That Place Beyond Place

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 01.25.15

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 13:24-35

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“Who art in heaven.”

Or so goes the second bitlet of that prayer that Jesus taught us, and for a very long time this was not a particularly easy one for me to wrap my head around.

Even when I was a kid, I struggled with it, because “Heaven” was just a tough concept to accept.  Sure, there’s that mental image of it, with St. Peter with his book at the gate, clouds and harps and everyone you know...wait, check that...everyone you like… happily sporting a pair of pegasus wings.  That, and the dark chocolate fountains and lakes of imperial india pale ale and the shining palaces filled with sleeping golden retriever puppies.

It’s a familiar image, but it...well...it just never felt right to me, even when I was a kid.  Why?  Beyond the sweetness of it, there was this little problem of *where* it was.  

The ancients thought they knew, of course.  Where is heaven, you would ask, and then, like those singing Indians in that scene from Close Encounters, they’d all point up.  It’s in the sky, the ancients would say, dazzled by the mystery of it.  Heaven was behind the firmament, that huge solid dark dome of the sky.  The Hebrews called it the raqi, and knew that in it, holes were punched that allowed the lights that we call “stars” to shine through, and there were little tracks in which the planets ran, like toy trains chugging across the sky.  This is not the way things are now.

We can look across all of time and space, look out past the blue of our sky, past even the dark of our night sky, and into the great deep.  And what we see is...well...everything there is to see, falling out and away, deeper and deeper with every passing discovery.  Like just a hundred years ago, back in 1915, when the big argument in astronomy was about these little swirly smudges that seemed dappled all around the skies.  Humans knew how big things were.  We lived in not just a solar system, but a universe that was a huge swirling spiral, filled with countless stars.  In that universe, there were “spiral nebula,” which most scientists believed were protostars.  Only...they weren’t.  They were, as we know now, other galaxies.  That discovery meant that the great deep grew even deeper, but in the vastness of it all...what?  

Now we look out with the machines we cast into orbit and we see light stretching back thirteen point nine billion years and change to the moment when everything Banged Bigly into existence.

When I was a science-loving boy, nine or ten, I remember a friend asking me where God was in all of that, and where heaven was, and I struggled to have an answer.  “Maybe it’s whatever lies on the other side of the Big Bang,” I’d suggest.  But...what if it was nothing?  What if it was just this endless cycle of banging out and compressing and banging out again?

While it was infinite, it all seemed simultaneously so painfully finite.  It was both vast and defined, both dizzyingly huge and observable, and peering out and back across space and time, it seemed somehow inadequate.  Where, in all of this, is the Creator?  Where in all of being is this “heaven,” in which God resides?

There are the books, of course, the ones that rise out of a genre that’s semi-mockingly called “heaven tourism.”  The stories are usually riffs on similar themes, with tunnels of light during near-death experiences, visits from angels or Jesus himself, the faces of the long lost and the beloved.  Despite the recent, strangely sad apology from a young author who admitted he hadn’t actually had the experience he described, I don’t choose to doubt that most of the people who write these books have experienced something that leads them to write about their encounter.

I don't read them.  I just prefer not to know, because I don't think we know what that will be like, not in the depth of it.  Even if a person has had an experience that dipped them into that chasm, that vastness, I don't think we can know well enough to meaningfully articulate it.  So we have this first fleeting glimpse of eternity, as our selves filter it through the lens of the tiny flicker of life we've lived.  So what? What does that mean, in terms of what is to come?  Very little.

And yet, still and all, we hear Jesus, in that one place he taught us to pray, placing the God he referred to as “father” in heaven.  Care to elucidate, Jesus, we ask, politely.  But when Jesus talks about heaven, or about the dynamics of what heaven means, it’s really amazingly nonspecific.  Sure, we want specific coordinates, latitudes and longitudes.  We may want detailed descriptions, maps and schematics and a couple of selfies with you, Robin Williams, and Mother Teresa.  But when describing heaven for us, Jesus doesn’t do that.

Instead, he talks about the Kingdom of Heaven, the Reign of God, which is something both similar and importantly different.  We get these peculiarly blurry stories, these willful bits of narrative imprecision, one after another.  Here, heaven is described, and we do not hear: “The kingdom of heaven is:”  Instead, we hear, “The kingdom of heaven is like.”  It’s metaphor and story, image after image of growth and harvest, goodness and darkness, value and choice.   It is like someone who sowed good seed in a field.  It is like a mustard seed.  It is like yeast.  It is like a treasure, hidden in a field.  It is like a merchant, in search of pearls.  It is like a net that was thrown into the sea.  And that’s just in this chapter of Matthew.

Every one of those images seems to blur the boundaries between heaven and earth, between “heaven,” where God hangs out, and “earth,” where, well, it’s a little less obvious much of the time.

This teaching about the Kingdom of Heaven is at the heart of what Jesus told us, and the center of the Gospel, but it’s something else.  It flies in the face of the way we think about heaven, about our tendency to cast it out as this realm that is impossibly far away and completely different.  “Our Father, who isn’t anywhere near us,” we tend to think, as we pray this.  “Our Father, who art not part of this crazy mess down here.”

That’s both understandable and a little bit off.  Because though the fullness of God’s reality...the Kingdom, Heaven itself...may be dizzingly different from our own, the intent of Christian faith is not to clearly delineate between one realm and the other.  It is to affirm the presence of the Divine, and to assert that there are realities beyond the one beyond the one we perceive right now in this particular place and time, and...importantly...to deepen our sense of connection to those states of being.

Though I pray it when I wake, I’ll often pray this one as I walk in the morning darkness, my dog by my side.  And on a clear morning, with the moon a sharp crescent, I’ll peer up into the same sky that was the dazzling heaven of our ancestors and see it both differently and in the same way.

Differently, because I see it for what it truly is.  In the same way, because I see it as a place of wonder and the presence of the One who created it all.  But it’s not a distant place, nor is it different from the place we dwell.

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

How Close the Connection

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

01.18.15; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: 1 Corinthians 8:1-7

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“Our Father.”

Our Father, begins that prayer Jesus taught us, a prayer I’ve been praying pretty much my whole life.  It speaks to a very particular form of relationship, a way of interacting that’s as unique as our own relationships with our parents.  While this prayer’s always been a part of my prayer life, I’ll confess that it prays a little differently when you’re a dad yourself.

One day, being a father is an abstraction, a thing that you know must be about to happen because there she is, getting larger month after month in a way that implies something significant is going on.  That great rising roundness of her belly moves and shifts and bulges, as the thing that is about to happen gets nearer.

And then there’s that day when it all goes down, messier and bloodier and harder than you thought possible, and the next thing you know, it’s the middle of the night and a tiny little creature is making some pretty impressively large noises that don’t take your need for rest into consideration.

Wait, I’m a father now?  This seemed, at the moment, pretty weird.  I was the same as I’d always been, just as flawed, just as imperfect, and yet here was first one and then another human being, for whom that word was exactly what I was.

There’s a strange, passing magic that comes from that relationship, at least for a short while when your kids are small.  You’re the dad, the daddy, the one who knows everything and can do anything.  Got a question?  Dad’s got the answer, or at least he’ll mansplain something that makes it seem like he does.  Dad can fix anything, mostly through the miracles of superglue and duct tape.  A father can pick you up and swing you around like you’re nothing, something I used to do a great deal but that now would require the services of an orthopaedic specialist if I even attempted it.   A father can spin out the stories at storytime, casting out entire worlds from the books he holds in his hands.  I loved those times.

It’s been a while since that magic has been there.  My boys are young men, and I’m proud of who they are and I like knowing them as they’ve grown.  But that magic?  Snort. They look at their father through young-man-eyes and can’t miss that I am limited and human and fallible, a truth I’ve never hidden but that gets more obvious to all of us as the years have spun on by.

Human fathers are human beings, the simple source of half of our deoxyribonucleic acid, people like we are.  Some of them are wonderful and some of them are not, and pretty much everything in between.  And all of them are mortal, creatures of flesh and bone, wonderful and flawed and passing.

And yet Jesus says, when we pray that most fundamental prayer, we are to call God “Father.”  What does that mean?  If “Father” is the term, what are the resonances of it?  When we speak that word in prayer, how is that meant to guide our soul?

Some would challenge the idea as being nothing more than projection, our human longing to recover that fleeting, primal magic of childhood.  Sigmund Freud in particular was fond of this idea, which he went on about for quite a while in his treatise “The Future of an Illusion.”  God the Father, as Freud would tell you as you sat on that couch in Vienna, is just an infantile prototype of your yearning for protection, a manifestation of your subconscious and neurotic desire to be sheltered by the father figure you both fear and require, who protects you and your mother, the object of your libido, while also being a threat to us.  You love him, and you want to kill him.

Freud was a...strange...man.

Others, like the more aggressive anti-theists you’ll come across on the interwebs, have another way of saying that.  “You and your stupid Sky Daddy Easter Bunny God,” they’ll say, every time I’m fool enough to glance at the comments on CNN.com.  Why human beings would be getting into religious name-calling in the comments on an article about a basketball game is beyond me, but hey, the net is a...strange...place.  

But the Sky Daddy idea is the same as Freud’s, just more clumsily and simply stated, through the miracle of our internet devolution.  God, or so the argument goes, is a projection of our own desires, which we name “Father” because we’re too stupid to see the truth.

Funny thing is, Christian faith has a word for projecting our desires into a false god we’ve fashioned to meet our needs.  We call that an “idol.”  And while that’s what some suggest we’re doing, it’s really very different.

Paul lays out his reaction to that challenge clearly in his writings to the church at Corinth.  They had a problem with idols, or so they thought.  That fractious, bitter church found reasons to argue about just about everything.  One of those things was the consumption of meat that had been part of a temple sacrifice, which they argued over angrily.  Should you, or shouldn’t you?  But the deeper issue was simple: they made an idol of their own pride.  The god of Corinth was, as Freud himself might say, the ego.  The “I.”

The way we understand God as Father, Paul explains, is not like that.  In making that statement, we are affirming our Creator as both the source from which we spring and the purpose which defines us.

In that, Paul is faithfully reiterating what Jesus himself taught.

The God Jesus asked us call “father” not because God is a man.  The Creator is not a male homo sapiens sapiens who provided us with our genetic material.  It does not describe the dynamics or expectations of gender roles in a culture.  God is as different from that form of fatherhood as we are from a Volvox or a paramecium or that nasty mutated H3N2 flu virus that has made such a mess of our lives this winter.  God is exponentially… no...infinitely different.

We call God “father” because faith pushes us beyond our self absorption, and calls us to realize that we did not just magically appear in the world. There is something that precedes us, and on which we depend, and from which we derive our being.  We are woven up into that being, in a way that goes so deep that we as human beings struggle to evoke it with our language.

But what does that mean?

Jesus touches on that in the teachings that are preserved in the Gospel of John, where that wonderful, poetic, gracious language describes how Jesus felt himself as a part of the One he called Father, to the point where it becomes difficult to see where Jesus begins and the Father ends.  “The Father is in me, and I am in the Father,” he says, in John 10:38.  “The Father and I are one,” he says, in John 10:30.  This is not, if we are being honest, the relationship we have with our parents.  It is certainly, from the flip side of the equation, the relationship we have with our children.  Lord have mercy, is it not that.

Jesus is evoking something more radical, deeper still.

He was spoken into the world, God’s own Word, God’s own self expression.

We are part of that, Jesus says.  We are part of that relationship.  We are, through the gift of God’s own spirit, knit into the big comfy sweater of being.  Our life, our breath, the atoms that comprise our bodies, the light that fills our eyes, the complex neurochemical dance of our minds and memories, the wild umpty-billion year process that gave birth to this moment, all of it is beyond us.  We depend on it, completely and at every moment, for the simple miracle of our lives.  It is a relationship so much deeper and more powerful than the relationship between a father and a child that it bends and strains the meaning of the word itself.  The word bends, but it does not break.

When we pray into that profoundly deep reality, calling out “father,” we are affirming our participation in all of that, and shattering that tendency to make ourselves the center of all things.  

We call God “father” because from faith, we have  come to realize that the purpose of that ineffable something isn’t random, and that woven into our natures is a call to stand in deep connection to one another.  Love stands graciously, quietly, yearningly at the boundaries of our lives, asking us to live it out.

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

The Amazing Secret Magic Jesus Prayer that Works Every Time

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

01.11.15; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 6: 5-15

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Though it’s hard to admit to myself, and harder still to admit publicly, I’m still going to say it: I don’t feel like I’m a particularly great pray-er.  Thinking and writing and discussing, sure.  That I can manage.  

But praying, the act itself?  Even after forty plus years of doing my best follow Jesus, I often feel fumbly at it, uncertain about it.  This is, of course, not supposed to be the case.  We pastors are supposed to be magically amazing at praying, radiant with our capacity for mystic incantations that summon the very angels to our beck and call.  We’re supposed to be radiantly confident, so pray-ey that we’ll pray at the drop of a hat.

Stillness and walking meditations I do.  I’ll go over the list of prayer requests when they come to me at the end of the week, remembering those who I know personally, asking God’s grace on those who I do not.  I’ll sing as prayer.   But my spoken prayers often feel so small, so inadequate.  Here I am, a tiny, ephemeral lump of life, humming the air around me with vibrations that serve as symbolic referents for those who live in my culture.  This is supposed to impress the Creator of the Universe?  It’s so tiny.

I do pray, every single day.  It’s how I begin my mornings, while I’m lying there and the snooze timer’s counting down my minutes.  I pray while walking, while driving, and a whole bunch when I’m on the Beltway or tiptoeing my motorcycle over patches of ice on River Road.

The question is: how?  How to go about it?

There are many ways to pray, almost as many as there are human beings.  So there are countless books on the subject, some of which I perused this last week at the library.  There were several shelves of books, books from mystics, books from pastors, pastel covered hardback books from tee vee preachers eager to sell you a prayer that’ll make you prosper.  It’s sure done good fer them.

I was searching for one in particular, and though it was supposed to be right there on the shelf, it wasn’t.  Huh, I thought.  I went back and checked the system.  Yup.  It was supposed to be there.  “Lord, help me find that book,” I said, smiling to myself, and then went back.  It still wasn’t there.  But like Inigo Montoya guided by his sword in the woods, I was not to be denied. I looked behind the neat row.  There it was, lying flat on its back, shoved back to where no-one could read it.

I was finally getting around to reading what had been a runaway best-selling book on prayer from a few years back: “The Prayer of Jabez.”  Anyone remember this book?  This was quite the thing, back around the turn of the millennia, so fifteen years later I finally got around to reading it.  I guess I never realized just how short it was.  Ninety pages and change.  Very small pages.  Very large print.  I started in, and it was, well, it was interesting.

There is a lot of talk about Jabez and his faith and his motivations, which struck me as odd, given that the only place in the whole Bible this guy is mentioned is in those two verses.  And the prayer itself?  One verse, squirrelled away in one chapter of the book of Chronicles. The author of the book prayed it every day, and credited it with all sorts of amazing supernatural events in his life.  

It’s a super-secret prayer, one that no one had noticed.  Why, you may ask, was it secret?  Because it was hidden away in a huge and agonizingly boring list of utterly unpronounceable names.  Chapter after chapter of names.  Seriously.  That hiddenness, I think, was part of the appeal.  Here, a thing of mystery, buried away, like a mystic rune you find in a cryptic book.  This is what humans want.  We want that one easy trick that will magically solve all of our problems.  

“If you pray it every day, it’ll work,” he proclaims, with utter and earnest confidence.  “Be unafraid to pray selfishly,” he also proclaims, which struck me as a little odd.  But most of the rest of the book was kindhearted, simple, and earnest, and the prayer itself was easy to remember.  How much do we want that?  For this little prayer, we wanted it to the tune of over nine million copies sold, number one on the New York Times Bestseller List for months and months.

Back then, and even now, it struck me as bizarre that so many Christians would seek out simplicity in a secret magic Jesus prayer, one found a justifiably obscure corner of the Bible.  Because if you follow Jesus of Nazareth, he tells you how to pray.  Not in a secret way, not in a hidden way, but right up front, in front of a crowd and where every last person can see it.  We hear about it today, right there in Matthew.  It’s not buried away in some corner of the Bible we never read for perfectly good reasons.  It’s in the heart of the Sermon on the Mount, at the core of the spiritual and ethical teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.

We also find it in Luke, in chapter 11.  It’s a slightly different form there, but the basic thrust of the prayer is the same.

It could not be more obvious.   It is intended to be that way, intended to be both simple and comprehensible.  This prayer is the one I pray, every day.  It’s the prayer I pray on waking, and into the inside of my helmet as I ride.

It’s also a prayer we say, in one of its forms, pretty much every Sunday.  The liturgist figures out how to make the transition.  “So we’ve just been talking about other stuff, and praying for our friends and the world, but Jesus taught us this thing we have to always say, so let us now say it, saying,”  and then we all intone it together, a shared incantation, so long burned into memory that it almost prays itself.  

The has always struck me as strange, given that the whole point Jesus is making is that prayer is something best done simply and in private.  

“The Lord’s Prayer,” we call it, and if you’re churchy folk, you learn it early and often.  It’s so well known to us that it almost becomes sounds, just the vibrations of the air around us, which we make because we know how to make them.

It can become like those prayers I used to sing every Hanukkah as my little family lit the candles.  I knew the words, of course I did, because you sing ‘em eight days in a row whilst simultaneously trying to keep your kids from setting things other than the candles on fire.   Singing in the midst of fire prevention is a great way to remember prayer.  And so I would sing it:  

Baruch atah, Adonai Eloheinu, Melech haolam, asher kid'shanu b'mitzvotav v'tsivanu l'hadlik ner shel Chanukah.

Baruch atah, Adonai Eloheinu, Melech haolam, she-asah nisim laavoteinu v'imoteinu bayamim hahaeim baz'man hazeh.

The words would tumble out, familiar from decades of repetition, woven up with music.   But for years, though I sang them, I didn’t always exactly know what I was singing.  Learning Hebrew a little bit helped, as did asking, which I’d do now and again.  Holding on to the meaning of a thing becomes harder still when it becomes familiar, the meaning lost.

That, for us now, is the challenge with this simple, perfect prayer.  It can become a tumble of vowels and consonants, a jumbled mass of sounds.  We can pray it on autopilot while our mind wanders far afield.

These next few weeks, as the new year unfolds before us, we’re going to take a walk through this little prayer, sense unit by sense unit, concept by concept.  We’re going to slow down, and pay attention.

Because simple things are magic.  The miracle of our existence is magic.  The faces of our loved ones and our friends are magic.  But we can become so used to them that we forget to slow down and appreciate them, to attend to the reality of what we are saying and doing.

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

Glory Shone Around Them

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Christmas Eve 2014; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 2:1-20

It’s a bright and shiny season, this time of year is.  My street, like so many other streets in the great sprawling American suburbs, is a festival of lights.  I don’t know.  Perhaps it’s that we’ve got more time on our hands, or that our expectations are different.  Or maybe it’s that those factories in China are pumping out an endless stream of inexpensive decorations, like the huge boxes I saw being unloaded from a semi at our local Sprawl-Mart last month.  “Christmas,” they had printed in block letters.  “Made in China,” right underneath.  Whatever the cause, it feels like there’s so much more decorating than there once was.

Not at my house, of course.  There, our one decoration is what we’re calling our Hannukah Miracle Pumpkin.  We set it out for Halloween, and forty eight days later, it’s still unrotted!  It’s a miracle!

When I was a kid, I remember it being shiny.  Just a little more...subtle.  Lights on a tree in a window.  A couple of strands of incandescent color, here and there.  There’d always be that one guy, or two guys, who’d get into a yard decoration arms race, pulling down three to four megawatts of blazingly radiant Christmas cheer in what in the good ol’ days of the Cold War you might have called Mutually Assured Decoration.  I both loved those houses, and was glad I didn’t have to bother with it.

But now?  Now it’s extra double shiny plus.  There are illuminated animatronic inflatables, waving Santas and Santas riding sleighs and motorcycles and ATVs.  As I walked through my neighborhood last week, one house had smooth synth Christmas music playing, softly, almost subliminally, on an endless loop, which I’m sure is not going to be the best thing for the sanity of those that dwell therein.

Now, the nuclear option is the off-the-shelf computer synchronized display, with lights in the high tens of thousands, all playing along to music that’s broadcast locally on your very own radio station.   If you want to absolutely dominate your neighborhood, victory in the decoration race is just a few clicks away.  The WowLights Christmas Light-O-Rama 128 Package, yours for only $5,899.99, FM radio transmitter not included.

It’s so bright, so glorious, that recent visual spectrum studies of energy usage patterns by the NASA/NOAAs Suomi satellite’s Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite have shown that huge portions of our country get almost half-again as bright during the Christmas season.  Those veins and speckles of light that mark our world as inhabited flare up, visible and measurably from distant orbit.

Were there angels on high, they’d be impressed with just how bright it’s getting down here.

And it’s lovely, and fun, and glorious, and as that old familiar story reminds us this evening, all that sparkle and shine almost entirely irrelevant.

Because while Luke’s annual recounting of the birth of Jesus has plenty of brilliant display, it’s also very clear what’s important.

It’s a very familiar tale, of shepherds tending flocks by night, of angels who are heard on high, and of a message conveyed.

What we do not hear from that messenger is a call to the shepherds to look to the skies, as angels up in the heavens do a synchronized dance to an Alvin and the Chipmunks version of Silent Night behind enough lens flare to make JJ Abrams blush.   Although that would certainly have explained why the shepherds were so terrified.

Glory is not what matters here.  The key words here are not “...and the glory of the Lord shone all around them.”  It is, instead, something much simpler.

It is the simple birth of a child to poor parents in humble conditions.  That’s it.  A baby gets born, the sort of thing that happens countless times a day, as a new human person enters the world.  Here, an event that every single one of us here has encountered, that most fundamental human act of being born.

But it is that human scale thing that matters, that is the heart of what this season is about.  What is sacred and holy and transforming is not the shine of it all, much as we ooh and aah at it.  It’s the more basic things.

A new life.  The hopes of a young mother.  And the fulfillment of a deep truth in the life of that new life.

Here in this season, all around us the world is radiant and buffed to a high-gloss shine.  The spectacle of Christmas is fun, but as the story reminds us, this is not the point.  The purpose of tomorrow, and the reason we gather to sing and to celebrate together this evening, is to recall that it is through the humblest things in life that we find the best expression of the season.

It’s in meals, shared with friends and family.  It’s in marking the changes that come year to year, as we grow up and our children grow up.  It’s in celebrating new arrivals, and remembering back to loved ones who have passed on.   These things may not catch our eye, because they are so familiar that we almost forget they are there at all.  But they are the essence of our lives here together, lives that are blessed by our Creator this season.  We’re

In this evening, and the day to come, we’re asked to remember that those most fundamental parts of our human identity...life and breath, birth and death, everything that we are...are blessed with the presence of a God who is with us.

So take this time to give thanks for the simple blessings of life, of yours, and of all of those you love.

This Christmas Eve, may that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.