Was it Coincidence…or Something Else?

Text: Mark 6:30-44

The wall of champions back in the Fellowship Hall has more than a few faces on it.  Actually, other ministers see the wall and note that there have been a lot of ministers here; twenty-six since 1843 with the average length of stay being about six and a half years.  One of the faces back there and I have something in common, the Rev. Mr. David Coutts the very first minister.  Is it coincidence…something else that the Census of 1863 has him living with the Smith family on what is now the farm of John and Helen Mason where I lived for my first year here?  Whether he actually lived there or just happened to be there for the counting is something we’ll never know.  Still, it’s just a little of hinky. 

Was it coincidence…or something else?  For me, of course my delusional mind was/is wondering if God was trying to tell me something.  Since the Reverend Mr. Coutts and I lived on the same farm and he was the first minister here, would I be the last?  And to add a little more hinky to the pot, as I wrote this paragraph someone from the Presbyterian Record called to ask about the picture they received of our annual picnic this year of us sitting on the steps of John and Helen Mason’s barn which is about as old as this congregation.  I got to tell him all about David Coutts and myself living on that farm.  Coincidence?  Enquiring minds want to know.  Am I to be the last minister here? 

Well, deluded optimist that I am I didn’t want to go with that delusion because I rather felt, believed, sensed, discerned that the Trinity had better things in store for us.  So, I chose rather to go with another possible delusional meaning to the coincidence.  Maybe it meant I was to be the first minister in something new here at Claude.  After all, the congregation that I came to nine and a half years ago was for the most part only fifteen or so years old.  There were only three or four people attending that had any association with this church for any longer than that.  So, I had a relatively new congregation to serve as opposed to one that was for decades set in its ways and so we did a lot and I mean a lot of new things. 

In my first six years here something really new and really refreshing seemed to be coming about.  We were one of those small churches that were doing great things.  We had a great youth ministry going and younger children coming along.  The concerts we had included some of the biggest names in Canadian folk music outside of the Maritimes and even had the CBC taking note of this little church on Highway 10 just north of Brampton.  The monthly fiddle jam had people coming from the bowels of Toronto and from points further than Schomberg to play.  We even got the Jammers to do a benefit concert for Caledon Community Services for whom this church became the west end location for Jobs Caledon.  Twice a year we provided the Sunday dinner at Evangel Hall and were the highlight providers if I must say.  We gave the disadvantaged in Toronto a real meal and live music to boot.  We got Arno up on a reserve planting potatoes.  We carolled in Inglewood and along with the Forget-Me-Nots’ we did a CBC Dickens’ Christmas Carol.  I played fiddle and banjo for a few of the nursing homes in the area and with a couple of friends have freely provided music for the Inglewood Farmer's Market helping to make that market more of a community gathering than just a market place.  We made our mark in doing things that foster community in an area that really needs community. 

Inside the house, we've done Christian Education and Worship very well.  The Gospel of the lordship of Jesus Christ and his defeat of sin and death which has resulted in the Trinity's reconciling us to himself by grace through faith (not by faith through grace) and making us to be and to know we are his beloved children who graciously have God the Father's steadfast love and faithfulness given to us just as he gives it to God the Son, Jesus because we are united to him and together in him by the Holy Spirit.  The image of God, the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit has been renewed in us and is visible.  As a minister, a teaching elder I've done what I was called to do in holding before you in truth the vision of who God the Trinity is and what he has done for his entire Creation in, through, and as Jesus the Christ.  Overall, you folks have been quite energetic and creative in your faithful response to the Trinity and the Gospel.

Let me wax hinky again concerning the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000 which I think describes this congregation very well.  For the last nine and a half years on at least a weekly basis our Lord has brought this passage before me.  This has been a coincidence or something else that has helped to keep me going.  Indeed, Jesus has shown himself to be Lord and has literally and metaphorically fed the multitudes with the limited resource of people we have in this wee small congregation and it has been miraculous.  Yet with outreach and with doing things new comes change and with change comes in-house tension, behind the scenes tension among the leadership and tension between the leadership and the people, as well as tension between the people.  We have lost a few along the way who simply chose to stop coming rather than to settle the differences.  That hurts.  In a small church when people stop coming it hurts us all emotionally.  It challenges our faith.  And for ministers, we tend to take all this quite personally.  It is indeed a cross to bear and the reason why small church ministry can be particularly brutal.  Yet, during those first six years it seemed that when we lost somebody, the Lord would send somebody new.  But, the last two-three years that hasn’t happened.  We have become financially strained, people poor, and wanting for additional leadership.  I could have stuck with the wall of champions’ law of averages and gone elsewhere at the six and a half year mark, but the word was always to stay.  In a way, I feel like Moses on Mt. Nebo.  We’ve seen the promise land, but I’m not the one who will see you into it.

So, was it coincidence…or something else?  Will I be the last minister here at Claude or was I the first in something new?  I stand here concerned because the delusional question that coincidence or something else raises is actually a valid one.  You have the choice to continue on or call it a day.  It will be a tough go and there will be those who chose to stop coming.  The only thing I can really say to you is that this congregation belongs to Jesus Christ.  It is his church and no one else’s.  His will has been and always will be done.  As Paul said to the Ephesian elders, “I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified”.  And so also, I commend you.  You know the Trinity and you know the Gospel which is able to build you up.  The Greek word for able there, dynamai is the same word from which we get our word dynamite.  Please do not underestimate the living and dynamic power of the grace of the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit among you, the power that creates this universe anew and raises the dead.  It often is the case that the moment you think you are dead is the moment in which you actually begin to live.  Elders, as St. Ignatius said to Bishop Polycarp on his way to Rome to die in the Coliseum, “Have a regard to preserve unity, than which nothing is better.”  Amen.

Family and the Image of God

Text: Genesis 2:18-24

What do Tarzan, Mowgli, and Peter Pan all have in common?  They are fictional feral children; homo sapiens feralus if you are into Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoons.  They were children who were either lost or abandoned or just run away who lived in the wild where they were adopted and raised by wolves or apes or fairies.  The authors who created these legendary wild children held to the Enlightenment ideal that humans are basically good and if we could be raised apart from normal human culture and upbringing we would display a purer and less corrupted form of human nature.  Thus these legendary wild children are portrayed with a higher than normal intelligence and an inborn understanding of human culture and the way civilization works.  They also exhibit expert survival skills, superior strength, and high moral standards. 

Not so in reality.  There are just over 100 documented cases of feral children in the last several hundred years, most of them being in the last fifty or so years.  Although many of these children were abandoned because the parents realized they were mentally and/or emotionally challenged, none of these children were able to re-enter human society.  They could not learn language or acceptable social skills.  Those who lived with animals simply continued to behave like them.  They simply could not understand or appreciate human society although some did fair better when in smaller family environments. 

If there is one thing we can learn from these so-called wild children is that human beings are not meant to be alone, not meant to be cut off from other humans.  When it is children who are in this state, they do not develop into fully functioning persons and I say that realizing we need to be careful in where we draw the line on what constitutes a human person.  For example, do people with late stage dementia ever cease to be persons to the extent that we no longer have to treat them as persons?  The answer to that is "of course not".

The writer of Genesis 2-3 would agree with me here.  One thing in Genesis 2 that comes as a surprise is that there is something not good in the Garden in Eden when Adam is first put there.  It's surprising because in Genesis 1 God completed every act of creation with the observation that it was good.  But here in chapter two God makes the observation that it is not good for the man to be alone.  So, God sets about creating companions for Adam.  Animal after animal the LORD God brings before Adam to name but none are a suitable companion.  So then the LORD God takes a rib from Adam and makes a helper for him, a companion equal to him.  (Unless of course, we count the number of times in the Old Testament that God is called a helper to humans then women should be considered the superior who simply condescends to help men.  I could probably agree with that.)  Then, and I bet you’ve never noticed this, when Adam sees the woman he blurts out what is the first instance of poetry in the Bible.  (Hmm…I used to try to woo Dana with Robbie Burns’ poems.) 

This just all goes to say that what makes us persons is that we are relational beings.  We need relationships, indeed close and intimate relationships to thrive.  We as persons are relational beings.  What makes the me in me is the sum total of nearly every relationship I have ever had, good and bad, plus my own unique wiring.  This definition of person comes as a bit of a contradiction to our the Western idea of what a person is.  A 5^th Century philosopher named Boethius said a person is a “suppositum naturae rationalis” (Yes, the word suppositum should disturb us.) - an individual substance of a rational nature.  That definition of person is what drives our culture to be individualistic to the point of a near innate narcissism.  It is also why we have such a very difficult time thinking of God as three persons in one being.  So, let’s go there.

When in Genesis 1 it says that we are created in the image of God it does not mean that I am an image of God or that you each are an image of God, but that we all together are the image of God.  We are relational beings whom when we get together we form a larger relational being, a corporate being.  That is why this church is different from that church and that family is different from that family.  Thus, it is in the midst of relational beings relating to one another that we find the image of God.  Persons-in-relationship is the image of God.  In Genesis 1 the Trinity said “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”  The fact of our relational nature is manifest in that God made humanity to consist of two utterly different beings, man and woman, who must find someway to get together in love in order to bring about and nurture further human life that thrives.

This now leads us to talk about family, probably a good thing to do since it is Thanksgiving weekend and many of us will be either blessed by our familial bond or tormented by its dysfunction.  Granted people like to say that there are many different ways to be family.  Yes, ok, I truly do get that but let us not dismiss that there is something fundamentally and fully human about the family unit of a man and woman coming together in the covenant of marriage to bring forth children.  At the risk of sounding like the Vatican here, the nuclear family bears the image of God like no other human community can.  Genesis 2 reflects this in portraying that the “marital bond is so intimate that the two "become one flesh"—naked, open to one another, vulnerable, trusting, passionate, loving, and ‘not ashamed’ (2:24-25).”  One commentator wrote, “This union of two lonely human beings yearning for community and finding it in one another is the great climax of the second creation story.”  Indeed, in Genesis 1 when God finished and looked at everything and pronounced it “very good”, the crown jewel of it all was human beings in the image of God, human beings carrying out the blessed mandate of multiplying and having rule over the creation.

The person of a father and the person of a mother coming together in faithful, self-giving, loving relationship to bring forth and nurture the person of a child is the image of God resembling the relational communion of the persons of the Father and the Son in the person of the Holy Spirit.  Our biological families gathered around the sanctum of a table and a shared meal reflects the image of God in a way that no other union of people can.  And please, I do not want to lessen those bonds among friends who have become family to each because the bonds of biological family are absent or have become nothing short of sub-human.  I do not want to lesson the meaning and necessity of those bonds.  I am not shy to say that adopted family, friends who by choice have become family in place of biological family, probably more than any other relational bond reflects the image of God in his saving grace.  Indeed, adopted family, friends whom God has brought together and who by choice regard each other as family in the name of Jesus is what the church is as the Body of Christ, the renewed image of God in Creation, the New Humanity rising forth from God’s redeeming of the broken, fallen, distorted humanity of Adam.

So, winding down, I’ve given you quite the theology lesson here on the family being the image of God and I’ve avoided going preachy on things that we do either to foster and make more clear the image of God in our families or the things we do or don’t do that mar God’s image among us.  But, this I will say.  To be human is to be in relationship with other persons from which God’s image arises.  Things which destroy our family bonds be it our biological or adoptive family don’t just put asunder a network of relationship, they destroy us at the core of our very being as persons so that we no longer know who we are.  When the union of love that brought us forth and nurtured us suddenly is no more, we lose the sense of who we are and that we are truly loved.  Ask any child who has had to split themselves between a home with her mother and a home with her father as the result of divorce.  She suddenly experiences a duplicity and insecurity deep within herself, in her person that I dare say never heals except by the healing hand of the Trinity to bring that wild child into his self as his own beloved child and into a community of healing that exists in Jesus’ name.

So, it’s Thanksgiving.  Leave here and go to your respective families and gather around your tables for your Thanksgiving exercise of gluttony and abdominal misery.  While there in the midst of those people please take a moment and ponder this mystery of the image of God in which you live and move and have your being and please not take it for granted.  There’s a beauty there which like light, can only be beheld.  Amen.