11.02.14; Rev. David Williams
What’s the point of everything we do? What’s the goal of our lives?
As best I can call, the goal as we’re presented it in our culture is to succeed, with success defined in some very specific terms. We want to succeed financially, of course. We try and we strive and we work so that we can be comfortable. We want to succeed vocationally, finding something that we’re good at, that we’re amazing at. Success involves starting at the bottom, all filled with gumption and moxie and stick-to-it-iveness, and working your way up to the very top. Success involves having that one brilliant idea, that one magical invention that everyone needs, and bam! You’re movin’ on up to a deeluxe apartment in the sky.
That’s part of it. But it goes deeper.
The goal, as our culture spins it out, is more than that. To succeed, we must become the muckety muck, the name in our field, the person that everyone knows and talks about, the one you they point at and whisper about when you enter a room--for good reasons, not because it’s two months after Halloween and you’re still dressed as a Disney Princess. Hey, how else are you going to stand out at Presbytery meetings?
In this town more than most, this yearning for social capital feels like the thing that drives our lives. It is the bright star towards which we direct our actions, fluttering towards it like moths towards that beautiful blue light.
We can’t help ourselves. We homo sapiens sapiens are social creatures, social beings, and for a social being few things are more desirable than social connections and social currency. It’s not what you know, as the saying goes, but who you know...or better still, who knows you. And so, here in the thumping heart of the American political system, where the word “network” is more a verb than a noun, people bustle and greet and schmooze. It’s the kind of town where you can regularly encounter people who are mostly interested in who you ARE, meaning who you know.
A while back, I was at a meeting of the Presbytery, and hopped over to greet a newcomer, a pastor who’d just arrived in town. Because, you know, that’s the welcoming thing to do. I shared a little bit about myself, and he...well...didn’t, not really. Instead, he got right to the point. “So,” said he, cutting to the chase. “Who do I need to know here?” I thought for a moment, and then told him about a couple of folks who got things done, and whose good work to get things done I’d personally encountered. “Right! Thanks,” said he, and off he went to sit with them.
And I thought to myself, “What? I’m not important enough to even bother talking to? That can’t be! It must be my Princess Ariel outfit again,” and hopped back to my seat.
The ethic of self-seeking and seeking to climb the social ladder just doesn’t work when held up against the ethic we hear Jesus teaching today. For the past several weeks, we’ve heard Matthew’s Gospel share with us the conflict between Jesus and the folks we call the Pharisees. Pharisees, as you’ll remember, were the people Jesus squabbled and debated and fought with most of all, but for reasons that have little to do with the way we think about the word “Pharisee” now, 2,000-plus years later.
If we hear or use that word now, we tend to use it as a synonym for a self-righteous hypocrite, the sort of person who claims to the purveyor of all things right and true and pure, and yet manages to be a totally unpleasant human being. This is the politician who talks endlessly about family values while cheating on his wife, or the radio show host who manages to both condemn drug users while having a major habit himself. “Pharisee” itself, though, has very different roots. The word comes to us slightly mangled after a twenty-century game of Telephone, and derives from the Hebrew term perusim. That means “the ones set apart.” Pharisees were the ancient Judeans who challenged the Greco-Roman cultural ethics of their day. They were the precursors of today’s rabbinic Judaism. What they valued wasn’t empty ritual or sacrifice, but instead a life focused on the study of the Torah and covenant. They were literate, valued education, and...like the rabbis of today...felt that active and engaged debate about the issues of the faith was a central value. They were the ones closest to Jesus, because they cared about all of the same things that Jesus cared about.
This is why Jesus begins this section of scripture by telling his listeners that there was nothing wrong with what the Pharisees had to say. When he says that they “sit at Moses’ Seat,” he’s indicating that they really do know the teachings of Torah. Here, Jesus makes a point of specifically honoring the teachings of the Pharisees. But where he gets a little less accepting is with those who taught it but had no desire to actually live out their teachings.
What Jesus condemned was the yearning for the pride of place and honor that came from being regarded as a teacher. In being set apart, they didn’t take that as a sign of additional responsibility. It was, instead, a sign of just how wonderful they were. The “being viewed by everyone as wonderful” became the priority, and the sharing of the justice and grace of the covenant became secondary. With that inversion of priorities, suddenly what should have been a blessing to the community became a curse.
Instead of focusing on living out the covenant, they focused on the trappings of being viewed as special. The focus became not what they were doing, but the social rewards, on the success, on the appearance. The goal became being known for the purposes of being known, and for a sense of just how useless that is, I would ask you to do a mental google for the search term Kardashian. With mental safesearch on, of course.
In place of that, Jesus instructs his listeners that they shouldn’t let themselves focus on hierarchy, titles, or on the things that bring worldly acclaim. Instead, they are to strive to serve others, and to be humble.
We have trouble with this. Humble is hard. How can we jibe what it takes to succeed in our culture with Christ’s relentless focus on humility and servanthood? Honestly, it’s not an easy connection to make. But it’s one we have to strive towards.
Because when communities become all about hierarchy, power, and social image, it does strange and unpleasant things to our lives together. These last few weeks, there’s been a whole bunch of darkness in my social media feeds, as one of the largest megachurches in the country has completely collapsed. The Mars Hill Church was the creation of a single person, revolving around the outsized and aggressive personality of its founder and senior pastor. He was confident and charismatic and unusual, with a style that was a weird mix of theologian, hipster, and WWE professional wrestler. His personality became the fulcrum, the linchpin, the entire point and focus of the congregation. He was famous and well known, the headliner of conferences, a bona fide muckety muck. But things, with him, fell apart. He’d stomped on too many people, and then there was the little scandal that his bestselling books were mostly bestselling because he’d used his church budget to buy a couple hundred thousand of them.
With his collapse, the congregation folded. In six months, a community of tens of thousands dissolved into nothing. When a single person...their attainment, their power, their connection... becomes the focus of our faith and our life together, it’s a bad thing. The impact that can have on the health of community is a dangerous thing.
At the same time I was reading about that sad, sad thing, I went out to do a site visit a nearby church as part of my doctoral research. It’s a community called Dayspring Church, and it has an interesting heritage. It’s one a group of little churches that arose out of the DC-Based Church of the Saviour, a deeply spiritual gathering founded on the principle of spirit driven relationship, mutual accountability and action-based faith. That church grew, and then grew, and then grew some more, as those inspired by their commitment were drawn in.
But as their founding pastor realized that many souls were coming because they were drawn to his message, he told the community: this can’t become all about me. We’ve got to divide ourselves up, and maintain the kind of relationships that make for real community. Because when it becomes about a single person, about their power or their connections or their celebrity, we lose sight of our goal.
In all of your strivings, in all of your efforts, keep this balance in mind. It’s so tempting, so very tempting, to make our own egos the reason for our actions. We can tear the grace out of even the most gracious action, and the truth out of even the most transforming word.
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN
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