June 22, 2008
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To be honest with you when I was sitting down to write the sermon this week I had every intention of using the Matthew reading, and avoiding the Genesis reading. Both seemed like difficult passages to talk about, but I figured I could do something with the Matthew reading… hey, nothing bad EVER comes from talking about Jesus anyway right!?
This was before I went away to a United Church conference in Toronto this week. It was called “More Franchises than Tim Hortons? Vital Ministry in the Canadian Context.” This is a conference that had nearly 100 sessions to choose from over 2 days, and was all about the various ways ministry is happening or can be happening in Canada. This conference was Thursday through Saturday, so by the afternoon of Friday when I was still had practically no sermon, I considered skipping the last part of the day to head back to my room to work on it. But… the service that had happened in the morning had been so good, I thought, why not. It’s only 2 hours anyway. So I went, and I heard the CBC’s winner of the Spoken Word Artists contest — Boonaa Mohammed — give a few of his “stories” about being a young black Muslim in Canada today. From there we had a talk from Amir Hussain who is a Professor of Muslim Studies in Los Angeles, who grew up in Toronto and is an adherent to the Trinity St Paul’s United Church in Toronto… and yes, he is still a strong Muslim. His talk was called “Faith Neighbours.” I’m going to leave it there and now share a re-telling of the story in Genesis.
The story in Genesis is part of a larger and very important one. It is the story of the half brothers Ishmael and Isaac. Ishmael is the son of Hagar and Abraham. Hagar is Sarah’s slave obtained from the Pharaoh during their brief vacation there. Jewish tradition says that Hagar was very beautiful: tall, elegant with the broad shoulders and narrow hips of Egyptians. Sarah decided that since she was barren that Abraham should take Hagar so that he could have children. Abraham leaps at this decision and voila, Hagar becomes pregnant with Ishmael. The problem with this is that now Sarah is very jealous of Hagar. She thinks Hagar is a bit too cocky — and complains about this to Abraham. Being a smart man Abraham stays out of this and tells Sarah to do whatever she wishes with Hagar. So, Sarah makes life as miserable as she can for Hagar, so much so that Hagar flees to the desert. In the desert God comes to Hagar and tells her to return, promising that God would bless her son Ishmael and make of him a great nation.
Hagar returns and for thirteen years Sarah watches as Hagar raises Ishmael. For thirteen years she sees Abraham enjoy and revel in Ishmael as his son. The pain and rage continue to boil in Sarah. No matter how miserable she tries to make Hagar’s life she cannot get beyond the fact that Hagar has borne Abraham a son and she has not. Can we imagine how that fact affected Sarah? Can we comprehend her sense of worthlessness? In this culture Sarah would be considered a complete failure as a woman and a wife. In a way we can see how she would have taken that out upon Hagar, someone lower than herself.
Then as we heard last week, the miraculous happens: Sarah becomes pregnant. At last God vindicates her! When Isaac (whose name means he laughs or he makes me laugh) is born she gives him his name because her anger is replaced by laughter. No more will she have to endure those snide looks from Hagar over her barrenness. Sarah has borne a son — she is now worthy!
However, all is not well in paradise. When Isaac is about three he is weaned and Sarah’s anger comes back. Ishmael — who is now about 16 — and Isaac are playing together and evidently Ishmael laughs at Isaac in a condescending manner. Sarah cannot stand it — she will not put up with this child of the slave girl being equal to her beloved Isaac, much less him mocking Isaac. Sarah demands that Abraham send Hagar and Ishmael away — much to the disappointment of Abraham. He loves Ishmael and Hagar and does not want to lose them. However, God comes to Abraham and reiterates the promise God made to Hagar concerning Ishmael. So Hagar and Ishmael are sent into the wilderness, the desert, with a skin of water and a loaf of bread.
Soon they face death from dehydration and starvation. Hagar places Ishmael under a bush because she cannot stand to watch him die. However, God has not abandoned them but leads her to a well of water. Ishmael then grows up in the wilderness under the care of his mother and becomes an expert hunter and marksman with a bow. When he is older Hagar goes to Egypt and gets Ishmael an Egyptian wife. Ishmael eventually has twelve sons who are later divided into twelve tribes — and yes, a great nation comes of them. For Ishmael’s descendents are the Muslims, the largest non Christian religious group on the face of the earth — about 1 billion people by latest estimates. The modern day Palestinians and many Arabs trace their lineage back to Ishmael. God did indeed fulfill the covenant with Hagar and Ishmael just as God did with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
So maybe some of you are trying to figure out how the first part and the story go together…
After hearing Amir Hussain’s talk and then going back to my room to write, I could not help but see HOW relevant the Genesis story was to me now! This story is the beginning of what would eventually become the Muslim faith! Clearly God had favoured both Ishmael and Isaac, and we can easily extend this to say God favours both Judaism and Muslims. Christianity finds its roots in Judaism, but both Judaism and Muslims find their roots from the same source. It would seem that all three religions are basically long lost cousins…
Amir Hussain talked about how Muslims and Christians can be neighbours, not only geographically, but also in spirit. He suggests that if you want to study the Muslim faith, do not talk with an Imam, do not read the Qur’an, but make friends with a Muslim. Now, in downtown Toronto where he spoke, this isn’t such a hard task… here outside of Guelph, where it is much more predominantly white Anglo-Saxon, this is much more difficult to do. Amir suggests that we look wherever we can then. Perhaps there is a store nearby that sells food from the east, or a doctor who is Muslim. We need to look around to find those who are different from ourselves to learn more about them, and hopefully in turn we can teach them about us. This simple act of sharing creates inter-faith dialogue! Inter-faith dialogue can be hard sometimes because we worry that we should be pushing our religion onto the other, or that they will push their religion onto us. We might have this fear that if we don’t try to convert them, then maybe we don’t have much faith. But this could not be further from the truth! I would suggest, and I know many would back me up, that by sharing in another faith, and by being able to share your faith with others; your own faith itself grows. You can create new ways and ideas of continuing your own faith in light of other faiths!
The more we can learn about our faith neighbours and share with them, the incidences of violence in the form of hate crimes significantly decreases. We are no longer afraid of the unknown. Amir talked about one project where in the US 70 Christian Churches were each matched with 70 Muslim Mosques. These created opportunities for sharing without the fear of having one religion pushed onto the other. It created friendships, but it also gave each religious congregation a buddy in the community in case times became difficult. If hate crimes began, each knew they had a buddy to back them up, and that 140 other congregations would back them up as well!
One other thing that urged me to preach on this topic was today’s bulletin. Thanks to my buddying up to Darlene, I get an advanced copy of the bulletin on THURSDAY mornings! So as I wrote this sermon, this [HOLDING UP BULLETIN] was what I saw every time I glanced to my left. In light of the Official Apology given by Prime Minister Harper last week, today’s bulletin is even more relevant to me. Thinking about what the residential schools were designed for, I am even more convinced that inter-faith dialogue is important. There was clearly no respect given to the Aboriginal people from the “White Christians” who stole the children away from their homes and families and forced them to forget their own faith and culture, and take on the “true” Christian faith and ways of life. If we had rather chosen to dialogue with the Aboriginal people (as many people are NOW doing) we would have learned how and why their faith is important, and we would have had the opportunity to respectfully share our faith. Because of this lack of inter-faith dialogue and respect the Aboriginal people have suffered so many ways, and it will take generations to repair this damage, if ever. However, this is in the past. We are in the present and we CAN learn from the past. As a church and as a country we have been working very hard to rebuild these relationships and slowly but surely there are many positive things happening.
We can use what we’ve learned from the past to improve inter-faith dialogue because we now know HOW important it is and what an important place it has in achieving some form of peace for everyone who shares this planet. We have seen where the branching of our roots begins today, and I have shared a few important ways to pursue inter-faith dialogue and why we need to, but it doesn’t stop at our Muslim and Aboriginal brothers and sisters, we must continue to learn from anyone who is willing to teach us, and we must continue to teach those who are ready to listen from us. We must continue this in order to help all of creation grow, and to help our own spirituality and knowledge grow.
We know inter-faith dialogue is not easy, but hopefully with the knowledge of today’s story along with God’s love and encouragement, we can go out with the hope of learning and peace on our hearts and when opportunities arise, we can gain strength to just befriend a neighbour!
Amen.
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June 15, 2008
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For years now, psychologists have shown the importance of giving words of praise and encouragement to raise self-esteem. In the workplace they say how necessary it is to tell people when they’re doing a good job, to give them a pat on the back, to provide reinforcement so that productivity stays at a high level. And let’s face it; we all like to hear those good words. Even if they don’t come as often as we think they should, at any age, whether it is at church or at work or at home or at school, if we are honest, we must confess that we all like to hear those words of affirmation and belonging.
But of course it doesn’t end there. There’s a flip side to this process because the expectation is that we will continue to do the things that brought about those wonderful words, and that in order to hear them again, something more is expected of us. This was certainly true of the Israelites in the Old Testament — they were God’s chosen people. Called and chosen, they were also expected to walk the road of discipleship along with Moses, to act like God’s people in the world. Not simply to give lip service to the commandments of God, but called to be living examples of God’s way, a royal priesthood and a holy nation. Not just to be, but also to do.
Throughout Scripture we see this pattern again and again. Prophets, and then later the rabbis, all had bands of followers or disciples, those who would sit at their feet and learn from the master. Then, when they had earned the favour of their teacher, they would be sent out themselves to share the knowledge they had gained with others. At that time, nothing but the sacred law was written down, and so it was given to these disciples to assist the rabbi by going about the countryside and sharing in the teaching. All of them, down through the ages, began as followers, chosen for their eagerness to study and learn, and perhaps many of them would have been content to stay in that role of sitting and listening and learning. But at some point in their discipleship it was required of them that they take that extra step of being sent out to share their knowledge with others. Chosen and sent.
So it was with Jesus and his disciples. Quite different from any of those who had gone before, these men were not scholars, nor were they particularly pious. In truth, we know them to have been a rag-tag bunch of fishermen and tax collectors, an unlikely lot called together to witness and be a part of the ministry of this new rabbi, Jesus. His was not a minister in the traditional rabbinic sense. He didn’t just sit under a tree and teach, at least not often. He took those disciples on a march from Galilee to Jerusalem and back again, through all the villages and towns, wherever he perceived there was a need for healing and restoration. He taught them, to be sure, but his words were often accompanied by such actions as raising the dead and healing every manner of sickness and affliction. And the more he did and the further he went, with his disciples right beside him, it became apparent that there was just too much to do, there were too many sheep without a shepherd. And so today we hear Jesus as he asked his disciples to pray for the Lord to send more labourers into this harvest field. He needed help. And the disciples were there, just as we are now.
I am sure the disciples, inexperienced and new to this ministry business, were nervous. This was all new to them, and they probably would have been perfectly content to continue as they were, just to be with Jesus, to see what he did, to talk to him and to have him talk to them, to walk with him and to pray with him. But it didn’t work out quite that way. They did exactly as Jesus asked — going to communities, teaching the people, helping the sick, curing diseases, loving God’s people.
It happens again and again. The call of God starts with individuals but always leads to a call to community, and then, just when you get it right and you hear those words of affirmation, members are asked to go forth to bring the Good News to others. In this day and time we are the labourers called to go into the harvest field.
Jesus instructed us all to go to his “lost sheep” and said that as we go, we must proclaim the good news, “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” Now this was almost 2000 years ago… those who heard this truly thought that the kingdom of heaven WAS right around the corner, Paul, the author of a very large part of our New Testament wrote many letters encouraging Christians because he believed that the time was soon also… clearly God’s idea of soon is very different from our idea of soon. Many fundamentalist Christians still talk about how the kingdom of heaven IS right around the corner. When the new millennium came in, so many people were convinced that THIS IS IT! God will bring all Christians to the Kingdom now! Words were thrown around like “the end of time” and “apocalyptic.”
So I think the lesson learned here is that we really have no idea! Humans cannot say for sure what God’s time really is. BUT, we must continue to live as if the kingdom of heaven IS right around the corner. Like the 12 disciples, Jesus has instructed us to be God’s labourers in this plentiful harvest. Jesus taught us about God through his words, but more he taught us with his actions. He taught us to love our neighbour as we love ourselves, but then he went out and showed us how to love each other by curing the sick. Jesus taught in the synagogues, and proclaimed the good news of the kingdom, but then he went out to the people curing every disease and every sickness. He healed a hurting people.
We are to use this example to go out and heal our world which still hurts as much today as it did 2000 years ago.
A farmer was out ploughing his field one spring morning. The spring thaw had just occurred and there were many muddy valleys in the field. Through one particularly wet place his tractor became stuck in the mud. The harder he tried, the deeper he became stuck. Finally, he walked over to his neighbour’s to ask for help. The neighbour came over and looked at the situation. He shook his head, and then said, “It doesn’t look good, but I tell you what. I’ll give it a try pulling you out. But if we don’t get it out, I’ll come sit in the mud with ya!”
Like this farmer’s friend, we can help a hurting world by just being there with people who are hurting. Some call this a Ministry of Presence. Think of the times you have been with someone who is grieving over a significant loss — the loss of a job, the loss of a friendship, perhaps even the loss of a loved one. Really, there is nothing we can do for them… we can try to help by bringing food over, or bringing flowers or gifts to cheer them up, but in the end, often it is by simply being with them, by listening and just sitting in the muddy time with them that we are helping. To know someone is there with you is a huge gift… no words are even necessary sometimes… just a gift of presence. If you have spent some time listening to Lou when he talks about his and Olie’s work with the hospice programs, then you’ll know… when you have someone who is dying or terribly sick, the only thing you can do is sit with them. Be there to listen to them if they want that, but simply by just knowing you are beside them is a relief. When we were children, we would call our parents to our room when we were sick or scared. We would ask our moms or our dad or someone else close to us to just stay with us. All we wanted was for someone who cared about us to stay until we had finally fallen asleep… we simply needed their presence!
There is a quote I have from Mark Twain: When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.
Fathers Day Quote by: Mark Twain, “Old Times on the Mississippi” Atlantic Monthly, 1874
Perhaps today is a day to reflect on all those things that our fathers have taught us — how did Dad show us how to help others? Was it by being nice to those you meet? Was it helping out those less fortunate than you? Was it sharing stories of joy to other? Or was it simply being a presence of strength and love. Knowing that Dad is going to be there whenever we need him… I certainly could not do many of the things I do without the knowledge that my mom and dad are there for me in case things don’t work out as I hoped or planned for. When I was younger I had a blanket I carried around the house with me — my security blanket — now I don’t need that… I’m too old for such silly things… or is it that my security blanket has changed shape into my parents!
In church today we have listened to the words of the Gospel and heard of God’s mighty acts of healing and forgiveness and restoration. As we gather together in community we are fed and strengthened and nourished by the Lord’s body and blood, we are clothed with power from on high. And then the last words we hear as we leave the church are: “Go forth.” “Let us go forth in the name of Christ.” “Let us go forth into the world, rejoicing in the power of the Spirit.” We need nothing else. We have been chosen and we are being sent. It is time to go for God. Let go forth yearning for the ways in which we can help Jesus heal the hurting world. In the small ways as well as the large. Let us be thankful to God who teaches us with words and actions and guides us to help all of creation Big and small…
Amen.
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June 1, 2008
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In 1174 the Italian architect Bonnano Pisano began work on what would become his most famous project: A separately standing bell tower for the Cathedral of the city of Pisa. The tower was to be eight-stories and 185-foot-tall tall. There was just one “little” problem: builders quickly discovered that the soil was much softer than they had anticipated, and the foundation was far too shallow to adequately hold the structure! And sure enough, before long the whole structure had begun to tilt… and it continued to tilt… until finally the architect and the builders realized that nothing could be done to make the Leaning Tower of Pisa straight again. It took 176 years to build the Tower of Pisa and during that time many things were done to try and compensate for the “tilt.” Foundation was shored up; the upper levels were even built at an angle to try to make the top of the tower look straight. Nothing worked. The tower has stood for over 800 years, but it leans 18 feet away from where it should be. One day, experts say, it will fall. All because it wasn’t built on the right foundation.
Today’s reading in Matthew includes one of Jesus’ MANY parables. Jesus used them about forty times in the New Testament! Clearly these are not trivial stories to brush aside or ignore. Theologian Walter Wink wrote that parables are tiny lumps of coal squeezed into diamonds, condensed metaphors that catch the rays of something ultimate and glint it at our lives. Parables are not illustrations; they do not support, elaborate or simplify a more basic idea. They are not ideas at all, nor can they ever be reduced to theological statements. They are the jewelled portals of another world; we cannot see through them like windows, but through their surfaces are refracted lights that would otherwise blind us — or pass unseen.
To hear a parable, then, is to submit oneself to entering its world, to make oneself vulnerable, to know that we do not know at the outset what it means. Parables function to tease the mind out of familiar channels and into a more right-brain view of things. Parables have hooks all over them; they can grab each of us in a different way, according to our need.
Perhaps what the parables show more than anything else is that Jesus was fully acquainted with human life in its multiple ways and means. He was knowledgeable in farming, sowing seeds, and reaping a harvest. Not only was he familiar with the workaday world of the farmer, the fisherman, the builder, and the merchant, but also he moved with equal ease among the managers of estates, the ministers of finance at a royal court, the judge in a court of law, the Pharisees and the tax collectors. His stories portray the lives of men, women, and children, the poor and rich, the outcast and the exalted. He knew about work and wages, about weddings and festive occasions as well as funerals and sickness. Jesus used and understood, familiar truth in order to teach an unfamiliar or unrealized lesson.
In this parable Jesus compares two house builders. One builder is smart and builds his house on a strong and sturdy foundation of rock, while the other builder is foolish and builds his house on slippery and frail sand. Everything seems to be fine; the builder on sand has even saved a ton of money. That is until the rains come. It rained, the wind blew, and the ground was flooded. The builder on the stone was fine. He had worked hard and planned for just this type of event. The builder on sand however, was unwise and his house washed out as soon as the rains came. He lost everything because of his hasty actions and desire to save time and money. In Matthew Jesus explains that those who follow Jesus’ words and actions are like the builder on rock. These followers are developing a good foundation and will not be swayed by evil thoughts. Those who do not listen to Jesus’ words are like the builder on sand. Jesus says that they will be washed away and have nothing in the end.
Essentially Jesus was saying that the words he gives us are not incidental additions to our lives, homeowner improvements to our standards of living. They are foundational words, words to build a life on. If we work these words into our lives, we can be like the smart carpenter who built his house on solid rock. Rain poured down, the river flooded, a tornado hit — but nothing moved that house. It was fixed to the rock. But if we only use Jesus’ words in Bible studies, for show and we don’t work them into our lives, we are like the thoughtless carpenter who built his house on the sandy beach. When a storm rolled in and the waves came up, it collapsed like a house of cards.
Jesus helped the people to understand that God was not always going to be there to stop the rains, the flooding, and the tornadoes from invading our lives. Nevertheless, Jesus expected the people to be smart about life, to be careful about the priorities that they built their lives on, to be cautious about who they listened to and what philosophy of life they chose to live by. Because a wrong decision in these foundational areas would prove to be their undoing when the pressures and forces of life begin to mount.
This is not a story about weather proofing your home, but that of the importance of the foundation. One of the things that a lot of building contractors want to stay away from is digging out and pouring their own foundations. They would rather have a specialist come in and do it for them. Why? If you mess up the foundation, you’ve compromised the entire structure. Building your life on anything other than what Jesus taught is to “mess-up” the foundation. It is to allow fault lines and cracks to form at pressure points of life. Just like every solid building has a foundation, every life, every home, every marriage has a foundation on which it is built. What does your foundation consists of? That’s Jesus’ point.
So this is great to know! Jesus and his teachings must be our foundation if we are to live out God’s call to be good and righteous Christians. But how do we do this? What are the rocks and what is the sand?
There are a few obvious “rocks” that we all know about from church and the Bible; love your neighbour, think of others before yourself, put yourself in another person’s shoes before you go and judge them, help out the poor, needy, unloved, unwanted.
And there are a few obvious “sands” as well — most can be found in the Ten Commandments. Do not lie, cheat, steal, kill, gossip, intentionally hurt, or ignore the pain of others.
Instead, we must build our lives on what Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt.5-7). Just a quick read through this sermon shows us how to build.
As a congregation we do many things to keep our foundation firm: we gather together and support one another when we can through committees and social groups, and even thought the greeting time at church. We support the music program which helps teach us how to be more spiritually in-tune, but also helps those who need outlets to offer their works to God in Worship. We do the same thing with the children’s choirs and the bell choir. We give our offerings in the form of money for the church to stay a part of our lives and to be used as God sees fit. We support many outreach programs through the church, especially in Africa. We recycle and try to use fair trade and organic when possible as a part of our commitment to God for Creation. We call and pray for one another when we know someone is going through difficult times. And I’m sure you can think of many more.
These things are all great ways we maintain our foundation as a church congregation, but how can we ensure the cracks don’t grow over time, and what about our personal foundations. How are we fulfilling God’s call to us? Are we listening to God’s call or doing our own thing? Are we caring for all of our neighbours both locally and far away?
These are the questions we must continue to ask ourselves over and over. As many home owners know, once you get a small crack in the foundation of your house, it’s pretty hard to stop it or reverse the damage unless you work hard to constantly fix and monitor the foundation!
As we continue in today’s worship and throughout the day, try to think about where the cracks are in our foundation. What can you do to stop them from growing? How can you repair them? And where is your foundation really firm? How can you ensure it stays that way?
Let us give thanks to God who helps to guide us and who gave us Jesus Christ to show us how to be the Christians that God wants us all to be.
Amen.
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May 18, 2008
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Today is called Trinity Sunday. This is the day that we rejoice in the gift of the Holy Spirit we were given on Pentecost. And last week we looked at all the great gifts the Holy Spirit gives us — without the Holy Spirit, we would not have the gift of Spirituality. Communication with God (which is already extremely difficult for most people) would be virtually impossible. How else would we feel those tugs on our souls; how would we know what God wants for us!
Today’s readings are full of famous Bible stories we’ve known for years. The Creation story from Genesis, Jesus’ Great Commission in Matthew, a praising Psalm, and Paul’s closing remarks to the people of Corinth. And these stories naturally lead to the timeless beautiful praise songs that we have in today’s service. The scriptural readings for the day are carefully chosen to reflect the Three-in-One doctrine: God as Creator, Christ and Holy Spirit. In one word we call this: the Holy Trinity.
The Holy Trinity is a difficult topic to discuss. Most of us think we kind of understand it, until we try to dig deeper into it… then we realize we really aren’t sure at all. Teaching the Trinity to others is also very difficult, and because of the concept of the Trinity the Christian church has been labelled polytheistic; a faith that worships many gods. Think of it from an outsiders point of view… yes, we worship God, who sent Jesus to Earth to save us from our sins, but God is also Jesus, and then there is the Holy Spirit that is always with us, surrounding us, helping us to communicate with God, But the Holy Spirit is also God… when you put it that way, you can see why so many people are sceptical eh?!
Water has often been used to help describe the Trinity. This common earthly element exists on this earth as a gas, a liquid and a solid. Three forms, one substance. Or, if that’s no help, one author tried to explain it this way:
At the age of three I had a memorable experience of the three-in-one, I was watching my grandmother sleep during her afternoon nap. As I contemplated her existence, I thought wisely, “That’s Grandmamma, Mamma and Nancy.” She smiled in her sleep as I called her by the names used for her by her grandchildren, her daughter and her husband, Three names, three relationships - and yet the same person. Amazing!
One prominent theme many people pick up from the Holy Trinity is that of relationships. Explaining the Trinity is all about looking at the relationship between God and Jesus, and God and the Holy Spirit. The relationship between God and Jesus is seen all over the Gospels: it is that of a Parent and a child. God has sent Jesus to do work on Earth and Jesus does this, and though he stumbles a little bit — such as when he prayed to God for an alternative to being crucified, Jesus maintains this relationship with God his whole time on Earth. The relationship between God and the Holy Spirit is a little harder to explain. The Holy Spirit is almost the vessel of God; the being which God does God’s works through. Jesus is baptised in the Gospels when God send the Holy Spirit down to fill Jesus, and then we are all baptised when God sends the Holy Spirit down to fill us all, as we saw last week.
Observing these relationships within the Holy Trinity can help us to explore OUR relationships with God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. What does it MEAN to be in relationship with God? Of course there are our spiritual relationships with God; our prayers and worship to God. And this is also seen in our relationships with Jesus and the Holy Spirit, but there are many other ways to be in relationship with God. We are all in relationship with God simply by being here this morning and by praying, participating, and learning more about God. Those who participate in the groups here at the church are in relationship; the book club, the movie club, the many committees, the men’s club, the choir, the youth group, the UCW and so on! We are in relationship with God because we are in relationship with God’s people. By caring, thinking about, helping, and loving God’s people, as we can’t help but do in these groups, we are continuing our relationship with God.
Looking to today’s Gospel reading, w have been given an explicit instruction from Jesus on how to preserve our relationship; Jesus told us to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Now, this does not necessarily mean to go out and convert everyone to Christianity, but we can look at is as an instruction to be with God’s people and helping those who do not know about God — teaching when it is desired, but modelling the life that God wants for us.
There are other ways to continue our relationship; many of you may have heard this referred to as stewardship; being good Christian Stewards for God. In the church this term has often been used to help gather funds for the church — which is also an important way to be in relationship with God, but stewardship is also used to describe our relationship with God. Our Old Testament reading today from Genesis is a perfect example of why it is important to be good stewards for God. This passage is the first creation story; it is the story where God creates the whole world for us, and when God made each thing, God declared it to be good. Earth, water, sun, plants, animals, and humans — God made all of these things and it was all good in God’s eyes. Therefore God is awe-inspiring yet also present within creation. Also, creation discloses both the nature of God and the human role within God’s world. God gave us human’s dominion over all that God created. We must remember that we were given dominion, not to dominate over which is completely different. God made a covenant with us to live on the Earth and with this we are given responsibilities to take care of all that God created.
The creation story says that human beings inhabit this earth along with the fish of the seas and birds of the air and every living thing that moves upon the earth (Gen. 1:26-28). But only human beings are images of God.
For the ancient Israelites, the writers of Genesis, “image of God” meant that men and women are signs of the sovereignty of God. Thus, as images, they represent how God, not humanity, reigns supreme. As images they are meant to carry out God’s role on earth. As images they are meant to subdue and have dominion in the way God would, in a way that enhances rather than destroys the earth. God wills that the world “be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters of the seas… and the earth” (Gen. 1:22). Our responsibility as God’s images and partners in the covenant is to see that this is accomplished. Since the earth itself appears to possess an inner urgency that strains toward this goal, we don’t have to induce it. What we must do is safeguard it: “The Lord God then took the man and settled him in the Garden of Eden, to cultivate and care for it” (Gen. 2:15). As we today “subdue” and “have dominion,” we must cherish the earth, nurture its fruitfulness, and foster its growth.
As stewards, therefore, we must fully participate in creation; in God’s world. We can do this by protecting, sustaining, and restoring creation. As wise stewards, we must refine our knowledge of God’s world through the natural sciences, environmental ethics, and a vision of sustainability so that we might learn that we are called to care for the diversity of life. A corresponding scientific insight is that life as a biotic community and everything is interconnected. We must care for the non-living aspects of creation such as land, water, and air that are essential for life.
As humans, we are special members of the Earth’s biotic community, because we have been given the capacity for conscious self-reflection. This approaches the view that we have exceptional characteristics yet we still remain one among other species formed from the earth.
Creation is very valuable regardless of whether it can sustain us by providing food, water, and shelter for humans. Therefore our stewardship can never be merely environmental; it also must address the links between human poverty and environmental degradation. Our stewardship must restore and maintain the entire creation in hopeful anticipation of God’s coming reign. This matches a vision of sustainability that incorporates both social justice and ecological restoration. Not only must we care for the planet and work to restore that which has been destroyed, but we must also care for those humans among us who are poor and hurting, and require our loving care.
As images of God, we must walk through the world with understanding and trustworthiness. The earth is now in our keeping. We must take up this responsibility as agents of God. It is an awesome role that we play in the world. The psalms speak of the honour with which God has clothed us: “What are humans that you are mindful of them, mere mortals that you care for them?” (Ps. 8:5). The earth is a storehouse of mineral and fossil treasure. Having discovered it, we are often captivated by its power and seek to find more and more. As responsible stewards we must limit our searching and testing lest we squander our treasure and lose it forever.
The earth vibrates with the pulsations of life; it works miracles of renewal within the secrets of its body. It feeds us with the outward signs of these miracles. Our insatiable appetites want more and more. As responsible stewards we must be considerate of the strains that maturation must bear and be patient with its timing. As images of God, we merely manage the earth in God’s name.
We are only beginning to realize that being the image of God is a distinction that brings serious responsibilities. We are summoned to be signs of the sovereignty of God; we represent how and where God reigns supreme. In humble recognition of this, we must not attempt simply to control the earth but to live in accord with it and to care for it. As we do this, we manifest the tender compassion that our God has toward all creation.
Let us Pray: Creator God, you have entrusted the earth to our keeping.
Help us to give you a good account of our management: to keep the earth generously and thoughtfully, even as you keep us rich in Christian living.
Amen.
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May 11, 2008
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Acts 2:1-21
Today is the day of Pentecost — the day that we celebrate the Holy Spirit coming down and filling everyone. As I was thinking about today’s Sermon I found this poem on Pentecost that I think says so much about it:
“The celebration of Pentecost beckons us to keep breathing.
It challenges us to keep ourselves open to the Spirit who seeks us.
The Spirit that, in the beginning, brooded over the chaos and brought forth creation;
the Spirit that drenched the community with fire and breath on the day of Pentecost:
this same Spirit desires to dwell within us and among us.”
As I mentioned earlier, Pentecost is the Spiritual birthday of the Christian church. It interesting to think about when the Christian church began — we have many celebrations — Christmas when Jesus was born, Good Friday when Jesus died for our sins, Easter when Jesus rose from the dead, Ascension when he rose to join God, and now Pentecost when the Spirit was given to everyone. There is an argument for all of these special days to be the beginning of the Christian church. The Christian church began when Jesus was born, or when he died for all sinners, or when he was resurrected, when he left the physical earth and left the rest of the people to continue his work, but today I argue that the Christian church began when the Holy Spirit filled everyone. This was the completion of the Holy Trinity for all human beings. There was always God, then along came Jesus, but now we finally have all three.
The coming of the Holy Spirit is the gift installing the final stage of the salvation story; this era leads up to the end of time. The arrival of the Holy Spirit is the fulfilment of Christ's promise made in Acts 1:8 that we heard about last week.
As we are ALL aware, today is Mother’s Day — one of the top three celebrate days in North America, the other two being Christmas and Easter. Clearly this is a very special day. But in the Christian Church, today is ALSO very special because it is Pentecost. My challenge this week was to find a way to honour both of these celebrations in today’s service…
After quite a bit of thinking, I found something out: I found that there are seven gifts we are given by the Holy Spirit — Joy, Truth, Life, Hope, Love, Wisdom, and Peace. Now, I don’t know about you but these qualities remind me an awful lot of motherhood. Think about the mother’s in your life — either your own Mother, family members who are mothers, yourself or your spouse, friends… now ask yourself if they hold these qualities as I repeat them: Joy, Truth, Life, Hope, Love, Wisdom, and Peace. Now, there are many that are not experienced very often: such as peace, and others that happen nearly every day: such as hope and life.
Joy is felt with mother’s when they praise children for hand drawn pictures that are beautiful to them because of the maker’s love. Truth is found when children learn that they truly will always be unconditionally loved by their parents. Life is found when children are guided on their path to successes in life, love, and family. Hope is seen each and every day when a mother sends her children out — hope for safety, hope for happiness. Love is seen each day in children who find little ways to show their love — through stories, hugs, or chores, and by mother’s who put off getting their own things done in order that their children will get what they need. Wisdom is seen in the foresight to bring a coat, or an extra pair of socks, or in the guidance of what classes to take, or which schools to go to. And finally Peace. This may be hard to see in most families, but it can be found in a mother’s heart when she knows her children are safe and happy, or when she knows her children have found their dreams.
Mothers (and Fathers too) hopefully get to experience a lot of Joy, but there are many times when parenthood seems too much to handle. For those of you who know what that feels like, here’s a story for you:
Whenever your kids are out of control, you can take comfort from the thought that even God's omnipotence did not extend to God's kids. After creating heaven and earth, God created Adam and Eve. And the first thing he said was:
“Don't.”
“Don't what?” Adam replied.
“Don't eat the forbidden fruit.” God said.
“Forbidden fruit? We got forbidden fruit? Hey, Eve… we got forbidden fruit!”
“No way!”
“Yes, way!”
“Don't eat that fruit!” said God.
“Why?”
“Because I am your Father and I said so!” said God, wondering why he hadn't stopped after making the elephants.
A few minutes later God saw his kids having an apple break and was angry. “Didn't I tell you not to eat the fruit?” the First Parent asked.
“Uh huh, ” Adam replied.
“Then why did you?”
“I dunno” Eve answered.
“She started it!” Adam said.
“Did not!”
“Did too!”
“DID NOT!”
Having had it with the two of them, God's punishment was that Adam and Eve should have children of their own. Thus, the pattern was set and it has never changed. But there is reassurance in this story. If you have persistently and lovingly tried to give them wisdom and they haven't taken it, don't be hard on yourself. If God had trouble handling children, what makes you think it would be a piece of cake for you?
As Parents have difficulties and need guidance, the Holy Spirit is there — helping each person to work out what might the best solution be here. Earlier I described the Holy Spirit in seven ways, and these are ways that we would describe our Mothers. Our mothers are our protectors and comforters. So is the Holy Spirit.
When I was younger, I was asked to draw a picture of the Holy Spirit. Everyone had a hard time with that request. Some drew the wind, some drew Jesus, and I drew a warm, soft, comfy blanket. To me the Holy Spirit has always been a comforter. When I am scared at night for no reason — I feel a form of comfort in the Holy Spirit. When I have no idea what I am doing with my life — I feel the comfort, reassurance and guidance of the Holy Spirit. When I have no idea what to write in the upcoming sermon and have NO idea how I will combine Pentecost with Mother’s day — the Holy Spirit is guiding my thoughts, the web pages I find, the words that I choose!
Maybe we don’t have driving winds to show the Spirit’s presence, and maybe we don’t have the razzle-dazzle of tongues of flame, or the word of salvation proclaimed in tongues to people on the street like the Book of Acts described today. Maybe that’s because once the Holy Spirit got the Church jump started, that Spirit would choose to work in more regular, ordinary ways. These ordinary ways are not signs of the Spirit’s weakness, or lack of attention to the Church. They may well be signs of the Spirit’s power, which can accomplish extraordinary things, in quite ordinary ways.
Where then, can we find the Holy Spirit at work? How about in the gathering of this community for prayer, where we are enlightened by the Holy Spirit to understand the words we hear as good news of salvation, as the promise of God for us?
How about in the chaotic preparation of families for Church today: making sure everyone is up and dressed, in the car and on time. Isn’t this the Spirit at work showing people the value of prayer by the efforts made to come together as God’s people?
How about when a parent stops what seems too urgent to do something more important, like spending some time with their kids? How about then a husband or a wife chooses to remain faithful to a spouse when the temptation to drift, or even the just not to care creeps into married life.
How about when a kid finds the courage to stand up to friends or foes and say no to drugs or sex, or bullying others.
The Spirit is at work in human hearts and minds, and souls. The Spirit is at work in the places where the Spirit chooses to take up residence, in the Temples of the people whom the Spirit filled with life in the waters of the font and whom the Spirit strengthened in the laying on of hands and the anointing with Christ at Confirmation.
The Spirit is at work in common, ordinary ways, in common ordinary people. In Mothers, in Fathers, and in children. What extraordinary power the Holy Spirit has, to work in such ways!
We may be tempted to think that the winds, the flame and the tongues are where the Spirit is, but to think like this is to miss a God with is with us every day through Jesus and the Holy Spirit. A God we see in those around us, especially in the love we have for our mothers, or the love mothers have for their children.
Today we give thanks to God for giving us so many wonderful women to experience in our lives. Mothers, Grandmothers, Sisters, Aunts, neighbours, and friends all around us. Thanks be to God who provides us with so much love, help, and comfort in the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
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May 4, 2008
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Acts 1:6 – 14
Our reading from today comes from the very beginning of the Book of Acts, which picks up right where the Book of Luke leaves off. Jesus is just getting ready to leave the physical world for good, and his disciples are trying to fit in as many questions as they possibly can! They asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” And he answers in the form we all know and love: telling us we aren’t ready to know, but we will know when we need to! Basically a very unsatisfying answer! It’s almost the equivalent of a parent telling a child “because I said so!” …Almost. But we know we must be content knowing that when God is ready and when we are ready we will know when the Kingdom will be restored. Since this IS the last time Jesus speaks directly to the apostles, he throws them a little bone: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” These phrases are basically the Great Commission from Matthew’s Gospel where Jesus said: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
From here, the disciples leave, and head back to Jerusalem to the upstairs room where they maintained a prayer vigil in Jesus’ name. All were gathered there who considered themselves a disciple of Jesus: Peter, John, James, Andrew, Philip, Thomas, Bartholomew, Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James. There were a number of women disciples, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as Jesus’ brothers. It is interesting that after the awesome sighting of Jesus’ Ascension, the disciples simply return to the upper room, the room they have grown to know so well in the last 50 or so days, and spend that time in prayer to God.
Perhaps they were preparing themselves to live out their great commission, or perhaps this was when they felt they were receiving the Holy Spirit Jesus spoke of, maybe they were still trying to comprehend all that they had just seen and heard, or perhaps this was simply a time of continuing to remember Jesus’ life, words, and works through prayer. We cannot say for certain what they thought and prayed about with this time, but we do know what this time prepared them to do: continue to live out Jesus’ ministry themselves, by offering their own lives to teach others about Jesus’ works and create a following of people devoted to the amazing works Jesus’ ministry only began. The early church grew and grew. They had many troubles and a very steep learning curve, but grow they did. How was the early church able to grow so fast and steadily? They believed three key truths: Jesus is Risen, Jesus is Ruling, and Jesus is Returning! Through the tireless work of Jesus disciples and followers, Jesus is not lifted up and away. He became shards of light dispersed to the corners of the earth, no matter how dark they may be.
The disciples showed the early church how to BE the early church. Everyone learned together from Jesus’ example. And we continue to learn from Jesus, but especially from the disciples. Through Luke’s account of Jesus’ Ascension in the book of Acts, we are placed in the shoes of the disciples as we are in most of Jesus’ parables; we are left to wonder what it all means.
If nothing, we can learn from the disciples how to use the Holy Spirit that has been given to us for the greater good of the church, which includes a greater good for our country and world!
From today’s story, we can learn to be more purposeful in our acts, just like the disciples were after Jesus ascended into heaven. What is it that we are being called by God to do? How can we better our church, our country, and our world. Those tiny twinges of our mission just might be what we are called to do. Through reflection and prayer, the Holy Spirit can help us to do the great works we are all able and meant to do.
Consider this story: An individual named Henry Rimmer wrote a letter to Charles Fuller when he heard that Mr. Fuller was going to preach on the subject of Heaven on Sunday night at church. Mr. Rimmer was an old man about to die. He wrote, “I would like so much to be in church Sunday night to hear your sermon on the subject of Heaven. But my physical impairment will not allow me to be there. The reason I would like to be there is because I have a great interest in that place.”
“I own a piece of land with clear deed and title in that wonderful place that you are going to be talking about. I didn’t buy it”, he said, “It was given to me without price and without money, although the One who gave it to me purchased it at great cost. I don’t have it as an idle investment,” he continued, “I have been busy sending materials to the Master Architect for more than fifty (50) years, and he is building for me a house of my dreams. It will never have to be painted or remodelled because it is being made just for me. Termites will never eat away at its foundation because it is built on the ‘Rock of Ages’.”
“Fire will never destroy it. Winds will never blow it away. There will be no locks on its doors because no evil people will ever live in that blessed land. Between me and my home there is a valley, a dark valley. And I must cross it. I am not afraid,” he said, “Because One has gone before [me]. And He will lead the way. I am ready to take His hand. My house is almost finished. I would like to hear your sermon on Heaven because I have a great interest in that land.”
“At the Ascension, Jesus left the here for the everywhere; He left the time for the Eternal; He left the first century to fill all centuries.”
Now, this is not to say that we can only go to heaven if we do everything right. God knows we are not perfect! God created us that way!! By following the example of Jesus, and especially the disciples, we can prayerfully TRY to do our best. And if we don’t quite reach the best, then God will show us how to try again through prayer. As believers who TRY to live out our lives as good, kind, prayerful, faithful Christians, we are all assured the same ‘piece of land’ that Mr. Rimmer talked about!
In the book of Acts, Luke writes that it is just as Jesus is blessing the disciples that he begins to leave them. He does not raise his voice in a lamentation over his departure, he does not offer any further words of wisdom and instruction, he does not fling last-minute advice their way. He blesses them. Where the disciples might have been justly distraught, Luke tells us that instead they worshiped Jesus “and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.” Jesus’ disciples recognize that his leaving is part of his blessing. Having called them into relationship with him and one another, having lived and journeyed with them, he frees them to live into their ongoing call. And as we well know, they, in turn, respond to Jesus’ blessing by offering blessings of their own, in the temple and beyond. They respond to his blessing by becoming his body. After much reflection and prayer, the disciples go out to be Christ’s church; through their blessing from Christ, the early church received their blessing from Christ, as do we receive our blessing from Christ still today.
The disciples may have been grieving during their time in the upper room, yet Jesus’ ascension reminds us there is something deeper at work in such times, something that not only carries us through the changes but also uses them to transform us and to bless the body of Christ. In the midst of every loss and change, the presence of Christ persists, shaping his community anew and calling us to blessing and joy.
Where have you found a blessing in the midst of loss? How have you experienced—and offered—the body of Christ among the changes in your life? Having received the blessing of Christ, how do you offer a blessing in return? How might we all better hear our call and learn to pray for God’s will for us?
May we all journey together, along with those first disciples and the early church, with great joy and blessing.
Many Thanks be to God, for the blessing of Christ’s ascension at the end of our Easter season.
Amen.
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April 27, 2008
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John 14: 15-21
Jesus starts this passage with love:
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”
And he finishes this passage with love:
“They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”
The middle of his speech is about how Jesus is showing us he loves us — through the Holy Trinity. By sending us the Holy Spirit as an advocate, a comforter, an encourager. Also by showing how Jesus and God are one and the same, and all of these parts love and care for everyone.
Ah, Love. Something hopefully everyone has experienced in one way or another. Think of the greatest love stories of all time: there’s Heathcliff and Catherine in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Alexei and Anna in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund in Casablanca, and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
However, these are all fictional. Real love is not always so spontaneous and romantic all the time. Think of the love you feel from your parents — it’s rarely passionate, but usually much more practical, such as feeding and clothing you, lending you money, supporting your decisions (yes, you might guess I’m talking about myself here! Lending money was the giveaway wasn’t it!) Think also of the love you feel towards your friends and family. It is love in the form of a phone call, or a visit, or a card remembered on your birthday, or a laugh when you need a pick me up.
Think about Jesus’ love. Nowhere in the Bible does Jesus drop everything and go running after his secret love to profess his undying devotion and love… it’s pretty laughable to even think about this! No, Jesus’ love was a practical love. Jesus cared for everyone’s well being, both physical as we see whenever he heals a blind man, or a leper, as well as spiritual, as he does through his parables and guiding of his followers.
Jesus knew he would not be on the physical earth for much longer, so he taught his disciples how to love others — through both his actions, and his words. In today’s passage Jesus explicitly tells us that “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” This was how Jesus shows us he loves us. Through the direction of how to love him and the way to love Jesus is to keep his commandments. What are some of Jesus’ commandments we have seen and heard him talk about? To honour no one above God, to be kind and thoughtful, and the big one in the Gospel of John is this. Jesus said:
“I give you a new commandment,
that you love one another.
Just as I have loved you,
you also should love one another.
By this everyone will know that you are my disciples,
if you have love for one another” (John 13:34-35).
The love that Jesus commanded was agape (uh-GAH-pay) love — that was the Greek word in the original Biblical manuscripts — agape. Agape love isn’t some sort of sentimental feeling, which is the way that we usually think of love. Agape love is love in action. Agape love is love that acts in loving ways toward the other person — regardless of our feelings. Jesus wasn’t telling us to feel warm and fuzzy feelings for each other. He was telling us to act in loving ways toward each other. He was telling us to encourage each other — to help each other — to take care of each other.
When Jesus gave this commandment, he was talking to his disciples. He was telling them to love each other. Each disciple was to love the other disciples. When we apply this commandment to ourselves, Jesus is commanding us to love the other Christians around us.
And then he tells us why loving each other is so important. He says:
“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples,
if you have love for one another”
In other words, Jesus was saying that we can give outsiders a glimpse of the heavenly kingdom by acting like Christians. He was saying that we can give people a glimpse of God’s love when they see us loving each other — helping each other — taking care of each other. And when people see us loving one another, they will want to get in on the action, because they too want to be loved. Our love for each other will draw them to us — and to Christ.
It isn’t always easy to love one another. In every church, there will be people we don’t like very well — people with whom we disagree — people who talk too much — people who never help — people with bad breath. The church is made up of sinners, and it isn’t easy to love sinners — but that’s what Jesus asked us to do. If you want to know what you can give Jesus, he has told you what he wants. He wants us to love one another — to act in loving ways toward each other even when we don’t like each other all that well. He wants us to do that, because it’s important. He wants us to love each other, because that will help to grow the kingdom of God.
There is a marvelous old legend about St. Francis. Brother Juniper said to St. Francis, “Teach me to preach as eloquently as you. I am not good with words.” “I will teach you to preach more eloquently than I,” said St. Francis. “Meet me tomorrow and I shall teach you to preach.”
Brother Juniper dutifully met Francis early the next morning. To Juniper’s surprise, they began walking. They walked through the market place, smiling at the laborers, the merchants, the children. They helped an old woman carry her wash up a set of stairs. They walked. Finally, an exasperated Brother Juniper asked, “Francis, when shall you teach me to preach?” Replied the Saint, “Why, we are preaching.”
Preaching is a way of telling God’s message to the world, the way we live is the best sermon any one of us could ever give.
A very noted Christian author Henri Nouwen has been quoted as saying this:
The most important question for me is not, “How do I touch people?”
but, “How do I live the word I am speaking?”
In Jesus, no division existed between his words and his actions,
between what he said and what he did.
Jesus’ words were his action, his words were events.
They not only spoke about changes, cures, new life,
but they actually created them.
In this sense, Jesus is truly the Word made flesh;
in that Word all is created and by that Word all is recreated.
Someone has said… that the only bible which millions of people read today is the daily example of Christians — your example and mine.
If we can bring ourselves to love each other — to help each other — to take care of each other — our lives will be the sermon that others hear every day of the week as we live out our lives illuminated by the light of God — moving toward the kingdom — helping people to see God living in us — drawing them to us and to God.
Thanks be to God,
Amen.
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April 20, 2008
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Peter begins the second chapter of his first letter to God’s chosen people with advice — He writes: “Rid yourselves then, of all evil; no more lying or hypocrisy, or jealousy, or insulting language. Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by drinking it you may grow up in your salvation.”
In the last verse of today’s gospel reading Jesus says: “You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.”
What do you crave? What do you yearn for? What blessing do you ask God for?
Verses 13 and 14 in the Gospel of John invite careful consideration. Asking “anything” is not the point. The gift and discipline is to ask in Jesus’ name, which invites thought of how the request aligns with Jesus’ way.
Jesus shows us God, and invites us to trust that in life and in death, our place with God is secure. We need not be anxious. But how, and through whom, has our place with God been revealed?
Although the disciples did not know what to make of Jesus’ speech, we know that Christ remains here, within us. He empowers us to be everything God created us to be. We have the creative power of God living in our hearts.
We know all of this, but the difficult part is, knowing how to hear, and how to respond, and most importantly, gathering up the courage to listen and respond!
Isaac Asimov, a noted scientist and author, once told a hilarious story about a Rabbi Feldman who was having trouble with his congregation.
It seemed they could agree upon nothing. The president of the congregation said, “Rabbi, this cannot be allowed to continue. Come, there must be a conference, and we must settle all areas of dispute once and for all.” The rabbi agreed.
At the appointed time, therefore, the rabbi, the president, and ten elders met in the conference room of the synagogue, sitting about a magnificent mahogany table. One by one the issues were dealt with and on each issue, it became more and more apparent that the rabbi was a lonely voice in the wilderness. The president of the synagogue said, “Come, Rabbi, enough of this. Let us vote and allow the majority to rule.” He passed out the slips of paper and each man made his mark. The slips were collected and the president said, “You may examine them, Rabbi. It is eleven to one against you. We have the majority.”
Whereupon the rabbi rose to his feet in offended majesty. “So,” he said, “you now think because of the vote that you are right and I am wrong. Well, that is not so. I stand here” — and he raised his arms impressively — “and call upon the Holy One of Israel to give us a sign that I am right and you are wrong.” And as he said this, there came a frightful crack of thunder and a brilliant flash of lightning that struck the mahogany table and cracked it in two. The room was filled with smoke and fumes, and the president and the elders were hurled to the floor. Through the carnage, the rabbi remained erect and untouched, his eyes flashing and a grim smile on his face. Slowly, the president lifted himself above what was left of the table. His hair was singed, his glasses were hanging from one ear, and his clothing was in disarray.
Finally he said, “All right, eleven to two. But we still have the majority.”
We all know that not everything that is done in the church is done to the glory of God. But wouldn’t it be great if we had a dream for this church that was big enough that we would have to depend on God to accomplish it? And wouldn’t it be great if we searched our hearts and souls with prayer so that our dream would match God’s dream? Wouldn’t it be great if we yearned for that pure spiritual milk that helps us to grow in our salvation — and which affects everything around us?
Dr. Robert Schuller, that legendary advocate of Possibility Thinking, says that there are two words that have killed more God-inspired dreams and hopes than anything else he can think of. The two words are “Be realistic!”
If we Christians, Dr. Schuller says, were “realistic” then nothing would be accomplished. He cites the example of Tom Dempsey — a young man who was born with half a right foot and deformed right arm but a ton of faith.
Dempsey wanted to be a football player — in spite of his considerable handicaps. And he did play football. He became a kicker for his high school team. But that wasn’t enough. He wanted to play college ball. And again, he became the kicker on his college team. But when he graduated from college, his dream became even wilder and more fantastic. He wanted to be a professional football player!
A professional football player with half a foot and a deformed right arm. Impossible! No coach would accept him. They all shook their heads. All except one, and it is ironic and more than coincidental that Dempsey became a kicker for the professional football team, The New Orleans SAINTS!
The rest, as they say, is history. In 1972, Dempsey kicked the longest field goal ever — 63 yards! All because he was not realistic! All because, Schuller tells us, Tom Dempsey had faith in Jesus Christ who gave him the strength to do what he dreamed.
Amazing things are accomplished in this world by people who believe and will not give up. Our text for the day says that you and I are capable of amazing things when we set out to serve Jesus Christ. Jesus was speaking to his church when he said, “If you ask Me anything in My name, I will do it.” Nothing is impossible for the church of Jesus Christ.
But there is something else just as important… Jesus adds a qualifier: “And whatever you ask in my name,” Jesus promises, “that will I do, that the Father may be glorified…” This little add on acts as an additional help to keep us on our toes. To help us remember that this is not about our agenda, but it is about God’s agenda!
Christ will do anything we ask, if it glorifies the Father. Here is where we generally stumble. Not everything we do in the church is done to the glory of God.
At the end of the John passage we read today, Jesus guides the apostles saying: Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves. Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father (John 14:10-12).
What is your dream? What do you desire the most? Is it pure spiritual milk that you may grow in your salvation and continue to know that God is good? Is it to do the works of God that God’s name may be glorified through you?
Let us take a moment to dream. What has God done through you? What does God want to do through you? What is your part in letting God work through you? I want you to focus on one thing that you could see God doing through you. I want you to take a moment to imagine and feel what that one thing would be like.
I will give you a moment to picture God doing this through you. First, I will pray and then you picture one thing that you could see God doing through you… Life Giver, please breathe your Holy Spirit upon our spirit and imagination as we picture doing your work… I invite you to take a full minute to picture one thing that God wants to do through you.
Pause for one minute to reflect.
Before we move on I want you to note how that went and how it felt. Did it feel good? Was there joy in doing this? Do you feel enthused about it? These can be signs that God is with you in this; that God is behind you as you are in this. Make note of what happened for you… and continue…
We have a purpose — and we have the tools that we need to accomplish that purpose, so much so that we can do even greater things than did Christ — should we desire to. What is God asking you to ask for?
“You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.” Why not put Christ to the test?
Blessed be our God, who day by day provides for all that we need. Amen
Note that a number of illustrations and ideas from today’s sermon came from Rev. Richard J. Fairchild — Spirit Networks, 1999-2006
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April 13, 2008
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A Sunday school teacher asked her group of children if any of them could quote the entire twenty-third psalm. A little four year old girl was among those who raised their hands. A bit doubtful, the teacher asked if she could quote the entire psalm for the class. The little girl went up to the podium, faced the class, made a little bow, and said: “The Lord is my shepherd, that’s all I want.” She then bowed again and sat down. She may have overlooked a few verses, but I think that little girl captured David’s heart in Psalm 23. The idea throughout the psalm is that we are utterly contented in the shepherd’s care and there is nothing else that we desire.
For those of you who were at Wayne Duffield’s funeral yesterday, this is not the first time you heard this Psalm this weekend. It is probably the most well known piece of Scripture. As we can all attest to, this Psalm is most often associated with funerals and death. And many out there might be tempted to think this is a Psalm about death, but it is not! It is a Psalm of life! It is used in funerals because of the comforting thoughts of God it brings.
“The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want.” As a shepherd cares for his sheep’s every need, God cares for each and every one of us, providing all that we need.
“He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters.” It’s not easy to get a sheep to lie down. A strange thing about sheep is that they will refuse to lie down unless four requirements are met. (1) They must be free from all fear. (2) There must be no tension between members of the flock. (3) They must not be aggravated with flies or parasites. (4) And they must be free from hunger.
It is the shepherd who must see to it that his flock is free from any disturbances. Sheep are very easily frightened. A stray jackrabbit jumping out from behind a bush can stampede a whole flock. When one startled sheep runs in fright, all of the others will follow behind it in blind fear, not waiting to see what frightened them. But nothing quiets a flock of sheep like seeing their shepherd in the field with them. God provides us comfort and rest, ensuring that all the requirements that we need for rest are covered. Even when we cannot seem to rest, God is providing for us, gently leading us so that we can rest. God is caring for our needs and nourishing us with the well of life.
“He restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name's sake.” As the shepherd watches over his sheep every hour, every day, every night making sure the sheep are headed in the direction of safety and food, so too does God care for all of us, gently guiding our path, when we stray leading us back to a path that is good for us, a path that honours God. We may stumble and fall, we may become helpless. And yet our shepherd is patient and tender and helpful in getting us back on our feet. We see in the gospels the tenderness that Jesus showed toward everyone. We see how he restored Peter’s heart after his denial. And we know that Jesus also restores our souls.
“Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff – they comfort me.” God is always walking along beside us – in happy and sad, in dark and light, in joy and pain. The famous poem “footprints” puts it beautifully: The times that there were two sets of feet Jesus walks with us, and when there is only one set of footprints, Jesus is carrying us through our darkest, toughest times.
“You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.” In the spring, after the snow melts, the shepherd will take his sheep up the mountain to finer, greener pastures. But first he will go up into the rough, wild country to check it out. He will take along a supply of salt and minerals to distribute over the range and decide where his camps will be located. He will make sure the vegetation is sturdy enough. He will check for poisonous weeds and uncover any snakes. In similar fashion, our Lord takes care of us in the presence of our enemies. Through Jesus, God has gone ahead and checked things out. He has already been “tempted in all points like we are.” (Hebrews 4:15). He has known our sorrows and endured our struggles in order to help us through.
“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD my whole life long.” Our Lord truly cares for us as a good shepherd. No matter what else may happen, we know that goodness and mercy will follow us.
And we are so content in our flock and in our shepherd that there is no desire for a change. “I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” But we can only confidently state this last verse if we can state the first one “The Lord is my shepherd.”
The Lord is my shepherd. What a difference that little word “my” makes. It is all the difference between joy and sorrow, purposefulness and meaningless, eternal life and eternal death.
A famous actor was once the guest of honour at a social gathering where he received many requests to recite favourite excerpts from various literary works. An old preacher who happened to be there asked the actor to recite the twenty-third Psalm. The actor agreed on the condition that the preacher would also recite it. The actor’s recitation was beautifully intoned with great dramatic emphasis for which he received lengthy applause. The preacher’s voice was rough and broken from many years of preaching, and his diction was anything but polished. But when he finished there was not a dry eye in the room. When someone asked the actor what made the difference, he replied “I know the psalm, but he knows the Shepherd.”
As you continue your day, why not ask yourself: Is the Lord your shepherd?
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April 6, 2008
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Today’s Gospel story on the road to Emmaus is a well known story of an encounter with Christ. Let us quickly recap what has happened in the past complex weekend for the disciples.
Jesus has been well known to stir up trouble with the leaders of the Jewish synagogue, this happens many times, such as when Jesus cleanses the temple. This specific point is where the Chief Priests, scribes and leaders seek to destroy Jesus and the religious leaders question his authority. They question Jesus’ loyalty and buy off Judas to betray Jesus. Then Jesus is arrested, mocked and beaten. He is falsely tried, taken before Pilate, who sends Jesus to Herod and then hands Jesus over to be crucified. Finally Jesus is crucified and buried. On the third day when the women go to his tomb, they find his body is gone!
Clearly this is not what makes for a great time of celebration that this Easter time was meant to be. But the discouragement and hurt the disciples felt would finally be turned into triumphs of belief on the Emmaus road.
Not much is told in the Bible about this route of travel. We know it was threescore furlongs from Jerusalem or about seven miles. The town of Emmaus actually got its name from the hot springs that was there. In the spiritual meaning the word Emmaus means “an earnest longing.” On this road we find two men walking in the evening from Jerusalem to Emmaus shortly after they have been told the Lord has risen. We know these men are disciples and one of them is named Cleopas. We find them deep in conversation about all that has happened over the past few days. While they were talking, Jesus himself approached them, but they were not yet ready to recognise him. Jesus asks them what they are talking about, and they are baffled that he does not seem to know about all that has transpired. Cleopas asks “are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?”
They tell Jesus about how they had hoped that Jesus would be the one to redeem Israel. And how the women had found the tomb empty earlier that same day!
Finally Jesus exclaims “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” After Jesus re-interprets the Biblical passages about him to them, they still do not understand who he is. However, they beg Jesus to come back with them for the night. It is only once Jesus blesses and breaks the bread that they finally realise who he is, and at that same moment he vanishes from them. They realise how dumb they had been all along the walk. So they rush to the others and tell them all that has happened and all of the disciples agree that Jesus has indeed risen from the tomb!
Through this Emmaus Road experience, the disciple’s eyes were opened so that they would understand the scriptures. Jesus encountered these two men to open their understanding, that they might fully understand the scriptures and know what God expects of them. The road to Emmaus is a story that is used very often to illustrate encounters with Christ.
Some of us have had close encounters with Jesus Christ right here in church. It may have happened during communion. As the music played, and as the bread was passed, you sensed that something spiritual and something holy was going on. You felt the presence of the Lord. It was a very special moment. It was a close encounter with Christ.
Or it may have happened during a sermon. The message was so practical that it felt like God was speaking directly to you. It was a special time in God’s Word you will always treasure. It was a close encounter with Christ.
This morning, we have seen how a close encounter with Jesus Christ changed the lives of two men on the road to Emmaus.
We have all had encounters with Christ in our lives, times when God has tried to speak with us; we just might not have known that was what it was at the time.
As most of you know, I am currently a student of divinity, training to be a minister. In the United Church once one decides to pursue ministry, one of the first things you are asked to describe is “your call” to ministry. This is how the United Church describes how to define a “call from God into the ministry.”
“For some it is felt as a discomfort with present life plans, a struggling to find meaning in life, a nudging, yearning feeling or a growing awareness of God’s purpose for one’s life. For others, the call may come in a highly dramatic fashion. For some, it may seem to be the natural path to follow or a response to the suffering of God’s creation and people around them. One thing inward calls have in common is that each one is different. Each one of us is unique and special in God’s sight, and so God approaches us in unique ways.”
It was not until I read this statement myself over 4 years ago that I could realise what I had been experiencing was a call from God. Before this I was pretty unsure about what I was doing. I did not hear God’s voice in my head, there was no vision of God to me in a burning bush like Moses experienced.
As a way of introducing myself, I thought I might share how I experienced my call to ministry today. I had been highly active in my church when I was in high school — teaching Sunday school, youth group, taking photographs for the newsletter, and I had thought about pursuing this interest more. So I talked with my minister at the time, and he suggested that I go to university for something other than religion, so that I might be a well rounded minister, and then go for a master of divinity. Well this sounded it was going to take a long time. So I dropped the idea, and got a bachelor of science instead, as one of my other interests was animals. I volunteered at vet clinics and the OVC, but somewhere along the line, I began to faint at the sight of blood, especially a lot of blood that occurs in surgeries! Finally I realised that becoming a vet just wouldn’t work well if I was going to be fainting a lot… and I didn’t seem to be getting over it at all!
Throughout my undergraduate degree I struggled very much with science, and towards the end of my degree I knew I did not want to be in the science field, but I didn’t know what else I could do! I had held onto my interest in religion throughout university taking a class for interest here and there and thought that it would be so fun to do a graduate degree to learn more just for me. As I researched programs out there, a friend of mine asked if I had ever thought about being a minister. As soon as that thought was back in my head, I started asking more questions of my minister, and started a discernment group. This group met with me over the course of a year and we walked together to learn what God was calling me to do.
Over the last 4 years I have learned a lot about myself and my relationship with God. There have been many doubts, but then there are many more affirmations that I am on the right path! I have now realised that experiencing my call involved many encounters with Christ! Beginning with a curiosity to take religious classes, encounters through friends who have guided me to where I am today, and the many times I have realized how much I can help God’s world through my work.
Once we have realised our encounters with the risen Christ on our own personal road, we can begin to see what God is asking of us. It might be something life changing as a career or a move. It might be something seemingly small such as talking with someone you haven’t seen in a while or donating money to a charity. I ask you to take a look at the times in your life when something has happened to you, but you just weren’t sure what. Could this have been an encounter with Christ? What might God be asking of you?
Glory be given to God who encounters us all along the road of our lives!
Amen!
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March 23, 2008
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“They will hunger no more, neither thirst anymore.
The sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat.
For the Lamb at the centre of the throne will be their shepherd,
And he will guide them to springs of living water,
And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
Rev. 7:16,17
I’ll bet that the last time you heard these words were when you stood in a graveyard burying someone you loved. Maybe snow was falling, or maybe mosquitoes were rising up from the grass like waves on the sea; maybe someone’s cell phone started to ring. Maybe balloons were released. Or maybe you don’t remember because it’s all one great vast ache of pain. Maybe you held things together throughout the funeral, but it was at the grave when the reality of death and loss and ending really hit you. As Christians, at the grave we commend the one we love to God,: we give them back to God, but the graveside committal is such a moment of pain, for there is nothing quite like seeing a casket being lowered into the ground to finally convince you of the fact of death.
Maybe, up until then you can pretend: “Oh, they’re not really dead; they’re just away, absent, out of sight, on a trip?” But see a casket or an urn and you know where your loved one isn’t. Or is.
No one comes to a committal by accident. In fact, everyone avoids a graveyard. If you look around at the grave, you will see familiar faces — the loved ones, the family, the friends. Concentric circles. It was just like that when Jesus was crucified. He addresses the first of his 7 last words to God, saying: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do”, and then progressively includes the others gathered there. In concentric circles, he speaks words of (first) forgiveness, then salvation, affection, despair, physical torment, triumph and now today a word of committal or commendation — “Father into your hands I commend my spirit.” Jesus begins and ends with God.
And, as Christians, I believe that is what we all do.
We begin with God at baptism when God speaks that word of welcome over us, like God did today for Kelsey. At baptism, God says: “You belong to Me, even though you are too young to understand that concept of ‘you’ (the self-identified ego), or the concept ‘me.’ (God, the great giver of life and perfecter of faith). “Doesn’t matter,” says God. “You’re mine and I’m yours, and here’s a special sign to bind us together.” So a minister paints a watery cross on our foreheads and invites us to follow Him all the days of our life. Along the way, we may just decide to make those baptismal vows our parents said our own. So we are confirmed — you make a commitment to God saying ‘Into your hands I commend my spirit’, like Karen did, saying, in effect: “You said ‘yes’ to me God, and now I say ‘yes’ to You — whatever that means”. That cross on our forehead, those hands placed on our heads, are a reminder of God’s power at work where we live. I’ve always wondered why we baptize with a cross on our foreheads, not on our hearts or hands or feet, and maybe it’s as simple as this: our behavior, our actions, all the good and evil we intend to do originate in our heads. “Let me just set a cross there,” says God. “It’ll show you what to expect from this marvelous, tortured world.”
Hmm — my Christian friends, are you scared yet? Who wants to go through life with that cross hanging between their eyes? Well, just as God was present at the beginning of our lives, we will find God there at the end of our lives too. And then we can completely hand back, give back to God the life God gave to us. When I stand at a grave, I always say: “Fixing our eyes on the cross of Jesus, I say again that this is not the end: Our God is the God of the living. In this faith, and in the hope of the resurrection, we commit this body to the ground. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” You know what? People, often non-church people, who may or may not know the Lord’s Prayer or 23rd Psalm, do know these words — earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust — and they repeat them with me. At first, I was unnerved but now I see it as a moment of honesty between us — stranger and friends: well — we’re all going to die and we all go down to the grave. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Maybe all this seems morbid, serious, inappropriate, but I’m sharing all this serious grave talk with you today because it is Easter Sunday. The graveyard was where those who came looking for him learned the truth about Jesus. They came sadly to the tomb to say their final respects, or do the final embalming, and found the stone rolled away, and the tomb empty. So you see, Easter really has everything to do with a graveyard, and nothing to do with bunnies and chocolate, butterflies or rainbows. Easter has everything to do with empty graves, confused disciples and weeping women.
Our society, our time, is desperately afraid of death. We prolong life at immense cost, we beautify corpses, we evade the reality of death by never going to funerals, or simply by keeping our distance from people. We take a cataclysmic event like the resurrection, put some sugar on it and call it the solstice, or the cycle of life or the rebirth of spring. We convince our children that a big bunny with eggs makes more sense than God at work in the world, overturning the power of death. All because, you see, no matter what we say, we’re afraid to die. So we’re also afraid to hand ourselves over to God; to commit or commend ourselves to God.
Poor us, we’re afraid to live. Or die.
I was reading some research on this very topic, Len Sweet, who says that a terrible fear gripped the villagers of England, Scotland, and Wales in the mid-18th century when waves of death and disease haunted the lands. Many died and the cemeteries were full, but since our forbearers had fewer qualms than we do about recycling and reusing the spaces, they dug up the old coffins, removed the remains to another site and reused both the coffin and the space. I imagine their horror when, occasionally they discovered scratch marks on the inside of the coffin: roughly one out of 25 people buried — so long ago — were buried alive. Bodies were not embalmed you see; and mistakes apparently did happen. And before you have night mares, or decide to write a new horror movie, it is possible that some of the movement was probably due to the release of internal post death gasses or muscle spasms, or whatever. What was born out of this very real fear was the Irish “wake” — the idea being that a family would stay with the body of the deceased around the clock in case the deceased “awakened.”
Well, even so long ago, cemetery owners were aware of market strategies. To allay the fears of the people, cemetery officials decided to tie a string on the wrist or ankle of the deceased, thread it through the coffin and up through the ground, and on top of the grave, set a little bell tower. So, if you woke up in the casket, you could ring the bell. Hence the expression “Saved by the bell.” Saved by the Bell — in those days, cemeteries were actually social centers where people would picnic, or walk through, so, if a bell on a grave were to ring during the day, someone would hear it. But at night, special people had to be hired for the job — to listen for the bell. These were the folks who worked — you guessed it — the graveyard shift.
This morning, if you listen very carefully, you might just hear those bells ringing, the sound carried on the wind. You think: “We don’t bury people alive today? — What in the world does Lynne mean?” Oh really?
No living dead? Many young people know a teen who’s tried to commit suicide. Or how often do we have to see a replay of Ecole Polytectics event where a shooter opens fire on complete strangers? How many of our children know what it means for a school to be in a lockdown? Our children — buried alive.
Or how about those folks we see huddled in doorways, sleeping on a church steps? How about the youth hostel — Change Now — closed at Norfolk St United Church? Buried alive.
Or how about the hungry ones? The Canadian Association of Food Banks, an umbrella organization representing food banks in every Canadian province, reporting that food bank use has increased 123% since 1989. And that in one month in 2004, 840,000 people used food banks, 13% of them were members of working family. Buried alive.
Or how about the 58,000 people who are living with HIV/Aids? Many of them don’t even know they’re infected! Every year about 4,000 Canadians become infected, and to the terror of the disease, we add the shame of judgment. Buried alive.
The bells are ringing all around us in the cemetery, and we have the joy of bringing to all the good news of Easter: not bunnies, but new life where there was only death before. Nor the rebirth of spring, but the sure and certain faith of the defeat of death. Not the natural cycle of the season, but the completely unnatural resurrection of Jesus. Not a sweet reward for surviving winter, but a life-changing, career-altering, mission driving reason for living. Easter is that moment when out of no — no hope, no faith, no future, no life, no death, comes Jesus resurrected; dangling the keys to the cemetery in his hand. A connection that began with God ends with God completely changing everything. A life that begins with God ends with God and that’s the best commendation ever.
Father: into your hand I commit my Spirit.
That God who loves us before life, into life, through life can be trusted — yes? To love us after life. The proof is found at the cross where the worst we can do and the best God can do meet. Well, that’s Easter.
Let us pray:
Thank you God for revealing to us the truth about us and the truth about you. We know who we are and we were always afraid that you were just as small and greedy and mean as we are: but you’re not! Not tormented by self-interest, not apathetic, not absent, not cold. We see with the eyes of Good Friday, and with those seven words, ringing in our ears, and with that cross hanging between our eyes — we truly see how you work in the world through us. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Amen
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March 2, 2008
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Let us pray: And now, Lord, whether through me or in spite of me, speak your Word to your people. We’re all here, at the foot of the cross, and we’re straining forward to hear your precious last thoughts. Can you speak a little louder so that we can hear? Amen.
I know someone whose current address is this: The Valley of the Shadow of Death. Well, not the actual Valley of the Shadow of Death, but the park just outside that Valley. This person is there unexpectedly, and really only fairly recently, the last year I’d say. She didn’t plan to be there, she didn’t plan to linger or settle there, but then, who does? We all, at some time, make a trip to that valley, and see those shadows and wonder if we’ll ever again see the light of day and hope. Death takes us there — the death of a parent or a friend or a spouse. That valley is familiar to all of us here — I know you’ve been there because I am your pastor and I’ve been there with you. Sometimes the Valley of the Shadow of Death looks like a hospital room in a Palliative Care Unit, or a bed in an Intensive Care Unit. Sometimes you blink and then there you are — in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and you are on your way to the hospital in an ambulance with sirens wailing, or in a car driven too fast over country roads. You’ll almost always find the Valley of the Shadow of Death in a funeral home, where you will see the residents of that shadowed domain crying softly or staring into space or sometimes laughing too loudly or simply leaving against a wall outside smoking a cigarette. Oh, we’ve all spent time in that Valley, but mostly we’re just passing through. No one wants to linger, but, at the same time, no one is exactly sure how to leave it. The throughway of death takes us there under protest, but we find it hard to remember how to go back: it seems you can’t just retrace your steps, you can’t just throw it into reverse and back out: it’s a nightmare of confusion and pain.
I know someone who is there, just outside of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, because she has a child who was diagnosed with a terminal illness: doesn’t really matter how old the child is, a child is always a child to a parent. The thing is, the child knows the truth too, so there they are, in that park just outside the Valley of the Shadow of Death, the whole family, and the concentric circle of friends and family who care for them and love them. They truly live life one day at a time because they have no idea what tomorrow with — may — could — bring. Each day is a question mark: what if this is the day? Or tomorrow? Or next month? Or next year? And at the same time, they are not actually in crisis — yet. Just at that Park, where it seems like life might still have some normality and where — sometimes — for a little while — they can forget their new address.
This family is not alone in the Valley of the Shadow of Death: in fact, Jesus is there too: along with all those who suffer violent death and all those who watch their children die of starvation or malaria or Aids, all those who die in genocide or tsunami or landslide or hurricane or mining accidents. Along with all those who simply disappear, or who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or who make a few bad choices and then find themselves lost in that dreadful valley. Oh yes, there are lots of people there, depressed, forgotten, elderly and marginal people — they’re in there, and as I say, so is Jesus.
I know that he is there because of this fourth word we hear from the cross today, and to my mind, this is the worst word. The other words; “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do, “Today you’ll be with me in paradise,” and “Woman here is your son, here is your Mother” — those were preachable words. Ministers love to preach on those passages. There is something for us to learn from them, like how to be a better Christians, or how much God cares for us, and so on. But not today: these agonizing words: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” are not going to make nice people nicer. These words are going to make nice people scared. Because it looks as though Jesus thinks he is God-forsaken. Synonymous words for forsaken: rejected, abandoned, desolate, depressed, forlorn, void, helpless, hopeless, lonely, empty. Not words we are used to associating with Jesus, God incarnate, Emmanuel, the Prince of Peace, God in the flesh, King of Kings, Lord of Lords. And if it happens to Jesus, what about us?
This is the scream from the Cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” or in the Aramaic: “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” — in fact in Matthews’ gospel, these are the only words from the cross. The other gospel writers add other words, but not Matthew. This is it for Matthews’s readers. Just these searing words. Jesus, forsaken, quoting the first verse of the 22nd Psalm; words Jesus learned as a child. Actually, these are the verses, the ones we learned as children, which often come back to us in those dark shadowed valleys. We cling to them like life-lines for they alone bring us out of the valley of dark, into the crest of life: oddly, we usually memorize the 23rd Psalm, don’t we, where goodness and mercy may follow us all the days of our life, though, as William Williaman says in “Thank God it’s Friday” Pg 57, the verb in Hebrew for follow is actually one which can also be translated as “pursue”. Goodness and mercy pursue me all the days of my life — and it is in that beloved 23rd Psalm that we find the map to the Valley of the Shadow of Death. But not for Jesus, it was the 22nd Psalm he quoted, not the 23rd with its hopeful, cozy ending. Nice people, are you getting scared?
I believe that this is the worst word for us because it forces us to admit that there is more going on here on the cross than we can understand. There is a terrible cosmic struggle it seems, as Jesus, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, screams WHY? Where are you God? And plumbs the depths of despair. Now, we can understand a little, because I know that there is not one person sitting in this building who has not at some time asked: WHY? Why me? Why now? Why this? In fact, most of the time our prayers pretty much come down to this:: “Help me! Save me! Rescue me! Reach me! Guide me! For just this one time, please don’t make 2 + 2 = 4. Our prayers are very self-centered. What will this death, this accident, this disease, this change mean to me? Selfish, selfish, selfish. We have been asking “Why me?” long before Jesus lifts his eyes to heaven and screams “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
So we can go along, go along and say “well, I understand this verse to mean that Jesus was human.” For some of us that is as far as we can go. Some think that he was a good man, maybe a great man, wrongly victimized by the political and religious forces of that day — though why anyone would remember him for 2000 years simply because he was a victim, eludes me. There can be no doubt that these words were a very human, stunningly honest cry from the very heart of Jesus. And it is pretty hard today, as we look up at the cross to go one step further to see the glimmer of what the early church called him, or what we sing about in Christmas carols, that Jesus was God of God, light of light, fully human, fully divine, very God of very God. Can we trust that the God to whom Jesus raises is voice is not simply letting Jesus suffer to teach him a lesson, which is how we think, but that God is as intimately part of this cosmic drama at the cross as is the Son?
Oh, these are deep theological matters: we could talk about redemptive suffering, trenitarian theologies, or atonement theologies. The temptation is to try to explain suffering away. And here’s the scary part: we can’t explain it. And we can’t understand it. And most of the time we don’t want to talk about it. And, by the way, we also don’t want to suffer. “Oh dear God,” we pray, “take away this cup of suffering from me”. I hear it all the time in the Gethscnamies I visit — in nursing homes, in kitchens, at the grocery store. We’re asking God to let us off the hook please, to act like a big daddy who will just keep getting us out of trouble: like those parents who keep rescuing their children, no matter what they do.
Well now, maybe this is a good word after all. A good word for scared people, for scarred people. We have the certainty that God knows us from the inside out, for we hear today that there is always suffering in the world even for God. There are no shortcuts through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. As we stand at the foot of the cross in the year of our Lord, 2008, we do not pretend to grieve. We do not cry crocodile tears. Our remorse is real. We grieve, we mourn. At our best we mourn for the suffering that others will endure: we stand in solidarity with all those who can’t find their way out of the Valley, because one day, life will cause us to walk there too. And that’s where and when we’ll find Jesus. He called us to follow him — to pursue him possibly? To take up your own cross, daily, daily, daily, and to follow, and to find our life by losing it. Though he bears the weight alone, without friends or followers, or priest, or lawyer, or politicians, and even when the sun refuses to shine. Jesus still yearns for God.
Is the story over yet?
Is it still Friday?
For all the shadowed Valleys of Death and all the gardens of pain and prayer and all the places of the skull, here the words of our brother Jesus.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
It’s the fourth word, but the story isn’t over yet.
Let us pray: Lord God, we don’t want to be at this cross. It hurts too much to see naked pain and grief and suffering and abandonment. But then we know that if we open our eyes and visit all the Gothsenames and Golgothas all the time in our own lives. Remind us that the journey is not yet over: and that we have other destinations ahead. Show us how to be faithful, we pray, even in the darkness, even in the pain, even when we’ve lost our way.
Amen
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February 24, 2008
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Let us pray: And now Lord, either through me or in spite of me, speak your word to your people. We are here to listen to you as you die on the cross. Will these dying words help us to live? We believe so! Amen
I think every parent gives their child a carefully considered name. Maybe, years ago, when families were bigger, names were simpler: parents could honor dead or living relatives, attendants at the birth, best friends, whatever. But now, when we’re all having 1.7 children, the pressure is on to make the name count.
I talked about this, you may remember, last December during advent: remember some of those wacky names — fe-mahlie (female), ur-een (urine) and Random? And now here’s some breaking news on the name front. Late last year, a Chinese couple decided to name their baby @ at. You know, @ - that computer symbol. They felt deep attachment and significance to that name, saying that, when combined the pronunciation of the Chinese characters for “a” and “t” sounds like a phrase which honored the baby’s father. And the symbol name, that distinctive swirl, baby @’s dad said “The whole world uses it to write emails and translated into Chinese it means “love him”.1
Well, it makes a kind of sense, doesn’t it? And just think for a minute of all the symbols we’ve been overlooking all this time!
When Tom and I were casting about for a name for our son Joel, we thought long and hard. “How about Simon?” I said. “How about Berkley?” he said. (That was the name of the United Church Studio.). “How about Mel — my father’s name?” I said. “How about Joe — my father’s name” he said. And hence Joe was named:
Jo — for Joe Bandy
El — for Mel Hannon
Joel — which was better than the other way around:
M — for Mel Hannon
Oe — for Joe Bandy
Moe
And it didn’t hurt that Joel was one of the most acceptable of the prophets. Joel, which means “Yahweh is God.” Joel, who says (2:12-13)
Yet even now, says the Lord,
Return to me with all your heart,
With fasting, with weeping, with mourning,
Rend your hearts, not your clothing,
Return to the Lord your God,
For he is gracious and merciful
Slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love
And relents from punishment.
Joel, who said:
I will pour out my spirit on all flesh,
Your sons and your daughters shall prophesize
Your old men shall dream dreams,
And your young men shall see visions. (Joel 2:20-29)
You see, there’s echo and re-echo within the choice of a child’s name.
Little do you know, when you name a child, that its only the first step on a long journey of choice and regret, of harmony and discord, of chaos and routine. For you see, life is complicated, and relationships are tangled. The relationship is especially complicated between children and parents of the opposite sex. Oh, I don’t mean all that Roman psychological stuff. I don’t want to get that complicated. I just mean like this:
A man called his mother in Florida. He said to his mother “How are you doing?”
She said: “Not so good. I’ve been very weak.”
The son then replied “Why are you so weak?”
She said: “Because I haven’t eaten in 38 days.”
The Son, aghast, then asked “Mother, why haven’t you eaten in 38 days?”
The mother replied: “Because I didn’t want my mouth to be filled with food when you called!”
Oh yes, guilt. The primary parental tool. I’m actually a pretty good dispenser of guilt to my family, judging by the way their eyes roll up in their heads. My key words and phrases to trigger guilt: “remember when…,” “I believe I told you that.” There are also apparently words I use — words like “responsibility,” “focus,” “nose to the grindstone” and so on which like the “go to jail card” in Monopoly, send my children and me on a fast trip to confrontation.
Well, relationships are complex. And certainly we get some flavor of that even in Jesus’ relationship with his mother. Even as a child, Jesus was a bit of a problem. Remember on their trip to the temple at Jerusalem when Mary and Joseph lose Jesus, the 12 year old, only to discover that he’s still in the temple talking to the teacher there. “Child, why have you treated us like this?” says Mary. If you’re a parent, and haven’t yet said these words: believe me, you will. And imagine if your child’s response was: “Hey — didn’t you know I’d be in my Father’s house?”
And when Jesus grew up, he and his mother were at a wedding party. When it wine ran out, Mary goes to Jesus and with those expressive eyebrows and glances that all mothers have, and much pointed head-gestures, she makes it clear to Jesus that he should do something about it. He says: “Woman, what does that have to do with you or me?” or alternatively put “ Hey — not my problem”. Parents — ever had your child say that to you?
When Jesus called his disciples, you may have noticed that he had little patience or time for breaking up families. He called fishermen to abandon their aging parents in order to follow. “I’ve come to turn Father against Son and Mother against Daughter” he said, and he did. “Daddy just died” said a man to him one day. “Let me just go bury him. I’ll join you after the funeral.”
Who remembers what Jesus said? “Let the dead bury the dead. Follow me.” Hmmm. Jesus. Not so big on family values like respect, cohesion, and nurturing. But, here at the cross we see him turn and commend his Mother to his friend and follower and then likewise him to her. We think it was John, the beloved disciple to whom he commended his Mother, although that’s murky. It’s more than Jesus saying to John “Hey, keep an eye on Mum for me”. Jesus gives Mary a new son, and John a new mother. William Williamon says Jesus creates a new family at the cross, a bigger, wider, deeper, broader family, not joined by the blood of DNA, but by the blood of Jesus. “Blood is thicker than water” we say. Well, at the cross, the blood flowing from the hands and side of Jesus is the only blood that matters. Here a new family is formed as only God can do it: it is familiar and strange, broken and whole, all at the same time. It’s just like your family, but better. There are in the family that gathers at the foot of the cross in concentric circles those who are crying and desperate, those who are afraid, those who would run away, those who really don’t understand what is going on; but all drawn magnetically to the cross, to see what God is up to.
I believe that Jesus learned a lot from his mother. William Williamon again says maternal love is that love which loves in order to give away. It’s a love which is sacrificial from the beginning. It’s a love which makes room. And we see that at the cross too. It’s all in the family, after all.
Let me tell you a true story:
Many years ago, Al Capone virtually owned Chicago. His claim to fame was, of course, his gangster empire, from prohibition, bootleg booze, drugs, prostitution and murder. Capone had a lawyer nicknamed “Easy Eddie” — he was so good at his job that he kept Capone out of jail for many years. And he was well paid for his work. Easy Eddie and his family lived in a fenced-in mansion so large that it occupied an entire Chicago city block. Eddie lived the high life of the Chicago mob, giving little thought to the atrocities he enabled. But he did have a soft spot — a son whom he dearly loves. Nothing was withheld from him — clothes, cars, education. Price was no object. And despite his own job, Eddie tried to teach him right from wrong, so that his son would grow up to be a good man. Yet, in spite of it all, Eddie couldn’t give his son a good name or a good example. So, Eddie decided the best way to make amends would be to testify against Al “Scarface” Capone, clean up his own tarnished name and make a new beginning. So he testified and was killed in a blaze of gunfire in a lonely Chicago street within a year. Police retrieved from his pocket a poem clipped from a magazine. The poem read:
The clock of time is wound but once
And no man has the power
To tell just when the hands will stop
At late or early hour
Now is the only time you own
Live, love, toil with a will
Place no faith in time
For the clock may soon be still.
They also retrieved a rosary, a crucifix, a religious medallion. A father’s last gift to his son.
Now I want to tell you about a World War II hero named Lt. Commander Butch O’Hare. There was a fighter pilot assigned to the aircraft carrier Lexington in the south Pacific. One day, his entire squadron was sent on a mission. After he was airborne, he realized his fuel tank was low and he was ordered to return to the carrier. So reluctantly he dropped out of formation and headed back to the fleet, only to discover that a squadron of Japanese aircraft was speeding to attack to the fleet. He knew that the fleet was all but defenseless. Caught between a rock and a hard place, he couldn’t return to the squadron and get help, and he couldn’t warn the fleet. So he dove into the formation and tried to damage as many planes as possible. After an amazing encounter, the Japanese squadron took off and he was able to land safely on the aircraft carrier. The film from the gun camera mounted on his plane told the truth. It was February 20th, 1942 and for his brave action, Butch O’Hare became the Navy’s first ace of WW II, and the first naval aviator to win the Congressional Medal of Honor. A year later Butch was killed in aerial combat. He was 29. His home town could not allow the memory of the WW II hero to fade and so they named an airport after him. It’s called O’Hare airport, and if you go between terminals one and two there you can find a display of his heroism.2
And oh, yes, did I mention Butch O’Hare was Easy Eddie’s son.
Father and sons, mothers and daughters: complex, tangled relationships given to us by birth.
Jesus gives us another family to love and argue with, to cherish and to bless.
Woman — here is your son… here is your mother.
Thank God it’s Friday T.G.I.F.
Thank God for the third word of “Love” from the Cross.
Let us pray: Lord God bless our families and all those we love who are bound to us by our DNA. But bless even more those we’re not so fond of but who still share that bond of connection which is — you. Here us as we pray: Amen.
1 from FoxNews.com
2 from www.Snopes.com
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January 27, 2008
Thanks to Rev. Mary Luti (www.firstchurchcambridge.org)
for her illustrations and prayer.
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You may know that there are at least two creation accounts in the Bible: there’s the familiar one, the end of which Bev just read, six days of work by God and then Sabbath — and then there’s another version beginning
at Genesis 2:4 and ending 21 verses later. You know the first version I bet — day one God created light, then the dome of the heaven culminating
in the creation of humankind. In the second version God began with man — Adam (or earth) moves to earth and heaven and ends with the creation of woman — Eve (or life). Most folks don’t know that there’s a difference either, because I guess, the two accounts are seamlessly woven together or because no one takes them too seriously: We hear “in the beginning God created… ” And maybe our minds enter a different part of reality — where we’d like to believe what we hear, but our educated scientific world view simply will not allow us to suspend disbelief. So we go to a “no-man’s land” in the middle where we do not actually literally believe, but neither do we completely discard.
Well, I say “Thank God for two versions of how the world cam to be! Thank God they both revolve around God at work, creating, shaping sculpting, and blessing!”
I say that the point of the first creation story and the second creation story is not whether they are scientifically provable, experimentally
re-creatable, or even logically appealing. The stories are truer than
true, in fact.
I’m tired of defending the stories actually. Lauren had a boy-friend once who kept asking about where the dinosaurs were in the Biblical account.
I would launch into a lengthy explanation during which is eyes would glaze over and then once I passed it on to Tom who tried to reach him, but
I know he wanted the mention of just one stegosaurus to justify belief. There are no dinosaurs or lab coats in Genesis.
A scientist approaches God and says to him” Look God, we don’t really need you anymore. Nowadays we can do all sorts of thing that used to
be considered miraculous. We can transplant organs, giving new life to
a dying man, we can cure almost every disease, and we can even clone animals. It won’t be long and we’ll be able to clone human beings too.
So, I’m sorry but you are just outdated”.
God listens patiently and says to the scientist “I can see that you believe you don’t need me, and I understand. However, I love you and I don’t want to see you make a bit mistake, so why don’t we make sure? I say
we could have a man-making contest, just to be sure”.
The scientist replies: “I’ll take that challenge!” So God says “OK, let’s do
it the way I did it in the old days with Adam and Eve” The scientist says “No problem!” and reaches down to scoop up a handful of dirt. “Whoa there! — hold on a minute” God says. “Get your own dirt!”
I might have wished that God had tinkered with Adam and Eve a little bit more — a little less pride, a little more humility, a little less aggression,
a little more compassion, but, hey, we are what we are: flawed, broken
at some very deep level, but also capable of incredible heights of bravery and generosity. In one pocket, we fish out the prayer which says “I am dirt, and to dirt I shall return”. In the other pocket, we find “You are
a little lower than the angels, created in the very image of God”.
The story of creation then is truer than facts; deeper than memory.
It explains us to ourselves. Where did I come from?
God
Where am I going? Back to God
How do I live along the way? In such a way that God will be pleased.
Pretty simple really.
I am particularly thankful that Creation story #1 ends with God, on the seventh day, resting. Do you get that? Not only does God rest, but God blesses and hallows the 7th day, and even reminds us in the 10 Commandments (in the 8th commandment) to remember the Sabbath
day and keep it hold.
God says this for a shocking reason — not because rest is good as
a regular relief from work or as a way to make more efficient workers,
but rather as a reminder that there is more to life than work.
Are you surprised to hear this? There is more to life than work! It is pretty counter-cultural. Ah, we say we’ve got more leisure time than any previous generation to inhabit this square foot of earth. But that’s not
how we live, is it? We commute great distances to work, shop, worship. We put in long hours on the land, in the office, at the library, in the classroom — longer than 10 years ago even before staffing cutback
and economic worries. Then we come home to check our email, blackberry and work a little bit more to get the jump on the next day. This is the Protestant work ethic taken to ridiculous extremes! And then on weekends we cram in all the family outings, sports and relationship maintenance we’re too tired or busy to do during the week.
God gives us Sabbath rest — for the Jews, Sabbath is Saturday, but to Christians, Sabbath is Sunday — thanks to Jesus’ resurrection on that day. For Christians, God gives us a gift of time away from work, not as a reward for being a good little worker bee, but like the gift a loving parent sends
to a child.
Sabbath is gift. My Sabbatical is gift too, and I say thanks to God and
to you. Your openness to letting me skip away for 4½ months beginning on April first is just remarkable. It’s a new idea or program for the National United Church only mandated since 2006 General Council, and I will only
be the 2nd minister in Waterloo Presbytery to take advantage of it.
As I said in the Annual Report, I will seek renewal, refreshment and rest:
I hope you do too.
Someone had said that Ministers are the last generalists. That means burnout is our occupational hazard. We swing between the belief that its all up to us l’eglise, c’est moi and moaning about all the work that needs to be done. Frederick Buechner said some clergy in the face of congregational need become “a quivering mass of availability.”
Neither of us wants that!
I once read this: that the dolphins at Sea World do tricks every day at 10:00, 1:00 and 4:00 — and that when the old dolphins are released back to the ocean they continue to do the same tricks at 10:00, 1:00 and 4:00. Until they die, they are obedient to their training, fixed in behaviour.
Well, when you begin to feel like an old dolphin, it can’t be good. So, during Sabbatical, please break some routines, get out of some rut before it’s too late — Not for your own good, only, but for the life and future of this church. We laugh and ridicule that old saying: “we’ve never done it that way before!” and its cousin “we tried it once and it didn’t work!” Well, try it again. Do something creative. Think outside of the church box, and don’t presume you know the whole story or see the whole picture.
This Sabbatical time is for me and for both congregations, and for all members.
I will seek deepened spirituality - so will you.
I will learn, study, pray, think - so will you.
I will return renewed and refreshed - so will you?
What do they say? A change is a good as a rest.
Get ready.
Let us pray:
Holy One,
You have planted us by streams of refreshment,
And given us the gifts of time,
The gift of breath,
The gift of Sabbath rest.
Help us to saviour, not squander your gifts.
Bless the people of this church, young and old.
May we always reach out to each other
With laughter, comfort, forbearance, and song.
May we be grateful for this time apart,
Participate with a peaceful spirit
In the ministries you entrust to us,
Worship you in grateful joy,
Serve and love our neighbours,
Pray for peace, work for justice,
Celebrate what goes well in our life together,
Appreciate all good gifts that come from you,
And forgive what falls short of our hopes.
In the ebb and flow of the months ahead,
Keep us all safe.
Remind us that we belong to each other,
Join us in the depths of you love,
Shower us all with courage and grace,
Strength and compassion, hope and renewal,
And bring us back to one another with fresh eyes,
Joyful hearts, deeper love and wonderful stories.
Until we meet again,
Hold us in the palm of your hand.
Until we meet again,
Hold us in the palm of your hand.
We pray all this and more
In the work our saviour gave us.
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January 20, 2008
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In January, 1990, when I started work here in this pastoral charge —
at a part-time ¾ time salary and with two small children, and a minister husband in another church, I had an idea that something else momentous was happening in the world. Remember, it was 1990 and little did I know that the American Dialect Society was poised to choose their first word
of the year. That year the ADS combed through all the new words or neologisms coined and chose one to describe the year. In 1990 the word was bushlips, meaning insincere political rhetoric.
More recently, in 2005 the word of the year was “truthiness”, a word spawned by fake newsman Stephen Colbert, meaning “what one wishes
to be the truth regardless of the facts.” The word of the year for 2996 was “plutoed” — a reference to the fact that the planet Pluto was declassified as a planet by some astronomers. “Plutoed” means to demote or declass someone or something as in “No Christmas Bonus”, totally pluoted by my boss” The runner up word of the year was “climate canary”, meaning any species whose extinction might indicate the destructive onset of global climate change.
The word of the year for 2007 was — ta da — “sub prime”, an adjective used to describe a risky or less than ideal loan, mortgage or investment. “Sub prime” is a choice which reflects the economic worries south of the border.
Maybe Canadians would choose different words of the year. I nominate “Tim’s” as an alternate name: we all know hat it means when someone says “I’m on a Tim’s run. Anyone want anything?” And maybe “Mick’s
could be a close second. And how about “loonie” or “toonie”? What other country nick-names their currency? How long does it take a newcomer
to catch on, I wonder?
Also, did you ever wonder what would someone think if they heard the expression “double-double” at any place except at Tim’s, a coffee shop?
Well, these words of the year make sense only if you know the background meaning, and if you’re culturally connected. For instance, for awhile Lo po mo (short for Low Power Mode) — computer speak for the “sleep” mode the machine goes into when not in use, and “Spave” — to spend money under the illusion of saving money (for example, you spave your money when you run up your credit card bill or bank frequent flyer miles). For actually these new words are a king of jargon, a kind of speech that only insiders understood. If you don’t have a computer or a credit card, or don’t collect travel miles, the lo po mo, spave, seem only like ridiculous nonsense. Right?
I wonder: do we use words here in the church that requires insider knowledge? Do words like salvation, repentance, resurrection have any meaning? Words like Holy Spirit, General Council, Annual Meeting, adherent member, minister? We I guess we do have our own jargon. Maybe that’s part of the reason that children’s story time is as popular in the church: the story teller strains to explain things simply, clearly, to the child and the adults listening in, especially adults new to the church or adults oblivious or forgetful of all the teachings they have had over the years, can learn too. Add to the odd words a whole new lexicon or words like
me church to describe how church serves me, and a word like famchi,
a shortened form of family/children, the groups we care greatly for the faith community, and things get even more confusing and complicated.
Maybe that’s why we welcome the central moment when I stop talking,
we all hold a cube of bread or cut of juice in our hands and connect directly to God. We may not know all the theology. We may not know what makes consubstantiation different from transubstantiation; we may not know the politics of ancient Israel, and the historical setting for the Last Supper. We may have forgotten the meaning of the big words like Eucharist or intercession or benediction.
But after all, the words are really only arrows that point to history? — no, politics? — no, things? — no.
All the words we use point to Jesus, who was God-in-the-flesh as Christmas has just recently reminded us. It’s all about Jesus.
So that’s simple, isn’t it? However we describe him — a Messiah, or Savoir, or Prince of Peace, a brother or friend or teacher or councilor — all of worship brings us to the central moment when we set aside our doubts, worries, our pains, problems and just see Jesus. It may not happen every Sunday or even every Communion Sunday. But it did happen once two millennium ago and we have never been able to forget it. That’s how cosmic was his arrival — Jesus split time in half. At his death the graves were opened and at his return to life, risen from the dead, he took lives like ours and set them free. That’s the moment we remember around this table. That’s the thanksgiving we feel at the words of welcome and the quickening of memory, and the joy of reunion if we only have 5/10 minutes with Him. The miracle at the wedding at Cana, wonderful, great. But he does greater miracles:
That Jesus can change our lives
from selfish into generous
from lost into found
from deal into live
from depression into hopeful
And the word of the year?
Well, that would be Love.
You are invited here
You were invited before you were ever born, and you will be invited here
if you grow up, if you go away to school, if you change, if you re-locate.
You’re invited here if you are old or young.
If you’re gay or if you’re straight
If you are poor or if you are rich
If you have faith or if you doubt
Even when you die, our Scripture promises that you will be invited to sit
at God’s table in heaven.
You are invited here to eat this bread, to drink from these cups and by doing these things to remember Jesus’ promise: that he will be with us… always.
Come to the feast of the Kingdom of God!
You are invited.
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January 6, 2008
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It’s that time of year, isn’t it? — To make lists: a way of recalling the past and broadcasting the future. The comedian/talk show host, David Letterman has made a career out of his top 10 lists. So important was the top 10 list as developed by David Letterman that he took it with him when he left one network to go to another network. When he returned to TV this week after making a separate agreement with striking writers of the Writers Guild of America, he capitalized on these lists by adding “Top 10 Demands of the Striking Writer”. Time Magazine published an issue called “The Best Top 10 Lists of the Year”, ranging from the 10 best new and upcoming Architectural Marvels, the 10 Best Movies, the 10 Best TV shows, the 10 Best Books, Fiction; - none of which I have read — The 10 best websites, the Ten Must Have Fashion Items, The 10 Best Scientific discoveries — well, you get the idea.
But I was most interested in 2 of the lists. Like this one — the 10 Biggest Religious Stories. #1 on that list was Mother Theresa’s Crisis of Faith. Letters Mother Theresa wrote to her confessors describe the agony of not being able to sense her beloved God for half a century. She wrote: “The silence and the emptiness are so great that I look and do not see.” Well, that’s list-worthy. Other notable stories include the death of the Rev Jerry Falwell, the ongoing defection of conservative Christians from the Episcopal Church over the church’s positions on gays, the Korean missionaries kidnapped by the Taliban, and the proliferation of atheist books. Pretty interesting.
But my favorite list of all was the one entitled The Power of 10 — why we go list crazy at the end of the year. The reasons range from the influence of God with the 10 Commandments, because they’re web-friendly, because they are a good marketing tool, because they let the list-maker assert authority, because we crave justice, because we need to remember and forget, because life is short and we all want to have an identity; and that’s most interesting to me actually; Lists are a means of asserting identities saying “I was here — especially at the end of the year when we reminisce about time past and think about how much time we have left. While we are around, says Time Magazine — we want to be known, and we want to be heard.
I bet you have a list in your purse right now, or in your wallet. It may be a list of phone numbers, or grocery store items; it may be a sequence of credit cards. It’s there. I know it’s there because I have one too or maybe more than one. At the turn of the New Year it seems that lots of people make a list, a list of resolutions. A survey of 300,000 people determined these as the top 10 most popular resolutions:
That sound familiar?
Maybe January is the time for resolutions, for deciding to make change because of the mythical God-King Janus revered by the Romans. It is from Janus that January is named, from the Latin Ianua, or entrance gate. Janus the king had two faces which allowed him to look both forward and backward in battle. He was the God of doorways and gates because both can be passed in either direction. Janus’ month is a good time to look back and look ahead at the same time.
New Years Resolutions are really essentially about change. Naming and changing. And though about half of us make resolutions, research shows that after six months, only half of those are still involved. Why make resolutions? Why determine to change? Well, what’s the alternative? It’s as true spiritually as it is behaviorally. A person who makes a New Years Resolution is ten times more likely to attain that goal than someone who doesn’t even make a list.
So, let’s make a list today on this first Sunday in the New Year: it’s early and the calendars are nice and clean and crisp, no time yet for the smudging and clutter that comes with time. No time for the regrets and negativity and anger to color our plans. And this is Church, so let’s think about what your New Year’s resolution as a Christian might look like. The usual resolutions you’ll recall are really pretty physical and self-directed. But I believe God calls us out of ourselves to think about the ways we can go deeper into our faith. So, you might think of things like intentional Bible reading, a significant time of prayer and meditation. Maybe you will decide to read the Bible in a disciplined fashion, or maybe just one Gospel, or maybe just one passage, like the Beatitudes. Maybe you will determine to volunteer at a food bank or teach Sunday School, or sing in the choir. Maybe you will come to me and say “Lynne, what this church needs is a small group to meet regularly for lunch, or a group to help with school breakfasts, or a group which plans special events for the community, either within these walls or without. Or maybe something else entirely. Maybe you will step outside of your comfort zone to be open to the new thing that God has in mind for you in this year — personally, behaviorally, physically, spiritually.
I believe the reason for resolving to change comes from that gospel passage in Matthew, where the wise men come to the Bethlehem manger to worship the new-born king of the Jews. History tells us that this scene probably happened later than at the actual birth; maybe even a few years later. But Matthew conflates the time, he combines the time, and really, does it matter when the Magi come? The point is that they come, and that they were the most foreign and the most unlikely visitors to make their way to the manger. The shepherds were in the fields, abiding. The angels were in the sky, hanging around. The Magi came from far away — Iraq? Iran? Places whose names to us mean enemy, stranger, terrorist. But they came on their knees, or as we said all during Advent in that candle lighting time:
We are the magi: as strange at the manger as any foreign visitor. So uncomprehending, so clueless, and yet welcome too. Isn’t that amazing? They come from the liquid night into that stable and they set before him gifts — not of fire, which was the usual Zoroastrian gift, but Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh. Martin Luther, the great reformer, the first protestant who said “I protest” and now we are Protestants. Martin Luther had something to say about these gifts. The great reformer said “The Gold signifies their faith is Jesus as their King, the Frankincense that he was their priest, and the Myrrh, that he would die for them.
Let’s remember these names and add them to our Advent discoveries of the names around Jesus: the Messiah, Emmanuel, the Savior, the King, the Priest, and the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.
That’s why we make resolutions: its our gift to God to say: “You mean this much to me, so much that I want to step outside of my own small selfish shell to say thank you to you, O God, to invite you into my life so that I may shine with your glory.” That’s why.
So here’s a little something for you, a chance to figure out what your gift will be to God in 2008. The index cards are for no one else but you to see. You can do nothing. You can do something. It’s up to you. I’ll give you a few minutes to think about it, and then close with prayer.
Let us pray.
Here we are, O God. As jubilant as the angels, as confused as the shepherds, as tired as the Holy Family, as alien as the Wise Men. We hold all the same places as do they. But we are here to worship you, and we know that what we ask we will receive. What we seek, we will find, where we knock, the door will be opened. Open all doors in this new day. We ask it in Jesus’ name.
Amen.
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November, 2007
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Someone once told me that you can get anyone to talk by asking him or her to “tell me about your Grandmother.” Tell me about your Grandmother. Ask about a Grandmother and you will learn more than mere statistics, more than genealogical connections, more than facts. You will learn as much about the Grandchild as the Grandmother. You will learn what matters to that child, where their roots are deep, what community holds them tight, which branch of the family they belong to, what kind of fruit their particular family tree bears - remember, earth to root, root to trunk, truck to branch, branch to fruit?
My Grandmothers, though very alike in some ways, both were what used to be called practical nurses, were markedly different in other ways. Both had many children. Both had married, I imagine, against their parents wishes. One Grandfather was clearly elderly, one was too wild. One Grandmother raised nine children in the depression on a farm, and when her husband fell ill, she moved into town and started a nursing home to care for him. To this day the smell of liniment and Ben Gay and oranges takes me back to that big old house in Collingwood. It took a stroke which left her paralyzed to stop her: not time, nor economics nor grief nor suffering. Nothing stopped Dolly until the stroke which left her bedridden for the last 10 years of her life.
I believe my other Grandmother gave me the gift of ministry. A lifelong church member, she, it was — I think — who sowed the seed I would learn to believe was my call. I still don’t know what possessed her to encourage her eldest Granddaughter to listen for God, but she did, and her happiest day was my Ordination at Timothy Eaton Memorial United Church in 1977.
Oh yes; “Tell me about your Grandmother “is really nothing more than magic words — Open Sesame — which break us open to reveal the truest facts of ourselves to each other.
Now if you had said to Jesus; “Tell me about your Grandmother” he would have shocked you out of your pew! While I was reading that passage from Matthew, all the begat passages, did your eyes glaze over as the 42 generations were listed? Well, buried in this family tree you will find four women’s names: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and “the wife of Uriah” — who remembers her name? — That’s right — Bathsheba. Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba — four wonderful scandalous names to find buried in this dusty list right at the beginning of the New Covenant in the New Testament. Take out your high lighter and mark these women’s names. Remember them; welcome them, for this family’s story is our family’s story.
Tamar was the daughter-in-law of Judah, Jacob’s fourth son, the fourth of the tribes of Israel. She was a foreigner, a Canaanite, whose husband, Ev was killed. According to Leverite marriage law, she was then married to Ev’s brother, Onan, until he too died, leaving her childless. Now set aside post modern ethics: we don’t understand what this means. By law and custom, she should have been given to Judah’s next surviving son, but when Judah reneged on the promise and obligation to his daughter-in-law Tamar, she disguised herself as a temple prostitute, and approached Judah himself. She bore him twin sons, Perez and Zerah. We can hardly imagine the times and customs, but we must wonder at the determination and the call and creativity which drove her to bear sons, the only certain measure of success for a woman at that time.
Then Rahab, a rich prostitute, this was the one who saved the lives of two of Joshua’s spies who were reconnoitering in Jericho to determine its vulnerability in battle. Rahab spared their lives and hid them and helped them to escape, becoming one of Israel’s great heroines. Joshua and his men were so grateful for her military information and her protection, that Joshua carefully spared the lives of all of Rahab’s family when Jericho fell. This woman too is a distant branch on our family tree.
Ruth, another foreigner was a Moabite who married Naomi’s son. Ruth then, was the faithful daughter-in-law who insisted on staying with Naomi after they were both widowed. Ruth and her sister Orpah — does that name ring any bells — Oprah is the misspelled Biblical reference here. Ruth and her sister-in-law Orpah had married Naomi’s sons, but after a severe famine swept the Bethlehem area the entire household moved to Moab. Death suddenly carried away all the men in the family. Naomi urged her daughters-in-law to return to Moab but Ruth refused in that most beautiful of Biblical passages “Whither thou goest I will go, and whither thou lodgest I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people and thy God my God”. They returned to Bethlehem and to a truly touching love story where Ruth attracted the attention of Boaz, and long story short — they married and became the great grandparents of David — King David. Now you know why Bethlehem was so important in the nativity story — it all went back to Ruth and Boaz.
Then Bathsheba. You’ll remember that she was married to Uriah, one of David’s commanders and that David, driven by lust, seduced her and had Uriah killed so that he could marry Bathsheba. You may recall the famous parable of the ewe lamb, told by Nathan the prophet to condemn King David.
Well, these are sketchy details, but I want you to get the flavor of this genealogical family tree so that you know amongst the ancestors of Jesus were Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba: a realist, a prostitute, an outsider and an adulterer. Well, it sounds like a soap opera, doesn’t it?
But these women and these mothers were the links in the chain, the branches on the family tree and the stepping stones that lead to Jesus. The tragedy and despair, in a story that spans all these 42 generations, we see the very active hand of God at work in Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba. We pick up the threads of their life stories, we bring things into focus and see the amazing power of God who takes four amazing women — with all their strengths and weaknesses — and takes the sacred story of salvation and unfolds it. All these women, who would become grandmothers, were instrumental in terrible times; times of upheaval and turmoil of warfare and political unrest. Each one was a stepping stone through the turmoil.
I bet you know someone who helped you through such times; maybe a family member or a counselor, or a stranger. Maybe a teacher or a friend or a guide. Someone whose voice in your ear or whose hand on your shoulder, or whose memory gave you the strength or courage or determination to carry on. Someone who lifted you over the hard places, or whose capacity for goodness shaped you when you needed it most. They might be dead and gone, or they might be alive; a king of living saint. And you know who saints are; someone once said - In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints. I want you to think about one of your saints, or stepping stones while I tell you one last story.
In her story book “The Great Silent Grandmother Gathering”, Sharon Mabbi tells about a waiter in a café, the windows of which faced the public park. He noticed that two grandmotherly looking women had been standing in the park all day, without moving at all, without talking. They were dressed in their Sunday best and they were just staring at the town hall. He asked the other patrons in the café what they thought the women were up to. They speculated on a variety of things, then a five year old spoke up and said: “One of them is my Grandmother and I know what they are doing. They are standing there to save the world.” Well, everyone hooted and howled and laughed. On his way home, the waiter decided to ask the women what they were really doing, and sure enough their answer was “We are saving the world!”
Over dinner that evening, the waiter told his parents and he and his father hooted and howled, but his mother was actually silent. After dinner, she called her best friends to tell them.
Well the next morning, the waiter looked out the cafe window and the two women were back, along with his mother, her friends and the women who had been in the café the day before. All were standing in silence, staring at the town hall. Again, people in the café laughed, saying things like “You can’t save the world by standing the park. That’s what we have armies for and everyone knows you have to have banners and slogans to save the world. You can’t do it by simply standing in the park.”
The next day the women were joined by the women who were in the café the day before and by a number of their friends. This brought the local newspaper reporter to the scene. He wrote a derisive article about the women. The day after it appeared, hundreds of women showed up to stand in the park in silence. The mayor then told the police chief to make the women leave because they were making the town appear to be foolish. When the police chief told them they would have to disperse because they didn’t have a permit, one of the women responded that “we were just individuals standing in our park, and we are not giving speeches or holding a demonstration, so why do we need a permit?” The police chief thought about it, agreed with them and left the park.
At this point, 2,223 women, including the mayor’s wife, the police chief’s wife, and a five-year-old girl were standing in the park to save the world. The news spread quickly and soon women were standing all over the country. The story ended with women standing in every country around the world. Standing to save the world.
It’s the power of one person to help another, to show the way, to provide a hand.
Please come forward and say the name of the person you recall. You don’t have to do this with your special stone, if you don’t want to. It will be someone who was a saint to you, male or female, young or old.
Amen
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