Behind the Stone

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 10.01.2015

Scripture Lesson:  John 11:32-44

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

Every other Thursday, I travel into my future.  

There aren’t flying cars and hoverboards.  You don’t see Marty McFly and Doc Brown rushing about trying to solve yet another inadvertent space-time continuum paradox.

It’s a little more subtle than that. I encounter, through the faces of others, what it might mean when I am older.  

I start up my van, and drive to the Baptist church at the heart of scenic downtown Annandale, during which time I get nowhere near hitting 88 miles an hour.  I’m there to pick up meals for Meals On Wheels, run by the county and Annandale Christian Community for Action.  In two large insulated containers, I have sometimes eight meals, sometimes six, sometimes seven, which I spend the next hour and a half or so shuttling around to human beings who are homebound.

I bustle through the halls of a huge retirement home, one that has through a peculiar mix of fate become populated entirely by elderly Asian Americans.  I smile politely and bow slightly at the waist as I deliver the meal, which seems the thing to do. On occasion, I’ll try out the few words of Korean I know.  Anyanghaseo, I’ll say, and they’ll smile, and wonder why that delivery man keeps saying he’s a happy donut.

I’ll stop at the homes of others, and stand patiently by the door as they move to it, as quickly as they can.  Or I ring, and I knock, and then I call, because hearing that door isn’t as easy as it once was.  Sometimes, I am the only soul they see that day.  I linger, if they want me to, and pass pleasantries.

It’s sobering, because it means I’m seeing what the future may have in store for me, and I’m not sure I’m all that excited about it.  Our consumer culture struggles with the idea of aging, because of course it does.  In a society that attempts to keep humankind in an endless adolescence, no longer children but never adult, aging is an inconvenient reminder that we’re not always going to fit into that perfect marketing sweet spot.  Because old people are old.

And when we are young, we don’t want to think about that, about how it is coming, about how swiftly the years fly.

It’s why most of us don’t prepare for tomorrow, why...as a study showed this week...the average non-billionaire American approaching retirement only has about $110,000 set aside for their future, which might seem like a lot, but given that the average one bedroom in an assisted living facility runs $3,500 a month, means we can manage that for just about half-a-decade before the cash runs out.

But in our culture of the now, we don’t want to look to what’s coming.  In our demographically divided society, all we are expected to encounter are others like us, those who fit neatly into our pre-assigned category.  In our culture of immediacy, we’re perfectly content to leave the future locked away, sealed conveniently behind a stone.

The products and media we encounter point us only to our hungers and our fears, showing us not reality, but only more of ourselves.  

And against that, today we hear from John’s Gospel a story of a sign.

Unlike the three other Gospels, the fourth Gospel is not set up like a travelogue.  Mark, Matthew, and Luke all share the same fundamental storyline, beginning with Jesus in Galilee and traveling down towards Jerusalem, with the physical movement towards the sacred city framing the narrative.

The structure of John’s Gospel is intentionally different.  What is important to John is telling the story of a series of seven signs.  Those signs, or semeion, are holy events, moments of miracle and meaning that speak to something beyond themselves.  In telling us their story, John is laying out not a movement through space, but a moving into deeper meaning.  Their task is to open us up to the reality of what Jesus is doing in the world, and to bring us deeper into relationship with him.

There are seven of them, because, well, seven is a number that in the ancient world is charged with meaning.  For both the ancient Jews and the ancient Greeks, it was the perfect number, the number of completion and wholeness.  To be honest, I don’t totally buy that, because, well, it’s totally random.  Why not three?  Like Schoolhouse Rock put it, three is a magic number.  Or why not eleven?  Aren’t things at their most amazing when Nigel Tufnel has turned them up to eleven?

But honestly, what matters for the unknown author of this Gospel is this:  it’s the right number.  It’s just as much as is needed.

Each of those seven events reinforces the character and nature of Jesus.  One, there’s the miracle at Cana in John 2:1-11, where Jesus turns water into a nice rich cabernet sauvignon, with just a hint of oak, peat, and elderberry.  Two, there’s the healing of the child of a royal official in chapter 4, and then three, the healing of an indigent lame beggar in chapter 5.  Four, five thousand folks are fed in chapter six, and then, because miraculous catering isn’t intense enough to fill one chapter, five, Jesus walks on water in chapter 6.   In chapter nine, we get number six, as a blind man is healed.   Finally, the seventh sign comes as Jesus journeys to visit Lazarus, Mary, and Martha, in the full knowledge that he’ll arrive shortly after the death of his friend Lazarus.

The story as we encounter it today begins with tears, begins with a household shaken by loss.  Family and friends have gathered, and there’s Jesus.  He’s come with the intent of changing the direction of things, or so the story has already told us, but he cannot help but be moved by what he encounters.  Here, human beings standing in encounter with death, shattered by loss, and here John does something odd with Jesus.  The Jesus of John is the most potently close to God.  John’s Jesus is the Jesus who was there in the beginning as the Word.  John’s Jesus is always on top of things, aware of who he is, completely in control with a peculiar mystic certainty.  

And yet, in the face of sorrow, it is John’s Jesus who breaks down.  It is John’s Jesus who weeps, and who is greatly disturbed.

And it is this compassionate, brokenhearted Jesus who finds his way with the mourners to the tomb, and it is there that he says: take away the stone.

Practical Martha, always aware of the reality of what is happening, suggests maybe that isn’t the best idea.  Four days dead in the Judean heat, locked away in the earth?  “Jesus,” she says, “it’s going to smell.”  It’s not an irrational response, and it makes sense emotionally.  Best to leave that stone untouched.

But Jesus will have none of that.  Believe.  See this thing that must happen.

And so the stone is heaved out of place, and reality is made different.

There are things about our lives that we may or may not want to know.  Things change, and change is hard.  We get older, and getting older ain’t easy.  People move on, and people pass across the mortal veil, and our love for them means that hurts.

We are afraid to stand in honest encounter with that reality, to see it, to smell its stench.  We’d rather hide away from that reality, in the dreams of our past, or in the magical screens that show us everything we want and desire in the now.  We want them sealed away, behind that stone.

But the Jesus who walks with us and weeps with us asks us not to shy away from turning aside those stones, from standing in encounter with those realities.

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

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.

Fact Checking

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

10.25.15; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 10:46-52

Listen to Sermon Audio Here:

I’ve always been a skeptic.

It’s kind of a strange thing to admit, as a pastor, but really, I don’t believe things easily.  Human beings are just too good at making stuff up.  At least, I know that boys are.  When I was a kid, I’d listen to the wild tales of braggadocio that the other boys would spin out, of their exploits with girls, or their exploits with cars, and I’d just sort of nod and smile and not believe a word of it.

Maybe it was because I was a compulsive daydreamer, spinning out my own tales of wild adventure, a tiny little Walter Mitty of a boy.  I knew, as storytellers do, that the world was full of people with stories, and those stories are fun and you can trust ‘em just about as far as you can throw ‘em.

Wild stories have always been out there, like, say, the one about how Mikey from the Life cereal commercial died after he ate poprocks, drank soda, and exploded.  I remember that being passed around the schoolbus, presented as something that was perfectly true because the kid behind you had heard it from their cousin, who knew a guy who worked with the doctor who tried to save Mikey’s life.

I’d shake my head, and just let it fly.

Now that I’ve grown up, more or less, the world seems even less trustworthy, a wild nest of totally fabricated folderol.  And for that, I have Snopes.

Snopes, in the event you’ve not bumped into it yet, is a site created by Barbara and David Mikkelson, two folklorists, back in the early days of the internet.  It was 1995, and their interest was in chasing down the truth of the stories told and retold in our culture.  

As a skeptic, I’m fond of Snopes, because someone out there has to be pushing back against the tendency of the internet to be a swirling festival of flagrant fabrication and falsehood.  Just about every single day, someone in my network of souls will pitch out a quote or a meme that I know in my heart of hearts just can’t be true.

Like, for instance, when someone earnestly passes on a picture that attributes a saying to Confucius, when in fact it was said by that old turtle dude in Kung Fu Panda.

Like, for instance, that picture of a snoring dormouse, which was soooo cute but totally doctored.

Like, for instance, that story about a special needs bagger at a grocery store who was insulted by a cruel shopper who then got her comeuppance.  

Like, for instance, a meme this last week purporting to be a quote from Donald Trump.  I, as you might imagine, am not really Donald Trump’s biggest fan.  A reality TV star/oligarch/casino magnate, brash and loud and insulting, who celebrates materialism and uses a third grade vocabulary to manipulate nationalist and racist sentiments.  I mean really, what’s not to like?  But the quote, which claimed to be from an article in People magazine, was outrageous in the wrong way, as Trump purportedly mocked Republicans as gullible and claimed he’d be able to con them into voting for him.  Whoever created it knew, without question, that they were creating disinformation.

Or, for other instance, a website called Creation Science Study, which makes a point of announcing after every major world disaster that the people who died brought it on themselves for being such wretched sinners.  I’d researched that one a little, and discovered that it was run by neoatheists, just out to say outrageous things against the faithful, sort of like unusually cruel and mean spirited performance art.

In this era when information is passed, soul to soul, more easily and virulently than ever before, skepticism seems necessary if we’re to remain even tangentially connected to reality.  

But when my inner skeptic comes into encounter with the stories I hold dear about Jesus, sacred and shaping and ancient, how is it to process them?  Like, for instance, the story of Blind Bartimaeus, which comes to us today from Mark’s Gospel.  It’s a lovely story, drawn from the very late stages of Mark’s story of Jesus.  

Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, heading for what he knows is to be his death.  As he and the disciples pass through Jericho, they’ve picked up a crowd of onlookers, a teeming throng.  On their way out of town, that throng catches the attention of a Jericho fixture, a roadside beggar who’d been around for a while.  His name, or so Mark tells us, is Bartimaeus, and his father’s name was Timaeus.

With this itinerant prophet-rabbi and his vast entourage moving by, Bartimaeus starts shouting out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”  Son of David, as it’s used here, doesn’t have to do with who your dad is.  It’s one of the titles that first century Judaism used to describe the messiah, as a way of evoking the lineage of kingship running back to King David.

Despite the efforts to shush this inconvenient attention seeker, Jesus hears him, and he is invited forward.  Their exchange is simple.  A question: what do you want from me?  The answer: Teacher, I want to see again.  The answer: Go, your faith has made you well again.

And the story tells us that Bartimaeus sees, and joins the swirling throng walking with Jesus.

I love this story.  And I struggle with this story.

I struggle with it because I am unable to silence my inner skeptic.  I have never reliably experienced such a thing.  Miracles of this sort exist outside of the range of my day-to-day life, and out of the range of what I understand to be the way the world works.  What are the mechanisms by which such a thing could happen?

And I look to where some people now make those claims, the bright eyed televangelists who’ll hold their hands up to the camera and swear that they’re healing someone’s lumbago right now, yes, there it is, someone out there right now has a heeeeaaaling upon them, hallelujah, have your mastercard ready when you call.

But not everyone is out there manipulating.  When I look to others, if I am honest with myself, I see only an earnest and well meaning hunger for miracles.

I look to the tools of historical critical scholarship, the unvested and analytic Biblical equivalent of Snopesian methodology.  There, scholarship tells me that Mark might not have been the only source for this tale, that both Luke and Matthew tell a very similar but slightly different story.  Only in Luke, who seems to directly use a version of Mark as his source in chapter 18:35-43, Jesus is on his way into Jericho when he encounters a nameless blind beggar.  And in Matthew 20:29-34, he’s on his way out of Jericho again, but the story involves not Bartimaeus, but two blind beggars.

And because it was two millennia in the past, there were no disciples wearing Go-Pro body cams.  There are just those three witnesses, each with their slightly different stories.  That’s all we’ve got.

It’d be tempting to do with this story what Thomas Jefferson did, just tossing it out as unsubstantiated irrational superstition, leaving it on the cutting room floor of history, just pasting in the moral teachings of Jesus and ditching all of the stuff that might trigger a visit to Snopes.  There are those who’d let it go.

But as much as I struggle with this story, I do also love it.

I love it because, well, sometimes things happen that seem both wildly improbable and miraculous.  Sometimes sick people get better.  Sometimes you look at the broken, seemingly barely alive body of someone you love...your parent, your friend, your child...and they get better.  And you know it doesn’t always happen, doesn’t *have* to happen just because we want it.  That makes those times when it does feel all the more miraculous.  

I love it because it is true in ways that go well beyond the material nature of the story, in ways that speaks to how faith can radically transform us as persons, opening us up to possibilities that seem outside of our reach.  It is an ancient tale that shapes our self understanding, that has shaped the understanding of countless broken souls, opening them to possibilities about themselves that they never thought possible.  Sometimes addictions are overcome, and long broken parts of our souls heal, and we suddenly see the path towards reconciliation and restoration, and danged if it doesn’t feel like the most amazing thing.

I love it because it gets at who Jesus was, at the strange shrouded magic of this soul whose impact on the world has been told and retold, yet whose identity is so veiled in history that we could walk right by him on the street and not have a clue it was him.  The best we can get is this historical triangulation, this story cobbled together out of old remembrances and recollections.    We know that something happened, something worth remembering, that in the strange organic crowdsourced way of the Bible got remembered.

When I honestly check the impact of such a story, the truth of how it plays across human beings, I see only something that bends our world towards hope and healing.

And that, to be honest, is something worth holding on to.

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