Aye Eff Triple Tee

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 08.21.2016

Scripture Lesson:  Isaiah 58:9b-14

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

I’ve always loved gadgets.  It’s just one of those American male things, I think, but few things warm the cockles of my heart more than a device that does something nifty.   Toy robots?  Oh, of course.   Tiny flying indoor helicopters?  I got one for my forty second birthday.  Oooh, look, there’s a helicopter flying in my house!  Cool.   If there’s a problem, having a gadget to solve it just seems so neat.  Like, say, the high tech mosquito trap I bought to handle our back yard bug problem just a couple of years back.  It was this propane powered device that used fans and nets and carbon dioxide emissions to lure in those little devils, and I was sure it’d be great.  Better living through engineering.  But when I actually did the math after it managed to catch fewer mosquitos than I’d swat on any given day, I realized I was paying about $15 per mosquito.  Fiddle.

That doesn’t stop me, though, and that means that another gadget has arrived in our household: an Echo.  It’s this little cylindrical object that sits in the living room and listens, permanently connected to the internet.  It’s like   Ask it something, and it answers.   Ask it to play music...almost any music...and it does.  “Play the soundtrack to the Broadway version of Evil Dead, The Musical!”  And lo and behold, that’s playing.  Ask it what Millard Fillmore’s birthday was.  Ask it who the prime minister of Bangladesh is.  It knows.  It knows the weather, and will tell you.  It’ll put things on your to do list, or update your calendar.  

It can also turn lights on and off in our entire upstairs with a simple command that works about eighty two percent of the time.  It’s all very much like something out of Star Trek.  It can learn new skills, like a one-minute-mindfulness app that turns it into a robotic guru...although, to be honest, that we imagine that a machine can guide us to a higher level of mindfulness in sixty seconds seems to indicate that that whole mindfulness movement has jumped the shark.

It also weirds out our dog, who I’ve watched either flee or wander over to the device and sniff curiously it after it speaks or turns off the lights.  This is, on the one hand, cute.  On the other, it’s started to remind me of that reaction the dogs had in the Terminator movies, which is possibly not a very good sign.

This hasn’t stopped us from exploring and expanding what this gadget to end all gadgets can do, though, and one of those things is something called IFTTT.  It’s a net-based protocol for controlling devices through what they call “recipes.”  

If This Then That, or so the acronym goes, and what it does, according to the website, is automate your life.  Want the lights in the house to come on whenever you get within a hundred yards after dark?  Just write the recipe that connects your phone GPS to your lights.  Want all of your dimmable lights to turn up to maximum whenever you say the words “Let there be light?”  You got it.  It’s a simple set of logical operators, one that lets you structure the world around you so that each of your actions triggers something else.  

It’s a strange analog of life, as the logic that defines the virtual world presses out into our actual existence.

From the Book of Isaiah today we hear a message of challenge, one that includes a surprising number of if/then statements.   This section of Isaiah comes from an interesting time in the history of the people of Israel.   Most Bible scholars worth their salt see the Book of Isaiah divided up into three clear sections, each of which has its own particular focus.  

Today’s section comes from what is known as Third Isaiah, which was written and preached perhaps 510-515 years before Christ by a prophet who followed the tradition of Isaiah.   Unlike First 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.  Unlike Second Isaiah, they do not assume that the Jewish people are shattered in the Babylonian exile, like chapters forty through fifty-five. The context of the last ten chapters is clear: the Hebrew people are back in their land.

They’d been given the opportunity to rebuild is their whole culture, after it was almost wiped from the face of the earth in by Babylonian Empire. After Babylon was defeated by Persia, the Hebrew people were encouraged by Cyrus of Persia to return to their ancestral lands. They were filled with hope at the prospect of return.  All they’d have to do is set up shop again, and all would be well.

The people returned thinking that things were going to be easy, and things were the farthest thing from easy. Life upon their return was a struggle from day to day. The bricks that had been smashed from the walls of Jerusalem did not leap up on their own and autonomously reassemble themselves into Zion Gardens Condos and Suites.

It was hard. It seemed hopeless. And there’s a funny thing about hopelessness.  It tends to bring out the worst in human beings.  Rather than pulling together, and working towards a common goal of rebuilding, we can begin to prey upon one another.  This, as evidenced by the prophet’s condemnation, is precisely what happened as they attempted to rebuild Judah.  For some, the time of rebuilding was a time to profit.  Whenever you find yourself rebuilding, when the system has been smashed and you’re trying to epoxy together a new way of life from the rubble, there are opportunities to do well.  For others?

Those who fell out on the margins of the society...the poor, the foreign, the different, well...things did not go so well for them.  Because, being weak and vulnerable, they became perfect targets for those who were in a position to take advantage.

Isaiah’s story of the rebuilding is full of evidence of this dark form of human relating.  Though the Torah and the heart of God’s covenant with the people of Israel was meant to hold people together.  It was meant to prevent the kind of wild devouring imbalance that turns the heart of any culture towards the bright suffocating blight of injustice.  That love of power is what had broken Judah in the first place, and here, with an opportunity to rebuild, human beings were making that same old pattern of mistakes again.

But the word from God that Isaiah proclaimed defied that despair, and challenged that cycle of oppression. It was a word of intense 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 work through his people to bring about restoration.

What is striking, though, is how that statement of hope is qualified.  If you do this, then this is likely to happen.  The Creator of the Universe isn’t saying through Isaiah: I will do this, guaranteed.  Instead, God is saying:  If you do this, I will likely do that.

The “recipe” for this?  The “program” for this?  As set out in this passage, it’s twofold:  1) care for those who are in need, and 2) take a sabbath from greed and self seeking.

If you are merciful, kind, gracious, and compassionate, your society will flourish.  Your just and gracious actions create the likelihood that the world around you will be bent towards both justice and graciousness.

It’s not precise, not mechanical, not quite as straightforward as we might hope.  

But in times when things seem broken, it is the place to begin.

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

Being Divided

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

08.14.2016; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Luke 12:49-56

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

I’m a little sensitive to family stuff right now, to those strange bonds of time and flesh that weave us together with those who share our blood.

My trip to the beach over these few days only deepened that sense.  Every single year for the last twenty years, it’s been a time for relaxation, a time for kicking back, though the week seems shorter every time it comes.  Was that a whole week, or was that half an afternoon?

In 2016, it was again a chance to try new things on the beach, as hours of my time vanish in a meditation on the coalescence of order from chaos, as particulate sand and liquid water mingle into an ephemeral solidity.  

Or to put that in English, me make sandcastles.  This year, a collapsed first attempt at a tower just happened to look like a letter, which lead to carving more letters, which lead to me discovering that writing the word “Bethany” out of the sand is a family-picture magnet.

But this last week was the marker of the last summer before my son leaves the nest for school.  It was at the beach, 19 summers ago, that we announced to the gathered family that his life was forming inside my wife.   Now, our presence there was a sign of his imminent departure.

I’ve been watching those markers fall, one by one, as the year has passed and my son has grown closer and closer to moving on.  The last swim meet.  The last musical.  The last performance.

The final trip to Hershey Park tomorrow, last of the family road trips.  Each a transitional moment, marking what had for so long seemed beyond the far horizon.

Each of them once inhabited a place in the future, a far off signpost of that morning when I wake up and the house is discernably more empty, a bed incongruously made, a room peculiarly clean, the sofa downstairs unwarmed by a sleeping form.

And I grumble at the big picture of a culture that takes away our babies, at a society that just expects the young to be far from us just as they’ve blossomed into their adulthood.  For tens of thousands of years, they stuck around and helped us on the farm and squabbled and we wished they’d go someplace else.  Now?  Now we just miss ‘em, as if, as the saying goes about children, our heart now lives outside of our bodies and walks around in the world.  And though that sounds cute, there are moments where it feels more like I’m that hapless extra in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, watching as my beating heart is removed from my body and cast into the fire.

I yearn, in this moment, for a reassurance, for words of sustaining comfort.

But it goes deeper than that.  In times when we are parted, we hope for connection, a deeply unbreakable, love-wrought union between those who have become part of us and ourselves.  When we move away from friends who’ve become like blood, that’s what we hope.  When we return home to that emptier house, that’s what we yearn for.

And so I go to scripture this week, and I get..what?  Oh Lord, it’s that passage from Luke.

“I came to bring fire to the earth?” What was that? You came to what? What are you talking about? “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!”

Division? Do we really need more division? If there’s one thing we human beings seem to be good enough at on our own, it’s factions and strife and conflict. Um, Jesus, we don’t really need your help for that, but…ahh…thanks for offering? How are we supposed to grasp this? What does this passage mean?

And it just keeps getting worse.  It’s not just that we can expect to encounter it in the world, Jesus says, but that he’s bringing it into our homes.  

From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three, they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother in law.

When his message hits, Jesus seems to be saying, I’m going to make sure that it’s not one of those fun family gatherings, but instead one of those “dear-God-when-will- this-dysfunctional-vacation-from-hell-finally-end” family gatherings.

None of us want this.  No-one yearns for that kind of brokenness.

How can we hear this passage as Good News?

That seems like the very last thing we need.

The answer lies in understanding both the context of the passage and the kind of separation that Jesus brings.

As a teaching that found purchase the context of the early church, it was remembered because the commitment to follow the Way did create a form of division.  There was some very real cost to following Jesus in that first generation of the church, as it required taking a significant risk, a break with either the standing practices and expectations of the Judaism of the time or the expectations of imperial Roman culture.  If you chose to follow Jesus of Nazareth, you were separating yourself from all of that.

We also can’t read this passage without having heard the whole context of Luke’s Gospel. This can’t be taken as a soundbite, as something that exists outside of relationship with the whole story.

Zechariah proclaims in Luke 1:79 that Jesus is coming “..to guide our feet into the way of peace.” In Luke 2:14 the angels proclaim that Jesus brings peace on earth and goodwill to all peoples. Jesus commands his disciples to declare peace as a greeting in every house they enter (Luke 10:5). He’s the one who weeps over doomed Jerusalem, crying “If only you had recognized on this day the things that make for peace.” And after Jesus returns to his disciples, after the cross and the empty tomb, the first words he speaks are “Peace be with you.” Peace and the desire for peace are a vital part of who Christ is. Creating peace is the point and purpose of the Gospel.

But though peace is at the heart of the Gospel, proclaiming and living out that peace doesn’t always result in an absence of conflict. Even if you live your life according to the teachings of Christ, even if you are one of the peacemakers upon whom he declared God’s blessing, there will still be conflict.

If you’ve ever tried to settle a dispute between two people who really, really want to fight with each other, you know that often doesn’t work out so well.  

It's not that Jesus is proclaiming himself to be yet another source of dissension, yet another firebrand eager to add his message to the throngs of competing world-views that tear and snap at one another. The world, our world, already has plenty of powers and principalities that claw at each other for control.

Because of this, those who follow him...actually follow him, not just mouthing the words...do stand separate. Where the world cries out for us to take what is rightfully ours, those who follow him instead give. Where the world insists that we should shove our way to the head of the table, those who follow him take on the form of a servant. Where the world declares that the other is the enemy, to be hated, to be despised, to be destroyed, those who truly follow Christ understand that Christ teaches that the other...be they the stranger or our enemy or that person we hate with the fierce bitter fire that comes from closeness...is to be loved, to be respected, to be built up.

There is a real distinction there, a division, a rift between one way of being and another.

Christ does bring that division.

So when we hear this passage, and we cry: What? What was that I just read? Was that Jesus talking?

Yes, it was. And he was saying that we should be separated from hatred, separated from fear and bitterness and anxiety and those dark walls of the infolded soul that can strangle God’s love from our lives.

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

The Things We Prepare

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 07.31.2016

Scripture Lesson:Luke 12:13-21

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

Summertime, and the living is easy?  Americans just can’t seem to stop working.

Every few years, there’s another spasm of interest in this characteristic of the American economy.  We work, and work a whole bunch.  In major metropolitan areas like this one, the number of hours you put in each week is almost a badge of pride, yet another way in which you can prove yourself superior to those around you.

Downtown, little clusters of young associates regale each other with tales of epic hours worked, 50 hours, 70 hours, 80 hours, 100 hours in a week. Among some junior executives at area contracting firms, where racking up billable hours is next to Godliness, there’s a rumor going around that if you pound back 25 triple espressos in a row it actually rips a hole in the space-time continuum…allowing you to put in that perfect 200 hour week. Either that or your head implodes, and honestly, after 25 espressos it’s a little hard to tell the difference.

This ethic of intensity expresses itself, oddly, in the work schedules of many of my pastoral brethren and sistren.  I’ll talk to ministers who’ll tell me they don’t have ten seconds to rub together, that they’re putting in two full weeks every week, that they’re exhausted and overburdened.  This confuses me, because for some reason I don’t equate spiritual leadership with shimmering stress and fatigue.  

According to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Americans work more than most of the industrialized world.  In 2015, the average worker in the United States put in 1,790 hours a year. That’s now almost two full weeks more than the average Canadian, three hundred and fifty hours a year more than the average Dutch worker, and 1,750 hours more than the average Frenchman.

For all of our seeming busyness, we’re still nowhere near matching the industrialized country that holds the record for the most hours spent working.  Is it Japan?  Korea, perhaps?  Nope.  Germany?  Hah.  The Germans work only 1371 hours a year.  They put in the fewest hours per worker of any modern democracy, ten full work weeks less per year than we do.  The people who work the most: It’s Mexico, at 2,246 hours annually.  Mexicans, according to the data, are the hardest working people in the world.  

Yes, they are, Donald.

What’s strange about this whole phenomenon is that it’s exactly the opposite of what people used to think 2016 would look like. Back in America in the 1950s, everyone was absolutely convinced that fifty five years in the future, we’d all be working 15 hours a week. They also thought we’d be commuting via jet pack, and I don’t know which one is more disappointing. Strangely, though, studies have shown that when you take into account all the increases in technology and productivity, it should only take a modern worker 11 hours to do the work that took 40 hours to do in 1950. If we were willing to accept the same standard of living as 1950s Americans, an 11 hour workweek might even be possible.

But we don’t want to live in little 1950s houses. We want to live in huge houses. We don’t want to own just one car. We want three cars, which we’ll put in a garage that’s bigger than that little 1950s house. We don’t want just one nine inch television. We want a 108” LCD HDTV…and oh yes, they do make one…so we can see the oil glistening in the pores on Jack Bauer’s nose. We want our cable and we want our  and we want our high speed internet and we want our smartphones. We NEED these things if we’re going to be happy. Because we are so much more happy now than we were half a century ago. Aren’t we?  We work so hard, every day, to gather in the material blessings of our Tantalus consumer culture, sure that our joy is just that one last gadget away.

We find security in those things, in those objects, in the having and the holding, and we allow ourselves to imagine that it is they that matter.

Though it’s a couple of thousand years ago, it is that ethic that Jesus is addressing in the story we hear from the Gospel of Luke today. The passage from chapter 12 of that book comes to us from one of the long teachings that Luke records. Jesus is standing before a crowd that has gathered to hear him share stories and riddles about the nature of the Kingdom of God. He’s showing them what’s important and telling them what they should value in their lives. He’s just told them to trust the Holy Spirit to guide them in what they have to say when someone from the audience pipes up.

“Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” What the audience member was hoping was to get Jesus to act as most rabbis would have acted, which is to go into a long discussion of the laws of inheritance and to come up with a legal ruling for him...for a small percentage of the inheritance, of course. Perhaps he should have waited on the Spirit just a little longer.

Jesus turns him down with surprising gentleness, and instead uses his question to launch into a story about a man who had so much stuff that he was having to think about building a new five car garage with a finished attic for storage. This is someone who has succeeded by every single standard of classical wisdom. He has invested wisely, he’s planted the right crops, and he is doing absolutely everything right. The wealthy man smiles to himself, sure that he’s going to have a chance to kick back and enjoy the bounty he’s gotten. I’m going to Disney World, baby!

But as Christ tells the story, that’s not what happens. It’s at that moment that God appears to the man and berates him. “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you.” In an echo of Ecclesiastes, we hear: “And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”

This is the point in countless sermons where your friendly neighborhood televangelist would start talking about not storing up treasures for yourself but being rich towards God...something you should definitely keep in mind when you see the offering plate that’ll be coming ‘round later. But that totally misses the point of what Jesus is talking about.

Within the story, what is being demanded of the rich man isn’t his barns or his crops or his goods. What’s being claimed is his life...all of his days, all of his actions, all of the choices he has made. The Creator of the Universe couldn’t care less about possessions. It is life that God demands.

That’s one of the primary challenges facing us in our modern culture of work. A deep personal commitment to excellence in all that you do in the working world was viewed by the Protestant reformers as a sign of spiritual maturity. God has given us all certain gifts, and called each of us to a particular task in life, and our willingness to embrace that task and pursue it joyously is a sign of blessing.

But we’re not called on to pursue work for the sake of profit alone. We’re called to work because what work is a joyous and honorable thing. We’re each given a vocation as a part of contributing to the broader good of God’s creation.

What work should not be, though, is all consuming. If it devours time for friendships and fellowship, and takes away those moments that should be given over to prayer and thanksgiving, then it has grown beyond its rightful bounds.

It is our lives that will be demanded of us. When the time comes to settle that account, what will we have to offer?

Let that be so, for you and for me,

AMEN

Seek. Ask. Knock.

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 07.24.2016

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 11:1-12

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

Name it and claim it.  That’s all you need to do.  If you want something, just set your heart on it, and it will come to pass.

This saying has become a peculiar part of American Jesus practice, front and center in our strange brand of 21st century consumer Christianity.  The idea, at least, is that God gives us everything that we want if only we ask faithfully.

I’ve read through the books by the great masters of the prosperity movement, by the Creflo A. Dollars and the Joel Osteens of the world.  I’ve got several of them on my twitter feed, for some reason that still eludes me, and I get their chirrupy words of positive-thinking encouragement mixed in with the art and the literature and the randomness.

Some spiritual practitioners elsewhere in this odd movement call that principle the Law of Attraction, asserting that the way you get something to happen is simply to desire it.  If you truly want something, it will happen.

I’ve tried this, and I find it doesn’t really quite hold water.

It’s not just with the stupid stuff, like the muscle cars and the yachts and the BMW R1200RTs of the world.  It isn’t...as one of the prosperity preachers wrote in his bestselling book...about praying to Jesus that you’ll find a parking space at the mall, and bam!  You get one.  Named it!  Claimed it!

It’s with other stuff.  The important stuff.

I truly wanted a friend not to die during brain surgery.  I didn’t just slightly want it.  I turned all of my hopes, all of my intention, all of my prayers, all of myself towards that end.  I named that future.  I claimed it.  I visualized it, and trusted in God. I rested my hopes in God that she’d pull through, when the surgery failed and she was induced into a coma.  She died.  I cannot possibly have wanted that not to happen more than I did.

I genuinely and utterly named and claimed the revitalization of my last congregation, my first call.  I could see it.  I could feel it.  I could visualize what it would mean for that church to turn around two decades of decay, and become something new and joyous.  I saw that, and I cast out that vision, and I prayed prayers full of hope.  

But folks got to fighting, and things didn’t work, and as much as I prayed and sweated and hoped and prayed some more, it just didn’t happen.  I left.  The church died.

What strikes me, every time I encounter prosperity preaching, is that it is complete and unmitigated bovine excrement.  The idea that you shape creation with your intention seems like egomaniacal bravado, preposterous bluster completely unfounded in the reality of our mortal frailty and our smallness.

And yet here Jesus is, telling us to do just that.

Ask, and you shall receive.  Seek, and you shall find.  Knock, and the door shall be opened to you.

That’s a little hard to hear, having lived enough life not to quite believe it.  So what does that mean?

Here in Luke chapter 11, we’ve worked our way through a sequence of Jesus teaching about prayer.  It’s a familiar teaching, one that we find in a more familiar form elsewhere in the Bible.  It’s in the heart of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, too, at the core of the spiritual and ethical teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.  It’s in the heart of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, too, at the core of the spiritual and ethical teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.

It’s the most basic prayer, the most

In Luke, as in Matthew, that simple teaching of a simple prayer is followed by a section on what it is we can expect from our Creator, and in both, we are told not to fear.

But in Luke, Jesus lays out a little story, a mental exercise meant to stir the imaginations of his listeners.  Imagine a friend, arriving with need in the middle of the night.  What do you do for that friend, in their need?

You help them.  You give them what they ask.

In ancient Judah, the demand for hospitality was radical, a fundamental moral principle that provided the social glue of a culture.  The reason to have things was to share them, was to be generous with them.

I’m not sure that’s quite the same in our selfish, fearful, anxious society.  A knock on the door in the middle of the night might get us calling the cops, or racking a shell into the chamber of the shotgun.

But the principle Jesus is trying to convey is straightforward: God, like a good friend, will give us what we ask if we diligently ask for it.

So how does that play out, really, here in the reality we inhabit?  If we ask, do we receive?  If we knock, is it opened?

In many ways, no.  We do not become gods by the asking.  Sure, we can stand out in a cornfield directly in the path of an F5 tornado, and say, “Dear Heavenly Father, I ask you in the name of Jesus to turn this storm aside!”  I mean, we can, but then our next prayer will be something along the lines of “Dear Heavenly Father, now that I’m flying through the air, could you find something soft for me to land on?  No, by soft I didn’t mean a tree.”

We do not become less mortal through the asking.  We are not immune to the reality of being human, of being frail, of being easily broken.  Christianity is not and has never been the promise that everything will always go right for us, that we will not grow old, that we will never experience illness or loss or death.  That’s the lie of consumer culture, which sates us with stuff and coddles us while eternally stoking our hungers.  Following Jesus is and has never been a guarantee that you’ll never experience suffering and loss.  

So if that’s what you’re seeking, you’ll be disappointed.

But following Jesus also changes the world.  It does.  As I like to think of it, the commitment to Christ’s way bends local probability towards the reality of grace.

I’ll freely admit that saying “I’m bending local probability towards the reality of grace” is a great way to insure that no-one has a clue what you’re talking about, which is probably why Jesus never used those words.

What are we to ask for?  As Jesus makes clear in Luke’s gospel, we’re asking for the Holy Spirit, which means we’re asking to stand in unmediated relationship with the love of God.  That changes us, and it changes our relationships, and that changes...right up close, where it matters...our world.

If we ask for God’s grace to work in and through us, to fill us with the light of kindness and mercy, and that is our sincere yearning, that changes things.  We are more likely to be graceful.  We are more likely to give others the benefit of the doubt.  We are more likely to forgive, and to be resilient, and to endure times of hardship.

If we search, diligently, for the Way of life that Jesus taught, that makes a difference.  It shapes our deciding, transforms the choices we make, modifies the way we relate to every human being with whom we stand in encounter.   That, in turn, has the potential to change how they experience their lives, and that changes them.

If we knock, diligently, against what can sometimes seem like the dark, closed door of the universe, we may not receive material blessings.  But that Spirit of grace, which is the heart of the Way that Jesus taught, is and will always be available to us.

And in that, there’s hope, in the strange inversion of naming and claiming.

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

Too Long on the Vine

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

07.17.2016; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Amos 8:1-12

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

I made another mistake this month, one of those classic mistakes of omission that tends to come when you’re a little scatterbrained.

It’s like leaving to go to the store, but forgetting your wallet.  Doh! Or getting back from that trip to the store, and realizing you didn’t actually buy the milk.

What I forgot, this last month, was to buy stock in Nintendo.  Every time I’ve see a little cluster of kids or teens wandering around Whalen Commons in lazy concentric circles, hoping against hope that a Snorlax might appear, I’m reminded that this was one of those times when a stock purchase might have made sense, one of those “double your money” moments that’s dangled like grapes before a capitalist Tantalus.

If only, you think, and then you start daydreaming about the fabulous things you could have bought if you’d only bet the house and the entire contents of your 401(3)b on Nintendo to ride.   Hmm.  Do I get my Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat in Go Mango Orange, or Maximum Steel Gray?

But I waited too long.  It’s been an incredible run for all stocks recently, truth be told.  After taking a pummeling during the collapse of the subprime market back in the last decade, the markets have roared back.

Home prices have also bounced back, with the average sale price of single family home in the Washington metropolitan area setting a new high water mark in June.  The median price for a single family home hereabouts: now $555,000.  This is great news if you already own a house, and perhaps not such good news if you don’t.

Wealth is piled upon wealth, rising as high and bright as the advertising that blares from the screens in Times Square. For those with the means to take advantage of it, this seems like an age of plenty, a time of harvest, when the fruit from all of the labor of all of the world is gathered into the larders of capital. With the average American corporate executive now pulling down a salary 400 times that of their workers, and with the growing concentration of wealth among the very few, it sure must seem like that way...to them, at least.

Throughout history, this pattern has repeated and repeated itself. Wealth concentrates, as riches create power that seeks to gather more riches. It’s a pattern as old as humanity itself, and that’s exactly the pattern that the prophet Amos was going on about nearly 2,800 years ago. The passage we heard this morning comes to us from around 760 years before Christ, during the reign of King Jeroboam the Second of Israel. For all of the chaos that had wracked both the Southern Kingdom of Judah and the Northern Kingdom of Israel, this period had been a peaceful time in the history of the Hebrew people.

No wars.  No uprisings.  Nothing.  Honestly, that’s pretty unusual.

For half a century, the wars between the great Empires of the Ancient Near East fell into a lull...Egyptian and Assyrian armies no longer swept back and forth across the land like a plague. In that brief time of peace, the cities of both kingdoms prospered. The educated and literate power elite that gathered around the throne of kings grew in influence and wealth, as taxation and the strengthening of the monarchy gathered in the wealth. But that prosperity wasn’t something shared by all. For those who didn’t live in the cities near the heart of power, things were not as good as they had once been.

Amos came from just such a place. He was from the village of Tekoa, in the southern kingdom. He was a shepherd, whose flock would have wandered the hills just to the south of Bethlehem. A series of visions drove him to travel to the north, across the border into Israel and up into the area around Bethel, where he made himself a nuisance to the priests and authorities of the north.

The vision he shared might seem a bit odd to us. Does God show him a golden throne surrounded by many-winged angels? Does he see radiant glory?

No...God shows him a basket of...summer fruit. A fruit basket? That’s his vision? What sort of vision is that? That’s not a message from God...it’s the kind of gift you give to a co-worker you barely know. No self-respecting televangelist is going to get up there and say...”Brothers and sisters, the Lord came to me in a dream last night...and in his radiant glory and power he showed me...a fruit basket. He also showed me a nice Hallmark card with a picture of a kitten.”

But Amos didn’t know we’d be hearing his voice nearly 3,000 years later. He was talking directly to the people of Ancient Israel, in terms that they would have understood. This is a passage that requires a little background knowledge about both Hebrew and ancient agriculture.

When Amos says basket of summer fruit, the thing we miss is that he’s making a pun in Hebrew. When God shows him a basket of summer fruit, and then tells him that the “the end has come upon my people Israel,” those are two related words. “Summer fruit” is, in Hebrew, the word qayits. “The end,” in Hebrew, is the word qets. Summer fruit and the end don’t just sound alike, though.

Like many Hebrew words that sound alike, they’re related.

When we think of “summer fruit,” we think of sweet buttered corn and watermelon juice dripping red down our chins. But for the ancient Israelites the term “summer fruit” meant the harvest that came at the very end of the season. It was the last of the gathering in, the crop that was brought in just as the growing season was over. Summer fruit didn’t last long. You had to eat it or store it quickly, because it wasn’t going to keep. It was like that banana that starting to brown and tomorrow will be nothing but blackened mush, like that watermelon that seems fine today, but when you cut into it tomorrow, the meat has turned to watery foulness.

Summer fruit is that two-foot zucchini that’s been left on the vine just a tiny bit too long, huge and mealy and barely edible.

Summer fruit doesn’t last, and after it’s done, there’s nothing to follow it. The harvest is over.

From the vision of Amos came a word of God’s judgement against those denizens of the ancient cities of Israel. All of the law codes of ancient Israel served to keep their society in balance. Those ancient law helped to maintain a balance in society, a balance under which no one individual or group was to gather too much power or control to itself. The point of the Torah, which is affirmed and lived out by Christ, is that power and material wealth weren’t allowed to become the goal of God’s people.

When they do, a society has lost its center. It is no longer focused on God’s love and love of neighbor, and is doomed to failure. The eloquent warnings that this shepherd from Bethlehem delivered to Israel proved to be true...as within a generation, Israel had fallen.

Hearing Amos...really hearing him...is as important in our age as it was in his. As amazing and impressive as the riches of the new global economy can be, we’ve got to look hard at them through that prophet’s eyes. When wealth and power become the whole focus of our lives, we lose our sense of responsibility for others. We no longer seek their good, but instead allow ourselves to believe that profit justifies itself. When profit seeks after profit, the world is thrown out of balance.

When a few are sating themselves on a harvest of summer fruit, and literally billions are struggling just to have the very most basic staples in life, the world is thrown out of balance.

Such imbalances aren’t part of God’s covenant desire for us, and as the taste of that fruit rests on our lips, we have to be mindful of the warning that Amos bore.

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

A Most Dangerous Path

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

07.03.16; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Passage: Luke 10:1-11; 16-20

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

Summer time is travel time.  It’s the season of the road trip, but those trips just aren’t what they used to be when I was a kid, or when I was a young man. Yeah, the roads are more or less the same. But getting ready for a trip when you’re a dad of younglings was nothing like getting ready for a trip as a kid, or as a twenty year old.

I still have old faded sepia memories of those first road vacations, back when I was a tiny little spud.  A week of vacation involved one large suitcase for my parents, and one for my brother and myself.  They’d get stuffed into the tiny front trunk of our well-worn white Volkswagen Beetle, and five year old me and my three year old brother would clamber into the back.  Off we’d go, two suitcases, no carseats, bouncing along the modestly maintained roads of 1970s Kenya towards Lake Malindi or the beach at Mombasa, or rattling along the dirt roads of the savannah on our way to some safari lodge or another.  It was a...different...time.

When I was a younger man, my idea of packing was even more streamlined. I’d get off my shift as a dishwasher at U.VA’s academic dining facility, rush back to my room, and preparing myself for a trip to Williamsburg to visit my girlfriend.

I had a very manageable checklist. Item one was to take a quick shower, because the frenetic pace of the dishroom tended to result in me heavily crusted with condiments and little chunks of broccoli. I learned pretty early on that most women don’t really appreciate the “I’m wearing my own snacks” look.

Item two was to pack everything I needed for a weekend away. That involved, in total, two pairs of underwear and a toothbrush. Total packing and preparation time: ten minutes, seven and half if I was feeling particularly motivated.  Then I’d start up my Honda 750 with a dozen hard stomps on the kickstarter...not that I needed to, but pressing the button on the electric start didn’t have that Marlon Brando feel...and off I’d ride, lickety split, with my mostly empty backpack flapping in the wind behind me. For some reason, my wife to be found my approach to packing strange.

But preparing for a journey...even a three-day trip...has taken a bit longer than seven and a half minutes throughout the majority of my years as a modern parent. Two days before the trip, there’s a twenty minute list preparation meeting, as we carefully go over every conceivable thing that we might need. At least one point seven five complete outfits is selected for every member of the family for each day of the trip, and several different pairs of footwear, each selected for function. Then there was the food, which is packed as if we were planning an expedition into a vast and trackless wilderness where the only other option would be to forage in the underbrush. Though the roots and berries are quite tasty in coastal Delaware, we’ve discovered that Bethany actually has stores.

To the list were added laptops and iPads and iPhones and chargers, so that we can’t be away from our electronic leashes for even one moment. Then the packing began. It was a three stage process. First, the suitcases were packed and canvas bags are filled up. Then, they were moved to a staging area near the carport, where they waited until the next morning, when the coolers full of food joined them. After the staging area was reviewed to confirm compliance with the established list, they’re moved one by one into the gaping maw of the minivan. I understand that George Mason University now offers vacation logistics coursework as part of its executive MBA program.

But that level of preparation seems utterly lacking from the instructions given to the disciples by Jesus in our passage from Luke this morning. This segment of Luke comes as a follow-on to a passage that comes at the beginning of chapter nine, in which Jesus commissions the twelve disciples and sends them out after giving them a set of packing instructions. Back in that chapter, we hear Jesus sending the 12 disciples out with a similar list of what to do and what to bring. Here, we have a mirror of Christ’s demands, and they’re no less challenging when they’re issued to seventy disciples instead of twelve.

Jesus begins his instructions to the seventy with an exhortation, calling them to go out into the world like laborers to a harvest. But then, his instructions get a little challenging. His followers are to “carry no bag, no sandals; and greet no-one on the road.” Here they are, intended to travel through the countryside of Judea, and they can’t even take a bag? What sort of preparation is that? It sounds...even by the standards of my college boy road trips...like a pretty half-baked journey.

Scholarly commentaries on Luke give us several options for how to interpret this peculiar demand that followers not actually go on their journeys in a prepared way. First, because it was structured like a history of the time, and because the structure and language of the Greek used in Luke is very sophisticated, most Bible scholars feel that the Gospel of Luke was written for an audience of well-educated Greek-speaking Christians. Luke’s double emphasis on this act of sending reinforces it, and it may have been kept as part of Luke’s tradition because it was just so hard for his sophisticated audience to hear.

How can you go off unprepared? No money? No way to carry things? No...shoes? Well...you can do it if you are intending to be utterly dependent on both your message and the response of those who will receive you.  It’s a bizarre concept, one that reminded me of a story in one of the car mags I read from a couple of years back, in which two journalists did a road trip across the American South in a Rolls Royce with no cash at all, relying on their charms and the appearance of wealth to finagle free rooms, food, and gas.  That’s...um...not what Jesus meant.

What may be being conveyed here is the ferocious urgency of that moment.  Go to these towns.  Don’t let yourself be distracted.  Through both a seemingly nonexistent packing list and the instruction not to dawdle in conversation on the way, what may be being conveyed here are two things.  

First, the intense need for action in the now. The seventy followers of Christ are being told...in no uncertain terms...that they need to get out there and engage the world with Christ’s message of hope and reconciliation. There wasn’t room for fiddling around or worrying over what you brought or didn’t bring. The moment’s pressing, it’s intense, and the need to act upon it is such that you just can’t dawdle.

Second, Christ seems to be telling us is that the journey of faith is not like the vacation of a modern American family, in which our immense vehicles are filled with 5 cubic yards of supplies to meet every potential eventuality. The journey of Christian faith may not be like the carefully planned business trip, in which we make sure that we schedule every last moment full of meetings so that we can justify the every penny of the journey to the folks down in accounting.

Instead, our journey of faith and our spreading of the Good News is like a journey into an unknown space, a place that is neither familiar nor safe.  It is not an easy or comfortable thing.  The message of the Gospel is one that requires you to risk the unknown, in the same way that reconciliation requires you to risk the unknown.  Healing the breaches and broken places requires you to set aside what you know...with certainty...about another person or another group of people.  

You know how terrible they are.  You know how badly you’ve been treated.  You know all of these things, carrying that knowledge with you and allowing it to shape your relationship with them.  

You fill the great empty hold of your minivan soul with every last bit of that baggage, and in doing so, you lose the ability to stand in that deeply risky place of reconciling and restoration.  

Carry nothing with you, says Jesus.  And just as that would have given the disciples pause, so too does it sound strangely off of our souls.  

Yet that willingness to leave behind security and risk an encounter with newness is an essential part of the Gospel journey.  It’s not easy, not for any of us, particularly not now.

But it’s the strange, dangerous, transformational path we’re called to journey.   Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.