The Possessed

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 10.11.2015

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 10:17-31

It is the first thing we ever owned together, and it’s finally dying.

Oh, I don’t want to admit it, I really don’t.  That old microwave, purchased way back when in 1991, has sat on the kitchen counter of every home my wife and I have ever lived in.  It’s popped our popcorn back before we had kids, before we’d even had the talk about being ready to have kids, back when she’d come back from class and I’d have put in a day’s work as a stock clerk in a little Williamsburg store, and we’d snag some pizza, some basic cable and chill, just the two of us.

We were past being boyfriend and girlfriend, and definitively fie-anced, that tiny little diamond on her finger having taken a huge chunk out of my meager savings.  We’d reached that magical point in a relationship where you’re buying appliances together, and it was the very first one.

It’s an 800 Watt Quasar, a long dead low end brand, wrapped all around with faux wood paneling applique, the kind of appliance that you’d find in K-Mart along with the tape decks and the cheap CD players.  It’s warmed up countless rushed meals for the kids, and surely, surely over the last twenty five years popped enough popcorn to fill our house several times over.

And now it feels like it’s failing.  Every once in a while, it’ll balk at starting, refusing to fire up, like my knees on the morning after a day when I’ve really pushed myself.  It just clicks, and fails, and clicks, and fails.  And then it works, for no reason, so we keep it around.  The old Quasar, perhaps finally dying, and I’ll admit to feeling this faint twang of loss, over this object that has done due diligence for so many years.  We can come to feel that way about our objects, about the things that populate our lives.  They become suffused with memory, rich with experience, even if those experiences are just of the most basic stuff of life.

It’s easy to feel that way about the objects that populate our lives, as they become part of the face of the world we encounter.  It’s almost like they take on a portion of our personality, like they become an extension of who we are.

I wonder, though, if it works the other way.  If we get too focused on the objects around us, if we allow our identities to be so wrapped up in the things that we own or desire, I wonder if something of their material soullessness bleeds out into our own identities.

Because the things we possess can easily become the things that possess us.

That warning comes to us bright and clear from all of scripture, but it’s particularly sharp on the lips of Jesus this morning.   The story, which is retold by Luke in chapter 18 of his Gospel and by Matthew in his 19th chapter, describes another question being brought to Jesus.   A whole bunch of folks would approach Jesus with questions that weren’t so much questions as traps, the theological equivalent of “does this dress make me look fat.”  This was not such a question.  It is posed, or so we hear, by someone who is approaching Jesus with a genuine concern on their heart:  “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

The response from Jesus is to recount six of the ten commandments, the last six, the ones that have to do with how we relate to other human beings.   All of them are in essentially the same form we hear them in Deuteronomy 5 and Exodus 20...except for the final commandment.  You know, the one about coveting and desiring stuff.  

The man recognizes these commandments, and tells Jesus that he has kept every one of them his whole life long.

Of the three Gospels, Mark is the only one that capture the reaction of Jesus to this reply, and it’s not a hostile one.  Jesus recognizes the authenticity of his desire to live a good life, and as Mark says, he loved him.

Good job, says Jesus.  You’re doing great.  Just one more thing: Give up everything you own, and follow me.

Just that one little thing.  Ack.

The man goes away grieving, and shocked, and it is impossible, from an honest heart, to blame him.    What is being asked of him?   He’s being told to let go of everything he has, and to commit himself fully to Jesus.   There’s not a one of us who’d have had a different reaction.  Let go of everything?  How could we even begin to consider it?

Jesus talks to his disciples as this good-hearted soul wanders away despondent, and his words to them don’t exactly clear things up.  He tells them that it is immensely difficult for the wealthy to enter the Kingdom.  If you’re possessed by your possessions, if you serve Mammon as your master, the Spirit of God will have no purchase in your soul.

Historically, this is where Christianity has begun to waffle.  

Hearing from Jesus that it is harder for a rich person to enter heaven than for a camel through the eye of a needle, pastors like to comfort their congregations with a story they found in their collections of sermon anecdotes.  

That story told how the “Eye of the Needle” is the name of a small gate into Jerusalem, which camels would pass through but it was sorta tight and you had to unload it and re-load it.   I hear that story, over and over again.  It was in that book about quantum prosperity hoo-hah magic I talked about last week.  

And because that’s such a popular tale, I’ll repeat what I said the last time I preached on this passage: there was no such gate.  It never existed.  That story appears to have been made up at some point in the late 19th century, right about the same time some folks started getting very, very rich.

What Jesus is saying is exactly what he was saying.  In the absence of a teleportation device or a shrink ray, this is not easily done.

That’s not good news for us, because I think pretty much every one of us would have just as much trouble with that demand as the young man Jesus loved.  It’s just too radical, too nuts, too way outside of the ballpark, for us to seriously consider it.

I mean, seriously, check yourself.  Right now, imagine that there’s a sudden shimmer in the air, the sound of trumpets, and standing right in front of our tiny little , there’s Jesus of Nazareth himself.  What does he look like?  I’ll leave that up to you.  He can look any way you want.   He can be historically correct short Near Eastern Jesus.  He can be a radiant, glowing pastel heavenly watercolor inspirational poster Jesus.  He can be the Jesus of your childhood Sunday School coloring books.  He can be Ted Neely from Jesus Christ Superstar, or Willem DaFoe from Last Temptation of Christ.

But there is no question in your mind that he’s Jesus.  And he says to all of us, in a way that cuts directly into you, in English and not in Aramaic, exactly the same word that he spoke to that man.  “You are doing great.  Only one more thing I ask: give up all of your possessions, and follow me.”

And into the stunned silence that would fill this little room, you’d hear my faint voice from behind Jesus,  “Even the microwave?”

Yes, even the microwave.

Think of the things that consume your attention, that demand your allegiance.  Your car.  Your phone.  Your house.  Your gun.  The computers and consoles, all of the endless cornucopic vomit of our overproducing materialist culture.

And realize that our attachment to all of it is an impediment to our really engaging with the Gospel.  

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

Lower Than Angels

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 10.04.2015

Scripture Lesson:  Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12

Listen to Sermon Audio Here:

I spend a whole bunch of time in the library, which after forty years remains one of my favorite places in the whole world.  I remember getting my first library card, remember the impossible magic of a place where you could have all the books you want.  Here, a place full of stories, filled with the sweet smell of books, row upon row of brightly colored spines, casting out their tales like filter-feeding coral, enticing you into the amazing, unexpected worlds living on the pages within.

I still love that magic, and it seems even more magical now in this era of algorithm driven encounter.  As the web grows more and more intelligent, it knows what I want to see.  It learns my interests, learns what I know so that it can market me the things it hopes I’ll buy, like I’m a trout and it’s a Smithwick Rattling Rogue, the perfect lure.  But I’m less frequently surprised, less frequently brought into encounter with the unexpected, less likely to have an unanticipated thing strike my eye.

So I still drift among the bookshelves, as I did the other day, noodling aimlessly from title to title until something unexpected catches my attention.  I was in the self-help books, somewhere after a row of construction-site-yellow books with names like “I-Pad Mini for Dummies,” when a book hooked me.  

Just all of a sudden, there it was, bright-orange and eyecatching, a megabestselling book written by one of those health and wealth authors.  “Harmonic Wealth: The Secret to Attracting the Life You Want,” the title proclaimed, with a tiny little action-figure sized picture of the author beneath it.  I slid it from its place, and there was the author, beaming out larger and healthily and wealthily from the cover.

James Arthur Ray, his name was, and it sounded faintly familiar, but I couldn’t place it.  Surely this wasn’t the guy who shot Martin Luther King, Jr.  No, no, that was James Earl Ray, and I doubt that any self-help bookshelf would have anything he’d written.

I couldn’t resist, and delved into the book, settling into a chair in the reading room.  It was all about how amazingly powerful we are, about how the only reason we don’t have the life we want is because we don’t want it.

The author proudly announced that he had trouble with the word self-help, because really, we don’t need self-help.  We are amazing, magical, powerful, and divine, and the only thing standing between us and getting exactly what we want is that we don’t recognize our own power.

That power comes from quantum something-or-other, because interconnection spooky action something parallel universes something.  Having written on that subject myself, I kept reading.  As it turns out, we only suffer because that’s what we want!  We only don’t have things because our energy doesn’t flow in the right direction.

You see, that’s the problem with those Syrian refugees, really.  I mean, if they just really *wanted* not to be driven from their homes...boom!  Wow. Problem solved!

Which, as I learned, is apparently the direction of figuring out how to make lots and lots of money.  You can have all the money and power you want, always, no matter what, because we are basically gods, so long as we let our Godness get what it wants.  If we don’t, it’s our own fault.  “Being poor is a sin,” Ray proclaims.

“You must be master of Earth and heaven to become the spiritual being you were born to be,” the book announces.

That kind of power is the goal, we are told.  It’s the dream of our culture, of the capacity to be just a little lower than angels, of having amazing power and control over all that we survey.

It’s also, quite frankly, one of the things I struggle with most as I read through this portion of the letter to the Hebrews.    

Hebrews was written late in the Apostolic era, and we honestly have no clue who actually wrote it.  For a while in the early church, there were some who thought it had been written by Paul.  But the text itself does not claim that, and the theology and writing style make it unlikely that Paul wrote it.   Martin Luther argued that it was probably Apollos, a prominent early Christian from Alexandria who is mentioned in both Paul’s letters and the Book of Acts.  

I honestly really buy into Luther’s perspective.  The letter of Hebrews itself is so uncompromisingly High Church, soaring, complicated, and rich in ritual.  The language, structure, and tone of the letter indicates a writer of unusual refinement and sophistication.  And Alexandria was a center of learning, the heart of teaching, and the home of the greatest library in the ancient world.  So, sure, as someone who still loves libraries, I totally buy into Luther’s argument.

Hebrews itself is less a letter than a theological treatise.  Although it concludes with reference to a visit by the writer, the beginning of Hebrews starts with the phrase “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in may and various ways by the prophets,” which tends to be a lousy way to start an email.

The purpose of Hebrews as a theological essay is relatively straightforward.  It’s a sustained exploration of the identity of Jesus of Nazareth, seen through the lenses of the Hebrew priesthood.

And in the midst of all of that, there’s this peculiar section in the text, a section that might resonate with folks who believe that the world is ours for the taking.   “But someone has testified somewhere,” it begins, a footnote that probably wouldn’t cut it with most professors.  It’s a coy quote, a “you and I both know this is Psalm 8:4-6” citation.

And what it seems to offer up is a high anthropology, one unusual in the Hebrew scriptures.  Here, human beings are presented as powerful, not quite angels...or, as the word translated as angels is “Elohim” in Psalm 8, it is perhaps better read as “just a little lower than God.”

Which sounds pretty amazingly close to what our Harmonic Wealth guru was saying, at least until you look at the context of the rest of Hebrews.

That context presses completely human Jesus was, how deeply connected he was not to power and wealth, but to the struggles and losses of humankind.   He was, or so we hear in Hebrews 2:17-18, “..like his brothers and sisters in every respect..” and...and here’s the difference “..tested by what he suffered.”

It is in that connection, in the depth of awareness of both God’s grace and human weakness, that is most significant for the author of Hebrews.   In Jesus, we encounter the intent and purpose and power of our Creator, but God also encounters us.   In Christ, we experience the depth of God’s relationship to us, participation in us, and love for us.

The depth of that form of connection can be hard to process, particularly in a culture that struggles with the idea of sacrifice.  Our society thrives on the cult of self, and where we encounter connection, we want it to serve us.  In our relationships, we are taught to yearn for power over others.  We interact to network, to create a latticework of connections that serves our advancement.   When all we’re taught to chase is self-interest, power and profit, sacrifice can seem an odd thing.   The radical compassion that was required to give over an entire life to teaching compassion to others does not process.  It certainly didn’t process for Ray.

We’d rather have attainment, turning our eyes to our own will to wealth and power, a cultural focus driven into us by the endless and insatiable hungers of consumerism.  We’d rather set our eyes on that prize of wealth and health, driving ourselves towards that goal of getting exactly what we want.

But it seems madness, crazy, because anyone who isn’t utterly self-deluded knows that striving does not alway get you what you want.  It doesn’t hurt, but neither does it guarantee that you will not fail. We are mortals, and we are flawed, and the system to which we are connected does not revolve around us.  We might think we know what our future brings, but we don’t, not with certainty.

I wondered, as I read Hebrews and James Arthur Ray, what happened to this soul, so sure of himself, fabulously rich from a self-help bestseller, famous and successful and actualizing his best future.

I asked the great and powerful Google, and it told me.  There it was, right in the blurb under a picture that looked a whole bunch less wealthy and harmonic.  James Arthur Ray, it said, is a motivational speaker and author who...was...convicted of felony negligent homicide.  The picture was a mugshot.

Now I remembered.  He had been charging ten grand a pop for people to join him in a mystic wealth-and-power sweat lodge designed to maximize their self-somethingorother.  But they remained in a poorly designed and superheated lodge too long, and 19 were hospitalized.  Three died.  After the dust cleared, James Arthur Ray spent two years in the Arizona State Penitentiary.  

Evidently, my cynical self said, this was the life he wanted to attract.

That, that is the core hubris of imagining that our connection to God’s creation revolves around us.  Are we connected?  We are.  But that connection isn’t founded in our own search for power, in our own strength building upon strength.

That connection has its reality in love, in an awareness that our connection is a place of compassion, not a place where power and ego rule.

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