Aftermath

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
09.14.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 18:21-35

You can tell a whole bunch about a collision by what comes afterwards. This week, we’ve watched a few different sorts of impacts, some that have created something possibly amazing, and some that have left devastation in their wake.

Midway through the week, scientists at the CERN facility in Switzerland powered up the Large Hadron Collider. This huge ring-shaped particle accelerator exists for one reason and one reason alone: to smash stuff into other stuff. It’s a bit like demolition derby, only using subatomic particles going at near light speeds. Why are scientists doing this? Well, I think part if it is the same reason that back in college me and some friends took my 20 gauge shotgun, a bunch of rotten watermelons and a stack of half-full paint cans to an abandoned lot. It’s cool to watch things go boom. Hey...it was Charlottesville. That’s what fratboys like me did for fun in the South. Well, it’s one of the things, but I’m not going to go there.

But the main reason is that the nice satisfying bang that the large subatomic particles they’re using will make creates an interesting result. It’s not just a little bang. It’s a little Big Bang. For a brief moment, they’re going to generate a tiny version of the energies that may have existed at the beginning of the universe.

Some folks are afraid that might have destroyed the earth, creating tiny black holes that would suck us all up, or unleashing an army of the undead to devour the brains of the living. Well, not so many people besides me are worried about that last one. When they turned the thing on this week, it appears that those worries aren’t justified. What scientists hope for, as they carefully watch the aftermath of those collisions, is the discovery of the new, of new ways to harness energies and matter that might change the direction of technology. These are hopeful, constructive collisions.

Yesterday, we watched as another huge storm in the Gulf hurled itself against our shores. Hurricane Ike hammered away at the sea wall of the city of Galveston and howled through Houston, as millions of Americans either fled or huddled in their homes. In Galveston, the storm may have done near catastrophic damage to large portions of that city, as the ocean rose up and consumed the east side of the town. Such collisions aren’t nearly as promising. Lives are shattered. Homes and the hopes of countless families are broken. Yet even after such horrors, there exists the possibility of healing. Even now, all around this nation, churches and governments and relief agencies stand at the ready, poised to give care and to help people rebuild their shattered lives. The aftermath of such disasters tells a great deal about a people and their spirit, and I’m sure we will do all we can to help with the recovery.

Life is full of collisions. Last week, I talked about the collisions that come inside human relationships, about the conflicts and struggles and tensions and fights that come into each of our lives. Those fights are inevitable. But the measure of them is not just in how they are conducted. We know them, as this smart guy I know once said, by their fruits. We know them by their aftermath.

Last week, we heard Christ’s teaching in the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 18:15-20) about how to show Christian graciousness in the midst of conflict. Today’s reading continues Christ’s teaching on fighting. He’s just told his disciples how we’re to constantly work towards reconciliation during a conflict. Once he’s finished, Peter asks him a perfectly sensible question about what happens afterwards. “How often should I forgive? As many as seven times?”

That shows that Peter has understood that forgiveness is the goal of Christian conflict. What he’s struggling with is how deep that goes. Jesus responds that Peter is going in the right direction, but that he needs to multiply that level of forgiveness by at least 10. And then, to make his point, Jesus does what Jesus does so often: he tells a story.

It’s a story of a powerful king and his slaves, and of what happens when the king decides to settle up who owes what. One of his slaves owes him 10,000 talents. That’s a crazy number, an impossible debt. A talent was 6,000 denarius. A denarius is an average day’s wages. It is, if you want to think in terms of American currency, like owing someone 6 billion dollars. If you paid off that debt at a rate of a million dollars a year, it’d only take you 6,000 years to do it. It ain’t gonna happen. And that’s the point Jesus is making. This is a debt that can never be paid off, not in a hundred lifetimes.

Yet when that slave begs forgiveness, falling on his knees and asking for just the chance to pay back the impossible debt, what does the king do? He has pity and compassion, and he forgives the debt. Amazingly, impossibly, the guy gets off.

But as the story goes on, we find our newly liberated debtor running across a guy who owes him money. It’s not a small sum, around 10,000 dollars, but it’s easily payable in monthly installments over four years at 5 and three quarters percent. But when the second guy begs for a small portion of the same forgiveness he was just shown, the first guy...well...he refuses. The guy who owed 10K gets tossed into prison.

Then the king hears about it, and he is seriously cheesed. Faced with such a graceless, unforgiving soul, he goes all medieval on his behind. Bad things happen, things that you only see in the Saw movies, things that are worse than being subjected to a thousand years of nonstop Hanna Montana concert videos. End of story.

And then Jesus turns to his disciples and says: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

So what is a Christian aftermath? When we’ve fought with another person, the aftermath is this: we have to forgive them. We have to forgive them whether we’ve won or lost or if the whole thing seems to grind out to a irreconcilable stalemate.

And the truth is, while we can listen to Jesus and say, gosh and golly, that sounds nice...we don’t want to hear this. Even though we’ve been baptized and we’ve sung the praise songs and we’ve prayed the prayers, we don’t want to hear him. We want to cherish that fight, to hold it close to our hearts and sustain it forever. We want to hate them for beating us, or to hate them for opposing us in the first place. We want to cherish our bitterness, or revel in our gloating.

So when we hear Jesus say that we must forgive seventy seven times, we want to smile and say, “Oh, that Jesus. He’s just such a softy. Of course he’d think that. And that’s fine for him. I mean, he’s Jesus. But that’s not the way things are in my life. Because of what [fill in the name of your enemy here] did to me, I have every right to still be angry.”

We want to think that way. But if we do, we don’t have ears to hear, and this is a teaching we need to hear down deep, because this isn’t a Big Happy Warm Fuzzy Huggy Bear Jesus teaching. It’s a teaching with teeth.

And then Jesus turns to his disciples and says: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

When we fail to forgive others, something in our relationship with our Creator is shattered, something that when broken is not fixable. We must trust....we must...fear...that God watches the aftermath of our life’s conflicts with all of the intensity of the scientists who pore over the traces from those colossal hadron impacts, and all of the intensity of those who watch to see how America will respond to the destruction in the Gulf.

You can tell a whole bunch about a collision by what comes afterwards.

Today’s Worries

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
05.25.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 6:24-34

Of all of the passages in the Bible, perhaps none is quite so frustrating to Presbyterians as the one you’ve just heard. Presbyterians, you see, like things to be orderly. Everything you do needs to be carefully planned out, from the first moment you have a planning session to determine the parameters of an action to insuring that the survey data from event participants is correctly tabulated.

This is, perhaps, why some Presbyterians have so much trouble getting second dates. If you think about it, maybe giving her an evaluation form and a self-addressed postage-paid envelope afterwards makes it lack a little bit of...I don’t know...spontaneity.

So when we hear Jesus commending that people not worry about what’s going to happen in the future, and instead suggesting that we should focus most intently on the present, it rubs us completely the wrong way. What? But then we’ll be completely unprepared! That’s utterly irresponsible! You need to have goals, and you need to work hard towards those goals, or you’ll never ever succeed in this life, young man! This invariably degenerates into a long rant about kids these days not appreciating hard work and planning ahead, after which many Presbyterians need to go and take a nap.

It’s hard to avoid interpreting it that way, though. Don’t worry about your life? Don’t worry about what you’ll eat, or what you’ll wear? Is Jesus suggesting that we skip along through our lives just doing whatever? That can’t possibly be the case.

Just what is Jesus talking about here, then? Is he suggesting that we just do what we want now, and not pay a lick of attention to the future? Hardly. But what he’s saying here is deeply important, part of one of the most essential teachings of his ministry. How do we know this?

We know this because this little reading comes to us right out of the thick of the Sermon on the Mount, that great soaring proclamation that begins at the beginning of chapter 5 of Matthew and ends at the end of chapter 7. So here in the thick of the most vital moral and ethical teaching in this Gospel, what is Jesus saying?

The essence of his focus is clear at the very beginning of the passage, where Christ says that you can’t serve two masters. You just can’t. You either serve God, or you serve...well...Mammon. Although mammon often is interpreted as meaning any range of things, it isn’t really one thing. Mammon means wealth, or money, or power, or attainment. It means worldly prosperity, any of the measures by which we determine how we’re doing relative to the next guy. Where do we stand in the great social and economic pecking order? That’s a mammon question.

How do we succeed in the world of Mammon? Well, you’ve got to have a plan. You’ve got to be thinking ahead. You’ve got to be figuring out how to compete, how to claw your way past the other guy on your way to the top. The end goal is happiness, pure material blissful happiness, and it doesn’t matter how many skulls you have to break to get there. You’ve got your eyes on the prize, baby. By any means necessary, as they say.

But Jesus takes things in a totally different direction. He knows, as anyone who’s lived for more than thirty seconds in America could tell you, that the struggles of our day to day lives create unbelievable stresses. Our relentlessly pursuing the goals of material prosperity causes us to chew our nails to the quick, and to completely fail to embrace the moment in which we are living. And missing out on the possibility of your present moment is a pretty dangerous thing, particularly if you understand what it was Jesus taught about the Kingdom of God. In each of the first three Gospels, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, parables and teachings about God’s Reign are the central part of what Jesus taught. What does Jesus have to say about God’s Kingdom? Well, he has two things to say. First, it is just about to happen, so you’d better be ready. Second, it is happening, right here, right now. It is now and not yet. It has arrived and it is still on it’s way.

What that means, and what Jesus is trying to get across in that little passage, is that this moment and every moment of a Christian’s life aren’t just lived with the idea that some day the Kingdom of God will arrive. The awareness of the Kingdom of God has to do more than just be something that we expect will come some time after the publication of the last book in the Left Behind Series. It has to drive how we act in the now. It’s something we need to seek every single day, something that needs to guide every single action that we take. That awareness will color our tomorrows, sure. But we’ve got to get to tomorrow first, and to do that, we’ve got to make our way through today’s worries. And the thing we need to worry about, as Christians, each and every day, is that the Kingdom of God is at hand.

What does that mean?

In your life, there are countless opportunities to act as you would act in the presence of God. You may encounter some of those opportunities today, before you’ve even left this building. There might come a moment when you’re given a choice of making a remark that cuts someone down to size or saying something that builds them up. There might come a moment when you’re given the choice between ignoring that person that you’d really rather not have to waste a moment with, or actually surprising them with a greeting. If you are living into the reality of the Kingdom of God, the way Jesus meant it...how are you going to deal with those simple moments?

The answer is simple. You deal with today’s worries according to the law of the Kingdom of God, and according to the righteousness of God. Every choice, every decision, every option needs to be guided by the awareness of real and present authority of the God who is love, and whose Son preached love, and whose Spirit guides us in love.

When we fail to hold ourselves to that immediate and inescapable measure is when our world comes apart. For when we allow ourselves to seek something other than the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, we start seeking in ways that tear down others, and shatter the very peace that we yearn for.

That’s our worry for today. That’s our worry for tomorrow. But don’t just worry about it.

Act on it.

A Blink of An Eye

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda; United Korean Presbyterian Church
08.26.07; Rev. David Williams; Rev. John An

(Preached Concurrently in English and Korean)

Scripture Lesson: Jeremiah 1: 4-10

It’s good to live in the modern world.

We human beings have changed dramatically in the last 100 years.

Our world is full of machines that would dazzle our ancestors

We have magical chariots that run without horses

We have pictures that talk and move

We have machines that think.

At least, it seems like my computer has a mind of it’s own.

But of all of the things that would startle our ancestors

One of the most striking is our age.

How long did the average human being in the Roman Empire at the time of Christ live?

Twenty-eight years.

We live, on average, three times as long today.

For them, saying you expect to live into your seventies

Would be us saying we expect to live to be 200.

Increasingly, human beings are among the most long-lived of God’s creatures.

We’re rapidly gaining on the current long life champion:

The giant tortoise.

Those slow moving giants live well over 100 years.

As just walking over to the lunch buffet

Takes them three hours

A long lifespan seems only fair.

We’ve left the loser in the long-life battle well behind.

That’s a tiny little freshwater animal called the gastrotrich.

Haven’t heard of that one?

It’s pretty much just a little living stomach.

I know a few people like that myself.

The gastrotrich lives only three days.

This means they don’t really get much enjoyment out of their retirement

But at least their teen years only last forty five minutes.

As exciting as our newly found human lifespans are

I’m not sure how much those extra years matter

in the eyes of God.

In our reading today from Jeremiah

The prophet finds out that age means very little to God.

The passage we’ve just heard read

describes the call story of the prophet.

Like many of the other prophets and leaders of the Bible,

Jeremiah does not feel worthy of the call God gives him.

The prophet Isaiah said his lips were unclean.

Moses said that he couldn’t speak well enough.

Jeremiah has his own excuse, too.

“I’m too young.”

“I haven’t learned what to say.”

But that doesn’t matter at all to God.

He hears that excuse for what it is.

An excuse.

God has a purpose for Jeremiah

And he’s not about to let the one he has chosen weasel out of it.

Jeremiah may not feel that he is prepared

But the truth of the matter is

That God has already prepared him.

Jeremiah may not understand his purpose

but in Jeremiah 1:5, God says:

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you

And before you were born I consecrated you.”

God has had a purpose for him from the moment creation was made.

As we Presbyterians like to say,

He was “predestined” to be a prophet.

It didn’t matter that he was young

What do differences in the little flicker we call life

Matter to the Eternal God?

God had a purpose for him

And God would give him the strength to fulfill it.

It is that call that Jeremiah needed to hear

And it’s the call we need to hear in our lives.

All of us need to find our purpose

Whether we’re students

Or in a career

Whether we’re raising children

Or in our retirement

All of us need to know our purpose

As we struggle to find a sense of mission in life

And wrestle with our sense of direction

We need to hear what Jeremiah heard:

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you

Before you were born I consecrated you.”

God knows who you are

Not just who you are today

But who you are tomorrow

And who you are next year.

Though our lives may be getting longer

There’s not a moment of them

Not a moment hidden from God.

God knows that self you will become

And God will give you the strength to get there.

All we have to do

Is to let go of our fear

Let go of our reluctance

Let go of our excuses

And let ourselves listen to God.

If we give ourselves space to hear,

We can turn ourselves over

to the purpose he has consecrated for us.

You can make that change

Because God will help you make it.

You can face those challenges

Because God will be with you to deliver you.

We have to let ourselves find His presence

And know His purpose

Because God’s purpose for us

Is not just long life

But a life worthy of eternity.