Doing Our Job

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

08.31.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Romans 12: 9 - 21

Yeah, I know, y’all here in Maryland have had a whole week of school already.

But it’s still summer, still hot and steamy on both sides of the Potomac, because of course it is.  It’s the Labor Day weekend, when summer still holds sway, right before we throw ourselves back into the flow of the year.  For those of us across the river in Virginia, Labor Day means nooow we can end summer.  Maybe it’s because we’re just a little further South, and we know that trying to get things going before the swampy heat has finally left the air will just make us want to lay out on the porch with a mint julep.

No matter what today happens to feel like, the lazy days of summer, those doldrums and drifting nothings of the final weeks of August, they’re finally winding down.  We’re back to work, and school is back, and that means a different thing every year.  Because every year, we put our beloved bundles of joy into the hands of a new cadre of teachers.

And that’s always interesting.  It’s interesting because, well, I’ve known so many teachers.  I’ve had wonderful, wonderful teachers, people who’ve radically changed the flow of my life by sharing their love for learning.  There was Uncle Bob, the English teacher who taught me to hone and focus my writing, teaching me that just because I’d developed a huge vocabulary I didn’t need to aim an endless firehose of words at people.  Be precise.  Be evocative.  Trust the imagination of your reader.  Please.

For that, and for the relatively brief sermons that writing lesson has produced, we can all be truly thankful.

There was Dr. B, the high school history teacher who brought history to life, who told it like a story, rich and complex and interconnected and human.  He pushed us, and demanded the best of us, but he also trusted that we’d deliver, and respected our best efforts.  I learned as much from him as I’ve learned from anyone.

There was my physics teacher, Judy, who we all called Grumby.  She just loved science, the wonder of losing yourself in the structure of creation.  She’d get excited about experiments, and taught us to look at equations like we’d look at a really cool puzzle, and when we actually managed to solve something on our own, her delight was genuine.  More than anything, she shared her enthusiasm with all of us.  Science is amazing and fun, she’d say, and she meant it.

They had impact, impact that still ripples down all these years later, and as our kids go off to school, the knowledge that there are some wonderful, gifted teachers out there who are going to challenge our kids to excel is heartening.

There is, of course, a flip side.  Because teachers are human beings.  Yes, I know, it’s hard to believe that when you’re a kid, but they are.  There are great teachers, and there are good teachers, and there are...well...not so good teachers.

For every Albus Dumbledore or Minerva McGonegal, there’s a Dolores Umbridge or a Gilderoy Lockhart.  That’s true in every vocation, and in every field of endeavor.  There are good cops and bad cops, good CEOs and bad CEOs, good pilots and bad pilots, good farmers and bad farmers, good soldiers and bad ones.  

Except for pastors.  There are only good pastors.  Um, right?   Ahem.

It’s a continuum, really, not a binary thing, and the danger that all of us face is that we can find ourselves drifting from one place to another.  We can start out with the best of hopes and intentions.    But we burn out, and get worn down.  We can lose our way in the thickets of distraction, focusing on process to the point where we forget our goal, or becoming so target-fixated on our goal that we forget the point of it as we claw our way there.  

From the Apostle Paul today, we get some vital teaching about the point of what we do.  What matters, in the day to day work of our lives?  What makes our efforts real, and worthwhile?

By the time we reach the middle of chapter twelve of this highly complex letter, we’re beginning the end of what Paul has to say to Rome.  He’s already pitched out some wild and complicated theology, as he pulled out the stops for his educated Roman audience.  For most of the letter, it’s difficult going, demanding our attention, demanding our focus.  

From Paul’s rock-solid foundation as a brilliant rhetorician, he’s crafted an extended exploration of what it means to be reconciled to God’s grace through faith, which fills the first eight chapters of the letter.  From chapters nine through eleven, it’s a dizzying theological and historical explanation of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity.

Then we get to chapter twelve, and the whole tone of the letter changes.  “So,” Paul says, “I’ve just like, totally blown your theological mind. Catch your breath.  Let’s take it down a bit, to the here and now, to what it means when this thing is real.”

When the Apostle Paul starts describing the end results of faith, the results of our struggle to embrace and serve God in this life, what’s striking is the degree to which he just gets down to brass tacks. His writing here is as basic and straightforward as the rest of this letter is complicated.

The Christian Way, after all, is a vocation.  It’s a calling.  If we’re allowing it to be what Jesus meant it to be for all of us, it’s the job of jobs, and like all good work, you can tell when you’re doing it right.

Paul lays the measures out, one by one.  Love is a huge part of it, the main part of it, the entire point of it, love and everything it means in our lives.  It means being giving, celebrating and rejoicing in the happiness of others.  It means refusing to let the human desire for vengeance to seep into your being, and become the reason you live as you do.  Compassion becomes the measure for every action.

It means actually caring about how you live and act, knowing that living out the teachings of Jesus isn’t something you can do grudgingly or emptily.  For that path to thrive, it has to be integrated into your whole being.  It has to be authentic.  It has to really matter.

It means not treating anyone differently, in honoring every person, no matter who they are or what they do.  The wealthy and the powerful and the famous should be no more worthy of your love and compassion than the poor and the weak and the unknown.  That one in particular was hard for the folks in Rome to hear, because First century Rome was an honor/shame culture, a carefully structured hierarchy, in which everyone knew their place.  You obeyed your superiors, and your inferiors were expected to come to you on bended knee.  Roman society was a place where you were forever trying to build connections, to develop contacts, to amass reputation so that you could move ever upward in the pecking order of society.  

Nothing like Washington in the 21st century.  Nothing at all.

And it needs to be chosen, again and again, as you move through life.  Every time we decide, every time we take an action, those basic measures apply to our Christian vocation.

They also, as it happens, are the primary measures of our work in any field of endeavor.  If we’re a student or a teacher, a public servant or a business person, these things matter.  I think about every great teacher I ever had, and those measures stand.  They really cared for their students.  They loved the subjects they taught.  They were authentic, genuine, and real persons, who embraced their role but did not allow it to crowd out their humanity.

In everything we do and everything we attempt, in our every task and action, remember that this is the point of it.

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

Old Clothes

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

08.24.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Isaiah 51:1-6

I‘m really bad about getting rid of clothes.  My wife reminds me of this, regularly.  “Honey, you really shouldn’t still be wearing those pants,” she’ll say, shaking her head, as I wander around Annandale in jeans so shredded they’d embarrass an eighties glam-metal band.

She’s right, of course.  I do hang on to things.

There, in my drawers and in the third portion of our bedroom closet space that I get to use, there are garments that have accreted over the nearly thirty years since I finally stopped growing.  There’s a shirt with a bright yellow sun, a shirt that a certain eighteen year old girl gave me.  It was her first present to me, purchased when she went down to Florida to visit her grandparents, just weeks after we’d started dating.  It’s threadbare and worn to the point where it might just dissolve if I washed it again, but I can’t quite bring myself to be rid of it.

There in the closet is a deep navy collar shirt, still neat and comfy, part of the uniform I wore when I was working as a stock clerk at a little shop and restaurant in Williamsburg, all of twenty-two years of age.  That, I still wear.

There rolled up in the back of a drawer is a strange mottled tie-dye, one purchased when my new bride and I took a honeymoon taxi jaunt into the green hills of Jamaica with this much older couple we’d met at our high security entertainment resort compound.  Thinking back, that couple must have been, gosh, maybe in their early thirties.  The shirt was a bargain, mostly because it was an ugly mess.  You want to buy that shirt?  The one that looks like mud and bile?  What you been smokin’, mon?   Even though I wouldn’t be caught dead in it now, I can’t be rid of it.

I have clothes, still, that were handed down from my grandfather.  I have clothes, still, that were handed down to me from my wife’s grandfather, who was just my size.  When we went, with family, to the gravesite as part of the Jewish tradition marking a year after his passing, I was wearing one of his shirts, and a pair of his pants, and his jacket, and his socks.

I have inexplicable clothes, like the shirt neatly rolled up in the back of my tshirt drawer.  On it, pictures drawn by every child in my younger son’s three’s class in preschool.  It’s a tiny little thing, a shirt that looks made for a stuffed animal.  I’d be hard pressed to fit it on my head as a hat.  And yet once my now 14 year old fit into it.

I just don’t like getting rid of clothes, especially if they’re imbued with positive memories, and double-especially-plus if they still fit me, even if only as a hat.  We like holding on to good things, we do.

Part of the reason for that may be that so much of what the world clings to seems dark and bitter.  At every turn, the world seems like a ruin.  You can’t power up your laptop without being bombarded by images of war and loss and horror.  You can’t drop onto Facebook for a kitten-picture-fix or a vacation image update without someone pitching up some reminder of the world’s brokenness.

The media hums and crackles with hysteria, every headline and talking head talking about the darkness, it’s easy to yield to the sense that what matters about humankind and our relationship with God is simply that we are an utterly irredeemable mess.  What seems permanent, etched forever in stone, is the brokenness of humankind.  We see it everywhere.  We see it in the violence and distrust on the streets of Ferguson, in the seemingly intractable mess in Gaza.  We see it as diseases straight out of our darkest tales of horror burn across Africa.  We see it as bombs and bloodshed still rage in the Middle East, and as Afghanistan teeters towards chaos and collapse.

What are you going to do to cheer yourself up these days, watch a Disney film?  You could pop in Aladdin...oh...wait.  Sigh.  

It feels sometimes like we are trapped in mess, wrapped up in mess as inescapably as a 19th century madman in a Bedlam straightjacket.  In that dark place, we lose our ability to see any other possibility than darkness.  We can feel trapped, helpless, and alone.

From the Book of the Prophet Isaiah today we hear a message from a time in which--for an entire people--the struggle to get around the brokenness of the world seemed insurmountable.  Most Bible scholars worth their salt see the Book of Isaiah divided up into three clear sections, each of which has it’s own particular focus.

Today’s section comes from what is known as Second Isaiah, which was written and preached over five hundred years before Christ by a prophet who followed the tradition of Isaiah. Its visions and proclamations do not describe a Hebrew people comfortably ensconced in Jerusalem and the temple, as do the first thirty-nine chapters. They assume that the Jewish people are shattered in the Babylonian exile, that they are slaves, that they are surrounded by the proud power of the world’s greatest empire.

What those enslaved people saw, around them, were some of the most impressive structures that humankind had ever built.  They saw towers and gardens, wonders of the world.  They saw great golden statues to strange and alien gods.  They saw the force of arms of a mighty empire that dwarfed even the greatest aspirations of their people.  In the hands of those who had enslaved them, all the power of the world seemed to reside.

There just seemed no way out of it.

It was hard. It seemed hopeless. People began to despair.

But the word from God that Isaiah proclaimed defied their hopelessness. It was a word of intense and shattering hope, a word that comes directly from the prophet’s sense of being anointed with the Spirit of the Living God. It’s a word of intense confidence in the power of God to bring about restoration.

For the oppressed and the brokenhearted and the captives, the prophet affirmed the devastation that they were experiencing. Yet in the face of their suffering...and in some way because of their suffering...the prophet declares that God’s love is infinitely greater than the powers of darkness that seemed so mighty all around them.

In this passage, he goes back to ancient promises to their ancestors, promises that were fulfilled.  He acknowledges that they’re in a wasteland, and doesn’t mock their experience of suffering.

What he does do is put into the context of the Creator of the Universe.  Look at everything you, Isaiah says.  Look at it.  The heavens?  They are no more substantial than smoke before a strong wind.  Those powerful people?  Their lives are as short as the lives of tiny flies.  And the seemingly tight knit power of the world?  That comes apart like a Kmart tube sock on the foot of a teenage boy.

It wears out like a garment.

It’s a word that they needed to hear, and a word without which their hearts would have been too broken to continue. It’s also a word that many of us need to hear in the darker places of our lives, as many of us look fearfully out at the seemingly insurmountable power of the broken world around us.

In his reaffirmation of God’s eternal power and love for all of his people, the prophet is affirming two things to those who despaired.  

First, that the only way out of a broken place lies in not allowing that brokenness to become the only thing you see.  That’s the great challenge that lies in those times when our lives seem to have closed in around us.  God’s capacity to make things new stands without boundary, and without limit.  But we too often hold on to the broken things, the darknesses and the griefs and the angers, and allow them to define our view of existence.  

That’s a place devoid of hope, and if we let ourselves be wrapped in it, it becomes a shroud.  That, more than anything, is the dark lie of depression, which whispers that there can never be change, never be good, never be anything again.

Second, the prophet affirms that no matter what happens, God holds on to those good things.  Salvation will be forever, and deliverance will never be ended, says the prophet.  Promises once made remain, and promises yet unfulfilled will be written forever into the book of life.

Whatever may shroud you now, whatever snares you and holds you, that’s not God’s will.  Let it fall away, and trust that this is God’s desire for you, a strong promise to a beloved child.

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

What We’ve Got

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 08.03.14

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 14:13-21

It’s rolling into late summer, and that means engaging with a favorite late summer pastime with my boys.  The wild bustle of the summer shuttling has reached the August doldrums, which means we finally have time to look around at the clutter and mess of the house, and begin the summer kid junk deletion.

Every year, we sort through the piles of debris that have built up and gathered, the old abandoned mess that has accreted into our lives over the years.  It’s fun, actually, like flipping through a scrapbook, the kind of chore that the kids volunteer for.  I remember when I got this!  I remember when we were there!

The flow of stuff into the lives of our children isn’t like a water fountain of possessions.  It’s like a water cannon, one of those truck-mounted jobbies that you use to extinguish burning aircraft or knock down rioters. The next time we have a water fight with the Baptists down the street, we are so going to rent one of those.

 It’s such a great wash of things that it seems sometimes to overwhelm us.  Cleaning out the results of that flow is both satisfying and necessary, as vital to our home as dreaming is to our minds, or defragging is to a hard drive.

Last year, during the summer, we cleared out the stuff they’d outgrown, and didn’t need or want.  The year before, during the summer, we cleared out the stuff they didn’t need or want.  And yet, still and all, when we went this week to clear out the stuff they didn’t need or want, there was a full thirty-two gallon garbage bag of stuff that was so useless and broken that it couldn’t even be donated.

Which, of course, we were keeping around the house, neatly stored in bins.  Or, rather, not so neatly stored, but it was in bins.  Mostly.

And yet here we are, in a society with so much that we struggle to know what to do with it, so much that we spend, according to the Self Storage Association of America, twenty-four billion dollars a year in the United States to rent space in one of the almost fifty thousand storage facilities in this country, where we stash the things we don’t have room for in our overstuffed homes.  What we have here in America is a choking overabundance.  

The desperate irony is that we are taught to feel, somehow, that this is not quite enough.  There’s still this carefully taught hunger, this sense that somehow what we have doesn’t cut it, a sense that is reinforced every time we’re bombarded with carefully targeted ads whenever we connect with the news or sit down to share baby pictures and arguments about Gaza on Facebook. Here is the car you do not have! Here are more shoes!

We are a society that, even in the face of having everything we could possibly need, is taught to be ever anxious.  Even more, so many of us feel deeply and radically alone, isolated from one another, distrustful of one another.  Here we are, connected to the whole world, with our thousand and four Facebook friends and millions of human beings there for us to connect with, and yet we feel more isolated and lonely than ever.  Anxiety can consume us, doubt at our ability to spread graciousness in the world tears at us, and we can despair.

Just as the disciples despaired, as they looked out into the crowds that surrounded in the gathering darkness of evening.

This story, of the loaves and the fishes, may be a familiar tale.  It is retold by all of the Gospels, but it’s got a couple of unusual and noteworthy elements.  First, it’s a really rather amazingly simple event.  It’s visceral, a fundamentally graspable and elemental thing, the stuff of the every day.

What it’s not is a hugely impressive mega-miracle, the sort of thing that would strike you as amazing the moment you saw it.  It’s nothing wild and supernatural, not a pillar of fire, not the Red Sea parting, not the 113th Congress actually getting something done.  You’d barely have even noticed, if you were there watching.

Up at the front, you’d have seen Jesus speaking a blessing, and then the disciples taking what little food they had and starting to share it with those around them.  Nothing glorious or striking about it.  It’s just that there was food, and everyone got fed.

Which is a miracle in and of itself, the sort of miracle we blunder right on by pretty much every day.  The yellow light from a G-class star falls on our rocky world.  In a wildly complex organic response, those photons awake grains, which rise up tall and golden and rich with life to meet that light.  Even more complicated organic beings systematically harvest those grains, which they’ve somehow learned to grind and mix and heat and mix with other organisms to make it rise.  Bread.  So simple.  So taken for granted, though it is part of the miracle of life itself and the glorious abundance of God’s creation.  That miracle we miss, even though it is amazing and wondrous.

Being a vegetarian and all, I won’t talk about the fish half of the equation.  Poor little fishies.  Snif.

There was food, and everyone got fed.  Everyone.

That second part was what the disciples struggled with.  Here in Matthew’s telling of the story, he and Mark speak the same truth.  They’ve gone to a “lonely place,” a place away from the crowds, for the sole purpose of getting away from the hubbub for a little while.

But the crowds have followed, setting out to hear this prophet, this teacher, this wonderworker.  The day was growing late, and the disciples, seeing the throngs, were eager to wrap things up and get people home.  That, and they were worried, because out there in the wild, there was no way they could insure everyone got fed.  Here they were in the wilderness, with nary a Burger King or Dennys in sight.

How can we know they’ve got food?  We have food, sure, but they might not.  They are anxious about the gathering, anxious that hungry crowds might lose sight of their message, anxious that there will not be enough.

Which, Jesus knew, there was.

In the face of their anxiety about what they had, Jesus told them: give it away.  Break the bread.  Cook the fish.  Share it with a blessing.

And sure, you can read this as the more traditional miracle if you so choose, as if Scotty had beamed down a replicator from the Enterprise and they were cranking out copies of loaves and tilapia.

I tend to see the miracle that spread through the crowd not as the fish or the bread, but the blessing that rode with it.  Here, Jesus insures that everyone will be fed by graciously, confidently sharing what they had, and sending the blessing of that sharing out into the throng.

Because while the disciples did not trust either their own resources or the resources of others, Jesus did.  Here, a crowd has come to learn about the grace of the Kingdom.  They’ve gone into the wilderness.

Jesus knew: you do not go into the wilderness without food.  I mean, seriously, my family can’t take any trip of more than twenty minutes without bringing along provisions.  If you’re going on a trip of indefinite duration, wandering into the desert, you’re going to bring a snack.

This Jesus knew.  And the start of that miracle was the act of turning around, not worrying about it, and sharing graciously.  If that alone was what Jesus did that evening, if all that happened was that through an act of grace, grace spread through every person gathered there and everyone shared in what they had without anxiety or grasping, that in and of itself is quite a miracle.

We who have so much poured out to us, and in whom so much potential lies, we need to trust that sort of miracle in us.

Some miracles are just right there, ready to happen, just waiting to be seen and acted upon.  The joy of life, of growing and giving and sharing from whatever sweetness we have been given?  That’s the deepest of miracles.  But first, we have to be able to see it through the thickets of our anxiety, and the depths of our grasping.  When we are choking on our plenty, we need to trust that

Know that you have the grace in you to pass along that blessing.  Trust that others have the grace in them to do the same.

And let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

A Little Leaven

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

07.27.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 13:31-33; 44-52

Perspective is everything.

How we see the world, and those around us?  It makes an amazing amount of difference.  Oh, sure, there’s a reality underlying everything we do.  But how we approach that reality shapes both ourselves and our reactions to it.

That’s been driven home over the last month, as I’ve engaged in conversations around the ongoing mess in Israel and Palestine.  And Lord have mercy, is it a mess.  It’s been a mess since before I was born, and it shows no signs of becoming any less impossible.

One of the things that is most maddening about the images of violence and suffering that rise up out of that wildly, impossibly complicated and intractable mess is that it feels so beyond reach.  Here there are blood hatreds and territorial complexities going back generations, a churning darkness that seems to have achieved a bizarre sort of critical mass.  It’s like that moment when a vast cloud of hydrogen has collapsed down, pressed in on itself by it’s own mass, until the energy of that mass ignites the fusion that begins a star.  It is like that, but with human souls.

The Middle East feels, at times, like a dark star of human suffering, as anguish begets violence, which begets more anguish.  I look at that dark star, radiating bitterness and pain, and I look out at our little fellowship.  If the task of preaching is to proclaim the Good News in a way that helps us all live that Good News out a little more, it’s so tempting just not to mention it at all.  What, really can we do here?  What can I do?  Preach a sermon?  Write a particularly pithy blog post?  No amount of playing with human language seems enough.  It is not here.  It exists on another scale.

That’s a frustration, but it’s not what I find most maddening about the scenes that play out over our collective media consciousness.

What’s most maddening about this problem is that it isn’t real.  Oh, it is, in the sense that human beings are really suffering and dying, and there’s the crack and thunder of bombs and rockets filling the skies over Galilee.  That has really been happening.

But it’s not real in the way that a storm is real, or that a tsunami is real.  It isn’t real in the way that a cancer cell is real, or Ebola is real.

As terrible as it is, as much as mothers weep over the bodies of their children, as much as the world wrings its hands in frustration at how seemingly impossible that old blood conflict is, it is a chosen thing.  Assuming the human beings who are part of this mess are still free, still moral agents, still capable of making decisions, it is as simple as everyone simply saying, “You know, I think I won’t choose to kill people today.”

There was a day like that, yesterday, and then again this morning, we hear the news.  We’ll just take a break, both sides said.  You can’t do that in the middle of a typhoon. “I’d like you to take a pause for humanitarian reasons,” you shout into the storm.  If it can stop, it’s a choice.  And I wondered, why not just run with that?  I mean, really.  How hard could it be just to not do something?

Because it’s a choice, the decision to create violence is question of perspective, of how we choose to filter and interpret our experience, as is so much of human brokenness.  We choose

An event, a death, a loss, or any action taken?  It is cast through a filter of perspective, an assumption that runs so deep that it flavors the whole experience of that event.   The more hardened your view of the world, the more likely it is to so critically compromise your view of things that you can’t even see the thing right in front of you.

That is a basic problem with our human subjectivity.  It can become a filter so thick that the reality of God’s work can’t get through.

And so we have Jesus, trying to describe the reality that he was proclaiming.  For the last two weeks, we’ve heard him pitch out two different stories, each of which he was using to illustrate the central theme of his teachings: the Kingdom of Heaven.

Within the three synoptic Gospels, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, that theme is consistent and sustained.  It’s the primary focus of all of his parables and teaching.  It’s the reason he brings out all of these complicated forms of teaching about what it meant for the Creator of the Universe to have authority over the world.

It’s a complicated reality he’s attempting to articulate, and today, he comes at both us and his disciples with a great rush of images.  The Kingdom of Heaven is like, each of them begins, and then suddenly we’re looking at it through the framework of another image.  He forces us into perspectival shifts, looking at it one way, and then another, and then another.

It’s a mustard seed, tiny and yet the thing that begins a wild growth!  It’s a treasure, discovered hidden in a field, which someone rushes to buy in their excitement.  It’s a pearl, one so perfect and beautiful that a merchant would sell everything to have just that single thing.  It is like the net that the fishermen cast into the sea, one that returns brimming with fish to eat and to cast back.

And it is like yeast, or “leaven.”  Mix a little with flour, and the yeast makes the whole loaf rise.

That last one sticks with me, and not just because it evokes the impossibly delicious smell of baking bread and the promise of some remarkably lovely and flavorful carbs.

It sticks with me because, as a metaphor, yeast mixed in with flour occurs elsewhere in the Bible.  It’s an image used by Paul, as he talks about the way that sin weaves its way into us.  It is Paul’s image that we hear most often coming from the mouths of Christians.

“A little leaven ruins the whole loaf,” they say.

It is the same image, the same concept, the very same metaphor.  Only it is used, here, for an entirely different purpose.  Paul uses the image twice.  Once in Galatians 5:9, but there it’s a small fragment.  He uses it more pointedly when he talks to the proud, fractious, endlessly arguing Corinthians, in 1 Corinthians 5:6, as he describes the impact of their pride on their faith.  Sure, you sort of get the idea, he says to the Corinthians, but you’ve let the bad seep through your whole being like yeast in bread.  It’s changed who you are.

The same metaphor, only now, describing our brokenness.

Paul’s intent in using it was to tell us to carefully sort through ourselves, in the knowledge that tolerating even the smallest bit of darkness in us risks corrupting us.  How much do we want in ourselves?  How much plutonium do we want in our morning coffee?  How much poop do we want in our smoothie?

But human beings have taken that, and turned it outward and away.  It becomes not about preparing ourselves for our participation in the Kingdom, but about turning against others.  You must be 100% doctrinally pure!  You must assent to everything that we say you must believe, or you can’t possibly be part of us!  Where do you stand in the third century debate between Arius and the Cappadocians?  Do you believe that the Bible is the one True and Inerrant Word of the Living God?  And when we saith the Bible, we meaneth the King James Version Only.  

If not, you’re ruining the whole thing.  You are the tiny seed of evil!  Evil!  Out you go.  

That fails to understand how Paul uses the metaphor, but it also seems to flip the Jesus-teaching on it’s head.  When Jesus describes leaven, he presents it as the way we should view the Kingdom among us and within us.  Here, this tiny thing, that changes who we are for the purposes of grace.

It is a seed, a hint of the future that lays before us, of the possibility that God might be working in us.

The challenge, of course, is seeing it that way, both in yourself and others.  If you work under the assumption that God’s work in you is ongoing, that it’s slowly transforming you, and you pour yourself into helping that happen by turning yourself towards it, that change happens.  It turns you, and heals you, slowly and surely.

More important still is seeing that Kingdom leaven at work in others.  Looking at a soul in that way changes your interaction with them.

And there, there lies something we can do, a way we can act when faced with those seemingly intractable challenges.  In our every interaction, our every engagement, both lighting up that part of the Kingdom in you, and assuming that it is shared with those you are engaged with.

Perspective, in matters of our integrity and our souls, is everything.

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

Weeding

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

07.27.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 13:24-30; 36-43

I’d really and truly meant to get around to weeding.  

There they were, right there in front of my house, the two little everbearing strawberry patches that I’d put in over the last two years.  They’d been wildly productive last year, to the point where I found myself with more strawberries than I knew what to do with.

I mean, here I was with so many strawberries that I was making big batches of homemade strawberry jam on my Monday mornings, which was both delicious and satisfying and vaguely unsettling to my self-image.  Homemade jam?  I’m making homemade strawberry jam?  I’m a loner and a rebel, born to be wild, a manly man!  I almost left the kitchen at that moment, almost threw a leg over my motorcycle to roar around Annandale like Brando in the Wild Bunch.  But I was worried that I might feel compelled to stop at Michaels for knitting supplies, so I just went on making jam.

I almost lost those berries this year, as voles nibbled and gnawed their way through my patches.  Terrible little beasties, voles are, more or less just little little hairy tubes with teeth at the front.  They don’t just steal the berries, like those chipmunk devils.  They eat the leaves and the roots and the whole plant, leaving your patch looking like the set of some World War One movie.  But I beat ‘em, and the patch recovered enough to yield enough strawberries for at least one little jar of delicious jam this year.

As summer got rolling, though, things got busy.  Kid shuttling and wrangling picked up.  I started more aggressively reading and prepping for my doctoral project.  And as the strawberries continued to recover, their spring fruiting done, I just couldn’t quite get around to them.

Here and there, other plants began to push their way in.  A little bit of barnyardgrass here, and a spot of clover there, a little bit of creeping spreadwell over there.  But I was busy, and life was busy, and it really wasn’t that bad.  Just a little greener, and a little less orderly.  So the days went by, filled with reading and writing and shuttling, and then came two weeks away on vacation.  I just couldn’t worry about it.  And strawberries are robust things, I’d tell myself.  They can handle it.  So I left it.

When I returned after a week and a half, you could barely see the strawberry plants.  Both patches were almost completely overgrown, swamped by a riot of grassy and broadleafed invaders who had taken advantage of my distraction.  Some of the weeds had grown so tall that they were pushing up the netting I’d put into place to keep out the birds, making the whole garden look like a tent, like a tiny little circus of weeds.  The strawberries were struggling, poking their heads out here and there.

It had been too long, and the process of uprooting the great tangle of matted life that was crushing out next years jam was going to be a long and difficult one.

You just can’t put off weeding.  You have to stay on it, constantly and consistently, or your garden won’t be the thing you hope it to be.

That image--of a garden teeming with weeds---is the central metaphor in the story Jesus tells today about a garden.  Most of the parables that Jesus tells play their way out across all three of the synoptic gospels.  When Matthew has Jesus telling a story, the odds are that Luke and Mark will tell it.

This story--of the wheat and the tares, or the wheat and the weeds--is unique to Matthew.  It comes in a sequence of teachings, all of which have to do with harvest and growing things.  There’s last week’s Parable of the Sower, then today’s parable, then the Parable of the Mustard Seed, followed by the Parable of the Yeast.  Growth and grain and harvest, it’s one after another.  The earnest soul who compiled the Gospel of Matthew likes things orderly and logical, and from all of the oral histories and written fragments he had available from Jesus he gives us this neat little thematic package.  

If there’d been a Parable of The Husband Who Went to Home Depot Five Times In One Day, this is where you’d find it in Matthew.

As Jesus plays these teachings off of his primarily agrarian audience, they would have struggled with them. Parables were, as I mentioned in last week’s sermon, designed to challenge and push a group of listeners, and this one was evidently no exception.

Again, we hear that the disciples came to him.  This one, at least, they were more straightforward about asking him to ‘splain.  “Alright, we know, we know, you’re at it with the parables again.  What did *that* one mean.”

Jesus breaks it down in terms of an apocalyptic conflict, with weeds and wheat being the different sorts of individuals that populate the field of the world.  Like most apocalyptic thinking, it tends to be binary in character.  There is good, and there is bad.  There is black and white, right and wrong.  It’s like a lightswitch, or a single bit of data.  So here we get weeds and wheat, and later in Matthew we get sheep and goats.

The point of this teaching is to help the listeners frame their understanding of existence, and to help them grasp why there are so many weedy people in the world.  And here, we’re not talking about the citizens of Colorado or Washington state.  We’re talking about the folks who seem to live to crowd out every seed of new promise that rises up.  Why, when so many human beings have only peace and compassion as their hope for being, are there so many others who seem to yearn to destroy that compassion wherever they find it?

Understanding this was particularly important for Matthew’s first audience, the church to which he wrote.  They lived at a time of intense challenge for the church, as the early followers of the Way of Jesus were both being thrown out of the synagogues where they’d grown up and being persecuted by the Roman authorities. Remembering this story would have been important to them, and to Matthew.

“Why,” say those who are being harmed, “are there people harming us?”  Why, they would have wondered, is the light we are trying to shine into the world being blotted out?  And what should we do about it?  To them, this parable counsels patience and forbearance.  Keep growing, it says.  Trust that God will settle all.  There is no call for vengeance, or for the children of the kingdom to take up the sword.  

And that’s important, because I think there’s a powerful and dangerous tendency for human beings to hear this parable in a very different way.  We hear it, and we know, of course, that we’re the righteous.  Of course we are.  Everything we do is right, and everything we think is right, and so say all of us, and so say all of us.

We look to those with whom we disagree, and we see weeds.  We look to our opponents, and we see those who need to be rooted out, torn away, burned, and discarded.  It becomes an excuse to set ourselves apart as the good and the valuable, and others as weak and worthless.  And so we start tearing them out, ripping and attacking, and in doing so, we don’t just pull up weeds.  We tear out the good with the bad, doing more harm than if we’d simply waited until everything bore fruit.

Reading across all of the teachings of Jesus, this just doesn’t fly.  Jesus showed no such partiality, not in any of the Gospel stories.  Still and all, it’s a dangerous temptation, one that I try to avoid by taking this teaching of Jesus one level deeper.  

I focus less on worrying about whether or not you’re a dandelion or kudzu and how much Holy Ghost Roundup I should be spraying on you, and more on the weeds that I have let run riot in my own soul.  What matters, and where we have the right to make change, is within the boundaries of our own selves.

And there, I’m deeply aware of the dangers of my own laziness, of the deep risks of avoiding the discipline it takes to be a disciple, and just letting whatever grows grow.

Be sure, as you live, not to let yourself be indifferent to the one place you can have effect, and to spend your life worrying about the business of others.

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