Part of it All

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

05.22.2016; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Proverbs 8:1-4; 22-31

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

It was a most peculiar book, one worth reading in a most peculiar time.

The book?  Beyond Freedom and Dignity, written way back in 1971 by B.F. Skinner.  He’s not necessarily front-of-mind for most of us these days, but Skinner’s name is worth knowing.  Buhrrus Fredric Skinner was the father of behavioral psychology, an experimentalist who explored how and why certain patterns of behavior are formed and created.

Meaning, he spent a whole bunch of time with rats.  Skinner’s essential view was this: living things avoid pain, and seek reinforcement.  That’s why they make decisions.  In fact, it’s the only reason living things select a course of action.  If it gives a reward, they do it.  If it causes discomfort, they avoid it.  Nothing more, nothing less.

To test this, Skinner called an operant conditioning chamber.  It’s simple, really.

You get a rat.  Or a chicken.  Or some other animal that people don’t feel particularly attached to.  Then you put it in a box.   That box has a button.  You teach the creature that if it presses a button it will get a reward, something that feeds it.   So it will press that button.  Yay!  Snack!

Or you have a section of the operant conditioning chamber that’s electrified, because, well, that’s how Skinner rolled.  Whenever the subject creature engages in a particular behavior, you run a little current through the floor of the chamber.  Zap!  Amazingly enough, the subject will eventually stop doing the thing that causes them to get a shock.  Ah, the insights of science.

Operant conditioning chambers are now called “Skinner Boxes.”

As far as Skinner was concerned, there was no real difference between humans and animals, and therefore, the best way to view human behavior was through the lenses of reinforcement and avoidance.  We are just machines, conditioned to respond in certain ways to certain inputs.

That, in fact, was the point of Beyond Freedom and Dignity.  Skinner viewed those concepts as antithetical to human progress.  If what we really are is nothing more than conditionable meat machines, then the idea of moral agency must be abandoned.  Liberty and freedom are just, Skinner argued for two hundred pages, illusions.  And dignity?  That just assumes that our actions give us value as persons, that our choices make us good people.  But if choice is an illusion, then integrity, dignity, and moral value are meaningless, and assuming they exist just gets in the way of progress.

I’m not the biggest fan of Skinner.  But he’s worth reading, in the way that it’s worth knowing in detail precisely what it is you disagree with.

Because Skinner’s vision of a choiceless, mechanistic world prangs darkly off of the assumptions we hear from the Book of Proverbs today.  

In Proverbs, as in the rest of the Bible, Wisdom literature has to do with the way we function in the universe.  What actions are likely to create a positive outcome?  What actions are likely to cause us shame or harm?  Wisdom is fundamentally practical.

As it manifests in the book of Proverbs, that practicality is expressed in several ways.  First, the familiar pithy little nuggets of moral guidance, taut little sayings and maxims and aphorisms, all of which point in the general direction of how to live a life that’s less messed up.  If you do this, then you will do well.  If you do that, well, things won’t go so good.  These sayings don’t provide any guarantees, but what they do is this: they make it much more likely that you will not fail.

And second, wisdom expresses itself through poetry and song, as we hear in this excerpt from chapter 8.  Here, Wisdom is both described and personified.  The voice we hear is of Lady Wisdom, the wise woman.  That’s a consistent theme throughout Proverbs, but here, her identity is more clearly defined.  She’s not just your smart friend.

She’s expressed as part of the world, as an essential part of both the creation and purpose of everything that is.  However the universe is crafted, she is a part of it.

Within ancient Wisdom literature, there are a number of core themes, all of which play around a sane and appropriate use of the world around you.  The wise do not seek wealth above all other things, because wealth is not the goal.  The wise know that the hunger to possess destroys.  The wise listen to criticism and concern, and adjust accordingly.  The wise know that God loves the poor and the rich equally, and that when wealth is created on the suffering backs of the poor, God will hold the powerful to account.  

Wisdom looks at the world, and carefully considers every action.  The wise know--more than anything else--that chasing after the desire of the now can compromise the life you hope to live tomorrow.  Because nothing is more foolish--in the Biblical definition of foolishness--than being so blinded by one’s own hungers and self-justification that you can’t see the harm you’re about to inflict on yourself and others.

Wisdom and foolishness are the two poles of Proverbs, and the dynamic between the two of them is the essence of the human moral struggle.  It’s also viewed as grounded in the real, in the now, in the meat and flesh and life of creation.

In that, it bears a strange similarity to Skinner’s behaviorism.  Reinforcement and aversion are, Skinner would argue, just the way the universe guides life, the way we are shaped and formed in response to our environment.

Wisdom, however, goes deeper.  It looks not at the immediate gratification of reinforcement, that hit of pleasure that comes in a moment, but at the long arc of a life.  It’s not about immediate mechanics, but grounded in the larger purpose of a life.  That purpose is something chosen, something that requires us to step back and look more deeply at the consequences of our action and engagement.

And that’s important to keep in mind now, now in particular.

Why?  Because Skinner’s behaviorism is at play in our lives like never before, in ways that are worth being aware of.  How?  I’d suggest that the entire business model of social media is just one giant operant conditioning chamber.  It exists to mold behavior.

I say this as someone who’s been in the deep of that world for a decade.  I’m in that box, but that doesn’t mean I’m unaware of it.

What is the business model of Facebook?  To make you spend more time on Facebook.  That’s the reason for Twitter and Snapchat and Pinterest and Instagram.  I’m not sure about Google Plus.  Does anyone really use Google Plus?

How does it work?  You know how it works.  Put up a post.  People “like” it.  People share it.  You get followers.  Your SnapChat score goes up, whatever the heck that means.  

Press the button.  Out comes the reward. Human beings are social creatures, and social media provides us with that little burst of seratonin we get knowing that we’ve been noticed.  

That’s the whole point, and it’s why it’s so easy to fall into patterns of repetitious behavior that border on compulsion.  It’s a medium that thrives on reward, that reinforces a way of living just as surely as a

But it does not, for the most part, encourage reflection.  It does not call us to have a long view.  It is just the moment, just the he

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

A Taste of Power

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

05.08.2016; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Ephesians 1:15-23

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

Gift giving has changed a little bit over the years, as time has passed.

Not so much for Mother’s Day, which in my household still involves the usual chocolates and handmade cards and breakfast in bed.  That hasn’t shifted, nor shall it ever.   Dark chocolate deliciousness must always be the gift, forever and ever, AMEN.

But other gift giving has changed.  As the children grow from being children into men, gift-giving is less and less about stuff.  They have more than enough stuff, stuff enough that for all of the stuff that has poured into our house, my offspring really don’t desire any more.  We’ve got giant bins of Lego, untouched for years.  We have enough Thomas the Tank Engine tracks in storage that Metro could probably use them to rebuild the system.   We have enough unused gaming systems and abandoned iPhones that collectively have more storage and processing power than most of the supercomputers of my childhood.   Material gifts are immaterial.  

Why not get what they most want?

What we offer, now, is the gift of power.  Not magical power.  Not their own orbital battlestation.  Not a small army of robots.  Not by shoehorning a Dodge Charger Hellcat motor into our minivan.  We offer power as our culture presents power.  Meaning, cold, hard cash, moolah, a little bit of cheddar.  This is the gift that my no longer young ones most desire.  Give me the ability to do what I want.  To have.  To travel.  To explore.  To do, in this moment, as I wish.

Money represents work, represents energy, represents a way to symbolically transfer labor for goods and vice versa.  It is power.

That gift was almost always, if I’m honest with myself, my favorite gift as a teen.  It meant I could do what I wanted, get what I wanted, that I could extend my will out into the peculiar world of our economy and have things that I’d otherwise not be able to manage.

Because wealth is power, as we social creatures have constructed it, power that we use in our lives to express and extend ourselves.  If you have wealth, you are free to do as you wish.  You can have that gaming system.  You can travel.  You can eat as you wish, where you wish.  You can have commonly understood ownership over a patch of earth.

It kinda sorta works.  But it also fails, in the same way that giving your mom a card filled with twenties isn’t likely the best gift today.  Sorry, mom.  

Power is inherently problematic, something our society really and deeply struggles to grasp.

That power, our power, the way we understand and share power together, manifests itself in some peculiar dynamics.  Take, for instance, the recent case of Haiti and the peanuts.  Haiti is the deepest mess of messes, a nation that barely functions.  The hardscrabble agriculture attempted by its farmers is not enough to feed those who live there, leading to chronic malnutrition among Haitian children.  For the subsistence farmers in Haiti, just getting by is often impossible if there’s a bad harvest, which leads many to flee the countryside into the deep, desperate poverty of the cities.

This last year, the USDA came up with a plan to use excess peanuts from the American harvest to insure that Haitian children had enough to eat.  We had the food.  They needed the food.  It seemed simple enough.  Only the challenge, given the power dynamics of our economic system, was more complicated.  Because if you flood Haiti with free peanuts, Haitian peanut farmers can’t sell their crops, meaning more people are forced to abandon their farms, which means more hungry people without work in the cities, and a nation rendered even less capable of feeding itself.  

Our power dynamics, the dynamics of wealth and mammon, seem strangely unable to resolve this seemingly most straightforward of problems.  People are hungry, there’s more than enough food, but the system itself just can’t manage to make that work.  Just as  six thousand years of human war has never quite managed to bring about peace, the power of mammon seems never to have quite managed to resolve human need.

That truth rings peculiarly against the texts for today, all of which talk about power.

Ephesians sings about it the most, in a unique voice.

This letter is one of what Bible scholars call “deutero-Pauline” letters.  That means that it was most likely not written by the Apostle Paul himself, but by one of his disciples writing in his name.  Scholars believe this for a variety of reasons.  Ephesian 2:20, for example, seems to assume that the apostolic period is over, which would be odd had Paul been the one writing it.

It also has one of the most peculiar styles, one of the oddest voices, in all of the New Testament.  Paul was a precise, thoughtful, analytic thinker, clearly trained in rhetoric and a gifted writer.  The author of Ephesians, on the other hand, wrote in a strangely circular, oververbose style, writing sentences that just went on and on, sentences that could be diagrammed with a spirograph, that went in fractal loops like a Mandelbrot set.

Even if this isn’t written by Paul, it’s still clearly written from the perspective of someone who was formed in the crucible of Paul’s teaching.  From that foundation, the author of this letter presents us with how we are to deal with life, once we’ve had the audacity to assert that we are disciples of Jesus Christ.   That’s the entire point of this first chapter of Ephesians, and it’s some pretty bright white line stuff.

Ephesians is not the letter to go to if you’re looking for permission to goof around as a Christian.  Because as the opening of this letter establishes, God is in charge.  Over and over again, themes of authority and power are stated and restated, with the word “power” surfacing again and again.

“Power,” in the Greek used by the author of Ephesians, is dunamis.  It gives us the words dynamic and dynamo.  In describes the interplay of energies, it give us words like dynamics.  As we human beings tend to understand it, it is wrapped up in the idea of control, of ruling over.  Or we hear it as destructive, like dynamite.

We hear this opening, this swirling praise of power and glory and authority, and we conceptualize that in terms of the familiar.  We visualize gold and shine and sparkle.  We see a mighty monarch on a throne.

But power, in the Christian understanding, is a little different.  God’s power is not expressed as ours is expressed.  Where we use power over one another, God is abundantly giving.  Where our power tends to seek its own interest, clotting and congealing around itself, God’s power is always pouring out in grace and possibility.

In that, God’s power is like the love of one who cares for us.  Like a mother, yes, who pours herself out body and soul for us.  But also like a father, or like a grandmother, like a friend.

It is that form of power that builds and restores, that form of power that sets things into right relationship.  It is creativity, turned in grace towards one another, as unselfishly giving as the morning sun or a spring rain.

In every exchange with others, in every moment where you can turn your life’s energies towards them, let that be the taste of power that they receive.

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

My Life As A Troll

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

05.01.2016; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: John 14: 23-29

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

Trolls are strange, strange creatures.

I’m not, of course, talking about the mythical beings that live under bridges in the old fairy tales.  I’m not talking about the giant monsters that inhabit the brilliant Scandinavian film Trollhunter, which I can commend to your viewing.

I’m talking about that creature of the internet age, the bane of the comments section, the Troll.  Trolls exist to attack, to arrive on a page and make rude and obnoxious comments about whatever it is you might be saying.   A study by Canadian psychologists confirmed that most trolls are basement dwelling sociopaths, ranking high on the four scales used to assess sociopathic behavior.

Which is kind of hard to hear, given that I was a troll myself for a while.

It was the dawn of the internet age, back when I did all of my blogging on a platform called xanga, and everything was wild and exciting.   It was a wild hurly burly, everyone getting into it with everyone else, a free-for-all of ideas, the virtual equivalent of a Wild West bar fight.  

I had trolls, often more than one.  Some were Christians who thought I was too progressive.  Others were Christians who thought I was too conservative.  Some were atheists who wanted to get into arguments about religion.  They’d lob giant essays packed with obsenity at me.  I’d lob giant essays filled with snark and wit and very large words at them.

It was fun.

But one day, as I engaged in a pointless back and forth with a group of radical antitheists on their website, I realized I’d become a troll myself.  I was just there for the fight, for the energy of it, for the thrill of battle.  I was scoring points, giving no ground, bobbing and weaving and stinging.

There was no purpose to it.  “Why am I doing this?” I asked myself.   I could see no reason, other than that relentless going after one another seems to be something our culture encourage us to do.

Because ours is a culture of competition and opposition.

Our task, when faced with an opponent, is to destroy them.  To take them down.  To obliterate them.  The goal is to find every weakness, or to fabricate weaknesses.  We see ourselves as prosecuting a battle, in which we must win and they must lose.  We’ll bend the truth about them, we’ll pull out the stops to prove their wrongness, we’ll do everything and anything required to tear them down and prove how weak and worthless they are.  If we they offer evidence they might have a point, we’ll ignore it.

But there’s a problem, if you’re a disciple of Jesus, of endlessly going after your enemies.  The prosecutorial mindset, the mindset of the troll and the flame war?  It has a precedent in the Biblical narrative.  It has an embodiment.  Ancient Judaism gave a name to the angel whose job it was to discover everything that was wrong about someone, to undercut them, to tear them apart.  That angel’s title was Ha Satan, meaning The Prosecutor or The Accuser.

Whenever I find myself coming up with reasons to hate, subvert, or attack another soul, I remember that.  But I also remember the words of Jesus as they rise up from John’s Gospel today.

It’s a potent little saying, delivered by Jesus as he speaks about his imminent departure to his gathered friends. They’re feeling the coming loss, as Jesus talks obscurely about his coming departure.

As part of that conversation, he gives them a command, and presents them with a promise.

Here is what it means if you obey me, Jesus says.  This is what it means to be my disciple.  And it’s a little bit aggressive.  He’s ordering us ­­using command language, after all­­ to love one another. And yeah, I know, we don’t like anyone telling us what to do. But if we’ve committed to the path of Christ, this is a foundational requirement. If you’ve signed up for this Jesus thing, if you’ve said: I’m committed to the Way, then you’re committing yourself to his service.

All he asks of us is that we love one another, and that we share that love. It should be a joy, and on many days, it is. On those days when it is not, when you’ve not had enough coffee or you’re just feeling grumpy and annoyed? Then it is your duty, to be done whether you feel like it or not. It’s duty. You do it, because you’ve said you would.

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

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

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

Think, for example, of the word paramedic.  They’re first there, right there, giving you the care you need to make sure you make it through that vital first few minutes.

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

It isn’t that they don’t know the stuff you’ve done wrong.  It’s that those parts of you are not their task.  Their goal is to light you up, to find your goodness and magnify it.  They stir your creativity, celebrate your thoughtfulness, encourage your patience.

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

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

This truth is and has always been what sets the Christian path as a countercultural corrective to the oppositional and self-seeking trollery of

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

The Way You Know

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

04.24.2016; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: John 13: 31-35

What makes a person Christian?  What is the thing that renders an individual or a community legitimately part of this peculiar movement that we claim to be participating in?

I found myself wrassling with that question this last week, as I dug my way into the first round copyedits on my novel.   It’s been nearly three years since I researched and wrote the manuscript that is, as the familiar opening to my elevator speech goes, the best work of literary postapocalyptic Amish fiction you’ll ever read.

And so that research and that reading into the dynamics of Amish communities is three years old now, and I remember it as well as I remember anything that I set aside and leave for a while.  Like my keys.  Or my phone.

It’s a little weird, because it’s been so long that it feels like I’m reading someone else’s novel.  Did I really write these words?  Huh.

Getting back into it surfaces some peculiar things about the Amish, bits of strangeness that are a little hard for we Presbyterians to process.  It’s not the bonnets and the buggies.  It’s not the clothing or the tendency not to purchase Apple products.  

It goes deeper, to the essence of what it means to be a follower of Jesus.  Like, say, the whole “church” thing.   You’re a Christian, or so we tend to think, because you go to church.  But the Amish don’t have churches, not in the way we tend to think of church.  And sure, they don’t have projectors and presentation software, none of the trappings of industrial scale American Christianity.   But they also have no stained glass, no steeples, no big tall pulpits, none of it, because they have no church buildings at all.

They have barns or large rooms, which are used as barns most of the time, and churches whenever you drag a bunch of chairs or wooden benches into them.

So one can be an Amish person, and never ever technically set foot within the doors of a church.  I probably shouldn’t bring that up on a beautiful spring morning, but it is the truth.  So they’re Christian, but with no churches.  The Amish also don’t go to church every week.  Their faith so interpenetrates their community and family lives that it’s not necessary.

Perhaps even more intimidating, from my perspective: there are no Amish pastors.  There’s not a single trained and paid professional guiding them through their church lives with a batch of seminary degrees in their pocket.  They do have a preacher, though.  That preacher gets picked by lot, in many communities, meaning it’d be like if at our annual meeting we just pulled a name out of a hat, and whoever came up would have to preach that year.

I’m not sure how well that would be received if we tried it here, other than to make most folks stay as far away from annual meeting as possible.

And there are rules, part of the Amish Ordnung, rules that define almost every aspect of life.  The hats you wear.  The clothes you wear.  What you may use.  How you may work.  How you must worship.  So many rules, with every action considered and reconsidered and discussed.  The Amish being human, there are disagreements, and when they disagree, they divide.  That means there are almost as many variations of Amish as there are of we Presbyterians.

They are, without question, radically different, so far removed culturally and materially from the life of every Christian community I’ve ever stood in encounter with that they seem more like a different faith altogether.

What is it that defines Christian community?  In the face of all that difference, what is it that constitutes a genuine Christian gathering?

A clue, a frustratingly simple yet opaque hint of a clue, can be found in the passage from John’s Gospel this morning.  

John’s Gospel, the record of the Beloved Disciple, is a paradox.  On the one hand, it’s remarkably, strikingly simple.  It’s also, in its simplicity, more than a tiny bit hard to figure out.  The way that John tells us about Jesus is different from the way that the other three Gospels pitch out that message.  If it’s Mark, Matthew, or Luke...particularly Matthew and Luke...the stories come one after another.  

The three synoptic gospels, the three that are “seeing-together,” they offer up the storytelling of Jesus of Nazareth, as he forces us to use our imaginations about the nature of the Reign of God, meaning what the world looks like when we all are living according to the love of God.  Those stories make us use our brains as we try to grasp the message that Jesus came into the world to deliver.

But John’s story of Jesus doesn’t roll like that.  Instead, this much more intimate Gospel tends to record challenging conversations, the kinds of exchanges you have with someone that define and shape your relationship with them.  It’s that late night talk with someone you’ve just met, that deep sharing moment with someone who you’ve known for years.  It’s the  prayers and peculiarly subtle sayings that play with language in odd mystic ways.  Unlike Mark and Matthew and Luke, the focus of those conversations is not God’s Kingdom here on earth, but Jesus talking about how he personally is living that out.  This is who I am, Jesus says.  

And more significantly, this is how you can be, if you are part of that reality that I’m bringing into being.

That’s the potent reality manifested in this little passage, the peculiarly taut and challenging metric that Jesus offers up to us when he sets it in front of us.  It’s at the time of the Passover festival, and in the face of the demands of that season Jesus places before the disciples the One Commandment, the single rule that defines the entirety of the Christian faith.

Agapate ellelous, the writer of John conveys.  Love one another.  This is the single law of the new covenant, the one primary instruction, the single governing value for all Christian life.  John’s Gospel may be an outlier, different in tone and form from the other three, but all of them sing this truth out together.

And that, to be honest, is a frustrating truth.

It is frustrating because it defies our ability to grasp it, to measure it, to make the critical comparisons of the relative merits of one community versus another.  We want metrics and measures, we want to be able to cleanly describe and define and deliniate.

But Jesus says, this is how everyone will know: that you love one another.

That’s a quality, not a quantity.  That most essential characteristic of Christian life together cannot be broken down neatly.  It exists, but it cannot be grasped.  It must be lived.  It must be the thing that defines whatever community it stands in encounter with.

That was perhaps the most frustrating thing about my doctoral work, which looked at healthy small communities.  People want to know, when they ask me, how can you tell.  And though I wrote several hundred pages, I could probably have just written agapate ellelous over and over again.  That might have made me seem a little crazy, like a less-menacing Jack Torrance in the Shining, but it wouldn’t have been technically wrong.

Which is why, though I’m the farthest thing from being Amish, I can see the faith so strongly in them.  I’m too anarcholibertarian to want a community with so many rules and strictures.  I’m too progressive.  I find science fascinating and delightful.  I like motorcycles, which are generally a no-go in Lancaster County.  

But for all of that difference, I can recognize in so many of their communities the fundamental essence, that ineffable reality: they love one another.  It’s true in congregations of every size, and of every flavor, just as it’s true among each of us in all of our glorious variety.

That’s how you know.

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

The Life Eternal

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

04.17.2016; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  John 10: 22-30

Death is a funny thing.  Meaning, not funny in a “ha ha” sort of way, no matter how well Deadpool has been doing at the box office.  Funny peculiar.

We don’t really talk about it, not much, in our day to day existence, because we’d just rather not.  It feels like a grim distraction, this reality that all of us face.  It’s such an integral part of life, that we age and grow old and eventually stop functioning, and yet it’s just not a regular topic of conversation unless you work in hospice-car, as a funeral home director, or as the lead singer for some Scandinavian death metal band.

The process of aging and dying is something that has fascinated science lately, as we human beings fish around for keys to maybe putting that whole dying thing off for, I don’t know, a century or two.  Or longer, as non-existence is something we’d rather avoid.

There were studies, back in the 20th century, that suggested that the way to live longer was to radically restrict the calories you consumed.  If you ate a very very small amount of healthy food, research suggested, you could bump up your lifespan by several decades.  “Calorie-restriction,” it was called, and there are communities of individuals on the web who are obsessively devoted to that practice.  It always struck me as a poor tradeoff...hey!  Instead of dying at 85, you can spend another thirty years being hungry the whole time!  Yay!

There are studies now into the process of senescence, meaning how living beings degrade as they age.  Not all do, it’s been found.  There are species of ants that just keep trucking along, utterly unaffected by age right up until the moment that they just mysteriously switch off.   There are living beings, like the bristlecone pine, that don’t seem to age at all.  The bristlecone has the distinction of being the living thing with the longest lifespan, with the oldest living specimens being over five thousand years old.   What’s striking about the older bristlecones is that they’re considerably healthier and more vibrant than younger trees.  The little thousand-year old adolescents aren’t as productive as the four to five thousand year old trees.  It’s not that they can’t die, of course.  You can burn them, or cut them down and make them into really-really-low-karma IKEA furniture.   But as best we can tell, bristlecones don’t die otherwise.

So science struggles and wrestles with our mortality, again, with some hope of unlocking why it is that we don’t just keep on truckin’.   

I do wonder, though, if that would be a good thing.   Would a life that just went on and on and on be a blessing?  I mean, I look back at my high school yearbook, and I find myself marvelling at just how few of those souls I still remember.  Those I’m still friends with, I remember.  But I know among those other faces, there are people that I may have been in class with, who were part of the ambient reality of my adolescence, that I really no longer remember.

If we lived for five hundred years?  A thousand?  It’d feel too much.  Old friends, forgotten.  Memories would pile upon memories, until we could no longer hold on to all of them, the two point five petabytes our organic neural network can hold finally filled to saturation.

I think, honestly, we’d feel a little like Bilbo Baggins after celebrating his hundred and elevenses, spread thin, like butter spread over too much bread.

And yet here, here in the Gospel of John, we have Jesus talking about eternal life.

In the midst of a festival, Jesus is wandering the around the temple in Jerusalem.  It’s a festival that in Jesus’ time was known as the Feast of Dedication, when Jews were meant to come and celebrate the temple’s liberation from the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes nearly two hundred years before.  We know it by another name:  Hannukah.

There are no dreidels or candles, at least not that make their way into the story as told, but it’s Hannukah nonetheless.  It’s an interesting marker, because this Gospel tells us that Jesus may have been hanging around Jerusalem for three months, since he wandered down from Galilee back in chapter seven to be part of the Sukkot fall festival.

Jesus finds himself in an exchange with a group of Judeans.  It’s a testy exchange, as those who gather around Jesus feel like he’s not being direct with them, that he’s leading them on with his peculiar, obscure way of talking.

Stop wasting our lives, they’re saying, which this gospel conveys in the Greek through an idiom of annoyed impatience.  “We follow, and we listen, and you’re taking up our time, Jesus, and still you just won’t just come out and tell us what we expect to hear.”

And he responds, as he tends to, with more challenges in response.

He makes the case that they should already know, because he’s already been among them and both teaching and acting for a while.  And when he says some strange, strange things.  He says that he and his Father are one, which really really cheesed people off.  But he also says, straight up, that those who grasp what he teaches are given something unusual.  What the Aramaic words were, we cannot be sure, but the Gospel of John describes it in the Greek as zoe aionion, literally, the life of all ages.  The Eternal Life.

This concept isn’t unique to the Gospel as told by John.  It’s in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, in exactly the same form.  It’s in Paul’s writings, and in other of the Epistles.

In addition to the overwhelming span of eternity set before us, there’s also something of a theological conundrum that I’ve always struggled with when presented with this concept.  If there lies an eternity beyond this one, a span of being that stretches forever, in which we are always ourselves just as we are now, why do the choices we make in this life matter?

If we continue as moral agents, forever and ever, just as we are now, what makes the choices of today and tomorrow relevant against the endlessness of eternity?   My life, all our lives, feel like a fleeting instant, an infinitesimal nothing against the yawning deep of all time.  Do you remember the time period between 7:27 am and 7:28 am on October 3rd of 2014?  That single minute is a vastly larger fraction of your life than living a hundred and thirteen years would be relative to the eternal life.  Is that the measure of you as a human being?  

And yet Jesus and the great story of redemption and repentance place an emphasis on this life, this time, the choices we make in the flesh and in the now.

For those of us who call ourselves his, this life is the place where that decision must be made, where transformation must occur.  It is the seedbed of our reality, the foundation on which our relationship with our creator rests.

How, then, to interpret this assertion that being a disciple of Jesus offers us a life eternal?

Speaking to it exactly, in its fullness?  I don’t think any of us can do that.  I don’t think human language itself is capable of bearing the weight of that reality.  It’s why Jesus talked in strange, indirect ways about it, using story and parable and peculiar, abstract symbols.

But we do know some things.

It is not simply about avoiding senescence, not about with aging or the way we change and grow over the course of our days.  Neither can it be interpreted as only being something we participate in at some point following this existence, in an endless life that is just precisely the same as the one we inhabit now, only infinitely longer.

The reality of the zoe aionion is that it is the life of all our ages, the life of our every moment.  It was yesterday, it is today, and it will be our tomorrow, whatever that may bring.  Our days, these days, are set into the reality of God’s work, as bright and precious and eternal as the heavens themselves.  Jesus, who was one with God, knew this, and his whole life was in the service of that reality.

In this time, Jesus calls us to be his flock, to act and live as if we have heard his message of grace and mercy, that we have listened and understood.  

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