The Truth We Possess

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

09.26.2015; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 9:38-50, Numbers 11:24-29

What does it mean to own an idea?  What does it mean, to say that a concept is your property.

It’s a central part of how we run things, about how our world operates, an endless thicket of trademarks and copyrights, as we stake out ideas and declare them to be ours in perpetuity, or for at least as long as we can manage to extend our ownership.

Here, in this era when information moves with wild abandon, when sharing a story or a song or video of a puppy is almost as easy as breathing, there’s a fierce desire to defend the rights of a creator to their creation.

I feel this, as a writer wrestling with the wild world of publishing.  Having someone wander off with your story idea and pass it off as their own would be wildly frustrating.  

But as a pastor, I have trouble processing that.  A few years back, there was a pastor of a big church in DC who got busted for plagiarizing other people’s sermons, something that I can’t imagine someone ever doing with my preaching.  Sermons are creatures of a moment and a place, spoken into a particular now and a particular context.  They’re personal, imbued with voice and relationship.  

Honestly, anyone is welcome to them, although eventually your church will start wondering why you keep dropping references to Poolesville, Maryland, your Jewish children and rambling on about motorcycles.

But in other ways, our culture teaches that we can own things, own them utterly and completely.

LIke this last week, when a copyright case was settled in favor of DC comics against a small business that made custom cars, and by custom cars, I mean Batmobiles.  The company, called Gotham Garage, would build you a perfect replica of an Adam West era Batmobile, so that you could if you so chose drive around and pretend to be Batman.

But the Batmobile, in any of its iterations, is owned by DC Comics.  You may not build one, or sell one, without them getting their cut.  The idea of Batman is owned, lock, stock, and bat-barrel.  I understand their legal counsel is also moving against anyone who might try to build Wonder Woman’s invisible jet, although that’s posing some technical difficulties.

If anyone sings our songs, we should get a cut, like Warner Music was every time Happy Birthday was sung over the last thirty years.  Fifty million dollars worth of payments, wrung out of every musician who sang that song in public.  Last week, in a rare press against that great tide of ownership culture, a judge finally struck that down.  Why, well, it’s Happy Birthday.  No-one should be able to own Happy Birthday.

And for the disciples, following along after Jesus, that was an issue they encountered as they travelled through Judah spreading the message.

As we heard last week, they’d been having trouble figuring out how to follow Jesus without getting into power struggles or worrying about pecking orders.  That concern about who had more authority or more responsibility was redoubled when they encountered someone doing Jesus work without being a part of the certified circle of licensed Disciples.

It is John who tells Jesus that they’ve run across this guy infringing on their copyright, flagrantly using the name of Jesus without permission.  That’s threatening to them, in the same way the spread of the Holy Spirit in the camp was threatening to those who followed Moses.  If anyone can do this, then where does that leave us?  We need to control it!  

“We tried to stop him,” John said, most likely expecting some positive response from Jesus.  We protected the brand!  We defended your intellectual property from copyright infringement!

“Don’t do that,” is the reply John gets, after which Jesus says, as plainly as he can, that there’s no reason to resist people who aren’t actively opposing you.  He’s not willing to be possessive about the Gospel message, or about the claim that a person is following him.

And he goes further, much further.

He reminds them of what matters to him, and of who matters to him.  What matters are those whose lives are beginning to be transformed by the radical love ethic he taught.  The “little ones,” or “micron”, don’t refer to children.  The term is used throughout the Gospels to refer to those in whom the seed of Christ’s potential has just been planted.

By challenging someone who was working in his name, John has not only not managed to undercut the individual busy about doing the work of Jesus.  He has potentially sabotaged the entire point and purpose of the Gospel, which is the spreading of the gracious news of the Kingdom.

Jesus responds to this in ways that aren’t exactly all sweetness and light.  They are the farthest thing from it.  His language gets positively medieval, all filled with drownings and chopping offs and poking outs, language that is far more aggressive and violent than we’d normally associate with Jesus, more scary-ISIS-Jesus than the Prince of Peace.

“If you stumble chop it off, else in faith you’ll have gone soft.  If you don’t you’ll burn in hell, where charbroiled you’s the only smell.”

Jesus, of course, was a storyteller-teacher, and if ever there was a passage that reminded us that significant portions of the Bible were never meant to be taken literally, this is it.  In context, it’s a challenge to his disciples to step away from the yearning for control that lies at the heart of all human conflict.

That dynamic, Jesus seems to be saying, is what destroys the faith we’re trying to share.  If we think the hierarchies and and dynamics of property and territory apply to the Gospel, we are no more Christians than salt can be salt if it no longer tastes or behaves like salt.

“Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another,” Jesus concludes, and in that, reminds his disciples that their entire identity is wrapped up in being willing to let go of the grasping, power-focused, selfish hunger that drives human beings to deny the God-given graces they encounter in others.

In our culture, which values the control that comes with ownership over almost all else, this yearning to own and to have ownership stands in fundamental opposition to the spread of the Way.

I encountered a reminder of that reality in a book I read recently, Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Living With A Wild God.”  It’s a spiritual autobiography of sorts, but with an interesting twist.  Ehrenreich is a third generation atheist.  Her mother and father were fierce, dogmatic atheists, as were her grandparents, passing their disdain for belief from generation to generation.  But Ehrenreich was also an accidental mystic, someone who in her adolescence suddenly began having powerful experiences of something she could only understand as the presence of God, experiences that shook both her sense of self and her own sanity.  It’s a fascinating, thoughtful, human book, filled with struggle and ambiguity.

One detail that struck me, and struck me hard, was the story of how atheism entered her Irish Catholic family.  The family story was of a grandmother, lying dying on her deathbed, and the call going out to the priest to come and be with the poor and struggling family in those last moments before she passed on.

The word came back to the family that sure the priest would come, but they needed to pay a required fee first.  The grandmother, in a final fit of good Celtic fury, hurled her bible across the room, renouncing the faith forever before she died.

That story, colored and flavored as all Irish family stories are, was enough to carry through the generations of a family, a stumbling block before the potential faith of those still unborn.

It’s still hard for us to shake, even if we know the impact it can have on others.  We get territorial.  We want to claim things as ours, and through our power over them to control them.  We get possessive, and in our possessiveness try to prove that others are wrong, or that others are unworthy.

And in doing so, we sabotage and undercut the very ethic that we’re claiming to live by.

This truth, the truth that matters, cannot be owned or possessed.  

As we move in the world, as we live and act, we need to listen carefully to that warning.

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

The Joy of Winning

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 09.20.2015

Scripture Lesson:  James 3:13-4:3; 7-8a

Listen to Sermon Audio Here:

It’s a funny thing, and I’m not quite sure when it happened, but at some point in my life, I entirely stopped watching television.

Maybe it was the screen overload, the endless stream of data that pours from my various screeny objects.  As I’ve adjusted to watching whatever I want, whenever I want it, almost nothing contemporary ever appeals to me.  I watch shows, sure, but years after they’ve come out, and on my own time.

But nothing drove me away from the medium more completely and effectively than the rise of the reality show.  I watched those shows for a while, Project Runway and America’s next top model, and came to hate reality television.  The schtick is the same, no matter what the venue, no matter what the theme.  You get a bunch of people together, you force them to compete, and you manufacture one absurd drama after another to maintain tension.

It’s one episode after another of pointless struggle and one-ups-manship, at the end of which someone’s declared the winner.  They’ve won a spouse, or been declared a top model, or a fashion designer, or the next pop star.  They’ve made the best cake out of meringue, pickles, and possum ganache.  They’ve the sharpest sword, or been given a lifeline for their struggling startup from a circle of venture capitalists, whatever it is that the panel of celebrity judges has deemed to be the best.

What matters is that the people in power have judged that they’ve won, and everyone else has lost.

It’s the spirit of it, the endless ferocious ambition of it, the hungry, borderline desperate feeling you often get from these souls who are pitched into conflict with one another.  Oh, if I win, I’ll finally be validated.  If I get this prize, my victory will be complete!

The ethic it teaches is a strange one.  It’s the core teaching of the Sith.  The goal is to be the one with the power, to claw your way to the top, and to warily watch your apprentice, who’s waiting in the wings with their thumb on the switch of their lightsaber.  It’s the moral at the heart of that wildly silly 1980s movie Highlander -  there can be only one.

The winner gets everything.  Everyone else doesn’t really matter.  It is the rule of the lion’s share.

But this, this is not what life is like.  Sports, sure.  Games, sure.  There is something healthy and vibrant about our striving together, about our making each other stronger by testing ourselves against one another.  When it is play, when it is sport, it’s a good thing.

But when it isn’t sport, when it’s something that defines our reality, then it’s completely different.  We’d have a word for a family in which every family member tried to “win” over all the others.  It’d be “dysfunctional.”  A business where that was true would tear itself to pieces.  And a society, set in an endless adversarial struggle?  It’d be doomed.  “A house divided against itself will fall,” as an old friend of mine once said.

Life does not have to be this way.  In healthy communities, there is not just a single winner, the one strongest and mightiest, to whom go all the spoils.  That’s not the ethic in families, not the way we think of those that we love.  It’s certainly not the way churches are meant to think of those who share in the life of faith together

But while that basic human striving and aspiring can be deeply positive and life affirming, it can also become deeply negative.   That’s the warning James has to bring in this morning’s reading.

From this totally practical book over the past several weeks, we’ve heard about how we need to let our faith govern our actions, and how we need to let grace govern our speech.   But from this little section, we hear from James that even those who received and engaged with his teachings have managed to muck things up.   They were still human, after all, so I suppose that’s not much of a surprise.

What James recognizes and asks his hearers to recognize is that there are some strivings and yearnings that do not build us up and do not strengthen the bonds of love and grace that define community.  James has told us what works over the last several weeks.   An ambition that is founded in what James calls alternately the “Royal Law” or the “Law of Liberty” will produce the good.   That law is nothing less than loving neighbor as yourself, and what it produces in us can be found in verse 13 of chapter 3.   

Following that law produces in us what the Bible describes as a “gentleness born of wisdom.”  What is being described there is not knowing something.  It’s not data, but a state of being we should strive for.   It’s a “wise kindness.”

In opposition to that stand other forms of wisdom, other ways of getting in the world.   James identifies two particular ways of thinking that create “wickedness of every kind.”

The first is what is translated for us as “bitter envy and selfish ambition.”   The English spin on this seems to warn us of being ruled by jealousy, where we let our lives be defined by our resentment towards the guy with the nicer smartphone and larger car.   James gets to that, but not here.  

The key word here is the world that we hear as envy, which is zelon, the word that gives us “zeal.”   Understood in context, it’s social.  It’s passion for one’s own power, one’s own success, in the worst possible way.  It’s just not about wanting to make things better, but wanting only your own success and orienting ourselves to defeating them.

If our ambition is driven by that desire to defeat the other, James says, it will invariably mess things up.  We lose sight of truth.  We lose sight of grace.   Things fall apart.  Just one look at our political system is all the evidence you need for the truth of that.

The second comes from a word that is repeated several times in the Greek, but is hidden from us in the process of translation.   In chapter four verse one, the source of conflict is described as coming from our “cravings.”  In chapter four verse three, we hear that we misdirect our ambitions by using them to feed our “pleasures.”  Both the word craving and the word pleasure are the same word in Greek, hedonyn, a word which gives us the term hedonism.

So the problem, James tells us, is that we are driven by a passionate desire to overcome others, from which we will reap material rewards and pleasures.

And that drive, that desire, goes well beyond the petty scripted machinations of reality television. Ambition for material gain folds itself, insidiously, carefully, into our lives together, into our economy, our oikonomia--which, in the Greek, just means “house-rules.”

It can impact how we view one another, how we act and think and speak together.  This is true in every field of endeavor, in every action, in every deed.  It whispers in our ears, yearning for the failure of others, subtly encouraging us to seek our own power.  We argue among ourselves about who is the greatest, like those embarrassed disciples, called out by Jesus.

That is true, for me, as a pastor.  It is true, for me, as a writer.  I feel that hum in my life, that whisper in my ear, because you cannot be in this world and not hear it.

I feel that bright, cold joy, that false, bitter joy, rising up in myself.  

And so I hear James, warning me.  I fall silent, embarrassed before Jesus at my zeal for my own pleasure, bought at the price of others.

As we should, when we feel that spirit rising up in us.

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

Blessing and Cursing

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 09.13.2015

Scripture Lesson: James 3:1-12

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

It was a beautiful late summer day, and the kids were out of town, and so I and my wife decided it might be nice to take our dog for a long walk in a nearby park.  The park’s just a few minutes from our house, seventy five acres of forest and meadows, a reminder of what Annandale was like before the great wave of suburban development swept across it in the 1950s and 1960s.  It used to be farmland, once, before the trees were let to grow, and the ruins of old houses and the rusted out hulks of three quarter century old farm trucks can still be scattered in the shadows of the woods.  Those woods are intermingled with soccer and baseball fields, basketball and tennis courts, and smattering of playgrounds for the little ones.  It’s got the best sledding hill in the area, a farmer’s market in the summer, and an amphitheater where bands and entertainment play on weekends.

So we geared up, and with our sniffing and snuffling pup we wandered through our neighborhood, across the four-lane, and into the park.  It was busy, bustling with energy, as people played tennis and picnicked.  Under a cluster of shelters, a gathering of Ghanaian immigrants preparing for a shared meal, all wearing orange.  The air was filled with their laughter as they came together, and the rich lilt of their voices filled the air.  Little children ran around, a girl of maybe five or six squealing in mock terror at our utterly unterrifying dog.  “That dog scares me,” she giggled, safely in the arms of her smiling father.

And up ahead in the amphitheater, the sound of music, thumping and insistent.  “Wonder what’s happening up there,” I said, as my wife and I wandered towards it.  I’d assumed, as we walked through orange clad Ghanaians, that it was part of some larger African festival.  That meant I wanted to get closer.

It wasn’t part of that festival.

It thundered and thumped, in the thunderythumpy way of contemporary music, and as I listened, I realized it was hippityhop, or whatever it is the whippersnappers are listening to these days.  I began to pick out the lyrics.  It wasn’t hard.

The lyrics were, well, contemporary.  In the manner of hippityhop, someone was laying down a rap, which can be as elegant and challenging as the best spoken word poetry, only this weren’t no Maya Angelou.  Most of it seemed to have to do with Bentleys and high end alcohol, and the effects of both on women.  Only it wasn’t “women,” but female dogs and gardening implements.  There was reference to how the singer’s opponent’s shouldn’t mess with his excrement, and how they could all, as far as he was concerned, engage in loveless self fornication.  He then them with multiple uses of a contraction referencing an Oedipal relation with one’s mother.

Then, a woman’s voice, a woman with an even more pungent vocabulary, and oh!  I recognized it, the timbre, the cadence.  “That’s Nicki Minaj,” I told my wife, feeling faintly pleased with myself for knowing that.

When we reached the amphitheater, it was just a group of teens, busying themselves around the stage as they prepared for an upcoming event.  Everyone was casually but nicely dressed, as multiethnic as a Target commercial, and working well together, bustling about to prepare the stage.  The music wasn’t the event.  They were testing the sound system, and someone had put on music as background.  

We walked past the sound, and on down a wooded path, and as the stream of objectification and obscenity was gradually smothered by the trees.  We both thought about that little girl, giggling with her father, about those children playing.

As a liberal, I’m a generally tolerant sort, open to encountering new and different things and trying to keep my mind open to ways I might be able to engage with them.  As a trickle of profanity wafted through the woods, I knew it wasn’t intended to be offensive.  It was just background noise, the chatter of a culture with an increasingly adult vocabulary.  But I struggle, I do, with the ever deepening coarseness of culture.

Because ideas do have power.  As a concept or a way of understanding the world is passed from person to person, it has the capacity to significantly transform the way we live and interact with our world.

Over the last month, we’ve been working our way in scripture through various wisdom literatures, both the Book of Proverbs and the Book of James, which is one of the most practical, action-oriented books of the New Testament.  Wisdom literature is radically oriented to the type of “right action” that makes the difference between a real faith and a faith that is dead and lifeless.

Right action is a significant part of James, who demands that our actions match what we claim about our faith.   That’s an essential part of any Wisdom literature.  But equally important is the focus on how we speak, because grasping the deep connection between words and actions is an essential part of moving wisely through the world.

Language, James acknowledges, can be meaningless.  We can speak platitudes, or talk about our faith in ways that our actions show to be completely false.  But that does not mean that James felt that words were meaningless.   He understood that language also bears the seeds of action.   Our sharing the symbols and sounds that allow us to communicate with one another is an essential part of being human together.   Language knits us together, as we listen and act upon what we hear.

Language permits us to organize ourselves, to move and think and share in ways that no other creature in God’s creation can manage.  It allows us to plan, to reflect, to coordinate our lives together in ways that either magnify our joy or deepen the brokenness we encounter.  It is fierce and powerful.  

Like a fire.

The tongue is, as James said, like a fire.  Not just a candle, not just a lovely Yule log crackling in the hearth, but a hundred thousand acres of Washington state forest, with roaring vortexes of wind driven flame, zero percent contained, with smoke visible from orbit.

Language is an immensely potent thing, this ability to share knowledge, to speak thoughts and convey potential into one another.   And with that potency, the wisdom literature of much of the ancient world counseled deep caution around the use of language.   In the Hebrew wisdom tradition, this is a strong and consistent thing.  

To be wise, Proverbs 10:19 tells us, you need not to multiply words, but to hold your tongue.  To be wise, Proverbs 10: 8 tells us, you listen for instructions, instead of chattering on endlessly.  To be wise, Proverbs 11:12 tells us, you stay silent rather than mock your neighbor.  

Wisdom teaches that words burn like fire, and our ability to freely express ourselves can both bring joy and cause harm.   

And in a mass media era, in an era when the broad dissemination of information has grown explosively, the power of language has only deepened and spread.  We’re only 500 years into the experience of human beings with mass media, ever since Gutenberg slapped together that typeface of his.

And information, exchanged rapidly and virally, has made it possible for changes in culture and language to accelerate.  Print media was layered over with broadcast media, which is in the process of morphing into the peculiar mess of the wildness of the internet.

And with each transition, our ability to spread thought has grown and magnified, and our transition from one state of being to another has accelerated.

In that encounter with change, we need to be aware that while change is not always wrong, the common shared assumptions of any culture may be wrong.  That a particular thing is all around us, and that it has become the shared assumption of a society...does that make it valid?

They’re just words, we say, as if words have no power, and are not the bearers of our identity.

In this, I’m not suggesting that the issue is cussing.  I’ve known honest and good souls whose natural vocabularies haven’t been what you would call churchy.  Motorcycle mechanics and military personnel aren’t known for their demure use of language.  It’s deeper than that.

The issue is cursing, the use of language to tell a story of who we are together that diminishes our ability to love and care for one another.  Language can convey hatred, dehumanize, objectify, and commodify other souls.  Language can close out the possibility of loving the other, can shut the doors of our compassion.

And in that, Wisdom says, be wary of how you speak, and attend to how what you hear shapes you.

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

Easy Pickings

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 09.06.15

Scripture Lesson:  Proverbs 22:1-2; 8-9; 22-23;  James 2:1-17

Listen to Sermon Audio Here:

I have never really known what it means to be poor.  I just haven’t.  Oh, sure, there’ve been times that I’ve been low on cash, like that time back in college where--having quit my part-time job to focus on my studies, and having chipped in on the keg a few too many times--I realized that I had left myself exactly $95 dollars to get me through the next month and a half of my life.  My parents were away in West Africa, where phone contact was spotty at best and the mail took two months and email didn’t exist yet.  Plus, I wasn’t particularly eager to say to my parents, hey, um, send me money, because I’m an idiot.  

That transfer of funds would come when it came.

I lived on three and half bucks a day for nearly a month, subsisting on ramen and half-cans of tuna.  A couple weeks in, I got myself a job washing dishes in a little Indian restaurant, and I made it through.  That doesn’t even begin to count as “poverty.”  That was just “me being stupid.”

And there was that other time, when I’d taken a part time job at a lovely little church so my wife could pursue her career, only she got canned in a corporate re-organization, and suddenly the only stable income we had was half of the minimum salary for pastors.

Even then, we had ample savings and family and connections.  We were never poor.  We never struggled, unless ditching cable counts as struggling.  It doesn’t.  We were never really at risk.

But for so many folks, poverty is a trap.  Once you’ve fallen into that pit, clambering your way out is the next thing to impossible, as hard as climbing out of the sarlacc after you’ve been shoved in by one of Jabba the Hutt’s henchmen.

It’s not just that life is harder when you have less power, not just that it’s difficult to get things.  It’s that the deck is actively stacked against those with fewer resources, as systems and structures that reward the rich are turned actively against those with less.

If you’ve never read Barbara Ehrenreich’s brilliant, thought-provoking classic “Nickel and Dimed,” it’s worth your time.  It describes her efforts to live the life of the American working class, the folks who struggle to cobble together a living in a post-manufacturing, service-work economy.  At every turn, life is harder.  If a family member gets sick, and both parents are working two jobs and barely getting by with minimal benefits, something’s got to give.  If your old car breaks down, but there are no savings to pay for the repair because day-to-day expenses are too high, the path is debt...and that debt costs you so very much more.

That has always been the case.  Those at the bottom of the economic food-chain have always struggled.  They’ve been easy pickings for the hucksters and the con men and the predators, because when you’re desperate and have no real choices, there are always folks out there willing to take advantage.

Back when I was working my first few jobs, I got a paycheck.  That, increasingly, is not the case. There are payment cards, now, for those folks who are paid minimum wage by the hour.  Not paychecks, but debit cards, which companies offer up as a convenience to employers.  It’s cheaper and faster than cutting checks every month, and so of course businesses go for it.  Only those costs are now passed down to the employees, who now pay fees every time they make a withdrawal, and every time they use that card.  “We’re just providing a convenient service,” say the companies who are skimming money from the folks at the bottom, filling in for the check-cashing businesses that used to prey on folks at the bottom back when I was a kid.

In the great state of Maryland, what that’s looked like these past few years are Structured Settlement companies, who hunt down mentally and physically disabled folks who are living on meager monthly settlement payments, and convince them to sign over those payments for a chunk of cash right now.  They pay pennies on the dollar, and leave their victims destitute.  “We’re just providing a service,” they say.  “It’s not our fault if they take advantage of our service.”

In the great state of Virginia, what that looks like are the Title Lenders that have now popped up on every corner of every community.  These businesses offer cash loans to people who are desperate and who have neither good credit or other assets.  They charge interest at between 300 and 400 percent annually, with the average borrower paying a buck forty to borrow a dollar.  And if you don’t pay ‘em back, you lose your car, which means you can’t get to your job.  “We’re just providing a service,” they say.  “It’s not our fault if they take advantage of our service.”

It is into that reality that today’s little selection of Proverbs speaks this day, a brief sequence of snippets from the Wisdom tradition that presents a potent perspective on how God views those who are on the margins economically.  It is into that same reality that James the brother of Jesus speaks, fiercely, about how we fail to understand our Christian responsibility for those who struggle.

It’s an interesting selection, because it highlights an often overlooked truth about the Biblical Wisdom literature.  Wisdom, or so it tends to get spun in seminary, is not your go-to place for talking about our responsibilities towards one another as we live in community.

For that, we’re generally told to turn to the prophets, to folks like Isaiah and Ezekiel, Jeremiah and Amos and Micah, for whom the oppression of the poor is a big deal.  Being prophetic generally means challenging the brokenness of the social order, standing up and challenging the ways that human beings violate God’s demand that we treat one another with compassion.

Wisdom, on the other hand, tends not to be about challenging the social order, but about maintaining it.  It teaches how to get along, how to avoid causing trouble or bringing shame on yourself.

But when you get right down to it, wisdom writings are just as concerned about how the poor, and the disenfranchised are treated.  Wealth is not the goal, and power is not the goal.  Living an honorable life in balance with the world around you is the goal.  A stable, balanced, and viable society is the goal of Wisdom, in which we live together humbly and respectfully.

Which is why in both the passages from Proverbs and the passages from James today, there is a direct challenge to the imbalances that come from wealth and power.  The long and short of both has to do with the practice of showing favoritism to the wealthy over the poor, where those with power benefit not just from their wealth, but from a willingness on the part of those around them to treat them with more deference, more respect, and just generally like they’re somehow better persons.

That was the way of the ancient world, where wealth and social connections were almost the same thing.

Now, of course, it’s completely different.  Ahem.

In both Proverbs and James, the message to those who have material goods and those who favor wealth is clear: this does not matter to God at all.  It is not how the Creator of the Universe views we creatures, and if we are bold enough to claim that we’re illuminated by the Spirit of the Living God, it can’t be how we view others, either.

This is hard for us to process, hard for us to push through our minds, because it is the way that pretty much every human society ever has organized itself.  Which is why, frankly, every human society ever has failed.  When those with power take from those who struggle, eventually, it is all struggle.  When power makes things unbalanced, societies teeter, and things go south, badly.

Classical wisdom says: be humble, be prudent, be honorable.  Christian wisdom goes deeper: be humble, be prudent, be honorable, and let compassion for all guide your every action.

When we are tempted to blame others for their failings, or to justify those who take advantage of others, Wisdom asks: is that attitude humble?  Is that spirit honorable?  And Christ, who is at the heart of Wisdom, asks: is that my Spirit?  Does it guide you to do what I have asked of you?

In everything we do, that needs to be our guide.  Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

My Righteous Anger

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

08.30.2015; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  James 1:17-27

LISTEN TO AUDIO HERE:

Anger has been on my mind lately, occupying the attention of my soul, consuming my heart.

It’s not that I think there’s no place for the feeling of anger.  We are created to have the capacity for anger, to respond to broken things and threats with ferocity.  

It’s that it’s hard to miss how much anger there is out there, simmering and aimless and without seeming connection to anything in particular.  

I can’t help notice that there is always something to be angry at in this internet age, always a reason to be upset and full of fury at the inherent injustice of this thing or that thing.  There can always be something that we find offensive, is always something out there to stir our sense of offense.  It’s a big wide world, filled with billions of people, and somewhere out there, someone is always doing something that we find horrible.

If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention, or so the saying goes.  But I’m paying attention to anger, and how much anger there is out there, and I find myself wondering: if we notice that there’s a dangerous level of anger in the world, is that something that we’re supposed to get angry at?   I’m angry at the anger, we’d say, but then we get trapped in a self-referencing recursion error, and that kind of programming error can lock up the system of your soul.

That desire for vengeance, the rage-driven setting right of all things, never ever has to go away, until we’re all walking around always angry, like Bruce Banner in that Avengers film--well, the last Avengers film I bothered paying money to see in the theater, anyway.

That can be problematic, because as a lens for seeing the world, as a primary operating paradigm for structuring our self-understanding, anger warps and bends our perceptions.  It is a funhouse mirror, warping both our sense of ourselves and our sense of others, only the house ain’t quite so fun.  Because anger is always right, always completely right, and the object of anger is always completely wrong.  This is useful when it’s you and your pointed stick standing between a leopard and your children.  You don’t worry so much about the leopard’s motivations, it’s cute widdle hungry kittens, or about how sharp and pointy the leopard’s teeth and claws are.  You just feel the rage, and that is all you feel.

That blindness helps with leopards and marauding bears and the guy who calls you insisting that he’s from the IRS and you’ll be under arrest unless you send him your credit card information.  It can be less helpful in human social relations.  

It was mindless, unseeing anger--fermented hatred, fortified by the toxic poison of racism--that drove Dylan Rooff to the pointless, horrific church shooting in Charlotte.  It was the same anger, carefully nurtured until it defined every interaction, that lead Vester Lee Flanagan III to fire seventeen shots at three other human beings, and to feel justified in doing so.  He claimed to have been inspired by the Charlotte shooting, and he was, because he and Dylan Roof are the same person, driven by the same dark spirit.  

It was that same rage, that same blind feeling, that lead a father to shoot his young daughter three years ago before turning his gun on himself, so angry with his ex-wife that he’d destroy their only child  Alexis, her name was, and she was just going into middle school with my sons, and I watched as one of the elders from her grandmother’s church quietly scrubbed her blood from their driveway with a bristle brush, five houses down from our own.

When allowed to define every we see, everything we do, and everything we are, anger becomes toxic.

The Book of James is all about seeing, and being, and doing, and it has valuable things to say about anger.    

This “letter” is more an essay or sequence of essays that establish the most essential nature of the Christian ethical life.   Ancient tradition suggests that the book was written by James, the brother of Jesus.  Modern historical-critical scholarship has taken a hard look at that claim, analyzing the text more carefully, paying attention to implicit context, deconstructing theological assumptions, and the linguistic cues that lie within the most ancient codices.

The modern scholarly consensus: yeah, it’s probably the brother of Jesus.

James is essentially a book of Wisdom.  As wisdom literature, it 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 that life is to be enjoyed, and that sustained enjoyment is best found in moderation, and in attending to what James alternately calls the “royal law” or the “law of liberty,” which means nothing more or nothing less than loving your neighbor as yourself.  (Jas 8:2)

From the foundation of radical love, James teaches that the wise do not speak without careful self-examination, first considering the impact of their words.

That is why James attends to the challenge of human anger.  “Be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger, because your anger does not produce God’s righteousness.”

We’re sure that it does, of course.  Our anger convinces us that it does, but that’s only because our anger lets us to ignore the wisdom that shapes and creates healthy relationships.  Anger is really not all that good at listening, unless by listening you mean listening carefully to find a vulnerability to exploit.  Anger is not great at keeping silence, unless it’s just sitting there fuming.

The boundary line between righteous anger and self-righteousness is so very easily crossed.

Yet we know that Jesus got angry on more than one occasion, and we know that anger is necessary part of human identity.  How do we find our way to righteous anger, then?

I think that test, honestly, lies in the advice James gives.  We must check our anger--just as we check our whole selves--against the law of liberty.  Is our anger concerned about our own interests, our own pride and social position?  Then it ain’t righteous, honey.  Is our anger something that rises quickly and daily, triggered by anything and everything?  Then it’s a sign of something wrong in us, something we need to deal with.

Righteous anger is anger that cares about the other, and places the integrity of that relation .  It is anger that allows itself to be reined in and bridled by love.  It is an anger that says, this thing is destroying us.  This thing is tearing us apart.  It is an anger whose intent is healing, and that does not seek to harm anything other than brokenness itself.  It is the fire that tempers like the blacksmith’s furnace, and restores, as fierce as the arc of a welder’s torch, as bright as a surgeon’s laser.

Where anger rises in us, we need to check it against that measure.  Is it just the ambient rage of a culture that has lost any sense of purpose or meaning?  Is it just our own animal frustration?  Or is it an anger that checks itself, that has as its goal and purpose the building up of Kingdom?

Wherever anger rests in you, wherever it speaks, measure it against the wisdom that rises from love.

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