What do you sign up for?

This is the week to sign up for fall programs.  The multiplex has their registration night on Wednesday, clubs host open houses, organizations start advertising their activities, and everyone hopes that people will come back and new folks join.  We have a smorgasbord of things we can try in this community, from pottery to hand bells to yoga and gymnastics, hockey, photography and golf.  It’s hard to choose.  Some people do the same thing year after year and others like to try something new every year.

I love signing up for new groups and trying out new things.  I have lost track of all the different stuff I tried at one time or another.  There’s something wonderful in taking the brave step to see if I can decorate a cake or macrame an owl.  For a moment the whole world feels open with great possibilities.  Even though I never became a great cake decorator or a prima ballerina, I had fun trying.

The spirit of exploration is something I tried to encourage in my children too, as they grew up.  They could choose an activity, something physical for after school.  One year, the gymnastics coach came up to us and asked if my 8 year-old son would like to join the competitive boy’s team.  There were a few extra practises that would be involved, and a few more fees to pay, but he could join the pre-Olympic training program.  Apparently, it wasn’t too late for 8 year-olds to start to prepare to compete, but it was too late for his 6-year-old sister who should have started competitive at the age of five.  Wow.

How many more practises were needed?  Something like 4 days a week and two hours on Saturday.  Once they got older, it would be 5 days and all Saturday.  For a seven-year old! I really didn’t know what to say.  I knew that some of my friends had their kids in a different program every night of the week.  One of my friends had her kids in Guides, karate, swimming, guitar, dance and voice lessons.  They seemed to thrive on it and one of them even went to Julliard.  Others built their lives around hockey every night and on the weekends, or indoor soccer, but I just couldn’t wrap my mind around being in the gym that many hours a week.  In the end, we decided as a family to keep gymnastics as a fun activity that the kids did for several years, and they can still do cartwheels or flips or fancy tricks on the trampoline from time to time.  One kid even earned some money as an assistant coach one year.  But they never went to the Olympics and they never competed.

One of the things it made me do is look at what values I believed in, and what did I want to pass on to my children.  I believed in doing one’s best, working hard, and keeping fit.  I didn’t believe in living vicariously through my children’s successes, or that competition was the be all and end all of childhood.  I wanted my kids to have fun and enjoy life’s opportunities, and if something had become a real passion for them, I would have supported that to the best of my abilities.  But my picture for them was not to become famous or rich, but well-rounded and healthy.

God’s vision for us is not to become famous or rich.  God’s vision is not just about us as individuals either.  God’s vision is bigger than a parent’s for a child or a coach’s for a star player or a teacher’s for a classroom.  God’s vision is for nations and countries and cultural groups as a whole.  God wants to shape whole nations and even the world like a potter shapes clay. 

What is it that God calls us as a nation to?  What is it that God wants us to repent of, to turn from?  What does God envision shaping us into as a potter shapes clay?

What if we looked at the world through God’s eyes and asked what we thought God would want from us?  What if we could see the storms on the East coast, the melting permafrost, the vanishing glaciers, the starving polar bears and asked ourselves what Canada would need to look like to be living in respect in creation?  What if we took seriously the scripture, “For God so loved the World”?

As Jesus put it, who among us would build a skyscraper without making sure they had a decent bank loan, engineering teams building the blueprints, competent contractors and skilled trades workers to put the skyscraper together?  Yet we either can’t or won’t look past our short-term pleasures and needs to the long term issues of justice and sustainability.  We have an election coming up that will probably focus on character assassinations, oil jobs and avoiding racist comments.  Where will the long-term vision be found, not just for Canada but for the whole world?  Who will ask the tough questions, like why women politicians who talk about the environment have death threats and foul language when they are out in public with their children?  What kind of world do we want for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren?

God calls us to look at our priorities.  Jesus calls us to test our loyalties.  And our United Church creed reminds us that our faith is about love in action, to live with respect in creation, to love and serve others, to seek justice and resist evil.  To repent and turn to God who can make all things new.  Let’s sign up to live into our creed, to listen to our potter, and heed the call of Christ, our coach and teacher.

Dear God, help us rejoice in signs of hope like bamboo cutlery and paper straws, electric cars and soap made from carbon capture technology.  Help us also roll up our sleeves and commit to loving this beautiful world you have created.  Amen.

Pride and Prejudice

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a minister in possession of a sermon, must be in want of a congregation to preach to!

One of my mentors in PEI who loved helping us work on sermon topics before he retired, founded a Jane Austen book club in his congregation.  Not only did he get them reading Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey and the rest of the Austen books, but he had them reading other novels from the time period, The Count of Monte Cristo, Frankenstein and so on.  Rev. Dawson was also seen on several occasions in full dress that would have rivaled Mr. Darcy at the grandest of balls.  He’s not the only Canadian to be a fan, there is a yearly ball in Edmonton where ladies and gentlemen have been preparing for months by sewing and taking dance lessons.  Young people like my daughter are watching Pride and Prejudice and Zombies on YouTube for free, or the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a modern version where Liz is making a vlog on the internet.  That was so well done that it took me three episodes in to realize it was based on Pride and Prejudice and not just some young thing talking about life and the stresses of modern living.  It took a while to convince my daughter, who first showed it to me, that it was based on a real book, then she was hooked!  There’s many new versions and retellings, even one from the point of view of the servants slaving away in the Bennet kitchen.  What an eye-opener that was, back before unions pushed to reduce the work week below 58 hours!

One of the characters is the indomitable Lady Catherine De Bourgh.  She is domineering, elegant, refined, and quite frankly a nasty snob who discriminates against Lizzie Bennet when she fears that Liz might marry her nephew Darcy.  She knows the lineage of everyone worth knowing, and judges people based on how well they can follow the rules of proper etiquette.  Her way of living is not that dissimilar to what we saw in Downton Abbey.

That society Jane Austen described was the contemporary culture in 1813, a mere 206 years ago.  And it wasn’t much different than the time of Jesus, or dinners of high state at today’s G7 events or tea at Buckingham Palace.  Choosing who we sit next to based on our sense of status is a very natural human habit.

Things have changed tremendously since 1813, of course, and in Canada especially, there is less chance of someone being judged by who their parents are.  But there are still times where is a sense of class structure.  The epidemic of drug overdoses is occurring primarily in young men in blue collar industries between the ages of 20 and 29, a trend that is in both Canada and the US.  No one is sure why ?  In construction and mining, men are six times more likely to die of overdoses than all the men of their age together.

Wage disparities are still an issue, with Canadian women earning 84 cents for every dollar earned by men in 2017, in 2015 the average income for 90% of Canadians was $33 thousand dollars per year, and the average income for the top 10% was more than ten times that much, $500 thousand dollars, with over $2 million for the top .1% of the population. 

So as much as we might like to think we have become a democratized society of equals, there is still the same snobbery and discrimination that Jane Austen liked to take pot shots at.  The same sense of entitlement that Jesus challenged.  The same kind of misplaced loyalties that Jeremiah pointed out.  The same kind of arrogance that the psalmist described.

Today we still struggle with pride.  We think that modern society has all the answers, that science can solve all our problems, that independence will be the ultimate character trait that we should celebrate and honor.  That pride is not helping us. 

Everywhere we turn, we can see how our human arrogance is leading us into troubles.  Whether it’s shootings in Texas, protests in Hong Kong, melting glaciers in Greenland and Canada, we see where human arrogance and pride has led us.  But it’s not just in the Lady Catherines of the world that we can see pride and prejudice.  The Lizzie Bennets, the average Canadians can also be living egotistically without even knowing it.  We forget the people behind the scenes that help us have a good life, the ditch diggers, the garbage truck drivers, and yes, even the street people who want love and hope for something better.

When I feel overwhelmed by all the disasters we face, I remind myself that amazing things happen when I start with the only person I can change, myself.  Every Thursday, there are people in our church basement telling amazing stories of transformation when they chose to look hard at their attitudes and their pride.  The ones who are humble about their stories are the ones who inspire me the most.  They remind us to start one day at a time.  I started this summer with a metal straw from Paddymelon and a bamboo toothbrush that is completely plastic free.  I have a travel mug in the back seat of my car that I use for those impulse trips to Tim Hortons.  It is a baby step, but it’s also a way to remind myself that change starts here at home.  Liz Bennet has to re-examine her beliefs about herself and it’s only when she let go of her own pride, her own prejudice, that she could get help from Darcy and bring about the changes she and her family needed in their hour of shame.  

More than ever we need to recognize, repent and turn back to our God of mercy, who provides us living waters to drink from instead of polluted, plastic-filled waters that fail to heal.  God loves us and wants us to have abundant life.  I hope that we can all come to find the joy of true humbleness that turning to God can bring to our lives and even the whole world. 

Just as we no longer live in a world where marriage is the only status a female can have, and a world where most children quit school to go to work at the age of eleven, one day may we live in a world where we live with respect in creation, where we love and serve others, seeking justice and resisting evil, proclaiming that God is with us, we are not alone.  Thanks be to God.