Just Believe?

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Luke 17:1-10

Back in 1985 when I came to faith…let me quantify that statement.  I had been raised in and around the church.  I believed in God.  I believed Jesus died for my sins.  I believed in forgiveness and Heaven and Hell.  I believed that you had to be a good, moral person and that good, moral people went to church.  I also believed that the US was specially blessed by God to bring peace and order to the world (I lost that one in university.).  I believed all that stuff you’re supposed to believe if you’re a Christian in the US.  I lived in the Bible Belt of the Southern US.  Those beliefs were so much a part of that culture that even if you didn’t believe them, you still knew you were supposed to.  If you just believed these things, you were on God’s good side.  

But there was something missing from that blessed magical formula. What I hadn’t come to believe, was that God was really with me, that Jesus was with me and that by the power and presence of the Holy Spirit I could hear and follow him.  In the wee hours of the morning on January 1, 1985 I gave my life to Jesus.  I entered into servitude to him.  I had to seek to know him and to listen for what he wanted me to do throughout this life he has given me and then do it.  That is a markedly different approach to life than just doing what I wanted to do hoping God would bless me for being good and believing the right stuff about him.

So anyway, back in 1985 when I came to faith, TV preaching was in its heyday.  The most prevalent message among the TV ministries seemed to be what was called the Health and Wealth Gospel, or the Name it and Claim It Gospel, or simply the Prosperity Gospel.  Its basic tenet was that Jesus didn’t want his disciples to be sick and poor.  You just have to believe that and claim it for yourself in Jesus’ name and you would have good health and become wealthy.  If you wanted that fry cook job at Burger King you had to say “Fry cook job at Burger King, I claim you as mine in Jesus Name”, then wait for the phone call.  If you were just scraping by, just give money to a TV ministry and what you gave would be returned to you 60, 80, or 100 times as much, so they promised. If you got sick and didn’t get better or didn’t get the job or your gift was returned multiplied, it’s because you didn’t have enough faith.  You wavered.  You doubted.  And so, you needed to ask the Lord to increase your faith.  To those TV folks, faith was a magic power that could be annulled by doubt.  The more you believed, the more you would receive.  Just believe!?

Well, the question for this morning is what did the disciples mean when they asked Jesus to increase their faith.  If we take the passage out of its context, it very nicely fits into the “faith as magic power” school of thought.  It sounds like if you remove all doubt from yourself, you could be like a Jedi warrior in the Star Wars movies and make a tree uproot and go jump in the ocean.  I will admit that in the Greek world and language the word we translate as faith sometimes did get used that way.  Regardless, if we put the disciples' request in the context of what has happened in the previous chapters in Luke’s Gospel, they are not asking for magical power.

They also are not asking for the ability to believe the right things about God and Jesus.  Just like I was raised to believe there is a God, and Jesus died for my sins, and all that, they aren’t asking for Jesus to help them believe all the more what Jews in their day were supposed to believe.  So, what were they asking for?

I hate to tell you this, but I am reasonably sure that we are reading our modern definitions of faith into this passage.  We hear it as if the disciples were asking Jesus to make it so they had less doubt and more trust in him.  Faith means more than just belief and trust as opposed to doubt.  Faith is loyalty, devotion expressed through the fulfilment of obligations.  The weight of its meaning falls more towards what we would call faithfulness not just faith.  Just as love is not love until we do love, so faith is not faith until we do faithfulness.

Moreover, I am inclined to say that “increase” is not the right word.  The Greek word simply means “add to”.  So, “Lord, add to our faithfulness.”  Were they asking for more faith to be added to what they already had or were they asking for something else?  I think they were asking for something else; for more obligation through which to show their loyalty.  Here we go; Randy’s complicated explanation.

In the chapters before this, Jesus has been using parables to prophetically proclaim that God had taken the responsibility of shepherding his people away from the Pharisees because they were abusing their role and authority.  Instead of doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with their God, they were power-greedy lovers of money who were using the Law of Moses to control and grow rich off of God’s people.  Their modus operandi was to give the people the false hope that the Messiah was coming and if they wanted a place in his kingdom, they were obligated to keep the Law jot and title… or they would be fined if they were caught breaking it.    

Jesus’ last words to his disciples (albeit within the hearing of the Pharisees) on the matter was simply that people are going to slip up and do something for which they feel guilty and ashamed of but WOE to anyone who causes another to feel guilty and ashamed of themselves.  Inflicting guilt and shame was the business the Pharisees were in.  The Pharisees were like a sycamore fig tree rather than mulberry which it resembles.  The mulberry tree isn’t well rooted and it looks like Cousin It from the Addams family, but its fruit is delicious.  It produces good fruit.  The sycamore fig is better rooted and has a strong trunk that they used for lumber, yet its fruit is inedible, bad fruit just like the Pharisees.  Jesus’ disciples were to instead practice the good fruits of accountability (to the Law of love) and forgiveness as opposed to the bad fruit of legalism.  I am persuaded to say that the disciples, in realization that the Pharisees were out as the shepherds of Israel, were asking Jesus to add obligation to their loyalty, something more to do to prove their loyalty than just following him around as his students.  They thought themselves ready to be the new shepherds of Israel.  

Jesus’ response to them on this matter goaded their apparent lack of humility.  Jesus asked them which of you would bring your servant in at the end of the day and sit them down at the table to eat (which they had been doing all along nearly daily every time they ate with him).  Would you thank your servant for their work?  Would you strip down to your loincloth and wash your servant’s dirty feet and then feed them (which Jesus would soon do for them).  No, you would tell your servant who just came in from a hard day’s work, to make dinner ready for you and then feed themselves when you were done.  You wouldn’t expect your servant to want to be thanked.  You would expect your servant to humbly do what he was obligated to do.

In order to shepherd the people of Israel Jesus’ disciples would have to know humility.  They would have to know how to humbly serve the people as opposed to ruling over them.  They already had loyalty and faithfulness (faith like a mustard seed), they just needed to learn humility.  Unfortunately, they won’t know humility until their teacher has washed their feet, until they’ve seen him die for the people, until they have felt his forgiveness for their betrayal, desertion, and denial of him.  Just believing isn’t faith.  Faith is faithfulness shown in humbly serving one another in love.  Amen.

 

What's in a Name: Lazarus

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Luke 16:19-31

Why did Jesus give that poor beggar the name Lazarus, inquiring minds want to know.  This is just a parable by which Jesus was addressing the Pharisees about how their love of money and consequent neglect of the poor was disqualifying them from being true descendants of Abraham and they needed to repent.  Jesus could have just stuck with saying there was a poor man who daily sat begging outside a rich man’s door, but instead Jesus named him Lazarus and on top of that he doesn’t name the rich man.  Why?  Obviously, there must be something about that name, Lazarus, that informs the parable?  Bear with me a minute and I’ll tell you what I think.

Right off the bat some would say it was the Lazarus that Jesus raised from the dead in John’s Gospel.  Afterall, Jesus mentions someone being raised from the dead there in the last verse.  I don’t think that’s it, because neither Luke, nor Matthew nor Mark seem to know of that event for some strange reason.  It is more likely Jesus was referring to his own resurrection which the Pharisees, who were responsible for his crucifixion, dismissed as a hoax.

The name Lazarus as it appears in our Bibles is a Latinized version of the Greek name Lazaros which is a Greekized version of the Hebrew name Eleazer which means “God has helped”.  In the Old Testament, the most famous Eleazer was the son of Moses’ brother Aaron who became High Priest after Aaron died.  Yes, a good many to most of the leaders of the Pharisees would have been from priestly families, albeit wealthy priestly families.  But I don’t think this Eleazar is the Eleazar Jesus was calling to mind.  There’s another more recent in memory to Jesus’ day that’s worth a long hard squint, but first there’s some armchair history you’ll need to know.

In Judea during the mid-100’s B.C., the Greeks had been ruling in Judea for about 150 years.  The leader of the Greeks at that time was Antiochus Epiphanes who was a twisted, sick individual.  He sacrificed a pig in the Temple as well as put a statue of Zeus on the altar.  He burned Torah scrolls and banned circumcision and all forms of observance of the Law of Moses.  His favourite pastime was publicly forcing Law-observant Jews to eat pork or be tortured to death. 

During his tenure, there arose a loosely configured resistance movement of faithful Jews known as the Hasideans.  It’s not really fair to say they were a resistance movement though.  Their devotion to keeping the Law of Moses was due to their unwavering faithfulness to God.  It was not simply a way of resisting Greek rule.  Antiochus, for some reason, hated their devotion to God.  

From among the Hasideans there arose the brothers Maccabeus who in 167 B.C. started a three-year-long revolt that drove the Greeks out of Judea resulting in a period of Jewish independence that lasted roughly forty years.  The festival of Hanukkah arose out of that revolt.  Oddly, the majority of Jews at the time opted to just keep their heads down and their faith private and took up the Hellenistic or Greek way of life.  Thus, the Hasideans were tortured for their faithfulness while the Hellenists lived comfortably.  Just so you know, a pretty convincing argument can be made that the Pharisees of Jesus’ day traced their origins back to the Hasideans.

The Hasideans had some key teachers, some very devoted men.  One of them was an elderly scribe named Eleazer.  He was probably in his 80’s at the time of the revolt.  There is a very well-known account of the day Eleazer and Antiochus Epiphanes met up (see 4 Maccabees 6).  Antiochus actually quite respected Eleazer for his intellect, his ability to speak eloquently, and his rationality.  He just didn’t understand why a rational person would keep such strict adherence to such a strict Law out of devotion to a god, especially a non-Greek god.  After a bit of debate, Antiochus decided to get on with testing the old man’s faith by threatening to have him tortured to death if he didn’t eat a piece of pork.  They debated some more and then with a bit of reluctance; Antiochus had the guards take him away to be flogged with a scourge.  That’s a whip made with many straps that is effective at ripping the flesh open.  They stripped him naked to humiliate him, tied his hands, and commenced scourging him.  He stood there bravely and took it for longer than expected.  Eventually he fell and then one of the guards started kicking him in the side trying to make him stand up but he couldn’t due to his age. 

The guards soon started to feel ashamed of what they were doing to this old man and pleaded with him to just eat a piece of meat and say it was pork so that they could stop the atrocity. Eleazer’s answer was basically, why should he let his long life of faithfulness end in such an act of cowardice.  What sort of an example would that set for the young.  It would be shameful to do such a thing just to gain a few more days which he would spend being mocked, particularly by the tyrant Antiochus.  He finished saying, “O children of Abraham, die nobly for your faith!  And you, guards of the tyrant, why do you delay?”, i.e., “Are you ashamed of what you are doing?” 

The guards then got on with it.  They took whatever metal things they could find and made them red hot and burned him to the bone with them all over.  Then they poured stinking liquids into his nostrils (sewage probably).  While they did this he looked towards heaven and said to God, “You know, O God, that though I might have saved myself, I am dying in burning torments for the sake of the Law.  Be merciful to your people, and let our punishment (there were seven brothers and their mother being martyred too), let our punishment suffice for them.  Make my blood their purification, and take my life in exchange for theirs.”  Then he died.  (Some serious theology there.)

If you remember, Eleazer means “God has helped”.  That may not seem to have been the case for Eleazer but not long after his death the brothers Maccabeus defeated the Greeks and drove them from the land.  For forty years the Jews enjoyed independence.  That was the last time until 1948 that they enjoyed that.

Eleazer (Lazarus) suffered for his faith in God and his faithfulness to the Law.  The Pharisees, his theological descendants, were on the other hand getting rich off of keeping the Law, one could even say they were being tyrants about it and that they were persecuting fellow Jews with it.  Actually, they were more like the Hellenist Jews in Eleazer’s day than the Hasideans from whom they originated.  I think Jesus used the name Lazarus (Eleazer) in this parable to truly convict the money-loving Pharisees of their hypocrisy.  Eleazer died for his faithfulness by being undeservedly tortured with flaming things. 

The rich man in the parable was also being tortured with flaming things, flames.  He was himself a Jew and should have gone to “Abraham’s bosom” where faithful Jew’s went to await resurrection.  But instead, he was in Hades, the afterlife that the Greeks believed in, where he was being tortured with flaming things because he deserved it.  He was a self-absorbed money-lover who neglected the poor right outside his door.  Even in death he thought that poor beggar Lazarus ought to be waiting on him.  So, it was with the Pharisees.  They missed what was at the true heart of the Law – the mercy that that rich man never showed to poor Lazarus and instead were using to Law really just to make people serve them and their hunger for power.

Let me try to lighten the mood. I knew an elderly man up until a couple of years ago when he died.  He had been a banker by career.  We all make assumptions that bankers are wealthy, but with this man you would never know if he was or wasn’t.  He and his wife kept things pretty simple.  He was a devoted Christian, husband, and family man.  Everywhere they lived they always found and attended a church.  When I first met him, he was treasurer of his church.  When I came on board, within just a couple of weeks he had me over to his house under the auspices of catching me up on the financial situation of the church.  The real reason was that he wanted to strike up a relationship, a friendship with me.  He thought a minister ought to know his people and their struggles and pray for them.  He wanted me to know that his wife had periods of not being well and he was afraid of losing her.  Whenever she got sick and went to the hospital, he would call me so that I could pray.  

He was a faithful man, but I do have to admit (as he would) that after having to live separated from his wife through Covid after a bazillion years of marriage, her death, his own health issues, and great untreatable pain there in his last two years, he was tempted to eat the pork so to speak.  He was also anxious that I was going to take a call somewhere else, so I had to routinely assure him that I would not take a call away from here before he died, that I would be here to bury him.  Number three on my list of reasons for not taking a call elsewhere is that there are so many of you just like him who have been faithful all your lives and deserve to be buried by someone who knows you.  He was a faithful, humble, generous man.

On a number of occasions his last couple of years, he had me over to talk about his funeral because he believed death was imminent or at least he hoped it was.  When it came to what if any particular Scripture he wanted read, he was adamant about one verse in particular, Micah 6:8: “He has told you, O Mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”  This man was Mac Elliot.  He passed away two years and nearly two months ago.  Whenever I come across the story of Eleazer (which is more often than you would think), he is one who comes to mind.  Mac knew what was at the heart of what God expects from humanity.  He was faithful all his life but had his faith tested there at the end, but still he endured…a just, kind, humble man before God.

Many small churches such as our four today are like Eleazer (Lazarus) keeping the faith and keeping the doors open and the lights on though it seems pointless.  On top of it all, the churches that are growing seem mired in the false beliefs Christian Nationalism, hating the immigrant, making the poor help themselves, (“The good Lord helps those who help themselves” is found nowhere in the Bible.) patriarchalism if not outright misogyny…and at the root of it really does seem to be the love of money.  But you folks, stay faithful, beloved of God.  Continue to listen to Jesus, the one who was raised from the dead.  The love, the friendship, you have here is an embodiment of him.  Keep the faith.  Amen.

 

Grifting

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Luke 16:1-16

If you’ve been a voyeur to American politics the past decade, you will have no doubt heard the accusation of grifting blaring out from both sides of the political spectrum towards each other.  Grifting is basically gaining people’s trust by dishonest means in order to get money or property from them.  There’s a bit of a diminutive insult in calling someone a grifter.  For example, Conrad Black was convicted of fraud for embezzling money from a company he was working for.  Though what he did would fit the definition of grifting, he should rather be called an “embezzler” than a grifter.  What he did was big-time and white collar.  Grifting, on the other hand, is something usually small change done by someone who’s sleazy.  It’s like rolling into town and pretending to be a world class pie chef and going to the PTA and after convincing them you will make world class pies for a fundraiser but you need cash up front for the ingredients and then absconding with that cash.  

Grifting is apparently commonplace among the rich and famous.  Celebrities do it quite often when they use their identity as a celebrity, their “brand”, to gain people’s trust to do things like run for public office when they know nothing about how the government works or even what it is to be a public servant.  They do it just to further their “brand”.  Or, like the actress G. P. back in the “90’s when she used her celebrity identity to assume the role of a health and wellness influencer while having no credentials in nutrition or mental health.  She started by selling juice blends for the use of cleansing the body not orally but from the bottom up.  She claimed particular blends could help particular health conditions and emotional states when administered that way.  She gives relationship advice too.  On the political stage, we’ve seen people go to a foreign country and use your identity as the son or sons of an American president to get business deals.  But here at home we should be really concerned when celebrities use their “pretend identity” as a celebrity to get elected to public office and then use that political and economic power to crash the stock market hoping that investors would instead buy their brand of Bitcoin.  Just saying.

Looking here Jesus’ Parable of the Shrewd Manager.  I would like to suggest that there is some grifting going on here but surprisingly, it’s not the shrewd manager who is doing it.  He’s an embezzler like Conrad Black and a skilled one; quite wily.  He’s a cut above a simple grifter.  I think the Grifters here aren’t even in the Parable but are rather the people the character of the shrewd manager represents.  It’s the Pharisees and Scribes from a chapter back who found it completely distasteful that Jesus kept company and even ate with tax collectors and “sinners”.  They were hypocrites like actors in the Greek theatre.  They were very good at putting on a mask and playing the role of devout religious authorities.  They knew the Scriptures, the law of Moses, the traditions, the traditional and authoritative teachings of the Rabbi’s going back to the 400’s BC.  There in the midst of Roman domination, they seemed to be keeping the faith by being as un-Roman as possible which they did by very publicly keeping the dress and dietary codes of the Law of Moses.  

These Pharisees (the Conservatives) along with two other groups, the Sadducees (the Liberals) and the Herodians (the royal Billionaires) were very politically savvy when it came to placating the Romans (a faux-democracy led by an Authoritarian).  If you were a devoted member of one of these Jewish sects (Parties), you would grow wealthy and powerful under Roman rule.  The Romans let you thrive as long as you kept rebellion against them at bay and gave them a cut on whatever grift it was you had going.  Rome by and large sent their most inept civil servants to govern in Judea and they were largely absent.  Rome held power over Judea primarily by military occupation and tax collectors who were Jews themselves but were seen as traitors.  The Roman military in turn kept order through bullying and extortion.  They weren’t known for mulching the public flowerbeds of Jerusalem or anywhere else.

Back to the Pharisees, their reason for being legalistic was that they were expecting God at any moment to send the Messiah to deliver them from Roman occupation and to establish the Kingdom of God once and for all forever and ever amen.  They believed that in the Kingdom of God the Law or Moses would be kept without exception.  If a Jew wants to be in God’s Kingdom when the Messiah comes, then they must live as faithful to the Law of Moses as possible in the present.  They also believed the Messiah’s coming could possibly be hastened if more and more Jews were keeping the Law so they were pretty good at making or rather coercing conversions.

The problem with the Pharisees was that they weren’t known for mercy.  They were actors, hypocrites (remember that sermon).  They were known for policing Law-observance and placing outrageous fines on those they caught violating them.  They didn’t really care about the real physical needs of widows and orphans, or refugees, or the poor in general.  They knew how to create loopholes in the Law where the Law required compassion and generosity from them.  They knew little about how to grant forgiveness to people who were weighed down in shame and guilt.  They weren’t very good at loving God with all their mind, soul, heart, and strength and their neighbour as themselves.  They were just good at keeping up appearances and penalizing those who didn’t.

In the Parable Jesus has the Landowner surprisingly commend the Manager for his shrewdness even though the manager had cheated him.  It was because when the Manager reduced the debts held by the tenants, even though it was for selfish motives, he was showing mercy, attending to the real needs of the tenants.  Like the Manager, the Pharisees were using their religious authority to grow wealthy by taxing the sins of others and in turn not using that wealth to help the poor among them.  They didn’t practice mercy.  Do you remember the story of the widow who came to the Temple and put her last two copper coins in the alms box?  That was all she had.  The Pharisees should have rather been looking out for her needs, but here she was not knowing where her next meal was coming from because she believed that you don’t come to Temple (church) empty-handed.  Like TV preachers, J.O. for one, they had no qualms with getting very wealthy by grifting on the spiritual needs of even the poorest among them.

It was apparent that the god the Pharisees really served was one called Mammon or what we would call Wealth.  Jesus warned his disciples that they cannot serve both God and wealth for they will inevitably love and be devoted to one over the other and their primary affection will likely be for mammon because that’s the way people are.  If we, Jesus’ disciples, choose to serve Wealth, we will likely get wealthy, but we’ll lose the Kingdom.  

Jesus will later tell his disciples in Chapter 22 after they have shared the Lord’s Supper and had a surprising argument about who is the greatest among.  Jesus said: “I confer upon you a Kingdom, just as my Father conferred one on me, so that you may eat and drink at my table and sit on thrones” (Lk 22:29).  His disciples will be tempted by Satan with political power and with wealth.  They must avoid those temptations and the King will be manifest in their midst.  

The Kingdom of God is about community, people bearing one another up in the love of Jesus Christ.   The end of chapter four of the Book of Acts gives a staggering image of what this community of the Kingdom of God looks like: “All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had.  With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was upon them all.  There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.”  

This passage from Acts describes beautifully what Jesus meant when he told his disciples to use their worldly wealth to make friends for themselves so that these friends may welcome them into the eternal dwellings.  Sharing what wealth we have with others according to need is Jesus’ rule for the handling of wealth in his kingdom.  This is what he was speaking of when he told his disciples “whoever is faithful with a little will be faithful with a lot”.  After all, the wealth that we have really is not our own.  

We, our very selves, belong to Jesus Christ.  He has bought us with his own blood.  We are his beloved slaves and everything we have is his own wealth which he has entrusted to us.  If we are not faithful in sharing the worldly wealth that is at our disposal, how can we expect God to entrust us with the true riches of his kingdom which are the peace of Christ and joy in his Spirit, knowing of God’s love, and genuine Christian community.  I may be stepping out on a limb and sawing behind me, but Jesus seems to indicate here that in the Kingdom of God there is a direct correlation between generously sharing wealth and truly receiving the riches and richness of the Kingdom of God in community.

To conclude, learning mercy by showing mercy is the first step into the kingdom.  Those who know this basic lesson pertaining to mercy and who strive to live accordingly will learn that the love of wealth threatens our God-given community.  If we are not faithful in our stewardship of the worldly wealth entrusted to us by sharing it according to need even to the point of exhausting it, (after all, Jesus gave his life) how can we expect the Triune God of grace to entrust us with the true wealth of the Kingdom of God, which is his very self embodied in Christian community?  Amen. 

 

Lost Yet Loved

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Luke 15:1-24

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Fear: The Opposite of Faith

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Luke 12:1-12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

The Sedimentation of Faith

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Hebrews 11:1-16

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Bless The City

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

^[2] Ibid.

^[3] Ibid.

^[4] Ibid.

 

Take the Transfer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

How Big Is Your Jesus?

Colossians 1:15-29

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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