Winter Games: Sermon, February 23, 2014

I do all this for the good news, because I want to share in its blessings.

You know that many runners enter a race, and only one of them wins the prize. So run to win! Athletes work hard to win a crown that cannot last, but we do it for a crown that will last forever. I don’t run without a goal. And I don’t box by beating my fists in the air. I keep my body under control and make it my slave, so I won’t lose out after telling the good news to others.

1 Corinthians 9:23-27, Common English Version

Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you that you must not oppose those who want to hurt you. If people slap you on your right cheek, you must turn the left cheek to them as well. When they wish to haul you to court and take your shirt, let them have your coat too. When they force you to go one mile, go with them two. Give to those who ask, and don’t refuse those who wish to borrow from you.

“You have heard that it was said, You must love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who harass you so that you will be acting as children of your Father who is in heaven. He makes the sun rise on both the evil and the good and sends rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love only those who love you, what reward do you have? Don’t even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing? Don’t even the Gentiles do the same? Therefore, just as your heavenly Father is complete in showing love to everyone, so also you must be complete.”

Matthew 5:38-48, Common English Bible

I don’t need to tell anyone that this winter has seemed exceptionally cold and snowy. You may remember that one day that the temperature here was colder than at the South Pole. Maybe the Winter Olympics should have been held here, instead of in the warmest city in Russia.

Someone said that there are always two Olympics. There is the experience of the games themselves, where athletes do amazing things, and there is another, darker side, all about in whose service the games are held. There can be no doubt that these Sochi games are intended to promote Vladimir Putin and his regime in Russia. Where the news from the Olympics should be about medal sweeps, in Russia there have been other sweeps, arrests of peaceful critics of Putin’s policies on the rights of gay and lesbian people, the right to a free press, and environmental protection.

Olympic games are ruinously expensive – Vancouver did relatively well, but Russia has spent $51 billion on the winter games in Sochi, the most ever. There have already been riots in Brazil over how much money the World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics are costing, money that could be spent on public services. And most of these venues in Sochi, built at such expense and some displacing entire villages of people, will apparently just be left to decay when the games are over, benefiting no one.

One of the big book and movie franchises for young adults the last few years has been The Hunger Games. I feel as if we are the citizens of the Capitol in The Hunger Games, as we eagerly watch these winter games and look past what’s behind the event. Among the few athletes who have drawn attention to this other side during the Olympics are two Canadian snowboarders. Michael Lambert said that he’s all for a pure form of sport with no distractions, but at the same time just because he’s part of the Olympics doesn’t mean he can ignore the controversial realities behind Sochi. Jasey Jay Anderson criticized the extravagant spending on these games, and how distant it is from his life at home, and from the future of humanity. As well, a Ukrainian skier withdrew from the slalom, her best event, saying that she can’t participate when people are dying in protests against the pro-Russian government of Ukraine.

So, like Michael Lambert, I can’t close my eyes to the reality behind these games, the corruption, the waste, the arrests and intimidation. But the young people from all over the world who have trained for years to compete in the games deserve honour, and the celebration of their achievements. They bring us together as we cheer them on. The whole country pretty much shut down for the hockey games. Complete strangers were gathering around someone’s cell phone to watch, and hugging each other when Canada scored. On Thursday afternoon I was on a church conference call, and suddenly everyone erupted into shouts of joy as news broke that the Canadian women’s hockey team had won the gold medal. We were in Toronto and there was a TV on in a food court, and men wearing Team Canada hockey sweaters were anxiously watching figure skating.

And these athletes inspire us. Who can’t rejoice with the three Dufour-Lapointe sisters from Quebec, who all qualified for the Olympics in moguls skiing, and two of them won gold and silver medals? Who can’t follow with rapt attention Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir in ice dancing, or Jennifer Jones and the Canadian women’s curling team? And who can’t sympathize with athletes who finished a fraction of a second out of the medals? These games have produced so many remarkable stories. There’s the story of Noriaki Kasai, the Japanese ski jumper who won a silver medal at Lillehammer in 1994, and 20 years later came to Sochi aged 41 and won another silver. Or Dario Cologna, from Switzerland, who won a gold medal in cross country sking. You would think that after such a gruelling race he would head off to rest, but he waited a half hour at the finish line to congratulate the final skier, from Peru, who was competing with broken ribs from an accident before the games.

For many of us these Olympics expose us to sports we don’t normally follow. A lot of us watch hockey and curling and figure skating, but when else are we so interested in freestyle skiing, or long track speed skating, or what I think are really insane sports like luge, where you go down feet first on a sled, or skeleton, where you go down face first. But as a kid I found tobogganing pretty scary at times, so these are probably not the sports for me. And after the Olympics finish there will be the Paralympic games, which will allow us to watch athletes with disabilities, who don’t get much attention any other time.

The Olympic flame burning in Sochi traveled from Greece, for the modern games are a revival of the ancient Olympics. And the Apostle Paul knew about these Greek games, as did the believers in the churches he was writing to, so he uses sports to make his point to the Corinthian church in his letter we read today: “You know that many runners – or skiers, or speed skaters, or snowboarders – enter a race, and only one of them wins the prize. So run to win! Athletes work hard to win a prize that cannot last, but we do it for a prize that will last forever.”

An athlete must train with intensity to win the contest. We can only imagine how hard athletes need to train to win an Olympic event. What’s more, an athlete went through this self-discipline and this training in ancient Greece, not to win a medal or commercial endorsements, but a simple crown of laurel leaves that withered within days. When we refer to laurels, that’s what the expression refers to. Nowadays the point is still the same: Athletes may work for a prize that can’t last, but followers of Jesus do it for the prize of eternal life.

To win the race demands discipline. But Paul is telling us that to win this eternal prize we must be just as self-disciplined in our lives. We have to discipline our bodies, our minds, our souls, because to follow Jesus and live in his way isn’t easy. Look at what Jesus tells us today: Don’t oppose those who want to hurt you. Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you. That’s hard, to put it mildly. It goes against the script our society has socialized into us. TV shows are called Revenge, and Die Hard, they’re not called Turning the Other Cheek or Loving Your Enemies.

Paul tells the Corinthians, “I don’t run without a goal.” In life we need to know our goal. And, Paul says, he won’t be able to reach his goal if he gets distracted by his own purposes. To reach our goal in life, to live in the way Jesus taught us and shows us, we need to practice self-discipline, self-control. William Barclay said that we can’t do what Jesus tells us to do, to serve others, until we have mastered ourselves. We can’t tell people the Good News of Jesus unless we know it. We can’t bring others to Jesus unless we ourselves are with him and found in him.

Remember on Thursday, when the Canadian women were down 2-0 in the third period to Team USA? No one gave up. These women responded as they had been trained to do, they pressed on, they showed discipline, they showed passion, they showed that, as they put it, every minute matters – and they tied the game and took it to overtime, and then scored to become the Olympic champions. Sisters and brothers, Olympic medals are for the young and fit, but our game, our race, is for the young and old, of all stages of health and ability, for all of us. And every minute matters. You know those Canadian Tire commercials, We All Play For Canada? Well, we are all athletes in this race of life, heading for the goal. Run to win!

Has Christ Been Divided? Sermon for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, January 19, 2014

From Paul, called by God’s will to be an apostle of Jesus Christ, and from Sosthenes our brother.
To God’s church that is in Corinth:
To those who have been made holy to God in Christ Jesus, who are called to be God’s people.
Together with all those who call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ in every place—he’s their Lord and ours!
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

I thank my God always for you, because of God’s grace that was given to you in Christ Jesus. That is, you were made rich through him in everything: in all your communication and every kind of knowledge, in the same way that the testimony about Christ was confirmed with you. The result is that you aren’t missing any spiritual gift while you wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed. He will also confirm your testimony about Christ until the end so that you will be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, and you were called by him to partnership with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

Now I encourage you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ: Agree with each other and don’t be divided into rival groups. Instead, be restored with the same mind and the same purpose. My brothers and sisters, Chloe’s people gave me some information about you, that you’re fighting with each other. What I mean is this: that each one of you says, “I belong to Paul,” “I belong to Apollos,” “I belong to Cephas,” “I belong to Christ.” Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you, or were you baptized in Paul’s name? Thank God that I didn’t baptize any of you, except Crispus and Gaius, so that nobody can say that you were baptized in my name! Oh, I baptized the house of Stephanas too. Otherwise, I don’t know if I baptized anyone else. Christ didn’t send me to baptize but to preach the good news. And Christ didn’t send me to preach the good news with clever words so that Christ’s cross won’t be emptied of its meaning.

1 Corinthians 1:1-17, Common English Bible

They entered Capernaum. When they had come into a house, Jesus asked them,“What were you arguing about during the journey?” They didn’t respond, since on the way they had been debating with each other about who was the greatest. He sat down, called the Twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be least of all and the servant of all.” Jesus reached for a little child, placed him among the Twelve, and embraced him. Then he said, “Whoever welcomes one of these children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me isn’t actually welcoming me but rather the one who sent me.”

John said to Jesus, “Teacher, we saw someone throwing demons out in your name, and we tried to stop him because he wasn’t following us.” Jesus replied, “Don’t stop him. No one who does powerful acts in my name can quickly turn around and curse me. Whoever isn’t against us is for us. I assure you that whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you belong to Christ will certainly be rewarded.”

Mark 9:33-41, Common English Bible

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity began in 1908, when it was proposed by a Franciscan monk and adopted by the Pope. By the 1960s it had its present name, Protestant churches had moved their own week for unity to January, and Roman Catholic and Protestant churches began working together on each year’s theme. This was the golden age of the ecumenical movement, bringing churches together to overcome the historic differences in belief and practice that had separated them. The way churches worship became more similar, we began using the same cycle of readings and church calendar and the colours of the seasons and holy days, great coalitions like the World Council of Churches and the Canadian Council of Churches were at the height of their influence. It even looked like the United and Anglican Churches would merge in Canada. The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity was marked by huge worship services that filled sanctuaries with worshippers from different denominations.

But since then we have pulled back a bit. These great church coalitions are not as influential or well-financed anymore. The Anglican-United talks did not result in an amalgamation, although they did produce the red hymn book. There aren’t any big services this week, at least not in this area. And as our country and the world changes, churches have to put energy into relationships with other faiths as well as other Christian churches.

As with so many things from the boom years of the church, the golden age of ecumenical activity is over. But there is still lots going on. Our United Church is, after all, the product of several denominations coming together, so we have been active ecumenically for a long time. We have no congregations outside Canada and Bermuda, so we have to cooperate with other churches to do anything outside our borders. So we participate in numerous coalitions, worldwide and in Canada. In February I am one of the United Church representatives at a World Communion of Reformed Churches meeting. This body has 229 member denominations in 108 countries. A United Church delegation attended the World Council of Churches assembly in Busan, South Korea, at the end of October. We have lots of partnerships which we hear about in our Minutes for Mission, and I have visited our partners the Moravian and Baptist Churches in Nicaragua. Partnerships and coalitions are how we feed the hungry and seek justice for the poor in this global village.

And there is a lot going on locally. Our Presbyterian neighbours kindly offering us poinsettias for Christmas Eve is just one example. We have proposed worshipping with Wesleyan and Pentecostal churches here in South Stormont on Good Friday. Some of us attend the service for World Day of Prayer each March, organized by local women from several churches. There will be a big worship service with local churches when the International Ploughing Match comes in 2015. When I was chair of Seaway Valley Presbytery we launched a partnership with the United Church of Christ across the border in New York State, and now I’m part of talks between our denominations at the national level.

When a Canadian team wrote this year’s worship service for the Week of Prayer, the theme chosen came from our reading from the First Letter to the Corinthians. Here the Apostle Paul is writing to the new church in the Greek city of Corinth. And near the beginning of his letter, right after he greets them and tells them that he thanks God for them, Paul says that he has heard that they are divided into rival groups and are fighting with each other. Some Corinthians are saying that they belong to Paul, others identify with another preacher, Apollos, and others are loyal to the apostle Peter. And Paul makes a plea for unity, asking, has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized in Paul’s name?

And you can imagine the Corinthian believers getting this letter, and reading it out loud to everyone because that is what you did with these letters then, and people hearing Paul’s words and the meaning sinking in and then drooping their heads. No, Paul or Apollos or Peter were not crucified for us. Jesus was. We weren’t baptized in the name of Paul or Apollos or Peter, but in the name of Jesus.

We can think, we’re not like those Corinthians at all. But even with the cooperation and good will we enjoy with other churches, we can still be suspicious, we can still think that we and our tradition are superior to those “other” churches, we can still believe that we have a monopoly on truth, we can still argue like the original disciples of Jesus about who is greater. We live in a culture that makes it easy, and even expected, for people to generate conflict and attack each other’s beliefs, whether in debates at Tim Hortons or on talk radio or in online comments. We can still feel that we are somehow in competition with the Anglican or Presbyterian or some other congregation, even congregations in our own denomination, for people and money. And the names may have changed, but we can still look to a founding figure like those Corinthians did, even a long-ago one, saying we belong to Calvin or Luther. But Calvin or Luther or Knox or Wesley weren’t crucified for us. Jesus was. We weren’t baptized in their names, but in the name of Jesus.

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity can be an opportunity for us to pray and renew our work for unity among Christian churches. But it is also a chance for us to reflect on the need for unity, not just in the worldwide church, but in our own United Church, and in our congregation. Because we can feel suspicious of, and superior to, and in competition with oher denominations, yes, and also other United Church congregations, and even people in our own congregation. Even though our Presbytery has been a model for others across Canada in how congregations have come together in the last few years, I can tell you lots of stories about congregations who don’t trust each other, and congregational boards torn apart by conflicts over what to believe and how to govern.

I just want to point out one thing about what Paul writes to the Corinthians. He wrote in Greek, and he uses a couple of different words that are translated into English as meaning “divided.” When he says to the Corinthians, “don’t be divided into rival groups,” the Greek word is schisma. We have an English word, schism, which refers to a division within a religious denomination that results in a faction breaking away. Schisms within churches produced the many denominations we have now. But the origin of this Greek word schisma is interesting: it did mean division, or groups in conflict with each other, but originally it meant a tear in a garment. When we fail to live up to the prayer of Jesus that we may all be one, and we behave in ways that divide denominations, and congregations, it’s as if we are ripping a beautiful piece of clothing. Jeans with tears in them may be in fashion, but we wouldn’t want to wear a winter coat with a tear in it and the filling coming out, or a shirt with a rip in it. In the same way, the church of Christ shouldn’t be ripped and torn.

Has Christ been divided? Elsewhere, in the letter to the Ephesians, it says that there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, unifying us as followers of Jesus. Later in this service we will say together a commitment to this unity, for Paul not only challenges the Corinthians, but us too, to know in our hearts and show in our actions that Christ has not been divided. We will say that together – together in the worldwide church, together in South Stormont, together in the United Church of Canada, together in this congregation – we are called to be saints, together we give thanks for one another, together we are not lacking in any spiritual gift, together we affirm that God is faithful, together we are called into fellowship, together we seek to be in agreement, together we belong to Christ. Has Christ been divided? No – together we go into the world to proclaim his good news.

No Time For a Child to be Born

In those days Caesar Augustus declared that everyone throughout the empire should be enrolled in the tax lists. This first enrollment occurred when Quirinius governed Syria. Everyone went to their own cities to be enrolled. Since Joseph belonged to David’s house and family line, he went up from the city of Nazareth in Galilee to David’s city, called Bethlehem, in Judea. He went to be enrolled together with Mary, who was promised to him in marriage and who was pregnant. While they were there, the time came for Mary to have her baby. She gave birth to her firstborn child, a son, wrapped him snugly, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the guestroom.

Luke 2:1-7, Common English Bible

After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in the territory of Judea during the rule of King Herod, magi came from the east to Jerusalem. They asked, “Where is the newborn king of the Jews? We’ve seen his star in the east, and we’ve come to honour him.”

When King Herod heard this, he was troubled, and everyone in Jerusalem was troubled with him. He gathered all the chief priests and the legal experts and asked them where the Christ was to be born. They said, “In Bethlehem of Judea, for this is what the prophet wrote:

You, Bethlehem, land of Judah,
by no means are you least among the rulers of Judah,
because from you will come one who governs,
who will shepherd my people Israel.”

Then Herod secretly called for the magi and found out from them the time when the star had first appeared. He sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search carefully for the child. When you’ve found him, report to me so that I too may go and honour him.” When they heard the king, they went; and look, the star they had seen in the east went ahead of them until it stood over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were filled with joy. They entered the house and saw the child with Mary his mother. Falling to their knees, they honored him. Then they opened their treasure chests and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Because they were warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they went back to their own country by another route.

When the magi had departed, an angel from the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up. Take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod will soon search for the child in order to kill him.” Joseph got up and, during the night, took the child and his mother to Egypt. He stayed there until Herod died. This fulfilled what the Lord had spoken through the prophet: I have called my son out of Egypt.

When Herod knew the magi had fooled him, he grew very angry. He sent soldiers to kill all the children in Bethlehem and in all the surrounding territory who were two years old and younger, according to the time that he had learned from the magi. This fulfilled the word spoken through Jeremiah the prophet:

A voice was heard in Ramah,
weeping and much grieving.
Rachel weeping for her children,
and she did not want to be comforted,
because they were no more.

Matthew 2:1-18, Common English Bible

A poem by Madeline L’Engle:

This is no time for a child to be born, with the
earth betrayed by war and hate
And a comet slashing the sky to warn that time
runs out and the sun burns late.
That was no time for a child to be born, in a land
in the crushing grip of Rome,
Honour and truth were trampled by scorn, yet
there did the Saviour make his home.
When is the time for love to be born? The inn is
full on the planet earth,
And by a comet the sky is torn – yet Love still takes
the risk of birth.

NIV Ragamuffin Bible

NIV Ragamuffin Bible: Meditations for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up and Brokenhearted
Zondervan, Grand Rapids MI, 2013
1460 pages

Having read The Ragamuffin Gospel by the American Franciscan Brennan Manning, who died earlier this year, I was pleased to receive a review copy of this edition of the New International Version of the Bible. It is a standard NIV Bible except for the inclusion of reflections, devotions and quotes from Manning at appropriate points in the text. For instance, turning to Luke 15 and the parable of the prodigal son, there is a passage from Manning's work that talks about the message of Jesus in this parable: "(Jesus) insisted that his Father is crazy with love, that God is a kooky God who can scarcely bear to be without us." At other places in the text the relevance of the quotes is less obvious; I'm not sure why a Manning quote about the meaning of Christmas - "the promise of God who came in history and who comes daily in mystery will one day come in glory" - is attached to the setting of Canaan's boundaries in Numbers 34.

There is a brief introduction by Manning, setting out his view of Scripture as "God's personal memoirs," but there is little explanation of why this Ragamuffin edition was prepared, other than his mention that "some of my thoughts (are) sprinkled throughout...but they serve only to highlight God's extravagant love." Nor is there a biography of Manning, so someone who knows little about him will not learn much more from this Bible itself, other than getting the flavour of his writing. However, the curious reader can always look him up on Wikipedia.

But this Ragamuffin Bible is a helpful devotional tool for anyone who is already familiar with Manning's grace-filled work or who just feels like one of the bedraggled, beat-up and brokenhearted (and who doesn't at times?). The grace of the God who is crazy with love shines through the words of Scripture and the Manning quotes.

Prayer for the Comprehensive Review

I was one of the commissioners to the United Church of Canada's 41st General Council in Ottawa who voted to undertake a major review of all of the church's structures, programs and processes. A small Task Group was formed, chaired by Rev. Cathy Hamilton (who was ordained with me), to consider how we are called to live out God's mission in a world of rapid change. The group has been receiving presentations from various groups in the church and feedback from facilitators who have been interviewing congregations and other ministry units. I am told that the next step will be to release some ideas for comment in 2014.

At the last meeting of Montreal and Ottawa Conference Executive, Rev. Trisha Elliott from Ottawa suggested that we pray intensively for the Comprehensive Review's work. She wrote and circulated a prayer for the month of November; here is my (very late) contribution for December, the seasons of Advent and Christmas. Please pray for the work of the review, and the questioning and visioning in which United Church folk are engaged - and sign up for United Future updates.

God, the prophet Isaiah tells us, “a shoot will grow up from the stump of Jesse; a branch will sprout from his roots.” As we look for signs of your coming, your peaceable realm where the wolf will lie down with the lamb, we overlook stumps. We want to find the green shoots of new life. But Isaiah says to look at stumps.

God, in your Spirit help us to search for the stumps. Remind us to ask where something in our church is solid and old, like a stump. Prompt us to recognize where you are inviting us into the old to discover the new.

We pray for participants in the Comprehensive Review: the members of the task group, the staff who support them, the facilitators who have interviewed local ministries, everyone who has been interviewed and contributed and awaits results. During this waiting time of Advent, assist us in our watching for stumps and signs of new life. We pray in the power of the Holy Spirit, and in the name of Jesus, who has come, is coming, and will come again to make all things new. Amen.

The Toronto Maple Leafs and Congregational Change: Sermon, First Sunday of Advent, December 1, 2013

Preparing for the First Sunday of Advent, I was inspired by Derek Penwell's thoughts about congregational transformation and being a Chicago Cubs fan. He writes eloquently about the lack of shortcuts, and the need for time and patience, and more time, in turning around a congregational culture.

This is what Isaiah, Amoz’s son, saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.
In the days to come
the mountain of the LORD’s house
will be the highest of the mountains.
It will be lifted above the hills;
peoples will stream to it.
Many nations will go and say,
“Come, let’s go up to the LORD’s mountain,
to the house of Jacob’s God
so that he may teach us his ways
and we may walk in God’s paths.”
Instruction will come from Zion;
the LORD’s word from Jerusalem.
God will judge between the nations,
and settle disputes of mighty nations.
Then they will beat their swords into iron plows
and their spears into pruning tools.
Nation will not take up sword against nation;
they will no longer learn how to make war.
Come, house of Jacob,
let’s walk by the LORD’s light.
Isaiah 2:1-5, Common English Bible

“But the exact day and hour? No one knows that, not even heaven’s angels, not even the Son. Only the Father knows.

“The Arrival of the Son of Man will take place in times like Noah’s. Before the great flood everyone was carrying on as usual, having a good time right up to the day Noah boarded the ark. They knew nothing—until the flood hit and swept everything away.

“The Son of Man’s arrival will be like that: Two men will be working in the field—one will be taken, one left behind; two women will be grinding at the mill—one will be taken, one left behind. So stay awake, alert. You have no idea what day your Master will show up. But you do know this: You know that if the homeowner had known what time of night the burglar would arrive, he would have been there with his dogs to prevent the break-in. Be vigilant just like that. You have no idea when the Son of Man is going to show up.”
Matthew 24:36-44, The Message Bible

At the meeting I attended in Toronto last week there were two people there from Edmonton, and they were saying that the City of Edmonton is talking about changing its slogan, “City of Champions.” Because there hasn’t been a championship in Edmonton for a while. The Eskimos haven’t been in the Grey Cup since they beat the Alouettes in 2005, and they’re now second last in the CFL. The Oilers have gone 22 seasons without winning a Stanley Cup, and in the NHL only the Buffalo Sabres have a worse record right now.

Now, we were talking about this in Toronto, which hasn’t been a championship city lately in any sport other than the Argos winning the Grey Cup last year. Think about the Toronto Maple Leafs. They are second only to Montreal in the number of Stanley Cups, but they haven’t won for 46 years, the longest championship drought in NHL history. In fact, until this spring they went seven seasons without being in the playoffs at all. The Leafs had a strong start to this season, but are now at the point where they didn’t manage to get a single shot on net in the third period and overtime of the Pittsburgh game on Wednesday.

And there are always plans to fix the Leafs. There will be a new general manager and hockey development staff, and there will be warnings that the rebuilding process will take time and fans need to be patient. And then the Leafs have yet another losing season, and fans start screaming. They want things turned around right away, most often through a quick fix like changing up the lines, or trading to get Roberto Luongo in goal, or firing the coach.

And, you know, when we grapple with questions about the church in the Seaway Valley, we can be like Leaf fans, or Habs fans or Senators fans for that matter. When membership and finances are headed south, we recognize that something needs to be done. But, just like the impatient fans who are phoning in to sports radio, we usually focus on quick fixes. People say that if the minister only wore jeans and a plaid shirt like the pastor in that church they visited, or there were songs with actions, new people would stream in. The old standby in sports is to fire the coach, and in the church it’s getting a new minister.

What we forget is that real change, whether in sports or in the church, takes a lot of time and a lot of patience. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try any of these new things. We need to. But we can’t see them as easy solutions that will turn everything around instantly, and then abandon them for something else if we don’t see immediate results. There aren't any shortcuts. We have to work, and wait.

Our experience tells us this, for we have been going through change for a long time in the Seaway Valley. And this season of Advent tells us this. If you have been coming to church for a few years, you have heard the Scripture readings in Advent talk about “waiting for the coming day of God,” “we wait for new heavens and a new earth,” and “be on your guard,” “stay alert at all times,” “keep awake.” Today we had Jesus saying “be vigilant.” This Advent season is about living in a society that is shouting at us to buy, and spend, and expect instant success – and in the middle of this frenzy, slowing down, waiting, watching, hoping, praying, and listening for Christ to enter our world and our lives to make all things new. Come, Lord Jesus. Amen.

Our God Comes

I was sent a review copy of the CD Our God Comes by Antioch Live, the worship band for Antioch Community Church in Waco, Texas. It's the band's second CD, having released Forever Sound last year.

Antioch Community Church currently has 30 church plants in the United States and another 40 in other parts of the world, all involving more than 30,000 people. So I had great expectations of the band of the church at the centre of this movement. I was not disappointed. Worship bands like Hillsong have set high standards for sound and songwriting, and Antioch Live is meeting them. The sound quality of the live album is what would be expected from an arena concert.

The album begins with the high-energy pop of Come (lyrics like "When you walk into the room, I can feel you" could as easily be in a Top 40 pop song as in a praise and worship song). Light Me Up and Awaken Us are also power pop numbers, but I admit that Come is my favourite song on the CD. Piano melody is featured on songs like Wonderful Counselor, How Much More, Savior Forever and I Will Raise, and electro-pop on such tracks as God and King and God Who Saves.

The 72-minute, live recording was produced by James Mark Gulley and assistant Owen Wible, recorded by Randy Adams and mastered at Marcussen Mastering in Hollywood CA by Stephen Marcussen. Featuring songwriters James Mark Gulley, Stephen Gulley, Brandon Seibert, Thomas Wilson and Johanna Six, Our God Comes also features worship leaders James Mark Gulley, Stephen Gulley, Johanna Six and Clare Berlinsky.

Full track listing: Come
God And King
Wonderful Counselor
God Who Saves
How Much More
I Will Raise
…Response
Light Me Up
Awaken Us
One Hundred Three
…Return
Savior Forever
…Selah
Our God Comes

All songs are available with CCLI licencing.

More information on Our God Comes can be found on iTunes and from Clear Day Media Group.

O Lord, Open the Eyes of the King: Sermon, All Saints 2013

All Saints is the second of three days known in the church as Hallowmas: Hallowe’en, or All Hallows Eve, on October 31st; All Saints on November 1st, honouring all of the saints and martyrs of the church; and All Souls on November 2nd, commemorating all the faithful departed. In Protestant practice, and especially in our Methodist tradition, both the saints of the church and the departed members of the congregation are remembered at All Saints. In many churches this is a memorial Sunday, with the names read out of all from the congregation who have died in the past year. This is because we regard all true followers of Jesus as saints. This is what Scripture tells us: The letter to the Romans begins, “To all God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints.” The first letter to the Corinthians: “To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints.” The letter to the Ephesians: “To the saints who are in Ephesus.” Believers in Jesus are called saints. We are called saints. We are all called to be saints.

So we could talk today about any follower of Jesus, past or present, as a saint. I could talk about any of the faithful departed from this congregation, and I know that names and faces will immediately come to mind – anyone who entered into their eternal rest hearing the words of Jesus, Well done, you good and faithful servant. I could talk about any of my relations who are now gone, who carved out lives for themselves and their families and descendants in the rough bush country of the Saint John River Valley in New Brunswick. For some reason the other day I was thinking of my relative Mary Johnson, who emigrated from Sweden to the United States when she was 16, in 1875, and married my great great uncle Burrell Hatfield when he was working in Massachusetts. She was active in the Advent Christian Church in Woodstock, New Brunswick.When anyone would visit her she would tell them, “Well, you’re looking good, but then again I don’t see so good.”

A Song of Faith of The United Church of Canada says:

Our ancestors in faith bequeath to us experiences of their faithful living; upon their lives are lives are built. Our living of the gospel makes us part of this communion of saints, experiencing the fulfillment of God’s reign even as we actively anticipate a new heaven and a new earth.

I’ve been quoting other words from a Song of Faith, that “Scripture is our song for the journey, the living word passed on from generation to generation to guide and inspire.” So part of the legacy of faithful living the saints have given to us is guidance and inspiration through Scripture. As this is the third sermon of our three-part series on Scripture, I want to talk today about saints and the Bible – not just the saints we find in the Bible, Matthew and Mark and Peter and Paul and Andrew and Mary Magdalene and the others, but those who wrote the Bible and worked so that Scripture can be passed on from generation to generation.

I was given a little book when I was in Sunday School: How We Got Our Bible, by Lucy Diamond, telling the story of how the Bible came to Britain and was passed on from Roman times to the publication of the King James Bible in English. One of the chapters is titled A Scholar of the Cotswolds, and it tells the story of one saint, William Tyndale. He was born in Gloucestershire about the time of the voyages of Columbus to the New World. I spent a week in this part of England, called the Cotswolds, this summer.

When Tyndale went to university he was drawn to the new ideas coming out of Europe, where, as we talked about last week, Martin Luther had kicked off the Protestant Reformation. Ordained as a priest, Tyndale often won debates with his fellow clergy because of his knowledge of Scripture. I mentioned last Sunday that this was a time when few people, including clergy, actually read the Bible. The Bible then was only in Latin, and Tyndale declared that he would translate it into English, telling a priest opposing him that “if God spares my life, I will see that a boy who drives a plough shall know more of the Scriptures than you do.”

So Tyndale began his work, translating the Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek. He went to London, but the church there would have nothing to do with him. He did, however, find some well-off friends who helped him. But this was the time of the Tudors, familiar to us from TV and movies, and King Henry VIII and the church remained so opposed to a Bible for the English people that at any moment Tyndale might be arrested and sent to be burned at the stake. So he concluded that there was no room anywhere in England to translate the Scriptures, and left to work in Europe, where reformed ideas had a stronger foothold.

I remember reading in this book how Tyndale’s life was “toil and privation, suffering and restless exile. For twelve years he lived as a wanderer, harried and driven from place to place.” When he finally finished translating the New Testament from Greek, a crowd burned the print shop and Tyndale only managed to snatch the pages from the press before he escaped. This English-language New Testament was then smuggled into England under the eyes of the King’s men, hidden in bales, sacks, and barrels, or landed from fishing boats. 15,000 printed New Testaments were read eagerly, to the horror of the bishops and King Henry, who burned any copies they could find, and burned several of Tyndale’s friends too. The campaign of suppression was so thorough that there are only three copies of Tyndale’s New Testament still in existence.

Tyndale then began translating the Old Testament from Hebrew. He got as far as Chronicles before he was betrayed by a friend to the men of the Holy Roman Emperor, who ruled much of Europe and had been asked by Henry VIII to arrest this man who had defied the King and bishops. Tyndale was imprisoned in what is now Belgium, tortured, tried, and condemned. In 1536, at the age of 41, William Tyndale, who consecrated his life to making God’s Word available to the people of England in their own language, was strangled and his body burned at the stake. His last words were, “O Lord, open the eyes of the King of England.”

Well, those eyes were opened, and Henry actually allowed publication of the Bible in English, and only three years after Tyndale’s martyrdom the King and bishops ordered that there be an English Bible in every church for anyone to read.

There are monuments to Tyndale, in Westminster Abbey and in the Cotswolds. But his real monument is in words, a legacy enshrined in the English language and in the English Bibles that followed his. Because of Tyndale we have phrases like “a man after his own heart,” “the living God,” “sick to death,” “flowing with milk and honey,” “the apple of his eye,” “a stranger in a strange land,” and the word “beautiful.” And to him above all others we owe the English Bible as our song for the journey, the living word passed from generation to generation. Those who drive the plough do indeed know the Scriptures better than the clergy of Tyndale’s time.

Brothers and sisters, we may not know anyone translating the Bible, although that work continues today – in fact, I’ve met the translators into Mohawk. We may not know any martyrs for the faith, although Christians are suffering as Tyndale did in places like Pakistan and Syria, Nigeria and Iraq: places where, as Jesus said, his followers are hated, excluded, reviled and defamed on his account, and we must pray as Tyndale did, “O Lord, open the eyes of the rulers of the world.”

We may not know anyone like that. But we do know followers of Jesus who went before us, those we have known and loved, who have spoken to our hearts and touched us with God’s Spirit: parents and grandparents, spouses, children, relatives, friends, ancestors. They may not have been saints with a capital S, enshrined in statues and plaques and stained glass windows. But they have been saints, with a small S, who left us a legacy of simple, little actions every day that add up to a lifetime of faith, and who inspire us to live faithfully. Thanks be to God.

Remembering and Thanksgiving - Israelites, Pilgrims and Us: Thanksgiving Sunday Sermon, October 13, 2013

When you have come into the land that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, and you possess it, and settle in it, you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the LORD your God will choose as a dwelling for his name. You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time, and say to him, "Today I declare to the LORD your God that I have come into the land that the LORD swore to our ancestors to give us." When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the LORD your God, you shall make this response before the LORD your God: "A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the LORD, the God of our ancestors; the LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O LORD, have given me." You shall set it down before the LORD your God and bow down before the LORD your God. Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the LORD your God has given to you and to your house.
Deuteronomy 26:1-11, New Revised Standard Version

When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, "Rabbi, when did you come here?" Jesus answered them, "Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal." Then they said to him, "What must we do to perform the works of God?" Jesus answered them, "This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent." So they said to him, "What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, 'He gave them bread from heaven to eat.'" Then Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world." They said to him, "Sir, give us this bread always." Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty."
John 6:25-35, New Revised Standard Version

The story of the first Thanksgiving. Once upon a time – well, in August 1620 – two ships, the Mayflower and the Speedwell, set sail from England with 102 English Pilgrims as passengers, en route to the New World. The Pilgrims were Protestant Christians who separated from the established church in England. This was a dangerous time to dissent from the official religion; when I was in England I saw monuments to martyrs who had been burned at the stake only a hundred years before the Mayflower and the Speedwell sailed. The Pilgrims wanted to start a colony overseas where they could live in religious freedom.

The Speedwell sprung a leak and had to turn back, but the Mayflower continued with her passengers. Just imagine that voyage across the rough Atlantic waters as waves crashed against a crowded cargo ship. Conditions on board were either pretty miserable or pretty boring. The passengers lived in cramped quarters. Anyone over five feet tall would have been unable to stand up straight - I would have been fine! They ate bad food. Several people got scurvy from the lack of fruit and vegetables.

But after three months at sea the Mayflower arrived at Cape Cod. The Pilgrims eventually went to Plymouth, now in Massachusetts, to found their colony, but had to live on board ship for the winter, where half of the passengers and crew died during those terrible cold months. The rest survived mainly because the Native people, the Wampanoag, donated food. When it came time to plant in the spring, the aboriginal people showed the Pilgrims how to grow corn and catch eels. So in the fall of 1621 the Pilgrims invited the Wampanoag to come for a thanksgiving celebration as they ate fish, game, and the corn from their first harvest in the New World.

If there is anyone who should be into the Thanksgiving holiday and all the imagery of Pilgrims at the first Thanksgiving dinner, it would be me. I just received my certificate from the Canadian Society of Mayflower Descendants showing that I am a descendant of John Alden, who came with the Pilgrims on the Mayflower. He was the cooper on board ship, looking after wooden barrels of supplies. Now, it seems that his main job concerned the kegs of beer, because water was unsafe to drink and even children drank beer then. John Alden married Patricia Mullins before that first Thanksgiving in 1621, and their great-great-great granddaughter Anne Burrill and her husband were Loyalists who came to New Brunswick after the American Revolution.

So our Canadian Thanksgiving gets mashed up, so to speak, with the American Thanksgiving and the Pilgrims, although the first Thanksgiving service in Canada was celebrated by John Frobisher on Baffin Island in the Arctic in 1578. There, you can mention that at dinner later today.

These seventeenth-century Pilgrims knew their Bible. They had no music in worship other than singing psalms, and they memorized most of those. And they knew the Bible stories. The Pilgrims would have known our reading from the book of Deuteronomy today. Maybe they even read it out at that first Thanksgiving: "When you have come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, and you possess it, and settle in it, you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground" and set it before God and celebrate the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you.

Our Deuteronomy reading recaps the story of Israel, the story told in the first books of the Bible:

A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labour on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.

We have this story, in our Bibles, and if we don’t read it there, we can see it in movies like Prince of Egypt and The Ten Commandments, if anyone remembers Charlton Heston as Moses. He may be on TV somewhere this weekend, or on Netflix.

The Pilgrims didn’t only read and know this story – they believed that in a sense they were living this story. They would make connections between their story and the Bible story. The Israelites were treated harshly in Egypt; the Pilgrims felt persecuted for their faith in England. The Israelites were brought out of Egypt through the sea; the Pilgrims left England and crossed the Atlantic Ocean. The Israelites made a covenant with God; the Pilgrims signed the Mayflower Compact in the name of God and called it a covenant. The Israelites came into the wilderness; the Pilgrims found North America to be a wild, forested land. The Israelites found their land flowing with milk and honey full of people too, who resisted their entry; the Pilgrims came into conflict with aboriginal people, and today we see this sad, violent part of both stories differently than when the Bible was written and the Pilgrims read it.

And, so, knowing this story, knowing that this is their story, the ancient Israelites and the seventeenth-century Pilgrims gave thanks to God, bringing the first portion of the harvest, celebrating the bounty God gave them. But if you know the rest of the story, and the Pilgrims would have, this is not the only way the Israelites responded to their deliverance by God from slavery in Egypt. This is not the only way they expressed their gratitude. The story is used throughout Deuteronomy and the rest of what are called the books of the law to underline how the Israelites are to act in their new land as they remember their story of rescue and give thanks.

In the book of Deuteronomy, the Israelites are constantly reminded that God brought them out of Egypt, guided and fed them in the wilderness, and made a covenant with them. In return, Israel must keep God’s commandments. Which means what? What does God tell the Israelites to do?

From the tenth chapter of Deuteronomy: “For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them with food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
From the fourteenth chapter: “Every third year you shall bring out the full tithe of your produce for that year; the resident aliens, the orphans, and the widows in your towns may come and eat their fill so that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work that you undertake.”
And in the next chapter: “If there is among you anyone in need, a member of your community in any of your towns within the land that the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted against your neighbour. Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbour in your land.’”
And in the twenty-fourth chapter: “When you reap your harvest in the field, or beat your olive trees, or gather the grapes of your vineyard, do not glean what is left; it shall be for the alien, the orphan, and the widow. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt; therefore I am commanding you to do this.”
These are just a few from Deuteronomy alone. There are over 2,000 verses in the Bible like this, about justice for the poor and vulnerable.

The Israelites’ remembering that God rescued them from slavery didn’t stop at offering the first of the harvest and celebrating a thanksgiving feast. They were to continue to act out their thanksgiving through caring for the poor, because God had cared for them when they were suffering in Egypt.

The Israelites knew that liberation and new life was their story. The Pilgrims knew that liberation and new life was their story. And, brothers and sisters, it is our story. We have been set free from slavery by sin and sinful systems. In the New Testament, the letter to the Galatians says “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” We have been brought to freedom through the waters, not of the Red Sea or the Atlantic, but of baptism. We have been guided, not into a new land, but into life with Christ, by God’s grace. And there we are given, not bread in the desert, not corn in the New World, but the true bread from heaven, Jesus Christ.

This is our story. And we give thanks. Like the Israelites long ago, we are to remember our liberation and show our gratitude for all of God’s gifts, by celebrating Thanksgiving. And we are not just to celebrate our bounty, but share it. We are to open our hands and our hearts to the poor and needy, and to work for a world where no one is need. God is saying to us, in the way God spoke to Israel: "Remember that you were slaves to sin and Jesus set you free by his death and rising again; therefore I am commanding you to do this: to love the stranger, to welcome the immigrant, to share with the poor, to feed the hungry." And, sisters and brothers, if we don’t do this, if we don’t share the blessings of our land with the world, then we can’t justify our own Thanksgiving dinners. For our God is the God of Israel and the God of the Pilgrims, the God who executes justice.

Destruction or Transformation? Technical or Adaptive Change?: Sermon, September 22, 2013

As the time approached when Jesus was to be taken up into heaven, he determined to go to Jerusalem. He sent messengers on ahead of him. Along the way, they entered a Samaritan village to prepare for his arrival, but the Samaritan villagers refused to welcome him because he was determined to go to Jerusalem. When the disciples James and John saw this, they said, "Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to consume them?" But Jesus turned and spoke sternly to them, and they went on to another village.
Luke 9:51-56, Common English Bible

This week we’ve changed some of our readings around. We’ve kept most of the ones that are in the cycle of readings shared by many churches, but I changed the reading from Luke’s Gospel so I can tell you about an experience I had this summer. We were in Chautauqua, New York, where I was selected to be a fellow in the New Clergy Program for ministers who have been ordained for seven years or fewer. Chautauqua is a summer community for the arts, religion, and knowledge, and there are 10,000 people there every day listening to lectures and the symphony orchestra and watching the dance company. One of the days our group was divided into two. Spouses went to a special lunch hosted by the wife of the Jewish rabbi in residence, and they got to go to this huge hotel on Lake Chautauqua, the largest wooden hotel in the United States. I don’t know what they talked about, as apparently what happened at the spouses’ lunch stays at the spouses’ lunch. But I imagine they discussed some of the challenges in being married to a minister.

The clergy had lunch at the Methodist church in Chautauqua and then we met with Peter Steinke, who is a Lutheran minister and expert on change in churches. And he talked about this story we just heard from Luke, as Jesus and his disciples are traveling and he sends messengers on ahead to find food and a place to stay for their group. They are going through Samaria, and we know from other stories that Samaritans and Jews were not friends. They were pretty hostile. And a Samaritan village refuses to welcome Jesus. James and John, friends of Jesus, ask him, “Do you want us to call down a bolt of lightning from heaven and incinerate them?” Jesus speaks sternly to them, probably something like, “Don’t be ridiculous,” and they continue on their way.

Peter told us that this story shows us the two approaches to change in churches. One is technical. A technical solution is like changing a tire. The other is adaptive, and it’s about changing people and systems. In this story of Jesus and his friends passing through Samaria, James and John have a technical solution to the problem of the Samaritan village refusing hospitality: Destroy them. Jesus, on the other hand, knows that an adaptive solution is needed.

And in churches we come up against problems of declining attendance and influence and finances and we usually propose technical solutions, just like James and John. We say, well, if we just redesigned the worship space, or we substituted contemporary songs for hymns, or the minister didn’t wear a robe, or we just got a new minister, then we would be full on Sunday. But these are technical answers to issues in the church that require adaptive solutions. Adaptive work isn’t as simple, as Jesus knows. In the story, it’s a lot harder to change the Samaritans’ hearts and lives than it is to wipe them out. Adaptive solutions take time, they involve dealing with the unknown, there is no certainty, they are unpredictable, and conflict will arise.

You may have heard that the United Church of Canada is engaged in a comprehensive review of all of our structures and processes. We don’t know yet, because we haven’t seen any recommendations, whether this will produce adaptive or technical change. And congregations across our area have been doing the same thing. So it would be helpful for us to know what adaptive change would look like, here at the local level, where we are. So here’s what Peter Steinke talked about.

I’ve mentioned this myself in speaking about discipleship, but we in the church today need to understand that we are not here to be members. We are here to be part of God’s mission. We have to shift from a membership model to a missional model. The church needs to leave our building to serve the needs of the world. And that affects the minister’s role too, with less emphasis on being a chaplain to members and more on being a witness for Jesus in the wider community.

As our denominations and our congregations have less influence in society, we have to replace our current approach. Right now it’s as if we have individual silos. There’s a United Church silo and an Anglican silo and a Presbyterian silo. So we need to break out of our silos and collaborate and share resources. We can’t continue to have completely separate franchises. There are hints of this shift coming; for instance, the United Church now shares publishing and distributing books and materials with the Anglican and Lutheran churches. Here we are clustering our congregations together to share ministry, and there have been conversations in at least one place about a community church shared by several denominations. I started a partnership with the United Church of Christ across the river in New York State, as we are physically closer to our sisters and brothers there than we are to United Churches in, say, Ottawa or Montreal.

I know if I want to get people all riled up, I can just use the words "church bureaucracy." Now, I have been in the United Church national and Conference offices quite a few times, but these don’t seem to be staffed with the out-of-touch, time-wasting, slacker, overpaid career technocrats that we might imagine. It’s hard to run an organization our size with no one managing it. We have about as many congregations in Canada as Tim Hortons has restaurants, but I’m sure the Tims head office has more staff. However, adaptive change means that we have to rethink our church structures. When the United Church was formed in 1925, it made sense to have Presbyteries, Conferences, and General Council, but all of these levels of governance may no longer serve the same purpose, or be affordable, today. So bureaucracy needs to be more flexible and slimmed down even more.

As I said, adaptive changes like these will produce conflict. We naturally resist disruptions to our established ways of doing things. When most people have only experienced church as members, and are faced with church as mission and discipleship, some will drop out. There will be resistance as long-time patterns and habits are challenged. And we also have the idea that conflict is somehow sinful, and we try to avoid it and postpone adaptive change if there are disputes. But disagreements are normal in transformations that affect things that are near and dear to people, like their church.

If adaptive change is to be successful, it has to be connected to mission. We have to ask ourselves hard questions about the mission God has given us here in Long Sault and Ingleside. How do people in our community know that we care about them? How we will help each other, here in our congregation, to know that we can make a difference in people’s lives? How do we balance looking after each other in the church with doing good to all, in the community and across Canada and the world? And these are not questions the minister can answer for everyone here. Adaptive change is a long-term process, usually lasting longer than one minister’s service to a congregation, and it has to involve all of us - the entire community of faith - and consultation with our neighbours.

These days it is not just the church facing adaptive change. Education, business, law, charities, all kinds of public and private institutions, are struggling with transforming themselves. So we are not alone in this, although it still seems daunting. Change isn’t easy. It can be scary. Yet Peter Steinke’s research shows that challenged churches are actually healthy churches.

You know, back in the sixteenth century or so there were a lot of geographers and mapmakers in Europe. They didn’t travel, but made maps and globes of what they thought the rest of the world looked like, places they had never seen. Up until now the church has had a lot of geographers, who stay inside our walls. But what the church needs – what God needs - is explorers, who go outside, into the world. And exploring isn’t as comfortable and safe as mapmaking. Yet, when we explore, when we go out on God’s mission, Jesus is with us. And perhaps some of the ways we are church have to die and rise again, transformed, just as Jesus was.

One Lost Sheep - and 99 Others: Sermon, September 15, 2013

Preparing to preach on these Scriptures, I came across the Summer/Autumn 2004 issue of the United Church of Canada worship resource Gathering. The sermon starter for these texts, written by staff from the church's London Conference, proposed asking "What if we are not the lost and found? What if we are the 99?"

The Scriptures are quoted from the Common English Bible.

I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has given me strength because he considered me faithful. So he appointed me to ministry even though I used to speak against him, attack his people, and I was proud. But I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and without faith. Our Lord's favor poured all over me along with the faithfulness and love that are in Christ Jesus. This saying is reliable and deserves full acceptance: "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners"—and I'm the biggest sinner of all. But this is why I was shown mercy, so that Christ Jesus could show his endless patience to me first of all. So I'm an example for those who are going to believe in him for eternal life. Now to the king of the ages, to the immortal, invisible, and only God, may honor and glory be given to him forever and always! Amen.
1 Timothy 1:12-17

All the tax collectors and sinners were gathering around Jesus to listen to him. The Pharisees and legal experts were grumbling, saying, "This man welcomes sinners and eats with them." Jesus told them this parable: “Suppose someone among you had one hundred sheep and lost one of them. Wouldn't he leave the other ninety-nine in the pasture and search for the lost one until he finds it? And when he finds it, he is thrilled and places it on his shoulders. When he arrives home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Celebrate with me because I've found my lost sheep.' In the same way, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who changes both heart and life than over ninety-nine righteous people who have no need to change their hearts and lives.

"Or what woman, if she owns ten silver coins and loses one of them, won't light a lamp and sweep the house, searching her home carefully until she finds it? When she finds it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Celebrate with me because I've found my lost coin.' In the same way, I tell you, joy breaks out in the presence of God's angels over one sinner who changes both heart and life."
Luke 15:1-10

I don’t know how many people are familiar with dowsing or divining. In rural New Brunswick my grandfather - who knew all kinds of things that have been forgotten these days, like how to see fairies if you got up very early in the morning - would cut a branch shaped like a wishbone or the letter Y from a willow tree and hold it while moving around until it would start twitching to indicate something we were looking for was nearby. I was reading The Last Crossing, by Canadian novelist Guy Vanderhaeghe. One of the characters in the book has a great description of her grandmother, who dowsed lost things. Her neighbours would come from miles around, asking for help to find lost valuables, rings, cufflinks, watches, brooches, earrings, cash, and the woman would walk through homes and barns and fields with her stick until the sap in the wood would quiver with the tug of lost silver or gold. And the character’s mother had a different gift, with her stick bending to find water in wells and springs.

Jesus tells two little stories about finding lost things, but not with divining. A shepherd who cares for a hundred sheep leaves the rest of the flock and searches for and rescues one lost animal. A woman with ten coins loses one and searches the whole house to find it. One of the Bible commentaries I have, by William Barclay, says that in the time of Jesus “a coin was easily lost among the straw in a dark corner of a windowless Oriental house.” Well, it seems just as easy to lose things in our house, 20 centuries later. Today Jesus would talk about searching the chesterfield cushions.

A lost sheep. A lost coin. What great images, so simple, so easy for us to relate to, so powerful. Chevrolet even adapts one of these in a commercial for its Silverado truck. A rancher finds a broken fence, and the hoofprints of a calf in the mud. He drives his pickup past his grazing cattle and out onto his land, getting up to the high places and looking through binoculars for the calf as a storm approaches. It’s raining, and he comes to police warning that a flash flood may take out the road, so he heads off on another track. The rain is coming down harder, and it’s getting darker, as he pushes through the bush with a flashlight, until he finds the calf and gently takes it in his arms back to the truck. The announcer says, “This is a story about a man, a lost calf, and the truck that lets him search for as long as it takes.” Now, a farmer might notice that the ad shows a Holstein calf when the man’s herd is all longhorns, beef cattle, but still…

And when the sheep and the coin are found, there are celebrations. That same commentary notes that in the time of Jesus flocks of sheep were often communal, owned by the whole village, and looked after by several shepherds, as they still are in parts of the world. So when the flocks were brought home and the villagers told that one shepherd was still out searching for a lost sheep, everyone would wait for the shepherd’s return. When they saw him coming back, carrying the lost sheep on his shoulders, a shout of joy would go up, just as Jesus describes. Jesus says that’s what God is like; when a sinner changes their life, God’s joy is like the joy of a village when the shepherd emerges from the gloom with the lost sheep, like the joy of a woman who has lost the money that she needs to feed her family, and finally sees the glint of the coin in a dark corner of her house.

In these two images Jesus tells us that God is kinder than people are. Respectable society, the Pharisees and legal experts who grumble at the unsavoury characters associating with Jesus, would dismiss these sinners as hopeless, too far beyond and too undeserving of God’s love to be rescued. But God doesn’t write them off. God doesn’t give up on them. God loves them, and will celebrate when a lost soul is found and returns to God.

As I said last week, when we hear these stories Jesus tells, we think about who the characters in the story are supposed to be: who is like God, and who is like us. Who are we like? Like the lost sheep? Sometimes we are. Sometimes we have wandered off, distracted by flashy, seductive things.

Should we be lost like that, we will be found. There will be rejoicing when we are brought back into the fold. So we are comforted that God is kinder than people. But what if we are not the lost and found? What if we are the 99 other sheep? What if we are the ones safe and secure, behind the walls of the sheep pen? What if we are the ones disturbed that the shepherd is heading out into the night in search of one sheep that has strayed? What if we are the Pharisees and the legal experts, muttering about those seedy, suspicious folks who don’t deserve to be saved? Today’s Pharisees look at a person’s clothes, or hairstyle, or tattoo, and make assumptions about their moral behaviour. Today’s Pharisees point to the rare examples of fraud and cheating in the system as being typical of families on social assistance. Today’s Pharisees gripe about refugees, who have fled war and persecution, receiving health care. Today’s Pharisees feel bitter when an aboriginal person in line ahead of them at a store uses the status card that exempts them from sales tax.

We can sometimes – too often – be like the 99 sheep, like the Pharisees and the legal experts to whom Jesus tells this story. We can be angry and resentful. If we are honest with ourselves and look deep into ourselves, we admit that there are times when we find it hard to love others, when the attitudes our society teaches crowd out love in our hearts, when we see our neighbours not as God's children but as the wrong sort of people.

Look at our other reading today, the First Letter to Timothy. The writer says that he used to speak against God, he had been proud, and he had attacked God’s people. We may be doing these things, too, when reject others, when we complain that God does not share our judgment of people as being hopelessly lost. And yet, the writer of First Timothy says, Christ didn’t give up on him. Christ didn’t stop loving him. Christ showed mercy to him. Christ showed patience – endless patience, the letter says. The writer tells us, “Our Lord's favor poured all over me along with the faithfulness and love that are in Christ Jesus.” He changed his life, and was judged to be faithful, and trusted with a ministry, to be an example of that mercy and grace and love. He was a lost sheep, but was brought back to the flock. He was a lost coin, but was found.

In our anger, in our indignation, in our moaning and complaining, in our prejudices, we ourselves are lost, just as much as, maybe even more lost than, the people we may resent. We can all be lost. The letter to the Romans says, we have all sinned and fallen short of what God intends for us. Yet we are sought, searched for with a divine diving rod that twitches and bends as our true selves are discovered, hidden underneath all of our attitudes and biases. There is celebration when we are found and we change our lives to be disciples of Jesus, living as he lived, loving as he loved. And then, whether we have been lost and found, or we have been safe the whole time, we are called to join the shepherd in the search.

A Greenbelt Tale

Like later-day pilgrims from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, 100 United Church of Canada clergy headed to the Greenbelt Festival in England for a week-long experience of learning and growing.

The United Church's EDGE Network for New Ministry Development had taken a small group to the annual Greenbelt event the year before, and Moderator Gary Paterson was quick to propose taking a larger contingent - composed equally of ministers under and over the age of 40 - in August 2013. Those under 40 were selected and subsidized by EDGE itself; I was, of course, in the over 40 group, selected and funded by our Conferences. We were organized into smaller cohorts, which met online to prepare ourselves for the pilgrimage.

I arrived in Heathrow Airport from Ottawa on August 21st and, after noting that the arrivals area didn't look much like the one depicted at the end of Love Actually, took the Tube into London. I was born in Wimbledon, although the hospital site is now a housing estate, and lived in Putney, part of South London's borough of Wandsworth; my parents were in England as my father was posted to the Canadian Naval Mission in London. So I looked around Putney, seeing our old streets, the block where we lived, the church where I was baptized (now a Polish Catholic congregation), and The Green Man pub my Dad frequented (built on the birthplace of Thomas Cromwell, vicar general to Henry VIII). Then I was off on the Tube to the City of London and St. Paul's Cathedral, and Westminster to walk up Whitehall to Trafalgar Square, The Mall and Buckingham Palace. I was in Cheltenham that night after the bus ride across Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, to meet up with arriving United Church folk. Some of us later took the opportunity to visit the nearby cities of Bath, with its Roman bath complex and beautiful Abbey church, and Gloucester, with its medieval cathedral.

Greenbelt, held at the Cheltenham Racecourse, is attended by 20,000 people, many of them young, in a country which North Americans are told is effectively "unchurched." It was an amazing, Spirit-filled experience. When there are hundreds of talks and workshops, some things won't work: I loved the music of "U2charist," a Communion service with the songs of U2, but the service itself was plain vanilla Church of England liturgy, straight out of the prayer book; another Communion service, supposed to be a Eucharist of the Divine Feminine, basically took the same Anglican liturgy and substituted "she" for "he"; I found Forest Church and its Old English-flavoured celebration of nature interesting, but some of it just didn't click for me as much as for others; and at one seminar I began to tune out the first time the speaker name-dropped "as I was saying to Jurgen Moltmann..."

But the occasional miss didn't detract from the many "hits" of Greenbelt in its 40th year: the opening talk by Barbara Brown Taylor; hard-hitting sessions on justice and faith; wonderful arts programming; Sunday morning Communion, with 20,000 people sharing bread and wine in small groups of 15 to 20 - like Jesus feeding the 5,000?; sessions I loved on English rural ministry, hymns of the Chartists (the nineteenth-century English reform movement calling for universal male suffrage at a time when only landowners could vote), and taking football back for the people (when many English clubs, founded by churches as community organizations, are now taken over by foreign billionaires and sponsorships by betting firms and payday lenders); seminars on dealing with and welcoming people with autism and dementia in congregations; deeply spiritual times of prayer and contemplation; a high-energy concert by the London Community Gospel Choir; Peter Rollins, who delivered a challenging talk about doubt, brokenness, and the need for church rituals that allow mourning for the God of certainty and satisfaction. His best quote: "I'm not saying you should doubt; I'm saying that you're already doing it." And whenever I am with a group of United Church colleagues - or any colleagues, for that matter - I learn a tremendous amount just from being part of their conversations. At Greenbelt EDGE and Conferences brought together a wonderful group of clergy, and I thank all of my colleagues for being passionate and supportive travellers with me.

So it was indeed a pilgrimage: into new ideas, challenges to existing ways of thinking and doing, and mulling over how to bring this learning to my congregations, Presbytery, Conference, and national church. This post, written five days after returning home, can only sketch out some preliminary thoughts. Watch this space.

My photos from Greenbelt are on Flickr.

New Clergy

Last week I was on study leave at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York. I have been to Chautauqua once before, courtesy of the International Order of the King's Daughters and Sons, and recommend it highly - Chautauqua, which was founded in 1874 as a retreat for Methodist Sunday School teachers and once spawned traveling Chautauqua shows, is a summer community for the arts, spirituality and learning. I was a Fellow in the New Clergy Program for clergy in the Abrahamic religions who have been in ministry for seven years or less. The program is intended to enrich and renew clergy, and to sustain us in our roles, as we are told that 60% of new clergy leave the ministry within five years.

Chautauqua is a beautiful place, with gingerbread cottages and gorgeous gardens on grounds that host 10,000 people during the nine-week summer season (but only 100 or so year-round residents). Fellows and their spouses were provided with passes to all of the week's programming, which included symphony concerts, dance, worship services, lectures by Robert Putnam (author of Bowling Alone), Charles Murray (notorious to me as the author of The Bell Curve), Justice Anthony Kennedy of the Supreme Court of the United States, Margaret Atwood, and the president of PBS television, among others. We had our own time to meet with Chautauqua Institution president Tom Becker, religion department head Joan Brown Campbell (who once worked with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.), religion author Karen Armstrong, the Muslim, Jewish and Christian young people who coordinate the Abrahamic Program for Young Adults, Rabbis Rami Shapiro and Sam Stahl, and the preacher at the worship services that week, Barbara Lundblad of Union Theological Seminary. As a clergy group we discussed adapting to change in the church, the emergent church, and our reactions to the fact that Chautauqua is largely white and affluent (although the institution is trying to make its patron base more diverse). We served Communion to 5,000 people at the Sunday morning worship service, which is certainly a record for me in my small-church ministry.

I benefited from all of this, from being challenged to think hard about change in churches and my own ministry, and from sharing with such a supportive, warm and engaging group of colleagues. I was glad that there were clergy from the United Church of Christ and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), as I will be engaging in conversations about a possible UCC agreement with our United Church of Canada, as well as folks from the Presbyterian Church (USA), United Methodist Church and Episcopal Church. Not all were in congregational ministry, either, which brought a lot of varied experience to the table. While my wife and I were the only Canadians, we could not have felt more welcomed by our American neighbours.

So I'm grateful to the Religion Department of the Chautauqua Institution, the program's faculty (Jan and Joy Linn and Nannette Banks), and wonderful colleagues and their spouses from across the United States. Sustained and enriched indeed!

Sliced Bread and Old Yeller at Unco

Last week I drove across the border, through the Adirondack Mountains and down the Hudson River Valley to Stony Point NY and Unco13. This is my third year attending the Unconference, which has now spawned eastern and western versions so this was Unco13 East. It is an Open Space concept, as was used at The United Church of Canada's 41st General Council in a setting with many more participants, with the conference's agenda crowdsourced from the participants. While many of those attending are clergy and lay leaders in the Presbyterian Church (USA), there were folks from other American denominations, and me and a friend who is a priest in the Anglican Church of Canada making it international. Here is one attendee's perspective on this year's Unco East.

With the closing service for, and move out of, the Newington United Church building just finished, closing a church was on my mind. I wrote "closing a church building" on the brainstorming whiteboard, and others began writing other topics and ideas around my words - my favourite was "when does a church become Old Yeller?" As a child I was an avid watcher of Wonderful World of Disney on TV, but I don't think I have ever seen Old Yeller. However, I suspect that the dog has to be put out of his misery at some point.

I ended up as the discussion leader on closing a church, with our conversation being livestreamed so folks outside Stony Point could see and listen. We talked over a range of issues, and soon turned from the process of managing the closure itself to assessing when to close. One participant likened a dying congregation to a patient with a Do Not Recussitate (DNR) order, which made me think of a recent case at a local hospital in which a family fought over declaring such a status - just as some congregants will clearly perceive that their church needs to be a DNR and others will fiercely resist. Another spoke of setting financial markers in advance and not discussing dying until that point is reached. This is an attempt to free a congregation from the inability to decide that usually accompanies fear of death.

This conversation was, I think, helpful to all who participated, and we agreed to set up some kind of blog to which we could contribute stories of churches that have closed and then been resurrected in some other form - the building may have been taken over by another congregation or ministry or otherwise repurposed.

I am grateful that Carol Howard Merritt writes about our discussion in her Tribal Church blog for Christian Century. She makes a great point about reluctance by pastors to preside over a church closing:

Closing a church is like eating the last slice of bread—somehow if you eat the last slice, you’re responsible for consuming it all (never mind that someone else ate the last 27 slices). A church can be declining for forty years, but if a pastor comes in and starts to talk about closing a congregation, then she closed the church. Many people don’t want to be that pastor.

I have learned a lot from that conversation and many others at Unco, and from the entire Newington closing experience. I am certain that this learning will be called upon again: given that even in the "golden age" of church growth in the 1950s and 60s there were at least seven church closures in this township alone, this is unlikely to be the last time that as a pastor I am called upon to eat the last slice.

Epiclesis - Praying for Transformation: Sermon, Day of Pentecost, May 19, 2013

When Pentecost Day arrived, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound from heaven like the howling of a fierce wind filled the entire house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be individual flames of fire alighting on each one of them. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages as the Spirit enabled them to speak.

There were pious Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. When they heard this sound, a crowd gathered. They were mystified because everyone heard them speaking in their native languages. They were surprised and amazed, saying, "Look, aren't all the people who are speaking Galileans, every one of them? How then can each of us hear them speaking in our native language? Parthians, Medes, and Elamites; as well as residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the regions of Libya bordering Cyrene; and visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism), Cretans and Arabs — we hear them declaring the mighty works of God in our own languages!" They were all surprised and bewildered. Some asked each other, "What does this mean?" Others jeered at them, saying, "They're full of new wine!"

Peter stood with the other eleven apostles. He raised his voice and declared, “Judeans and everyone living in Jerusalem! Know this! Listen carefully to my words! These people aren't drunk, as you suspect; after all, it's only nine o'clock in the morning! Rather, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:
In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your young will see visions. Your elders will dream dreams. Even upon my servants, men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.
I will cause wonders to occur in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and a cloud of smoke.
The sun will be changed into darkness, and the moon will be changed into blood, before the great and spectacular day of the Lord comes.
And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.
- Acts 2:1-21, Common English Bible

Giving all glory and honour to God.

Last week, on Ascension Sunday, we stopped reading the book of the Acts of the Apostles after Jesus tells his friends, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses.” This week his promise comes true. The whole group of his followers is in Jerusalem, as the city is filled with pilgrims coming for the Jewish festival of Pentecost. And as they are gathered together in a house, the Holy Spirit arrives in wind and flame, and the speaking of different languages. The Jewish holiday of Pentecost celebrated the new crops, and for early believers in Jesus Pentecost becomes a festival of new spirit, the church’s birthday, as the Spirit gives this little group the power to come out of hiding and go out into the world to tell the Good News of Jesus and live his new life.

This story is in the second chapter of Acts, and the next 26 chapters tell the story of the early church. The real star of this book isn’t Peter, even though he is the lead character in the first 12 chapters, or even Paul, who is the main figure in the rest of the book. The story of the church told in Acts is really the story of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit directs the church throughout the book. Anne Howard said that the story of Pentecost and the early church is not an account of a group of people who received something and then sat around admiring the gift. It’s a story of movement, bold action, beginning in that house in Jerusalem and reaching out across the globe, always moving outwards despite all odds, always inviting and including new people, as those early disciples got busy and went out to change the world as they themselves had been changed by the Spirit.

Well, we talked about the Spirit last week and will talk more next Sunday. This is the second of a three-part series on the Spirit. Today on Pentecost I just want to take a few moments to speak about the Spirit and our Communion together. I want to discuss the Epiclesis, which sounds like a medical procedure. You expect to hear someone say, “I have an epiclesis scheduled for next week.”

But epiclesis is a Greek word meaning invocation, or calling down from on high. I try not to use a lot of Greek in worship, but I also paid for a year and a half of Greek courses in theological college and need to get my money’s worth sometime.

When we go through the Communion prayer later in this morning’s service, the prayer has different parts. There is a call to give thanks, when I say something like “lift up your hearts” and “let us give thanks to the Lord our God.” This is followed by a thanksgiving, and a song of creation when we say or sing something like “Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might.” Today we are using one from West Africa. This is followed by the story of Jesus at his last supper, and his command to remember him in the bread and the cup.

Towards the end of the Communion prayer is the epiclesis. And it isn’t a medical procedure. As I said, epiclesis means calling down from on high. In our Communion it is a prayer for transformation, to invoke the Spirit and to transform us. This goes way back, as the earliest known Communion prayer we have in its entirety is from the third century, and it has an epiclesis which says:
“We ask you to send your Holy Spirit upon the offering of the holy church.
Gather into one all who share these holy mysteries,
Filling them with the Holy Spirit and confirming their faith in the truth.”

In our Communion prayer today, the epiclesis is one we say together:
“Send your Holy Spirit upon us and upon this offering of your church,
That we who eat and drink at Christ’s table may share in his life.
Pour out your Spirit upon the whole earth,
And make it your new creation.”

So the epiclesis calls on the Holy Spirit to come upon us, as on that Pentecost day, and upon our gifts of the bread and the cup, and to transform us who share in the Lord’s Supper to be like Jesus.

The Holy Spirit who moved on the face of the waters when the world was created, the Holy Spirit sent upon the prophets of old, the Holy Spirit Jesus promised and who filled the church at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit by whom we are all baptized into one body, is the same Holy Spirit who unites us in and with the entire body of Christ in our Communion as we break the bread and share the cup together. Our epiclesis, our prayer of transformation, is our prayer that our eating and drinking at the table of Jesus Christ will, through the Spirit, make us one with the risen Christ and with all God’s people, and nourish us so that we won’t just sit around after our meal but will, like those first believers in Jesus, go from here changed by the Spirit to change the world.

And so we cry, come, Holy Spirit. And so the church shouts, come, Holy Spirit. And so the earth pleads, come, Holy Spirit. Enliven this bread, pour us out for each other, transform our minds, ignite your church, nourish the life of the earth. Make us, while many, united. Make us, though broken, whole. Make us, despite death, alive. Amen!