The Parts You Don’t Need

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 02.16.14

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 5:21-37

We are creatures of habit, and creatures of pattern.  Those things we do and do regularly come to give us a sense of identity, forming us and shaping us.  They are things we get good at, and that we incorporate into our personhood.

Like, say, the patterns that we get into in the evenings, which for me for decades tended to involve a beer or three.  It was just a part of the Hobbitish pattern of my evenings, as I’d settle in with a nice complex Belgian Triple or a warm and easy stout, a bright and light pilsner or...preferably...a hoppily aromatic and potently flavorful imperial India Pale Ale.  It was that last category that I used to brew myself, at the only professional grade do-it-yourself brewery on the eastern seaboard.

A typical evening would involve I’d have one as I was making dinner, one with dinner, and one as I settled in to read or write in the evening.  I didn’t think much of it.  Didn’t really even notice.  For five years, ten, then twenty, it was just how I rolled.  It was warm and pleasant and relaxing.

But late last year, I realized that this pattern meant that though there were seven days in the week, I was consuming ten days worth of calories.  As my metabolism began the deceleration into middle age, I’d gathered so much mass that things weren’t working quite so well.  Getting into my motorcycle riding suit was increasingly feeling more and more like what I imagine it’s like to make haggis.  I’d begun to more regularly notice Newton’s first law as I moved around the house.  An object at rest tends to stay at rest, and I was tending to have to stay at rest a whole bunch more than I used to.

Talking to a doctor friend over a few delicious and potently flavorful imperial India Pale Ales, it was pretty plain.  “You’d be better off if you were twenty pounds lighter,” he said.  “You’ll live longer.”  

Twenty pounds?  That seemed rather a lot, as I thought about it.  That’s about how much an arm weighs, or my leg below the knee, plus maybe an ear.  That’s a whole bunch of me to be getting rid of.  How can that happen?  I shopped around on Amazon for home liposuction kits, but ultimately decided the cleanup wasn’t worth it.

There were just parts of myself I was going to have to remove.  Beer every night?  It’d have to go.  Eating anything and not paying attention, or just snacking because I feel like it?  Not any more.  

This last week, I hit the mark I’d set for myself last year.  There’s this much less of me, just gone, no longer a part of my person.  After I hit the mark, I went down and snagged this weight, twenty pounds of iron, and walked around the house a bit.  It seemed like a whole bunch of me, gone, like I’d lopped off an arm, and in fact it was.  But it wasn’t the mass.  It was an entire pattern of living, a way of being.  That was what had to change.

And if we are to change, and change ourselves for the better, that’s how we have to do it.  It requires a significant and sustained engagement.  It takes time.  And it takes a willingness to set aside old patterns of behavior and...and this is harder...old patterns of thinking.

That transition from an old pattern of being to a new one was central to what Jesus is teaching here in this fifth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel.   Last week, we talked about the vital, central nature of these teachings in Matthew for the entirety of the Gospel.  

Today’s passage continues the pattern we’ve seen earlier in the Sermon.  In the section presented, Jesus starts by saying “You have heard that it was said,” and then takes it to the next level by saying, “But I tell you...”   He begins by presenting us with the Biblical teaching on murder in Matthew 5:21 and 22.   

We hear that commandment, thou shalt not kill, which is part of the Mosaic Decalogue, the fancy words Bible scholars use when they talk about the Ten Commandments.  It comes from Exodus 20:13, and Deuteronomy 5:17.  We tend to interpret it as limiting our killyness.  No killing!

Generally, the problem Christians have with this verse comes when we look at the passages from Exodus and Deuteronomy, and realize that this messes with many of the ways we run our societies.  We get into legalistic arguments about what it means relative to the death penalty, and we argue whether or not the wars our society fights are justified in the eyes of God, quibbling about the nuances between killing and murder.

But those arguments completely miss the point, because Jesus goes further.  If you want more than simple justice, if you actually want to participate in what he has declared to be, if you want to aggressively and intentionally make things better and tip the balance to the side of grace, then you need to press it way down deep.  You need to pour out your grace, even to those who seem to be taking more from you than is their right.

That means that it isn’t just murder that violates what Jesus is teaching.  It’s the intent itself, the anger, the hatred, the willingness to belittle or destroy.  It is the heart of it, that inner desire.  Not killing people is easy, most of the time, even in traffic and in meetings.  We can pull that off.  But not wanting to do violence, ever?  Not letting ourselves hate, not letting our hearts turn red in tooth and claw?  That’s a deep, rough thing.

He goes on, laying out similar, deeper challenges throughout the passages are to come, and among those comes a particularly difficult metaphor.  If your eye causes you to sin, pop that sucker out?  If your hand causes you to mess things up, off it goes?  I mean, really, ew.  

It’s a rough, difficult, and heavy-feeling image.  It’s a little too brutal, a little too aggressive, a little too bloody.  It reminds me, frankly, of that scene in Sam Raimi’s 1987 absurdist horror-comedy classic Evil Dead 2.  You know...um...the one where Bruce Campbell’s hand becomes possessed with an evil spirit and tries to kill him?  No spoilers here, but the solution comes when the hero wrestles his hand into the toolshed and utters the single line:  “Chainsaw.”  

OK, maybe that was a spoiler, but it’s such a great line.   

I will freely admit that this is not the best family movie night choice, but it’s actually a little more family-friendly than Evil Dead 2: The Musical.  And yes, that actually exists.

What we want to hear from Jesus is something easier, maybe something involving a new prescription for our glasses when our eyes bug us.  Or maybe we could reword it as “when your hand offends you, try this delightful moisturizing hand lotion.”  Jesus

But as hard as that saying is, it has the unfortunate character of actually being true. When we’ve allowed ourselves to become defined by a particular way of thinking, removing that isn’t easy.  It’s a difficult thing, changing the way that you feel and view the world.  It’s remarkably hard, harder even than changing a comfortable and long-lived pattern of behavior. It requires a change that alters our self.

Excising those things that have woven themselves into us is immensely difficult.  When we feel a deep anger towards someone, when we feel we have had a trust betrayed or been fundamentally mistreated, that can become a defining feature of our identity.  We can carry that rage in us, and it can weave itself in and out of our soul like a cancer.

When we’ve suffered powerful setbacks and loss, and had our sense of who we are shaken, that can turn itself into self-loathing and despair, which drives us deeper and deeper into darkness.

Those things, if we allow them to thrive and grow in us, will destroy us.  Whatever that may be for you, the first step is to identify it, name it, and realize that you yourself do not need it to be a part of you.  Then, through a pattern of actions, work your way to it from the outside in, cutting away at it until it is gone from you.

Because some parts of us we simply don’t need, not if we’re going to live into the Reign of God that Christ proclaimed.

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

Laying Down the Law

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 02.09.14

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 5:13-20

Rules change.

We’d like them not to, because they can be comforting and part of the pattern of our lives, but they do nonetheless.  Like, say, the rules for how we watch our shows.  It used to be, back in the paleolithic entertainment era, that if we wanted to be entertained, we’d do so at a particular time and in a particular place.

I can remember how I used to watch shows, way back in the 1980s.  I’d climb onto my brontosaurus, and go over to a friend’s house.  Back then, shows were a social thing.  We’d bring soda and chips and snacks, and sit around a large room staring at a vast 19 inch cathode ray tube.  “That’s a screen?” we might laugh now, but yes, it was, and in color, too!  We’d be watching the A-Team or Knight Rider or Manimal, the kind of quality entertainment that reminds you just what a high point in our culture the 80s really were.  

Now, the rules have changed.  We ingest it, not here and there, but all at once. You find a show and you binge on it, streaming episode after episode, often squirreling yourself away with a tiny little screen or a laptop to crank your way through a show you’ve heard about but never quite gotten around to seeing.

Lately, the show that’s been binge-watched around my household has been been Parks and Recreation, a delightful little comedy with Amy Poehler about the parks department in a small town.  It’s filled with entertaining characters, but perhaps the most entertaining of the characters is the director of the department, Ron Swanson.

He’s amusing for a range of reasons, but the most singular of those reasons is that Ron Swanson is perhaps the most overtly libertarian character in any show you can see today.  Here you have a character on a comedy who tends to give firearms as office birthday presents, whose favorite food is a turkey leg wrapped in bacon, and whose idea of staying hydrated is putting an ice cube in his scotch.  And even though as a vegetarian I’m not quite so sure about the bacon and turkey, I can’t help but enjoy him, because he’s just so very himself.

Maybe it’s that peculiar relationship that we Americans have with rules and the law.  On the one hand, there’s still a strong cultural memory of our frontier days.  The values that make us self-sufficient, capable, and resilient as individuals and as households still hold significant sway over our sense of our own identities.  We like our freedom, and our ability to be autonomous persons.

On the other hand, there are a whole bunch of us.  When you get three hundred and thirteen million rugged individualists, they have to figure out how exactly it is they’re supposed to live together and function. We need rules for that dance, and ways we can simultaneously preserve our freedom and respect the freedom of our neighbor.  We know the truth of that, because we know that there are always those folks who will use our God-given liberty to oppress others and prey on others.  We protect our neighborhoods, we protect our kids and our environment, and we’re comfortable with that.  And yet still we struggle and chafe against the rules we set for ourselves, particularly when those rules impinge on us.  We don’t like people telling us what to do.  We don’t like having to worry and fret over every last regulation, about whether or not we’ll need to get a special permit to sell bottled water or whether we’ll get hit with a ticket issued by some unblinking eye of Sauron robot camera for being in a hurry to pick up our kid from preschool.  Hey, 87 seemed an appropriate speed for the road conditions.

It's that strange tension between law and liberty that Jesus is taking a good hard whack at in today's portion from the Gospel of Matthew.  Today's reading comes to us out of the deepest heart of Christ's teaching, as we're starting to roll our way into the Sermon on the Mount.  Here in Matthew chapters five through seven, we have the most succinct expression of the moral and ethical implications of what Jesus had been teaching about the in dwelling Kingdom of God.

If you're a Red Letter Christian...meaning you have one of those Bibles where they print the words Jesus said in red, and you for some reason think those words are worth highlighting...these three chapters of Matthew are absolutely the Reddest of the Red Letters.  There are many places of grace you can point people to in the bible, places where the essence of what being a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth burns bright.  I’m a lousy chapter and verser, but Matthew 5 - 7?  That you need to remember.  That needs to be part of what you know.

Here, as the teaching is conveyed by Matthew, we Jesus beginning his exploration of what the heart of the Kingdom really means.  Of all of the four Gospel stories, Matthew’s account is most grounded in the traditions of the Jewish people, and so for Matthew, Jesus starts out with a statement about the law.

For the Pharisees and the scribes..the literate and studious Jews for whom life in the synagogue was central..the issue of how Jesus and his message related to the law was absolutely key.   Here, “law” doesn’t mean civil regulations.  It means the sacred law of Torah, the first five books of the Bible.  So much of the essence of the faith of the people of Israel was understood in terms of duty and obedience to the legal system established by Torah.   All of faith as the understood it revolved around their engagement with and discussion of the Law, and so...listening to this strange itinerant preacher/prophet/rabbi person, they would have been hanging eagerly on these words.  What does all of this mean, relative to everything that is important to us?

And so after a series of blessings for those who are suffering and downtrodden, he begins to talk about the law.

What we want to hear, we who tend to prefer freedom and openness, is that with Jesus, we’re free to do whatever it is we want.  Jesus, the one who brings us love instead of the law.  Jesus, the one who sets us free from the fear that God is going to smite us for infractions.  Jesus, the one who shows us grace, and makes it so much easier.

He doesn’t.

He says that he’s not here to destroy the law or to get rid of it or even really to replace it.    He’s here to fulfill it.  Every word, he says.  And to that, the part of us that does not like to be bounded cringes a little bit.  How are we to relate this to our faith?  Are all of the laws of Torah still in effect?  Does this mean that we’re stuck frittering over every last detail of the law, worrying over whether or not our clothes have inappropriately mixed fibers and unable to eat a cheeseburger or anything wrapped in bacon?  Because a Christianity that forbade bacon would make spreading the good news a little more challenging.

If we read further on, though, into the section where Jesus describes what that means, it’s clear that has very different implications for those who are called into following the Christian path.

In the sections that follow, Jesus shows that what matters to God is less about the letter of the law, and more about the degree to which we have taken the intent of that law into ourselves.  If the purpose of the law is restoration, then we cannot retaliate.  If the purpose of the law is to set the world at peace, then we cannot turn our hearts to violence.  If the purpose of the law is God’s radiantly generous love for all of us, then we can’t mete out love only to those who can do for us in return.

In that, the goal of the Christian is to be...as Jesus describes it...like salt.  Meaning, we are the person that God created us to be, down to our very core.

And that, to tell the truth of it, is harder than just following a simple pattern of rules.  It requires us to continually work on ourselves, on our angers and our hungers, on our anxieties and on our fears.  It requires us to challenge ourselves, to be continually engaged in that process of committing ourselves to God’s Reign, allowing that transformation to work in us.

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

System Requirements

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

02.02.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Micah 6:1-6

[errata: In the below audio version of this sermon, I wandered off text for a moment or two when explaining Shittim and Gilgal.  While the section on this being shorthand for "entering the promised land" is correct as it appears in the written text, my additional discussion of Jacob and Esau is not.  That river is the Jabbok.  I realized this as I was saying it, and accuracy matters.]

In our kitchen, we have a drawer.  If you slide that drawer open, inside it you’ll find papers and knicknacks, the detritus of the fifteen years we’ve spent in our home.  We call it the “stuff” drawer, or words to that general effect.

In that drawer are things we apparently think might still be useful at some point, like phone directories from our kid’s preschool.  There are also electronic devices, the latest and greatest technological doodaddery from five or six years ago.  It’s an amazing array of Apple products, mostly, iPods and nanos and iPod Touches, and a couple of first gen iPhones.  There’s also an impossible tangle of chargers and dongles and mangled earbuds, all wound up together like a ball of hibernating albino garter snakes.  

Here and there around the house, there are little hidden corners, where ancient laptops and boxes of old three and a half floppy disks sit gathering dust.

It’s hard to let those things go, it is, because it’s kind of hard to believe that they don’t have any residual worth.  My motorcycle is a 2008, dagflabbit, and it still runs just fine if you change the oil now and again.  But that 3G iPhone you can find sitting in that drawer, made that very same year?  It’s worth less than nothing.  It’s still the same device, and able to do all of the things it once did.

Only that’s not quite enough any more.  As we rush forward in the ever sweeping march of progress , our expectations are always being pushed and stretched forward.

It can feel overwhelming at times, as the machines that surround us relentlessly require either new operating systems or upgrades or updates.  You’ll settle in, trying to do something, and the next thing you know your magic devil box is telling you that you need to install this thing, or that thing.

Or it will just sigh at you, and let you know that it doesn’t meet the requirements, and maybe you should just go drop it in that drawer.

That little computer brain in your pocket just won’t have any clue what to do with the new thing you’ve shown to it.  It’ll have absolutely no idea. To do that new thing, you’ll need to do it in a new way.  Real change is like that.

Which, honestly, is kind of the alert message that Micah is sending the people of Judah in the sharp little missive we find in today’s scripture reading.  Micah pitched out his message to the people about eight hundred years before Jesus showed up, meaning he was preaching at pretty much the same time as the prophet Isaiah and the prophet Amos.

There is, in the Bible, a kind of writing called “theodicy.”  This is when a faithful person stands on their relationship with God, and challenges God to hold up the divine end the bargain.  If you’ve ever read the book of Job, that’s a theodicy, a theological indictment.

This little section of Micah is exactly the opposite.  From the mouth of the prophet, we hear a challenge laid before the people of Judah.  “You expect me to be in relationship with you,” God asks.  “You really want to be in relationship with me?  I wanted that, too. I thought we had an understanding.  I thought we were on the same page.  But now, well, now I’ve got beef.  You’ve crossed a line, and you don’t even seem to know that you’ve crossed it.”

Though the mouth of the prophet, God is challenging the people to hold up their end of the arrangement.  “I’ve done what I can do,” God says, and then reminds them of what that means.

Remember Egypt, and the Pharoah, and how you were slaves?  Well, you’re not any more.  Remember Moses, and his brother Aaron, and his sister Miriam?  You’re free now.

“Remember what I did with King Balak of Moab, and Balaam, son of Beor?”  

To which we, now, say...um...not really.  Um.  Was Beor..uh...that big hairy bear guy in the second Hobbit movie?

But this story would have been more familiar to the people of Judah, a total favorite for the kids at bedtime.  We can read it in Numbers chapter 22.  On their journey through the wilderness to the promised, land, the people of Israel passed through the land of the Moabites.  King Balak summoned the prophet Balaam, and asked him to curse the people of Israel as they trucked on through, but three times Balaam tried, and three times Balaam found that he was unable to say anything other than a blessing.  Great bedtime stuff, huh?  Um.  Did I mention there’s a talking donkey in the story?  I’m not sure if Eddie Murphy voiced it, but still.  A Talking Donkey in the Torah.  You remember that story.

God then reminds them what happened between Shittim and Gilgal, which, again, we’re not quite so clear on these days, beyond noting that this is one of those verses you need to remind lay readers to pronounce very carefully when reading it in worship.

Here, it helps to know your geography.  Shittim is on one side of the river Jordan, and Gilgal is on the other.  What happened between those two places?  You came to the land of promise, that’s what happened.  

So in this passage, God is saying: I delivered you.  I blessed you.  I named you.  And in return, what do I expect?  I expect you to hold up your end of the arrangement, and that means something rather different than you seem to think it does.

What the people had come to think was simple. Their worship needed to be nothing more or less than the ritual sacrifice of the temple.  All they needed to do was to show up, do their thing, and they had fulfilled their responsibility.  You make the sacrifice, you reap the blessings.  The exchange was basic.  It was a nice and easy transaction, a simple process that couldn’t have been more straightforward.

So they did those things, and then trucked on through life as if God couldn’t have cared less how they lived.

Micah challenged the people of Israel to understand their relationship to their Maker in different terms.  To really live into that relationship, they were going to need to do things in a new way.

What mattered to their Creator was not the volume of their sacrifices, but the way they lived.  What mattered to their God was that they attended to the injustices in their society, not allowing the poor to struggle without hope and not allowing the wealthy and powerful to prey on the weak.  What mattered to their God was that they valued kindness in their exchanges with others, and that they stood humbly with their God.

If they wanted to really be engaged with their God, wanted that relationship to change and transform their existence, then they needed to understand what the requirements were, and understand those requirements clearly.

And as easy as it is for us to scoff at those silly Judeans, we may also have something of a struggle with approaching our God in the way that Micah asked.  Our expectation, as a culture, is that most of our exchanges can be approached as a transaction.  We assume that there’s really very little that cannot be dealt with as an exchange, little that can’t be managed as a this-for-that.

But that way of approaching life isn’t how our Creator means us to live.  If we approach God in that way, we’re not quite getting it.  The life we’re trying to live does not quite mesh with the one that God seeks to bless and inhabit.

What God seems to require of us is that our lives mesh with the purpose he’s laid out. To experience that relationship, to actually be engaged with our Creator in the ways that matter, we need to have structured our days in such a way that our doing makes space for God’s work.  It isn’t complicated.  Pray.  Make space and time for acts of kindness, and works that heal the broken.

But it also means no longer viewing those actions as an exchange, but instead a thing you do with your whole being.

That means living out that self that God knows, and is calling us to be.

So as you hope for that sense of grace and purpose in your life, remember what it is that is required.

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