Biblical Outlaws: Sermon, July 17, 2011

Genesis 28:10-19a

Giving all glory and honour to God.

Our reading this morning is from Genesis, the first book of the Bible. Long story short, twin brothers Jacob and Esau have a big falling out, and Jacob runs away, and he sleeps with a stone under his head, which sounds very uncomfortable. And Jacob dreams that he sees a ladder, or stairway, or ramp, reaching to heaven, and angels going up and down on it.

We ‘re going to sing the old spiritual “We are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder” later. I’ve sung it before in ministry, and the older folks tend to get nostalgic for their days at camp. My generation would get nostalgic thinking of another song, Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin, which was always the last song at dances in high school.

There’s lots to think and talk about in this story, but one thing that stands out for me is that Jacob is on the run. His brother wants to kill him. The story takes place when there isn’t really any government or legal system, just families enforcing their own codes of honour, but Jacob is an outlaw.

Now, we have kind of a conflicted relationship with outlaws. When my mother was growing up in Aylmer, Quebec, the entertainment for teenagers was going to the movies, and for a dime or whatever it was 70 years ago you got a newsreel, a cartoon, a Western, and the movie. My mother saw all the Westerns. And in that era of Roy Rodgers and Gene Autry and Hopalong Cassidy, the outlaws were the bad guys. They wore the black hats, so you could tell who they were. The white hat guys might be falsely accused and be outlaws for a while, but they always came back to the side of law and order.

But by the time I was a kid the movies had changed. I just bought a set of spaghetti westerns on DVD, on sale for $5, Westerns that were made in the 1960s and 70s. And in this era, Clint Eastwood and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Wild Bunch, the movies were about the outlaws.

After all, the outlaws tend to be the most interesting characters, and not just in Westerns. The Pirates of the Caribbean movies are about the pirates, not about the Navy enforcing the law. We love these colourful eighteenth-century pirates, but not the 21st century ones who are capturing ships off Somalia.

I just watched a movie about Jesse James and his gang, called American Outlaws, and the viewer is intended to root for the James boys against the army and the railroad. The movie glosses over unpleasant aspects like their support for slavery in the Civil War. If you watched The Brady Bunch, you may remember the episode where the parents are very concerned that Bobby has written a school essay about his hero, and he has chosen Jesse James. So they let him stay up late and watch a movie about Jesse James, hoping that he will see his hero robbing banks and murdering people and get turned off. But the movie is edited so that Bobby sees none of this. Our outlaw stories can be like that too. We like the bad boys and the bad girls, at least in fiction, but they’re romantic and thrilling only if they’re not too bad.

Jesse James is certainly far from a perfect character, but at least a part of us still roots for him, especially when he’s played by Colin Farrell or Brad Pitt. In this story we root for Jacob, the outlaw. And he is far from perfect, too. He may not murder anyone – although later his sons kill everyone in a city - but Jacob is on the run in the first place because he fooled his father into giving him the blessing that was the right of his brother Esau. He’s a tricky guy, and his mother eggs him on.

Yet even though Jacob is a trickster and lies to his father, even though he’s an outlaw on the run, God speaks to him in this dream of the stairway to heaven, and makes a promise to protect him. And later Jacob gets a new name – Israel. And in turn the new nation of God’s people is named Israel after Jacob, for the tribes of Israel are descended from Jacob’s children. God is known in the Bible as the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. Pretty good for an outlaw.

Look at the characters of the Bible. There are more than a couple of bad boys and girls in there. Moses killed a man in Egypt and was an outlaw in the desert. Rahab was a prostitute who helps the Israelites. David was an outlaw fleeing the king. Elijah fled another king and hid out. Jesus himself, although he never did anything wrong, had to escape from angry rulers and live on the run, saying 'foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.' He was put to death as a criminal. And he predicted that his followers would be dragged before rulers and courts, and they were frequently on the run too, run out of town.

I think the point here for us is what Jacob says when he wakes up from his dream, and looks around at the desolate, rocky place where he had been sleeping in his escape. He remembers how in the dream God has promised to stick by him, and he says, “Surely God is here in this place, and I didn’t know it.” God is in this place, even among outlaws. God knows that none of us is perfect. God promises to stick with us no matter what, even in our wanderings, even when we are outside the acceptable boundaries of society.

And God’s people aren’t necessarily respectable, well behaved people. The Bible tells us over and over that to follow God, as God is shown to us in Jesus, means that we have to do what Jesus did and break the rules of society from time to time. Proclaiming the good news of Jesus in our lives results in us offending comfortable people. We have to love people whom society doesn’t want us to love. We have to work for love and justice and peace at times when society prefers fear and injustice and violence. God’s people in every time and place have found that there are times when the law violates God’s justice and our faith requires us to disobey the law. And so Christians in the southern United States in the 1960s broke the laws that discriminated against black people. They were outlaws. That American Outlaws movie said sometimes the wrong side of the law is the right place to be, and that's true.

It’s not something we do lightly, it’s not something we do without a lot of prayer and questioning, but sometimes we must be outlaws too, whether pushing against the boundaries of society or going beyond them and breaking an unjust law. We won’t all agree on when God is calling us to be an outlaw. There are consequences for disobeying the law. And that’s scary.

But God is in this place and all places, even if we don’t know it. And we have God’s Spirit for guidance and strength, and we have Jesus, who knew what it was like to live on the run, and is different in one crucial way from all the outlaws of movies and books – he would rather die for us all than draw a gun on any one of us. Thanks be to God.

Fasting for Change

This will be one of our activities this fall in the Ingleside and Newington United Churches. Fast for Change is an initiative of the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, supported by 15 churches and church agencies, to respond in a Christian way to global hunger. We are invited to fast and pray, fast and give, and fast and advocate.

Thinking About Methodists

Our denomination, The United Church of Canada, was formed through a merger of the Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregationalist churches in Canada in 1925 (the Evangelical United Brethren came in later). We live near the living history museum at Upper Canada Village; many of the houses in the Village, moved there to escape the flooding of the St. Lawrence Seaway, were known to people in my congregations in their original locations.

Providence Chapel in the Village is meant to recreate the rough log Methodist chapels of the 19th century. I wonder about the faith and courage of those Methodist circuit riders, traveling through all weather conditions to lead worship in these simple buildings. And their simplicity reminds me that we don't need PowerPoint, photocopiers, and Twitter to worship.

A Heaping Helping of Our Hospitality: Sermon, June 26, 2011 (at Knox-St. Paul's United Church, Cornwall ON)

Matthew 10:40-42

Giving all glory and honour to God.

I hadn’t thought of a title for the sermon or reflection time today when I sent in the slides for the worship service, but it’s called ‘A Heaping Helping of Our Hospitality.’ If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s from The Beverly Hillbillies – you may remember the closing song, ‘you’re all invited back next week to this locality, to have a heaping helping of our hospitality.’

The Bible has a lot to say about hospitality, and welcoming, because it was written in a culture that placed a great value on hospitality, and a lot of honour came from how you welcomed visitors. In the book of Genesis, Abraham and Sarah receive a visit from three strangers. Abraham and Sarah don’t know that at first, but they offer their hospitality. And it turns out that the three strangers are divine visitors, for the Bible says that God appeared to Abraham in the visit. In the New Testament the Letter to the Hebrews says, do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing so some have entertained angels without knowing it. Another word for ‘angel’ is ‘messenger’, so this could say that some have welcomed God’s messengers without recognizing them.

Jesus is talking about this hospitality in our reading from the Good News According to Matthew. This is part of a talk as he sends out his followers and instructs them on where to go and what to do. And he tells them, his followers who are going out as his messengers, those who welcome you are also welcoming me, and those who welcome me are welcoming the one who sent me.

So let’s think about that: When we welcome someone, a stranger, a messenger, we are also welcoming Jesus, and when we welcome Jesus we are welcoming God. This reminds me of an old Gaelic poem, which goes:
I saw a stranger yesterday;
I put food in the eating place,
Drink in the drinking place,
Music in the listening place,
And, in the sacred name of the Trinity,
He blessed myself and my house,
My cattle and my dear ones.
And the lark sang in her song,
Often, often, often,
Goes the Christ in the stranger’s guise,
Often, often, often,
Goes the Christ in the stranger’s guise.

There’s a story about hospitality, and it’s also a Celtic one, from the Iona Community in Scotland.

The guests were starting to arrive for the church’s big anniversary celebration, and the minister was standing at the door waiting to greet the new mayor. She wondered how she would recognize him.

When a chauffeur-driven car arrived at the specially cordoned-off area, she came forward and greeted the impressive-looking gentleman who emerged, and led him into the building. But after being introduced to one or two people, he tactfully informed her that he was not the new mayor! She apologized profusely, only grateful that she had not already ushered him to a VIP seat.

Meanwhile, however, she had missed the real mayor. He had passed her in the corridor, but how could she have known? Not only did he not have his chain of office around his neck, he looked so ordinary! Furthermore, he had walked to the church, and come in at the back door.

Jesus was speaking 20 centuries ago to his followers, but he is speaking to us today: in welcoming someone, we are welcoming Jesus, and in welcoming Jesus we are welcoming God. We have to believe that, just as Jesus sent his messengers out then, he is sending messengers to us now, so we can welcome him in them. The people we welcome may not look like how we think Jesus would look. Like the mayor in the story, they may be ordinary, they may come in the back way. They may be tall or short, old or young, well-dressed or casual, male or female, single or with a family, able-bodied or with a disability, white or black or Asian or aboriginal, speaking any language. They may have ideas about church that are different from ours. Often, often, often, goes the Christ in the stranger’s guise.

You know, I go to conferences on the missional church, the emergent church, the renewed church, and clergy say how much they wish their church was cooler, more hip, was in an old brick warehouse and a twenty-something congregation dressed casually with black-rimmed glasses and drinking fair trade cappuccinos and an awesome worship experience with praise and worship music performed by a band with guitars and a drum set. Rachel Held Evans, who is a blogger I follow pretty avidly, wrote about this longing for a ‘cool church.’

But there’s a story, which was in the news, about a church in North Carolina that promises that worship will be an explosive, phenomenal movement of God. That sounds like a pretty cool church. I don’t know if they have cappuccinos, but I do know that on Easter Sunday a family went to the service with their 12 year-old son, who has cerebral palsy, and when he tried to say ‘amen’ after the opening prayer a church volunteer abruptly escorted him and his mother out of the sanctuary. The church later said that their goal is to provide an environment free of distractions for their guests. The mother offered to start a ministry for special needs children, but the church staff say they offer worship, not ministries.

As Rachel points out, this cool congregation got so wrapped up in the performance part of worship that they forgot to actually be the church. They were looking for a phenomenal movement of God – and got so distracted that they failed to notice God at work - they failed to welcome God’s messenger – they failed to welcome Jesus, who was sitting there among them. In fact, they ushered him out. Jesus is a big distraction when you want a church free of distractions.

This church in North Carolina says it offers worship and not ministries. On Tuesday I was at a meeting of the executive of Montreal and Ottawa Conference of our United Church. There we talked about how, in the old days, 50 years ago, when the church had more power and influence, when attendance was higher, when you could assume that most people were Christians, we thought to a considerable extent of coming to church, being in the church, as us doing something for God. We came to worship and give God praise and honour. And that’s still important today, it’s how we express gratitude to God for all the blessings showered on us. But thinking about church has shifted quite a bit. Many people come now, come for the first time or return after a long time, not to do something for God, but to join what God is doing.

Here at Knox-St. Paul’s, brothers and sisters, and across the Seaway Valley, we are not about offering worship and not ministries. That cannot be us as the United Church. We worship and we do ministry – and in both we seek to join what God is doing. We are participants; we aren’t guests. And part of what God is doing is welcoming and accepting, showing wonderfully generous hospitality to all of God’s children. And if we try to do that, if we try to welcome as Jesus says we should, welcome extravagantly, welcome unconditionally, welcome radically and inclusively, welcome in big ways and little ways as Jesus says, if we set aside our judgments and our knee-jerk reactions and make people feel genuinely at home and delight in the new ideas brought by these folks, whether they are brand new or attend once in a while or have come back after years away from the church or have been here their whole lives – if we welcome like that, well, then I have bad news and good news.

The bad news is, we won’t have a cool church. And we won’t have a comfortable church. Everyone here won’t dress alike and like the same music and talk about the same things. Church will be messy. There will be chaos. There will be distractions. People will disagree on issues. When a diverse group of people come together, there will be preferences expressed for music I don’t listen to and TV shows I don’t watch and political parties I wouldn’t vote for and clothing I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing. But that’s what happens in God’s hospitality for everyone.

And the good news is, if we welcome as Jesus tells us to, if we live out hospitality that fosters this kind of untidy, unpredictable diversity, then we are indeed welcoming God’s messengers, we are welcoming Jesus. And Jesus will show up, unexpectedly, surprisingly.

You know, there will be a lot of disagreements in this congregation, and in this Presbytery, in the coming year. But we need to remember the words of the Letter to the Hebrews, in practicing hospitality some have been unaware that they are entertaining God’s messengers. When someone says something that we think is wrong, it may just be God’s message to us. Are we listening? Are we welcoming? Are we extending our hospitality to all of God’s children? For in doing so, we are receiving Jesus, and in receiving him, we are receiving God. And, sisters and brothers, all will be invited back next week to this locality, to have a heaping helping of our hospitality.

Love is All Around; or, God and Tim Hortons: Sermon, June 19, 2011

This is my sermon for Trinity Sunday, June 19, 2011. I drew on 2006 and 2008 sermons for the Tim Hortons analogy.

Psalm 8; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Many ministers try to avoid preaching today, Trinity Sunday. For whatever reason preachers seem to find it difficult to explain the idea of the Trinity, God being one God yet three persons. One minister online commented that the Trinity Sunday sermon is like delivering an academic paper rather than a message or a reflection.

There’s a famous quote from Winston Churchill, about the Soviet Union being ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’ Many people think of God as Trinity as being like that; a riddle, a mystery, an enigma, a code we try to break but often can’t. Someone called the Trinity the Rubik’s Cube of theology.

Well, it is a mystery, how God can be one yet three, three yet one. We sang, God in three persons, blessed Trinity. The Trinity is the concept that there is indeed one God with three distinct yet equal persons: Father or Creator, Son or Saviour in Jesus Christ, and Holy Spirit. The Trinity is our way of summing up the richness and depth of our experience of God, and maybe this richness and this mystery can be best expressed as an image rather than a dry description. Preachers over the centuries have come up with different ones.

I wrote my thesis on Gregory of Nyssa, who lived in the fourth century when there was a great church council that settled the disputes among Christians over the Trinity. Gregory said that the persons of the Trinity are like three gold coins; the coins are many, but are one in sharing the same substance. The Celtic Church said that the Trinity is like one finger with its three joints. St. Patrick of Ireland used another image, holding up a shamrock and saying that just as the shamrock is one plant, so God is one; and just as the shamrock has three leaves, so God has three distinct and equal persons. And the shamrock became the symbol of Ireland. Water as ice and steam and liquid is another example of the Trinity, three with the same substance.

The Roman Catholic writer John Aurelio points out that we are each a trinity. I am a trinity. My father is in me. My nose, and much of the rest of my appearance come from his side. My mother is in me. Her height became mine. The way I blend all these together, like mixing cream and sugar and coffee together, are the unique me. I am three in one. This is just one way I am made, and each of us is made, in the image of the Trinitarian God.

Preaching on Trinity Sunday a few years ago, I used another example. The Trinity is like Tim Hortons coffee. What more Canadian idea could there be?

If you order a Tim Hortons double-double, in the cup there is coffee, cream, and sugar. Each is distinct. Each is equal, for if any one is absent the taste is completely different. Yet all are one, and cannot be separated from each other in the cup. They are in relationship. Three in One, and One in Three.

Coffee, cream, and sugar. Each is unique, yet each is present in every sip. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Each is unique, yet each is present in everything God is. In Zen Buddhism there is a saying: seed and grain and flour are not three things, but three aspects of one thing. That’s the Trinity, too.

In a while we will say the creed that came out of that great church council in the fourth century, held at Nicea in Turkey, where the church stated that we believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. That’s one person of the Trinity, the Father or Creator. And we believe in on Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God. That’s another person of the Trinity, the Son, the Saviour, the Word. And we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life. That’s another person of the Trinity, the Spirit, the Sustainer.

That was the fourth century. In 2006 the United Church of Canada produced A Song of Faith, which expresses the same belief in the Trinity, but in poetry, and we will be taking a closer look at this faith statement in an upcoming service. And the Song of Faith says that with the church through the ages, we speak of God as one and triune: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We also speak of God as Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer; God, Christ, and Spirit; Mother, Friend, and Comforter; Source of Life, Living Word, and Bond of Love; and in other ways that speak faithfully of the One on whom our hearts rely.

Now, this Tim Hortons example of the Trinity isn’t a perfect one, because in a double-double the three parts aren’t in equal proportions. There’s more coffee than there is cream and sugar. I don’t think I could drink equal parts coffee, cream, and sugar. But maybe that’s the way a lot of us see God – we tend to emphasize on person over the others. When we say ‘God’ we often mean the Creator, the Father – we’re not thinking of Christ or the Spirit. We’re seeing the three persons of the Trinity as distinct, but not equal. But Gregory of Nyssa said that it is impossible to think of one of the three members of the Trinity without thinking of the others; they are like a chain of three links, pulling each other along.

So that’s the Trinity, summed up in a few minutes when we could spend our entire lives exploring this mystery. The church has had great debates between Christians who believed that the three persons of the Trinity are equal, and those who believed that the Creator is superior to the Son. Yet what do these really matter? How can this enigma of the Trinity have any relevance for our daily lives and our spirituality, as we try our best to love God and each other, feed the hungry, and work for God’s realm of love and justice and peace?

Well, there’s a clue for us in the Song of Faith, which in its first lines acknowledges that dealing with the idea of the Trinity is a challenge. The Song of Faith says, God is holy mystery, beyond complete knowledge, above perfect description. Yet, in love, the one eternal God seeks relationship.

And that’s why, sisters and brothers, the Trinity is relevant to us as believers. As the Trinity is in relationship, and seeks relationship with us, so we seek relationship with each other. The Trinity is the model of relationship for us.

When we discuss the Trinity, God as Trinity seems static, unmoving, abstract. Even when we think about images of the Trinity like a shamrock or three coins or a Tim Hortons double double, these can’t capture all of the mystery of the Trinity, because they seem too static and unfeeling. For the Trinity is all about movement. The Trinity is all about relationship. The Trinity is all about love. God is love, Scripture tells us. The Father loves the Son with all that God is. The Son loves the Creator in exactly the same way. The Holy Spirit is the love that moves between the two of them. There are three persons of God, but they aren’t solo, they’re made one in a perpetual state of giving and receiving. Love is always moving, always flowing, among the three persons of God.

You know, as some of us buy gifts for Father’s Day, the Father gave Christ an infinite gift to express infinite love, the gift of the universe. Billions of galaxies. Uncounted numbers of stars and planets. All created by the Father in Christ and for Christ, for all things in heaven and on earth were created through him and for him.

And the Spirit is there at the creation, as we read at the beginning of the Bible, moving over the waters. The Spirit is there, bringing Jesus into the world so that he can show us how much God loves us. And it is the power of the Spirit that raises him from the dead. All this shows that the Trinity is not an abstraction. The Trinity is action. The Trinity is events – creation; incarnation; resurrection.

Creation is not a one-time thing but is ongoing. God has created and is creating. God is the source of everything that is in every moment of time - and all because of the love that moves constantly among the Maker and the Saviour and the Spirit.

It is in God that we live and move and have our being. God is the medium in which we exist, like the air, and as God in Trinity is love, it is like we are breathing in love. All creation exists in God’s love. All creation depends on God’s love. We know God’s love because we breathe it in.

But it can’t stop there. To breathe in air and hold onto it would kill us. We have to exhale. And so we must breathe out the love we breathe in. We can’t hold onto God’s love. We have to give it away.

We love because God first loved us. We love because we have no choice; love is all around us. We can’t stop breathing - and we can’t stop loving. That’s the Trinity. And that’s why the Trinity for us is not some irrelevant and abstract doctrine. The Trinity shows us how to love like the three persons of God: continuously, without limit, bound to each other in love, always seeking relationship.

And so Jesus, who is God in human form, love made known, calls us to live in love, to serve in love, to act in love:
“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to do everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Statements of Faith

When I was growing up we said the Apostles' Creed every Sunday in worship. Then, in adult life, we said the United Church of Canada's A New Creed pretty regularly. At Ingleside and Newington we say A New Creed about once every two months on average - partially a consequence of having two services, and the Newington service MUST end on time so I can get to Ingleside! I suppose this says something about the importance of confessions of faith in modern spirituality.

But during June and July I plan to ask everyone to say a different statement of faith each week, including A New Creed and the tried-and-true Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, but also Eric Liddell's creed (which he wrote in a Japanese prison camp in China during the Second World War), our United Church of Canada's recent Song of Faith, and this statement of faith just written by my friend Connie Waters, the 'Mama Outlaw' of Outlaw Preachers. I hope this will allow us to reflect on what Christians have believed over the centuries, how these ancient words can have meaning for us today, and how we can retell the Jesus story in our own words. Maybe we'll be inspired to write our own statement!?

It's Pentecost!

Can't improve on this video:

Unco11 fallout...or blowback...or whatever.

A key takeaway for me from the Unco11 conference was the teaching (articulated by Brian Merritt and others) that we don't need to wait for permission from the institutional church - we just need to risk, and go for it. I've been trying to do that in small ways since May 18, and thinking about larger ways.

So, for instance, prior to Unco I got the big idea to work on a partnership between our United Church of Canada Presbytery and the United Church of Christ Association on the other side of the US border, involving a joint witness for peace during the upcoming War of 1812 Bicentennial. I've now set up a discussion of training for ministry and ordination standards between our Presbytery and the UCC Association. I'm sure our two denominations do talk at the national level, but I haven't heard much, and believe that there's much learning to be done as we both deal with putting national decisions into practice and cut denominational standards to fit our own cloth.

As another example, our Montreal and Ottawa Conference has no official Twitter presence, and last year at our annual meeting the table stewards told me not to tweet. This year I didn't wait for the Conference to get around to using Twitter - I went with my tablet and live tweeted the entire meeting, and produced a volume of tweets (and retweets) that enabled me to lobby the new president-elect (who was ordained with me in 2009) to have official tweeting next year.

And our Presbytery, of which I have the honour to be chair this year, is undertaking a major revisioning and restructuring initiative which breaks the traditional 'one minister = one pastoral charge' mould. We began this with little consultation with other levels of the denomination, and I plan to continue to do so - in fact, I am setting up consultations with other Presbyteries interested in our bottom-up process.

None of this is because I'm hostile towards, or suspicious of, The United Church of Canada I love dearly. I'm just an open source church kind of person. I'm thankful that our United Church of Canada is working within a planning framework that recognizes that much of the energy and innovation in the church comes from trying new things at the local level. However, I'm under no illusions that such thinking has support at all levels of our institution. Sometimes, if not most of the time, you have to follow the words of Barry Manilow: "You get what you get when you go for it."

Feverishly Thinking...

...about how to use QR codes to proclaim the Good News through promoting church initiatives, serving members, and welcoming new folk. A QR code is a pixelated picture that, when seen by a mobile phone's camera, is translated by a QR app into a link, text, or phone number. My Twitter friend @mirgray suggests replacing printed announcements in the church bulletin with a QR code for those worshippers who can use their phones and the code to go right to an announcement page online. Or QR codes could be scattered around town as part of a scavenger hunt - perhaps a youth activity, or a 'seeker' initiative that would bring people to a welcoming service.

This QR code promotes a national survey in which my pastoral charge is participating. Just an idea.

Clear

Kardinal Offishall has a song, Clear: People on the left, clear; people on the right, clear. I was thinking about clarity today, trying to follow the Church of Scotland's General Assembly on Twitter and in the British media. There were two resolutions dealing with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) clergy in the same day: one to lift a moratorium on inducting LGBT clergy ordained before 2009 to their parishes; and another to consider lifting a ban on ordaining candidates who are in same-sex relationships. Both passed, but it was unclear to an observer, even one steeped in church polity, that the first was independent of the second, and the implications of the first in particular. This may have been clear to commissioners to the General Assembly, but it wasn't to me and others, and it was embarrassing to tweet the results of the first vote based on equally fuzzy reporting in the Guardian newspaper and have to be corrected by more knowledgeable folks.

My reflection today was that so often the resolutions presented to church courts, whether the local Session, Presbytery, Conference, or General Council (in our case in The United Church of Canada) are likely just as confusing. So often we've been about to take a vote and I can hear delegates asking each other urgently, "What are we voting on?" It's made me resolve as chair of my Presbytery in 2011-12 to ensure that resolutions are as clear as possible - because, after all, there are few bureaucracies with language as opaque as the Church.

People on the left, clear; people on the right, clear.

Living Stones: Sermon, May 22, 2011

I relied quite a bit on the Lectionary commentary from the United Methodist Church General Board of Discipleship in writing this sermon!

1 Peter 2:2-10; John 14:1-14

Giving all glory and honour to God.

We have had an opportunity to talk about our identity, who we are as a congregation, with a facilitator this past week, and to think even more about it with the United Church identity survey being done online. The author of the First Letter of Peter is writing a sermon to newly baptized Christians, and this week is telling them about who they are, and who we are, and about their identity as a people. The way First Peter puts it is that we are like living stones, being built into a spiritual house.

I used to be a pretty avid rock collector as a boy. I had igneous rocks and metamorphic rocks and sedimentary rocks. I’ve lost a lot of that knowledge now, but when I was in theological college at Queen’s I would go to the geology museum and see rocks and crystals. I can see them here in Ingleside too, just near the bank where Marlene Waldroff’s father displayed some big rocks. And driving through New York State this week I went through some spectacular rock cuts in the Adirondack Mountains.

But these aren’t living rocks like the reading is talking about. This part about stones is actually a pun in the Greek the letter was written in originally. Jesus tells his friend and follower Simon, you are a rock, and on this rock I will build my church. He calls him Peter, from the Greek word for rock. It’s like nicknaming him Rocky. So this letter is like Rocky writing about living rocks.

The letter says, you are coming to God as a living stone. Even though this stone may have been rejected by humans, the way God sees it it is chosen and valuable. Whenever we feel like an outsider, whenever we’re not part of the in crowd, whenever it seems that we don’t belong, whenever we feel pushed aside and that we don’t count because of our beliefs or our appearance or our age or our gender or what town we’re from or anything else about us, this is what we must remember: from God’s perspective we are chosen, and we have value.

The ancient readers of this letter would recognize that the writer is referring to one of the Psalms, which says, the stone rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone. They saw this verse as a reference to Jesus, who was betrayed, and rejected, and put to death. Whenever we feel alienated and marginalized, God knows our hurt, our pain, for Jesus knew rejection. Yet he was raised from death to become the cornerstone of a new temple. This would be different from the Temple buildings Jesus and his friends visited in Jerusalem, constructed from physical stones. By the time this letter was written, that Temple was probably gone, because the Roman army crushed a Jewish revolt and destroyed the Temple. The huge complex that took decades to build was burned and its great stones pulled down. Only part of its stone wall survives in Jerusalem today, the Western Wall where Jews come to pray.

That Temple, the centre of religious life, disappeared. But Jesus is the cornerstone of a new, spiritual temple, one that isn’t built with human hands and earthly materials. The letter tells us, you yourselves are being built like living stones into a spiritual temple. We are like living stones no less than Jesus, for in his rising from death and our baptism, we have been made alive with him.

We are being built like living stones into a spiritual temple, which is the church – not the church in the sense of the bricks and mortar and plaster and glass around us, but the church as the community of believers, past, present and future. Jesus says, in my Father’s house there are many dwelling places, and it’s as if the church community of Newington and Ingleside is one room in this spiritual temple.

But we don’t build this spiritual structure. We don’t build the church as community. That’s hard for us to understand, because we, or at least Ontario Hydro, built this physical building with their hands and tools. But we don’t build the spiritual temple, the church: we are being built into it, incorporated into it. This is a really important part, a critical part, of what the author is trying to explain to us. We aren’t the builder. The builder is the Holy Spirit, God’s Spirit, who is at work always and everywhere. We join in the building, we participate in it, we are swept along and enlivened in and through it. But we don’t make it. God does.

God builds. And God calls. We are being built into this spiritual temple in which God’s Spirit lives, and we are given particular ways to fulfill our calling. Elsewhere in the Bible, the Apostle Paul tells the Corinthians about another way to describe the church, as the body of Christ, and all of us are members of the body, with different roles, just like feet and hands and eyes. Some of us, Paul says, are ordered ministers. Some teach. Some lead music. Some visit. Some cook. Some fix things. But no one has greater honour or wisdom than anyone else, Paul says. A modern way of putting it is the title of a book I started reading after the conference I went to, called Open Source Church. All of us contribute, all of us are called to leadership, and we all gain when all of us let the Spirit use us to feed ideas and energy into the church.

And this First Letter of Peter says that we are together a holy priesthood. That doesn’t mean we all have to wear shirts with clerical collars. But we are all priests. The writer is thinking of the priesthood in that physical Temple in Jerusalem in ancient times, as the priests sacrificed animals and birds to God. The members of the church, the living stones in this new spiritual temple, are a holy priesthood making spiritual sacrifices to God. Not physical sacrifices of meat and blood. But like those long-ago priests, we hold the world before God for God’s remaking. We hold ourselves and one another before God for God’s transformation. Just as the ancient priesthood had God’s authority, so do we – we have the authority of Jesus Christ, whom the Bible calls the chief high priest. And so we pray for the world, we pray for ourselves, we pray for one another, constantly interceding in prayer. A United Methodist Church author I was reading calls prayer “the unceasing heartbeat” of our participation as priests in God’s mission.

You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, people who are God’s own possession. That’s what this letter says. And these words cause some of us to kind of jump back in horror. We know how language like ‘chosen race’ has been used to justify slavery and genocide. We know what nations who claim to be holy have done, as they believe they can do no wrong. We know what violence and bloodshed and oppression result from words like these.

But, of course, that’s not at all what the author is preaching. Nor is it what the early believers in Jesus who heard it would hear. For the listeners when this letter was read out, at the end of the first century or so, these Christians in the first church communities, were mostly people with almost no power. These were people who were baptized, not as babies, but only after studying long and hard and taking vows that included pledging never to kill anyone for any reason. These were people who knew what it meant not to be people, who knew what it meant to be on the outside. To be told that the living stones rejected by humans are chosen and valuable to God, that they are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that gave them identity, that gave them belonging, that was good news for them, these people who had been powerless and voiceless.

And so this vision of belonging to a people was not the way we would see it today. It didn’t draw on the imperial imagery of the empire in which these listeners lived - and we live - but on the Biblical images of the scattered tribal peoples of Israel, acting as a nation that was a light to the nations, a sign of God’s glory in their weakness. These hearers of the First Letter of Peter were an unlikely nation then, and now, a nation founded on communion with God in Jesus Christ and therefore with one another, a nation based on love of God and neighbour, a nation serving in the name of Jesus Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit, a nation committed to constant lifting up of the world and humanity in prayer.

That was the nation, the people, of the early Christian church to which this letter was written. And it still is. As we process in our minds the meeting we just had, as we answer survey questions about our identity as a community of the United Church of Canada, a part of this spiritual temple, we can ask ourselves: If we are indeed like living stones, how is God building us into a temple of the Spirit? How are we carrying out our holy and royal priesthood? How can we live out the fullest possible vision of being a holy nation, God’s own people, in union with all the Christians who have gone before us in many generations? How are we speaking of God’s wonderful acts, God who called us into the light of the risen Christ? What emerges from the stories that we tell as living stones? These are questions for us as we sift through all that we have talked about in the last few days.

At the conference I was at, there was a session on science fiction and faith, and people talked about how the Christian story is reflected in Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica and other movies and TV shows and books and comics. I said that I was probably one of the few people there old enough to remember the first Star Trek TV series, and two things made it important for me: the stories, and the community it depicted. Star Trek was one of the few shows in the 1960s that had a black woman, and an Asian man, and a Russian, all working and living together. It modeled what a community should be like.

And so, sisters and brothers, as a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, we try our best to lead Christ-like lives and model what a community - a community of love, a community of faith, a community of belonging, a community of welcome, a church - should be like, as we pray, as we care, as we act, as we tell the Christian story through our stories. And as our reading from the Good News According to John tells us, in believing in Jesus and following his way, we know and live truth, the very truth of God, and we will do the works that Jesus did, and even greater works for love and justice and peace. As the captain on Star Trek: The Next Generation used to say, make it so. Amen.

Unco11

On Monday I drove - seven and a half hours in the rain - to Stony Point NY, on the Hudson River north of New York City, for Unco11, held at the Presbyterian Church (USA) conference centre there. I got to see lots of Adirondacks and Catskills scenery on the way there and back, including zipping into the US Military Academy at West Point (which was overcrowded during Graduation Week) and driving past Revolutionary War sites at Newburgh, Fort Montgomery, and Stony Point itself.

The Unco11 un-conference is intended to be an alternative to the usual church conference. The agenda is crowd-sourced: attendees write their suggested topics on a board, and then discussion leaders nominate themselves and are assigned discussion rooms. I went to sessions on bivocational ministry, moving the church forward, palliative care for dying congregations, science fiction/fantasy and faith, and requirements for ministry training and ordination - and learned lots. There were also amazing worship services. I suggested reading in different languages for the closing worship to show that we are not going out into a unilingual world; and we had the Gospel read in English, Korean, French, and Greek.

Folks were drawn from PC(USA) and a few from other American denominations like the United Methodists and Disciples of Christ - and two Canadian attendees, myself and an Anglican priest, to make Unco international for the first time. They tended to be younger, and tech-savvy - there were more iPad 2s at Unco than exist in all of the three United Counties here, I'm sure.

Unco for me: Just what I needed after an insanely busy April, with Holy Week, Easter, and my mother's death. Lots of learning. Lots of inspiration. Lots of real-life connections with people whom I had only seen in tiny pictures on Twitter. Lots of sharing. Lots of quiet, too, so I could decompress. And now back into the world, to put all that I've learned and digested into practice, knowing that I have a new network of support and prayer to draw on.

Mother's Day

My mother died on April 23, so our Mother's Day included a visit to her grave. This is a portion of my prayers from the worship services for the Third Sunday of Easter - Mother's Day or Christian Family Sunday - as I try to pray for all kinds of mothers.

On this Mother’s Day, we pray to you, God, mother of our hearts, that you will hold us in your warm and encircling arms, soothing our troubled thoughts, kissing better our hurts, disciplining us with love filled with wisdom, forgiving us when we stumble and fall. We pray for mothers; and we pray particularly for all of us who are in sorrow over the deaths of our mothers, for children who do not know their mothers, for mothers who grieve for children, mothers separated from spouses and children through travel or work or broken relationships, mothers who are estranged from their children, mothers who gave up babies for adoption, adoptive mothers, foster mothers, women who made hard choices not to become mothers, and women who have not been able to bear children.

140 years ago Julia Ward Howe called for Mother’s Day to be a day of commemoration of all killed in war, and of counsel among women for peace. We pray today, God of peace, for our world, trapped in violence; we pray for our wrestling with issues of war and peace, when so often in our broken world it seems that we can only achieve a limited peace through making war; we pray for victims of war and terror, for all the lives lost and changed since, and even before, 2001; we pray for your kingdom to come, your realm where there is no more death, or pain, or grief, for the former things will have passed away and everything will be made new. And we pray for ourselves, that we will be peacemakers, making peace with every little act of peace in our families and neighbourhoods and community and country. God, make us instruments of your peace.

'The Sword of Murder is Not the Balance of Justice': Sermon, May 8, 2011

Thanks to Martha Spong, of North Yarmouth Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, for her blog post that inspired this sermon.

Acts 2:14a, 36-41; Luke 24:13-35

Giving all glory and honour to God.

On this Mother’s Day, as I miss my mother, I remember that she had lots of mysterious folk wisdom. If your nose itched, it meant that you were going to kiss a fool. If you dropped a fork, a man was coming over. You could predict a baby’s gender by dangling a needle over the mother’s stomach. And a lot of the time this stuff came true. And both stories this morning have elements that are just as mysterious and unbelievable. How could the couple walking with a stranger from Jerusalem to Emmaus not recognize that he was Jesus? How could he just disappear after they recognized him as he blessed and broke the bread? How could 3000 people have their lives changed as they were baptized after Peter’s sermon?

It seems impossible. But it also seemed impossible when 3000 people had their lives changed, in New York and Washington and a field in Pennsylvania, on September 11, 2001. Their lives were taken away from them. And this week we have thought of that day, and those lives, and how our lives changed, too. On Sunday night I was using my computer, and on Twitter there was an announcement that President Obama would make an unscheduled national security announcement at 10:30. I just thought, uh oh. In movies this usually means that a meteor or comet is heading for the earth, or we have contacted aliens. But soon we knew that American commandos had killed Osama bin Laden.

And celebrations broke out in the United States. This is understandable, that people felt joy that a figure who had done such harm to Americans and so many others was dead, that they finally had a real victory in the war on terror, that this was part of healing the wounds of 9/11. And I can’t judge anyone who was celebrating. I only know what I believe our faith tells me as a follower of Jesus Christ about how I, and maybe we, can react to news like this.

Osama bin Laden was a criminal responsible for the mass murder of many innocent people, and exploiting and twisting the Islamic religion to promote hatred and division. As far as we know, he never showed any remorse for the harm he caused, and in fact bragged about it. Many Christians feel relief that he is no longer able to threaten us, and that is a legitimate reaction. But faced with the death of a person, I as a Christian cannot rejoice. That’s the way I see it. I can’t view the death of anyone, no matter how reprehensible their actions and beliefs, as an occasion for street parties like a win for a sports team.

Others have said that, hearing of bin Laden’s death, they had to rejoice in this news, and their faith justified them doing so. They could point to, among others, the song sung by the Hebrews in the book of Exodus when the Egyptian army was drowned in the sea, and the verses in Ecclesiastes, there is a time to mourn, and a time to dance, a time to love and a time to hate. And that is true. But it also says in the Old Testament, in Proverbs, ‘Do not rejoice when your enemies fall, and do not let your heart be glad when they stumble.’ The prophet Ezekiel quotes God as saying, ‘I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live.’ And Jesus tells us, in words that we discussed here in February, ‘Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.’

Let the wicked turn from their ways, and live. Osama bin Laden seemed bent on not turning from his ways. He was probably plotting the deaths of more people. So what do we do when the wicked will not turn away? Augustine, one of the great figures of the ancient church, said, yes, Jesus tells us to love our enemies, but there are times when love requires us to go to the aid of the innocent and to turn the wicked from their ways by using violence in the cause of justice. War could sometimes be a necessity to obtain peace, Augustine thought. Yet, he continued, even in war we as Christians must cherish the spirit of peacemakers. War is only a last resort in a just cause that tries to restore peace. It cannot be used for revenge and retribution on our enemies.

Although both the president and our prime minister say that justice has been done, for many people killing bin Laden is revenge. And as followers of Jesus we cannot bask in the satisfaction of vengeance. Now, refusing to embrace revenge does not mean that, even if we find it in our hearts to forgive bin Laden for his crimes, we forget his deeds, or his victims. But if we accept the unfortunate necessity of violence in our broken world, we must also recognize that all bloodshed, no matter how justified, only perpetuates the cycle of violence and counter-violence. This week, bin Laden may be dead, but there is still terrorism, there are still wars, and we know that his death will bring retaliation someday. The cycle continues.

Jesus shows us a better way. The couple who walk with him on the way to Emmaus tell him how disappointed they are, how Jesus had been a great prophet but was put to death. They had hoped he would be the one to redeem Israel. They had hoped he was the Christ, the Messiah, but the Messiah they expected, the warrior king who would expel the Roman occupiers from their land with arms and bloodshed. And so they don’t recognize Jesus, because he is not what they expect. And, so often, we don’t either, because we expect Jesus to follow us in the violent ways of the world we have made, rather than us following him in his way.

God refuses to oppose evil with evil. On the cross Jesus does not retaliate with violence against those who use violence; instead, he forgives them. And he rises from death to overcome evil and death. At Good Friday and Easter, Jesus conquers the hatred that inspires violence, and the revenge that inspires counter-violence, exposing the lie that makes this cycle of violence inevitable. He is not a warrior, but a lover, who gives himself in love rather than take life, who extends God’s healing love to all who suffer, and the forgiving love of God to all who use violence for their purposes – yes, even Osama bin Laden.

Jesus comes to bring the kingdom of God, whose story denies the story of the violent world where we live. We are trying as followers of Jesus to live in and to extend this realm of God, the realm of love and justice and peace, while living at the same time in a world of hatred and domination and brutality. We are citizens of heaven, yet with responsibilities and duties as citizens of Canada. And that is a struggle. That’s why there is no one Christian response to the death of Osama bin Laden, or the war in Afghanistan, or the war in Libya. There are many legitimate reactions as different believers interpret Scripture and their reason and experiences and tradition. The Apostle Paul tells the Philippians, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, and that is what each of us is trying to do as we are confronted with how we can respond in faith to issues of war and peace.

As I said, it is understandable that pent up rage and fear that has lasted nearly 10 years burst into celebration on Sunday. But I think that this could have been, and can still be, a somber time, a time for serious reflection, not a time to dance and chant slogans. A death like this should cause us to ponder the serious responsibilities each of us has before God to follow Jesus in his way of peace, and to commit ourselves to working for God’s realm of peace, and love, and justice. Osama bin Laden was about hatred, and division, and death. We cannot be.

Jesus says, all who draw the sword will die by the sword. He knew how much we love to get revenge, and how vengeance just spirals into an unending cycle of bloodshed. He knew that we are trapped in webs of violence that seem inescapable in this world. We cannot figure out ways for peoples to live together without war being a necessity to keep peace.

Yet there is hope. Look back through the story of the week before Easter, to Thursday night, when Jesus goes with his friends to the garden to pray. Peter and the others, knowing that Jesus is in danger, do what makes sense to them to protect him – they bring weapons. And when the authorities arrive to arrest Jesus, Peter draws his sword and strikes at one of them, and wounds him.

Peter, like us, is trapped in the violence of our world. He, like us, knows no other way to respond to threats. He, like us, can’t see how we can live in peace and security without threatening death and harm.

Yet Jesus tells Peter to put away his sword. And here Peter is in our reading today, preaching to the people of Jerusalem, ‘Repent every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven. The promise is for you, for your children, for all who are far away, everyone whom God calls. Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.’ Peter who drew the sword in anger has been changed by the words and the resurrection of Jesus into Peter who preaches the good news of peace, Peter who brings people into the community of Jesus who died and rose again to show that love is stronger than hatred. Peter is doing what he can to extend God’s realm, for true peace does not come because an enemy has been killed, but because God’s realm is at hand.

One of the earliest calls to celebrate Mother’s Day was in 1870. Julia Ward Howe, who earlier had written the hymn Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, wrote her Mother’s Day Proclamation in reaction to the carnage of the American Civil War. She stated that women need to say firmly, our sons cannot be trained to injure the sons of the women of another country. And she continued, the sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Women must meet to commemorate the dead, and then solemnly decide how the human family can live in peace.

On Mother’s Day, a day originally intended to be dedicated to peace, the news is still dominated by violence fostering more violence. Bin Laden is dead but little else has changed. Yet we are called, as Peter was called, as Julia Ward Howe called to other mothers, to be peacemakers. We are called to grieve, for the thousands who were murdered on September 11 and the lives that were changed, for the thousands who have died in the wars that followed, for those who will die as these wars drag on for years to come. We are called to pray, for the world, for our leaders, for the common good, for God’s kingdom to come. And we are called to look at ourselves and the opportunities we have to make peace. We are called to let Jesus and his resurrection change us as Peter was changed, called to travel the way with Jesus like that couple on the way to Emmaus, walk with him on the way to peace, not just in the imperfect choices we must make in matters of war and national security, but especially to build peace right here in our families and our community. And maybe then we will reach out to a stranger, and in gestures of friendship we will recognize Jesus, and we will run back to the community with this good news and to embody the grace and love of Christ. May it be so.

How to Vote: Sermon, Palm Sunday, April 17, 2011

Matthew 21:1-11

Giving all glory and honour to God.

My family on my father’s side has always been quite political. One of ancestors sat in the first New Brunswick Legislature in the 1780s. My grandmother’s family, the Hatfields, were all Liberals until my great-uncle Heber became a Conservative. That was youthful rebellion at the start of the 20th century, you defied your parents by being a Tory. The Liberal riding association would meet in the Hatfield general store, and Heber could hear everything through the stove pipe, and he would tell the Tories all the Liberal plans. He went on to be elected as a Member of Parliament, and his son Richard was Premier of New Brunswick. The family was still divided. In his first election Richard was the Conservative candidate and his brother-in-law was the Liberal. Richard’s sister Rheta never said whom she voted for in that election, her brother or her husband.

I’m thinking about this as last year on Palm Sunday I preached that 20 centuries ago there would in fact have been two parades. One stars Jesus, and today we have had our own version of this parade, people waving palm branches and laying their cloaks on the road and shouting Hosanna. The other parade stars the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate. For before the festivals he and his troops would march from the coast, to beef up the garrison in the fortress so that the pilgrims can be monitored and the power of the Roman empire displayed.

These two parades are such a contrast. The kingdom of God and the empire of this world. Jesus is indeed a king, but a completely different kind of king than anyone expects, the Son of God, a king who comes to bring a realm of love and peace and justice. Pilate represents the Roman emperor, who is also called the Son of God, and claims to rule with peace and justice, but with the world’s ways with armies and navies and legislation and taxes.

Today, long after and far away from Jerusalem in the year 30 or so, these two parades continue. And we participate in both at the same time. That’s right, we try to walk with Jesus on his way, where our duty is to love God and each other and seek justice and resist evil. And we live in civil society, in a country that has a military and taxes and laws just like the Roman Empire, and we are citizens here with duties and responsibilities. Just as in the time of Jesus, we have to live faithfully in empire.

We have a responsibility which didn’t exist in the time of Jesus, to elect our representatives in elections for the federal Parliament, the provincial Parliament, and the township council. We had municipal elections last year, in the fall we will vote provincially, and right now we’re in the middle of a federal election campaign. And we see lawn signs and media stories for the election in our riding, Stormont-Dundas-South Glengarry, and we’re deciding which candidate we will support on May 2nd. So today’s sermon is called How to Vote.

This doesn’t mean I’m going to say who to vote for. My family has an allergy to being told in church which party to elect, as my mother grew up in Quebec during the period when you were told in church that you must vote for the Union Nationale government of Premier Maurice Duplessis. This has horrified us ever since. And, as I said, my father’s family was split between two political loyalties, but he saw that the relatives who voted for one party were no better Christians, or no worse, than ones who voted for the other. I’m saying that a follower of Jesus can in good conscience support any party and any candidate in this election, and it will be a legitimate choice. There have been times and places where believers in Jesus could not in good faith vote for a certain party, but we are fortunate to live in Canada today where it’s not unchristian to vote a certain way.

So I don’t think, and the United Church of Canada doesn’t think, that the church should be a partisan cheerleader for a political party or candidate. As Canadian Christians we can vote for whomever we wish. But as people of faith, our beliefs impact on every aspect of our lives, including our political choices. Our faith does have something to say about voting. Our vote is an act of faith, for it is a witness to what we believe, a chance to make a difference for the common good. So this sermon is about how to vote – how to choose.

God calls us to be engaged in the world, to play a role in shaping society, to be witnesses to the good news of Jesus Christ all the time, including during elections. We have a right and a responsibility as citizens of Canada to participate in elections, and we have a responsibility as citizens of heaven to bring our values to the ballot box (with us as we go behind that cardboard screen and make our mark on the ballot paper). So here are some suggestions for how to vote.

The first thing is to vote. When my great uncle was elected in 1940, 70% of eligible Canadians voted. In 2008 it was only 59%, and among younger people it’s very low. And, with our duty to love and serve others, if we are going to vote, we need to check if our neighbours need help getting to the polls.

We have to educate ourselves about where the parties and candidates stand. Our values as followers of Jesus include pursuing the common good, overcoming poverty and injustice, and caring for the Earth, and these are benchmarks for us as we look over the party platforms. We have to evaluate the promises made during the campaign, asking about each promise if it is just, and inclusive of everyone. And we can ask questions informed by our faith as we engage in debate, at all candidates meetings and at our door and in letters and online, asking where the candidates stand on issues like criminal justice, democracy, peace, agriculture, debt and taxes, immigration, health care, poverty, justice for aboriginal peoples, the environment, and others. The United Church has an election kit that discusses these issues, and there is information in the bulletin.

And we can pray, for the party leaders, candidates, election workers, and for us as voters. The Book of Common Prayer has a prayer before an election, and as we prepare ourselves to bring our faith to how we vote, let’s pray it.

Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom: Guide and direct, we humbly ask you, the minds of all of us who are called at this time to elect fit persons to serve in the House of Commons. Grant that in the exercise of our choice we may promote your glory, and the welfare of this country, And this we beg for the sake of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

Quotations From the Chairman

I have a little book I got at a garage sale, published in 1969, Quotations from Chairman Jesus. Its title was meant to be a play on the ubiquitous Red Book of Chairman Mao's quotations, always being brandished by Red Guards in photos from China during the Cultural Revolution. We're a lot less sentimental about the Cultural Revolution and its human toll than people were 40 years ago.

The book itself is a collection of quotes by and about Jesus from the New Testament and some other early church writings, but I have always been moved by the poetic foreword by Daniel Berrigan, whose name was prominent in Christian circles during the 1960s. Here is the first part of his poem, written for a different time of cultural unrest and war in Vietnam (and language that wasn't inclusive), but speaking with fresh words to our time of war in Libya and Afghanistan:

The gospel of Jesus is spoken in a world
intoxicated with death
mesmerized by death
convinced of the necessary rule of death
skilfully conniving with death
technologizing death
acceding to the omnipresence of death

And Jesus says No
to this omnivorous power
So his word makes the slight
all but imperceptible difference
(which is finally the only difference).
A good man, himself powerless,
stands at the side of powerless men
and says to death No
for them for himself

Can any of you
place before you a single child, smiling
squirming in your arms; and say
The death of this child is a fact of modern war; I accede
to that death. I regret it of course
but what can one do? We have to destroy
in order to save; villages, women, children.
The system traps us all...

The system; horrible word! Can the system
trap the conscience of a free man? Traps are for
animals; freedom is for men. I cannot speak
for you but I will not wait upon Caesar
to instruct me in God's word. I am a man. I can read;

If a man will save his life, let him lose it.
I say to you, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.
Whatever you do to the least of these my brothers,
you do to me.
Blessed are you who suffer persecution for justice's sake...

Jesus had nothing to say to "systems", except to deny
their power over him.
He said in effect, violence stops here (pointing to his body)
He said in effect, it is better to die for others
than to live (live?) in a trap.

Be concrete be immediate! Imagine the world!
If you embrace a child, can you consent
to the death of a child? each human face
leads you (follow!) to every human face.

I can only tell you what I believe. I believe

I cannot be saved by foreign policies
I cannot be saved by sexual revolutions
I cannot be saved by the gross national product
I cannot be saved by nuclear deterrents
I cannot be saved by aldermen, priests, artists,

plumbers, city planners, social engineers,
nor by the Vatican, nor by the World Buddhist Association,
nor by Hitler nor by Joan of Arc
nor by angels nor archangels nor by powers and dominations

I can be saved only by Jesus Christ.

Resurrection and Life: Sermon, April 10, 2011

John 11:1-45

Giving all glory and honour to God.

Lazarus is dead. Our story today is about death. In our society we try not to think too much about death, even though death is our constant companion. We see hundreds of people die fake deaths in TV crime shows and mysteries, and real deaths in the news from Libya and the Ivory Coast and Japan. All of us have experienced in some way the death of a loved one or friend, and probably quite a few deaths. We may have planned for our own death, for all of us are walking around with an expiry date on us, a date we don’t know, but at some point many of us try to get ready through wills and estate planning and funeral pre-arrangement. But death isn’t a topic we like to talk about. It’s unpleasant. It makes us uncomfortable. It scares us.

But this story allows us to reflect on death which will come to us all, and how we react to death among us. Lazarus is a close friend of Jesus, the brother of Mary and Martha, and Jesus likes to stop in at his friends’ home and rest and be entertained. And Jesus gets word that Lazarus is sick. We can all relate to this, hearing that a friend is ill. And in this conversation his followers don’t understand what Jesus means. Jesus says, ‘Our friend Lazarus is sleeping, but I am going to wake him up.’ And they say, well, if he’s only sleeping, he will get well. Once again, the words of Jesus are taken too literally – at that time, sleep was a less harsh term for death, just as we avoid the word dead and say that someone has passed away or has been called home. But then Jesus is direct; he says, ‘Lazarus is dead.’ This sounds hard. Some of us prefer less direct ways of saying this, and avoid saying ‘dead,’ referring instead to someone passing. But sometimes we need to hear plainly. Your friend is dead. Your spouse is dead. The truth may be painful and catastrophic, but hearing it is the first step in healing.

So when Jesus and his group arrive, Lazarus has been dead and buried for four days. And Martha says to Jesus, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died. Even now I know that whatever you ask God, God will give you.’ Mary tells Jesus too, if you had been here Lazarus wouldn’t have died. What human, honest words. We try to detect the tone of voice behind these words, and the sisters seem angry. That is one of the stages we go through in our grief when a loved one has died. The sisters can’t keep back their feelings. But they can’t escape from their faith in Jesus either, and I hear this very human mixture of anger and belief when I talk with people in sorrow. The sisters know that Jesus has a unique relationship with God. Martha confesses that Jesus is the Christ, the one promised by God.

Mary and Martha are just like us, for we say too, in hurt and in resentment, if only God had been here, if only God had healed my parent or spouse or sibling or child, if only God had prevented this happening, I would not be going through this pain.

Yet Jesus goes through pain himself, for next in the story it says, ‘When Jesus saw Mary crying and the people who had come with her crying also, he was deeply disturbed and troubled.’ Next is the answer to many trivia questions, what is the shortest sentence in the Bible? John 11:35 – ‘Jesus wept.’ It is indeed the shortest sentence in the Bible, and one of the most moving, and astonishing. Jesus, the Word of God made human, God’s child, knows weeping, knows deep grief, knows being moved by the sorrow and hurt of his friends. The word translated as ‘deeply disturbed’ is really more powerful. In Greek it could also be used to describe a horse snorting – it’s trying to convey that such strong emotions seize Jesus that he groans involuntarily.

Here Jesus, who shows us God, is indeed showing us what God is like. Jesus doesn’t show us a passionless and compassionless God who ignores our suffering. Jesus shows us God afflicted with grief as we are, God caring so much that God’s heart is racked by anguish at the agony of God’s people, God sharing our tears. Jesus wept. God weeps.

And if Jesus weeps, God weeps, we can weep too. So often we are told, stay strong, don’t give in to tears. Boys in particular are instructed, men don’t cry. And we express admiration for family and friends who don’t cry at the funeral home or the funeral service, saying, look how composed they are – when in our grief we should act as Jesus does, we should let out our tears and our anger and our upheaval rather than keep them bottled up inside.

Every death is tremendously upsetting to the family and friends of the deceased, even if it has been expected for a long time, whether it’s the only death that day or part of a natural disaster that kills thousands of people. So far this story seems to be about just another death, no matter how much sorrow Mary and Martha and Jesus experience. But now it takes a turn. Jesus is very emotional as he comes to the tomb, with its entrance covered by a large stone, and says, ‘Remove the stone.’ And Martha tells him, ‘The smell will be awful! He’s been dead four days.’ In the King James Bible, she says, ‘He stinketh.’ But resurrections happen where things are messy and smelly, not in clean, perfect surroundings. They do move the stone, Jesus prays and then shouts ‘Lazarus, come out!’ And the dead man does come out, still wrapped in the burial cloths used in those days, and Jesus says, ‘Untie him and let him go.’

Well, that’s amazing. Jesus raises Lazarus from death, after four days. Scholars argue about how much of this story is historical and how much is mythical. No one knows if things took place in the way this story is written. But it doesn’t really matter whether or not Jesus literally raised a dead man to life on a certain date in history. For John, writing this story, Lazarus being restored to physical life isn’t what matters most. What does matter, what matters a lot, is what the story tells us, that God in Jesus loves so much that tears flow and emotions become overwhelming. And it matters the most what Jesus tells Martha: ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live, even though they die.’ That is the whole point of this story.

We often hear these words at funerals. This has been called the greatest of the ‘I am’ statements Jesus makes in John’s Gospel, perhaps the greatest saying in the whole Bible. I am the resurrection and the life. We have probably heard these words many times, but we can only grasp at their meaning. For when Jesus refers in John’s Gospel to life, or eternal life, or living forever, he doesn’t necessarily mean what we hear.

Jesus means life in this life. Resurrection and life for him mean resurrection right now, not from physical death, but from living as if we are dead, dead to sin, lost to all that is worth calling life. We may live selfishly, as if we are dead to the needs of others. We may live with insensitivity, as if we are dead to the feelings of others. We may live with hopelessness, spiritually dead. And Jesus calls us from these deaths within life, unbinds us from selfishness and insensitivity and greed and despair, and sets us free to live true lives here and now. As he said, I have come that they may have life, and more abundant life.

And that is good news. Jesus calls to us as he called to Lazarus, and frees us from spiritual death in the lives we live now. But is that all, wonderful as that is? Does this story have anything for us as we contemplate physical death? Yes, it does, and Martha realizes this as she talks about the resurrection at the last day. Jesus is the resurrection and the life in this world, and the next. In him we are certain that death is not the end. William Barclay writes in his commentary on John, in Jesus we know that we are on the way, not to the sunset, but to the sunrise, that death is a gate into a new kind of life.

When we trust in Jesus, when we accept his gift of new life, we enter into a new relationship with God, and into a new life in which life has a new beauty, a new strength, and is free from the fear and futility of life without faith in God. This life in Christ is so rich and beautiful that it cannot end in death. When we believe that God is as Jesus shows God to be, infinitely loving and forgiving and accepting, then we need not fear death, for death at the end of our lives here means going into the eternal joy of God’s loving presence. The Apostle Paul tells the Thessalonians, don’t grieve in the same way as others who have no hope, for since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, so we also believe that God will raise those who have died. And Paul says, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us, for I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor things nor things to come, can separate us from the love of God that is ours in Christ Jesus our Lord. Where, O death is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? Death may still be disturbing to us, may still frighten us no matter how much we trust God, but we have the hope that in death we do not perish, for Jesus has defeated death and has taken away its sting. He is the resurrection and the life.

And that is what we take away from this story. That is the truth behind the questions about what may have happened in history. There is another story, about a troop ship returning across the Pacific Ocean at the end of the Second World War. And an army chaplain led a Bible study on this story of Lazarus, and after they studied it an American Marine came to him and said, “Everything in that chapter is pointing at me.” He said that he had been living in hell, the hell of war and of trouble he had been in, so that he felt that his life was ruined. He felt dead. But he told the chaplain, “After reading this I have come alive again. I know that this resurrection Jesus is talking about is real here and now, for he has raised me from death to life.” In his sin and guilt that Marine came to know Jesus as the resurrection and the life, true and abundant life in the present, and true and abundant life that death cannot bring to an end. He knew, and so can we. Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Acts of God: Sermon, April 3, 2011

I was greatly inspired by Brian McLaren's response to John Piper on theodicy in the wake of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Brian's article struck a chord with me, that is certainly reflected in this sermon.

Psalm 23; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41

Giving all glory and honour to God.

Jesus heals a man who was born blind. Our reading is referred to in the hymn Amazing Grace, which quotes the blind man in the story, “I was blind but now I see.” This could also be the story Hank Williams mentions in his song I Saw the Light: “Just like the blind man who God gave back his sight, praise the Lord, I saw the light.”

And the followers of Jesus ask him, “Who sinned so that this man was born blind, him or his parents?” At that time people believed that illness was the result of sin; if you were blind or deaf or had a physical deformity, it wasn’t because of bacteria or genetics or some environmental cause, but was a punishment for something you had done wrong or your parents had done wrong. And Jesus breaks this link between sin and sickness; he says that neither this man nor his parents sinned to cause his blindness, and heals him.

In the story the Pharisees keep saying that the man was blind because of his sin. Even the followers of Jesus ask who sinned to make the man blind, him or his parents. They are trying to figure out why bad things happen to people, and their answer is that the people must be bad. And we still struggle with this. We may not think that sin causes disease or disability. But we look around the world and see natural disasters, floods and earthquakes and tsunamis and volcanoes and hurricanes. In just the last year or so we have watched flooding in Pakistan, and quakes that have devastated Haiti, and New Zealand, and Japan, and places we hear less about in China and Burma, and we are still hearing about New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina, and the Indian Ocean tsunami. And we ask for answers, just as the Pharisees and followers of Jesus did, 20 centuries ago. It’s an age-old question: why do the innocent suffer? It’s easier to come up with answers in the case of war and poverty, where sin does play a role – but it’s the reverse of the attitudes on display in this story, for it isn’t the sin of the victims causing their suffering, but the collective sin of societies and empires that perpetuates violence and injustice.

But it’s different in the case of natural disasters, because they are, after all, natural. Society doesn’t cause the earth to shake or winds to blow or volcanoes to erupt, although humanity’s impact on the earth’s climate may play a role in hurricanes and flooding. But the earthquake and tsunami that devastated part of Japan and killed 10,000 people – that was completely natural, the result of two giant plates in the planet’s crust grinding together.

So did someone sin to cause this? Some Christians have said yes, the disaster in Japan was brought about by the country’s sins in the Japanese aggression that led to World War II in the Pacific, 70 years ago. Others have laid the blame on all of us, saying that God is punishing humanity as a whole for wandering from the right path. But many Christians, the majority according to opinion polls, do not believe this.

We call these natural disasters acts of God. If you read your home insurance policy, or travelers’ insurance if you’re going anywhere, it refers to acts of God.

So there is even bigger and more difficult question for us, if human sin doesn’t cause these catastrophes. Are these truly acts of God? Did God make the earth heave in Japan and a tidal wave wash over towns and people, killing thousands and leaving millions more suffering in their grief and homelessness and under threat of nuclear radiation? Well, some pretty respected Christians say yes. A prominent theologian named John Piper points out that in the Bible earthquakes are attributed to God, because God is Lord of heaven and earth. Nature does not have a will of its own. God controls everything. Nothing is random. So, somehow, God has a good and wise purpose for this tragedy, as God has hundreds of thousands of purposes, which remain hidden to us until they are finally revealed at the end of time.

So there’s an answer. God took thousands of lives, as one step toward achieving an unknown purpose in God’s plan for good. We have probably heard this before, about deaths and cancer and all kinds of events we don’t understand: It’s God’s will. It’s God’s plan. This is a simple answer, clear cut, and it solves all our problems about why there is suffering and where God is in tragedies.

I think this is trying to get at the truth, as God’s purposes are indeed unknown, but I’m not sure this is a complete, or satisfying, or helpful, answer. I’m not sure that the explanation of evil and suffering in the world is this simple. And I’m not sure that this does solve our problems, as what seems simple can just get more complicated as we ponder whether this makes God seem, well, less loving than heartless and uncaring. We may wonder if this answer is really spiritually blind, blind to who God is.

We know that the Bible says that God is love. We know that the Bible says that Jesus came to show us what God is like. So what do we see Jesus doing, in this story and the other stories we read? Another prominent Christian thinker, Brian McLaren, and I like his work a lot, says that the scandal of God becoming human in Jesus is how Jesus acts. Jesus doesn’t take control. He doesn’t micro manage. He doesn’t eliminate all suffering and evil, yet he doesn’t cause any additional suffering and evil either. He doesn’t give in to the temptation offered to him, to take power over all the nations of the world and become an earthly ruler.

Instead, look at what Jesus is doing at the beginning of today’s story. He’s walking along. He’s on his way from one place to another. Brian McLaren points out that that’s what Jesus does, goes quietly from town to town, confronting suffering and evil, urging people to turn away from their sins that inflict suffering and evil on others, and healing and liberating people from suffering and evil so they can see spiritually, people like the man born blind. Jesus doesn’t force this healing on anyone; he allows them in faith to accept it, and to become, as the letter to the Ephesians says, children of the light. And then, at the end of this season of Lent, we will hear again how God ultimately deals with suffering and evil, in Jesus on the cross: in pain and tears, taking all of the suffering of the world into the heart of God and healing it, no through vengeance, but through forgiveness and love. Martin Luther talked about how God is made known to us, not in glory, not in control, but in the suffering of Jesus on the cross. God’s power and God’s kingdom appear in weakness.

So, if we look at our universe with spiritual eyes, eyes of faith, maybe God is not a dictator. The realm of God, the kingdom of God, is not totalitarian. Instead, perhaps God allows the universe to evolve on its own. So possibly the way God rules is not through absolute control, but through absolute commitment to be with us whatever happens, working to bring healing from suffering, good from evil, hope from despair. This is how we see God appear to us in Jesus, the king who is born as a tiny, vulnerable baby, the king who washes his friends’ feet, the king whose power is not through conquering and violence but through suffering and dying, and rising again. God is not waving an almighty hand and sweeping away homes and lives; God is wrapping us in loving arms and holding us close. God is present with us in suffering, feeling our agony, crying with us, sharing our loss, bearing our hurt, moving in the Spirit to give us courage and to empower us to offer empathy and aid to victims of catastrophe, in huge disasters like Japan, and the personal disasters we experience of sickness and fire and death.

This may not be a complete answer. But, you know, the best answers to the problem of suffering and evil in the world work better in a classroom or from a church pulpit than in a hospital room, or beneath a pile of rubble from an earthquake. When we are in pain, or see pain in our world, an intellectual answer is of little comfort. We can’t always, or ever, understand what is happening when tragedies strike and lives and land are devastated. But we can know this – when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, God is with us.

Hell's Bells: Sermon, March 20, 2011

This is the draft of the Sunday, March 20 sermon at Newington and Trinity Ingleside United Churches - but as they say in the news business, check against delivery! There's lots of time for editing, adding and subtracting before Sunday morning!

John 3:1-17

Giving all glory and honour to God.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him won’t perish but will have eternal life.” This is the famous verse, John 3:16, and sometimes when you’re watching a football game or some other sporting event on TV someone will hold up a sign that says John 3:16. It’s been called everyone’s favourite text, the very essence of the Good News According to John.

And it comes in this discussion Jesus is having with Nicodemus, who is one of the Jewish leaders, a member of the chief religious court. And he comes to talk with Jesus, as he knows about the wonderful things Jesus is doing and saying, but he misunderstands what Jesus tells him. Jesus says you must be born again, meaning you must be changed so radically that it can only be described as being born all over again. But Nicodemus can’t understand this. He interprets the words of Jesus literally, and responds, “Isn’t that impossible? How can an adult reenter the womb and be born all over again?” Jesus says, “You’re a teacher of Israel and you don’t know these things?”

Well, this story takes place 20 centuries ago. But things haven’t changed a lot. We have lots of religious leaders today who misunderstand what Jesus is saying. Many take his words too literally. Nicodemus lives. This has been proven the last few weeks. There’s been some reporting in mainstream newspapers and TV on this, but it’s been a huge controversy in Christian, particularly evangelical, circles.

Rob Bell is the pastor at Mars Hill Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He’s a hipster guy with cool glasses, and he has a popular series of videos about faith that are used a lot in evangelical churches as teaching tools, and I’ve seen some of them and they’re very good. So just before his new book, called Love Wins, came out, Christians on the Internet suddenly went crazy. Everything Jesus talked about in what we just read in the Sermon on the Mount, everything Jesus said about not judging and not calling names – well, Christians did all that, judged Rob Bell and called him names. He was called a teacher of a false Gospel. He was called a heretic. Another well-known pastor said that Rob Bell was dead to him, said, “farewell, Rob Bell.” All of this without anyone actually reading his book. So this was not a great moment for followers of Jesus following Jesus. There wasn’t a lot of loving your neighbour.

The whole mess was about people suspecting that Rob Bell is a universalist and denies the existence of hell. Universalism is the belief that all humans will be saved through Jesus Christ. Its critics call universalism a heresy and a rejection of biblical Christianity. Well, now the book is out, and people have read it, and he says specifically that he is not a universalist, but he does raise questions about heaven and hell, so the controversy is continuing. I haven’t read his book, but these questions he poses have been asked in theology since at least the 18th century, and have probably been raised in United Church of Canada sermons and Bible studies. So this is an opportunity to look at what John is quoting Jesus as saying in this morning’s reading.

Now, it was news to me that universalism is a heresy, as I wrote my thesis on Gregory of Nyssa, who lived in the fourth century, at about the same time as Saint Patrick. Gregory is considered a saint too, in the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and he was a universalist. Gregory believed that the ultimate triumph of good would redeem everyone, even including the devil, who would be unable to resist God. So I don’t think being called a universalist is an insult.

It was also news to me that biblical Christianity requires believing that a select few Christians go to paradise while other sinners are punished in hell by burning for eternity. The Bible is actually murky about hell. The word ‘hell’ is absent from the Old Testament, and while it appears 16 times in the New Testament, it doesn’t necessarily mean what we mean by hell. Several times it’s a translation of a Greek word for the place of the dead, which didn’t distinguish between heaven and hell – it meant both. The other times hell is used to refer to a real, earthly place, Gehenna, the garbage dump outside Jerusalem. Jesus does use Gehenna as an image of punishment, but often in a context which isn’t to be taken literally. When Jesus says, “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than to go into Gehenna, or hell, with two hands, where the fire never goes out,” he’s using exaggerated language to make a point; he doesn’t literally mean that you should cut off your hand, so he may not be that literal about going into hell, or about fire either. And when Jesus mentions the garbage dump as hell, he’s usually addressing the religious people of his time. The idea that unbelievers will burn in hell forever is not explicit in the teachings of Jesus or the rest of the New Testament. The book of Revelation describes a lake of fire where anyone whose name is not written in the book of life is to be thrown, but this is not intended to be interpreted literally anymore than the beast with seven heads and ten horns or the other weird images that appear in Revelation.

There are statements in the Bible that can be taken as suggesting that salvation will be universal, that there will be no one in hell as we understand it. Jesus does say later in John’s Gospel, When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to me. The Apostle Paul writes, in the second letter to the Corinthians, God was reconciling the world to himself through Christ, by not counting people’s sins against them.

But elsewhere in the Bible it suggests that there is a final judgment. Jesus talks about it, although again in stories that defy literal interpretation, and so does Paul, telling the Romans that we will all stand before God’s judgment seat. The letter to the Hebrews tells us that each person will die once, and after that will face judgment.

It’s hard to live with ambiguity. It’s a lot easier to say this is biblical Christianity, there is a clear standard for heaven and hell, and we know what it is, and this is who’s in and who’s out – and, oh, people who believe what we do, coincidentally, are the in group – for heaven, that is. But the Bible isn’t that certain.

So what do I believe? The first letter to Timothy says, God our Saviour wants all people to be saved, and I believe that is indeed what God wants. God is not out to condemn or punish us, but to love us. But because we have free will, we can make choices, and we can then make choices that separate us from God. Freedom has consequences. Some of us may choose to be so irreconcilable that we reject God forever and cut ourselves off from God’s grace. I don’t think God ever rejects us, but we can reject God. The United Church of Canada states in our Basis of Union that there will be a resurrection of the dead, and the finally impenitent shall go away into eternal punishment and the righteous into life eternal. I think that’s true. So I’m not a universalist, based on how I understand Scripture, and Church tradition, and my experience. But it would be great if my thesis subject Gregory of Nyssa was right, and everyone will be reconciled with God. And I wouldn’t underestimate the power of God’s desire that everyone be saved.

So I believe in hell, in the sense that I think we can choose to separate ourselves forever from God. Another person of faith could reach a different conclusion. I don’t think that not believing in hell means rejecting Jesus. And I don’t think that biblical Christianity requires belief in hell as a literal place of eternal fire. That’s just one biblical image of final separation from God. The writers of the Bible also speak of separation as being like falling into a bottomless pit. Maybe it’s just nothingness, non-existence. The biblical writers weren’t trying to depict a real place, but were warning us that separation from God is a choice we can make, and that choice has consequences. We can’t know what hell is like any more than we know what heaven is like. We can only guess. And our imaginations have produced very vivid images of hell in art and poetry and literature and movies, even video games, but they are all guesses. This separation from God might be fire, or nothingness, or it might be like when The Simpsons visit hell on TV, and it has German potato salad, and they’re out of hot dogs.

And we need less tossing around of labels like heretic whenever anyone asks questions about heaven, or hell, or anything else. I get the impression that a lot of Christians think that the people who go to hell are those who don’t agree with them about who goes to hell. Well, we shouldn’t make God in our image rather than the other way around, we shouldn’t presume to say that someone who doesn’t sign on to a certain set of propositions that just happen to be our beliefs will be separated from God for eternity, and we shouldn’t put limits on God’s grace. We can be as stingy about grace as God is generous. Instead, we should trust in God’s love and justice, and avoid speculating about things that God has not revealed to us.

From the amount of time and energy this debate has consumed among Christians the last while, you would think that much of the Bible and the teaching of Jesus must be about hell and punishment. And that’s not the case. Jesus talks about the poor 25 times in the Gospels. That’s twice the number of times he mentions hell. Yet it isn’t considered a heresy to refuse to support anti-poverty measures.

In fact, the idea of hell is a pretty minor part of biblical Christianity. And Jesus would probably say to all the debaters, why are you so concerned about hell in the afterlife, when you have hells on earth right here, right now? Because we can’t get a better image of what hell might look like than northeastern Japan, with buildings pulverized and ships swept right into the middle of towns by the tsunami, or the inside of a nuclear reactor with radiation rising to frightening levels. We have hells now, in Libyan cities under attack, in too many places where social and personal sin separates people from God and God’s vision of peace and justice and love. With the hells of poverty, disease, war, oppression, abuse, grief, fear, despair, addiction all around us, we should have no energy to worry about any other hell.

And so we come back to John 3:16. God so loved the world that we were given God’s only Son, so that everyone who believes in him won’t perish but will have eternal life. Everyone who believes - not everyone who believes and agrees with the following doctrinal statements. And the word ‘world’ is one Jesus uses elsewhere for what is opposed to God – he prays, ‘the world has hated my followers because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.’ The world hates God. The world hates Jesus. But God so loved the God-hating world that God gave the only Son of God, so that everyone who believes in him would live life abundantly now and forever. That’s how much God loves. That’s how broad and high and deep God’s grace is. So, rather than worry and argue about hell and who may go there, let’s rejoice that God loves this world so much, let’s share this wonderful good news, let’s try to love the world with even a little of the love God has, let’s try to bring that love to our neighbours here and around this planet, let’s make this world less of a hell for so many people trapped in hells on earth. That is biblical Christianity. We may not know for sure about hell, but we do know that this is true: God loves us, and calls us to love others. Amen.