A Little Leaven

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

07.27.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 13:31-33; 44-52

Perspective is everything.

How we see the world, and those around us?  It makes an amazing amount of difference.  Oh, sure, there’s a reality underlying everything we do.  But how we approach that reality shapes both ourselves and our reactions to it.

That’s been driven home over the last month, as I’ve engaged in conversations around the ongoing mess in Israel and Palestine.  And Lord have mercy, is it a mess.  It’s been a mess since before I was born, and it shows no signs of becoming any less impossible.

One of the things that is most maddening about the images of violence and suffering that rise up out of that wildly, impossibly complicated and intractable mess is that it feels so beyond reach.  Here there are blood hatreds and territorial complexities going back generations, a churning darkness that seems to have achieved a bizarre sort of critical mass.  It’s like that moment when a vast cloud of hydrogen has collapsed down, pressed in on itself by it’s own mass, until the energy of that mass ignites the fusion that begins a star.  It is like that, but with human souls.

The Middle East feels, at times, like a dark star of human suffering, as anguish begets violence, which begets more anguish.  I look at that dark star, radiating bitterness and pain, and I look out at our little fellowship.  If the task of preaching is to proclaim the Good News in a way that helps us all live that Good News out a little more, it’s so tempting just not to mention it at all.  What, really can we do here?  What can I do?  Preach a sermon?  Write a particularly pithy blog post?  No amount of playing with human language seems enough.  It is not here.  It exists on another scale.

That’s a frustration, but it’s not what I find most maddening about the scenes that play out over our collective media consciousness.

What’s most maddening about this problem is that it isn’t real.  Oh, it is, in the sense that human beings are really suffering and dying, and there’s the crack and thunder of bombs and rockets filling the skies over Galilee.  That has really been happening.

But it’s not real in the way that a storm is real, or that a tsunami is real.  It isn’t real in the way that a cancer cell is real, or Ebola is real.

As terrible as it is, as much as mothers weep over the bodies of their children, as much as the world wrings its hands in frustration at how seemingly impossible that old blood conflict is, it is a chosen thing.  Assuming the human beings who are part of this mess are still free, still moral agents, still capable of making decisions, it is as simple as everyone simply saying, “You know, I think I won’t choose to kill people today.”

There was a day like that, yesterday, and then again this morning, we hear the news.  We’ll just take a break, both sides said.  You can’t do that in the middle of a typhoon. “I’d like you to take a pause for humanitarian reasons,” you shout into the storm.  If it can stop, it’s a choice.  And I wondered, why not just run with that?  I mean, really.  How hard could it be just to not do something?

Because it’s a choice, the decision to create violence is question of perspective, of how we choose to filter and interpret our experience, as is so much of human brokenness.  We choose

An event, a death, a loss, or any action taken?  It is cast through a filter of perspective, an assumption that runs so deep that it flavors the whole experience of that event.   The more hardened your view of the world, the more likely it is to so critically compromise your view of things that you can’t even see the thing right in front of you.

That is a basic problem with our human subjectivity.  It can become a filter so thick that the reality of God’s work can’t get through.

And so we have Jesus, trying to describe the reality that he was proclaiming.  For the last two weeks, we’ve heard him pitch out two different stories, each of which he was using to illustrate the central theme of his teachings: the Kingdom of Heaven.

Within the three synoptic Gospels, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, that theme is consistent and sustained.  It’s the primary focus of all of his parables and teaching.  It’s the reason he brings out all of these complicated forms of teaching about what it meant for the Creator of the Universe to have authority over the world.

It’s a complicated reality he’s attempting to articulate, and today, he comes at both us and his disciples with a great rush of images.  The Kingdom of Heaven is like, each of them begins, and then suddenly we’re looking at it through the framework of another image.  He forces us into perspectival shifts, looking at it one way, and then another, and then another.

It’s a mustard seed, tiny and yet the thing that begins a wild growth!  It’s a treasure, discovered hidden in a field, which someone rushes to buy in their excitement.  It’s a pearl, one so perfect and beautiful that a merchant would sell everything to have just that single thing.  It is like the net that the fishermen cast into the sea, one that returns brimming with fish to eat and to cast back.

And it is like yeast, or “leaven.”  Mix a little with flour, and the yeast makes the whole loaf rise.

That last one sticks with me, and not just because it evokes the impossibly delicious smell of baking bread and the promise of some remarkably lovely and flavorful carbs.

It sticks with me because, as a metaphor, yeast mixed in with flour occurs elsewhere in the Bible.  It’s an image used by Paul, as he talks about the way that sin weaves its way into us.  It is Paul’s image that we hear most often coming from the mouths of Christians.

“A little leaven ruins the whole loaf,” they say.

It is the same image, the same concept, the very same metaphor.  Only it is used, here, for an entirely different purpose.  Paul uses the image twice.  Once in Galatians 5:9, but there it’s a small fragment.  He uses it more pointedly when he talks to the proud, fractious, endlessly arguing Corinthians, in 1 Corinthians 5:6, as he describes the impact of their pride on their faith.  Sure, you sort of get the idea, he says to the Corinthians, but you’ve let the bad seep through your whole being like yeast in bread.  It’s changed who you are.

The same metaphor, only now, describing our brokenness.

Paul’s intent in using it was to tell us to carefully sort through ourselves, in the knowledge that tolerating even the smallest bit of darkness in us risks corrupting us.  How much do we want in ourselves?  How much plutonium do we want in our morning coffee?  How much poop do we want in our smoothie?

But human beings have taken that, and turned it outward and away.  It becomes not about preparing ourselves for our participation in the Kingdom, but about turning against others.  You must be 100% doctrinally pure!  You must assent to everything that we say you must believe, or you can’t possibly be part of us!  Where do you stand in the third century debate between Arius and the Cappadocians?  Do you believe that the Bible is the one True and Inerrant Word of the Living God?  And when we saith the Bible, we meaneth the King James Version Only.  

If not, you’re ruining the whole thing.  You are the tiny seed of evil!  Evil!  Out you go.  

That fails to understand how Paul uses the metaphor, but it also seems to flip the Jesus-teaching on it’s head.  When Jesus describes leaven, he presents it as the way we should view the Kingdom among us and within us.  Here, this tiny thing, that changes who we are for the purposes of grace.

It is a seed, a hint of the future that lays before us, of the possibility that God might be working in us.

The challenge, of course, is seeing it that way, both in yourself and others.  If you work under the assumption that God’s work in you is ongoing, that it’s slowly transforming you, and you pour yourself into helping that happen by turning yourself towards it, that change happens.  It turns you, and heals you, slowly and surely.

More important still is seeing that Kingdom leaven at work in others.  Looking at a soul in that way changes your interaction with them.

And there, there lies something we can do, a way we can act when faced with those seemingly intractable challenges.  In our every interaction, our every engagement, both lighting up that part of the Kingdom in you, and assuming that it is shared with those you are engaged with.

Perspective, in matters of our integrity and our souls, is everything.

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

Weeding

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

07.27.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 13:24-30; 36-43

I’d really and truly meant to get around to weeding.  

There they were, right there in front of my house, the two little everbearing strawberry patches that I’d put in over the last two years.  They’d been wildly productive last year, to the point where I found myself with more strawberries than I knew what to do with.

I mean, here I was with so many strawberries that I was making big batches of homemade strawberry jam on my Monday mornings, which was both delicious and satisfying and vaguely unsettling to my self-image.  Homemade jam?  I’m making homemade strawberry jam?  I’m a loner and a rebel, born to be wild, a manly man!  I almost left the kitchen at that moment, almost threw a leg over my motorcycle to roar around Annandale like Brando in the Wild Bunch.  But I was worried that I might feel compelled to stop at Michaels for knitting supplies, so I just went on making jam.

I almost lost those berries this year, as voles nibbled and gnawed their way through my patches.  Terrible little beasties, voles are, more or less just little little hairy tubes with teeth at the front.  They don’t just steal the berries, like those chipmunk devils.  They eat the leaves and the roots and the whole plant, leaving your patch looking like the set of some World War One movie.  But I beat ‘em, and the patch recovered enough to yield enough strawberries for at least one little jar of delicious jam this year.

As summer got rolling, though, things got busy.  Kid shuttling and wrangling picked up.  I started more aggressively reading and prepping for my doctoral project.  And as the strawberries continued to recover, their spring fruiting done, I just couldn’t quite get around to them.

Here and there, other plants began to push their way in.  A little bit of barnyardgrass here, and a spot of clover there, a little bit of creeping spreadwell over there.  But I was busy, and life was busy, and it really wasn’t that bad.  Just a little greener, and a little less orderly.  So the days went by, filled with reading and writing and shuttling, and then came two weeks away on vacation.  I just couldn’t worry about it.  And strawberries are robust things, I’d tell myself.  They can handle it.  So I left it.

When I returned after a week and a half, you could barely see the strawberry plants.  Both patches were almost completely overgrown, swamped by a riot of grassy and broadleafed invaders who had taken advantage of my distraction.  Some of the weeds had grown so tall that they were pushing up the netting I’d put into place to keep out the birds, making the whole garden look like a tent, like a tiny little circus of weeds.  The strawberries were struggling, poking their heads out here and there.

It had been too long, and the process of uprooting the great tangle of matted life that was crushing out next years jam was going to be a long and difficult one.

You just can’t put off weeding.  You have to stay on it, constantly and consistently, or your garden won’t be the thing you hope it to be.

That image--of a garden teeming with weeds---is the central metaphor in the story Jesus tells today about a garden.  Most of the parables that Jesus tells play their way out across all three of the synoptic gospels.  When Matthew has Jesus telling a story, the odds are that Luke and Mark will tell it.

This story--of the wheat and the tares, or the wheat and the weeds--is unique to Matthew.  It comes in a sequence of teachings, all of which have to do with harvest and growing things.  There’s last week’s Parable of the Sower, then today’s parable, then the Parable of the Mustard Seed, followed by the Parable of the Yeast.  Growth and grain and harvest, it’s one after another.  The earnest soul who compiled the Gospel of Matthew likes things orderly and logical, and from all of the oral histories and written fragments he had available from Jesus he gives us this neat little thematic package.  

If there’d been a Parable of The Husband Who Went to Home Depot Five Times In One Day, this is where you’d find it in Matthew.

As Jesus plays these teachings off of his primarily agrarian audience, they would have struggled with them. Parables were, as I mentioned in last week’s sermon, designed to challenge and push a group of listeners, and this one was evidently no exception.

Again, we hear that the disciples came to him.  This one, at least, they were more straightforward about asking him to ‘splain.  “Alright, we know, we know, you’re at it with the parables again.  What did *that* one mean.”

Jesus breaks it down in terms of an apocalyptic conflict, with weeds and wheat being the different sorts of individuals that populate the field of the world.  Like most apocalyptic thinking, it tends to be binary in character.  There is good, and there is bad.  There is black and white, right and wrong.  It’s like a lightswitch, or a single bit of data.  So here we get weeds and wheat, and later in Matthew we get sheep and goats.

The point of this teaching is to help the listeners frame their understanding of existence, and to help them grasp why there are so many weedy people in the world.  And here, we’re not talking about the citizens of Colorado or Washington state.  We’re talking about the folks who seem to live to crowd out every seed of new promise that rises up.  Why, when so many human beings have only peace and compassion as their hope for being, are there so many others who seem to yearn to destroy that compassion wherever they find it?

Understanding this was particularly important for Matthew’s first audience, the church to which he wrote.  They lived at a time of intense challenge for the church, as the early followers of the Way of Jesus were both being thrown out of the synagogues where they’d grown up and being persecuted by the Roman authorities. Remembering this story would have been important to them, and to Matthew.

“Why,” say those who are being harmed, “are there people harming us?”  Why, they would have wondered, is the light we are trying to shine into the world being blotted out?  And what should we do about it?  To them, this parable counsels patience and forbearance.  Keep growing, it says.  Trust that God will settle all.  There is no call for vengeance, or for the children of the kingdom to take up the sword.  

And that’s important, because I think there’s a powerful and dangerous tendency for human beings to hear this parable in a very different way.  We hear it, and we know, of course, that we’re the righteous.  Of course we are.  Everything we do is right, and everything we think is right, and so say all of us, and so say all of us.

We look to those with whom we disagree, and we see weeds.  We look to our opponents, and we see those who need to be rooted out, torn away, burned, and discarded.  It becomes an excuse to set ourselves apart as the good and the valuable, and others as weak and worthless.  And so we start tearing them out, ripping and attacking, and in doing so, we don’t just pull up weeds.  We tear out the good with the bad, doing more harm than if we’d simply waited until everything bore fruit.

Reading across all of the teachings of Jesus, this just doesn’t fly.  Jesus showed no such partiality, not in any of the Gospel stories.  Still and all, it’s a dangerous temptation, one that I try to avoid by taking this teaching of Jesus one level deeper.  

I focus less on worrying about whether or not you’re a dandelion or kudzu and how much Holy Ghost Roundup I should be spraying on you, and more on the weeds that I have let run riot in my own soul.  What matters, and where we have the right to make change, is within the boundaries of our own selves.

And there, I’m deeply aware of the dangers of my own laziness, of the deep risks of avoiding the discipline it takes to be a disciple, and just letting whatever grows grow.

Be sure, as you live, not to let yourself be indifferent to the one place you can have effect, and to spend your life worrying about the business of others.

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

Different Lives, Different Islands

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 07.13.2014

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 13: 1 - 23

I’m always a little off after a vacation, just a little flaky.  Or flakier, to be fair.  For the last couple of Sundays, I’ve been bobbing about a couple of hundred miles off the west coast of Ecuador, meaning I’m probably not to be trusted around heavy machinery for a while.  It was my wife and my sons and all of my inlaws, all together on an eighty-five foot boat smack dab in the middle of the Pacific, as my family and I explored the Galapagos Islands.

It’s an amazing little archipelago, nineteen volcanic islands dappled across the ocean, islands that are slowly drifting along on the Nasca plate, moving just a tick over two inches a year towards South America.  It’s most famous, of course, for providing the inspiration for Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species.

Before he got around to writing Origin of the Species, Darwin wrote a travelogue entitled The Voyage of the Beagle, which chronicled his journey as a naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle, a 90 foot brig.  Darwin was 22 years old when it began, having just gotten his bachelor’s.  The career plan for young Charles after graduation: becoming the pastor of some small congregation in England.

“I’m just taking a short break before getting into the working world, Dad,” I can hear him saying.  “I’m sure I’ll get right back to my church plans when I get back.”  “How long will you be gone,” his Dad would say.  “Oh, it’s just a short 40,000 mile trip all over the world. By sail.  Oh, and could you spare some cash?  It’s kind of, um, an unpaid internship.  But it’ll only be, like, you know, for the next five years.”

Having spent time aboard an 85 foot vessel--just a foot and a half shorter than the HMS Beagle--I have to admit that I’m amazed that the twenty-something Darwin could get any thinking done at all without the jar full of dramamine they kept in the common area of our little boat.  He did that for five years?  Yikes.  I guess after the first year or so at sea seasickness wears off, or so I’ve heard.

In the months that the Beagle spent mapping the Galapagos, Darwin noted the wild variety of life there, and how that life subtly differs from island to island.  Darwin’s observations of the subtle difference between the living things on those islands led him to intuit the idea of evolutionary change.

Moving from island to island, what was most amazing was not just the variety of life.  It was the wildly, impossibly different landscapes that you’d encounter as you moved from island to island.  On the northeastern reaches of San Cristobal, the land was arid desert, where a few scrubby plants clung fiercely to the rocky soil.  Travel just thirty miles, and on the Southern shores of Santa Cruz, the land was lush and rich and tropical, a riot of green and growth.  Travel around to the narrow channel between Santa Cruz and the volcanic Sombrero Chine island, and the land is a lava moonscape after a ten year long eruption back around the year 1900.  It is utterly devoid of life, black rock blasted dead by the relentless equatorial sun.

For almost a week, we traveled around an area not considerably larger than my home state of Virginia, and it was like we’d traveled from Virginia to Arizona to somewhere on Mars.  And life, wherever it could, adapted and made do, finding some way to scramble out a foothold.  Some places were dead.  But there was not a single place it wasn’t trying, endlessly casting seed, endlessly trying to find purchase.

Life is like that.  It yearns to live, yearns to grow, yearns to make more of itself.  But it has limits to where and how it can engage, limits that are remarkably like the limits played out in the challenging little parable Jesus spins out in today’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew.

This teaching is called, by Jesus himself, the Parable of the Sower.  Jesus has been flashmobbed, as crowds have gathered, pressing in.  He’s forced to create an impromptu amphitheater, separating himself from the crowd by putting out a short distance from shore in a small boat.  As the throngs lined the shore, Jesus bobs out a little distance, sits in the boat, and starts talking about the Good News.

The story he tells is of a man who goes out planting.  He’s spreading his seed, far and wide.  He sows it on a path, where it is exposed and helpless, and it’s quickly eaten by flying varmints.  He casts it down on rocky ground, hard and impermeable as lava flow, and there the seed is blasted dead in the relentless sun.  More gets cast into soil where weeds are growing, sedge and crabgrass and kudzu, no doubt.  There, the plants grow, but are strangled out by their fiercely growing competitors.

But some of the seed, cast out with wild and generous abundance, falls in soil that’s good enough to yield.  That grows into a harvest, some places more richly than others, but a harvest nonetheless.

This is pretty much the entire story, and Jesus moves on with no further comment, as the crowd mutters in rumbling debate amongst itself.  He makes no effort to interpret.  He gives them no symbolic key.  He just lays the story out there, and lets it sit on their heads for a while.

Afterwards, we hear that the disciples come to Jesus, after the crowds have dispersed.  They say, “Um, hey, Jesus...er...these stories aren’t quite working.  Have you considered maybe a nice list, you know, something relevant, something the people can relate to, like The Seven Harry Potter Characters You’ll Find In The Kingdom of God.”  

But there’s a reason Jesus tells them this strange, intentionally obscure and confusing story.  If you want to learn from a story, you need to be focused.  You need to engage with the deeper concepts involved.  Rabbis in first century Judaism commonly used storytelling as a way of engaging the insightful, and closing out those who didn’t want to put in the effort.  It’s not exactly a method that’s designed to make everyone feel good about themselves, nor is it a method that rewards those who want everything neatly spelled out for them.  That’s the point.  It is meant to challenge.  It is meant to be hard.

As he shared with his disciples, that’s the reason for storytelling.  Though he was intentionally making us work our imaginations to grasp it, it was still Good News he was sharing.  It’s good news about a radically new Way of life, about the Reign of God at hand.  That Reign of God meant the shattering of the brokenness that rules us.  It means graciousness and forgiveness, a world ruled not by the power of Mammon or the sword, but by the radical love of God.

As hard as this parable was intended to be, one thing that’s worth paying attention to is the “foolishness” of the sower, whose generosity with the seed is wild and wanton and seemingly pointless.  Who pitches seeds out among weeds?  Why waste seed on rocks, or on your sidewalk?

C’mon, God.  Get with the times.  Better to be neat and precise, wasting nothing, as your semi-autonomous John Deere tractor pulls a Kinze 4900 robotic planter, precisely placing every seed based on the satellite mapping data uploaded from your Farmworks management suite, while streaming realtime data on crop distribution and soil composition from your circling Trimble UX-5 agricultural drone.

But the Kingdom of God is not like industrial agribusiness.  If it were, there’d be no hope for any of us.

God would not waste God’s precious love on bad soil.  There’d be none of it for the bitter, or the selfish, or the anxious, or the greedy.  God would not waste God’s love on the distractable, or the shallow, or the proud.

But the point Jesus is making here is not that God withholds the possibility of the Kingdom from all but the few.  It’s that God pours out that possibility to every soul willing to receive it, and even those souls who are not.

This was the image that played out as this parable danced across my time in the Galapagos, seeing island after island, and the relentless efforts of life to find purchase even in the most blighted, desert corners of God’s creation.

For any who are willing to listen, and to pay attention, Jesus tells a story of the soil of our own selves.  Here God is, telling us, over and over, across the thousands of years of human history, what it would mean to live a gracious existence.

And yet we--all of us-- can give ourselves over to ignorance, clouding our hearing through willful laziness of heart and mind.  We can realize that faith is hard, that it requires hard choices and can create conflict with the broken things in our lives, and we back away to the comfort of the familiar and the easy.  We can be distracted by the endless cornucopia of distractions in the world, the busyness and nattering stress of our every day.  We can turn ourselves towards the hunger for wealth and posessions, towards the pursuit of power and privilege.

These ways, Jesus tells us, we can turn the islands of our souls into dead and lifeless places.  That’s not what he wants for us, for any of us, as he bore the seeds of a new creation.

Let your eyes be blessed, and see, he says.  Let your ears be blessed, and hear, he says.  Let the soil of your island receive God’s new life as best it can, and yield as best it can.

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

The Tribe

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

06.15.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 10:24-39

It’s been a very intense and bookish last few weeks in my life, as I’ve inhaled my way through a couple of thousand pages of churchy reading for my doctoral program.

My interest and the revised focus of my project, for some reason, is what makes for a spiritually healthy and vibrant small church.   One book after another, all of them talking about the way little congregations function or don’t function.  You read one, you put it down, you pick up the next one, until you start realizing that you’ve read pretty much everything the experts have to say about little tiny faith communities.  I’d be reading one book, and I’d realize that the quote I was reading in the book in front of me was familiar, because it was from the book I’d read the day before.

There aren’t a whole bunch of people who’ve looked hard at small churches.

Most churchy books tend to talk about how to build and manage the giant churches, the great sprawling Jesus Malls of AmeriChrist Inc..  How do you get huge?  How do you stay huge?  Grow grow grow!  Bigger Bigger Bigger!  Books with titles like Seven Reasons Christ Wants You to Build a Parking Garage  and Take Over the World for Jesus: How a Robot Army Can Help You Grow Your Ministry.  But having spent the last year in a sustained effort to make myself a little less huge than I’d been, that just doesn’t sound appealing.  

Bigger is not always better.  I like a faith life that exists on a human scale, and communities that reflect that.

In those books, little churches like ours are described in so many different ways.  It’s been a festival of metaphors.  Church researcher and small church pastor Carl Dudley described the very smallest churches as being exactly like a cat.  Independent, self-sustaining, and totally capable of taking care of themselves.  In another place in the same book, little churches this size are described as collies, friendly and loyal and totally willing to go running to get help when little Timmy falls in the well.  I like these metaphors, but it does seem that you’d be vacuuming up a whole bunch of fur.

There’s one book that puts small church life entirely in terms of the slow food movement, which is cool and kind of true, but also makes us sound a little bit too much like something out of Soylent Green.  Small churches are made of people, I can hear Charlton Heston howling.  Peopllllee!

But the metaphors that I most appreciate have to do with relationships.  There’s the idea that a small church is like a family, a gathering that is so intimate and lifelong that it’s like the folks in the world who are closest to you, your own flesh and blood.  But it’s more than what we Americans think of as a family, more than the mom and dad with their quarter acre, two point five children and seven tenths of a dog.  A gathering of a small fellowship is like a cluster of families in a delimited space.   And there’s a word for that, this family of families, the most elemental organic unit of human societies.

Little churches are like tribes.  

Which, according to what I’ve been reading, is a good thing.  You’ve got the intimacy of family connectedness that stretches around and through multiple generations.  You have storytelling, and shared sacred spaces.  You have a place of belonging, a home open to many.  As Presbyterian author and pastor Carol Howard Merritt wrote a couple of years back in her book The Tribal Church, this is something for which human beings increasingly hunger.  As our industrial society and the shattered, scattered nature of net-culture make us feel isolated and alone, that need for organic, human, tribal connection grows all the stronger.

And of course, right as I’m reading that little churches are like families and tribes, we get what our triannual cycle of readings pitches out today, one of the most peculiar and difficult passages in all of the teachings of Jesus.

The words of Jesus feel like a blow: “For I have come to set a man against his father…” they begin, and I thank the Creator of the Universe that this passage didn’t show up last week.  Jesus says hate your dad!  Happy Father’s Day!  But then it goes on to lay into mom, so I suppose at least Jesus is an equal opportunity offender.

Why is Jesus saying this?

While a Freudian psychoanalyst would have a field day with this passage, (“Zo, Jesus.  Lets talk more about your feelinks for your mother,”)  I think it’s absolutely essential to read this in the context in which it was first heard and first spoken.

This is Matthew’s Gospel we’re hearing, and while the passage sees analogues in both Luke and Mark, it would have been a tremendously timely teaching for Matthew’s community.  Most of the scholars who study Matthew consider it the most Jewish of the four Gospels.  It assumes a deep familiarity with the sacred texts of Judaism, as Matthew vigorously and aggressively seeks to put all of the teaching of Jesus into the context of Torah and the Hebrew Prophets.  The sacred story of the Jewish people matters to Matthew--even more so because most scholarly dating of Matthew puts it right at the same time that Christians were being removed from the synagogue.

Mark came too early for this to be a major issue.  Luke and John both wrote to mixed communities, where to be of another faith didn’t matter as much.

But for the community that heard Matthew, it was a time of conflict, in other words, when to follow the teachings of Jesus meant that you would find yourself torn away from family and friends.  If you chose to be a disciple of of the Way, all of those sustaining connections with the community that had given you your most fundamental sense of identity would be broken.   This was their reality, and so this remembered story had real significance for Matthew.

The reason for this saying goes deeper, though, beyond the context Matthew’s remembering and into that moment when Jesus first spoke it.  It comes to us from a larger teaching about going out into the world in mission.  He’s in the middle of giving his disciples instructions about how to go out on a mission trip, as they prepare themselves to spread the message of the coming Reign of God.

The instructions Jesus gives are, I will note, nothing like the instructions you give your kids when you’re sending them on a trip.  When my boys go away, there are lists upon lists, hats and sunscreen and wallets and chargers, giant backpacks and duffels full of clothes every possible need.  Have nothing, he says.  No money, no extra shoes.  Can I bring a change of underwear, asks Simon Peter.  No, says Jesus.  Be unprepared, says Jesus, sounding like the worst scoutmaster ever.  Go, and force yourself to trust that you will be cared for as you bear this message of universal love and grace.

They arrive as strangers on the doorstep, and theirs was a deeply tribal culture.  The dangerous reality of being a stranger in a tribal culture is that while families and tribes can be deeply hospitable and welcoming, they can also not be.  Sure, you’re fine if you’re recognized as “us.”  But if you are truly strange?  You are a threat.

Those deep ties of primal human identity are the “us,” and the us is something that we both cherish and defend fiercely against those who are not “us.”  The bonds of extended family and shared story that make for a tribe go from being a blessing to being a curse.  Tribal identity is part of human hubris, in which the very same thing that makes us strong makes us weak.

So sure, family is sacred, and those bonds of loyalty and mutual care go deep.  But precious though that may be, it is those bonds of loyalty that unite the young men you see in pictures of Iraq these last difficult days.  There they are, young and strong and handsome, with the other young men who make us their community.  They laugh and encourage one another, they sing the songs of their childhood, and they love each other with a deep love forged from being part of the same blood story.  And they dance in a circle with their Kalashnikovs raised high, and they go and do terrible things to those who are not the “us.”

We should not allow ourselves to imagine that we’re better than those young men.  They are human beings, just as we are.  That is what Jesus challenges in all of us, as he seeks to heal the brokenness of the world.

If you really love me, Jesus says, and really want to say that I have authority over your life, I have to matter more than those ties of blood.  If you want to bear my message, loving the world with the same impossible, generous grace as the God who loves all of us, then you need to set aside anything that gets in the way of that love.  

That’s a hard path.  It is.

But it’s the one he challenges us all to walk, because it is the way along which good news lies.

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

A Kiss Goodbye

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

06.15.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lessons: Matthew 28:16-20; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13

I was never particularly good at saying goodbye.

When I was a tiny little pup, no more than four or five, I can still remember how much trouble I’d have whenever the time came for saying goodbye.  That was particularly true at parties.  The day would come, and I’d be psyched.  Oh, I’d be a gracious host.  It’d be wonderful to have my friends there, and I’d always be completely on my best behavior.  Games would be played.  Cookies...or better yet, cake..would be eaten.  More games would be played.  There would be presents.  We’d run around, and it’d be fun, and then, well, then their parents would show up.  Which meant it was all coming to an end.

This would be the point where, had I been a tiny little Mr. Manners, I would have pleasantly ushered each of my friends to their waiting parental transport pod like the miniature host of some Victorian-era salon.  “Thank you so very much for coming!  It was absolutely lovely.  I do hope that we might be able to do this again sometime very soon.  Give my regards to your family, if you would.”

That was not my reaction.  As I realized that the time we’d been spending together was coming to an end, it was like a switch had been thrown in my little head.  Click, it would go, and then things would change.  I have vague memories of inconsolable weeping and flopping around.  It was tears and snot and piteous wailing, which I’m sure made the very best of impressions on the parents who were picking up their children.

“Is...is someone killing a cat next door?”  “No, no, that’s the birthday boy,” my parents would say, as I tantrumed incoherently.

As the years passed, I’m not sure I got much better at it.  Like, say, when the time came to part from my high school girlfriend, as I left her...and our relationship...after a trip out West to help her move to the other side of the country.  I was fine for about the first minute or so sitting on the plane to come back home, and then, well, there were the tears and the snot and the piteous wailing again.

“Is someone killing a cat back there,” the pilot must have said to the stewardess over the intercom.  “No, no,” she would have said.  “I’ve got no idea what’s wrong with that kid.”

It’s hard getting the closure thing just right, especially if things are challenging, and especially if you’re not entirely sure when you will come back into the presence of the one you’re with.  When you’ve shared life with them, they become part of your story, part of that Book of You that’s being written into the fabric of creation.  They’re part of you, just as you’re part of them, and there are some stories you just never want to end.

In that leave taking, you want to carry them with you, and for...in the goodbye you share...something to be passed on between you that brings your time together to the best possible close.

There are two such leave-takings in our readings today from the Gospels and the Epistles.

The first we find as Jesus prepared to move on, in the final moments of the Gospel of Matthew.  It’s a leave-taking that Matthew uses to sum things up for the shared story of Jesus and those of us who have chosen to follow his Way.  Unlike Mark, who ended his story bluntly and abruptly, in fear and confusion, or Luke, who carries on the tale through the story of the early church, this is is as far as things run in Matthew.  These are parting words, the end of things, the place where the story ends and we part ways while Vera Lynn sings “We’ll Meet Again” wistfully in the background.

Into that place, Jesus speaks confidently about his connectedness to those he’s brought into community around him.  Yes, the story of their time together may seem to be ending.  But in their commitment to live and to teach the life that he brought them into connection with, there was a deeper bond...one that would not pass or fade or change.

Go out with confidence, he said.  Know that you and I are now part of something that will always be, until everything that we know passes away.

And then there’s the second leave taking, the one we hear at the very end of Paul’s Second letter to the church at Corinth.  Paul hadn’t exactly had the easiest of relationships with the messy and conflict ridden community at Corinth, and here we get the last of the correspondences that history retains about that often awkward, often contentious relationship.

All had not been well in Corinth, as Paul struggled to get them to stop fighting and tearing at one another.  As he leaves them, he knows that they may choose to live according to the way that he’d taught them.  Or not.  Corinthians were pretty good at the “or not” part.

As he closes out his letter, Paul leaves the Corinthians with a word of encouragement that is also a word of challenge.  When he asks them to put things in order, to finally stop their insistence on factions and infighting, he’s taking that one last moment to remind them of the very thing that’s been his hope for them all along.  Live into God’s grace, he says.  Find a way to be gracious to one another.

Live in peace, he says, and the God of love and peace will be with you.  And sure, there’s an implicit flip-side to those words.  Keep things chaotic, don’t listen to me, endlessly fight and war with each other, and y’all are just out of luck.

But he chooses not to say that, as tempting as it must have been.  He chooses to depart not with a swift parting kick, but with a good word.

Even in the face of a community that’s been a serious and sustained pain in the backside, Paul’s words of leavetaking are very intentionally chosen to be graceful.  He doesn’t lose sight of the reason he has walked with them, hoped for them, and struggled with them.

Which is why, as hard as his words have been with them, his leavetaking takes the form of a benediction--a familiar one, I might add.  His hope is that the relationship that they’ve had will still be part of who they are.  His hope, having shown both grace and challenge, is that they’ll understand the purpose of everything they’ve shared.

This is, for so many, a season of leave-taking.  In our endlessly churning culture, we never know when we might be moved on.  But with the coming of summer comes the time for moving on from the places and faces we’ve known.  It’s a time of graduation and advancement, and as hoped for as all of those things are, there comes with them the reality of a story’s end.

If you’re moving on from one school to another, or moving on from college, the fabric of your relationships--the day in, day out presence of those around you--is going to change.  If you’re not moving on, precious others are.  That face and that voice and that presence that has been a part of your life since the moment it came into the world may soon not be part of your every day.

I’m aware that, myself, as a father, every time I wrap my arms around my children who are no longer children.  That little boy I used to carry on my shoulders to bed after storytime now is a man who smiles down at me from broad shoulders.  The time they set themselves out into the world is a few short years still to come, but it’s just a few now, close enough that I can feel it.   

Which is why, frankly, I think it’s better to preach this sermon now when that reality is a few years out, rather than to try to choke out these words when my little tiny ones are just about to leave.  I’d rather not subject you to the tears and the mucus and the piteous wailing.

“Is someone killing a cat up there,” a guest will ask one of you.  “No, no, that’s just the pastor.”

But in the words I know I’ll struggle to offer them, I’m hoping that I’ll remember the way that both Paul and our shared teacher took their leave from those they loved.  They spoke from the certainty that the time that they had shared with the people who they loved was forever woven into God’s story of us together.  We remain forever part of one another, wherever love and peace abides.

I am with you always, says our Teacher.

That truth of grace, love, and communion is one we should remember, no matter when those times of leaving come.

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