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While We Wait Rev. John Moses Trinity-Clifton Pastoral Charge Charlottetown, PEI November 27, 2011 Advent 1 Texts: Isaiah 64:1-9 1 Corinthians 1:3-9 _______________________ O that you would tear open the heavens and come down…… This was the cry of a people broken and defeated, living in exile, lamentingt heir lost homeland, fearing that their God had abandoned them. Their sacred stories told of how this God had acted long ago “with a strong hand and an outstretched arm” to deliver them from slavery in the land of Egypt, to part the sea before them, to feed them in the wilderness, to put the armies of their enemies to rout. Now, in their extremity, they wanted to see some of that old-time power. “God, it’s time to stop hiding. It’s time to shake things up. It’s time to show this sorry mess of a world who is boss.” O that you would tear open the heavens and come down…… Even today there are many people of faith---especially of Christian faith---who look and long for the tearing open of the heavens. They are convinced that the present order of things has become so corrupt that God will not allow it stand. Soon, we will see Jesus returning in power and great glory to reward his own and punish his enemies and bring history to an end. Only those who hold the correct beliefs will be saved. All others will be consumed in the fires of God’s judgment. That’s a pretty powerful incentive to be “on the right side,” provided you can buy into this particular way of thinking and believing. As for myself, I suppose I’ve done too much reading over the years. When I hear someone telling me “the end is near,” I think of Joachim of Fiore who, back in the twelfth century, told the crowds who flocked to hear him, “This will not take place in the days of your grandchildren or in the old age of your children, but in your own days, few and evil.” (Cited in Jonathan Kirsch, A history of the End of the World, p.142) Then there was William Miller, a farmer and Baptist lay preacher from upstate New York who calculated that Jesus would return and the world would end on October 22nd , 1844.
Miller’s prophesies generated a huge amount of excitement and tens of thousands of people in the United States and in what would become Canada confidently expected to meet the returning and triumphant Christ on that day. They were disappointed, just as those who heeded Joachim of Fiore six hundred years earlier were disappointed. And only this year Mr. Harold Camping took his turn, offering first May 21st and then October 21st as the doomsday date. History
shows that predicting the end is a mug’s game. And yet, there never seems to be any lack of people ready to play it. O that you would tear open the heavens and come down…… Although I can’t help but be sceptical of all the attempts to outguess God, as it were, I do find myself sharing in the yearning for something to happen. And perhaps you do too. In the midst of the world’s turmoil and torment I want to see some sign of God’s presence, some indication that God cares. If the heavens are not going to be torn open, if the mountains are not going quake, if Jesus is not going to come riding to the rescue on a great white horse, couldn’t there at least be a candle lit against the darkness, a ray of hope to lift our spirits and lead us on? One response to the perceived absence of God is to conclude that there is no God at all and that the only help we are going to get is what we can provide for ourselves. That is an option for a significant and quite vocal minority of people these days. Another kind of response is suggested near end of our text from the prophet Isaiah. After the outpouring of yearning and lamentation, we hear these words: “Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.” (Is.64:8) Any potter will tell you that there is more to pottery than technique. There is a mystery in the clay and in the potter’s touch. Something is happening; something is being made, and yet, the exact shape of what will emerge will not be known until it emerges. This is neither the impersonal determinism of a certain kind of science nor the equally impersonal unfolding of a divine plan. It requires of us a trust in the goodness of the One who is shaping the clay that we are and the humility to wait for that goodness to be revealed. And there’s the rub. Waiting does not come easily to us who have been taught to believe that there is----or ought to be--- a solution for every problem, a fix for everything that is broken. Dan Clendenin, one of my favourite Christian bloggers writes, “God is not our Cosmic Concierge…….Rather, God offers us a way to live without answers to questions and with problems that don’t disappear.” (www.journeywithjesus.net, posted November 24, 2008) A way to live without answers to questions and with problems that don’t disappear—I wonder if that is what the Apostle Paul meant when he told the Corinthians, “You are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1Cor.1:7) Fred Buechner, another of my favourite writers, says, “To wait for Christ to come in his fullness is not just a passive thing, a pious prayerful, churchly thing. On the contrary, to wait for Christ to come in his fullness is above all to act in Christ’s stead as fully as we know how. To wait for Christ is as best we can to be Christ to those who need us to be Christ to them most and to bring them the most we have of Christ’s healing and hope because unless we bring it, it may never be brought at all…..” (Buechner, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons, p.284) I have been thinking about two items in the local news this past week. One of them is the controversy over whether women should have access to abortions here on the Island rather than having to be referred to doctors elsewhere. The other is the lack of a shelter for homeless men in Charlottetown due to the difficulties attending the reopening of the Bedford MacDonald House. On the issue of abortion, the supposed “religious voice” of this community was very loud indeed—so much so that politicians of all stripes went scurrying for cover. On the issue of the Bedford MacDonald House, almost nothing. This leaves the impression that while Christians care a whole lot about telling women what to do with their bodies, they are not at all concerned about bodies that might freeze to death on our streets some cold winter’s night. If there had been as much noise made about Bedford MacDonald House as about abortion, provincial funding would already be in place and the doors would be open. There may be room for debate over what Jesus would have had to say about abortion if it had been within the ken of his day although I am inclined to think that, given his empathy with women whom religious folks wanted to boss around and dehumanize, a lot of us might be surprised where he would land on this one. On the other hand, there is no doubt at all about where Jesus would be with regard to providing a shelter for the homeless: “Truly, I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me……Truly, I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” (Matt.25:40,45) Maybe it’s time we got involved. Maybe it’s time other “religious voices” were heard. As we try to be Christ, as we bring the most we have of Christ’s healing and hope to the situations we know, something does happen. The holy breaks in upon the profanity of this world and in the ordinariness of our lives there is the gift of God’s presence. If our hearts are open to receive this gift and our hands are open to share it, it will be enough, more than enough, to sustain us until “ the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ,” whenever that may be, in whatever shape it may come. Getting What I Deserve
Rev. John Moses Trinity-Clifton Pastoral Charge Charlottetown, PE
September 18, 2011
Texts: Exodus 16:2-15 St. Matthew 20:1-16 __________________________
Business owners here on Prince Edward Island are fond of appearing in their own TV commercials. I suppose this serves the double purpose of saving the cost of hiring actors and assuring us that we are not dealing with foreign interests based in Moncton or some other far-away place. One such commercial, which can be seen nearly every evening during the local news, promotes a water filtration system. It concludes with the proprietor of the company urging us to “get the water quality you deserve.”
Have you ever thought about “the water quality you deserve?” Most of us take it for granted that our water will be safe to drink and available whenever we want it. Beyond that, we would like it to be sufficiently free of mineral content to allow us to make a cup of tea or coffee that doesn’t taste like Hillsborough River mud. But is this what we deserve? And if it is what we deserve, why are we more deserving than, say, a woman in Africa who has to make a fifty-kilometre round trip every single day just to get a few litres of water of dubious quality? Why are our children more deserving than the children who die every day because of contaminated water?
Obviously, the gentleman in the TV commercial wants us to buy his filtration system so maybe that’s the answer. We deserve what we can pay for. The more you can pay for, the more you deserve. And how does one acquire the means to be so deserving? He/she earns it, of course. The CEOs of financial institutions and large corporations all insist that they earn their mega-salaries even as performance declines and employees are laid off. Professional athletes earn every penny of the remuneration that allows them to live like Roman emperors—as do movie stars and celebrities like Sarah Palin. You don’t have to take my word for it. Go to their websites or Twitter accounts. They will tell you themselves.
There are lots of people these days who can’t earn enough to be deserving and our very deserving politicians insist that they need to be punished by further cuts to government services that might help them while the rich ought to be rewarded with further tax breaks. This is not, as some of us might suppose, only an American problem. According to the Conference Board of Canada, the growing gap between the rich and the rest of us is actually wider here than in the United States. Perhaps you didn’t realize how woefully undeserving you are.
Nonetheless, I suspect that The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Mtt.20:1-16) disturbed the Sunday morning slumber of more than a few of you—as it always does when it is read in the hearing of respectable pew-sitters. We tend to identify ourselves with the workers who laboured the whole long day under the hot sun, bringing in the harvest. We know that if we had been there, we would have been first hired and we certainly would have expected to be first in line to be paid. Those others, the latecomers, must have been too lazy to get themselves out of bed in time to do a full day’s work. When we see those who worked only one hour being paid first and receiving exactly the same as those who worked twelve hours—for that’s what the work day was---it outrages our sense propriety. This is no way to run a vineyard! This is no way to run an economy! Everyone should get exactly what he earns, no more, no less. That’s the way things are done in “the real world.” Am I right?
Perhaps we should take a moment to look at the cultural and economic background of this parable. In Galilee in the early first century the hiring place, the labour hall, was the village square. Those who wanted work would gather there well before dawn, hoping that someone would take them on. If they were hired, they would be paid at the end of the day and they would be able to buy food for their families. If there was no work, their families would most likely spend a hungry night hoping for better luck tomorrow. For such people, “Give us this day our daily bread” was not a casually muttered prayer. It was a fervent petition born of need and fear.
To make matters worse, there was at this time a surplus of day labourers because so many poor peasants had lost their plots of land due taxes and debt. Rich landowners were only too ready to buy them out at desperation prices, often barely enough to cover outstanding debts and unpaid taxes. Then those who had once been able to sustain themselves from what they produced were at the mercy of those same wealthy landowners who hired them when they required their services and otherwise didn’t care what happened to them. Who was going to worry about a few peasants starving? There were always more where they came from.
When the grape harvest was ready to be brought in, the workers shuffling in the pre-dawn darkness of the village squares were especially hopeful. When the grapes were ripe, the landowners couldn’t fool around. There was a small window of opportunity and they had to take advantage of it. Today, everyone would be hired. Well, maybe not quite everyone. Those who were crippled, those regarded as agitators and troublemakers, the elderly—these might still be disappointed. These might still be unwanted.
I have a hunch that the latecomers to the vineyard in Jesus’ story were the unwanted, the lot left behind in the first round of the draft. An ordinary landowner would have paid them only for the hours they worked, even though that might not have been enough to “keep body and soul together.” This landowner, however, gave them a full day’s wage, that is to say, what they needed to sustain their lives. And there was great rejoicing among all the labourers when they saw how the unable and the unwanted were blessed.
No, there was not. There was bitter complaint: “These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.” (Mtt.20:12) Although they themselves must have known full well how capricious life could be and how quickly a person could leave the ranks of those just managing to get by and join the line-up of those not making ends meet, still they clung to the notion that everyone should get what he deserves and everyone deserves what he earns. And so do we. And we call anything else “unrealistic” or “idealistic” or “utopian.” These are all dirty words in the current vocabulary.
In order to pull the parable’s teeth in case anyone might think that Jesus had anything to say about how we order our lives and live together in this world, preachers and interpreters often try to spiritualize it. What this really means, they tell us, is that people coming late to faith will be blessed equally with those who come early to faith. No matter what conditions prevail here below, there are no second class citizens up in heaven. God is good. God is kind. God is gracious. Up there.
Yes, my friends, God is good, kind and gracious but the Bible testifies that there is an earthiness to these divine attributes that meets us here and now. In the wilderness, says the Book of Exodus, the newly-liberated Israelites complained of the lack of food and they regretted their new-found freedom: “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” (Ex.16:3) God’s response to the Israelite’s complaint is manna, bread from heaven.
Or maybe not. In his commentary on Exodus Terrence Fretheim writes that in the Sinai Peninsula “a type of plant lice punctures the fruit of the tamarisk tree and excretes after drinking its juice, a yellowish-white flake or ball. During the warmth of the day it disintegrates, but it congeals when it is cold. It has a sweet taste. Rich in carbohydrates and sugar, it is still gathered by natives who bake it into a kind of bread.” (Cited in “Living by the Word” by Theodore J. Wardlaw in The Christian Century, September 6, 2011, p.19)
For people hungry enough to take notice such an ordinary thing, the excretions of plant lice might indeed be a blessing from heaven, a gift sent by a gracious God to sustain them in their journey to the land of promise. I think what the Exodus story of the manna and The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard have in common is that they both seek to alert us to the truth that we all live by the grace of God and out of the abundance of God’s blessing, no matter who we are or where we are or what our circumstances. The high-rolling executive in a private jet and the poor woman walking barefoot with her water can are equal in this—as are we in our more or less comfortable existence.
The world of our experience is seldom fair and it is frequently unjust. As long as we keep insisting that we get what we deserve and that we deserve what we earn, we will only make it more so. If we can come to know ourselves as those who daily receive the benefits of God’s amazing kindness and astounding generosity, we will be able to move beyond our fixation on what we deserve to rejoicing that the needs of all—even the unable and the unwanted---are met, and the world will be changed.
“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire labourers for his vineyard….” (Mtt.20:1)
Rev. John Moses Trinity-Clifton Pastoral Charge, Charlottetown, PE
June 17, 2011
Text: St. Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43 ____________________
Once upon a time in a land far away, there was an evil knight who wore black armour and rode a great black horse. The news of his foul deeds spread throughout the realm and struck terror into every heart. It was said that he robbed the poor, taking their bread and leaving them to starve, that he fathered children upon innocent maidens, that he stole golden candlesticks and crucifixes from churches, that he slew with his sword all who tried to stop him. There was no end of his wickedness.
A handsome young knight, newly dubbed by his lord, was outraged that anyone should behave in such a manner. He resolved to rid the land of this scourge. He donned his gleaming new armour, mounted his great white steed and rode forth to do battle with the evil knight. He rode many for many days and then the days became weeks and the weeks became months but he did not find the one whom he sought. Nonetheless, he kept on, unwilling to abandon his righteous quest.
After so long and arduous a journey, the young knight was not nearly as bright and shining as he had been at the beginning. His hair was long and shaggy, his beard was matted, his armour was tarnished and, worst of all, his horse went lame, so he had to continue on foot. The money he had brought with him was long since gone. He was reduced to begging food from strangers.
Then one evening he found himself in a desperately poor village where no one had anything to spare. Hunger gnawed his belly and he feared that he might die if he could not find a morsel to eat. When he saw a loaf of freshly baked bread cooling in the window of a peasant’s hovel, he seized it and began to wolf it down. The woman of the house protested that the loaf was all she had to feed her children but his hunger was fierce and he would not give the bread up. Soon he was surrounded by a crowd of angry villagers wielding clubs and pitchforks. He had to use his sword to cut his way free. Some of the villagers fell to rise no more.
After that the young knight was a fugitive but he was, all his misadventures notwithstanding, still handsome. For a time he found solace with the daughter of an innkeeper who sheltered him in her father’s stable and brought him food from her father’s kitchen. When she told him that she was with child, he knew he must quickly resume his quest to find the evil knight. Once that was accomplished he would return and marry the innkeeper’s daughter. He reasoned that if only he could get a get a another horse, he could put everything right. Smearing his armour with the dirt from the stable, he crept away by night to the neighbouring church where he gathered up the golden crucifix and the golden candlesticks. He would sell them and buy a horse. Later on, when the king honoured him for slaying the evil knight, he would restore all that he had taken.
As he was leaving the church with the borrowed treasures there appeared in the moonlight a figure in gleaming armour, brandishing a gleaming sword. The voice that spoke was barely more than a boy’s: “I have been seeking thee, thou vile miscreant. I have come to make an end of thy contemptible life. This is the hour of reckoning. Prepare to defend thyself.”
The knight tried to explain to the youngster that he was making a terrible mistake, that they were both on the same quest, but the youth would not listen. He came on in a fury, his sword flashing. In short order the knight dealt him a mortal blow. As he lay dying, the youth looked up and asked, “How is it then that evil hath triumphed?”
Perhaps this story will help us understand another story---the one Jesus told about the wheat and the weeds. Those of us who are gardeners know that weeds are bad. They rob the plants we are trying to grow of the soil’s nutrients. Left unchecked, they will take over the whole garden and there will be no fragrant blossoms to cut, no fresh vegetables for the table. When I see I see a weed, I want to rip it out and throw it away. But what if you can’t tell which are the weeds and which are the good plants? Or what if in attacking the weeds you destroy what you are hoping to nurture?
This seems to have been the case in today’s parable. The weed in question is the darnel whose Latin name is Lolium temulentum. It is related to wheat and in its early stages it is very difficult to distinguish from wheat. At harvest time, however, it yields a small, black seed which can cause blindness or even death if too many of them turn up in the bread dough. Most farmers of Jesus’ day were willing to risk losing some of their wheat in order to rid their fields of the dreadful darnel. Not so this particular farmer. He tells his slaves who want to have a go at the weeds, “Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them into bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.” (Mtt.13:30)
Let both of them grow together until the harvest. As Jesus goes on to explain, what we have here is a parable of The Last Judgment when God will reward the good and punish the wicked. Until that day, known only to God, both good and evil will share the same field. Inclined as we are to identify ourselves as the wheat rather than the weeds, we are often impatient with this, even contemptuous of it. Like the knight in the first story, we want to run evil to earth and strike it down. If we were in charge, there would be no ambiguity.
And yet, human history is rife with ambiguity, with the intermingling of good and evil. During the Middle Ages Christians knights rode off to the Holy Land to smite the infidel and recover the places associated with Christ’s life and death for Christ’s people. They aspired to do a beautiful thing for God but what they perpetrated was an abomination in the sight of God and humankind. In the name of the Prince of Peace who would not take the sword to defend himself, they made the streets of the places where he walked run red with the blood of the “enemy.”
During World War I our side talked of “making the world safe for democracy.” while at the same time we were allied to Tsarist Russia, which resolutely refused all attempts at democratization and ruthlessly put down all opposition to its corrupt and incompetent regime. I do not doubt that Nazi Germany was evil and it is difficult to see what decent people could done other than to go to war to stop Hitler. But we probably would have lost World War II were it not for our ally Joseph Stalin, a murderous villain every bit as reprehensible as Adolf Hitler. And let us not forget the firebombing of Dresden and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And what need I say about Iraq and Afghanistan, about attempting to rid the world of terrorism at the cost of collateral damage measured in hundreds of thousands of non-combatant lives, at the cost of comprising our own standards of due process and humane treatment?
When we look at our own lives, the ambiguity is still there. Do I sit at my keyboard sweating over a sermon because I want to share the good news of Christ with anyone who will hear or because I need to hang onto this job for a few more years and I want you all to think what a fine preacher I am? When you volunteer in church or in the community is it solely to make the world a better place or do you sometimes hope that your friends and neighbours will take note and nominate you for an award? Did the good I tried to do cause hurt and pain only because my actions were misunderstood or was there something in my motives that caused the damage?
Let both of them grow together until the harvest. It is a mercy that God is slow about the weeding. Otherwise, who knows who might find him/herself in the fire?
By now you may be thinking that until the Day of Judgment---whenever that may be, if that will ever be---we are doomed to a paralysis of ambiguity, that there is nothing to be done but to tolerate everything. In reflecting on The Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds in The New Interpreter’s Bible Eugene Boring writes, “When the master in the parable forbids the servants to go and weed out the field, this is not be interpreted as a call to passivity in the face of evil. It is not a divine command to ignore injustice in the world, violence in society, or wrong in the church. It is, rather, a realistic reminder that the servants do not finally have the ability to get rid of all the weeds and that sometimes attempts to pluck up the weeds cause more harm than good.” (Vol. VIII, p.311)
Our United Church Creed says that God calls us “to seek justice and resist evil.” If we are not careful to look for and confess the evil within ourselves, we are at risk of becoming the evil we want to oppose. But do not despair, my brothers and sisters,God is not defeated by the complexity of our condition. Listen to these words from the United Church’s A Song of Faith:
Evil does not—cannot— undermine or overcome the love of God. God forgives, and calls all of us to confess our fears and failings with honesty and humility. God reconciles, and calls us to repent the part we have played in damaging our world, ourselves, and each other. God transforms, and calls us to protect the vulnerable, to pray for deliverance from evil, to work with God for the healing of the world, that all might have abundant life.
“Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let everyone with ears listen.” (Mtt.13:43)
Is This Any Way to Seed a Field?
Rev. John Moses Trinity-Clifton Pastoral Charge, Charlottetown, PE
June 10, 2011
Text: St. Matthew 13:1-8, 18-23 _________________ A couple of weeks ago, as I was searching through my sock drawer for a matching pair with no major holes, I discovered a few pole bean seeds of a variety I haven’t used since I gardened in Whitby, Ontario. (That would make them at least four years old.) I’m not quite sure how the beans came to be in my sock drawer but it is not uncommon at our house to find partially-used packages of seeds tucked away in odd places. If you are a gardener or if you live with a gardener, you may know what I’m talking about. We hate to throw seeds away. Not only are they expensive, there is all the potential they represent. If there is no room for them this year, there is always next year. And if “next year” turns out to be four years off, who knows? I’m happy to report that almost one hundred percent of the sock drawer seeds germinated in PEI soil. Not so happily, Jane and I were away when they poked their heads above the ground so about fifty percent were eaten by slugs before I could launch a counterattack.
Well, I am only a hobby gardener and as Jane and others have often reminded me, there is not a whole lot riding on the outcome. I remember a bemused neighbour looking over the backyard fence in Whitby and telling me that there was a farmer’s market over in Oshawa every Saturday. His implicit question was, “Why do you bother?” If you are a non-gardener, you may be thinking along similar lines.
Imagine, however, that you are a farmer in the region of Galilee about two thousand years ago and the survival of your family depends on the success of the seeds you sow each year. If there is no harvest, they don’t eat. It’s as simple as that. Therefore, you carefully sift through the threshed grain, putting aside a supply of likely seeds for the next planting season. You store them in what you hope is a safe place, praying that the rats and mice won’t find them or that the tax collector won’t require them of you. If your food supply runs low and your children are hungry, you resist the temptation to grind the seed grain into flour, exchanging next year’s bread for bread now. You know the value of a seed.
Then one day you find yourself in the crowd that has turned out to hear Jesus of Nazareth, a local boy who has been causing quite a stir of late. And you hear him talking about a sower who went out and scattered his seeds indiscriminately. Some fell along the path and the birds came and ate them. Other seeds fell on rocky ground where they quickly sprouted only to wither under the scorching sun because they lacked roots to sustain them. Others fell among thorns and were soon, as Maritimers say, “choked out.” Some, perhaps a quarter of them, fell on good soil and “brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.” (Mtt.13:8)
This is not what you would do. You would not waste precious seed on poor soil. You would make every effort to make every seed count. The story rubs you the wrong way, leaves you ill at ease, maybe a bit angry. Oh yes, you know that this fellow is not really talking about the kind of sowing and reaping that you do. You’re not totally obtuse. But that only makes the story all the more irritating. Is Jesus of Nazareth saying that God is like the irresponsible sower, that God is some kind of cosmic wastrel? There are enough uncertainties in your life without this. You want God to be reliable, to follow the rules that you have learned. You go home scratching your heard. You can’t escape the thought that the world as you know it is not quite the same as it used to be. Maybe, in spite of yourself, you are intrigued by possibilities you had never dreamed of.
It could be that you are not a farmer. It could be that you are a scribe or a Pharisee, steeped in the law of Moses and the traditions of your people. Like the farmer, you have learned to be careful. You jealously guard what God has entrusted to Israel, not only against the outsiders, the goyim, the gentiles, but also against the unworthy of your own kind. Like the farmer you know that survival depends on this guarding, this caution. Your faith and your culture have a precarious existence in a political landscape fraught with hazards—any one of which could prove fatal. Now here is this damned fool implying that God is not the least bit cautious, that God really doesn’t care about the things you care about so deeply. Perhaps for a moment you hear in his words an echo of the sheer joy and abandon you have yourself sometimes sensed hidden within the sacred texts. But you cannot allow yourself to go there. Ordinary people, faithful Jews like the farmer standing beside you, for example, might be led astray. It is time to silence this disturbing voice.
Now, please come back to this morning to the pew where you sit listening to yet another sermon on The Parable of the Sower. Unless you are new to this church stuff, you’ve likely heard a good many of them. And since Jesus---or the gospel writer—conveniently provides an explanation of the parable, you may be wondering why there is any need for a sermon to begin with. The need arises from the fact that Jesus’ parables are notoriously elusive of explanation, even when the explanation is attributed to the man himself. I have read somewhere that a good rule of thumb when we’re reading or listening to one of the parables is “If you think you understand it, you don’t.” The best we can do is try the story on for size, so to speak. We can try to get the feel of it, see how it fits us. It won’t always fit the same way. Sometimes it may be as comfortable as an old pair of L.L. Bean corduroy trousers. At other times it may make us itch in places we’d forgotten were there.
Let’s try on The Parable of the Sower from the point of view of our being the soil which receives the word of the kingdom. This is the approach most favoured by preachers over the centuries and the inevitable admonition is that we must be good soil wherein the seed can take root and flourish and yield a rich harvest of faith and good works. I long to be the good soil but I know how often the seed of the word falls on me only to be snatched away by some devil of my own devising or to wither because there is nothing in me to nourish it or to be choked by the thorny cares of this world that infest my life. I think the truth is that all the types of soil in the parable can be found within each of us and the Sower can never be sure on which the seed will fall. And yet it doesn’t seem to matter. He keeps on scattering seeds as if there were no end to the supply. That’s hard for us to get our minds around because everything in our experience runs out sooner or later. But what if there really is no end to the supply?
In her sermon on this text, titled “The Extravagant Sower,” Barbara Brown Taylor says the story is not about us and what kind of soil we are but on God’s boundless kindness and generosity: “The focus is not on us and our shortfalls but on the generosity of our maker, the prolific sower who does not obsess about the condition of the fields, who is not stingy with the seed but who casts it everywhere, on good soil and bad, who is not cautious or judgmental or even very practical, but who seems willing to keep reaching into his seed bag for all eternity, covering the whole creation with the fertile seed of his truth.” (The Seeds of Heaven, p.26) If you’re looking for a definition of grace, there it is.
Then again, maybe we’re meant to be the sower, or at least, to follow in the footsteps of the great Sower, spreading the word of the kingdom wherever we go. I’m not talking about just about preachers and preaching. I’m talking about how we embody the gospel, the good news, and bring it to all the places where we live out our lives. Many of us are cautious and stingy sowers, aren’t we? That’s especially the case when we come together as the church. Like the first-century farmer clinging to his plot of land, struggling to hold on for another year, like the scribes and the Pharisees clutching their sacred texts and their sacred traditions, we are averse to taking risks of any kind and we want to be told that God agrees with us. We want to hear that God doesn’t like change any more than we do. “It just ain’t so,” says Jesus, “It just ain’t so.”
Martin Luther liked to say that we should “sin boldly but rejoice and believe in Christ more boldly still.” Of course, we’re going to make mistakes. The only way to avoid that is to do nothing. In this parable it seems as if the doing nothing, trying to live risk-free, is what is most offensive to God. Grace will cover everything else.
Finally, let’s try the parable on with ourselves as the seeds the sower casts about with such abandon. We don’t always find ourselves in ideal circumstances or even pretty good circumstances. Over the course of a lifetime we will likely find ourselves trying to put down roots in many different kinds of soils---some hard-packed by the careless feet of others, some shallow and rocky, some thick with thorns and noxious weeds and, blessedly, here there a few patches of deep, rich loam, well-watered and well-tended. Perhaps, when God’s will is done of earth as it is in heaven, when the kingdom has fully come, we shall all find a place where we can flourish. I hope and pray that this is what God wants for us.
These are some of the ways The Parable of the Sower might fit us. Let those who have ears to hear, hear.
How Can We Know the Way?
Rev. John Moses Trinity-Clifton Pastoral Charge Charlottetown PE
May 22, 2011
Text: St. John 14:1-14 ______________________
Two weeks ago last Thursday we here at Trinity hosted an interfaith event on behalf of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community. The theme of the event was “Freedom of Conscience According to the Holy Founder of My Faith.” There were four speakers representing the Hindu, the Jewish, the Christian and the Muslim traditions and the audience of a little more than a hundred persons was quite diverse. They weren’t all Trinity folk there because they felt obliged to be supportive. At least one of them, I later discovered, was an atheist. He flagged me down at the Farmer’s Market to say how much he had enjoyed the presentations. What took place here on May 5th is indicative of the changing face of Prince
Edward Island. There was a time not so long ago when “interfaith” meant Catholics and Protestants. Other than a few scattered Jews who mostly kept a low profile and the minority of aboriginal people who managed to hold onto their traditional spirituality, that was about it. Now we are welcoming new people who are redefining that cherished Island expression “come from away.” These days a “come from away” is as likely to be from Sri Lanka or Beijing as from Sackville, New Brunswick, or Bridgewater Nova Scotia. And these new people bring with them their customs and religions which are being added to the local cultural mix. If you think things are getting complicated here on PEI, consider that the World Christian Encyclopedia estimates that there are 10,000 distinct religions in the world today, 150 of which have a million or more followers.
It is with a growing awareness of this global context of religious diversity that we hear this morning’s reading from the Gospel of John, especially the part where Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (14:6) What are we to make of this? Does it mean that all of the other 9,999 religions are wrong and that those who practice them will never come to the Father, will never come to God? We might also ask which of the 11,000 plus Christian denominations has the correct take on Jesus. Many claim that other Christians as well as people of other faiths are “lost and bound for hell.” Harold Camping, the key figure in yesterday’s rapture speculation, estimated that 97 percent of all people on earth would not be gathered up to Jesus but rather left behind to face unspeakable suffering. Mr. Camping may be a nutter but he joins a long succession of preachers who have said pretty much the same thing.
Perhaps you’ve hear the song “Let The Mystery Be,” sung by Iris Dement. The chorus says:
Everybody's wonderin' what and where they all came from.
And then there is the last verse:
Some say they're goin' to a place called Glory and I ain't saying it ain't a fact.
I choose to let the mystery be. This sentiment finds resonance with many people who manage to live their lives quite satisfactorily with little or no religion. I must confess that whenever I hear yet another self-styled prophet announcing that he has figured everything out and has a monopoly on truth, I am tempted to embrace it as well. But I can’t help thinking that it’s a bit too easy. To distance oneself from a quest which has been part of the human experience since the dawn of consciousness is to assume an unmerited superiority. I would rather find myself in the company of Thomas, admitting his perplexity and asking, “How can we know the way?” (Jn.14:5) Or in the company of Philip who says, “Show us the Father and we will be satisfied.” (Jn.14:8) Philip is unwilling to settle for anything less than a genuine encounter with God.
The members of the community in which the Gospel of John took shape were convinced that they had experienced exactly such a genuine encounter with God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. The conversation in today’s text is quite deliberately intended to lead to such a conclusion. It culminates with Jesus saying, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father……Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me….” (Jn.14:9, 11)
What we have here is not a dogmatic statement which answers once and for all the question of which religion is right. It might be better heard as the effusion of a star-struck lover who says to his/her beloved, “You are the only one for me. You are the most beautiful person in the whole world.” This is not the language of careful analysis or calculated comparison. It is an outpouring of the heart.
In her commentary on John in The New Interpreter’s Bible Gail R. O’Day writes:
The claim of John 14:6-7 becomes problematic when it is used to speak to questions that were never in the Fourth Gospel’s purview. To use these verses in a battle over the relative merits of the world’s religions is to distort their theological heart…The Fourth Gospel is not concerned with the fate, for example, of Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists, nor with the superiority or inferiority of Judaism and Christianity as they are configured in the modern world. These verses are the confessional celebration of a particular faith community, convinced of the truth and life it has received in the incarnation. The Fourth Evangelist’s primary concern was the clarification and celebration of what it means to believe in Jesus. (p.744-745)
In other words, Jesus’ statement about his being the way, the truth and the life is not a weapon to be used to beat people of other faiths or fellow Christians who disagree with us into submission. It is an articulation of and an invitation to the Jesus experience, which is a particular experience of God---one in which God comes to us and shows us , not a way out of but a way through this world. In spite of Thomas’ and our lack of comprehension, the Gospel of John is really quite clear about what the way God shows us in Jesus is. On the night before his death Jesus gathers with his disciples and washes their feet, taking on the role of a servant among them. Then he tells them, “I have set you an example, that you should do as I have done to you….” (Jn.13:15) And then, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you should also love one another.” (Jn.13:34) I thinks this explains why Jesus says, And you know the way to the place where I am going.” (Jn.14:4)
If we are following in this way, our primary concern will not be being right. Our primary concern will be how faithfully we are living the kind of life to which Jesus calls us. Are we embodying his servanthood, his compassion, his love---not only among ourselves but for the world? And surely, we will try to live respectfully and peacefully with people of other faiths and people of no faith. This is not to say that we will never disagree or that we should never disagree or that we should never call one another to account for the things in our traditions that are destructive and dehumanizing. It is, however, very much to say that we will not treat one another as less fully human, as less than those made in the image of God.
C. S. Lewis wrote in his book Mere Christianity:
Here is another thing that used to puzzle me. Is it not frightfully unfair that this new life should be confined to people who have heard of Christ and been able to believe in Him? But the truth is God has not told us what His arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him.
This is a good attempt at moving beyond the “my way or the hell way” position that Christianity has historically espoused. It affirms the universal significance of Christ without make that significance a sentence of eternal damnation for anyone except the Jesus insiders. However, I expect that people who are not Christians would find it more than a little presumptuous and patronizing. Another Anglican, John Hick, says, “It is not the religions themselves that are true and save anyone, but God saves men and women within the Christian way, the Muslim way, the Jewish way, the Buddhist way.” (Cited in Resources For Preaching and Worship Year A, compiled by Hannah Ward and Jennifer Wild, p.145)
We are followers in the way of Christ. May we be saved in this way. May we find life in this way. And may what we find and what we share be a blessing, and not a curse, to all whom we meet along the way.
The Golden Thread
Rev. John Moses Trinity-Clifton Pastoral Charge Charlottetown, PEI
Easter Day, April 24, 2011
Text: St. John 18:1-20
“Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed.....” (Jn.20:1)
The Gospel of Peter, written sometime during the second century, describes Mary Magdalene as “a woman disciple of the Lord” and says that she and Jesus’ other female followers were unable to mourn him publicly on the day he died for fear of what his enemies might do to them. So, when the Sabbath day of rest was over, Mary said to the others, “Although we could not weep and lament on that day when he was crucified, let us do so now at his sepulchre.” (12:50-52)
The Gospel of Peter did not make it into the New Testament but I think it provides us with some insight into Mary Magdalene’s frame of mind as she approaches the tomb in the Gospel of John’s telling of the story. She expects and wants nothing more than to pour out her grief. Her beloved teacher, her rabbi, is crucified, dead and buried, and with him, all the hopes and dreams that he inspired. She has nothing left but her tears. As the sun rises on the first day of a new week, she will sit outside the tomb and weep. It will not be the restrained weeping of a western woman. It will be the wild keening of a woman of Galilee. If God in heaven is listening, God will know that Mary’s heart is broken.
Then she sees that the stone at the entrance of the tomb has been removed. This is not good. It must mean that someone has been inside, and who knows what has happened to Jesus’ body? Perhaps his enemies have decided, after all, to deny him the dignity of a decent burial. Perhaps they have taken the corpse and left it for the jackals and the vultures. Or it could be that they have reburied it elsewhere to prevent the tomb becoming a shrine to Jesus’ memory, a rallying point for his followers. The conclusion that Mary Magdalene reaches is: “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” (Jn.20:2) This is what she goes and tells Simon Peter and the other disciples.
The news of a possible vanished corpse brings Peter and “the beloved disciple” (whoever he is) on the run. We can picture Peter, more used to the rolling deck of a fishing boat than to fast roadwork, huffing and puffing as he tries to keep up with that other fellow and falls behind anyhow. But Peter is first into the tomb and what he sees only confirms his worst fears. The grave clothes are scattered about but the body is gone. Then the other disciple gathers up his courage and comes in and he too sees and believes---that the body is gone “for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.” (Jn.20:9)
Well, there is no point in hanging around the tomb. What’s done is done. Besides, it could be dangerous to linger. Whoever took the body may be waiting to round up the remnant of the Jesus movement. Peter and his friend hurry back to their homes with heavy hearts, no doubt anxiously looking over their shoulders to see if anyone is on their trail.
Mary, however, stays. She has come to grieve and that is what she will do. Since she doesn’t know where Jesus’ body is, this is as good a place as any. But first, she takes a look inside and there she sees “two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been, one at the head and the other at the feet.” (Jn.20:12) The angels ask her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” (Jn.20:13a) What a strange question! It sounds almost as if they are taunting this poor soul. Or might it be that the angels really don’t know? Might it be that the joy of what God has done this day is so magnificent, so wonderful, so all-consuming that those who are caught up in it find human tears incomprehensible? And what if it is this exceeding great joy that is at the heart of absolutely everything? What if this is the surprise God is waiting to spring on us?
The distance between Mary Magdalene and the angels is measured out in her stolid reply: “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” (Jn.20:13b) She is still exactly where she was when she first came to the tomb and saw the stone removed. She is still looking for a dead body. This is also the distance between us and the angels, between us and God. It is there whenever we can see nothing but the finality of death. It is there whenever we insist on conceiving of reality only in terms that fit our limitations. It is there whenever we close ourselves to the possibility of joy unspeakable.
So now, there is another voice but the same question: “Woman, why are you weeping.........?” (Jn.20:15a) One would think that Mary might have begun to smell the coffee by now, that she would have realized that she was no longer in the territory of the ordinary. Wouldn’t those angels there in the tomb have been something like a clue? But no, she can’t get beyond the fact that she knows: Jesus is dead. That is what fills her heart and her mind. Supposing the questioner to be the gardener, she says to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him and I will take him away.” (Jn.20:15)
“Mary!” (Jn.20:16a) It is not until she hears him speak her name that she recognizes the Risen One. The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is not something Mary or any one of us can imagine or conjure. It is a word spoken from beyond us. It is the calling of a name. It is the discovery of life when we believed there was only death. Jesus is not lost to Mary and Mary is not lost to Jesus. This moment of encounter recalls the words of Isaiah the prophet: “But now thus says the Lord, he who created you......, he who formed you......Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.” (43:1) It echoes Paul the apostle: “For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face; now I know in part; but then I shall know even as also I am known.” (1 Cor.13:12)
Like Peter and James and John in the story of the Transfiguration when Jesus appears to them in glory, Mary must long to stay in this moment. “But in this world you cannot cling to love. You cannot hold or hoard it. In a suffering world there is no time to linger in the sacred moment. Instead, every love must transfigure into an ever-widening circle of compassion. This love must go out to the ends of the earth with the message of hope.” (Susan Guthrie, “No Time to Linger,” The Christian Century, March 25, 2005, p.18) “Do not hold onto me,” says Jesus “But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father, to my God and your God.’” (Jn.20:17) In other words, tell them, “This resurrection is about you too. You too are being raised up to God.” And so, Mary Magdalene, by the reckoning of her time “a mere woman,” becomes the first witness of the living Christ. “I have seen the Lord,” she announces. Jn.20:18)
In her reflection on this text Kate Huey writes, “Mary Magdalene represents that thread of hope that runs through the Scriptures like gold: God’s trust of the small ones, the ones in the margins, the ones without voice, the ones God trusts and lifts up to shine like the sun.” (www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/april-24-2011-easter.html ) May we this day take hold of the golden thread and be lifted up to shine like the sun.
When you first see it, the painting looks much like many another pious picture, far removed from the wildness of the Jordan wilderness where, wilder still, John preached and baptized.
The setting is a country villa with orderly trees and well-mannered sky. The Jordan itself is a shallow, artificial channel dug by the nobleman’s servants.
Then you notice Jesus’ feet just at the place where the mirror-perfect water thins to reveal the cobblestones beneath. Jesus stands at the hard place.
And standing there, he stands with us; the stones will bruise his feet too; as he makes his way downstream, those rusty tin cans, our garbage, will lacerate his soul.
“This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased,” says the voice. (Mtt.3:17) Here is where God wants him to stand, and to walk, risking all the hazards with us.
The hard folk will happily tells us that Jesus wallowing in our misery will do us no good at all. He is as much at the mercy of what is in the brook as any unsuspecting child among us.
Look at the painting again. Half hidden behind the tree nearest Jesus is someone, an angel maybe, with a pink cloth draped over his shoulder.
When in another painting Piero imagines the scene of the Resurrection there we will see it, Jesus’ robe, re-clothing him on Easter morning.
Jesus’ being with us at the hard place is no mere wallowing; he comes to show us how to cross over, from laceration to healing, from death to life.
And yet, even now, right here, there is a blessedness, rusty tin cans notwithstanding, and the heavenly voice seeks to awaken us to our own belovedness.
At the bottom of the pasture field near the house where I grew up there ran a little brook, energetic in spring, slow when summer days burned hot.
The Sign of the Child
Rev. John Moses Trinity-Clifton Pastoral Charge Charlottetown PE
Christmas Eve, 2010
Texts: Isaiah 7:10-16 St. Matthew 1:18-25 _________________________ Christmas Eve is a time when our thoughts often turn to the past, especially to Christmases past and the memories they evoke for us. Tonight, however, we begin at a point much further back than any of our memories---at a time long before Christmas, a time long before Christ. It is the year 734 BCE and King Ahaz of Judah is a desperate man. His little scrap of a kingdom is hemmed in by larger, stronger neighbours and two of those neighbours, Israel and Syria, have just declared war on him. The prophet Isaiah has told him that if he stands firm in faith, God will not allow his enemies to prevail. They will soon be overthrown. Unwilling to trust everything to God, Ahaz has sought the help of the mighty Assyrian Empire, the superpower of the day, and agreed to become an Assyrian vassal. That’s like asking the crocodile to protect you from the jackal.
Exasperated with Ahaz and his pathetic manoeuvring Isaiah says, in effect, “Okay if you don’t believe me, ask God for a sign. It can be as high as heaven or as deep as hell. You tell God what you need in order to believe.” “I will not ask and I will not put the Lord to the test,” replies Ahaz. (Is.7:12b) Obviously, he doesn’t want to hear a contrary opinion, not even God’s contrary opinion. Very well then, says the prophet, “The Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel…..For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted.” (Is.7:14,16)
No one knows for certain who this child Immanuel was and his birth does not seem to have been envisioned as an event in the distant future. The name Immanuel means “God is with us” so it might have been given to any number of children born at a time when it appeared that God had indeed delivered Judah from its enemies. People tended to name their children symbolically in those days. (It makes as much sense as naming them after pop stars I suppose.) No doubt, Ahaz himself was mystified or maybe he was just annoyed. What good was a child to someone with his problems? He needed some military muscle and he needed it right now. That’s the way it is with prophets. If you pay attention to them, they will mess with your thinking.
About 400 years later a group of scholars got together to translate this story and the rest of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek, which had by then become the language spoken by most Jews. For some reason, they rendered the Hebrew word for young woman as parthenos or virgin. So it is that with a copy of this Greek translation in his hand or in his memory, the writer of the Gospel of Matthew could say of the events attending Jesus’ birth: “All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name in Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.” (Mtt.1:22-23)
Are we as mystified and/or as annoyed as old King Ahaz must have been? What good is a child to people like us, with the problems we are facing? Do we not need hardnosed solutions rather than weird prophecies? And Ahaz didn’t have to deal with that pesky Greek translation. We know how babies are conceived. In fact, we know a whole lot of things. A student in elementary school in the year 2011 knows far more about the history of the universe and about biology and about everything else than Isaiah or Matthew or any of those fellows ever knew.
And yet, what do we know, really? When it comes to knowing how to live without destroying one another or destroying this planet which is our home, we are, quite frankly, not all that bright. When it comes to knowing what it means to be a human being and what life is for, we are pretty much at a loss. We try not to think about what we don’t know. We try to avoid what we don’t know by filling our lives with motion and noise and possessions and, inevitably, stress. “I’m stressed out” is the mantra of our time. If you’re not stressed, you’re not with the program.
I think maybe this why the Gospel writers Matthew and Luke tell such fantastic stories about how Jesus was born. They want to interrupt us in our headlong flight to nowhere. They want to put us on alert that what we can see or understand is not even the tip of the ice berg. They want to awaken us to the wonder of our being by awakening us to the presence of God at the heart of our being. John Calvin, a man not noted for being overly sentimental, once wrote:
Although it is by the operation of natural causes that infants come into the world, and are nourished with their mother’s milk, yet therein the wonderful providence of God brightly shines forth. This miracle, it is true, because of its ordinary occurrence, is made less account by us. But if ingratitude did not put upon our eyes the veil of stupidity, we would be ravished with admiration with every childbirth in the world. (Commentary on Psalm 22)
You don’t believe in miracles? You have never seen a miracle? Look into the face of a newborn child. Look into the face of the person sitting beside you. Look at yourself in the mirror. The world is full of miracles. That’s the good news. That is what we’re celebrating here and now. But like John Calvin, I’m not noted for being an overly sentimental guy so I want to tell you another story.
There was a stern, unbending preacher, a Calvinist Baptist, who knew what was right and what was wrong. There were no shades of gray in his world. His fiery sermons always carried the threat of eternal damnation and his God didn’t deal in compromises. When the preacher’s teenage daughter became pregnant out of wedlock, he saw his duty clearly, painful as it was. He threw her out of the house and forbade the rest of the family to have anything to do with her.
Somehow the girl managed to survive on her own until the baby was born but then things got much more difficult. One terrible winter night when the wind was howling and the sleet was driving, she turned up on the doorstep of her family home, begging to be taken in, if not for her sake, then for the child’s. It was the girl’s mother who answered the door and in spite of her fear of her husband, she felt she had to do something. She took the baby and went to the study where he was reading the Bible. “This is you grandson,” she said and put the child in his arms. For a long time the old man sat holding the child, tears streaming down his face.
No, he didn’t welcome his daughter back and he never saw his grandson again. Recollecting his duty, he sent them both away into the dark night. A few years laterwhen the old man died, most of his family were estranged from him. (Story credited to Thomas Long, Emory University Divinity School)
This is not the kind of story you want to hear on Christmas Eve but it’s the way the world often is. Perhaps this night God is that frightened young mother standing on the doorstep in the cold, hoping against hope, that we will so far forget ourselves and all our stern duty to scepticism and doubt as to welcome her in.
If we can do that we welcome our true selves.
Maybe the Sudden Presence of God
Rev. John Moses Trinity-Clifton Pastoral Charge, Charlottetown PE
November 28, 2010
Texts: Isaiah 2:1-5 St. Matthew 24:36-44 _________________________
The Christians whom I knew when I was growing up were people who took the Bible literally. They believed that everything in the Bible had happened or would happen just as it is written. A topic of great interest and much discussion was “the End of Days” or the “Second Coming of Christ.” There was no doubt, they said, that the time was very near. Any day now we would see Jesus riding on the clouds and the final drama would unfold. I remember asking a study group leader if he thought that some of the language might be a bit out of date. For example, what about the verse in the Book of Revelation that speaks of blood “as high as a horse’s bridle, for a distance of about two hundred miles?” (14:20) Maybe the blood would be as high as the top of a battle tank or something like that? No, he assured me, there would be horses. He had been reading only recently that the Russians were secretly training large numbers of cavalry. I don’t think he made it up. He probably did read it in one of the publications on which he relied for information and interpretation.
Later on I learned that at least some Christians in every age since the first century of the Common Era have been convinced that they were living in the Last Days. Repeated delays and disappointments have not discouraged successive generations of believers from concluding that this is finally it, that the waiting is over, that the true Christ will appear, that God’s power and glory will now be revealed for all to see.
Be honest. Have you never looked at the state the world is in and thought, “We’re not getting it right; we’ve never gotten it right; there’s absolutely no reason to suppose that we ever will get it right? So, God, if you’re up there or out there or wherever you are, why don’t you come on down and sort it all out? Why don’t you get busy and clean up this ugly mess we’ve made?” This, surely, is the basis of the yearning and the speculation. This is what keeps it alive at some level even in those of us who consider ourselves way too sophisticated to take such things seriously.
Of course, the current crop of militant atheists and any of their predecessors would be happy to tell us that it’s all nonsense---and rather dangerous nonsense. This longing for God to come to our rescue is symptomatic of humankind’s persistent refusal to abandon its infancy. It keeps us from behaving like adults and accepting responsibility for our actions and finding our own solutions. Grow up, people. Leave your childish fantasies in the unenlightened past where they belong.
I suspect it’s much easier to maintain such a point of view if you are an habitué of academic common rooms and/or a veteran of lucrative books tours rather than one of the downtrodden of the earth. Apocalyptic hope is born of the experience of human suffering and of the conviction that this is not God’s will for us. Therefore, God will act to save us. It might be argued that, far from being a childish fantasy, the longing for and expectation of Christ’s return reflects a realistic assessment our predicament. Considering all the forces arrayed against us and considering our collective proclivity for making things worse rather than better our hope must be grounded in God and God’s goodness—if we have any hope at all.
Jesus of Nazareth was shaped by the long history of his people’s suffering and by their faith in a God who had never stopped loving them, all the evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. In the Gospel of Matthew he speaks with great urgency:
Then the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see ‘the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven’ with power and great glory. And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other……Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. (Mtt.24:30-31,34)
Then he pulls back from the brink: “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” (Mtt.24:36) What is going on here? Is Jesus trying to hedge his bets? Is he playing mind games? Most likely, this is simply an indication of his humanity, of his total identification with us. In his heart he holds the hope that God will act in dramatic and transformational ways but as one like us and one with us he cannot claim to know the timetable. In Preaching the Hard sayings of Jesus John and James Carroll write, “Jesus speaks with assurance and conviction, not with certitude based on divine omniscience and precognition.”
Ah, yes, but wasn’t Jesus mistaken in any event? Albert Schweitzer in his Quest of the Historical Jesus argued as much. In offering himself up to die on the cross Jesus, he said, threw himself on the wheel of history, hoping to make it turn. The wheel did not turn and he was broken upon it. God remained silent and hidden. And yet, Schweitzer couldn’t bring himself to walk away from Jesus. He determined to go on seeking him in the paths of service, and so, went to back to school to qualify as a doctor and spent the rest of his long life as a medical missionary in what is now Gabon, in Africa.
The course of Schweitzer’s life shows that there is a whole lot more to Jesus than his sayings about “the End.” The failure to see this is a mistake that some Christians make when they dwell on “last things” to the virtual exclusion of all that Jesus had to say about how we ought to live together and treat one another and the kinds of communities we need to build. That being said, Christians (like us) who have for the most part consigned apocalyptic hope to the theological dustbin tend to be a tired and disillusioned lot. For example, we know that Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God,” (Mtt.5:9) but peacemaking is hard, hard work. Remember Isaiah’s image of the smith standing at the anvil by a hot forge hammering the swords into ploughshares. That’s what it’s like. The smith’s arm grows weary and the smith’s resolve falters, especially when there seems to be no end to the supply of swords.
In his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew Tom Long writes, “When tomorrow is just more of today and all labours of love seem poured into a bottomless pit of human suffering, indifference and cynicism, then it is hard to march out the front door and be a disciple. In the face of the crushing needs of the world, the only way to preserve hope, the only way to maintain a willing sense of discipleship, is to trust that any moment we may be surprised by the sudden presence of God.” (Matthew, Westminster Bible Companion)
Maybe the sudden presence of God. In her sermon on today’s Gospel Barbara Brown Taylor recalls a professor who told her that the Second Coming of Christ was an idea cooked up by a theologian who had only two fingers: “The truth, he said, is that Christ comes again, and again, and again---that God has placed no limit on coming into the world, but is always on the way to us here and now. The only thing we are required to do is to notice---to watch, to keep our eyes peeled.” (“On the Clouds of Heaven:” Matthew 23:29-44 in The Seeds of Heaven)
Last Tuesday night as I was driving home from a church meeting in Murray River, I listened to the program Ideas on CBC radio. The topic was the Book of Exodus. One of the presenters was talking about the famous burning bush in which Moses encountered the living God. There is, he said, no claim that the bush burned only for Moses. It might have been there from time immemorial but Moses was the one who turned aside to see it and that made all the difference—to Moses, to Israel and to the world. I had never thought of that before. Maybe the sudden presence of God.
We have entered the season of Advent, the season of the Coming. At this time of the year we are always tempted to focus on the Christ who came to us as the Child of Bethlehem more than two thousand years ago, as if this faith were all about the past and not about the present or the future. We often treat the Child like just another Christmas ornament to be taken out and put away when it suits us. But the God we know in Jesus Christ will not be tamed, will not be confined to the comfortable limits of our understanding, will always come “at an unexpected hour.” (Mtt.24:44)
I’m going to let Barbara Brown Taylor have the last word (for today, at least): “Who knows? Ours may be the generation that finally sees him ride in on the clouds, or we may meet him the same way generations before us have—one by one, as each of us closes our eyes for the last time. Either way, our lives are in God’s hands.” (“On the Clouds of Heaven.)
No, on second thought, I’m going to let the apostle Paul have the last word: “Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, for you know that in the Lord your labour is not in vain.” (1 Cor.15:58)
Intentional Faith Development---This is a Hard One
Rev. John Moses Trinity-Clifton Pastoral Charge Charlottetown PE
October 31, 2010
Texts: Deuteronomy 6:4-9 Ephesians 4:7-12 St. Matthew 5:1-12 _____________________
Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.You shall love the Lordyour God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind themas a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:4-9)
Although these words are said to have been spoken by Moses not long after Israel had been liberated from slavery in the land of Egypt, they were most likely written about nine hundred years later when Israel was in exile in Babylon. As such, they reflect the concerns of the Jewish people for the survival of their faith amid drastically altered circumstances. Forcibly uprooted from their homeland after the fall of Jerusalem, they were living in a strange place among people who worshipped strange gods and practised alien customs. Everything that had supported their faith and their identity had been stripped away. There was every likelihood that the exiles would be assimilated into the dominant culture, forgetting their faith and being themselves remembered no more.
We are here today, gathered in the name of a Jew called Jesus of Nazareth, because those people so long ago beat the odds. They beat the odds by committing themselves to Intentional Faith Development. Because it mattered tremendously to them that their sons and daughters should be children of Abraham and not little Babylonians, they made certain that those sons and daughters learned the traditions of Israel---that they knew what it was to be a Jew and how to continue on that path. Because in their everyday experience they encountered hostility and temptations that made it difficult for them to remain faithful, they gathered with other Jews in community centres or study houses called “synagogues.” There they prayed and encouraged one another and discussed the holy law and how it might apply to their new situation. They discovered that they could walk with God, even in the land of exile.
I suggest to you that we have gone into exile without ever leaving home. The culture around us has changed dramatically over the past few decades. The majority of the people with whom we work and play are either indifferent to our faith or hostile to it. Few of us care to admit that we are Christians in any public context for fear of an adverse reaction---or perhaps because we aren’t certain about what it means to be a Christian---and the Babylonians are luring our children and grandchildren away. There is every likelihood that we will be assimilated into the dominant culture, forgetting our faith and being ourselves forgotten.
If ever there was a time for Intentional Faith Development, this must surely be it. And yet, of all the Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations, I think this is the one where we are weakest. Robert Schnase says, “Intentional Faith Development describes the practice of churches that view the ministries of Christian education and formation, small group work, and Bible study as absolutely critical to their mission and that consistently offer opportunities for people of all ages, interests and faith experiences to learn in community.” (Five Practices, p.68)
This is not true of Trinity-Clifton. Yes, we have a Sunday School which is not doing badly in terms of attendance by today’s standards. And, yes, there are some opportunities for adults to study to together. But it is an uphill struggle for the Sunday School to compete with all the other influences on our children’s lives and the study groups are sparsely attended. We usually consider that we are doing well if we get twelve to fifteen participants. Twenty is a mob that sends us scrambling for more chairs. And few, if any, any of these people will be under the age of sixty.
At this point you may be saying to yourself, “Last week he was on our case about coming to worship more often. Now he’s talking about study groups and faith development. What more does this guy want from us?” To quote Schnase again, “Worship opens our hearts to Christ’s pardon, love, and grace, creating in us a desire to follow. Growing in Christ requires more than weekly worship though, and it is through Intentional Faith Development that God’s Spirit works in us, perfecting us in the practice of love as we grow in the knowledge and love of God.” (Five Practices, p.63)
Of course, the automatic rejoinder to this is, “I’m too busy; I don’t have time.” There is no doubt that our lives are busy and often stressful but most of us make time for the things we judge to be important. Minor hockey, for example, is a demanding god that requires parents and children to be at rinks at ungodly hours without fail. Very few red-blooded Canadian parents would ever dream of saying, “I’m too busy. I don’t have time.” And when it comes to our personal physical fitness, some of us are quite fanatical about finding the time. As a long-term gym rat myself, I know what this about. I keep at it both because I enjoy it and because it’s good for me. When I convince myself that I am “too busy to work out” I don’t become more productive or effective, I just get fat. If growth in faith were important to us, we would not so glibly advance the busyness excuse as if that explained everything.
In view of how essential Intentional Faith Development is to congregational and individual Christian fruitfulness and in view of the fact this is an area where we are not doing very well at all, I want to leave you with a six-month challenge.
For the next six months, if you have young children at home, don’t assume that bringing them to Sunday School is all that is necessary for their faith development. Try in some way to make your home identifiably Christian and not just another frantic household like every other frantic household on your street or road. You might get a book of children’s Bible stories and read to the little ones from that. You might have a quiet time of prayer at the end of the day. You might offer thanks before meals, if you don’t do this already. If a child asks a question about God, treat it with at least the same attention and seriousness you would give to a question about sex. And if there are teenagers in the house, don’t take it for granted that they are going to sleep in every Sunday morning. Should this result in an argument (and it probably will), it will be an opportunity to have a conversation about faith and why it matters---if it matters.
Within the next six months, whoever you are and whatever your age, try to do something that will help you focus on your faith and explore you faith both by yourself and with other people. The by-yourself bit could begin with something as simple as a visit to the church library to see what is on offer there or it could mean making space in your day for prayer and reflection. When it comes to what you might do with others, if there’s nothing on offer here that sparks your interest or speaks to your soul, please don’t be shy about saying to Greg or me, “This is what I’d like to talk about, this is what I’d like to learn, this is what I’d like to be involved with.” If we can’t resource this ourselves, we’ll find someone who can and at a time and place that’s accessible to you. Perhaps you could be a resource person yourself for something in which you have a particular interest or for which you have a particular passion. Don’t wait until you are older and have more time. Do it now, while there is time.
When we look only at the time it will take and the effort it will require, Intentional Faith Development can seem like nothing more than another huge burden. And who needs that? When we understand that it is really about receiving the gifts of the risen Christ of which Paul writes in today’s reading from Ephesians, our lives are enriched and we are empowered. When we understand that growing in faith is about being schooled in the radical blessedness of which Jesus speaks in the Sermon on the Mount, our lives are transformed and our church is transformed.
Amen. So let it be.
Passionate Worship—An Oxymoron?
Rev. John Moses Trinity-Clifton Pastoral Charge, Charlottetown PE
October 24, 2010
Texts: Isaiah 6:1-8 St. Luke 4:14-21 ________________________
Passionate Worship—An Oxymoron?
Just in case there is someone who isn’t quite sure what an oxymoron is, it is a combination of contradictory words such as, “cruel kindness” or “sweet bitterness” or “short sermon.”
When I was serving my first pastoral charge in Newfoundland, I had five worship services in five different churches each Sunday. It was a bit of a challenge getting to the various churches on time, especially if the weather didn’t cooperate. One Sunday morning when the roads were icy I arrived about ten minutes late at the church in the village of Garnish. To save time, I didn’t bother putting on my preaching gown. I just threw off my overcoat and went to the pulpit in my Tip Top Tailors three-piece suit. Later I heard that a woman who had been at home nursing a cold asked her elderly mother, “What happened in church today?” “Well, it were a bit different,” was the reply. “The minister didn’t wear nothing at all.”
What happened in church today? What happened when the congregation gathered for worship? How would you answer? What would you say?
“In the year that King Uzziah died, says the prophet Isaiah, “I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of His robe filled the temple.” (Is.6:1) And there were six-winged seraphs calling “ Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; The whole earth is full of His glory!” (Is.6:3) The posts of the great doors were shaken and the sanctuary was filled with smoke and Isaiah was overcome with a profound sense of his own unworthiness:
“ Woe is me, for I am undone! Then his lips were seared by a glowing coal from the altar and he heard the voice of God saying “ Whom shall I send? And who will go for Us?” And he replied, “Here am I, send me.” (Is.6:8) What happened in the temple today, Isaiah? “I met the Holy One of Israel and I trembled for my sins and for my people’s sins but these were all purged away; I heard the call of God and I answered.” “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” Jesus tells the congregation in the synagogue at Nazareth. (Lk.4:21) He has been reading to them from the scroll of Isaiah, the place where it says: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour. (Lk.4:18-19) Imagine that. The fulfillment of God’s promises, not as a faded rumour from the past or as a faint hope for the future but as a present reality. What happened at synagogue today? “ The Lord’s Messiah, the Anointed One, stood among us and proclaimed the time of jubilee.” God is always waiting for us when we gather for worship. The anticipation of God’s presence is the beginning of passionate worship. If we come expecting an encounter with God, how can we not be passionate about what is happening here? In Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations Robert Schnase writes, “Comprehending the meaning of worship requires looking beyond what people do to see with the eye of faith what God does. God uses worship to transform lives, heal wounded souls, renew hope, shape decisions, provoke change, inspire compassion, and bind people to one another.” (p.34) “Comprehending the meaning of worship requires looking beyond what people do to see with the eye of faith what God does.” That being said, it is the recognition that God is present and active with us that shapes what we do, that determines what each of us brings to the worship experience. What else can we bring to a meeting with God but our very best? You will note that I said our very best, not the very best. When I went to St. Paul’s United Church in the Halifax suburb of Spryfield in 1985, they had just lost their organist. Her husband had been transferred to Toronto and she, of course, went with him. Since the congregation couldn’t afford to pay more than a token honorarium, there were not a lot of candidates for the position. A woman from the choir who played a little bit on her Hammond organ at home agreed to give it a try. And let me tell you, she was awful. She butchered even the simplest hymns and anthems. But she kept plugging away, coming in after work to practice, taking lessons at her own expense, and over the course of a few months there was a noticeable improvement. And she kept on improving. After a couple of years, visitors often expressed surprise at the quality of the music in our grungy little church. I still regard this particular organist as one of the finest church musicians with whom I have ever worked. She was no Donnie Fraser but she refused to settle for less than the best she could give. That, I think, is a story of passionate worship or of passionate leadership in worship. There is no doubt that leadership in worship is important. Preachers, musicians, readers of scripture, tellers of children’s stories, ushers and greeters, ought never to be content with mediocrity even if we perceive ourselves to be mediocre people with nothing out of the ordinary to offer. It is in striving against mediocrity that we rise above it. Striving against mediocrity is a prerequisite for passionate worship. Worship, however, is not all about the leadership. Regardless of how much the leaders bring to the experience, passionate worship is what the congregation does. And first of all, we have to be there. We have to be together with God’s people. Increasingly, that seems to be something that many of us can manage only occasionally. The excuse is inevitably “I’m too busy; there are so many other things to do. I find it hard to fit this into my schedule. Robert Schnase says, “We don’t attend worship to squeeze God into our lives; we seek to meld our lives into God’s. It’s a time to think less about ourselves and more about faith, less about our personal agendas and more about God’s will. We encounter a fresh vision of God’s reality in Christ so that God’s Spirit can reshape our lives and form us into the body of Christ.” (p.34) We might say that coming to worship is a kind of letting go, of getting over ourselves and our frantic busyness so that we can be with God and find a deeper purpose for our lives. Once we are there, once we are here, then what? The surest way to kill the passion in any relationship is to be constantly on the lookout for the faults and failings of the other and to point them out at every opportunity. The same applies to worship. If you come looking for something to complain about, you will more than likely find it and that is probably all that you remember about “what happened in church today.” I know whereof I speak. When I am not in the pulpit, I tend to be quite critical, especially of the sermon. I have to remind myself to let go and let the Spirit speak to me. I hope to avoid the path of a minister acquaintance, now well into his seventies, who refuses to retire because, he says, “If I did, I would have to listen to idiots preach.” Passionate worship requires openness to the Spirit and openness to the Spirit means openness to the unexpected, being vulnerable to the possibility they we may be surprised or startled or shaken to the core. When I lived in a community where Jane and I were on occasion invited to parties other than church parties, I would often be approached by someone, usually a man with drink in hand, who would say something like “Reverend, I have to admit I don’t go to church very much but whenever I do, I always feel better for it.” Where is it written that you’re always supposed to feel better? Maybe there’s something in your life for which you should feel badly, something you need to change, something for which you need to ask forgiveness. In Teaching A Stone to Talk Annie Dillard writes: “On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” There are many other things that I might say but going on too long is another guaranteed passion killer. I do think it is important, though, to say that passionate worship is not limited to one style of worship. Some folk call us passionless because we’re not much given to clapping and dancing. It’s just who we are. It’s a cultural thing that we’re not going to get over in a hurry. That doesn’t mean that our worship cannot be a genuine, life-transforming encounter with God. Schnase says, “Even with a thousand distinctive ways to worship, congregations marked by the quality of Passionate Worship stand apart…..In whatever culture or context, Passionate worship includes the “aha” moments that change people and mold them, the touch of transcendence that pulls them out of themselves, deepens their understanding of life and their relationship to God, and makes them feel richer, stronger and truer to what God has created them to be.” (p.43) Let us thank God for the passion we have. Let us pray that God will help us find our passion. May Passionate Worship never be for us a combination of contradictory words.
How Much Faith Do We Need?
Rev. John Moses Trinity-Clifton Pastoral Charge Charlottetown PE
October 3, 2010
Texts: Lamentations 3:19-26
St. Luke 17:5-10
The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” (Lk.17:5)
In the Gospel of Luke the apostles’ awareness of a lack of faith or of the inadequacy of their faith seems to have been awakened by a warning from Jesus against “causing one of these little ones to stumble” and his teaching about the absolute necessity of forgiving repentant sinners---as many times as required. In the Gospel of Matthew’s version of this saying the disciples ask Jesus why they could not cast out a demon and he replies, “Because of your little faith.” (17:20)
Well, how much faith do we need? How much faith does it take to cast out a demon or to prevent someone from stumbling or to forgive as we ought to forgive---or to move a mountain (as Matthew has it) or to tell a mulberry tree to be uprooted and planted in the sea (as Luke has it)?
Much of the time we’re pretty sure that we don’t have enough faith. No matter what face we put on, we know what’s behind the mask. We know all about our doubts. We know how many are the days when we’re just hanging on by our fingernails. Surprisingly, Jesus doesn’t tell the apostles how much more faith they need. He says, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed….” (Lk.17:6) From one perspective this can be tremendously discouraging. If all it takes is the tiniest bit of faith, what does that say about me? Is my faith less than nothing?
On the other hand, maybe I have enough faith already. This can give us pause to reflect on the nature of faith. In the Bible faith does not equal intellectual assent to a set of beliefs or doctrinal statements, as we often suppose. It is more an orientation of the heart. It is an inclination to trust in a reality alternative to the one in which we are usually immersed. Paradoxically, this kind of faith can manifest itself in the form of distrust of the conventional wisdom that shapes our decisions and our lives. There is no better example of this than Jesus himself. He lived with an acute consciousness of the nearness of God’s sovereign reign, of God’s kingdom, and he refused to accept what the religious and political authorities said about how the world, from their point of view, ought to be ordered.
We are always being told that economic considerations will inevitably trump concerns for the health of our plant. We are also told that economics and care for the environment are mutually exclusive. Anyone who has caught a glimpse of the kingdom which Jesus proclaims will wonder about that, will entertain doubts about the received doctrine. The same applies to other issues with which we struggle. Faith causes us—or ought to cause us—to be profoundly sceptical of many things. And here is something else to consider: what the apostle Paul calls “the principalities and powers,” the mighty forces or domination and oppression, are really quite fragile because, in order to flourish, they require our uncritical acceptance and complicity. They require our unquestioning belief in their invincibility. Once we begin to have doubts about them, cracks appear in their foundations and in these cracks tiny seeds of hope can take root. And then, all bets are off.
That is why faith (apparently so puny) is so powerful. It can result in things as improbable as a giant tree pulling up its roots and planting itself in the sea or a mountain moving itself out of the way. Think of all the great social movements that have brought us step by step along the way to a more just and humane world. They all began as absurd notions---in the estimation of the dominant culture. Free the slaves? Without slavery, the economy would grind to a halt and everyone, including those held in servitude, would be much worse off. Slavery, don’t you know, is ordained of God. Do away with child labour? Preposterous. Who would sweep the chimneys? Entire cities would burn down. Unemployed children would starve. Equality for women? The full inclusion of gay and lesbian people in the life of the church? Saving Earth from the ravages of climate change and other abuse? All absurd, all impossible, until the scarcely visible seed of faith begins to take root and the unshakable foundations begin to crumble.
Lest we get carried away, the second part of the Luke text speaks to us of duty and obligation and likens the disciple to a slave, and a worthless slave at that. (17:10) As jarring as this imagery is, it points to the truth that faith requires discipline. It is not a kind of magic that will take care of all our problems. It is not about how optimistic we happen to be feeling on a given day. Sometimes, when our faith is weakest, what we have to do is keep on acting faithfully We have to keep on doing justice, loving kindness and walking humbly even though there is no reward or no apparent result. We just keep on doing what we must do because we refuse to bow to the inevitability that threatens to crush any love, any justice, any peace that dares raise its head.
It’s not all about us, though. Thank God, it’s not all about us. The Lectionary pairs this morning’s Gospel with a reading from the Book of Lamentations which evokes the heartbreak and close-to-despair of one who has witnessed the humiliation and devastation of a nation defeated and on the verge of extinction. But the one who laments also remembers that “the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning….” (3:22-23a) “Therefore I will hope in him.” (3:24)
The one who laments goes on to say, “The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him. It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.” (3:25-26) Waiting for God, waiting quietly for salvation does not mean doing nothing. While we wait for what God is bringing to birth, we do what we can. In the context of those for whom Lamentations was originally written that would have meant keeping the Law of Moses, continuing to walk with God in the path the Law provided, albeit in strange and daunting circumstance. For us it can mean not giving up on God’s kingdom and all that it promises even though this is not the time of fulfillment. Like the sower who went forth to sow in another of Jesus’ stories, we keep on planting the tiny seeds of our faith and wait for the impossible to blossom and flourish.
Following Jesus in “The Real World”
Rev. John Moses Trinity-Clifton Pastoral Charge, Charlottetown PE
September 19, 2010
Text: St. Luke 16:1-13 ___________________ There was a man, a good United Church member, who bought a lottery ticket every week for years. Like most lottery ticket buyers, he won nothing. Then he developed a serious heart condition and his doctor advised him to avoid all excitement. He followed the doctor’s advice and lived a quiet life but he did keep on buying lottery tickets. One morning while he was having coffee (decaffeinated) with his cronies down at Tim’s, his wife decided to check this week’s ticket against the numbers in the newspaper. To her utter astonishment, she discovered that her husband was the winner of a $50 million jackpot. At first she couldn’t wait to tell the old boy when he got home. Then she remembered what the doctor had said about avoiding excitement. Wouldn’t it be terrible if this news resulted in a fatal heart attack?
“I know what I’ll do,” she thought, “I’ll ask the minister to tell him.. He’ll know how to break the news gently.”
Actually, the minister didn’t know but he agreed to give it a try. He came to visit and when the wife slipped out to the kitchen to make tea, he asked, “Have you ever dreamed of being rich?”
“I used to,” the man replied, “but it’s not going to happen. I can’t work anymore. We get by on a small pension and a little money we have invested.”
“Well, just imagine. Suppose you won…oh, say…$50 million in the lottery. What’s the first thing you would do?”
“That’s easy, Reverend. The first thing I’d do is get out my cheque book and give half of it to the church.”
I’m sorry to tell you that the minister’s funeral is tomorrow afternoon at two o’clock.
Perhaps you have heard this story or something like it before. It calls our attention to two things. First and most obvious, of course, is the extreme unlikelihood these days of anyone being that generous to the church. Second , there is the question of whether the church could ever accept such a gift. After all, the United Church of Canada has never wavered in its stand against lotteries. Wouldn’t it be the worst sort of hypocrisy to take the cash, no matter to what good uses it might be put? Then again, according to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus did say, “Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into eternal homes.” (Lk.16:9) What does this mean? Is it of any help to us as we try to follow Jesus in “the real world,” where there are so many shades of gray and so few simple choices?
It may come as a surprise to those who think the Bible is mainly concerned with telling us how to be nice people that the parable of the Unjust Steward or the Dishonest Manager reflects a fondness for clever rogues that goes all the way back to Israel’s earliest stories. The patriarch Jacob, for example, tricked his brother Esau into giving up his birthright as the older son in exchange for a bowl of lentil stew. Then he tricked his father Isaac into giving him Esau’s blessing. He became rich by outwitting his uncle Laban, who was himself more than a bit of a shyster. As my Old Testament professor, Dr. John Hardie, used to say, “Jacob was a man so crooked he must have cast a shadow in the shape of a corkscrew.”
So, there was this manager, a person who looked after the interests of a wealthy, absentee landlord, who was accused of “squandering” his employer’s property. (Lk.16:1) The Message Bible says he “had been taking advantage of his position by running up huge personal expenses.” (Where have we heard that before?) In any event, he was caught and the axe was about to fall. He could only expect to be put out on the street with no references and no prospects. What should he do? All his high living had left him too soft to hire on with a construction crew and he couldn’t see himself panhandling: “I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.” (Lk.16:4)
The survival plan called for separating the employer from still more of his money as the manager drastically reduced the obligations of each tenant farmer. You owe a hundred jugs of olive oil? Make it fifty. A hundred containers of wheat? Make it eighty. Now the tenants would be indebted to the manager and they would be honour-bound to help him out in his time of need. He would have markers to call in. Perhaps recognizing a kindred spirit, the landlord “commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.” (Lk.16:8a) And Jesus seems to commend him too: “For the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.” (Lk.16:8b) The children of this age are those who live by the standards of their time and place, however corrupt the standards may be. The children of light are those who live in anticipation of the dawning of God’s righteous kingdom. And yet, when it comes to wealth and its uses, the children of this age are said to have an advantage over the children of light.
No, I don’t think Jesus is recommending sharp practices and I don’t think he is saying that it’s okay to gain wealth by whatever means we can, regardless of the moral issues involved. He is saying, however, that the children of this age have clear-eyed appreciation of the value of money. They know what it can buy. They know how much good it can do them.
One of the reasons why there is so much hypocrisy attending money matters in the church is that we don’t know—or at least, we pretend not to know. We don’t want to talk about money. We want to focus on “spiritual” things. That’s a kind of code for “Keep your hands off my wallet, Reverend,” and “No one is going to tell me what to do with my stuff. What’s mine is mine.” After the sermon we’re going to sing the hymn “Take my life and let be, consecrated, Lord to thee.” Older versions of the hymn used to have a verse that began “Take my silver and my gold, not a mite would I withhold.” This is missing in Voices United, our current hymn book. I wonder if the editors might have concluded that it would be difficult for us to sing it without lying through our teeth.
“No servant can serve two masters; for he/she will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” (Lk.16:13) In other words, everything has to be at God’s disposal. We can’t fence off areas of our lives and tell God not to go there. The bottom line is that if we are not using our material possessions to serve God, we will find ourselves serving our possessions, however few or many they may be.
At this point you are probably digging in, waiting for the inevitable “Give more to the church.” Well, I’m going to disappoint you. That’s not what this sermon is about. I said a bit earlier that the wisdom of the children of this age consists in their knowing how much good money can do them. What the children of light need to know is how much good their money can do others. And not all of the children of light are Christians.
Patti Retik is a Jewish woman who lost her husband when the Twin Towers were destroyed in New York on September 11th, 2001. At the time she was pregnant. A little later she met and bonded with another 9/11 widow, Patti Quigley, also pregnant with a child who would never see its father. As the two women dealt with their grief and tried to find some way of responding to what had happened to them, they learned that there were already more than half a million widows in Afghanistan and that there would soon be many more as military operations against the Taliban were ratcheted up. Thinking that if these widows were empowered they might be a stabilizing force in the country, Retik and Quigley founded an organization called Beyond the 11th, which helps Afghani widows start small businesses. And we’re talking really small here—things like providing a loan to buy a dozen chickens to provide eggs that can be sold. To date Beyond the 11th has helped about 1000 widows.
I’m quite sure that the smart folk in charge of the war in Afghanistan would say that this doesn’t amount to anything. But they and we might want to pause and consider what all their expenditures of treasure and lives have actually accomplished other than intensifying hatreds and bankrupting economies. Paul Barker, who for many years ran CARE’s operations in Afghanistan, believes the United States would have accomplished more there if its government had shared Retik’s and Quigley’s passion for education and development. “I can only wonder at what a different world it could be today if in those fateful months after 9/11 our nation’s leadership had been guided more by a people-to-people vision of building both metaphorical and physical bridges.” (Info re Retik and Quigley and Barker quote in Nicholas D. Kristof, “The Healers of 9/11, NYT, September 8, 2010.)
Many of you know or have heard of Martha Deacon who has strong ties to the Trinity congregation. Back in 1998 Martha began the Townships Project in South Africa, which also deals in micro-credit and empowering people. If you take $100 to a banker here in Charlottetown and ask her to invest it for, you’re not going to get much of a return. That same $100 dollars in the hands of a poor mother in South Africa can change lives because it can help her find dignity and a future for her family.
When the Rev. Nathan Mair, who sits in the balcony nearly every Sunday, visited the African country of Zambia he met many orphans who asked him to bring them to Canada. As a pensioner of the United Church of Canada, Nathan was not exactly in a position to take on that kind of responsibility. But one of the orphans, a young man named Tobias, made an especially strong impression. Even though he didn’t see how he could afford it, Nathan took a leap of faith and brought Tobias to Charlottetown, where he attended UPEI. He’s now living in Alberta, working on his master’s degree and Nathan has acquired a daughter-in-law and three grandchildren. Quite a good investment, wouldn’t you say? (story used with Nathan’s permission.)
“I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into eternal homes.” (Lk.16:9) In a sense all wealth, however we acquire it, is dishonest because we can so easily be deceived by it. As followers of Jesus in the real world, we need to know what it is for and what it can do. May God grant us eyes to see, hearts to feel and a will to act.
Someone Cares, Someone Is Looking for You Rev. John Moses Trinity-Clifton Pastoral Charge Charlottetown PE
September 12, 21010
Texts: 1 Timothy 1:12-17 St. Luke 15:1-10 ________________ My first pastoral charge was in Newfoundland on the Burin Peninsula. It consisted of six little churches in six different communities. Each of these churches had its own treasurer who kept track of all the money contributed by the congregation and forwarded some of it to a central treasurer either “to pay the minister” or to be sent on to Toronto to the Mission and Service Fund. (The remainder stayed with the local church to pay for heating, maintenance, et cetera.) One day, when I was making pastoral visits in the village of Epworth, the treasure there handed me a large brown paper bag filled mostly with one and two dollar bills. “This here’s for the Mission and Service Fund,” he said. “It would save me a trip if you was to take it along to Garnish.” Garnish with a population of more than 700 souls was the largest of the six communities and it was where both the minister and the central treasurer lived.
About a month later I received a phone call from the treasurer in Epworth: “Where’s that money I give you for the Mission and Service Fund?”
Good question. Where was that money? All I could recall was that he had given it to me. “Didn’t I hand it in to the central treasurer?”
“No, you didn’t. I asked him why he didn’t give we people credit for it and he said he never got it.”
“Okay, I’ll have to look for it.”
“Well, I hopes you finds it. There was nine hundred dollars in that bag.”
I too hoped I would find it. Nine hundred dollars was a tenth of my annual salary in those days and I would have felt honour bound to pay it all back, month by painful month. What was worse, I would almost certainly have been under suspicion. “Do you think that feller was tryin’ to get away with keepin’ the church’s money for hisself?”
Jane and I turned the house upside down. Nothing. We took looked under the car seats. Nothing. There was not a trace of that bag. I had just reconciled myself to admitting I had lost it and making arrangements for repayment when I suddenly remembered that it had been pouring rain that day in Epworth. I would have been wearing my old yellow oilskin which was hanging up….out….in….the…garage. Sure enough, there in one of the large pockets was the bag stuffed with money. Perhaps there is more joy in heaven but there certainly was no shortage of joy in our house that night.
When our second daughter, Rebekah, was born, we were living in St. Stephen, NB. She came a couple of weeks early and caught us a bit off guard. I had agreed to be director of a United Church camp for boys in that time slot. So, immediately after the baby was born, I said “good bye” to Jane in the hospital and Jane’s mother came over from Halifax to look after our older daughter, Sarah. The next morning I was out playing softball with the boys when someone shouted from the main building that I was wanted on the phone. “It’s an emergency.”
Jane’s mother was calling to tell me that she couldn’t find Sarah anywhere. She had looked in all the places a two-year-old might hide and checked with all the neighbours. No one had seen her. My first thought was that the St. Croix River ran swiftly not far from our house. My second thought was, “How I am I going to tell Jane?” I don’t know how I got back to St. Stephen without causing an accident or at least being stopped for speeding. But when I pulled into the driveway, Sarah and her grandmother were waiting for me on the front steps. It seems the little tyke had decided to go next door and try out the new swing set the kids there had. Her grandmother didn’t know about the swing set and had gone knocking on front doors rather than looking in back yards. At that moment, I don’t think there could have been more joy in heaven.
“Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.” (Lk.15:6b) “Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.” (Lk.15:9b)
On some level we can all identify with the finder’s joy in Jesus’ parables of The Lost Sheep and The Lost Coin. These stories resonate with our own experiences. But if we pay closer attention to them, we will find that they do not fall quite so easily on the ear. Their purpose is to deconstruct the comfortable little worlds we create for ourselves. They profoundly challenge our assumptions about what matters and who matters: “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?” (Lk.15:4)
Which one of us indeed? Any shepherd who left ninety-nine sheep in the wilderness at the mercy of thieves, predators and their own stupidity to go searching for a stray might well have returned to find that he now had only one sheep---the one he was carrying. And what about that woman who neglected her housework and her children and her husband to go rummaging for a lost coin? Is she really an example of prudent domesticity? Or might she better advised to accept the loss and do her duty? What was it Caiaphas the high priest said when he began plotting Jesus’ death? “It is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.” (Jn.11:50) That’s smart math. That’s hard-nosed realism. Who will nominate Caiaphas for another term of office?
As for Jesus, he is reversing the equation---putting the many at risk for the sake of one foolish wanderer. And he also seems to be saying that this is how God operates as well: “Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.” (Lk.15:7)
We, of course, assume that our sympathies are with Jesus. This is the script we have learned. But are they really, I wonder? The church, for example---this people gathered in Jesus’ name—often resembles nothing so much as a members-only club. We do things our way---the way we have always done them. We sing the hymns we like or perhaps it is more accurate to say, we sing the hymns we think we should like. We wish more folk would come and sing our songs and do things our way but we’re not about to inconvenience ourselves for them. We’re not going to go looking for them. And we’re definitely not going to look at ourselves to see how we might be more open to them. More than one church treasurer has told me, “You have to keep the paying customers happy.” Keeping the paying customers happy is a full-time job. It doesn’t leave much time to go looking for strays.
And there are the people we as a society are willing to lose. Last week in the village of St. Jude, 75 kilometres northeast of Montreal, the decomposing bodies of two brothers, Jean-Guy and Richard Roy, were found in their run-down home. The older of the two, Jean-Guy, was the caregiver for Richard, who had Down’s Syndrome. When Jean-Guy died of natural causes, Richard apparently starved to death. There was a time when the parish priest would have missed them at Mass and gone to check on them. These days, there probably is no parish priest. As for secular support, the brothers to not seem have met the criteria for any of the programs on offer so they were left to themselves. Sometimes people just get lost. There will be a few days of media handwringing and some expression of indignation but we will soon be back to business as usual, that is to say, keeping the paying customers happy. Whoever the paying customers are, they aren’t people like Jean-Guy and Richard.
“Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?.....Or what woman having ten silver coins. if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it?”
Perhaps the way to enter into these stories is not to identify ourselves with the finders but to try to imagine what it is like to be lost. Perhaps it is only then that we can begin to appreciate the profligate grace that puts everything at risk in order to go looking for the one who is missing. In his short story Watch with Me Wendell Berry tells of a community watching out for a man who has mental health problems. The man’s nickname is “Nightlife.” Near the end of the story Nightlife is in a barn surrounded by friends who are trying to keep him safe and he begins to preach:
Oh, it’s a dark place, my brethren. It’s a dark place where the lost sheep tries to find his way and can’t. The slopes is steep and the footing hard. The ground is rough and stumbly and dark, and overgrowed with bushes and briars, a hilly and hollery place. And the shepherd comes a-looking and a-calling for his lost sheep, and the sheep knows the shepherd’s voice and he wants to go to it, but he can’t find the path, and he can’t make it.
If you were Nightlife, would you tell the shepherd to be sensible and stay with the main flock? Would you worry about looking after the paying customers? Or would your poor, broken heart sing at the at the shepherd’s approach? Would you not hope with every fibre of your being somehow to be found and taken home?
The truth is, we are all Nightlife. We are all lost and wandering far from home. It’s just more apparent to some of us than to others. “The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance,” Paul wrote to his young friend Timothy, “that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners---of whom I am the foremost.” (1 Tim.1:15) No, Paul; wasn’t what we would call a reprobate or a screw up. His personal righteousness would put most us to shame. But he had once mistaken evil for good and he had served evil in the name of serving God. Therefore he knew he needed to be first in the line-up for grace, not off to the side looking down his nose at all the lost sheep. Where do you need to be? Where do I need to be?
In the Gospel of John Jesus says, And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day.” (Jn.6:39) Brothers and sisters, someone cares, someone is looking for you.
And the angels echoed around the throne, ‘Rejoice, for the Lord brings back his own. Rejoice, for the Lord brings back his own. (from the old hymn The Ninety and Nine)
Clay in God’s Hands?
Rev. John Moses Trinity-Clifton Pastoral Charge, Charlottetown PE
September 5, 2010
Texts: Jeremiah 18:1-11 Philemon 1-21 St. Luke 14:25-33 __________________ I’m not sure how exactly long preachers have been searching for illustrations that will make their message come alive and rivet the attention of their hearers but the quest goes back at least to the prophets of Israel and Judah. In this morning’s reading from the Old Testament the prophet Jeremiah draws his inspiration from the work of a potter busy at his wheel: “The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him. Then the word of the Lord came to me: Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done? says the Lord. Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.” (Jer.18:6)
Clay in God’s hands—what does this mean? In his Commentary on Jeremiah John Calvin emphasizes God’s sovereign power to build up and break down and the need for an abiding humility before that power. We must not be confident in ourselves, he says, or in what we have achieved. Our pride can be the flaw which causes the Potter to rework us or to discard us altogether just as (so Calvin believed) Israel’s overweening pride in being God’s chosen people resulted in its downfall. God will do what God will do. We mortals are foolish to presume that we have a part in the shaping of things. (Calvin on Jer.18:1-6)
Had Calvin been an artist or an artisan rather than a lawyer, he might have had a somewhat different take on the creative process. He might have understood that making a clay pot, for example, is not merely a matter of manipulating the material according to a set of rules in order to get to get a predetermined product. The potter works with the clay to see what it will become. She begins with an idea of the pot she wants to form but the clay in a sense has its own ideas. It is the interaction of the potter’s skill and vision with the reality of the clay that makes the vessel—whether decorative or functional, extraordinary or commonplace. And sometimes the potter has to recognize that this is going nowhere and start all over again.
If God really does have a hand on or a hand in our lives, is this how it is, do you suppose? Do we ourselves help decide what it is that God will make of us? The prophet Jeremiah can be read as saying “yes.” At the very least, he seems to be saying that God will respond---positively or negatively---to our response: “At one moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck it up and break it down and destroy it, but if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring on it. And at another moment I may declare concerning a nation or kingdom that I will build and plant it, but if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will change my mind about the good I had intended to do it.” (Jer.18:7-10)
Calvin was right, nonetheless, in identifying pride as the flaw in the clay. I’m not talking here about the pride any of us might take in a job well done or in our children and grandchildren. I’m talking about the kind of pride that says, in effect, “I’m as good as I’ll ever be; there’s nothing more for me to learn. I’m perfectly satisfied with who I am; I wouldn’t change if I could.” It’s very difficult for God to work with this kind of clay. It resists the divine touch. Under pressure it gets harder and harder but it is only clay, after all, and eventually it shatters into so many pieces that, like Humpty Dumpty, it can’t be put together again.
And yet, this is precisely the pride that often takes hold of religious people and religious institutions. One of the charges levelled at the Christian faith by its detractors is that it is obsessed with human sinfulness and makes people feel guilty and worthless. What I have mostly encountered in my thirty-two years as a minister of The United Church of Canada is a whole lot of smug satisfaction. At the institutional level this has prevented us from engaging the changing culture around us. It has prevented us from finding ways of being and communicating the good news of Jesus in our time and place. On a personal level it has left many of us in a state of arrested spiritual development beyond which we simply refuse to go: “This is what they told me in Sunday School and that’s all I want to know about it. Don’t bother me with new information or new interpretations; I don’t have time to think to think about that stuff.”
In the state of Florida there is a pastor who has announced that his church will burn a Quran (the sacred scriptures of Islam) on September 11th in commemoration of/retaliation for the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City nine years ago. Last week Michael Gerson, a former speech writer for George W. Bush, responded to this and other religious lunacies in The Washington Post. He wrote:
Every religious tradition has two competing visions. First, religion may be a source of tribal identity. This was the norm for centuries in Western history. The Christian church jostled for social power along with other interests, pursuing a tribal agenda at the expense of Jews, heretics at home and Muslims abroad. The goal was to see Christian theological beliefs publicly recognized and favored. This remains a temptation in the United States and a problem in much of the world, where the appeal of the tribe remains strong.
But Christianity, as an Abrahamic faith, sets out another vision -- an assertion of human worth and dignity that transcends tribe and nation. Christianity has accommodated this belief in slow, halting, often hypocritical stages -- a history that should leave Christians tolerant of the slow, halting, hypocritical progress of other traditions. The implications of this shift within Christianity, however, are profound. In light of this belief, the purpose of social influence for Christians is not to favor their own faith; it is to serve a view of universal rights and dignity taught by their faith. It is not to advance their own creed; it is to apply that creed in pursuit of the common good. This is what turns religion into a positive social force -- a determination to defend everyone's dignity. (September 3, 2010)
We here in this mostly tolerant and harmless church may perhaps take find some not-unjustified satisfaction in not being quite so narrow and nutty as that book-burning pastor in Florida. But that is not the issue. The issue is one of whether we are the kind of clay God can mould to serve the vision which asserts a human worth and dignity transcendent of tribe and nation. Is this our passion? Or is it merely something to we pay lip service while hanging on desperately to what it is we really believe? Another way of putting it might be to ask whether we are susceptible of being reshaped by God for healing, reconciling, transforming mission. Or are we better described as brittle old pots full of half-remembered prejudices and superstitions?
In the Letter to Philemon the apostle Paul is attempting a reshaping of both his friend Philemon and the runaway slave, Onesimus. He wants them to be no longer master and slave but beloved brothers in Christ. To accomplish this he uses all his considerable skills of cajolery, including a bit of a guilt trip. (I say nothing about you owing me even your own self.) From our perspective nearly twenty centuries later we may deplore the fact that Paul says nothing about the evils of slavery itself but I suggest to you that this of one of those “slow, halting, often hypocritical stages” by which we Christians came to recognize slavery as an abomination before God. If master and slave can be remade as beloved brothers in Christ, slavery cannot endure. Can we perceive the creative hand of God in Paul’s wheedling?
If we become Christ’s disciples at all, is usually by slow, halting, often hypocritical stages. We count the cost and find it too high so we try to negotiate a different deal. We’ll let others do the heavy lifting, we’ll let other carry the cross while we sit on the sidelines and evaluate their performance. And above all else, God, keep your hands off our possessions. This is where we are hardest and least amenable to being shaped for service because, notwithstanding all our protestations to the contrary, our possessions are what matter most to us. The good news is that the potter has been at work a long, long time and has never been known to be discouraged by unpromising material. Clay that we are, can we feel the hand upon us?
The Holy Trinity: Who Gives a Damn?
Rev. John Moses, Trinity-Clifton Pastoral Charge, Charlottetown PE
May 30, 2010 Trinity Sunday
Texts: Psalm 8 Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31 St. John 16:12-15 __________________
Holy One, Holy Three, we are not much given to the contemplation of mystery or thinking about difficult things. We want what the TV commercials promise: simply, user-friendly, neatly packaged for our convenience. Why can’t you be more like that?
This is the first part of a prayer for Trinity Sunday included in the most recent issue of Gathering, the United Church of Canada’s worship resources periodical. (Summer-Autumn, p.38) It seems to me to state the reality which I and many other preachers face Sunday after Sunday. While some people in our congregations are prepared to do a great deal of “church work”---attending meetings, baking pies, organizing fundraisers, et cetera.--very few care to spend any time or effort studying the scriptures or reflecting on things theological. For the vast majority of pew-sitters the Sunday sermon and the content of the Sunday liturgy are their only exposure to the substance of the Christian faith. And even then, not much substance is required. “Give me some little thing to lift my spirits” is an often-heard request.
I suppose this all fits with our perception of ourselves as busy, stressed-out people who just don’t have time for anything. For example, I used to think the slow-cooker was a terrific time-saver. You could put supper in it before you left the house in the morning and at the end of the day there would be a meal ready for the family. Now McCain’s and Cavendish Farms tell me that I’m way too busy to chop up vegetables for the slow-cooker. Out of consideration for the mad rush that my life is, they will provide the veggies already chopped. Why can’t I as a preacher be equally considerate of you? Why can’t I give it to you pre-chopped?
More to the point, why would I bother myself or bother you about something like the Holy Trinity, that strange way of speaking of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit? Many of us have difficulty enough believing in God without adding complications. Some of us have a notion of God that helps us get through the week and we’re content to stay with what works. Does it really matter whether we confess our faith in Father, Son and Holy Spirit or simply in God or a “Higher Power” or the “Spark Within” or “Something Somewhere?”
Historically, what we believe and say about God has mattered tremendously to Christians. Indeed. the working out of the doctrine of the Trinity was the pre-eminent intellectual and spiritual effort of the first five centuries of the church. It evoked deep passions and often resulted in high drama as formidable minds clashed and politicians, both ecclesiastical and secular, manoeuvred. I heard the echoes of that Trinitarian obsession last December when my grandson was baptized according to the ancient rite of the Greek Orthodox Church. Every question and every response was repeated three times: once for the Father, once for the Son, once for the Holy Spirit. It is hard to imagine anyone shaped by the Orthodox tradition asking whether the Trinity matters.
You may be thinking that the fact that something once mattered a whole lot and may still be important to some people is no good reason why it should have significance for us. Perhaps so, but I am going to ask you to step outside our common presumption that we in this century are the smartest people who ever lived and try to get a sense of what it was that led our ancestors in the faith in this direction. Why did they come to believe that the One God is revealed to us in Trinity? Were they deluded? We they just cranky old geezers who wanted like to make things difficult? Or were they conscious of a truth to which we also need to be attentive?
We might say that the Trinity is all Jesus’ fault. No, he didn’t talk about it; he didn’t formulate the doctrine. Most New Testament scholars agree that the passage at the end of the Gospel according to St. Matthew where the risen Christ tells his followers to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit….” (26:19) is not something Jesus would ever have said. It reflects the concerns and practices of the early church. Nonetheless, it is precisely because of Jesus that the church came to have such concerns and practices. In his book Professing the Faith Douglas John Hall writes:
The Christian movement was formed, not around the memory of a great rabbi, a heavenly messenger, or a prophet and judge (Israel already had many such); it was founded upon the insistent belief that in this person and in a manner both unique and ultimate, humanity had been visited by the Eternal. Time had been invaded by the Creator of time…..not merely a manifestation of the divine, which might be superseded by subsequent manifestations; not merely a Son of David bearing extraordinary authority, but rather (declared the community of Pentecost) in this one we have experienced Emmanuel, God-with-us. (p.59)
The people of the disciple community believed that in the man Jesus of Nazareth they had encountered Yahweh, the Holy One of Israel, the Creator. They were also convinced that what they had encountered in Jesus continued to be present with them and to empower them beyond the point of his historical sojourn. Very simply stated, they began to think in terms of God the Father (the Holy One, the Creator), God the Son (Emmanuel, God-with-us) and God the Holy Spirit (the ongoing, empowering presence.) Inevitably, there were questions, especially as the Jesus community moved away from its Jewish base into the Greco-Roman milieu. Enquiring minds wanted to know: are you talking about three Gods or one God? If you are talking about only one God, how do the three fit together?
The answer on which the faithful settled after nearly 500 hundred years of reflection and debate and struggle is that the three “persons” of the Trinity are of one substance, co-eternal and co-equal. There was never a time when the Father did not exist; there was never a time when the Son did not exist; there was never a time when the Holy Spirit did not exist; each is fully God. That’s extremely hard for us to get our heads around. “Who’s the boss?” we wonder. “Which one is really God?”
The Shack, by William Paul Young, although an immensely popular book, is not a very good book. Even so, it has its moments. Mack, the book’s main character, meets up with the Trinity in the remote cabin where his young daughter was murdered. The Trinity appears to him as a large African-American woman called Papa, an almost ethereal East Asian woman named Sarayu and a rough-hewn Palestinian male named Jesus. Mack is perplexed at the easy give-and-take among them and he asks about “the chain of command.” The reply is:
Mackenzie, we have no concept of final authority among us, only unity. We are in a circle of relationship, not a chain of command or ‘great chain of being’ as your ancestors termed it. What you’re seeing here is a relationship without any overlay of power. We don’t need power over the other because we are always looking out for the best. Hierarchy would make no sense among us. (p.122)
Hierarchy is identified as being rooted, not in the divine nature, but in flawed human nature: “Humans are so lost and damaged that to you it is almost incomprehensible that people could work or live together without someone being in charge.” (p.122)
It is here that Young shows that he has read some theology and it is here that he helps us see that the Trinity is not primarily about arcane definitions but rather about a way of being in which we are invited to participate. It is at once a challenge and alternative to the ways in which we usually live and the values we commonly embrace. The Russian iconographer Andrei Rublev saw this back in the 15th century in his
depiction of Abraham’s angelic visitors at the oaks of Mamre as the blessed Trinity. (Gn.18-1-4)
The three are seated in a circle around a table as if to suggest that there is still room, still a place for us to be welcomed.
So, now do you understand the Trinity? I hope not. If you understand the Trinity, you have God all figured out and that is the most dangerous of all delusions. As Doug Hall puts it, “The Trinity is necessarily complex because it represents an attempt to describe the indescribable.” (Professing The Faith, p.56)
Okay then, why did the early Christians make the attempt? Why do we bother? Is it not because this trying to understand God, this longing to know God is intrinsic to what it is to be human? “What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” asks the psalmist. (Ps.8:4) The flip side of the question is “What sort of God are you that you care about us?”
In speaking about God, in articulating what it is that we believe we are always reduced to metaphor. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that we are elevated to metaphor—one of the most beautiful which is the figure of Lady Wisdom in this morning’s reading from the Book of Proverbs. This figure of Wisdom played a part in both the church’s reflection on Jesus as the eternal Word or God and on the creativity of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus told his disciples, “I still have many things to say to you….” (Jn.12:16) That’s the way I feel right now but my time is up. Remember the circle of the Trinity, remember the invitation, continue the conversation. The second part of the prayer that I quoted at the beginning says:
Perhaps it is because life is often not simple or user-friendly or convenient that we need to reach beyond ourselves to find you, God, ---as much in the questions as in the answers --as much in the tears as in the smiles --as much in the shadow as in the light. Holy One, Holy Three, be present to us this day. Amen. (John Moses, Charlottetown PE)
Freeing Whom Satan Has Bound
Rev. John Moses, Trinity-Clifton Pastoral Charge, Charlottetown, PE
August 22, 2010
Texts: Isaiah 58:6-9 St. Luke 13:10-17 ___________________ In March of last year in the Brazilian city of Recife a nine-year-old girl complained of feeling unwell. Her mother took her to a medical clinic where it was discovered that she was fifteen weeks pregnant---the result of being raped by her stepfather. On the advice of doctors who told her that carrying the pregnancy to term would endanger her daughter’s life, the mother consented to a legal abortion and the procedure was carried out. One of the doctors, Olimpio Moraes, told the media, “As doctors, we could not allow a girl of nine to suffer like this, or until she paid with her own life.” (Quoted by Linda Diebel in the Toronto Star, June5/2010)
When Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Recife , heard of what had happened, he excommunicated the girl’s mother and the medical people involved. That is to say, he kicked them out of the church. The girl herself, being under the age of eighteen, was not subject to excommunication---nor was her alleged rapist. “Rape is a serious sin,” said the Archbishop, “abortion is much worse.” (Time Online, Mar 4, 2010)
The Archbishop’s words and actions provoked widespread outrage, expressed by everyone from staunch Catholics, to women’s rights advocates, to militant atheists. Brazilian President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva declared: “As a Christian and as a Catholic, I find it deeply lamentable that a bishop of the Catholic Church has such a conservative attitude. In this case, the medical profession was more right than the Church.” (Quoted by Linda Diebel in the Toronto Star, June5/2010)
Although clearly embarrassed by what had become a public relations fiasco, Sobrinho was not about to back down. The Roman Catholic Church’s strictures on abortion, he explained, are based on its belief in the sanctity of human life: “They took the life of an innocent. Abortion is much more serious than taking an adult’s life. An adult may or may not be innocent but an unborn child is definitely innocent.” (Time Online, Mar 4, 2010) Lest anyone suppose the archbishop was indifferent to the plight of the nine-year-old rape victim, he urged that she be lovingly cared for and suggested that a Caesarean section might have substantially eliminated the dangers of childbirth at such a young age. The Vatican also refused to back down. Its spokesman on this issue said, “We have laws, we have discipline, we have a doctrine of faith.” (Time Online, Mar 4, 2010)
I don’t think it’s difficult to determine where most of our sympathies lie. Whatever our convictions about the rightness or the wrongness of abortion, our hearts must surely go out to that poor little girl and her mother and the doctors who did what needed to be done. Who among us has any esteem for that aged prelate and his unflinching adherence to “official teaching” in the face of such a calamity? Who among us does not think of the word “hypocrite,” especially in light of the abuses to which already-born children have been subjected by the servants of an institution that professes so to cherish the sanctity of life?
Nonetheless, we ought to be careful about portraying this as a clear-cut case of religious hypocrisy versus compassion. What we have here is a complex tragedy, not a simple morality play. I think we can take it as given that the archbishop genuinely believed that he was upholding a higher principle and that the rights of the unborn must almost always take precedence over every other consideration. In his mind, to have made a concession in this extreme instance, might have opened the door to other concessions. And then, where would the sanctity of life as he understood it be? Sadly, he couldn’t find a way of honouring the sanctity of the little girl’s life or of recognizing the immensity of the violation she had suffered. Wanting to do the right thing, acting out of the best of intentions, and getting it all terribly wrong---that is the essence of tragedy.
Now, let’s join Jesus of Nazareth as he is teaching in a synagogue somewhere in Galilee on the sabbath day. “And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.” (Lk.13:11-14)
Because we have almost no concept of sabbath, of a sacred time of rest in our lives, it’s hard for us to see what the big deal is here. Jesus heals a woman who has been suffering for most of her life. Suddenly, she’s free of pain. Suddenly, she can stand erect in the congregation and praise God. Who but the worst sort of nitpicker would criticize that? Why can’t this synagogue big shot celebrate what has happened? Why does he stand there quibbling over what should be done on which day of the week? Has he no compassion at all?
Actually the sabbath was a big deal for Jews of Jesus’ day—as it remains for observant Jews to this day. The fourth of Ten Commandments as it is stated in the Book of Exodus says, Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shall you labour and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work……..For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it. (Ex.20:8-11) In others words, to keep the sabbath is to be in sync with the rhythm of creation itself and to be in touch with God’s way of being.
The Deuteronomy version of the Ten Commandments links the sabbath rest, a blessing for the entire community, to the Exodus from Egypt: “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and that the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore, the Lord God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.” (Deut.5:15) I suspect that it was this explanation of the origin of the sabbath observance that had the most resonance with Jesus’ contemporaries. Keeping the sabbath was integral to their identity as a people who had once been free and might yet be free. It reminded them of what God had done and gave them hope that, with God’s help, they might again find release from the clutches of the oppressor---this time from the power of Imperial Rome. It was, therefore, no small thing to break the sabbath for any reason.
And yet, we hear Jesus saying to the leader of the synagogue and those sided with him, “You hypocrites!” (Lk.13:15a) Then he reminds them that the Law of Moses allows the necessary labour of caring for their livestock on the sabbath. “And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?” (Lk.13:16) The reference to the woman’s being bound by Satan is not merely a naïve medical diagnosis. Her bent-over condition is more than likely the result of too much hard labour at too young an age combined with childhood malnutrition. It is symptomatic of the plight of the poor in the first century and the twenty-first century---being burdened by crushing loads imposed by systems so impersonal and destructive as to be diabolical in their effect. Would he but recognize it, the leader of the synagogue, shares in the woman’s condition. He too is bent over beneath the heavy yoke of Rome and all the powers of this world. But all he can think to do is add his faith as a weight to the woman’s load.
About twenty-five years ago a woman came to my church office. Her husband had walked out, leaving her with four children and no income. Through the intervention of a local politician’s wife she had obtained casual employment at a liquor store. However, the pastor of her church told her that it was a sin to be involved in the selling of alcohol and she had either to quit her job or leave the church. Would she be welcome at this church? I told her “yes” and she came, bringing her children with her and added quite a good soprano voice to the choir. I wish I could say that she received a warm welcome. A catty welcome would be more like it. She was an attractive woman and there were lots of snide remarks about her “being on the hunt for a man” and about how the church ladies had better “keep an eye on their husbands.” We prided ourselves in not being so prudish as to push someone out for working at a liquor store but we added to her burden all the same. She had to bear the weight of prurient imaginations. Eventually, she gave up on church.
In the synagogue, when he healed the bent-over woman, Jesus was not introducing something new. He was in fact reaching back the Israel’s ancient prophetic tradition as exemplified in this morning’s reading from the prophet Isaiah:
Is this not the fast I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? (Is.58:6-7)
This is the heart of Israel’s faith; it is the heart of our faith. If we don’t know this, then all our music and preaching amount to so much empty noise and all our fine building are heaps of rubble. The message is quite simple, really. If you are going to make a mistake---and God knows, we certainly will--- try to err on the side of justice and compassion. This is the substance of the kingdom that Jesus proclaims to us and this is what will take us beyond the human tragedy in which we all participate to what the apostle Paul calls “the glorious freedom of the children of God.” (Rom.8:21)
What If This Were True?
Rev. John Moses Trinity-Clifton Pastoral Charge Charlottetown PE
April 10, 2011
Texts: Ezekiel 37:1-14 St. John 11:38-44 ______________________ On March 30th David Suzuki celebrated his 75th birthday. Although many of you here might be inclined to regard him as “a mere boy,” reaching this landmark has set him thinking about the end of his life and what it is that he has actually accomplished in his tireless advocacy for the environment. He must be keenly aware of the irony of his situation. On the one hand, Suzuki has achieved the status of a Canadian icon, respected and admired. School children learn about him. His genial countenance is widely recognized. On the other hand, environmental issues have disappeared from the public agenda. In the current federal election, for example, none of the major parties is saying very much at all about the environment. This reflects their calculation that the voters—that’s us—are not interested. On a similar calculation the Canadian broadcasters have excluded the Greens, the one party that might have raised the profile of these issues, from the leaders’ debate.
Not long ago in a radio interview, I heard Suzuki talking about climate change. He said that he was “hopeful but not optimistic.” I took that to mean that he still thinks that humankind has an opportunity to take action to reverse or, at least, ameliorate the damage caused primarily by our consumption of carbon-based fuels but it’s unlikely that we will rise to the occasion, that we will seize the opportunity before it’s too late. Instead, we will opt for comfort and convenience in our time and let those who come after us, our children and grandchildren, deal with the consequences, which will certainly be unpleasant and may well be dire. It’s not that we don’t care about our children and grandchildren, is it? It’s just that we don’t want to pay higher taxes or change our lifestyles or think about anything more complicated than who’s going to make the hockey playoffs this year. We’re good people, really we are.
You may or may not have heard that Mardi Tindal, our moderator, has been touring the country speaking about climate change from a faith perspective and urging local congregations and communities to get excited and get involved. Mostly so far, she has been out west but now her tour is moving east so I expect that we will hear something about it soon. But not much. Tindal’s “Spirit Express,” as she calls it, has thus far failed to ignite the national imagination. This is not only because the environment is not a priority for most Canadians, it is also because the United Church of Canada which she represents has every appearance of being a spent force. We can’t get excited about anything. We’re too busy dying.
I’ve been presiding at a lot of funerals lately. If I stay here another five years, until I turn sixty-five, I’m going to conduct a whole lot more funerals That’s going to make a huge difference to what goes on here. Indeed, it places a large question mark over this congregation’s future because it’s all too obvious that we are not anywhere close to replacing ourselves. Along with this, there is the growing awareness of my own mortality. I too am getting old. My father lived to the age of ninety-one but my mother was dead at forty-nine. Which way will the genetic dice roll for me?
Maybe now you are far enough down to go with Ezekiel to the valley of the dry bones. It is a bleak and hopeless place, a scene of utter desolation. It represents God’s people in the aftermath of the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem and Judea in the year 587 BCE. They are broken, scattered, defiled. All his life Ezekiel the priest has been careful to keep himself from the ritual impurity that comes from contact with dead bodies but here he is, carried by the spirit of the Lord and set down in this place. He is immersed in death.
“Mortal, can these bones live?” (Ez.37:3a)
“O Lord God, you know.” (Ex.37:3b) At the end of all possibility, Ezekiel opens himself to God’s possibility. And God announces what God will do: “I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.” (Ez.37:5-6) Lest there be any confusion about what this means: “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely’………I am going to open your graves and bring you up from your graves, O my people……I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live….” (Ez.37:11-12, 14)
So here it is, at the very depths of despair, the promise of new life. But as the story of Israel continues, it becomes clear that what God is offering is no simple return to “the way we were.” And what is being offered will not always be easy. An American preacher named Karen Georgia Thompson writes:
The hope for the people points them to a new way of thinking and a new way of doing that which they have always done. This place of newness is found in many ways in the text. Newness in this context is not a sign of all things being well. The people are in a new place. They are experiencing significant change that is debilitating to their existence individually and corporately. They are experiencing God in new ways – even as they are experiencing life in new ways. (Reflections for April 10, 2011, www.ucc.org )
A new way of thinking and a new way of doing that which they have always done. Surely, this is the challenge facing us as a church but we are reluctant in the extreme to meet it. Our preferred strategy seems to be to avoid it. Oh yes, we would like to have new life, new hope, but only if that looks like what we remember as our “better days” when there were more people in the pews and the future beckoned rather than loomed menacingly before us. God did not abandon Israel, even in Babylon, but Israel could not return to the past. If we really want new life, we too will have to venture into new places, strange and scary though they may be.
There are some striking similarities between the Ezekiel text and the story of the raising of Lazarus in the Gospel of John, and yet, they are not the same story. Whereas the valley of the dry bones is explained as a metaphor for Israel’s unhappy plight, Lazarus called forth from the tomb is presented in a “this-is-what happened” fashioned. Contrary to what we might suppose, we are not the first people smart enough to entertain doubts that this is what happened. When Martha says, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days,” (Jn.1139b) that’s an indication that the gospel writer fully expected many of his contemporaries to opt for what we would call a “rational” explanation. Old Lazarus wasn’t really dead, he was in a coma and he was awakened by all the commotion outside his tomb. No, says John, he had been dead four days. He stank. And then Jesus called him back to life.
In his book Nothing to be Frightened Of, a far-ranging examination of beliefs concerning and attitudes toward death, Julian Barnes says that this story and the story of Jesus’ resurrection succeeded so well for so long, not because people of the first century were more gullible than we are or because in later centuries these beliefs were imposed from above as a means of social control, but because they are a “beautiful lie” (p.53) or a “supreme fiction.” (p.58) Shakespeare also told beautiful lies. He had few qualms about playing fast and loose with history but he can still make us weep and make us laugh and, most important, give us a sense of what a wondrous thing it is to be a human being. If that’s what the Bible does, if that’s what John the evangelist does, maybe we shouldn’t ask for anything else.
Barnes doesn’t let himself off the hook that easily. He says that he is troubled by the “haunting hypothetical” that this grand story might be true. And that’s what haunts me as well. Yes, I know and I’ve often said that all good stories are true insofar as they tell us the truth about ourselves. But what if this story is telling us the truth about God and it really is God’s purpose revealed in Jesus Christ to raise up from death? What if this reality has already broken into this dying world to transform it?
This is what John invites us to believe. In his First Letter to the Thessaloniansthe apostle Paul “Christianizes” first century Jewish expectations regarding “the last day:” “For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first.”(4:16) John brings all this forward into the present age. “Lazarus, come out!” (Jn.11:43) is the cry of command.
Suppose we were to respond to the invitation to believe, not just with one toe dipped tentatively in the water, but risking our whole being with the Lord, the Giver of life? How would that change our ways of thinking and doing? How would it shape our practice and witness respecting our endangered planet, our dying church and our dying selves? Would we at last lean our real names? Would we at last discover that we are Lazarus?
“Lazarus is us, bound by death in our current lives, called to life by Jesus who is the Light and the Life of the world. Jesus stands at the edge of our tomb, shouting "Come out!" (Alyce M McKenzie, Edgy Exegesis)
Here’s Mud in Your Eye
Rev. John Moses Trinity-Clifton Pastoral Charge Charlottetown, PEI
April 3, 2011
Text: St. John 9:1-41 _______________
It is possible to have 20/20 vision and yet be blind as the proverbial bat when it comes to discerning the presence and the power of God in our midst. This morning’s reading from the Gospel of John introduces us to a diverse cast of characters, all of whose spiritual vision is impaired. Some of them think they know what they are seeing. Some of them are not sure what they are seeing. Some are afraid to see and others simply refuse to see.
At the centre of this spiritual blindness is a man who is physically blind. He was born that way. Although being without eyesight is certainly not easy in our time, it was in the ancient world a terrible calamity. In most instances it doomed a person to a life as a beggar, forever dependent on the charity of passers-by who might be moved to drop a few coins into an outstretched palm. What was worse, in Jewish culture an affliction of this kind carried a moral stigma. Someone must have done something to provoke God’s anger. A serious sin was being punished. We often look at people who are down and out and say, “It’s their own fault.” People of Jesus’ day did not hesitate to apply that same judgment even to something like congenital blindness.
It is the question of who sinned that interests Jesus’ disciples. They look at the man born blind and they see a theological problem. “Tell us, Rabbi, is he that way because of something he did or because of what his parents did?” (Jn.9:2, paraphrase) Their attitude may seem callous but is it really so different from our own tendency to see problems rather than people? The poor are a problem. Drug addicts are a problem. The elderly are a problem. Teenagers are a problem. Anyone who disagrees with me is a problem. Problems can be analysed and, sometimes, be made to go away. People are another matter.
Jesus does not see a problem, theological or otherwise. He sees a person who can be made whole: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” (Jn.9:3) Surely this does not mean that God caused the man to be born blind so that Jesus could come along one day and work a miracle. What Jesus is saying, I think, is that every encounter with suffering and need is an opportunity to do God’s work. The origins of suffering and evil and all the maladies that afflict us are part of the complex mystery of our existence. The response that God asks of us is really very simple: Do what is in your power to bring to ease the pain and bringing healing. And that is exactly what Jesus proceeds to do.
The manner in which God’s work gets done is not inconsequential. Jesus uses what was then a common medical technique. He mixes saliva with mud and puts it on the man’s eyes. Then he tells him to go and wash in the pool of Siloam which was probably deemed to have curative properties. Can mud and saliva and water heal blindness? Probably not. The result in this case far outstrips the remedy. It must be God’s doing. Can cornea transplants and laser surgery heal blindness? We like to think so. But who is to say that God is any less the healer when the technique is more sophisticated? Perhaps what we need to see is that the work of God is accomplished through the means at hand. A miracle can begin with something a primitive as a glob of mud and saliva or as advanced as a team of surgeons in a high-tech operating room.
The reaction of the man’s neighbours to whatever it is that has happened is mixed. When he comes back from the pool of Siloam with his sight restored, some of them see a wondrous sign from God. Others see a clever trick. “This guy looks like the one who was born blind but it is not he. This Jesus fellow has pulled a fast one on us. We’re not about to be taken in.” Does that sound familiar? Scepticism, even cynicism, is the hallmark of our culture. Show me a politician and I will show you a crook. Show me someone who is trying to help people and I will show you someone who is padding his resume. Show me a saint and I will show you a hypocrite. Show me the presence of God and I will show you a delusion. We have developed an acute ability to see through everything. Seeing through everything, we see only emptiness and mockery.
Well, let’s take the man to the Pharisees. They walk in the unblinking light of the law of Moses. They will be able to see what is going on here, if anyone can. Again, the reaction is mixed. What some of the Pharisees see is that the man born blind was restored to sight on the sabbath and that, therefore, a sin has been committed. Of Jesus they say, “This man is not from God, for he does not observe the sabbath.” (Jn.9:16) How very church-like. What really matters is the observance of proper form. “It’s not that we’re opposed to people being healed or lives being transformed, mind you. It’s just that we would like these things to happen—if they do happen—in the right place and at the right time. We’ll tell you where and when that is.” With the Pharisees as with the church, the saving grace is that there are those for whom the rules and God are not one and the same. They say of Jesus, “How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?” (Jn.9:16)
Okay, if the theological experts can’t sort it out, maybe we should ask the man’s parents what they see. The parents have no doubt that the one restored to sight is their son. They see him there before them, ready to begin a new life. No longer will they have to lead him out to the roadside each morning and leave him there to beg. He will be able to go to the marketplace and hire on as a labourer or perhaps he can learn a trade. No longer will his very existence be a reproach to them. The other villagers will not be able to point to them as people visited by God’s displeasure. No longer will they have to fear for their old age. Their son will be able to take care of them and there may even be grandchildren to carry on the family name. They must see all that. How can they not see it?
Alas, they choose not to see. Or perhaps they are distracted and frightened by other things that they see. Their position in the community has not been enviable up to now but, at least, they have belonged. They have gotten used to the stares and the whispers and they have managed. If they identify themselves too closely with what has happened to their son, there may be consequences. It’s better to sit at the back of the synagogue than not to be allowed in at all, better to put up with your neighbours talking about you than to have them refuse to speak to you. They decide to play it safe: “We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind; but we do not know how it is that now he sees, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself.” (9:22)
They might have been included in the miracle. They might have rejoiced at the power of God. Instead, they try not to get involved. There are a lot of people in the church who try not to get involved. I’m not talking about people who decline to serve on boards and committees or work at the pancake breakfast. Some of the most involved in these things are the least involved in what God in Jesus Christ is doing among us. We don’t want to be drawn in. We don’t want leave the safe and the familiar behind, however unsatisfactory that may be. We don’t want to risk what people might say about us if we begin to take this stuff seriously: “Why do you go to church? What does your faith mean to you? Is God real?” “Don’t ask me. Ask someone else. I’m late for a meeting.”
That leaves us with the man himself. Imagine his situation. All his life he has been blind, unable to participate in most normal activities, ignored by everyone except his parents. Now he is the focus of a blistering controversy. He has no time to adjust to the world of the sighted, no leisure to enjoy his new status and freedom. He is beleaguered by angry people who are offended by his healing. Still, there is a way out of this mess. All he has to do is agree that Jesus is a sinner, in other words, deny the one who gave him his sight. This he will not do: “I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” (Jn.9:25)
Though I was blind, now I see. This kind of testimony cuts through all the nonsense. It cuts to the heart of what this Christianity business is all about. Unless there are people for whom the power of God is not a distant rumour but a present reality, unless there are people who have been touched by the hand of Christ, unless there are people who do not fear to say what they know, the whole thing collapses into inanity and the church is no more than a social club which a diminishing number of us continue to support.
The good news here is that Jesus seems to have a partiality for the unlikely and the unpromising. To the Samaritan woman at the well, a person of uncertain character, he revealed himself as the Messiah, the Anointed of God. To the man born blind, a pitiable outcast, he reveals himself as the Son of Man which, as far as the Gospel of John is concerned, is pretty much the same thing. (Jn.9:37) When I see myself as I am and the church as it is, I am often close to despair. What I need to do and what we all need to do is see Jesus as he is. That can change everything.
May the God whom we know in Jesus Christ restore our sight
Taking Away the Sin of the World
Rev. John Moses Trinity-Clifton Pastoral Charge Charlottetown, PEI
January 16, 2011
Text:
St. John 1:29-42
In 1994 the genocidal slaughter that took place in the African nation of Rwanda claimed an estimated eight hundred thousand lives within a hundred days. (United Nations) During that time many people sought refuge in churches–to no avail. Men, women and children were murdered indiscriminately and photo journalists took soul-chilling pictures of their mutilated bodies and the blood-spattered walls of those violated sanctuaries. A reporter asked a French priest who survived the massacre whether these experiences had shaken his faith in God. “Absolutely not,” he replied, “but what happened in this country has destroyed my faith in mankind (sic) forever.” (Cited in F. Rutledge, “Dies Ires”, in Selected Sermons, pp.1-9)
In the face of such a horror many of us might not be able to agree with the priest’s verdict on God but it is hard to deny the validity of his assessment of humankind. The human potential for unspeakable evil is by no means confined to what we might be tempted to label as “primitive, tribal societies.” Witness the recent shootings in Tucson Arizona. Witness the violence perpetrated in the service of freedom and democracy by supposedly “enlightened” nations, including our own. Are you not sometimes ashamed to be a human being, to belong to a species capable of such depravity? With shame comes a sense of helplessness. It seems as if we are doomed to repeat the cycle of violence and destruction in every generation until at last we exterminate ourselves en masse.
The same sense of shame and helplessness can creep up on us when we look honestly at our own lives and our own relationships. As good as we are, as good as we try to be, there are things that defy our best efforts and our best intentions. We are hurt and we inflict hurt. We are put down and we put down. We are struck and we strike back. No one gets married expecting that the marriage will turn out to be a living hell. Even so, some marriages are exactly that. No wise counsel, no determination to make it work can change the sad reality. There are families who cannot gather in the same room without being at each other’s throats. They keep on getting together because, after all, they are family and they know it is not supposed to be this way. But it is. Colleagues in the workplace undermine one another and, sometimes, destroy one another. In the end, everyone loses. There is no lack of models of constructive collegial interaction but none of them helps. What was it the apostle Paul said? “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but the very thing I hate.” (Rom.7:15) The theological term for this propensity is “sin.” Sin is more than an individual act or a collection of individual acts. It is a condition of bondage. Sin makes slaves of us all.
The Rev. Will Campbell, now in his late eighties, is a Southern Baptist preacher of a type seldom invited to appear on TV talk shows. He has spent his life advocating for social justice and ministering among the outcasts of society. Campbell was once asked to state the Christian message in ten words or less. He did it in nine. “We are all bastards,” he said, “but God loves us anyway.” (W. D. Campbell, Brother To A Dragonfly, p.220) We are all bastards but God loves us anyway. If God does love us and if God’s love has any relevance to who and what we are, God will have to deal with our reality. God will have to help us get free from the slavery of sin.
In today’s Gospel John the Baptist identifies Jesus as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” (Jn.1:29) Early on, many Christians associated Jesus the Lamb of God with the Passover lamb whose blood was sprinkled on the doorposts of the Hebrew’s houses on the night when God sent the angel of death to kill the firstborn of the Egyptians. The houses so marked were spared or “passed over.” (Exodus 12) In this thinking the blood Christ shed on the cross was what covered the sins of believers so that God’s anger did not visit them. Strictly speaking, the Passover lamb that Jewish families killed and ate each year was a memorial to the deliverance from Egypt, not a sacrifice, but the distinction had become so blurred with the passage of time that Paul could write, “Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us.” (1 Cor.5:7b) It is in terms of sacrifice that what Jesus did and does to free us from sin has been most commonly understood.
Why is a sacrifice necessary? If God is loving and merciful, why can’t God simply forgive and forget? Why does God require the death of anyone, much less the death of God’s own Beloved Son? Although Anselm of Canterbury lived nearly nine hundred years ago, you will often hear his theory of substitutionary atonement expounded by TV evangelists and, if you listen carefully, you can hear it in the words of many of our hymns and choir anthems. Anselm worked with the medieval concepts of honour and satisfaction. On the one hand, he said, God was loving and merciful and God desperately wanted to forgive sinners. On the other hand, God’s honour had been outraged by human disobedience and outraged honour demanded satisfaction. So God had a problem. How could God be loving and merciful and still be the God to whom humankind owed lawful obedience? God solved the problem by sending Jesus to die on the cross in the place of those who really deserved to die for their sins. Thus, the requirements of both love and honour were fulfilled. Reformation thinkers like John Calvin recast the divine dilemma in terms of love and justice but the net result is pretty much the same. Jesus takes our place. Jesus dies for us. Because of him we are forgiven.
Feminist theologians, especially, have argued that the classical atonement theory portrays God as a cosmic child abuser and that it legitimizes all kinds of abuse in human communities, especially the abuse of women and children. There is no denying the force of their arguments. Christ’s sacrificial death has often been upheld as a model of suffering to be imitated. People who suffer, people who are oppressed, people who have no power have been told to quietly endure and offer up their misery as a sacrifice to God. This advice almost invariably serves the interests of the status quo. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t make trouble. Leave things as they are. Far from taking away the sin of the world, it sometimes seems that the Lamb of God dumps its full weight on those who are least able to bear it.
Therefore, I think it is essential that we summon again to our imaginations the image of the Passover lamb as a symbol of liberation rather than as a sacrifice only. Jesus the Lamb of God seeks to free us from our sins by leading us into a new way of being. In the Gospel of John this new way of being is demonstrated for us when on the night of the “last supper” Jesus washes his disciples feet and says to them, “I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.” (Jn.13:15) In other words, Christ the Servant King calls us to be a servant people, tenderly caring for one another, and letting go of all our false pride---be it pride of race or pride of nation or pride of status and wealth or whatever form pride takes. It is precisely because the prideful and powerful of his time and place rejected his call to live differently and be different. that Jesus had to carry the burden of the cross. Whenever Jesus’ people choose a way other than the servant way, whenever we succumb to the lust to dominate and manipulate and establish ourselves at the expense of others, we add to his burdens and to the sorrow of the world.
“We are all bastards but God loves us anyway.” That is good news. The better news is that God sees beyond our bastardliness and dreams of the day when we will awaken to the reality of who we are. Even though we find it hard to believe in ourselves, God believes in us, all the wreckage of history notwithstanding. When in today’s Gospel the disciples of John the Baptist as Jesus where he is staying, he tells them to “Come and see.” (Jn.1:39) As always in John, there are layers of meaning in that response. Come and see where I am staying; come and see who I am; come and see who you can be. Still to us he says, “Come and see.” When at last we do see, the sin of the world will be taken away.
Sometimes, the Rusty Tin Cans Cut our Feet (a sermon in free verse) Rev. John Moses, Trinity-Clifton Pastoral Charge, Charlottetown PE
January 9th, 2011
Text:
St. Matthew 3:13-17
At the bottom of the pasture field near the house where I grew up there ran a little brook, energetic in spring, slow when summer days burned hot.
My father valued it because it watered the cows, even the driest times, but we children---the three of us and the neighbour kids— like to go wading in it.
Upstream from where the cows drank, we would leave our sneakers on the mossy bank and then cool our feet on the water-smoothed stones until mealtime or chores called us home.
It was all perfectly innocent, harmless fun that kids these days can seldom have, except that fifty or maybe a hundred years before, someone had built a camp in the woods there.
You could still see its outline in the moss and in the stream bed waiting for us were the tin cans the camper had thrown away. Sometimes, those rusty tin cans cut our feet.
When we ran bleeding to the house, there were dire warnings about “lockjaw” and stern prohibitions against playing there again but we always went back.
Even though the older kids would try find the cans and clear them out so no one would come to harm, they never got them all.
Later on we learned that life is a lot like that little brook where we played. No matter what you do or how you try, you can never get rid of all the rusty cans.
We have to deal with what other people have left behind and then there are our own leavings, our mistakes, our failures, our sins. We all contribute to the garbage in the stream.
Sometimes, the rusty tin cans cut our feet, sometimes they lacerate our souls, and it seems that no bandage, nothing, can ever bind our wounds or stop the pain.
There are those who say it’s all in the hardness: if our feet are calloused enough, the cans won’t cut us; if our hearts are hard enough, all that stuff at the bottom of the brook can’t hurt us.
God knows, hardness has been tried; human history is full of hardness and still the hard people tell us how to run the world; about hardness, they have no doubts.
Speaking of hardness, there is a painting, “On the Baptism of Christ,” by Piero della Francesca, an early Renaissance artist, who sets his hand to show us that dove-descending day.
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