Will You Will

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

02.08.15; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Job 38: 1 - 33

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“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Here, in that prayer, one big chunk, all one unit, all one thing.  Up until this point, we’ve been parsing our way through the Lord’s Prayer just a couple of words at a time, and now, a great rush of words.

Well, a dozen words and change.  Not quite a rush.

We’ve looked at that wild blurring that is at the heart of all of the teachings of Jesus, that tearing down of the walls between heaven and earth, as he in his own person etches the will of God into a reluctant creation.  Here, the prayer moves from holiness to a call for God’s will to be done, not just in that perfect fluttery place far away, but right here and now.  Woven into those first words were the intimacy of the presence of a loving father, wildly juxtaposed with the distance of an unknowable heaven and untouchable, unspeakable holiness.  Now, there’s something new.

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.

The concept of the kingdom we’ve already explored, just a little bit, in the part of this series called “That Place Beyond Place.”  That’s back on January 25th, and you can read it at your leisure or listen to the podcast.  Preferably...um...not now.

Thy will be done.

There, there is the portion of it that pops, that is different, that is new.  It’s a yearning, not just for some future time, or some future moment when the sky rips open and everything changes.   It’s not, maybe at some point it would be nice for you to get around to it, God.  It’s not, well, do it, but wait until I’ve made my way through this fifth of bourbon first and ripped off that nasty email to my ex.  It’s more immediate, more right now.

And it’s about intention.  It’s about what God WANTS.  It’s about the drive of awareness to do and act.

What does it mean, for God’s will to be done, here on earth?  What can that mean, for God’s Hand to reach out, touch and shape creation?  

I was fuddling over this and contemplating it this week when an image came drifting through my consciousness. Well, my social media consciousness.  I guess that counts these days.  Here, it was announced, on about five of my different Twitter science feeds, is a new picture of God’s Hand!  Taken with what they call the Very Large Telescope, which I suppose it must be to get that shot.  Not sure my iPhone can manage that.

I pored over the image, a color-adjusted bit of interstellar beauty, a vast dust cloud, cupped around stars like a hand ladling water from a stream.  It’s technically called CG4, but the name God’s Hand is just far more nifty.   It’s something called a Bok Globule, which sounds faintly like something you might find floating in an order of Sweet and Sour Soup.  God’s hand a huge, cold cloud of particles, floating in a region of space about thirteen hundred light years from here. It’s a cradle for stars, one point five light years high, nine light years long.   It is impossibly huge, existing on a scale that bends the human imagination.

And sure, there are a variety of reasons why it might be there, but though it may be called God’s hand, it’s kind of hard to see God’s will in there anywhere in a way that means anything to us.  It’s just this vast splot in space...unless you step back and look at the immensity of the universe.  Then, it seems like nothing more than a tiny little smudge of schmutz, no more important in the scheme of things than a single dust mote sitting on the screen of your laptop.  It is dirt and earth, as we are dirt and earth.

God’s will, being done?  What does that look like?

On the one hand, it is something that’s always beyond us, something that is so much vaster and deeper than we can grasp.  

That’s the encounter we have with God this morning, as the Book of Job builds its way into its ferocious conclusion.  

The story of Job is an old story, a retelling of an ancient tale of a pious man that may have come to our Bibles from somewhere outside of the Jewish tradition.  The name Job, scholars note, is not a Hebrew name, and neither are the names of his three friends.  But this story has cross-cultural legs, perhaps in part because it is relatively simple, easy, and straightforward.  Do right, and be steadfast, and you will be rewarded.  That’s how God works.  That’s the essence of the divine will.  

But as this story was brought into the telling of the Jewish people, it got richer and more complex.   Into this older tale was woven a subtler and wiser story, one that was considerably more complex than the simple story we’ve been taught.   It’s a dialog between Job, his friends, a young man named Elihu, and finally, the Creator of the universe.   It is told entirely in poetry, written in language that indicates it came from the pen of a scholar with a gift for the art of writing.   It relates Job’s faithful challenge to God in a time of lostness and suffering, and God’s reply.

I have done nothing wrong, Job says.  I have served God all my life.  If I have held up my end of my commitment to God, why should God not protect me?  His friends challenge that assertion, insisting that Job must have done something to justify what he is experiencing.  But Job knows he has not, and refuses to cede the point.  He has stood in covenant, and it is his right, as one in covenant, to lodge his faithful appeal.   

Back and forth the conversation goes, until finally God himself arrives, and Job...having been heard...stands down in the face of the scale of what he’s encountering.  That was a looong passage this morning, but God’s reply goes on, in this chapter, then all of the next.  In the chapter after that, Job says, Alright, I get it, enough already, but God just shakes his head and says, no, I’m not done yet.

Here, as relentless as a storm, this book of Wisdom lays out the deep mystery of the divine purpose, casting out Job’s travails against the yawning vastness of creation.  Who are we, that we’d presume to know what the exact purpose of the Creator might be?  It is more than we could manage, more than our minds and our selves could bear.

And yet, here we are, in this prayer, asking for something that we can’t totally grasp.

That’s an important thing.  Where we are overly certain of ourselves, when we conflate our own needs and desires completely with God’s, bad things can happen.  When we take the expectations of our culture and assume that it’s biases and hatreds are God’s biases and hatreds, we make a shambles of everything around us.  That’s painfully, heartbreakingly true in the Middle East, and it’s been painfully true in countless other cultures, our own included.

Mystery must be, has to be, part of our encounter with God’s intent.  And yet that’s not where our connection with God’s will concludes.

Here, the person who has chosen to follow Jesus of Nazareth makes a leap of faith.  By choosing this path, we’re making an assumption that we can perceive a glimpse of that Kingdom we want to come, and that will, in the person and life of the human being we’re following.  

We’re looking at the heart of those teachings in our Adult Ed class right now, as they are spoken out in the Sermon on the Mount.  There we are seeing that Jesus saw a Kingdom and a will whose boundaries are defined by a clear and tangible love, teachings about release of captives and the transformation of the human heart.  It is the assertion that somehow in the vastness and emptiness of creation, compassion and grace and mercy are part of the intent for all creatures.

It is the assertion that the will of God has some meaning for us, right here in the scale of our lives.

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

Words We Don’t Use and Things We Don’t Do

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

02.01.15; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Exodus 3:1-15

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“Hallowed be thy name.”

There it comes, right there in that third snippet.  The word “hallowed,” which comes thumping down on us in all it’s anachronistic glory.  It’s just not a word we use in our regular speech, not at all.  When was the last time you used the term in conversation?  And yet here it is, inserting itself into our consciousness, as obscure as some long lost nubbin of Victorian era slang.   We’re as likely to use the word hallowed tomorrow as we are to use the word podsnappery (which means to pretend to be above it all), daddles (which are your hands), skilamalink (which means shady), or gigglemug (which means an always-happy person).

Seriously, though.  We should all use more Victorian-era slang.  It’s a fine bit of nanty narking. (which means fun)  Some words just shouldn’t fall out of use.

But they do, as we stop doing the things that give those words meaning and relevance.  Like, say, the words Araba and Barouche, Calash and Clarence, Curricle and Herdic, Sociable and Sulky, Tarantass and Whiskey.  A hundred years ago, everyone in this room would have known what those words meant, and what they had in common.  And if you know a guy named Clarence whose love of whiskey makes him first sociable and then sulky, that doesn’t count.

So what do all of these words have in common?  

They’re all kinds of horse-drawn conveyance.  We just don’t use them, because the way of living they represent is not a way of living we’re familiar with.

in the meantime, “hallowed” falls from our mouths, and we sort of know what it means, sort of.   We know it’s kinda sorta related to the holy, to the idea we should set something aside as special or unusually important.  It refers to battlefields, or to some place that is unusually important, or...conceivably...to the Vince Lombardi Trophy.  It has to do with the things and symbols and places we set aside as being fundamentally different, special, important in ways that are hard to articulate.

Hagiastheto to onoma sou, it rings out in the ancient Greek in which Matthew’s Gospel was written, which in the English reads, literally, “Let it be holy-ized the name of you.”   That the Greek has a word that means “let it be holyized” is one of the reasons Greek is so simultaneously fun and headache inducing.  Why would we “holy-ize” such a thing?  Why does it matter?

That meaning comes from the root of where we derive this word, in the passage you’ve just heard from Exodus.  Moses is wandering around, and suddenly...whoah...the burning bush, a shrubbery entirely alight but not being consumed.  He goes over to check it out, and it speaks, which adds considerably to the bizarreness factor.

He’s instructed to remove his shoes, because he is on holy ground, and then told that this fter asking just who in the Sam Hill he should tell people he’s been talking to, he’s told.  

Among the Jews of Jesus’s day and among Jewish folk today, the name of God was approached with reverence.  Various Hebrew words were and are used to describe God.  There’s Elohim, which is the word used.  There’s Adonai, which means “Lord.”  And then there’s the name itself, which is written out in four Hebrew letters, a Yud, a Hey, a Vav, and a Hey.  Whenever that term is written in Hebrew, Jews don’t say it.  They say “Adonai” instead.  Funny thing, and your name-of-God factoid for the day: the name “Jehovah” was entirely made up by European Christians in the late middle ages.  It comes when you muddle up the consonant sounds of  the Hebrew letters YuhHeyVavHey with the vowel sounds of Adonai, and there’s no evidence ancient Jews used that word.  

I endeavor not to tell this to Jehovah’s Witnesses when they come to the door.  Seems sort of mean, although I do keep a Powerpoint available in case they get too persistent.

The Tetragrammaton, it’s called, because of the four letters, and while we can say it...Yahweh..those sounds don’t convey the depth of it’s meaning.  Eyeh Asher Eyeh, it’s pronounced, I say, hoping that this building is well grounded.  And there lies the holiness of that name, the sense of the holiness that Jesus is evoking in this prayer.

“I Am That I Am,” Moses hears.  But the words can mean “I Am What I Shall Become.”  And they can mean “I Will Be What I Will Be.”  Finally, Moses is told, simply, “Tell them that the I Am sent you.”

This name bears the sacredness that arises out of unmediated interaction with existence...existence in its depth and power, the root and ground and foundation of all being. beyond language, beyond our ability to grasp and contain and control it.  This is more than a little overwhelming.  Frightening, even.  The holy isn’t easy, and it isn’t simple, and it isn’t mundane.

Holy?  What does holy mean in a consumer culture?  Honestly, it means very little.  The holy is dangerous, and more than a little frightening.  It is completely out of the ordinary, set aside as beyond the boundaries of all other things.

Holy? It is a place that is intentionally beyond the scope and scale of our everyday, both a time and a space set aside.  We don’t have time for that.  We rush about, carefully managing every moment, rushing through life with our every minute scheduled, our every instant accounted for.  Unlike Moses, we’re in such a rush that we wouldn’t notice if a bush gave off an unusual radiance, any more than we’d notice that there’s a boxwood out front of the CVS that every once in a while pours forth steam.  We’re on our way to the next thing, late and rushed and overscheduled.  The holy?  Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Holy?  What does holy mean in a culture that sells every last thing, that marketizes and brands.  Some might say the flag can become a sacred object in our culture, and though I have issue as a Jesus follower with any national emblem...even my own...being declared holy, I also just can’t believe it given what I see.  How many times tonight, as we watch our great national festival of football, will that same flag be used to sell you something?  Buy our product and/or service, because America!  And the holy things of my faith are no different.   I read part of a book this last week entitled “Jesus Calling.”  The phrase is copyrighted...meaning we’d better remember to bleep over that in the sermon podcast.   What does the holy and the sacred mean in such a society?  

Holy?  How do we approach holy when we so easily confuse the carefully choreographed with the sacred, the tugging of our heartstrings with the shaking presence of our maker?  We are used to things standing in between us and everything else, to experiences are encountered and filtered through something else.  Though words and symbols, which point to things but are not the things themselves.  Through the screens that fill our days with the endless flicker of thousands upon thousands of pixels, standing like a shimmering wall, simultaneously connecting and separating us and our friends and our followers and our work.  What does the holy mean, to creatures like us, used to having the world processed for us by intermediaries?

And here Jesus is, telling us whenever we pray in private, whenever we speak our relationship to our creator into our days, to remember that none of those ways of being, so part of our lives, can even begin to express the nature of that space where we encounter God.

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