The Little Things

1 Samuel 16:1-13; John 9:1-41; Psalm 23

March 26, 2017

So often it really does come down to the small details, the little things that mean a lot. I am notoriously lousy at the little things. Ask anyone who has ever worked with me … and, while you’re at it, lift up a prayer for Beth and every other administrator who has ever worked with me! Oh, and, surely another one for Cheryl.

But seriously, you’ve heard about folks who cannot see the forest for the trees? My challenge in life is the opposite: I can see well beyond the forest, but I’m quite likely to smack my head up against a tree that I never even noticed.

Still, even as I am rubbing the sore spot on my forehead, I recognize the importance of the trees and of all of the smaller things that make up the system that supports the tree that stands in the forest that stands in mountain range that stands at the edge of the ocean.

The story of David, from beginning to end, turns on the small things. It starts when God nudges Samuel to notice David’s eyes – the little things lead to David’s anointing. It continues when David picks up five smooth stones, and there is a straight line between the small stone and the fall of the Philistine empire. David’s own fall from grace begins with a small thing: a glance out the window where his eye catches sight of Bathsheba.

The entire story turns on the little things. That’s not unusual. Most of our lives turn on little things – a glance, a moment, a choice, a distraction. The small things add up to huge ones. Every crashing wave is made up of tiny drops of water. The cancer that devastates a body begins with one cell mutation. The life you lead began with a single heart beat.

The smallest unit of a community is one individual. The smallest unit of a nation is a single citizen. The little things matter.

With David’s five small, smooth stones in mind, I’m going to mention five little things this morning. They don’t have any great theological heft to them in and of themselves, but I think they matter. I’m guessing that one or more of these will make you squirm just a bit as you think of your own choices around them. I’m OK with your squirming, because each of these small things is, in fact, something that I either continue to wrestle with in my own life or have come to some resolution only following some lengthy squirming.

The first one is simple – as simple as it is hard: hang up and drive. No, seriously, do that. No call – and certainly no text – is as important as the life of the pedestrian crossing the street in front of you or the guy riding the scooter through the intersection whose red light you missed because you were distracted.

Obviously, there were neither cell phones nor scooters in scripture, but there is great emphasis on paying attention, as the story of David’s anointing reminds us. God doesn’t exactly tell Samuel to hang up and drive, but God all but says “shut up and listen.”

And, yeah, this one is personal. But it’s way more than that: almost a third of all traffic crashes involve at least one driver using a cell phone. The research on this is abundantly clear: it’s not the hands holding a device, it’s the brain distracted by the conversation that matters. The last two years have seen the biggest spike in traffic fatalities in the United States in more than a half century. Traffic experts are clear about the cause: it’s drivers on devices.

If you receive calls that are so important that you can’t let it go to voicemail, then you need a driver. Seriously. If the boss complains when you say, “I’m sorry, I couldn’t answer immediately because I was driving,” give ‘em my number. I’ll refer them to my sister.

The next one is also simple – and, of course, a challenge. What’s for dinner? Or lunch? Or breakfast? Yes, our food choices matter. They matter to our bodies, of course, but they also matter to the wider world, indeed, to the planet, itself.

Food matters throughout scripture, and one imagines that it played a significant roll in the celebration of David’s anointing. Though their concerns were different from ours, scripture frequently focuses on food choices, food preparation, and food justice.

The one personal change that any of us can make that will have the largest impact on climate change is to cut back or cut out consumption of beef. Moreover, how we think about our food not only says something important about how we think about larger systems, the decisions we make about food shape those systems. For example – one small example – take the egg, and, please take the one that came from a cage-free chicken. Choosing to buy cage free chicken eggs is not so much about the life experience of a chicken – although who’s to say that the stardust that became me is more important in the grand scheme of things than is the stardust that became the chicken. No, the choice is about the agricultural system that so profoundly separates us urban and suburban consumers from our rural neighbors that we have completely forgotten that we are, in fact, bound together.

So, yes, what I’m saying is that the entire phenomenon of Donald Trump can be explained by looking carefully at the life of chickens. I’m not going to do that this morning, but if the whole point is to remember that little things mean a lot, then we begin to see how social change results from the accumulation of countless small choices.

Our “yes” to some things and “no” to others matters. Which brings me to the third small thing: RSVP. Or, better, the lack thereof. What I mean to ask is, whatever became of the RSVP? I am far from alone in noticing – and mourning – its loss in the culture.

As one blogger noted a while back:

Prepare thine hair shirt as penance: Lizzie Post, the great-great granddaughter of the most correctly etiquetted person in the history of the world has decreed that "We are worse at RSVP-ing than we have ever been," and this critical mass of incompetence is ruining everything.[1]

I don’t know if it ruins everything, but it sure does make it hard to plan for food! From my own internal struggles with this, I’m convinced that our failure to respond and make commitments to invitations is symptomatic of a culture that is so awash in choices that we’ve become overwhelmed to the point of paralysis. We so fear committing to one thing because something better might come along that we wind up stuck.

The story of the anointing of David would have been short and pointless if the elders of Bethlehem had ignored Samuel’s invitation to conversation because they hoped a better invite might be coming. Also, as I said, it makes it hard to plan for food.

Our inability or unwillingness to say “yes” or “no” bleeds into a fourth small thing: lack of civic engagement. We, the citizens in the great democratic experiment of the United States, have too often become passive consumers rather than active participants in the civic arena. Progressives and other Democrats can complain about last fall’s election outcome until the cows come home, but the truth is, when more than 40 percent of eligible voters don’t bother to cast ballots the problem lies not so much with an archaic electoral system as it does with a systemic failure to engage.

This is a huge issue, so it might seem out of place in a list of little things, but really, on an individual level, it is a small thing: as small as a post card or a text or a call to a public official.

Samuel could have ignored God and anointed the first of Jesse’s sons. After all, he was a strapping, good-looking, strong lad who looked the part of king. Samuel could have said, “I vote for you,” and then just gone home to tend to his own garden and complain about the new king.

Voting, of course, is the lowest level of engagement. Sitting on the sidelines complaining about the officials is for fans at a ballgame. If you are bothered by policy decisions of local, state, or federal officials, then get out of the stands and into the game.

The opportunities are endless, which, no doubt, is part of the challenge. When there are so many issues, how do I decide where to put my energy?

Well, what do you feel most passionate about? What cause or issue grieves you the most? Angers you the most? Or most makes your heart sing when things go well? Give your energy there. It’s a big country. There are plenty of other voices for other concerns, but the country desperately needs every one of our passionate voices.

The fifth small stone may seem like the least significant in a list of little things, but it might just be the stone that brings down the giant. Create beauty and choose joy. That’s it. That’s the small thing: celebrate the small things.

In Leonard Wolf’s memoir of the war years he writes,

One of the most horrible things at that time was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler—the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful. We were in Rodmell during the late summer of 1939, and I used to listen to those ranting, raving speeches. One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple-tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers… Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting room window: “Hitler is making a speech.” I shouted back, “I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.”

We cannot choose the time we are given, but we can choose what to do with it. God said to Samuel, “How long are you going to sit there grieving the old king? Get up and get going!”

We do not get to choose so many of the things that happen around us or to us, but we always get to choose how to respond. If the times are ugly, create small beauty and celebrate it. It’s a little thing, but little things mean a lot.

These are five small stones that I carry around, that I wrestle with, that sometimes weigh upon me but that, at other times, remind me and inspire me. Each of them, ultimately, is about making a choice: to what will I pay attention? What will I consume? To what will I commit? How shall I engage the wider world? What attitude will I bring to the decisions, the commitments, the engagements, the beauty I choose?

This morning, I invite you, in a time of prayerful quiet, to think about the small stones you carry. Which ones are like a pebble in your shoe, that irritate you, that hobble you, that you need to get rid of? Which ones are like a reminder that you carry in your pocket, a touchstone that, when you feel its presence, inspires you to act? What are the little things that mean a lot in your life?

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[1] http://jezebel.com/were-all-a-bunch-of-noncommittal-assholes-who-cant-rsvp-1672425886

Water Is Life

John 4:5-42

March 19, 2017

Every once and a while serving on the board of a nonprofit has some perks. Last week I received one related to my work with People of Faith for Equality in Virginia: I had the distinct privilege and pleasure of having lunch with Bishop Gene Robinson.

I asked him what connections he saw between the reformation-type shifts in the global church that we’ve been talking about this year and his work for GLBTQ justice – in the church and the wider world. He said, “you know, David, people come to church looking for God and we give them religion instead. But that’s changing in a lot of places these days.”

I don’t think that disconnect is anything new under the sun, and it may be the root cause of all of the great religious upheavals throughout history. People are parched for a sip of living water, and the religious establishment says, “first let’s see if you’re after Lutheran water or Presbyterian water or some other weird flavor,” or “first, learn this 2,000 year-old-creed that in no way speaks to your thirst, but learn it first anyway,” or “tell me about your gender and your sexual orientation, first.”

In Martin Luther’s time, it would have been, “let’s talk about the matter of a small indulgence, and then we’ll get to the God-talk.” In Jesus’ time, as the reading from John’s gospel surely indicates, it would have been, “the temple is no place for a woman” or “let’s judge your marital status first” or “you are a Samaritan, you have no business in this conversation in the first place.”

There is and always has been a religious establishment who perceive as their first charge protecting the institution and guarding its gates. People come to those gates seeking God, thirsting for something to quench a thirst that they can barely name, and we say, “let me tell you the history of this lovely stained-glass gate. You know, my great-grandfather helped pay for the gate.”

And we wonder why the institutional church is collapsing all around us. Oh, and it is collapsing. Make no mistake about that. It matters not whether we are talking the Mainline or the old line or the out-of-line, the liberal or the conservative, the northern or the southern – the institutional church in North America is collapsing. Every single denomination that is older than a decade is experiencing membership decline. Mainline Protestant churches – Lutherans, Presbyterians, UCC, Methodists, Episcopalians, and so on – have seen total membership decline by more than 10 percent over the past decade. Since 2005, our denomination has lost about one quarter of its members – a decline of more than a half million. Heck, the percentage of white Republicans with no religious affiliation has tripled since 1990. And so it goes.

So Jesus and a woman of questionable reputation meet at the local watering hole. “Pour me a drink?” Jesus asks.

“I am so tired,” the woman probably thinks to herself. “I am tired of carrying this water; I am tired of the midday heat; I am tired of men.”

But she says, “You’re not from around here.”

“Why do you say that?” Jesus asks.

“Well, first off, if you were from around here you would know that men do not speak to women. Indeed, you’d know that a man should never be alone with a woman unless they’re married.”

“Hm,” says Jesus, “Well, in that case, call for your husband and I’ll speak with him.”

“I’m not married,” she replies.

“Yes, but you have been. And more than once. Quite a few times, I’m thinking.”

“Ugh. Men,” she probably thinks to herself. “Is that all they care about? Ever?” But aloud she asks, “how do you know?”

And he tells her, “I can see the sorrow and the pain in the lines around your eyes; I can hear the longing and the thirst in your words and in your voice. You come out here at midday to get away from the gossip and the talk, and you are looking for something that you can’t even name. I can give you water; water that fills you down to the souls of your feet and up as high as your spirit can reach.”

“Sir, give me a drink. Please. I am so tired and so thirsty.”

This is the word of the Lord to the church in our time.

The people are parched; let’s give them something to drink.

The challenge, of course, is that, as an institution, we have lost most of our credibility because we, too, are parched. We are too much like the dry bones to which Ezekiel preached, and the boneyard is the last place people come looking for a drink.

So, what good news can we possibly hear in this? After lunch last week, Bishop Robinson spoke to an interfaith group of several dozen NoVA clergy. He was encouraging us to continue the work for LGBTQ justice. He reminded us that it is still possible in about half the states in the Union – including ours – for a gay or lesbian couple to get married on a Saturday, get evicted from their apartment on Sunday when the landlord reads about the wedding in the lovely write-up in the local paper, and lose their jobs on Monday because management saw the story, too. And they have no legal recourse because such discrimination in housing and employment remains perfectly legal.

That doesn’t sound like good news at all! In fact, I think the woman at the well would understand such a story perfectly well, and could probably see herself in it, too.

Here’s the good news: just as Jesus met the woman at the well right where she was, and loved her just as she was, God is right there in the midst of not only the beautiful wedding but present, heart broken open in anguish, in solidarity with those who suffer discrimination.

That is good news for all who suffer, for all who thirst, for all who will be hurt by the policies coming out of the White House and the Congress these days. None of us suffer alone. God is there, in the midst of the down-trodden, the broken-hearted, the poor, the outcast, the prisoners and the oppressed, the children who will go to school hungry because there is no “demonstrable evidence” that feeding children produces results and the elderly who will no longer receive meals on wheels because “reasons,” the children of Flint drinking contaminated water because they are poor, and the water protectors of Standing Rock who remind us of the same deep truth that Jesus spoke: water is life.

The challenge to the church is as clear as clean water drawn from a deep well not contaminated by lead or by oil or by fracking. If we want to be where God is then we need to get ourselves to the places where we can stand in solidarity with the broken-hearted children of a broken-hearted God.

As Bishop Robinson said to us, “when the church goes out to do justice we find that God is already there.”

If people come to church looking for God, maybe the best thing they could find is a sign in the window that says, “gone fishing … for justice” and a note that invites them to join us – join us walking on the picket line, join us serving in the soup line, join us in crossing every line that would divide the people from one another.

Drink deeply from the wellspring for it overflows with living water, then rushes down in a mighty stream of justice and righteousness. In that water we will find life. In that water we will find the God for whom our parched souls thirst. May it be so. Amen.

The Great Confusion

Psalm 121; John 3:1-17

March 12, 2017

John 3 … especially John 3:16. What more is there to say about this most-interpreted, over-determined passage that many of the faithful take as the heart of the gospel? I wrestled with that question for several days last week, and, well, I got nothing, or next to it. So I want to begin backwards this morning.

How many of y’all have done lectio divina reading with me or in other contexts? Lectio divina, or divine reading, is a Benedictine practice of devotional or inspirational reading of scripture in which one listens for a word of phrase in a passage that sparkles or shines out or strikes you particularly and then meditates on that word or phrase listening for the Spirit’s moving in your thoughts.

That’s not what I want to do at all. Instead, I have in mind this morning what I’m calling, almost seriously, lectio Diablo. Yeah, I want to invite you to think for a moment about the worst misuses or abuses you can recall related to the text, “for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

How many of you can recall an instance of being beaten over the head with that verse, or of seeing it used as a cudgel in some argument over religion?

One of the occupational hazards of pastoral life is being asked from time to time to take surveys for religious studies professionals. I got one last week, and took 15 or 20 minutes to complete it. Hey, I remember doing research so I try to help out when I can!

In any case, this one was about faith and political engagement, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the researcher was fairly conservative. The biggest tell for me was a question asking me to rate how important it was to believe that Jesus is the only way to salvation. That’s a question whose roots run straight back to John 3:16, or, more accurately, to John 3:18 where the author of John’s gospel adds a motivational kicker: “”those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”

A few of us are old enough to remember the rainbow wig guy who used to show up at major sporting events sporting a t-shirt with “John 3:16” emblazoned on it. Just as an aside, if you want to read a really sad tale, Google “rainbow wig guy” and read about his life – a cautionary tale that a single verse of scripture cannot redeem.

But for a certain strain of evangelical Christianity, this single verse provides a firm enough foundation to rest an entire religion upon. If believing is all that matters then salvation is a simple transaction: I say, “I believe that Jesus Christ is the only Son of God” – all caps and probably trademarked – and God stamps my golden ticket to eternity. If you believe this, then your top priority becomes getting others to believe it, too, because their salvation rests not so much on God’s love of the world but on your ability to convince others to believe it, too. When that’s your fundamental conviction, well, you might just wind up wearing a rainbow wig at baseball games.

The problem arises when you rest your entire faith on a single verse or even a single passage taken out of the context of the whole.

The Great Reformation had several watchwords or key, simple-sounding, and – of course – Latin phrases that came to define it and set Protestant churches apart from their Roman Catholic sisters. These included:

·      Sola scriptura;

·      Sola fide;

·      Sola gratia.

Or, scripture alone, faith alone, grace alone provide the key to salvation. It doesn’t take a math major to wonder quickly how there could be three “solas” when it seems that the word itself implies singularity, but the reformers were apparently theologians first and simple mathematicians eighth … or something like that.

In any case, these simple phrases provided a shorthand reminder that, for the Reformers, salvation rested on scripture rather than the tradition of the church, on faith rather than good works, and on the grace of God rather than any inherent merit of human beings.

These watchwords have their merit, to be sure. Most importantly, they shift the central focus of faith toward the relationship between the believer and God, and away from the relationship between the believer and the church hierarchy.

Every gift has a shadow side, of course, and the shadow side of this shift of focus toward the faith life of individuals has been a focus on individual salvation at the expense of deep community life and commitment to justice. You go too far down that road and you wind up with the Joel Osteens of the world and a gospel of individual prosperity that has way more to do with American consumerism than it does with Jesus of Nazareth.

When your principle commitment is to individual blessing in this life and individual salvation in the life to come, it’s also a pretty short leap to political support for an ugly stew of utterly unrestrained capitalism and a toxic libertarian-conservatism. That is to say, when your primary religious concern is individual salvation it’s easy to understand your primary economic concern as individual prosperity and your primary political concern as anything – say, income taxes or environmental regulations or being compelled, as a man, to pay for prenatal care for women – anything that stands in the way of individual prosperity.

You can get to the prosperity gospel pretty quickly from John 3:16, but you don’t have to. That is to say, whatever diabolical readings of John 3 you may have experienced over the years, none of them is inherent in either the text itself nor in an authentically Reformed reading of the text.

For when you proclaim sola scriptura, or scripture alone, you are not saying, “one verse alone.” As John Calvin put it, “There are many statements in Scripture the meaning of which depends upon their context.”[1] Furthermore, following the great confessional statements of the Reformation era, we are reminded, in the Second Helvetic Confession, that we Reformed folk “hold that interpretation of the Scripture to be orthodox and genuine which is gleaned from the Scriptures themselves … and expounded in the light of like and unlike passages and of many and clearer passages.”[2]

That’s a ridiculously scholarly way of saying, “don’t take David’s word for it, or the church’s word for it, and don’t take it on its own out of context of the whole.”

Moreover, when you proclaim sola scriptura you are also proclaiming, with the Reformers, fealty to the rule of love. That is to say, in this case along with the authors of the Scots Confession, “We dare not receive or admit any interpretation which is contrary to […] the rule of love.”[3]

That rule of interpretation holds simply that, when Jesus said, “love God and love your neighbor,” he ruled out any reading of scripture that demeans human beings or God. If our reading does not lead to love, then our reading is wrong.

That gets back to the heart of the matter in John 3:16: “for God so loved the world” – and the Greek word there is “cosmos,” or the whole of Creation. In other words, the Christ event, the whole Jesus story, is about God’s love for all of creation.

When the story of Jesus leads away from love, then we’re reading it wrong. If your reading of scripture leads you to believe that it’s God’s will and it should be legal for you to discriminate and refuse to bake wedding cakes for same-sex couples, well you’re reading it wrong. If your reading of scripture leads you to declare yourself anti-feminist, well you’re reading it wrong. If your reading of scripture leads you to support anti-Islam immigration orders, well then your reading it wrong.

Indeed, if we read just a few more verses past 3:16, we are challenged to understand that living into the truth of God’s love leads, precisely, to living love. “But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God” (John 3:21). In other words, by their fruits you shall know them.

In still other words, if we read John 3:16 and the result of our reading is hateful language that excludes, then we’re doing it all wrong. If we read those words, and hear in them an invitation to live fully into that divine love, then we’re getting closer to the heart of the gospel.

When we draw closer to the heart of the gospel we’ll begin to wrestle deeply with the same questions that drove Nicodemus to seek out Jesus under cover of darkness. As we draw closer to the heart of the gospel, we find ourselves responding in all kinds of ways to the invitation to live in the bright light of God’s love. In that light, we know that God is love is love is love is love is love is love is love. Amen.

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[1] Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, IV, 23.

[2] Book of Confessions, 5.010.

[3] Book of Confessions, 3.18