O Breath

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 04.06.14

Scripture Lesson:  Ezekiel 37:1-14

Every once in a while, we get stuck.  We reach that point where we feel we’ve run out of ideas.

Generally, we bop along, repeating the patterns of our days, and things work, more or less.  You wake up early, you have a cup of coffee, you go tell your teens to wake up already, then you go straighten up a bit, and then you pour another half-cup of coffee, which steels you for having to go tell your teens that really, c’mon, it seriously is time already.

Those comfortable patterns work for us, cycling day in and day out.  You get to work, you check your messages, you check your email, you review your to-do list and your quarterly task list, you play just a tiny bit of Candy Crush, and then you get to it.  You keep getting to it until the day is over, and then you go home, eat, sleep, and repeat.  Nothing anomalous.  Every day a little bit different, and a whole lot the same.

But then there come times when you suddenly realize that none of it is working.  So you double down on what you know should work.  Oooh, I know, I know, we Presbyterians think.  Let’s have a meeting! Gather a committee! Or maybe, maybe, we’ll have to bring out the big guns.  A task force. Task forces always work. But then it doesn’t.

You get creative, you try new things.  You try crazy new things.  You try anything that pops into your head.  Admittedly, the one that involved wearing everyone hand-made paper-mache heads wasn’t well thought through, but hey, you were spitballing.  And still, none of it is working.

You’re at that place where, if you are hard and honest with yourself, there seems to be no way out. 

You are becalmed.  You’re dead in the water. You feel locked in place, paralyzed with a fundamental uncertainty about what to do next, or how to even begin to move on from the place you find yourself.

I’ve been in those times, and they’re rough on a soul.  You feel trapped, locked into a certain way of being.  They can happen in our vocations, or in our schooling, when we find ourselves suddenly at an impasse.  We’re unable to move forward, stalled out as we realize we’re doing something that we’d really never planned on doing with our lives, and we can’t see how we could do anything else.

It’s harder still when you reach that point in a relationship, when that whole arc of a friendship or a marriage suddenly seems to have changed.  It’s not the thing you were sure it was going to be, and it has reached the point where you can no longer really even imagine it becoming anything different.

For most of us, for normal human beings, this is a difficult place. It is the place where we become anxious, and angry.  It is a place of quiet desperation, one that normal human beings hope not to encounter.

Ezekiel, though, was not a normal human being.  Ezekiel was a weird, weird dude.

He needed to be weird, because he lived in weird times. Ol’ Zeke was a member of the priesthood, with a clear career track as a priest in the temple in Jerusalem.  That was his whole life.  He was a Zadokite, meaning the priesthood was in his blood.  His daddy’d been a priest, and so had his grandpappy.  As he’d grown up, he would have learned all of the rituals, all of the complicated prayers and songs and sacrificial techniques. He would have learned how to dress, how to eat, and how to follow the law to keep himself pure for the temple. It was his whole life, his whole understanding of himself.

And then that thing was destroyed. Ezekiel shared his visions with a people who had watched Jerusalem burn. They had seen their leaders butchered. They had been driven from the land that had belonged to their ancestors for generation that stretched back into legend. The temple, the Holy of Holies, the footstool of the God of Israel, that temple lay as a ruin, battered and burned, all of its sacred and holy objects looted or scattered to the four winds.

His people were lost. Their hopes were dead. Their future was a dead thing, shattered by the military might of Babylon and blowing like ashes throughout the empire. Ezekiel himself had been taken with them, and he found suddenly that all of the tools of his trade, all of the rituals that made him a priest over the people, were now meaningless. What does it matter if you know how to do a perfect temple worship if the temple has been crushed to rubble? How do you speak to a people who have given up, who declare that they might as well be dead...no, more than that....they say they ARE dead. As they sat and wept by the rivers of Babylon, the people of Israel were dead to hope, dead to a future, and worst of all, convinced that they were dead to God.

How does a priest talk to a people when he has no temple and no sacrifice? Every tool in his priestly toolbox was gone. He had nothing. But Ezekiel wasn’t just a priest. He wasn’t just a temple functionary. Having been torn from the foundations of the past, he suddenly found himself connecting to God in ways that he hadn’t planned for and hadn’t trained for and didn’t expect.

Ezekiel suddenly finds himself connecting to God in ways that go beyond rites and sacrifices. Throughout this book, we see him moved by visions and impulses that stem from God himself.  Each time, it’s a vision. Each time, he is being grasped by God’s Spirit, and shown something that an ordinary way of understanding can’t express.  More often that not, he chooses to express himself in extraordinary ways.  He digs holes in things.  He lies on one side for a month.  He makes Ezekiel bread. Anyone ever buy Ezekiel bread?  That Whole Foods kinda product is notable not so much for the healthy ancient grains that comprise it, but for the fact that he’s supposed to cook it over a burning mound of excrement.  Like I said, Ezekiel was a weird, weird dude.

And his 

This vision is one of a great valley, one that could be accurately called the “Valley of the Shadow of Death.”  It’s filled with bones and lifelessness, the remains of a people.  There’s nothing there any more, nothing at all.  They are not just bones, but dry bones.

It’s a stark and desolate image, in which no hope remains.  It is the most primal form of ruin.

In the midst of this bleakness, Ezekiel finds himself set down by his Creator’s hand and spirit.  He surveys the death around him, shown them all by his Creator.  He gets asked a question.  “Can these bones live?”   And he says, wisely, “Um, I think you have the answer to that.”  The answer rested in God’s creative power, so far beyond Ezekiel’s grasp that in this vision he wisely chose not to even hazard a guess.

In this vision, that which seems totally lost, irrevokably broken?  It gets remade.  And then it is not just remade, but given life again.  “Come from the four winds, O breath,” Ezekiel is told to say, and he does, and what seemed broken beyond repair is made whole again.

That was the message that the shattered people of Israel needed to hear in their lostness and despair.  It is also the message we need to hear, when we find our lives are empty, broken, or lifeless.

In those places, what allows us to endure is trust and patience.  

Trust, that even though we may not ourselves be able to find an answer, that does not mean that there is not an answer out there.  

Patience, because as we are pushing our way out of those times of seeming hopelessness, it doesn’t happen on our schedule.

Let that breath be in you, and in me, AMEN.

Facepalm Sunday

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

04.13.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 21:1-11

There are some things, now, that are a little hard to understand.  There’s a peculiar new shift in language, something having to do with our slow transition away from being people who can actually read to people who can only look at pictures of kittens.

Among the new words we might not understand is one that wasn’t around 20 years ago: meme.  “Meme” is a unit of cultural data, a bit of information that is passed along from person to person, kind of like a gene is passed from generation to generation.  Now, it tends to involve pictures of kittens.

Another new word is a mix of two others.  Face and palm give us “Facepalm,” that movement you make when someone says something so impossibly oblivious that your head sinks down in despair, resting in your hand.  Face, meet palm.

These things, we get.  But there are some things I just can’t get, and have never been able to quite grasp.  Like, say, the concept of “winning.”  On the surface, that would seem like a pretty basic one.

There’s something to be said for winning, for triumphing, for coming out on top.  I’ll freely admit that it doesn’t happen often in my own existence.  That fierce competitiveness, the intensity of our aggressive culture, I seem to have missed out on it somehow.  I like doing my best, but I just don’t have that killer instinct.

But compete we do.

It’s a peculiar form of madness, which was everywhere last month.  March Madness is done now, finally, and I notice it even though I suffer from Sports Enthusiasm Deficiency Disorder.  Honestly, I’m glad we’re done with March, because it’s starting to freak me out a little bit.  Maybe it’s the reinforcing effect of the social media echo chamber.  I pop onto Facebook to see how my friends are doing, and they’re all talking about brackets, and sharing brackets, and making up brackets that involve prominent figures from modern Christianity and superheroes and global political figures.  I wake up on March mornings, haunted by the fear that I’ll go outside, and everyone I know and love will be shambling around with dead eyes, mumbling the word “brackettttts” over and over to themselves.

And in those brackets, there is just a single winner, just one who makes it.  From Connecticut, or so I’m told, although why Connecticut as a state should be so dominant eludes me.  Maybe there’s a special place in America’s heart for a team named after extra large boys clothing.  

We approach so much of life as conflict, and in some ways that’s a good thing. Being competitive strengthens us.  It pushes us.  It drives us to stretch ourselves. Striving with another person makes us stronger, just as straining against a weight builds us up.

But when we view our whole world in terms of conflict, when we look at everything in the binary and polarizing terms of our victory and their loss, we create a world that looks a certain way.  We establish a way of relating to other persons that defines them as either our adversary or the opposing team.

That’s fine when it’s a game, something done for mutual enjoyment, and for mutual strengthening.

But in the world, as a way of understanding everything?  As a way of running a political system, or a legal system, or an economy?  It often causes more harm than good.  It creates adversarial relationships that do not need to exist. It turns us from those around us who may have something to offer, and instead drives us to view every moment as time to be in conflict.  That approach to living just drives us away from being able to see others with a heart of compassion.

And it is the way of human relating that sits at the heart of the Palm Sunday error, the fundamental misunderstanding of who Jesus was that colors every retelling of this story every year we retell it.

If you’ve ever been to a Palm Sunday service before, or if you learned about this story as a child, then you probably have a mental image of what I just read to you. There’s Jesus riding into town on a donkey, and he’s coming through the gates of the city, and everyone is waving these fronds in the air and hosannahing like they just don’t care.

That’s certainly the story we get in the other Gospels.  But it’s not the story we’ve just heard, not if we were listening closely.   Matthew, earnest and eager and passionate about finding connections between everything Jesus ever did and the stories from the Torah and prophets.

In Matthew’s story of Jesus, the tale gets told a little bit differently.  He takes a quotation about the arrival of the messiah from the prophet Zechariah (14:4), pitching out to us the vision that the one will arrive riding a donkey.  Well, not just a donkey.

Hebrew poetry doubles things up when it wants to emphasize something.  Many of the Psalms and sayings of the prophets end that way, saying the same thing again in a slightly different way to make sure you haven’t missed it the first time.  I do that with kids all the time myself.

What’s being emphasized is the humbleness of the mount.  This is a small, mild, and nonthreatening beast of burden, not the noble steed of a mighty king, but another kind of creature entirely.  This isn’t a mighty stallion, or even an elephant.  This is nothing like Prince Ali’s arrival scene from Aladdin, kids, and it’s not just because there’s no Robin Williams genie or 95 white persian monkeys.  

Matthew wrote like a Jewish scribe, meaning he was eager to double-down on every scripture that might have possibly in some way pointed to Jesus.  And so, unlike Mark, Luke and John, Matthew gives us Jesus riding not one, but two donkeys, which I honestly have a little trouble visualizing.  

He’s “sitting on them both?”  

In my more mischievous moments, I see Matthew’s Jesus riding them like a dolphin rider at Seaworld, one foot on one, one foot on another like he’s donkey-skiing into Jerusalem.  

But that’s just being silly.  Jesus enters the city, and the story Matthew pitches out to us covers that, more or less.

As the story tells it, everyone in Jerusalem thought the arrival meant there would soon be triumph, that it spoke to them finally finding their way to the place where the whole of their world would recognize who he was.  The world had been cruel to the people of Judah, and they were looking, eagerly, for their savior.  They understood that savior as the meshiach, the anointed one, the king who would come and set the whole world right again.

But from atop that donkey, the smell of animal and dust and sweat strong about him, Jesus saw where he was very differently.    He knew, as the crowds and his disciples did not, what this arrival meant.   It did not mean the crushing and humiliating defeat of Herod and Rome.  It did not mean angelic armies, or God showing up with face-melting death beams like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark to smite the infidels with a big smitey smiting.

He saw, as the Judeans in Jerusalem did not, that Jerusalem itself and the power struggles around it meant nothing.  Why would he want to overthrow that power?  Why would he desire to take it for himself?  Soon enough, it would be nothing, shattered and smoldering after Rome had annihilated it.  And then, in just a blink of an cosmic eye after that, the false glory that was Rome would tear itself to pieces, just as every empire does.

The most peculiar part of what Jesus proclaimed was that it wasn’t just about one group winning out over another.  He was not there just to give the Judeans victory over their Roman oppressors.  He was not bringing them the thing they were cheering for.

What Jesus had been teaching was different.  What he saw was rather different.  Jesus saw redemption and love, and the path of compassion.  And in the cheering of that crowd, in their yearning for victory, Jesus would have heard them not getting it.  

They didn’t get that compassion, radical and fundamental, was at the heart of the message that carries through this most holy of Christian seasons.  They didn’t understand that the reconciliation and hope Jesus brought was not just theirs, but was also intended to restore their enemies.  It was not just meant for them.

And from that misunderstanding, so written into our sacred story, it is maybe better not to think of this as Palm Sunday.  It’s more Facepalm Sunday, that day when Jesus rests his face in his hand, the shouting throng around him, and says, “Oh, me, they really really don’t have a clue what I’ve been talking about.” 

And to be honest, we still struggle with this.  We struggle with it as we look out to those who are different, to those who stand in opposition to us.  Our task, if we take what Jesus taught us seriously, is not to destroy them.  It is not to prosper at their expense.  It is not to rout them, but to find a way to love them as God does.

In this sacred season, take that out into the world with you. 

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