A Family Plan

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Genesis 24:34-67

This story of Abraham’s servant going to find a wife for Abraham’s son Isaac and everything happening so according to plan, if I can say it that way, it just seems so right out of the movies.  It starts with what appears to be the makings of a very old school arranged marriage that’s not fair to anybody, especially the woman.  Arranged marriages always leave you asking the Tina Turner question: “What’s love got to do with it?”  But surprisingly Rebekah is given the choice and it’s a choice remarkably like the one Abraham made in responding to God’s promise.  Like Abraham, Rebekah had to leave her native land and her father’s house to go to a land she’d never seen, but a land that would become hers and her offspring will become a great nation.  Like Abraham she goes.  If Abraham is called the father of faith, Rebekah rather than Sarah should be called the mother of faith.  She arrives and is immediately struck with, smitten by Isaac whom she finds doing a prayer walk in a field.  The story ends with the words, “and he loved her.”  This is the only place in the Bible that I am aware of where a husband’s love for his wife is actually noted.  Also, their marriage is one of only a handful that’s not complicated by other wives and concubines.  

Probably the most astonishing thing of all in this story is the role God has in bringing them together.  Abraham sends his head servant off on a fool’s errand – “Go find a wife for my son from among my people.  These Canaanite women just ain’t like us.”  The servant loads up a small caravan of ten or more camels and goes to roughly the area Abraham came from.  He goes to the local watering hole, the well.  That’s where the local shepherds like to watch the young women come to draw water from the well.  There’s just something about watching a woman draw water apparently. Expecting that there will be women coming, he prays and basically tells God what to make happen to make it clear to him who is the right woman for Isaac.  It will be the woman who gives him water and waters his camels too.  As soon as he opens his eyes, there’s Rebekah.  She fills the bill.  Gives him water – check.  Waters the camels – check.  Related to Abraham – check.  A match made in heaven.  Pray, faith, wait, God comes through….umm….hmmm….It does happen, you know.  I don’t know if you have ever had your jaw dropped by God when you asked for a sign, a specific sign, and you got it.  I have.  It happens.

Well anyway, the idea that God can play matchmaker and that a marriage can be life-long and monogamous are ideas that challenge us these days.  There are all kinds of views out there these days on love, marriage, and family.  Just to pop off a few, there’s the idea that we are not complete or whole without a significant love relationship.  You may remember the iconic moment in the vintage 90’s film Jerry McGuire when Jerry played by Tom Cruise, says to Dorothy, played by Renee Zellweger, “I love you…you complete me.”  That one turned up all kinds of red flags in the world of relationship advisors who say, “You should be complete in yourself.  You shouldn’t need another person to complete you.”  Well, yeah.  If you’re saying that to someone you just recently met, red flags should be flying.  That’s just your body pumping some feel good hormones at you.  Even in the long run we cannot make another person responsible for making me feel complete.  That’s a huge burden for one person to bear.  

But…there’s the other side of that coin.  We do need relationships, significant relationships with significant others to be complete…if there is such a thing as completeness in this life.  We are not independent, autonomous, rational, decision-making individual beings who can do and be what we want to do and be with no consequences to others.  We are relational beings.  Sure, there’s some “unique to me” stuff floating around in us, but for the most part, I don’t know who I am apart from the relationships (not just love relationships) I have and have had and some relationships are more foundational to who I am than others so that without those people in my life I am very incomplete and, in some cases, freaking devastated.  

Then there’s also the idea that there isn’t just one person you’d make a good fit for.  Danny DeVito’s character, Eddie, in the movie Jumanji: The Next Level voices this in some advice he gives to his grandson, Spencer.  Spencer is a bit broken up over a relationship that is on the outs with a girl with whom he was well fit.  I couldn’t find the quote exactly but DeVito says something like “Don’t get too bent up over one girl. If I was your age, I’d just go ride the subway. There are all kinds of girls there to meet and one in five of them I’d marry.”  When it comes to mates fit for us, there is more than one person with whom you could make it work, but still, one asks is there that one person we are meant to be with.  It depends on who you ask.

Then there’s what’s vogue today in popular relationship psychology.  Some will say monogamy and marriage are unrealistic expectations only meant to cause us shame and guilt.  They say we are living longer now and people change and grow and you can’t expect life-long commitments.  So, grow as a person all you can with the person you’re with now and there’s no shame in moving on to someone else.  We should all be mature adults and able to let go of people when they or we need/want to move on.  It only hurts if you hold on to those unrealistic expectations.  They also make the argument that Evolutionarily speaking we are not wired for monogamy.  It’s better for the species if we have more than one partner.  To that I say, in every culture that has endured, those evolutionary urges have always had to be curbed.  Stable communities require relationships based in trust and for some reason, the evolutionary urge to have more than one partner does a world of hurt in the trust department.  

Then there’s the biblical perspective.  Well, honestly, it’s all over the place and you have to say that the role of Scripture at times is to show us that some things are wrong, for lack of a better word, by making them look accepted and even right; things like polygamy and giving a slave to your husband as a wife to bear children for you.  These things are wrong.  Just because it’s a seemingly accepted practice in the Bible doesn’t make it right.  If you pay attention to how having multiple spouses plays outin the biblical stories, you find it leads to a world of hurt.  

King Solomon is probably the worst example of them all.  He was the wisest and richest of all of Israel’s kings but he had the habit of marrying to form alliances with other kings.  He had over 700 wives who were princesses and 300 concubines.  Nowhere is love mentioned in these relationships.  These women were simply “treaty-trophies” to him.  There seems to be such total disregard for the fact that they were real women, real persons, and certainly not property.  In the end, Solomon’s marrying for political reasons led him to put shrines to other gods in the Temple so that his wives and he along with them could worship their own gods…in the Temple…and he did it with them.  Polygamy damaged his relationship to God…we can only imagine the damage it did to the women.  Polygamy (or polyamorous relationships as they are called today) only led to idolatry and shallow family relationships.  As soon as he died, Solomon’s son split the nation.

To the other extreme, the New Testament would seem to offer celibate singleness as the way to go, but with the advice that if you can’t control your urges, it’s better to marry than to burn with passion or to be untowards to another.  But the singleness thing was simply the bias of the Apostle Paul whose opinions were skewed by his own ability and preference to live single and probably more so by his very urgent expectation that Jesus would return at any moment and that, to him, was more important than love, marriage, and pushing a baby carriage.  That noted, there is nothing wrong with staying single but in the New Testament the overall bias is that monogamous, life-long marriage is the best way for women and men to partner up.  We also find that marriage should be rooted in love, a love that grows and blossoms to resemble the way that Jesus loves the church and the church loves Jesus – unconditionally and selflessly, full of hospitality, generosity, patience, kindness, and forgiveness.  Serving, not demanding to be served.    

Turning back to our reading here about Isaac and Rebekah, there’s a couple of things to notice.  First, in God’s plan for healing his very good creation from evil, sin, and death through a people of faith, marriage and family play a central role.  Genesis, the first book of the Bible, is the story of marriages and families who are trying to be faithful.  It’s not the stories of faithful individuals.  Moreover, even Jesus was born and raised within the context of the marriage and family of Mary and Joseph.  Solid societies are built on solid families not on individuals seeking self-fulfillment.  

Second, one could make the argument that yes, there is that one certain somebody that God would have us to be with.  But we need to acknowledge that if God does indeed bring two people together, those two people need to keep God in the relationship, acknowledge that the relationship is a gift from God not to be taken for granted, and in times of trouble we must always let God and the relationship take precedence over “me, myself, and I”.  God has a purpose for our marriages, for our families.  The best way to keep things healthy is to together seek that higher purpose. 

To close, I think I need to say that this sermon is not meant to be part of the ongoing debates of who can and cannot be married due to sexual orientation and what constitutes a family.  As far as I’m concerned, the love of Christ will and should always surprise and challenge us in its scope.  God’s heart will always be bigger than our own and God’s arms open wider than our own.  It’s best we learn to live with that reality.  I’m simply trying to say that in God’s plan to heal this hurting creation, particularly the aspect of wounded human community, the roles of marriage and family are vital.  Amen.

 

Beyond Child Sacrifice

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Genesis 22:1-14

Last Sunday was Father’s Day and that usually invites some interesting posts on social media particularly on the religious side of things.  Take this one for example from a Facebook page called ‘God Is Not Real’.  It reads:

“I'm bothered when religious people make claims about God taking sides in a war or favoring any specific country. If God were a loving father, as he is alleged to be by his followers, then he would PREVENT wars from happening in the first place. Can you imagine a human father with a son and a daughter brutally fighting each other over some trivial matter, like property or political discourse? And their father knows about it and allows it to happen, or worse yet, aids one sibling in the destruction of the other? That would be absurd, and we'd say of that father that he is a horrible parent. That is why I wrote in a 2013 essay that ‘We know for fact from listing qualities of a ‘loving father' that God most certainly isn't one.’”

I’m not going to argue this one down because it would just begin to sound like two fifth graders in a contest to see who can stand the furthest from the urinal and still hit it.  That might be fun for the boys involved but who wins pales in comparison to the mess that’s left behind.  Just ask the custodian, teacher, or parent who has to clean it up.  Back in the day, we would have made the kids responsible clean it up.  But not today. I can only imagine the lawsuit that loving parents would wage against a school system should it make the children responsible clean up that kind of mess.  Should God be any different with the horrible, horrible, horrible messes that we humans create by doing things God has for millennia said don’t do?  Should God make humanity clean up its messes and learn from them?  We humans have a propensity to do things we know are horribly wrong, indeed evil.  

But I will say this to those standing on both sides of the argument this post invites.  It is problematic to reduce biblical faith to a matter of beliefs vs facts or what God says vs what Science says.  The Bible is the story of the fidelity of God to a people and the fidelity of that people to God.  It is about fidelity between two parties, a relationship.  In that relationship one of the parties, the people, have a problem with fidelity for being overly self-involved and becoming addicted to things.  It’s not about who has the right beliefs and most accurate facts.  It’s about how God continues to deal with the infidelity and addiction of his people to heal them.  God stays faithful, holds them accountable, forgives and heals.  It’s not a pretty story and there are areas to find fault, but it's an accurate portrayal of who, what, and how we humans are.  Don’t smash the mirror.  Study the person that’s in it.  

I would also warn against being what is called anachronistic which involves judging the moral standards and values of past cultures by the moral standards of our present culture.  What a Western Gen-Xer or Millennial calls a “loving father” should not be used to judge what we define as a biblical definition of fatherhood.  There’s a couple thousand years between those two definitions and they are very different cultures.  The task for us is to know what they did and why they did it.  So also, we should neither ignore lessons learned over the past couple thousand years.  Both times and cultures would agree that fathers (parents) should discipline their children and that doing so is love.  But…sparing the literal rod?  That comes from a time when children were regarded as a little more than livestock.  How literal do you want to be about that?  How many of you could take a wooden stick and beat a child?  We now know that there are better ways to correct a child than traumatizing them with physical abuse.  Maybe we should let that spare the rod stuff stay in the past and pursue better avenues to discipline.  

I would also say that I am a bit sympathetic with what the poster is saying.  Political leaders and religious communities should not be running around claiming God is on our side.  If God is on the side of anybody in a war, it is the side of those who are seeking to love, feed, and house the enemy, the side of the children who are being scarred for life by bombs and bullets, the side of those having to suffer the horrors of war.  Why doesn’t God prevent it?  Good question.  I would like to know that too.  

One answer is that love involves giving the one you love freedom and free will which involves the harsh reality of eventually letting the people you love make their own mistakes.  Loving fathers (and mothers) will from time to time have to let their children suffer the consequences of doing what they have told their children time and time again not to do.  This is especially true when it comes to matters involving addiction.  So, it is with war.  War is rooted in the revenge addiction, power addiction, wealth addiction, and usually narcissism of certain powerful individuals at the top of the food chain.  They are the ones who tell the lies that delude the masses who unfortunately buy into the stinking thinking of wanting to rule the world.  Unfortunately, “God is on our side” is one of those lies.  The only way humanity is going to learn that war is not an option is to suffer the consequences of it.  Unfortunately, we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over and the only lesson we seem to be learning is how to do war with bigger and more effective means. 

The best way to approach this subject is to try to determine as best one can what the biblical definition of a father is and hold God accountable to that. If you’re interested, the best definition of what the Bible would call “Fatherhood” I have found for why we call God the Father “Father” is from a book written by a woman, Marianne Meye Thompson (spelled with a “p” if some of you Chesley Thomson’s are wondering).  She looked at a couple of Old Testament examples of fathers, particularly Abraham and Job, to garner an understanding of what Jesus may have meant by calling God the Father “Father.”  She gave a list of things that a father did: the father brings a family into existence, provides his children with an inheritance, protects and provides for his children, and is a figure of authority to whom obedience and honour are properly rendered.  I would add disciplines or rears rightly his children, himself has faith, and rears his children within the context of faith.  If a father fell short in these responsibilities, he would be seen as dishonourable in the eyes of the broader community.  The standard was not whether or not you were a loving father.  It was whether or not you kept your responsibilities and were honourable.  Oddly, things like affection and attending to the emotional development of your child, and helping them to pursue their dreams would have been absolutely foreign ideas back then.  

With respect to a child’s responsibilities, children were to honour and obey the father and serve the needs of the family, and be faithful stewards of the inheritance until it became theirs.  This be all you can “be all you can be”, “the world’s your oyster”, child-centred, go to therapy world we live in would have been utterly foreign to them…as it was in our own culture not less than 100 years ago.  We might want to ask if our ideas of “loving father” which involves a whole lot of pandering to individualism might actually be an aberration that we as a culture need to put a check on.

Having said all that, let’s play a game called “Let’s not jump to conclusions”.  We just read together the story of God commanding Abraham to take his son Isaac, the child of the promise, on a three day journey to Mt. Moriah (which would later become the Temple Mount), and there offer Isaac as a burnt offering.  Abraham set out and even made Isaac carry the wood.  He lied to Isaac profusely about what was going to happen, that God would provide the sacrifice.  Abraham himself couldn’t believe God would have him do such a thing.  He followed through right up to the point of raising the knife to bring it down to kill Isaac when an angel stopped him and there suddenly was a ram in the thicket.

I hear this story and I am appalled.  The trauma that Isaac must have suffered, Abraham too.  He loved his son, which was something uncharacteristic of a father in those days.  What kind of a God would demand such a thing?  What kind of a “loving father” would follow through on it.  It would be very easy to dismiss this God and this faith on the basis of this atrocious treatment of a child.  But…let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.  Let’s dig a little deeper.  

The nations around Abraham practiced child sacrifice.  It was not uncommon for a father who sought to be a powerful leader of a great nation to sacrifice his firstborn son to the Canaanite-Phoenician-Moabite god named Molech.  If this passage says anything, it is that Israel by command of its God will not sacrifice children as did the surrounding nations!  Even so, as the centuries went on, the kings and oligarchs of Israel and Judah (in like manner of today’s presidents and billionaires among the Epstein class) began to sacrifice their children to Molech believing that sacrificing their firstborn, their namesake, would make them powerful and all the more wealthy.  Guess what God did?  When they began to do that, God first sent the Assyrians and then the Babylonians to rout them and carry them off the Land into exile as a humiliated nation.  God even let the Babylonians destroy his Temple.  The sacrificing of children in the pursuit of power and wealth would not be tolerated by God among God’s people, then…nor now for God is on the side of the children.

Atrocious things still happen to children today.  In the pursuit of their own wants and desires, adults inevitably sacrifice their own children.  We are not remiss to ask God why he allows it.  I certainly have my questions as to why God let things happen to me in my childhood that scarred me.  I could have gone the route of revenge and prayed to God to get them or found some way myself of getting back at them.  But revenge can become an addiction.  Grudging is an addiction before which we will become powerless.  If I chose that route, I might feel as if I got even but the law of generational trauma dictates that I would only wind up sacrificing my children just as I was sacrificed.  The route I chose was to do everything I could not to do unto others as was done unto me and more so to seek to forgive, something which took God’s help and which he showed up for and led me to do.   

I’ll close by saying let’s not judge the stories of the Bible at face value nor the God to which the book gives witness.  They are multi-faceted and meant to be mined deeply.  But, let us also not be so shallow as to say its God’s rule book meant to be followed or else.  Remember that just about everybody around you has suffered some sort of childhood trauma to varying degrees.  Tread lightly, gently.  Amen.

 

Alive to God

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Romans 6:1-14

Sometimes in life in order to understand where we are at in things we need to step back and examine what we would call the “big picture”.  Faith plays a big role in that.  If we are of the conviction that our lives somehow fit into the “Big Picture” of what God is doing in God’s very good Creation we will value things and go about life differently than if we thought we were just here fending for ourselves.  

Our reading from Romans this morning is one of the Apostle Paul’s “Big Picture” moments.  On the surface it seems to be about what Baptism is but when you start mulling on it, it becomes one of those places where we catch a glimpse of Paul’s “Big Picture” of what God did do, is doing, and will do in, through and as Jesus the Christ.  When we get inside his “Big Picture” one thought that really sticks out is that in, through, and as Jesus Christ God has changed human existence.  Jesus is the new Man, Christ, as opposed to the old Man, Adam.  As the old humanity flowed forth from Adam so now in Jesus Christ there is a new human existence coming forth.  The difference is that the new human is in union with God in Christ through the Holy Spirit and that changes everything.  In Paul’s thinking God is changing humanity from “in Adam” to “in Christ”.  At the end of the Age, the Day of Resurrection when Jesus returns, the change will be complete.  All Creation will be made new.  Until that time God the Holy Spirit is at work calling people to fidelity to Jesus Christ, creating a community of people centered on him who have a sense of this new life in Christ in which we are being healed of our Sin-sickness. 

The old humanity, which Paul would call “in Adam” and which Paul names after the Bible’s story of Adam being the first human, is diseased.  We are sick in our minds with a disease called Sin that twists our perception of reality to be grossly self-oriented.  It makes us misunderstand God, ourselves, and each other.  We are unable to perceive God as we should and so we put ourselves and other “idols” into the place of God and in turn we each do not just do bad things, but rather we do evil things even when we think we are doing good.  

This disease of Sin culminates in Death and though death frees us from the misery of Sin we are especially fearful of Death because it ultimately dethrones us as our own gods.  Death, and particularly our ignorance of what comes after death, a-fears us with the fact that the day is coming for each of us when the unholy trinity of “Me, Myself, and I” will end, the day when “I” who likes to sing, ‘I did it my way” will be humbled if not humiliated into apparent non-existence because death shows no mercy.

But the finiteness of Death is not the final word in God’s very good Creation.  Because God loves us and is deeply wounded to the core with our addiction to Sin, God has acted to heal us.  In, through, and as Jesus Christ, God the Son took upon himself - unioned to himself - the Sin-diseased nature and flesh of the old humanity, “Adam”.  Infusing himself into humanity is another way of putting it.  Like putting a food colouring in water, the colouring works its way into every molecule of the water changing it to become colored water.  (Also, forgive me for using the male singular pronouns.  The more accurate pronouns for God would be Us-self, Our-self, and We-self but be a bit too distracting at the moment.) 

Back to the topic, as Jesus, God and Sin-diseased humanity became one – two natures, one person.  Just as Jesus touched lepers and took their disease upon himself and healed it, God took the disease of Sin into himself so that we will be healed.  Jesus then lived the faithful life that we are unable to live though tempted in every way as we are.  He then died the death that is the consequence of sin.  Then God the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit raised Jesus from the dead with a human body, indeed created matter, that is now healed from sin and that will not die - voila, the first born of the new humanity that Paul calls “in Christ”.  In the wake of Easter God has poured the Holy Spirit upon the followers of Jesus.  And to keep us humble, I am quite sure the Holy Spirit is at work in people outside of what we would call the church.  The Holy Spirit opens our eyes so that we see, experience, and understand the nature of God as God has revealed himself in Jesus as unconditional, self-giving, redeeming, healing Love.  The Holy Spirit is at work in us healing our Sin-diseased nature making us desire to be more Christ-like, making us desire to live a faithful life.  Then in the end when the Day comes, God will raise us from the dead as well.  All creation will be healed of the futility it now suffers.

  Back to Paul and his “Big Picture”; Baptism fits into this “Big Picture” as the moment a person has for certain passed from the Old Humanity of Adam into the New Humanity in Christ Jesus.  It is the outward sign of an inward working as theologians of the past called it.  Paul believed that Baptism is a mysterious participation in Jesus' own death and resurrection with the result that the person baptized has died the death that sin begot and is now alive to God in Christ.  The person being baptized is in essence being put to death and raised to new life in Christ.  

Understanding Baptism in Paul’s way is probably a bit out there for most of us.  Most of us have probably just been taught that Baptism is simply a ritual Christians do to say they and their children are Christians.  And, being Christian is simply a way of living where we clean up our acts and try not to do anything wrong so that we can stay on God’s good side.  

But, that’s not what Paul says Baptism is!

Baptism is incorporation into a new humanity – a new human existence that God brought into being when Jesus was conceived in his mother’s womb by the power of the Holy Spirit and brought to its completion with Jesus’ resurrection in the power of the Holy Spirit.  We have called ourselves Homo Sapiens but now we are Homo Christiens.  This new humanity is now at work in us as we are “in Christ” by the presence and work of the Holy Spirit who is in us freeing us from our enslavement to Sin and Death as we go about walking in the Way of Jesus. 

Baptism is our participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus.  With respect to that Paul writes, “You must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”  Elsewhere he writes, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.  The life I now live in the body, I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:19-20).  For us, this basically means we are dead.  We no longer have a claim to ourselves to do what we want to do with the lives we still live.  Rather, we must live as disciples of Jesus in prayerful discernment in order to do what Jesus is doing in and through us in the power of the Holy Spirit.  We cannot seek conformity to the world but rather we must yield to the Spirit’s transformative power at work in renewing our aims and ambitions to reflect the new life called “in Christ”.

If we are to take Paul’s Big Picture seriously, then this is who each of us is.  We each have died and been raised with Christ.  We each belong to Jesus Christ who loves us each and gave his life for us each.  Our lives will never be our own.  Therefore, we must live as living witnesses to Jesus and the new life that is in us.  God has rebirthed God’s image in us.  As God is the loving Communion of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – Three Persons who give themselves so completely to one another in unconditional love that they are One and the Same in Being, so are we to put “me, myself, and I” on the back burner and live according to unconditional love in all our relationships.  Afterall, “me, myself, and I” was crucified and buried with Jesus.  We must give space and time in our lives to foster the awareness that the Holy Spirit is with us – we are never alone.  Nor are we left to our own efforts for the Holy Spirit is at work in each of us making us each more like Jesus.  We must listen for Jesus to speak and sense the Holy Spirit’s moving and prodding.  Most importantly, we must learn to rest ourselves in the sure knowing that we each are a beloved child of God and that God loves us each as much as he does Jesus, the only-begotten Son.  We are each here to help and support each other in any way we can to remember who we are “in Christ” and to live as those who are alive to God.  Amen.

 

The Marks of the Kingdom

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Matthew 9:35-10:14

As best as we can tell from the Gospels, it appears that Jesus began his ministry wandering from town-to-town teaching and preaching in the region of Galilee. It seems he liked to start his visit to a town by teaching in the synagogue. We know that he did have some rather large outdoor moments like when he preached the Sermon on the Mount and when he fed the 5,000-15,000. He also wound up getting invited to dinner quite often. And, it goes without saying that he spent a lot of time just teaching his disciples as they made their way from place to place. Nevertheless, the local synagogue on the Sabbath seemed to be where he made his initial stop when he came to town.

Now surprisingly, we don’t know much at all about what went on in the local synagogue back then. Synagogues arose during the Babylonian Exile as places for the displaced Jews to go and be Jews together and the practice followed them back from exile. We know that after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and leveled the Temple in 70AD and then for sure by the 300’s AD, the synagogue became very important as a place of worship. But as far as in Jesus’ day, we know there was a place called a synagogue in most small towns in Israel and throughout the Roman empire where there were large communities of Jews. The word itself means “the gathering” and that seems to have been the synagogue’s most important function. It was a place for people to gather.

In the first century, the synagogue building seemed to have been a large, walled courtyard that may or may not have had a roof. There were benches for sitting around the walls with one important spot called the “Seat of Moses” where the head teaching rabbi sat when they gathered on the Sabbath. Outside of the Sabbath, it seems the courtyard served as a marketplace or park. Similar to how the rural/small town church used to be the social hub a few decades ago in North America, the synagogue was more so a place for fellowship in first century Judaism. The crowds that Jesus had compassion for were likely townspeople fellowshipping at the synagogue.

As far as what synagogue worship was like, well, your guess is as good as mine. As important as these places were, none of the rabbis or the Temple authorities ever wrote down the rubrics of what synagogue worship would look like. We know there was prayer. They probably read the story of the Exodus, a few excerpts from the Law, and a bit of a prophet read by whoever was invited to read. At some point, a local rabbi would give a short commentary on one of the readings. There might be some discussion. That’s about all we know.

As I mentioned earlier, Jesus liked to start his local ministry in the synagogue, but things didn’t always if ever go without confrontation. He and his Kingdom of God message stirred things up. In the Gospel of Mark as a matter of first course, we see Jesus visit the Capernaum synagogue. Capernaum and a house there seem to function as a home base for Jesus. The people, the crowd, at the synagogue were amazed at his teaching. Just then a demoniac challenged Jesus calling him the Holy One of God. Jesus told him to shut up and cast the demon out of the man, an act of the Kingdom or reign of God being at hand. The crowd was gobsmacked.

But tides change. When Jesus went to his hometown synagogue in Nazareth, he was given the Scroll of Isaiah to read. News of Jesus and his ministry preceded him. They wanted to hear what their hometown boy, whom everybody knew, would have to say. He read a passage about things the Messiah would do, things only God could do, the miraculous things which he had been doing. For his brief commentary on the passage, he simply said “Today, this passage has been fulfilled within your hearing.” That prompted some heated discussion for which they ran him out of town.

From then on, most of his teaching moments in synagogues which were always accompanied by healings and exorcisms were met with opposition from the synagogue authorities, the scribes and Pharisees. No wonder Jesus said that the crowds for which he had such compassion were like sheep without a shepherd. When it came to the crowds fellowshipping in the synagogues, distressed and dejected due to Roman oppression, the shepherds did not feel compassion for them but rather an apparent love of authority over them.

So, Jesus would come to a town and go to the synagogue and teach/preach that the Kingdom of God has come near and he demonstrated it by healing people, casting out demons, holding the authorities accountable, touching the unclean, eating with tax collectors and sinners, and sometimes he even raised the dead. To these crowds of troubled people of God and to the outcast among them he came and brought real hope. He didn’t come with a moral code to be obeyed or else. He didn’t come saying, “believe what I believe or else.” He certainly did not come preaching, “Believe in me or go to Hell when you die.” He came bringing the Kingdom of God.

Well, that was a long time ago in a land 9,353 kilometers (5,812 miles) as the crow flies from my recliner. What does Jesus bringing his Kingdom look like today in our communities? A primary marker for the presence of Jesus and his kingdom is compassion for the crowds, a real burden to do something to uplift the multitudes of people in our communities who are troubled, cast out, and vulnerable like shepherdless sheep. Israel in Jesus day was a land occupied and overtaxed by a foreign nation and there was widespread hopelessness. In the small towns the people gathered at the synagogue. That’s not our context today, but there are still a lot of people troubled by economic hardship, medical issues, family problems. It’s a huge list. There are plenty of people ostracized in our communities, lots of young people being ostracized in online communities. There are still all those phobias and -ism’s that people use to build walls to throw people off of. There are vulnerable people all around. People getting scammed in ways we can’t even imagine. Are we moved with compassion?

About crowds, it’s a reasonably sure bet to say that the primary place Jesus saw the crowd was at the synagogue. For us today, local churches are not the place people are gathering to. The gathering places are online. They are at sporting events and concerts. We have to go to big cities to see people crowding through the routines of daily life on public transportation or going to shopping and education centres. Nevertheless, people gathering for fellowship is a rare gift if you can find it. Today is not the day to expect people to come to a church and discover the secret gem of compassionate fellowship that we house in our small congregations. Rather, the harvest is out there at the county fair, the fitness center, the beach, the Tim’s, and so on. But – and this is scary - the predominant place that people are gathering now is online in social media outlets were taking advantage of or outright attacking the vulnerable is the name of the game. Human beings need face-to-face, in-person community.

Jesus said pray the Lord of the harvest to send workers out into the harvest. That’s us. Notice in the passage that those workers were immediately all listed by name. The small church is like the theme song to that TV show Cheers from years ago. “Sometimes you wanna go where everyone knows your name. And they’re always glad you came. You wanna be where you can see our troubles are all the same. You wanna be where everybody knows your name.” People long to be known. So, we need to be the people who go out there among the harvest and putting our fears and shyness aside we learn people’s names and something about them. We take nothing with us like agendas and we expect nothing in return. We just go and listen giving love and support. We just want them to get a sense of the peace of Christ that abides with us. Who knows? Maybe they will want to know where we got this peace from and come and fellowship with us. Amen.

Matthew's First Day

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Matthew 9:1-34

It is a rare person who hasn’t had an eventful day at some point in life, good or bad, that had the significance or should we say the power of changing everything.  A moment that you know that from this point forward things are going to be different.  The type of days about which we say, “This is the first day of the rest of your life, how are you going to live it?”  “There’s an irrefusable opportunity here, but are you going to take it.”  Or sometimes it is one of those things that happens that leaves us and the people around us saying, “You never know what a day is going to bring.”  Things happen that change everything and you have to go on.  Do you get out of the chair and get on with it?

Here we find Matthew in such a moment – the first day of the rest of his life.  In the Gospel that bears his name, he is the fifth named and called disciple behind the fishermen Peter, Andrew, James, and John.  Some others seemed to have volunteered but without necessarily counting the cost.  He was faced with an invitation from Jesus to follow him.

Matthew was a tax collector in the small little town of Capernaum up on the northern tip of the Sea of Tiberius, Galilee to the locals, but you know how the Romans liked to put their emperor’s name on things when they occupied a land.  And you also know, tax collectors worked for those Romans collecting taxes for them.  Roman taxes were a burden for most everybody.  It was very easy to get behind on them.  You were taxed on your land and because you had a head (the head tax).  There were tolls on roads and customs at borders.  You were taxed on what you wanted to sell and sales tax on what you sold.  Tax collectors typically came from already wealthy families and found ways to extort more tax than was required to further enrich themselves.  They kept a ledger of who was and was not paid up and had Roman soldiers at their disposal to enforce things.  Thus, they were considered to be traitors.

Matthew was sitting in his tax collector’s booth one morning there on Main Street.  A crowd had suddenly formed down at the sea shore and was rather exuberant, praising God loudly.  As the crowd headed on up into town, he was able to gather that that guy Jesus had told a paralyzed man his sins were forgiven which upset the religious hoity-toities.  Then, to prove he had the authority to forgive sins, Jesus healed the man and this wasn’t the first time this Jesus of Nazareth guy had done such a thing in the last few months since that John the Baptist freaky dude got arrested.  A paralyzed man would have been considered cursed by God for his secret sins and by this healing apparently Jesus proved he had the authority to amend that.  Jesus was verging on God’s territory which the hoity-toities claimed as their exclusive domain.  

When Jesus in the midst of the crowd passed Matthew’s booth, he stopped and said to Matthew, “Follow me.”  Perhaps Jesus knew Matthew was looking for a way out of the ledger keeping and the bullying and being seen as a traitor.  Matthew found himself having the courage to get out of the chair and follow.

They showed up at “the house” about lunch time.  It was probably that guy Peter’s mother-in-law’s place.  When they entered the dining room, already reclining there at the table were a few of the other tax collectors in the area and a handful of those people that the religious hoity-toities liked to pass judgement on because they had better things to do on Saturday morning than go to synagogue and listen to the Rabbi’s argue about irrelevant stuff. Nor were they able to afford to make a trip to Jerusalem once a year to make a sacrifice so that they could be considered good people.  Nor could they afford the Temple tax that those religious hoity-toities were glad to collect and take to Jerusalem on their behalf.  With the Romans around you had to pay to live and make a living.  With the hoity-toities, you had to pay just to be a good person.  Matthew started to feel at home with the people at Jesus’ table and reclined.

The hoity-toities from the sea shore also followed Jesus to the house.  When they saw the company he kept, they went behind his back and questioned his disciples as to why he sat at table with such as these, you know, people like Matthew.  I’m sure Matthew was a bit put out by their judging him.  Jesus got wind of it and got quite frank with them.  He quoted a short verse from the prophet Hosea telling them, “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire compassion rather than sacrifice.”  Boy, did he hit the nail on the head…but who was the “I” he was referring to?  Himself?

Then some of John the Baptist’s followers showed up.  They were staying in the proximity of Jesus since John got arrested.  They had seen the heavens opened and heard the voice when John baptised Jesus, “This is my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.  John’s disciples, like the hoity-toities, were expecting the Messiah to show up at any moment to kick the Romans out.  They, like the hoity-toities, thought they could hasten his coming by following the Law of Moses and praying and fasting a lot.  They wanted to know why Jesus and his disciples didn’t do the same.  Jesus answered by making a cryptic clue to himself being the Messiah here now and that it was time now to celebrate because it won’t be long before the hoity-toities make him gone, if you know what I mean.  The new, the works of power, that he was doing will tatter that old religion like sewing unshrunk cloth onto old cloth or putting new wine into old wine skins.  So, it’s best to put new wine into new wineskins like these tax collectors and sinners.

Just then one of the town leaders, a powerful man, rushed in, knelt before Jesus, and begged him to come to his house and lay his hand on his little twelve-year-old daughter because she had just died and Jesus could make her live.  Whoa.  Touch the dead?  Raise the dead!? Did this man know what he was asking!  Who did this man think Jesus was?  These are things only God can do.  Jesus didn’t deny having that kind of power nor did he try to talk the man down.  They just all got up from the table and went with the man.

On the way, a woman who had been bleeding for twelve years came and touched the edge of Jesus’ robe.  Blood was life and she was bleeding to death from where God brings life into the world.  That’s not good.  The hoity-toities had laws about ritual purity.  They stigmatized her as impure in the eyes of God and by touching Jesus she would have made him impure as well.  Jesus felt the touch, but he didn’t get angry with the woman.  He simply encouraged her and told her that her faith had healed/saved her.  Suddenly, she was healed.  This is new wine for sure.

Then they made it to the leader’s house.  Jesus went up to the dead girl’s room.  He took her by the hand.  Touching dead people also made you impure, by the way.  But the girl got up.  She got up!  That there is some new wine too.

When they came out of the house, two blind men started following Jesus loudly shouting over and over, “Jesus, son of David, have compassion for us”.  Jesus made it back to “the house” and invited them in.  Yes, the blind also carried the stigma of being cursed by God for some secret sin.  “Do you believe I can do this?”  Wait a minute.  Do what?  They answered, “Yes, Lord.”  Hold on. Jews only call God Lord.  What are they saying?  Jesus said, “Let it be done for you according to your faith.” He touched their eyes.  Their sight came back.  Jesus told them not to tell anybody he did that, but they went and told everybody.  How could you not?

Now here’s the clincher.  Jesus and the disciples set out from the house to go camping and fishing or something.  Just then someone brought a demon possessed man who couldn’t speak to him.  Lo and behold, Jesus cast that demon out and the man could speak again.  Everybody was saying nothing like this had ever happened in Israel before.  The hoity-toities, well, they said that it was by the authority of the ruler of the demons that Jesus could do these things that only God could do.  

So, that was the first day of the rest of Matthew’s life.  You never know what a day is going to bring.  What a day.  What Jesus did that day impacted Matthew so much that he continued following him.  It led him to collect stories about Jesus and write something called a Gospel voiced to speak primarily to the hoity-toities in the wake of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70AD.  The Pharisees and the followers of Jesus were the two predominant forms of Judaism that survived that event.  Matthew was trying to build a bridge.

Jesus brought something new, unconditional compassion in the power of the Holy Spirit, while the Pharisees were clinging to the old.  Allowing God, allowing Jesus to do something new in our lives is a difficult thing.  I remember the night I finally said yes to the inner tug of the voice of Jesus saying “Follow me.” And the day I said yes to the inner tug of the voice of Jesus calling me to the ministry.  The first time I stepped into a church service and felt that there was a sweet, sweet Spirit in the place and I knew it was the presence of the Lord.  I remember the day Jesus took away the burden of the anger, hurt, and unforgiveness I felt towards my mother and step-father because they had chosen themselves over their families.  He took that burden, and it weighed a lot, and replaced it with a joyful love for them.  I remember how when antidepressants brought out that old family tradition or should I say the demon of alcoholism even in me, the good son, the minister, I remember the night Jesus utterly took that compulsion to drink before which I was absolutely powerless away.   There’s more, but I think I’ve made the point that Jesus changes things.  He brings new life and changes things.  

But we need to be careful about how we cling to the old, about how we can be hoity-toities.  We can stand in judgement of even our own children and ignore the new, the unconditional compassion of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, that he touched us with and claimed us as his own.  Do you remember the day that happened for you?  Amen.

 

Jesus Is with Us

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Matthew 28:16-20

There was a big movement a couple of decades ago of ministers vacating those grand elevated pulpits such as we have here in order to preach from a lectern on the floor.  Part of the reason for that is how it feels to preach from way up there.   Hovering (maybe even sometimes havering) about up there, above the congregation makes us feel conspicuous, overbearing, and stuffy, not to mention cut off from the people.  Whereas being down on the floor makes us feel like we’re one of you.  It’s more personable and engaging.  It even invites conversation.  On the floor we feel more like a coach while up there we feel more like a pontificator, even though the Latin root of that word, with a bit of irony maybe, means “bridge-builder”.  How do you build a bridge from way up there?

The rest of the reason for the move has to do with what the location of the pulpit says about God to the people in the pew, especially those visiting.  The high pulpit can give the impression that God is above us, always watching, distant and unapproachable.  No matter how much grace we preach, “the medium is the message”.  It is hard to say God has befriended his people when the one conveying the message stays aloof.  One can make the argument that the high pulpit is for reasons of visibility and acoustics.  Maybe so originally, but couple a high pulpit with an obsequious, ashen looking, dower, pompous pontificator telling you that God is a voyeur to your every sin and indeed your every sinful thought.  Woe and curses.  It doesn’t work.  Some people try to soften that impression by saying that God is watching from above making everything go hunky-dory for you.  But what happens when things don’t go hunky-dory?  Did God stop watching?  Moreover, a distant God is just as easily kept at a distance and then, just as easily dismissed…as has happened in Western Christianity. 

Preaching from a lectern on the floor at the level of the congregation on the other hand says that God is with us.  Jesus did not make the promise, “I will be above you always, watching until the end of the age.”  His promise was that he would be with us.  

Just take a second and think about this.  What if Jesus’ promise to us really was rather to be above us than to be with us?  The effect of placing Jesus above us rather than with us is profoundly deadly to the church.  If he is above, then he is not with us.  He is not presently involved in the work of his church or present to us in our individual lives.  He has simply left us, down here, to fend for ourselves trying to figure out what God wants from us.  Trying to forge the way for the church in the 21^st Century in the wake of the death of cultural Christianity simply becomes our task rather than our participation in what he is doing.  It is like he has left us to our own efforts to save his church from oblivion.  That’s just wrong.

If that’s what happens when the church thinks Jesus is above us, then what does it do to us as individuals?  If Jesus is above me, distant from me, a complete non-participant in my life, then faithful living is just a matter of my own efforts, of doing what I think best hoping that God will bless it from above.  If that is the case, then no wonder we conjure up some sort of magical power we call faith (If you just believe hard enough...), invent rituals which must be followed to the T for them to gain God's favour, and negotiate contracts with God (“I’ll do this for you God, if you do that for me.”).  If Jesus is above us, we are simply left to our own.  That’s scary.  But praise be to God! Jesus is with us.  He is not above us.  He is with us.  We are not alone nor abandoned to our own efforts.  

Maybe the most significant change that needs to happen in the church today is a change in our thinking, in our way of understanding the very fabric of reality.  Everything about the way we do church and practice our own personal faith in Christ, I believe, is based in an understanding of reality in which God is above us, in which Jesus is above us.  Our perception of reality needs to effectively change to that of Jesus is with us.  For our churches to make the switch from being the religious institution that undergirded our culture in these days when the culture doesn’t want us to be that anymore into being a church that is out in the world in a missionary kind of way in this land which is now a mission field, we must cease thinking of Jesus as being above and let Jesus retrain our thinking by letting us know he is with us.

I had this change of thinking and this is how it happened with me.  I was raised as Christian.  As a child, my family went to church on and off with irregularity.  Going to church was something you knew you were supposed to do.  It was the super-daddy of all New Year’s resolutions.  It was a good habit to be into; one that would make the rest of life go better because God, who was way off somewhere up there, would bless you for it.  

Well, on New Year’s Eve when I was almost twenty I threw a party and nobody showed up and that just seemed to be the culmination of a life that had been quite emotionally and relationally painful.  Things got dark for me that night.  I started to think that if this was the sum total of my life, then why is it worth living.  I thought about ending it but in consideration of the pain it would cause my mother, I chose differently.  I listened to a different tug going on inside me and figured Jesus could do a better job with me than I was.  So, I decided my life was his.  I called my best friend’s mom the next morning and asked if she was going to church.  She said, “yes.” And I said, “I’ll see you there”.  That’s when I made the decision to start going to church on my own.

I also started sensing that God was calling me to the ministry and so I made a bargain with him.  I said, “God, I will go this route as long as I don’t have to go it alone.  Bring me a wife…the sooner the better.”  You just got to laugh at that.  A year later I was in university and I had just got dumped by the girl I thought was “the one”.  I knew I was called to the ministry, but it looked like I was going alone.  The bargain I made with God ended through no apparent fault of my own but according to Jimmy Buffet it’s always one’s own damn fault.  I sat there in my dorm room, all alone, having a pity party.  It is hard to describe what happened next.  All I can say is that it was like a door opened in my sense of reality and Jesus stepped in.  From that moment on I have had the awareness that I am not alone.  That he is with me.  Jesus is always with me.  I’ve nothing to fear.  It was also during those days that I really began to realize that God loved me, that I was one of his beloved children.  This change in my perception of reality changed the way I did things.  Prayer for example,  now when I pray, instead of praying to an old man who is seated on a throne somewhere above the expanse of this infinitely huge universe, I pray to God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who are seated in the room with me.

I always feel like people look at me like I’m mentally ill when I tell these stories.  And it’s odd because the only place I ever really tell them is at church among church people.  As a minister, I get very little exposure to non-church people.  Regardless, we church people, we really need to wake up to the reality that Jesus is with us.   We shouldn’t think it odd if someone says “it just feels so good here.  There’s a peacefulness here at church.” Or, “I was looking out the kitchen window with a world of worry on my mind and a sudden calm came over me.”  We shouldn’t think it strange even if someone says, “I heard the voice of Jesus say.”  That happens.  We, the disciples of Jesus, should expect to have an awareness of Jesus being with us and celebrate it when it happens.  

It would also be great if we as congregations gathered really had the awareness that Jesus is with us and that by the power of the Holy Spirit he is leading us.  In order to figure his leading out, we need to do things like getting together outside of Sunday morning to study the Bible and pray together.  He’ll make his presence felt. Jesus' presence with us isn’t something that only crazy people sense.  It is something he has promised to his disciples.  He is with us.  Amen.

 

Big Changes

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Numbers 11:4-30

To be honest, I don’t deal with change very well.  I have my little agoraphobic world that I subsist in where everything’s the way I’m used to it.  I may not like it, but it is what I’m used to.  I like my chair, my room, my bed, my routine, what I eat, being lazy, what I watch.  Don’t change my it.  My it don’t change.  Can anybody relate?  Do I hear an “Amen”?

But, you know, change, the change itself, isn’t the real culprit when it comes to our reluctance to change things.  Change, whether good or bad, is a fact of life.  It happens with regularity.  It’s not the change that’s difficult.  It’s the transition that occurs as we adjust from the way things used to be to a new reality, a reality that is a huge unknown.  When a change happens it inevitably means we have to let go of some thing’s in ourselves and in our identity, and start doing things a different way, and at some point, eventually accept a new it.

Nevertheless, in the midst of the transition things are quite ambiguous and that makes us feel quite anxious.  The feelings associated with the stages of grief come up.  We enter the deep river of denial and isolation; feeling like we’re the only person to have ever gone through this.  We can be perpetually angry or at least grumpy all the time.  Or, we can start to dwell on the past, constructing a list of regrets, of “if only I had done this or not said that” in a futile effort to get back what’s gone.  We understandably feel sadness even to the point of depression.  We can’t seem to get it in gear.  But, in time the shock wears off and we feel like maybe taking a kick at this new can.  All those feelings and stuff, that’s the transition that comes with change and its why we naturally don’t want to go through change.

The Israelites are a good example of this.  They were slaves in Egypt.  Their workload was ever-increasing under cruel taskmaster’s.  They cried out. God heard them and with a mighty hand freed them.  In the process God humiliated Pharaoh, devastated his armies, and showed the gods of Egypt to be impotent.  Then, God veiled in a cloud personally and powerfully led them to the Promised Land, the land of milk and honey, but they still had to go through the Wilderness to get there.  You’d think that they would have shouted “Free at last. Free at last. Thank God we’re free at last.” and danced their way to Canaan’s Land.  But…, no, that wasn’t the case.

In the transitional days of the Wilderness they were scared.  They complained…a lot, the food’s terrible and where’s the water.  They pined for Egypt where there were cucumbers and leeks, where they had the security of being slaves.  Slavery may have really sucked but at least they could count on it.  And, yes, returning to Egypt would have meant returning to the protection of those impotent gods of Egypt and worshipping them.  They didn’t trust they’re leaders or their ability to lead.  Then when they arrived at the Promised Land and they spied it out, they were too afraid to enter it.  There were giants in the Land.  Only two of the spies, Joshua and Caleb, were bold enough to say, “To God be the glory, we got this.”  It all boiled down to the cold, hard fact that the Israelites just didn’t trust God to settle them in the new Land, the God who had parted the Red Sea and drowned Pharaoh’s army, who had led them and fed them all the way through the Wilderness.  So, God made them wander in the Wilderness some more so as to learn faith.  Forty years and a generation later, the people of Israel finally crossed the Jordan.  The only two people of the first generation to settle in the Promised were Joshua and Caleb, even Moses didn’t make it.

The “Change” was God’s delivering them from slavery in Egypt to go live in the Land God had promised to their ancestors.  The “Transition” was what they went through in the Wilderness to get there.  The “Change” was a powerful work of deliverance by God’s hand, but powerful works alone do little to build our faith and identity as God’s people.  The “Transition” they experienced in the Wilderness was where Faith happened – loyalty and devotion to God.  Following the presence of the Lord in the cloud, listening to Moses, and living under (and pardon the phrase) austerity measures changed the Hebrew people from being slaves to Pharaoh into the beloved people of God.  You see, you can take the people out of Egypt, but how do you take Egypt out of the people?…wandering in the Wilderness.  They had to learn to trust and follow the Lord without reservation because that’s the type of people they needed to be to live in Canaan’s Land where they were not welcome and where they faced the threat of becoming just like the people of Canaan.

Looking more towards today, most churches today resemble God’s people in slavery in Egypt.  People who participate in a congregation such as ours today are likely to feel like slaves to an institution.  Having fewer people means more work for fewer and fewer able bodies.  The financial burdens of full-time clergy and aging facilities necessitate greater giving by fewer and fewer people just to keep up.  Congregational self-esteem plummets.  Whole congregations get depressed.  There’s grumbling, complaining, and fighting due to real but unchecked anxiety about the future of “my church home.”  

So many churches see their only option to be the either/or of staying open until someone pries the church key from Mr. Heston’s cold, dead hands or making proactive decisions around closing or amalgamating.  But, closing a church and forcing a church family to go elsewhere isn’t at all like moving from the recliner to a table to eat my dinner.  Leaving a church building that you’ve called “home” and/or a group of people that have been friends who are family for years to decades does not come without a truly painful personal cost to one’s own faith.  When people leave a church today, no matter the reason, they are likely to not go anywhere else.  Do a survey of retired clergy and see how many of them still go to church…that’s if they can retire.

Something called discontinuous change has come to our land.  Congregations today face the harsh reality that the communities in which we are situated are not Christian anymore while we, the Church, have existed in our culture as part of the culture bedrock.  The people in our neighbourhoods are secular and post-Christian often with a bad taste in their mouths.  Some may claim to be “spiritual” and whatever “spiritual” may mean to them, it’s private and don’t go there unless you’ve gained a lot of trust first.  They are definitely poised against participation in the institution of the Church and that’s if they have any inkling at all of what Christian faith is.  The media tends to make a mockery of the Christian faith and in some cases that is deserved.  Something called discontinuous change is upon us. 

Sometimes change is simply an adaptation in order for things to continue the way they always have.  This was the church from the 70’s to the early 90’s.  Praise bands, PowerPoint presentations, a sermon that sounds, feels, and looks like a self-improvement seminar that your boss sent you to in order to increase productivity in the workplace - the congregations who made those adaptations experienced institutional growth up until about 20-25 years ago but the growth was mostly from church swappers rather than new believers.  These changes within congregations were in-house adaptations to the change in media and technology that everybody has grown accustomed to since the advent of television.  But now, even the churches that made these adaptations are beginning to struggle.  The Discontinuous Change brought upon us by our surrounding culture has truly become pervasive.  The people in our surrounding communities are no longer simply back-slidden or latent Christians who just need to find their way inside these doors.   

I think we need a truer understanding of what the church is in order to exist in this Wilderness of discontinuous change.  We can no longer simply strive to make adaptations in style.  There is nothing we can do technologically or stylistically to compete with what the handheld smart device, social media, and a culture-wide addiction to revenge have done to our culture over the last 20 years.  What we must be is a compassionate fellowship of friends who are family who participate in Jesus’ own ministry of healing, prayer, and forgiveness.  We must be a fellowship where things of status like wealth, ethnicity, race, and prestige don’t define a person.  God does not discriminate against people when deciding whom to pour his Spirit upon so as to adopt as his own beloved child, and that’s everyone.  God is indiscriminate in whom he wants to heal.  

The compassionate fellowship in Jesus that persists through this wilderness of discontinuous change will emerge as a community of healing in which God has poured his Spirit on each and every one of us not just the elders as he did in Moses’ day.  This healing fellowship is where people who are suffering the burdens of the world are prayed for and they indeed find relief in the presence of the Lord.  This fellowship of forgiveness is where people come and share their weaknesses and own up to their short-comings and the pain they’ve caused and rather than judge them we pray for them so that they feel those burdens lifted up and born away by Jesus.  It’s a wonderful feeling of deliverance, if you’ve ever felt that.  The soul-healing that Jesus has to give is akin to resurrection from the dead.  Indeed, it is the proof and foretaste of resurrection from the dead.  What is even more amazing is that he uses our ears and our prayers in the process of bringing this soul-healing about.  

The church that survives this discontinuous change will be the compassionate, healing, forgiving fellowship that happens over the backyard fence or the cup of coffee in conversations where we love our neighbours, our actual neighbours, enough to sincerely ask them how they are and listen to them, really listen to them hearing the burdens they bear and praying for them rather than judging them; expecting nothing in return from them but from Jesus, expecting him to bring them soul-healing as he has done for us.  Amen.

  

A Eulogy for Jesus

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Luke 24:44-53

If you’ve ever had to do it, you know that it’s not easy to give a eulogy.  The word literally means good word and to eulogize is to speak good things about someone.  In most cases, finding nice things to say about a person you’ve known since way back when is not a difficult thing.  The difficulty arises when it’s a funeral and you are grief-stricken.  For that reason, the task of eulogizing the dearly departed will from time to time fall back on me, the minister.  

When that happens, I like to get the family together a day or so before the funeral and get them to start telling me stories about who this person was.  I don’t tell any of their stories in the eulogy.  That gathering simply gives me a sense of who that person was and then I try to say how God worked through this person to love and bless her family, friends, and even whole communities.  Some people are so saintly that I can say that God gave us a glimpse of himself through this person.  

But then there’s that odd funeral when trying to find something good to say…hmmm…better talk about something else.  I‘ve had to do that twice in 30 years of ministry, twice too many.  I’ll tell you about the first time.  I was in my first year of ministry down in West Virginia and I hardly had a clue what to do for a funeral anyway.  In seminary, they wisely taught us to avoid eulogizing people if at all possible because our role at a funeral is to proclaim resurrection in Christ.  In our theological tradition, the service we do at death isn’t a funeral service nor a celebration of life.  In our Book of Common Worship, it’s called a Service of Witness to the Resurrection.  We’re supposed to talk about resurrection.  That’s why if you come to a funeral that I conduct you won’t hear me talking about going to heaven when you die but rather I talk about resurrection in a new creation.  You will also notice that I don’t take my seminary professor’s advice as I will always say something about the person we’re commending on.

Anyway, here’s what happened.  It started when the local funeral director called me and said a family wanted the Presbyterian minister to do their father’s funeral because Grandma so and so from way back when was a Presbyterian and that’s what they thought they must be.  Being the only Presbyterian minister for miles around I consented.  Unfortunately, I was unable to get the family to agree to meet with me for storytime.  It simply would have been just too difficult for them.  One of the daughters led me to suspect that her father wasn’t all that great of a man.  I also asked a few people who might have known him or at least of him and they all agreed he wasn’t the finest example of a human being.  So, I was left with a mess on my hands.  I had to do the funeral for a man most people regarded as “Hell bound”.  My usual funeral plan wasn’t going to work because I had no evidence that God had blessed this family through their father and he certainly hadn’t been a person you’d look at and say God is like that.  

Well, showtime.  I stood there and did the service before his two daughters and son as they wept.  There were less than ten people there in total.  I sensed there was a lot of unfinished business in that family.  So, instead of eulogizing I talked a bit about how to deal with grief and that death is not the end of things.  As I expected, they didn’t pay me any attention.  No matter.  What really wretched my gut with that funeral was that I was unable to tell a grieving family that their father was a blessing to them. That’s pretty messed up.  This man’s funeral had no eulogy.  I am saddened with the thought that this man’s life may have lacked God’s blessing and therefore there was no reason for his family to bless God and be thankful for their father.  If assumptions or should I say judgments are correct, this man was one of those people that make it hard for us to say that Jesus Christ is Lord for if he is Lord, why would he let someone be so hurtful to his own family.  We have all known people like this and I’m sure that is a question we’ve all asked.  I don’t know the answer.

Well, this is Ascension Sunday.  Today we celebrate that Jesus the resurrected one has ascended to the right hand of the Father and from there reigns in the power of the Holy Spirit; and by power I mean the power that comes through the vulnerability of self-denying, self-giving love.  We would like to believe that the way God reigns in his creation is through blessing the good and cursing the wicked.  But, thinking of the man I spoke of earlier, we want to ask why God didn’t get that man for causing so much hurt.  I can’t answer that question, the justice question; but with respect to how Jesus reigns in this world, I can say that Jesus’ reigning in this twisted world is going to look like his death on the cross.  The cross was his throne and he reigns in unconditional love.  Jesus shows us how God rules in his creation by suffering for us and with us whether the suffering comes as just part of life or because of the bent and twisted will of others not to mention our own.  

To that weeping family I could have said that Jesus was with them in the sufferings they have endured from being the children of that man but I had no details to point to.  I could have said that their expectations of God should be that somehow God was going to take all the hurt that man caused them and instead of letting it remain as senseless hurt, use it as the means of blessing them and others.  The blessing will primarily be experienced as knowing God and God’s love, which tends to heal and change us so that we might be a blessing to others in their suffering.  The reign of Christ is that he will bless us by being present with us in our hurts and then making those hurts to be the means by which he blesses us with new life in himself and then others through us.  He reigns by suffering with his own and healing us in such a way as we wind up knowing God himself, being healed and changed by God, and them being part of God’s blessing to others.

Well, if you are wondering why I’m talking about eulogies and blessings, I have no short answer to give you other than at the end of our passage from Luke he says that the disciples were continually in the temple blessing God.  The Greek word for blessing is eulogia – literally, eulogy.  The apostles spent their days after Jesus ascended to the right hand of the Father in the temple eulogizing Jesus.  Ascended to the right hand means what it sounds like.  Jesus is God’s right-hand man so to speak, the one through whom God does what God does in God’s Creation which is to save and heal his Creation and those in it.  What Jesus did as he ministered back then, is what God continues to do through the people of Jesus in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit: healing, restoring, reconciling, resurrecting in the power of self-giving love.  

Immediately after Jesus ascended, the disciples went back to Jerusalem to eulogize him.  The evidence that Jesus Christ has ascended and reigns in this world is that there are those who know him and can eulogize him because he has acted in their lives for healing, reconciliation, restoration, indeed given new life to them by the presence and good work of the Holy Spirit.   These people know they have been in the presence of God and blessed by God and the wish to witness to that, to eulogize.

The Trinity works in our lives and through us by means of blessing us so that we are a blessing to others.  Jesus, the Son blesses us by letting us know that he is the one who suffers with us, who prays continually for us, and reveals the self-giving love of God to us.  This blessing bears its fruit as we get involved with being Jesus’ blessing of others.  If we’ve got a friend at work suffering through a divorce, or grief, or whatever, this means we will be inclined to be part of God’s blessing to them by suffering through it with them.  Be the one who is intentional about being there and listening.  Be the one who gives hope and encouragement.  Be the one who helps people to forgive and reconcile.  Be a living eulogy of Jesus, the proof of his ascension and reigning.  Be part of his good healing work in the lives of others.  Amen.

God Is Knowable

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Acts 17:16-31; John 14:15-21

I wonder what Paul would have to say to us today after walking around in our culture reflecting upon our objects of worship.  In Paul's day usually the only things portrayed publicly by images of persons were gods or rulers.  Therefore, I think he would mistake nearly every billboard and every advertisement he saw as an icon of some god.  They would lead him assume our gods would be food, radio stations, automobiles, real estate agents, financial institutions, athletes, and underwear models.  Some of the same gods would still be around like Nike.  He would think that we had a god for every activity in life just like they did in ancient Greece and Rome; gods of partying, wealth, power, sex, family, trades, cities, kingdoms, war, sports, etc.  I would also be interested in hearing his thoughts about these handheld smart devices to which we are so glued.  Would he think they are a portal into the realm of the gods?  I’m certain he would think that we are possessed by them, that through them some unseen powers control us.  I suspect that in the end, he would conclude that we are as extremely religious as the Athenians were and be troubled.  

Paul described the Athenians as being extremely religious.  The Greek word for that basically means an excessive fear or excessive respect of supernatural powers which they called daimones.  It’s the word we get our word demon from except to them a daimon could be either benevolent or evil.  For us, post- the vivid imagination of Medieval Christianity, we talk about blessed angels and evil demons.  But, to the Greeks and Romans the daimones were lesser deities or guiding spirits who could help you or hinder you and even possess you.  People believed that the daimones were a present help for the things of daily life because the big gods on Olympus didn’t care.   And so, in Athens there were shrines for just about every god and daimon imaginable to which the Athenians went to perform the prescribed rituals in the hopes of keeping the spirits appeased and on their side.  

As Paul walked through Athens on a preaching tour, he noticed all these shrines.  Among them, he saw a shrine with the inscription “Agnosto Theo”, to an unknown God or an unknowable God.  FYI, the Greek word agnosto is the word from which we get our word agnostic.  Some philosopher types who heard Paul preach took him up to the Areopagus, “Philosopher's Hill”, for him to present his “new ideas” of Jesus and the Resurrection.  He started talking about the shrine to the unknown or unknowable god.  He suggested that this God whom they thought of as unknown or unknowable is actually the one true God, the Creator and Lord of Creation who has revealed himself to humanity, indeed, truly made himself known and knowable to humanity in, through, and as Jesus the Jewish Messiah who continues to be knowable to us by means of the Holy Spirit.  

Paul hit a core nerve with the Athenians that we would do well to ponder.  The reason the Athenians were so extremely religious was that they believed that knowing a god personally was impossible.  God and the gods to them were essentially unknowable and could only be managed by rituals or through the help of daimones.  A person could have experiences of daimones, but a true honest to God encounter with God or a god was impossible.  To the Athenians, encounters with gods were the things that myths were made of similar to how some people say that only the people in the Bible had experiences of God but not us today. Because they believed that gods were ultimately unknowable, they built shrines where they went to perform rituals that were supposed to incite the daimones to regard them favourably and grant their requests.

Returning to our culture, Paul's diagnosis of the Athenians' excessive religious-ness fits us quite well.  If Paul were to walk through our cities and countrysides he would see Christian symbology everywhere particularly the crosses people like to wear and think us very committed to Jesus.  But he would also wonder why there are all these churches that have become community centers or are just boarded up or have so dwindled off in membership they are about to become community centers.  His diagnosis would be that after nearly 2,000 years, even we the disciples of Jesus have bought into the idea that God is ultimately unknowable.  We too have become agnostic and because of this, the church is dying and people are yet again seeking spiritual experience by means of the daimones (guiding spirits).  Palm readers, spiritual guides, mediums, witches, crystal vendors, marketers of the magic of ancient peoples, and your corner drug dealer all have a guaranteed clientèle these days; and most common to just about everyone are our little handheld portals to the realm of the gods (smartphones).  Our culture as a whole, head over heels and foot in mouth, believes God cannot actually be known, but yet we blindly seek something more than “this”, something “beyond” ourselves, that good life that our little portals to the realm of the divine continually advertise and which we hope to experience with every next swipe.

Paul just might tell us that we have a theological problem and by theology I don't mean the academic study of religious beliefs about God or the gods.  The word theology means the study or contemplation of one's personal/experiential knowledge of God.  In the first couple of centuries of the church, theology was first and foremost the act of prayer and sitting with the awareness of God’s presence and a sense of God’s goodness, faithfulness, love, beauty, and joy.  Then in the second place, Christian theology was pondering and talking about how God has made himself known in, through, and as Jesus Christ who continues to make himself known to us by means of the Holy Spirit.  Ultimately, theology culminates in our prayerfully pondering that God is the loving communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who has graciously adopted us each into God’s very self so that we know we are God's children just as Jesus is.

Theology works with the basic premise that God is knowable and can be known albeit by revelation.  We in our pride and brokenness are prone to create gods in our own images and would not know the True God from a tree apart from God getting a hold of us and shaking us down with an overwhelming sense of God’s love in the face of our having to face ourselves in all our false successes and glorified failures.  We are never going to understand God fully, but understandability is not the same thing as knowability.  God is knowable.  The fact that most Christians think that theology is the academic study of religious beliefs about God or the gods drives home the point that the average Christian believes that God is ultimately unknowable and just a matter of dogmatic belief and rituals. 

God is knowable, but not knowable as some sort of experience of the supernatural powers or the daimones.  The Christian faith is that, not believes that, the Christian faith is that God has revealed himself to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit unites us to Jesus so that we share in his relationship with the Father.  This is what our reading in John is all about.  True theology, true spiritual experience is to personally know that God the Father has been steadfastly loving and faithful to you, to me, to all just as Jesus himself knows it and to share in Jesus' own love for and faithfulness to the Father.  And, empowered with their loving communion living within us each and in us as a community of faith by the presence of the Holy Spirit we share in the Jesus' mission to go into the world obeying the commandment that we love one another so that the world may know what God looks like and want to enter into the community that bears the image of God the Trinity and come to know God.  

Speaking with regard to myself, my personal practice of theology (prayer, sense of God’s presence) culminates in the awareness that I am God’s beloved child.  Even when I have thoroughly blown it, God does not abandon me but guides me to grow up and fix it.  When the feathers come flying out of left field and then hit the fan and life comes crashing down in hurt, especially then when it seems more apparent that there cannot be a god, God finds me to whisper “You are my beloved son.  My delight.  I will work this to your good.  Sit and rest.  Weep, wail, and rant if you need.  I’m here.  I'll listen.”

Let me share with you one of the first lessons I learned in parenthood.  When William was just born, I was in to see my doctor and reflected on that parental fear of absolutely blowing it.  He said, “Don’t worry so much about that.  You know how you feel about your father.  Your son will feel the same way about you.”  Through his mistakes, failures, and success, he was still my dad.  There’s a bond of love there that’s hard to put words to.  And for mother’s I suppose it’s even deeper we little beggars grow inside you and feed off you.  It’s a completely unique bond I can't pretend to understand or romanticize. 

Not long after that conversation when William was just a few months old it became the pattern that around 5:00 AM he would begin to stir and grumble and complain.  We learned that we could usually get another hour of sleep out of him, if one of us went and got him and brought him to bed.  After a couple of good kicks to the stomach, he would snuggle in and fall back to sleep.  I didn't sleep much for that hour but it was just good to hold him.  That bond of love is good.  So is the bond of love that we share with God in Christ by the gift of the Holy Spirit.  That bond I feel about my son and my daughter, that’s a small taste of how God feels about me, about us all.  God is knowable and makes himself known to us by making us to know we are his beloved children.  Amen.