Letting the Light Through

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

09.21.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Philippians 1:21-30

It’s funny, what you notice when you’re paying attention.

I’ve been paying a whole bunch of attention to my garden this summer, and over the last month or two that’s meant my wildly productive patch of bush beans.  I’ve watched them come up, tending them every morning, watering them and weeding them and generally fussing over them.  I wanted them to do well, because these plants are the children of the plants I grew last year.  I seed-saved from last year’s crop, marking the largest and healthiest pod on each of the most vigorous plants.  So this is kind of a a little extended family of green beans that I’m carefully watching over.  I’m getting to know them.

As the season has moved on, I’ve watched them grow up ferociously together, rising up into a dense thicket of plants.  I’ve watched as they’ve cast their foliage out thick and heavy, catching so much of the light that they leave nothing to feed the weeds that struggle to grow in the dim soil beneath. With their leaves woven up together into a quilt of green, they also shade the earth, holding back the sun so that more moisture remains to fuel their growth.

Plants are not, after all, objects.

When you garden, you become more and more aware of them as living creatures, simple beings that are nonetheless aware of one another and aware of their environment.  They have a peculiar form of intelligence, one that allows them to engage in behaviors that we miss if we are not watching carefully.  They cooperate.  They interact.  They communicate.  And beans, like many plants, grow.  They grow, but not like ice-crystals or a thundercloud billowing up on a hot and humid summer afternoon.  They move.  They just move a whole bunch more slowly than we do.

Over the course of the late summer, I’ve been able to watch this.  In the morning, the leaves of that patch of bush beans are all facing one way, towards the sun as it comes over the tall trees on the far side of the street.  In the evening, they’ve all turned, facing the sun as it disappears behind the row of trees on our side of the street.

It’s called “heliotropic” movement, and it generally means that plants track the sun to maximize photosynthesis.  And maximized photosynthesis means that at the height of the season, growing in good soil and light, those beans come out of the plants like balloons out of a clown’s mouth at a birthday party.  Only, you know, not shaped like dogs or bunny hats.  I suppose, if you were into it, you could try to figure out a way to make them grow that way, but I don’t have that kind of time on my hands.

But as the plants poured out gallon-bag after gallon-bag full of tasty fresh greenbeans, I noticed they were doing something different.  As the days grew cooler and the summer began to wane to fall, the leaves on the now-fully-grown plants changed. They no longer aligned themselves to catch the sun, but turned their leaves so that their edges faced the sun as it passed.  Light streamed down and through to the soil, and...notably...onto the beans that I’d left to grow full on the plants to go to seed.

When dusk settled, they’d return to their former posture, leaves out, preserving moisture.  Why, I wondered.  Why would they do this, these simple creatures?  I observed, and I watched as the pattern continued, and I searched through scientific studies of bean behavior to scry out the truth of it.

And in the thick of watching this, I was also reading Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi.

Philippi was a decently-sized ancient town just a little less than twice the size of Poolesville.  It sat on a major East-West thoroughfare in the Roman province of Macedonia.  It was near the sea, and more importantly, near some highly productive gold mines.  Phillippi was a prosperous place.  It did well for itself, for a long while.

This little letter has a different flavor from pretty much all of the other letters Paul pitched out into the early church.  The letter he wrote to Rome was to strangers he wanted to impress.  The letter to the Galatians, to people who he was frustrated with to the point of calling them idiots.  He wrote letter after letter to Corinth, in the desperate hope that they might improve

Paul really cared for the church at Philippi.  He’d put them there, and .   The letter he wrote to them was a manifestation of that love, an expression of the deep bond of affection that he felt for the community there, particularly as they supported him through times of challenge.  This letter was written during one of Paul's many imprisonments, and may well have been written from jail in Rome in the early 60s.

The letter is both warm and deeply personal, thanking the Philippians for both their material support of Paul in his time of imprisonment, but also thanking them for their prayers and care.  What makes this little section so interesting is that Paul is staring the potential of a messy death at the hands of the Roman authorities.  “You know, I might die, or I might not,” he says, which generally isn’t something you fire off in a casual email to folks.

That’s impressive, but even more impressive is how much pleasure he takes in the exchange with the Philippians, in their well-being, and in the mutual support that this relationship has brought to both of them.

This is a remarkably generous letter, in both spirit and in intent.  Paul’s hope and intent is with them, which, again, is a little odd given the context.  

What matters to Paul?  Sharing joy with them.  What is the hope that’s sustaining him?  That they’ll thrive, and that if he has the good fortune to survive his imprisonment, he and they will be able to celebrate their shared joy together.  It’s their well-being he cherishes, their lives that matter to him, and their strength that is more important to him than his own.

It’s the love that drove his relationship with them, and it’s also the primary thing that he tried to share as he spread the message of Jesus of Nazareth throughout the ancient world.  What makes Philippians such an important letter, and such a vital part of the story-of-stories that comprise our Bibles, is that it is a letter of affirmation.  What it presents isn’t primarily theology, or Paul pastorally trying to correct a community that’s managed to turn the message of Jesus into an excuse for infighting or other forms of human mess.

What we see in this letter is the core of the Christian message, being lived out in the relationship between Paul and a gathered community that he loved.  He knows he will someday cease to be among the living, sooner or later, but what sustains him is knowing that the Philippians are living out what most mattered to him.

They, in turn, felt the deep grace of that letter so powerfully that they kept it, and they shared it, so that long after Paul had met his death--executed in Rome, either during this imprisonment or a later one--the words of encouragement he shared with them would linger on.

Philippi no longer exists as a city.  It dwindled and faded, slowly but surely, and by the nineteenth century, all that was left were ruins.  Maybe the gold ran out.  No-one knows.  There’s a little Greek town nearby, just about three hundred souls.

But they passed along this letter, copying it and sharing it, because they wanted everyone who followed on to know what they’d known, and share in the light that had shined between them and Paul.

Which, in the roundabout way my mind works, brings us back to those beans.  They’re not loving, not as we’d understand it.  It’s so easy, as a human, to anthropomorphize everything you encounter, seeing our human intentionality and our emotional responses in the whole world around us.  But God made beans to be beans, and if they think, they think like beans.

Here, at the end of their season, as they’re coming to the end of their two-to-three month lifespan, what matters to them is not themselves.   Having prepared the seeds for the next generation, they seem more interested in insuring that those unknown others thrive than in keeping themselves growing.  They don’t take the light for themselves, but let it pass through them, let it cast down onto the seeds below, drying them out, preparing those pods for the life in the seasons to come.  It’s the way of beans, I suppose.

Where that speaks to me, as metaphor, as part of the story of living creatures, is in how much the life of this Way that Jesus taught does not have to do with our own selves, our own power, and our own well-being.  What gives us joy isn’t our own thriving, but the thriving of those others around us.  It’s a radically countercultural message, in this consumer era of self-absorption and self-promotion.  What matters isn’t what we have and what we grasp, anxious for ourselves, anxious for our own wealth and success.

That form of faith, that’s all about the self, that’s not who we’re called to be.  We are called, like Paul, to rejoice in the rejoicing of others.  We’re called, like the Philippians, to pass that light along.

Let that be so, for you and for me.

AMEN

Debt Service

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 09.14.14

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 18:21-35

I hate debt.  I hate it.

Part of that comes from my Scots blood, which is just about as cheap as they come.  How cheap?   When I buy delicious, crunchy kosher dill pickles, I save and re-use the pickle juice to pickle my own pickles from home-grown cucumbers.  How cheap?  When I jar the jam that I make from the strawberries in my strawberry patches, I’m too cheap to use Mason jars.  I just wash and re-use jars I’ve saved from other purchases.  So sure, maybe the jam tastes a little bit like kalamata olives.  So what?  I saved a couple of bucks, and the way I figure it, there’s gotta be some funky little vegan store out there someplace selling organic kalamataberry fusion jam in tiny little jars for ten bucks a pop.  It’s a “boutique flavor.”  That’s it.

I don’t just re-use 7-11 cups so I can get the refill price.  I’m so cheap that I wash and re-use Ziploc bags.

I like to think of myself as practical, but my family invariably reminds me that I’m deluding myself.  I just don’t really like to spend money.

But the money I particularly don’t like to spend is the money that I’m going to have to spend money to spend.  The very idea makes me recoil, which is unfortunate, because that means I do a whole bunch of recoiling from our debt-obsessed culture.

Debt and the interest paid on debt are the lifeblood of our economy, the essence of our economic system.

If we want a place to live, we need to go into debt.  If we want to start a small business to sustain our lives, we need to go into debt.   If we want to go to school to get the degree that we’ve been told will allow us to live a satisfying life, we’ve got to saddle ourselves with debt that we’re going to spend much of our adulthood trying to pay off.

I’m convinced that all debt-financed purchasing does, in the long run, is drive up the cost of things.  

So we avoid debt, and not just my own.  I don’t let other people owe me.  I don’t lend, which again, my family will confirm.  “Hey dad, can I borrow a few bucks,” is not a phrase uttered in my house, because it’s futile.  I just won’t.  They go straight to mom for that one.

Because what debt does is put you in the thrall of power.  It makes you vulnerable.  It skews relationships, and stirs anxieties.  

What is worse is the impact it has when others are in debt to us.  The power dynamics created by wealth can blow huge holes in friendships, and can shatter relationships.  But the idea of “debt” goes deeper still.  If others do harm to us, or diminish us in some way, we hold that as a debt against them.  We tally that up, and expect repayment of our resentments with interest that compounds annually, and that expectation and our own unwillingness to release it can grow in our souls like a cancer.

That exchange between peoples, the debts we hold over others, that’s the core of the parable of the Kingdom offered up in Matthew’s Gospel this morning.

It begins with a simple question, asked by Peter as he approaches Jesus.  “How often should I forgive?”  It’s a fair question, and Peter seems to understanding that forgiveness should come frequently and often.  “Seven times,” he asks.

Jesus turns it up to eleven, taking Peter’s suggestion of repeated grace and multiplying it exponentially plus-one, and then...because he’s Jesus...tells a little story.

It’s the time to settle up, and the bill is coming due, and a king is collecting.

A slave is brought to him, and that slave owes him ten thousand talents.  Understand, this is not like owing someone ten thousand dollars.  A talent was the single largest unit of Roman currency.  To earn a talent, a typical laborer in the time of Jesus would have to work for fifteen years.

So to translate into our currency, we know that a fully employed construction laborer in the United States averages just over $29,000 a year.  We multiply that by fifteen, and we get $435,000.  That’s a talent.   Then, we multiply that by ten thousand.

Our unfortunate slave has managed to dig himself a hole four billion three hundred and fifty million dollars deep.

It is an insane amount, completely and intentionally overblown, wildly out of the realm of possibility.  But faced with the prospect of losing everything he has, the slave cries out, “I’ll pay you back, I will.”

Oh, technically, sure.  All he’d have to do is plug that number into one of those online mortgage calculators that were so easy to come by in the first century.  He’d find that if he gets a thirty year jumbo loan at 4.216 percent, he’d be making much more manageable payments of twenty-nine million, two hundred and fifteen thousand a month.  Much more manageable.

The idea behind this is, simply, that it is a debt that could never be repaid.  It just can’t.

The king, though, is unanticipatedly and immensely gracious, and not only does not sell his slave, but forgives his debt.

Five minutes later, the same guy’s walking down the street, and he sees this person who owes him money.  It’s a hundred denarii, meaning just under a third of a year’s wages for that same day laborer.  Nine thousand bucks, using the same measure we’ve already used.

His reaction is swift and relentless, completely focused on his rage at the slight of not being paid back.  How dare you take from me, he snarls.  He presses charges, and off to prison goes the one who owes him money.

The raw injustice of it outrages those around our debtor, and word gets back to the king, and the king reacts the way a just king would.

Bad things happen, for a very long time.  And Jesus says, this, this is how God views our inability to forgive one another.  If you do not find the Spirit’s grace in yourself to show mercy to those who owe you so little, why would the Creator of the Universe show you mercy?

As rough as that parable is, it reminds us of how we as human beings hold on to the ways we’ve been slighted.  We keep a record of things, we do, we tally them up in our minds and calculate every little last slight and injustice and wrong, like some dark version of Excel all spooled up in a deep recess of our cerebral cortex.

This parable is a reminder of the radical, unbearably intense challenge facing anyone who claims that Jesus of Nazareth is their teacher.

It can be a little rough seeming, as Jesus could be on occasion when he was trying to make a point.  There’s some getting medieval, the implicit threat of a God seriously cheesed at those who find forgiveness beyond them.  

But I see this call to forgiveness as arising not primarily from our fear of punishment.  We cannot act in grace if we are driven by fear.  Real gratitude cannot be coerced, as every parent who has ever twisted a thank you note out of child knows.  What Jesus taught was good news, after all, and our willingness to show mercy to other should arise from our radical sense of gratitude at the simple fact of our being.  

We exist, we live, we are, and frankly, we do not need to be.  We just don’t.  Looking out at the endlessness of existence, the wild and glorious nature of creation, I know that as important as I happen to seem to me, there’s just no doubt that God could have figured out how to make this whole thing work without including me in.

Yet here I am.  I’ve been given life. I exist, when I could easily not.  It is a simple reality, so very simple.  It is so simple we forget it like we forget our heart is beating and that we are in this moment breathing, but in it God has been wildly, impossibly generous with us, in the simple fact of our existence and our awareness.  All that is expected, all that is required, is that I pass that same generosity on.

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

Thank You for Your Service

Poolesville Presbyterian Church
05.25.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: John 14:15­-21



It was a mission of sorts, last year, as our summer vacation plans took us winging across the Pacific to the Hawaiian Islands, where the weather is almost as lovely as it’s been here over the past few weeks. Almost.

We had a whole bunch of different plans for that trip, touchstones that we absolutely had to do to register our Hawaiian experience. We had to go into the bay at Waikiki, paddling about in the perfect blue waters as we hummed the Hawaii­Five­O theme to ourselves. We had to sit around poolside as the boys splashed and mucked about with people they’d just met. Cooling Pacific breezes wafted over us and our adult beverages, while the gentle melodies of Hawaiian music filled the air. Oh, the humanity.

But in the midst of our visits to museums and our wanderings through Oahu, there was a key destination we had set before us. An entire day was set aside for a visit to Pearl Harbor, the Naval Aviation Museum, and the two great battleships that rest in that harbor.

As a pastor, I shouldn’t like battleships, I suppose. They are, after all, instruments of war. But the twelve year old boy in me just couldn’t quite get over the cool of it. I wandered the decks of the retired USS Missouri, the Mighty Mo, it’s hard not to be impressed by the scale and scope of it.

Here, a ship that was active in my lifetime, with a storied history spanning decades. It was a history so mythic that some of those myths had apparently somehow worked its way into the schpiel of our cheery Hawaiian bus driver. Did you know the Missouri could be ready for action in less than a week, he intoned over the intercom. Well, no, actually, that was a movie about aliens. And you didn’t need myth. There’s a primal quality to it, this immense vessel with its immense 14 inch cannons that could easily hurl me and and my Prius most of the way back to Annandale. '

'It’d be much a faster commute, but I don’t think it would end well. 
'
'I stood there, right there, on the spot where MacArthur and Shigemitsu signed the end of that terrible war, and it was hard not to feel the ghosts of that September day for the peoples of both nations.

The other battleship we saw that day, though, was more solemn, and our visit there was also about family history. We took the ride over to the USS Arizona Memorial, and peered over the edge of that stark and simple building into the clear water of the harbor. From the depths below, oil still drifts up from the coral encrusted corpse of that broken ship. The BB­39 had been thirty thousand tons of steel, six hundred feet long, and in that floating, bristling fortress, one thousand five hundred and twelve young men lived and worked together. For one thousand one hundred and seventy seven of them, enough souls to fill every seat in every church in Poolesville, the first day of that war was their last. There, on a far wall, was a long list of names.

I was there not just for the history, but for one name. When I was a boy, I’d talked with my grandfather about that war. He’d lived through it, and my child’s mind was a whirl of Zeros and P­38s. My family wasn’t a warrior bunch on either side, mostly farmers and pastors and mathematicians, but when I asked him if he knew anyone who had died in that war, he said he did. He’d shared with me that his first cousin had been on the Arizona. We searched for his name among the sailors, but couldn’t find it. But there was another list there, nestled in the larger list of crew, laying out the names of the marine contingent on board. 

There he was. R.G. Huff.

It was a peculiar thing, there in that distant paradise, to think of how so many lives would have come so quickly to an end. At one moment, for this cousin, this family, blood of my blood, young life had been an adventure. He would have been just a few years older than my oldest son. For a while, life was work and duty, mixed with oceans and far off ports and the beauty of an island eden. And in another instant, it was over, as were the lives of everyone he knew.

It was important to remember him, to have that time set aside for remembrance. I do and will always struggle with the idea of war. Even though in my own life it has remained blessedly distant, I am not fool enough to think of it as a marvelous thing. It is a terrible thing, as it always has been. So I think of this weekend as a time to remember the lives of the hundreds of thousands of human beings touched by war, and his life in particular. As I remember that life, remember that he served, I remember also that he worked alongside others, as part of a community that supported one another and sustained one another.

In that service, that servant ethic, in which individuals within a community see their duty in dedicating themselves to supporting and protecting one another, I can find a value that translates more cleanly into the Gospel, particularly as we stand in encounter with the story told by John this morning. It’s a story of duty, and a story of service.

The text today comes to us again from John’s story of Jesus, rich and deep and full of the Spirit. It’s a potent little saying, delivered by Jesus as he speaks about his imminent departure to his gathered friends. They’re feeling the coming loss, as Jesus talks obscurely about his coming departure.

As part of that conversation, he gives them a command, and presents them with a promise.
The command is a simple one. He’s ordering us­­using command language, after all­­to love one another. And yeah, I know, we don’t like anyone telling us what to do. But if we’ve committed to the path of Christ, this is a fundamental. If you’ve signed up for this Jesus thing, if you’ve said: I’m committed to the Way, then you’re committing yourself to his service. All he asks of us is that we love one another, and that we share that love. It should be a joy, and on many days, it is. On those days when it is not, when you’ve not had enough coffee or you’re just feeling grumpy and annoyed? Then it is your duty, to be done whether you feel like it or not. It’s duty. You do it, because you’ve said you would.

And then there is a promise. Jesus promises their disciples that as they work their way through life, he won’t be with them­­but another will be.

That other is described by various bibles in various ways. It’s the “helper.” It’s the “Comforter.” In John 14:16 today, we heard it described as the “Advocate.” Advocate is the best word, really, because it comes closest to the the language first used in this Gospel. It’s a term used to describe the Holy Spirit, the presence of God in and with us.

The word John used to tell the world what Jesus had said was the word parakletos. In the Greek, para means together with, right by your side, close in. It’s a prefix of support, of care, of help, right there at your time of need.

Think, for example, of the word parachute. It’s what you need strapped tight to your back as you’ve flung yourself from the burning plan, as the ground is rushing up towards you. They’re first there, right there, giving you the care you need to make sure you make it through that vital first few minutes.

Then there’s the second half of the word: kaleo. It means to make a call or judgment, and taken together, the whole word means the one who knows you intimately, and from that intimate understanding is willing to speak on your behalf. They are your supporter, they stand with you, they serve you.

That’s the grace of the Spirit, as it’s given to us. But it’s not a gift given to us for ourselves alone. It governs and defines our duty towards others. As we invite that Spirit into us, we take it on as our purpose.

Meaning, we’re called to care for and serve and advocate for others, just as God cares for and serves and advocates for us.

It means intentionally seeking out ways to do this. If we are genuinely committed to our duty to serve Jesus of Nazareth, then we can’t say we’re too busy with other things. Our consumer culture will try to steal that time, to take away our commitment to Christ and turn our energies elsewhere. We have to make the time, to prioritize those relationships of care, as we use our energies and gifts not for our own glory, but for building up others.

[Example­­--ya gotta listen to the sermon for this one, my friend.  Just click on the embed...] 

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