The Word Proclaimed

Epiphany 3B

2012-01-21T21:17:00.001-08:00

“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

Repentance. I think the Christian proclamation has twisted this word into so many knots that it would be unrecognizable to Jesus’ first listeners. And now, the mere utterance of that word evokes strong feelings of shame. At least it does for me.

“Repent!” we hear preachers say. And what they usually mean is “Stop sinning! Change those parts of your life that is putting you in conflict with God. Cut out those impure thoughts and actions and turn to the purity of God’s will. If you want to be close to God then you have to remove anything that gets in the way with your relationship with God.”

I heard that a lot from too many preachers. For me, when I hear that, and if it`s true, I always wonder if I have repented enough. I always worry that there’s something that I’ve missed, that there might be a spiritual blind spot that is keeping me from growing in my faith.

Luckily, in an old prayer of confession, there’s an escape clause. The prayer confesses those sins “known and unknown.”

However, while we may be forgiven of those unknown sins with a linguistic sleight-of-hand, practically, we are no better off because we cannot change that which we do not know that we SHOULD change. If being close to God and greeting the kingdom when it arrives is dependent on something that I do, than I’m not sure that really sounds like good news.

As Christians, we tend to focus our faith on the sin/forgiveness transaction. We reduce our faith to us sinning and God forgiving. And we repeat that over and over and over again.

And yes, that is an important part of our Christian faith. But that’s not where our faith ends. Our Christian faith is SO much more than that. Receiving forgiveness of sins is just the beginning of our faith. It’s not the whole of our faith.

“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

There’s more here than meets the ear. Jesus’ first listeners might have gasped at the boldness of such a proclamation. Not just because of it’s religious expressions, but for it’s political overtones. Such talk was a good way for a guy to get himself killed.

That’s because they lived in Caesar` kingdom. And Caesar doesn’t share. And Jesus’ listeners had seen plenty of loved ones fixed on crosses so Caesar could keep his real estate.

So Jesus set up “The Kingdom of God” in direct competition and contrast to Caesar and the kingdoms of this world.

The “Kingdom of God” that Jesus talks about isn’t a disembodied existence in the heavenly realm. But the Kingdom of God that Jesus talks about is God’s presence in their world. The Kingdom of God was God’s vision of life, of peace, of forgiveness, of justice, of mercy, and grace alive and running loose in our world.

To repent means to “turn in a different direction.” So when Jesus says, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” what they’re hearing is:

“Turn away from Caesar and the kingdoms of this world, and turn to God’s kingdom. Where the Caesars and kingdoms of this world protect their power through force and oppression, God’s Kingdom brings peace and justice. Where the Caesars and the kingdoms of this world seek revenge against those who hurt them, God’s kingdom brings mercy and forgiveness. Where the Caesars and the kingdoms of this world seek to grow their wealth by stealing from others, God’s kingdom feeds the poor and sets the captives free.

“So don’t align yourself with the Caesars and the kingdoms of the world. Be part of God’s kingdom. For God’s Kingdom is here. The kingdom of God arrived! Be my kingdom agent, be my agent of healing, of working for justice, of seeking peace, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, forgiving one another. That’s the kingdom that I have brought to the world. That’s the world I want my followers to live in. That’s the Kingdom I want you to be a part of.”

So, maybe, for us, instead of the Brief Order of Confession and Forgiveness, some Sundays we could have a Brief Order of Kingdom Accomplishments.

Instead of always talking about where we have failed, we can share about those times we have succeeded!

Instead of always admitting our guilt, we can proclaim our successes.

Instead of pointing to our shortcomings, we can share our victories.

You can talk about where you have seen God working the world.
You can tell stories of how God is working in your life.
You can share about how you have participated in God’s kingdom work.
You can talk about the forgiveness you offered and received.
You can talk about the justice you worked for.
You can talk about how you feed the hungry, clothed the naked, and visited the sick. You can talk about how you were that caring ear, that comforting touch, or that encouraging word.

You can talk about how you fished for people by letting them know about a God who loves them.

You can share all of this, not to brag about how spiritually awesome you are. But because this is evidence of the kingdom of God at work in the world and in your life.
You can share these stories to bear witness to the God who promised to make all things new.

You can tell these stories not to point to you, but to point to the one who called you, who chose you, who tapped you on the shoulder and said, “Follow me.”

You can do this to remind yourself and each other, that God has not given up on us or the world, but that God still creating and re-creating everything. Just as Paul tells us in the first reading that the present world is passing away just as the new world is arriving in Jesus.

You can do this because you are a citizen of Kingdom of God, named and claimed as God’s own because of what Jesus has done for you.

“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

Now go! Be the kingdom people that God called you to be!

May this be so among us. Amen!

Epiphany 2B

2012-01-14T16:07:00.000-08:00

New Years day was quite an education for me. I was told that Japanese people are not religious, yet they pray at the shrine. And from the lineups I saw at the various shrines in the area, I could see what people meant.

I would say that makes Japanese people VERY religious. At least in practice if not in belief. It seems that in such a highly ritualized culture, the act of praying at the shrine is a quite a religious thing to do, even if folks sometimes do so out of ritual or simple tradition.

Tokyo is this amazing city where I can walk through blocks and blocks of highly modern landscape, with its massive steel and glass buildings, and stunning architecture. Then I encounter - out of nowhere - a small Buddhist temple. And someone might be praying there. And down the block I’ll stumble upon a Shinto shine, reminding people of the city’s deep history.

And of course, on my way to the office I walk through the Yasukuni Shrine, where there is, often, a crowd gathering. And knowing its complicated history, and the strong feelings it arouses, I make my way as quickly as I can when the young men in black shirts and sunglasses start shouting into their microphones.

Religion is everywhere here. Yearnings for the sacred are found on every city block.

This wouldn’t have been news to the Christians in Corinth. The Corinthian Christians knew shrines, and they knew temples. They knew that temples and shrines were places where gods and goddesses lived.

Temples were expensive to build and even worse to maintain. Temples were sacred, holy, awe-inspiring places. They were places people went to celebrate life’s special events, those transitional moments that helped them along life’s journey. If they wanted to find the Holy, they went to the shrine and the temple.

So they were probably surprised when Paul asked them: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own?”

They probably answered, “No, we didn’t know that.” After all, how COULD they know that their bodies were temples of the Holy Spirit? That wasn’t what they were taught. And it’s not always something we remember as well. And forgetting that we - our bodies - are temples of the Holy Spirit can bear significant consequences.

I know this from personal experience.

I think I’ve done more walking in the past 10 weeks than I’ve done in the past 5 years. Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, where I came from is, very much, a car culture. Actually, it’s more of a truck culture. While I buzzed around the city in my mighty 2006 PT Cruiser manual, 5-speed, with no cruise control or air conditioning, most other vehicles on the road were fully loaded half-ton pick-up trucks, with the occasional gun rank on the back.

In the eight years I lived in Lethbridge, I never once took the bus. It simply didn’t occur to me. Public transit wasn’t on my radar screen. Even though I could walk to my office from my apartment in 24 minutes (I once timed it), I still drove. I told myself that it was because I needed my car for home visits, and going to meetings, or running around the city doing church business.

But that was just a lie I told myself. I was immersed in the car culture of Alberta and didn’t want to admit it. I assumed I was better than those who reflexively bought into the unspoken idea that successful adults drove. Losers and children didn’t.

And swallowing whole the notion, I grew into the lovable mass of tubbiness you see now. And why my walking has helped me reconnect with my physicality. Aching leg muscles and sore feet remind me that I’m alive.

I see Alberta’s car culture as a metaphor for how we see ourselves. It’s as if the less we need to use our bodies than the further progress we’ve made.

It’s as if we’re running from our physicality, and with our physicality, our humanness. And perhaps, as we’re running from our humanness, we are trying to escape our mortality. Because our physical-ness reminds us of our limitations.

Maybe that’s putting too fine a point on it, but I DO think that we’re forgetting how to be human in a way that deeply connects with others and our surroundings.

On the subway everyone’s face is buried in a screen, including mine. And people are trying not engage the person next to them. I find riding the subway eerily quiet. So I put on my ear buds, turn on some music, and open a card game on my phone, so I join the rest of those who are oblivious to the mass of humanity milling around.

You may already have heard bout this, but I read recently about a game called LovePlus+, where men can get a virtual girlfriend as an app for their mobile device.

According to an article in The Atlantic Monthly: “Users play the game by simulating everything from holding hands to sending flirty text messages, and can even use the device's built-in microphone to hold simulated conversations. But unlike traditional video games, LovePlus+ users say the point of the experience isn't simple fun or virtual competition. 19-year-old player Tatsuya Fukuzawa [says], "There isn't a lot of romance in my life. This helps me cope with some of the loneliness." (Atlantic, November 2009)

And this reached an extreme with a guy, in 2009 “marrying” his virtual girlfriend. Is this a frightening trend away from deep human connections? A symptom of the growing desire to craft one’s own life apart from human community? Or the obvious next step for a techno geek to take on his way to nerd heaven?

I think I know what Paul would say:

“...do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? 20For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body...”

In other words: YOU are sacred, YOU are holy, YOU are awe inspiring, because YOU - are temples. Or the better way of saying it: you are a temple. The Holy Spirit is dwelling within your physical space, in your very body. Everyone together. That’s why you can never really be your own. You’ve been summoned into a life where you are responsible for others and others are responsible for you.

That’s the life into which Jesus called Philip in this morning’s gospel. The simple summons, “Follow me” created an earthquake within him, and he knew his life was not his own, that he was part of a bigger family, a larger community. He was - with the rest of God’s people, a temple of the Spirit of God, who calls, gathers, enlightens, and makes holy.

And that’s what Paul was trying to say to the Corinthian Christians. We are made in God’s image, and our bodies have been made into the body of Christ, Our lives are not to be about arrogant, self-serving freedom, demanding that our personal hungers be satisfied.

Our lives are about loving and serving each other, knowing that our lives - and our life together - is a gift; a gift of the Spirit that lives and thrives deep within us, that there is not part of our lives that God does not dwell, no corner of our existence that God is not transforming. God lives in this body [pointing to me] and THIS body [point to the congregation] - YOU are the temple of the Spirit of God.

“Glorify God in your bodies,” Paul concludes. God lives in you and you live in God. YOU are the dwelling place for the Almighty, welcome all into the Spirit’s Temple, swing the doors wide open and receive a broken, hurting, and sin-stained world. In THIS Temple there is forgiveness and healing. In THIS Temple life is renewed.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Baptism of Jesus B

2012-01-07T22:09:00.000-08:00

We met John the Baptist in Advent – two Sundays in a row! And we encounter him again today. And he’s in no better a mood now than he was then.

But Mark left out the juicy bits of John`s story. He took his scissors to the moments when John’s venom was most poisonous. John had a few choice words for King Herod and his wife. John didn’t like the fact that Herod married his brother’s wife. In fact, it was against Jewish law. And if Herod didn’t like John’s well-aimed preaching he should have taken it up with God, not John. John was just doing his job.

It might have been that joltingly honest preaching that drew Jesus – and everyone else - to John that morning at the Jordan River. John was refreshing. Unique. Different from other preachers who either told people what they wanted to hear, or lined their pockets with the pennies of little old ladies. John wasn’t warm and fuzzy. But you knew that he’d give you the straight goods when it came to the things of God.

That day, in the river of freedom, where thousands of years prior, God’s people crossed from slavery into the land that God promised them, was where Jesus joined himself to that saving story, where his mandate as God’s Son was given to him. Where the affirmation of the Almighty wrapped around him like sun-soaked blanket.

“You are my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased...” Who wouldn’t want to hear that from God? Or from any parent for that matter.

But lying underneath this affirmation from the divine was a summons. A calling that might have made Jesus’ blood turn to ice.

If Jesus was God’s Son - Israel’s Messiah - the one to save people from their sins and create a world of justice and mercy, then that didn’t mean that he could simply bask in the warm embrace of heavenly approval. He couldn’t walk around town all Messiahy cashing in on his sacred status.

Being God’s Son meant he had to go and do things that the messiah was supposed to do. Being the messiah wasn’t a state of divine being. It was a job description. A letter of conscription from the only one in the universe who won’t take “no” for an answer.

Although, I’m sure saying “no” crossed his mind. And so, I wonder if before he dipped his toe in the water for his heavenly bath, he was tempted to take another walk around the block. Or hop on the next bus out of town.

Maybe Jesus’ temptation didn’t begin or end, like we assume, in the desert to where he ran after being dunked by John. I wonder if his temptation anxiety started well before he found himself in the Jordan River. I wonder if he was tempted to run away from his calling. From his task as God’s Son. I wonder if he was tempted to escape and hide from who he was.

If he was tempted to stay in Nazareth and take over the carpentry business from Joseph, maybe settle down, get married, and crank out a few kids, I don’t think anyone would have blamed him. After all, it wasn’t a bad life. The work was steady. He was close to family. And there were no crosses following him wherever he went.

I’m sure he had all that in the back of his mind when he followed John into the water. I’m sure he knew that, once he was dipped in the muddy river, his life was over. Everything he was and did was gone. He knew the weight that was being placed on his shoulders. It was a new beginning for Jesus. A call into God’s vision of the world that he had to follow. A path that led to the Kingdom of God - the kingdom that dwelled within his very being.

“You are my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased...” The next, unspoken, sentence was “Now get to work.”

Work on healing the sick and raising the dead. Work on preaching good news to the poor and setting the captives free. Work on giving sight to blind and comforting the broken hearted.

Work on showing God’s Kingdom love to a world in pain. Work on forgiving people’s sins. Work on setting the world straight through mercy and justice.

That’s quite the job description, isn’t it?

I’m glad that’s his job and not mine. I wouldn’t want to be saddled with such a burden.

But then again, who were all those people who being baptized with Jesus? What did God want for them?

As it turns out, Jesus wasn’t the only one being called into a new life that day in those waters. God was calling them into the same life that Jesus was called into. Baptism isn’t just a ritual that we perform as an entry way into the church family. And baptism isn’t just a one-off salvation ticket.

Baptism is about being recruited - drafted - into a movement. In baptism, we are joined to Jesus’ death and resurrection, so we can live resurrection lives in a world so often more interested in death.

Baptism is about God’s light shining through us in a dark world. It’s about binding the world’s wounds. It’s about being part of a movement that is bigger than ourselves, God’s movement of renewing everything about the world, where God wipes every tear from our eyes, where crying and pain are extinguished, where the hungry are satisfied, and the dead rise breathing new life.

That’s the life into which God has called YOU. That’s the task that God has placed in front of YOU. Not to earn special favour, or gain some sort of heavenly reward, or attain special spiritual status.

But God has called you into this life because that mission who God is and that’s what God does, and you are in Jesus, and Jesus is in God.
You have been joined to Jesus’ death and resurrection. You have been drafted into Christ’s mission. You have been named and claimed as God’s own child through your baptism into Christ so that you walk the earth as a healing presence.

It’s because God looked upon you, saw everything you’ve done, looked over your pains, your weaknesses, your regrets, and your failures, God has looked you up and down and inside out, and God open the divine arms, wrapped your in divine love, and said, “You are my beloved child, with whom I am well pleased…Now, you have a job to do.”

May this be so among us. Amen.

Christmas 1B

2011-12-31T18:05:00.000-08:00

I rang the doorbell and a young woman answered.

“Hello I’m Pastor Kevin,” I said.

She let me in and we sat down on the couch. The baby was asleep in the crib by the window.

I got straight to the point.

“So, why a baptism?” I asked.

“Well, I think it’s important to have God in my child’s life,” she said.

“What’s the baby’s name?” I asked looking over the crib.

She muttered something I didn’t recognize.

“That’s an interesting name, “ I said. “What’s the story behind that? Is it a family name?” I asked because I hadn’t heard that name before.

“No, it’s not a family name,” she answered.

“Do you know what it means?” I asked.

“No, it doesn’t have any meaning. It’s just a word I made up. I like the way it sounds.”

It wasn’t always this way, and she is an extreme case. And while the young mom had every right to make up a word with which to name her child, I wonder if she missed out on an opportunity. Names can offer a message to who we want our child to be when they grow up.

Most people know what their names mean, or why they were given their name by their parents.

What does your name mean? Most of us have names that mean something. Perhaps they reflect the hopes and dreams parents have for their children. Or they’re carrying a family tradition. Or they name them after a celebrity or important public figure.

My oldest daughter is named “Sophia” because it means “wisdom.” We chose that name to honour Lady Wisdom found in the book of Proverbs. Sophia in proverbs is a feminine expression of God, and her mom and I wanted to recognize aspects of the divine that are sometimes overlooked.

Sophia’s (or “Sophie” – she hates being called “Sophia”) sister is named “Naomi” to remember the biblical story of Ruth and Naomi and the message of faith and commitment that it inspires. It’s a wonderful story of integrity and sacrifice for others. And we wanted our child to embody those virtues.

When my parents named me, I know they struggled for days to find just the word to describe who they saw when they peered into my future. They wanted to place upon me the mantle of my destiny, hoping that I would be a force for good in the world, that I would lead others into a new tomorrow. And so they reached out to the heavens and grabbed with two hands and pulled down the name “Kevin” which means...”handsome.” Or more accurately, “handsome birth.”

And every time I look in mirror I’m absolutely shocked by how prophetic my parents were!

Bible names all mean something. In fact, if you don’t know the meaning of the many of the names you could miss the point of the story.

Mary and Joseph did what they were told and named their son, “Jesus” which means “God rescues” or “God saves.” They were glad to give him this name because they had laid all their hope on him, as one who would save God’s people from their sins, and rescue them from the hands of their enemies.

And so, as required by law, Mary and Joseph bring Jesus to Jerusalem to offer the usual sacrifice as a thanksgiving to God.

And they encounter Simeon, the old man who’d been around the temple forever, whose eyes may have given out, but he could see God’s promises being fulfilled in a baby.

And Anna then wants to hold the baby, because she wants to feel in her arms the very power of God.

Both of them may have had a lot more years behind them than in front of them, but they could see God’s bright future being born among them. They could see that everything old was passing away. And that God was doing something new.

It was like there was a flip of the calendar and a new age had begun. And they were glad that they could see it before they closed their earthly eyes.

And at this flip of the calendar what are YOU hoping for? What are YOU looking for God to do?

This is the first new years where it actually feels like a NEW year. It could be because I’m in a very different place physically, emotionally, and spiritually than I’ve ever been. Being in this new environment, and carving out a new life, has forced me to think about what I REALLY want from my life. What I REALLY want my time on earth to be about. How I think God REALLY wants me to use my gifts.

So this flip of the calendar is opportunity for me.

What about you? How do you meet 2012?

Is it just another year, just like the last one, where you go on your day-to-day activities, not thinking of the future or worrying about the past? Just taking life as it presents itself?

Or do you see 2012 as a time pregnant with possibility, and you feel that anything is possible, and you just can’t wait to get in the game, grab the ball, and run to the end zone?

Or are you anxious about 2012, not knowing what’s around the corner, since 2011 has provided unexpected challenges?

Or are you hopeful that this will finally be the year when you get your life together?

Or are you all of the above? A muddle of mixed motivations? A patchwork of expectations?

What about for us here at St. Paul’s? What do you hope for our congregation in 2012? What do you want God to do with us?

We talked about our future during Adult Forum for a few weeks last month and we came up with some good ideas. I really enjoyed going through that exercise with you. Not just because I believe it’s vitally important to have your input in the future direction of the congregation.

But that exercise was also a test of sorts. Don’t worry, you all passed! You get an A+. The test was to see how you thought about the future. I wanted to see how you envisioned our church’s challenges.

Were you anxious about our future? Were you angry that this congregation isn’t what it once was? Did you have any anticipation that things were going to get any better?

What I saw was a group of people who are see the church’s challenges with sober realism, but also who are hopeful and excited about future possibilities for growth. And that is a powerful starting place for us to begin to rebuild a church that has always met its challenges head on. That’s because St. Paul’s is a church that still believes that Jesus – the message that God rescues and saves - is still being born within and among us.

No matter where you are in your life. No matter the challenges, expectations, quandaries, or possibilities, we trust in a God who was born in the middle of all of this, blessed us in our confusion and our hopes, so that we can rise to meet God’s future with open hands.

For you are a people who have seen salvation, which has been prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Christmas Day

2011-12-24T23:16:00.001-08:00

Most of the travel guide books I’ve read before coming to Japan say that most people under the age of 40 will understand and speak at least a little bit of English. Especially in Tokyo, they say. So, an English speaker shouldn’t have any trouble getting his or her point across.

Having been here for almost two months I can now say without equivocation that this is absolutely NOT true!

I may have told you this story before, but bear with me. About a month ago I was at a Tully’s Coffee shop and I tried to order a large decaf coffee. The young university-aged barista looked at me puzzled and pointed to the small cup. I shook my head “No” and pointed to the large cup. She looked at me with the same puzzled gaze and help up the small cup. I again, shook my head “No” and tapped the large cup. She shrugged her shoulders and made my coffee.

She said something to the other barista who then looked in my direction with the same puzzled look her co-worker had, but with a glint of amusement in her eye. The barista smiled as she handed me my coffee. I peeled off the lid to smell the coffee like I usually do (the aroma is half the coffee experience).

And I noticed a little foam floating on the dark liquid. I smelled it, tasted it, and realized that she TOTALLY misunderstood what I was looking for. Instead of a large decaf, she made me a triple espresso! Pretty much the OPPOSITE of what I was looking for!

I had to laugh because I realized that I hadn’t communicated my order well enough. It wasn’t the barista’s fault that I couldn’t order in Japanese in a Japanese coffee shop. The language created a gulf that no amount of hand signals or slow english nouns could bridge.

And when I talk with some Japanese people they often say “Sorry” for their limited English. And what I always want to say back is “No, you’re not the one who should apologize for your limited English. I should apologize to YOU for my infinitesimally small amount of Japanese. After all, I’m in YOUR country! I should be adjusting to YOU. You shouldn’t have to accommodate ME!”

Which is why, in the new year, I plan to make a more concentrated effort to learn Japanese.

I want to learn Japanese NOT just because it will help me get my order right at the coffee shop and make my experience here much more rich.

But I want to learn Japanese because words and language create a universe. They shape our view of reality. They form the lens through which we see the world. That’s why the words we use are important. Learning Japanese will help me learn more about the culture, and how Japanese people see the world.

“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word WAS God.”

It’s common to talk about the bible as God’s Word, but here John is telling us that JESUS is God’s Word. Jesus is the mouthpiece through which God speaks.

Words create a world. It’s not just the words we proclaim that create, but the words of prayer we offer in tears, through clenched teeth, and even through mindless rote repeating over and over and over again, that mold us into who God wants us to be.

We believe in a God who, with a word, created something out of nothing. We believe in a God who shows us that words have tremendous creative power; and who also shows us that words that have devastating power to destroy. We believe in a God whose word is written on our hearts. We believe in a God who saves us through the Word that was made flesh.

That’s why we’re careful about the words we use in church. I know I am. Although some of you might not think so. But when I craft the liturgies and compose my sermons, I linger over every word. I try to be colloquial and parochial, hitting the balance between common language and sacred speech, between earthy nattering and heavenly declarations. It’s in the connection between those two realms that God lives in Jesus.

I try to link life and faith, connecting to where we say God is and where we haven’t thought about God being. In the words I offer you, and words I ask you to pray, I try to shape how you think about God in your life and in the world, because I believe in a God who creates a world with a word.

And today we celebrate the fact that God NOT stop speaking creation into being. Today we celebrate that God’s Word is still speaking life into the world. Today we celebrate because God has spoken the Word in YOU. God’s has spoken God’s New Creation story of Jesus in YOU. God has put the word of prayer on your tongue and the word of praise on your lips.

Now YOUR life becomes a Word - God’s Word. Your LIFE is the prayer Jesus prays. Your LIFE is the gospel message through which God proclaims. Your LIFE is the song through which God sings. Your word has been joined to God’s Word, so together all may know the love and forgiveness God has spoken in Jesus.

It’s a Word of healing you speak to all who are sick.
It’s a Word of comfort you speak to all who are grieving.
It’s a Word of peace you speak to all who are anxious.
It’s a Word of life you speak to all who are dying.

And in return you speak the world’s word back to God in prayer. You lift up the pains, the tragedies, the conflicts, the illnesses, the injustices of this troubled life to the One who promises to make all things new.

You are the one who calls upon God to make good on God’s promises.
 You are the translation between the world’s word and God’s Word.
 You are the Word through whom God is still creating the universe.

You are the message that tells the world, that there is forgiveness and freedom in Jesus.
 You are the Word that gives others a glimpse into the heart and mind of God, which is filled to overflowing with love and mercy.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word WAS God. The Word was with God in the beginning.”

That Word is still speaking. Just look to the person on your left. Now look to the person on your right. Look to the person in front of you. Now look to the person behind you.

What do you see?

I see God’s Word being spoken so loudly that it’s almost overwhelming. I see God’s love and mercy being proclaimed with great passion and joy. I see the Word-still-being-made-flesh.

I see Christmas.

May this be so among us. Amen!

Christmas Eve

2011-12-24T05:24:00.001-08:00

This being my first Christmas in Japan, one of the things I’ve found refreshing is that I don’t have to worry about people whining about the so-called “War on Christmas.”

If you follow the western news you might notice that every December a few commentators, pundits, bloggers, and blowhards decry the fact that some people offer the seasonal greeting by saying “Happy Holidays” instead of the more traditional “Merry Christmas.”

This makes some people’s heads explode. They’re worried that by saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” Christ is being taken out of Christmas, thereby being denied his rightful place in our December celebrations.

But I won’t comment on the fact that Christmas doesn’t start when Costco decides to put up their decorations, or when the radio stations start playing Christmas muzak.

I won’t point out that Christmas actually starts tomorrow, December 25, the day when we actually celebrate Jesus’ birth.
I won’t mention that the song The 12 Days of Christmas alludes to the fact that Christmas runs from December 25 to January 5.

What I WILL say is that demanding that people bow down to the cultic consumer idol that Christmas has become, they are pushing people further away from what gives the Christmas story -the story of Jesus’ birth - it’s power.

They want Jesus at the centre of society. But they forget that Jesus wasn’t given a celebrity birth. Yes there were angels celebrating and singing in the sky. But Jesus was born in a barn far away from home to impoverished parents. He slept in a feeding trough surrounded by smelly animals, while a crowd gathered outside and visitors came and went. I can’t think of a less dignified birth.

So, for me, it’s, again, refreshing to be in a country that doesn’t have the cultural memory of Christmas. Japan is inventing Christmas for itself. And yes, it looks a lot like the Wal*Mart version of Christmas, which has more to do with Santa than Jesus. But Christians know that Christmas is so much more than what Tobu provides.

Christmas is about God inserting God’s self into history by being born as a first century, Mediterranean, Jewish peasant.

Christmas is about God making the whole world sacred by sharing the best and the worst of humanity.

Christmas is about God’s ongoing commitment to life by being born to a world obsessed with death.

Christmas is about God reaching out and gathering the whole world to God.

If this story is new to you, don’t worry. It’s new to many people. And it was new to most of those who gathered at the stable after the angel announced Jesus’ birth.

Most of those who were summoned to the manger were those who had been shut out of the halls of economic, religious, and political power. They were the 99%. They muddled through their days hoping that their lives would get better, even though they didn’t expect that they would.

They heard over and over and over again that they were insignificant little nothings, whose existence would never be remembered, much less celebrated. They were told that they had no direct access to God.

So, they had to pay the priests with money they didn’t have to gain forgiveness from a God they barely knew.

The system was broken. The deck was stacked against them. They had hope, but little expectation that anything would ever change.

I wonder if we see the same thing today.

People muddle through their lives directionless, devoid of purpose other than paying the bills and crashing in front of the TV. Work can be a meaningless slog up a slippery hill. Relationships break. Families fall apart.

And when people seek after God they often find even more troubles and burdens from those who claim to speak for God.

There’s so much religion out there whose chief aim is to make you feel badly about yourself. There’s so much religion out there who makes money off of YOUR guilt.

There’s so much religion out there that demands perfect moral behaviour from you, that trades on your shame, that requires that you hide those parts of your life that need healing but that others would judge you on.

There’s so much religion out there that tries to strip you of your humanity, denying your failures, your grief, your regrets, proclaiming a false victory in your life. There’s so much religion out there that asks you to ignore your pain in order to fit their tiny view of God.

But the Christmas story tells us something very different. The Christmas story tells us that God dropped Jesus down right in the middle of the world’s pain. God dropped Jesus down in the middle of YOUR pain. YOUR shame. YOUR sin. YOUR Death. By dropping Jesus right down in the middle of your aching failures God is saying to YOU:

‘You don’t have to hide anything from from me because I know everything about you. You don’t have to hide your shame. Your grief. Your loneliness. Your addictions.

‘You don’t have to hide your resentments and discouragement. You don’t have to hide your fear, your lack of faith, or doubts.

‘You don’t have to hide those moments when you wonder if life is worth living at all. In fact I will share them with you. I will take those burdens from you.

“Others may reject you. But I embrace you.
Others may point out your faults. But I celebrate your gifts.
Others may hold a grudge. But I forgive you for everything wrong you’ve done.
Others may demand that you stay locked in place, weighed down by social expectations. But I will give you wings so you can fly.

“I will wipe your tears. I will heal your pain. I will die your death so that you can rise to new and everlasting life as the beloved child of God that I made you to be.”

Today Jesus is saying from the manger,

“If you want to know who God is, just look at me, hear my words and feel my embrace.

‘When you’re longing to see a better tomorrow keep your eyes wide open because the future is as bright as a resurrection morning.

‘If you want to know eternal life, trust that I know what to do with you after you’ve closed your eyes.”

Jesus came so that YOU may have abundant life.
Jesus came so that YOU can live in the freedom and joy of being God’s child.
Jesus came so that YOU can be forgiven and set on a new path.
Jesus came so that your past will NOT dictate the future that God has for you.

Because of Jesus you have a new chance at life.
Because of Jesus you can know that your tomorrow will be better than today.
Because of Jesus you can know that the God who created the universe holds you in the palm of his hand.

So now you can go back out into the world carrying Jesus with you, giving birth to life and hope wherever you go.

You can go out into the world spreading peace and joy to you meet.

You can go out into the world shining God’s light in life’s dark corner’s.

You can go back out into the world singing the song of the angels, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and peace and goodwill to all the world!”

That’s Christmas. That’s why we celebrate.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Advent 3B

2011-12-10T22:33:00.001-08:00

If you think you’re having a deja vu experience, don’t worry, you are. For some reason, the lectionary gives us John the Baptist two Sundays in a row during Advent. Why they think we need two doses of the wilderness preacher is a mystery to me.

But here we are with John’s version of, umm, John. “John” must have been a popular name back then because it takes an accountant to keep track of them all in the bible. So John, the writing evangelist, tells us about John the Baptist as someone who plays a specific role in the salvation story. The Baptist howls in the wilderness, preparing people to receive God’s anointed one.

The Baptist wasn’t like anyone else they’d ever heard. Which is why John had to make sure that people didn’t mistake the Baptist for “The Light.” John emphasized that the Baptist was simply “...a voice crying out in the wilderness...”

“A voice crying out in the wilderness...”

I don’t know what your experience has been with this expression, but, for me, there’s always been a kind of romance to this saying. The romance of adventure, the romance of passion, of fighting the good fight, of challenging the status quo, of siding with the oppressed, of battling injustice, of speaking uncomfortable truths to power.

But to many unbelieving ears, saying that we are “ a voice crying out in the wilderness...” is akin to Don Quixote “tilting at windmills...” but proud of it.

And as churches are declining in the west, and we face our own challenges at St. Paul’s, we may be tempted to see ourselves simply as “a voice crying out in the wilderness” because it gives us comfort when we don’t see our church bearing the kind of fruit that it once did. We get used to being marginalized, justifying our diminished state.

We are a voice crying out in the wilderness, although we are in the city centre, we are spiritually hours away from the power centres, far from the rushing crowds, hidden amongst the trees, and miles off the main road. To find us you have to look for us. In fact, people walk by us not even realizing we are here.

So, some Christians are tempted to take heart in withdrawing from the mainstream and opting out of society. We celebrate how different we are, as if “different” somehow means “better.”

If you want to hear what we say, you really have to listen, you really have to want to hear it. We are a voice crying out in the wilderness, you have to stop what you’re doing and unplug your iPod to make out our words.

To prepare for my ministry with and among you I read a series of books on small churches, and how they’re different from large churches. Many of the authors noted that many small churches function like they’re large churches. Especially if they’re part of a denomination that requires them to have certain core programming. They rightly note that when small churches mimic the programming, staffing, and worship of larger churches, resources are stressed to the snapping point. Members burn out. Bank accounts get emptied. And morale plummets.

And that’s true.

So, one guy - a small church pastor - in an effort to combat this phenomenon used a baseball analogy to help small churches getter a better perspective on their place in the world.

He said to think of the large church like Major League Baseball. The large church is the New York Yankees, with their inflated budgets and high batting averages, and enough resources to try to snap up Japanese players. These are the big boys.

Small churches, by contrast, are like little league, where everyone gets together on weekends and has fun. There are few home runs, but no one makes the hall of fame. Friendships are built and everyone goes home smiling.

I almost threw the book across the room when I read that. Unless I totally missed his point, he seemed to be saying that large churches are the experts, the ones REALLY good at what they do. These are the pros from which the rest of us learn, to whom we can aspire, and for whom we can cheer.

And WE - the small churches - are the amateurs, the children, who are still learning how to be church, and perhaps, someday make it to the big leagues. But really - let’s not kid ourselves - the best we can do is play beer ball on Saturday evenings.

Although I’ve only been here just over a month, I can say with absolute certainty, that while St. Paul’s is a small church, you are NOT amateurs. You are NOT spiritual children. This church is NOT little league. Your hard work, dedication, and faithfulness are NOT worth less than a large downtown church. You are a people with unique strengths and talents that can make a powerful impact where you are.

I’m guessing that the guy who used that baseball analogy didn’t thoroughly think through the consequences of that comparison. Other than it being untrue and insulting, it also lets small churches off the missional hook. It allows small churches to think, “We’re small, we’re not as a good as the big church down the street, so what can we do?”

Spiritual and missional inadequacy is a disease that plagues small churches. And it’s often nurtured by leaders, who, worn out after years of fighting uphill battles to make the church grow, convince themselves that their losses are victories.

Some theologians have taken this a step further saying that large churches sell out to consumer culture while small churches remain true to God’s mustard seed vision of the church. That they are the voice crying out in the wilderness, away from the world’s power centres, and siding with the world’s forgotten.

I would agree with this, except that many theologians and small church pastors who proudly proclaim the purity of the small church’s faithfulness against the ecclesiastical Wal-Marts, are often the first ones to run to their Facebook pages to announce the “full church [they] had to today.” Everyone craves significance. And in our consumer culture, size presumes impact.

And those who who blithely say that “size doesn’t matter” are often the large church pastors for whom resources are not a problem. Or they’re small church leaders who are intentionally blind to their church’s financial reality.

So, instead of baseball to compare the size and importance of churches, I prefer to use a musical analogy. I like to think of the big church as a symphony. It requires massive resources to keep it functioning. Some music is specifically written for them, simply because of its make up. And when it’s performed well, the results can be stunningly transcendent. The symphony is its own unique form.

A small church is like a chamber ensemble. Much fewer resources are needed to keep them playing. The players need lots of eye contact and body signals to keep them in sync. There’s an intimacy that’s lost on the symphony, both among they musicians and the listener. And composers write music specifically for this small group. And, again, the chamber ensemble is its own unique form.

So, is a chamber ensemble “little league” and the symphony “big league”? The Tokyo String Quartet would certainly have an answer to that question.

And like a chamber ensemble, every part is needed to make the music come alive. In a symphony, if a violist scratches her nose, the music isn’t affected because there are other violists playing the same part.

But in a brass trio, if the trombone player sneezes, he blows a hole in the music, and people notice.

That’s like us here at St. Paul’s. When your part isn’t being played, people notice. Here, at St. Paul’s, we need YOU to make our little chamber ensemble play the music that God has put in front of us. St. Paul’s needs YOU to play the music of our mission, our mission to live and proclaim God’s love and mercy in the world. The mission of God’s Kingdom come to earth in Jesus. The mission of sharing God’s justice, grace, peace, and joy to everyone who walks through or past our doors.

St. Paul’s needs YOU and the powerful gifts that YOU have. YOU have an important and unique part to play in the chamber ensemble that is St. Paul’s. St. Paul’s can’t function without YOU. When YOU aren’t here, there’s a hole in our music. When you ARE here, we come together in joyful harmony. And together, we make music to the praise of God.

St. Paul’s may be a voice crying out in the wilderness. But you are a MIGHTY voice, preparing the world to receive its saviour, making a path for Jesus to enter peoples’ lives, shining God’s light in the dark corners of the world.

As we move forward in mission, as we discern together the future that God has for us, please know that YOU are a part of that future. God has put you HERE to do great and wonderful things for God. YOU have a part to play in God’s salvation song.

May this be so among us. Amen!

Advent 2B

2011-12-03T14:52:00.002-08:00

“Prepare the way of the Lord! Make the Lord’s path straight!” says John the Baptist.

I know what he means. In my first week here in Tokyo I decided to go for a walk, to get to know the area a little bit better. It’s hard to get to know a place from a subway car or from a seat on a train.

Still in Alberta mode, where the streets are a grid, I wandered from the office to, what I assumed was the area of the Tokyo Dome. It didn’t look that far on the map, so I charted my route, thinking that it was just a quick north east from the front door of the church.

Well, I kept walking, and walking, and walking, and walking. And walking. And no Tokyo Dome anywhere in sight. I looked on my map and none of the street names were listed.

Since I had a general idea of where I was I tapped on the compass on my iPhone, and I knew I had to go south west to get to where I wanted to be. So I followed the compass for quite a few blocks.

After walking for another hour or so, I thought to myself, “This is crazy. I really gotta figure out where I am.”

So I stepped into a 7-11 and asked the clerk, “Tokyo Dome?”

She looked at me funny as if to say, “Really?”

So I asked again, “Tokyo Dome”?

She looked at me quizzically and pointed. I looked in the direction she was pointing, and THERE it was staring down at me! I didn’t see it because I was concentrating on the streets and not the buildings.

I tried to figure out how I could have gotten so far from my mark. After all I had stayed on one street. But then I realized that the streets weren’t straight. And apparently they weren’t MEANT to be straight. I’ve been told that the streets here in Tokyo were built in such a way as to confuse the enemy.

And I say, Job well done! While I hope I’m not the enemy, the streets sufficiently confused me. And still do. I still get lost trying to find places. And it doesn’t help that the streets were designed for people to get lost in them.

You have to be from here to really get the streets. Or at least you have to be here a long time to understand how to get around without getting lost.

I wonder if that’s what it’s like to be Christian here in Japan. After all, Christians are a VERY small part of the population. Christianity isn’t indigenous to Japan and hasn’t been here very long historically. Christianity is still trying to find its way around the streets, and not get lost searching for its final destination.

“Prepare the way of the Lord,” the John the Baptist says, “Make the Lord’s path straight.”

The people of God known as Israel knew what it was like to try to navigate the streets in a strange land.

Some have said that the road John was talking about was the road they were required to build while in exile in Babylon. John, they say, was evoking a common memory. He was asking them to recall a time when the people of God know as “Israel” were captured and forced into slavey. And as slaves they were ordered to build a road each each year so that a procession honouring the pagan God Marduk could be celebrated.

The road would only be used once. It’s job was done. Then a new road for next year’s procession would have to be built.

So not only were they captured, taken from their home in Jerusalem and brought to a foreign land. They were enslaved, forced to work their hands raw to build a road celebrating the victories of a false god. They worked all year to build a road that was used only once. Then they started again on a new road. This went on year after year after year after year.

But now the announcement had come. God was bringing them out of exile. They were going home. Their penalty was paid, and their exile was over. So they packed up their stuff and started walking. Their path would not lead to a false god. But their path would led to the God who made heaven and the earth. The God who put the stars in the night. The God who rescued them from slavery and gave them a home. The God who chose them to shine God’s light in an often dark world.

And those standing at the Jordan River, listening to John, knew this story and they knew their place in it. They knew exile. They knew the exile of not being welcome in the halls of official religion. They knew the exile of poverty. They knew the exile of pain. Of disease. Of loneliness. Of grief. Of hunger.

They knew the exile of broken family. They knew the exile of depression. They knew the exile of wondering if their lives have any meaning. They knew the exile of wondering if their death would go ungrieved.

They knew the exile of feeling separated from God.

These were the 99 percent. These were the ones who toiled day after day, scrounging for a scrap that fell from society’s table. These were the ones who thought that God had abandoned them long ago because they couldn’t measure up religion’s impossible demands. These were the ones aching for a God who would touch them, wash them clean, and give them a new life.

So that’s where John appeared. John waist deep in the Jordan River, the river that the people crossed from the wilderness to the Promised Land, gazed out in the crowd, and everyone thought to themselves, “He’s looking straight at me.”

Yes he was. John stood in front of the crowd, and the look in his eye said, he knows you. I mean he REALLY knows you. He hasn’t met you before and doesn’t know your name but he has you all figured out.

He knows what hides in the secret chambers of your heart. He knows what you do when nobody’s looking.

He knows your shame and he knows your pain. He knows all that stuff you’d rather keep quiet and hidden. He can see it in your eyes.

He can see in the way you keep staring at the ground while he’s preaching.

He can see it in the way you walk. He can see it in your phony self-assured strut or with your hunched back, stooped from being beaten down by the world. He knows the secrets you harbour.

He knows your failings. He knows your broken places. He knows those moments of weakness that, if ever came to light, your life would end.

He knows about your cancer. Your failed marriage. The feeling that life is passing you by.

He knows about the grief that tearing your heart into rags.

He knows how you just can’t put down that bottle.

He knows how you just can’t let go of a lifetime of resentment.

He knows that some days you feel so lost and purposeless that you wonder if life is worth living at all.

Yes. He knows ALL of this. That’s why he’s so loved and so feared. But when he looks at you and excavates the buried hurts that lie in deepest alcoves of your soul, his eyes soften and he pleads with you, “Prepare the way of the Lord. Make his path straight.”

But, instead of scolding you for your moral failings, or telling you to stop blaming others for your troubles, he leads you to the shore of the Jordan River and reminds you that when the people of God were liberated from their slavery in Egypt, they crossed the Jordan which led to the Promised Land.

Then, looking so deeply into your eyes that you’re afraid you’ll melt, he opens his arms and says, “Your exile is over. Enter the water of freedom. God is giving you a fresh start. God is putting you on a straight path. It’s time for you to start over. It’s time for you to begin again.”

The Baptist was giving out second chances. That’s the gift you are given each and every day when you remember the gift of your own baptism. The gift of starting over. The gift of a new beginning. The gift of rising each new day knowing that you are forgiven and free. The gift of knowing that yesterday is behind, and today is full of new, fresh possibilities.

The gift of knowing that you are used by God for great things in this world. The gift of knowing that God is doing something special and loving with your life. The gift of knowing that God’s love shines through you.

The gift of knowing that whenever the world knocks you down, you will rise again to meet whatever challenges come your way.

Even though, as Christians, you are one percent in Japan, you are 100 percent in God. You are a people chosen by God to lead others to the waters of life. You who gather in love and scatter to serve, so that God’s name and God’s love may be known in this part of the world.

Get you up to a high mountain, O St. Paul’s, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O people of God, lift it up, do not fear; say to a world needing a word of grace, “Here is your God!”

May this be so among us! Amen!

Advent 1B

2011-11-27T00:51:00.000-08:00

On May 21, 2011 I was on a plane traveling from from Minneapolis, Minnesota to Calgary, Alberta, having just finished attending a five day preaching conference, when I remembered the date, and a bead of sweat appeared on my brow.

How could I have forgotten so easily? After all it had been in the news for months. Warnings had appeared in my email inbox, billboards were erected all over the world, the TV was overflowing with news stories sounding the alarm for us to be aware of the impending scene about to unfold. Houses and businesses were sold in preparation. Millions of dollars were raised in the effort to make sure that the whole world knew what was about to take place on May 21, 2011.

As many of us were told, May 21, 2011 was to be the Day of Judgment. It was the Day when Christ would return in glory. It was the Day when God would judge the nations, and the dead shall rise in judgment, the righteous to be lifted up into heaven and the unrighteous left behind for destruction. It was a day of salvation and chaos. Heavenly joy and earthly suffering. A day when the good receive their reward and the the bad endure eternal punishment. It was a day when history was to come to a screeching halt.

And I was on a plane wondering if the pilot was among the righteous, lifted out of his earthly existence at cruising altitude upon Christ’s return. I wondered if he would go to his heavenly reward at 38000 ft, leaving the plane’s driver’s seat empty. Being that far up I’m guessing he wouldn’t have far to go. But then what would the rest of us do?

But then, three hours later, the plane landed safely in Calgary, the pilot still at the helm. I looked out the window and earth bound existence seemed no worse for ware. There was no fiery landscape, no weeping and gnashing of teeth. No mothers wailing or blood soaked mountains anywhere to be seen. The sun had not been vanquished by the night.

When I stepped off the plane I saw that it was just another day in Calgary. Sunny. Warm. Nothing to get excited about.

“H’uh,” I thought to myself. “It looks like Harold Camping was wrong.”

As many of you know, Harold Camping is the American doomsday preacher who prophesied May 21, 2011 to being the End of the World. Having been a lifelong student of the bible, he believed he cracked the code and did the math, calculating the date when Christ would once again, step foot on terra firma.

And people believed him. Even though he’d been wrong before. Some of his followers quit their jobs and sold everything they had to warn the world of the coming doom. Millions of dollars were spent in advertising.

And then....nothing happened.

After his humiliating mistake Camping said, “Oh! I must have dropped a decimal point. Silly me. I meant OCTOBER 21, not MAY. Oops!”

And when that second prediction failed to materialize, Camping became strangely quiet. His radio talk show ended, and we stopped hearing from him. And then Time magazine listed his warnings as one of the “Top 10 Failed Predictions.”

It’s easy to make fun of these preachers who seem to believe they have special access to God that rest of us don’t have. But what I find so frustrating about Camping and preachers like him, is that they haven’t really read the bible they say they believe to be God’s Word. If it is true that Jesus will one day return in glory and judgment, then surely today’s gospel needs to be part of the conversation

Jesus says,

“But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. 33Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come.”

So, if anyone tells you that they know the date, time, and place of Christ’s return, they’re either lying or they’re wrong. And I’m not sure that this passage means what they say it means.

Many people call this passage, “Mark’s Little Apocalypse” but I don’t think there’s anything “little” about it. It’s about cosmic forces colliding, and the power of God returning to fill the earth.

And Christians have been reading this story for 2000 years, expecting Jesus to return shortly after lunch. But of course, he hasn’t. And it makes thoughtful Christians wonder what we mean when we confess that Jesus will “come again to judge the living and the dead” as we do each week in the Apostles’ Creed.

But what this passage assumes is that Jesus will be, somehow, absent, from us. It assumes that his physical presence is more potent than his presence with us through the Holy Spirit. And I’m not sure that’s what Jesus wants. Because if we keep our eyes fixed on what God WILL do we miss what God is ALREADY doing.

When Jesus tells us to “keep awake” I wonder if he also means to keep awake for the signs that he is ALREADY here with and among us.

It’s like he’s saying, Keep your eyes open to the wonderful, life-giving signs of God present among you today. Keep your eyes peeled to God’s promised future reaching back and touching you in your life TODAY! Right NOW! In this place!

Keep awake to the care that’s shared between two wounded people. Keep awake to the concerned phone call to someone whom you know is hurting. Keep awake to the stranger who is looking for food. Keep awake to the prayers said at a hospital bedside. Keep awake to promises of the resurrection to eternal life heard and believed while standing over a loved one’s grave.

Keep awake to the joy of knowing that you are a child of God, beloved and chosen to do great things in this world. Keep awake to the gift of life that rises with each new day.

If you want to see what God’s future looks like, just watch a baby. After all isn’t that what we’re waiting for this season? We’re waiting, preparing to meet Jesus in a Bethlehem manger. We’re waiting with hopeful anticipation for God to show us that God’s world’s is filled with immense possibility. We’re preparing to receive God’s promised future in our lives TODAY. We’re watching to see that God has not abandoned the world, but that God is deep IN the world, transforming it and and US from the inside out.

We’re preparing to meet the one who brings peace and salvation, justice and mercy, forgiveness and grace. We’re preparing to greet the one who brings love and healing to a troubled world.

Jesus isn’t talking about the earth’s destruction. Jesus is talking about the world’s creation and re-creation. Jesus is talking about YOU and YOUR re-creation, as Christ is born within you. Jesus is telling YOU to keep awake to the awesome things God is doing in YOU and through YOU. It’s about the FULFILLMENT of what God is already doing among you and us. It a call to keep your eyes wide open to what God is doing HERE. TODAY. In YOUR life and in mine. And in the life of the whole family of God.

So keep alert. Keep your eyes open. You don’t want to miss what God is doing.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Pentecost 22A

2011-11-12T22:36:00.001-08:00

This story from Matthew’s gospel starts out really well, doesn’t it? Then it takes, a nasty, nasty, turn.

The boss is heading out of town and leaves his staff in charge. He’s not the type of let his money sit around doing nothing, he wants to put this cash to work for him while he’s gone. He’s probably the one who usually handles the finances, but this time he delegates.

He’s a savvy enough investor that he knows how to make money while he’s sleeping. He knows the difference between earned income and residual income and passive income. He’s probably part of the one percent, and had to step over some Occupy protestors to get to his waiting limousine to take him to the airport.

It’s clear he TRUSTS his staff to invest his money wisely. He wouldn’t leave his hard-earned money with just anyone. Since he’s probably the one who trained and mentored them, sharing the wisdom of what it takes to build a successful investment firm, he releases his capital according to each person’s abilities. We hear that one guy received 5 talents, another 3, and another one.

After his trip abroad, the boss comes home to find that the first two doubled their investment. Great job! They did exactly what the boss expected them to do. They get a promotion, a raise, and a couple extra weeks holiday.

But the third guy, afraid to take a risk, leery of the instability of the stock market and afraid of losing it all in real estate, buries the money in the backyard. An inelegant yet safe approach to protecting his assets.

This is where the story gets ugly.

The boss’s eyes burn and his skin turns red. The poor, lowly, slave, cowers under his bosses wrath, justifying his behaviour,

“I know you are a harsh man...I didn’t want to get into trouble if I lost you money....!”

“You knew, did you, that I’m a harsh man...so now I’ll REALLY show you what harshness looks like.”

The boss grabs him by the collar, drags him to the door, and throws him out into the cold night air.

The boss didn’t loose anything. But he didn’t gain anything either. What I think got the boss so angry was that this guy didn’t even try, there was NO attempt - even a tiny one - to build on what he had given him. A savings account or even a guaranteed income certificate would have given him at least a modest return (if it wasn’t eaten away by banking fees). No the third guy hid the money where it couldn’t be used. The boss was enraged because all the possibility that money brings is hidden and locked away, under the guise of safety and security.

So the boss, in a fit of excessive managerial rage, strips the scared hapless grunt of the money he was given, and was pushed out into the darkness. There was no sympathy for poor performance, and no room for error. His job was to make money for the boss. No return on investment? Then no job. Period.

Sounds like an awful place to work, doesn’t it? Do you have a boss like that? I’d hate to hear how some of my former staff would answer that!

I find it unsettling that this story should have such a nasty ending like this. After all, this could be such a POSITIVE parable. This could be about how we use our gifts to build on what God is doing. It could be an affirmation of the joy people get when put to work doing something that brings our their passions.

Instead we get an ugly threat. And people don’t usually respond well to ugly threats.

So it makes me ask: where is God in this passage? The traditional reading is that God is the boss, and as the boss, expects great things from us, or we’ll suffer the consequences.

But I have trouble seeing God that way. There’s no forgiveness, no mercy, and no grace here. If we read this story with God as the boss then God becomes a nasty, punishing, overlord, who demands high levels of spiritual performance from us.

The boss cannot be God, because God does not behave this way.

You might point out that is was the boss who gave out the talents, and isn’t God who gives us our gifts?

But I want to ask, who gave the boss the talents to give out? He wasn’t born with them. He may have earned them, but these talents passed through his fingers. He was the steward - or caretaker - of the talents, not the provider. And as a steward - or caretaker - he wisely invested them. But he also harshly judged those who didn’t live up to his performance standards.

That’s why I see the boss as the church. As US. I’ve been around the church long enough to know that the church brings out peoples’ best and peoples’ worst. Even a quick glimpse at church history shows that many church leaders often used people to build the institution rather than use the institution to build people. After all, the Reformation that gave birth to the Lutheran church was a response to how church leaders forgot that God was interested in growing faith, not in creating structures of political power and empires of wealth.

But the could be others as well

The boss could be the culture, the voices of the past; your parents, your teachers, your pastors, your friends, anyone who made you so scared that you buried your talents, that you hid those gifts that God wants you use for the life of the world, the skills that bring joy, peace, and healing to others.

We all have the “boss” in our lives, standing over our shoulders, making sure we won’t make a mistake, and threatening to punish us when we do. Everyone has a voice whispering threats in our ears.

Who is YOUR “boss”? Who is it in YOUR life that keeps you in such fear that you bury your talents so they won’t be used?

This past week’s bible study we talked about Steve Jobs, and asked whether or not there could be a Japanese version of him. Most agree that, no there couldn’t. That Japanese culture demands conformity at the expense of individual creativity. And that, somehow, makes Japanese culture deficient.

I don’t know if that’s true or not, and that’s certainly not for me to decide, but it did get me thinking. Yes, we say that North American culture created the environment for a Steve Jobs to emerge, and that he represents the best of North American aspirations. His innovation, risk taking, and creativity represented all that North Americans strive for. We like to take collective credit for his individual accomplishments.

But then I realized that Steve Jobs is the exception, not the norm. Which is why there was such an outpouring of emotion upon his death. He may be symbol of what North Americans SAY they aspire to, but in reality, North Americans are not the ones who take their talents and invest them wisely. North Americans pay lip service to innovation, individuality, and that anyone can chase after their dreams and create their own destiny.

But in reality, North Americans encourage conformity, walk the easy path plopping in front of the TV or computer after work, and pursue the comfortable if diminished dream. North Americans celebrate the weirdoes only when the weirdoes are successful. We mock failure. So most don’t even try to excel.

So, I don’t think either Japanese or North Americans, or ANYONE has a lock on what helps people grow into who they were created to be. That famous Japanese saying about the “nail that stands up gets hammered down” is just as true anywhere else in the world as it is here. At least, here in Japan, people are honest about it.

As Christians, we are asked to walk a different path. Our job is not the be the “boss” in the story, but to fire him if he gets in the way of what God is doing.

Our job as Christians is NOT to throw people into the darkness but to help them SHINE in the world, to show them how much God loves them, to help build on what God has given them, to affirm their gifts and to set them loose into other peoples’ lives bringing peace and healing to those who need it..

And we can start by shining OUR lights, the light’s that WE have been given, by using our gifts, skills, and passion for the sake of other for the the life of the world.

In a few weeks or months, we’ll be offering the workshop on discovering your spiritual gifts, so you can use them for the good of the church and the life of the world.

And so, as Christians, followers of the crucified and risen Jesus, Paul reminds us in today’s second reading, as he reminded the church in Thessalonika, “let us be sober, and put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation. For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him. Therefore encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing.

That is who we are. That is what we do. May this be so among us. Amen.

All Saints Sunday

2011-11-05T14:33:00.001-07:00

First. Class. Doormat. That’s what I said to myself as a little boy and heard this passage from Matthew for the first time.

And I’m not alone. American civil rights activist, Malcolm X once noted that oppressed people will continue to be oppressed if they follow this teaching. And US comedian Bill Maher likes to make fun of this “crazy” teaching that sets people up for abuse.

Those of us who’ve been around the church for a while might find Malcolm’s and Bill’s comments offensive. After all, they’re the words of Jesus, and their sharp edge might have dulled in our ears from years of hearing them.

But to fresh ears, Jesus’ words can sound astonishingly naive. Or even dangerous to our well being.

Blessed our the poor in spirit....blessed are those who mourn...blessed are the meek, the merciful, the peacemaker, and the persecuted.

Most of these are parts of ourselves that we’d rather keep hidden, aren’t they? These are human attributes that we’re trying to avoid. We don’t want to be on the same city block of mourning, or of meekness, or even of peacemaking.

We spend more time and energy trying to look strong. We put on brave faces to share with others, so we won’t look weak.

And this week, I’ve been wracking my brain trying to figure out why these readings have been assigned to All Saints Sunday.

To me it seems that we’re being asked to celebrate those who’ve lived according to Jesus’ impossible standard in this passage if finding blessing in tragedy. We’re supposed to remember with thanks those who have succeeded in the Christian life and are now gathered around the throne singing praises to God. We’re supposed to want to emulate the heroic faith of Saints past, who joyfully divested themselves of worldly pain and now reap the rewards of heavenly peace.

But that’s not something I want to do. Because if we spend our time looking at other peoples’ spiritual “successes,” our faith lives can look small. And we learn the wrong lessons.

I think the Christian life isn’t measured by our successes, but by our scars. It’s our weaknesses and failures that make us strong. It’s in our crosses that we find resurrection.
 I stopped regularly wearing a clerical collar because I found that it ceased doing what it was supposed to do. I found that the clerical collar wasn’t a way INTO peoples’ lives, but was keeping me out. I noticed that people were talking to the ring around my neck rather than to me. And they were parsing their words.

And because of that, I saw that people were hiding information from me. They were afraid that I’d judge them for their mistakes and hurts. They were afraid that my uniform meant that I was in the business of condemning them for their failures rather than being an agent of God’s mercy and forgiveness. My job was getting in the way of doing my job.

The phone rang and I recognized the number on the call display and wasn’t going to answer it. But the guilt-ridden sucker in me wouldn’t let me ignore someone who I knew needed my help.

“Hi pastor, I need you to pick up my daughter’s prescription and take it to her apartment...” said the voice on the other end of the line.

I sighed.

What was I, a delivery service? Why does she assume that I have time to drop everything to pick up some pills, then drive across town to drop them off?

But rather than get into a heated argument with this particular person, like I so often did before, I decided I’d help her and her daughter.

“Where can I pick them up?” I asked.

I was still grumbling when I drove across the city to the outskirts where she lived. I put my “Clergy Parking -Emergency” sign on my windshield hoping that it might discourage vandals or thieves, since she was living in a drug-addled neighbourhood.

She buzzed me in and I and made my way through the haze of marijuana smoke that loitered in the air. I was worried about the smell sticking to my clothes and having to answer some uncomfortable questions when I got home.

I knocked on her door. When she opened it and saw me in my work clothes, it looked like her eyes were going to pop out of her sockets. She wasn’t expecting - for what she knew - a priest to deliver her medication.

She invited me in and told me her story. She’d been arrested for stealing a car. She had a history of drug abuse, and so the judge put her under house arrest.

She sat up straight in her chair with her hands folded on her lap as we talked. She was choosing her words carefully. It was clear that she didn’t trust me.

“Thank you for picking up my pills, pastor” she said. “They keep the demons in their cages.”

“What demons?” I asked.

“Depression,” she said, examining my face for a reaction.

“How are you finding the medicine? Is it helping?” I asked.

“Sort of,” she answered. “They keep me functioning. But they make me feel like I’m just going through the motions. I have no highs or lows. They steal the flavour from life.”

“Yeah,” I noticed the same thing when I was on them.

Her eyes widened.

“YOU!?” she shouted? “Why would a pastor need pills for depression!?”

“We all need help from time to time,” I said.

Her shoulders relaxed and the muscles on her face softened. Then the REAL conversation began. She talked about her bully of an ex-husband, the impossible expectations of a perfectionist mom, and the life she dreamed of having.

I realized that she was sharing so openly with me, NOT because I had a collar around my neck and the word “reverend” in front of my name. In fact those things kept us at a distance.

She shared so openly because I shared her brokenness. I wasn’t preaching from a mountain top as one with all the spiritual answers.

But we communed as two children of God bound by our frail humanity. And I think that could be the blessing that Jesus talked about when he said, “Blessed are you who are poor in spirit, for yours is the kingdom of heaven.”

That phrase, “Kingdom of heaven” isn’t describing a disembodied existence of heavenly bliss far away from the dirt and pain of earthly life.

But the kingdom of heaven is wherever God is healing the sick and raising the dead. The kingdom of heaven is wherever God is working within our lives and the world that God so loves. The kingdom of heaven is wherever two or more people gather to share their common frail humanity, trusting that God can use them for God’s resurrection purposes.

As we begin our ministry together, it is my greatest hope and most heartfelt prayer that this community will be marked with God’s healing power in the brokenness of our lives. That our mission is to serve each other and the world God loves through our common human frailty rather than worldly strength and power. Because it’s in the midst of weakness and pain - the crosses of our lives - that God’s resurrection work is done.

It is your wounds that give you power. It is your scars that give you strength. It is your tears that give you wisdom. It is your weakness that gives you authority to minister to others in Jesus’ name.

And together, as we join the saints of every time and every place, joined together in our common need for a saviour, we will sing with one voice, Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever!

May this be so among us! Amen!

Pentecost 19A (Farewell Sermon at Good Shepherd)

2011-10-23T12:22:00.000-07:00

I have to admit, I’d been putting off writing this sermon. A part of me didn’t want this chapter of my story to end, and this sermon is my final pastoral act with and among you. In fact I waited until this morning to write this.

I can hardly believe today is here. It’s hard to comprehend that, in two Sundays from now, I’ll be standing in a pulpit in Tokyo, Japan, opening my mouth, and hoping - praying! - for the best; that my new congregation will be as receptive as you have been to my preaching.

Folks have been asking why I decided to take a new call. The short answer is this: It’s the best way I feel I can move on with my life. While R and I are on VERY good terms, I still see Lethbridge as a place WE are. And after two years of separation, and a divorce that will become final this coming week, I feel like I need a fresh start in a new city, somewhere I’d never been, to begin anew.

And I have never been to Japan. I’ve never been off the continent. I’ve never really had an adventure like this before. Call it a midlife crisis if you want, but I recently turned 42 and it feels like I need to spend the second half of my life exploring areas of myself, the world, and God’s place in it, in ways that I wouldn’t have dreamed of in the first half.

So, my move has nothing to do with you. You have been a WONDERFUL partner in ministry. And I thank you for eight AWESOME years together.

A lot has happened since that cold day in November 2003. I arrived with a wife and one kid. And now I leave with two kids and minus one wife. I was fit and trim when I moved here from Halifax. And now I’m...ummm....well....not.

And you’re not the same either. We’ve welcomed many new people, and have said good-bye to many faithful members. We’ve tried some new ministries. Some have succeeded, and some have not.

We have an elevator that changes both the look and the witness of our church. It tells visitors that we value EVERYONE; that EVERYONE can participate in every ministry of the church.

But I have seen this congregation change more in the last 3 months than in the last 8 years. And sadly, it hasn’t been a good change. The issues of gay marriage and the ordination of gays and lesbians have wreaked havoc on our community. These issues have created dividing lines where there hasn’t been previously.

Relationships are strained. Some families have left even though nothing has changed in either policy or practice. Some people are not talking to some other people.

One’s stance on these issues has become the litmus on test on how we, not only judge the other person’s faithfulness, but decide whether or not one can be friends - in the same church - with someone with whom we disagree. And that troubles me. That’s not the Christian way.

While the issue of how we can faithfully minister to our gay and lesbian sisters and brothers evokes strong emotions, I worry that sexuality will be the defining mark of our life together, rather than our faith in the God revealed in Jesus Christ. The issue of sexuality has the power to tear our church family apart at the stitching.

But Good Shepherd is better than that. I know you’re better than that because I’ve seen you be better. You have worked too hard to build this church into the loving, caring, dynamic congregation that it has been through most of your history. You have prayed too many prayers together to allow this church to descend into division.

You have been to too many bedsides, visited too many shut-ins, attended too many funerals, danced at too many weddings, witnessed too many baptisms, sang too many hymns, ate at too many potlucks, and received too many eucharists, together to simply walk away from the life you have created, from the years of faithful service, from the love that has bound you together since the church began.

You are STRONGER and you are BETTER than anything that threatens to destroy what has been so carefully and lovingly built.

I know that you are stronger and better than your divisions because I have seen you at your best. I have seen this congregation respond to terrible tragedy with tremendous compassion. I have seen your arms wide open to anyone who walks through our doors. I have seen you laugh at each other’s jokes, and cry with each other’s losses.

In other words, I have seen you take seriously what in today’s gospel, Jesus called “The Greatest Commandment;” the command to love God and love neighbour.

I have seen you remember that being a Christian is about loving people, not simply being “right.” I have seen you sacrifice for each other and for folks you would never meet, but who need your help. I have seen you open your hearts to those desperate for a word of grace.

It is my deepest desire and most heartfelt prayer that you will continue on this path; the path that you have walked so faithfully for so many years.

It is my hope and my prayer that, when you confess each Sunday, that you “[believe] in the communion of saints” the principle that reminds us that we are bound together, not by belief, or morality, or even by doctrine, but we are joined together by faith in what God has done for us in Jesus, that you will live it out in all that you do together.

I pray that you will continue to see each other as sisters and brothers of the crucified and risen Jesus, not as opponents on opposite side of an issue that has nothing to do with salvation.

It is my hope and my prayer that love will continue to be your witness, that you will show the world how to love. That you will shine with the brightness of God’s love.

Your distinctive witness will be how you love each other, and how you are committed to each other, even when it’s hard. Even when you disagree. Even when you don’t want to. You love because God is love, and you are in God. You love because that’s who you are. That’s what you do.

And that love begins here, as you forgive each other for the wrongs you have done to each other. And I ask that you DO forgive each other for the hurts, words, dissensions, and divisions that have wounded your relationship with your sisters and brothers. I ask that forgiveness permeate this family of faith, that it soaks into the walls, and seeps into your skin, and that you grow in the love and joy that God has waiting for you.

And today I ask YOUR forgiveness as I move on to a new adventure. I ask your forgiveness for the mistakes in ministry I’ve made over the past eight years.

For the visits not made, for the words poorly chosen, for the prayers unsaid, and for the meetings that somehow didn’t make it into my DayPlanner.

For unreturned phone calls and unanswered emails. For my moments of unpastorly behaviour. For my messy office.

I ask your forgiveness for the moments of discouragement and resentment. For the days when I failed to model the Christian life. For the sacraments given out in haste. And for the times I preached the gospel with less than the fiery zeal it deserves and demands.

And in return I forgive YOU. I forgive you for those moments when you forgot that I was not just a pastor, but also a person. I forgive you for the occasional angry word, the gossip about my personal life, and unfounded accusations. I forgive you for the threats and ultimatums, and for the times when you questioned my motives, my competence, and my faithfulness.

In other words, I forgive you for being less than perfect, as I ask YOUR forgiveness for being less than perfect, and as we ask EACH OTHER’S forgiveness for being less than perfect.

As I begin a new journey, I’m grateful that we can part as friends and partners in the gospel. I’m glad that we can bless each other’s future in confidence that God is still working with and among us, that both our futures are as bright as a resurrection morning, that the living God, revealed in Jesus Christ, gives us courage to meet whatever challenges come our way.

So, I give thanks and praise to God for this time that we’ve shared, and I look forward to the great and promised future, where we will, one day, share in the feast which has no end.

May this be so among all of us. Amen.

Pentecost 18A

2011-10-16T11:12:00.001-07:00

You can almost feel the tension rising. The way Matthew tells the story is that time after time, Jesus encounters these religious leaders who were trying to trap him, condemn him, and reveal him as a fraud, and time after time Jesus humiliates them.

This morning’s reading was probably the encounter that broke the camel’s back for both of them.

The religious leaders probably thought they were going to trap him once and for all. They start by buttering him up, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you don’t show favouritism. Tell us then, what do you think, Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?”

But Jesus sees right through them. And uses some pretty strong language,” Why are you trying to trip me up, you hypocrites?”

Then he asks, “Who has one of those idolatrous coins on them, the ones that taxes are paid with?” One of the religious leaders fumbles in his pocket and pulls out a coin.

“Whose head is on this coin and what’s his title?” Jesus asks holding the coin to their noses and his eyes lazar-beamed into theirs.

“The emperor’s” they respond.

“The give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s and the give to God the things that are God’s,” Jesus snipes, throwing the coin back at them.

On surface, Jesus seems to be giving a non-answer - a politician’s answer that doesn’t really answer the question - when backed into a corner.

But the subtext might not be totally clear, at least not to these religious leaders. They know they’ve been beat at their own game. But I’m not sure they get the insult lying underneath Jesus’ answer.

When Jesus asked for the idolatrous coin, the astute observer probably noticed that Jesus didn’t have one on him, but the religious leaders did.

You need to remember that Roman coins, adorned with Caesar’s likeness, wasn’t just as instrument of exchange, it was an object of worship. The Romans worshipped Caesar as a god. For good and faithful Jews, to carry a coin with a pagan god was to be in direct violation of the first and second commandments.

So, the shrewd observer who noticed that Jesus didn’t have a coin and the religious leaders did, probably said, “We know where your allegiances lie.”

It appears that Jesus is condemning these religious leaders for being too cozy with worldly power. It looks like to Jesus, and probably to those listening in, that these keepers of the faith owed too much to Caesar – their livelihoods, their social status, their wealth – that there was nothing left over to give to God.

They stormed off, angry that they’d been beat, insulted, and exposed. Now they knew their enemy. But they respected him the way you respect any worthy adversary. But this adversary needed to be crushed before more damage was done.

Matthew says that the religious leaders were “amazed” at Jesus. Amazed at what? That some nobody from the middle of nowhere could out argue these learned men of God?

For Jesus, this was the beginning of the end. He stepped over the line. He angered the wrong people.

That day, at that hour, Jesus’ fate was sealed. And so began the church’s uneasy relationship with worldly power.

The Roman Emperor Constantine’s baptism by Pope Sylvester in the year 326 inaugurated a new era for the church when the Christian religion came out of hiding to reside in the official palaces of empire.

Most theologians point to that event as the church’s One Big Mistake. By becoming too close to power Christians lost their voice; their dynamism; their passion for the good news of Jesus Christ. And we settled into a comfortablity that snuffed out the vitality of the early Christian movement; and in the twinkling of an eye, or a sprinkling of water, we became the Christian institution.

Some might say that, with Constantine's conversation, Christians moved from adolescence into adulthood. That we finally grew up and took our seat at the political grown-up’s table. Others might say that we gained the whole world, yet forfeited our soul.

And history tells us that church does its best work from the sidelines, far from the corridors of power, on the fringes.

In the late 1980's, it was the churches in East Germany that largely prevented the revolt against the Marxist-Leninist regimes from turning violent after the Berlin Wall fell. The churches were among the only people in the country who had the moral credibility to stop the crowds because the churches were NOT part of the establishment. Church had enough distance between them and the powerful rulers, that people could look to Christians for guidance and support without worrying that they might be betrayed into government hands.

And we can learn today from our sisters and brothers in other parts of the globe. The fastest growing churches in the world are in places where Christians are being persecuted. It’s been noted that, in China, a new church is being planted every seven minutes. In some places in Africa, someone comes to faith in Jesus every three minutes.

But here in southern Alberta, where Christians are culturally coddled, churches are suffering dwindling memberships and closing their doors.

I think that’s a powerful lesson for us. The closer we get to worldly power, the weaker is our proclamation. Christianity thrives when it is in the minority. Churches spiritually stagnate when we achieve institutional credibility.

Does this mean that there is no place for Christians in the public sphere? Not at all. We need Christians in public office. But not to protect our own interests, not to look out for ourselves; but to be the voice for the voiceless, to be the power for the powerless, to be the strength for the weak.

To be the servant people that God has called us to be. To bear witness to a different way of being in the world, where opposition and enemy become friend and neighbour, where the values of life, freedom, forgiveness, mercy, servanthood, and peace are the features of the public face of the church.

What I think this passage is about, is Jesus telling his followers to live in the world as beacons of light, as voices of justice, as living contradictions to the prevailing powers of Caesar that rules through might and force and conflict.

Jesus says to speak with another power; the the cross of Jesus and the power of his resurrection; the power of suffering, self-giving love for neighbour as well as enemy. The power of God’s promises of good news to the poor. The power of life and salvation for everything God has created.

This is the power that creates. This is power that gives life. This is the power that the Caesar’s of the world don’t understand, but a power that comes from God, so that every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess, that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

So give to Caesar the things are Caesars, because all he has will one day pass away. And give to God the things that are God’s, for everything that comes from God gives life and peace, and lasts forever.

Amen.

Pentecost 17A/Thanksgiving

2011-10-09T10:55:00.000-07:00

I have a confession to make: I find preaching on Paul’s Letter to the Philippians really hard. It’s not that there no content to work with. Like all of Paul’s letters, this letter is overflowing with wisdom. And it’s not as if I have trouble understanding what Paul is trying to say, although, I do gain more insight his message every time I read it.

It’s just that Paul seems to be writing with a perpetual smile on his face. He seems abnormally happy. Which is particularly jarring given his circumstances. He’s sitting in jail knowing that, at any time, the cell door could open, and he’d be taken away to die an excruciating death.

But he sounds almost giddy in this letter. Which I find unsettling. I don’t know if I’d be in such a good mood where I in his position. I don’t know from where I’d summon the strength to get through the day, much less write a hope-filled letter to a struggling church that I just founded.

Of course, we can say that God has given him the strength. We can say that the Spirit of Jesus and the power of his resurrection was vibrantly within Paul, giving him courage to face an unspeakable horror. We can say that the mighty presence of God so filled his heart that he couldn’t help but burst out in joyful song. “Rejoice in the Lord, always! Again I say rejoice!”

And that would be true. But it would also be too easy. It would be only half the story.

I say that would be too easy because I often hear easy affirmations of faith in difficult circumstances. I sometimes hear people jump to quickly into the artificial God talk after something terrible has happened. I often hear pious slogans dismissing peoples’ real pain.

“She’s in a better place....” a husband says after his wife’s quick battle with cancer has ended.

“God doesn’t give us anymore than we can handle” she says at the bedside of a child whose been in a car accident.

“All things work together for good, for those who love Jesus,” is said after the last attempt to salvage the marriage fails.

You may have heard some of your own. You may have even said some of these. I know I have. These types of sayings often mask a fear. A fear that, if we don’t acknowledge God right away when something bad happens, then we’re not being good Christians. A fear that we’re losing faith. A fear that we’ve stopped believing in God in the presence of real, terrifying, pain.

A fear that, for all our talk about God being active in and among us, for all our prayers and proclamations about Jesus being raised from the dead, for all our pious declarations of the Holy Spirit’s power in our lives, we worry that, at the end, it’s all just vacant words. And so we hide behind empty God talk, hoping that we can convince ourselves into feeling better.

But then there’s the rest of the story. The part of the story that says, that after the empty, pious, slogans have stopped; that after the quick spiritual sayings have been put away; that after the book of easy answers has been closed; and you sit in the stark silent jail cell of your very real, very human pain, you remember the whole story.

You remember the story that tells you that you are not alone. You remember the story that tells you that God’s light is brighter than any darkness. You remember the story that tells you that life is stronger than death and that God has a hold on you with a grip that will pull you into eternity. You remember that you have a saviour who died and rose again so that the world - indeed the whole cosmos - might be saved.

And you don’t just remember the story. You feel it. It’s in your bones. It’s in every cell. It’s part of you. And you realize that your pain does not make you any less of a Christian. You realize that your doubts do not make you any less of a believer. You realize that your grief, your regrets, your broken relationships do not make you any less of a follower of Jesus.

In fact, it is your brokenness that gives you power. The husband who buried his wife knows how to talk to another person who just said good-bye to their spouse. The mom who knows what it’s like to sit at the bedside of a child in a coma can sit with other parents sitting by similar beds. The one whose marriage collapsed knows what to say, and what NOT to say to their friend who just found herself alone.

It’s then that you realize that YOU are part of God’s story, and that God cannot and will not tell that story without YOU, and you begin to understand what Paul was REALLY talking about.

That’s when you start to get a sense of how Paul could sing a song of rejoicing while sitting in a jail cell awaiting execution. You begin to see Paul with new eyes. And you begin to see yourself with renewed vision.

And you realize that you CAN rejoice, you CAN praise God. Not an empty or easy, sunny or smiling praise to an already blue sky. But a praise that emerges from the darkness, a praise that unlocks your jail cell, a praise that rises from the dirt and filth of your life, a praise that might bring as many tears as it does laughter.

It’s a praise of defiance. It’s praise of defiance against the powers of darkness that seek to overwhelm you and keep you trapped in your misery.

It’s a praise of defiance against pain and grief, it’s a praise defiance against all those things in your life that are trying to keep you down.

It’s a praise a defiance against all those things that are keeping you from becoming who God wants you to be.

It’s a praise of defiance that tells you pain, “You will not define me.” It’s a praise of defiance that tells your grief, “You will not take over my life.”

It’s a praise of defiance that tells the dirt and filth that surrounds you, “I am turning my gaze away from you. I will focus on whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is commendable. If there is any excellence, and if there is anything worthy of praise, I will think on these things. I will keep doing the things that I have learned and received and heard and seen, and the peace of God will be with me.”

I think we caught a glimpse of that defiance this morning. You have turned your gaze. Many of you have brought an item to church that represents something for which you are thankful. And all of these items represent something hopeful, something life-giving. These items came from your lives. Many of them were an answer to hopelessness.

They are the keys that may have let you out of your own personal jail cell. They acknowledge the fact that thanksgiving isn’t trite little ritual we engage in once a year, but something that comes from deep within us, that we carry with us everyday.

That’s why we can join Paul in his song, Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I say rejoice!

May this be so among us. Amen.

Pentecost 16A

2011-10-02T10:23:00.001-07:00

One of the things they tell us in preaching class is to NOT use ourselves as positive examples of gospel living. The preacher should never be the spiritual superstar in the sermon.

It’s arrogant. It assumes that the preacher is on a higher spiritual plane than the listener. It suggests that its the preacher’s behaviour the listener is supposed to model rather than Christ’s.

It puts the preacher in the centre of the sermon, rather than God. And the pulpit is not the place to show off the preacher’s spiritual prowess.

Paul would have failed that class. He wouldn’t have listened to instructions. He’s not afraid to plop himself down right in the middle of his proclamation. He inserts himself into a story that he did not create.

Just look at verses 4-6 in today’s second reading. That’s a killer resume Paul has, isn’t it? It’s sounds like back-handed bragging. If it were anyone else it would seem that Paul wanted the church in Philippi to know with cold clarity, just how awesome he was, and the cost he paid to be a Christian.

“If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh,” he says, “I have more: 5circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; 6as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.”

In other words:

“Yes, I was amazing at everything I tried. I was born into the right family. I went to the right schools. I graduated at the top of my class. I reached the top of my profession. And when I was at the height of my powers, I met Jesus, and gave it all away. And now I count all my former success as losses because I have gained Christ. So, I hope you realize what I gave up to follow Jesus.”

Paul is clearly contrasting a “before” and “after” picture of his life. His “before” picture is his life as a religious leader, a protector of tradition, obedient to Jewish law, and a fully-fledged, card-carrying, enthusiastic member of the religious establishment.

His “after” picture was one of loss of status, prestige, authority, and wealth. He renounces everything about his former life, content to live out his days as a wandering preacher, planting churches where ever he found himself.

He says he’s gained everything since gaining Christ. His old life is past. He just wants to forget about who he once was. That’s why, as you may recall from the Book of Acts, he changed his name from “Saul” to “Paul” when he met Jesus, to mark the birth of the new person in Christ. Saul was dead. Paul was alive.

But I’m not sure that’s entirely true. I’m not convinced that Paul’s life is as clearly marked as he would like us to believe. Paul was still deeply invested in his past, no matter what he says.

It’s not that I’m saying that Paul was lying, or was a fraud, or was somehow being disingenuous about his testimony. I just see fingerprints of his old life all over this letter. And all over his other letters. I see his old life popping up everywhere in his new life. I see his old life underneath everything he writes.

Paul was DEEPLY schooled in greco-roman rhetoric. In other words, the literary forms he uses in his letters expose his educational past. He knew how to write in ways that educated, upper-class, Roman citizens could understand. His letters are masterpieces of an ancient literary tradition that he knew intimately.

For example, by using himself as an example of exemplary living he was employing an important device used in Roman persuasive arguments. That’s how people wrote, according to Roman literary tradition. He wasn’t being arrogant. He wasn’t inserting himself where he didn’t belong. He wasn’t putting himself at the centre of the sermon.

Paul was writing according to the tradition in which he was taught. In other words, without Saul, the zealous Pharisee, blameless under the law, there could be no Paul, the letter-writing evangelist, who suffering for Christ counted as gain.

No matter how hard he tried to run from his past, it was always there. In his mind there may have been a clear mark between his past life and his present vocation, but in his work, his past is always present, under the surface.

As Christians, we often have a difficult relationship with our pasts. We like the language of growth. We like to feel that we’re moving away from one thing (sin) toward another thing (righteousness before God).

We like to feel that we’re moving toward a spiritual goal, a deeper connection with God. A bolder proclamation of God in our lives. We want to know that our faith is growing, that we are somehow, getting better at following Jesus.

And those are worthy aspirations. Aristotle rightly noted that human beings are “teleological creatures” which means we humans are goal oriented, that we need a purpose to living, that we want to grab hold of something that is always in front of us.

And of course, Paul knew his Aristotle. That’s why Paul said that he “presses on toward the goal...” He needs something in front of him to keep himself going. He keeps looking for new challenges, new quests, new experiences. His feet never stay in one place for long, and his hands are always occupied. Paul is always running another lap in the race that has been set before him.

But if Paul’s running this race to escape his past, then that is race that he’ll never win. Nor should he. God used his past to make the great Christian thinker and preacher that he was. Without all those years in school, Paul wouldn’t have been able to share the gospel so effectively. Without persecuting Christians, Paul wouldn’t have learned the humility he needed to connect with other believers.

And God uses YOUR past to create YOur future in Christ. It doesn’t matter if your past is something to brag about or something to be ashamed of, God uses both the dirt and the gold to build the kingdom of God.

That’s why you CAN run the race that has been set before you. You can press on because Christ Jesus has made you his own.

But that race is fraught with fits and starts, success and failure, pains and losses. As well as gains and triumphs. We make our way up the mountain with skinned knees, calloused heels, and bloody fingers, only to find ourselves falling backwards and landing back on the spot where we started. And then we begin again, tired. But stronger.

Paul says to forget the past and push toward the future. And you may forget your past but your past does not forget you. Your past follows you, reminding you of who you were. It’s your past that so often pushes you backward down that mountain, because that’s where your eyes have been fixed.

But God redeems your past, and trains your eyes towards God’s future. Your past may have made you who are you, but your past will not make you into who you are becoming.

So you press on to what lies ahead, you press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. You press on because Christ has put you on the path that leads to God. You press on because God has given you the strength to meet the days ahead. You press on because that’s all you can do now that you have gained everything in Christ.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Pentecost 15A

2011-09-25T11:01:00.001-07:00

An article, by American preacher Lillian Daniel has been circulating widely among religious professionals. In fact I think half my clergy friends on Facebook and Twitter provided a link to it because it speaks to a common frustration among church folks.

The article has the provocative title “Spiritual But Not Religious? Please Stop Boring Me.” In it she takes on those who create their own spirituality on their own terms. She scolds those whose heartfelt theological reflections lead people to the deeply profound and radical conclusions that they “find God in the sunset” or “during walks on the beach” or “while hiking in the mountains” as if we Christians never thought of finding God in nature before.

She waves a finger at them chiding them saying “Being privately spiritual but not religious just doesn't interest me. There is nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself. What is interesting is doing this work in community, where other people might call you on stuff, or heaven forbid, disagree with you. Where life with God gets rich and provocative is when you dig deeply into a tradition that you did not invent all for yourself...”

I understand her frustration. As one who has dug deeply into the Christian theological tradition, and discovering its riches, it can seem downright insulting to centuries of thoughtful theological reflection being diminished in favour of a “I find God in the sunsets” kind of kindergarten spirituality.

And we - YOU - as a church, who gather regularly to hear God’s word and receive the Holy Sacraments, who work hard to build a strong church, who give so much of your time, talents, and treasure to ensure that the proclamation of the gospel is heard between these walls and lived out in the community.

Those of you who’ve lived, breathed, and died the gospel message, might be offended to hear that some folks believe their self-styled “walk along the beach” spirituality is a more authentic expression of faith than you who have holy dirt under your fingernails.

In my job I encounter these folks with self-created spiritualities all the time, folks who dismiss or challenge institutional religious traditions. But the weird thing is that they want me, as a religious leader to affirm their religious rants, no matter how bizarre they are.

A conversation usually goes like this, “Look, pastor, I know you are a Christian, but I believe that the earth is just a school for us to learn how to live on a higher plane of existence when we die, after which we exist as pure energy. And when we suffer it means we were meant to have that experience because in a past life we hurt someone and we need to feel the same thing. That’s true right? RIGHT?”

And, of course, if I disagree with them, I’m forcing my religion on to them, being the typical despotic preacher who demands intellectual obedience, as if they weren’t doing the same to me.

I find those conversations annoying, if not insulting. As if their random musings are at the same level as thousands of years of deep theological refections.

Many religious commentators have chimed in on why this phenomena is happening. Some say that it’s because of boring church services with long, tedious sermons that are out of touch with peoples’ daily lives.

Others suggest that we speak a religious language that does not compute in the brains of non-believers; that the words we use get lost in translation when they reach secular ears.

Yet others blame the growth of a multi-cultural society, where there’s no moral or religious consensus, and so the spiritual waters have been so muddied that folks are forced to create their own spiritual meaning.

Still others blame a self-centered consumer society, where people get to pick and choose everything else in their lives, so why not their personal spirituality?

While I’m sure that there’s truth in all of these theories, I wonder if the rise of self-styled and self-created spiritualities is the unintended consequence of Christians behaving badly. Our cultural memory is long, and history doesn’t forget, and it hurts our proclamation and our reputation as good news people.

People remember the Crusades and the Inquisition. The know about the sexual abuse scandals and Residential Schools. The or complicity or silence of Christians during the Holocaust.

People remember when the church was more interested in protecting its cultural and political power than in setting people free in Jesus’ name. People remember the angry, judgmental sermons and the mean Sunday School teacher. They remember being forced to memorize scripture, and they saw the vitriolic TV evangelist.

They experienced a Christianity that was about controlling peoples’ behavior, demanding social conformity. They experienced a Christianity that celebrated obedience rather than freedom. They saw preachers who used their positions and pulpits for financial gain at the expense of the gospel.

So, it’s not as if this is happening in a historical vacuum. People are rebelling against an institutional, authoritarian Christianity that hurt them, which is the only kind of Christianity that seems to make the news. Should we be surprised, then, when people walk away and claim spiritual independence for themselves?

As a church leader, there’s something therapeutic in criticizing self-styled spiritualities. But criticism can easily devolve into smugness. It’s tempting to look down my nose at those whose faith has as much spiritual nourishment as a Big Mac with fries.

It’s easy to ask, “Why can’t these folks just see what they’re doing, and then get back on board with traditional Christianity?” But that question speaks as much about what we’ve lost as much as our concern for those who are wandering in the wilderness searching for spiritual food that sustains.

Today is supposed to be called “Back to Church” Sunday, where we’re encouraged to invite people who have not been to church for a while. It’s supposed to be an evangelistic exercise designed to help churches return, once again, to a place of institutional prominence.Which is why I decided that Good Shepherd will NOT participate in Back to Church Sunday.

Back to Church Sunday, to my eyes, focuses our vision on the past - on what we’ve LOST rather than what God has for us in the future. The program wants to bring “BACK” our previous successes rather than to turn our gaze to what’s ahead.

To me, it’s clear that God is doing something new, by doing something old. God is calling us away from the cultural captivity of western culture, and asking us to learn again, what Paul was trying to teach the church in Philippi.

“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility, regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others...”

While I think Paul overstates the issue when he says to “regard others as better than yourselves,” calling the church to humility, I also think he was on to something when he reminded the church that the heart of our life together is humble service to others, just like Jesus lived.

Paul goes on to quote from an early Christian hymn:

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human likeness, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death - even death on a cross...”

As followers of this one who humbled himself, that is our calling. I’ve always said that the church of the future will be smaller, but stronger. As we break free from our cultural captivity to power and success, as our institutional structures crumble, God will raise up a new church that is marked by humility, and revitalized by a deep spirituality rooted in ancient practice but with eyes open for God’s future.

We will no longer feel threatened by people with self-styled spiritualities or feel endangered by world religions. We will no longer worry about being a minority, but will embrace our small numbers. We will no longer look to the past with longing, but will look to the future with anticipation.

Because having been set free from institutional shackles and cultural entitlement, we will once again be a movement of good news people, joyfully proclaiming God’s message of life and salvation, freedom and forgiveness, justice and joy.

We will grow as a resurrection people. And then one day, we will see that every knee will bend and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

May this be so among. Amen!

Pentecost 14A

2011-09-18T11:12:00.001-07:00

I have trouble believing Paul in today’s second reading. Not because I think he’s dishonest, but because, given his circumstances, I can’t see why he can be in such a good mood. This letter EXUDES joyful praise of God, and offers encouragement to a struggling church that he just started. His worry wasn’t for himself. His worry was for this new church in Phillipi that was trying to keep afloat.

I have trouble believing Paul because it sounds like he’s trying to talk himself into not being afraid of being executed. He’s sitting in a Roman jail, chained to the wall, and what does he have to think about all day? He’s thinking about when his end will come, and what it will look like.

“It is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be put to shame in any way, but that by my speaking with all boldness, Christ will be exalted now as always in my body, whether by life or by death...” he says.

That’s a bold statement. Especially from someone who could be taken away and executed at any moment. Some might say that he’s masking his fear with heroic religious language, trying to convince himself that the promise of new and everlasting life with Christ was not a mere fantasy, but a present reality waiting for him just on the other side of the jail cell door.

Others might say Paul is declaring his strong, confident faith in difficult circumstances, defiantly staring death in the face, proclaiming the mighty acts of God in a world opposed to God’s kingdom.

Maybe it’s a mixture of the two.

“For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain,” he goes on to say. “If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me; and I do not know which I prefer.”

So this is a win-win for Paul. If he lives, he knows that he will continue his productive hard, building churches. But if he dies he’ll be with Christ. He doesn’t know which one is better. He can’t decide which one he wants: doing rewarding, effective work on earth, or being with Christ in heaven. It’s a tough choice for Paul

But not for me. I know what I’d choose. Dying isn’t something I’m looking forward to. Although I trust that God will know what to do with me when it happens, the thought of closing my eyes with only the hope and assurance of everlasting life doesn’t sit well with me. So maybe I don’t have the confidence of Paul. Or maybe Paul is putting on a strong religious face for his people - or even for himself.

What really worries me about this passage, is that we might be tempted to reduce our faith to the prospect of being with Christ when we die, and we miss Paul’s other great joy: being fruitful in this life. Which I think is the real point he’s trying to make.

I hear too many well-meaning Christians who seem to say that this life doesn’t matter, that all that we do here in this life is just a set up for the life that is to come, that our time here on this planet is nothing more than a warm-up act for the main event which is heaven.

And if we misread what Paul is saying we could find ourselves even further from his message. Paul seems to be saying that suffering is GOOD! That we should rejoice in our suffering! But, of course, the suffering that Paul is talking about is the suffering of persecution, not just any old suffering.

But that’s not always clear. And again, I’ve heard many Christians talk about how suffering is the evidence of our evil and sinful world, and that we should just accept it because, in the next world, our suffering will end. We just have to be patient.

But that’s NOT what Paul is talking about because that is to completely miss the point of what God wants for us. God doesn’t want us to keep our gaze continually turned toward heaven. God wants our eyes set on the race that is before us. God wants us to focus on the task at hand. God wants us to love the life we’ve been given because that life is such a precious gift.

To diminish the life we have today is to diminish the value of the gift of life that God has given us the world God has so lovingly made.

That’s why Paul tells them to “live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.” Not as an act of obedience that will get you into heaven. Not as a burden meant to give you worth. But as a gift to give you life.

The gospel is love. The gospel is forgiveness. It’s peace, justice, mercy, and grace. These are the values that Paul is talking about when he says to live your lives in a manner worthy of the gospel.

It is because you have been given love, grace, mercy, forgiveness, and peace, that you can live them. It is because of Jesus, you ARE worthy of the gospel. It is because God has named and claimed you as God’s own, that you can live your life in Christ.

And that means something difference for everyone. Everyone has a different task. Maybe God is asking you to pray for others. Maybe God is asking you to talk to a stranger. To heal a broken relationship. To write a letter of encouragement to someone you know who needs it. To pick up the phone and share some good news.

No matter who you are, and not matter where you are, God is calling you to live a life worthy of the gospel, because that is who you are, that is who God in Christ made you to be, so now you are agents of God’s healing mercy and forgiving love.

And today, God has claimed Ziya Jaye-Lynn in the waters of baptism. In these waters God has made her worthy to live her life in Christ. God hand is upon her, and will NEVER be let go. It is because of God’s good work in her, that she will do good work for others. God has set her on a path that leads from the joys and challenges of this world, and into the world to come.

So, live YOUR life in a manner worthy of the gospel. Life YOUR life in a manner that reflects God’s grace, live YOUR life in a manner that reflects God’s mercy, that reflects God’s forgiveness and peace. LOVE the life that God has given you. Shine with God’s brilliant light.

Jesus is the one who set your free from sin and death, so live your life knowing that you’re worthy, and one day, you will depart and be with Christ.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Pentecost 13A

2011-09-11T10:15:00.001-07:00

I’m not one who believes that God is pulling the strings of a puppet-like universe, but I have to wonder how this gospel popped up on the Sunday which happens to be the 10 year anniversary of the attacks on New York City and the Pentagon. I don’t know if I should read anything inappropriate into the collision of events, as if God had manipulated the lectionary to tell us something about how to process our memory of that September morning.

There are many who believe that there is no divine collusion between this morning’s bible readings and this particular event. Many of the worship planning materials and sermon help websites suggest changing the gospel for this Sunday into something more palatable.

After all, how can we talk about forgiveness after such a terrible and horrific attack? How can we read this passage in light of the hostility, violence, and death that took place that morning? How we hear Jesus’ call to reconciliation with our enemies when our enemies are filled with so much fanatical hatred?

This text cannot speak to this moment, they say. There must be a more appropriate text to mark the day.

Preach about God’s comfort for the grieving. Preach about the need for community and human connection. You can even talk about the human longing for peace. But you cannot talk about forgiveness. Forgiveness opens up a wound that was calloused over. So, they say, find a better text.

But I can’t. This text jumps out at me at this moment because it goes to the heart of what we believe as Christians. It speaks to the very essence of who we are as believers. After all, we are the beneficiaries of God’s costly, self-giving love. How can we NOT give to others what we have received?

In most of our day-to-day decisions, we’ve become followers of Reinhold Niebuhr, the 20 century American theologian who coined the term “Christian Realism” which basically says, that, yes, God does make some great and grandiose promises to the world, and yes, Jesus calls us to an ethic of love and compassion for our neighbour as well as enemy. And yes, as followers of Jesus we are called to shine God’s light in the dark places of the world.

But let’s get real. You cannot create foreign policy from Matthew 18. The best we can do is create and achieve “approximate goals” in Jesus’ direction. To take Jesus’ love ethic and transpose it to the realm of politics and policy would lead to disaster. To impose the bible’s standards of love on to the public realm would simply get people hurt. Jesus’ words may INFORM our decisions. But they should never DICTATE. Niebuhr was just being realistic.

However, the problem with Christian Realism is that it lets us off the biblical hook too easily. It makes no real demands on us as followers of Jesus and bears no witness to the world God has in mind for us.

While it tries to create a Middle Ground where the Christian voice can be heard at the decision making table, it’s really an escape clause,where we as Christians can dismiss Jesus’ call to love and forgiveness under the guise of security and freedom. It’s a backhanded way of saying that we don’t really trust what Jesus says when his words are put under the harsh light of human conflict. It’s like we’re saying that the world cannot be saved through love.

And even as I say this I know how hopelessly naive it sounds. It sounds like some hippy-dippy, new age, left wing nonsense that doesn’t take seriously world realities or the human capacity for evil. I know there’s evil in the world and there are people who wish to do us harm.

But to fail to ask the question: “What would the world look like if our decisions were based on forgiveness rather than revenge or or self-interest or even self-protection?” is to fail to take our Christian vocation to love our enemies seriously. It is to fail to ask how our Christian faith informs our lives. It is to fail to ask how we Christians are different from others.

And we’re not the first ones to fail to ask this question and we won’t be the last. Peter, in today’s gospel, wanted a number. He wanted to know how exactly many times he needed to forgive his enemy before he could indulge in his base human desire for revenge. What would be an appropriate amount of forgiveness to fulfill Jesus’ commands before the other guy could get what’s REALLY coming to him?

That’s our natural instinct. It’s our human inclination. We’re hard wired for revenge. In fact, I read a National Geographic article recently that said that a region of the brain known as the “dorsal striatum” which controls enjoyment or satisfaction, is activated when test subjects experienced giving punishment to someone they deemed to deserve it. In other words, yes, revenge is biologically sweet.

Of course men gained a greater sense of revenge satisfaction than women. Take from that which you will. It could explain the swaggering tough guy posturing that a lot of guys like to display.

What this study tells me though, is that our revenge inclinations aren’t something to deny or be ashamed of, but neither are they something to nurture. And they are something to be aware of. Revenge may be our human way. But revenge is not God’s way.

I’ve always been challenged by my Mennonite friends, and their tradition of pacifism. And if there’s one thing our society hates almost as much as terrorists, it’s pacifists.

I know a few faithful Mennonites who have been regularly harassed for their beliefs. They’ve been taunted and teased, just to see how far they can be pushed before they lash out. I even know some who’ve been beaten, just to see if they’d fight back.

And of course if they do fight back or protect themselves, they’d be exposed for the frauds they are, and it would be a triumph for brute force.

It’s as if the mere notion of not wanting to participate in a violent culture is so offensive to some, they faithful Mennonite Christians become targets for brutal attacks. It’s as if we, as a culture, believe that the most moral way to protect ourselves and solve our problems is through violence.

But Jesus doesn’t believe that. Jesus believes in loving his enemies, even if it meant his death. Jesus is more interested in repairing broken relationships than in inflaming them. Jesus is more interested in bringing life and hope to the world rather protecting what is his through violence. Jesus is more interested in forgiving others than in exacting revenge.

It’s a hard way to live. And I’m not going to stand up here and pronounce everything violent as evil. I’m not so naive as to think that world peace can be achieved through a few kind words and an outstretched hand.

But today, I can’t help but ask the question because I believe it needs to be asked even if we can’t get a clear answer: What does forgiveness look like in light of 9/11?

I don’t really know. It could mean a lot of things. It could also NOT mean a lot of things.

It could mean NOT scapegoating all Muslims for the acts of a few extremists. It could mean NOT glorying in the deaths of their leaders. It could mean NOT giving in to the human compulsion to vengeance.

And it could also mean building bridges between us and those who are different. It could mean listening to other viewpoints with patience and understanding. It could mean loving others more deeply rather than allowing the actions of others change you into who don’t want to be and who God did not make you.

It could mean taking up God’s challenge to live in the love and freedom that you have in Jesus. It could mean looking to God’s future with joy rather than in fear. It could mean serving others and the world God made, so that others may receive the same mercy and grace that you’ve been given.

Today, God is reminding us that forgiveness is at the heart of who we are as Christians because forgiveness is at the heart of who God is. And, as we know from God, forgiveness is not forgetting. And forgiveness is not condoning.

Forgiveness is repairing, repairing that which is broken. And in our fallen world, a world marked by so much hatred and violence, maybe our job as those who’ve been forgiven, is roll up our selves and start fixing things.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Pentecost 12A

2011-09-04T10:47:00.001-07:00

Whenever I’m asked to explain Holy Communion, I always start with this story from the Old Testament. And I usually get the same confused stare that you’re giving me right now.

But this story is what Jesus was enacting when he instituted Holy Communion in the night before he was executed. He was being a good Jew. And as a good Jew he was celebrating passover with a special meal called a “seder” meaning “order” or “arrangement” referring to the ritual customs of when and how the the food was to be served, the traditional prayers said, and questions asked and answered . Each item and each event represented something in the story.

They gathered as a family of Jews to remember a terrible night in Egypt thousand of years before. They remembered how their people were slaves. They remembered how they cried out to God for so long that they assumed that God had abandoned them.

They remembered Pharaoh's cruelty and God’s silence. They remembered the bricks made without straw, the monotony of hard labour, and the welcome freedom of death.

They remembered Moses, the burning bush, and the plagues.

And they remembered that awful night when they were told to put lamb’s blood on their doorposts because something terrible was coming.

So they slaughtered their best lamb, and painted their doorposts with its blood.

Who knows what they saw that night, but I can imagine what they heard. The hysterical wailing of mothers whose firstborn children were killed during the night. The angry cries of fathers whose heirs died before the sun rose. They heard loud voices crying out for justice for their generation of dead.

And they remembered that they were safe, because the lamb’s blood that covered their doorposts told the angel of death to pass over their homes.

They remembered Pharaoh telling them to leave. And they had to leave so quickly that their bread didn’t have time to rise. It was unleavened bread that they took with them on their road to freedom. They grabbed it from the window and ran before Pharaoh changed his mind.

This was how the nation of Israel was born. This was the story that they remembered that night.

And then, Jesus, turned that story around and pointed it at himself.

He took a piece of unleavened bread, the bread of freedom, and said the traditional prayer,

“Blessed are you, O Lord our God, sovereign of the universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.”

He ripped the bread in half as the disciples bowed their heads in reverence.

Then Jesus broke the silence and said, “This is my body, which is given for you. When you eat it, remember ME.”

Remember him? What was he talking about? They were remembering the Exodus story. Why would he ask us to remember him?

Then he took the cup of wine, red wine to remember the lambs blood on the Hebrews’ doorposts, and he said the traditional prayer,

“Blessed are you O Lord our God, sovereign of the universe, who gives us fruit from the vine.”

The disciples probably knew something was up, but didn’t know what. As Jesus passed the cup around, he said, “This is my blood of the new and everlasting covenant, which is poured for you. When you drink it, remember me.”

As the disciples ate and drank and remembered, they probably wondered what Jesus was saying. They knew the Exodus story. That story was as much a part of them as the dirt under their fingernails.

But Jesus was saying that the Exodus story didn’t end at the final chapter of the book. Or when they reached the land of promise, or when they finally had a king, or...

Jesus was saying that the Exodus story finally ended with him. He was the passover lamb that would save them from sin and death. As they eat of his flesh and drink of his blood, death will pass over them, and indeed, pass over the whole world.

His death is your death, my death, the world’s death. His blood which is poured out, is painted on the doorposts of the world, so that the world will be saved.

Even Judas, the one who betrayed Jesus, ate Jesus’ bread and drank his wine. Some traditions have him as the first occupant of Hell for his betrayal of Jesus. Other Christian traditions regard him as a Saint for his role in salvation history.

Because of Jesus, that freedom story is now your freedom story, it’s now my freedom story. The world’s freedom story. That’s why we eat the bread of freedom and drink the cup of salvation.

Because of Jesus the tyranny of sin and death is defeated, the chains of slavery to the powers of this world are broken, the cries of those held in bondage are heard.

Because of Jesus, you are fee. You are free to live your life as a child of God. You are free to ignore other peoples’ opinion of you and other peoples’ expectations of you. You are free to love as Jesus loved. You are free.

Freedom is something we like to hear about and talk about. But it’s often not something we welcome. We spend more time drawing lines, building walls, putting parameters around our ordered lives, than we welcome the responsibility of freedom.

It’s easier to know our place, to know what we can and cannot do, rather than trust that God is guiding our lives, working inside of us, transforming us from the inside out.

We’re afraid of freedom because we’re worried it might descend into chaos, rather than build us up, make us grow, and help us reach the potential that God has given us.

We often shun freedom, and stay mired in captivity. We stay stuck in our painful pasts rather than look to God’s future. Our depression and grief can feel like chains we can never break.

Our feelings of unworthiness or shame keep us from grabbing on to the freedom that God has for us. We don’t trust God’s freedom because we don’t trust ourselves. And tyranny is often more comfortable than freedom.

And as the people of Israel found out, freedom isn’t easy. Freedom costs. Freedom demands creativity and initiative.

Freedom is scary because it can feel like you’ve lost control. But freedom trusts that you know what to do with it when you receive it.

In Christ, you are free. Jesus trusts that you know what to do with your freedom. You have been entrusted with gifts and responsibilities. Because you have been set free, you can use your creativity energy, in communion with the Spirit of God, to bring life to the world.

Because the angel of death has passed over you, you can embrace life with the joy and passion of knowing that you are building something new and beautiful in the world. You can trust that you are contributing to God’s ongoing creation. You can trust that God is using YOU for wonderful things.

You can trust that your labour brings life to others. You can trust that you are a witness to God’s love and mercy.

So, your job, as a follower of Jesus, is to speak words of liberation and healing, from your own experience of liberation and healing.

Live your freedom, knowing that God’s Word is growing inside you, knowing that God’s law is written on your heart, knowing that the blood of the lamb is on your doorpost.

Live like you KNOW that your are God’s child, named and claimed in the waters of Holy Baptism, joined to Jesus’ death and resurrection.

When you come to the table this morning, you receive the bread of freedom and the cup of salvation. That is God’s liberating work within you. As you receive our Lord Jesus in the bread and wine you are trusting that the tyranny of sin and death is defeated in your life. That the shackles of your past are broken. That you have been liberated from captivity of your grief and pain. That you belong to Jesus who belongs to God.

And as you depart from the table, Jesus has one simple request: Now go live your freedom.

Amen.

Pentecost 11A

2011-08-28T11:40:00.001-07:00

Don’t you wish it were that easy? Wouldn’t it be nice to have such clarity? Wouldn’t you want to have such a moment of certainty that you knew - for sure - what God wanted for you and your life?

Hearing directly from God is something I think we all yearn for. We long for certainty in a world of doubt. We try to hear God’s clear voice in our noisy and chaotic lives. And so we might look at this burning bush episode with envy.

For those of you who don’t know the story, or haven’t seen the movie or the cartoon, there is Moses, having just murdered some poor soul in Egypt, escaping to Goshen, finding a wife, having kids, and getting into the farming business with his father-in-law Jethro.

And that’s when Moses sees this burning bush, but does not become consumed by the flames. So he has to check this out because his eyes seem to be lying to him.

And that’s when Moses meets his God. And tells Moses that the cries of the oppressed Hebrew slaves in Egypt. And so God is sending Moses back to Egypt to rescue the thousands, if not millions, of slaves under pharaoh’s rule.

That’s quite the task. And Moses wonders if he’s up to the job.

Why did God choose Moses for this adventure?

Was it because Moses grew up in the imperial household, and knew all the power players?

Was it because Moses assembled a killer resume while in Egypt, building huge cities for his pharaoh, and God saw in him a natural leader who could speak with conviction and strength?

Was it because Moses knew that his one-time brother intimately, the one who now occupied the throne, and so Moses could exploit Rameses weaknesses to achieve freedom for their people?

That would make strategic sense given that pharaoh’s army was the strongest in the world, and his reach could summon a force greater than the mind could grasp. If God’s people were to be freed from this tyrant, they needed a leader equal to the task. And Moses looked like that leader.

At least on paper. His record of accomplishments was impressive. He had a first class education. He knew the Egyptian mind, and could speak the language. He was immersed in Egyptian culture and knew their stories. He looked like the obvious choice.

But if you read between the lines on his resume, you’d see a different Moses. A Moses who was conflicted. He was a man caught between two worlds. The Egyptian world he was adopted into. And the Hebrew world he born into, and later embraced.

He was caught between wanting to follow God’s will into Egypt to rescue his people, and living the comfortable life he had built with his wife and family in Goshen.

He was caught between want to do the work that God put in front of him, and knowing that he was wanted for murder back in Egypt, and would probably be tried and executed upon stepping on Egyptian soil.

For Moses, his path was anything but clear.

So maybe that burning bush episode is anything but something to envy. That encounter probably sent a shiver of fear down Moses’ vertebrae. His life as he knew it was over. He couldn’t pretend he didn’t hear from God on that mountain. And he couldn’t erase from his mind the fact that God asked him for the impossible.

I’ve always had trouble with the way they show this story in the movie. Charlton Heston’s Moses seems so earnest, so sure of his path, so spiritually elevated, that he doesn’t experience the conflict of his impossible situation. His character is so far removed from most of what we see and hear and feel about God, that I find it hard to relate to him.

That’s why I think the movies have it wrong. The movies make it look like Moses was chosen because he is such a strong leader and faithful servant of God who, may ask the occasional question, but nonetheless knows clearly that he’ll do whatever God asks him to do.

That’s why the movie gets it wrong. I think God chose Moses, not for his strength, but for his weakness. God wasn’t interested in Moses’ resume, God didn’t care about his knowledge of palace politics, God ignored Moses’ culture, education, and breeding.

God chose Moses because Moses was a stuttering, fearful, murderer. The only power that God would equip Moses with was God’s power. God stripped Moses of everything Moses had, and asked Moses to walk into enemy territory unarmed, but with one simple, four word message, “Let my people go.”

It takes a while, and a lot of pain and suffering on both sides, but pharaoh finally gives in. God’s people are free. Not because of Moses’ brilliant tactics, but because of the simple power of God’s message. “Let my people go.”

Of course we could say that Moses also had visible signs and wonders, and even the power over life and death, at his disposal. But we remember that Moses was only a vessel, or a mouthpiece. Moses could claim no credit for what God achieved. Only God could claim credit for this liberation.

So maybe that’s the good news after all. Since we’re not in charge of results, we can live in the freedom of knowing that our failures don’t meaning anything in God’s scheme. In fact, God uses your failures to create miracles. God uses your weaknesses to bring strength. You uses your hard fought battles to win God’s war.

It is in your falling that you rise.

And Doug and Lorraine, you continue in Moses’ footsteps. You will walk into the imperial halls of suffering and grief, armed with nothing but the word and promises of God. You will enter the fortress of despair and depression as mouthpieces of God’s liberating healing. You will confront the empire of pain and death with words of God’s freedom.

Doug and Lorraine, it’s your scars, not your strengths, that qualify you for this ministry. It’s your wounds, not your wins, that allow you to walk into peoples’ hurting lives.

Just like Moses, who could have traded on his inside knowledge of palace politics, who could have devised a plan of action based on his experience in pharaoh's house, realized that such a plan wasn’t God’s way of bringing healing.

Instead, Moses found out that God can use the stuttering tongue of a murderer to achieve freedom for God’s people. God stripped Moses of all his worldly power, and placed in his mouth words of liberation.

And that’s the same for all if you. It’s not the battles that you won that give you wisdom, but the battles that you’ve lost, and take a part of you down with it.

It’s not your achievements that qualify you for ministry in God’s church, but the wounds and scars that your wear so openly.

It’s not the easy successes or simple wins that put you on the front lines of God’s healing work, but the failures and the fights that authorize you to speak God’s words of freedom to those who are trapped in their own personal bondage.

Your most powerful work rises out of your pain. God looks down into the deepest, darkest, parts of your lives, the parts you’d rather keep hidden, the parts of your that you’re ashamed of, the parts of you that keep you from growing fully into who God wants you to be, and says, “Yes. This is something I cam work with. This is someone who knows what life is like. This is someone who came back from the battle and lived to tell about it.”

If God can use a murdering stutterer to speak an entire nation into freedom, God can and will use YOU.

It may not be the burning bush you see, but God calls you to be a healing presence in the world. And God only uses those scarred and bruised by life, to bring life and salvation to the world.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Pentecost 9A

2011-08-14T10:34:00.000-07:00

They probably didn’t know what was going through his head. They don’t recognize their own brother even when he’s two feet away from them. And Joseph stands in front of his brothers, who have no clue who he is, wondering what he should say.

It had been decades since his brothers’ jealousy had driven them to sell Joseph into slavery. He’d been their father’s favourite. He had privileges that they were denied. When they were out in the fields, working their fingers to the bone under the scorching Canaanite sun, Joseph was inside reading books, learning languages, being taught skills that his brothers wouldn’t dream of having.

And those familiar with the story know that Joseph, as a slave, worked his way through the ranks of his master Potiphar’s household until Potiphar’s wife tried unsuccessfully to seduce him. She accuses him of trying to attack her, and Joseph is thrown in prison for seven years.

Even though Joseph gets out of jail, and had risen to highest position anyone could attain in Egypt except for Pharaoh, I would guess that his mind occasionally turned back toward Canaan, his home. He missed his father Jacob, whom he loved deeply. But I can only guess the level of hatred he felt for his brothers.

As Joseph’s thoughts turned toward home, he probably assumed that he’d never see his father again. After all, Jacob was already pretty old when Joseph last saw him.

And he also probably assumed that he’d never see his brothers again. He’d never have the opportunity to get back at the brothers who took everything from him.

But that life was a million years behind him. Or at least it seemed like it. Joseph had a new life. He had a wife and family. And he had an important job saving Egypt from starving to death. And he was successful beyond anything that anyone could hope or imagine. He was living a good life doing meaningful work with people who loved him.

So, when Joseph saw his brothers appear at his door asking for food, all his comfort and success all of a sudden meant nothing. All the memories of betrayal and abuse came flooding back.

Why did they have to come into his life again and open old wounds? Why did they have to come and remind him of everything he had lost? Why did they have to come and bring with them the ghosts of the past?

As Joseph stood there and looked into his brothers’ eyes, he probably wondered what to do next. His mind probably leaped to the moment so many years ago when the looks on his brothers’ faces told him that they were no longer his family but his enemies. His mind probably leaped to that day when he was staring down into the pit where his brothers tried to dump him. His mind probably leaped to that moment when he found himself in shackles and sold to the highest bidder.

His mind probably leaped to the humiliation of forced servitude, the rage over wasted years in prison, the despair of losing everything he had, home, family, a future that was of his own making, not a future thrown upon him.

His mind probably leaped to the injustice and the betrayal of his past.

Joseph probably fantasized of this moment, the moment when he could take from his brothers everything they had taken from him.

What would the revenge be? Would he provide a quick ending to their betraying little lives. Or would he draw out the pain over time, allowing their cries of agony to nestle warmly in his vengeful ears?

As Joseph stood there, all the anger and hatred of his past came flooding into his present. His was a story of jealousy and betrayal. Of family dysfunction and sibling rivalry. It was a story that he thought he had left behind. But at that moment as he looked into his brothers’ eyes, that story, the story of his past, consumed him.

The stories of the past are hard to escape. In my job I see this all the time. I hear lots of stories. Most of them painful.

I hear stories of abuse, be it physical, verbal, sexual, or spiritual abuse. I hear a lot of stories of grief. I hear lots of stories of rejection, of loss, of failure, of guilt, and of shame.

And when I hear those stories, it’s not the painful acts or traumatic events themselves that strike me. But what strikes me is how those injustices follow people throughout their lives. They’re like shadows hovering over peoples’ relationships, peoples’ choices, even their physical health.

People then become defined by their pain. Their identity is overwhelmed by the trauma of the past. They feel shackled by the harm done to them. They feel trapped in a cage of suffering, from which they don’t know how to escape.

It’s something we ALL struggle with. We all struggle with past trauma. We all hear voices of earlier loss or rejection or pain. We call carry within us, the burden of bearing someone else’s painful past. So that their story becomes our story, which we then share with others.

No matter how much you try to hide it, no matter how much to try to tell yourself it’s behind you, no matter how much you ignore it, it’s there.

Your past is there in the way you misconstrue a simple comment made by friend. Your past is there in how you overreact to bad news. Your past is there in tears after someone criticizes you.

Your past is there when you ignore wonderful opportunities lying at your feet. Your past is there you met accomplishment and success with guilt and shame rather than with joy and celebration.

Your past there when you look in the mirror, and all you can see is someone else’s negative opinion of you. Your past is there when the power of the previous years overwhelm the possibilities you see for the future.

As Joseph’s feet were fixed in place, and he was looking into his brothers’ unknowing eyes, I can only assume that his first, gut reaction, was to reach for his sword and cut them down where they stood.

But first reactions aren’t always the best reactions. And Joseph realized that no matter what they did to him he did NOT want to give them any more power over his life. He did NOT want their actions to define who he was. He did NOT want anger and bitterness to control his behaviour.

If he gave into revenge, he’d be allowing their actions to diminish him. And they would, once again, victimize him. And he was no one’s victim.

His brothers may have been responsible for his past. But they will NOT be responsible for his future. He would NOT give them that power.

I would imagine that that moment with his brothers, was the hardest moment of his life. The moment he turned from angry victim to forgiving brother. And at that moment of forgiveness, he got his family back.

I say that this moment was probably one of the hardest of his life because, too often, the anger and bitterness of injustices of the past do more harm than the injustices themselves. The voices of pain, trauma, abuse, and grief caused by others can be like voices shouting in our ears, drowning out any word of healing that you want to hear.

The story of guilt and shame, abuse and rejection, betrayal and loss, can overwhelm you, and wonder if your life will ever be any different.

But this is when Joseph suddenly realized that the story CAN change and DOES change, and IS changing. He suddenly realized that his story and his brother’s story wasn’t the only story. There is also God’s story. And that is the story that Joseph realized he wanted to live.

The story that Joseph now lived was a story of creation rather than destruction. It was a story of mercy and forgiveness rather than anger and revenge. It was a story of hope for tomorrow, peace between enemies, and strength in adversity. It was a story of life rather than death.

He realized that God’s story was already working within him. He realized that God’s story is stronger and bigger than any other their stories. God had brought Joseph and his brothers back together so they could live as a family again. God wouldn’t allow any injustice to define them. God wouldn’t allow any betrayal to keep them apart. God wouldn’t allow any anger or bitterness or abuse to keep them from being a family.

God was bigger than their past. God was bigger than their pain. God was bigger than their trauma.

And today God knows your past. God knows what has been done to you. God knows the pain, the injustice, the abuse, the grief, the rejection, and the loss.

And today God is saying that your past does NOT control your future. God is saying that the story of your painful yesterday is not the story of your healthy tomorrow. God is telling a different story in your life. God is telling a story of hope, of healing, of forgiveness, of peace, and of joy.

Your future is before you. And it’s not just your future. It’s God’s future. Your story isn’t finished. The pain of your past does NOT have power over your future. Your future belongs to God.

Someone else’s opinion of you is NOT your reality. God decides who you are, and God has declared you to be a beloved, forgiven, beautiful, and free child of God.

Your future will not be perfect. Your future will not be without pain or illness or grief. But God has given you power over anything that life throws at you. God has given you power over any betrayal, over any injustice, and over any loss. God has given you power over any rejection, over any conflict, and over any abuse.

God has given you this power because you belong to God. God is writing the story of your life. And God’s great and glorious future rests inside of you.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Pentecost 8A

2011-08-07T11:15:00.001-07:00

Where does your life and faith connect? Is your faith something that you reflect upon only at church? Is your religious activity limited only to these four walls? How does what we do “here” impact what you do out “there?” Or even, more to the point, where is God’s best work being done?

In this story, known as the “Joseph saga” (Most of you know it as “Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat”) the line between the earthly world and God’s world mists over to the point of being indistinguishable. God seems freer than what we might previously have thought. Which makes me wonder where God best work is actually being done.

On the surface this looks like a story of hard work paying off, with a little forgiveness and reconciliation thrown in to jerk a few theological tears. The stuff of good movies and snappy musicals.  But we have to look deeply into the details to see what God might be saying to us.

It starts with Joseph.

Joseph was the guy you hated in high school. You know the one I mean. The Golden Boy, the Favoured One, who was good at everything. He was captain of the football team and he dated the head cheerleader.

He won math awards, edited the school newspaper, played Hamlet in community theatre, sang solos at Christmas, and couldn’t decide whether he’d be a brain surgeon or a rocket scientist when he grew up, so he decided to do both. And you just knew he could pull it off.

You couldn’t stand him. Not just because he was better at everything than you were. You didn’t like him because he liked himself so much. His arrogance was breathtaking.

And he enjoyed showing off. But his Emotional I.Q. hovered around Charlie Sheen levels.

Joseph was oblivious to his brothers’ scowls. He didn’t notice their clenched jaws and furrowed brows. He simply didn’t see how badly his arrogance made his brothers wanted to smack that arrogant smug right off his conceited mug.

It’s no wonder that his brothers wanted to get rid of him. Joseph made them look bad. Really bad. And he flashed his egotistical white teeth while doing so.

You couldn’t accuse Joseph of putting on a show. He knew himself. He knew he was talented. He knew that he could succeed at anything he put his mind to.

Even his fantastical dreams stroked his ego. Some said his dreams were God’s dreams that lived inside him. Others believed he simply dreamt what he wanted his life to be. Maybe it was both.

But Joseph also knew what his values were. He may have been a conceited jerk but he knew what was expected of him.

When his brothers betrayed him and sold him into slavery, he worked hard in his master’s house, being promoted again and again until he ran the whole household, landing a fancy-schmancy new royal suit to wear. As far as slaves went, he reached the top.

But he knew that success in an imperial household meant less than the values his parents taught him about God.

So, when his master’s wife tried to seduce him, trying to use her power to fulfill her lustful desire, she can only grab his royal clothes, ripping them from his body, but leaving empty-handed. The clothes do not make this man. It is God’s dream living inside him that makes him who he is. And no earthly power can take that from him.

When he’s thrown in jail on the trumped-up charge of adultery he takes charge of the prison, tending to other prisoners’ needs, telling them God’s future for their lives. Good and ill.

And when Pharaoh’s nightmares taunted him, displaying a vision of both abundance and famine, his own imperial priests are stymied.

So Pharaoh was forced to turn to the prisoner Joseph to tell him God’s future. Joseph told Pharaoh what the dream meant: that there would be seven years of prosperity followed by seven years of famine.

Apparently, Pharaoh was impressed. The criminal becomes the ruler. Second in command. Only Pharaoh is greater. He is no longer Joseph. His name is now Zaphenath – paneah meaning “revealer of secrets” Or some say it means “God speaks: he lives!”

Zaphenath – paneah gets a shiny new chariot and a wife out of the deal. Not to mention a really cool job: saving the world’s only remaining superpower from starving to death.

This is where the line between God’s people and others blurs. Joseph doesn’t just get a great job with excellent benefits. He joins the inner-circle of the power elite.

He exchanges his Hebrew name for an pagan Egyptian one. And to keep his job he at least needs to pay lip service or ceremonial tribute to Pharaoh being some kind of divine being, if not a god. A definite no-no he learned in Canaanite Sunday School.

When Pharaoh’s dream comes true, and the economy goes south because of a famine, Joseph’s brothers come looking for food. Those who’ve seen the musical know what happens next.

Without revealing his identity, Joseph accuses his brothers of spying and stealing. He demands to see his younger brother. Whom they produce.

When Joseph reveals finally himself to his brothers, it’s interesting what he DOESN’T say. He doesn’t say “I am Zaphenath – paneah. The prince formerly known as Joseph.” He doesn’t say, I used to be one of you puny little people. Now look at me. You’ll suffer for what you did to me.”

Joseph isn’t hung up on titles or royalty. He knows who he REALLY is. And royalty means nothing to him. He’s bigger than that.

To identify himself he simply uses his plain, bare, Hebrew name. “I am Joseph,” he says. They thought he was dead. But he’s alive and saving the world through his work in Egypt.

His brothers were surprised. Not just because their brother is alive and successful in Egypt. But because of what God allowed to happen in order to keep the world from starving to death.

God wasn’t afraid to use Joseph to help save pagan Egypt from famine, and through Egypt, the whole world known to them. God wasn’t afraid to let Joseph become everything God despised in order to make it happen.

God wasn’t afraid of the cruelty of betrayal or the injustice of false imprisonment.

God wasn’t afraid of the pompousness of royalty, or the abuses of empire, or the idolatry of the Egyptian religions.

God’s only priority was rescuing people from being destroyed. And God trusted Joseph to do the rescuing because that’s who God chose to do that job.

God chose Joseph even if Joseph blurred the lines between faithful obedience and rank idolatry. God chose Joseph to help save a people who would not recognize God as God, a people who still maintained their own idolatrous religious practices, a people who ignored the massive miracle that God worked among them.

God chose Joseph because God trusted Joseph to use his gifts for God’s saving purposes.

And God trusts YOU. God trusts YOU to use YOUR gifts for God’s saving purposes.

When you are at work, at school, at Tim Horton’s, at the board meeting, on the soccer field or hockey rink, or at church, God trusts that YOU know who YOU are, and that you’ll be able to use your gifts for the life of the world.

God trusts that God’s dream lives inside of YOU, and you will live God’s dream with a joy and passion that can only come from God.

In your everyday, moment-by-moment encounters with life; at work, at school, with friends, among family, God trusts that YOU will use your gifts and live your faith in all that you do.

Even when others don’t recognize it. Even when you fail. God trusts you enough to pick you back up and use your failures for God’s gracious purposes, to minister to others in every corner of your life.

Me, I’ve got it easy. I can always hide behind my collar and people know what to expect from me. Whenever I’m tempted by the world I can simply put on my church clothes as a shield against those things that threaten to diminish me as a Christian. I can clothe myself with the institution, and hide within the safety of the church’s four walls.

You don’t have that option. You are Joseph. Yours is the greater witness. You’ve got the hard job. You have to walk the fine line between working with culture and not letting it define who you are. You have to work in a “me-first” world without submitting to its selfish temptations.

And it’s not easy. Because sometimes that misty line between God and world disappears completely.

But while you have to live in the tension between God’s world and our world, you also get to see where God is doing things, you get to see where life, joy, beauty, justice, and compassion are lived and celebrated. You get to see where the free and active God is working outside the safety of church walls.

You get to see what God is up to because you are making it happen. You are God’s hands, feet, voice, and heart,

Your life is your Christian mission. Your ministry starts just as soon as you walk out the door and into the rest of the world. We gather here together to remember who we are, to remember our story, so we can live that story in our lives.

Some say that we should be doing more - as a church - to engage the world, to be more active in outreach to our community, to be a larger Christian presence in a broken and hurting world.

And in many ways, those who say that are right. Being a Christian community means working as a group to share God’s love and mercy with those who desperately need it.

But I think that you’re already living your Christian mission. In your everyday encounters. In the way you use your gifts to enhance the life of those around you. In the small occasions of grace where words of hope and healing are heard and received.

That’s YOUR mission. That’s where God’s best work is being done.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Pentecost 7A

2011-07-31T10:41:00.001-07:00

Jacob was on his way home. He simply wanted to make things right. Guilt-ridden over the way he treated his twin brother Esau in stealing his birthright and snatching the blessing from their father Isaac, Jacob just wanted to say sorry for everything he had done to them.

God had asked him to return and seek forgiveness from his family. While it wasn’t his idea, Jacob knew it was the right thing to do.

And he was going to do it himself. He didn’t ask God to solve his problems for him. Nor did he ask God to protect him against his brother Esau. Nor does he devise yet another clever trick to fool his brother into forgiving him.

Jacob merely prays for the strength to do the right thing. He prays for the courage to reconcile with his brother. He prays that he will have what it takes to set things right between him and Esau, who is understandably angry with him. Jacob simply prays that Esau will find it within himself to forgive his brother.

And it is at that moment, that moment in prayer, that Jacob is attacked. It’s night and Jacob can’t see his attacker. And all he can feel is a sharp jab to his hip, knocking it out of its socket. They fight all night and Jacob could barely stand the pain.

Then the attacker says, “Let me go, the sun is coming up.”

But Jacob says, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.”

Interesting request.

Does this mean that Jacob knew his attacker? From whom is he looking for a blessing?

It’s hard to say. No one really knows who this attacker is. Some say it’s an angel. Perhaps even Esau’s guardian angel. Others say it’s a demon out to prevent Jacob from reconciling with his brother. Still others see him as the personification of the dangers lurking in the darkness. And yet others say it’s actually God.

But I like what Rabbi Harold Kushner says. Rabbi Kushner notes that Jacob is alone. And that the attacker is exactly as strong as Jacob. No stronger, but no weaker. Which is why they can’t beat each other and they last all night.

The rabbi says, “The attacker, the angel, is Jacob’s conscience, the part of him that summons him to rise above his bad impulses. The struggle is between the part of him that wins by cleverness and fraud, and the part of him that feels summoned by God to climb a ladder to heaven, to become someone exemplary.” (Kushner, Living a Life That Matters p. 26)

In other words, Jacob is at war with himself. Yes, he is clever and gets what he wants through craftiness and deceit. He’s very smart. Perhaps too smart. And he’s really proud of his abilities because they have given him the life he’d been looking for, and helped him walk the path that God put in front of him.

But he also knows the cost his cleverness and deceit take on his relationships with others. Especially his brother Esau and his dad Isaac. He regrets what he’s done to them. He feels cut off from his family. Estranged from from his past. He’s lost. Without a home.

So Jacob finds himself wrestling in the dark with an adversary that is his equal, because that adversary is himself.

“Then the man said, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” So the man said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” Then the man said, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.”

What Rabbi Kushner doesn’t notice, however, is that it was God who put Jacob in all those impossible situations, knowing that the only way out of them was deceit and cunning.

Jacob clearly was the right person to receive the birthright, the inheritance of land and leadership, from their father Isaac, but Esau was the first born, and not up to the task. And since the birthright went to the oldest son, Jacob had to manufacture a way to obtain what was legally his brother’s, but divinely appointed to Jacob.

And Jacob, with his mother Rebekah as an accomplice, needed to receive the blessing from his blind father, so they schemed to steal the blessing away from Esau, the official passing of the reigns of authority, to Jacob and not Esau. So Jacob tricked a blind old man into giving away something meant for someone else. This was the only way he could do the work that God had given him to do.

So, Jacob had been wrestling with God long before the midnight encounter at Jabbok. He’d been wrestling with God since before he was born. God wasn’t making it easy for Jacob to receive his destiny as the one to be called “Israel.” Jacob was always at war with himself, and with God.

“You have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.” And he could also add, with striven with himself and prevailed.

But that win came with a cost. Jacob was left with a limp that would remain with him for the rest of his life, reminding him of that night, reminding him of the battle between his worst instincts and his best self. But also reminding him that he can be hurt by life and he can survive.

His limp, which would follow him for the rest of his life, was why he was now Israel, meaning “one who has striven with God” would be a constant reminder of the cost of being chosen by God.

This is a new day for Jacob, now called “Israel.” With a new name comes a new life, a new identity, a new way of seeing the world and his place in it. It was an affirmation of the victory of his better self over his worst impulses.

God had given him the name Israel, perhaps in admiration, and maybe even as a reward. Because in losing that battle, Jacob had won the war against himself.

I think that’s a war that we all fight. We all live in constant struggle, battling between our worst impulses and our best selves. Sometimes, like Jacob, we can’t tell the difference between the two. Sometimes, like Jacob, we wrestle with God’s call on our lives.

We wish that being a person of faith were easier. We wish faith was something we could simply get up and do, much like brushing our teeth or eating breakfast. We wish we could see God’s plan for us and lives so clearly that we could follow it and never doubt nor stray from God’s path.

We wish that our best selves drove our lives and our choices all the time. But we know that we are - at best - a muddle of mixed motivations. And we trust that God works within us and through us, as our lives go in directions we don’t expect or anticipate.

My divorce is something that neither I, nor Rebekah, nor God intended when we got married. But the separation experience has taught Rebekah and I the power of a reconciliation that allows us to part ways blessing the other’s future.

A friend’s cancer came as a shock, while it was a treatable form of melanoma, he said it helped him to see the world with new eyes. The disease opened to him the generous preciousness of life. He actually calls his cancer “the gift” because, he says, because of his cancer, he’s become more loving, and can live in joyful gratitude for his time on this planet.

The same-sex marriage debate in our church has created division and acrimony. But it also gives us the opportunity to learn how to disagree as Christians, and to show the world a different way of disagreeing, a way of disagreeing that is marked by compassion, grace, and healing.

I’m sure you all have your own stories. Stories of victory from failure, and life from pain. Stories of survival.

This is why you ALL can be called “Israel,” you who have striven with God and with others and you have prevailed.

This is why you can be proud of your struggles. This is why you can be proud of the journey your life has taken. This is why you can be proud of your bruised and battered hearts. Because you have striven with God and with life, and you have survived. You have prevailed.

I know that you have prevailed because you are here. You are still walking the path that God put in front of you. You are still following the voice that calls your name. You are still communing with God among fellow survivors.

Like Jacob, you may walk with a limp, but that pain is a constant reminder of your victory. That pain is a constant reminder that God can create something new and beautiful out of the ugliest circumstances. That pain is a constant reminder that you are stronger and better because of your battles.

And today, Jase, or maybe I should call him “Israel” because who knows what God has already done with him? And who knows what God will do with him in his life? But we do know that Jase will face struggle and failure, victory and joy, and everything in between.

And we also know, that because he has been chosen by God, named and claimed in the waters of Holy Baptism, that Jase will wrestle with God and with life, and he will prevail. He will survive.

He may walk with a limp that life gives him, but that limp will be a constant reminder of his strength, a constant reminder that God will raise him up from any defeat, and at the end, God will give him - and all of us - the final blessing.

And may this be so among us. Amen.

Pentecost 6A

2011-07-24T11:21:00.000-07:00

I don’t know which cliche to use to describe what happened to Jacob in today’s Old Testament reading. I’m not sure if this is a case of “the devil being in the details” or “what comes around goes around.” Or both.

But we do know, that whatever cliche we use to describe Jacob’s situation, we recognize that he received the “short end of the stick” because Laban, being “crazy like a fox” indeed “drove a hard bargain” (to conclude my list of cliches).

Jacob had an agreement with Laban, but he should have paid close attention to what his boss DID and DID NOT say. He needed a good lawyer to glance over the contract to read the fine print.

After asking Laban for Rachel’s hand in marriage, as a reward for seven years of hard work, Laban said, “It is better that I give her to you than that I should give her to any other man. So...we have a deal!” And they shook on it.

Notice what he DIDN’T say. He didn’t say “I will give RACHEL.” He merely said “HER.”

That’s why when the seven years were finally up, and Jacob climbed into his wedding tent, lifted the veil over his bride’s head, and the sun came up the next day, he was in for big surprise. And the surprise was, of course, that it was Leah, not Rachel, who was waiting for him.

Understandably angry, Jacob tracks down Laban the next morning, “Hey! I thought we had an agreement! I was supposed to get Rachel NOT Leah!”

Pretending to NOT be devious, Laban responds, “O c’mon, you know better than that. The oldest daughter always gets married first. It’s custom. Tradition. The way it’s done around here. So stop being so silly. But I’ll tell you what. Give me seven more years, and you can have Rachel as well.”

Seven years later, Jacob takes Rachel for his wife. And later, since Rachel couldn’t get pregnant, Jacob marries Bilhah, Rachel’s maid, with whom he had a son. And then Jacob married Leah’s maid Zilpah who became pregnant and had more children.

That’s a lot of wives. And a lot of children.

But this wasn’t a case of Jacob philandering. In fact the bible tells us that there was much rejoicing at each of those births from all of Jacob’s wives.

This was the way it was done. It was custom. Tradition. And I won’t even get into the issue of a wife being payment for work accomplished.

So, when we talk about the “traditional” or “biblical view of marriage” what are we talking about?

We tend to think that the bible defines marriage as one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others ‘till death do us part, amen. And yes, the bible DOES say that.

But the bible also DOESN’T say that.

The bible provides examples of MANY forms of marriage. The bible writers were not of one mind on how human beings are to enter into marital covenant. Which makes me draw the conclusion that the various forms of marriage that the bible gives are born from culture and tradition rather than divine edict.

Of course, this brings me to the the business of the national church in convention who passed a motion allowing pastors, in consultation with their congregations, to preside over same-sex weddings. And I know there’s been concern and anger from some people. And rejoicing from others.

Some of you are concerned that we’re changing the definition of marriage and family. You’re worried that what was decided in Saskatoon deviates from what is presumed to be the one and only biblical model of marriage.

But as we see from this story of Jacob, the definition of marriage and family has never been static or fixed, either in scripture or in society.

For example, our own Martin Luther said that polygamy was permissible, and that if a Christian man wanted multiple wives he, “he may do so in accordance with the Word of God” and suggested that the pressure from society for a man to have only one wife was irrelevant to scripture.

To our ears that sounds insane. (Personally, one wife was PLENTY for me). In fact during the same-sex marriage debates many Christians argued that same-gendered couplings was a greasy pole to allowing polygamy. But it shows that marriage is always born from multiple factors, including faith and experience.

I say this not to support or defend one side of the debate and admonish the other. I bring this up to tone down the rhetoric, and to show that this issue may not be as cut-and dried as we may think.

I want us as a congregation, to explore where this change came from, and not to merely assume that those Christians who support same-sex marriage are simply genuflecting to the culture.

We can talk about we are going, and whether or not that is an appropriate place for us to go. But we can’t assume that our understandings of marriage and family come straight from scripture. Because they don’t. They are INFORMED by the bible and our experiences.

And we can talk about how to include our gay and lesbian sisters and brothers into the life of our congregation. And it’s important to remember that gays and lesbians ARE our sisters and brothers in Christ. Just as they are our sons and daughters, friends and acquaintances, co-workers and fellow believers. Gays and lesbians are not “them” out there, but in here among “us.” And they have been with and among us for a long time.

We are going to talk about these issues. And we are going to disagree. But I want us to talk as Christians. I want us to talk as members of Christ’s family, trying to discern together where God is taking us.

I don’t want us to talk to and about each other as enemies who we are trying to defeat. I don’t want any US verse THEM. That’s not what Christians do to each other. That's not how Christians behave. Christians love each other.

We Christians don’t just love each other when it’s convenient.

We Christians don’t just love each other when we agree.

We Christian don’t just love each other when we are right.

And we Christians certainly don’t hold our love conditional on a final outcome that’s to our favour. Anyone can do that. As Jesus would say, “Even the tax collectors and sinners can love when its easy.” We’re called to a different loving standard.

As followers of the crucified and risen Jesus, we love each other even when we thoroughly disagree. We love each other even when it hurts. We love each other even when, and maybe ESPECIALLY when it costs us something.

That’s the Christian way. That’s the Christian challenge.

And this is our opportunity to show the world a different way of being in deep disagreement, a different way of relating to people and ideas who make us crazy, a different way of coming to a common discernment.

As followers of the one who would not lift a finger against his enemies because he came to save not to destroy, revealed to the world what real divine love looks like, we are going to show the world that this love of God in Christ, this self-giving, reconciling love of God, who lives within us by the power of the Holy Spirit is stronger than any of our disagreements.

We are going to discuss. We are going to debate. We are going to disagree. But we are going to do so as Christians.

Some of you say that we should have been talking about this months ago. That we should have been talking and discussing sexuality long before the convention. That may be true. And you may be right.

But that ship has sailed (and you can tell I’m back to the cliches), and it would not have changed the outcome of the convention.

But what we have now is an opportunity to be the church in faithful disagreement, because there are people on both sides of this debate who have VERY strong feelings. If you have a strong opinion on this issue, please remember that there is a sister or a brother on this other side of the debate who has an equally strong opinion as yours. And that divide needs to be recognized and respected.

God is now calling us together as sisters and brothers, bound by baptism, joined to the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, to figure out together, how to move into the future that God put before us.

We are going come together as a people who are convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Pentecost 4A

2011-07-10T10:34:00.001-07:00

I understand twin brothers, since I am one and have one. I understand both the friendly rivalry and bare-knuckled competition between twin offspring.

My brother Keith was born 10 minutes before me, and you’d think, by the way he talks about those 10 minutes, that during that extra time, he’d gained a world of experience that I’d never possess.

Growing up we’d wrestle and fight. We’d tussle. We’d race. We once we competed for the same girl (I won). And when we started our careers we tried to “one-up” the other in terms of salary and status.

Most twins I know are the same way. That’s why I immediately understood what was happening between Jacob and Esau.

As most often in stories of twins, Jacob and Esau were different in every way you could imagine. It’s almost as if they needed each other to be a complete person.

Esau was a big hairy brute who liked to spend his time rummaging around in the woods when he wasn’t playing football. He worked with his hands and hated every moment he spent in school.

Jacob was the smart, articulate, smooth-skinned bookworm who was probably president of his school’s math club.

Esau was Isaac’s favorite because he probably lived vicariously through his son’s ultra-masculine accomplishments. Jacob was Rebekah’s favorite perhaps because she saw a lot of herself in him.

Jacob and Esau never got along. Rebekah could feel the fist fights in her womb. And at the moment of their births, Jacob grabbed hold of Esau’s heal in an apparent attempt to “trip” his brother on his way out the door. Which is why Isaac and Rebekah named him “Jacob” which means “heel” or “leg puller” or “tripper-upper.”

They were as different as wine and petroleum. They fought because they wanted to show the other whose path was better.

And today’s Old Testament story tells us just how far their competition and animosity went.

Esau comes home empty handed after a long day of hunting, and he’s famished. He hasn’t eaten all day because he hadn’t caught anything. He finds Jacob cooking lentil stew, and since he’s starving, he asks his brother for some.

“I’ll give you some stew if you give me your birthright,” Jacob offers, which is quite the stunning condition to put on a simple bowl of lentils.

“What good is a birthright if I die of hunger today?” Esau answers. As if people ever die from missing one meal.

Some commentators call Jacob “shrewd.” But I think this tells us more about Esau than it does about Jacob. And this is the narrator’s way of taking the birthright out of Esau’s hands and putting it in Jacob’s.

The birthright, which traditionally went to the oldest son, was their inheritance; the majority of land and wealth that was promised to them after their dad died.

And not only the land and wealth, but position and power. Esau was in line to take over the leadership of God’s people after Isaac went to his grave. Esau, presumably was being groomed for this job, since Isaac showed such favoritism toward him.

But as you read the story, the narrator clearly wants to the birthright to go to Jacob. The narrator can’t FATHOM Esau taking over the reigns from Isaac. Jacob is clearly the right one to lead.

“What good is a birthright if I die today of hunger,” Esau says. And that’s the punchline.

Esau reveals himself to be a person ruled by his appetites, someone who has no vision for the future. Someone who can’t look beyond the moment to see what can and will be.

Esau is clearly not up to the job. He’s not interested in living up to his family and community obligations. He find comfort in the present moment, and lacks the capacity to envision a new and better life for himself and those he is called to lead.

“I’m going to die anyways, so what do I need of a birthright? So, please pass the bowl.”

It’s easy to hate Esau. The bible goes to great lengths to describe how dumb and ugly he was, just in case you were starting to feel badly for him.

Which is why I have trouble taking my eyes off of him. Not for the fascination with the abomination, he’s not some sideshow freak that I can giggle and point at.

I keep staring at him because I see something of him in me. And in us. He’s like a mirror reflecting back at us those parts we’d not admit about ourselves.

For me it’s the constant struggle of living according to my appetites rather than according to the vision of life and health that God wants for me. Working harder and harder with less and less to show for it. Of being in constant competition with those who are supposed to be my partners.

For us I see in him our sense of worry for the coming years. Overall church decline. The battle to include all people into the life and ministry of our faith community. Decreasing influence in society. Diminishing resources. We’re slowly and painfully fading away.

We’re going to die anyways, so what do we need of a birthright? So please pass the bowl.

Please pass the bowl of comfort to help us feel better about our challenges. Please pass the bowl of minor squabbles to make us feel like we’re still doing something that matters.

Please pass the bowl of blame so I can point my finger at the cause of all our troubles. Please pass the bowl of the past, so we can remember when the churches were full, money was flowing, and outreach was thriving.

We’re going to die anyways, so what do we need of a birthright? So please pass the bowl.

That, I think, is our greatest temptation.

Esau hovers over us as we talk about who we are and where we’re going.

Conversations about our future are often more about bringing back what once was rather than building something new. We keep looking to the past for inspiration rather than to the future to see what God has in store for us. We’re looking for restoration or resuscitation, rather than resurrection.

That’s what I hear from certain sectors as we prepare for the national convention. “If those motions are passed that will mean the end of the church!” they scream, as if God is waiting for a certain amount of moral purity to restore our church to it’s former glory. As if God chooses only the holiest and most righteous saints to build Christ’s church. As God will be boxed into a corner from which God cannot escape. As if our birthright was born from our obedience.

But if we look closely at the story we see something very different at work. While the narrator seems relieved that Esau was deprived of the birthright, the narrator isn’t at all pleased by the way Jacob obtained it. And as we shall see in the coming weeks, the narrator of the story becomes less and less impressed by Jacob’s behaviour. It’s a pox on both their houses.

Jacob didn’t receive the birthright, the opportunity to lead God’s people because he was handsome, smart, and smooth-skinned, where his brother was ugly, hairy, and dumb.

Nor did Jacob receive the birthright because he was the virtuous one and his brother was a moral midget. This was a game both of them lost.

Jacob received the birthright because he knew what to do with it, and his brother didn’t. Jacob received the birthright because he could see God’s vision for the future.

Jacob could see God’s promises unfolding around him, and he trusted God to lead him and his people into the life that God had chosen for them.

God gives the birthright to those who have vision, to those who look forward in faith, to those who eyes are fixed on the future, those who grab God’s promises with both hands and run toward the finish line that God puts in place.

God does not want us to settle for what is. God fixes our eyes on what COULD be.

God does not want us to stay stuck in the present moment, filled with worry about the future. God gives us eyes to see beyond the troubles of this day and sets our gaze on what CAN be.

God does not want us to keep looking back to once was, God turns our faces to the direction of what WILL be.

And this isn’t easy. Especially when world is changing so fast and we have trouble seeing what’s coming next.

Some see change as unbridled chaos and long for a simpler time when everything seemed fixed. When our lives were fixed and ordered, we knew our places, and the future looked just as stable as the past.

But instead of mere change, others see creation unfolding faster than in any other time in history. And we have been chosen to witness to God’s future vision here today.

This is OUR time to bear witness to God’s love for the world. This is OUR time to tell God’s saving story. This is OUR time to be God’s healing presence.

This is OUR time to share God’s mercy, to bring relief to the suffering, to live God’s compassion for the world. This is OUR time to live God’s resurrection life.

This is not a time to stop the clock or to turn it back. God is calling us to march forward into the future, proudly proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God, the good news that God’s reign of justice, of mercy, of forgiveness, of freedom, of peace, and of healing is HERE - right now - in Jesus Christ.

By the grace of God, we are not children of Esau. We are sons and daughters of Jacob. We have been chosen for this holy task TODAY. We have been called by name and anointed by the Holy Spirit to bear witness to God’s promised future TODAY. God has given us eyes to see and mouths to proclaim the great and mighty deeds of God.

That is our calling. That is our birthright. May this be so among us. Amen!

Pentecost 3A

2011-07-03T10:41:00.000-07:00

Today’s Old Testament reading begins in the middle of a story. Actually, it starts in the middle of a sentence, and we only hear part of the conversation that sets the story in motion. And in this reading that we’re told to hear only bits and pieces, as the lectionary folks suggest that we leave out a few verses.

It’s as if they’re in a hurry to get to the point of the story, they want to rush to the end, bypassing some conversation along the way.

And I guess it makes sense. After all this story is about the next generation taking over. It’s a passing of the torch. An opportunity for fresh blood and new ideas to emerge. And as we all know, the younger generation tends to be in more of a hurry than their elders.

Genesis chapter 24 starts out by saying “Abraham was now old, and advanced in years...” This may sound like an innocent enough saying, but we have to remember that Abraham was almost 100 years old when God called him out of retirement to be a father of nations.

But everyone is called home at one point, no matter how many years they’ve put on this earth. And when that happens, someone new needs to take over, a new leader needs to step in and take charge.

And Isaac, for better or for worse, was that person.

Isaac can be, at best, described as a placeholder leader. He’s in between two towering figures. His father Abraham and his son Jacob.

It’s not that greatness was not in him, he was simply uninspiring. While his father Abraham is said to have “hungered and thirsted for righteousness,” Isaac seemed to hunger only for his lunch

Even next to his brother Ishmael, Isaac seemed small. Ishmael was the motorcycle driving bad boy who probably got all the girls, while Isaac stayed home and played video games all night, never giving any thought to his life or his future.

You might remember that Isaac and Ishmael were half-brothers. Ishmael was born of Hagar, a maid that Abraham impregnated; while Isaac was the miracle child that Sarah bore. And even though Isaac was the fruit of God’s faithfulness, he never really lived up to expectations. After all, if you’re born from a barren womb, how to do top that?

It wasn’t that Isaac was lacking in brains or potential. He was just unambitious. He was passionless. He had no direction. He simply floated down the current of life, not really thinking about where he ended up.

He even waited until he was almost forty before getting married. While I’m sure that Abraham and Sarah were dropping the occasional hint about how wonderful it would be to have grandchildren, Isaac probably came home from work each day, crashed in front of the TV, and let the days and evenings slip into weeks and years, with little to show for it.

So when Rebekah agrees to be his wife (the first time EVER in the bible where the bride actually gives her consent to be married), it’s like an alarm clock had woken him up, and he wanted to get married RIGHT away, even though both their families suggest that they wait a while before rushing into a lifetime commitment.

Isaac’s anxious to get going. This was HIS time! Maybe he knows that his dad is sick. Maybe he can see his mom slowing down.

Maybe he looked around and saw that all Abraham and Sarah were asked to do was accomplished and realized that it was his turn to lead.

And he was right. Although the story doesn’t come right out and say it, Abraham does die, as does Sarah. And now Isaac is left alone, trying to figure out how to take charge of a people looking for guidance.

But his initial enthusiasm soon fizzled into settled mediocrity. If you follow his career you’d probably give Isaac a B or B-. He enjoyed some success and endured some failures; but accomplished nothing of note. He was involved in some shady business dealings and lost a lot of money, but gained most of it back.

He ruled competently but charted no new course, he had no new vision for his people, and inspired no devotion. It wasn’t the force of destiny that compelled him to grab hold of the leadership reigns. It was like he was just taking over the family business and lacked the passion that gave rise to its institution. If Isaac weren’t Abraham’s son and Jacob’s dad, we probably would never have heard about him.

His personal life was also troubled. Like his parents, Isaac and Rebekah had trouble getting pregnant. And when they did have kids he couldn’t control his sons, Jacob and Esau. He even fought with his wife over who was the favorite. Rebekah favored Esau where Isaac favored Jacob. That must have made for interesting dinner conversation.

Isaac was a leader, but he was not a role model. He is the bridge between his father Abraham “The Father of Many Nations” and his son Jacob whose sons formed the twelve tribes of Israel. He was a transition. An interim. No one to admire or hate.

So what can we learn from Isaac? What does he have to teach us?

I think Isaac represents what most of us are.

The point of Isaac’s life wasn’t that he was an uninspiring, mediocre, leader who didn’t quite live up to expectations. The point of Isaac’s life was that he was a promise fulfilled. He was a child of Abraham and Sarah, the miracle child, who has his own place in salvation history.

He is the father of Jacob, who was the father of Joseph, who led Egypt through a terrible famine, and brought prosperity to the region.

Isaac may be the middle-child of history, but he did his job the way he was supposed to. To me that’s bac-handed good news

When I worry that I haven’t lived up to my potential (and I know I haven’t) I know I’m in good company, and that God can and does use me for God’s own purposes just the way I am.

This doesn’t mean that I can stop striving to be better at what I do.   It doesn’t mean that I can float through life until my days come to an end and have nothing to show for it.   It doesn’t mean that I can stop and rest on the laurels I’ve inherited from other church leaders.   It doesn’t mean that I can stop flexing my muscles to help Christ’s church become stronger, looking for new and better ways to share God’s love with the world.

It DOES mean that I can fail, I can be human. It means that I don’t have to worry about God’s promised future for the church or the world, because I’m not in charge of that future. I’ll let God worry about that future instead.

And for US it means that WE know the future is in God’s hands, not ours. We know that some days we will succeed and some days we will fail. But our every days, the daily moment-by-moment encounters of our lives may seem small and insignificant, but they add up to a larger vision of what God wants for us and the world, and moves God’s salvation story forward.

So today, we can remember Isaac not as a cautionary tale of ignored potential, but as a parent of grace, an example of God choosing the wrong people for the right reasons, as evidence that we are not in charge of the world’s salvation.

And for that I can say, “Thanks be to God.”

May this be so among us. Amen.

Pentecost 2A

2011-06-26T10:38:00.000-07:00

Where was Sarah? That’s what I want to know. Where was Isaac’s mom when Abraham took their son up the mountain?

Did Abraham even consult his wife before taking their son - their miracle child - to Mount Moriah, to stab him until he bled to death, before throwing his body in to the fire to be roasted and then eaten. After all, that’s what a sacrifice was; a holy barbecue where the sacrificial victim was served as dinner.

Did Sarah even know what Abraham was up to?

Many people, including some of the biblical writers say that God was testing Abraham’s obedience. And some say that Abraham passed the test.

He was willing to destroy the person he loved the most on this planet to show his loyalty to God. He was willing to kill, burn, and eat his own son because he believed that’s what God wanted him to do; an act which apparently showed God that Abraham was the right choice to father a nation.

But I’m not entirely convinced that’s what happened, because I’m not convinced that was God’s test. And I don’t know if Abraham passed the test or failed it.  
If killing, burning, and eating your own child was a test of obedience to God, then I’m not sure that such a test was God’s intention.

Was God trying to see how far Abraham could be pushed? Was God trying to show Abraham something about himself? Was God showing Abraham something about God’s OWN self?

When make this test all about Abraham and turn him into a hero for his willingness to commit such an unspeakable act, we forget about the collateral damage, namely Isaac and Sarah. We applaud Abraham’s obedience, but ignore the innocent victims. Abraham’s obedience would have devastated others. 
It makes me wonder if we need to reflect on the cost OUR obedience has on others. Does our obedience hurt others, or help them?

Is the desire to be in obedience to God and God’s Word bringing life to the world, or causing pain to innocent victims?

Does our desire to be obedient to biblical teaching inflict unholy suffering on someone? And if so, then is that what God even wants from us?

Are we willing to sacrifice others on the altar of our obedience? And if so, who? And does obedience equal faithfulness?

One of the great young conductors of our time is a 30-year-old Venezuelan kid named Gustavo Dudamel aka “The Dude.” He’s the music director of the LA Philharmonic, and was given that job at the annoying age of 26.

I downloaded a bunch of his recordings from iTunes because he wakes up tired old classics. In his hands Beethoven breathes new life, and Mozart is made alive again.  I also watch to a lot of his concerts on YouTube. He’s a delight to observe. He’s a very emotional conductor but he also has flawless technique. He evokes both a devoted following and a chorus of critics.

On the YouTube version of the final movement of Mahler’s ninth symphony, someone posted a comment about Dudamel’s conducting technique which I found astonishing. And as we all know, YouTube comments are ALWAYS a source of edification and inspiration.

This person said, “He’s too young, too emotional to understand such profound music. It’s as if he’s forgotten the notes and is simply conducting the music. He’s forgotten that music is made up of notes, not emotional sounds that hang in the air.”

“It’s as if he’s forgotten the notes and is simply conducting the music.” Wow.

Having spent the first half of my life as a musician I can say that the best conductors and finest performers play the music not merely the notes. They know that the notes are a gateway to sound, not the end.

The best conductors and performers I’ve seen and worked with are the ones who seem to get lost in the music, who appear to embody what they’re playing, it’s as if their very selves get lost in the sounds that they’re making. It’s as if they become the music, it’s as if they are the music made flesh.

And, by contrast, the most boring ones are those who are technically competent, but emotionally absent. The play the notes, but not the music. It’s as if they believe that playing the notes perfectly is all that matters and the aesthetic experience is irrelevant.

Often I worry that we as Christians worry too much about playing the notes of the bible, the notes of obedience, that we forget to play the music of the gospel.

We spend too much time and energy worrying about the words of scripture, the intricacies of the law’s demands, the individual moral admonitions, the details of personal codes of behavior.

So I wonder that if by being obedient to the notes of the bible, we can be disobedient to the music of the gospel; the deep strains of freedom, the flowing melodies of peace, the harmonizing chords of forgiveness, the colorful orchestrations of joy, the counterpoint of justice, and the triumphant fanfare of eternity. That’s the music of the gospel. And when we make the scribblings on the page the focus of our Christian life together, we miss the music that God is singing through those notes.

When we make decisions for our congregation or for our national church, when we discern together the direction the Holy Spirit is leading us, when we ask our leaders where they are taking us, when we look to the future of our faith community, the question we ask is “Are we playing the notes of obedience, or singing the music of the gospel?”

I wonder if that’s a lesson Abraham learned the hard way. Who knows what went through his head as they climbed the mountain? Who can say what Abraham was thinking as he wrestled with his squirming son, tying him down on the altar?   We can only guess Abraham’s thoughts as he raised his knife, and began to thrust it in the direction of his son’s heart.

What did Abraham think about his own obedience? What did he think about a God who would ask him to commit such a horrific act?

If he had questioning thoughts they didn’t affect his actions. Abraham was obedient. A loyal foot soldier of the Lord. A steadfast servant.

But when Abraham felt the angel’s hand on the knife in mid thrust, then saw the ram that God provided for him, something probably clicked, a light turned on inside him, and he realized that, yes, he was obedient, but was he obedient in the right way?

When Isaac asked where the sacrificial lamb was, we think that probably Abraham lied to his son. “God will provide one,” he said. But his eyes weren’t open for a lost baby sheep, ambling up the mountain. Abraham had every intention of murdering his son as a radical, and horrific act of obedience to God.

But at the last possible moment, God grabbed Abraham’s wrist, and pulled the knife from his hand.

And when Abraham saw the ram caught in the thicket by its horns, he knew that he both passed and failed the test. He sang the notes of obedience, but not the music of the gospel.

That’s when God unveiled the promise to Abraham; the promise that he and his wife Sarah would give birth to a mighty nation. Now Abraham was ready to receive that promise. Now Abraham’s eyes were open to God’s vast vision for the world. Now Abraham could grasp what God was doing.

Abraham finally understood that God did not demand a fearful fealty, slavishly attending to the notes of obedience, but God desired a total immersion in the music of God’s kingdom.

By sacrificing his son on the altar of his obedience, Abraham discovered that he could be obedient to yet still faithless. Abraham learned that what he understood as an act of personal submission toward God, could cause pain and death to others. Abraham realized that he could play the notes of obedience perfectly, yet miss the music of God.

It was at that moment that Abraham finally knew and understood this God we serve.

It was at that moment that he finally knew and understood that we don’t serve a god of destructive obedience. We serve a God of faithful freedom.

It was at that moment that Abraham finally knew and understood that we serve a God of LIFE, NOT a god of DEATH. We serve a God who creates, not a god who destroys.

We serve a God who raises a son from the dead, not a god who sends him to his grave. We serve a God who makes all things new, who builds a human family, whose people number among the stars lighting up the dark night sky.

Abraham finally knew and understood that his job was not to cower in compliant subservience in the presence of divine power. His job was to shine, his job was to light up the universe with God’s love, his job was to be a beacon of God’s kindness and God’s favour.

With his wife Sarah, Abraham’s job was to give birth to a new people, a new reality, a new way of living.

Together, God empowered Abraham and Sarah to create a nation, a nation that would be God’s light to ALL nations, where God’s vision of love, forgiveness, peace, mercy, justice, and grace, intertwined in a melody of freedom for the whole world.

Their job was to sing the music of God’s glorious realm.

And our job is to continue the song that we learned from our Father Abraham and Mother Sarah.

Our job is to shine. Our job is to light up the dark places of the world with God’s love. Our job is to sing God’s gospel song, a song not of our own composing, but a song placed on our lips.

It’s God who opens our mouths to sing God music of forgiveness. It’s God who gives us strength to sing God’s song of freedom. It’s God who teaches us to sing God’s song of justice, God’s song of mercy, God’s song of peace.

So now we look out at the night sky and see our future, which is God’s future for us, where the stars - too numerous to count - shine with the brightness of God’s love, as we continue to sing God’s song of life.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Trinity Sunday

2011-06-19T11:18:00.001-07:00

I’m guessing that the folks who put the lectionary together chose the first reading from Genesis because of a certain word.

You probably read this passage so often that you might have passed right over it. I know I did the first 1000 times I read this passage.

But when I read this passage with Trinitarian eyes, I can’t help but lock in on the fact that God speaks of God’s self in first person plural.

“Let US make humankind in OUR image...” God says. And this is not a typo. It’s in the original Hebrew. It’s like the lectionary folks wanted to remind us that God is a tiny community - and always has been, right from the beginning, if God can ever be said to have a beginning.

Maybe I’m reading too much into this Genesis passage, but that’s what it says to me. God may be “One” but we don’t know how God self-identifies that “Oneness.” Especially when God is a relational God. God is never alone because God can’t be. That’s not who God is.

And since we’re created in God’s image, we can’t run from the fact we TOO are relational creatures. We are made to engage and interact. Our very being demands that we we remain connected to others, that the path of faith and life is not a lonely walk, that we can’t be who we are without each other. No matter how much we try.

“I’d like you to baptize my baby,” she said, on the other end of the phone.

“I’d be glad to,” I replied.

“What’s involved?” she asked

“Well, I’d like to meet with you and we can talk about how we can get your child baptized.

“When can you meet?” I asked

“How’s Sunday at 1:00?” she said.

“How about you come to church and see what we’re all about then we’ll meet in my office after worship,” I suggested. 
“Ummmm...no, I don’t think so,” she responded. “How about you come to my place at 1:00.”

“Okay,” I responded.

I arrived at her house armed with a hymnal marked to the baptism service, as well as a copy of Baptized We Live, a sort of comic book version of what we believe as Lutherans.

“So, why a baptism?” I asked her. I ask this question, not to jam parents into a corner, and I’m NOT looking for a “correct” answer. But because I’m genuinely interested in what parents believe about baptism.

“Well, I got done, my parents got done, and I should have my baby done,” she said. Her answer was pretty typical from what I get from parents. At least she was honest.

I opened the hymnal and turned to the liturgy for Holy Baptism, and I pointed out the section where she would be making some pretty heavy duty promises on behalf of her child:

“As you bring your child to receive the gift of baptism, you are entrusted with responsibilities:

to live with her among God’s faithful people,
bring her to the Word of God and the Holy Supper
teach her the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments,
place in her hands the holy scriptures,
nurture her in faith and prayer,
so that your child may learn to trust God,
proclaim Christ through word and deed,
care for others and the world God made,
and work for justice and peace.

Do you promise to help your child grow in the Christian faith and life?”

I couldn’t get through the rest of my spiel because she immediately burst out crying.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t want to do any of that,” she said.

“I don’t understand, what’s your concern?” I asked.

“I don’t want to force any religion on my baby. I’m not going to bring her to church because I want her to make her own choice when she grows up. I don’t believe in church. I don’t believe you have to go to a building to worship God,” she said.

“It’s not the building that’s important, it’s where God’s people gather to worship,” I replied.

“I don’t care!” she said, and stormed out of the room.

I always find it interesting that many parents see faith and spirituality as areas where they can raise their children with little or no guidance, yet still assume their children will make good choices about these when they grow up.

And I often wonder if she told her friends about the mean ol’ pastor who wouldn’t baptize her baby. But then I realized it wasn’t me who said “No” to her child’s baptism, it was her.

At an earlier point in my ministry I would have been furious at this encounter. I would have thought “How dare she treat the sacrament of Holy Baptism with such cavalier consumerism, as if I’m in the religious service industry! This is God’s activity in her child’s life, not the Sears portrait studio!”

But after a few years into this job I realize that she’s just doing what the culture taught her to do, to define life and faith on her own terms, rather than seek the wisdom of a community who lived and breathed their faith for thousands of years.

She was making it up as she went along, dogmatically asserting the infallibility of personal choice and inerrancy individual spiritual preferences. She’s so deeply immersed in the waters of consumerism, believing that she is swimming upstream, against the religious current, that she can’t see that most other people are floating in the same direction.

She is not as unique and radical as she probably believes herself to be.

She was probably worried that I was trying to jam her into a religious box that was not her own making, where she would gasp for air, rather than providing a doorway into new and abundant life that God wants for her and her child, offering her and her daughter an opportunity for participate in the world’s salvation.

And she was right about one thing. You don’t have to go to a building to worship God. But you can’t be a Christian without others. We need the support, encouragement, fellowship, and prayers of others to grow into our faith. There cannot be any individual Christians, because there is no individual God.

God is a community. Three-in-one and one-in-three. Don’t ask me how this all works because I haven’t a clue. No one really knows.

But what I do know is that God is profoundly relational. God-is-with-us because that’s who God is. And that’s who God wants us to be. We can’t be Christians without each other.

Some say that such a perspective coming from a guy like me, doing what I do, is just the theological justification for keeping my job, and it’s the religious rationale for propping up the church institution.

I won’t deny that you folks coming to church helps pay my rent and puts shoes on my kids’ feet. After all, a guy’s gotta eat. And I really like my job.

But there are easier ways to make money than being a pastor. And more of it.

So when we baptize in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, we baptize into a community - God’s community - where we are never alone.

As I thought about what that mom said I realized that at least she had the integrity to NOT go through with a ritual that she didn’t believe in. And it could be said that she saying “No” to her child’s baptism respected us and what we believe.

But still, I never say No to a baptism because God never says No. Even when the parents clearly have no desire to follow through on the promises they make on behalf of their child at baptism, I still do the baptism, because God DOES follow through on God’s promises at baptism.

Our challenge - as a church - is learning how to live our promises in world that doesn’t believe in them, in a world that tries to make up faith and spirituality as it goes along, in a world that’s - rightly or wrongly - suspicious of formalized faith.

But whether we live up to that challenge or if we fail, God who is Trinity will remain faithful to us and to the world, because that’s who God is.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Day of Pentecost

2011-06-12T12:45:00.001-07:00

What I find troubling about the Christian church is that we too often seem to be facing in the wrong direction. We look backwards in history rather than forward in hope. We look to the past for inspiration rather than to the future with expectation.

This is especially true when we talk about our beliefs. We trip over ourselves trying to prove that what we believe is the same thing as what people believed 2000 years ago, or even longer.

We say that God is unchanging, which may be true, but we don’t know the whole of who God is. So we take our thoughts about God, freeze them in time, and present them as if by their very nature, their un-embodied truths will speak to all people in every time and every place.

It’s as if we think that the glory days of the church were “back then” when the faith was fresh and the Spirit spoke with awesome clarity. It’s as if we believe that today’s expression of church is a pale imitation of what God has done in previous generations.

I hear this all the time. People wax poetic about the primitive church, and how the early Christians were filled with fiery zeal, upon which we have poured cold institutional water.

Others point to the great church reformers, and the heroism that was shown in restoring a corrupt faith to the purity of the original.

Even the father of our Lutheran Church, Martin Luther went to great pains to demonstrate that he is not an original thinker, that he was just a mouthpiece for an ancient proclamation. Theological innovation in the church, we are told, is heresy.

So we ponder the drama of the Reformation story, and are inspired by the Christian heroes who stood up against the enemies of the gospel, and we think, THOSE -THOSE - were the glory days of the church.

  Still others look to the recent past with memories of full churches and crowded Sunday School classrooms. They and we remember when committees had more members then they needed, when new church buildings were being constructed weekly, and the budget kept growing, and we say “Those were the church’s glory days.”

We think that God set the standard thousands of years ago, and we are not to deviate from iota from what we say God has created. It’s as if we’re saying that, the more ancient the expression of faith, the more pure it is, since it hasn’t yet been stained by the messy fingerprints of human history.

And when we say that we are not totally wrong. We just don’t see the whole story.

The Day of Pentecost starts telling the rest of the story. When the Spirit descended upon the disciples there was no going back to where they started. For those whose eyes were fixed on their glorious past, the Day of Pentecost must have seemed horribly chaotic.

It must have seemed like everything they knew to be true and good was crumbling around their ankles.

It must have looked like their ancient faith was being trampled upon, pushed aside in favour a dangerously innovative religious expression.

They were taught that salvation was reserved for God’s chosen people - Israel. Now people from all over the world were receiving God’s mercy and grace.

They were taught that a series of national laws and religious disciplines made them unique in their faith. Now those laws and disciplines were being replaced by new practices.

They were told they had to offer sacrifices in the temple and worship in the synagogue, Now people were praying in the streets and meeting in homes.

They were taught that people could come to God only through the mediation of a priest, that they couldn’t understand the bible, that women had no place in leadership.

Now people prayed without the help of religious professionals, they could study the scriptures for themselves, and women took their place at the head of the table.

Those invested in an unchanging religious tradition must have met the Day of Pentecost will unyielding scorn. It must have sent them into a panic. It must have seemed like the world was ending.

And they would be right. Their world was ending. But out of something old and dying, something new arose.

For those who trust in a God that makes all things new, Pentecost must have been the blast of fresh air they were waiting for. Something new had begun.

The Word of God was now spoken in all languages. God’s message of mercy and grace was now for everyone. People from all over the known world fell down and worshipped the God of Israel. Now, all people were invited to God’s table.

Church folks like to call Pentecost Sunday “The Birthday of the Church.” And what do we celebrate on birthdays? The fact that a new person has arrived on this planet. We celebrate a birth, a new age of possibility.

I guess the danger and the worry is that people will diminish or dismiss the past as if what happened before us is irrelevant or unimportant. That the hard work of those who came before us will be lost in the dust of history. That we need to honour those who dedicated their lives to building Christ’s church.

And that’s an appropriate fear. We DO need to honour what God has done in and through those whose names are now written in the Book of Life. It’s important that we remember the saints of the past whose sweat and toil has built Christ’s church and whose voices still echo in our collective proclamation.

But forgetting the hard work of past Christians is not the danger I see. The danger I see is that we cling too closely to the church of the past that we miss the opportunities for ministry that God has placed today on our doorstep, opportunities that will take us into a faithful future. A bigger danger is believing that our glory days are behind us, and in front of us is a ministry boulder that we’re being asked to roll uphill.

And to think like that is tempting. VERY tempting. Especially when we’re honest about the challenges we face as a church.

But today, this Pentecost Sunday, this day when we celebrate the coming of the Holy and Life-giving Spirit into the church and the world, God is telling us that the glory days of the church are NOW. TODAY!

Whenever the Spirit speaks words of mercy and grace through Christians just like you and me, those are the church’s glory days.

Whenever God is praised either with a smile or through tears, those are the glory days of the church.

Whenever the captives are set free, people’s eyes are opened to new possibilities, and the poor receive good news, THOSE are the church’s Glory Days.

Whenever the lonely find friendship, when the grieving are comforted, when the dying receive and believe the promise of new and everlasting life, those are the glory days of the church.

Whenever the people of God gather to hear good news, to receive the holy sacrament, and go out into the world bearing witness to God vision of peace, justice, mercy, forgiveness, love, and grace, those are the Glory Days of the church.

In other words, TODAY - TODAY is the Glory Day of the church. Right here. Right now. In this place.

Tomorrow is the Glory Day of the church. Whenever the Spirit ignites faith, when the gospel is proclaimed in every language, whenever a sinner receives forgiveness, whenever the waters of baptism is poured over a child’s head, that is the church in its glory because God is glorified in what we do.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Lent 5A - Service of Prayer and Healing

2011-04-10T10:29:00.001-07:00

“What bible readings do you suggest, pastor?” she asked as we sat across the table from the funeral director.

“How about Psalm 23, ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want...’”? I asked

“Perfect. Mother loved that psalm. She had a copy of it on her bedroom wall.”

“Also, what about Romans chapter 8, ‘Neither death nor life...nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

“Lovely. I think she would have appreciated that message.”

“For a gospel reading, how about John 11?”

“Which one is that?”

“‘I am the resurrection and the life, those who believe in me shall not perish, but whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.’ It’s the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.”

“Absolutely NOT! No one is raising mother from the dead. She is NOT coming back to life. How dare you suggest that story!”

She looked at me as if she couldn’t tell if I were a monster or moron. Or just some religious nut spewing biblical nonsense.

I was shocked by her vehemence, but could see her point. She was still trying to come to grips with the fact that her mother had died. She was drowning in details and trying to just get through the next couple of days. She didn’t have time to reconcile the Christian proclamation with her own secular scientific perspective.

“No one is raising mother from the dead. She is NOT coming back to life!”

They probably said the same thing about Lazarus. No one is raising him from the dead. He is NOT coming back to life.

He’d been dead for four days. Tradition said that the soul had since departed and what was left in that tomb was an rotting, empty, shell.

When Jesus arrived on the scene he must have seemed terribly insensitive. People were grieving. He even wept.

Then Jesus shouted, “Lazarus, come out!” I’m sure that some of Mary and Martha’s friends wanted to put a hand over his mouth and hustle Jesus back to where he came from. How would you respond if some preacher showed up at family member’s funeral and starting pounding on the coffin, and shouting “Wake up! Wake up!”?

This was NOT a pleasant scene.

It got even worse when Jesus demanded that the grave be opened. And when the stone was pulled back, the smell probably reached their noses before Lazarus appeared at the entry way. This was no sanitary resurrection, because death is not clean.

I’m sure Lazarus emerging from the tomb was met with mixed reaction. His sisters I’m sure were overwhelmed with relief that they got their brother back. Others might have been terrified at such a passionate display of God’s power. Still others probably didn’t know what to think.

For the reader, questions remain. Was his body healed? Was his skin repaired after days in the hot tomb? What could he tell us about his experience during those four days in death?

Not everyone was glad to see Lazarus alive, however. For the religious authorities, Lazarus being raised from the dead created a problem. Seeing Lazarus walk around again would create a huge support base for Jesus, which would catch the attention of the Romans, who would then act swiftly and mercilessly to protect their rule.

If Jesus became too popular, the Romans would step in. If Jesus became too powerful, then Caesar would protect his painful peace by killing Jesus’ supporters.

But if Jesus died, then the Romans would stand down. If Jewish leaders dealt with the Jesus problem themselves, then the Roman problem would take care of itself.

So there is a direct line between Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, and his own execution.

“It is expedient than one man die than to have the whole nation destroyed,” admitted Caiphas, the high priest. Most bible commentators call Caiphas “ruthless,” sentencing Jesus to death to spare the country.

But I’m not sure that’s true. I can see the bind he was in. Despite the way history reports it, I’m sure Caiphas wasn’t happy about sacrificing one of his fellow Jews to satisfy Roman anger. It wasn’t a perfect solution because their wasn’t one.

I’m obviously not saying that I agree with Jesus being executed. But I understand the reasoning behind it. At least in this situation.

But what Caiphas didn’t know, was that he was sending Jesus to his death not just to “save a whole nation,” but to save the whole world. Jesus’ death wasn’t just for his own people, but for all people everywhere. His death was political. And it was universal. The cross wasn’t just an isolated event on a lonely hill just outside the city. It was an event that touched history with the force of its love.

And unlike Lazarus who appeared from the grave still wrapped in his grave clothes, still bound to death, Jesus rose from the dead with his grave clothes neatly folded and tucked away. He wouldn’t be needing them any more.

“No one is raising mother from the dead. She is NOT coming back to life!”

That’s true today. But that’s not true tomorrow. There will be a day when our grave clothes will be neatly folded and put away forever. There will be a day when the strength of Jesus’ death and power of his resurrection will be shown in its fulness. There will be a day when the whole world will rise and meet its God. There will be a day when tomorrow lasts forever.

And today, we cling to that promised future by coming to altar for a taste of what God has in store for us. Today, I invite you to come to the altar and bring your hurts and your wounds, or those pains you carry for others. We will offer them to God with the hope that you will receive a touch of eternity today from the one who said, “I am the resurrection and the life, those who believe in me will live. And those who live and believe in me shall never die.”

May this be so among us. Amen.

Lent 4A

2011-04-03T11:34:00.001-07:00

“He put some mud on my eyes. I washed. And now I see.”

Simple. To the point.

But that wasn’t enough. They wanted a fuller explanation. The religious types couldn’t accept his version of the story. There had to be more to it.

Jesus meets this blind man who has been blind from birth. With some spit and dust Jesus heals him. Praise be to God! A man who was blind can now see.

But not so fast. A controversy breaks out. Was this man really healed? How was he healed? If Jesus healed him, what does that say about Jesus?

Fortunately, a bunch of pastors appear on the scene to help sort things out, religiously speaking.

“Who sinned? This man or his parents that he was born blind?” they ask. Like lots of religious folks, they want to place blame. They want to talk about sin. They want to beat this guy with a theological stick.

Jesus doesn’t play that game.

The neighbours can’t believe it. Isn’t this the same blind man who once had to beg to survive?

The pastors alert the bishop who refers it to the disciplinary committee to investigate.

“All I know,” the man tells the committee, “is that this man put mud on my eyes and now I can see.”

Though the man is standing right in front of them, the committee can’t reach a conclusion. They subpoena the man’s parents.

“Is this your son?” they ask.

“It looks like our son, but we don’t want to get into any trouble. We have no idea how he got his sight back. If you want to know what happened, ask HIM,” his parents reply.

They call Jesus back in and say, “Jesus, you don’t have a medical license. You’re not on the clergy roster. You shouldn’t be messing around with things you know nothing about.”

The bewildered and annoyed formerly blind man says, “I don’t know a lot about all that big theological stuff. I don’t have a lot of fancy words. The only thing I know is that a few days ago I was blind and now I can see. If you want to know how all this works ask Jesus.”

“He put some mud on my eyes. I washed. And now I see.” That was his testimony.

Simple. To the point.

Sometimes I think we make it harder than it needs to be. I have, on my bookshelf, a whole section on church growth and personal evangelism.

And here at Good Shepherd, we’ve spent a lot of time and money on resources to help you share your faith. We have ChristCare, Stephen Ministry, Making God’s House a Home, Discovering God’s Vision for Your Life, etc.

I’m not saying that these programs aren’t valuable. They are VERY useful. But I do worry that we place too much emphasis on method, and not enough trust in what God is ACTUALLY doing in our lives.

We make it harder than it needs to be.

But then again, it’s not as easy as it looks. Telling people about what God has done in our lives is a challenge because not everyone welcomes conversations from church folks.

I think the problem isn’t God or Jesus. It’s been my experience that, despite the protest of some high profile atheists and their disciples, people are NOT turned off by God talk. In fact, most people WANT to talk about God. They simply don’t want to talk about the church. And in some peoples’ minds the two can be one in the same.

Given the church’s spotty historical record I don’t blame them. When non-church people ask me what I do for a living I’m often hesitant to tell them. Not because I’m ashamed of God or the church.

I’m hesitant because I know that an onslaught of hostility is probably coming my way. People often unload about the pastor who told them their uncle was going to Hell because he was gay. Or how they’re appalled by the sexual abuse and cover-up by the Catholic Church, or the residential schools abuses.

When people unload on me, I RARELY, if EVER, hear someone say, I have a real problem with God intruding on my life, so I try to stay away from church. And I never hear someone say, I have real difficulty with Jesus’s message.”

People’s problems are rarely with God or Jesus. People LOVE talking about God. Peoples’ problems are usually with the Church. Rightly or wrongly, they see the Church like the Pharisees in today’s reading, blind to what God is doing because they’re too busy protecting the religious institution.

We can’t escape the sins of the past. Those are the burdens we carry into the future. And I’m sure that we’ll create new burdens along the way.

But what I try to do when confronted with the sins of our collective past, is to listen to the pain behind those concerns. And all I can do is tell that person what I know about God, and what Jesus has done in my life.

I can’t apologize for other peoples’ sins, but I can tell them about the grace that I’ve received. And about the God I know and who loves me enough to die for me.

All I can do is say “He put some mud on my eyes. I washed. And now I see.”

Our future as a church will be created by simple testimonies rather than large programs. The church of the future will be sustained by our stories of God in our lives rather than by institutional support. Our life together will be about sharing with each other and the world what God is doing with and among us.

I’ve always believed that the church of the future will look more like an AA meeting than a Broadway musical. The church of the future will have one simple message, a message that will change peoples’ lives and the world.

“He put some mud on my eyes. I washed. And now I see.”

May this be so among us. Amen.

Lent 3A

2011-03-29T14:14:00.000-07:00

Last week, Jesus encountered Nicodemus. This week, he meets the woman at the well. And the two encounters couldn’t be more different.

Nicodemus is a man. She’s a woman. Nicodemus arrives at midnight. Jesus meet the woman at noon. Nicodemus is a highly educated, a greatly respected moral and religious leader.

The woman is an outcast, forced to retrieve her water from the well under the hot sun, instead of during the cool morning breeze, with the rest of the women.

He’s received honours throughout his life. She’s been rejected by most people who knew her.

I’m more like Nicodemus than I am like the woman at the well. I think most of us here are as well. We may have our fair share of rejection in our lives, but we managed to get through it with the help of friends, family, and fellow church members.

While the woman at the well has been the victim of her circumstance, she was also a survivor. She lived in a culture that placed woman in the same category as livestock. She observed a religion on the fringes of her world.

She was a member of a race that was met with hostility by the surrounding peoples. Her family was held together by the flimsiest of strings. She bounced from one bed to another, just to secure food and shelter for another night for herself and her children.

We know his name. We don’t know hers.

Like I said, I have no idea who this woman is. I can’t imagine what her life is like.

Despite the pain I’ve experienced in my years, I can’t measure it against her suffering. I can’t put myself in her dusty sandals. I don’t see my face in hers. She’s a stranger to me.

I’m guessing it’s the same is most for most of you. It was certainly the same for Jesus. Jesus was more like Nicodemus than he was the woman.

Even though he was a poor, wandering, homeless, preacher, he still had the respect of his friends (for the moment), crowds gathered to hear him speak. He saw the gratitude in peoples’ eyes as they were healed. His life was pretty good.

And Jesus could have easily walked past the woman at the well. He’d seen hundreds like her. He could have walked past her as he walked past the thousands of beggars in back alleys who didn’t come to hear him preach, or the lepers who stayed at a safe distance so not get to into trouble by being so close to others.

But something must have caught Jesus’ attention that day. It was probably his parched throat, since they’d be walking for hours. He was thirsty. She had water.

In what must have sounded like a reverse pick-up line, Jesus asked her for a drink. And she probably thought that this strange man wanted more than a cup of water from her. And just as Jesus received water for his dry mouth, she received water for her dried up soul.

It turns out that Jesus knew everything about her. The men. The rejection. The pain. His knowledge came from God but it probably wasn’t hard for him to guess what her life was like. Her story wasn’t unique.

Of course she bounced from bed to bed, she had no other option. She traded her body for a flimsy security. Of course, she had to get water from the well at the hottest time of the day, the respectable women would push her away if she showed up at a more convenient time.

She was just trying to get through her life and provide for her children the best way she knew how.

She was strong. But she felt weak. She was resilient. But she felt like she would collapse from exhaustion at any moment. She was tough. But she longed to just let herself fall down and rest.

And here was this Jewish preacher, who, by definition, should be her enemy. This man who preached the ancient faith and worshipped in the REAL temple. This man who exuded life and strength. This man, who by all accounts should hate her, looked at her with a love she’d never seen in a long time - if ever.

He told her all about her life. And he didn’t forgive her of her sins. At least not in words. He didn’t have to. He drank from her cup. He accepted her gift of water.

Jesus’ disciples didn’t know what to say. They just watched this scene unfold with their mouths hanging open, until one of them had to put a stop to it.

“Don’t you know who this woman is? Why are you talking to her?”

That’s when she took off. She didn’t want to be reminded of her past, because, all of a sudden, she could see a different future for herself - God’s future for her life.

This Samaritan woman who bounced from bed to bed, who worshipped in a sham temple, who was hated by everyone, became the first gentile evangelist, spreading the good news to those beyond Israel’s borders, making true John’s announcement that “God so love the WORLD that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”

And, on that day, God’s saving work spilled into the world, from a broken woman, simply trying to survive.

“Come and see!” she says, “He can’t be the Messiah, can he?”

Not exactly the proud proclamation of the disciples. But a proclamation nonetheless. People probably never looked at her the same way ever again.

I don’t know why that is, but that’s the way God works. God has a way of using our brokenness for God’s purposes. God has a way using our weakness to show God’s strength. God has a way of using our pain to reveal God’s glory.

God seems to be attracted to pain and weakness. That could be because that’s where God’s greatest work is done.

I’ve noticed that’s true in my life and ministry. When I meet people as “Pastor Kevin” or “Rev. Powell” I encounter a shield where people protect themselves, afraid of what I may say about their lives.

But when I drop the titles and formalities, when I take off my collar and minister to people as one who’s gone through his own personal issues; the death of a parent, a divorce, and depression, then people drop their guards, and I can minister as one human being to another, trusting that God will bring healing in the midst of common pain. In fact, it’s in that shared experience, that the healing work begins. For both of us.

So, the woman at the well was the perfect first evangelist. She couldn’t look down her nose at anyone. She was no one’s judge. All she had to do was point to Jesus and say, “Come and see the man who told me everything about me...and made me a new person, and gave me a new future.”

May this be so among us. Amen.

Lent 2A

2011-03-20T10:52:00.001-07:00

“Ask me what I know,” he told me, “don’t ask me what I believe.”

This was from a well-known bible scholar, who, in a moment personal honesty, confessed that what he knew intellectually after a lifetime of dissecting ancient texts, was different than what he believed personally.

It wasn’t that he didn’t believe the Christian faith to be false, or that what he learned from studying the bible all those years turned out to be a fabrication or delusion. He had no malicious intent.

“Ask me what I know. Don’t ask me what I believe....Because,” he said, “I don’t know what I believe. I’m still searching.”

I appreciated his openness. It couldn’t have been easy for him to share his personal faith crisis with some young punk who had more answers than there were questions.

Sharing his doubts was his way of saying that a lifetime of searching doesn’t necessarily mean a lifetime of finding.

Just ask Nicodemus.

He spent his life in study and prayer. He knew the bible backwards and forwards. He read the philosophical masters. He spent years absorbing the wisdom of the centuries. He understood profound truths.

But he couldn’t quite understand Jesus. His curiosity must have consumed him because, as did his sense of personal safety, because he goes to great lengths to find out more about Jesus.

Nicodemus has to slink around at night so no one will see him, to find Jesus. He wants to learn something. He knows that Jesus has come from God, but also knows that Jesus’ divine origin is a little controversial in the halls of the learned. He just wants to get a handle on Jesus, and how Jesus can be from God.

But Jesus seems to be more interested in riddles than answers.

“Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.

But Nicodemus doesn’t get it.

“What am I supposed to do, climb back and in and make my way out again?”

Looks like Nicodemus is taking Jesus WAY too literally. But I encounter this all the time. When talking to a pastor A LOT of people revert back to their childhoods where they take the bible, and stuff preachers say, with childish simplicity.

For example, I was trying to explain to someone the different between Catholic and Lutheran understandings of grace, and I used an example of a broken window.

“Say you threw a ball and accidentally broke your neighbour’s window,” I said.

“What!? Is breaking a window a sin? Why would God punish me for accidentally damaging someone’s property? Why would God send me to Hell if it were an accident? Does God have more important things to do than worrying about a broken window?”

*sigh*

I would imagine that Jesus had the same reaction to Nicodemus. Despite all his years of school, and his skills in critical thinking, he reverted back to a time when truth was literal and black-and-white. No imagery or metaphor. Imagination not needed.

Jesus calls him on his lazy thinking, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

I think Jesus said this with a twinkle in his eye followed by a wink. I don’t think that Jesus was trying to shame Nicodemus. He was saying, “C’mon, Nick, you know better than that.”

What I like about this story is that Jesus doesn’t then spell out what he means. He gets even more metaphorical, and paints even weirder pictures. He talks about Moses and the serpent, heavenly truths and earthly facts colliding. He talks about the Son of Man - Humanity’s Child - being lifted up.

Then he sums up this whole passage, and indeed, his entire message and mission, with the familiar words:

“God so loved the world he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

We don’t know whether or not Nicodemus was any closer to understanding Jesus than when he began. But my guess is that he was just as clueless when he left as when he came.

He disappeared back into the darkness, and we never hear from him again until chapter seven when he’s consulted about a fine point in the law, and again, after Jesus died, when he assisted Joseph of Aramethia in preparing Jesus’ body for burial. He’s not a major player in this story.

Who knows what he told his friends when he got home, if anything. After all, he didn’t want anyone to know he met with Jesus, so he probably just kept what he heard to himself.

Since we don’t hear very much from him, I wonder if he was a secret follower of Jesus, keeping his mouth shut and his head down, lest he be detected by the other religious leaders and get himself into some trouble.

I don’t know if Nicodemus really understood what Jesus was saying. But then again, I’m not sure that was the point. If Nicodemus came to faith it wasn’t because Jesus argued him into it. Jesus didn’t even try to reason with him or answer his questions. But it was through Jesus himself, an encounter with the God within him - that Nicodemus came to understand who Jesus was.

He may not have fully understood who Jesus was, but then again, do any of us really know? For most of us Jesus is a mystery; a puzzle to piece together, a spiritual knot to unravel, a fuzzy picture we can’t bring into focus.

But I think what is more important than KNOWING Jesus, is to be KNOWN by Jesus. And that we can be sure of.

In the waters of baptism, where we have been born again from above, we are joined to his life, his death, and his resurrection. In baptism, we are KNOWN by Jesus.

I don’t know about you, but, for me, this is a HUGE relief. It means that I’m freed from the tyranny of trying to understand what God is all about. It means that I have enough faith in Jesus to follow him. It means that, no matter how hard I try, I will never know him well enough or fully understand his role in God’s saving story. But I know that I play a part in that story.

This isn’t to say that we don’t keep exploring who God is and what God wants for us. Nicodemus certainly never put his feet up in comfort or threw up his hands in confused resignation. He still questioned. he still investigated and searched.

But he also lived his faith as part of the searching, following Jesus in his own way, playing his part in God’s saving story.

And so do YOU. You play your own part in God’s ongoing, unfolding, story. Not only by knowledge, but also by faith, by trust, by hope. And you tell God’s story with your lives. Being not just a source of knowledge about God, but a blessing to people you meet.

And, together we study and we pray. We discuss and we discern. We search and we proclaim. We live God’s story together. We follow Jesus as a family.

Perhaps, at the end, that’s all we can do. God has done the rest.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Lent 1A

2011-03-13T11:03:00.001-07:00

NB: With a bit 'o help from Douglas John Hall and Maryetta Anshutz in Feasting on the Word.

Grace to you and peace, from God our Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

In a sermon a few months ago I asked you, “How would you recognize God’s voice if you heard it? And how would you know it was God’s?”

Today, I want to adjust the question a little, and ask, “How would you know the Devil’s voice if you heard it? What does the voice of evil sound like? How would you know evil if it was sitting across the table from you?”

On the surface, the answer may sound obvious. Just listen for the sound of the guttural voice, growling under your bed at night.

Or look for the goateed fellow in the red pajamas and pitch fork standing on your shoulder, whispering naughty suggestions in your ear.

Or the guy with horns growing out of his forehead, laughing at you while you try to follow the bible’s moral guidance.

Is that what you hear when you listen for the voice of evil?

Or maybe you’re not so fanciful. You know that there’s evil in the world and it bears no resemblance to a cartoon character. You’ve seen it. Heard it. And felt it.

Maybe for you, the voice of evil is the one justifying child poverty in our communities as a unavoidable result of economic changes.

Maybe it’s the voice of third world dictators oppressing their people as they try to hang on to power.

Maybe it’s the church leaders who covered up decades of sexual abuse.

You can say that the voice of evil is everywhere, shouting in our ears.

And that would be true. But I would say that the voice of evil doesn’t only shout, but also whispers.

The voice of evil sends us subliminal messages, until evil’s message makes its way into our lives, and before we know it, we stop recognizing it as evil.

I think that’s the evil that Jesus was fighting in the desert. After all, there wasn’t anything in the devil’s temptation list that we don’t affirm as good. Yet Jesus rejects as evil. Or at least outside of his mission and God’s plan for him.

Look at the first temptation. The devil knows he’s hungry. After all, Jesus hasn’t eaten in weeks. I’m sure he was getting the tummy rumbles.

So the devil says, “Hey, Jesus, just turn the bread into stone. You’re famished. People will understand. Plus it would be a really cool trick.”

“One does not live by bread alone,” Jesus replied. “But by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

Okay, Jesus. Be that way.

The devil then takes him to the roof of the temple.

“Jesus, if you just jumped from here, the angels will swoop in and carry you to the ground. Then people will know who you are, and will listen to you and believe your message is from God.”

“The bible says, ‘Don’t test God.’”

Okay, Jesus. But this is a lost opportunity. Don’t you know about the power of self-promotion?

Then the devil shows Jesus the kingdoms of the world. “Think of it Jesus, think of all the good you could do if YOU were in charge and not these petty, selfish, ham-fisted, rulers. You could REALLY set the world straight - one YOUR OWN terms. All you have to do is bow to me just once.”

“The bible says, worship the Lord your God, and only him.”

“Okay, Jesus, leave the world to these small-minded incompetents. Let’s see how THAT works out.”

Then the devil disappeared and the angels nursed Jesus back to health.

But I’m not sure that Jesus passed the test, because I don’t think that test ever finished. The devil was just getting started.

These temptations popped up all through Jesus ministry. Jesus had to be on his guard against the forces of evil trying to end his mission, trying to pull him away from God’s purpose for him.

It may seem like the devil tempted Jesus with three different temptations, but I think there was one temptation running through each of them, and through Jesus’ entire earthly mission: the temptation to power.

The power to bend the world to feed personal desire; the spiritual power over the heavenly realms to draw attention to himself rather than to God’s message; and political power over earthly kingdoms.

The devil tried to get Jesus to abandon his mission of changing the world through love, by tempting him to change the world by force. Force is easier than love.

And since the devil failed to tempt Jesus, he turned his guns on to a more susceptible group: the church. Christians. Us. I think we’re being tempted everyday by the very things that Jesus was tempted by.

When our churches aspire to be religious corporations rather than servants to the poor and hurting, we are being tempted by the devil to abandon Jesus’ mission.

When we demand that Christians be given preferential treatment from government and culture, and seek to change the world by force or by legislation rather than by love, the devil wins a victory.

When we worry more about doctrine and dogma than about sharing and being good news to broken people in a sin-stained world, we succumb to evil’s temptation.

And, of course, we DO fail the devil’s test, just as we fail God’s test. The devil knows the standard by which we will be judged, and knows the evil that lives within us. The devil knows what buttons to push.

The devil knows that we aspire to transcend our humanity, that we have a will to dominate, that our selfish impulses often overwhelm our desires to do good.

The devil knows that we are capable of terrible evil and incredible good. The devil knows that we are muddle of mixed motivations, and the harder we try to deny the darkness within us, more darkness comes out of us.

We will be tempted. And will fail. We ARE tempted. We DO fail.

But Jesus, finally, did not.

He passed the test by dying on the cross rather than crown himself as king. He conquered his enemies by suffering a horrible defeat. He won the war by losing the battle.

Love won over force. Servanthood was victorious over power.

On the cross Jesus overcame our darkness with God’s light. A light that glows with a cleansing fire. A light that disinfects. A light that shines in our hidden places. A light that fills the whole world with God’s loving grace.

That’s why I don’t worry too much about our future. I know we’ll be tempted and I know we’ll fail. But Jesus has passed the test for us. And that’s all we need.

Amen.

Ash Wednesday

2011-03-10T08:59:00.001-08:00

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.

Today is about death. Your death. My death. There’s no sugar-coating or watering it down. We are dust and to dust we WILL return.

And you came to hear this message. Many of you were here last year as well, so it’s not as if this was a case of bait-and-switch. You knew what you were getting into when you laced up your boots, put on your coats, and negotiated the dirty streets to get here.

You arrived expecting to hear that “you are dust and to dust you will return.” And if you didn't hear that message, you might just turn around and walk out.

And it’s not as if you didn’t have other options. Especially when we’ve had the first beautiful day in months and an evening walking might have been mighty tempting

But something drew you to this place to hear this specific message, a message that you probably wouldn’t hear anywhere else: “remember that you are dust and to dust you will return.”

Maybe you’ve come because you have questions about life, death, and what comes after. Maybe you’ve been told a story of what a fulfilling life is supposed to be but that story doesn’t sit well in your ears. You want to know how life and death connect. You want to know that your life means something.

Maybe you’re asking: what DOES make a fulfilling, purposeful life? Does my life matter in some grand scheme?

Often we answer those questions by saying that we need to build something that will outlast us: establish a business, build a school in Peru, create a thriving church, write a book.

Or we say that it’s not our accomplishments that make life fulfilling, but the love we’ve given and received along the way; the deep human connections that tell us that we are not alone, that we are truly known, and we know others with the same closeness.

But our accomplishments are fleeting: Churches close. Schools crumble. Businesses get sold. Books sit unread. Our labor doesn’t live on much longer after we’re gone.

And, every relationship ends, whether by distance, by conflict, or by death. We will, one day, part ways with those whom we cherish the most, we’ll say goodbye to the one we love most deeply. With great love comes great loss.

So maybe you ask, what’s then, the point? If everything dies, our dreams, our accomplishments, our relationships, then why bother with any of it?

If life means nothing, then all we can do is live for the moment because any moment could be our last. If we try to create immortality through our accomplishments then we’ll find ourselves empty handed when our lights are finally turned off. If we’ll say good-bye to everyone some day, then why get close to people at all?

What, then, do we do?

Do we then fulfill every selfish desire or follow every guttural instinct for pleasure, since everything we are and know can be snatched away from us in a failed heartbeat? How do we live with the knowledge that our entire existence will dissolve into nothing?

We are dust, and to dust we will return.

I guess the question is, how do we respond to our dustiness? Do we hunker down afraid to leave the house? Do we deny our mortality and live lives of quiet mediocrity, wasting countless hours watching silly sit-coms and poisoning our bodies with junk food, as if each day will be followed by another in endless succession?

Or do we see life as a gift that is not ours’ to keep? Our lives are not our own since they could be taken from us at any moment.

We can respond in gratitude for what we’ve been given. We can respond by living a life that matters, if only for a season; a life that connects deeply with those around us; a life that is not just about consuming, but also about giving. A life not for ourselves, but a life offered to others to be shared.

Knowing - really knowing - that we are dust and to dust we will return can make us more generous, more kind, more gracious. Maybe that’s the gift of death, if death can be said to be a gift. Knowing that we are fragile and finite beings brings us together in common cause to create something new and beautiful each day.

Our dustiness can remind us that we have children, not just because we have a primal urge to procreate, but so we can learn to love all children.

We chase after our dreams, not just to leave something of ourselves behind after we’re gone, but so we can use our gifts to build on what God is doing.

We create strong relationships, not to use others for selfish gain or lustful desire, but because we’re created to connect. We long to share ourselves.

The rarity and preciousness of a finite life are magnified by a God who sees us through the eyes of eternity. A God who has defeated the power of death. A God who knows that our end is God’s beginning.

Remembering that we are dust and to dust we will return is to remind ourselves of the finitude of life AND the miracle of resurrection. We cannot separate the two.

Our relationships end. Our bodies give out. Our accomplishments are momentary. Everything on earth dies.

But God does not. God is at work making everything new, breathing life into everything that falls and fails. Second chances rise out of failure. Forgiveness is born from conflict. Healing emerges from pain.

Our end is God’s new beginning. Our finale is God’s overture. Our final buzzer is God’s opening whistle.

This we know by faith. By trust. By hope. There’s nothing else we can do. We have no other option. We are only dust.

Amen.

Epiphany 8A

2011-02-27T10:56:00.001-08:00

“No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

Jesus makes it seem so easy; so cut and dried.

No doubt Jesus was right. Serving God and wealth is impossible because they demand two very different things from us. God puts us on a mission for the healing of the nations, for justice, mercy, compassion, and forgiveness.

What does money ask us to do? I think it’s different for everyone. God puts us in a common mission. Money pulls us inward.

What is money to you? What’s your relationship with it?

For some, it’s just a number on a bank statement. They receive it in the mail, open it up, make sure that the number hasn’t gone below zero, and throw the paper in the recycle bin.

For others, it’s a game. How much can I accumulate? How can I make the number go higher and higher?

Still others fear money. They get a knot in their stomach every time they go to the bank. Money - or lack of money - represents judgment on their lives.

Another group equates money with life and status. Others with self-expression.

One financial self-help book said that money is a tool, nothing more and nothing less. Money helps us get stuff. It’s the means by which we transact with others.

But I agree with the guy who said that money is energy. It represent possibility. He said that people freak out if you burn a 5 dollar bill because all the possible uses of that five dollars is lost forever. It’s wasted energy.

We Christians have a difficult relationship with money. Many of us don’t like to talk about it. Some think it’s unspiritual to discuss such earthly matters.

We’re uncomfortable with money-talk in church because money is so personal. How spend our money tells us a lot about ourselves and what our priorities are. As Jesus says, “Where your treasure is, there you heart is also.”

I’m always suspicious of some of my Christian friends who are hostile towards those who have money. One colleague of mine was celebrating Canada’s recession and slow recovery because she believes that a market-based economy is idolatry; that large corporations are destroying communities and hurting the earth.

That the capitalistic impulse is born from sinful greed, that economic self-interest only hurts the poor and most vulnerable in our society. That if you have money, it means that you’ve taken more than your fair share. That if you’ve feasted on good food, it means you’ve taken the food out of someone else’s hungry mouth.

You can’t serve to masters.

I used to think that way. Until I got a job and ventured out beyond the safe group-think of seminary pub nights.

I’d like to ask my friend if she’d change her tune when the bad economy starts affecting her community. When people lose their jobs they don’t have anything left over for the offering plate, which makes it harder to pay her salary. And I’m guessing her friends at the bank won’t accept her sanctimonious theologizing in lieu of a mortgage payment.

Whether we like it or not, we’re caught in Jesus’ trap. Our lives are so intertwined that we are forced to serve two masters.

After I got a job (this one) and started connecting with people from a vast array of economic backgrounds, I began to wonder if we’re thinking about Jesus’ words the wrong way. Jesus isn’t accusing rich folks of worshipping money. He’s challenging ALL of us in how we think about wealth.

I’ve met rich folks who are extraordinarily generous. Not just because they can be, but because they want to be. They see their wealth as a positive energy that they can share with others.

And I’ve met folks of moderate and limited means who are tight-fisted, who worry about every nickel they spend, whose lives revolve around their bank account, and who judge others according their own miserly, selfish standards. The master they serve is clear.

For example, I recently met someone who said that she NEVER bought something unless it was 80 to 90 percent off the regular price. She would spend the day hunting down bargains, or demanding the rock-bottom price.

On what seems like ultra-careful stewardship of her resources can easily devolve into a worship of money, a fear of scarcity. She may be saving a lot of money, but she’s also spending a lot of time. And money is a renewable resource. Time is not.

We assume that rich folks serve the god of wealth, and that the rest of us are immune to the idolatry of money.

Yes, there are classic cigar-chomping capitalists who, from their private island vacation homes in the Caribbean, deny medicine to cancer stricken children in developing countries. They serve one master. But they don’t define everyone who has money.

After all, if that is the standard, then everyone here stands guilty, no matter your economic situation. As much as I joke about how much money I don’t make, I know that I am one of the richest people in the world, percentage-wise. The overwhelming majority of people in the world live on a fraction of what I make.

And when I remember how rich I really am, I feel tremendously grateful. And I feel a sense of obligation to share what I have with those who have much less. Not just in terms of money. But in my labour and my time, so that more people can share in what God has some abundantly provided for us.

Serving the god of wealth means is to serve a god of scarcity. Serving the god of mammon says that we don’t trust the God of abundance; that we don’t believe that the God who made heaven and earth supplies all that we need.

Of course, I’m not talking about being reckless with what God has given us. Of course we know there are Christians on the OTHER end of the spectrum who say that our job is to use up all the resources of the earth because God is just going to destroy the planet anyway. And if we don’t pillage the planet, then we’re being disobedient to God’s call to “subdue” the earth.

Economically self-serving biblical interpretations aside, serving the God of abundance means being careful stewards of what God has provided for us. It means making sure that people everywhere can share in what God has given us, and that future generations will be able to enjoy the fruits of creation.

Serving the God of abundance means being generous with all that we have, because we serve a God who is generous with everything God has created for us to you.

We are generous because God is generous. We share our abundance rather than scarcity because God is a God of abundance. We serve a God who delights in providing for the world, who celebrates life, and who rejoices in generosity.

That’s why no one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.

God feed the birds of the air and clothes the lilies of the field. God makes it rain on the just and unjust because the kingdom of heaven, God’s reign of justice, mercy, forgiveness, and abundance, has come among us.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Epiphany 7A

2011-02-20T11:14:00.000-08:00

Those of us who’ve been around the church long enough have probably forgotten the punch that this passage from the gospel packs. Some of these phrases have made their way into peoples’ everyday language.

“Turn the other cheek.”

“Go the extra mile.”

“Love your enemy.”

But if we take Jesus’ commands seriously, we might worry that we’d become a first class doormat.

If someone punches me in the face, I’d probably hit them right back. I wouldn’t point to the other side of my face and say, “missed a spot.”

If someone hijacked my car, I wouldn’t drive them to the border. I

f someone sues me, they better have a good lawyer because I’m going to protect what is mine.

And I have enemies for a reason. Loving them is not one of them. Especially since they don’t have my best interest in mind.

And then comes the command that puts all the others in their place:

“Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

That’s were we REALLY run into trouble. Perfection, especially for us Lutherans, is not a spiritual value. Perfection is a burden. Grace is a gift.

But I think a better way of saying it is “Be HOLY, as your heavenly Father is holy.”

While that may not sound much better than “be perfect.” When we think of “holy people” we think of super spiritual people who walk just a couple inches off of the ground, people who live a life of prayer, who exude serenity and peace. And most of us know we are not that person.

But, “holiness” according to the bible means being set apart. It means being different, unique, distinct.

So, you could translate this passage as “Be unique, just as your heavenly Father is unique.” Or be set apart, separate, just as your heavenly Father is set apart and separate.”

One of the charges some of our evangelical friends have laid on us mainline churches is that we are “too close” to the culture, that there’s nothing unique about us as Christians to distinguish us from the rest of society, that we’re no different than the Rotary Club, except that we meet at an inconvenient time.

I hear this all the time. That Lutherans and other mainline Christians, such as Anglicans, Presbyterians, and United Churches, have compromised their moral standards to ingratiate themselves to a secular world, and have watered down their theology to make it palatable for mass consumption.

Those charges are usually laid by Christians who seem to delight in stirring up trouble, often operating out of a robust persecution complex. If they’re not being passing moral judgment on others to the point of being hated, then they’re not doing their jobs as Christians. And since we’re not hated like they are (or perceived that they are), then we’re clearly not as Christian as they are.

They’re not completely wrong. But it’s not that we’ve sold out to culture, we’ve just been part of it for so long that we’ve forgotten how to be a minority. And we take from the culture and use it for gospel purposes.

Lutherans, and other historic state churches, had become cozy with the culture. By definition, that’s what a state church is and does. A state church blesses national ambitions.

And we’ve carried that tradition across the pond to Canada. While this is changing, clergy still are called upon to bless whatever the culture deems “good.”

And, Lutheran and mainline clergy, including myself, are schooled in secular counseling theory, which carries with it, certain moral assumptions about human behaviour.

Even the language we use about being an “inclusive” church comes from the social sciences and not from the bible (which is one of the reasons I don’t use that word).

Our organizational structure is borrowed from a model frequently used in the 1970’s and 80’s by non-profit organizations. We’re deeply invested in the surrounding culture.

But Evangelicals and other Christians who criticize us for being too close to the culture need to relieve themselves of the logs in their own eyes before pointing out the speck in ours. Many of these churches are expert marketers, using secular business models to draw a crowd. They preach while waving iPads rather than bibles, and use latest technology to create multi-media worship experiences. They the culture’s tools to get peoples’ attention. The tools then become the message.

At best, these mega-churches that could be mistaken for shopping malls tells the visitor, “Don’t worry, there’s nothing new for you here. Being a Christian is just like every other part of your life.”

At worst, these churches bless peoples’ consumer impulses, turning faith into a consumer choice, pulling them further away from the poor man from Nazareth. These churches may have strong moral stands, but their message gets lost in their medium.

My intent isn’t to trash these churches. That would make me a first rate hypocrite. (but what else is new?) My aim is to point out that ALL churches cozy up to the culture - or at least the part they’re comfortable with. No church is exempt.

I think our inability to disengage from culture shows us how hard it is to be a Christian. It reveals just how difficult it is to be different, just as our heavenly Father is different. It’s tough to be separate, set apart, just as our heavenly Father is separate, and set apart.

But separate and set apart for what? And how can we be separate and set apart?

I think the answer lies hidden in the text.

It’s obvious. Of course, people aren’t going to offer the other side of their face to be smacked. Of course people aren’t going to give more than asked of them. Of course, people aren’t going to go the extra mile for someone who is oppressing them. Of course, people aren’t going to love their enemies.

But Jesus did. And he gave his listeners tools to live set apart from others.

Back then, if someone hit you on the right cheek, they had to use the back of their hand, which was usually a punishment for slaves. But to hit you on your left, they’d have to use an open hand, which was considered low class behaviour. To hit you on your left would lead to public embarrassment.

And people would usually have only two garments. If they gave their enemy both of them, you’d be naked. And your enemy would be shamed for requiring you to go without clothes.

And Roman soldiers were only allowed to require people to carry their packs for one mile. If someone carried the solider’s pack an extra mile, that person would embarrass the soldier and probably get him into trouble.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Jesus was giving his listeners tools for resisting those who were oppressing them. He was providing a different way of dealing with their enemies. He gave peaceful solutions to conflict. He was teaching them how to be set apart.

While Jesus doesn’t provide a solution to every oppressive encounter, he’s pretty clear about what it means to be different.

When the world lashes out in anger, you respond in love. When others demean you, you have creative solutions to maintain your dignity.

You will not let other peoples’ destructive behaviour turn you into your enemies. You will not become who they are.

Your behaviour will be different because you ARE different. You are God’s holy temple, whose foundation is God’s grace in Christ Jesus.

You are a people of mercy and love. You are a people of peace and justice. You are a people of forgiveness and freedom.

You are a people chosen to be set apart to be a light to the world. Your lives bear witness to the love God has for the world and everyone and everything in it.

You are a resurrection people whose eyes are fixed on God’s new horizon, where all sorrow, pain, and suffering is transformed into abundant life for all.

You may not know this about yourself. You may not see this in yourself. But you are tomorrow’s people because that’s who God has made you.

You are God’s holy temple, where the Lord, the giver of Life dwells. You shine with the light of God’s glory, where the spirit of the crucified and risen Jesus radiates love in a world so often devoid of hope.

You are all these things because that’s who Christ is. And you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Epiphany 6A

2011-02-13T10:43:00.001-08:00

Anger, adultery, divorce, lying. In a few small verses Jesus brings out the big guns, and isn’t afraid to use them.

The crowd knew their bibles, and they knew the commandments. And here, it looks like Jesus is ADDING to what they already observed. Jesus was piling additional obligations on people already struggling to get through their days.

The commandment says “Do not murder.” For most of us, that’s easy enough to obey. But Jesus turns up the volume on his listeners and says, Don’t just NOT murder. But don’t get angry either, especially with another believer. You can’t worship God if you’re angry with a brother or sister.

Don’t commit adultery. Okay. We get that. We’re supposed to have one partner for the rest of our lives. And then Jesus dials up God’s demands. Don’t even LOOK at another person with lust. So, good-bye advertising industry. Sterling-Cooper needs to close their doors. Don Draper is out of a job.

Jesus then lays out the proper procedure for divorce, as expressed in scripture, only to place greater demands on people trying to get out of a bad marriage. The only grounds for divorce is marital unfaithfulness, he says. Irreconcilable differences? Irrelevant. Abuse or mental cruelty? Hardly deserves a mention. And if you divorce your partner and she remarries, you’re causing her to commit adultery.

Don’t lie. Or in Ten Commandments parlance, don’t bear false witness. In other words, don’t tell stories about your neighbors. Don’t gossip. Don’t massage the truth about another person just to make them look bad. We get it. That’s what we learned in confirmation when we studied the commandments.

But then he cranks it up a notch. He says, don’t just NOT bear false witness, don’t even swear an oath. Just say “yes” or “no” if someone asks you a question. Anything more than that comes from that guy in the red pajamas brandishing a pitchfork.

Sorry, folks, these are the rules. Thanks for playing.

I was tempted to acknowledge the difficulty of this text, then move on to preach from the easier Old Testament reading. This is one of the harder passages of scripture to bundle our brains around. It seems like Jesus is more interested in placing barbed-wire fences around our moral behaviour than setting us free with the good news of the Kingdom of God.

After reading this passage, I can only say with irony that “This is the good news of Jesus Christ” because I don’t find any gospel relief for my anxiously sinful soul. All I find is burden piled upon burden, rather than grace heaped upon grace, as the bible promises.

I would guess the same is for you. Who HASN’T committed at least one of the sins that Jesus identifies? Who HASN’T perpetrated one of these crimes?

Gotten angry? Burnt your bridges with someone close to you? Killed a friendship? Then have the temerity to come to church without repairing the relationship? Then, sorry, no soup for you.

Have you ever put a poster of half-naked women on your wall? Have your pupils dialated over Justin Bieber or Michael Buble, or the Old Spice guy? Ever felt a slight tingle over the server who brought you your lunch? Then, sorry, it’s to the back of the line for you.

Have you ever been divorced and re-married? Has your former spouse? How about your current spouse? This is a sin I’m consciously committing as I preach. If or when Rebekah gets remarried, I’m causing her to commit adultery, which causes me to sin. If you’re in the same boat as I am, I guess we’ll go down together on the same sinking ship.

I think we can ignore the last one because it doesn’t really apply to church folks, does it? Good church people don’t ever gossip, do they? Christians let peoples’ behaviour speak for itself. We observe without comment, don’t we? BUT, on the off chance that you have shared a small story, or’ve been party to a tiny smidgen of gossip, then, sorry, you better stock up on aloe vera.

That’s certainly what it sounds like Jesus is saying. But if that’s true, heaven is going to be a pretty empty place.

And if THAT’S true then there must be something else happening in this passage. Jesus isn’t interested in an uninhabited heaven. His job is to fill heaven, not empty it. He was sent to gather people to God, to set them free, to show them God’s way of living, not to push them away from God and into eternal torment.

And here, Jesus is doing exactly what he was sent here to do. If you look closely, you’ll notice one thread running through this passage, even throughout the whole sermon on the mount. And, perhaps, through the entire bible.

This passage isn’t about governing our moral behaviour. This passage is about creating strong, deep, life-giving relationships.

Jesus knows that most of us don’t murder, but we all destroy important relationships. He says that reconciling with those from whom we’re estranged is just as important as worship. That’s why, in the communion liturgy, we share the peace before the offering. We say “peace” to those around us before we place put offering on the altar.

Some churches, especially in the Mennonite tradition, require more than a ritual gesture, but a real, true reconciliation between two estranged people before they’re allowed to give their offering.

Jesus set strict parameters around divorce to protect women. In the culture he was preaching to, men could divorce women on a whim, leaving them homeless and forced to beg to provide for themselves and their children. And also, by saying that those who look lustfully at a women de-humanizes her. He was telling the men to treat women as fellow human beings, and not as sex objects. He wanted to encourage deeply human relationships, not utilitarian partnerships.

And he had a problem with oaths because it assumes peoples’ basic dishonesty. Let your be yes and your no be no. That turns the assumption on its head and assumes peoples’ basic honesty. If you are his follower, of course you’re honest. That’s who you are because that’s who he is.

Is it still impossible to live up to Jesus’ standards?

Absolutely.

But I’m not sure that’s what Jesus wants from us. This isn’t a list of behaviours to obey as much as a description of what the Kingdom of Heaven looks like.

The Kingdom of Heaven is God’s gracious presence in the world, God’s vision of mercy, justice, forgiveness, reconciliation, and peace, let loose in our lives. The Kingdom of God isn’t a far away ideal or a heavenly promise of a perfect afterlife.

The Kingdom of Heaven is Jesus, and his reconciling work in us and in the world. We treat others with love and respect because that’s who Jesus is. We seek peace among enemies because that’s what Jesus did in us and for us.

As baptized people of God, joined to Jesus’ death and resurrection, the Kingdom of Heaven is who we are, and who we are becoming.

We still get angry. We still break off important relationships. We still are unfaithful and we still manipulate others for our own selfish ends. We still hurt one another.

But God does not. God is working within us so that this Kingdom that is alive in Jesus will also be alive in us.

The Kingdom of Heaven is about life, not death. The Kingdom of Heaven is mercy and forgiveness, not judgement and condemnation. The kingdom of Heaven is freedom, not constraint. The kingdom of Heaven is living in God’s new tomorrow, not in slavish obedience to a human past.

The Kingdom of Heaven, this Kingdom of life, of love, of mercy, of peace, of forgiveness, and justice reigns in our lives, transforming us from the inside out, so that we can bear witness to the one who is making everything new.

The Kingdom of Heaven is drawing us in to live in the freedom that God wants for us and all God’s people, and indeed, the whole world, so that - together, with Christians of every time and every place - we can grow into the fulness of who God wants us to be.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Epiphany 4A

2011-01-30T10:13:00.001-08:00

I was once asked to provide what they called an “Invocation” at a political event a few years ago. So I chose for the bible reading the passage we just heard from Matthew’s gospel, popularly known as “The Beatitudes.” I wanted to offer the crowd a different vision than what usually passes for political discourse.

Later that evening, a politician came up to me and thanked me for reading the “softer” Beatitudes rather than the “harsh” Ten Commandments.

I held my tongue, but what I was thinking was, Were you paying attention? There’s nothing SOFT about the beatitudes! The Ten Commandment are a mile easier to live by than these 12 verses in Matthew.

I guess somewhere along the line the beatitudes became domesticated. Pretty little religious words that offer comfort without challenge. Spiritual poetry to calm our anxious hearts.

How we hear the beatitudes depends largely on where we’re sitting when we hear them.

Where are you in Jesus’ list? Are you the poor in spirit, struggling to find evidence of a loving God in a harsh world? If you are, then Jesus says that you are blessed?

Are you mourning? Jesus promises comfort...some day.

Are you being persecuted? Then rejoice in your pain! You must be an awesomely faithful person!

That’s where it gets a little weird, and probably where the he lost the crowd. But he may have lost others a long time before that. Who wants to be blessed the way Jesus says to be blessed?

Theologians struggle with the beatitudes. They wonder what they could possibly mean. Lutherans have traditionally interpreted this passage, and the rest of the sermon on the mount through what we call “The Impossible Ideal.” In other words, Jesus sets so high a standard that no one can possibly live up to it. And since we can’t be as perfect as Jesus demands that we be, we cling to the cross for forgiveness.

Others interpret this passage as a promise to be fulfilled at the end of time, or when we arrive in heaven. That God’s perfect world will be establish - some day. Not today. So don’t bother looking for it in this life. Just keep your eyes fixed on the next one.

And still other say that this passage gives us our moral marching orders, that, while Jesus sets a standard that may be impossible to attain, we still have to try because that’s how God wants us to live. And if we don’t try to live according to the Jesus’ demands, the world won’t be saved. It’s up to us to implement God’s kingdom vision.

I find none of these interpretations satisfying. I don’t think Jesus is giving his listeners a sneak peek into God’s promised future, nor do I think Jesus is setting us up to fail, and I certainly don’t think that the world’s salvation depends on how morally obedient we are.

I think this passage is about Jesus, and who he is. “Blessed are you who are poor in spirit, blessed are you who mourn, blessed are you who are meek, blessed are you who hunger and thirst for righteousness, blessed are the merciful, the peacemaker, the pure in heart, the persecuted.”

That sounds like Jesus’ job description to me.

He’s not talking just about them, he’s talking about himself, and who they will become because of him. Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s promise. In Jesus, the kingdom of God has arrived. In Jesus, God’s healing is not something to hope for in the future, but a present reality living among them.

I think of the beatitudes as God’s thesis statement. God tells the people what God will do. Then does it.

The beatitudes are Jesus’ way of showing the world that God is in the healing business, that God is more interested in peoples’ wounds than in peoples’ strength.

God cares more about people’s failures than their successes, that God looks at peoples human frailties and says, “There’s something I can work with.”

The point of the gospel is to be good news in our bad news lives. And that good news means that God goes deep down inside where we might not want God to go.

We don’t always want to be confronted with our grief. We don’t always want to be face-to-face with our spiritual poverty. We don’t always want to show our weakness and vulnerability because the world scorns meekness and rewards strength.

But it’s in our frailty that God’s best work is done. It’s in our poverty that God’s riches are poured.

It’s in what the world throws away that God creates something beautiful. It’s in what the world leaves behind that God collects as treasure. It’s not our successes that bring us to God, it’s our failures.

“God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise;” Paul reminds us in our second reading, “God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; 28God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, 29so that no one might boast in the presence of God. 30He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, 31in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

I don’t know why that is, but God is attracted to weakness. That could be why Jesus called weakness a blessing.

Our weakness could be a blessing because that’s when we realize that we need others and need God. It’s when life hits us hard that God can seem important again, that we’re more open to the intrusion of the divine in our lives.

I’ve noticed that it’s in our pain that we connect most deeply with others. It’s in our shared humanity, knowing that we are not alone in our suffering, that we receive a blessing.

It’s in our weakness that we can best reach out to others. It’s out of our pain that we can minister to those who need a healing touch. It’s from our darkness that God’s light shines.

So, wherever you are on Jesus’ list, you are blessed, because God is at work IN you.

Wherever you on Jesus’ list, you are blessed because God is at work THROUGH you.

God is at work, singing a new song into our lives. God’s light is shining, so the whole dark world may receive God’s blessing.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Epiphany 3A

2011-01-23T11:10:00.001-08:00

How would you know God’s voice if you heard it? What it be so clear that you could respond with great joy in knowing that you’re part of God’s saving plan for the world? How would explain that call to others? How would you describe that voice?

That’s not an easy question to answer, is it? Most stories of hearing God’s call are met with suspicion, or even laughter. It takes some guts to talk about the voice of the divine. Not everyone will believe you. Few people will take you seriously.

I should know. That’s been my experience.

When I first heard the call to ministry I was in the third year of my music degree. I didn’t hear any voice whispering in my ear, the heavens didn’t open up, there was no dove descending, nor did I hear a disembodied baritone address me, telling me that I was to become a pastor. And it definitely wasn’t the voice of the community affirming my gifts for ministry.

It was just a strong sense that my life was going to be dramatically altered. After all, becoming a pastor was NEVER my plan. But this call was from a voice I couldn’t define, but seemed very real. I needed to explore it.

It certainly wasn’t those around me who told me I should be a pastor. In fact, my community was telling me to NOT go to seminary. It’s not that I wasn’t given affirmation of my call, most of my friends, colleagues, and teachers were actively discouraging me from pastoral ministry.

The strongest response was from my conducting teacher. When I told my her that I wasn’t going to pursue a career in music and was going to seminary instead, I thought she was going to have an aneurism.

She stood up her in chair, pointed her finger at me and bellowed, “I FORBID it! I FORBID you to go to seminary!” In fact, after that encounter we stopped having any meaningful conversations. It was like she felt that she wasted her time with me.

The most “encouragement” I received was from the campus pastor, who when I told him I thought God was calling me to ministry said, “I guess if that’s what you want to do I suppose there’s no harm in that.”

I was still officially an Anglican at the time, although I was involved with the Lutheran Student Movement, so I went to see my bishop in Niagara to see what kinds of hoops I had to jump through to become an Anglican priest.

Back in the mid-nineties, there were, apparently, too many clergy. And I was told that I’d have to wait ten years after seminary to be ordained and receive a parish.

So, I called a number of other bishops in Canada looking for better news. But they all said the same thing. There were too many clergy. Sorry. Can’t help you.

I began to wonder if everyone was right. I began to wonder if the call I heard to ministry was something other than God-given. Did I really receive God’s call? Or was I just talking to myself? Who was I trying to impress?

If so many people were responding so negatively to me becoming a pastor, and if so many doors were closing in my face, maybe God was saying that I shouldn’t be looking in the pastoral direction. Maybe that sense of call wasn’t as real as I had imagined it to be.

I had to figure this out because graduation was only four months away. I had to discern my life’s path before I made a HUGE mistake.

So, I went back to the campus pastor, who was in a more helpful mood that day, and let him know what was happening. He suggested that I visit with Eastern Synod staff of the ELCIC. So I did.

I made an appointment with the assistant to the bishop, who, although didn’t welcome me with fanfare and confetti, certainly didn’t discourage me.

He outlined the process. Gave me some forms to fill out. And, most importantly, encouraged me to keep discerning whether ministry was what God wanted me to do.

And so, with that in mind, I entered seminary in the fall of 1995, after finishing my music degree.

Then something interesting happened. While I supported myself up until then through trombone playing and composing music, after I started seminary, the phone stopped ringing. My music life ended with silence.

It was like an endorsement that one life ended and other life began. It was like someone was saying that the old Kevin was gone, and a new Kevin was born. It was like I was severed from the person I was previously. It was a lonely affirmation that I was following God’s call.

I imagine that’s what the first disciples’ felt after they left their old lives behind and followed Jesus.

As Jesus walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen. 19And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” 20Immediately they left their nets and followed him. 21As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them. 22Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.

Can you imagine Zebedee’s reaction to having two of his sons abandon him and the family business to chase after God’s call? With just two words from Jesus, the brothers James and John left their lives behind.

I would think that their friends and family were not at all impressed with such a display of religious recklessness. Zebedee needed them to keep the business going. Those two pairs of hands were sorely needed. Jesus’ call had consequences, and left collateral damage. Following Jesus is not without repercussions.

What about you? Where have you heard God’s call on your life? Since you’re here I’m guessing that God has placed a claim on you. In the waters of baptism, Jesus has said “Follow me” and you followed.

But what does that call look like for you? In your life? How do you hear God’s voice leading and directing you? Is it through the words of scripture, proclaiming salvation in Jesus? Is it the Holy Spirit whispering in your ear, guiding you along God’s path? Is it the community of believers helping you discern God’s vision for your life?

Or are you still waiting, not knowing what to look for, suspicious of disembodied voices and divine intervention?

God’s call on our lives can be a fearful thing. And it’s ongoing. It never stops. I don’t know if God wants me to be a pastor for the rest of my life. I don’t know if God wants for me tomorrow, let alone 25 years from now.

But what I do know, is that I have been recruited into God’s salvation movement, that the Kingdom of Heaven has come near to me, that wherever God leads me, wherever Jesus calls me, I can rest in knowing that I am a child of God, shining God’s light into a world that can be devastatingly dark, bearing witness to the one who died so that we might have life.

And I know the same is true for you. I know that God has a call on your life, that you are being used by God to bring love and healing to this world. God has a hold on your life that will never be let go. In you, the Kingdom of Heaven has come near.

May this continue to be so among us. Amen!

Epiphany 2A

2011-01-18T08:27:00.001-08:00

In reading today’s gospel, it’s clear that we shouldn’t be looking to John the Baptist for advice on how to grow a church. He sends his best people over to another preacher, who looks surprised to see them.

“What are you looking for?” Jesus asks these strangers at his door. “What are you doing here? What do you want from me?” are questions that he was probably really asking.

But it’s a good question, isn’t it? It’s perhaps THE question. Especially for those who have a sense that God is doing something in their lives. And for those who have a gaping God-sized hole inside.

“What are you looking for?”

That could be the question for us here at worship. We come to worship looking for something, perhaps we can’t put that something into words.

We come looking for God, or an experience of God. Or we come looking for community. Or we come looking for meaning in a seemingly meaningless world.

Or we just come, not knowing what we’re looking for, but hoping to recognize it when we see it.

I’m sure it was the same with John’s disciples. There must have something about John’s fiery preaching that lit up their spirits, and compelled them to follow him, hanging on his every word. They probably didn’t understand much of what John was saying, but they knew what he preached was true. Truer than anything else they’d ever heard.

Which was why it must have been puzzling for them to be on the street to find themselves at the door of another preacher. There must be something more about this Jesus if John was sending them to him. What’s this “Lamb of God” stuff about anyway,? They may have wondered. But if John wanted them to follow this other rabbi, then follow him they must. After all, John pointed to God.

“What are you looking for?” the teacher asks when they present themselves to him.

“Where are you staying?” they reply.

Where are you staying? Why would they want to know that? What’s that got to do with what they’re looking for? Is where Jesus hangs his hat a clue to what he was all about?

“Come and see” Jesus replies, and with that reply comes a fresh batch of new recruits for his movement.

“We have found messiah!” they proclaim to their friends after spending time with Jesus. But that doesn’t give us any more insight into what they were looking for.

They may have been looking for the Messiah, but that word, “Messiah” meant a lot of things to a lot of people.

And while that sounded like good news, someone would be disappointed when they found out what John meant by that word.

Many people were expecting royalty, someone to kick the Romans out of the holy land and bring in the kingdom like the one when David reigned. When other countries were afraid of them, when everyone had enough to eat, when arts and culture flourished, when God showed them the favour they believed was their divine birthright.

Others saw a religious figure, kind of like a pope, who will return God’s people to great prayer and devotion, where worship was central to peoples’ lives, where the bible was read and studied by everyone, and where people structured their lives according to the Law of Moses.

And still others believed the messiah would rescue people from their earthly lives, destroy the planet, banish unbelievers and punish evil doers, and then lift the righteous into heaven.

It seems that not much has changed in 2000 years. That could be why the question “What are you looking for?” can be so potent. We’re all looking for something. We’re all placing our hopes on Jesus even if those hopes contradict each other.

“What are you looking for?” is a question often rooted in selfish desires rather than a pursuit of something greater and truer than ourselves.

I may be looking for God, but my motivates certainly aren’t pure. I want God to make my life better. I want God to give me certainty rather than faith. I want God to bless everyone I love and curse those whom I hate.

When I’m looking for God those are the desires hiding underneath my pursuit of the divine. And that’s why God isn’t terribly interesting in giving me what I’m looking for.

What we’re looking for isn’t always what God wants to give us. They wanted a King. God gave them a lamb. They wanted their enemies destroyed. God gave them mercy. They wanted a return to their glory days, God gave them forgiveness.

That’s why it’s hard to be a Christian who believes that God does something in our lives. It’s hard because we can’t control God. We can’t offer up our hopes and fears in prayer, and - poof! - God answers in just the way we want.

All throughout the bible we see God ignoring the peoples’ cries then going and doing whatever God wants. And usually, God’s actions are more life-giving than what people ask for.

What we can know, and what we can trust with our lives and our deaths, is that God is faithful, that God is merciful, that God is loving. We can trust in the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, who is still at work healing the world, forgiving our sin, making us whole.

So what are YOU looking for? Do you believe you will find it here, among God’s people, within the Word proclaimed and the sacraments received?

Your answer, I’m guessing is “Yes”....and...“No.” You look for God where God promises to be. And there we do find God. We receive God’s forgiveness and remember that we are indeed children of a living and loving God.

But also, the God you find can often seem like a ghost, a flicker at the corner of your eye, a slippery truth that you can’t quite grasp, a meal half eaten. Our darkness can often make us blind to God’s light.

That’s because who we want God to be and who God is can be very different people.

God doesn’t act according to our directions. But God does what God does. Forgiving our sin. Making a new world filled with justice and marked with peace. Preparing us for eternity, where we will live in the fullness of who God wants us to be.

May this be so among us.

Christmas Day

2010-12-25T11:25:00.001-08:00

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”

I understand why we read this passage from John’s gospel every Christmas Day, but, I’m not always happy about. To me, it sounds bloodless, the abstract ruminations of a cloistered philosopher who comprehends the mysteries of the divine, but can’t get a date for Friday night. Maybe I’m missing something but John’s message of the Word made Flesh doesn’t quite make it down to earth. His words to describe The Word betray his message.

After all, we’re here this morning not to theologize about the nature of the incarnation or speculate about the inner-relationship of the Trinity.

We’re here to greet a baby. A tiny creature who cries all night and fills his diapers. We sing songs about mangers and barns, shepherds and angels, sheep and donkeys. And last night we heard stories so earthy that they have dirt on them and made our clothes smell. Today’s reading only leaves us lost in our thoughts.

So I worry about John’s Jesus. I worry that he can’t relate to me. Or to us. Or to anyone with a pulse and who bleeds red. I worry that he might come across as human in name only, that he doesn’t understand the limitations of a mortal life. That he’s comfortably abstract, afraid to touch our skin, uninterested in changing our lives or the world. I worry that he came just to have a really interesting conversation.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word WAS God. The Word was with God in the beginning. All things came into being through him, and without him, not one thing came into being.”

Hmmm. Upon reading this again, I wonder if John might be up to something here. But I’m not sure what. It appears that he’s asking us to open up our bibles and turn to page one. What’s going on?

“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness God called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.”

“And God said...” There were six more times “God SAID...”

Why is John asking us to re-read the creation story? What is John trying to tell us?

Is he somehow connecting Jesus to the creation story? It could be that John is telling a “New Creation” story, with the word that spoke creation into being in the beginning is now speaking something new into existence. Is “in the beginning” now “in a NEW beginning?”

It could be that John is reminding us that words have tremendous creative power, that words create a world, words shape us, words build a life. The words we use tell us who we are. Words fashion a people and form a community.

Maybe John was on to something and I just didn’t see it. He knew the power of the Word to save us. If I was worried about John’s Jesus I had no reason to be. John knew that the Word made flesh did more than just think lofty thoughts. John was saying that the Word of God, the Word that spoke creation into being, speaks into our lives TODAY, shaping them, re-molding them, tearing them down and building them up again, John was saying that Jesus - the Word made flesh through whom all things were made, speaks us into salvation. This is a Word we could not speak for ourselves, but speaks on our behalf. This Word is not our’s, but God’s.

This is why I’m suspicious of attempts to make Christianity intelligible to non-believers. This is were I part ways with the so-called “seeker-sensitive” approach to evangelism, or so-called “emerging church” leaders. They say that our job as Christians is to make it easy for visitors to our church to understand the message. That they shouldn’t have to make an intellectual or cultural commute1 in stepping into our churches and experiencing our worship. They say that we have to use the language of the culture for people to hear our message. That we have to penetrate the cacophony of competing voices to make OUR voice heard. Some suggest that it’s an act radical INhospitality to make non-Christians intellectually or culturally uncomfortable during the liturgy.

And while, yes, we welcome all people the way people welcome guests into our homes. We make sure they have a place to sit, we ask them their name, But there comes a time when there will be a disconnect between where the visitor is and where we are. There will be a gulf, a distance, between what we say and how a non-believer will experience it.

And that’s okay. It’s meant to be like that. After all we preach a message that does not belong to the world. Jesus may be the Word made flesh but even his own people didn’t recognize him, so what makes us think that people today would be any different? The distance between us and the non-believer is where Jesus does his best work. It’s a holy discomfort where we realize that the Jesus’ message of new and everlasting life isn’t something that we create on our own, but it comes from far beyond us, yet also has taken up residence deep inside us.

I’ve heard it said that becoming a Christian is like learning a language. I really like that idea. When you learn a new language you are given a fresh lens in which to see the world. You’re given a whole new vocabulary to describe what you see.

Christmas. The Festival of the Incarnation. The celebration of the Word made Flesh is about God speaking a new world into being. It’s about God giving us a whole new language, a fresh set of eyes through which to see the world. No longer do we see the world in the darkness of sin and death, but God has given us eyes to behold the light of mercy and peace of everlasting life.

And the Word never stops speaking. The Word never stops becoming flesh. In us, as the Body of Christ, the Word speaks it’s message of life and salvation, so we can speak that Word.

In the love we give to the world, in the joy we have in receiving God’s mercy, in the tears we wipe dry, and the compassion we show to the hurting, the Word becomes flesh and lives among us full of grace and truth.

May this Word be always on our lips. May this Word always become flesh and live among us. Amen.

Christmas Eve

2010-12-25T06:52:00.001-08:00

For those who say that religion and politics don’t mix aren’t paying attention to tonight’s reading from Luke that we just heard. Maybe this passage has become TOO familiar to those who’ve been coming to Christmas Eve services for so many years or been watching endless loops of Linus’ monologue from A Charlie Brown Christmas, that the story has lost its political edge.

“In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. All went to their hometowns to be registered.”

I’m no statistician, but why people had to take time off work to head to their hometowns to fill out a government form is a mystery to me. They could just as easily been counted where they lived and the Roman bureaucrats probably would have gotten better information.

But Luke, in his sneaky sort of way, makes a point in telling us that Jesus was born during the reign of Caesar Augustus in the city of the great King David. And anyone listening who knew their history would have known the Augustus fancied himself as the “King of Peace” who was to bring an end to all wars everywhere.

On top of that, Augustus, in a stunning act of hubris, also referred to himself as “Saviour” and encouraged people to worship him like a god. He was the all-powerful, wise, and virtuous leader who would usher in an era of peace and prosperity, whether you wanted his brand of peace and prosperity or not.

This gives the angels’ announcement to the shepherds more of a political spin: “Do not be afraid; for see- I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”

So Luke presents us with two competing saviours, two kings battling for attention, a contrasting vision of peace. One is Pax Augusta, sustaining a painful peace by force. And one is a Pax Christi, who brings peace through love and sacrifice.

Whether or not Luke’s intention was for Jesus to usurp Caesar’s authority or to merely contrast God’s love with human power is anyone’s guess. Maybe Luke was asking his listeners where their allegiances lie. Perhaps Luke was reminding people that while the saviour brings peace, that peace looks different to every one.

What does peace look like for you?

Is it peace in your heart knowing that you’ve been forgiven of sin and gained entry into eternal life with Christ? Does peace mean “peace with God” in an intimate, personal, relationship?

Or has peace been a long time coming? Does peace mean finally accepting that your life hasn’t turned out the way you wanted it to? That the dreams of your youth have disintegrated under the weight of numerous obligations. Maybe it’s accepting your failures and learning from them. Maybe peace is realizing that your broken marriage will never be healed, that it’s not your fault that your spouse won’t stop drinking. It’s learning to live with the fact that some losses are forever, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Maybe peace for you is learning to walk with a limp after wrestling with God.

Or does peace mean the absence of conflict in your life? That you’ve finally reconciled with those who’ve hurt you? Does peace meaning forgiving others so you don’t have to carry the burden of anger or resentment any longer? Does peace mean knowing that, even though others have hurt you, you will not hurt others?

Or maybe you’re thinking on a grander scale. Peace means “peace on earth” where swords are beaten into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks, and guns are ground into gardening tools. Where nuclear weapons are disarmed and banned. Where Palestinians and Israelis learn not just to live with each other but to love one another as children of God, progeny of Abraham and Sarah. Where our soldiers in Afghanistan will be relieved of their duty with thanks. Where North and South Korea lay down ancient animosities,and embrace each other as sisters and brothers. Where old historic hostilities between nations and peoples are settled once and for all and a new age of friendship on earth begins.

Or maybe, for you, peace not just reconciliation or the end of conflict, but the beginning of a sustainable prosperity for everyone, where all people live to their fullest potential, where hungry bellies are full, where teary eyes are wiped clean, where all people live and thrive in the joy of knowing they are loved and valued.

What is peace for you?

What do you suppose the angels were singing about that night? “Glory to God in the highest heaven and on earth peace among those whom God favours.”

It could be that the angels were proclaiming all those kinds of peace we just talked. And other kinds of peace we haven’t thought of.

That’s because the one they were proclaiming was the saviour who came for YOU. As Martin Luther said, “The angel does not simply say: ‘Christ is born!’ but “for YOU he is born.’ What good would it do me, if he were born a thousand times, and if this were sung to me every day with the loveliest of airs, if I should not hear that there was some [message] for me and that it should be my own”1

The saviour comes to bring peace TO you and FOR you. This is the peace the world cannot give and a peace we can’t create on our own. The saviour comes not to enforce peace like Augustus tried, but to create it, to give birth to is as God’s promised future peace resting vulnerably in a manger. The Christ Child, Jesus born in a barn, sleeping in an animal’s food trough, is the peace we are seeking.

On this Christmas Eve, we think about peace, we pray for it, we sing about it, and we bring our longings for it to worship hoping to catch glimpses of peace, perhaps just out the corners of our eyes, so that we can begin again with the dream that - one day - we will have peace in just the way we need, just as Jesus promised.

And when we capture that hint of peace, we join the song of the angels, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and peace among those whom he favours.”

May this be so among us. Amen.

Advent 3A

2010-12-14T11:08:00.000-08:00

Leap frog a few generations from last week’s reading and you’ll land in this morning’s passage from Isaiah. The past two weeks we were knee-deep in palace intrigue when King Ahaz of Judah buckled, making common cause with the enemy only to find the holy city in ruins.

A few kings later, and God’s people find themselves conquered and enslaved by the Babylonians. This has been their recurring national nightmare. Those who’ve seen the movie know that God’s people were enslaved in Egypt. Then they wandered lost in the wilderness for 40 years before finding the land that God promised them.

And, like last time, the people called to the prophet Isaiah for a word from the Lord. When will they be rescued from slavery?

This Isaiah, which many scholars call “second Isaiah” doesn’t have any inside information for his people. He doesn’t know the “when” or the “how.” He can’t tell them at what time they’re supposed to pack their bags. He only brings large promises. When first Isaiah brought grand visions for the history of the world, this second Isaiah has a word that is more personal than that of his ancestor in name.

This Isaiah talks about how the land and the people will be transformed. Deserts will have swimming pools. Arthritic hands will be like vice-grips, those with bad knees will throw away their walkers, blind folks will paint murals, and deaf people will update their CD collections.

In other words, the physical consequences of slavery will disappear, and they and everything around them will be made new again.

Then, Isaiah says, a highway shall be there and it shall be called the Holy Way...”

A highway? Really? Did he have to say highway? They knew about highways. They were the ones who went from place to place for 40 years looking for a spot to start over. They were dragged down the highways to Babylon to live as slaves. They built highways for their oppressors’ pagan festivals. A highway was something that they didn’t want. No matter how holy it was. All they wanted was to finally sit down and rest.

But a highway was promised. It was the only way out of slavery and into freedom. The highway kept them moving, despite their aching muscles and blistered feet. The highway kept them in motion, so they would not become complacent. The highway was their teacher, giving them the wisdom of the road. At least the highway was familiar to them. For better or worse, the highway - the Holy Way - made them who they were.

It’s been said that mobility is a sign of 21st life. That we are a people on the move. I know that’s true for me. I’ve lived in three provinces, numerous cities, countless apartments, and have logged hundreds of thousands of kilometres on too many cars, down far too many highways.

But that doesn’t make me any different from many people of my generation. We move around a lot. In fact, I’m surprised when I meet someone who’s lived in the same town their whole lives. Very few people do that anymore. Especially here in Alberta. Most come from somewhere else for work or to retire. I’ve met very few adults in Lethbridge who say they were born and raised here.

Some say that we lose a sense of place by our wanderings. They say that we are deprived of a sense of collective identity and shared history by going from place to place to place. They say that we lack a rootedness that comes from being committed to a community. They say that we’ve lost a sense of “home.”

And so, they say, we grieve this loss of “home.” And we’re always trying to find it again.

I think they’re right. But that doesn’t mean that we wander around lost in the world. But we do feel the loss. And we’re forever trying to recover it. From country western songs waxing nostalgic about the times in our lives when we felt free and secure, or retro-radio stations that play tunes that remind us of when we may have known a place called “home” to high school reunions to re-visit the time before we set out in life’s highway to make our place in the world, we’re afraid that we’ll never find “home” again.

And we probably won’t. Not in the way we want.

When the captives in Babylon took their exit off the highway and found their way to what they thought was home, they were deeply disappointed. They didn’t find what they were looking for. They didn’t find freedom and security waiting for them there. Only new sorrows and fresh oppressions. The highway didn’t lead them to where they longed to go.

So back on the road they went. Still searching for “home,” still hoping to find a cure for their restlessness, but probably knowing in the backs of their minds, that they’d never find what they were looking for, they’d never stop wandering, they’d never settle into one place forever. God wanted them on the move.

But as they would find out, they would return home. Not to place. But as a people. Their home was their relationship to each other and to God. They would recover who they were. They would remember the stories that shaped them, they would re-learn the prayers that brought them to God, they would be restored into that deep fellowship of knowing who they were. That knowledge, the knowledge of their history and the knowledge of their God would be their home.

All that was taken from them would be returned. Their time in exile would be over. They would be strong. They would be God’s free people again. They would, once again, be a light to the nations, bearing witness to God’s love and power, and then all the nations would assemble at the mountain of the Lord singing praises to the One who rules over heaven and earth.

They learned that home is not WHERE you are, but WHO you are, and WHO you BELONG to.

And we may never feel the security and freedom of “home” in the way a place does, but we do have a home together, when we gather as God’s people, receiving God’s love and giving it away. Our time of exile may be over, but we are a people on the move, returning to the Lord with singing; everlasting joy on our heads, where sorrow and sighing flee away.

May this be so among us.

Advent 2A

2010-12-05T13:57:00.001-08:00

Against Isaiah’s counsel, King Ahaz of Judah rejected the calls for an alliance with the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Arameans to rebel against the Assyrian empire. And such a decision came with terrible consequences. The northern kingdom was destroyed. And Samaria soon followed. King Ahaz kept his crown, but his reign was effectively over. He lost his peoples’ trust. And so they turned their gaze to young Hezekiah, the heir apparent, who might be the righteous ruler they all longed for.

And this righteous ruler had quite the job description. If Hezekiah was the One, he had huge expectations on his shoulders.

A shoot shall come from the stump of Jesse. Jesse, as they would have known, was David’s father. And the news couldn’t have been better.

But “stump” isn’t quite right. “Base’ is more true to the original. From the base of the tree of Jesse a shoot will come out, and a branch shall grow out of its roots. The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge, and the awe of the Lord...”

This leader will rule not according to his own ambitions, but from God’s Spirit. He shall be wise and humble, righteous and fair, strong and just. He shall be everything God’s people needed in a king. He would lead their people back into their glorious past which would become their future.

God’s people had a long and weighty memory. The stories about King David nestled snuggly in their DNA. Those were Israel’s glory years when the kingdom was united and expanding. Their enemies feared them. Their lives overflowed with abundance. The world was their’s to win.

And most importantly, they remembered their God. They remembered what God had done for them. They worshipped as a forgiven and free people. Ahaz may have lead them to ruin, but Hezekiah - they hoped - would return them to their former glory when David was king.

Whether or not Hezekiah was this man of destiny was anybody’s guess. Isaiah knew that Hezekiah was Judah’s last, best hope. So, if not him, then who?

It turns out that Hezekiah’s reign was more successful than his dad’s. While he oversaw a religious reformation, finally got tough with the Assyrians, and built a vast aqueduct to deal with the on-going water shortage1, he just wasn’t the messiah his people were hoping for. While life was better under Hezekiah, it wasn’t Isaiah’s vision of a new and better world.

The people knew what they wanted. They just didn’t know how to get it. So again, they cried out to God for a Messiah - an anointed one - to give them the life and the world they couldn’t create on their own.

They wanted a king who would judge their disputes according to God’s wisdom, who would defend the vulnerable, and protect them from their enemies. They wanted a king who would bring final peace.

We Christians usually connect this king with Jesus, the branch of Jesse, who is the one Isaiah prophesied. We see Jesus as the answers to their cries and in the promises Isaiah made.

“The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.”

This child who leads them, we say, is Jesus, vulnerable in human form, leading by gentleness, “new, bright, undefended, and free”2, immersing himself in the life of the world, transforming it from the inside out.

But for those paying attention the first part of this passage might sound familiar. We use this promise as a blessing in Holy Baptism. When I lay my hands on the one being baptized, I pray this prayer:

We give you thanks, O God. that through water and the Holy Spirit you give your daughters and sons new birth, cleanse them from sin, and raise them to eternal life. Sustain [this child] with the gift of your Holy Spirit; the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the awe of the Lord, the spirit of joy in your presence, both now and forever. Amen.

While the people of Judah were waiting for a king, one man to lead them into glory and to usher in a new era of peace and prosperity, God created a people. Instead of one magnificently righteous ruler to reign over a re-established kingdom, God provided a family of nations gathered together as one body. Instead of one divinely anointed Leader of leaders called to inaugurate God’s new world, God appointed YOU.

In the waters of holy baptism YOU were crowned to reign over all creation, anointed by the Holy Spirit to rule with justice and peace. You are the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy. You are the answer to God’s promise. You are the shoot that came from the base of Jesse’s family tree, you are the branch that grew from his roots. You are the answer to the cries of God’s people.

Your reign is Jesus’ reign, a reign where pain and conflict are replaced with peace and friendship, where grief and struggle are replaced with delight and rest, where violence and death are replaced with newness of life. Life-long wounds are healed. Age-old grudges are reconciled. Enemies become family. Tears become joy.

A tall order isn’t it? But not for God. We serve a God who rescued Israel from Egypt. We serve a God who raised Jesus from the dead. A God who defeated the power of sin and death. A God who desires above all else, that the world might have life today and life eternal.

The spirit of the Lord has rested upon YOU. Each one of you here. Everyone who has been died in the waters of baptism and raised to new life in Jesus. The spirit of wisdom and understand, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge, and the awe of the Lord, the spirit of joy in his presence has rested on YOU. YOU are the answer to prayer. YOU are the one the world is waiting for. This is YOUR time. Because Jesus and his life-giving Spirit has rested upon YOU.

The cries of God’s people have been answered. And we’re it. It is God’s presence in us, the spirit of the crucified and risen Jesus, who calls us into this life. It is not our doing, but God’s spirit working within and through us, who blesses us for what God wants us to do.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Advent 1A

2010-11-28T10:40:00.001-08:00

“Freedom” is a program I recently installed on my computer. It helps me get more work done and to better focus. In fact I used Freedom to get the first draft of this sermon written.

Freedom has one simple task: to disable my web browser for as long as I want or need it to. In other words, if I set Freedom’s clock for 60 minutes, I can’t access the internet for one whole hour. No email. No Facebook. No Twitter. No message alerts No downloading sermons to listen to. No internet radio. Not even my beloved blog. Just cyber-silence. (do people still use the word ‘cyber’?) If I want to access the internet, I have to go through the hassle of re-booting my computer. So, for that one hour, I have “Freedom.”

It’s beautifully ironic that the program is called “Freedom.” After all, the internet was supposed to free us. Now we have to be freed from it. The internet was supposed to make us more productive, it was supposed to help us better connect with each other, it was supposed re-create our lives, giving everyone access to the world, a platform for even the weirdest and most extreme views to find an audience. The internet was supposed to be democracy in action, where everyone has a voice if they chose to speak. The laissez-faire marketplace of ideas.

And it’s true. The internet is all those things. And more. But like most tech users, I let the medium redefine my life, at least what I call “freedom” The internet re-defined “freedom” on its own terms. And not only “freedom” but also words like “friends” “connections”

We’ve also let it re-define “work” and “time.” I’ll respond to email while waiting in line at the grocery store. I cruise bible commentary sites while watching football (Go Alouettes!). I’ll text in between hospital visits. I’m continuously connected, tethered to technology, always available.

It’s no wonder that I need “freedom.”

The people of Judah had the same problem. They needed freedom.

They were in the middle of a war. The northern kingdom of Israel and the Aramean kingdom of Damascus demanded an alliance with them in opposition to the Assyrian Empire. Judah was backed into a corner when Jerusalem was attacked. Not knowing what to do, King Ahaz sent for the prophet Isaiah1. And I wonder if Ahaz wasn’t more troubled than comforted by what he heard the prophet say.

On the face of it, Isaiah sounds hopeful; “In the days to come,” Isaiah says, “the mountains of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.”

“In the days to come...” What days? When? Soon? How will we know when it’s about to happen? I’m sure Ahaz had questions. After all, his wasn’t a spiritual concern. His was a flesh and bone, blood and death emergency. His enemies were destroying the holy city. He was being forced into an arranged marriage with the Arameans. Everything he and his people had worked to achieve was being taken away from them by no fault of their own. They could no longer control their national destiny. They were the victims of other peoples’ ambitions.

They longed for freedom. But they didn’t know how to get it. Ahaz just wanted to know what to expect. And what God was going to do about the enemies at his gate.

And Isaiah brought Ahaz some good news. But he didn’t provide specifics. Isaiah just said, “In the days to come...”

But “in those days...” it wouldn’t be Ahaz who has the victory. It would be God. In those days all nations and people shall stream to the holy mountain. All people will come to the house of God to learn the ways of the Lord. ALL people. No exceptions.

And Isaiah doesn’t stop there. He says how this will happen:

“For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate between many peoples. They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation. Neither shall they learn war any more.”

It’s a lofty vision. Some of you might even smirk at its naivete. But it’s God’s vision. And it’s God’s promise.

It is the word spoken by God that will make these promises come true. “For out of the holy mountain shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.”

We Christians say this word is Jesus. The instruction from the holy mountain and the Word of the Lord is the one for whom we wait. This word of the Lord is the one who will defeat the final enemy, the power of sin and death, and will rule over the whole of creation with justice and mercy.

“O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord...!”

Ahaz may have learned the hard way that God’s promises don’t always match our immediate needs. We may find ourselves trapped in a life we can’t control. We may feel stalled by circumstance. Caught in a quagmire of consumerism.

It’s often this time of year when pain and sorrow show themselves most fiercely. There’s something about the Advent to Christmas month that turns up the volume on peoples’ grief.

Suicide rates are highest this time of year. Family squabbled become full blown wars. Loneliness deepens.

It could be the increasing darkness wreaking havoc on our brain chemistry. Or the longer nights and shorter days simply bring out what is already there, and now we don’t know what to do with it.

And so we wait for the saviour to do what we can’t do ourselves: to free us from what keeps us trapped, to bring peace to our troubled lives and the conflict stained world, to bring newness when we are tired and discouraged.

We wait for the “...days to come [when] the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it.”

We wait for the day when we are pulled out of the darkness we are drowning in, liberated from the traps the world lays for us, when peace will rule over our lives and our world. We wait for the day when all God’s dreams will come true.

We wait for the day when God will have the final victory. Indeed, God already has. The Word has gone forth from the holy mountain and become flesh in Jesus. In Jesus we are taught God’s ways and walk in God’s paths. In Christ, we are tomorrow’s children, claiming God’s resurrection promises today.

This Advent, I encourage you to ask God to give you eyes to see what God is doing because we don’t always recognize divine promises being fulfilled. It’s because we’re in this in-between time where God’s future touches us, yet is not fully blossoming around us. God’s future is here. But we’re still waiting for it. That’s the mystery of Advent.

And until that day comes when all people worship at the mountain of the Lord, the day when all people are freed from the power of sin and death, the day when God’s promised future arrives in all its fulness, we wait.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Reign of Christ the King

2010-11-21T11:06:00.001-08:00

This morning we meet a paradox, or tension, or even a contradiction. On this Reign of Christ the King Sunday we sing the great triumphal hymns proclaiming that “Jesus Shall Reign!” before we “Crown Him With Many Crowns!” Music so strong and confident that we are swept up in the glorious majesty of the divine.

But then, a few minutes later, we find Jesus dying between two thieves. Naked. Humiliated. Tortured. Terrified.

The sign above his head proclaiming him as king was meant to mock him, but it was really an announcement for those who had eyes to see. If you were looking for a king who would crush his enemies, then you might want to divert your eyes. This king forgives his enemies. And he doesn’t raise a finger to protect himself against those who would kill him.

It looks like we have two kings competing for our attention and adoration. Two contrasting visions of who we say God is. Two wildly divergent understandings of how we believe Jesus brings us salvation.

We have a king who is high above the heavens ruling over the universe with a strong arm. And we have a king whose throne is a cross, and whose crown was made of thorns.

This contrast is nothing new. This is as old as the gospels themselves. Just listen to the story.

The Romans mounted a sign over Jesus’ head, “King of the Jews.” That was, of course, supposed to be a joke. This Jesus certainly wasn’t a king. He was anything but a king. Look at him. He was just a poor wandering preacher who said the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong person. The world was full of folks like that.

It turns out that history - and Christians - agreed with the Romans. That sign over his head WAS a joke. The poor, suffering, nobody from the middle of nowhere didn’t rule over anything - not even his own death. This Jesus on the cross couldn’t be a king - at least not one worthy of our devotion.

So Christians elevated him. We clothed his naked body with royal robes -purple - befitting a king more deserving of our attention. We took him off the cross and placed him high above the earth in the heavenly realms where he could rule over everything with power and might. We shuffled him away from the poor and suffering, transforming the cross into a sword, and we sent him into battle to destroy our enemies.

From the emperor Constantine who saw the flaming cross in the sky and believed it was God leading him to glorious victory in war. To the crusaders who battled the muslim hordes, believing that God desired both the death of sinners and a political victory. To those Christians who believe that our politicians must genuflect to them and their agenda, because they assume that the Kingdom of God can only come through political power. We mask our fetish for strength and power with religious piety.

By proclaiming that “Christ is King” many Christians are really saying “The Church is King.” Some Christians want to dominate rather than serve.

When we as Christians look too lustily at the strength and power of the world, we hear Jesus whisper in agony, “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing” and we we abandon the suffering Jesus dying on the cross for the sins of the world.

And so we then find ourselves at Jesus’ bloody feet, confronted by his self-giving, suffering, love. And we realize what true power looks like. We see that true power come from giving of our selves so that others might have life. True power comes when we forgive those who’ve hurt us rather than seek out revenge.

True power leaves us vulnerable. We may be taken advantage of. We may get hurt.

But the power of the cross, the power of Christ our King, only grows the more we give away. The way of Christ our King isn’t what we get, but by what we give.

To many, this power looks like weakness, like we’re capitulating to those who don’t have our best interests in mind. That it’s not practical. It’s a fool’s journey.

After all what would our foreign policy look like if reconciliation was the operating principle? Would our strategy in Afghanistan be any different? How would our laws work if they functioned by forgiveness rather confrontation and punishment?

But then again, forgiveness and reconciliation is not a mere strategy. It’s not a way of getting what we want. Forgiveness and reconciliation is a way of being in the world. Like Jesus on the cross offering forgiveness to those who were killing him, it’s saying that evil powers of the world will not control our lives. My enemies will not dictate how I live my life. Retribution and retaliation may be bred in human bones, but God calls us to a different way of living.

Jesus is saying, my enemies want to hurt me, but I want to love. The principalities and powers of the world want to destroy me, but I want to build people up, creating a world where all people can live and thrive. The world may rage with war and violence, but I will live peacefully. Others may live according to what they can get, I will live according to what I can give. They may live selfish lives, doing violence to others, but they won’t drag me down with them. I will not let them turn me into who they are because of what they have done to me.

That is Jesus’ life. It’s not an easy life. But it is God’s life. And today, Grady and Kylie are being called into this life, they are being recruited to serve this Christ who is our King. Through the waters of baptism, they are being killed to the death dealing powers of the world and they are rising to live in the joy and freedom that comes from being children of God. Their lives will bear witness to God’s alternate vision of the world. A vision that places forgiveness over revenge, a vision that gives before receiving, a vision that plants freedom in the centre of their lives

As servants of Christ our King, the God on the cross, they will be known by how much they love, bearing witness to the Christ who loved us so much that he died rather than lift a finger against those who were killing him, so he would rise to transform the whole world into his likeness.

And may this be so among US. Amen.

All Saints

2010-11-07T11:34:00.001-08:00

(NB: I’ve had to dip into the vault and pull out one of [what I call] Kevin’s Klassics. It’s been a long week and I was sick during the time I had budgeted to write my sermon. This is from All Saints 2005.)

The condo-development where my mom lives backs on to a local cemetery. In fact, this cemetery has the distinction of being one of the only cemeteries in Canada that has a highway running through it. In that small strip of highway the feverish pace of southern Ontario life connects with the stoney stillness of history and death without stopping to reflect.

A few years ago, while visiting my mom, we were feeling a little cooped up in my her house, so Rebekah and I took the kids for a walk through the cemetery.

“What are those rocks sticking out of the ground?” Sophie asked.

“Those are headstones,” I replied, “They tell us who is buried there and when they lived.”

Sophie is still trying to figure out the whole death and dying thing. She knows that my dad is in heaven, as is our dog Zooey. And she can’t figure out how people can be buried, yet still be alive in somewhere else.

But I wonder if any of us have that really figured out.

As we walked through the cemetery, we noticed how some graves were immaculately kept. The grass around the headstone was neatly trimmed, even if weeds on the pathway covered our shoes.

Some graves looked abandoned. Or forgotten. Someone whose memory has been left to whither.

Others were decorated with mementoes. Objects that meant something to the deceased. Or told a story about what that person loved to do: A nine iron. A construction helmet. And in one sad instance, a Teddy Bear. Relics of a life lived well or not so well lived; or maybe just simply lived.

I’ve been told that it’s morbid to walk through cemeteries. That it’s better to live life than to brood about death.

So maybe I’ve got a bigger morbid streak running through me than most people. From the time I was five and my grandmother passed away, I’ve always had a certain fascination with cemeteries. I read the names and the dates. I wonder who they are. What they loved. What they despised. What contribution that made to the world – if any. If they enjoyed their lives or simply muddled through them.

I wonder if that’s what we’re doing on All Saint’s Day: taking a walk through a cemetery. For some, the names that we hear read out loud today are like the names we see on headstones; many of them are strangers, but with stories to tell that teach us something about life.

For others, these names are of people whom we know intimately. People who shaped our lives, for good and for ill; whose legacy is still lingering around years after they’re gone.

And maybe, All Saints' Sunday is also like a family reunion, or like pulling out our old photographs and remembering where we came from.

We remember those who angered us and those who inspired us. Those who raged against the dying of the light and those who went quietly their rest. But we know, whether we acknowledge it or not, that we are – somehow- linked together. All Saints Day makes the bold claim that all our stories matter, that are lives are webbed, interwoven with God’s Big Story of life and salvation.

St. Benedict said that an important spiritual discipline is to constantly remember that you are not the centre of the universe, but, to use Benedict’s words, “Keep death daily before your eyes.”

I think that’s wise counsel. Death tells us a lot about life.

I’m old enough to remember the sirens blasting from a tower just a block away from our school, and the teacher telling us to hide under our desks.

These types of drills, a practice for the end of time, while out of vogue in most of the rest of Canada, still happened on occasion in my hometown well into the ‘70’s.

“It’s because of Niagara Falls,” the teachers would say. “Niagara Falls is a nuclear target.”

So from the earliest of ages, my classmates and I learned that all life as we know it could be wiped out at faster than a well aimed spitball.

That is what we live with as children of the Nuclear Age. Now when hostilities between India and Pakistan heat up we all hide under our beds. Or when North Korea gets snippy, we all wonder if the world is going to end before the next commercial break. Or when we hear that Islamic terrorists may have gotten their hands on old Soviet-era bombs, we turn on the hockey game and hope for the best.

So I wonder that when it is all said and done - if or when the Big One comes, if our lives and the stories they tell, will amount to a hill of radioactive beans.

Many people remark to me that they wonder the same thing, nuclear threat, terrorism, or not. They wonder if the headstone that marks their burial place will be the only monument left by which people will remember them; they wonder if their story will be lost, their name forgotten.

They wonder if when they close their eyes, they will never open them again.

So they come to the cemetery looking for some kind of guarantee. What clues to eternity are hidden amidst these stones? Are our loved ones really in heaven? Will we eventually join them? What really happens to us when we die?

That’s when God’s Big Story captures our attention, a story about the one who has been there and back again: Jesus the faithful bearer of God’s story. The story that tells us that our life is in God and God does not die.

When I make my occasional pilgrimages to the cemetery, I don’t just see death. I see promises yet to be fulfilled. I see possibilities hiding underneath each headstone. I see stories, some known to many, and some known to God alone. But God, one day, telling those stories.

I did a funeral once for a woman who took her own life. She was about to be charged with a crime and couldn’t live with the shame she felt she brought to her family. The son came to see me and asked that if any reporters came poking around that I should deny any knowledge of the service. He didn’t want any reporters crashing the funeral.

It turns out this woman’s story made it to the paper. And she would be forever known as for the crime she is said to have committed.

Her daughter shared some stories with me of this woman’s life. But stories mostly about how good she was with the grandchildren. How these small babies would stop crying when grandma picked them up. How she spent a month caring for the little ones when their mom was suffering from post-partum depression. How she worked hard to raise her children as a single mom. Her daughter wanted me to know that her mother’s story was more than the story people heard about in the newspapers.

Then others started sharing more stories with each other about this woman’s life. People wanted to remember that she was more than what the newspapers said she was. She impacted those around her in ways she probably didn’t know.

I couldn’t help but think that these are the stories that God remembers. These are the stories that God tells to the angels. These are the stories that tie us to God’s Great Story, where we are linked with that great multitude that no one can count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne crying out in a loud voice: “Salvation belongs to our God…”

So what is your story? How will you be measured among the saints? How does your story connect with the stories of others, or with God’s Big Story?

But we know that, no matter what stories our lives tell, we will never be forgotten, for we will live with those whose lives have connected with God’s, and together we’ll sing songs of praise to the One whose story makes our story live.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Reformation Day

2010-10-31T12:08:00.001-07:00

If someone asked you what a Lutheran was, how would you respond? I posed that question to the confirmation class a few weeks ago and they looked as blankly then as you do this morning.

For most of us, that’s a tough question to answer. Lutheranism has such a rich and diverse tradition. But it’s also very specific. How do you sum up a whole faith history in a few words?

Those of us initiated in the deeper workings of the Lutheran theological tradition would throw around weighty words such as “justification” and “sanctification” before lapsing into latin spewing phrases such “sola fide” “sola gracia” “sola scriptura;” high sounding words to explain what is a really tremendously personal faith. “Why,” ask Lutherans, “would you use a 50 cent word when a $100 word will do just as well?

Others, more narratively minded, will tell the story of Martin Luther, from whom we derive our name “Lutheran.”

You’d mention his beginnings as a law student, before being caught in a rain storm, thinking he’s going to die, he cut a deal with St. Anne that if she helps him survive the storm, he’ll devote his life to God and become a monk.

She did. And he did.

You’d mention that in the Monastery Luther beat himself up - literally and figuratively - to punish himself for his sins. He believed that he couldn’t do anything acceptable to God. And so, Luther said he hated God for creating him sinful, then punishing him for those sins.

And then, you tell how Luther, while reading the passage from Romans we heard this morning, finally realized that we sinful human beings as justified by faith alone, and not by works. You’d explain that this is a fancy way of saying that God declares us clean, forgiven, and freed from the power of sin because of Jesus and not because of how much we pray, go to church, live moral lives, give to the poor, or anything else that we think will make us acceptable to God. We ARE acceptable to God because we’ve been joined to Jesus’ death and resurrection in holy baptism.

It may sound like the story stops there but you’d keep on going. You’d tell how Luther was sent to study and teach at the University of Wittenberg. Meanwhile, in Rome, Pope Leo X wanted to build a big cathedral for himself but didn’t have the cash. So he recruited Johann Tetzel - slimiest, smooth talkingest stickiest-hand-in-the-offering-plate-iest - preacher he could find to scare the hapless German Christians into handing over their hard earned paycheques to Rome to so Leo could pay for his ego enhancement.

Tetzel told them that if they wanted to free Uncle Hans from purgatory all they had to do was hand over a few dollars to the traveling preacher. He would ask, “How could you let Aunt Mary suffer when all you had to do was put some extra cash in the offering plate, and she would be released into heaven?”

With an advertising campaign so slimy that it would make Don Draper blush, Tetzel came up with a slogan: “When the coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs.” Catchy, eh? This practice was called “selling indulgences.”

You’d emphasize how Luther, who was also a parish priest, caught wind that his parishioners were buying these worthless indulgences, and he went ballistic. And Luther did what every good clergy person would when overheated with anger at the injustice and abuse in the church: he composed 95 debating points (which we call the “95 Theses” with a “th” NOT an “f”) and nailed them to the church’s front door, for discussion and debate. This was the 16th century equivalent of writing a blog post.

Luther nailed his 95 these on October 31, 1517. Which is why we celebrate Reformation Day on October 31. Or usually, on the last Sunday in October. But October 31 is officially Reformation Day.

We remember October 31 because it was when he nailed his 95 these to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg that Luther set a match that ignited a fiery change to Europe’s religious landscape - and beyond to the whole world.

Luther was eventually excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church - but he didn’t care. He believed he was doing God’s work. You’d point out that Luther didn’t intend to split the church. He wanted to simply reform it.

He wanted to rid the church of the abuses that were exploiting everyday Christians. He wanted everyone to participate in worship instead of just watching clergy folks litugize. It’s because of Luther that we sing hymns during worship. Before him, worship was a spectator sport for those who didn’t have collars around their necks.

But most importantly, you’d want to say that being a Lutheran is about being saved - put in a right relationship with God not through any outside works or inward prayers. We have a right relationship with God because of Jesus death and resurrection, to which we are joined in Holy Baptism. We call this: grace.

In fancy theological language, grace means “unmerited favour.” In regular speak, grace means receiving God’s love and salvation even though we DIDN’T nor COULD WE do anything to deserve it. When we say that God is gracious, we are saying that God loves us even though we’re not entitled to God’s love. We didn’t earn it. And we couldn’t earn it even if we tried. Grace is living with the hope that God has a hold on us in this life, and faith that God will carry us into eternity.

But I’m guessing that for you, if asked what a Lutheran is, you might simply say that it means salvation in Jesus. And that would be a great answer. But it would also be just the beginning.

Being a Lutheran isn’t just remembering the story that shapes us. It’s looking to the future to see how the story ends.

And not just our small, individual stories, but God’s GREAT story of the salvation of the world, the new birth of the New Creation, where God will make all things new, where tears will be wiped from our eyes, where mourning, crying, and pain will be no more, where the kingdom of heaven and the brokenness of the world unite in God’s healing love, and where every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus is Lord.

And so, as Lutherans, we confess it’s by grace alone through faith that we - and the world - is saved.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Pentecost 22C

2010-10-24T10:46:00.001-07:00

I think I can sum up today’s gospel reading in one short sentence: Jesus says not to be a smug, arrogant, self-righteous jerk. So, there it is. Now I can go sit down and enjoy the rest of the service having preached the shortest sermon of my life.

But if I do that I will have fallen into the trap that Jesus set for us. We think we know whose side we’re on in Jesus’ little morality tale. Especially in the way Jesus tells it. And that is dangerous territory. We better watch were we step.

In Jesus’ story we have two people praying. We have the smug, arrogant, self-righteous jerk of a religious leader who thanks God that he’s not like the dirty, disgusting sinners and moral midgets that he has to deal with all day. He thanks God that he’s better than them.

And in contrast, we have a hated tax collector, who grew rich off of collaborating with the enemy, collecting taxes for the Roman empire, taking more than he needed to, and pocketing the difference. He was a thief and a collaborator. He helped God’s people under the Roman boot. He was NOT welcome at worship. And now he has the audacity to ask God for mercy.

The story says that the Pharisee held the tax collector with contempt. And I’m sure the feeling was mutual. There are no innocent parties here.

The thing is, the Pharisee isn’t wrong. That’s why this story isn’t as cut and dried as we might think. Remember that Jesus’ audience was Jewish. The Pharisee was modeling what an exemplary Jewish life looks like. He was doing everything right. He was the perfect Jewish leader. He was giving thanks that he was able to bear faithful witness to a world that God wanted.

And Luke’s listeners would have heard this story after the fall of Jerusalem where the temple was destroyed, and so they probably wondered why Luke’s Jesus picked on the Pharisees. Certainly he could have found a more appropriate target.

It was the Pharisees that kept the Jewish faith alive as Jews scattered all over the known world in order to escape annihilation after the Romans decimated Jerusalem, It was the Pharisees, this particular group of rabbis who preserved the faith and taught the tradition so it wouldn’t be lost. They took up the cause of salvaging the Jewish rituals from the temple ruins. If it weren’t for the Pharisees’ heroic faithfulness, Judaism would probably have been destroyed.

And so the Pharisee prays,

“I give you thanks, O God, that I have been able to keep the commandments, that I’ve been faithful in giving what you ask, that I’ve been remembering your peoples’ suffering by fasting. I thank you that temptation has not overcome my desire to live for you.”

If you think about it, it’s a pretty Lutheran prayer. The text says that the Pharisee trusted in himself, but I don’t really see that happening here. The Pharisees’ prayer is one of thankfulness in what God has done in him and for him. He recognizes that he couldn’t be faithful on his own. He thanks God that he can follow the rituals and the traditions that make up the heart of the Jewish faith. He thanks God for doing in him what he could not do himself. If it was all his own doing, this prayer was mere bragging to the Almighty, if his faithfulness was his own hard work, then why was he thanking God for the ability to be so obedient?

Then we have the hated tax collector, who can’t take his eyes off the floor. He whispers his prayer, “Be merciful to me, a sinner.” Simple. Humble. To the point.

But I wonder if both the Pharisee and the tax collector were praying the same prayer, but in different words. A religious leader, thanking God for helping him be faithful in a world where it’s so easy to fall away from the faith. And a tax collector who knows that his actions have put him at odds with God and God’s people, and who asks God to repair him and his broken relationships.

They probably didn’t realize they are really brothers with more in common than they might have liked to admit. They both called out to the same God asking for the same thing: they called out to the God of Abraham and Sarah, the God Isaac and Rebekah, the God of Jacob and Rachel. Those stories were their stories. The same God was at work within both of them. They called out to the God who spoke the whole of creation into being, so that their same God would re-create them.

I don’t like the traditional interpretation of this story because it creates a binary universe. It trades on “us verses them.” It assumes that there are righteous and unrighteous people. Those who are in and those who are out.

And in interpreting the story the way we usually do - that the Pharisee is a smug, arrogant, jerk, and the tax collector is a poor, humble, sinner, then we better watch where we step, because this is where the trap that Jesus lays for us is hidden.

If I asked you where you were in this story, I’m guessing most of you would say that you’re more like the tax collector than the Pharisee. After all, you’re not a smug, arrogant, self-righteous jerk. And then you’d look down your humble noses at the smug, arrogant, self-righteous Pharisee, and in doing so, you’d become just as self-righteous as he is.

“I give you thanks O God, that I’m not like this smug, arrogant, self-righteous jerk of a Pharisee. I thank you that I’m a poor, humble, sinner, who knows what the faith is REALLY about. I thank you that my eyes are not blinded by pride.”

And how would that prayer be any different from the one we believe the Pharisee prayed?

I think, for us, this story helps us remember that it’s God who does the humbling and God who does the exalting. It’s remembering that we, gathered in this place as God’s people, cry out to God where we are. It’s about trusting that God is at work in us, whether as a Pharisee who gives thanks for the faithfulness he’s been able to see in his life, or the tax collector who calls out to God to restore him to the life he knows God wants for him. In both cases, we are humbled, so that God may be exalted.

And at the end we will all go home justified.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Pentecost 21C

2010-10-17T10:42:00.001-07:00

On Friday a group of us from Good Shepherd went to the Good Samaritan Society’s Spirituality and Wholeness workshop, and the presenter had us do an interesting exercise.

He first asked us to assume the posture of someone who is happy. So, we all sat up straight in our seats, shoulders back, chin square, and lips smiling.

Then he asked us to assume the posture of someone who is depressed. So we hunched over, slouched our shoulders, put our heads down, fixed our eyes at the floor, or in some cases, closed them.

Then we went back to our natural posture.

Then, he said, “Let us pray...” and we assumed a prayer posture, which soon became obvious to many people in the room that our prayer postures looked a whole lot like the posture of a depressed person.

Interesting, isn’t it? We say that prayer connects us to God, but does our body language say something about that connection?

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard some criticize the way we morph our bodies when we pray. Some say that when we pray we try to make ourselves smaller in a false humility. And prayer is supposed to enlarge us, deepen our relationship with God, and broaden our vision of how God works in our lives and in the world. We don’t have to make ourselves smaller for God to be larger. God already is.

Others say that closing our eyes while praying pulls us inward rather than pushing us outward, creating a mass of self-centred Christians whose eyes are shut to the suffering of others. Closed-eyed prayer becomes all about ME and MY needs rather than about US. Open-eyed prayer helps us see the world that needs more of God.

I don’t know if any of that is true. But I do find it interesting that our default prayer posture mirrors the body language of a depressed person. Especially after reading today’s gospel.

Jesus encourages persistence in prayer. Nagging. Crying until you get your way. A curious way to think about prayer, don’t you think? It’s not what we usually picture when we think of prayer. This is not what a depressed person does.  
Some think of prayer the honest outpouring of the heart, or the ancient poetry of the liturgy, or humble - or maybe even mindlessly rote - prayers before meals. Whining or grumbling at God, irritating the Divine isn’t what how we learned to pray in confirmation.

Jesus says to pray always and not to lose heart. He says to keep at it, keep hammering away at God, keep poking the Almighty until you get the response you’re looking for. That’s how to get God’s attention. That, according to Jesus, is how to pray.

If you think about it, that IS how we pray as a church family. Especially when we use liturgies over and over and over again, praying the same assigned prayers, many of them written thousands of years ago.

When we follow the traditional liturgy, God knows that on Pentecost 21 - Year C, God will hear a specific set of ancient prayers. These same prayers reach God’s ears over and over and over and over and over again. Relentlessly. Which, to God, must sound like nagging.

But, if Jesus is to be believed, we’re just following his instructions. And we’re still waiting for God’s end of the bargain to be upheld.

So, upon Jesus’ directions, we keep praying, and praying, and praying, and praying, until those words begin to do something to US.

We keep praying and we begin to be shaped by the words we pray, praying until those words become part of us, praying until those words take root inside of us, and we are changed.

We keep praying until we become God’s answer to our prayers. We keep praying until we become the Word we’ve been waiting for.

We keep praying until we see the world as God sees it. We keep praying until we start seeing others as beloved creatures of God. We keep praying until forgiveness takes hold of our hearts. We keep praying until justice becomes our daily food. We keep praying until compassion grips our lives.

I think that’s why Jesus says to pray and to not lose heart. Because, it is in the act of praying that God works within us. It is in those words we say over and over and over again that God’s Word takes shape inside us.

Words create a world. It’s not just the words we proclaim that create, but the words of prayer we offer in tears, through clenched teeth, and even through mindless rote repeating, that mold us into who God wants us to be.

We believe in a God who, with a word, created something out of nothing. We believe in a God who shows us that words have tremendous creative power; and who shows us that words that have devastating power to destroy. We believe in a God whose word is written on our hearts. We believe in a God who saves us through the Word that was made flesh.

So prayer isn’t just offering our hope and fears to an invisible God with the hope that this God will do something. But prayer is also God’s way of giving us power. Prayer changes US, not God.
Prayer, in the words we use, transforms us from those who wait for God to act, to those whom God has given power to act.

Prayer isn’t passive. Prayer is God acting in us, so that we become the answer to that for which we pray.

That’s why we’re careful about the words we use in church. I know I am. Although some of you might not think so. But when I craft the liturgies and compose my sermons, I linger over every word. I try to be colloquial and parochial, hitting the balance between common language and sacred speech, between earthy nattering and heavenly declarations. It’s in the connection between those two realms that God lives in Jesus.

I try to link life and faith, connecting to where we say God is and where we haven’t thought about God being. In the words I offer you, and words ask you to pray, I try to shape how you think about God in your life and in the world, because I believe in a God who creates a world with a word.

So, pray, and do not lose heart, because in your praying, God is at work in you. In OUR praying, God is changing US, so that we become the answer to that for which we pray.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Thanksgiving

2010-10-10T10:55:00.000-07:00

“Do not work for the food that perishes, but work for the food that endures for eternal life...”

Sounds good, doesn’t it? It sounds like something we’d expect Jesus to say. Work for the food that endures for eternal life...it has the aroma of holiness, sacred words we come to church to hear because we don’t find them anywhere else.

We know these words are true. They even sound correct. Like something to which we SHOULD aspire. Eternal food verses perishable food. Light verses dark. Sacred verse secular.

But one thing that makes me crazy about John’s Jesus is that he can be abstract to the point of being unhelpful. He speaks in lofty poetry when I need concrete prose. His elevated speech seems unreachable in my life.

John’s Jesus talks and talks and talks and talks - and talks. And when he’s finished I’m sure not sure I know what he wants me to do. I’m inspired by his message, but I don’t know how his words touch my life in a way that I feel.

“Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life...” is one of those passages that snuggle warmly in my ears yet doesn’t crawl down into my hands and feet. I don’t know exactly what response Jesus wants from me with these words. It’s hard to say what this means for US.

Does Jesus want us to stop eating actual food and simply spend our days “feasting” on God’s Word? Does he want us to quit our jobs and focus all our attention on getting to heaven, doing spiritual things, abandoning our earthly cares and human delights? Does he want all our energy devoted to proclaiming the gospel and making our church grow? What does he want?

“Do not work for the food that perishes, but work for the food that endures for eternal life...”

The word “work” also troubles me. It’s so “un-Lutheran.” This isn’t to say that Lutherans are lazy sofa spuds. But Lutherans are naturally suspicious of the word “work” when it’s connected to anything resembling “eternity.”

We say that our work doesn’t get us into a right relationship with God. As Lutherans we believe that our salvation is all GOD’S work in Jesus, dying and rising again, to which we are joined in Holy Baptism, where we become part of God’s family. It’s not what WE do. It’s what God does that connects us to eternity.

And then again, Jesus says, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but work for the food that endures for eternal life...”

But, I’m guessing that, despite all my initial objections, Jesus knows exactly what he means by the “food that perishes” and the “food that endures for eternal life.” His disciples did too.

And probably, when you look deeply into the secluded safe haven within your souls, you know what Jesus means as well. You know how hard you work for the food that perishes. You have the cuts and the blisters to prove it. Because our appetites for the food that perishes can be insatiable.

I read recently that most North Americans will be grossly overweight in the coming years. Looking at my belt size I know that I stand convicted of over indulging, and putting my health in peril. And my oversized midsection - and those burgeoning North American bellies - are a symbol for a society who has abandoned the search for food that lasts for eternity and has gorged on the food that perishes.

  It’s been noted that houses are getting bigger as families are getting smaller. We have fewer friends, and more loose personal connections, but more stuff. They say that we’re no longer defined by what we create or what we produce, but we’re defined by what we consume.

We find our identity less by our family and our faith, than by our jobs and what we put in our shopping cart. My generation is being told that we’re the first ones to have a less affluent lifestyle than that of our parents, which is deemed a tragedy, as if growing affluence is the mark of a good life.

We demand cheap goods without asking who really pays the cost for them. We close our ears to the cries of the hurting. We do what’s easy rather than what’s right. We’re quick to anger and slow to forgive. We let relationships die over the small details of life.

We’re work our fingers raw for the food that perishes.

But Jesus, who is the bread that endures forever, calls us out of that life, and opens our eyes to the broadness of God’s vision, and opens our mouths that so we can feast on eternity.

He puts on our tongue the bread of love, of compassion, of peace, and of forgiveness - he puts on our tongues his very self - so that Jesus, the bread that endures will grow within us, transforming our lives and our world into his likeness.

When your world is filled with love rather than indifference, you touch eternity. When you forgive rather than bear a grudge, that is bread that lasts forever. When your heart and mind is on other people rather than what’s in your garage, the bread of life is within you.

And today, in the waters of baptism, Sara is beginning her journey of transformation. Indeed, she has been transformed as God has taken hold of her life. If you want to see what the bread that endures looks like, just look at Sara today. And she begins her eternal life this morning as God places within her the bread of love, compassion, peace, and forgiveness. God has claimed her as a healing presence, shining divine light through her.

And today we celebrate Thanksgiving, which I think, is about remembering who we are. It’s remembering that we’ve been given gifts that can be used for the healing of the world. Thanksgiving is remembering that God is a God of abundance, who asks that we share the fruits of creation so that all people can participate in what God has done.

Thanksgiving is remembering that we’ve been given bread that endures for eternal life, that we are transformed and are being transformed into who God wants us to be.

So this passage from the gospel isn’t so much about what we are to do, but about who we are, and who we are becoming.

“Do not work for the food that perishes, but work for the food that endures for eternal life...”

Indeed, Jesus already has. Because of him, we have become the bread that endures for eternal life.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Pentecost 19C

2010-10-03T10:20:00.001-07:00

“Lord, increase our faith!” the apostles plead.

A reasonable request. Especially when they saw Jesus work many signs and wonders and heard him preach endlessly about the kingdom of God. If they wanted more of God in their lives, and if faith was the entry point in connecting with God, it makes sense that they’d ask for more faith.

And who could blame them? As people of faith, isn’t that what we all want? A larger faith to make us more than we already are? Better at being Christian? Greater confidence about what we believe? A stronger witness to what we see God doing?

My guess is that the apostles’ prayer is your prayer today. That’s why you’re here this morning. “Increase our faith!” we ask, or even demand of Jesus, because we feel that our faith could be stronger. We know our limitations. We’ve reached the boundaries of belief. And we know we can’t find more faith on our own.

So we come to church with our tiny faith tucked neatly in our pocket, out of sight, but hoping that here - among God’s people, through God’s redeeming Word and saving sacrament, our little bundle of faith will grow into maturity. The details may be different but the concern is common to all.

You think that your faith could be larger than it is. You feel like you lack the strength of certainty that Jesus seems to have, and that you often see in others.

You have questions that haunt you, doubts that dog you, and you maybe even have pain that simply won’t go away, a pain which constantly reminds you that you are weak and frail. And you lack the inner-resources to move your life ahead in any meaningful way.

Or you’re searching for something bigger than yourself or even bigger than your world, you’re looking for something that binds everything together so that the mess and chaos of the world will make some kind of sense.

You worry that hope is an illusion, a story we tell ourselves to make an unknown future a little less scary. You’re afraid that you’re forgetting how to love, because you’ve been hurt so badly.

You want to know that the droning of your daily routine matters - somehow - in God’s Grand Design. You want to believe that you haven’t walked the planet in vain, and that your life and your labour will live on after you’re gone.

You want faith that will help you truly know that when you close your eyes in death, you will open them again in the presence of God, and all your sorrows, questions, doubts, and frailties will be traded for confidence, newness, and strength.

And so, in response to all our longings, all our fears, and all our questions, we gather here as one family, lifting up the deepest concerns of our hearts, and together we pray, “Lord, increase our faith!”

Well, forget it. Jesus won’t help you. He didn’t even help the apostles.

He mocks them saying, “Hey folks, if you had the faith of a mustard seed, you could say to this Mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.” But look at you! Hello! When was the last time you did THAT? Have you seen any flying bushes lately?

So we say, Wow, Jesus, we KNOW that we can’t do that, we can’t through force of will or mental telepathy or heartfelt prayer defy the laws of gravity and nature. Are you belittling the meagre faith we DO have because we can’t commit an ostentatious display of faith?

I came here for encouragement, not to be insulted. Why is asking for more faith such as bad thing?

Well, it’s not. It all depends on what you mean by the word “if.”

The Greek language has two types of “if” clauses: those which express a condition contrary to the fact (ex: If you had faith [implying which you don’t]) and those which express a condition according to the fact (ex: If you had faith [implying which you do]). Verse six is the second kind of “if” clause.

“IF you had faith the size of a mustard seed [which you do], you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.”  Jesus is saying that you already have all the faith you need to work miracles in your life and in the lives of others.

IF you have the faith of a tiny mustard seed (and you do), you can confront your doubts and fears, putting them to rest and learning to trust God with your life and with your death.

IF you have the faith of the tiniest of all seeds planted within you (and you do), you have the strength to meet the days ahead with confidence, believing that God at work in your life.

IF you have the faith so small you can hardly tell it’s there (and you do), you will know that God is using you for great things in this world.

IF you have faith so small you’re worried you can’t see it, (and you do) you will love because God loves, and God will never let you go.

I think we don’t see our faith because it IS so small. But small doesn’t mean weak or limited. We expect anything of worth to be large, grand-scale.

But Jesus always uses images of smallness to describe God’s kingdom. Yeast. A penny. Treasure buried in a field. A mustard seed.

Small things are easily hidden - or even forgotten. Overshadowed by competing demands. Drowned out by loud voices who insist that we stay in fixed our place, mired in our fears. Securely stunted.

But the mustard seed that God planted in you also makes it grow. Not in a snap of the fingers like the apostles’ demanded, but in our everyday living and dying. The moment by moment encounters of our lives.

Our mustard seed faith reaches beyond our limits and touches the world in ways we may not even see. Our mustard seed faith works WITH us and IN SPITE of us.

And our mustard seed faith works WITHIN us, so that our lives may be slowly and silently transformed into the image of the one who planted it there.

Lord, increase our faith. Indeed, he already has.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Pentecost 17C

2010-09-20T11:01:00.001-07:00

This is one of my favorite gospel readings. It’s wonderfully, ethically ambiguous. It comes put of nowhere and leaves the listener with an itchy scalp.

To me, it gives permission to color outside the lines and to push the edges of acceptable behaviour, Jesus demolishes any sense of ideological purity.

What we have is a guy who really likes his job and wants to keep it. Or at least to clear a smooth exit for himself. So he goes to each of his clients and takes an axe to their invoices. It looks like he’s more interested in keeping these folks as customers then in keeping his boss happy. Maybe he wants to strike out on his own since he knows that a pink slip is waiting in his mailbox when he gets back to the office.

But when his boss finds out what the manager has done, the pink slip becomes a promotion. Apparently, the boss liked the way his manager played the game. Dishonest initiative is rewarded. A weird reaction, isn’t it? Or as one bible commentator put it, “ethically reprehensible.”

The punch line to this story makes even less sense, Especially after the story he just told, “You can’t serve God and money.”

So, which is it Jesus, “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth” or “You can’t serve God and money”? You can’t have it both ways.

I could be that Jesus is saying to make friends with money but don’t let it become your master. Be the chess player, not the chess piece. Work the system. Don’t let it work you.

That may sound like good news for anyone who’s been caught tipping the scales in their favour. After all, we have to live in the real world, where our messy hands leave a grimy film on the purity of God’s ethical demands.

But maybe that’s the point that Jesus was trying to make. Jesus could be telling us in a backhanded way that there is no clear division between clean and unclean, good and evil, comedy and tragedy.

Just as there is no such thing as clean money there is also no such things as a pure person. We are mixed both with the blood of Jesus which declares us innocent, and the blood of Adam and Eve which announces us broken and sinful. We are, as one writer puts, “citizens of heaven and tax-payers on earth. It’s no excuse for the trouble we get into, but it does explain our spotty record.”

So what does this story REALLY mean? I’m not entirely sure. But what I do know is this: the world will behave shrewdly and with calculation. Perhaps Jesus is asking us to make the best of a bad situation by being shrewd and calculating ourselves, not worrying about following every rule, but daring to think outside the cubical, knowing we aren’t saints, but forgiven stewards trying to figure out how to live faithfully as Jesus’ followers.

Jesus says that we can’t serve two masters. But that’s where we live. All of us. We serve one master who is merciful and loving and in who’s name we are saved - and live with another master who asks us to be shrewd and calculating. And all we can do is ask for the wisdom to tell which one is which.

And this wisdom is something we can discern together. Today we’re re-launching our ChristCare Small Group ministry. As many of you know, ChristCare is a specific model of small group ministry. A ChristCare group usually has 3 to 12 members, and it rests on four pillars:

Care and Community
Biblical Equipping (I call this “bible study you can use in daily living”)
Prayer and Worship
Missional Service

These four pillars make up the small group gathering and help each member grow as a follower of Jesus. ChristCare groups are microcosms of the large church. In fact, many people have pointed out that they grow more from Christ Care groups, because of the participation it requires, than they do after sitting through hours and hours of preaching. Even MY preaching!

ChristCare groups bring together the collective wisdom of their members, so that, together, they learn and discern God’s will. Then, with the help of God and the accountability of the group, live their faith in all that they do, being shrewdly gracious in their relationships.

And our participation in the One Community Project with Canadian Lutheran World Relief helps us reach beyond our doors and our lives as we help people in developing countries build a sustainable future. One thing I know about development agencies like Canadian Lutheran World Relief is that they are shrewd managers, working a system that is built to keep poor people poor, but reversing those who benefit from it. They raise funds, not by dishonest means, but they certainly need to have their voices heard over a cacophony of competing voices. And that takes creativity and cunning.

So whether it’s the One Community Project, ChristCare Small Group Ministry, or the regular healing the sick and raising the dead ministry that we do everyday, what I think this passage does is challenges us to think and act creatively in the cause of the gospel. To learn to work the system in a way that benefits the kingdom. To act on God’s vision in ways that would astound us.

Because we believe in a God and follow a saviour who broke all the rules so that we might have life.

Amen.