The Parts You Don’t Need

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 02.16.14

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 5:21-37

We are creatures of habit, and creatures of pattern.  Those things we do and do regularly come to give us a sense of identity, forming us and shaping us.  They are things we get good at, and that we incorporate into our personhood.

Like, say, the patterns that we get into in the evenings, which for me for decades tended to involve a beer or three.  It was just a part of the Hobbitish pattern of my evenings, as I’d settle in with a nice complex Belgian Triple or a warm and easy stout, a bright and light pilsner or...preferably...a hoppily aromatic and potently flavorful imperial India Pale Ale.  It was that last category that I used to brew myself, at the only professional grade do-it-yourself brewery on the eastern seaboard.

A typical evening would involve I’d have one as I was making dinner, one with dinner, and one as I settled in to read or write in the evening.  I didn’t think much of it.  Didn’t really even notice.  For five years, ten, then twenty, it was just how I rolled.  It was warm and pleasant and relaxing.

But late last year, I realized that this pattern meant that though there were seven days in the week, I was consuming ten days worth of calories.  As my metabolism began the deceleration into middle age, I’d gathered so much mass that things weren’t working quite so well.  Getting into my motorcycle riding suit was increasingly feeling more and more like what I imagine it’s like to make haggis.  I’d begun to more regularly notice Newton’s first law as I moved around the house.  An object at rest tends to stay at rest, and I was tending to have to stay at rest a whole bunch more than I used to.

Talking to a doctor friend over a few delicious and potently flavorful imperial India Pale Ales, it was pretty plain.  “You’d be better off if you were twenty pounds lighter,” he said.  “You’ll live longer.”  

Twenty pounds?  That seemed rather a lot, as I thought about it.  That’s about how much an arm weighs, or my leg below the knee, plus maybe an ear.  That’s a whole bunch of me to be getting rid of.  How can that happen?  I shopped around on Amazon for home liposuction kits, but ultimately decided the cleanup wasn’t worth it.

There were just parts of myself I was going to have to remove.  Beer every night?  It’d have to go.  Eating anything and not paying attention, or just snacking because I feel like it?  Not any more.  

This last week, I hit the mark I’d set for myself last year.  There’s this much less of me, just gone, no longer a part of my person.  After I hit the mark, I went down and snagged this weight, twenty pounds of iron, and walked around the house a bit.  It seemed like a whole bunch of me, gone, like I’d lopped off an arm, and in fact it was.  But it wasn’t the mass.  It was an entire pattern of living, a way of being.  That was what had to change.

And if we are to change, and change ourselves for the better, that’s how we have to do it.  It requires a significant and sustained engagement.  It takes time.  And it takes a willingness to set aside old patterns of behavior and...and this is harder...old patterns of thinking.

That transition from an old pattern of being to a new one was central to what Jesus is teaching here in this fifth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel.   Last week, we talked about the vital, central nature of these teachings in Matthew for the entirety of the Gospel.  

Today’s passage continues the pattern we’ve seen earlier in the Sermon.  In the section presented, Jesus starts by saying “You have heard that it was said,” and then takes it to the next level by saying, “But I tell you...”   He begins by presenting us with the Biblical teaching on murder in Matthew 5:21 and 22.   

We hear that commandment, thou shalt not kill, which is part of the Mosaic Decalogue, the fancy words Bible scholars use when they talk about the Ten Commandments.  It comes from Exodus 20:13, and Deuteronomy 5:17.  We tend to interpret it as limiting our killyness.  No killing!

Generally, the problem Christians have with this verse comes when we look at the passages from Exodus and Deuteronomy, and realize that this messes with many of the ways we run our societies.  We get into legalistic arguments about what it means relative to the death penalty, and we argue whether or not the wars our society fights are justified in the eyes of God, quibbling about the nuances between killing and murder.

But those arguments completely miss the point, because Jesus goes further.  If you want more than simple justice, if you actually want to participate in what he has declared to be, if you want to aggressively and intentionally make things better and tip the balance to the side of grace, then you need to press it way down deep.  You need to pour out your grace, even to those who seem to be taking more from you than is their right.

That means that it isn’t just murder that violates what Jesus is teaching.  It’s the intent itself, the anger, the hatred, the willingness to belittle or destroy.  It is the heart of it, that inner desire.  Not killing people is easy, most of the time, even in traffic and in meetings.  We can pull that off.  But not wanting to do violence, ever?  Not letting ourselves hate, not letting our hearts turn red in tooth and claw?  That’s a deep, rough thing.

He goes on, laying out similar, deeper challenges throughout the passages are to come, and among those comes a particularly difficult metaphor.  If your eye causes you to sin, pop that sucker out?  If your hand causes you to mess things up, off it goes?  I mean, really, ew.  

It’s a rough, difficult, and heavy-feeling image.  It’s a little too brutal, a little too aggressive, a little too bloody.  It reminds me, frankly, of that scene in Sam Raimi’s 1987 absurdist horror-comedy classic Evil Dead 2.  You know...um...the one where Bruce Campbell’s hand becomes possessed with an evil spirit and tries to kill him?  No spoilers here, but the solution comes when the hero wrestles his hand into the toolshed and utters the single line:  “Chainsaw.”  

OK, maybe that was a spoiler, but it’s such a great line.   

I will freely admit that this is not the best family movie night choice, but it’s actually a little more family-friendly than Evil Dead 2: The Musical.  And yes, that actually exists.

What we want to hear from Jesus is something easier, maybe something involving a new prescription for our glasses when our eyes bug us.  Or maybe we could reword it as “when your hand offends you, try this delightful moisturizing hand lotion.”  Jesus

But as hard as that saying is, it has the unfortunate character of actually being true. When we’ve allowed ourselves to become defined by a particular way of thinking, removing that isn’t easy.  It’s a difficult thing, changing the way that you feel and view the world.  It’s remarkably hard, harder even than changing a comfortable and long-lived pattern of behavior. It requires a change that alters our self.

Excising those things that have woven themselves into us is immensely difficult.  When we feel a deep anger towards someone, when we feel we have had a trust betrayed or been fundamentally mistreated, that can become a defining feature of our identity.  We can carry that rage in us, and it can weave itself in and out of our soul like a cancer.

When we’ve suffered powerful setbacks and loss, and had our sense of who we are shaken, that can turn itself into self-loathing and despair, which drives us deeper and deeper into darkness.

Those things, if we allow them to thrive and grow in us, will destroy us.  Whatever that may be for you, the first step is to identify it, name it, and realize that you yourself do not need it to be a part of you.  Then, through a pattern of actions, work your way to it from the outside in, cutting away at it until it is gone from you.

Because some parts of us we simply don’t need, not if we’re going to live into the Reign of God that Christ proclaimed.

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

Laying Down the Law

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 02.09.14

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 5:13-20

Rules change.

We’d like them not to, because they can be comforting and part of the pattern of our lives, but they do nonetheless.  Like, say, the rules for how we watch our shows.  It used to be, back in the paleolithic entertainment era, that if we wanted to be entertained, we’d do so at a particular time and in a particular place.

I can remember how I used to watch shows, way back in the 1980s.  I’d climb onto my brontosaurus, and go over to a friend’s house.  Back then, shows were a social thing.  We’d bring soda and chips and snacks, and sit around a large room staring at a vast 19 inch cathode ray tube.  “That’s a screen?” we might laugh now, but yes, it was, and in color, too!  We’d be watching the A-Team or Knight Rider or Manimal, the kind of quality entertainment that reminds you just what a high point in our culture the 80s really were.  

Now, the rules have changed.  We ingest it, not here and there, but all at once. You find a show and you binge on it, streaming episode after episode, often squirreling yourself away with a tiny little screen or a laptop to crank your way through a show you’ve heard about but never quite gotten around to seeing.

Lately, the show that’s been binge-watched around my household has been been Parks and Recreation, a delightful little comedy with Amy Poehler about the parks department in a small town.  It’s filled with entertaining characters, but perhaps the most entertaining of the characters is the director of the department, Ron Swanson.

He’s amusing for a range of reasons, but the most singular of those reasons is that Ron Swanson is perhaps the most overtly libertarian character in any show you can see today.  Here you have a character on a comedy who tends to give firearms as office birthday presents, whose favorite food is a turkey leg wrapped in bacon, and whose idea of staying hydrated is putting an ice cube in his scotch.  And even though as a vegetarian I’m not quite so sure about the bacon and turkey, I can’t help but enjoy him, because he’s just so very himself.

Maybe it’s that peculiar relationship that we Americans have with rules and the law.  On the one hand, there’s still a strong cultural memory of our frontier days.  The values that make us self-sufficient, capable, and resilient as individuals and as households still hold significant sway over our sense of our own identities.  We like our freedom, and our ability to be autonomous persons.

On the other hand, there are a whole bunch of us.  When you get three hundred and thirteen million rugged individualists, they have to figure out how exactly it is they’re supposed to live together and function. We need rules for that dance, and ways we can simultaneously preserve our freedom and respect the freedom of our neighbor.  We know the truth of that, because we know that there are always those folks who will use our God-given liberty to oppress others and prey on others.  We protect our neighborhoods, we protect our kids and our environment, and we’re comfortable with that.  And yet still we struggle and chafe against the rules we set for ourselves, particularly when those rules impinge on us.  We don’t like people telling us what to do.  We don’t like having to worry and fret over every last regulation, about whether or not we’ll need to get a special permit to sell bottled water or whether we’ll get hit with a ticket issued by some unblinking eye of Sauron robot camera for being in a hurry to pick up our kid from preschool.  Hey, 87 seemed an appropriate speed for the road conditions.

It's that strange tension between law and liberty that Jesus is taking a good hard whack at in today's portion from the Gospel of Matthew.  Today's reading comes to us out of the deepest heart of Christ's teaching, as we're starting to roll our way into the Sermon on the Mount.  Here in Matthew chapters five through seven, we have the most succinct expression of the moral and ethical implications of what Jesus had been teaching about the in dwelling Kingdom of God.

If you're a Red Letter Christian...meaning you have one of those Bibles where they print the words Jesus said in red, and you for some reason think those words are worth highlighting...these three chapters of Matthew are absolutely the Reddest of the Red Letters.  There are many places of grace you can point people to in the bible, places where the essence of what being a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth burns bright.  I’m a lousy chapter and verser, but Matthew 5 - 7?  That you need to remember.  That needs to be part of what you know.

Here, as the teaching is conveyed by Matthew, we Jesus beginning his exploration of what the heart of the Kingdom really means.  Of all of the four Gospel stories, Matthew’s account is most grounded in the traditions of the Jewish people, and so for Matthew, Jesus starts out with a statement about the law.

For the Pharisees and the scribes..the literate and studious Jews for whom life in the synagogue was central..the issue of how Jesus and his message related to the law was absolutely key.   Here, “law” doesn’t mean civil regulations.  It means the sacred law of Torah, the first five books of the Bible.  So much of the essence of the faith of the people of Israel was understood in terms of duty and obedience to the legal system established by Torah.   All of faith as the understood it revolved around their engagement with and discussion of the Law, and so...listening to this strange itinerant preacher/prophet/rabbi person, they would have been hanging eagerly on these words.  What does all of this mean, relative to everything that is important to us?

And so after a series of blessings for those who are suffering and downtrodden, he begins to talk about the law.

What we want to hear, we who tend to prefer freedom and openness, is that with Jesus, we’re free to do whatever it is we want.  Jesus, the one who brings us love instead of the law.  Jesus, the one who sets us free from the fear that God is going to smite us for infractions.  Jesus, the one who shows us grace, and makes it so much easier.

He doesn’t.

He says that he’s not here to destroy the law or to get rid of it or even really to replace it.    He’s here to fulfill it.  Every word, he says.  And to that, the part of us that does not like to be bounded cringes a little bit.  How are we to relate this to our faith?  Are all of the laws of Torah still in effect?  Does this mean that we’re stuck frittering over every last detail of the law, worrying over whether or not our clothes have inappropriately mixed fibers and unable to eat a cheeseburger or anything wrapped in bacon?  Because a Christianity that forbade bacon would make spreading the good news a little more challenging.

If we read further on, though, into the section where Jesus describes what that means, it’s clear that has very different implications for those who are called into following the Christian path.

In the sections that follow, Jesus shows that what matters to God is less about the letter of the law, and more about the degree to which we have taken the intent of that law into ourselves.  If the purpose of the law is restoration, then we cannot retaliate.  If the purpose of the law is to set the world at peace, then we cannot turn our hearts to violence.  If the purpose of the law is God’s radiantly generous love for all of us, then we can’t mete out love only to those who can do for us in return.

In that, the goal of the Christian is to be...as Jesus describes it...like salt.  Meaning, we are the person that God created us to be, down to our very core.

And that, to tell the truth of it, is harder than just following a simple pattern of rules.  It requires us to continually work on ourselves, on our angers and our hungers, on our anxieties and on our fears.  It requires us to challenge ourselves, to be continually engaged in that process of committing ourselves to God’s Reign, allowing that transformation to work in us.

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

System Requirements

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

02.02.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Micah 6:1-6

[errata: In the below audio version of this sermon, I wandered off text for a moment or two when explaining Shittim and Gilgal.  While the section on this being shorthand for "entering the promised land" is correct as it appears in the written text, my additional discussion of Jacob and Esau is not.  That river is the Jabbok.  I realized this as I was saying it, and accuracy matters.]

In our kitchen, we have a drawer.  If you slide that drawer open, inside it you’ll find papers and knicknacks, the detritus of the fifteen years we’ve spent in our home.  We call it the “stuff” drawer, or words to that general effect.

In that drawer are things we apparently think might still be useful at some point, like phone directories from our kid’s preschool.  There are also electronic devices, the latest and greatest technological doodaddery from five or six years ago.  It’s an amazing array of Apple products, mostly, iPods and nanos and iPod Touches, and a couple of first gen iPhones.  There’s also an impossible tangle of chargers and dongles and mangled earbuds, all wound up together like a ball of hibernating albino garter snakes.  

Here and there around the house, there are little hidden corners, where ancient laptops and boxes of old three and a half floppy disks sit gathering dust.

It’s hard to let those things go, it is, because it’s kind of hard to believe that they don’t have any residual worth.  My motorcycle is a 2008, dagflabbit, and it still runs just fine if you change the oil now and again.  But that 3G iPhone you can find sitting in that drawer, made that very same year?  It’s worth less than nothing.  It’s still the same device, and able to do all of the things it once did.

Only that’s not quite enough any more.  As we rush forward in the ever sweeping march of progress , our expectations are always being pushed and stretched forward.

It can feel overwhelming at times, as the machines that surround us relentlessly require either new operating systems or upgrades or updates.  You’ll settle in, trying to do something, and the next thing you know your magic devil box is telling you that you need to install this thing, or that thing.

Or it will just sigh at you, and let you know that it doesn’t meet the requirements, and maybe you should just go drop it in that drawer.

That little computer brain in your pocket just won’t have any clue what to do with the new thing you’ve shown to it.  It’ll have absolutely no idea. To do that new thing, you’ll need to do it in a new way.  Real change is like that.

Which, honestly, is kind of the alert message that Micah is sending the people of Judah in the sharp little missive we find in today’s scripture reading.  Micah pitched out his message to the people about eight hundred years before Jesus showed up, meaning he was preaching at pretty much the same time as the prophet Isaiah and the prophet Amos.

There is, in the Bible, a kind of writing called “theodicy.”  This is when a faithful person stands on their relationship with God, and challenges God to hold up the divine end the bargain.  If you’ve ever read the book of Job, that’s a theodicy, a theological indictment.

This little section of Micah is exactly the opposite.  From the mouth of the prophet, we hear a challenge laid before the people of Judah.  “You expect me to be in relationship with you,” God asks.  “You really want to be in relationship with me?  I wanted that, too. I thought we had an understanding.  I thought we were on the same page.  But now, well, now I’ve got beef.  You’ve crossed a line, and you don’t even seem to know that you’ve crossed it.”

Though the mouth of the prophet, God is challenging the people to hold up their end of the arrangement.  “I’ve done what I can do,” God says, and then reminds them of what that means.

Remember Egypt, and the Pharoah, and how you were slaves?  Well, you’re not any more.  Remember Moses, and his brother Aaron, and his sister Miriam?  You’re free now.

“Remember what I did with King Balak of Moab, and Balaam, son of Beor?”  

To which we, now, say...um...not really.  Um.  Was Beor..uh...that big hairy bear guy in the second Hobbit movie?

But this story would have been more familiar to the people of Judah, a total favorite for the kids at bedtime.  We can read it in Numbers chapter 22.  On their journey through the wilderness to the promised, land, the people of Israel passed through the land of the Moabites.  King Balak summoned the prophet Balaam, and asked him to curse the people of Israel as they trucked on through, but three times Balaam tried, and three times Balaam found that he was unable to say anything other than a blessing.  Great bedtime stuff, huh?  Um.  Did I mention there’s a talking donkey in the story?  I’m not sure if Eddie Murphy voiced it, but still.  A Talking Donkey in the Torah.  You remember that story.

God then reminds them what happened between Shittim and Gilgal, which, again, we’re not quite so clear on these days, beyond noting that this is one of those verses you need to remind lay readers to pronounce very carefully when reading it in worship.

Here, it helps to know your geography.  Shittim is on one side of the river Jordan, and Gilgal is on the other.  What happened between those two places?  You came to the land of promise, that’s what happened.  

So in this passage, God is saying: I delivered you.  I blessed you.  I named you.  And in return, what do I expect?  I expect you to hold up your end of the arrangement, and that means something rather different than you seem to think it does.

What the people had come to think was simple. Their worship needed to be nothing more or less than the ritual sacrifice of the temple.  All they needed to do was to show up, do their thing, and they had fulfilled their responsibility.  You make the sacrifice, you reap the blessings.  The exchange was basic.  It was a nice and easy transaction, a simple process that couldn’t have been more straightforward.

So they did those things, and then trucked on through life as if God couldn’t have cared less how they lived.

Micah challenged the people of Israel to understand their relationship to their Maker in different terms.  To really live into that relationship, they were going to need to do things in a new way.

What mattered to their Creator was not the volume of their sacrifices, but the way they lived.  What mattered to their God was that they attended to the injustices in their society, not allowing the poor to struggle without hope and not allowing the wealthy and powerful to prey on the weak.  What mattered to their God was that they valued kindness in their exchanges with others, and that they stood humbly with their God.

If they wanted to really be engaged with their God, wanted that relationship to change and transform their existence, then they needed to understand what the requirements were, and understand those requirements clearly.

And as easy as it is for us to scoff at those silly Judeans, we may also have something of a struggle with approaching our God in the way that Micah asked.  Our expectation, as a culture, is that most of our exchanges can be approached as a transaction.  We assume that there’s really very little that cannot be dealt with as an exchange, little that can’t be managed as a this-for-that.

But that way of approaching life isn’t how our Creator means us to live.  If we approach God in that way, we’re not quite getting it.  The life we’re trying to live does not quite mesh with the one that God seeks to bless and inhabit.

What God seems to require of us is that our lives mesh with the purpose he’s laid out. To experience that relationship, to actually be engaged with our Creator in the ways that matter, we need to have structured our days in such a way that our doing makes space for God’s work.  It isn’t complicated.  Pray.  Make space and time for acts of kindness, and works that heal the broken.

But it also means no longer viewing those actions as an exchange, but instead a thing you do with your whole being.

That means living out that self that God knows, and is calling us to be.

So as you hope for that sense of grace and purpose in your life, remember what it is that is required.

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

Division and Multiplication

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 01.26.14

Scripture Lesson:  1 Corinthians 1:10-18

Every once in a while, someone will ask me what the whole Presbyterian thing is all about.  Not often, mind you.  The Presbyterian brand isn’t exactly front and center in the minds of Americans, even with all our ads during football games.  But every once in while, I’ll have the chance to describe what it means to be Presbyterian, and how that distinguishes this little community from Baptists or Episcopalians or Discalced Carmelites.

And no, that’s not a beverage.  You can’t order a tall half-caf discalced carmelite latte at Starbucks.  It’s a mystic monastic order, one of the umpty-bazillion different types of Jesus follower.  That’s one of the hardest things to come to terms with as a Christian.  There are just so very many different ways to do this thing.

In point of fact, even saying you’re a Presbyterian doesn’t really give folks enough of a handle on who you are.  What kind of Presbyterian, one might ask, because there’s a remarkably wide variety.  It’s a veritable smorgasbord.

There’s the Presbyterian Church USA, which is us.  Yay, us! 

Then there’s the Presbyterian Church in America and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, which is not to be confused with the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in America.  There’s the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, which is a totally different thing than the Evangelical Covenant Order of Presbyterians.  There’s the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America, which is not the Reformed Presbyterian Church or the Reformed Presbyterian Church in the United States, none of which are to be for a moment confused with the Presbyterian Reformed Church.

Wow, one might say!  It’s like a veritable Baskin Robbins for the Frozen Chosen!  So many different flavors!  What a remarkably abundant way of being Christian!

But there’s a problem.  For every one of these different flavors of Presbyterian, there’s a fight.  One group of people decides that they can no longer tolerate the flagrant way those people are misrepresenting the true heart of the Presbyterian tradition, and so they storm off.   It happens over and over and over again, until the landscape of the church is as cracked and fragmented as the back of your iPhone.  It can get crazy.  How crazy?

Like, say, the Presbyterian Reformed Church, which split from the Free Presbyterian Church in the early 20th century over the issue of taking public transportation to church.

Seriously.  That was their big church fight.  Public.  Transportation.

So here we have two groups of people who follow Jesus of Nazareth, and their heat and light and energy, the essence of their Gospel proclamation?  Fighting about whether or not the Son of God minds if you take the bus.  Sure, it’s like a Baskin Robbins, but every flavor is bitterness.

That painfully human tendency to look for any and every possible reason to get into it with one another was front and center in the Apostle Paul’s mind in today’s passage from 1 Corinthians.  Paul struggled to cope with one of the most fractious congregations in early Christendom.  It’s the heart of their problem as a community made up of human beings, all of whom are eager to prove their place.

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 Roman trading colony, Corinth was a place full of hard-charging, self-made souls, proud of their place in the culture and eager to rise up the social ranks.  They were driven, they were in it to win it, and God help anyone who got in their way.

And so as they’d received the Gospel, and heard it taught by some of the earliest leaders of the church, they managed to find ways to stand in opposition to one another.  Who’s the most important teacher, they’d say to one another.  Who does the best possible baptizing?  Some would side with Paul himself.  Others would side with an Apostle named Apollos.  I know, there’s no named Letter from Apollos, but he was a big deal in the early church.  He’s referenced in Acts 18, and some folks...like Martin Luther...have suggested that he might have been the author of the Letter to the Hebrews.  

Seeing these people arguing about which teacher was the most important, still others would say that they just plain ol’ followed Christ.  You’d think that would be the right answer, but from the way Paul describes it, it’s clear that it was just another thing people said to feel better about themselves.  “You people with your arguing about Paul and Apollos.  I follow Jesus.  So nyah.”

To each and every one of these fractious souls, Paul suggested that they might not be quite understanding the point of what Jesus came to the world to teach.  If manifesting God’s radical, transforming, and saving love was the point of what Jesus lived out, then to continue to cling to the desire for superiority is not a sign that you’ve gotten the point.  You remain among the perishing.

How important is resisting division to the Christian walk?  It’s hard for us to grasp, we whose freedom is so much a part of us.  Division comes as easily for us here in our culture as it did to the Corinthians.  We are, after all, a nation of fierce and rugged individuals, who measure our worth by our ability to stand out from others...or better yet, stand over others.

Division and conflict are just more interesting. We human beings are naturally drawn to tension, to the shimmering energy that comes when our fight or flight instinct is kicked in.  It makes us feel fierce, gives us a sense of energy and engagement.  It draws a crowd, and gives us a heightened sense of purpose.  In the high school lunchroom, rarely did you hear a crowd of kids suddenly gathering around two adversaries chanting: “Mutually respectful conversation!  Mutually respectful conversation!”

That’s the driving energy behind so much of our ‘net-based culture now, as our love of conflict stirs endless and meaningless chatter around which celebrity has said something catty about which other celebrity, or what one political pundit has said about another talking head.

In the absence of sniping at someone you disagree with, or saying something outrageous that starts a good fight, there’s almost nothing that you can do to make yourself interesting, or to distinguish yourself from the teeming throngs.  But there’s something else about refusing to participate in division.  It involves a far deeper level of risk.

The images fluttered briefly across my social media feeds yesterday, before being swept aside by a tidal wave of Bieberblabber.  These were images from the Ukraine, where rioting and social unrest have been moving closer and closer to a terrible tipping point, to that place where signs and slogans are replaced with guns and bombs.

They were pictures of Orthodox priests and monks, holding crosses and icons as they stood in the streets of Ukrainian cities.  They were pictures of a woman, holding a sacred icon, kneeling on a frozen, snowy urban street.  Those streets were littered with rocks and debris.  On one side of the priests and monks, riot police, shields at the ready.  On the other side, an angry crowd.

And in between, Christians.

The sole point they were making, using their bodies and their faith, was that brokenness and the human tendency to attack one another is not part of God’s gracious intent for us.  They would not side with violence.  Don’t do this thing.  Don’t harm one another.  It was a peculiar image, and one I struggle with.  It’s so much easier to yield to the desire to participate in conflict, to get deep into the passions and energies that are released when we go at it with one another.

It’s also paradoxically safer.  If you stand with a crowd, with a gathering of those who are like you and sharing your disdain for others, then you are not as deeply at risk as when you stand against the conflict itself.  It’s a risk that we personally struggle to take, but if we are to live meaningfully and actually as disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, it’s a risk we must take.

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

Here's Hoping

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 01.19.14

Scripture Lesson:  Isaiah 49:1-9

Hope can be hard.

It is easy to feel that way, because life is rough.  Oh, sure, you were hopeful once.  But that was a long time ago, back before you had your hopes dashed to the ground and crushing under the rumbling wheels of ten thousand commutes to and from a soul-draining cubicle-farm.  That was a long time ago, before the story you had told yourself about your life got as messy as that wood chipper scene from Fargo. 

It’s easy to set aside hope when being hard and cold as stone feels so much safer.  Life makes it considerably easier to cast up a hard wall of jadedness around yourself.  Why be hopeful, when you can protect yourself from the world by casting a thick armored shell around yourself, doubting the motivations of everything and everyone?

It’s easy to feel that way, particularly given the way hope gets used in the world around us.  If you’ve been around other human beings for more than a couple of years, you know that the language of hope tends to be used by folks who are trying to sell you something, or trying to get your vote.  These days, I’m not even sure those are two different things.

I’ll confess to getting that feeling sometimes, particularly when I hear the Jesus-pitchmen on the teevee cranking out the health and wealth gospel.  No-one is easier to separate from their money than someone down on their luck, desperate for healing, desperate from something that might break the pattern that has ruled their lives.  Give ‘em a little bit of hope for a blessing, just a smidgen of hope for a miracle to turn their life around, just enough to tease out their credit card information.  It troubles me.  I’ll admit it.  Cynicism should not be too much of a pastor’s makeup, but it’s always been a part of the way I approach the world.

Which is why the last week has been good for my spirit, as I’ve delved into some of the latest approaches to blending Christian faith with therapeutic counseling.  Over and over again during a whole week coursework, a theme has been reinforced.  When you’re struggling with a mess, or trying to rebuild a life, nothing is more potent and more valuable than hope.  That’s true in dealing with a crisis of relationship, or a vocational struggle, or even a struggle with mortality itself. It is the basis and bulwark of almost every intervention we were taught during the week, because without a sense of hopefulness, nothing gets anywhere.

Hope builds resilience.  If you’re going to survive something disastrous, something like an earthquake, a sharknado, or the last Redskins season, a sense that things will get better is absolutely key.  It doesn’t guarantee anything, but if there’s one factor that makes it more likely that you’re going to make it through a time of trial, it’s your ability to hold out the possibility of getting through it that can make the difference.

Hope motivates and gives direction.  Without a sense that things can ever get better, you’re not going to seek help, or take steps to live a life that has within it the potential to be better.

You can know these things, and yet still struggle with hope.  Like the people of ancient Israel, who found themselves in a place where hope seemed completely pointless.  We’re in Second Isaiah again this week, the middle part of that great prophetic book, and that means that...just like last week...we’re hearing a story told when the people of Israel were in between a rock and a hard place.

It’s hard for us, here in the comfort of a sanctuary in a snug little town, to really grasp how much they’d lost.  For us, I suppose, we might know that feeling if Washington lay in ruins, the monuments destroyed, the Constitution burned, the internet blasted clean of every trace of our identity as a people.  Just like the Judeans, we’d then be dragged off to a strange land to the north...but then it breaks down a bit, because for us, that’d be Canada, where they’d probably just make us be polite to one another and give us access to health care.

It’s hard, as a people, for us to grasp how shattering that time would have been.

Hope, when you’re in the deepest possible despair and everything you’ve worked towards your whole life long is a shattered ruin?  It feels impossible.

And what Isaiah was telling them was a wild and impossible thing.  Hear it through those ancient ears, if you can.  You’ve been beaten down, broken and trampled.  Everything you thought was solid and real and eternal in the world had been smashed.  Around you, a great and powerful empire dominates the world, and they’ve done a great job of destroying your identity as a people.  They are everything that you hear and see, and you belong to them.  You are nothing.

Isaiah acknowledges this.  He names it.  He’s speaking to the “one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations.”  Meaning, he’s talking to everyone around him.  He’s speaking to those who see themselves as slaves, to those who see power all around them and know that they aren’t anything.  Everything that was sacred and precious to them, everything that made them who they were, all of that will be forgotten.

To those people, Isaiah hits them up with a hope that is so far beyond their hoping that it must have seemed completely insane.  Let’s play that out a little bit.  If you’d sat down with one of those Judean slaves in Babylon, and you’d asked them:  “What’s the wildest hope you can imagine? ”  What would they have said?  They’d probably have sat there for a while and struggled to come up with anything.

Maybe some more food would be nice.  Or maybe fewer beatings.  Fewer beatings would be a pleasant change.  

If you gave it a little bit, and pressed them a little harder, they might have dreamed wildly that some day, some how, they might be allowed to return to their land.  Oh, it seemed completely crazy, because there’d never been an empire as mighty as Babylon, with it’s wonders and gold and gardens and armies.  But maybe we’ll get to go back home, to the life we knew.  That would have seemed like a wild and distant fantasy, a Walter Mitty daydream going pocketa-pocketa-pocketa through your mind, almost totally divorced from reality.

But the message received by the prophet was that even this image they had in their minds wasn’t enough.  It was too light.  It couldn’t even begin to match God’s future for their people.  Instead, to this broken people, Isaiah proclaims, speaking in the voice of the Lord: You will be a light to all nations....so that my salvation can reach to the ends of the earth.

This seems to go beyond hope and into the land of double extra crazy, completely wild and impossible, hope that is so preposterously beyond the reality that the people of Israel knew that it might as well have involved alien crop circles and magic.

And yet here we are, we sitting here in this little space, thousands of years later.  What do we have to say to those Judeans in their slavery?  What does the reality of this country, this place, and this gathering, have to say?  Imagine yourself suddenly back there, sitting with a Hebrew by the rivers of Babylon.  They look up at you, and ask you...what’s going to become of us?  Is there any future for the things that we hold sacred?  What could you honestly say to such a person?

You could say that two thousand and five hundred years from now, there will be a nation that is utterly unknown.  It will be a nation of many peoples, from many lands.  They will speak a language that your world has never heard.  It will be filled with strange and powerful magics.  People will fly great metal ships in the sky.  There will be tools that think and speak, pictures that seem to live and move.  This people will reach out their hands and touch the moon and the stars in the heavens.

Among this strange and magical people, millions will be telling your stories, and worshipping your God.

What sort of hope would that be?  It would make Isaiah’s wild proclamation seem almost tame by comparison...and yet it would be true.  

The reality of God’s creation can spin out futures that not only meet our hopes, but make our hopes look like a shadow by comparison.

So if you struggle with hope, if cynicism and anxiety have closed like a steel band around your heart, hear Isaiah’s message.

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

Dimly Burning

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

01.12.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Isaiah 42: 1-9

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

That thought has been echoing through my brain a whole bunch over the last week, as my doctoral studies have taken a trip to the wayback machine.   It was five straight days of stepping back through time into the first century, to understand what it meant to lead and follow in Rome and Greece the world of the first century.  Unfortunately, no TARDIS was involved.  In the absence of any Time Lords on the seminary staff...at least no Time Lords that are willing to admit it...we were stuck with getting back there with books.  Using contemporary scholarship and ancient texts, we spent an entire week reading and examining and thinking about what it was like to live and think back in the time when the New Testament was written.  

In many ways, the ancient world inhabited by those first primal Christians was completely different from our own.  It’s preindustrial, and the internet connections back in the first century were really surprisingly slow and expensive.  Just writing and sending a letter could cost you the equivalent of an entire month’s worth of wages.  Expectations of what it meant to be a person in the ancient world were different, too.  Like, say, that little section that caught my eye in the writings of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who informed his readers that a sign of a virtuous man was that he was bearded and hairy, just like .  I’d be set in the first century, evidently.

But there were other things, deeper understandings of personhood that were completely different than the way we imagine our culture to exist.  Roman culture was what they call an honor/shame culture.  What was most important in that culture was not how much money you had but how much honor you had.  That meant how well-known you were, and how connected you were, and how able you were to connect others to one another.

It was social power, the relationship between a powerful patron and a client, between a teacher and a student, between one whose influence is all about the network of relationships that they can bring to bear to maintain their status in their society.  In that system, what was expected of those lower down in the hierarchy was loyalty, period.  You existed to be loyal, and your value as a human being was completely defined by who you knew.  As far as the society was concerned, you weren’t an individual.  You were just a node in a complicated web of relationships.

Or you were nothing.  If you had no status, no honor, no power, and nothing to offer, you were little more than a hunk of meat.  Those who were poor or powerless, those who did not have a place in the pecking order?  They were viewed as little more than livestock, and could be owned and disposed of however the more powerful saw fit.

That ugly and difficult reality meant that most of the human beings in the ancient world were powerless or property, with some estimates being that up to 30% of the inhabitants of ancient Rome were slaves.  That form of power was really hard on those who found themselves on the bottom of the cultural hierarchy, and it was just the way Roman culture...and most of the cultures of the ancient world...worked.

And when this passage from Isaiah was written, that was exactly where the people of ancient Israel found themselves.   They were slaves, an owned people, powerless and broken and vulnerable.

The dynamic laid out by Isaiah presents us with a completely different way of viewing the world and the people around us. Power dynamics were everything, absolutely everything, but they take on a really very different feeling when you have no power at all, or when all of your power has been taken from you.   In this chapter of Isaiah, the prophet is describing to his people the nature of the leader who’s going to change everything. 

This portion of Isaiah is found in what is often called “Second Isaiah,” meaning that the majority of scholarship suggests it was most likely not written by the same individual who composed chapters 1 through 39 of the Book of Isaiah.  It was, most likely, written by a disciple of the Jerusalem prophet, one who fully understood the essence of his teachings, and was equally connected to the One who spoke through them both.

That first section describes and relates to the kingdom of Judah in the eighth century before Christ.  It is full of challenge, challenge directed particularly against the wealthy and powerful in Jerusalem.  This section, on the other hand, speaks to a completely different context.  Running from chapter 40 through to chapter 55, it is primarily about reconciliation, grace, and restoration, and appears to be speaking to an Israelite audience living in Babylonian exile nearly two hundred years later.

This was a people who had been utterly shattered.   Unlike the proud and the powerful who lived in Jerusalem and gathered in the wealth of the nation, this was a people who had been torn from their land and forced into slavery.  They had watched as their holy city had been destroyed.  They had watched as their temple, the holiest of holies, the place where they communed with God on earth, they had watched as it had been razed and looted.  Everything they were as a people had been taken.  They were nothing.  They had nothing.  They were nothing but property.  They were a fragile and barely standing thing, a broken reed, a flickering candle.

At this point, the One who spoke through the prophet no longer spoke words of judgment.  Where the first thirty nine chapters speak in some pretty harsh language, what we hear throughout this section of Isaiah is God’s commitment to healing and rebuilding those who are broken.  In the face of the suffering experienced by the people, the words that the prophet had to share with them were not rebuke, not condemnation, not mocking and rejection.  It did not tell them: you are powerless, get out of my way. It did not tell them: you are worthless.

The reminder to this shattered people was that their powerlessness did not make them worthless to God.

Isaiah is here promising the arrival of a leader...a messiah...whose power does not bear any resemblance to the power of human societies as they existed in the ancient world.  We who walk the Christian way see that promise fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth, whose entire life flew in the face of that way of wielding power. His power was that of a suffering, healing servant, not the trampling, destroying power of emperors and their armies.  It had nothing to do with the hierarchies of social power that had always defined humanity. 

It still doesn’t.

Because though we might not be an honor/shame culture any more, at least not on the surface, power and influence still work the same way.  Human beings are still human beings, and as much as we might like to pretend that we’re all equal and our worth is defined by our individuality, that’s not the reality we live in.

Power is still all about relationships and influence, about who you know and who knows you.  Yesterday on the other side of the Potomac, we just installed a new governor.  He might do a great job.  Who knows?  But he is where he is because he knows how to play the system of social power.  It’s still how the world works.

What we have to ask ourselves, frankly, is how deeply we allow that system to work its way into our own lives here as followers of Jesus, who taught a different kind of power.  When we encounter people who have power and the ability to get things done, do we see them as a means to an end?  Do we approach them seeing not a brother or a sister, but instead as someone who can do something for us?

That was a danger in the ancient world, but here in the age of new media, when everyone is promoting themselves as a brand and clamoring for attention, that human hunger for power is particularly strong.

More importantly, when we see people who have nothing, who are struggling and broken and have no advantage to offer us, do we dismiss them or ignore them?  It’s easy to do this, as we rush hungrily from one business relationship to another.  We can trample on or dismiss the struggling and the fainthearted.  We can ignore the broken soul, or the person who seems not to have anything.  We can put out that faint light of hope that glows in them.  We can crush them underfoot.

Jesus challenges us to step outside of that way of viewing the world, to make sure that we are taking time for the struggling, and the prisoner, and the lost, and the powerless.  It’s why his message was so radical and so subversive, then and now.

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.  Know Jesus, and know what that means.

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

Treasuring The Words

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams: Christmas Eve 2013

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 2

All around this great land of ours, Christmas trees are glowing in bay windows and the corners of rec rooms, sparkling with the delightful radiance of a hundred billion twinkling LEDs.

Underneath that warm radiance, resting silent and bewrapped, a pile of presents roughly the size of Wisconsin, one that will be mysteriously added to overnight until the mass of gifts becomes so large it seems to stretch the boundaries of time and space itself, creating a shiny seasonally wrapped wormhole that extends into another dimension, a parallel universe made entirely of tinsel.

And in that impossible pile of presents, there are two conundrums.

First, every one of them has been picked out with care, and every one of them is precious, but in the Christmas morning feeding frenzy, that sense of connection that a gift creates between giver and recipient sometimes gets rushed on by.  It’s hard to know whether or not that sense of treasure extends for more than four seconds.  

“Ohlookit’smyveryfavoritethingever” (toss) 

“Ohlookit’smyveryfavoritethingever” (toss) 

“Ohlookit’smyveryfavoritethingever” (toss)

And second, it’s hard in this season to look at those boxes and wonder just where all that stuff is going to go.  Buying a second home seems sometimes to be the only option but, really, covering one mortgage is enough.  Maybe we can just curl up and live on top of our piles of presents, like Smaug nestled on his gold.

As the years have gone by, and my children have grown and grown and grown, the gifts of the past have piled up on top of one another, treasure upon forgotten  treasure, until the pressure of all of those piled up treasures may actually have started turning some of those plastic toys back into fossil fuels.

And so in preparation for this season, they and I will go through the strata of their rooms and storage bins like archeologists on a dig.  Mingled in with the long abandoned Leap Pads and battery-less doodads, the gifts and trinkets from seasons past, it is amazing how much of that stuff no longer matters, and can be given away or recycled.  

But we’ll find other things, things that are genuinely treasures.  These are the objects we pause over and find ourselves spending time with.  Because digging through mess, you always find forgotten treasures that make you linger, and only very rarely are they the sparkly and expensive gifts from years past.  Some of them are fondly remembered toys.  Most of the things that matter, though, are different.

The things that matter are made of humbler stuff.  They are little books filled with bright crayon drawings done in the hand of a little boy who has vanished, replaced by a teen who now towers over me.   They are stories and doodles in old kindergarten composition books, words that speak in voices long passed.  And coming across those old words written in a small and uncertain hand, you sigh that they grow up so fast, and you put those little bits of paper into the keeper pile.

Those are precious words, words to treasure, even though their market value comes nowhere near to that of a PS4.  Words can be like that, as we carry them with us through life, particularly those words that tell us the story of important things.

Here in the story of Christmas that Luke tells us every year, it is words that are the treasure of the season.  There are no wise men in this telling of the story, no gold and frankincense and myrrh.  That’s how dear old uncle Matthew’s Gospel tells it.

For Luke, though, there are not gifts brought, at least not the sort of gifts we’re used to on Christmas.  The shepherds who arrive aren’t the kind of folks who’d have been able to manage much of a gift anyway.  For all of our warm fuzzy images of the life of a shepherd, they lived a day-to-day subsistence, just trying to make it to the next meal.  It was not an easy life, and it was not a job that got any respect.  

And yet as Luke tells it to us, it was to these struggling, just barely making it souls that a message was brought, a simple word to be carried to Mary and Joseph, the parents of a tiny newborn forced to live out in the barn, themselves living just barely on the edge of making it.  Those words they bore are pretty much the only possessions they had to their names, but they were treasures nonetheless.

The message brought to them was one that changed them, that told them that something important and transforming was about to take place.  The message they bore was one of an old promise fulfilled, one that goes deep back to the stories told by the prophets.  

In the clutter of this season, in the mess and rush of it, it’s easy for us to lose sight of the significant and actual treasures that come at this time of year.  We rush along, and if we’re moving as quickly as we feel obligated to move, we lose time to reflect over the time we are given with one another.  As gifts pass between loved ones tonight or tomorrow, remember to take time to ponder the blessings of family and friendship that lie behind those gifts.  

That’s why we stop for a moment, and slow down this evening, and catch our breaths.  We remember that Mary received those strange and marvelous words for the treasure that they were.  And in the great groaning table of this season, we remember that she gave herself time to linger over them, to let them settle into her.

In that story, of a little child, we have an example of the kind of humble gift that really does matter.  It’s the gift of a life that would turned over completely to the cause of love and justice in the world.  In that life, so new and so precious, there is hope for restoration and forgiveness and mercy, of a message of Good News, offered up to all. 

It’s the kind of message that changes how we understand ourselves and our world, the kind of words that can make the world anew if we give ourselves the time and the focus to let them settle in to us.

Let that treasure rest in your heart.  Give yourself time to ponder it, time to appreciate it, time to set it aside as a precious thing. 

May it be a Merry Christmas, for you and for me, AMEN.