The Scattering

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

11.24.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Jeremiah 23:1-6

Thanksgiving is almost upon us, and it’s a day that requires a great deal from all of us.  We’re a nation made up of people on the go, people who find that making our way to that day tends to involve traveling across crowded highways and byways to find our way to that table.

Which, frankly, is one of the reasons why its been worth it to stay close to home.  There’s only so much life you want to spend stuck in vacation traffic on I95.  

We drive for a day, and we prepare for hours, and the meal seems to last for seven and a half minutes.  Or maybe it just seems that way because I have teen sons.  If you’re not careful near my fifteen year old at the table, you can seriously lose a finger.  

And afterwards, after the work of the better part of a day has been inhaled and a vast stack of dishes awaits, most of the gathered family scatters, drifting off in a triptophan haze to disappear into their various screens.  What a peculiar thing, the holiday that this holiday has become, a day when we travel thousands of miles not to spend time together. 

And there are so many new options for escape this year, so many different ways that we can choose not to spend this holiday actually getting reacquainted with our far-flung families.  There are our iPhones and our Galaxies, filled with apps.  There are the five hundred and forty three Facebook friends we sort of kind of know, with whom we can share artfully retouched pictures of the meal that we just recently inhaled.  Right after we share it on Instagram, and tweet it, and pitch out a Vine of Uncle Don snoring gapemouthed in the Barcalounger.  We can disappear into our PS4 or our XBox One, gaming or watching the Breaking Bad Thanksgiving Special on Netflix.  

There are the traditional distractions.  There’s the game, of course.  There’s always a game, in front of which relatives who probably should be doing the dishes can be found completely asleep.

And for those who prefer to avoid the prep work for the meal, there’s been the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.  Every year since 1924, there’s been a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.  It’s a tradition, this parade of vast overinflated cartoon floats bobbing along above the road, a tradition that tends to remind us that maybe we should think about going for a walk after the meal.  It was, or so the ancient fable of it’s creation goes on wikipedia, the idea of Macy’s employees.  They were mostly recent immigrants, and they were so proud of their newfound country that they were happy to march in a parade on the morning of Thanksgiving.  What better way to celebrate before the evening meal they’d all share that night, as a nation together took time to remember the bounty of this land?

But that was 1924, and this is 2013.  This year, for the first time, Macy’s is offering another distraction, a new distraction that takes you out of the rec room and into your SUV to go hang out at the Mall.  It’s opening all of its stores on Thanksgiving Day.  At 8PM on Thanksgiving Day, they’ll be offering all kinds of exciting doorbuster opportunities to their loyal consumers, giving them a chance to leave the house and wait in long lines to buy stuff that they could just as easily buy next week at just as steep a discount.   

As will Best Buy, and Toys R Us, and WalMart, and scores of other major retailers, who’ll be opening themselves up for a festival of buying on the afternoon of Thanksgiving Day.  KMart, not to be outdone, will open up all of its stores at six am on Thanksgiving Day, and will stay open for forty one hours straight.  

And they’ll be giving their employees an opportunity for a little overtime away from their families.

It feels like yet another way in which our culture grows more and more scattered, as we’re driven from one another into the waiting arms of wolves.

Today’s passage from Jeremiah  talked about scattering, and was a direct challenge to the “shepherds” of Israel. By shepherds, Jeremiah was referring to those in power, those charged with guiding the lives of the people. According to the passage we’ve just heard, the folks in positions of power have misled the people, and have caused the flock to be scattered. In their place, God is going to find other leaders, ones who will help bring the flock back together.

The metaphor of herdsmen and their flocks is great, but it doesn’t tell us very much about what the leadership had done or failed to do.

For that, we have to look to the broader context of Jeremiah, to both historical and textual context.  

Historically, this was the sixth century BCE, in the time of the Babylonian diaspora.  What does “diaspora” mean?  Well, it comes from the Greek word diaspora, which means “scattering.”  It was the official policy of the Babylonian empire towards the nations that they conquered.  Those people were scattered and divided, with some left on the land, and others dragged away into slavery.  

Textually, the passages that come before and after this little chunklet of verses give us deeper handles on who Jeremiah was speaking about. 

Before today’s passage, in Jeremiah 22:13-17, the prophet lays into the royal household of Judah. Why? Because those leaders enriched themselves at the expense of their people. They built themselves huge houses made of only the finest materials, taking from those in need and giving to themselves. Justice and righteousness were put second. Their personal prosperity was put first.

After today’s passage, in Jeremiah 23:16-17, Jeremiah goes after the leaders of his age. What was the message that those leaders were bearing? It was a message of well-being. It was a message of prosperity. Everything is going to be just fine. It shall be well with you. Just keep pouring your wealth into the system. No calamity shall come upon you. 

In both instances, what was proclaimed and what was lived was a prosperity based in falsehood. Leaders used their power to amass great wealth for themselves. Leaders convinced people that all they needed to do to be doing well in the world was to give and give and give to feed king and temple....which, conveniently enough, meant that the king and temple would do well.

But those kinds of shepherds aren’t the sort of folks that God likes to entrust with his flocks, because their interest goes no deeper than their own hungers.

And so this year, as we approach Thanksgiving, we find ourselves in a peculiar place.  Progress, one might say, but a peculiar progress.  Just two years ago, on my first sermon before my first Thanksgiving here, I preached on something very similar...and joked about how Black Friday was becoming Black Friday Weekend, and joked that Thanksgiving itself would be next.

That was just two years ago, just a flicker of time, and the march of progress goes forward.

Now, it’s becoming the norm, as a day of national reflection and sabbath becomes just another reason to sit in lines to buy things that we don’t need from people who’d rather be home with their families.

It feels like a regression, like we are getting weaker, like we are forgetting the best graces of who we are as a people, driven further and further from one another as the products and stressors of consumerism drive us one from another.  And we are getting weaker, just as a scattered flock is weak and vulnerable.

“We’re just being more flexible to accommodate the desires of consumers,” say the executives making these decisions.  “We’re just responding to demand,” they say.  To which I say, balderdash, or other words beginning with B that aren’t quite as sanctuary friendly.

If you’re creating the demand in the first place, spending billions upon billions of dollars on advertising to stir desire in the hearts of consumers, then that dog don’t hunt.

Turning away from that path, though, is not hard.  You have to choose, choose not to be broken and torn, one from another.  Hearing that call to shop as the disingenuous thing that it is is a beginning.

And then do not follow the lead of this culture, not on that day.

Meaning, don’t.  Don’t do it.  Take the time, take the space, and be together with family and friends and loved ones.  Share space together.  Talk.  Reconnect, and use the time to be thankful for life.

Because that’s not just the purpose of Thanksgiving, but the purpose of every day.

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

A Little Short

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

11.02.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 19:1-10

Do you remember the first time you ever bought something?  Can you remember the first time you ever used money?

It’s a tough thing, stretching your mind so far back, because so many grownups are struggling to remember all of their deadlines and their teenager’s insane schedule and when their two year old has playgroup.  Even with our magic devil boxes there to tell us what to do, it’s hard enough to keep track of all of that, without accidentally dropping your teen off at Gymboree and your toddler off at dive practice.

But remembering who we’ve been is a vital thing, and if you follow back through the deep dark thickets of growing up and go back to that bright little self you once were, you might find an echo of a whisper of that moment.

My first memory of money is a fragment, old and faded like parchment in my mind.  It’s so old that I’m not even sure it’s real, or if it’s a mingling of memories and dreams, blurred together by my subconscious mind over a lifetime.

I was four years old, and I was living in Nairobi.  My grandparents had come to visit, and Grandfather was going to take me to go get ice cream.  This, I think, is why I remember it.   Amazing, how the human brain prioritizes a memory when there’s ice cream involved.  

What was also important about this outing was that I was going to buy it myself.  I’d been given change over the course of my grandparents visit, in part to teach me about how money worked.

Because as when you’re a very little one, money just doesn’t quite process.  Things show up.  Toys just appear.  Food is there because it’s there.  And at some point, we start having to learn about this peculiar system we’ve created for managing exchange in our society.

I remember, frankly, finding the whole money thing a little bizarre.  That was probably because I was living in Kenya, which approached money in a way that seemed designed to be as hard to understand as possible.  You had a shilling, which was made up of pence, which may or may not have been made up of hapennies.  The hapenny was the subatomic particle of the old British monetary system, meaning it was kind of crazy money.  Here’s a penny, the smallest possible unit.  A hapenny is...half of the smallest possible unit.  Alrighty then.   

Above a shilling, there were crowns and gold pieces and bitcoins and doubloons and krugerrands.  Or something like that. It was all very intimidating.

I can remember how awkward it felt, the whole experience of trying figure out what to do with the money.  What if I didn’t have enough?  What if I didn’t do it quite right?  What if I didn’t end up getting ice cream?  What if I lost those shillings and they fell out of my pocket?  I remember checking my pockets regularly for the reassurance of those round hunks of metal.

But I also remember how it felt vaguely magical.  I give you this little circle of metal with a picture of Jomo Kenyatta, and you give me ice cream?  Wow.

Wealth has that peculiar dichotomy.  While it makes exchange possible, and it makes it possible for us to do things in our culture, it quickly becomes a source of anxiety and personal struggle.

Luke’s Gospel struggles and wrestles with the spiritual implications of wealth more than perhaps any other of the books of the Bible.  It is Luke who retains most of the stories of Jesus that deal with wealth, and today’s story of Zacchaeus is no exception.  Like many of the stories we’ve been hearing from him over the last few weeks, this recounting of the actions of a tax collector is unique to Luke.

And quite a story it is, too.  It’s a fun one, one of those stories that I remember from Sunday School, because the images that it produces tend to stick in a kids head.  We hear about Zacchaeus.  He’s a man of some importance, and he’s rich, and while those are the details that were key to the story that Jesus was telling, they aren’t the details that stick in your mind.

Zacchaeus was a little guy.  He was small and scrappy.  He was...well...not particularly tall.  Maybe not quite in the Wizard of Oz Mayor of Munchkinland way, not quite in the Randy Newman Short People kind of way, but enough so that when the crowds gathered around this remarkable traveling rabbi, Zacchaeus just couldn’t see.  It was a forest of torsos and shoulders, and he couldn’t quite get a view.

This detail makes this story stick in the heads of kids.  Because if there’s one think a kid knows, it’s that feeling, of being small and lost in a sea of towering adults.  And the other detail that makes it cling is that this adult, this little man, he hasn’t lost his childlike willingness to express himself.  He’ll clamber wildly up a tree just to get a view, as if the opinions and expectations of everyone around him didn’t exist at all.

But beyond the shortness, beyond the silliness of imagining a little grown up clambering up a tree, the heart of this story has to do with wealth and the way we struggle with it.   Because just as Zacchaeus was a tax collector, and thus despised by everyone around him, he was also rich...and Jesus has a peculiar relationship with wealth.

What we do with our wealth, and how we function in a society where wealth allows us to act and to get things done, those things are often a challenge, even for those of us who are supposedly all grown up.  

Wealth and the dynamics of wealth tend to induce all kinds of anxieties and tensions in adult human beings.  We know, because it is the culture in which we live, that being a little short of stature is something we can get over.  Being a little short on cash, on the other hand, tends to cause a whole bunch more tension.  It gives us a sense of powerlessness.  It can paralyze us, leaving us unable to act.  Or we can find ourselves so anxious about wealth that we do not turn it towards a positive purpose in the world.  We hold it, we cling to it, and it does nothing.

In this story, Zacchaeus finds himself in a position to play host to Jesus.  Short though he may have been, his actions show that though he was a wealthy man who’d gained his wealth in a hated profession, somewhere, he hadn’t lost a part of his childlike exuberance.

Now as sermons about stewardship go, I’ll admit that using the story of Zacchaeus can seem like quite a stretch.  Particularly the “I’ll give half of everything I have to the poor part.  Yeah, sure, the IRS limit on deductibility is fifty percent of income, but c’mon.  That’s a pretty huge chunk of change there.  And generally, the pastors who get up there and tell you that they want to talk about cinctupletithing don’t make it through the next Sesion meeting.

I think what is more important for us to hear in this is the combination of purpose and attitude, as this tiny tax collector manages to deal with his wealth in a way that shows he understands its purpose.  The purpose of wealth, as Jesus presents it throughout the Gospels, is not wealth itself.  

He asks us instead to turn that wealth towards another purpose, in much the same way that we are all called to turn your life towards particular purpose.  And he asks us to do it in a way that reflects both exuberance and childlike hopefulness.

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

The Masks We Wear

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

10.27.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Luke 18:9-14

This is a week for masks.  On Thursday, on All Hallows Eve, my neighborhood fills with people pretending to be things that they are not.  Ninjas and princesses and pirates, Jedi and clones and astronauts, all of them come moving in little clusters through the early evening darkness.  It’s a time for community, as neighbors circulate and talk and remind each other that there are really other human beings living around them.

For children, it’s also a time of sweet magic, a evening in which every neighbor’s house is a fountain of candy, when you heave that bag back to your room and dump a cubic yard of Twizzlers and Snickers onto the floor.  “I’ll save some for later,” you said when you were a kid, and you meant it, because the volume of your stomach even at full capacity wasn’t a match for that mighty mound of corn-syrup and sugar.

As the boys drift into their teens, that time is increasingly fading into my past.   They’re busy now, with school and life.  My eight grader, in the last year when trick-or-treating would be not-awkward, has a rehearsal that evening.  So it will go.  I miss it already.

But it’s not just the candy and the community.  It’s a time to pretend we are something else, to wear a mask that for one evening makes us seem like another thing.  What that is depends on our aspirations, on our sense of what is interesting or frightening or powerful or beautiful, on what is meaningful to us as a person.

Like, say, the first costume either of our children picked out themselves.  On that first All Hallows Eve, when my oldest son wasn’t a sophomore in high school but a bright-eyed member of the twos class at his preschool, he had a very very specific costume request.  “What do you want to be for Halloween,” we asked.  “Harry Potter?  Ron Weasley?”  “I want to be a tuna,” he said.   “A what?”  “I want to be a tuna!”  “A can of tuna?”  “No, Daddy, a tuna!”

The mighty tuna is, for some reason, not one of those costumes you can buy at Toys R Us or Party City.  Suffice it to say, this ended up being a home-made costume.  The tiny guy was delighted with it, although he grew increasingly frustrated with all of the clueless grownups around him as the evening wore on.  “What a scary shark costume!”  “I’m not a shark.  I’m a tuna!”

It took a little while to figure out precisely why he wanted to be a tuna.  It was, my wife and I finally realized, because of a Magic Schoolbus book we’d read to him, and that he’d begun to read on his own.  He wanted to be the tuna he read about in the book, the Atlantic Bluefin, which in its natural form does not come packed in a small can.  It’s fifteen feet long and over a thousand pounds, a ferocious pack hunter, an apex predator, huge and fierce.

So maybe being a tuna makes sense.  We want to think of ourselves that way.  We want to have a sense of ourselves as powerful and mighty and important, and we want the whole world to see that same person that we desire to project.

Playing that role is a big part of what this week’s festivities will be about, but it can also be a significant part of the way we live our lives on days we’re not dressed up like someone else.

That can be fine, in so far as it makes us more confident and certain of ourselves.  That’s a good thing, right?  We’re constantly told that it’s a good thing.  Be the person you want to be, right?  

And yet here, in today’s passage from Luke, we have Jesus telling us a story about two individuals, both of whom have gone up to the temple to pray.  It’s a story told with a purpose, or so the author of Luke’s Gospel tells us.

The two characters inhabit entirely different portions of the human spectrum.  On the one hand, we’re shown a Pharisee.  The Pharisees inevitably get a bad rap in the Gospels, but there’s every evidence that the reason for this wasn’t because they were automatically terrible, impossible people.  Instead, they were the ones who were most interested in talking with and debating with Jesus.

What we encounter in the story, though, is the Pharisee who made Pharisee a bad name.  It’s an individual who has complete confidence in himself and in who he is.  The Pharisee is praying, and his prayer is that of a content and confident individual.  He looks out at the world around him, and he is utterly confident in himself and in his goodness.

What makes him particularly confident in his own goodness is looking at a world that is filled with people who just don’t make the grade.  His list isn’t exhaustive, but he knows he’s better than others.  Thieves, rogues, and adulterers?  He’s nothing like them.

He looks around, and he sees a tax collector.  “Even this guy,” he whispers in his fervent prayer.  “Thank you so much that I’m not that guy.”  Then, like you’d need to tell God this, he lays out the reasons why he’s so amazing.  He fasts, and he gives a full ten percent of his income to the temple.  He’s righteous, and he knows it, clap your hands.

Jesus then presents us with another soul, this one standing rather father off and away from the temple.  It’s a tax collector, and that means in all likelihood we’re talking about a guy who is not exactly in good standing with the community.   If he was responsible for taking taxes to support the power of the Roman Empire, then he was the next thing to a traitor in most folks books.

Worse still, most tax collectors had the reputation for lining their own pockets by tacking on an extra percentage here or there.  If you didn’t pay up, you could expect a visit from some nice men in Roman uniforms.  It was a remarkably negatively viewed profession, and for good reason.  Tax collectors were not like the civil servants charged with gathering revenue in a constitutional republic, held accountable by both the law and civil servants.  They were, in many ways, just plain ol’ predators.  Their business was extortion, and charging excessive fees was their business.  

This is an important thing for us to grasp.  We’re not being presented with a simple, binary equation, as much as we like to think of the world in that way.  Jesus is not saying to his listeners, “Here’s a good guy and here’s a bad guy.”  He’s saying, both of these guys are a mess.  Neither of them is good.

But only the tax collector seems to know it.   He’s a wreck and a ruin.  Here he is at the temple, and what we hear is that his interaction with God is one of lament and sorrow.  There’s no confidence, there’s no naming it and claiming it.  He’s just a mess, and everyone around him holds him in contempt, including himself.  

Jesus calls these two characters out, and establishes them as examples of how we are and are not to stand in right relationship with our Creator.

The tax collector is aware of himself, deeply aware of how he and his profession have impacted those around him.  He hides behind nothing, and knows that he and his life are broken.  He knows how deep and wide that chasm between his reality and God’s call on his life truly is.  He has no masks, and he sits there, raw and broken and honest. 

The Pharisee, on the other hand, is deeply focused on his image.  He is the righteous one, and he knows it, and everyone around him knows it.  He wears that identity as proudly as if it were a Dolce and Gabbana suit.  He is utterly confident in it.

The Pharisee in this story is typically presented as a hypocrite, someone who says one thing and does another.  This ain’t quite so.  There is nothing in this story that Jesus is telling to suggest that he does not fulfill the requirements of righteous religious practice.  He checks every box, every box but one.

That “box” is the one where you understand that who you are depends not on your own estimation of yourself, but on how you express yourself towards the world around you. 

It’s just a mask, though, just a role he plays.  But it is not the world that he is deceiving, as he prays there smugly to himself.  What this parable shows us is that the most dangerous masks are not the ones that hide our identity from others.  The most dangerous masks are those that hide our identity from ourselves.

They allow us to imagine that our contempt for others is justified.  They allow us to tear others down.  They allow us to hate, and to express even our faith as bitterness.

Each of us has such a mask, sometimes more than one.  We present them to the world, and in so doing, are as dishonest to ourselves as that Pharisee.  And worse yet, we can turn those masks inward, allowing them to justify all sorts of darkness, allowing our image of ourselves to be as disconnected from reality as if we really and truly believed we were the mighty tuna.

God knows us better than that, and so should we.

Wherever those falsehoods lie, wherever you’ve allowed yourself to cast up a mask of contempt towards others that prevents you from showing love to those around you, set it aside.  

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