Rise and Shine!

One of the joys of having adult children is that we don’t have wriggly little bodies jumping on the bed at 5 a.m. on Christmas morning, full of excitement about Santa arriving and let’s go open the presents RIGHT NOW!

They have such enthusiasm and joy and it’s so early in the morning!  Rise and Shine with a vengeance.  Whereas the rest of us who are older love to sleep in on a holiday morning.  Rising and Shining is something that we tend to resist the older we get.

Isaiah, which we’ve been reading since the start of Advent, was writing in a time of political turmoil, and the audacity of him, telling people to rise and shine when all around them were wars, poverty, and political shenanigans.  People must have wondered why he was so hopeful when the world seemed so bleak.  Today’s passage is from what Scholars call 3^rd Isaiah. This particular writer was preaching to the people who had returned from the Babylonian Empire, and the first part of Isaiah was writing to people who hadn’t yet been conquered by Babylon.  There’s about 100 years between the two events.  Third Isaiah was writing to the refugees rebuilding the Temple and the city.  They had come with high hopes fueled by the stories of their parents and grandparents of the ‘good old days’ of the glorious temple.  They were living with the legacy dream of rebuilding and restoring those glory days.  When they arrived, they faced the awful reality of a city that had been left to crumble for a hundred years.  The countryside was sparsely populated by the descendants of survivors who had struggled to survive without infrastructure or community.  A hundred years means shifts in language and accent, so probably those that stayed had a hard time understanding the newcomers.  Like a young person who goes away to school at university and comes back home with new ideas and new language, the ones who stayed must have felt overwhelmed by all the plans and idealism of this large group that arrived.  And the folks who were returning with their heads full of dreams, were staggered by the immensity of what had been lost and what needed to be rebuilt.  When faced with rubble and weeds, even the best dreams seem daunting.  Isaiah 60 talks to these people, the discouraged idealists, the frustrated dreamers, the refugees and the survivors who struggled to find common ground and a new hope for the future.  “Arise, your light has come!”  Join together to work for your dream of a city so filled with light and peace and wisdom that nations will flock to learn together about God’s people.  Isaiah wanted to remind everyone to work together no matter where they were born, in captivity or in hardship on native land, and in that cooperation, despite language barriers and cultural differences, they would remember what they had in common, the heritage of a faith in a loving God who would sustain them in a better way that would benefit the world.

We see the same coming together in our Gospel reading with scholars coming to a poor family in an obscure town in Israel.  Now, Matthew doesn’t mention shepherds or a census or a stable.  That’s all Luke.  And we have to be careful to remind ourselves that both Gospel writers were not primarily historians, but theologians.  Josephus was a Jewish historian writing about the same time as Matthew and Luke, and he makes no mention of massacres although Herod the Great had a reputation of being ruthless and murderous in other situations.  Matthew is writing theology to his community of Jewish Christians, the ones who were first converted to following the teachings of Jesus.  He’s also writing to the whole Jewish community because he sees himself as part of the long story of the people of Israel.  So his focus is on Joseph, more than Mary.  And Joseph, like the technicolor dream coat Joseph in the book of Genesis, has dreams and respects what those dreams teach him.  And Joseph takes the mom and the baby to Egypt after a dream of danger.  Just like Moses was saved from a massacre by a powerful monarch, so too Jesus was saved from a massacre.  And just like Moses grew up in Egypt to be a savior for all the people living in oppression and slavery, so too Jesus would grow up in Egypt to free his people.  The parallels were an important reminder that Jesus was rooted and grounded in the traditions and stories of his Jewish heritage.  And just like King Solomon of old, Jesus attracted special scholars from outside the country to come and pay their respects.  This contrasts again with Luke’s theology which talks about Jesus being presented in the Temple as a young infant according to the customs of the time, or staying behind in the temple to debate the scholars when he was only 12, showing that he was a student of Torah, again according to the traditions of the time.  No mention of Egypt because Luke’s theology is a little different.

Both Christmas stories, Luke and Matthew, are not writing a theology of escape. Nor is Isaiah writing a theology of escape.  Theirs is a theology of imagination and courage. It asks us to envision a world ordered not by fear or scarcity, but by building community, compassion and commitment.  Scholars and carpenters, farmers and city dwellers from another land, peasants and rich magi alike come together to rise and shine as one community of hope.

The United Church is at a crossroads.  If we don’t rise and shine, our grandchildren won’t have churches to come to to find hope and healing for the future.  If we don’t build community, compassion and commitment, our country might fragment into small territories that lack infrastructure for all.  If we don’t dream of a better future, our schools and hospitals will become privatized and the rich Herods will continue to hoard trillions of dollars.  If we don’t find ways to work together, our lights will struggle to shine.  We too have hard work ahead of us, both as a church and as individuals.  Do we buy into a theology of Herods accumulating power and wealth and not caring who we hurt as we do so, or do we buy into the theology of Isaiah, Matthew and Luke that cares for each other and helps each other shine?  As Isaiah proclaimed, “Though chaos still covers the earth and conflicts cloud the people, upon you God now dawns, and God's glory will be seen among you!  The nations will come to your light and the leaders to your bright dawn!”  God, help us to see your glory, help us to rise together to be the light of hope to your struggling world this year.  Amen.

Love over Hate

If you ever want to know how a town or a village or a city is doing, ask a hairdresser or a cashier or a school bus driver.  They have their fingers on the pulse of the community in a way that others might not.  They are the ones who see us at our worst.  Bus drivers see our kids when they are sleepy or after a hard day’s work at school.  Grocery store clerks find one more turkey for the foodbank, or one more toy for Santa’s Anonymous.  They are the innkeepers of the Bethlehem story, the ones who make room for people who show up at inconvenient times.  They are not the star of the show, no one is going to write carols about them, or have saints’ days named after them or give them Nobel prizes or medals of bravery.  They are quiet people who show up, day after day, enduring long shifts, aching feet, and impossible customer requests while on minimum wage. The innkeeper barely gets mentioned in the Christmas story, and yet in some ways, he or she was the first person to respond with generosity and creativity to the Christmas Story.  Welcoming the stranger becomes the first act of the world responding to the good news of Jesus being with us.  Before the shepherds, before the three kings, there is the humble innkeeper, trying to come up with a creative solution to an impossible situation. 

Even though Mary and Joseph ended up in a barn, it was a shelter from the woes of the world that were pressing down on them.  According to Luke’s gospel, they faced a government that made unreasonable demands on ordinary people, ordering a census based on place of birth without regard for where they lived.  They had to travel in a time when the roads were not safe from wild animals or wilder bandits.  They had to travel through a country run by a foreign army speaking a foreign language.  They travelled to a town where there were no hospitals or ambulances if there was an accident, and no police to intervene in cases of violence.  Justice and healthcare came for the wealthy and influential, not for a poor family forced to relocate unexpectedly because of politics.

Today, we live in a world that glorifies powerful people.  We live in a world that promotes fear of anyone that doesn’t look like us or talk like us or live like us.  We live in a world where rumors spread faster than ever before, and stories that teach us to be scared multiply like snowflakes in a blizzard.  This year, we have heard political figures insulting Canadians and threatening our independence.  We’ve seen the return of measles causing many children to become sick.  We’ve seen the notwithstanding clause used to limit people’s fundamental human rights and pitch the public sector against the private sector.  We’ve also seen people responding with elbows up to rally behind our economy.  We’ve worked together to shop Canadian, and to keep Alberta in Canada.  We’ve spent tourist dollars in Canada, learning how beautiful our parks and cities are.  It hasn’t been easy.  It hasn’t been peaceful.  But it has been inspiring to see how we all, working together, do make a difference.

The story of the birth of a baby in a stinky barn with straw and dirt all around, is a reminder that God comes when we least expect it, into the messiness of our lives.  Whether our homes look pretty, and the tinsel and lights are just perfect, or whether there is clutter and wrapping paper everywhere, God shows up.  Or maybe we are struggling to keep the lights on and the heating bills paid.  Even in the direst of situations, God shows up in love. God shows up despite the messages of fear or anger, despite war and violence. God shows up at your door with an unexpected turkey, or at the post office, with a package you didn’t know was coming.  God shows up with a hug or a small box of chocolates.  God shows up in a phone call from someone you hadn’t heard from in a while.  Or God shows up by saying, hey, send a card to Auntie, it’s been ages. Go deliver Meals on Wheels. Help put on a Christmas dinner for folks who may be alone.  Call your family member, not to get into a big debate over vaccines, but just to say, I love you.  Or shovel your neighbor’s walk if they’ve been sick. We’ve seen what hatred and fear can do to a country, but we’ve also seen what love can do.  Even when we feel like we live in a barn, surrounded by animals, God still shows up in love to make a difference.  We can too!  Just like the innkeepers, the hairdressers, the bus drivers, the cashiers, let’s all do our part in 2026 by standing for love, compassion and empathy for all.  Spread the good news that Love is stronger than Hate, and be the love that someone else desperately needs to see.  

What's Your Sign?

 Have you ever asked God for a sign?  Did you ever receive a sign?  Both of these are not questions we ask easily in the United Church.  We are logical, rational human beings not given to flights of fancy. Some of us refuse to ask for signs, some of us ask for signs too often. It’s hard to get a handle on, and it can feels like getting our tea leaves read or staring into a crystal ball.  Maybe it’s more like driving down the highway in a snowstorm, unsure whether to keep our high beams on or not.  Those times when the snow is blowing so thickly that we can’t see ahead no matter how fast or slow we go.  We look with anxiousness for the next sign for our turn off or to get a sense of where we are or how much further we need to go.  I often feel like I’m getting close to Athabasca when I see the moose crossing sign on the highway.  I look for that sign, and when I see it, I know where I am.  I also know that when I see it, I need to take extra care and be alert for unexpected hazards.

Our Isaiah reading has an unexpected hazard in it.  If we cherry-pick how we read Isaiah, the longest book of all the prophets, we can indirectly feed into antisemitic attitudes.  The attitude that the Hebrew scriptures are useless or full of an angry God or only valuable when they predict the arrival of Jesus is a way of diminishing the influence of Jewish theologians on the world and on Jesus.  The verses we heard this morning were once translated as ‘behold, the virgin is with child and will bear a son” but that is based on a Greek mistranslation.  Now scholars have restored the ancient and accurate meaning to us.  When we put it into context, we see that Isaiah was preaching to King Ahaz who was facing a civil war with two other kings.  The two kings planned to attack Jerusalem, kill Ahaz and put a puppet ruler in his place so they could attack the Assyrian Empire.  Ahaz was unsure what to do.  Isaiah challenged him not to put his faith in politics but in God.  Ahaz couldn’t ask for a sign because he didn’t have confidence in his faith.  It’s hard to trust in God when there are two armies making a beeline for your front gate.  Isaiah heard Ahaz’s excuses and said, “See this pregnant lady here? Her child will not starve to death because of two armies but will eat healthily before he is very old.”  Isaiah was saying to Ahaz that hope even for the pregnant mom was so close she could name her baby, “God is With Us”.  She became a tangible sign of hope for their people and their king.    Even in the midst of doom, she became a sign that violence would not have the final word.  And it became something to remember in other times of danger, that helped people trust in God.

Trust in God came to Joseph too, in our gospel reading this morning.  Joseph found that all his ‘happily ever after’ hopes and dreams, were turned upside down.  As a carpenter, he might have been building a house or renovating the kitchen for the day when he and Mary would start their wedded life.  As often happens, his best laid plans were thrown into a tailspin.  He knew that he wasn’t the father, and as many men have, he decided he didn’t want to be involved.  If he married her when she was already pregnant, people would assume that he was somehow lacking as a man since his young fiancé had strayed.  But as always in a world that has a double standard for the behaviors of men and women, it would have been Mary that would have taken the brunt of abuse from the other villagers for not honoring her commitment to Joseph.  Joseph wanted to do the honorable thing according to the culture of his time.  Break the engagement privately and send her away.  The double standard for women back then would have meant that she would have been on her own, a single mom with no extended family to support her, no income support, no family allowance.  Most young women in such a situation would end up prostituting themselves to survive.  Putting her away quietly would have only kept Joseph’s and Mary’s families honorable standing.  It would not have protected Mary or her baby from the worst abuses the Roman occupied world could throw at vulnerable young girls.

Then Joseph got a sign.  Signs make us question our assumptions about the world.  Joseph’s dream had him question his assumptions about how to deal with Mary.  Just as Isaiah, pointing at a young woman in a land threatened with invasion, questioned his king’s assumptions about God.

Some signs that question our assumptions about the world that I saw this week, were the heroic intervention of a Syrian Muslim refugee in the shooting of unarmed Jewish people in Sydney, Australia.  His bravery disrupts the racist stories that brown immigrants are violent and evil.  Some conspiracists tried to pretend that he was Christian, not Muslim, or tried to erase him from the story altogether.  The other thing that disrupted our assumptions was Skate Canada cancelling all interprovincial figure skating competitions from being held in Alberta, in order to protect young girls from double standards here.  Double standards and fear-based disinformation are hard to see until we look for the signs that God sends us.  God wants us to look for signs that build hope, peace, love and joy.  This Advent season, like Joseph and Isaiah, let us see signs of hope and love to change our assumptions about the world.  So if you feel like you are driving in a blizzard, slow down and look for signs of God’s love.  Chances are, you will find them.  Thanks be to God! Amen.

It’s the End of the World as we know it and I feel fine!

Ever notice how things can get twisted and changed as people share stories over time?  We used to play a game where one person would whisper a secret message to the person next to them who would then repeat it to the person beside them until it went all around the circle.  No matter how carefully we listened, the message that was received at the end had very little to do with the message that was started.  For some reason human communication can get bent and twisted out of the original intent.  So we shouldn’t be too surprised that scripture gets twisted into hurtful interpretations that are unrecognizable to the original authors.  How do we deal with scripture like this that have been used to distort and damage what Christianity is about?

Jesse Zink, in his book Faithful, Creative, Hopeful shares the story of a congregation that is preparing a Good Friday joint service that would rather go to a big sale than attend their special worship.  Zink says it’s not that the minister is a failure, but that the Christian faith has been defeated by today’s culture.  Bill McKibben wrote an article in last week’s Guardian, describing how progressive protestant Christian has been distorted by mainstream culture to the point that US politicians use scripture abusively to support their oppressive laws, and I quote:

“relatively obscure passage in a relatively obscure Old Testament story is a good example of what is known as prooftexting – the citing of some verse somewhere to support your predetermined beliefs…[which] is like a restaurant critic who has visited a steakhouse, noted that it has creamed spinach on the menu, and declared confidently that it is a vegetarian eatery.”

Scripture gets twisted like this and Christianity gets twisted like this  into an excuse to bully people who care for others, who are compassionate for outsiders, for the vulnerable and for the powerless.  How many times have we heard people say, “I can’t stand organized religion” because they have experienced twisted uses of scriptures to justify toxic abuses of power.  Power over how people lead their lives, power over legislation that appears on the surface of it to be harmless but isn’t.  All supposedly justified in the name of Christianity but without the compassion and empathy that Jesus taught his disciples to show towards folks less fortunate than themselves.

A case of scripture that often gets twisted beyond recognition is this passage in Matthew.  It refers back to the Noah Story.  You know, the one that has generated all kinds of songs and art like the Irish Rovers singing about ‘green alligators and long-necked geese’ and completely ignoring the tragedy and destruction the Flood story implies.  This is not a cutesy story about animals on an overcrowded floating barn with the chaos of keeping the lions fed and the rabbits from taking over.  This is about heartbreaking tragedy where people are swept up off in a tidal wave of destruction.  Once we see a painting of the people left off the ark, it’s hard to think of Noah as cute.  And here’s the thing.  The Matthew passage doesn’t sound like the persons taken up are raptured into Heaven, it sounds ambiguous.  The ones that are taken, are they taken by the flood waters, sparing the ones left behind? It’s hard to tell.  Yet there has spawned a multimillion-dollar industry of books and movies taking this single passage out of context into a bizarre faith that has people sure they are entitled to special treatment from God.  They proudly put bumper stickers on their car saying, “In case of the Rapture, this vehicle will be driverless” because they know how the end times are going to work in their favor.  It’s nasty and cynical and snobbish.  The opposite of what Jesus taught.

Our Song of Faith, a document in the form of poetry that tries to put into words our best understanding of the United Church’s ideas says that “Scripture is our song for the journey, the living word passed on from generation to generation to guide and inspire, that we might wrestle a holy revelation for our time and place from the human experiences and cultural assumptions of another era. God calls us to be doers of the word and not hearers only... The Spirit judges us critically when we abuse scripture by interpreting it narrow-mindedly, using it as a tool of oppression, exclusion, or hatred.”

All too often it may feel like we have been defeated by toxic Christian teachings that drown out our understandings of following the teachings of Jesus.  All too often it seems like the only Christians we hear about get into the news because they own palaces or private jets or are condemning immigrants or abortion or inflicting the Lord’s Prayer on every school-aged child regardless of what faith they may have.  But when we look at the scriptures as a whole, it seems certain that we are being called not to twist them to allow us to judge our neighbors!  It does not give us permission to oppress others with laws that lock people up.  Scripture instead invites us to live decent lives, sober lives, empathetic and dare I say woke lives.  Lives that recognize God at work in our neighbors, God at work in us to see and call out hatred while inviting God to heal our hearts and minds so we can focus on what is truly important.

Not when or where the end times will come but why and how we love ourselves and love our neighbors and love God.  That way, whenever God shows up in our lives, to take us or to leave us behind, we will be ready. Now is the hour for us to wake up and live honorable lives.  That way, whenever the end times come, we will be ready for God who comes in love. May it be so for us all.

Actions Speak Louder than Words

 

It’s shocking to see a minister take a police baton in the stomach as what happened this week in Chicago.  She was protesting outside an ICE detention centre with other clergy.  Together, they asked to enter the detention centre to provide spiritual care to detainees, something that clergy regularly do in jails and hospitals across North America.  Not at ICE detention centres.  Instead, they are being shot at with pepper pellets and laughed at when they collapse in pain.  They are being arrested and accused of being violent because they have their hands up in prayer.  This is not just one incident.  These clergy are putting their bodies in harm’s way for the gospel.  They are following in the footsteps of a criminal who was so dangerous, he was publicly tortured and executed on a high hill to be an example to anyone who might try to resist evil.  This criminal’s brave action, his courage and his innocence shocked many who witnessed it.  Even the soldiers and thieves wondered what kind of man had just been killed.  That man was Jesus of Nazareth, and the people who knew him and loved him soon called him Christos, the Greek word for Lord.  Christos meant ‘anointed one’, a phrase used for King David after he killed Goliath and became the new leader of Israel.  So Jesus was seen as the ruler of the new followers of the way, and when they pledged allegiance to Jesus, they pledged resistance to hate, resistance to persecution, resistance to human rights abuses.

The erosion of human rights starts small.  Innocuously.  We don’t aim to lose our human rights, after all.  And it’s easy to ignore or pretend that an issue here and there are not a problem.  It’s not a problem to ban abortions in the 8^th month because that is extremely unlikely to happen.  But then it gets earlier and earlier until abortions are completely illegal regardless of situation or circumstance.  We see this happening down south. Human rights get chipped away gradually and subtly until all of the sudden it impacts us.  Privatization of health care doesn’t seem to be a problem when we are talking about electives, but when it’s a burn victim or someone limping from a bad hip for years because they can’t afford the extra fees, or the person who waits years for cardiologists, the slope is slippery, and we lose the battle by invisible inches.

There’s a famous poem by a German preacher,

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I kept quiet; I wasn't a communist.
When they came for the trade unionists, I kept quiet;
I wasn't a trade unionist.
When they locked up the social democrats, I kept quiet;
I wasn't a social democrat.
When they locked up the Jews, I kept quiet;
I wasn't a Jew.
When they came for me, there was no one left to protest.

What this leaves out is the first few groups that the Nazis sent to places like Auschwitz.  They came for people with medical conditions.  They came for people who didn’t measure up to their standards of physical and mental perfection.  And they came for people, especially men, that weren’t conforming to their assumptions of what masculinity meant.  They came for gay men.  And when Auschwitz was liberated, it was the gay men, labelled with pink triangles, that were left behind in that death camp.

We like to think that Canadians are squeaky clean but our history is sprinkled with stories that prove otherwise.  Japanese internment camps, residential schools, butter box babies, the rounding up of German Canadian farmers, the denial of refuge to the over 900 Jewish passengers of the M.S. Louis in 1939.  There was forced sterilization of people living in institutions as well as immigrants from Eastern Europe and indigenous women, in Alberta and B.C. until the 1970’s.  Violence against the rainbow community was commonplace, especially since it was seen as both criminal and a medical condition.

What would Jesus have done?  What are we as Christians called to do when facing discrimination in all its ugly forms against whatever minorities are currently fashionable?  In Matthew 25 Jesus says “ ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’  Or how about Luke 6:27  ^“Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man”. Or in John 15 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.  No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you”.  Or Luke 6: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has … sent me to set the oppressed free...”

Jesus taught his disciples to choose compassion and love as the true signs of holiness.  He reminded them to stand for those who were seen as unlovable or unvaluable, the leper, the tax collector, the prostitute, the orphan, the widow, the poor, the ones who had no power or authority.  Jesus calls us to do the same.  It is never easy, but when we cry out for justice, when we write or call or e-mail, we are participating in God’s new creation. 

If we want to be the friends of Christos Jesus, there are three questions we need to ask ourselves.

1.  Why do we want to be friends of Jesus?

2.  Who is Jesus calling us to love?
3.  What sacrifice are we able to make for the people Jesus loves?

These questions may be the same, but each of us will be called to a different answer.  May we pray and listen for the voice of the Risen Christ and help bring heaven a little closer to earth by our words and actions and sacrifices. Amen.

Tourist Trap

 

Have you ever gone on a trip to someplace new and been caught up in excitement with how beautiful it is or how exciting or how new it is?  The first time going to West Edmonton Mall, maybe, or the first time at a movie theatre, or going to Redwater for the first time to play a hockey game.  Playing tourist brings out more than our cameras, it brings out a childlike playfulness.  Just like some of Jesus’ disciples in our reading today.

“Wow, look at that!  Look at the gems! Look at the marble! Look at the windows!  Look at the gifts people have given to our amazing temple!”  If they had cell phones, they would have been snapchatting while they took it all in.

They were caught up in the glamor and the glory and probably, if they were deeply honest, a bit of nationalistic pride.  Maybe some of them were dreaming of the day Jesus would become king, move in and take over the whole place.  The Temple, heart of their faith and their spirituality, the house of their God, would one day be their playground.

Buildings can be like that.  A beautiful building with amazing architecture can create a sense of awe when you wander in.  No wonder they were having a childlike response to their sacred landmark. 

The Temple had a long and checkered history.  King David, the one who killed Goliath, had wanted to build it, but God wanted to stay in a tent.  King Solomon, his son, built the first temple, and it was glorious.  One of his many times great grandsons made the mistake of doing a tour for Babylonian travellers, and showing off all the gold and treasures the temple had accumulated.  Next thing they knew, the Babylonians came back with an army, ransacked the temple, stole the people and the gold and destroyed much of the city.  It would take a long time before it was rebuilt.  The temple had just finished being renovated before Jesus came, by Herod the Great, and had a beautiful golden vine carved on the outside.

And yet, this didn’t impress Jesus much.  While the disciples gazed and exclaimed in excitement, Jesus recognized that the second temple was just as fragile as the first one had been.  Jesus knew that the prophets who wrote Isaiah saw the destruction of the first Temple as a sign of how far the nation had strayed from its true purpose, to be in relationship with God.  The temple was supposed to be a place of peace and mercy, a refuge from injustice and quarrelling. A place of calm and stillness, healing and holiness.  A place of joy and music and halleluiahs.  A place where the lion could one day lie down with the lamb.

Jesus wanted to warn the disciples from being too focussed on what the Temple was instead of why it was there. 

We can get focussed on the what instead of the why too.  Our buildings need roofs and furnaces and stoves and heat, which is important, but the why is more important.  We need a place to gather together to heal, to sigh, to learn, to sing, to pray, to hold each other in love and in light.  We need a place to remind ourselves that God is with us, we are not alone.  We need a place where we can experiment with giving radical hospitality to people of all ages and stages, where we can recapture some of the joy and playfulness we had when we were children, the curiosity, and the openness to God in our lives.

Jesus challenged his disciples to look past the glamour of a tourist trap to the real purpose of the Temple, and how the best of buildings, the holiest of buildings can still be fragile and fleeting. And Jesus dared to tell the truth about the Temple, and about his country.  The people were fixated on power and money, and resentments were common.  The ordinary people resented the Roman occupiers, the leaders resented challenges to their power and control, and this meant people were simmering at the brink of violence.  The temple was doomed, they just didn’t know it yet.

Our society, our province and our neighbors to the south are also simmering.  With the release of more Epstein files, with the frustration with the attack on our human rights in our province and our children’s human rights, with the increase of measles and tuberculosis in Alberta, with rising food prices and a global economy that adds up to what is being called a polycrisis, there is a feeling of frustration and helplessness for many.  One minister in the states wrote on Friday, about the politics in the states:

Power is not rooted in goodness. It is rooted in grievance, nostalgia for white dominance, patriarchal entitlement...

This is not a political analysis. It is a moral one…

We cannot force the reckoning justice calls for, but we can refuse to pretend that the absence of justice is anything less than a moral failure. We can stop waiting for institutions that have already failed to do what they have no intention of doing. We can choose, in our own communities and families, to name what is true: This is not normal. This is not acceptable. And this is not what a just society looks like.

Jesus refused to pretend with his disciples.  He refused to pretend that the Temple was the vision Isaiah preached about where the lion lays down with the lamb.  God is calling us to trust in a better dream than tourist traps covered with gold or marble.  God is building a world where human rights are valued, where all people, despite their differences, children and adults alike, are treated with justice and love.  God is about to create a world where there is no weeping or distress, where the lion will lay down with the lamb.  May we know and trust in God’s promise for us all. Amen.

Note: Since I preached this on Sunday, November 16, it was brought to my attention that The Economist published two excellent articles in their Nov. 1 2025 edition, "By Invitation" written by Peter York, author of "Dictator Style: Lifestyles of the World's Most Colorful Despots", and "Palace Intrigue" that highlights the parallels between what is currently happening at the White House and what happened in Versailles and other national buildings when in the hands of the dictators. They are found on pages 17 and 78 of the magazine and readily available in public libraries including Athabasca's Alice B. Donahue Library.  Although I had not read them, the conclusions are eerily similar, including a photograph of the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles similar to my photo which I took in 2017.

Lost In the Details

There’s a congregation in the states that had someone ask, “What was the hardest time this congregation ever faced?” The consultant, knowing that the church was established before the Boston Tea Party, thought it might be in the American Revolution when the British shot the minister’s wife.  Or maybe it was something that happened in the civil war, or in the World Wars, or the Spanish Flu, or even the Covid pandemic.  “Nope, sir, the hardest day was when we were flimflammed back in the 1860’s by our new minister. He said that the end times were near so we all sold our farms and put on white robes to go wait on a high hill for Jesus to take us to Heaven.  The hardest part of that was going back down the hill to buy our places back.”  Seems silly, but it happens again and again in the news.  It happened again this September and October, thanks to an enthusiastic TikTok pastor.  He was so convincing that people fretted about how they would find a way to get their pets raptured with them.  The shame and embarrassment they felt after the dates passed was as intense as it was back in the 1860’s.

It's easy to get caught up in the details, to play the prediction game.  It’s easy to go skimming through the Bible, picking a verse here and there until we’ve built up a case that has turned our opinion into cold hard fact.  The Sadducees were masters at analyzing scripture.  They knew their bibles inside and out, and these smart Sadducees were the ones with all the power and the wealth in their society.  They were smart men, however, and realized as they listened to Jesus teaching in the temple, that he was gaining a reputation of being smart, authentic in his faith, and convincing to ordinary people.  They watched the scribes and pharisees question Jesus, and they tried to trap Jesus in a question of their own. A question designed to prove that their belief was right and anyone else who believed differently was childish or even ridiculous.  How could there be a resurrection when it would lead to conundrums like the scenario of the woman with seven husbands?

Jesus didn’t get caught up in their details.  He didn’t step into their trap.  He talked not about verses but about relationships.  Not an analysis of marriage, but of how God is in relationship with human beings.  There is no past, present or future when it comes to God and the tribal ancestors.  If the pharisees wanted to get caught up in the details, they could, but that was not what Jesus cared about.

All scripture, according to Jesus, was about loving God with all our hearts and souls, and loving our neighbors as ourselves.  It goes straight to the heart of our faith.  It’s a big ‘why’ question.  Why do we have faith?  Why do we have church?  Because God loves us, and because we need reminders of that love.  You don’t get a bigger why than that. 

All too often we get caught up in the details, the how questions.  How will we get to heaven?  How will we act in Heaven? How will we know when Jesus will come again?  How will we fix the church?  How will we bring in new members.  And often, we come up with solutions to the how questions that don’t consider the bigger why questions.  It’s like when we have a hammer and we assume every problem can be fixed with pounding a nail in.  That’s great when we have a broken bookcase, but when we are having problems with our furnace, a hammer is not going to help.  Switching from how questions to why questions is not easy, but when we know our why, that can change how we fix our real problems.  It pulls us away from details and helps us see the big picture.  And as Jesus showed the Sadducees, the big picture is where God is.  Not in the details of which man is going to end up with a wife.

Churches often get caught up in how questions.  People have been absolutely convinced that bringing in an organ will grow a church.  People quit a church because it dared to bring in an organ, I think this was in a Presbyterian church back in the 1890’s.  Some campaigned to get rid of pews.  Some campaigned to install pews and get rid of chairs.  Some pushed to get PowerPoint into worship, some pushed to get it out.  During the Great Depression, a United Church in Edmonton didn’t want Methodists joining them because they would want a honky-tonk piano for worship, and pianos were only for bars.  Some people thought that using overhead slides would appeal to the youth, back in the 1970’s.  All these are hammer solutions to how questions.  They don’t work.

A big how question many Christians are concerned with is heaven and hell. Reverend Doctor Chuck Currie wrote, “Instead, we need to be more concerned with what happens here on earth. Christianity is a faith for the living. But we treat it as a faith for the dead, even when Jesus taught us to pray that the Kingdom come here on Earth. In spending so much time worrying about what comes after this life, we ignore what is occurring in our world today.”

Paul, too wanted to shift his friends in Thessalonia to shift from worrying about the ‘how’ of the second coming. Instead he goes to the why, “Therefore stand firm. Hold fast to the traditions you received from us, either by word of mouth or by letter.  May our Savior Jesus Christ and our Abba God-who loved us and in mercy gave us eternal consolation and hope- console your hearts and strengthen them for every good work and word.”

May we too learn to start with the why.  The why of growing resilient hearts to strengthen our ability to act with healing and compassion in a world fixated on hammering solutions onto each other.  May we find our hearts consoled and our courage to do good works strengthened by God’s almighty Grace and love. Amen.