A Stranger in These Parts

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 10.13.13

Scripture Lesson: Luke 17:11-19, Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7

One of the more fascinating things about my bi-weekly visits to Poolesville has been encountering a community that has a sense of history.  That goes beyond having ancient bottles of Guinness stuffed into the walls of church buildings.  It’s a personal thing.  It’s a community thing.  There are families that have been here for generations, and that’s something rather different than I’m used to.  

That is in large part because I’m “from” a place that no-one’s actually from.  When you live inside the Beltway, in that suburban moonscape that sprawls as far as the eye can see, you’re in a place where pretty much everyone comes from somewhere else.  My home town of Annandale, for example, is a place without history.  

Folks can’t go back that far there, because the there that is there wasn’t there a hundred years ago.   It was a few farms, a few estates, and a whole bunch of woodland.  There was a little Methodist church a crossroads, one that had the misfortune to be burned to the ground during the Civil War.  Annandale was more of a place than a town.

There was nothing, and then there was something.  It stayed that way until a great tide of ramblers and asphalt swept across the land in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and suddenly there were people there.  Whatever sense of history existed in Annandale now rests under a strata of asphalt, tract homes, and stubbornly struggling Korean businesses.  Here and there, you’ll find a sign or a historical marker, sitting rusting on a patch of pavement by the place they’re building the Walgreens.  

There used to be something here, that sign will say.  But it isn’t here any more.

I think that’s the Annandale community motto.

You can’t really be rooted in a place that has no living roots.  You’re just another transient, drifting through for a year or two before your next assignment or your next posting or when another job calls you on to another place.  Everyone is a stranger, and just about when they stop being a stranger, they move.  We’ve been ensconced in our little slice of suburban paradise for just over 13 years.  Our neighbors to the right?  Different.  Our neighbor to the left?  Different.  The guy across the street?  Different.  We’re starting to be among the old timers, and we’ve been there only a quarter of a generation.  

Annandale’s most famous resident is sort of a poster boy for our transience. Who is that?  It’s Mark Hamill.  Yes, Luke Skywalker himself lived in Annandale, and went to Annandale High School, but for Mark, his time in Annandale was as fleeting as Luke’s time on Tatooine.  He lived there for a few years, but his dad was a military officer, and Mark Hamill found himself having to move around a whole bunch.  Having to constantly move because of your father’s job was yet another reason he was selected for that role, I think.

Annandale is increasingly the face of America.  It’s what everyone’s lives are like, everywhere in the United States.  Almost no-one is “from here.”  

Transience is a basic part of our culture.  We’re forever churning and cycling, chasing off after one thing or another.  Our society roils relentlessly, like ripples on the surface of a bathtub, bouncing from coast to coast now that we’ve filled up our allotted portion of the North American continent.

Both today's passage from the Prophet Jeremiah and the reading from Luke you just heard speak to how we are To live when we find ourselves strangers in a strange land.  Hundreds of years separate them,  just as they aree departed from us by millennia, but the basic nature of the human condition has not changed.

When you're in a place you don't belong, it influences how you think and act.  It can drive you to isolation.  It can draw you to fold in on yourself, or to resent those around you.

That was particularly true for the folks who heard Jeremiah's counsel.   Jeremiah was speaking specifically to a people who had been uprooted, and uprooted in a way that was a tiny bit more wrenching than having to go to a new school midway through your junior year 'cause your Dad has a new posting on the Death Star.

The people of Judah had relocated to a strange land because they'd been forced to.  As part of the Babylonian Empire's strategy to shatter and subvert the nations it had subjugated, official policy was to force leaders from those nations to come and serve Babylon in exile.  This was the beginning of what was called the diaspora, the scattering of the Jewish people throughout the world.

This diaspora was not exactly a move they'd desired.  Powerless, oppressed, and torn from their land, it would have been easy to succumb to resentment.

Almost as easy as it would have been for that one member of a band of lepers to be resentful.  In the ancient world, contracting Hansen's disease wasn't just something that would ruin you physically.  Because it could not be treated and was highly contagious, it also consigned you to a life as a social outcast.

By law, lepers were required to stay away from the rest of humanity.  If afflicted, you could beg...from a distance.  But the joys and celebrations of life,  the friendships and family, the rituals of meaning and belonging, those were forbidden to you.

You were a person without a place or a people.  Which is perhaps why, among a group of ten lepers who cried out to Jesus for help, there was a single Samaritan.  He wasn't among his own people, but really, he had no people.

For such an isolated soul, it would have been easy to succumb to bitterness or fear or resentment.

And yet in both of these instances, in these two utterly different tales from different times, we hear of a very different response.

From Jeremiah, we get exactly the opposite of what we  might expect.  Here we have the isolated prophet whose name gives us Jeremiad, which means to to shout and rant and rage like you're hoping for a career in talk radio...and what we get is not a prophecy of fury.  Instead, an incongruous word of grace and forbearance.  live your lives.  And while youre at it, pray for those who've oppressed you.

From Luke's Gospel, the only one of the four Gospels to remember this story for us, we hear that the one who was doubly isolated, the one who even when healed didn't belong, that one was the only one who thought to return to Jesus and give thanks for being released from that prison of illness.

It's a striking reversal, one that Jesus found worth calling to the attention of everyone around him.   All a y'all are Jews, and this guy, this foreigner, is the only one who thinks maybe a word of gratitude is in order?

And in each of these stories, a word to those of us who dwell as stranger in a land of endless diaspora.  Yes, even some of y'all in Poolesville, because of the nearly six thousand souls who live here in the year of our Lord two thousand and thirteen, most aren't related to the five hundred souls who were here in 1960.  It's a prolific town, but not THAT prolific.  The crunchy exurban shell that has formed around Poolesville's caramel small town center is filled with souls who live lives of wandering.

First, there's the call to be a blessing to whatever community you find yourself in.  That call, expressed by Jeremiah, establishes a positive and gracious attitude towards neighbors as the fundamental call of anyone who finds themselves a stranger.  Do all of those things that define you as a healthy and joyful person, and then hope that health for all those around you.

Allowing isolation to form, or casting up walls of distrust, hatred, and otherness?  That’s not the message that comes from Jeremiah, which is both practical and prophetic.

Second, and related to the first, there’s the call to connect with those who show kindness to us when we find ourselves as strangers.  If we have an attitude of blessing towards those around us, we will be more connected.  The Samaritan leper shows that attitude twice.  We know very little about this soul, but we do know some things.  Though this nameless man was a hated stranger in Judea, he is not alone.  He sought the fellowship of others who share his struggle, even those who aren’t quite like him.  And when he encounters someone who is willing to show him an impossible grace, he is willing to show gratitude.

The third is the flip side of the second.  For those times when we find ourselves on the other side of that coin, when we’re the ones with deeper roots, we are given the example of Jesus himself when presented with those who are outside the boundaries of the familiar and the acceptable.  The Jesus we hear in Luke’s Gospel is powerfully interested in the care for the stranger, the outcast, and the oppressed.

The foreigner is not someone to be feared or hated, or used as a scapegoat for our own failings.  The foreigner is our neighbor, a human being worthy of our care, and worthy of healing.  Two thousand years later, there are still a surprisingly large number of human beings who’ve missed this fundamental Christian truth.

When you are a stranger in a strange land, have a heart of blessing to those around you.  From that heart, find connection and community.  And when you are connected in community, remember that the stranger is your sister or brother.

Eyes Up

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

10.06.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Habakkuk  (it's short. read the whole thing.)

When I was a youngling, in second and third grade, my mom and I would conclude most days by sitting and reading stories together.  This was aeons ago, of course, back before we knew the joys of everyone sitting alone in a different room with their very own screen.  

Hey, we made do with what we had.  For a couple of years, what we did right before sleep was read aloud through the Narnia books, one after another, cover to cover.  Rich books they are, and full of memorable characters and subtle, gentle hints at the best and greatest purposes of Christian faith.  From those pages, there came a character I loved, one that I identified with so very much that my mom started calling me by his name.  A marshwiggle he was, an amphibious flipper-toed humanoid, tall and lean and sallow.  Puddleglum was relentlessly certain that the worst would come of everything, which was just the way of the world, which he endured with a wry stoicism. 

As a child, I was that marshwiggle.  Not because my toes were webbed, which they aren’t, at least the last time I checked.  It’s that I was consistently and insistently pessimistic.  

My assumption, no matter what, was that the one great law governing the universe was Murphy’s law.  If something can go wrong, it will.  

If I had a test the next day?  I was going to fail it, as I’d suddenly forget everything I’d been studying for over the last week and my pencils would all break.   Just got an awesome new flying gas-powered toy plane that I’d bought with all of my birthday and Christmas money?  It would never start.  Ever.  It was just my operating assumption about the nature of things, and I was content with it.

Whenever I would make some pronouncement along those lines, which I did often, my mom would say, “Oh, Puddleglum.”  

There was a logic to that approach to existence, as I reasoned it.  Being a pessimist means that if things go wrong, at least you knew it was coming.  And if your grim assessment proves incorrect, and the world comes up roses, and you ace that test?  Well, then you’re happy.  So the pessimist is either right or happy, which means you’re pretty much never disappointed.  Ah, the seamless logic of the eight year old mind.

And feeling grim about the world has been easy lately.  It seems like an increasingly safe bet.  Human beings are always just a wee bit on the difficult side, as a species, but lately we’re not exactly rocking it.   

This week around here in particular, it was a festival for pessimists.  Watching as our government pointlessly, meaninglessly was ground to a semi-halt was difficult enough in the abstract.  For some reason I have a fondness for this country, and watching as even the most basic processes of our Constitutional governance became mired in pointless, unconstructive gamesmanship was not easy.

That it seemed both so easy to avoid and inescapable didn’t make that any easier.

This went a little bit beyond the usual media grimness, the relentless toll of negativity that can often consume us as we compulsively check the news apps on our pocketscreens.  Those you can shut out or turn off, retreating to your garden or to your work.  It was different because this was going on all around.  Seeing neighbors and friends out for walks with their kids in the middle of the day is usually a pleasant thing.   When traffic is notably lighter than usual as you go pick up your kids at around 5:15 in the afternoon, you usually marvel at the Good Lord’s blessings.  This week, those things had a different feel.  Fighting and stalemate, grandstanding, blood, gunfire and madness, dead mothers and weeping children.  It was a mess, even by Washington standards.

When bad news is all around, when it’s in the stories that are being told around you and humming through the community all about, it’s easy to become consumed by it.   When our existence seems defined by the negative, that becomes all we think about.  It becomes the defining feature of our existence, consuming our thoughts.

That’s the struggle facing the prophet Habakkuk this morning, as he wrestles and tussles and struggles with the impossible mess in the world around him.  Habakkuk is one of those books that we don’t spend a whole bunch of time hearing about in church, perhaps because it’s really, really easy to miss.  Three short chapters, a couple of pages, and it’s easy to truck right on by this little book.  

It’s a pity, because this is a remarkably rich little text.  We know almost nothing about Habakkuk, other than that this book must have been written at some point in the sixth and seventh century before Jesus.  We know that because he references the Chaldeans...meaning Babylon...which apparently had not yet quite gotten around to crushing Judah yet.

What’s striking about this teensy little book is that it’s what is called a “theodicy.”  That means it is a divine indictment, a challenge offered up by someone who is calling into question whether or not God is holding up God’s end of the whole “being your God” deal. 

Habakkuk is laying out a question, one based on what he’s seeing and experiencing in Judah.  What he’s observing is a wreck of a society, in which the essential balance of the culture is shot.  Nothing seems to work.  Everything he saw was fighting and self-seeking, as the powerful sought more power and justice is trampled.

Nothing at all like today, in other words.  Ahem.

Standing in encounter with this text, there are three takeaways that we should be able to carry with us on our own journeys through times of challenge and hardship.  Because after almost three thousand years, human beings remain rather frighteningly similar.

First, that acknowledging and naming the negative is an essential part of covenant.  If all we want to show the world all the time is shiny happy people holding hands, then we’re not really standing in encounter with the world.   There are broken things here, hurts and horrors, predation and monstrousness.  

Those powers can be huge, walking the world like the giant monsters in that Guillermo Del Toro film I never got around to seeing this last summer.   They can also be as tiny as a virus, worming their way into us, tearing us from the path of grace God sets before us.  If we don’t name them, if we don’t call them out and challenge them, then they’ll consume us.

It’s the call of a prophet to name those things as Habakkuk named them.  It’s also the prophetic call to challenge those things, calling their validity into question against the essence of covenant.

And that gets us to the second takeaway.  Habakkuk is challenging the reality he encounters, casting it into stark contrast against the essence of his sense of covenant with God.  He’s not just tearing down for the sake of tearing down.  He’s not abandoning his relationship with his Creator.  He is not becoming a cynic, in other words.

The cynic doubts everything, and believes that things are broken because that is just the way things are.  The prophet challenges the broken things, knows that they are wrong and off and horrific.  They know that even more deeply than the cynic, because for the cynic, there is no contrast between what should be and what is.  Of course things are horrible, says the cynic.  Things are just horrible, period.

The faithful soul knows that this is not true, that there is, hidden within the mess, the potential for things to be whole and healthy...and that potential is what God desires for us.  Theodicy is not shaking ones fist at God, but going deeper into that relationship of covenant.

And that turns to the third takeaway.  Just as Habakkuk stands on the watchpost and looks out for what God might bring, we’re called to turn our eyes up and away from the broken things, and towards that place where justice and restoration stand.

This is not easy.  It is much easier, particularly if you’re of a marshwiggly temperament, to simply let yourself get mired in the mess.  That means doing nothing, or worse yet, becoming so consumed by the hopelessness of the broken world that it becomes all that you see, and the thing that you let define your being.

If we let our vision become only for our brokenness, and do not also have an eye towards who we know God wants us to be, then we are lost.  It is the great purpose of faith to give hope and meaning in those times.

Name those broken things you encounter, and know that you are called to challenge them.  Stand in confidence that you are in covenant relation with your Creator, and let that be the ground of your challenge.   And keep your eyes up, not letting them be clouded by the darkness you encounter.

Though the fig tree does not blossom, and no fruit is on the vines; though the produce of the olive fails, and the fields yield no food; though the flock is cut off from the fold, and there is no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will exult in the God of my salvation.  God, the Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, and makes me tread upon the heights.

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

Compare and Contrast

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

09.29.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 16:19-31

Way back when, when I was the age of my boys and every week brought some test or another, there was one form of exam that always worked for me.  I had the skills in mathematics one might expect of a pastor, and that my brain had hardwired itself early with English as its programming language meant that I was pretty useless at translation.    But in English or in History, whenever I’d see we were being asked to compare and contrast, I’d light up.  “In a minimum of 1500 words, compare and contrast the sociopolitical dynamics of Andrew Jackson’s administration to the music of Michael Jackson.”  Awesome.  I’ve got that one.   Lining up one thing against another thing is just such a natural way to think.  It allows us to make distinctions and to highlight features of a thing.  This was an easy type of essay, because human beings do that compare/contrast thing almost automatically.

We just can’t help ourselves.  There’s a basic human desire to do it, to take a look at those around us and try to figure out exactly how what they have and who they are measures up to us.  Being a male Homo Sapiens Americanus, this compulsion wasn’t like that of the female of the species, which, if my wife’s stories of young adulthood are any measure, develops that skillset early around hair and shoes and skirts and who’s in right now and oh my god did you hear what she did?

Like many males, that proneness comparison clearly manifested itself on the parking lot of the high school, as I’d take a look at who was driving what as a way of taking stock of who was who.   There was the perfectly reconditioned black ’68 Chevelle with a white racing stripe and a 327 under the hood, driven by a skilled junior greasemonkey who worked in a garage and had built it from a wreck in autoshop.  I’m still pretty sure his lifetime income profile has significantly exceeded mine.   

There was the one kid who rode a motorcycle, a Yamaha RZ350, the last of the great snarling roadgoing two-strokes.  He was lean and French, and wore a leather jacket while he leaned against his bike and smoked Gauloises and seemed to always be talking to girls.  This, I think, is why Americans have an issue with the French.  They’re just so frustratingly cool.

And though I’d try not to, I’d compare and contrast.  I’d look at my old blocky tan Plymouth with the green vinyl interior, which burned a quart of oil a week, stopped running whenever it rained, and every once in a while would belch green coolant from the heating vents like it was Linda Blair in the Exorcist.  You compare.

Even now that I’m supposedly more spiritually and personally mature, I do this.  Whenever I spend more than a few moments in dead-stopped traffic, which happens with unsurprising frequency, I look out across the sea of vehicles at a dead stop.  Metal boxes, four wheels, not moving.  My brain does that comparo, particularly if I’m astride my bike or ensconced in my Prius.  Ninety-nine percent of them are using more gas than me, I think, as the Smugometer gauge in the dash of the Prius reminds me of my superior thrift and wisdom.  

We compare, we contrast, ourselves to others, assigning value and assessing our place in the social scheme of things.  It’s a natural thing for a social creature to do, but rarely does it challenge us to think about the implications of those contrasts.

Which, of course, is exactly what Jesus is doing when he pitches out the wild contrasts we see in the story from Luke’s Gospel today.  The story of the rich man and Lazarus could not have wilder human contrasts.  First we are shown a wealthy man, wealthy and  powerful.  He’s dressed in purple, which was both an expensive dye to use on clothing and also a mark of royalty in the ancient world.   One look at him would have told you that he was a person of distinction.   He had everything anyone could ever want, eating and drinking to his heart’s content.

Jesus then zooms us out to the doorstep of this nameless man’s home.  Lying there, we find a man called Lazarus.  This isn’t the Lazarus we read about in John’s Gospel, brother to Mary and Martha, the friend of Jesus who dies and is brought back.  It’s just a man called Lazarus.

And the contrast could not be starker.  Where the nameless rich man is covered in purple pantsuits majesty as he eats his way across the fruited plain, what Lazarus is covered in are sores.  Which may or may not have been purplish.  What we do know about them is that as he lay there helpless, a wreck of a man, he’s set upon by dogs which...well...do what dogs do when they encounter an interesting smell and taste.

It’s a foul story, all oozy and doggy and generally unpleasant.  Too Much Information, we want to whisper to Jesus.  Ixnay on the Ores-say, Jesus.  That’s a little graphic, isn’t it?  But what counts for Jesus the storyteller is really hitting us with the desperation of this starving, sick, and miserable Lazarus, and casting it in as stark a contrast as possible with the opulence of the wealthy, nameless man.

The two exist on entirely opposite sides of the spectrum of human society, and in so far as we human beings would like to be one of those guys, we're pretty sure we'll take the purple door.

But this is Luke's gospel, Luke who made a point of assembling every last teaching and saying of Jesus about wealth and power.  And as is so often the case, only Luke retains this story.  It ain't in Matthew, it ain't in Mark, it ain't in John.

And as is even more often the case, this little parable is a trap.  We have no sooner touched it with our imaginations than it has suddenly flipped itself over. Both Mr. Purple and Lazarus have died and passed on, and find themselves in utterly different relationships with God.

Their material wealth, which had so completely distinguished them in the world, that had melted away into nothing.  Lazarus, having been a righteous but desperately poor man,  is suddenly in heaven with God and the angels and Abraham and Jim Henson.  Most versions of the story leave out that last one, but I seem to recall it in one of the Syriac codices.

And the rich man?  He's in that other place.  Why?  This little story doesn't tell us directly, but we get hints.  He knows the name of the man who was in agony on his doorstep, but that’s as far as it went.  What did he do about it?  He wore purple, and feasted.  

It is at this point that the rich man speaks, calling out to Abraham to help him out.  It's worth noting that even though the story does not give him a name, he has a voice and Lazarus does not.   Why is this worth noting?  Because the rationale for it as a storyteller is pretty clear.  His is the voice we hear because we are meant to be drawn into a sense of association with him.   The people who first heard this story would have certainly felt it.  He's begging for water, asking Abraham for mercy, and by couching his request in terms of his position as an observant Jew, Jesus is clearly taking this character and connecting with his listeners.

They'd have gotten the comparison, seen themselves in this person.  When his request is rejected, and he finds himself not only unable to get help but also unable to further warn his siblings about the nature of things, his listeners would have registered it as a deep and personal connection.  This guy is us.

As he has mistakenly assumed that his worldly prosperity matters in the slightest to God,  so did they.  And, frankly, so do we.  As we listen to this challenging, challenging passage, there are a couple of things that are worth hearing in our time.  

First, there's our growing obsession with the peculiar realm of social media, which both connects us and casts us into a peculiarly relentless cycle of self-promotion and one-upsmanship.  It’s supposed to be a blessing, this ability to stay connected to one another, and yet studies have shown that deep engagement with social media can often only heighten our unhappiness.

We find ourselves surrounded in a wash of images that show all of our four hundred and seventy three best friends in the whole world at their very very best.  They’ve got a shiny new car.  Oh, look, here’s a selfie from their fabulous vacation, in which they appear to be posing with their new best friend Matt Damon.  Here’s a picture of that absolutely perfect and delicious home-cooked meal, which has been as carefully assembled for media distribution as a meticulously plated gourmet meal on America’s Top Chef.

We look at the rust spots on our eleven year old van, and think about our last staycation, and look at the flaccid Stouffer’s lasagna casserole we scrambled to get made, and we compare.  And sure, the images of our friends aren’t the whole story. They hide the job stress and the rocky relationships and the fear of loss.  But even if those images aren’t the total reality, and we know it, they nonetheless deepen our sense of social and competitive stress.

This story reminds us, in all of our scrambling and anxiety, that what really matters before God are not those things.  

But there’s a second, harder message.

Take, for example, the response we invariably have when we encounter deep and seemingly intractable poverty.   Having regularly visited my parents in Nigeria as a young man, I can still remember that visceral reaction.

When we took a wrong turn off of a highway at night, and found  ourselves in a slum filled with the burned out hulks of cars and vans, now used as shelter, I felt it.   When I saw a leper by the side of the road, his face devoured by that ancient and terrible illness, I felt it.  I am so grateful for what I have, I thought.

On the one hand, that's a great thing.  We should always give thanks for what we have.  Maintain an attitude of gratitude,  as they say.  But when we stand in encounter with poverty and that is our only reaction, this sharp little story provides something of a counterpoint.

You can’t walk by Lazarus every day, and know his name, and just think, thank you Jesus, I’m so grateful I’m not that guy.  God asks more of that from us.

So don’t fret about your place, mistaking the struggles all of us face for God’s displeasure.  And don’t walk on by, comfortable in your purple smugness.

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

The Important Things

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

09.15.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Luke 15:1-10

What’s important to us?  That can change But are we really able to hear the words that Jesus spoke in the same way that his audience did in first century Judea?

We don’t live in the same time, or the same culture.  Our idea as to what is important, what matters, what’s worth putting in the extra effort for?  That’s changed.  Our sense of what has value, what is deserving of our energy and focus?  That’s changed, too.

This week, the focus of attention for a day or so was a slightly disappointing Apple event, as fans of that particular brand awaited news of the next and latest and greatest.  Which, as we found out, wasn’t just another rectangular phone with a screen, but...drumroll, please...two of them.  The iPhone 5C and 5S, they are, which best I can figure out stands for iPhone 5 “Cheap” and iPhone 5“‘Spensive.”   

Which means, now, that my fragile glass telecommunications brick is even more worthless than it was at the beginning of last week.  If you drive a car that was made in 2007, it’s still basically a decent car.  But my iPhone, which still more or less works, except for the rackafrackin’ home button?  It’s drifted off into oblivion, buried somewhere in the towering mountain range of better and faster and shinier devil boxes that came after.  It’s worth less than nothing.  Actually less than nothing.  They give away better phones now as an upgrade.  You may as well just take all of those obsolete iPhones and see what you could build with them...like, say, paving two lanes of the Beltway with iPhones...not just the HOT lanes, but the entire way around. You could...really. I’ve done the calculations. You’d just need lots of epoxy and a whole bunch of free time.

But something else has happened in this era.  It isn’t just that things that come rushing at us.  Through those little screens and our larger ones pours an endless cornucopia of stimulations, a rushing fountain clamoring for our attention.  What you want right now is right there.  You can set out towards a goal, and then somehow an hour has passed, and you’ve managed to crush a whole bunch of candy or whatever it is you do in Candy Crush Saga along with 100 million of your best friends, but that report isn’t quite written.  And you’ve somehow managed to spend real money on something called a Lollipop Hammer.  You can be in a family gathering, surrounded by human beings who love you and cherish you, and yet your mind is not on their stories or their lives, but on buying those Lollipop Hammers and extra lives that will get you through that impossible level.

It becomes harder and harder to tell what is and is not important.  It becomes harder and harder to know what is valuable.

But then again, as we listen to Jesus this morning, maybe things aren’t so different.  We’ve always struggled to know that matters, what is truly important.  Jesus, of course, knew that there were people like that in his own time.  That’s particularly true when it comes to understanding the importance of our relationships with others.

As he taught a crowd that had gathered around him, he could hear people in groups around the edge of the crowd muttering and complaining about him under their breath.  And not just him.  More significantly, they were annoyed that Jesus didn’t seem to understand who was important.  Look at this rabble! Look at this mess...they’re the dregs of humanity! These people aren’t worth anyone’s time...I can’t believe he even bothers with them.

The ones who grumbled against him were the educated and the elite. The Pharisees were the literate suburbanites of first century Judea, the ones who read and studied the law. The scribes worked for the court of the king and in the houses of the wealthy, managing their affairs and keeping track of their business. They did well. They had possessions, all that they needed.

So when Jesus told his parable of the lost sheep to describe how earnestly God seeks out those who are broken and lost in this life, he knew those mutterers would be unable to hear.  Shepherds would understand exactly what Jesus was talking about, but shepherds were poor Galilean trash, and the mutterers weren’t...ugh...shepherds. Pharisees didn’t gather their flocks by night. They paid people to do that for them. Lost sheep? Who cares about one lost sheep? I’ve still got the 99...and I was planning on ordering a new one from isheep.com anyway. Why bother with that worthless thing? My time is more valuable than that.  The return on investment just isn’t there.

Then Jesus tells another little story, a story that only appears in Luke’s Gospel. Matthew tells the parable of the lost sheep in Matthew 18:12-14, but doesn’t give us this next one. Why? Why the difference? Remember, Luke was put together to be heard by an educated and elite audience of early Christians, and so it’s author wanted to make absolutely sure that they heard the next thing that Jesus said...because Luke’s readers were dangerously similar to the whisperers who sat around the outskirts of the gathered crowd.

I can hear him raising his voice a little, pitching it out a little further, out over the heads of the outcasts and tax collectors around him and towards the well-dressed little group beyond..making sure that they heard, making sure that they saw his eyes on them. Then he tells a story of a coin. Say...you had a stack of ten one hundred dollar bills.  A hundred bucks is close to what a drachma would be worth today, eight hours of work from a day laborer. Enough to be real money, something you can relate to. And you knew you had $1,000, it was right there the last time you counted it, but when you counted it up again, you came up fifty bucks short. You’re going to tear the house apart looking for that bill, now, aren’t you?

But Jesus wasn’t talking about sheep, and he wasn’t talking about the value of cash. He’s trying to get it through the thick skulls of human beings just how deeply God values each and every one of us, and how deeply God wants us to understand the goodness that God intends for us.

Jesus saw that we struggle to see the value that God sees, and that the richer and more powerful we become, the harder that struggle becomes. As you gather wealth and position in society, it isn’t just that you stop caring quite so much about things. It also begins to color your relationships with other human beings. 

The Pharisees and the scribes were sure that they were righteous, sure that they were chosen, sure that they were important. They were equally sure that those who had less, who didn’t measure up, who deserved less...the shepherds and the sinners and the tax collectors...they were just less important to God. We are the chosen! We are the saved! God just loves us more.

That was the trap of self-righteousness they’d fallen into, and it’s a trap that clamps shut on any number of Christians today. Our wealth makes the wealth of those scribes look like the allowance you might give to a five year old. A one bedroom apartment pretty much anywhere in MoCo has more luxuries than the palace of Herod...which, in new findings from recent archeological digs, may not even have had cable.

The temptation is there..strongly there for all of us...to succumb to the same selfishness that consumed the Pharisees. You look out into the world and you see it everywhere, the willingness to cast people aside, to discard them, to see them as somehow of less worth than ourselves.

In a society where we are choking on both an abundance of stuff and an abundance of things competing for our attention, Jesus reminds us of what is ultimately important.  Rebuilding relationships is important.  Turning your whole self towards the task of reaching out to the broken and the outcast is important.  

Does the struggle with addiction that has crushed the joy from that rank-smelling man we push our way past, eyes averted, matter less to God?  Too often, we act as if he is worth discarding, worth less than that chiclet phone that sits abandoned in the back of a kitchen drawer.  Does the gnawing in the belly of a seven year old Bangladeshi boy matter less to God because he is poor amidst a crowd of the poor? As we move through our lives, full of wealth and the pursuit of wealth, such people barely merit a second thought.

But each of those people deserve our love, deserve our concern, deserve to be told...and more significantly, shown...that God and those who follow Christ care for them.

Orienting our lives towards the restoration of what has been broken?  That’s the Gospel call, and that’s what is important.

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

A Time of Turning

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

09.08.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Jeremiah 18:1-11

It’s a funny time of year, this week is.  For most pastors, this is the week of Rally Day, as we try to get folks fired up for getting back into the swing of the whole Jesus thing after a summer lull.

Hey everybody, we say!  Going back to church should bring you that same joyous, excited feeling you got when you were a kid and the summer ended and you got to go back to school!  Yay Jesus!

For me, this week is a bit different.  It has different echoes, and a different flavor, because of the bizarre mutant faith-o-rama that is my family.  On Thursday, I spent almost the entire day in worship at Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church, only I wasn’t doing the Presbyterian thing.  I was there because Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church shares space with Bethesda Jewish Congregation.  I was there because of my Jewish wife and Jewish children, and we were there because this week represents the holiest week in all of Judaism.

Thursday we spent the day celebrating Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.  Rosh Hashanah means, literally, “the head of the year,” and in the Jewish annual cycle, we just started the year 5774.  it’s a busy time for everyone except all of the Gentile schoolchildren in Montgomery County, who give thanks for getting a super extra bonus holiday.  

My wife, who’s now the vice president of the board at the synagogue, was sporting a nifty name tag announcing that to the world.  My older son was singing with the adult choir.  My younger son, who was Bar Mitzvahed this spring, was a liturgist for the children’s service.  All of which meant I was in Rosh Hashanah services for about four consecutive hours.  At about hour three, my little guy lamented that he wasn’t Presbyterian.   I mean, you guys get out after only an hour, he said.

It was actually both pleasant and spiritually uplifting, because I get a tremendous amount out of the High Holy Days.   The entire event, with the meals and the fasting, the singing and the shuttling back and forth from Annandale to Bethesda, the whole thing is about change.   Not just any change, either.  If the week of the High Holy Days has one central theme, it is repentance.  

With the transition from one year to the next, the purpose of this holiday is to acknowledge the ways that you’ve managed to mess up in the previous year, and to commit yourself to improvement.  What begins on Rosh Hashanah ends on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when you commit yourself to changing those things that must be changed.

That call to personal transformation is a central part of both Judaism and Christianity.  “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand,” as Jesus put it.  It was also a major part of what the prophet Jeremiah proclaimed and preached.

And Jeremiah?  He knew from change.  Jeremiah’s time was a messy one, one in which every single thing in the world around him was in wild flux.  And by “wild flux,” I don’t mean the trivial change of our consumer culture, the stuff of new car model years or smartphones with huge screens.  

For Jeremiah, the entire world had changed.

Jeremiah lived and taught right on the edge of a vast and wrenching shift in the life of the Jewish people.  There’d been a brief period of hope, after the fall of the Assyrian Empire in the year 627 BCE.  Assyrian rule had been brutal, and that the empire had collapsed seemed like an opportunity.  Finally, finally, the Jewish people would have a chance to be free, and to live as they so chose.

But things just didn’t work out.  Though the Jewish people had placed their hope in a new ruler, the wise and noble King Josiah, his efforts to rebuild were smashed on the slopes of the mountain of Meggido when he died in battle.

With all of that chaos going on around them, the Jewish people struggled to find direction.  More often than not, the direction they found themselves going in was to play exactly the same political games that were played by every other nation around them.  Their political leaders did so with the backing of a cadre of prophets who affirmed the principle that God would always and invariably defend Jerusalem, no matter what.

It didn’t matter what Judah did, or how they acted.  God’s temple was in Jerusalem, and that was that.  With God on your side, no matter what, you can pretty much do anything.

That also tends to make the prophets involved rather popular with the folks in power.  

But Jeremiah just couldn’t do that.  His messages were consistent and difficult, drawn not from his desire to say what folks wanted to hear, but instead to tell them what he knew to be real.

We find a particularly challenging message coming from Jeremiah today, as he wanders through the streets of Jerusalem to the house of a potter.  He watches the work of that craftsman, seeing how they worked and reworked the clay, correcting flaws, starting again.

And in that moment of observation, Jeremiah found that it spoke pointedly to the dynamic of God’s relationship to God’s people.  What would have been most challenging to his listeners, I think, would have been that he ran straight at their assumption that they were automatically the most special, wonderful, and perfect creatures ever in the eyes of their Creator.

They weren’t.  If a people are just and kind and stand in good relationship with God and neighbor, sure, all is well.  But if not?  Well, then all was not.   The point of this whole teaching was pretty straightforward.  

It leaves space for a people to change their ways, to make themselves anew, to restore themselves and bring themselves into right relationship with God and neighbor.  This is a good thing, but as I meditated on this passage during this week in which transformation is banging on my door, one of the most striking things about it not our own changeability.

We all know we change.  Life is change.  Life is continual shift and flux for we human creatures.  But what seems striking about this passage is that it is not simply human beings that shift.  Nations can choose and change.  But wildly and unexpectedly, we hear also that God, the creator of the universe, is capable of change.  If you change, then I will change, or so God speaks through Jeremiah.

This feels, on the face of it, a tiny bit unsettling if we think about it theologically.  Here we have the Creator of the Universe, the Alpha and the Omega, the God that knows all, sees all.  How can God possibly change God’s mind?  Doesn’t everything that happens fit within a plan that’s already mapped out, already certain, already complete?  Everything happens for a reason, we say.  It’s all part of God’s plan, we say.

And yet there it is, said once, said again, just so we don’t miss it.  I will change my mind, speaks the text which conveys the prophet who conveyed God.  I will change my mind, we hear again.  It’s not a clumsy choice of words, to be interpreted around or skipped over, as my bible commentaries did this week.

What does this mean?  Here we generally like to think of God as knowing all things, and being in charge of all of creation, and yet there is this peculiar statement that God willing to think about doing something, and then say, Nah, you know what, I just don’t feel like it any more.

If God is in charge, and God is in control of all things at every moment, then how can God be about to do one thing, and then decide not do it because of something we do?  And yet we hear, from Jeremiah, that this is so.

Wrassling with this passage, I find that the best way to approach this headscratcher is by remembering that God is both loving and love itself.  I also apply multiverse cosmology to it, but as we don’t want to sit here for another hour while I ramble on about my book, let’s stick with the love angle.

Loving another being does not mean that you delimit them.  If all that we are is cogs in a great linear plan, then we cannot be meaningfully held responsible for our actions.  I didn’t mean to smack you just then, we could say to our little brother.  It was predestined.  I didn’t mean to bomb your village and kill your children, a nation could say to another.  It was just part of God’s plan from all eternity, so, hey, sorry about that.

But if that is true, then repentance is meaningless.  Our choosing to live differently, which is the entire point of the holiest season in the Jewish faith out of which Jesus sprang...that’s meaningless?

Instead, God stands in relationship to us, loving us, showing us what it is to live most joyfully and fully in creation.  And as we freely choose to live towards that reality, God’s love for us grows richer and stronger.  Where we choose to live against it, seeking power or control, allowing our addictions and hatreds and resentments to govern us, God’s love remains as a stark reminder of what could have been, had we so chosen it.

And even if you don’t celebrate the turning of the calendar year from the year 5773 to 5774 this week, it remains a new day, every day.  Remembering that, and acting on the truth of it, and changing for the better?  That’s the point of faith.

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

Of God and Lobsters

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

09.01.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lessons: Luke 14: 1, 7-24

It was years ago, and I was in Portland, Maine.  The reason?  A conference of scholars researching the dynamics of nonprofit organizations.  My organization provided research grants to those folks, and so I was moving from conference session to conference session, hearing the latest thinking.  And hearing it.  And hearing it.  And hearing it.

After a long day of sitting and listening to academics talking to one another, folks decamped from the hotel and wandered over to a nearby hotel for a great feast, the big meal of the conference.  Being Maine and all, this was to be a lobster feast.  Such a delicacy!  I’d actually been rather looking forward to it, as this was in a time before I’d given in to the siren song of tofu.

Folks gathered around, and settled in at tables, and although I was just a low level twenty-something admin flunky at my organization...the keeper of the files and the manager of the database...I found that there were no end of folks eager to sit with me.

Being affiliated with a giver-out of money often has that effect.

Everyone gathered, and a welcome was given, and the feast was brought before us.  On dining carts, piled high, were wheeled out hundreds of lobsters.  I’d always liked lobster, but that day, seeing those great piles of red carcasses, something snapped.  Maybe the long day of academic talk did something to my brain.  “The underlying semiotics of exchange in voluntaristic entities varies from that of profit-seeking enterprise in one hundred and twelve discrete ways, which I will now explicate in detail. As you will observe on slide 1.a...”  I don’t know.  Maybe that was it.

But those mounds looked to all the world like a heap of giant boiled insects, as appealing as a bowl full of pillbugs and centipedes.  It felt like I’d stepped into that feast scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, or like when we entered the restaurant we’d stepped through a wormhole that brought us from Maine to the planet Klingon.  But there are those for whom lobster is still a delicacy, so to each their own.  I’m sure those antennae and mandibles are delicious.

I was reminded of that awkward evening recently, as I read through a sequence of articles in the business press about the latest challenge facing lobstermen, the folks who ply the waters off of Maine, pulling the critters up from the depths.

What was struck me about the crisis for lobster fisheries was that it was exactly the opposite of much of the rest of the fishing industry.  For more fishermen, the problem is that the oceans are dying after a century of industrial overfishing.   But the issue wasn’t shortage, or that the sea beds were denuded of lobster.  Instead, the issue was that the catches were huge.   Stirred by unusually warm waters, there was a huge surge in the numbers of tasty young adolescent lobsters.  The traps were full, and every boat that went out came back with a bumper catch.

It was the best harvest in decades.  In other words, it was a total disaster.  The entire industry has been jeopardized because the harvest was so abundant. Those boatloads of delicious buttery sea bugs were worth less and less, and livelihoods were jeopardized.

On the one hand, this makes sense.  It’s the law of supply and demand at work.  If you’ve got a whole bunch of a thing, or if you make too much of a thing, it becomes worth less and less.  If, say, Chinese industrial interests build too many factories to produce solar panels, as happened a few years ago, then suddenly there are too many panels.  Overcapacity makes it impossible to recoup your investment costs, and things fail.   Nice and simple.  On the other, it strikes me as peculiar.   Here you have an abundance, a rich harvest from the bounty of creation, and it’s a problem.

An overbrimming groaning table means financial wreck and ruin.  Feast becomes famine.  It’s a strange inversion of what one might expect from a harvest bounty.  So much of our world is like that.  

It seems, sometimes, like we’ve set up our entire culture backwards.

It was perhaps because of that peculiar reversal that we get Jesus pitching out a mess of reversals in today’s passages from Luke’s Gospel.  

He’s been invited to a feast, a big sabbath shindig at the house of an important muckity muck at the synagogue.  We’re not exactly sure where the event took place, but it was part of his journeying as he moved towards Jerusalem.

It was a big to-do, an event that brought him into connection with the important people in the community.  It was a place to see and be seen.  Where you sat and how you ate and who you talked to would have said a whole bunch about where you fell in the social pecking order of that community.

It was an elaborate social construction, a carefully staged dance, and Jesus knew it.  And when Jesus charged through those conventions like a bull in a china shop, it made for enough storytelling moments to fill a large chunk of this chapter.

He begins by challenging their assumptions about what is and is not appropriate action on the sabbath, and then quickly moves on to the way the meal itself is organized.  There were places of honor, nearer to the host or others of importance.  Then there were other seats and other places.  Jesus is being watched, but he is also watching those around him and observing their behavior.

He’s seen them jockeying for position and power, and then calls them on it.  He calls out his fellow guests, suggesting that perhaps their entire attitude is wrong.  Seeking glory for yourself may be the way of the world, but it is not the way Jesus teaches.  Instead, he says, seek the humble things.   When you look for a seat at the table when you arrive at an event, take the last one.

On one hand, this is actually rather cunning advice.  If you try to push your way up to a place that’s beyond you, you might get knocked down a notch or two, which would be seriously embarrassing.  Better to get called out and moved up by your host.  

Oh yeah.  I’m sittin’ in the good chair.

Subtle and passive aggressive as that might seem, that’s OK, because it’s not the point Jesus is making.

He’s declaring the entire power dynamic of the society around him to be at odds with the ethic he’s teaching.  It’s not just that you shouldn’t seek that best seat at the table.  It’s that...to the best of your ability...you shouldn’t even desire it.

His messing with the way things are becomes even more obvious when he turns his attention to his host.  Here he’s talking to a man who has invited his friends and his neighbors and business associates he wants to impress to a gathering, and he tells him: This thing that you’ve done and everyone does?  Don’t.  Sure, it’s the way we do business and the way we get to know one another.  It always has been.  It certainly is now.  If we want it to count for anything, our goal is not gain, or even that back and forth that constitutes much of the way human beings interact and develop relationships with one another.

“Invite those who cannot return the favor.  Invite those who can’t pay you back,” says Jesus, somehow managing to undercut every dinner party and social engagement ever.

Finally, Jesus hits ‘em with a story.  You know Jesus and his stories.  It’s a story about a meal, a great feast prepared.  The person in question sends out invitations, and then follows them up on the day of the event, only to discover that guest after guest had come up with excuses not to follow through.  

His response?  To fill the party with all of those who are on the margins of society, those who were broken and struggling.  And when there weren’t enough of them to fill the house, they just packed in anyone they could find.

Again, a most peculiar way to approach a feast, but here, Jesus was presenting his listeners and us with a pungent little tale with a very sharp point.  That point is that the way we do things, the structures of economics and relationship that rule human society, those things profoundly off.

It’s the kind of message that I’m sure had the host of the party summoning over his majordomo and whispering, “That Jesus guy?  Make sure we don’t ever invite him back.”

Because that, ultimately, is one of the great challenges of really engaging with the message of Jesus of Nazareth.  The more time you spend with the Gospel, the harder it becomes to see the world in the same way you’ve always seen it.

We can look at the way power is used to create power, the way violence is and always has been used as a means to create was passes for peace, and suddenly it seems like a false dance.

We can look at the way wealth and privilege become self sustaining, and hard work often seems divorced from reward in the same way that an abundant harvest is cause for despair.

The message of Jesus, listened to and taken in, changes all of that.

So much of what the world calls a feast, seen through the eyes of the Gospel, suddenly starts looking like a table full of dead bugs.

And as much as I hate to end a sermon that way, let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.