Warts and All

 Dry bones lie scattered around in a vivid dream God sends Ezekiel one despairing day.  Dry bones in a dead valley. The world is in turmoil, the people have seen their capital city destroyed and their lives disrupted.  They have gone from city dwellers to refugees and slaves overnight.  The whole nation is grief-stricken and devastated.  Hope is dead. 

That is the magnitude of what faced Ezekiel some twenty-six hundred years ago.  This was a time of anxiety, fear and apathy as the people struggled to make sense of what had happened to them.  Not unlike what we are dealing with today. Severna and I struggled to find photos of 2022, and there weren’t a lot.  It’s hard to remember but this time last year we were still wearing masks, still recording who came to church in case of an outbreak, still struggling with health measures and precautions.  Palm Sunday I preached from the Manse as Tim had tested positive.  We didn’t have coffee time after church at all and served communion in the pews with tongs.  Some United Church congregations are still serving communion that way and still enforce masks every Sunday and are not having coffee time yet.  So there weren’t a lot of events to take pictures of.

We still worshiped. We still prayed.  We still had book study and we still met for council and committee meetings. We had an amazing donation of $14,000 gifted to us because of our affirming work.  We still started a youth group and gradually added coffee time.

All these things happened because we worked together.  A church is not one Ezekiel doing everything.  A church is a valley of people coming together, remembering when they were dry bones and rejoicing that they can stand up again, they can move again, they can breathe again.  Why?  Because they heard and felt God’s breath blowing in and through them, God’s spirit clothing their dry bones and reenergizing them, helping them, helping us to remember to thank God for our lives.

These past few years have been hard and have taken their tole on us.  We wonder when the stress of all the change will be done with.  When will things go back to normal?  And the answer is we really don’t know.  How do we adjust to that reality, that uncertainty?

Two images come to mind.  One is from the Pirates of the Caribbean, where Johnny Depp’s pirate ship is being chased down by faster boats and his capture is likely.  Depp takes a huge risk – he throws out his anchor and snags it on a rock. The boat pivots around the anchor, like a yoyo someone spins around their head, and the other ships sail right past him.  But it puts a tremendous strain on the ship, puts it in range of the pursuing ships and almost pulls the bottom off his boat!  The chasing ships can’t turn around in time and he escapes once again.  We could try something drastic like that to adjust to the times we are in.

The other image that comes to mind is when two years ago, I had a bad wart on my foot that wouldn’t go away.  I tried everything I could, even went to the doctor to get it burnt off, which the nurse was not impressed with.  She didn’t want to be burning a wart on a toe when people were struggling with Covid.  So I bit the bullet, and became obsessively diligent on using the Dr. Scholl’s wart freezing stuff to the point where it hurt more than I liked, but that was what the nurse had done.  I never thought I would get to the bottom of that wart, but persistence, consistence and patience made the difference.

What does God call us to do now?  What will breathe new life into our dry bones?  Do we need to resort to drastic methods like a risky toss of an anchor that stresses everything, or smaller methods like a can of freezing wart solution?  I remember when we first went into lockdown three years ago this very month, my motto became “5% better”.  It helped us remember to take small steps every week to improve how we worshipped and how we did church together.  It kept us calm and hopeful.  Now we can ask it again, what would help us as a church to be 5% more faithful, 5% more prayerful, 5% more generous, 5% more courageous?  Now is a time for deep faithful courage and deep love of God and our neighbors.  May we find the courage to work towards a healthier future.  Amen.

Puzzling predicaments

Have you ever done a jigsaw puzzle?  Remember the wooden ones or cardboard ones where a circle went in the circle hole or the cow in the cow silhouette?  We graduated to 10-piece puzzles and then 50 pieces.  Some folks got so into it that they do 500- or 1000-piece puzzles.

Life has felt like a jigsaw puzzle where we only have some of the pieces and there’s no picture on the box.  For some of us, this has led to a sense of anxiety, anger or apathy.

On this the third anniversary of going into shut-down, how do we put the puzzle back into a coherent picture?  How do we see what the picture is, feel like we are shaping it rather than falling into despair?  Especially when we are dealing with a massive deficit as a congregation?  It would be easy to panic or to give up.  But as followers of Jesus, we are reminded that Jesus points to a different way of seeing, a different way of acting in the world.

The story of the man born blind is worthy of a movie or epic novel.  What must it be like to have grown up without sight, only to have some interfering busybody come along. Did he sign a consent form?  Did Jesus explain the possible side effects such as being pulled into an interrogation by the religious authorities?  Did the man want to see?  Or was he happy with his life?

And who really couldn’t see in this story?  The disciples were struggling with the age-old question of why do bad things happen and assuming that it must be punishment for something the man did or his family did.  As if God sent blindness to punish the individual!  We still often think that when we hear about tragedies, asking what the person did to deserve the situation they find themselves in.  Why did Dad get cancer?  Why did Grandma have a heart attack?  Why were two police officers gunned down in Edmonton? Why are libraries in Winnipeg installing metal detectors in all the entrances? Why? 

I don’t particularly like Jesus’ answer.  So that God can be seen in action in their life, so that God’s healing love can be witnessed.  Not great.  What about the 20 or 30 years the man lived with a difficult disability, the ostracization he and his parents faced?

I don’t believe a God of Love would deliberately inflict suffering on anyone for the sake of winning a debate.  I do believe that Jesus was intentionally and publicly including people that didn’t fit.  He wanted people to have an indisputable and unforgettable experience of God’s presence in the world.  He wanted to shake people’s expectations and assumptions of who God was, what God’s community looks like, and who is worthy of God’s grace.

He wanted people to shake up the puzzle pieces.  To rethink about who fits in and who is out.  To reimagine community and reimagine where God is in the world.

What are the puzzle pieces that we have that aren’t fitting together the way they used to?  First piece is that we have gone through the valley of the shadow of death as a whole world these last few years.  Three years ago, I went to a St. Patrick’s Day birthday party.  It was usually a crowded, happy, raunchy event but that night there was barely a dozen adults in the room, and we were all wondering if it was even safe to be together.  A few days later, we were in lock down.  I was half-planning my funeral because I have asthma and allergies and didn’t think I would survive the virus.  We changed on a dime because we had to.  We learned how to work from home, how to stay away from our neighbors, how to do everything from church to banking online.  Sales of jigsaw puzzles went through the roof when people weren’t hording toilet paper or making sourdough bread or trying to keep their sanity and their marriages and families together.  It was hard.

Many community clubs like Toastmasters, WeightWatchers and Tops closed, churches too of all kinds of denominations.  Girl guides and brownies haven’t come back, schools opened and shut faster than a fridge door, with devastating impacts on children’s mental health and education.  Senior’s homes weren’t much better. People got angry and targeted each other, the health profession, the politicians that listened to scientists.  Dr. Henshaw’s appearance on television saw a surge in dress sales for her outfits and yet also a surge in death threats. And people died.  We were in the valley of more than just a shadow of death.  This has been world-shaking.

But. But.  Even though we are in the valley of the shadow of death, even though we have been blind since birth, even though we have come through many dangers, toils, and snares, the grace of Jesus has brought us safe so far, and that grace will lead us home.

Our book study this Lent had a story of a refugee living in a homeless shelter.  His name was Saleh and as a paraplegic, Saleh had crossed both desert and ocean to get to Canada.  He wanted to raise money for gift cards for his shelter friends. The goal was to raise $5,000 in 36 hours and get the cards to people before Christmas Eve. Impossible? No! He said “In Arabic we have a saying: ‘it is God who guides the hand.’ People told me I couldn’t cross the desert in a wheelchair. With God, I knew I could.” They did indeed meet their goal. Imagine the faith that helped him cross the desert in a wheelchair! We need that faith now!

It takes Saleh’s deep, courageous spirituality to meet challenges like what we have faced these last three years.  It will take deep courage, daring conversations and bold testimony to our neighbors to get through these next years.  But I have no doubt in my mind that whatever jigsaw pieces we have, God’s big picture will come together when we work as a team to puzzle it out together.  In life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with us, we are not alone.  Thanks be to God!

Hate or Love?

Have you heard the joke about the new arrivals in Heaven?  St. Peter takes them on a tour of the place, shows them the shining tall cathedral full of popes, the Anglican church with exquisite choirs, the Pentecostal glass building with the rock blaring full blast, the synagogues and mosques and so on.  Finally, they get to one building and Peter says “take off your shoes and don’t say a peep until we get past this place” and they go tiptoeing by as quietly as possible.  When they are out of range, someone asks, “why did we have to be so quiet?”  St. Peter said, “Oh, that’s the United Church, they think they’re all alone here!”

Now I have to admit that when I heard that joke, it was another denomination, but the point is that sometimes we get a little bit of an ego, we get a little puffed up thinking that our church is the best and only we really are getting it right.  Luckily, I think we know that we’re not perfect.  I hope.

Why am I sharing this? Because our gospel lesson today has been historically used in toxic ways to judge, condemn and ostracize, to determine who doesn’t belong, who is not good enough, who is out and who is in.  John 3:16 gets put on flags and posters waved at football games and on t-shirts, shouted on street corners and pounded on pulpits.

I think the United Church’s Song of Faith is spot on when it says, “The Spirit judges us critically when we abuse scripture by interpreting it narrow-mindedly, using it as a tool of oppression, exclusion, or hatred.  Or is that me thinking we’re the only ones in Heaven again?

It’s also why we Christians have such a bad reputation in North America right now.  When most folks think of church, they remember when scripture was used in destructive, hate-filled ways. 

So it’s rather fascinating to hear of the revival meetings happening in some universities down in the states.  These are going on for days in Kentucky and other places, where thousands of young millennials heard stories of testimonials, sang and prayed in large groups and spread it to other campuses across the states.  Interestingly this had happened before in 1970 at the very same school.  That also was a time of great anxiety, where young people who had grown up with drills on how to hide under desks to protect themselves from atomic bombs, who were being sent to fight in Vietnam, who heard about earthquakes in China killing 15,000 people, who had seen their popular president assassinated, and who had rioted after Martin Luther King’s death; suddenly they joined together for days of prayer and vigil and testimony.

No wonder revivals are hitting the news with so many people suffering from anxiety, stress, fear, grief and anger.  I watched a United Church workshop called United Against Hate.  It had a panel of four people including a United Church minister, a drag performer and several members of the 2sLGTBQ community.  They talked about the level of hate in public spaces and how incidents against Drag performers have escalated in the last 6 months.  There are a lot of people who were seen at anti-mask rallies and convoy protests who now are turning their attention and anger to a small group of people who like to, as one person put it, “get sparkly and have fun”.  Words like perverted, sinful and degenerate are being thrown around, and the hate is seen as protecting families and so-called ‘normal people’ from aberrant individuals in our society.  Now I must confess I have never gone to a drag show and the Vagina Monologues was a stretch for me, but hating drag queens?  There was one speaker at this event who was so scared that they didn’t use their real name or their video.    They didn’t feel safe in front of a hundred United Church people and congregations.  So many people wanting to make a stand against hatred, but this person was terrified of a hate backlash!

We have an opportunity to hear this scripture through a lens of love and tolerance instead of hate, and I think we must take this opportunity.  God loved the world so much that God sent Jesus, not to hate the world, but to love us so we can have everlasting life. John says what everlasting life in John 17: 3 - Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.

So eternal life is not about who’s in or who’s out, but who is in relationship with God and Jesus.  That relationship is to be based only and solely on Love.  Hate has no place in everlasting life.  If St. Peter does take tours around Heaven, there won’t be all these churches segregating and separating people, no buildings we have to tiptoe by because they think they are alone.  Just one big community united in love of God.  We don’t need to wait until we’re dead to have everlasting life, we can have it here and now! The invitation is clear and open to us all.

Let us pray: "God of deepest desires, we live better when we are possessed by your Spirit, devoting our hearts to you amidst our community. We confess our devotion has been in things and not on You. We have replaced the care for our communities to care only for ourselves. Help us learn again how to devote our hearts to you so that we can discover time and again how to pray, how to serve, how to love your people, our communities, the land around us and all its living beings." Prayer written by Claudio Carvalhaes pg 3 from “Good Courage: Daily Reflections on hope” c 2022, United Church Publishing House, Toronto.