Setting Aside, Holding Fast

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 07.05.2015

Scripture Lesson:  1 Thessalonians 5:12-28

LISTEN TO AUDIO HERE:

Summer has rolled around again, meaning that the battle against clutter in my house has again reached a fever pitch.  During the school year, there’s a respite, as the kids are off at school and there’s a moment or two to catch your breath.  

But in these weeks of summer, with two teenage boys around more of the time, the house--and their rooms--descend into a deeper chaos, one that they attempted to remedy last week with a huge cleanout.  Meaning, of course, that all those boxes full of stuff that they no longer need are gone from their floors and closets, and now inhabit the storage room in our basement.

Out of sight, out of mind, as they say.

As fiercely as I try to get stuff moved out of that basement storage room, it seems to remain filled with the things and the memories of a lifetime.  Every few months or so, we go through, and clear stuff out.  Some things continue to have meaning, and so back they go into boxes and crates and storage bins.  Other things no longer carry any of the weight of identity, and so we set them aside.

Some of those memories are older than others.  Like the little brown workbook that I come across, every time I shuffle back through one particular box filled with old letters and school records.  I hold on to it because it’s the oldest written thing I have, the first record I have of my having taken pencil to paper.

And I remember having written it.  I was four, or maybe five, and attending the Riverside Farm Nursery School in Nairobi, Kenya.  Once a week, I needed to produce a journal of my thoughts for that week, along with drawings that represented the events described in that journal.  I remember that it was a big production, a significant amount of work, a huge assignment.  I remember being stressed out as I tried to come up with words enough to fill the journal.

Meaning, I needed to write a single coherent sentence, which typically was shorter than the one I’m reading to you right now.  And that, looking at that little page, is what makes it so bizarre.  That’s me.  I remember it as me, and remember writing it as me.  I remember padding out my word count by adding in a clause about how many weeks it would be before I traveled back to America.

But looking at it now, at the haphazard spelling, that memory seems bizarre.  That was me, writing that out.  I remember it as a thing that I did.   And sure, my handwriting isn’t much better now.  But it is clearly a small child writing, in language that is that of a child.

But that’s the reality of how we are, as we grow.  We add to ourselves, bit by bit, piece by piece.  We both change and do not change, with the change more easy to measure than the spirit of our not-changing.

The dynamics of change and identity are a vital part of understanding the nature of love, and the nature of every person and every community that hopes to live out its best identity.

Paul’s first letter to the small church at Thessalonika is all about a community that had figured out how it was supposed to be.  It’s an important letter, because in many ways it is one of the earliest memories of the Christian movement.  1 Thessalonians is the first of the written records of Christian faith, at least the earliest one that remains.  Paul wrote it somewhere between 40 and 50 CE, making it at least ten and maybe twenty years older than the oldest of the Gospels.

I really like this letter, because it’s not abstract theology.  It’s kind of a love letter, between Paul and a community he really cared for.  It’s consistently positive, hopeful, and practically affirming, a letter that shows a deep and personal connection between the Apostle and those to whom he was writing.

It’s enough of a personal letter that it acknowledges that even though they’re a lovely little gathering, they’re not perfect.  At times they get lazy, and at times they just can’t, really, they just can’t.  Paul knows this, and he loves them anyway.  Have patience with yourselves, Paul says, from the heart of the patience that is grounded in love.

So here, as Paul wraps things up, a sweet letter of encouragement and support to a community that got it, he pitched out a batch of maxims and sayings about how to live, each of which rests on the radical compassion that is so central to the Gospel.

Those moral orders begin before the passage we just heard, as Paul gently but firmly challenges those who heard him to push themselves, to hold themselves to the standard he saw in Christ.  He presents them with maxims, plain and simple measures of what it will mean to live out the life that Jesus taught.

“Be at peace among yourselves.” “Never pay back evil for evil, but show good to one another and to all.”  “Give thanks in all circumstances.”

More than anything, he challenges those he loves to do two things.  First, to always challenge themselves, testing everything against the goodness that they know.  That part of faith is essential if we’re going to grow in faith.  It’s the part of faith that the ancient church knew as metanoia, which we translate as repentance.  Healthy, growing personhood is not a static thing.  It involves continual self-assessment, a testing of ourselves against the transforming, radiant love of God.  Those things that stand opposed to our ability to love one another need to be set aside, and given no power to guide our lives.

Second, in that testing, to know that there are parts of ourselves we should hold on to, things that are worth carrying forward with us.  Those good things are moments in our story of ourselves that help develop us, help build us up as persons, that give a gracious integrity to our story.

Finding that balance is essential if we are to have healthy souls, if those souls are to exist at peace together, and if, together, we are to continue to grow.  That goes well beyond our learning how to spell, or to string together sentences.  It reaches deeper into us than that inevitable clearing out of the clutter of material stuff that fills our lives.

(IT BEING THE FIFTH OF JULY AND ALL, I WANDERED OFF INTO A SEMI-RELATED REFLECTION AT AROUND THIS POINT, ABOUT WHAT IT MEANS TO REALLY LOVE BOTH OTHERS, A COMMUNITY, AND A NATION. WROTE IT UP LATER, AND YOU CAN FIND IT BY CLICKING THE LINK)

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

Shaken Together, Running Over

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 06.28.2015

Scripture Lesson: Ecclesiastes 3:16-22; Luke 6:27-38

LISTEN TO AUDIO HERE:

Everything is interconnected, or so the saying goes, and as much as that’s become a truism, it remains something worth reminding ourselves of every now and again.

We hum along to that old Beatles song, at least those of us who remember who the Beatles are, knowing that in the end, the love we take is equal to the love we make.  We hum along to the Lion King, which we watched so many times on DVD when our parents needed an hour of quiet time, about the circle of life, how it ruuuules us aaaaalll, through despaaaair and hooooope, through faith and luuuuf.   It’s a thing we’ve heard so many times we don’t even think about it, or what it means.  

Because we forget that, we do, in the way that a people do when everything is neatly divvied up and packaged for us.  Oh, we think we’re connected.  We think we’re as connected as human beings have ever been.  Here we are, in an age when we can see whatever we want, and have whatever we want, so long as our credit is good.  It arrives two days after we click a button on our trackpad, neatly bubblewrapped in a brown box on our doorstep.  Anything at all, anything in the world, right there whenever we want it.  Want a GPS mount for your new motorcycle?  Boom.  Want a vintage analogue synth?  Want any book ever printed, or any movie ever made, or the seeds to grow anything?  We can have it, right now.

And yet the reality underlying that sense of instant industrial interconnectedness is that we are personally oblivious to the material things that flow through our consumer lives.  We do not build them.  We do not see them built.  We do not know what goes into their production.

They just sort of appear, as if they have been conjured up by some peculiar magic.

This can be neat, I suppose, but in some circumstances, it is rather less so.  Like, say, with the stuff we eat, and in particular the creatures we consume.  I was reflecting on this reality on the afternoon of Father’s Day, as I sat by the grill and prepped the food for my gathered family.

I love grilling, love the primal character of it, love the fire and the smoke and the scent of it.  I remember, hard as it is as a vegetarian, that the reason Cain was so made at his brother Abel was that God liked the smell of burning meat more than the smell of veggies.  

There my little protein circlets and zucchini cutlets sit grilling away, as the rich flavorful incense of burning beef fat and barbecue sauce mingle and rise to the heavens, and I have to give YHWH that one.  

Still and all, it’s a little weird for a vegetarian to be out there at the grill cooking up chicken and burgers, because there’s something I know.  Those boneless thighs and breasts, those sizzling patties, they all came from somewhere.  They did not magically appear, neatly plastic wrapped and prepared, having been vat-grown in some huge facility.

And as I cook, and that scent rises up to heaven, I think about the formerly living beings that I’m cooking, about the specifics of what they are and were.  I consider their existence, their lives, as known to God as my own.  

Having read my Bible for the last forty years, I wonder at how my connection to the creatures we consume plays off against what I know from my faith about my bond with all being.

I accept, because it resonates, the ancient teaching from the book of Ecclesiastes.  Last week, we heard some of the sayings from the Book of Proverbs, laying out the essence of Wisdom, as she teaches us how we are to live in ways of quiet, ungrasping righteousness.  Ecclesiastes is traditionally ascribed to Solomon, Mr. Big Wise Wisdom himself, the most discerning of the kings of ancient Israel, but the book itself seems to draw provenance from a later period.  But the book is coy about authorship, telling us only that the author’s name is Qohelet.  In the Hebrew, that means either “The Teacher” or, more exactly, “The One Who Assembles.”   That works for teaching on so many levels, frankly.  

So this week, words come to us from the Teacher, the author of this taut little book of deeper wisdom.

The little passage we heard this morning is a peculiar one.  On the one hand, Qohelet is the great cynic of scripture.  He knows that, where Proverbs claims that the righteous prosper, being good often yields suffering, and the evil can do quite well for themselves.  “Meaningless, meaningless, all is meaningless,” he sighs in an accent that could be French, while leafing through his dogeared copy of The Stranger and furtively smoking an unfiltered cigarette.    But while it’s intended to be a stone-faced reflection on the mortality of humanity, of how we are but creatures of earth just as the animals around us are creatures of earth, I’ve actually found it to be one of my go-to comfort passages in a very particular instance.

Because we all have loved animals, at least, the ones we’ve gotten to know.  And when that tiny shy little puppy grows up into a reserved dog, we don’t love them any less.  And when that old cat dies, well, we feel the loss.  They’re family, and we don’t just say that, we feel it.  We mean it.

So when I am asked, by mourning children or sorrowful adults, what happens to our animals after they die, I can point to this passage, and say from the deepest wisdom, their breath is like our breath.  They return to God, just as we do.  And we take comfort in that, we do.

But then I also know a truth from elsewhere in the great story of scripture, one that hums oddly when I try to harmonize it with that truth.  That truth comes from the very heart of the teachings of my own Teacher, from Jesus himself as his story is told in Luke’s Gospel.

It’s from a section of scripture known as the Sermon on the Plain, the shorter, tauter version of the Sermon on the Mount that appears in Luke.  Where Matthew gives us three full chapters, Luke encapsulates it in 29 verses, starting in verse 20 of chapter 6 and running through verse 49.  All of the core teachings are there, with the radical moral imperative to show grace, mercy, love, and justice to all standing like the sure foundation under all of it.

It is an immense and fiercely challenging teaching, calling those who’d follow Jesus to commit themselves to proactively seeking healing.  The Way Jesus lays out is the path of transforming love.  The Christ follower is asked not just to passively receive hatred, but to to push back hard against hatred with grace and mercy, doubled down.

Right here in these words is the moral core of all Christian faith, the ethic that guides how we are to act in this world.  And it ends with verse 38 words that sing out an image...a feeling, really...of what God’s justice looks like.

“A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”

It’s that truth again, only less passive. Jesus presses it down to intensify the flavor, mixes it up, and then pours it out over us.   We are connected to all things, and our every action will be returned to us.

Which is why, when I look at the reality of how we eat, and the reality of how most of the meat we consume gets to our grills and our tables, I’m a little reluctant to be a part of that thing.  Because most of our meat -- the remarkably affordable packaged bulkmeat that fills the fridges at Harris Teeter, the meat in our fast food burgers, the meat in our Banh Mi sandwiches -- comes to us through the miracle of modern mass production.

When I was a boy, I remember taking field trips to factories, you know, back when they used to have factories in America.  I remember, on one tour, watching musical instruments being manufactured, trombones and trumpets and tubas.  Big machines and workers, and it was really cool.  Years ago, when my wife and I celebrated our fifteenth wedding anniversary with a week of Vermont bed and breakfasts, we stopped in at the Ben and Jerry’s factory and took the tour.  We saw every step of the process, and got to taste some weird new flavors.  Elderberry Snapple Crunch, or something.  That, let me tell you, was pretty awesome.  Those factories stirred in me an appreciation for production.  I felt proud to be part of such a thing, in my small way.

But a tour of a modern factory farm or industrial scale slaughterhouse would not feel quite the same.  I don’t think Mr. Ramsey’s fifth grade class would ever quite recover.

Because we are part of the systems that sustain us, and their reality, shaken together and running over, is the measure we will be given.

What these passages in conjunction ask us to consider is the depth of our connection to the Creation of which we are a part, and over which we are meant to exercise care.  As we move further and further into systems that isolate us from the reality of how things are made, it’s important that we keep the knowledge of our connection front and center.

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

The Fool and the Road Ahead

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 06.21.2015

Scripture:  Proverbs 3:13-14; 27-29; 10:4; 17; 25; 11:28; 12:1; 15; 24; 13:11; 14:31; 15:16; 16:8; 21:17;  27:12; 23-24

LISTEN TO AUDIO HERE:

It’s been almost thirty years since the first time I threw a leg over a motorcycle, and over the last week and a half, I’ll admit that I’ve felt just as giddy this last week on occasion as I did way back when I was eighteen.

Of course, I’m not exactly the same person I was back then, though I carry those memories with me.  On the one hand, I was twenty pounds lighter and substantially less creaky.  On the other, well, let’s just say I didn’t always make the wisest of choices.

Like, say, some of the choices I made around that very first motorcycle.  It was a snorting beast of a bike, a ratty old semi-maintained Honda CB750, whose swept back four-into-four exhaust had rusted out in a couple or three strategic locations.  Meaning, it was waaay louder than it needed to be, which meant, as far as eighteen year old me was concerned, that it was just exactly loud enough.

Back at that age, maintenance wasn’t really front and center on my list of priorities.  Giving rides to girls?  Sure.  Tearing around the bucolic back roads of Albemarle county horse country, or taking a beautiful late spring afternoon to go snarling around the Blue Ridge?  Those were my priorities.

Paying attention to other things wasn’t a strength.  Like, say, remembering to always reset the fuel petcock when I gassed up.  You see, that first bike wasn’t like the Big Tan Motor Chicken I’m riding now.

Being a creature of the information age, the Motor Chicken is a font of information, with an onboard computer that tells me current fuel consumption rates to the second, average consumption for the current tank, and range to empty.  It has a fuel gauge, a digital one, which has alerts that flash with increasing levels of urgency as I get closer to running out of go-juice.

But that old Honda was state of the art 1973 motorcycling, meaning that while it looked cool riding with bell bottoms and feathered back hair, it’s a little less information-driven.  It didn’t even have a fuel gauge.  How did you know you needed to get to the gas station?  You ran out of gas.  Seriously.  That was the protocol.  That big ol’ air cooled four would start to stumble and sputter, and that meant you--still moving--had about half a click to reach down with your left hand, fumble for the petcock, and switch it to reserve.  That gave you access to the lowest portion of the tank, and meant you had about thirty miles to get gas.

Unless, of course, you’d forgotten to switch back to the main tank as you filled ‘er up.  Then, well, that stumbling and sputtering meant you’d be walking soon, son.

As, in point of fact, I did on a number of occasions in Charlottesville.  “Hey man,” I’d say when I arrived late and on foot.  “I totally ran out of gas.  Can you give me a ride?”   Which I did more than once, because, well, I was a young fool, as opposed to being the older fool I am today.

It’s a characteristic of fools, and I know this from ongoing personal experience, that we tend not to take a good hard look at what it is our current actions are actually going to accomplish.  Instead, we act on our impulse, on our big feely feels in the moment and the now.  We assume that just because we believe it to be so, it must be true, and that somehow we’re the special one who will be the exception to the rule.

The Whitman’s Sampler of verses that we’ve just tasted our way through comes to us from the great ancient collection of Hebrew Wisdom literature, the Book of Proverbs. In Proverbs, Wisdom is seen as more than just the ability to make a lucky decision, like buying ten thousand dollars worth of bitcoin in August of 2010 and selling it all in November of 2013.  Wisdom, in so far as we allow ourselves to receive it, shapes how we live in the world.  It is fundamentally practical.

As it manifests in the book of Proverbs, expressed in pithy little nuggets of moral guidance, taut little sayings and maxims and aphorisms, all of which point in the general direction of how to live a life that’s less messed up.  They don’t provide any guarantees, but what they do is this: they make it much more likely that you will not fail.

Within ancient Wisdom literature, there are a number of core themes, all of which play around a sane and appropriate use of the world around you.  The wise do not seek wealth above all other things, because wealth is not the goal.  The wise know that the hunger to possess destroys.  The wise listen to criticism and concern, and adjust accordingly.  The wise know that God loves the poor and the rich equally, and that when wealth is created on the suffering backs of the poor, God will hold the powerful to account.  

Wisdom looks at the world, and carefully considers every action.  The wise know--more than anything else--that chasing after the desire of the now can compromise the life you hope to live tomorrow.  Because nothing is more foolish--in the Biblical definition of foolishness--than being so blinded by one’s own hungers and self-justification that you can’t see the harm you’re about to inflict on yourself and others.

Which, quite frankly, is why I’m so fuddled as to why any person who’s spent even a moment of time around Wisdom literature and the Proverbs in particular would feel motivated to resist doing something about our wildly out-of-control and self-destructive consumption of the earth’s resources.

We know, for instance, that remaining supplies of fossil fuels will last the world just about exactly as long as I’ve been alive.  If we take the span of time between 1969 and now, and push it out into the future, that’s roughly when it’ll all run dry.  It could be a few years earlier.  It could be a few years later.  But that’s the ballpark.

Now, one can always question those estimates.  Someone out there might have an agenda.  But coming as they do from the wild eyed liberal tree-huggers at British Petroleum, I think it’s safe to say that this is an...um…”conservative” estimate.

So we know, we do, that the entire energy basis of our economy will be gone in what I hope will be the last few years of my lifetime.  

We also know, we do, that if we just keep blundering on down the path of endlessly increasing consumption we’ll do lasting and potentially irreparable harm to our delicate little jewel of a world.  The byproducts of our endless devouring choke the landfills of the world, and are changing the entire biosphere we inhabit.  We are changing the earth for the worse, altering the climate, strip-mining our seas.

And sure, there are those whose ideology prevents them from seeing this reality.  To be honest, as someone who has been both, and is still on occasion, there’s no functional difference between an ideologue and a fool.  Both get so lost in their dreams and their stories that they can’t see the reality they inhabit.

I read, this week, through that little essay released this last week by Pope Francis.  A Papal Encyclical, it’s called, and for our Catholic sisters and brothers, it is a teaching with authority.  For we Protestants, it’s not quite the same thing.  It is, for me, a document written by another pastor, a brother in the faith, one with a kind heart and a church that’s just a tiny bit larger than ours.

It’s worth the read, all hundred and ninety-eight carefully footnoted pages of it.  It’s a profoundly Catholic document, carefully constructed, paradoxically both progressive and deeply traditional, open to the insights of science and the ancient insights of our faith.

It’s been criticized, of course, by those who’d suggest that faith needs to focus on spiritual things.  Stay out of the world, they say, and focus instead on matters of the soul.

Which, if you understand the Bible at all, is completely wrong.  The Bible speaks consistently and directly to how we are to live and order our lives, right here in this world.  It is the whole and entire point of prophetic literature, and it’s also the heart of Biblical wisdom.

So what do we do?  Here we are, barrelling along the road, loving--as Proverbs 21:17 puts it-- both our wine and our oil.  We are riding into darkness, into a wilderness we do not know.  We know that it’s going to be hard, and that we’re getting close to reserve.  Assuming we remembered to switch the petcock, which we may or may not have done.

Wisdom asks us to step back, and really consider our actions.   Wisdom asks us not to cling to either our pleasure or our preconceived notions, and to be willing to change our actions to match reality.  Wisdom asks us to be prepared, both individually and as a community, for the very real demands ahead.

We have the information we need, right in front of us.  Whether we are fools on the road, or wise, will depend on how we respond to it.

Let wisdom be your guide.

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