The Life Eternal

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

04.17.2016; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  John 10: 22-30

Death is a funny thing.  Meaning, not funny in a “ha ha” sort of way, no matter how well Deadpool has been doing at the box office.  Funny peculiar.

We don’t really talk about it, not much, in our day to day existence, because we’d just rather not.  It feels like a grim distraction, this reality that all of us face.  It’s such an integral part of life, that we age and grow old and eventually stop functioning, and yet it’s just not a regular topic of conversation unless you work in hospice-car, as a funeral home director, or as the lead singer for some Scandinavian death metal band.

The process of aging and dying is something that has fascinated science lately, as we human beings fish around for keys to maybe putting that whole dying thing off for, I don’t know, a century or two.  Or longer, as non-existence is something we’d rather avoid.

There were studies, back in the 20th century, that suggested that the way to live longer was to radically restrict the calories you consumed.  If you ate a very very small amount of healthy food, research suggested, you could bump up your lifespan by several decades.  “Calorie-restriction,” it was called, and there are communities of individuals on the web who are obsessively devoted to that practice.  It always struck me as a poor tradeoff...hey!  Instead of dying at 85, you can spend another thirty years being hungry the whole time!  Yay!

There are studies now into the process of senescence, meaning how living beings degrade as they age.  Not all do, it’s been found.  There are species of ants that just keep trucking along, utterly unaffected by age right up until the moment that they just mysteriously switch off.   There are living beings, like the bristlecone pine, that don’t seem to age at all.  The bristlecone has the distinction of being the living thing with the longest lifespan, with the oldest living specimens being over five thousand years old.   What’s striking about the older bristlecones is that they’re considerably healthier and more vibrant than younger trees.  The little thousand-year old adolescents aren’t as productive as the four to five thousand year old trees.  It’s not that they can’t die, of course.  You can burn them, or cut them down and make them into really-really-low-karma IKEA furniture.   But as best we can tell, bristlecones don’t die otherwise.

So science struggles and wrestles with our mortality, again, with some hope of unlocking why it is that we don’t just keep on truckin’.   

I do wonder, though, if that would be a good thing.   Would a life that just went on and on and on be a blessing?  I mean, I look back at my high school yearbook, and I find myself marvelling at just how few of those souls I still remember.  Those I’m still friends with, I remember.  But I know among those other faces, there are people that I may have been in class with, who were part of the ambient reality of my adolescence, that I really no longer remember.

If we lived for five hundred years?  A thousand?  It’d feel too much.  Old friends, forgotten.  Memories would pile upon memories, until we could no longer hold on to all of them, the two point five petabytes our organic neural network can hold finally filled to saturation.

I think, honestly, we’d feel a little like Bilbo Baggins after celebrating his hundred and elevenses, spread thin, like butter spread over too much bread.

And yet here, here in the Gospel of John, we have Jesus talking about eternal life.

In the midst of a festival, Jesus is wandering the around the temple in Jerusalem.  It’s a festival that in Jesus’ time was known as the Feast of Dedication, when Jews were meant to come and celebrate the temple’s liberation from the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes nearly two hundred years before.  We know it by another name:  Hannukah.

There are no dreidels or candles, at least not that make their way into the story as told, but it’s Hannukah nonetheless.  It’s an interesting marker, because this Gospel tells us that Jesus may have been hanging around Jerusalem for three months, since he wandered down from Galilee back in chapter seven to be part of the Sukkot fall festival.

Jesus finds himself in an exchange with a group of Judeans.  It’s a testy exchange, as those who gather around Jesus feel like he’s not being direct with them, that he’s leading them on with his peculiar, obscure way of talking.

Stop wasting our lives, they’re saying, which this gospel conveys in the Greek through an idiom of annoyed impatience.  “We follow, and we listen, and you’re taking up our time, Jesus, and still you just won’t just come out and tell us what we expect to hear.”

And he responds, as he tends to, with more challenges in response.

He makes the case that they should already know, because he’s already been among them and both teaching and acting for a while.  And when he says some strange, strange things.  He says that he and his Father are one, which really really cheesed people off.  But he also says, straight up, that those who grasp what he teaches are given something unusual.  What the Aramaic words were, we cannot be sure, but the Gospel of John describes it in the Greek as zoe aionion, literally, the life of all ages.  The Eternal Life.

This concept isn’t unique to the Gospel as told by John.  It’s in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, in exactly the same form.  It’s in Paul’s writings, and in other of the Epistles.

In addition to the overwhelming span of eternity set before us, there’s also something of a theological conundrum that I’ve always struggled with when presented with this concept.  If there lies an eternity beyond this one, a span of being that stretches forever, in which we are always ourselves just as we are now, why do the choices we make in this life matter?

If we continue as moral agents, forever and ever, just as we are now, what makes the choices of today and tomorrow relevant against the endlessness of eternity?   My life, all our lives, feel like a fleeting instant, an infinitesimal nothing against the yawning deep of all time.  Do you remember the time period between 7:27 am and 7:28 am on October 3rd of 2014?  That single minute is a vastly larger fraction of your life than living a hundred and thirteen years would be relative to the eternal life.  Is that the measure of you as a human being?  

And yet Jesus and the great story of redemption and repentance place an emphasis on this life, this time, the choices we make in the flesh and in the now.

For those of us who call ourselves his, this life is the place where that decision must be made, where transformation must occur.  It is the seedbed of our reality, the foundation on which our relationship with our creator rests.

How, then, to interpret this assertion that being a disciple of Jesus offers us a life eternal?

Speaking to it exactly, in its fullness?  I don’t think any of us can do that.  I don’t think human language itself is capable of bearing the weight of that reality.  It’s why Jesus talked in strange, indirect ways about it, using story and parable and peculiar, abstract symbols.

But we do know some things.

It is not simply about avoiding senescence, not about with aging or the way we change and grow over the course of our days.  Neither can it be interpreted as only being something we participate in at some point following this existence, in an endless life that is just precisely the same as the one we inhabit now, only infinitely longer.

The reality of the zoe aionion is that it is the life of all our ages, the life of our every moment.  It was yesterday, it is today, and it will be our tomorrow, whatever that may bring.  Our days, these days, are set into the reality of God’s work, as bright and precious and eternal as the heavens themselves.  Jesus, who was one with God, knew this, and his whole life was in the service of that reality.

In this time, Jesus calls us to be his flock, to act and live as if we have heard his message of grace and mercy, that we have listened and understood.  

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

Undercover Boss

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

04.10.2016;  Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  John 21:1-19

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

Reality television was just such a peculiar thing.  Or I guess it is still, but I don’t really have much basis for observing it.

I remember when it reared its strange, misshapen head from the murk of some programmer’s id, all the way back in the era when MTV still mostly played music.  Is MTV even still around?

The Real World, it was called, and I remember watching fragments of it once or twice as I flipped through the channels, in the same way that I can’t help looking briefly at a deer carcass lying by the side of the road on my way home.  It involved finding the most annoying possible twenty-something human beings, putting them in a fancy house, and manufacturing fake drama.  One would never have thought, not for a moment, that it would start a cascade of entertainment-product that just hasn’t stopped.

As a genre, reality tv has delved deep into the dark recesses of the human soul, as we for entertainment have watched one absurdity after another.  Over the years it’s subjected us the Kardashians and Honey Boo Boo, and at least one presidential candidate.    It has been wildly absurd, “reality” distorted through the lenses of profit driven absurdity.  

There’ve been shows like The Swan, where women who had been determined to be “ugly” were surgically altered, with the most successfully modified woman “winning.”  There was a show about a woman having to pick a romantic partner based only on his personality, meaning from a group of men who wore masks the whole time.  To add gravitas, it was hosted by Monica Lewinsky.  There’s been a show about Mike Tyson raising racing pigeons, and a show entirely revolving around 1990s rapper Vanilla Ice learning to live among the Amish.

I have watched none of these shows, just as I’ve never watched the show “Undercover Boss.”  That conceit, honestly, seems better than most.  Unlike Shark Tank and that show starring a particular presidential candidate, Undercover Boss doesn’t fawn over the rich and the powerful.   It wasn’t an American show to start, so perhaps that explains it.  The conceit behind this strange bit of tee vee is, apparently, that you take a CEO and make them work secretly as an entry level employee at their company.  There, not only do they learn what it’s like to be at the bottom of their corporate food chain, they also get an unvarnished perspective on just what their employees think of them and their leadership.

It’s a reality version of a theme in human storytelling called the King Incognito, in which...in order to learn the truth about things...a powerful ruler or monarch will don a disguise and go out amongst the people.    It’s a storyline that goes back at least to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which was published in the year eight.  Not 2008.  Just eight.  One of the tales in that collection involves the gods Zeus and Hermes, who pretend to be beggars and go seeking hospitality, and find only one elderly couple (Baucis and Philemon) willing to care for them.  They are rewarded by being allowed to die simultaneously and be turned into  a pair of intertwining trees, which, romantic as it is, seems like maybe not the best reward, even if they did ask for it to be their destiny.

That idea of a ruler coming among his people in a form that’s hard to recognize is written deeply into the concluding concluding section of John’s Gospel.  This portion of the Bible is full of intriguing stories, like, for instance, the description of the doubts that Thomas felt when Jesus showed up, and Christ’s response, as He told us what it meant to believe.

But this last section is particularly odd, as Jesus both appears and does not appear to his disciples.  It comes as something of an epilogue, added on to John’s Gospel after it had already concluded.

The disciples are fishing, out there on the shores of the Sea of Tiberias.  It was Peter’s idea, we hear, but they’re out on the water and having not much luck.  Then someone appears on the shore, someone who shouts out to them a question about their fishing.  “Catching anything,” he yells.  “Nope,” they yell back.  “Try the other side of the boat,” yells back the stranger.  There are fish there, of course.

It’s at this point that the unnamed disciple realizes, although others do not, that it is Jesus.  Because apparently it wasn’t obvious, meaning the person in question did not actually look familiar, or like the Jesus they knew.  LIke Mary at the tomb, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, this Jesus is both Jesus and not Jesus.

The disciple announces this to Peter, who was evidently not wearing clothes.  Peter puts on his clothes, and then flings himself into the water, yet another bizarre moment in a bizarre tale.  Maybe it was that he thought he’d walk on the water.  It’s hard to say, but it doesn’t bear any resemblance to any fishing trip I’ve ever taken.

Once the haul of fish is ashore, Jesus is there...apparently already with fish, and a fire going.  He invites them to breakfast, at which point none of the gathered can bring themselves to ask just who exactly he is, because he is Jesus, but simultaneously not Jesus.

There’s a peculiar resonance with this story, that of the King Incognito, one that plays out monthly in the life of our little community.     It’s the story of Martinus Turonensis, a third century Roman equestrian aristocrat.  Yes, that has something to do with Poolesville.  Give me a minute.

Martinus was the child of a Roman cavalry officer, who entered into the service of the Empire despite his fledgling Christian faith, one that was an offense to his father and family.  As the story goes, Martinus eventually gave up on the military life, renouncing all violence and setting aside the power and privilege of his office.

The transforming moment for Martinus came while he was out riding one winter’s day, in the full regalia and armor of a Roman horseman.  As he rode, he came across a beggar freezing by the side of the byway.  Suddenly overcome by compassion, Martinus drew his sword and cut his heavy winter riding cloak in half, keeping one half, and giving the other to the beggar to keep him warm.

That very night, as the story goes, Martinus saw a vision of Jesus wearing the cloak he’d given to the beggar, and realized that the beggar was, in fact, Jesus.

It was at that point that Martinus Turonensis, or Martin of Tours, was transformed.  That plays interestingly across the life of this community, where we regularly spend our time at a Catholic parish named after good brother Marty.   

I missed that Lord’s Table experience yesterday, as I realized halfway to Gaithersburg that I’d managed to take off with the set of keys to the van that my wife needed.  But as I was driving back mumbling grumpily to myself, I was reminded of how the story of our care and service to others meshes with the manifest reality of the Christian journey.

His story speaks to the core moral assumption of Christianity, that of our encounter with Jesus in every soul and every individual we meet.  It’s something of a baseline, as we deal with the peculiar mix of human beings in our lives.  The healthiest default for Christian ethical behavior, for our approach to every interpersonal interaction, is this: every single one of them is undercover Jesus.  Every last one.  

He’s disguised?  Sure.  We’re not quite certain.  Sometimes he’s very, very disguised.  But we should, with the disciples at that first prayer breakfast, be afraid to ask.

Hey, we should say to the anxious looking woman who just cut us off in traffic.  Are you by any chance Jesus?

Hey, we say to that co-worker who’s a serious pain in the behind.  Might you be Jesus?  When one friend shares a bit of particularly juicy gossip about a mutual acquaintance, we can nod and say, you know, they still are Jesus.

And sure, that reality is a peculiar thing.  But unlike most of the “realities” we create to distract ourselves from one another, when we let that shape us, it does some pretty amazing things.

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

Very Slightly Treasonous

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 4.03.2016

Scripture Lesson:  Acts 5:27-39

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

I’m a little bit suspect.

Maybe it’s in my blood, the inherent bias of my MacDougall-clan Scots heritage.  The MacDougalls, after all, were the ones who got so annoyed at their fellow Scots that they were happy to side with the English when things got ugly.  And a Scot who sides with the English is more than a little suspect.  Not, of course, that they were truly Scottish at all.  As the raven battleflag on the prows of my ancestral galleys indicated, that part of my blood was really actually Viking, the Norsemen who just decided that maybe they’d bail on Denmark and stick around in the highlands.

I’m a little bit suspect.

It goes beyond my not particularly caring about the Redskins, and my never having been to a Nationals game.  It goes beyond my complete indifference to the performance of the University of Virginia in March Madness.  I don’t even have a bracket.

I am, truth be told, kind of a little bit of a traitor.  I am, if I am honest with myself, perhaps not completely to be trusted.

I’m reminded of this even more as we go deep into the blathering obsessive relentlessness of a superheated political season, and as one politician after another declares their undying love of America.  How much do they love America?  They love it so much, more than anything.

Pronouncement of patriotism are made, and there are flags upon flags, as red, white and blue decor becomes the rule of the day.  And in the midst of all of this love of country competitiveness, I find myself doing a gut check, and finding that I probably don’t pass muster.

It’s not that I don’t find value in our constitutional republic.  Our system of government may seem flawed at time, but it is a more perfect union than I’ve encountered elsewhere.  I appreciate that I can write what I want, that I can say what I want, that I can travel where and when I am able.  I appreciate that we can gather here in worship without fear of oppression, and that Buddhists and Episcopalians and Mormons and Muslims and humanists and Raelians can all do the same.

I’ve been places in the world where that is not the case, and I am sincerely glad not to live in those places, and to live here instead.

But for all of that, I’m still not to be trusted.

And in that, the degree to which my identity is shaped by nation has some pretty clear boundaries.  

Because not only do I have no sense of allegiance to either political party, I also feel America is less important to me than Jesus, if I’m honest with myself.

This is faintly alarming.  I mean, think about it.  Here, a religious zealot with a beard who cares only about his faith.  Such people are dangerous, right?    But honestly, it’s true.  Jesus is more important.  If it came down to choosing, I’d go with Jesus.  That commitment has priority over pretty much every other one in my life.

Not institutions.  Not nations.  Not structures.  Just the life and teachings of Jesus, and the moral demands of that whole Easter story I seem to faintly recall hearing about recently.

That someone is Gamaliel, who appears at just the right moment in the story from the Book of Acts today.  Here we are, just a week out from Easter, and already the early church is in some significant trouble.   We hear that every single one of the apostles, meaning every leader of the fledgling Jesus movement, every one of them is gathered together and in the hands of the Sanhedrin.  

They are refusing, and have refused, to stop telling people about their Easter experience. Honestly, at this point in the story, it’s the Pentecost experience, too.  But that’s jumping ahead a little bit, and so let’s forget I said that.   When they’re point-blank ordered to cease and desist, their reply is simple:  “We must obey God rather than any human authority.”

This doesn’t go over well, particularly as many of the people they’re talking to are the Tzaddikim, the Saducees...meaning priests, whose entire career revolves around being the ones who have access to God.

As they’re actively defying the power of folks who have the power to kill them, things are looking pretty dire for Christianity.  It’s just one drone strike away from being completely expunged from world history.

As the gathered group of rabbis and priests gets worked up into a fury, one of them stands up and changes the course of history.  

It’s one of the rabbis, the Pharisee Gamaliel, the President of the Sanhedrin, one of the most respected rabbis of the first century, who is still remembered in the traditions of rabbinic Judaism today.

As Luke tells the story, Gamaliel finds himself holding the lives of all of the apostles in his hands. The crowd calls for their deaths. What does he do? If he lets things go as they're going, and doesn't intervene, all of the leaders of the early Jesus movement will die. Instead, he takes a stand and counsels tolerance, making a vigorous and persuasive case that they should be spared.

After citing some examples, he suggests that if God was not at work in them, then they would fail anyway, but if God is in them, then opposing them would be pointless. He sways the Sanhedrin, and instead of being killed, Peter and the apostles are just given a whuppin' and set free. So here we have a thoughtful, gracious, and tolerant rabbi saving Christianity.

Which, if he’d seen the history of the Crusades and the Inquisition and other places where people who claimed to be following Jesus didn’t exactly return the favor, he might have reconsidered.

Early Christianity found this a little confusing, particularly in light of theologies that assumed that Judaism lacked legitimacy as a faith tradition after Jesus.  There are stories, which are as reliable as the stories you might have seen on Facebook two days ago, of Gamaliel secretly converting the Christianity.  In Eastern Orthodoxy, he was made a saint.

But however you look at it, Gamaliel affirmed the perspective of those first apostles: he reminded the Sanhedrin that they must trust and prioritize God over all other interests.

That’s the mark of a faith that has the right to call itself faith.  A faith commitment must have primacy, must be the first and foremost among commitments.  That’s what makes morality moral, what allows it to establish life purpose.

That does have limits, sure.

If your faith is dark and misguided, and your God is your own power, declaring that the only thing that matters is God tends to make things look a whole bunch like Northern Iraq.

That is and has always been the danger of faith, that if misguided and misplaced, it blinds us to the reality of both the human beings and the creation around us.

But it is also the thing that gives form and shape to our other relationships.  It is what allows us to be gracious in loss.  It is what allows us to see past the anxieties and fears that can govern our careers and our relationships.  It is what turns our hearts from self-interest, from the yearning for war.

It is always, always, just a little subversive, a little unsettling of the orders of power and anger and fear.

It is, in it’s own way, the heart of our grounding, the foundation on which we can safely stand.

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