Undercover Boss

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

04.10.2016;  Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  John 21:1-19

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

Reality television was just such a peculiar thing.  Or I guess it is still, but I don’t really have much basis for observing it.

I remember when it reared its strange, misshapen head from the murk of some programmer’s id, all the way back in the era when MTV still mostly played music.  Is MTV even still around?

The Real World, it was called, and I remember watching fragments of it once or twice as I flipped through the channels, in the same way that I can’t help looking briefly at a deer carcass lying by the side of the road on my way home.  It involved finding the most annoying possible twenty-something human beings, putting them in a fancy house, and manufacturing fake drama.  One would never have thought, not for a moment, that it would start a cascade of entertainment-product that just hasn’t stopped.

As a genre, reality tv has delved deep into the dark recesses of the human soul, as we for entertainment have watched one absurdity after another.  Over the years it’s subjected us the Kardashians and Honey Boo Boo, and at least one presidential candidate.    It has been wildly absurd, “reality” distorted through the lenses of profit driven absurdity.  

There’ve been shows like The Swan, where women who had been determined to be “ugly” were surgically altered, with the most successfully modified woman “winning.”  There was a show about a woman having to pick a romantic partner based only on his personality, meaning from a group of men who wore masks the whole time.  To add gravitas, it was hosted by Monica Lewinsky.  There’s been a show about Mike Tyson raising racing pigeons, and a show entirely revolving around 1990s rapper Vanilla Ice learning to live among the Amish.

I have watched none of these shows, just as I’ve never watched the show “Undercover Boss.”  That conceit, honestly, seems better than most.  Unlike Shark Tank and that show starring a particular presidential candidate, Undercover Boss doesn’t fawn over the rich and the powerful.   It wasn’t an American show to start, so perhaps that explains it.  The conceit behind this strange bit of tee vee is, apparently, that you take a CEO and make them work secretly as an entry level employee at their company.  There, not only do they learn what it’s like to be at the bottom of their corporate food chain, they also get an unvarnished perspective on just what their employees think of them and their leadership.

It’s a reality version of a theme in human storytelling called the King Incognito, in which...in order to learn the truth about things...a powerful ruler or monarch will don a disguise and go out amongst the people.    It’s a storyline that goes back at least to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which was published in the year eight.  Not 2008.  Just eight.  One of the tales in that collection involves the gods Zeus and Hermes, who pretend to be beggars and go seeking hospitality, and find only one elderly couple (Baucis and Philemon) willing to care for them.  They are rewarded by being allowed to die simultaneously and be turned into  a pair of intertwining trees, which, romantic as it is, seems like maybe not the best reward, even if they did ask for it to be their destiny.

That idea of a ruler coming among his people in a form that’s hard to recognize is written deeply into the concluding concluding section of John’s Gospel.  This portion of the Bible is full of intriguing stories, like, for instance, the description of the doubts that Thomas felt when Jesus showed up, and Christ’s response, as He told us what it meant to believe.

But this last section is particularly odd, as Jesus both appears and does not appear to his disciples.  It comes as something of an epilogue, added on to John’s Gospel after it had already concluded.

The disciples are fishing, out there on the shores of the Sea of Tiberias.  It was Peter’s idea, we hear, but they’re out on the water and having not much luck.  Then someone appears on the shore, someone who shouts out to them a question about their fishing.  “Catching anything,” he yells.  “Nope,” they yell back.  “Try the other side of the boat,” yells back the stranger.  There are fish there, of course.

It’s at this point that the unnamed disciple realizes, although others do not, that it is Jesus.  Because apparently it wasn’t obvious, meaning the person in question did not actually look familiar, or like the Jesus they knew.  LIke Mary at the tomb, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, this Jesus is both Jesus and not Jesus.

The disciple announces this to Peter, who was evidently not wearing clothes.  Peter puts on his clothes, and then flings himself into the water, yet another bizarre moment in a bizarre tale.  Maybe it was that he thought he’d walk on the water.  It’s hard to say, but it doesn’t bear any resemblance to any fishing trip I’ve ever taken.

Once the haul of fish is ashore, Jesus is there...apparently already with fish, and a fire going.  He invites them to breakfast, at which point none of the gathered can bring themselves to ask just who exactly he is, because he is Jesus, but simultaneously not Jesus.

There’s a peculiar resonance with this story, that of the King Incognito, one that plays out monthly in the life of our little community.     It’s the story of Martinus Turonensis, a third century Roman equestrian aristocrat.  Yes, that has something to do with Poolesville.  Give me a minute.

Martinus was the child of a Roman cavalry officer, who entered into the service of the Empire despite his fledgling Christian faith, one that was an offense to his father and family.  As the story goes, Martinus eventually gave up on the military life, renouncing all violence and setting aside the power and privilege of his office.

The transforming moment for Martinus came while he was out riding one winter’s day, in the full regalia and armor of a Roman horseman.  As he rode, he came across a beggar freezing by the side of the byway.  Suddenly overcome by compassion, Martinus drew his sword and cut his heavy winter riding cloak in half, keeping one half, and giving the other to the beggar to keep him warm.

That very night, as the story goes, Martinus saw a vision of Jesus wearing the cloak he’d given to the beggar, and realized that the beggar was, in fact, Jesus.

It was at that point that Martinus Turonensis, or Martin of Tours, was transformed.  That plays interestingly across the life of this community, where we regularly spend our time at a Catholic parish named after good brother Marty.   

I missed that Lord’s Table experience yesterday, as I realized halfway to Gaithersburg that I’d managed to take off with the set of keys to the van that my wife needed.  But as I was driving back mumbling grumpily to myself, I was reminded of how the story of our care and service to others meshes with the manifest reality of the Christian journey.

His story speaks to the core moral assumption of Christianity, that of our encounter with Jesus in every soul and every individual we meet.  It’s something of a baseline, as we deal with the peculiar mix of human beings in our lives.  The healthiest default for Christian ethical behavior, for our approach to every interpersonal interaction, is this: every single one of them is undercover Jesus.  Every last one.  

He’s disguised?  Sure.  We’re not quite certain.  Sometimes he’s very, very disguised.  But we should, with the disciples at that first prayer breakfast, be afraid to ask.

Hey, we should say to the anxious looking woman who just cut us off in traffic.  Are you by any chance Jesus?

Hey, we say to that co-worker who’s a serious pain in the behind.  Might you be Jesus?  When one friend shares a bit of particularly juicy gossip about a mutual acquaintance, we can nod and say, you know, they still are Jesus.

And sure, that reality is a peculiar thing.  But unlike most of the “realities” we create to distract ourselves from one another, when we let that shape us, it does some pretty amazing things.

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

Very Slightly Treasonous

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 4.03.2016

Scripture Lesson:  Acts 5:27-39

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

I’m a little bit suspect.

Maybe it’s in my blood, the inherent bias of my MacDougall-clan Scots heritage.  The MacDougalls, after all, were the ones who got so annoyed at their fellow Scots that they were happy to side with the English when things got ugly.  And a Scot who sides with the English is more than a little suspect.  Not, of course, that they were truly Scottish at all.  As the raven battleflag on the prows of my ancestral galleys indicated, that part of my blood was really actually Viking, the Norsemen who just decided that maybe they’d bail on Denmark and stick around in the highlands.

I’m a little bit suspect.

It goes beyond my not particularly caring about the Redskins, and my never having been to a Nationals game.  It goes beyond my complete indifference to the performance of the University of Virginia in March Madness.  I don’t even have a bracket.

I am, truth be told, kind of a little bit of a traitor.  I am, if I am honest with myself, perhaps not completely to be trusted.

I’m reminded of this even more as we go deep into the blathering obsessive relentlessness of a superheated political season, and as one politician after another declares their undying love of America.  How much do they love America?  They love it so much, more than anything.

Pronouncement of patriotism are made, and there are flags upon flags, as red, white and blue decor becomes the rule of the day.  And in the midst of all of this love of country competitiveness, I find myself doing a gut check, and finding that I probably don’t pass muster.

It’s not that I don’t find value in our constitutional republic.  Our system of government may seem flawed at time, but it is a more perfect union than I’ve encountered elsewhere.  I appreciate that I can write what I want, that I can say what I want, that I can travel where and when I am able.  I appreciate that we can gather here in worship without fear of oppression, and that Buddhists and Episcopalians and Mormons and Muslims and humanists and Raelians can all do the same.

I’ve been places in the world where that is not the case, and I am sincerely glad not to live in those places, and to live here instead.

But for all of that, I’m still not to be trusted.

And in that, the degree to which my identity is shaped by nation has some pretty clear boundaries.  

Because not only do I have no sense of allegiance to either political party, I also feel America is less important to me than Jesus, if I’m honest with myself.

This is faintly alarming.  I mean, think about it.  Here, a religious zealot with a beard who cares only about his faith.  Such people are dangerous, right?    But honestly, it’s true.  Jesus is more important.  If it came down to choosing, I’d go with Jesus.  That commitment has priority over pretty much every other one in my life.

Not institutions.  Not nations.  Not structures.  Just the life and teachings of Jesus, and the moral demands of that whole Easter story I seem to faintly recall hearing about recently.

That someone is Gamaliel, who appears at just the right moment in the story from the Book of Acts today.  Here we are, just a week out from Easter, and already the early church is in some significant trouble.   We hear that every single one of the apostles, meaning every leader of the fledgling Jesus movement, every one of them is gathered together and in the hands of the Sanhedrin.  

They are refusing, and have refused, to stop telling people about their Easter experience. Honestly, at this point in the story, it’s the Pentecost experience, too.  But that’s jumping ahead a little bit, and so let’s forget I said that.   When they’re point-blank ordered to cease and desist, their reply is simple:  “We must obey God rather than any human authority.”

This doesn’t go over well, particularly as many of the people they’re talking to are the Tzaddikim, the Saducees...meaning priests, whose entire career revolves around being the ones who have access to God.

As they’re actively defying the power of folks who have the power to kill them, things are looking pretty dire for Christianity.  It’s just one drone strike away from being completely expunged from world history.

As the gathered group of rabbis and priests gets worked up into a fury, one of them stands up and changes the course of history.  

It’s one of the rabbis, the Pharisee Gamaliel, the President of the Sanhedrin, one of the most respected rabbis of the first century, who is still remembered in the traditions of rabbinic Judaism today.

As Luke tells the story, Gamaliel finds himself holding the lives of all of the apostles in his hands. The crowd calls for their deaths. What does he do? If he lets things go as they're going, and doesn't intervene, all of the leaders of the early Jesus movement will die. Instead, he takes a stand and counsels tolerance, making a vigorous and persuasive case that they should be spared.

After citing some examples, he suggests that if God was not at work in them, then they would fail anyway, but if God is in them, then opposing them would be pointless. He sways the Sanhedrin, and instead of being killed, Peter and the apostles are just given a whuppin' and set free. So here we have a thoughtful, gracious, and tolerant rabbi saving Christianity.

Which, if he’d seen the history of the Crusades and the Inquisition and other places where people who claimed to be following Jesus didn’t exactly return the favor, he might have reconsidered.

Early Christianity found this a little confusing, particularly in light of theologies that assumed that Judaism lacked legitimacy as a faith tradition after Jesus.  There are stories, which are as reliable as the stories you might have seen on Facebook two days ago, of Gamaliel secretly converting the Christianity.  In Eastern Orthodoxy, he was made a saint.

But however you look at it, Gamaliel affirmed the perspective of those first apostles: he reminded the Sanhedrin that they must trust and prioritize God over all other interests.

That’s the mark of a faith that has the right to call itself faith.  A faith commitment must have primacy, must be the first and foremost among commitments.  That’s what makes morality moral, what allows it to establish life purpose.

That does have limits, sure.

If your faith is dark and misguided, and your God is your own power, declaring that the only thing that matters is God tends to make things look a whole bunch like Northern Iraq.

That is and has always been the danger of faith, that if misguided and misplaced, it blinds us to the reality of both the human beings and the creation around us.

But it is also the thing that gives form and shape to our other relationships.  It is what allows us to be gracious in loss.  It is what allows us to see past the anxieties and fears that can govern our careers and our relationships.  It is what turns our hearts from self-interest, from the yearning for war.

It is always, always, just a little subversive, a little unsettling of the orders of power and anger and fear.

It is, in it’s own way, the heart of our grounding, the foundation on which we can safely stand.

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

Right In Front of Us

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Easter Sunday 2016; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  John 20:1-18

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

I get worried about Mary.

Every year as I read through the central part of this text, I find myself concerned for her mental state, worried because here she is, right there with Jesus, and she has absolutely no idea who it is she’s talking to.  She’s raced to the tomb, right after a remarkably traumatic couple of days, and she sees some pretty unsettling stuff.  There’s death, of course, as we read through John’s story, the chance to watch someone you love die slowly, which isn’t exactly the kind of thing to put you in your happy place.  Where she expected to see a tomb, there’s just an empty hole.  That’s going to mess with you.  And then there are there’s Jesus right in front of her...and she has no idea who he is.  

Not a clue.  Not even the faintest whisper of a clue.

And Jesus isn’t just someone who Mary knew faintly or briefly.  Mary was from Magdala, a healthy Galilean farming and fishing community just south of Capaernaum.  Meaning, “Magdalene” not her last name, any more than my last name is Annandale, or y’all all are all part of the Poolesville family.   Every single story of Jesus describes her as part of the inner circle of Jesus, a disciple who followed him just as significantly as the twelve apostles followed him.  We don’t know exactly how she met Jesus, other than that we’re told that there was some sort of healing involved.  She was right there with him, learning and journeying with him from Galilee down south to Jerusalem.

And yet she doesn’t recognize him.  There he is right behind her, saying, woman, why are you weeping, and she turns around and looks right through him.

This is usually a sign that something’s a little strange.  That, plus: there are angels, which is also a bit out of the ordinary.

It’s possible, because we hear it elsewhere in the New Testament, that Jesus is a master of disguise, wearing one of those Tom Cruise Mission Impossible masks, or one of those Tom Cruise Tropic Thunder body suits.  In Luke’s Gospel, there are stories of him walking with other disciples, and they don’t clue in to who he is, either.  Given that we hear elsewhere of Jesus moving effortlessly through angry murderous mobs, there’s probably a paper out there in an academic journal somewhere.  “The Semiotics of Stealth in the Story of Jesus: Implicit  Hensojutsu Disguise Technique in the Johannine Text.”    I’d write that myself, but it’s so been done.

However it worked, Mary just doesn’t see him, even though he’s talking to her, even though it’s him, right there.

It has to do, I think, with her expectations.  

Because nothing blinds us to possibilities like our assumptions, those parts of ourselves that we bring to every moment of our lives.  Every one of us carries with us a set of understandings that govern who we are and how we move in the world.  Sometimes, that’s a helpful thing.  Those expectations are formed and shaped when we are small, as our minds come to terms with the patterns of reality we encounter.  

We expect the ground to be there when we take our next step.  We expect that when we’re walking rhythmically down the beach on a lovely summer’s day, a giant sandworm isn’t going to erupt out of a dune and devour us.

Some things just don’t happen, and it’s perfectly normal for us to expect that they won’t, and live our lives as if they won’t.

Mary just doesn’t for a moment imagine that her beloved teacher and friend is anything other than dead and gone.  She’d been following him as a disciple, filled with hope for that fledgling movement, and the whole thing had just totally come apart.  That’s the reality she has accepted.  That’s the reality that is settled in her heart.

And so that’s the only thing that she can see.  Just a gardener.  It’s what she expected.  So it’s what she saw.

There’s a wonderful classic film about a gardener and expectations, one that’s worth a viewing if you’ve never had the chance to see it.  It’s the 1979 movie “Being There,” starring Peter Sellers as a man named Chance.  He’s a gardener, one who’s lived his whole life in a household in a wealthy DC neighborhood.  He’s ah, well, he’s what they used to call “simple”, in a Forrest Gump kind of way.  He’s never left the house.  He knows nothing of the world at all.

Chance the Gardener knows only gardening, and is completely helpless otherwise.   The only way he knows to interact with other human beings is to 1) talk about gardening and 2) reflect back to them whatever it is they’re saying, or, if that’s too confusing, just repeat lines or mimic actions he’s recently heard and seen on television.

But he’s pleasant and well dressed, reflective and seems thoughtful, and this is so rare in DC that every person who comes into encounter with him assumes that he must be strangely wise.

They see only what they imagine him to be, and not the man himself.  They project their expectations onto the blank slate he presents them, and come away marveling at what he presents them.

As a pastor, I really do appreciate this.

But what’s striking about this as a human tendency, it means that we are often utterly oblivious to both our neighbors and ourselves.

We don’t see the people standing right there in front of us.  Instead, we see the projections we cast onto them.  We see them as categories, or types, or as echoes of other human beings we’ve known.  We see another to blame, another who’s an object, another who’s They’re right there, but we don’t see them.

Even more significantly, we don’t see ourselves.  We see the person we imagine we are.  We see ourselves living and acting and being according to our self-understanding.  Which is fine, if that understanding is healthy and life-giving.

And here, the Easter moment manifests itself in a word, a single word.

Jesus speaks her name, and she suddenly sees herself...and him...in light of the reality right in front of her.  Not her expected reality of despair and failure and hopelessness, but a completely different path, one she was so convinced was real that she couldn’t see it even as it stood there right in front of her.

When we’ve fallen into patterns of life that we can’t seem to shake, when we find ourselves unable to break out, today reminds us that an entirely different reality sits there right in front of us.  

We have only to allow ourselves to see it, and see ourselves in the light of it.  

On this Easter morning, let that be so, for you and for me,

AMEN.

Palm Sunday, LLC

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

03.20.16; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Philippians 2:5-11

What is it that defines us, as human beings?  What gives cohesion to our sense of ourselves, and from that establishes our relationship to others?

On the one hand, there is faith.  On the other hand, there is our identity as "brand."

Brand identity is the Big Buzzy Thing in our consumer culture.  It used to be less all pervasive, less radically defining.  I mean, shoot, back when I was a kid there was Tide and Ivory, Coke and Pepsi, Chevy and Ford, but those lived in their own domain.  There were brands, and there were people, and we didn’t confuse the two unless we were actually Colonel Sanders or Walt Disney, in which case our lives were weird enough already.  Now, with the net-driven commodification of all human interaction, we're all supposed to attend to our brand.  We’re meant to build our brand, to become our brand.

But what is this identity, that brand-focus creates within us?  Brand is about the relationship between a product/service and a consumer of said product/service.  It is intended to develop a pattern of repeat or customary purchase, based on the consumer's perception of qualitative dynamics of the brand.

I use Google products, for instance, like Gmail, and my Chromebook.  I use them because Google represents, for me, innovation coupled with an imperfect but intentional beneficence.  It’s also cheap, meaning free, which warms my Scots Irish heart, and easy to use, and when Google becomes sentient a few years from now and Googlenator Drones are hovering over our neighborhood like Angels of Death, I figure having a Chromebook will be the next best thing to lambs blood on my doorpost.

Brand does more than confer corporate identity.  It "rubs off," by intent, in the relation.  The brands we consume are meant to modify our own sense of self, to be a social marker within culture as to our place and status.

Like out in my carport and driveway, we have a Honda and a Toyota, which tell us that we are a practical, reliable, comfortably bourgeois family.  The more we internalize the brands we interact with as shaping our own identity, the more we are embedded as a consistent and reliable consumer.

And so the question becomes: what is the relationship between brand identity and an identity shaped by faith?

It's an important question, because as branding becomes the defining feature of both corporate and individual self-understanding, there's bleed over into the realm of faith.  Churches need to "think about their brand" in the process of the endless self-promotion we're now obligated to pursue.  

And if you’re self-promoting, you don’t allow for any complexity in the nature of your identity.  Brands don’t tout their struggles or their flaws or their weakness.  They don’t talk about their mess.  They present an idealized vision of themselves, of their identity, a vision that’s buffed and polished by Madison Avenue.  They don’t want you to know the sausageworks of how they produce their product.  All we’re meant to see is the surface.

Our living out of spirituality together becomes both shaped and expressed in terms of the market ethic.  Is that an issue?

Honestly, it is.  Because faith shapes identity in ways that are radically different from "brand."

Brand, after all, is about ownership and possession.  It is driven by commodified self-interest.  The point and purpose of branding is to promote the corporate or individual person being branded.  While it creates relationship, that relationship is essentially grasping, oriented to benefit the brand itself.

Brand identity is about a mask, an image, a carefully constructed “reality” that presents

And in that, brand identity is the inverse of the identity created by faith.

That reality is driven home by the sweet, short passage from Paul’s letter to the church at Phillippi we hear today.  As Paul would often do when he was trying to make a significant point, he’d burst into song.  Think of 1 Corinthians 13, that well known hymn to love.  Here, talking about who Jesus was, Paul does it again between verses 6 and 11.  It’s a song, a little hymn or poem about the nature of Jesus, one Paul shared with a community that fundamentally got who Jesus was.  And sure, he’s probably just quoting lyrics, but I’d like to think that maybe just maybe he actually sang it.

Paul! The musical might not do well on Broadway, but hey...if a hip-hop musical about the father of American federalism can be a smash hit, you never know.  

This song has particular content, which speaks to appearances, power, and the new self in Christ.  What we hear, from Paul, is that Jesus “emptied himself.”  Philippians 2:6-7 are touchstone verses for the Christian mystic.   They read, in the New Revised Standard:

“who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.”

The two key terms here come first in verse 6, where Paul sings out about how Jesus did not exploit his relationship with God.  The word we parse as “exploit” was the Greek term harpagmon, which means “grasping” or “taking” or “snatching” or “pillaging.”  It means, whichever way you slice it, the use of your power to your own personal profit.  

In verse 7, the words from this ancient Jesus song are heauton ekenosen, which mean “self emptying.”   Jesus turns himself completely over to God’s purpose, and to the care and service of others.  Everything he was served that purpose.  His flesh, shaped and formed by God.  His every inward thought, turned over to the love of God and neighbor.  Pride and greed and profit?  Those things were set aside.

Because Christian faith, which is shaped by the identity and person of Jesus, is oriented not towards the self, but the self orienting itself towards a purpose that transcends self.  Or the organization orienting itself towards a purpose that transcends organization.   The purpose we find in faith--or at least, an existentially valid faith--challenges us to be grounded in something that will continually demand our growth.  It is relation with the other rooted in the other.

An identity shaped by faith is a different thing from a faith formed by a brand, a different thing entirely, and that's worth keeping in mind before we press that hot metal against the surface of our souls.

It isn’t about manipulation, or by falsely conforming ourselves to the expectations of other and culture.  

That’s part of the strange tension of this Palm Sunday, the tension between the false proud imagined reality of the messianic brand and the entirely different truth of who Jesus was.  The Messiah, the anointed one, was meant to be all sparkle and shine, the embodiment of the power and glory of Judah.

Those who pretended to that power presented themselves as liberators, as bearers of the proud heritage of David.  They played directly to the expectations of the crowd, who wanted nothing more than to wave their palms in the air and celebrate the coming of a perfect and powerful warrior king.

That was not who Jesus was, and he knew it.  He was there to serve, and not to rule.  Who he was was not the shallow brand of power, not the manipulative mask of brand, but the deep honest integrity of a soul that turned itself completely to the service of God’s love.

As we begin this Holy Week, let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

Credentials

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

03.13.16; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Philippians 3:4b-11

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

There’s a peculiar thing about having spent the majority of my adult life getting an education as a professional Christian.

I’ve got the undergraduate degree in Religious Studies from Mr. Jefferson’s University, that flagship of the stellar state system across the Potomac, an institution that has become so fiercely competitive that there’s not a chance I could have gotten in now.   I mean, not a chance.

Then there’s seven years of Master’s Degree work, mostly part time, at a little Methodist seminary in Washington, followed by five years of Doctoral study, which is...just barely...most of the time since I turned eighteen.

That’s not to mention the requirements for Continuing Education, training, and recertification that we Presbyterians require of our Teaching Elders.  I’m trained.  I’ve got credentials out the wazoo.  

Which is where the whole professional Christian thing gets a little peculiar.

On the one hand, having some clue what you’re doing a good thing.  It is.  I mean, training and certification is a vital thing.  You don’t want a nurse to have no clue what they’re doing, and you want your surgeon to have actually been trained on something other than a Wii game.  You want the truck drivers on the road to have gotten their CDLs, and we’re generally more comfortable if the folks up in the cockpit of the plane weren’t sitting up there thinking, Oooh, I wonder what this lever does!

Oops.

If you assume that conveying the teachings of Jesus in an accurate way matters, then having some training is kind of important.

But on the other, there’s the painful reality that on another level, it doesn’t really matter.

The Apostle Paul reminds me of this, every time I read him.

Paul’s more than faintly threatening to every professional Christian.  Here, the most influential early follower of Jesus, whose energy and dynamism were absolutely central to the spread of the faith...and he’s the dude who takes no salary as a point of pride.  Oh sure, it’s fine for some, he says.  If people really need it.  But for me?  I’m not going there.

And that’s in the face of a set of credentials that was as impressive as anything the early Christian movement could have expected.

The funny thing about Paul sharing his credentials with the folks at Philippi was that they kind of already knew him, and knew him well.  It was a church that he himself had founded, likely in around the year 50 in the Common Era.   The short letter he wrote to them reflected their relationship, and that relationship was a good one.  This wasn’t a mess like Corinth or Galatia.  It also wasn’t a church where Paul wasn’t well known, like the church in Rome.  

These were his peeps, and the letter reflects that.  It’s an expression of the love he felt for the community there, particularly as they had supported him through times of challenge.  This letter was written during one of Paul's many imprisonments, most likely written from jail in Rome in the early 60s.    

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 training and background, and recounted it to the folks at Philippi as a way of reminding them of his impeccable credentials.  In every way, he’d prepared himself for one life.  He’d been born into the faith of his parents.  He’d studied the Torah and the Prophets ferociously, training at the feet of Gamaliel, grandson of Hillel, and one of the most renowned rabbis of that era.  Gamaliel is such a significant rabbi that he shows up in the book of Acts, chapter 5, as the wise and thoughtful counsel who prevents an angry klatch of rabbis from killing the apostles.  

There was very little doubt of Paul’s skill, training, and background.   He had prepared himself in every conceivable way for leading a Jewish community.   That was not the life he ended up living.  Having had a powerful and transforming experience of Christ, Paul found himself radically changing the arc of his life.  

In this new life was not his pedigree or his flawless credentials that mattered.  What mattered was the transformative relationship he had with that odd man from Nazareth.  This isn’t a gentle relationship of wuv, either, not about the warm fuzzies.  It’s the kind of relationship that knocks you to the ground and leaves you as blinded as if Jesus had just tossed a flash grenade into your soul.  

Paul’s faith in the justice, grace, mercy, and love of Christ was what defined his life, and what gave him value.  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.

The other stuff?   It helped.  Without question.  Paul’s knowledge of Torah and his gifts of persuasion did sort of come in handy later on.  But for all of his training and all of his experience, Paul completely rejected the idea that those things had any value.  How completely?

So completely that this passage in Philippians is the one place in the New Testament where profanity is used.   Right there in Philippians 3:8, when Paul says:

More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.

The word in the Greek is skubala, which has nothing to do with either swimming underwater or Hanna Barbara characters.  The slightly cowardly translators of the New Revised Standard Version render it “rubbish,” which means that Paul ends up sounding a little bit like the Dowager Countess from Downton Abbey.  But in the common Greek of the Greco-Roman world, that word had a very specific meaning.  It was, back then, the precise equivalent of a four letter word for excrement.

“All those things don’t count for skubala,” Paul says.  “They’re just a bunch of skubala.”

Paul, remember, may not have realized that he was doing anything other than writing a letter to a community of friends who loved him, and wasn’t feeling the need to be guarded.

The long and short of it:  those things that build up our pridefulness, that allow us to assume that we are of more value or more significant than others?  They can be stumbling blocks on our walk along the Way, if we allow them to become so.

This last year, we had on our prayer list a woman named Phyllis.  I’d put her there, because she was dying.  Which she did, as we mortal creatures inevitably do.

Phyllis Tickle, besides having one of the most delightful names ever bestowed in the history of naming, was also a significant thinker, a writer of Christian books and poetry.  I’d gotten to know her as the silver haired grand-dame of emergent Christianity, back when I was part of that movement.  Her books and lectures were everywhere.  She was the Religion Editor of Publisher’s weekly.  She was, within American Protestantism, a Personage.

And so, as a Hail Mary of sorts, I’d reached out to her to see if she’d be willing to even look at my efforts at writing.   Not only was she willing, but she was also remarkably supportive, generous with time and praise in a way that belied her august status as a Name with Impeccable Credentials.

Her grace...her ability to remain unchanged by all of that?  It was remarkable.  

And whenever we find ourselves viewing our identity in terms of roles and cultural expectations, whenever we allow ourselves to forget our essential humanity because we’ve internalized the false standard of hierarchical power?

That’s when Paul has a word for us, about how much that’s worth in the eyes of our Maker.

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

A New Creation

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 03.06.16

Scripture Lesson:  2 Corinthians 5:16-21

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

This last week, I've started in on my next writing project. It's a screenplay, the screenplay for the book I'm going to have published--God willing--this next year. My agent encouraged me to take a swing at it, because, well, it doesn't hurt to have one drafted.

Honestly, I'm finding it a little hard to focus. I'll start writing and visualizing the scenes, and the next thing you know, I'm daydreaming about what I'll say when I accept the Oscar. "I'd like to thank the Academy," I mutter, while my dog stares at me like I'm crazy.

But the whole screenplay thing is kind of ironic, because I increasingly find myself uninterested in movies.  

I’ve been a cinephile much of my life, thoroughly enjoying film as a medium.  I’d dutifully bop along to the thee-aa-tah many weekends for whatever they might have been showing.  I’d dive in to the classics at home, from slotting in a VHS to watching the little tray slide in with the DVD to scrolling through the selections on Amazon Prime.

And yet now, it all seems kind of the same.  Everything’s a reboot or a remake or a mashup, part of a great Circus machine that blorts out an endless stream of pre-fab entertainment product.  It starts to all feel, well, like it’s been done.  Guardians of the Galaxy felt the same as Star Trek which felt the same as Star Wars, just different faces and franchises applied to the same movie, over and over again.

I start feeling like Frances at the end of Bread and Jam for Frances, which I hope Hollywood never ever touches, because there’d be some dark backstory and a cameo by Lady Gaga.  

I mean, look at the Superhero Movie Industrial Complex.  It’s collapsing, slowly but surely, under the weight of pretending to take things to the next level, to the point where the genre is beginning to devour itself.  It’s Superman versus Batman!   And yet another Avengers Movie, only now they’re fighting each other!  It’s got all of the sophistication of arguments I used to have around the cafeteria table when I was in first grade, with all the artistic integrity of Frankenstein meets the Wolfman or King Kong versus Godzilla.

Speaking of which, there’s another King Kong movie coming out this year, apparently an origin story, because...well, I honestly don’t know why we care about King Kong’s backstory.  He was a littler giant gorilla, and then he became a bigger giant gorilla.  Wow.  And they’ve decided to remake Ghostbusters, only with women, which I’m pretty sure was the entirety of some agent’s elevator speech.  “It’s, like Ghostbusters...only with goils!”  Because the sisters are doing it for themselves now, by which we mean piggybacking on an existing beloved franchise.

Maybe it’s midlife.  But where once I enjoyed film, now I feel like the author of Ecclesiastes.  There is nothing new under the marquee of the twelve-plex.   

Coming to terms with newness was something that the Corinthians were not particularly good at doing.  Oh, they thought they were.  But from this strangely cluttered letter, Paul gives us a powerful sense of just how much that first church couldn’t find their way to real change.   Unlike first Corinthians, which tells a single story and moves graciously from one section to another, Second Corinthians wanders wildly all over the place.    

The tone of the letter changes suddenly and abruptly, with odd transitions and shifts of emphasis that just make no sense whatsoever.  Given the clear gifts of rhetoric that Paul shows in his other letters, most competent critical scholars believe that this text is a mashup, a cut-and-paste job that weaves together three or more free-standing letters into one single text.  One moment Paul will be waxing eloquent about love, and then suddenly he’s attacking someone, and then he’s right back to being positive again.

Here in this morning’s text, we’re in one of those positive sections, as Paul stirs and cajoles the folks in Corinth to truly embrace the reality of what Jesus taught.  Because as much as they fought about Jesus and took stands and argued over who was holy and who was not, the Corinthians never quite got around to changing.

In his dealings with the Corinthians, Paul repeatedly had to deal with that community’s complete inability to do anything differently.  Oh, sure, they’d gotten all excited when Paul had first shown up and joined his colleague Apollos in starting up this new community.  It felt new then, exciting in the way every new cult from far off lands felt exciting when it first sailed in to that port city.  But the years passed, and things just didn’t change.  All of the rhythms and patterns of their old way of life just kept right on keeping on.

Paul challenges them, over and over again: stop this pattern of hatred and conflict.  Stop blaming others.  Stop finding reasons to attack one another, and really commit yourself to creating relationships of reconciliation with one another.

And that’s the heart of the change that Paul sees unrealized in Corinth, the new story that they just can’t quite seem to bring themselves to tell.

The old pattern, the pattern of conflict and adversarial relationship?  Again and again in this passage, Paul articulates the alternative, the really new thing that defines a different path of life:

{And again, an off the cuff conclusion, at the end of which I say:}

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