January 31, 2023

Walls and Horizons

 Last week we had a fun time with music, and I mentioned how much I liked a variety of musicians as I was growing up.  One in particular was a fellow named John Denver.  His song “Country Roads, Take me Home” is one that a lot of people can relate to.  “Almost Heaven West Virginia” is one I want to change to “Almost Heaven Athabasca” with the hills and the river.  Every time I drive down the east hill, that view of the river grabs my heart with its beauty.  Gorgeous!  I’m sure many of you have a river valley you love to see, or a hill you live next to that puts a lump in your throat, a piece of wilderness that just seems special every time you see it.

The ancient writer of our psalm, one of the oldest psalms in the bible, reminded us to give credit for the beauty of nature to God.  Recognize God in those moments of wonder.  Honor God in those moments of awe.  See God in those country roads, those shining waters, those mountains and hills, but don’t get messed up thinking that the hills and mountains are God.  They are fragile and changeable, not as permanent as we’d like to imagine.  God can disrupt and change that which we mere mortals see as unchangeable.  Which is a good thing from time to time.

We need disruptions to keep our attention on the right things.  It’s important not to get stuck in ruts, assume we have all the answers, that we’ve come to an end point in our thinking or understanding.  And God seems to shake things up just when we least expect it, sometimes in powerful ways, sometimes in gentle whispers.

Baptism and confirmation are when we take a moment to recognize the disruptions that have brought us to a new stage in our lives.  A new baby, a new family, a new understanding of our faith come together in the waters we use to symbolize a change has taken place, something new is in our lives.  It can be something we can’t quite put into words and bring a lump into our throats just like a beautiful sky or a glimpse of river.  Something we wish we could sing about if only we could find the right tune.

Baptism and confirmation are not the end point.  And they are not some kind of magical spell or ritual we cast to prevent bad things happening, the storms of life from hurting us.  Jesus was baptized and it didn’t keep him safe, he got crucified.  He wasn’t baptized to give himself a ‘get out of hell free’ card like we’re playing some kind of cosmic Monopoly game.  These kinds of ideas were what people thought baptism was but not for John and Jesus.  Confirmation too used to be a sign of who was in and who was out.  When I was growing up, confirmation was the ticket we needed to have communion, or teach Sunday School.  It became a wall that kept ‘them’ in and us kids out.  It was something that excluded.  And just as our faith grows and our ideas about how to worship change from one decade to the next, so our understanding of baptism and confirmation also change. 

Not every church is comfortable with change.  There are churches that still forbid organs and pianos as sinful.  There are churches who have women and children sitting on the left and men on the right and never the twain shall meet.  There’s one United Church in Halifax that has gates on their pews and the ‘free’ pews in the back were where people sat if they couldn’t afford to pay for a box.  Even today no one sits in the front box for that is reserved for the Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia.  I don’t know if it’s ever used.

Jesus and John were not interested in putting walls up or boxing people in.  They were interested in getting people to look up, past the walls that hemmed them in to look at far horizons, and to take courageous steps on our journey towards God.  They were interested in rituals with simple everyday things like water, bread, wine, and fish that would break down walls between people.  Even then, they were working together to bring hope and inspiration to ordinary people like you and me.  They were working together to stir things up, to get folks thinking, to inspire new ideas and new ways of being in community.  Just like country roads with the radio reminding us of our home far away, baptism and confirmation are the voice of Jesus calling to us today to move beyond our walls to far horizons together with this congregation of courageous travelers.  May we hear that voice and heed the call and find blessings and fellowship this day and ever more. Amen.

January 17, 2023

A New Song in our Mouths

I don’t know U2 music very well at all.  You ask me a trivia question about an ABBA song, and I’m your gal.  U2 is my brother’s music, something the younger generation listened to.  So, I was floored to learn that U2 took the words of Psalm 40 and put it to music.  Not only that, but they used “40” as their concert grand finale for many years, leaving the stage while the audience sang the chorus of “How Long to Sing this Song” which would go on and on and on.

Almost like the kids songs we used to sing, “This is the Song that Never Ends” or “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall”.  They can go on for a long time, much to the annoyance of others who listen to them and don’t want to join in the silliness.

There are times we feel like we can’t sing.  Like we are still caught in the horrible pit, out of the miry clay, or in some translations, the miry bog.  Taxes, kids clothes, food, expenses, sickness, family drama, fender benders, and world events, all kinds of things can contribute to that feeling that our lives are out of control and we are in a sticky situation. Sometimes we cry for help and feel like there is no answer to our dilemma, like no one is listening, like we are alone and abandoned.  And sometimes we feel like there is something listening, that encouragement comes when we least expect it, we get a phone call from someone we haven’t heard from in a while, or something comes together and things make sense.

For me, that was music.  When I was struggling with depression as a twenty-something, I stumbled into church one day and the music and hymns were what helped me feel less alone, less hopeless and helpless.  Songs outside the church also supported and encouraged me.  Music like John Denver’s “Sweet Surrender”.  Many folks found country gospel music like “I Saw the Light” or “I Come to the Garden Alone” sustained them in their dark times. Or Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” or Judy Garland’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” or Natasha Beddingfield’s “Unwritten” and the list goes on.  Hymns like “Amazing Grace”, “This Little Light of Mine”, “Be Thou my Vision” can pull us out of our negativity we may be stuck in. It also reminds us that we’re not alone. 

But music is not enough to help us when we are really in challenging times.  Like a bandage and a kiss on a boo boo, this may make us temporarily flushed with positive adrenaline, but sometimes a panacea won’t work.  Sure, there is something magical about sitting on Connor’s Hill on an August night singing along to Ian Tyson’s “Four Strong Winds” with a thousand or more other Albertans that leaves us all with lumps in our throats, but what kind of love will end conflict in Ukraine or starvation in the Sudan or political unrest in Peru?

I’ll never forget leaving the old Rexall hockey arena in Edmonton after a Neil Diamond concert where thousands of people had sung about brotherly love together only to discover that the same people were now arguing loudly and heatedly over taxis.  My faith in humanity was shaken hard that night as we stood there wondering how we would get home.

Songs are not enough if they slip out of our lips without thinking.  And if they are only about our pleasures and our concerns.  The words that slipped out of John’s lips in our gospel reading were pointing to something beyond him.  John wasn’t singing “I will Survive” like Gloria Gaynor, he was singing, “B-b-b-baby, you ain’t seen nothing yet” and pointing to Jesus.  “Go, follow that guy!  Go, watch him pull you out of the horrible pit, the miry bog.  Go and learn a new song to sing that will spill out of your mouths and bless everyone who will hear you, to come and see!”

John’s excitement was contagious.  How can we share our excitement to the people around us that are feeling stuck, hopeless and helpless?  We tend to do exactly the opposite of what the scriptures suggested – at the first sign of opposition, we have concealed the signs of God’s steadfast love, and hidden the truth of the difference our faith has made in our lives.  We’ve experienced too many cases of toxic bullying that was used to bring people to church, too many ugly songs that preached shame, guilt, fear and superiority.  We’ve listened to stories of racism, injustice and intolerance that have been done in the name of winning souls to Christianity.

Enough!  Time to sing the truth, the new song!  One of joy and liberation, of new light in our troubled world, of power with rather than power over.  This week I was talking to a young lady about our church and she got very excited when she saw our big rainbow flag in our basement.  “I left my church because they preached hate”, she told me. “I didn’t know churches like yours even existed.”  She needed to hear that new song we are singing, and there are others, so many others that also need to hear words of hope.  People who need a light in their lives, a lamb of God to pull them out of the clay bogs of their lives. How can we do that?

Remember that all John the Baptiser said was “Wow look at him!” and all Jesus said was “Come and See”.  Very simple.  Very straightforward.  “Wow, this has happened, check it out.  Wow, I feel much more hopeful with my life, come and try it out.” It’s okay to hear no, just keep singing anyway.

And we may find that people, hungry for a new song of hope in their lives, will join us as we say “Wow” together every Sunday.  The light is with us, we are not alone, thanks be to God!

January 10, 2023

Journeying to hope

Sometimes the Bible is hard to understand.  Strike that, most of the time the Bible is hard to understand.  It’s hard because we don’t really know what kind of book it is.  A history book?  A novel? A fairy tale?  A newspaper report? A bunch of lies and exaggerations?  We scratch our heads and try to force the bible to fit into a category that we are comfortable with.  And many people assume it is an inflexible collection of facts and absolutes, while others throw it out of their libraries and lives.  It’s not to be read like a conventional book from cover to cover.

I often assume that United Church folks try reading with the intention of starting at Genesis and plowing all the way through to Revelation, then give up the first time they hit the begats.  The only time we read our bible is in church but that’s another extreme for sure.

Case in point, today’s reading from Isaiah.  Many would be excited to see the reference to gold and frankincense, and say that this is all about Jesus because Isaiah was predicting Jesus and the wise men on the first Epiphany.  Except, of course, it’s missing the myrrh.  But the bible is inerrant, right?  It can’t have mistakes as glaring as forgetting the third wise man’s gift to Jesus?

This shows up the huge gulf between what we read in the bible and what we think is in the bible.  We often think, for example, that Isaiah and the other prophets were like the stereotypical gypsy fortune teller, using tea leaves, tarot cards or stars in the sky to tell us mere ignorant mortals what would happen in the future.  Isaiah stares into his God-given Crystal Ball and predicts the birth of Jesus.

It’s a shame when we do this.  The Bible is not meant to be a Crystal Ball, and while it is often used as such, I don’t think God wants us to use it that way.  Our pattern of taking chunks of scripture every Sunday can add to that misunderstanding.  The United Church’s “Song of Faith” says that Scripture is our 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.

It also says the Bible is a library of songs, poetry, stories, memories, sermons and letters where generations of people record their best understandings and experiences with God. Sometimes the understandings clash – is God with us in our suffering or punishing us by sending our suffering?  Is God in history or is God in my life?  Does God care about foreigners or only care about the descendants of Abraham, Jacob and Moses?  And because the bible is a conversation, we see people claiming both views.  Isaiah’s passage today is such a view of Israel’s place in God’s vision, an inspiring beacon of hope for the whole world to gather around. A grand family reunion that also has all the neighbors wanting to join in the party.  So many camels coming that there is a dust storm covering the roads to Jerusalem.  Hope is a magnet for all humanity to gather around!

And Matthew remembered that scripture.  He sprinkled his gospel with many quotes from Isaiah and other prophets.  He referred to them 40 times, connecting what he knew of Jesus with what he knew of his sacred story.  Scholars see these quotes and the style he uses as signs that Matthew was a scribe, trained in scriptures, Jewish traditions and a deep understanding of the heritage of Jesus.  He was also on the cusp of separating from the synagogue institution, like an ancient Luther, John Knox or Charles Wesley, still connected to the faith of his childhood yet absorbing new understandings of scripture inspired by the teachings of Jesus.  He is the only one to talk about wise magi and stars in the sky, which again help him connect his ancient scriptures to the modern understanding he was sharing, the understanding Jesus had taught him.  On one hand, he was making those connections to the Moses story, the Isaiah story, but on the other hand, he was making connections to people who were not part of his ethnic group.  And when he has these images of royalty come from the east, the first thing he has them do is throw themselves down in the humble home in Bethlehem where they found him – no inn here, no manger, just a home – and give their deepest respects.  Only after that moment of worship did they hand over their presents.  That moment of worship which must have confused everyone who saw it, also changed them.  They saw through Herod’s evil plot, and they changed their direction home. 

Their only guide, other than, wait for it, consulting the scripture scholars in Herod’s palace, scribes like Matthew in fact, was the star in the sky. It too has a million explanations and rationalizations.  Even scientists join in the conversation of whether it was a conjunction, a comet, a horoscope event or a plot device by Matthew. In one theory, in 6 BC, Jupiter and Venus shone together like a single star, and Jupiter as the king star or planet shining with Venus, the love star, would have looked like one very bright new star.  The King of Love indeed! For six nights it shone in the early morning twilight, leading the magi forward into mystery. 

I think the Bible can be a star that lights our way, but like the magi, it is best seen through teamwork.  Isaiah and Matthew and all the other writers worked separately on their understandings of God, then church and synagogue leaders put it together like a conjunction of stars and planets. When we gather together to hear these words week after week, we are being like the wise magi, thinking and pondering and asking for directions. This can help us find bible wisdom for our time, hope for our journey, faith and inspiration for our lives. May it be a guiding light for our Epiphany season.

January 03, 2023

Christmas gifts

When Cam brought me the story of “Baseball Bats for Christmas” this year, I found it fascinating. How much we take for granted, in Canada.  Standing ups! Interesting word for pine trees.  Who knew that they can also be for baseball bats? And rather than using them for a week or two, the trees gave enjoyment and exercise for a whole year for a lot of kids.  How creative is that?

The boys looked at those trees with innocent and creative eyes, coming up with ideas that the adults didn’t expect.  Children can do that because they don’t know that there’s a right or proper way of doing things.

Christmas is like that.  We celebrate a baby who grew up to see the world in unexpected ways.  We remember and honor the people who first experienced him, who told stories of how inspiring, how different he was.  We tell tales of how his teachings still inspire us to see the world in different ways.  And it is not something that only happens on December 25th.  Like the baseball games the kids could have for months afterward, remembering Jesus can last throughout the year.

That’s not easy.  It has been a chaotic year for many of us.  “The people who walked in chaos have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep destruction — on them light has shined.”  We have seen chaos and destruction on the news.  We have experienced earthquakes and snowstorms, political turmoil and fears about supply chains and inflation.  In Alberta we are not living in a land of deep destruction, but we have met refugees fleeing that destruction.  It is real for them whether they are from Peru, Columbia, Ukraine, or Iran.  Some of us have experienced trauma or what I call family drama that can feel chaotic and destructive too.  Trauma is defined as how we react to a painful experience.   It’s how we feel when there’s an event that is unexpected, that we were unprepared for, and that we could not have prevented. 

Trauma can leave us feeling helpless, in search of a new light, new hope in our lives.  What if we reminded ourselves to look for that new hope as part of our everyday rituals?  What if every night as we brush our teeth, we look for hidden baseball bats inside the unexpected trees we found that day?  What if every morning we opened our eyes like the Gospel writers who saw the life of Jesus as so exciting that they couldn’t wait to tell their stories?  What if we had the ears of shepherds who when confronted with something they couldn’t quite explain, hear the message “Don’t be afraid” and go charging off to see something new.  What if we had the hands of Mary and Joseph, cradling new possibilities for a fresh life with gentleness and kindness?

What if we found a way in our busy days to take a moment to just breathe?  And to think about hope, peace, love and joy?  And not just about how we want life to dump them into our laps but how we can intentionally dump them into other people’s laps?  What if, while we are eating breakfast each morning, we took a moment to ask ourselves, who needs more hope in their life today?  Where can I bring more peace to the world?  How can I be loving to my neighbor?  And when can I do something for the sheer joy of it?

For refugees coming here, Canada’s warm welcome has indeed been a great light shining in their lives.  For the Homeless shelter in town, our donations of socks, mitts, sleeping bags and period products have been a great light that they are able to pass on to people sleeping rough.  For the people coming to our Spaghetti supper every year, for the participants in this year’s blanket exercise, for the community members who turn to us when they are struggling to make ends meet, for the lonely and stressed who need to see a friendly face and share their story over a coffee, we are a great light.  When people come here, they find gifts beyond measure, gifts of hope, peace, love and joy. As one famous person put it this week, “The light of our faith in ourselves and God will never be put out.”

Faith is in our control and doesn’t cost us a cent.  Stronger than any baseball bat, it helps us in chaotic times.  Faith is how we practice batting with hope, peace, love and joy, and when we do so, we will hit home runs.  We will be more resilient no matter what life throws at us.  We will live our lives remembering the message the angels send us, even today.  Be not afraid for there are tidings of great joy, that God is with us, and has sent us news of a child who will turn our world upside down, inspire us to look at our lives in new and joyful ways, and help us nurture peace, hope and good will to all the people of the world. May it be so for us all!

"Baseball Bats for Christmas" was written by Michael Kusugak and based on his experience growing up in 1955 in the far north.  Published by Annick Press.