Listen to the Voice

Please Click Here For Sermon Video

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

Please Click Here for Sermon Video

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

Please Click Here For Sermon Video

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

Please Click Here For Sermon Video

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.