Spiritual AND Religious

I love reading the letters to the editor in the Observer Magazine.  This month had a scathing comment about the great divide between the Spiritual but not Religious and the Religious but not Spiritual, sometimes known as the Frozen Chosen, or as Jesus bluntly put it, hypocrites.  Linda Moffat wrote, “Religious but not spiritual Christians are, by definition, fearful of any personal growth.  This can be a serious problem when they act to limit opportunities for … spiritual growth… Many faithful people, young and old, are deeply offended by the shallow, sometimes punitive and often joyless approach to the Christian faith of the RBNS in our midst.”  Ouch! 

Lent is the time when we take stock of where we are.  Are we being too spiritual and not religious enough? Or are we being too religious and not spiritual enough?  Rev. Anthony Robinson once asked a fellow minister, “why are African American worship services so different from our services?” His friend responded, “you whites think that God needs you.  We blacks know that we need God.”

Ouch!  But as Dr. Phil likes to say, we can’t change what we don’t acknowledge.  Or as AA and Al Anon say, make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.  Now I would be the greatest hypocrite in the world if I said that I had all the answers and knew how to make life easy.  But if we are to be followers of Jesus, we need to be prepared to follow him into the wilderness to wrestle with our angels and demons.  There are a lot of people who are living in chaos or feeling like they are drowning.  People who are imperfect and flawed.  People like you and me.

Are you drowning in fear, anger, grief or resentment? North American culture loves to deny that we are drowning. 

No, we are pretending to be perfect Noahs, sailing over the stormy waves of life in a massive boat we’ve built ourselves, happy in the certain knowledge that we are God’s favorite person, and we can float above everything life can throw at us, proud of our superiority and how we have our acts together.

We ignore the fact that what helped Noah rise above the dangers that threatened to destroy the world was Spiritual practices, in other words prayer.  He was spiritual but not religious.  Again and again, he turned to God.  How big do I build this boat? What kind of wood should I use? How do I get the animals aboard?  How will I know that it’s safe to leave the boat?  Noah was also very patient, for that was a huge project when you don’t own a chain saw or a lumber yard.  But he was also very independent.  There’s no record of subcontractors helping out.  And there’s no second opinion either.  Noah is not seen as a hero by many rabbis, on the contrary, they much prefer Abraham who bargained God down from wholesale destruction of humanity by asking God to remember compassion.  Noah never protested, never argued, and never showed compassion for his neighbors or community.  Noah was not religious; he did not worship God in a community committed to support each other in developing their relationship with God.  Maybe Noah fell into the temptation that he was the only one holy enough to deserve being spared the chaos of the waters.  Ouch!

God saw differently.  God looked at the world and saw, not a fresh start, but the despairing mothers trying to push their babies onto the highest rocks they could find.  God saw the husbands trying to keep their wives’ heads above the water.  God saw children in terror for their lives.  The art here is not the cute two by two parade we think of when we hear the Noah story, but the stark reality of what a dreadful thing a flood is.

God rejected Noah’s complacency and indifference to his neighbors.  God rejected violence as a solution to violence.  God chose relationship with imperfect humans rather than destroying them.  God chose to nurture community and relationship.

People who think, like Noah, that they are perfect, that they have all the answers, aren’t much different than the people who think they have the right to go into a school with loaded guns, or that they have the right to execute trespassers and thieves on their property.  People who think that their truck or their snowmobile are worth more than a human’s life, and that they are right to be executioners when their property are threatened, are not following Jesus.

Jesus calls us to follow him into the wilderness of Lent.  We are called to challenge our assumptions and deepen our relationship with God and our neighbors. We are called to be both spiritual and religious, practicing our faith and exploring our bibles and our prayer lives.  This Lenten season, join me in adding a spiritual practice to your life.  Practice seeking signs of God’s covenant in this beautiful world.  Be brave enough to examine your lives and bold enough to ask God and neighbors for help when you feel like you are drowning.  Experiment with trusting God’s covenant that the powers that bring hope out of chaos are still here, still available for anyone who is brave enough to admit that they are not perfect and follow Jesus into the wilderness of Lent.  Amen.

Razzle Dazzle them?

I had a chance to see “The Greatest Showman”, a movie based loosely on the life of PT Barnum, who happily exploits humans that people will pay money to stare at, bearded ladies, conjoined twins, little people and the like, all so Barnum can make a quick buck.  The feeling he gets when he stands in the spotlight, a lovely sense of his own importance as he drinks in the applause of the audience is also a huge motivation.  He’d rather be in glittery circus outfits than at home watching his beautiful young daughters grow up.  He loves anything he can do to get attention and doesn’t even mind snobbish reviews as they are free publicity that help sell tickets to his events.

Contrast his extravagant behaviour with today’s scriptures.  Jesus is on a mountaintop with his three special students when something amazing happens and Peter, James and John catch a glimpse of who Jesus really is.  They don’t know what to do next.  Let’s set up some tents, and under the big top, our main attraction, Glow in the Dark Jesus! Did they plan to charge admission or to live in tents with him, or were they trying to keep Jesus from lighting up the neighborhood and blinding them in the process?  Or even, outlandish as it might sound, were they trying to start a new religious holiday like the Festival of Booths that celebrates the harvest and even now has devout Jewish people build tents and temporary shelters to remember their history of escaping Egypt and living in tents while they wandered the wilderness?

We will never know.  But it’s striking to compare Jesus or even Paul to PT Barnum.  Paul repeatedly says that he’s not in the business of being a Ring Master or a carnival hawker.  There’s no glib, “step right up, get your tickets here folks and put your hands together for the one, the only Apostle Paul, all the way from Jerusalem with Good News for all!” 

No, quite the contrary, Paul insists that he is not the star attraction, only Jesus is, and only because Jesus is an image of God, and gives us a glorious idea of what God is like.

Transfiguration Sunday celebrates that we, like the disciples, get glimpses of God when we have Jesus as the lens in which we see God, our lives and the world, sometimes in surprising ways.

One such moment was last fall when I stood on the hill in the Amber Valley graveyard overlooking the fields and farmland that stretched for miles as far as I could see.  With me were black ministers here to learn about the story of freedom and bravery of early settlers escaping racist oppression in the United States.  One lady wrote about it for this year’s Black history month worship resource and said,

It is hard to imagine how anyone, Black or White, would take their families on such a treacherous trip from Oklahoma to northern Alberta, and especially in the days of little to no infrastructure. What a gruelling experience that must have been—to come to settle in the Great North with minus 50 weather. According to the National Post, Canadian Whites weren’t at all crazy about the idea of a bunch of “coloured folk” coming to settle in Alberta, but they took no action against talks of the migration because they strongly doubted that Black people (even those dodging Jim Crow laws) would want to or be able to survive the northern Alberta winters.

That little field trip we assisted with, which had folks coming from as far away as Detroit and London England, was more than just a glimpse into the past; it was a clarion call for action in the present.

Someone said to me that when they heard scriptures say, “his clothes became dazzling white such as no one on earth could bleach them,” or “the light shone in the darkness and the darkness knew it not,”
they felt like the Bible has institutionalized ‘whiteness’ as good and pure and ‘darkness’ as evil to be fought against and as justification for racism.  Given the fact that some United Churches in Alberta had connections with the Klu Klux Clan back in the 1920’s, these scriptures could have been misused in just that way.  We must never allow that to happen again, but always remember that Jesus called us to love our neighbor, and that Paul reminded us that there is no male or female, neither slave nor free, but all are one in Christ Jesus.

Transfiguration, the light of God breaking into the world, happens in the oddest ways and at the oddest times.  P. T. Barnum retired from the spotlight, became a politician and became a member of the new anti-slavery Republican Party. In one of Barnum’s speeches, he said, "A human soul, ‘that God has created and Christ died for,’ is not to be trifled with. It may tenant the body of a Chinaman, a Turk, an Arab or a Hottentot – it is still an immortal spirit."  Lest you think that our work is done, and our world is perfect, even though the antislavery law was passed in the US in 1850, Mississippi did not ratify it until 2013.

God is still breaking into our world, shining a spotlight on the challenges, inhumanities and injustices that people are suffering under.  God is still speaking to us, reminding us to love our neighbors no matter what, and to rise above and challenge discrimination and racism wherever we may find it.  And may we all remember that God’s grace is still with us when we work for justice and love in amazing ways.  Our work here in this little church impacts congregations across Canada just as their work helps support us on our journey.  May we all be transfigured into people ready to speak good news of amazing grace to everyone we meet.  Amen.

Remembering our story

Isaiah 40:21-31, Mark 1:29-39

I was thinking how cynical we have become in this world.  Between news stories and family drama, political speeches and outrageous tweets, the levels of cynicism are depressingly high.  It is a vicious trap that many people are caught up in, and I hear it often in the lives of people around me who have given up in despair because they can’t see a way out.

But there is a strong message that was intended for people in that situation.

Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning?

These urgent questions are passionately spoken to an audience who has forgotten their story.  And our gospel today also has a feel of urgency.  Today’s translation starts with ‘as soon as they left the synagogue’, but a better translation is ‘immediately they left’, and that word is used repetitively throughout the first chapter of Mark.  Immediately they left the synagogue, where he had just cast out a demon (who had immediately left the interrupting man, by the way), he goes to a house where he then quickly heals a sick woman and she immediately gets up and becomes the first deacon of this new church. And right after that the house is surrounded with folks wanting to be cured of all their problems.  That’s a hectic schedule for one day’s work, and we haven’t even finished Chapter One!

One common thread in these readings is the number of lost and hurting people who do not know who they are and who created them.

Isaiah is writing to exiled Jews in slavery in Babylon to remind them of who they are. 

Come on, he seems to be saying, you don’t remember that your family ancestors were enslaved once before in Egypt? God was with our ancestors back then and God is with us right now here in Babylon.  Remember who God is, so that you can turn to God when we are living through tough times.  But you have forgotten your stories of who God is.

I think Isaiah realized that when we forget our stories, we lose a piece of hope for the future and we get bogged down in soul-crushing demons.

Demons such as depression, anxiety, narcissism and addiction.  Demons who live off cynicism, resentment, apathy, racism, entitlement and pity parties.  Demons that want us to believe we are slaves with no hope of rescue. No wonder people flocked to Jesus to be cured of all that.  No wonder Jesus needed to get away from it all and wander off into the desert.

Can you picture it, a starry black night with the Milky Way painted overhead like a tiara of diamonds too numerous to count?  The flashing streak of a meteor or two.  The deep stillness with maybe a wolf howling in the far distance, and crickets and frogs the only other sound.  The stillness that filled his soul as he waited, remembering the words of Isaiah ‘those who wait for God shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

Contrast that with Simon, filled with excitement who wants to have Jesus in his house first.  He wants Jesus to fix his mother in law, his neighbors, his relatives and even his whole town.  Does he want to be able to say, “look at how significant I am, I brought Jesus to you all, and if it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t be fixed.”  Jesus has a bigger vision.  He’s not willing to become the neighborhood guru setting up a shop of miracles and healing potions.  His vision is bigger than just one family, one town.

Have you not known? Have you not heard? Do you not remember the story? Often we don’t remember, we don’t know who we are.  Simon doesn’t know he is Peter yet, the rock on whom the new church will be built.  The slaves in Babylon don’t know they will return, rebuild their culture and renew their faith in ways that will endure for centuries.  They don’t know that their story will survive kings, wars, and genocides, or provide hope to many who follow after.  We too lose track of who God is calling us to be.  But ours is a powerful, transforming story.

If you think about it, this story speaks to each generation in surprising new ways that outlast many stories.  My grandmother was a Fraser, but I never had a haggis until I was 18.  I never went to a Robbie Burns dinner until I was in my late forties.  My grandmother did not pass on that part of her story, because her family had been in Canada for four generations and intermingled with a lot of other ethnic groups along the way.  They lost the story of their culture and customs, they lost their scots accents, but they kept their faith in God and in the church community, their new clan and culture.  That gave them faith to weather the storms of world wars, revolutions, economic depressions and personal tragedies.  It gave my grandmother a passionate commitment to the Women’s Vote as well as the temperance movement that strived to free people from the slavery of abusive relationships, family violence and addictions.  It helped her have the courage and strength to cope with her British husband’s loss of sight and career.  Her faith story is one that inspires and encourages me to this day.

Life can be a chaotic series of challenging circumstances.  We may feel like a pebble tossed into Niagra Falls, wondering if we’ll ever surface again.  When life is like that, we need to remember our stories of Jesus, Isaiah, and the exiles in Babylon, to do as they did and remember the stories of God’s love so that God may renew our strength once again.  May it be so for us all!