Right In Front of Us

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Easter Sunday 2016; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  John 20:1-18

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

I get worried about Mary.

Every year as I read through the central part of this text, I find myself concerned for her mental state, worried because here she is, right there with Jesus, and she has absolutely no idea who it is she’s talking to.  She’s raced to the tomb, right after a remarkably traumatic couple of days, and she sees some pretty unsettling stuff.  There’s death, of course, as we read through John’s story, the chance to watch someone you love die slowly, which isn’t exactly the kind of thing to put you in your happy place.  Where she expected to see a tomb, there’s just an empty hole.  That’s going to mess with you.  And then there are there’s Jesus right in front of her...and she has no idea who he is.  

Not a clue.  Not even the faintest whisper of a clue.

And Jesus isn’t just someone who Mary knew faintly or briefly.  Mary was from Magdala, a healthy Galilean farming and fishing community just south of Capaernaum.  Meaning, “Magdalene” not her last name, any more than my last name is Annandale, or y’all all are all part of the Poolesville family.   Every single story of Jesus describes her as part of the inner circle of Jesus, a disciple who followed him just as significantly as the twelve apostles followed him.  We don’t know exactly how she met Jesus, other than that we’re told that there was some sort of healing involved.  She was right there with him, learning and journeying with him from Galilee down south to Jerusalem.

And yet she doesn’t recognize him.  There he is right behind her, saying, woman, why are you weeping, and she turns around and looks right through him.

This is usually a sign that something’s a little strange.  That, plus: there are angels, which is also a bit out of the ordinary.

It’s possible, because we hear it elsewhere in the New Testament, that Jesus is a master of disguise, wearing one of those Tom Cruise Mission Impossible masks, or one of those Tom Cruise Tropic Thunder body suits.  In Luke’s Gospel, there are stories of him walking with other disciples, and they don’t clue in to who he is, either.  Given that we hear elsewhere of Jesus moving effortlessly through angry murderous mobs, there’s probably a paper out there in an academic journal somewhere.  “The Semiotics of Stealth in the Story of Jesus: Implicit  Hensojutsu Disguise Technique in the Johannine Text.”    I’d write that myself, but it’s so been done.

However it worked, Mary just doesn’t see him, even though he’s talking to her, even though it’s him, right there.

It has to do, I think, with her expectations.  

Because nothing blinds us to possibilities like our assumptions, those parts of ourselves that we bring to every moment of our lives.  Every one of us carries with us a set of understandings that govern who we are and how we move in the world.  Sometimes, that’s a helpful thing.  Those expectations are formed and shaped when we are small, as our minds come to terms with the patterns of reality we encounter.  

We expect the ground to be there when we take our next step.  We expect that when we’re walking rhythmically down the beach on a lovely summer’s day, a giant sandworm isn’t going to erupt out of a dune and devour us.

Some things just don’t happen, and it’s perfectly normal for us to expect that they won’t, and live our lives as if they won’t.

Mary just doesn’t for a moment imagine that her beloved teacher and friend is anything other than dead and gone.  She’d been following him as a disciple, filled with hope for that fledgling movement, and the whole thing had just totally come apart.  That’s the reality she has accepted.  That’s the reality that is settled in her heart.

And so that’s the only thing that she can see.  Just a gardener.  It’s what she expected.  So it’s what she saw.

There’s a wonderful classic film about a gardener and expectations, one that’s worth a viewing if you’ve never had the chance to see it.  It’s the 1979 movie “Being There,” starring Peter Sellers as a man named Chance.  He’s a gardener, one who’s lived his whole life in a household in a wealthy DC neighborhood.  He’s ah, well, he’s what they used to call “simple”, in a Forrest Gump kind of way.  He’s never left the house.  He knows nothing of the world at all.

Chance the Gardener knows only gardening, and is completely helpless otherwise.   The only way he knows to interact with other human beings is to 1) talk about gardening and 2) reflect back to them whatever it is they’re saying, or, if that’s too confusing, just repeat lines or mimic actions he’s recently heard and seen on television.

But he’s pleasant and well dressed, reflective and seems thoughtful, and this is so rare in DC that every person who comes into encounter with him assumes that he must be strangely wise.

They see only what they imagine him to be, and not the man himself.  They project their expectations onto the blank slate he presents them, and come away marveling at what he presents them.

As a pastor, I really do appreciate this.

But what’s striking about this as a human tendency, it means that we are often utterly oblivious to both our neighbors and ourselves.

We don’t see the people standing right there in front of us.  Instead, we see the projections we cast onto them.  We see them as categories, or types, or as echoes of other human beings we’ve known.  We see another to blame, another who’s an object, another who’s They’re right there, but we don’t see them.

Even more significantly, we don’t see ourselves.  We see the person we imagine we are.  We see ourselves living and acting and being according to our self-understanding.  Which is fine, if that understanding is healthy and life-giving.

And here, the Easter moment manifests itself in a word, a single word.

Jesus speaks her name, and she suddenly sees herself...and him...in light of the reality right in front of her.  Not her expected reality of despair and failure and hopelessness, but a completely different path, one she was so convinced was real that she couldn’t see it even as it stood there right in front of her.

When we’ve fallen into patterns of life that we can’t seem to shake, when we find ourselves unable to break out, today reminds us that an entirely different reality sits there right in front of us.  

We have only to allow ourselves to see it, and see ourselves in the light of it.  

On this Easter morning, let that be so, for you and for me,

AMEN.

Palm Sunday, LLC

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

03.20.16; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Philippians 2:5-11

What is it that defines us, as human beings?  What gives cohesion to our sense of ourselves, and from that establishes our relationship to others?

On the one hand, there is faith.  On the other hand, there is our identity as "brand."

Brand identity is the Big Buzzy Thing in our consumer culture.  It used to be less all pervasive, less radically defining.  I mean, shoot, back when I was a kid there was Tide and Ivory, Coke and Pepsi, Chevy and Ford, but those lived in their own domain.  There were brands, and there were people, and we didn’t confuse the two unless we were actually Colonel Sanders or Walt Disney, in which case our lives were weird enough already.  Now, with the net-driven commodification of all human interaction, we're all supposed to attend to our brand.  We’re meant to build our brand, to become our brand.

But what is this identity, that brand-focus creates within us?  Brand is about the relationship between a product/service and a consumer of said product/service.  It is intended to develop a pattern of repeat or customary purchase, based on the consumer's perception of qualitative dynamics of the brand.

I use Google products, for instance, like Gmail, and my Chromebook.  I use them because Google represents, for me, innovation coupled with an imperfect but intentional beneficence.  It’s also cheap, meaning free, which warms my Scots Irish heart, and easy to use, and when Google becomes sentient a few years from now and Googlenator Drones are hovering over our neighborhood like Angels of Death, I figure having a Chromebook will be the next best thing to lambs blood on my doorpost.

Brand does more than confer corporate identity.  It "rubs off," by intent, in the relation.  The brands we consume are meant to modify our own sense of self, to be a social marker within culture as to our place and status.

Like out in my carport and driveway, we have a Honda and a Toyota, which tell us that we are a practical, reliable, comfortably bourgeois family.  The more we internalize the brands we interact with as shaping our own identity, the more we are embedded as a consistent and reliable consumer.

And so the question becomes: what is the relationship between brand identity and an identity shaped by faith?

It's an important question, because as branding becomes the defining feature of both corporate and individual self-understanding, there's bleed over into the realm of faith.  Churches need to "think about their brand" in the process of the endless self-promotion we're now obligated to pursue.  

And if you’re self-promoting, you don’t allow for any complexity in the nature of your identity.  Brands don’t tout their struggles or their flaws or their weakness.  They don’t talk about their mess.  They present an idealized vision of themselves, of their identity, a vision that’s buffed and polished by Madison Avenue.  They don’t want you to know the sausageworks of how they produce their product.  All we’re meant to see is the surface.

Our living out of spirituality together becomes both shaped and expressed in terms of the market ethic.  Is that an issue?

Honestly, it is.  Because faith shapes identity in ways that are radically different from "brand."

Brand, after all, is about ownership and possession.  It is driven by commodified self-interest.  The point and purpose of branding is to promote the corporate or individual person being branded.  While it creates relationship, that relationship is essentially grasping, oriented to benefit the brand itself.

Brand identity is about a mask, an image, a carefully constructed “reality” that presents

And in that, brand identity is the inverse of the identity created by faith.

That reality is driven home by the sweet, short passage from Paul’s letter to the church at Phillippi we hear today.  As Paul would often do when he was trying to make a significant point, he’d burst into song.  Think of 1 Corinthians 13, that well known hymn to love.  Here, talking about who Jesus was, Paul does it again between verses 6 and 11.  It’s a song, a little hymn or poem about the nature of Jesus, one Paul shared with a community that fundamentally got who Jesus was.  And sure, he’s probably just quoting lyrics, but I’d like to think that maybe just maybe he actually sang it.

Paul! The musical might not do well on Broadway, but hey...if a hip-hop musical about the father of American federalism can be a smash hit, you never know.  

This song has particular content, which speaks to appearances, power, and the new self in Christ.  What we hear, from Paul, is that Jesus “emptied himself.”  Philippians 2:6-7 are touchstone verses for the Christian mystic.   They read, in the New Revised Standard:

“who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.”

The two key terms here come first in verse 6, where Paul sings out about how Jesus did not exploit his relationship with God.  The word we parse as “exploit” was the Greek term harpagmon, which means “grasping” or “taking” or “snatching” or “pillaging.”  It means, whichever way you slice it, the use of your power to your own personal profit.  

In verse 7, the words from this ancient Jesus song are heauton ekenosen, which mean “self emptying.”   Jesus turns himself completely over to God’s purpose, and to the care and service of others.  Everything he was served that purpose.  His flesh, shaped and formed by God.  His every inward thought, turned over to the love of God and neighbor.  Pride and greed and profit?  Those things were set aside.

Because Christian faith, which is shaped by the identity and person of Jesus, is oriented not towards the self, but the self orienting itself towards a purpose that transcends self.  Or the organization orienting itself towards a purpose that transcends organization.   The purpose we find in faith--or at least, an existentially valid faith--challenges us to be grounded in something that will continually demand our growth.  It is relation with the other rooted in the other.

An identity shaped by faith is a different thing from a faith formed by a brand, a different thing entirely, and that's worth keeping in mind before we press that hot metal against the surface of our souls.

It isn’t about manipulation, or by falsely conforming ourselves to the expectations of other and culture.  

That’s part of the strange tension of this Palm Sunday, the tension between the false proud imagined reality of the messianic brand and the entirely different truth of who Jesus was.  The Messiah, the anointed one, was meant to be all sparkle and shine, the embodiment of the power and glory of Judah.

Those who pretended to that power presented themselves as liberators, as bearers of the proud heritage of David.  They played directly to the expectations of the crowd, who wanted nothing more than to wave their palms in the air and celebrate the coming of a perfect and powerful warrior king.

That was not who Jesus was, and he knew it.  He was there to serve, and not to rule.  Who he was was not the shallow brand of power, not the manipulative mask of brand, but the deep honest integrity of a soul that turned itself completely to the service of God’s love.

As we begin this Holy Week, let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

Credentials

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

03.13.16; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Philippians 3:4b-11

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

There’s a peculiar thing about having spent the majority of my adult life getting an education as a professional Christian.

I’ve got the undergraduate degree in Religious Studies from Mr. Jefferson’s University, that flagship of the stellar state system across the Potomac, an institution that has become so fiercely competitive that there’s not a chance I could have gotten in now.   I mean, not a chance.

Then there’s seven years of Master’s Degree work, mostly part time, at a little Methodist seminary in Washington, followed by five years of Doctoral study, which is...just barely...most of the time since I turned eighteen.

That’s not to mention the requirements for Continuing Education, training, and recertification that we Presbyterians require of our Teaching Elders.  I’m trained.  I’ve got credentials out the wazoo.  

Which is where the whole professional Christian thing gets a little peculiar.

On the one hand, having some clue what you’re doing a good thing.  It is.  I mean, training and certification is a vital thing.  You don’t want a nurse to have no clue what they’re doing, and you want your surgeon to have actually been trained on something other than a Wii game.  You want the truck drivers on the road to have gotten their CDLs, and we’re generally more comfortable if the folks up in the cockpit of the plane weren’t sitting up there thinking, Oooh, I wonder what this lever does!

Oops.

If you assume that conveying the teachings of Jesus in an accurate way matters, then having some training is kind of important.

But on the other, there’s the painful reality that on another level, it doesn’t really matter.

The Apostle Paul reminds me of this, every time I read him.

Paul’s more than faintly threatening to every professional Christian.  Here, the most influential early follower of Jesus, whose energy and dynamism were absolutely central to the spread of the faith...and he’s the dude who takes no salary as a point of pride.  Oh sure, it’s fine for some, he says.  If people really need it.  But for me?  I’m not going there.

And that’s in the face of a set of credentials that was as impressive as anything the early Christian movement could have expected.

The funny thing about Paul sharing his credentials with the folks at Philippi was that they kind of already knew him, and knew him well.  It was a church that he himself had founded, likely in around the year 50 in the Common Era.   The short letter he wrote to them reflected their relationship, and that relationship was a good one.  This wasn’t a mess like Corinth or Galatia.  It also wasn’t a church where Paul wasn’t well known, like the church in Rome.  

These were his peeps, and the letter reflects that.  It’s an expression of the love he felt for the community there, particularly as they had supported him through times of challenge.  This letter was written during one of Paul's many imprisonments, most likely written from jail in Rome in the early 60s.    

This whole letter is basically one big thank you to the Philippians.  Paul thanks them for both their material support in Paul’s time of imprisonment, but also thanking them for their prayers and care.  What makes this sweet little thank you note so interesting theologically is its focus on expressing the nature of Jesus of Nazareth, and particularly the humility and self-giving nature of Christ.   That's the focus of the well known hymn to Christ in Philippians 2:5-11, in which Paul encourages his readers to empty themselves of themselves, and be humble even in the face of their newly found connection to God.

The purpose of today's reading is similar, but with a more pointed focus.  Paul knew his own training and background, and recounted it to the folks at Philippi as a way of reminding them of his impeccable credentials.  In every way, he’d prepared himself for one life.  He’d been born into the faith of his parents.  He’d studied the Torah and the Prophets ferociously, training at the feet of Gamaliel, grandson of Hillel, and one of the most renowned rabbis of that era.  Gamaliel is such a significant rabbi that he shows up in the book of Acts, chapter 5, as the wise and thoughtful counsel who prevents an angry klatch of rabbis from killing the apostles.  

There was very little doubt of Paul’s skill, training, and background.   He had prepared himself in every conceivable way for leading a Jewish community.   That was not the life he ended up living.  Having had a powerful and transforming experience of Christ, Paul found himself radically changing the arc of his life.  

In this new life was not his pedigree or his flawless credentials that mattered.  What mattered was the transformative relationship he had with that odd man from Nazareth.  This isn’t a gentle relationship of wuv, either, not about the warm fuzzies.  It’s the kind of relationship that knocks you to the ground and leaves you as blinded as if Jesus had just tossed a flash grenade into your soul.  

Paul’s faith in the justice, grace, mercy, and love of Christ was what defined his life, and what gave him value.  It is that relationship that allowed Paul to endure, and to press on through the considerable trials and difficulties of his existence, certain that there was a purpose to his life.

The other stuff?   It helped.  Without question.  Paul’s knowledge of Torah and his gifts of persuasion did sort of come in handy later on.  But for all of his training and all of his experience, Paul completely rejected the idea that those things had any value.  How completely?

So completely that this passage in Philippians is the one place in the New Testament where profanity is used.   Right there in Philippians 3:8, when Paul says:

More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.

The word in the Greek is skubala, which has nothing to do with either swimming underwater or Hanna Barbara characters.  The slightly cowardly translators of the New Revised Standard Version render it “rubbish,” which means that Paul ends up sounding a little bit like the Dowager Countess from Downton Abbey.  But in the common Greek of the Greco-Roman world, that word had a very specific meaning.  It was, back then, the precise equivalent of a four letter word for excrement.

“All those things don’t count for skubala,” Paul says.  “They’re just a bunch of skubala.”

Paul, remember, may not have realized that he was doing anything other than writing a letter to a community of friends who loved him, and wasn’t feeling the need to be guarded.

The long and short of it:  those things that build up our pridefulness, that allow us to assume that we are of more value or more significant than others?  They can be stumbling blocks on our walk along the Way, if we allow them to become so.

This last year, we had on our prayer list a woman named Phyllis.  I’d put her there, because she was dying.  Which she did, as we mortal creatures inevitably do.

Phyllis Tickle, besides having one of the most delightful names ever bestowed in the history of naming, was also a significant thinker, a writer of Christian books and poetry.  I’d gotten to know her as the silver haired grand-dame of emergent Christianity, back when I was part of that movement.  Her books and lectures were everywhere.  She was the Religion Editor of Publisher’s weekly.  She was, within American Protestantism, a Personage.

And so, as a Hail Mary of sorts, I’d reached out to her to see if she’d be willing to even look at my efforts at writing.   Not only was she willing, but she was also remarkably supportive, generous with time and praise in a way that belied her august status as a Name with Impeccable Credentials.

Her grace...her ability to remain unchanged by all of that?  It was remarkable.  

And whenever we find ourselves viewing our identity in terms of roles and cultural expectations, whenever we allow ourselves to forget our essential humanity because we’ve internalized the false standard of hierarchical power?

That’s when Paul has a word for us, about how much that’s worth in the eyes of our Maker.

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

A New Creation

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 03.06.16

Scripture Lesson:  2 Corinthians 5:16-21

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

This last week, I've started in on my next writing project. It's a screenplay, the screenplay for the book I'm going to have published--God willing--this next year. My agent encouraged me to take a swing at it, because, well, it doesn't hurt to have one drafted.

Honestly, I'm finding it a little hard to focus. I'll start writing and visualizing the scenes, and the next thing you know, I'm daydreaming about what I'll say when I accept the Oscar. "I'd like to thank the Academy," I mutter, while my dog stares at me like I'm crazy.

But the whole screenplay thing is kind of ironic, because I increasingly find myself uninterested in movies.  

I’ve been a cinephile much of my life, thoroughly enjoying film as a medium.  I’d dutifully bop along to the thee-aa-tah many weekends for whatever they might have been showing.  I’d dive in to the classics at home, from slotting in a VHS to watching the little tray slide in with the DVD to scrolling through the selections on Amazon Prime.

And yet now, it all seems kind of the same.  Everything’s a reboot or a remake or a mashup, part of a great Circus machine that blorts out an endless stream of pre-fab entertainment product.  It starts to all feel, well, like it’s been done.  Guardians of the Galaxy felt the same as Star Trek which felt the same as Star Wars, just different faces and franchises applied to the same movie, over and over again.

I start feeling like Frances at the end of Bread and Jam for Frances, which I hope Hollywood never ever touches, because there’d be some dark backstory and a cameo by Lady Gaga.  

I mean, look at the Superhero Movie Industrial Complex.  It’s collapsing, slowly but surely, under the weight of pretending to take things to the next level, to the point where the genre is beginning to devour itself.  It’s Superman versus Batman!   And yet another Avengers Movie, only now they’re fighting each other!  It’s got all of the sophistication of arguments I used to have around the cafeteria table when I was in first grade, with all the artistic integrity of Frankenstein meets the Wolfman or King Kong versus Godzilla.

Speaking of which, there’s another King Kong movie coming out this year, apparently an origin story, because...well, I honestly don’t know why we care about King Kong’s backstory.  He was a littler giant gorilla, and then he became a bigger giant gorilla.  Wow.  And they’ve decided to remake Ghostbusters, only with women, which I’m pretty sure was the entirety of some agent’s elevator speech.  “It’s, like Ghostbusters...only with goils!”  Because the sisters are doing it for themselves now, by which we mean piggybacking on an existing beloved franchise.

Maybe it’s midlife.  But where once I enjoyed film, now I feel like the author of Ecclesiastes.  There is nothing new under the marquee of the twelve-plex.   

Coming to terms with newness was something that the Corinthians were not particularly good at doing.  Oh, they thought they were.  But from this strangely cluttered letter, Paul gives us a powerful sense of just how much that first church couldn’t find their way to real change.   Unlike first Corinthians, which tells a single story and moves graciously from one section to another, Second Corinthians wanders wildly all over the place.    

The tone of the letter changes suddenly and abruptly, with odd transitions and shifts of emphasis that just make no sense whatsoever.  Given the clear gifts of rhetoric that Paul shows in his other letters, most competent critical scholars believe that this text is a mashup, a cut-and-paste job that weaves together three or more free-standing letters into one single text.  One moment Paul will be waxing eloquent about love, and then suddenly he’s attacking someone, and then he’s right back to being positive again.

Here in this morning’s text, we’re in one of those positive sections, as Paul stirs and cajoles the folks in Corinth to truly embrace the reality of what Jesus taught.  Because as much as they fought about Jesus and took stands and argued over who was holy and who was not, the Corinthians never quite got around to changing.

In his dealings with the Corinthians, Paul repeatedly had to deal with that community’s complete inability to do anything differently.  Oh, sure, they’d gotten all excited when Paul had first shown up and joined his colleague Apollos in starting up this new community.  It felt new then, exciting in the way every new cult from far off lands felt exciting when it first sailed in to that port city.  But the years passed, and things just didn’t change.  All of the rhythms and patterns of their old way of life just kept right on keeping on.

Paul challenges them, over and over again: stop this pattern of hatred and conflict.  Stop blaming others.  Stop finding reasons to attack one another, and really commit yourself to creating relationships of reconciliation with one another.

And that’s the heart of the change that Paul sees unrealized in Corinth, the new story that they just can’t quite seem to bring themselves to tell.

The old pattern, the pattern of conflict and adversarial relationship?  Again and again in this passage, Paul articulates the alternative, the really new thing that defines a different path of life:

{And again, an off the cuff conclusion, at the end of which I say:}

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

Vantage Point

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

02.28.16; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Isaiah 55:1-9

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE

I’m a gamer.  It’s a strange new world, a peculiar new art and form of storytelling, one that’s remarkably complex and ever evolving.  

Eve:Online, if you're not aware of it, is a science fiction game.  Players construct spacecraft, which then explore, mine and trade...and battle over territory.  It's wildly complex, with a steep learning curve and a deep level of sophistication.  I've been tempted, on and off over the years, to get into it...but it feels like the sort of thing that would disappear me from the real world.

Over 500,000 people play it on a regular basis, and the coupling of in-game currency and real world dollars means that Eve has now become a complex economy in and of itself.   

This ain’t Candy Crush or Call of Duty, folks.

Eve: Online is dominated by a tyrant.  Not a made up tyrant, either.  A real dictator.  Meaning, there is a single human being, a gamer who has risen to a position of political and economic control of a virtual empire whose holdings are worth millions of real-world dollars.  His in game avatar name is The Mittani (an apparent reference to an obscure ancient Near Eastern empire), and as the leader of the Goonswarm, he is the single most powerful person in a virtual community of half a million souls.

Meaning he gives orders, and tens of thousands of actual human beings do what he says.  He has a complex communications and administrative apparatus in place to maintain control.  More significantly, he developed a sophisticated intelligence operation, spies and informers and moles in other coalitions, which he uses to dominate and intimidate.  And by the thousands upon thousands, his subjects maintain his empire.  He is a despotic warlord, by every measure of the term.

Some might giggle at this, because, well, shoot, it's a game.

But what the Mittani does is no more or less real than what the CEO of any midsized internet business does.  He maintains control, directs activities, and can mobilize millions of dollars worth of resources towards a particular end.

That and motivate close to to twenty thousand people to follow him.

These are real people, choosing to play as the obedient subjects of a mildly sociopathic overlord.  Choosing it.  Uncoerced, they fight for him, create resources for him, create propaganda for the Goonswarm, spy for him, you name it.

That in and of itself is fascinating, and seems to speak directly to our current political funhouse.  It would seem the kind of thing worthy of study by anthropologists and sociologists.  But having recently gotten a doctorate in leadership dynamics, there was a spin on this tale that I found remarkable:

The Mittani does not actually play the game himself.

Meaning, the real human being who created this character never logs into the game's servers.  He has an account, sure.  But he does not use it.

He can't be directly impacted by actions in Eve: Online.  His systems of command and control exist entirely outside of the game, on websites and forums where he coordinates his rule.  It's metagaming, I suppose, playing the game above the game.

In corporate leadership literature, there is much talk of "being on the balcony," or being able to rise above your organization in order to effectively observe, direct and transform it.  Leaders of this type influence a system, but they are not themselves a part of the system they control.

And what higher balcony could there be than not actually inhabiting the world you control?

The Mittani’s ways are not the ways of everyone else in Eve Online, which has a bizarre echo in today’s reading from the book of Isaiah.

Today’s section comes from what is known as Second Isaiah, which was written and preached over five hundred years before Christ by a prophet who followed the tradition of Isaiah. Its visions and proclamations do not describe a Hebrew people comfortably ensconced in Jerusalem and the temple, as do the first thirty-nine chapters. They assume that the Jewish people are shattered in the Babylonian exile, that they are slaves, that they are surrounded by the proud power of the world’s greatest empire.

What those enslaved people saw, around them, were some of the most impressive structures that humankind had ever built.  They saw towers and gardens, wonders of the world.  They saw great golden statues to strange and alien gods.  They saw the force of arms of a mighty empire that dwarfed even the greatest aspirations of their people.  In the hands of those who had enslaved them, all the power of the world seemed to reside.

There just seemed no way out of it.

It was hard. It seemed hopeless. People began to despair.

But the word from God that Isaiah proclaimed defied their hopelessness. It was a word of intense and shattering hope, a word that comes directly from the prophet’s sense of being anointed with the Spirit of the Living God. It’s a word of intense confidence in the power of God to bring about restoration.

For the oppressed and the brokenhearted and the captives, the prophet affirmed the devastation that they were experiencing. Yet in the face of their suffering...and in some way because of their suffering...the prophet declares that God’s love is infinitely greater than the powers of darkness that seemed so mighty all around them.

In this passage, he goes back to ancient promises to their ancestors, promises that were fulfilled.  He acknowledges that they’re in a wasteland, and doesn’t mock their experience of suffering.

What he does do is put into the context of the Creator of the Universe.  Look at everything you, Isaiah says.  Look at it.  The heavens?  They are no more substantial than smoke before a strong wind.  Those powerful people?  Their lives are as short as the lives of tiny flies.  And the seemingly tight knit power of the world?  That comes apart like a Kmart tube sock on the foot of a teenage boy.

It’s a word that they needed to hear, and a word without which their hearts would have been too broken to continue. It’s also a word that many of us need to hear in the darker places of our lives, as many of us look fearfully out at the seemingly insurmountable power of the broken world around us.

{And here, I go off the cuff, because, well, it's good practice}

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