All Fall Down

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

11.15.2015; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 13:1-8

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

It was a very peculiar moment, bordering on the surreal.

It’s one of those things that happens when you’ve lived in an area for a while, I suppose, but I didn’t expect it to sneak up quite like that.  Back when I was a teenager, living in Virginia, I spent a whole bunch of time in malls, which is I think what suburbanite teens are just genetically programmed to do.

The back side of the Mall looked a certain way.  You went through a pair of doors, and you were in a parking lot.  On the far side of the lot, there was an electronic store, a place where I had once purchased a state of the art double tape deck for the giant speakered stereo that graced my room at home.

I’d been through those doors dozens of times, twenty, thirty, times.  Every time, the same thing was on the other side.

That was twenty years ago.  And I knew, conceptually, rationally, that things weren’t the same.  I’d experienced the construction, driven past it, watched from other angles as the area had changed.  I’d been elsewhere in Tysons, as it grew and expanded.

But those doors?  I’d never had cause to walk through them.  My mind, being a human mind, locked down that memory.  If you go through those doors, this is what you’ll see.  Object permanence, it’s called, if I remember correctly from my psych classes.  One of the most important things humans learn as they transition out of babydom is that things don’t just disappear when you can’t see them.  They remain, even when outside of our perception.  Admittedly, this takes pretty much all the fun out of peek a boo.  But as pioneering 20th century psychologist Jean Piaget described it in the last century, being able to do this is one of the great feats of human cognitive development.

Which is probably why walking out the mall doors messed with my head.  I knew what was on the other side, a strong echo from my memory.

And it just wasn’t there.  Instead, two towering midrise skyscrapers blotted out the sky across a new plaza.   I felt like one of those apes waking up during the opening sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001.  How the heck did that get there?  Because the towers weren’t supposed to be there.  It was wrong, the wrong thing, because I was sure I knew what had been there.

It should have been right there, only it wasn’t.  It had all changed, completely, like a twenty year game of peekaboo, only when the hands move away Daddy’s face is different.

We make that mistake, we do, when it comes to the structures of the world around us.  We assume, for some inexplicable reason, that the stuff we make is both what matters and what sticks around.  We confuse

As they wandered by the Jerusalem temple in the story told by Mark this morning, the disciples were just as confused as we are.   

This was the Herodian Temple, one of the most overblown and intentionally ostentatious structures in the ancient world.   Herod the Great looked at the temple that the Jewish people had built when they came back from exile in Babylon, and deemed it too small, too pedestrian.  It lacked boldness and aggression.

So he rebuilt it one hundred years before Jesus showed up on the scene, supersized and double extra-shiny.  The entrance was a great sweeping arch in the style of Roman monuments.  The temple itself was built on a new and huge raised foundation, the new Temple Mount, a flat surface that spanned over thirty six acres, for which Herod enlisted the help of over 10,000 workers.  The temple building itself was determined to be inadequately fabulous, so Herod had the whole thing wrapped in gold.

It was striking, a remarkable and seemingly unchanging edifice to the incestuous Herodian dynasty.   It was willfully, intentionally, over the top.  One of the disciples was as overawed as a five-year-old in Times Square, and remarked on it to Jesus.

Jesus was rather less impressed, looking up at the gold and the rocks and the whole self-assured bluster of it.  None of it mattered.  None of it would remain standing.  “It all falls down,” he said.  And he was right about the temple.  

The temple itself, for all of its golden shine and super-sized construction, got helped in the falling down part by the Roman Empire, who left pretty much none of it standing.  Except for the Temple Mount, which now sits in Jerusalem as one of those sacred, holy places that people fight about.

But he was right on another level.  Nothing we make on earth will withstand the passing of time.  Nothing.  All those things we imagine to be cast in stone, permanent, unchanging, and everlasting?  They will one day crumble and fade.   Other things will rise to replace them.  We have trouble grasping it, trouble realizing it.  Surely something we make will stick around.   

We look to the spread of our culture around us, and imagine that it must always be as it is.  We look to the great edifices of our republic, just two hundred years young, and it seems impossible that they won’t endure.  We see the sprawling malls and the shine and the sparkle, and we can’t visualize that as impermanent.  How can anything that to us seems so vast not be sticking around?

Ours is a culture that is always growing and changing, and that’s part of it.  That change can leave us feeling wildly disoriented, like walking out a door one day and finding that the content of our memory no longer matches the reality we’re encountering.

Finding our ground, then, can be hard.   To us, and to us in particular, Jesus offers the reminder that clinging to that which appears the most impressive and spectacular does not serve our best purpose in the Kingdom.

In the heart of what Jesus taught us, we find something rather different.  Instead of allowing ourselves to be taken in by the promises of edifices, Jesus asks us to look to very different things.  

We are to attend to our relationships with those around us, showing care and grace and kindness to every soul we encounter.  We are to attend to our relationship with our Creator, whose presence is so vast we struggle to see it, and so subtle and quiet we have to hold very still to hear it.

These things might, to us, seem rather less impressive than superhighways and malls and the shine of the world around us.  They do not stand.  But our encounter with time and space is not the same as our Maker’s, and our understanding of what is significant is not the same, either.

God does not care about those objects, to be frank.  Our memories of place, and our attachment to place, those things are of far lesser significance to God than the nature of what we do in that place.  Because the purpose of the places and spaces we build and inhabit is just as temporary and fleeting as these mortal bodies we find ourselves in.  It’s not that they’re bad, but that they exist to serve others.  Not their own glory, not their own power, but the furtherance of God’s love for us.

And sure, that can be unsettling.  One of the cornerstones of our sentience is the ability to grasp that things remain the same, and realizing it goes further than that is hard for us.  When our desire to hold things fast and unchanging prevents us from turning ourselves towards loving and caring for our neighbors.

So turn your attention from the distractions, from the large stones hewn by the Herods of our own time, and turn it instead towards what matters.  

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

Jesus Industrial Complex

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 11.08.2015

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 12

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

There are some things that are harder to hear than others, some truths that we’re going to struggle with more as we stand in encounter with them.

One of those truths, if I am honest with myself, is the strange interplay between Christian faith and wealth, between the demands of material gain and the demands that Jesus places on those who say, hey, I’m going to follow you.

I’ve encountered that over the last few weeks, as I’ve struggled and heaved my way through a book.  It’ll be the fortieth book I’ve read this year, part of the diet of words and ideas that makes for a healthy and well-nourished soul, but it’s one of the harder books I’ve pushed through this year.

I’ll crank through ten or twenty pages, and then I’ll set it down, because I just can’t digest any more of it.  Or I’ll curl up on the sofa to start in for an evening read, and wake up thirty minutes later asleep with the book on my chest.  But I didn’t give up, because it’s a book filled with important reminders for Jesus people.

The book is entitled “The Fourth Crusade,” by a British historian named Jonathan Phillips, and it’s not that it’s a badly written or researched book.  It’s that the subject matter is just, well, painful.  It tells the story of a particularly unpleasant chapter in the history of Christianity.  It was the heart of the medieval period, and Christian Europe was up in arms over the rise of Islam.  In particular, Europeans were outraged to the point of hysteria at the idea that Jerusalem should be in the hands of Muslims.

And so army after Christian army was mobilized, and for the better part of a century wars of religion burned across the middle east, as Christians followed that great teaching of Jesus, kill all the unbelievers.  I think it’s in the Sermon on the Mount.  Wait a minute.  [leafs through Bible]  No, no, I can’t quite place my finger on it.  

As bloody and ugly as the first three crusades were, the fourth was, well, it was unique.

The organizers of the fourth crusade wanted to build a huge battle fleet, and so signed binding contracts with the Venetians to build them the greatest armada in history.  Only, well, they kind of overestimated their capacity to raise funds.  With the fleet constructed, they realized that they couldn’t pay for it.  They were on the verge of bankruptcy, and the whole endeavor was about to collapse.  So before wandering off to do some killing of non Christians, they decided to pay a little fundraising visit.  They sailed the whole fleet to the Byzantine Empire, and in particular the colossally wealthy capital of that empire, Constantinople.

The Byzantine Empire was, of course, Christian, which as far as the Crusaders were concerned, meant that they should be willing to part with some cash money to help with the whole killing thing.

The Byzantines weren’t eager to do so, and as the crusaders had an army that needed to be fed and watered, one thing lead to another.  Constantinople, one of the largest cities in the world, an ancient center of Christian culture and learning, was sacked and burned, as the crusaders looted churches and pillaged cathedrals for Jesus.  It was a roaring success, immensely profitable.  The Venetians got paid off, with money to spare.

And here we are in the middle of stewardship season, and I’m thinking to myself, huh.  The Episcopalians have a pretty nice building.  Ahem.

What this dark chapter in Christian history teaches, honestly, is that there is a danger that arises when we mingle church, wealth, and power, a message that is also driven home by the teaching from Jesus in Mark’s Gospel this morning.

Mark’s story of Jesus has just given us an expression of the radical focus on God and the love of neighbor, as Jesus lays out the Great Love Commandment back Mark 12:28-34.  We are shown love as both the essence of the law and the living center of Christian faith.   

Then, in today’s verses, we get a compare and contrast.  On the one hand, the successful scribe, the one with the nice robes and the fancy fancy duds.  On the other hand, the one who struggles to get by, the widow with nothing.

Jesus highlights them both, one, the wealthy one, the scribe who uses their wealth not for the greater good but to reinforce their place of power in the culture.  The other, the widow, who gives out of piety, out of duty, out of faith, and wildly

Clearly, historical Christianity has not quite always managed to pull that off.  But if we are honest, that’s the challenge that always faces organizations, groups, and societies.  The preservation of the system comes to be the primary focus of everything, to such a degree that the system often forgets why it exists in the first place.

Like those Crusaders, who were so disappointed to have gotten so focused on raising money that they slaughtered other Christians to do it.  One can imagine their disappointment on the Day of Judgement.  “Oh, Jesus, if only we’d done it right!  We really meant to kill unbelievers instead.”

To which Jesus, undoubtedly, would sit there dumbfounded.

But there are other ways to direct our resources and our personal energies.  

That, quite frankly, is what stewardship is all about, and as our nation looks forward, so do we as a community.    

As Poolesville Presbyterian Church begins to turn its attention to 2016, the resources we commit to that journey have a tremendous amount to do with what will actually happen here this next year.   So, assuming you’re earnestly thinking about it, here are a few things to throw into the mix.

As you’re looking at what you may be able to give this year, realize that this isn’t money that’s being poured into something self-serving.  This little community does not have, as our focus, our own power.  If faith is faith, it is the most radically defining element of our existence, and this community is how we together live out and develop that faith.

In that very real sense, your time and treasure here means putting your energies and hopes into something that is both tangible and unifying.  This place is our common house, a place of gathering that belongs to all of us, but in that belonging goes further.  It permits us to open up our space to community, to be a blessing to the world around us.  Our space on Wednesdays and Fridays is filled with mothers and their children at play.  Some evenings, it is filled with souls doing the hard work of recovery.  Other times, it is a place for planning, as those gathered to raise money to fight against cancer meet.

It’s a place of abundance, as abundant as the garden that poured out tomatoes and potatoes and berries and peppers, so many that those we’d invited to gather here with us often didn’t know what to do with them all.  That’s what we do here, and that’s worth something.

It is easy, easy to be anxious about what we have.  It’s easy to look at shortfalls, and to fold up, or to lose sight of the reason for our life here together.

Those are real, solid tangible things, and they all contribute in their own simple way to making that Great Commandment the center of our lives.

Stewardship is an outward facing thing, like faith, hope, and love are outward facing things.  It is a matter of abundance, of a gathering in and pouring out.

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

Behind the Stone

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 10.01.2015

Scripture Lesson:  John 11:32-44

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

Every other Thursday, I travel into my future.  

There aren’t flying cars and hoverboards.  You don’t see Marty McFly and Doc Brown rushing about trying to solve yet another inadvertent space-time continuum paradox.

It’s a little more subtle than that. I encounter, through the faces of others, what it might mean when I am older.  

I start up my van, and drive to the Baptist church at the heart of scenic downtown Annandale, during which time I get nowhere near hitting 88 miles an hour.  I’m there to pick up meals for Meals On Wheels, run by the county and Annandale Christian Community for Action.  In two large insulated containers, I have sometimes eight meals, sometimes six, sometimes seven, which I spend the next hour and a half or so shuttling around to human beings who are homebound.

I bustle through the halls of a huge retirement home, one that has through a peculiar mix of fate become populated entirely by elderly Asian Americans.  I smile politely and bow slightly at the waist as I deliver the meal, which seems the thing to do. On occasion, I’ll try out the few words of Korean I know.  Anyanghaseo, I’ll say, and they’ll smile, and wonder why that delivery man keeps saying he’s a happy donut.

I’ll stop at the homes of others, and stand patiently by the door as they move to it, as quickly as they can.  Or I ring, and I knock, and then I call, because hearing that door isn’t as easy as it once was.  Sometimes, I am the only soul they see that day.  I linger, if they want me to, and pass pleasantries.

It’s sobering, because it means I’m seeing what the future may have in store for me, and I’m not sure I’m all that excited about it.  Our consumer culture struggles with the idea of aging, because of course it does.  In a society that attempts to keep humankind in an endless adolescence, no longer children but never adult, aging is an inconvenient reminder that we’re not always going to fit into that perfect marketing sweet spot.  Because old people are old.

And when we are young, we don’t want to think about that, about how it is coming, about how swiftly the years fly.

It’s why most of us don’t prepare for tomorrow, why...as a study showed this week...the average non-billionaire American approaching retirement only has about $110,000 set aside for their future, which might seem like a lot, but given that the average one bedroom in an assisted living facility runs $3,500 a month, means we can manage that for just about half-a-decade before the cash runs out.

But in our culture of the now, we don’t want to look to what’s coming.  In our demographically divided society, all we are expected to encounter are others like us, those who fit neatly into our pre-assigned category.  In our culture of immediacy, we’re perfectly content to leave the future locked away, sealed conveniently behind a stone.

The products and media we encounter point us only to our hungers and our fears, showing us not reality, but only more of ourselves.  

And against that, today we hear from John’s Gospel a story of a sign.

Unlike the three other Gospels, the fourth Gospel is not set up like a travelogue.  Mark, Matthew, and Luke all share the same fundamental storyline, beginning with Jesus in Galilee and traveling down towards Jerusalem, with the physical movement towards the sacred city framing the narrative.

The structure of John’s Gospel is intentionally different.  What is important to John is telling the story of a series of seven signs.  Those signs, or semeion, are holy events, moments of miracle and meaning that speak to something beyond themselves.  In telling us their story, John is laying out not a movement through space, but a moving into deeper meaning.  Their task is to open us up to the reality of what Jesus is doing in the world, and to bring us deeper into relationship with him.

There are seven of them, because, well, seven is a number that in the ancient world is charged with meaning.  For both the ancient Jews and the ancient Greeks, it was the perfect number, the number of completion and wholeness.  To be honest, I don’t totally buy that, because, well, it’s totally random.  Why not three?  Like Schoolhouse Rock put it, three is a magic number.  Or why not eleven?  Aren’t things at their most amazing when Nigel Tufnel has turned them up to eleven?

But honestly, what matters for the unknown author of this Gospel is this:  it’s the right number.  It’s just as much as is needed.

Each of those seven events reinforces the character and nature of Jesus.  One, there’s the miracle at Cana in John 2:1-11, where Jesus turns water into a nice rich cabernet sauvignon, with just a hint of oak, peat, and elderberry.  Two, there’s the healing of the child of a royal official in chapter 4, and then three, the healing of an indigent lame beggar in chapter 5.  Four, five thousand folks are fed in chapter six, and then, because miraculous catering isn’t intense enough to fill one chapter, five, Jesus walks on water in chapter 6.   In chapter nine, we get number six, as a blind man is healed.   Finally, the seventh sign comes as Jesus journeys to visit Lazarus, Mary, and Martha, in the full knowledge that he’ll arrive shortly after the death of his friend Lazarus.

The story as we encounter it today begins with tears, begins with a household shaken by loss.  Family and friends have gathered, and there’s Jesus.  He’s come with the intent of changing the direction of things, or so the story has already told us, but he cannot help but be moved by what he encounters.  Here, human beings standing in encounter with death, shattered by loss, and here John does something odd with Jesus.  The Jesus of John is the most potently close to God.  John’s Jesus is the Jesus who was there in the beginning as the Word.  John’s Jesus is always on top of things, aware of who he is, completely in control with a peculiar mystic certainty.  

And yet, in the face of sorrow, it is John’s Jesus who breaks down.  It is John’s Jesus who weeps, and who is greatly disturbed.

And it is this compassionate, brokenhearted Jesus who finds his way with the mourners to the tomb, and it is there that he says: take away the stone.

Practical Martha, always aware of the reality of what is happening, suggests maybe that isn’t the best idea.  Four days dead in the Judean heat, locked away in the earth?  “Jesus,” she says, “it’s going to smell.”  It’s not an irrational response, and it makes sense emotionally.  Best to leave that stone untouched.

But Jesus will have none of that.  Believe.  See this thing that must happen.

And so the stone is heaved out of place, and reality is made different.

There are things about our lives that we may or may not want to know.  Things change, and change is hard.  We get older, and getting older ain’t easy.  People move on, and people pass across the mortal veil, and our love for them means that hurts.

We are afraid to stand in honest encounter with that reality, to see it, to smell its stench.  We’d rather hide away from that reality, in the dreams of our past, or in the magical screens that show us everything we want and desire in the now.  We want them sealed away, behind that stone.

But the Jesus who walks with us and weeps with us asks us not to shy away from turning aside those stones, from standing in encounter with those realities.

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

The Possessed

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 10.11.2015

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 10:17-31

It is the first thing we ever owned together, and it’s finally dying.

Oh, I don’t want to admit it, I really don’t.  That old microwave, purchased way back when in 1991, has sat on the kitchen counter of every home my wife and I have ever lived in.  It’s popped our popcorn back before we had kids, before we’d even had the talk about being ready to have kids, back when she’d come back from class and I’d have put in a day’s work as a stock clerk in a little Williamsburg store, and we’d snag some pizza, some basic cable and chill, just the two of us.

We were past being boyfriend and girlfriend, and definitively fie-anced, that tiny little diamond on her finger having taken a huge chunk out of my meager savings.  We’d reached that magical point in a relationship where you’re buying appliances together, and it was the very first one.

It’s an 800 Watt Quasar, a long dead low end brand, wrapped all around with faux wood paneling applique, the kind of appliance that you’d find in K-Mart along with the tape decks and the cheap CD players.  It’s warmed up countless rushed meals for the kids, and surely, surely over the last twenty five years popped enough popcorn to fill our house several times over.

And now it feels like it’s failing.  Every once in a while, it’ll balk at starting, refusing to fire up, like my knees on the morning after a day when I’ve really pushed myself.  It just clicks, and fails, and clicks, and fails.  And then it works, for no reason, so we keep it around.  The old Quasar, perhaps finally dying, and I’ll admit to feeling this faint twang of loss, over this object that has done due diligence for so many years.  We can come to feel that way about our objects, about the things that populate our lives.  They become suffused with memory, rich with experience, even if those experiences are just of the most basic stuff of life.

It’s easy to feel that way about the objects that populate our lives, as they become part of the face of the world we encounter.  It’s almost like they take on a portion of our personality, like they become an extension of who we are.

I wonder, though, if it works the other way.  If we get too focused on the objects around us, if we allow our identities to be so wrapped up in the things that we own or desire, I wonder if something of their material soullessness bleeds out into our own identities.

Because the things we possess can easily become the things that possess us.

That warning comes to us bright and clear from all of scripture, but it’s particularly sharp on the lips of Jesus this morning.   The story, which is retold by Luke in chapter 18 of his Gospel and by Matthew in his 19th chapter, describes another question being brought to Jesus.   A whole bunch of folks would approach Jesus with questions that weren’t so much questions as traps, the theological equivalent of “does this dress make me look fat.”  This was not such a question.  It is posed, or so we hear, by someone who is approaching Jesus with a genuine concern on their heart:  “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

The response from Jesus is to recount six of the ten commandments, the last six, the ones that have to do with how we relate to other human beings.   All of them are in essentially the same form we hear them in Deuteronomy 5 and Exodus 20...except for the final commandment.  You know, the one about coveting and desiring stuff.  

The man recognizes these commandments, and tells Jesus that he has kept every one of them his whole life long.

Of the three Gospels, Mark is the only one that capture the reaction of Jesus to this reply, and it’s not a hostile one.  Jesus recognizes the authenticity of his desire to live a good life, and as Mark says, he loved him.

Good job, says Jesus.  You’re doing great.  Just one more thing: Give up everything you own, and follow me.

Just that one little thing.  Ack.

The man goes away grieving, and shocked, and it is impossible, from an honest heart, to blame him.    What is being asked of him?   He’s being told to let go of everything he has, and to commit himself fully to Jesus.   There’s not a one of us who’d have had a different reaction.  Let go of everything?  How could we even begin to consider it?

Jesus talks to his disciples as this good-hearted soul wanders away despondent, and his words to them don’t exactly clear things up.  He tells them that it is immensely difficult for the wealthy to enter the Kingdom.  If you’re possessed by your possessions, if you serve Mammon as your master, the Spirit of God will have no purchase in your soul.

Historically, this is where Christianity has begun to waffle.  

Hearing from Jesus that it is harder for a rich person to enter heaven than for a camel through the eye of a needle, pastors like to comfort their congregations with a story they found in their collections of sermon anecdotes.  

That story told how the “Eye of the Needle” is the name of a small gate into Jerusalem, which camels would pass through but it was sorta tight and you had to unload it and re-load it.   I hear that story, over and over again.  It was in that book about quantum prosperity hoo-hah magic I talked about last week.  

And because that’s such a popular tale, I’ll repeat what I said the last time I preached on this passage: there was no such gate.  It never existed.  That story appears to have been made up at some point in the late 19th century, right about the same time some folks started getting very, very rich.

What Jesus is saying is exactly what he was saying.  In the absence of a teleportation device or a shrink ray, this is not easily done.

That’s not good news for us, because I think pretty much every one of us would have just as much trouble with that demand as the young man Jesus loved.  It’s just too radical, too nuts, too way outside of the ballpark, for us to seriously consider it.

I mean, seriously, check yourself.  Right now, imagine that there’s a sudden shimmer in the air, the sound of trumpets, and standing right in front of our tiny little , there’s Jesus of Nazareth himself.  What does he look like?  I’ll leave that up to you.  He can look any way you want.   He can be historically correct short Near Eastern Jesus.  He can be a radiant, glowing pastel heavenly watercolor inspirational poster Jesus.  He can be the Jesus of your childhood Sunday School coloring books.  He can be Ted Neely from Jesus Christ Superstar, or Willem DaFoe from Last Temptation of Christ.

But there is no question in your mind that he’s Jesus.  And he says to all of us, in a way that cuts directly into you, in English and not in Aramaic, exactly the same word that he spoke to that man.  “You are doing great.  Only one more thing I ask: give up all of your possessions, and follow me.”

And into the stunned silence that would fill this little room, you’d hear my faint voice from behind Jesus,  “Even the microwave?”

Yes, even the microwave.

Think of the things that consume your attention, that demand your allegiance.  Your car.  Your phone.  Your house.  Your gun.  The computers and consoles, all of the endless cornucopic vomit of our overproducing materialist culture.

And realize that our attachment to all of it is an impediment to our really engaging with the Gospel.  

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

Fact Checking

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

10.25.15; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 10:46-52

Listen to Sermon Audio Here:

I’ve always been a skeptic.

It’s kind of a strange thing to admit, as a pastor, but really, I don’t believe things easily.  Human beings are just too good at making stuff up.  At least, I know that boys are.  When I was a kid, I’d listen to the wild tales of braggadocio that the other boys would spin out, of their exploits with girls, or their exploits with cars, and I’d just sort of nod and smile and not believe a word of it.

Maybe it was because I was a compulsive daydreamer, spinning out my own tales of wild adventure, a tiny little Walter Mitty of a boy.  I knew, as storytellers do, that the world was full of people with stories, and those stories are fun and you can trust ‘em just about as far as you can throw ‘em.

Wild stories have always been out there, like, say, the one about how Mikey from the Life cereal commercial died after he ate poprocks, drank soda, and exploded.  I remember that being passed around the schoolbus, presented as something that was perfectly true because the kid behind you had heard it from their cousin, who knew a guy who worked with the doctor who tried to save Mikey’s life.

I’d shake my head, and just let it fly.

Now that I’ve grown up, more or less, the world seems even less trustworthy, a wild nest of totally fabricated folderol.  And for that, I have Snopes.

Snopes, in the event you’ve not bumped into it yet, is a site created by Barbara and David Mikkelson, two folklorists, back in the early days of the internet.  It was 1995, and their interest was in chasing down the truth of the stories told and retold in our culture.  

As a skeptic, I’m fond of Snopes, because someone out there has to be pushing back against the tendency of the internet to be a swirling festival of flagrant fabrication and falsehood.  Just about every single day, someone in my network of souls will pitch out a quote or a meme that I know in my heart of hearts just can’t be true.

Like, for instance, when someone earnestly passes on a picture that attributes a saying to Confucius, when in fact it was said by that old turtle dude in Kung Fu Panda.

Like, for instance, that picture of a snoring dormouse, which was soooo cute but totally doctored.

Like, for instance, that story about a special needs bagger at a grocery store who was insulted by a cruel shopper who then got her comeuppance.  

Like, for instance, a meme this last week purporting to be a quote from Donald Trump.  I, as you might imagine, am not really Donald Trump’s biggest fan.  A reality TV star/oligarch/casino magnate, brash and loud and insulting, who celebrates materialism and uses a third grade vocabulary to manipulate nationalist and racist sentiments.  I mean really, what’s not to like?  But the quote, which claimed to be from an article in People magazine, was outrageous in the wrong way, as Trump purportedly mocked Republicans as gullible and claimed he’d be able to con them into voting for him.  Whoever created it knew, without question, that they were creating disinformation.

Or, for other instance, a website called Creation Science Study, which makes a point of announcing after every major world disaster that the people who died brought it on themselves for being such wretched sinners.  I’d researched that one a little, and discovered that it was run by neoatheists, just out to say outrageous things against the faithful, sort of like unusually cruel and mean spirited performance art.

In this era when information is passed, soul to soul, more easily and virulently than ever before, skepticism seems necessary if we’re to remain even tangentially connected to reality.  

But when my inner skeptic comes into encounter with the stories I hold dear about Jesus, sacred and shaping and ancient, how is it to process them?  Like, for instance, the story of Blind Bartimaeus, which comes to us today from Mark’s Gospel.  It’s a lovely story, drawn from the very late stages of Mark’s story of Jesus.  

Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, heading for what he knows is to be his death.  As he and the disciples pass through Jericho, they’ve picked up a crowd of onlookers, a teeming throng.  On their way out of town, that throng catches the attention of a Jericho fixture, a roadside beggar who’d been around for a while.  His name, or so Mark tells us, is Bartimaeus, and his father’s name was Timaeus.

With this itinerant prophet-rabbi and his vast entourage moving by, Bartimaeus starts shouting out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”  Son of David, as it’s used here, doesn’t have to do with who your dad is.  It’s one of the titles that first century Judaism used to describe the messiah, as a way of evoking the lineage of kingship running back to King David.

Despite the efforts to shush this inconvenient attention seeker, Jesus hears him, and he is invited forward.  Their exchange is simple.  A question: what do you want from me?  The answer: Teacher, I want to see again.  The answer: Go, your faith has made you well again.

And the story tells us that Bartimaeus sees, and joins the swirling throng walking with Jesus.

I love this story.  And I struggle with this story.

I struggle with it because I am unable to silence my inner skeptic.  I have never reliably experienced such a thing.  Miracles of this sort exist outside of the range of my day-to-day life, and out of the range of what I understand to be the way the world works.  What are the mechanisms by which such a thing could happen?

And I look to where some people now make those claims, the bright eyed televangelists who’ll hold their hands up to the camera and swear that they’re healing someone’s lumbago right now, yes, there it is, someone out there right now has a heeeeaaaling upon them, hallelujah, have your mastercard ready when you call.

But not everyone is out there manipulating.  When I look to others, if I am honest with myself, I see only an earnest and well meaning hunger for miracles.

I look to the tools of historical critical scholarship, the unvested and analytic Biblical equivalent of Snopesian methodology.  There, scholarship tells me that Mark might not have been the only source for this tale, that both Luke and Matthew tell a very similar but slightly different story.  Only in Luke, who seems to directly use a version of Mark as his source in chapter 18:35-43, Jesus is on his way into Jericho when he encounters a nameless blind beggar.  And in Matthew 20:29-34, he’s on his way out of Jericho again, but the story involves not Bartimaeus, but two blind beggars.

And because it was two millennia in the past, there were no disciples wearing Go-Pro body cams.  There are just those three witnesses, each with their slightly different stories.  That’s all we’ve got.

It’d be tempting to do with this story what Thomas Jefferson did, just tossing it out as unsubstantiated irrational superstition, leaving it on the cutting room floor of history, just pasting in the moral teachings of Jesus and ditching all of the stuff that might trigger a visit to Snopes.  There are those who’d let it go.

But as much as I struggle with this story, I do also love it.

I love it because, well, sometimes things happen that seem both wildly improbable and miraculous.  Sometimes sick people get better.  Sometimes you look at the broken, seemingly barely alive body of someone you love...your parent, your friend, your child...and they get better.  And you know it doesn’t always happen, doesn’t *have* to happen just because we want it.  That makes those times when it does feel all the more miraculous.  

I love it because it is true in ways that go well beyond the material nature of the story, in ways that speaks to how faith can radically transform us as persons, opening us up to possibilities that seem outside of our reach.  It is an ancient tale that shapes our self understanding, that has shaped the understanding of countless broken souls, opening them to possibilities about themselves that they never thought possible.  Sometimes addictions are overcome, and long broken parts of our souls heal, and we suddenly see the path towards reconciliation and restoration, and danged if it doesn’t feel like the most amazing thing.

I love it because it gets at who Jesus was, at the strange shrouded magic of this soul whose impact on the world has been told and retold, yet whose identity is so veiled in history that we could walk right by him on the street and not have a clue it was him.  The best we can get is this historical triangulation, this story cobbled together out of old remembrances and recollections.    We know that something happened, something worth remembering, that in the strange organic crowdsourced way of the Bible got remembered.

When I honestly check the impact of such a story, the truth of how it plays across human beings, I see only something that bends our world towards hope and healing.

And that, to be honest, is something worth holding on to.

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