Snakebite

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

03.18.12;  Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lessons:  Numbers 21:4-9;  John 3:14-21

Back when I was a little kid, I had a pretty intense aversion to anything that might in any way cause pain.  This would seem to be a fairly normal thing, if you think about it, but then again, I was a boy.   In my experience boys are typically far more oblivious to this than they should be.  

Riding your Razr scooter full-tilt down a hill and right into a curb to see if you can pull off a ninja tumble?  Sure, what could possibly go wrong?  Sticking your finger into a hole on the side of a machine to see how fast those gears are actually moving?  Give it a go!  It’s in the interests of science!   And why would the Good Lord have made that stick all nice and pointy if He didn’t intend in His Gracious Providence for us to chase our brother around with it at the bus stop? 

As the parent of boys, you just have to learn to take those things in stride, and it helps to live within five minutes of a good E.R.  

But as a child, I was small spindly bookish critter, allergic to what the doctor determined was, and this was his informed medical opinion after extensive testing, “pretty much everything.”   More significantly, as a young pup I was utterly terrified of pain.  For example, I played soccer, in that I stood on field for as little time as league rules allowed and hoped against hope that the ball would stay as far away as possible.  Because even though I shuffled tentatively around midfield wearing giant armored maxipads stuffed under my 1970s tube socks, I was convinced that one stray kick might crunch through my twiglike shins.  And that would hurt.

Even worse, though, was my fear of injections.  As the progeny of a foreign service family, this didn’t work out so well.  If you’re planning on spending time in the Southern Hemisphere, a battery of shots was pretty much necessary to avoid some impressively unpleasant illnesses.    I lived in mortal terror of shots, not because they actually hurt so much, but because of the anticipation of the pain.   Few things are less pleasant than the anticipation of pain.    

I can remember, although it’s an old and not often retold story in the Williams household, one particular trip to get a series of shots back when I couldn’t have been more than seven or eight.  We arrived, and I was nervous, and we waited, and I got more nervous, and then the nurse came in with a tray with some objects on it and said, “Alright, young man, are you ready for us to drop you into a giant bucket full of rattlesnakes?”

I don’t think that’s what she actually said.  I think she actually said something like, “Alright, young man, are you going to be brave for me?”  But I think what I heard must have involved a large pit full of snakes, because my next memories of that event involve total, abject flight from the room, as if I were a small cat who’d suddenly encountered a snarling rabid brindle mastiff.  Following a period of squealing, which I think was coming from me, I vaguely recall being under a table and people trying to coax me out with candy.

I am not prone to that kind of response now, except when someone asks me to serve on a Presbytery committee.   None of us like suffering, after all.

And yet suffering is inevitable in life.  It is just not possible to go through the whole of a life and not experience it.  The connected stories in today’s reading from the Book of Numbers and chapter three of John’s Gospel reflect that reality, and the response we’re meant to have to the deep challenges of our lives.

We don’t often read the book of Numbers, in large part because the name itself has a tendency to drive us away.  The book gets that name from the creators of the ancient Latin version of the Bible, known as the Vulgate, which calls it Numeri.   The Vulgate got it from the even older Greek version of the Hebrew bible, which was called the Septuagint.  That version calls it Arithmoi.  

The reason for that name becomes obvious when you start reading it.  It starts with a census, as the author begins carefully counting off the numbers of all of the members of all of the tribes of Israel.  This goes on for about five absolutely riveting chapters.  This is followed by obscure purity law code, followed by a few chapters where people weigh different objects.  Again, riveting stuff.  If you’ve ever tried to read the Bible cover to cover, this is one of those books that stops you in your tracks.

But in chapter 10, the book takes a different turn.  The Hebrew version of this book is called Ba Midbar, which means “In the Wilderness,” because that’s precisely where the Jewish people are.  That’s a much more interesting title, and a better description of the far-better second half of the book.  They are wandering through the 40 years in the desert, experiencing hardship, encountering famine and opposition and challenge, and once the lists are out of it’s system, the stories of that time of trial become the focus of the book.   They include talking donkeys, earthquakes, miracles, battles, and fire from the sky.

It also includes today’s story, in which the people of Israel are once again anxious, impatient, and complaining.  “We don’t have any food,” they complain in verse five.  “And the food is terrible!”   And so, for the sin of sounding remarkably like a moody teenager inspecting the contents of the family refrigerator, the Lord sends a plague of poisonous serpents.  These are the seraphim, and the word “poisonous” is actually the Hebrew word for “fiery.”   

After some unpleasantness, the people decide they’ve had enough, and Moses is instructed to create a bronze serpent, which is placed on a pole.  To be healed of a snake bite, all the people need to do is look at the serpent, and they’d be fine.

Without getting into the mechanics of that, what is worth noting is that the thing they looked to for healing is the emblem of suffering itself.  That was the point being made in John’s Gospel, as it recalled the story of Jesus and his conversation with the curious but confused Pharisee Nicodemus.  

This is a remarkably rich conversation, as the Pharisee asks question after question of Jesus, and Jesus responds.  Nicodemus is particularly confused by the idea of being born from above...which is what John 3 verse seven literally reads.  In explaining what this means, Jesus references the Book of Numbers.   “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up...”

Here, Jesus is using the words “lifted up” to mean both “exalted” and “raised up on the cross.”   It’s a strange conjunction, the fusion of these two images, seemingly so at odds with one another.   The image of power on high gets conceptually woven together with the broken body on a particularly cruel and unusual instrument of execution.

That latter image messes with us, and we might prefer not to think about it.

But understanding suffering and understanding how we are to respond to suffering are absolutely essential to overcoming it.   It’s a bit like a vaccine that way.  Just as our bodies need to know a disease before they can effectively respond to it, our hearts and minds and souls need to understand how to respond to the broken things in our lives.  And while we might rather not know and experience suffering, we will.  It is an inescapable part of mortality.

The question is how we approach and understand that suffering.  If we approach suffering with grasping, selfish hearts, it will be made worse.  If we approach it from a position of anxiety or fear, we magnify its power over us.  Our terror feeds it, and amplifies it, and that fear can completely devour us.

If our attitude is one of faith, things change.  We change.  If we recognize that the Creator stands in complete solidarity with us, when we suffer but also in our joys, our experience of life is tranformed.  We no longer live in terror.  That doesn’t mean being as oblivious as a seven year old boy up on the roof with a makeshift parachute.  It doesn’t mean seeking out pain as a way of proving our faith.  

But it does mean no longer being afraid.  And that matters.

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

On Your Fingers

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

03.11.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Exodus 20:1-17

As we roll further into what looks like it will be a really entertaining election year, one of the most striking things about the public mood is that we all hate Congress.  This is a bit bizarre, frankly.  We elect our Senators and Representatives.  Most of us feel that the person who we elected is doing a good job.   And yet, taken together, we hate them with a big hatey hate.   Just how big is that hatey hate?  Well, let’s look at the numbers.  

The latest poll results on the polling data aggregation site Real Clear Politics show that 11.3% of Americans think that Congress is doing a good job, and 82.5 percent think they’re stinking up the place.  Just to put that into context:  A recent poll by the Zogby survey firm asked Americans what they thought of former head of the KGB and autocratic Russian despot Vladimir Putin, a man who routinely has his opponents killed and imprisoned and who hands out political power to his many lovers.  Putin scores ten points higher among Americans than our own Congress. This is not a good sign for Congress.  It’s not a good sign for Americans, either, honestly.

Some have argued that this is because Congress is “do-nothing,” and that they’re always deadlocked, and they just don’t do anything.  But being a contrarian, I’m compelled to suggest: what if the problem is that they do too much?   They are, after all, primarily lawmakers.  What they do is make laws.  Do we have enough laws?

Let’s take a look at the United States Code. I can’t claim to fully understand it, but here’s what little I managed to pluck off the internet so I can make it seem like I know what I’m talking about. 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, which many of us are thinking about this time of year.  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 real 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 figure out most universal remotes. When regulations and requirements reach that level of complexity, it becomes harder and harder for us to keep track of them.  They stack up one on top of the other, until the tower of laws grows so high we can’t look at them without feeling dizzy.

One of the most striking things about the Ten Commandments we encounter in today’s passage from the book of Exodus is how simple and non-complex they are.  This listing of the most essential elements of God’s covenant with the people of Israel can be found in two places in the Torah, both here and in a slightly modified form in Deuteronomy 5:6-21.   In both locations, the basic structure and essence of the commandments remains the same.

The Mosaic Decalogue, which is what bible scholars call the 10 Commandments when they want to seem smarter than you, is divided up into two separate primary sections.   The first of those sections incorporates the first four commandments, all of which describe the relationship we’re supposed to have with God.   Those are, first, I am your God, second, don’t watch American Idol, third, don’t use my name unless you really mean it, and fourth, remember to chill on the Sabbath.   

The fourth commandment tells us to remember to take time to both worship and be at ease, but it also represents the transition between the first section of the covenant and the second.  We’re not just to take Sabbath for ourselves, after all.  It’s not just about us and God, although it is that.  What this commandment says is that we are to view Sabbath as a moral imperative, part of our commitment to other creatures as well.  We will not endlessly demand.  We will permit rest and reflection.   As such, this sets the stage for the remaining six commandments, in which our obligations towards other human beings are established.

There, we’re told to honor our parents, not to kill, not to cheat on our spouses, not to steal, not to lie about those around us, and not to be governed by greed.   Then, of course, the Book of Exodus continues, going into more complexity and detail.   But the essence remains intact and clearly discernable, easy to recall at the most elemental level.   How many are there?  Just take a look at your fingers, and count them off.   

Or your toes, if you’re so inclined.  This little piggy didn’t steal, this little piggy didn’t cheat on his wife, and this little piggy went wee wee wee all the way past his neighbor’s brand new car without even the slightest twinge of jealousy.

The world, of course, is a complex place, and we often struggle with the application of simple principles to the whirling sea of variant challenges that face us in our day-to-day existences.  It’s a whole bunch easier, on a certain level, if we have directions about what to do that are clearly and precisely applicable to the specific instance that we’re experiencing.

But where that begins to fall apart is in the nearly infinite complexity of the world in which we live.  Moment for moment, instance for instance, we just can’t match it.   Where it becomes even more challenging is in the growing complexities of our society.  If you’re a bronze age agrarian culture, you might be able to get away with several hundred laws.  Life was relatively simple.  But as a pluralist, semi-post-industrial culture, things for us are hugely more complicated, and our legal system reflects that.    The ethical and social dynamics of our societies are mindbogglingly complex.

From that intricacy, we arrive at a legal system that is equally intricate, and equally difficult to comprehend.  While I understand the value of our system of jurisprudence, and the reason for the structures of our laws, I can also understand how when a system gets more demanding, it can also become more frustrating.  If the scales of justice measure down to the picogram...that’s a trillionth of a gram, kids...then getting them to balance can make us crazy.

There is value in higher order laws, in ways of understanding our ethical responsibilities towards one another and to our Creator.   Those basic principles need to be interpreted and adapted to every particular situation, and that requires both wisdom and grace.  That is true for any framework of laws, no matter how complex.  What matters is our judgment, our capacity for mercy, our ability to look at the law as not just cogs and gears in a machine, but as an opportunity to manifest justice, mercy, and the best promise of our Creator in every moment we encounter.

Perhaps that’s a reason for our frustration, as we see how little grace abounds in our culture, and how we seek to use the law to punish rather than to build up.  But that’s not the fault of Congress.  It’s the fault of the folks who elect them.

It is those people, us, who need to be more deeply rooted in the gracious love of God.   Whether ten laws or ten thousand, it is that one law that must govern them all, and that one law that must govern us.  

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

Profit Margin

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

03.04.2012; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 8:31-38

I am not, truth be told, much of a businessman.  I’ve worked for businesses, far back across the long span of my working life.  I dished out popcorn and movie tickets as a teen, in a floundering little independent theatre, the kind of place that showed badly dubbed Italian horror films and ran Karate Kid 2 for four straight months to empty houses.  Even as a teenager, I wondered at the managerial wisdom of continuing to show a movie that was bringing in three patrons a week, as the endless repetitions of Mr. Miyagi’s muffled voice haunted my dreams.   I washed dishes in academic dining halls and a little Indian restaurant, drove cabs, schlepped auto parts around on a forklift in a warehouse, and stocked shelves in a little specialty store.  

I worked in a patent law firm as a clerk for a few months, but quickly realized that while 80 hour weeks and constant stress might be justified in some professions, I just couldn’t quite see it.  How much of the short flicker of my mortal life did I want to dedicate to maintaining intellectual property rights on intricate japanese toilets?   The answer to that question was: as little as possible.  That way lies madness.

But most of my adult working life has been in nonprofit organizations and churches.  The entrepreneurial dynamics of business just don’t appear to be in my genetic makeup.  I look out across the landscape of my immediate family, and I see teachers and social workers and professors and government scientists and nonprofit executives...but not a whole bunch of those git-out-there-and-make-it-happen small business job creators.

I can appreciate those folk.  It takes a whole bunch of courage and energy to start and run your own business.  You have to be focused, and disciplined, and aware of market dynamics.  You also have to be creative.   And if you do all of those things, and do them with passion, you can still watch a business fail.    The marketplace is red of tooth and claw, as ruthlessly Darwinian as the African savannah at dusk.  Just one look across the empty storefronts in this little town speaks the truth of that.  Plenty of dreams have been separated from the herd, run down, and devoured in the savage wilds of the Poolesville economy.

Some do succeed, of course.  And others are wildly successful.  That desire to win, to succeed, and to get as much as you can lies at the heart of our economic system.  According to Nobel-prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, the entire purpose of the marketplace is to maximize profit for shareholder return.  If that is the ethic that defines our whole economic life, though, what does that do to us?   What effect does that have on us as persons?

This last week, a group of psychologists lead by a team at UC Berkeley released some of the results of an ongoing multi-year study of altruism, one that examines the impact of material success on giving and compassion towards others.  Through a series of experiments, what this showed was that the more wealthy and materially successful you were, the less likely you were to show compassion towards others.  Those self-reporting incomes over $150,000 year were more likely to use deception to “win” a game, and less likely to reveal a truth if it would impact their success. Whether this means that getting wealth makes you less moral or that less moral folks tend to be wealthy isn’t clear.   Having recently done my taxes and looked at my household’s adjusted gross income, it also makes me a little concerned for my own spiritual health.

Being ruled by the desire for gain and personal benefit seems, well, to have some pretty negative consequences on who we are as a person.  

Selflessness and the quest for material success are at the core of the teachings we’re receiving from Mark’s Gospel today.    This collection of teachings is shared with both Matthew’s Gospel and Luke’s, although Mark presents it in a very slightly different way. 

Even though Mark tends to be more hush-hush and quiet about Jesus than the other gospels, in this section both Matthew and Luke have Jesus only talking to his immediate circle of followers.   Mark, on the other hand, puts this teaching out in the world, with Jesus gathering both his disciples and “the multitudes” to listen.  

What he’s teaching about is how his Gospel speaks into the lives that we all lead, and how his proclamation meshes with the way we exist.   As Mark took Christ’s words and shifted them into Greek for the Greek speaking world, one key term is repeated over and over again in the text, particularly verses 35 through 37.  

We hear about saving life, but losing it.  We hear about losing life, but saving it.   We hear about getting the whole world...in the original language, gaining the whole kosmos...but losing life.   And what can you give, if you’ve lost your life?

Bibles that have been translated into English don’t all agree on how to translate the word we hear rendered as “life.”  The Greek term that we hear presented as life is the term psyche, and the reason that some bibles translate it as “soul” and others “life” is that this word means all of those things.  It can mean the process of life, but it means more than that. 

It is our person, our self, our identity, our existence, our being.  

Heard in this way, it’s a bit different than the way we hear it in our language.   What Jesus is challenging his listeners to do is to set aside self, and to be willing to do so in as radical a way as Jesus himself did.   This came as something of a challenge for those who heard him.  If your yearning was for a messiah who followed the apocalyptic model, then what Jesus was saying went radically against the expectations of the day.  

It’s for that reason that Peter takes Jesus aside, because suddenly, what Jesus was saying was starting to be troubling.   Teaching that the Son of man was going to die meant that those who were gathering around Jesus in the hopes that he was there to kick some Roman behind were suddenly aware that what Jesus was offering wasn’t what they’d anticipated.  And as their cultural expectations were suddenly unsatisfied, they became less motivated.  I’m not sure if Peter used the phrase “paying better attention to our messaging” or warned Jesus about how the optics of crucifixion-language might downmarket the brand.  If he were alive today, sure, but I’m not sure marketing consultants were quite as common back in the first century.   Whichever way, Jesus would have none of it.  

What he warned, instead, was that a life lived in service to itself is not in keeping with the message he had come to live and teach.   And this message rings as dissonant in our culture of attainment today as his rejection of the messianic warrior-mantle would have been back in his own time.

Jesus is telling us that if we’re taking what he says seriously, our identity will be woven together by the Gospel.  It becomes the essence of what we are, the golden thread of grace that unifies our actions and makes us a cohesive human being.  It is, personally and spiritually, the source of our integrity, and I mean that in the most literal sense of the word.  It holds us together.

And when that integrity is challenged by the hunger for more, we’re required to resist it.  If we yield to the desire to gain at another’s expense, then sure, we’ve gained.  But we’ve lost our selves.

That doesn’t mean we can’t be entrepreneurial, or driven, or pour our hearts into making something work.  Those are good things, for both businesses and...quite frankly...churches.

But the point at which we realize that our efforts have taken us away from the essence of what Christ taught, when our desire to succeed has folded in on itself and closed us off to compassion, when other human beings become adversaries to be overcome and not other children of God to be loved, that’s when we have to be prepared to ask ourselves the price of what we’re about.

Because if we we lose ourselves, what are we?  All the gain in the world means nothing if we have vanished in the effort to attain it.  

So here, in this second week of Lent, let’s keep ourselves about the business we’ve all been called to pursue.  Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

Time to Prepare

Poolesville Presbyterian Church of Bethesda

02.26.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 1:9-15

There are few things that are more anxiety producing than being unprepared for something.  That basic gnawing feeling that you’re just not ready for the arrival of an inescapable reality is one of those things that justifiably tears and wrenches at our psyches, stirring in us that lingering stress dream.  

You know the one, that dream most of us have.

It’s the student stress dream, which crawls its way out of our subconscious whenever other stressors arise in our lives.    You’re dreaming along, happy as a clam, when suddenly you step through a door, and there you are in class, the test before you.  You don’t have a clue what the class is or what the subject is or why it is you’re only wearing a powdered British lawyer’s wig and a rhinestone studded halter top.

Maybe that last one’s just me.   

But most of us at some point encounter some variant on  those anxiety dreams, because feeling like you’ve not done what needs to get done really gets to us.   If you’re a musician, you don’t know the piece.  If you’re an actor, you’re playing Macbeth, only Lady Macbeth is Adam Sandler and he doesn’t know any of his lines, either.   If you’re a pastor?  Well, most of our dreams involve catastrophic worship experiences, most of which coincidentally also involve Adam Sandler.  

So we try to be ready for things, we do.  But it is easy, very easy, to not take the time to be prepared.  It’s easy not to be ready to deal with that particular moment when it arises, because we’ve convinced ourselves that it’s just not possible that it’ll happen.   It’s easy to get distracted, to know that something needs to happen, and to say...well...you know...I’ll get around to it.  I’ll get it done eventually.

Like, say, backing up your computer.  That one can hurt, particularly if you’re a writer.  Or, say, not keeping your backup in the same place as your computer.   Carrying the drive you use to back up your laptop in the same bag as your laptop might seem to make sense, because it lets you back up on the go.   I mean, if you drop the thing, what are the odds of both of them breaking?  And you almost never let the thing out of your sight.  Still, you know you should be backing up into the cloud, onto some distant server, just in case.   You just...well...can’t quite get around to it.  

But then when you return to your van with a couple of bags of bagels, and there the van door is, wide open, and the bag with your Mac and the backup drive containing the only copies of your half-finished sermon, your final doctoral paper, and a 25,000 word manuscript have wandered off to be sold on Craigslist, well, then you realize that the time to have taken steps to remedy that problem was the last time you were reminded about it.

Yesterday was not a particularly fun day.   

But as I filled out the police report, it did remind me that for some things, some very important things, the time to be preparing is right now.

The discipline of preparedness and the imperative of the right now are two key themes in today’s annoyingly apropos reading from the Gospel of Mark.   Mark’s Gospel is perhaps the most direct and to the point of all of the four narratives of Jesus.    His language is terse, and his stories are completely devoid of anything other than the most essential elements.   

Here we are in the first chapter of Mark, for instance, and things are very different than the first chapters of Luke and Matthew.  Those other two stories of the life of Christ begin with tales of the birth of Jesus, and long lists of ancestors.   They take a meandering storyteller’s path to the beginning of Jesus’ teaching and ministry.

Mark just doesn’t have time for that.  This Gospel gives us a quick introduction to John the Baptist in the first eight verses, and then...here’s Jesus!   He gets baptized, and then   wham, he’s out in the desert for forty days of preparation.

Those forty days of preparation are non-random.  Within the ancient Hebrew tradition, forty is a number of completeness or fullness.   A generation is forty years.   Moses spends forty days and forty nights on the mountaintop before he comes back with the 10 Commandments.  The Israelites wander in the wilderness for forty years.   During the story of the flood, the rain came down for forty days and forty nights, while Noah popped dramamines and thought to himself that animal stench and rocking boats really aren’t two great tastes that taste great together.   When applied to time, forty means “enough.”  It means “sufficient.”

And so where Matthew and Luke both give details about that time, Mark hits us with the shortest possible version.  What happened in the desert?  Enough that Jesus was ready.

Ready for what?   Ready to proclaim and teach the Gospel.   What is that Gospel?  The essence of that teaching can be found in its completeness in verse 15, summarized in typically blunt Markan style.   “The time is fulfilled.   The Kingdom of God is at hand.  Repent, and believe in the Good News.”

This Kingdom proclamation is the essence of what Jesus will teach in Mark, Matthew, and Luke, and it speaks directly to the urgency of being ready, because what matters is happening right now.

What is most significant in this tight little synopsis of Christ’s teachings is the immediacy of that declaration.  What Jesus is NOT saying is that we’re waiting around for something to happen before things matter.   What this is NOT saying is that our response to this event can wait.   Things are already happening, and have already happened.

When the author of Mark conveys the essence of Christ’s message in the Greek, he uses language that leaves no doubt on that front.   When he talks about the time being fulfilled, the verb he uses for fulfill is in a form that indicates completeness.   Even the word used for time by Mark is not the Greek word chronos, which simply delineates the passage of one moment to another.

Instead, Mark presents us with time as kairos, the Greek term that delineates time as a completed moment, a moment of accomplishment.  This is time outside of time, and is instead something complete in and of itself.

The nature of that time is revealed in the next phrase. “The Kingdom of God is at hand” means precisely that.   The thing that Jesus proclaimed is not something far off.  It is close enough that if you reach out, extending your fingers just a little, it’s right there, as close as the person nearest to you.

What that means for us, right now, in this 40 day period of preparation, is that we are meant to feel intensity and urgency of purpose as we act in the world.  That is always true, of course.  That is always meant to be the dynamic of a faithful life.

But we lose that in the shuffle of the day to day, as the stress and sparkle of the world turns our attention away from those things we know we really should be attending to.  Those things are not the stuff of data and REM sleep compare and contrast exams.   They go deeper into our relationship with the creation into which we have been placed, and the other souls with whom we share it.

Are we prepared, in the right now, in the This Instant, to respond to the world in such a way that we are acknowledging the reality that Christ proclaimed?  Being prepared to encounter each moment in grace is the essential task of every Christian, because...as we were reminded this Ash Wednesday...our lives are finite.  The vital, turning-point instants that shape the flavor and nature of our days can sneak up on us, as stealthy as a thief.  No matter where we find ourselves, that moment could be upon us.   There isn’t a single moment when we can be unprepared to respond in keeping with the grace of the Kingdom.

A cutting word can be stilled on your lips, and the arc of a relationship can be changed.  A word of forgiveness can be found and offered though the wound goes deep, and a brokenness can begin to heal.  A silence can be broken, and in doing so a falsehood can be quashed, or an injustice halted.  In an instant, we can find everything that defined the pattern of our lives shattered, in that call that comes too late in the night, or that look in the doctor’s eye.  How do we survive such moments?   Because we don’t know when those moments will come.  We have no idea.

If we are unprepared, undisciplined, unfocused in our Way, then we’ll meet those unexpected moments of kairos possibility with our anxieties, our angers, our fears, and our selfishness.   And from those places, what we’ll write onto the fabric of time and space will not bend things for the better, not live into the reality of that Kingdom.

So in the days ahead, use the time to claim the time.  Whatever actions deepen your capacity to live into the Kingdom, recommit yourself to practicing them.  Prayer and service, worship and justice, meditation and action, each of these, renewed across these days, can strengthen us in our yearning to live into the time at hand.   And the time is, and always has been, at hand.

Let this season, in its completeness, complete us to respond to that essence of Christ’s message.  The time is right now. 

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

Just Not Seeing It

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

02.19.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  2 Corinthians 4:3-6

Our world is filled with folks with different perspectives.  None of us stand in the same place, or view the world through the same set of eyes.  From those different perspectives, we can struggle to see the value in what others believe about the world.   We see something, and think to ourselves, huh.  How does that possibly work for you?

This last week, for instance, I was doing background work for the Ash Wednesday service we’re going to have here at PPC this upcoming Wednesday.   Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the Lenten Season, and is the neglected sister of Fat Tuesday.   We’re big into Fat Tuesday, because Fat Tuesday is fun.  On Mardi Gras Americans get to go down to N’walins and do stupid things.   Americans continue to do this despite the fact that while what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, what happens in N’walins tends to require stitches, antibiotics and six months of court mandated community service. 

But Ash Wednesday, the Mercredi des Cendres, well, that one we don’t celebrate so much.   The day gets its name not from the greyish skin-tone you encounter in post-Mardi Gras Louisiana State University frat boys, but from the ritual application of oil and ash to remind us of our mortality.

As I looked into ways we might celebrate Ash Wednesday, I encountered all kinds of liturgies, from all sorts of different traditions.  There were Episcopalian services, Methodist services, and Catholic services.  But the oddest service I encountered was a Presbyterian service, one that I...well...I just couldn’t wrap my head around it.   It was a service of the First Presbyterian Church of Second Life.  This is a gathering of Presbyterians in a virtual world in which virtual representations wander around and...well...do stuff.  Including, apparently, go to church.   The bulletin for that service, well, um, included phrases like this:

After a prayer is offered, each person will come forward to receive the imposition of ashes. When you receive the ashes, go into your inventory, find the ashes (type "ashes" in your inventory search) right click on them, and select "wear."

This Wednesday at PPC will not be like that.   I just can’t even find my way to seeing how that would feel like worship.  Second Life is a place you go to pretend to be something you’re not...so what does that say about worship there?   But that may just be me.  I’ll often encounter folks who just can’t see my own faith as I see it.   

The atheists I sometimes encounter, for example, have an experience of the Christian faith that bears no resemblance to my own.

Seen through the eyes of atheism, even the most basic things about Christianity seem totally different.  I can understand the struggle to grasp faith, or to believe in God.  But what I can’t get is the way that Jesus is seen.  When I look at Jesus, as objectively as I can, I see teachings that revolve around love, grace, and mercy.  I see a theology that is rooted in a loving relationship with our Creator, and an interpersonal ethic that requires radical compassion for every human being around us.   Then I encounter seemingly intelligent human beings who’d describe Jesus totally differently.   

In my office, I have a book that was given to me as a gift.  It’s a Brick Testament book, one of a series of books in which scenes from the Bible are recreated using Lego people.   I find them amusing, because 1) I love the Bible and 2) Lego is awesome.  But when I went to buy an anthology of the books, one that included some Jesus teachings, I made a difficult discovery.   The books themselves are produced by someone who sees faith through the eyes of atheism.   When you get to the Brick Testament spin on his teachings, it’s hard to read them.  Jesus is presented as a glazed eye warmonger, a hate-filled psychopathic zealot, and a rigid legalistic hypocrite.  And try as I might, I just can’t see it.  I cannot see how the author of those books sees, see or feel how he feels, no matter how mightily I try to empathize.

Being able to see people through the eyes of compassion was a skillset in short supply in the congregation that had gathered in Corinth.   The last few weeks, we’ve been digging our way through Paul’s correspondence to this benighted community.  First Corinthians is, in all likelihood, not the first letter Paul wrote to Corinth at all.   Given the evidence in the text, it is probably the second is a series of letters to a church that seemed to need every little bit of help it could get.   

Second Corinthians continues Paul’s correspondence, but very few scholars now believe that this is just a single letter.   Where 1 Corinthians develops naturally, with each section following logically after the next, 2 Corinthians wanders all over the place.  The tone of the letter changes wildly and abruptly, with odd transitions and shifts of emphasis that just make no sense whatsoever.  One moment Paul will be waxing eloquent about love, and then suddenly he’s attacking someone, and then he’s right back to being positive again.

Given the clear gifts of rhetoric that Paul shows in his other letters, most objective scholars believe that this text is a mashup, a cut-and-paste job that weaves together three or more free-standing letters into one single text.  Think of it as a K-Tel medley of Paul’s greatest hits, if you will, or if you’re old enough to even know what that means. 

In this section, which begins at the start of chapter 3, Paul is dealing once again with the tendency of the Corinthians to categorize human beings according to their worth in the social pecking order.  The Corinthians were big fans of shiny people.  If you had impressive credentials or showed the outward signs of wealth, you did well in Corinth.  If you had big impressive spiritual gifts, or could preach a firebrand sermon, you did well in Corinth.

And, as was the case in much of the rest of the Greco-Roman world, if you had a rich and powerful person vouching for you with a strong letter of recommendation, you’d do well in Corinth.  Doors would open.  People would see you as a more important and more valuable human being.   Two thousand years have passed, and not much is different.

As Paul argues against this rather basic human tendency to value one person more than another, he expands his argument to talk about the fundamental challenge many human beings had grasping the purpose of what Jesus was doing in the world.  The radical character of what he taught is just too much to grasp.  In 2 Corinthians 3:15, he describes those who live with “veiled minds,” and in 2 Corinthians 4:4, he talks of those for whom “the god of this world has blinded their minds.”

That veiling and hiding from sight takes two forms, according to Paul.  The first comes with rigid legalism, when human beings get so caught up in the letter of the law that they lose the movement of the Spirit in their hearts.  As he writes in 2 Corinthians 3:6, we are called to be “..ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit, for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”

The second thing that blinds us is the pride social power, status, and otherness.   We’re not to proclaim ourselves and our superiority over others.  If we are to be the lights shining in the darkness, then our task is not to let ourselves be deluded into thinking that wealth or intelligence or any human condition matters.  What matters is letting the light of grace and the Spirit shine from us.  That’s pretty much it.

How does that look?  It requires us to look at those who are not us, and who we struggle to grasp, through the lenses of grace.   If there are souls who gather virtually to worship, though it might seem a bit silly to me, my job is not to assume they’re somehow getting it wrong just because their approach to faith is...um...different.  Here, the practice of compassion requires that you see the grace in what they are doing.  Sure, worship is better enfleshed, and feeling the touch of ashes on your forehead is arguable better than selecting “Ashes” from a dropdown menu.   But if that some folks choose to be Christian even in their places of play isn’t a bad thing.   

And if someone has convinced themselves that Jesus is hateful, legalistic, and warlike, the response that is guided by the light of Christ is not one that mirrors that presumption back at them.  Instead, the response is grace, to live a life that is an “open statement of the truth.”  Not any truth, but the reality that is formed and shaped when we let ourselves be governed by the Spirit of grace, and see our world through the lenses of grace.  So I can disagree, and I can say so, but I can do that graciously.  You may be wrong about Jesus, as wrong as you can be, but Lego is still awesome.  

That is the purpose of the Lenten season that begins on Wednesday.  It is to remind us, through the discipline of 40 days of self-denial and renewed commitment, that being the light of the world is not only Christ’s calling.  If we walk with him, it is our calling as well.

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

Long. Distance. Running.

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

02.12.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  1 Corinthians 9:24-27

For the first decade or so of our relationship, my wife and I had a few things we’d always do when we’d go somewhere in a car.  If we were commuting together or going out, there were patterns we’d fall into, little ritual exchanges or actions that were always the same.  Like, say, me always driving, although she’s a perfectly good and capable driver.  Or every journey always beginning with the application of makeup, no matter how much time had been spent preparing to go out beforehand.

Here, I’m talking about her.  Just to be clear.   

If the car trip was longer than 20 minutes, the odds were that at some point, she’d fall asleep, as the warmth and the movement of the car would rock her to sleep.  I’d usually find this out as I was in the middle of what I thought was a conversation, only to look over and see her twitching slightly.   Honestly, though, I liked her tendency towards vehicular narcolepsy.  It made whatever trip we were taking feel warm and cozy.   Nothing makes you feel more nurturing and husband-ish than when the woman you love is sleeping in the car next to you.

And whenever we’d drive past a jogger, we’d both roll our eyes.  I hate running, either she or I would say.  So boring, either she or I would say.  And so high-impact, either she or I would say.   What about their knees, either she or I would say.

So it came as something of a surprise this last year when my wife really, really got into running.  It started when a co-worker invited her to go on a run with a group, and she discovered that it was both challenging and kind of fun.  From there, it was more running, followed by running a 5K, and then a 10K.    After a few runs, she decided, gosh, why not attempt a half-marathon?  

And so for the last several months, she’s been training.  Running 12 point one miles isn’t just something you decide to do.  Well, you could decide to do it.  I could decide to run from here to Bethesda this very afternoon.  By the time I reached the Poolesville city limits, though, I’m pretty sure I’d be deciding to sit down for a while and then deciding to call someone to come pick me up.

You have to prepare for a run of that length.   You have to work at it, building into it, paying attention to how your body responds.  You have to attend to technique, making sure you’re working with your own muscles, sinew, and bones in such a way that you build strength and endurance, but don’t do damage.

Slowly, patiently, methodically, my I-hate-running wife managed to run six miles.  Then eight.  Then nine.  Then eleven point one.  What would have seemed completely impossible just a few years ago has, with time and discipline and focus, become a possible thing.

The Apostle Paul understood what it took to make a seemingly impossible thing happen, in a way that only a few other human beings across the span of our history have understood it.  When he embraced the teachings and Spirit of Jesus of Nazareth as his guide and purpose in life, the Jesus movement was just a tiny, fragile bud, a little group of human beings who came from the most backwater region of a backwater province of a vast and teeming empire.

Paul devoted the full and complete energies of his life towards the spread of that faith, taking his considerable gifts and talents and pouring them into the effort to share Christ’s gracious teaching with the world.  This was not something done easily.   

It was particularly not easy in Corinth.  The church in Corinth was notoriously troubled, riven with conflicts and gossip.  More significantly, it was challenged by a form of hyper-competitiveness, as members of the church allowed the values of the city of Corinth to worm their way into the life and dynamics of the church.  As a recently planted trading colony, Corinth was a place full of hard-charging, self-made souls.  They were driven, they were in it to win it, and God help anyone who got in their way.

In this ninth chapter of this letter, Paul is talking explicitly about how Christians are to use their lives.   He begins the chapter by talking about the rights of Christians who teach the Christian faith to be supported by those who learn the faith from them.   This one’s a favorite of many pastors come salary and budget season, let me tell you.

After declaring that to be a right of Christian teachers, Paul then affirms his freedom to set that aside.  He could take income, and would be well within his rights to take income, but because he is free, he won’t.  He doesn’t chase after his own self-interest above all other things, but instead chooses to discipline himself, focusing his energies on the Gospel.

In the verses immediately before the passage you heard read this morning, he goes further.   Not only does he not pursue his own self-interest, but he finds ways to structure his relationships with others in such a way that he connects with them as much as is possible.  His knowledge of Torah and training connected him to the Jews.  His well developed skills with Greco-Roman rhetoric and knowledge of the social context of his culture connected him with Gentiles.  His own personal history as a self-appointed inquisitor against Jesus folk connected him with those who were struggling to come to grips with the faith.  

Paul’s success in sharing what Christ taught came not because he beat people over the head with it, bullied them into being afraid of it, or pitched the same Jesus-script to every human being he encountered.   Instead, his personal discipline was different.

In describing that discipline in verses 24 through 27, Paul uses the image of a runner, one that would have been familiar to the folks at Corinth.  This letter was written in the early 50s...that’s Fifties, not Nineteen Fifties...and seems likely to have been written in either 53 or 54.   If so, it would have come just a year or so after a major sporting event called the Isthmian games, held at an arena only eight miles from the city of Corinth.  Sports would still have been on the mind of the Corinthians, and they would have viewed it as a potent metaphor for the way they lived competitively.

Paul first reminded them of the imperative to try to do what you are doing and do it well.  Then he reminded them that chasing after material success means nothing.  The wreaths of fresh greens that were given to the champions in the Isthmian games wilted.    Superbowl rings can be bought on eBay.   

What Christians are attempting...a life lived in accordance with the essential and fundamental grace underlying all creation...is of far more ultimate value than material success.   That reinforces the need for self-discipline and focus in the pursuit of a Christ centered existence, and that often eludes us.   While we’re perfectly content to assume that discipline is necessary for success every other area of our lives, we get ourselves to thinking that somehow our journey of faith is not like that.   We’re spiritual, we tell ourselves, and somehow that’s going to be enough.  God’ll get ‘er done, because we are just so awesome.  

But if we attend to Paul’s teaching, we realize that a bit of focus might be necessary.

First and foremost, we find discipline in the consistent developing and practicing of compassion.  That’s the point Paul is making in 1 Corinthians 9:19-23.  His primary and central discipline, as the most focused and successful Apostle of the Gospel, was that of compassion.  It was compassion that enabled him to connect with others.  It was compassion that allowed him to find ways to articulate the transforming message of Jesus to others.

In our own journeys, this is something we all struggle with.  Sometimes, compassion is easy.  If we’re at ease, and in a place of balance and calm, it’s easy.  But in conflict, or struggle, we’re not so good at it.  When we’re exhausted, or shimmering with stress, we’re not so good at it.  When we find ourselves pressed on a dozen fronts, our capacity to care...well...it’s pressed.  We’d rather be ornery.  We’d rather lay into/mock/subvert those fools who just don’t get us.  It’s what we like to do.

But if we’re in it for the long haul, if our journey with Jesus isn’t just a half-hearted twenty five meter waddle followed by some ibuprofen and a nap, then we need to be able to do more.  We need self control in the expression and practice of faith.  Maintaining that discipline is essential, if we are to have the boldness to call ourselves disciples of Christ’s grace.   Let’s get that done.  Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

The Sacrifice

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

02.05.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Hebrews 2:14-18

It’s been nearly a decade since I started making that regular trip across the American Legion Bridge, and I’ll confess that as a lifelong Virginian, there are still some things about Maryland that I just don’t get.

I’m sure the feeling is mutual, particularly now that things are getting odd over there in the capital of the Old Dominion.  Take, for instance, the recent push in the Virginia State Senate to eliminate restrictions on multiple simultaneous handgun purchases. It’s not that you can’t buy a handgun in Virginia, or legally own a handgun in Virginia.  It’s just that under standing Virginia law, you can only buy one a month.

Clearly, this gets in the way of Christmas and Hanukkah gun shopping.  How can I buy a Pink Walther P22 for my wife and a pair of Ruger SR22s for the boys if I’ve got to wait a  whole month between purchases?   Sure, I could plan ahead and take my time, but I shop like a man, so that just wouldn’t work for me.   

It might seem that most Virginians would be perfectly capable of defending their household against marauding hordes of bandits and/or Democrats with one pistol.  But what if my plan for defending my household involves leaping sideways through the air in slow motion Matrix bullet time while simultaneously dual-wielding two Glocks?  Unless the law is changed, I’d have to wait a whole month before I could do that.  So Virginia’s State Senate is working to change that law, although their efforts to change the laws of Newtonian physics to permit slow mo shooting may get hung up in committee.

That this is a legislative priority might be confusing to some Marylanders.  

I, on the other hand, am always confused by Maryland’s endless dabbling with gambling as a revenue source.  With the expansion of slots once again coming before the Maryland State Senate tomorrow, I confess to find slots baffling.  For me, slots just seem like the worst possible video game EVER.  A game that involves no skill, no strategy, no storyline, and over which you have only the illusion of control?  That, and fifty bucks gets you only two hours of gameplay?  I’m never going to play that game. I’m not even going to download the demo.  

That said, I conceptually grasp the neurology of gambling as a compulsion, how intermittent and random rewards generate a greater tendency to repeat an action.  Because of this, it’s a great way to take money from addictive personalities, the gullible, and the desperate.  

Clearly, people want roads that have been maintained sometime in the last decade, and decent schools, and competent and professional law enforcement, and all the infrastructure that makes for good and efficient government.  But to have those things, you have to pay for them.  Paying for them means taxes or tolls, in the same way that buying anything involves paying for it.   

But it’s far easier to convince people to do something if they think they can do it without any sacrifice at all.   Why pay for something, if you can get people to just dump money into bright flashing machines and then use that cash to pay for it?   

Someone else makes the sacrifice, so you don’t have to.  Someone else gives, and you just sit back and enjoy the fruits of their loss.  It’s a strange way to run a government.

It’s also, quite frankly, one of the things I struggle with most as I read through the letter to the Hebrews.   Hebrews is a challenging letter on many fronts, particularly for our twenty-first century sensibilities.  

It was written late in the Apostolic era, and we honestly have no clue who actually wrote it.  For a while in the early church, there were some who thought it had been written by Paul.  But the text itself does not claim that, and the theology and priestly focus make Pauline authorship unlikely.  Scholars at the time the King James Bible was produced suggested that Paul’s companion Timothy wrote it.  Martin Luther argued that it was most likely to have been Apollos, a prominent early Christian from Alexandria who is mentioned in both Paul’s letters and the Book of Acts.  

Modern scholarship tends to favor Luther’s perspective, because Alexandria was a city of learning, and the letter of Hebrews itself is so uncompromisingly High Church.  The language, structure, and tone of the letter indicates a writer of unusual refinement and sophistication.  To put it into soap operatic terms, if 2 Corinthians is “Days of Our Lives,” then Hebrews would be “Downton Abbey.”

The “letter” itself is less a letter than a theological treatise.  Although it concludes with reference to a visit by the writer, the beginning of Hebrews starts with the phrase “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in may and various ways by the prophets,” which can hardly be considered to be a warm opening salutation.

The purpose of Hebrews as a theological essay is relatively straightforward.  It’s a sustained exploration of the identity of Jesus of Nazareth, seen through the lenses of the Hebrew priesthood.  Jesus is identified both as the ideal priest, but also...as is indicated in verses 17 and 18 of chapter 2, as the “sacrifice of atonement.”  The essential principle behind this theology is that Christ’s death is similar to the sacrifices in the temple.  This sacrificial way of understanding Jesus is explored in more depth in chapter 9 and the early portion of chapter 10, and is often described as substitutionary atonement.  God is angry with us, but instead kills Jesus, who absorbs God’s anger against us.

While this is a fairly core assertion of Christian theology, I’ve always had to wrestle with it.  The idea that the God who is love should demand a blood sacrifice has always been difficult to reconcile conceptually.  

This is something that other Christians have wrestled with deeply as well, and no one I’ve studied has been more mightily challenged by the concept than 19th century Scottish mystic George MacDonald.  MacDonald was C.S. Lewises spiritual master, and one of the most intense theological minds you’ll ever encounter.   His writings are just smart, hard, bare-knuckled and uncompromising theology, applied directly to the forehead with all the merciless intensity of a Scots intellectual.    MacDonald burns bright like fire, and he gets God in a way that goes well beyond abstract knowledge. 
Primary among these is the emphasis on how completely human Jesus was, how deeply connected he was to the struggles and losses of humankind.   He was, or so we hear in Hebrews 2:17-18, “..like his brothers and sisters in every respect..” and “..himself..tested by what he suffered.”

MacDonald, as a mystic whose theology was formed not by doctrine but by personal encounter with God, had no patience whatsoever for the doctrine of substitutionary atonement.  This is a basic assumption for many Christians, but MacD viewed it as essentially pagan, little more than a cultic sacrifice.  He saw it as a fundamental misunderstanding of Christ's person and teachings, the central teachings of the apostles, and the nature of God.  For MacDonald, God is ferocious, absolute Love, and there's no way to reconcile God's essential nature with the popular version of this theology.  And Lord ha' mercy, he's gonna be tellin' ya 'bout it.

It is in that connection, in that depth of awareness of both God’s grace and human weakness, that is most significant for the author of Hebrews.   In Jesus, we encounter the intent and purpose and power of our Creator, but God also encounters us.   It is not that God demands the blood of Jesus, like some cruel and bloodthirsty demigod.  It is that in Christ, the depth of God’s relationship to us, participation in us, and love for us is shown.

That depth of connection can be hard to process, particularly in a culture that struggles with the idea of sacrifice.  Our society thrives on the cult of self.  We yearn for power over others, and we seek the easy way out, the way that involves us giving as little as we can for as much as we can get.  When all we’re taught to chase is self-interest, guns and gambling, power and profit, sacrifice can seem an odd thing.   The radical compassion that was required to give over an entire life to teaching compassion to others does not process.

That someone would choose to give themselves to walk with us and teach us and heal us, and that they wouldn’t be broken from that path even by the worst we had to offer...well...that’s a transforming thing.  It’s a sacred thing.  Sacrifice, of course, means nothing more than “to make holy.”  It’s what Jesus was all about.  Making this creation holy.  And as we embrace the ethic and the Spirit that filled him, it’s our task as well, no matter which side of the Potomac we call home.

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