Pastor David's Sermon Repositorium

The Present Form

2012-01-22T10:33:00.000-08:00

Poolesville Presbyterian Church
01.22.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: 1 Corinthians 7: 29-31

Over the past several years, one of the recurring threads of chatter

in the Williams family minivan on the way to swimming or tutoring or

music lessons has been about how human civilization will come to an

end. Apparently, it comes down to one of two options, and there is

some debate as to which one will win out in the end.

Option number one, of course, is the zombie apocalypse. This scenario

involves mindless animated undead roaming dead-eyed through

the land, oblivious to anything but the tasty, tasty brains of the few

living human beings still struggling to get by. Conversation around

this end-times option typically involves discussion of potential

causes and survival tactics, along with the recognition that given how

people drive in traffic around here, it may already be well under way.

Option number two is the robot uprising. The first sign of this event

will come when our Roomba retreats under the sofa and makes

growling noises, and will be finally confirmed when Siri 2.0 informs

us that she’ll be asking the questions now. While our planning for

the zombie apocalypse involves waiting it out in a hardened shelter,

the Williams family plan for surviving the robot uprising involves one

simple mantra: side with the robots.

Then there’s Option number three. That involves the arrival of the

K’tall harvester fleet in low earth orbit, and this one we prefer not

to talk about. Don’t want to start a panic, after all.

These are, of course, just the sort of silly conversations that one

has when one has kids, but I think there’s a certain fascination with

the end of things that draws our interest. That fascination goes

beyond the sturm und drang, thunder and lighting spectacle that we

envision going along with the end of things as we know them. Much of

what makes the whole end-of-things speculation so fascinating is a

subversive yearning in our day-to-day lives, a yearning that

says...what if everything changed? What if none of the things that

make up the familiar pattern of our existence counted for anything any

more?

While we rarely have these thoughts during the more joyous moments of

life, they are prone to surfacing when things seem particularly

meaningless. If we’re stuck in a long commute or in an endless

meeting that’s going nowhere, we wonder why things must be this way.

If we’re listening to a lecture on a subject that will have no

pertinence to our future, we wonder why things must be this way. If

we’re watching a national political debate that seems more about

posturing and psychodrama than it does about the actual issues facing

our nation, the yearning grows even stronger.

Why can’t things be different? Why can’t the world shake, and shift

the ground out from under us, and suddenly, everything become new?

The Apostle Paul saw the world that way. His view of things didn’t

involve aliens or robots or zombies, but for Paul, every action and

thought and moment was seen in the light of apocalypse. In each of

the seven letters that were undisputedly written by Paul in the New

Testament, Paul appears driven by a similar conviction...that the

world in its present form is passing away, and a new thing is being

unveiled. Apocalypse just means “unveiling,” after all.

If you stretch your mind way back to last week, you might recall that

the trading city of Corinth was renowned for being obsessed with

social status and roles within culture. That set of values worked its

way deeply into the church in Corinth, which meant that Paul spent a

great deal of time trying to get them to get past that dog-eat-dog

mentality. He struggled repeatedly to get them to grasp how deeply

the divisions and distinctions they used to categorize one another

meant nothing now that they had committed themselves to the teachings

of Jesus of Nazareth.

In chapter seven of first Corinthians, Paul dedicates most of the

chapter to explaining how Christian folk should live as they move

through their lives in the world. In particular, he talks to the

people of the Corinthian church about how men and women should live in

relationship to one another. This is where Paul gets into talking

about marriage, and commitments, and the dynamic between the genders.

It’s thoughtful, practical, textured-vegetable-protein-and-potatoes

stuff, right up until the passage I just read. Then, things change,

and what he has to say is a bit difficult for us to hear.

That tends to be the case with a most of what Paul says, actually, but

this little section is particularly challenging. It’s challenging

because while Paul describes marriage with a depth of grace and

understanding, we find him saying bizarre, awkward things like in

verse 29 “let those who have wives be as though they had none.” I

would make a joke about this being Newt Gingrich’s favorite passage of

scripture, but that would be overly political of me. Although if I

said it was also Bill Clinton’s, that might make it more non-partisan.

Best not to go there, I think. Whichever way, it’s an odd thing

to hear the Bible say about the covenant of marriage.

What Paul goes on to say is even harder to hear. Those who mourn

should be as they were not mourning? Those who rejoice, like they’re

not? How can you tell folks who are experiencing the extremes of

human emotion that they should live as if they weren’t experiencing

them? What could he possibly be getting at here?

For Paul, the reason the form of these things meant so little was that

because of Jesus, the world was in the process of being completely

changed. When Paul says in verse 31 that the present form of the

world is passing away, he uses the Greek word schema. That word,

which is the root for English words like “scheme” or “schematics,”

means structure or framework or order.

All those things that give structure to our existence...the

relationships, the work, the school, the kids, the stuff, all of

it...are viewed by Paul as subordinate at best, and distractions at

worst. For Paul, all of them are secondary to the transforming

message of the Nazarene.

Paul heard the words that came from the lips of Jesus in today’s

passage from Mark’s Gospel and took them seriously. When Jesus says

in Mark 1:15 that “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has

come near; repent, and believe in the good news,” Paul takes him at

his word. There is every evidence in the writings, theology, and

teachings of Paul that he sees the apocalyptic fulfillment of the

Kingdom Jesus proclaimed as being not just about to happen, but

actually in the process of happening.

According to the Nazarene and Paul, his most prolific disciple, the

present form was passing away.

Hearing this, we should struggle with it.

We struggle to see how we’re supposed to apply what Paul is telling

us. How are we to actually DO this? It’s a matter of priorities.

Our faith does not demand that we abandon the commitments we have

made. We can be, as Paul indicates, married, or working, or

experiencing the joys and sorrows of life. What Paul asks us to do,

though, is to give primacy to Jesus in defining how those things play

out. In the context of our relationships with others and the world,

we’re asked to live into those relationships in such a way that both

Jesus and the love of God are evident in our every action.

That manner of life is what Paul describes in verse 35 of chapter 7,

where the schema of this world is intentionally contrasted with the

euschemon...the “good scheme” or the “good order” of our relationship

with God. The good form of life requires that we be defined by a

radical love God and stranger, no matter what. Other relationships,

no matter how blessed or significant, cannot crowd that out. The

demands of work and business and the maintenance of our stuff cannot

crowd that out. If we weep, or are in the midst of celebration, that

can’t be crowded out.

That is the new form that is being unveiled. It still is. Let it be

so, for you and for me, AMEN.

Not It

2012-01-15T10:07:00.000-08:00

Poolesville Presbyterian Church
01.15.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: 1 Corinthians 6:12-20

In struggling through my reading and your hearing of today’s text, myfirst reaction to it is similar to one often encountered by parents ofyoung children as they negotiate the dynamics of our culture.

The family has gathered for restful togetherness on a Friday nightafter dinner, curled up with popcorn around the glow of lightedelectric diodes radiating from a big corner flat screen. The film forthe evening is one remembered from long ago, through the fondly hazyrecollection of many years. The earnest little faces of youryounglings beam at the screen as the movie begins, and for a while,all is well.

Then, about ten minutes in, there’s a tickle in your memory. Did Iwatch this in the theater? Or did I see an version edited fortelevis...

As that thought struggles to surface, you’re suddenly reminded,simultaneously, of two things. First, PG movies back in the 1980sdidn’t involve the same vocabulary that they do today, and second,your memory of the dialog in movies isn’t always quite as reliable asyou thought.

With that reminder, the parents in the room turnslightly white, and the little ones giggle, as one or more of them saywith barely constrained glee, “Oooooh! Daddy! THAT wasinappropriate!”

This is, of course, an entirely hypothetical situation. Ahem.

And Paul, well, Paul feels inappropriate today. Yes, it’s scripture,and yes, it’s part of the great sacred story of our tradition, but,really? Reading through this excerpt from 1 Corinthians 6 feels likethat moment after Thanksgiving Dinner when that relative who lovestelling off color jokes starts in on the one about the priest, therabbi, and the oh no, you’re not going to tell THAT joke, and you tryto shush him because UNCLE PAUL, there are CHILDREN in the ROOM, buthe Just. Won’t. Stop.

Again, this is entirely hypothetical.

So how to approach this one? What’s the appropriate illustration forsuch an awkwardly inappropriate passage? I mean, there are plentyof images out there for exploring the concepts the Apostle Paul wantsus to explore, but very few are what I’d describe as sanctuaryappropriate. Having been tagged by this passage in the cycle ofreadings, I really do want to cry out...NOT IT!

And so, instead, I’ll do what Presbyterian pastors generally do whenthey’re forced to deal with a problematic passage. Let’s take a lookat the history and the language a bit more closely, why don’t we?

Paul’s letters to the church at Corinth spring from his deep care forthis endlessly troubled community.Corinth was a centrally located trading hub in the Roman Empire, andwas legendary for it’s dog-eat-dog, do anything to get ahead,I’m-gonna-get-me-mine mentality. In part, this was because Corinthwas a city recently repopulated by Rome. Everyone there was new, andunlike the more rigidly structured hierarchy in more establishedcorners of the Empire, the residents of that city were able to riseand fall based on their skills, their abilities, or sheerself-centered ruthlessness.Proving yourself a winner and back-stabbing your way up the socialladder of prosperity was the Corinthian way.

It’s what Corinthiansdid, to the point that Roman historians and social commentators at thetime invariably mention what a heartless, hyper-competitive,uncharitable, and self-absorbed city Corinth was. Corinthians didnot need reality television. They were reality television.

As tends to be the case in such communities, there was a strongtendency to view other people as objects, as rungs in the socialladder, as convenient stepping stones and nothing more.This approach to other human beings was completely opposed to theethic of love that is at the center of Christ’s teachings. As theApostle Paul struggled to convey that really rather basic principle tothe Corinthians, one of the primary ways they struggled withfulfilling the requirements of the Christian life was through theiroften predatory approaches to one another.

For Paul, this manifested itself most intensely in the way that theCorinthians commonly approached the most intimate relationships intheir lives.In this passage, Paul is playing with Greek words in a way it’s a bithard for us to grasp in the English. The word that’s translated“prostitute” in verses 15 and 16 in the New Revised Standard version,and translated “harlot” in older English versions, that word is theGreek word porne. The word “fornication” in verses 13 and 18 isporneian, and has exactly the same root. The connection between thetwo, in Paul’s original language, goes deeper than we tend to hear inour own language.

In connecting forms of porneia, Paul is making apoint. If human intimacy was approached as a transaction, in which apartner was viewed as just an object to be purchased, then the newlife Paul taught as he spread the Gospel was threatened.For Paul, the purpose of Christian life was to be utterly personallytransformed by our connection to the love of God. Through ourconnection to that love, which Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 13 asthe single highest and most important gift shared by all Christians,we are also connected to one another in love, a love that defines ourethical interactions.

The Christian life, if it is to mean anything,demands that we recognize that we are woven up together by the love ofGod. None of us are objects. None of us are things.While this passage is typically viewed as just being about Christiansexual ethics, I think it’s important to realize that while Paul’spoint should be well taken in that realm of adult moral life, it goesfurther than that.

Paul gets so irritated at porneia because it is the form ofrelationship that is the complete opposite of selfless, compassionateagape love. That way of being in relationship is diametricallyopposed to our connection to one another in Christ. Porneia istransactional relationship. Porneia is objectified relationship, inwhich another human being becomes viewed as less than human. Inresponse to this, there are things we need to open our eyes to ifwe’re to live into being the transformed persons Christ intends us tobe.

First, we have to recognize porneia in culture. Our society, like thecommunity that formed in Corinth, is one that is unusually prone toobjectification and commodification. We are, after all, encouraged tothink of ourselves first and foremost as consumers. We are bombardedby images of product, and images of other human beings who existprimarily to provide us with products and services, or sell usproducts and services.We can easily stop treating them as human, worthy of love. Instead,they become inanimate means to the end of our profit or satisfaction.

Porneia is not just something that crawls and seethes in the darkerrecesses of the Internet. It is a state of mind that increasinglypermeates our society, one that needs to be resisted if we are toremain true to our calling to pursue Christ’s Kingdom grace.

Second, we need to recognize the impact of porneia in ourselves. AsPaul tells us in verse 18, porneia is not just a sin against anotherbeing. It is a sin against our own body. How so? Paul is oftenaccused, unfairly and inaccurately, of being one of those folks whodivide up the spiritual realm from the physical. But so much ofPaul’s teaching is about the transformation of our physical reality,as we shift ourselves into a life conformed to the grace of the spiritof the living God. The purpose of Christian faith is thetransformation of our lives, right here in this world. Our actions inthe now matter. The way we live and act here in the meat and andblood and bone of our being matters.When we live as if others are objects, things that can be purchased,used, and discarded, then we are living outside of the bounds of theKingdom of grace that Christ proclaimed.

Living that way effectsus. It changes us. Those who treat others as not a you, or a thou,but an “IT,” those souls are the ones that most quickly become an “IT”themselves. That relationship weaves its way into our being.

Don’t be “IT.” Let it not be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

Another Road

2012-01-08T10:45:00.000-08:00

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

01.08.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 2:1-12

This is a great week to be in the virtue industry. The moment that

ball drops in Times Square and the odometer rolls over on another year

of our lives, those of us who are in the business of being good are

briefly rolling in gravy.

Because out there in the world, people hope for a life that will be

different in the New Year. They’ve said that they’re finally going to

get around to doing the things that for some reason they just couldn’t

get around to doing in 2011. And so we realize that our midsections

are never going to get toned if we eat only Little Debbie Snack Cakes

for breakfast, second breakfast, lunch, high tea, and dinner, plus

that little sumthin’ sumthin’ right before bed ‘cause we’re feeling a

bit snackish.

We’re never going to feel physically well again if our only exposure

to aerobic activity is watching it on ESPN 5 for five hours straight

on a Sunday evening. Yes, we may be deeply vested in the life

changing banter we get from the beefy guys at the Sportcenter, and

eager to hear their analysis of the results of today’s Extreme

Downhill Waterpolo National Championships. But calories don’t burn

themselves vicariously, and coupling that with the Little Debbie Snack

Cakes really aren’t doing us any favors.

Now, in a brief moment of culturally-induced clarity, we’ve realized

we need to go down another road. The virtue industry knows this. And

so during this week after the new year, our media is always

supersaturated with marketing for diet plans and exercise machines and

gyms. The ads jabbering in the commercial lulls of the morning news

show my wife watches as she gets ready for work have changed.

During one single commercial break this week, I counted four ads for

diet plans. There was one in which substantially slimmer pop star

Jennifer Hudson warbled inspirationally as newly slender people smiled

in front of pictures of their former selves. What she was singing

sounded like Christian Contemporary Music, but given the focus of the

camera, I think the lyrics had something to do with her thighs. There

was another one in which a middle aged woman who had been surgically

altered to look like Marie Osmond circa 1977 spoke earnestly into the

camera in a room filled with pastel furniture and suffused with warm

light.

And in between those ads, there was another ad, in which young, fit,

and smiling people danced around and waved huge fistfuls of

multicolored Twizzlers at the the camera. Because after you’ve been

good, well, what harm could a one pound bag of Twizzlers do? The

problem, of course, is that if you are intending to make a lasting,

deep, and substantial change in your life, consumer culture cannot

help you.

Consumer culture exists to serve up the right now, the immediate, the

quick fix for four easy installments of $19.95. But it will not

change you, not permanently. It does not want you to change

permanently. It wants you back down that same path again next year,

credit card in hand.

Real transformation does not involve going back down that path. And

welcoming in real transformation is part of the purpose of the story

of Epiphany in the Gospel of Matthew today. Matthew’s Gospel is told

from a deeply Jewish perspective, and the story of the arrival of the

wise men from the East reflects a completely different tradition than

that of the one from Luke that we retell every Christmas. From that

perspective, what mattered was affirming how the birth of Christ

reflected an anticipated change in the order of power in the world.

To do this, Matthew relentlessly places the events in the life of

Jesus into the context of Torah and the writings of the prophets.

The arrival of the wise men from the East marked just such an

affirmation. It’s worth noting that these wise men were not kings in

their likely native lands of Persia or Babylon, despite what we’re

singing today. The word used for them in Matthew’s Gospel is magoi,

which can be rendered “wise men” but is more accurately rendered as

“astrologer.” The only other place in the New Testament where this

word is used is in Acts 13, verses six and eight, and there, it gets

translated as “sorcerer.”

As the story goes, when these three wizards in the Jerusalem court of

the Herodian dynasty, it causes a bit of panic. They’ve shown up to

honor the birth of a king, bringing gold from Griffindor, frankincense

from Hufflepuff, and myrrh from Ravenclaw. This meant trouble for

Herod.

The Herodian dynasty had been in power since the year 76 BCE. The

family business was being in power and holding on to power. Herod

Antipas, the tetrarch of Galilee and the province of Perea, had

learned all about the family business from his father, Herod the

Great. He’d watched his father’s unwaveringly obedient attitude

towards Rome. He’d seen the fortresses that his father had built

throughout the Judean countryside to insure obedience. He’d watched

his father execute not just those who opposed him from outside the

family, but also one of his own wives and three of his sons. Like his

half-brother Herod Philip, he kept power in the family by making a

point of marrying his own niece. Reading through the Herodian family

tree, the most natural response is “Ewwww.”

The grip that Herod and his literally incestuous kin had over Judah

was powerful, and any change meant a threat to that bitterly won

control. Yet the negative form of power that Herod embodied was to

be completely opposed by the child who had been born in Bethlehem.

Though the magi first travel to meet with Herod, and are affirmed in

their journey by the reflections of the priests, who recall the

teachings of Isaiah, what matters is that their destination is not the

seat of power, but a humble home far from the center of power.

The movement of these wise men towards Bethlehem was driven by their

ability to observe interpret the signs of transformation. Having

discovered the true nature of that change in Christ, they continued to

be open to signs of the direction they should follow. Instead of

being taken in by the hypocritical and self-serving power of Herod,

they listened to the more subtle warnings given in their dreams.

Having left corrupt power behind them, they did not return to it, but

chose another road.

In this season when we find ourselves more aware of the passing of

time and yearning for something new, to move past the powers of the

past that have kept us as broken as the Herodians kept Judah, there

are lessons worth learning from the wise actions of those magi.

Seek the True. There are countless stars that shine around us and

seek to guide us. Wealth and power, physical desire and endless

trivial distractions, all of these things shine as bright as the

fortresses and palaces and decadent indulgences of Herod. They draw

the attention of our eyes, and the hunger of our hearts.

But though we walk those centers of power daily, they cannot offer us

joy. They only offer more hunger, and more fear, and more grasping.

The bright light of grace and forgiveness offered by Christ is

something utterly different.

Be Attentive. Be attentive to that place where our loving and

infinitely-creative God is working to transform you. If you’re paying

attention to your own life, to the places where you’re living into

being the human being God made you to be, then you’ll be more likely

to be aware of those directions you need to travel to encounter real

and living change. Here, we all need to avoid our attentiveness

being clouded by either cynicism and complacency.

If we’re in a place of struggle or hardship, weighed down by broken

relationships or shattered hopes, it’s easy to give up on the

possibility of encountering deeper joy in life. Cynicism congeals

like a scab across our spiritual wounds, and we hide behind it and the

dark comfort of its hardness. From that place, you do not look, and

you do not seek, because you have given up. If you are not open to

the possibility of a gracious transformation that shines before you,

you’ll miss it.

If we’re in a place where we’re comfortable in our lives, we can

easily drift into a life where we do not grow. We simply move along

in a blind pattern, repeating the rote actions of our day-to-day, as

thoughtless as an ant following a pheromone trail. If you are not

attentive to the necessity for growth that comes with real life in

Christ, you’ll just roll on past it.

Be attentive, then. In order to change, we have to be oriented towards it.

Don’t Go Back. When you encounter that place of transformation, don’t

go back. Take another road. When you’ve encountered transforming

grace, be aware that those places of controlling power in your life

will want you to come back their way. Addictions and old resentments,

self-loathing and unresolved angers, these things can be eager to

recast control over your life. Those patterns of thinking cling as

ferociously and desperately to power as Herod. Don’t return along

that path, and allow the Herods of your own spirit to destroy the

possibility of the new. Let whatever new grace God has lead you to

encounter change the way of your walk.

This is easy to say, of course. But translating that intent into

lasting action, not falling back but moving forward, that’s not an

easy thing. Even the parts of our pasts we most despise are

ourselves, and dying to that self is not an easy thing. It is not

like a purchase. Unlike commodified change, change based on a

material transaction, it involves relationship. It is not done alone,

but by a self changed by faith in God and love for neighbor, drawing

support and strength and guidance from both.

Every moment God has given us offers that potential for change and

transformation. Be attentive for it, seek what is truly good, and

when you’ve found it, don’t go back down that old dark road.

In this New Year, let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

That First Christmas

2011-12-27T08:04:00.000-08:00

Poolesville Presbyterian Church
12.25.11; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Luke 2:1-20

Why did that passage sound so familiar?

It’s like...we heard it only yesterday...

The repetition and retelling of things is an important part of how we both identify ourselves and structure how we approach both our present and our future. We are storytelling creatures, our lives woven from a tapestry of tales that stretch back as far as our memory allows.My own memory can be a bit on the spotty side. I am not entirely sure, for example, what I had for breakfast one week ago today. The further back I go, the more scattered that remembrance becomes.

How far back do you recall? How many Christmases? As the years go on, going back to your first Christmas gets harder, as more and more memories get layered upon it. Rewinding back through the forty two Christmas mornings I’ve experienced, I think I can get back to one sometime in the early nineteen seventies. I was four, or maybe five, and living in East Africa. That memory is a fragmented thing now, cobbled together from textures and scents and still-frames, as frayed and well-worn as a Christmas tree decoration you made when you were a child.

I remember getting up early on that Christmas morning, before the sun rose. I can remember five year old me sneaking silent down the hall like a tiny footy-pajama ninja, to steal a look at the Christmas tree downstairs in the great room of our house in Nairobi. It was still there, sparkling with tinsel, its big fat hot incandescent colored lights off so as not to set the tree and the house on fire. Under it lay presents, not the vast impossible piles of today, but enough. After that peek, I can remember sitting in my room and waiting for my parents to awake, and inexplicably passing the time attempting to read an obscure Victorian novel called Tom Brown’s School Days.

I’m not entirely sure about the accuracy of that last memory.

Of that Christmas, I remember one gift, a large toy Jaguar. E-Type, I think. I can remember the smoothness of the plastic, hard and chitinous and light-beetley-green. It was battery-powered, and had lights that lit up. It would go forward, honking and flashing, until it crashed into an object. That object could be a wall, a door, or, ideally, my younger brother. It would then turn to the left, and, honking and flashing, continue on to it’s next destination. It honked and flashed pretty much continuously for half a day, before the six primitive C cell batteries that powered it punked out.

As I recall, that was the last time it worked, much to the great relief of my parents, who somehow managed to never quite get around to replacing those batteries.

At this time of year, those echoes of Christmases Past whisper like the first of Scrooge’s ghosts in our ears, padding around our subconscious in their footy pajamas, shaping and forming us as stories do.That is the purpose of story, after all. That’s the reason for the retelling of that very first Christmas story, spun to us year after year out of Luke’s Gospel.

In last week’s sermon, I talked a little bit about the purposes of Greco-Roman storytelling, about how rich it was with human detail. The reason to tell the stories that had come before was not just to absorb historical factoids so’s you could do well on standardized testing. It was to participate in those stories. They were meant to form and shape the reality of the listener, to draw them in to the telling.Luke does precisely that in his retelling of the story of how the birth of Jesus came about.

He begins before the beginning, spinning a story of an older couple who’d wanted to have a child but could not. His story of Zechariah and Elizabeth is full of the scent of incense in the temple, of human yearning and doubt, all suffused with joy and hope and promise.As Mary meets Elizabeth, the story tells of infants stirring joyfully in the womb, and as filled with song as an episode of Glee, as both Mary and then Zechariah burst into celebratory songs in response to the unexpected good news they’ve received.

And then, of course, there is the story we have just heard, again. It’s a tale of a long journey to Bethlehem. There’s an overbooked Bethlehem Ramada, a stable full of the stench and warmth of animals and birth, angels and shepherds and a new mother pondering what all this might mean.

Strikingly, what Luke’s narrative lacks is any fear, any sense of tension and dysfunction or sorrow. We don’t hear about Herod and his plans and plots. We don’t hear about wise men steering clear on their way out of town. We don’t hear about the fears of a young man whose fiance has conceived, a conception that could doom her to death or a lifetime of isolation. Matthew’s story gives us that. But this time of year, when the time comes for the telling, we tell Luke. And Luke’s story is relentlessly, defiantly joyous.

Those other realities may be there, but in choosing to emphasize the most gracious elements of the season, Luke is making an interpretive point. These stories are fundamentally about hope and joy, and their retelling should serve that purpose.We retell this story every year for a reason, the same reason we retell the history of our selves in our minds. The grace and the joy of this season is intended to define our lives together, and in doing so, define who we know ourselves to be. This sacred story is what some scholars of the sacred would describe as an anamnesis, the fancy-pantsy academic way of speaking of a remembering that defines the present. It is a narrative that has the power to transform, one that is both ours and greater than us.

As Professor Herbert Anderson and Father Edward Foley put it in their book Mighty Stories, Dangerous Rituals, taking these ancient stories as part of our own story is a “weaving together of the human and the divine,” which “enables us to hear own own stories retold with clarity and new possibility. And when our own stories are retold, our lives are transformed in the telling.” (p.7)Hearing this rich and glorious tale, we’re asked to see ourselves as participating in it, and that can require a little effort.

There may be other echoes in this season, other stories that are not so joyous. As we move through the years, those less joyful stories can also build up, and take on lives of their own. Just as stories of hope and promise work within us to define us, so too can stories of brokenness and sorrow and anger.

But the truth of it is that we can choose between them. Instead of becoming ensnared by those less-pleasant echoes, we can instead embrace that joy in the same way that Luke embraces that joy. Instead of letting them define us, we can let our lives tell another story, defined by joy.So here as we are gathered, hearing that story of the first Christmas again, let it sink in just a little bit. Let it define and sustain you. Let the message of birth and good news and new life be your story for this morning and this season.

Merry Christmas! Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

In The Fields

2011-12-24T18:52:00.000-08:00

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

12.24.11; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Luke 2:1-20

We’re just about through Christmas party time. Or, perhaps, “Holiday Party time.” Or ChristmaKwanzakah party time. It’s so hard to tell these days.

If you’re just one of the masses, one of the regular folk, then your parties are friends and family and co-workers. You get together, you sing songs, you decorate trees, and you share in the warmth of the season. There’s the social warmth of each other’s fellowship, and better yet, the insulating warmth of all those additional fat cells that we get from endless bouts of eggnog and hot chocolate and fruitcake. It’s cheaper than buying a new coat, or so I tell myself. Given that the smart way to keep warm in winter is wearing layers, I figure it shouldn’t matter if some of those layers just happen to be under the surface of my skin.

But for those who follow the society pages, the professional party people, the friends and family festivities of the common folks are not enough. In a town where influence is everything, and connections often trump competence, you are only as important as the people who populate your smartphone contact list. Getting those people to show up to your parties is a competitive contact sport, one that shows your place in the status race.

If you don’t have an ambassador or someone from a consulate at your party, you’re just not important. If you don’t have someone from the city council at your party, you’re just not important. If you don’t have the Assistant Deputy Undersecretary of the Department of Cheesedoodle Assessment at your party, you’re just not important.

If powerful people arrive at your doorstep, take a half-sip of eggnog, and then scurry off thirteen minutes and twelve seconds later to the next of the sixteen parties they’re going to that evening, then it’s a sign of your influence and your connections. I mean, golly, what’s the point of a party if you can’t name-drop afterwards?

Our familiar reading from the story of Luke this evening begins with a little bit of name-dropping. As the story of the birth of Christ begins, we hear a litany of the most influential muckity-mucks in the ancient world.

Luke drops the name of the Roman governor of the province of Syria, Publius Sulpicius Quirinius. He was a well connected but profoundly unpopular Roman politician, and not just because his name made him sound like a particularly obnoxious Slytherin. He was one of those “connected people,” someone in the inner circle of power who had the favor of the Imperial Family. He was elected consul in Rome in the year 12 BCE, which was the highest elective office in the Empire. He was given the office of governor of Syria as a reward for being so reliably supportive of the Emperor. He was generally disliked by the people, as his marriage to a well known Roman socialite very publicly ended in a series of lawsuits in which he accused her of poisoning him. If there’d been a “Real Housewives of the Province of Judea” back then, he’d have been on it. Whichever way, he was famous and powerful.

We hear about Caesar Augustus, whose reign over Rome made him arguably the most influential and powerful of the Roman Emperors.

Truth be told, he’s the guy who built the Roman Empire. This was a guy with clout. He wasn’t just called Caesar Augustus, after all. He had title after title after title. He was the Pontifex Maximus, the high priest of Rome. He was the Pater Patrie, the father of his country. He was the Princeps, the citizen above all other citizens. He had the resume of all resumes, and was the ne plus ultra of potential party guests.

But neither of these two gets an invite to the party. He’s just mentioned for the same reason that Quirinius is mentioned. Luke, being the good historian that he was, needed to tell us roughly when this whole thing happened. He’s just saying: Remember when that guy was around? And that other guy? Well, while you were paying attention to them, something really important happened then that you might have missed.

So who is important to Luke as he tells this story? Who are the ones worthy to receive the news about the Christ child? Are they the leaders and the ruling class of society? No. Are they the religious leaders, the rabbis and the priests and the desert ascetics? Nope. It’s the shepherds.

Now for us, shepherds might seem like honest, down to earth folk. We conjure up images from Christmas pageants past, of kids in repurposed bathrobes, of bucolic rolling fields speckled with fluffy sheeplings. But in the ancient world, shepherds weren’t considered worth bothering with. They were the dregs of the dregs, inhabiting the lowest possible rung on the first century social ladder.

They were lower than telemarketers. Lower than spammers. They were at about the same level as lobbyists, only they smelled slightly more like sheep. Slightly.

Yet according to Luke, when the skies over Nazareth lit up like a Spielberg Special Effects Spectacular, who got to see it? Shepherds. When an invitation was extended to visit the bedside of the Christ Child, who got invited to be there? Shepherds.

By sending this message to the ones gathered in the fields, God shows us who is invited, and who is valued.

In verse 14, the traditional and beautiful King James Version has the angels proclaiming: “Glory to God in the Highest, and on earth peace, goodwill towards men.” But if you go back and read what was originally written in Luke, the last part of that beautiful passage is more accurately translated as on earth “peace to those he favors.” This is a proclamation of peace and joy for those in whom--here’s another way to say it---”for those in whom God delights.”

So who are those people? In whom does God delight? Not the ones with social influence or power. Credentials, titles, and any other form of earthly status mean nothing to God. God leaves the places of power, and goes out into the fields to find those for whom Jesus is actually good news. They are the lowly. The poor. The weak. The meek.

Christ is there, a gift and a promise, waiting for those who are rejected, who are broken, who are lost. Christ is there, a gift for those who find themselves outside of the circles of power, out beyond, out in the fields.

To those fields, the invitation has been sent. The party has been prepared. It’s a humble little gathering, to which we are all invited.

Let’s accept that with rejoicing. Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

Mechanics

2011-12-18T09:48:00.000-08:00

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

12.18.11; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Luke 1:26-38

There are certain things that I just don’t totally understand.

This is a hard thing for a man to admit. We males are absolutely marvelous at speaking as if we completely and totally understand everything around us, even if we don’t have a clue what we’re talking about. There are several handy techniques we use to do this.

There’s the Self Confidence technique. If you’re utterly self-confident, then you can look at your wife’s dying laptop and, after staring at that error code, you scratch your chin and nod serenely. Then, say something like “I’m pretty sure the problem is the carburetor.”

Then there’s the Jargon Shotgun technique. Here, the male of the species just strings together a few randomly assorted technical-sounding words they know about something and fire away. “It may be that the level 4 DDRAM flash cache interface with the flux capacitor has become corrupted.” Here, it helps to remember which words you got while reading a Best Buy ad, and which words came from the movie Back to the Future. She did watch that movie with you, you know.

Then again, after a while folks do catch on, so if there’s something you don’t totally grasp, it’s better to admit it. There are plenty of things like that. Occasionally, there are things that we won’t get...and that we’ll particularly not get if we’re focused on figuring out exactly how they happen.

Take falling in love, for instance. If you approach love in terms of neurophysiology, you might assume that you know what love is. If you study the reaction of the human brain to love, neural imaging reveals that when an individual is shown an image of the one they love, there is unusual activity in the right caudate nucleus and right ventral tegmental area. These brain locations produce large amounts of dopamine when active, which generates a range of somatic effects.

But if you think that is the best way to explain what love is, then you’re not getting it.

Then there’s the approach that developmental psychologists take in assessing the smiles of babies. Extensive analyses of the role of the smile as a social signal in pre-verbal infants do often indicate the varying roles that differing physiological affects play in establishing the dynamics of interpersonal connection. But if you use sentences like that last one in describing the tiny little person that just cooed sparklingly at you, then you’re missing something.

There are some things that we just can’t quite get, and the harder we grasp, the less sense they’ll make to us.

The story from today’s passage in Luke’s Gospel can be a perplexing one. It’s part of Luke’s prolonged narrative of the birth and childhood of Jesus, which is unique to this story of Jesus. Unlike Mark’s Gospel, which dispenses with anything prior to the adulthood of Jesus, and John’s Gospel, which begins with the beginning of all things, Luke gives us lengthy and detailed personal accounts of significant events in the early life of Jesus.

Luke’s Gospel was, after all, crafted as a history, and history in the ancient world was not dry and mechanical. It was, first and foremost, story. It was retelling for the purposes of understanding, but also for deepening a sense of connection with the story being told. Greco Roman histories were rich with personal details and narrative flourishes.

The story we’re connecting with is that of Mary, and the arrival of the angel Gabriel, who announces to her that she will bear a child, a son. He will be Son of the Most High. He will rest on the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob, and his kingdom there will be no end.

Mary doesn’t really get past that first part. I’m going to have a WHAT? She is, as the New Revised Standard Version puts it, “perplexed.” How can this possibly be the case? Her response to the angel, as recorded in Luke’s Greek, sounds like this: Puus estai touto, epei andra ou ginuuskuu. Translated literally, that comes out as, “How will be this, since a man I know not?”

That makes Mary sound a bit like Yoda, but I won’t attempt the voice.

The mechanics of this announcement, as she understands it, are impossible. Even though Family Life Education in the Galilee County Public Schools was probably not all that detailed, she still struggled with how such a thing could be so. It flew in the face of her understanding of the world.

As, I think, it does for many who hear the story of the Annunciation today. We know a great deal about the mechanics of human reproduction, far more than our ancient forebears. We grasp the way in which the genetic material of two parents recombines to form a new and remarkably unique person. We’ve gone deep into the wondrously created complexity of DNA, and the ways in which the twenty-three pairs of human chromosomes function.

From that understanding, it’s easy to become entangled in the mechanics of the story. Is Mary’s DNA suddenly recombining with Divine DNA? Is there a Y Chromosome in the Divine DNA? We want to get into the process. We want to understand the mechanism. And if we take that path as our primary way of getting what is being talked about here, we find ourselves unable to enter the story, unable to process it, unable to enter into it. If mechanics are the mechanism by which engage with the story Luke tells us, then we’re not going to be able to rejoice in it.

The underlying purpose of the story we’re hearing is to establish that the new life that arises in Mary’s womb is, through some impossible happenstance, a life set aside for significance. It is to be a holy life, one defined by a fundamental relationship to the Holy Spirit and the Creator of all things, one marked by the power to change and transform both people and nations. It is a life that is filled with God’s creative intent to change things, for any willing to pay attention and listen.

Even that statement is a challenge. How can it be that this child, born in a backwater province of a long dead empire, can be of any relevance to the world? This child, born under uncertain circumstances, to a powerless and un-noteworthy family, who had neither status nor wealth nor fame. How can this life, this single life, be of any significance to the direction and purpose of humanity?

And yet, here we are. Two millennia later, across oceans unknown, in a nation that had not yet come to be in Mary’s time, in a language that didn’t even exist in Mary’s time, telling the story of deep hope and promise we find in that child.

Had the angel told Mary about today, right now, us here, I think she’d have been equally “perplexed.” As should we be.

There are certain things that are impossible to understand. They tend to be the most important things, the things that we do not grasp, but that fill and transform us. Perplexed though she was, Mary’s answer was to present herself, and to be present in that story. “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your Word.”

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

Good News

2011-12-11T10:02:00.001-08:00

Sermon Title: Good News
Poolesville Presbyterian Church
12.11.11; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11

It’s always good to be bit wary about things that seem to be good news.

When you get that eager call from someone representing a lottery that you didn’t enter, that may not be good news. When that email announces to you that you’ve won a brand new iPad 2, yours the moment you go to the claims website and enter your mailing address, full name, mother’s maiden name, and the last nine digits of your social security number, that may not be good news.

Unless you do it, in which case it’s probably good news for someone who isn’t you.

Because sometimes, the thing that purports to be something wonderful is, in fact, not quite what it seems to be.

Do that mental rewind, for instance, to conversations people were having about home prices six or seven years ago. I can recall, myself, listening to folks at social gatherings talking excitedly back in 2004 and 2005 about just how much equity they were building in their home. I can recall, myself, as the market value of our own home soared, ten, twenty, fifty, ninety percent. I can also remember thinking at the time that every uptick in the market meant that houses were that much farther out of reach from families like our own. It was good news for us, sure. But with salaries stagnant, it wasn’t so good for anyone who didn’t yet own a home. It still isn’t good news.

Then there’s the whole excitement we hear in the voices of business newscasters if the Dow Jones Industrial Average goes up on any given day. If the Dow rises, everything is awesome! Here, I’m a bit uncertain. If the Dow rises, what does that mean? It means that the average cost to buy stock in 30 major corporations has gone up. That’s pretty much it. So if the Dow goes up 3% in a day, that’s great news. If the average price of a gallon of gas goes up 3% in a day, would that also be good news? And those Dow points really just measure the cost of a stock in United States dollars, and the value of the dollar is as much a constant in the same way that Oprah Winfrey’s weight is a constant. It goes down. It goes up. Meaning if you do something like print several trillion more dollars into the economy as part of a stimulus package, stock prices will automatically go up, as will the price of everything else.

It would be tempting not to think so much sometimes, I guess. But if you’re going to know the difference between what is good for those in need, and what is only good for those who have power, well, then you do have to pay attention to those things.

From the Book of Isaiah today we hear a message about good news, news that is actually good. As I mentioned in last week’s sermon, there was more than just one writer of Isaiah. Most Bible scholars worth their salt see the Book of Isaiah divided up into three clear sections, each of which has its own particular focus. Last week we heard about sections one and two.

Today’s section comes from what is known as Third Isaiah, which was written and preached perhaps 510-515 years before Christ by a prophet who followed the tradition of Isaiah. Unlike First 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. Unlike Second Isaiah, they do not assume that the Jewish people are shattered in the Babylonian exile, like chapters forty through fifty-five. The context of the last ten chapters is clear: the Hebrew people are back in their land. Yay! Good news, right?

They’d been given the opportunity to rebuild is their whole culture, after it was almost wiped from the face of the earth in by Babylonian Empire. After Babylon was defeated by Persia, the Hebrew people were encouraged by Cyrus of Persia to return to their ancestral lands. They were filled with hope at the prospect of return. All they’d have to do is set up shop again, and all would be well.

The people returned thinking that things were going to be easy, and things were the farthest thing from easy. Life upon their return was hardscrabble, a struggle from day to day. The bricks that had been smashed from the walls of Jerusalem did not leap up on their own and autonomously reassemble themselves into Zion Gardens Condos and Suites.

It was hard. It seemed hopeless. People began to despair. Worse yet, they began to prey upon one another. Those who fell out on the margins of the society...the poor, the foreign, the different, well...things did not go so well for them.

But the word from God that Isaiah proclaimed defied that despair, and challenged that oppression. It was a word of intense 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 work through his people to bring about restoration.

For the oppressed and the brokenhearted who had returned to the land, the prophet did not say everything was cheery. He affirmed the devastation that they were experiencing and the ruins in which they found themselves. Yet in the face of their suffering...and in some way because of their suffering...the prophet declares that God’s love for justice and covenant presence will make his people an instrument with which he will rebuild the brokenness of their land.

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 right now, as many of us look fearfully out at the continuing chaos and confusion of our economy.

The great wave of bank failures may have ended, but we hardly live in stable or certain times. Families are still struggling with foreclosure and job loss, and retirees are still reading their investment reports and bank statements with trembling hands, it is easy for us to fall into the same kind of despair that seems to have afflicted those Hebrews upon their return. With the media humming with hysteria, it’s easy to give in. We feel an uncertainty that can paralyze us, allowing us to turn from the task of rebuilding. We become overwhelmed. We hunker down.

In his reaffirmation of God’s essential justice and care for his people, the prophet is telling those who despaired that no matter what happens, God will show grace to a covenant people. If we’re willing to accept that grace, and to practice it, those places of ruin will be rebuilt.

This is an important message, right here in Advent. Why in Advent? Well, because if Advent means arriving, or beginning, then it’s worth noting that this text has an important place in setting out the purpose of Jesus. That place can be found in Luke’s Gospel, in chapter 4, verses 16 through 19, where Jesus begins the teaching phase of his time among us by sitting down in the synagogue and reading from this exact passage in Isaiah.

Through the prophet, and through the one whose arrival establishes the purpose for our celebration of this season, we are reminded that the purpose of our faith is to provide that assurance of God’s intent to bring about news that is actually, truly, and completely good for those who are most in need of it.

Meaning, if we’re bearing glad tidings of great joy, we need to remember first and foremost those who are in need of such tidings. If we are in such a place, because of brokenness of body and spirit, or of relationship, or of health, or of finance, we need to hear this simple assertion: the One who created the Universe is there for us. The intent for everything that is is justice, and it will come, as surely as spring follows winter.

If we find ourself in that place in life where we can speak or act to bring about healing, or peace, or joy, then need to hear this as our call. Like Isaiah, we are called to press through the stress and selfishness of the season. As we give, we can remember to extend that giving to those who have deep need. As we act, we can take moments out of our lives to be a presence, offering a hand up to those for whom this season is a time of trial.

If the Spirit of the Lord is upon us, as surely it must be in this season, that that is the Good News we’ve been called to hear, and sent to share.

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

The Leveling

2011-12-04T09:33:00.001-08:00

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

12.04.11; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lessons: Isaiah 40:1-11; (Mark 1:1-8)

Over the past few months, I’ve been exploring the hills and the valleys of the Occupy DC and Occupy K Street movements.

I’ve read articles about their demonstrations in both print and online media. I’ve wandered through their encampments. I’ve followed them on Twitter. It’s hard not to be sympathetic to their cause, to their idealism, to their yearning for justice in all things. They want equality in society, and for our culture to cast aside the radical polarization of wealth that is threatening the integrity of our republic. But I’ve not gotten involved, not really, for a variety of reasons.

First off, while I’m not a fan of injustice, I don’t really like cold-weather camping, particularly if given the option of either a) sleeping out on hard frost-bitten ground or b) curling up in my own cozy bed under several layers of down and flannel.

Mmmm. Flannel. I will always err on the side of flannel. I get that from the hobbit side of my family, I guess.

Second, I’m not sure I could handle the odd bureaucracy. Whenever you get a bunch of anarchists and leftists together, the first thing they do is create the most impossibly well-meaning and convoluted ways to make decisions. Back in October, when I visited their camp, I observed their decision-making in action. A group of earnest people dressed like extras in Les Mis sat in a circle, talking intently amongst themselves. To express their approval or disapproval of a particular idea, they would either do jazz hands up for yes, or jazz hands down for no.

I’m reasonably sure that wasn’t how the organizers of the Montgomery Bus Boycott or the First Continental Congress got things done. I just don’t know about a revolution that involves jazz hands.

Third, I have the unfortunate tendency to remember history. Movements calling for more equity and the righting of economic imbalance have risen up throughout the story of humankind. This week, I read the jazz-hands-approved manifesto of Occupy DC, which calls for an end to all self-serving, exploitative, and oppressive systems. Then, I read another manifesto. You can never read enough manifestos. This was one I remembered from my graduate education, a little something subtly entitled An Arrow Against Tyranny.

This second one dates back from England in 1646, and was written by a man by the name of Richard Overton. He was part of a leaderless movement called “The Levelers.” Anyone remember this little movement from history class? They got their name because they’d tear down the fences that kept peasants out of the fields of the wealthy and powerful landholders. The movement was concerned with equity and justice, demanding that all men...and it was men back then...be treated equally. It’s interesting stuff, because some of the language lays the foundation for our own nations’ founding documents. Listen, for example, to this quote from Overton:

No man has power over my rights and liberties, and I over no man's. [...] For by natural birth all men are equally and alike born to like propriety, liberty and freedom; and as we are delivered of God by the hand of nature into this world, every one with a natural, innate freedom and propriety — as it were writ in the table of every man's heart, never to be obliterated — even so are we to live, everyone equally and alike to enjoy his birthright and privilege; even all whereof God by nature has made him free.

Sentences were longer back then. Despite the centuries separating them, the similarity between the Levelers and Occupy is clear. Then again, later in the essay Overton spends a bunch of time demanding the overthrow of what he calls, and I quote, the “...barbarous, inhuman, blood-thirsty desires and endeavors of the Presbyterian clergy.”

I don’t like that part very much.

The yearning for things to be made right and returned to balance is a powerful one, whether it’s right now, four hundred years ago, or twenty-five hundred years ago. It was without question the point of the message conveyed in the section from the book of the prophet Isaiah that you heard this morning, a section echoed in the reading from Mark’s Gospel.

This portion of Isaiah is the very beginning of what is often called “Second Isaiah,” meaning that it was most likely not written by the same individual who composed chapters 1 through 39 of the Book of Isaiah. It was, most likely, written by a disciple of Isaiah, one who fully understood the essence of his teachings, and was equally connected to the One who spoke through them both.

That first section describes and relates to the kingdom of Judah in the eighth century before Christ. It is full of challenge, challenge directed particularly against the wealthy and powerful in Jerusalem. This section, on the other hand, speaks to a completely different context. Running from chapter 40 through to chapter 55, it is primarily about reconciliation, grace, and restoration, and appears to be speaking to an Israelite audience living in Babylonian exile nearly two hundred years later.

This was a people who had been utterly shattered. Unlike the proud and the powerful who lived in Jerusalem and gathered in the wealth of the nation, this was a people who had been torn from their land and forced into slavery. They had watched as their holy city had been destroyed. They had watched as their temple, the holiest of holies, the place where they communed with God on earth, they had watched as it had been razed and looted. Everything they were as a people had been taken. They were nothing. They were deep, deep, deep into that valley of loss and sorrow.

At this point, the One who spoke through the prophet no longer spoke words of judgment. Where the first thirty nine chapters speak in some pretty harsh language, what we hear beginning in chapter 40 is God’s commitment to restoration and reconciliation. In the face of the suffering experienced by the people, the words that the prophet had to share with them were not rebuke, not condemnation, not mocking and rejection. Instead, the message of God to them was one of comfort and hope.

The reminder to this shattered people was that the suffering of the now was as impermanent as the grass and the flower of the field. More importantly, the prophet announces a time of transformation and restoration. In verses three through five, the people who have wandered in a wilderness of loss and sorrow are assured that the desolation they are feeling will not be permanent.

The rough times, those deep and impassable valleys, those imposing, unclimbable mountains, they’ll be leveled out. That wilderness will be overcome. In its place, we hear that a way will be prepared for the justice, glory, and comfort of the Creator.

It was, in that time, a word of truthful encouragement that the enslaved people of Judah desperately needed to hear. In our own time, in this Advent time, it’s a word that we equally need to hear.

These weeks prior to Christmas are, after all, that point in the year when we should be making the effort to make the way straight for our Creator.

Within culture, that means actually paying attention to the ways that our society casts up impediments to the reconciling mercy and comfort of our Maker. In this season of preparation, it’s important not to allow cynicism about the sputtering struggle for justice throughout history to keep us from being aware of our Maker’s intent for us. Though we’ve made rough going of the story of ourselves as a species, casting up soaring heights of avarice and power, and doubly deep valleys of need and oppression, we’re reminded that this is not our purpose. We’re called to act, recognizing that though perfect balance just isn't possible, giving in to cynicism is doubly unacceptable

That’s going to mean making space in our lives to work directly against the oppression that comes from hunger and want, and making space in our identity as citizens of a democracy to speak...and vote...in ways that reflect our commitment to being a nation in balance. Ours is a nation founded on ideals, ideals that at one time seemed as pie-in-the-sky as those offered up by Occupy or the Levelers. If we are to be the just and gracious nation we were intended to be, then we need to live into that ideal.

Individually, that means reinforcing those places within ourselves the help us be about the work of Christ’s love and justice. Our psyches are, if we’re honest with ourselves, all too frequently rough and ragged wildernesses. Though that bright and gracious way exists within each of us, we often do not make ourselves that level way. We let ourselves live in deep valleys of depression, anxiety, and self-recrimination. We cast up great mountains of anger and pride.

In this advent time, work to find that gracious level place that has been placed within all of us. There is that path within us, no matter where we find ourselves in our journey through this life.

Prepare it. Make it straight.

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

Staying Awake

2011-11-27T10:26:00.001-08:00

Poolesville Presbyerian Church

11.27.11; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Mark 13:24-37

Over the last week, I've been seriously slacking off. I have, despite the whole world's efforts to the contrary, managed to totally neglect my duties as an American shopper.

For the past several weeks, the busy busy people of America’s marketing and advertising industries have been spooling up for the most important shopping day of the year. Every retailer we’ve ever done business with has been filling our email inbox with excited announcements, and our snail-mail box is a cascading cornucopia of catalogs. Banner ads are splashed across every web page. Our newspaper arrived on Wednesday bearing an advertising supplement insert that weighed more than most butterball turkeys. Employees of retail outlets across the region are putting in long, long hours, working through the small hours of the morning.

And even in the face of all that herculean effort, I just can’t seem to get myself motivated. I can’t seem to managed to get out there and shop during this long four-day vacation, which business media outlet CNBC described as “Black Friday Weekend.” That’s what this is, right? “Black Friday Weekend?”

Instead of camping outside of Best Buy in the hopes of getting a half-price flat-panel TV, I spent Thursday afternoon eating tofurkey and stuffing and gravy in a room full of family. Instead of being encouraged to line up under the illuminated Toys R Us sign for a super, super deal on the latest Call of Duty game, my children were preparing music and impromptu comedy routines to entertain the adults. Instead of rushing out from the family gathering to hit the anchor stores at Tysons, my family went home and curled up on the sofa and watched a movie. A Norwegian movie, with subtitles, a clear sign that our credentials as American consumers are deeply in question.

When we’re called up before the Committee on UnAmerican Consumer Activities, that’s the question that’s going to get us in trouble. “Are you now, or have you ever been, a watcher of Norwegian films with subtitles?” Couple that with the tofurkey, and I could be in some serious trouble.

And then we went to sleep, while the lines snaking around the stores hadn’t even been let in yet.

Oh, there was a chance to redeem myself on Black Friday, that day of all shopping days. It was a banner day, by all reports, fully six point six percent better than last year. I don't know if that does the next decimal place to six point six six, but if it does, that opens a can of worms we just don't want to mess with this morning.

I could have gotten up early. I could have rushed out to hit the second wave. But no. I was too lazy. Too self-indulgent. Instead, I woke up at about seven-thirty. I walked the dog. I had some coffee. I read the paper, the whole paper. Our entire Friday morning vanished in a warm haze, a morning when we could have been productively consuming. And then, because it was a distractingly beautiful day, we all went for a five-mile roundtrip walk to go get lunch. We. Weren’t. Even. Consuming. Gas. Then I came home and took a nice little nap.

Lazy, lazy, lazy. Every moment counts, and we’ve got to stay awake and on the ball. That’s the point Jesus is trying to make in this morning’s passage from Matthew, although I’m pretty sure his completely different spin on it wouldn’t pass muster before the Committee on UnAmerican Consumer Activities.

This text comes to us from a portion of Mark that is often called the “little apocalypse.” The “little apocalypse” runs for most of chapter 13 of Mark’s Gospel, and contains much familiar imagery. It’s a description of the destruction of the temple and the catastrophic collapse of society, followed by the fulfillment of the messianic age.

There are wars and rumors of wars. There are earthquakes, trials and tribulations, cats and dogs, living together, the whole shebang. At the conclusion of the sequence of events, we hear, in verse 26, that there will be the arrival of the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory.

It’s pretty much the essence of what we visualize when we visualize the apocalypse. There are a couple of elements, however, that make this a bit different from the typical end-times schpiel.

First, most apocalypses follow a particular format. In the Book of Revelation, the apocalyptic chapter twelve of the book of Daniel, and a variety of apocalypses that didn’t make it into the Bible, there is usually 1) a bizarre vision being presented from God; 2) an angelic intermediary to interpret the strange visions, and 3) a clear judgment of bad folks. We don’t see those elements here.

Second, and more significantly, this “little apocalypse” strongly implies that the events that are unfolding are not in the future, or even imminent, but in process. In verse 30, Jesus seems to clearly indicate that everything that he’s talking about will occur within the lifetimes of “this generation,” reiterating a commitment that he also made earlier in Mark 9:1, where we heard that “there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.” It’s a bit of a fuddler, frankly.

The world didn’t appear to come to an end in the first century, nor are there, to my knowledge, some 2,000 year old Judeans kicking around anywhere. How are we supposed to read this, then?

It helps to remember that much of what Jesus declares in chapter 13 of Mark’s Gospel did occur. Within the lives of most of his listeners, Judea had been completely destroyed by the Roman Empire. The city of Jerusalem fell, destroyed in the year 70 by the combined assault of three Roman legions. The second temple was razed, and Israel as a nation was shattered for nearly 2,000 years.

Yet though that “suffering” which is described earlier in the chapter and is referred to in verse 24 seem certain to have happened within a generation of Christ’s saying it, the passage does go further. Jesus suggests strongly that somehow Christ’s Reign may be something that the disciples will experience...and yet it clearly hasn’t happened yet. The Son of Man descending? Has he? Angels gathering the elect? They can’t have. Can they?

It is that tension between the fulfillment of the Reign of God and the anticipation of it’s arrival that is why this passage gets served up on the first Sunday of Advent. What Jesus is saying is not to be understood as being true only for the generation that heard him first. The reality he is describing isn’t something that occurs at one moment in time, or at one place. The arrival of God’s Kingdom does not belong to one particular generation...it belongs to all of them.

It’s not a reality that happens at one moment, and then passes on. As Christ says, though Heaven and Earth will pass away, my words will not pass away. That call to stay awake, then, has direct implications for how we are to live our lives in the now.

Are we structuring our lives so that we’re clearly prioritizing those things...in the right now, the this-instant...that mean our existence reflects our Maker’s purpose? Attentiveness and giving priority to those actions that best mirror the gracious intent of the Gospel is absolutely essential. It reinforces the necessity of considering how and in what way our actions mirror our reason for being, and how the ways we choose to focus both our minds and the precious time we’ve been given reflect the Reign of God.

That, I think, is the biggest challenge facing us in the festivals of consumption our culture encourages. We like the shiny shiny things we’re offered, and that fleeting hit of Splenda sweetness that comes from getting a new thing.

But the “new” things we cram in the backs of our ‘utes, big boxes coming home from big boxes, well, they’re not really new. They lack the ability to change us in any way that matters. Well, perhaps that’s not true. They do reduce our patience, increase our hunger for possessions, and distract us from both injustice and the glories of creation around us. The choice we’re given--between shopping and shabbas, between time in line and time to catch our breath and find connection with loved ones--is a real one. Attending to the life that Christ seeks for all of us needs to guide our every moment.

We do not know, after all, when that hour will come. Is it next year? Is it next week? Is it tomorrow? Is it one forty five this afternoon? Is it now? Was it yesterday? Was it Friday?

We are called to live as if those all were true. We are called to stay awake. Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

Greyscale

2011-11-20T10:20:00.001-08:00

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

11.20.11; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 25:31-46

Before we begin...I have a confession to make.

I am, and have always been, a gamer. I like gaming, and by “gaming” I don’t mean someone who participates in the “gaming” industry, that peculiar institution that involves you giving someone money so that you can experience the thrill of losing money, over and over and over again. I never did understand the appeal in that kind of game. It used to be called “gambling,” of course, before they decided to hide the “B” and the “L,” because I suppose they thought doing so would hide away the fact that it’s BL.

No, I play video games. I have since I was a young lad, and that first Atari 2600 arrived one Christmas after a sustained campaign of cajoling and whimpering. It filled my fallow tween hours with Combat, and Centipede, and PacMan, and Star Raiders. I once played Space Invaders for such a prolonged period that when I went to sleep that night, I found that when I closed my eyes, I could still see the game cranking away. That was strange, but stranger still, I found I could control it. Must have inadvertently downloaded it, I guess.

Whichever way, that Atari was the latest and greatest technological advancement, providing cutting edge entertainment through the raw processing power of its four kilobyte chip. Given that a Word Document that contains only the number 4 and the letter K is 15 kilobytes, things have clearly come a ways since then.

Having gamed for over three decades, across several dozen different platforms, I’ve watched the medium evolve. One of the most striking changes in the last few years is the introduction of systems of ethics and morality into the virtual world in which you’re gaming. The first game to do this well arrived about a decade ago. It was called Fable, and you played a young man growing up in a place called Albion. How you grew up, however, depended on you. As a child, you could help others, run errands, find lost cats, and stop bullies from hurting other children. Or, if you so chose, you could steal things, intimidate other children into obeying you and giving you stuff, and punt chickens down the street. That last one was rather tempting, particularly given that the game kept track of your chicken-kicking skills.

As you grew into adulthood in the game, those choices continued. You could choose to be kind and giving and noble, in which case everyone would be overjoyed to see you, villagers would applaud your arrival, and you’d eventually start glowing just a little bit, as a trail of butterflies and small tweeting birds followed you. Alternately, you could be cruel and selfish and vicious, in which case you’d grow horns, people would cower or flee in terror at your arrival, and the only things flying around you would be biting flies and lobbyists.

It was interesting, because it meant that the way in which you acted had a direct influence on the way in which the game played. This went well beyond just shooting something and having it blow up, or jumping over something. The dynamics of the world changed, depending on your ethical choices.

But those choices were almost entirely binary. There was the good path. There was the bad path. Everything was nice and neat and clear, without confusion, without greyscale. There’s good, and there’s evil, and there’s a nice little gauge at the upper left of the screen that lets you know how you’re doing.

But in non-virtual life? Well, life out here in the meatspace world tends to be a bit more challenging. Once you get out of a realm created in binary, things stop being binary.

That’s one of the biggest challenges, I think, in trying to wrap our heads around the story that Jesus tells in Matthew’s Gospel today. This particular story is unique to Matthew. None of the other three Gospels contain it. It is also the only place in any of the Gospels where Jesus explicitly describes what will happen at the conclusion of all things. When Jesus speaks of the Reign of God, he almost always does so using poetry, metaphor, and storytelling. These are forms of teaching that require us to use our insights and imagination, and that don’t lend themselves to being taken literally.

Here in the final story of a sequence of stories that have brought us to the end of Jesus’s teachings in Matthew, though, he steps away from that approach. This is not a parable, a story told to speak to a meaning beyond the story. It is not an allegory, in which every thing in the story acts as a symbolic stand-in for some other thing. It’s just a description, a recounting...or, I suppose, a “precounting”...of how things are going to wrap up.

It’s a pretty classic image, with the Son of Man on the throne of glory, surrounded by angels and suffused in the sort of light you typically see in a Steven Spielberg film. This is the big cosmic Sorting Hat moment, when the lives of every single human being from every single nation are measured against the only standard that counts.

It appears, as we read it, to be something of a binary process. The good go on the right hand, in the sheep line. The not-good? They go in the goat line. The sheep are the righteous, the goats, the unrighteous.

Figuring out the difference should be a simple thing. All the Son of Man needs to do is check whether you’re a member in good standing in the Presbyterian Church (USA), right? Oh, and whether you’ve gotten your generous pledge in for the next year.

But when all those nervous Methodists and Episcopalians and Buddhists get to the front of the line, we find that the judgment call is measured by standards that are somewhat different from those we might otherwise expect.

For all of the really amazing amount of energy Christians have spent arguing about theological and doctrinal issues over the last 2,000 years, there’s no doctrinal multiple choice test administered. There is also no reference, much to the befuddlement of many followers of Jesus, to whether or not you’ve been a church going Christian or accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior.

Instead, the measure is feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and visiting those who are sick or imprisoned. Done it? Then you’re set. Somehow managed not to get around to it? Then things aren’t looking so good for you.

It’s a pretty simple measure, but one that we might, upon some reflection, struggle with a bit. How does that work?

Have we done things that are good? Have we cared for those in need, and given a kind word to those who were lost or hurting? I’m pretty sure we’ve all done that here and there, more or less.

But life is typically not as straightforward as the drop-down conversation menu in a game, in which you can either give a hungry man some bread or kick him.

There are times we give of ourselves, but not fully. There are times we are good, but not wholly. We might give, but feel a tinge of resentment. We might pull away, failing to give as much as we could. We might be meeting one need, but failing to meet another. That’s the reality in which we live. How does this vision of how things are measured connect with our deeply greyscale reality?

Here, I think it’s worth keeping a couple of things in mind.

First, that our world is most often not black and white is not an excuse for inaction or paralysis. Jesus presents us with a living or dying edge, that place in ourselves where we are daily, moment by moment, given the choice to live out grace or live out selfishness. That choice is not a binary one, an either/or, a one or a zero. We don’t live in two dimensional space, after all.

But we are day by day, hour by hour, given the freedom to move closer towards being that soul that we were created to be. We are given to grow deeper in grace, richer in patience, freer with mercy. We can speak a kind word about that soul, instead of a bitter one. We can take a moment for silence, to listen for God, to hear the other. And we can choose to use our energies, our life, in ways that bring more light into the world. That is true wherever we are.

Second, while our lives may be painted in a shade of grey, we have a grasp of what is expected of us, wherever we find ourselves in our own development as spiritual and ethical persons. We know what is expected of us. We are shown, with clarity, that we are to deepen our commitment to love, mercy, justice, and grace. That is true for churches, which need to take the care of others...the last, the least, the lost...as a significant and visible priority. That is true for ourselves as individuals, as well. Wherever we are, we know how to lean more deeply into that reality. And in doing so, reality itself is changed, as is our relationship to it.

That’s a meaningful goal. It’s the goal of the Reign of Christ. This life is not, after all, a game. Live it, and inherit that grace that He intended for all of us. Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

The Doing

2011-11-13T10:09:00.001-08:00

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

11.13.11; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 25:14-30

Before rolling too far into this sermon, I wanted to be sure we’re clear about something. The title of this sermon is “The Doing.” That’s “doing” as in “to do,” meaning “to perform,” “to execute,” “to accomplish, finish, or complete.” It derives from the Old English “dun,” and is related to the the Dutch verb “doen,” and the Archaic German “tun.”

The title of this sermon is not “The Doinggg,” as in the sound your rapidly vibrating head makes right after Bugs Bunny hits you in the noggin with a cast iron skillet.

I know you were wondering about that, and it’s important to clear up these things on the front end.

We all like to think of ourselves, in our best moments, as doers. Being someone who can “get things done” is one of those values we celebrate in our culture. If we’re the person who can juggle a thousand events and activities and still maintain the kind of house where things are so you could feel comfortable eating off of the kitchen counter, we’re doers. This is to be distinguished from maintaining the kind of house where you regularly eat off of the kitchen counter.

If we’re the sort of person who puts in those long, long hours to get a project done, or complete that assignment, then we have that good solid feeling about ourselves and our ability to deliver whatever it is that we’ve been asked to deliver.

Doing, unfortunately, can be something that Presbyterians struggle with. The challenge we have, I think, is a tendency to think that doing is the same thing as thinking about doing, or meeting to think about doing, or thinking about meeting to think about doing. While thinking about things beforehand is an excellent way to insure that you’re going to do something right, it can also be an excellent way to insure that you don’t ever do anything at all.

It’s easy, if you’re the sort of person who wants to get everything perfectly right, to think your way into making a task so much more complicated than it needs to be that it becomes impossibly daunting.

I can recall a seminar quite a few years back with a group of earnestly thoughtful Presbyterians, in which the concept of “putting up a website” was discussed. There was much thinking involved. Could you use pictures of people? People scratched their heads. What about liability issues? What about waivers and official policies about site use? Congregational leadership really needed to set up a task force to examine the potential issues before they could even think about creating a web site. People asked how you put up links to worship audio and video. Well, what about music that was copyrighted? Again, an exploratory task force was required.

It was...well...a bit silly. Every possible negative eventuality was considered, turning what could be easily be done in a single afternoon by a single motivated congregant into a process involving many months and countless meetings.

Overthinking leads to inaction, to analysis paralysis, and it was to that issue in the lives of Christians that Jesus was speaking in the parable we heard from Matthew’s Gospel this morning. This is the second of three stories that comprise the twenty-fifth chapter of this Gospel. It comes to us from what scholars call the “Q” source, meaning it comes from a hypothetical text, now lost, that contained all of the sayings that appear in Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark. Though the version of the story that Luke presents is somewhat different, the two share a common essential narrative.

In them, a wealthy and powerful man goes on a journey, and entrusts his property to three of his slaves. Upon his return, he discovers that the one who’d received the most had invested it in business ventures. He’d taken risks, and doubled what he’d received. The one who’d received less than half of that amount had also doubled it.

The last one? Well, he’d been cautious. He’d been careful. He took what he’d been given, and he dug a nice little hole in the ground, and buried what he’d been given. It’s the careful thing to do. It’s the prudent thing to do, particularly given that his boss was demanding.

And hearing this, the rich man takes back the money, gives it to the first slave, and fires the guy with a flourish worthy of Donald Trump, casting him into the outer darkness of weeping and gnashing of teeth.

We don’t like hearing this story, which strikes us as a tiny bit unfair. It’s not like the slave squandered the money. He didn’t go to Atlantic City with it, after all. Heck, if you bury it in the ground, you’re getting nearly the same interest you’d be getting if you put it in 6 month Bank of America Certificate of Deposit these days. Doesn’t that count for something?

There’s another version of this parable that occurs in an early Christian Gospel that didn’t make it into the Bible, one that changes it around in exactly that way. The Gospel of the Nazarene has the first slave investing, the second burying it, and the third blowing it all on the ponies, or doing the first century equivalent. That’s easy for us to buy in to. It’s a straightforward tale about doing what is morally right. It’s simple. It’s fair.

But that’s not the point Jesus was trying to make. This is not that simple.

This isn’t a parable about investment strategies, one that provides us with Seven Rules for Making Partner at Goldman Sachs. It’s a parable about what it means to actively and purposefully engage in the work of God’s Kingdom. As we engage in that work, both individually and corporately, there are a couple of key things we should take away from this passage.

First, this is a call for boldness. It follows on last week’s parable of the Bridesmaids, which counseled adequate preparedness and wisdom. This parable balances that call for wisdom by reminding us that taking the safest course of action is not always the path to grace.

There are times we need to risk if we’re going to live into the Kingdom, and there are times when the appropriate action is not doing the safe thing, or the easy thing, or the thing that maintains the status quo. That doesn’t mean being foolhardy. It doesn’t mean taking wild and unnecessary swings at glory.

But it does mean steering away from that false wisdom that counsels keeping things quiet and safe, that warped prudence that seeks to protect what is by not doing what needs to be done.

That sort of thinking was what drove mistake after mistake in the tragic and horrific Penn State scandal. Play it safe. Keep it quiet. Bury it away. That sort of caution, caution that covers it’s own behind instead of taking the risk that comes with seeking justice, always leads to ruin.

When something must change, then risk is a prerequisite for that change. That’s true for every venture in life. It’s true in relationships. It’s true in our work-life, and in our schooling. And it is particularly true in the lives of congregations. If we are called...as we are called...to be servants of the transforming love and grace of Jesus of Nazareth, then we need to be bold about it.

Second, this is a call to make a little noise. Bold action is not invisible action, the kind of thing you whisper about inaudibly to yourself as you go about your business. In the early church, being willing to be forward and visible and audible in their actions was absolutely essential.

That, I think, is one of the greatest challenges facing churches. They can be engaged in wonderful, meaningful, important work in the world. But if you engage in work that is vital and important and has the potential to transform lives, you need to share its importance. It’s not just in the doing of good, but in the spreading of the desire to do good. As PPC prepares itself to work towards another year, to apply the resources of our time and our treasure, we need to be mindful of that call. Don’t hide away this good thing. Don’t be reluctant to be bold about the doing and the speaking of it.

I guess, honestly, now that I really think about it, that this story isn’t just Jesus telling us about “doing.” He’s also giving us a little whack in the head, to remind us what we're about in the world.

So... “doingg.”

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

Gassing It Up

2011-11-06T11:32:00.000-08:00

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

11.06.11; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 25:1-13

Every time I have ever preached this sermon, I’ve said I hate preaching it.

It’s stewardship season again, and there’s a strong tendency among many pastorly types to approach this in much the same way you’d approach that corner of your sofa where the puppy you’re puppy-sitting decided to surreptitiously go number two.

Meaning, you grimace, roll your eyes, and then go about the messy business that you’re obligated to get done, while trying not to breathe through your nose. This does not tend to make for good sermon writing.

I’m hardly the only pastor to have this problem. Many of us just don’t like talking about money. It feels grasping and materialistic. It makes us feel like we’re taking that first step on the slippery slope to televangelism.

We’re terrified that once we start talking about money, the next thing you know we’ll be standing there on the stage next to Joel Osteen, our big hair and shiny white teeth glistening in unison as we tell everyone that the Lord loves a cheerful giver, and that if you have a need, you got plant a seed, and if you want to be blessed abundantly, you have to bless this ministry abundantly. Just swipe your Visa, Mastercard, Discover, or American Express through the card-reader on the pew in front of you, brothers and sisters. Then, the money pours in like a waterfall. In the case of Osteen, we’re talking an actual waterfall, one that his congregation installed at the front of the sanctuary to remind people 1) to pour out their blessings and 2) to hurry up about it, because that water always makes them recall the three cups of coffee they had right before the service. And as that “waterfall of blessings” starts up, every drop pattering down would remind us that we’d sold out.

This week, though, I got to thinking. Why should I be so distressed by this? Do I get anxious when I’m doing other things that relate to money? When I was seven years old, and I had a dollar in my pocket, would I stress out when I went to the counter at 7-11 to buy a couple of X-Men comic books and a Snickers bar? Nope. I’d look forward to it. I'd save up especially for that purpose.

Then there the moment when that little flashing LCD starts cranking away at the bottom of my bike’s fuel gauge, telling me it’s time to get more fuel. When it comes time to fill up the five point eight gallon tank on my motorcycle, I don’t fret about that, either. Sure, gas isn’t as cheap as it once was, back in high school, when I would funnel 62 cent-a-gallon leaded gasoline into the endlessly thirsty maw of my beater 1973 Plymouth Valiant. But I know that without that gas, I can’t run the errands I need to run. Without that gas, I’m not going to be able to get where I’m going.

Sure, I could neglect it out of cheapness. Or I could ignore it, and just assume I’ll get where I’m going.

But ignoring that expenditure or putting it off always results in the same thing. You find yourself coasting to a stop, filling your helmet with choice phrases as you drift towards the shoulder, as traffic surges past you and you start wondering whether you remembered to charge your cell phone.

Fuel was the underlying metaphor in the teaching we hear from Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel today. We’ve been taking a journey through Matthew’s Gospel over the last few weeks, and we’re beginning to come to the final sequence of teaching. The section we’re in now begins at the start of chapter 23, and runs through the end of chapter 25. Some bible scholars describe it as the “Judgement Discourse,” in which Jesus tells stories and gives some declarative answers to some rather essential questions. What is valuable and good in the eyes of God? What isn’t? How will things end? What is the destiny of the rich and the self-righteous and the powerful?

Among the stories that were told to answer some of these key questions was the one heard today, which is generally known as the Parable of the Ten Bridesmaids. Let me be the first to note that this is a very parable-y parable, told for the purposes of symbolism. Some scholars argue that it doesn’t represent the typical activities of bridesmaids in the first century, any more than the movie Bridesmaids was an accurate representation of most Bridal showers. At least, I hope it wasn’t, because that’d mean there are things my wife really needs to tell me about.

Others suggest that the pattern of awaiting a bridegroom in the evening was common, and that delays were frequent, as the event dragged on and on.

Whichever way, the images presented are a call for wisdom in how we approach resources and the world...and, more importantly, the Kingdom. The parable itself is intended to indirectly describe the nature of the reign of God among us, and begins, as do many of the parables of Jesus, with the words “The Kingdom of God is like...”

Here, the issue is not just being prepared. All ten of the bridesmaids begin by being prepared, arriving with their lamps filled with oil. The five wise ones, though, remember to bring extra oil, more fuel in the event that the bridegroom is delayed.

The others? Well, they don’t quite manage to get around to it. They just assume it’ll all work itself out.

It’s a typical wisdom parable, in that there are the wise, and there are the foolish, and the wise are the ones who plan and prepare, who set aside their resources under the assumption that maybe, just maybe, it might take a little while for the bridegroom to show up. The bridegroom is, here, rather obviously intended to be Christ as the Son of Man. The bridesmaids? Well, they’re us. Do we do what we need to sustain our faith, not just in the short term, but over the long haul? Do we use our resources in such a way that if Jesus doesn’t show up tomorrow, we’re still going to be doing what we need to be doing to keep that light burning?

That, quite frankly, is what stewardship is all about, and what we need to be talking about when we talk about the needs of our fellowship moving forward into the next year. As Poolesville Presbyterian Church looks forward to 2012, the resources we commit to that journey have a tremendous amount to do with how bright our light will shine over the next year. Y’all all each got a letter, and in that letter was a request to think about giving to PPC to support it in 2012. So, assuming you’re earnestly thinking about it, here are a few things to throw into the mix.

First, as you’re looking at what you may be able to give this year, what’s most important to realize is that this is your church. The resources you give to support and sustain it are not, in a very real sense, resources that you are giving away. They are resources that you are committing to your own community, to this church, to something that is a basic and fundamental part of your life. Faith is, after all, the most radically defining element of our existence, and this community is how we together live out and develop that faith.

In that very real sense, it’s like making sure your car is gassed up and ready to go. Or prepping for that big home improvement project you’ve been telling yourself you’d do for the last ten years. What matters is that you’ve planned ahead, and provided enough for what is to come. You need oil so that your lamp will stay lit as long as it needs to stay lit.

Second, it’s not hard to see the impact of your resources and energy here. This is, rather obviously, not a large church. There is no big fat endowment. There aren’t nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine other people giving, so that what you do just disappears in the background. What you do matters in a little church. And we’re efficient. We make do. We deal with things as practically and efficiently as it can. But those resources are nonetheless necessary, and have a clear impact. Your giving is the fuel that lights and heats this buildings, and the manse, and Speer Hall. Those things don’t just magically happen on their own. The community organizations that we open our doors to here rely on that commitment. It is that same commitment that makes music and mission possible here. It is what allows PPC to be a vibrant and bright part of this community, a witness to the light that guides each and every one of us.

So consider what you can do to help prepare for the promise of this ministry in 2012. What will keep our light lit, both materially and spiritually? How will we be ready for the surprises that always, always come our way? What will insure that we are, as a community, ready throughout this next year to light the way for the grace and justice of the Bridegroom? Let’s be wise. Let's plan ahead. And let's do so boldly.

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

Tooting Your Own Horn

2011-10-30T11:19:00.000-07:00

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

10.30.11; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 23:1-12

I’ve never been particularly good at tooting my own horn, and that’s something of a problem.

As I look out at the world, and at the people who seem to shimmer and beam from the airbrushed pages of the magazines in the checkout aisle, it’s clear that social success and own-horn-honking go hand in hand. And if people hear how amazing you are, surely, surely, the joy and fame and acclaim that everyone seems to aspire to in our culture will be yours. In fact, there’s an entire industry dedicated to helping people proclaim to the world just how amazing they are.

I spent some time perusing the Public Relations Society of America’s web presence this week, in hopes of getting a few pointers. The PRSA, in case you haven’t heard of it, is the association of people who professionally toot the horns of other people. These are the folks who make sure that we know, against a background of swelling, patriotic music, that the People of America’s Oil and Natural Gas Industry are working hard to bring Americans the American energy we need, right here in America.

These are the people who arranged the multi-city book tour for reality tv personality Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi’s novel A Shore Thing, an exciting and imaginative romp through the cultural wonderland that is New Jersey. I can’t speak for the book itself, but let me tell you: the reviews for the book on Amazon are really worth reading.

These are the people who recently got the word out that Can’t-Touch-This 1990s rapper M.C. Hammer is launching a search engine to compete with Google. It’s called WireDoo. Really. It’s in “pre-Beta,” in pretty much the same way my career as the world’s premiere professional interpretive dancer is in “pre-Beta.” I do not envy M.C. Hammer’s publicist.

What I found at the PRSA’s site were all kinds of conferences and webinars about how to generate buzz and how to stir interest in whatever it is you’re pitching. This might come in handy in promoting my own recently self-published book, which rests proudly at number #280,279 on Amazon’s Kindle Store, precisely Two Hundred Fifty Five Thousand Seven Hundred and Sixty Seven positions behind Snooki’s magnum opus.

Self-promotion has become a central value in our culture of consumer celebrity, in which even everyday folks find themselves chasing the retweet on twitter or the repost on Facebook.

If you don’t do it, if you don’t pitch and spin and try to stir buzz, you don’t exist.

This is a value that prangs awkwardly against the ethic laid out in Matthew’s Gospel today. For the past several weeks, we’ve heard Matthew’s Gospel recount some of the challenges that Jesus faced from the Pharisees. Pharisees, as you’ll recall, were among Jesus of Nazareth’s primary opponents, but for reasons that are a bit different than those we typically think of when we hear the word Pharisee.

Someone who is a “Pharisee” is typically assumed to be a self-righteous hypocrite, the sort of person who claims to the purveyor of all things right and true and pure, and yet manages to be a totally unpleasant human being. The term Pharisee, though, does not refer to hypocrisy. That word derives from the Hebrew term perusim, which means “the ones set apart.” These were the ones who defied the Greco-Roman cultural ethics of their day, and who were at least making the effort to define their identity in terms of the demands of Torah and covenant. Because of this, they were the ones closest to Jesus. Unlike the Sadducees, who ruled over the temple didn’t mingle with their inferiors, the Pharisees were interested in getting out and changing their communities for the better.

Which, quite frankly, is why Jesus begins this section of scripture by telling his listeners that there was nothing wrong with what the Pharisees had to say. When he says that they “sit at Moses’ Seat,” he’s indicating that they are attentive to the teachings of Torah, which tradition held had been passed on down from Moses. The issue for Jesus, however, was not that there was anything wrong with the covenant law. He makes a point of specifically honoring the teachings of the Pharisees. But where he gets a little less accepting is with those who taught it but had no desire to actually live out their teachings.

Instead, what mattered to the Pharisees Jesus condemned was the pride of place and honor that came from being regarded as a teacher. In being set apart, they didn’t take that as a sign of additional responsibility. It was, instead, a sign of just how wonderful they were. The “being viewed by everyone as wonderful” became the priority, and the justice and grace of the covenant became secondary, and with that inversion of priorities, suddenly what should have been a blessing to the community became a curse.

Instead of focusing on living out the covenant, they focused on the trappings of being viewed as special. The focus became not what they were doing, but the social rewards, on the success, on the appearance. The goal became being famous for the purposes of being famous, and for a sense of just how useless that is, I would ask you to do a mental google for the word Kardashian.

In place of that, Jesus instructs his listeners that they shouldn’t let themselves focus on titles, or on the things that bring worldly acclaim. Instead, they are to strive to serve others, and to be humble.

We have trouble with this. How can we jibe what it takes to succeed in our culture with Christ’s relentless focus on humility and servanthood? Honestly, it’s not an easy connection to make, but there are a couple of things we need to take away from this difficult mix of teachings.

First, the command to not seek and yearn for titles and importance is not a suggestion that everyone has the same gifts, or that there are none in a community worth following or learning from. We’re not all the same, and movements that try to live as if all of us are the same have an tendency to collapse in on themselves, or chase their tails in endless circles. The Occupy movement appears on the verge of learning this lesson yet again.

But turning particular gifts to the service of the community is a different thing than expecting the community to shower you with accolades. The joy of teaching, for example, does not come in having an obedient and deferential student. It comes when that student suddenly lights up with understanding, as they grasp a concept for the first time. It’s not the title. It’s the expression of the gift.

Second, avoiding self-promotion and self-righteousness is not the same thing as not talking about one’s faith and living out one’s faith. Jesus was not telling us that we should be shrinking violets in the expression and living out of our walk along the Way. Among the oldline denominations...and that’s us, the Methodists, the Episcopalians, and the like...there’s an almost compulsive drive to not talk about faith, and to not talk about the impact that the Nazarene has had on our day to day lives.

It often feels inadequately humble, overly aggressive, and conjures up in our minds images of some loud red-faced guy in an ill-fitting suit, bellowing Hellfire and Brimstone through a megaphone at passing students on some college campus, while glazed-eyed followers hand out tracts.

But the way Jesus-followers live, both individually and in community, is something that should not be a place of complete silence. It’s worth speaking of, and living out, in such a way that others will not be completely oblivious of its existence. If we’re utterly silent, so self-effacingly humble that our faith and it’s fruits are functionally invisible, then we’re not fulfilling the call of our faith.

So yeah, maybe we’re not great at self-promotion. Given how deeply our culture has become consumed by that drive, perhaps it’s not a bad thing to be bad at. But that’s no excuse for us to be stifled in our joyous expression of the fundamental goodness of what the Gospel teachings. It’s no excuse for us to hold back in reaching out into the world with both hands and voices, changing it for the better and proclaiming grace, love and justice to a world that needs to both hear those things and see them lived out.

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

Stripped Away

2011-10-23T09:27:00.000-07:00

Poolesville Presbyterian Church
10.23.11; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lessons: Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18 and Matthew 22:34-46

How can we know what is important?

It can be difficult to tell, particularly with all the competing demands and priorities in our society. But there are little thought exercises we can do that tell us how close we are to getting things right, meaning right in a God sort of way. One of my favorites is to wondering what my little suburb of Annandale would look like if it were stripped.

Not stripped of clothing, mind you. First, that would be very unpastorly of me, and I'm afraid my own contribution to that collective event would be rather unsettling. But rather, what it would look like if the two great powers that define and "clothe" our culture simply weren't there.

I talked a little bit about those powers last week, but in the event things are a little blurry right now, they are mammon and the sword. The sword is coercive power, the force wielded by the state to undergird the legal frameworks of our society. Mammon is symbolic power. It drives the market, and is itself dependent on the power of the sword to establish and enforce the value of currency.

So let’s take a little journey into the Twilight Zone for a moment. Your bedside radio chirps to life at 6:45 am one bright and crisp fall morning, and you hear WTOP breathlessly announce that there is no longer any law enforcement. In fact, there are no longer any laws. No traffic cops. No courts. No law books. Nothing. Not only that, all currency is no longer valid. Our plastic is just plastic with random data encoded into a magnetic strip. Our cash is just paper with some, like, serious trippy pictures on it, dude. It all simply ceased to be meaningful or accepted.

Far fetched? Sure. A bit silly? Undoubtedly. But still interesting.

What would your community look like on the day of that announcement? The answer to that question, I think, is a measure of just how healthy a society is. If the first word that pops into your head is "looting," followed by the word "pillage" and the phrase "everything on fire," then perhaps the place you are is not spiritually healthy. If you immediately think of staging a raid on the nearest Apple Store, then perhaps the you that you are is not healthy.

If, on the other hand, a society could just dispense with those things without batting an eye, then I think it would be in a rather different moral position. Would we still do what we do to fill our days? Would our relationships within our communities remain the same? Would our patterns of consumption be changed? For most social groups, the answer is yes. The changes would be huge and shattering. But if we’re honest about it, the closer we get to modeling the Way that Jesus taught, the less impact this thought exercise would have.

The fundamental essence of that Way is laid out for us in the passage from Matthew this morning.   Matthew’s Gospel continues the story of Jesus being challenged and tested by the religious and cultural authorities. Last week, the question was about taxes and Caesar. This week finds the Pharisees again coming to Jesus with a challenge, this one about the nature of the law.

He’s approached by a lawyer, although it’s important to note that this “lawyer” isn’t the kind of lawyer we’re used to. This isn’t some guy woodenly reading lines into a camera on late night TV about how you might be eligible for compensation if you’ve gotten brain-freeze after consuming a Slurpee due to 7-11‘s straw-design negligence.   This isn’t that $750 an hour litigator from Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer and Feld, the one you don’t dare talk to at parties because even saying hello to her will cost you forty-five bucks. This is a theologian, a Bible scholar, a student of the sacred law of Torah.

That lawyer asks him a question, one that required a knowledge of the sacred law. The question is simple: which law is the most important. This was a non-trivial question, as the law of Torah was not simple. At the time of Jesus, the rabbis had identified 613 different laws which governed the life of an observant Jew. These laws were generally assumed to all be of equivalent importance, each an essential piece of the covenant, with not one out of place or irrelevant or less important. It was a tricky one. Say none, and you aren’t showing that you know the law. Choose one, and you set yourself up for an argument that could last for generations.

But Jesus again responded elegantly, providing his erudite and well trained interrogator with a teaching that is at the core of both ancient and modern Judaism. He first quotes from Deuteronomy 6:4-5, a passage from Torah that lays out the essential duty of everyone who stands in covenant relationship with God.   That text, known as the Shema, reads: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”

This little chunklet of Torah lays out the basic responsibility of everyone who stands in relationship with God to prioritize that relationship, to allow it to be the thing which defines the character and purpose of your life.

The second response comes from elsewhere in Torah, from the Book of Leviticus, chapter six, in a section that lays out the fundamental ethical responsibilities of every human being towards every other human being. We heard an excerpt from that section read earlier, but the baseline teaching is the one Jesus drew out from Leviticus 19:18. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

In this tight and well structured response, Jesus gets down to the essence of covenant. If you ditch everything but these things, if you whittle down and strip away everything but the most vital and central elements of what it means to live as a faithful and ethical human being, you end up with this. This is what counts. This is where the rubber meets the spiritual road, where it is less about law and more about a way of living.

These two related teachings actually give us a pretty good metric for assessing how we’re doing, both as a culture and as individuals.

As a culture, the Great Commandment asks: are we as a people looking past our own interests, and to our broader created purpose? Are we as a community treating every member in a way that expresses our profound care for them?   If we are, or we’re at least trying, then things are probably going to be turning out OK. If we’re not, if we’re distracted by process and politicking and pursuing power over one another...well...things will probably look a whole bunch like they look now.

As individuals, the Great Commandment challenges: are we looking past our own biases and the filter of both macroculture and microculture, and instead focusing on the gracious and transcendent purpose towards which our Maker is calling us? Are we caring for the last and the least and the lost among us, or is our day to day life so focused on our own needs that our neighbor might as well not exist at all?

This essence of our connection to God and to each other is a touchstone, a foundation, the clear and basic measure of the value of our every corporate and individual action.

If we’re followers of the Nazarene, we know what is important. He can’t have made it any clearer. Hear it, and live it.

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

Taxing

2011-10-16T10:58:00.000-07:00

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

10.16.11; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 22:15-22

Money is power.

This, to be quite frank, is a difficult thing for many Jesus people to choke out of their voicebox. We’re not comfortable with either of these things on their own, and when you put them together, the discomfort gets magnified. Money and power go together like peanut butter and chocolate, or like bacon and pretty much any other edible object, and many inedible objects.

So they tell me, anyway.

Christians fumble around when we talk about money, I think, because we know deep down how closely it is interwoven with power. What is power?

It’s the ability to assert your will in the world to make something happen. It’s a physical thing. If I want to bench press 250 pounds, I apply force with my pectorals and triceps, and lo and behold, absolutely nothing happens. Other than my turning beet red and grunting out some unpastorly words, that is. The message from the engine room is clear: “We just don’t have the power, Captain.”

Within human societies, power takes on other forms. It’s the ability to not just do what you can physically do, but to get other human beings to do things that you want them to. If your car breaks down, and you don’t have 10 strong guys riding the car with you, you can always hand some bills over to a tow truck driver, and lo and behold, that car moves. Currency helps us get things done. It buys us gas. It gets us lunch.

Money is power.

Money can get things done because underlying it is the raw coercive power of the state. Human beings together have agreed that the way we’ll measure power between one another is by a means of exchange, be that greenbacks or conch shells, and we’ll enforce that exchange by the state. Anyone who decides they’ll step outside of that system will get stomped on by that system.

That peculiar, inescapable fusion between wealth and power is the reason for the stirrings and hummings at the heart of many American cities this Fall. As the tents of the Occupy movement sprout up, in New York, and in DC, but for some reason not yet here in Poolesville, it can be hard to tell exactly what the folks there are demonstrating. The drum circles and dances and handmade cardboards signs do say it, though it can be hard to parse out from the chants of “Hey hey, ho ho, something something has got to go.” In essence, these...um...slightly chaotic protests are saying:

Power is out of balance.

So how do folks who have committed to following Jesus of Nazareth deal with this strange form of power?

For an answer to that, let’s turn to today’s interesting little story from the Gospel of Matthew. This is one of those stories that we get from three out of four Gospels, in pretty much identical form. It also appears in Luke 20:20-26, and in what was likely its earliest form in Mark 12:13-17, what many scholars believe was the first Gospel to take written form.

No matter what the Gospel, Jesus is having another run-in with the Pharisees, who have determined that he posed a threat to their belief system, and are trying to get him into trouble with the law. They start by flattering him a little bit. “We know that you teach the way of God in accordance with truth,” they coo. “You do not regard people with partiality.” That’s a baseline for being just in Torah, one we see in Deuteronomy 1:16-17. According to the covenant law, a truly just judge doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor. It’s a genuine compliment.

Then again, when people you know have an axe to grind with you show up and start buttering you up, it’s a sure sign they’re hoping to eat you alive. Particularly if it’s butter flavored with bacon, although given that these were Pharisees, that wasn’t really a very kosher option.

They ask him a question that they think can have no correct answer. That question is simply this: Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar?

It was a very well conceived trap.

On the one hand, if Jesus answered yes, it meant that he was willing to use Roman money on which was inscribed assertions of the emperor’s divinity. For many devout Jews at the time, this meant that you were assenting to the emperor as a god, and betraying the God of Israel. It also meant you were supporting the hated occupiers of the Holy Land, accepting the power of Roman society as legitimate. So you couldn’t answer yes, or you were a traitor to the Jewish people.

On the other hand, if you answered no, it meant that you were a dangerous revolutionary, a threat to the Empire. The Roman authorities didn’t look kindly on people who refused to pay their taxes. So you couldn’t answer no, or you were a threat to Rome.

Jesus was not so easily taken in. Given the choice of saying yes or now, he didn’t say either. He just told everyone to look at the coin, and see who was on it. It was the emperor, of course. So give him what belongs to him, and give God what belongs to God. It was a perfect answer, both yes and no, neither yes nor no. I’m not sure any modern day politicians could have done better. The trap his enemies had set for him snapped closed on empty air, and they were stunned. Jesus had evaded them.

That evasion is the primary purpose of this little snippet of scripture, but there are implications within it for our relationship with that odd form of power that comes from wealth.

First, the power of money is social. It is not real, not in the way that the sun is real or you or I are real. It has no objective reality. It belongs, instead, to Caesar, to the structures of culture and nation, which we totally make up as we go along. It’s like a game, or a dance. In this passage, Jesus founds his response to the question of taxation in the distinction between what belongs to society, what belongs to the rules of the game we’ve made up, and what belongs to God.

The power of God is not like the power conferred by money. It’s the power of existence, of life, of being, of everything that is and everything that we are. It is not mediated by anything. It is direct. In that, we need to understand that our relationship to our Maker is nothing like that relationship we have with wealth. It is far deeper, more central, and more defining.

Second, and related to number one, the power that comes from wealth has no relationship to your value as a human being, or as a child of God. It may speak to your social standing, or the material success of your endeavors within the social sphere. But when it comes to you, your heart, your soul, and your integrity as a person, wealth means nothing.

We’d like to think it does, particularly if we’re doing well for ourselves. There are entire branches of popular theology that would tell us that we’re somehow superior spiritually if we’re materially well off. This is simply not so. In our relationship with God, what matters is our commitment to integrity and grace and kindness. We are not to be partial, after all. Letting social power color our value of another being..or of ourselves...is a sign that we don’t understand God’s covenant justice.

Third, money is not inherently evil. Jesus does not say, “EEEEEW! Money! Don’t touch it! Don’t touch it!” Within the sphere of our social interactions, it can be useful, just as any expression of human power can be useful. It can help us care for others. It can feed the hungry, and clothe the naked. It can be a tool for justice, just as our lives can be such a tool. It can rebuild and restore. But it can also be harmful.

It becomes harmful when it creates division between us, when it becomes the thing that allows us to value one person more than another, or feel either inferior or superior to others around us. It can become harmful when it becomes a means of control, or a source of resentment, throwing everything out of balance. Then, it can tear apart relationships, shatter communities, and destroy societies.

To tame that power, we have to to recognize the limitations of wealth. Its power is something we create. We have to recognize the limitations of wealth. It does not define our integrity as human beings, and cannot be allowed to define our relationships with one another, and our relationship with God.

And as we assert our wills into the world, as we turn our whole hearts and minds and souls to loving God, and to loving neighbor as ourselves, we have to be sure that we’ve not forgotten that everything...even the things we’ve made up...needs to be a part of that. That demands our all.

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

Anxiety

2011-10-09T10:52:00.000-07:00

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

10.09.11; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Reading: Philippians 4:1-9

With the passing of Steve Jobs this last week, the world lost an amazingly creative, focused, and committed innovator and entrepreneur. His relentless pursuit of excellent shiny new handsomely priced electronic gadgetry has had a measurable impact on my own life. Were it not for Steve, my wife would not have to repeatedly remind me that it’s Thanksgiving dinner, and to just put my iPhone away already.

Since I first got this odd little device, I’ve noticed that it really can become something of a compulsion. Maybe that email I’ve been waiting for has arrived. No...wait...not yet...hold on. Maybe something is happening in the world, just a second, wait, let me check my CNN app. Maybe that bike part I’ve set my Craigslist app to RSS update has finally been put up for sale. Maybe I’ve gotten a text back from that guy about the thing. You know, that thing that I was talking to that guy about. Just a sec. Maybe I can...finally...knock over...that stupid tower...with those stupid egg stealing pigs. It’ll just take me a second. Hold on.

Perhaps the worst of all of them, for those of us with retirement plans or investments, is that pesky little CNBC app. Every day, minute to minute, we can tie in to the endless mosh pit of shouting panic on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. We can watch the Dow soar 180 points because Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke sighed contentedly after finishing a large lunch. We can watch it plummet 250 points just a few moments later, as the market realizes Bernanke was eating spanakopita at a Greek restaurant. The market tears back and forth, a mad flock of trader pigeons spooked to exhaustion by the slightest movement, and we stare at our little screens and take that in, fretting about our futures and our retirement and our children.

That’s the problem with smartphones, and has been ever since Research in Motion introduced my wife to her own Crackberry. On the one hand, they mean you’re plugged in. You can know whatever you want. The ‘net becomes your memory. You can know anything anyone knows, whenever you need to.

On the other, those shiny little touchscreens in your pocket gnaw and worry at the back of your subconscious mind. It’s like being ten again, with that baby molar that’s not quite ready to come out. It just dangles there, hanging by a thread of flesh, and you can’t help but fret and tease at it with your tongue. It’s insistent, always there, whispering in your ear.

It’s a form of anxiety. And we all know anxiety. It’s that worry that something is happening, something we really should be doing something about, and we’re not. It’s that feeling that we’ve missed something, that we’ve not gotten something right. Our ability to reasonably assess what’s going on becomes clouded, and we begin to imagine every possible thing that might go wrong. It can paralyze us, governing our lives with fear. There’s a reason Anxiety Disorders have their own little corner of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual that clinicians use to assess mental illness. They can consume a life.

You would think that having access to all the information in the world would reverse that fear. You can know anything you want! Whenever you want! Wherever you want! But it can have the opposite effect. We know there’s more information out there, and we don’t know it. It becomes too much, and we can just...seize up.

Being focused on the right thing makes all the difference when it comes to anxiety, and that’s a significant theme in today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi. The section you heard today comes as Paul is wrapping up this letter to this well-loved Christian community. As tends to be the case at the end of formal letters in the ancient world, this concluding section begins with a direct address to people known to the writer.

Here, Paul addresses two women directly, with a request that they make some effort to get along. He names Euodia and Syntyche directly, which means he held them in some regard. It’s clear that he viewed them as co-workers and equals, but that somehow along the way they’d managed to start not getting along with each other. It’s just a human thing, one that afflicts and has always afflicted humankind.

After commending a few other souls, Paul gets down to a few little key bits of advice for the Philippians. He reminds them of the importance of celebration, of realizing that faith is a source of joy. He reminds them to continue to be known for their welcoming, hospitable, compassionate, and kindly way of being together.

And then, he talks a little bit about anxiety.

He reminds them not to worry, but to instead focus on joyous connection to God, from whom peace will come. These are nice words, calm words, pleasant words. They are only remarkable words when you consider that this don’t worry be happy message is being delivered from prison, and that Roman incarceration was not necessarily the most pleasant experience.

It’s easy to say “don’t be anxious” when you’re sitting with a fretting friend on your sofa in the living room of your twenty-first century home. It is considerably harder to say it and mean it if you’re facing the real possibility of an unpleasantly first-century Roman execution. Having a heart that is at peace in those circumstances is, as my 13 year old might say, kind of epic.

But that is precisely what Paul seems to manage, and what he commends to those who read his words. He seems to manage this non-anxious attitude through a combination of factors, which are worth laying out.

He reminds the Philippians the importance of where we focus. The essence of anxiety, after all, is being drawn inexorably towards the negative that you do not know, but that might be. Are your children not home from school yet, and their bus should have been at the stop fifteen minutes ago? Anxiety spools up visions of flaming, tumbling buses. Do you have a particularly important presentation to give to a key client? Anxiety spools up visions of you not only forgetting to load the presentation onto your laptop, but also forgetting to wear pants. Anxiety whispers in your ear: think what might go wrong!

Paul, on the other hand, reminds us to focus...not on the worst that is not, but on the good that is and might be. “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, is there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

It’s not the quantity of information, but that we have the wisdom to focus on that which is most conducive to joy. That doesn’t mean being ignorant of the negative. Paul is not asking us to be naive. Rather, don’t be consumed by the negative. Similarly, don’t be distracted by the irrelevant and meaningless.

It couldn’t be easier, and yet...it’s remarkably easy to give in to the negative, the whispering, and the “what if something went wrong.” If you’re an overthinker...and overthinking is the great Presbyterian plague...then getting your mind to focus on those things that are true and positive can be hard.

Paul also reminds us that the path to Christ’s peace is in the doing of those things. “Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me,” he writes. Not just the thinking about them, or in the forming a committee to discuss them, or in the writing a memorandum to lay out the advantages of considering forming a task force to implement them. If you want the God of peace to be with you, and to bless you with that peace that surpasses all understanding, then you have to act on that focus.

Focus your thoughts on the good that is God’s intent for your life. Let your actions follow that focus.

It’s not always easy, because our fears and the endless whirlwind of distractions that pour at us can scatter us and shatter us. But if we keep our hearts and minds turned towards the One who formed and keeps us, then we can both think it and do it.

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

Credentials

2011-10-02T12:09:00.000-07:00

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

10.02.11; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Text: Philippians 4b-14

Hi there! I’m David!

I'm new around here, so let me tell you a little bit about where I'm from. I've spent pretty much my whole life in a town about forty miles East-South-East of Poolesville. I was born there, went to school there, and met my wife Rachel there when we were in high school. We got married there, have both worked there, and are raising my kids there so they can be near both sets of grandparents. I don't know if you've heard of it.

It's a little South of Olney, pretty much due East from Centreville?

Washington? Washington DC? You guys know where that is? Cool. You can never be sure.

Every town has it's own character, and Washington is no exception. I don't know if y'all get this here in Poolesville, but as someone whose lived almost his entire life inside the Beltway, I come from a city where everyone seems to have an impossibly, intimidatingly stellar set of credentials.

Washingtonians are, as the Census Bureau’s most recent American Community Survey reveals, among the most educated people in the United States. And Lord Have Mercy, are we going to let you know about it. We have the most college educated folk, and the most people with advanced degrees. You can't swing a cat in my home town without hitting someone with a Masters degree. That's actually kind of a fun way to pass the time at DC parties, although in my experience it does make it less likely you'll be invited back.

We are deeply, deeply proud of our accomplishments, of our learning, and of our credentials. Our children go to the best schools, and get the best grades. If you spend more than twelve seconds in conversation with a Washington Parent, you'll be amazed at how tippity top notch our kids are, and how impossible it is to keep us from telling you about it. If you talk to me, for instance, I'll probably start babbling about how my 13 year old Sam did such a great job in the lead role as MacBeth in his school's performance of MacBeth this last year, or about how my eleven year old Elijah's bongo stylings helped his group rip out a surprisingly tight and funkalicious rendition of "Play That Funky Music White Boy" in a recent battle of the bands.

It's a universal parental compulsion, this bragging on our kids, but it feels particularly potent in the town where I grew up. And don’t even get me started on how hard my wife works.

We DC folk are so fixated on superlatives that we even take a perverse pride in our traffic. A study by Texas A&M University released last week noted that Washingtonians spend more time in traffic than the denizens of any other metropolitan area. We spend three entire days a year sitting on our tushies at a dead stop. To be honest, I think there's a part of us that, upon hearing how appalling our traffic has become, smiles smugly and says, "Oh yeah. We're number one." If we dropped from the top of that list of woe, I think we'd actually be disappointed. This may be a sign that we need to consider changing our meds.

We are all about our credentials, about our degrees, about our accomplishments. We're proud that we got into the best schools, that we graduated summa cum laude, that our resume is one great soaring arc of attainment, from that very first White House pre-school internship to our current appointment as Vice Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Protocol in the Office of Widget Measurement and Enforcement.

There's nothing wrong with attainment. But in my home town, I think folks would have a bit of trouble hearing what the Apostle Paul has to say about his own attainment in his letter to the church at Philippi this morning.

At 10,000 inhabitants, Philippi was a town roughly twice the size of Poolesville. It sat on a major East-West thoroughfare in the Roman province of Macedonia, just about 10 miles from the seaport of Neapolis. While it was not close to Rome, it was a Roman colony, and had deep connections to the center of Empire. The language there was Latin, and the citizens there had the same privileges as full Roman citizens.

Paul really loved the church at Philippi. It was a church that he himself had founded, likely in around the year 50 in the Common Era. The letter he wrote to them was a manifestation of that love, an expression of the deep bond of affection that he felt for the community there, particularly as they 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.

The letter is both warm and deeply personal, thanking the Philippians for both their material support of Paul in his time of imprisonment, but also thanking them for their prayers and care. What makes this little missive 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 frequently had run-ins with groups of Christians who were convinced they were superior to other Christians. Some were the hyper-spiritual and some were the legalists, but both were convinced that they grasped Jesus in ways that rendered other Christians their inferior. In the verses right before what you heard today, Paul is responding to some of the legalists.

Those folks argued that their adherence to the laws of the Torah made them better Christians than those who did not. Paul’s response was taut and aggressive. In his blood, his training, his passion, and his life, he was completely in obedience to Torah in every way. And yet, he did not for a moment let himself succumb to the delusion that this meant diddly-squat to God.

It was not his upbringing or his flawless credentials that mattered. What mattered was the transformative relationship he had with that odd man from Nazareth. 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 was just...stuff.

As we move through our own lives, we need to keep this in focus. There’s nothing wrong with all that effort we put into advancing ourselves, or in learning more. It’s good stuff, up until the moment we allow it to be the thing that defines us and our value in this world.

If we have the boldness to claim ourselves as followers of Jesus, what defines us is our willingness to be humble, no matter what we know or who we are. What defines us is our willingness to set aside place and station and training and credential, and to care those around us with the same grace Christ showed us. It’s that heart and mind that lets us set aside our pride, and turns us to serving both one another and those who are most in need.

So...I’m David.

I’m looking forward to working together, and moving forward together, and getting to know one another, and living out the love, justice and peace of Christ together. That’s what lies ahead. Let’s press on towards that goal. Let it be so, for you, and for me. AMEN.

Sermon Title: The Bunker

2011-04-09T16:47:00.000-07:00

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
03.03.11; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Reading: Ephesians 5:8-14

Earlier this week, I sat down on the sofa with the wife and my boys and, like a good 21st century net-connected family, we shared our favorite viral videos from the week. A significant sub-sample of my Facebook universe had been pitching out that “twin baby boys having a ‘conversation’” video, so I made a point of sharing it with them, after which they shared with me a mindbendingly bizarre Olson Twins video. If I don’t get that song out of my head soon, I’m going to need some therapy.

In the unlikely event you haven’t seen it, my video was just what it says. Two cute babies stand in front of a refrigerator. “DAAADADADADADA?” says one. “DADADADADADADADA!” says the other, laughing.   They gesture. They point. They clearly think they’re having a conversation. It’s totally cute, and funny, perfectly suited for going viral. You can check the viral video checklist: 1) Does it have a cute thing, like a baby or a puppy or a kitten? Check. 2) Is that cute thing laughing or doing something bizarre? Check. 3) Is there more than one cute thing, interacting with the other cute thing? Check.   If you can meet that checklist, virality is almost a guarantee, because we all love seeing cute little babies and wuvable puppies and fuzzy kittens doing cute fuzzy things.

But not all viral videos follow that checklist. Some...well...some are harder to explain. One in particular. There are now dozens of versions of this mashup video on YouTube, based on a scene from a 2004 foreign movie. In a room sits Adolph Hitler. His advisors bring him bad news. He refuses to believe it. They reinforce it. He goes into a ranting, screaming spittle-flecked raging hissy fit. It’s all in German, so because we don’t speak German, the dubbing can say...well...anything.   One parody “dubbing” has him screaming about how he’s been kicked from World of Warcraft. Or about how his new iPhone has an antenna problem. Or about how badly his real estate investments are doing. Or about how he can’t find Waldo in one of those “Where’s Waldo” books. There are literally hundreds of screaming Hitler parodies out there, and let me tell you, they don’t seem to work at all against the “cute” viral video checklist.

Years ago, I watched the movie Downfall, from which this strange little internet phenomenon is based. It’s a brilliant but brutal drama, set in the last moments of World War Two. The film revolves around life in the Berlin bunker in which Adolph Hitler and the tattered remnants of his Third Reich finally came to their end. It is entirely in German, and is taut and intense and brilliantly acted. Much of that brilliance comes from the acting of Bruno Ganz, who plays Hitler. As everything collapses around him, Hitler cannot bring himself to see what is real. He clings to his illusions about his own power, even though that power has...in reality...been completely destroyed.   He is in utter darkness, trapped not just in a physical bunker, but in the bunker of his own lies to himself. The light of truth is something that he vehemently, psychotically resists for much of the movie. He’s a tormented, warped shadow.

It’s not a funny movie. At. All.

Because without light, without really seeing where you are and what you’re doing, life can become a broken and terrible thing. That’s the essence of the message from the letter to the church at Ephesus today.   This letter is one of what Bible scholars call “deutero-Pauline” letters. That means that it was most likely not written by the Apostle Paul himself, but by one of his disciples writing in his name. Scholars believe this for a variety of reasons. Ephesian 2:20, for example, seems to assume that the apostolic period is over, which would be odd had Paul been the one writing it.

Even if this isn’t written by Paul, it’s still clearly written from the perspective of someone who was formed in the crucible of Paul’s teaching. From that foundation, the author of this letter presents us with how we are to deal with life, once we’ve had the audacity to assert that we are disciples of Jesus Christ.   That’s the entire point of this fifth chapter of Ephesians, and it’s some pretty bright white line stuff.

Ephesians is not the letter to go to if you’re looking for permission to goof around as a Christian. In setting out a pattern for Christian moral behavior, Ephesians gets pretty binary. There is darkness, and there is light. The goal of the Christian, as we hear it from this letter, is to be visibly, obviously, and intentionally different from the world around you.

What’s important, though, is not to primarily read this section as meaning we should be judgmental of the world around us. It’s important that we not view it’s primary purpose as being to keep us from ever spending a moment with all those pesky sinners out there. Ephesians 5:1 reminds us to be like God in Jesus, after all, and if we’re imitating Jesus, we can’t refuse to hang out with people because we’re, like, so much holier than them.

Instead, we should take this as a reminder that we’re to primarily live by example. If being Christian means anything, then we need to be living our discipleship out in the light. And if we’re in the light, then we’re not hiding away in our own delusions. We’re not hiding away behind the false idea that anything we do is automatically fine.

Ephesians is not a letter that tolerates excuses about how you’re just showing that you’re like everyone else, or that you’re just being authentically you when you tie one on because, heck, it’s Tuesday, or make suggestive comments to someone who’s not your wife. It’s not a letter that tolerates our own rationalizations about how we’re a complicated person, or that accepts that we have those secret parts of ourselves that make us...you know...interesting.

It’s easy to have those bunker places in our lives, where we hide away from the light and from the reality of our relationships with God and with other people.   We feel safe there, secure from having to challenge ourselves, sheltered away from coming to terms with things that are tearing us apart.

But that sense of security is a false one.   We’re still clinging to an illusion about ourselves, one that doesn’t speak into the reality around us. If we have any interest at all as living as children of light, we need to be open to light.

We experience that, first and foremost, in our relationships.   Are we really listening to the cues we’re getting from people around us, or are we letting our own pride cast a dark shadow over the reality of how we connect to others?

Are we paying attention to those who would guide us towards the good? Or are we surrounding ourselves with only our own lies about the world?

We have to move out of the fallen darkness of our own bunker of lies and pride and shame.   We have to live in the light.

If we live in the light, then we live into the true and the good.

And if we live in the light, we also share the light in the world.

And if we live in the light, we’re doing what Christ asked us.

Let it be so. AMEN.

The Anarchist

2011-03-22T05:34:00.000-07:00

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
03.20.11; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lessons: Romans 4:1-5; 13-17

Winter is finally giving up. Spring is shoving it aside in a great wash of buds and warmth and pollen. If you step outside and into the no longer bitter air, and breathe deep in the lingering light of evening, you can smell the first few pioneers slapping firing up their grills, as the sweet heady smell of meat and barbeque mingles with the first flowered fragrances of the season.

For those of us who prefer not to spend our whole lives sitting in little metal boxes, this is also the time of year when we can finally fire up our motorcycles, get our motors running, and head out on the highway. I used to do that 12 months a year, riding in driving rain or in sub-freezing temperatures. I had the kit and the skills to handle it.

But with my boys to drop off at religious school or swimming or drum lessons, that got a bit dicey. My boys are too smart to buy the line that frostbite builds character, and “Honey, I froze the kid” is not something you ever say to your wife if you expect your next date night to go the way you want it to. And if you have to bring your magic devil box to church to project the slides for praise and worship, it really helps if that magic devil box isn’t exposed to 20-degree temperatures and 75 mile an hour winds. That’s a minus 5 fahrenheit with windchill, kids.

I’ve already lost one MacBook that way, and I’m not making that same mistake twice.

Now, though, with the passing of winter, I’ve coughed the bike to life again. Those first few rides in the air of spring are always enough to remind you why you bothered getting into motorcycling in the first place. As that motor clears it’s throat, and you hear the snarl of the inline four, and the hungry rasp of the intake when it gets on the pipe, it’s tempting to let ‘er rip. It’s tempting to just go wide open throttle and howl like a Bat out of Aitch-EE-Double--Toothpicks, slicing and dicing through traffic like a five terawatt laser through Jello. I’ll freely admit that I do open the old girl up now and again. I did manage to get from Annandale to downtown DC in 18 minutes for this week’s Presbytery meeting, at the height of rush hour. And I found a parking space instantly in Northwest DC at 5:40 pm on a Tuesday. A free parking space, no less. Man, I love my bike.

But I never, ever ride in a way ride in a way that would startle, trouble, or panic those around me. This is not because I’m afraid of the law. It’s not because I’m worried about blue and white and flashing lights. I’m not worried about being pulled over or ticketed. It’s because I’m concerned about not just my own well being, but also the well being of the car-trapped souls around me who’ve been consigned to the asphalt and steel circle of Dante’s Inferno.

I don’t want to offend them. I don’t want to freak them out, or have them brake suddenly, or swerve and curse and hate those inconsiderate bikers. Life is stressful enough without me adding to it. I do not do this because it’s the law. I don’t do that because I’m afraid I’ll get in trouble. I do that because that’s just the right thing to do.

The Apostle Paul thought and taught a great deal about the place of the law in the life of Christians, and nowhere does he go deeper into that thought than in his letter to the church at Rome. It is, as you heard last week, a powerfully complicated and convoluted letter. It does not read easily or simply, because it wasn’t meant to. This letter was written as the height of Paul’s theology, and is intended to open his readers up to the continuum between the traditions of the people of Israel and the non-Jewish people who found themselves drawn to follow Jesus. This week’s passage is also not easy, a circling and often challenging text.

The issue, for Paul, is how we get into right relationship with God. What connects us to God? What allows us to find our purpose, and to know the how and the why of our lives?   For that, Paul goes back to Abraham, back to the most ancient ancestor of the Hebrew people, the one from whom the whole covenant people sprang.

How, asks Paul, was Abraham connected to God? Was that relationship a relationship defined by a set of rules, measured by the requirements of the Torah? No. How could it have been? There wasn’t the Law. Torah did not yet exist.

Instead, what Paul suggests is that what mattered in the relationship between Abraham and God was not that Abraham did one thing or refrained from doing another. It was not because Abraham followed a particular set of rules to keep from offending God. It was not because he followed the law.

Laws, after all, are the way that we keep order in the world. They exist to keep things in balance, and to keep people from doing harm to one another. If we break a law, then we can expect to get punished. You speed, you get a ticket. You really really speed, and you lose your license. You hurt someone, you go to jail. You kill someone, and your own life may be taken away. As Paul says in verse 15, the law brings wrath.   If you fear the wrath, you act to avoid it. That is the relationship we often have with the law, particularly on a big straight stretch of road on a beautiful spring day.

But faith, the kind of faith that saves, is not that kind of relationship.   Faith is not based on fear of punishment. It is based on our willingness to receive the gift of God’s grace. What did Abraham do to merit God’s grace? Nothing. He did nothing. Well, that’s not true, entirely.

He did have faith. Faith is not an action among other actions, but a way of defining yourself in relation to God. It’s a bit like trust, but it goes deeper. It’s trust in the same way that you trust that your heart will beat, or you trust that you’ll remember to breathe when you sleep, or the way that you trust that your hand is just a part of you. Faith is the orientation of your whole self, of your whole being, towards God. In that state, God’s gracious love is far easier to receive...because we’re already turned towards it.

Living like that puts us outside of the law. It makes us anarchists, in a way, but not in the angry black clad radical Molotov cocktail throwing way. It makes us anarchists, but not in the goony V-for-Vendetta-Guy-Fawkes-mask-wearing way. Those so-called anarchists who think their freedom gives them the right to hate and destroy are just as caught in the trap of worldly power as dictators and despots. If you are a true anarchist the way that the Apostle Paul was an anarchist, that just means that the law no longer matters, as, in fact, it really doesn’t matter if you are a truly moral person.

If you don’t do something that effects other people only because you’re afraid of getting busted, then you aren’t really moral. If you see someone fall, you don’t stop to check to see if they’re OK because you’re afraid they might sue you otherwise. When the leadership of this church makes sure that we deal effectively with damaged ceilings so that the asbestos they contain doesn’t harm folks here, they aren’t doing it because regulations and laws say so.

You do those things, if you are a person of faith, because you want to.

What matters in our relationship with God is not that we do what God wants of us, but why we do what God wants of us. What matters is our heart. First and foremost, we are to love God. And love is not something you can legislate or regulate. It can’t be coerced or forced and remain love. The God we know most fully in Jesus Christ does not do that.

Really loving God, and through that loving neighbor, fulfills all of the requirements of both the sacred law of Torah and the laws of whatever nation we find ourselves in.   At the end of Romans 13, in verses 8-10, after talking of the laws of the state, the Apostle Paul says his final word on this:

“Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.”

Such a radical, that Paul.   But that’s the rallying cry of the revolution that Christ began. It might be fun to join the two of them, and in joining them, change the world.   AMEN.

Afraid of Our Light

2011-03-07T05:14:00.000-08:00

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
03.06.11; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 17:1-9

Why is it that it is so very hard for us to embrace what is good?   Or, to put it another way, why are we so frightened of the good?

We have no problem at all getting excited about things that are completely messed up. Think, if you will, to our tendency to hunger for juicy gossip.   Do we want to hear the news about the couple that is happily married, that is doing great, that has kids who are doing fine?

Or do we want to dish about the stuff that is dripping with dysfunction and intrigue? Would we rather hear about the conflicts and the betrayals and the “Oh my God that is SO like her” and the “Of course that’s EXACTLY what he always does?” Human beings like the dirt and the darkness, the trainwrecks and the spectacular failures.

We do. It’s clear. And if ever anything made it more clear, the recent stratospheric rise of Charlie Sheen’s star is incontrovertible proof that we loves us some mess. Charlie Sheen, in the event that you live on a mountaintop and have a life untainted by the madness of popular culture, has been acting since before many of y’all were born. He got his first major roles in the 1980s. He took up a rifle in the glorious hoo-hah NRA fantasy “Red Dawn.” He had a significant bit part in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”   He starred alongside Willem DaFoe in the Vietnam flick “Platoon,” the movie I watched on my very first date with my very first serious high school girlfriend.

I don’t remember his role on Platoon so much, for some reason. I think something must have been distracting me.

And then, well, it was straight to the B-list. In 2003, he started starring in Two and a Half Men, a decent but run-of-the-mill CBS sitcom. Making lots of money, but still, not really famous. Still, basically B-list.

Until addiction and partying and total collapse, that is.   And instead of going into rehab, Sheen chose the Red Pill. He just let himself completely flagrantly descend into complete splattery personal disaster. To revel in his meltdown. To bliss out on neglecting his kids and pouring as many intoxicants into his body as possible. To use his newfound fame to curry the favor of young women from a particular corner of the entertainment industry. To spew out his crazy all over the internet and on as many shows as his publicist can get him on.

And we’re eating it up with a spoon. This last Thursday, Sheen set a new record on the ADHD micro-blogging site Twitter. In just over 25 hours, over one million people subscribed to his increasingly bizarre and delusional ranting. One. Million. In a day. Because we love collapse. We love failure. The more spectacular, the better. We’re cool with glorious failure.

But what makes us uncomfortable and uncertain is actual winning.

Take, for instance, the peculiar scene that occurs in today’s scripture from the Gospel of Matthew. This passage finds us following along with Jesus, Peter, James and John as they go off on a retreat together. They remove themselves to a place described only as a “high mountain,” where things suddenly get a little bit intense.

This story within the scriptures is called “The Transfiguration,” because that’s precisely what happens to Jesus. He suddenly appears completely different. We hear, in Matthew 17:2, and in the mirror passages in Mark 9:3 and Luke 9:29, that Jesus is suddenly too bright to look at.   This “brightness,” both of clothing and of his face, is a consistent marker throughout the Bible of holiness. Where the divine is present, be it God or an angelic figure, it is consistently described as being suffused in light.

This is followed by the arrival of two individuals, who are described as Moses and Elijah.    The disciples see Jesus speaking with both of them. Why Moses? Why Elijah? Those two figures are absolutely central to Judaism. Moses was the one who led the people to the promised land, the liberator from slavery, the receiver of the Commandments and the Law. Elijah, was the most potent of the prophets, who stories told had never died, but would return to proclaim the coming of the Messiah. One is linked with the covenant, the other with the final fulfillment of covenant.

Peter starts suggesting that they might build something, in this case, “booths,” or “sukkot,” which are ritual shelters used during Jewish festivals. But before he can set to building, there is more brightness, this time from a radiant cloud, and the words “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” are spoken for the second time in Matthew’s Gospel.

The first time is during Christ’s baptism in the Jordan, in Matthew 3:17.   There, it seems more personal, more about the connection between Jesus and God, and less about others hearing. Here in Matthew 17, it’s something directed to the disciples, and reinforced with the admonition: “Listen to him!” The appearance of a cloud is not random, either, not just an indication of fog at higher altitudes. It’s an event which is mirrored in Exodus 24, when Moses went up the mountain to receive the Law. The bright consuming cloud is a sign and mark of the presence of the Creator.

If you are Peter and James and John, this is without question all really good stuff.    All of these things couldn’t possibly be any better. First, they get a clear and unmistakable sign that Jesus is holy. Then, they see a vision of Jesus with the two most significant historical figures for first century Jews. Finally, they hear a voice from a cloud, affirming Jesus as being something...well...extraordinarily good.

That moment of transfiguration acts serves a real purpose in Matthew’s Gospel. It’s the stamp and official seal of approval on who Jesus is. The marks of Holiness, fulfillment of Torah and the Covenant, and the voice and presence of God, these are all powerful affirmations of Christ’s identity and his Kingdom proclamations.

It couldn’t get any better than that. That’s winning. So are they excited? Are they all pumped up? Hardly. They’re terrified. Their knees buckle, and they fall flat on their faces.    That’s because there’s something in getting things right that we find terrifying.

Because as deeply as Jesus embraced his transformation, the point and purpose of following Jesus of Nazareth is to be similarly transformed.   And that scares the bejabbers out of us. It just seems so impossible. We’re afraid to even set foot down that path.

It’s far easier to get nice and comfortable with our personal demons, the array of failings that claim to define us. It’s easier to let ourselves be judgmental and condescending towards those we deem to be our social or spiritual inferiors. It’s easier to be bitter towards our enemies. It’s easier to whisper and complain and subvert, until every word that comes out of our mouth is poison. It’s easier to take pride in our frighteningly high alcohol tolerance, or our ability to ingest mass quantities of illicit substances, until the wonderfully made body in which we live begins to fail, and our mind goes to gibbering ruin.

But though we may find the crazy that comes with self-destruction fascinating, self-immolation is not the same thing as being transformed.

From faith, we know that that the truth of our transformation...the movement towards the self that we are not but desire to be...rests in our connection to our Creator. The person that you desire to be but are not, the just, kind, centered, constantly loving and grace-radiant person that you struggle to become...that person is known to your Maker as surely as you are. They are as real as you are. Getting there is not easy, any more than climbing is easy.   But effort...some effort...is needed. Just ‘cause it flows easy doesn’t make it right.

There is nothing easier than falling.   Climbing that mountain, and finding the self that God has in store for you, well, that’s hard. You have to trust that it is there. And you have to dedicate yourself, day by day by day, in a hundred tiny actions, to moving towards it.

But that’s what it means to be winning. Let that be our goal. AMEN.

Anxiety

2011-03-04T06:25:00.000-08:00

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
02.27.11; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 6:24-34

If you are a practically minded person, the words from Jesus today can be a little frustrating. Here we are in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount. We’re in the midst of the heart of Christ’s teaching, the essence of the Gospel, where Jesus lays out for us the core teachings of the Bible.

This may, in fact be a teaching that Jesus delivered many times. In the Gospel of Luke, Luke 6:17-49 contains many of the same teachings, in basically the same order.   That version is known, generally, as the Sermon on the Plain. It’s only 30 verses, instead of the just-over 100 verses we find in Matthew. So in Luke’s retelling, the essence and the heart of the teachings is there. Just not the passage we heard this morning.   That gets taught elsewhere, in Luke 12:22-32.

But whether it’s in Matthew or in Luke, it’s most certainly from Jesus...and it makes us a bit crazy. Just what is Jesus saying here?   Don’t worry, be happy?   Don’t worry about it? Don’t worry about your life? To the ears of folks who are out there working and organizing and planning for their lives, this slacker Jesus sounds way too much like the Dude from the Big Lebowski.

“Like, dude, just, like, don’t sweat it, man. It’ll, like, take care of itself, if, you know, you just, like, abide.”

If you’re a practical person, this kind of thinking makes you crazy. You know that things need to be planned. You need to work hard. You need to keep your eyes on the prize. You need to constantly be thinking ahead.   You need to get ready for tomorrow. The food doesn’t just buy itself. The mortgage doesn’t just pay itself. People who don’t plan and don’t prepare end up eating out of dumpsters. And not even the nice dumpsters.

But what Jesus is talking about here is not being practical and prepared and prudent. Life requires those things. He’s talking about anxiety.

There are few things that can tear apart a life more completely and totally than anxiety. Please note...we’re not talking about being stressed here. Being anxious is a very different thing than being stressed.

Stress is when you have ten million things demanding your attention. The house is a mess, and the laundry is piled up like the Rockies, only stinkier, and you’ve got a test tomorrow for school, and the baby is crying, and your boss just sent you a text saying that you’ve got to meet with a client in Uzbekistan next Thursday.

That’s stress. It’s the Washingtonian way, and it’s a problem if you want to live a sane and balanced life. But it’s not anxiety.

Anxiety is different.   Anxiety has very little to do with what is real, and a whole bunch to do with the things that are not real. Not yet. Anxiety is the gnawing uncertainty about the future, the fear of those things that are not, but may be. It’s that sense of consuming, all encompassing panic about “what if.”

Those “what if’s” can consume our personal lives. We all feel them.

What if I don’t get little Tyler into the right tutoring program and he/she doesn’t get into college and ends up living in the basement until he/she is forty seven? What if someone steals little Tyler and sells their body parts, just like they’re always on about on the tee-vee? What if I tell him I love him, and he just laughs? What if she falls in love with someone else and leaves me?    What if that isn’t a zit, but a rare form of cancer? What if I can’t get another job here and I end up hungry, strung-out, and preaching semicoherent fire and brimstone out of the back of a beat-up 1972 Chevy pickup to a bunch of bikers in some small Alabama town?

That last one is probably just me.

We obsess about the what ifs, and not just in our personal lives. Spend a few moments watching the fevered panic on CNBC and CNN.

What if the government shuts down and they stop paying their contractors and the whole national economy grinds to a halt?    What if the uprising in Egypt and Libya spreads to Saudi Arabia? That could drive up gas prices to five or six bucks a gallon, which would mean we’d have to drive less and conserve more and do all the things we know we’re supposed to do to be good stewards of God’s creation that we can’t quite get around to now.

Oh, the horror!

Fear of what the future might bring is absolutely paralyzing. It can consume us. It will, if we let us destroy us. Why? Because a life lived without hope goes nowhere, and anxiety is the precise and exact opposite of hope.   Just as hope is the anticipation of something better, anxiety is the fear that the future brings with it something far worse.

That anxiety, within the context of Christ’s teachings, comes from focusing so much on your needs and your desires that the whole world revolves around you.    If all you think about is what you need and what you desire, then of course you’ll be anxious. Focusing on the things of this world is a sure way to be sure that you’ll be filled with worry. If your whole live revolves around material things, you’ll find that they give you no ground, no foundation, no basis for anything other than fretting about existence.

If we let ourselves be grounded in the day-to-day, then we’re grounded in nothing. We’re grounded in endless, cycling change. Yeah, every day is same-ol’, same-ol’, but the truth of it is that every day brings it’s own needs, it’s own worries, it’s own new and different concerns.

What Jesus tells us to do instead is to move beyond our own desires for self. Self seeking leads to anxiety. Instead, we are told to seek first the Kingdom of God and it’s righteousness. That means...in case y’all have somehow missed it...loving God with all our hearts and all our minds and pretty much everything we’ve got, and loving our neighbors as ourselves.

That means a couple of things, practically speaking.

First, as we move through our day to day lives, we have to take a hard look at what it is we’re focusing on and thinking about. Take a look at, oh, I don’t know, yesterday. Or the day before. How much of your energy, your time, your passion, and your effort was put into making this world a teensy bit more like the Kingdom Jesus proclaimed? How much of your thought yesterday revolved around the ways you could...right in that moment...make your life and the lives of those around you more gracious. More just. Compare that with how much thought went into picking out your outfit. Or prepping for your taxes. Or modding your car. Or wishing you had another job. Or just a job.

Are you focused on the things that matter to God? Or just the thousand trivial anxieties that consume us? It makes a difference. If so, be aware, and change.

Second, as we together, meaning all of us here in this particular room, call ourselves some sort of church...how much of our energies and passions are focused on the anxieties of churchy life? Do we worry about how many people are here? Or, rather, are not here? Do we fret about how much time and energy and effort are required to keep this huge honking mess of a building going?   Do we figure out what it is that someone else is doing wrong, and use that as an excuse to wring our hands and shake our heads sadly and not do what it is that God wants us to do right now?

Then we are distracted. Then we are not focusing on what needs to be focused on.

If you have your priorities straight, then your actions are what they need to be, and things will take care of themselves. If you seek first what you need to be seeking, anxiety dies, and hope abides. Let it be so. AMEN.

With Friends Like These

2011-03-04T06:22:00.000-08:00

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
02.20.11; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 5:38-48

We all enjoy having friends.   Heck, we don’t just enjoy it. We need it. It’s a baseline necessity of the human experience. We’re social animals, creatures that really enjoy the company of others of our kind.

That’s why solitary confinement is such a terrible, difficult, horrible punishment, something that breaks the mind and the spirit. One of the hardest things you can do to a human being is to isolate them, to force them into a little box where real human relationships are nearly impossible to develop.   You know, like spending forty hours a week in a telemarketing call-center cubicle, where the only voices you hear really don’t want to be talking to you.

There are some things we just shouldn’t inflict on other human beings.

Having a healthy network of people with whom we play and laugh and socialize is something that most of us need to be happy and healthy.   We like having a group of people around us who will always have our backs, who will always be there for us, who will do pretty much anything to help us out when the going gets tough.   Wherever you are, and whatever you’re doing, friendships make life...better.

School without the friendships you’ve made would be just brutal. No one wants to be the guy sitting alone at the table in the far corner of the cafeteria. Friendships in the workplace make the day to day of our working lives far more tolerable. If you can get together with your buddies after work and laugh at the boss over a few cold ones, it makes work almost tolerable.   And yes, even here, even in church, friendships seem to be vital to our happiness.

Study after study has shown that churchgoing folks are happier and more content in life.   Take the findings of a recent book by sociology professors Chaeyoon Lim and Robert Putnam entitled Amazing Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us.   That book reviewed results from thousands of interviews with church going folks. What they found was that going to church didn’t necessarily make you a happier person. What makes folks really content in life was if they not only went to church, but they developed meaningful relationships in church.

People who went to church regularly but had no close friends in the church were less than half as likely to say they were very satisfied with their lives.   This comes as no surprise. Isolated people just don’t tend to be happy people.

So the data is clear. What’s best and most happiness-making about church is having church friends.

And here, we encounter a problem. The name of that problem is, as it so often is, Jesus.

We heard Jesus today, once again, from the Sermon on the Mount. Running from Matthew chapter 5 to Matthew chapter 7, this collection of teachings is the heart and soul of the Gospel, the essence of what Jesus taught, and how Jesus expected us to live.

Today’s passage continues the pattern we’ve seen earlier in the Sermon. In each of the two sections presented, Jesus starts by saying “You have heard that it was said,” and then takes it to the next level by saying, “But I tell you...”   He begins by presenting us with the Biblical teaching on revenge in Matthew 38 through 42.

We’ve all heard the saying, an “Eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” It comes from Exodus 21:24, and Leviticus 24:20, and Deuteronomy 19:21. We tend to interpret it as meaning revenge pure and simple and sweet, in the “You hit me, I take you out” kind of way.

But the real meaning of that saying is different. The intent and purpose of that saying is not revenge. It’s measured justice. It means, if someone harms you, you are only to seek balance. That means you don’t take more than you are due. You don’t poke out both of their eyes, then sue them and take their house.   Justice, as presented by the Torah, is balance and fairness.

But Jesus goes further. If you want more than simple justice, if you actually want healing and reconciliation and not just balance, if you want to aggressively and intentionally make things better and tip the balance to the side of grace, then you need to press it. You need to pour out your grace, even to those who seem to be taking more from you than is their right.

Then, in verses 43 through 48, Jesus talks about friendship.   Throughout Torah, the commandment to love those near to you is made clear. You are to care for your kin, and for those close to you, and for those in need. But Jesus takes it further, because he knows what human beings are like.

We all have friends. We all have people who we like, and who like us, and who are like us.   Everyone does. It’s the nature of human beings.   We all look out for each other, particularly if the “each other” means “people like us who like us.” It’s the nature of friendship.

But that isn’t the standard and measure of the Christian walk, because standing by your friends can be morally meaningless. Take, for instance, the difficult story that just came to light out of the University of Virginia, my alma mater. In an article in Marie Claire...my wife subscribes, and I read whatever is in front of me because you never know what you might encounter...a woman described being drugged and sexually assaulted by a brother at one of the big fraternities on fraternity row, three years before I attended. Her efforts to find out who had attacked her...and those of the police...met a brick wall of silence at the fraternity. No-one was talking. No-one knew anything.

Years later, a guilty conscience led her assailant to reveal himself, and to submit himself to justice. But at the time...well...he got by with a little help from his friends.

Looking out for the folks who are right around us, and who are part of us, well, that’s easy. Even the Taliban do that.

But caring for and showing grace to and being moved by Christ’s love for those who are different, who we do not like, who are not “us,” or who are actually our enemy...that’s a much harder challenge. It’s much easier just to fight them.

But when we do so, we are not acting as God would have us act. What Jesus is demanding of us is the same sort of transforming, powerful, relentless love that he offered up to us, even as we crucified him.

He asks us to be that person, moved by and changed by the same Spirit that led him to ask forgiveness for those who took him.

And that is just not easy.

Still. It’s what he asks of us. And if we want to be disciples, then we have to take that seriously. It’s what shows the world we have a clue what he was talking about. We have to live it. Let it be so. AMEN.

Judgment and Condemnation

2009-03-24T06:33:00.000-07:00

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
03.22.09; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: John 3: 14-21

There are few verses in the New Testament more familiar than John 3:16. It’s at the very heart of the evangelical movement. It’s meat and potatoes stuff, or perhaps that’s tofu and potatoes. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

It’s a quick, short, catchy verse. It sums up, for most, the whole purpose of Jesus. It also is a shorthand verse that makes it’s way onto an array of different evangelical products. You can buy John 3:16 caps. You can buy John 3:16 shirts. There are bumperstickers in a whole array of different colors. There’s John 3:16 candy corn. There are these little John 3:16 keyring bells they market to bikers, which tinkle quietly as you motor along. Also for bikers, there are these John 3:16 pant clips to connect your jeans to your riding boots, because God so loved the world that he didn’t want your pants to hike up your legs in an unattractive way as you motor down the road on your Harley.

I’m convinced that a large part of the reason that this passage is so well known...particularly to my generation...is because of a guy known as the Rainbow Man. He was, waaaay back in the 1970s and 1980s, the guy who showed up at pretty much every sporting event he could wearing a huge multicolored afro wig and waving a large, handmade sign. That sign, often written on a simple sheet, said: John 3:16. Christians knew what that meant, and the idea was...outside of Rainbow Man promoting himself...to get people curious as to what John 3:16 actually was.

The man’s name was Rollen Stewart, and he was seriously dedicated to his rather straightforward task. Every year, he’d rack up over 60,000 miles of driving to truck himself across country. Every Sunday, during at least one major televised sporting event, there he’d be, waving his homemade sign.

He became somewhat sort of kind of famous, the nation’s most well known sports fan. He also became a small celebrity in the evangelical Christian community...and then he disappeared. Well, he didn’t so much disappear, as he ended up convinced that he had to tell the world that Jesus was coming back to destroy it soon. It was 1992, and the end-times were about to be fulfilled, and everyone needed to repent or be destroyed in the very near future. As no-one seemed willing to listen to this rather less cheery message, Mr. Stewart took three people hostage at gunpoint, demanding that police give him access to the media so that he could tell the world that destruction was imminent.

After 8 1/2 hours of armed standoff, Mr. Stewart was apprehended by the police. He’s now doing three concurrent life terms at Mule Creek State Prison, near Sacramento. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times given in May of 2008, he shared that he’s unrepentant, convinced that he only botched the timing of his message. He remains absolutely positive that he did the right thing in trying to warn people that the world will soon be destroyed. If he had it to do over again, he would. What could have been a simple message of grace became somehow obscured by an growing obsession with condemnation and destruction.

It’s a strange tension for many Christians, one that can be reinforced if you bother going beyond branding and slogans and actually look at the passage that surrounds that iconic verse. It’s a challenging one.

The saying itself comes in the middle of a conversation that Jesus is having with a curious Pharisee named Nicodemus. Nicodemus truly struggles to understand what Jesus is talking about, as he’s prone to taking things...like being “born again” completely literally. As Jesus tried to explain himself to Nicodemus, the conversation turns to talk of the purpose of the coming of the Son of Man, one of the terms that Jesus uses to describe his relationships with God. What is his purpose? His purpose is defined by God’s love for the world, and God’s desire to give those who know the truth of Christ’s grace eternal life.

That’s the 3:16 part of John...but Jesus may not be finished talking. Or maybe he is. We aren’t sure, actually, where the words of Jesus end in this passage. In large part, that’s because the Greek language in which this Gospel was written doesn’t happen to have anything like quotation marks. You just have to kinda figure out from the context of a sentence when someone is no longer speaking. Many reputable scholars think that Jesus is done in verse 15, and 3:16 through 3:21 come from the voice of the Gospel writer.

Whichever way, the passage goes on, as conveyed by John’s elegantly simple Greek, to describe the purpose of the Son of Man further. Here, we start to get some mention of condemnation and judgement. Verses 17 through 19 talk a great deal about who is and who is not condemned. Coming off of the grace of verse 16, the rest of this passage seems to stand as a stern warning: believe, or be condemned. The transition can seem as intense as the one that was expressed in the life of Rainbow Man. Grace on the one hand...and the threat on the other.

Here, though, it actually does help to have a smattering of Greek, and to be aware that sometimes what is expressed in the Gospel we read may not be exactly what was written by it’s author. English and Greek are related, as English relies on Greek for many of it’s words...but they are not the same.

The word “condemn,” for instance, has a strong negative connotation. You condemn a building when it’s time to knock it down. You condemn a rainbow-afro wearing John 3:16 quoting hostage taker to prison for pulling a pistol on bystanders and the police. Condemnation means a judgment in the negative. Problem is, the word that the most ancient texts of John’s Gospel uses to describe what the Son of Man is doing in verses 17 through 19 doesn’t have that negatively charged meaning. The word is krino, and it just means to judge or to decide. It can just as easily imply a positive outcome as a negative outcome. Where it appears in verse 19, for instance, as the related word krisis, any sense of being a negative value judgment is completely missing. It is simply “judgment,” or, if you’re using the NIV, “verdict.” Verse 19 would read pretty strangely if we translated it as “And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world...” That would as far from John’s point as it’s possible to get, and that point is the depth of God’s love as expressed in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. What we get when we go back to the original language is a much more consistent passage, one that speaks primarily of God’s love and God’s willingness to embrace humankind, and in which condemnation and damnation are not a central part of what Jesus was all about.

There, I think, is a core Gospel challenge for many contemporary Christians. It’s easy for the message of grace to be lost in our desire to be sure of our own savedness. It’s easy for the message of God’s Kingdom to be lost as we dither endlessly over who gets to go to their 10,000 square foot mansion in heaven and who gets Left Behind. It’s easy for us to take this message of reconciling love as just another thing to argue about or to use as a club against those who don’t believe as we do.

It’s just a question of judgment.

Course Correction

2009-02-01T11:57:00.000-08:00

Course Correction from David Williams on Vimeo.

The Heart of a King

2009-02-01T11:56:00.001-08:00

The Heart of A King from David Williams on Vimeo.

Favored One

2009-02-01T11:54:00.000-08:00

Favored One from David Williams on Vimeo.

Building from the Ruins

2008-12-16T11:14:00.000-08:00

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
Rev. David Williams; 12.14.08
Scripture Lesson: Isaiah 61:1-4; 8-11

Several months ago, anyone traveling across the Washington metropolitan area on our painfully inadequate public transportation system would have begun to notice some rather striking advertisements posted in Metro stations.

They weren’t the usual fare of metro maps or Macys ads or charities begging for you to remember them during a United Way campaign. They didn’t involve rail thin models looking at each other poutily while crammed into boot-cut jeans sized to provide a relaxed fit for skeletons. They weren’t pitching the latest Omnia touch screen phone from Samsung, with 3G browsing, an HD camcorder, and optional surgically implanted neural dock.

These ads showed stark images of a bleak Washington landscape after a nuclear attack. In the background of one ad, the Capitol building stands as a shattered ruin, nestled on a National Mall now painted with a mix matte grey ash and blast-black. In the foreground, a faceless warfighter stares out at you through the lenses of a bio-chem armored helmet. In another ad, the Washington Monument stood silhouetted like a broken, bony finger against a similarly grey sky, great gashes torn from it’s sides.

These ads got noticed. For those who have lived in the Washington Area long enough to remember the Cold War, such pictures of destruction are enough to stir up memories of the nuclear nightmares of childhood. For those who were in this area during the horrific moments of September 11, and felt the fear that held the whole region in a chokehold of anxiety after the anthrax and sniper attacks, this vision of WMD effects wasn’t particularly welcome either. People complained to the metro board. People wrote angry letters about the ads the Post and the Washington Times. Articles discussing the propriety of the ads and the product they were pitching appeared in the media. The ads themselves became news.

In other words, this was an insanely, wildly, gloriously successful marketing campaign.

What was being pitched was a game called Fallout 3, the latest from a well regarded Bethesda software publisher. The game is set in the post-apocalyptic remains of the Washington Metro Area, generations after a nuclear exchange between the United States and China leaves the world in ruins. Reviewers describe it as an absolutely haunting game, filled with a level of primal violence and survival-of-the-fittest moral ambiguity that makes Lord of the Flies look like good storytime reading for preschoolers.

So, of course, I’m playing it...for purposes of sermon research, of course, and only well after my boys have gone to sleep. It is relentlessly grim, both spare and tense, and filled with intelligent writing and voice acting. It completely engrosses you in it’s world, giving a profoundly realistic sense of the depths to which human beings will go to survive after everything they’ve known and the whole framework of their society has been obliterated. The struggles to rebuild something, to live something resembling a worthwhile life...well...they feel painfully real.

From the Book of the Prophet Isaiah today we hear a message from a time in which the struggle to rebuild from the ashes of a society was front and center. In our Bible studies over the last few weeks, we’ve discussed how most Bible scholars worth their salt see the Book of Isaiah divided up into three clear sections, each of which has it’s own particular focus.

Today’s section comes from what is known as Third Isaiah, which was written and preached perhaps 510-515 years before Christ by a prophet who followed the tradition of Isaiah. It’s visions and proclamations do not describe a Hebrew people comfortably ensconced in Jerusalem and the temple, as do the first thirty-nine chapters. They also do not assume that the Jewish people are shattered in the Babylonian exile, like chapters forty through fifty-five. The context of the last ten chapters is clear: the Hebrew people are struggling to rebuild.

What they’re struggling to rebuild is their whole society, wiped from the face of the earth in by the relatively low-tech but nonetheless effective implements of the Babylonian Empire. After Babylon was defeated by Persia, the Hebrew people were encouraged to return to their ancestral lands. They were filled with hope at the prospect of return, but what they came back to was the ancient equivalent of stepping out of a fallout shelter. There was pretty much nothing left.

The walls of Jerusalem had fallen, and the temple had been razed. Everything had to be rebuilt from the ground up. The people returned thinking that things were going to be easy, and things were the farthest thing from easy. Life was hardscrabble, a serious struggle from day to day. The bricks that had been part of the walls of Jerusalem did not leap up on their own and autonomously reassemble themselves into Zion Gardens Condos and Suites.

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

But the word from God that Isaiah proclaimed defied that despair. It was a word of intense 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 work through his people to bring about restoration.

For the oppressed and the brokenhearted and the captives who had returned to the land and still despaired, the prophet affirmed the devastation that they were experiencing and the ruins in which they found themselves. Yet in the face of their suffering...and in some way because of their suffering...the prophet declares that God’s love for justice and covenant presence will make his people an instrument with which he will rebuild the brokenness of their land.

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 right now, as many of us look fearfully out at the seeming chaos and confusion of our economy.

With banks and businesses both small and large failing, families struggling with foreclosure and job loss, and retirees reading their investment reports with trembling hands, it is easy for us to fall into the same kind of despair that seems to have afflicted those Hebrews upon their return. With the media humming with hysteria, every headline and talking head warning of a new depression, it’s easy to give in. We feel an uncertainty that can paralyze us, allowing us to turn from the task of rebuilding. We become overwhelmed. We hunker down.

In his reaffirmation of God’s essential justice and care for his people, the prophet is telling those who despaired that no matter what happens, God will show grace to a covenant people. If we’re willing to accept that grace, and to practice it, those places of ruin will be rebuilt.

It won’t be easy, and it won’t come quick. Nothing good does. But if we turn our will towards righteousness...meaning care for one another...and praise...meaning care that glorifies God...then the garden will spring forth.

Water in the Desert

2008-12-13T08:27:00.000-08:00

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
12.07.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture: Mark 1:1-8

A while back, I had the great pleasure of presiding over the wedding of a friend. I’d known her since high school, when she and my wife were part of a circle BFFs before the word BFF even existed. It was a complete joy officiating over her union with her husband, but as I prepared for the service, I got a little bit concerned about the location.

Her parents had left the Washington metro area years back, and now lived in Las Cruces, New Mexico. It’s an absolutely gorgeous place, smack out in the middle of the desert in the Rio Grande Valley and surrounded by mountains. The plan for the wedding ceremony was to have it in a park at the base of the mountains, at an amphitheater that had towering and glorious peaks as a backdrop. When the couple showed me pictures of where they wanted to have the event, I had to agree. It was a perfect place, just radiant with the glory of God’s creation.

That didn’t make me any less nervous. I tend to be a total wuss when it comes to outdoor weddings, because as complicated and challenging as organizing a service can be, adding the randomness of weather into the mix is just more than I can stand. What if it rains? What if one of those sudden storms pop up, and the wedding party has to flee from driving winds and torrential rain?

When I arrived to check out the site the day before and to do the wedding rehearsal prep, I realized that my worry about rain was totally off. This was really and truly desert. The sun was brilliant and intense, and the light pressed down like a physical presence. But the heat you felt was totally different. It was the complete opposite of the Washington August heat, which is like getting into a jacuzzi while wearing a sleeping bag. This heat was totally dry, and the strong winds that blew off of the desert and up the sides of the mountains had not a single molecule of H2O in them. As I stared into that wind, I felt it greedily pull the moisture from my mouth and throat. After five minutes, my tongue felt like sandstone, and my eyes were like sand-crusted marbles. It’s a good thing I wasn’t going to have to do any public speaking there. Oh. Wait. I was.

The only option was water. I had to drink, and drink both regularly and constantly. Without that, my vocal cords would have dried out like parchment in a matter of minutes. Fortunately, the wedding party had provided this aplenty.

They knew, as anyone with a lick of sense knows, that there is nothing more precious in the desert than water. We kinda sorta know how important water is, but it’s easy to forget it as we trundle about our day to day lives, our Big Gulps in hand. Water is everywhere. But in the intense scarcity of the desert, our appreciation of the humble liquid that makes up around 70% of our physical forms is heightened. We need it more, and we become aware of how deeply we need it.

The desert and those wilderness places in the world have always been central to the lives of those who wanted to get down to the most essential, the most necessary, the most vital parts of their faith. Throughout the history of the people of Israel, desert places had always been the ones that had provided refuge from the distractions of the world. It was into the wilderness that monks had fled seeking escape, and it was from the wilderness that prophets came with proclamations of truths that were beyond the grasp of those who had forgotten what was truly necessary in the world.

As Mark’s Gospel begins, we heard today of a prophet who came from the wilderness, of John the Baptist. Mark’s book of the story of Christ begins by first declaring itself good news, and then gets right into a reference from the prophet Isaiah. That prophet’s poetic cry of the arrival of a messenger in the wilderness is declared a reference to John the Baptist. What John did was not too uncommon among the Hebrew people. Rituals of cleansing in water were part of the way in which Jews in the first century reclaimed themselves and recommitted themselves to their faith. In order to be ritually pure for worship in the temple, the Torah requires ritual bathing. While the process of being baptized was not quite the same, it had the same spiritual foundation.

But while there were similarities between what John did by the banks of the Jordan and what others had done before, there were some real and significant differences. What was striking about John was how intensely he pointed beyond the act that he was engaged in. While he was engaging in a ritual that had deep symbolic roots, the one who was to follow on afterwards, and who John himself was to baptize...that one would engage in an act far more potent and transforming than the ritual and symbolic cleansing of baptism by water.

The baptism by the Holy Spirit described by involves a far deeper transformation, a changing of the will through the presence of the grace of God. That sense of the presence of God, and the awareness that in some strange way God is working through you to change you...that’s the very heart and essence of the Gospel message that Jesus proclaimed.

But, you may ask, how does this work for us, today? To get a sense of the powerful presence of God’s Spirit, the prophets wandered out into the wildernesses of Judea. To know the working of God’s grace in themselves, the monks of the early Christian church isolated themselves in the deserts of North Africa. How can we get that same sense of God’s presence?

We are far closer to the desert than we might think. Not a desert as defined by the absence of water, but a desert as defined by the absence of the Spirit. Just as water brings green life and blooms and fruit, the fruits that come from the presence of the Spirit are grace and comfort and forgiveness. All of us experience areas in our lives in which those things are as hard to find as an orange tree in Death Valley.

Those broken and barren places may be a friendship that has soured. It might be a relationship where once there was love and now there is only hurt. It might be a place that should bring direction and hope, but brings only anger and confusion. It might be a season that should bring comfort and joy, but instead yields only stress and greed. Our lives do not lack for deserts, and they test us as truly as the burning sun tested the prophets. How we respond to those times and places is the measure of our faith.

We all have our deserts. And just like we need to take every opportunity to drink in the desert to keep it from drying us out like a stone, we need to take every opportunity to both seek and express the fruits of the Spirit in those desert places in our lives. There is no moment or place in your life where that cannot be expressed, where the Spirit cannot work change. It comes when you offer a word of grace instead of a cutting remark. It comes when you choose to reach out to someone who is different, or who seems to stand in opposition to you. It comes when you choose to help someone grow, instead of ignoring them or allowing them to continue to fail.

That Spirit is always there, always present, always waiting to rain down upon the dead places and to bring life to them again.

Know that truth, and drink deep.

Generation Now

2008-12-06T20:30:00.000-08:00

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
11.30.08; Rev. David Williams

Scriptures: Mark 13: 24-37

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been watching the activity in the marketplace with a considerable amount of interest. As my retirement investments ditch tens of thousands of dollars, and this church loses hundreds of thousands of dollars from it’s endowment, it’s hard not to be paying attention.

It’s strangely fascinating, and for some reason reminds me of this last summer, when I and the family were vacationing up at Hershey Park in Pennsylvania. A couple of the coasters there were just too intense, even for my coaster-happy 10 year old, so we’d sit and watch them as they went howling by, laden with screaming, happy, terrified park-goers.

Watching the markets lately is a bit like that, only you have to imagine that all of the coaster riders are carrying their life savings with them in big open buckets filled loose hundred dollar bills. As the ride soars by, the air is filled with their lost money, fluttering down and filling the air like dry leaves in a strong autumn wind. The screaming of the riders is still plenty, though.

For some reason this week, I found myself thinking back to a book that did extremely well waaaay back in the year 2000. It was written by James Glassman, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the current Undersecretary for Something Something Something in the outgoing administration. Mr. Glassman suggested that stocks were hugely undervalued, and that the Dow Jones Industrial Average was going to soar high up into the heavens, more than tripling in value in the near future. The book was entitled: Dow 36,000. Glassman was not alone in this prediction. There were books calling for the Dow to be at 40,000. There were books calling for the Dow to be at 100,000. An investment advisor by the name of Robert Zuccaro was pitching a much more specifically dated book back in 2001. It was entitled: Dow 30,000 by 2008.

It’s easy to be cynical. Sure, the market has plunged wildly this last year, dropping from close to 14,000 to under 9,000. But we have, what...still a bit over a month left in the year! You never know!

For Glassman and Zuccaro and others like them, those totally incorrect predictions are likely to make most of us rather skeptical about taking their advice in the future. Any future they might have had as a market prophet is shot. That’s fine, though. There are plenty of other jobs out there in retail. Oh...wait...not any more. Ooopsie.

Our reluctance to take the these self-declared market gurus seriously anymore actually follows a biblical rule about prophecy. How do you tell whether or not a prophet is truly from God? In the Torah, those first five books of scripture that are the highest law of the Hebrew Bible, the measure is pretty clear. In Deuteronomy 18:21-22, we hear that the measure of a prophetic truth is...whether it comes true or not. From those verses we hear this:

"How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the LORD ? If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the LORD does not take place or come true, that is a message the LORD has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously. Do not be afraid of him.”

Pretty easy to remember. While this law works well for weeding out delusional prophets of God and crackhead financial advisors alike, it also leads us to a great fuddling question. If you were listening to today’s scripture from the Gospel of Mark, one verse should have whacked you straight in the forehead.

Beginning at the start of chapter 13, Jesus has begun to describe the things that will happen as the end-times come. We hear of trials and tribulations that will be endured. We hear that Judea will undergo all manner of bad things, and that people will flee to the hills. In today’s passage, which follows on all of this talk of apocalypse, we hear that the Son of Man will come in his glory, and gather up the chosen. It’s pretty standard “Left Behind” book fare.

But then things get odd. In verse thirty of chapter 13, as he wraps up his we hear Jesus say this: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.” To which any of us who are actually listening might say...what? Huh? Ex-squeeze me?

Jesus is talking to his innermost circle of disciples. He is telling Peter, James, John and Andrew about the fulfillment of the Kingdom and the coming of the Son of Man, and saying that it will happen in their generation. That generation, of course, lived 2,000 years ago. So...um...how does this teaching of Jesus...which is as clear and as straightforward as could be...fit within the measure of truth laid out within Scripture itself?

To put it more plainly...is Jesus wrong? I mean, we’re happy to snicker at the dolt who claimed that the Dow would hit 30,000 this year. Are we equally happy to laugh at this nutjob from Nazareth who claimed that the Kingdom of God would come 2,000 years ago? If you talk to many atheists...as I do...this is one of their very favoritest passages. Look, they say, parading around triumphantly. Jesus said the end time would come, and it didn’t. Naany Naany Noo Nooo!

Yet I think that approach to what Jesus is saying misses several vitally important things about his teachings. The first...quite frankly...is that most of what was described in chapter 13 of Mark’s Gospel did occur. Within the lives of most of his listeners, Judea was completely destroyed by the Roman Empire. The city of Jerusalem fell, burned into nothing in the year 70 by the combined assault of three Roman legions. The second temple was razed, and Israel as a nation was shattered for nearly 2,000 years.

Yet though that “suffering” which is described earlier in the chapter and is referred to in verse 24 seem certain to have happened within a generation of Christ’s saying it, the passage seems to go further. Jesus suggests strongly that somehow Christ’s kingdom may be something that the disciples will experience...and yet it clearly hasn’t happened yet. The Son of Man descending? Has he? Angels gathering the elect? They can’t have. Can they?

It is that tension between the arrival of the fullness of the Kingdom and the anticipation of it’s arrival that is why this passage gets served up on the first Sunday of Advent. What Jesus is saying is not to be understood as being true only for the generation that heard him first. The reality he is describing isn’t something that occurs at one moment in time, or at one place. The arrival of God’s Kingdom does not belong to one particular generation...it belongs to all of them. It’s not a reality that happens at one moment, and then passes on. As Christ says, though Heaven and Earth will pass away, my words will not pass away.

What Jesus is doing is not predicting a future, for this generation or some future generation. He is declaring something that is happening, right now, for you and for me and for those who came before us and for those who will come after.

As we move towards the celebration of the coming of the Christ child, let’s do all that we can to live into that moment.

Judgment Call

2008-11-23T12:16:00.000-08:00

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
11.23.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 25:31-46

I’ve always loved bloopers.

When I was a kid, nothing struck me as funnier than watching someone make a highly entertaining error in judgment. I always thought that as I got older and more jaded I would stop finding America’s Funniest Videos quite as amusing. I’ve got a degree in Religious Studies from Mr. Jefferson’s University. I spent ten years working for the Aspen Institute, which is one of the most muckity muckity organizations in the Western Hemisphere, if it does say so itself. I graduated from theological seminary magna cum laude, and am now a Minister of Word and Sacrament with all of the rights and privileges thereunto bestowed.

But for some reason, watching a video of a guy knocking himself out while showing off with nunchucks still makes me laugh uncontrollably. Got a short video of someone dancing on top of an obviously too-flimsy table at a wedding? It works on me every single time. Show me a YouTube clip of that overeager amateur theater performer who’s great at belting out the mostly-on-key show tunes but not so good at knowing where the edge of the stage is? I’ll giggle till I just about pee. I just can’t help myself. About the giggling part, at least.

I know I shouldn’t. I’m not eight years old any more. I should be better than that, more mature, more dignified. But I’m not, and at the rate I’m going, I don’t think I ever will be. There is something about those essentially harmless errors that is fundamentally delightful. Why is that? I think we like those entertaining mistakes for a couple of reasons.

First, because they represent the unexpected. Human beings take joy in things that don’t turn out quite like we anticipate. If you know exactly how something will turn out, it doesn’t delight you, doesn’t stir you to rejoicing or infectious giggles. It’s what makes a good joke funny. The unanticipated, the wacky, and the absurd are the heart of comedy.

Second, because they show us how flawed we are. If we’re really getting it, we’re not laughing because we’re enjoying the embarrassment or discomfort of others. The Germans call that dark enjoyment shadenfreude, and while that might be a factor for some, it isn’t a factor for me. I’m not laughing because I enjoy the suffering of others. I’m laughing out of sympathy. I’m laughing because I’m feeling it myself. All of us have messed up. All of us have...with the best of intentions...managed to totally mess up on at least a dozen occasions, possibly even over the last week. For all of our efforts to be dignified and in control, we aren’t. We just aren’t...and often it shows. For all of our conviction that we know exactly what we’re doing, more often than not, we’re the one who loses control of those nunchucks or walks too close to the edge of that pool. Our judgment fails us, and unexpected hilarity ensues.

Yet for some reason, the deeply unexpected moment of judgment we hear from Matthew’s Gospel today doesn’t strike us as particularly funny. It isn’t funny at all, actually, even though it is one of the most intensely unanticipated moments in all of Scripture. Throughout the Gospels, in all of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, he speaks a great deal about the Kingdom of God. He tells us what it means to live and act according to that Kingdom. But in how many places does he teach about how the final determination? In how many places does he teach exactly what will happen on that final Day of Judgment?

Just one.

It’s right here, at the end of twenty-fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. Unlike the stories that have come before, which told about the need to prepare for the coming kingdom, this story is not a parable. It is not a story told as a symbol. It is not a story that holds within it a message that you have to think about or puzzle over as you work your way through what it means. Though most of Christ’s storytelling was through parables, here he sets aside that way of teaching and does something completely different. Here, he tells it as it is. Or, rather, as it will be.

It’s a classical image, of the Son of Man on the throne of God, separating out all of the peoples of the world. It’s the big judgment call, the final moment when the lives of all of those who have lived are measured against the only standard that counts, the standard of Christ Jesus Himself, who is the Way, and the Truth, and the Life.

That should be a simple process. All the Son of Man needs to do is check whether you’re a member in good standing in the Presbyterian Church (USA). Right? But when all those nervous Methodists and Pentecostals get to the front of the line, we find that the nature of the judgment call being made is...well...surprising to them.

When the Son of Man congratulates the righteous for making the cut, he thanks them for showing him care, for feeding him and clothing him and visiting him when he was sick or imprisoned. And the righteous are...well...surprised. Um...when did I do that? I don’t remember doing that. I remember praying. I remember going to church...um...sometimes. I sorta got through reading the Bible, at least up until those long lists of names put me to sleep. But when did do any of those other things? When did I do any of those things for God?

The answer is a surprise. It’s unexpected. It’s unanticipated. You did those things for me when you did those things for the least of my brothers and sisters. For those who inadvertently made the right call, it’s a moment worth of joy and laughter. For those who didn’t...well...things aren’t so good.

But it’s that first group that really are the ones doing what we don’t expect. If you are a student of human nature, as we all become as the years go by, you quickly come to expect human beings to mess things up. Our basic instinct is to serve ourselves, is to seek our own interest, is to make sure that we come out on top and that the other guy is goin’ down. That’s human nature. It’s what we do.

Our judgment call, time after time, is in favor of ourselves and our buddies. It is in favor of our wealth and our pride and our comfort. It is what stirs wars. It is why human beings turn against each other and tear at each other, why they shout and scream and whisper, why they hate and hurt and lie. Honestly, it isn’t particularly delightful. It is certainly not unexpected.

What is unexpected is when we are surprised by our own grace, when we stumble into goodness, when we inadvertently fumble our own selfishness and surprise ourselves. By the standards of the world, it might seem like bad judgment. By the standards of the world, it’s like a mistake or an error, like the thing that wasn’t part of the plan and wasn’t supposed to happen.

[Where's the conclusion? Well...you had to be there.]

12 Months To Live

2008-11-23T05:55:00.000-08:00

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
11.16.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 25:14-30

It’s a scenario that has launched a thousand Hallmark Movies of the Week. The main character has been feeling a bit under the weather. They finally get themselves around to going to the doctor, who administers some tests. The tests come back...well...they come back indicating that they need to do more tests. So off our protagonist goes to a specialist, who administers the additional tests.

There’s much sitting around in an examination room. As time goes by, the character starts feeling more and more annoyed. What could possibly be taking so long? They’ve got other things to do that day. There’s the laundry that needs doing, and then there’s that new client they need to call and set up a meeting with. And today was the day that you’d scheduled in time to research a new data plan for your cellphone. I mean, c’mon! What’s taking so long! There’s important stuff that needs to get done!

It is at this moment that the doctor comes through the door, and they’ve got a grim look on their face. They look right at the Hallmark Movie of the Week main character, and, swallowing, say, “We’ve gotten back the test results. I’m afraid you have asymmetric uvular fargulomitis. It’s very rare...but it means you only have twelve months to live. I’m so sorry.”

Now, if you’ve seen one of these movies before, you know what happens. At first, there is stunned silence. This is followed by much screaming and weeping. That is followed by disbelief. “Die! I can’t die! Who will take care of little Timmy?” That is followed by anger, usually expressed by shouting up at the heavens while a camera pans away. “How can this happen to me? Noooooooo!!!!!” I’ve heard that shouting it loudly enough will invariably get you an Emmy. Then...well...then what?

Does the hero of the story just curl up into a whimpering fetal ball in a dark corner of their attic for eleven months, three weeks, and two days, waiting for the clock to run out?

Well, they probably do the fetal ball thing for at least a week. Then suddenly they realize: “Hey...I need to do all the things I’ve always wanted to do. I don’t have much time.” Getting that reminder that you are, in fact, mortal is something that has a tendency to focus the mind. So before asymmetric uvular fargulomitis takes it’s terrible toll, there’s a whole bunch of life to be lived. You have unfinished business, and you need to get busy with it. Every moment becomes utterly precious.

Have you always wanted to travel to India and see the Taj Mahal? Then now is the time to do it. Is there that one great idea for a novel that’s been pinging about in your head for years? Well, you’d better start writing it. Always wanted to learn to ride a motorcycle? Hey...no time like the present, and I know just the pastor who could teach you. Have you always wanted to run down one of those long smooth slopes near Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina, until the hang glider you’re running with bites into the breeze and the ground falls away and you rise up like an eagle? You have...let’s see...eleven months, three weeks, one day, twenty three hours and...um..54 minutes to get that done. So get on the stick.

Because there’s going to come a moment when the clock runs down to zero, and you’ve got no more time. The things you’ve left undone will remain undone.

Today’s parable from the Gospel of Matthew is all about things not getting done. It is a bit of a harsh one. In it, a rich man goes on a journey, and entrusts his property to three of his slaves. Upon his return, he discovers that the one who’d received the most had invested it in business ventures, and doubled it. The one who’d received half that amount had invested it in business ventures, and doubled it. The last one...well...he’d hidden it away from the world, making absolutely sure that there was no chance that any of it was lost.

The rich man gets seriously annoyed. How dare the slave fail to invest? He takes back the money, gives it to the first slave, and fires the guy with a flourish worthy of Donald Trump, casting him into the outer darkness of weeping and gnashing of teeth that comes when you fail to make it in reality tv.

it’s a difficult story to hear. It tends to strike us as a little unfair. Hey...didn’t the slave just do what they were supposed to do? It isn’t like they went to Atlantic City and lost it. It tends to strike us as perhaps a little unrealistic. What if that first slave had gone out and invested the ten talents in a nice solid business with a historic trend of solid return on investment...you know, like Lehman Brothers? How happy would the boss have been then?

That is, of course, not the point that Jesus was trying to make. This story comes to us in a section of Matthew that is dedicated to preparedness and setting ourselves right with God. This section begins back in Matthew 24:3, as the disciples gather on the Mount of Olives to listen to Jesus teach them in private. These teachings run through the end of chapter 25, and it’s the last sustained message from Jesus before the story of his betrayal and death begins. For that reason, the teachings have a consistent urgency and intensity about them, reminding us again and again of the importance of our actions in the now.

What we hear strongly in this morning’s parable builds upon the passage that Pastor Mike read to us last week. While the five bridesmaids managed not to get done what needed to get done, it isn’t just being unprepared that is the danger. It is the way in which we are unprepared. You certainly can’t say that this third servant wasn’t preparing for his master’s return. He knew what was coming...but chose to be passive and fearful in his response to that coming reality. His form of preparation for the inevitable was to refuse to take any risk, to retreat into the comfort of what was known. He hunkered down and sheltered in place.

But in our lives of faith, that approach doesn’t recognize a central part of what it means to live as a faithful Christian, that thing that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called “the fierce urgency of the now.” It is that “fierce urgency” that speaks to our need to act, and not simply remain passive and inert in our faith lives.

Every moment of our lives calls for that depth of commitment, because this life is far shorter than we’d like to admit. Every moment is infinitely precious, and we need to look to our unfinished business..and get busy.

The One Law

2008-10-28T06:22:00.000-07:00

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
10.26.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 22:34-46

There’s a reason there are so many lawyers in America. No, it has very little to do with the fact that many parents view it as the only acceptable alternative after you don’t manage to make it into medical school.

There are so many lawyers because there are just so many laws.

Let’s take the United States Code as an example. I can’t claim to fully understand it, but here’s what little I managed to pluck off the internet this last week. Every law passed by Congress gets plugged into one of 50 “Titles,” which logically sort American laws into different categories. Those titles are divided into subtitles, which are divided into chapters, which are divided into subchapters, which are divided into parts, which are divided into sections.

As a Presbyterian, I find that all strangely exciting.

For example, Title 26 has to do with revenue and taxation, so if you had this deep and burning desire to know when you have to file a special return, you could look to Title 26, Subtitle F, Chapter 61, Subchapter A, Part I, Section 6001, which tells you everything you need to know. Or is that Section 6002? I always muddle those two.

How many laws are there? Well, Title 26...which is one of the 50 Titles...is about 7,500 pages long. Fortunately, it’s a page turner. When you get to Title 26, Subtitle V, Chapter 37, Subchapter B, Part I, Sec. 7042, you’re just not going to believe the plot twist it serves up. Man. I was shaking my head after that one. Never saw it coming. It seriously sets you up for the sequel in Title 27. Don’t worry. I won’t ruin the ending.

The sheer volume of American law is truly dizzying. Hundreds of thousands of pages of code are simply more than any one human being...or even a roomful of human beings...can come to terms with.

I know they say that ignorance of the law is no excuse, but you couldn’t be aware of the fullness of the laws that govern our country if you spent your entire lifetime studying them and every single neuron in your brain was dedicated to learning them, including the neurons that you currently use to figure out how to eat, breathe, and use most universal remotes. When regulations and requirements reach that level of complexity, it becomes harder and harder for us to know how we relate to them. It becomes harder for us to know how to apply them to our lives.

For the ancient Hebrews, the law was also a big deal, although it was considerably less complex. As the scholars of Torah figured it, there were 613 total laws. 248 of them were things you had to do, and 365 of them were things you were supposed to not do. Compared to the United States Code, this was a cakewalk.

Still, though, the complexities of Torah were such that they consumed the thoughts of those who took it seriously. In the time of Jesus, those folks were called the Pharisees, and today we hear about how one of them asks him a question. It’s a lawyer, but by “lawyer,” we need to understand that Matthew means someone who would be more like a bible scholar ...challenges Jesus to make a judgement call about the law. It’s an interesting question: “Which is the greatest commandment in the law?”

Jesus, of course, knows his stuff. He responds with a quotation from Deuteronomy 6:5...”You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all of your soul, and with all of your mind.” It’s a good answer, as that verse is the second part of the Shema, the holiest prayer of the Jewish people. So...that’s the commandment, right?

Jesus doesn’t stop there, though. Sure, he’s given the guy his “greatest commandment.” But he’s not finished with his response. While this is the first and greatest commandment in his book, he feels compelled to take it a step further. He makes sure to add in a second commandment, which he pulls from another book of the Torah...the book of Leviticus. From Leviticus 19:18, he says: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Having presented his questioner with this reply, he makes it clear...both of these commandments seem to be part of one single law. When he declares that the two laws are similar, he’s not really setting one up as above the other. They are to be understood as somehow part of the same single unitary thing. It is on the combination of both of these that the entire law...meaning the law given to the Jewish people by God...finds its foundation.

Our lives are not simple things. We have to figure out how to make moral choices in countless different situations. How do we act in the workplace? How do we respond to those around us in school? How do we deal with our families, and our friends? How do we deal with that annoying neighbor who cranks his music up at 3 in the morning when we’ve got important things to do the next day?

If you’re living your life in accordance with the faith that Christ brought to us, the answer to that question does not lie in having memorized a whole slew of different laws, each one designed to deal with every single specialized circumstance. You don’t need to dig down to find exactly which chapter and subchapter and part and section speaks directly to where you find yourself at that very moment.

Those things are very useful for organizing a society, and for trying to make sure things go more-or-less smoothly as we human beings bump and jostle against one another in the world. But faith governs us very differently. Faith is not about nattering over each tiny detail. Faith is about purpose. Faith is about direction. Faith is the thing that gives life depth and meaning.

For that reason, followers of Jesus Christ have a single law that gives just that sense of purpose. It is a remarkably simple thing. It is a thing that most of us can grasp without having to spend our entire lives studying some highly complicated ethics. Yet if we look hard at how most Christians seem to live their lives, it is something that we seem to struggle to come to terms with. We’d almost rather lose ourselves in studying and legalistic dickering over tiny little details. We’d almost rather throw up our arms and declare that it’s just all too much for us to possibly understand.

When there are laws enough to fill a thousand books, it’s hard to grasp them all. But when there is just one law, it is harder for us still. How can we find a way to apply that law to everything we do? How is it even possible?

Christ wants all of us to spend the rest of our lives finding that out.

Republic and Responsibility

2008-10-21T06:59:00.000-07:00

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
10.19.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 22:15-22

I enjoy blogging. I am, as many of you folks know, a fairly compulsive blogger, and it’s not for the fame and the glory. There are now over 100 million blogs in the world, and the way I figure it by my dismal technorati numbers, I’m probably number seventy-five million, four hundred and thirty seven thousand, nine hundred and twenty two. Not that I’m keeping track or anything.

Still and all, there are many good reasons to put myself out there.

First, I like to write. It’s good mental exercise. Keeping an online journal of my meditations and reflections on life helps me to explore ideas that are too random to make their way here on Sunday. This helps me avoid the pastoral temptation to just ramble on and on and on about everything I’ve thought about this week. That keeps most of my sermons under that magic twenty minute adult attention span mark, and for that, I’m sure you’re all truly grateful.

Second, I think that if pastors are going to study scripture and society and reflect on it as part of a daily discipline, they should do so publicly...so that everyone and anyone who has the inclination can see the results of those reflections. Pastors are supposed to be public thinkers. And, yes, it’s just a tiny drop in the great global slopbucket of blogorreah, but it’s still worth doing.

Third, and most important, it means that when I write, I’m going to be called on what I write. People who don’t agree and who stumble across my page are going to let me know about it. Sometimes, the folks who comment are just trolls, small hairy beings who live under bridges who couldn’t care less about getting into a real exchange. They just want to spell badly at you and snap angrily at your ankles. But other times, those disagreements develop into fascinating conversations about the tensions within our society. Even though the disagreement is intense, you find yourself getting to know that person. Even though the disagreement may seem irreconcilable, you find yourself liking and caring for the soul that hides behind their cartoonish avatar.

Over the last year or so, I’ve engaged in some intense but almost invariably civil disagreements with a deeply conservative young woman. She’s a navy officer, fervently Christian, and as sharp as a tack. While we’re on the opposite sides of the political spectrum, I respect her formidable intellect and her writing ability. Though I’m often frustrated at her inability to see the world as I do (which as we all know, is correct 142% of the time), I still appreciate her as a daughter of Eve. Though I wish she bore less anger in her heart, I know she’s a basically decent and honorable soul.

I keep track of her writings through my feed reader, and when I took a look at what she’d posted this week, I was compelled to challenge her.

She’s given up on the election this year. She’s convinced that neither major party candidate reflects her profound conservatism, and isn’t going to vote at all. Now you might think I’d be pleased at this. Y’all know where I stand politically, and might assume I would be pleased with this. Booyah! Another one bites the dust! But hearing her cast aside her vote in cynical resignation, I felt that I had to do a little witnessing. Why?

Because a significant majority of Americans do exactly the same thing. In this great democracy, most of our citizens have allowed cynicism or apathy to stand between them and fulfilling that basic duty at the polling booth. Some might say: why is that bad? Isn’t it our right to not vote if we so choose?

For a partial answer to that, let’s turn to today’s interesting little story from the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus is having another run-in with the Pharisees, who are trying to get him into trouble with the law. After buttering him up a little bit with flattery, they ask him a question that they think can have no correct answer. That question is simply this: Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar?

It was a very well conceived trap.

On the one hand, if you answered yes, it meant that you were willing to use Roman money on which was inscribed assertions of the emperor’s divinity. It meant that you were assenting to him as a god, and betraying the God of Israel. It also meant you were supporting the hated occupiers of the Holy Land. So you couldn’t answer yes, or you were a traitor to the Jewish people.

On the other hand, if you answered no, it meant that you were a dangerous revolutionary, a threat to the Empire. The Roman authorities didn’t look kindly on people who refused to pay their taxes. So you couldn’t answer no, or you were a threat to Rome.

Jesus was not so easily taken in. Given the choice of saying yes or now, he didn’t say either. He just told everyone to look at the coin, and see who was on it. It was the emperor, of course. So give him what belongs to him, and give God what belongs to God. It was a perfect answer, both yes and no, neither yes nor no. I’m not sure any modern day politicians could have done better. The trap his enemies had set for him snapped closed on empty air.

But as we hear his answer, we have to ask ourselves: what it is that we owe the emperor today? Both in this passage and in the Apostle Paul’s discussion of Christian citizenship in Romans 13, we know that we do have a duty to the government of the nations we inhabit. We don’t have an emperor, of course. We’re not an Empire or a Kingdom. Here in America, we’re a Republic. What do we owe, when the “emperor” is us? What do we owe to the emperor when we the people are the emperor? We don’t just owe just our taxes. All that an empire needs is for people to think of themselves primarily as taxpayers. But this is a democracy, and what a democracy needs from it’s citizens in order to thrive is participation.

Our duty in a democracy is to pay attention. It is to be engaged. When we fail to do that, we fail to give to Caesar what Christ told us is his due. We need to hear this passage in that way in our lives as citizens of our counties, of our states, of our nation.

But if we fuse that with what we owe Christ, it becomes a different thing. If we recognize that rendering unto God what is God’s means living a life of gracious forgiveness, showing lovingkindness and mercy and forbearance even to those who oppose us, we have to be citizens in a different way. We can stand firm on our political beliefs, but only if we are - first - standing firm on our faith.

It was that fundamental duty that I reaffirmed to my conservative blog-friend. No matter where we stand as Christians, no matter what our political orientation, we are each of us required to view our participation in the processes of the republic as a central and fundamental duty. It’s our task to remind each other of this, and support one another in this.

It’s what we owe.

We’re just a few short weeks away...so remember what it is you owe.

Wild Vines

2008-10-07T12:02:00.000-07:00

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda/United Korean Presbyterian Church
World Communion Sunday 2008; Rev. John An and Rev. David Williams

(preached in English and Korean)

Scripture Lesson: Isaiah 5:1-7

Sometimes a bright idea just doesn’t turn out the way you hoped.

Take, for example, the introduction of kudzu into the United States.

It’s a lovely flowering vine, brought to America in 1876.

It could be used as an ornamental plant.

The blossoms are rich and purple and vibrant.

And it’s really, really easy to grow.

Even I could probably grow it.

It has lush, broad leaves and deep taproots.

For that reason, Americans thought that it could prevent erosion.

So in the 1930s until the mid 1950s, farmers were encouraged to plant it.

Then they noticed something.

It really, really liked to grow.

And it grew a lot.

In it’s native Japan, where it was called kuzu, it had natural predators.

It was also limited by Japanese winters.

But in America’s South, growth conditions were perfect.

There was nothing to stop it.

At the height of a Virginia summer, kudzu vines grow a foot a day.

One.

Foot.

Every Day.

Kudzu now covers over seven million square acres of the South.

It strangles trees.

It smothers fields.

It covers crops.

It’ll overrun houses if you’ll let it.

Where once it was planted, now farmers fight against it.

They spray it and root it out.

It is the most invasive of the wild vines.

If you don’t fight it, starve it, or poison it

It will consume everything around it.

The prophet Isaiah also preached a great deal about wild vines.

Today, we heard his proclamation to the people of Judah.

Isaiah was preaching from Jerusalem, and to Jerusalem.

He had the ears of leaders.

He had the attention and respect of kings.

Many people in that position would have spoken easy platitudes.

They would have insured their position and spoken nothing hard.

But it was the time of the rise of Assyria.

Eight hundred years before Christ

Isaiah saw around him the flaws of his people.

He saw their complacence

He saw how the powerful in Jerusalem celebrated

Even though great threats faced them from the outside.

He saw how the wealthy in Jerusalem helped themselves to riches

Even when the poor scrabbled for a living.

He saw how everyone in Judah was utterly convinced that they could do no wrong.

They were God’s people!

God would protect them.

It didn’t matter how they lived.

It didn’t matter how they acted.

God would protect them.

In the face of that, Isaiah heard God’s challenge to the people and conveyed it.

Today’s passage expresses that challenge.

Isaiah spoke it in terms that all his listeners, rich and poor, would understand.

He spoke of a vineyard owned by a ruler.

That vineyard, though carefully prepared, was overrun with wild vines.

It yielded nothing of worth.

In the face of their injustice and unrighteousness,

Isaiah warned Judah of how land that wouldn’t yield would be treated.

That pleasant planting would be given over to ruin.

It would be an arid waste.

Because what growth there was was bitter and worthless and wild

The garden would be yielded to desolation.

It did not matter that the people were sure they were God’s people.

They had supplanted the harvest of righteousness

With a harvest of bloodshed.

They had supplanted a harvest of justice

With cries of despair and conflict.

Soon, with Assyria’s armies storming down from the north

Much of what Isaiah proclaimed would come to pass.

God would not stand by while his garden was overrun with wild vines.

He would tear down the walls that protected it.

He would make the garden a ruin.

As we each look to our own lives

We have to ask ourselves how deeply our hearts are overgrown.

We are all God’s gracious planting.

It is easy for us to personally assume, like those in Jerusalem, that God is always on our side.

We naturally believe that no matter what we do

God must be on our side.

But, like those whom Isaiah challenged, we have to always think:

Do our lives bear the fruit of God’s goodness?

Each and every one of us is called upon to show God’s grace in all we do.

How deeply do we show our Creator’s care to those around us?

How eagerly do we bear the fruit of righteousness?

How richly do we show God’s justice to the world?

How deeply do we manifest that highest fruit of the Holy Spirit

The self-sacrificing love that Christ showed to all?

Or are we overgrown?

Do our own desires tangle as heavy as kudzu on our souls?

Does our own pride

Pride in our position

Pride in our job

Pride in our spiritual superiority

Pride in our worldly wealth

Blind us to God’s love for others?

Does it try to strangle the good and gracious Gospel planting in us?

It is not the pride of others that should be our concern.

It is our own.

When we ask those questions, we must answer:

Of course it does.

None of us escape that temptation.

None of us.

Not a single person here today.

We all struggle with it.

So hear Isaiah, as Jerusalem heard and repented.

Hear that prophet’s word.

Bear good fruit, and be that pleasant planting.

Wilderness of Sin

2008-10-07T12:00:00.000-07:00

Shared Sacrifice

2008-10-07T11:57:00.000-07:00