Why are You Surprised and Disturbed?

Surprise! Another gospel, another shocking surprise!  Jesus pops back into the disciples’ lives when they least expect it.  Luke, John, and Matthew have Jesus popping in and out of their Easter Sunday stories like a jack in a box or a game of whack a mole.  Not just once, but several times.  On the road to Emmaus, behind locked doors, on the Galilee beach with a fish fry, and making sure that the disciples know that he’s no ghost or zombie.  Again and again, he is physically present to people described as reliable and trustworthy witnesses who are completely bewildered at the turn of events.

Not for long, according to our scripture reading this morning.  Peter has transformed in a few short days from someone full of grief and guilt into one who speaks with confidence and authority.  This is not the man who denied Jesus three times.  This is not the man who scolded Jesus and being told “Get behind me you Satan!”

Peter speaks not about himself and his grand ideas but God’s healing power.  The verses before this talk about a man born with weak legs.  He was a beggar at the door of the temple in Jerusalem, dependent upon the generosity of passers by.  Everyone knew him.  To see him standing on his own two feet, hanging on to Peter and John, would have been a surprise and shock.  Impossible!

Peter gave his first sermon spontaneously, and it was powerful because of the beggar standing beside him, a little wobbly perhaps, but a living example of a surprising God in action.

It's amazing to hear that both Jesus and Peter don’t make these extraordinary events about themselves.  Even though Jesus talks about being the Messiah, it is all in service of reconnecting people to God.  When we think that only perfect humans can connect with God, how can anyone feel comfortable approaching the sacred mystery that guides us?  Peter firmly told people he was not the one with healing powers.  Only God had that power, and only through following the teachings of Jesus could Peter help the beggar.  Peter knew that what he had learned from Jesus was rooted in his devotion to God, his understanding of scripture, his participation in worship and prayer in the temple.  Surprise! God wasn’t only found in the scrolls they read, in the old stories of their ancestors, but also in the lives of the people right there in front of them!

Surprise, Jesus was still there.  Even though authorities had done everything physically possible to silence Jesus by killing him, it had not killed the healing stories and actions that Jesus had done.  If death could not stop his message of love and grace and hope, what could?

Who needs that kind of surprise in 2024?  Who is the lame beggar in our midst?  There are many reports of Millennials and Gen Y adults struggling with despair and apathy.  The winter edition of Orion Magazine whose cover is the picture for this sermon, was about the struggles young people are having with dating around the world.  China is struggling with a sharply plummeting birth rate.  Canada’s birth rate has been dropping since 2009.  Young adults struggle to find stable long term relationships.  Some give up on romance altogether.  It’s easy to forget that this is the generation that saw the twin towers explode when they were in elementary school.  They’ve grown up in a world that has been talking about climate change since before they were born.  My children were learning about recycling and caring for the environment as early as Grade Three, and knew that car exhaust and pollution were causing global warming. Australian kids had wide-brimmed hats added to their school uniforms in the 90’s because 80% of cancers there are skin cancers.  Many young people experience climate anxiety that impacts their emotional health.  They wonder where they can turn to for hope.  Between Covid, 9/11 and global warming, who can blame them?

They have grown up in a world of contradictions.  A world that claims that there is no God.  There is no reason to plan for the future because at any time a gunman can walk into their schools, or a terrorist can fly a plane into a building or someone can get a cough in China that shuts down a university in Toronto or a cruise ship in Hawaii.  There is no safety in this world. 

Surprise! God is still up to something.  This is as hard to believe today as the resurrection was for the people listening to Peter.  But there are lots of little signs of grace and hope showing up when we know what to look for.  There are websites like Fixthenews.com that report on the drop in violent crime in the US, the shrinking of the Japanese Mafia, the increase in the number of countries that are making same sex marriage legal despite the pope’s latest news release.  Or Optomistdaily.com with stories like Medellín, Colombia, once the most dangerous city in the world planting so much greenery that they are lowering the average temperature of their city at the same time that they lower their carbon footprint and their crime rate.  Or the United Church’s Faithful Footprints program that aims to lower our carbon emissions by 80% by 2030, who have worked with over 400 United Church properties. Faith communities are the second-largest property owners in Canada after the federal government, and the United Church of Canada, alongside the Mennonite Church of Canada, is one of only two faith communities with a national-level grant program, and our example is inspiring the Anglican Church of Canada to develop something similar.  We also now have so many people wanting to become candidates for ministry that we have had to put a cap on how many students are going into our programs! Because no matter what, God is with us, we are not alone.  God is still surprising us, inspiring us, healing us so that we can stand, wobbly, leaning on each other for support so that we can dream with God of a healthier more loving world for the future.  May it be so, Amen!

Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.

There’s an old family story about my grandfather who was in the Colonel Mewburn Hospital in Edmonton.  He was waiting for surgery on his eye that had become so affected by glaucoma the doctors told him it had to be removed.  This was a blow to him as he was a salesman travelling across Alberta to show merchants his advertising samples.  He had binders of pens, calendars, mechanical pencils, all labeled “Your business here” that stores could order and hand out to their customers.  He ignored the headaches and the blurry vision as long as possible, then when he did see a doctor, it was too late. His three sons were adults so that was a mercy, but the night before the surgery, his heart was troubled and he couldn’t sleep.

Finally, he dozed off only to have a vision that Jesus was standing at the foot of his bed and told him that he would be okay, and would still have a good life.  He woke up and told his wife and sons of his dream. 

His experience of Christ was as real to him as he was to his children and grandchildren.  That experience didn’t solve all his problems, it didn’t give him his sight back, it didn’t help him to learn braille, it didn’t help him keep his temper when blindness frustrated him, but it gave a sense of comfort that no one could take away.  He also committed to going to church, and it was so important that he went every Sunday.

We view experiences like this and Thomas’ with more than a grain of salt.  The world thinks everything should have a logical explanation, and that facts are more important than fiction.  People angrily attack others on social media for sharing such stories.  They type things like “Religion is evil, it has caused nothing but suffering and the only people who benefit are the con men pushing an unbelievable Santa Claus in the sky.”  The anger is as real as surgery or glaucoma.    It’s hard to have faith in a mysterious God and an even more mysterious resurrection in such a world.

Thomas knew that anger.  The death of his beloved rabbi Jesus was traumatizing.  It went against everything he had hoped for.  The disciples, along with women like Mary Magdalene, had been together for a long time, and learned much from Jesus.  But now he treated their words with distain.  How could they, in the space of a single day, go from grief to enthusiasm?  No wonder Thomas rejected their crazy story.  He felt betrayed by them, and he must have felt lonely and abandoned.  He no longer trusted them.

Our whole society right now is suffering a crisis of trust.  Bridges collapse, charity workers get bombed, civilians and even children are targeted for drone attacks, and there’s unpredictable and catastrophic weather patterns leading the news on a regular basis. Some people turn to shopping channels or bibles being sold by a politician.  Some believe that the UN is trying to sterilize everyone with contrails.  They ignore warnings about measles.  The world is changing, and they want to get back to a time when the world was predictable and there were never empty shelves in the grocery store.

It's hard to know who to trust or what to trust.  Thomas trusted his own senses.  He trusted his Rabbi.  But his friends?  No way would he have trusted them with his possessions as described in our Acts passage. And yet, he had an experience of Jesus that changed all that.

This experience was transformative, just as the vision of Jesus in the Colonel Mewburn Hospital was transformative for the man who lost his sight.  Just as it was for the disciples and followers of Jesus living in Jerusalem.  They became so inspired and so trustworthy that they were able to live together in what sounds like perfect harmony.  They came together in hope and trust and vulnerability and joy, because of the Easter experience of resurrection.

We too are called together to be in community.  This is not easy, and there will be times when we have angry Thomases demanding signs and proof.  They will demand a high level of trust from us.  What a daunting task!  If we think about trust in the way that the 1 John passage from our prayer of confession thinks, if we say we are perfectly trustworthy, we are liars.  The only thing that is perfectly trustworthy is God, and God is both the hardest and the easiest to trust.  Human trust is fragile and easily damaged.  As Brene Brown describes it, trust is made up with little moments when humans do thoughtful things for one another.  The more we are trustworthy in the little things, the more we will be trustworthy in the big things.  Trust, according to Stephen Covey, is made up of integrity and action.  Integrity is caring about equality, justice, and fair play.  Without action, it is useless.  When we commit to doing something that aligns with our values and fail to follow through, we lose trust.  When we follow through, that builds trust. We need to build a pattern of trust in ourselves and others that will stand the test of time.

Trust is seen in acts of bold discipleship and daring justice, but it is fed with deep spirituality by reflecting on the integrity and purpose Jesus had.  When we practice deep spirituality, we find the energy to be bold disciples who do daring justice.  Thomas’ encounter with Jesus was so transformative that he traveled far and wide to share good news to many people.  The blind man’s encounter gave him the courage to keep on living despite his many hardships and struggles.  May it also give us the courage to keep growing, trusting and praying for our own Easter experiences of the living Christ so we can make a difference in the world!

Against All Expectations

Easter was a disaster, at least according to the Gospel of Mark.  Three women came to a gloomy tomb to do a distasteful task by themselves.  There were no undertakers, no funeral homes, or no caskets.  If anyone was to take care of a corpse, especially one who was the product of a shameful torturous execution, it was family members who loved the deceased.  So the ladies, in this oldest of Gospels, made their way in the dark of the early morning, grieving and stumbling on the rough road to the outskirts of town where they expected to cry and hold their beloved rabbi one more time.  They knew what would happen next.  They knew that it was going to be stinky, stomach-churning business.  They knew they were alone in this distasteful task.

It's easy to gloss over this when we think of Easter.  Chocolate, colorful pysanka, flowers, fancy hats, it’s a bright colorful celebration of the return of spring.  And most people prefer the sugar rush of sweet chocolate to the heavy perfumes and ointments that the two Marys and Salome were carrying.  Let’s have fun after a long winter!

It's good to celebrate, but what are we celebrating?  The resurrection, of course, in all its illogical, implausible and unscientific glory.  Despite the Da Vinci Code and other conspiracy theories, some that are even debunked by Peter in our scriptures, something surprising and shocking happened that Easter Sunday.  It was such a news item that even a Jewish Historian named Josephus wrote about him some 50 years afterwards, saying:

Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man. For he was a doer of startling deeds, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. And he gained a following both among many Jews and many of Greek origin. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.

A Roman historian also mentioned Jesus in his records as well, Tacitus, as did several other writers.  What’s interesting is that they didn’t think Christianity would last, but it persevered despite all odds.  When Peter was executed in Rome, people must have thought it was the end.  Peter’s story had spread too far to let his death stop the message of Easter.  Peter spoke so often about the life and death and life after death of Jesus, his beloved rabbi that it spread everywhere.  Today’s scripture showed that at first he preached to people who only spoke his language.  Then he was summoned to another town to visit a powerful Roman commander and he didn’t know what to think. 

Roman army leaders didn’t ask people to show up for a visit without a very good reason.  I can imagine that Peter was nervous about the invitation.  Would the trip be a trap or a test?  Would he be arrested, thrown in jail, executed?  Instead, much to his surprise, he found himself welcomed, with the whole large household of Cornelius, soldiers, slaves and all, waiting on every word.  It was the last thing he expected.

Peter still thought that Jesus was the Messiah for his own people, for those who were faithful to the Torah, who went to the Temple, who prayed to the God of Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Leah and Rachel, Moses and Miriam and Aaron.  But Jesus had never turned down a conversation with Samaritans or Phoenicians or Romans.  And Peter had forgotten that.  Peter needed to relearn a lesson of hospitality and welcome, a lesson of courage and boldness, a lesson of inclusion and daring.  The experience of the first Easter shattered his understanding of who God was and how the world worked.

This shattering experience continued to have ripple effects to everyone who knew Jesus.  The women at the tomb broke their silence and shared their news to Peter.   He found the courage to spread his experiences of Jesus and that first Easter.  “Now I understand that this message is for everyone, the amazing message that Jesus lived and died and still lives.” This shattering experience that defied all logic would inspire new understandings and new courage.  Christianity continues to be impacted by the ripples of that first Easter.  It continues to inspire new bold and daring and deep acts of justice and compassion.

Josephus must have thought this tribe of Christians would soon be relegated to the history books as a small footnote.  In his four-volume history of the Jewish people, Josephus only writes a few sentences about Jesus, the doer of startling deeds.  But Jesus wasn’t stopped by even death, and his followers continued to do startling deeds.  They opened schools and hospitals for everyone regardless of any age, race, ethnicity, or ability.  They took care of the dead with tenderness and love regardless of whether they were rich or poor, jew or gentile, slave or free, something that was anathema to cultured Romans of the day. We as followers are to continue to recognize that God knows no partiality, and that we too are called to join this courageous tribe of Christians.  Easter is more than chocolates, it is an invitation to join Peter, Mary, Paul and the others in deep spirituality, bold discipleship and daring justice that the world so desperately needs right here and right now. 

They had Courage because they discovered that God transformed even the ugliness of death into life.  The deepest grief and fear can be transformed by God.  Nothing we can do can stop God.  We too can find ourselves doing startling deeds of inclusion, love and acceptance.  We can still inspire others by our loving example.  We can also do acts of daring courage.  We can chose to include others that seem as distasteful as Peter saw the centurion. May we be as bold, as deep and as daring as the tribe of Christians that the world has always seen as insignificant but that has through the centuries changed the course of history.  May it be so for us all!

Small Sacrifices

 Why do we follow Christ?  Why do we listen to his teachings when he seems to glorify abusive behaviors and torture by embracing his death on a cross?  These are deep, puzzling questions, and the scriptures sometimes help us and sometimes confuse us.

John’s gospel is not for the faint of heart in this regard.  It’s the gospel that almost didn’t make it into the bible back in the time of Constantine.  John was a philosopher, the Steven Hawking of bible writers.  When he described what Jesus taught, there weren’t many down to earth stories like we find in the other gospels, but flowery metaphors and complex images. 

And sometimes, we need flowery metaphors when dealing with the subject of today’s scripture.  Jesus was predicting his death and talking about suffering.  That wasn’t a popular topic back then, and it’s not today either.  Sometimes it feels like a modern slogan for the good life should not be “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” but “Life, liberty and the avoidance of all suffering”.  Our world struggles to know what to do with suffering.  We interpret the good life as being like an Oscar show, full of glittering gowns, fancy tuxedos and cleverly written speeches where everyone looks perfectly happy.  A lot of people put time and effort into looking like they are living the perfect life.  Social media is full of pictures of people living glamorous lives.  Unfortunately, this leads to increasing feelings of isolation, loneliness and depression as people wonder why they aren’t having more successes themselves.  Where are their statues for best actor or best costume designer, best director of the perfect life?  For those who are struggling with chronic illnesses and chronic pain, the push to portray only the happy moments of life can be a cruel expectation.

Jesus had an odd opinion about suffering. Jesus didn’t say that anyone who became his follower would be handed a “Get out of suffering free” card.  Some folks may preach that, and push the idea that Christians automatically get to avoid suffering.  There are people in our community who have turned their backs on Christianity because of that.  A catastrophe happens in their lives, and they take it as a sign that either they are terrible, or that God is angry at them and they don’t know why.  So, they reject Christianity altogether.

Jesus didn’t say that he would save people from suffering.  He did say that he came so that they could have life abundant.  And many of his disciples led very transformed lives that were abundant and fulfilling.  Fishermen became world travelers, tent makers became famous orators, tax collectors became community leaders, and they all followed Jesus’ teachings so passionately that they took his message to the ends of the earth.  Even faced with derision, imprisonment, and even crucifixion, they were so on fire that they kept sharing the good news to all who would listen.

Even Greeks wanted to come and speak with the Rabbi, and Jesus shared his message with them too.  His good news was for everyone regardless of ethnicity.  Often a reference to the Greek people was a reference to the rest of the world, for Greek was the language of intellectuals and philosophers.  Wealthy Romans considered a Greek tutor as a status symbol, like having a child in French Immersion may be considered a status symbol.  And Paul went to Greece, home of Socrates and Plato and schools of philosophy and medicine and was able to plant multiple small communities of faith, house churches with maybe a dozen people across that country that spread until it became a universally embraced way of life.

The disciples did that by making sacrifices.  They left their comfortable homes and their familiar ways and their homeland where everyone spoke the same language.  Now, we may squirm at the thought of sacrifices, but we do it every day.  How many of us sacrifice sleeping in on a Saturday morning because the dog needs to go out for a walk?  How many of us sacrifice our time by volunteering for Meals on Wheels or making lunch for crib players or selling tennis balls for the Lions or raising money for Rotary Club’s international exchange student program?  How many of us sacrifice our money for supporting good causes at the Farmer’s Market or buy fair trade coffee at the grocery store or buy chocolates for a kid’s school fund raiser?  How many of us helped our neighbors during Covid, or supported family and friends when they were going through hard times, or drove neighbors to doctors appointments?  We know how to follow in the footsteps of Christ and we often do it without realizing that we are even making sacrifices.

We sacrifice for others in many ways.  It’s because of those sacrifices, large and small, that we have continued to provide support for so many people for so many centuries.  Peter Drucker, a business guru, would ask industry leaders which organization was the most resilient.  People probably named institutions like the UN, or the Red Cross and the like.  Drucker surprisingly said it was the Church.  It was durable not because it created great leaders but because it allowed ordinary people to do outstanding things. It’s survived plagues, wars, collapses of empires, corrupt leaders trying to produce evil things like crusades and witch hunts, and it keeps returning to its core values of empathy, equality and courage. Or as we say in the United Church, deep spirituality, bold discipleship and daring justice.

Christianity transformed communities over the centuries. It’s easy to forget how resilient it has been and hard to see how resilient it is even now.  We don’t get the big picture when we are wrapped up in our worries and struggles.  When we hang on to our lives tightly, we can get tied up in knots of grief, fear and anxiety.  When we focus on our community and make those little sacrifices that we know so well how to do, we can do bold and beautiful things that make a difference in the world. And God glorifies what we do, saying, “This is my beloved child with whom I am well pleased.”  May our sacrifices continue to glorify God and inspire and empower the world! Amen.

Snakes Alive!

The things we do to survive difficult times are truly surprising.  Wilderness survival has become a staple on Netflix and YouTube, with shows like Man Tracker being popular.  But the ancient Hebrews, wandering around in the wilderness, didn’t have encyclopedias to tell them how to survive, or what to eat.  They didn’t have an app on their phone pointing to where the nearest grocery store was, and they certainly couldn’t skip the dishes!  Survival was not something they could take for granted.  So when snakes moved in to their campground, no wonder they were upset.  They couldn’t contact Fish and Wildlife and rent a snake trap to deal with the infestation.

They did have a clear understanding that their choices had led to their misfortunes.  Their decision to be negative, to complain repeatedly about the food like a bunch of teenagers in the school cafeteria, was very human.  There are at least 14 instances in the books of Exodus and Numbers, of the people complaining about the food or the water, like a broken record that went on and on.  Despite everything Moses did, finding rocks with water in it, or manna on the ground, or quails in the air, the people still complained.  Slavery where they had no choices and they knew what would happen every day of their lives, was better than the unpredictable never-ending hiking trip that left them all tired and grumpy at the end of every day.  Freedom is not as wonderful as they thought it would be.  They were still part of the slavery mindset where it was always someone else’s fault.  They were addicted to seeing only the negative in every situation.  Surprisingly, snakes are supposed to be better protein than beef, and according to one website, rattlesnake meat is particularly delicious.  And since Moses hadn’t gotten time to write down what was clean and what was unclean yet in the book of Leviticus, snakes could have been a real boost to their diets.  At least, if you don’t eat the poison glands in the heads, and don’t get bitten as you try to catch them.  Maybe Moses or the writers of Leviticus knew something about those snakes we don’t.

Whatever the reason, God and Moses cooked up some art therapy for the Hebrews to get them looking up.  They cooked up a snake on a stick, to remind the folks that they had someone to trust in that was more powerful than snakes.  To remind the folks to go to prayer first, not negativity.  To break their slave thinking which assumed the worst in all situations.  To put God right in the centre of all their calamities and fears and frustrations.

Jesus continued that metaphor and built on it in a night-time conversation with Nicodemus.  Nicodemus, an educated believer, was an expert in the bible.  He wanted to figure out if Jesus was legitimate or just a con man, if Jesus was rooted and grounded in his scriptures or just inventing whatever he felt like.  This was a test of Jesus and his theology by a temple official.  This was not a casual chat about whether or not snakes might be edible, a conversation that was light and fluffy between two strangers wondering if they might be able to become friends.  This was the meeting of two great minds to talk about deep philosophical stuff.  Jesus could throw obscure quotes from the bible at Nicodemus because Jesus had studied it well.  Nicodemus would have been impressed that Jesus knew that odd story, and he would have taken it as a sign that Jesus had done his homework.  From the questions Nicodemus asked Jesus, he was honestly open and curious as to what Jesus was teaching, and was listening hard to understand.  That teaching was surprising on so many levels.  We tend to focus mostly on John 3:16 because that has become the most famous passage of the bible, seen at football games and on billboards.  It also has become interpreted in toxic ways.  One person described John 3:16 as a “believe it or else” warning sign used to divide and discriminate against people that don’t believe in Jesus in just the right way.  Which is ironic, because Nicodemus came with questions and an attitude of curiosity.  Jesus treated him with deep respect, engaging his questions, inspiring deeper questions, and having a rich, metaphorical conversation.  If Nicodemus were here today, would he read John 3:16 as an invitation to deeper conversations or as a condemnation of himself as not doing Christianity right?  Would the people he talked to today condemn him for not understanding, or encourage him to keep questioning?  It’s too bad that we stop at 3:16, because 3:17 is in my mind a much more invitational and hopeful verse.  Jesus came into the world not to condemn the world but that the whole world might be saved.  In some ways, that is the true scandal of this passage.  Our secret deeds will no longer be secret, our actions that we’re not proud of, these will be as evident and as prominent as if we had put them on a stick and marched them in a parade in the downtown on Canada Day.  But the whole world will be saved not only from our faults and mistakes and secrets, but from all that has us feeling scared or angry.  The whole world.  Not just the pretty ones, the famous ones, the straight ones, the rich ones, the powerful ones, but the whole world.

The whole world includes people of all ages, races, ethnicity, abilities, sexual orientation, gender identity, and family structure.  It also includes creation, snakes and all.  Jesus didn’t condemn Nicodemus, who helped care for his body on Good Friday.  Jesus came for all of us, in all our glorious diversity.  Whether we are campers who like our microwaves, or survivalists who want to know how to cook the snakes that are edible, we are part of the world that Jesus came to be lifted up for.  May we find courage and strength no matter where we find ourselves or what we are struggling with, by keeping our eyes on Jesus.  Amen.

Raging against the Machine

Anger is a dangerous tool.  It’s intoxicating when we feel we have a legitimate reason to let it all out and pull out our whips, rant at people present in the room and knock over tables.  It feels good.  Or at least for the first 10 or 20 minutes.  Then remorse sets in and we start second-guessing ourselves.  Did we do it for the right reasons?  Was that the only way we could get our point across?  Did it have the results we hoped for?  And when we ask those kinds of questions, often the answer is a resounding ‘no’.

Anger often lowers the trust we have in the angry person.  It can also emphasize our own vulnerability.  The news recently of a shooter invading Edmonton City Hall is a good example of this.  The beautiful glass pyramid was the location of celebrations, heated debates and controversial presentations, but it was open to everyone, adults, children, new Canadians, First Nations, rich and poor alike.  Now because of one man’s anger, that has gone from City Hall.

It's easy to imagine that being the response of the temple authorities to Jesus having his little hissy fit.  Whether we read the Mark version or the John version, the leaders were not happy. They wanted to know why Jesus thought he had the right to pull such a stunt.  It was upsetting enough that his disciples all remembered it a little differently.  Mark’s story has Jesus quoting scripture, John’s has Jesus predicting his death and resurrection.  Mark remembered it happening just before Jesus was crucified, and John told it as happening as the start of Jesus’ ministry.  Either way it was so memorable that it got into all 4 gospels.  Even Christmas doesn’t get into them all.  So, this is right up there with Palm Sunday, Good Friday and Easter.  This is an important story.

It is easy to point a finger at the scribes and Pharisees and say, “boy did they ever get it wrong! At least we don’t worship like that!”  This is problematic on two counts.  One is that it assumes that they were bad, and that assumption has sometimes slipped into anti Semitism.  The other assumption is that we aren’t like them, and that too is not helpful.  It says that the way we do things in our church or our denomination is perfect, and so are we so we don’t have to change.

Worship isn’t perfect.  And maybe it should never strive to be perfect.  Oh sure, there are the churches who have teams of technicians, multitudes of musicians, a preponderance of polished preachers, and a horde of happy hosts clamoring to greet you at the door.  There’s a church near Halifax that went from 20 people to a congregation of over 500 people in the space of three years, whose preacher got on the cover of a magazine!  The church even put out souvenir dvds of that day’s service that they sold to folks as they left the sanctuary.  They were pressing those dvds as fast as others were pouring coffee in the fellowship hall.  It was quite the entertaining event.  For many, it was a powerful spiritual experience, complete with laying on of hands, speaking in tongues and spiritual warfare.  Heaven and Hell were mentioned as both bribe and threat.  The lighting was superb and the slide show was flawless.  Is that what worship is supposed to be?

It’s easy for us to look down our noses or be jealous of that kind of worship, but worship is supposed to be a time when we come together to support each other on our faith journey.  It’s a time when we look and listen for signs of God at work in our our world.  It’s a time when we open ourselves to learning something new, something we hadn’t thought of before, something that may spark new ideas and new insights.  It’s a time where, as one theology writer said, “we are to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”.  So those of us who are in a good space support those of us who are struggling.  And those of us who are struggling will pay it forward to the next person when we can.  All this is happening in worship.  We hope. 

The ancient Latin word for worship was ‘liturgia’ which translates to literally public service or may also be work of the people.  Something we all do together.  Something that helps us all serve each other together and serve the world.  It’s not something one person does to others.  It’s not a stand-up comedy routine or a dramatic monologue. It’s work of the people by the people for the people to serve and love God.

When we read the scripture of Jesus knocking tables over in the temple, it’s a time to ask ourselves how we are doing?  Are there things getting in the way of our worship?  Are there things that we can be adding or taking off?  This is a constant process.  Pews weren’t introduced into churches until the 1200s and there are Alberta churches that had no pews until the 1930’s or later in the Ukrainian tradition.  There was a church in New York that split in the 1880’s when a newfangled organ was put in, others rebelled at the 'honky-tonk pianos or the Methodists that belong only in bars' or even singing.  We substituted grape juice because of the temperance union movement, and I’m sure that annoys some folks, and comforts others.  But however we worship, whatever way we worship, Jesus calls us to focus on God.  Not on our performance of worship.

The temple leaders were shocked at Jesus.  If he came here today, we might be shocked too.  But as we worship, as we wrestle with the scriptures in this place with our community of faith, we are also wrestling with Jesus, who continues to call us to look at why we worship and how we worship.  We are called to celebrate God’s presence here among us. May it all be to the glory of God and to loving our world.  Amen.

Setting Our Minds on Divine Things

Poor Jesus!  He was wanting to be honest and open and transparent, and Peter wanted to play politics.  “None of that honesty, Jesus, let’s say whatever it takes to build influence, you know, friends in high places” Peter said, and Jesus was so committed to brave, bold talk that he got hot under the collar with Peter, and scolded him in public. Hardly a Christian thing to do.  But Jesus was making a point that they weren’t waging a popularity contest or a political campaign, they were building a new way of living in the world.  One of radical rejection of what the world thinks is success, money, influence, power, none of that could hold a candle to what Jesus intended.  We see this still happening in our world on a daily basis, people willing to say anything and promise anything for the sake of fame and fortune.  People willing to poison their political opponents or sabotage their planes, destroy hospitals with children in them for the sake of peace, willing to promise anything in order to get elected.  Or promote misinformation agendas that will hurt vulnerable minorities for the sake of power.  People wanting to eliminate crosswalks intended on showing support to bullied teens.  Jesus flatly rejected and denounced that when he scolded Peter.

Peter wanted Jesus to be as influential as the religious leaders.  Jesus rejected that.  It wasn’t about comparing himself and building up a reputation.  It was not about setting his mind on human things, but on divine things.  What does that look like today?

Last month I had an opportunity to set my mind on divine things with a wonderful group of ministers.  31 United Church clergy from BC to Newfoundland joined with our Moderator the Right Reverend Dr. Carmen Lansdowne in Five Oaks, Ontario, a retreat centre like Naramata Centre in the Okanagan.  Lansdowne is the first female indigenous leader to be elected Moderator, and only the second indigenous leader ever elected to that role.  She is also warm, funny, and passionate about the United Church.  Using her indigenous lens of looking at the world, she brings a fresh perspective to what it means to set our minds on divine things.  We spent a week wrestling with what it means to be a Christian leader focused on taking up our crosses and letting go of the need to be successful, or even worse, the need to be right.  We talked about and learned about leadership best practices, ideas like figuring out what our strengths are.  We talked about what we loved doing and what was not so lovable about our jobs.  We talked about how all of us felt intimidated by the other bright minds in the room and how we all came feeling like we were not good enough to be in such an important program.

We also talked about the world and how it has changed.  In the sixties, ladies wore hats and gloves and dresses to church.  Jellied salads with everything from canned peas, lettuce or marshmallows would show up at potlucks.  No one had microwave ovens and a trip on an airplane was a rare and special event where a complimentary meal was served by women who looked like models.  Today, we still have potlucks, but the hats and gloves are long gone.  And jellied salads might still show up, but they tend not to have vegetables any more. 

We talked about how hard it is to preach good news in this changed world.  It’s like we keep serving jellied vegetable salad and the world looks at it and goes yuck.  Another analogy was that of the goldfish swimming in their bowl.  Do we know what the water tastes like that we are swimming in?

We talked about how worship has become something that is done privately.  And how it’s become something that people spend money on, crystals, candles, and the like.  It’s often an individual focus – my faith in me is what makes me well.  And I don’t need to do it with other people, because that can lead to conflict.  We’ve lost faith in social organizations.  Guides and scouts, Canadian Legion, Rotary, Lions, even the armed forces and the RCMP struggle to recruit new people.  We’ve also lost our sense of the sacred and focus mostly on the practical, the measurable, the obvious. No wonder congregations are struggling in today’s culture!  We stand for values and community and public spirituality.  Everything that our society has moved away from.

Jesus would have said to us, even though Society has moved away from God, even though the world focuses only on the material, even though it’s only about the individual, that we are to set our minds on divine things, not on earthly concerns.  Our last day in Ontario, we heard that message from none other than Rev. Michael Blair, who is the United Church’s General Secretary.  He told us that we have become focused only on the decline of the church, something that has been happening since 1964.  And yet he is seeing new opportunities and new missions rising up.  The church is committed to planting 100 new communities of faith, one of which has already started in Edmonton, a first-nations led group that meets in the old Beverly United Church.  Other projects and groups are doing exciting things in the name of Jesus in our denomination. He said that we are too focused on the cross, and not on divine things.  It’s easy to only believe in death and it’s hard to believe in resurrection.  Even Jesus struggled with that.

Rev. Blair called us to keep focused on divine things through our faith communities because that's where we find Christ with us.  We are not alone in our spiritual journeys.  God is with us.  We easily forget that as we swim in our fishbowls or serve jellied salads or learn better recipes to serve.  But in the cross and the resurrection, in life, in death, in life beyond death, we are not alone.  Thanks be to God!