all around, when it’s in the stories that are being told around you and humming through the community all about, it’s easy to become consumed by it.   When our existence seems defined by the negative, that becomes all we think about.  It becomes the defining feature of our existence, consuming our thoughts.

That’s the struggle facing the prophet Habakkuk this morning, as he wrestles and tussles and struggles with the impossible mess in the world around him.  Habakkuk is one of those books that we don’t spend a whole bunch of time hearing about in church, perhaps because it’s really, really easy to miss.  Three short chapters, a couple of pages, and it’s easy to truck right on by this little book.  

It’s a pity, because this is a remarkably rich little text.  We know almost nothing about Habakkuk, other than that this book must have been written at some point in the sixth and seventh century before Jesus.  We know that because he references the Chaldeans...meaning Babylon...which apparently had not yet quite gotten around to crushing Judah yet.

What’s striking about this teensy little book is that it’s what is called a “theodicy.”  That means it is a divine indictment, a challenge offered up by someone who is calling into question whether or not God is holding up God’s end of the whole “being your God” deal. 

Habakkuk is laying out a question, one based on what he’s seeing and experiencing in Judah.  What he’s observing is a wreck of a society, in which the essential balance of the culture is shot.  Nothing seems to work.  Everything he saw was fighting and self-seeking, as the powerful sought more power and justice is trampled.

Nothing at all like today, in other words.  Ahem.

Standing in encounter with this text, there are three takeaways that we should be able to carry with us on our own journeys through times of challenge and hardship.  Because after almost three thousand years, human beings remain rather frighteningly similar.

First, that acknowledging and naming the negative is an essential part of covenant.  If all we want to show the world all the time is shiny happy people holding hands, then we’re not really standing in encounter with the world.   There are broken things here, hurts and horrors, predation and monstrousness.  

Those powers can be huge, walking the world like the giant monsters in that Guillermo Del Toro film I never got around to seeing this last summer.   They can also be as tiny as a virus, worming their way into us, tearing us from the path of grace God sets before us.  If we don’t name them, if we don’t call them out and challenge them, then they’ll consume us.

It’s the call of a prophet to name those things as Habakkuk named them.  It’s also the prophetic call to challenge those things, calling their validity into question against the essence of covenant.

And that gets us to the second takeaway.  Habakkuk is challenging the reality he encounters, casting it into stark contrast against the essence of his sense of covenant with God.  He’s not just tearing down for the sake of tearing down.  He’s not abandoning his relationship with his Creator.  He is not becoming a cynic, in other words.

The cynic doubts everything, and believes that things are broken because that is just the way things are.  The prophet challenges the broken things, knows that they are wrong and off and horrific.  They know that even more deeply than the cynic, because for the cynic, there is no contrast between what should be and what is.  Of course things are horrible, says the cynic.  Things are just horrible, period.

The faithful soul knows that this is not true, that there is, hidden within the mess, the potential for things to be whole and healthy...and that potential is what God desires for us.  Theodicy is not shaking ones fist at God, but going deeper into that relationship of covenant.

And that turns to the third takeaway.  Just as Habakkuk stands on the watchpost and looks out for what God might bring, we’re called to turn our eyes up and away from the broken things, and towards that place where justice and restoration stand.

This is not easy.  It is much easier, particularly if you’re of a marshwiggly temperament, to simply let yourself get mired in the mess.  That means doing nothing, or worse yet, becoming so consumed by the hopelessness of the broken world that it becomes all that you see, and the thing that you let define your being.

If we let our vision become only for our brokenness, and do not also have an eye towards who we know God wants us to be, then we are lost.  It is the great purpose of faith to give hope and meaning in those times.

Name those broken things you encounter, and know that you are called to challenge them.  Stand in confidence that you are in covenant relation with your Creator, and let that be the ground of your challenge.   And keep your eyes up, not letting them be clouded by the darkness you encounter.

Though the fig tree does not blossom, and no fruit is on the vines; though the produce of the olive fails, and the fields yield no food; though the flock is cut off from the fold, and there is no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will exult in the God of my salvation.  God, the Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, and makes me tread upon the heights.

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

Compare and Contrast

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

09.29.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 16:19-31

Way back when, when I was the age of my boys and every week brought some test or another, there was one form of exam that always worked for me.  I had the skills in mathematics one might expect of a pastor, and that my brain had hardwired itself early with English as its programming language meant that I was pretty useless at translation.    But in English or in History, whenever I’d see we were being asked to compare and contrast, I’d light up.  “In a minimum of 1500 words, compare and contrast the sociopolitical dynamics of Andrew Jackson’s administration to the music of Michael Jackson.”  Awesome.  I’ve got that one.   Lining up one thing against another thing is just such a natural way to think.  It allows us to make distinctions and to highlight features of a thing.  This was an easy type of essay, because human beings do that compare/contrast thing almost automatically.

We just can’t help ourselves.  There’s a basic human desire to do it, to take a look at those around us and try to figure out exactly how what they have and who they are measures up to us.  Being a male Homo Sapiens Americanus, this compulsion wasn’t like that of the female of the species, which, if my wife’s stories of young adulthood are any measure, develops that skillset early around hair and shoes and skirts and who’s in right now and oh my god did you hear what she did?

Like many males, that proneness comparison clearly manifested itself on the parking lot of the high school, as I’d take a look at who was driving what as a way of taking stock of who was who.   There was the perfectly reconditioned black ’68 Chevelle with a white racing stripe and a 327 under the hood, driven by a skilled junior greasemonkey who worked in a garage and had built it from a wreck in autoshop.  I’m still pretty sure his lifetime income profile has significantly exceeded mine.   

There was the one kid who rode a motorcycle, a Yamaha RZ350, the last of the great snarling roadgoing two-strokes.  He was lean and French, and wore a leather jacket while he leaned against his bike and smoked Gauloises and seemed to always be talking to girls.  This, I think, is why Americans have an issue with the French.  They’re just so frustratingly cool.

And though I’d try not to, I’d compare and contrast.  I’d look at my old blocky tan Plymouth with the green vinyl interior, which burned a quart of oil a week, stopped running whenever it rained, and every once in a while would belch green coolant from the heating vents like it was Linda Blair in the Exorcist.  You compare.

Even now that I’m supposedly more spiritually and personally mature, I do this.  Whenever I spend more than a few moments in dead-stopped traffic, which happens with unsurprising frequency, I look out across the sea of vehicles at a dead stop.  Metal boxes, four wheels, not moving.  My brain does that comparo, particularly if I’m astride my bike or ensconced in my Prius.  Ninety-nine percent of them are using more gas than me, I think, as the Smugometer gauge in the dash of the Prius reminds me of my superior thrift and wisdom.  

We compare, we contrast, ourselves to others, assigning value and assessing our place in the social scheme of things.  It’s a natural thing for a social creature to do, but rarely does it challenge us to think about the implications of those contrasts.

Which, of course, is exactly what Jesus is doing when he pitches out the wild contrasts we see in the story from Luke’s Gospel today.  The story of the rich man and Lazarus could not have wilder human contrasts.  First we are shown a wealthy man, wealthy and  powerful.  He’s dressed in purple, which was both an expensive dye to use on clothing and also a mark of royalty in the ancient world.   One look at him would have told you that he was a person of distinction.   He had everything anyone could ever want, eating and drinking to his heart’s content.

Jesus then zooms us out to the doorstep of this nameless man’s home.  Lying there, we find a man called Lazarus.  This isn’t the Lazarus we read about in John’s Gospel, brother to Mary and Martha, the friend of Jesus who dies and is brought back.  It’s just a man called Lazarus.

And the contrast could not be starker.  Where the nameless rich man is covered in purple pantsuits majesty as he eats his way across the fruited plain, what Lazarus is covered in are sores.  Which may or may not have been purplish.  What we do know about them is that as he lay there helpless, a wreck of a man, he’s set upon by dogs which...well...do what dogs do when they encounter an interesting smell and taste.

It’s a foul story, all oozy and doggy and generally unpleasant.  Too Much Information, we want to whisper to Jesus.  Ixnay on the Ores-say, Jesus.  That’s a little graphic, isn’t it?  But what counts for Jesus the storyteller is really hitting us with the desperation of this starving, sick, and miserable Lazarus, and casting it in as stark a contrast as possible with the opulence of the wealthy, nameless man.

The two exist on entirely opposite sides of the spectrum of human society, and in so far as we human beings would like to be one of those guys, we're pretty sure we'll take the purple door.

But this is Luke's gospel, Luke who made a point of assembling every last teaching and saying of Jesus about wealth and power.  And as is so often the case, only Luke retains this story.  It ain't in Matthew, it ain't in Mark, it ain't in John.

And as is even more often the case, this little parable is a trap.  We have no sooner touched it with our imaginations than it has suddenly flipped itself over. Both Mr. Purple and Lazarus have died and passed on, and find themselves in utterly different relationships with God.

Their material wealth, which had so completely distinguished them in the world, that had melted away into nothing.  Lazarus, having been a righteous but desperately poor man,  is suddenly in heaven with God and the angels and Abraham and Jim Henson.  Most versions of the story leave out that last one, but I seem to recall it in one of the Syriac codices.

And the rich man?  He's in that other place.  Why?  This little story doesn't tell us directly, but we get hints.  He knows the name of the man who was in agony on his doorstep, but that’s as far as it went.  What did he do about it?  He wore purple, and feasted.  

It is at this point that the rich man speaks, calling out to Abraham to help him out.  It's worth noting that even though the story does not give him a name, he has a voice and Lazarus does not.   Why is this worth noting?  Because the rationale for it as a storyteller is pretty clear.  His is the voice we hear because we are meant to be drawn into a sense of association with him.   The people who first heard this story would have certainly felt it.  He's begging for water, asking Abraham for mercy, and by couching his request in terms of his position as an observant Jew, Jesus is clearly taking this character and connecting with his listeners.

They'd have gotten the comparison, seen themselves in this person.  When his request is rejected, and he finds himself not only unable to get help but also unable to further warn his siblings about the nature of things, his listeners would have registered it as a deep and personal connection.  This guy is us.

As he has mistakenly assumed that his worldly prosperity matters in the slightest to God,  so did they.  And, frankly, so do we.  As we listen to this challenging, challenging passage, there are a couple of things that are worth hearing in our time.  

First, there's our growing obsession with the peculiar realm of social media, which both connects us and casts us into a peculiarly relentless cycle of self-promotion and one-upsmanship.  It’s supposed to be a blessing, this ability to stay connected to one another, and yet studies have shown that deep engagement with social media can often only heighten our unhappiness.

We find ourselves surrounded in a wash of images that show all of our four hundred and seventy three best friends in the whole world at their very very best.  They’ve got a shiny new car.  Oh, look, here’s a selfie from their fabulous vacation, in which they appear to be posing with their new best friend Matt Damon.  Here’s a picture of that absolutely perfect and delicious home-cooked meal, which has been as carefully assembled for media distribution as a meticulously plated gourmet meal on America’s Top Chef.

We look at the rust spots on our eleven year old van, and think about our last staycation, and look at the flaccid Stouffer’s lasagna casserole we scrambled to get made, and we compare.  And sure, the images of our friends aren’t the whole story. They hide the job stress and the rocky relationships and the fear of loss.  But even if those images aren’t the total reality, and we know it, they nonetheless deepen our sense of social and competitive stress.

This story reminds us, in all of our scrambling and anxiety, that what really matters before God are not those things.  

But there’s a second, harder message.

Take, for example, the response we invariably have when we encounter deep and seemingly intractable poverty.   Having regularly visited my parents in Nigeria as a young man, I can still remember that visceral reaction.

When we took a wrong turn off of a highway at night, and found  ourselves in a slum filled with the burned out hulks of cars and vans, now used as shelter, I felt it.   When I saw a leper by the side of the road, his face devoured by that ancient and terrible illness, I felt it.  I am so grateful for what I have, I thought.

On the one hand, that's a great thing.  We should always give thanks for what we have.  Maintain an attitude of gratitude,  as they say.  But when we stand in encounter with poverty and that is our only reaction, this sharp little story provides something of a counterpoint.

You can’t walk by Lazarus every day, and know his name, and just think, thank you Jesus, I’m so grateful I’m not that guy.  God asks more of that from us.

So don’t fret about your place, mistaking the struggles all of us face for God’s displeasure.  And don’t walk on by, comfortable in your purple smugness.

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