Breathe In, Breathe Out

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

04.07.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: John 20:19-31

We breathe in, we breathe out. It’s a simple and basic part of our existence, so simple that we don’t really even think about it. 

Well, actually, the last week or two we have been thinking about it.  It’s Spring, and the world is a joyful riot of life.  The morning begins with the flutter of birdsong with the rising brightness of the sun, followed by the glorious sound of our dog hacking and sneezing. Our every breath brings in those floating flecks of pollen, which embed themselves in our red itchy eyes and coat our scratchy sinuses and phlegmy throats.  We did say we were eager for spring to arrive, right?

But breathing itself, when the air isn’t filled with tiny spiky balls, well, we don’t think about that.  it just happens.  And it happens a whole bunch.

The muscles of our diaphragm contract, and pull air deep into our lungs. The muscles of our diaphragm relax, and the air is released. That action happens between 8-15 times a minute, around 17,000 times a day. We do it mostly without thinking, without thought, and we do it a lot. 

We can control it, sure. You can breathe really really fast...but if you keep that up, you’ll hyperventilate and pass out. You can stop your breathing entirely for a while......but that ends up having the same effect. For breathing to work, we have to take the air in, and give the air out. We receive it, and we send it. We send it out, and we take it in. If we don’t, we die.

Our lungs are partnered with our heart, which functions in a similar way. The oxygen taken in by our lungs enters our blood, and needs to get out to the body. Our heart is like the heart of any other mammal, and has four chambers. The left atrium receives oxygen rich blood, and the left ventricle sends that blood to the body. The right atrium receives the oxygen-depleted blood back, and the right ventricle sends it back to the lungs. All this happens without our thinking, 72 times a minute, 2.5 billion times over an average lifetime. Receiving and sending, sending and receiving. It’s absolutely necessary if we are to live.

Breathing and sending and receiving are at the heart of what Jesus was proclaiming in today’s post-Easter passage from the Gospel of John.  This little chunk of John’s Gospel is full of intriguing stories, like, for instance, the description of the doubts that Thomas felt and Christ’s response, as He told us what it meant to believe. 

If you read it closely, you might also notice that this was probably the point where some early version of John’s Gospel actually ended. Take a look at the last two verses, at John 20:30-31. 

“Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”

Those verses read like the conclusion of a book. Why?  Because at one point, they probably were.  It wraps things up, telling us that there were other witnesses to Christ, and telling us why John’s Gospel was written. Of course, after that, we get a whole ‘nutha chapter.  It’s just part of John’s open ended approach to the Gospel.  This Gospel admits there are other accounts out there, other stories and other parts of the truth about what Jesus taught.  

What most likely happened as the Gospel was pulled together was that after the writing was done, John’s community discovered another story, one containing some of the “many other signs”...that was remembered later.  And so we get John 21, which also ends with the same invitation to embrace more of the story.

“There are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”

But what I want to raise up about this final section of John’s Gospel has everything to do with breathing in and breathing out. The story comes after the resurrection, after Mary had met the risen Jesus in the garden. It’s John’s post-Easter story, but when we encounter the disciples, we don’t find them happy and uplifted and never wanting to see another chocolate bunny again. Instead, they are frightened and isolated, huddled behind locked doors and unwilling to move out into a world that has just taken the life of the rabbi that they loved.

Suddenly, Jesus is among them. He just is, right there, in the flesh. Though they’ve closed ranks, he works his way among them. They are, understandably, overjoyed.

But his arrival isn’t without purpose. First, he offers them his shalom, his peace. Then he tells them that peace will be with them a second time. Having promised them peace, he presents them with a challenge. They’ve received him in. They’ve been filled with rejoicing at his impossible presence.

So he tells them this: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” He has found them holed up, locked away, and he wants them out in the world. This is, as John’s Gospel tells it, the equivalent of the Great Commission in Matthew’s story, when Jesus tells the disciples to get out there and baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Get out there. Be sent, as I was sent. 

And then Jesus breathes on them. Breathes on them?  It’s not something that we’d usually expect someone to do when they’ve asked us to do something.  I mean, seriously.  When I want the boys to do their chores, I don’t say, “Go clean your room....hhhhhHHHHaaaaaaaa.”  Although given how much that might freak them out, perhaps I should consider it.

Giving marching orders? Sure. Giving instructions? Fine.  We’d expect that. But Jesus breathes on them.

In the Greek that John’s Gospel uses to tell the story of Christ, of course, the words for “breath” and the words for “spirit” are the same.  Pneuma, it is, in Greek.  So out flows Christ’s breath, and it carries with it the words “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Having given them the breath and the spirit, Jesus then makes a radical statement. He tells them that they have been charged with the ability to forgive or retain sins. That’s an odd mirror of such passages as Luke 7:49, where people can’t believe that Jesus would have the audacity to forgive sins himself. But remember, right here Christ is sending them, just as he was sent, using the same Spirit, the same breath, the same hope, the same Gospel.

Just as He also sends us. That is a difficult thing to grasp here, even if we are sorta right in the middle of a church. I mean, here we are on Sunday, as always. We’re doing the stuff we do, singing and studying and praying and worshiping and then hitting McDonalds afterwards. We listen to passages like this and we think, great!  Good for them. Good job guys!  Go to it!

But passages like this aren’t meant to be heard as referring to some long distant time, or as being intended only for the ones gathered there in that room. They are spoken just as directly to us. It is we who need to receive them, we who need to know that we are sent, we who need to feel the warm sweetness of that breath upon our brow.

And if we can allow ourselves to be grasped by that truth, then we have to ask ourselves...having received this Spirit, having been entrusted with this Spirit and this calling...what are we supposed to do?

What we cannot do is hold it in. We can’t just receive and receive and receive and not send it out ourselves, any more than lungs can fill themselves with air and not breathe it out, or a heart can fill with blood and not send it on. Holding it back, keeping it to ourselves, trying to grasp it and keep it...none of these things can lead to our own spiritual life. If we receive only, and do not act and send...we’ve missed the point.

And our culture drives us to miss the point.  We are consumers, after all.  We are told to take, to have, to devour.  The taking is easy.  We breathe in easy.  

How do we breathe out? Being willing to share our faith, to speak it and breathe it out into the world...these things are important. But we also have to be able to live and act in such a way that those who hear us talk about our faith know that we aren’t holding back.

Take, for simple instance, Christ’s affirmation that we are empowered to forgive. Sure, we can also retain sins, keeping a meticulously detailed Excel spreadsheet of all the ways that we have been wronged or slighted or disrespected. We can do that. Problem is, most of us were doing a great job of that before Jesus came along. Human beings have that one down pat.

Do those around you...and *particularly* those you’ve gotten into disagreements with, who are on your bad side...have any idea that you’ve been given the power to forgive? We’ve all received that forgiveness ourselves, from the one whom we crucified...all of us...with the nails of our selfishness and the hammer of our hatred. But do we give that forgiveness out in return...or do we sop it up like a heart that refuses to beat, or a chest that refuses to breathe?

Breathe in. 

Breathe out.

It’s as simple as living.

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

The Great Restart

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams, Easter Sunday 2013

Scripture Lesson: Luke 24:1-12

In this technological age, I’d like to pretend that I have amazing technical skills.   We increasingly seem to need those technical skill for pretty much everything we do.  Humanity has moved well beyond the “me rub stick make fire” stage, although honestly, having tried that, it’s not anywhere near as easy as it looks.

With our magic devil boxes now absolutely everywhere and doing absolutely everything,  we are both amazed at their wonderful magicalness and fearful of what happens when they no longer operate.  How could we find our way anywhere without Googlemaps telling us where it is?  How could we survive even a moment if we couldn’t artfully share our morning bowl of Froot Loops with Instagram?

Honestly, if our Playstation had punked out over this last week with the boys at home, I don’t know if my family could have survived.  

Which is why it’s unfortunate that while I might pretend to have technical skills, but I actually don’t.  I’m basically a technical one-trick pony.   That trick:  Turn it off.  Wait a minute.  Then turn it back on.

If my phone is acting up, I just hold that little button until it clicks off.  Then I sit there and quietly count to thirty, anxiously concerned about any emails/texts/Facebook messages/tweets I might have missed in those vital thirty seconds.  When I turn it back on, nine times out of ten, it’s just fine and dandy.   The same thing works for our computer.  And for our Wi Fi router.  It even works for our car.  

Toyota Priuses...Prii..are hybrid technological marvels, as complex internally as an Apollo space capsule.  Yeah, it’s not a Lamborghini Veneno or a Full-kit Apocalypse Ready Unimog.  It’s the perfect suburban transportation appliance, meticulously engineered for 99.9675% of reality, for commuting and errands and laughing right on past that gas station.  But every now and again, for no apparent reason, the button that’s supposed to activate the navigation system decides it wants to be the button that selects Country and Western music on satellite radio.  It has not yet decided it wants to change our destination to Nashville, although I expect when we end up driving robot cars everywhere, that will occasionally happen.  

The fix for this problem?

Well, I could have an engineer spend sixty hours running a complex diagnostic assessment of both software and hardware.  Or I could turn off the car.   And six times out of ten, when I turn it back on, it’s fixed.  That does for the car what it does for all of our complicated but-not-quite-sentient machines.  Shutting completely off returns things to their most essential state.  It clears out whatever processes have gotten corrupted or fragmented or broken.

But for human beings, that’s not usually an option.  When we become corrupted or fragmented or broken, if you power us down completely, we don’t turn back on again.

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons that when we retell the story of the Resurrection on every Easter Sunday, we have so much trouble wrapping our heads around it.  Really stepping past our pasts just seems impossible.  

How can we not be who we’ve been?  That seems beyond us.

It feels as impossible as that wild story that was brought breathlessly back to the disciples in Luke’s retelling of the resurrection.   Luke has carried us through this season, recounting his story of the journey from Galilee to Jerusalem.

From the false triumph of his arrival in Jerusalem, things went rapidly south.  There was betrayal and arrest.   He was brought before the religious authorities, and then the power of the occupying Empire, and then the local authorities.  Each was broken in it’s own way, but each had that paradoxical power to make things right by beating them into their own broken version of rightness.  

And faced with this subversive who sought no power, who refused to raise his hand in violence, who taught that violence was its own reward, they chose to use violence to destroy him.  Those who’d placed their hopes in Jesus watched their broken world get a vastly more broken.

But today is not about that brokenness.  We sang and told that story on Friday.  The sabbath Saturday passed, and then a group of his disciples went to the place he’d been buried.   Luke’s story is filled with women, always mingled in with the disciples, even though the culture of the first century did not view women as equals.  Being less equal, women tended to get stuck with the dirty work, dealing with the mess of birth and babies and death.  

So it was the women who went, bearing spices and perfumes.

This wasn’t because they were planning on making some spicy schwarma, or that they were going out and were wearing Calvin Klein’s Judean Obsession.  It was because they expected the smell of decay to fill the tomb.

This was to be expected.  That’s what it looks like when we physically break.  We stay broken.  Our bodies fragment and fall apart.  But it is true of our souls, too.  We can stay broken.  We can be trapped in hurt, consumed by anxiety, rotted away by anger and bitterness until we dissolve into the stench of our own sorrows.

But when they encountered the tomb, it was not what they’d expected.  What they found was nothing.  The tomb was open, the stone rolled away, and there was nothing there.

And then, suddenly, there were two men there, each wearing clothes that evoked a strange response. Terrifying clothes?  I’ve been known to wear outfits that were terrifying on occasion.  Just ask my wife, or anyone who’s seen me wear white socks with dress shoes.  But the men who appear at the tomb are wearing clothes that mark them as otherworldly.

The message they convey to the women is a simple one...a reminder, of all the times that Jesus had told them that what he was about was not the power that the world knew, but something utterly different.  The world’s power, the power of temple and Herod and empire, that only deepened the darkness.

That was not what Jesus was trying to accomplish.

He accepted all that brokenness, taking it all in, until he was himself shattered by it.  He took it as far as a human being can take it, to the place of death itself and then beyond.

On that Easter morning, and on this one, and on every one, we tell ourselves into this story to remind ourselves that in Jesus and through the life he taught every single one of us to live, we are given the opportunity to turn our lives into something utterly different than they’ve been.

Every broken thing, every fragmented piece of mess that has set itself deep into us, all of those do not have a hold over us.  Those old patterns have only the power we give them, defining us only as we permit them to define us.

It’s hard for us to believe it, trapped as we are in our old ways of viewing the world.  We hear that report, and we can’t quite get ourselves to accept it.   How can that be?   It’s an idle tale, said the disciples.  It’s just dreaming.  It’s just rose-colored glasses fantasy.

It is easy to fall into that way of being, to refuse the new, to close off the possibility that things might change for the better.

But Easter morning is our celebration of the great restart. 

On this day, we are reminded that we do not have to dwell in the darkness of that tomb, or to wander forever in our places of loss and bitterness.  The newness of God’s creation rests before us, and we have been set free to embrace it.

He is risen.  Hallelujah.  AMEN.

  

    

Different Eyes

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 03.24.13

Scripture Lesson: Luke 19:28-40

Human beings can encounter the same thing, the very same slice of reality, and yet see it in completely different ways.

Take, for example, the peculiar case of Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla.  My older son and I were talking through that the other day, after he’d watched another Epic Rap Battles of History Youtube Video.  

If you’re not aware of this internet phenomenon, actors play two figures from history, who then hurl insults at each other as if they were rappers engaged in a musical battle.   Viewers are then asked to determine who won.  You have Einstein taking on Stephen Hawking, and Beethoven laying a smackdown on Justin Bieber, and Gandhi nonviolently dissing Martin Luther King Jr., and Mr. T taking on Mr. Rogers. The videos are funny, and more than a little bit profane, so view them at your discretion.   They’re a big thing, though.   Last year’s Epic Rap Battle between Obama and Romney was viewed 60 million times on Youtube, ten times more than the most viewed Youtube version of their actual debates.  Unlike the actual debate, the Rap Battle was clearly won by the spirit of Abraham Lincoln, who was carried down from the sky by a giant bald eagle to cut them both down to size.  Ours is a very, very strange culture. 

Edison and Tesla was particularly interesting, because it was an actual struggle.  They’d worked together, both brilliant pioneers of the electrical era.  Tesla was a genius, wildly creative.  Edison was also a genius, but more organized.  They ended up as adversaries.  If you were Tesla, Edison was a profiteer, interested more in patents, wealth, and power than expanding human knowledge.  If you were Edison, Tesla was a fool, a distractable, aimless semi-competent who wouldn’t know a business plan from a hole in the wall.  Where was the reality?  It’s hard to say.  

That’s the case with so many things.  Like, say, an article I read in one of my business media inputs this last week.    The article was about the recent uptick in the construction industry, and about the deep concern that some financial analysts had about a phenomenon they were observing.  Construction starts were up, said the article, but hiring was not up by nearly as much.

The reason, according to an interview with a Goldman Sachs analyst, was a practice called labor hoarding.  I’d never heard of this, so I looked into it a bit.  “Labor hoarding” happens when a company hits a downturn.  Instead of appropriately downsizing, the CEO chooses not to lay off workers.  They continue to draw salaries, even if they aren’t being maximally productive.  This is a problem that businesses should avoid, analysts say, because it reduces profit margins further at a time when they are already negatively impacted.

That’s an interesting perspective.  I’ve known business owners who’ve engaged in “labor hoarding,” and I’ve always just assumed it was because they knew that if they fired their employees, it would impact people they cared about.  They knew it meant a family would struggle, and a home might go into foreclosure, and that mattered to them more than profit.   I’d call it “compassion.”  Or being a “Christian businessperson.”   Same phenomenon exactly.  Two entirely different ways of seeing it.

Just as the story in today’s passage from Luke is seen in completely different ways by the different people we encounter.  This is Luke’s version of Jesuses’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem after slowly wending his way down from the North.  He’s been teaching, he’s been preaching, he’s been performing miracles.

If you’ve ever been to a Palm Sunday service before, or if you learned about this story as a child, then you probably have a mental image of what I just read to you.  I certainly do.  I have this old visual image of a cartoon kid’s book of Bible stories from when I was a young pupling in Sunday School at the Evangelical Free Church in London.  I visualize Jesus on a donkey, and he’s coming through the gates of the city, and everyone is waving these palm branches and shouting Hosanna.

That’s certainly the story we get in the other Gospels.  But it’s not the story we’ve just heard, not if we were listening closely.   First, it’s Palm Sunday, sure.  But where does Luke say the word “palm?”   Where does he talk about the people waving branches of palms and laying them on the ground before this strange rabbi?   He doesn’t.  Mark, Matthew and John all include palms, but not Luke.  Luke just uses the Greek world himateeon, which can mean cloak, but is really just a generic word for any kind of clothes.  

In Luke’s story of Jesus, people spread their garments on the ground before Jesus.   Period.  But we’ll stick with our palm fronds today, because taking off our clothes and waving them around just wouldn’t be very Presbyterian.  Maybe it’s Methodist.  I’ll have to ask Pastor Bill from across the street the next time I see him.

But what are they shouting?  Here, Luke mostly agrees with Mark and Matthew, but unlike all of the other Gospels, the crowds don’t cry Hosanna.  Luke chooses to leave that out, because he figured his Greek speaking non-Jewish audience would have no idea what that Hebrew word meant.  It means a weird complex mix of “Yay,” and “Please Help Us.”  There was too much backstory, too much detail that would have to be explained, and so he simply deletes it.  

And as a last blow to my vision of the story, in verse 41, Luke has all of that stuff happening, and then says “And when he drew near and saw the city he wept over it...”  This means he’s not even there yet.  Fiddle.  

But as Luke’s vision varies from that of the other Gospels, so too do each of the primary characters in this story.  Each of them thought they knew what was happening.  Each of them encountered Christ’s arrival in Jerusalem.  

The disciples thought the arrival augured a triumph, that it spoke to them finally finding their way to the place where the whole of their world would recognize who he was.  They’d heard Jesus speak of Jerusalem as a place of death and loss, but they figured Jesus was talking about something else.

The Pharisees saw the danger to the structures of their society, to the city of Jerusalem, and even the danger to Jesus himself.  They saw and feared that Jesus would upset all of that.

But from atop that donkey, the smell of animal and dust and sweat strong about him, Jesus saw where he was very differently.    He knew, as his disciples did not, what this arrival meant.   It meant that the end of his life was near.  It meant that suffering was at hand.  It was not triumph, and it was not victory.  That came later, but it would be much harder than any of them thought.

He saw, as the Pharisees did not, that Jerusalem itself and the power struggles around it meant nothing.  Why would he want to overthrow that power?  Why would he desire to take it for himself.  Soon enough, it would be nothing, shattered and smoldering after Rome had annihilated it.

Three sets of eyes.  Three different visions of the very same event.  The disciples saw a triumphal parade, and the Pharisees saw an invading threat.  

But what Jesus saw was rather different.  Jesus saw redemption and love, and the path of compassion.

When we encounter one another through the lenses of our own subjectivity, we tend to see things as we wish to see them.  One person’s hero is another person’s enemy.  One person’s wise financial strategy is another person’s cruelty.  From that place, where we see the world in terms of power, we struggle to encounter the real.

It’s a bit like an old classic 1950 movie by director Akira Kurosawa.  Made shortly after the Second World War, it’s called Rashomon, and it’s the story of a single horrible crime, told from the different perspectives of each of the characters.  None of the stories is the same, and the effect is dizzying.  How do we know what is real?  How can we have any idea what matters when everyone sees a different thing?

The response at the end of Rashomon--spoiler alert, so plug your ears if you don’t want to hear it--is that the only way through the chaos is to have faith in the power of compassion.  And that, as he entered the city, was Christ’s answer.  The faith that carried him there was deep enough that he trusted it could carry him through death itself.

Our journey together brings us into similar encounters.  We encounter difference in every other set of eyes, in every single soul we experience.  That can be enriching, but it can also stretch us to grasp where reality lies.  In the face of that, we can harden ourselves, circling the wagons and pouring our energies into hating the other.  We can become more deeply selfish, more aggressive, more hostile.

What Christ calls us to do instead is to radically value the compassion that guided him, not to allow our varying perspectives to tear us from the call to radically love both stranger and enemy.  He calls us down to that deepest reality, that place that challenges us and changes us.  That’s the essence of self-sacrifice.  That’s the heart of redemption.  And it’s the path he walked.  It’s up to us to see it, and follow.

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

Knowing Where You’re Going

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

03.17.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Philippians 3:4b-14

When I was in second grade, I knew exactly where I was going.  

I remember thinking about it, one day after school, as I was ambling my way home.  It was all very clear.  There was an obvious path, a clear goal, and I knew how to get there.

Get good enough grades in second grade, and you’d get into third grade.  Then, assuming you could handle long division, you’d be in fourth grade, and eventually you’d be one of the sixth graders, the kings of the school, the towering giants before whom kindergarteners tremble.   That was four years away, and four years is an eternity when you’re in grade number two.  It was half the span of a life at an age when a summer could last forever and a day was time enough to get anything done.

Beyond that, the hormonal Hades of junior high, and then, further still, there was high school.    High schoolers drove cars, and did grown up things.  Deeper into the haze of the future, so far I could barely see it, there was college.  I was going to go to college.  Second grade me just assumed this.  But I’d have to get in, and that wasn’t a shoo-in.  I’d have to have done things that would appease the gatekeepers.  I’d need my coin to put into the boatman’s hand as he took me across the river.

When time passed, and I found myself there, the credentials lined themselves up.  Test scores lined up nicely.  In an era before you needed community service hours, I had them.  I wrote for the school newspaper, and was the editor of the school’s literary magazine, and had placed third in the state in a writing competition.  Grades?  Well, the less said about them the better.

Through what could only be described as divine intervention, college happened.   Problem is, that was as far as my vision for my life went.   Because after college came life, and my story of myself ended with “going off to college.”  That was it.  After that, I didn’t have a clue.  Something was going to happen.  But what that something was?  I had no idea.  A job, perhaps?  But in second grade, I’d wanted to be a long haul trucker driving a road train across the Australian outback, and I couldn’t quite see how my degree worked into that plan.

What I learned pretty quickly was that life pitches you curves that nothing you’d ever done before could prepare you for.  You’ll have experiences and encounters that stretch you beyond your credentials.  Some of those are hard.  Recessions and long agonizingly fruitless stretches of unemployment.  Friends dying young.  Couples you love splitting.

The Apostle Paul had experienced exactly that.   He’d thought he knew where his life was going.  But he didn’t.  Life had thrown him a hard curveball, and as he recounts his background in today’s passage, he lets his readers in Philippi in on how he views his own personal history.

The funny thing about Paul sharing his background with the folks at Philippi was that they kind of already knew him, and knew him well.  It was a church that he himself had founded, likely in around the year 50 in the Common Era.   The short letter he wrote to them reflected their relationship, and that relationship was a good one.  This wasn’t a mess like Corinth or Galatia.  It also wasn’t a church where Paul wasn’t well known, like the church in Rome.  

These were his peeps, and the letter reflects that.  It’s an expression of the love he felt for the community there, particularly as they had supported him through times of challenge.  This letter was written during one of Paul's many imprisonments, most likely written from jail in Rome in the early 60s.    

At 10,000 inhabitants, Philippi was about double the size of Poolesville.  It was conveniently located on an East-West thoroughfare in the Roman province of Macedonia, 10 miles from the bustling port of Neapolis.  It was not close to Rome, but it was a Roman colony with deep connections to the center of Empire.

This whole letter is basically one big thank you to the Philippians.  Paul thanks them for both their material support in Paul’s time of imprisonment, but also thanking them for their prayers and care.  What makes this sweet little thank you note so interesting theologically is its focus on expressing the nature of Jesus of Nazareth, and particularly the humility and self-giving nature of Christ.   That's the focus of the well known hymn to Christ in Philippians 2:5-11, in which Paul encourages his readers to empty themselves of themselves, and be humble even in the face of their newly found connection to God.

The purpose of today's reading is similar, but with a more pointed focus.  Paul knew his own history and his own background, and recounted it to the folks at Philippi as a way of reminding them of his impeccable credentials.  In every way, he’d prepared himself for one life.  He’d been born into the faith of his parents.  He’d studied the sacred law ferociously, training at the feet of Gamaliel, one of the most renowned rabbis of that era.  There was very little doubt of Paul’s skill, training, and background.   He had prepared himself for a very particular future.

That was not the future that he would end up living.  Having had a powerful and transforming experience of Christ, Paul found himself radically changing the arc of his life.  The thing he thought would not be became what he was.  The life he couldn’t imagine himself living became his.

In this new life was not his upbringing or his flawless credentials that mattered.  What mattered was the transformative relationship he had with that odd man from Nazareth.  Paul’s faith in the justice, grace, mercy, and love of Christ was what defined his life, and what gave him value.  It is that relationship that allowed Paul to endure, and to press on through the considerable trials and difficulties of his existence, certain that there was a purpose to his life.    

The other stuff?   It helped.  Without question.  Paul’s knowledge of Torah and his gifts of persuasion did sort of come in handy later on.  But what mattered wasn’t what he thought mattered.  He found himself forced to adapt to a new reality.

As we move through our own lives, we need to keep this in focus.  Generally, when people talk about being unable to move beyond their past, or when they become defined by what they have already encountered, they’re talking about a negative thing.  You can be trapped in the resentments of a collapsed relationship.  You can be paralyzed by memories of failure.  You can be unable to shake the aimless rage that still seethes over an unresolved injustice long ago.  Those old patterns of life carve out deep furrows into us, into which pours all of our energies and all of our hopes.

But that’s true of even what we might think of as the more positive ways we’ve shaped and formed our lives.  We train, we learn, we develop, and we grow more and more in a particular field or area.  

There’s nothing wrong with all that effort we put into advancing ourselves, or in learning more, or in having a strong sense of yourself and your place in the world.  It’s good stuff, up until the moment we allow it to be the thing that prevents us from taking a new and God-given direction in our lives.   That’s true if you’re a senator who realizes that the ideological stance he’s defended his whole life long is less important than his love for his family.  It can also be true for the faithful.

Take, for example, St. Thomas Aquinas.  Aquinas was a 13th century Dominican priest, and a brilliant, brilliant theologian.  His writings on ethics, natural law, and political theory helped shape Western thought.  And Lord have mercy, did he think and write.  He wrote and wrote and wrote, creating a book called the Summa Theologica.   It’s three thousand five hundred pages of carefully and intentionally structured logical argumentation, the sort of thing you might inflict on the other women in your book group if you really, really don’t like them.

He was still writing it when he had a vision of Jesus.  That encounter, which he would never fully discuss, ended with him no longer writing.  “Everything I’ve done is just straw,” he would say.  And that was that.  

As those experiences come, we need to be open to them.  We need to understand that it is grace and love that are our best guides in that place of unexpected trial or unanticipated gift.

If we have the boldness to claim ourselves as followers of Jesus, what defines us is our willingness to be humble, no matter what we know or who we are.  What defines us is our willingness to set aside place and station and training and credential.   be open to the radical encounter with grace that allows us to ever deepen in our faithful journey

It’s that heart and mind that lets us set aside our pride, and turns us to serving both one another and those who are most in need.

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

The “F” Word

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

03.10.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

It’s hard to have kids.  

One of the most significant challenges in parenting comes when that first bundle of joy becomes more than one bundle of joy.  It’s not just because life gets twice as hard, because it doesn’t.    It’s not one plus one.  It’s one with a zero added.  It’s not addition.  It’s exponential.

That’s felt particularly true these last few months, as kids have gone to school to gather knowledge and the latest crop of influenza and noroviruses.   Dealing with one feverish child is a challenge.  Dealing with two feverish children?   Oh, that’s extra super fun.

And even more fun?  When you have more than one of them, your kids more quickly learn that four-letter word that every parent dreads.  It’s the worst one of all, the one that changes everything.   Oh, you think your little ones are innocent, you think they’re never going to say it, because they’re so sweet and charming.  Plus, they’ve been raised by you, so naturally they’re going to be perfect.  Then, when you least expect it, you’re sitting around the dinner table and that word pops out of their mouths:   

“Fair.” 

“That’s just not fair!”

I mean, that is the word you were thinking, right?

You’d think that’d be a good word.  Be fair, you say.  Don’t be unfair, you say.  But for some reason, that word causes trouble.

Because things are never fair.   After dinner, someone gets very slightly more ice cream than someone else.   “Moom!   Look at Taylor’s plate!  He’s got three point two grams more than me!  That’s not fair!”  And if you measured it, it’d be amazing how dead on they’d be.   When you’re meting out household responsibilities, one task is ever so slightly more difficult than another.   “Daaad!  Taylor’s room isn’t as messy as mine!  She’s not having to work as hard as me!  That’s not fair!”

When you try to get them to unplug from their cybernetic brain-leeches for just a moment to engage with the real world,  you’ll hear,  “But DAAAAAAD!   OMG!     TNF!  TNF!”

Finding that balance seems impossible.   That perfect point where everyone gets exactly the same and no-one gets less than any other person seems forever beyond us.     It’s a good thing we stop worrying about that when we grow up.  Right?  I mean, right?

Like, say, during that one Presbytery meeting every year when my colleagues are presented with the breakdown of every salary of every pastor in the area.  There’s just never ever grumbling or complaining or comparing.  I mean, we’re ordained servants of Jesus of Nazareth, Teaching Elders gifted with the vocation of sharing the Good News.  Gosh, we’re just so holy that we’d never resent another person who works the same hours as us but makes twice as much.  Never ever.  Honestly.  We pinky swear.

And if you believe that, there’s a guy I got an email from recently who you might want to talk to, a pastor who wants to transfer 11.5 million dollars into our church bank account that he inherited from his dear praying departed Nigerian uncle.

Human beings do resentment easily.  We have mad skillz at feeling aggrieved and outraged and annoyed.  What we’re rather less good at is generosity, forgiveness, and grace, and it was that pointed message that Jesus was endeavoring to drive home in the famous parable we hear today.

The parable of the prodigal son is a remarkable story.   But like so much of what we’ve been hearing over the past few weeks, it is also a story that just one of the gospel writers included in their story of Jesus.   Only Luke chooses to tell it as a part of his recounting of Christ’s teachings, and for a reason.

The reason that this particular story was remembered in Luke’s Gospel and in none of the other three stories of the life of Jesus?   It’s the same reason that Luke was the only Gospel writer to recount how Jesus told those stories about suffering, the ones we heard last week.  

Why?  Of all of the Gospels, Luke’s was most clearly written for those who were doing well in life.  It was a formal Greco-Roman history, remember, one written for those who could read it themselves.   In the ancient world, that meant that it would have been heard by the literate, the elite, the merchant class.  Luke’s first audience were the successful and the hard-working and those diligent in their studies, in other words.

How would they have heard this story?   They would likely have heard it in much the same way that Christ’s first listeners heard it: as a challenge.

This story is not only a challenge, mind you.  Like many of the stories of Jesus, it’s rich with possibilities, and speaks powerfully into all corners of the human condition.   The traditional name of the parable tends to drive us into reading it through the lens of the youngest son, the prodigal himself.

This kid has messed up on a whole bunch of different levels.  The first level we miss, because we’re not first century Judeans.   The younger son goes to his father, and says “Give me my inheritance.”   In the Jewish culture of the time, you received your inheritance only when your father died.  What this young man was saying wasn’t just “let me have access to my trust fund.”  He was saying, “Dad, you may as well be dead, for all I care.”

And then, well, then he’s off to Atlantic City for a wild spree.   That ends the way these things always end for marks and suckers, with promise lost and a life’s possibility seemingly ruined.   Bad choice follows bad choice, step by step, until nothing is left but what’s aways left.  Nothing.  Realizing what he’s done, the son returns home, utterly repentant and willing to be nothing more than a slave in his father’s home.

Instead, the father receives him with joy, and calls on the whole household to celebrate his return.    That’s the part of the story we tend to focus on.  It’s the part that shows the depth of God’s love for all of us, and the willingness of God to receive us back.  For any human being whose ever felt broken and lost, it’s powerful stuff.   

If you’ve every really and truly screwed something up, and your life has been a ruin, and suddenly someone has shown that they’re willing to look past all that and see hope in you, then you know why this part of the story has power.

But when Jesus starts telling the tale, he doesn’t say, “And the title of today’s story is ‘The Parable of the Prodigal Son.’”   He says, instead, “There was a man who had two sons.”

As short as this story is, it isn’t about the dynamics of the relationship between a parent and one child, but the significantly more complicated relationship between three souls.  And the Eldest child, honestly, is just as much a part of the story.  This is the diligent one, the dutiful one, the one who stayed at home and did what was in the best interests of the family.   He’s done well for himself.  His place in the household is without question.  He’s been working the fields and being responsible and folding his laundry and putting it away instead of stuffing it under his bed.

And when his ingrate brother comes back with nothing, and his father rejoices, the brother seethes.  He’s outraged, outraged at the total lack of justice.  If there was justice, that worthless moocher would be sent packing.   If there was justice, then at least that stain on the family name would be made to earn his place back again.  Worthless piece of garbage.  He deserves everything he got.  

But no.  Instead, celebration!  They’re having a party!

Faced with this utterly unfair turn of events, the brother sits down in the field.  I’m not going in there.  Not going to do it.  

When his father comes out to talk with him, the older brother is clear where he stands.  “You know what I’ve done for you.  You know how hard I work.  Every day.  And what do I get?  I get bupkus.  Nada.  Zilch.  And this...this...”   Here, the older brother searches for words, and comes up with “...this son of yours.”   Meaning, “He may be your son.  He’s not my brother.”

The father gently chides him.   “Why wouldn’t I celebrate?   Right now, that’s the right thing to do.  Your brother,” says the father, and those words need to be emphasized, “Your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.”

The reminder Jesus offers up in this story is that grace, like mercy and forgiveness, are fundamentally unfair.  Grace is not a transaction.  Grace does not work that way.  It’s offered up as part of God’s infinitely generous love.

For Jesus’s first listeners, the tension was between law and grace, between obedience to the regulations of Torah and the deeper law of God’s love that gives all of them power.

For those who first read Luke, that tension between law and grace remained, but it went deeper.   Those who’d done everything that the law required and had done well?  Those wealthy and successful merchants, those scribes and elites who did well because they deserved it and read Luke’s history of Jesus with bright and searching eyes?  They were reminded that they were loved just the same as any struggling street drunkard who heard that word of grace and yearned for change.

And for us, the story remains, rich with meaning, sounding in our ears as we need to hear it.  If we see our brokenness for what it is, and can’t imagine that God’s justice has a place for us, the story opens up the truth of God’s grace, in all it’s unfathomable depth.   If we perceive mercy as unfair, and grace as a slap in the face, then Jesus reminds us, in his relentless, pain-in-the-behind way: “This is your brother.  This is your sister.  This is your child.”

Hard as it may be to have kids, we’re reminded by the one who loves us all that unfair, unjust, and absolutely unconditional love is always and invariably God’s answer.

It needs to be our answer, too.

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

They Had It Coming

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 03.03.13

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 13:1-9

We all like to know the causes of things.  We like to see clear linkages between X and Y, between one action and a clear reaction.  It’s just a basic aspect of human nature.  It helps us have a sense that we’re in control of our destinies.  It helps us have a sense that we know why things happen, and how things happen.

I think that’s one of the reasons we as a culture are so obsessed with watching reality shows and following the sprawling, disastrous trainwrecks of celebrity lives.  Watching individuals make flagrantly bad decisions, and then gossiping about them?  It keeps us amused.

The word for that is schadenfreude, a German word that means “finding amusement in the suffering of others.”  It comes from schaden, the word for suffering, combined with freude, the word for joy.  Now, I know what you’re thinking.  You’re thinking, “Of course the Germans would have a word for that.”   But they’re not alone.  The Danes and Norwegians call it skadefryd.  The Swedes call it skadegladje.  The Finnish vahingonilo, the Russians zlo’radstvo, and the Greeks epichairekakia.   

And Americans?  We call it America’s Funniest Home Videos.  Man, I love that show.

No matter what our culture, watching a disaster in the making allows us to feel superior and good about ourselves.  

It’s why we watch those reality shows in which they gather a bunch of dysfunctional, self-absorbed egomaniacs together and just let nature take its course.  There are countless shows like this.  Flip through the three hundred and seventy channels, and it’s an amazing percentage of what you’ll encounter.  There’s Jersey Shore, or Buckwild, or Honey Boo Boo, and lately, pretty much anything on CSPAN.

As we move deeper into our lives, though, the challenging reality is that more often than not, suffering and loss and hardship often seem completely decoupled from the neat and clean predictability we like.  Death and disease and loss defy our desire to find clear linkages between things.

Take that absurd, insane story that came out of Tampa, Florida this Thursday.  You’ve heard it, perhaps.  Here you have this guy, just sitting in his bedroom.  He’s just a guy, a person like any other person.  He’s probably watching TV in his room in the evening after a long day.   Suddenly, the earth opens up, and the floor of his bedroom collapses, and he’s gone.  Swallowed up.

And sure, sinkholes are common occurrences in that area of Florida, as the limestone geology of the area produces caverns and chasms that cause the sudden collapse of the ground above them.   But what in the life of this one human being caused that to happen?  What could he have conceivably have done that might cause the earth to just devour him?

The answer, of course, is nothing.  He was a mortal being, like all of the rest of us, no different at all.  He was in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and now he is most likely gone to rest in the heart of our Maker.  He did no more to bring that on himself than those poor souls in that Egyptian hot air balloon that exploded this week.  What did those eighteen souls do to deserve that fall, thousands of feet of terror and fire and death?  Nothing.

We don’t want this answer.  We want to think that somehow these people deserved it, that they are different from us, because they have to be.

And we’re not different, as Jesus so pointedly reminds us in today’s lesson from the Gospel of Luke.  Jesus has been teaching the crowds, and we hear that as he taught, some folks came to him to ask his opinion about some of the wilder rumors that were circulating.  It was a challenging time, with Rome in charge, and what is brought before Jesus was evidently a story that was making the rounds.

What do you think about the story that Pilate slaughtered some Galileans who were in the midst of making sacrifices, asked folks from the crowd.   Jesus doesn’t respond direct to this, but instead challenges them right back in return.

What he’s challenging is something called “retributive justice.” Retributive justice is the theological idea that suffering in this life is reflective of God’s punishing us for wrongdoing.  That theology undergirds much of the book of Proverbs, for example.  There, God’s will plays out like the logical operators in a spreadsheet.  IF you do this, THEN that will always happen.  If you are righteous, then you will prosper.  If you are wicked, then you will fail.   If you are wise, then you will do well.  If you are a fool, then you put your life savings into Best Buy stock early last year.

It’s a simple, binary, cause-and-effect approach to existence, and on some level, it works.  Wisdom does create certain probabilities, even if the results may vary.  But presented with a story of woe and misfortune, Jesus takes it in a very different direction.   His listeners probably expected a tirade against Pilate and corruption and Rome.

Instead, Jesus takes apart the distinction between those telling the story and the people they were describing.  You think you’re better off than those poor souls, he asks.  Well, you’re not.  He then tells another story, one otherwise lost to history, of a building collapse that took the lives of eighteen in Jerusalem.  Are you any better than those folks who died?  You’re not.   

Jesus spins both stories to make them Kingdom challenges, pressing his listeners to make the radical change of life that embracing his teachings would require, no matter what their worldly condition.  If you’re doing well in life, it’s easy to assume that you do not need to change or be changed by what Jesus taught.  Why would you need to be?  Things are going well.  You’re obviously doing what you’re supposed to be doing.

There’s a reason that this particular story was remembered in Luke’s Gospel and in none of the other three stories of the life of Jesus.  Of all of the Gospels, Luke’s was most clearly written for an educated audience.  As a formal Greco-Roman history, it was meant for the literate, the elite, the merchant class.

They’d have heard this little tale in much the same way as those around Jesus would have heard it...as a reminder that the suffering of others were no mark of their inferiority in God’s eyes.   He was correcting their tendency to assume that their success and their attainment meant that they were in any less need of turning themselves towards the transforming grace of their Maker.

Our human tendency to assume superiority is exacerbated by our culture, which celebrates the big and the rich and the powerful.   If you’re small and struggling and helpless, our society tells us that the problem is ours.  We suffer because we aren’t pullin’ ourselves up by our bootstraps the way we oughta do.  

And, hey, have you ever actually *tried* to pull yourself up by your bootstraps?  I have a pair of motorcycle boots, with straps, and I’ve tried it.  Assuming you don’t throw out your back, it’s a great workout for the quads and the core.  But no matter how hard you pull, you ain’t goin’ noplace. 

As Jesus came into encounter with this reality, he offered his listeners...in first century Judah, in the early church, and us right now...a different way to think about the suffering encountered in the world.

First, this teaching tells us not to stand in judgment over the suffering.  When we encounter people who’ve lost work, or who are struggling with addictions, or who can’t seem to get their lives together, our job as disciples of Jesus of Nazareth is not to smack them down.  When we hear stories of people who have made unwise decisions, and have had those cascade into ruin, we can take no pleasure in their suffering.  God loves them no less than God loves us.  That is true if they are strangers, but it is more deeply true if they are enemies.  There can be no schadenfreude in the heart of a disciple.  In this age of snark and sarcasm, that reality might be hard to grasp.  But schadenfreude is the enemy of the Spirit.

Second, Jesus reminds his listeners that they are mortal and fragile beings.  Age reminds all of us of this reality, but we somehow allow ourselves to forget it.   Our lives in these bodies on this earth are not long, and they are...as we perceive them...finite.   When we encounter others who are broken, we need to see in their brokenness both ourselves and the Christ, who showed us that God’s love extends even to the most shattered places of human existence.  

Third, time is short.  This life matters, and it is not endless.  Jesus follows the stories of loss with a parable about a fig tree, one that has not borne fruit for years.  The owner wants to destroy it, but at the pleading of the gardener, he gives it another year, just one more, before it will be uprooted.  It’s a reminder that God does give us second chances...sometimes.   And in the face of that offer, what matters is repentance, the act of turning ourselves away from ourselves and towards the transforming power of God.  There, we find strength for the times of trial we all endure, but we also find our best and most gracious self.   

Do not judge, or celebrate.  We are mortal, so stand in compassion.  Remember to turn towards that transforming relationship with God that offers life.

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