The Test

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

06.24.2012; Rev. David Williams

Scripture:  2 Corinthians 6:1-13

Vacation is such a strange time.  Vacation gives us that time away from the bustle and thrum and normal processes of life.  It’s not hard.  It doesn’t test or try us, beyond perhaps testing the elasticity of our stomachs.  We can do whatever we want, whenever we want, and it’s all wonderful and free and delightfully liberating...at least right up until the next month’s credit card bill arrives.

One of the highlights of this last week’s vacation for my family was our two day visit to Monterey California, where the winds blew cool of the Pacific, and clear blue skies mirrored clear blue waters.  It was seventy two perfect degrees, and totally lacking in humidity, the kind of day that makes Washingtonians grumble resentfully about.  Monterey has an amazing Aquarium, and my family spent a long and highly edutaining morning there.  

We wandered through exhibits about reef life, about anemones and mussels that wave their tendrils and tentacles through the nutrient-rich waters in the nearby Monterey Bay kelp forests, snatching up every passing morsel.  From there, we wandered out into a strip of t-shirt emporiums and gift shops and the inescapable Dippin’ Dots, all of which seemed to approach us with the same basic filter-feeding principles as the mussels and the anemones.

We wanted to steer clear of the the typical tourista food dispensaries, so a little web-research on the Yelp social-review app lead us to a tasty little local Indian curry house right near the water.  The staff were remarkably friendly, and the vegetarian options were plentiful, and the huge clay tandoori oven yielded some really amazingly fresh and delicious naan.  Over the audio system played music that was equal parts New Age and Bollywood crooning.

Off in one corner of the restaurant was a statue, a three-foot-high golden multiarmed elephant-headed dude.  On the arms and on the tusks were strewn dollar bills, and at the base burned three little candles.  When my little guy asked about it, I told him that the owners were likely Hindu, and that this was a shrine to the Hindu god Ganesha.  In the convoluted Hindu pantheon, elephant-headed Ganesha has many complex meanings, but is popularly considered the god of the kitchen, the god of business endeavors, the god of prosperity, and given all of the positive reviews, apparently also the god of Yelp.

It was a nice little splash of authentic Indian color in a lovely little place, but I was struck by two things as I mused about it.  First, that there are some strains of Jesus folk who might be bothered by it, though I’m not among them.   And second, that a prosperity-focused faith is remarkably successful belief system, one that is hardly unique to polytheistic religions.  Worshipping the god of prosperity and business endeavors is actually the way a surprisingly large number of Christians approach their faith.

That version of the gospel..the name-it-and-claim-it, Word Faith, to-meet-your-need-gotta-plant-a-seed movement...is perhaps best known for it's tendency to emphasize material rewards as the fruits of faith.  If you have faith, you will prosper.  Your car will be large.  Your shoes will be fancy.  You will have all the very best toys.

That desire is strong enough that it has spawned functionally identical versions of the prosperity gospel across world religious traditions.  It exists in basically the same form and with entirely the same purpose in Buddhist, Hindu, pagan, and neopagan traditions.

That emphasis resonates with a pretty basic higher primate desire.   We want the tastiest fruit for our young.  We want that female to be so awed by our abundantly padded nest that she can't help but approach us with the cooing sounds that mean we're going to get some serious...nitpicking...on.  Ooooh. Yeah.  Right there...

But that primal urge is alien to the Gospel, and totally opposed to the passage we heard from the Apostle Paul’s second letter to the church at Corinth this morning.  Second Corinthians is an interesting mess of a letter.   Unlike first Corinthians, which develops arguments logically and segues neatly from one concept to another, Second Corinthians wanders wildly all over the place.    The tone of the letter changes suddenly and abruptly, with odd transitions and shifts of emphasis that just make no sense whatsoever.  One moment Paul will be waxing eloquent about love, and then suddenly he’s attacking someone, and then he’s right back to being positive again.

Given the clear gifts of rhetoric that Paul shows in his other letters, most competent critical scholars believe that this text is a mashup, a cut-and-paste job that weaves together three or more free-standing letters into one single text. It’s a bit like a best-of-Paul playlist strung together by Spotify after the servers have been infiltrated by Stuxnet, as jarring as blending the Brandenburg Concerti, Death Metal, and the best hits of one of those 64 member J-pop girl bands.

In his dealings with the Corinthians, Paul repeatedly had to deal with that community’s obsession with the trappings of success, and to cast a vision before them that upended their view of the world.  As a highly dynamic port city, Corinth rewarded those who rewarded themselves, and your place within the culture was measured by your status, wealth, and power.  They were all about prospering.

And yet Paul, in asserting that the time to respond to God’s goodness, and challenging the Corinthians to be reconciled to one another, well...he chooses to tack hard against that worldview.  His authority...what commends him...is not a list of achievements, not a resume packed with one triumph after another.  Instead, for the second time in this letter, Paul hits the Corinthians with what’s called a hardship list.

A hardship list is, well, exactly what it sounds like.  Both here and in 2 Corinthians 4:7-12, Paul sings out a rhythmic cadence of woes, a catalog of sorrows and injustices that he had himself endured in his efforts to spread the message of Jesus of Nazareth.   The theme underlying this message is fundamentally simple:  faith is something that inhabits an entirely different category of reality than our quest for material well-being and physical ease.  That’s not to say that being faithful can’t sometimes lead to prosperity.  Kindness and thrift and diligence and honesty and patience...values which may seem alien in this era but rise out of faith...those values have a tendency to result in both well-being and contentment.   Instead, it’s important not to conflate faith with the quest for gain because of what that does to faith.

Of all the many problems with thinking that way, the greatest comes when you actually get past all your daydreams about God finally getting you all the wealth you’re sure will make you happy. Because if having faith means having your dreams all come true, then if you suffer...it must be because you just don’t have enough faith. 

If you pray and you pray and you pray over someone you love...and they die anyway...it must mean you don’t have enough faith. If you pray and hope over someone who just can’t seem to get their lives together...and they never do...it must mean you don’t have enough faith. If you try your hardest to do what’s right, and that relationship just comes apart anyway, it must mean you didn’t have enough faith. If you put in long hours at work, and do your best, and don’t get ahead...it must mean you didn’t have enough faith. Just believe a little harder, they say. Just pull yourself up by your Jesus bootstraps, they say.

But faith doesn’t work like that. It’s not measured in the same way as worldly power. It’s not social. It’s not economic. It’s not a question of being able to do whatever you want, and impressing people with your power.

Instead, it is what deepens your joy in times of celebration, and what keeps you from unravelling in times of hardship.  Faith is the thing towards which we orient ourselves, and that keeps us oriented no matter what we encounter.  It governs our actions, whether we are deep in the fat of the world’s sweetness or in a place of bones and ruin and tears.

The measure of faith is not whether it stands when the world seems to pour out affirmation.   The test and the purpose of our faith lies in the fullness of a life, in ill repute and good repute.  Let's live out our every moment, no matter what it be, guided by that fundamental grace.   Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

The Secret Power

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

06.10.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  1 Samuel 8:4-20

If you spend more than a short while interacting with other Americans, you’ll encounter one of them.  They are the conspiracy theorists, the folks who are utterly convinced that things are not as they seem, and that somewhere, someone is secretly manipulating everything to some unspeakable and nefarious purpose.  Nothing is as it seems.  

These are folks who might well seem bright and capable, like the perfectly normal seeming person in the cubicle next to you.  He seems so busy and so capable, right up until you realize that he spends most of his work day researching his 1,500 page unpublished manuscript, which reveals that the United States is actually run by the disembodied brain of Walt Disney, which controls both political parties and the military industrial complex from its jar in a deep vault under the Masonic Temple in Alexandria.

This might perhaps explain why he spends his every lunch hour watching iCarly online at one-tenth normal speed while taking furious notes.  Although now that you’ve figured out why, you just don’t have the heart to tell him it’s not actually a Disney show.

About a week ago, things were conspiracy-theory central in the D.C. suburbs.  In Chantilly, Virginia, the annual meeting of something called the Bilderberg Group was held.  It’s a private, informal conference, one that’s been run since the 1950’s for high level political leaders and operatives, captains of industry, and other assorted muckity mucks.   It’s invite only, and the goings on within are confidential, so of course conspiracy theorists swarm around it like moths to a porchlight.

According to the Bilderberger conspiracists, this gathering of some of the world’s most powerful and influential people is actually a cabal that is secretly controlling the entire global economy, manipulating everything from behind the scenes.   

Here, I confess to being a little bit baffled.  This conspiracy theory...if I’m getting this right...hopes to reveal that the world’s most powerful, connected, and influential people are controlling the world.  Huh.  

Alrighty then.  

That, I think, is one of the things I’ve never quite gotten about the whole secret-cabal-conspiracy thing.  Powerful people don’t hide their power.  They don’t need to.  Billionaires and old landed money and political powerhouses tend not to live on secret bases just under the surface of private islands.  They do their thing right out there where everyone can see them.  Why?  Because they’re powerful, and power can do whatever power wants.  You want to pour four hundred million dollars into an election to sway the country in a direction that favors your business?   You just do it, right out there where everyone can see you.

That’s certainly true now, but it has always been true.  Whenever human beings have created societies, there have always been those with power and those without.  And those with power?  You just can’t miss them.

As we hear the reading from 1 Samuel 8 this morning, that was clearly the case a little over 3,000 years ago.  This was a period of considerable change for the Hebrew people, a time during which they found themselves transitioning from one way of being community together to another.

This story comes to us from somewhere between one thousand and eleven-hundred years BCE, a time when the loose tribal federation that had comprised the people of Israel was under considerable pressure.  The world around them was changing, both technologically and sociologically.  Technologically, the ancient near east was moving from the bronze age to the iron age.  Israel was on the bronze side of that exchange, and it was costing them dearly whenever they encountered more advanced iron on the field of battle.  The Philistines, for example, had mastered that metal, and that made them scary no matter how many giants they might have with them.

But of equal significance was the shift among the peoples of that region to more and more centralized systems of government.   The people of Israel were not yet in that category.  Instead of having a central state, they lived without a significant locus of power.  The tribes operated more or less on their own, and when an external threat arose, they relied on whatever charismatic or talented leader might arise to help them resist that threat.  Those leaders, called “judges,” weren’t of any particular lineage, and their power tended not to convey beyond their own personal authority.  They were an odd blend of leader and prophet, and their leadership was part and parcel with the idea that only God was ultimately sovereign.

When all Israel faced were surrounding peoples who were increasingly organized around consolidated, central authority.  Individual tribes or city-states were merging into kingdoms, which could leverage that consolidated power into more and more organized military systems.  Their armies were better equipped.

And so the pressure was on, and the struggled to come to terms with their seeming lack of power.  The solution was simple.  In order to provide the unifying and concentrated power that would permit the Israelites to compete with other nations, the elders of all of the tribes approached Samuel.  “Give us a king like the other nations.”  

This was, for Samuel, frustrating, but as he sought the counsel of God, he receives an odd response.  

Faced with what appears to be a rejection of the balance that has maintained the integrity of the covenant people, God tells Samuel in verse 7:  “Listen to the voice of the people,” and again in verse 9, “Listen to their voice.”  For all of Samuel’s frustration, he is told, listen...and then told to just tell them precisely what will happen if he does what they ask.  

What the leaders of Israel hope is that the king will serve them.  Samuel predicts is what always happens when human power concentrates in the hands of a few.  The powerful will take what they need to maintain power.  The king will take sons as soldiers and daughters for his courts.  He will take taxes and take land, which will be distributed to those who hover around the riches of power.  The king will serve the people, alright, but not quite in the way they’d hoped.

It’s not quite like that old classic Twilight Zone, but it’s pretty close.

But the yearning for national power was too strong, and Samuel acceded to the demands of the people.  He listened, as he had been told to listen.  That’s not necessarily what was most striking.  What is more striking is the way God responds to the request of his people.  Despite the seeming move away from covenant, there is no smiting.  There are no pillars of fire or plagues or sudden arrivals of the YHWH Death Star in low earth orbit.

What appears to matter most significantly is the free embrace of covenant.  If the people choose not to focus on the justice of covenant with God, and instead seek the justice that comes with the balance of human power, then they are free to do so.  They’ll receive the truth about the nature of their choice, as Samuel conveyed it.  That truth played out across the history of the kingdom, as within two generations, Solomon’s son Rehoboam would so oppress the people of the North that the kingdom would split clean in half.

The misuse of power always produces the same result.  When power concentrates, the result is always the same.  It is hardly a secret, and hardly a mystery.  Throughout the three thousand or so years of human history, power is always it’s own downfall.   Wherever human beings have drawn power to a few, be it political or economic, that culture has always and without fail collapsed.

In that, though, we miss the power that quietly but inescapably underlies all things.  That power is a subtle part of the structure of all being, as present as the air we breathe or the gravity that keeps us from drifting off the surface of this world.  That power is the grace and justice of our Creator, and it’s easy to miss.   It’s a form of power that does not demand, that does not coerce or oppress, but instead permits us the freedom to either stand in covenant or not.

Whenever we find ourselves in positions of authority, we need to recall this.  Whether at work on in family life, there will be times when we find others in our charge. There is always a temptation to use power like a king, or like a tycoon.  It can maintain order, sure.  But it too often becomes the means by which we force our wills upon others, to no other purpose than to affirm ourselves.  When we do that, our power turns into a feedback loop, feeding only itself.   God’s power is not like that.  It is infinitely generous, not controlling.  It is truly giving, not grasping and self-oriented. 

And though it’s as subtle as a sunset, and as quiet as the breath of a newborn child, it’s not really a secret.   Not really.   It just gets drowned out in the din of our shouting.

Live, in whatever power has been given you, so that truth might be more clearly heard.  Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

The Disembodied

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

06.03.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Romans 8:12-17

It’s been odd, watching that transition from the physical to the virtual.  I’ve been there, and it’s been peculiar.

There was a time, not so long ago, when getting a video involved a physical trip to something called a video store.   I know this might be hard to conceptualize, but let me attempt it.  Ever seen one of those Redbox automated DVD rental kiosks, the ones that sit outside of grocery stores and pharmacies?   Imagine one of those, only the size of a whole store, with a much better selection and actual human beings who know stuff about movies who can make recommendations and help you find things.   It was like that.

But now?  We just stream things, or get them on demand.  We don’t need to go anywhere, or see anyone, or do anything other than point a remote at the screen.   Every last part of the transaction is virtual, to the point at which we start feeling annoyed that we have to move to the microwave to get popcorn.  Isn’t there some way to automate that, we think, as we noodle through the Netflix menu wasteland?  Nope.  Seen it.  Nope.  Seen it.  Nope.  Seen it.   Oooh, look!  Rutger Hauer in Hobo with a Shotgun!  That looks perfect for family movie night.

That movement towards a disembodied reality has also played its way across the floor of my rec-room.  Back when they were smaller pups, the kids accrued vast piles of plastic toys, to the point at which our basement looked like a Toys-R-Us right after it had been hit by an F3 Tornado.   At some points, a tornado might actually have made it a bit cleaner, sort of like the “Voooom” at the end of The Cat in the Hat Comes Back.   I hope I’m not spoiling the ending of that classic for anyone.

There was a time when you couldn’t walk across a surface in my house without worrying about encountering some tiny plastic object, specifically the dreaded one by two standard thickness Lego brick.  For years, these pernicious little critters seemed to be everywhere, or...to be more accurate, not everywhere.   Just in the places you were stepping with your bare feet on your way to the bathroom in the middle of the night.  

But then things began to shift.  Instead of saving up their hard-won allowance to get things, the lads began to save for Dee El See, or downloadable content.  The things they wanted weren’t real anymore, but were instead part of the virtual world.   Slowly but surely, the material objects have begun to disappear, and more and more of life has become peculiarly intangible.   Instead of toys, there were costumes and plugins for Little Big Planet.  Instead of books crowding shelves, there was data that filled the drive of Kindles.  Instead of piles of records or boxes of tapes or stacks of CDs, there came music that sits invisible in the cloud and on portable drives.   And yet still the house seems cluttered.

Our movement away from meatspace reality and into the realm of the virtual has been remarkably abrupt, spanning half of a generation.  But for all of that transition, for all of the shift we’ve made from things you own and can touch to things you own yet don’t materially exist, we still might have some trouble grasping just exactly what the Apostle Paul was talking about in this morning’s reading from the Letter to the church at Rome.

As we reach the middle of chapter eight of this highly complex letter, Paul has just finished giving us an explanation the role of the law and the role of faith in our salvation. Romans is the farthest thing from a soundbite letter.   You can’t break Romans down into single verses or sections and be able to fully grasp its meaning, because that’s not how it was written.  From Paul’s rock-solid foundation as a brilliant rhetorician, he’s crafted an extended exploration of what it means to be reconciled to God’s grace through faith.  It’s a long and convoluted argument that he begins in chapter one, and that ends at the end of this chapter. 

When the Apostle Paul starts describing the end results of faith, the results of our struggle to embrace and serve God in this life, what’s interesting is the degree to which he managed to couch the end result of that struggle in terms that aren’t matter of fact. His writing here isn’t about the specifics. The struggle is deeply there, the groaning and the effort of faith, but the reward...well...Paul there gets a little coy.

He speaks about life governed by the Holy Spirit, but that’s in the now and not in the fulfillment of God’s time. He speaks about a glory to be revealed, but then he doesn’t actually reveal it. Paul speaks instead in soaring and rhythmic cadences, but when it gets right down to the nitty gritty of what awaits us in glory...we don’t hear a whole bunch of details. 

We do, however, hear that our lives must be lived in a particular way if our relationship with God is to be a healthy one.  Paul says in verse 13 that “...if you live according to the flesh, you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.”  We hear that...but what does it mean?  How can we do something, if we don’t do it with our bodies?   Is Paul here somehow suggesting that any action of the body is wrong?   Is Paul maybe saying that we’re to live out faith in such a way that it’s separate from our meatspace reality, as unconnected from real life as virtual space is from the flesh and bones of being?

No, of course not.  What Paul is absolutely not suggesting is that faith is a disembodied thing, or something that exists separate from the way in which we live.   Paul focuses a great deal on the manner in which Jesus followers are to spend their day-to-day lives.  Our ethical and moral behavior...meaning the stuff we actually do with ourselves...matters tremendously to Paul.   We need to pay attention to what we do with these bodies we seem to inhabit.

When Paul says that we should not “live according to the flesh,” and that we need to “put to death the deeds of the body,” he is talking about how we need to orient ourselves.  Faith is the thing that defines the trajectory of our lives, and so the focus of disciples of Jesus can’t be themselves.  

Our hungers, our wants, and all of the collateral yearnings of our physical and cultural selves cannot be the end towards which we focus and orient our being.  This is Paul’s intent when he warns us not to live kata sarka, or according to the flesh.   That manner of life is diametrically opposed to the ethic of self-giving love that defines both the teachings or Christ and the central ethical teachings of Paul himself.   

Paradoxically, our culture’s move away from the physical and into the virtual hasn’t reduced our tendency to be self-oriented.   If anything, we now face the challenge that our immediate desires can be met immediately, as the virtual world serves up exactly what we want to see and experience, right now...or at least as quickly as it takes us to punch in our credit card information.   Living kata sarka can easily be done in the virtual world, because what we want is just an instant away, almost as close as the neurochemical twitch of a synapse.   But that life is a life of isolation, in which we exist in a world filled with objects...real and virtual...instead of a world filled with other souls.  In that world, there is no life.  It’s a dead place, in which we ourselves die spiritually.

Instead, Paul asks us to reorient ourselves towards the Spirit, whose nature and highest gift to us is love.  If we orient our being not towards our own hungers, but towards spirit-led relationships with those around us, then those basic hungers will not consume us.  Governed by that as our defining value, our every action and every deed of our body, becomes a part of what Christ was working in the world.  That is the very nature and purpose of faith.

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

Internal Combustion

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

05.27.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Acts 2: 1-21

It was fire that brought you here.

Most of us don’t smell too strongly of smoke, and aren’t visibly singed, so that reality is easy to miss.  But it is, without question, true.  That’s an easy reality to miss as you’re cosily ensconced in a bucket seat, or zoning out with your iPod touch in the third row of a van.  Fire?  There’s no fire.  There’s just a faint purring as you motor along.

But given the absence of any electric cars or Amish buggies in the parking lot this morning, it was fire that brought us here.  We rode here, all of us, on the back of hundreds of thousands of tiny little explosions.  The reality of the carefully constrained violence of the internal combustion engine is just the dull and muffled background noise of our lives.

For me, not so much, because having those explosions right up close and personal on the bike is hard to miss, as is the muffled racket as I open ‘er up on River Road.  For the nine-hundred-thousand participants and spectators who’ve gathered for Rolling Thunder in DC today, the presence of those undamped straight-pipe Milwaukee-Iron explosions is as hard to miss as the 1965 carpet bombing campaign that gives the annual Memorial Day motorcycle gathering its name.

But when we’re in our vans or tooling along in our cars?  We just don’t notice.  It just seems so normal.  We miss it.   And we’re missing a great deal.  It is far more intense than we realize.  How intense?  

This being Poolesville and all, most of y’all have been around horses.   If you ride a horse, or even stand alongside a horse, you get a sense of them as living beings.  You can place your hand flat against the great firm stillness of their neck, and though they’re beautiful creatures, you can’t help notice just how powerful they are.  Even behind those gentle eyes, they are so much swifter and stronger than we, and standing by one, you feel a little small.  Or a lot small.

Perhaps that’s why we still use the horse--after a hundred years--as the measure of power.   Horsepower.  Am I the only one who thinks this is a little odd?  Our measure of power is not some abstraction, or something that relates to some scientific progress.  It’s...horsies.  And if being around one horse reminds us of our smallness, why are we so oblivious to the tremendous forces at work every time we inch forward in the McDonald’s drive-through?

If we’d all ridden here in wagons drawn by teams of twenty horses, there’s no way you’d have missed their presence.  I’d also expect that the sanctuary would have a slightly different fragrance.  If you were crossing the One Oh Seven after church for a nice little lunch and refreshing beverage at Bassets and you looked to your left and a hundred thoroughbreds were thundering past St. Peter’s towards you at full gallop, the earth shaking beneath their hooves, that might possibly catch your attention an/or require a change of undergarments.  

But you rode to church this morning on fire, fire with the power of hundreds of horses, and you probably barely noticed.  That energy was quiet, contained, and out of sight.  The energy on the first Pentecost was not quiet.  It was not contained, and it was not hidden away.   

The Pentecost story in Acts 2 is an important fulcrum in the story being told by Luke.   Having told the story of the passion, crucifixion, and resurrection in the Gospel of Luke, the same historian begins the narrative of the movement that would rise up in response to Jesus in the Acts of the Apostles.  

Chapter one of the Acts of the Apostles was mostly transition and housekeeping.  We hear about the previous book, and get a few verses describing the post resurrection Jesus.  Then we get some organizational housekeeping, as they select someone to replace Judas, who for obvious reasons...he’d either hanged himself or just spontaneously exploded, depending on which gospel story you read...was no longer on Session.

It is with chapter two that the story of the early church begins.   It starts on a day of noise and hubbub in Jerusalem, with the disciples gathered into a room by themselves.  Pentecost means, in the Greek, “The Fiftieth Day,” and the crowds that were in Jerusalem had gathered for one of the many festival celebrations that defined the life of that city.   

The Jewish celebration of Pentecost marked fifty days following the celebration of the Passover, and the festival was often called either the Festival of the Weeks or the Feast of Harvest.  Traditionally, this festival was also assumed to remember the giving of the law to Moses.

Whichever way, the city was full of life and noise.   With the disciples gathered all together, we hear that “..suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind.”  We hear that “..divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.”   This is not actually fire, of course, nor is it actually a violent wind, or some combination of the two.   If you’re trying to start a movement, opening up on your followers with a flamethrower is usually not the best way to get them motivated.  The Creator of the Universe knows this, fortunately for us.  

As with most language describing our interaction with God, it’s metaphor.  It has to be metaphor.  It is “like” a violent wind.  It is tongues “as of” fire.   Both images are intended to evoke the immense and transforming energy of God’s presence, but in slightly different ways.   The word for wind used by Luke is pnoes, derived from the word pneuma, which in Greek means wind, breath, and spirit.   It’s the same word used to describe the Holy Spirit in verse 4, and throughout the Bible.  It speaks to the life giving and ordering presence of God.

And fire?   The term for “fire” used here is puros, the Greek word for fire that gives us the word “pure” and “purify” and that highly flammable alcohol-based hand sanitizer.   Each and every one of the gathered disciples are brought into a relationship with their Creator, as the presence of God’s lifegiving breath and cleansing fire rests upon them.

From the creative and transforming energy of that moment, the gathered disciples find themselves able...depending on their gifts...to take those tongues of fire and speak to the world around them.   What they are not doing is babbling, or speaking in some ecstatic language that only they can understand.  That’s an entirely different thing.   

The great gift of Pentecost is the ability to speak and be understood, conveying the truth of God’s grace and Christ’s love across the boundaries of culture and language.

It is for that purpose that both breath and fire mingled on Pentecost, and it is towards that purpose that we Jesus folk are called every year.  What does that look like in our lives?  How do we make that happen?  It goes beyond suddenly being able to speak Xhosa or Tagalog.   The Spirit’s power is seen through two things.  First, we are called to breach boundaries.  Second, we’re called to recognize those countless moments of the Spirit’s fire in our lives.

To breach boundaries, we are shown the actions of the disciples, a rag-tag band of notoriously poorly spoken Galilean country-folk.  They are given both the competence and the gifts to communicate with those who are radically different from themselves.  That capacity...the ability to connect with those who are different and those who are strangers...is an essential component of any Christ-gathering that wants to live into the intent of Pentecost.

You encounter those boundaries every day.  Every day, you’re confronted with difference, with those who see the world through different cultural or political lenses.  Our ability to live as people empowered by the Spirit’s fire is measured by our capacity to articulate God’s transforming love to those who aren’t us.  That person who you are not like, who does not look like you or talk like you?  That’s another soul, beloved of God, worthy of your love.   The measure of your life in the Spirit is your capacity to reach across, and to listen, and to be present to those souls.  

Then there are those moments of fire.  The movement of the Spirit isn’t always like a mighty flame hurricane.  Sometimes, yes.  But not always.  Mostly, it’s surprisingly subtle.   Over and over, day by day, moment by moment, choice by choice, that flame rises in us.  At each point of decision, each instance where we choose a kind word or a caring hand or to take time for that stranger or not to feed that monkey on our back, that fire is fed.

And as subtle as they are, those moments in each of our lives are the tens of thousands of tiny Pentecost explosions that drive the Christian life.  

It was that Pentecost fire that brought you here.  And if we attend to it, it is fire that will carry us where God’s best grace intends.

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

Tilt-A-Whirl

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

05.20.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  John 17: 6 - 19

I was reminded this last week that there is a reason pastors don’t talk much about classical theology when we get up into the pulpit.   It’s a bit like the reason I have an absolutely least favorite ride at amusement parks.

Don’t get me wrong about amusement parks.  I have a thing for amusement parks, all of them, from the biggest to the smallest.  It’s an old echo from my boyhood, one that I’ve not let be dimmed by age or being the one who actually has to pay for it.  

I find pleasure in the great honking industrial-sized entertain-o-plexes served up by Disney and Hershey, in the promise of sweet shiny shiny fun that hangs like a tantalizing mirage on the far horizon of that seemingly endless expanse of parking lot.  And Lord have mercy, does that lot go on.  The parking lots at Disney World, for example, are bigger than the entire Disneyland Park in California.  When you’re parked in DisneyWorld Lot Section Pluto Z12, it’s important to be aware that the name doesn’t come from the cartoon character, but the distance from the entrance in light-minutes.   

I still delight in seeing one of those gritty little traveling carny-parks sprouting in the parking lot of a nearby struggling strip mall, its aging Ferris Wheel rising like an incandescent blossom from the cracked asphalt.

I love bucketing along in roller coasters and giggling in haunted houses and halls of mirrors.  I love funnel cake and cotton candy and the way your kid’s faces get so sticky by the end of the day that if they start complaining about leaving, all you have to you press your hand to their face, hold it for a second, and you’re going right where I tell you to go, young man.  

But I’ve never understood the attraction of the tilt-a-whirl.  There are dozens and dozens of variants to that particular ride, but all of them stick to the same basic principle.   You sit in a gondola that orbits around a central point.  That gondola can also be spun around as it spins around, a bit like the earth rotating as it goes around the sun.  That’s it.  

I had an ex-girlfriend who was really, really into riding tilt-a-whirls at fairs and state parks, and insisted that I ride them with her while she cackled with glee and spun the car as fast as she could.  Let me reiterate:  this was an ex-girlfriend.

Because riding the Tilt-A-Whirl is fun in the same way that the second day of a particularly bad stomach flu is fun.  After thirty seconds, the world is a whirling blur.  The movement of the liquid in your inner ear becomes more complicated and chaotic than the best fluid dynamics computer model  can predict.  You don’t know where you are, or where you’re going next, and you’re not entirely sure you’re going to be able to know the near-term location of that corn-dog you ate ten minutes ago.

When theologians try to talk about our relationship with our Creator, it can sometimes have the same effect.  The heady, interwoven abstractions that human beings are forced to use when we try to articulate a reality that transcends our reality can be existentially dizzying.  

This last week, as I and a group of other doctoral students wrestled with the ancient theologies of the church, it sometimes felt much the same way.  As the week rolled on, meanings and symbols seemed to dance in and out of one another, and the more complicated it became, the more our minds churned and struggled.   We learned that our task as Christians was to participate in a maximally existential joyous organic koinonia of logoi personhood.  We found the purpose of the church was to incarnationally and perichoretically manifest the eternally catalyzing energia of the Numinous.  We were challenged to embrace a robust cosmological capacitative explosion of triune ontological robustness.  At least, that’s what I think I remember.  Having both a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a value-sized bottle of ibuprofen on hand also proved helpful.

The seventeenth chapter of John’s Gospel, like much of the rest of that Gospel, evokes a seemingly similar interweaving.   Words repeat and cycle and repeat again.   Concepts in the text swirl and connect and reconnect.   Chapter seventeen is one long sustained prayer, one that serves a clear purpose in the arc of the story John is telling.  The sequence of seven signs that defines the heart of the narrative for John has been completed.  The teachings about the Holy Spirit and community that are Christ’s final summation to his disciples have just come to a conclusion.  That summation, which is called the “farewell discourse,” has filled chapters fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen, and now finally wraps up.

Chapter seventeen is one long sustained prayer, one that transitions us between the farewell discourse and the beginning of John’s passion narrative in chapter 18.  The purpose of the prayer is a benediction of sorts, as Jesus conveys through prayer that he has, in fact, taught the disciples everything that needed to be taught.   He has given them both his teaching and himself, and through this prayer, he asks that his Father protects them and stands present for them.

Who are the folks he’s praying for?   First, it’s the disciples that had gathered around him.  But it’s more than that.  If we continue on through past the end of this reading, we hear that the verses in question were meant for not just them, but also for “..those who will believe in me through their word.”   It’s a prayer intended towards those who would follow on, meaning, it’s a prayer for us.

What it asks is both simple and complex.   The language is a simple request for protection, in recognition that both Jesus and those who follow him stand in tension with “..the world.”   That word is repeated eleven times in the thirteen verses you heard read today, and that repetition isn’t random.  It reflects a tension that John is intentionally developing.

The word used for “world” in the original Greek of this passage are variants of the word kosmos,  which is the word that gives us the English word...um...cosmos.  It can mean a number of things, but it primarily refers to the way that life and existence order themselves.   Kosmos is the process of material reality.  It’s the way things work.

Or, if we’re honest about many of our encounters with material reality, the way things don’t work.   Our world and the lives we live in it can be a swirl of chaos, a churning mass of unpredictability and mess and disorder.  What is predictable is that things are not predictable.  We seek pattern and meaning and purpose, but the world often seems to defy our efforts to give it form and structure.   When Jesus speaks of kosmos here, that’s what he’s talking about.

Our studies and our work lives take unexpected turns.  Our relationships strengthen, or they can suddenly fail.  Reminders of our mortality are ever present.  If we focus on that chaos, it will churn and roil our psyches.  If we abide in that chaos, it can leave us dizzy and nauseated and confused and overwhelmed.

But what Jesus taught and lived out was not rooted in the raw chaos of life and existence.  His grounding, his heart, and his person was in the source and foundation of our existence, and in the purpose towards which we are to orient our lives.  In this prayer, we are reminded that the role of faith is to orient our eyes and selves away from the mess and the churn, and towards the transforming love and grace of God.

That doesn’t mean we’re not aware of chaos, or that it ceases to be around us and a part of our lives.  We don’t get a pass on that.  But though we are in faith in the world, we are not...if we are in the Truth as Jesus was in the Truth...of the world.

For all of the whirl of being, and for all of the complex structures and frameworks and paradigms we’ve fabricated to understand our relationships and our theology, what is most important in our faith is maintaining that consistent focus on the gracious presence and purpose of our Creator.   It is in and towards this presence that we’re invited to abide and live.

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

Mr. Bossy Pants

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

05.13.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  John 15:9-17

It was the first day of school, and I had been assigned a friend.   The year was 1978, and I was going into fourth grade, and the school was the American School in London.

The ASL is a private school for the spawn of expats and diplomats and American businessfolks, inhabiting a large and mostly windowless cement and brick modernist building in the posh district of St. John’s Wood.

Like the base schools that serve military munchkins, it was a constant churn of faces.  Every single year, the classes were different, as their globetrotting parents were reassigned or moved to another business office. So every single year, a substantial percentage of the class would be replaced with new faces.  If you showed up mid-year, as I did and so many kids did, those first few days were like walking into that school stress dream.   You didn’t know where you were, who anyone was, and what you were supposed to be doing.

If you were one of those helpless new faces, for the first couple of weeks you got a teacher-assigned “friend,” whose job it was to help show you the ropes.

My assigned friend clearly enjoyed his role.  He explained where everything was.  He told me where I needed to put my stuff.  He told me where I was supposed to sit.  He told me how the bell system worked, and how to get to the buses through the great windowless warren of a building.   I ate lunch with him in the lower school lunchroom, and he told me what food was good and what meals I wouldn’t want to eat.  I heard a great deal about how many toys he had, and how rich he was.  He had many toys, all of which were better and far more interesting than my toys, which weren’t worth talking about.

When the time came to run around on the patch of modernist asphalt and concrete that passed for the playground, he told me who I should want to hang out with.  That turned out to be pretty much just him.  He told me how I shouldn’t play with one kid because he was stupid, and how I should stay away from this other kid because he was obnoxious, and how every single one of the girls was dumb.   “All of them?”  “Yes, all of them.”  I decided I wasn’t quite so sure about my assigned friend.

Then he decided we should play a war game, in which he would pretend to be Ultraman, a giant Japanese hero robot space warrior, and I would pretend to be the monster that Ultraman defeated.  I’d seen Ultraman...it was a fourth grade favorite...but I just couldn’t get my “soon to be defeated monster” right.    No, I needed to stand over there.  No, that “roaring monster” sound I was making wasn’t right, it needed to be different.   No, you can’t hold your hand that way when you pretend to blast me with your alien attack, it’s insulting in some cultures, but of course you wouldn’t know that, because you wasn’t the world traveller.   It was a really quite not-fun way to spend recess.

On the bus on the way home that day, I decided that perhaps that friend assignment was only going to be a one-day assignment.   Being ordered around is not anyone’s idea of a friendship.

And then, as we drift in and out of the lectionary reading this morning, we hear Jesus saying “You are my friends if you do what I command you.”   What?  Huh?  You’re my friends...if you obey?  How is that friendship?

If we just hear that verse, in isolation from every other verse this section of John’s Gospel, then we might take it that way.  But separating out a verse from context is never an appropriate way to read the Bible.  That’s generally true, but it’s particularly true here in the fifteenth chapter of John.  Chapter fourteen through seventeen are all part of one long teaching in John, what Bible scholars call the “Farewell Discourse.” 

Unlike the three other Gospels, the fourth Gospel is not set up like a travelogue.  Mark, Matthew, and Luke lay out an arc beginning with Jesus in Galilee and traveling down towards Jerusalem, with the physical movement towards the sacred city framing the narrative.

The structure of John’s Gospel is intentionally different.  What is important to John is telling the story of a series of seven signs.  Those signs, or semeion, are holy events, moments of miracle and meaning that speak to something beyond themselves.  In telling us their story, John is laying out not a movement through space, but a moving into deeper meaning.   

Each of those events reinforces the character and nature of Jesus.  There’s the miracle at Cana in John 2:1-11, where Jesus turns water into a nice piquant cabernet, with just a hint of oak, peat, and elderberry.  There’s the healing of the child of a royal official in chapter 4, and an indigent lame beggar in chapter 5.  Five thousand folks are fed in chapter six, despite the fact that the disciples hadn’t arranged for a caterer.   In chapter nine, a blind man is healed.   Finally, the seventh sign comes in John 11, as Jesus raises Lazarus.  

With the completion of this set of signs, John’s story of Jesus begins to come to a close.   But before it does, John needs to complete the telling.  And so we get the Farewell Discourse, in which Jesus describes who he is, promises that God will provide the disciples with the Holy Spirit.  It’s a collection of sayings, complex and interwoven and blended up together, as is so much of John’s Gospel.

That blending poses something of a challenge conceptually in today’s passage, one that surfaces as we consider the peculiar internal tension between loving and command.   It’s not just that Jesus is telling us that we need to love one another.   It’s that in that whirling circling way that John’s Gospel has, Jesus seems to be demanding it.   If you keep my commandments, you abide in my love.  This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.  I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

The tension is this: can you demand love, and have it still be love?   We know a friend who is assigned is not a friend.  We know a friend whose friendship is contingent on you doing every last thing they say is not a friend.  Is love that is commanded still love?

Anyone who’s every been through high school can confirm that giving someone a romantic note that tells them that you command them to love you doesn’t do anything ninety-nine point four percent of the time.  And that other point-six percent of the time, it tends to result in a restraining order.

What Jesus is doing, though, is not just ordering people around.  The commandment he is conveying is not an effort to control or manipulate.  It is, instead, an “order” in the same way that a joyful life itself is “ordered.”  Living into the love that Jesus requires is a part of any healthy human relationship.  It is a command, but only in the way that a paramedic might whisper “breathe” into your ear during CPR.  We are compelled to it, but only in the way that a  mother is compelled to love her child, or a child is compelled to love their mother.  It is an order, but only in the way that the laws of physics order the universe to make existence possible.

When Jesus offers up that command, he does so from the heart of who he is, recognizing that if our communities and our lives are ordered according to the Spirit that dwelled within him, then our freedom will not be diminished, but magnified.

So hear that command, and live into it.  Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

A Tangle of Vines

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 05.06.12

Scripture Lesson:  John 15:1-8

As April droughts have finally brought May showers, my little quarter acre plot of inside the Beltway suburb has finally begun to green.  The grass had been growing a nanometer a week, as it patiently awaited the coming of moisture, but now it’s going full throttle.  Yay.  More mowing.  

The little strawberry plot that was just planted beside my carport is beginning to show signs that it might actually become something more than a five-by-five patch of cracked earth, fenced off so the rabbits won’t get their feet all dusty.  The blueberries and blackberries that went in the ground looking like little more than lumps of dirt with a stick embedded now look like sticks with two or three tiny little budding leaves.  

With the yard humming away, though, I’ve found myself trying to figure out how to get the boys out to give dad a bit of help.  My XY chromosomed ‘uns are remarkably martial creatures, filled with the love of conflict that comes with those first surges of testosterone.  Luring them away from the virtual battlefield and out where they can get nice and mud-encrusted just like the Good Lord intended is something of a challenge.  For that, I need something they can battle.  They need to go to war, to be wrapped up in a life or death struggle with...well...something.

And I found that something.  In our yard, winding its way around the gorgeous dogwoods the boys both used to climb when they were little, we’ve got honeysuckle.  Honeysuckle is not the most fearsome name for an adversary, even if you put Darth in front of it. 

As a little boy, I always thought honeysuckles were lovely.  As we’d walk through the North Georgia woods near Athens, my grandfather taught me to pop the copious flowers off their vines, one after another, to suck the tiny one-quarter-calorie drop of sweet nectar from the base of the thousands of pretty little flowers.  You could slurp them all day and it wouldn’t be enough to keep you alive, but at least you’d starve with that sweet honey taste in your mouth.

And that smell, oh, that amazing smell.  The sweet perfume honeysuckle hangs thick in the air on those perfect, intoxicating Virginia summer nights, when the heat of the day has finally given way to a dark barely-cool moistness.  Just a whiff of that delicious odor throws me back, back to an earlier time.  I smell it, and suddenly I’m back riding shotgun in a 1972 Chevy Impala on a Fairfax County back road late on a Friday night.  The green vinyl seats are cool on my back, the wind is reaching through that wide open window and playing through my hair, the music of a three hundred and fifty cubic inch eight thrumming in my ears.  

But to those dogwoods and any other plant in the garden?  For them, honeysuckle is lovely flowery evocative death.  It grows into a dense tangle of roots and vines that weave and interlock and wind themselves into a nearly impassible snare.  The vines explode outward with virulent vitality, a writhing mass of angry green serpents twining around everything they touch.  They crush the life out of flowers.  They strangle your trees.  They’ll collapse your fences.  If you let it grow, it’ll grow and it won’t stop growing until you and your yard and your house and your car and your cat all sit under an impenetrable four foot deep mat of vines...and of course, thousands upon thousands of pretty little one-quarter-calorie flowers.

The passage from John’s gospel today is about vines and growth and gardens.   But mostly, it’s about Jesus.   

Unlike the three other Gospels, which all focus on Jesus’s teachings about the Kingdom of God, John’s Gospel emphasizes the identity of Jesus himself.   Rather than using parables to metaphorically explore the nature of God’s reign, John gives us lengthy teachings about who Jesus was, and why Jesus was, all using language that was highly symbolic and evocative.

When Jesus says “I AM the true vine” in verse 1 and “I AM the vine” in verse 5, these represent the last of “I AM” statements in John’s Gospel.  Each of these statements attempts to express Christ’s identity metaphorically, in terms that his listeners would have been able to grasp.  “I am the bread of life.”  “I am the living bread.”  “I am the light of the world.”  “I am the gate for the sheep.”  “I am the good shepherd.”  “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”

In this final passage, Jesus describes himself as the “true vine,” and in doing so draws on a long Biblical tradition of using agricultural imagery to express God’s connection with God’s people.   In the two verses we heard today, Jesus uses this image of growth to show the connection he establishes between God and all of us.   In verse 1, the connection is between Jesus and God.  Jesus is the vine, and God is the vinegrower.   In verse five, the connection is between himself and us.  Jesus is the vine, and we are the branches.   

The movement of this imagery has Jesus marking how in his life and teachings we find ourselves grafted in to the life of God, and from that place find ourselves bearing fruit.   Jesus asks that we participate in the life of grace that he himself has lived, being a part of him in the same way that he would be a part of us.

The essence of “abiding” in Jesus is a life intertwined, and the language of John’s Gospel weaves and repeats and reconnects with itself.   We abide in him, and he abides in us, and his word abides in us.   The relationship between Jesus and God and us and Jesus again is as complex and intricately interconnected as an organic system, in which we’re asked to take part.

The purpose of that relationship is spelled out pretty clearly in the verses that follow.  We can know if we are abiding in Jesus by the simple measure that we love and show care for one another.  When we hear about “bearing fruit” in this verse, it speaks to an existence that directly and actively manifests the love of Christ.   Just as we are nourished by grace, received from God, we also nourish others with the grace we’ve received.  Bearing fruit does not necessarily mean material abundance, although this might come as a disappointment to some watchers of Joel Osteen.  It means that we are able to bear the fruit of grace and mercy and kindness in every circumstance of life.  It means we’re able to live into whatever place in life we are, and still be nourished and sustained by our relationship with God and Christ and the Spirit that fills our neighbor.  

As we seek to bear that fruit, we need to be aware of those other vines that grow in us.   Abiding in loving relationship with God and Christ and neighbor is one manner of life, but there are other vines we can abide in, as sweet and lethal as honeysuckle.

There’s the pretty empty sweetness of consumer desire, ever on our lips, but never ever enough.  We can pluck at its flowers all day, but they will only eternally stir our appetites, leaving us always hungry for more. 

There’s the ferocious fever-hot growth of partisan anger and spiritual self-righteousness, which snarls and snakes its way around every other plant in the garden.  No kind and loving thing can stand near it and be permitted to live.

There are the deep taproots of anxiety and fear, which snake and wind their way under the surface, invisible to the eye.  They feed all kinds of growth, and choke out the roots of grace in us.

We need to set ourselves against those vines in ourselves, with the same eager focus my boys found wielding shovel and spade, tearing down and digging deep, making room for the growth in grace that Christ is seeking in us.  

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