The Place of Evil

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

03.15.15; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Genesis 3:1-8

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“Deliver us from evil,” we pray, and we mean it.  

But what is it we mean, exactly?  Just naming what is good and evil is something of a challenge these days.  What is good?  What is evil?  We are told that such things are culturally mediated, that what is good for one person may be evil for the next.  Who is to say what is good and what is bad?  Really, what does that even mean?

Back when I was a pup, I thought I knew what evil was.  Evil was monsters and the monstrous.  I was a voracious reader, the kind of lad who gets sent to the principal’s office for reading in class.  For a couple of years, round about third grade, when every time we’d line up single file and go marching in an increasingly chaotic column to the little library at Timberlane Elementary School, I’d wander out with two or three books.  Every one of those books would have a title like “Twenty Tales of Terror” or “Seven Spinetingling Stories” or “Five More Reasons Your Child Won’t Be Sleeping Tonight.”

As indeed I often did not.  Having read and read and read, I’d lie there drawn up tight under the impenetrable protective shield of my race car covers and my Snoopy sheets, listening to every last creak and groan of our nondescript suburban home, to the faint rushing of pipes, to the wind sussurating through the trees.

Every sound meant the slime was there, that formless dark devouring monster I’d read about in a short story creatively titled, “The Slime.”  It had oozed from depths of the sea after a nuclear test, as all good monsters from the 1950s and 60s did, where it had moved through the darkness of night to absorb hobos by campfires and unwitting children.  It could be there, bubbling and undulating hungrily in my closet, waiting to engulf and digest me.  Or it could be under my bed, waiting for the deep darkness of night and mindlessly hoping I wouldn’t notice how derivative that short story was of the Blob.  I would lie there and tremble until I trembled off to sleep.

When I was in fourth grade, we moved to England.  There, thousands of miles away in a new home, I would recall a Victorian-era story I’d read in one of those books, a tale of bloodcurdling horror, in which one never actually saw the terror, but only the poor souls who died from sheer fright.  It was set in a London suburb, and told in a way that seemed to insinuate that the story could possibly have been true, perhaps, and there I was, with my race car covers and Peanuts sheets, now living in a London suburb in the very city where that ancient evil manifested itself.  I would lie there, fearing evil, wondering how I might ward it away.

That fear of evil, of monstrous things?  It’s not quite the same in me now.  I do not fear beasties and creepy crawlies and things that go bump in the night.  I can read through a scary tale and be unphased, or watch a horror film and only very infrequently squinch my eyes closed and plug my ears to keep from getting too riled up.  Make-believe evil and monsters don’t really phase me.

As I’ve moved into adulthood, it’s the existence of evil in the world that I struggle with, the terrible things and monsters that move about in the light of day in our world.  The wars and violence that plague our species.  The way we manage somehow to have people starving to death in the midst of abundance.  The ease with which we inflict sorrows on each other, and hurts on each other.  Evil is something we wrestle with, struggle to come to terms with, something human beings have always wondered at.  Why does this exist?  Why does God let this happen?  How can we keep it far away from us?

That’s the purpose of the story we heard a snippet from this morning, this earthy, meaty, fascinating tale about why it is things are the way they are.  This is the second of two completely different tales of the act of creation from the book of Genesis.   The first is the the newer of the two, a back-and-forth song of seven days and creation and goodness, which scholars believe may have been sung or chanted by priests in the ancient temple.  It come from what’s called the Priestly tradition.

But the other story is older and earthier, the kind of tale that would be spun out in the flickering light of a campfire, the tents circled at night, as the wise one is asked: “Why is everything so messed up?  Why do bad things happen in the world?”

And so, remembering the story that had been told for generations, they would take a quaff from the passed wineskin, clear their throat, and start in.  In the day that the I AM THAT I AM created the heavens and the earth, they would begin, using that ancient Hebrew name for God.  From that name, scholars can link this to what is called the Yahwist tradition.  It’s more ancient than the priestly stories, and the relationship it reflects with the God of Israel goes back to a primal time.

The answer, told in the earthy cadences of an ancient wisdom story, revolves around a garden, the man, the woman, the snake, and the fruit of a tree that must not be consumed.

It is there at the center of the perfect garden, and it’s the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

This is not, not, not, the tree of knowledge.  This is an important thing to grasp.  It is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, where up until this point, everything that the man and the woman have known has been good.

By taking that bite, they’re not deepening their understanding of what it means to live graciously with one another, or in harmony with the garden.  They are not growing in their understanding of what their world truly is.

They are tasting what it means to lose sight of their purpose, which is to be helpmates and supports and companions to one another.

That fruit does not open their eyes more deeply to the world.  All it taught them was what it means to be ashamed, to hide from their Creator, and to blame one another.  What is the first thing the man and woman do, upon having their eyes opened up?  They are open to social shame, to hiding the truth of who they are away.  What they know is separation and defensiveness, fear and anxiety.

From that place, they choose to pass blame to one another, which we can read in the very next verses.  When asked, “Did you eat,” the man does not say, “Yes I did, I knew better, and I wish I had not.”  He says, “It was her fault.  She made me do it.”   When asked, did you eat, the woman does not say, “Yes, and I am so sorry because this is kind of terrible now.”  She says, “The snake made me do it.”  We don’t hear what the serpent says, but it might have been, “Everything I said was technically true.  Technically.  What’s wrong with telling the truth?”

So where, in this story, is the evil that Jesus asks us to pray to be delivered from?   Where, in the swirl of this broken world, is that evil we’d be delivered from?

It is not my mortality, not my small and fragile being.  That’s just a part of my reality, which can be neither escaped or denied.  It is my nature, as a creature of earth, as a creature of dust and ashes.

And while I don’t particularly want brokenness around me, the sweeping darkness of war and famine and illness that moves like a plague of locusts through so much of the world?  That is not the evil I fear most.

I do not pray, “Deliver me from it.”  I am not praying, “Deliver me from them.”

I am praying, “Deliver me from the shadow of my own soul.”  The evil I want to be most delivered from is the evil that has laid down root in my own soul, in my own self, body and spirit.  I fear that thing that tears me from my vocation, those parts of me that turn me from the task of living out Christ’s grace and the heart of Christ’s compassion.

And when I pray, and offer up that call for deliverance, that’s where I most pray.

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

Your Heart’s Desire

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

03.08.15; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 4:1-13

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“Lead us not into temptation,” goes the next little snippet of prayer, which is a funny thing, considering the society in which we live.

Because our culture is all about temptation.  It is the driving force underlying so much of our economic system.  Temptation is what we live and breathe.  Temptation forms and shapes so many of our interactions, so much of what we see and who we are.  We have a hard enough time keeping ourselves focused, even in the absence of countless inputs stirring our hungers.  Getting us to want things...advertising and marketing...is an almost 200 billion dollar industry in the United States alone.  The ad industry, with its heady blend of sex and power and hunger and fear, all blended up and mixed together, are all a huge part of who we are.

But temptation?  As a thing, it goes deeper than that, deeper than the shallow manipulations of marketing and advertising.  

It’s hard, and I feel it, that temptation, whenever I try to make a positive shift in my existence.  When I made the commitment to get myself healthy again a couple of years back, it seemed basic enough.  Just eat less and exercise more.  So simple.  So easy.   But the patterns of us, the routines that we establish through years of writing and re-writing and doing and re-doing?  They aren’t so easily undone.

When we try to shift them, to move down a new path, to set old ways aside?  Those old ways fight back.  

Hunger and fear, sex and power and pleasure?  All of these things play and shimmer across our consciousness in a hundred different ways.  

For the last several years, I’ve tried to keep on track, to eat healthily, but as I sat in Starbucks, it teases me with things that sound delicious.  “Sip a sweet escape,” the sign whispers at me, with pictures of some sweet creamy caramel caffeinated concoction.  Oh, the delicious alliteration.  Oh, the temptation, as rich as the smell of Cinnabon that they pump into the mall whenever I have the ill fortune to go there, the siren song of scent, calling us to crash onto the caloric rocks.  Or there’s the pizza, whose carbs and cheese are rendered magically healthy by the addition of vegetables.

I try to write, try to live into my gifts so that I’m being creative, or just live into that simple satisfaction of getting things done.  But there’s Facebook with so many of the people I know sharing their lives and whatever silly thing might have distracted the world today.  There’s Twitter, with those neat little lists I’ve created that show me the things in the world I most enjoy.  And I click, and I like, and you comment, and suddenly an hour has passed, and you’ve gotten precisely nothing done besides reading a comment thread or watching videos or taking stupid little quizzes.  

I try to stay on the path I’ve set for myself this Lenten season, not just of prayer, but of setting aside pointless pleasures, those habits that are simply habits, neither mortal sins nor meaningful.  For me, for years, that means marking the season with an absence of alcohol.  For me, it’s not and has never been addiction, not a pathology with which I struggle mightily and desperately.  It’s just those beers, a couple of them, or a glass or three of wine, which warm my evenings.  A pattern, nothing more.  Just a habit, a simple thing.  

But even in that, I feel it those first few weeks, like an itch in a phantom limb.   I want to pop open that IPA as I make dinner.  When I sit down for a family dinner, I want the taste of that nice merlot--oaky, with a tones of elderberry and...mmm, what is that flavor...a hint of warm outgassing esthers from the green vinyl front seat of a brand new 1972 Dodge Polara.  Mmmm.  I feel myself wanting that flavor, even though I’ve committed to mark the time with that change in myself.  That hunger is there, that taste in my mind, challenging me to be something other than the person I’ve committed myself to being.

And that--small as it is--represents the essence of temptation, the heart of why it is such a dark part of us.  It is that thing that draws us towards the thing we want the very most in this moment, towards the thing we want the most right now.  It is our heart’s desire.  It’s what we want.

That wanting has nothing to do with who we are as a person.  It does not mirror our aspirations for ourselves.  It does not reflect healthy relationships with others.  When we strive towards building ourselves up as a person, we are “integrating” ourselves, which is just a fancy way of saying that we have integrity.  We have set that self before us that we strive towards, and we are committed to moving towards it.  Temptation?  That can test and temper us, sure.  But it can also be what disintegrates us, breaking us apart, leaving us a squiggly, aimless mess of hunger and anger and soul-emptiness.

There is no subtler, more powerful curse to place on an enemy than this: may you get everything your heart desires.

So we ask God, in this most basic of prayers: Don’t lead us there.  Don’t place temptation before us.   Wait, what?  God’s doing this?  God is the one we’re asking to not connect us with temptation?  Huh.  This is odd.  It gets odder.

Here, we get word from Luke, the story that begins our Lenten season, of how Jesus wanders out into the desert to be tempted.   This is doubly odd, because, well, generally we don’t think of a desert wasteland as the kind of place that is filled with temptation.  For that we’d typically think of Vegas, or New Orleans, or some seedy back alley in Bangkok.  But the desert?  As a place to check yourself for temptation?  It seems strange.

And yet it is the desert where Jesus seeks temptation, actively looks for it.  He is called to it, to test whether he is who he says he is, or whether he will fall short.  Human beings do not need outside influences to test them.  For that, he only needs to be in connection with himself.

Jesus was most surely aware that the test of our commitment lies not in the external pressures and choices that surround us.  The most profound test rests in ourselves, in our fundamental nature as persons.  If you carry with yourself hungers, they’ll be with you just as completely in the desert as they are in Coldstone Creamery.  If you carry with yourself the desire for power, it will ride you just as strongly when you’re in solitude as it will when you interact with others.

Those parts of us that we do not want to rule us, that are set against the best self we know we have the capacity to be?  They are with us everywhere.  Jesus, in that place where everything else was swept aside, was tested, and sought that testing out.

But wait...isn’t that a good thing?  I mean, seriously.  Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do, to seek out those places that test us to be sure that we’re actually the people we claim to be?  Isn’t that kind of the whole reason behind this season of Lent?  A time of testing, when we press ourselves to prove our commitment?

Yet in this prayer, we are acknowledging that those times when we test and challenge our faith are hard on us.  All of us can bear up under it for a while, but to be blunt?  Those times of testing are not something we generally seek out.  Jesus certainly did in the desert, but that wasn’t his hardest test.  His hardest test came later, not the test that comes at the beginning of this season but the test that comes at the end of it.

And when he was in the garden of Gethesemane, alone and realizing what was to come, he was perfectly within his rights to not be eagerly looking forward to it.  To ask, as he taught us to pray, that he not be led into that time of trial.

Sometimes, of course, we have to go there.

But it is perfectly fine, perfectly within our right, to ask, simply: insofar as it can be so, can you not test me more than I can bear right now?  Can you not lay out my fears and angers and hungers before me?

And as we know those things, and as we ask, we remember not to do it ourselves.

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

The Balance Sheet

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

02.22.15; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 7:1-12

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Here, we come to that point in the prayer when things get really hard.  Or, rather, harder.  It’s hard enough to want only necessary things.  But hardest still is that portion we get today: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”

This whole “debts and debtors” issue is a strange and difficult one, one that goes well past the difficulty Christians have figuring out whether it’s “debts,” as we Presbyterians say it, or “trespasses,” as those who aren’t as smart and wise and humble as us put it.  It’s debts, of course.  Opheilemata and opheiletais, go the words in Matthew and Luke’s original Greek, and they refer specifically to a financial obligation owed.  But we forgive those who trespass the other way, so we’re cool.

Honestly, though, that little translation quibble is meaningless.  This section of the prayer has to do with any way in which we personally are offended by another, or harmed by another, or owed something by another, or when someone crosses a boundary they’re not supposed to in an act that might conceivably be called trespassing.  Conceivably.  

How good are we at forgiving such people?

We might think it’s straightforward and exact.  How do we get to forgiveness?  We think, oh, all we need to do is get things just so.  There must be just recompense, and then forgiveness will come.  We want the balance sheet to line up perfectly, where every little thing I’ve done and every little thing you’ve done come out even.

It’s one of those things you work your way through with kids, particularly when they were little and you’re meting out scoopfuls of New York Super Fudge Chunk Chip.  If the servings didn’t come out exactly just so, you’re going to hear about it.  

If everyone doesn’t get exactly the same amount of time on their screens, you’re going to hear about it.  Amazing, how even though everyone’s got a smartphone and a 3DSXL and a Vita and a tablet and a laptop and a desktop and a 30 incher in the kitchen and a 50 incher in the living room and a 75 incher in the rec-room, so many screens that our homes have started to look like sports bars, we still manage to not get that balance exactly right.

It’s hard, making things come out exactly right.  When human beings try, we make a mess of things.

I was reminded of this, often, as I read my way through a peculiar and fascinating book recently.  It was a biography entitled The Faithful Executioner, inspired by the real-life journal of a man who’d dedicated his life to being an instrument of justice.  His name was Franz Schmidt, and he lived back in the sixteenth century in Nuremberg, Germany.  He was, by profession and trade, a Master Executioner.  It was a trade he’d learned from his father, who’d prepared his son to learn the family business, which was nothing more and nothing less than the art of killing other human beings in the service of the state.   Dad was really, really committed to making his son the best at their trade.  How committed?  Generally, when we buy our eleven-year-old son a dog, it’s not so they can use it to practice chopping off heads with swords.  

“Yay, Daddy, a puppy!”  “Son, don’t get too attached.”

It’s a strange, strange story about a very odd life, about a time that is so different from our own that it’s a little hard for us to even process.  Here, at the beginning of the modern era, was a culture in which justice was understood as a carefully structured retributive process.   Every punishment was exactly measured out to match the crime, carefully calculated to inflict a certain amount of pain, or induce a certain amount of fear.  Steal once, and you’d have to pay it back, plus a specific number and level of whippings.  Steal again?  You’d be hung from the gallows, and your corpse left to rot.  Worse crimes?  They had worse punishments, which I will not recount in detail because they’re both creative and unspeakably horrendous.  He records several examples in his journal of prisoners being told they were going to be beheaded, and them saying, “Oh, thank goodness.”  This was a time where having your head chopped off with a large two-handed sword was the “merciful” outcome.  It was the 16th century equivalent of getting your sentence reduced to community service, only, you know, with death.

What was most peculiar about this story was the matter-of-fact way in which Franz went about his trade, convinced that he was simply an agent of justice.  He was the sword that set things back in balance, or so he assumed, as he meticulously recorded every one of the almost four hundred souls he personally killed, not to mention those he chopped, hacked, maimed, and tortured.  Franz, you see, was a devout Christian, a teetotaler, and he saw this all as completely necessary to set things right and make things just.  

All in the name of balance.  All in the name of setting everything straight.  Which, of course, it didn’t.  Crime continued, and within a hundred years, the city-state of Nuremberg had collapsed.  All that pain, all that death, all that trying to create the balance on the sharp edge of the sword?  Useless.  It made nothing better.  It healed nothing.  

Which Jesus came to do, through his life and his teachings, in a way we haven’t quite figured out yet.

In Matthew’s Gospel today, we hear how Jesus wrapped up the Sermon on the Mount, which stands as the highest and most significant of all of Christ’s teachings. It’s why our adult ed class has been working our way through it, bit by bit, over the last couple of weeks, weather notwithstanding.  It’s hard stuff.  Throughout this heart-of-his-message teaching, he makes a point of consistently challenging the way his listeners thought about the world. Throughout his teaching, he constantly told all who heard him that what mattered most was how we responded to the knowledge that God’s kingdom was at hand. He reminded his disciples and the crowds that gathered to listen that what mattered was that perfect fusion of faith and action. That means going above and beyond the demands of the law, and living a life  of radical love, up to and including loving one’s enemies.  That means being humble, and refusing to be hypocritical or judgmental.

Judgmental?  

That last part is hard, perhaps the hardest thing of all, which is why when Matthew’s Gospel gives us that prayer, the forgiveness part is the part that Jesus doubles down on.  “Forgive us our debts as we forgive debtors,” he says in the prayer, right there in Matthew 6:7-8.  And then, in case we missed it, in the verses right after the prayer he says, “If you forgive others, God will forgive you.  If not, you’re outta luck, buddy.”  

Then, in case we’ve missed it, in case we’ve spaced out and managed not to register what he was talking about, we get Jesus right back on us in chapter seven.  “Do not judge, or you will be judged.  With the judgment you give, you will be judged, and the measure you give is the measure you will get.”  Three times in two short chapters, Jesus says it, first, and then again and then again, because he knows how dismally terrible human beings are at really and truly forgiving others.

But perhaps the oddest spin on this whole thing?  Jesus asks us to pray for that to be so.   Here we are, offering up this pure and simple and straightforward prayer to our Creator, and we are *ask* to be forgiven as we forgive.

Does this really register as we pray it?  Here we are, addressing the fount from which all Creation flows, the terrible Numinous I Am that I Am, and we say, “Hey, you know all those angers and resentments that burn like a carefully tended fire in our hearts?  You know the way we grumble to ourselves whenever we’ve been slighted and offended?  You know how we take sides, how we attack people who we disagree with socially and personally and politically?  

That is the standard by which we are hearby, officially, through this holy Jesus prayer, asking You, the Almighty God, to judge us for all eternity.”

What amazes me, as I pray this, is that my throat doesn’t involuntarily close or my larynx seize up as part of some existential defense mechanism.

This is what Jesus tells us to ask for.  Do this to us, God.  Yikes.

Why would we want this?  Honestly, I think a more likely prayer would be: Please don’t do that, God.  Judge us by some other standard.  Maybe our SAT scores.  Yeah.  Use those.  Just...not by the reality of who we have been as we stand in relationship with others.

But Jesus gets us to pray this, because this is the way God is.  We are judged according to our hearts, and according to how our hearts guide us to act towards all the rest of God’s children.

That’s a reminder we need, desperately need, every single time this prayer tumbles from our lips like a recorded message.

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

Necessary Stuff

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

02.15.15; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  James 2: 1-13

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“Give us this day our daily bread.”

Daily bread.  Just what is that?  What is it that we need, each and every day?  Is it our way of giving thanks for all the stuff we have?

Our sense of our own need for stuff is pretty solid, pretty intensely well developed.  How do we know what we need?  Well, we need the stuff that the world tells us we need.  When I was a kid, I knew my family needed a television.  Without it, we wouldn’t be able to watch Batman reruns and Star Trek reruns and the Rockford Files and football, in 19 inch black-and-white glory.  That was what we needed, as we watched from across the room.  

“Which one of those little bunches of specks is our team, Dad?”  “The ones with the red jerseys, son.”  “That’s not helping, Dad.”

For a while, until there was color, and we could see the uniforms.  And then, of course, 19 inches became 25 inches, with one-a-them newfangled remote controls.  Which became 32 inches, with surround sound.  Which became 54 inches, rear-projection, and high definition digital, purchased for a Superbowl party nearly a decade back.  That television started to die a few months ago, as the wildly complex little array of mirrors at its heart began to come apart.  And the Superbowl was coming up, and we couldn’t risk having something that didn’t work, so after some research and waiting for an appropropriate sale, the replacement was gathered.

Two fingers thin, 60 inches and so high def that you can see every pore and every drop of sweat on the faces of the players.  It’s necessary, or so we think.  We can’t have less an a sixty inch screen!  It’d look so small!  It’s essential, or so we tell ourselves.  It gets used every day in our house, or just about every day.  As I also use a coffeemaker, my smartphone, a netbook, and at least one of the three internal combustion powered vehicles that allow me to scurry all over the DC metro area.

Do these count?  

What is really essential in life bears no resemblance to the carefully manipulated desires that consumer culture implants in us.   I think about my time, my desires, the things that fill my day.  How many of them represent what could meaningfully be described as my “daily bread?”

Here, we come to a transition in the great prayer that Jesus taught, as it goes from directly invoking our relationship with God to speaking to our own lives.  And this request is straightforward, as straightforward as it comes.  Give me what I need to live.  Give me my daily bread.

Digging a little deeper into what Jesus means by “daily bread” reveals something of a conundrum.  The word “daily,” or rather the Greek term from which Bible translators get that word, is epiousios.  There’s a problem with that word.  It has nothing at all to do with the idea of “daily,” or something that happens during every 24 hour period.

In fact, the biggest problem with epiousios is that it occurs only two places in all of the Greek language.  It’s in Matthew’s Gospel, when Jesus says it as part of this prayer.  And it’s in Luke’s Gospel, in the same prayer.  That’s it.  Up until it was written into the Gospels, there’s no trace in any Greek literature or letters or anywhere of anyone else ever using that word.  So what to make of it?  Scholars, well, they’ve had to guess.

It’s an educated guess, them bein’ scholars and all, one that rises from the prefix and the root of the word.  Epiousios we can break out into “epi” and “ousios.”  Epi, meaning necessary, apt, or appropriate.  Ousios, meaning “substance,” or “the nature of a thing,” or just its “stuffness.”

“Give us this day our necessary-stuffly bread” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, but that’s what that prayer appears to most directly mean.

What is necessary stuff?  What do we really and truly need?  I need a warm place on this savagely bitter day, true.  But I do not need, not really, the computer on which I wrote this sermon.  I do not need the television, or the PS3, or that Alienware Alpha Steambox my son keeps trying to convince me to buy.  None of them are necessary-stuffly things.  In fact, almost all of what is around me and fills my life is really not “necessary.”  And yet those yearnings continue, endless hungers.

We have trouble seeing our actual needs.   And from that difficulty seeing what we need, we have difficulty being who we need to be.

The Book of James has something to say about our daily bread, and about what matters if that prayer is to mean anything.    This “letter” is more an essay or sequence of essays that establish the most essential nature of the Christian ethical life.   It has been traditionally attributed to James, the brother of Jesus, and as it is perhaps the most theologically Jewish of the books of the New Testament and written in a Greek that seems shaped and formed by Hebrew and Aramaic, a majority of contemporary Biblical scholarship sees no reason to challenge that.  

James is one of the most practical, rubber-meets-the-road books in the New Testament.  By genre, it’s a book of Wisdom, the only one in the New Testament.  What that means is simple.  Wisdom concerns itself with how we human beings should act if we’re to get along in the world.

Wisdom teachings are found elsewhere in the Bible, in Proverbs, and in Ecclesiastes, and in Job, as well as in a number of the Psalms.   Those books teach the basics of how to live, and particularly how to live so that you are playing well with others and doing well for yourself.   They teach thrift, foresight, and patience.  They teach that life is to be enjoyed, but that sustained enjoyment is best found in moderation.    They teach that the wise do not speak without first considering the impact of their words. They also teach about what does and does not matter.

What doesn’t matter, as far as this little section of James is concerned, is wealth and power.  We see shine and sparkle, and immediately assume that it confers some superiority to an individual.  They have nice things, they dress well, they are surrounded by the trappings of material prosperity, and that must mean something, right?

And here we human beings, living in this culture and this age, encounter a challenge.  We prefer the rich, so much so that this becomes our goal for ourselves.  The trappings of wealth become our own desire, our own yearning.  We have been trained to want the larger and the brighter and the better, and it is this desire...this hunger...that lines us up, our minds filled with fantasy, whenever the Powerball gets to the half-a-billion mark.  

That yearning is directly challenged by the words Jesus offers up in that little prayer.  Want only what is truly necessary for your life, Jesus says.  But how do we even know what that is?  How can we tell, we who live in a society that feels like it is so disconnected from the real that “necessary” seems like a dream?

There’s a word I’ve known for years, one that’s been surfacing a whole bunch in my reading over the last several years.  It’s a German word, one that’s used in the archaic German spoken by the Old Order Amish in Lancaster County.  Yeah, I know we call them the “Pennsylvania Dutch,” but “Dutch” is just a mis-speaking of “Deitsch.”  In the peculiar version of German they still speak, one of the core values of the Amish folk is called Gelassenheit, which roughly translates into calm, content humility.

It is that spirit that moves those folks to set the seemingly strange rules that govern their community.  If a thing makes you proud, or makes you stand out from your brothers and sisters?  You don’t want it, because it will tear at the heart of community.  No jewelry, no ornamentation, no LTE Wifi hotspot in your buggy, none of it.

A phone?  Not necessary in your house, although there’s a single land-line shared by neighbors  Electricity?  Nope, not in the home, although you can have a diesel generator to power your carpentry tools or a washing machine.  Tractors?  Not in the fields, but you can park one in the barn and use it to bale hay.  So long as they have steel wheels, so you’re not tempted to drive it on the road.  At every point, gelassenheit is the measure of whether one should have a thing or not.  

It’s a strange thing, and the Amish are a peculiar and alien culture, but they seem to get that idea a little better than we do.

And so as we pray this prayer, whenever we pray this prayer, it reminds us...challenges us...to remember what our Creator offers up, and what is truly necessary.

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