Letting the Light Through

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

09.21.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Philippians 1:21-30

It’s funny, what you notice when you’re paying attention.

I’ve been paying a whole bunch of attention to my garden this summer, and over the last month or two that’s meant my wildly productive patch of bush beans.  I’ve watched them come up, tending them every morning, watering them and weeding them and generally fussing over them.  I wanted them to do well, because these plants are the children of the plants I grew last year.  I seed-saved from last year’s crop, marking the largest and healthiest pod on each of the most vigorous plants.  So this is kind of a a little extended family of green beans that I’m carefully watching over.  I’m getting to know them.

As the season has moved on, I’ve watched them grow up ferociously together, rising up into a dense thicket of plants.  I’ve watched as they’ve cast their foliage out thick and heavy, catching so much of the light that they leave nothing to feed the weeds that struggle to grow in the dim soil beneath. With their leaves woven up together into a quilt of green, they also shade the earth, holding back the sun so that more moisture remains to fuel their growth.

Plants are not, after all, objects.

When you garden, you become more and more aware of them as living creatures, simple beings that are nonetheless aware of one another and aware of their environment.  They have a peculiar form of intelligence, one that allows them to engage in behaviors that we miss if we are not watching carefully.  They cooperate.  They interact.  They communicate.  And beans, like many plants, grow.  They grow, but not like ice-crystals or a thundercloud billowing up on a hot and humid summer afternoon.  They move.  They just move a whole bunch more slowly than we do.

Over the course of the late summer, I’ve been able to watch this.  In the morning, the leaves of that patch of bush beans are all facing one way, towards the sun as it comes over the tall trees on the far side of the street.  In the evening, they’ve all turned, facing the sun as it disappears behind the row of trees on our side of the street.

It’s called “heliotropic” movement, and it generally means that plants track the sun to maximize photosynthesis.  And maximized photosynthesis means that at the height of the season, growing in good soil and light, those beans come out of the plants like balloons out of a clown’s mouth at a birthday party.  Only, you know, not shaped like dogs or bunny hats.  I suppose, if you were into it, you could try to figure out a way to make them grow that way, but I don’t have that kind of time on my hands.

But as the plants poured out gallon-bag after gallon-bag full of tasty fresh greenbeans, I noticed they were doing something different.  As the days grew cooler and the summer began to wane to fall, the leaves on the now-fully-grown plants changed. They no longer aligned themselves to catch the sun, but turned their leaves so that their edges faced the sun as it passed.  Light streamed down and through to the soil, and...notably...onto the beans that I’d left to grow full on the plants to go to seed.

When dusk settled, they’d return to their former posture, leaves out, preserving moisture.  Why, I wondered.  Why would they do this, these simple creatures?  I observed, and I watched as the pattern continued, and I searched through scientific studies of bean behavior to scry out the truth of it.

And in the thick of watching this, I was also reading Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi.

Philippi was a decently-sized ancient town just a little less than twice the size of Poolesville.  It sat on a major East-West thoroughfare in the Roman province of Macedonia.  It was near the sea, and more importantly, near some highly productive gold mines.  Phillippi was a prosperous place.  It did well for itself, for a long while.

This little letter has a different flavor from pretty much all of the other letters Paul pitched out into the early church.  The letter he wrote to Rome was to strangers he wanted to impress.  The letter to the Galatians, to people who he was frustrated with to the point of calling them idiots.  He wrote letter after letter to Corinth, in the desperate hope that they might improve

Paul really cared for the church at Philippi.  He’d put them there, and .   The letter he wrote to them was a manifestation of that love, an expression of the deep bond of affection that he felt for the community there, particularly as they supported him through times of challenge.  This letter was written during one of Paul's many imprisonments, and may well have been written from jail in Rome in the early 60s.

The letter is both warm and deeply personal, thanking the Philippians for both their material support of Paul in his time of imprisonment, but also thanking them for their prayers and care.  What makes this little section so interesting is that Paul is staring the potential of a messy death at the hands of the Roman authorities.  “You know, I might die, or I might not,” he says, which generally isn’t something you fire off in a casual email to folks.

That’s impressive, but even more impressive is how much pleasure he takes in the exchange with the Philippians, in their well-being, and in the mutual support that this relationship has brought to both of them.

This is a remarkably generous letter, in both spirit and in intent.  Paul’s hope and intent is with them, which, again, is a little odd given the context.  

What matters to Paul?  Sharing joy with them.  What is the hope that’s sustaining him?  That they’ll thrive, and that if he has the good fortune to survive his imprisonment, he and they will be able to celebrate their shared joy together.  It’s their well-being he cherishes, their lives that matter to him, and their strength that is more important to him than his own.

It’s the love that drove his relationship with them, and it’s also the primary thing that he tried to share as he spread the message of Jesus of Nazareth throughout the ancient world.  What makes Philippians such an important letter, and such a vital part of the story-of-stories that comprise our Bibles, is that it is a letter of affirmation.  What it presents isn’t primarily theology, or Paul pastorally trying to correct a community that’s managed to turn the message of Jesus into an excuse for infighting or other forms of human mess.

What we see in this letter is the core of the Christian message, being lived out in the relationship between Paul and a gathered community that he loved.  He knows he will someday cease to be among the living, sooner or later, but what sustains him is knowing that the Philippians are living out what most mattered to him.

They, in turn, felt the deep grace of that letter so powerfully that they kept it, and they shared it, so that long after Paul had met his death--executed in Rome, either during this imprisonment or a later one--the words of encouragement he shared with them would linger on.

Philippi no longer exists as a city.  It dwindled and faded, slowly but surely, and by the nineteenth century, all that was left were ruins.  Maybe the gold ran out.  No-one knows.  There’s a little Greek town nearby, just about three hundred souls.

But they passed along this letter, copying it and sharing it, because they wanted everyone who followed on to know what they’d known, and share in the light that had shined between them and Paul.

Which, in the roundabout way my mind works, brings us back to those beans.  They’re not loving, not as we’d understand it.  It’s so easy, as a human, to anthropomorphize everything you encounter, seeing our human intentionality and our emotional responses in the whole world around us.  But God made beans to be beans, and if they think, they think like beans.

Here, at the end of their season, as they’re coming to the end of their two-to-three month lifespan, what matters to them is not themselves.   Having prepared the seeds for the next generation, they seem more interested in insuring that those unknown others thrive than in keeping themselves growing.  They don’t take the light for themselves, but let it pass through them, let it cast down onto the seeds below, drying them out, preparing those pods for the life in the seasons to come.  It’s the way of beans, I suppose.

Where that speaks to me, as metaphor, as part of the story of living creatures, is in how much the life of this Way that Jesus taught does not have to do with our own selves, our own power, and our own well-being.  What gives us joy isn’t our own thriving, but the thriving of those others around us.  It’s a radically countercultural message, in this consumer era of self-absorption and self-promotion.  What matters isn’t what we have and what we grasp, anxious for ourselves, anxious for our own wealth and success.

That form of faith, that’s all about the self, that’s not who we’re called to be.  We are called, like Paul, to rejoice in the rejoicing of others.  We’re called, like the Philippians, to pass that light along.

Let that be so, for you and for me.

AMEN

Debt Service

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 09.14.14

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 18:21-35

I hate debt.  I hate it.

Part of that comes from my Scots blood, which is just about as cheap as they come.  How cheap?   When I buy delicious, crunchy kosher dill pickles, I save and re-use the pickle juice to pickle my own pickles from home-grown cucumbers.  How cheap?  When I jar the jam that I make from the strawberries in my strawberry patches, I’m too cheap to use Mason jars.  I just wash and re-use jars I’ve saved from other purchases.  So sure, maybe the jam tastes a little bit like kalamata olives.  So what?  I saved a couple of bucks, and the way I figure it, there’s gotta be some funky little vegan store out there someplace selling organic kalamataberry fusion jam in tiny little jars for ten bucks a pop.  It’s a “boutique flavor.”  That’s it.

I don’t just re-use 7-11 cups so I can get the refill price.  I’m so cheap that I wash and re-use Ziploc bags.

I like to think of myself as practical, but my family invariably reminds me that I’m deluding myself.  I just don’t really like to spend money.

But the money I particularly don’t like to spend is the money that I’m going to have to spend money to spend.  The very idea makes me recoil, which is unfortunate, because that means I do a whole bunch of recoiling from our debt-obsessed culture.

Debt and the interest paid on debt are the lifeblood of our economy, the essence of our economic system.

If we want a place to live, we need to go into debt.  If we want to start a small business to sustain our lives, we need to go into debt.   If we want to go to school to get the degree that we’ve been told will allow us to live a satisfying life, we’ve got to saddle ourselves with debt that we’re going to spend much of our adulthood trying to pay off.

I’m convinced that all debt-financed purchasing does, in the long run, is drive up the cost of things.  

So we avoid debt, and not just my own.  I don’t let other people owe me.  I don’t lend, which again, my family will confirm.  “Hey dad, can I borrow a few bucks,” is not a phrase uttered in my house, because it’s futile.  I just won’t.  They go straight to mom for that one.

Because what debt does is put you in the thrall of power.  It makes you vulnerable.  It skews relationships, and stirs anxieties.  

What is worse is the impact it has when others are in debt to us.  The power dynamics created by wealth can blow huge holes in friendships, and can shatter relationships.  But the idea of “debt” goes deeper still.  If others do harm to us, or diminish us in some way, we hold that as a debt against them.  We tally that up, and expect repayment of our resentments with interest that compounds annually, and that expectation and our own unwillingness to release it can grow in our souls like a cancer.

That exchange between peoples, the debts we hold over others, that’s the core of the parable of the Kingdom offered up in Matthew’s Gospel this morning.

It begins with a simple question, asked by Peter as he approaches Jesus.  “How often should I forgive?”  It’s a fair question, and Peter seems to understanding that forgiveness should come frequently and often.  “Seven times,” he asks.

Jesus turns it up to eleven, taking Peter’s suggestion of repeated grace and multiplying it exponentially plus-one, and then...because he’s Jesus...tells a little story.

It’s the time to settle up, and the bill is coming due, and a king is collecting.

A slave is brought to him, and that slave owes him ten thousand talents.  Understand, this is not like owing someone ten thousand dollars.  A talent was the single largest unit of Roman currency.  To earn a talent, a typical laborer in the time of Jesus would have to work for fifteen years.

So to translate into our currency, we know that a fully employed construction laborer in the United States averages just over $29,000 a year.  We multiply that by fifteen, and we get $435,000.  That’s a talent.   Then, we multiply that by ten thousand.

Our unfortunate slave has managed to dig himself a hole four billion three hundred and fifty million dollars deep.

It is an insane amount, completely and intentionally overblown, wildly out of the realm of possibility.  But faced with the prospect of losing everything he has, the slave cries out, “I’ll pay you back, I will.”

Oh, technically, sure.  All he’d have to do is plug that number into one of those online mortgage calculators that were so easy to come by in the first century.  He’d find that if he gets a thirty year jumbo loan at 4.216 percent, he’d be making much more manageable payments of twenty-nine million, two hundred and fifteen thousand a month.  Much more manageable.

The idea behind this is, simply, that it is a debt that could never be repaid.  It just can’t.

The king, though, is unanticipatedly and immensely gracious, and not only does not sell his slave, but forgives his debt.

Five minutes later, the same guy’s walking down the street, and he sees this person who owes him money.  It’s a hundred denarii, meaning just under a third of a year’s wages for that same day laborer.  Nine thousand bucks, using the same measure we’ve already used.

His reaction is swift and relentless, completely focused on his rage at the slight of not being paid back.  How dare you take from me, he snarls.  He presses charges, and off to prison goes the one who owes him money.

The raw injustice of it outrages those around our debtor, and word gets back to the king, and the king reacts the way a just king would.

Bad things happen, for a very long time.  And Jesus says, this, this is how God views our inability to forgive one another.  If you do not find the Spirit’s grace in yourself to show mercy to those who owe you so little, why would the Creator of the Universe show you mercy?

As rough as that parable is, it reminds us of how we as human beings hold on to the ways we’ve been slighted.  We keep a record of things, we do, we tally them up in our minds and calculate every little last slight and injustice and wrong, like some dark version of Excel all spooled up in a deep recess of our cerebral cortex.

This parable is a reminder of the radical, unbearably intense challenge facing anyone who claims that Jesus of Nazareth is their teacher.

It can be a little rough seeming, as Jesus could be on occasion when he was trying to make a point.  There’s some getting medieval, the implicit threat of a God seriously cheesed at those who find forgiveness beyond them.  

But I see this call to forgiveness as arising not primarily from our fear of punishment.  We cannot act in grace if we are driven by fear.  Real gratitude cannot be coerced, as every parent who has ever twisted a thank you note out of child knows.  What Jesus taught was good news, after all, and our willingness to show mercy to other should arise from our radical sense of gratitude at the simple fact of our being.  

We exist, we live, we are, and frankly, we do not need to be.  We just don’t.  Looking out at the endlessness of existence, the wild and glorious nature of creation, I know that as important as I happen to seem to me, there’s just no doubt that God could have figured out how to make this whole thing work without including me in.

Yet here I am.  I’ve been given life. I exist, when I could easily not.  It is a simple reality, so very simple.  It is so simple we forget it like we forget our heart is beating and that we are in this moment breathing, but in it God has been wildly, impossibly generous with us, in the simple fact of our existence and our awareness.  All that is expected, all that is required, is that I pass that same generosity on.

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

Thank You for Your Service

Poolesville Presbyterian Church
05.25.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: John 14:15­-21



It was a mission of sorts, last year, as our summer vacation plans took us winging across the Pacific to the Hawaiian Islands, where the weather is almost as lovely as it’s been here over the past few weeks. Almost.

We had a whole bunch of different plans for that trip, touchstones that we absolutely had to do to register our Hawaiian experience. We had to go into the bay at Waikiki, paddling about in the perfect blue waters as we hummed the Hawaii­Five­O theme to ourselves. We had to sit around poolside as the boys splashed and mucked about with people they’d just met. Cooling Pacific breezes wafted over us and our adult beverages, while the gentle melodies of Hawaiian music filled the air. Oh, the humanity.

But in the midst of our visits to museums and our wanderings through Oahu, there was a key destination we had set before us. An entire day was set aside for a visit to Pearl Harbor, the Naval Aviation Museum, and the two great battleships that rest in that harbor.

As a pastor, I shouldn’t like battleships, I suppose. They are, after all, instruments of war. But the twelve year old boy in me just couldn’t quite get over the cool of it. I wandered the decks of the retired USS Missouri, the Mighty Mo, it’s hard not to be impressed by the scale and scope of it.

Here, a ship that was active in my lifetime, with a storied history spanning decades. It was a history so mythic that some of those myths had apparently somehow worked its way into the schpiel of our cheery Hawaiian bus driver. Did you know the Missouri could be ready for action in less than a week, he intoned over the intercom. Well, no, actually, that was a movie about aliens. And you didn’t need myth. There’s a primal quality to it, this immense vessel with its immense 14 inch cannons that could easily hurl me and and my Prius most of the way back to Annandale. '

'It’d be much a faster commute, but I don’t think it would end well. 
'
'I stood there, right there, on the spot where MacArthur and Shigemitsu signed the end of that terrible war, and it was hard not to feel the ghosts of that September day for the peoples of both nations.

The other battleship we saw that day, though, was more solemn, and our visit there was also about family history. We took the ride over to the USS Arizona Memorial, and peered over the edge of that stark and simple building into the clear water of the harbor. From the depths below, oil still drifts up from the coral encrusted corpse of that broken ship. The BB­39 had been thirty thousand tons of steel, six hundred feet long, and in that floating, bristling fortress, one thousand five hundred and twelve young men lived and worked together. For one thousand one hundred and seventy seven of them, enough souls to fill every seat in every church in Poolesville, the first day of that war was their last. There, on a far wall, was a long list of names.

I was there not just for the history, but for one name. When I was a boy, I’d talked with my grandfather about that war. He’d lived through it, and my child’s mind was a whirl of Zeros and P­38s. My family wasn’t a warrior bunch on either side, mostly farmers and pastors and mathematicians, but when I asked him if he knew anyone who had died in that war, he said he did. He’d shared with me that his first cousin had been on the Arizona. We searched for his name among the sailors, but couldn’t find it. But there was another list there, nestled in the larger list of crew, laying out the names of the marine contingent on board. 

There he was. R.G. Huff.

It was a peculiar thing, there in that distant paradise, to think of how so many lives would have come so quickly to an end. At one moment, for this cousin, this family, blood of my blood, young life had been an adventure. He would have been just a few years older than my oldest son. For a while, life was work and duty, mixed with oceans and far off ports and the beauty of an island eden. And in another instant, it was over, as were the lives of everyone he knew.

It was important to remember him, to have that time set aside for remembrance. I do and will always struggle with the idea of war. Even though in my own life it has remained blessedly distant, I am not fool enough to think of it as a marvelous thing. It is a terrible thing, as it always has been. So I think of this weekend as a time to remember the lives of the hundreds of thousands of human beings touched by war, and his life in particular. As I remember that life, remember that he served, I remember also that he worked alongside others, as part of a community that supported one another and sustained one another.

In that service, that servant ethic, in which individuals within a community see their duty in dedicating themselves to supporting and protecting one another, I can find a value that translates more cleanly into the Gospel, particularly as we stand in encounter with the story told by John this morning. It’s a story of duty, and a story of service.

The text today comes to us again from John’s story of Jesus, rich and deep and full of the Spirit. It’s a potent little saying, delivered by Jesus as he speaks about his imminent departure to his gathered friends. They’re feeling the coming loss, as Jesus talks obscurely about his coming departure.

As part of that conversation, he gives them a command, and presents them with a promise.
The command is a simple one. He’s ordering us­­using command language, after all­­to love one another. And yeah, I know, we don’t like anyone telling us what to do. But if we’ve committed to the path of Christ, this is a fundamental. If you’ve signed up for this Jesus thing, if you’ve said: I’m committed to the Way, then you’re committing yourself to his service. All he asks of us is that we love one another, and that we share that love. It should be a joy, and on many days, it is. On those days when it is not, when you’ve not had enough coffee or you’re just feeling grumpy and annoyed? Then it is your duty, to be done whether you feel like it or not. It’s duty. You do it, because you’ve said you would.

And then there is a promise. Jesus promises their disciples that as they work their way through life, he won’t be with them­­but another will be.

That other is described by various bibles in various ways. It’s the “helper.” It’s the “Comforter.” In John 14:16 today, we heard it described as the “Advocate.” Advocate is the best word, really, because it comes closest to the the language first used in this Gospel. It’s a term used to describe the Holy Spirit, the presence of God in and with us.

The word John used to tell the world what Jesus had said was the word parakletos. In the Greek, para means together with, right by your side, close in. It’s a prefix of support, of care, of help, right there at your time of need.

Think, for example, of the word parachute. It’s what you need strapped tight to your back as you’ve flung yourself from the burning plan, as the ground is rushing up towards you. They’re first there, right there, giving you the care you need to make sure you make it through that vital first few minutes.

Then there’s the second half of the word: kaleo. It means to make a call or judgment, and taken together, the whole word means the one who knows you intimately, and from that intimate understanding is willing to speak on your behalf. They are your supporter, they stand with you, they serve you.

That’s the grace of the Spirit, as it’s given to us. But it’s not a gift given to us for ourselves alone. It governs and defines our duty towards others. As we invite that Spirit into us, we take it on as our purpose.

Meaning, we’re called to care for and serve and advocate for others, just as God cares for and serves and advocates for us.

It means intentionally seeking out ways to do this. If we are genuinely committed to our duty to serve Jesus of Nazareth, then we can’t say we’re too busy with other things. Our consumer culture will try to steal that time, to take away our commitment to Christ and turn our energies elsewhere. We have to make the time, to prioritize those relationships of care, as we use our energies and gifts not for our own glory, but for building up others.

[Example­­--ya gotta listen to the sermon for this one, my friend.  Just click on the embed...] 

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

Doing Our Job

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

08.31.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Romans 12: 9 - 21

Yeah, I know, y’all here in Maryland have had a whole week of school already.

But it’s still summer, still hot and steamy on both sides of the Potomac, because of course it is.  It’s the Labor Day weekend, when summer still holds sway, right before we throw ourselves back into the flow of the year.  For those of us across the river in Virginia, Labor Day means nooow we can end summer.  Maybe it’s because we’re just a little further South, and we know that trying to get things going before the swampy heat has finally left the air will just make us want to lay out on the porch with a mint julep.

No matter what today happens to feel like, the lazy days of summer, those doldrums and drifting nothings of the final weeks of August, they’re finally winding down.  We’re back to work, and school is back, and that means a different thing every year.  Because every year, we put our beloved bundles of joy into the hands of a new cadre of teachers.

And that’s always interesting.  It’s interesting because, well, I’ve known so many teachers.  I’ve had wonderful, wonderful teachers, people who’ve radically changed the flow of my life by sharing their love for learning.  There was Uncle Bob, the English teacher who taught me to hone and focus my writing, teaching me that just because I’d developed a huge vocabulary I didn’t need to aim an endless firehose of words at people.  Be precise.  Be evocative.  Trust the imagination of your reader.  Please.

For that, and for the relatively brief sermons that writing lesson has produced, we can all be truly thankful.

There was Dr. B, the high school history teacher who brought history to life, who told it like a story, rich and complex and interconnected and human.  He pushed us, and demanded the best of us, but he also trusted that we’d deliver, and respected our best efforts.  I learned as much from him as I’ve learned from anyone.

There was my physics teacher, Judy, who we all called Grumby.  She just loved science, the wonder of losing yourself in the structure of creation.  She’d get excited about experiments, and taught us to look at equations like we’d look at a really cool puzzle, and when we actually managed to solve something on our own, her delight was genuine.  More than anything, she shared her enthusiasm with all of us.  Science is amazing and fun, she’d say, and she meant it.

They had impact, impact that still ripples down all these years later, and as our kids go off to school, the knowledge that there are some wonderful, gifted teachers out there who are going to challenge our kids to excel is heartening.

There is, of course, a flip side.  Because teachers are human beings.  Yes, I know, it’s hard to believe that when you’re a kid, but they are.  There are great teachers, and there are good teachers, and there are...well...not so good teachers.

For every Albus Dumbledore or Minerva McGonegal, there’s a Dolores Umbridge or a Gilderoy Lockhart.  That’s true in every vocation, and in every field of endeavor.  There are good cops and bad cops, good CEOs and bad CEOs, good pilots and bad pilots, good farmers and bad farmers, good soldiers and bad ones.  

Except for pastors.  There are only good pastors.  Um, right?   Ahem.

It’s a continuum, really, not a binary thing, and the danger that all of us face is that we can find ourselves drifting from one place to another.  We can start out with the best of hopes and intentions.    But we burn out, and get worn down.  We can lose our way in the thickets of distraction, focusing on process to the point where we forget our goal, or becoming so target-fixated on our goal that we forget the point of it as we claw our way there.  

From the Apostle Paul today, we get some vital teaching about the point of what we do.  What matters, in the day to day work of our lives?  What makes our efforts real, and worthwhile?

By the time we reach the middle of chapter twelve of this highly complex letter, we’re beginning the end of what Paul has to say to Rome.  He’s already pitched out some wild and complicated theology, as he pulled out the stops for his educated Roman audience.  For most of the letter, it’s difficult going, demanding our attention, demanding our focus.  

From Paul’s rock-solid foundation as a brilliant rhetorician, he’s crafted an extended exploration of what it means to be reconciled to God’s grace through faith, which fills the first eight chapters of the letter.  From chapters nine through eleven, it’s a dizzying theological and historical explanation of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity.

Then we get to chapter twelve, and the whole tone of the letter changes.  “So,” Paul says, “I’ve just like, totally blown your theological mind. Catch your breath.  Let’s take it down a bit, to the here and now, to what it means when this thing is real.”

When the Apostle Paul starts describing the end results of faith, the results of our struggle to embrace and serve God in this life, what’s striking is the degree to which he just gets down to brass tacks. His writing here is as basic and straightforward as the rest of this letter is complicated.

The Christian Way, after all, is a vocation.  It’s a calling.  If we’re allowing it to be what Jesus meant it to be for all of us, it’s the job of jobs, and like all good work, you can tell when you’re doing it right.

Paul lays the measures out, one by one.  Love is a huge part of it, the main part of it, the entire point of it, love and everything it means in our lives.  It means being giving, celebrating and rejoicing in the happiness of others.  It means refusing to let the human desire for vengeance to seep into your being, and become the reason you live as you do.  Compassion becomes the measure for every action.

It means actually caring about how you live and act, knowing that living out the teachings of Jesus isn’t something you can do grudgingly or emptily.  For that path to thrive, it has to be integrated into your whole being.  It has to be authentic.  It has to really matter.

It means not treating anyone differently, in honoring every person, no matter who they are or what they do.  The wealthy and the powerful and the famous should be no more worthy of your love and compassion than the poor and the weak and the unknown.  That one in particular was hard for the folks in Rome to hear, because First century Rome was an honor/shame culture, a carefully structured hierarchy, in which everyone knew their place.  You obeyed your superiors, and your inferiors were expected to come to you on bended knee.  Roman society was a place where you were forever trying to build connections, to develop contacts, to amass reputation so that you could move ever upward in the pecking order of society.  

Nothing like Washington in the 21st century.  Nothing at all.

And it needs to be chosen, again and again, as you move through life.  Every time we decide, every time we take an action, those basic measures apply to our Christian vocation.

They also, as it happens, are the primary measures of our work in any field of endeavor.  If we’re a student or a teacher, a public servant or a business person, these things matter.  I think about every great teacher I ever had, and those measures stand.  They really cared for their students.  They loved the subjects they taught.  They were authentic, genuine, and real persons, who embraced their role but did not allow it to crowd out their humanity.

In everything we do and everything we attempt, in our every task and action, remember that this is the point of it.

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

Old Clothes

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

08.24.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Isaiah 51:1-6

I‘m really bad about getting rid of clothes.  My wife reminds me of this, regularly.  “Honey, you really shouldn’t still be wearing those pants,” she’ll say, shaking her head, as I wander around Annandale in jeans so shredded they’d embarrass an eighties glam-metal band.

She’s right, of course.  I do hang on to things.

There, in my drawers and in the third portion of our bedroom closet space that I get to use, there are garments that have accreted over the nearly thirty years since I finally stopped growing.  There’s a shirt with a bright yellow sun, a shirt that a certain eighteen year old girl gave me.  It was her first present to me, purchased when she went down to Florida to visit her grandparents, just weeks after we’d started dating.  It’s threadbare and worn to the point where it might just dissolve if I washed it again, but I can’t quite bring myself to be rid of it.

There in the closet is a deep navy collar shirt, still neat and comfy, part of the uniform I wore when I was working as a stock clerk at a little shop and restaurant in Williamsburg, all of twenty-two years of age.  That, I still wear.

There rolled up in the back of a drawer is a strange mottled tie-dye, one purchased when my new bride and I took a honeymoon taxi jaunt into the green hills of Jamaica with this much older couple we’d met at our high security entertainment resort compound.  Thinking back, that couple must have been, gosh, maybe in their early thirties.  The shirt was a bargain, mostly because it was an ugly mess.  You want to buy that shirt?  The one that looks like mud and bile?  What you been smokin’, mon?   Even though I wouldn’t be caught dead in it now, I can’t be rid of it.

I have clothes, still, that were handed down from my grandfather.  I have clothes, still, that were handed down to me from my wife’s grandfather, who was just my size.  When we went, with family, to the gravesite as part of the Jewish tradition marking a year after his passing, I was wearing one of his shirts, and a pair of his pants, and his jacket, and his socks.

I have inexplicable clothes, like the shirt neatly rolled up in the back of my tshirt drawer.  On it, pictures drawn by every child in my younger son’s three’s class in preschool.  It’s a tiny little thing, a shirt that looks made for a stuffed animal.  I’d be hard pressed to fit it on my head as a hat.  And yet once my now 14 year old fit into it.

I just don’t like getting rid of clothes, especially if they’re imbued with positive memories, and double-especially-plus if they still fit me, even if only as a hat.  We like holding on to good things, we do.

Part of the reason for that may be that so much of what the world clings to seems dark and bitter.  At every turn, the world seems like a ruin.  You can’t power up your laptop without being bombarded by images of war and loss and horror.  You can’t drop onto Facebook for a kitten-picture-fix or a vacation image update without someone pitching up some reminder of the world’s brokenness.

The media hums and crackles with hysteria, every headline and talking head talking about the darkness, it’s easy to yield to the sense that what matters about humankind and our relationship with God is simply that we are an utterly irredeemable mess.  What seems permanent, etched forever in stone, is the brokenness of humankind.  We see it everywhere.  We see it in the violence and distrust on the streets of Ferguson, in the seemingly intractable mess in Gaza.  We see it as diseases straight out of our darkest tales of horror burn across Africa.  We see it as bombs and bloodshed still rage in the Middle East, and as Afghanistan teeters towards chaos and collapse.

What are you going to do to cheer yourself up these days, watch a Disney film?  You could pop in Aladdin...oh...wait.  Sigh.  

It feels sometimes like we are trapped in mess, wrapped up in mess as inescapably as a 19th century madman in a Bedlam straightjacket.  In that dark place, we lose our ability to see any other possibility than darkness.  We can feel trapped, helpless, and alone.

From the Book of the Prophet Isaiah today we hear a message from a time in which--for an entire people--the struggle to get around the brokenness of the world seemed insurmountable.  Most Bible scholars worth their salt see the Book of Isaiah divided up into three clear sections, each of which has it’s own particular focus.

Today’s section comes from what is known as Second Isaiah, which was written and preached over five hundred years before Christ by a prophet who followed the tradition of Isaiah. Its visions and proclamations do not describe a Hebrew people comfortably ensconced in Jerusalem and the temple, as do the first thirty-nine chapters. They assume that the Jewish people are shattered in the Babylonian exile, that they are slaves, that they are surrounded by the proud power of the world’s greatest empire.

What those enslaved people saw, around them, were some of the most impressive structures that humankind had ever built.  They saw towers and gardens, wonders of the world.  They saw great golden statues to strange and alien gods.  They saw the force of arms of a mighty empire that dwarfed even the greatest aspirations of their people.  In the hands of those who had enslaved them, all the power of the world seemed to reside.

There just seemed no way out of it.

It was hard. It seemed hopeless. People began to despair.

But the word from God that Isaiah proclaimed defied their hopelessness. It was a word of intense and shattering hope, a word that comes directly from the prophet’s sense of being anointed with the Spirit of the Living God. It’s a word of intense confidence in the power of God to bring about restoration.

For the oppressed and the brokenhearted and the captives, the prophet affirmed the devastation that they were experiencing. Yet in the face of their suffering...and in some way because of their suffering...the prophet declares that God’s love is infinitely greater than the powers of darkness that seemed so mighty all around them.

In this passage, he goes back to ancient promises to their ancestors, promises that were fulfilled.  He acknowledges that they’re in a wasteland, and doesn’t mock their experience of suffering.

What he does do is put into the context of the Creator of the Universe.  Look at everything you, Isaiah says.  Look at it.  The heavens?  They are no more substantial than smoke before a strong wind.  Those powerful people?  Their lives are as short as the lives of tiny flies.  And the seemingly tight knit power of the world?  That comes apart like a Kmart tube sock on the foot of a teenage boy.

It wears out like a garment.

It’s a word that they needed to hear, and a word without which their hearts would have been too broken to continue. It’s also a word that many of us need to hear in the darker places of our lives, as many of us look fearfully out at the seemingly insurmountable power of the broken world around us.

In his reaffirmation of God’s eternal power and love for all of his people, the prophet is affirming two things to those who despaired.  

First, that the only way out of a broken place lies in not allowing that brokenness to become the only thing you see.  That’s the great challenge that lies in those times when our lives seem to have closed in around us.  God’s capacity to make things new stands without boundary, and without limit.  But we too often hold on to the broken things, the darknesses and the griefs and the angers, and allow them to define our view of existence.  

That’s a place devoid of hope, and if we let ourselves be wrapped in it, it becomes a shroud.  That, more than anything, is the dark lie of depression, which whispers that there can never be change, never be good, never be anything again.

Second, the prophet affirms that no matter what happens, God holds on to those good things.  Salvation will be forever, and deliverance will never be ended, says the prophet.  Promises once made remain, and promises yet unfulfilled will be written forever into the book of life.

Whatever may shroud you now, whatever snares you and holds you, that’s not God’s will.  Let it fall away, and trust that this is God’s desire for you, a strong promise to a beloved child.

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

What We’ve Got

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 08.03.14

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 14:13-21

It’s rolling into late summer, and that means engaging with a favorite late summer pastime with my boys.  The wild bustle of the summer shuttling has reached the August doldrums, which means we finally have time to look around at the clutter and mess of the house, and begin the summer kid junk deletion.

Every year, we sort through the piles of debris that have built up and gathered, the old abandoned mess that has accreted into our lives over the years.  It’s fun, actually, like flipping through a scrapbook, the kind of chore that the kids volunteer for.  I remember when I got this!  I remember when we were there!

The flow of stuff into the lives of our children isn’t like a water fountain of possessions.  It’s like a water cannon, one of those truck-mounted jobbies that you use to extinguish burning aircraft or knock down rioters. The next time we have a water fight with the Baptists down the street, we are so going to rent one of those.

 It’s such a great wash of things that it seems sometimes to overwhelm us.  Cleaning out the results of that flow is both satisfying and necessary, as vital to our home as dreaming is to our minds, or defragging is to a hard drive.

Last year, during the summer, we cleared out the stuff they’d outgrown, and didn’t need or want.  The year before, during the summer, we cleared out the stuff they didn’t need or want.  And yet, still and all, when we went this week to clear out the stuff they didn’t need or want, there was a full thirty-two gallon garbage bag of stuff that was so useless and broken that it couldn’t even be donated.

Which, of course, we were keeping around the house, neatly stored in bins.  Or, rather, not so neatly stored, but it was in bins.  Mostly.

And yet here we are, in a society with so much that we struggle to know what to do with it, so much that we spend, according to the Self Storage Association of America, twenty-four billion dollars a year in the United States to rent space in one of the almost fifty thousand storage facilities in this country, where we stash the things we don’t have room for in our overstuffed homes.  What we have here in America is a choking overabundance.  

The desperate irony is that we are taught to feel, somehow, that this is not quite enough.  There’s still this carefully taught hunger, this sense that somehow what we have doesn’t cut it, a sense that is reinforced every time we’re bombarded with carefully targeted ads whenever we connect with the news or sit down to share baby pictures and arguments about Gaza on Facebook. Here is the car you do not have! Here are more shoes!

We are a society that, even in the face of having everything we could possibly need, is taught to be ever anxious.  Even more, so many of us feel deeply and radically alone, isolated from one another, distrustful of one another.  Here we are, connected to the whole world, with our thousand and four Facebook friends and millions of human beings there for us to connect with, and yet we feel more isolated and lonely than ever.  Anxiety can consume us, doubt at our ability to spread graciousness in the world tears at us, and we can despair.

Just as the disciples despaired, as they looked out into the crowds that surrounded in the gathering darkness of evening.

This story, of the loaves and the fishes, may be a familiar tale.  It is retold by all of the Gospels, but it’s got a couple of unusual and noteworthy elements.  First, it’s a really rather amazingly simple event.  It’s visceral, a fundamentally graspable and elemental thing, the stuff of the every day.

What it’s not is a hugely impressive mega-miracle, the sort of thing that would strike you as amazing the moment you saw it.  It’s nothing wild and supernatural, not a pillar of fire, not the Red Sea parting, not the 113th Congress actually getting something done.  You’d barely have even noticed, if you were there watching.

Up at the front, you’d have seen Jesus speaking a blessing, and then the disciples taking what little food they had and starting to share it with those around them.  Nothing glorious or striking about it.  It’s just that there was food, and everyone got fed.

Which is a miracle in and of itself, the sort of miracle we blunder right on by pretty much every day.  The yellow light from a G-class star falls on our rocky world.  In a wildly complex organic response, those photons awake grains, which rise up tall and golden and rich with life to meet that light.  Even more complicated organic beings systematically harvest those grains, which they’ve somehow learned to grind and mix and heat and mix with other organisms to make it rise.  Bread.  So simple.  So taken for granted, though it is part of the miracle of life itself and the glorious abundance of God’s creation.  That miracle we miss, even though it is amazing and wondrous.

Being a vegetarian and all, I won’t talk about the fish half of the equation.  Poor little fishies.  Snif.

There was food, and everyone got fed.  Everyone.

That second part was what the disciples struggled with.  Here in Matthew’s telling of the story, he and Mark speak the same truth.  They’ve gone to a “lonely place,” a place away from the crowds, for the sole purpose of getting away from the hubbub for a little while.

But the crowds have followed, setting out to hear this prophet, this teacher, this wonderworker.  The day was growing late, and the disciples, seeing the throngs, were eager to wrap things up and get people home.  That, and they were worried, because out there in the wild, there was no way they could insure everyone got fed.  Here they were in the wilderness, with nary a Burger King or Dennys in sight.

How can we know they’ve got food?  We have food, sure, but they might not.  They are anxious about the gathering, anxious that hungry crowds might lose sight of their message, anxious that there will not be enough.

Which, Jesus knew, there was.

In the face of their anxiety about what they had, Jesus told them: give it away.  Break the bread.  Cook the fish.  Share it with a blessing.

And sure, you can read this as the more traditional miracle if you so choose, as if Scotty had beamed down a replicator from the Enterprise and they were cranking out copies of loaves and tilapia.

I tend to see the miracle that spread through the crowd not as the fish or the bread, but the blessing that rode with it.  Here, Jesus insures that everyone will be fed by graciously, confidently sharing what they had, and sending the blessing of that sharing out into the throng.

Because while the disciples did not trust either their own resources or the resources of others, Jesus did.  Here, a crowd has come to learn about the grace of the Kingdom.  They’ve gone into the wilderness.

Jesus knew: you do not go into the wilderness without food.  I mean, seriously, my family can’t take any trip of more than twenty minutes without bringing along provisions.  If you’re going on a trip of indefinite duration, wandering into the desert, you’re going to bring a snack.

This Jesus knew.  And the start of that miracle was the act of turning around, not worrying about it, and sharing graciously.  If that alone was what Jesus did that evening, if all that happened was that through an act of grace, grace spread through every person gathered there and everyone shared in what they had without anxiety or grasping, that in and of itself is quite a miracle.

We who have so much poured out to us, and in whom so much potential lies, we need to trust that sort of miracle in us.

Some miracles are just right there, ready to happen, just waiting to be seen and acted upon.  The joy of life, of growing and giving and sharing from whatever sweetness we have been given?  That’s the deepest of miracles.  But first, we have to be able to see it through the thickets of our anxiety, and the depths of our grasping.  When we are choking on our plenty, we need to trust that

Know that you have the grace in you to pass along that blessing.  Trust that others have the grace in them to do the same.

And let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.