Whatever We Ask

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

04.26.15; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  1 John 3:16-24

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What is it that I want, right now?  What should I ask God to give me?

That changes from year to year.  When I was the age of my teenage boys, I wanted a Lamborghini Countach.  Oh, how I wanted a Lamborghini.  What I got was my grandmother’s tan 1973 Plymouth Valiant with a green vinyl interior, which was exactly like the Lamborghini Countach of my dreams in that it had four wheels, got terrible gas mileage, and broke down all the time.  When I started dating, I realized that it was, in fact, far better than a Lamborghini, because the Countach has fixed bucket seats, whereas the Valiant had a front bench seat.  

Valiant, for the win.  That was what I wanted then.  But what do I want now?

I know I’m supposed to want a smartwatch now.  The internet tells me this, as I find myself bombarded by images of young people wearing stylish little wrist-baubles which can, through the magic of our electronic age, do some amazing things.

“Hey,” say the people who tell us what we are supposed to want.  “Here’s this amazing new device that totally revolutionizes the idea of the watch!  Remember those little watches that you could barely tell were on your wrist?  Well, this one is much, much heavier!  You’ll always know it’s there!  Remember how your watch was there to tell the time?  Well this watch can do a million things, so long as you’ve linked it to the pocket-screen you need to buy along with it, which we’re happy to sell you for a couple of hundred bucks, not counting monthly service charges and data streaming charges.  Remember how you used to have to take five seconds every day to wind your watch, or change its battery once every year?  Well, these new watches are rechargeable, so all you need to do is make sure you’re charging it for half an hour every eight hours.  And you know how annoying it is when people are constantly taking out their phones and staring at them?  Well, now you can just glance down at your wrist constantly!  You’ll be so cool if you buy it.  You’ll be one of the popular kids, with their special magic popular watches.”

This is what I am supposed to want, because they are telling me so.  

Should I ask God for a smartwatch, I wonder?

Or maybe I’m thinking too small.  Perhaps, with Pastor Creflo A. Dollar, my favorite teevee preacher, I should be asking God for more.  His whole ministry is based on the idea that if you ask God for anything, really ask in faith, God is going to give it to you.  This theology has built some pretty giant churches, and sells an amazing number of books.  It was in that hopeful spirit that he recently asked the Creator of the Universe for a Gulfstream G650.  He famously hit up his congregation for that private jet to make sure he could fly around the world to better spread the message of Jesus.   Not just any jet.  The best jet, the most expensive jet, the jet that is as far above all other forms of air transportation as a Rolls Royce Phantom Limelight Edition is above my trusty rust-speckled 2002 Honda Odyssey.  It’s only sixty five million dollars, after all, and he needs it.   What does sixty five million dollars mean, to the God who made the heavens and the earth?  It’s small potatoes.  And why shouldn’t a Christian be able to boldly ask God for whatever he wants?  He’s doing the Lord’s work, after all.  “If I want to believe in God for a $65 million dollar plane,” he said, rebuking the devil for challenging his jet-ministry, “you cannot stop me. You cannot stop me from dreaming.”

Maybe that’s it.  I’m just dreaming too small.  I’m just not asking God for enough.  A Gulfstream G650 cruises at Mach Zero Point Nine, which would significantly cut my commuting time.  That’d be, what, Annandale to Poolesville in four point four minutes?  Think of how much that would facilitate the ministry of this community!  I’m sure that’d be well worth every penny of the next six hundred years of our church budget.

Why shouldn’t I ask?  There it is, right there in scripture, right there in 1 John.  Here, the beloved community says: Be bold!  Ask for what you want!  You’ll receive it!  That’s what they mean, right?

What, just what, are the things I should ask from God?

That’s the wonderful thing about taking a single verse out of context.  You can make it do or mean anything you want it to mean, and that’s almost always something that serves your own interests.

And there, the beloved community that gathered around the message of John’s Gospel and the letters of John lived out their lives in a way far different from our own lives and wantings.  It is amazing, how we manage to find ways to turn and twist and bend Christianity to our own hungers, or to the expectation of our own culture.

The church that gave us this little spiritual essay would have been experiencing that pressure.  John’s Gospel, and the three letters that bear his name, all come to us from a later period than most of the other writings in the New Testament.  They took their final written form considerably later than the letters of Paul, perhaps as much as fifty to seventy-five years later, depending on which bible scholars you listen to.  The faith that they reflected was the story of Jesus seen through the lens of a more developed church, one that rested on both the old tales handed down through generations.  

Who was handing it down?  First John was written by someone who chose not to give their name.  There’s not a hint of it.  But the same author likely wrote 2 John and 3 John, and they identify themselves in the Greek as ho presbuteros.  The Elder.  The Presbyter.  This makes me like the letter even more.

Though there is much beauty in the writings of this primal Presbyterian, there is also evidence of considerable tension.  What this letter resists, throughout and consistently, is the idea that walking the way of Jesus of Nazareth brings with it fame or power or wealth or worldly glory.  As the message of Jesus spread and grew, and more and more people encountered it, many of those human beings brought with them the expectation that what Jesus was bringing was the same message as the mystery cults and secret societies that gathered on every Roman streetcorner.  Jesus will help me get ahead.  Jesus will get me what I want.  Jesus will give me power.

And that’s true, on a certain level.  If you completely dedicate yourself to the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, and to doing what it is he asks us to, you will get what you want.

But first, we hear, Jesus just needs one little thing.  He needs us to change what we want, so that it’s the same thing that he wanted, and that his Father wanted, and that the Spirit wanted.

Give yourself completely over to the love of others.  Reject social, economic, and political power.  Take up your cross, and follow.  As the Presbyter writes back in 1 John 2:15-17:

Do not love the world or the things in the world.  The love of the Father is not in those who love the world; for all that is in the world--the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches--comes not from the Father but from the world.  And the world and its desire are passing away, but those who do the will of God live forever.

The challenge, of course, comes because we have trouble doing that.  We hunger for those things, and we do so doubly and moreso because that is precisely what our culture wants us to do.  In a society in which we are called to identify ourselves first and foremost as consumers, in which we are taught to want and want and want some more, this is a hard teaching to embrace.  We want that Lamborghini, that magical-wrist-bauble, that Learjet.

We are asked to want, instead, the well being of our neighbors and our sisters and our brothers.  We are asked to yearn, instead, for a world that puts more energy into feeding the hungry than it does into destroying enemies.

That’s what we are called to want, right now.  That, more than anything, is what we are to ask of God.

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

Startled and Terrified

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

04.19.15; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 24: 36b-48

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I am not the hugest fan of surprises.  I don’t think, to be honest, that most of us are.  

We startle easy, we humans do.  It’s part of our factory firmware, to the point where we can almost make it a form of entertainment.  This may just be for dads amusing themselves by inducing the startle-reflex in our little ones when they’re babies...you know, when they’re lying there on the changing table, minding their own business, when suddenly out of nowhere you...whoosh...gently blow on their faces and they suddenly stick their arms and legs straight out and get all wide-eyed and shivery.  

Boingggg...they’d go.  Whoosh, you’d go.  Boinggg...they’d go, almost as much fun as having one of those crazy little fainting goats for a pet.

Not that I would ever have done that as a father.  Of course not.  My goodness.  

Although if it worked on teenagers I’d probably still be doing it.  Whoosh.  Boinggg.  

The Moro Reflex, it’s called, named after early twentieth century Austrian pediatrician Ernst Moro, who apparently spent a great deal of time in his practice startling babies.  This may or may not be on the list of questions you should ask when you’re trying to decide on whether to go to a new pediatrician.

Whichever way, Moro found that pretty much every human being has that hardwired reaction to things they weren’t expecting.

The sudden or the radically unexpected just isn’t something we welcome, even when we’re grown up.  It’s the heart of our fear, in many ways.  Bam, the jumpscare, the laziest form of fear, like walking up behind someone and shouting boo.  Our heart races, we shriek, and then express our annoyance at the person who should know that JUST ISN”T FUNNY.

Generally, the unexpected tends not to be a good thing.  We don’t react well to those things that startle us, or that surprise us.

In today’s passage from the Gospel of Luke, we hear a story of the intensity of surprise.   In this final chapter, Luke’s narrative of the Gospel is wrapping up, in preparation for the sequel in the Book of Acts.  In the opening verses of chapter 24, Luke has shared with us that women arrived at the tomb and found it empty.  This isn’t the sort of thing you keep to yourselves, so they tried to report what they had encountered.  They returned to the others, and said that angels had told them that Jesus was risen, but...unlike the story in John...the apostles wouldn’t listen.  They don’t believe them for a minute.  “Them crazy wimmins and their wild stories.”  

We’ve heard about how two disciples were walking the road to Emmaus, and on that journey encountered a stranger who turned out maybe to have possibly been Jesus.   And still, they’re having some trouble processing what it is that they’re encountering.  “Did he look like Jesus?”  Well, no.  “Well how did you know, then?”  Um.

With these stories dismissed from their minds as just crazy talk, Jesus is suddenly among them, which just scares the bejabbers out of them.  He offers them a greeting, a simple “Peace be with you,” no more than the Hebrew greeting shalom aleichem that you’d say in encountering a friend.

But this is a dead friend, a person who they know, from pretty much every interaction ever, cannot possibly be there wishing them peace.  Peace?  Peace would be the farthest thing they would be feeling right then.  It would have been an impossibly overwhelming moment, the kind of instant that would simply be too much to process.

It reminds me a little bit of one of my favorite moments in any film ever, a little snippet of brilliance that occurred in the 1991 British film Truly Madly Deeply, which starred the lamentably not-known British television actress Juliet Stevenson and the decades before Severus Snape Alan Rickman.  They were playing two young lovers, both musicians, and...well...he dies.  Even before the film starts.  We are introduced to her in the depth of a mourning she can’t shake, which is one sign that this is definitely a European film.  She just can’t bring herself to get past his death, lost in a deep and inescapable depression.

Until, and this is no spoiler, he comes back.  That scene is, well, perfect.  It is just exactly right, exactly the way you would feel in that moment.  I’m a hard mark when it comes to tear-jerkers, but this moment just gets me every single time.  That and the end of Monsters Inc., which I suppose means I’m not quite as hard a mark as I like to say I am.

That scene, which you can watch on Facebook this very afternoon, is what it would be like, in that room in Jerusalem.  Hysteria.  Snot and joy and wailing panic, times twelve.

At this point in Luke’s story, Jesus takes three specific actions. In verse 39, he offers them his hands and feet, to see and to hold, as a sign that he is really and truly with them.  In verse 41, he takes a bit of fish and eats it, again, to show the reality of his actual, material presence among them.

These actions are mirrored in the post-resurrection story told in John’s Gospel.  Even though John and Luke are drawing on very different oral and written traditions about Jesus, they both contain nearly identical reminders of Christ’s physical presence.  In the passage we heard last week from the first letter of John, the community that had gathered around that Gospel reflected on how important it was that they knew his tangible self, his hands and his side, as proof that he truly is risen.  

Two totally different traditions, both sharing a core remembrance of what that post-Easter experience was like for disciples.

In Luke, that moment means that the disciples need some help overcoming their first reaction.  If they’re going to embrace a new thing, it needs to be made real for them, and their fear needs to be overcome.

That can be the challenge for us, as we strive and wrestle and struggle to find new paths and new directions in life.  We can be averse to those things, as the patterns of whatever sorrow or pain we find ourselves in prevents us from seeing the possibility offered up in each moment.  Depression is like that.  Addiction is like that.  Carefully held anger is like that.  When we encounter an opportunity to turn our life for the better, those states of being prevent us from recognizing and embracing that hope.

Depression did not expect that it would turn out as well as it did, and that you’d feel alive again for a moment.  Addiction did not imagine that you could say, no, no I’m not going to do that, not this time.  Anger did not expect that that person you’ve been angry with forever would seem so genuinely kind and willing to make peace, not after you had carefully made that forty three bullet point list of all the ways that person done did you wrong.

And when faced with a reality that is completely, startlingly different from the comforting darkness we inhabit, we tend to resist it.  We can’t believe that it could be so.  We can’t imagine that this new thing is real, and so we freak out a little bit.

That’s where the reaction of Jesus is so important, and where what he does mingles with what he says.

“Peace,” he says, hushing us down a little bit.  But to reinforce that peace, he makes it clear that what he brings is real.  He invites them to see that he’s really part of their world.  Hands and feet and a shared meal, because what he offers to them is real.

And there, again this week, we have a reminder of what is necessary to bring about Kingdom change in our lives and in the lives of others.  For us to be transformed and changed, we have to be willing to get over our own resistance to Gospel possibility, to overcome fears that have embedded themselves deep within us.

For us to be agents of that change, and help spread it in a world filled with sorrow and dark patterns of being, we have to make that good news manifest.  Here, we can say, as we live it out.  See this thing.  Touch this thing.  See how we eat and live out this new Way among you.

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

Confirming Data

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

04.12.15; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  1 John 1:1 - 2:2

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Man, it’s been a while since I was confirmed.  Having spent weeks with these four, sharing and listening and exploring the faith, it was hard to miss just how much the world has changed since I was their age and making this choice.

I can say to them, yeah, I had a computer when I was your age, and you could connect it to the outside world!  I’m, like, totally hip to this groovy interwebs thing, man!   Only the fastest connection speed was three hundred baud, which translates into 300 bits per second.  Not bytes.  Bits.

Which means, for example, that if you wanted to download something….let’s choose something totally at random….Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, at that download speed it would take you just slightly less than thirty three years.

Meaning, you’d start the download now, and you’d be as old as I am when you could finally play it.

But what if you wanted to stream a Vine of a French Bulldog puppy doing something totally adorabl...wait, let me translate...that’s...um... “totes adorbs?”  Well, those six point five seconds of video would only take three days of buffering.  Well worth the wait, I’d say.

We live in a strangely connected age, a time when we are so awash in information that it becomes really immensely difficult to tell where reality lies.  You’d think, given where we are and how much we can know about our world, that things would have gotten easier.  We can know so very much, about almost anything.

I can clack away at my keyboard and trackpad, and before me on a little screen I can watch storm-fronts sweeping across the mid-Atlantic, telling me that once again, I’m going to have to take the minivan rather than my bike.  I can watch panda cubs squirming around in real time, and anything that humanity has ever known ever will be know to me.  I never have to be lost, not for a moment, not for an instant, so long as I’ve got at least a couple of them little circley doohickeys showin’ on my smartphone signal meter.

We can know anything, at any moment, in any place.  And yet, with all of that impossibly vast amount of information available to us, we struggle with how to manage it.  “Truth” seems something that becomes more and more subjective, as we carefully pick our facts to match the things that we already know.

Confirmation bias, it’s called.  We have a particular way of understanding something, and we carefully assemble all of the facts that reinforce what we already believe.  Let’s say, for example, that you are seven years old, and you do not want to have water with dinner instead of the delicious and life-giving glass of chocolate milk that is the birthright of every redblooded American child.  You can choose facts that support your position, like, say, that 100% of people exposed to water will die.  And that water is the leading cause of drowning.  And that water is a primary ingredient in commercial herbicides and pesticides.  And that consuming too much water has been proven to cause significant health impacts, up to and including death.

All of these things are true, and they are all “facts,” in that they are not made up and really do describe reality.  

It is remarkably easy to fall into this pattern of thinking, to affirm what we affirm because of all of the facts that affirm our affirmations.  And in this age, when we can easily seek out only those things that confirm what we already know, surrounding ourselves with an endless stream of carefully hand-picked information, we can lose our ability to really test and challenge what we’re encountering.

But it means we never really take a hard look at what we believe and how that belief makes us live.  It means we carefully choose to filter out every last bit of countervailing or negative information.  It means we never allow our understanding to grow or deepen or embrace newness, and that we just stagnate away.

Engaging in real confirmation, really checking the truth of something that you hold to be true, is at the heart of the journey we reaffirm every Easter.  Does this Jesus-thing really matter to us?  Does what we encounter in Christ really make any difference in how we experience this brief butterfly-wing-flutter of life that we’re given?

We get a sense of what that life looks like from the First Letter of John this morning, which is an interesting letter for a variety of reasons.

First and foremost, First John isn’t actually a letter.   If you scan back to the beginning of it in 1 John 1:1, you’ll find that it doesn’t have any greetings or salutations.  Unlike the letters from the Apostle Paul, there is no community to which this “letter” is directed.  Not only that, but it doesn’t end at all like the letters that Paul wrote, back a couple of thousand years ago when human beings actually wrote letters to one another.

If you scan to the end at 1 John 5:12, you find that it ends abruptly.  No “Goodbye,” no “Look forward to seeing you soon, please send money.”  There’s just a short talk to the reader, saying, Little Children, don’t worship idols.  And...what?  Nothing else.  It’s more like an essay than a letter, more a treatise than a communication from one human being to another.  Heck, it’s not even an essay.  There’s no, “In conclusion, let me summarize the three points I’ve tried to carefully make so that the computer that grades my writing will notice my summary.”  None of that.  

Secondly, First John is, like the other Epistles of John, remarkably similar to the Gospel of John.  The language used is almost identical to the language of that Gospel, with the same circling, elegantly simple writing.  It is so closely linked that it clearly either comes from the same source or from someone in the same community who was so steeped in that style and theology that they couldn’t help but write that way.

Finally, First John is a letter that, like the Gospel of John, is a peculiar blending of the powerfully mystic and the deeply practical.  It is soaring and beautiful and spiritual on the one hand, and remarkably practical and straightforward on the other, all at the same time.

Take, for instance, the intense focus on the tangibility of the Gospel in the passage we’ve just encountered.  This isn’t strange esoteric language about some theological idea.  It isn’t abstract or distant or intellectualized.  It doesn’t talk about wild dreams or strange visions.  “Here is this deep and transforming truth,” the author tells us.  “I have heard it with my own ears, seen it with my own eyes, touched it with my own hands.”

What’s reported are some pretty intense claims, a set of truths that place significant demands on those who listened and heard.  

The claims made directly speak to how lives are changed in encounter with the reality of Jesus of Nazareth, and they remind us, no matter what we say or claim, to always test our statement of faith against the confirmation of the reality immediately around us.

Does this way of living change us?  Does it shape us?  Can we see it reflected in the way we choose to relate to other human beings?

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

Let It Be So

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Easter 2015; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: John 20:1-18

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As we’ve moved through Lent, through these forty days that lead up to Easter morning, we’ve moved through an extended time of preparation, one in which many of us have set aside carbs and chocolate and delicious hoppy beverages, and taken up forty days of prayer.  Ardent, deep, sustained, prayer.  “Dear Lord, please make the spacetime continuum move a little faster so that I can get back to carbs and chocolate and delicious hoppy beverages.  Please.”

And lo, here we are at Easter.

That journey through this season has merged in with a time of conversation about a single part of the Christian journey...that simple, basic, fundamental prayer that Jesus taught, one that completely encapsulates what he taught and how he asked us to relate to one another.  The Lenten journey blended in with our wander through that short prayer, merging in with one another as seamlessly as cars merging onto 270.  Well, hopefully more seamless than that.  

The journey through that prayer began in months ago, step by step, sense unit by sense unit, week after week, has ended right here on Easter morning, which I totally meant to do.  I mean, sure, it meant y’all had to try to figure out why I’d preach an entire sermon on the letter “K,” but such are the skills they teach you in seminary.  And Sesame Street.  Amazing, how much overlap there is between the two.

So today, we wrap up our holiest of seasons with the very last word of the prayer, that word that Jesus probably didn’t actually say when he taught it to both disciples and crowds.

It’s a word so common in prayer that we mistake it for punctuation, just a little embellishment at the conclusion of something that we’re mumbling our way through.  Which is a pity, because what it is is a statement of hope and affirmation.

AMEN, it goes, and it’s one of those words that managed to somehow wander from the Hebrew not just into English, but into every language it encountered.  In the Christian Bible, it’s one of the few words that goes unchanged when we wander from the Torah and the Prophets into the Gospels and Epistles.  Aleph Mem Nun, it goes in Hebrew, only, you know, backwards and with those funny little dots and squiggles under the letters.  Alpha Mu Epsilon Nu, it goes in the Greek, like some particularly religious sorority.  

Hebrew has given that word to just about every language, where it means the same thing:  “Let it be so.”  “Let that thing that I have just heard be true.”  It is a simple word of deep affirmation, which makes it exactly the word to both end a prayer and to end this holy season.

It is an affirmation of not just what has been heard, but of what is hoped for.

And this morning, we need to register that, because we find ourselves once again in John’s Gospel for the story of resurrection.  It’s a familiar story, one that plays its way out just about every year at this time.  Like that short prayer, the story can become so familiar that we lose sight of it.  If we lose sight of it, it ceases to shape us, the story becomes rote.  It is the thing we say because we are saying it,

Here, something that was completely broken is suddenly and inexplicably unbroken.  A story that had moved in a familiar direction--defeat, despair, and collapse--suddenly moved another way.  

Even if it’s right there in front of us, we no longer affirm it.  How do you say AMEN, to something that you don’t really let resonate with your soul?  How do you say AMEN, if the story being told is not somehow your own story?

That story, this morning, begins with the return of Mary Magdalene, one of women who comprised the inner circle of those who chose to shape their lives around the strange rabbi from Galilee.  She travels to the grave, and encounters not a sealed tomb, but a stone rolled away, wide open and empty.  She comes back running, shouting out that the tomb was empty, not certain what it meant.  Two hear her cry, and rush back with her to the grave.  

Peter, of course, who in John’s Gospel is earnest and well-meaning but a little bit clueless.  With him runs “the disciple whom Jesus loved.”  This is important for John’s Gospel, because this disciple--one who goes carefully and intentionally unnamed throughout the text--is the one responsible for the whole Gospel.  “John” is just a guess, made by the early church.  Why is this disciple more loved?  We don’t know.  But we do know that on that morning, as this Gospel tells the story, this unnamed person and the beloved disciple ran to the tomb.  That nameless one found it open, and...unsurprisingly...they didn’t barrel on in.  They paused, and collected themselves, and while they caught their breath, they watched as Peter just barged right on in.

This is the Peter we get in John, a guy who randomly throws himself from boats elsewhere in the Gospel.

The Beloved remains outside for a moment, and then enters.

What we hear is that “he saw and believed.”  They’re not entirely sure what it is they’re experiencing, but they’re ready to let it shape how they will come to understand the world.  Though the encounter stretches them, they are nonetheless willing to encounter it from that limited understanding and embrace it.

Where there had been death, there was suddenly...something else.   Where there had been weeping and sorrow, there was...something new.  That disciple Jesus loved did not yet know exactly what that meant, or what that looked like.  But he trusted, and was willing to offer up an affirmation, a simple AMEN to the resurrection promise we proclaim this morning.  It’s a willingness to stare into the face of a world that seems so often only about brokenness, and to affirm that things can be made new, that lives can be remade, that hopes can be rekindled.

That is the purpose of this story, every year we tell it.  

It is a story that insists, despite the seeming crazy of it, that there is something beyond the darkness of whatever tomb we find ourselves inhabiting.  

Instead, our renewal in body and spirit comes from God, who we know through Christ and his teachings.  It comes from God’s own Son, living a life filled with God’s own Spirit.  In the hopeful wonder felt by the Beloved Disciple, and in the joy felt by Mary we have a taste of what that truly new life is like.

What we say, on this day, is not just that we affirm the story that we’ve heard.  We affirm what that story means for all of us as we set ourselves towards the days to come.

We say AMEN, let it be so, to the indwelling of real newness.  We say AMEN, to the change that transforms our view of the past, helping us heal those places where we just can’t imagine it might ever happen.  It is a story that when we say AMEN to it, alters our actions in the present, shaping our lives to the form of life Jesus lived out and taught.  It is an Amen that sets a bright hope to guide us towards resurrection.

On this Easter morning, find that place of promise, as it lives in you, and say, let it be so.

On this Easter morning, live this joy with a new heart, and let it be so in your every moment.

He is risen.  Alleluia, AMEN.

A Mighty Long Time

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

03.28.2015;  Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 11:1-11

“The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” we reflected on last week, and then, that little prayer goes: “Forever.”

What do we expect, when we say, “forever?”  Because our expectations of what it means to be in relationship with our Creator for all time, for that prayer to hang in the air for all time?  They may not quite be completely thought through.  Forever, in the event you hadn’t noticed, goes on rather longer than we have the ability to wrap our heads around.

It’s unsettling, honestly, given the tiny little flicker of our lives, to even begin to try.  I remember as a lad, on a warm day in the summer between third and fourth grade, wandering about with nothing to do by anything I wanted.  It was Fire Island, a place without cars, in a time where kids could amble about blissfully with the sand between their toes, lazing about, the kind of summer afternoon at the beach that seems to be forever.  I wanted ice cream, two scoops, chocolate chocolate chip with chocolate sprinkles in a sugar cone, and...as a sign of how old I am...a dollar would buy that.  And I had a dollar.  Wouldn’t it be awesome, I thought, if every day I just got a dollar?  Just like that.  I’d be rich.  I wondered, then, how long it would take me to save up a million dollars, if I got one every day.  

I’d be just a couple of years shy of my three-thousandth birthday, or so my faltering math told me.  Urk.  That, um, wasn’t going to work out.  What about a dollar an hour, I thought?  Almost.  But not quite.  Even then, I wouldn’t make it to a million bucks.  I wouldn’t live that long, even if I lived as long as anyone ever in the history of ever.  And the breezes of that summer afternoon blew a little colder, because I was suddenly aware of how very finite my life on earth was going to be.  Plus, it was summer, and I was doing math.

I had my ice cream, and the day got back to being better.

The scale of forever can be more than a little scary, something I was reminded of these last few weeks as my evening reading led me into an anthology of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories and novellas.  I can’t tell you how nice it is to have a break from reading churchy books every once in a while.

Lovecraft himself was an early 20th century writer of peculiar horror fiction.  He was an odd fish, Lovecraft, a strange and isolated soul, the sort of writer who lived awkward, poor, and alone.   His stories, of alien and ancient horrors, are written in a very particular style, in which every moment is filled with horror of inhuman madness, as monstrous things of mindshattering scale, who for a countless depth of inconceivably immense eons have woven their eldritch and inscrutably vast machinations around the helpless, irrelevant, and shallow mortality of an oblivious, frail and fleeting humanity.  

Those writings profoundly products of their time, and of the growing realization on the part of humanity that everything we know--our whole history, everything that we are and have been--occupied only the tiniest sliver of a fraction of creation.   Before history, there was a yawning chasm of time, time on a scale that our minds can barely comprehend.    And as late 19th and early 20th century astronomy peered more deeply into the recesses of space, we realized that the universe fell back farther than we had ever imagined possible, our sense of the hugeness of it all was overwhelming.  How, in all of what we are, do we fit into this?

Lovecraft’s writing, strange and gothic, was the creation of that era, when we suddenly stood in encounter with a reality that was so much more than we had thought that the first reflex was to block it out, to recoil in terror, the way we might if we glanced over a ledge and realized that it was a 10,000 foot drop.  It wasn’t horror with vampires and werewolves.  It was “cosmic horror,” fear at our encounter with something so different from our expectations that we didn’t have any way to process what we were encountering.  We don’t want forever, not really, because it reminds us how small we are.  And we both hate and fear things that make us feel like we’re small and fleeting, or that we’ve got it wrong.

When the early church taught us to add in our affirmation of the forever of God to our praying, I think they grasped this.  Prayer, if it is to be a real connection, must shake us loose from ourselves, drawing us away from the the shallowness of our expectations.  If it does not, then we don’t really put ourselves in a position to receive what Jesus was offering.

Like, say, in the story we heard repeated twice today, of Jesus arriving in Jerusalem.  It’s the recounting of Palm Sunday, that annual tale of how a gathered throng managed to filter the arrival of Jesus through their expectations, and come out with a completely skewed grasp of why he was there and what he was there to do.

We’ve heard two of those stories today, the one from Mark’s Gospel and the one from John’s story of Jesus, and they reflect remarkably similar accounts of a single event.  Here, Mark, who lies as the storytelling foundation for both Matthew’s Gospel and Luke’s Gospel, shares a memory of Jesus that is exactly the same as John.  This is important, because they came from completely different lines of tradition, with harmonious but different lenses on the story of who Jesus was.

If you’ve ever been to a Palm Sunday service before, or if you learned about this story as a child, then you probably have a mental image of what was just doubly read to you. There’s Jesus riding into town on a humble donkey, and he’s coming through the gates of the city, and it’s a great celebration, after which the boys in the crowd would immediately start whacking each other with the fronds and turning them into frond-swords.

For most of the crowd, in either of these tellings, what they were crying out for was the arrival of the thing that they expected.  That crowd had a very specific understanding of what it would mean when their anointed one arrived, when the great king showed up to finally set everything right.  

For centuries, the people of Judah had been kicked around, battered by one empire after another, and they were looking hungrily for the person who was going to set it all aright.  They knew exactly what that would be.

That savior would neatly meet every expectation that had been formed over the course of their thousand year history.  He would be a King with all his Kingly glory, just like Solomon or David from eight hundred years before.  He would be a mighty warrior on the field of battle, wise and handsome and strong.  He would express the will of their God, by delivering a divine whupping on each and every one of their enemies, and liberate them through the force of the sword and/or a sustained campaign of angelic carpet bombing.

From hundreds of years of oppression and subjugation, their anger and desire for a big fierce setting right burned bright and strong.

That was not what Jesus was bringing.  His arrival in Jerusalem, and his teachings throughout his brief time among us?  They were something that bore no resemblance to that

He saw, as the Judeans in Jerusalem did not, that Jerusalem itself and the power struggles around it meant nothing.  Why would he want to overthrow that power?  Why would he desire to take it for himself?  Soon enough, it would be nothing, shattered and smoldering after Rome had annihilated it.  And then, in just a blink of an cosmic eye after that, the false glory that was Rome would tear itself to pieces, just as Babylon and Assyria had torn themselves to pieces.

What Jesus had been teaching was different.  What he saw was rather different.  Seen from the perspective of the Creator of the Universe, everything we fight about and every reason we have to war and hate on each other seems pointless.  Jesus saw redemption and love, and the path of compassion.  And in the cheering of that crowd, in their yearning for victory, Jesus would have heard them not getting it.  

They didn’t get that compassion, radical and fundamental, was at the heart of the message that carries through this most holy of Christian seasons.  They didn’t understand that the reconciliation and hope Jesus brought was not just theirs, but was also intended to restore all of humanity their enemies.  It was meant for them, but not only for them.

It was a message that was not just relevant in a particular time, or in a particular culture.  What Jesus brought, and what he claimed?  It was something cast out of the deeper purpose of humanity, something that runs far beyond our smallness.

That’s what we pray, when we pray with the early church, asking for this to be “forever.”  Those ancient Christians prayed this in the Greek, and in that language, “forever” is three words:  ais tous aionas, meaning “into the ages,” or, more exactly,  “into the eons.”  An eon, in geologic time, ranges from 500 million to well over a billion years. It means, roughly, a billion years.  For those first Greek-speaking Jesus folk, it just meant a vast and almost immeasurable amount of time, time on God’s scale.  And it’s eons, plural, all of the ages, all times and all spaces, billions and billions, as Carl Sagan might have put it, time beyond count, time beyond measure.

That’s why people misunderstood.  That’s why, when those who held power realized what he was doing, they became frightened and violent.  What happens in our evoking of this prayer, like that moment when Jesus came into Jerusalem, is a reminder of the scale of things, against which what matters is our care for one another, our forgiveness of one another, our forbearance and grace towards one another.

That, more than anything, is the joyously eldritch truth, the strange magic of this day, and this Holy Week.

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

The Power and the Glory

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

03.22.15; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: John 12:20-33

Listen to Audio Here:

“For thine is the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory.”

Man, again with the tough bits of prayer, for reasons that go well beyond theological parsing and playing around with words.  Here, we’re closing on the end of this greatest prayer that Jesus taught, and the familiar lilting cadence of that perfectly churchy conclusion starts to wrap up, back and forth in a rhythm that seems made for worship.

In the Greek of Matthew’s Gospel, it reads, hoti sou estin he basilea, kai he dunamis, kai he doxa.  Basilea meaning kingdom, dunamis--like dynamic or dynamo--meaning power, and doxa--which gives us the prefix for doxology, that song we sing after the little collection baggies go around--meaning glory.  It’s a part of the prayer we know, part of the way it comes out every time we pray it.  

Wonderful.  Perfect ending to a perfect little prayer.  Thanks, Jesus!  

Only...um...that passage is not actually there in your bible.  I mean, really.  Take a moment, and look at Matthew 6:13.  Not there.  Not in the New Revised Standard Version.  Not in the New International Version.   Oh, it is if you’re reading from the King James, but it’s not part of any recent direct translation.  Just isn’t in there, because most of the most ancient authorities did not have it, and those were manuscripts the King James translators didn’t have yet, because in the year 1611, archeologists hadn’t found them yet.  Again, a significant majority of the most ancient and reliable manuscripts agree: the prayer does not contain those words.  The most ancient authorities indicate that the prayer originally in Matthew was almost exactly identical to the prayer we find in Luke 11:1-4.  

This section comes to us later, hundreds of years after Jesus, as the communities that had gathered to celebrate and follow Jesus added in a conclusion so that the prayer would end, you know, like a prayer.  That’s why there are, in the Greek texts of the ancient church, no less than ten different endings to this verse.  Ten.  

Otherwise, we’d come to a screeching halt at “but deliver us from evil.”  And...um...what?  No Amen?  I can’t even get an Amen?  The text doesn’t give it to us.

So what to do with this bit, this ending, when we know as certainly as reliable scholarship can tell us that this wasn’t part of what Jesus taught?

A clue, a wee little inkling of a clue, can be found in the passage from John’s Gospel this morning.  

John’s Gospel, the record of the Beloved Disciple, is a tiny bit hard to figure out.  The way that John tells us about Jesus is different from the way that the other three Gospels pitch out that message.  If it’s Mark, Matthew, or Luke...particularly Matthew and Luke...the stories come one after another.  

The three synoptic gospels, the three that are “seeing-together,” they offer up the storytelling of Jesus of Nazareth, as he forces us to use our imaginations about the nature of the Reign of God, meaning what the world looks like when we all are living according to the love of God.  Those stories make us use our brains as we try to grasp the message that Jesus came into the world to deliver.

But John doesn’t roll like that.  Instead, this much more intimate Gospel tends to record challenging conversations, prayers and peculiarly subtle sayings that play with language in odd mystic ways.  Unlike Mark and Matthew and Luke, the focus of those conversations is not God’s Kingdom here on earth, but Jesus talking about how he personally is living that out.  This is who I am, Jesus says.  This is how you can be.

It’s a strange story, this reflection, as we first hear of some Greeks...meaning, Greek-speaking citizens of the Roman Empire who were not Jewish...who ask if they can meet with Jesus.  The story goes wildly amiss from there, as Jesus answers them with a strange nonsequitur, suddenly talking about his death in oblique and challenging ways.  He’s talking to a crowd, and the the Greek speakers are forgotten, washed away, like a thread of a story that no longer seems relevant to the conclusion.  Jesus instead talks about glory, and about how the glory of who he is...the doxa...is woven up with the glory of the Creator.

What I am doing, you can do.  You are part of this thing, he says.  You are called to live this life too, and to share in it.  Follow me, and be where I am.

It’s an intense teaching, made all the more intense because right as he’s wrapping up, he gets an answer from above.

Rrrrumble, go the heavens, right at exactly the moment he’s making his point.  Some folks hear God speaking.  Some hear angels.  Most just hear thunder, but it makes everyone shiver just a little bit.   My glory is God’s glory, says Jesus.  And then, You will be honored, as I am honored.  You will be glorified, as I am glorified.

We hear this, and we’re like, yeah, awesome.

Because we like glory.  We like power.  And we sure do like being in charge of things.  Well, maybe I can’t speak for all of y’all, but I can talk with some authority about myself.  I really like that stuff, in ways that are a constant challenge spiritually.  

Glory?  That’s the brightness, the shine, the sparkle, the thing that you look at in wonder and awe.  Glory is you lying flat on your back in the grass on a fourth of July night, when the light and thunder of that display you’re sitting just a tiny bit too close to fills the whole field of your vision, a riot of leaping colors and brightness, the concussions filling your hearing, so intense you feel them in you deep, a whole body hearing.  And even though you’ve seen it dozens of times in your life, and you’re supposed to be all grown up and jaded, you go, Wow.  You just can’t help it.

We want that to be us.  We like it when people see us, and go, Wow.  That’s wow in a good way, and not because of our tendency to wear white socks with dress shoes or because of our less-than-perfect haircut.  We like glory.  Glory is what we value, what we celebrate.  It is the goal and dream of our culture, to be celebrity, to be the bright shiny one, noted by all, our every post with five hundred likes and an endless stream of admiring comments.  

We like that, that, and power.  We like power more.  We are dynamic!  We’re a dynamo!  We like knowing that we can make things happen, that we can get it all done, that we’re completely capable of accomplishing anything we wish to accomplish.  We will get it all done, every single thing on our list.  We will meet every need, we will go to every meeting and do every last thing that’s expected of us.  Sure, it’ll drive us crazy, leave us stressed and in a ruin of mental chaos, but gosh-darn it, we’re going to try.  We will repair that toilet, we will, and there’s just no way in the world we need to call a plumber, because we’ve got this.  Do you remember where the water shut-off valve is, honey?  And you didn’t need any of our towels any time soon, did you?  We like to feel ourselves in control of our lives, in our homes, in our education, in our politics, in every conversation we have and everything we do.  We.  Like.  Power.

And the kingdom, or the “reign?” That has everything to do with authority over territory, which has to do with power.  Here, the place that we rule!  This place is ours!  And human beings are very, very peculiar when it comes to the places that we assume are ours.  This land is my land, we may sing, but our lives mumble the part where we say this land is your land.  We’d much rather it be ours, because that space is the space where we do our thing.  Like when I was a kid, and my Mom and I would sit up in the balcony of the church where I grew up, all the better to pass notes and to whisper about things to one another.  Sometimes, every once in a while, someone would come and sit right where we usually were, and it was just so easy to feel grumpy about it.  That’s our turf, I’d think, as I started humming a song from West Side Story to myself.  Or when I come into the Starbucks where I often sit when my youngest son is at drum practice, and someone is already in that nice chair off in the corner where I like to write and study.  Grumble grumble grumble.  They’re in my spot, the spot that is mine because it belongs to me because I sit there and it’s mine.

But the early church, the church that wrote this prayer?  They knew exactly the nature of Christ’s power, glory, and kingdom.  It belonged to God.  Was a part of God.  And it bore no resemblance to the glory, the power, and the kingdom that we’re used to.  In fact, it subverted all of that.  

That sense of power or glory as something that is owned and ours?  That doesn’t stand, not in the face of our acknowledging that what we’re asking to share in is the glory we see in a Jesus who set it all aside for the love of not just those who followed him, but those who would take his life.

Because it’s not our power, glory, or control that rests at the heart of this prayer.  That power transcends us.  The early church knew it, as the Spirit taught it to them, and so when we pray that prayer, we can add that in with confidence that it’s really kinda sorta what Jesus was getting at anyway.

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