Searching and knowing

There is a t-shirt that used to be in bible stores with a caption of “Moses was a murderer, Noah was a drunk, Jacob was a con man, Isaiah preached in his birthday suit, Job went bankrupt, Rahab was a prostitute, Martha was bossy, Mary Magdalene was mentally ill and Mary, Jesus’ mom was an unwed pregnant teen who became a refugee.  If God called them, how do we know that God isn’t calling us?

It's a great t-shirt.  We often may struggle with the idea that God is calling us.  How can God call me when I am not whatever I think God really needs?  Surely someone else, anyone else is better than me.  And we put off answering that still small voice, that nagging sense of being lured into a bigger vision, a bolder idea, a stronger stance.  “No, not me! I’m not called to run for town council, join the library board, speak up about racism, knit mitts for homeless people, buy Tylenol for Ukrainians, attend a rally in support of school boards, fill out a survey about pensions, put solar paneling on my roof, drive an alcoholic home, sit next to a hurting person, sign a petition about the environment or get out and vote on a contentious bylaw.  Somebody else is being called to do that.  Not me.  And yet every day people here in this space do exactly this.  They buy that cup of soup on a cold day for some stranger they just met, they buy granola bars for folks who have no homes to go to, they jumpstart stalled cars or push them out of snowbanks.  Ordinary people called to do what seems like something insignificant, yet what may be insignificant to us may be huge to those who see it or experience it.

How do we know we are called?  How do we know what we are called to?  Knowing is complicated, and when we hear the claim that God knows us can be both a gift and a challenge. 

If you have ever tried to study a foreign language, the word “to know” can be tricky. In French, they have two different words for knowing, connais and sais – connais is more about relationships with people and places, and sais is more about facts and skills, knowledge.  Hebrew is the same way, there is “Yada” which is know, and “Bantah” which is understand. So if you hear someone saying "yada, yada, yada", it means, "I know, I know, I know".

It’s one thing to know someone or something, it’s another thing to understand them. When we read Psalm 139, it is both yada and bantah.  God knows of me and God knows me.  In detail.  In depth.  Right down to the dna level and right up to how I will respond to anything that happens.  The thought of God knowing me both Yada and Bantah is, well, quite honestly, more than a little unnerving.  There’s a limit to how much I want anyone to know me.  Even spouses don’t know each other at that level.  Parents find their children to be mysteries, and siblings who have known each other all their lives can be surprised by choices and thoughts.  No one we know are in our lives from sunup to sun down.  No one we know have been in our lives since we were conceived.  It’s an extraordinary claim for an extraordinary faith in an extraordinary God.

That much transparency is uncomfortable.  We humans have been hiding from being known like that as long as we’ve been telling stories.  Some rabbis say that the day God wandered into Eden looking for Adam and Eve and realized that they were hiding from him, trying to cover their nakedness from him and each other, that’s the day God cried.  We even hide from ourselves.  M. Scott Peck wrote a book about people who lied so much they started to believe themselves!  He said that those kinds of people are really hard to help because they are so committed to their own lies.

That’s very different than Nathanael, the one Jesus praised for his honesty and transparency.  Nathanael had no guile in him, which means he was not sneaky or underhanded or manipulative.  He was honest to the point of rudeness when he said, “can anything good come out of Nazareth?”  Nathanael was described by Jesus as a model citizen, the kind of person we would think deserved to be called to some kind of holy ministry.  He’s special, he’s honest, he’s transparent.  And yet, he’s not mentioned again other than that he was in a group that saw the resurrected Jesus.  He didn’t write any books, he didn’t found any churches, he didn’t go on any missions, he didn’t have any hymns written by him or about him.  This perfect paragon of an Israeli disappeared from the bible completely.

Instead, Peter with his wishy washy faith, the big stinky fisherman who denied Jesus before he died, and Paul who hunted Jesus followers down in order to lock them up and torture them, these are the people that were called to turn the world upside down with.  Once again, the perfect people, the beautiful people, the people who had in their yearbook “most likely to succeed” were not the ones God turned to.  God called the ones who didn’t know their own potential, ones with self-doubt and insecurity.

God called, in other words, people like you and me.  Flawed, imperfect, impatient humans.  God still calls us because God knows us and wants to be in relation with us just as God once had a relationship with Adam and Eve.  God sees us just as we are, as beautiful creatures that can share love and hope and joy to everyone we meet.  God calls us to share our light of hope in daily acts of random kindness, to stranger and family alike.  God calls us to tiny acts and large acts alike.  May we have the courage and the faith to trust that God calls us because God sees us as we really are!

Whose sign is it anyway?

Remember when almost three years ago, we couldn’t find toilet paper anywhere, for love or money?  Or the great sugar shortage of 2023?  Or how people were dumping ice buckets on their heads for charity? Or when people were learning how to make sourdough bread?  We jump on bandwagons at the drop of a hat.  We look for trends like adopting pets we don’t know how to take care of, or washing our floors with laundry detergent, or jumping into icy waters on January 1^st.  And we look for people we can trust, who will tell us what to do and how to do it.

We look for role models, heroes, signs, or coincidences.  We look for people who will do our thinking for us so we can relax and follow along.  We don’t always know how to pick the leaders and heroes that are good for us.  History is full of people who followed cult leaders or elected dangerous individuals into positions of power, like Hitler, Mao Zedong or Mussolini, to name a few.  History is also full of great leaders, like Gandhi who freed India from Colonial Rule, Churchill who inspired resistance to Hitler, Martin Luther King Junior, or here at home people like Terry Fox or Christ Hatfield.  They did courageous things and inspired others to do similar acts of courage and leadership.

Our challenge, as ordinary humans, without superpowers or magical wands or tricks up our sleeves, is to learn if we are following leaders who are leading from their own need for power and control or leading from a passion to do better by the people who need them.  How do we figure out if we should be protesting for carbon taxes or against them, for a provincial pension or against it, for SOGI or against it for Israel or for Palestine or any other hot button topics bound to rise up in 2024?  And what about those of us who don’t get caught up in news stories?  Should we support Aunt Matilda or Anty Becky in the dispute over Great Grandma’s silver teaspoon?  Should we soak our feet in rice to lose weight like that commercial on Facebook?

The ancient Hebrew people were caught up in a similar problem.  They jumped on the bandwagon of wanting to have a king like all the other countries did.  It’s hard to tell from the biblical narrative if this longing for a king was like trying to keep up with the Joneses when they get the latest virtual reality equipment, or if it was more of a political move for survival.  The prophets predicted that the people would stop putting their trust in God and start putting their trust in the men who wore the shiny gold crowns, which was pretty much what happened.  In fact, that’s probably why Psalm 72 was written.  It’s a description of what the prophets and the poets and the priests and the ordinary people like you and me hoped they would get in their kings.  They didn’t have movie stars or Taylor Swift to admire and emulate.  All they had were kings and they had all turned out to be disappointing.  Even beloved David wasn’t perfect, Saul had frightening mood swings were, and Solomon seemed wise enough but his choice in wives caused trouble and his son was not accepted by many as the new king, which led to a divided country.   As a side note for you science fiction fans, the split away group became known as the 10 lost tribes of Battlestar Galactica fame.

So, when the psalmist describes the kind of king they want, that description comes from first-hand experience.  They want a ruler who will promote fairness, protection, and prosperity.  A king that will put the interests of the weak on equal footing with the powerful, and that will be so honorable, so just, so capable and so kind that people will come from around the world with presents to show their respect.

Matthew would have been familiar with this scripture when he wrote his Gospel.  He had no shepherds watching flocks and no census to tell us about.  He looked at psalms like this one, and the story of Moses whose life was in danger because of the ruler of the day, Pharaoh, threatening to kill male babies.  He drew connections between the scriptures and stories his people already knew to the stories of the new Messiah Matthew had met and learned from. Jesus was the kind of leader, who like Moses, grew up to challenge state powers and leaders to account for how they treated the powerless.  Jesus threatened the leadership of people like Herod Matthew did not see Herod or his sons or Caesar as the promised ruler people were seeking.  Matthew wanted to highlight the kind of king he saw Jesus, one so inspiring, so kind, so powerful in his gentleness and his focus on God, that Matthew hoped to inspire his readers to leave everything behind as the Magi did. Unlike our society that loves trends and fads and tictoc videos, Matthew challenged his people to think about what kind of leader they wanted, and encourage them to follow Jesus, the only king who had measured up to the wish list of psalmists and prophets alike.

The magi were bold disciples.  They left their comfortable homes and prosperous lifestyles, banded together for support, and traveled into the unknown future to an unknown place to meet an unheard of king.  Many didn’t jump on their bandwagon, certainly the scholars they got directions from did not offer to join them and show the way to Bethlehem.  But the magi continued on, past many obstacles and temptations, following the star until they found what they were truly looking for.  May we too join the camel caravan of hope, may we consult wisely, follow our stars of inspiration and travel together towards the new year full of fairness, boldness, equality and respect.

Stinky Night, Holy Night

Ever wonder what that first night was really like?  What it would be to travel back in time to Bethlehem when everything was happening, the chaos of a baby’s birth in such a strange place in an insignificant town in a tiny remote province of the great Roman Empire?  It wouldn’t have been as pretty as a Christmas card, that’s for sure.  The mom and dad were wandering from place to place, looking for a roof over their heads for the night and not even finding a tent to keep the snow off.  No cell phone to find an Air BNB either.  The desperation Joseph felt searching for somewhere safe, the frustration Mary had, and maybe fear of having to go through an ordeal she had never personally experienced before, and to do it far from her family and community, is not what we talk about when we think of the first Christmas.

And the stink would not have been mentioned either.  Animals kept indoors will do what animals do.  No litter boxes back then, no paper training or air freshener there.  No toilet paper either.  All the time travel novels don’t mention that the hardest part of going back in time would be the smells because our plumbing systems and soap for personal hygiene didn’t become popular or affordable until the crusades!  

We don’t think about stinks and spirituality combining, and yet isn’t that the picture we see when we look deeply at a Christmas card?  A holy baby, glowing with a special radiance, right beside the animals, the cows and sheep and donkeys and camels and probably a few rats as well, hiding in the hay.  That is the scandal of the Christmas message.  The scandal that when something so special, so unusual, so surprising, so hopeful comes into our world, that you would think belongs in palaces or beautiful places, that’s not where it comes.  It comes into our messy everyday lives even in the midst of chaos and confusion.  We may be living the stress of finding a place to live, or the frustration of feeling out of control of our world.  We may be living in the fear of what may happen next, of politics being done to us rather than with us, of decisions being made far away that will impact our daily lives.  All these frustrations and fears and anxieties were present in Mary and Joseph’s world.  They knew war and hunger and strife.  They lived in a land where they had no vote, where the only police were the occupying army, and where there was only justice and law for wealthy Roman Citizens.  Into this time of uncertainty, a baby was born.  He grew up to be a man of such extraordinary ideas and incredible vision that his followers wrote stories to try to put into words all that he meant to them.  In a time when very few people had the skills and knowledge to read, never mind write, this would have been astonishing.  More writing was done about Jesus than any other person until that time.  Writing was also for keeping track of records or sending instructions and was expensive.  Hard-working peasants who had to work to keep from starving, were not going waste their precious time or money to get someone to write down their memories of some guy they knew, any more than they had time to take a bath with a bar of soap.  

And yet this man turned their world of fear, anxiety, hopelessness, and conflict on its head, so much so that they wrote that on the day he was born, the first good news was that humanity was not to be afraid, that there were tidings of great joy.  This surprising message of hope was delivered to the stinkiest place in town, a stable full of animals and homeless refugees.

We need tidings of great joy.  We may have soap and sanitizers and air fresheners, but our souls, our character, our thoughts may be needing a thorough scrubbing.  What would it look like if we could hear those words of the angels with fresh ears, “be not afraid” in ways that gave us life and energy?  These words have inspired great change and great hopes.  Where would Gretta Thunberg be if she let fear hold her back?  Where would Barack Obama be if he let fear hold him back?  Where would Mother Theresa have been if she had let fear hold her back?  Where would Volodymyr Zelensky be if he let fear hold him back? 

In 1961, Dr. Howard Thurman wrote: The symbol of Christmas… is the brooding Presence of the Eternal Spirit making crooked paths straight, rough places smooth, tired hearts refreshed, dead hopes stirred with the newness of life. It is the promise of tomorrow at the close of every day, the movement of life in defiance of death, and the assurance that love is sturdier than hate, that right is more confident than wrong, that good is more permanent than evil. And from a German prison during World War 2, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said: “Human beings are dehumanized by fear but we should not be afraid.”  Living fearless compassionate lives changes the world for the better.

The surprise of the Bethlehem story is that the strength to live fearless lives comes even in the strangest, stinkiest places, and if it comes in a manger, that surprising gift of hope will come even into our lives no matter how chaotic or painful, like the most gloriously surprising song of angels and shepherds, cows and sheep.  Thanks be to God for this wonderful Christmas present, given freely to us all! Amen.