Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
04.27.08; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Acts 17:22-31
We really, really, wanted there to be life on Mars. It’s our next door neighbor here in the solar system, and the hope in the heady early days of astronomy was that it would prove to be the home to intelligent life. From the observations of early skywatchers, and through the lenses of the first telescopes, those first scientists saw...or thought they saw...evidence that Mars was not all that different from our own home planet.
One hundred years ago, in fact, a book was published by famed early American astronomer Percival Lowell. In 1908 he published a book compiled from a series of lectures, which was entitled “Mars as the Abode of Life.” From observations using the at that point in time, Lowell was convinced that Mars was crisscrossed with a series of canals, which were being used by the sentient beings who lived on Mars to water their increasingly dry desert world. The possibility of a whole new world, a new fantastic point of view from a strange and wonderful new set of non-human friends, well, it sparked the imaginations of a generation.
Of course, all of our hopes of making friends with our little green neighbors were quickly dashed. We soon learned that Mars had an incredibly thin atmosphere with essentially no oxygen. Early probes to Mars found a desolate place, just dust and bone-numbing cold and intense and human-cooking radiation. The only things moving under their own power on the Martian surface are our own amazingly resilient Mars Rovers, who continue to pluckily noodle around as part of their now multi-year mission.
Next month, NASA’s Phoenix robotic lander will arrive on Mars after a long cruise through interplanetary space. When that craft settles down and begins digging deep into the permafrost near the Martian poles, there’s still the hope we might find something, some evidence of there having been life on that harsh little world. If we find it, it’s likely to be bacterial or viral, some hardy little single-celled bug that you couldn’t kill with a stick.
But the odds are against it. It seems to be a dead world.
And maybe, maybe, that’s for the best. How would we even communicate with an alien species? For all of the many ways that we human beings have learned to talk and share with one another, we’re unbelievably bad at making ourselves understood, and at understanding others. Human history is chock full of the wreckage of society after society that simply couldn’t bring themselves to see other human beings as human beings. Mostly, our first reaction when we encounter someone who is unlike us is to try to figure out if we can kill ‘em before they kill us.
Even in the same country, speaking more or less the same language and sharing many of the same experiences, we human beings often have trouble really understanding one another. We’re not willing to see another point of view, or to have enough empathy or imagination to figure out what another person thinks or believes. Given our track record dealing with one another, it’s probably a good thing that Mars proved not to be brimming over with intelligent life. Communicating with other cultures...other species...other peoples...well, that’s just not our specialty.
Which brings us, strangely enough, to the Apostle Paul. This morning, we find Paul in Athens, a strange and distant land for a Jew from Tarsus. Athens was the philosophical and cultural center of the Greek-speaking world, a place seemingly far, far distant from the backwaters of Judea. In that city, Paul found himself in a largely alien culture, filled with the gods of a hundred cultures and ancient philosophies. Those who heard about what he’d been saying in the synagogue came and challenged him to speak about this Christ he was proclaiming. These weren’t the Jews in Athens, but the philosophers, the Stoics and the Epicureans, the ones who would have debated and discussed the meaning and life and existence. They want to hear more, to talk, to exchange ideas, and to try to understand and debate what Paul was telling them.
They brought him to the place where all strange and new things were discussed and debated, up to a great rock promontory in Athens, a hill known as the Areopagus. “Pagus” just means “hill,” and according the ancient storytelling of the Greek people, this was the hill on which the war god Ares was born. Ares, of course, is the same god the Romans called Mars.
So atop Mars Hill, Paul stood and defended his message about Jesus.
But how? How is Paul going to tell these people about Christ, who he believed was the Messiah? Even the word Messiah meant nothing to them. Could he quote to them from the Bible? Well, that would have been hard, for two reasons. First, the New Testament didn’t exist yet. Second, the Bible didn’t mean anything to these philosophers. You can’t just say, “Well, it’s in the Bible” to someone who doesn’t believe that the Bible is the Word of God.
So what did Paul do? Among the many gifts that Paul had been given was the gift of communication, of telling people who Jesus was in ways that they could understand. What Paul did was to explain Jesus using language that Stoic and Epicurean philosophers would have understood. Epicureans rejected the idea that temples or statues were magic or places of power, and Paul pointed out to them that the Christ he proclaimed didn’t have anything to do with temples or idols made of gold. Stoics believed in the creative power of the universe, which made all things but could not be easily understood by human beings, and so Paul told them about God as creator. In verse 28, Paul quotes two philosopher poets. We’re not sure where the first one comes from. But the second quote, “for we too are his offspring,” is a quote from the Stoic philosopher Aratus, who wrote three hundred years before Christ.
Paul connects with them, on their terms. He understands them, on their terms. He speaks to them, on their terms. What he doesn’t do is beat them over the head and shoulders with language that they can’t understand, like an American tourist who thinks that the best way to get you to understand English is just to speak louder. He has a sense for who they are, and how they need to hear the good news. Not all of his listeners agree. But some are willing to listen and hear more.
It’s a pity that the church often doesn’t approach people in the way that Paul did. Too often, churches expect everyone who is not part of church to think the same way and act the same way as they do. They go out into the world, out beyond the life and language of their community, and they expect it to be just like church. So they go out, and speaking the language of church and describing Jesus in churchy ways, and are amazed when people who live in a culture that is, increasingly, like another world, doesn’t respond.
A well meaning person who read about me on the web sent me a packet of tracts the other week, little pamphlets to hand out to share about Jesus. Every one of those tracts went like this: “The Bible says this.” “The Bible says that.” And there wasn’t a word there that I personally disagreed with. But if you’re handing that to a person who doesn’t yet personally know the grace and love and justice of Christ, you might as well be giving them a tract written in Martian.
Each of us is called to witness, called to proclaim the Gospel, and like Paul on Mars Hill, we’ve got to be sure to do so in a way that others can understand. That means we have to listen, to be aware, to have both compassion and understanding for those who may at first seem alien and different to us.
It’s important, because we’re still hoping that there might be life...real life in Christ...on this spiritually desolate and God-starved world.
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Disposable Sheep
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
09.16.07; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Luke 15:1-10
No-one likes losing stuff. But are we really able to hear the words that Jesus spoke in the same way that his audience did in first century Judea?
We don’t live in the same era, and in our society, we’re pretty far away from caring about the stuff that clutters and piles up in our lives. We’re just so very used to tossing things away. Sure, you could use that plastic container a hundred times or more, or reuse that plastic spork for a dozen meals without it breaking. But we don’t. We drink, we eat, and we discard.
The boys and I often hike over to a neighborhood fast food establishment...I won’t tell you where, ‘cause my agent wasn’t able to negotiate enough compensation for this product placement... when my dear wife is off traveling or at a meeting. There, we consume plenty of empty calories, but also an amazing quantity of paper. After we’ve eaten, a mound of cups and fry containers and balled up hunks of wrappers piles high on that tray, seemingly taking up more room empty than they did full. They get dumped, of course, into the wide open maw of the trash bin.
It used to be worse. We used to get the boys kid’s meals, which not only had mounds of paper and cardboard, but also came with...a toy! These toys weren’t anything like the doofy little cardboard crowns that I used to get as a kid. No, these toys were real toys. Little handheld video games, batteries and all. Wind up cars. Action figures. Spongebob Bobbleheads. Little stuffed animals. Every last one was a marketing tie-in for a film or a T.V. show, but they were the kinds of things that you’d have paid good money for back when I was but a lad. Progress!
Only... the kids played with them for about 30 minutes, then forgot them. If you go once a week and you get two toys each time, they...well, they start to pile up. Bins full of them, buckets full of them, until it started to feel a bit like that scene from Fantasia with the replicating brooms, like we’d accidentally put a boy happy meal toy in the same cage as a girl happy meal toy. You can’t give them away...they’re just...disposable. So we finally threw them away, and just stopped getting kids meals. The boys didn’t mind. The meals were still the meals...but the toys were worthless. They weren’t even worth having.
Ours is a society where things are either disposable or soon worthless. In the relentless march of progress, the relentless consumption of stuff is necessary to keep the great wheels spinning along. It’s something called planned obsolescence. If we don’t get rid of our stuff, or feel that our stuff is no longer good enough stuff, then there’s not going to be a reason for us to buy new stuff. So products are planned that will only last...or only be desirable for a few years...and then they’ll be undesirable, not worth searching out, not worth having. The legendarily fast product cycle of the iPod is a perfect example. If you drive a car that was made in 2002, it’s still basically a decent car. But who’s going to buy a second generation iPod...shoot, they didn’t even really have the click wheel going the way it should. Of course, there are 90 million iPods out there that have just been rendered obsolete...but if you lost one, are you really going to go look for it? Of course not. We wouldn’t bother. You may as well just take all of those obsolete iPods and see what you could build with them...like, say, paving two lanes of the Beltway with iPods...not just the new HOT lanes, but the entire way around. You could...really. I’ve done the calculations. You’d just need lots of epoxy and a whole bunch of free time. And why not? We’re too rich in possessions to care about such things.
Jesus, of course, knew that there were people like that. As he taught a crowd that had gathered around him, he could hear people in groups around the edge of the crowd muttering and complaining about him under their breath. Look at this rabble! Look at this mess...they’re the dregs of humanity! These people aren’t worth anyone’s time...I can’t believe he even bothers with them.
The ones who grumbled against him were the educated and the elite. The Pharisees were the literate suburbanites of first century Judea, the ones who read and studied the law. The scribes worked for the court of the king and in the houses of the wealthy, managing their affairs and keeping track of their business. They did well. They had possessions, all that they needed.
So when Jesus told his parable of the lost sheep to describe how earnestly God seeks out those who are broken and lost in this life, he knew those mutterers would be unable to hear. Shepherds would understand exactly what Jesus was talking about, but shepherds were poor Galilean trash, and the mutterers weren’t...ugh...shepherds. Pharisees didn’t gather their flocks by night. They paid people to do that for them. Lost sheep? Who cares about one lost sheep? I’ve still got the 99...and I was planning on ordering a new sheep from isheep.com anyway. Why bother with that worthless thing? It’s not worth the time.
Then Jesus tells another little story, a story that only appears in Luke’s Gospel. Matthew tells the parable of the lost sheep in Matthew 18:12-14, but doesn’t give us this next one. Why? Why the difference? Remember, Luke was put together to be heard by an educated and elite audience of early Christians, and so it’s author wanted to make absolutely sure that they heard the next thing that Jesus said...because Luke’s readers were dangerously similar to the whisperers who sat around the outskirts of the gathered crowd.
I can hear him raising his voice a little, pitching it out a little further, out over the heads of the outcasts and tax collectors around him and towards the well-dressed little group beyond..making sure that they heard, making sure that they saw his eyes on them. Then he tells a story of a coin. Say...you had a stack of ten fifty dollar bills. Fifty bucks is close to what a drachma would be worth today, seven hours of work from a day laborer. Enough to be real money, something you can relate to. And you knew you had $500, it was right there the last time you counted it, but when you counted it up again, you came up fifty bucks short. You’re going to tear the house apart looking for that bill, now, aren’t you?
But Jesus wasn’t talking about sheep, and he wasn’t talking about the value of cash. He’s trying to get it through the thick skulls of human beings just how deeply God values each and every one of us, and how deeply God wants us to understand the goodness that God intends for us.
Jesus saw that we struggle to see the value that God sees, and that the richer and more powerful we become, the harder that struggle becomes. As you gather wealth and position in society, it isn’t just that you stop caring quite so much about things. You also make the mistake of viewing people further down in the pecking order as somehow less worthy than yourself. The Pharisees and the scribes were sure that they were righteous, sure that they were chosen, sure that they were important. They were equally sure that those who had less, who didn’t measure up, who deserved less...the shepherds and the sinners and the tax collectors...they were just less important to God. We are the chosen! We are the saved! God just loves us more.
That was the trap of self-righteousness they’d fallen into, and it’s a trap that clamps shut on any number of Christians today. Our wealth makes the wealth of those scribes look like the allowance you might give to a five year old. A one bedroom apartment pretty much anywhere in Montgomery County has more luxuries than the palace of Herod...who, in new findings from recent archeological digs, may not even have had cable.
The temptation is there..strongly there for all of us...to succumb to the same selfishness that consumed the Pharisees. You look out into the world and you see it everywhere, the willingness to cast people aside, to discard them, to see them as somehow of less worth than ourselves.
Does the feeling of helpless anger that fills the hearts of those day laborers who’ve been cast back out onto the streets in Herndon matter less to God because their documentation isn’t up to snuff? There are some who think so. Does the struggle with addiction that has crushed the joy from that rank-smelling man we push our way past, eyes averted, matter less to God? Too often, we act as if he is worth discarding, worth less than a piece of crumpled burger wrapper that blows by in the wind. Does the gnawing in the belly of a seven year old Bangladeshi boy matter less to God because he is poor amidst a crowd of the poor? As we move through our lives, full of wealth and the pursuit of wealth, such people barely merit a second thought.
But each of those people deserve our love, deserve our concern, deserve to be told...and more importantly, shown...that God and those who follow his Son care for them. Because our good shepherd does not have a single disposable sheep.
09.16.07; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Luke 15:1-10
No-one likes losing stuff. But are we really able to hear the words that Jesus spoke in the same way that his audience did in first century Judea?
We don’t live in the same era, and in our society, we’re pretty far away from caring about the stuff that clutters and piles up in our lives. We’re just so very used to tossing things away. Sure, you could use that plastic container a hundred times or more, or reuse that plastic spork for a dozen meals without it breaking. But we don’t. We drink, we eat, and we discard.
The boys and I often hike over to a neighborhood fast food establishment...I won’t tell you where, ‘cause my agent wasn’t able to negotiate enough compensation for this product placement... when my dear wife is off traveling or at a meeting. There, we consume plenty of empty calories, but also an amazing quantity of paper. After we’ve eaten, a mound of cups and fry containers and balled up hunks of wrappers piles high on that tray, seemingly taking up more room empty than they did full. They get dumped, of course, into the wide open maw of the trash bin.
It used to be worse. We used to get the boys kid’s meals, which not only had mounds of paper and cardboard, but also came with...a toy! These toys weren’t anything like the doofy little cardboard crowns that I used to get as a kid. No, these toys were real toys. Little handheld video games, batteries and all. Wind up cars. Action figures. Spongebob Bobbleheads. Little stuffed animals. Every last one was a marketing tie-in for a film or a T.V. show, but they were the kinds of things that you’d have paid good money for back when I was but a lad. Progress!
Only... the kids played with them for about 30 minutes, then forgot them. If you go once a week and you get two toys each time, they...well, they start to pile up. Bins full of them, buckets full of them, until it started to feel a bit like that scene from Fantasia with the replicating brooms, like we’d accidentally put a boy happy meal toy in the same cage as a girl happy meal toy. You can’t give them away...they’re just...disposable. So we finally threw them away, and just stopped getting kids meals. The boys didn’t mind. The meals were still the meals...but the toys were worthless. They weren’t even worth having.
Ours is a society where things are either disposable or soon worthless. In the relentless march of progress, the relentless consumption of stuff is necessary to keep the great wheels spinning along. It’s something called planned obsolescence. If we don’t get rid of our stuff, or feel that our stuff is no longer good enough stuff, then there’s not going to be a reason for us to buy new stuff. So products are planned that will only last...or only be desirable for a few years...and then they’ll be undesirable, not worth searching out, not worth having. The legendarily fast product cycle of the iPod is a perfect example. If you drive a car that was made in 2002, it’s still basically a decent car. But who’s going to buy a second generation iPod...shoot, they didn’t even really have the click wheel going the way it should. Of course, there are 90 million iPods out there that have just been rendered obsolete...but if you lost one, are you really going to go look for it? Of course not. We wouldn’t bother. You may as well just take all of those obsolete iPods and see what you could build with them...like, say, paving two lanes of the Beltway with iPods...not just the new HOT lanes, but the entire way around. You could...really. I’ve done the calculations. You’d just need lots of epoxy and a whole bunch of free time. And why not? We’re too rich in possessions to care about such things.
Jesus, of course, knew that there were people like that. As he taught a crowd that had gathered around him, he could hear people in groups around the edge of the crowd muttering and complaining about him under their breath. Look at this rabble! Look at this mess...they’re the dregs of humanity! These people aren’t worth anyone’s time...I can’t believe he even bothers with them.
The ones who grumbled against him were the educated and the elite. The Pharisees were the literate suburbanites of first century Judea, the ones who read and studied the law. The scribes worked for the court of the king and in the houses of the wealthy, managing their affairs and keeping track of their business. They did well. They had possessions, all that they needed.
So when Jesus told his parable of the lost sheep to describe how earnestly God seeks out those who are broken and lost in this life, he knew those mutterers would be unable to hear. Shepherds would understand exactly what Jesus was talking about, but shepherds were poor Galilean trash, and the mutterers weren’t...ugh...shepherds. Pharisees didn’t gather their flocks by night. They paid people to do that for them. Lost sheep? Who cares about one lost sheep? I’ve still got the 99...and I was planning on ordering a new sheep from isheep.com anyway. Why bother with that worthless thing? It’s not worth the time.
Then Jesus tells another little story, a story that only appears in Luke’s Gospel. Matthew tells the parable of the lost sheep in Matthew 18:12-14, but doesn’t give us this next one. Why? Why the difference? Remember, Luke was put together to be heard by an educated and elite audience of early Christians, and so it’s author wanted to make absolutely sure that they heard the next thing that Jesus said...because Luke’s readers were dangerously similar to the whisperers who sat around the outskirts of the gathered crowd.
I can hear him raising his voice a little, pitching it out a little further, out over the heads of the outcasts and tax collectors around him and towards the well-dressed little group beyond..making sure that they heard, making sure that they saw his eyes on them. Then he tells a story of a coin. Say...you had a stack of ten fifty dollar bills. Fifty bucks is close to what a drachma would be worth today, seven hours of work from a day laborer. Enough to be real money, something you can relate to. And you knew you had $500, it was right there the last time you counted it, but when you counted it up again, you came up fifty bucks short. You’re going to tear the house apart looking for that bill, now, aren’t you?
But Jesus wasn’t talking about sheep, and he wasn’t talking about the value of cash. He’s trying to get it through the thick skulls of human beings just how deeply God values each and every one of us, and how deeply God wants us to understand the goodness that God intends for us.
Jesus saw that we struggle to see the value that God sees, and that the richer and more powerful we become, the harder that struggle becomes. As you gather wealth and position in society, it isn’t just that you stop caring quite so much about things. You also make the mistake of viewing people further down in the pecking order as somehow less worthy than yourself. The Pharisees and the scribes were sure that they were righteous, sure that they were chosen, sure that they were important. They were equally sure that those who had less, who didn’t measure up, who deserved less...the shepherds and the sinners and the tax collectors...they were just less important to God. We are the chosen! We are the saved! God just loves us more.
That was the trap of self-righteousness they’d fallen into, and it’s a trap that clamps shut on any number of Christians today. Our wealth makes the wealth of those scribes look like the allowance you might give to a five year old. A one bedroom apartment pretty much anywhere in Montgomery County has more luxuries than the palace of Herod...who, in new findings from recent archeological digs, may not even have had cable.
The temptation is there..strongly there for all of us...to succumb to the same selfishness that consumed the Pharisees. You look out into the world and you see it everywhere, the willingness to cast people aside, to discard them, to see them as somehow of less worth than ourselves.
Does the feeling of helpless anger that fills the hearts of those day laborers who’ve been cast back out onto the streets in Herndon matter less to God because their documentation isn’t up to snuff? There are some who think so. Does the struggle with addiction that has crushed the joy from that rank-smelling man we push our way past, eyes averted, matter less to God? Too often, we act as if he is worth discarding, worth less than a piece of crumpled burger wrapper that blows by in the wind. Does the gnawing in the belly of a seven year old Bangladeshi boy matter less to God because he is poor amidst a crowd of the poor? As we move through our lives, full of wealth and the pursuit of wealth, such people barely merit a second thought.
But each of those people deserve our love, deserve our concern, deserve to be told...and more importantly, shown...that God and those who follow his Son care for them. Because our good shepherd does not have a single disposable sheep.
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