Let Me Count The Ways

Sermon Title: Let Me Count The Ways

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

05.11.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  John 10:1-10

We’ve started reaching the point where I’m struggling to help my kids with their homework.

Perhaps I should rephrase that.  We are reaching the point when they’ve both grown up so much that I can’t help either one of them with their work.  

I was never exactly the best of folks when it came to getting homework done.  I’d developed a profound skill at looking like I was doing homework, though.  I would diligently settle into my room to read, immersing myself in the vital study of Camus and Sartre and Doestoevsky, which would have been great if they’d had anything to do with any class I was actually taking.  I would sit there with my geometry textbook on one hand, and a piece of paper on the other.  There I am, ready to study.  But somehow when those equations passed from the text through my brain and out my hand onto the page, they came out on the page looking like pencil drawings of jacked-up ‘71 Chevelles.  The human mind is an incredible thing.

When it came time to get around to getting my work done, it’d tend to be a frantic rush on the bus or in the five minutes before class started.

Hey...what’d you get for question three?  Cool. That’s just what I got!  What about questions four through ten?

I finally mastered high school math well after high school, when I had to reteach it to myself to take grad school exams.  And there, the way I learned on my own was to find the replicable pattern for any particular type of equation.  Look at one problem.  Look at another problem.  Grasp the principle that moves you from one step to another, and bam...every problem after that is remarkably straightforward.

It’s a clear path, the cleanest and simplest way to get from the problem to the resolution.  Which, as I see it, is the whole point of doing a math problem in the first place.  Find the path to the outcome.

My older son has already moved well past my outer threshold mathematically, but I also struggle with my younger one’s work.  What’s most challenging is finding that simple rule, that most elemental solution, as I work my way through the thickets of complexity in his textbooks.  I can do it, still, but I don’t recall it being as hard to find the basic patterns.  Here’s one way to to it, the text says.  Here’s another way.  And wait, here’s a way to write it out.  And here’s a concept map.  And here’s a clown, acting it out with puppets.

Eventually, it’s in there, but there are so many different ways presented that getting through to the simplest solution path seems like a struggle.

The idea, of course, is that there are many different ways that human beings learn.  Some learning is more visual.  Some folks operate more conceptually, and some are more kinesthetic.  The challenge comes when we try to find our way when there seem to be a thousand different possible paths.  How do we get down to that which is the most essential?  How do we get to where we’re yearning to be in life, if we’re not even quite sure where we’re headed or how to get there?

That’s the peculiar tension that plays out through the reading from John’s Gospel today, where we see Jesus wrapped up in conversation with Pharisees.  This little passage picks up where the last story we heard from John left off.  He’s just been in the middle of a conversation with a blind man that had been healed, a conversation that seemed to slam the Pharisees, when some Pharisees nearby interjected.

And suddenly, Jesus is sort of telling a story.  Sort of.  This is John’s Gospel, after all, and the way that John tells us about Jesus is different from the way that the other three Gospels pitch out that message.  If it’s Mark, Matthew, or Luke...particularly Matthew and Luke...the stories come fast and furious.  

There’s one parable after another, headspinning tales about the nature of the Reign of God, meaning what the world looks like when we all are living according to the love of God.  Those stories force the listener to think and to use their imaginations as they try to grasp the message that Jesus came into the world to deliver.  It was a standard method of rabbis of the time, a way to force their students to learn what was most essential by actually using their brains.

But John doesn’t usually roll like that.  Instead, this much more intimate Gospel tends to record challenging and highly symbolic conversations.  Unlike Mark and Matthew and Luke, the focus of those conversations is not God’s Kingdom here on earth, but Jesus talking about how he personally is living that out.  This is who I am, Jesus says.  This is how you can be.

Here, though, he tells a story.  That makes this little section of John unusual, because it almost...almost...is a story.  Jesus begins with the story of a sheepfold, an enclosure in which livestock would be kept safe from predators over the course of an evening.  There was just one way in, and one way out, and as Jesus spins out the story, he presents himself as a shepherd leading sheep into the fold.

The gate is opened, and the sheep follow the voice of their shepherd, and...a hand goes up in the back of the room.

“Um, Jesus?  We...er...ah...don’t quite get what it is you’re talking about.”

“Excuse me?”

“You know, the gate thing.  And the sheep.  Are we the sheep?  Are you the shepherd?  What is the sheepfold?  And if you’re the shepherd, who’s the gatekeeper?  Does the gatekeeper look like Sigourney Weaver?”

It’s clear that they don’t get it, not at all.  And so Jesus takes another swing at it.

“I am the...um...gate for the sheep,” he says, completely changing metaphors.  He then makes reference to “all those who came before” as being thieves and bandits, which most scholars take to mean those messianic figures that came before him.  “Enter by me,” he says.  “Have life, and have it abundantly.”

Our passage wraps up there, but if you go on one more verse...well, he’s right back to talking about being the good shepherd again.

What’s fascinating about this little passage is that there’s a peculiar tension.  

On the one hand, throughout John’s Gospel Jesus gives us images of a single path, a single Way.  He is clearly presenting himself, his person, his Way of being, as the Way to stand in right relationship with God.  Follow this teaching, he says, and all will be well.

That’s great, we say.  Tell us the one thing we need to know, and we’ll be done with it.  We like things nice and simple and straightforward.  Do this, do that, do the next thing, and then you’ll have reached the solution.

“I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” says Jesus, elsewhere in John.  Christians are particularly fond of that passage, because it’s really simple, and it makes us feel we’ve got the answer right and everyone else is just out of luck.  We like that.

But then there’s the other hand.  Jesus makes a point of describing this one great truth in dozens of different ways.  He explains it using story after story, image after image.  They are all different, each one framing the same great Truth from a different perspective and using a different image.  He does not hit us with one slogan, over and over again, like Don Draper trying to get a brand identity stuck in our heads.  The Kingdom of God!  I’m loving it!  Just do it!  It’s finger lickin’ good!

That’s not how he teaches.  He gives us stories and symbols, and comes at who he is and what he taught from dozens of different angles.

In that tension between one simple path and the many ways of telling it, we find the challenge for our own faith and our own journey.

We are to follow that path, but each of us with our own gifts and in our own way.

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

The Stranger At Your Side

Right.  So for this Sunday, well, I'd written a sermon.  It was all done.  But then, Saturday night, I realized that it wasn't the sermon that I wanted to preach.

So the embed below is semi-off-the-cuff.  Meaning: no text.  No outline.  Just the message that wanted to be preached instead of the one I'd put all that effort into writing.

All the Relevant Data

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 04.27.14

Scripture Lesson: John 20:19-31

Knowledge is a funny thing.

We like knowing, and knowing what we’re doing.  We like being aware, in the most general way, of the parameters of our engagement with the world.  

Flying blind into something seems like the best way to get completely messed up.  Oh, sure, we might be completely confident in our abilities, totally sure of ourselves.  But confidence can only carry you so far, we remind ourselves.  Sure, we can fire that motorcyle up.  But when it comes time to twist the throttle, we don’t want to go barreling into a roadside sign like Pee Wee Herman.

We need information.  And so there is a very human tendency to focus our energies on finding out more.  We want to try before we buy.  We want to do the research.  We don’t want to be vested in something until we have a complete understanding of every last detail, and every possible parameter.

Before we can proceed, we tell ourselves, the matter needs more study.

And I realize we’re outside the Beltway here, but y’all spend enough time inside that burning ring of fire to know what saying something needs more study means.  It means that somewhere, someone wants to make sure that nothing ever happens.  It needs more study is basically a bureaucratic death ray.  There is no better way to kill a new thing than to hit it with an analysis paralysis beam.

As much as it pains my Presbyterian soul to say it, almost any simple, basic, essentially good thing can be blasted into oblivion by overthinking it.  Something remarkably easy can be turned into something remarkably hard, if you do not find it in yourself to trust.

I’ve always been a critical overthinker. Like, say, in high school, whenever I’d contemplate whether or not it might be appropriate to mention to a particular someone that I liked them.  Should I tell her?  I’d weigh the variables in my mind, trying to play out every possible scenario.  But if I say this, she might think that.  And if I say that, she might respond in thus and such a way.

I’d try to anticipate every single possible response, and then carefully construct the most positive possible answer, until I’d arrived at the scenario that seemed least likely to result in either mortal embarrassment or some other disaster.  I was ready.

Of course, by this point, I’d been in college for eighteen months.

When our need to grasp things extends to the point where we find ourselves unable to act, unable to move, unable to engage with a new and potentially joyful thing, then we’ve managed to let our fear govern us.  We have allowed our doubt about something to consumer our ability to engage with it.

That’s a particular challenge when it comes to engaging with our faith, because we are always and ever finding ourselves wanting to base our actions on what we know with certainty.

That’s the core of the message about doubt that we hear in John’s Gospel this morning, the tale that has become known as the story of Doubting Thomas.  It begins with the disciples gathered in a house, tight knit and fearful behind locked doors.

Their fear makes sense, because even though it was just after the events of Easter, and they’d heard reports of some amazing things happening from Mary Magdalene, things were still far from settled.  Their rabbi was dead, or probably dead, or mostly dead, or something they couldn’t quite figure out.  Mary kept telling them, “I have seen the Lord,” but they were skeptical.  More than skeptical.  They were terrified.

Having seen him die, they weren’t particularly eager to go that route themselves.  And so we hear they’re gathered around in the house, “for fear of the Jews,” our Bibles say.

This seems a little weird, to be honest.  Not the fear part.  Generally, most of us have that reaction when presented with the very real likelihood of being crucified.  “I might be killed horrifically?  Eh, doesn’t bother me much.”

It’s the “fear of the Jews” bit that makes less sense.  Every single person in that room would have thought of themselves as Jewish.  James isn’t going to glance over at Peter and shriek “Aaaaah!  A Jew!”  There are two ways to think of this.  First, John’s Gospel is the latest and last of the stories of Jesus to reach final written form, perhaps sometime between 50 and 70 years after the life of Jesus.  By the time it was written, Judaism and Christianity were very distinct, and the Greek speaking Gentiles who were the likely audience for this Gospel would have felt themselves to be very much apart from Judaism.  

Another option is that the word judaioi, which is the Greek word used here for “Jews,” might actually mean “Judeans,” the urban people who lived in the southern kingdom, particularly in and around Jerusalem.  The disciples would all have been rural galileioi, Galileans, who spoke and dressed in very different ways.  It’d be a bit like a bunch of folks from Kentucky hiding away in terror in an apartment in New York city for fear of “the Americans.”  Yeah, they’re *technically* from the same country, but really, they’re not.  Really, not.

Whichever way, these frightened souls have a visitation, the arrival of a Jesus who brings them a word of shalom, of peace.  He gives them peace, he gives them the the great gifts of the true church.  He gives them the Holy Spirit, and he gives them the power to forgive.  And then, he’s gone.

This is where Thomas comes in.  It’s not clear quite why he wasn’t there in the first place.  Maybe they’d sent him out to get beer.  He gets back, and they say the same thing to him that Mary Magdalene had said to them.  “We have seen the Lord!”

And Thomas stands there, with the case of Pabst Blue Ribbon in his hand, and he shakes his head.  “What, are you kidding me?  Seriously, no.”  He wants evidence, and it’s hard to blame him.  Show me, he says.  It’s easy to read his demands as being overly aggressive and a bit bloody.  “I won’t believe until I stick my fingers in his wounds,” he says, and we say, “ew.”  But though his requirements put the viscera in visceral, he doesn’t ask for more than Jesus showed the others.

A week passes, and the doors are still locked, and somehow ninja Jesus manages to slip in again.  He offers them the same shalom, the same peace, and then has a little chat with Thomas.  He does not attack him.  Instead, he says, “Here I am.  Here’s my hand.  Here’s my side.  Go ahead.  Just don’t doubt, but believe.”

Thomas does, but we still struggle a bit with it.  We struggle because doubt seems to be a necessary part of who we are.  We struggle because while there may be brief moments of clarity and certainty in our lives, there are other times when we are less clear and less sure about both the path before us and the robustness of our knowing.

Do not doubt, but believe?  It seems impossible.  Doubt is always there in us.

Here, I’ve always found the writing of 20th century German existentialist theologian Paul Tillich helpful.  Yes, he’s a little dense and hard to read.  20th century German existentialist theologians aren’t like reading the Hobbit, although they are *great* for putting your kids to sleep at bedtime.  Yes, Tillich tends to use words that stretch even the most robust vocabulary.  I was reading one of his books of theology years ago, and came across a word I’d never ever seen.  When I looked it up, the “example” sentence for usage was exactly the same sentence I was reading.

But his way of putting doubt into the context of faith really works.  If we are completely certain of a thing, we grasp it totally, and there’s nothing about it we do not know?  Then we do not have faith.  If we can explain everything, and be totally and utterly confident in our explanations?  We do not have faith.

Like hope, faith isn’t a hard and fast thing.  It is the thing we do not completely grasp, but allow ourselves to be moved by.  It is the state of being that is beyond us, but that we trust enough to guide us.

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

The One We Can’t See

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Easter Sunday 2014; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: John 20.1-18

We can miss things, miss them completely, and be staring right at them.

Mostly, it has to do with our being really small creatures.  Like this morning, if you got up early for the Easter Sunrise Service up there on Sugarloaf.  Four thirty in the Ey Em, if you’re coming from Annandale.  You get up, and you clamber out of bed, and you heave yourself into the shower, which you wish by some miracle would actually be a shower of coffee.  Yeah, you wouldn’t get clean, but you really wouldn’t care.

Then it’s out into the day, only it isn’t day, it’s far before morning, long before the earth rotates around and brings that star we orbit into view.  The day has not yet begun, and when you look up heavenward, you see that darking dome, sprinkled with points of light.

Though you’re looking right at it, you can’t quite process what it is you’re looking at.  It’s a funny thing, about the sky in the early morning.  Oh, sure, we know what we’re looking at, and we know all about the distances involved.  Neither our eyes or our minds can quite grasp what we’re staring into, this immensity.  We see twinkle twinkle little stars, our mind spooling out a two-dimensional dome above us.  That sense of volume, of depth, an impossible depth stretching out to the fastness, that’s lost to us.  We’re looking right at it, and we can’t recognize what we see.

It’s like when you look into the face of your newborn child, just hours old.  You see that little tiny baby in your hands, that scrunchy-faced bit of a thing, and you don’t have a clue who you’re looking at.  Oh, they may have a name, assuming you didn’t just get lost in the sea of options.  And they may look a little like someone, more like the mom or more like the dad.

But in your hands, you hold a life that has within it potentials that are completely beyond you.  Behind those little eyes, struggling to focus on a world that just suddenly got a whole lot larger and brighter, there rests the possibility of a person that you do not yet know.  You hear that little voice...well, not so little, when they want you to do something...and yet you can’t hear them singing.  You don’t hear the voice of the woman or the man they will become.

You can stare at them all day long, and often, you do.  You just sit there at the side of their crib, and look at that sleeping face...finally sleeping, thank you Jesus...and still not know the truth of who it is they will be.

That message is the same as the Easter message we’ve heard in John’s Gospel this morning.  The message is one of a powerful transformation, of a shift from brokenness to grace, from ruins to a new being.  It’s a hard thing to see and move towards, because we really struggle to see it.  It’s the kind of thing we can’t wrap our brains around, like the immensity of the heavens.  It’s the kind of thing that is completely beyond us, like the future that rests before that child in our arms.   

Even if it’s right there in front of us, we struggle to see it and understand what it means.

It’s like Mary Magdalene, standing there, weeping at the empty tomb.  She’d discovered it, on her way to mourn, and rushed back to tell everyone who cared about him that things were not copacetic back at the tomb.

Others come, and they look around, and they see nothing.  They leave, and she stays.

Then there are some random strangers, chilling in their white rhinestone leisure suits.  She’s otherwise occupied, and is unphased by their appearance, and so they ask her why she’s crying, and she tells them.  Not just of her loss, but that now, she doesn’t even have what she needs to properly mourn.  Not even a body.  

And then there’s a man with her, asking her why she’s crying.  She looks up at him, her vision clouded by her tears.

He asks the same question, and she asks if maybe, just maybe, he knows where the body is.  “Tell me, and I’ll take him away,” she says.

He speaks her name, and suddenly, she sees.  She knows who he is, and she knows who she now can be.

The heart of Easter is that story of resurrection, of having our eyes opened to a new way of living that transcends death itself.  It’s a story that first plays its way out by the empty tomb, in a garden, in a conversation between a woman and this strange man who seems like an unknown, and yet becomes known.

Where there had been the certainty of death and loss, Mary is opened to the possibility of something so wonderful that she could barely bring herself to see it.   

That, for us, is the heart of the the resurrection promise we proclaim this morning, as we bear witness that things can be made new.

Because as difficult as it might be for us to look up at the face of the heavens and see them for what they are, and as much as we might struggle to grasp just what we’re seeing when we look in the face of that little one, we struggle most mightily to grasp who it is we are to become.  That person that we are not yet, that self that we have not yet encountered, we have trouble perceiving that.

It’s us, of course, but we don’t yet know what that looks like.  It’s easy, in our yearning to make ourselves, to become just more of what we know.  We can allow ourselves to be trapped in the tombs of our making, dead to newness, dead to the promise that rests in all of us.

But on this day, we trust that our renewal in body and spirit comes from God, who we know through Christ and his teachings.  It comes from God’s own Son, living a life filled with God’s own Spirit.  In the recognition and in the joy felt by Mary, we have a taste of what that truly new life is like.

It’s not just a materially successful life, not as the world defines it.   It’s not wealth.  It’s not power.  It’s real newness.  It’s change that transforms our view of the past, alters our  actions in the present, and sets a bright hope to guide us towards our future

It’s a recommitment to newness of joy, and a renewal of our life, every day.  It is the hope of restoration, of a city that rises from the ruins in which the only tears are tears of joy.  It is the hope of transformation, of a stone rolled away and a life made new.

On this Easter morning, see this with new eyes.

On this Easter morning, live this joy with a new heart.

He is risen.  Alleluia, 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.

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.