Vantage Point

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

02.28.16; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Isaiah 55:1-9

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE

I’m a gamer.  It’s a strange new world, a peculiar new art and form of storytelling, one that’s remarkably complex and ever evolving.  

Eve:Online, if you're not aware of it, is a science fiction game.  Players construct spacecraft, which then explore, mine and trade...and battle over territory.  It's wildly complex, with a steep learning curve and a deep level of sophistication.  I've been tempted, on and off over the years, to get into it...but it feels like the sort of thing that would disappear me from the real world.

Over 500,000 people play it on a regular basis, and the coupling of in-game currency and real world dollars means that Eve has now become a complex economy in and of itself.   

This ain’t Candy Crush or Call of Duty, folks.

Eve: Online is dominated by a tyrant.  Not a made up tyrant, either.  A real dictator.  Meaning, there is a single human being, a gamer who has risen to a position of political and economic control of a virtual empire whose holdings are worth millions of real-world dollars.  His in game avatar name is The Mittani (an apparent reference to an obscure ancient Near Eastern empire), and as the leader of the Goonswarm, he is the single most powerful person in a virtual community of half a million souls.

Meaning he gives orders, and tens of thousands of actual human beings do what he says.  He has a complex communications and administrative apparatus in place to maintain control.  More significantly, he developed a sophisticated intelligence operation, spies and informers and moles in other coalitions, which he uses to dominate and intimidate.  And by the thousands upon thousands, his subjects maintain his empire.  He is a despotic warlord, by every measure of the term.

Some might giggle at this, because, well, shoot, it's a game.

But what the Mittani does is no more or less real than what the CEO of any midsized internet business does.  He maintains control, directs activities, and can mobilize millions of dollars worth of resources towards a particular end.

That and motivate close to to twenty thousand people to follow him.

These are real people, choosing to play as the obedient subjects of a mildly sociopathic overlord.  Choosing it.  Uncoerced, they fight for him, create resources for him, create propaganda for the Goonswarm, spy for him, you name it.

That in and of itself is fascinating, and seems to speak directly to our current political funhouse.  It would seem the kind of thing worthy of study by anthropologists and sociologists.  But having recently gotten a doctorate in leadership dynamics, there was a spin on this tale that I found remarkable:

The Mittani does not actually play the game himself.

Meaning, the real human being who created this character never logs into the game's servers.  He has an account, sure.  But he does not use it.

He can't be directly impacted by actions in Eve: Online.  His systems of command and control exist entirely outside of the game, on websites and forums where he coordinates his rule.  It's metagaming, I suppose, playing the game above the game.

In corporate leadership literature, there is much talk of "being on the balcony," or being able to rise above your organization in order to effectively observe, direct and transform it.  Leaders of this type influence a system, but they are not themselves a part of the system they control.

And what higher balcony could there be than not actually inhabiting the world you control?

The Mittani’s ways are not the ways of everyone else in Eve Online, which has a bizarre echo in today’s reading from the book of Isaiah.

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’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.

{And here, I go off the cuff, because, well, it's good practice}

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

The Worst Job In the World

Poolesville Presbyterian Church of Bethesda

02.21.2016; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Philippians 3:17-4

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

Man, it’s a weird year.  The endless grind of the American political process is in full swing, as our nation wrassles ferociously with the question:  who wants the worst job in America?

Because being the President of the United States of America would be the worst.  The worst.

I mean, seriously, it’s the worst.  When I was a little boy, I thought, briefly, that it might be cool to be president.  You get your own airplane!  Whee!  But I am no longer a child.  Not for a moment in my entire adult life have I thought to myself, gosh, that’d be a great job to have.

Having been a pastor for just a tick over a decade, I think of the presidency in those terms.  It’d be like pastoring a congregation where everyone knows you, but you only know the names of one out of every hundred of them.  Just under half of the congregation thinks you’re the devil incarnate, and everyone is always fighting about everything.  I’ve seen what that looks like, and it ain’t pretty.  You don’t want to be there.

I would rather wash dishes in an industrial dishroom than be president.  I would rather sit in a phone cubicle as a customer service representative for Comcast than be president.  I would rather shovel coal into the furnace of a 19th century state mental hospital than be president.  I mean, this goes on and on.  How far?

A friend of mine, after graduating with a bachelors of science degree, got his first out of college job working for an environmental firm that checked for regulatory compliance on industrial farms.  More specifically, his job was to insure that odors from huge lakes of pig excrement were being adequately contained.

The sensor he was issued to check on these giant swamps of fetid porcine nastiness:  his nose.  That was his full time job.  Smelling pig leavings and filling out forms.  

I would rather have that job than be President of the United States.

I wonder, sometimes, at what would drive a person to want such a terrible job.

Paul talks a bit about leadership at Philippi, in this little passage we just heard.  This was a church that knew him, and knew him well.  The community in Philippi was one that Paul had established himself, one of the earliest gatherings of Christians in the history of our little movement.   The short letter he wrote to them was usual, because Philippi was unusual.  It didn’t endlessly squabble like the church at Corinth.  It didn’t wander off after whatever confident charismatic leader showed up pitching their ego, like Galatia.

Philippi got it.  They knew what they were, and who they were, and what it meant to walk in the Way of Jesus.   So what we get in this letter is an expression of the love he felt for the community there, particularly as they had supported him through times of challenge.  And Paul had, when he wrote this letter, once again gotten himself in trouble.  He was writing from Rome, and from jail, in around the year 60.     

Generally, that’s a sign that you have a strong relationship with your congregation.  Hey, I can’t make worship this Sunday, I’m in jail again.  

This whole letter is basically one big thank you to the Philippians.  Paul thanks them for both their material support in Paul’s time of imprisonment, but also thanking them for their prayers and care.  What makes this sweet little thank you note so interesting theologically is its focus on expressing the nature of Jesus of Nazareth, and particularly the humility and self-giving nature of Christ.   That's the focus of the well known hymn to Christ in Philippians 2:5-11, in which Paul encourages his readers to empty themselves of themselves, and be humble even in the face of their newly found connection to God.

The purpose of today's reading is similar, but with a more pointed focus.  Paul knew his own gifts and his own weaknesses, and how those things both strengthened and limited his servant leadership.

In this new life, it was not his ego that mattered.  It wasn’t his desire to be a disruptive and transformative leader, to be the person in charge.   What mattered was the transformative relationship he had with that odd man from Nazareth, a man he’d only ever known in the spirit, and in the grace he encountered in his followers.  

Paul’s faith in the justice, grace, mercy, and love of Christ was what defined his life, and what gave him value both as a person and as a leader.  It is that relationship that allowed Paul to endure, and to press on through the considerable trials and difficulties of his existence, certain that there was a purpose to his life.    It defined his vocation.

The other stuff?   It helped.  Without question.  Paul’s fierce, adaptable intelligence and his remarkable capacity for both intellectual and pastoral connection made him.  But what mattered wasn’t what he thought mattered.  He found himself forced to adapt to a new reality, the reality of mutual servanthood that Jesus.

And around him, Paul saw the terrible reality of those whose lives were lived in opposition to that reality.  “Their end is destruction, their god is the belly, and their glory is in their shame, their minds are set on earthly things.”

But that’s true of even what we might think of as the more positive ways we’ve shaped and formed our lives.  We train, we learn, we develop, and we grow more and more in a particular field or area.  

There’s nothing wrong with all that effort we put into advancing ourselves, or in learning more, or in having a strong sense of yourself and your place in the world.  There’s nothing wrong with being in a position to shape the lives of others.  It’s good stuff, up until the moment we allow it to be the thing that prevents us from taking a new and God-given direction in our lives.  It can also be true for the faithful.

As those experiences come, we need to be open to them.  We need to understand that it is grace and love that are our best guides in that place of unexpected trial or unanticipated gift.

Because faith is about teleology, which is a big fancy word for purpose-ology.  The purpose of life, Paul would assert, our goal, our end?  It’s to do what Jesus asked.  Love one another, and do so in such a way that those around you can see it clearly.

If we have the boldness to claim ourselves as followers of Jesus, what defines us is our willingness to be humble, no matter what we know or who we are.  What defines us is our willingness to set aside our desire for self promotion, to set aside the hunger for power that has driven the savage mess of human history.   What defines us be open to the radical encounter with Christ’s grace that allows us to ever deepen in our servant journey.

It’s that heart and mind that lets us set aside our pride, and turns us to serving both one another and those who are most in need.

That’s our job, the job every one of us who claims to be Christian has.  It’s not easy.  It’s certainly not easy.  But it’s the best job in the world.

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

Empty Carbs

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

02.14.2016; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 4:1-13

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

Last Sunday, the tradition continued.  It’s been years now, since the kids were little.  We gather with my parents before the radiant rectangle of our primary downstairs screen, and watch the sportsball.  It is our solemn duty, as Americans, to gather on Sportsball Sunday to watch sportsball.

And sure, we usually don’t have a dog in the hunt.  We do it anyway.  I enjoy the game, for the big spectacle sportuality of it, which is usually impressive.  And there’s something else.  Not the commercials, which for some reason I cannot fathom have become a cultural event in and of themselves. Not the halftime shows, because gah.

I enjoy the carbs.  Because on Sportsball Sunday, the meal is a festival of carbohydrates.  Chips and dips and insta-pizza and pretzels and hoppy fermented beverages, one empty calorie after another, in a stream that flows forth from the kitchen to the basement in multiple bustling errands.

It’s not exactly the most nourishing of evenings, but Lord, do we eat.

It’s the story of the temptation of Jesus, of his trial and challenge in the wilderness.  This story occurs in both Luke’s Gospel and Matthew’s story of Jesus.  It’s not in Mark, of course.  Mark doesn’t bother with details he views as irrelevant, so he gives us just one terse sentence: “Wilderness.  Forty Days.  Tempted by Satan.  Wild Beasts.  Move along.”

But Matthew and Luke share it in every detail.  What that tells us is that this story likely comes from what is called the “Q” source.  “Q,” which comes from the word “source” in German, is an ancient collection of sayings and stories about Jesus to which Matthew and Luke both had access.

Q’s story of the temptation is three distinct vignettes, three little stories within a story.   Matthew and Luke tell them in slightly different order, but each has Jesus facing the Accuser, who tempts him three ways.  Let’s wind ‘em back, in reverse order.

The last of the stories in Luke has Jesus up on the highest point of the temple.

The whispered suggestions to Jesus here are notable, because they’re not just Ol’ Scratch offering power.  “You say you trust in God above all else,” comes the sly suggestion.  “Then jump.  Surely God will protect you from harm.”  And then, well, then comes the kicker.  “Angels will protect you,” he hears.  “They’ll bear you up.”  Both words from scripture.

Jesus responds with a single verse, from Deuteronomy 6.  “Don’t put God to the test.”

In the second of the two stories, Jesus is tempted with political power, with control over all of the world.  “It’ll all be yours, if you just worship my power.”   Again, Jesus responds with a passage from Torah, from Deuteronomy 6:13.  And again, he affirms that his relationship with God is central, vital, and unshakeable, and that the human hunger for power over others doesn’t rule over it.

And in the first, in the first  of the three stories, Jesus is tempted with his hunger, with his physical need.  “You’re hungry.  Use your gifts to feed your hunger,” comes the whisper.  Here’s a rock, Jesus.  Turn that rock into bread.  Maybe a sourdough.  Or a tasty Challah.  Just something, to meet your most basic needs for energy.  But Jesus responds with a word of scripture from Torah, with Deuteronomy 8:3, which declares that our relationship with God is more important than anything else.

More important, in fact, than our own desire for life, our own desire to sustain ourselves and to feed the hungers that gnaw at us.  Out in the desert, deep in the heart of a fast, bread would have been an understandable thing to be thinking about.  Just a little energy, to keep yourself going.  Just a little something, to tamp down that feeling of emptiness.

But Jesus wasn’t there for bread.  He was there for something more, for a nourishment that bread couldn’t provide.  He was, in that wilderness, testing himself against the purpose of his life, against the end goal against which every action he took was tested.

He knew that what was presented to him meant nothing.

So much of what we do, frankly, is equally empty.  Our minds are full of information that claims to be relevant

Like late last Saturday afternoon, when I was going for a walk.  More of a hike, really, as I found myself taking an introvert-break from the retreat that I’d been running since the night before.  Session after session, conversation after conversation, and my capacity for socialization had been depleted to critical levels.  I’m not sure if that red light was flashing on my forehead, but it might have been.

And it being a retreat, there was food.  Cookies and little tiny powdered donuts and dessert after every meal, and presentation software really doesn’t burn that many calories.

I needed to recharge and move my body, and there was time.  And so, a hike, down well maintained dirt roads and along fields, heading towards a familiar destination: Sugarloaf.  It was sort of a funny thing, being so close to Poolesville, particularly as the retreat organizer had told me the facility was right at the foot of Sugarloaf Mountain, and asked if I knew where that was.  

Yeah, yeah, I’ve been there.

And last Saturday was a perfect Sugarloaf day, the air Granny-Smith crisp and sweet in the comfortable mid forties.  The well kept dirt and gravel roads around the Stronghold were wet with melting snow, and burbling streams of meltwater splashed and sparkled as they wended their way to the Potomac.  As I approached the entrance, a little group of hiply dressed-for-a-hike twentysomethings popped out of late model hatchbacks.  They walked ahead of me, chatting earnestly about something just out of earshot.

Something exciting and young, I didn’t doubt.  The merits of some obscure band they had gone to see, perhaps.  Maybe an art house film, or some point of politics or sociology.

I arrived at the overlook, just a couple of minutes after they did, and slightly more winded.  Before us, the Ag Reserve, a clear sky dappled with cloud, the day beautiful, the view lovely.

And as I stood, taking in the beauty of God’s creation, I couldn’t help but overhear the conversation of my little cluster of twentysomethings.  They were having a sustained conversation about health insurance deductibles, and the process by which they’d submit reimbursement requests for out of network providers.

For five minutes.  None of them seemed particularly interested in the view they’d hiked up there to see.  They were not there, in the place they found themselves.

I’m not much different, much of the time.  My mind easily turns to thoughts that are distractions, empty calories.

In this first Sunday in Lent, as we enter our own forty days of wilderness preparation, there’s plenty of empty carbs out there.  There are plenty of nothings, processes that are part of our lives but do not build us up.  There’s nothing inherently wrong about them, if they’re kept in balance.

But ours is not a balanced culture.  We are encouraged to chase after emptiness, to pursue things that stir our hunger but do not nourish our souls.

And we are reminded, as we are every year, that this season is the time to remember that we do not live by bread alone.

Seek, and be fed.

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

Love Never Ends

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 01.31.16

Scripture Lesson: 1 Corinthians 13

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

It was, when I woke up, the plan for my morning.

I looked out the window into the pervasive whiteness.  The blizzard was howling, frosted flakes cascading from the sky, and it wasn’t particularly grrreeeeat.  The snow looked as deep as my knee, rising up to the bumper of our Prius, and almost to the bumper of the big red Ford F150 XLT SuperCrew 4X4 I’d rented for the storm.

It was one of those snows that are so deep even walking is kind of a challenge, so deep that my usual boots just weren’t going to cut it.  I took the dog for a walk, but it was short, because there just wasn’t anywhere for her to go, literally.  She was up to her shoulders in the snow, and with no path, she quickly started giving me the “Oh please let’s stop this madness” look.

Which meant it was time to put the plan for the morning into effect.  I remembered, from Snowmageddon, how we’d needed the tracks bludgeoned into the road by an eager driver of a giant SUV to get anywhere.  My goal, for the day of Snowzilla, was to both insure I could get out to snag my parents and inlaws if power went out and to be the provider of said walking tracks.

I cleaned off the Ford, loaded and packed down snow into the truck bed, put it into four high, and proceeded to make those tracks down our street, blasting through the snow.  Just as a community service.  Not because it was a hoot and the inside of the truck sounded like a Dukes of Hazzard episode the whole time.  That wasn’t a factor.

That day, I watched from our kitchen bay window, as folks walked up and down the street as the snow swirled and fell, the snow deepening, but the tracks still there, two clear paths for neighbors and dogs and children.

Every hour or two, I’d fire up the truck, and remake the path.  It gave the day a sense of purpose, a plan, a clear pattern and structure.

But what does that mean now?

Those tracks are gone now, thank the good Lord, Fairfax County, and the great state of Virginia.  The intent and energy that went into making them disappeared before the plows and the warming sun.  It is as if they never existed.

I didn’t even get to keep the truck.

What are we to make of life, of those things that seem to be there one moment and utterly vanished the next?  What is it that has importance?  When the Apostle Paul was faced with a community sure that they had the answer, he was forced to tell them that their vision of what counts was completely off.

Where he went was the passage we heard today, one of the most justifiably familiar passages in the entirety of the New Testament.

Paul has just finished up a conversation about the varying different gifts and abilities given to all of us by the Spirit of God.  He’s speaking that to a community that had a whole bunch of trouble figuring out what was important.  That’s not to say they didn’t talk about what they viewed as most significant.  There was apparently a great deal of conversation amongst the Corinthians about who was the bearer of the best truth, the greatest gifts, the deepest blessings.

It was a relentlessly divisive, compulsively competitive church.  Paul’s struggles with the mess that was the church at Corinth were nearly constant. Corinth was a trading hub in the Roman Empire, and was legendary for its dog-eat-dog, do anything to get ahead, I’m-gonna-get-me-mine mentality.  Proving you weren’t a weak loser and back-stabbing your way up the ladder of prosperity was just expected. It’s what Corinthians did, to the point that Roman historians and social commentators at the time invariably mention what a heartless, money-grubbing, uncharitable, and self-absorbed city Corinth was.

Within the church, the question of what was most important was couched in terms of who was right and who was wrong, who had the deepest spirituality.  They took the gifts and blessings that they’d been given, and chose to make them a source of competition, conflict and chaos.   So in response to that mess-making, what Paul offered up to them was to lay out what he viewed as the most essential and foundational characteristic of any Christian.

In doing so, he doesn’t pitch out dogma, or a set of rules.  He doesn’t prescribe a checklist.  Instead, he gives them a song, a hymn that sings the praises of what he views as the single highest value and purpose of all life.  He shows them what he describes as the most excellent way, the single path that defines the essence of the Christian journey.

That way is the path of God’s love, the primary, essential, and most foundational gift of our Creator.  Paul makes it radiantly and unmistakably clear: this love is the defining feature of any authentic Christian faith.

And as he sings out that hymn, Paul makes an assertion that hangs potent in the air:  Love never ends.  There it is, in verse 8: Love never ends.

Everything else comes to an end, or ceases to be.  The Corinthian church was particularly proud of itself, of how holy and powerful and amazing it was.  They declared themselves prophets, gifted with the ability to predict God’s plan for the future, better even than the Capital Weather Gang.  They all spoke in tongues, working themselves up into a frenzy of Holy Ghost Incoherence.  And they knew more.  They were the smartest, the wisest, the most urbane, the ones who knew all of the secrets of God.

Those “gifts” were at the heart of the spiritual pride of Corinth, and Paul pops each of ‘em like a balloon.  In the original Greek, Paul sings out the song:  Eite de prophetai katarghethesontai, (But as for prophecies, they will come to an end) eite glossai pausontai, (as for tongues, they will cease)  Proeite gnosis katarghethesetai.  (as for knowledge, it will come to an end.)

Pausontai is familiar, the word that gives us the English word “pause.”  But katarghethesontai and katarghethesetai are...well...they’re not so familiar.  They sound, honestly, like the linguistic lovechild of Klingon and Elvish.  Given that his was a hymn, I’m not even sure how you’d sing them.  Maybe Paul rapped, a concept I will not even attempt to simulate here.

They’re compound terms, words built of other words, and what they mean, roughly, is that prophecy and knowledge will be “unacted downwards.”  It kind of means discarded or trashed, but it also means that the energy required to sustain them will just fall away.

As complex as the term is, the essential meaning is simple.  So much of what we consider valuable, the impressive things of life?  Here at the heart of Paul’s teaching, and at the heart of the Christian faith, is the assertion that those things are impermanent, that they melt away like tracks in the snow, that they vanish like a rental.

What lasts, Paul asserts, is love.  Love, understood not just as a fleeting emotion, but as the fundamental interconnection between all things that is both God’s nature and God’s gift to us through the Spirit.

That, for Paul, is the foundation of the Christian life, both our lives as individuals and our lives together as a community.  It’s something that’s admittedly difficult to see, hard to quantify and measure.

Other things are easier to measure.  You can take a ruler, and see that there is a twenty two inch variance between the top of the snow and the imprint of your passing.  But what matters more deeply and permanently is the why of that imprint, the reason for it.  

For all of us, impermanent and mortal as we are, that fundamental truth is worth holding on to.

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

The Common Good

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 01.17.2016

Scripture Lesson:  1 Corinthians 12: 1-11

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

I didn’t win.

This last week, the single largest lottery prize in human history came and went, and I am reasonably sure that I didn’t win it.  Oh, sure, one of the three ticket purchasers might have dropped that ticket into an envelope and mailed it to me at random.  

The probability of that event is not zero.  So I suppose there’s always hope, right?

Although, honestly, I’m not sure I even wanted to win.  I haven’t played the lottery in nearly two decades, because I bothered looking around me at the 7-11 when the prize got big enough for me to notice.  Watching day laborers and retirees dropping fifty bucks on tickets just got to feeling too soul-sucking, because the lottery is kind of a desperation tax.  I know, it’s meant to fund schools and education and puppies and kittens or something, but honestly, it’s just about the worst way to go about that endeavor.  The less hope you have, the more likely you are to allow yourself to get lured into the illusion that you’ve got a meaningful shot at it.

I mean, I’m sure fabulous wealth has it’s advantages, and at around $700 million after Virginia taxes, my family could have lived like royalty on the interest off of one years interest.  There’s something else, though, something that I wrestled around with this last week as fantasies of an entire stable of motorcycles played around in my head.  And sure, it’d be nice to buy a Shinmaya US-2 ocean-going four engine turboprop seaplane and convert it into a fabulous intercontinental flying yacht, so that I could sneer at the other yacht owners. Hah. My yacht FLIES. But once I’d dropped 150 million on that, what to do with the rest?  Did I really want to win?  

And if I don’t play at $50 million, why would I play at $1.5 billion?  I’m reasonably sure that even my wildest avarice would be sated by a couple of million dollars a year, that I wouldn’t somehow feel put out.

But most significantly honestly, would my life be better in ways that ultimately mean anything?  Perhaps, if I didn’t have a roof over my head and enough food to eat.  But that’s not the case.  My family is fine.  We already have more than we need.  If I won, I’d just be rich, for reasons that would have nothing to do with me and everything to do with complete randomness.  Lottery winning confers no merit, any more than getting struck by a micrometeorite means you’re a bad person.

The Powerball, frankly, is irrelevant to your success or failure as a human being, because it has nothing at all to do with who I am as a person.  Winning it is morally neutral, and if living into your values matters to you, the Powerball becomes irrelevant.  It is immaterial to what matters.  What matters, as we should particularly remember on this Martin Luther King weekend, is the content of your character.

This was news to the church at Corinth, because as far as the city of Corinth was concerned, what had value was wealth.  

Being able to see people as anything other than their total net worth was a skillset in short supply in the congregation that had gathered in Corinth.   First Corinthians is, in all likelihood, not the first letter Paul wrote to Corinth at all.   Given the evidence in the text, it is probably the second is a series of letters to a church that seemed to need every little bit of help it could get.   

1 Corinthians is a brilliant work, a letter written by a mature mind in its prime, a mind that’s been pushed to it’s limit.  Given the clear gifts of rhetoric that Paul shows in this letter, it’s clear that he’s pulling out all of the stops for this community that he loves, and that at the same time makes him crazy.

Over and over again throughout the text, we read evidence that while there were those in Corinth who got it, who grasped what was most important about the Jesus-path Paul was teaching, there were just as many others who couldn’t figure out what was truly significant.

In this section, Paul is dealing once again with the tendency of the Corinthians to categorize human beings according to their worth in the social pecking order.  The Corinthians were big fans of shiny people.  If you had impressive credentials or showed the outward signs of wealth, you did well in Corinth.  If you had big impressive spiritual gifts, or could preach a firebrand sermon, you did well in Corinth.

And most of all, as was the case in much of the rest of the Greco-Roman world, if you had a rich and powerful person vouching for you with a strong letter of recommendation, you’d do well in Corinth.  Doors would open.  People would see you as a more important and more valuable human being.

Wealth and material success were the great virtues of Corinth, which made it not all that different from the rest of the Roman Empire.  If you look at where humanity stood two thousand years ago, about nine point eight percent of humanity living under the rule of the Roman Empire were economically secure.  They could reasonably expect that they would experience no significant hardship.  A tiny fraction--just under two percent--controlled most of the wealth.  An additional seven percent were functionally secure, consistently receiving enough income to maintain a surplus.

Twenty two percent were just above subsistence, meaning hunger was at bay and shelter was consistently present, but they were vulnerable.  And sixty-eight percent were either in poverty or scrambling day to day just to keep afloat, one accident or illness away from real privation.

But that was two thousand years ago, before industrialization, before science and technology, before the global economy and the dynamism of capital markets.

Which, if you look at wealth globally today, means that absolutely nothing at all has changed.

As Paul argues against this rather basic human tendency to value one person more than another, he expands his argument to talk about the way God values human abilities.  Unlike the wealth obsessed Corinthian morality, he offers up a completely different ethic.  

It was an ethic that challenged us to see our value in terms of both our individual gifts and the greater good.

If we are to be the lights shining in the darkness, then our task is not to let ourselves be deluded into thinking that wealth or intelligence or any human condition matters.  What matters is letting the light of grace and the Spirit shine from us.  That’s pretty much it.

As we wonder at the baubles our culture puts before us, and struggle to see human value in terms that are not defined by wealth and worth, Paul’s words are a necessary reminder.

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

Through Fire, Through Water

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams;

Scripture Lesson: Isaiah 43:1-7

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

There comes a time, in every life and in every endeavor, when it all just totally comes off the rails.  You had a plan.  You had a vision.  You knew what was going to happen, and you could see your life mapped out as clean and clear as could be.

And then you couldn’t.

I was reminded of this truth, in a simple way, as my extended family returned from what had been a generally delightful vacation.  We were a fatigued herd, after days upon days of journeying and hiking through the beauty of Costa Rica, half of the family tired, and the other half getting by only with the generous application of Pepto Bismol and Imodium, the sale of which is apparently a staple of most Latin American economies.

But the return trip was set, and all was planned and clear and easy.  Extra super easy, because we’d been upgraded to business class for the last leg of our trip, which was a nice little moment of luxury to end our journey.  There’d be doting stewardesses.  Wide comfortable seats with tons of legroom.  Hot meals and champagne and those steaming hot towels to freshen our faces.  Home was just a few comfortable hours away.   Just fly out of San Jose’s airport, have a two hour layover in Miami, get on another plane, and boom.  We’d be back.

Only, well, journeys often don’t work like that.  The flight out was delayed by twenty minutes, then forty, then an hour.  Then, we were airborne, and things were lovely, but that loveliness was tainted, because we were anxious about getting home.  There was weather in Miami, low-hanging clouds over which the plane circled and circled, as the hum in the cabin about missed connections got louder and louder.  Then, fifteen minutes taxiing, from one end of the airport to another, after the landing gate was reassigned.

Anxiety increased, that stressed out snappishness that comes with a combination of uncertainty, long lines, and bowel discomfort.  The outgoing flight, blessedly delayed by forty minutes, meaning that the plane home was on the ground awaiting when we stepped out of our aircraft.  

All we had to do was negotiate Miami Dade International Airport customs and immigration in slightly over an hour.  Which is technically possible, in the same way that winning the Marine Corps Marathon without having trained first is technically possible.

Things began to go south quickly.  First, with the automated immigration machines, which flagged both me and my son for further scrutiny in a long line.  And the delay in getting the plane unloaded.  And thirty minute line to have your stamped immigration papers checked a second time.

The process went on and on, and the window to catch our plane departed, and we realized all ten of us were stuck in Miami.  “Just go to the American ticket counter, and they’ll rebook you,” the weary guard suggested.

And there,  we encountered the last line, at eleven o’clock at night, a line stretching the entire length of the terminal, a line so long you couldn’t see the start of it from the end of it, snaking around one corner, and then another, literally thousands of souls long.  The wait time, at least two hours, and the word that there were no flights available for at least two days.

Among the tribe, tempers were fraying, despair setting in.  Hope had evaporated.  School would be missed.  Work would be missed. There was no way out.

And it is hope that rises bright from the snippet of Isaiah we heard this morning.  Isaiah is up today, because Isaiah is my very favorite book of the Bible, tied with Luke and John and the Letters of Paul and Job and the stories of the Samuel-Kings cycle and Proverbs and Psalms and...OK, well, maybe favorite is not the right word.  I love Isaiah in the same way you love a child, meaning it’s my favorite in the way that both of my sons are my favorite son.

It’s a marvelous book, rich with poetry and vision, but also utterly practical.  It soars to the heavens, but it also cares about how we live right here and now.   It’s also a book that adapts to the time in which it was written, changing its tone and focus to meet the needs of the people.

This portion of Isaiah is found in what is often called “Second Isaiah,” meaning that the majority of scholarship suggests it was most likely not written by the same individual who composed chapters 1 through 39 of the Book of Isaiah.  It was, most likely, written by a disciple of the Jerusalem prophet, one who fully understood the essence of his teachings, and was equally connected to the One who spoke through them both.

That first section describes and relates to the kingdom of Judah in the eighth century before Christ.  As those who are in the adult education class heard this morning, it is full of challenge, challenge directed particularly against the wealthy and powerful in Jerusalem.  It’s a book of rebuke and challenge, to the complacent rich, to the predatory powerful.  

This section, on the other hand, speaks to a completely different context.  Running from chapter 40 through to chapter 55, it is primarily about reconciliation, grace, and restoration, and appears to be speaking to an Israelite audience living in Babylonian exile nearly two hundred years later.

This was a people who had no hope.   Unlike the proud and the powerful who lived in Jerusalem and lazed luxuriantly on the fat of the land, this was a people who had been torn from their land and forced into slavery.  They had watched as their places of comfort had been destroyed.  They had watched as their temple, the holiest of holies, the place where they communed with God on earth, they had watched as it had been razed and looted.  Their experience was of nothing but flood and fire, of having everything they had known torn away.

At this point, the One who spoke through the prophet no longer spoke words of judgment.  Where the first thirty nine chapters speak in some pretty harsh language, what we hear throughout this section of Isaiah is God’s commitment to healing and rebuilding those who are broken.  In the face of the suffering experienced by the people, the words that the prophet had to share with them were not rebuke, not condemnation, not mocking and rejection.  

Instead, they heard words of reassurance, and of endurance, and of the commitment of God to be with them.  “You will get through this,” Isaiah proclaims.  “God is with you, even though the fire rages and the flood roars and American Airlines can’t find it’s behind with both hands.”

Well, maybe not the line part, but had Isaiah seen that line at Miami airport, he might have slipped that one in.

Hope, hope was what the people needed, and Isaiah gave it to them.  God does not abandon human beings in times of trial.  Because in the absence of hope, nothing can be accomplished.

And in the presence of hope, life becomes a different thing.

“We could rent a car and drive home,” my older son suggested, as we stood despairing in a line without end.  And boom, there was a way home.  So, the rush to the rental counters, where a 12 passenger van was procured for the thousand mile non-stop overnight drive from Miami to DC.

Ten people in a Ford Transit van for 17 hours of straight driving up 95 is the farthest thing from business class, but there’s a funny thing about that part of the trip.  Despite the notable absence of stewardesses and legroom, and despite the fact that the champagne was replaced with huge cans of Monster Energy Drink, that ride was not just bearable, but good.

We knew it was going to work out.  We knew that the path home was harder, but we could see it.

That’s what hope does, in both simple things and the hardest parts of our journey.

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