Thanks to Martha Spong, of North Yarmouth Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, for her blog post that inspired this sermon.
Acts 2:14a, 36-41; Luke 24:13-35
Giving all glory and honour to God.
On this Mother’s Day, as I miss my mother, I remember that she had lots of mysterious folk wisdom. If your nose itched, it meant that you were going to kiss a fool. If you dropped a fork, a man was coming over. You could predict a baby’s gender by dangling a needle over the mother’s stomach. And a lot of the time this stuff came true. And both stories this morning have elements that are just as mysterious and unbelievable. How could the couple walking with a stranger from Jerusalem to Emmaus not recognize that he was Jesus? How could he just disappear after they recognized him as he blessed and broke the bread? How could 3000 people have their lives changed as they were baptized after Peter’s sermon?
It seems impossible. But it also seemed impossible when 3000 people had their lives changed, in New York and Washington and a field in Pennsylvania, on September 11, 2001. Their lives were taken away from them. And this week we have thought of that day, and those lives, and how our lives changed, too. On Sunday night I was using my computer, and on Twitter there was an announcement that President Obama would make an unscheduled national security announcement at 10:30. I just thought, uh oh. In movies this usually means that a meteor or comet is heading for the earth, or we have contacted aliens. But soon we knew that American commandos had killed Osama bin Laden.
And celebrations broke out in the United States. This is understandable, that people felt joy that a figure who had done such harm to Americans and so many others was dead, that they finally had a real victory in the war on terror, that this was part of healing the wounds of 9/11. And I can’t judge anyone who was celebrating. I only know what I believe our faith tells me as a follower of Jesus Christ about how I, and maybe we, can react to news like this.
Osama bin Laden was a criminal responsible for the mass murder of many innocent people, and exploiting and twisting the Islamic religion to promote hatred and division. As far as we know, he never showed any remorse for the harm he caused, and in fact bragged about it. Many Christians feel relief that he is no longer able to threaten us, and that is a legitimate reaction. But faced with the death of a person, I as a Christian cannot rejoice. That’s the way I see it. I can’t view the death of anyone, no matter how reprehensible their actions and beliefs, as an occasion for street parties like a win for a sports team.
Others have said that, hearing of bin Laden’s death, they had to rejoice in this news, and their faith justified them doing so. They could point to, among others, the song sung by the Hebrews in the book of Exodus when the Egyptian army was drowned in the sea, and the verses in Ecclesiastes, there is a time to mourn, and a time to dance, a time to love and a time to hate. And that is true. But it also says in the Old Testament, in Proverbs, ‘Do not rejoice when your enemies fall, and do not let your heart be glad when they stumble.’ The prophet Ezekiel quotes God as saying, ‘I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live.’ And Jesus tells us, in words that we discussed here in February, ‘Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.’
Let the wicked turn from their ways, and live. Osama bin Laden seemed bent on not turning from his ways. He was probably plotting the deaths of more people. So what do we do when the wicked will not turn away? Augustine, one of the great figures of the ancient church, said, yes, Jesus tells us to love our enemies, but there are times when love requires us to go to the aid of the innocent and to turn the wicked from their ways by using violence in the cause of justice. War could sometimes be a necessity to obtain peace, Augustine thought. Yet, he continued, even in war we as Christians must cherish the spirit of peacemakers. War is only a last resort in a just cause that tries to restore peace. It cannot be used for revenge and retribution on our enemies.
Although both the president and our prime minister say that justice has been done, for many people killing bin Laden is revenge. And as followers of Jesus we cannot bask in the satisfaction of vengeance. Now, refusing to embrace revenge does not mean that, even if we find it in our hearts to forgive bin Laden for his crimes, we forget his deeds, or his victims. But if we accept the unfortunate necessity of violence in our broken world, we must also recognize that all bloodshed, no matter how justified, only perpetuates the cycle of violence and counter-violence. This week, bin Laden may be dead, but there is still terrorism, there are still wars, and we know that his death will bring retaliation someday. The cycle continues.
Jesus shows us a better way. The couple who walk with him on the way to Emmaus tell him how disappointed they are, how Jesus had been a great prophet but was put to death. They had hoped he would be the one to redeem Israel. They had hoped he was the Christ, the Messiah, but the Messiah they expected, the warrior king who would expel the Roman occupiers from their land with arms and bloodshed. And so they don’t recognize Jesus, because he is not what they expect. And, so often, we don’t either, because we expect Jesus to follow us in the violent ways of the world we have made, rather than us following him in his way.
God refuses to oppose evil with evil. On the cross Jesus does not retaliate with violence against those who use violence; instead, he forgives them. And he rises from death to overcome evil and death. At Good Friday and Easter, Jesus conquers the hatred that inspires violence, and the revenge that inspires counter-violence, exposing the lie that makes this cycle of violence inevitable. He is not a warrior, but a lover, who gives himself in love rather than take life, who extends God’s healing love to all who suffer, and the forgiving love of God to all who use violence for their purposes – yes, even Osama bin Laden.
Jesus comes to bring the kingdom of God, whose story denies the story of the violent world where we live. We are trying as followers of Jesus to live in and to extend this realm of God, the realm of love and justice and peace, while living at the same time in a world of hatred and domination and brutality. We are citizens of heaven, yet with responsibilities and duties as citizens of Canada. And that is a struggle. That’s why there is no one Christian response to the death of Osama bin Laden, or the war in Afghanistan, or the war in Libya. There are many legitimate reactions as different believers interpret Scripture and their reason and experiences and tradition. The Apostle Paul tells the Philippians, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, and that is what each of us is trying to do as we are confronted with how we can respond in faith to issues of war and peace.
As I said, it is understandable that pent up rage and fear that has lasted nearly 10 years burst into celebration on Sunday. But I think that this could have been, and can still be, a somber time, a time for serious reflection, not a time to dance and chant slogans. A death like this should cause us to ponder the serious responsibilities each of us has before God to follow Jesus in his way of peace, and to commit ourselves to working for God’s realm of peace, and love, and justice. Osama bin Laden was about hatred, and division, and death. We cannot be.
Jesus says, all who draw the sword will die by the sword. He knew how much we love to get revenge, and how vengeance just spirals into an unending cycle of bloodshed. He knew that we are trapped in webs of violence that seem inescapable in this world. We cannot figure out ways for peoples to live together without war being a necessity to keep peace.
Yet there is hope. Look back through the story of the week before Easter, to Thursday night, when Jesus goes with his friends to the garden to pray. Peter and the others, knowing that Jesus is in danger, do what makes sense to them to protect him – they bring weapons. And when the authorities arrive to arrest Jesus, Peter draws his sword and strikes at one of them, and wounds him.
Peter, like us, is trapped in the violence of our world. He, like us, knows no other way to respond to threats. He, like us, can’t see how we can live in peace and security without threatening death and harm.
Yet Jesus tells Peter to put away his sword. And here Peter is in our reading today, preaching to the people of Jerusalem, ‘Repent every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven. The promise is for you, for your children, for all who are far away, everyone whom God calls. Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.’ Peter who drew the sword in anger has been changed by the words and the resurrection of Jesus into Peter who preaches the good news of peace, Peter who brings people into the community of Jesus who died and rose again to show that love is stronger than hatred. Peter is doing what he can to extend God’s realm, for true peace does not come because an enemy has been killed, but because God’s realm is at hand.
One of the earliest calls to celebrate Mother’s Day was in 1870. Julia Ward Howe, who earlier had written the hymn Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, wrote her Mother’s Day Proclamation in reaction to the carnage of the American Civil War. She stated that women need to say firmly, our sons cannot be trained to injure the sons of the women of another country. And she continued, the sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Women must meet to commemorate the dead, and then solemnly decide how the human family can live in peace.
On Mother’s Day, a day originally intended to be dedicated to peace, the news is still dominated by violence fostering more violence. Bin Laden is dead but little else has changed. Yet we are called, as Peter was called, as Julia Ward Howe called to other mothers, to be peacemakers. We are called to grieve, for the thousands who were murdered on September 11 and the lives that were changed, for the thousands who have died in the wars that followed, for those who will die as these wars drag on for years to come. We are called to pray, for the world, for our leaders, for the common good, for God’s kingdom to come. And we are called to look at ourselves and the opportunities we have to make peace. We are called to let Jesus and his resurrection change us as Peter was changed, called to travel the way with Jesus like that couple on the way to Emmaus, walk with him on the way to peace, not just in the imperfect choices we must make in matters of war and national security, but especially to build peace right here in our families and our community. And maybe then we will reach out to a stranger, and in gestures of friendship we will recognize Jesus, and we will run back to the community with this good news and to embody the grace and love of Christ. May it be so.
Saturday, May 07, 2011
Sunday, April 17, 2011
How to Vote: Sermon, Palm Sunday, April 17, 2011
Matthew 21:1-11
Giving all glory and honour to God.
My family on my father’s side has always been quite political. One of ancestors sat in the first New Brunswick Legislature in the 1780s. My grandmother’s family, the Hatfields, were all Liberals until my great-uncle Heber became a Conservative. That was youthful rebellion at the start of the 20th century, you defied your parents by being a Tory. The Liberal riding association would meet in the Hatfield general store, and Heber could hear everything through the stove pipe, and he would tell the Tories all the Liberal plans. He went on to be elected as a Member of Parliament, and his son Richard was Premier of New Brunswick. The family was still divided. In his first election Richard was the Conservative candidate and his brother-in-law was the Liberal. Richard’s sister Rheta never said whom she voted for in that election, her brother or her husband.
I’m thinking about this as last year on Palm Sunday I preached that 20 centuries ago there would in fact have been two parades. One stars Jesus, and today we have had our own version of this parade, people waving palm branches and laying their cloaks on the road and shouting Hosanna. The other parade stars the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate. For before the festivals he and his troops would march from the coast, to beef up the garrison in the fortress so that the pilgrims can be monitored and the power of the Roman empire displayed.
These two parades are such a contrast. The kingdom of God and the empire of this world. Jesus is indeed a king, but a completely different kind of king than anyone expects, the Son of God, a king who comes to bring a realm of love and peace and justice. Pilate represents the Roman emperor, who is also called the Son of God, and claims to rule with peace and justice, but with the world’s ways with armies and navies and legislation and taxes.
Today, long after and far away from Jerusalem in the year 30 or so, these two parades continue. And we participate in both at the same time. That’s right, we try to walk with Jesus on his way, where our duty is to love God and each other and seek justice and resist evil. And we live in civil society, in a country that has a military and taxes and laws just like the Roman Empire, and we are citizens here with duties and responsibilities. Just as in the time of Jesus, we have to live faithfully in empire.
We have a responsibility which didn’t exist in the time of Jesus, to elect our representatives in elections for the federal Parliament, the provincial Parliament, and the township council. We had municipal elections last year, in the fall we will vote provincially, and right now we’re in the middle of a federal election campaign. And we see lawn signs and media stories for the election in our riding, Stormont-Dundas-South Glengarry, and we’re deciding which candidate we will support on May 2nd. So today’s sermon is called How to Vote.
This doesn’t mean I’m going to say who to vote for. My family has an allergy to being told in church which party to elect, as my mother grew up in Quebec during the period when you were told in church that you must vote for the Union Nationale government of Premier Maurice Duplessis. This has horrified us ever since. And, as I said, my father’s family was split between two political loyalties, but he saw that the relatives who voted for one party were no better Christians, or no worse, than ones who voted for the other. I’m saying that a follower of Jesus can in good conscience support any party and any candidate in this election, and it will be a legitimate choice. There have been times and places where believers in Jesus could not in good faith vote for a certain party, but we are fortunate to live in Canada today where it’s not unchristian to vote a certain way.
So I don’t think, and the United Church of Canada doesn’t think, that the church should be a partisan cheerleader for a political party or candidate. As Canadian Christians we can vote for whomever we wish. But as people of faith, our beliefs impact on every aspect of our lives, including our political choices. Our faith does have something to say about voting. Our vote is an act of faith, for it is a witness to what we believe, a chance to make a difference for the common good. So this sermon is about how to vote – how to choose.
God calls us to be engaged in the world, to play a role in shaping society, to be witnesses to the good news of Jesus Christ all the time, including during elections. We have a right and a responsibility as citizens of Canada to participate in elections, and we have a responsibility as citizens of heaven to bring our values to the ballot box (with us as we go behind that cardboard screen and make our mark on the ballot paper). So here are some suggestions for how to vote.
The first thing is to vote. When my great uncle was elected in 1940, 70% of eligible Canadians voted. In 2008 it was only 59%, and among younger people it’s very low. And, with our duty to love and serve others, if we are going to vote, we need to check if our neighbours need help getting to the polls.
We have to educate ourselves about where the parties and candidates stand. Our values as followers of Jesus include pursuing the common good, overcoming poverty and injustice, and caring for the Earth, and these are benchmarks for us as we look over the party platforms. We have to evaluate the promises made during the campaign, asking about each promise if it is just, and inclusive of everyone. And we can ask questions informed by our faith as we engage in debate, at all candidates meetings and at our door and in letters and online, asking where the candidates stand on issues like criminal justice, democracy, peace, agriculture, debt and taxes, immigration, health care, poverty, justice for aboriginal peoples, the environment, and others. The United Church has an election kit that discusses these issues, and there is information in the bulletin.
And we can pray, for the party leaders, candidates, election workers, and for us as voters. The Book of Common Prayer has a prayer before an election, and as we prepare ourselves to bring our faith to how we vote, let’s pray it.
Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom: Guide and direct, we humbly ask you, the minds of all of us who are called at this time to elect fit persons to serve in the House of Commons. Grant that in the exercise of our choice we may promote your glory, and the welfare of this country, And this we beg for the sake of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.
Giving all glory and honour to God.
My family on my father’s side has always been quite political. One of ancestors sat in the first New Brunswick Legislature in the 1780s. My grandmother’s family, the Hatfields, were all Liberals until my great-uncle Heber became a Conservative. That was youthful rebellion at the start of the 20th century, you defied your parents by being a Tory. The Liberal riding association would meet in the Hatfield general store, and Heber could hear everything through the stove pipe, and he would tell the Tories all the Liberal plans. He went on to be elected as a Member of Parliament, and his son Richard was Premier of New Brunswick. The family was still divided. In his first election Richard was the Conservative candidate and his brother-in-law was the Liberal. Richard’s sister Rheta never said whom she voted for in that election, her brother or her husband.
I’m thinking about this as last year on Palm Sunday I preached that 20 centuries ago there would in fact have been two parades. One stars Jesus, and today we have had our own version of this parade, people waving palm branches and laying their cloaks on the road and shouting Hosanna. The other parade stars the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate. For before the festivals he and his troops would march from the coast, to beef up the garrison in the fortress so that the pilgrims can be monitored and the power of the Roman empire displayed.
These two parades are such a contrast. The kingdom of God and the empire of this world. Jesus is indeed a king, but a completely different kind of king than anyone expects, the Son of God, a king who comes to bring a realm of love and peace and justice. Pilate represents the Roman emperor, who is also called the Son of God, and claims to rule with peace and justice, but with the world’s ways with armies and navies and legislation and taxes.
Today, long after and far away from Jerusalem in the year 30 or so, these two parades continue. And we participate in both at the same time. That’s right, we try to walk with Jesus on his way, where our duty is to love God and each other and seek justice and resist evil. And we live in civil society, in a country that has a military and taxes and laws just like the Roman Empire, and we are citizens here with duties and responsibilities. Just as in the time of Jesus, we have to live faithfully in empire.
We have a responsibility which didn’t exist in the time of Jesus, to elect our representatives in elections for the federal Parliament, the provincial Parliament, and the township council. We had municipal elections last year, in the fall we will vote provincially, and right now we’re in the middle of a federal election campaign. And we see lawn signs and media stories for the election in our riding, Stormont-Dundas-South Glengarry, and we’re deciding which candidate we will support on May 2nd. So today’s sermon is called How to Vote.
This doesn’t mean I’m going to say who to vote for. My family has an allergy to being told in church which party to elect, as my mother grew up in Quebec during the period when you were told in church that you must vote for the Union Nationale government of Premier Maurice Duplessis. This has horrified us ever since. And, as I said, my father’s family was split between two political loyalties, but he saw that the relatives who voted for one party were no better Christians, or no worse, than ones who voted for the other. I’m saying that a follower of Jesus can in good conscience support any party and any candidate in this election, and it will be a legitimate choice. There have been times and places where believers in Jesus could not in good faith vote for a certain party, but we are fortunate to live in Canada today where it’s not unchristian to vote a certain way.
So I don’t think, and the United Church of Canada doesn’t think, that the church should be a partisan cheerleader for a political party or candidate. As Canadian Christians we can vote for whomever we wish. But as people of faith, our beliefs impact on every aspect of our lives, including our political choices. Our faith does have something to say about voting. Our vote is an act of faith, for it is a witness to what we believe, a chance to make a difference for the common good. So this sermon is about how to vote – how to choose.
God calls us to be engaged in the world, to play a role in shaping society, to be witnesses to the good news of Jesus Christ all the time, including during elections. We have a right and a responsibility as citizens of Canada to participate in elections, and we have a responsibility as citizens of heaven to bring our values to the ballot box (with us as we go behind that cardboard screen and make our mark on the ballot paper). So here are some suggestions for how to vote.
The first thing is to vote. When my great uncle was elected in 1940, 70% of eligible Canadians voted. In 2008 it was only 59%, and among younger people it’s very low. And, with our duty to love and serve others, if we are going to vote, we need to check if our neighbours need help getting to the polls.
We have to educate ourselves about where the parties and candidates stand. Our values as followers of Jesus include pursuing the common good, overcoming poverty and injustice, and caring for the Earth, and these are benchmarks for us as we look over the party platforms. We have to evaluate the promises made during the campaign, asking about each promise if it is just, and inclusive of everyone. And we can ask questions informed by our faith as we engage in debate, at all candidates meetings and at our door and in letters and online, asking where the candidates stand on issues like criminal justice, democracy, peace, agriculture, debt and taxes, immigration, health care, poverty, justice for aboriginal peoples, the environment, and others. The United Church has an election kit that discusses these issues, and there is information in the bulletin.
And we can pray, for the party leaders, candidates, election workers, and for us as voters. The Book of Common Prayer has a prayer before an election, and as we prepare ourselves to bring our faith to how we vote, let’s pray it.
Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom: Guide and direct, we humbly ask you, the minds of all of us who are called at this time to elect fit persons to serve in the House of Commons. Grant that in the exercise of our choice we may promote your glory, and the welfare of this country, And this we beg for the sake of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Quotations From the Chairman
I have a little book I got at a garage sale, published in 1969, Quotations from Chairman Jesus. Its title was meant to be a play on the ubiquitous Red Book of Chairman Mao's quotations, always being brandished by Red Guards in photos from China during the Cultural Revolution. We're a lot less sentimental about the Cultural Revolution and its human toll than people were 40 years ago.
The book itself is a collection of quotes by and about Jesus from the New Testament and some other early church writings, but I have always been moved by the poetic foreword by Daniel Berrigan, whose name was prominent in Christian circles during the 1960s. Here is the first part of his poem, written for a different time of cultural unrest and war in Vietnam (and language that wasn't inclusive), but speaking with fresh words to our time of war in Libya and Afghanistan:
The gospel of Jesus is spoken in a world
intoxicated with death
mesmerized by death
convinced of the necessary rule of death
skilfully conniving with death
technologizing death
acceding to the omnipresence of death
And Jesus says No
to this omnivorous power
So his word makes the slight
all but imperceptible difference
(which is finally the only difference).
A good man, himself powerless,
stands at the side of powerless men
and says to death No
for them for himself
Can any of you
place before you a single child, smiling
squirming in your arms; and say
The death of this child is a fact of modern war; I accede
to that death. I regret it of course
but what can one do? We have to destroy
in order to save; villages, women, children.
The system traps us all...
The system; horrible word! Can the system
trap the conscience of a free man? Traps are for
animals; freedom is for men. I cannot speak
for you but I will not wait upon Caesar
to instruct me in God's word. I am a man. I can read;
If a man will save his life, let him lose it.
I say to you, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.
Whatever you do to the least of these my brothers,
you do to me.
Blessed are you who suffer persecution for justice's sake...
Jesus had nothing to say to "systems", except to deny
their power over him.
He said in effect, violence stops here (pointing to his body)
He said in effect, it is better to die for others
than to live (live?) in a trap.
Be concrete be immediate! Imagine the world!
If you embrace a child, can you consent
to the death of a child? each human face
leads you (follow!) to every human face.
I can only tell you what I believe. I believe
I can be saved only by Jesus Christ.
The book itself is a collection of quotes by and about Jesus from the New Testament and some other early church writings, but I have always been moved by the poetic foreword by Daniel Berrigan, whose name was prominent in Christian circles during the 1960s. Here is the first part of his poem, written for a different time of cultural unrest and war in Vietnam (and language that wasn't inclusive), but speaking with fresh words to our time of war in Libya and Afghanistan:
The gospel of Jesus is spoken in a world
intoxicated with death
mesmerized by death
convinced of the necessary rule of death
skilfully conniving with death
technologizing death
acceding to the omnipresence of death
And Jesus says No
to this omnivorous power
So his word makes the slight
all but imperceptible difference
(which is finally the only difference).
A good man, himself powerless,
stands at the side of powerless men
and says to death No
for them for himself
Can any of you
place before you a single child, smiling
squirming in your arms; and say
The death of this child is a fact of modern war; I accede
to that death. I regret it of course
but what can one do? We have to destroy
in order to save; villages, women, children.
The system traps us all...
The system; horrible word! Can the system
trap the conscience of a free man? Traps are for
animals; freedom is for men. I cannot speak
for you but I will not wait upon Caesar
to instruct me in God's word. I am a man. I can read;
If a man will save his life, let him lose it.
I say to you, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.
Whatever you do to the least of these my brothers,
you do to me.
Blessed are you who suffer persecution for justice's sake...
Jesus had nothing to say to "systems", except to deny
their power over him.
He said in effect, violence stops here (pointing to his body)
He said in effect, it is better to die for others
than to live (live?) in a trap.
Be concrete be immediate! Imagine the world!
If you embrace a child, can you consent
to the death of a child? each human face
leads you (follow!) to every human face.
I can only tell you what I believe. I believe
I cannot be saved by foreign policies
I cannot be saved by sexual revolutions
I cannot be saved by the gross national product
I cannot be saved by nuclear deterrents
I cannot be saved by aldermen, priests, artists,plumbers, city planners, social engineers,
nor by the Vatican, nor by the World Buddhist Association,
nor by Hitler nor by Joan of Arc
nor by angels nor archangels nor by powers and dominations
I can be saved only by Jesus Christ.
Saturday, April 09, 2011
Resurrection and Life: Sermon, April 10, 2011
John 11:1-45
Giving all glory and honour to God.
Lazarus is dead. Our story today is about death. In our society we try not to think too much about death, even though death is our constant companion. We see hundreds of people die fake deaths in TV crime shows and mysteries, and real deaths in the news from Libya and the Ivory Coast and Japan. All of us have experienced in some way the death of a loved one or friend, and probably quite a few deaths. We may have planned for our own death, for all of us are walking around with an expiry date on us, a date we don’t know, but at some point many of us try to get ready through wills and estate planning and funeral pre-arrangement. But death isn’t a topic we like to talk about. It’s unpleasant. It makes us uncomfortable. It scares us.
But this story allows us to reflect on death which will come to us all, and how we react to death among us. Lazarus is a close friend of Jesus, the brother of Mary and Martha, and Jesus likes to stop in at his friends’ home and rest and be entertained. And Jesus gets word that Lazarus is sick. We can all relate to this, hearing that a friend is ill. And in this conversation his followers don’t understand what Jesus means. Jesus says, ‘Our friend Lazarus is sleeping, but I am going to wake him up.’ And they say, well, if he’s only sleeping, he will get well. Once again, the words of Jesus are taken too literally – at that time, sleep was a less harsh term for death, just as we avoid the word dead and say that someone has passed away or has been called home. But then Jesus is direct; he says, ‘Lazarus is dead.’ This sounds hard. Some of us prefer less direct ways of saying this, and avoid saying ‘dead,’ referring instead to someone passing. But sometimes we need to hear plainly. Your friend is dead. Your spouse is dead. The truth may be painful and catastrophic, but hearing it is the first step in healing.
So when Jesus and his group arrive, Lazarus has been dead and buried for four days. And Martha says to Jesus, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died. Even now I know that whatever you ask God, God will give you.’ Mary tells Jesus too, if you had been here Lazarus wouldn’t have died. What human, honest words. We try to detect the tone of voice behind these words, and the sisters seem angry. That is one of the stages we go through in our grief when a loved one has died. The sisters can’t keep back their feelings. But they can’t escape from their faith in Jesus either, and I hear this very human mixture of anger and belief when I talk with people in sorrow. The sisters know that Jesus has a unique relationship with God. Martha confesses that Jesus is the Christ, the one promised by God.
Mary and Martha are just like us, for we say too, in hurt and in resentment, if only God had been here, if only God had healed my parent or spouse or sibling or child, if only God had prevented this happening, I would not be going through this pain.
Yet Jesus goes through pain himself, for next in the story it says, ‘When Jesus saw Mary crying and the people who had come with her crying also, he was deeply disturbed and troubled.’ Next is the answer to many trivia questions, what is the shortest sentence in the Bible? John 11:35 – ‘Jesus wept.’ It is indeed the shortest sentence in the Bible, and one of the most moving, and astonishing. Jesus, the Word of God made human, God’s child, knows weeping, knows deep grief, knows being moved by the sorrow and hurt of his friends. The word translated as ‘deeply disturbed’ is really more powerful. In Greek it could also be used to describe a horse snorting – it’s trying to convey that such strong emotions seize Jesus that he groans involuntarily.
Here Jesus, who shows us God, is indeed showing us what God is like. Jesus doesn’t show us a passionless and compassionless God who ignores our suffering. Jesus shows us God afflicted with grief as we are, God caring so much that God’s heart is racked by anguish at the agony of God’s people, God sharing our tears. Jesus wept. God weeps.
And if Jesus weeps, God weeps, we can weep too. So often we are told, stay strong, don’t give in to tears. Boys in particular are instructed, men don’t cry. And we express admiration for family and friends who don’t cry at the funeral home or the funeral service, saying, look how composed they are – when in our grief we should act as Jesus does, we should let out our tears and our anger and our upheaval rather than keep them bottled up inside.
Every death is tremendously upsetting to the family and friends of the deceased, even if it has been expected for a long time, whether it’s the only death that day or part of a natural disaster that kills thousands of people. So far this story seems to be about just another death, no matter how much sorrow Mary and Martha and Jesus experience. But now it takes a turn. Jesus is very emotional as he comes to the tomb, with its entrance covered by a large stone, and says, ‘Remove the stone.’ And Martha tells him, ‘The smell will be awful! He’s been dead four days.’ In the King James Bible, she says, ‘He stinketh.’ But resurrections happen where things are messy and smelly, not in clean, perfect surroundings. They do move the stone, Jesus prays and then shouts ‘Lazarus, come out!’ And the dead man does come out, still wrapped in the burial cloths used in those days, and Jesus says, ‘Untie him and let him go.’
Well, that’s amazing. Jesus raises Lazarus from death, after four days. Scholars argue about how much of this story is historical and how much is mythical. No one knows if things took place in the way this story is written. But it doesn’t really matter whether or not Jesus literally raised a dead man to life on a certain date in history. For John, writing this story, Lazarus being restored to physical life isn’t what matters most. What does matter, what matters a lot, is what the story tells us, that God in Jesus loves so much that tears flow and emotions become overwhelming. And it matters the most what Jesus tells Martha: ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live, even though they die.’ That is the whole point of this story.
We often hear these words at funerals. This has been called the greatest of the ‘I am’ statements Jesus makes in John’s Gospel, perhaps the greatest saying in the whole Bible. I am the resurrection and the life. We have probably heard these words many times, but we can only grasp at their meaning. For when Jesus refers in John’s Gospel to life, or eternal life, or living forever, he doesn’t necessarily mean what we hear.
Jesus means life in this life. Resurrection and life for him mean resurrection right now, not from physical death, but from living as if we are dead, dead to sin, lost to all that is worth calling life. We may live selfishly, as if we are dead to the needs of others. We may live with insensitivity, as if we are dead to the feelings of others. We may live with hopelessness, spiritually dead. And Jesus calls us from these deaths within life, unbinds us from selfishness and insensitivity and greed and despair, and sets us free to live true lives here and now. As he said, I have come that they may have life, and more abundant life.
And that is good news. Jesus calls to us as he called to Lazarus, and frees us from spiritual death in the lives we live now. But is that all, wonderful as that is? Does this story have anything for us as we contemplate physical death? Yes, it does, and Martha realizes this as she talks about the resurrection at the last day. Jesus is the resurrection and the life in this world, and the next. In him we are certain that death is not the end. William Barclay writes in his commentary on John, in Jesus we know that we are on the way, not to the sunset, but to the sunrise, that death is a gate into a new kind of life.
When we trust in Jesus, when we accept his gift of new life, we enter into a new relationship with God, and into a new life in which life has a new beauty, a new strength, and is free from the fear and futility of life without faith in God. This life in Christ is so rich and beautiful that it cannot end in death. When we believe that God is as Jesus shows God to be, infinitely loving and forgiving and accepting, then we need not fear death, for death at the end of our lives here means going into the eternal joy of God’s loving presence. The Apostle Paul tells the Thessalonians, don’t grieve in the same way as others who have no hope, for since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, so we also believe that God will raise those who have died. And Paul says, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us, for I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor things nor things to come, can separate us from the love of God that is ours in Christ Jesus our Lord. Where, O death is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? Death may still be disturbing to us, may still frighten us no matter how much we trust God, but we have the hope that in death we do not perish, for Jesus has defeated death and has taken away its sting. He is the resurrection and the life.
And that is what we take away from this story. That is the truth behind the questions about what may have happened in history. There is another story, about a troop ship returning across the Pacific Ocean at the end of the Second World War. And an army chaplain led a Bible study on this story of Lazarus, and after they studied it an American Marine came to him and said, “Everything in that chapter is pointing at me.” He said that he had been living in hell, the hell of war and of trouble he had been in, so that he felt that his life was ruined. He felt dead. But he told the chaplain, “After reading this I have come alive again. I know that this resurrection Jesus is talking about is real here and now, for he has raised me from death to life.” In his sin and guilt that Marine came to know Jesus as the resurrection and the life, true and abundant life in the present, and true and abundant life that death cannot bring to an end. He knew, and so can we. Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Giving all glory and honour to God.
Lazarus is dead. Our story today is about death. In our society we try not to think too much about death, even though death is our constant companion. We see hundreds of people die fake deaths in TV crime shows and mysteries, and real deaths in the news from Libya and the Ivory Coast and Japan. All of us have experienced in some way the death of a loved one or friend, and probably quite a few deaths. We may have planned for our own death, for all of us are walking around with an expiry date on us, a date we don’t know, but at some point many of us try to get ready through wills and estate planning and funeral pre-arrangement. But death isn’t a topic we like to talk about. It’s unpleasant. It makes us uncomfortable. It scares us.
But this story allows us to reflect on death which will come to us all, and how we react to death among us. Lazarus is a close friend of Jesus, the brother of Mary and Martha, and Jesus likes to stop in at his friends’ home and rest and be entertained. And Jesus gets word that Lazarus is sick. We can all relate to this, hearing that a friend is ill. And in this conversation his followers don’t understand what Jesus means. Jesus says, ‘Our friend Lazarus is sleeping, but I am going to wake him up.’ And they say, well, if he’s only sleeping, he will get well. Once again, the words of Jesus are taken too literally – at that time, sleep was a less harsh term for death, just as we avoid the word dead and say that someone has passed away or has been called home. But then Jesus is direct; he says, ‘Lazarus is dead.’ This sounds hard. Some of us prefer less direct ways of saying this, and avoid saying ‘dead,’ referring instead to someone passing. But sometimes we need to hear plainly. Your friend is dead. Your spouse is dead. The truth may be painful and catastrophic, but hearing it is the first step in healing.
So when Jesus and his group arrive, Lazarus has been dead and buried for four days. And Martha says to Jesus, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died. Even now I know that whatever you ask God, God will give you.’ Mary tells Jesus too, if you had been here Lazarus wouldn’t have died. What human, honest words. We try to detect the tone of voice behind these words, and the sisters seem angry. That is one of the stages we go through in our grief when a loved one has died. The sisters can’t keep back their feelings. But they can’t escape from their faith in Jesus either, and I hear this very human mixture of anger and belief when I talk with people in sorrow. The sisters know that Jesus has a unique relationship with God. Martha confesses that Jesus is the Christ, the one promised by God.
Mary and Martha are just like us, for we say too, in hurt and in resentment, if only God had been here, if only God had healed my parent or spouse or sibling or child, if only God had prevented this happening, I would not be going through this pain.
Yet Jesus goes through pain himself, for next in the story it says, ‘When Jesus saw Mary crying and the people who had come with her crying also, he was deeply disturbed and troubled.’ Next is the answer to many trivia questions, what is the shortest sentence in the Bible? John 11:35 – ‘Jesus wept.’ It is indeed the shortest sentence in the Bible, and one of the most moving, and astonishing. Jesus, the Word of God made human, God’s child, knows weeping, knows deep grief, knows being moved by the sorrow and hurt of his friends. The word translated as ‘deeply disturbed’ is really more powerful. In Greek it could also be used to describe a horse snorting – it’s trying to convey that such strong emotions seize Jesus that he groans involuntarily.
Here Jesus, who shows us God, is indeed showing us what God is like. Jesus doesn’t show us a passionless and compassionless God who ignores our suffering. Jesus shows us God afflicted with grief as we are, God caring so much that God’s heart is racked by anguish at the agony of God’s people, God sharing our tears. Jesus wept. God weeps.
And if Jesus weeps, God weeps, we can weep too. So often we are told, stay strong, don’t give in to tears. Boys in particular are instructed, men don’t cry. And we express admiration for family and friends who don’t cry at the funeral home or the funeral service, saying, look how composed they are – when in our grief we should act as Jesus does, we should let out our tears and our anger and our upheaval rather than keep them bottled up inside.
Every death is tremendously upsetting to the family and friends of the deceased, even if it has been expected for a long time, whether it’s the only death that day or part of a natural disaster that kills thousands of people. So far this story seems to be about just another death, no matter how much sorrow Mary and Martha and Jesus experience. But now it takes a turn. Jesus is very emotional as he comes to the tomb, with its entrance covered by a large stone, and says, ‘Remove the stone.’ And Martha tells him, ‘The smell will be awful! He’s been dead four days.’ In the King James Bible, she says, ‘He stinketh.’ But resurrections happen where things are messy and smelly, not in clean, perfect surroundings. They do move the stone, Jesus prays and then shouts ‘Lazarus, come out!’ And the dead man does come out, still wrapped in the burial cloths used in those days, and Jesus says, ‘Untie him and let him go.’
Well, that’s amazing. Jesus raises Lazarus from death, after four days. Scholars argue about how much of this story is historical and how much is mythical. No one knows if things took place in the way this story is written. But it doesn’t really matter whether or not Jesus literally raised a dead man to life on a certain date in history. For John, writing this story, Lazarus being restored to physical life isn’t what matters most. What does matter, what matters a lot, is what the story tells us, that God in Jesus loves so much that tears flow and emotions become overwhelming. And it matters the most what Jesus tells Martha: ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live, even though they die.’ That is the whole point of this story.
We often hear these words at funerals. This has been called the greatest of the ‘I am’ statements Jesus makes in John’s Gospel, perhaps the greatest saying in the whole Bible. I am the resurrection and the life. We have probably heard these words many times, but we can only grasp at their meaning. For when Jesus refers in John’s Gospel to life, or eternal life, or living forever, he doesn’t necessarily mean what we hear.
Jesus means life in this life. Resurrection and life for him mean resurrection right now, not from physical death, but from living as if we are dead, dead to sin, lost to all that is worth calling life. We may live selfishly, as if we are dead to the needs of others. We may live with insensitivity, as if we are dead to the feelings of others. We may live with hopelessness, spiritually dead. And Jesus calls us from these deaths within life, unbinds us from selfishness and insensitivity and greed and despair, and sets us free to live true lives here and now. As he said, I have come that they may have life, and more abundant life.
And that is good news. Jesus calls to us as he called to Lazarus, and frees us from spiritual death in the lives we live now. But is that all, wonderful as that is? Does this story have anything for us as we contemplate physical death? Yes, it does, and Martha realizes this as she talks about the resurrection at the last day. Jesus is the resurrection and the life in this world, and the next. In him we are certain that death is not the end. William Barclay writes in his commentary on John, in Jesus we know that we are on the way, not to the sunset, but to the sunrise, that death is a gate into a new kind of life.
When we trust in Jesus, when we accept his gift of new life, we enter into a new relationship with God, and into a new life in which life has a new beauty, a new strength, and is free from the fear and futility of life without faith in God. This life in Christ is so rich and beautiful that it cannot end in death. When we believe that God is as Jesus shows God to be, infinitely loving and forgiving and accepting, then we need not fear death, for death at the end of our lives here means going into the eternal joy of God’s loving presence. The Apostle Paul tells the Thessalonians, don’t grieve in the same way as others who have no hope, for since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, so we also believe that God will raise those who have died. And Paul says, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us, for I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor things nor things to come, can separate us from the love of God that is ours in Christ Jesus our Lord. Where, O death is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? Death may still be disturbing to us, may still frighten us no matter how much we trust God, but we have the hope that in death we do not perish, for Jesus has defeated death and has taken away its sting. He is the resurrection and the life.
And that is what we take away from this story. That is the truth behind the questions about what may have happened in history. There is another story, about a troop ship returning across the Pacific Ocean at the end of the Second World War. And an army chaplain led a Bible study on this story of Lazarus, and after they studied it an American Marine came to him and said, “Everything in that chapter is pointing at me.” He said that he had been living in hell, the hell of war and of trouble he had been in, so that he felt that his life was ruined. He felt dead. But he told the chaplain, “After reading this I have come alive again. I know that this resurrection Jesus is talking about is real here and now, for he has raised me from death to life.” In his sin and guilt that Marine came to know Jesus as the resurrection and the life, true and abundant life in the present, and true and abundant life that death cannot bring to an end. He knew, and so can we. Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Sunday, April 03, 2011
Acts of God: Sermon, April 3, 2011
I was greatly inspired by Brian McLaren's response to John Piper on theodicy in the wake of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Brian's article struck a chord with me, that is certainly reflected in this sermon.
Psalm 23; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41
Giving all glory and honour to God.
Jesus heals a man who was born blind. Our reading is referred to in the hymn Amazing Grace, which quotes the blind man in the story, “I was blind but now I see.” This could also be the story Hank Williams mentions in his song I Saw the Light: “Just like the blind man who God gave back his sight, praise the Lord, I saw the light.”
And the followers of Jesus ask him, “Who sinned so that this man was born blind, him or his parents?” At that time people believed that illness was the result of sin; if you were blind or deaf or had a physical deformity, it wasn’t because of bacteria or genetics or some environmental cause, but was a punishment for something you had done wrong or your parents had done wrong. And Jesus breaks this link between sin and sickness; he says that neither this man nor his parents sinned to cause his blindness, and heals him.
In the story the Pharisees keep saying that the man was blind because of his sin. Even the followers of Jesus ask who sinned to make the man blind, him or his parents. They are trying to figure out why bad things happen to people, and their answer is that the people must be bad. And we still struggle with this. We may not think that sin causes disease or disability. But we look around the world and see natural disasters, floods and earthquakes and tsunamis and volcanoes and hurricanes. In just the last year or so we have watched flooding in Pakistan, and quakes that have devastated Haiti, and New Zealand, and Japan, and places we hear less about in China and Burma, and we are still hearing about New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina, and the Indian Ocean tsunami. And we ask for answers, just as the Pharisees and followers of Jesus did, 20 centuries ago. It’s an age-old question: why do the innocent suffer? It’s easier to come up with answers in the case of war and poverty, where sin does play a role – but it’s the reverse of the attitudes on display in this story, for it isn’t the sin of the victims causing their suffering, but the collective sin of societies and empires that perpetuates violence and injustice.
But it’s different in the case of natural disasters, because they are, after all, natural. Society doesn’t cause the earth to shake or winds to blow or volcanoes to erupt, although humanity’s impact on the earth’s climate may play a role in hurricanes and flooding. But the earthquake and tsunami that devastated part of Japan and killed 10,000 people – that was completely natural, the result of two giant plates in the planet’s crust grinding together.
So did someone sin to cause this? Some Christians have said yes, the disaster in Japan was brought about by the country’s sins in the Japanese aggression that led to World War II in the Pacific, 70 years ago. Others have laid the blame on all of us, saying that God is punishing humanity as a whole for wandering from the right path. But many Christians, the majority according to opinion polls, do not believe this.
We call these natural disasters acts of God. If you read your home insurance policy, or travelers’ insurance if you’re going anywhere, it refers to acts of God.
So there is even bigger and more difficult question for us, if human sin doesn’t cause these catastrophes. Are these truly acts of God? Did God make the earth heave in Japan and a tidal wave wash over towns and people, killing thousands and leaving millions more suffering in their grief and homelessness and under threat of nuclear radiation? Well, some pretty respected Christians say yes. A prominent theologian named John Piper points out that in the Bible earthquakes are attributed to God, because God is Lord of heaven and earth. Nature does not have a will of its own. God controls everything. Nothing is random. So, somehow, God has a good and wise purpose for this tragedy, as God has hundreds of thousands of purposes, which remain hidden to us until they are finally revealed at the end of time.
So there’s an answer. God took thousands of lives, as one step toward achieving an unknown purpose in God’s plan for good. We have probably heard this before, about deaths and cancer and all kinds of events we don’t understand: It’s God’s will. It’s God’s plan. This is a simple answer, clear cut, and it solves all our problems about why there is suffering and where God is in tragedies.
I think this is trying to get at the truth, as God’s purposes are indeed unknown, but I’m not sure this is a complete, or satisfying, or helpful, answer. I’m not sure that the explanation of evil and suffering in the world is this simple. And I’m not sure that this does solve our problems, as what seems simple can just get more complicated as we ponder whether this makes God seem, well, less loving than heartless and uncaring. We may wonder if this answer is really spiritually blind, blind to who God is.
We know that the Bible says that God is love. We know that the Bible says that Jesus came to show us what God is like. So what do we see Jesus doing, in this story and the other stories we read? Another prominent Christian thinker, Brian McLaren, and I like his work a lot, says that the scandal of God becoming human in Jesus is how Jesus acts. Jesus doesn’t take control. He doesn’t micro manage. He doesn’t eliminate all suffering and evil, yet he doesn’t cause any additional suffering and evil either. He doesn’t give in to the temptation offered to him, to take power over all the nations of the world and become an earthly ruler.
Instead, look at what Jesus is doing at the beginning of today’s story. He’s walking along. He’s on his way from one place to another. Brian McLaren points out that that’s what Jesus does, goes quietly from town to town, confronting suffering and evil, urging people to turn away from their sins that inflict suffering and evil on others, and healing and liberating people from suffering and evil so they can see spiritually, people like the man born blind. Jesus doesn’t force this healing on anyone; he allows them in faith to accept it, and to become, as the letter to the Ephesians says, children of the light. And then, at the end of this season of Lent, we will hear again how God ultimately deals with suffering and evil, in Jesus on the cross: in pain and tears, taking all of the suffering of the world into the heart of God and healing it, no through vengeance, but through forgiveness and love. Martin Luther talked about how God is made known to us, not in glory, not in control, but in the suffering of Jesus on the cross. God’s power and God’s kingdom appear in weakness.
So, if we look at our universe with spiritual eyes, eyes of faith, maybe God is not a dictator. The realm of God, the kingdom of God, is not totalitarian. Instead, perhaps God allows the universe to evolve on its own. So possibly the way God rules is not through absolute control, but through absolute commitment to be with us whatever happens, working to bring healing from suffering, good from evil, hope from despair. This is how we see God appear to us in Jesus, the king who is born as a tiny, vulnerable baby, the king who washes his friends’ feet, the king whose power is not through conquering and violence but through suffering and dying, and rising again. God is not waving an almighty hand and sweeping away homes and lives; God is wrapping us in loving arms and holding us close. God is present with us in suffering, feeling our agony, crying with us, sharing our loss, bearing our hurt, moving in the Spirit to give us courage and to empower us to offer empathy and aid to victims of catastrophe, in huge disasters like Japan, and the personal disasters we experience of sickness and fire and death.
This may not be a complete answer. But, you know, the best answers to the problem of suffering and evil in the world work better in a classroom or from a church pulpit than in a hospital room, or beneath a pile of rubble from an earthquake. When we are in pain, or see pain in our world, an intellectual answer is of little comfort. We can’t always, or ever, understand what is happening when tragedies strike and lives and land are devastated. But we can know this – when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, God is with us.
Psalm 23; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41
Giving all glory and honour to God.
Jesus heals a man who was born blind. Our reading is referred to in the hymn Amazing Grace, which quotes the blind man in the story, “I was blind but now I see.” This could also be the story Hank Williams mentions in his song I Saw the Light: “Just like the blind man who God gave back his sight, praise the Lord, I saw the light.”
And the followers of Jesus ask him, “Who sinned so that this man was born blind, him or his parents?” At that time people believed that illness was the result of sin; if you were blind or deaf or had a physical deformity, it wasn’t because of bacteria or genetics or some environmental cause, but was a punishment for something you had done wrong or your parents had done wrong. And Jesus breaks this link between sin and sickness; he says that neither this man nor his parents sinned to cause his blindness, and heals him.
In the story the Pharisees keep saying that the man was blind because of his sin. Even the followers of Jesus ask who sinned to make the man blind, him or his parents. They are trying to figure out why bad things happen to people, and their answer is that the people must be bad. And we still struggle with this. We may not think that sin causes disease or disability. But we look around the world and see natural disasters, floods and earthquakes and tsunamis and volcanoes and hurricanes. In just the last year or so we have watched flooding in Pakistan, and quakes that have devastated Haiti, and New Zealand, and Japan, and places we hear less about in China and Burma, and we are still hearing about New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina, and the Indian Ocean tsunami. And we ask for answers, just as the Pharisees and followers of Jesus did, 20 centuries ago. It’s an age-old question: why do the innocent suffer? It’s easier to come up with answers in the case of war and poverty, where sin does play a role – but it’s the reverse of the attitudes on display in this story, for it isn’t the sin of the victims causing their suffering, but the collective sin of societies and empires that perpetuates violence and injustice.
But it’s different in the case of natural disasters, because they are, after all, natural. Society doesn’t cause the earth to shake or winds to blow or volcanoes to erupt, although humanity’s impact on the earth’s climate may play a role in hurricanes and flooding. But the earthquake and tsunami that devastated part of Japan and killed 10,000 people – that was completely natural, the result of two giant plates in the planet’s crust grinding together.
So did someone sin to cause this? Some Christians have said yes, the disaster in Japan was brought about by the country’s sins in the Japanese aggression that led to World War II in the Pacific, 70 years ago. Others have laid the blame on all of us, saying that God is punishing humanity as a whole for wandering from the right path. But many Christians, the majority according to opinion polls, do not believe this.
We call these natural disasters acts of God. If you read your home insurance policy, or travelers’ insurance if you’re going anywhere, it refers to acts of God.
So there is even bigger and more difficult question for us, if human sin doesn’t cause these catastrophes. Are these truly acts of God? Did God make the earth heave in Japan and a tidal wave wash over towns and people, killing thousands and leaving millions more suffering in their grief and homelessness and under threat of nuclear radiation? Well, some pretty respected Christians say yes. A prominent theologian named John Piper points out that in the Bible earthquakes are attributed to God, because God is Lord of heaven and earth. Nature does not have a will of its own. God controls everything. Nothing is random. So, somehow, God has a good and wise purpose for this tragedy, as God has hundreds of thousands of purposes, which remain hidden to us until they are finally revealed at the end of time.
So there’s an answer. God took thousands of lives, as one step toward achieving an unknown purpose in God’s plan for good. We have probably heard this before, about deaths and cancer and all kinds of events we don’t understand: It’s God’s will. It’s God’s plan. This is a simple answer, clear cut, and it solves all our problems about why there is suffering and where God is in tragedies.
I think this is trying to get at the truth, as God’s purposes are indeed unknown, but I’m not sure this is a complete, or satisfying, or helpful, answer. I’m not sure that the explanation of evil and suffering in the world is this simple. And I’m not sure that this does solve our problems, as what seems simple can just get more complicated as we ponder whether this makes God seem, well, less loving than heartless and uncaring. We may wonder if this answer is really spiritually blind, blind to who God is.
We know that the Bible says that God is love. We know that the Bible says that Jesus came to show us what God is like. So what do we see Jesus doing, in this story and the other stories we read? Another prominent Christian thinker, Brian McLaren, and I like his work a lot, says that the scandal of God becoming human in Jesus is how Jesus acts. Jesus doesn’t take control. He doesn’t micro manage. He doesn’t eliminate all suffering and evil, yet he doesn’t cause any additional suffering and evil either. He doesn’t give in to the temptation offered to him, to take power over all the nations of the world and become an earthly ruler.
Instead, look at what Jesus is doing at the beginning of today’s story. He’s walking along. He’s on his way from one place to another. Brian McLaren points out that that’s what Jesus does, goes quietly from town to town, confronting suffering and evil, urging people to turn away from their sins that inflict suffering and evil on others, and healing and liberating people from suffering and evil so they can see spiritually, people like the man born blind. Jesus doesn’t force this healing on anyone; he allows them in faith to accept it, and to become, as the letter to the Ephesians says, children of the light. And then, at the end of this season of Lent, we will hear again how God ultimately deals with suffering and evil, in Jesus on the cross: in pain and tears, taking all of the suffering of the world into the heart of God and healing it, no through vengeance, but through forgiveness and love. Martin Luther talked about how God is made known to us, not in glory, not in control, but in the suffering of Jesus on the cross. God’s power and God’s kingdom appear in weakness.
So, if we look at our universe with spiritual eyes, eyes of faith, maybe God is not a dictator. The realm of God, the kingdom of God, is not totalitarian. Instead, perhaps God allows the universe to evolve on its own. So possibly the way God rules is not through absolute control, but through absolute commitment to be with us whatever happens, working to bring healing from suffering, good from evil, hope from despair. This is how we see God appear to us in Jesus, the king who is born as a tiny, vulnerable baby, the king who washes his friends’ feet, the king whose power is not through conquering and violence but through suffering and dying, and rising again. God is not waving an almighty hand and sweeping away homes and lives; God is wrapping us in loving arms and holding us close. God is present with us in suffering, feeling our agony, crying with us, sharing our loss, bearing our hurt, moving in the Spirit to give us courage and to empower us to offer empathy and aid to victims of catastrophe, in huge disasters like Japan, and the personal disasters we experience of sickness and fire and death.
This may not be a complete answer. But, you know, the best answers to the problem of suffering and evil in the world work better in a classroom or from a church pulpit than in a hospital room, or beneath a pile of rubble from an earthquake. When we are in pain, or see pain in our world, an intellectual answer is of little comfort. We can’t always, or ever, understand what is happening when tragedies strike and lives and land are devastated. But we can know this – when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, God is with us.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Hell's Bells: Sermon, March 20, 2011
This is the draft of the Sunday, March 20 sermon at Newington and Trinity Ingleside United Churches - but as they say in the news business, check against delivery! There's lots of time for editing, adding and subtracting before Sunday morning!
John 3:1-17
Giving all glory and honour to God.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him won’t perish but will have eternal life.” This is the famous verse, John 3:16, and sometimes when you’re watching a football game or some other sporting event on TV someone will hold up a sign that says John 3:16. It’s been called everyone’s favourite text, the very essence of the Good News According to John.
And it comes in this discussion Jesus is having with Nicodemus, who is one of the Jewish leaders, a member of the chief religious court. And he comes to talk with Jesus, as he knows about the wonderful things Jesus is doing and saying, but he misunderstands what Jesus tells him. Jesus says you must be born again, meaning you must be changed so radically that it can only be described as being born all over again. But Nicodemus can’t understand this. He interprets the words of Jesus literally, and responds, “Isn’t that impossible? How can an adult reenter the womb and be born all over again?” Jesus says, “You’re a teacher of Israel and you don’t know these things?”
Well, this story takes place 20 centuries ago. But things haven’t changed a lot. We have lots of religious leaders today who misunderstand what Jesus is saying. Many take his words too literally. Nicodemus lives. This has been proven the last few weeks. There’s been some reporting in mainstream newspapers and TV on this, but it’s been a huge controversy in Christian, particularly evangelical, circles.
Rob Bell is the pastor at Mars Hill Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He’s a hipster guy with cool glasses, and he has a popular series of videos about faith that are used a lot in evangelical churches as teaching tools, and I’ve seen some of them and they’re very good. So just before his new book, called Love Wins, came out, Christians on the Internet suddenly went crazy. Everything Jesus talked about in what we just read in the Sermon on the Mount, everything Jesus said about not judging and not calling names – well, Christians did all that, judged Rob Bell and called him names. He was called a teacher of a false Gospel. He was called a heretic. Another well-known pastor said that Rob Bell was dead to him, said, “farewell, Rob Bell.” All of this without anyone actually reading his book. So this was not a great moment for followers of Jesus following Jesus. There wasn’t a lot of loving your neighbour.
The whole mess was about people suspecting that Rob Bell is a universalist and denies the existence of hell. Universalism is the belief that all humans will be saved through Jesus Christ. Its critics call universalism a heresy and a rejection of biblical Christianity. Well, now the book is out, and people have read it, and he says specifically that he is not a universalist, but he does raise questions about heaven and hell, so the controversy is continuing. I haven’t read his book, but these questions he poses have been asked in theology since at least the 18th century, and have probably been raised in United Church of Canada sermons and Bible studies. So this is an opportunity to look at what John is quoting Jesus as saying in this morning’s reading.
Now, it was news to me that universalism is a heresy, as I wrote my thesis on Gregory of Nyssa, who lived in the fourth century, at about the same time as Saint Patrick. Gregory is considered a saint too, in the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and he was a universalist. Gregory believed that the ultimate triumph of good would redeem everyone, even including the devil, who would be unable to resist God. So I don’t think being called a universalist is an insult.
It was also news to me that biblical Christianity requires believing that a select few Christians go to paradise while other sinners are punished in hell by burning for eternity. The Bible is actually murky about hell. The word ‘hell’ is absent from the Old Testament, and while it appears 16 times in the New Testament, it doesn’t necessarily mean what we mean by hell. Several times it’s a translation of a Greek word for the place of the dead, which didn’t distinguish between heaven and hell – it meant both. The other times hell is used to refer to a real, earthly place, Gehenna, the garbage dump outside Jerusalem. Jesus does use Gehenna as an image of punishment, but often in a context which isn’t to be taken literally. When Jesus says, “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than to go into Gehenna, or hell, with two hands, where the fire never goes out,” he’s using exaggerated language to make a point; he doesn’t literally mean that you should cut off your hand, so he may not be that literal about going into hell, or about fire either. And when Jesus mentions the garbage dump as hell, he’s usually addressing the religious people of his time. The idea that unbelievers will burn in hell forever is not explicit in the teachings of Jesus or the rest of the New Testament. The book of Revelation describes a lake of fire where anyone whose name is not written in the book of life is to be thrown, but this is not intended to be interpreted literally anymore than the beast with seven heads and ten horns or the other weird images that appear in Revelation.
There are statements in the Bible that can be taken as suggesting that salvation will be universal, that there will be no one in hell as we understand it. Jesus does say later in John’s Gospel, When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to me. The Apostle Paul writes, in the second letter to the Corinthians, God was reconciling the world to himself through Christ, by not counting people’s sins against them.
But elsewhere in the Bible it suggests that there is a final judgment. Jesus talks about it, although again in stories that defy literal interpretation, and so does Paul, telling the Romans that we will all stand before God’s judgment seat. The letter to the Hebrews tells us that each person will die once, and after that will face judgment.
It’s hard to live with ambiguity. It’s a lot easier to say this is biblical Christianity, there is a clear standard for heaven and hell, and we know what it is, and this is who’s in and who’s out – and, oh, people who believe what we do, coincidentally, are the in group – for heaven, that is. But the Bible isn’t that certain.
So what do I believe? The first letter to Timothy says, God our Saviour wants all people to be saved, and I believe that is indeed what God wants. God is not out to condemn or punish us, but to love us. But because we have free will, we can make choices, and we can then make choices that separate us from God. Freedom has consequences. Some of us may choose to be so irreconcilable that we reject God forever and cut ourselves off from God’s grace. I don’t think God ever rejects us, but we can reject God. The United Church of Canada states in our Basis of Union that there will be a resurrection of the dead, and the finally impenitent shall go away into eternal punishment and the righteous into life eternal. I think that’s true. So I’m not a universalist, based on how I understand Scripture, and Church tradition, and my experience. But it would be great if my thesis subject Gregory of Nyssa was right, and everyone will be reconciled with God. And I wouldn’t underestimate the power of God’s desire that everyone be saved.
So I believe in hell, in the sense that I think we can choose to separate ourselves forever from God. Another person of faith could reach a different conclusion. I don’t think that not believing in hell means rejecting Jesus. And I don’t think that biblical Christianity requires belief in hell as a literal place of eternal fire. That’s just one biblical image of final separation from God. The writers of the Bible also speak of separation as being like falling into a bottomless pit. Maybe it’s just nothingness, non-existence. The biblical writers weren’t trying to depict a real place, but were warning us that separation from God is a choice we can make, and that choice has consequences. We can’t know what hell is like any more than we know what heaven is like. We can only guess. And our imaginations have produced very vivid images of hell in art and poetry and literature and movies, even video games, but they are all guesses. This separation from God might be fire, or nothingness, or it might be like when The Simpsons visit hell on TV, and it has German potato salad, and they’re out of hot dogs.
And we need less tossing around of labels like heretic whenever anyone asks questions about heaven, or hell, or anything else. I get the impression that a lot of Christians think that the people who go to hell are those who don’t agree with them about who goes to hell. Well, we shouldn’t make God in our image rather than the other way around, we shouldn’t presume to say that someone who doesn’t sign on to a certain set of propositions that just happen to be our beliefs will be separated from God for eternity, and we shouldn’t put limits on God’s grace. We can be as stingy about grace as God is generous. Instead, we should trust in God’s love and justice, and avoid speculating about things that God has not revealed to us.
From the amount of time and energy this debate has consumed among Christians the last while, you would think that much of the Bible and the teaching of Jesus must be about hell and punishment. And that’s not the case. Jesus talks about the poor 25 times in the Gospels. That’s twice the number of times he mentions hell. Yet it isn’t considered a heresy to refuse to support anti-poverty measures.
In fact, the idea of hell is a pretty minor part of biblical Christianity. And Jesus would probably say to all the debaters, why are you so concerned about hell in the afterlife, when you have hells on earth right here, right now? Because we can’t get a better image of what hell might look like than northeastern Japan, with buildings pulverized and ships swept right into the middle of towns by the tsunami, or the inside of a nuclear reactor with radiation rising to frightening levels. We have hells now, in Libyan cities under attack, in too many places where social and personal sin separates people from God and God’s vision of peace and justice and love. With the hells of poverty, disease, war, oppression, abuse, grief, fear, despair, addiction all around us, we should have no energy to worry about any other hell.
And so we come back to John 3:16. God so loved the world that we were given God’s only Son, so that everyone who believes in him won’t perish but will have eternal life. Everyone who believes - not everyone who believes and agrees with the following doctrinal statements. And the word ‘world’ is one Jesus uses elsewhere for what is opposed to God – he prays, ‘the world has hated my followers because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.’ The world hates God. The world hates Jesus. But God so loved the God-hating world that God gave the only Son of God, so that everyone who believes in him would live life abundantly now and forever. That’s how much God loves. That’s how broad and high and deep God’s grace is. So, rather than worry and argue about hell and who may go there, let’s rejoice that God loves this world so much, let’s share this wonderful good news, let’s try to love the world with even a little of the love God has, let’s try to bring that love to our neighbours here and around this planet, let’s make this world less of a hell for so many people trapped in hells on earth. That is biblical Christianity. We may not know for sure about hell, but we do know that this is true: God loves us, and calls us to love others. Amen.
John 3:1-17
Giving all glory and honour to God.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him won’t perish but will have eternal life.” This is the famous verse, John 3:16, and sometimes when you’re watching a football game or some other sporting event on TV someone will hold up a sign that says John 3:16. It’s been called everyone’s favourite text, the very essence of the Good News According to John.
And it comes in this discussion Jesus is having with Nicodemus, who is one of the Jewish leaders, a member of the chief religious court. And he comes to talk with Jesus, as he knows about the wonderful things Jesus is doing and saying, but he misunderstands what Jesus tells him. Jesus says you must be born again, meaning you must be changed so radically that it can only be described as being born all over again. But Nicodemus can’t understand this. He interprets the words of Jesus literally, and responds, “Isn’t that impossible? How can an adult reenter the womb and be born all over again?” Jesus says, “You’re a teacher of Israel and you don’t know these things?”
Well, this story takes place 20 centuries ago. But things haven’t changed a lot. We have lots of religious leaders today who misunderstand what Jesus is saying. Many take his words too literally. Nicodemus lives. This has been proven the last few weeks. There’s been some reporting in mainstream newspapers and TV on this, but it’s been a huge controversy in Christian, particularly evangelical, circles.
Rob Bell is the pastor at Mars Hill Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He’s a hipster guy with cool glasses, and he has a popular series of videos about faith that are used a lot in evangelical churches as teaching tools, and I’ve seen some of them and they’re very good. So just before his new book, called Love Wins, came out, Christians on the Internet suddenly went crazy. Everything Jesus talked about in what we just read in the Sermon on the Mount, everything Jesus said about not judging and not calling names – well, Christians did all that, judged Rob Bell and called him names. He was called a teacher of a false Gospel. He was called a heretic. Another well-known pastor said that Rob Bell was dead to him, said, “farewell, Rob Bell.” All of this without anyone actually reading his book. So this was not a great moment for followers of Jesus following Jesus. There wasn’t a lot of loving your neighbour.
The whole mess was about people suspecting that Rob Bell is a universalist and denies the existence of hell. Universalism is the belief that all humans will be saved through Jesus Christ. Its critics call universalism a heresy and a rejection of biblical Christianity. Well, now the book is out, and people have read it, and he says specifically that he is not a universalist, but he does raise questions about heaven and hell, so the controversy is continuing. I haven’t read his book, but these questions he poses have been asked in theology since at least the 18th century, and have probably been raised in United Church of Canada sermons and Bible studies. So this is an opportunity to look at what John is quoting Jesus as saying in this morning’s reading.
Now, it was news to me that universalism is a heresy, as I wrote my thesis on Gregory of Nyssa, who lived in the fourth century, at about the same time as Saint Patrick. Gregory is considered a saint too, in the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and he was a universalist. Gregory believed that the ultimate triumph of good would redeem everyone, even including the devil, who would be unable to resist God. So I don’t think being called a universalist is an insult.
It was also news to me that biblical Christianity requires believing that a select few Christians go to paradise while other sinners are punished in hell by burning for eternity. The Bible is actually murky about hell. The word ‘hell’ is absent from the Old Testament, and while it appears 16 times in the New Testament, it doesn’t necessarily mean what we mean by hell. Several times it’s a translation of a Greek word for the place of the dead, which didn’t distinguish between heaven and hell – it meant both. The other times hell is used to refer to a real, earthly place, Gehenna, the garbage dump outside Jerusalem. Jesus does use Gehenna as an image of punishment, but often in a context which isn’t to be taken literally. When Jesus says, “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than to go into Gehenna, or hell, with two hands, where the fire never goes out,” he’s using exaggerated language to make a point; he doesn’t literally mean that you should cut off your hand, so he may not be that literal about going into hell, or about fire either. And when Jesus mentions the garbage dump as hell, he’s usually addressing the religious people of his time. The idea that unbelievers will burn in hell forever is not explicit in the teachings of Jesus or the rest of the New Testament. The book of Revelation describes a lake of fire where anyone whose name is not written in the book of life is to be thrown, but this is not intended to be interpreted literally anymore than the beast with seven heads and ten horns or the other weird images that appear in Revelation.
There are statements in the Bible that can be taken as suggesting that salvation will be universal, that there will be no one in hell as we understand it. Jesus does say later in John’s Gospel, When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to me. The Apostle Paul writes, in the second letter to the Corinthians, God was reconciling the world to himself through Christ, by not counting people’s sins against them.
But elsewhere in the Bible it suggests that there is a final judgment. Jesus talks about it, although again in stories that defy literal interpretation, and so does Paul, telling the Romans that we will all stand before God’s judgment seat. The letter to the Hebrews tells us that each person will die once, and after that will face judgment.
It’s hard to live with ambiguity. It’s a lot easier to say this is biblical Christianity, there is a clear standard for heaven and hell, and we know what it is, and this is who’s in and who’s out – and, oh, people who believe what we do, coincidentally, are the in group – for heaven, that is. But the Bible isn’t that certain.
So what do I believe? The first letter to Timothy says, God our Saviour wants all people to be saved, and I believe that is indeed what God wants. God is not out to condemn or punish us, but to love us. But because we have free will, we can make choices, and we can then make choices that separate us from God. Freedom has consequences. Some of us may choose to be so irreconcilable that we reject God forever and cut ourselves off from God’s grace. I don’t think God ever rejects us, but we can reject God. The United Church of Canada states in our Basis of Union that there will be a resurrection of the dead, and the finally impenitent shall go away into eternal punishment and the righteous into life eternal. I think that’s true. So I’m not a universalist, based on how I understand Scripture, and Church tradition, and my experience. But it would be great if my thesis subject Gregory of Nyssa was right, and everyone will be reconciled with God. And I wouldn’t underestimate the power of God’s desire that everyone be saved.
So I believe in hell, in the sense that I think we can choose to separate ourselves forever from God. Another person of faith could reach a different conclusion. I don’t think that not believing in hell means rejecting Jesus. And I don’t think that biblical Christianity requires belief in hell as a literal place of eternal fire. That’s just one biblical image of final separation from God. The writers of the Bible also speak of separation as being like falling into a bottomless pit. Maybe it’s just nothingness, non-existence. The biblical writers weren’t trying to depict a real place, but were warning us that separation from God is a choice we can make, and that choice has consequences. We can’t know what hell is like any more than we know what heaven is like. We can only guess. And our imaginations have produced very vivid images of hell in art and poetry and literature and movies, even video games, but they are all guesses. This separation from God might be fire, or nothingness, or it might be like when The Simpsons visit hell on TV, and it has German potato salad, and they’re out of hot dogs.
And we need less tossing around of labels like heretic whenever anyone asks questions about heaven, or hell, or anything else. I get the impression that a lot of Christians think that the people who go to hell are those who don’t agree with them about who goes to hell. Well, we shouldn’t make God in our image rather than the other way around, we shouldn’t presume to say that someone who doesn’t sign on to a certain set of propositions that just happen to be our beliefs will be separated from God for eternity, and we shouldn’t put limits on God’s grace. We can be as stingy about grace as God is generous. Instead, we should trust in God’s love and justice, and avoid speculating about things that God has not revealed to us.
From the amount of time and energy this debate has consumed among Christians the last while, you would think that much of the Bible and the teaching of Jesus must be about hell and punishment. And that’s not the case. Jesus talks about the poor 25 times in the Gospels. That’s twice the number of times he mentions hell. Yet it isn’t considered a heresy to refuse to support anti-poverty measures.
In fact, the idea of hell is a pretty minor part of biblical Christianity. And Jesus would probably say to all the debaters, why are you so concerned about hell in the afterlife, when you have hells on earth right here, right now? Because we can’t get a better image of what hell might look like than northeastern Japan, with buildings pulverized and ships swept right into the middle of towns by the tsunami, or the inside of a nuclear reactor with radiation rising to frightening levels. We have hells now, in Libyan cities under attack, in too many places where social and personal sin separates people from God and God’s vision of peace and justice and love. With the hells of poverty, disease, war, oppression, abuse, grief, fear, despair, addiction all around us, we should have no energy to worry about any other hell.
And so we come back to John 3:16. God so loved the world that we were given God’s only Son, so that everyone who believes in him won’t perish but will have eternal life. Everyone who believes - not everyone who believes and agrees with the following doctrinal statements. And the word ‘world’ is one Jesus uses elsewhere for what is opposed to God – he prays, ‘the world has hated my followers because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.’ The world hates God. The world hates Jesus. But God so loved the God-hating world that God gave the only Son of God, so that everyone who believes in him would live life abundantly now and forever. That’s how much God loves. That’s how broad and high and deep God’s grace is. So, rather than worry and argue about hell and who may go there, let’s rejoice that God loves this world so much, let’s share this wonderful good news, let’s try to love the world with even a little of the love God has, let’s try to bring that love to our neighbours here and around this planet, let’s make this world less of a hell for so many people trapped in hells on earth. That is biblical Christianity. We may not know for sure about hell, but we do know that this is true: God loves us, and calls us to love others. Amen.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Stewards of God's Mysteries: February 27, 2011 Sermon
Scripture readings: Isaiah 49:8-16a
1 Corinthians 4:1-5
Matthew 6:24-34
This sermon begins a stewardship preaching series at the end of Epiphany and during Lent, as part of a stewardship project that began with a workshop given by the United Church of Canada's Montreal & Ottawa Conference stewardship consultant for the Ingleside and Newington pastoral charge. The sermon was intended to introduce the congregations to the concept of being a steward, using the Revised Common Lectionary readings for that Sunday.
The Apostle Paul is writing to the church at Corinth, telling them to think of their leaders in the church as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries, and reminding them that stewards must be considered trustworthy (1 Corinthians 4:1-2). In the time of Jesus and Paul, well-off families had large houses and estates, and the steward was the manager. In fact, that’s how some contemporary Bibles, like the Common English Bible, translate this word: manager. The steward looked after the accounting, supplies and upkeep for the whole household. The word for steward in Paul’s original Greek carried with it emphasis on great responsibility and accountability. For one important aspect of being a steward was that in that position he reported only to one person, the head of the household. He didn’t answer to the other servants, the other members of the family, or anyone else, even though his decisions would affect them all. No one other than the head of the household could praise or criticize his work.
In the same way, Paul is saying, since he and the other leaders of the Corinthian church are stewards of God’s mysteries, they, too, only report to the head of the household. Of course that means God. Only God can judge the leaders, and determine who had done well. This continues what Paul has been saying in this letter to the Corinthians, about the church there being divided into factions, each arguing that they belong to a leader, whether Paul or Apollos or Peter. Here Paul is saying again that all the Corinthians’ bickering over which one leader is the right authority, and taking sides about which leader is greatest, is completely misguided. For all the leaders are stewards, and so, as in households, stewards answer only to God. It is up to God to assess their ministry.
In many United Church congregations we have a Committee of Stewards, who do a great job looking after finances, property maintenance, and insurance: all the things needed to keep the building up and heated and lit and the bills paid. If we use the word ‘steward’ much in our church, we’re usually referring to them. But Paul is using it to refer to all the leaders of the church in Corinth, and it actually can become even broader than that, if we look at what Jesus is saying as we read his Sermon on the Mount.
Jesus says, No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other (Matthew 6:24). Or, to put it another way, no one can be a steward for two heads of households. You couldn’t be a steward in two houses at the same time. Stewards were in exclusive service.
Jesus goes on to say, you can’t serve God and wealth. The King James Bible expresses this as, you cannot serve God and Mammon. Mammon is an old Hebrew word for material possessions. Originally it wasn’t a bad word at all, but over time it came to mean that in which you put your trust. It came to be regarded as an idol, something that people worship and to which they feel allegiance. When we trust in material things and rely on wealth for security, then possessions indeed become idols. They become like God.
So this makes us think about what place our possessions have in our lives. I have been using the Daily Study Bible commentaries by William Barclay, which he wrote in the 1950s and are particularly good on the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew. Barclay writes that at the basis of what Jesus taught about possessions are three great principles. I would add, these are different than and counter to the way our society and systems think about wealth.
First, all things belong to God. This is crystal clear through the whole Bible. When Jesus tells stories, he often depicts God as the master of these big estates, and back then the owner had complete authority. We may be able to rearrange and alter things, but we can’t create anything on this planet or in this universe. Only God can do that, and so ultimate ownership of everything belongs to God. No matter how hard we work, we can’t point to anything and say, this is really mine. We can only say, this belongs to God, and God has given us the use of it as God would want it to be used. So we are all stewards. We manage. And we answer to God for the way we manage the creation God allows us to use.
Second, people are always more important than things. If wealth is accumulated by treating people as things, then these riches are wrong. Jesus says, what does it profit someone if they gain the world but lose their soul (Matthew 16:26)? What puts money in our bank account and makes us prosperous may be at the expense of others. Barclay uses the example of making money during the Industrial Revolution in England by putting children to work in mines and factories. If he were here today, he might point to the chocolate we eat, made from cocoa which is often harvested by child labour. And today we are often treated solely as consumers, as the sum of our purchases.
Third, wealth is always secondary. We often think that the Bible says that money is the root of all evil; but Scripture in fact states that it is the love of money that is the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10). This is what John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, preached: material things can be used to help your family and to benefit your neighbours and community, and that is good. But possessions can also be sought simply to heap luxury on top of luxury. Wealth can become the thing we live for and live by, and that is bad. Riches can take over the place in life that only God should occupy. Then wealth does become Mammon, an idol that replaces God.
For Barclay one more point comes out of these principles from what Jesus says about wealth: The possession of money and material things is not a sin, but it is a great responsibility. Just as the stewards of Jesus and Paul’s time had great responsibility over household finances and property, and the Committee of Stewards in United Churches today has responsibility over finances and property, we have great responsibility as stewards of all the gifts God has given us. I was amazed at how much stuff we had when we moved to Ingleside! If we own so much, then this is not a matter of congratulating ourselves: it is a matter for prayer, that we will use our possessions as God wants us to.
For we may not use our possessions at all. We may be so miserly that we may delight simply in getting, and not using. All of our stuff may actually be quite useless. All of our money may just sit there, doing no one any good.
Or we may use our wealth selfishly, piling up thing upon thing just for the sake of having things, and owning the latest and greatest of everything. We may think of possessions simply and solely in terms of what they can do for us.
We may also use our riches maliciously. The news is always full of stories of how wealth and the power it brings can corrupt. Displaying money can be a tool to dazzle others and persuade them to part with their money. There have been lots of financial advisers lately who have made enough to recruit clients who would then lose all of their savings.
Or we may use our riches foolishly, or more accurately, accumulate what seems to be wealth in foolish ways, like borrowing so much and spending so freely that we are so deep in debt that we can’t get out again.
But we may also act as good and responsible stewards, using our possessions for the happiness of others. After all, we don’t really own anything – it is all God’s, and is to be used for God’s purposes. After we provide for ourselves and our families, as stewards we are to manage our finances, property, and goods so that they can be of benefit to our neighbours, and above all our neighbours who are in need.
When my Dad was a boy in New Brunswick during the Depression, he and his brother would only get a few Christmas presents - usually a book, a barley toy, and something my great uncle made in his workshop. But Christmas of 1934 Grampy Hayward hitched the horses up to the sleigh, and they drove up the frozen St. John River to one of the neighbouring houses. The Haywards had little, and lived in the parsonage of the Advent Christian Church as there was no minister there at the time. But the nearby family had even less, and lived in a shack made out of logs covered with tarpaper. And Grampy, Dad, and my uncle gave the children of that family some of their Christmas presents and a basket of food from the pantry, and those would be the only presents that family would get.
So it doesn’t matter how wealthy we are, for we can be just as bighearted with ten dollars as ten thousand dollars if ten is what we have. Remember how Jesus talks about a poor widow who could give only two pennies to the Temple offering, and how her gift was more blessed than the offerings of the rich men who had so much more to spare (Luke 21:1-4). What is important as stewards is for us to use what we have so that giving ranks above getting. For after all, if God is so wonderfully generous to us - if God indeed, as the prophet Isaiah says, never forgets us and inscribes us on the palms of God’s hands (Isaiah 49:15-16) - how can we not be generous to others? Jesus says, it is more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:35).
Now, my Dad was only six years old, so he may not have been particularly happy to have to give away his Christmas gifts. Later in life he and my uncle did think that Christmas did give them some sense of what Christmas, and giving, should be all about. But we can be pretty grudging in our giving, too. Paul addresses this when he writes to the Corinthians and reminds them that, if you sow a small number of seeds, you will reap a small crop, and if you sow a generous number of seeds, you will harvest a large crop. Everyone should give whatever they have decided in their heart, but not with hesitation or because of pressure. God loves a cheerful giver (2 Corinthians 9:6-7).
Paul goes on to tell the Corinthians that if they are made rich in every way, it is so that they can be generous in every way and their generosity can produce thanksgiving to God (2 Corinthians 9:11-13). That is stewardship, managing what God has given us in God’s gifts of the talents we have and the money and material things we own. We are stewards with great responsibility, the duty to give willingly and lovingly from all that we have for the work of the church to extend God’s realm. We are stewards with accountability, answering like the stewards of ancient times to the head of the household. We serve one master exclusively: our God who created all things and to whom all things belong, and who calls us to look after what we have with trustworthiness, compassion, and joy.
1 Corinthians 4:1-5
Matthew 6:24-34
This sermon begins a stewardship preaching series at the end of Epiphany and during Lent, as part of a stewardship project that began with a workshop given by the United Church of Canada's Montreal & Ottawa Conference stewardship consultant for the Ingleside and Newington pastoral charge. The sermon was intended to introduce the congregations to the concept of being a steward, using the Revised Common Lectionary readings for that Sunday.
The Apostle Paul is writing to the church at Corinth, telling them to think of their leaders in the church as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries, and reminding them that stewards must be considered trustworthy (1 Corinthians 4:1-2). In the time of Jesus and Paul, well-off families had large houses and estates, and the steward was the manager. In fact, that’s how some contemporary Bibles, like the Common English Bible, translate this word: manager. The steward looked after the accounting, supplies and upkeep for the whole household. The word for steward in Paul’s original Greek carried with it emphasis on great responsibility and accountability. For one important aspect of being a steward was that in that position he reported only to one person, the head of the household. He didn’t answer to the other servants, the other members of the family, or anyone else, even though his decisions would affect them all. No one other than the head of the household could praise or criticize his work.
In the same way, Paul is saying, since he and the other leaders of the Corinthian church are stewards of God’s mysteries, they, too, only report to the head of the household. Of course that means God. Only God can judge the leaders, and determine who had done well. This continues what Paul has been saying in this letter to the Corinthians, about the church there being divided into factions, each arguing that they belong to a leader, whether Paul or Apollos or Peter. Here Paul is saying again that all the Corinthians’ bickering over which one leader is the right authority, and taking sides about which leader is greatest, is completely misguided. For all the leaders are stewards, and so, as in households, stewards answer only to God. It is up to God to assess their ministry.
In many United Church congregations we have a Committee of Stewards, who do a great job looking after finances, property maintenance, and insurance: all the things needed to keep the building up and heated and lit and the bills paid. If we use the word ‘steward’ much in our church, we’re usually referring to them. But Paul is using it to refer to all the leaders of the church in Corinth, and it actually can become even broader than that, if we look at what Jesus is saying as we read his Sermon on the Mount.
Jesus says, No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other (Matthew 6:24). Or, to put it another way, no one can be a steward for two heads of households. You couldn’t be a steward in two houses at the same time. Stewards were in exclusive service.
Jesus goes on to say, you can’t serve God and wealth. The King James Bible expresses this as, you cannot serve God and Mammon. Mammon is an old Hebrew word for material possessions. Originally it wasn’t a bad word at all, but over time it came to mean that in which you put your trust. It came to be regarded as an idol, something that people worship and to which they feel allegiance. When we trust in material things and rely on wealth for security, then possessions indeed become idols. They become like God.
So this makes us think about what place our possessions have in our lives. I have been using the Daily Study Bible commentaries by William Barclay, which he wrote in the 1950s and are particularly good on the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew. Barclay writes that at the basis of what Jesus taught about possessions are three great principles. I would add, these are different than and counter to the way our society and systems think about wealth.
First, all things belong to God. This is crystal clear through the whole Bible. When Jesus tells stories, he often depicts God as the master of these big estates, and back then the owner had complete authority. We may be able to rearrange and alter things, but we can’t create anything on this planet or in this universe. Only God can do that, and so ultimate ownership of everything belongs to God. No matter how hard we work, we can’t point to anything and say, this is really mine. We can only say, this belongs to God, and God has given us the use of it as God would want it to be used. So we are all stewards. We manage. And we answer to God for the way we manage the creation God allows us to use.
Second, people are always more important than things. If wealth is accumulated by treating people as things, then these riches are wrong. Jesus says, what does it profit someone if they gain the world but lose their soul (Matthew 16:26)? What puts money in our bank account and makes us prosperous may be at the expense of others. Barclay uses the example of making money during the Industrial Revolution in England by putting children to work in mines and factories. If he were here today, he might point to the chocolate we eat, made from cocoa which is often harvested by child labour. And today we are often treated solely as consumers, as the sum of our purchases.
Third, wealth is always secondary. We often think that the Bible says that money is the root of all evil; but Scripture in fact states that it is the love of money that is the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10). This is what John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, preached: material things can be used to help your family and to benefit your neighbours and community, and that is good. But possessions can also be sought simply to heap luxury on top of luxury. Wealth can become the thing we live for and live by, and that is bad. Riches can take over the place in life that only God should occupy. Then wealth does become Mammon, an idol that replaces God.
For Barclay one more point comes out of these principles from what Jesus says about wealth: The possession of money and material things is not a sin, but it is a great responsibility. Just as the stewards of Jesus and Paul’s time had great responsibility over household finances and property, and the Committee of Stewards in United Churches today has responsibility over finances and property, we have great responsibility as stewards of all the gifts God has given us. I was amazed at how much stuff we had when we moved to Ingleside! If we own so much, then this is not a matter of congratulating ourselves: it is a matter for prayer, that we will use our possessions as God wants us to.
For we may not use our possessions at all. We may be so miserly that we may delight simply in getting, and not using. All of our stuff may actually be quite useless. All of our money may just sit there, doing no one any good.
Or we may use our wealth selfishly, piling up thing upon thing just for the sake of having things, and owning the latest and greatest of everything. We may think of possessions simply and solely in terms of what they can do for us.
We may also use our riches maliciously. The news is always full of stories of how wealth and the power it brings can corrupt. Displaying money can be a tool to dazzle others and persuade them to part with their money. There have been lots of financial advisers lately who have made enough to recruit clients who would then lose all of their savings.
Or we may use our riches foolishly, or more accurately, accumulate what seems to be wealth in foolish ways, like borrowing so much and spending so freely that we are so deep in debt that we can’t get out again.
But we may also act as good and responsible stewards, using our possessions for the happiness of others. After all, we don’t really own anything – it is all God’s, and is to be used for God’s purposes. After we provide for ourselves and our families, as stewards we are to manage our finances, property, and goods so that they can be of benefit to our neighbours, and above all our neighbours who are in need.
When my Dad was a boy in New Brunswick during the Depression, he and his brother would only get a few Christmas presents - usually a book, a barley toy, and something my great uncle made in his workshop. But Christmas of 1934 Grampy Hayward hitched the horses up to the sleigh, and they drove up the frozen St. John River to one of the neighbouring houses. The Haywards had little, and lived in the parsonage of the Advent Christian Church as there was no minister there at the time. But the nearby family had even less, and lived in a shack made out of logs covered with tarpaper. And Grampy, Dad, and my uncle gave the children of that family some of their Christmas presents and a basket of food from the pantry, and those would be the only presents that family would get.
So it doesn’t matter how wealthy we are, for we can be just as bighearted with ten dollars as ten thousand dollars if ten is what we have. Remember how Jesus talks about a poor widow who could give only two pennies to the Temple offering, and how her gift was more blessed than the offerings of the rich men who had so much more to spare (Luke 21:1-4). What is important as stewards is for us to use what we have so that giving ranks above getting. For after all, if God is so wonderfully generous to us - if God indeed, as the prophet Isaiah says, never forgets us and inscribes us on the palms of God’s hands (Isaiah 49:15-16) - how can we not be generous to others? Jesus says, it is more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:35).
Now, my Dad was only six years old, so he may not have been particularly happy to have to give away his Christmas gifts. Later in life he and my uncle did think that Christmas did give them some sense of what Christmas, and giving, should be all about. But we can be pretty grudging in our giving, too. Paul addresses this when he writes to the Corinthians and reminds them that, if you sow a small number of seeds, you will reap a small crop, and if you sow a generous number of seeds, you will harvest a large crop. Everyone should give whatever they have decided in their heart, but not with hesitation or because of pressure. God loves a cheerful giver (2 Corinthians 9:6-7).
Paul goes on to tell the Corinthians that if they are made rich in every way, it is so that they can be generous in every way and their generosity can produce thanksgiving to God (2 Corinthians 9:11-13). That is stewardship, managing what God has given us in God’s gifts of the talents we have and the money and material things we own. We are stewards with great responsibility, the duty to give willingly and lovingly from all that we have for the work of the church to extend God’s realm. We are stewards with accountability, answering like the stewards of ancient times to the head of the household. We serve one master exclusively: our God who created all things and to whom all things belong, and who calls us to look after what we have with trustworthiness, compassion, and joy.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Blogging on the Wane?
Well, my blog seems to be. This article in The New York Times finds that blogs are being eclipsed by social media like Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. After all, a blog post requires a lot more time and thought than a 140-character tweet or a Facebook status update. During the current crisis across the Arab world, I'm spending a lot of time on Twitter to get updates from folks on site (although a lot of the updates are just rehashes of what Al Jazeera is broadcasting).
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
Church Words
Do clergy ever listen to themselves? Seriously, I found the phrase "erection of the Ordinariate" in a Roman Catholic Church article for public consumption. How could the average person not find that...well, dirty?
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Don't Be Afraid
Christmas Eve sermon, Trinity United Church, Ingleside
Giving all glory and honour to God.
Tonight we have sung and read the Christmas story, the one we love from carols and Sunday school pageants and Christmas services and A Charlie Brown Christmas. We know all the parts of the story from hearing it and singing it, and we can put the story together from our carols: once in royal David’s city, Mary and Joseph arrive in O little town of Bethlehem, and Gentle Mary laid her child, away in a manger, no crib for his bed. While shepherds watched their flocks by night, angels from the realms of glory came upon the midnight clear, sweetly singing o’er the plains glory to the newborn king, and the shepherds come and adore him, Christ the Lord. Nowell, nowell, born is the king of Israel.
That is indeed the story. And there’s a lot here in this story, behind the words of the carols and the figures of our nativity sets. It’s like an onion, with lots of layers. Think of that tomorrow if you’re peeling an onion for Christmas dinner. Now I know you’re probably not going to be thinking of that, because on Christmas Day you’re more likely to be thinking of how you’re going to lose it if you hear Gramma Got Run Over by a Reindeer one more time, so we’ll explore this now. Not all the layers we could find, as we want to leave time for lots more singing, but maybe a couple.
Here’s one layer. Who gets told the news about the Christ being born? Not religious or political leaders or celebrities. Shepherds. We imagine shepherds to be the respectable folks in nice clean robes we see in pageants, but in the time of Jesus people looked down on shepherds as dirt poor, smelly outsiders who couldn’t keep up their religious obligations as they were away a lot, just not the right sort of people at all, at the bottom of the economic and social ladder, like homeless people today. Yet they are the first ones told of this good news for all people.
Here’s another layer. You know, a lot of us have heard the word bedlam, which means a place full of noise, frenzied activity, and confusion. But we don’t know where the word comes from. Well, 500 years ago in England there was a group of monks called the Order of the Star of Bethlehem, devoted to the care of those who were mentally ill. They established an institution called the Bethlehem Hospital, which eventually got shortened to Bedlam. So bedlam comes from Bethlehem. And we can imagine as the story takes place that there really was bedlam in Bethlehem at that first Christmas, the village packed with people for the census, no room in the crowded inns, tired, cranky travelers shouting, Mary and Joseph finding a place with the musty hay and noisy and smelly animals, nothing quite as tidy and antiseptic as our nativity scenes or the old paintings where no animals go to the bathroom and Mary is always shown as very calm, kneeling beside the manger. One female minister commented that this shows that men painted all these pictures, as there was no way she was kneeling after childbirth. And we may make the story very sentimental as we sing little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes, and sleep in heavenly peace, but the story must really be bedlam, the baby wailing as all babies do, animals crying out, mess and filth and darkness, a sore and tired mother, Joseph dealing with these shepherds who rush in, falling over each other, dirty and enthusiastic.
Bedlam in the Christmas story. And Bedlam in our Christmas, today and tomorrow, excitement and shouts of joy as relatives arrive and gifts are opened, music and TV blaring, exhaustion – does this bedlam sound like anyone’s house here? – and perhaps tears of disappointment as a brand new toy breaks, maybe anger as too many drinks cause family tensions to boil over, weeping as sorrow over the death of a loved one or a relationship comes to the surface. Bedlam in our Christmas, and bedlam in our lives, our busy, busy lives of crises and stress that leave us as sleepless and weary and grumpy as the travelers in the original Bethlehem bedlam, lives where we are overwhelmed by noise and cries for attention, lives of worry and anxiety and fear, fear about health and marriage and finances and jobs and crime, fear about an accident or diagnosis or a layoff changing everything in a moment, fear of being alone, fear for ourselves, fear for our loved ones, fear for our world. So many of us, I think all of us, are afraid, and often we don’t know what it is we’re afraid of.
The shepherds in the story were afraid, too. After all, they’re sitting in the dark, minding their own business, and suddenly an angel appears. Yet what is the first thing the angel says to them? Don’t be afraid. These words resound throughout the Christmas story. Just read Luke. The angel comes to Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, and says, don’t be afraid. The angel comes to Mary to tell her that she will have a son named Jesus, and says, don’t be afraid. The angel comes to Joseph, who is engaged to Mary, and says, don’t be afraid. The angel comes to the shepherds on Christmas night, and says, don’t be afraid. All of these lives turned around unexpectedly, Zechariah, Mary, Joseph, the shepherds – and they are reassured, don’t be afraid. And so we are reassured when our lives change suddenly. Don’t be afraid.
The angel says, don’t be afraid, I bring you good news of great joy, for all people. And these words, don’t be afraid, are good news for us, people living in the darkness of bedlam and fear, for on us God’s light has shined. Good news for all – well, nearly all. For another layer in this story is that we think of it as the most unthreatening, status quo story imaginable. After all, it’s usually acted out by kids in bathrobes with tea towels on their heads. But it is really a subversive, radical story, so much so that in the 1980s in Guatemala the government banned public readings of part of the Christmas story because it was too dangerous, it could incite rebellion.
In the story the angel comes and says, Your Saviour is born today. He is Christ, the Lord. Well, 20 centuries ago only one person in Palestine, one person in the entire Roman empire, was called Saviour and Lord, even Prince of Peace – and it wasn’t a baby. It was the emperor, Augustus Caesar, considered to be divine, who had ordered the census in the story – the Bible doesn’t say if it was the short form or long form census, but the census is why Joseph and Mary were in Bethlehem, this one-horse town in a remote backwater of the empire. Born is the king of Israel are nice lyrics to The First Nowell for us, but when this story was written down these words were threatening to the power of the Emperor and the empire. These words frightened the powers that be – the Bible says about the Emperor’s puppet ruler in Palestine, King Herod was afraid, and all Jerusalem with him. These words threatened the authorities so much that as the story continued Joseph and Mary and Jesus had to flee for their lives and become refugees.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran minister in Germany and one of the greatest theologians of the 20th century. He was executed by the Nazis for opposing the ideology of Hitler with the good news of Jesus Christ. And he wrote about this Christmas message, don’t be afraid, saying: “For the great and powerful of this world, there are only two places in which their courage fails them, of which they are afraid deep down in their souls, from which they shy away. These are the manger and the cross of Jesus Christ. No powerful person dares to approach the manger. For this is where thrones shake, the mighty fall, the prominent perish, because God is with the lowly.”
Sisters and brothers, Bethlehem was bedlam, and it seems that our Christmas is bedlam, our lives are bedlam, and our world is bedlam, just as the world into which Jesus was born was bedlam, a world dominated by empire and power then and now, a world of violence and hunger and poverty, a world with no solutions in sight, just in our world a bedlam of competing voices screaming out opinions on every issue from the census to whether you should say Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays.
And into bedlam comes God, in this mystery of God somehow born among humanity as a tiny, vulnerable baby. God is with us as God identifies completely with us, born as we were. And into our bedlam today God comes just as God came in the Christmas story of bedlam in Bethlehem, this revolutionary story of God coming in and with the lowly, the humble, the poor, the defenceless, the voiceless. That is the deep, eternal truth of this story of Christmas, that we are not alone, for Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, God come to be with us in our vulnerability, our weakness, our helplessness, our fear. And that message of Christmas is not just for poor outsiders on a hillside 20 centuries ago; it’s for us: Don’t be afraid. God is with us. And that message of calm and comfort cuts through the bedlam of our Christmas, the bedlam of our lives, and brings peace, the real silent night, holy night.
Don’t be afraid. And so we are not to be afraid of what is happening to us and around us and in our world, and of what may happen in the future. We have hope, brothers and sisters, for Jesus came at Christmas and comes to us always and will come again - to save us, and to show us what our loving God is like, and to show us how to be fully human – unafraid, and loving, for the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s fear. And when we are not afraid, we can act, act out this story that turns expectations upside down, we can work to make God’s vision of peace on earth and goodwill to all a reality in our world.
Don’t be afraid. That’s what God’s messengers say in the story. If we live our lives in hope and love, free of fear, we too will be God’s messengers, telling and showing the world that we are not afraid because we have been given the good news of Christmas, And so I say to you on this Christmas Eve, the old message, the true message, the amazing message, “Don’t be afraid. Look, I bring you good news to you, wonderful, joyous news for all people. Your Saviour is born today in David’s city. He is Christ, the Lord. This is a sign for you: You will find a newborn baby wrapped snugly and lying in a manger. Glory to God in heaven, and on earth, peace and goodwill to all.”
Giving all glory and honour to God.
Tonight we have sung and read the Christmas story, the one we love from carols and Sunday school pageants and Christmas services and A Charlie Brown Christmas. We know all the parts of the story from hearing it and singing it, and we can put the story together from our carols: once in royal David’s city, Mary and Joseph arrive in O little town of Bethlehem, and Gentle Mary laid her child, away in a manger, no crib for his bed. While shepherds watched their flocks by night, angels from the realms of glory came upon the midnight clear, sweetly singing o’er the plains glory to the newborn king, and the shepherds come and adore him, Christ the Lord. Nowell, nowell, born is the king of Israel.
That is indeed the story. And there’s a lot here in this story, behind the words of the carols and the figures of our nativity sets. It’s like an onion, with lots of layers. Think of that tomorrow if you’re peeling an onion for Christmas dinner. Now I know you’re probably not going to be thinking of that, because on Christmas Day you’re more likely to be thinking of how you’re going to lose it if you hear Gramma Got Run Over by a Reindeer one more time, so we’ll explore this now. Not all the layers we could find, as we want to leave time for lots more singing, but maybe a couple.
Here’s one layer. Who gets told the news about the Christ being born? Not religious or political leaders or celebrities. Shepherds. We imagine shepherds to be the respectable folks in nice clean robes we see in pageants, but in the time of Jesus people looked down on shepherds as dirt poor, smelly outsiders who couldn’t keep up their religious obligations as they were away a lot, just not the right sort of people at all, at the bottom of the economic and social ladder, like homeless people today. Yet they are the first ones told of this good news for all people.
Here’s another layer. You know, a lot of us have heard the word bedlam, which means a place full of noise, frenzied activity, and confusion. But we don’t know where the word comes from. Well, 500 years ago in England there was a group of monks called the Order of the Star of Bethlehem, devoted to the care of those who were mentally ill. They established an institution called the Bethlehem Hospital, which eventually got shortened to Bedlam. So bedlam comes from Bethlehem. And we can imagine as the story takes place that there really was bedlam in Bethlehem at that first Christmas, the village packed with people for the census, no room in the crowded inns, tired, cranky travelers shouting, Mary and Joseph finding a place with the musty hay and noisy and smelly animals, nothing quite as tidy and antiseptic as our nativity scenes or the old paintings where no animals go to the bathroom and Mary is always shown as very calm, kneeling beside the manger. One female minister commented that this shows that men painted all these pictures, as there was no way she was kneeling after childbirth. And we may make the story very sentimental as we sing little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes, and sleep in heavenly peace, but the story must really be bedlam, the baby wailing as all babies do, animals crying out, mess and filth and darkness, a sore and tired mother, Joseph dealing with these shepherds who rush in, falling over each other, dirty and enthusiastic.
Bedlam in the Christmas story. And Bedlam in our Christmas, today and tomorrow, excitement and shouts of joy as relatives arrive and gifts are opened, music and TV blaring, exhaustion – does this bedlam sound like anyone’s house here? – and perhaps tears of disappointment as a brand new toy breaks, maybe anger as too many drinks cause family tensions to boil over, weeping as sorrow over the death of a loved one or a relationship comes to the surface. Bedlam in our Christmas, and bedlam in our lives, our busy, busy lives of crises and stress that leave us as sleepless and weary and grumpy as the travelers in the original Bethlehem bedlam, lives where we are overwhelmed by noise and cries for attention, lives of worry and anxiety and fear, fear about health and marriage and finances and jobs and crime, fear about an accident or diagnosis or a layoff changing everything in a moment, fear of being alone, fear for ourselves, fear for our loved ones, fear for our world. So many of us, I think all of us, are afraid, and often we don’t know what it is we’re afraid of.
The shepherds in the story were afraid, too. After all, they’re sitting in the dark, minding their own business, and suddenly an angel appears. Yet what is the first thing the angel says to them? Don’t be afraid. These words resound throughout the Christmas story. Just read Luke. The angel comes to Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, and says, don’t be afraid. The angel comes to Mary to tell her that she will have a son named Jesus, and says, don’t be afraid. The angel comes to Joseph, who is engaged to Mary, and says, don’t be afraid. The angel comes to the shepherds on Christmas night, and says, don’t be afraid. All of these lives turned around unexpectedly, Zechariah, Mary, Joseph, the shepherds – and they are reassured, don’t be afraid. And so we are reassured when our lives change suddenly. Don’t be afraid.
The angel says, don’t be afraid, I bring you good news of great joy, for all people. And these words, don’t be afraid, are good news for us, people living in the darkness of bedlam and fear, for on us God’s light has shined. Good news for all – well, nearly all. For another layer in this story is that we think of it as the most unthreatening, status quo story imaginable. After all, it’s usually acted out by kids in bathrobes with tea towels on their heads. But it is really a subversive, radical story, so much so that in the 1980s in Guatemala the government banned public readings of part of the Christmas story because it was too dangerous, it could incite rebellion.
In the story the angel comes and says, Your Saviour is born today. He is Christ, the Lord. Well, 20 centuries ago only one person in Palestine, one person in the entire Roman empire, was called Saviour and Lord, even Prince of Peace – and it wasn’t a baby. It was the emperor, Augustus Caesar, considered to be divine, who had ordered the census in the story – the Bible doesn’t say if it was the short form or long form census, but the census is why Joseph and Mary were in Bethlehem, this one-horse town in a remote backwater of the empire. Born is the king of Israel are nice lyrics to The First Nowell for us, but when this story was written down these words were threatening to the power of the Emperor and the empire. These words frightened the powers that be – the Bible says about the Emperor’s puppet ruler in Palestine, King Herod was afraid, and all Jerusalem with him. These words threatened the authorities so much that as the story continued Joseph and Mary and Jesus had to flee for their lives and become refugees.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran minister in Germany and one of the greatest theologians of the 20th century. He was executed by the Nazis for opposing the ideology of Hitler with the good news of Jesus Christ. And he wrote about this Christmas message, don’t be afraid, saying: “For the great and powerful of this world, there are only two places in which their courage fails them, of which they are afraid deep down in their souls, from which they shy away. These are the manger and the cross of Jesus Christ. No powerful person dares to approach the manger. For this is where thrones shake, the mighty fall, the prominent perish, because God is with the lowly.”
Sisters and brothers, Bethlehem was bedlam, and it seems that our Christmas is bedlam, our lives are bedlam, and our world is bedlam, just as the world into which Jesus was born was bedlam, a world dominated by empire and power then and now, a world of violence and hunger and poverty, a world with no solutions in sight, just in our world a bedlam of competing voices screaming out opinions on every issue from the census to whether you should say Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays.
And into bedlam comes God, in this mystery of God somehow born among humanity as a tiny, vulnerable baby. God is with us as God identifies completely with us, born as we were. And into our bedlam today God comes just as God came in the Christmas story of bedlam in Bethlehem, this revolutionary story of God coming in and with the lowly, the humble, the poor, the defenceless, the voiceless. That is the deep, eternal truth of this story of Christmas, that we are not alone, for Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, God come to be with us in our vulnerability, our weakness, our helplessness, our fear. And that message of Christmas is not just for poor outsiders on a hillside 20 centuries ago; it’s for us: Don’t be afraid. God is with us. And that message of calm and comfort cuts through the bedlam of our Christmas, the bedlam of our lives, and brings peace, the real silent night, holy night.
Don’t be afraid. And so we are not to be afraid of what is happening to us and around us and in our world, and of what may happen in the future. We have hope, brothers and sisters, for Jesus came at Christmas and comes to us always and will come again - to save us, and to show us what our loving God is like, and to show us how to be fully human – unafraid, and loving, for the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s fear. And when we are not afraid, we can act, act out this story that turns expectations upside down, we can work to make God’s vision of peace on earth and goodwill to all a reality in our world.
Don’t be afraid. That’s what God’s messengers say in the story. If we live our lives in hope and love, free of fear, we too will be God’s messengers, telling and showing the world that we are not afraid because we have been given the good news of Christmas, And so I say to you on this Christmas Eve, the old message, the true message, the amazing message, “Don’t be afraid. Look, I bring you good news to you, wonderful, joyous news for all people. Your Saviour is born today in David’s city. He is Christ, the Lord. This is a sign for you: You will find a newborn baby wrapped snugly and lying in a manger. Glory to God in heaven, and on earth, peace and goodwill to all.”
Thursday, December 23, 2010
A Christmas Post: Santa and Christ
Thoughtful piece by Patricia Paddey in today's National Post, The Nice Road to Santa and the Difficult Path to Christ. Here's an excerpt:
Think about it: today’s Santa is the perfect deity for our day; he’s a god-man who is eternal, omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent, who judges and rewards good and bad behaviour. He is a vehicle of undeserved love, forgiveness and grace. Children are taught to adore him and to please him with sacrificial offerings of milk and cookies. He dwells far off in another realm but promises to return regularly to the benefit of those who believe in him. The fact that he’s also one of the great underpinnings of the world industrial economy doesn’t hurt his appeal.
But the story of Jesus? Well that’s a far different matter and one that could never be described in half-measures. The sweet infant sleeping on the hay in the Christmas crèche grows up to be the man who angers local religious authorities, is betrayed, abandoned and handed over for torture by disappointed friends, and dies a traitor’s cruel death. In the days and weeks after his death, hundreds of people are convinced of the reality of his resurrection – including his scared and scattered friends who ultimately hear him victoriously proclaim, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”
Thursday, December 16, 2010
KJV Turns 400!
It's the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible in 2011. I used to hold out for calling it the Authorized Version, but have now given up. We'll have a special Bible Sunday sometime during the year to celebrate this translation and its immense impact on the English language and the Christian faith. After all, what would Christmas be without Linus reciting Luke's nativity story from the KJV in A Charlie Brown Christmas?
Monday, December 13, 2010
Common English Bible
I've been using the Common English Bible for the New Testament readings on Sundays in Advent. It's a brand-new translation, and I like it - contemporary in feel but takes fewer liberties with the text than The Message (although I still like The Message too). Here's a lookup tool for any New Testament passage.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Reign of Christ
Sermon for Reign of Christ Sunday, November 21, 2010 (this is the draft! lots of rewording and polishing still to do)
Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23:33-43
There’s no denying that winter will soon be here: This week I put out 14 bags of leaves for the final collection of yard waste, had my snow tires put on, and watched semi-final and final games in university and CFL football. And the Official Board met and set dates for our congregational annual meetings in February, which doesn’t seem that far off now.
In the calendar of the church, we’re at the end of the year. That’s right, the last Sunday of the church year is November 21, which is called Reign of Christ Sunday. Some churches name it Christ the King. And so our readings this morning have been about Christ as ruler: the Colossians passage, which is probably an early Christian hymn, and Luke, the description of Jesus being put to death on the cross as the King of the Jews, a title given to him to make fun of him but which is truer than the Roman Empire could ever have known, for Jesus is indeed King of the Jews, the Christ, the Messiah sent to bring God’s reign not just to Israel or to the empire but to the whole world.
So today is kind of like the church’s New Year’s Eve. The church will begin a new year with the first Sunday in the season of Advent, November 28. But in our society there is no longer a season of Advent. For retailers and consumers, we’re already at Christmas; stores had Christmas decorations up on the day after Hallowe’en. And those decorations will disappear after Boxing Day, when the church is celebrating the real season of Christmas. The first Christmas special I have noticed in the TV listings actually aired last night. And some radio stations have already switched over to 24-hour Christmas music. Majic 100 starts tomorrow. A writer I was reading the other day commented that he was invited on a talk show to talk about the so-called war on Christmas; he said if there is a war, Christmas seems to be winning, as it’s now colonizing November. A Jesuit priest said that eventually Christmas will start around Labour Day. Now I’m not sure Jesuits are the ones to talk, as I was at United Church meetings in Montreal, and we rented a lovely Jesuit facility in Pierrefonds, and they were putting up Christmas wreaths – the week before Hallowe’en. I thought, just because Jesuits are the Society of Jesus, they don’t have to start celebrating his birthday two months early.
Now, I like that Christmas is the only time of the year you’re going to hear Jesus mentioned in a song playing at the mall, but I also know that this isn’t the true Christmas - Jesus is very much secondary in this version of Christmas, this essentially Christless Christmas, in which the birth of Jesus and its meaning are buried way, way down under the message of buy, buy, buy. If a war on Christmas exists, it’s being waged by retailers and advertisers.
As I think about Reign of Christ Sunday, with its imagery of Christ as ruler that we heard in our Scripture readings, I wonder who really is ruler where we are? Jesus Christ, or the empire of shopping? Jesus Christ, or our earthly empires, ruled by prime ministers and premiers and company presidents? We talked last week about the persecution the church faces in many countries today. Reign of Christ Sunday was placed in the church calendar in the 1920s as a response to that kind of persecution, which at that time came from governments in Mexico and Russia. Perhaps Reign of Christ Sunday has fresh meaning for us as followers of Christ today, as a response not just to governments but to the materialist consumer “Christmas” whose power will dominate all that we hear and see for the next month.
Now, if the connection isn’t obvious between our theme for Reign of Christ, and our spend like Santa and save like Scrooge shopping spree at Christmas, as Canadian Tire used to put it, or between Reign of Christ and what governments and companies do, we need to look back at when Reign of Christ Sunday was placed in the church calendar. This day wasn’t created to praise Christ’s majesty or to talk about how nice things will be when he rules forever and ever. The Pope who put this Sunday in the Roman Catholic church calendar, and from there it has come to us, said that the Feast of Christ the King will call to this world’s leaders. They are the thrones and powers and rulers and authorities the letter to the Colossians talks about in our reading this morning, which were created through Christ and for Christ, and are subject to him. But they have cast Christ not just out of Christmas, but out of public life, and despised, and neglected, and ignored him. Christ’s kingly dignity, Pope Pius XI wrote, demands that the state should take account of God’s commandments and Christian principles in making laws and administering justice.
This year ministers have been following a new initiative, called the Proper 29 Project because in the calendar Reign of Christ is the 29th, or proper, Sunday in Ordinary Time. The project began after thousands of pages of documents were released about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. You may have read about those in the paper, or about the debate in Canada over turning detainees in Afghanistan over to Afghan authorities for possible torture. Coalition forces have been responsible for the deaths of 66,000 Iraqi and Afghan civilians, and have ignored the torture of prisoners. The sponsors of Proper 29 wanted to speak out against this when preaching on Reign of Christ Sunday – but also did not want to point fingers at the military, for that’s too easy to do. All of us are morally responsible for the actions carried out in our name, and all of us are subject to the Reign of Christ.
I thought of this watching George W. Bush talking to Jay Leno on the Tonight Show, far too late on Thursday night. President Bush has a new book out, so he’s on all the talk shows. And he admits – well, he doesn’t admit, he puts it out there because he’s proud of it – that he personally approved torturing al-Qaeda prisoners. Even though waterboarding, which is the technique the CIA used, is considered torture under United Nations conventions which were signed into law in the United States, it’s torture under the terms the Allies used to prosecute Japanese officers after World War II, and it’s torture under any application of common sense. American law says that every act of torture is a criminal offence, and no public official may authorize anyone else to commit torture. There is no wiggle room here. Churches hold that torture is immoral and unjustified under any conditions. Yet President Bush shows no shame and says that he would do it again, and here he is, being applauded by the Tonight Show audience. He tells us that he is a man of faith, that Jesus is his personal Saviour, and I believe him. We are all people of faith, yet we are all sinners, and we are all under Christ’s reign.
Proper 29 organizers specifically did not want to blame the military for what has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, as the soldiers and aircrew and sailors are ordinary people, many of them people of deep faith, making life-changing decisions in split seconds and following difficult orders. When the Director of the CIA asked President Bush whether to use torture to get information out of captured al-Qaeda leaders, he had to make a difficult decision too. I believe, and most churches believe, that his decision to torture was the wrong one. But all of us have to make decisions in our lives, and they need to be guided by Christ as the ruler of our lives.
When Reign of Christ or Christ the King Sunday was created, the Pope did not just talk about earthly rulers ignoring Christ’s reign. He went on to say that this day addresses not just governments but all Christians, for Christ must reign in our minds, all our minds, which should assent to his teachings; Christ must reign in our wills, which should obey the commandments of God; Christ must reign in our bodies, which should serve as instruments for God’s justice.
You may remember a few weeks ago, on Hallowe’en, Reformation Sunday, when I talked about Martin Luther, who contrasted the theology of glory with the theology of the cross. Well, Reign of Christ was not created to celebrate or promote a theology of glory, dressing Christ up like a king or emperor on earth and making him act like that – what the old Anglican catechism called the ‘vain pomp and glory of the world.’ Next year there will be a royal wedding, with lots of pomp and circumstance, and it will be great to watch, but that’s not how Christ reigns as king.
Christ as ruler does not follow the world’s idea of glory. Soren Kierkegaard, who lived in Denmark about 170 years ago and is one of my favourite theologians, had a little story about Christ the king to illustrate this.
Once upon a time a king fell in love with a humble maiden, but wished to avoid embarrassing or offending her. If he went to her in his kingly glory, with royal garments and a retinue of courtiers, he would overwhelm her. And if she should respond to his love, he could never be sure that she loved him or his majesty. He could disguise himself as a beggar and go to her; but then she would not really love him – he is really a king, but she would love a beggar. The reverse solution, elevating the girl instead of lowering the king, wouldn’t work either; this would imply that as a humble maid she was not good enough to be loved, when it was in fact in this state that the king loved her. The only possible answer was for the king to become a beggar in reality, not just to pretend to be one, and to win the maiden’s love as a beggar.
The king in the story is Jesus Christ – and the maiden he loves, the one he loves the way she is, - that’s us. Christ the King did not come to us in glory, but became a beggar, one of us, to win our love. He is not pretending to be humble like us, he really is like us, even though we heard from Colossians that he is the image of God and all things were created by and for him. The letter to the Philippians in the New Testament talks about this, that Christ was in the form of God, but goes on to say that Christ did not consider being equal with God something to exploit. He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave and becoming like humans, and in that human form he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
And our Luke reading is a description of this, how as king, as ruler, Jesus Christ does humble himself, turning all expectations of how a king should act on their head as he goes to death on a cross. Kings are supposed to be in charge, not obedient. Kings are supposed to be powerful, not humble. Kings are supposed to lead armies into battle, not be put to death alone as a criminal. Kings wear crowns and sit on thrones. But this is the theology of the cross, a theology of suffering, not the theology of glory. The only crown Jesus has is a crown of thorns. His throne is the rough wood of the cross, with two thieves on either side. Christ does not follow the ways of the world. He refuses to use violence when it is used against him. He forgives his persecutors. He is indeed King of the Jews, and the king of creation, but a different kind of king, a servant king, a king who will not take up the sword, a king who says he did not come to judge the world but to save it.
Brothers and sisters, it's as if our world is in darkness. We struggle to learn how to move beyond the violence embedded in our culture. We look with dismay at the war and poverty and environmental destruction that afflicts our world, at the way in which human life is made a commodity or even considered worthless. We try the solutions the rulers and authorities of this world tell us to adopt, embracing violence abroad and consumption at home, and find out that these solve nothing at all. We can’t afford either one.
So who can help us? Who can be found to lift us out of this sorrow and fear we have created for ourselves? We are not so lost that we don't realize that we need a saviour. But our saviour isn’t any of the ones we seize on as who or what can make us happy and fulfilled. We won’t be saved by a political party or leader, or a celebrity, or a corporation. Salvation won’t come from a political or economic or social empire. No, the Bible says, God so loved the world that we were given God’s only Son: Jesus Christ, the image of God, the head of the church, the one who created all rulers and authorities on earth, the king who turned away from glory to become a beggar to love and save us and who brought peace through the blood of his cross. And so he alone is sovereign, he alone deserves our loyalty, he alone must reign in our wills, our minds, our bodies. And when we say to him, Jesus, remember me, he says to us as he brings us into his royal dominion as God’s people, you shall be with me in paradise.
Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23:33-43
There’s no denying that winter will soon be here: This week I put out 14 bags of leaves for the final collection of yard waste, had my snow tires put on, and watched semi-final and final games in university and CFL football. And the Official Board met and set dates for our congregational annual meetings in February, which doesn’t seem that far off now.
In the calendar of the church, we’re at the end of the year. That’s right, the last Sunday of the church year is November 21, which is called Reign of Christ Sunday. Some churches name it Christ the King. And so our readings this morning have been about Christ as ruler: the Colossians passage, which is probably an early Christian hymn, and Luke, the description of Jesus being put to death on the cross as the King of the Jews, a title given to him to make fun of him but which is truer than the Roman Empire could ever have known, for Jesus is indeed King of the Jews, the Christ, the Messiah sent to bring God’s reign not just to Israel or to the empire but to the whole world.
So today is kind of like the church’s New Year’s Eve. The church will begin a new year with the first Sunday in the season of Advent, November 28. But in our society there is no longer a season of Advent. For retailers and consumers, we’re already at Christmas; stores had Christmas decorations up on the day after Hallowe’en. And those decorations will disappear after Boxing Day, when the church is celebrating the real season of Christmas. The first Christmas special I have noticed in the TV listings actually aired last night. And some radio stations have already switched over to 24-hour Christmas music. Majic 100 starts tomorrow. A writer I was reading the other day commented that he was invited on a talk show to talk about the so-called war on Christmas; he said if there is a war, Christmas seems to be winning, as it’s now colonizing November. A Jesuit priest said that eventually Christmas will start around Labour Day. Now I’m not sure Jesuits are the ones to talk, as I was at United Church meetings in Montreal, and we rented a lovely Jesuit facility in Pierrefonds, and they were putting up Christmas wreaths – the week before Hallowe’en. I thought, just because Jesuits are the Society of Jesus, they don’t have to start celebrating his birthday two months early.
Now, I like that Christmas is the only time of the year you’re going to hear Jesus mentioned in a song playing at the mall, but I also know that this isn’t the true Christmas - Jesus is very much secondary in this version of Christmas, this essentially Christless Christmas, in which the birth of Jesus and its meaning are buried way, way down under the message of buy, buy, buy. If a war on Christmas exists, it’s being waged by retailers and advertisers.
As I think about Reign of Christ Sunday, with its imagery of Christ as ruler that we heard in our Scripture readings, I wonder who really is ruler where we are? Jesus Christ, or the empire of shopping? Jesus Christ, or our earthly empires, ruled by prime ministers and premiers and company presidents? We talked last week about the persecution the church faces in many countries today. Reign of Christ Sunday was placed in the church calendar in the 1920s as a response to that kind of persecution, which at that time came from governments in Mexico and Russia. Perhaps Reign of Christ Sunday has fresh meaning for us as followers of Christ today, as a response not just to governments but to the materialist consumer “Christmas” whose power will dominate all that we hear and see for the next month.
Now, if the connection isn’t obvious between our theme for Reign of Christ, and our spend like Santa and save like Scrooge shopping spree at Christmas, as Canadian Tire used to put it, or between Reign of Christ and what governments and companies do, we need to look back at when Reign of Christ Sunday was placed in the church calendar. This day wasn’t created to praise Christ’s majesty or to talk about how nice things will be when he rules forever and ever. The Pope who put this Sunday in the Roman Catholic church calendar, and from there it has come to us, said that the Feast of Christ the King will call to this world’s leaders. They are the thrones and powers and rulers and authorities the letter to the Colossians talks about in our reading this morning, which were created through Christ and for Christ, and are subject to him. But they have cast Christ not just out of Christmas, but out of public life, and despised, and neglected, and ignored him. Christ’s kingly dignity, Pope Pius XI wrote, demands that the state should take account of God’s commandments and Christian principles in making laws and administering justice.
This year ministers have been following a new initiative, called the Proper 29 Project because in the calendar Reign of Christ is the 29th, or proper, Sunday in Ordinary Time. The project began after thousands of pages of documents were released about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. You may have read about those in the paper, or about the debate in Canada over turning detainees in Afghanistan over to Afghan authorities for possible torture. Coalition forces have been responsible for the deaths of 66,000 Iraqi and Afghan civilians, and have ignored the torture of prisoners. The sponsors of Proper 29 wanted to speak out against this when preaching on Reign of Christ Sunday – but also did not want to point fingers at the military, for that’s too easy to do. All of us are morally responsible for the actions carried out in our name, and all of us are subject to the Reign of Christ.
I thought of this watching George W. Bush talking to Jay Leno on the Tonight Show, far too late on Thursday night. President Bush has a new book out, so he’s on all the talk shows. And he admits – well, he doesn’t admit, he puts it out there because he’s proud of it – that he personally approved torturing al-Qaeda prisoners. Even though waterboarding, which is the technique the CIA used, is considered torture under United Nations conventions which were signed into law in the United States, it’s torture under the terms the Allies used to prosecute Japanese officers after World War II, and it’s torture under any application of common sense. American law says that every act of torture is a criminal offence, and no public official may authorize anyone else to commit torture. There is no wiggle room here. Churches hold that torture is immoral and unjustified under any conditions. Yet President Bush shows no shame and says that he would do it again, and here he is, being applauded by the Tonight Show audience. He tells us that he is a man of faith, that Jesus is his personal Saviour, and I believe him. We are all people of faith, yet we are all sinners, and we are all under Christ’s reign.
Proper 29 organizers specifically did not want to blame the military for what has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, as the soldiers and aircrew and sailors are ordinary people, many of them people of deep faith, making life-changing decisions in split seconds and following difficult orders. When the Director of the CIA asked President Bush whether to use torture to get information out of captured al-Qaeda leaders, he had to make a difficult decision too. I believe, and most churches believe, that his decision to torture was the wrong one. But all of us have to make decisions in our lives, and they need to be guided by Christ as the ruler of our lives.
When Reign of Christ or Christ the King Sunday was created, the Pope did not just talk about earthly rulers ignoring Christ’s reign. He went on to say that this day addresses not just governments but all Christians, for Christ must reign in our minds, all our minds, which should assent to his teachings; Christ must reign in our wills, which should obey the commandments of God; Christ must reign in our bodies, which should serve as instruments for God’s justice.
You may remember a few weeks ago, on Hallowe’en, Reformation Sunday, when I talked about Martin Luther, who contrasted the theology of glory with the theology of the cross. Well, Reign of Christ was not created to celebrate or promote a theology of glory, dressing Christ up like a king or emperor on earth and making him act like that – what the old Anglican catechism called the ‘vain pomp and glory of the world.’ Next year there will be a royal wedding, with lots of pomp and circumstance, and it will be great to watch, but that’s not how Christ reigns as king.
Christ as ruler does not follow the world’s idea of glory. Soren Kierkegaard, who lived in Denmark about 170 years ago and is one of my favourite theologians, had a little story about Christ the king to illustrate this.
Once upon a time a king fell in love with a humble maiden, but wished to avoid embarrassing or offending her. If he went to her in his kingly glory, with royal garments and a retinue of courtiers, he would overwhelm her. And if she should respond to his love, he could never be sure that she loved him or his majesty. He could disguise himself as a beggar and go to her; but then she would not really love him – he is really a king, but she would love a beggar. The reverse solution, elevating the girl instead of lowering the king, wouldn’t work either; this would imply that as a humble maid she was not good enough to be loved, when it was in fact in this state that the king loved her. The only possible answer was for the king to become a beggar in reality, not just to pretend to be one, and to win the maiden’s love as a beggar.
The king in the story is Jesus Christ – and the maiden he loves, the one he loves the way she is, - that’s us. Christ the King did not come to us in glory, but became a beggar, one of us, to win our love. He is not pretending to be humble like us, he really is like us, even though we heard from Colossians that he is the image of God and all things were created by and for him. The letter to the Philippians in the New Testament talks about this, that Christ was in the form of God, but goes on to say that Christ did not consider being equal with God something to exploit. He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave and becoming like humans, and in that human form he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
And our Luke reading is a description of this, how as king, as ruler, Jesus Christ does humble himself, turning all expectations of how a king should act on their head as he goes to death on a cross. Kings are supposed to be in charge, not obedient. Kings are supposed to be powerful, not humble. Kings are supposed to lead armies into battle, not be put to death alone as a criminal. Kings wear crowns and sit on thrones. But this is the theology of the cross, a theology of suffering, not the theology of glory. The only crown Jesus has is a crown of thorns. His throne is the rough wood of the cross, with two thieves on either side. Christ does not follow the ways of the world. He refuses to use violence when it is used against him. He forgives his persecutors. He is indeed King of the Jews, and the king of creation, but a different kind of king, a servant king, a king who will not take up the sword, a king who says he did not come to judge the world but to save it.
Brothers and sisters, it's as if our world is in darkness. We struggle to learn how to move beyond the violence embedded in our culture. We look with dismay at the war and poverty and environmental destruction that afflicts our world, at the way in which human life is made a commodity or even considered worthless. We try the solutions the rulers and authorities of this world tell us to adopt, embracing violence abroad and consumption at home, and find out that these solve nothing at all. We can’t afford either one.
So who can help us? Who can be found to lift us out of this sorrow and fear we have created for ourselves? We are not so lost that we don't realize that we need a saviour. But our saviour isn’t any of the ones we seize on as who or what can make us happy and fulfilled. We won’t be saved by a political party or leader, or a celebrity, or a corporation. Salvation won’t come from a political or economic or social empire. No, the Bible says, God so loved the world that we were given God’s only Son: Jesus Christ, the image of God, the head of the church, the one who created all rulers and authorities on earth, the king who turned away from glory to become a beggar to love and save us and who brought peace through the blood of his cross. And so he alone is sovereign, he alone deserves our loyalty, he alone must reign in our wills, our minds, our bodies. And when we say to him, Jesus, remember me, he says to us as he brings us into his royal dominion as God’s people, you shall be with me in paradise.
Friday, November 12, 2010
Yet More Online Nuttiness
So I retweeted several articles (like this one on the anti-Semitic overtones in Glenn Beck's current obsession with George Soros, and am now on several Twitter lists like 'hate-mongers-claiming-2b-christian,' 'list-of-mentally-ill-people,' 'listofpeoplementallyill,' 'list-GLBT-hate-mongers-of-Glenn-Beck.' I'm sure that I'm in great company. George Soros is not immune to criticism, but Glenn Beck's depiction of him as the 'Puppet Master' pulling the strings of international finance resurrects a dangerous anti-Semitic image, and Beck spreads what seem to me to be outright lies about how Soros survived the Shoah. So, as a straight Christian, I'm proud to be listed with other Christians and with GLBT opponents of Beck's close encounter with anti-Semitism.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Updating the Blog...
Thoroughly identifying with Queen's University Principal Daniel Woolf as he launches his own blog, and writes: "This will probably not be very frequent, but sometimes one needs more than 140 characters to say something." So, now that I spend three-quarters of my online time on Twitter rather than the blog or Facebook, I will likely be the same.
Thanksgiving Day! In-laws visiting for the holiday and their 63rd wedding anniversary. Have driven to the St. Lawrence Seaway locks at Iroquois to see the leaves, served Great Lakes Brewery's Pumpkin Ale and Hex from Magic Hat Brewery (Burlington VT), and about to tuck into the turkey and ham. Grateful for the harvest, the farmers who grew our food, and all the blessings God showers on us.
Thanksgiving Day! In-laws visiting for the holiday and their 63rd wedding anniversary. Have driven to the St. Lawrence Seaway locks at Iroquois to see the leaves, served Great Lakes Brewery's Pumpkin Ale and Hex from Magic Hat Brewery (Burlington VT), and about to tuck into the turkey and ham. Grateful for the harvest, the farmers who grew our food, and all the blessings God showers on us.
Friday, October 08, 2010
Polkaroo!
I mentioned the Polkaroo on Twitter and received a tweet from the Polkaroo - my life is complete:) If you're unfamiliar with the Polkaroo, he is a children's TV character on Ontario's TVO network who looks somewhat like a large green giraffe and can only say his own name: Polkaroo! See http://polkaroo.com.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Must be a Protestant...
So I'm in the local Foodland supermarket and run into the Roman Catholic priest, who is nicely dressed in a dark blue clerical shirt (I own the same one). I, on the other hand, am wearing a black MMA Elite T-shirt with a large cross, a camouflage hunting jacket, Levi's, and a International Ice Hockey Federation ball cap. Oh, and I haven't shaved, either (but, in my defence, neither do the actors on Hawaii Five-Oh). The parishioners he is chatting with must be silently comparing Catholic and Protestant clergy.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010
Stop Fox News North?
I've been asked to sign, and know a number of United Church folk who have done so, the Avaaz petition to "stop Fox News North" - that is, Sun TV's proposed all news network. I'm not sure that branding the channel as "hate media" is actually getting us anywhere, and would seem to generate a bonanza of free publicity for Quebecor and its Sun minions (who own, among other things, all of the newspapers along the St. Lawrence River, and then complain about "liberal" dominance of the media).
Like Margaret Atwood, I have problems with the process of getting a Category 1 TV licence, but don't think we need to shut down Fox News-style speech.
Like Margaret Atwood, I have problems with the process of getting a Category 1 TV licence, but don't think we need to shut down Fox News-style speech.
Thursday, August 05, 2010
"Ground Zero Mosque"
I've been twittering constantly the last few days about the controversy over the proposal to build an Islamic cultural centre (termed the "Ground Zero mosque" as it will include a prayer space) two blocks from the World Trade Centre site. There's way too much material, pro and con, to summarize here - see my Twitter feed! - but let me examine a statement by Allen West, who is running for Congress in Florida, and opposes the cultural centre project:
That's true. And the school teachers, headmasters, and schoolgirls, being Muslims, would also say, "Allahu Akbar" (God is great). It's part of the prayers Muslims say five times a day. It's like saying that the Crusaders, who massacred Muslim civilians, Jews, and even Orthodox Christians, said the Lord's Prayer, so it's somehow a bad thing for Christians to pray the same prayer.
The individuals who hijacked two airplanes and flew them into the World Trade Center towers shouted, “Allahu Akhbar”. The individuals who will attend the mosque would offer up like praise of “Allahu Akhbar”. The individuals who detonate suicide vests, behead school teachers and headmasters, throw acid on little girls trying to attend school, and fire rockets into Israel shout, “Allahu Akhbar”.
That's true. And the school teachers, headmasters, and schoolgirls, being Muslims, would also say, "Allahu Akbar" (God is great). It's part of the prayers Muslims say five times a day. It's like saying that the Crusaders, who massacred Muslim civilians, Jews, and even Orthodox Christians, said the Lord's Prayer, so it's somehow a bad thing for Christians to pray the same prayer.
Sunday, August 01, 2010
Now a Chautauquan
Back from a great week at the Chautauqua Institution in New York State. Chautauqua was founded in 1874 as a retreat for Methodist Sunday School teachers, and became the centre of the Chautauqua movement of lectures, performances and worship services - "art, religion, music, and knowledge" ("recreation" has now been added as Chautauqua is rife with opportunities for boating, sailing, swimming and biking). There are other "Chautauquas" still operating in the summer elsewhere in the US.
Clergy Renewal Week is organized by the Christian service organization The King's Daughters and Sons and brings ministers from across the US and Canada to Chautauqua. Our group had United Church of Canada, Anglican Church of Canada, United Methodist, Presbyterian Church of the USA, and United Church of Christ clergy. Gate passes were provided by the Chautauqua Institution's Department of Religion and accommodation is provided by the IOKDS in the two houses they own.
Chautauqua is a beautiful town of Victorian cottages, many of which have been in the same family for generations. Its winter population of 300 mushrooms to 10,000 people a day in the summer. It's certainly a bastion of liberal Protestantism, with the mainline American Protestant denominations maintaining houses in the village, although there are two Jewish congregations, and a Roman Catholic presence in facilities borrowed from Protestants. I attended worship services with the Episcopal priest and renowned preacher Rev. Dr. Barbara Brown Taylor preaching (and she signed two books for me!), lectures on the week's theme of photography - the inventor of the digital camera, Steve Sasson, photographers Steve McCurry and Ed Kashi, former US poet laureate Billy Collins, and George Eastman House director Tony Bannon were among the speakers - and symphony, ballet and opera performances. It was indeed a renewal week.
Clergy Renewal Week is organized by the Christian service organization The King's Daughters and Sons and brings ministers from across the US and Canada to Chautauqua. Our group had United Church of Canada, Anglican Church of Canada, United Methodist, Presbyterian Church of the USA, and United Church of Christ clergy. Gate passes were provided by the Chautauqua Institution's Department of Religion and accommodation is provided by the IOKDS in the two houses they own.
Chautauqua is a beautiful town of Victorian cottages, many of which have been in the same family for generations. Its winter population of 300 mushrooms to 10,000 people a day in the summer. It's certainly a bastion of liberal Protestantism, with the mainline American Protestant denominations maintaining houses in the village, although there are two Jewish congregations, and a Roman Catholic presence in facilities borrowed from Protestants. I attended worship services with the Episcopal priest and renowned preacher Rev. Dr. Barbara Brown Taylor preaching (and she signed two books for me!), lectures on the week's theme of photography - the inventor of the digital camera, Steve Sasson, photographers Steve McCurry and Ed Kashi, former US poet laureate Billy Collins, and George Eastman House director Tony Bannon were among the speakers - and symphony, ballet and opera performances. It was indeed a renewal week.
Friday, July 23, 2010
"Church" in an app
Fascinating Huffington Post article by Paul Lamb on the potential for religious communities (including creating new kinds of communities) of location-based, social networking apps for mobile phones. He concludes:
I'll be thinking about this one for a while.
There is no question that the mobile experience will redefine how and when people engage with their spiritual and religious communities. Just as we have Web-only worshippers, we may soon be seeing mobile-only congregations which organize and disband on the fly. Nobody knows exactly where things will end up, but next-generation mobile apps could offer a powerful and extended community experience unlike anything that exists today outside of institutional walls and on the Internet.
In a world where it is getting harder and harder to bring people to church, mobile apps might lead the way in bringing church to the people.
I'll be thinking about this one for a while.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Farewell to Prison Farms
The fight to save the prison farms around Kingston, Ontario, was lost in a recent court decision that gave Correctional Services Canada the go-ahead to close the farms and auction off the livestock. I've worked with ex-offenders and with food banks, and I support prison farms: the work gives prisoners confidence and skills (the government says that farm skills aren't useful in the "real world" but I wouldn't say that to the farmers around here, or to the government's rural base!), the output of the farms feeds prisoners and goes to local food banks, and closing the farms will not actually save the government money as there will have to be new skills training programs and replacement purchases for the farm produce. It's rumoured that the hidden agenda at work is using the farmland for expansion of the prisons. Father Raymond de Souza has an excellent piece in The National Post on the issue.
Friday, July 16, 2010
"Jerusalem"
Although I'm in what at one time would be called a "Dissenting" denomination, I always love William Blake's lyrics to Jerusalem, listed by its first line in hymn books as And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time. Chariots of fire, arrows of desire, the Holy Lamb of God walking on England's pleasant pastures green. See the blog Ghost of a Flea on controversies over singing the hymn (which was in our 1971 joint Anglican-United Church of Canada red hymnal, and whose tune is in our present hymn book as O Day of Peace) in the modern Church of England.
Wednesday, July 07, 2010
Tea Party Jesus
The Huffington Post has excerpts from Tea Party Jesus, putting quotes from key Tea Party and Republican figures into the mouth of Jesus. It makes a great point about how the language of people who call themselves Christians so often isn't, well, Christian. What would Jesus do?
Monday, June 28, 2010
Just a few lines on the G20 Summit
The Muskoka G8 and Toronto G20 summits have been analyzed from here to back online, but here are just a few lines from John Doyle in today's Globe & Mail:
Nobody on TV was prepared, or indeed intellectually equipped, one suspects, to see the enormous fences and the extreme disruption of downtown life and business, as a symbolic act of hostility against a population, and as symbolic examples of the remoteness of the powerful from ordinary people.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Fox in the Henhouse
Much hand-wringing, name-calling, glee, and angst from commentators of various political stripes over the prospect of a "Fox News North" as Quebecor plans to expand Sun TV - which I get on my TV, and seems to broadcast mostly The Casino Rama Grill Room sports talk show - into a conservative news network. Publicity that Quebecor couldn't buy otherwise. I do find the trumped-up indignation of both Fox News and Sun TV amusing, as they protest that a conservative voice is absent from the "lamestream media." In Canada English-speaking conservatives have The National Post, the entire Sun newspaper chain (which in turn owns virtually all of the local papers in my area), talk radio, and Maclean's magazine. As well, conservative talking heads are part of CBC and CTV news coverage. But, of course, it plays well to the base if one is constantly foaming at the mouth about how there is a media conspiracy against one's point of view. The left does the same thing.
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Rare Bibles
I'm home from the Medieval Festival at Upper Canada Village - a very sanitized version of the Middle Ages. Many visitors were there from Quebec, where medieval re-creations are very popular. The all-pervasive influence of the Church was left out of this version of medieval times - nary a cross or friar in sight, although a couple of Roman Catholic priests were among the spectators (I was incognito).
But further on ancient times, and my last blog posting about the Lowy Council, this article is about amassing a collection of old Bibles. The Lowy Collection has a first edition of the Authorized Version, the King James Bible, as well as editions of the Torah and the Tanakh, the complete Hebrew Bible.
But further on ancient times, and my last blog posting about the Lowy Council, this article is about amassing a collection of old Bibles. The Lowy Collection has a first edition of the Authorized Version, the King James Bible, as well as editions of the Torah and the Tanakh, the complete Hebrew Bible.
Monday, June 07, 2010
Judaica and Hebraica
I'm on the Council of the Jacob M. Lowy Collection at Library and Archives Canada - the Lowy donation is Canada's national collection of Judaica and Hebraica, meaning Jewish and Hebrew literature. We had a meeting tonight with Library and Archives officials to discuss how the collection will fit into modernization of the agency, while adhering to the terms of the deed of Mr. Lowy's gift in 1977 (pre-public Internet). But I do need to pay tribute to our retiring curator, Cheryl Jaffee, and welcome the incoming part-time curatorial team led by Leah Cohen. It's a privilege to be part of the Lowy Council and to be surrounded by books that speak of heritage and survival.
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
Church is good for something...
According to the Tamil rapper Maya (aka M.I.A.). In this profile in the New York Times Magazine, Maya is driving by a church in East London and says:
I haven't blogged for so long! Been relying on Twitter and Facebook. I'm just back from the annual meeting of the United Church of Canada's Montreal & Ottawa Conference in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec, and the annual meeting of the Canadian Theological Society at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, held at Concordia University. Montreal was great as always - smoked meat, distractions like the boutique at the Musée des beaux-arts and the Apple Store, hundreds of people around Concordia and on Crescent Street on a Monday night, driving up and down the Main and St. Urbain.
And I'm mourning the death of the Rev. Rod Carter, who taught restorative justice at Queen's Theological College. Rod had been in prison and received a pardon, going on to serve in the military and as a Correctional Services of Canada chaplain, making a difference in the lives of many, many offenders and students - his story is a good counter to the portrayal of pardons by the federal government and media. A gentle man who had a quiet passion for justice.
“That church saved my life. Christ Church! That’s the last time I got to be a high-school dropout: I should have been in school, and a youth worker at the church, who had been in prison, grabbed me and slammed me against the wall one day and said: ‘What is the matter with you? If you stay around here, you’ll end up living in one of these apartments with six babies before you’re 20.’ I used to be hanging about, getting into trouble. He changed my life.”
I haven't blogged for so long! Been relying on Twitter and Facebook. I'm just back from the annual meeting of the United Church of Canada's Montreal & Ottawa Conference in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec, and the annual meeting of the Canadian Theological Society at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, held at Concordia University. Montreal was great as always - smoked meat, distractions like the boutique at the Musée des beaux-arts and the Apple Store, hundreds of people around Concordia and on Crescent Street on a Monday night, driving up and down the Main and St. Urbain.
And I'm mourning the death of the Rev. Rod Carter, who taught restorative justice at Queen's Theological College. Rod had been in prison and received a pardon, going on to serve in the military and as a Correctional Services of Canada chaplain, making a difference in the lives of many, many offenders and students - his story is a good counter to the portrayal of pardons by the federal government and media. A gentle man who had a quiet passion for justice.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Beck surrogate responds
There's an ongoing debate about churches and social justice, prompted by Glenn Beck of Fox News commenting that Christians should "flee" churches which talk about social justice. He sees "social justice" as a code phrase for both communist and fascist extremism. This brought a predictable backlash from a wide range of Christians, from the Sojourners' Rev. Jim Wallis to Biblical scholars pointing out that the early church was effectively socialist (see Acts 4:32-35).
The Washington Post's religion pages have been filled with this debate, with the latest being a response from a producer of Glenn Beck's show. He cites one example of "social justice" extremism and says that Beck has nothing against Christian charity, only against advocacy of societal change. But can churches stop at charity? One Brazilian bishop said in the days of the dictatorship in that country, "When I feed the poor, they say I am a Christian. When I ask why they are poor, they say that I am a Communist." Can churches ask these questions?
The Washington Post's religion pages have been filled with this debate, with the latest being a response from a producer of Glenn Beck's show. He cites one example of "social justice" extremism and says that Beck has nothing against Christian charity, only against advocacy of societal change. But can churches stop at charity? One Brazilian bishop said in the days of the dictatorship in that country, "When I feed the poor, they say I am a Christian. When I ask why they are poor, they say that I am a Communist." Can churches ask these questions?
Friday, April 09, 2010
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
30th Anniversary of the Martyrdom of Oscar Romero
"The poor have shown the church the true way to go. A church that does not speak out from the side of the poor is not the true church of Jesus." - Monsignor Oscar Romero, assassinated in San Salvador, March 24, 1980
Monday, March 22, 2010
World Water Day
The UN reports that polluted water accounts for more deaths than all forms of violence in the world.
Monday, March 08, 2010
A Kindle in Every Pot
A talk radio host in Ottawa is going on in amazement about how his wife can sit in their living room and access 270,000 books on her Kindle - so why do we need to spend money on libraries? Well, for one thing none of the recent books on the Kindle are free - only Project Gutenburg and other similar public domain works are. And not only can many families not afford to buy ebooks for the Kindle, they can't afford the Kindle in the first place. I shudder to think how I would have bankrupted my parents if they had had to pay for the stacks of books I would bring back from the bookmobile. Yes, libraries will change - but they're still needed. And talk radio hosts with vacation homes in the Bahamas, and $500 to buy a Kindle, should not assume that everyone has the same standard of living.
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