Poolesville Presbyterian Church
04.26.15; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: 1 John 3:16-24
Listen to Audio Here:
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment