Division and Multiplication

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 01.26.14

Scripture Lesson:  1 Corinthians 1:10-18

Every once in a while, someone will ask me what the whole Presbyterian thing is all about.  Not often, mind you.  The Presbyterian brand isn’t exactly front and center in the minds of Americans, even with all our ads during football games.  But every once in while, I’ll have the chance to describe what it means to be Presbyterian, and how that distinguishes this little community from Baptists or Episcopalians or Discalced Carmelites.

And no, that’s not a beverage.  You can’t order a tall half-caf discalced carmelite latte at Starbucks.  It’s a mystic monastic order, one of the umpty-bazillion different types of Jesus follower.  That’s one of the hardest things to come to terms with as a Christian.  There are just so very many different ways to do this thing.

In point of fact, even saying you’re a Presbyterian doesn’t really give folks enough of a handle on who you are.  What kind of Presbyterian, one might ask, because there’s a remarkably wide variety.  It’s a veritable smorgasbord.

There’s the Presbyterian Church USA, which is us.  Yay, us! 

Then there’s the Presbyterian Church in America and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, which is not to be confused with the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in America.  There’s the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, which is a totally different thing than the Evangelical Covenant Order of Presbyterians.  There’s the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America, which is not the Reformed Presbyterian Church or the Reformed Presbyterian Church in the United States, none of which are to be for a moment confused with the Presbyterian Reformed Church.

Wow, one might say!  It’s like a veritable Baskin Robbins for the Frozen Chosen!  So many different flavors!  What a remarkably abundant way of being Christian!

But there’s a problem.  For every one of these different flavors of Presbyterian, there’s a fight.  One group of people decides that they can no longer tolerate the flagrant way those people are misrepresenting the true heart of the Presbyterian tradition, and so they storm off.   It happens over and over and over again, until the landscape of the church is as cracked and fragmented as the back of your iPhone.  It can get crazy.  How crazy?

Like, say, the Presbyterian Reformed Church, which split from the Free Presbyterian Church in the early 20th century over the issue of taking public transportation to church.

Seriously.  That was their big church fight.  Public.  Transportation.

So here we have two groups of people who follow Jesus of Nazareth, and their heat and light and energy, the essence of their Gospel proclamation?  Fighting about whether or not the Son of God minds if you take the bus.  Sure, it’s like a Baskin Robbins, but every flavor is bitterness.

That painfully human tendency to look for any and every possible reason to get into it with one another was front and center in the Apostle Paul’s mind in today’s passage from 1 Corinthians.  Paul struggled to cope with one of the most fractious congregations in early Christendom.  It’s the heart of their problem as a community made up of human beings, all of whom are eager to prove their place.

The church in Corinth was notoriously troubled, riven with conflicts and gossip.  More significantly, it was challenged by a form of hyper-competitiveness, as members of the church allowed the values of the city of Corinth to worm their way into the life and dynamics of the church.  As a recently planted Roman trading colony, Corinth was a place full of hard-charging, self-made souls, proud of their place in the culture and eager to rise up the social ranks.  They were driven, they were in it to win it, and God help anyone who got in their way.

And so as they’d received the Gospel, and heard it taught by some of the earliest leaders of the church, they managed to find ways to stand in opposition to one another.  Who’s the most important teacher, they’d say to one another.  Who does the best possible baptizing?  Some would side with Paul himself.  Others would side with an Apostle named Apollos.  I know, there’s no named Letter from Apollos, but he was a big deal in the early church.  He’s referenced in Acts 18, and some folks...like Martin Luther...have suggested that he might have been the author of the Letter to the Hebrews.  

Seeing these people arguing about which teacher was the most important, still others would say that they just plain ol’ followed Christ.  You’d think that would be the right answer, but from the way Paul describes it, it’s clear that it was just another thing people said to feel better about themselves.  “You people with your arguing about Paul and Apollos.  I follow Jesus.  So nyah.”

To each and every one of these fractious souls, Paul suggested that they might not be quite understanding the point of what Jesus came to the world to teach.  If manifesting God’s radical, transforming, and saving love was the point of what Jesus lived out, then to continue to cling to the desire for superiority is not a sign that you’ve gotten the point.  You remain among the perishing.

How important is resisting division to the Christian walk?  It’s hard for us to grasp, we whose freedom is so much a part of us.  Division comes as easily for us here in our culture as it did to the Corinthians.  We are, after all, a nation of fierce and rugged individuals, who measure our worth by our ability to stand out from others...or better yet, stand over others.

Division and conflict are just more interesting. We human beings are naturally drawn to tension, to the shimmering energy that comes when our fight or flight instinct is kicked in.  It makes us feel fierce, gives us a sense of energy and engagement.  It draws a crowd, and gives us a heightened sense of purpose.  In the high school lunchroom, rarely did you hear a crowd of kids suddenly gathering around two adversaries chanting: “Mutually respectful conversation!  Mutually respectful conversation!”

That’s the driving energy behind so much of our ‘net-based culture now, as our love of conflict stirs endless and meaningless chatter around which celebrity has said something catty about which other celebrity, or what one political pundit has said about another talking head.

In the absence of sniping at someone you disagree with, or saying something outrageous that starts a good fight, there’s almost nothing that you can do to make yourself interesting, or to distinguish yourself from the teeming throngs.  But there’s something else about refusing to participate in division.  It involves a far deeper level of risk.

The images fluttered briefly across my social media feeds yesterday, before being swept aside by a tidal wave of Bieberblabber.  These were images from the Ukraine, where rioting and social unrest have been moving closer and closer to a terrible tipping point, to that place where signs and slogans are replaced with guns and bombs.

They were pictures of Orthodox priests and monks, holding crosses and icons as they stood in the streets of Ukrainian cities.  They were pictures of a woman, holding a sacred icon, kneeling on a frozen, snowy urban street.  Those streets were littered with rocks and debris.  On one side of the priests and monks, riot police, shields at the ready.  On the other side, an angry crowd.

And in between, Christians.

The sole point they were making, using their bodies and their faith, was that brokenness and the human tendency to attack one another is not part of God’s gracious intent for us.  They would not side with violence.  Don’t do this thing.  Don’t harm one another.  It was a peculiar image, and one I struggle with.  It’s so much easier to yield to the desire to participate in conflict, to get deep into the passions and energies that are released when we go at it with one another.

It’s also paradoxically safer.  If you stand with a crowd, with a gathering of those who are like you and sharing your disdain for others, then you are not as deeply at risk as when you stand against the conflict itself.  It’s a risk that we personally struggle to take, but if we are to live meaningfully and actually as disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, it’s a risk we must take.

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

Here's Hoping

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 01.19.14

Scripture Lesson:  Isaiah 49:1-9

Hope can be hard.

It is easy to feel that way, because life is rough.  Oh, sure, you were hopeful once.  But that was a long time ago, back before you had your hopes dashed to the ground and crushing under the rumbling wheels of ten thousand commutes to and from a soul-draining cubicle-farm.  That was a long time ago, before the story you had told yourself about your life got as messy as that wood chipper scene from Fargo. 

It’s easy to set aside hope when being hard and cold as stone feels so much safer.  Life makes it considerably easier to cast up a hard wall of jadedness around yourself.  Why be hopeful, when you can protect yourself from the world by casting a thick armored shell around yourself, doubting the motivations of everything and everyone?

It’s easy to feel that way, particularly given the way hope gets used in the world around us.  If you’ve been around other human beings for more than a couple of years, you know that the language of hope tends to be used by folks who are trying to sell you something, or trying to get your vote.  These days, I’m not even sure those are two different things.

I’ll confess to getting that feeling sometimes, particularly when I hear the Jesus-pitchmen on the teevee cranking out the health and wealth gospel.  No-one is easier to separate from their money than someone down on their luck, desperate for healing, desperate from something that might break the pattern that has ruled their lives.  Give ‘em a little bit of hope for a blessing, just a smidgen of hope for a miracle to turn their life around, just enough to tease out their credit card information.  It troubles me.  I’ll admit it.  Cynicism should not be too much of a pastor’s makeup, but it’s always been a part of the way I approach the world.

Which is why the last week has been good for my spirit, as I’ve delved into some of the latest approaches to blending Christian faith with therapeutic counseling.  Over and over again during a whole week coursework, a theme has been reinforced.  When you’re struggling with a mess, or trying to rebuild a life, nothing is more potent and more valuable than hope.  That’s true in dealing with a crisis of relationship, or a vocational struggle, or even a struggle with mortality itself. It is the basis and bulwark of almost every intervention we were taught during the week, because without a sense of hopefulness, nothing gets anywhere.

Hope builds resilience.  If you’re going to survive something disastrous, something like an earthquake, a sharknado, or the last Redskins season, a sense that things will get better is absolutely key.  It doesn’t guarantee anything, but if there’s one factor that makes it more likely that you’re going to make it through a time of trial, it’s your ability to hold out the possibility of getting through it that can make the difference.

Hope motivates and gives direction.  Without a sense that things can ever get better, you’re not going to seek help, or take steps to live a life that has within it the potential to be better.

You can know these things, and yet still struggle with hope.  Like the people of ancient Israel, who found themselves in a place where hope seemed completely pointless.  We’re in Second Isaiah again this week, the middle part of that great prophetic book, and that means that...just like last week...we’re hearing a story told when the people of Israel were in between a rock and a hard place.

It’s hard for us, here in the comfort of a sanctuary in a snug little town, to really grasp how much they’d lost.  For us, I suppose, we might know that feeling if Washington lay in ruins, the monuments destroyed, the Constitution burned, the internet blasted clean of every trace of our identity as a people.  Just like the Judeans, we’d then be dragged off to a strange land to the north...but then it breaks down a bit, because for us, that’d be Canada, where they’d probably just make us be polite to one another and give us access to health care.

It’s hard, as a people, for us to grasp how shattering that time would have been.

Hope, when you’re in the deepest possible despair and everything you’ve worked towards your whole life long is a shattered ruin?  It feels impossible.

And what Isaiah was telling them was a wild and impossible thing.  Hear it through those ancient ears, if you can.  You’ve been beaten down, broken and trampled.  Everything you thought was solid and real and eternal in the world had been smashed.  Around you, a great and powerful empire dominates the world, and they’ve done a great job of destroying your identity as a people.  They are everything that you hear and see, and you belong to them.  You are nothing.

Isaiah acknowledges this.  He names it.  He’s speaking to the “one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations.”  Meaning, he’s talking to everyone around him.  He’s speaking to those who see themselves as slaves, to those who see power all around them and know that they aren’t anything.  Everything that was sacred and precious to them, everything that made them who they were, all of that will be forgotten.

To those people, Isaiah hits them up with a hope that is so far beyond their hoping that it must have seemed completely insane.  Let’s play that out a little bit.  If you’d sat down with one of those Judean slaves in Babylon, and you’d asked them:  “What’s the wildest hope you can imagine? ”  What would they have said?  They’d probably have sat there for a while and struggled to come up with anything.

Maybe some more food would be nice.  Or maybe fewer beatings.  Fewer beatings would be a pleasant change.  

If you gave it a little bit, and pressed them a little harder, they might have dreamed wildly that some day, some how, they might be allowed to return to their land.  Oh, it seemed completely crazy, because there’d never been an empire as mighty as Babylon, with it’s wonders and gold and gardens and armies.  But maybe we’ll get to go back home, to the life we knew.  That would have seemed like a wild and distant fantasy, a Walter Mitty daydream going pocketa-pocketa-pocketa through your mind, almost totally divorced from reality.

But the message received by the prophet was that even this image they had in their minds wasn’t enough.  It was too light.  It couldn’t even begin to match God’s future for their people.  Instead, to this broken people, Isaiah proclaims, speaking in the voice of the Lord: You will be a light to all nations....so that my salvation can reach to the ends of the earth.

This seems to go beyond hope and into the land of double extra crazy, completely wild and impossible, hope that is so preposterously beyond the reality that the people of Israel knew that it might as well have involved alien crop circles and magic.

And yet here we are, we sitting here in this little space, thousands of years later.  What do we have to say to those Judeans in their slavery?  What does the reality of this country, this place, and this gathering, have to say?  Imagine yourself suddenly back there, sitting with a Hebrew by the rivers of Babylon.  They look up at you, and ask you...what’s going to become of us?  Is there any future for the things that we hold sacred?  What could you honestly say to such a person?

You could say that two thousand and five hundred years from now, there will be a nation that is utterly unknown.  It will be a nation of many peoples, from many lands.  They will speak a language that your world has never heard.  It will be filled with strange and powerful magics.  People will fly great metal ships in the sky.  There will be tools that think and speak, pictures that seem to live and move.  This people will reach out their hands and touch the moon and the stars in the heavens.

Among this strange and magical people, millions will be telling your stories, and worshipping your God.

What sort of hope would that be?  It would make Isaiah’s wild proclamation seem almost tame by comparison...and yet it would be true.  

The reality of God’s creation can spin out futures that not only meet our hopes, but make our hopes look like a shadow by comparison.

So if you struggle with hope, if cynicism and anxiety have closed like a steel band around your heart, hear Isaiah’s message.

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

Dimly Burning

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

01.12.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Isaiah 42: 1-9

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

That thought has been echoing through my brain a whole bunch over the last week, as my doctoral studies have taken a trip to the wayback machine.   It was five straight days of stepping back through time into the first century, to understand what it meant to lead and follow in Rome and Greece the world of the first century.  Unfortunately, no TARDIS was involved.  In the absence of any Time Lords on the seminary staff...at least no Time Lords that are willing to admit it...we were stuck with getting back there with books.  Using contemporary scholarship and ancient texts, we spent an entire week reading and examining and thinking about what it was like to live and think back in the time when the New Testament was written.  

In many ways, the ancient world inhabited by those first primal Christians was completely different from our own.  It’s preindustrial, and the internet connections back in the first century were really surprisingly slow and expensive.  Just writing and sending a letter could cost you the equivalent of an entire month’s worth of wages.  Expectations of what it meant to be a person in the ancient world were different, too.  Like, say, that little section that caught my eye in the writings of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who informed his readers that a sign of a virtuous man was that he was bearded and hairy, just like .  I’d be set in the first century, evidently.

But there were other things, deeper understandings of personhood that were completely different than the way we imagine our culture to exist.  Roman culture was what they call an honor/shame culture.  What was most important in that culture was not how much money you had but how much honor you had.  That meant how well-known you were, and how connected you were, and how able you were to connect others to one another.

It was social power, the relationship between a powerful patron and a client, between a teacher and a student, between one whose influence is all about the network of relationships that they can bring to bear to maintain their status in their society.  In that system, what was expected of those lower down in the hierarchy was loyalty, period.  You existed to be loyal, and your value as a human being was completely defined by who you knew.  As far as the society was concerned, you weren’t an individual.  You were just a node in a complicated web of relationships.

Or you were nothing.  If you had no status, no honor, no power, and nothing to offer, you were little more than a hunk of meat.  Those who were poor or powerless, those who did not have a place in the pecking order?  They were viewed as little more than livestock, and could be owned and disposed of however the more powerful saw fit.

That ugly and difficult reality meant that most of the human beings in the ancient world were powerless or property, with some estimates being that up to 30% of the inhabitants of ancient Rome were slaves.  That form of power was really hard on those who found themselves on the bottom of the cultural hierarchy, and it was just the way Roman culture...and most of the cultures of the ancient world...worked.

And when this passage from Isaiah was written, that was exactly where the people of ancient Israel found themselves.   They were slaves, an owned people, powerless and broken and vulnerable.

The dynamic laid out by Isaiah presents us with a completely different way of viewing the world and the people around us. Power dynamics were everything, absolutely everything, but they take on a really very different feeling when you have no power at all, or when all of your power has been taken from you.   In this chapter of Isaiah, the prophet is describing to his people the nature of the leader who’s going to change everything. 

This portion of Isaiah is found in what is often called “Second Isaiah,” meaning that the majority of scholarship suggests it was most likely not written by the same individual who composed chapters 1 through 39 of the Book of Isaiah.  It was, most likely, written by a disciple of the Jerusalem prophet, one who fully understood the essence of his teachings, and was equally connected to the One who spoke through them both.

That first section describes and relates to the kingdom of Judah in the eighth century before Christ.  It is full of challenge, challenge directed particularly against the wealthy and powerful in Jerusalem.  This section, on the other hand, speaks to a completely different context.  Running from chapter 40 through to chapter 55, it is primarily about reconciliation, grace, and restoration, and appears to be speaking to an Israelite audience living in Babylonian exile nearly two hundred years later.

This was a people who had been utterly shattered.   Unlike the proud and the powerful who lived in Jerusalem and gathered in the wealth of the nation, this was a people who had been torn from their land and forced into slavery.  They had watched as their holy city had been destroyed.  They had watched as their temple, the holiest of holies, the place where they communed with God on earth, they had watched as it had been razed and looted.  Everything they were as a people had been taken.  They were nothing.  They had nothing.  They were nothing but property.  They were a fragile and barely standing thing, a broken reed, a flickering candle.

At this point, the One who spoke through the prophet no longer spoke words of judgment.  Where the first thirty nine chapters speak in some pretty harsh language, what we hear throughout this section of Isaiah is God’s commitment to healing and rebuilding those who are broken.  In the face of the suffering experienced by the people, the words that the prophet had to share with them were not rebuke, not condemnation, not mocking and rejection.  It did not tell them: you are powerless, get out of my way. It did not tell them: you are worthless.

The reminder to this shattered people was that their powerlessness did not make them worthless to God.

Isaiah is here promising the arrival of a leader...a messiah...whose power does not bear any resemblance to the power of human societies as they existed in the ancient world.  We who walk the Christian way see that promise fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth, whose entire life flew in the face of that way of wielding power. His power was that of a suffering, healing servant, not the trampling, destroying power of emperors and their armies.  It had nothing to do with the hierarchies of social power that had always defined humanity. 

It still doesn’t.

Because though we might not be an honor/shame culture any more, at least not on the surface, power and influence still work the same way.  Human beings are still human beings, and as much as we might like to pretend that we’re all equal and our worth is defined by our individuality, that’s not the reality we live in.

Power is still all about relationships and influence, about who you know and who knows you.  Yesterday on the other side of the Potomac, we just installed a new governor.  He might do a great job.  Who knows?  But he is where he is because he knows how to play the system of social power.  It’s still how the world works.

What we have to ask ourselves, frankly, is how deeply we allow that system to work its way into our own lives here as followers of Jesus, who taught a different kind of power.  When we encounter people who have power and the ability to get things done, do we see them as a means to an end?  Do we approach them seeing not a brother or a sister, but instead as someone who can do something for us?

That was a danger in the ancient world, but here in the age of new media, when everyone is promoting themselves as a brand and clamoring for attention, that human hunger for power is particularly strong.

More importantly, when we see people who have nothing, who are struggling and broken and have no advantage to offer us, do we dismiss them or ignore them?  It’s easy to do this, as we rush hungrily from one business relationship to another.  We can trample on or dismiss the struggling and the fainthearted.  We can ignore the broken soul, or the person who seems not to have anything.  We can put out that faint light of hope that glows in them.  We can crush them underfoot.

Jesus challenges us to step outside of that way of viewing the world, to make sure that we are taking time for the struggling, and the prisoner, and the lost, and the powerless.  It’s why his message was so radical and so subversive, then and now.

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.  Know Jesus, and know what that means.

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

Treasuring The Words

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams: Christmas Eve 2013

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 2

All around this great land of ours, Christmas trees are glowing in bay windows and the corners of rec rooms, sparkling with the delightful radiance of a hundred billion twinkling LEDs.

Underneath that warm radiance, resting silent and bewrapped, a pile of presents roughly the size of Wisconsin, one that will be mysteriously added to overnight until the mass of gifts becomes so large it seems to stretch the boundaries of time and space itself, creating a shiny seasonally wrapped wormhole that extends into another dimension, a parallel universe made entirely of tinsel.

And in that impossible pile of presents, there are two conundrums.

First, every one of them has been picked out with care, and every one of them is precious, but in the Christmas morning feeding frenzy, that sense of connection that a gift creates between giver and recipient sometimes gets rushed on by.  It’s hard to know whether or not that sense of treasure extends for more than four seconds.  

“Ohlookit’smyveryfavoritethingever” (toss) 

“Ohlookit’smyveryfavoritethingever” (toss) 

“Ohlookit’smyveryfavoritethingever” (toss)

And second, it’s hard in this season to look at those boxes and wonder just where all that stuff is going to go.  Buying a second home seems sometimes to be the only option but, really, covering one mortgage is enough.  Maybe we can just curl up and live on top of our piles of presents, like Smaug nestled on his gold.

As the years have gone by, and my children have grown and grown and grown, the gifts of the past have piled up on top of one another, treasure upon forgotten  treasure, until the pressure of all of those piled up treasures may actually have started turning some of those plastic toys back into fossil fuels.

And so in preparation for this season, they and I will go through the strata of their rooms and storage bins like archeologists on a dig.  Mingled in with the long abandoned Leap Pads and battery-less doodads, the gifts and trinkets from seasons past, it is amazing how much of that stuff no longer matters, and can be given away or recycled.  

But we’ll find other things, things that are genuinely treasures.  These are the objects we pause over and find ourselves spending time with.  Because digging through mess, you always find forgotten treasures that make you linger, and only very rarely are they the sparkly and expensive gifts from years past.  Some of them are fondly remembered toys.  Most of the things that matter, though, are different.

The things that matter are made of humbler stuff.  They are little books filled with bright crayon drawings done in the hand of a little boy who has vanished, replaced by a teen who now towers over me.   They are stories and doodles in old kindergarten composition books, words that speak in voices long passed.  And coming across those old words written in a small and uncertain hand, you sigh that they grow up so fast, and you put those little bits of paper into the keeper pile.

Those are precious words, words to treasure, even though their market value comes nowhere near to that of a PS4.  Words can be like that, as we carry them with us through life, particularly those words that tell us the story of important things.

Here in the story of Christmas that Luke tells us every year, it is words that are the treasure of the season.  There are no wise men in this telling of the story, no gold and frankincense and myrrh.  That’s how dear old uncle Matthew’s Gospel tells it.

For Luke, though, there are not gifts brought, at least not the sort of gifts we’re used to on Christmas.  The shepherds who arrive aren’t the kind of folks who’d have been able to manage much of a gift anyway.  For all of our warm fuzzy images of the life of a shepherd, they lived a day-to-day subsistence, just trying to make it to the next meal.  It was not an easy life, and it was not a job that got any respect.  

And yet as Luke tells it to us, it was to these struggling, just barely making it souls that a message was brought, a simple word to be carried to Mary and Joseph, the parents of a tiny newborn forced to live out in the barn, themselves living just barely on the edge of making it.  Those words they bore are pretty much the only possessions they had to their names, but they were treasures nonetheless.

The message brought to them was one that changed them, that told them that something important and transforming was about to take place.  The message they bore was one of an old promise fulfilled, one that goes deep back to the stories told by the prophets.  

In the clutter of this season, in the mess and rush of it, it’s easy for us to lose sight of the significant and actual treasures that come at this time of year.  We rush along, and if we’re moving as quickly as we feel obligated to move, we lose time to reflect over the time we are given with one another.  As gifts pass between loved ones tonight or tomorrow, remember to take time to ponder the blessings of family and friendship that lie behind those gifts.  

That’s why we stop for a moment, and slow down this evening, and catch our breaths.  We remember that Mary received those strange and marvelous words for the treasure that they were.  And in the great groaning table of this season, we remember that she gave herself time to linger over them, to let them settle into her.

In that story, of a little child, we have an example of the kind of humble gift that really does matter.  It’s the gift of a life that would turned over completely to the cause of love and justice in the world.  In that life, so new and so precious, there is hope for restoration and forgiveness and mercy, of a message of Good News, offered up to all. 

It’s the kind of message that changes how we understand ourselves and our world, the kind of words that can make the world anew if we give ourselves the time and the focus to let them settle in to us.

Let that treasure rest in your heart.  Give yourself time to ponder it, time to appreciate it, time to set it aside as a precious thing. 

May it be a Merry Christmas, for you and for me, AMEN.