When I Look at Your Heavens

Psalm 8, 2 Corinthians 5:17

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Let’s talk about how this Cosmology, our understanding of the Creation and how we fit in it, and how it has changed over the last 3,000 years starting with King David. When King David stood under a starry sky one night and wrote “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” he most likely understood himself to be standing on a flat earth that was somehow fixed in a huge bubble that God had created in the midst of primordial waters.  He would have believed that the sun and the moon revolved around the earth and that the stars were fixed in their places.  He would not have known of the existence of other planets or even what a planet was.  David lived around 1000 BC.  

1,200 years later in the 2nd Century AD a Greek scientist named Claudius Ptolemaeus wrote a book called The Almagest in which he described the motions of celestial objects as he saw them.  He was the first to really write down what is known as the geocentric or earth-centered model of the universe.  Like David he believed the earth was flat and that the sun and moon and also the stars orbited around the earth.  But, he also described the movement of some strange objects called planets or planets, which means wanderers.  These wanderers, like stars, were lights in the sky but they weren’t fixed in place and seemed wander around.  They even appeared to move backwards at times.

Apart from a few wackos, geo-centrism was the way nearly all cultures understood the universe, from the Chinese to the Arabs to the Hindi to the Europeans.  But this all changed in the 1500’s with a few key events.  The Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan sailed around the globe proving that the Earth was round rather than flat.  So, now we have a round earth not flat.  Then in 1543 Nicolaus Copernicus published his revolutionary work On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres and offered a heliocentric or sun-centered model of the universe in which the planets including the Earth and the stars revolved around the Sun making it the centre of the universe.  He was also a proponent of the theory that Earth spun on an axis. 

Thus, the beginning Copernican Revolution, a rotating Earth that orbits the sun.  But it took a little over 50 years, Galileo’s Telescope, and Johannes Kepler’s discovery of the elliptical orbit of the planets for the Copernican Revolution to truly kick in.  Not surprisingly, the Roman Catholic Church, Martin Luther, and John Calvin all thought Copernicus’ theories to be heretical, contradicting Genesis One.  The relationship between Church and Science is as embarrassing as the relationship between Church and State.

It took about another 150 years for the idea of a galaxy to come about.  If you go outside on a clear, dark night, you can see a thick band of stars that crosses the sky called the Milky Way.  In the early 1600’s Galileo was the first to say that the Milky Way consisted of stars rather than just being a very distant band of fire.  In 1750 on the coattails of Galileo’s telescope and Sir Isaac Newton’s Theory of Gravity an Englishman named Thomas Wright suggested that our sun is just one of thousands of stars revolving around a central point and this galaxy looks like a mostly flat disk.  He was spot on. Yet, little did he know that at the centre of the Milky Way there lurks a supermassive blackhole.  It’s taken the likes of Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking and telescopes that see the light of Gamma rays and x-rays and radio signals to establish that.  

Today, We have since come to accept that the Milky Way consists of of upwards of about 400 billion stars maybe even a trillion if you count proto-stars and it is between 100,000-180,000 light years across.  If you want to think about planets, it would be a gross underestimation that there are 100 billion planets in the Milky Way and that 40 billion of those, like Earth, are in habitable zones creating a possibility for life as we know it.  We know our Solar System is on an inner-edge of a spiral arm located 27,000 light years from the centre of our galaxy.  It takes roughly 240 million years to make a full revolution.  So, the last time Earth was here dinosaurs were just about to begin their dominance of life on earth.

Well, there’s more.  The Milky Way isn’t alone.  Almost 100 years ago Edwin Hubble, the namesake of the Hubble telescope, stared into the heavens from the Mt. Wilson Observatory in California through the then monstrous 100-inch mirror of the Hooker Telescope and discovered that what we had been calling the Andromeda Nebulae was too far away to be a part of the Milky Way.  It was another galaxy all together, the Andromeda Galaxy.  He then went on to discover more and more galaxies and also noticed that these galaxies were tinted red which meant they were moving away from each other and from us which meant the universe was expanding.  

We have very recently, in the last twenty years come to know that not only is the universe expanding it is weirdly accelerating as it expands.  It should be slowing down.  Scientists believe the cause of this accelerating expansion is something called Dark Energy which makes up about 70 percent of the stuff in the universe.  There is also Dark Matter out there making up about 25 percent of the rest of the stuff.  Its dark because it doesn’t interact with the light particle, the photon, which means it doesn’t light up.  Astrologist have also noticed that the Dark Matter seems to spider-web across the universe and where strings cross, so to speak, that’s where galaxies are.

Now think of this. 95% of the stuff in our universe (We may live I a multi-verse or be just one of an infinite number of universes) is Dark.  We can’t see it, but we know it’s because of its gravitational effect on the 5% we can see.  Did you catch that?  We can only see 5% of all the stuff in our universe.  

What do we know about the five percent?  Well, the light from the furthest objects that we can see took almost 13.8 billion light years to get here.  The estimate today is that there are at least 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe each of which contains anywhere from 1,000 to 1 trillion stars.  We cannot imagine the number of planets that might be out there let alone habitable ones. 

Because the universe is expanding most astrophysicists say that it began with a Big Bang roughly 13.8 billion years ago and they will use the word “created” and the phrase “created out of nothing”.  Many scientists today actually do believe in God and like David stare in awe and wonder at the universe God created.  When David looked at the heavens, he didn’t have a clue and it’s likely that today’s science has only scratched the surface.  But let’s stop there for a moment because David was looking at the vastness of the universe and contemplating how it is that the God who created it could love humans.

David asked a second question, “What is humankind that you are mindful of him, the son of Adam that you care for him?” he likely believed that his line of descendants began with a man named Adam whom God formed from the dust of the earth and a woman Eve from one of his ribs and from those two came humanity.  He would also have believed there were other heavenly beings – angels and other gods.  One thing he certainly understood is humanity’s insignificance, our weakness, our smallness before the greatness of the heavens, but also, that there is something remarkable about us.  God made us a little lower than the heavenly beings, yet has given us dominion over his creation to be his vice-regent.

Well, even science says we have a special place in the universe.  When we look at the universe from the infinitesimally small side, it is accepted that all the stuff in the universe, the energy and particles from which atoms are made were contained in one very small extremely dense super-particle that God created out of nothing that exploded to become this big universe.  

Early on hydrogen and helium formed and then gravity pulled together super-massive stars that lived for a few billion years and then exploded.  These massive explosions, or supernovae, provided the energy to form the dust of slightly heavier atoms one of these being carbon upon which life as we know it is based and blew this stardust across the universe. 

This stardust formed into more stars and then planets.  In fact, the particles which form the atoms which form the molecules which form the cells of which we each consist have been around from the very beginning getting rearranged by different forces until finally here on planet Earth there is life, life of varying kinds.  Some life forms here on Earth eat rocks and some even need sulphuric acid to live.  We humans are special in that we are the part of the universe that is able to understand the universe.  Someone once said, maybe it was Carl Sagan, “The universe has an interesting sense of irony, in that you are the universe experiencing itself.”  I won’t mention the strong possibility of alien life. 

We are indeed quite wonderful.  Just think of our eyes.  In these eyes through which we stare at the heavens and behold the majesty of God, in just one of them, there are about 130 million photoreceptor cells.  In just one of those cells there are over 100 trillion atoms, way more atoms than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy, in one tiny cell of your eye.  Get this.  When we stare into the stars with these eyes we are actually looking back in time because it takes light time to get from there to here.  We can actually see the very remnants of supernovae which we call quasars billons of lights years away that may have been the supernovae that provided the stardust out of which this solar system, this planet, and each of us is made. Wow!

With these eyes we cannot see the edge of the universe, but get this, with our ears we can hear it.  The Big Bang produced a remnant of sound that permeates the universe.  When I was a kid TV stations went off the air shortly after midnight leaving my little black and white TV hissing with static.  This will blow your mind.  About one percent of that noise was produced by the Big Bang.  Through something as simple as our little black and white TV sets the very beginning of the universe can say, “Here I am.”

When we consider all this, David was indeed right when he wrote in Psalm 139:14 we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.”  Yet, we are more than just stardust that has evolved to be able to observe and understand bits and pieces of this mind-blowing universe.  We are the part of the universe God has created to know and love him and to give voice to the praise the Creation offers its Maker.  Everywhere, from the biggest galaxy to the smallest particle, every part of the Creation when you take the time to look at it loudly proclaims, “If you think I’m wonderful consider the One who made me.”  And when we do, we, like David, say, “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name.”

 The awesome God who created this inconceivably huge and wonderful universe loves us each.  We here the static of the Big Bang.  God hears the static of our prayers - and answers.  Then there’s Jesus. In, through, and as Jesus Christ by the powerful working and presence of the Holy Spirit God became human and God continues to embody Godself by pouring the Holy Spirit into human community called the Church.  But, try not to think the institution of the Church, think followers of Jesus in relationship to each other embodied by the Holy Spirit who can’t be seen.  In Christian communities all over this planet God is making humans to look less like a virus in his good Creation and more like himself in the love we share, the love God demonstrated in Jesus giving his life for us and which God pours into our hearts with the gift of his very self, the Holy Spirit. Jesus, God the Son becoming human, his death, and his resurrection was a new Big Bang.  Each of us in Christ are New Creation and the God of the universe calls us each his beloved child.  If you think the universe is awesome, take a look at yourself and who you are in Christ Jesus and consider the awesomeness of that.  Amen.

 

A Crumby Preoccupation

 Matthew 15:1-28

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Years and years and years ago I was an assistant manager of a steakhouse. If you’ve ever worked in the restaurant industry, then you know how crumby a restaurant can be.  Crumbs are everywhere.  Crumbs mean dirty.  Dirty says, “Don’t eat here.”  So, when I was on duty out on the floor during the meal rushes and when the restaurant was empty between meals, you would find me neurotically pushing a carpet sweeper keeping those floors clean.  That experience has left my eyes irreversibly trained to notice crumbs on the floor.  Crumbs on the floor will be the first thing I notice when I enter a restaurant, a house, your house.  Let’s not even talk about restrooms.

People generate a lot of crumbs, children especially.  Being masterfully crumby, children wreak havoc in restaurants and create a lot of extra work for the person serving them.  A small child in a high chair can be an absolute nightmare if all you see are the crumbs.  Little kids drop food, throw food, drool food everywhere.  The mess is overwhelming.

When my children were small, I was very thankful that we had a dog.  A dog will clean the crumbs…and the kid.  Dogs love cleaning up under the table.  Every restaurant should have a crumb dog.  When a family with a small child comes into the restaurant the crumb dog would see them and be overjoyed as opposed to the overwhelming sense of futility that your waitperson will feel.  Instead of dreading the extra work of cleaning up the mess, the crumb dog would eagerly wait for the smorgasbord of bits that would soon be spread before it.  It wouldn’t even mind cleaning up the high chair…and high chairs are nasty. Food gets smashed into every little crevice and they always seem to acquire the lingering odour of a full diaper.  A crumb dog will lick that clean.

Looking at our passage today, this Canaanite woman compares herself to a crumb dog eating the crumbs of the mercy, the grace, the loving kindness of “Israel’s” God.  Being a Canaanite, she lived with the religious stigma that she didn’t deserve the mercy, the loving kindness of Israel’s God the way Israelites did.  You see, the Canaanites were one of the peoples of the Land that the Israelites didn’t completely annihilate when they returned from Egypt.  As a result, Canaanite people suffered much stigmatization from the Israelites who conquered them.

Well, there is something special about this Canaanite woman.  She appears to know something about Jesus that only the Twelve Disciples and Satan and the demons know here in Matthew’s Gospel.  She knows that somehow Jesus is the Living God of Israel in the flesh.  How do we know this?  She calls him “Lord”.  The only person a Jew would ever call “Lord” was the God of Israel.  She also makes her request of Jesus in the way one would ask God for help.  She continually cries out to him, “Have mercy on me, Lord.”  She kneels before him and begs, “Lord, help me.”  God shows us mercy.  God helps us.  Unlike the other gods that you have to strike a bargain with. 

As far as what she was asking for, mercy is a word we Western Christians tend to be a bit short-sighted in our theological definition of it.  To us mercy largely means acquittal in which God doesn’t get us with the penalty that our sins deserve.  That’s majoring on a legal courtroom understanding of mercy that is actually quite minor in the Bible.  

Her request for mercy was what one made in the royal court to a monarch.  It was a request for a king’s or queen’s favour towards you demonstrated in acting on your behalf.  The Greek word for mercy is more or less the same word they used for olive oil.  Olive oil was a main staple of life for ancient Mediterraneans.  It was also a healing balm.  Such is the love of God.  In Hebrew the word for mercy means undeserved, unconditional loving-kindness.  In asking for mercy this Canaanite woman was asking King Jesus to show her the healing balm of loving-kindness that the Lord God of Israel promises to his people by healing her demon-possessed daughter.

She also makes the request, “Lord, help me”.  The word she uses for help isn’t the word you use to ask somebody to come help you in the kitchen.  It’s the word you use to get a doctor to come running to help you in a gravely serious situation.  It’s the word typically used in very desperate prayers for God to come and help. 

So, the Canaanite woman’s request was a gravely serious one.  Her daughter was possessed by a demon which was something only the Living God of Israel could do anything about, something she believed Jesus could do something about.  Jesus says she has faith, great faith.  This Canaanite woman has great faith.  She’s the only person in Matthew’s Gospel that Jesus says this about.  He never says this about any Israelite – his disciples or the religious authorities.  Remember, they are not in Israel anymore and it is this “Canaanite woman” (said with an air of indignation both because she’s a Canaanite and because she’s a woman) that has faith. 

Comparing her to the Israelites, among them the people who considered themselves to be the most faithful were the Pharisees who were like the crumb police in a restaurant – like me.  They were only concerned with religious rules and regulations, morality, ritual cleanliness – petty things.  They felt entitled to the loving kindness of their God and believed wasn’t worthy of it.  They believed that “petty things” could separate a person from the loving kindness of God, from his coming to help them.  To the Pharisees, to be faithful was to be faithful in the petty things of outward appearances.  Jesus called that hypocrisy.

This Canaanite woman’s faith/faithfulness was her desperate, humble desire for God to heal her daughter of demonic torment, a desperate and humble desire for God to help her daughter because she believes God is loving-kind.  That is what faith/faithfulness looks like.  Add to this, she realized that the God she was petitioning was somehow embodied in Jesus, something the Pharisees never saw.

Jesus’ response to her was, at first, only troubling, then it got worse.  At first, he’s silent.  He says nothing.  He seems to be, maybe, waiting to see how the disciples are going to react to this “Canaanite woman”.  Just days before, Jesus had fed the 5,000.  Then, that evening he walked on water and calmed a mighty wind that was battering their boat with waves.  After that, they worshipped him and confessed him to be the Son of God.  So, knowing who he is and having been with him for so many healings we have to ask whether they will clue in and understand that his loving kindness could be for this “Canaanite woman” too, this non-Israelite.  But, how did they respond?  Indignance!  “Send her away.  She’s a bother to us.”  Their faith was still too little, to crumby, to grasp the full scope of the “loving-kind” nature of Jesus, Son of God; that it wasn’t just limited to them.

Jesus’ response to her then appears to get worse and we need to talk about that.  You know, sometimes the best way to get people to see that their beliefs and prejudices are wrong is to mimic them, behave like they are behaving.  You folks probably remember that show from the ‘70’s called All in the Family and how it’s main character Archie Bunker was bigoted against women, racist, homophobic, and anti-everybody who didn’t share his political views.  I think he used every derogatory term for any person who wasn’t a white, straight man with the exception of using the “N-word”.  The writers of the show ingeniously used humour to get us Americans (I’m one of them) to look at Archie Bunker and say “Wait a minute.  He’s me.  I’ve a problem.”  

So, I think Jesus here, though obviously not using humour, is mimicking his disciples prejudice against Canaanites and women and this is why his response to this Canaanite woman seems so uncharacteristic of him.  He says to the women, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”  In great desperation, she falls to her knees and begs, “Lord, help me!”  Jesus’ response to this cry for help is just plain cold-hearted.  He says, “It is immoral to take bread from children and give it to the dogs.”  Immoral!?  Seriously, who’s calling who a dog here?  He’s saying that because she is a Canaanite “dog” and it would be immoral for him to help her.  Ouch!  I would hope that at this point his disciples would be saying to themselves, “This humiliating act of racist, misogynist religious exclusivism is completely out of character for the Jesus we know to be the Son of God who shows mercy and heals.  The way he is acting is not what we are about.  Jesus, you made your point.  We don’t want to be religious bigots.  We want to be like you, like the loving-kind, Living God of Israel who created us all.

To give you some history, the early church had to overcome a lot of racial prejudice and religious exclusivity to be the Body of Christ into which God was calling the Gentile peoples.  They had to welcome Samaritans, Canaanites, Arabs, Greeks, Romans, Scythians, barbarians, and so forth into the fellowship of the Body of Christ because that’s what God in Christ through the working of the Holy Spirit was doing.  God was welcoming these once excluded people into the fold and so the people of God just had to get on board or lose their “saltiness” so to speak.  

Moreover, it may have seemed to the early Christians that God was changing his stance on a few things.  For example, roughly 1,300 years prior to this encounter, back when the Israelites invaded the Land of Canaan after the Exodus from slavery in Egypt, God told the Israelites to annihilate the Canaanites because they were idolatrous and perverted and he didn’t want their ways to be practiced by the Israelites.  Moses gave them laws that included such things as men who dress like women and women who dress like men should be stoned to death.  That seems really strange to us, but I suspect that’s how the Canaanites dressed and acted when they worshipped their idols.  

In Jesus’ day, among the people of God were the Pharisees, the religious crumb police, the law-abiders who judged what was moral, good, virtuous, and beautiful in God’s eye.  They would have had nothing but disdain for this “Canaanite woman” particularly that she thought that Israel’s loving-kind Living God would have anything to do with her.  They likely would have said that her daughter was demon-possessed because she simply deserved it for what she was.  But, Jesus, the Son of the Living God of loving-kindness who shows mercy and helps us, healed the daughter on account of the faith exhibited by her mother, the “Canaanite Woman”.

This is a lesson for us.  There are a lot of people outside (and inside) the church that we look down our noses in disdain at.  We think “those people” immoral and that if we have anything to do with them it would be immoral.  We quote scriptures about how God is going to get “those people”.  But among “those people” are some desperate people in whom God has planted “great faith”, people who cry to our God for help just like we do, but they can’t come to church to find that help and loving kindness.  Why?  We the disciples of Jesus are too preoccupied with crumbs to see the loving-kindness that God himself has been showing these hurting people before our very eyes!  We see the speck in our neighbour’s eye, but fail to see the log in our own.  Amen.

A Tale of Two Feasts

 Mark 6:14-46

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You folks may be familiar with the Presbyterian Church in Canada’s shelter ministry down in Toronto known as Evangel Hall.  They’ve a really amazing ministry there.  Daily meals, medical and dental care, temporary housing even for special needs people, clothing, help with job searching, bathing facilities, a chaplain, and that’s just getting started.  Evangel Hall serves meals every day of the week, but they like to provide churches with the opportunity to come and serve the Sunday dinner.  This is a wonderful thing.

My last church was close enough to Toronto to go down a couple times a year to serve the Sunday dinner.  It was a big effort for my church for we averaged only in the upper twenties on a Sunday.  We had to bring enough food for upwards of a hundred people and ourselves.  We had to get there in plenty of time to prepare the meal in their kitchen with enough volunteers to cook, serve, and clean up afterwards.  We were small and mighty and we did it joyfully and efficiently.  You know how small churches are.  Once we had done it a couple of times everybody knew what they each had to do and we did it and it never became a labour of love.  I even brought along a couple of musician friends to provide a little hillbilly indigestion to accompany the meal.  When everybody was served, we served ourselves and sat and ate with the people and made friends.  After dinner, we took whoever wanted down to the chapel and had a little informal church service that was a really beautiful moment in time.

I don’t want to say these meals were a miracle of loaves and fishes.  It was just a group of relatively well-off white-people pulling together $400-500 and donating a Sunday afternoon and evening to provide a meal to some folks who otherwise wouldn’t have had a meal on Sunday.  The real miracle, the real gift was the sharing of lives; the building of relationships in what I would call a wilderness place, getting to hear the stories of people who for so many reasons just aren’t able to do life the way “society” expects them to do it.  To such as these belongs the Kingdom of God.

Now, if I may, let me share another meal experience I’ve had as a minister that for me was not so uplifting.  It was a Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast.  There was an element in the ministerial association in a community in which I previously ministered who thought it would be good to let the mayor and other local government officials know that the local churches were praying for them.  Good idea, but…I would have whole heartedly supported the event if it had just been a thing where the Ministerial invited the Mayor and the Councillors for breakfast in the fellowship hall of one of our churches and we shared a meal and then prayed for them, but that’s not how those Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast things work.  Let me bring you up to speed.  

It was a well-catered event for which everybody had to pay, I think it was about $35 a person.  You got a little break on the deal if you could get enough people from your church to fill a whole table, about eight.  Of course, there was some status associated with being able to do that.  It’s been a while, but I think the venue wound up being either a big meeting area in the town offices or one of the local banquet halls.  The local business community was also invited as if this were a Chamber of Commerce event.  They were also given a reduced price if they could bring enough employees to fill a table.  Posters went up all over town.  There was a motivational type of speaker and a brief prayer at the end. 

Being a frugal Presbyterian with some Mennonite in my background, I had a hard time seeing the purpose in the event.  The people who attended, the mayor included, were already involved in local churches so it wasn’t outreach.  It wasn’t even a fund raiser for a special need in the community.  There wasn’t much socializing afterwards.  Everybody had to get to work.  I questioned why have these breakfasts.  Knowing the theological tradition from which the idea of the Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast arose down in the States, at best it seems they hope that they can build a type of relationship between the Ministerial and town council that was enjoyed by Billy Graham and American Presidents.  But…, and I don’t want to sound cynical but I guess I am…, I am suspicious that these breakfasts are just a way of letting local politicians know there is a Christian voting block they need to consider next time they run for office.  Anyway, a good time was had by all, but the next year when the Ministerial decided to organize another one of those things, I just stopped participating in the Ministerial.  It just didn’t feel right.

These two meals show two different ways the church can be in the world.  We can serve others unconditionally or we can court power.  In his Gospel, Mark presents us with these two options.  First, we have Jesus miraculously serving a meal of abundance to the crowds of people who followed him everywhere because he was bringing hope and healing to them.  It was really wild what was happening around Jesus.  People were coming believing they just had to touch the hem of his cloak and their lives would be dramatically changed.  They would be healed, restored; the word for that is salvation.  Jesus and his disciples were so busy they could hardly get away to rest and regroup.   

The Ministry at Evangel Hall is like Jesus’ Feast of Loaves and Fishes.  Presbyterians all over Canada give what amount to a loaf or a fish to Presbyterians Sharing and it’s funnelled through to Evangel Hall to where it becomes a feast of abundance of sustenance for people in some really challenging situations and their lives are changed.  The people who come to Evangel Hall, if they keep coming back and take full advantage of what’s offered there, they will get a taste of salvation now in the Kingdom of God that manifests wherever Jesus is.

As far as the other way the church can be in the world, the courting power way, we had a look at it last week with the Birthday Feast of Herod Antipas.  The guests at that feast were exclusively the rich and powerful.  It was totally cut off from the real needs of real people.  In fact, the abuse of privilege exercised by those at that feast was causing most of the “real needs” that the real people of the land had.  John the Baptist, who bore the Word of the Lord to that bunch, God’s word of judgement against them for their abuses of privilege, was locked up in prison only to finally suffer beheading.  The disciples of John, unlike Jesus disciples who were flooded with opportunity to minister, they had no opportunity for ministry among that clique at Antipas’ Feast.  All they could do is collect John’s dead, beheaded body.  At Antipas’ Feast a child was exploited, made to dance a perverted dance.  Then, they made the child to be a pawn in a marital game of power that resulted in murdering the Word of God.

I don’t wish to depress anyone.  I did enough of that last week in highlighting that the Church in our culture has been a welcome guest at the Feast of Herod Antipas.  We’ve courted power.  Ever since the fourth century when Emperor Constantine made Christianity the unifying religion of the Roman Empire we have been courting political power and have given a false prophet’s approval to the greed and power lust of Western empires that have destroyed and enslaved the people of many cultures.  We called the spread of Christianized Western Culture the Kingdom of God.  Children were exploited and killed everywhere this anti-Christian form of Christianity went.

For me, that Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast really struck a discordant cord of a not right mix of Church, Power, and Wealth.  It was trying to keep that unholy connection of Church and State alive.  As I said, I would have had no problem inviting the Town Council to one of our churches’ fellowship halls and feeding them breakfast, listening to their challenges, and praying for them.  I would even have gladly cooked the breakfast for that.  But the way those Mayor’s Prayer Breakfasts get done…let’s say 75 people were there.  75 people at $35 each equals just over $2600.  That would have provided at least six sit-down Sunday dinners at Evangel Hall where people’s lives really do intersect with Jesus and his Kingdom and they get changed.

In our society today churches are closing left and right as we’ve lost our place at the banquet table of Antipas.  Our current place in this society that we helped to shape resembles that of John the Baptist locked up in Antipas’ basement prison.  We who are left need to be asking how we should be in the world.  Should we be like Jesus’ Feast of the Loaves and Fishes or should we be wasting resources on trying to regain the prestige we once had in our society?  

There is a world of ministry opening up as we come out of these COVID lockdowns vaccinated and are able to socialize more.  People are needing space in the midst of other people to just (for lack of a better word) debrief; to say this is how I’ve experienced the last year and a half.  Giving each other the opportunity to speak and be heard will be an important ministry for churches to offer.  It’s also an important ministry to be there with listening ears for our neighbours.  Doing things outdoors that gives people an opportunity to stop and chat are helpful.  Two of our Coop churches pre-Covid offered a coffee time during the week.  Things like that can now start-up again, but maybe, if possible, weather permitting, do it outside.  Have lemonade and cookies after church outside.  If you’re a townie, spend some time in your front yard instead of the back.  Be mindful that short conversations, short visits are nice.  Oddly, a lot of people, particularly introverts, have lost their stamina for being around people.  

Be mindful that many people have been and still are suffering employment stress, financial stress, marital stress, family issues, depression, anxiety.  Many children are going to need a lot of encouraging to begin to explore outdoor life.  Grief is huge as we haven’t been able to say good bye to those who’ve died the way we are accustomed to.  People have had to move away.  We’ve lost touch.  There’s also a lot of anger and discord still over how the pandemic has been handled.  Many of us have people in our families and friendship networks that refuse to get vaccinated.  Like the people flocking to Jesus had so much need that Jesus and the disciples were overwhelmed, our communities are like that now – full of need.  Being available and listening with non-judgemental ears is the best meal we can serve out here in this barren wilderness.  Amen.

Behind the Scenes

 Mark 6:14-29

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The Royals, what would life be without the British royal family?  Hardly a week goes by without a new whiff of scandal out of that bunch.  What’s the real relationship between Prince William and Prince Harry?  Let’s not mention how Megan and Kate feel about each other.  There’s Charles’ affair with Camilla.  Would somebody please crack the conspiracy behind Diana’s death.  While we’re discussing her, was life with Charles so bad that it lead to Harry being fathered by her one-time riding instructor, or was it her former body guard or was it an officer of the Welsh Guard?  And then there’s Prince Andrew, what exactly was the nature of his relationship with Jeffery Epstein or should I say the nature of the relationships that Jeffery Epstein availed him to?  If John the Baptist were alive today and a British subject, he would have no problem finding sermon material among the British Royals.  Fortunately, the laws are such that he wouldn’t be beheaded for it.  It would have been a different story if these were the days of King Henry the VIII.

Anyway, John the Baptist and Herod Antipas, that was an interesting relationship to say the least.  Modern Royals face the rumour mill of the tabloids.  But for Herod Antipas, he faced a prophet of God.  We know John.  Every Christmas he shows up.  He was the hermit who lived in the wilderness along the Jordon River somewhere probably in a cave.  He wore a camel hair tunic and ate locusts and wild honey.  Crowds of people were flocking to him out there in the wilderness to be baptised in the Jordan River.  As to why, the best I can explain it is that due to Roman oppression and the corruption in the Jewish government and the Big Business religious machine going on at the Jerusalem Temple there was this sort of mass pervading expectation/hysteria that God was going to bring about that long foretold Day of the Lord judgement upon his people.  They were expecting that any day would send the foretold Holy Spirit anointed King, the Messiah, to deliver God’s people from their Roman oppressors and establish his reign here on earth where there would be justice, equity, righteousness and peace. 

The people wanted to be ready for this Day.  So, in order to be ready, the stain of the sin of the people, otherwise known as the iniquity of the people, needed to be dealt with, washed away.  Normally, the annual observance of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, was the means to do this.  It involved sacrifices at the Jerusalem Temple and fasting.  Unfortunately, these people coming to John in the wilderness believed that the Temple priests were so corrupted by greed and power that any sacrifices the offered where nothing but a hypocritical show of the rich and powerful in which the poor of the land (which was most everybody) could not afford to participate.  The rich had gotten richer and the poor had gotten poorer.  So how was a person of faith to be ready for the Messiah’s Coming if what was going on in Jerusalem was a sham?

  Well, they bathed a lot.  Archaeologists have found that during that period many people had ritual bath cisterns at the entrances of their houses for the purpose of washing off the “uncleanness” they may have incurred by contact with the Roman and Greek cultural influences that had pervaded their daily lives for close to 400 years.  (We do this today with hand sanitizer stations everywhere we go.)  John’s baptism took this ritual bathing instinct one step further by moving it to the Jordan River where the Israelites first entered into the Promised Land after the Exodus.  So, John’ and his baptizing offered a mass cleansing and restoration for the people of God.  

Archaeologists have also found that in the likely area where John was baptizing many of the wealthy and powerful people of Jerusalem, Herod Antipas included, had luxury mansions on the hilltops overlooking the Jordan Valley.  To get to these mansions they had to pass by John and the masses of people he was baptizing.  We can’t help but imagine that as they rode past in royal procession John the Prophet, the forerunner of the Messiah, did not pass up the opportunity to expose their corruption.  This public prophetic lashing by a dirty desert hermit defacing the honour of the royals particularly of she who would be Queen, Herodias, was powder keg wired to explode.

So, how about a little royal gossip about Antipas and Herodias; but I guess it’s not gossip if it’s true according to the historical record.  The marriage of Herod Antipas and Herodias was at the heart of John the Baptist’s confrontation of the two and it’s really complicated; as in there was only own family tree involved.  Antipas was the son of Herod the Great who was King at the time of Jesus’ birth.  Herod the Great was a great builder known for expanding the Jerusalem Temple.  He was very much a pawn of the Roman Emperor Augustus.  He was also very paranoid.  He had three of his eight sons, his second wife, and a brother-in-law executed believing they were trying to usurp his throne.  He had a total of ten wives, one was his cousin and another his niece.  We also know Herod as the one who culled the children in the area of Bethlehem who would have been born around the same time as Jesus.

Antipas was the son of Herod the Great’s fourth marriage.  Upon Herod’s death, Caesar Augustus divided the land between him and two other brothers, Philip and Archelaus.  Like his father, Antipas became very much of a pawn of the Roman Emperor who was by then Tiberius.  He built several cities and named that after Tiberius and others of the imperial family.  In an effort to maintain peace with the Nabatean Kingdom I (Saudi Arabia), Antipas married the daughter of the Nabatean King, Aretas IV.  Her name was Phasaelis.  Well, he divorced her in order to marry Herodias.  This unlawful divorce which disgraced Phasaelis resulted in an eventual war with the Nabateans about three years after Jesus’ resurrection.  Antipas lost and since it was part of the Roman Empire Tiberius exiled him to Spain.

Herodias was actually the niece of Antipas, the daughter of one of his half-brothers whom Herod the Great executed.  Herodias was also first married to another of Antipas’ half-brothers named Herod II whose mother was the daughter of the High Priest in Jerusalem whom Herod the Great had appointed as a political favour (oh, what tangled webs we we’ve).  They had a daughter, the young girl in our reading from Mark whom some say was named Salome.  Well, according to Levitical Law one cannot marry a niece. The blood lines are too close. 

Antipas and Herodias became a thing when one year when Antipas took a trip to Rome to see Tiberius and stayed with Herod II and Herodias.  Apparently, Antipas and Herodias got a little too close.  She decided she would rather be the wife of a tetrarch in back home than just a low-ranking socialite in Rome.  Now, it’s hard to determine whether or not she actually divorced Herod II, which women were typically not allowed to do.  Regardless, she took Salome moved to live with Antipas in the backwater land of the Jews.  Again, let me remind you, Herodias was also Antipas’ niece as well as the wife of his half-brother of whom she was also a niece.  This blatant divorcing of spouses for lust and power-playing and the marrying within bloodlines really upset the faithful in Israel.  It was just one more display of how corrupted with the Greek and Roman ways that the political and religious leadership had become in Israel.

As noted, John the Baptist would pass up no opportunity to point out to Antipas and Herodias how much of a stain their marriage was on the honour of God’s people.  So, Herodias had Antipas arrest John.  Fortunately, Antipas had a soft spot for John.  As Mark says, Antipas was afraid of John for he could tell he was a righteous man, a prophet.  Antipas also enjoyed the novelty of John’s preaching and teaching.  So, he didn’t have John executed as Herodias desired (“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” I’ve often heard commentators say about Herodias.)  

The opportune time for Herodias’ revenge arose.  It was Antipas’ birthday.  There’s a feast.  The guests are Antipas’ cabinet officials, high ranking military officers, and the ‘first citizens’ of Galilee.  For some really weird reason Antipas has his stepdaughter who is somewhere around twelve to fourteen years old come and dance provocatively for this gross group of older men who’ve been drinking.  She nails it, at least for Antipas.  He’s so struck with her moves that he offers her half of his kingdom.  

Now before this gets any grosser, we have to ask why this dance?  Could it be Antipas was trying to find out who among his courtiers would like to try to marry into the royal family.  For good or for ill, he was trying to figure out who’s got “ambitions”.  There’s a lot of power that comes with being the son-in-law of the President, so to speak.  In consideration of the offer, the young girl goes to her mother for advice which opens up another angle on who has really orchestrated this young teen dancing for a bunch of drunken men at a birthday party for the wanna-be king.  Her own mother!  Could it be it was her own mother, Herodias, who was trying to see who in the kingdom had “ambition”?  In the world of wealth and power “ambitious” people can be manipulated.  

But then Antipas, does this stupid, stupid, ridiculous thing of offering half his kingdom to a young girl…on oath.  Herodias seizes the opportunity and gets her to ask for the head of God’s prophet served to her on a platter. (I can’t imagine how traumatizing that must have been.)  Herodias made it clear that this is what happens to those who would question her honour, even if it is God’s prophet speaking for God.  Herodias has “ambition.”  She has this mysterious power to get the people who have power to do what she wants done.  She’s the behind-the-scenes manipulator you point to when the people in power start doing things that otherwise don’t make sense.  

Well, welcome to the world of wealth and power at the top of the food chain.  I hope you could keep track of all that.  One of the puzzles of Mark’s Gospel is figuring out why he interjected this story of the death of John the Baptist.   He could have just noted that Herod had beheaded John.   It seems he wants to give a behind the scenes peak into the way things are in the world of wealth and political power and where it leads.  He is attempting to say that life at the top of the food chain, so to speak, is a sick, twisted mess.  He is trying to say with this senseless death of John the Baptist that this is what happens to those who speak God’s truth to wealth and power.  The death of John the Baptist had a profound impact on Jesus for this reason.  In all the Gospels, when Jesus hears of the death of his forerunner he becomes certain that something like that is going to happen to him.   Those who speak God’s truth to wealth and power will die.

The world of wealth and power is just a mess of “ambition”, manipulation, debauchery, lewdness, child abuse, and people making irresponsible promises because something has pleased them – and this is the behind the scenes that makes the world go round.  If you’ve ever wondered why governments can’t just get done the things that need to get done like creating a truly fair and just society, saving the planet, protecting children, well, the dynamics at play around the banquet table of Antipas’ birthday feast just might be your answer.  

I don’t mean to sound hopeless in saying that those who speak God’s truth to wealth and power will die.  And I am certainly not saying we, the disciples of Jesus should therefore say nothing.  But one thing we do need to reckon with being the Church today is overcoming the historical reality that the majority of us Christians have been ambitious guests at the banquet table of Antipas, if I may use that as a metaphor.  The Church’s wholesale participation in the Indian Residential School debacle is clear evidence of that.  We gave a theological backing to slavery, to colonial expansion and the outright genocide and culture-cide of Indigenous peoples all over the world.  Christian Anti-Semitism enabled Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.  We even give a theological reason for the destruction of the environment,  With this Pandemic, it is no secret that one can find Christians playing a key role in why people don’t get vaccinated and won’t wear masks or abide by other public health measures.  

I’ll speak more about what we should be doing next week as I will be comparing the Feast of Antipas to Jesus’ Feast of the Loaves and Fishes.  But to wet your appetite, we disciples of Jesus have a prophetic voice to speak with in our communities, the loudest manifestation of which is the way we love each other and our neighbour.  Having a Prophetic voice does not have to mean running around condescendingly pointing out the sins of others.  Being prophetic is to offer a vision of hope to the world, a vision that helps people to see that there is another table to sit at, another feast to attend that’s being hosted by Jesus – a feast where the dance is people bowing to serve one another in a spirit of unconditional, mutual, and sacrificial love, where everyone has enough, abundantly enough.  Amen. 

Beyond Hometown Rejection

 Mark 6:1-13

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Every town has its hometown hero, someone who grew up among us and went forth to do “extraordinary” things.  Where I live in Owen Sound, ON one of the hometown heroes is Canadian World War I flying ace, Billy Bishop.  He had 72 victories making him the top Ace of the war for Canada and the entire British Empire.  I am daily reminded of him as I share backyards with the Billy Bishop Museum, which is housed in his childhood home.  Another hometown hero to the area is the very famous painter, Tom Thomson.  He was one of the Group of Seven painters who became famous for their portrayals of the distinctiveness of the Canadian landscape.  When you look at Thomson’s paintings you see Canada particularly Ontario.  We won’t tell anyone that he actually came from the little hamlet of Leith six miles down the road.

The thing about hometown heroes is that we tend to celebrate them as larger than life good.  If anyone has a bad story about them it will usually be laughed off or discredited.  People have tried to discredit Billy Bishop’s war record over the years saying he embellished a bit.  The official record will say he likely embellished a few accounts but he otherwise tended to play down how skilled he was.  And Tom Thomson, there’s a lot of mystery surrounding his “accidental” death on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Provincial Park and also whether he’s actually buried in the graveyard of the Leith Church.  But the stories only add to the mystery, they don’t discredit him.  Hometown heroes can do no wrong. 

Well, then there’s Jesus, this rule apparently didn’t apply to him.  To his hometown of Nazareth, he was anything but a hero.  To the communities around Nazareth Jesus was a well-known religious celebrity. He taught with a sense of authority that the rabbis and Pharisees and scribes just seemed to lack.  He astounded people with his healings and exorcisms and his message that the Kingdom of God was at hand so much so that people were beginning to think he was the expected Messiah. 

Jesus’ celebrity had grown so remarkably that we would expect him to have received a hero’s welcome coming back to his hometown of Nazareth, but not so.  It seems that the hometown crowd thought he was little more than a religious upstart who had disserted his family.  He was not honourable in their eyes but rather an embarrassment of a firstborn son.  

Looking at Mark here, Jesus came to Nazareth and brought some the circus with him – he’s got followers, disciples, like a respected rabbi would.  Well, out of respect (maybe curiosity) the synagogue leaders let him teach on the Sabbath.  As we would expect, the people were astounded.  But…something’s was not sitting right.  They just can’t understand how this Jesus, their Jesus, who grew up in their midst could have gained so much wisdom.  They knew what he had been taught in Sabbath School and it wasn’t this Kingdom of God being at hand message that he was proclaiming throughout the region and backing it up with healings and exorcisms.  We also know from a previous encounter a few months earlier that Jesus’s mother and brothers had come to collect him because they thought he was out of his mind.  They likely did that because the townspeople were saying that too.  You folks know how the rumour mill works in small communities.  

The hometown people were likely saying that Jesus was out of his mind and this was why he was shirking his responsibility as the oldest son.  As the eldest son in a family in which the father had died, Jesus should have been providing for the family, teaching his brothers the family trade of basic carpentry.  He should have been walking them daily to the neighbouring newly under construction city of Sepphoris where they could make a lot of money framing houses.  But instead. Jesus was walking around the countryside of Galilee with a ragtag band of fisherman living off of the generosity and hospitality of others and teaching people about the Kingdom of God which was the responsibility of the priests and scribes.  Jesus was shirking his responsibilities as eldest son and also usurping the role of a rabbi.   

Though the people of his hometown hear him teach and are astounded, they chastise him for not living up to his obligations.  They even take a shot at the questionable paternity rumour that overshadowed him.  They refer to him as Mary’s son rather than mentioning Joseph – a totally uncalled for slight.  It all culminates with Mark saying they took offense at him which meant that they believed he had brought nothing more than scandal to the reputation of their town rather than the intended hope of the Kingdom of God at hand.  Jesus countered their slight by nonchalantly commenting, “Prophets are not dishonourable except in their hometown, among their kin, and in their homes.”  That was likely not a helpful thing to say if he was trying to keep the bridge mended.

Taking offence at Jesus is the opposite of having faith in Jesus.  Consider the disciples, though Jesus often challenges whether they have faith, they are still faithful to him.  They are loyal to him, listen to him, follow him, and do as he asks.  That’s faith.  But the people of Nazareth, his hometown, are offended by him and the result is that the Kingdom did not burst forth in their midst as it was in the rest of Galilee.  Outside of a few healings he could do no works of power there.

Just like everywhere else Jesus went, the people of Nazareth were astounded at his abilities, astounded because he taught with an authority unlike the scribes and priests.  But, the “We know this kid” stuff set in and that was that.  Jesus could do no works of power there and Mark says that Jesus was, in turn, amazed at their “lack of faith”.  Jesus is amazed, which means he’s quite puzzled by it. 

Well, Jesus’ response to this rejection is to keep on keeping on at what he was called to do.  He took the crew and the Kingdom elsewhere.  He also upped his game by empowering his disciples to also do what he was doing – proclaiming, healing, casting our demons – and he sent them forth two by two.  He also made them travel light resulting in their having to depend on the hospitality of others.  He told them to go to people’s homes rather than tell the people to come out to the synagogues.  And so the Twelve went proclaiming that all should repent and they cast out many demons and cured many sick anointing them with oil.  The hometown rejection didn’t hinder things.

When I think of what it is to be the church in our world today, I think we’re in a situation that’s kind of like Jesus’ hometown rejection.  In North America up until quite recently Christianity was the “hometown” religion. The institution of the Church provided the standards for what made for right and wrong.  Christian faith played a role in family cohesion.  Parents taught Christian beliefs and practises to their children.  A Bible could be found prominently displayed in most houses.  Civic events usually commenced with a prayer.  There was the Lord’s Prayer in schools and Ten Commandments in courthouses.  People didn’t work on Sundays.  But today, people are largely ignorant of the Christian faith or misinformed or see the church as irrelevant if not a hindrance to healthy living.  People can be ambivalent or apathetic in the least or as we are seeing more and more, people are taking offense at the church.  In the wake of these discoveries of the unmarked graves of Indigenous children, churches particularly Roman Catholic churches are being burned down.  

We have to ask how it is that the church is largely rejected in the hometowns of North America when it was a cornerstone of community not so long ago.  It is more so the case here in Canada than it is the States.  The national Censuses of the last four decades clearly demonstrate first, a turn away from denominational identification but still having a Christian identification; then, to being Christian but having no church involvement; and now to where the most recent Censuses are showing a strong growth in no religious affiliation at all.  People left the church and are now renouncing having any faith at all.  How has this happened?

The answer to that is multi-faceted and complicated, but this is how I would very broadly give an answer.  Frederick Douglas was an escaped slave who wrote and spoke extensively on the role Christianity played in enabling slavery.  He spoke of two kinds of Christianity – the Christianity of the land and the Christianity of Christ.  He, like me and many of you, was perplexed by how the teachings of Jesus and the Bible could be so twisted and misused by those who claimed faith in Jesus as to undergird the institution of slavery and we could say the same thing about the Church’s role in the institution of the Indian Residential Schools here in Canada.  Douglas wrote:

“What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference – so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other.  I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, woman-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.  Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.”

My broad-sweeping generalized answer to the question of how Christianity has become the rejected hometown religion of North America at which people are taking offence is that it is the Christianity of this land that is being rejected rather than the Christianity of Christ.  The Christian faith that’s rooted in the Christianity of Christ does not get rejected when we do the acts of unconditional, non-judgemental compassion that Jesus calls us to – except by the Christianity of the land.  If you love the enemy, the immigrant, the refugee, the homosexual, those different than the status quo it is the Christianity of the land that will lead the way in reject you.  

The Christianity of the land is getting rejected and here are some reasons.  It stepped into the hypocrisy of doing compassionate things and attaching a coercive price tag on it.  “You can have this plate of food if you will sit and listen to me tell you how you’re going to Hell unless you accept Jesus and become just like us.”  The Christianity of the land is getting rejected for saying God is on the side of particular political parties and politicians rather holding our elected officials accountable to the biblical prophetic standards of seeking justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God when the bend of the political sphere tends to be seeking power, loving privilege, and cowering before those more powerful than themselves.  The Christianity of the land is being rejected because we have spent billions upon billions upon billions of dollars building extravagant houses of worship all the while competing over who can make the best desert at the potluck when billions of people all over the world including our own communities do not have adequate housing, clean water, enough food, and proper health care.  The Christianity of the land has believed and propagated lies rather than acted according to the Way, and the Truth, and Life of the unconditional love embodied in Jesus Christ.  The Christianity of the land is being rejected because it is indeed offensive.

The Christianity of Christ – well let me say this – I like small congregations.  It is easier to build a culture of loving community in a smaller group of people because smaller groups are so insanely relational.  We are privileged to be smaller congregations because it easier to love one another unconditionally and sacrificially as Jesus commanded when we can actually get to know one another.  We don’t have to be “all that” like the big program churches have to be.  We just have to love each other and find one way to unconditionally and sacrificially bless to the community around us.  When this land is done rejecting the Christianity of the land, it is my prayer that what will be left is the Christianity of Christ embodied in the loving community of small congregations such as ours, small congregations maybe still meeting in buildings or maybe only meeting in homes; small congregations that will be beacons shining forth with the sacrificial, unconditional love of the One who gave his life that all may have life abundantly.  Amen.