Listen to the Voice

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Luke 2:1-20

We all have our fears, both rational and irrational.   Anything involving heights is likely to freeze me up, standing on a roof, flat roof is ok but a slanted roof…it’s l’appel du vide, the call of the void.  I feel an impulse to go ahead and roll off.  Jet planes are a flying coffin.  Those are irrational fears.

There are likewise fear inducing things that happen that leave us shaking in our boots.  Parents don’t scream at each other in front of the kids.  It’s traumatizing.  It’s been just over fifty years since I listened to my parents go at and I still want to run and hide when two people argue loudly and I avoid it myself at all costs.  I’ve been physically assaulted twice in my life and so I take karate.  Those are fear inducing things that leave life scars.  

Life changes can cause us some fear.  What to do after high school is fearful.  Getting married, having kids, taking out a mortgage, serious illness, surgery, unemployment, divorce, irrational presidents, retirement; these are fearful things that cause us anxiety.  The big changes in life don’t come without fear.

Then there’s this sort of thing that happens and I’ll do my best to describe it.  It may just be a guy thing, I don’t know.  So, it’s nighttime, dark, you’re sitting on the hillside by a fire with your buds watching over the livestock.  You’re joking and telling stories about how y’all fought off lions, wild dogs, and bears, and pushy neighbours all the while and though it seems you’re having fun, your ears are still attuned to hear every snapping twig out in the darkness of the void.  And then it’s, “While shepherds watched their flocks by night, all seated on the ground, the angel of the Lord came down and glory shone around.  ‘Fear not,’ said he for mighty dread had seized their troubled mind; “Glad tidings of great joy I bring to you and all mankind.”  

An angel, I don’t know if you folks have ever seen an angel.  I haven’t either, but from what I’ve deduced from the Bible, they don’t always look like attractive, red-headed Irish women or have the angelic, bluesy voice of Della Reese.  The Greek version of the story says they were a-feared with phobon megon.  Phobon like phobia and megon like mega, bigger than huge.  They were a-terrored with megaphobia.  That’s as scared as you can get.  Most people need a change of clothing for that.  This isn’t like the fear of flying.  It’s what you feel when your plane starts falling out of the sky.

“Fear not,” the angel said.  “Be not afraid,” is another way of saying it.  Did you know that “fear not” is the most frequently recurring command in the Bible.  100 times in that wording and if we count commands like “Take heart” or “Have courage”, we’re looking at roughly 300 times.  Now personally, I think it would be highly inappropriate for an angel of the Lord to show up out of nowhere to these shepherds with megaphobia in its wings, scare them to death, and then tell them to not be afraid.  If you’ve ever come across someone out of control with fear, telling them to not be afraid or to calm down is the most ludicrous thing you can possibly do.  I’ve been rappelling before and froze up just as I leaned back over the edge and a few steps down.  I could not move.  What got me going again was the calmness of the instructor saying “listen to my voice, just listen to my voice, I’m here” and when he had my attention, he said, “Here’s what I want you to do, one step, one step at time, just focus on my voice, one step.”  I unfroze and made it down.  Would I do it again?  If I had to.  And I would do it knowing I would likely freeze up and that’s okay, but I would also know what to do.

Back to the angel, from my experience when the message, the command, from God is “Be not afraid” when in the midst of our getting harrowed by life, those words aren’t empty.  The peace of Christ, the peacefulness of God’s presence comes along with the words.  The still small voice heard that the prophet Elijah heard while afraid for his life and hiding in a cave afraid fleeing from evil King Ahab and his evil wife Jezebel.  The voice that said, “You’re not alone.  I’ve 7,000 faithful servants in Israel to stand beside you. Go back and take those royals to task and anoint a new king on the way.”  It’s the same voice that told the Psalmist, “Be still and know that I am God, the one who ends wars on earth.”

The voice of the angel brought joy to those shepherds who were a-fearing for their lives.  He told them their Saviour, their Deliver, was born and to go to Bethlehem and see the baby, born in a barn and laying in a feeding trough, the same likely conditions in which they came into the world.  Peace on earth, God was acting – through a baby born to a family in some troubling circumstances.

We live in some fearful times right now.  Russia’s Foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov said back in July that we are in World War III.  As far as Russia is concerned, we very well may be.  The US is not at present a reliable ally for world peace.  Most of the political rhetoric and the response to it sounds like pre-WWII stuff.  Europe, Canada, and a good bit of Asia have increased defence spending and are arming up, preparing for the worst.  The global economy, which was recovering fairly well after Covid, is grinding to a halt.  It’s amazing how much things can change in a year.  Our young people are not being given any example at all of what constructive political discourse, much less political participation, looks like.  All they see is adults who should have gotten off the scene years ago staying around and clinging to power for money’s sake.  If you’re a young person trying to get a start today, I hope you can find some hope. 

It’s like we are rappelling down a cliff and have leaned back over the edge to start down but have suddenly frozen up.  Where’s the voice for us to listen to?  We’ve all likely got a nativity scene at home that holds special memories for us.  Like the shepherds, we visit it with nostalgia and some holy awe set upon us as well.  Let us focus on the one that’s centered there.  The baby Jesus, he’s the Word for us to listen to.  The Word who calls us to focus on love expressed through unconditional faithfulness, who calls us to take the risk of being vulnerable, of listening, of generosity, of showing kindness and hospitality.  It’s the voice that calls us to prayer and to sit in stillness before we do anything else.  It’s the voice that says “You are my beloved.  I won’t leave you or betray you.  I am with you always.”  Fix your ears on hearing the voice of God’s Word – Jesus.  He is the way to true life.  Amen.

  

Love Is Faithfulness

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Matthew 1:18-25 

I’ll step out on a limb here and admit that I wanted to give this sermon the title “Man Up” but instead I decided to call it, “Love Is Faithfulness”.  “Man Up” in the last few years has apparently changed in meaning from the way I originally heard it.  As a phrase, it originated years ago in the sports world, I think, as a way of saying put a team together and step out on the field.  When I first heard it getting used, it was in the context of telling young, deadbeat, toxic men to step up and take responsibility for their lives which they had made a mess of.  But now, apparently the phrase has been taken over by the toxic masculinity camp to encourage particularly white men to recover their John Wayne-Caveman masculinity defined by domination that looks like “I did it my way”.  So, I chose not to go with that and use words I think are more fitting to what it is to be a man and not only a man but also a woman, and indeed what it is to be truly and fully human – “Love is Faithfulness”.  

Now before anybody gets their knickers in a twist, yes, I do realize I’m about to start talking about what it is to be a man on the Sunday when, traditionally, it is the voice of Mary that we should be hearing as she sings her “Magnificat”, a song about God’s great upheaval of the oppressive “way things are” through her son Jesus, the Son of God.  I should be preaching on the God-given right of women to have a voice and the God-given right of women to lead not only in the Church but in society as whole and especially in the family.  

No, I don’t mean to take away Mary’s voice and her Magnificat but there’s a song that seems to be getting a resurgence these days.  It goes: “Boy the way Glenn Miller played songs that made the Hit Parade.  Guys like us, we had it made.  Those were the days.  And you knew who you were then.  Girls were girls and men were men.  Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.  Didn’t need no welfare state.  Everybody pulled their weight.  Gee, my old LaSalle ran great.  Those were the days.”

I’m sure you remember that as the theme to the television show “All in the Family.”  Its lyrics point us back to the good ole days of the 1930’s and there are some sexist and other not so good societal undertones to it.  Herbert Hoover was president during the Great Depression and he apparently thought that people picking themselves up by their bootstraps and tariffs would cure it.  The tariffs and the ensuing trade war made the depression worse and longer lasting for the whole world.  In the show you had Archie Bunker, the toxic, racist, bigoted, 9-5 factory working, old school man.  Standing beside him was his unquestioning ever-faithful wife Edith, a stereo-typed housewife whom he affectionately called “Dingbat” and whom he truly loved as best as he could.  They had a daughter Gloria who for a “Little Goil” she was a very liberated, out-spoken, feisty woman.  Gloria was married to Michael Stivic, a man of Polish descent whom Archie called “Meathead” along with some other ethnic slurs.  Their family dynamic was a tug and pull between old and new and conservative and liberal values.

The character Mike (played by Rob Reiner who was tragically murdered this week) was meant by the writers to give North America a new definition of what it is to be a man.  He was emotionally sensitive and talked about his feelings and tried to bring awareness to the pink elephants in the room.  He treated Gloria as an equal.  He even let her be the primary bread-winner.  He was an atheist pacifist who protested for the rights of others, all the while being typecast as a whiney academic who was debatably emasculated.  

All in the Family was iconic and was instrumental in the change that was coming about in North American culture due to the Civil Rights and Feminist movements.  But it left a bit of a hole when it came to a definition of what it is to be a man.  Yes, men like Archie Bunker had to and still have to go but the new definition of what it is to be a man put forth by Michael was lacking.  Foremost in my opinion, it lacked faith which I define as a primary fidelity to God which shapes the rest of life.  This left the keys to the kingdom of the Old Man upstairs in the hands of the likes of Archie Bunker.  Societally, this has held true as misogyny, racism, and disdain for immigrants seems to keep such a firm death grip in conservative and nationalist forms of Christianity, particularly in this nebulous thing known as Evangelicalism.  In my opinion, the writers of All in the Family would have all but nailed it if they would have had Michael going to a female clergyperson seeking support and prayer.  It would have been especially great if she were The Vicar of Dibley, but that would be asking too much.

40 very odd years later in the wake of All in the Family, I think a generic definition of what your typical guy is like was said very well by a Mexican man named Hector in an article from the Guardian about five years ago in a series of articles called The State of Men.  He said: “I can cook, clean, buy tampons for my wife or daughter, wear pink, cut down a tree, split logs, fix my own car and can always make time to listen to my wife or children when they need me. I am a man that embraces the qualities that both sexes contribute to a relationship. By not conforming to the gender paradigm imposed on us as children, I’ve been able to enjoy life in a more open and fulfilling fashion.”  Notice, there’s no mention of faith.

There was a book written in 2011 by David Murrow that attempted to answer the question of why men are largely absent from the church.  Its catchy title was “Why Men Hate Going to Church.”  Murrow said it’s because the church is too feminine.  His solution was simply to make the church more masculine, but his definition of masculine was a bit stereo-typically old school.  Personally, I don’t think he hit the nail on the head as to why men don’t come to church and I think with the current near-extinct state of the church, the point is probably moot.

So, what is it to be a man?  Joseph might give us a clue or two.  We meet Joseph here in the context of having to deal with a difficult real-life situation where it appears that his wife-to-be has been unfaithful, the evidence of which was she was pregnant.  Joseph was probably into his 30’s and Mary at most 15 and yes, we don’t like the sound of that.  The marriage was probably arranged.  They lived in Nazareth which archeology tells us was probably a very conservative, Jewish small town with somewhere between 500 and 2,500 people.  Joseph was a faithful, practising Jew who worked with his hands who was looking forward to being a husband and a father.  But then, Mary was suddenly found to be with child, his hopes were dashed.  

In a town the size of Nazareth it would have been difficult for that to be handled discreetly.  He had some options.  A “real” man could have acted all offended at such an assault on his honour and publicly spurned her and she would likely have been stoned for her infidelity.  But Joseph didn’t go that route.  It seems he was aware that infidelity didn’t play a role in the pregnancy.  If she had been raped, it would have been cruel for him to make a scene over it.  So, he decided to handle it as quietly as possible; simply call off the engagement and Mary goes to live with a distant relative for a while.  He could also have just said the baby was his and they had gotten prematurely involved, but there would always be whispers and I think Joseph was fearful of the gossip.  

Well, with the decision made, he laid down to sleep and has one fantastic dream that changes everything.  Mary’s baby truly was an act of God.  This child was “the One” who would save God’s people and apparently God was calling him to be the father.  Faithful Joseph, without conditions, put fear aside and went ahead and married Mary, and raised the child as his own.  Upon hearing in a dream that King Herod (boo, hiss) wanted to kill the baby, he took his family and fled to Egypt where they lived as “illegal immigrants” until Herod died and they were able to return to Nazareth.  

Joseph was loyal to God before anything else and that flowed into the type of husband and father that he was.  Joseph chose to love and to show compassionate understanding in difficult circumstances.  His character shone through unconditional loyalty, through faith, faithfulness.  He knew that with God’s help he need not fear come what may.  He found honour and love in protecting Mary and her reputation amidst her very vulnerable state and in taking responsibility for a child that was not his own.  

Joseph did what God asked him to do and there he discovered that love is faithfulness, unconditional faithfulness.  What is it to be a man?  I think it is to do what God asks us to do: love by showing unconditional faithfulness.  Finally, since I can’t say “man up”, I will say real men take up their crosses and follow Jesus.  Amen.

 

Beyond Disillusionment

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Matthew 11:2-11; Isaiah 35:1-10

So, there’s John the Baptist, in prison, more than a wee bit disillusioned I would think.  The Empire struck back at him, one could say.  King Herod and his wife, Herodias, who was also his brother’s wife, often rode past where John preached there in the wilderness by the Jordan River.  There were many mansions of the rich and famous in the area overlooking the Jordan Valley.  John liked to hold the two of them to account for their adultery whenever they passed.  So, Herodias, not liking this prophet of God meddling in her morality, got Herod to arrest him.  John was not under a death sentence, but it was for sure that he would rot in prison unless Cousin Jesus, if he was the Messiah, got on with it.  

I say “if” because I think that even to John the Prophet Jesus was a bit of an enigma.  Jesus didn’t live up to the expectations of what the Messiah was supposed to be.  Faithful Jews were expecting an overthrow of their Roman occupiers and a clean-up of their corrupted royals and temple authorities.  But Jesus didn’t fit that bill.  He just healed people, had some great debates with the religious authorities, cast out demons, pronounced forgiveness of sins...and he kept company with all the wrong people (whores, revenuers, and fishermen).  To the powers that he was supposed to overturn, Jesus seemed to be more like a source of entertainment and a bit of a blasphemer than the One who was to bring in the Kingdom of God; though the size of the crowds was concerning.

So, John went and did what many a pastor goes and does about mid-career when ministry hasn’t gone the way you expected.  He sent out a hotline to Jesus wondering what the holdup was.  You see, it’s a difficult thing to come to grips with the troubling reality that God does what God does…or doesn’t do, and it seldom is what we want and expect to happen.  John sent some of his own disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you the One, the Messiah who is coming, or should we wait for another?”  Jesus told them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see.”  And just to make sure they got it right, Jesus gave them a list of things that he was doing, things that the prophets of old and particularly Isaiah foretold that the Messiah would do. 

So…what did these disciples of John hear?  In my imagination John’s disciples heard the sound of people praising God with great joy, a sound so loud that it seemed to be the voice of all creation resounding in joy at the arrival of its Saviour. If you have ever heard Middle Eastern people when worship comes on them, you know what I mean.  It is emotional, loud, and powerfully joyful.  If you are the type who hears the sound of colours, it was like the wanton wasteland of the dry wilderness becoming lush, breaking forth and blossoming like the dry riverbeds in the Palestinian wilderness in Spring just after the end-of-winter flooding…bright purples, pinks, yellows, whites (I’ve seen that and it’s beautiful.) 

So, if that’s what John’s disciples heard, what did they see?  What could have caused all that loud praising?  Well, Jesus doing what God himself said he would do when he himself came to deliver not only his people but more so all of his creation from oppression by sin and death.  Weak hands were strengthening. Unstable knees were steadying.  Jesus was opening the eyes of the blind and unstopping the ears of the deaf.  He was making the lame to leap like deer and loosing the tongues of the mute so they could praise.  He was cleansing lepers and even raising the dead.  Jesus was sending out his own disciples ahead of him and they did these things too as if to make a highway in the desert so that God’s people could come to him.  Joy was overtaking those people.  Sorrow and sighing were fleeing.  John’s disciples were seeing and hearing Isaiah 35 manifesting all around Jesus everywhere he went.  What better news could there be for the poor in the land than these signs of “Immanuel” – God is with us!?

Jesus told John’s disciples to go report what they hear and see and also sent them back with a little kick in the pants for John.  Tell John, “Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”  If I had to paraphrase that, it would be, “John, I am who I am and I will do as I do.  I may not be doing what you think ‘God’ ought to do.  But I am ‘God with you’.  Keep being faithful, John.”  

I can relate to John.  Faith in Jesus can be quite disillusioning.  We want a God who does what we think God ought to do, but God does what God is going to do in what to us seems like a test of patience as God goes about working all those things to the good for those who love him.  It is especially difficult when suffering is involved.  As a minister, I’ve walked with many people through some very trying and undeserved illnesses praying all the way that God would act and heal them, yet God didn’t.  Instead, what God more often does is come alongside the person he’s calling home and gives peace.  Instead of fear there is the peace of Christ.

When I think of the present circumstance of the world today, I get really spooked.  The environment of planet earth is at the tipping point.  The population of species homo sapiens is reaching the point of being unsustainable on this planet.  The political and economic destabilization that has been inflicted upon the world by the last American election.  The economy is great for the very rich, but the day will soon come when economic disparity will catch up with us and the Recession of 2008 will seem mild to what’s coming.   I want Jesus to come and be King Jesus right now.  I don’t want to live in a dystopia where billions of people starve to death and there are epidemics and wars.  Then there’s the state of the Church.  My outlook on life has been profoundly affected by the dramatic decline of the Church.  I am not seeing the Kingdom of God grow as I hoped it would through my work.

All things considered it would be quite easy to be disillusioned with the whole God/Jesus thing.  If it were not for one thing, the blatant fact that God is with us.  In patience and in prayer the presence of the Lord is with us and there is a joy that comes with that.  These Advent themes of Hope, Joy, Peace, Love are all the effects of Jesus being with us and he has promised to be with us to the end of the age when he finally comes.  To know ourselves to be the beloved children of God in Christ upon whom he has rested his Spirit is something to be joyful about this day and always.  Where the presence of the Lord is, the lame leap, the blind see, the deaf hear, the mute speak, the dead are raised.  Whether literally or spiritually, where Jesus is present, healing happens; and there is the silent sound of all creation joyfully worshipping. Amen.

 

Hospitality and Peace

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Isaiah 11:1-10; Romans 15:5-7

World peace, when I hear that combination of words it reminds me of Sandra Bullock in the movie Miss Congeniality. She played the role of Gracie Hart, a very tomboyish FBI agent who went undercover at the Miss United States Beauty Pageant to capture a terrorist who dubbed himself “the Citizen”. When she received her orders to go undercover Gracie expressed her disdain for beauty pageant contestants as “stuffed bikinis who want world peace”.  She was making fun of how beauty contest contestants are stereotyped as answering "heavy" questions that are meant to make their intelligence shine with “light” answers. The host will ask, “What is the one thing you want most in life?” to which the standard answer is “world peace”.   With a bit of humour, later in the movie when Gracie is asked that sort of question, she pauses dramatically as we expect her to rant on her view of beauty contests.  Yet, she bites her tongue and says, “world peace”.  

Well, these days we got to wonder if world peace really is only a “light” answer to a “heavy” question in beauty contests?  Seriously, the way the world has seemed to be teetering on the edge of a third world war this past year as greed, power lust, and a desire to control the supply of the rare earth minerals needed for future “green” energy sources have trumped rationality and common civility.  The Industrial Revolution didn’t come upon us free of warring over control of resources.  Should we not expect that the Green Revolution will come about in the same way?  Sorry to sound like a conspiracy theorist but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Inspector Brackenreid on the Murdoch Mysteries, it’s “Follow the money”.  There’s a lot of money in rare earth minerals.  Moreover, if there’s anything I’ve learned from Dr. Gregory House from the medical drama “House”, it’s that everybody lies when it comes to their health.  When it’s money and lies calling the shot, how can we expect peace?

So anyway, peace – peace is such a hard thing to imagine. It seems that in order to have it on the global level we have to learn how to do peace at the neighbourly level. In order to have it at the neighbourly level we have to learn how to do peace at the individual level. But, and a big one at that, the prophet Isaiah does not lead us down that road of thinking. The way he “sees” things is quite different. I use the word “sees” quite particularly. His vision, his prophetic imagination, of what things will be like when the Triune God of grace finally says “enough” is quite different than our saying, “I’ve got to get myself together and then get things right between my neighbours and me and then hopefully when we’ve all got our patchouli together, we can work on world peace. That is not what Isaiah sees for the Trinity's world after he, not us, has put it to rights.

Isaiah’s vision, his imagining of future peace (and please don’t think imagination here in the sense of he’s just imagining things. Imagination to the Old Testament Prophets was seeing the way things are/will be from God's perspective.) is that the One will come, the One whom we’ve come to know as Jesus Christ, and in the end he will put things to right. The Spirit of God will be upon him. He will judge according to righteousness and equity giving the poor what they need. He will strike the land with the Word of the Truth and his breath shall put to death the wickedness and the wicked, those who have worked against God and his people. Isaiah's vision of that day calls us to reimagine our world back within the bounds of the first days of creation when God spoke the Word and the breath of that Word brought things into being out of nothing.  But in that future day, God will make Creation anew out of the chaos we’ve made of the present creation, a Creation in which the Presence and knowability of God fills everything.  No longer will God seem veiled or hidden.

Back to Isaiah, when this One, this Jesus Christ, returns and sets things right – imagine this – wolf will lay down with lamb, leopard with kid, lion with calf, cow and bear. Lions will eat straw instead of hunt and kill. Predation will not exist in this new creation.  Moreover, Isaiah calls us to "see" a world where not the old and the wise lead, but rather a little child. This may seem odd until we remember Jesus pointing out that FAITH like that of a little child is what we are called to have, indeed gifted by the Holy Spirit to have to be rightly related to God. Finally, Isaiah calls us to "see" a world where everything is full of the knowing of God.

For Isaiah, world peace does not come about by me getting myself together so that I have inner peace and then, having inner peace, I can work with my neighbours to have peace among neighbours and then, having peace among neighbours, we can work together and bring about world peace.  World peace is also not something we should entrust to world leaders.  Seriously, has there ever been a peace treaty that was not in someway loaded with greed and powerlust? Isaiah says that God himself will intervene and fill everything with the knowledge of himself, with the loving communion of the Trinity, and then there will be peace, peace in which there will not even be predation in the animal world. Can you "see" that?

Well, believe it or not, God has given his creation a foretaste of this peace. Paul’s letter to the Roman Christians exhibits this particularly through Paul's encouraging them to welcome one another.  Hospitality in the name of Jesus is a core component of world peace.  The way we Christians welcome one another is the linchpin of world peace. We are not gathered here on Sunday morning just to sing hymns, hear a sermon, and drink some coffee. We are here to show hospitality to one another, to love one another as Jesus has loved us each as a sign and foretaste to the world of the Trinity's New/renewed Creation coming.  Churches are not clubs marked by philanthropic gestures. Churches are communities, communions of people who because we know the love of God in Jesus by the free gift of the Holy Spirit we show steadfast love and faithfulness to one another. 

Please do not think that I am insane in saying that we have a foretaste of world peace here or even that we are the foretaste of the healing of the entire universe. The more openly we model Jesus’ hospitality to the world around us expecting nothing in return, the more we foreshadow world peace. Being hospitable to one another, to everybody, is our gift of giving the foretaste of world peace to our surrounding communities. 

Friends, the word welcome is probably the centre-most word in Christian faithfulness. Welcome one another, indeed welcome all peoples with the same love that Christ Jesus has welcomed us each. Amen.

 

Streaming Hope

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Isaiah 2:1-5

How often have we heard people say or said ourselves that if governments were to cut out military spending there would be enough money to eradicate poverty, to explore the ocean depths and space.  There would be enough money to find cures for diseases that appear incurable.  If only our governments would learn war no more.  Well, Isaiah gives us a picture of that day.  His book begins with the Lord telling his people that they are a rebellious lot and so he hates their religion, doesn’t want their sacrifices.  He wants to get ‘em, but not in the way you’d think.  He wants to redeem them, give them back their dignity.  He will refine them and make their sins though scarlet as white as snow.  What he wants from them is their repentance which means he wants them to turn from the idolatry and set their minds on him and walk in his ways.   Then they will be righteous, upholding their end of the covenant.  Then on the coattails of the Lord’s redeeming and refining and his peoples repenting, once his people are righteous, in the last days, Isaiah says the nations will stream to Zion to the mountain of the house of the LORD to learn the ways of the Lord that that might walk in them, to face judgment by the one who speaks the Truth, and to have their disputes settled by the LORD.  Then they will learn war no more.

The poetic imagery is pretty profound in what Isaiah is saying.  The people will stream to the mountain of the house of the Lord.  By saying “stream”, Isaiah doesn’t mean people will binge watch it over the internet.  He’s talking about how water flows.  There have been Sunday mornings when driving from Southampton to Chesley crossing over the bridges overlooking the Saugeen and I see the river is running high and muddy.  It strikes me as weird because I knew it had rained a little on Saturday night but I didn’t think it was enough to put the river up that much.  But, you know, it doesn’t take much for a good-sized river to get up because water comes from near and far.  Water that fell on far away fields and forests filled up little runs and licks which flowed into small creeks that flowed into the Saugeen River making it grow more and more flood-like as it made its way to Lake Huron which itself is fed by many rivers.

That’s the way Isaiah foresees all the nations of the earth streaming together, flowing together, flooding together to come to the place where the presence of the LORD is and there…they shall learn war no more.  As they flow to the LORD, many people will say, “Come (“Lehku!” in Hebrew.  I like the sounds of that word.)!  Let us go up to the mountain of the LORD to the house of the God of Jacob.”  Imagine with me, because desire is fed by imagination.  Imagine the days when the peoples of all nations start desiring to be in the presence of the Triune God of grace that they might learn the ways of the LORD taught by the Lord Jesus Christ himself.  Imagine the days when all nations truly want to walk in the light of the LORD, when all nations truly want to be disciples of Jesus Christ.  Imagine those days for they are the reality of our hope.

Isaiah says “from Zion shall go forth Torah (law or teaching), and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.”  Zion to Isaiah has nothing to do with the Zionism of today which is at the heart of the war in Gaza.  Isaiah’s Zion is the place where God is and where God’s people gather to worship him.  It’s Utopia but it’s the presence of God that makes it utopia.  Zion is where God and people gather together in worship with justice, equity, and peace.  When we gather for worship in the Presence of the Holy Spirit to worship, we are in Zion.  Gathered here in Zion, the teaching and the word of the Lord that all nations need for their healing goes forth.  From the midst of this Zion and millions of other Christian fellowships just like ours God is speaking the word of his having reconciled us to himself in Christ Jesus as Paul writes in chapter five verses seventeen to nineteen of Second Corinthians: Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.  The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.  All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.”  

When the LORD speaks a word, it does what it says it will do.  The Lord speaks later in Isaiah about his words. In chapter 45 Lord says: ²² "Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other.  ²³ By myself I have sworn; from my mouth has gone out in righteousness a word that shall not return: 'To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear allegiance.'  ²⁴ "Only in the LORD, it shall be said of me, are righteousness and strength; to him shall come and be ashamed all who were incensed against him.  ²⁵ In the LORD all the offspring of Israel shall be justified and shall glory."  And again, in chapter 55: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD.  ⁹ For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.  ¹⁰ "For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, ¹¹ so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

The word of God’s having reconciled the world to himself in Christ is going forth into the world through a people such as little ol’ us and the response will be that all nations are going to flood into the presence of the LORD to learn from him his ways and to be sorted out and put to right and the result will be that “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”  The machinery of warfare will be turned into the means for fair and equitable life among all peoples.  The desire to learn the ways of Jesus will surpass war, greed, injustice, and self-preservation.  We are part of that many people who along the way are saying, “Come! Let us go together into the presence of the LORD that he might finally make peace so that it will be here on earth as it is in heaven.

There’s an African American spiritual about this flowing of the nations to the LORD called “Down by the Riverside” and I’d like to leave it with you.  It goes:

Going down by the riverside, meet my Jesus there.  Study war no more.

I ain’t gonna study war no more, study war no more, study war no more.

Study war no more, study war no more.  I ain’t gonna study war no more.

I’m gonna lay down my heavy load, down by the riverside.  Study war no more.

I’m gonna talk to the Prince of Peace down by the riverside.  Study war no more.

I'm gonna lay down my sword and shield down by the riverside.  Study war no more.

I’m gonna shake hands with everyman down by the riverside.  Study war no more.

            Friends, come!  Let us walk in the light of the LORD.  We do it and the nations will come.  Amen.

 

True Power

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Luke 23:32-49

So, behold King Jesus. Crucified.  Hanging between two insurrectionists as if he were one too.  A sign was over his head that read, “This is the King of the Jews”.  The Romans put it there to insult the Jewish people implying that a person they judged to be a blasphemer was actually their king, and also to remind them that this is what happens to all those who would challenge the authority of Rome; not that Jesus had done that.  The only authorities he had challenged were the religious leaders of his own people.  The Romans themselves had judged him innocent of any crime but crucified him anyway to avoid trouble among the Jews.  During the trials before both the Temple authorities and Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, Jesus stayed mostly silent saying nothing in his defense.  They say in a relationship if you ever have to defend the quality of person that you are which should be obvious, then it’s not love.  All the charges against him were false.  He was innocent.  God’s people should have recognized that, but they didn’t.  They didn’t love God enough to see Jesus for who he really is.

What was the evidence against him?  Jesus’ acts were obvious, done right out in the open; nothing in secret.  They were acts of power that only God could do.  He healed people not just of colds and flus and fevers.  He restored sight to the blind, even those born blind.  He restored mobility to paralytics.  He restored hearing to the deaf, voice to the mute.  He healed lepers and he did it by touching them to show that he regarded them as persons.  On several occasions he even raised the dead.  

Jesus had power over evil.  He cast out demons; even out of this one man who had more than 1,000 of them in him.  That’s as many as there were soldiers in a Roman legion.  Hmmm…that’s an interesting coincidence.  This power over evil is something only God has.  Interestingly, the demons knew he was the Son of God and shouted it out when he confronted them.  But the religious authorities said Jesus did by power from Satan.  Instead, when Jesus held them accountable for the evil of their false teachings and spiritual abuse and for their abuse of power, they plotted to kill him.  Seems like those devout, good religious authorities are the ones holding hands with the devil. 

Jesus did a few other obvious God-things.  Twice he fed crowds of over 10,000 people with just a few loaves of bread and a few fish.  In the presence of his disciples, he literally walked on water and calmed a storm on the Sea of Galilee that was threatening to kill them.  Truly, only God can do that.

 As far as what he taught, well, his teachings were a bit subversive with respect to the world and every kind of power in it.  He went around proclaiming this royal edict that we call the Gospel: “The Kingdom of God is at hand.  Turn around and get on board with this good thing that God is doing.”  As Jesus went about, he did the above-mentioned acts of power that made the presence of God’s Reign obvious.  He called people to follow him as students of him and his way of life, not as arms-bearing revolutionaries.  He taught nothing that was against the teachings of Moses and the Prophets.  Unconditional, self-denying love topped his list.  “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 love your neighbour as you love yourself.”  He taught his followers to be compassionate, merciful, non-judging, generous, hospitable, loyal, morally upright, and…forgiving.  He taught his disciples that the greatest of them would be the one who served them all and modelled this by washing their dirty, stinky, well-fungused feet before their last meal together.  He taught that “life” (true life, abundant life) is found in laying down one’s life for others, and in denying oneself, taking up one’s cross (there’s that pesky cross and they all knew what it meant), and following him in his way of hope, healing, and love.  

How would Jesus’ kingdom spread?  Not by violence.  Twice Jesus sent his followers out to go from town to town.  He explicitly told them not to bear a sword but instead to wish peace upon every house they entered.  He told them they would be persecuted because of him.  He told them that after he died, he himself would be with them always…always.  Moreover, God his Father would empower them by sending the Holy Spirit to dwell in them.  The Holy Spirit would tell them what to say and enable them to do the things that he did.  He told them to go into all the world and teach his way and invite people to take it up.  Oddly, he definitely told them to avoid wealth. (Sorry.  I know that’s not easy to hear.)  

With respect to the kingdoms of the world, never did Jesus call his followers to take up arms and overthrow governments nor become the government.  Instead, he simply predicted that he would be killed by the powers that be, but that he would rise from the dead and go back to his Father.  And then after “a while”, he would return and he would himself establish his throne.  They could expect the same treatment themselves for as the world hated him, so it would hate them.  Yet still, his followers must remain faithful, loyal to him and steadfast by living according to his way of hope.  Until he returns, their, our, greatest form of power is prayer.  When he comes will he find loyalty, will he find his disciples faithfully praying and living his way.

Jesus was innocent.  He had done only good.  He truly was the King of the Jews, indeed the Lord of All Creation.  They gave him a crown of thorns, enthroned him on a cross, and had him toast himself with vinegar…and there on that cross, he died.  The words spoken by him and by bystanders while he died are telling.  Among his last words were, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they are doing.”  Who does that?  Who pleads for the forgiveness of those wrongfully murdering them?  On the other hand, the people, common people and powerful people, soldiers and insurrectionists alike mocked him saying, “He saved others.  Let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, the Chosen One…If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself.”  

That Jesus didn’t act to save himself should raise some eyebrows.  By the mighty hand of God, by the power of God – the God who created, ordered, and sustains everything – Jesus had healed people, cast out demons, raised the dead, fed thousands, calmed a sea.  He had the power.  It could have been, “Jesus of Nazareth.  Come on down.  The Price is right.”  He had the power to save himself…but he didn’t.  Jesus isn’t that kind of king.  The nature of his power isn’t like that.  In this world where political power is most often exhibited as SYA (save your own bottom) or CYA (cover your own bottom), Jesus didn’t fit but they wouldn’t acquit.  

Jesus chose the way of faithful obedience rather than self-assertion, self-glorifying.  Though Jesus was God he didn’t exploit that and come here and act like one of those Greek gods; the way we act like we are gods to ourselves.  He emptied himself, denied himself, humbled himself and did what was right in God’s eyes.  That’s what true power looks like.  True power is self-denying, unconditional, sacrificial love…not saving oneself, not looking out for only yourself and those like you, not seeking one’s own interests at the expense of others. 

It’s Christ the King Sunday.  The day we talk about how Jesus reigns in this crazy world.  Honestly, on any given day these days that’s a hard topic to sell.  It’s more obvious to say that there is no God.  But, you know, the problem is that we are looking for God to act in power, but we forget what true power is.  God is acting.  God truly is.  God’s reign is in effect wherever we find people are prayerfully and humbly acting according to the mind of Christ – humbly acting according to self-denying, unconditional, sacrificial love in whatever form that takes.  There in those acts the reign and power of God is manifest.  Whenever there is healing, reconciliation, restoration of relationships there is the reign of God.  Whenever we look past our own selves and try to understand where others are at and seek their good, there is the reign of God.  In this selfish world, acts of the true power, acts of love can and will look and feel like dying on a cross…but…let us not forget that death is not the final word in God’s Good Creation.  God’s final word is Jesus and his resurrection which will raise all of God’s Creation to new life.  Let us empty ourselves and love at all cost, for that is the path past death to resurrection and new life.  Choose the path less traveled. Amen.

 

Wandering and Enduring

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Luke 21:5-19

         I made a decision this week to avoid being so politically contemporary with this sermon so as to give us a break from the seemingly dystopian reality we live in and its accompanying dysphoria.  So, I’ll ask you to imagine that you live in the ancient Mediterranean world around the time of Jesus on a farm out in the country.  There’s olive trees and vineyards.  You’ve got nothing to do at night except to sit on the same hillside night after night in a toga, eating olives and sipping wine while studying the stars.  The stars in the night sky are just “Wow!” because there’s no light pollution.  Because stargazing is such an integral part of life, you are able to identify bunches of constellations, especially the twelve of the Zodiac.  The stars appear to follow a set course across the sky night after night.  Their positions change with the seasons but their path stays consistent year after year, as if changeless and predetermined.  

At any time of the year, you know what stars and which constellations are supposed to be where…excepting five of them.  Those five are the “Planetes” which means “Wanderers” because they seem to stray from their course through the sky.  They are in the night sky for several months at a time, sometimes at dawn, sometimes at dusk, and sometimes all night long.  Sometimes they disappear altogether for several months.  Sometimes they would even seem to go backwards.  In retrograde it’s called.  They wander.  They stray.  Like true Baptists, they even backslide from time to time. 

The scientists, astrologers to us today, say the Wanderers act like they have minds of their own, like gods, and may even be the embodiment of one of the gods so they named them Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.  When a particular Wanderer is in a particular constellation, it means something.  If a planet is in retrograde while in a particular constellation, that really means something.  Sometimes the Wanders cross in front of each other and sometimes they form a perfect arch across the sky.  They line up.  These are signs.  If you can interpret the signs, then you can know the course of your life, the future.  Thus, you spend night after night gazing at the stars watching for signs.

Being a stargazer, you are a part of a fellowship of scientists (astrologers, magi) with a repository of knowledge reaching back for as long as time itself.  Recently, like in the last 1000-2000 years, stargazers noticed a change in the way the stars were moving in what was believed to be a predetermined, changeless course.  Something happened with the Spring Equinox, the day on which the Northern Hemisphere begins to tilt towards the sun due to its orbit.  For as long as anyone has known, the Equinox progresses across the sky from year to year along a particular trajectory.  On the Equinox, the sun was supposed to rise within or near the constellation of Taurus.  Something has happened in recent memory of the stargazers, in the last 1000-2000 years, that has caused the equinox to change its trajectory and begin to move away from Taurus and towards and eventually into the Constellation of Aries.  What did that sign mean?  The changeless, seemingly predetermined course of the stars in the sky changed.  What did that sign mean?

Today we know that the earth wobbles on its axis so that the angle of the tilt of Earth’s axis changes a few degrees every 26,000 years which changes the way we see the stars in the sky.  That change the ancient stargazers noticed was the moment the earth’s wobble began to wobble back the other way.  As far as its meaning, the ancient stargazers explained it as the beginning of a new Cosmic Age, a shift of power among the relationships of the gods.  It was like the “60’s man and the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.  What’s your sign?”  Many people began to write a mythical story to explain it.  They said that Helios, the god of the Sun, had assassinated Zeus, who was sometimes represented as Taurus the Bull.  He was the most powerful of the gods.  Then Helios ceded power to Aries the Ram, god of the agrarian worker.  It was becoming the Age of the Farmer.  Did this sign mean it was the end of kings and empires and was now the time for the worker to rise to power something we would call a cosmic Marxist Revolution?

There was a cult, a Messianic cult, that rose up within the Roman world coincidental with the coming of Jesus, the Messiah, that attempted to explain this cosmic shift.  As best as can be determined it started in Rome where it was likely invented by a Roman of Persian (Iranian) descent.  It told the story that the god Mithras, a messiah-like soldier rooted in Persian religion, slew the mighty Bull Taurus setting in motion a new age of spirituality.  It was very popular among the Roman military who did their job but were tired of going to war and practising cruelty in the service of insane emperors in the hopes of being made a Roman citizen one day.  (Oops, I’m supposed to be giving the politics a break today.)  

Mithraism, as we call it, is categorized as a Mystery religion in that most of its rituals were secret and it leaned heavily on ecstatic experience.  When someone was initiated into the cult, they were led into a pit which was covered with a large grate.  A bull was then brought over top and sacrificed on the grate so that its blood poured down upon the initiates who then began to speak in tongues or manifest other ecstatic, trance-like behaviours.  Having participated in the slaughtering of Taurus they were now alive in the dawning of a New Age. 

Mithraism was likely Christianity’s most persistent rival until the late 400’s AD.   In its early years, Christianity and Mithraism had things in common.  Secrecy surrounding rituals and ecstatic experience top the list.  The general public believed that Christians by Baptism participated in the death and resurrection of Jesus and were washed in his blood and thereby had entered a new age in Christ by the gift of his Spirit.  People also believed that Christians were cannibals of a sort because they were purported to drink Jesus’ blood and eat his flesh at their “love feasts”.  In worship, particularly among non-Jewish Christian churches, there was a lot of tongue-speaking and prophesying.  These were sort of half-truths and misrepresentations of Christians among the general public because of the secrecy and it often led to persecution.  The followers of Mithras were on the other hand widely accepted.  Jesus was the Lord of a new spiritual Kingdom that was popular among the working class, slaves, and the poor and that was rivaling Caesar and the Imperial Cult.  Mithraism was popular among the soldiers and some political elites.  They both had in common that they were bringing in a new age.

So, looking at Luke for a moment, we pick up with Jesus having just been inside the temple watching hypocrites make elaborate donations.  Then came this widow who gave her last two coins.  No one seemed to care that she had nothing left to live on.  You would agree with me that there was something wrong with that?  They come outside and people start talking about how beautifully adorned the Temple was due to all those lavish donations.  It would have been a greater display of beauty if the people inside would have followed the requirements of the Law and looked after the needs of the widow.  Jesus remarks to them that the day is coming that this sham ends.  Those people in turn ask, “When will this be?  What will be the sign that this is about to take place?”  They believe the God of Israel is supreme among the gods.  For his temple to be destroyed, there’s going to have to be signs in the stars comparable to Taurus the Bull being supplanted by Aries the Ram at the Spring Equinox, a cosmic shift.

Jesus’ answer to them is remarkable, “Be careful that you are not made a wanderer.”  Many imposter messiahs will come claiming to be him, don’t go retrograde after them.  There will be wars and insurrections.  Nations and kingdoms going against each other.  Earthquakes, famines, plagues, terrorisms, even signs in the heavens.  These are all things that people at that time would believe to be indicative of a cosmic upheaval.   Now I’m going to paraphrase a little, he says, “But the end won’t come until you, my followers, have to give account for your loyalty to me.”  They will be persecuted, arrested, put on trial, put to death, betrayed, and hated.  But Jesus will give them what to say and not a hair on their heads will perish meaning they will not suffer an eternal death. 

Jesus’ last words on the matter: “By your endurance you will gain your lives.”  By your endurance you will attain what it is to truly live, the life that will persist into the age that is coming.  You might call it eternal life.  Endurance.  The Greek word there means to stand fast in acts of hope.  It is to live according to the hope of new life in Christ Jesus.  

These days there is a cosmic upheaval occurring so to speak. The Church these days, well, we’ve lost our most favoured status.  We’re being maligned not so much because of Jesus but because the general public assumes that all Christians are like those Wanderers who have allied themselves with corrupted political leaders whom they believe are God-sent and political parties who have co-opted Jesus’ name just so they can abuse power and gain wealth.  But that’s not us.  We will continue to be compassionate, to find ways to better help the poor, the immigrant, the refugee, the marginalized, the grieving, the broken-hearted, the broken of home.  We will continue to find ways to bring healing in our communities.  In the name of Jesus, we will speak the Truth and hold the Wanderers accountable.  We will be known for the way we love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength; and our neighbour as ourselves.  It has been said that at any given time in the history of Christianity, 2/3 of the Church is following heresy.  This is certainly true today.  But we are of the 1/3.  Friends, endure.  Stand strong as beacons of hope.  Amen.

 

Be a Neighbour

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Luke 10:25-37

We find Jesus here in a conversation with a lawyer who is testing him, testing whether Jesus is just some charlatan, wanna-be Messiah/prophet wandering through grifting the people with charismatic teaching and magic healings and stuff.  Jesus wasn’t from around there where that lawyer lived.  He was from away, from the hinterlands of Galilee.  On top of that, Jesus had sent 72 of his disciples out into the communities to prepare the way for him.  They had been proclaiming the arrival of the Kingdom of God just as Jesus had and were doing some of those magic healings themselves.  The countryside was erupting with curious excitement, if not real hope that Jesus truly was the Messiah bringing in the Kingdom of God.  

Yet, Jesus wasn’t from around there.  He was just a-wandering through.  I don’t blame the lawyer for playing protector.  He put Jesus to the test just as Satan did at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry.  “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”  He’s trying to trap Jesus with a loaded question.  But we need to be clear here about what he meant by eternal life.  Eternal life back then would not have meant going to Heaven when you die.  It would have meant life in the Kingdom of God, here on Earth when it comes.  Earthly life that was “filled with the knowing of the Lord as the waters cover the see” to quote Isaiah (Is. 11:9).  

It’s a complicated question he’s asking.  It hits at the heart of what it is to be a Jew living in that Land.  All Jews understood themselves as heirs to the promise God made to Abraham to make Abraham’s descendants into a great nation and to give them that parcel of land on which today the modern state of Israel shares with the Palestinians.  By simply living in the Land of Judea as a nation they were receiving their inheritance, the fulfillment of that promise.  

Yet, since the Babylonian exile in the 500’s BC there was a sense that they could lose their inheritance by not living up to the just, equitable, and peaceful way of life set out to them in the Law of Moses particularly the Ten Commandments.  If they turned from the Law, they would cease to be a blessing to each other and to the nations around them and God would kick them off the Land just as God had done by means of the Babylonians five centuries prior.

The presence of the Romans in the Land put that Promise under jeopardy.  At any moment they could lose their national identity and the Land due revolutionaries who sought to kick the Romans out of the land and secure God’s Promise to the Jewish people by means of violence.  It did not go well for them when twice that happened.  The Romans proved unbeatable in 70 AD during the Jewish-Roman War when due to Jewish revolt the Romans leveled Jerusalem and the Temple and then again in 135 AD, the Bar Kokhba Revolt, which resulted in a large dispersal of the Jewish people from the Land and the Romans changing the name of the Land from the Province of Judea to Syria Palestine.  (The current Israel/Palestine situation has roots going back that far and further.  It’s complicated and war is not the solution.  Loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and your neighbour as yourself likely is.)

This lawyer here is testing to see if Jesus is trying to lead a revolt and he’s asking Jesus in a tricky, somewhat coded way, “Are you leading a revolt that’s going to get rid of the Romans and establish the Kingdom”; i.e., return national sovereignty in the Land to the Jews.  If that’s what you’re doing Jesus, how do I get to be a part of that?”  Remember inheriting eternal life here does not mean going to heaven when we die.  It’s life in the Kingdom of God come here to earth, life here on earth filled with the peace of the presence of God.

Jesus gives an interesting answer.  He puts the question back on the lawyer.  He makes the Lawyer deal with the reason why centuries before God kicked the Jews off the Land and sent them to captivity in Babylon.  “What does the Law tell you to do?” Jesus pushes back.  The lawyer answers with what is basically the equivalent of the Apostle’s Creed for the Jewish faith at the time, the Schema.  Schema means “hear”.  It goes: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is your God, the Lord alone.  You shall love the Lord your God with all heart, and with all soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind.”  And, he also tags on to the Creed another commandment from Leviticus, “and your neighbour as yourself.”  “You’ve answered well.”  Jesus says.  “Do this and you will live.”

I guess something must have hit the lawyer when he heard himself say The Creed, the Schema, because for some reason he felt the need to justify himself.  I’m guessing he was having a bit of trouble with the requirement to love God, self, and neighbour and I’m guessing that the part he was having the most trouble with had to do with loving the neighbour.  He asks: “And who is my neighbour?”  

Well, I did a little research on who was considered to be a neighbour according to Israelite Law and I was surprised.  A neighbour is anyone, Jew or non-Jew, who lives in your community.  Strangers or aliens, people who moved to Judea and settled there were your neighbours too; even if they didn’t worship the God of Israel.  Under that definition, the Romans, particularly the soldiers, who were there occupying the land and bullying the Jews, they were neighbours too.  Therefore, the Law required the Jews to love them unconditionally (agape love) as they would another Jew.  Interestingly, the only category of person not considered a neighbour was the person who was just passing through, you know, kind of like what Jesus was doing.  You need to settle down in the Land if you’re going to be considered a neighbour.  

Jesus answers that question with the Parable of the Good Samaritan.  We’re all very familiar with that story.  The point of the parable isn’t to define who a neighbour is but rather to ask, "What kind of a neighbour are you?"  There’s loads of irony in the parable.  The Samaritan who was just passing through who did not fit the Law’s definition of a neighbour proved to be the better neighbour to the wounded Jew because he showed mercy.  He showed mercy to one who was his nemesis by blood and by history.  The priest and the Levite were legally neighbours to the wounded man but they were so concerned about keeping the Laws that pertained to being made ritually unclean by touching a corpse, that they didn’t even go see if the man was all dead, or just mostly dead.  That’s not neighbourly.  Our lawyer here would have been allied to them by professional association.  

Showing extravagant mercy even to your enemy defines what it is to be a neighbour whom you must agape love, unconditionally love, just as you would yourself, just as you would love God.  Showing mercy like that is a taste of Eternal life, life in the Kingdom when it finally comes to earth.  I suspect that our Lawyer by now recognizes that Jesus is not a charlatan revolutionary cult leader trying to start an armed uprising to bring in a violent false imitation of God’s Kingdom by attempting to overthrow the Romans.  The way this wandering Messiah prophet made this lawyer own his own baggage, well…there just might be life found in following this Jesus.

Well, here we are on Remembrance Sunday remembering those who made the ultimate sacrifice to free the world from autocrats who sought to be kings and we do so in a world that is still plagued with war and autocrats seeking to be king of the world.  This sermon may have brought your minds to the current conflict in Israel/Palestine.  There are two peoples there who have historic claim to the land.  By definition of the Law, they are neighbours.  They are neighbours!  Ghettoizing and attempting to exterminate your neighbour do not fit the biblical definition of being neighbourly nor does marauding and terrorizing your oppressor.  In fact, these horrific acts only demonstrate a lack of love for self and especially a lack of love for the Lord their God who is indeed God alone.  In fact, if we look at historical precedence, it is reason for God to cast them both off of his Land.  But there are a lot of innocent people there, families with children just trying to live, just like us, but whose lives are being destroyed by men who would be king.  

I was in Israel in May of 1995.  Yitzhak Rabin was the Israeli Prime minister and Yasser Arafat was leader of the Palestinian people.  It was peaceful then because those two men had begun to see each other as neighbours, indeed more than neighbours, family.  They ate in each other’s homes, played on the floor with each other’s grandchildren.  November 4, 1995 Rabin was assassinated by a Zionist settler who didn’t want peace, who just wanted the land, and then hawkish men, the current Prime Minister among them, took over and returned to oppressive ways.  The Palestinians lost hope and returned to terrorism.  There’s been a peace plan for decades but there will be no peace until they accept each other as neighbours and love one another.  Then they will live.  So also us.  Be a neighbour.   Amen.

 

 

What Is Enough?

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Luke 19:1-10

         These days it’s hard for me to read this story of Zacchaeus, that wee little man, and not think about…billionaires.  I have to admit I am very prejudiced against billionaires.  There may be some of them out there that are really nice people.  In the news, the governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, weighing in at 3.9 billion, seems alright but that’s just on TV and by juxtaposition to a certain other billionaire.  That other?  According to Forbes, the current US president’s net worth has gone up 3 billion since being elected to his second term November 6, 2024.  There are laws down there that require elected federal officials, especially presidents, to take a hiatus from amassing private wealth during office to keep from appearing to be using the power of the office for personal gain.  I don’t care to know how much the net worth went up of the other top American billionaires who stood behind him at his inauguration.  Since that change in the American presidency, my grocery bill along with the cost of everything else except for gasoline here in Canada has gone up because of his economic policies.  It’s worse in the States.  

I’m sorry but I’m going to rant.  Considering that corruption is usually the result when wealth and political power intermingle…need I say more.  I will.  I guess the history of the Robber Barons from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s has been written out of the high school textbooks.  Have people forgotten what Carnegie, the Vanderbilt’s, the Rockefeller’s, the Huntington’s, the Dixon’s, etc. did to the average worker particularly in Appalachia.  They pillaged the region and that’s an understatement because I don’t want to use the “r” word.  Anyone who would vote for a billionaire for public office is not a good student of human nature nor of the historical relationship between wealth and political power.  It’s bad enough that billionaires buy off politicians for political and economic favours, but to put one in office.  Moreover, shouldn’t we be concerned about people who own or run multinational corporations holding positions of power in national governments.  I apologize for the rant and I hope I don’t lose any friends over this one, but seriously.

There are roughly 3,028 (according to Forbes) billionaires in the world today.  247 more than there were in 2024.  That’s 8% growth in one year.  8 of the top 10 billionaires are American.  There are 902 billionaires in the US.  89 more than last year; 10% growth since this president took office.  (Oh, that Big, Beautiful Bill.)  China has half as many coming in at 450, 44 more than last year; 10% again.  Russia with its war economy is ranked fifth in the world with 140, up twenty from last year; 14%.  Oligarchies are quite lucrative for the billionaires especially when there’s war involved. We have to wonder about Germany sitting at #4 with 171 of them, 20 more than last year, 12% more.  Canada has 76, nine more than last year, also 12% more.  The rich keep getting richer.

What about everybody else?  Globally, there are roughly 3.63 billion people earning an income among the 8.23 billion global population.  Only 3,028 of those workers are billionaires.  50% of those workers earn only 8% of global income averaging US$6.85/day(@$2,500/year) and own 0% of the world’s wealth.  The top 10% (@360M people) earn 52% of global income.  Realizing a difference between income and wealth, the wealthiest 1% inclusive of billionaires own 47.5% of the world’s wealth.  That’s from The World Inequality Report 2022.  I suspect it’s worse now.  Moreover, a year and a half of a global Pandemic made for a sharp little spike in billionaire assets; i.e., they took advantage of us when we were sick.  

Here in Canada by global standards we are doing pretty good; 24^th overall in average gross individual income.  The Canadian average gross individual income is around $54,000, but how many people do you know actually make that?  Take the rich people and an equal number of poor out of the equation and you get somewhere in the low $20k range for mean individual income. 

Realizing that I’m "numbering" you into dullness, here's a normal life picture. My income which is made public every year in our annual reports…it’s pretty good for someone working in the non-profit sector.  But, it is not enough in today’s world to support a family of four without taking on considerable and likely unpayable debt.  A second income in the household is necessary.  For this reason, finding ministers to serve in rural Canada is near to impossible.  It’s just enough for a single person with no dependents to be fed and housed and have a little extra once any education loans are paid…and the education is required for the job.  For the average Jill and Joe with a couple of kids, they now need a third income.  That third household income became necessary in the last 9 months in the midst of a shrinking jobs market…all the while them billionaires are giving each other jet planes.

I think I need to distract myself for a moment because my blood is beginning to boil, so let me talk about Zacchaeus for a minute.  Zacchaeus was a Jew who collected taxes for the Romans who were militarily occupying what they called the Province of Judaea.  The larger Jewish community would have viewed him as a traitor only partly because he was employed by and for the Roman occupiers.  The real hatred for tax collectors stemmed from the hard cold fact that nearly all of them used their post to extort money from Jewish the people.  They were notorious for corruption.  There was the Roman tax which was difficult for the average working Jill and Joe to pay and then there was what the tax collector padded on for himself.  If you were a Galilean fisherman living from catch to catch and had a bad catch or got skunked completely one day, to keep from falling behind on what you owe the taxman you had to go fishing on Friday night, the Sabbath, in the dark hoping not to get caught by the religious authorities who would fine you for working on the Sabbath.  If you’re a typical farmer and have a bad season... welcome to debt slavery.  The corruption of tax on top of tax had everybody hurting except for the tax collectors who were rolling in the dough.

But Zacchaeus, he was apparently different.  He claims to have not extorted wealth (maybe, it's kind of vague) and…he’s inexplicably drawn to Jesus.  A usual tax collector would have shamelessly extorted the people and wouldn’t have cared less about a wandering prophet who was a friend to the poor.  A usual tax collector would have been looking for a way to extort Jesus too.  But not Zacchaeus as far as we can tell.  He was just a Jewish employee of the Romans…and inexplicably drawn to Jesus.  

Well, Jesus came to town.  Zacchaeus, being a wee little man, humiliated himself by climbing a tree to see Jesus.  A usual tax collector would have had his thugs clear the crowd away.  Then, to everybody’s surprise, Jesus for some reason sought Zacchaeus out and informed him that he would be eating at Zacchaeus’ house that day. 

The crowds, sharing my sentiment for billionaires, were put out by this.  Zacchaeus was a “sinner”, a man steeped in the ways of the world as opposed to being true to his Jewish lineage, a betrayer.  The crowd let Jesus know it too.  Like good Israelites they grumbled.  Jesus belonged to them not to the likes of that tax collector, that “Sinner”.  When you’ve got a crowd of “sinners” calling you a “sinner”, well that kind of makes you a “sinner’s sinner”, the walking damned.  2,000 years later we’re fairly accustomed to Jesus being a friend to tax collectors and sinners but rather hard on judgemental, hypocritical religious types.  But, how surprised would we be if Jesus got himself invited to a feast at the White House ballroom? 

Well, I wish Jesus would and I wish the billionaires would respond like Zacchaeus did in response to Jesus' befriending him.  Zacchaeus came on down from the tree and was joyed to welcome Jesus.  Joy!  But then, Zacchaeus, that wee little man, hears the grumbling of the crowds at what he had become being a tax collector.  The Truth at what he had been doing with the life God had given him.  He didn’t do what billionaires do when people try to hold them accountable.  He didn’t belittle them, call them stupid with low IQs, or seek retribution by suing them for defamation.  No.  He immediately gave a third of his personal wealth to the poor and promised to repay fourfold anyone he may have extorted.  He made restitution rather than sought retribution.  We have to wonder what it would be like if billionaires instead of hoarding wealth in extravagance, shared it with the rest of the world who don’t have a livable income and no means of generating wealth.  Reality is that it takes millions of very poor people to make one very rich person.  Whether we mean for that to happen or not, it does; but… it’s reversible, you know.  

Notice what Jesus calls salvation here.  It’s not that Zacchaeus made the right decision about Jesus and now he’s going to Heaven when he dies.  That’s not mentioned anywhere here.  Salvation is that Zacchaeus, the betrayer of God’s people, is restored to being a child of Abraham by climbing down out of that figurative tree of ultra-wealth and restoring to his people, God’s people, what he had taken.  In Jesus’ Kingdom, salvation looks like wealth shared rather than this game of accruing more and more and more of it.  There needs to be a point where enough is enough.  There’s nothing wrong with having some wealth as long as everybody has the opportunity to acquire wealth.  One person having more than enough wealth robs a multitude of others from it.  

If there was a role for the church could play in this, it would be to be more specific on wealth.  It is not enough to simply talk about greed and stewardship.  The Christian Church should be saying things like it is immoral to have an annual individual income of more than $115,000 and unethical not to give the excess to create means to wealth for those who do not have it.  That means doing things drastically different than how Capitalism does it.  At the very least, we in the church need to be thinking about and addressing in practical ways what is enough and what we should do when we have more than enough.  Just saying.  Amen.

 

At the Heart of the Matter

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Luke 18:9-14

Recently, I saw a meme posted on Facebook which simply read, “Saying Jesus died for me is manipulative.”  The meme also included one of the comments in response to it which read, “To say he rose from the dead is gaslighting.”  That meme pushed a button with me but not because of the antichristian overtones.  Disagreement with or denial of the Christian doctrine of Penal Substitution (in a courtroom drama, Jesus, the innocent one, took humanity’s deserved penalty of death and damnation unto himself and died once and for all earning us an acquittal and enabling reconciliation with God) or, if you don’t like the courtroom imagery, just plain Substitutionary Atonement will do (Jesus’s death was in Humanity’s place for more reason than just moral infractions for which we deserve to be punished),…disagreement and denial of those biblical metaphors which attempt to explain Jesus’ death is nothing new nor is denying his resurrection.  That wasn’t what pushed the button.  I wear big boy pull-up pants these days and I can handle it when someone disagrees with my Jesus-centered understanding of reality.  

What pushed my button was just how loosely if not inappropriately terms which can be classified as “Therapy Speak” get thrown around these days.  Manipulation and gaslighting are terms that come to us from the world of psychotherapy and are particularly associated with the behaviours of narcissistic personality disorder.  We all know how roughly 10 years ago narcissistic personality disorder and the behaviours associated with it (so also the kindred diagnoses of sociopathy and psychopathy) hit the world stage with an unbelievably huge impact as people were trying to come to grips with the behaviour of a certain world leader.  Still today, we can rest assured that whenever certain political figures open their mouths we’re being manipulated and gaslighted.  Regardless, the aftermath of that sort of armchair psychologizing working its way through the news media and social media is that two people can’t have a disagreement anymore without somebody getting offended and somebody getting called a narcissist and somebody getting accused of manipulation and gaslighting just because their narratives differ around the same body of facts (whatever a fact is anymore).  When we accuse somebody of manipulation or gaslighting when that is not the case and we’re just having a disagreement, it only serves to shut down the conversation.  We need to leave the Therapy Speak to the therapists and hope to God they know what they’re doing with them.  Unfortunately, the world of therapy has its vogue pop-culture too.

In thinking about a possible response to the meme I could, in Pharisaical manner, very easily with a high degree of certainty at least as far as I am concerned look down my nose and accuse the meme and the sharers thereof of manipulating and gaslighting me for trying to convince me that my spiritual experience is a figment of my imagination that I use to get people to do what I want them to do.  I could say they have offended me and traumatized me because I have since been having ruminating thoughts because of the meme. After all, I’m writing a sermon about it.  No. I won’t play Pharisee and look down my nose and act all offended that somehow my rights have been violated by someone who sees things differently from me.  I also won’t mask  some sort of condescending, self-righteous rage at “people like them” behind a passive aggressive question in the comment section such as, “Doesn’t it bother you that you’re going to Hell?”  No, I won’t respond like that.  To me and many like me, Jesus’ resurrection and New Life in him by the gift of the Holy Spirit are as real and felt as are death and shame and guilt and suffering.  I can’t fault someone for not having the experiences that I have had in life.

Actually, I’m going to agree with the meme and the person who posted it as far as I can without denying the Truth of the substitutionary nature of Jesus’ death.  I know the person who posted it and I care greatly for that person.  I know where this person is coming from and it’s important to note that this posting came about in the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk when American Christian Nationalists and people on the left were having a bit of a tit for tat to put it mildly.  I have some empathy for this person and this person’s views.  I will agree that a certain element of the Christian church truly has been manipulative with Jesus’ death, trying to coerce conversions out of people by guilting and shaming them with the big club of Jesus dying for them.  That big club becomes a battle axe when a person is further told that they aren’t a real believer in Jesus unless they are (and these days the list is) anti-immigrant, anti-Trans, anti-science, anti-climate change, anti-higher education, anti-abortion, anti-vax, pro-US, pro-Israel, and pro-Trump.  That arm of Christianity needs to see through its own delusion and realize they are causing “little ones” who belong to Christ to fall away.  As far as the meme goes, I will agree that Jesus’ death has been and continues to be used  by some to manipulate people, but I won’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and say that Jesus’ death was not in some wonderful way for me, for humanity…actually for the whole creation.

So, how would I respond to the meme if were to ever be able to get beyond the trauma of being called a manipulative gaslighter?  I would ask questions that sound a lot like those condescending “rhetorical questions” that people ask and then say you don’t have to answer.  I would start with “What if it’s true that Jesus died for us?”  What if it’s true that there is something so utterly wrong within the human condition that only God can heal it by becoming human, dying, and being raised from the dead?  

Seriously, what is wrong with humanity?  We suffer alienation from one another and from God.  We hide in shame.  We so often do violence to one another even if it is just a little lying to cover our asses.  We all have nasty little secrets we don’t want anybody to know (but isn’t great when we can trust another person enough to get that shit off our chests and then find ourselves still loved and accepted?). We’re all narcissistic to varying extents.  We’re all addicted to something.  We all do selfish stuff that hurts the weak and vulnerable and especially the people we love.  And, do I even need to mention the things we should have done but didn’t for lack of courage or fear of embarrassment.  This disease of the human mind is so profound and extensive that the whole creation suffers because of us.  As remarkable as we human beings are, we become a deadly virus everywhere we go.

What if the only way for a loving God to heal humanity of this disease is to become one of us as Jesus of Nazareth and thereby infuse God’s very life to humanity and not just humans but even literal physical matter not just the something nebulous called “spiritual” stuff.  And, not just infuse himself and his life into us, but he took human being, including this disease, into Godself, let it run its course in him, and then died with it, and that’s not the end.  Jesus rose from death, healed of the disease, with a new life to share and we discover it in following Jesus in his way of life marked by unconditional love, forgiveness, compassion, hospitality, generosity, and dying to self (which is antithetical to the pursuit of self-fulfillment, self-aggrandizement).  In following him that seed of new life, the Holy Spirit, begins to grow.  What if it is true?

I look at the world around me these days through the lens of this parable.  I see what appears to be just about everybody, myself included, self-righteously pointing the finger at everybody else while claiming to be right and thanking the god they’ve created in their own image that they ain’t like “those people”.  I really don’t see anybody hiding in the corner, sick to death of the way they are and the way they have hurt and taken advantage of others be they friend, family, or foe.  To be frank, we are all at heart tax collectors running around thinking everybody owes us something when in fact we each are the biggest debtors of all…broken, hurting, hiding.

This tax collector for some reason realizes that the cure for his diseased mind, soul, and body is that only God can do something about it.  It’s very interesting what he asks of God…and here comes a Greek lesson.  This tax collector’s prayer is mistranslated in every translation.  In the Greek text, he is not asking for mercy.  The word for mercy, eleos, is not there.  It would be fitting if it was.  That word is from the same word family as the words for olive and olive oil, which they used for a healing balm.  If that word was there, a beautiful translation of the prayer would be, “God, be a healing balm for me, a sinner.”  But that’s not what he is asking.

The word that is there is hilasterion, which means a sacrifice of expiation.  In the world of sacrifices, there were two kinds that the ancient world did to make things right with God, propitiation and expiation.  The driving thought pattern was: “I’m a sinner.  If I come into God’s holy presence, I will deservedly die.”  Propitiation, which the Israelites did not practice, was sacrificing an animal in your place to get God’s favour.  Expiation was a person transferring their sin to an animal usually by touching it.  The animal was then sacrificed, putting the sin to death.  This is similar to a poultice drawing infection from a wound.

This prayer is audacious.  It literally reads, “God, be yourself the sacrifice of expiation for me, a sinner.”  The tax collector realizes the extent of his sin is so great that a simple animal sacrifice of expiation won’t do it.  A human sacrifice would be evil and no cure at all.  He can’t fix it with his own death.  Everybody dies and we will all face God.  His sins, our sins, are so great his only hope for the healing of his diseased mind and being reconciled to God and to those whom he has hurt is for God himself to become the sacrifice of expiation for him.  

It may sound like ridiculous metaphysics, but that is why Jesus, God the Son, in love died on the cross for each of us.  There is healing for humanity in Jesus in the Holy Spirit-filled New Life he has to give.  It is time we check our self-righteous pride at the door and come to grips with how great a debtor we each are.  Jesus paid that debt.  Maybe we ought to give him a chance.  Amen.