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.