The Heart of Us

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 10.26.14

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 22:34-46

Here we are, right on the cusp of All Hallows Eve, that day every year when our neighborhoods hum and bustle through the evening, as hordes of little people and not-so-little people come drifting through the twilight, carefully escorted by flashlight-toting parents.  It’s a time for community, a time to see the neighbors and their little ones, and to marvel at how very quickly those trick-or-treating years went.

And every year, a festival of masks and illusions, as at our door arrives a parade of individuals pretending to be someone that they are not.  “Are you Elsa from Frozen?  How cute,” we’ll say, as we hand candy to the tiny girl with the light blue dress and fake blonde braid wig.  “Are you Elsa from Frozen?  How cute,” we’ll say to the tiny girl next to her with the light blue dress and fake blonde braid wig.  We are going to be saying that a whole bunch this year.

It’s a time when we get to be someone we are not, to play with the concept of our identity.

What makes us who we are?  What is our core, our person, our heart, our soul?

It seems like it should be remarkably easy question, on the one hand, and on the other, it’s an astoundingly difficult one.  We can rattle off a bunch of stats, our height and our weight, our eye color and the color of our hair.  We can talk about our age and our favorite hobbies, our political leanings and our relationships.

There’s all sorts of different things that comprise us, that make up who we are.   And yet we ourselves are strange, ephemeral, and ever-changing beings.  We are, after all, mostly water.  Our cells, our flesh, about sixty five percent of who we are is water.   Even if we don’t get out there and sweat, adult human beings take in and put out a minimum of seven pounds of water every day.  Most of our bodies flow through us like a river.

We talk about who we are in our hearts, but our large four chambered hearts themselves rotate out about one percent of their cells every year.  What are we?  Where does the I that we are reside?  It’s not the heart, of course, but our minds.

We might say that it resides in our memories, the recall we have of things.  I remember, for example, as a deep and old memory, the wet sweetness of my grandparents basement in Athens, Georgia.  Whenever I step into a room rich with the scent of must, I’m cast back to the remembrance of being a boy, mucking around with the old HO-scale electric trainset that sparked and hummed, and the hours lost sorting through endless boxes of comics.  I remember, for example, the scent of the U.Va. library, of hundreds of thousands of books wafting their rich odor of settling paper into that shallow-ceilinged labyrinth.  I smell that smell, and I’m there.  That’s me, right?

And yet we know that the cells in our brains that store scent information...in the hippocampus and the olfactory bulb...are repeatedly replaced over the course of our lives.  That original memory itself, the fragrance of childhood, no longer exists.  It has been passed over to other cells, which have passed them along to others.

And those cells themselves are comprised of atoms, eight octillion in all...and atoms are almost entirely empty space.  Our body is ninety nine point nine nine nine nine nine percent nothingness.

Where are we, in all of that?  Where does the heart of the person that we know ourselves to be reside?  Are we the same person we were when we were seven, or seventeen, or forty seven, or seventy-five?  We are, in ourselves, like a paradox, like smoke.

What defines us, then?  Where can we honestly say we find our identities?  What makes us cohere and hold together as persons?  The simple answer to that is our purpose, what philosophy calls our telos, the goal of our lives, the reason we exist.

The fundamental essence of that Way is laid out for us in the passage from Matthew this morning.   Matthew’s Gospel continues the story of Jesus being challenged and tested by the religious and cultural authorities.  Last week, the question was about taxes and Caesar.  This week finds the Pharisees again coming to Jesus with a challenge, this one about the nature of the law.

He’s approached by a lawyer, although it’s important to note that this “lawyer” isn’t the kind of lawyer we’re used to.  This isn’t the kind of lawyer whose firm you see being pitched by William Shatner on daytime television.   This isn’t that $750-an-hour litigator from Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer and Feld, the one whose house you tell your kids to avoid on Halloween, because the two minutes she spends handing them candy is potentially billable.  This is a theologian, a Bible scholar, a student of the sacred law of Torah.

That lawyer asks him a question, one that required a knowledge of the sacred law.  The question is simple:  which law is the most important.  This was a non-trivial question, as the law of Torah was not simple.  At the time of Jesus, the rabbis had identified 613 different laws which governed the life of an observant Jew, and every one of those laws were open to debate, discussion, and interpretation by different schools of thought.   It was a tricky one.  Try to dodge the question, and you aren’t showing that you know the law.  Choose one, and you set yourself up for an argument that could last for generations.

But as he did last week, Jesus gave a gracious response, providing his interrogator with a teaching that is at the core of both ancient and modern Judaism.  He first quotes from Deuteronomy 6:4-5, a passage from Torah that lays out the essential duty of everyone who stands in covenant relationship with God.   That text, known as the shema, reads:  “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”

This little snippet of Torah lays out the basic responsibility of everyone who stands in relationship with God to prioritize that relationship, to allow it to be the thing which defines the character and purpose of everything else in your life.

The second response comes from elsewhere in Torah, from the Book of Leviticus, chapter six, in a section that lays out the fundamental ethical responsibilities of every human being towards every other human being.  We heard an excerpt from that section read earlier, but the baseline teaching is the one Jesus drew out from Leviticus 19:18.  “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

In this tight and well structured response, Jesus gets down to the essence of covenant.  If you ditch everything but these things, if you peer through the fog and chaos of complexity and interpretation to what it means to live as a faithful and ethical human being, you end up with this.  This is what counts.  This is where the rubber meets the spiritual road, where it is less about law and more about a way of living.  There, in this answer, Jesus provides the purpose that gives cohesion to the complexity of the Bible.

That was important, because though the Torah itself was a good thing, it was easy to lose yourself in it.  Instead of seeing the point of it all, human beings got lost in chasing the details, in arguments over nuance and debates over minutia...and forgot the point of what they were doing.

Which we can, too, as we press our way through the competing demands and expectations of all of the different identities we take on in our lives.  We are students and teachers, parents and children, friends and lovers and spouses.  We are saints and sinners, sometimes whole, sometimes broken.  There can be so many parts to us that it becomes hard to see where the truth of us lies.

And there, as we struggle to come to terms with the complexity of our identities, Jesus offers up this beacon, illuminating the point of the faith he proclaimed and the life he offered to us.  That, he tells us, can be both the goal towards which we strive and the heart of who we are.

Let that be so, for you and for me,

AMEN.

The Coin of the Realm

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 10.19.14

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 22:15-22

It happens in cycles, it does, like the cycles of the seasons.  We learn to read those signs, the ways that mark the arrival of a new season.  In the spring, the little buds poke their heads out of the brown grass.  In the fall, the air grows brisk, and the trees speckle themselves with a frosting of yellows and reds and oranges, a glorious dance of color that augurs us having to do a whole bunch of raking.

There are other seasons, like, say, hunting season, which isn’t that big a deal in and around Annandale, but I understand is a little more of a thing out here in Poolesville.  On my way home from church late in the evening this week, I had to slow waay down for a little herd of deer crossing Partnership, and though I know bowhunting, muzzleloading, and kamikaze motorcycle hunting is in season, I chose to leave them for y’all.

Then there’s political season.  Every couple of years, it rolls around, and you can tell its arrival by the signs that speckle the roadside with names and patriotic colors, and the ads that speckle every nook and cranny of our media experience.

Those ads are, admittedly, a little offputting.  They tell us pretty much nothing, other than that candidate A is a fine upstanding American, who loves babies and America and American Apple Pie because America, and that candidate B worships Satan.

In this great democracy, most of our citizens have allowed cynicism or apathy to stand between them and fulfilling that basic duty at the polling booth. Some might say: why is that bad? Isn’t it our right to not vote if we so choose?

For a partial answer to that, let’s turn to today’s interesting tale from Matthew’s Gospel.  Jesus is having yet another dust-up with the Pharisees, who are trying to get him into trouble.   You’d think, Jesus being Jesus, that he wouldnt need any help getting into trouble, but they were doing what they could to move that whole thing along.  So they compliment him, laying it on thick and piling it on deep.  Then, they ask him a question.  It’s a classic gotcha setup, because it’s one of those questions that they think can have no correct answer.   

That question is simply this: Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar?  Yes or no?

As Admiral Ackbar might say, it’s a trap, a landmine, one of those third rail questions that’s guaranteed to get you into trouble with someone.

On the one hand, if Jesus answered yes, it meant that he was saying he thought it was fine to use Roman money on which was inscribed assertions of the emperor’s divinity.  For the zealots and the most radical among the Jewish community, that meant that you were saying Caesar was a god, and if you did that?  You were betraying the God of Israel. It also meant you were supporting the hated occupiers of the Holy Land. So you couldn’t answer yes, or you were a traitor to all that was holy.

So of course, Jesus had to answer no.  But no meant, in the way of binary logic, that you were on the other side completely.  If you refused to pay taxes to Rome, it was a sure sign that you were a dangerous revolutionary, a threat to the Empire. The Roman authorities didn’t look kindly on people who refused to pay their taxes, and the Roman process for collecting back taxes with penalties made an IRS audit look like a trip to Hershey Park. So you couldn’t answer no, or you were a threat to Rome.

It was the kind of question that gives politicians nightmares, like that dude who stands up at a town hall meeting and..with all of the cameras on...demands a straight yes-or-no answer on your position on whether or not the Affordable Care Act should cover abortions for same sex couples when they’re traveling to Gaza to meet with representatives of Hamas.

Jesus was not so easily taken in.  “You can only say yes or no,” said his opponents, but he was having none of that.  He just told everyone to look at the coin, and see who was on it. It was the emperor, of course. So give him what belongs to him, and give God what belongs to God. It was a perfect answer, both yes and no, neither yes nor no. I’m not sure any modern day politicians could have done better. The trap his enemies had set for him snapped closed on empty air.

But as we hear his answer, we have to ask ourselves: what it is that we owe the emperor today?   From this passage, we know that we do have a duty to the government of the nations we inhabit.  We don’t have an emperor, of course. We’re not an Empire, and we’re not a kingdom. Here in America, we’re a Republic.   That means we are the ones who rule us.   

That means that sure, we have a ruler.  Who is that ruler?  We all are.  What do we owe, when the “emperor” is us? What do we owe to the emperor when we the people are the emperor? We don’t just owe just our taxes. All that an empire needs is two things.  First, people need to think of themselves primarily as taxpayers.  You pay for protection, and whatever other services the emperor deems it fit to provide.  Second, you obey.  Failure to render tax and render obedience results in bad things happening.  This is a consistent theme in empire.

But this is a democracy, and what a democracy needs first and foremost from its citizens in order to thrive is twofold.  

First, there has to be participation.  This whole thing doesn’t work if we don’t make sure that we’re engaging with it ourselves.  Oh, sure, we want to be cynical about the process, and the way things are run makes it really really easy to give in to cynicism.  The endless streams of negativity and spin that will come pouring out at us over the course of the next several weeks will make bailing on the whole mess really and deeply tempting.

Most of us do bail, just plain ol’ check out.  It’s too negative, too bitter, and too pointless, we think.  Which is why, in the typical midterm election, participation barely exceeds forty percent.  In other democracies, countries like Australia and Belgium, Chile and Austria, Sweden and Italy, elections draw between 75% and 95% of eligible voters.  If we think of our democracy as a group project in school, we’re not doing so well.  

Our disengagement means...as one recent study found...that the only subgroup that does vote consistently are the loudest and most radical partisans, those who are most vigorously opposed to whoever it is they’re supposed to be opposed to.  So we avoid voting because it seems so loud and angry and polarized, which means the loud and angry and polarizing people get a bigger say in who gets elected.  This creates a feedback loop, and it ain’t a good one.

The duty of people of goodwill in a democracy is to pay attention and to be engaged. When we fail to do that, we fail to give to Caesar what Christ told us is his due. We need to hear this passage in that way in our lives as citizens of our counties, of our states, of our nation.

But if we fuse that with what we owe Christ, it becomes a different thing, one that just so happens to spin out the other thing that we really need to embrace if we’re to have a functioning democratic republic.  If we recognize that rendering unto God what is God’s means living a life of gracious forgiveness, showing lovingkindness and mercy and forbearance even to...especially to...those who oppose us, we have to be citizens in a different way. We can stand firm on our political beliefs, but only if we are - first - standing firm on our faith.

That faith demands...radically and intentionally...that we commit ourselves to being compassionate towards and gracious to those around us.  That’s true in our congregations, but it’s doubly true in our lives out there in the polis.  

No matter where we stand as Christians, no matter what our political orientation, we are each of us required to view our participation and engagement in the processes of the republic as a central and fundamental duty. It’s our task to remind each other of this, and support one another in this.

It’s what we owe to Caesar, when Caesar is us.

We’re just a few short weeks away...so remember, as you vote and as you share life in this land with those who do not always agree with you...remember: what it is you owe, and to whom you owe it.

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

For All Peoples a Feast

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 10.12.14

Scripture Lesson:  Isaiah 25:1-9  

No matter what the time, or the season, there seems to be a single truth in our family life: We really, really need to clean out our fridge.

It starts in a well-intentioned way.  You need to have food, after all, and there the fridge is, this giant behemoth of a thing, towering in our kitchen like the monolith from 2001, assuming the monolith had been an innocuous off white.  The fridge is, like all fridges these days, a colossal thing, a giant yawning chasm.

Back in the day, nine-point-five or ten cubic feet was all the space a household needed to store food.  Now, though, we need more.  Our fridge is a “Large” sized one, meaning it’s the smallest one our particular manufacturer makes.  Storage capacities start at twenty cubic feet and run to thirty three cubic feet, with sizes running from Large through Ultra Large to Super to Mega.  We have enough storage space inside it to hold the fridge that lived in my grandparents kitchen, which could hold the dorm fridge I used for three years of my life inside it, like the world’s largest Russian nesting doll.

We have a huge, huge fridge, and so the temptation is to fill it with food.  We wouldn’t want it to be empty, now, would we?  It would be so sad.  Poor, sad, fridge.

So we do, and it contains so much more than we need, and worse still, more than we can remember.  The food we bought a week ago gets pushed to the back of the fridge, where it’s out of sight and out of mind.  The food in the giant pull-out freezer?  It piles up, new items on old, layer upon layer..  What lies at the very bottom of our freezer now?  I don’t even know, but if that label-less packet of leathery freezerburned mystery meat turns out to be mammoth chunks, I wouldn’t be surprised.

And so, every rare once in a while, we’ll clear that freezer out.   It’s not a pretty thing, because I hate throwing away food.

I hate it because it’s a waste, and I hate it because, well, we do a tremendous amount of that in the United States.  It’s an amazing thing, actually, just how much food we manage to not use in America.  This land is amazingly fertile.  The amber waves of grain that sit between our purple mounted majesties upon our fruited plain produce an amazing amount, an incredible amount, so much food that it boggles the human mind.  Four hundred and thirty billion pounds of food a year, when you look at the numbers, which is...um...rather a lot.

Of that, we don’t use thirty one percent.  This is food that gets discarded because it doesn’t meet certain specifications for appearance, or that goes bad on store shelves.  This is food that we buy but stash away until after it’s gone bad.  That’s 133 billion pounds of food, every single year.  A recent study calculated that out to one hundred and forty one trillion calories, the equivalent of one thousand two hundred calories per American per day going to waste.  Enough goes to waste, in other words, to feed three hundred million people breakfast, lunch, and dinner every single day.

It’s a little crazier, but it’s even crazier that we don’t notice.  But we don’t, because most of us are not hungry.

It’s easy to miss those things, when you’re in a comfortable place, and that’s why Isaiah preached as he did to those folks he encountered in Jerusalem.

From chapter 25 in the Book of Isaiah today we hear a story of new things.  It’s a lovely little story about a meal, and the end of suffering.  It’s the promise that tears will be wiped away, and that God will make everything alright for the people of Israel.  What we have not heard is chapter that came right before it, because that’s a bit harder on our ears.

Chapter 25 of Isaiah comes across nice and easy, but it’s part of that 8th century prophet’s many oracles against the people of Israel.  Speaking from the comfort of royal Jerusalem, where he was well regarded by all and had the willing ear of the king, it would have been easy for Isaiah to just tell folks what they could see from the world immediately around them.

Jerusalem, after all, was a place that was prospering.  It was the center of power in Judah, and in every age and every time power draws wealth to itself.  The city was doing well, was comfortable, was at ease.  There were other prophets, I’m sure, who proclaimed to the the people at that time that all was well, that everything was going swimmingly, and that all anyone needed to do was just keep on keeping on.

That was not the message Isaiah bore.  In the verses before we roll into chapter 25, we hear that God’s annoyance with the selfish indulgence of the world.

And to those Jerusalemites, a clear message: this is not a feast just intended for those who prosper now.  God’s care extends particularly and pointedly to the poor and the struggling, and to the denizens of Judah’s capital, Isaiah says:  you can’t ignore this.

Following this comes a Psalm, a song of praise that fills the 25th chapter.  In this, Isaiah proclaims that with the collapse of the life we had known, something truly new and more gracious and more promising will arise.  All will not forever be wreck and ruin.

At the heart of that vision lies, as is so often the case with Isaiah, a meal.  What he brings to the table is the vision of a feast, a table overbrimming with good things.  It’s not just intended for his few chosen, or for those who are wealthy and powerful.  It’s intended for all peoples, and all nations.

That, as Isaiah speaks it into the ear of the powerful denizens of Jerusalem, is the vision of God’s presence on earth, the work that God engages in as the Reign of God is shaped.

And that, in so far as we Jesus folk claim to be moved and engaged by the Spirit of God at work in us, is kinda sorta our job too.  Let me say that again: if we want to claim God is at work in us, we have to be working towards God’s goals in this world.

So, sure, we often encounter God as abundance.  But our task, as we engage with the great groaning table of our sweet little planet’s productivity, is not to devour all for ourselves or to be oblivious to our impact.

It’s to be aware, aware of how our actions and our choices echo out across creation, and how those choices impact the world around us as they pile up by the thousands and the tens of thousands.

Here, we’ve been placed in a world that has all that we might need, that creates and produces everything that we human beings might ever need.  And yet the

What can we do?  It all has to do with our attention.  We have to pay attention, in our homes, in our communities, and in our culture.

We can attend to ourselves, to the way we approach the food that pours out of our culture’s cornucopia in such a relentless flood of calories.  So much of justice comes from just paying attention, and allowing ourselves to move and act in ways that reflect our attentiveness not just to our own lives, but to the impacts that life has on others.

We can make a point of growing our own food.

Now, you’d think that’d be exactly the opposite thing we should do.  Wait, don’t we have waaaay too much already?  There is plenty, vastly more than we need.  This is true.

But the primary issue here is inattention.  It’s losing sight of the reality that creates what we consume.  If we don’t see waste as waste, don’t make the connection, we’re not going to notice it in our own actions.  When you’ve tilled the soil, worked the earth to bring up those tomatoes and beans and zucchini, you feel it when the fruit of your labors goes unused.  And that increased awareness means you feel it more when you see other food go to waste.

In our communities, we can attend to the needs of the hungry, making a point of personally engaging ourselves with those who need help to connect them with the abundance of creation.  Here in Poolesville, that happens through WUMCO, and in the region, through the Lord’s Table.  It’s a vital part of what we do here, a way we stand as the servants of our Maker to make that promised feast real.

And you can be aware of broader efforts to lessen waste, and to connect the abundance of creation to the needs of God’s children.  How?  Well, through the magic of the interwebs, that’s how.  On our Facebook page right now are links to what the Presbyterian church is doing to educate and alleviate hunger, and a link to a wonderful “gleaning” organization called the Society of St. Andrew.

Paying attention matters.  

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

Speaking About Us

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

10.05.14;  Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 21:33-46

This is one of those tough scriptures, one that hits hard for me in particular.

It’s not hard because it’s rough or violent or messy.  There’s plenty of stuff that’s more challenging that that.  Just wander into one of our classes on the Book of Revelation, and you’ll get plenty more of that.  It’s not because it’s too complicated, or because Jesus is making a point that I don’t understand.  He makes it very, very clear what he believes.

It’s the way Christianity has typically approached this text, and how that plays across the last week in the life of my soul.  I’ve been doing a whole bunch of worshipping this last week, as I’ve moved to and fro from Bethesda and the synagogue where my family is a member.

It’s the Jewish High Holy Days, that sacred transition, that movement from one year to the next, and it invariably comes at a time when I’m not ready for it.  The Hebrew calendar is, after all, a lunar calendar, so it’s wildly and crazily all over the place.  Sacred days sneak up on you, without regard for the passing of the seasons.  But here it is, the week-long festival marking the transition from the year fifty-seven seventy-four to the year fifty-seven seventy-five.  

The season begins with Rosh Hashanah, which in Hebrew means, “The Day You See If Your Children’s Dress Clothes Still Fit.”   The answer, this year, was that my youngest child--the baby, the little one--now fits into my clothes.  Sigh.

Yom Kippur, though, which fell yesterday?  That’s the “Day of Atonement,” when Jews remember the suffering of the world.  It is also the day when my teenage sons can have nothing to eat all day, and my wife can’t have any coffee...so sure, yeah, I’m feeling that one.

I’ll freely confess that my encounters with the High Holy Days...particularly the worship...are potent and spiritually moving.  I’ve been attending those worships for over two decades.  I know the songs by heart.  Every year, I struggle through the prayerbook, trying to phonetically read the Hebrew that I spent two semesters learning in seminary a decade ago.  There are moments every year, like when the Avinu Malkeinu sweeps in minor key across the congregation, that the hairs on the backs of my arms always s tand up on end.  Our Father, our King, sing a roomful of voices, in the same tongue that Jesus would have learned as his sacred language.

I like the whole point of the season, frankly.  Here, the holiest of holy times, and what it’s primarily dedicated to is forgiveness, atonement, and repentance.  In a New Year, the whole point is that it’s a chance at a reset, a chance to begin again and to set things right.

And so every year, I find myself sounding the themes of the High Holy Days off of the core theme of the teachings of Jesus.  Turn away from those things that are broken in you, and realize that right now, in this moment and in the moments to come, you can be inhabiting the Kingdom of God.  That’s the heart and soul of the Days of Awe, and it also happens to be kind of the whole point of the Gospel.

Which brings me back to the passage from the Gospel of Matthew today.

What makes this pointed parable a bit rough, a bit hard to hear, is the way that it’s been interpreted.  What’s clear, absolutely and without question, is that this is a teaching that arises from Jesus.  Matthew, Luke, and Mark all have it as a part of their Gospels, each in essentially the same format.

In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus tells this story in the temple to a gathered group of Pharisees and temple priests.  What’s impressive is that they’re listening to him at all, because according to the story as Matthew tells it, the very day before he’d shown up at the temple and trashed the place.  Here he is, telling stories, and what you’d think his listeners would be doing is calling security or getting the local constabulary to come pick this crazy guy up on a trespassing and destruction of property rap.

But no.  They’re listening, and and they’re engaging.   He tells them a story, one ripped right out of the agricultural life of the Judean countryside.  Here, a man has worked his own land.  He’s put in the vines for grapes, and protected them with a hedge, and prepared everything for a fruitful harvest.

He does this, and then leaves the field in the hands of tenants.  Harvest time comes, and when the rightful owner of the land sends folks there to collect his portion of the yield, they’re beaten and attacked and killed, one after another.

Finally, he sends his son, in hopes that perhaps that will make a difference...but it doesn’t.  He’s killed, just as the rest were killed.

And then, he asks the question:  What should the landowner do with those tenants?

The answer, from his listeners, was that the landholder would be rid of them in violent ways, like he was Liam Neeson in one of those revenge-porn movies that I’ve never ever bothered to watch.  

Some scholars have suggested that a first century audience would have automatically connected with the tenants, as landowners ant the wealthy were not exactly the most popular folks in and around Judea.  But this wasn’t Judea.  It was Jerusalem, and the temple, the very heart of power in that corner of the world.  These were the powerful and the rich, the ones who own a brownstone in Dupont Circle, a condo in Aspen, and a little 2,400 square foot pied a terre on Park Avenue overlooking Central Park.  

Given his audience, this was a charged parable.  If--as Matthew describes it--Jesus is talking to the priests and those in charge of the temple, then these are people who would have strongly identified with a landowner or a landholder.   “Someone’s squatting in the Aspen condo?  My gracious, lovie, something must be done.”  They would have been up in arms at the idea that anyone would have taken what was not their right.

And so Matthew recounts Jesus asking a question, and springing a trap.

“You’re those tenants,” Jesus says.  “You’re going to have the thing that has been given you taken away, and given to another.”  Boom, bing, and he’s gotten them, although whether they’d have been more offended at the theology or the idea that they might be renters is another question for another time.

It’s a potent little story, but it’s also one that has over the thousands of years of our faith journey been interpreted to mean something that I for some reason have trouble with.   The story, as it’s been understood, has been often read as a straight up allegory over the last two thousand years to indicate the end of Judaism as a viable religion.

They didn’t listen to the prophets, driving them away or killing them.  They didn’t listen to Jesus.  So….[buzzer sound] that’s it all over then.  The garden--meaning the promise of God’s kingdom--will be taken away from them and given to others.  They’d had their chance, and they’d failed to get ‘er done.  Instead of listening and doing what God had told them over and over again they needed to do, they pursued power and their own interests.  They didn’t embrace the Spirit of the living God within themselves, and made a mess of the world.

So now the only real faith is Christianity, so, nyaaah. Tough for you, Jewish people.

The word for that is supercessionism, the idea that Christianity just plain ol’ replaces Judaism as a legitimate way to be truly faithful.  I’ve got some significant problems with this way of thinking, for reasons that go beyond my admittedly deep personal connection.

What strikes me about this parable, and strikes me hard, is something having to do with time.  Here Jesus is, speaking to the high priests and the rabbis--because Pharisees were primal rabbis--about their failure to truly engage in covenant.  Judaism had it’s chance, right?  I mean, they’d had a long time to figure it out, and--according to the supercessionist idea--all they’d managed to do was to fight amongst themselves, get either massively legalistic and judgmental, or turn the faith into something that had more to do with material wealth and political power than a relationship with God.  

How long?  Well, the covenant with Israel began with Abram, when he and Sarai were renamed Abraham and Sarah.  It’s admittedly messy and imprecise, because it’s the hazy stuff of ancient story and legend, but the best general guesstimate on when that was?  

The year 2018...BCE.

So...how long has it been since Jesus showed up to teach and offer up the Good News?  Two thousand and...what?  

How far away is twenty eighteen?  And how are we Christians doing?  It’s a good thing there’s no infighting in the church ever, being judgemental in the church ever, or focusing on money and power.

We’ve been around for a while, to the point where it’s perhaps time for us to hear this parable not so much as a condemnation of “them,” but the way it should always have been heard: as a challenge to us.

It’s a challenge to insure that we, here and now, as we live and respond to the message of grace that has always been at the heart of covenant, are responding in such a way that we’re bearing fruit that can be shared with our Maker.  When we’re not doing that, when we’re grasping and focusing on our own reward, where we’re smug and self-righteous, when we’re in it for our own gain?

Then, we’re not getting it.

Let's hear this, then, to us, for us, reminding us of the dangers that come from complacency and a focus on power.

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

Losing Yourself

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 09.28.14

Scripture Lesson:  Philippians 2:1-13

We like being self-sufficient.  There is perhaps no more primally American attitude.  We like being able to do things for ourselves, to be the master of our own domain.  It’s very practical, very real, very get ‘er done.

In the house where I’ve now lived for the longest period of time in my adult life, the home where my children have grown from being wee little spuds to the teen largelings they are today, there’s a whole bunch of evidence of that mindset.  The walls are covered with paint that I myself put there.  The grounded plugs?  I put them there.  That chandelier in the dining room?  I put that there, after a great deal of fiddling and a couple of very pointed reminders that the principles “trial and error” and “learning through play” work a little differently when you’re messing with electricity.  

The ceiling fan in the kitchen?  That it has managed to stay up for the last 13 years is one of those miracles that would have to be taken into account if I was ever being considered for sainthood.

Being self-sufficient is perhaps the greatest luxury of them all.  It’s the stuff of my book-sells-a-million copies daydreams, really, as we look to our roofs and wonder if we could generate enough solar power to get by, or look to that little patch of land we live on and wonder just how much food we might be able to produce if we really, really put our minds to it.  It’s a residual from the frontier consciousness, from those days when you either figured out how to make it work or things got all Donner Party.

Well, if we only ate a spoonful of jam a day, plus two greenbeans, we’d probably be fine.

We like being the ones who take care of our own stuff.  And it’s not just the things around us that we like to build or repair or maintain.  We like being the ones who tinker with ourselves.

We like handling our own mess, particularly if it has to do with who we are and how we’re living.  It is, in point of fact, a remarkable and thriving industry in the United States.  Self-help and the books and the conferences and the trainings?  They account for a several billion dollar industry, as we try to figure out how to make our way through vocation, relationships, our own foibles, and the challenges of parenting.  We like nothing more than a manual, a handbook with clear guidelines and handy how-to directions.

There are books for everything, quite literally everything.  There is even a self-help book out there that helps you pick out self-help books.  Meta-self-help!  It’s part of our goal to make ourselves the best selves we can, refining and improving and constantly developing ourselves, hopefully with more luck than we have the first few times we try to disassemble an old four-barrel carburetor.  

So much of our culture revolves around the self that we should, if we’re paying attention, be a little weirded out by todays reading from Paul’s letter to the church at Philippians.  In it, we hear Paul’s proclamation of how following Jesus impacts that essence of who we are.

Again, we find Paul writing from a point in his life when he--and his well-being--were really being pushed to the edge.  As we heard last week, this is a letter written from imprisonment, very possibly the imprisonment that ultimately cost Paul his life.

Here he is, writing to the church at Philippi from a profoundly dark place in his life, and what he has to offer up isn’t a cry for help.  In prison and facing death, he isn’t anxious, or panicked, or even evidently stressed out.   There’s no, “Hey, could you please be sure to include a diamond edged bandsaw in your next care package” in his letter.  Instead, what he offers up is a song.   

That doesn’t come first.  First, he lays out a sequence of rhythmic, rhetorical questions.  Paul, for all of his claims to be an incompetent speaker, knew his way around the soaring, purple prose.   “If then,” he begins, “There is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, and sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy…”

They read that, or they hear it read as they share that letter with one another, and they say, well, duh.  Of course there is.  Remember, this was a church that he loved deeply, and that returned the favor.

He then asks them to do what he knows they are already doing.  Focus on one another.  What matters is the love you share, and the degree to which your care for one another supports everyone around you.

Then, he gets into the song.  It’s verses six through eleven, and it’s a peculiar song.  It was written in Greek, of course, and has rhythm and meter woven into it.  But the patterns are peculiar, not like other ancient Greek songs.  They seem, some scholars of the Bible argue, more like the rhythms of ancient Hebrew or Aramaic music.  Like, perhaps, there was a song sung about Jesus, or a poem told about Jesus, in the language of those who knew him.  And Paul is translating it into Greek, which is then translated for us into English.

That message includes a phrase that’s something of a touchstone for Christian mystic practice.  In the Greek, it’s alla eauton ekenousen, and in the English we hear it as “he made himself nothing” or “he emptied himself.”  

Christ is the servant, the one who empties himself of himself.  This is not something we do easily, assuming we want to do it at all.

It’s an entirely different approach than the one we’re used to.  We’re expected to examine and analyze, to have plans and goals and strategies, to take a hard look at ourselves and pour our energies into our needs.  Oh sure, we want to help others, but as the popular saying goes, how can we help others if we don’t help ourselves first?  We need to deal with our own mess before we start trying to do stuff for other people, right?  

Problem is, we’re complex beings, and the things that aren’t quite right about us don’t get solved in an instant.  We work through the process of living a good life our whole lives long, correcting here, fixing there, triumphing here, falling flat on our faces there.

If we wait until we’re totally good, totally fine, totally set, before turning our energies towards the work of Christ’s compassion in the world, then we’re going to be waiting a very, very long time.  When the self turns to the self above all else, we forget our purpose.  It’s like being that dad on the plane with his kid, and bam....the cabin depressurizes, and those face masks come popping down.  And dad takes the mask first, just like he’s ‘sposed to...but then he sits there.  The kid looks at him, waiting, but dad shakes his head.  “I’m not done breathing yet, son.” he says.  Don’t be that dad.

Paul points to a completely different way of being.  Healing and graciousness, mercy and salvation, these things rise from finding a deep place of connection with our Creator, and turning your life not towards love of self, but love of others.  Through contemplation of our Creator and compassion lived out in community, we are ourselves made anew.

This is a paradox, but it works.  The best way to make ourselves anew is to look away from ourselves.  If you’ve forgotten who you really are and who you’re meant to be, the way to discover that person isn’t by digging through the ways you’ve failed to be that person.  Have you ever forgotten something, the name of an actor?  There was a time before Google, and before IMDB, when you could sit around in a room with a bunch of friends and no-one could quite remember the name of that guy, you know that guy, with the hair, who was in...oh, what was that film with Morgan Freeman, you know?  And the more you chased it, the harder it was to find.  The only way to remember was to set it aside, to think and talk about something totally different, and then suddenly, wham, the name would come.

How do we build that self, that person we know we are meant to be?  Contemplation and compassion, self-emptying and service woven together, are that path to that place.  It’s very practical, very real, very get ‘er done.

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