Water in the Desert

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.

Eat My Sheep

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
11.25.07; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Jeremiah 23:1-6
watch it here: part 1; part 2

In October or November of every year, as we Presbyterians dig our way into the joyous budget season, an e-mail pops into the inbox of pastors and treasurers at each of the over 100 Presbyterian churches in our presbytery. The powers that be are sending us a number, a number that every church needs, the number that sets up the base salary of every Presbyterian minister in the Washington metropolitan area for the upcoming year.

Being Presbyterians, of course, we don’t just pick that number out of the air. That number is based on a highly complex series of equations that includes national level data on ministerial wages, information on the regional housing market, and cost of living projections for the area, which are then multiplied by the percentage of games the Redskins have won this year. Let me tell you, it’s been a very, very disappointing season.

At the end of the day, the base salary of a Presbyterian minister in the DC area ends up being pretty much equivalent to the average salary paid to a Metrobus driver. Most pastors think this is fine. It’s as it should be. Pastors shouldn’t be raking in the big bucks.

Or…should we?

Apparently, there’s a contingent of pastors out there who think that the ministry isn’t for the meek and the lowly. It’s for those who are willing to set a standard of success for their gathered flock. Among many pastors of larger churches, particularly pastors of big churches with massive media ministries, the argument is that a pastor should be paid what he or she is worth. If you’ve gathered a flock in the thousands or the tens of thousands, if you’re watched by millions on T.V., you’re basically like the CEO of a successful corporation. If you’re the CEO of a major subsidiary of AmeriChrist, Inc., then by cracky, you need to be living like a CEO.

In fact, it’s gotten so intense that earlier this month, Senator Charles Grassley launched an investigation of several big name television ministries. Why, you may ask? Well, for some reason, the Senator was miffed by a few things he’d heard.

Like, for instance, when Kenneth Copeland Ministries celebrated their 40th anniversary, they apparently thought it might be nice to give a little present to Ken. I mean, c’mon, it was just a little two-million dollar token of their esteem. Presents are apparently very popular among the pastoral elite. Another ministry, Paula White Ministries, is in trouble for giving Bishop T.D. Jakes a Bentley for his birthday. A Bentley? He got a Bentley for his birthday? Schwing low, schweet chariot! I hope Rev. An takes note of that...my birthday is next month! I never realized that when the Apostle Paul talked about spiritual gifts, he meant luxury automobiles.

Paula White Ministries is also under investigation for, among other things, charging the costs of cosmetic surgery to the ministry. That’s hardly fair, though, is it? How can Paula White Ministries bring people to Jesus if Paula White doesn’t look like she’s 21 again?

All of the pastors in question seem to have a taste for travel in private jets. One of them, Joyce Meyer, also bought a $23 thousand dollar marble toilet for her headquarters. Hey…people have needs. Don’t go hatin’. And anyway, if you’re the shepherd of a big enough flock, where in the Bible does it say you can’t live like that?

Well…gee…where to begin? I suspect that the prophet Jeremiah would have something to contribute on that subject. Jeremiah was a notoriously grumpy prophet, who lived and preached six hundred years before Christ, during the time of the fall of Jerusalem in the face of the might of the Babylonian Empire. Most of his teaching and proclamation was aimed directly at the wealthy and the powerful of Judah, those in the royal court and the priests of the temple.

Today’s passage was a challenge to the “shepherds” of Israel. By shepherds, Jeremiah was referring to those in power, those charged with guiding the lives of the people. According to the passage we’ve just heard, the folks in positions of power have misled the people, and have caused the flock to be scattered. In their place, God is going to find other leaders, ones who will help bring the flock back together.

But as we listen to this little passage, we have to ask ourselves: what…specifically…have the current batch of shepherds done? The metaphor of herdsmen and their flocks is great, but it doesn’t tell us very much about what the leadership had done or failed to do.

For that, we have to look to the broader context of Jeremiah, to the passages that come before and after this little chunklet of verses.

Before today’s passage, in Jeremiah 22:13-17, the prophet lays into the royal household of Judah. Why? Because those leaders enriched themselves at the expense of their people. They built themselves huge houses made of only the finest materials, taking from those in need and giving to themselves. Justice and righteousness were put second. Their personal prosperity was put first.

After today’s passage, in Jeremiah 23:16-17, Jeremiah goes after the false prophets of his age. What was the message that those prophets were bearing? It was a message of well-being. It was a message of prosperity. Everything is going to be just fine. It shall be well with you. Just keep giving to the temple. No calamity shall come upon you.

In both instances, what was proclaimed and what was lived was a prosperity based in falsehood. Leaders used their power to amass great wealth for themselves. Leaders convinced people that all they needed to do to be doing well in the world was to give and give and give to the temple....which, conveniently enough, meant that the priests and prophets would do well.

But those kinds of shepherds aren’t the sort of folks that God entrusted with his flocks, and the modern purveyors of the Gospel of prosperity are perilously close to meeting that dark standard.

In last Sunday’s Washington Post, finance columnist Michelle Singletary, whose advice is usually sound and wise, took a little issue with Grassley’s challenge to these ministers. She made the CEO argument, saying that if these pastors are running a large organization that has revenue equivalent to that of a big for profit enterprise, they should be compensated accordingly. If that means they’re living large, well, that’s their right. “They haven’t taken a vow of poverty,” she said.

On one level, that may be true. But the standards to which Christian leaders should aspire aren’t the standards of the for profit world. They aren’t even the standards of the nonprofit world. Those who are called to leadership in the body of Christ shouldn’t starve, sure. But neither should they live in a way that doesn’t reflect the community they serve. The heart of the Gospel message that Christ brought to us is not that we are called to serve ourselves and our own needs. The self-serving approach to the world and to how we live and work may play well with the ethics of our culture...but those aren’t the values that define the Christian life.

As Presbyterians, our task as members of the church and leaders of the church is to hold one another accountable to the servant ethic that Christ himself embodied. It’s why we’re so open about how we pay our pastors, and why we strongly...strongly...encourage all of our members to be engaged in and aware of how our congregations act as stewards over our resources. Each of us, in our own way, is called to be a shepherd over the flock. That means stepping away from the me-first value that defines the consumer culture around us. Why?

Because a shepherd that looks out for number one isn’t one who cares for the sheep. At the end of the Gospel of John, the great command given to Peter isn’t eat my sheep.

It’s feed my sheep.

There is a difference.