Lights and Darkness

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Christmas Eve 2015; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  John 1:1-18

Christmas is a time of beginnings, one of which is a little hard to wrap our heads around on this particular peculiar evening.

That beginning is the beginning of winter.  Remember winter?  Winter was supposed to begin three days ago, and Lord, it don’t feel that way.   The night air is warm and moist from today’s rains, and it’s late May out there, barely a whisper of winter’s bite in the air.  Good King Wenceslaus is slogging through mud on this feast of Stephen, with murky puddles in the dinted sod where his foot had printed, and if you try to sing that you’re dreaming of a white Christmas, just be sure that you’re nowhere near anyone who works in the East Coast ski industry, because you’re either going to make them cry or you’re going to get punched.

It’s a bizarre, paradoxically unChristmasy Christmas, more Maui than Montgomery County.  But Christmas is a peculiar celebration no matter what the temperature outside, because it’s a day when we celebrate something new by doing the same thing we’ve do every year.  On the one hand, the story of a new life, a new child born into the world bringing new possibility.  On the other, it’s the same story, told and retold, iterated and reiterated in all of its familiarity.

Right there in the thicket of tonight’s readings of that story we’ve heard so many times, there came that soaring and poetic excerpt from the opening chapter of the Gospel of John. That tells us something different about this Jesus, something that adds a different flavor to the images of mangers and donkeys and wise men and flocks by night.

John’s story goes back to the beginning. Not to the beginning of Jesus’s life, which is where the dear old Gospel of Luke opens the story. For his opening of the tale, John goes way back, back, back to the dawning of time and creation itself, to the beginning of all things.

The story John tells of the beginning is a story of beginnings, of something happening that isn’t easily grasped or understood.  It is the story of the Word, meaning not spoken human language but God’s own self-expression.  It is about the order of the universe, about the way everything is set up, about how everything changes and is made new.  There’s a little passage in there that’s always striking:

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”  That’s how it was read tonight from the New Revised Standard Version, but there’s a tighter translation:  “...the darkness did not grasp it.”  Or “..the darkness did not comprehend it.”

Meditating on this passage of light and darkness this week, I was reminded of a paradox deeper than the strange warmth of this Christmas Eve.  There was a time, in the history of human understanding of existence, that we believed the universe had never known a beginning.  Nothing was truly ever new, argued the scientific consensus of the 18th and 19th century, and creation was infinite and went on forever in both time and space.  There was no “in the beginning.”

But there was a challenge to this, one that was a part of the night sky itself.  The challenge is called Olber’s Paradox, named after 19th century physicist Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers, who, in case you missed it, vas just a little bit German.  If the universe was infinitely large and infinitely ancient, and filled with evenly distributed stars, Olbers noted, what we should see in the night sky is not darkness, but infinite light.  Every point in an endless sky should be a star or galaxy of some magnitude, the sky just a sea of radiant brilliance.

But it is not.  And that means that the stars, seemingly endless and infinite and unchanging, are neither.  The stars are not, much to the ultimate disappointment of Javert from Les Mis, silent sentinels that hold their course and their aim, that return and return and are always the same.  The salt-speckled deep of the heavens tells us that they are not infinite.

The stars tell us, in their intermingling with the darkness, that creation had a beginning.  There was a time when they were not, and a time when they were new.  Olber’s Paradox points towards the Big Bang, but it has other resonances this season.

That there are stars in the night sky looking down where he lay tells us that all things were once new.  It tells us that there is the hope for new birth, that there is the possibility for grace and mercy and transformation in all of our lives.

Both John and Luke are telling us stories of beginnings.  In the dawn of light and existence, the firelight flickering in the warmth of the manger, we proclaim that a new thing has happened.  In the life of that tiny infant, we see things differently.  We see the promise of a human being would would give themselves over fully to the cause of God’s love.  We see how that child will change and grow into adulthood.  And in that man, we see the promise of the Creator.  In that child that has been born for us, in that life given to us, we can see hope for restoration, and hope for righteousness, and for peace without end.  We encounter that in him, no matter where we are in life.

And that realization that things might be new again changes how we see the world, because if we hear it and embrace it, it becomes a vital part of the change in each of us.  We become different people when we stand in relationship to it.  It shifts the arc of our lives.  

In that that promise of beginnings, in the promise of transformation in all of our hearts, lies the hope of this night, and tomorrow, and all of our days.

Let that Christmas hope live in you.  See the world through its eyes.   Let it be a Merry Christmas, for you and for me, AMEN.

High and Mighty

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 12.20.2015

Scripture Lesson: Luke 1:39-55

Goals matter.  They really do.  

And we have our goals, so neatly laid out for us in our culture.  The task, as we see it, is success.  Material success and recognition, fame and fortune, being both excellent and recognized as excellent by all of those around us.

There are a variety of ways to assess those goals, and primary among those measures in our society is wealth.  Our screens must be large, our phones must be large, our cars must be big and shiny.   Everything about our culture celebrates the power that comes with wealth, the gleaming wonderment of having attained.

One place you’ll find that expressed is the Forbes 400, an index of the winners of the global wealth race, maintained by Forbes magazine, which tracks the rise and fall of our planet’s glitterati.  There are those who inhabit the pinnacle of that list, names we know because, well, they’re the ones at the top of the mountain.  There reside the like of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who seem to have managed to remain human despite the rarified air they inhabit, turning their gobsmacking wealth into good for the world.  

There are others who just seem to enjoy having stuff, like the legendary founder of Oracle and #6 on the Forbes list Larry Ellison, who in 2012 bought a private island for himself.  And not just any island, but the Hawaiian Island of Lanai for $500 million. Why?  Because, among other things, he needed a place to park his 290 foot megayacht Musashi.  Musashi, as it turns out, was Ellison downsizing from his previous custom built megayacht, the Rising Sun, which at 453 feet in length and 86,000 square feet of living space, was getting just a little too big.  You know, he’s getting older, and when you get older, you just don’t need quite as much space.

One of the fascinating things about that list is that it’s updated in real time, every day, against the value of their holdings, you can check out just whose star is on the rise and who hasn’t had a good day.

This last week, for example, the greatest loss in net worth came from Prince Al’Waleed Bin Talal Al’Saud, the richest man in Saudi Arabia, whose net worth managed to drop by $685 million.  Something about oil prices, and some poor investments.  Somehow he’s going to have to try to scrape by on his remaining $23.5 billion.  It’ll be hard, but I’m sure with grit and determination, he’ll manage it.

Recognizing power and the fulfillment of purpose are at the heart of today’s reading from the opening chapter of Luke, but it takes on a really rather different form than Forbes’ churning megalisticle of billionaires.

It’s the story of a journey, one that does not involve a yacht.  Just dusty feet, as Mary travelled to see her cousin Elizabeth.

Mary and Elizabeth were certainly not in positions to feel like they were on anyone’s success list.  As women living in a rural area of Judah, they wouldn’t have been anyone.  Not anyone at all.  They would have had no wealth.  They would have had no right to study Torah, or to learn, or to study and debate the sacred alongside the men in the synagogue.  They would not have had the right to access the temple, or to amass worldly wealth.

They were just two women, one six months pregnant, one only recently realizing that something wonderful was happening inside her.  But what we get from them is not a lament about how little they have, or words of sorrow about how oppressed they are.  

Instead, Elizabeth shouts out with joy, sharing a blessing with Mary.  

And Mary then offers up her rejoicing, which Luke remembers for us in verses 46 through 55.  That passage is called the Magnificat.  Even though Mary’s just received a blessing from Elizabeth, the focus of the poetry we hear from Mary doesn’t show any signs of her ego being inflated by what she’s just heard.

What the Magnificat from Mary celebrates is not herself, or even her role.  Instead, what we get from Mary is an affirmation of her position.  She knows she is simply a servant, and a lowly one, at that.   What she rejoices in is not power, and not wealth, none of the things that stir human beings to feel they’re better one than the other.  She rejoices in the simple gift of life she has received from her Creator, and the promise of God’s setting-things-right for all of humanity.

The Magnificat reinforces a potent truth about the human encounter with the divine.  It takes apart the things that we think make us more significant or more important than any other creature.  Here a young no-one from nowhere bears within her the gift of the living promise of God.

And in her song, all of the things that we human beings have always valued above all else are declared meaningless.

The Rich?  Sent away empty.  The powerful?  Cast down from their thrones.  And the proud?  Scattered.

The sense one gets, hearing Mary sing it out, is that this downfall goes well beyond having to downsize from a 450 foot megayacht to a 280 foot megayacht.  It is more than just losing a small portion of a sprawling investment portfolio.

There is this strange theme, throughout the whole great story of the Bible, that reinforces the futility of wealth. No matter how much we gain, we remain mortal beings.  No matter how wildly we might succeed, it does not change either our ultimate destiny or the truth of God’s equal love for all of us.  For all the shine and sparkle of material gain, Larry Ellison is of no more value to the Creator of the Universe than a Syrian refugee child.

Seeking wealth, hungering for it?  That shatters us, because when we do that we are seeing only the image of ourselves that we’ve created, we can lose sight of the reality we inhabit.  We become lost in our own thoughts and our own story about how very perfect and right we are.  Then, well, reality does have a pesky tendency of catching up with us.  

If we allow ourselves to be closed off from real relationship to God’s work around us, it doesn’t matter how skilled we are or how much potential we have.  Those gifts will do nothing, nothing besides causing us to look like fools.

That does not mean God wants us to hate ourselves, or to despise the life and the gifts all of us have been given.  Right here on the cusp of Christmas, we are reminded that we are all called to use the lives that God has given us in ways not guided by pride.  

Though we aren’t much more than dust and ashes, God has placed within each of us the gift of God’s own love.   It’s that gift that we are called to share, fully and wholly, with the world around us.

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

The Ungrasping

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

12.13.2015; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 3:7-18

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

As much as I can, I stay away from it.  I always have, but it’s a struggle.

It’s advertising, and it chases us everywhere, whispering and muttering, poking its head into our every moment.  I tune it out, or try to, my mind struggling for the sake of my sanity to quiet the din into white noise.

Back in the day, the tricks were easy.  Just ignore the print ads.  When a commercial came on, you’d go to the bathroom or go make popcorn or just shut off the sound.  Boom.  Problem solved.  But marketing is an adaptive system.  It learns and grows more sophisticated, changing as the years progress, like a mutating virus growing ever stronger.

If you’ve ever looked at old advertisements, one of the most bizarre trends you’ll see is that they’re full of information.  Crank through one of those Sears catalogues from the turn of the last century, and every single product is described in immense detail.  Here’s how it was manufactured!  Here are specific details about its functionality!  There’ll be paragraphs upon paragraphs of detail, using...ugh...words.

Now, though, advertising has gone lizard brain on us, even as it grows more sophisticated.  It doesn’t sell the item.   It sells an experience, a feeling, an emotional response.  You will win the holidays, the ad announces, if only you come and by the thing!  You will be beautiful and successful, if only you possess the Object!  Your life will be sad and you will be unhappy, if you have not the Object.

I remember, as a little lad, an ad that stirred an emotional response.  It was in Boy’s Life, which I received as a rumpled little Cub Scout.  It was one of the cheapest ads, black and white and as small as you could buy.  Someone was trying to sell World War One pilot hats, with the goggles and all.  That was all the ad said, along with the words, “You will love it!”  I don’t know why that ad stuck with me, other than the fact that even as a second grader I could feel pity for a business model.

But now, in the grasping of the season, the marketing onslaught for things like, well, the upcoming Star Wars movie feels rather different.  “You will love it,” the campaign roars at me, and honeychild, it’s not plaintive.  It’s insistent, demanding, relentless, omnipresent, marketing so inescapable as to feel like some kind of assault, as relentless as that drunk at the bar who just won’t stop hitting on you.  Here’s yet another trailer! Here’s a manufactured controversy!  Here are toys that will let your kids play games with characters they don’t even know yet, like the overnamed Disney Star Wars The Force Awakens Kylo Ren Electronic Lightsaber Roleplay Toy, yours on Amazon for $47.95 with free shipping.  Just rolls of the tongue, doesn’t it? Sort of like the official Red Ryder, Carbine Action, Two-Hundred Shot Range Model Air Rifle, only a word longer.

 “Daddy!  Can you let Santa know that I really really really want the Disney Star Wars The Force Awakens Kylo Ren Electronic Lightsaber Roleplay Toy?”  “Um, son, how can you roleplay Kylo Ren if we don’t even know who he is yet?”  “I don’t care.  If I don’t get the Disney Star Wars The Force Awakens Kylo Ren Electronic Lightsaber Roleplay Toy my Christmas joy will be crushed under the weight of existential angst.”

All of it, every last moment, designed to make us desire and grasp and feel.  We are meant to want to have things, the games, the toys, the experiences.  We are meant to never feel like we have enough, always grasping and hungering for more.  It is all about us, our hungers, fears, and carefully manipulated desires.

Here, this week, in the frantic face of getting and grasping, we hear John the Baptist.  Last week, we got the context and the runup to what he had to say.  John spread his message in a broken Judah, a people under Roman occupation who yearned for a messiah...an anointed king...to set them free.  They’d flocked by the hundreds to hear John, lining up like the fanboys and fangirls who are apparently as we speak lining up in front of theatres to see the aforementioned Star Wars movie.

As a marketing technique, I’m not sure John’s approach makes much sense.   If you want people to buy what you’re selling, you tell ‘em what they already believe about themselves.  Hey, you guys are awesome!  Love ya!  But John spins another way.  Those who’ve gathered to listen to his words are Jews, and they understand themselves as part of a long spiritual lineage, a covenant of law and relationship that goes back thousands of years to Abraham.

Even this defining aspect of their identity is called into question.  What does that matter to God?  As far as God was concerned, even rocks and inanimate objects had as much standing.    What matters, as John proclaims it, is that they live their lives in such a way that they are clearly manifesting the form of life God has demanded of all of them.

It’s not an amorphous faith that John is demanding of them.  It’s a specific, concrete, manifested faith, one that articulates itself through specific actions.

“Produce fruits worthy of repentance,” John says.   And in reply, the people ask, “What then should we do?”  That depended who they were.

So he tells them, but what he tells them is not what they wish to hear.  Allow no-one to go without, he says, demanding that those who have more than they need give up the comfort of excess.  You aren’t to desire more than you need.  The purpose of abundance, of having But that was for everyone.  Then the tax collectors ask.  “What should we do?”

Who were they?  These weren’t Roman tax collectors, but were instead Judeans under contract with the Roman government.  Having paid for the privilege of collecting taxes, these contractors were then empowered to make profits from the fees and taxes and tolls they collected from the Judeans around them.  It was the nature of the business.  For them, the demand was simple.  Do not seek to profit from your position.

Then it’s soldiers who ask.  “What should we do?”  

Who were they?  These would not have been Romans, but Judeans working for the Herodians.  They would basically have been mercenaries, and as such would have been paid practically nothing.  Like so many soldiers and police in the developing world today, they would have expected to supplement their income by extorting it from those around them.  It would have been the expectation, rooted in their desire to have enough.

To them, John says, simply, stop doing what you have been doing.  Stop taking advantage of your position, and realize that your actions make the lives of everyone around you more negative.

What John is telling those who have come to listen is that there is no magical, simple, easy fix for what ailed Judah.  That they had come hoping for a quick fix, for a splash in the water that made everything right, hoping that the ritual of baptism would transform them and restore their broken nation, that was all well and good.  

But what he told them, rather simply, was that if they wanted to change then they would have to actually change.  Each would have to set down something precious to them.

They would have to stop grasping, stop allowing themselves to be defined by fear and hunger and the endless human fear of inadequacy.  

And with that, John lays out what it means to lean into any future hope.  The possibility of the messianic age that he declared, that reality of the Holy Spirit that Jesus would bring, that would come no matter what.  But in order to participate in it, people would have to turn away from broken ways of acting and being.

What to do?  Well, who are you?  What defines you?  What world are you a part of?  Ask yourself, and then act.

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

Wilderness Paths

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 12.06.15

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 3:1-6

It was dry, bone dry, death dry.

Yohanan would have licked his lips, but his mouth was filled with powder, fine dust that ground between his tongue and his teeth, that scraped between his reddened eyes and eyelids.  It was good, good that he didn’t have to speak, because all the voice he had was a raven’s croak.

There was no-one to listen, not now, not now that he’d wandered away from the river, away from the place where the crowds had gathered to listen.  Not that he’d had much to say, not then, but that didn’t matter.  People always came to see the show, like the circus of the accursed Romans.

What he had said, he had shouted, bellowed out into the shimmering heat of the day and into the stink of the crowd.  He had cursed them, cried out at them for their madness.  Some had heard, some had scoffed and left in disgust, but some had stayed, eyes bright and changed, or eyes brimming and wet with the tears that he himself could no longer muster.

He’d cast them into the water, one by one into the slow-flowing mikvah of the Jordan, the ancient ritual bath washing away the dust of their travels through the world, the copper-brown water staining their copper-brown flesh.

Still they pressed in, reverence mingled with shouted questions, debates blossoming into shouting all around him like flowers in the spring.  It was too much, too much, their crowded voices a distraction from the One voice that drowned out all others.

And yet he taught, shouting back, roaring out answers like a cornered lion, until the day grew dim and the shadows long, laying one after another into the waters.  

He had fled them, then, fled from the riverside, shouting warnings and curses at any would would follow.  He didn’t want them following, but he also didn’t want to be by the water, not at night, not when things with shining eyes came howling and gibbering.  Most of them were animals.  Some of them were not.

There, in the half light, movement in the bony fingers of a scrub-bush.  Yohanan squatted, eyes sharp and focused by his hunger.  Locusts, five, six, seven of them, more, their dull brown matching the color of the dirt as they gnawed at the furtive growth of leaves.

He plucked at one, slow in the cooling air of evening. Then another, then another, filling his hand, feeling the hard chitin against his palm, the strugglings of tiny legs.  With a thick, dirty thumbnail, he popped off the heads, plucking the legs away, and popping the thick meaty abdomens into his mouth.  Like figs.  Or grapes.  

Only no.  Not really.  Not really at all.

It was hard, hard to swallow against the dust, the acrid flavor mingling with the taste of clay in his mouth, his mouth thick with the paste of it.  Not at all like figs.

A woman had brought him figs, just this morning, and flat sour bread, and a skin with watered wine.  That had been good, a gift.  The locusts were was also a gift, only in that it stayed the snarl in his stomach for the night.

And it kept him on his path.  Because the figs were good, and the wine was gently sweet in the skin, and nearby Nazareth was full of possible pleasures.  He could choose those pleasures, in a moment.  But they were not the wilderness path he had chosen, and to which he had been called.

He remembered the first time he journeyed beyond that simple home in the hill country, with his father Zechariah, down into the bustle and stench of the town.   His father was growing old, his beard a splash of earth and silver, but it was years before that night he had been unable to rise, unable to speak, unable to move his arm.  He was still strong, and he had said to Yohannan that it was time for him to see the city.

Not Nazareth, not that little backwater, but Gadara of the Decapolis, the ten cities that were the backbone of trade in the region.  Gadara, renowned for its wisdom and teachers, a real city, filled with souls, not just by the hundreds, but by the thousands.

He was just thirteen, finally a man in his fullness, or so he thought, finally a full part of his community, and yet he’d never traveled there.

He’d not known what to expect, not known the wildness and distraction of the town. There were just so many people, so many, a press of faces, a blur, so many you could never remember them. It was too much.  The shouting, chasing madness of the marketplace.  The smell of the incense, the stink of fish, the fragrant oil shining in the beards of the merchants.  He’d not expected the brightness of the baubles, the shine of the bracelets that tinkled on ankles as the women walked past.  It had been beautiful.  It had been horrible.  

He’d not expected the cries of the lepers on the road into town, or the desperate emptiness in the eyes of that child, begging with its mother.  He’d not expected the whip of the soldier, lashing at a prisoner, dragged away for failing to meet his debts.

So much life, so much noise, and so much pain.

And no-one seemed to notice.  It struck Yohanan like a blow, like a stone.  The excitement of the journey wanted nothing more, nothing, than to return to the wilds, to the comfort of his small village.

Maybe it was that Yohannan had grown used to the quiet of the hill country around Galilee, to the slower ways of things.

Maybe it was that he lived in the backwater of a backwater, that he was just not wise to the ways of things, that he just didn’t get how important all of that rushing around and shouting and shine was.

Maybe it was that he spent his days wandering with the herd, and every new soul he encountered out there in the wilderness seemed worth knowing, seemed filled with their own story, a story that wove up with his own.  

But even then, even as a boy, he had known that wasn’t it.

It was from the teachings of his father and the songs of his mother.  It was from the reading of the Torah scrolls, the reading that had come so hard for him at first.

He heard the stories and he read, about the one whose name was Everything, who was called Adonai, the Lord, who was called Elohim, the Strong Ones, how the I Am That I Am had come to Abram and to Mosheh, how Elohim had given a covenant to his people.  At the heart of that covenant was balance and justice, a justice woven out of the whole cloth of Adonai’s love for his people.

It was a simple path, the simplest and humblest of paths.   But in the rush and chase of life, in the shouting of the market, in the pride of the sword’s sharp edge and the shouting of powerful men, the people forgot it.  There was too much to see, too many other bright and shiny things to draw their eyes, and so they lost sight of the way.

The cries of the hungry?   They couldn’t hear them, because the shouting of the fish merchant and the seller of silver trinkets drowned them out.  The shivering of the child, begging in the cold of the morning with his widowed mother?  They couldn’t see it, couldn't see that little body trembling.

Their paths were crooked, wild and circling, endlessly folding back over the same selfish, bloody ground.

They simply couldn’t, lost in the struggling rush of their loud lives.

Yohannan squatted back on his haunches, feeling the roughness of the crude cloth against his back.  Hard as it was, that was why he preferred the wilderness paths.  The quieter places, the humble dirt, paths so simple they were just part of the world. Paths so simple, they were where the voice of Adonai could be heard.  

There, in the evening sky, a single star bright in the heavens.  An evening wind whispered up, and muttered in his memory.  It reminded him of those strange stories of his strange cousin, the stories his mother would tell him when he was just a boy.  And the words of a scroll suddenly sang in his heart, that scroll of Yesahyah the prophet.

“Bamidbar Panu Derekh Y’weh,” “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,” it began.  “Baaravah m’silah l’eloheynu.”  “Make his paths straight.”

And though the night air was growing cold, Yohannan felt the warmth of that hope.

Let that be so, for you and for me,

AMEN.

Fear and Foreboding

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 11.29.2015

Scripture Lesson: Luke 21:25-36

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

It’d be great, really great, if this particular bit of scripture didn’t seem quite so dead on lately.

I mean, here we are, just a few days past Thanksgiving, and we’re supposed to have been taking time to catch our breath.  It’s a time to chill out, to take it easy, the long weekend equivalent of a deep cleansing breath.

And it’s Advent, that season of preparation for Christmas, and our candles are lit and the sanctuary is soft and as quiet as a manger.  Well, quieter, hopefully, and with less of that wet cow smell.

As the temperatures decline and the days grow short, it feels like the right time for stillness, for contemplation and finding places of warmth by the fire.

But the world seems not to have gotten that message.   It feels like discord is the rule of things, as tensions rise and our capacity to be thankful has faded away to nothing.  The world seems agitated, riled up, and the farthest thing from at ease.

The news is full of darkness and anxiety, bombings and shootings and terror both overseas and here at home, and it seems like every day brings new forms of darkness and stress.  War seemingly without end or reason in the Middle East, rising racial tensions, diminishing material resources, the weather getting crazy, and the recently released Pixar movie isn’t supposed to be any good, and technically, Princess Leia is a Disney Princess now, and that’s just too hard to wrap your head around.

Things seem to be falling apart, in ways that feel more than a little bit apocalyptic.  The other day, when every picture I saw was that Russian plane going down in flames, shot down by a NATO member state, I went online to see if there was any uptick in the legendary doomsday clock, a measure set out by a group of concerned scientists during the cold war.   There wasn’t, as it happened.  It’s just kind of stuck at three minutes to midnight, meaning no-one has been updating that website for years.

Just for funsies, I went and checked the rapture index, too, a bit of internet bizarreness that tracks the likelihood of a biblical apocalypse.  It’s the “prophetic speedometer of end times activity,” or so it declares itself.  It presents forty-five metrics that its creators insist are all markers of the end-times, each in a neat little five point Likert scale.  Floods and Earthquakes and Global Turmoil were all maxed out at five, and Liberalism and Peace Process and Civil Rights were all dangerously high at four, although I’m not quite sure why peace and civil rights are negatively correlated.  Interest Rates are also apparently a factor, and are at historic lows, so maybe things aren’t quite as bad as anticipated.  

And The AntiChrist is only at a three, which would seem like...um...the most relevant metric.

Silliness aside, it’s hard to get around that pervasive anxiety about the purpose of things this time of year, as our hopes for the arrival Christ’s gracious kingdom prang up against the churning mess of our ongoing history.

In the face of that, Luke’s Gospel today serves up a little apocalypse.  The word “apocalypse” in the Greek comes from the root words “apo, “meaning “un” and “calypsis” meaning “veil.”  It’s to “remove the veil,” and what we’re hearing from Jesus are words that describe the coming into completion of God’s intent for creation.     

Almost all of this passage is likely drawn from the Gospel of Mark, the earliest of the four Gospels, which the author of Luke clearly had available as a source-text.   The same passage can be found in Mark 13:24-32, and also in Matthew’s Gospel, from 24:29 to 24:36.

The imagery is striking, and totally not at all what we’re looking for as we approach Christmas.  There are signs in the heavens, which themselves tremble.  There is an angelic figure...the Son of Man...which is sometimes equated with Jesus in the Gospels, and sometimes not.

In all three versions of this story, Jesus then tells a short parable, about how we are to know the coming of the end of things.  It’s a simple metaphor of a fig tree.   When the leaves are budding, you know that summer is near.    So when you see what he’s talking about, then...well...the time is at hand.   So far, pretty straightforward.

And then Jesus says, in every single version of this story, “Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all has taken place.”

What?  What does that mean?  Jesus is saying, or appears to be saying: “All this crazy stuff will go down while you are still alive.”  Meaning the people listening, all the way back when, nearly two millennia ago.   How can that possibly be true?  It’s something that Biblical interpreters have struggled with, because it seems to fly in the face of history.   Theories have included suggesting that “this generation” means Israel generically, or the generation that will actually experience the end of things.  

But those seem like weaselly outs to me.  A generation in Hebrew thought was a discrete reality.  It meant either a particular group of individuals or a forty year timespan, because, well, that’s about how long you could reasonably expect to live back then.  Jesus is talking directly to particular generation.  The language he’s using is clear.  He’s talking to them, and about them. There’s no complex parsing of meaning, no evidence of Jesus saying, “When I say ‘this generation,’ I actually mean ‘that generation,’ meaning, of course, the Baby Boomers,” to which Peter would have raised his hand and said, “The what?”  And Jesus would have said, “Oh, I’m talking to people who aren’t around yet and who live so far in the future that the language we’re speaking won’t even really exist any more then.”

That’s not what Jesus was doing.

The point of Christ’s teaching at the dawn of this season is to remind us that God is at work in creation, and that our expectation that God will make things right is to be fulfilled.  It’s the expectation that God will transform our reality, just as the Gospel of Luke tells it.  It’s the anticipation that something significant will shift in the lives of those who stand in relationship to Jesus of Nazareth.

Each and every year, that happens.  It just doesn’t happen in the way that anyone expected.

When God does act--and God does act--how does God act?   God acts continually in ways that are difficult to miss, but that aren’t always quite what we’d anticipate.  Like that year, for example, when God did enter the world.   That arrival did not take the form that anyone would have anticipated.  There wasn’t the arrival of a mighty and divine warrior, but a tiny newborn child.  There wasn’t the descent of a vast conquering army dropping out of low earth orbit into the skies over Bethlehem, but a simple couple, bearing the miracle of a life.

Every single year, Advent begins with our own remembering of how God came into the world.  It was gloriously simple, it was powerfully humble, so much so that we can miss it.  As we enter this season of preparedness, though, we are challenged not to allow ourselves to become so distracted by the shine and sparkle of the season that we completely miss the purpose.

We can become so distracted, so consumed by the endless drumroll of human suffering, that we can easily miss the subtle but inescapable signs of the kind of transformation that this season is all about.  As we enter into this season of new birth and transformation, it’s important that we not miss the powerful potential that is brought by each moment.  How has God shaped us?  Where in the grace of our Maker does the reality of our redemption lie?

We want it to be big and immense, to be some grand-scale apocalypse, and so we often look for things that are huge and unmistakable.  

There will come that moment, for all of us, when God enters our world.  It will change.  It will be transformed, just as surely as a new shoot brings the coming summer, or that little child was born.  It will come, and we have to make ourselves ready every single day, because we really don’t want to miss it.  

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

Not So Good Ta Be Da King

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

11.22.2015; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  John 18:33-37; 1 Samuel 8:10-20

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

Here we are, right on the cusp of that holiday of all holidays, the day of giving thanks, the day when we are thankful that we invested in larger belts and for the miracle of elastic waistbands.

Thanksgiving is a holiday of welcome, a day when we celebrate the old story of the arrival of the pilgrims, and the sharing of a meal with the stranger.  I remember, faintly, my first American thanksgiving, from first grade in Ms. Baumgartner’s class, as the week before we cut out feathers and made construction paper pilgrim hats, and in the carpeted common area there was an object made of boxes that when viewed from 1000 meters might have looked something like a ship.  There was lots of candy corn involved, which made it awesome and entirely historically accurate.

I mean, here the Wampanoag people brought maize to the meal, and I was eating congealed nuggets of high fructose corn syrup.  It was like I’m part of history!

Somehow, in the thick of all of that, the core idea of that simplified story of the Pilgrims arrival on our shores managed to sink in.  They arrived because they were seeking a place where they could live without persecution, a place where they didn’t have to worry about being shot with a blunderbuss just because they happened to practice a particular strain of Jesus faith.

That myth...and by myth I mean a story that defines a people...stuck around in my head, as one of those things that’s worth giving thanks for.

I am, in point of fact, very thankful for that story, thankful that I’m in a position to stand here on a Sunday and talk about Jesus in a singularly Presbyterian way without worrying about the aforementioned blunderbusses being pointed in my direction.  I am thankful for a Thursday when I can gather together with my family in all its complex blend of beliefs and traditions, and know that a person’s beliefs can be practiced out in the open without fear of persecution.

And by that, I mean not just my beliefs, that peculiar set of particular understandings that defines me and guides my actions.  I mean the beliefs of those who come from a very different perspective, those who have chosen different paths or come from different cultures.

In so far as they do not force themselves on others, I am particularly, singularly, uniquely thankful that they, too, can practice what they believe, without anyone harassing them or using the power given them to dominate and control.  

Because the lesson learned from the bloody history of faith, of every faith and the Way of Jesus in particular, is that the temptation of coercive power and the desire to hold on to such power always corrupts.  The power to rule over others, to bend them to your will?  Human beings have proven themselves unable to wield that sword.

The story told in John’s Gospel today is a story about the power to ruling, and it lands right here on the cusp of Thanksgiving.    In John’s narrative, we’ve moved to the very beginning of the Passion narrative, which describes the events immediately leading up to the crucifixion.

Jesus is having a little chat with Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, a dismally unsuccessful functionary who had been given power over the Judean province between 26 and 36 BCE.   This was not a choice assignment.  There are many stories about Pilate, most of which come to us from various Jewish or Christian sources.    In the Jewish histories of that period, he’s viewed as insensitive at best, and brutal at worst, being willing to do whatever it took to maintain power over that restive region.

And in his capacity as governor, John’s story of Jesus brings Pilate into a peculiar conversation with Jesus.   Jesus has just been brought to Pilate from the Sanhedrin, the  Jewish High Council.  What is being done is a political gesture, as the Sanhedrin acknowledges the power of Pilate, which is a projection of the power of Rome.  Here, they said, was a potential revolutionary, someone who is seeking to overthrow both our power and yours.  Here, they said, was someone who sought to be king, and to seek to be king was to subvert the power of both state and temple.

So Pilate finds himself confronted with this human being who was trying to take power for himself, yet another in a long line of crazies who had declared themselves messiah, and he asks him a series of questions.   But in every one of the responses Jesus gives to Pilate’s questions leads further and further away from the place Pilate was familiar with.  Jesus refuses to enter into the kind of conversations about power that Pilate would have expected.

Instead of staking claim over land or over a people, asserting his right to defend or destroy, Jesus takes a completely different approach to kingship.

Pilate asks a pointed question.   Jesus replies, “Are you asking because you think that, or because you’re relying on the witness of others?”

Pilate asks another question, trying to draw Jesus out.  “My kingdom is not of this world,” Jesus says.  “If it were, my followers would be fighting to prevent my arrest.”

Jesus simply refuses to engage in the kind of leadership that would have been familiar to Pilate.  He is not a king, not as Pilate understood kingship.  He was not powerful, not in the way that Pilate understood power.   The story Jesus had been telling about himself and the role that he plays in the coming of the Kingdom of God was completely different.  

In its difference, it sings out against all Israel faced were surrounding peoples who were increasingly organized around consolidated, central authority.  Individual tribes or city-states were merging into kingdoms, which could leverage that consolidated power into more and more organized military systems.  Their armies were better equipped.

And so the pressure was on, and the struggled to come to terms with their seeming lack of power.  The solution was simple.  In order to provide the unifying and concentrated power that would permit the Israelites to compete with other nations, the elders of all of the tribes approached Samuel.  “Give us a king like the other nations.”  

This was, for Samuel, frustrating, but as he sought the counsel of God, he receives an odd response.  

Faced with what appears to be a rejection of the balance that has maintained the integrity of the covenant people, God tells Samuel in verse 7:  “Listen to the voice of the people,” and again in verse 9, “Listen to their voice.”  For all of Samuel’s frustration, he is told, listen...and then told to just tell them precisely what will happen if he does what they ask.  

What the leaders of Israel hope is that the king will serve them.  Samuel predicts is what always happens when human power concentrates in the hands of a few.  The powerful will take what they need to maintain power.  The king will take sons as soldiers and daughters for his courts.  He will take taxes and take land, which will be distributed to those who hover around the riches of power.  The king will serve the people, alright, but not quite in the way they’d hoped.  

Because as historian Mel Brooks noted, it's good ta be da king, pretty much all the time. But for those who aren't? It's not quite so great.

This is the model of power that has always been the enemy of God’s reign among us.

Jesus presents us with a way of living that is completely at odds with the dynamics of power that have always governed human society.  He was not the sort of leader who would take more power for himself, consolidating an iron grip on a nation for “the good of the people and their security.”   We’ve seen plenty of that in the world.  He was not the sort of leader who stirred violence for the sake of violence, motivating his people by turning them in hatred towards a demonized enemy.

And there, there we are called to ask ourselves, from this place of power that we inhabit, what our responsibility is towards those who are suffering under oppression, who may be different, and whose hope is for a better future, whose hope for nothing more and nothing less than the God-given rights that I myself am thankful for.

Our task, as we give thanks in this season of thanksgiving, is not to maintain a fierce and ungiving grip on what we have.  It is to maintain an attitude of grace and abundance, which is and has always been the best spirit of this nation.  

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