Lost Yet Loved

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Luke 15:1-24

Years ago, when my son was about three and my daughter was still a babe in a stroller, the family went downtown Toronto to the Aquarium.  It was very crowded and a challenge to keep track of the kids in tow.  At the end of the visit, we went to the ultra-crowded gift store.  My son and I were wandering around looking at stuff.  I guess I must have let go of his hand to pick something up.  In just a matter of about three seconds, he was gone.  He had probably caught sight of his mother and off into a sea of people he went. Thankfully, the lost-ness lasted only about 15 seconds if that.  He didn’t know he was lost…but I certainly did.  It scared the socks off me.  

I remember once when I was maybe four being with my mother in Woolworth’s department store.  I don’t know what happened, but all of a sudden, I wasn’t with Mom anymore.  I was all alone and fear set in.  Little children don’t know how to process that.  I just froze and started to cry.  A salesclerk heard me and came and assured me we’d find my mother.  She took me to customer service and sat me on the counter then picked up a microphone and said, “Would the mother of a boy named Randy please come to Customer Service.”  Seconds later, Mom showed up crying and was very relieved.  

Those two stories shared; I can’t imagine how it would feel for your child to get so lost that they wished you were dead when all you’ve been is kind and gracious and provided for their every need.  Then after demanding their inheritance, they took off and squandered it.  Then, they show up a year or so later, maybe remorseful, but likely not.  That has to hurt…and the fear…and the grief.  You don’t stop being a parent.  When your children get lost you feel it.

In our reading today we have three parables involving something being lost.  They demonstrate three reasons for being lost; by accident, by neglect, and by willfulness.  We’ll spend a moment with each.

The first is the lost sheep.  When an animal wanders off, it’s not like they meant to.  It’s accidental.  It followed its nose or something.  We do that.  We’ve all been out driving or out for a walk, enjoying the day, not realizing we took a wrong turn or missed the turn and wound up somewhere else not knowing how to get back.  It’s accidental and yes, there’s a threat of danger. 

Getting lost in life happens as well.  We can get lost while following pursuits that take us away from the important things which are our relationships in life particularly with God.  We can just get too busy or overcommitted.  We can get caught up in doing and being what I want to do and be and suddenly we find ourselves alone and scared not knowing how to get back and mend the relationships we wandered away from.  We find ourselves being metaphorically just like the sheep in those paintings of the Parable of the Lost Sheep, alone and stuck in the bushes or on the side of a cliff where we can’t go forward and we’re unable to turn around. 

The thing to notice in this Parable is the shepherd’s concern for that one sheep who accidentally got lost.  The Shepherd leaves the other sheep, possibly to their detriment, and goes searching for that one that got lost.  When he finds it, over the shoulders it goes and he brings it back.  He doesn’t punish it, or lock it up by itself, or make it first on the slaughter list.  He celebrates.

Next, neglect can be the reason something gets lost.  That coin didn’t lose itself.  It’s a coin and it can’t wander off.  It was the woman who lost it probably in a moment of not paying attention.  Just like at the Aquarium, my son wandered off because I let go of his hand.  At Woolworth’s, I didn’t wander off from my mother.  She just assumed I was following her every twist and turn among the racks of the clothing section.  She took a turn without making sure I was with her.  Sometimes our getting lost is not our fault but of the one watching over us.

So also, it can happen in our relationship with God, sometimes our getting lost is God’s fault.  That’s a hard thing to grasp, but it’s true that sometimes God loses us.  Stuff happens and it seems God is not there.  Where are you God?  Why won’t you act?  These are two persistent questions.  Please notice in the parable that the time comes when the woman, when God realizes that he has lost his treasured coin.  You will be found and a lot of those “why God” questions will get answered.  Remember, when we feel cut off from God, alone amidst those faith shattering things that come out of left field, it is then that God is actually vehemently seeking for us and will find us.  Our task is to wait.

Lastly, there’s willful lostness when we abandon God and the good life he’s given simply looking for more.  It can and usually does happen when we are in a time when things seem to be going good. The marriage and the family are good.  The social life is good.  Church is good.  The prayer life is good.  Life is good.  But, then suddenly it isn’t.  Suddenly, what was once good is now not good enough.  We want more out of relationships or just plain want new relationships.  We’ve lost our connections to the old ones.  God, and we question if there is a God, seems to be a million miles away.  We’re trying to figure out who we are except in a context that doesn’t include the God who made us who we are.  The Church which we once experienced as quite supportive, we start to think is a fraud.  We no longer feel connected to our friends, especially our Christian ones.  In love they try to help, but we don’t accept their help and insist on finding it ourselves, whatever “it” is.  We just want to take what’s ours, or what we feel we’re entitled to, and leave.

Beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing.  They will show up and subtly convince the lost that they have or that they themselves are that more we’re looking for, that there are many ways to fill that hole in you that only God can feel.  They are caring and supportive and very encouraging of us as we inadvertently begin to hurt the people closest to us.  Time passes and we’re suddenly find ourselves believing that we are in life solely for ourself, fending for ourself, trying to make a name for ourself…and sadly we believe that that’s all there is.

Willful lostness will actually require us to betray ourselves, our core values.  To justify ourselves particularly our leaving people behind and hurting them, we find fault in them and blame them.  Our relationship to God, past friendships that were solid and good for us, well, we suddenly begin to see them as being bad for us, restrictive, preventative of our becoming who we truly are, who we truly want to be.  We will also rationalize what we’re doing by buying into the latest self-help videos on YouTube.

If you noticed in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the Father wisely and with great restraint doesn’t blow up at his son or seek after him.  Instead, he very bravely allows him to go and make his own mistakes.  Being in life solely for oneself will usually lead us to a rock bottom at which we hopefully will come to our senses and return to the good life we had and hopefully we will not have burned those bridges too badly.  At least with God, the door is always open and the light is always on should we want to come home, but with the people we’ve hurt, there’s trust to rebuild.

These three parables teach us a great lesson with respect to God’s love.  When we get lost in life, God does not cease to love us.  God will either seek us out or when it’s a case of willful lostness wait for us, wait for us to come to our senses.  We also should do the same for those in our lives we know to be lost.  Don’t be like the older brother and judge, continue to love and forgive.  Amen.

 

Fear: The Opposite of Faith

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Luke 12:1-12

A few months back I was mindlessly watching little short videos on Facebook which they call Reels and I came across one that made that royal waste of time and life suddenly have some worth.  It started with a young woman of university age speaking on the topic that Americans are suddenly waking up to the fact that Shakespeare is better performed with a Southern accent.  Then the video switched to a young Japanese-American named Reed Choi who began to recite Hamlet’s To Be or Not to Be soliloquy with a Southern accent. He even had a dip of snuff and a bottle to spit in for authenticity.  It went something like this:

“To be, or not to be – That is the question; Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing them; to die: to sleep”.  

The soliloquy is a very powerful bit of overthinking by Hamlet on the question of whether it’s better to live with shameful hardship brought on by the actions of one’s family or to take one’s own life.  The conclusion is that the fear of the unknown after death makes cowards out of us and so we resign to endure undeserved hardship.  That’s as best as I can figure what Hamlet was saying.  I don’t get Shakespeare half the time.

What struck me about this video wasn’t that Shakespeare actually sounded good with a Southern accent.  It actually did.  But it wasn’t that.  What got me was how good of an actor that young man was.  He drew you right into it.  He had a good sense of the cadence, when to pause, even when to spit.  That short moment was mesmerizing.  He was a really good actor.  He was good at stepping outside of himself to play a role.  That’s admirable.  He was a very good hypocrite.

Now, why would I call him a hypocrite?  Back in the Greek and Roman world, acting and the theatre were quite popular.  Actors would put on masks and go out on stage to play their role.  It was weird because you couldn’t see the emotions of the actor unless it was somehow portrayed in the mask.  Theatre was a Greek innovation.  Most cultures enjoyed just sitting around and listening to a good storyteller tell a story.  It is likely that the Gospels were meant to be portrayed in public that way.  They were memorized and performed by good storytellers.  But the Greeks, they were the ones who developed the art of telling a story by actors acting out the various roles.  This art of acting was called hypokrisis or hypocrisy as we know it and actors were hypocrites or hypocrites.  So, my young actor was thus a good hypocrite.

But the meaning of words changes over time.  By Jesus day, the theatre and hypocrisy had been in the land of Israel ever since the days of Alexander the Great, the 300’s BC, when the Greek Empire conquered the Land and Greek culture began to infect the cities.  Jews were not keen on hypocrisis and hypokrites –hypocrisy and hypocrites – and not simply because they were Greek activities.  Jews saw the profession as deceptive, as pretending to be something that you are not.  Putting on a mask and hiding your true identity to them was an affront to the God who created us as unique persons who should be the persons God created us to be.  

Looking at our text in Luke, this is why Jesus tells his disciples to beware of the yeast of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.  When yeast gets into your dough or into your grape juice it works its way through the whole batch.  Particularly with wine, if a wild yeast makes it into the batch, it will ruin the taste.  So, keep the wild yeast out.  To Jesus, the Pharisees were good at putting on the mask of the externals of dress and dietary codes and following the jots and tittles of the Law of Moses and pretending to be righteous or rightly related to God.  But it was all a deception.  They lacked love.  They were judgmental.  And worse, they didn’t practice the way of justice and equality that were at the heart of the Law.  They simply used their religious pretense to gain power and grow wealthy.  They were hypocrites, actors, not faithful Israelites.  What they looked like on the outside was not reflective of who they were on the inside.

Now there’s a catch here to what Jesus was saying to his disciples.  The hypocrisy he was warning them against wasn’t the legalism of the Pharisees.  It was actually the opposite.  He was warning them against the hypocrisy of acting like they were not his followers when they were in public for fear of being persecuted.  It’s the hypocrisy of denial.  If they try to hide their faith, they will inevitably be found out for God’s powerfully working in them through the Holy Spirit cannot be hidden under a bushel basket.  That little light is going to shine like it or not.  The changes that were happening in them by the living power of the love of God in Christ simply cannot be hid or denied.  You can’t deny Jesus’ and his resurrection when you’ve been filled with his new life.  

Last week we talked about faith as being the hypostasis of the hoped-for things, the coming to light of unseen things.  Hypostasis meaning the settling out or the becoming visible of the unseen, behind the scenes things that God is doing to save and heal his very good creation and especially humanity.  Faith is our participation in what God is doing.  It’s not simply believing ideas and stuff about God as opposed to doubting.  Faith is found in the acts of faithfulness which are the coming to light, the becoming tangible of God’s doings.  

The opposite of faith isn’t doubt.  It is fear, the fear that we will be judged, rejected, shamed, or even physically harmed for our loyalty to Jesus.  A fear that causes us to hide behind a mask of looking and acting like we are not a part of what God is doing to save and heal everything through Jesus Christ.  Jesus addressed this fear with his disciples because persecution for association with him was a harsh reality they lived with.  If they denied him, they could spare themselves ostracism, job loss, prison, torture, even death.  One of the strongest arguments for Jesus’ resurrection was that none of the disciples who saw him raised from the dead denied it even while being tortured to death.  Nevertheless, like Hamlet, fear can make cowards of us.

I feel a bit apprehensive of talking about this kind of hypocrisy to you folks. In this day when people have walked away from the church and largely from following Jesus and to be quite frank, at the heart of why that has happened is Christian hypocrisy in one form or another.  But usually that form of hypocrisy was like that of the Pharisees, a hypocrisy that boiled down to those who called themselves Christians were very good at judging people for doing things the Bible says not to do while failing miserably at the things the Bible says to do such as: Love one another as Jesus has loved us.  Seek justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God, and forgive.  Be generous, welcome the stranger, i.e., the immigrant, feed them, clothe them, shelter them.  Turn the other cheek.  We’ve put keeping tradition before faithfulness.  We’ve mistaken the church building for the Body of Christ.  We’ve put nationalism before faithfulness to Jesus.  We’ve let bullies get their way. We’ve followed false teachers, false messiahs.  We’ve hurt children, women, and vulnerable people.  We’ve just simply and to our shame had some really nasty wild yeasts work their way through us.

Regardless, in this day and age when there appears to be next to nothing left of the North American church, you folks still come.  You keep the doors open and the lights on. You’ve raised your families in the church, lived the faith before them at home only to stand bewildered at their apathy, ambivalence with respect to Jesus.  The media has had nothing good to say about Christians since the movie Home Alone back in 1990 when a lonely young boy convinced a lonely, estranged old man to reconcile with his son while sitting in a pew anonymously watching his granddaughter rehearse being Mary in a Christmas Pageant.  He went home and made the call.  As a minister, in 27 years of ministry I’ve gone from being a valuable part of town life to being largely irrelevant if not suspect.  The question is always why do we continue on?

Please notice here that Jesus wasn’t accusing his disciples of the hypocrisy of denial.  He was just warning them, because they were going to face some pretty dreadful opposition and they would have reason to fear.  Fear is the opposite of assurance and cowardice is the opposite of faithfulness.  Cowering in fear to the point of denying Jesus is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, it is to waste one’s life to the point of deserving being thrown on the trash fire that was Gehenna.  Jesus was prodding his disciples to remain faithful for the God who loves each and every sparrow, loves us each even more.  In those fearful times when put on trial, the Spirit would be with them giving them what to say and do.

So, it is for us in these trying times.  Keep the doors open and the lights on.  As Peter wrote in the first of his two general letters to the churches, to Christians simply suffering because they were good, upright people, “Always be ready to give account for the hope that is in you.”  Your gracious behind the scenes well-doing, generosity, loyal friendships, love; these are embodiments of the hope this world so desperately needs, the hope that is in Christ Jesus who will yet again soon begin to call people to himself.  Endure.  Amen.

 

 

The Sedimentation of Faith

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Hebrews 11:1-16

My great-grandmother lived in a little house in the country.  Oddly, she had no well.  Instead, she had a rainwater cistern at the end of the back porch with a hand-crank pump on it.  She didn’t have indoor plumbing so she didn’t need a lot of water.  She had a tin roof with eavestroughs that emptied into the cistern to provide her with water.  All the water she needed for drinking, cooking, dishwashing and bathing came from that cistern.  I remember having to carry an old metal bucket out to the pump and cranking that pump to fill it and then struggling to carry it back in without spilling.  For a drink of water, you ladled it from the bucket into a glass. The water always seemed so clear and fresh, but my dad always said, “Don’t drink what’s at the bottom of the glass.”  Once it sat there for a minute or you knew why.  There would be bits of rusted metal and who knows what else that had washed down off the roof with the rain…but we drank the water anyway as per dad’s instructions.  It was good, fresh water instead of city water.

Anyway, the polite word for that stuff at the bottom of the glass is sediment.  Sediment is the result of that very complicated process known as sedimentation.  That’s where the stuff that seems hidden at first settles out and becomes visible.  When you ladle the water into the glass the motion keeps the sedimentary product afloat and depending on what it is it seems invisible.  But the sedimentary product is heavier than water and starts to sink to the bottom.  It’s sort of a natural purification process.

Now, I bet you didn’t know it but in the Greek of the New Testament there’s a word that describes that process of sedimentation.  It’s hypostasis. Breaking the word down, hypo means under or below and stasisroughly means standing so put them together and it means “that which stands under” sort of like foundation.   Hypostasis means “that which is more real”.  In the process of sedimentation, the sediment is the hypostasis, the more real stuff that at first was hidden but becomes visible in the water as it settles out.  Medically speaking, when you feed a baby, the milk goes through the hidden process of digestion and then you have the hypostasis of the brutal reality of a loaded diaper.  

Philosophically speaking, hypostasis is the reality of the stuff of our lives.  It’s what arises from the hidden processes of cause and effect or the stuff that comes out of left field.  It’s the reality that arises from our plans and motives and dreams.  Hypostasis is the real stuff we have to deal with.

Well guess what?  Paul uses hypostasis to define what faith is.  He says, “Faith is the hypostasis of the hoped-for things; the coming to light of unseen things.  I have to warn you this is a different way of looking at faith than we have become accustomed to.  Paul is saying there is a hidden, behind the scenes realm of God acting in history to save and heal his very good creation and especially humanity and like sediment, faith is the real, tangible things of God’s actions becoming visible.  It’s as real and strong as a dandelion plant poking through in the middle of an asphalt parking lot.  It’s as beautiful and symbolic of hope as snowdrops and crocus blooms in early March.  Faith is the sedimentation into reality of the hoped-for things in Christ, the inbreaking of God’s kingdom, the real tangible evidence of God’s love.  Faith is better defined as the actions of faithfulness, both God’s faithfulness and our own. 

We tend to understand faith as a subjective reality, meaning something that goes on inside of me.  For example, our NIV translation of that verse reads: “Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”  The NRSV reads: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen.”  Faith seems to be a feeling of certainty.  When somebody says “I have faith”, they usually mean the belief or the feeling or the intuition or a just plain irrational agreement to ideas that there is a God we can trust.  In that sense, faith is purely subjective.

        But what Paul is trying to say here about faith is that it is the objective, outside ourselves, reality of the very real things that God is doing in history that are coming to light, that are being evidently and really manifest. What we call “my faith” should rather refer to our participation in what God is doing instead of simply what I believe or trust. Read the rest of the chapter and you will notice that it is all about God working through people to set the stage for his saving of his very good creation especially humanity in, through, and as Jesus Christ. Faith is more about what God is doing in us than whether I think or feel the right things about God, about Jesus.

Paul said it well in Galatians 2:20 where he says, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.  The life I now live in the flesh, I live in the faith that is of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.” Or, “…I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God who loved me or gave himself for me.”  It is likely that Paul is reflecting a bit on what Baptism is.  For him, Baptism was a real participation in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus.  Paul believed he had died with Christ when he went under the water.  The life he lived after coming out of the water was "new life" in Christ, a new life in which Jesus was living in and through him by the presence of the Holy Spirit.  Paul, the persecutor of Christians, had had a life re-orienting encounter with Jesus on the Road to Damascus that left him not only knowing Jesus was who he said he was, (the Lord, the Messiah, the Son of God) but Paul suddenly became a faithful servant of Jesus and an integral part of Faith, the sphere, the realm, the inbreaking reality of what God is really doing to save his very good creation and especially humanity.

So it is with each of us.  We are each part of the reality, the hypostasis, the sedimentation of God’s acting in history to bring about the world’s hoped-for saving by means of the Lordship of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.  God has done things in our lives to create in us a sure sense that we are his beloved children, that he is watching over us, and he creates in us a sense of loyalty to Jesus.  These inner workings by God are often hidden to the world like particulates swirling around in a freshly ladled glass of Great-grandma’s water.  But in time we begin to act according to the love of God in Christ that God has poured into us, the Living Water of the Holy Spirit.  Nurtured by daily devotions and Christian fellowship we begin to do things for others that are part of God’s acting to bring the hope and love of Jesus to them.  Also, when we organize together and as a congregation do things we feel led by God to do, well, that’s the sediment of, the becoming real and visible of the reality of the Kingdom of God.  Faith isn’t so much about what we believe as it is about Jesus living in and acting through us.  Faith isn’t so much about us being able to say what we believe, but rather our being able to point out what God is doing in our midst.  I hope this makes sense.  Amen.

 

Bless The City

Jeremiah 29:4-7; Acts 2:36-47

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You folks here in Chesley (and some of the Elliot’s over in Williamsford) may have heard the name Adam Scott Elliot.  He was a miller and in 1858 he purchased the land upon which the Village of Chesley sits and became the town founder.  He did some time in Williamsford too.  But it appears that he spent most of his life here in Chesley.  He is accredited as being the town founder.  He cleared the land and he and his son John, a storekeeper and good citizen, did a lot to bring in business and develop the fledgling town so that by 1867 the wee village had a population of roughly 60 and a sawmill, gristmill, a couple of stores, and a shoemaker. The Chapter on the Town of Chesley in a work known as History of the County Bruce, Ontario, Canada says this about Adam Elliot: “Active and enterprising, he was a successful business man. In religion a staunch Presbyterian of the old school; kindly of heart, he did much good. Chesley has every reason to be proud of the man who was its founder.” ^[1]  He died in 1899.

John H. Elliot was especially instrumental in developing the town and the surrounding roads for business and for bringing the railroad to town.  The town land was owned by his father and him.  When he surveyed lots, he didn’t keep every other lot for himself for future profit as a person driven by greed would have done.  Rather, he sold them for $20 per lot and gave people as long as they needed to pay.  He also started the town’s first bank.  He died May 11, 1901.  The town council passed a resolution upon his death in which was stated: “He was at all times most anxious to render assistance to all proper schemes for promoting its (the village’s) welfare, and he has left us a noble example in the many sacrifices he made to improve the material condition as well as the mental and moral welfare of the residents of this village. In him the business men have lost a wise and prudent adviser and the poor a generous friend.”^[2]  Like his father, John Elliot was a Presbyterian.

With respect to churches in this town, in the first decade there is nothing much to report.  In 1870, a resident writing on town life declared that sermons in Chesley were like angels’ visits, few and far between.^[3]  But by 1875, another resident reported two gatherings.  One was a Canada Presbyterian congregation pastored by Rev. John Bethune that met in a log house somewhere the second concession.  The second was a Baptist congregation without a minister at the time.  Apparently, the Baptists were the first in establishing a preaching outpost in 1859.  The History then goes on to catalogue the arrival of the Associate Presbyterian Church in 1873, the Methodists in 1875 who became the United Church in 1925, and the Church of England and a German Evangelical Church which both built buildings in the mid-1880’s.

With respect to Geneva, the History writes: “Following close in point of time to the Baptists, the Presbyterians commenced to form the nucleus of a congregation afterwards to bear the name of the Geneva Presbyterian Church. The little body of worshippers met for worship in the log school-house which stood on lot 26, concession 3, of Elderslie. Every other Sunday from 1860 for a number of years the Rev. Geo. Bremner, the then lately ordained minister at Paisley, conducted the services. At times the village part of the congregation held services in Elliot's Hall. In 1872 a church was built in Chesley, and on October 20th, 1874,' the Rev. John Bethune was inducted as minister of the congregation. He was succeeded in 1879 by the Rev. John Ferguson, who after a most successful pastorate passed to his reward in 1890. It was while Rev. Mr. Ferguson was the minister of Geneva Church that the present commodious church building was erected, [The old church was sold for $1,000 to the Church of England congregation.] the opening of which took place January 11th, 1885, the Rev. Dr. Grant, Principal of Queen's University, officiating.”^[4]

On June 9^th, 1888 a fire struck the downtown businesses of Chesley.  As the buildings were made of wood, nearly the whole of Mainstreet burned.  There was a very interesting photograph taken from a hillside on the north east of town.  It was taken after the fire damage was cleaned up and shows block basements waiting to be built upon.  Just off center of the photograph, is Geneva, the Presbyterian Church.  The only recognizable church building in the picture.  Not to brag or anything but the picture speaks volumes to the role Presbyterians played in the founding of this town.  We were always there and prominent.

I found that brief chapter on Chesley quite interesting if not exciting to read.  This town was founded by Christians who were seeking the well-being, the peace, of the town in which they lived.  The spiritual and moral life was important.  This was very much unlike the towns that were popping up out West like Deadwood and Dawson City, where people were settling for reasons of economic prosperity.  Alcohol abuse, gambling, and human sex trafficking were prominent.   Having good morals and a place to worship was not on their minds.  But here in Chesley, Christians who sought the welfare of the city were central to having a peaceful and prosperous place to live and raise a family.

Here we gather 150 years later.  Chesley is facing the issues that most rural small towns face.  The days of an industrial base have passed.  The downtown businesses come and go.  There’s plenty of stuff for Seniors to do, but the lack of industry means a lack of children.  There’s also a drug problem among the younger generations.  The funeral home is likely the most successful business in town (and you’ve got the best one around!).  It’s a fight to keep a doctor in town and the hospital open.  Churches are struggling and are slowly closing one by one.  Residentially, there are some beautiful homes and some really wonderful people here.  Some newer housing developments are springing up as Chesley is more and more becoming a retirement/bedroom community.  

There are not many children in the area.  Of those you do see, a good many are of Amish Mennonite who have bought a lot of the farms in the area.  Of historical note, in the early 1900’s this church had a Sunday School enrollment of 104 boys and 102 girls and was taught by 23 teachers.  That’s unimaginable.  Camp Kintail, just south of Kincardine, is the flagship of Presbyterian Church in Canada’s camping program.  It doesn’t see numbers like that during a week with a full contingent of campers.

Geneva has grown smaller but our members are still involved in the community.  We serve in the Agricultural Society and help with the Fall Fair, Women’s Institute, the Fire Department and the Hospital Auxiliary, and enjoy curling.  But sadly, these civic organizations are struggling for participants just as are the churches.  There’s no rest for the weary.  Our fundraiser meals are an opportunity for people in the community to sit down together to a good meal.  They have the feel of a family reunion of good friends.  This church was founded by Presbyterians who needed a place to worship.  Now our surrounding community(s) are majoritively not Christian with no need for churches. 

All that said, it doesn’t change the fact of our fundamental nature as a congregation, a congregation that continues to seek the well-being of the town.  Our calling is the same as God’s calling to Abraham when he was in his late 70’s and 80’s – to go and be a blessing.  We must continue to bless our respective communities.  Just as it was said back in the days before there were churches in this town that a sermon was like an angel’s visit, few and far between, so each of you are a living sermon in this town.  The faith, hope, and love you each embody as disciples of Jesus and the depth of friendship that you share together after years of fellowship is living water to hurting people who don’t know how to sing the song of praise that everywhere surrounds them.  Bless this city!  Amen. 

---

^[1] The Town of Chesley; History of the County Bruce, Ontario, Canada; https://electricscotland.com/history/canada/bruce/chapter28.htm

^[2] Ibid.

^[3] Ibid.

^[4] Ibid.

 

Take the Transfer

Colossians 1:13-14, 2:6-15

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In many ways I am glad I am a minister in a denomination that doesn’t transfer ministers from charge to charge to charge to charge.  The Anglicans do it up here in Canada.  From what I’ve seen happen with my Anglican colleagues, the pattern seems to be to start a priest out some place small or where a Newbie won’t do much damage.  You give them a couple to a few years to get a feel for the work and then, if the minister is successful, you move them on up the ladder to bigger and supposedly better.  Personally, I’m not convinced bigger is better.  The pattern repeats itself until retirement.  Then there’s the other side as well, if the minister doesn’t do so well or there is conflict, you move them somewhere else hoping they’ll do better…and the pattern repeats itself

Or, if you’re like the Rev. Carrie Irwin here in Grey and Bruce Counties, you start her off in an area with an impossible workload in the number of churches assigned and, in Carrie’s case, watch her pastorally excel in those churches through closures and possible amalgamations and adding more congregations.  She started in these a couple years before I did ten years ago and with the help of a skilled underling, the Rev. Anne Veyvara Divinski has kept Anglican Christians vibrant in this monster of a geographical challenge.  Now she’s been moved up to be the Rev. Canon Carrie Archdeacon of Essex and Kent and part-time Rector St. John’s, Windsor in a place called Sandwich.  We will need to pray for her congregations (St. Paul’s, Southampton; Christ Church, Tara; St. John’s, Port Elgin; and now dissolved appointments in Chatsworth and Chesley, and let’s not forget her hospital chaplaincy work in Southampton) for they are going to be grieving, greatly grieving.  Moreover, the person who replaces her will have big shoes to fill.

For Carrie, the transfer will entail a physical change in location, a change in work responsibilities, new faces in a new office, and a new way of “this is the way we do things around here.”  In short, this transfer means you and your little dog too are not in Kansas anymore.  No click of the heels will get you back.  But in the bigger, brighter picture Carrie will be able to help and coach congregations and ministers with her invaluable expertise in the area of multi-point ministry as it is becoming more and more and more and more common.

Bear that in mind as we think about what Paul means here in Colossians when he says that God has “rescued us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us into the Kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”  Paul is saying that here in the present, here in the right now God has done a saving act that has transferred us literally and effectually from one jurisdiction into another.  We were under the jurisdiction of darkness where we were willing slaves to dark powers that demeaned and destroyed us, but in Christ Jesus God did a saving act and transferred us literally and effectually and right now into the Kingdom of his beloved Son where we are literally and effectually God’s adopted beloved children who share in the inheritance belonging to the Beloved Son.  We got transferred.  We got transferred to work in a different kingdom actually.

You may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?” (Talking Heads reference, if you got it.) “How did this transfer happen?”  Paul had a very "focused-on-Jesus" understanding of what is going on in history.  For him it is that in, through, and as Jesus Christ the Beloved Son of God entered his Creation and by means of his very being, faithful living, death, and resurrection defeated the powers of darkness primarily Sin, Death, and Evil.  

Jesus, the Beloved Son of God became human as the Jewish Messiah, took Sin, Death, and Evil into his fully divine and fully human self and destroyed them in death when he was wrongly crucified.  Then, God the Father vindicated Jesus when by the power of the Holy Spirit God raised him from death and set in motion a New Creation that will ultimately be free of Sin, Death, and Evil.  But for now, God the Father and God the Son in the power of God the Holy Spirit are dispelling the unseen spiritual powers of darkness as the Kingdom of the Beloved Son, the Reign of the Beloved Son, bursts forth all over the world.  The dispelling of darkness happens as the good news of the Gospel, the Divine royal edict of God’s victory in Christ is being proclaimed all over the world.  God’s Kingdom comes as Christian gatherings begin to form among people touched by love of God through the presence of the Holy Spirit come to believe this Good News and change their loyalties to the reality that Jesus Christ is the world’s Lord and Saviour.  These communities through the love they embody are living signs that God has not abandoned this world and there is reason to hope.  

Through the power, presence, and indwelling of the Holy Spirit, God’s victory over the dark powers and his reign are being manifest in people whom God has transferred literally and effectually from the jurisdiction of that darkness into the reign of the beloved Son.  We are among those people whom God has transferred.  In us, this change in jurisdiction is literally and effectually taking place right now in the present.  

Transfers come with better benefits. Paul says that one of the benefits of this transfer is that in Christ Jesus we have redemption.  Redemption does not mean that we got a book of coupons to trade in for discounts on stuff.  Redemption is a term from the slave trade and means to pay to buy another human being out of slavery and give them their freedom and dignity.  By the price of Jesus’ life God bought us out of slavery to the dark powers in which we so often willingly served.  In turn, God has set us free to live for the purpose he created us for: to be that part of God’s creation that bears the image of God in and as loving community.  God has given us our true human dignity back, a dignity which we live through love for one another.

We also have the benefit of the forgiveness sins.  God is not holding a ledger against us for when we have willingly participated in that slavery to the dark power.  Our sin was nailed to the cross with Jesus and died with him.  Yet, it was not also raised to new life with him.  The old life truly is gone and a new one has begun in Christ.  Now we must live a life worthy of Jesus that brings honour to him.  

This transfer took effect in us when we heard this Good News.  There came a time when we heard this Good News of what God has done for us in, through, and as Jesus Christ and by the touch of the Holy Spirit it got hold of us and gave us the assurance that we are God’s beloved children.  Karl Barth, probably the greatest theologian of the 20^th Century, was once asked if he could sum up the Gospel in one sentence and he answered, “Jesus loves me, this I know.”  Notice that he left out the part of the verse that says, “for the Bible tells me so.”  For Barth the only way you can know and understand God’s love is to experience it by encountering the Holy Spirit.  From that moment on the love of and for God begins to grow in us and we find ourselves beginning to share in the work of Christ due to the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit with us so that we begin to care about people in a way we never thought possible.  And the next thing you know we have the very real and certain hope that God is saving his creation and that nothing can separate us from his love.

Paul also brings baptism into this notion of being transferred.  Since most of us were baptised as babies and don’t remember it, Paul’s understanding of baptism goes over our heads.  In baptism, we participate in Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection.  To Paul, we have all already died, but now we live.  As the fullness of God nature dwelt fully and bodily in him, he now fills us with himself, with his life.  We live in him.  So, we must walk in him, being rooted and built up in him.  Through Christian community Jesus makes himself visible.  There’s a lot hinging on how we, his followers, let Jesus make himself visible through us.  

At the beginning of the letter to the Colossians, Paul noted his thankfulness for how they were expressing their fidelity to Jesus in the way they showed the love of Christ to one another.  Like Paul, I express my thanks to God to be the minister of these four churches who excel in love for one another.  You are definitely rooted in Christ and being built up in him.  I look forward to the day when the community around us begins to say, “I want what they have.”  But, the timing of that is in God’s hands.  All I can say now is “Take the transfer.  Continue on.  Enjoy the benefits.”  Amen. 

  

How Big Is Your Jesus?

Colossians 1:15-29

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Many New Testament scholars tell us that the first part of our reading is a hymn or maybe just part of a hymn that Paul is quoting or even wrote himself.  He seems to be trying to make the point that all of God’s very good, awesome, wonderful, beautiful creation is integrally and intimately tied to Jesus – in him, through him, for him all things…all things…were created and hold together.  He’s not just talking about physical matter, the stuff we can see and touch, but also means things like the power to rule, relationships, and things we can’t see that influence other things.  In some way that we ain’t ever going to understand Jesus is integrally and intimately tied to everything.  Nothing exists apart from him.  Everything is in some sort of relationship with him whether it’s a personal, communicative relationship like we have with him or that he can turn a stone to bread if he wanted but doesn’t.  Everything in God’s very good, awesome, remarkably beautiful creation is bound to and answers to Jesus.

Let me tell you a bit about the way Paul understood reality.  We would call this his Cosmology.  He’s a Hebrew Bible scholar not a Greek philosopher.  The Greeks believed everything has just always been.  They believed reality was two-sided.  There’s an unseen spiritual world of divine energy that was very good and is all that really mattered.  And, there’s also the material world in which we live which is of lesser importance if not all out evil and which just needs to be left behind for better things in Eternity.  The gods who are themselves very self-involved and capricious have their way with this world and especially us.  Divinity to them was sheer, raw power such that an emperor could be called divine even a god for the power he wielded.

Hebrews were very different from the Greeks.  They had the audacity to say that God created everything and it is good, very good especially once you put humanity into it – humanity made in God’s image.  Genesis Chapter One stuff.  God in God’s love and good will wants matter and us and everything there is to exist.  God spoke the Creation into existence and God’s Spirit made it come about.  And God was very pleased with Creation.  

The Apostle John at the beginning of his Gospel says that Jesus is the Word that God spoke to bring everything into existence.  This Word was with God and was God and it was this Word who himself became human as Jesus of Nazareth to heal God’s very good creation of the very lethal disease of sin which causes us to act like those Greek gods whom we make in our own image and worship.  Paul is basically saying the same “Word” thing in saying that by, through, and for Jesus everything was created and in him it holds together.

With respect to how Paul understood the Cosmos, the world.  He’s very Genesis one.  God created light and then spoke a big bubble of order into the chaotic waters of darkness.  He separated the water that was in the bubble and made land come up.  Then, he put the lights in the sky, filled it with creatures, and finally made humanity and then took a day off.  To be humorous, he was a flat-earther and geo-centric; all the lights in the sky circled the earth.  

Paul also said there are unseen heavenly realms in the Cosmos one in particular called Heaven were the angels and other powers were and in which God would abide.  There was also a “below” realm which the Hebrews called Sheol which was a holding place for the dead as they await resurrection and somewhere in there was a place called Paradise where we are with Christ.  Oddly, Paul never spoke of a Hell or Hades so neither will I.  

In Paul’s world, God existed outside of Creation and stepped in and out as he pleased.  This changed when God the Son became human as Jesus which bound physical matter to God and so also the Holy Spirit indwelling Jesus’ followers.  This is New Creation – Creation bond to and indwelt by God.  So, God (the Father) created Creation and bound it to himself integrally and intimately in, through, by and for Christ Jesus (the Son) in the power of the Holy Spirit. The completeness of that bond is where Creation is ultimately heading.

Well, by today’s standards, Paul’s cosmology is pretty small.  It’s based on what can be seen with the naked eye and has more than a little of what could be called “mystical experience” thrown in there.  It’s just this bubble in the midst of water with land and sky and realms above and below which God in his love and will created.  God loves it so much that he bound it to himself as, in, by, through, and for Jesus Christ in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit.  

I used the word small there because today due to telescopes and microscopes we have a way bigger picture and understanding of the universe.  Most would accept that our universe banged into existence about 14 billion years ago.  The static we hear on radios is a remnant of that explosion.  When we look up into the night sky with the naked eye, depending on our eyesight, the average person sees between 2,500-5,000 stars.  In actuality, there could be as many as 200 billion trillion stars out there and many to most of those have planets orbiting them and an astronomical number of the planets are probably able to support life.  Hmmm. Inquiring minds want to know.

A man named Edwin Hubble in 1922 at an observatory just outside of Hollywood discovered that one of the stars he saw with his latest and greatest telescope was actually another galaxy, Andromeda.  When I was in High School in the ‘80’s the number of galaxies was hardly in the thousands.  In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope focused on a section of space hardly the size of a thumbnail and showed us that in just that little bit of space looking back 13 billion years there were roughly 10,000 galaxies.  Based on that little picture, there could be anywhere from 200 billion to 10 trillion galaxies in our universe.

There’s a new telescope up there now, the James Webb Space Telescope.  It can see a little further back in time than the Hubble Telescope can and it sees a few galaxies that apparently formed just 250 million years after the Big Bang.  Most astrophysicists say galaxies couldn’t have formed that early.  So, they are starting to say that those Galaxies are part of an older universe into which we Big Banged.  And some are even saying that it is entirely possible that our universe is what’s on the other side of a black hole that’s in another universe.  I’m not quite sure what to do with the black hole stuff.

Many people use the bigness of this universe as we know it to dismiss Paul and his understanding of the universe.  They basically say there’s no God big enough to deal with all that and instead they call it an accident.  Me, I look at the pictures that these telescopes give us of this big, beautiful universe and I can’t help but sing, “O Lord, my God, when I in awesome wonder, consider all the worlds Thy hands have made…How great Thou art.”  It moves me to praise.  If it is as Paul says, and I believe/know it is, that everything is held together in Jesus Christ then this means that the love of God is as big as the universe and bigger, infinitely big.  How big is your Jesus?

Let’s talk about small things for a moment and then I’ll be done.  With microscopes we can now almost see atoms.  Atoms are made of even smaller particles and some of those particles are made of even smaller particles.  Basically, when we say particle, we mean a little blip of energy and somehow when particles of a different type interact with each other by means of a particle called the Higgs Boson, known as the God Particle, they form matter.  Physical matter is at ground zero energy.  

Atoms have a nucleus made of protons and neutrons bound together.  Electrons orbit the nucleus but they don’t circle it.  Rather they pop in and out of existence at certain distances around the nucleus.  Where they come from and where they go, nobody knows and the blipping in and out of orbit happens at or faster than the speed of light.  An atom is like a spectacular light show that at any moment may or may not exist.  I can’t tell you how in the world, those quantum physicists have figured that out.  They some smart cookies.  

Inside the atom’s area of influence, those electrons are so teenie-tiny that they are as proportionally as far away from the nucleus as the inner planets of our solar system from the sun.  This means that atoms, like our solar system, are predominantly empty space.  Gravity keeps the planets in orbit around the sun but it’s something called the Strong Force that keeps atoms together.  It’s called strong because if you break that bond, well, that’s what a nuclear bomb is.

Ponder what we are.  We are mostly empty space inhabited by a gazillion gazillion particles bound together to be electricity-filled fluid sacs that have consciousness and God-awareness.  We think, learn, feel, love, build stuff - we are really amazing!  Our bodies consist of roughly 37 trillion cells.  When you include the microbiome that each body has in and on it – bacteria, viruses, yeast, and fungi – there’s over 130 trillium cell-size bio-machines that have a purpose you don’t mess with or you get sick.  That’s more than the number of galaxies in our universe.  We are each like a little universe.

When you pull out a microscope and look at those cells and then the molecules that make-up those little cells, you see beauty.  The cells of a flower are more beautiful than the flower.  And to think that cells and the parts of the cell are like little living machines that have particular jobs to do…and people say it’s accidental!  The cells are made of molecules and stuff that are made of atoms.  That energy can be pulled together into matter that can become a living human being who does art and sings and stuff.  We are fearfully and wonderfully made!  “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all.”

From the very big of the universe to the very small of things at the subatomic level, all things were created by, in, through, and for Christ Jesus and are held together by him.  That’s how big Jesus is.  That’s how big the love of God is.  And Paul says also that in him all the fullness of God is pleased to dwell.  Through Jesus the infinite love of God abounds everywhere and in everything. Finally, Paul says that the mystery of all times is Christ in you.  This great big, infinitely big Jesus and all his love is in us.  “Jesus loves me, this I know.”  I’ll shut up now because I’m speechless.  Amen.

 

Live Lives Worthy

Colossians 1:1-14

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One of the most powerful moments in motion picture history is the ending of the movie Saving Private Ryan.  Private Ryan was an American soldier in WWII post D-Day.  He needed to be found and extracted because he had become the only surviving male in his family.  So, the Army sent in a team of men to get him out of the combat zone.  They all died getting him out.

The final scene takes place in Normandy Cemetery in France at the grave of the soldier who led the mission, Cap. Miller.  Now an elderly man, Private Ryan kneels at the grave and reflects on Cap. Miller’s dying words to him, “Earn this.”  Ryan says, “I’ve thought about what you said every day of my life.  I’ve tried to live my life the best I could. I hope that was enough. I hope that at least in your eyes I have earned what all you have done for me.”  He stands up and his wife comes up to him and notes the name on the cross-shaped grave marker.  He says to her, “Tell me I’ve lived a good life.  Tell me I’m a good man.”  Not really understanding what’s going on, she simply touches him on the cheek and says, “You are.”

Private Ryan stands emblematic of the soldiers who came home from the War and the burden they carried to live a life worthy of the men and women who paid the ultimate price, who died instead of them.  My grandfather was one of those who lived.  He came home and got into law enforcement and retired as chief of police in Waynesboro, VA, a city about the size of Owen Sound.  He was a good man.  He made “Benson” a name to be proud of.  When I look into myself and wonder about how I’ve lived my life, it’s his gravestone that I find myself kneeling at asking if I’ve lived a life worthy of the name he left behind.  

If I might rant a bit; we have all been reaping the benefits of the world that men and women like my grandfather came home from the War to build.   They saw firsthand just how evil that otherwise good people can be.  I mean, how does a person justify to themselves being a guard in a concentration camp.  Sadly, time has passed and that generation and its values are now passed.  I think we as a culture are no longer appreciative of the sacrifices made for us to live the lifestyle we live.  We have forgotten that people had to kill or be killed by people who were deceived and deluded by Fascist authoritarians who disrupted global security and well-being because they lusted after power and simply did not care that people had to suffer and die for them to grow richer.  We have forgotten that war only serves to make the very wealthy wealthier.  There are no longer eyewitnesses to the atrocities of that war: the Holocaust, nuclear bombs, bombing of whole cities and civilian populations done by all sides, the starvation, children traumatized in fear.  That war in particular had a historical lesson that we apparently did not learn: that it is better for nations to work together for the common good of all rather than to seek their own national interests at all costs or worse, being the vehicle through which a handful of sick puppies seek power and wealth by trying to turn the world into a dystopia.  We’ve lost our sense of having to live worthy lives…that sense of "Earn it"…and have replaced it with a sense of entitlement that will not end well.

Well, anyway, sorry for that rant.  But then again, if I were really sorry, I would have deleted it from the sermon and never said it.  So, I guess it was a bit premeditated and it must serve a purpose in this sermon.  I’ll get on with that.

Paul in this letter to the Colossians is writing to a group of Christians he did not know, to a church he did not plant.  I would conjecture that the church was likely planted by and being pastored by a man named Epaphras who may or may not have been an understudy of Paul’s.  For some reason, Epaphras came to Paul and told him of the Colossian Christians and of a particular problem they were facing that was brought to them by some false teachers who appear to have been teaching that you weren’t fully Christian unless you got circumcised and kept the Law of Moses.  Epaphras probably thought that a visit or at least a letter from Paul, the Apostle, would help stamp it out.  

So, to these Christians whom he has never met Paul wrote this letter and highlighted right at the beginning the most important things they need to concern themselves with.  First, in the entirety of this section of the letter we get a glimpse at the world according to Paul.  Just like after WWII there was a global sense that the world is now free from some pretty dark and sinister forces, so also Paul paints a picture that God has intervened in his very good creation in, through, and as Christ Jesus and his death and resurrection to deliver and heal it from the power of darkness, a healing being made manifest as churches – Holy Spirit enlivened human communities.  The Colossians were one of these many small gatherings springing up all over the world in response to the royal edict (or Gospel) being heralded from town to town that Jesus, the Son of God and the Messiah of the Jews, had defeated sin and death and is the world’s one true Lord and Saviour.  This victory was felt and seen through the presence and work of the Holy Spirit whose primary work was bonding and shaping these Christians into a community of strangers from all walks of life who loved one another unconditionally, as if they were family, because they all knew themselves to be beloved children of God the Father just like Jesus.  By the presence of the Holy Spirit, they were experiencing an inheritance that was eternal.  Paul tells them that God had rescued them from the power of darkness and transferred them into the Kingdom of his beloved Son.  In and among them, God was bringing about New Creation, a new world order one could say, in and through Christ Jesus and those who follow him. 

With the exception of the Letter to the Galatians, Paul began his letters by stating some things that he was thankful for about the church that he was writing to.  If you pay close attention to what he’s thankful for, you will usually find the solution to the problem he sought to address.  Two things Paul brings up as the antidote to this false teaching in their midst – Paul says he is thankful for their loyalty to Christ Jesus and their love for one another which is evidence of the Holy Spirit at work in their midst.  They will discover God’s will, God’s desire for them, not by keeping the Law, but by attending to their loyalty to Christ Jesus and to their love for one another.  “Live lives worthy of the Lord” is the imperative Paul gives that sums it all up.  That’s what it is to be fully Christian.

 Live lives worthy of the Lord is very applicable to us and our world today, especially we who claim to be disciples of Jesus Christ.  In this world where the greatest source of discontent appears to be people not getting the things they feel they are entitled to, live lives worthy of the Lord is the antidote.  Love others as Jesus loves you.  This discontent is at the heart of how people can be so easily misled, indeed radicalized, into populist authoritarianism that’s just one more unkept promise and lie fulfilled away from the Fascism that my grandfather laid his own life on the line to combat.  

The world is in a very precarious place at present.  We are at a pivotal point when we who call ourselves disciples of Jesus Christ, who know his love and the peacefulness of the Holy Spirit, who feel the tug of loyalty to him…we need to step up and “Earn it!” – Live lives worthy of the Lord.  We must pay particular attention to how we express our loyalty to him.  Paul here mentions only one way, one word – love.  He used that pesky word for love that’s known in the Greek language as agape.  It’s not romantic love.  It’s not the love of friendship nor is it the love of family.  It is unconditional, selfless, indeed sacrificial love for others.  We must put aside our political affiliations and our cultural values be they liberal, conservative, or something else and attend to our loyalty to Jesus.  

I’m sure you’ve heard of WWJD, the acronym for What Would Jesus Do.  That’s a good place to start, but I invite you to take that to a higher level with WIJD – What Is Jesus Doing?  Discern what Jesus is doing in every situation we find ourselves in.  I can guarantee that it will likely be compassion-based, heartfelt understanding of a person’s situation and needs.  It will involve honesty and kindness.  A sense of what to do and the resources for it will be there.  There is a harsh realization on each of our parts that we need to come to: I might be the only Jesus someone sees.  Therefore, in all things, am I living a life that is worthy of him.  Amen.

  

The Work of the Kingdom

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Luke 10:1-20

As you might remember, I went to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada back at the beginning of June. One of the matters we dealt with and probably the most pressing was (and these are my words) the imminent death of this denomination if we do not make some drastic changes right now. We appointed a commission, for once not a committee, that has the authority of the Assembly to act to effect certain changes. The changes appear to be mostly structural and among them will be the establishment of regional resource centers that will help congregations with everything from Sunday School resources to legal advice. I don’t know. Time will tell.

I have some thoughts on the matter if you care to hear them. Jesus and the early church ushered in the inbreaking of the Kingdom or Reign of God. The early Christians met mostly in homes. When they met, they nearly always ate together. They were known for their love, generosity, and how everybody was an equal. The institution we call the Church with its buildings and paid clergy has existed ever since Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the late 300’s AD is indeed largely palliative. It unfortunately has served as the religious impetus of European/North American Imperialism, Colonialism, and Westernization, as well as the Morality Police of Western Culture. We need to remind ourselves that the institution we call the church is very different from the gatherings of the early church. What we call the Church in our culture is not synonymous with the Kingdom of God that we heard about in our reading from Luke. Sometimes the two overlap. Sometimes Kingdom things happen in churches. Sometimes church activities are manifestations of the Kingdom. But, please, do not confuse the two as being the same. Terrible things have happened when we have done that.

At many points over the centuries the Kingdom of God has broken in and the church served it resulting in things such as the civil rights movement, the abolition of slavery, hospitals, public education, worker’s rights, and soup kitchens and food banks for example. The Kingdom of God does not exist as an institution but rather it is embodied by everyday people like us. It manifests in places like the kitchen of my best friend’s mother, Mom Landis, who gave a sense of home to this somewhat orphaned child. The door was always open and there was always something on the stove to eat for whoever stopped in and a Bible not far away giving evidence that she actually read it. Mom Landis went to church but the Kingdom of God could be found at her kitchen table. What we call the Church and the Kingdom of God are not synonymous.

Back to our denomination, we’ve commissioned ten people to come up with how to save a whole denomination from imminent death. We’ve got the commissioning part right. If one interprets what we did in the light of the reading from Luke, commissioning people is a good place to start. The translators used the word “Appointed” here but commissioning is the better word, I think. To commission is to empower to act with the authority of the commissioning body or person. In Greek, the word literally means to make visible. What Jesus did here was to empower his disciples to make his Kingdom visible.

If it were up to me to call the shots for the denomination, I wouldn’t have commissioned just ten people with the authority to tweak the structure of the denomination. I would rather go to every congregation and start commissioning disciples of Jesus to go and make the kingdom visible. And now, to quote Al Pacino’s famous courtroom line from the movie Scent of a Woman, “I’m just getting warmed up.”

Let’s humour Jesus here for a minute and try to imagine doing in our community what he did back then. I would divide you up into groups of two and section off the neighbourhoods of this town into as many sections as there are groups of two. You would leave your homes and go to that neighbourhood with only the clothes on your back, wearing no shoes, and no money. You will be barefoot and hungry and sleep in the street unless someone takes you in. You will look like the poorest of the poor. You will have to rely on the hospitality of the people in the neighbourhood.

While you’re on the street, don’t greet anybody. Don’t say “hi” or “how’re you doing”. Just keep announcing, “The Kingdom of God is at hand. Come and follow and believe this good news.” If people stop to talk to you just ask them what they need prayer for and pray for them. When the prayer is answered, tell them, “The Kingdom of God has come near to you”.

If someone invites you to their house, go with them and when you get there proclaim “Peace be to you”. Peace is rest. It’s the laying down of burdens. It’s well-being. When welcomed into a home, stay in that home. Don’t house hop. Eat what is set before you. In this day of dietary restrictions, food allergies, and overwhelming choice that may be the hardest thing to do. Pray for your hosts particularly for their healing. When they are healed, tell them, “The Kingdom of God has come near to you.” You may be interested to know that in Greek there are two words that can be translated as salvation and both are synonymous with healing. Again, stay in that house. That home may wind up being where the gathering meets.

The idea here is that the Kingdom becomes visible when in loyalty to Jesus we take the risk of being completely reliant on God; when we open ourselves to utterly accepting the hospitality of others and that’s not easy as proud and self-sufficient as we are. The Kingdom of God becomes visible when we pray, especially when we pray for healing. When the Kingdom is present, Peace is felt and people gather.

I realize I probably just scared the socks off of every one of us, myself included. What I just described though not from the twilight zone is definitely beyond the comfort zone. I think I have fairly well described church planting, which is what this denomination really needs to do if we Presbyterians want to be around in 25 years, but we probably don’t have to go to the extreme of living in the street hoping someone will invite us in. Yet, we need to rethink Church planting. The goal isn’t to wind up with a building, or even paid clergy, and certainly not a denomination. The goal should be making Jesus’ Kingdom visible. Work which involves hospitality, gathering, and praying for real needs.

I can think of something that congregations can do that takes advantage of the fact that we have buildings. Something that involves hospitality and gathering, could involve prayer. All our churches have kitchens. Pick a regular night, monthly or weekly, for a potluck or a regular morning for coffee or even breakfast or put a pot of soup on ( a big pot). Get the word out to the surrounding neighbourhood. Just let the church fellowship hall and kitchen be a place the immediate neighborhood can gather and see what comes of it. Southampton’s been doing this for a couple of years now. Cornerstone in Tara has a Friday coffee as well that is doing remarkably well. These things aren’t resulting in new faces in the pews, but new faces come to the kitchens, friendships are made, and Jesus’s Kingdom is there. Amen.

Healing Leaves

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Revelation 21-22

One afternoon while coming out of the Jerusalem temple one of Jesus’ disciples remarked how beautiful the temple was saying, “Look, Teacher, what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings!"  And then Jesus dropped a bomb.  He prophesied saying, "Do you see these great buildings?” Which means do you understand what they are about, what they represent? “There will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down."  In 70 AD that prophecy came to pass. 

Flavius Josephus was a Jewish historian in the first century AD.  In his book The Jewish Wars he recounts how the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 AD.  He recounts of how Titus Caesar ordered his army to utterly destroy the city and the Temple leaving only its two towers and the Western Wall of the Temple in order to demonstrate to posterity what kind of city it was, and how well fortified, and yet the Romans were powerful enough to demolish it.  They even destroyed all the gardens and trees around it in order to make it like a desert.  Josephus claims that 1,100,000 people were killed during the siege, of which the majority were Jews, and that 97,000 were captured, enslaved, and most were made gladiators.  The Jews that were left mostly fled to areas around the Mediterranean. Titus reportedly refused to accept a wreath of victory, as there is "no merit in vanquishing a people forsaken by their own God". 

Building further on that note, the God forsaken note, the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem temple on the last day of the Jewish month of Av (our July), a day they call Tisha B’Av, the Day of Five Calamities.  On that same date in 586 BC, the first temple, the temple Solomon built, was destroyed by the Babylonians.  In those days the prophet Ezekiel had a vision in which he saw the glory of the Lord leaving the temple in Jerusalem and heading east to be with the exiles in Babylon.  A very touching message proclaiming that God had not abandoned his people even though he had cast them off of the land.  Seventy years later when a remnant returned none of the prophets in that day claimed a vision of the glory of the Lord returning to the temple.  Isaiah 65:1 which dates to this time indicates that God didn’t want to live in the temple anymore.  “Heaven is my throne, earth is my footstool.  What is this house that you would build for me?”  The Lord God apparently did not return to the Jerusalem temple after it was rebuilt by the remnant that returned and certainly not after Herod the Great did all his glorious renovations just before Jesus was born.  It was not until Jesus that the presence of the LORD God of Israel again dwelt among his people.

Coming to John in exile on Patmos, he was a Jew and his love for Jerusalem, the Holy City, would have been quite strong.  The destruction of Jerusalem by Rome and the dispersion of the Jews was only 20 years prior to the writing of the Revelation.  Talk to any war refugee and they will let you know full well that what happened 20 years ago might as well have been yesterday.  To a Jew the Roman destruction of Jerusalem was as vivid and traumatic as the eruption of Mt Vesuvius to the Mediterranean world 9 years later. 

Jerusalem was more than just the symbol of national identity over which people swell with patriotism.  The temple was in Jerusalem and to a Jew the Jerusalem temple was the one place on earth where heaven and earth were open to each other.  To a Jew the temple symbolized the presence of the LORD God with his people.  Therefore, the opposite would be true as well.  Jerusalem destroyed, the temple destroyed, and the Jewish people cast forth from the land would have been clear indication that God had not only rejected his people, but abandoned them as well.  

It is into this context that we must place this climatic vision of John’s.  He saw a new creation, a new Heaven and a new Earth.  The old had passed.  It was gone, never to be again.  The Greek word for “new” here, kainos, is more powerful in its emphasis on utter newness than is the typical Greek word for “new”, neos.  Neos is like having a new car.  Kainos means coming up with an altogether new mode of transportation, the flying car of The Jetson’s.  The old was gone and the new had come.  And then there in the midst of this utterly new creation where heaven and earth are openly now joined as one, where it finally is on earth as it is in heaven, John sees the New Jerusalem coming from God.  I suspect that the heart of John the Jew leapt.  Like the tower of Babel, God had destroyed the Jerusalem his people had built as a symbol of the name they had made for themselves and sent them asunder.  Now God himself is giving a new holy city to his people to symbolize the name that the LORD God had made for them and it was as beautiful as a bride prepared to wed her husband.

Then a voice came from the throne of God saying that God himself is with his people and he himself will comfort them.  Not only would a new esteem be given to his people, Jew and Gentile alike, but God would once again be with his people and this time personally.  He would intimately involve himself with each of them to heal and comfort them.  God himself will wipe away their tears.  Moreover, death will be no more and mourning, crying out, and toilsome suffering will be no more.

Then, God himself speaks, “Behold, I am making all things new.  Write this down.  It is trustworthy and the Truth.”  This is the most important word spoken in the entire book, indeed in history.  God is making all things new.  Time in the Book of Revelation is two faceted.  John sees what is and what is to be.  Sometimes, it’s skewed to one side more than the other, but in this passage John is seeing both what God is doing now and what will be in the future.  In this world that is a mess, God is presently working to make all things new until the day comes when the old is utterly gone and everything is made utterly new with the glory of God.  It may not seem like it to us, but behind the scenes of history God is making all things new.  That’s the Truth; capital “T”.

Then God speaks directly to John and it is a message for John to give to his churches in Turkey who are about to undergo great persecution for refusing to call Emperor Domitian Lord.  He says, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.” This means the buck stops with God.  The LORD God has the final word in every matter and his final word is all things are being made new; all things on earth will be as they are in heaven.  He says to those Christians about to suffer and some even be martyred that the one who conquers, the one who keeps the faith even unto death, he will freely give of the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Living Water.  But those who cowardly deny Him and in turn resort to a pagan life, they will suffer the bitter fire of judgment for there is nothing left for those who knowing the Truth, turn back from it, who put their hand to the plough and leave it in the field when the ploughing gets tough.

Then John sees a river of living water flowing out from the middle of the city from the throne of God and straddling it is the Tree of Life from which humanity was banned from eating after the Garden of Eden fiasco.  John notes that the leaves on the Tree are for the healing of the nations…for the healing of the nations.  Friends, this image of the New Jerusalem with the River of Living Water flowing from it and the Tree of Life with its healing leaves, this is what we are as fellowships of followers of Jesus.  We, who are born of the Holy Spirit, the Living Water, and united to Jesus and to each other in him and share in Jesus’ relationship to the Father so that we know the steadfast love and faithfulness of God and drink of the very communion of love that the Trinity, the LORD God is, we are the new Jerusalem in the making. 

We are the Tree of Life and each one of us is one of those healing leaves. Love one another.  It’s important.  Feed the hungry. Give drink to the thirsty.  Give home to the homeless.  Clothe the naked.  Visit the prisoner.  Care for the orphaned and the widowed.  Show hospitality to the stranger, the refugee, the immigrant.  It’s important.  Those are the actions that heal the nations, that point to the coming new creation.  The ways of Empire are exercises in futility that lead to death but the work we do in the Lord is not in vain.  In these interesting times in which we presently live, when Empirism is making itself so blatantly obvious (except to those who are deceived and deluded by it), what the world needs is for us Christians, each and every one of us healing leaves, to step up and show our loyalty to Jesus through acts of unconditional love.  Amen.