O Breath

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 04.06.14

Scripture Lesson:  Ezekiel 37:1-14

Every once in a while, we get stuck.  We reach that point where we feel we’ve run out of ideas.

Generally, we bop along, repeating the patterns of our days, and things work, more or less.  You wake up early, you have a cup of coffee, you go tell your teens to wake up already, then you go straighten up a bit, and then you pour another half-cup of coffee, which steels you for having to go tell your teens that really, c’mon, it seriously is time already.

Those comfortable patterns work for us, cycling day in and day out.  You get to work, you check your messages, you check your email, you review your to-do list and your quarterly task list, you play just a tiny bit of Candy Crush, and then you get to it.  You keep getting to it until the day is over, and then you go home, eat, sleep, and repeat.  Nothing anomalous.  Every day a little bit different, and a whole lot the same.

But then there come times when you suddenly realize that none of it is working.  So you double down on what you know should work.  Oooh, I know, I know, we Presbyterians think.  Let’s have a meeting! Gather a committee! Or maybe, maybe, we’ll have to bring out the big guns.  A task force. Task forces always work. But then it doesn’t.

You get creative, you try new things.  You try crazy new things.  You try anything that pops into your head.  Admittedly, the one that involved wearing everyone hand-made paper-mache heads wasn’t well thought through, but hey, you were spitballing.  And still, none of it is working.

You’re at that place where, if you are hard and honest with yourself, there seems to be no way out. 

You are becalmed.  You’re dead in the water. You feel locked in place, paralyzed with a fundamental uncertainty about what to do next, or how to even begin to move on from the place you find yourself.

I’ve been in those times, and they’re rough on a soul.  You feel trapped, locked into a certain way of being.  They can happen in our vocations, or in our schooling, when we find ourselves suddenly at an impasse.  We’re unable to move forward, stalled out as we realize we’re doing something that we’d really never planned on doing with our lives, and we can’t see how we could do anything else.

It’s harder still when you reach that point in a relationship, when that whole arc of a friendship or a marriage suddenly seems to have changed.  It’s not the thing you were sure it was going to be, and it has reached the point where you can no longer really even imagine it becoming anything different.

For most of us, for normal human beings, this is a difficult place. It is the place where we become anxious, and angry.  It is a place of quiet desperation, one that normal human beings hope not to encounter.

Ezekiel, though, was not a normal human being.  Ezekiel was a weird, weird dude.

He needed to be weird, because he lived in weird times. Ol’ Zeke was a member of the priesthood, with a clear career track as a priest in the temple in Jerusalem.  That was his whole life.  He was a Zadokite, meaning the priesthood was in his blood.  His daddy’d been a priest, and so had his grandpappy.  As he’d grown up, he would have learned all of the rituals, all of the complicated prayers and songs and sacrificial techniques. He would have learned how to dress, how to eat, and how to follow the law to keep himself pure for the temple. It was his whole life, his whole understanding of himself.

And then that thing was destroyed. Ezekiel shared his visions with a people who had watched Jerusalem burn. They had seen their leaders butchered. They had been driven from the land that had belonged to their ancestors for generation that stretched back into legend. The temple, the Holy of Holies, the footstool of the God of Israel, that temple lay as a ruin, battered and burned, all of its sacred and holy objects looted or scattered to the four winds.

His people were lost. Their hopes were dead. Their future was a dead thing, shattered by the military might of Babylon and blowing like ashes throughout the empire. Ezekiel himself had been taken with them, and he found suddenly that all of the tools of his trade, all of the rituals that made him a priest over the people, were now meaningless. What does it matter if you know how to do a perfect temple worship if the temple has been crushed to rubble? How do you speak to a people who have given up, who declare that they might as well be dead...no, more than that....they say they ARE dead. As they sat and wept by the rivers of Babylon, the people of Israel were dead to hope, dead to a future, and worst of all, convinced that they were dead to God.

How does a priest talk to a people when he has no temple and no sacrifice? Every tool in his priestly toolbox was gone. He had nothing. But Ezekiel wasn’t just a priest. He wasn’t just a temple functionary. Having been torn from the foundations of the past, he suddenly found himself connecting to God in ways that he hadn’t planned for and hadn’t trained for and didn’t expect.

Ezekiel suddenly finds himself connecting to God in ways that go beyond rites and sacrifices. Throughout this book, we see him moved by visions and impulses that stem from God himself.  Each time, it’s a vision. Each time, he is being grasped by God’s Spirit, and shown something that an ordinary way of understanding can’t express.  More often that not, he chooses to express himself in extraordinary ways.  He digs holes in things.  He lies on one side for a month.  He makes Ezekiel bread. Anyone ever buy Ezekiel bread?  That Whole Foods kinda product is notable not so much for the healthy ancient grains that comprise it, but for the fact that he’s supposed to cook it over a burning mound of excrement.  Like I said, Ezekiel was a weird, weird dude.

And his 

This vision is one of a great valley, one that could be accurately called the “Valley of the Shadow of Death.”  It’s filled with bones and lifelessness, the remains of a people.  There’s nothing there any more, nothing at all.  They are not just bones, but dry bones.

It’s a stark and desolate image, in which no hope remains.  It is the most primal form of ruin.

In the midst of this bleakness, Ezekiel finds himself set down by his Creator’s hand and spirit.  He surveys the death around him, shown them all by his Creator.  He gets asked a question.  “Can these bones live?”   And he says, wisely, “Um, I think you have the answer to that.”  The answer rested in God’s creative power, so far beyond Ezekiel’s grasp that in this vision he wisely chose not to even hazard a guess.

In this vision, that which seems totally lost, irrevokably broken?  It gets remade.  And then it is not just remade, but given life again.  “Come from the four winds, O breath,” Ezekiel is told to say, and he does, and what seemed broken beyond repair is made whole again.

That was the message that the shattered people of Israel needed to hear in their lostness and despair.  It is also the message we need to hear, when we find our lives are empty, broken, or lifeless.

In those places, what allows us to endure is trust and patience.  

Trust, that even though we may not ourselves be able to find an answer, that does not mean that there is not an answer out there.  

Patience, because as we are pushing our way out of those times of seeming hopelessness, it doesn’t happen on our schedule.

Let that breath be in you, and in me, AMEN.

Facepalm Sunday

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

04.13.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 21:1-11

There are some things, now, that are a little hard to understand.  There’s a peculiar new shift in language, something having to do with our slow transition away from being people who can actually read to people who can only look at pictures of kittens.

Among the new words we might not understand is one that wasn’t around 20 years ago: meme.  “Meme” is a unit of cultural data, a bit of information that is passed along from person to person, kind of like a gene is passed from generation to generation.  Now, it tends to involve pictures of kittens.

Another new word is a mix of two others.  Face and palm give us “Facepalm,” that movement you make when someone says something so impossibly oblivious that your head sinks down in despair, resting in your hand.  Face, meet palm.

These things, we get.  But there are some things I just can’t get, and have never been able to quite grasp.  Like, say, the concept of “winning.”  On the surface, that would seem like a pretty basic one.

There’s something to be said for winning, for triumphing, for coming out on top.  I’ll freely admit that it doesn’t happen often in my own existence.  That fierce competitiveness, the intensity of our aggressive culture, I seem to have missed out on it somehow.  I like doing my best, but I just don’t have that killer instinct.

But compete we do.

It’s a peculiar form of madness, which was everywhere last month.  March Madness is done now, finally, and I notice it even though I suffer from Sports Enthusiasm Deficiency Disorder.  Honestly, I’m glad we’re done with March, because it’s starting to freak me out a little bit.  Maybe it’s the reinforcing effect of the social media echo chamber.  I pop onto Facebook to see how my friends are doing, and they’re all talking about brackets, and sharing brackets, and making up brackets that involve prominent figures from modern Christianity and superheroes and global political figures.  I wake up on March mornings, haunted by the fear that I’ll go outside, and everyone I know and love will be shambling around with dead eyes, mumbling the word “brackettttts” over and over to themselves.

And in those brackets, there is just a single winner, just one who makes it.  From Connecticut, or so I’m told, although why Connecticut as a state should be so dominant eludes me.  Maybe there’s a special place in America’s heart for a team named after extra large boys clothing.  

We approach so much of life as conflict, and in some ways that’s a good thing. Being competitive strengthens us.  It pushes us.  It drives us to stretch ourselves. Striving with another person makes us stronger, just as straining against a weight builds us up.

But when we view our whole world in terms of conflict, when we look at everything in the binary and polarizing terms of our victory and their loss, we create a world that looks a certain way.  We establish a way of relating to other persons that defines them as either our adversary or the opposing team.

That’s fine when it’s a game, something done for mutual enjoyment, and for mutual strengthening.

But in the world, as a way of understanding everything?  As a way of running a political system, or a legal system, or an economy?  It often causes more harm than good.  It creates adversarial relationships that do not need to exist. It turns us from those around us who may have something to offer, and instead drives us to view every moment as time to be in conflict.  That approach to living just drives us away from being able to see others with a heart of compassion.

And it is the way of human relating that sits at the heart of the Palm Sunday error, the fundamental misunderstanding of who Jesus was that colors every retelling of this story every year we retell it.

If you’ve ever been to a Palm Sunday service before, or if you learned about this story as a child, then you probably have a mental image of what I just read to you. There’s Jesus riding into town on a donkey, and he’s coming through the gates of the city, and everyone is waving these fronds in the air and hosannahing like they just don’t care.

That’s certainly the story we get in the other Gospels.  But it’s not the story we’ve just heard, not if we were listening closely.   Matthew, earnest and eager and passionate about finding connections between everything Jesus ever did and the stories from the Torah and prophets.

In Matthew’s story of Jesus, the tale gets told a little bit differently.  He takes a quotation about the arrival of the messiah from the prophet Zechariah (14:4), pitching out to us the vision that the one will arrive riding a donkey.  Well, not just a donkey.

Hebrew poetry doubles things up when it wants to emphasize something.  Many of the Psalms and sayings of the prophets end that way, saying the same thing again in a slightly different way to make sure you haven’t missed it the first time.  I do that with kids all the time myself.

What’s being emphasized is the humbleness of the mount.  This is a small, mild, and nonthreatening beast of burden, not the noble steed of a mighty king, but another kind of creature entirely.  This isn’t a mighty stallion, or even an elephant.  This is nothing like Prince Ali’s arrival scene from Aladdin, kids, and it’s not just because there’s no Robin Williams genie or 95 white persian monkeys.  

Matthew wrote like a Jewish scribe, meaning he was eager to double-down on every scripture that might have possibly in some way pointed to Jesus.  And so, unlike Mark, Luke and John, Matthew gives us Jesus riding not one, but two donkeys, which I honestly have a little trouble visualizing.  

He’s “sitting on them both?”  

In my more mischievous moments, I see Matthew’s Jesus riding them like a dolphin rider at Seaworld, one foot on one, one foot on another like he’s donkey-skiing into Jerusalem.  

But that’s just being silly.  Jesus enters the city, and the story Matthew pitches out to us covers that, more or less.

As the story tells it, everyone in Jerusalem thought the arrival meant there would soon be triumph, that it spoke to them finally finding their way to the place where the whole of their world would recognize who he was.  The world had been cruel to the people of Judah, and they were looking, eagerly, for their savior.  They understood that savior as the meshiach, the anointed one, the king who would come and set the whole world right again.

But from atop that donkey, the smell of animal and dust and sweat strong about him, Jesus saw where he was very differently.    He knew, as the crowds and his disciples did not, what this arrival meant.   It did not mean the crushing and humiliating defeat of Herod and Rome.  It did not mean angelic armies, or God showing up with face-melting death beams like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark to smite the infidels with a big smitey smiting.

He saw, as the Judeans in Jerusalem did not, that Jerusalem itself and the power struggles around it meant nothing.  Why would he want to overthrow that power?  Why would he desire to take it for himself?  Soon enough, it would be nothing, shattered and smoldering after Rome had annihilated it.  And then, in just a blink of an cosmic eye after that, the false glory that was Rome would tear itself to pieces, just as every empire does.

The most peculiar part of what Jesus proclaimed was that it wasn’t just about one group winning out over another.  He was not there just to give the Judeans victory over their Roman oppressors.  He was not bringing them the thing they were cheering for.

What Jesus had been teaching was different.  What he saw was rather different.  Jesus saw redemption and love, and the path of compassion.  And in the cheering of that crowd, in their yearning for victory, Jesus would have heard them not getting it.  

They didn’t get that compassion, radical and fundamental, was at the heart of the message that carries through this most holy of Christian seasons.  They didn’t understand that the reconciliation and hope Jesus brought was not just theirs, but was also intended to restore their enemies.  It was not just meant for them.

And from that misunderstanding, so written into our sacred story, it is maybe better not to think of this as Palm Sunday.  It’s more Facepalm Sunday, that day when Jesus rests his face in his hand, the shouting throng around him, and says, “Oh, me, they really really don’t have a clue what I’ve been talking about.” 

And to be honest, we still struggle with this.  We struggle with it as we look out to those who are different, to those who stand in opposition to us.  Our task, if we take what Jesus taught us seriously, is not to destroy them.  It is not to prosper at their expense.  It is not to rout them, but to find a way to love them as God does.

In this sacred season, take that out into the world with you. 

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

Seeing But Not Seeing

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 03.30.14

Scripture Lesson:  John 9:1-41

It happens with remarkable frequency.  You’d figure, after all of these years, I’d know better, or have figured out a way not to do this.  I’m pulling things together, typically on a Sunday morning.  Sermon text printed out? Check. Phone? Check? Bible? Check.  Pants? Check.

It’s important to have a thorough list.  Trust me on this one.

Everything will be together, and I’ll suit up, and be raring to roll, and I’m right on time.  I’ll go to the place where my keys are, that hook where I always hang them. 

 There’s the place they are meant to be.  But they are not in that spot.

I  know I must have put them there.  That is the place they go.  It is inconceivable that they might be anywhere else, absolutely inconceivable, I think, ignoring my inner Inigo Montoya, who chides me at the misuse of that word.  But they are not there.  The last time I saw them was the day before, at some point. And that means I have no idea where they might be.  I check the pants from the previous day.  Nope.  I dig around in one or another of the jackets I wear.  Nope and nope.  I look at the hook again, hoping that maybe they might rematerialize from whatever rift in space-time caused their disappearance in the first place.

This is where things start getting mildly panicked.  This is when I go to the wicker basket that lives in the kitchen, the one we called “the important bowl,” and which is now filled with random debris.  And in it I find mysterious keys and scratched-off iTunes gift cards, old pocketknives and Lego figurines, marbles and the wristband my thirteen year old wore when he was born.  Boy, it says, with a weight and a date and a number.  Yes, that is an important object.  Sure.  But Not. My. Keys.  So I go tromping down the stairs, the whole time wishing I didn’t have boots on that weighed ten pounds a piece.  Maybe by the computer?  I glance into the study.  And there’s nothing.  Not a thing.  Drat.  Then it’s tromping back up the stairs, faster this time, and starting to panic and sweat into my suit.  I need those keys.

My mind inevitably goes to into full on blame mode.  I always put them there.  Always.  Surely, surely, someone else is to blame. Someone is at fault!  There should be a Congressional hearing!  There must be justice!  Grumble, grumble, grumble.  Who moved them?!   But no-one has moved them.  Who took them?!  They have not been stolen by roving key-bandits.  Mischievous gnomes are in no way involved.  I simply have not placed them where they go.

I check the hook again.  Still not there.  I stomp to the bedroom, and check the pants again.  Still not there.  I return to the “important bowl.”  Still not there.

Only I realize, as I’m preparing to start weeping like a baby, that the keys may not be in the important bowl, but they’re sitting right next to it.  There they are.  They were right there, right underneath the hook, right next to the bowl, where I set them down without thinking. 

I had looked at them, not right at them, but at them.  And though they were right there, in all their reality, I simply could not see them.  My retinas sent a stereoscopic stream of signals down my optic nerve to my primary visual cortex at eleven point five frames per second, and there the keys were, right in the images my mind was receiving and knitting together.  But I couldn’t process it, couldn’t see it, even though it was right there in front of me.

Because there is seeing, and there is perceiving and understanding what we see.

Today’s extended passage from the Gospel of John shows us a remarkable exchange between Jesus and a man who has been blind from birth. 

It’s a striking tale, for several reasons. It starts with Jesus walking, strolling along with his posse, and catching sight of a man.  He’s a beggar, one who had never been able to see. If you were blind in ancient Judah, that would have been your destiny.  Unable to farm, unable to read, you’d pretty much be stuck. 

It’s a healing, of course, a miracle, one of the series of seven signs that Jesus performs in John’s retelling of his story. Like all of the stories that John’s Gospel tells, it’s deeply, personally human. It revolves around a series of conversations, exchanges between a man who was born without the ability to see.  

Jesus heals him, but in a peculiar way.  He takes dirt and spit and places the spit-mud on this man’s eyes.  It evokes, if we listen carefully to it with the ears of the Spirit, the story of creation, calling us back to Eden, and the God who sinks his hands down deep into the clay to make the creature of earth.  It’s less a story of fixing someone, and more a story of re-creating them.  

And that’s all well and good.  He’s made again, and made whole.

People can’t believe it’s him. Can this be him?  Suddenly he’s being challenged by some of the Pharisees. They can’t believe that Jesus has done this thing, even after the blind man tells them himself.  They grill the nameless guy, and he answers, holding his own against their questioning...in fact, doing so well that they can’t rebut him, and toss him out of the synagogue.  They can see him, right there, the guy who used to be blind, and now sees.

But though they see what is happening, they just can’t quite bring themselves to process what it is they’re observing.  Which makes sense, if you think about it.  Here you know a person to be one way.  It defines them.  It is who they are.  And then suddenly, the characteristic that you’d used to grasp who they are is shattered.  It can’t be him.  How can that be the person?   

What’s a particular challenge to them is that, as far as they were concerned, he was blind because he’d done something wrong.  He had to have done something wrong.  Somewhere, someone had messed up.  That had to be true.  Somewhere, sin had to be involved.  Someone was to blame.  Either it was the parents, or the man, or Jesus himself, working as the agent of some dark and sinister power that heals blind men on the sabbath.

They just can’t quite bring themselves to see the reality that is right in front of them.  Instead, they encounter a reality that reflects what they want to see.  For many of the Pharisees, that reality was the the inescapable truth that suffering is a punishment for sin.  The wicked perish.  The righteous prosper.  That was the whole point of existence.  They saw every human being through that lens, their success or their suffering, their triumph or their tragedy.

Which, as it so happens, is exactly how the disciples responded when they walked past the guy at the beginning of the story.  Remember the question, the one from the very beginning of the story?  “Rabbi, who sinned, the man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

And Jesus answers, neither.  What he says after that is actually a little different than the English in the New Revised Standard Version.  Our pew bibles have Jesus saying, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”

That just sounds all kinds of wrong.  If you take it all alone, it kind of bites.  God made this guy spend his entire life as a blind beggar, so that Jesus could heal him? Dude, that’s harsh. When I’ve been in conversation with aggressive online atheists, this is one of the Gospel verses they like to throw at me.  Look at this terrible, terrible, monstrous Sky-Daddy God of yours, who blinded a baby just so Jesus could make a point.  That God’s not real, of course, they add, but if that God were real, we’d hate that God.

But the story as John tells it...not just one verse, but the whole story...is very different.  In the verse itself, the words “he was born blind” are not there in the Greek of the Gospel.  It simply says, and here I’ll use the exact sentence construction of John’s Gospel:

Neither this man sinned nor the parents of him, but that might be manifested the works of God in him.

Greek is a different language, with a different way of speaking.  And as we wrap our heads around the oddness of that phrase, it begins to take us to a different place, and a different way of seeing.

It isn’t about the “why” of the man being born blind.  It’s about the response we have when we encounter suffering.  Do we blame the person, finding the ways we can justify their suffering to ourselves?  They aren’t doing well, because they aren’t right with God. They aren’t prospering, because they haven’t prayed hard enough or in the right way. They got sick, because they didn’t take care of themselves the way they should have.

That is the way that Pharisees think.  They look right at a human being, and find reasons to see why they deserve what they’re getting.  

What they do not see is what Jesus sees: that the only thing we should be thinking about in this encounter is how to use the life we have been given to show grace to such a soul.  Right now I’m the light of the world, he says. And seeing this man and his suffering through the light that burns in me right now, I know what I must do.

That way of seeing everyone around us is that lost key, for which we struggle and frantically search, the one that opens the door to new life.

That way of seeing is how Jesus sees.  It is the light by which we are to encounter the world. 

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

Confuse-A-Christ

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 03.23.14

Scripture Lesson:  John 4: 5-42

When my kids were little, they went through this phase.  You’d be scurrying around, trying to juggle the day, the work and the laundry and the endless scatter of tiny people.  It was time for dinner, and there they’d be, plopped down at the table, little faces peering up over the edge, little hands cleaned.

It’d be a simple meal, elemental and basic in the way that meals are when you’re scrabbling desperately just to keep ahead of the day, feeling for all the world like you’re the lead character in some disaster movie, just one step away from catastrophe at every moment. 

And so you cast aside your Julia Child fantasies, and even your deep-fried Paula Deen daydreams, and go with what works in ten minutes or less, which more often than not is breaded chicken strips and instant mashed potatoes.  And because you want the meal to be healthy, there’d be those frozen peas you can bombard with microwave radiation and steam in the bag, just the way grandma used to do.  It is, technically, a home-made meal, or so you tell yourself.  Technically.  It’s nothing at all like just skipping out to Mickey D’s, because you warmed up the factory-made food yourself.

You settle in at the table, and after some encouragement someone bumbles their way through a blessing, and then it’s time to ingest the manufactured nutrients.  Mmmm, manufactured nutrients.  

Only one of them or the other of them just sort of sits there, looking disconsolate and poking sadly at their plate.  They’re not about to eat.  They can’t possibly eat.  The world is coming to an end. This is not food, this is a nightmare.  Why?  Why, you ask?

Because the food is touching.  The peas keep rolling into the mashed potatoes.  They are leaving their designated official pea area, and are being drawn relentlessly into the area set aside for mashed potatoes, as if the potatoes have their own peculiar gravitic field.  But that’s not the worst of it.  Bits and pieces of the breading on the manufactured instachicken have detached themselves, and have wantonly intermingled with the peas and the mashed potatoes.  

It’s a violation of all that is good and holy, total chaos, the end of the world, cats and dogs, living together.  A total loss.  You may as well have covered the food in live earthworms and small chunks of uranium 238. 

We don’t like it when our expectations are shattered, when those carefully constructed categories that help us understand the world get busted open.  When something punches a great big hole in our understanding about the way the world should work, it bothers us.  It’s not just the world that has been unsettled.  It’s our sense of ourselves.  We think we know where we fit in, how things work, and we’ve created the neat little silos and categories that help us navigate our existence.

Things that mess with those categories are, well, problematic.

As, frankly, were the words of Jesus in this week’s passage from the Gospel of John.  It’s a funny thing, this Gospel.  It’s got some of the most complex and soaring passages of Jesus talk you’ll find anywhere, complex and mystic and difficult in the way that only very simple things can be difficult.

And yet it can also be remarkably earthy, setting you into a place and a moment.  It’s noon, and the sun is high in the sky.  To the west, a low mountain, Mount Gerizim, atop which is a Samaritan temple.  We hear that Jesus is all tuckered out, and chilling by a well.  A woman arrives, to draw water from the well, and a conversation ensues.

It’s a strange conversation, for a couple of reasons.  First, Jesus is talking with a woman.  He just up and starts talking to her, even though he does not know her.  In the ancient near east, this wasn’t something that you just did.  It violated some fairly basic expectations of decent human behavior.  You just didn’t do that, unless you had certain rabbi-inappropriate intentions.  “Hey, haven’t seen you at this well before. Can you buy me a drink?  How you doin’?”

But second, and even more significantly, he was talking with a Samaritan woman.

Throughout the Gospels, the tension between Jews and Samaritans is a constant theme.  There was some big hatey hate there, the kind of multi-century loathing that seems to be a specialty of Middle Eastern cultures, as much a part of the flavor of that region as hummus and tabouleh.  There were reasons for this, ones that we often don’t grasp.

Once upon a time, Samaritans were Jews.  When King David ruled over Israel, they were the Jews who lived in the northern part of the kingdom.  But when David’s grandson decided to inflict heavy taxes on the North, and to force their people into bondslavery, the north rebelled.  They broke away from the southern portion of the kingdom, and formed their own kingdom.  The name of the Northern kingdom: Israel. 

Folks in the south hated them, I think mostly because they’d forgotten to trademark the name Israel.  Judah?  Why do we have to be Judah?  That split happened eight hundred years before Jesus, which just goes to show you how long folks can bear a grudge.

But there were other things that happened over those 800 years.  Worship in the temple in Samaria was very different from the worship in the temple in Jerusalem.  Where the Jerusalem temple ferociously defended itself against the incursion of any outside influences, the Samaritans didn’t seem to care quite so much.  They worshipped the God of Israel, sure.  But they also folded in celebrations of Ba’al, the Caananite God.  Why not? When the region was overrun by Alexander the Great, the Judeans fought a ferocious war to drive out those who’d violate their temple with images of the Greek Gods.  The Samaritans?  They just sort of chilled with it.  Oh, sure.  You want to put up a statue of Zeus Xenios, right up there on our sacred mountain?  No problem.  We can totally do that.

This would make the Samaritans the Unitarians of the ancient world, I guess.  

And it meant that the Judeans viewed them as not really Jews at all.  They were a mongrel faith, a mismosh of things, no more welcome in Judah than a stray from the streets of Mombasa would be welcome at the Westminster Dog Show.  In the same strange way that family hatreds can be the deepest hatreds of all, the Judeans utterly despised their Samaritan cousins.

Which is why this woman is confused when Jesus speaks.  She knows how things are, how deep the hatred runs.  She knows, or thinks she knows, what this Judean must think of her.  

So when he raises his voice, and speaks to her, she has some trouble processing it.  Really?  You’re going to talk to me?  We don’t mix, you and I.  And as confusing as those first words are, the conversation gets even more confusing.

Having asked for water, Jesus offers her living water.  Wait, what?  What and the what?  Why would you ask me for water if you have living water?  And how did you get it?  Where’s the bucket?

What she hears, when he says “living water,” is “spring water.”  “Flowing water,” like you’d find in the spring-fed well where they were sitting.  But Jesus is taking her understanding of that, and saying that the reality God is calling her to is radically different.  He’s telling a completely new story, offering her a Spirit-driven way of life that has nothing to do with the old hatred between the Northern temples and the temple in Jerusalem.

The whole way you understand our relationship is going to change, he is saying.  The way you think things are--broken, hateful, negative--will have to shift, if you are to be open to the deep and transforming reality of God’s presence.  We, all of us, need to be shaken out of our strange, self-absorbed natures.  We all have this desire to shape the world, to control it, to take our limited grasp of what is truly real and force the world to comply.  We do not want peas and mashed potatoes touching.  We want everything divided up, exactly the way we understand it.

Jesus takes that way of knowing, and shatters it. The way of life he lived out, and that he offers all of us?  It’s completely different.  It presents us with a reality that demands that we love all, stand freely in relationship with a God who is Love, and Spirit, and Light.  That relationship, if we let it really touch us, shakes us out of our patterns of complacency and moping.

It’s why everyone who talks with him seems a little confused, a little shaken, as they struggle to grasp what he’s talking about.  

But it’s a struggle worth having.

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

A Different Way of Thinking

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

03.16.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  John 3:1-17

This last week, the internet had a birthday.  Well, sort of.  The internet has been around for quite a while, and it's had lots of birthdays.  Back in the fall and winter of 1969, it was ARPAnet, set up during the cold war so that scientists from the defense community could robustly and securely share pictures of kittens with each other after a Soviet attack.

This last week we celebrated the twenty-fifth birthday of the web. With the introduction of hypertext tranfer protocols, suddenly an entirely new way of connecting with one another was opened up to humankind.  The Mesh, it was called at first, but that name just didn’t stick.

Twenty five years, it’s been, since the web came into existence.  It’s sort of bizarre, at this point, to imagine that there was a time when it wasn’t around.  But unless I dreamed the first twenty years of my life--that doesn’t seem entirely out of the question--there really was a time when it wasn’t around.  That’s hard to remember, because our connectedness seems to define every aspect of our existences.   It’s how we share.  It shapes the warp and woof of our communities. It’s how we shop. It fulfills the aspirations of humanity to take endless online quizzes about which character we are.  I get Yoda, Dumbledore, Gandalf, and Shepherd Book.  Mostly because I know the outcome I want, and I know my way around a survey instrument.  I also recently got Aria from Pretty Little Liars.  I have no idea why I even took that survey. 

Clearly, our ability to know where we fit in with pop culture, we’ve reached the very pinnacle of human existence.  In many ways, I’ll admit, things are different.  We work differently, and shop differently.  As the ‘net has moved out of we walk around differently, too, staring down at the tiny rectangles of light that we just can’t quite seem to look away from.  It’s been an absolute revolution, or so the storyline goes.  Our entire world is now completely connected...or, rather, the eighty-six percent of us that have the ‘net in the US are connected.  

That it has changed us is without question.  But as much as it seems everything has shifted, it’s easy to question just how deep that transformation really runs. The pace of things seems to have picked up, sure.  We expect things right now, not an hour or two from now or even ten minutes from now.

But have we been changed?  Has this been a new dawn for humanity, the birth of a new age of hope and happiness?  It’s hard to look out at the world and see anything really deeply better.  We seem to do all the same things we always did, but we just do them faster.  We’re much more efficient at getting things done, but we’ve managed to take that and make ourselves even more stressed.  War continues.  Hunger continues. The poor are still poor, and there’s still plenty of hatred out there in the world.  We still misunderstand one another, turning the countless differences we’ve been able to tally up into reasons to turn on one another. In fact, we seem to have gotten better at misunderstanding and hating on each other.  Twenty five years after the dawn of the web, the mess of humanity bumbles onward with a few more distractions and free two day shipping.

We so easily get confused around change, assuming that a change means something that it does not.  We don’t know what to make of What are the changes that matter?  What do they even look like?

Nicodemus struggles with this, as the strange man he’d heard of demanded his attention.  He wants to talk with him, but can’t do so in public without destroying his reputation.  So he waits until darkness, and then goes sneaking into the house where Jesus was staying at night like a ninja rabbi.

The discussion they have is a remarkably rich conversation, as the Pharisee asks question after question of Jesus, and Jesus responds.  Nicodemus is particularly confused by the idea of being reborn, which he’s heard from Jesus on several occasions.

How can you be born if you’ve already been born?  How is that even possible?

It is John’s story of the Gospel that first gives us that phrase, to be “born again.”  Or rather, we think that it is.  Nicodemus describes it as being “born again.”  How can that even happen, he stammers.

But those are Nicodemus’s words, not the words John’s Gospel writes for Jesus.

In the Greek in which John was written, what Jesus says, over and over again, is that we must be "gennethenai aneuthen."   As an aside, the rule of thumb for pronouncing ancient Greek when you have to speak in public?  Sound like Arwen and Aragorn speaking Elvish. 

The first word means "born," and it has a familiar root. Think "generate," or "genesis." The challenge comes with the word aneuthen, which if you’re reading the NIV and the KJV translate as "again."

That word occurs 31 times in our Bibles. It surfaces eighteen times in the Septuagint--that's the Greek translation of the Old Testament that was circulating at the time of Christ--and thirteen times in the Gospels and Epistles.

Of those 31 occurances, it is translated "again" only three times. Two of those are the verses we just saw in John 3. The third is in Galatians 4:9--but there it disappears into part of a two-verb construct with the verb form palin. And palin is--guess what--the most commonly used Greek term for "again."  Which, oddly enough, is exactly the word say whenever I see Sarah Palin’s face.

In every other location, aneuthen is translated to mean "over," "on top," "from the beginning," or "from above." 

Given the dominant Biblical meaning of aneuthen, what Jesus said in that conversation with Nicodemus--despite the influence of the English translations--was not that we should be born "again." 

The word we hear in scripture does not mean doing the same thing over again, or doing the same thing better and faster.  Jesus is expressing a much more powerful spiritual truth to Nicodemus--that we should be born "from above," or born "from heaven."

Honestly, for mature Christians, the distinction is mostly moot. Even with that verse historically mistranslated as "born again," we still know exactly what Christ was talking about from the broader context of his teachings. We are to be transformed. We are to be "born of water and the Spirit." (John 3:5) Those who have felt the Spirit moving in their lives, and whose lives have been--and are being--changed by Christ?  

They know what it means, no matter what word is used. They're feeling it. They're living it.

It is also interesting that these words conveyed in John’s Gospel have a specific theological meaning, one that resonates with all of Christ's other teachings about the change he is bringing us. The birth that Christ describes has to do with what is "above," which in the context of John's Gospel indicates a connection with something of God.  It is a reality that has not yet happened, a state of being that is not yet a part of the world we inhabit.

That, I think, is the key to Nicodemuses struggle.  He is earnestly trying to imagine the story as being a repetition, a reiteration of the things that he already knows.  Jesus is trying to kick him loose from that understanding.  God’s spirit shakes us loose from those old patterns of being.  It doesn’t exist to help us do them faster, or help us do them better.

Being born from above means being born into a reality...a sense of your own self...that you have not yet inhabited.  You don’t yet know what that is.  You’ve not ever experienced it.

That, I think, is why twenty-five years of what appears to be astonishing change has actually really changed very little at all.  We’re just being born again, new and yet not new, as we are when we wake every morning, repeating the same reality faster and faster.

We have not yet really begun to be born from above, from that reality that represents the Reign of God that Jesus calls us towards.

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

The Truth About Snakes

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

03.09.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7

It’s a saying that has never made much sense to me.  

I want to be my true self, it goes.  I want to find out who I truly am.

This gets said a whole bunch as we’re heaving our way through adolescence, trying to figure out who the heck we’re going to be as adulthood comes barreling towards us like a driverless monster truck.

It gets said a whole bunch when we suddenly wake up after that truck has hit us, and realize that we’ve spent the last twenty years sitting in a cubicle sending earnest emails to other members of our departments as we try to organize the weekly meeting to discuss the protocols for interfacing with the task force established to review the procedures for sending email within our departments.

Or we wake up, and we’re sitting in traffic on a Friday afternoon in a minivan, having just dropped off one kid at taekwondo and another at violin and the third has just demonstrated in no uncertain terms that they have come down with the stomach virus that’s been going around school.  You think back to when you used dream of music and dance, and that novel seemed in reach. 

Our true self, we think.  I just need to find that true self.  This can’t really be me.  Surely, surely, there’s more to me than this.  I just need to find out who that is.  But how?  

We imagine ourselves wandering out into the wilderness on a vision quest, our faces painted blue with leftover tempura paint from when the kids were in preschool.  Oh, sure, they’re off in college now, but really, it’s hard to find time to clean out those closets?  We will find that person we are meant to be. We will find that true self.

I wonder about this, because truth, as a category, is a little bit neutral.  It can mean best, sure.  But really, what it means is “our real selves.”  Truth has to do with something that is real, that is not a fabrication or a falsehood.  This hunk of wood in front of me is a pulpit.  It is the thing it is.  It is its true pulpity self.  Truth is our reality, the thing that we actually are.

When we talk about truth, and about finding out what is real about ourselves, just saying we are “truly ourselves” seems borderline meaningless.  We can be truly many things.  Our true self is the person that we are.  

If we decide to get a second mortgage our house, go out to Vegas, and blow our families’ future at the high stakes penuckle tables, that self is our true self.  It’s been a while since I’ve been to Vegas, clearly.  If we are horrible to our kids, cutting to our spouses, and are consistently making sarcastic comments to our dog, that person is who we genuinely, truly, actually are. 

The truth, about ourselves, about the reality we inhabit?  That is not the same as the good.

As we listen to the ancient story from Genesis this morning, and listen to the words of the serpent, it’s good to keep that in mind.   Because though the snake may be many things, what it is not is a liar.

That’s important to grasp here on the front end, as we read the second of the two complete stories of creation we receive in Genesis.  The first of the stories, the one with seven days, that one is a song sung in the temple by priests, explaining why creation is so awesome.  “Everything is awesome,” sing the priests, sounding like they just got out of the Lego Movie.  Good job, God!

This second story is older, grittier, the kind of tale told by the firesides of a wandering people when someone asks why everything isn’t quite so great.  This story is filled with little grace note details, of a God who reaches into the dust of the earth with his hands, and breathes life into it.  In this story, there’s a snake.

 Over the millennia, we’ve conflated this creature with the idea of Satan, Lucifer, or the devil.  The story, read in its plain intent, does not tell us that.  There’s no reason to believe from within the narrative of Torah...or anywhere else in the Old Testament...that this is anything other than a snake.  It was only in the intertestamental period...when the Hebrew people had been influenced by the dualistic religion of Babylon...that storytelling about Satan became woven up with this story of the snake.

It’s a strange sort of snake, to tell the truth of it.  One, it talks.  Your run of the mill garter snake isn’t the best conversationalist, although they’re great listeners.

Two, it’s crafty, the craftiest of the creatures, by which we can safely assume that we’re not talking about knitting or woodworking or macrame.  It’s cunning, although it is worth noting that the same word used to describe it...arum, in the Hebrew... has no inherently negative connotation.  It’s used in the book of Proverbs (12:23; 12:16; 13:16; 14:15; 22:3) repeatedly to mean wise and prudent.

Three, in Genesis chapter 3, we hear that the punishment meted out to the serpent for having managed to completely mess up humankind is that it has to get around by squiggling around on the ground on its belly.  Which begs the question: what exactly was it doing before?  Hopping around on its tail?  Hovering?  I always visualize it hovering, coiling through the air like living smoke.

Clearly, this is not a normal snake.  But a snake nonetheless. 

What we hear from this subtle talking hoversnake is that it is somehow in conversation with the woman...as yet nameless.  She’s still just the isshah, the woman.  They’re talking about food, which sort of figures, and the snake asks about what foods were not allowed.

She replies that they’re all pretty ok, except for the tree at the center of the garden.  It’s the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and in it, or so they’d been told, was death.

The snake, being a smartypants...and if it could fly and talk, pants are always a possibility...replies by telling her what?  It tells her two things.  First, that if she eats she will not die.  Second, if she eats, she will...like God...know good and evil, and thus be like God.  

So she does, and things get messy.  But what is striking about the words of the serpent is that they are not technically false.  In fact, nothing the snake says is technically incorrect.  She eats, and she does not immediately die.  Not even that day.  Second, she knows good and evil, just as the serpent affirms.  Not lies.  Not falsehoods.  Truth.

It tells her the truth, a truth that then sets the stage for a different truth about human beings, their relationships with one another, and their relationship with God.

Is it the whole truth, one that includes the impacts of that action on the things that matter?  No.  Is it a truth that includes the future, and the realities that the choice will help write into being?  No.  Is it a truth that happens to mention that all that is being exchanged is a reality in which humankind only know the good for a reality in which we have the privilege of knowing shame and wrong and evil?  That somehow does not get included.

So it is the truth, in that it is not wrong.  But what is spoken does not set up a possibility for the deepening of the good.  It is a truth that, when used to guide a life, bends it towards a less gracious end.

As we try to come to terms with the truths we know about our own existence, and the truths we know about our own selves, we need to be careful as we consider which ones we allow to shape the direction of our lives.

We need to be aware that what is real in our own lives, of the place that we actually inhabit, of the web and blend of relationships that are the stuff of our existence.  We can tell ourselves truths about who we are that may well be true, but that leave out those elements of truth that we’d rather leave out.  We close out our culpability for a failed venture, or a broken relationship, and choose instead to look at those truths that only serve our immediate angers and hungers and anxieties.

But more importantly, we need to be aware of what lies as the still-unrealized moment ahead of us.  Of the paths before us, which one bears the marks of the feet of our Teacher?  Which one is the most gracious, creating the greatest likelihood of the restoration and building up of the good?

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