The Joys of Smugness

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 9.17.2017

Scripture Lesson: Romans 14:1-8

Apparently, I can be even more smug now.

The permission came via news of a recent study by Oxford University.   Not just any study.  An Oxford study, meaning it has it’s provenance in a University that will soon be celebrating its one thousandth anniversary.  This of itself seems grounds for smugness.  Oh, your town just turned one hundred and fifty?  How lovely!  I remember my alma maters one hundred and fiftieth.  It was eight hundred and fifty years ago.   

Hah.  Hah.  Hah.

I know my diet better for the environment, because that is precisely what the study at Oxford says.  A vegetarian diet uses less than half of the land, and produces half of the carbon emissions of a meat based diet.  If we were all vegetarian, it would save the planet, or so the headlines ran.  Seriously, how much more smugness potential could exist in a dietary form?

The study itself added significantly to my dietary smugness potential, for as a vegetarian, it is so very easy to feel the teensiest bit superior.  It’s been so long since I stopped eating meat that I’ve kind of forgotten when it was I stopped eating meat.  It was some time after I got married.  That, I remember.  So when anyone asks, I’ll say, well, I think it’s 18 years.  Sometimes I say 15 years.  Other times I say twenty.  

I know a diet of vegetables is healthier, because of course it is.  There is nothing healthier than being a vegetarian.  Now, one might say, oh, it’s too hard to be vegetarian.  What can you possibly eat?  Hah.  Hah, I say.  It’s easy to enjoy this healthful diet.  Take for example, pizza.  Pizza is vegetarian.  Pepperoni, not so much.  But pizza?  It’s fine.  Beer is also vegetarian.   As a pro tip, I will note that New York Super Fudge Chunk Chip ice cream is also vegetarian.  This remains true whether you eat but a spoonful or manage to down the whole pint. Whichever way, it’s vegetarian. See how easy it is?

And it’s so easy, so very easy these days to be vegetarian.  There are countless more things to eat, up to and including a nifty new veggie burger that supposedly tastes completely and exactly like meat.  More importantly, said veggie burger also smells like meat when you grill it, because the smell of meat on a grill on a perfect summer evening is just about the best smell on the planet.  Even after 18, 15, or twenty years of being vegetarian, I still salivate and mutter to myself “dear lord in Heaven, that smells good.”  What is this burger made of?  Well, a bunch of things, most notably a genetically modified yeast that has been tweaked by science to...for lack of a better way to describe it...bleed.  Actual blood.  Which is a little gross, but it apparently smells delicious when you eat it.

I know it’s kinder.  We get our meat from hideous factory farms, and even if we don’t, well, poor Bambi is still crying alone on the forest.  “What’s wrong,” says Thumper.  “Someone wasn’t a vegetarian,” says Bambi, at which point even more smugness occurs.

For all of this, it’s not that I’m lacking conviction that not eating meat is better.

Perhaps it’s because I have those three strikes against me that I find the Apostle Paul’s discussion of a form of early Christian vegetarianism so appropriate.  Here, though, what’s both strange and worth noting is that the smug folks weren’t the vegetarians.  They were the carnivores.  Paul, an omnivore himself, describes vegetable eaters as “weak,” which seems actually surprisingly smug and totally unfair, because, gosh darn it, I’m supposed to be the smug one.

The issue for early Christians who chose not to eat meat was not that they were concerned about lipids or carcinogens.  They weren’t worried about climate change.  Instead, the issue was consuming meat that had been sacrificed to idols.  This generally isn’t a concern when we stop by McDonalds or Red Robin or White Castle, but back in the first century, it was a thing.

Meat in the highly dynamic, pluralistic culture of the Greco-Roman world was often...well... “used meat.”    That meant that before it went for sale in the marketplace, the animal involved had been sacrificed at the altar of one of the almost countless gods of the ancient world.  While a small amount of the sacrifice would have been burned, most of the rest of an animal would have been either 1) consumed by the priests/priestesses of whatever god it was sacrificed to or 2) sold to the market as income for that particular temple.  

For some early Christians, this was a major issue.  They’d just converted to the movement that worshipped Yeshua Ben Yahweh, and they knew that they were supposed to only worship one God.   Having rejected all other gods, they were terrified that they might somehow be violating their relationship with Christ and their Creator if they had some BBQ ribs that had first been sacrificed to Ba’al.

Rome, standing as it did at the very heart of empire, was filled with temples and altars.  It was chock-full of ancient religions and mystery cults.  For some of the fledgling Christians in the town, there was very real fear that they might accidentally lose their Jesus connection if they ate pagan meat.

For those who were wiser and more well read, the whole idea was just absurd.  And it was to those others...and sharing their perspective...that Paul directed this section of his letter.  Paul, though a stranger to the Roman church, knew it by reputation.  It was comprised, or so we can assume from his writings to them, by the erudite...by philosophers, the wise, the aware, and those who were steeped in knowledge of how things really were.

Paul is not rejecting them.  In fact, Paul is showing that he believes exactly the same things.  For those whose grasp of the faith was strong, and who understand that from that strength they are free to eat and act and live in ways that stand beyond the grasp of others, Paul is clear: don’t be judgmental.

Remember, he softly chides, that there are things all of us disagree about.  Should we celebrate some of the sacred days of the Jewish tradition, or not?  Some think yes, and some think no, but what matters most is that we do what we do in a way that honors and respects those who do not share our position.

What he does not share is their willingness to condemn or mock those fledgling Christians who lack the depth of understanding that he shares.  He acknowledges that they are “weak,” sure.  But what he will not do is act and live in ways that subvert what faith the weak do have.  If you love others, you don’t live that way.  Possessing knowledge is not enough.  

The task of every Christian, even in disagreement, even when you know you’re right, even when your absolute correctness is utterly and empirically provable to any halfway sentient being, your task is to love and to build up.

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

The Unsettling New

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

03.12.2017; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  John 3:1-17

Y’all know I like new things.  

I like the latest and shiniest, the cutting edge, the most sparkling and exciting, the objects that most radiate that new car smell.  Particularly if they are actually a new car.  Every new technological gadget, packed with doodads and gizmos and gimcrackery?  They’re like catnip to the seven year old boy who still dwells within this much, much older body.

And so, as a lifelong player of video games, who earned his spurs playing Space Invaders and Pitfall on a well-used Atari 2600, I’d prepared myself to throw in with the latest innovation in gaming:  Virtual Reality.  I’d sampled the headsets, and marveled at how radically this new tech changed the experience of gaming.  No longer were you staring at a screen.  Instead, you were in the game, as a perfectly rendered three-dimensional virtual world took shape around you.  You could be actually in the cockpit of a starfighter, at the helm of a futuristic battle-tank, or in the driver’s seat of a Group B Rally car.  

You can say, I am Batman, and looking around at what appears to be Arkham Asylum, it will seem to be true.

I tried it, and it was amazing, and I was bedazzled and certain: this is the next wave.   This is unlike any other experience I’ve had before.  I blogged about it, and wrote an excited article about it for a radical Mennonite magazine in Manitoba.  Because what’s more new and cutting edge than writing an article about VR gaming for a radical Mennonite magazine in Manitoba?

For Christmakkah in my household, I was surely going to get myself a set of VR goggles and controllers for my Playstation, settling into my basement, ready to encounter a new era of gaming.

Only, well, when they came out, they were the new and the latest and the greatest, and were snapped up immediately. I'd missed my chance, and I didn’t feel like paying twice the price to an opportunistic gaming scalper.  So I waited.  This was a good thing.

Because reviews started coming in, and something peculiar began to surface, something I’d noticed when I played.  The sense of immersion is so real that your visual cortex and your inner ear are telling your brain two entirely different things.  You’re sitting on a comfy sofa, says your inner ear.  You’re performing a reverse Immelman in a P-38 Lightning, say your eyes.  These two things do not line up, and this does not end well.  This new reality makes you nauseous.  Meaning, actually nauseous.  In a recent review of DIRT, one of my favorite driving games, at the International Gamers Network site, six out of seven reviewers felt sick after playing for fifteen minutes.  If I want to feel carsick, I don’t need to spend five hundred dollars for the privilege.  

New things, really new things, can often feel just as unsettling.  They don’t jibe with what we know, and rattle our sense of self, and leave us feeling dizzy and off balance.

Like poor, struggling Nicodemus.

We read his story, and there’s a tendency to go clucking and shaking our heads at him.  You get to meet Jesus, we might say, and yet you still don’t get it?  How do you not get it?  He must be thickheaded.  He must be easily confused, as he fumbles and stumbles about trying to grasp the message of this strange man from Nazareth.

We listen to him as he struggles to find his footing, bobbing about like he’s lost his equilibrium.  C’mon, Nick.  Get it together.

But standing at our point of imagined comfort with the message of Jesus, we may not grasp how deeply unsettling this encounter is, this encounter with the new.

What Nicodemus is experiencing is existential nausea, the yawning chasm between what he knew to be true and a reality that jarred and twisted against what he was certain was real.

What he would have known was the fundamental goodness of his tradition, of an ancient covenant with God that went back

Like him, we so easily get confused around change.  What are the changes that matter?  What do they even look like?  How do we find our balance, that place where we still know who we are relative to a different way of being?

Nicodemus struggles with this, as the strange man he’d heard of demanded his attention.  He wants to talk with him, but can’t do so in public without destroying his reputation.

There, in the night, the discussion they have is a remarkably rich conversation, as the baffled Pharisee asks question after question of Jesus, and Jesus responds.  None of it makes sense to him, and yet it does, and yet it doesn’t.

How can you be born if you’ve already been born?  How is that even possible?  What does it mean that we should be born "from above," or born "from heaven."  And if we are to be "born of water and the Spirit,” what does that mean?  The words are familiar from the ritual and tradition of Judaism, but they seem to point to something else.   Jesus talks, and the more he talks, the more his furtive night visitor becomes even dizzier.  

These words conveyed in John’s Gospel have a specific theological meaning, one that resonates with all of Christ's other teachings about the change he is bringing us. The birth that Christ describes has to do with what is "above," which in the context of John's Gospel indicates a connection with something of God.  It is a reality that has not yet happened, a state of being that is not yet a part of the world we inhabit.  Yet it is a reality that has happened, that is happening, right now in the moment.

This should be existentially unsettling, if we’re listening to it carefully.  It is meant to sound simple, to be composed of simple words that seem to make sense but then also don’t.

That, I think, is the key to Nicodemus's struggle.  He is desperately trying to imagine the story as being a repetition, a reiteration of the things that he already knows.  Jesus, on the other hand, is trying to kick him loose from that understanding.  God’s spirit shakes us loose from those old patterns of being, it is...when we encounter it...genuinely unsettling.  

Being born from above means being born into a reality...a sense of your own self...that you have not yet inhabited.  You don’t yet know what that is.  You’ve not ever experienced it.

The challenge we face is that we expect...with Nicodemus...that we will be able to just truck along as we have before as we stand in encounter with the Gospel.  We do not bring with us the same set of expectations.  But we have our own traditions...our love of wealth, our infatuation with power, our idolizing of self-interest.  We have our own traditions...the deep old lie of race, the strange violence of nation...which are unsettled by Jesus just as surely as those of any Pharisee.

When we hear the message of Jesus, a grace that is deep and simple and confounding, it should have that effect...not physically, but on the whole of our self-understanding.  

Until that moment, we have not yet really begun to be born from above, from that reality that represents the Reign of God that Jesus calls us towards.

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

The Unit of Analysis

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 03.05.2017

Scripture Lesson:  Romans 5:12-19

Nothing makes life easier than categorical thinking.  It’s one of the things that human beings do well, and we do it almost without thinking.

These assumptions are based on a set of general sociocultural categories, which I use to interpret and make sense of the world around me.  We used to use them to quickly assess our world.  We understood that plants that looked a certain way were likely in an edible category.  This was useful.  Or, when encountering a strange animal for the first time, we could assess it relative to a prior knowledge base.  Large?  Check.  Forward facing eyes?  Clearly a hunter.  Large, sharp teeth and claws?  Definitely a hunter.  Moving slowly towards me in a coiled crouch like it’s ready to spring?  Perhaps it’s time to aaaaargh.

Categorical thinking can be helpful, because it lets you make quick survival decisions.

But it can also be problematic.  Because as we group other human beings into neatly definable categories, we stop seeing them as persons.  They become a proxy for another encounter, perhaps, a stand in for someone else we have known rather than someone completely unique.  Or they become representatives of a set, defined more by the features of that set than they are by their own characteristics as a person.  We encounter them, and what we see is not that person, but a set of characteristics that we believe tell us...already...everything we need to know.  

It is convenient, it is easy, but it is the heart of human bias.  Just because a person reminds us of someone else, or seems to bear the features of a particular subset of human being, that doesn’t mean that we are right in applying those labels to our view of that person.

Take, for example, an article in the most recent issue of the Harvard Business Review, which highlighted the work of a group of researchers considering how to eliminate subliminal racial bias among AirBnB hosts.  AirBnb is a recent business, in which individuals who own a home open it up to paying guests.  What’s been found is that there’s significant evidence of racial bias in whether or not a host chooses to accept a guest, as hosts use pictures and even the names of their guests to come to quick...and often racially biased...decisions about who to host.  

Researchers from Indiana University and Michigan University conducted a study in which those hosts were presented with a series of names, each of potential guests.  Some of those names were what the researchers considered “white,” and others “black.”  What they found was that bias was clear and present, with a twenty percent increase in the denial rate for “black” names, when the name was the only real indicator.  They also found that if there was more information...either a generic good review of a guest or a bad review of a guest...the bias disappeared.  Once a host saw that guest as more of an individual, as a person and not representative of a category, they acted on relevant rather than irrelevant data.  The study was both grim...in that it showed bigotry to still be a potent force in our culture...and hopeful, in that it showed that it can be wiped away once we view each person for who they actually are.

The unit of analysis, as we consider the moral integrity...the goodness...of the human beings we encounter, should be no more and no less than the reality of that person.  

We should not judge all people together, or based on assumptions that derive from a prior experience.  This, I think, we can all agree upon.

So from that shared assumption, what in the Sam Hill are we supposed to do with this little section in Romans?

Paul’s letter to the church at Rome is the high water mark of Paul’s theology.  It’s written to a church that he did not personally know, and so he...well...he’s showing off a little bit.  Bringing his A game, to demonstrate to a group of strangers that, yes, in fact, he did know what he was talking about.

It’s the scriptural equivalent of a job interview for that position that would totally be a step up, or that first date with a girl you’ve been crushing on for the last six months.  No pressure.  None.

What Paul produced in his letter to Rome has helped shape Christian theology for the last several thousand years, and much of that...like the idea that what matters is God’s grace, that we have no right to look down on others no matter how much it might make us feel righteous, or that the very heart of the Christian ethical path is love...is pretty easy to grok to.  But here, well, here in this passage I tend to wrestle a little bit, because Paul is at the point of presenting his assumption about the nature of human brokenness.

Why are human beings all unworthy?  Because of Adam.  Meaning, every single person, everywhere, is culpable for that one time when this one guy snuck some food God had asked him not to eat.  

To be honest, I’ve always wrestled with this as a point of theology, particularly if we understand sin…”Original sin”...as deriving from the single action of a single individual.  Meaning, as we read through this densely worded, circuitous bit of Greco-Roman rhetoric, that there is the assumption that every human person can be viewed through the lenses of a single act of disobedience.

How does that work, exactly?  It has always felt, if read a certain way, that there’s an unfairness to the assumption that every soul should be held accountable for the actions of a single other.  It feels, frankly, unfair.

My actions should have no impact on how you are judged.  Your actions, being your own, should not reflect on me, if I can have no influence over them.

Yet here we have what...on one reading...seems like a desperately unfair bias against individual persons, and it is persons...not categories, not groupings...that are the fundamental moral unit of analysis.   

When we read through the prophets, we hear that it is persons who are judged for what they do.  Speaking with the voice and authority of God, Ezekiel and Jeremiah essentially say, no, that way of thinking has nothing to do with the way God works.

When we hear the stories of the life of Jesus, we hear that he refused to let bias against persons take precedence over their response to his message.  It didn’t matter if you were a leper or a prostitute, a tax-collector or a Syrophonecian or an officer in the foreign army that was occupying Judah.  He treated everyone as a person, to be judged on their own merits.  The individual was the unit of analysis.

This seems in rather significant tension with Romans 5.   

How to resolve this?  Can it be resolved?  I tend to find my peace with the idea of the Fall by understanding Adam as signifying all of humankind.   Because the name adam, in Hebrew...which the Jewish Paul with his rabbinic training would have known...means “creature of earth.”   He is life, drawn from the dust and dirt and soil.   I view the story of the Fall as an archetypal expression of our universal human resistance to God's grace and our calling to care for one another, a reminder that we are both mortal and imperfect.  

This last Wednesday, we started our Lenten journey by reminding ourselves that we are all creatures of dust and ashes, that every human being is made of the stuff of earth, and to it we shall return.

That knowledge is meant to humble us, and to remind us to stand against the biases and bigotries that we use to divide ourselves from others.  That is the point of this season of discipline, the point of the path of Jesus.  Every soul we encounter stands on equal ground, and that...that is the reason we treat every person with honor and respect.

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

The Mountaintop

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 02.26.17

Scripture Lesson:  Exodus 24:12-18

Years ago, in the rolling green hill country of Wales, I went for a hike.  I was in seventh grade, out on a multi-day middle school field trip, and the country impossibly lush, and we were on a day hike.  Meaning, all day, from morning till the first dimming of dusk.  The goal...a craggy, rocky outcropping overlooking a valley, a valley that was striated with streams and fields, ponds and lakes.  

It took nearly four hours to reach the summit, as the little group of twelve and thirteen year olds splashed along muddy trails and clambered over rocks, following paths where we could find them.  We’d scraggle across fields, clambering over cattle gates and wandering through fields where the cows would eye the chattering, jabbering gaggle of loud young primates with faint suspicion.   It was probably our accents.  

It was exciting, and even though the 4G signal was terrible out there in the wilds, no one complained about it, it being 1981 and all.  

We did what you used to do, back when the netmind wasn’t constantly present.  We talked.  We laughed.  And we took it in, the day a misty cool mix of clouds, interspersed with occasional bursts of sun.  

As we came within five minutes of the summit, a thousand feet above the valley floor, there was a long way around and a short way.  The long way, a technical path.  The short way, a rocky cliff face covered in dense gorse and bracken.  I and a few others went the short way, clambering hand over hand, clinging to the growth on side of the face for the last twenty meters like fetal kangaroos wriggling upward towards their mother’s pouch.

“Don’t fall,” said one of our teachers, before looking away and continuing up the path.  It was 1981.  Things were different.

At the top of the crag, we could look out over the valley.  The sky had cleared, and the day was beautiful.  There, set out before us, our whole day’s hike, every path, every stream, every field and tree laid out like like a meticulously designed diorama.  It was the memory of the hike we had just taken, and a reminder of just how far we had to go, our whole day, laid out in a single vision.

It’s hard not to be drawn to high places, to those points where you can look out over the world and see it as it is.

It’s the appeal of the mountaintop, the grand vista, the vantage point where the muddle all around you fades away and the scope and scale of things becomes clear.  You’re on the top of the world, and below you, you can see the interconnection of things.

Those moments can change us.  Shift our vision.  

Here on this Transfiguration Sunday, we find ourselves on the mountaintop.  It’s the story of Exodus, and we are deep into the tale of the flight of the people of Israel from Egypt.   They’re out of slavery, and Pharaoh’s armies have done drownded in pursuit.  Into the wilderness they’ve gone, eating manna and quail, fighting off attackers.  It’s been a difficult journey.  So, of course, they’ve been complaining constantly, bickering and kvetching right up to the foot of Mount Sinai.

When we get to that mountain, the whole flow of the story changes.  It’s no longer just a journey through the wilderness.  it’s about the receiving of God’s instructions on how to live, both in the land of the promise and wherever the Jewish people might find themselves.  Moses heads up onto Mount Sinai, alone, where he encounters his Maker in a cloud of mystery.  

The Ten Commandments are received, and the covenant with Israel is sealed, a covenant that begins with the calling of Moses and that has its fruition up on the mountain top, right there on the cusp of earth and heaven.

It’s a straightforward set of principles that Moses brings back down with him, a set of instructions that tell us how to stand in relationship to our Creator, and how to stand in relationship with one another.  Or, as Jesus summarized them:  Love God with all your heart and mind and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself.

They’re not some lofty, distant abstraction, one that has nothing to do with the reality of existence.    Those commandments, affirmed in their intent by Jesus, give us that mountaintop view of our lives.

We need those high places, those spaces in our existence where we can look out across the span of our lives and get some sense of where we stand relative to the purpose God has for all of us.  

It’s the primary challenge we face as we move from day to day to day in our lives, as we check one expectation against the next, just happily bopping along until one day we bop right out of this mortal coil.

It’s so easy to be shortsighted, to look to this moment and not see where you have been and what tomorrow might bring.  It’s so easy to play small ball, to be so consumed by the demands of our anxious immediacy that we are constantly in a state of reaction to whatever it is we are encountering.

That has always been a challenge for humankind.  The challenges of day to day survival make it difficult to stop and take stock of where we stand.  If you’re struggling to make bricks for Pharaoh, it’s a little hard to take time off for a brickmaker’s sabbatical.

The demands of our net-age culture reinforce this.

If we never stop, never look out to see where we are and where we’re headed, never allowing ourselves to catch our breath and really grasp the why of what we’re doing.

That, in large part, is the reason for the season that begins this upcoming Wednesday.  We start the season of Lent, a time set aside as different, a mountaintop time when we can consider the paths of our lives against the paths of discipleship.

We can look down at that diorama, considering where we have been, and ask ourselves: is this the journey of faith?  Are we living by the standards of compassion and justice that Jesus places before us?

From that, our questioning needs to to stir us to action, action that we can reinforce in this season of discipleship.

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