An Understanding Mind

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams, 08.16.15

Scripture Lesson: 1 Kings 2:10-12; 3::3-14

Listen to Audio Here:

Vacation.  It seems like such a simple word, such a straightforward concept.

The idea seems simple enough.  You go somewhere, far away.  What you bring with you is nothing but the most precious and important things in your life, that and five cubic yards of material possessions, packed into a dense mass in the back of your groaning vehicle, every last thing you need to have with you so that you can leave it all behind.

You get to your destination, and then spend a good half-hour unpacking.  It’s like playing minivan Jenga, each piece coming out carefully so as not to dump the entire load out of the van in a tumbling avalanche of bags and cases and boogie boards.  

Vacation is, by definition, vacatio, from the Latin meaning to be empty, as empty as your mind becomes after zenning out on a sandcastle for four hours.  The word is related to vacuum, which, hopefully, was not one of the things you felt compelled to pack.  

But as full as our vehicles are, I wonder if vacatio is something we’re even capable of any more.  Vacatio is by definition freedom, the freedom that was meant to come from setting it all aside, and rediscovering ourselves in the process.

Only now, well, it’s not.

And sure, there’ve always been ways that work intrudes onto those times we take away.  But now, the life we’ve left behind isn’t left behind.  It’s there on our laptops and our tablets and our pocket devil boxes, as we continue to text and Snapchat and message and Instagram just like we always do.

If I’m reading my way through a novel, one of the books I inhale when I’ve found a quiet little corner to hide away, I make a point of sharing my review of that book on Goodreads, because, well, hey, that’s what I always do.

If I’m going down to the beach to build some weird totemic sand sculpture, I’ll bring a large shovel, several small shovels, an array of carving tools, two large buckets to mix the precise sand/water mixture required.  And my smartphone, from which to share pictures with the entire universe of those I know via social media, after which I can check back every quarter hour to see how many likes I’ve gotten.

It’s a strange mix, because honestly, I enjoy seeing what others are doing.  But being a chronic Presbyterian overthinker, I can’t help but wonder: is this really vacation?  And then I start thinking about Latin root meanings, because that’s what overthinkers do.

It seems to open us up, it does, this new form of connection with those around us, as the images and thoughts that make up our day to day reality can be shared and offered up to those around us.  

Here, images from our life, or from the lives of others around us, and we can share those memories as immediately as we choose, with everyone we know.  It can be a good thing.  It lets us share joys and sorrows, to celebrate or lean on the collective shoulder of our friends when hard things weigh us down.

At the dawn of the internet era, this was the goal.  New media would be mean a new us.  In an era when everything was connected, mutual awareness and mutual understanding would blossom like a field of sunflowers, and as we learned more and more about one another, the petty bigotries and miseries of our isolated, separate existence would come apart.

It’d be a new and wonderful paradise, an era of mutual understanding.

Only, well, all of that connection hasn’t always worked out that way.  It can liberate, or bring anxiety.  It can help deepen understanding, or

Each of the texts that we’ve shared today sings a song of Wisdom as it expresses itself in the journey of life and faith.  Wisdom, first and foremost, is about our capacity to understand the best path for bringing life into balance, about finding our path

From the Book of Proverbs, that ancient collection of teachings about how to live a balanced, sane, and just life, we together read an homage to Wisdom itself.  Wisdom, as it’s made manifest in the writings of the Hebrew scriptures, is almost always conceptualized as a woman.  In that passage, we hear a call put out to any and all who are willing to listen, of a metaphorical meal set out for those who are willing to partake of it.

From the letter to the church at Ephesus, that call to live wisely and in balance is taken up by the early Christian church, as the author of the letter to the Ephesians encourages those first walkers of the way to resist the violent decadence of Roman society and to live in a way that reflected the Good News.  This was radically, fundamentally countercultural in the Greco-Roman world, as much so as it is today.

Roman culture was all about power and social connection, about how many people depended on you and were connected to your authority.  It was all about who knew you, who owed you, and who you owned.

What those early Christians were asked to prioritize, instead, was the sort of power that is described in 1 Kings this morning.  It’s the story of Solomon, son of David, the second...and last...of the kings of the Jewish people.  In the ancient world, where a monarch’s absolute power could make a serious mess of things, the single most desirable trait in a leader was wisdom, the ability to--in a careful, measured, and thoughtful way--discern the best possible path for a people.

Solomon has a dream, a dream in which God asks what he wants, and what Solomon replies is not that he wants armored limos and personal chefs and the trappings of wealth.  What he wants is “an understanding mind,” the capacity to know what the best course of action is under any particular circumstance.

Whether this story is literally true or hagiography is almost impossible to discern, these thousands of years later.  But it indicates that what matters to God is not a hunger for power or connection, not a desire for charm and acclaim, but instead the desire to choose rightly in whichever place we find ourselves.  

And in that choosing, about how to live rightly and in balance, social media is increasingly a factor.

Social media can make us reactive and impulsive, turning our attention to the right now and the outrage and...oh look, a puppy!   Social media encourages us to feel the big feely feels, right now.  Tears.  OMFG.  I just can't.  I am so done!  This!   

As we engage with this new form of communication, Wisdom gently requests that we be deliberative, considering our actions and our responses before we respond to something, or before we pass something along.  A wise person, as Proverbs 11:12 reminds us, keeps their peace, considering before they share.

Social media can be where you look for those who affirm what you believe, where we choose our own virtual echo chambers.  It calcifies positions, hardening social and political lines.  It can, if approached with the wrong spirit, drive us to cement our positions.  Wisdom takes criticism, listens, and changes.  

Social media goes with it, often becoming full-on virtual mobbery, just as filled with passion and destructive potential, and just as easily manipulated.  The"wisdom of crowds?"  Honey, please.  That ain't never been true, say I, with the colloquial emphatic double negative.   Social media screams wildly, stirring our fears and anxieties, creating discord and tension for the sake of drawing eyeballs, spreading outrage, an endless fractal Fibonacci sequence of manufactured umbrage and trollery.   Wisdom is wary of dangerous company, of the mob mentality and of the power that gives to the unjust and the rabble-rouser.

Wisdom, in other words, is willing to be emptied of those things.  The wise soul exists with a vacation mind.

As we engage and are engaged by this new form of media, the witness of wisdom is essential.  Because with an understanding mind, a mind willing to let itself be emptied of the anxieties and mob-panic and to consider every action, this new era

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

Being Fed

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

08.02.2015; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  John 6:24-35

The year was 1972, and an NIH researcher by the name of John B. Calhoun was conducting an experiment.

That experiment was simple: build paradise.  Utopian societies are kind of hard to create, or so human beings have found out, so Mr. Calhoun chose instead to go simpler.  He chose to build a utopia for mice.  Mice would seem to have lower standards for paradise, as they generally don’t require jet packs and fairy castles, roller coasters and small independent brewpubs and a nationally ranked school in convenient walking distance for the kids.

Calhoun figured that what mice wanted was simple.  First, no predators.  So mouse utopia was entirely catless, which seems a good first step.  Second, there was ample space.  Calhoun’s mouse utopia was a large space with many chambers, plenty of room for the mice to live and make more mice, which mice seem to enjoy doing.  The habitat included space for well over thousand mice, with ample bedding material that was constantly replenished.  Articles about the experiment make no mention of whether there was a tiny little mouse IKEA nearby, but there may well have been.   Third, no disease.  Every mouse selected as part of the experiment was carefully vetted and illness-free.

And finally, Calhoun made absolutely sure that there was always as much food and drink as the mice could ever need.  This wasn’t a Malthusian exercise, in which the mice would reproduce until there were too many mice and not enough food.  Instead, it was like being on a rodent Carnival cruise, with open buffets 24 hours a day, all the food you can eat, whenever you want it.  No matter how many mice there were, there would always be enough food.  There would never be starvation or thirst in Mouse Utopia.

He named that space Universe 25, because, well, he’d done this before.

And then he set eight mice--four males, and four females--into that world, and watched.  For a while, all was well.  There was plenty, enough for all, and mice did what mice do.  Eight became eighty, then eight hundred.  Still, there was enough food, plenty for all.  Eight hundred became a thousand, then two thousand, and though the world grew crowded, there was still plenty of food and drink for all.  At five hundred days, the mouse-paradise reached a population of two-thousand two-hundred, nowhere near the theoretical carrying capacity of the habitat.

Then things came apart. Meaning, what makes mice mice, what gives them their mouseness when they live together? That came apart. Mouse society collapsed. Males stopped defending territory, and lost interest in reproduction. Most of the others, stripped of their usual social roles and without any purpose, became alternately listless or hyperviolent.  Some of the males became what Calhoun called “beautiful ones,” only interested in grooming, sleeping, and eating.  Females abandoned their young, fleeing off by themselves to empty habitat areas.  Universe 25 never recovered, and within months, all the mice were dead.  Even though there was still space, and even though the buffet was still open and stocked.  Just having plenty, it seems, was not enough.

Living creatures, even such simple ones as mice, need more.  We human beings need considerably more.  

The “more” that we need is written all over the passage we heard from John’s Gospel this morning, although while it’s written in terms that are simple, that doesn’t necessarily make it easy to grasp.    

John’s Gospel is easily the richest and most spiritual of the Gospels.  It speaks most directly to the relationship Jesus has with God, to his identity, and to the purpose of his life.  It is also the Gospel that speaks most potently to the presence and nature of the Holy Spirit, God’s transforming presence in and among us.

The purpose of Christ’s time among us is laid out in John, more often than not in statements about Christ’s nature that are cast in “I am”  statements.  Using these, Jesus presents his identity in language rich in metaphor and symbolism.  This particular portion of John’s Gospel, lays out imagery that is powerfully eucharistic.  Eucharist, the combination of “good” and “gift,” that peculiar word we use to describe the meal we Christians all are asked to share.  Here, John’s Gospel tells us the story of the purpose of communion.

It is a purpose, we hear, that goes well beyond food.  John’s Gospel has just told us a story about food, that “feeding of the five thousand” tale again, and that event has gotten people as excited as they are about free donuts on national donut day.  That’ll be June 3, 2016, folks.  Be sure to mark your calendars.  The crowds pile into boats, and chase after Jesus, filled with excitement at the prospect of the encounter.

But when they find him, he’s a little less than welcoming.  He doesn’t work the crowd.  He responds to their pursuit with a slightly cynical attitude.  You’re not really here because of what I truly represent.  You’re here because you ate bread.

That stings a little, and so from the crowd comes a genuine question: What should we do?  Tell us what to do!

Jesus has described himself using the phrase “I am the bread of life.”  He talks about bread that comes from heaven, evoking the ancient story of manna in the wilderness. That story, of receiving what was needed at a time of hunger, is usually understood as being about sustaining the lives of the Israelites as they wandered through the wilderness.  It’s the story of avoiding starvation, and of God’s material providence.  It’s God the Father, pulling the family minivan into a drivethrough that has miraculously appeared just as the situation had gotten unworkably dire.

But as with so much of what Jesus did, he pressed his listeners to move beyond their understanding of that text, and deeper into understanding the purpose of what he was doing in the world.  What he was offering was not about food, not about drink.  It was more.

The essence of what Jesus is teaching here has to do with both incarnation and the Spirit.  What he is telling us has to do with the nature of our participation in who he was, and his participation in who we are.

It is a statement of spirit, and a statement of purpose, because it is purpose that Jesus brings.  What is offered up by Jesus, in his whole person, is meaning.

Jesus, a person who made flesh and taught what it meant to live according to God’s best and most gracious intent, was himself the nourishment.  We partake of him by believing, meaning not that we agree to a set of propositions or arguments, but that we turn our whole lives towards the goal he established.

This is the point of faith, the reason we have faith, and why faith is so important for all human beings.  What faith does is give us both ground to stand on, and a goal, and in that, it does so much more than food.

Not that we don’t need food to maintain the processes of our lives.  We do.  But without any sense of purpose, any goals, anything to guide us, food itself is not enough.  Just sustaining our lives is not enough.

And sure, yeah, we’re not mice, and the great belching cornucopia of global capitalism isn’t Universe 26.  Hopefully.  But it’s hard not to see parallels.  Here, we are blessed to live in a society where there is more than enough food to meet the needs of all.  Water is clean and freely accessible.  There are more than enough living spaces for every human being to stay warm and dry.

By all rights, the world we live in should be utopia.  And yet in the absence of a sense of meaning, of a clearly lived out purpose, we struggle.

In the meal we will soon share, and in the life we’re called to live in response to Jesus, find that purpose.

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

Among the Tombs

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Mark 5:1-20

LISTEN TO AUDIO HERE:

It is not good, or so the word comes from the ancient story of Genesis, for human beings to be alone.  Because we are social beings, creatures woven up of dirt and words, of stories shared and of lives together.

It is our ability to be together, or so an article in this month’s Scientific American argues, that made humankind the single most successful species in the great story of life on this world.  Dr. Curtis Marean, a professor of archaeology at Arizona State University, suggests that is not just our intellects that make human beings what he describes as “the most successful invasive species ever.”  I tend to take issue with the idea that we’re invasive, as if we’re little more than stinkbugs spreading across the continents, but there’s no question that human beings have had a really significant run on this planet.

What makes that possible, Marean suggests, was the unique capacity of homo sapiens sapiens to cooperate socially.  We can share purpose and knowledge with those around us, in ways that allow us to accomplish together what we could not accomplish alone.  We, together, are so much more than we are apart.

This is a true thing.  Sure, individual humans are wonderful creatures.  But when we pool our strength, when we share life together, we become something more than we are individually.  Individually, we can look at the moon and the stars and wonder.  Together, we can reach out and touch them.  

Which is why, in the rustle and chase of human life, it’s hard to see those places where human beings fall into isolation and separation.   Last week I talked about the expectations of culture, of how rushed and busy and distracted we can be.  Because as frenetic and as busy as life can be, in the thick of it there’s a peculiar shadow.

But the shadow-side of that busyness is this: many human beings in our connected, always on culture are increasingly socially isolated.  It’s a strange happening, one that is peculiarly counterintuitive.  You’d think, with all of the new ways to connect and to move, that we’d be much more able to interact with each other.  Yet somehow in that increased movement and exchange, we’ve wandered away from those places of personal face-to-face connection that we were created to require to thrive.  We travel and we move about, and friendships wane, families fray, and the circle of our tribes comes apart.  We were not made for the world we now inhabit, and that means more and more souls fall through the cracks.

And social isolation breeds all manner of soul-darkness.  Separated from other human beings, individuals become more aggressive, more on edge, more prone to paranoia and anger or depression.  We don’t even sleep well, waking throughout the night.  Scientists suggest that this is a natural response for human beings separated from their social group, as an isolated individual alone in the darkness of the savannah would be on edge, on guard against the bright eyes and the panther-fangs, the fight-or-flight instinct kicked fully in.

Being alone breeds what poet William Blake once called the “reptiles of the mind,” and it’s a deep spiral.  Isolation begets anxieties, which make you less able to socially connect, which makes you more and more isolated.   It’s a terrible, dark place, a place of death and madness.

And at the far side of a lake, on a desolate crag near the tombs of the dead, that is where the great story of the Gospel brings us this morning.  The broken soul in question is known as the Gerasene demonaic, a broken soul who was unmanageably shattered.

We hear that his community had been unable to handle him, unable to connect as his rages and angers grew more and more wild and destructive.  Finally, he was cast out from his community, both by his own anger and by their fear, cast out into the wilderness.

He was, as the story reminds us on several occasions, consigned to living among the dead, among the tombs, just him and his demons, who grew and thrived and reproduced until they were legion, a community of delusions and angers and loathings that were his only company.

It is he who steps up and challenges Jesus, he and all of his angers and delusions and loathings, and it is Jesus who...as the story goes...casts them out into a herd of pigs, which promptly freak out and fling themselves into the lake.

Even demons taste better with bacon, apparently.

This always bothered me a little bit, because my first thought is always, awwww, poor little piggies.  What did those pigs do to deserve that?  But for the first century Jewish ears that would have first heard Mark’s version of the Gospel story, pigs were considered ritually unclean, somehow inherently unpleasant creatures.  No one would have been worried about that.

I’m not sure there’s a contemporary analog that works.  Maybe it’s like if Jesus cast the demons out into a gathering of industry lobbyists and their hired congressmen and they threw themselves into the Potomac.  I don’t know.

What is perhaps the most striking part of this story is not the healing, wild and wonderfully mythic as it may be.  It’s the way Jesus interacts with that formerly shattered soul.  After the healing, they are talking, sitting together and sharing conversation.

“Let me go with you,” says the human being who has just finally found themselves and found purpose in their lives.  “Let me go with you.”  But Jesus rejects him.  No, you can’t, Jesus says.  It seems perhaps a little cruel, a little harsh.  Here, all this person wants is the company of the one who has made them whole.  But I am convinced, listening, that what Jesus is doing is not rejection.  Instead, he is responding with words that mark both the nature and completeness of the healing.

Here, to a soul that has lived in the agony of isolation, alone in the wilds with only the voices of madness to keep him company, what does Jesus say?  Go and be at home, with the understanding that home, finally, is a real thing.  Go and tell your friends, with the understanding that friends are there, waiting.

To the demoniac, healed, the most healing and potent words were this: you have a place.  You have a people.  Go be there, among them.  You are no longer alone.

The cost of human isolation is a heavy one, and one that I have personally felt.  It came several years ago, when things were going south in my last congregation, and I looked around and realized that my circle of friends had slowly eroded away to functionally nothing.

Though I’m introverted to the point of hermitishness, a helpful skillset if you’re a writer, I do enjoy the regular company of other people.   So that realization that I’d kind of whittled my total number of friends down to one person, a single friend, who I saw every couple of months?  That was a little disturbing.  

My days were mostly alone.  The kids would go off to school, and the wife off to work, and I’d realize--I’ve got no-one I can expect to talk to for the next six hours.  Not a soul.  Not today.  Not tomorrow.

In the midst of juggling work and seminary and children and church, I’d somehow managed over the years to develop shallow connections with many.  If you can’t go out to socialize with work folks because you need to get kids to tae kwon do, and you can’t socialize with your seminary cadre because you’ve got other commitments, it’s easy for the whole thing to just fade away.

And though church should be the first place one turns for community, there is...for pastors in particular...a danger in the social distance that comes from being the paid professional Christian.  I’d become the part-time organizational guy, the one who put out the fires and settled the fights and wiped the tears and dealt with the building.  I was pastor there, sure.  But I was no-one’s friend.  

Dear Lord Jesus, I thought, I’m lonely.  And as I felt my own reptiles arising...anxieties and angers that began to compromise my ability to serve, I knew I had work to do.

It meant that I had to work to be intentional about finding places of connection, which I was.  I went back to school.  I began volunteering in my community on a regular basis.

This, frankly, is one of the things that congregations, those gatherings of Jesus folks, should do well.  It’s the point of this gathering, of our sharing in fellowship and welcome, in a world filled with those who live among the tombs.

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

Coming and Going

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

07.19.2015;  Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 6:30-34; 53-56

LISTEN TO AUDIO HERE:

We are a wildly mobile society, and when I was a kid, I remember how cool I used to think that was.  America, the land where you never ever have to get out of your car even for a moment!

You’d sit in the back of the car, and pull up to the bank teller, and there’d be this wild contraption with tubes and pneumatics and funky little plastic containers.   “Let me put it in,” you’d say, because there’s nothing more exciting than depositing checks.  Whoosh, it would go, up and away, zooming through pipes, and then...thunk...right down there in front of the teller.  Cool.  Then there’d be paperwork, ooh, paperwork, and you’d watch carefully as they loaded up the tube-pod with receipts...oh, the excitement...and, of course, a handful of lollipops.  Whoosh, thunk, there it was back to you, you still sitting there in the comfort of your car only now with lollipops.

And then, from there, to a magical speaker on the side of a Wendy’s, where a muffled voice would speak in some strange and alien tongue.  “Wrkrm deWerndacnnatkk’r rda?”  And by some miracle, your parents knew that language, and would request fries and burgers and drinks, which were there ready for you when you pulled around.  Amazing.

It felt miraculous, like you’d arrived in the land of the future.  Lollipops through tubes to the comfort of your air-conditioned car!  French fries and burgers, right there!  Wow!  So convenient! We must be right on the cusp of the future.  Or so it felt, when I was a child.

Now that I’m a grown up, I have a slightly more jaded view.  Slightly.

And it’s not because we can do less in our cars.  We can do so much more.  We can watch movies, not just one movie, but everyone watching a different movie on their very own screens.  Cars have their own built in WiFi hotspots, laced into the great global sprawl of the internet, so that you can stream Rhett and Link or play Clash of Clans from right there in the comfort of your captain’s chair.  There are vehicles with built in vacuum cleaners, perfect for sucking up errand french fries and lollipop wrappers, which apparently we need because--even though we have a perfectly good vacuum at home-- we’re driving so much that we may have forgotten where our home is.

We’re on the go, always and without ever slowing down, it seems, rushing from one event to another event to another, a people who’ve come to accept that meals are things that can be inhaled while in the wild scurry between a meeting and football and tae kwon do.  It’s just what we do, and we do it because everyone else does it, so of course it must be the way that we’re supposed to be.

The challenge, in our lives now, is that we have so many ways of doing so much so much faster that we feel compelled to chase after them every moment.  Life can overtake us, even in what should be the syrupy slowness of summer.

It is into this reality, which defines the existence of so many suburban souls these days, that today’s scripture wanders.

It’s a story about eating, it is, only the Revised Common Lectionary, that list of readings that’s used by Christians all around the world, leaves most of the eating out.  This is the story of the feeding of the five thousand, as Mark’s Gospel tells it.  You know, loaves and fishes and all that good stuff, only for some reason, today’s passage just completely deletes that bit.  It also completely deletes the familiar story of Jesus walking on water, as he comes skiing across the sea of Galillee without a tow boat.  Strange, that those are the bits we’d edit out.  It’s like a picture, in which the picture has been removed, and all we have left is a lovely frame.

Why?  Why remove it?

Well, so that we can see what the context was, see some of the rationale underlying the story, and to get a sense of what life was like for that first circle of souls who gathered around Jesus.

The answer to that question:  it was busy.  It was crazy busy.  The disciples have just returned from being sent out to spread the message of the Good News, a message that they somehow managed to convey without any comfort or luxury.  They went out with a staff and sandals and one outfit, and that was it.  And as a result, it got really busy, as more and more people have responded to the message of transformation they preached.  It was the mad rush of the crowd, the chasing after one thing and then another, to the point where the disciples didn’t even have enough time to sit and share a meal together.  “Many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat.”

The answer Jesus had to offer them did not involve McDonalds drivethrough, mostly because I’m reasonably certain that McDonalds didn’t have a drivethrough until at least the year five hundred.  I think.  It’s been a bit since I ate there.

What Jesus says, instead, is this:

“Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.”

In Mark’s Gospel, the “deserted place” is described with the Greek word eremon, a word that surfaces repeatedly and with particular meaning.

It is to the eremon, to the “deserted place,” that Jesus goes when he needs to pray, center, and strengthen himself.  In Mark 6:35, we hear that he wakes early in the morning, after a wild and crowded day, and goes off to be alone for a while.  He evidently must have left his smartphone behind, because the disciples have no idea where he is or what he’s up to.  In the stories of Jesus going to prepare himself in the wilderness, the word used in Matthew’s Gospel and Luke’s Gospel for “wilderness” is the same.  Eremon.  It’s a desolate place, a wilderness, and while we might find that idea a little threatening and dangerous, it is not presented as such in the New Testament.  The eremon is a place of refuge, a place of quiet and stillness, a place where the expectations and demands of normal life are removed.  It is the place where God speaks.

And here in the bustling rush of this city, this place where we are always on the go and always connected and always moving, where family life now requires scheduling software just to keep things on track, this reminder is pointed and deep.

Sure, things should have decelerated here around Washington, dropped down into a pace of existence that reflects the great sopping steambath of a Southern summer.  But thanks to air conditioning that fills our churches and homes and transport pods, it may be summertime, but the living ain’t easy.  We don’t slow down any more, not here, not in this place of wild busyness.  For many families, the summer involves a wild juggling of schedules, as our vans and SUVs fill with wrappers and drink cups from the processed food we barely have time to eat.  to the point where it becomes a topic of conversation, of scheduling one-upsmanship.  

I’ll hear it as I sit in the popped open hatchback of our car, as harried moms circulate from van to van and chitchat during one of the storm delays that have blighted almost all of the swim meets this summer.

“We haven’t sat down for dinner in a week,” one said, part of a little cluster nestled under the hatch of a minivan.  “And I’m scheduled or double-scheduled every night for the next ten days.”  She listed off the events, the various activities and demands, and the other moms nodded, and shared their stories, like athletes showing off scars.

In all of that, in all of our coming and going, I wonder if there is time to listen for meaning and purpose, to attend to anything other than the chasing about of life.

And here, just as he takes time to move into those empty, quiet spaces, Jesus invites us, and his disciples, to do the same.

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

Likes and Friends and Followers

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

07.12.2015;  Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Mark 6:14-29

LISTEN TO AUDIO HERE:

I spend a fair amount of time on the internet, what with blogging and tweeting and emails and Facebook posts, part of the endless cycle of connectivity that seems to link us together these days.

I find social media in particular to be fascinating and peculiar, perhaps because it’s such a new phenomenon.  We take it for granted, just part of the background hum of being now, but it’s a remarkably, strikingly new thing.

Twenty three years ago, for example, it did not exist, except perhaps in the fevered sci-fi imagination of William Gibson.  That’s a non-random number, a number I pick because this week my wife and I celebrated twenty three years of marriage.  It’s one of those anniversaries, that, while it might mark a significant chunk of time, wouldn’t really have been worth doing all that much about in prior generations.  Silver?  That’d be another couple of years.  Gold is still a ways off.  This one, having looked it up, was the “Imperial Topaz” anniversary, wedged right in between spinel and tarzanite.  

I honestly haven’t paid much attention to those traditional annual gifts, which is probably a good thing.  According to the list of recommended gifts I googled recently, I was supposed to have bought my wife copper plate last year, which I totally managed not to do.  But the twenty fourth is supposedly the “musical instrument” anniversary, so I’m sure I can make up for it by giving her a copper kazoo.  

So we went out, had a nice dinner, and watched a show, and it was the kind of date one has for a anniversary of modest significance.  As part of that evening, the big guy took a couple of pictures of us for posterity.  Twenty three years ago, such a thing would have been normal.  But then, my wife asked: “Hey, are you going to share those on Facebook?”  Which I started to do, but then I thought, um, “Why?  Aren’t we on a date?”

I mean, sure, it’d get likes.  Anniversaries and birthdays and videos of puppies with the hiccups are like-magnets.  But, well, why should I want that?  Ten years ago, that wouldn’t have been an expectation, couldn’t have been, because Facebook didn’t even meaningfully exist.   And if I’d tried to do everything I do now on Facebook with everyone I know?  I mean, seriously.  Translate this into the analog era.  Let’s say this was the distant, distant past, the year two thousand and two.  Every single day all of you received in the mail from me a package containing pictures from my last week, little sayings, and a DVD containing a montage of pictures and videos of my dog.  Also included in that package would be a return envelope with check-boxes to indicate whether you liked that day’s mailer or not, along with space to write a comment.   How’d that have felt?    “Please stop sending me this,” I think you’d write in the comments box.

And yet that’s the thing we’re doing, socially, and on a vast scale.  We’ve gone from zero to one point four billion human beings using Facebook, and more using other social media, all within a decade.   It’s a new and completely different way of being together socially, and yet we human beings aren’t any different than we were twenty years ago.  We’re still the same complex, social, smart, and frustrating bipeds we were just a blink of an evolutionary eye ago, and we still deal with and respond to social cues in more or less the same way we did before this new strange magic swept over our consciousness.  We have Facebook and twitter and pinterest and instagram, vine and youtube, each clamoring for our attention, each creating forms of interactive community that demand instantaneous, reflexive responses.

Human beings in social groupings become different creatures than we are individually.  We look to our neighbors for cues about how to act, about how to live, about how to treat one another.  And social interaction shapes our neighborliness, shapes how we look to those around us for approval...or disapproval.  And I wonder, looking at this new thing, what that might be doing to our souls, to the essence of who we are as persons and to how we live together.

Because social cues aren’t always the best guide to life, as we hear in the story of Herod and John the Baptist this morning.   This Herod is not Herod the Great, but Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Perea, not to be confused with his brother Herod Philip, Tetrarch of Batanea, Auranitis, and Trachonitis.  I think I had trachonitis once, but antibiotics cleared that right up.

It was a thicket of social demands and relations that got Herod into some ultimately mortal trouble with John the Baptist, as the story is told by Mark.   John had been challenging Herod’s tendency, one he inherited from his father, to have unworkably messy relationships.  In this case, it was marrying his brother’s wife Herodias.  

This said, Mark presents Herod not as a cartoon cut-out villain, but as a human person trapped in a social mess.  It’s funny, for Mark, who usually doesn’t bother with emotional niceties and just goes bluntly barrelling through the Gospel story, but apparently, that detail is important.  Herod is presented as a flawed human being, but a human being nonetheless.

Despite John’s attacks on Herod, Mark makes a point of saying that Herod was strangely drawn to him, both fearing his connection to the people and “liking to listen to him.”   John, or so the story is told by Mark, was protected by Herod.

But that protection proved nowhere near enough, as Herod is socially obligated into giving the order to kill John the Baptist.  As king, his power lay entirely in the relationships he had with others.  If he made a public statement, that statement radically defined his identity as Tetrarch.  If he made a commitment, he was forced to stick with it.  A king is no more powerful than their social connections, without which they’re just a single, solitary, and very vulnerable human being.  If those social connections fail you, it’s Et Tu, Brute time.

Herod would have known this, known it with a deep anxiety about his place in the world.

And then, at her mother’s bidding, the daughter of Herodias did her legendary poledance for the royal court.  Herod, watching his stepdaughter slash niece ---ew--- was so entranced-- ew--- that he told her she could have whatever she wanted with a grand flourish.

What did she want?  She wanted the head of John the Baptist on a platter, and Herod was trapped in a web of social commitments.  

As the story goes, even though Herod was completely aware that serving up John the Baptist’s head would be wrong, he was compelled to follow through and fulfill the request.   Driven by his relationship to the community in whose power his identity lay, Herod acted in a way that both preserved his social integrity and shattered his personal integrity.

Each of us faces similar pressures as we participate in groups that share our basic worldview or interest.  But now, with our social awareness changed, it feels as if that has been intensified.

If we understand our identity is shaped by Jesus, it’s not how God works.  Our integrity as created beings, as sentient living and aware parts of God’s creation, that integrity rests on an entirely different foundation.  That foundation is our capacity to be just, even if it is to our detriment.  That foundation is our willingness to be gracious and kind, particularly if that grace and kindness is being shown to someone who opposes us.  This is fundamental to the Christian way, the absolute moral and ethical ground of the teachings of Jesus.

The argument could be made, of course, that this is unrealistic.  The only way to get anything done is to cling with a deathgrip to the beliefs of your group, and to never for a moment waver in your commitment to your social identity.  Your every tweet and post and pin needs to reflect the will of the gathering.  Those likes and friends, those followers and retweets, those things take a dominant place in our identities.  And in that, there can be real social consequences.

I’ve watched that play out, through twitter-mob-shaming and the forced expulsion of harmless individuals from groups by self-appointed purity police, by the endless predatory pursuit of offense and the stirring of reflexive desires and angers.

If social media is a place where you live and spend time, and if the teachings of Jesus are something that matters to you, then it deserves watching--and checking--just as any social groups demands on our ethical imagination require checking.

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