Blessing and Joy

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Luke 1:39-56

Many years ago I had a conversation with a good friend and she coined a phrase I had never heard before and it sounded strange to me.  She said, “I’ve lost my joy.”  She was a Christian of a more charismatic variety than me.  She had been taught that joy is one of the fruits of the spirit that Christians receive through the workings of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22,23).  These spiritual fruits like fruit on a tree develop and ripen over time in followers of Jesus as a result of a deepening devotional life.  

Being raised your typical Presbyterian I had hardly heard of the Holy Spirit let alone that the Spirit works in us and brings forth these fruits.  I thought being a Christian simply meant being good and sticking to God’s rules all on your own efforts because that’s the deal if you want God on your side.  

My friend was the most committed and devout Christian I knew at the time and always seemed so joyful.  She was the first person I met who went to church and actually worshipped.  She said she lost her joy, that at the end of the day she wasn’t feeling joy anymore, but rather profound disappointment.  People she loved had let her down and hurt her.  These people wouldn’t give her the space to sort things out.  On top of all that she didn’t feel close to God anymore.  She lost her joy.  It even came to the point that this worship-filled person pulled away from church.  For a couple of years, she couldn’t worship.  She lost her joy.

Thankfully, her story is not tragic.  In time her joy returned.  God brought her life together in the way she felt he promised he would.  She married, became an elementary teacher, and had children.  She had hit a period where she just needed to walk alone, a period of time for God to heal some deeper hurts in her than just her present ones.

This friend is one of those people I think of when I hear Mary’s Song.  Let me give a rather expanded translation.  “My soul, the entirety of my being, worships the Lord and my spirit, that within me that makes me feel alive, rejoices greatly in the God of my salvation.  For, He has looked with favour on his overwhelmed servant.  From now on people will call me blessed!  God has done great things for me that only God can do.  His mercy is for all those who trust their whole lives to him.”  Mary sang that song the moment she realized that God truly did have his hand in her troubling circumstances.  The angel had told her that her elderly relative Elizabeth was pregnant and so she was. 

There is great joy in Mary’s Song, in Mary, but it leaves me with a few questions.  I don’t think that what she means by joy and by being blessed is what we think they mean.  Let me start with what it is to be blessed.

These are holiday times and most of us gather together with our families and have a big meal.  Usually someone will say grace and in that prayer begin to count the many blessings the family enjoys.  Everybody is reasonably healthy.  Everybody enjoys a comfortable life.  The family has a good name.  We give thanks that God has blessed us in so many ways.  Gratitude is a good thing to feel towards God, but I don’t think this sort of “count your many blessings” is what Mary meant when she said people would call her blessed.

For Mary, being blessed meant God had included her in his mission to bring healing salvation to his hurting, broken, suffering world.  Oddly, this blessing came by means of an unexpected pregnancy that was troubling, indeed scandalous in so many ways.  In our eyes Mary was disturbingly young, probably somewhere between 13-15.  It was not unusual back then for marriage arrangements to be made between a father and a man between 25 and 50 years of age to marry his daughter.  Such was Joseph.  

Mary and Joseph were only betrothed and not yet married when she was discovered to be with child.  Archaeologists tell us that the wee town she lived in, Nazareth, appears to have been very law-of-Moses-abiding Jewish.  A pregnancy out of wedlock there would have been horribly scandalous.  Nobody but Cousin Elizabeth and Joseph believed Mary that the child in her was the Son of God conceived by the Holy Spirit.  

Then, after Jesus was born Joseph and Mary had to become refugees in Egypt. Jealous King Herod wanted to kill the baby.  That meant Joseph had to leave his job as a respected carpenter.  They would have struggled financially as strangers in a foreign land.  

Add to it all that, the difficult reality that as Jesus progressed through childhood, he apparently wasn’t your "normal" child and people knew it.  So, Mary had to bear the stigma of having a child who appeared mentally unstable.  And after finally leaving home at age 30, Jesus started his “Kingdom of God” ministry on the coattails of crazy cousin John - John the Baptizer...locusts, honey, camel hair…that John.  Then, Jesus appeared to be dealing with his paternity issue by claiming God as his Father and seemed to prove by doing and saying things that only God could do and say.  

Then, Jesus, her son, was arrested and tried for treason.  Mary had to watch her son die a public execution by crucifixion and as she stood there utterly heartbroken people certainly would have mocked her for being the mother of this humiliated false Messiah.  Whatever she felt when she encountered Jesus raised from the dead would have certainly been tempered with what we know today as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Mary said people would call her blessed but when you consider what she went through because of Jesus, you have to ask: How was that a blessing? Mary is called blessed not because she was a good, hardworking person, a good mother and all that and so God rewarded her with health, wealth, and a respected family name.  Mary is called blessed because God was working through her and she remained faithful through all that she suffered for being the mother of Jesus, the Son of God, the Messiah. 

Blessing always comes in the face of suffering.  In this fallen world full of evil, God’s workings, his mission to save and heal it will always meet with adversity.  Yet, the blessing one receives for being a disciple of Jesus and living according to him who is the light of the world is, well, him; the assurance of his presence, the Holy Spirit, being personally with us.  It’s the blessing of enjoying God’s favour, God’s faithfulness to us.  Health, wealth, and a good name are quite often distractions that keep us from being faithful and enjoying the fullness of life that Jesus has for us.   

If blessedness comes in the face of suffering, what does this say about joy?  We live in a culture that sees the pursuit of happiness as a basic human right.  But we also live in a culture in which corporate advertisers tell us we can’t be happy unless we have this or have that and there’s never enough.  True happiness in this broken world is not found in wealth and security.  It’s when your whole being rejoices from saying “I know my Jesus is with me and that he is working through me and that my dis-ease at not having the “good life” that so many around me enjoy is not in vain.  God…yes, God is working through me.  I am blessed!”   There’s a joy in God’s blessing.  It’s when all Hell has broken forth against you trying to break your faith and you somehow find yourself singing, “When peace, like a river, attendeth my way, When sorrows like sea billows roll;

Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul.

At the end of the day when we are alone with ourselves, what do we come back to?  Is it joy?  Do we lift our hearts in the wonder that we belong to Jesus, that he is with us and we are a part of his reign in this hurting world?  At the end of the day what do we come back to?  Is it joy?  Amen.

 

Economics and Joy

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Luke 3:7-18

At our house we had two cats; an orange tabby named Tiggs, whom we said goodbye to in March a year ago, and a grey and white something or other blob we call Peewee.  They were just months old when we rescued them from the local shelter.  At first, Peewee was quite outgoing and affectionate and Tiggs was a bit shy.  But after a month or so that all changed and we don’t know why. Tiggs became the outgoing, curious cat who liked your company.  Peewee, well quite honestly, he became a disappointment.  He was skittish and rarely let you touch him.  He liked to demand his food with a very annoying bit of relentless meowing that started 30-45 minutes before they got their food.  Peewee would just eat and eat and eat.  He had his dish and Tiggs had his.  Peewee was the faster eater so he finished his food and moved on to Tiggs’.  So, Tiggs was always hungry and Peewee grew quite fat.  Peewee didn’t seem to know how to stop when he’d had enough. He was just a fat, annoying, hairball barfing, litter box filling mistake that we obviously couldn’t euthanize and I know quite well he couldn’t make it as a barn cat.  So, we were stuck with him, which meant…we just had to love him, find out what makes him tick, and try to draw him out.  He has become a completely different can’t now that Tiggs is gone.  If Nellie the dog wasn’t around, I’m sure he would become a fine lapcat. 

Well, that’s cats, what about people.  It’s almost Christmas and of course I’m waxing nostalgic about the Christmas Eve dinners we used to have at Grandma and Grandaddy’s and what joyous occasions those dinners were.  The food, the conversation, the gift giving, being a kid, and then growing up and watching the kids.  Everybody was welcome in their house and loved, even my Aunt’s boyfriends who left a bit to be desired.  Mawmaw always put out an abundant feast.  There was more than enough for everybody.  We ate and everybody was “fat, dumb, and happy.”  There was joy.  

Having mentioned my cats, I can’t imagine what would have happened if there was one or more of us in the family who acted like Peewee.  I’ll pretend it was me. What if I started an hour or so before dinner yelling “When’s dinner going to be ready?  Feed me.  I’m hungry.”  And then kept it up while everyone else was doing their part to get it ready.  And then once dinner was on the table, I claimed all the food for myself, even pushed everybody else away from their plates so as to eat their food too…and we won’t get into the dietary disturbances that come along with eating all that food to which I would so rudely subject everybody else a little later.  Then while I’m gorging myself, I start to go on about “When can we open presents?  I want to open my presents.  Where’s my presents?”  The time comes and I tear into mine and it’s, “Look what I got. Look what I got.” Only to throw it aside and move on to the next.  Cool stuff but apparently, it’s not enough so I start taking everybody else’s presents.

I can’t imagine what would have happened at Christmas Eve at Grandma and Grandaddy’s if someone had been a Peewee.  There would have been absolutely no joy at all.  What do you do with someone like that?  You can’t just euthanize them or banish them to the barn.  You don’t do that to human beings (but we do).  But you know, welcome to Banquet Planet Earth…and you know what else?  We are part of that small percentage of people who are ruining the banquet for most everybody else.  I wish I could say this is the way humanity has been just since the Industrial Age and the advent of Capitalism, but no.  If you look back, it’s the way humanity has been throughout recorded history.  There have always been the human versions of Peewee and Tiggs but, oddly, the Tiggs have idolized the lifestyle of the Peewees and when given the chance have acted likewise.  We want to have it all and turn a blind eye to those who have it all and how they got it and won’t admit the cost that comes from attaining it…the poverty, disease, hunger, pollution, violence.  We simply refuse to make the bold claim that having too much is immoral, but rather it’s our common goal.  There’s no wonder there’s a widespread lack of joy here at Banquet Planet Earth.

Unfortunately, we psychologize Joy.  We tie it to mental health and remove it from the context of economic lifestyle.  We think material comforts contribute to joy and the more material comforts you have the happier you’re supposed to be.  Then, when somebody who has it all winds up being so miserable that they stay doped up all the time, or cheat, we explain their lack of joy away as mental illness, give them antidepressants, and tell them to spend some time reading Joel Osteen or Deepak Chopra.  “Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die” is not the way to Joy.  In fact, there are mental health consequences to living “the lifestyle of the rich and famous” and those consequences are worsened when we realize that that way of life is not the path to joy but rather leads to a profound lack of it.

Well, you might question why I would bring out an angry sermon by John the Baptist on a Sunday when we are supposed to be talking about Joy, but bear with me.  People were flocking to the prophet of God in the wilderness because their lives were so bad that they had no hope in anything other than a mighty act of God to fix it.  They were not happy people. The bulk of them were everyday people who were overtaxed and over-worked, scared not only about the future, but about what loss tomorrow may bring.  Even tax collectors and soldiers (law-enforcement), the upper-middle class were coming to John for answers, for hope and what did he do?  He called them a brood of vipers, a snake pit, who thought they could flee from the cataclysmic change that’s going to affect everybody when God acts, the people of God too.  Apparently, he didn’t go to the same preaching class I went to, but then again, how would my sermons be different if you weren’t paying me?

John actually gave this hope deprived, joy deprived people the way to joy.  The brood of viper comment aside, John gave them a glimpse of the joy-filled life that will be at the heart of the coming Kingdom of God.  It’s quite simple actually, something we learned in kindergarten probably.  If we have more than enough, then we share what we have with those who don’t have.  Don’t use our position of influence and privilege as a means to take more for ourselves which sounds a whole lot like don’t use your wealth to gain more wealth.  Be satisfied with what we get for what we do rather than using extortion to get more.  It’s quite simple…be satisfied with enough.  Be generous with what we’ve earned so that everybody has enough.  Don’t take more than we need.  

It’s interesting that they are in the wilderness and if you remember Israel’s wilderness wandering after God delivered them from slavery in Egypt, then you recall that God fed them on manna.  Every morning God provided them with this bread-like stuff that tasted like coriander.  They were supposed to collect only enough for that day and no more.  Any extra they collected would go rancid.  So it is with life at Banquet Planet Earth.  There is abundantly enough for everybody if everybody takes only enough for themselves to live on.  If we take more, rancidness occurs and it is occurring – Climate change, pandemics, poverty, wars, etc.  All this bad stuff is the consequence of our lifestyle of wanting to have more than enough.

To close, if we want to know more than fleeting glimpses of Joy like at Grandma and Grandaddy’s on Christmas Eve, then we have to accept the fact that true joy is tied to ‘economic justice’ - fairness, generosity and learning to live on enough.  The downside of this is that if everybody lived this way, the economy would crash and those who have everything would lose everything…but, the feast of abundance and resulting Joy will be permanent rather than fleeting.  Joy - that’s God’s promise for what’s coming with his Kingdom and he will bring it about, so it’s best we start living for it now.  Amen.

Shouting from the Backbench

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Luke 3:1-6

Doug was an Elder in a small Presbyterian church.  He at one time became quite motivated about finding an outreach project for his little church.  It just happened that he happened to meet the minister of the Presbyterian church in Puslinch, ON who was passionately involved in a newly founded organization that was a cooperative venture between First Nations Reserves in Northern Ontario and various organizations in Southern Ontario to help relieve poverty on the more isolated northern reserves.  

The organization had a unique approach.  It let the Reserves say what they needed and then it resourced those needs.  The typical protocol in these matters is that the government or some other organization tells the Reserves what the Reserves need and tells them to take it or get nothing.  When actual needs are ignored, the system remains paternalistic and nothing changes.

One of this organization’s success stories involved a Northern Reserve needing clean drinking water.  Government solutions were proving inadequate and slow…and yet the people still needed water like now.  Someone in the Puslinch church looked over at the Nestle water plant and said “They have water” and went and asked if Nestle would help.  Nestle did…by the truckload.  A common-sense solution to a sickeningly unnecessarily all too common problem. 

Inspired by such successes, Doug became more involved in this organization and so did his church.  For some reason known only to him, Doug decided to go to his local Member of Parliament to see if he could maybe possibly see if the government might maybe want to endorse such an ingenious way of helping people.  Doug asked his minister (me) to come along and together they had a very cordial meeting with the MP.  

Now get this, the MP said there was really nothing he could do about the problem.  He said, “I’m just a backbencher in the party and I don’t have a say in anything.”  Moreover, In the conversation the MP noticed that the minister had a Southern accent and offered to do what he could to help him become a Canadian citizen which amounted to nothing more than giving him paper copies of Citizenship documents and forms that are readily available online. 

The minister (me) left that meeting a bit astounded.  Here was a government official drawing a salary over three times his own, a member of the governing party of Canada (PC), elected to represent his constituents yet here he was saying he really could not represent or help anybody because he was a backbencher in his party and in Parliament.  Back benchers sit in the rear of the House and say little to nothing except maybe join in on the very adult heckling and hissing that happens in Parliament.  He was good for photo ops, but not for much else.  

This is troubling for a nation.  If any MP elected to represent the people of a constituency is effectively voiceless in Parliament, this means that in the end Canada is little more than a functional oligarchy, a nation ruled by a few who weren’t necessarily elected by the people but were simply powerful in their party.  How these few gain their power is always an interesting story.  Nevertheless, such is power.

Looking at Luke’s Gospel, it is interesting that he begins his account of John the Baptist’s ministry of preparing the way for the Messiah by naming “the few” in the land who had “the power”.  There were the Roman powers at the top: Tiberius, the Emperor; Pontius Pilate, the governor of Judea.  There were the Jewish home-grown powers appointed by Rome: Herod, his brother Phillip, and Lysanias.  And, there were the Rome-appointed Jerusalem Temple authorities: the High Priests Annas and Caiaphas.  This was the rule of one imposed by a few.  But, there’s also the few behind the scenes who have power over that one.  That’s how power works in an Empire.

It was during the rule of this band of cronies that the Word of God came to John the Baptizer out in the backwater region of the wilderness of Jordan. As we remember from Sunday School and Children’s Sermons of yore, John was a bit of an odd cookie.  He was a hermit, very hairy and dishevelled, wore clothes made of camel’s hair, and ate locusts and honey.  He was the son of a rural priest named Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth.  They were too old to have children but God gave them John, a child of promise.  And remember the wilderness?  For forty years after the Exodus God’s people wandered in the wilderness of Sinai and there learned to rely on God and believe his promises.  

In the scheme of how political change happened in the world of first century Israel John was a backwater, backbenching prophet.  He had no “power” at all in the government.  Yet, when prophets start talking about valleys being filled, mountains being brought low, the crooked being made straight, and the rough being smoothened they are talking about the people being empowered, the powerful being brought low, corruption ending, and life becoming better.  But, his own attempts to hold the powers that be accountable to the way God gave his people to live only got him arrested and, in the end, beheaded.  Regardless, the “grassroots” movement the grasshopper-eating backwater prophet started paved the way for Jesus, the Messiah, whose followers did in time destabilize the Roman Empire and change the world.  

John the Baptist didn’t do bad for a backwater backbencher.  If we think that his call to repent to those people of God flocking to him in the wilderness was simply a non-political matter of private religion, we are mistaken.  Moreover, if we think that following Jesus is just a private matter of personal faith, we are mistaken.  Following Jesus is a public matter that will involve confronting the “powers” from the backbench in backwater places. 

The people flocking to John in the wilderness were desperate people who were expecting their God, the God who had delivered them from Pharaoh out of slavery in Egypt, to deliver them from Roman domination.  John’s calling them from the wilderness of Jordan to return to the ways given them by God was a grassroots call to the people of God to stop participating in the elements of their way of life that fed on the Roman way of life and in turn start living as the faithful people of their God.  Faithful living was/is the way to prepare the way for the Lord to come and establish peace. 

We could learn something from what God was doing through John the Baptist.  The way to overthrow an Empire is to stop living according to the ways of that Empire. This is difficult because we ourselves have grown too accustomed if not addicted to the ways of the Empire.  We  have to change our loyalties.  Primarily, we must start doing as Jesus said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself” (Lk 10:27). 

John’s call to repentance was the call to the people of God to start acting like people of God and in so doing find that the Kingdom of God is near.  Love for God lived out looks like love for neighbour…even if and especially if that neighbour comes from Syria or Guatemala.  How different would this world be if we, the followers of Jesus, stopped with the Consumerism, the Materialism, the Militarism, the Patriotism, the Racism, the Individualism, and all those “ism’s” that make empires so strong and simply made a practice of loving our neighbours?  Especially those who are different and vulnerable?  Amen.

 

Anxious Times

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Luke 21:25-36

In the Biblical worldview, we live in an “in-between” time, the time between Jesus’ first coming to inaugurate the Kingdom of God and when he comes again to bring the Kingdom in its fullness, a day which culminates in resurrection and creation being made new.  The Christian Gospel, contrary to popular belief, is way bigger than how we get to heaven when we die.  It is ultimately about God’s reign breaking in from heaven and coming to earth culminating with Jesus’ return, Creation being made anew, resurrection, a great setting of things to right,…and “He shall reign forever and ever.  Hallelujah. Hallelujah.”  Jesus was indeed being quite literal when he taught us to pray “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done” …where?... ”on earth as it is in heaven.” 

Our reading here from Luke known as Jesus’ Little Apocalypse points us towards that event, that day.  Granted Jesus says what he says in as weird a way as he could say it with these images of eclipses (signs in the moon and sun and stars), roaring seas, the shaking of the heavens amidst times of great anxiety, confusion, and cosmic upheaval.  These things sound so big and scary.

But, don’t worry.  I’m not going to go freaky on you.  These images are what we could call apocalyptic code phrases.  There was a genre of literature popular in Jesus’ day that Bible scholars have dubbed “Apocalyptic.”  The word means “to reveal or unveil”.  The Book of Revelation is the best-known example.  It was a way of talking in public about political things current to their day that wouldn’t get you in trouble.  What you did was use coded images that your community of faith knew the meaning of but those in power did not. 

If Jesus were to say outright that the God of the Jews was going to put an end to Caesar and his false reign, he would in turn be tried for treason and leading a revolt and rightly sentenced to crucifixion.  Since Jesus couldn’t say such a thing outright he used this apocalyptic imagery to make his point to his disciples. Eclipses represent divine acting and judgment upon those in power.  The roaring of the seas is the chaos among people that erupts when regimes fall.  The shaking of the heavens is the catastrophic changing and dismantling of institutions that people believe will never change, things like empires, banking institutions, democracy, and even the Church.  

One of the deeper points that Jesus makes here that is cloaked behind the imagery is that when the Kingdom draws near, when God draws near to act in history, things on earth get quite wonky.  To say this in a more personal way, great teachers of Christian spirituality past and present often remark that when God draws near to us personally as individuals or draws us closer to himself, turmoil and trying times erupt in our lives and having come through those times we come to realize that we have grown in faith and been changed to be more Christ-like, but most of all, we’re just more aware of God’s presence with us.  This happens for whole congregations as well.  And what Jesus is indicating here is that this happens for nations and all of humanity.  When God draws near things get wonky and so Jesus says “Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near,…you know that the Kingdom of God is near.”

When God draws near, anxious times erupt.  It goes without saying that things are pretty anxious at present.  Economic concerns, the instability in the American political situation, the threat of a tariff war with the U.S., wars in the Middle East in which it seems like every step forward towards peace becomes a major disheartening and scary disappointment.  Changes in climate where storms are getting more severe.  Wildfires here and wildfires there.  We don’t feel it’s safe to let our children go out and run and play like we did as kids.  Anxiety, depression, and addiction are at epidemic levels.  All the while, for several decades now people have been abandoning the Christian faith left and right.  This may sound weird, but when God draws near we can safely say that the powers of darkness that are just out there behind the scenes can be expected to become all the more aggressive in lies and violence and orchestrating those things that come out of left field.  Jesus’ message here is when crazy overwhelming stuff is happening instead of burying our heads in the sands of anxiety, despair, and disillusionment, stand up and look around because God is somewhere in the midst of it.  God is drawing near to us, so we need to draw near to him.

Anxious times are the sign that we need to draw near to God because, and though it may not seem like it at face value, God is drawing near to us.  Jesus asks us to pray so that we may have the strength to escape the turmoil of the Kingdom drawing near and in turn find ourselves standing in his presence. 

It is my experience that we simply don’t get the importance of prayer.  In anxious times mostly what we see is people complaining, scapegoating people who are different, abandoning the faith, placing their hope in authoritarian figures.  We will do anything besides develop a deeper, more disciplined prayer life in which we open ourselves up to God’s presence.  When God draws near we need to draw near to God, but our inclination is to do completely the opposite; flee and become disillusioned and deceived.  There is a war going on right now and our only weapon is prayer.

 Prayer is the very foundation of living the lives that God has entrusted to us.  The popular Christian author Oswald Chambers who wrote My Utmost for His Highest once said, “Prayer does not fit us for the greater work; prayer is the greater work.”  We pray before doing things rather than understanding that prayer is what we are called to be doing always.  We are to live as those devoted to prayer, like monks and nuns. 

I bet you didn’t know it, but our Reformation roots hold that the everyday believer should live a life as devoted to prayer as any monk or nun does.  One of John Calvin’s main tasks of ministry in the Swiss city of Geneva where he pastored was to attempt to take the prayer-filled life that he had observed behind the walls of convents and monasteries and make it the way of life for the ordinary Christian.  Inside the walls of the monastery, the monks rose very early for morning prayer in which they prayed and read Psalms, and then ate and worked.  At mid-morning they prayed and read Psalms again.  Then around midday they had worship with communion and then worked some more.  In mid-afternoon they prayed and read Psalms again.  In the evening they had vespers and then again before bed they prayed and read Psalms.  Then at some point in the middle of the night they rose again to pray and read Psalms.  They also studied at some point in the day.  Calvin thought that all Christians, not just monks and nuns should follow that sort of a routine of prayer.

The Apostle Paul said, “Pray without ceasing.”  Many people try to train their minds to do just that.  Training the mind is crucial to living a sane and peaceful life.  If we do not choose to discipline our minds with prayer, we essentially let ourselves suffer or wallow in all forms of unhealthy thinking.  Therefore, the biggest part of living a devoted Christian life is disciplining our minds to pray and the rest of the Christian life will take care of itself and blossom.  Here’s a few suggestions on how to do that.

   In the Eastern Orthodox tradition they have the Jesus Prayer which they try to pray continually throughout the day.  “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me.”  They will pray that prayer over and over.  Months ago, we did a series on the Lord’s Prayer and I encouraged you to try to pray it continuously. 

Another way one might take down this road of continual prayer is the practice of the presence of God.  There was a Franciscan monk named Brother Lawrence who lived in the 1700’s who wrote a book chronicling his attempt to be aware of the presence of Jesus with him at all times.  Its title is The Practice of the Presence of God.  This practice was something I discovered back in my university days when one day it became inseparably clear to me that Jesus is with me always.  No prayers to be said, no bargains to be made, and even if I am in the midst of sinning, he is with me.  When Paul wrote in Romans 8 that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ he was not speaking of a metaphysical idea or some sort of conclusion that he arrived at by reason.  He was speaking of the unconditionally loving presence of Jesus with us through the Holy Spirit always.

Well, why all this talk about prayer?  Well, read the news.  With all that’s going on in the world the Kingdom of God is obviously drawing near.  Things are wonky to say the least.   Stand up.  Watch lest you miss something really wonderful that God is doing.  But more so…we Christians have a role to play in the drawing near of the Kingdom.  Hope comes alive in and through people who pray.  True strength, true grit, comes in and through prayer.  I know from my own spiritual journey that my struggles have been easier and I have grown as a person in Christ in the times that I have been a praying person. Living as prayerful people in a prayerful community is how God creates healing grounds in this anxious and confused world.  Jesus is breaking into the world with his Kingdom.  Prayer-filled Christian community is where he and his kingdom are most evident.  Friends, pray.  This world right now needs us to be praying.  Amen.

 

He Reigns in Truth

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John 18:33-38

A long, long, long, long time ago I was a Boy Scout and I will go on record saying that there are/were few organizations as effective as scouting at taking boys and girls and preparing them to be good men and women emphasis on the word “Good”.  It is sad that scouting like all civic organizations and similar groups that teach values is going the way of the dodo.  I was in Troop 73 in Waynesboro, VA.  We met every Thursday night.  Each meeting started with us standing in front of our flags, right hand up in the Scout Sign and saying the Scout Oath, “On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.”  Then, we would say the Scout Law: “A Scout is: Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent.”  I know that’s a little different than what Canadian Scouts say.

Looking at the Scout Law I think it is noteworthy that it starts with the trait of character known as being trustworthy.  Indeed, honesty is at the top of the list.  This creates the expectation that a scout can be counted on to tell the truth at all times to oneself and to others.  Apparently, telling the truth matters, or at least should I say it mattered.  I may be wrong but the only time I can remember lying being acceptable behaviour was those Liar’s Contests they would have at fairs and festivals.  People would spend all year baking up a tall tale for the Liar’s Contest, go on stage to tell it, and everybody was rolling on the floor by the time you were done.  These days Liar’s Contests seems to be what we call elections to public office.  The biggest liar wins the election but ain’t nobody rolling on the floor laughing.  Instead, people want to do violence to each other.  If people are not trustworthy, human community falls apart.  Trust is at the heart of human community, the heart of friendship, marriage, family; neighbourhood, business, towns, cities, provinces, and nations, and relationships between nations.  There is no peace without trust.  We need to know that those we rely on will not betray and lie to us.  The truth and telling it is important.

Looking here at our reading from John, we do best to truly take to heart just how politically centered this conversation Jesus and Pontius Pilate are having is.  It is about who has the right reign.  The charge against Jesus is at one and the same time one an accusation of blasphemy and treason.  The Jerusalem authorities brought Jesus before Pilate to be tried and put to death for his identifying/revealing himself as God, Son of God, and Saviour or Christ.  Pilate stood before Jesus as the representative of Caesar, the Roman Emperor, who himself made claims to be God, Son of God, and Saviour.  Caesar was a pretender whose power was a lie that was embodied in a very powerful military.  Jesus was the Truth before whom the Pretender would not stand except by means of proxy.  The real deal whose power was manifested in healing, setting people free from oppression, feeding the multitudes, and, above all, compassion.  If anybody had a rightful, true, and just reason to be called “King” it was Jesus.  This was Truth, reality, undebatable.

Take note of what Jesus does here in this politically charged conversation he is having with Pilate.  Jesus does not claim his kingship.  Pilate asks him if he was a king.  Jesus wants to know who told him that because the Jewish nation was certainly not calling him king.  His ragtag, motley crowd of on the verge of being disillusioned followers were the only ones doing that.  Pilate says a king is what your own people claim that you claim to be.  Jesus doesn’t deny it, but quantifies it by saying his reign, his realm, his kingdom is not rooted in this world; a fact made obvious by his followers not rising up in armed revolt to save him.  Pilate, thinking he’s got the cat by the tail, says, “So you are a king.”  Jesus points out that the only person who is saying that is Pilate and being a king is not why he has come into the world.  Jesus’ reason for being in this world is testifying to the Truth. Please note that we get our word “to martyr” from the Greek word for “to testify”.  Jesus is going to die for the Truth, for telling the Truth.  And Pilate then asks the perfect question, the most perfect of all questions and its really big, huge, the hugest of all perfect questions: “WHAT IS TRUTH?”

Let us take a minute to note the chess move, so to speak, that Jesus has made.  He has superseded kingship with telling the Truth.  Real power to reign is the power of telling the Truth.  Jesus tells the Truth.  Those who belong to the Truth listen to his voice.  His kingdom is found around, centered upon the Truth.  That’s very different from the way the kingdom, which is the power to rule, works in this world.  Let me describe how ruling in this world works.

Bob Woodward, an American Investigative reporter known for getting to the truth of the matter recently asked a politician who is well-known of late, “What is power?”.  The politician gave a very telling answer, “Power – and I hate to say it – is fear.”  It is no secret that the people who govern in this world are tempted to use intimidation to have power and they will inevitably use it.  Kingship in this world finds its power in fear and intimidation.  Jesus, on the other hand, reigns with the power of the Truth.  Those who listen to him belong to the truth.  

With great frustration, the kind of frustration that easily becomes futility, Pilate knowing the impossibility of ever hearing and recognizing the Truth within the system of fear, intimidation, and groveling for favours in which he lived and moved and had his being threw his hands in the air in an act of self-justification and asks, “What is Truth?”  One can’t help but feel for him.  He’s nothing more than a pawn, a middleman, the fall guy in all this.  As best as he can, he tries to wash his hands of the crime of killing the Truth, a crime for which he became notorious. 

What does the truth, testifying to the truth, look like?  In John’s Gospel there are seven instances of Jesus demonstrating his power to tell the Truth.  At a wedding in Cana, they ran out of wine.  There were empty jars there each holding forty or more gallons of water.  The jars held the water that Jews used for ritual washing before eating but they stood empty because that way of being religious was empty.  Jesus had the jars filled with water and he turned it into very fine wine.  Truth invigorates.  It is the life of the party, so to speak, when religion gives out.  

The son of a royal official in Capernaum was ill and near death.  The father begged Jesus to heal him.  Jesus told him his son was healed and sent him home.  The man found his son was healed at the exact time Jesus pronounced it.  Truth heals.

A hopeless paralytic lying beside a pool of water in Jerusalem, the pool of Bethesda, believed that when an angel rippled the water the first to jump in will be healed.  But he was unable to jump in because he was paralyzed.  Jesus asked him if he really wanted to be made well.  He said he did but other people always managed to get to the water first.  Jesus told him to pick up his mat and go home.  Suddenly finding himself healed, he picked up his mat and went home.  The Truth heals those hopelessly paralyzed in disability.

A crowd of over 15,000 was following Jesus around and at the end of the day they were in a barren place with no food.  Jesus told them to sit down and he fed them all with five loaves of bread and two fish that a little boy had given to the cause.  In the Truth there is abundantly enough for everybody.  No one has too much or too little.

Jesus sent his disciples out into the sea of Galilee in a boat.  He stayed behind to pray.  A great wind blew up making it impossible to move forward.  Jesus came walking to them on the water.  They were afraid for their lives.  He told them, “I am (the Hebrew name for God.”).  Don’t be afraid.”  He got into the boat and they got to where they were going.  The Truth quells fear even when it seems the unseen forces hidden behind creation are against us.  The Truth gets us unstuck and moving forward to where we need to be.

Jesus healed a man born blind, a man whom everyone was cursed by God for some hidden sin of his parents.  Jesus spit into the dirt and made some mud that he rubbed into the man’s eyes and sent him to wash in the pool of Siloam.  He found his way there, washed the mud off, and he could see.  He got kicked out of the synagogue because Jesus healed him on the Sabbath.  It didn’t matter for he now put his loyalty in Jesus, the Truth who gave him sight rather than the religious people who said he was cursed.  Seeing the Truth, we see Jesus.

A man named Lazarus, a close friend of Jesus, died.  Four days later, Jesus went to Lazarus’s heart-broken sisters and he wept with them.  He went with them to the tomb as if to grieve.  Instead, he had the stone rolled away.  In a great voice, he commanded Lazarus to come forth.  Lazarus came forth.  They removed the stinky graveclothes from him.  The Truth grieves but it also raises the dead.

It is Christ the King Sunday, the day we celebrate his reign over all creation.  We worship him today in a world that thinks that lying is the new acceptable norm, that intimidation and fear are the way to get things done, that escalating wars with more brutal weapons will somehow bring peace.  In this world, where is Jesus reigning?  Look for the Truth.  The Truth, Jesus, doesn’t lie or intimidate.  It’s not legalistic and judgemental.  The Truth loves our children.  The Truth heals.  The Truth frees.  The Truth feeds. The Truth calms.  The Truth gives sight.  The Truth restores.  The Truth knows the pain of grieving.  The Truth gives new life.  The Truth resurrects.  The Truth speaks.  Do you hear his voice?  Amen.

 

Why Stay?

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Mark 13:1-8

I can’t help but imagine what the twelve disciples must have thought and felt at this point in the journey.  They had left everything behind to follow this wandering, parable teaching, miracle working preacher who was proclaiming by everything he said and did that the Kingdom of God was at hand.  They themselves had even healed the sick and cast out demons.  They had traveled a long way in their three years together.  But something changed just a month or so earlier after Peter confessed that Jesus was indeed the Messiah.  Jesus stopped wandering from village to village and started off directly towards Jerusalem.  The healings became fewer and far between.  He taught less except to tell them they needed to be like children if they wanted to be in the Kingdom of God and that humbly serving one another is what would make a person great in the Kingdom.  Mostly, when Jesus did break the silence, it was to say that in Jerusalem the authorities would mock him and put him to death.

The day came when they finally arrived in Jerusalem.  Mark said the crowd following Jesus was greatly afraid.  No one knew what to expect…and then it started.  Jesus sent two of the disciples to get him a donkey (the most impressive and regal of all steeds) and he rode it into town just like a king would. (It was also likely that Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, was coming into Jerusalem about the same time mounted on a warhorse and surrounded by a legion of soldiers.)  No war started.  No armies of angels came.  Jesus just went to the temple and looked around.  As it was late, they left Jerusalem and went to Bethany to spend the night.  

The next day they returned to the temple and Jesus cursed a fig tree for appearing to be fruit bearing when it wasn’t.  Jesus got angry and ran the money changers and livestock vendors out of the table.  This angered the powers that be and they started looking for a way to kill.  Again, Jesus and his motley crowd left Jerusalem for the night.

The next day on the way back to Jerusalem the disciples noticed that the fig tree Jesus had cursed was withered.  He told them to believe in God and they could command mountains to move…but make sure you forgive everyone you need to forgive before you pray or your heavenly Father won’t forgive you.  Jesus spent the day successfully debating the religious authorities.  Then they sat down in front of the temple treasury to watch the people give.  Amid a charade of rich people throwing in large donations that cost them nothing, a widow put in her last two cents.  Jesus made note of her gift and they got up and left again.  

Coming out of the temple, one of the disciples looked back and taking note of this wonderful old building he said to Jesus, “Look Teacher, what massive stones and what magnificent buildings!” like any of us would do upon seeing a beautiful old church or one of those new Christian worship centers complete with a gymnasium and a coffee shop in the lobby.  Unimpressed, Jesus replied in a rather peculiar way as if he hadn’t even heard the disciple saying, “Do you see these great buildings?”  It was as if there was something the disciple was supposed to understand, but weren’t getting it.  “Not one stone will be left here upon another; every one will be thrown down!”  

Well, that shut everybody up for a couple of hours; until after they climbed the Mount of Olives and sat and stared across the valley of tombs towards the temple.  It seemed Jesus during those last days and hours rather preferred to sit and stare at things, rather than to be a man of action.  The silence finally ended when the four senior elders asked Jesus, “When will all this happen?  Will there be a sign to look for?”  I think they are really wanting to ask,  “What are you sitting around watching and waiting for?  What sign are you looking for?  When is the show going to start?  Messiah, when are you going to take your throne and commence your reign?”.  Jesus gave his classic reply, “Beware that no one leads you astray.  Many will come in my name saying, ‘I am’ and they will lead many astray.” 

If I were one of the disciples at that moment, I believe the irony of the moment would have been a little too much.  I would have had to say to him, “it seems that is exactly what you, Jesus of Nazareth, have done with us and here we have left everything behind to follow you.  How foolish could we be?”  That disillusion would have gotten even worse after Jesus was crucified.  Was he himself really the one who was just leading them astray?  

“Beware that no one leads you astray.”  What an ironic thing to say at that moment.  You would think he would say something like, “The sky will catch fire.  An army of angels will cleanse the city.  The dead in these tombs will rise and then we will go down and I will take my place as Messiah and establish the Kingdom.”  No, he basically says, “It’s going to be a while, there will be disasters and wars, they will suffer on his account but the Holy Spirit will be with them, political beasts are going to do heinous things, imposters will come in his name.  No one knows when the end will be. Just don’t let yourselves be led astray by people who claim they can do the things that only I can do.  Keep awake.”  I have to ask: why, at that moment, didn’t the disciples just walk away?  It seems Jesus is riding his pony on a boat out on the sea or something.  Why didn’t they just walk away saying, “Done!”?

A related question for us today would be why, in a culture where less than ten percent of the population regularly goes to church.  It was 67% just after WWII.  There’s a trend here and why aren’t we, you and I, following it?  Here’s some recent numbers.  In 2001 77.1% of the population checked the Christian box on the census.  In 2011 it went down to 67.3% and in 2021 53.3% and just less than 20% of those still participate.  I suspect that in 3031 the percentage will be in the low 30%.  It is likely the decline correlates to the death by old age rate among the general population.  The older generation is dying and the church along with it.  The younger crowd doesn’t want anything to do with organized religion of any kind.  In the midst of that, the percentage of those with no religious affiliation has crept over the 30% mark and is growing fast and most of these are people who have left the church in the last 20 years.  Dones become nones.  

Here’s something else to think about – ministers leaving the ministry.  In 2022 roughly 42% of ministers said were thinking about leaving the ministry.  Stress, loneliness, and political division were the three highest cited reasons.  It may be comforting to know that only 1% of ministers per year actually leave the ministry (Lifeway Research).  But not comforting and this may be hearsay, in the Presbyterian Church in Canada last May only three of the people who graduated from our three seminaries were looking to go into pastoral ministry.  All the while there’s a huge shortage of clergy as so many churches are too small to afford a minister.  

And about churches getting small, prior to Covid the national average of church closures was one per week.  I can guarantee you that the reason for those closures had little to nothing to do with people throwing their hands in the air and saying we don’t believe anymore.  If churches were businesses those small churches would have been closed decades ago.  The question to ask is not why they are closing.  That answer is obvious; old age.  The question to ask is why small churches persist for so long.  Why do people such as yourselves persist in coming back week after week?

Back to the Disciples, they didn’t walk away but rather stayed for everything that came next except for when Jesus got arrested.  They stayed because they had been with Jesus through so much and had seen him do things only God could and they had done some of these healings and exorcisms themselves.  They didn’t know what nor when the final coming of the Kingdom would be but they knew Jesus was for real and so they stayed.  It wasn’t just a matter of personal belief.

Looking at ministers again.  Why do ministers not leave the ministry even though they think about it? We know we’re called.  We’ve been around long enough to know the real hope that God really does work all things to the good for those who love him and that the things we go through aren’t for naught. God uses them to shape our character to be more like Jesus and so we endure.  Though this is a lonely job, we know we are not alone.  We sense God’s presence and hear the still small voice.  If something happens to hurt us, well for me, I know there are shoulders among my colleagues and in each of these congregations that I can and have cried on.  If I’m feeling lonely and getting down on myself, I just start making pastoral phone calls and have a laugh and catch up.  Moreover, there have just been too many things happen in my life that I can point to and say, “God did that.”  I know that Jesus is real and what he’s doing in this world through the presence and power of the Holy Spirit until he comes is real.  Satan tries to shake me on that but to no avail.

So, how about you folks? When everybody around you has all but walked away from Jesus and the church, why are you still here?  I think it’s because you know your Jesus.  He’s made his presence, his love, his hope real to you.  In a way unique to each of you, you also feel called.  The church is going through a down period now, a period of transformation.  It’s like Jesus has said, “There’s not a church building here that’s not going to be left empty.”  That very well may be the case.  Who knows?  The one thing I know for certain, is he is still with us.  But I also sense that the future of the church lies not in how well we do things inside the church that the church has always done.  We need to do those things out there.  Now more than ever we have to focus on how we go about reflecting Jesus to our neighbours, families, and out in the community.  We love each other deeply inside these walls.  We need to do the same outside these walls as best we can all the while inviting people to come.  Amen.

Two Cents Worth

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Mark 12:38-13:2

I went online the other day and searched for the origins of the phrase “my two cents worth.”  No one really knew.  Several sites pointed here to Mark’s Gospel (and Luke’s) as the earliest reference to the phrase, but not likely the origin.  Mark uses the widow’s “two cents worth” quite differently than what the phrase means to us.  A person’s “two cents worth” for us is usually their opinion.  We also use this phrase as a way to tone down our comments with a little humility or politeness.  For example, it is better to say, “if you want my two cents worth, that dress doesn’t bring out your best features” than saying “If you’re going to wear that dress, you best not stand next to any couches because people will mistake your rump for an end table.”  Another more rare use we have for the phrase is for indicating too much information.  I say to you “a penny for your thoughts” and you in turn give me “two cents worth”.  There are some who think the phrase most likely dates back to the early days of the British postal system when postage was two cents.  If you wanted to send your thoughts to someone, you wrote a letter and put a two-cent stamp on it, thus valuing the worth of your thoughts at two cents. 

            My two cents worth on the matter is that we shouldn’t point to the actions of this widow as the source of the phrase.  If we did, we would find that her “two cents worth” isn’t just an opinion.  It’s rather a powerful indictment of the hypocrisy of institutionalized religion.  The widow’s faithfulness cost her everything.  Her two cents worth was literally all she had to live on and here she was giving it to the establishment because that’s what faithful people did when they came to the temple.  Her meager gift which cost her everything was much greater than that of all the rich people who came and made a public display of their huge donations which were supposed to make them appear to be exceptionally faithful.  Yet in comparison to widow, their extravagant gifts really cost them nothing.

And consider where the money went.  The treasury money bought the long robes the scribes were wearing while they stood there giving long, meaningless, bereft of faith prayers on behalf of their wealthy patrons to honour them rather than God.  The temple itself looked great due to these ostentatious donations.  Even Jesus’ disciples are impressed.  A well-kept temple and a well-dressed priesthood made Israel and Israel’s God look good before all the other gods of all those other nations, so they believed.  But, what a waste of this widow’s last two cents.

When Jesus gave his two cents worth he pointedly noted how this widow and her two cents exposes the hypocrisy of the whole affair.  The scribes in all their empty, obsequious impressiveness were nothing more than devourers of the household means of many a truly faithful widow.  That offering box or treasury was there in keeping with Moses' command that the other eleven tribes of Israel support the tribe of Levi who were designated to be the priests and scribes.  The Levites who were not given an allotment of land when the Israelites first conquered the Promised Land and were dispersed among the other tribes like parish priests.  They were unable to support themselves.  The other tribes were to support them.  But, the Israelites were also supposed to support the widows and orphans and strangers in their midst.  This widow really shouldn’t have been giving anything to the Scribes.  They should have been taking from the treasury to provide for her.  Yet, her two cents only went to make them look better while they apparently wouldn’t give her a dime.  What a waste of her two cents worth!

 Yet, here this widow was giving everything she had probably hoping that God would notice and in turn bless her.  TV preachers and scam ministries are good at using that scam to manipulate people in times of financial desperation.  Give to my ministry and God bless you a hundredfold.   Well, God did notice her.  Jesus noticed her.  Her two cents worth would stand as the condemnation of that whole twisted system and be the reason for its destruction.  It did happen as Jesus said that not a stone would be left on top of another.  That judgement came to pass in 70 A.D. when the Romans destroyed the Temple. 

And...whatever became of this nameless widow?  We don’t know.  We only know that she is just one of those insignificant characters who show up only once in the Gospels to reveal what true fidelity to God is.  It is to give the totality of one’s life in faithfulness even if it appears by this world’s standards to be a waste of everything you have and are.  This widow gave her last two cents to God (unfortunately it went to support a sham) and that was her two cents worth.  In essence, she gave her whole life, her last little bit of security.  She put it all into what she believed to be the hands of God.  Just like Jesus did with his life when he took it to the cross. Faithfulness has to do with what we do with the “two cents worth” of the totality of our lives.  The rich, like everyone of us, gave from their abundance and it really didn’t cost them anything.  This impoverished widow gave everything she had.

I have to admit that I hear this widow’s “two cents worth” with fear and trembling.  Quite frankly, being a minister I’m one the Scribes.  I, like you, try to be faithful, but I pale in comparison to this widow.  Oh, (and to pat myself on the back) there was a time many years ago when I was a university student that I put my last fifty dollars in the plate to help pay for my church’s parking lot.  That was all I had until the next paycheck which was never enough to pay my bills.  There was also the time years ago in my last church when the year end credit card balance equaled what Dana and I had contributed to my employer, the church I was serving, that year because “ministers are supposed to set an example in giving for their congregations” and that we did.  That debt was in the thousands and it took a few years to get out from under it.  Interestingly, my employer’s bottom line began its downward spiral after that year because we, one of the largest giving units, had to stop contributing.  I feel rather strongly that ministers should not give financially to the congregations they serve.  It’s a “company town” way of doing things.  I give to PWS&D ministeries and some missionary friends currently serving in Jordan.

This Remembrance Day we should all be feeling like Scribes knowing that there are those who have given their lives or been maimed in body and spirit for us to have basic human freedoms.  Do we honour the sacrifices they and their families have made?  I look at our materialism and consumerism and the narcissism that plagues our culture and I don’t think "this" is what my grandfather suffered for in France and Germany as a machine gunner in World War II nor what so many of his friends died for.  We pay a lot of attention to remember those who served in WWI and WWII, but let us not forget the Korean Conflict, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the UN Peacekeeping missions.  Let us not forget the psychological injury our soldiers endure – the PTSD, the moral injury.  When the go to war they have to do and see horrible things which they find quite difficult to live with.  Let us not forget the families who have lost and who struggle to love someone who’s come home quite different because of war and horribleness.  

Let us not forgot and let us remember that remembering isn’t just a mental exercise.  Remembering means getting involved, making some changes that give continuing worth to the lives that have been lost due to war.  How can we live our lives differently in ways that are truly faithful and not just in appearance?  This widow was the prime example of what it looks like to love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength and it truly showed in what she did with what little means of security she had.  Can we find ways to do the same and love our neighbours as we love ourselves?  I personally think we need to start thinking and moving this way or not a stone will be left on top of another.   We need to truly start looking to the needs of our very neighbours.  We need to start thinking “we” rather than “me”.  Let’s not be afraid to waste our “two cents worth” on Jesus and his Kingdom because what we have in Christ is an invaluable “two cents worth” this world needs to hear.  Amen.

Fidelity's Reward

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Ruth 1:10-18, 3:1-5, 4:13-17

Fidelity is a word that I think we don’t hear much anymore.  One place that I think it oddly shows up is the financial world pertaining to investments.  The idea is that we take our money and we enter into an agreement with an investment specialist who gets paid to have our best interests in mind and we entrust our wealth to him/her and they will make it grow.  We can trust them because they make their money based upon how much they make our money make for us.  In essence, we can trust this investment specialist because we have bonded his or her skills, knowledge, and indeed their greed to work for us rather than to take advantage of us.  We have to trust that they won’t just take our money and run as does sometimes happen.  In proving faithful to us by seeking what’s best for us and our financial needs, the specialist is rewarded.  

Fidelity is also a word that shows up in the context of marriage.  Spouses bound one another on oath that they will set their own needs aside to seek what is best for the other rather than seek their own self-fulfillment or fulfillment with another.  Fidelity doesn’t pertain simply to the bedroom.  It is the whole of the relationship.  In fact, if you want to know what the biblical definition of love is, it is fidelity.  Fidelity goes beyond feelings.  Feelings come and go.  But choosing to remain faithful, choosing fidelity to another, when feelings have waned and even at times in the face of adversity, that is love.  If you read the Psalms, the two words that show up most frequently to describe God are steadfast love and faithfulness.  The two words together are fidelity.  God’s love for us is God’s fidelity to us.

The story of Ruth, the Story of Ruth is about fidelity and its reward. In a way it is like Job’s story, a sort of "lose it all, choose fidelity, get it all back” thing.  Yet, her story comes at it from a different angle.  Ruth’s story is more about fidelity to people, whereas Job’s was about fidelity to God.  Let me tell you a bit about her.

Ruth was a Moabite woman.  In the Bible, the Moabites are not viewed favorably.  They come from the bad side of the family tree so to speak.  The Moabites are not direct descendants of Abraham, but rather of Abraham's nephew Lot, if you remember him.  Well, Lot had two daughters who never married and were afraid they wouldn’t have children thus leaving Lot without descendants.  So, taking matters into their own hands, they got Lot oblivious drunk on two consecutive nights and had sex with him respectively and they each got pregnant.  One had a son whom she named Ammon, the father of the Ammonites.  The other daughter named her son Moab.  Because the Israelites and the Moabites shared borders and were always fighting each other, the writers of the Old Testament kept that story alive to tarnish the Ammonites and Moabites as being the children of incest.  Thus, there was considerable prejudice against the Moabites.  

It is surprising that in the continuing story of God’s people that Ruth even though she was a Moabite in the end became the great-grandmother of King David, Israel’s greatest king and the royal ancestor of Jesus.  This turn for the better came about as the result of Ruth’s simple choice of fidelity, her choice to be faithful to her mother-in-law Naomi.  Ruth is a reminder that we must be careful about looking down our noses at people because we never know what God has in store for them.

The story of Ruth begins with an Israelite family taking a turn for the worse into infidelity to their God.  They were a family who turned away from their God to try and save themselves from dying during a famine.  Hard times, famine, came upon the land of Israel.  In order to survive this famine Elimelech, his wife Naomi, and their two sons left Bethlehem, left Judah, left the Promised Land of their God, Israel’s God, to go to the land of Moab because things were apparently better there.  

Leaving the land was an act of infidelity.  Back in those days people believed that gods were tied to particular plots of land.  In the Promised Land, the god was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  The God known as Elohim or Yahweh, the warrior God who brought the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt and led them to conquer the land of Canaan, the land he had promised to give to Abraham, their ancestral father, and his descendants.  Elimelech, whose name interestingly means "my God is king", left his God and king to go to the land of another god.  That god's name was Chemosh, another warrior god like his God Yahweh.  In the land where Chemosh was god, there was no famine.  Apparently, the Hebrew God Yahweh was only good at making war and wasn't so powerful when it came to making rain come and crops grow.  So, Elimelech took his wife, Naomi, and their two sons and left for Moab where it seemed apparent that Chemosh could make crops grow.  To top it all off, in Moab his sons married Moabite women, an even greater act of infidelity.

The outcome of Elimelech's infidelity was that he and both his sons died leaving Naomi and his two daughters-in-law widowed and in grave circumstances.  Back then, the only honorable way for women to survive was either they had to be married or live with family.  Women were usually not allowed to own property for they themselves were considered to be property.  Without a man and his piece of land, a woman didn't have a chance.  Naomi, realizing that she was now widowed and in essence son-less decided to return to her homeland and to her God for her God, Yahweh, was now blessing the Promised Land.  The famine was over.  In the Promised Land she had family who could help her.  Elimelech’s infidelity to Yahweh, his moving to the Land of Moab, the land of the other god Chemosh, left Naomi being nothing more than a victim of someone else's poor decision.

Naomi decided to turn back to her God and head back to her homeland.  She tells her two daughters-in-law to go back to their own mothers’ houses because she could not promise them any security.  At least there in Moab, there in the land of their god Chemosh, they had a secure way to survive among their people and families.  If they were to leave and forsake their god as the family of Elimelech had done with Israel’s God, Chemosh might turn against them as Yahweh had turned against Elimelech.  One daughter-in-law, Orpah, turned back.  But Ruth for no other reason than love and loyalty to Naomi, something we call fidelity, Ruth decided that no matter what she would go with Naomi to Judah.  This act of fidelity by a young woman maybe not even yet seventeen or eighteen sets the stage for God's means of salvation for all humanity.  She becomes the great-grandmother of king David, the royal ancestor of Jesus.

Ruth's act of fidelity was very involved.  It was a turn for the better.  It required her to become a completely different person.  She had to forsake her family identity and become Naomi's family.  She abandoned her people to become one of the Hebrew people.  She turned away from her god to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  

Though it was a turn for the better, this act of fidelity came with great risk.  There was no guarantee that Naomi's family would accept this foreigner…this Moabite.  If they didn’t, she had no real alternative.  There was no guarantee that the Hebrew people would not treat her with prejudice.  Could she dare to hope that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would bless her as she was not one of “his people” but rather a child of Moab?  

Well, in the end Ruth's act of fidelity has a reward.  Naomi's skill at matchmaking leads to Ruth marrying Boaz, a wealthy kinsman of Elimelech.  She and Naomi live happily ever after.  The son of her son’s son became Israel’s greatest king.  Further down the line, a grandson of hers would be Jesus, the Messiah, Son of God.  Fidelity has its reward.

The story of Ruth is a powerful one for it makes us ask ourselves some difficult questions.  The first one is simply to what extent are we willing to exercise fidelity towards God, towards Jesus?  Are we willing to stick with him through those times of proverbial famine - when our relationships are sour, when our kids are going their own way, when money is tight, when other people persecute us?  Do we trust God to see us through the tough times or do we start looking out for ourselves?

Our second question pertains to our fidelity to others.  We live in a culture that teaches us to be faithful to ourselves over and above fidelity to others.   We like to misinterpret Shakespeare’s character Polonius who said: “To thine own self be true.”  We mistake “true” there as meaning fidelity rather than honesty and think it means to put ourselves before others, to be faithful to ourselves above being faithful to others.  Polonius was giving advice to his son who was leaving home and it was to be honest with himself and that will help him to be honest with others.  That’s a far cry from speeches that turn up at High School graduations in which this line is quoted and interpreted as follow one’s own dreams, seek one’s own happiness, above all else.  Put fidelity to self before fidelity to others.  This is why marriages and families are disintegrating, addictions are rampant, volunteerism and community involvement have fallen by the wayside, civic organizations and churches are a thing of the past, and mental health crises are off the scale.  We are miserable because we have misplaced our fidelity.

Ruth presents us with the challenge that it’s highly probable that the happiness everyone seems to be seeking these days can’t be found in focusing on being faithful to oneself as a matter of first course.  Ruth’s story demonstrates that fidelity to God and to others is blessed with contentment.  Fidelity has its reward.  Amen.

 

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2 Timothy 3:14-4:5

In 1967 a scientist by the name of G. R. Stephenson conducted a study on some rhesus monkeys that revealed a very human-like pattern of behaviour.  What exactly the experiment was is lost to time but the popularized version goes like this.  He put five monkeys in a cage, suspended a banana from the ceiling, and put some stairs under it.  Every time one of the monkeys tried to climb the stairs to get the banana all the monkeys were sprayed with very cold water.  The monkeys soon learned to leave the banana alone.  He then replaced one of the monkeys with one that hadn’t been sprayed.  It, of course, went for the banana and as soon as it attempted to climb the stairs the other monkeys attacked it.  It learned not to go for the banana…but not why.  They then replaced a second monkey.  The same thing happened.  Surprisingly, the first “new guy” also joined in on the attack…but not knowing why.  Stephenson did this until all five monkeys were replaced.  They all repeated the attack behaviour…without knowing why.  Then, they introduced more new monkeys to the same result.  Without knowing why, the monkeys continued to prevent each other from taking the banana.

A young girl was helping her mother cook the Christmas ham.  They unpackaged the ham and the mother cut the ends off of it before putting it in the pan.  The young girl asked why she did that.  Her mother said, “That’s how my mother taught me to do it.”  When her grandmother arrived, the young girl asked her why they needed to trim the ends off the ham.  Her Grandmother said, “That’s the way my mother showed me to do it.”  Great-Grandmother arrives for Christmas dinner and the young girl, wanting to get to the root of the matter, asked her why she trimmed the ends off the ham.  Great-Grandmother says, “Oh, the pan I used was too small for a full size ham so I had to trim it down a bit. 

Well, these two stories are popular among that group of people known as congregational redevelopment experts.  They are examples of that dreaded pattern of behaviour that congregations get into called, “The way we always done it.”  The experts seem to believe that the reason congregations haven’t been growing the last four decades is that they have gotten out of step with the culture around them and need to change.  So, they go to congregations and tell such stories.  Then, predictably, they dish out the timeless definition of insanity: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again each time expecting a different result.  Then, predictably, the consultants make the threat that if a congregation doesn’t change, it will die.  Then, predictably, the congregations do nothing.

The redevelopment experts seem to think that calling a congregation insane and then threatening them with death will spark a congregation to make some changes to adapt to the world around them and thrive. Oddly, I have noticed that it’s the congregational redevelopment experts who might be insane.  They seem to keep expecting different results as they continue to do and say the same things over and over to congregations who in the end just continue to do the things they’ve always done.  The most disillusioning field of ministry to be in today has to be congregational redevelopment. 

Personally, I have been in the ministry now for 27 years  toying around in the field of congregational redevelopment for roughly 24 years with a doctorate and a couple of other pieces of paper that say “Certified In” to back me up.  But, I guess in an effort to preserve my sanity, I have come to the conclusion that “doing things the way we’ve always done them” isn’t really a bad thing just so long as no one gets hurt.  If like monkeys we pound on people, especially new people, every time they want to try something new, then there is a problem.  But, if there are things we do and ways of doing things that have become part of who we are, then that’s who we are.  They are part of what makes us to be us.  

 What’s more, I think most new people, what very few there are, who come into a congregation come expecting to learn that congregation’s traditions and ways of doing things.  One doesn’t marry into a family expecting them to do things in a way suitable to me.  It’s best to learn the way they do things.  It’s part of who they are.

The problem with people not coming to church anymore isn’t that congregations keep doing the same things the same way they’ve always done them not understanding why.  The problem is that an institutional expression of faith is not something the culture we live in has any desire for and there’s nothing we can really do about that.  For the most part, congregations and the individual Christians who make them up by doing the things they’ve always done actually continue to do a lot of good in their surrounding communities. 

For example, you folks…Three years ago when Williamsford flooded this congregation put over $15,000 towards the cause of helping people rebuild and that’s not even counting how you as individuals helped your neighbours.  You pray for each other.  You check in on each other.  You’re there for each other through the good and the bad.  If there’s a death, you’re there with arms wide open to comfort.  The dinners you put on give the community an opportunity to come together that wouldn’t be available if you weren’t here.  This congregation and each of you are assets in this community in the name of Jesus.  If this is just doing what you’ve always done, then keep doing it.  Indeed, well done!

Paul wrote to Timothy here saying, “Continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it.”  Timothy apparently had a pretty good knowledge of the Old Testament and how it pointed to Jesus and his kingdom and particularly the way of unconditional, sacrificial love that Jesus commanded of his disciples.  Timothy had learned a lot in that respect.  Yet, book learning isn’t exactly the type of learning Paul is talking about here.  Rather, it’s the type of learning where someone takes you under their wing so you can learn what you need to learn by seeing it embodied in your mentor…and Scripture is helpful for that.  If I were to offer a translation of what Paul said here, it would say, “Continue on in the things that you learned through discipleship and to which you are observantly loyal, keeping in mind the character of the person who discipled you.”

  What Timothy learned is the Way of Jesus.  He didn’t learn this by studying the Bible.  He learned it from his mother and some other Christian role models in the congregation he grew up in, and from Paul.  And so, Paul tells him to keep those people in mind meaning that by reflecting on their character and the Jesus way of life they modeled he would continue to grow in Christ himself and be able to teach and lead others in the Jesus way, equipping them for ministry…and of course Scripture (back then it was only the Old Testament) was helpful in that task.  

We live in a day when people “have turned from the truth and wander away to myths”.  This day and time people more than ever need us to continue being and doing the things we’ve always done.  So, continue to be not just role models but Jesus models to your families and neighbours, always ready to give an account for the love that’s in you.  Don’t be afraid to say “My mother taught me to be like Jesus, so did my Sunday School teacher sixty years ago, so that’s why I do what I do.”  Moreover, don’t be afraid to invite people to church assuming that they won’t want to come. 

Churchgrowth.org conducted a poll as to why people start attending a church.  2% said it was advertising.  6% said a minister invited them.  Another 6% said it was because of an organized visitation program (They must have been JW’s).  The rest, a whopping 86%, said it was because a friend invited them.  A personal invitation from a respected friend goes a long way.

So, continue on in doing the things you’ve always done.  Continue being disciples of Jesus in front of your families and your friends.  Keep inviting them to come.  We don’t know when the Spirit of God is going to again begin to get people to hunger for Jesus and Christian community.  But the day will come.  So, keep the light on.  Amen.