June 17, 2017

Inspiring Winds

Pentecost is here again.  It doesn’t seem so long ago that we celebrated it.  Last year I remember that we had so many folks here from Fort MacMurray that we decided to not use flame and fire for our service.  We did some serious rethinking and scrambling to come up with wind images, and the folks who had fled the fire were most appreciative.

But this year, I don’t know what to do.  Wednesday the wind was spectacular and fierce.  On this block, trees were blown over, rain barrels knocked over and the screen door to the church office was pulled right off its hinges.  The only thing that kept it from heading to the river was the chain and metal piston that attached it at the top of the door jam.  I looked outside my window and it was like a grey fog there was so much dust and dirt blowing down the street.  I honestly wondered if it was a tornado, and if I would be heading to Kansas on a rocking chair!

Wind is dangerous, and unpredictable.  It is noisy and flighty.  No wonder the people in Acts came running to see what was happening.  Luke, the writer, combined the two most dangerous and unpredictable forces of nature, fire and wind, to describe the workings of the Spirit amid that confused gathering of disciples.

It was also transformative.  The disciples were meeting yet again behind closed and locked doors, afraid of going outside their safe place.  Going out into the dangerous world of deceitful politicians, violent foreigners, and religious spokesmen who were more interested in power than in justice.  And yet despite all that, they burst out into the open with joy and enthusiasm, full of the Spirit and unwilling, no, unable to keep their story a secret any longer.  That the one they had followed as a friend turned out to be so much more than they had first thought, and his teachings so different than the other rabbis, that they could not explain it in any other way than that he was the true Emperor.

Augustus Christos? No way! From that moment on, Jesus Christos was their ruler, their guide, and the one they pledged allegiance to, making them traitors to the very empire they lived in.  Even torture and death would not, did not stop them.  They forgot that they were ignorant peasants, they forgot that they were poverty-stricken, they forgot that they had no education or fancy clothes or rich bank accounts or clever leadership training in public speaking.

They were inspired to go and make a difference in the world. A world that doesn’t look too much different than today.  Or does it?  We now understand the importance of human rights, something that was unheard of in Roman Society.  We have a dislike of slavery, something seen as commonplace back then.  We have public schooling, we have much better healthcare and a democratic system that the Romans would have envied.

But we too live in unsettling times where we don’t trust politicians, authority figures and those we think we should depend on to guide us through the challenges we face.  With attacks in London, confusing definitions of freedom of speech, elected officials getting into physical altercations with reporters, and the fearmongering that is being spread, when we are hearing about bullying and discrimination in the RCMP and bank tellers being pressured to sell, sell, sell, it’s hard to know who to trust or how to care about what happens to our neighbors.

We need a support person, a cheer leader to get, as my teenagers used to say, ‘our mojo going’.  We do that by remembering that, in the words of 1 Corinthians, we are many parts of the one body, we are all given different gifts through the Spirit.  Our gifts won’t make a difference if we use them as individuals for our own benefit, but as part of a community, watch out world!

We are all part of a community for an important reason.  We share our gifts together and we become more than the sum of our parts.  Peter didn’t start the church by himself. 

Jesus gathered a community and trained them to work together.  Paul, as soon as he came into a new town, made friends of folks before he taught them what he knew.  We gather in community because we are stronger that way.  We get inspiration from one another and from gathering together.

Inspiration.  What is the root of that word?  ‘Spiri’ – the latin root for breath or wind.  In spire means breath in that keeps us going.  Spiri, the root of the word Spirit.  For those of you who speak ancient Greek or Hebrew, the same word for Spirit also meant breath.  Breathe on me breath of God.  But where do we turn for that inspiration?

I met someone very inspiring to me at Olds, a neighbor from Lister hall at University.  I hadn’t seen her in over 35 years, and I was astonished that she was United Church.  I asked her when she became United, and she said she grew up in the church.  How come I didn’t know that, I asked her.  Because you were a very cynical, angry atheist!  She was more surprised than I was to see me there.  And her example of courage and kindness that inspired me when I was young was the Spirit blowing me back into church community. 

The Spirit moves to inspire us in unexpected ways.  All that wind on Wednesday didn’t touch my empty plastic flowerpots sitting in the front yard.  It is a mystery I can’t comprehend.  The Spirit blows fiercely and with fire and energy when we least expect it, but also gently and lovingly at other times.  The Spirit is not a tame lion, and will inspire us not to play it safe but to convert and support wild-eyed bitter atheists like myself in ways we can’t imagine.  The Spirit is not done with you yet, or us yet, or even the world yet.  God so loved the world, and God is not stopping.  Thanks be to God!

June 03, 2017

Eager to do Good?

Are we eager to do good?  What a question! And even though it is a short question, it is complicated.  How do we know what good even is?  As history shows, there are lots of times when decent Christian folks thought that they were doing good, but in the end, it was not the case.  The residential school system comes immediately to mind.

The simple answer to that is what we do should follow Jesus’ commandments to love God and love Neighbor and love self.  Loving our neighbors without judging them could have reduced and prevented some of Christianity’s greatest sources of embarrassment and shame, like the crusades or witch hunts.

I wonder, though, if we have let those historic failures become a reason to avoid doing good.  We don’t want to make such a colossal blunder again, so we don’t do anything.  We become suspicious of eagerness, and we worry about what the neighbors think.  We fear slander, lies, gossip, maligning our characters, being labeled a religious fanatic by family and friends if we do.  Yet we are not to fear that.  “Do not fear what the world fears, and do not be intimidated.”

We are called to be Easter people, people who have heard the good news that there is nothing the world can throw at us that will stop the message of God’s love.  We are called to be eager, to share our hope when we are asked, with gentleness and respect.  We are called to be lights of the world, to speak out against the evils that we see, and be eager to do something about it.

I remember being on a Habitat for Humanity build one year with my church.  It wasn’t a fund raiser, it was a team project to help out families who struggled to find affordable homes.  We had one fellow who also was on the build because he was court ordered to do community service.  As we cheerfully worked away with hammers and saws and many jokes and laughs, he grumbled and swore. 

When he grumpily asked how much time we had to serve, we told him we were volunteers.  Why the * would we do that, he asked.  Because that’s what Christians do.  He thought we were crazy, but that was his problem not ours.

Generosity, love, kindness, gentleness, these are what we are called to be as Easter people.  But we’re not called to be nice.  We are called to make bold statements, to be a shining light in this troubled world.  If we are just nice, then we aren’t really Christians.  No, because we are to be prepared to suffer for doing good.  We are to be brave and strong for what is right.

But that brings us back to what is good?  It needs, first of all, a lot of prayer to make sure that what we think is good is indeed a loving thing and not just an ego trip.  And second, it needs to ask the question, ‘will people be angry if we do this?’

When the United Church protested Japanese Internment camps, people got angry at them.  When the United Church decided to ordain women, people left the church.  When the United Church married divorced people, they were scorned as not Christian enough.  When the United Church said it was okay to ordain the GLTBQ community as long as they had gone through the same process as everyone else, they were heaped with ridicule, hate and anger.  When they apologized for their involvement in residential schools and for the Port Alberni abuses, there was scorn from Canadians about that too. What will cause scorn and anger today?

One way is by lighting a candle.  We light our Christ Candle this Easter season not because it’s a nice thing to do, like putting birthday candles on a cake, but because it is to remind us of who we are and whose we are.  It is a powerful act of protest against the anger and hatred and greed in the world.

There is a Methodist church in South Africa who started buying candles made in a poor neighborhood during Apartheid. Each Sunday they would light their candle and name the folks who had gone missing, who had been beaten up, or who had been arrested.  Even teenagers were being scooped up and locked up.  The church sold the candles to other congregations to help this little neighborhood, and it spread like wildfire.  We heard about it even in Canada, as we also have Methodist roots.  The candles were being sold around the world. 

The South African government did not like this.  They did not like the prayer, and they passed a law making it illegal to light these candles in church.  Can you imagine, police would charge into Sunday Worship to stop it?  They smashed doors and broke windows.  The congregations suffered.  They suffered, people, but their eagerness to do good did not stop them!  It still does not stop them.  Even today they gather to pray and to testify that government corruption is not what God intends for this world.

What would we be eager to do good for?  Who is it that needs our gentle loving support?  Who would we light this candle for even though it might mean scorn and scandal?  Homeless people in Athabasca who sleep in the Gazebo or in the pottery studio across the street?  Families torn apart by the Fentanyl crisis?  People who have lost family members to random acts of destruction by disturbed people using cars or guns in public spaces?  People who struggle with mental illness and are afraid to admit that they need help?

Are we brave enough to light this candle? 

Let us pray:  Oh God, you sent your son Jesus to be the light of the world.  The world was afraid and reacted with violence and scorn to silence his light.  But You would not let that be the end of his story.  The world did not understand your light-bringer, but they also did not destroy him.  Help us to have the courage to be eager to do good in wise and loving ways. Amen.