Different Lives, Different Islands

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 07.13.2014

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 13: 1 - 23

I’m always a little off after a vacation, just a little flaky.  Or flakier, to be fair.  For the last couple of Sundays, I’ve been bobbing about a couple of hundred miles off the west coast of Ecuador, meaning I’m probably not to be trusted around heavy machinery for a while.  It was my wife and my sons and all of my inlaws, all together on an eighty-five foot boat smack dab in the middle of the Pacific, as my family and I explored the Galapagos Islands.

It’s an amazing little archipelago, nineteen volcanic islands dappled across the ocean, islands that are slowly drifting along on the Nasca plate, moving just a tick over two inches a year towards South America.  It’s most famous, of course, for providing the inspiration for Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species.

Before he got around to writing Origin of the Species, Darwin wrote a travelogue entitled The Voyage of the Beagle, which chronicled his journey as a naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle, a 90 foot brig.  Darwin was 22 years old when it began, having just gotten his bachelor’s.  The career plan for young Charles after graduation: becoming the pastor of some small congregation in England.

“I’m just taking a short break before getting into the working world, Dad,” I can hear him saying.  “I’m sure I’ll get right back to my church plans when I get back.”  “How long will you be gone,” his Dad would say.  “Oh, it’s just a short 40,000 mile trip all over the world. By sail.  Oh, and could you spare some cash?  It’s kind of, um, an unpaid internship.  But it’ll only be, like, you know, for the next five years.”

Having spent time aboard an 85 foot vessel--just a foot and a half shorter than the HMS Beagle--I have to admit that I’m amazed that the twenty-something Darwin could get any thinking done at all without the jar full of dramamine they kept in the common area of our little boat.  He did that for five years?  Yikes.  I guess after the first year or so at sea seasickness wears off, or so I’ve heard.

In the months that the Beagle spent mapping the Galapagos, Darwin noted the wild variety of life there, and how that life subtly differs from island to island.  Darwin’s observations of the subtle difference between the living things on those islands led him to intuit the idea of evolutionary change.

Moving from island to island, what was most amazing was not just the variety of life.  It was the wildly, impossibly different landscapes that you’d encounter as you moved from island to island.  On the northeastern reaches of San Cristobal, the land was arid desert, where a few scrubby plants clung fiercely to the rocky soil.  Travel just thirty miles, and on the Southern shores of Santa Cruz, the land was lush and rich and tropical, a riot of green and growth.  Travel around to the narrow channel between Santa Cruz and the volcanic Sombrero Chine island, and the land is a lava moonscape after a ten year long eruption back around the year 1900.  It is utterly devoid of life, black rock blasted dead by the relentless equatorial sun.

For almost a week, we traveled around an area not considerably larger than my home state of Virginia, and it was like we’d traveled from Virginia to Arizona to somewhere on Mars.  And life, wherever it could, adapted and made do, finding some way to scramble out a foothold.  Some places were dead.  But there was not a single place it wasn’t trying, endlessly casting seed, endlessly trying to find purchase.

Life is like that.  It yearns to live, yearns to grow, yearns to make more of itself.  But it has limits to where and how it can engage, limits that are remarkably like the limits played out in the challenging little parable Jesus spins out in today’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew.

This teaching is called, by Jesus himself, the Parable of the Sower.  Jesus has been flashmobbed, as crowds have gathered, pressing in.  He’s forced to create an impromptu amphitheater, separating himself from the crowd by putting out a short distance from shore in a small boat.  As the throngs lined the shore, Jesus bobs out a little distance, sits in the boat, and starts talking about the Good News.

The story he tells is of a man who goes out planting.  He’s spreading his seed, far and wide.  He sows it on a path, where it is exposed and helpless, and it’s quickly eaten by flying varmints.  He casts it down on rocky ground, hard and impermeable as lava flow, and there the seed is blasted dead in the relentless sun.  More gets cast into soil where weeds are growing, sedge and crabgrass and kudzu, no doubt.  There, the plants grow, but are strangled out by their fiercely growing competitors.

But some of the seed, cast out with wild and generous abundance, falls in soil that’s good enough to yield.  That grows into a harvest, some places more richly than others, but a harvest nonetheless.

This is pretty much the entire story, and Jesus moves on with no further comment, as the crowd mutters in rumbling debate amongst itself.  He makes no effort to interpret.  He gives them no symbolic key.  He just lays the story out there, and lets it sit on their heads for a while.

Afterwards, we hear that the disciples come to Jesus, after the crowds have dispersed.  They say, “Um, hey, Jesus...er...these stories aren’t quite working.  Have you considered maybe a nice list, you know, something relevant, something the people can relate to, like The Seven Harry Potter Characters You’ll Find In The Kingdom of God.”  

But there’s a reason Jesus tells them this strange, intentionally obscure and confusing story.  If you want to learn from a story, you need to be focused.  You need to engage with the deeper concepts involved.  Rabbis in first century Judaism commonly used storytelling as a way of engaging the insightful, and closing out those who didn’t want to put in the effort.  It’s not exactly a method that’s designed to make everyone feel good about themselves, nor is it a method that rewards those who want everything neatly spelled out for them.  That’s the point.  It is meant to challenge.  It is meant to be hard.

As he shared with his disciples, that’s the reason for storytelling.  Though he was intentionally making us work our imaginations to grasp it, it was still Good News he was sharing.  It’s good news about a radically new Way of life, about the Reign of God at hand.  That Reign of God meant the shattering of the brokenness that rules us.  It means graciousness and forgiveness, a world ruled not by the power of Mammon or the sword, but by the radical love of God.

As hard as this parable was intended to be, one thing that’s worth paying attention to is the “foolishness” of the sower, whose generosity with the seed is wild and wanton and seemingly pointless.  Who pitches seeds out among weeds?  Why waste seed on rocks, or on your sidewalk?

C’mon, God.  Get with the times.  Better to be neat and precise, wasting nothing, as your semi-autonomous John Deere tractor pulls a Kinze 4900 robotic planter, precisely placing every seed based on the satellite mapping data uploaded from your Farmworks management suite, while streaming realtime data on crop distribution and soil composition from your circling Trimble UX-5 agricultural drone.

But the Kingdom of God is not like industrial agribusiness.  If it were, there’d be no hope for any of us.

God would not waste God’s precious love on bad soil.  There’d be none of it for the bitter, or the selfish, or the anxious, or the greedy.  God would not waste God’s love on the distractable, or the shallow, or the proud.

But the point Jesus is making here is not that God withholds the possibility of the Kingdom from all but the few.  It’s that God pours out that possibility to every soul willing to receive it, and even those souls who are not.

This was the image that played out as this parable danced across my time in the Galapagos, seeing island after island, and the relentless efforts of life to find purchase even in the most blighted, desert corners of God’s creation.

For any who are willing to listen, and to pay attention, Jesus tells a story of the soil of our own selves.  Here God is, telling us, over and over, across the thousands of years of human history, what it would mean to live a gracious existence.

And yet we--all of us-- can give ourselves over to ignorance, clouding our hearing through willful laziness of heart and mind.  We can realize that faith is hard, that it requires hard choices and can create conflict with the broken things in our lives, and we back away to the comfort of the familiar and the easy.  We can be distracted by the endless cornucopia of distractions in the world, the busyness and nattering stress of our every day.  We can turn ourselves towards the hunger for wealth and posessions, towards the pursuit of power and privilege.

These ways, Jesus tells us, we can turn the islands of our souls into dead and lifeless places.  That’s not what he wants for us, for any of us, as he bore the seeds of a new creation.

Let your eyes be blessed, and see, he says.  Let your ears be blessed, and hear, he says.  Let the soil of your island receive God’s new life as best it can, and yield as best it can.

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

The Tribe

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

06.15.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 10:24-39

It’s been a very intense and bookish last few weeks in my life, as I’ve inhaled my way through a couple of thousand pages of churchy reading for my doctoral program.

My interest and the revised focus of my project, for some reason, is what makes for a spiritually healthy and vibrant small church.   One book after another, all of them talking about the way little congregations function or don’t function.  You read one, you put it down, you pick up the next one, until you start realizing that you’ve read pretty much everything the experts have to say about little tiny faith communities.  I’d be reading one book, and I’d realize that the quote I was reading in the book in front of me was familiar, because it was from the book I’d read the day before.

There aren’t a whole bunch of people who’ve looked hard at small churches.

Most churchy books tend to talk about how to build and manage the giant churches, the great sprawling Jesus Malls of AmeriChrist Inc..  How do you get huge?  How do you stay huge?  Grow grow grow!  Bigger Bigger Bigger!  Books with titles like Seven Reasons Christ Wants You to Build a Parking Garage  and Take Over the World for Jesus: How a Robot Army Can Help You Grow Your Ministry.  But having spent the last year in a sustained effort to make myself a little less huge than I’d been, that just doesn’t sound appealing.  

Bigger is not always better.  I like a faith life that exists on a human scale, and communities that reflect that.

In those books, little churches like ours are described in so many different ways.  It’s been a festival of metaphors.  Church researcher and small church pastor Carl Dudley described the very smallest churches as being exactly like a cat.  Independent, self-sustaining, and totally capable of taking care of themselves.  In another place in the same book, little churches this size are described as collies, friendly and loyal and totally willing to go running to get help when little Timmy falls in the well.  I like these metaphors, but it does seem that you’d be vacuuming up a whole bunch of fur.

There’s one book that puts small church life entirely in terms of the slow food movement, which is cool and kind of true, but also makes us sound a little bit too much like something out of Soylent Green.  Small churches are made of people, I can hear Charlton Heston howling.  Peopllllee!

But the metaphors that I most appreciate have to do with relationships.  There’s the idea that a small church is like a family, a gathering that is so intimate and lifelong that it’s like the folks in the world who are closest to you, your own flesh and blood.  But it’s more than what we Americans think of as a family, more than the mom and dad with their quarter acre, two point five children and seven tenths of a dog.  A gathering of a small fellowship is like a cluster of families in a delimited space.   And there’s a word for that, this family of families, the most elemental organic unit of human societies.

Little churches are like tribes.  

Which, according to what I’ve been reading, is a good thing.  You’ve got the intimacy of family connectedness that stretches around and through multiple generations.  You have storytelling, and shared sacred spaces.  You have a place of belonging, a home open to many.  As Presbyterian author and pastor Carol Howard Merritt wrote a couple of years back in her book The Tribal Church, this is something for which human beings increasingly hunger.  As our industrial society and the shattered, scattered nature of net-culture make us feel isolated and alone, that need for organic, human, tribal connection grows all the stronger.

And of course, right as I’m reading that little churches are like families and tribes, we get what our triannual cycle of readings pitches out today, one of the most peculiar and difficult passages in all of the teachings of Jesus.

The words of Jesus feel like a blow: “For I have come to set a man against his father…” they begin, and I thank the Creator of the Universe that this passage didn’t show up last week.  Jesus says hate your dad!  Happy Father’s Day!  But then it goes on to lay into mom, so I suppose at least Jesus is an equal opportunity offender.

Why is Jesus saying this?

While a Freudian psychoanalyst would have a field day with this passage, (“Zo, Jesus.  Lets talk more about your feelinks for your mother,”)  I think it’s absolutely essential to read this in the context in which it was first heard and first spoken.

This is Matthew’s Gospel we’re hearing, and while the passage sees analogues in both Luke and Mark, it would have been a tremendously timely teaching for Matthew’s community.  Most of the scholars who study Matthew consider it the most Jewish of the four Gospels.  It assumes a deep familiarity with the sacred texts of Judaism, as Matthew vigorously and aggressively seeks to put all of the teaching of Jesus into the context of Torah and the Hebrew Prophets.  The sacred story of the Jewish people matters to Matthew--even more so because most scholarly dating of Matthew puts it right at the same time that Christians were being removed from the synagogue.

Mark came too early for this to be a major issue.  Luke and John both wrote to mixed communities, where to be of another faith didn’t matter as much.

But for the community that heard Matthew, it was a time of conflict, in other words, when to follow the teachings of Jesus meant that you would find yourself torn away from family and friends.  If you chose to be a disciple of of the Way, all of those sustaining connections with the community that had given you your most fundamental sense of identity would be broken.   This was their reality, and so this remembered story had real significance for Matthew.

The reason for this saying goes deeper, though, beyond the context Matthew’s remembering and into that moment when Jesus first spoke it.  It comes to us from a larger teaching about going out into the world in mission.  He’s in the middle of giving his disciples instructions about how to go out on a mission trip, as they prepare themselves to spread the message of the coming Reign of God.

The instructions Jesus gives are, I will note, nothing like the instructions you give your kids when you’re sending them on a trip.  When my boys go away, there are lists upon lists, hats and sunscreen and wallets and chargers, giant backpacks and duffels full of clothes every possible need.  Have nothing, he says.  No money, no extra shoes.  Can I bring a change of underwear, asks Simon Peter.  No, says Jesus.  Be unprepared, says Jesus, sounding like the worst scoutmaster ever.  Go, and force yourself to trust that you will be cared for as you bear this message of universal love and grace.

They arrive as strangers on the doorstep, and theirs was a deeply tribal culture.  The dangerous reality of being a stranger in a tribal culture is that while families and tribes can be deeply hospitable and welcoming, they can also not be.  Sure, you’re fine if you’re recognized as “us.”  But if you are truly strange?  You are a threat.

Those deep ties of primal human identity are the “us,” and the us is something that we both cherish and defend fiercely against those who are not “us.”  The bonds of extended family and shared story that make for a tribe go from being a blessing to being a curse.  Tribal identity is part of human hubris, in which the very same thing that makes us strong makes us weak.

So sure, family is sacred, and those bonds of loyalty and mutual care go deep.  But precious though that may be, it is those bonds of loyalty that unite the young men you see in pictures of Iraq these last difficult days.  There they are, young and strong and handsome, with the other young men who make us their community.  They laugh and encourage one another, they sing the songs of their childhood, and they love each other with a deep love forged from being part of the same blood story.  And they dance in a circle with their Kalashnikovs raised high, and they go and do terrible things to those who are not the “us.”

We should not allow ourselves to imagine that we’re better than those young men.  They are human beings, just as we are.  That is what Jesus challenges in all of us, as he seeks to heal the brokenness of the world.

If you really love me, Jesus says, and really want to say that I have authority over your life, I have to matter more than those ties of blood.  If you want to bear my message, loving the world with the same impossible, generous grace as the God who loves all of us, then you need to set aside anything that gets in the way of that love.  

That’s a hard path.  It is.

But it’s the one he challenges us all to walk, because it is the way along which good news lies.

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

A Kiss Goodbye

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

06.15.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lessons: Matthew 28:16-20; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13

I was never particularly good at saying goodbye.

When I was a tiny little pup, no more than four or five, I can still remember how much trouble I’d have whenever the time came for saying goodbye.  That was particularly true at parties.  The day would come, and I’d be psyched.  Oh, I’d be a gracious host.  It’d be wonderful to have my friends there, and I’d always be completely on my best behavior.  Games would be played.  Cookies...or better yet, cake..would be eaten.  More games would be played.  There would be presents.  We’d run around, and it’d be fun, and then, well, then their parents would show up.  Which meant it was all coming to an end.

This would be the point where, had I been a tiny little Mr. Manners, I would have pleasantly ushered each of my friends to their waiting parental transport pod like the miniature host of some Victorian-era salon.  “Thank you so very much for coming!  It was absolutely lovely.  I do hope that we might be able to do this again sometime very soon.  Give my regards to your family, if you would.”

That was not my reaction.  As I realized that the time we’d been spending together was coming to an end, it was like a switch had been thrown in my little head.  Click, it would go, and then things would change.  I have vague memories of inconsolable weeping and flopping around.  It was tears and snot and piteous wailing, which I’m sure made the very best of impressions on the parents who were picking up their children.

“Is...is someone killing a cat next door?”  “No, no, that’s the birthday boy,” my parents would say, as I tantrumed incoherently.

As the years passed, I’m not sure I got much better at it.  Like, say, when the time came to part from my high school girlfriend, as I left her...and our relationship...after a trip out West to help her move to the other side of the country.  I was fine for about the first minute or so sitting on the plane to come back home, and then, well, there were the tears and the snot and the piteous wailing again.

“Is someone killing a cat back there,” the pilot must have said to the stewardess over the intercom.  “No, no,” she would have said.  “I’ve got no idea what’s wrong with that kid.”

It’s hard getting the closure thing just right, especially if things are challenging, and especially if you’re not entirely sure when you will come back into the presence of the one you’re with.  When you’ve shared life with them, they become part of your story, part of that Book of You that’s being written into the fabric of creation.  They’re part of you, just as you’re part of them, and there are some stories you just never want to end.

In that leave taking, you want to carry them with you, and for...in the goodbye you share...something to be passed on between you that brings your time together to the best possible close.

There are two such leave-takings in our readings today from the Gospels and the Epistles.

The first we find as Jesus prepared to move on, in the final moments of the Gospel of Matthew.  It’s a leave-taking that Matthew uses to sum things up for the shared story of Jesus and those of us who have chosen to follow his Way.  Unlike Mark, who ended his story bluntly and abruptly, in fear and confusion, or Luke, who carries on the tale through the story of the early church, this is is as far as things run in Matthew.  These are parting words, the end of things, the place where the story ends and we part ways while Vera Lynn sings “We’ll Meet Again” wistfully in the background.

Into that place, Jesus speaks confidently about his connectedness to those he’s brought into community around him.  Yes, the story of their time together may seem to be ending.  But in their commitment to live and to teach the life that he brought them into connection with, there was a deeper bond...one that would not pass or fade or change.

Go out with confidence, he said.  Know that you and I are now part of something that will always be, until everything that we know passes away.

And then there’s the second leave taking, the one we hear at the very end of Paul’s Second letter to the church at Corinth.  Paul hadn’t exactly had the easiest of relationships with the messy and conflict ridden community at Corinth, and here we get the last of the correspondences that history retains about that often awkward, often contentious relationship.

All had not been well in Corinth, as Paul struggled to get them to stop fighting and tearing at one another.  As he leaves them, he knows that they may choose to live according to the way that he’d taught them.  Or not.  Corinthians were pretty good at the “or not” part.

As he closes out his letter, Paul leaves the Corinthians with a word of encouragement that is also a word of challenge.  When he asks them to put things in order, to finally stop their insistence on factions and infighting, he’s taking that one last moment to remind them of the very thing that’s been his hope for them all along.  Live into God’s grace, he says.  Find a way to be gracious to one another.

Live in peace, he says, and the God of love and peace will be with you.  And sure, there’s an implicit flip-side to those words.  Keep things chaotic, don’t listen to me, endlessly fight and war with each other, and y’all are just out of luck.

But he chooses not to say that, as tempting as it must have been.  He chooses to depart not with a swift parting kick, but with a good word.

Even in the face of a community that’s been a serious and sustained pain in the backside, Paul’s words of leavetaking are very intentionally chosen to be graceful.  He doesn’t lose sight of the reason he has walked with them, hoped for them, and struggled with them.

Which is why, as hard as his words have been with them, his leavetaking takes the form of a benediction--a familiar one, I might add.  His hope is that the relationship that they’ve had will still be part of who they are.  His hope, having shown both grace and challenge, is that they’ll understand the purpose of everything they’ve shared.

This is, for so many, a season of leave-taking.  In our endlessly churning culture, we never know when we might be moved on.  But with the coming of summer comes the time for moving on from the places and faces we’ve known.  It’s a time of graduation and advancement, and as hoped for as all of those things are, there comes with them the reality of a story’s end.

If you’re moving on from one school to another, or moving on from college, the fabric of your relationships--the day in, day out presence of those around you--is going to change.  If you’re not moving on, precious others are.  That face and that voice and that presence that has been a part of your life since the moment it came into the world may soon not be part of your every day.

I’m aware that, myself, as a father, every time I wrap my arms around my children who are no longer children.  That little boy I used to carry on my shoulders to bed after storytime now is a man who smiles down at me from broad shoulders.  The time they set themselves out into the world is a few short years still to come, but it’s just a few now, close enough that I can feel it.   

Which is why, frankly, I think it’s better to preach this sermon now when that reality is a few years out, rather than to try to choke out these words when my little tiny ones are just about to leave.  I’d rather not subject you to the tears and the mucus and the piteous wailing.

“Is someone killing a cat up there,” a guest will ask one of you.  “No, no, that’s just the pastor.”

But in the words I know I’ll struggle to offer them, I’m hoping that I’ll remember the way that both Paul and our shared teacher took their leave from those they loved.  They spoke from the certainty that the time that they had shared with the people who they loved was forever woven into God’s story of us together.  We remain forever part of one another, wherever love and peace abides.

I am with you always, says our Teacher.

That truth of grace, love, and communion is one we should remember, no matter when those times of leaving come.

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

Do As I Do

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

05.18.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: John 14:1-14

How do we understand ourselves?  How do we articulate that understanding into the world?

Most of us have a picture of who we are in our minds, one that we knit together out of all of the different things we believe about ourselves.  I am, we say, and then there’s a blank, and we fill in the blank.

I am a human being, you might say.  I am left-handed, you might say, if you weren’t me.   I am fabulously fashion-forward, you might say, if you also weren’t me.  When we say we are something, we’re expressing--if we’re being accurate--something about the nature of who we are.

When we really talk about who we are, what that statement is not is a statement of what we believe about ourselves.  Sure, it can speak to an aspiration or a hope.  But if we talk about ourselves in terms of what we believe to be true, but that aren’t quite exactly totally real yet, then we’re not making a meaningful statement.

Like a year or so back, say, when I’d finally decided to follow through on something I’d believed about myself for years.  “I am an aikido master,” I would think to myself.  I was sure that in there somewhere, there were latent aikido skills that would require only the slightest attempt to reveal that I was almost supernaturally gifted in that particular martial art.  It’s a peculiar martial art, aikido is.  It’s almost completely nonviolent.  It’s meditative, but not quite like tai chi.  Like judo, it involves taking the energy of an opponent in a conflict and applying it to the task of having them lying unharmed on the ground.

As martial arts go, it’s a little mystic, sort of a Jedi thing.  “This is not the standing position you were looking for.  Move along.”  But I never quite got around to it when I was younger and working, and then, well, kids came along.  But still in my mind, there rested the certainty: “I am an aikido master.”  As my boys grew up from tiny spuds to the towering largelings they have become, I pictured going with with them to some hidden lair of aikido masters, where we would together learn the ways of that mystic order.

In my mind, I’d played the whole thing out.  “Join me, my son,” I would say, and then we’d go on a Father Son Jedi outing, preferably without all that Skywalker family drama.  I talked it up, and the big guy was up for it.

When my oldest turned fourteen, he and I began that journey.  We found a lair of aikido masters hidden away in a warehouse complex, and then began our training.  “I am an aikido master,” I said to myself, radiant with mystic certainty.  That lasted all of about five minutes.  Thump thump, I went, as the instructors attempted to teach me to fall.  Focus your energies and make yourself a circle, they would say, rolling across the mats as smoothly as if they were the aforementioned circle. “Just do that,” they’d say.  Thump thump, I’d go.  “No, that’s a square,” the instructor would say, and they’d inscribe another perfect circle on the mat.  “Do that,” they’d say.  Thump thump, I’d go.  “I think that’s a triangle,” the instructor would say.  “Are you alright,” the instructor would say.

I was not going to magically be an aikido master.  It was not going to happen simply because I held it in my mind.  And if we do not do the thing we say we believe, it does not matter whether we believe it about ourselves.

Which is, I think, one of the things we most easily forget when we say the words: “I am a Christian.”

Here, we tend to think of this in terms of certain things that we believe to be true.  We are Christian because we hold to thus and such, or because we believe thus and such.   The challenge, though, is that such a way of thinking is a great way to insure that we spend very little time actually being the human beings Jesus challenges us to be, and instead spend all of our time squabbling about things on the interwebs.

This passage comes to us at the beginning of the ending of John’s Gospel.  At the end of chapter 13, John has given us the last supper--or rather, his version of it.  Jesus has just washed the feet of his disciples, showing himself to be completely humble--as if he were their servant.  It was his way of showing his love for them, and reminding them that their primary task was to be servants of one another.  He notes to Peter that despite his protestations to the contrary, he’s going to betray him.  Then he sends Judas off to begin the whole betrayal process, and that brings us to where our reading begins.

Jesus is confronted with the questions of his disciples, who are sensing that something big is about to happen.  When Jesus starts saying that he’s going to prepare a place for them, they get a little fuddled.  Oh, sure, he just said that they knew the way there, but in that pre-GPS era, things must have felt a little bit dicey.

It falls to Thomas to say, Lord, we just don’t know that place.  How are we supposed to get there if we’re not even sure how to get there?

To that, John’s Jesus does not mince words:  “I am the way.”  He’s also the truth and the life, and in the face of Thomas and his struggles to come to terms with what that means, Jesus lays out a pretty straightforward measure for how you get there.  Here, he is saying to Thomas.  Look at me.  See how I am.  See how I teach, how I live, and how I relate to you.  If you see that, and you know that, then you know the way.  All you have to do is act on it.

This passage, though, tends to get spun other ways.  We interpret these words of teaching welcome as meaning something very, very different.  Here Jesus has just shown the way.  He is in the presence of his disciples, showing them the depth of his love for them--which, if you read what the Beloved Disciple wrote, is the entire point of this whole story.

But instead of looking to what we know--deep in ourselves, with our minds and our hearts and our whole selves--about Jesus and letting that be our guide on the path, we look instead to other things.  Our knowledge of the Way becomes not about our deeply wrought sense of who Jesus was, and drifts into abstractions.   Do you believe exactly the right things about how to interpret the Bible?  Do you hold to the correct set of theological datapoints?  Do you affirm the infralapsarian position taught in the Canons of Dort?

Jesus does not mention the infralapsarian position taught in the Canons of Dort to Thomas, or to Philip, probably because he doesn’t want to make Thomas weep uncontrollably.

He says, look to me and how who I am shapes what I do.  Hear my voice.  See my actions.  I spend time with those who our culture curses.  I will not raise the sword in anger.  I get down on my knees, and show with my hands and my care that I love you.

That, as we attempt to claim ourselves as Christians, is the key challenge we face.  We may believe many things about ourselves.  We are good people.  We are right with God.  Our understanding of the faith is the best possible way to be,

But if our actions do not tell the truth of that, if we are bitter and hateful, self-absorbed and anxious, unforgiving and unloving, then we know neither Jesus nor the Way.  Our task, if we are to be disciples, is to change that in ourselves.  We should work with the Spirit of God as it moves in us, so that those who see us will see, and so that they’ll know.

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

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.