tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363667472024-03-13T16:19:57.607-04:00Daniel in the Lions' DenDan Haywardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738708370158604594noreply@blogger.comBlogger322125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36366747.post-46181921601963263012021-05-10T10:26:00.000-04:002021-05-10T10:26:32.276-04:00An UpdateIn personal news, I have been seconded to the staff of the Nakonha:ka Regional Council, which covers most of the province of Quebec, as interim Pastoral Relations Minister to cover nine months of a leave. So I won't be in the (virtual) pulpit or providing pastoral care in the congregations I have been serving, and I have stepped out of the chair of the Theology and Inter-Church Inter-Faith Committee during this time. But I am looking forward to working with the Regional and National staff of the United Church and with the ministry personnel and lay leaders of the Nakonha:ka Region, and especially to speaking and writing in the French language, my maternal grandmother's tongue which I haven't used much in recent years.Dan Haywardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738708370158604594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36366747.post-39856628741671749512021-03-25T21:47:00.000-04:002021-03-25T21:47:40.154-04:00A Lament for the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination<i>Sunday, March 21, was the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, observed annually on the day the police in Sharpeville, South Africa, opened fire and killed 69 people at a peaceful demonstration against apartheid "pass laws" in 1960. I participated in an online worship service with colleagues from the Eastern Ontario Outaouais Regional Council of The United Church of Canada.<p>
One of my contributions to this worship service was composing a Lament. The Anglican and Evangelical Lutheran churches in Canada and the United States issued a <a href="https://www.anglican.ca/news/statement-for-the-international-day-for-the-elimination-of-racial-discrimination-march-21-2021/30032580/">statement</a> together for this day, with a prayer which begins “God of holy ground, move us to lament and repent.” And so we are moved to lament during the day and the season of Lent. This lament is mine, as a white person, and is written from my perspective.<p></i>
The book of Lamentations says, “See, O Lord, how distressed I am; my stomach churns, my heart is wrung within me.”<br>
That is how I feel today, O Lord, as I reflect on this day to eliminate racial discrimination.<br>
I lament.<p>
I lament all the times I have thought of the accusation of racism as being worse than racism itself, when I have bristled at phrases like “white privilege,” when I have thought or even said the time-worn excuses, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body” and “some of my friends are Black, or Indigenous, or Asian.”<p>
I lament when I thought or said, “I don’t see colour,” thinking that absolved me of racism when I was really diminishing the identity of BIPOC people. I lament when my mind turned first to the motives and history of a BIPOC person caught up or killed in an altercation with police– and I lament that I even think of these as “altercations” when there aren’t two sides.<p>
But reflecting on today, what I really lament is what I have missed, with my unconscious and conscious prejudices and attitudes and socializations.<br>
I missed so much by regarding a white Canada as “normal.”<br>
I missed so much by building up and contributing to myths that rely on white people, white institutions, and by feeling threatened if stories are told of a Canada with BIPOC people.<p>
When our churches are predominantly white, I have considered them to be, well, churches, and if they are largely BIPOC people, I have put them into a category of “ethnic ministries.”<br>
I have missed so much by viewing whiteness as so much a part of the natural order that I barely notice it.<p>
The United Church made an apology to Indigenous peoples in 1986 and I lament that its wording still rings true today: We confused Western ways and culture with the depth and breadth and length and height of the gospel of Jesus Christ.<br>
Western ways. White ways.<p>
How much have I missed, Lord, how much have we missed, by not hearing BIPOC voices, how much have we missed being closed to BIPOC spirituality and ways of worship and interpretations of the good news of Jesus, how much have we missed displaying the omnipresent portrait of white Jesus and not representing him as other than white.<p>
How much have I, we, missed by seeing BIPOC people and spirituality and culture and conditions as alien, or only in terms of white culture and spirituality and conditions?<br>
How much have I, we, missed by only reading and listening to and watching stories of BIPOC people if they are minor characters in a narrative with a white saviour who rescues people who can’t help themselves?<p>
How have I, we, missed by thinking of Christianity as European when its first followers were brown, when one of the first “Christian” nations was Ethiopia? How have I, we, missed with mental pictures of non-white peoples as latecomers to Christian faith when there have been Christians in India for 20 centuries, in China for 14 centuries – when the first Protestant missionaries arrived in China at the same time as much of Canada?<br>
I lament that I, and we, are poorer for this, that conscious and unconscious prejudice has blurred the image of God in me and us, I and we are not what God meant me and us to be.<p>
I lament too, God, that I have been taught to see racism as only individual acts,done by bad people. “Uncle so and so is racist but I’m not,” I can then say. I lament that this protects the whole system behind these actions as I and we think of racism as a personal choice, not a web of systems and principalities and powers that ensnares us and yet we benefit from it. I lament that when I only see the systemic racism, I am letting the systems to be racist for me, protecting myself as a white person from my own personal prejudices, assumptions, biases and benefits from a racist society and structures.<p>
I lament, God. May my lament produce in me personal transformation and become action, as an individual, as a community, as a church, that lament can inspire me and us to make the name of this day real, concrete, life-changing, life-giving. But, God, don’t let us stop lamenting, as if we have reached the end of the journey.<p>
Dan Haywardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738708370158604594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36366747.post-26443696298505567152021-03-04T22:17:00.002-05:002021-03-04T22:17:40.610-05:00Foundation and EmpireHere's a passage of science fiction that captures what a bit of colonialism was like for Indigenous peoples back on Earth. I'm not sure there is a way to make the descendants of colonists (I am one, with my ancestors arriving in New England on the <i>Mayflower</i> in 1620 and in New France in 1640) understand how bizarre and disconcerting the imposition of a foreign power's sovereignty and alien laws and practices was for the unwilling people who were living happily on the land, unless it is transported into the future through science fiction as a way to tell us about our past and present.<p>
This is from Isaac Asimov's <i>Foundation</i> series of novels - not <i>Foundation and Empire</i>, as my blog post's title would suggest, but <i>Second Foundation</i>, published in 1953. This passage is set on Rossem, a chilly but inhabited planet on the periphery of the Galaxy, visited only by trading ships.<p>
<blockquote>And then one day not unlike other days a ship arrived again. The old men of each village nodded wisely and lifted their old eyelids to whisper that thus it had been in their father's time - but it wasn't, quite... The men within called themselves soldiers of Tazenda.<p>
The peasants were confused. They had not heard of Tazenda, but they greeted the soldiers nonetheless in the traditional fashion of hospitality. The newcomers inquired closely as to the nature of the planet, the number of its inhabitants, the number of its cities - a word mistaken by the peasants to mean "villages" to the confusion of all concerned - its type of economy and so on.<p>
Other ships came and proclamations were issued all over the world that Tazenda was now the ruling world, that tax-collecting stations would be established girding the equator - the inhabited region - that percentages of grain and furs according to certain numerical formulae would be collected annually.<p>
The Rossemites had blinked solemnly, uncertain of the word "taxes."</blockquote><p>
I don't know if this was Asimov's intent, but how dissimilar is the Rossemites' experience from that of the original peoples of the Americas, Africa, or the Pacific when Tazenda/European powers asserted sovereignty based on a decree made by a far-away ruler?<p>
Isaac Asimov, <i>Second Foundation</i>, © 1953 by Isaac Asimov (New York: Ballantine Books, 1983, 12th ed. 1987), p. 43.Dan Haywardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738708370158604594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36366747.post-3687589346726146542021-02-02T09:33:00.001-05:002021-02-02T09:33:21.742-05:00Unclean Spirits, Mental Health and Safe Space: Sermon, January 31, 2021I am grateful to my friend Tom Reynolds of Emmanuel College at the University of Toronto, and the writing of New Testament scholars like Colleen Grant, for shaping my thinking on how to approach the healing narratives in the Gospels from the standpoint of disability.<p>
<blockquote><i>Jesus and his followers went into Capernaum. Immediately on the Sabbath Jesus entered the synagogue and started teaching. The people were amazed by his teaching, for he was teaching them with authority, not like the legal experts. Suddenly, there in the synagogue, a person with an evil spirit screamed, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are. You are the holy one from God.”<p>
“Silence!” Jesus said, speaking harshly to the demon. “Come out of him!” The unclean spirit shook him and screamed, then it came out.<p>
Everyone was shaken and questioned among themselves, “What’s this? A new teaching with authority! He even commands unclean spirits and they obey him!” Right away the news about him spread throughout the entire region of Galilee.<br>
- <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark+1%3A21-28&version=CEB">Mark 1:21-28</a>, <a href="https://www.commonenglishbible.com/">Common English Bible</a></i></blockquote>
We are in the beginning of Mark’s Gospel and Jesus is beginning his ministry by preaching in Galilee that the kingdom of God is near, calling his first disciples, and arriving in the town of Capernaum, teaching in the synagogue, and healing a man with a spirit. The Greek word used to describe this spirit can be translated as unclean, impure, evil. And the spirit cries out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” These words can be translated as “leave us alone” or “mind your own business!” And Jesus tells the spirit to come out, and the people are amazed, that he teaches with authority, not like one of their religious leaders; he even commands evil spirits and they obey him.<p>
This is one of the healing stories in the Gospels, which are really meant to be stories about who Jesus is – the writer wants us to concentrate on Jesus and the authority he demonstrates rather than the person being healed. But modern people miss this point and get embarrassed by these stories, because who these days believes in a person being possessed by a spirit that the Greek word describes as "unclean," "impure," "evil"? Evil spirits, demons, are only in movies now. A lot of preachers are grappling with this, and their own embarrassment, this morning.<p>
But in the ancient world people didn’t have any other way to think of what we call mental illness. We don’t depict mental illness in terms of evil spirits these days, but you can see how this would make sense. We are going to sing a hymn in a few minutes, <i>Silence, Frenzied, Unclean Spirit</i>, that puts this story in modern terms, saying that demons are still thriving in the gray cells of the mind, tyrant voices, twisted thoughts, doubts that stir panic, fears distorting reason, guilt, frightening visions. I was reading a story by a woman who had attempted suicide, how for years loud voices in her head told her that she was a bad person, a failure, better off dead. She cut herself in secret and didn’t tell anyone about her thoughts.<p>
We heard a lot about mental illness on Thursday, January 28, which was Bell Let’s Talk Day, and you couldn’t miss it if you watch a TV channel like CTV or TSN or listen to a radio station Bell owns. And this is important, to raise awareness of how vital it is for our mental health for us to talk to others and be available to talk, to listen, to be kind. It would be nice if media covered this other than on one day, but on Let’s Talk Day well-known people from sports and entertainment came forward to admit that they themselves have days when they are not OK, and they need someone to listen, and we all have to get away from stereotypes and stigmas about “crazy people” so that the courage to talk can be found and diagnosis and treatment sought out. This is even more important these days. <i>The Globe and Mail</i> yesterday spoke of a “surge in mental distress during the pandemic.” Isolation and loneliness are damaging. They affect mental health and the ability to seek out that listening ear and can make depression, anxiety, addiction, suicide more prevalent. Did you know that suicide is one of the leading causes of death in Canada, particularly among men? Or that Canada has one of the highest rates of youth suicide in the world? And yet we have this idea that if we never mention suicide, no one will think about it.<p>
But talking, and listening, and fighting stigma, as essential as they are, aren’t enough. Mental health care needs to be accessible – in financial terms, in logistical terms – just getting there – in cultural terms. We need mental health care to be compassionate, and effective, because for too many Canadians, it’s not. The wait time for intensive mental health management in Eastern Ontario is three years. And almost half of people who have suffered from depression or anxiety have never seen a doctor about it. Only one in five children who need mental health services are able to get them. We also need to admit that housing is a mental health issue, ending poverty is a mental health issue, access to food, sick leave for workers, harm reduction programs for addiction are all mental health issues.<p>
The way we react to persons with a mental illness is part of the way we react to disabled people in general. Jesus shows us in these healing stories that disability, illness, are not due to a lack of faith or some shortcoming on the part of the person with the disability. We need to stop thinking in these terms and pushing people with diagnosed mental illnesses onto the margins of society. As today’s scripture makes clear, as Jesus shows, it is the mental illness that seems demonic, not the person.<p>
These healing stories focus not just on the elimination of mental or physical illness, not only on returning people to what society considers to be “normal,” but on the personal and social transformation that takes place in the presence of Jesus. Healing, driving out the impure spirits, in the Gospels restores community, removes barriers to belonging, embodies the radical hospitality of Jesus who has already recognized the man with the unclean spirit and other disabled people as part of God’s people, even though society excludes them and treats them as problems. This is how these stories reveal Jesus to be the Christ, the Anointed One of God, the one with authority. The way he heals and overcomes isolation and builds community reveals the kingdom of God he proclaims.<p>
All of us are on a spectrum of mental health. It isn’t that there are mentally ill people who are way over at one end and the majority of us are way over at the opposite end. Here are some numbers from the Mental Health Commission of Canada:
<ul>In any given year, 1 in 5 Canadians will personally experience a mental health issue of illness.</ul>
<ul>About half of Canada’s population will have or have had a mental illness by the time they reach 40 years of age.</ul>
<ul>10 to 20 percent of Canadian youth are affected by a mental illness or disorder.</ul>
<ul>8 percent of adults will experience major depression at some time in their lives.</ul>
Numbers like that prove that mental health is not an issue just for other people. And so our churches must intentionally be safe spaces: for these conversations about mental health, for candour and listening and support and education and removing stigma. We have spoken in the United Church about congregations welcoming and fostering belonging - see the <i>Theologies of Disabilities</i> report I worked on, for example - and this is a perfect example of what we should be doing, as we said in that report: what Jesus did when he refocused community away from the centre toward the margins, ushered in the outcast as the honoured guest, and pointed toward people who are shunned by society because of illness and disability as treasured members of the new community of God. When we sing in just a few seconds about the power of Christ’s healing, we are not singing only about the person being healed, but also the community being made faithful, true and whole.<p>
Dan Haywardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738708370158604594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36366747.post-67774130587354398682020-11-20T17:38:00.001-05:002020-11-20T17:38:20.324-05:00Apology for Adoption PracticesMy denomination, The United Church of Canada, has been struggling for 10 years with the legacy of the maternity facilities we operated for what were then called "unwed mothers." During the period from the 1940s to 1980, a high demand for babies to adopt and cultural attitudes (partially shaped by our and other churches) about the "shame" of pregnancy outside marriage shifted these facilities from having most mothers leave with their infants to coercing them into giving their babies up for adoption. The demand for adoptable babies decreased in the late 1960s and by 1980 most of these facilities had closed or were in transition again to working with mothers who would keep their children. This was not unique to Canada; the same conditions prevailed in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. The Australian federal government <a href="https://www.ag.gov.au/families-and-marriage/national-apology-forced-adoptions">apologized in 2013</a> for forced adoptions in that country.<p>
After a researcher reported on the history of United Church-run maternity facilities and the experiences of women who stayed there, the church's Theology and Inter-Church Inter-Faith Committee (which I chair) produced a report on Theologies of Adoption in 2018, which looked at this issue as well as the "Sixties Scoop" of Indigenous children from their communities to be adopted by non-Indigenous families, international adoptions, and the secrecy that restricts adoptees from finding out their history. I testified on the church's behalf to a committee of the Canadian Senate examining forced adoptions during this period (which produced an excellent <a href="https://sencanada.ca/content/sen/committee/421/SOCI/reports/SOCI_27th_e.pdf">report</a>) and met some of the mothers who have been working for years to have their pain acknowledged. I then wrote the draft of an apology for the church's past adoption practices, which was extensively reworked and refined by a group from the Theology and Inter-Church Inter-Faith Committee. I was pleased to present that apology today to our denomination's General Council Executive, the national decision-making body which is in place between the General Councils which are held at three-year intervals. The Executive adopted the apology and is communicating it to mothers and adoptees, media, other denominations and the United Church.<p>
Here is the news release summarizing the apology:<br>
<a href="https://united-church.ca/news/apology-past-adoption-practices">English</a><br>
<a href="https://egliseunie.ca/excuses-pour-les-pratiques-dadoption-de-jadis/">French</a><p>
Dan Haywardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738708370158604594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36366747.post-7827701811528051352020-09-09T16:48:00.000-04:002020-09-09T16:48:33.476-04:00Review: Word for Word Bible Comic - The Gospel of Matthew<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vIPTXwSaZik/X1k5ELKrh7I/AAAAAAAALy4/UXumO6Zi-to_iqctvSSNbtQa_x01W55dwCLcBGAsYHQ/s284/wordforwordcover.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="284" data-original-width="198" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vIPTXwSaZik/X1k5ELKrh7I/AAAAAAAALy4/UXumO6Zi-to_iqctvSSNbtQa_x01W55dwCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/wordforwordcover.jpg"/></a></div><p>
<i>This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham...</i><p>
<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+1&version=NIV">This</a> is how the Gospel of Matthew starts in the New International Version of the Bible, and so begins the new graphic novel of this Gospel in the Word for Word Bible series. I have been following the Word for Word Bible and its author Simon Pillario on social media for some time, so I was excited to be able to review the newest of the currently six-volume series (the others are the books of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Esther, and the Gospel of Mark). I appreciate Simon sending me a download of the digital version of Matthew's Gospel. Both of us participate in the Bible Gateway Bloggers Grid (his blog is <a href="https://www.wordforwordbiblecomic.com/blog">here</a>.<p>
This is a 240-page graphic novel, intended for adults and teens and having an advisory age of 12+, with all of the Gospel presented in comic format but word for word from the New International Version. The word for word presentation inherent in the Word for Word Bible title can be challenging with Biblical books; I came into the theatre to see the 2003 movie <i>Gospel of John</i> wondering how the filmmakers would depict the lengthy discourses of Jesus in the text, and I had the same question about this graphic novel of Matthew's Gospel (I have not seen the 2014 film of the Gospel of Matthew, which is supposed to be word for word, but it is in my lengthy queue of videos to watch). How would this comic deal with the family tree of Jesus, which takes up the first 17 verses of the book? The Sermon on the Mount is a key part of the gospel, but can a graphic novel sustain the reader's interest over three chapters?<p>
I thought the Word for Word Bible Comic did an excellent job with Matthew, one of the wordier gospels (other than John). The Sermon on the Mount, for instance, is indeed word for word, but throughout this version imagery and metaphors in the spoken discourse are illustrated in panels coloured in a pink-purple hue. So the preaching of Jesus in the sermon, with its many instructions and examples ("You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden." "If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also." "When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do." and others), is illustrated throughout, and is not just text. I liked that that these word pictures may relate to other scriptures - for example, the brothers Cain and Abel appear in the panel for <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+5%3A21-24&version=NIV">Matthew 5:21-24</a> ("anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment"), and David and Bathsheba illustrate <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+5%3A27-30&version=NIV">Matthew 5:27-30</a> ("anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart"). They may also use modern imagery, for instance in <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+10%3A18-22&version=NIV">Matthew 10:18-22</a> as Jesus speaks about the coming persecutions of those who believe in him, with the panel depicting not just the stoning of Stephen and a Christian threatened by a wild leopard in the Roman arena but the burning of a modern church, Christians being crucified in 16th century Japan, authorities arresting African Christians, and Chinese authorities using technology to track a Christian on the street.<p>
The Word for Word Bible books are claimed to be accurate to the historical, ethnic and cultural setting in order to represent the story as truthfully and faithfully as possible. This is apparent in the earlier volumes from the Hebrew Scriptures, as this graphic shows, and in the Gospel of Matthew - unlike most comic book depictions of the life of Jesus, and Western art until recently - the characters here do not have pale skin!<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nCXtjwWATyU/X1k6pV_P9AI/AAAAAAAALzI/-CEdg21QSrw1taztvPencWBP6Yu2DnXvwCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/Historically%2Baccurate.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" height="600" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1686" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nCXtjwWATyU/X1k6pV_P9AI/AAAAAAAALzI/-CEdg21QSrw1taztvPencWBP6Yu2DnXvwCLcBGAsYHQ/s600/Historically%2Baccurate.jpg"/></a></div><p>
Angels are also drawn as mysterious and frightening, not as the winged, robed white people of Renaissance art - there's a reason that angels in scripture frequently have to tell humans not to be afraid, after all. There is also an effort to distinguish languages different from the Aramaic that Matthew's characters would be speaking throughout, by using a different font - at least, that seems to be the case in the story of the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15:21-28, where the font would indicate that she is speaking in Greek.<p>
Finally, I enjoyed little details that fill out Matthew's words - when Jesus and his disciples in their boat leave the region of the Gadarenes in <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+9%3A1&version=NIV">Matthew 9:1</a>, they sail through the floating carcasses of the pigs who died by drowning in the lake when an evil spirit was sent into them in <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+8%3A32&version=NIV">8:32</a>. It was also helpful to have the chapter and verse inked on each page, page breaks to begin each chapter, and footnotes for quotes from the Hebrew Scriptures. I would, however, have liked a footnote or explanatory note for <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+27%3A25&version=NIV">Matthew 27:25</a> (the crowd calling out for Jesus to be crucified, shouting "“His blood is on us and on our children!”), given how often this verse has been used as part of anti-Semitic arguments for the Jewish people's guilt.<p>
This graphic novel may appeal to readers who don't find text-only Bibles helpful or easy to read, those who enjoy comics, and readers who would gain insight and pleasure from a comic-format supplement to the biblical text. If you would like to read this faithful adaptation of the New International Version translation of the Gospel text, the Gospel of Matthew can be ordered <a href="https://www.wordforwordbiblecomic.com/buy">here</a>. There are hardcopy and digital versions available of all of the Word for Word Bible Comic books, and links to Kindle and Comixology versions.<p>
Dan Haywardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738708370158604594noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36366747.post-83992071341810382992020-05-19T16:11:00.000-04:002020-05-19T16:11:31.506-04:00The Faith, Hope and Love of Noah: Sermon, May 17, 2020<blockquote><i>Who will harm you if you are zealous for good? But happy are you even if you suffer because of righteousness! Don’t be terrified or upset by them. Instead, regard Christ as holy in your hearts. Whenever anyone asks you to speak of your hope, be ready to defend it. Yet do this with respectful humility, maintaining a good conscience. Act in this way so that those who malign your good lifestyle in Christ may be ashamed when they slander you. It is better to suffer for doing good (if this could possibly be God’s will) than for doing evil.<p>
Christ himself suffered on account of sins, once for all, the righteous one on behalf of the unrighteous. He did this in order to bring you into the presence of God. Christ was put to death as a human, but made alive by the Spirit. And it was by the Spirit that he went to preach to the spirits in prison. In the past, these spirits were disobedient – when God patiently waited during the time of Noah. Noah built an ark in which a few (that is, eight) lives were rescued through water. Baptism is like that. It saves you now – not because it removes dirt from your body but because it is the mark of a good conscience toward God. Your salvation comes through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who is at God’s right side. Now that he has gone into heaven, he rules over all angels, authorities, and powers.<br>
<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+peter+3%3A13-22&version=CEB">1 Peter 3:13-22</a>, <a href="https://www.commonenglishbible.com/">Common English Bible</a></i></blockquote><p>
So we haven’t read a lot from the First Letter of Peter. It’s one of those books tucked in at the end of the New Testament, with Hebrews, James, Jude and so on, and we just don’t seem to get to it that often. But it does have some very meaningful things to say. The writer speaks about the story of Noah. We read two books about Noah and the ark during our children’s storytime, and went over the story of God telling Noah to build a big boat, two of every kind of animal, the flood and the rainbow. The First Letter of Peter talks about how God patiently waited during the time of Noah, and how Noah built an ark in which eight lives were rescued through water. It’s referring to the human family on board, Noah and Mrs. Noah – we never learn her name – their three sons and their daughters in law.<p>
The letter uses the Noah story to make a point about baptism. But I think it can speak to us baptized people in this time. Look at this story – there is a disaster, a family is in isolation for a long period, they look for signs that they can come out, finally they do, they give thanks to God in worship. It’s all there in the Noah story, and it’s the story of our recent past, our present, and, we hope, our future.<p>
This would be a good time to talk about what has been the theme of government news conferences the last week: reopening. People ask me, when will we be back in our church building. And the short answer is, I don’t know. Ontario just began the first phase of the three-phase reopening plan for the entire province. The United Church of Canada also has three phases in its <a href="https://www.united-church.ca/community-faith/being-community/reopening-churches-during-covid-19">guidance for governing boards</a> as they decide when to reopen, in consultation with the province, local health unit, and United Church regional council. Phase one is reopening the building so small groups may meet in person, with physical distancing and wearing masks. Worship would continue to be online, or possibly outdoors. The second phase is resuming in-person worship, with appropriate health measures. Phase three would be full return, but still subject to health and safety regulations.<p>
The guiding principle in these three phases of reopening is the safety of all who enter the church building. Let me say some more about this. You may have seen Facebook posts or heard people say something like, “how come 500 people are allowed in Home Depot but we can’t worship in church?” Well, let me respond. Churches are not businesses. We need revenue coming in because we have expenditures going out, but the similarities end there. We are not like Home Depot, or the health unit, or a charity, even if we have a charitable registration number. We are here, as the First Letter of Peter says, to proclaim that “your salvation comes through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” We are here to celebrate God’s presence, to live with respect in creation, to love and serve others, to seek justice and resist evil, to proclaim Jesus, crucified and risen, our judge and our hope. We are tell each other and tell others that in life, in death, in life beyond death, we are not alone. God is with us. No one else does this. Home Depot isn’t doing this. Our message includes but goes far beyond just saying “stay home and wash your hands.”<p>
Church buildings will be among the last to reopen, because worship services, like other indoor gatherings, are what are called superspreader events. They are high risk activities involving a high risk population, because there are a lot of older people. And it is difficult to reduce these risks. There was a <a href="https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/i-would-do-anything-for-a-do-over-calgary-church-hopes-others-learn-from-their-tragic-covid-19-experience-1.4933461">United church in Calgary</a> that had its last worship service in the sanctuary the same day as us, March 15. There was a social time after church for a member’s birthday. They took all the precautions. There were fewer than 50 people there, so it was allowed. They stood six feet apart in the church hall. Those serving food used gloves and tongs. They did everything right. And yet of the 41 people there, 24 got the coronavirus and two have died.<p>
To resume worship in the church building, the final phase of reopening, we would have to make significant changes to the way we gather. We probably won’t have greeters. There may not be a printed bulletin. We will have to sit six feet or more apart, and, yes, this means you may not be able to sit in your usual seat. We will probably have to wear masks. We may have to limit the number of people in the building. We won’t have any contact with each other. The entire space – pews, hymn books, floors, doors, everything – will have to be sanitized after every service. If you go to the washroom, that will have to be cleaned immediately before the next person can use it. And this is an even bigger issue, there will be no singing. Singing expels a cloud of droplets into the air, and if you have the virus, even if you don’t have symptoms and don’t know you have it, those droplets contain the virus. Someone could walk 10 feet from where you sat, 20 minutes after the final hymn, and become infected from the virus remaining in the air.<p>
We have a responsibility that businesses don’t have. We can’t love and serve others, we can’t proclaim Jesus our judge and our hope, without obeying his commandment to love one another. If we are to worship again in the church building, we can’t just adhere to the letter of the health regulations. We have to act in the spirit of love. We need to learn the lesson of our siblings in that church in Calgary, who did everything correctly but are still desperate to relive that day and do it differently so no one became ill and no one died. The Board and the Session may decide that even with all this in place to let us worship in person, there is still too much of a risk of infecting people we love. Many of us may make that decision for ourselves and stay away. We would continue to have worship online to serve those who can’t come, and have to figure out how to serve those who currently can’t access worship online and would probably not be able to attend in person either.<p>
It is perfectly understandable that we want to get back into the buildings that mean so much to us, and we want to see each other in person. We want to be back to normal. But what is “normal” will change. Think about Noah and his family. When they got off the ark, got back to normal, the normal was completely different from before. We know something about this here along the St. Lawrence Seaway, starting over after a flood.<p>
And, you know, the Noah story shows that not reopening the building until we are good and ready isn’t about a lack of faith. Noah and his family didn’t get off the ark early. We need the faith of Noah and his family, who stayed on that ark for over a year, the Bible story says. And we need the hope they had, that their time on the ark would indeed end. First Peter says, “Whenever anyone asks you to speak of your hope, be ready to defend it.” We do have hope. We can defend our hope, telling anyone who asks that God is with us now in this time and will still be with us in the new normal, whatever that is like. And we need love. We can say that we are not living in fear now – we are obeying Jesus, who told us to love our neighbours. Scripture says, faith, hope and love abide, these three. Noah had all three despite a great disaster, the Christians First Peter was written for had all three despite persecution, and we have all three despite a pandemic. Noah and his family, the first Christians, neither had buildings to worship in, yet they worshipped, in faith, hope and love. And so do we, together with each other right now, no matter how long it takes to reopen fully.<p>
Dan Haywardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738708370158604594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36366747.post-7811058628631110272020-04-05T11:48:00.001-04:002020-04-05T11:48:45.292-04:00Two Parades (Pandemic Edition): Sermon for Palm Sunday, April 5, 2020<blockquote><i>
When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, just say this, ‘The Lord needs them.’ And he will send them immediately.” This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, saying,<br>
“Tell the daughter of Zion, look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”<p>
The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them. A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting,<br>
“Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!”<p>
When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, “Who is this?” The crowds were saying, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.”<br>
<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+21%3A1-11&version=NRSV">Matthew 21:1-11, New Revised Standard Version</a></i></blockquote><p>
I have said on other Palm Sundays that the story of this entire Holy Week is one of contrasts. The happy crowd of Palm Sunday, shouting Hosanna, and the angry crowd of Good Friday, yelling Crucify him. Celebration, and rejection. Joy, and abuse.<p>
And another contrast is that there is more than one parade into the city. There is the one we just heard about, Jesus on a donkey in a crowd of excited pilgrims coming for the religious festival. That is one parade. The other is the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, who travels to Jerusalem each year to take personal charge during the festival. One parade has happy shouts; the other has the tramp of Roman boots. One parade has waving palm branches; the other has imperial shields and spears and helmets. One parade has a poor Jewish man on a donkey; the other has the Roman Emperor’s representative on a war horse wearing full armour.<p>
It seems to me on this very unusual Palm Sunday of 2020 that these contrasts are still with us. Churches all over the world are breaking bread and drinking the cup in the simple meal to remember Jesus – but online, to keep each other safe, to flatten the curve, as we say now. And the contrast is with the empire, just as it was in the time of Jesus, the empire of political and business power that is ramping up its calls to get rid of these measures to flatten the curve, to get everyone back to work, to let the virus run unchecked while – so they say – protecting seniors and disabled people. Of course, in reality seniors and disabled people, and people of all ages, would die in great numbers, but that’s a cost billionaires are prepared to pay. And just as in the time of Jesus there were religious leaders who disapproved of his parade, in our day there are pastors who want exemptions so they can keep their church buildings open and services full, when this will bring sickness and death to the people they are called to safeguard.<p>
Two parades. Two visions of how to love, or not, our neighbours, of commitment, or not, to the common good. You know, in this time we can live without church buildings. What we can’t live without is the church, without love, without loving, without being God’s people, followers of Jesus Christ, called to be the church and love and serve others here and now in the circumstances we are in. Easter is coming, when love can’t be kept in the grave, when life bursts forth, when Jesus is raised from death to triumph over the culture of death too many of the world’s political and business leaders want to entrench. The Lord and Son of God isn’t the Emperor in Rome, who had those titles. The real king comes riding on a donkey. Thanks be to God.<p>
Dan Haywardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738708370158604594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36366747.post-15846618255326136082019-12-26T16:25:00.002-05:002019-12-26T16:25:28.654-05:00The Christmas Message We Need to Hear: Sermon, Christmas Eve, December 24, 2019<blockquote><i>And it came to pass in those days that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered.
The census first took place while Quirinius was governing Syria. So all went to be registered, everyone to his own city.<p>
And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be registered with Mary, his betrothed wife, who was with child.
So it was that, while they were there, the days were completed for her to be delivered.
And she brought forth her firstborn Son, and wrapped Him in swaddling cloths, and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.<p>
Now there were in the same country shepherds living out in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night.And behold, an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were greatly afraid. Then the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people. “For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be the sign to you: You will find the Babe wrapped in swaddling cloths, lying in a manger.”<p>
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying:
<blockquote>“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men!”</blockquote><p>
So it was, when the angels had gone away from them into heaven, that the shepherds said to one another, “Let us now go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has come to pass, which the Lord has made known to us.” And they came with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the Babe lying in a manger. Now when they had seen Him, they made widely known the saying which was told them concerning this Child.
And all those who heard it marveled at these things which were told them by the shepherds.
But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.
Then the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told them.<br>
- <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke+2%3A1-20&version=NKJV">Luke 2:1-20, New King James Version</a></i></blockquote><p>
If you visit our house at this time of year, you will notice that we have a few – as in a couple of dozen – nativity scenes, with the characters from the Christmas story. We have one from Honduras made out of corn husks, one I bought in Nicaragua moulded in clay, painted on wood from El Salvador, a couple from Ecuador with the characters dressed in Inca peasant clothing, more from the Cayman Islands and Indonesia and Bethlehem itself, and my parents’ nativity set in the original box with the tag telling me they paid $2.97 at Kmart. Our latest one is a gift from the Ingleside congregation and is a Canadian nativity, with a moose and beaver as the animals, Mary and Joseph in Mountie uniforms, and the baby lying on a maple leaf. Someone said it looks like the police are apprehending the baby. That’s a different the Christmas story!<p>
And not all these scenes have all the characters, other than, of course, Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus. Some don’t have wise men. Some don’t have shepherds. Some don’t have the animals. But nearly all of them have an angel. Because, perhaps, angels have the main speaking part in the story we just read, telling the shepherds about the baby and what his world-changing birth means, and proclaiming God’s glory and peace on earth. This is important – and the most important line in the story is the very first thing the angel says.<p>
Do not be afraid. These are words the shepherds need to hear; they are out, minding their own business, earning a living such as it was, and as the story says, this angel appears and God’s glory shines around them, and they are greatly afraid. Terrified. Scared out of their wits. And the angel says, “Don’t be afraid.”<p>
And this isn’t the first time an angel says this in the Christmas story. These are words Mary needed to hear. An angel comes to her and tells her that she, a young unmarried woman, will become pregnant and will give birth to a child who she will name Jesus and who will be called the Son of God. And Mary, the story says, is confused. As you would be. And the angel says, “Don’t be afraid.”<p>
Now, the news that his fiancé is pregnant causes Joseph just a bit of concern, and he decides to call off their engagement. But an angel appears to him in a dream, and says the words Joseph needed to hear. The angel says, “Don’t be afraid.”<p>
What the shepherds needed to hear. What Mary needed to hear. What Joseph needed to hear. And, tonight, at Christmas of 2019, what we need to hear. Don’t be afraid. Because we spend a lot of time and effort being afraid – of what’s in the news, of changes in our culture, of what the future holds, of loss of a loved one or a relationship or a job or our health or even the Christmas we used to know. And the angel says, “Don’t be afraid… Look! I bring good news to you – wonderful, joyous news for all people. Your saviour is born today. He is Christ the Lord. You will find a newborn baby wrapped snugly and lying in a manger” – and the angel’s words are true, and we will find our Saviour, God come to live among us, born as we were, in Bethlehem 20 centuries ago, and right here, right now, born in the hearts of everyone who makes room for him so they can sing with the angels, “glory to God in heaven, and on earth peace.”<p>
Dan Haywardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738708370158604594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36366747.post-81222522761137931732019-08-31T15:51:00.001-04:002019-08-31T16:12:39.700-04:00Book Review: Church Reformed<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-momevI-dReg/XWnTb5G3UeI/AAAAAAAAJBg/mg8-FGm0HOQvPewYv-521stsu-AeaegOgCLcBGAs/s1600/41JUMpbIXyL._SX322_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-momevI-dReg/XWnTb5G3UeI/AAAAAAAAJBg/mg8-FGm0HOQvPewYv-521stsu-AeaegOgCLcBGAs/s320/41JUMpbIXyL._SX322_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="208" height="320" data-original-width="324" data-original-height="499" /></a></div>The Barnabas Agency was kind enough to send me a review copy of <i>Church Reformed</i>, by Tim Bayly (Warhorn Media, Bloomington IN, 2019, 166 pages) - it is available from Amazon in <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Church-Reformed-Tim-Bayly-ebook/dp/B07TKGJ85L/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=church+reformed&qid=1567215283&s=gateway&sr=8-1">Canada</a> and the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Church-Reformed-Tim-Bayly/dp/1940017211/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=church+reformed&qid=1567215361&s=gateway&sr=8-1">United States</a>.<p>
I was intrigued by the news release, which says:
<blockquote>In the newly released <i>Church Reformed</i>, (published July 2019, Warhorn Media) Pastor Tim Bayly draws on over 35 years of ministry to address the failures of the American evangelical church. As he exposes the lies Christians have believed, he shows how the Church is at the heart of what it means to be a Christian.<p>
Evangelical publishing has had a field day presenting solutions to the modern crises in our churches. As church attendance falters, books multiply—books on growth, strategies for reaching millennials, new models of doing church to appeal to youth, and on and on ad nauseam.<p>
Too many of these models take their cue from the very trends and ideas that have caused the problems. But what if there was a way to climb out of the hole we’ve dug? What if the church found the power to attract people we thought we’d lost—just by returning to a humble, biblical pattern of church life?<p>
<i>Church Reformed</i> is a call to embrace what we see modeled for us in the Bible and by our fathers in the faith across church history. It's a call to be committed to the Church that Jesus Christ bought with his own precious blood. As Tim says,<p>
"Jesus loves the Church, and we should too."</blockquote><p>
I certainly agree that there is a veritable publishing industry built up around books, strategies and models for church growth and "getting the young people back in." I'm also of the firm belief that decline in church attendance and influence in North America is the result of demographic and cultural changes that no one model or strategy is going to reverse. So I was interested to read what Tim Bayly, who is senior pastor at Trinity Reformed Church in Bloomington, Indiana, has to say.<p>
Bayly begins by stating that "one of the legacies Evangelicalism has bequeathed to Christians today is growing separation between becoming a Christian and becoming a member of the Church of Jesus Christ." I wholeheartedly agree, although with the caveat that I also encounter lots of people who claim membership in the Church while not having been active in the Church for years. But as Bayly says, the Church is no longer viewed as essential to Christian growth as, for instance, conferences, Facebook groups, music, podcasts, Christian books, and so on. The age-old temptation of believers - one we find reflected even in patristic writings, 15 centuries old, not to mention C.S. Lewis' <i>Screwtape Letters</i> and many other works - is to think that people will come to faith more easily if they can avoid all the drama of the Church: infighting, hypocrisy, abuse of authority.<p>
<i>Church Reformed</i> is, in Bayly's words, a call to return to our Mother the Church and love her - to put it another way, to commit ourselves as disciples of Jesus to involvement in a local community of faith and to the authority, accountability, deep relationship and, yes, even discipline that comes with it. "Jesus loves his sheep. He expects His servants to love them also. How can we claim to love Jesus while turning our noses up at the smell of His flock?"<p>
Bayly goes on to look at who is the Church, grounding his own writing in the words of scripture and the Reformers, specifically Martin Luther and the Westminster and Belgic Confessions (coming from a Reformed tradition myself, I appreciated this). He follows this with one of two very helpful chapters on sacramental theology, this section dealing with baptism, how we enter the Church. The book then moves into its second part, what does the Church do, with four devotions (found in <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=acts+2%3A44-47&version=NRSV">Acts 2:44-47</a>) that were the priorities of the apostolic church: the teaching of the apostles, fellowship, the breaking of bread, and prayer. Each has its own chapter, with that on the breaking of bread, the Lord's Supper, being the second in the book on sacramental theology. Bayly proceeds in the book's third part to examine threats to the Church: naiveté, hypocrisy and "gathering goats." This last chapter critiques the modern Christian emphasis, at least in North America, on money and numbers as measures of church growth and "success"; "what we're really saying," Bayly comments, "is that we want to do whatever we can to add people without having to discipline, feed, rebuke, clothe or love them."<p>
So I appreciated <i>Church Reformed,</i> with its grounding in scripture and the Christian, specifically Reformed, tradition, and its call to commitment to the local faith community with all its blemishes and joys. But at a few points Bayly's writing irked me. One of his main points is his preaching against schism; the local church may have many defects and sins, but the believer must remember that while the Church has never been perfect, Jesus owns her, and He is the one who says He came for sinners. Bayly says in one moving passage about the experience he and his wife had one local church, "that church was beautiful, and it was as weak and needy and sinful as we were. (It) loved us despite how weak and needy and sinful we were, and we loved her back."<p>
But a few pages prior to this story, he writes in criticism of readers who say that "no church should ever be given up on and that's the reason you're still in your pro-abortion, pro-feminist, pro-gay church of Satan." So what is the dividing line? When is a church too "weak and needy and sinful," in his view, for followers of Jesus to continue to be members? Bayly himself admits that he and his spouse attended a church that had women elders, even though he is a strong complementarian, writing in the chapter on apostolic teaching about the issue of women elders and staff in congregations, and stating that "the real test of our devotion to the teaching of the apostles is whether we use the pulpit to call the women of the congregation to submit to their husbands."<p>
His disdain for mainline Protestant churches is evident throughout, even for denominations that come from the same Reformed tradition. He was in the Presbyterian Church (USA) at one time, which he describes as having "deeply wicked" pastors and elders who endorse "the slaughter of the unborn" and "fornication, adultery, sodomy, and every other form of sexual perversion." Elsewhere he claims that "it is true that mainline churches have abandoned all pretense of fidelity to Scripture," and introduces his writing on prayer during worship by saying that "I'm not talking about liberal churches, but conservative congregations who would see themselves as committed to the Bible and to the Lordship of Jesus Christ."<p>
Being ordained in what he calls a "church of Satan," a denomination with a Reformed heritage which has had women and LGBTQ people in leadership for decades and at one time saw itself as "liberal evangelical," I have to push back. Bayly may not think that mainline churches have any commitment to the Bible and the Lordship of Jesus, but I am surrounded by clergy and lay colleagues with a deep love for the Trinitarian God, who proclaim that Jesus is Saviour and Lord, and who invest many hours in studying, pondering and praying about the Biblical text so they can preach in a way faithful to the Reformers who made the sermon the centrepiece of worship. I utterly reject that mainline Protestants have abandoned fidelity to scripture - in fact, I am so tired of hearing this that whenever I come across it on social media I ask for details. Did the person making this criticism hear this directly in a sermon or read it in a publication? If so, how is it unfaithful? Are they simply repeating something they believe, or do they have evidence for this claim?<p>
And I was struck that Bayly devotes six pages of his chapter on prayer to the elements of Reformed Lord's Day worship from the 16th century: call to worship, prayer of confession, assurance of pardon, the Ten Commandments, psalm or hymn, prayer for illumination, scripture reading, sermon and closing prayer, pastoral prayer and Lord's prayer, psalm, Lord's Supper, and blessing. He calls on modern evangelical pastors and elders to study the order and wording in worship during the Reformation and how the Reformers returned practices to those of the early Church. But who uses this liturgy today? Mainline Protestants. The service outline he presents is basically the one I use every Sunday, and very similar to that set out in The United Church of Canada's worship resource <i>Celebrating God's Presence</i> as a pattern of worship common to all Christians. Bayly would find that "churches of Satan" like ours, the United Church of Christ, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and other mainline churches are the most faithful to Reformed liturgical practice.<p>
Bearing this in mind, any Christian, whether or not they are in church leadership, can benefit from reading <i>Church Reformed</i> in order to orient themselves to loving and participating in Christ's Body through the local church - remembering that in some instances the author assumes that his own interpretation of scripture and tradition is the correct, and only, one.<p>
Dan Haywardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738708370158604594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36366747.post-46542289077713859472019-06-10T14:21:00.000-04:002019-06-10T14:21:08.364-04:0094th Anniversary of Church UnionThe United Church of Canada was formed on June 10, 1925, 94 years ago. From C.T. McIntire's chapter, "Unity Among Many: The Formation of The United Church of Canada, 1899-1930," in <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/United-Church-Canada-History/dp/1554585872/ref=sr_1_4"><I>The United Church of Canada: A History</I></a>, edited by Don Schweitzer:
<blockquote>A rousing worship service in Toronto on the morning of Wednesday, June 10, 1925, formally inaugurated The United Church of Canada. In a flash, nearly all the Methodists and Congregationalists of Canada, as well as most Presbyterians and many independents, blended into one vast new nationwide body. The heat wave of previous days broke during the night of the ninth, just in time to help make the event 'an hour of palpitating joy.' Eight thousand people filed inside The Arena, a wrestling palace and professional ice hockey venue, transformed for the occasion into sacred space. Thousands of others in Toronto and across the country attended parallel services, and thousands more listened to the proceedings broadcasted live on the radio. Still more saw exhaustive reports in the newspapers the next day. The venue and the numbers spoke volumes. The United Church of Canada aspired to be Canada's church, a church of the people.</blockquote>
And from Phyllis Airhart's <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Church-Soul-Nation-Making-Remaking/dp/0773542493/ref=sr_1_2"><i>A Church with the Soul of a Nation: Making and Remaking the United Church of Canada</i></a>:
<blockquote>The church that was ceremonially born in Canada on 10 June 1925 is usually cast as a new and youthful player on the international religious stage. Critics often panned it as modernist and depicted its founders as innovators who had been captivated by the novelty of church union. There was within the uniting traditions a strong progressive element, to be sure. Canadian churches were not the first to propose 'organic union' between rival confessional families, but such a proposition had never actually been consummated elsewhere on such a large scale.</blockquote><p>
Personally, I can't think of anything more fitting for a Canadian church than being founded in a hockey rink.<p>
Dan Haywardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738708370158604594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36366747.post-63586494509952841792019-04-28T21:25:00.001-04:002019-04-28T21:25:19.615-04:00The Body of Christ: Sermon, April 28, 2019<blockquote><i>Then, the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled, for fear of the religious authorities, Jesus came and stood in the midst, and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When He had said this, He showed them His hands and His side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord.<p>
So Jesus said to them again, “Peace to you! As the Father has sent Me, I also send you.” And when He had said this, He breathed on them, and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”<p>
Now Thomas, called the Twin, one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. The other disciples therefore said to him, “We have seen the Lord.”<p>
So he said to them, “Unless I see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe.”<p>
And after eight days His disciples were again inside, and Thomas with them. Jesus came, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, “Peace to you!” Then He said to Thomas, “Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; and reach your hand here, and put it into My side. Do not be unbelieving, but believing.”<p>
And Thomas answered and said to Him, “My Lord and my God!”<p>
Jesus said to him, “Thomas, because you have seen Me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”<p>
And truly Jesus did many other signs in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.<br>
John 20:19-31, <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john+20%3A19-31&version=NKJV">New King James Version</a></i></blockquote>
We have read every word of the story in John’s Gospel of the death and resurrection of Jesus, beginning on Good Friday with his trial, execution and burial, through his grave being found empty on Easter morning and his appearance to Mary Magdalene. And today we pick up right where we left off in the Easter Sunday service, and we are now at the evening of Easter day. Remember that morning two of the male disciples had seen that the tomb was empty, the body of Jesus was not there, and then Mary Magdalene had come and announced to all of them that she had seen Jesus.<p>
Now, here they are, still in hiding, for fear of the authorities who might be coming for them next. They must have been anxiously debating what this empty tomb and Mary seeing Jesus could mean. And Jesus himself comes and stands among them, even though the doors are locked, and greets them: “Peace be with you.”<p>
So much of this Easter story deals with Jesus appearing in his resurrected body that I want to talk about this. On Easter morning his body isn’t in the grave. The cloths in which his corpse were wrapped are lying there as if the body just vanished. John is making the point that the risen Christ encountered by the disciples is the same as Jesus of Nazareth who they followed until his death. He shows them his body. He speaks. He can be touched. In other stories he holds things, he starts a fire, he cooks, he eats. He isn’t a ghost, or a reanimated corpse like a zombie. These were common in stories told at that time, and the Gospel writers want to rule this out. He is the same person as before.<p>
But he is also mysteriously different; he can appear and disappear, he can go through or around locked doors, he isn’t always easily recognizable to friends who have known him for a long time. So Jesus is alive, but changed somehow.<p>
On this evening of the first Easter, Jesus shows his disciples his hands and side, still bearing the wounds of his crucifixion. He does the same a week later, when Thomas is there. This means more than just proving that he is indeed the same man who was crucified. The body of Jesus is important in Christian thought, because we believe that, as we say in <i>A New Creed</i>, Jesus is the Word made flesh. John expands on this <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john+1%3A14&version=NKJV">at the beginning of his Gospel</a>: the Word, the divine, became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. The Word became flesh. The divine became human, in the body of Jesus – the body that is raised from death by God’s power.<p>
And that resurrected body continues to carry the wounds of the nails and the spear, suffered for us. This is a powerful image for all of us. But it is tremendously meaningful for disabled people that the Word made flesh, the divine incarnated as human, has physical impairments. The Christ is disabled. His resurrected body, which presumably could have been without blemish, remains broken. For disabled people, who bear the marks of disability in their own bodies, this is truly liberating.<p>
When we talk about the body of Jesus, we may not be speaking literally. We may be following the Apostle Paul, who calls the churches to which he is writing “the body of Christ.” The church is the continuation of the risen body of Jesus. In Scripture the church is born when the Holy Spirit is sent upon the followers of Jesus, as Jesus promised. In another story, in the Acts of the Apostles, the Spirit comes at Pentecost, after the final appearance of Jesus following Easter. Here, in John, it is on this Easter evening, as Jesus breathes on his disciples, an act of creating, just as when the world was formed, God breathed life into the first human. Jesus says, “receive the Holy Spirit.” He gives them the authority to forgive sins. The church has begun. This is an in between time, after the resurrection but before Jesus ceases to appear to his followers in his risen body. This is a transition period, from being able to see and touch and hear Jesus physically, to Jesus being present in the Holy Spirit. The church is to continue as his body.<p>
We have been hearing a lot about churches lately. Church is guaranteed to get on the TV news twice a year, Christmas Eve and the Good Friday and Easter weekend. But there were also the terrible attacks on Easter worship services in churches in Sri Lanka. And the week before, the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.<p>
There was much emotional reaction to that fire, from people who have been to Paris and visited the cathedral, and from those who have never been there. Crowds of Parisians stood watching the fire and singing hymns. I think the response to the fire tells us something about the church as the body of Christ. We know, in our minds, that the words of the song are true: "the church is not a building, the church is not a steeple, the church is not a resting place, the church is a people." Church can be anywhere, for God can be anywhere. <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm+139%3A9-10&version=NRSV">The psalm says</a>, if I could fly on the wings of the dawn, to the farthest side of the ocean, even there God would be with me. Church can be outside. It can be in a house. That’s where the first churches were. Before our ancestors could build churches on the Canadian frontier, they worshipped in houses and outdoors. I have a drawing of Presbyterians in Upper Canada celebrating communion outside. In Beijing, China, I was told that there are 100,000 worshippers on Sunday, but only 21 Protestant church buildings, so many people attend at 500 affiliated meeting points in houses or offices or warehouses.<p>
And yet, although we don’t need dedicated church buildings, we want sacred spaces. Every major religion has some kind of building for worship: a church, a synagogue, a mosque, a temple, a gurdwara. We can trace this progression through the Bible: God was worshipped at rough open-air altars, then at dedicated holy sites outdoors, and in a tent traveling with the people of Israel. King Solomon built a small temple; it was destroyed by invaders. The temple was rebuilt; it was destroyed. And the Jewish people continued to worship in synagogues.<p>
Sacred buildings speak to us. They can be beautiful in their simplicity, like the Methodist chapel at Upper Canada Village. They can be lovely in their ornate art and exquisite architecture, like Notre Dame. They embody the body of Christ, with memories of generations who have gone before, and artifacts of the long-dead but remembered faithful. We are devastated when we lose them. Also last week, the United Church at Pacquet, Newfoundland, <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/pacquet-church-fire-1.5107003">burned</a>, and the members of that community were as much in grief as the people of Paris. In both places the heart, the centre, with all of its memories and associations, is gone.<p>
And yet there is resurrection. The body of Jesus, which was broken and died on the cross, was raised from the grave. The body of Christ, the church, burned and blasted and broken in fires, in bombings, in floods, in scandals and decline and doubt, will rise again, as sure as springtime returns to bring new life to the barren land. The body retains the wounds it has suffered, but it still brings peace, forgives sins – and celebrates God’s presence, lives with respect in creation, loves and serves others, seeks justice and resists evil – and proclaims Jesus, crucified and risen, our judge and our hope. For in life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with us. We are not alone. Thanks be to God.<p>
Dan Haywardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738708370158604594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36366747.post-78887914992517329892019-04-26T11:38:00.002-04:002019-04-26T11:38:16.736-04:00Essential AgreementI am one of the authors of a document, released by the Theology and Inter-Church Inter-Faith Committee which I chair, on the meaning of "essential agreement" for United Church of Canada candidates for ministry and ministry personnel. This work was done at the direction of the last General Council (the 43rd, meeting in 2018) of the United Church. The document itself is on the <a href="https://commons.united-church.ca/Documents/Governance/General%20Council/43rd%20General%20Council%20(2018)/Updates/Essential%20Agreement,%20Final.pdf">United Church Commons</a> - here is the summary statement.<p>
<blockquote>From its beginning, The United Church of Canada has required persons entering ministry to be in “essential agreement” with the denomination’s Statement of Doctrine and to see that Statement of Doctrine as in substance agreeable to the teachings of Scripture.<p>
The Statement of Doctrine currently consists of the Preamble and Twenty Articles that formed the original Doctrine section of the Basis of Union (albeit as that section has been amended on a few occasions since 1925), plus three other United Church faith statements adopted by various General Councils: the 1940 Statement of Faith, the New Creed (also known as the United Church Creed) in 1968, and A Song of Faith in 2006. Each of these documents expresses the substance of the Christian faith, as understood by the United Church, in the spirit and context of the time in which it was written.<p>
Two common misconceptions exist about essential agreement. Some persons think that essential agreement means that a candidate must believe and accept each and every word of the United Church’s Statement of Doctrine. Others have concluded that because the denomination does not require “literal subscription” (i.e., literal agreement) to its Statement of Doctrine, a candidate for ministry, and ministry personnel themselves, can believe whatever they like and still claim to be in essential agreement. Neither understanding is accurate.<p>
Essential agreement means that the examining committee must be able to find that a candidate they are interviewing stands sufficiently within the Christian tradition, as expressed in the United Church’s Statement of Doctrine, to be able to carry out ministry in the United Church faithfully, intelligibly, and with integrity. The examining committee must be able to reach this conclusion because those whom it agrees to recommend for authorized ministry must be able to teach, preach, do pastoral care, and provide outreach and service to the wider community in continuity with the Christian faith as expressed in the doctrine of the United Church. In carrying out the ministerial office, ministers re-present the Christian tradition and the United Church to those with whom they interact, both inside and outside the particular communities they serve. They need to be able to carry out those functions of ministry faithfully and with integrity.</blockquote><p>
Dan Haywardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738708370158604594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36366747.post-54624090077972583952019-01-07T11:16:00.004-05:002019-01-07T11:20:40.561-05:00Wise Men and Holy Innocents: Sermon for The Epiphany, January 6, 2019<blockquote><i>Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is He who has been born King of the Jews? For we have seen His star in the East and have come to worship Him.”<p>
When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him. And when he had gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together, he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born.<p>
<blockquote>So they said to him, “In Bethlehem of Judea, for thus it is written by the prophet:<br>
‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,<br>
Are not the least among the rulers of Judah;<br>
For out of you shall come a Ruler<br>
Who will shepherd My people Israel.’ ”</blockquote><p>
Then Herod, when he had secretly called the wise men, determined from them what time the star appeared. And he sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and search carefully for the young Child, and when you have found Him, bring back word to me, that I may come and worship Him also.”<p>
When they heard the king, they departed; and behold, the star which they had seen in the East went before them, till it came and stood over where the young Child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceedingly great joy. And when they had come into the house, they saw the young Child with Mary His mother, and fell down and worshiped Him. And when they had opened their treasures, they presented gifts to Him: gold, frankincense, and myrrh.<p>
Then, being divinely warned in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed for their own country another way.</i><br>
<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+2%3A1-12&version=NKJV">Matthew 2:1-12, New King James Version</a></blockquote><p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ome2nnSUcjw/XDN8FOQSmgI/AAAAAAAAHlY/2dA79VPgXi4FeJioA5KR4sBmYsfPtnDBgCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/epiphany-2013-1500x975.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ome2nnSUcjw/XDN8FOQSmgI/AAAAAAAAHlY/2dA79VPgXi4FeJioA5KR4sBmYsfPtnDBgCPcBGAYYCw/s400/epiphany-2013-1500x975.jpg" width="400" height="260" data-original-width="1500" data-original-height="975" /></a></div>We have the Epiphany story so many of us love – wise men from the East come searching for a new king who has been born. They are guided by a star to the child Jesus and his mother, and they present gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. This is the story with the crowns because the wise men are traditionally called kings, the rich robes, the camels and the bright star overhead. We see it on Christmas cards and in nativity scenes.<p>
But we stopped reading at verse 12, as the wise men decide not to tell King Herod where the child is. And after that the story takes a much more sinister turn. There are already hints of this, as Herod and his court are troubled that the wise men claim that a new king has been born. Herod tells them to go and find the child and bring back word, so that he may also go and worship him, and it seems that he may not be entirely sincere. Here is how the story continues in Matthew’s Gospel:<br>
<blockquote><i>Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying, “Arise, take the young Child and His mother, flee to Egypt, and stay there until I bring you word; for Herod will seek the young Child to destroy Him.”<p>
When he arose, he took the young Child and His mother by night and departed for Egypt, and was there until the death of Herod, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying, “Out of Egypt I called My Son.”<p>
Then Herod, when he saw that he was deceived by the wise men, was exceedingly angry; and he sent forth and put to death all the male children who were in Bethlehem and in all its districts, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had determined from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, saying:<br>
<blockquote>“A voice was heard in Ramah,<br>
Lamentation, weeping, and great mourning,<br>
Rachel weeping for her children,<br>
Refusing to be comforted,<br>
Because they are no more.”</blockquote></i></blockquote>
This is a much more disturbing story than the wise men’s visit. We would rather not sing about it, although there is an old Christmas song, the Coventry Carol, with the lyrics:<br>
<blockquote><i>Herod the King, in his raging,<br>
charged he hath this day,<br>
his men of might, in his own sight,<br>
all children young, to slay.</blockquote></i>
The Church, though, continues to tell this story, called the Massacre of the Innocents. These holy innocents, the boys of Bethlehem killed by Herod, are often considered to be the first Christian martyrs.<p>
This seems very long ago and far away. So exotic and so upsetting. Or is it so long ago? Is it so far away? Who are the Holy Innocents of today? Are they the children of Yemen, victims of the ongoing war launched by Saudi Arabia and its allies? In Yemen 394,000 children under the age of five are suffering from severe acute malnutrition. Millions more barely have enough to eat, while the war has resulted in a lack of safe water, the spread of disease, and the destruction of hospitals. Are the holy innocents the 15 percent of Canadian children, one in seven, who live in poverty? Are they the Indigenous children who account for nearly half of all children in foster care in Canada? What are the causes of such a disproportionate number of Indigenous kids being removed from their homes? Are the holy innocents the children taken from their parents at the American border with Mexico, in many cases never to be reunited with their families again? Families from Central America have been arrested by the American authorities, the children taken away, placed in cages and then in tents in camps in the desert, and often put up for adoption after their parents have been deported. We don’t know what happens in these camps as journalists and even elected representatives aren’t allowed in. We do know that here you can’t work with children in hockey or Sunday school or any other setting without a police check, but there is no screening for the private contractors who operate these detention facilities. There are stories of babies taken from their mothers who are just given to teenage girls in the camps to look after, without diapers or formula. We do know that two children have died in detention.<p>
Now, people try to explain all this away. Don’t try to sneak into the country illegally, they say, if you don’t want your kids taken away. But these families are usually applying at a border crossing for asylum as refugees, which is perfectly legal under American law. And having your children ripped away and placed for adoption is a disproportionate and cruel punishment, although the cruelty is probably the point to deter refugees and immigrants from coming.<p>
This Epiphany story shows that Mary, Joseph and Jesus were refugees. Now, people deny this too. Calling Jesus a refugee is very controversial. Refugees may have left everything behind to escape persecution and violence, but people see them as fakers, as undeserving, as potential terrorists, so there’s no way Jesus could have been one. But it’s right in the story. Verse 13, “Arise, take the young Child and His mother, flee to Egypt” – in Matthew’s Gospel the Greek word translated as “flee” is <i>pheuge</i>, which is the root of the word “refugee.” Jesus and his parents were fleeing political violence. They were refugees. My Loyalist ancestors who fled the American Revolution, like the ancestors of a lot of us here, were refugees. People still quibble, saying the Holy Family was traveling within the Roman Empire, not across an international border, so they weren’t refugees, but of course borders as we understand them today are a recent development. This kind of nitpicking can’t change the story, or the broad story of the Bible, which tells a long story, several books long, of the people of Israel fleeing oppression, and then emphasizes again and again how God’s people are to welcome refugees and immigrants, for they were foreigners themselves in Egypt.<p>
This story of the massacre of the innocents and a family’s narrow escape is still fresh, still unnerving. It is being acted out all over the world right now. Someone <a href="https://twitter.com/revlucymeg/status/1077235135643295744?s=03">tweeted</a> - and I agree - that Herod was a paranoid, narcissistic, authoritarian ruler who did not hesitate to destroy children when his power was threatened. Any resemblance to any political leaders today isn’t a coincidence. And the reaction to the refugee crisis shows how, as someone else <a href="https://twitter.com/theboyonthebike/status/1077451193042063360?s=03">said</a>, some Christians may worship the name of King Jesus but they follow the policies of King Herod.<p>
If The Epiphany is about Jesus being revealed to the world, then his being a refugee is as much a part of who he is as his being the saviour worshipped by the wise men. Jesus being a refugee tells the world that God coming among us in Jesus shares the experiences, the suffering, of the most marginalized and oppressed people. Jesus being a refugee underlines for us, who follow him today, God’s instructions in Scripture, to show love for foreigners, for God’s people were once foreigners in the land of Egypt. And may we ever see the splendour of Jesus, who so thoroughly identified with humanity that he was, indeed, a refugee in Egypt.<p>
Dan Haywardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738708370158604594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36366747.post-52556676150765815572018-11-21T22:03:00.000-05:002018-11-21T22:03:39.048-05:00Letter to the Editor of the Cornwall Seaway NewsThis letter to the editor was published in the November 21 issue of the <a href="https://www.cornwallseawaynews.com/home.html"><i>Cornwall Seaway News</i></a>. I was writing in response to a column in the previous edition of this weekly newspaper, mentioning the case of the Rev. Gretta Vosper and the settlement of the review of her fitness for ministry in The United Church of Canada. Columnist Claude McIntosh wrote:
<blockquote>In Toronto, a United Church minister who says the Bible is a fairy tale and God doesn't exist, will continue to deliver her non-Christian message from the pulpit with the blessing of the folks who call the shots in Canada's second largest Christian denomination, the United Church of Canada. Instead of giving her the heave-ho, the United Church moderator (aka big cheese) has asked members to pray for the atheistic pastor and her congregation. Sounds like we should be praying for the United Church...</blockquote><p>
So I responded:<p>
November 16, 2018<p>
To the editor:<p>
I always enjoy reading Claude McIntosh’s column, and he fits a lot of material onto the page. His November 14 discussion of a United Church of Canada minister did not include important parts of the context which are necessary for readers to understand what is happening in this case.<p>
People who attend United churches are at many different points on their faith journey, but clergy are held to a standard of being found to be in essential agreement with the Church’s statements of faith before they can be ordained or commissioned. As Claude noted, a minister in Toronto who professes to be an atheist was placed under review. He says that she will continue to serve “with the blessing of the folks who call the shots,” but this is not the case. In the United Church, discipline of ministers is the responsibility of local jurisdictions, just as in Canada the federal government and the provinces have different areas of responsibility. Toronto Conference of the United Church was conducting the formal hearing into her ministry and then settled the case with her and her congregation, which does allow her to continue in ministry. Legal actions often end in settlement, so this hardly represents a “blessing” by any part of the Church; this resolution was not made by the national Church, does not affect any other minister or any other jurisdiction in the Church, and does not imply any acceptance of atheist beliefs as being in agreement with what the Church believes. Claude mentions that the Moderator of the United Church (as he puts it, “the big cheese,” which is a good way to explain this position) asked for prayer for this minister and her congregation, which I believe is entirely appropriate. Claude omits that this call for prayer came at the end of the Moderator’s letter which states explicitly that as a Christian church, we continue to expect that our ministers will offer their leadership in accordance with our statements of faith. This follows a statement by The United Church of Canada that the resolution of this case does not alter in any way the Church’s belief in a God must fully revealed to us as Christians in and through Jesus Christ. The Church’s statements of faith have all been grounded in this understanding.<p>
Claude says that we should be praying for the United Church, which I appreciate. Please pray for us as we try to be faithful and loving followers of Jesus, and for all of the churches and faith traditions ministering to the people of the Seaway Valley.<p>
Sincerely yours,<p>
Rev. Daniel Hayward UE<br>
Minister, South Stormont Pastoral Charge<br>
(Ingleside-Newington United Church and St. Andrew’s-St. Mark’s United Church, Long Sault)<br>
The United Church of Canada<p>
Dan Haywardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738708370158604594noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36366747.post-83802908427014088272018-11-18T17:10:00.001-05:002018-11-18T17:12:03.361-05:0060 Years!: Sermon, November 18, 2018In 1957 Ontario's electrical utility began constructing two New Towns to house people whose homes would be flooded by the creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Those towns became Ingleside and Long Sault, and both had United Church buildings: Trinity United Church, Ingleside (now Ingleside-Newington United Church), to which the congregations of United Churches in Aultsville, Wales, Gallingertown and Osnabruck Centre moved; and St. Andrew's United Church, Long Sault (now St. Andrew's-St. Mark's United Church), which became the home of congregations from Moulinette and Mille Roches.<p>
The towns and churches all turned 60 years old in 2018. Trinity held its first worship service in the sanctuary on Easter Sunday, April 6, 1958, and its dedication service on May 25. The St. Andrew's dedication service was November 16, 1958. Both 60th anniversaries were marked in worship on November 18, 2018, just two days off 60 years since the St. Andrew's dedication and a week away from 61st anniversary of the November 10, 1957, laying of the Trinity cornerstone.<p>
<blockquote><i>Every Jewish priest performs his services every day and offers the same sacrifices many times; but these sacrifices can never take away sins. Christ, however, offered one sacrifice for sins, an offering that is effective forever, and then he sat down at the right side of God. There he now waits until God puts his enemies as a footstool under his feet. 14 With one sacrifice, then, he has made perfect forever those who are purified from sin.<p>
We have, then, my friends, complete freedom to go into the Most Holy Place by means of the death of Jesus. He opened for us a new way, a living way, through the curtain—that is, through his own body. We have a great priest in charge of the house of God. So let us come near to God with a sincere heart and a sure faith, with hearts that have been purified from a guilty conscience and with bodies washed with clean water. Let us hold on firmly to the hope we profess, because we can trust God to keep his promise. Let us be concerned for one another, to help one another to show love and to do good. Let us not give up the habit of meeting together, as some are doing. Instead, let us encourage one another all the more, since you see that the Day of the Lord is coming nearer.<br>
- <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=hebrews+10%3A11-25&version=GNT">Hebrews 10:11-14, 19-25</a>, Good News Bible<p>
As Jesus was leaving the Temple, one of his disciples said, “Look, Teacher! What wonderful stones and buildings!”<p>
Jesus answered, “You see these great buildings? Not a single stone here will be left in its place; every one of them will be thrown down.”<p>
Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives, across from the Temple, when Peter, James, John, and Andrew came to him in private. “Tell us when this will be,” they said, “and tell us what will happen to show that the time has come for all these things to take place.”<p>
Jesus said to them, “Watch out, and don't let anyone fool you. Many men, claiming to speak for me, will come and say, ‘I am he!’ and they will fool many people. And don't be troubled when you hear the noise of battles close by and news of battles far away. Such things must happen, but they do not mean that the end has come. Countries will fight each other; kingdoms will attack one another. There will be earthquakes everywhere, and there will be famines. These things are like the first pains of childbirth.”<br>
- <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark+13%3A1-8&version=GNT">Mark 13:1-8</a>, Good News Bible</i><p></blockquote>
So many stories over 60 years.<p>
Someone told me once that before the St. Andrew’s building was finished, the United Church congregation in Long Sault met in the liquor store. Well, it wasn’t the liquor store at the time, but it’s still a great story. So I have the bulletin here
for the dedication service of St. Andrew’s United Church, November 16th, 1958, 3 PM. The minister then was Rev. Wilfong and the guest preacher was Rev. Gordon Porter, superintendent of missions for Montreal and Ottawa Conference. Officiating was Rev. Lewis, president of the Conference. The bulletin tells me that the hymns were all from the 1930 Hymn Book: Ye gates, lift up your heads on high; I joyed when to the house of God go up, they said to me; Christ is made the sure foundation, which we sang today; and Rise up, O men of God. And the bulletin lists who donated the sign board, hymn books, hymn board, offering plates and guest book. We are going to give this bulletin, which is one of the few left from 1958, to the Lost Villages Museum.<p>
Another booklet, A History of Trinity United Church, was published for the 25th anniversary in 1983. It tells me that before the manse was ready in 1957 the minister, Rev. Profitt, and his wife, lived on Pine Street, which was also the home of the Sunday school and youth groups. The booklet describes the Session, Stewards, Official Board and so on, so many groups. I learned that the original black choir gowns were replaced with red ones with white and yellow collars in 1980. Canadian Girls in There was Canadian Girls in Training, boys’ groups too, and Hi-C, a Mission Band, a Baby Band, Sunday school, a Women’s Federation with 90 members, which became the United Church Women in 1962, and the 50/50 or Couples Club. The booklet goes on to describe the 20th anniversary of Trinity church in 1978 and the 25th in 1983. I’m sure that these few sentences I’ve used to sum all this up have brought up a lot of memories for long-time members of both congregations.<p>
And since then 60 years of worship, baptisms, Communions, weddings, funerals, Sunday school classes, meetings and more meetings, suppers, bazaars, soup and sandwiches, quilting and food bank collections and cards going out and more than I can mention.<p>
So much has changed over six decades, but so much has stayed the same. <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ecclesiastes+1%3A10&version=NRSV">The book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible says</a>, “There is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, ‘See, this is new?’ It has already been, in the ages before us.” There isn’t a lot that can happen in the life of the church that hasn’t already happened in the two thousand years the church has been around or even the 93 years of our denomination. I was reading Phyllis Airhart's great history of The United Church of Canada, <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Church-Soul-Nation-Making-Remaking/dp/0773542493/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1542578441&sr=8-1&keywords=a+church+with+the+soul+of+a+nation">A Church With the Soul of a Nation</a>, and there is a story of a United church deeply in debt that was saved by the women fundraising to cover the payments, and another congregation whose finances were straightened out by the women’s group, in, the story says, a mysterious way known only to the ladies. The book says that when money was needed to install new lighting, improve the sanctuary, or purchase new hymn books, collection plates, or Communion sets, the ladies were there. And this sounds like the last few years, but this was the 1930s. So much has changed, but so much has stayed the same, and all of us know that the Trinity and St. Andrew’s buildings would not have made it to 60 years without, in particular, women organizing and working, and we are grateful.<p>
So much has changed. I want to talk about something that would have been unthinkable 60 years ago, and still seems strange to many of us now. You may have heard that in the United Church there is a minister who is an atheist. Well, her beliefs are more nuanced than that (<a href="http://www.westhill.net/">this is her congregation</a>), but that’s what it boils down to. Her ministry was being reviewed by Toronto Conference in a formal hearing, but she has good lawyers, and last week it was announced that Conference had settled her case. So she is back in ministry. The details of this settlement are confidential, but it is based on process, not theology, and it doesn’t apply to any other minister in any other conference. This hasn’t stopped her supporters, and she has lots, claiming victory, and many, many other United Church people being very upset. It just doesn’t make sense to most folks that an atheist could be, would even want to be, a minister in Christ’s church. It just doesn’t add up. It’s my impression that she wants to stay in the church because she genuinely sees herself as evangelizing the church, converting us to her way of believing, or not believing. This brings to mind for me what Jesus says in our reading today, “Watch out, and don’t let anyone fool you. Many claiming to speak for me will come and say, ‘I am he,’ and they will fool many people.”<p>
I would add here that we are a church that doesn’t believe in what is called creedal subscription – we don’t make members sign off on a specific faith statement. People in the pews, over the last 90 and 60 years and today, have believed lots of things – they have been at different points on their journey of faith, and that is expected, and encouraged. But those who are called to paid, accountable ministry are set apart, and to be ordained or commissioned or admitted they must be found to be in essential agreement with the doctrine of the church.<p>
Both the national church and the Moderator responded to this development. The <a href="https://www.united-church.ca/news/united-church-canada-responds-joint-statement-rev-vosper">statement</a> from the national church office says that this settlement with one minister does not alter in any way the belief of The United Church of Canada in a God most fully revealed to us as Christians in and through Jesus Christ. The church’s statements of faith over the years have all been grounded in this understanding. The most recent statement, A Song of Faith, begins with the words “God is Holy Mystery,” recognizing that as humans we will never fully understand the nature of this mystery.<p>
The Moderator, the Right Rev. Richard Bott, <a href="https://www.united-church.ca/news/moderators-message-rev-gretta-vosper">adds</a> that as a Christian church, we continue to expect that ministers in The United Church of Canada will continue to offer their leadership in accordance with our shared and agreed upon statements of faith and celebrating the sacraments. He says, I believe that God continues to call us to be people who love, and in that love, to be communities of faith where all are welcome, whatever you believe or don’t believe.<p>
And that, I think, is what we have tried to be here, for 60 years. We have tried our best to do what the letter to the Hebrews tells us to do: to come near to God with a sincere heart and a sure faith, purified from guilt and washed clean in baptism, to hold on firmly to the hope we profess, because we can trust in God’s promises, to be concerned for one another, to help one another to show love and to good, to meet together in worship, to encourage one another on our journeys of faith, today and for another six decades, and for six more and more until all things are made new.<p>
Dan Haywardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738708370158604594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36366747.post-31513673147778871772018-07-22T22:02:00.002-04:002018-07-22T22:02:35.698-04:00Full CommunionI was interviewed twice today - in English and French - about the proposal coming to The United Church of Canada's <a href="http://www.generalcouncil43.ca">43rd General Council</a>, being held July 21-27, 2018, in Oshawa, Ontario, to work towards Full Communion with the <a href="http://www.disciples.org">Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)</a> in the United States and Canada.<p>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGh0JcTSIBQ">Interview with Lauren Hodgson in English</a><p>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4DsC2SAzzs&feature=youtu.be">Entrevue avec Stéphane Vermette en français</a><p>Dan Haywardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738708370158604594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36366747.post-48105787591358864052018-05-19T15:58:00.000-04:002018-05-19T16:06:39.911-04:00That Royal Wedding Sermon...I joked today that American interest in the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle (who are now Their Royal Highnesses, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex) is how we descendants of Loyalists exiled from the United States in 1784 will roll back the American Revolution. Canada is a constitutional monarchy, so I dutifully got up early to watch the Queen's grandson get married.<p>
The wedding had great liturgy, great music (including a gospel choir!), and great preaching, in a beautiful setting (although St. George's Chapel is much more High Church than I am). The sermon by the Most Rev. Michael B. Curry, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church of the United States, has taken off on social media and online. Whenever else have we seen the full text, or video, of a sermon posted on <i><a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeednews/michael-curry-sermon-royal-wedding?utm_term=.tbGKEnLDq0#.cm13pk1Xyn">Buzzfeed</a>, <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/40575294/watch-bishop-michael-currys-rousing-royal-wedding-sermon?partner=rss&utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss">Fast Company</a>, <a href="https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/a20754692/royal-wedding-sermon-michael-curry-full-transcript/">Town and Country</a></i> and <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/05/royal-wedding-sermon-text"><i>Vanity Fair</a></i>? It is heartening to see the Church covered by the major media for speaking of love, sacrifice and justice, instead of for attacking gay people, abusing children, and defending Trump.<p>
I like <a href="https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/05/royal-wedding-sermon-bishop-michael-currys-radical-theology.html?via=homepage_taps_top"><i>Slate's</i> take</a> on the sermon's "subtly radical theology." I would quibble that the Queen, who is the head of a 53-country Commonwealth that includes a number of nations populated largely by the descendants of slaves (Jamaica, Barbados, Grenada and St. Lucia come to mind first), has probably heard slavery mentioned in a sermon before. But as someone who was excited to see the cathedral and university in Beijing associated with Teilhard de Chardin, I loved that Bishop Curry mentioned this theologian (and paleontologist). And here is the article's conclusion:
<blockquote><i>...Curry’s sermon('s)... central argument was the world-transforming power of love. On the surface, this is pretty standard fodder for a wedding homily, of course. But Curry explicitly defined “love” as something much larger than romantic attachment. “Imagine our governments and countries when love is the way,” he told the crowd, as he approached the sermon’s climax. “No child would go to bed hungry in such a world as that. Poverty would become history in such a world as that. The Earth would be as a sanctuary in such a world as that.” This is a core tenet of the kind of robust mainline Christianity that many people will have been introduced to for the first time on Saturday: both a call to faith and a call to action. Seeing that message delivered so forthrightly to millions of people enjoying the silly pomp and extravagance of a royal wedding was bracing. If it left you hungry for more, go to church.</i></blockquote><p>
Dan Haywardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738708370158604594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36366747.post-18887757382533095952018-03-04T17:06:00.002-05:002018-03-04T17:06:52.476-05:00"Untimely, Unwise, Unnecessary:" Sermon, March 4, 2018<blockquote><i>For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,<br>
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,<br>
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”<p>
Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.<br>
<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+corinthians+1%3A18-25&version=ESV">1 Corinthians 1:18-25, English Standard Version</a><p>
The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there. And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; do not make my Father's house a house of trade.” His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.”<p>
So the Jews said to him, “What sign do you show us for doing these things?” Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” But he was speaking about the temple of his body. When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.<br>
<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john+2%3A13-22&version=ESV">John 2:13-22, English Standard Version</a><p></i></blockquote>
Our text from the Good News According to John is known as the Cleansing of the Temple. Jesus becomes angry when he enters the Temple in Jerusalem, the centre of Jewish religious life, and finds animals being sold for sacrifice and money being changed within the Temple precincts. He drives the moneychangers and sellers out with a whip, along with the sheep and oxen they were selling, flips over the tables and scatters the coins of the moneychangers, saying “don’t make my Father’s house a place of business.” In <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+21%3A13&version=CEB">Matthew’s Gospel</a> he cries out, “It’s written, my house will be called a house of prayer. But you’ve made it a hideout for crooks.”<p>
Now, I could go through how this buying and selling going on in a sacred space offended Jesus, and how his driving out the sellers and moneychangers fulfilled Old Testament prophecy. But I think what strikes me most about this reading is that, coming as it does in the season of Lent when we are preparing for Holy Week and Easter when Jesus is arrested, tried, executed, and then is raised from death, it offers us an opportunity to consider Jesus in his fullness. Because here, wielding his whip, overturning tables, Jesus is showing a, shall we say, definitely less placid side. And I’m sure that a lot of us find this disconcerting. We’re not comfortable with it. So many of our hymns and our imagery about Jesus comes from a time in the mid-19th century when Jesus was depicted as pure, meek, and humble. The “little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes” of <i>Away in a Manger</i> grew up to become the “gentle Jesus, meek and mild,” of another hymn. There’s nothing wrong with showing Jesus as merciful and modest, but emphasizing one part of the personality of Jesus means we miss out on the picture of him as a fully rounded person – and of course a person who is more than a person, who is both human and divine.<p>
So we may in fact disapprove of anyone acting in the way Jesus does, even if they are trying to correct an injustice or push back against corruption. People disapproved at the time. The religious elite thoroughly disapproved of what Jesus did, which they saw as an attack on religious ritual and the proper worship of God. Mark and Luke both say that after this, the chief priests, legal experts and other religious leaders were so worked up that they were seeking to kill Jesus.<p>
And, reflecting on this, things haven’t changed much. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement weren’t just up against the power of American states, they encountered the disapproval of the majority of white Americans at the time. The movement for rights for Black people wasn’t popular, even with religious leaders. Clergy called Black leaders “outside agitators,” they said that civil rights marches were untimely and unwise, that sit-ins and demonstrations were unnecessary as negotiations were a better path.<p>
Today, many people disapprove of Black people protesting the shootings of unarmed Black men by police. Again, a Black people’s campaign is called untimely, unwise, unnecessary, even racist for saying that Black lives matter. Black people demonstrate in the streets, and many people disapprove. So Black athletes silently kneel during the national anthem, and many people disapprove, criticizing them as unpatriotic, as insulting the flag and the military, as being ungrateful that they are paid to play sports. Many people disapprove of Indigenous protests for justice in the deaths of Colten Boushie and Tina Fontaine, and to pressure Canada to meet the obligations of treaties with Indigenous peoples. On Valentine’s Day a mass shooting at a high school in Pakarkland, Florida, killed 17 students and staff. Since then, students who survived have spoken out, demanding actions to stop these massacres taking place. And many people disapprove. These teenagers have been accused of being actors in a conspiracy, or paid agents of opponents of the Administration. Their families have received death threats. They are called publicity seekers who have inserted themselves into a national debate when they are too young to understand the issues. Their requests to feel safer at school are said to be unhelpful, counter-productive, missing the point. These teens are told to respect their elders, although it is their elders who did nothing when 20 six and seven year old children were gunned down in Sandy Hook, who did nothing when 26 worshippers were slaughtered in the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, who did nothing when 58 country music fans were killed in Las Vegas.<p>
Martin Luther King was in jail in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 when he responded to such criticisms from other religious leaders in a <a href="https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html">letter</a>. He told his fellow clergy that Black people had not made a single gain in civil rights without determined pressure, that painful experience had shown that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor – it must be demanded by the oppressed, and that Black people being told “wait” almost always means “never.” And when other clergy called civil rights actions “extreme,” King asked, wasn’t Jesus an extremist for love? So, King said, the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or the extension of justice? He reminded other religious leaders that three men were crucified on Good Friday, all three for the same crime – extremism. Two were extremists for immorality. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness.<p>
Untimely, unwise, unnecessary, extreme. People said that about Jesus, about Martin Luther King, about Black Lives Matter and Indigenous activists and the Parkland students when they were extremists for justice and came up against the powers that be. Their actions were, are, seen as a stumbling block, as foolish, just as the cross of Jesus was. But God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. Jesus says that the real temple of God isn’t the building that he cleared out, but his body. His flesh is where God dwells. God the Father is in him, and he is in God the Father. And when his witness to love and justice becomes so threatening that the authorities try to silence Jesus by killing him, his body is raised from death after three days. When we become one with him, God the Father is in us and we are in God the Father, and we become part of his body, the church. Here in the church - as we say in <a href="http://www.united-church.ca/sites/default/files/resources/song-of-faith.docx"><i>A Song of Faith</i></a> of The United Church of Canada - we seek to continue the story of Jesus by embodying his presence in the world, seeking justice and resisting evil – however untimely, unwise, and unnecessary disapproving people may think that is. For we follow Jesus Christ, an extremist for love, truth and goodness.<p>Dan Haywardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738708370158604594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36366747.post-23921987198947131382017-11-05T14:15:00.000-05:002017-11-05T14:15:10.430-05:00"Peace, Peace," Where There is No Peace: Sermon for Remembrance Sunday, November 5, 2017<blockquote><I>The Lord said to Joshua, “Today I will begin to make you great in the opinion of all Israel. Then they will know that I will be with you in the same way that I was with Moses. You are to command the priests who carry the covenant chest. As soon as you come to the bank of the Jordan, stand still in the Jordan.”<p>
Joshua said to the Israelites, “Come close. Listen to the words of the Lord your God.” Then Joshua said, “This is how you will know that the living God is among you and will completely remove the Canaanites, Hittites, Hivites, Perizzites, Girgashites, Amorites, and Jebusites before you. Look! The covenant chest of the ruler of the entire earth is going to cross over in front of you in the Jordan. Now pick twelve men from the tribes of Israel, one per tribe. The soles of the priests’ feet, who are carrying the chest of the Lord, ruler of the whole earth, will come to rest in the water of the Jordan. At that moment, the water of the Jordan will be cut off. The water flowing downstream will stand still in a single heap.”<p>
The people marched out from their tents to cross over the Jordan. The priests carrying the covenant chest were in front of the people. When the priests who were carrying the chest came to the Jordan, their feet touched the edge of the water. The Jordan had overflowed its banks completely, the way it does during the entire harvest season. But at that moment the water of the Jordan coming downstream stood still. It rose up as a single heap very far off, just below Adam, which is the city next to Zarethan. The water going down to the desert sea (that is, the Dead Sea) was cut off completely. The people crossed opposite Jericho. So the priests carrying the Lord’s covenant chest stood firmly on dry land in the middle of the Jordan. Meanwhile, all Israel crossed over on dry land, until the entire nation finished crossing over the Jordan.<br>
<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=joshua+3%3A7-17&version=CEB">Joshua 3:7-17</a>, <a href="http://www.commonenglishbible.com/">Common English Bible</a></I></blockquote><p>
After two months of reading how the people of Israel are brought out of slavery in Egypt and wander through the desert, today they cross the Jordan River into the land God promised to them. It sounds like a military campaign as the people march from their tents and across the river, and it was, because if you keep reading in the book of Joshua you find that Israel crossing on the dry Jordan riverbed took their opponents by surprise, and then Israel goes to war against the nations listed by Joshua, the Canaanites, Hittites, Hivites, Perizzites, Girgashites, Amorites, and Jebusites, to conquer the land for themselves.<p>
Crossing a river is always a very difficult military operation, in any age. A lot of battles get named after rivers. I read a book once about a division of British and Indian troops crossing an otherwise insignificant river in Italy during the Second World War, and all the planning that went into this relatively minor attack and all the decisions that had to be made quickly under fire. I was in the infantry at one time, and all this preparation and logistics goes largely unnoticed by the troops who are on the front line. We just expected that food and ammunition would arrive and that trucks would show up to take us out. But someone had to arrange that, and someone had to make the food, and someone had to load the ammunition, and someone had to drive the truck and someone had to get fuel for the truck. That’s what militaries are like, the people at the sharp end where the fighting takes place are supported by many more people who look after food and supplies and transport and mail and pay and repairs, and bringing home the dead and wounded.<p>
The head of the American Federal Emergency Management Agency was on TV saying that hurricane relief in Puerto Rico "is the most logistically challenging event the United States has ever seen." I thought, in 1944 the United States was fighting a war against Japan on the other side of the Pacific Ocean while simultaneously participating in the invasion of Europe and campaigning in Italy. That was a challenge. You know, our societies are good at war. We are good at these big and expensive efforts to deploy and sustain forces overseas. We get practice. Canada kept a substantial force in Afghanistan for over 12 years.<p>
The Bible tells us that there will be a future time when the old things pass away and all things are made new, and in that future swords will be beaten into ploughshares, nation shall not lift up sword against nation, and no one will learn war anymore. So we say today in our worship that this is God’s vision of peace, one proclaimed to us by Jesus.<p>
But we live in a time when, as the prophet Jeremiah <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=jeremiah+6%3A14&version=NRSV">says</a>, we say, “peace, peace,” but there is no peace. Jesus tells us that we will hear of wars and rumours of war, and that is our world. The time when no one will learn war anymore seems very far off. So how are we to act now? Is the way that we must follow one of refusing to participate in anything our government does that involves war or preparation for war? Many Christians would choose that route. Or do we follow what many other faithful people have believed, to quote the Church of England’s Articles of Religion from 350 years ago, that it is lawful for Christians, at the command of the government, to serve in war?<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6ZzTZ2Ajttg/Wf57l6wsW_I/AAAAAAAADnQ/hkH1xYnngVsTlJGQeEkIcN3dATizSKrrQCLcBGAs/s1600/MV5BMTg4MDI2ODc0MF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwMTg0MTU2._V1_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6ZzTZ2Ajttg/Wf57l6wsW_I/AAAAAAAADnQ/hkH1xYnngVsTlJGQeEkIcN3dATizSKrrQCLcBGAs/s320/MV5BMTg4MDI2ODc0MF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwMTg0MTU2._V1_.jpg" width="248" height="320" data-original-width="325" data-original-height="420" /></a></div>This is not an easy choice. War isn’t clean and antiseptic the way it seems when we see videos from drones of missiles striking their targets. We don’t see the blood and broken and burned bodies that are the result. War is a horrendous evil. But sometimes it can be argued that not going to war will allow other evils like aggression and genocide to continue and to grow. Christians have to decide. I remember watching the movie <i>Sergeant York</i>, with Gary Cooper. Alvin York is a simple man who believes strongly in what his church in rural Tennessee teaches, that war and killing are wrong. He has to work this through for himself when he is drafted during the First World War. He chooses to become a soldier. There is another movie, made just last year, called <i>Hacksaw Ridge</i>. Another devout man, named Desmond Doss, is a Seventh Day Adventist who swears never to carry a weapon or to commit violence. But he also believes that it isn’t right that he stay safe at home during World War II, so he enlists in the army. He is called a coward, but as a conscientious objector he becomes a medic, without a rifle, in the battle for Okinawa. Two men, two different choices on whether Christians can use force. And both men won the American Medal of Honour for bravery under fire.<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6uwkhXVjfR0/Wf5716Ili1I/AAAAAAAADnU/ykgf7DSzU38UHmTuUQKuy4YqrLixtKQPQCLcBGAs/s1600/MV5BMjM5MjM1NDg4M15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwMzUwNDU0MDI%2540._V1_SX1500_CR0%252C0%252C1500%252C999_AL_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6uwkhXVjfR0/Wf5716Ili1I/AAAAAAAADnU/ykgf7DSzU38UHmTuUQKuy4YqrLixtKQPQCLcBGAs/s320/MV5BMjM5MjM1NDg4M15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwMzUwNDU0MDI%2540._V1_SX1500_CR0%252C0%252C1500%252C999_AL_.jpg" width="320" height="213" data-original-width="1500" data-original-height="1000" /></a></div>We talked last week about our Protestant heritage of being able to make our own decisions about faith and what the Bible teaches. So, just like Alvin York and Desmond Doss, we can choose for ourselves. As I said, there is a tradition of pacifism and non-violence, going back to the early days of the Christian faith. It has been rediscovered in recent years through the work of scholars who come mainly from what are called the peace churches, like the Mennonites. They see Jesus refusing to be a military leader in a violent revolt against the Roman occupiers of his homeland, and conclude that Jesus rejects all coercion and violence in favour of non-violent love of our enemies. God’s peace is not just in the future, but a way of life in our war-torn present.<p>
And, as I said, there is another, ancient, tradition to draw on in dealing with war and peace. I have been reading a book, <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Defence-War-Nigel-Biggar/dp/019967261X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1509849280&sr=8-1&keywords=in+defence+of+war"><i>In Defence of War</i></a> by Nigel Biggar, which is a significant and well-argued work on whether war can be permitted for Christians. Biggar does not hesitate to say that the evils war brings ought to be strenuously avoided if they can be. But not all conflict can be avoided. Sometimes war breaks out because one party, for reasons of greed or resentment or paranoia or nationalism, does not want peace, or wants it only on its own, unjust terms.<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-QinzjySvO5c/Wf55vrScaFI/AAAAAAAADnE/EiarDoGQ0fIE_-gJQ3gq5FmNbR6YJTHyQCLcBGAs/s1600/51C3szl0JNL._SX345_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-QinzjySvO5c/Wf55vrScaFI/AAAAAAAADnE/EiarDoGQ0fIE_-gJQ3gq5FmNbR6YJTHyQCLcBGAs/s400/51C3szl0JNL._SX345_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="278" height="400" data-original-width="347" data-original-height="499" /></a></div>Biggar points out that several times in the New Testament Jesus or his followers encounter soldiers, who become disciples of Jesus, but there is no suggestion that they left military service as part of renouncing their past sinful behaviour. So Jesus, and the Scriptures, do not seem to regard being in the military as incompatible with Christian discipleship. It does seem clear that Jesus did not want to lead a religious, nationalist rebellion against Rome, but this does not mean that violence is never permitted against oppression. And, yes, Jesus commands us to love our enemies. But we might kill an aggressor, not because we hate him, but because, tragically, we know of no other way to prevent him from harming the innocent. So, for Biggar, the Scriptures’ prohibition of violence is not absolute.<p>
So, as believers, as followers of Jesus, we can decide for ourselves. The men and women we remember today and on Remembrance Day made their choices too. Regardless of the choice we may make, we respect and honour their choice to serve, and that they died as a result. Jesus says, greater love has no one than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. And we pray for the day when this choice will not be needed and God’s peace will prevail over the whole earth.<p>
Dan Haywardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738708370158604594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36366747.post-16307091987757685602017-05-07T22:18:00.001-04:002017-05-07T22:18:24.598-04:00In Life, in Death, in Life Beyond Death: The United Church of Canada on Medical Assistance in DyingThe Executive of The United Church of Canada's General Council met online on May 6 and 7. Among the business items for consideration was a proposal from the Theology and Inter-Church Inter-Faith Committee, which I chair. Two years ago the Executive passed a motion on what was then called physician-assisted dying:<br>
<blockquote><i>That the Executive of General Council enable the Church to be prepared to respond to a change in the laws of Canada that will provide a greater number of options in end of life decision making by:<br>
1. Affirming the right and capability of individuals to engage with all of the issues making, the church affirms moral reasoning undertaken in relationship with family, loved ones, close friends and community and one’s physician.<br>
2. Directing the Theology and Inter-Church Inter-Faith Committee to examine the theological implications of physician assisted dying and to offer guidance to the Executive on the development of a church statement on the issue.<br>
3. Encouraging congregations to deepen pastoral capacities to assist those who are facing end of life decisions, including a willingness to talk openly about death and dying.</i><p></blockquote>
My Committee held a major consultation in Toronto last fall with theologians, physicians, people with disabilities and their allies, patient advocates, one of our Anglican partners (the Anglican Church of Canada has now produced an excellent document on this topic, <I>In Sure and Certain Hope</I>), and the co-chair of the special parliamentary committee preparing the federal legislation on Medical Assistance in Dying, Rob Oliphant MP (who is a United Church minister).<p>
As requested by the Executive, the Committee presented a report on Medical Assistance in Dying. The Executive voted to receive the report and to adopt it as an official statement of The United Church of Canada. It will be released with an added section containing resources for pastoral care, congregational study, and liturgy.<p>
The statement has been publicly available as part of the workbook for the Executive meeting, but here it is (without the glossary and the introduction to the resource section). Thank you to everyone who worked on this.<p>
<b>
MEDICAL ASSISTANCE IN DYING</b><p>
<b>Outline</b><p>
The United Church of Canada looks at the recent legal developments in regards to Medical Assistance in Dying with considerable interest. We are not opposed in principle to the legislation allowing assistance in dying and to such assistance being the informed, free choice of terminally ill patients. There are occasions where unrelenting suffering and what we know about the effect of pain on the human body can make Medical Assistance in Dying a preferable option. However, we urge a cautious approach by legislators and medical professionals implementing these laws, as well as by individuals, families and communities of faith who are considering making use of this new legislative option. To this end, we advocate community-focused and theologically robust discernment on a case-by-case basis that also ensures the protection and care of those potentially made vulnerable by this new law and others like it.<p>
<b>How We Got Here</b><p>
In the past, The United Church of Canada has taken no formal position on assisted dying or euthanasia. A survey or poll of those attending a United Church worship service or event would likely find a range of views on this issue.
In 1995 the Division of Mission in Canada issued a study document entitled “Caring for the Dying: Choices and Decisions.” In summary, the document said:
<blockquote><i>We believe that it is appropriate to withdraw medical treatments that are not benefiting the patient and that are prolonging suffering and dying when the competent patient so decides, and when firm evidence of disease irreversibility exists. We believe that much can and should be done to facilitate the gentle, peaceful death that so many of us wish for, and the United Church should give leadership in this area. We do not believe, however, that the legalization of assisted suicide/euthanasia is justified, or will help make such a death possible.</i></blockquote><p>
This statement strongly supported the strengthening of palliative care options. As an alternative for those who have sought and received palliative care “and still believe that they want to end their lives, we believe that an acceptable alternative that does not require external assistance is to stop eating and drinking.”<p>
No formal policy positions were brought forward as a result of the study document.<p>
The positions outlined by the 1995 paper were consistent with the best prevailing social and medical opinions of the time. Since that time, there has been a shift in the legality and public acceptance of both passive and indirect euthanasia. Modern medicine is able to keep people alive much longer than had previously been possible. We have increased knowledge of the effect of pain on the human body in the process of dying. Many people will conclude that in some circumstances, particularly those of grievous suffering at the end of life, preserving life may be a worse alternative than death. In light of these changes, we must respond.<p>
In February 2015 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled unanimously in the Carter vs. Canada case to strike down the federal prohibition of doctor-assisted suicide as unconstitutionally infringing on the rights of individuals under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The court’s decision applied to competent adults with enduring, intolerable suffering who clearly consented to ending their own lives. Federal and provincial governments were given a year to craft new laws. After a joint parliamentary committee (co-chaired by Member of Parliament and United Church of Canada minister Rob Oliphant) proposed a model for federal legislation, the federal government tabled, and Parliament passed, legislation allowing competent individuals aged 18 years and older with a grievous and irremediable medical condition to make a voluntary request for Medical Assistance in Dying.<p>
With Medical Assistance in Dying now legal in Canada, people participating in United Church of Canada communities of faith are faced with their loved ones choosing such assistance in dying, or considering this option themselves. How can the church support people challenged with such a decision? How can the church prepare people for end-of-life decision-making? What context can the church provide for thinking about dying in general, and Medical Assistance in Dying in particular, from our theology and faith tradition?<p>
<b>Theological Convictions</b><p>
Our latest statement of faith, <i>A Song of Faith</i> (2006), states that the Creator “made humans to live and move and have their being in God” and that “made in the image of God, we yearn for the fulfillment that is life in God.” The church affirms the image of God in every person. Each human being has an intrinsic dignity and infinite worth, qualities given by God. These understandings mean that the ending of any human life, regardless of apparent necessity, perceived propriety, or just cause, cannot be considered apart from this unique claim God has on each individual. Nor can any decision to end a human life be considered apart from its relation and potential contribution to the tragic dimension of the human condition (described in A Song of Faith as “brokenness in human life and community”). Medical Assistance in Dying, in this sense, is not something to be considered as morally or ethically neutral.<p>
Holding these theological tensions is part of ethical discernment around medical assistance in dying. With these considerations in mind, there are certain instances where imperfect actions may be required in the face of worse alternatives. Christ’s own ministry of healing and reconciliation made manifest the divine intent for the full flourishing of human life. In the case of some who are terminally ill, extreme, prolonged suffering and pain can diminish human flourishing to the point where assisting the process of death may be an act of compassion. We are made in the image of God, and a human life is not ultimately ours to take. At the same time, preserving human life is not an absolute in all circumstances.<p>
Former Moderator, the Very Rev. Gary Paterson, wrote in this regard that the United Church’s theological tradition is not to suggest that believing in the sanctity of life means that any attempt to end life must be prevented:
<blockquote><i>For Christians, life is a sacred gift from God and needs to be valued and protected. But we also know that both life and death are part of the whole created order. Life itself isn’t absolute. Nor certainly is death. To speak of the sanctity of life is to affirm God’s desire for abundance of life for all of creation. God is love, and the Christian affirmation is that God’s love is the only absolute. "In life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with us," says our creed</i>.</blockquote>
There are circumstances where concerns about undue suffering can outweigh the taking of an individual life and make Medical Assistance in Dying a preferable option. At the same time, we must ensure that societal notions about what constitutes “a good life,” or “a useful life” do not pressure individuals into seeking Medical Assistance in Dying. In the end, the mystery of death prevents it being seen as a problem to be solved with pat theological answers. We hold in tension God’s desire for full, abundant life with God’s promise to be faithful to us in death.<p>
<b>Cautions and Challenges</b><p>
Medical Assistance in Dying is a multi-dimensional issue. The legislation emphasizes the role of the individual patient. The church, on the other hand, seeks to hold together individual moral agency and life in community. The church’s General Council Executive, in directing further study and dialogue on Medical Assistance in Dying, affirmed the right and capability of individuals to engage with all of the issues involved in end of life decisions, and stated that “in all of the complexity of end of life decision-making, the church affirms moral reasoning undertaken in relationship with family, loved ones, close friends and community and one’s physician as taking precedence over absolute statements.”<p>
God’s people are called to embrace those struggling with these difficult decisions and to ensure that they are not alone. The choice of assisted death must be a free and informed decision by an individual who, with the support and accompaniment of others, sees this as one option among many in determining their future, and not as the only option that must be taken due to a lack of choice when facing terminal illness. Our communities of faith need to be safe places for discerning, thoughtful conversations about these options.<p>
Medical Assistance in Dying must not be viewed as a way to curb health care costs or system burdens by terminating lives, or as a means to remove people from society because they are seen as a liability. In this sense, the church shares the valid concerns of people with disabilities and others about possible distortions and subtle abuses that may be used to pressure patients. The duress may be very subtle, even unconscious, exploiting the hopelessness that can result from the stigma and negative stereotypes of disability being irremediable and the guilt perpetuated by our society about people with disabilities being a burden or shameful. The lack of access to palliative and hospice care can lead people who otherwise might not choose to do so to seek Medical Assistance in Dying. All these factors jeopardize, sometimes even negate, the concept of informed consent to assisted death that is required under Canadian legislation.<p>
It is also important to recognize that holding up the right to Medical Assistance in Dying for some patients may jeopardize others. Some people, particularly people with disabilities, are made more vulnerable in this regard because their agency has been diminished by society. People with disabilities are often defined by society in terms of what they cannot do, what bodily parts or mental processes “do not work” in relation to what is “normal.” Sometimes they are not regarded as having the capacity to make free choices. In other cases their choices are constrained by societal pressure of what “a good life looks like” or “what is normal,” or the equation of a good life with being free from significant pain or from mental or physical constraint. In such situations, the “right to choose” can be subject to pressure—overt, hidden, or even sub-conscious. Affirming the image of God in each person means adopting a concept of interdependence, as opposed to our culture’s idea of the autonomous individual, the latter perspective a viewpoint that privileges some communities or sectors of society over others. As stated above, the church must hold together both individual agency and our covenant to each other in both living and dying.<p>
To this end the church must call for full inclusion and attention to the concerns of vulnerable communities (e.g., people with disabilities, the frail elderly, those with mental illnesses, those without personal advocates) whose members may be coerced into choosing assisted death. The church must challenge society’s prejudice that equates a healthy life, often identified as “a life worth living,” with being able-bodied, and that defines happiness as the absence of suffering. It must also recognize the ways in which social power and economic privilege can affect the ability of people to make decisions about the end of their lives. Affirming well-being in a theological sense is a key contribution the church can make. Vulnerability is not abnormal – it is a sign of our interdependence as God’s children.<p>
The church has a particular role to play in spiritual care by chaplains and spiritual care practitioners when suffering takes on a spiritual dimension as well as physical and psychological aspects. Despair at the end of life may manifest itself as loss of hope, meaning and self-worth, and may be articulated as a desire to die (which should not be interpreted simply as a request for assisted death).<p>
What is more, those who face the challenge of the end of their lives should have the best of end-of-life care. The Canadian Council of Churches’ Commission on Faith and Witness has called for access for all to dignified, quality palliative care, in hospital, hospice, and home settings, and stated that:
<blockquote>
<i>We see the provision of such care as an intrinsic human responsibility toward the suffering person because of the inestimable worth and dignity of every human being, created as we are in the image of God, and because of Jesus' command to care for the sick (Matthew 25:36). All life is sacred, but all earthly life must end. When an illness cannot be cured or when natural life draws to a close, it is essential to offer relief of pain and suffering.</i></blockquote><p>
Palliative care is not universally available across Canada, and it is particularly lacking in regions with aging populations that lie outside major urban centres as well as in Indigenous communities. Such care must be available across the country so that those facing the end of life are not forced into assisted death due to the fact that their personal needs cannot be met in their own region or community.<p>
In addition to addressing concerns related to the patient, the church must also attend to the struggle of conscience faced by some health professionals (who may be part of United Church communities of faith). Physicians and other health professionals are expected by their training and commitment to save life. They can find it challenging and disturbing to be expected to provide Medical Assistance in Dying. While terminally ill patients need to have their decisions honoured, medical staff need to be able to have the right to decide if they will provide assistance in death. Patients must be able to choose freely; medical staff also should be able to be clear, and to be respected for their decisions, as to how they will live out their oath to preserve and maintain life. Health professionals should also expect that the church will provide an open and supportive pastoral presence as they wrestle with the issue.<p>
It is important to engage communities of faith, and the broader community, in conversations about death and dying. Despite focusing in Holy Week and Easter each year on the story of a God who died on a cross, and being part of a faith fundamentally shaped by questions around the meaning of suffering and death, we have often been swept up in our society’s death-denying culture and its general avoidance of conversations about death and dying. The stories and symbols of our faith tradition are a resource for supportive and pastoral conversations with those struggling with suffering (either their own or a loved one’s) or struggling with making end of life decisions.<p>
In our provision of pastoral care, we need to bear in mind that different cultures, including those represented in our membership, view death in varied ways. Those differences need to be respected even as they add complexity. For example, in a culture that views death in very negative terms, the desire of an individual to seek Medical Assistance in Dying can create a crisis for family members struggling to accept that decision.<p>
Engaging different communities in ongoing, deep discussion well in advance of specific moments of decision-making can enable communities of faith to develop greater capacity to assist members who are facing end of life decisions and to support all of us to engage in moral reasoning in the midst of the complexities of the choices we are asked to make.
Those facing the end of their lives, and their families and friends, must feel that they will not be abandoned by the church at any point. This is an imperative for a church that, in the words of A New Creed, trusts in God and proclaims that in life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with us. We are not alone.<p>
<b>Conclusion</b><p>
The issue of Medical Assistance in Dying is one that needs ongoing reflection and dialogue in communities of faith. It may be chosen as a faithful option in certain circumstances. At the same time, there are many challenges that have emerged since this option became available, challenges both spiritual and practical. While the right of terminally ill patients under the legislation needs to be honoured, affirmation of this legislation must be accompanied by protection and care of the most vulnerable in our society and by universal, equal access to palliative care. It must recognize and respect the challenge Medical Assistance in Dying can pose for health care professionals. It must also be accompanied by an affirmation of the dignity and intrinsic worth of every life in relation to community.<p>
Dan Haywardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738708370158604594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36366747.post-14080589120352382002017-04-02T21:57:00.002-04:002017-04-02T22:05:14.627-04:00Mortality and Immortality: Sermon, April 2, 2017<blockquote><i>A man named Lazarus, who lived in Bethany, became sick. Bethany was the town where Mary and her sister Martha lived. (This Mary was the one who poured the perfume on the Lord's feet and wiped them with her hair; it was her brother Lazarus who was sick.) The sisters sent Jesus a message: “Lord, your dear friend is sick.”<p>
When Jesus heard it, he said, “The final result of this sickness will not be the death of Lazarus; this has happened in order to bring glory to God, and it will be the means by which the Son of God will receive glory.”<p>
Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. Yet when he received the news that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was for two more days. 7 Then he said to the disciples, “Let us go back to Judea.”<p>
“Teacher,” the disciples answered, “just a short time ago the people there wanted to stone you; and are you planning to go back?”<p>
Jesus said, “A day has twelve hours, doesn't it? So those who walk in broad daylight do not stumble, for they see the light of this world. But if they walk during the night they stumble, because they have no light.” Jesus said this and then added, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I will go and wake him up.”<p>
The disciples answered, “If he is asleep, Lord, he will get well.”<p>
Jesus meant that Lazarus had died, but they thought he meant natural sleep. So Jesus told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead, but for your sake I am glad that I was not with him, so that you will believe. Let us go to him.”<p>
Thomas (called the Twin) said to his fellow disciples, “Let us all go along with the Teacher, so that we may die with him!”<p>
When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had been buried four days before. Bethany was less than two miles from Jerusalem, and many Judeans had come to see Martha and Mary to comfort them about their brother's death.<p>
When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went out to meet him, but Mary stayed in the house. Martha said to Jesus, “If you had been here, Lord, my brother would not have died! But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask him for.”<p>
“Your brother will rise to life,” Jesus told her.<p>
“I know,” she replied, “that he will rise to life on the last day.”<p>
Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me will live, even though they die; and those who live and believe in me will never die. Do you believe this?”<p>
“Yes, Lord!” she answered. “I do believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who was to come into the world.”<p>
After Martha said this, she went back and called her sister Mary privately. “The Teacher is here,” she told her, “and is asking for you.” When Mary heard this, she got up and hurried out to meet him. (Jesus had not yet arrived in the village, but was still in the place where Martha had met him.) The people who were in the house with Mary comforting her followed her when they saw her get up and hurry out. They thought that she was going to the grave to weep there.<p>
Mary arrived where Jesus was, and as soon as she saw him, she fell at his feet. “Lord,” she said, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died!”<p>
Jesus saw her weeping, and he saw how the people with her were weeping also; his heart was touched, and he was deeply moved. “Where have you buried him?” he asked them.<p>
“Come and see, Lord,” they answered.<p>
Jesus wept. “See how much he loved him!” the people said.<p>
But some of them said, “He gave sight to the blind man, didn't he? Could he not have kept Lazarus from dying?”<p>
Deeply moved once more, Jesus went to the tomb, which was a cave with a stone placed at the entrance. “Take the stone away!” Jesus ordered.<p>
Martha, the dead man's sister, answered, “There will be a bad smell, Lord. He has been buried four days!”<p>
Jesus said to her, “Didn't I tell you that you would see God's glory if you believed?” They took the stone away. Jesus looked up and said, “I thank you, Father, that you listen to me. I know that you always listen to me, but I say this for the sake of the people here, so that they will believe that you sent me.” After he had said this, he called out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” He came out, his hands and feet wrapped in grave cloths, and with a cloth around his face. “Untie him,” Jesus told them, “and let him go.”<p>
Many of the people who had come to visit Mary saw what Jesus did, and they believed in him.<br>
- <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john+11%3A1-45&version=GNT">John 11:1-45, Good News Translation</a></i></blockquote><p>
I got an email the other day that said, “Here’s how to cheat death.” It turned out to be a link to a magazine article about research into how to make people live much longer, even forever. This is a big topic now. I found articles with titles like <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/silicon-valleys-quest-to-live-forever">“Silicon Valley’s Quest to Live Forever”</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/mar/25/animal-life-is-over-machine-life-has-begun-road-to-immortality">“The road to immortality"</a>. That one has the sub title “In California, radical scientists and billionaire backers think the technology to extend life is only a few years away.” I was reading in one of these about a gathering of Hollywood stars and tech billionaires to hear about radically lengthened lives. And the speaker asked how many people in the room would want to live to be two hundred years old, if they could be healthy, and almost every hand went up.<p>
So technology companies are now taking on the ultimate problem, death. One billionaire says that he wants to end mortality. He and others who made fortunes in computing and the Internet are ploughing money into research on extending life, altering the enzymes that regulate aging in the body and the genes that control life span, or even somehow downloading the human brain and your memories into a machine so that, in theory, your mind can last forever.<p>
Now, I’m not sure I want to live on as a mind inside a computer, or have my genetic makeup changed so I live to be two hundred years old. But if you asked a group of people who aren’t Hollywood stars or rich technology executives if they want to live to be two hundred, there would still be a lot of hands go up. Particularly from baby boomers. They’re the largest group of Canadians currently living. And many baby boomers have assumed for most of their lives that they will live forever. This isn’t based on any evidence; baby boomers just don’t want to think about being dead, or old. But, of course, now people born in the postwar years are at an age where it is obvious that they will die, or are dying. And they understandably want every medical and technological intervention possible to keep death away.<p>
You know, our culture goes to great lengths to avoid death and even thinking about death. Our own deaths, that is. At the same time as denying our own deaths we watch and read about many, many fictional deaths on TV and in movies and novels. A colleague of mine, Rev. Linda Yates, <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Death-Me-accepting-death-choosing/dp/0993653804">says</a> that our obsession with watching people die in the name of entertainment may in part be due to our resistance to dealing with our own impending demise. And these fictional deaths skew how we imagine our own deaths, and create unrealistic fears. For instance, the statistics show that we are far more likely to be killed by a lawnmower than a terrorist, but we don’t have expensive and elaborate government programs for lawnmower safety. And there are no action movies about saving the world from lawnmowers.<p>
Linda Yates notes that things weren’t always this way. For much of human history, death was familiar. It was observed and accepted. It had rituals. We see that in the story of Lazarus. Not so long ago, dying was not hidden in a hospital. When many of my ancestors died, their bodies were laid out at home.<p>
We still have rituals, maybe more so here than in the city. A funeral or memorial service or graveside service is important, I think, because in storytelling, celebration of life, and lament, we are helped to remember the loved one who has died, and to think about our own deaths and the meaning of our own lives.<p>
Well, we will die. There is no getting around it, as much as we don't want to acknowledge it. They say nothing is certain except death and taxes, and just as income taxes are due this month, death is coming up sometime. I just finished editing the United Church of Canada’s draft statement on medical assistance in dying. Now, we don’t have time today to deal with assisted dying for terminally ill patients. But the statement does say that despite focusing in Holy Week and Easter each year on the story of a God who died on a cross, and being part of a Christian faith fundamentally shaped by questions around the meaning of suffering and death, we in the church have often been swept up in our society’s denial of death. The church should be one place where we can overcome our society’s reluctance and have conversations about death and dying. It’s important to think and talk about death before dying is actually near. At church we hear stories and see symbols from our faith tradition that expose us to the idea of our own death. Linda has more to say about this in her book <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Death-Me-accepting-death-choosing/dp/0993653804/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1491185063&sr=8-1&keywords=for+the+death+of+me+linda+yates"><I>For the Death of Me</I></a>.<p>
And our church statement says that those facing the end of their lives should have access to palliative care, because each human has dignity, each person is created in God’s image, and Jesus commanded us to care for the sick. It is essential to offer relief of pain and suffering when life draws to a close.<p>
And that makes me think about this research into extending life and keeping the mind going outside the body. I’m not sure these life spans of two hundred years are intended to be for everyone. Only those who can afford it would be genetically modified to live longer, or have their brain downloaded so their mind could be immortal. So a lot of brainpower and money is being sunk into projects that will only ever benefit rich people. I can’t help but think this is trying to solve the wrong problem. Funding improvements in palliative care would be a much more meaningful response to the problem of death.<p>
And we already know how to extend and improve life, but it’s far less glamourous than coming up with a way to download your brain. Those technologies are <a href="https://www.wired.com/2017/03/silicon-valley-rather-cure-death-make-life-worth-living/?mbid=nl_32417_p1&CNDID=44501219">already here</a>: clean water, urban sanitation, smokeless cooking, access to healthcare, quality education. The arithmetic of improving life just by adding more years is too simple. It ignores what makes a life an abundant life, in Jesus’ words.<p>
Yesterday we had a funeral service. And I said the traditional words,<br>
"You only are immortal, O God, Creator of all.<br>
We are mortal, formed of the earth, and to the earth we shall return.<br>
All of us return to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song,<br>
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah."<br>
Billions of dollars in research may add a few years to the life spans of the rich. It may even preserve their minds for centuries. But the earthly lives of humans will still be finite. "You are dust, and to the dust you shall return," <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=genesis+3%3A19&version=NRSV">God tells Adam and Eve</a>. Humans can’t live forever through their own power.<p>
But our story shows us what is possible through God’s power. Lazarus died. And then he lived again, through Jesus using the power of God. Now, Lazarus would die eventually. But after this story took place, Jesus himself would be raised from death by God’s power at Easter, raised to new life, and because he has been raised we will all be raised. Jesus took on the ultimate problem, death, and won. "Our mortal bodies will put on immortality," <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+corinthians+15%3A54-55&version=NRSV">Scripture says</a>. "Death will be swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?"<p>
“I am the resurrection and the life,” Jesus tells Martha. “Those who believe in me will live, even though they die; and those who live and believe in me will never die.” And then he asks her, “Do you believe this?” “Yes, Lord,” she answers. How will we respond?<p>
<I>Rev. Linda Yates' resource <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Death-Me-accepting-death-choosing/dp/0993653804">For the Death of Me: Accepting Death, Choosing Life</a> was very helpful in preparing this sermon and, along with her oral remarks to a consultation, in writing the proposed United Church of Canada statement on Medical Assistance in Dying. It is a great resource for individual and group reflection on death and dying.</I><p>
Dan Haywardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738708370158604594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36366747.post-61111888602538330472017-03-17T21:12:00.000-04:002017-03-17T21:12:15.534-04:00Tragic Echoes of 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'From <a href="http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/17/apache-helicopter-guns-down-boat-full-of-somali-refugees-fleeing-yemen/?utm_content=bufferaffae&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer"><i>Foreign Policy</i></a>, March 17, 2017:<p>
<blockquote>
On Friday, an Apache military helicopter reportedly opened fire on a boat packed with over 140 Somali migrants off the coast of Yemen.<p>
Forty-two people were killed in the attack, according to the U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR). All 42 were reportedly carrying official U.N. refugee papers. Eighty survivors were rescued from the water after the attack and taken to a detention center in Hodieda, Yemen, the International Organization for Migration’s Laurent De Boeck told AP. He added the IOM is liaising with hospitals to ensure the survivors get the care they need.<p>
The boat, filled with refugees attempting to flee war-torn Yemen including women and children, had made it about 30 miles offshore when a helicopter swooped in and opened fire. A local coast guard official from the Houthi-rebel controlled coast of Yemen told Reuters an Apache helicopter attacked the boat, though it remains unclear who is responsible for the attack.<p>
Saudi Arabia, which leads an Arab air campaign against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels, owns U.S.-made Apache helicopters. A spokesperson for the Saudi-led coalition said the coalition didn’t operate in the region of the attack Thursday.</blockquote><p>
From <I>Nineteen Eighty-Four</I>, by George Orwell, first published in 1949. Winston Smith is writing in his illicit diary:<p>
<blockquote>
Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank, then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it, there was a middle-aged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms, little boy screaming in fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him, then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood, then there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up up up right into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up...</blockquote><p>Dan Haywardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738708370158604594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36366747.post-52215781185661432472017-02-06T15:16:00.000-05:002017-02-06T15:16:09.780-05:00Salt, Light and Fake News: Sermon, February 5, 2017<blockquote><i>Shout loudly; don’t hold back;<br>
raise your voice like a trumpet!<br>
Announce to my people their crime,<br>
to the house of Jacob their sins.<br>
They seek me day after day,<br>
desiring knowledge of my ways<br>
like a nation that acted righteously,<br>
that didn’t abandon their God.<br>
They ask me for righteous judgments,<br>
wanting to be close to God.<br>
“Why do we fast and you don’t see;<br>
Why do we afflict ourselves<br>
and you don’t notice?”<br>
Yet on your fast day<br>
you do whatever you want,<br>
and oppress all your workers.<br>
You quarrel and brawl, and then you fast;<br>
You hit each other violently<br>
with your fists.<br>
You shouldn’t fast as you are doing today<br>
if you want to make<br>
your voice heard on high.<br>
Is this the kind of fast I choose,<br>
a day of self-affliction,<br>
Of bending one’s head like a reed<br>
and of lying down in mourning clothing and ashes?<br>
Is this what you call a fast,<br>
a day acceptable to the Lord?<p>
Isn’t this the fast I choose:<br>
Releasing wicked restraints,<br>
Untying the ropes of a yoke,<br>
Setting free the mistreated,<br>
And breaking every yoke?<br>
Isn’t it sharing your bread with the hungry<br>
and bringing the homeless poor<br>
into your house,<br>
Covering the naked when you see them,<br>
And not hiding from your own family?<br>
Then your light will break out like the dawn,<br>
and you will be healed quickly.<br>
Your own righteousness<br>
will walk before you,<br>
and the Lord’s glory<br>
will be your rear guard.<br>
Then you will call,<br>
and the Lord will answer;<br>
You will cry for help,<br>
and God will say, "I'm here."<br>
<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+58%3A1-9&version=CEB">Isaiah 58:1-9a</a>, <a href="http://www.commonenglishbible.com">Common English Bible</a><p>
Jesus said, “You are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its saltiness, how will it become salty again? It’s good for nothing except to be thrown away and trampled under people’s feet. You are the light of the world. A city on top of a hill can’t be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a basket. Instead, they put it on top of a lampstand, and it shines on all who are in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before people, so they can see the good things you do and praise your Father who is in heaven.<p>
“Don’t even begin to think that I have come to do away with the Law and the Prophets. I haven’t come to do away with them but to fulfill them. I say to you very seriously that as long as heaven and earth exist, neither the smallest letter nor even the smallest stroke of a pen will be erased from the Law until everything there becomes a reality. Therefore, whoever ignores one of the least of these commands and teaches others to do the same will be called the lowest in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever keeps these commands and teaches people to keep them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. I say to you that unless your righteousness is greater than the righteousness of the legal experts and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”<br>
<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+5%3A13-20&version=CEB">Matthew 5:13-20</a>, <a href="http://www.commonenglishbible.com">Common English Bible</a><p></i>
</blockquote>
I was reading in the <i>Seaway News</i> that the <i>Cornwall Standard Freeholder</i> now has only five reporters. At one time, not so long ago, there were 20 journalists working in the newsroom. It tells you something about the newspaper industry these days. I was at a meeting in Montreal, and one minister said he really needed a paper, and wondered where he could find one. I joked that, rather than search for a newspaper box these days, it might be easier to invent time travel and go back to 1955 and find a newsboy selling the <i>Montreal Star</i> on the corner. We don’t get the paper. I read the stories online. When I visit people who do get the paper, they usually tell me they only take it for the obituaries.<p>
So how we get the news has changed. And our trust in the news has changed. If you’re on social media, on Facebook or Twitter, people are always posting their own version of the news. We aren’t confident anymore that the news is really the news, that is, that it’s accurately reporting what happened. There has always been bias and mistakes in reporting, but people didn’t used to dismiss the entire output of news outlets as “fake news.” There really is fake news, though. There have been mistaken rumours as long as humans have been able to talk about what’s happening. A few years ago, even now, you would get an email from a friend of yours, usually with a whole list of email addresses because it had been forwarded many times, about what we used to call an urban legend. It would tell a story that was supposed to have really happened, usually to someone’s brother in law’s barber’s second cousin, like a woman driving and hearing a report on the radio about an escaped convict with a hook for a hand, and she stops for gas and finds the hook dangling from the car door handle. Urban legends were like the scary stories the counsellors would tell us when we went to summer camp, and later we would repeat the same stories to frighten the new kids. Anyway, if you got an email about an urban legend, you could check it with a website like <a href="http://www.snopes.com">snopes.com</a> that collected all these chain emails and fact checked them and would tell you if they had any basis in fact.<p>
But now people on the Internet can invent fake news in minutes. On Sunday night we got the terrible news of the attack on the mosque in Quebec City. Later that night the names and pictures of two suspects, said to be Syrian refugees, began circulating on social media – but it was all fake. And people leaped to conclusions based on the names and pictures, and then when the identity of the real suspect came out, other people leaped to conclusions based on his name and photo. And the fake story was still out there.<p>
One great thing about our digital age is that anyone can create content online. You don’t have to own a newspaper or a TV station. And sometimes a bad thing about our digital age is that anyone can create content online. Because they can just make up their own facts for their own purposes. Maybe at one time journalism was about “just the facts, ma’am,” as they used to say on <i>Dragnet</i>, but now all sides on an issue are twisting stories to fit their agenda and just plain lying.<p>
And today there is so much news content that we often filter it by only paying attention to news networks that cater to our preconceived notions. It’s like an echo chamber where we only hear voices like our own, that reinforce the views we already have.<p>
This fast-moving news cycle, and how easy it is for us to get only the news that fits what we already think, and how quickly we can post our opinions about it, just feeds constant anger and outrage. Online it’s as if we are like the mob in Western movies, surrounding the jail where the sheriff is keeping the bad guy, carrying our torches and a noose. You used to have call talk radio and give your opinion to a host, but now you can express your fury to hundreds or thousands of people online. And because on the computer screen we may be talking – well, typing - with strangers who live far away and we will never meet them face to face, it’s easier than ever to insult and call names and harass and say shocking things. And the more outrageous you are, the more attention you get.<p>
There have always been rumours, and name calling. There have always been labels and stereotypes that allows us to dismiss people with views opposing ours. But now we’re no longer out to debate those with different positions – we’re out to destroy them.<p>
And, you know, all this has consequences. There was a fake story about a child abuse ring being run out of a pizza parlour in Washington DC. It was completely false. It was invented to try to discredit an election candidate. But a guy read it, and showed up at the pizza place with a gun to protect these children, and he fired shots. If we promote fake news, it has consequences. If we are incessantly spreading stories about Islam being dangerous and raising fears of Sharia law and terrorism and criminal refugees, then it has consequences.<p>
All this divides us. All this cements the barriers we put in place to separate humanity into different groups. All this helps us to identify only with our own group, and resent everyone else. All this traps us in a bubble where we are only exposed to people and opinions like our own. All this warps reality so that we can’t tell anymore what is true and what is false.<p>
Do we think this is what Jesus wants for us, as his followers? To perpetuate division? The <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=james+3%3A5-10&version=CEB">Letter of James</a> says to Christians, “Think about this: a small flame can set a whole forest on fire. The tongue is a small flame of fire, a world of evil at work in us. With it we both bless the Lord and Father and curse human beings made in God’s likeness. Blessing and cursing come from the same mouth.” Today James might write about fingers typing on computer keyboards, as well as the tongue, but you see the point.<p>
Jesus teaches in his Sermon on the Mount that we are to live as salt of the earth, light for the world. Jesus says, “Let your light shine before people, so they can see the good things you do and praise your Father who is in heaven.” What do people see when we report fake news, spew insults, degrade opponents, label and stereotype? Are they seeing good things that will cause them to give God glory? The way so many Christians act, online and in the real world, is not exactly flavouring the world and letting Christ’s light shine through them. Their behaviour doesn’t reflect Jesus. Sure, Jesus could argue, he could use his words to take the powerful down a peg, he could get angry at injustice – but he was out to love, not condemn, his enemies.<p>
We stopped our Isaiah reading at verse 9. The next part of that verse says, “remove the finger-pointing, the wicked speech.” That is one way to be salt and light in the world, as Jesus told us to do – to let blessings, instead of curses, come from our mouths and our typing fingers. In the <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=galatians+5%3A22-23&version=CEB">Letter to the Galatians</a>, the fruits of the Spirit, the qualities of a Christian life, are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control – and these should shape the way we behave in the online and the real worlds, So next time we are in a heated argument on Facebook, or in person, with someone who disagrees with us, Jesus wants us to see that person not an adversary to be destroyed, but as a child of God, made in God’s image, someone who can see the good things we do and come to praise God.<p>
Dan Haywardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738708370158604594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36366747.post-41594418891637538692016-12-27T10:07:00.001-05:002016-12-27T10:09:06.246-05:00"Poorest and Simplest of Earthly People:" Sermon for Christmas Eve, December 24, 2016<blockquote><I>And it came to pass in those days that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered.<p>
This census first took place while Quirinius was governing Syria.<p>
So all went to be registered, everyone to his own city.<p>
And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be registered with Mary, his betrothed wife, who was with child.<p>
So it was, that while they were there, the days were completed for her to be delivered.<p>
And she brought forth her firstborn Son, and wrapped Him in swaddling cloths, and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.<p>
Now there were in the same country shepherds living out in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night.<p>
And behold, an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were greatly afraid.<p>
Then the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people. For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign to you: You will find a Babe wrapped in swaddling cloths, lying in a manger.”<p>
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men!”<p>
So it was, when the angels had gone away from them into heaven, that the shepherds said to one another, “Let us now go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has come to pass, which the Lord has made known to us.”<p>
And they came with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the Babe lying in a manger.<p>
Now when they had seen Him, they made widely known the saying which was told them concerning this Child. And all those who heard it marveled at those things which were told them by the shepherds.<p>
But Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.<p>
Then the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told them.<br>
<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke+2%3A1-20&version=NKJV">- Luke 2:1-20, New King James Bible</a></I></blockquote><p>
The Christmas story is one of the most beautiful texts in the entire Bible. When a story is so lovely and so familiar, I can’t add much. I just want to talk for a minute about a couple of things that stand out for me.<p>
The story says, “in those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered.” This reminds us that Jesus was born in a country occupied by Rome, a foreign power.<p>
And it tells us more. "All the world should be registered." The story joins the census of the whole world to the birth of Jesus. Jesus has come to be the saviour of all the world. It’s important to know that in the Roman Empire there was already someone called the Saviour of the world and the Son of God – that was the Emperor Augustus himself. There was a cult of the emperor. But the angels announce that the titles of God’s Son, Saviour, Lord don’t really belong to the Roman emperor, or any other ruler – they belong to Jesus, for in him alone God and humanity are joined, and real salvation, real peace, for the whole world, can only come from him.<p>
The other thing that stands out for me is who is told about this wonderful birth. Who do God’s angels come to with this news of great joy for all people? Not the emperor in Rome. Not the king the Romans put in place over the region. This news isn’t announced in a palace or temple or mansion. It is proclaimed in a field, to shepherds at their jobs outside a little village in a backwater province on the fringe of the empire, far from the centre of power.<p>
Now, we tend to be very sentimental about these Christmas card shepherds. But shepherds were simple, rural, working people, like a lot of folks here. They were rough around the edges, maybe like some folks here. But there’s more. They were poor. They had a bad reputation. Shepherds were what today might be scorned as white trash. Respectable people looked down on them. You could even say people despised them. Being a shepherd was not an honourable way to make a living. Staying out on the hills, they were unable to carry out the religious obligations of good, observant Jews. They couldn’t do what society expected of the heads of households. And they were seen as thieves, because they grazed their sheep on land belonging to other people. That shepherds - poor, powerless, dishonourable - would be the first to receive the good news of the Saviour and come to worship him shows God’s concern for the outcasts of society.<p>
That the shepherds are so privileged is a way of showing us that the birth of Jesus is for all people, including, even especially for, those who are on the margins, outside the elite, those who are shunned and excluded. The news of Christmas joy is for everyone. For everyone. For you and me. If you here tonight are country people, working people, if you are unpolished, if you have a bit of a bad reputation, if you have been in trouble, if you don’t have much, if you feel left out –the angels are trusting you first with the Christmas news that there is born to you this day a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord. And then remember that the shepherds were changed by what they had heard and seen, and they spread the news.<p>
There is a prayer about the shepherds, from Christians in Uganda.
<blockquote>Blessed are you, O Christ child,<br>
That shepherds, poorest and simplest of earthly people,<br>
Could yet kneel beside you,<br>
And look, level-eyed, into the face of God.</blockquote>
Dan Haywardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738708370158604594noreply@blogger.com0