Seeing But Not Seeing

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 03.30.14

Scripture Lesson:  John 9:1-41

It happens with remarkable frequency.  You’d figure, after all of these years, I’d know better, or have figured out a way not to do this.  I’m pulling things together, typically on a Sunday morning.  Sermon text printed out? Check. Phone? Check? Bible? Check.  Pants? Check.

It’s important to have a thorough list.  Trust me on this one.

Everything will be together, and I’ll suit up, and be raring to roll, and I’m right on time.  I’ll go to the place where my keys are, that hook where I always hang them. 

 There’s the place they are meant to be.  But they are not in that spot.

I  know I must have put them there.  That is the place they go.  It is inconceivable that they might be anywhere else, absolutely inconceivable, I think, ignoring my inner Inigo Montoya, who chides me at the misuse of that word.  But they are not there.  The last time I saw them was the day before, at some point. And that means I have no idea where they might be.  I check the pants from the previous day.  Nope.  I dig around in one or another of the jackets I wear.  Nope and nope.  I look at the hook again, hoping that maybe they might rematerialize from whatever rift in space-time caused their disappearance in the first place.

This is where things start getting mildly panicked.  This is when I go to the wicker basket that lives in the kitchen, the one we called “the important bowl,” and which is now filled with random debris.  And in it I find mysterious keys and scratched-off iTunes gift cards, old pocketknives and Lego figurines, marbles and the wristband my thirteen year old wore when he was born.  Boy, it says, with a weight and a date and a number.  Yes, that is an important object.  Sure.  But Not. My. Keys.  So I go tromping down the stairs, the whole time wishing I didn’t have boots on that weighed ten pounds a piece.  Maybe by the computer?  I glance into the study.  And there’s nothing.  Not a thing.  Drat.  Then it’s tromping back up the stairs, faster this time, and starting to panic and sweat into my suit.  I need those keys.

My mind inevitably goes to into full on blame mode.  I always put them there.  Always.  Surely, surely, someone else is to blame. Someone is at fault!  There should be a Congressional hearing!  There must be justice!  Grumble, grumble, grumble.  Who moved them?!   But no-one has moved them.  Who took them?!  They have not been stolen by roving key-bandits.  Mischievous gnomes are in no way involved.  I simply have not placed them where they go.

I check the hook again.  Still not there.  I stomp to the bedroom, and check the pants again.  Still not there.  I return to the “important bowl.”  Still not there.

Only I realize, as I’m preparing to start weeping like a baby, that the keys may not be in the important bowl, but they’re sitting right next to it.  There they are.  They were right there, right underneath the hook, right next to the bowl, where I set them down without thinking. 

I had looked at them, not right at them, but at them.  And though they were right there, in all their reality, I simply could not see them.  My retinas sent a stereoscopic stream of signals down my optic nerve to my primary visual cortex at eleven point five frames per second, and there the keys were, right in the images my mind was receiving and knitting together.  But I couldn’t process it, couldn’t see it, even though it was right there in front of me.

Because there is seeing, and there is perceiving and understanding what we see.

Today’s extended passage from the Gospel of John shows us a remarkable exchange between Jesus and a man who has been blind from birth. 

It’s a striking tale, for several reasons. It starts with Jesus walking, strolling along with his posse, and catching sight of a man.  He’s a beggar, one who had never been able to see. If you were blind in ancient Judah, that would have been your destiny.  Unable to farm, unable to read, you’d pretty much be stuck. 

It’s a healing, of course, a miracle, one of the series of seven signs that Jesus performs in John’s retelling of his story. Like all of the stories that John’s Gospel tells, it’s deeply, personally human. It revolves around a series of conversations, exchanges between a man who was born without the ability to see.  

Jesus heals him, but in a peculiar way.  He takes dirt and spit and places the spit-mud on this man’s eyes.  It evokes, if we listen carefully to it with the ears of the Spirit, the story of creation, calling us back to Eden, and the God who sinks his hands down deep into the clay to make the creature of earth.  It’s less a story of fixing someone, and more a story of re-creating them.  

And that’s all well and good.  He’s made again, and made whole.

People can’t believe it’s him. Can this be him?  Suddenly he’s being challenged by some of the Pharisees. They can’t believe that Jesus has done this thing, even after the blind man tells them himself.  They grill the nameless guy, and he answers, holding his own against their questioning...in fact, doing so well that they can’t rebut him, and toss him out of the synagogue.  They can see him, right there, the guy who used to be blind, and now sees.

But though they see what is happening, they just can’t quite bring themselves to process what it is they’re observing.  Which makes sense, if you think about it.  Here you know a person to be one way.  It defines them.  It is who they are.  And then suddenly, the characteristic that you’d used to grasp who they are is shattered.  It can’t be him.  How can that be the person?   

What’s a particular challenge to them is that, as far as they were concerned, he was blind because he’d done something wrong.  He had to have done something wrong.  Somewhere, someone had messed up.  That had to be true.  Somewhere, sin had to be involved.  Someone was to blame.  Either it was the parents, or the man, or Jesus himself, working as the agent of some dark and sinister power that heals blind men on the sabbath.

They just can’t quite bring themselves to see the reality that is right in front of them.  Instead, they encounter a reality that reflects what they want to see.  For many of the Pharisees, that reality was the the inescapable truth that suffering is a punishment for sin.  The wicked perish.  The righteous prosper.  That was the whole point of existence.  They saw every human being through that lens, their success or their suffering, their triumph or their tragedy.

Which, as it so happens, is exactly how the disciples responded when they walked past the guy at the beginning of the story.  Remember the question, the one from the very beginning of the story?  “Rabbi, who sinned, the man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

And Jesus answers, neither.  What he says after that is actually a little different than the English in the New Revised Standard Version.  Our pew bibles have Jesus saying, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”

That just sounds all kinds of wrong.  If you take it all alone, it kind of bites.  God made this guy spend his entire life as a blind beggar, so that Jesus could heal him? Dude, that’s harsh. When I’ve been in conversation with aggressive online atheists, this is one of the Gospel verses they like to throw at me.  Look at this terrible, terrible, monstrous Sky-Daddy God of yours, who blinded a baby just so Jesus could make a point.  That God’s not real, of course, they add, but if that God were real, we’d hate that God.

But the story as John tells it...not just one verse, but the whole story...is very different.  In the verse itself, the words “he was born blind” are not there in the Greek of the Gospel.  It simply says, and here I’ll use the exact sentence construction of John’s Gospel:

Neither this man sinned nor the parents of him, but that might be manifested the works of God in him.

Greek is a different language, with a different way of speaking.  And as we wrap our heads around the oddness of that phrase, it begins to take us to a different place, and a different way of seeing.

It isn’t about the “why” of the man being born blind.  It’s about the response we have when we encounter suffering.  Do we blame the person, finding the ways we can justify their suffering to ourselves?  They aren’t doing well, because they aren’t right with God. They aren’t prospering, because they haven’t prayed hard enough or in the right way. They got sick, because they didn’t take care of themselves the way they should have.

That is the way that Pharisees think.  They look right at a human being, and find reasons to see why they deserve what they’re getting.  

What they do not see is what Jesus sees: that the only thing we should be thinking about in this encounter is how to use the life we have been given to show grace to such a soul.  Right now I’m the light of the world, he says. And seeing this man and his suffering through the light that burns in me right now, I know what I must do.

That way of seeing everyone around us is that lost key, for which we struggle and frantically search, the one that opens the door to new life.

That way of seeing is how Jesus sees.  It is the light by which we are to encounter the world. 

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

Confuse-A-Christ

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 03.23.14

Scripture Lesson:  John 4: 5-42

When my kids were little, they went through this phase.  You’d be scurrying around, trying to juggle the day, the work and the laundry and the endless scatter of tiny people.  It was time for dinner, and there they’d be, plopped down at the table, little faces peering up over the edge, little hands cleaned.

It’d be a simple meal, elemental and basic in the way that meals are when you’re scrabbling desperately just to keep ahead of the day, feeling for all the world like you’re the lead character in some disaster movie, just one step away from catastrophe at every moment. 

And so you cast aside your Julia Child fantasies, and even your deep-fried Paula Deen daydreams, and go with what works in ten minutes or less, which more often than not is breaded chicken strips and instant mashed potatoes.  And because you want the meal to be healthy, there’d be those frozen peas you can bombard with microwave radiation and steam in the bag, just the way grandma used to do.  It is, technically, a home-made meal, or so you tell yourself.  Technically.  It’s nothing at all like just skipping out to Mickey D’s, because you warmed up the factory-made food yourself.

You settle in at the table, and after some encouragement someone bumbles their way through a blessing, and then it’s time to ingest the manufactured nutrients.  Mmmm, manufactured nutrients.  

Only one of them or the other of them just sort of sits there, looking disconsolate and poking sadly at their plate.  They’re not about to eat.  They can’t possibly eat.  The world is coming to an end. This is not food, this is a nightmare.  Why?  Why, you ask?

Because the food is touching.  The peas keep rolling into the mashed potatoes.  They are leaving their designated official pea area, and are being drawn relentlessly into the area set aside for mashed potatoes, as if the potatoes have their own peculiar gravitic field.  But that’s not the worst of it.  Bits and pieces of the breading on the manufactured instachicken have detached themselves, and have wantonly intermingled with the peas and the mashed potatoes.  

It’s a violation of all that is good and holy, total chaos, the end of the world, cats and dogs, living together.  A total loss.  You may as well have covered the food in live earthworms and small chunks of uranium 238. 

We don’t like it when our expectations are shattered, when those carefully constructed categories that help us understand the world get busted open.  When something punches a great big hole in our understanding about the way the world should work, it bothers us.  It’s not just the world that has been unsettled.  It’s our sense of ourselves.  We think we know where we fit in, how things work, and we’ve created the neat little silos and categories that help us navigate our existence.

Things that mess with those categories are, well, problematic.

As, frankly, were the words of Jesus in this week’s passage from the Gospel of John.  It’s a funny thing, this Gospel.  It’s got some of the most complex and soaring passages of Jesus talk you’ll find anywhere, complex and mystic and difficult in the way that only very simple things can be difficult.

And yet it can also be remarkably earthy, setting you into a place and a moment.  It’s noon, and the sun is high in the sky.  To the west, a low mountain, Mount Gerizim, atop which is a Samaritan temple.  We hear that Jesus is all tuckered out, and chilling by a well.  A woman arrives, to draw water from the well, and a conversation ensues.

It’s a strange conversation, for a couple of reasons.  First, Jesus is talking with a woman.  He just up and starts talking to her, even though he does not know her.  In the ancient near east, this wasn’t something that you just did.  It violated some fairly basic expectations of decent human behavior.  You just didn’t do that, unless you had certain rabbi-inappropriate intentions.  “Hey, haven’t seen you at this well before. Can you buy me a drink?  How you doin’?”

But second, and even more significantly, he was talking with a Samaritan woman.

Throughout the Gospels, the tension between Jews and Samaritans is a constant theme.  There was some big hatey hate there, the kind of multi-century loathing that seems to be a specialty of Middle Eastern cultures, as much a part of the flavor of that region as hummus and tabouleh.  There were reasons for this, ones that we often don’t grasp.

Once upon a time, Samaritans were Jews.  When King David ruled over Israel, they were the Jews who lived in the northern part of the kingdom.  But when David’s grandson decided to inflict heavy taxes on the North, and to force their people into bondslavery, the north rebelled.  They broke away from the southern portion of the kingdom, and formed their own kingdom.  The name of the Northern kingdom: Israel. 

Folks in the south hated them, I think mostly because they’d forgotten to trademark the name Israel.  Judah?  Why do we have to be Judah?  That split happened eight hundred years before Jesus, which just goes to show you how long folks can bear a grudge.

But there were other things that happened over those 800 years.  Worship in the temple in Samaria was very different from the worship in the temple in Jerusalem.  Where the Jerusalem temple ferociously defended itself against the incursion of any outside influences, the Samaritans didn’t seem to care quite so much.  They worshipped the God of Israel, sure.  But they also folded in celebrations of Ba’al, the Caananite God.  Why not? When the region was overrun by Alexander the Great, the Judeans fought a ferocious war to drive out those who’d violate their temple with images of the Greek Gods.  The Samaritans?  They just sort of chilled with it.  Oh, sure.  You want to put up a statue of Zeus Xenios, right up there on our sacred mountain?  No problem.  We can totally do that.

This would make the Samaritans the Unitarians of the ancient world, I guess.  

And it meant that the Judeans viewed them as not really Jews at all.  They were a mongrel faith, a mismosh of things, no more welcome in Judah than a stray from the streets of Mombasa would be welcome at the Westminster Dog Show.  In the same strange way that family hatreds can be the deepest hatreds of all, the Judeans utterly despised their Samaritan cousins.

Which is why this woman is confused when Jesus speaks.  She knows how things are, how deep the hatred runs.  She knows, or thinks she knows, what this Judean must think of her.  

So when he raises his voice, and speaks to her, she has some trouble processing it.  Really?  You’re going to talk to me?  We don’t mix, you and I.  And as confusing as those first words are, the conversation gets even more confusing.

Having asked for water, Jesus offers her living water.  Wait, what?  What and the what?  Why would you ask me for water if you have living water?  And how did you get it?  Where’s the bucket?

What she hears, when he says “living water,” is “spring water.”  “Flowing water,” like you’d find in the spring-fed well where they were sitting.  But Jesus is taking her understanding of that, and saying that the reality God is calling her to is radically different.  He’s telling a completely new story, offering her a Spirit-driven way of life that has nothing to do with the old hatred between the Northern temples and the temple in Jerusalem.

The whole way you understand our relationship is going to change, he is saying.  The way you think things are--broken, hateful, negative--will have to shift, if you are to be open to the deep and transforming reality of God’s presence.  We, all of us, need to be shaken out of our strange, self-absorbed natures.  We all have this desire to shape the world, to control it, to take our limited grasp of what is truly real and force the world to comply.  We do not want peas and mashed potatoes touching.  We want everything divided up, exactly the way we understand it.

Jesus takes that way of knowing, and shatters it. The way of life he lived out, and that he offers all of us?  It’s completely different.  It presents us with a reality that demands that we love all, stand freely in relationship with a God who is Love, and Spirit, and Light.  That relationship, if we let it really touch us, shakes us out of our patterns of complacency and moping.

It’s why everyone who talks with him seems a little confused, a little shaken, as they struggle to grasp what he’s talking about.  

But it’s a struggle worth having.

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

A Different Way of Thinking

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

03.16.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  John 3:1-17

This last week, the internet had a birthday.  Well, sort of.  The internet has been around for quite a while, and it's had lots of birthdays.  Back in the fall and winter of 1969, it was ARPAnet, set up during the cold war so that scientists from the defense community could robustly and securely share pictures of kittens with each other after a Soviet attack.

This last week we celebrated the twenty-fifth birthday of the web. With the introduction of hypertext tranfer protocols, suddenly an entirely new way of connecting with one another was opened up to humankind.  The Mesh, it was called at first, but that name just didn’t stick.

Twenty five years, it’s been, since the web came into existence.  It’s sort of bizarre, at this point, to imagine that there was a time when it wasn’t around.  But unless I dreamed the first twenty years of my life--that doesn’t seem entirely out of the question--there really was a time when it wasn’t around.  That’s hard to remember, because our connectedness seems to define every aspect of our existences.   It’s how we share.  It shapes the warp and woof of our communities. It’s how we shop. It fulfills the aspirations of humanity to take endless online quizzes about which character we are.  I get Yoda, Dumbledore, Gandalf, and Shepherd Book.  Mostly because I know the outcome I want, and I know my way around a survey instrument.  I also recently got Aria from Pretty Little Liars.  I have no idea why I even took that survey. 

Clearly, our ability to know where we fit in with pop culture, we’ve reached the very pinnacle of human existence.  In many ways, I’ll admit, things are different.  We work differently, and shop differently.  As the ‘net has moved out of we walk around differently, too, staring down at the tiny rectangles of light that we just can’t quite seem to look away from.  It’s been an absolute revolution, or so the storyline goes.  Our entire world is now completely connected...or, rather, the eighty-six percent of us that have the ‘net in the US are connected.  

That it has changed us is without question.  But as much as it seems everything has shifted, it’s easy to question just how deep that transformation really runs. The pace of things seems to have picked up, sure.  We expect things right now, not an hour or two from now or even ten minutes from now.

But have we been changed?  Has this been a new dawn for humanity, the birth of a new age of hope and happiness?  It’s hard to look out at the world and see anything really deeply better.  We seem to do all the same things we always did, but we just do them faster.  We’re much more efficient at getting things done, but we’ve managed to take that and make ourselves even more stressed.  War continues.  Hunger continues. The poor are still poor, and there’s still plenty of hatred out there in the world.  We still misunderstand one another, turning the countless differences we’ve been able to tally up into reasons to turn on one another. In fact, we seem to have gotten better at misunderstanding and hating on each other.  Twenty five years after the dawn of the web, the mess of humanity bumbles onward with a few more distractions and free two day shipping.

We so easily get confused around change, assuming that a change means something that it does not.  We don’t know what to make of What are the changes that matter?  What do they even look like?

Nicodemus struggles with this, as the strange man he’d heard of demanded his attention.  He wants to talk with him, but can’t do so in public without destroying his reputation.  So he waits until darkness, and then goes sneaking into the house where Jesus was staying at night like a ninja rabbi.

The discussion they have is a remarkably rich conversation, as the Pharisee asks question after question of Jesus, and Jesus responds.  Nicodemus is particularly confused by the idea of being reborn, which he’s heard from Jesus on several occasions.

How can you be born if you’ve already been born?  How is that even possible?

It is John’s story of the Gospel that first gives us that phrase, to be “born again.”  Or rather, we think that it is.  Nicodemus describes it as being “born again.”  How can that even happen, he stammers.

But those are Nicodemus’s words, not the words John’s Gospel writes for Jesus.

In the Greek in which John was written, what Jesus says, over and over again, is that we must be "gennethenai aneuthen."   As an aside, the rule of thumb for pronouncing ancient Greek when you have to speak in public?  Sound like Arwen and Aragorn speaking Elvish. 

The first word means "born," and it has a familiar root. Think "generate," or "genesis." The challenge comes with the word aneuthen, which if you’re reading the NIV and the KJV translate as "again."

That word occurs 31 times in our Bibles. It surfaces eighteen times in the Septuagint--that's the Greek translation of the Old Testament that was circulating at the time of Christ--and thirteen times in the Gospels and Epistles.

Of those 31 occurances, it is translated "again" only three times. Two of those are the verses we just saw in John 3. The third is in Galatians 4:9--but there it disappears into part of a two-verb construct with the verb form palin. And palin is--guess what--the most commonly used Greek term for "again."  Which, oddly enough, is exactly the word say whenever I see Sarah Palin’s face.

In every other location, aneuthen is translated to mean "over," "on top," "from the beginning," or "from above." 

Given the dominant Biblical meaning of aneuthen, what Jesus said in that conversation with Nicodemus--despite the influence of the English translations--was not that we should be born "again." 

The word we hear in scripture does not mean doing the same thing over again, or doing the same thing better and faster.  Jesus is expressing a much more powerful spiritual truth to Nicodemus--that we should be born "from above," or born "from heaven."

Honestly, for mature Christians, the distinction is mostly moot. Even with that verse historically mistranslated as "born again," we still know exactly what Christ was talking about from the broader context of his teachings. We are to be transformed. We are to be "born of water and the Spirit." (John 3:5) Those who have felt the Spirit moving in their lives, and whose lives have been--and are being--changed by Christ?  

They know what it means, no matter what word is used. They're feeling it. They're living it.

It is also interesting that these words conveyed in John’s Gospel have a specific theological meaning, one that resonates with all of Christ's other teachings about the change he is bringing us. The birth that Christ describes has to do with what is "above," which in the context of John's Gospel indicates a connection with something of God.  It is a reality that has not yet happened, a state of being that is not yet a part of the world we inhabit.

That, I think, is the key to Nicodemuses struggle.  He is earnestly trying to imagine the story as being a repetition, a reiteration of the things that he already knows.  Jesus is trying to kick him loose from that understanding.  God’s spirit shakes us loose from those old patterns of being.  It doesn’t exist to help us do them faster, or help us do them better.

Being born from above means being born into a reality...a sense of your own self...that you have not yet inhabited.  You don’t yet know what that is.  You’ve not ever experienced it.

That, I think, is why twenty-five years of what appears to be astonishing change has actually really changed very little at all.  We’re just being born again, new and yet not new, as we are when we wake every morning, repeating the same reality faster and faster.

We have not yet really begun to be born from above, from that reality that represents the Reign of God that Jesus calls us towards.

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

The Truth About Snakes

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

03.09.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7

It’s a saying that has never made much sense to me.  

I want to be my true self, it goes.  I want to find out who I truly am.

This gets said a whole bunch as we’re heaving our way through adolescence, trying to figure out who the heck we’re going to be as adulthood comes barreling towards us like a driverless monster truck.

It gets said a whole bunch when we suddenly wake up after that truck has hit us, and realize that we’ve spent the last twenty years sitting in a cubicle sending earnest emails to other members of our departments as we try to organize the weekly meeting to discuss the protocols for interfacing with the task force established to review the procedures for sending email within our departments.

Or we wake up, and we’re sitting in traffic on a Friday afternoon in a minivan, having just dropped off one kid at taekwondo and another at violin and the third has just demonstrated in no uncertain terms that they have come down with the stomach virus that’s been going around school.  You think back to when you used dream of music and dance, and that novel seemed in reach. 

Our true self, we think.  I just need to find that true self.  This can’t really be me.  Surely, surely, there’s more to me than this.  I just need to find out who that is.  But how?  

We imagine ourselves wandering out into the wilderness on a vision quest, our faces painted blue with leftover tempura paint from when the kids were in preschool.  Oh, sure, they’re off in college now, but really, it’s hard to find time to clean out those closets?  We will find that person we are meant to be. We will find that true self.

I wonder about this, because truth, as a category, is a little bit neutral.  It can mean best, sure.  But really, what it means is “our real selves.”  Truth has to do with something that is real, that is not a fabrication or a falsehood.  This hunk of wood in front of me is a pulpit.  It is the thing it is.  It is its true pulpity self.  Truth is our reality, the thing that we actually are.

When we talk about truth, and about finding out what is real about ourselves, just saying we are “truly ourselves” seems borderline meaningless.  We can be truly many things.  Our true self is the person that we are.  

If we decide to get a second mortgage our house, go out to Vegas, and blow our families’ future at the high stakes penuckle tables, that self is our true self.  It’s been a while since I’ve been to Vegas, clearly.  If we are horrible to our kids, cutting to our spouses, and are consistently making sarcastic comments to our dog, that person is who we genuinely, truly, actually are. 

The truth, about ourselves, about the reality we inhabit?  That is not the same as the good.

As we listen to the ancient story from Genesis this morning, and listen to the words of the serpent, it’s good to keep that in mind.   Because though the snake may be many things, what it is not is a liar.

That’s important to grasp here on the front end, as we read the second of the two complete stories of creation we receive in Genesis.  The first of the stories, the one with seven days, that one is a song sung in the temple by priests, explaining why creation is so awesome.  “Everything is awesome,” sing the priests, sounding like they just got out of the Lego Movie.  Good job, God!

This second story is older, grittier, the kind of tale told by the firesides of a wandering people when someone asks why everything isn’t quite so great.  This story is filled with little grace note details, of a God who reaches into the dust of the earth with his hands, and breathes life into it.  In this story, there’s a snake.

 Over the millennia, we’ve conflated this creature with the idea of Satan, Lucifer, or the devil.  The story, read in its plain intent, does not tell us that.  There’s no reason to believe from within the narrative of Torah...or anywhere else in the Old Testament...that this is anything other than a snake.  It was only in the intertestamental period...when the Hebrew people had been influenced by the dualistic religion of Babylon...that storytelling about Satan became woven up with this story of the snake.

It’s a strange sort of snake, to tell the truth of it.  One, it talks.  Your run of the mill garter snake isn’t the best conversationalist, although they’re great listeners.

Two, it’s crafty, the craftiest of the creatures, by which we can safely assume that we’re not talking about knitting or woodworking or macrame.  It’s cunning, although it is worth noting that the same word used to describe it...arum, in the Hebrew... has no inherently negative connotation.  It’s used in the book of Proverbs (12:23; 12:16; 13:16; 14:15; 22:3) repeatedly to mean wise and prudent.

Three, in Genesis chapter 3, we hear that the punishment meted out to the serpent for having managed to completely mess up humankind is that it has to get around by squiggling around on the ground on its belly.  Which begs the question: what exactly was it doing before?  Hopping around on its tail?  Hovering?  I always visualize it hovering, coiling through the air like living smoke.

Clearly, this is not a normal snake.  But a snake nonetheless. 

What we hear from this subtle talking hoversnake is that it is somehow in conversation with the woman...as yet nameless.  She’s still just the isshah, the woman.  They’re talking about food, which sort of figures, and the snake asks about what foods were not allowed.

She replies that they’re all pretty ok, except for the tree at the center of the garden.  It’s the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and in it, or so they’d been told, was death.

The snake, being a smartypants...and if it could fly and talk, pants are always a possibility...replies by telling her what?  It tells her two things.  First, that if she eats she will not die.  Second, if she eats, she will...like God...know good and evil, and thus be like God.  

So she does, and things get messy.  But what is striking about the words of the serpent is that they are not technically false.  In fact, nothing the snake says is technically incorrect.  She eats, and she does not immediately die.  Not even that day.  Second, she knows good and evil, just as the serpent affirms.  Not lies.  Not falsehoods.  Truth.

It tells her the truth, a truth that then sets the stage for a different truth about human beings, their relationships with one another, and their relationship with God.

Is it the whole truth, one that includes the impacts of that action on the things that matter?  No.  Is it a truth that includes the future, and the realities that the choice will help write into being?  No.  Is it a truth that happens to mention that all that is being exchanged is a reality in which humankind only know the good for a reality in which we have the privilege of knowing shame and wrong and evil?  That somehow does not get included.

So it is the truth, in that it is not wrong.  But what is spoken does not set up a possibility for the deepening of the good.  It is a truth that, when used to guide a life, bends it towards a less gracious end.

As we try to come to terms with the truths we know about our own existence, and the truths we know about our own selves, we need to be careful as we consider which ones we allow to shape the direction of our lives.

We need to be aware that what is real in our own lives, of the place that we actually inhabit, of the web and blend of relationships that are the stuff of our existence.  We can tell ourselves truths about who we are that may well be true, but that leave out those elements of truth that we’d rather leave out.  We close out our culpability for a failed venture, or a broken relationship, and choose instead to look at those truths that only serve our immediate angers and hungers and anxieties.

But more importantly, we need to be aware of what lies as the still-unrealized moment ahead of us.  Of the paths before us, which one bears the marks of the feet of our Teacher?  Which one is the most gracious, creating the greatest likelihood of the restoration and building up of the good?

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

Peak Experience

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

03.02.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 17:1-9

Most of the time, life just sort of bumbles along.

It's the reality of the life of this part-time pastor, at least.  I realize that you might imagine something different about the lives of most pastors.  When we are not here, pitching out our remarkable erudition and insight into the deep and secret meanings of sacred texts, you might think we are deep in arcane study.  Perhaps you imagine that we get lost in bowels of some ancient catacombs, poring over the fragments of browning, ancient scrolls as we carefully translate from the Syriac.  Or we are sitting on our rooftops, deep in meditation and prayer, ascending through the mystic realms as we move further and further into realms of glory.

That vision, though, isn't us.  That's Dumbledore.  If you want a better sense of my week, a better analogy from the world of Harry Potter isn’t a wizard.  But we are magical creatures, no doubt.  We’re house-elves.  

Because most of my life is the life of Dobby, most of the time.  It's not adventure or excitement.  It's not the moments that soar.  It's shuffling around the house in cobbled together clothes, old jeans and flannel and vests, the sort of outfits that make me glad I’m unlikely to run into any of y’all in Annandale.

It’s doing laundry, and then walking the dog, and then errands, and then taking the dog out again.  It's sitting in traffic with one kid or another, on our way to drums or drama or chorus.  It's puttering around the bright aisles of some supermarket, and realizing that the bland background music that they're piping in is now the music of my youth.

Karmakarmakarmakarmakarmachamelee-uuun, we hum along, as we drift through the toiletries aisle, trying not to let ourselves think how it came to this.

That doesn't play well with how we like to think of ourselves, not generally.  We want to be filled with stories, filled with tales of adventure and excitement, those peak experiences that sparkle and shimmer in the telling.  And as satisfying as it is figuring out just how to get your recalcitrant overdesigned new clotheswasher to stop aborting every other wash midway through the spin cycle, that's not exactly the stuff of legend.

The simple, basic, humble stuff of life doesn't tend to play well into our stories.  It is forgotten, day by day, as our dreams sift it out of our souls.  What we remember are the high and bright instants.  We remember that first kiss, but not the drive to her house seventeen days later.  We remember the moment we said "I do," but not cleaning the kitchen after dinner four months later.  

We prefer those peak moments, those soaring, glorious mountaintop moments, because we remember them.  As we knit our lives together into a patchwork quilt of stories, those come to be the defining moments.  It feels like we are them.

Take, for instance, the peculiar scene that occurs in today’s scripture from the Gospel of Matthew.  This passage finds us following along with Jesus, Peter, James and John as they go off seeking something big.  They remove themselves to a place described only as a “high mountain,” where things suddenly get a little bit intense. 

This story within the scriptures is called “The Transfiguration,” because that’s precisely what happens to Jesus.  He suddenly appears to be completely different.  We hear, in Matthew 17:2, and in the mirror passages in Mark 9:3 and Luke 9:29, that Jesus is suddenly too bright to look at.   This “brightness,” both of clothing and of his face, is a consistent marker throughout the Bible of holiness.  Where the divine is present, be it God or an angelic figure, it is consistently described as being suffused in light.

This is followed by the arrival of two individuals, who are described as Moses and Elijah.    The disciples see Jesus speaking with both of them.  Why Moses?  Why Elijah?  Those two figures are absolutely central to Judaism.  Moses was the one who led the people to the promised land, the liberator from slavery, the receiver of the Commandments and the Law.  Elijah, was the most potent of the prophets, who stories told had never died, but would return to proclaim the coming of the Messiah.  One is linked with the covenant, the other with the final fulfillment of covenant.

Peter starts suggesting that they might build something, in this case, “booths,” or “sukkot,” which are ritual shelters used during Jewish festivals.  But before he can set to building, there is more brightness, this time from a radiant cloud, and the words “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” are spoken for the second time in Matthew’s Gospel.

The first time is during Christ’s baptism in the Jordan, in Matthew 3:17.   There, it seems more personal, more about the connection between Jesus and God, and less about others hearing.  Here in Matthew 17, it’s something directed to the disciples, and reinforced with the admonition:  “Listen to him!”  The appearance of a cloud is not random, either, not just an indication of fog at higher altitudes.  It’s an event which is mirrored in Exodus 24, when Moses went up the mountain to receive the Law.  The bright consuming cloud is a sign and mark of the presence of the Creator.

If you are Peter and James and John, this is without question all really good stuff.    All of these things couldn’t possibly be any more intense.  First, they get a clear and unmistakable sign that Jesus is holy.  Then, they see a vision of Jesus with the two most significant historical figures for first century Jews.  Finally, they hear a voice from a cloud, affirming Jesus as being something...well...extraordinarily good.  This is the peakiest of the peak experiences.

That moment of transfiguration acts serves a real purpose in Matthew’s Gospel.  It’s the stamp and official seal of approval on who Jesus is.  The marks of Holiness, fulfillment of Torah and the Covenant, and the voice and presence of God, these are all powerful affirmations of Christ’s identity and his Kingdom proclamations.

It couldn’t get any better than that.  That’s the soaring experience of  So are they excited?  Are they all pumped up?  Hardly.  It’s such a big deal that they’re terrified.  Their knees buckle, and they fall flat on their faces.  It’s huge.

And then, as it all wraps up, Jesus does what he so often does when things get intense.  He tells them not to talk about it.  This seems kind of bizarre.  Why wouldn’t you do talk about it.  This is a big deal, a huge thing, the kind of thing you share with everyone, because it’s a game changer.  It’s like taking a selfie with Jennifer Lawrence, and not posting it to Facebook.  You just gotta tell people about that.  You just gotta.

But it’s a common refrain.  Keeping quiet about miracles and the most intense moments in the Gospels are apparently the first two rules of Disciple Club.  Meaning, you shall not talk about Disciple Club, and you shall not talk about Disciple Club.

That seems odd, and paradoxical.  Here Jesus is trying to get the word out, trying spread a message, and he consistently seems to silence conversation when something amazing or miraculous happens.  

Part of that, I think, has to do with the way that Jesus wanted everyone who heard his teachings to respond to what he taught.  Those bright and powerful moments in our lives are all well and good, but if they are all we see and all we think about, if they are the only places where our faith has any purchase, then we lose track of how completely Jesus wants our hearing of his message to change our lives.

And that message, which we’ve heard challenge us over the last several weeks in the Sermon on the Mount, is one that folds its way neatly into every single moment of our lives.  It is not a message limited to those soaring moments of transforming power.  It is not a message that only has meaning when we stand atop the world, peering down at our lives from those places.

It speaks into our every moment, and informs our every instant.  It speaks into the humblest moments of our lives, into the doing of dishes and the wrangling of children.  If we’re really engaging with the heart of what Jesus taught.

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

The Parts You Don’t Need

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 02.16.14

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 5:21-37

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laying Down the Law

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 02.09.14

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 5:13-20

Rules change.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He doesn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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