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.