Standing together without fear

Paul’s reading today has some powerful phrases.  “Conduct yourselves in a way that is worthy of the Gospels.”  Wow.  Strong language.  Or how about “the privilege of believing in and suffering for Christ.”  Who would have thought belief and suffering were privileges?  Or “I will persevere with you all, for the sake of your joy”.  Or Jesus saying, “The last shall be first and the first shall be last”. Each one of these phrases could be the core of any sermon. 

The phrase that shone for this week, though was “Standing together without fear”.  We saw this happen on last Wednesday across the country.  Many people turned out to stand for what they saw was an important cause, the welfare and education of children and how important it is to ensure that they are safe and protected from abuse.  We can all agree that children’s well-being is of the utmost importance, and it is one reason why we have child labor laws and public schools.  Back in the time of Jesus and Paul, that was not the case.  There was no form of birth control other than abstinence or infertility.  In the Greek and Roman world, it was common for families to abandon their babies in the wilderness if they had too many mouths to feed.  Rich people could come along and collect these babies to raise as slaves, as concubines or even as heirs.  It was their choice, their right to collect or dispose of these children as they saw fit.  Which makes the parable of the Land owner a real puzzle.

So where do you sit on this story?  Is the landowner an exploitive boss short-changing the hard-working laborers, or is the land owner a compassionate employer who wants to take care of as many people as possible?  Parables can be uncomfortably ambiguous that way.  Jesus doesn’t spell it out or explain it, he just dumps a story on us and lets it percolate.  How would we feel if we were the first laborers hired?  Or the last?  And how nasty of the landowner to line the laborers up in reverse chronological order, deliberately fueling the expectations of the first laborers, then in a surprising reversal, tells them they don’t deserve fair wages for their work.  Sure, the pay was following the letter of their contracts, but the outrage was deliberately cultivated by the landowner.  Mind you, the fact that the landowner took the time to talk to the workers about why the pay was not based on time and effort is interesting.  Landowners back then didn’t have to explain anything to their employees.  There were no labor laws or unions or workers compensation programs.  Nothing.

There were no pension plans, neither federal ones or provincial ones.  Only what a person could earn by the sweat of their brow, or what their children could provide when they could no longer work themselves.  Laborers like these had no retirement age to look forward to.  They were often the bottom of the barrel, with no skills that they could use for long term employment, no way to get a job that was more stable, a career working for some rich foreigner, or something steady with a town or city.  So again, the fact that the landowner even wanted to talk to the workers is a very bizarre twist and unlike most bosses that the disciples and followers had ever met.  This boss hired people in person, kept going to the market and hiring more.  This boss said, “why are you not working?” and put them to work.  This boss included everyone in the important job of bringing in the harvest.  And this boss then went and personally handed the money over to each of the employees.  Enough money, a living wage in fact, that would put bread on the table for their families so their little ones wouldn’t cry themselves to sleep because of an empty belly. A living wage so they would not try to cram their families into a leaky boat and cross a sea to a different land.  A living wage that treated them with dignity and respect.

It was more than feeding their bodies but treating them as equals, fellow humans, worthy of a boss looking them in the eye, giving them a firm handshake and a pat on the back.  That was the secret that helped Jesus turn his followers from fearful fishermen who knew their place or shy shepherds or fatalistic farmers, into passionate leaders.    That dignity was the daily bread that restored the self-worth of his followers.  That dignity helped them love their neighbors so calmly, so peacefully and with such surety that it changed the world.  They stood together without fear.

It's easy to wonder how people can stand together without fear in the face of the kind of hatred we saw expressed this week.  How can we stand without fear? Partly by learning our rich stories of people using solidarity to change the world.  We no longer have children working in mines because of people standing together.  We no longer have education only for the rich elite who can afford it.  We no longer have legal rights only for those who have power or the ear of a judge.  We no longer have rampant starvation of children and the elderly in this country because they don’t have anyone to support them.  We do have a public health care system open to all and a pension plan, fair labor practices and freedom of speech because people stood together without fear.  Often those standing together without fear were Christians like us, empowered by the examples of Jesus and Paul, who didn’t let death threats stop their messages of love.  May we find the faith, intelligence, courage and compassion to also stand together for the dignity and rights of all humans in this beautiful creation.  May we stand together in daring justice.  Amen.

Based on Scripture readings:

Philippians 1:21–30 For me, to live is Christ.

Matthew 20:1–16 Daily wages for the labourers; what’s fair?

Holy Impossible Math

 Romans 14:1–12 Welcome without judging

Matthew 18:21–35 How many times must I forgive?

The answer to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe and Everything, is, as every well-educated hitchhiker knows, 42.  If you are not sure why the answer is 42, check out the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  Hopefully it will give you a chuckle.  However, in today’s scripture reading, it’s 490, way more than what Peter thought.  Peter may have thought he was going above and beyond in even suggesting 7. 

Why 7?  Well, how many days are there in a week? 7.  How many animals did Noah bring into the Ark in Genesis 7?  Surprisingly, 7, (the 2 by 2 is in Genesis 6, a good thing to toss out there if someone is trying to prove that the bible has no contradictions in it).  How many days did Jacob work so he could marry Rachel?  7.  How many days did Isaac grieve Abraham’s death? 7.  How many generations suffer for the wrong doings of their family? 7 generations.  How many years of famine brought Joseph’s family to Egypt for reconciliation?  7.  How many days did Noah wait before sending out the dove to find dry land? 7.  You get the picture.  7 was a special, almost magical number for the Jewish people.  It still is seen as a lucky number by people.  Also consider that there are the Seven Wonders of the World, the seven dwarfs, seven colors in the rainbow, seven notes on a musical scale, seven deadly sins, and we all want to get into 7^th heaven.  Buddhism believes 7 is the highest form of wisdom, and other faiths also have special meanings they attach to 7.

A mathematician explained that 7 is the only number that can be counted on the fingers of two hands that can’t be multiplied or divided into the other numbers on the hand. 2 can be multiplied, 5 can be doubled, 8 can be halved, but 7 is the only one that sticks out, dare we say it, like a sore thumb.

So, Peter may have thought he was onto something smart when he proposed seven.  Rabbis suggested three, which if you blew that, you were out of luck, just like a batter striking out in a baseball game.  Peter was proposing a level of forgiveness that was perfect in his eyes.  Jesus went even higher than that.  Perfection multiplied by infinity.  Ouch!

For so many of us, even one time seems impossible.  “I’ll never forgive Uncle So and So after that one time he did such and such” is more our style.  People don’t forgive the oddest of things.  I remember a time when I put a “No Smoking please, baby lives here” sticker on my front door and had an aunt and uncle tell me that they would never forgive me for my inhospitality.  And they would never visit me or my babies either.  Ouch!  Forgiveness is a dirty word, one that our society struggles to understand.  How many times have we heard, “I will never forgive you for that!” spoken in anger?

Then we hear in the news tales of forgiveness that sound unbelievably naïve.  The 2007 story of the Amish community who forgave the man who had shot and killed their children.  Or Reverend Dale Lang, an Anglican Priest in Taber Alberta who forgave the shooter who killed his son in 1999.  Or this week, Cheryl Uchytil, mother of Nature Duperron of Athabasca, who was in court to hear the sentence for her daughter’s killer, talked about how she needed to forgive what had happened.  Cheryl said that the anger made her sick and did not help her with her grief.  Forgiveness was healing, but it wasn’t easy or fast.

Some of the challenges we have with forgiveness is that we don’t know what it is.  Forgiveness is not tolerance.  Tolerance means we put up with bad behavior, which leads to further resentment.  Tolerance is a way to justify avoiding conflict, and it tries to strengthen us to continue to endure bad behavior.

Forgiveness is not forgetfulness either.  Rev. Lang will never forget losing his son, nor would he want to. 

Forgiveness is not conflict resolution.  Often people seem to think that they would have to look their abuser in the face and have a conversation with them that would lead to mutual understanding and peace.  There are times when reconciliation can take place, but there are times when reconciliation is not possible.  Nor is forgiveness a weapon to shame someone into admitting they were wrong and need to apologize to you.  Although that can sometimes happen, forgiveness doesn’t work like that except in daydreams and bad movies.

Forgiveness is a work of our hearts.  It is a reminder that we cannot fully judge other people’s actions without a clear understanding of why they did what they did.  Like an iceberg, their reasons for their actions are far below the surface of public statements.  Holding a grudge makes us sick and fearful and easily triggered.  Our reactions signal that we need to explore our own icebergs to find out why we are resisting forgiveness.  Did the event leave us feeling vulnerable? Unsafe? Afraid? Anxious?  What can we do to strengthen our hearts so we will feel safer, braver, able to better protect ourselves from future problems? 

One thing that we can do to strengthen our hearts is listen to Paul.  He wrote that we are to stop passing judgment on one another and resolve not to be stumbling blocks.  In other words, when we judge that the other person should have been better, smarter, kinder, calmer or more compassionate to avoid the bad behavior they inflicted on us, we are putting a barrier between ourselves and God.  Like the official who judges the servant and throws him in jail for an insignificant debt, we are failing God’s holy math.  When we forgive, we free ourselves from the painful addiction to a bad memory.  Or as one Facebook post said, “sometimes we are the collateral damage in someone else’s war against themselves”.

When we pray that God forgives our trespasses as we forgive others who trespass against us, we not only let go of the anger and fear that the initial event triggered in us, we also commit to not retraumatizing ourselves by revisiting the old pain.  This can be just as damaging as the original event.  When we apply holy math and practice letting go of that hurt, we can heal ourselves and our relationships.  Brene Brown says that when we can accept that most people are doing the best they can, we can become kinder and more resilient.  That’s the kind of math Jesus wanted for us.  A math that leads to peace and compassion and kindness, a call to resilience and hope.  May we find ways to live out that call. 

5% better!

What would it be like to see Isaiah’s vision come true, with God’s holy mountain so filled with peace that everyone could live in harmony with all living creatures?  It’s a big vision of peace.  Not too practical when we struggle to even have dogs and cats share the same household without too much ruckus!

Peace seems like a far off pipe dream in this day and age.  We may be aware of the challenges of listening to family members driven by conspiracy theories, or watching the latest news from Ukraine wondering when it will end.  We may be arguing with friends who deny climate change or we may be struggling with climate grief, the latest buzz phrase to explain the complex emotions we have when we think about all the smoke this summer.

There’s a lot of grief out there.  When we hear of people who adopted pets during the Covid lockdowns now turning their pets back to animal shelters, it’s obvious that for many, ‘pet therapy’ didn’t work for them.  Or maybe it worked in the short term but not for the long haul.  Our pets are not served well when we use them to fill holes in our lives that they are not capable of filling.  The French word for pet is “animal de compagne” or animal companion.  Not a toy or a replacement child, or even a form of emotional therapy. A companion who has a limited vocabulary mostly around treats and feelings.  Learning how to have a healthy relationship with a pet is not easy, and many people found that out the hard way during Covid.  Some gave up, and some persisted.

We are as a world, addicted to quick fixes that will solve our problems.  All too often, those fixes only touch the surface of what we are dealing with.  We can get easily overwhelmed with all the challenges that we as a community and as a world are facing.  Rev. Dianne Strickland, a retired United Church minister and traumatologist, told Alberta congregations that 76 percent of Canadians had experienced at least one traumatic event in their lives, and described living through Covid as a collective traumatic experience that we all had.

That might have been in the past, but it still echoes in our lives two years later.  When we hear of a potential salt shortage, we rush to the stores to buy salt, only to find the shelves empty.  Our use of plastics is being reduced now that we know how dangerous they are, and we may feel anger that this change is being dictated by new government policies.  And people are trying to organize a boycott of Canadian schools who teach that all people are worthy of respect regardless of gender.  But that too can lead to anger, confrontation, grief and a loss of peace.

We humans like to be complacent, and it is not easy to restore once our complacency has been challenged.  We long to be like the goldfish swimming calmly in its bowl, the canary singing in its cage safe from predators, the horse that can bask in the sun and graze at its leisure.  But we are not animals.  Our brains, very similar to our feathered and furred and scaled friends, is bigger and more complicated.  Our relationships with each other are much more complicated too.  Finding peace and comfort with our neighbors is not done in the same way as an alley cat having a fight with another tomcat. 

Jesus gave wise advice for complex humans wanting peace.  Don’t fight on Facebook or through a bunch of texts or e-mails.  Talk to the person directly with the intention of looking to build peace and understanding.  If that doesn’t work, ask for help.  In small towns, we tend to avoid conversations like that.  But like adopting a pet during Covid, it can mask our pain and grief and lead to avoiding the real issues rather than working together to find solutions.  In congregations, that may mean having a conversation with our ministry and personnel committees.

And keep our big picture in mind.  The big picture that Isaiah painted where there is so much peace that even a rabbit can cuddle up without fear to a big wolf and a mouse can play with a cat.  And that big picture doesn’t need big actions.  It can be as simple as buying a small solar panel to help charge phones and small items.  It can be as small as remembering to bring those reusable grocery bags to the store.  It can be 5% better.

It can be as simple as asking to go for coffee with someone and really listening to what is going on for them.  It can be as simple as putting out seeds for birds, or taking your pets to visit others who don’t have pets.  Living with respect in creation, a phrase of our United Church Creed, reminds us that it is about our attitudes and intentions as much as it is about our actions.  When we love our pets and treat them with respect as the companion animals they are, when we don’t treat them as objects to fix our surface problems, and work together, we are participating in building that beautiful dream where all will live in peace in God’s great community!

Surprising Views

Ever noticed how addicting excuses are?  We can’t try that, it’s been done before.  It’s too risky, it’s too new, nobody will like it, the community won’t care, people are too busy, life’s not like that, we don’t have any power over the situation, people don’t change, and on and on.  The excuses are legion, and we all have endless supplies of them that we can whip out at a moment’s notice.  Risk is often seen as scary, especially when we are anxious about the state of our world.

The continued presence of smoke from forest fires, the rising cost of groceries, the challenges of renegotiating mortgages, and the sticker shock of school supplies do not help.  We can feel like we are laboring on giant pyramids for the sake of folks like Jeff Bezos who reported earning $75 billion dollars in 2020 while the average warehouse worker for Amazon won’t be a billionaire any time soon.

New pharaohs are in our world, and the poverty of the folks that support their pyramid or yacht building schemes are also real. The view is bleak. But Exodus tells the tale of a God who has a different and surprising view of the world, “I have seen the affliction of my people in Egypt, I have heard their cries under those who oppress them; I have felt their sufferings.” That is as true today as it was several thousands of years ago.

Of course, Moses came up with a million excuses as to why he couldn’t help.  He was a nobody shepherd doing the worst jobs for minimum wages.  He was even a convicted murderer who had left Egypt after killing some Egyptian overseers for abusing their workers.  He was a poor public speaker. He knew he was the wrong man for the job.

God had other views.  God knew that Moses had grown up in an Egyptian palace and had an insider’s knowledge of Pharaoh’s court.  Moses also had an insider’s understanding of the religious system, the priests, the court officials, the racism that had been institutionalized from before he was born.  As an adopted child, he would have experienced a disconnect, on one hand, he would have learned his family’s culture, but on the other hand he would have been pampered and set aside from them.  He would have been a member of both the elite and the oppressed, and not fully comfortable in either.  No wonder he attacked the Egyptian overseers.  Like most middle managers, they didn’t think about what the system was doing to the people under them.  They went with the status quo and didn’t question orders from higher ups.  Curiosity, empathy and imagination were not part of their mindset. And they certainly were quite happy with their place in the world.

Peter was also happy with his place in the world.  In last week’s reading, he said Jesus was the Messiah, the anointed one specially chosen by God to bring about change for the oppressed people, a new Moses.  And Jesus was happy, calling him the rock on which he would build his new community, his new network.  And then Jesus took Peter down a peg when Peter tried to be his image consultant.  Peter wanted Jesus to tone down his rhetoric, keep things positive and light, stop talking about sacrifice and pain.  Jesus unequivocally rejected that.  Watering down the message was not on, and that if Peter wasn’t on board with that, Peter could find another rabbi to follow.  Harsh words, and a difficult criticism to accept.  But crucial for the vision Jesus had in mind, establishing a movement that was so radical it would have ripple effects for centuries. He didn’t want to hear Peter’s excuses as to why that couldn’t be done or couldn’t be said.

The famous rebuke, “Get behind me, Satan!” would have been a real shock to Peter’s ego.  It would have startled and surprised him, like an emotional burning bush.  He would have had to rethink all his assumptions that he held about what a messiah was, what Jesus was up to, what the future held in store, what he was prepared to sacrifice in order to live into the expectations Jesus had of him.  It shocked him into a new sense of mission, and a new sense of purpose.  It was both humbling and hurtful, and reminded Peter that he still had a lot to learn.  Shocks hurt.

Shocks like the burning bush.  Moses didn’t expect it, and his curiosity got the better of him.  Rabbis often say that there were many shepherds wandering by, but only Moses got curious about what was happening.  How long had God waited for someone curious and humble to come along?

Many people long for a new Moses to come along and fix things, a new Jesus to end their suffering.  They look for strong people that will do their thinking for them.  It’s hard work being open to the shocking divine mystery, to hearing the surprise, to learning to be humble and open, to letting go of the sure-fire easy answer that they know will quickly fix everything.  They don’t want to think about the systems they are caught up in or the oppression they are perpetuating.  Unfortunately, there are no easy answers.  We will need to use our curiosity, empathy and imagination, while sacrificing our excuses, our safety and our comfortable habits in order to bring about the real change God is calling us to.  But when we have a clear and noble, God-given purpose that is centred on love of neighbor, we can work together in joy!  We are called, after all, to be the Church: to celebrate God's presence, to live with respect in Creation, to love and serve others, to seek justice and resist evil, to proclaim Jesus, crucified and risen, our judge and our hope.

In life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with us. We are not alone. Thanks be to God!