The Power of Words

Words can make such a difference in how we hear a story. “Peace, be still!” Jesus says to the storm, then “why are you so afraid?” to the disciples, some of whom had only recently joined the hand-picked team that Jesus had selected.  Jesus sounds so calm, so pastoral in these words.  So kind, so comforting.  Except that’s just a little bit of a disservice to the original Greek language that Mark was struggling to write his gospel in.  Unlike Matthew, Luke and John, his Greek was not smooth,  flowery or poetic. Mark didn’t use big words, and he didn’t get into fancy descriptions.  He was the kind of writer who would say, “The dog bit the man who tried to take away his bone.” Whereas the others might write “The tiny brown dachshund snarled and snapped when the robber tried to grab his meaty bone away from him”.  They paint a picture, but Mark is a plain-spoken, blunt man.

The Greek words he used wasn’t “Peace be with you”, expecting the storm to respond, “and also with you”.  No, the words he chose were much more like a rebuke you’d give to a barking dachshund, “Shut up! Be Quiet”.  Then he turned to his disciples and bluntly said, “Why are you such cowards still?”  And some versions translate their response as ‘great awe’, while other translate it as ‘great fear’.  It would be very easy to be fearful if one minute I’m feeling like I’m going to drown in a storm, then the next thing I know, Jesus yells at the storm to chill out, and then yells at us for our cowardly attitude.  I’m not sure which would be more unnerving, almost drowning, or the unnatural stillness that follows, or the scolding afterwards.  And why did they still struggle to have faith, as Jesus presumed?

Good question.  We’re only in Chapter 4, and yet the disciples have seen healings like Peter’s Mother-in-law, a withered hand, and someone with mental illness.  They’ve watched crowds be healed and heard stories that were inspiring.  But they still waffled in their faith.

They were still new in their roles of being disciples, the 12 that were singled out for special teaching, and yet they waited to wake Jesus until the last minute.  They were still like us, one moment rock solid in their excitement about being the chosen ones caught up in a wave of enthusiasm, like a 5-year-old watching their first Oiler’s game, not really understanding what all the hype was but happy to cheer like everyone else.  Then they try skating for the first time and discover that while the big men make it look easy, it’s not.  It takes practice, discipline, patience and a lot of courage.  It’s not easy.  And coaches that bark at kids, using words like “Why are you such cowards?” are likely to lose their potential recruits before they are even starting out.  Words matter. 

Faith matters too.  When times are good, when everyone around us is happy, it’s easy to feel certain that we can trust God.  But when we’re away from the crowd, when the storms of life come roaring into our lives, fierce and unexpected, it’s natural to feel scared.  The disciples were no fools, they were experienced fishermen, and they knew how dangerous the sea of Galilee was.  They turned to Jesus for support.

Interesting words there.  “Do you not care that we are dying?” they cried.  They had accepted their fate.  Fishermen knew what it meant when a boat started filling up with water.  Death was certain, so certain for people who used boats for a living that even up to the 18^th century, many sailors and naval officers did not know how to swim, partly because of Europe’s cold and dirty waters on land, and  some believed it was better to drown fast rather than try to fight to survive.  They didn’t cry out asking Jesus to spare their lives, they couldn’t imagine that he could do that.  They cried out for Jesus to care about them as they faced death together.

Does someone care about us when we are in the middle of the storms we are facing?  Does someone support us, and calm the situations we find ourselves in, time and time again?  Now, I’m not saying that praying to God will cure our cancers, and protect us from disasters large and small, but something happens when we take our deepest fears and anxieties to the Holy Mystery, however we understand it.  Scientific researchers have often studied the power of prayer. Interestingly, there’s growing evidence that prayer works on us and our relationships!  When we pray that love be in our hearts towards another person, that can have real results on how we relate to them.

Words matter.  We often hear that Perfect Love casts out Fear.  If we turn it around, Perfect Fear casts out Love too.  And that’s what happened to the disciples.  They were in perfect fear.  “Don’t you care that we’re about to die” may have been tinged with anger, often the product of fear.

And of course he did care.  Turning to Jesus, even when we feel swamped by the storms of life, is the way of courage and faith.  It’s not easy, but it is the only thing that calms the trials we face.  We all wrestle with their last words to each other, “Who is this man?” That is the crux, who is Jesus?  For us, Jesus can be the man who inspires us to continue to grow our love for one another in the face of stormy times.  When we choose the word love over the word fear, God over chaos, hope over despair, our faith grows and strengthens in amazing ways. May we all practice such faith until we too are as brave as the disciples became, brave enough to face all our fears with a calm and certain faith in Jesus, our Christ, who always has the last word, love.  Amen.

Surprising Seeds

 Ever wonder why Jesus talked about gardening metaphors to fishermen who knew more about ropes than they did plows?  Why did he talk about seeds to tax collectors and prostitutes?  And did he throw in a wink and a laugh with these stories to keep them from being too dry, too dull?    These stories seem simple and yet they still leave us scratching our heads centuries later.  This particular parable is perfect for us to wrestle with in June.  Many of us are digging in our gardens, pulling weeds that got a good head start from all the rain we’ve had recently, or throwing seeds in the ground so we can eat lettuce, spinach or radishes in a few weeks.  You don’t know which ones will live and which ones won’t. You don’t know which ones will grow fast and which will grow slowly.  Which ones will thrive this year, and which won’t. 

The saskatoons have already set berries, but will they produce fruit?  God knows.  We throw in marigold seeds from last year’s bedding plants, but many won’t germinate at all.  Then there’s sunflowers seeds that can produce massive plants taller than people, and my goodness the birds love them!

And other than weeding, watering, fertilizing, picking bugs off, and covering our prize petunias with netting, (at least here in Athabasca where the deer love to nibble on our bedding plants and everything except crabgrass and dandelions), there’s not much we can do to help the process along.  Sure, some folks start bedding plants indoors with grow lights, or test the soil to figure out what will grow where or read up on everything from companion planting to square foot gardening, but once the seed is in the ground, as many a farmer knows, it is out of our control.  That’s hard for those of us who like to be always doing. Like the kid who wonders when the warm weather will finally arrive so he can go have fun at the spray park, we wait impatiently for the seeds to sprout, the new potatoes to form, the fresh peas and corn to be harvested.  But sometimes, no matter how hard we try, the peas get washed away, the carrots don’t come up, and the raspberry canes don’t root.  It’s out of our hands.

Relax, Jesus said, God is taking care of the growing.  Hard to believe that in times like these.  And yet there are signs of hope we see here and there.  Perth Australia has so many solar panels installed in that city that city officials are asking people to use their appliances during the day to use up that excess power. And this is in their winter season!  The kids who survived the Sandy Lake school massacre are avid gun control lobbists and they graduated high school this month, determined to make a difference.  The British Isles are seeing storks fly overhead again after 600 years of extinction, thanks to careful wildlife rehabilitation efforts, farmers are finding crops like spinach that love growing under solar panels, not to mention sheep grow more wool when they graze on solar farms, and Norwegian researchers are heating homes with renewable energy stored in beach sand of all things.  Times are shifting, attitudes are shifting.  People are living into what Paul described as cheerfully pleasing God. 

Today we please God with a special day of prayer.  Back in 1971, someone somewhere came up with the idea to have an indigenous day of prayer.  There’s very little known about who had the idea, but the United Church formally recognized it at the 24th General Council and the Anglican Church of Canada also passed it in their court that same year. Eleven years later what later became the Assembly of First Nations called for the creation of a National Aboriginal Solidarity Day. Around that time the Sacred Assembly, a national conference chaired by Elijah Harper, also had a similar call for a national holiday to celebrate the contributions of Indigenous Peoples. And the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1995) recommended the designation of a National First Peoples Day. More recently, on June 21, 2017, Prime Minister Trudeau issued an intention to rename this day National Indigenous Peoples Day.

The United Church has traditionally referred to the Sunday before National Indigenous Peoples Day as Aboriginal Sunday. As part of acknowledging National Indigenous Peoples Day, communities of faith are invited to focus on prayer, as it was originally intended in 1971. 1971 was the same year that the Anglican Church closed its last residential school (as an aside, we closed our last one in 1968) and that might have been the reason for it.  

As a side note of interest, Elijah Harper who helped organize this, who is also the famous politician who helped block the Meech Lake Accord, went to school in Norway House, a residential school in northern Manitoba that was run by the United Church of Canada until it was closed in 1965.  So there’s a United Church connection on several levels to this date.

Seeds sprout up from a 1971 prayer request.  They seem small and innocuous, but they can grow into a national inquiry into truth and reconciliation.  Seeds sprout up from the frustration and heartbreak of being educated in a foreign language in a school far away from one’s family and parents into the courageous resolve to stand against the political machinery that forgot to consult first nations people.  Seeds sprout up from a simple time of prayer into a National Day of Remembrance.  What seeds are sprouting up even now in this time and place?

When we live lives focused on hopeful intentional values, as describe by Paul, we can find ourselves partnering with God in surprising and wonderful ways.  We can watch for God at work in the world.  And we can focus on living God-centred lives.  We do that best by setting aside time to pray intentionally and regularly, watching for those seeds to sprout up.  They will bloom in ways we may not imagine, but they will bloom because God is with us, we are not alone, thanks be to God!

Power Play

Wow, Jesus was throwing his weight around in the temple that morning!  He got a little hot under the collar, and when the Pharisees tried to blow the whistle and tell Jesus he was icing, he told them in no uncertain terms that what he did fell within the regulations, then skated off and scored a winning goal!  Except that the Pharisees decided to eject him from the league for unsportsmanlike conduct but recognized that they would need to get more people to back their decision.  Everyone to the Penalty Box!

There are three things going on in this gospel story.  First there’s the issue of leadership and who is following whom.  Then there’s the conversation around why the 7^th day is special, the Sabbath.  And lastly, there’s the decision point that is made by the person who the fuss is about.

First, what’s happening with leadership in this story?  Jesus is leading his disciples into the sanctuary where he sees a man with a withered hand.  The Pharisees react to his interest and see it as a threat to their authority.  Now it’s important that we acknowledge that this is not all the Pharisees as there were Pharisees like Nicodemus who are recorded as hosting Jesus for dinner, or having conversations with him.  In light of what is going on in the Middle East, we have to remember that these were some of the leaders, and make sure we do not encourage or imply any kind of antisemitism that could be used to fuel attacks like the one we saw at a Toronto Jewish school this week.  That being said, the leaders are confronting Jesus during a worship service like hockey players getting ready for a face off.  They are determined to control the play and get the puck away from Jesus.  They are calling him out in front of his disciples in a blatant attempt to shift the momentum away from Jesus and back onto themselves where they feel it belongs.  How dare this upstart disrupt worship? How dare he take on the authority that is rightfully theirs?  How dare he defy and defile the Sabbath? 

Then we have the theological debate.  This is the lens through which everyone is looking at the Sabbath.  It’s like if one team has helmets with yellow plexiglass visors, and the other one has helmets with pink visors.  What colors are the referee’s stripes? What color is the ice?  Those visors will shape how the players look at their rink and the other people on it. These particular Pharisees see the Sabbath as something that is honored by abstaining from work.  It is a reminder that no one is to be treated like a slave.  The Sabbath is a gift from God and is kept by following many laws to the letter to show respect to God. That’s something Jesus agrees with, it’s a gift from God to the people of God, but he also sees it as a time to experience God’s presence.  One of the highest principles of the laws protecting the Sabbath as a sacred time, that even these particular Pharisees would agree with, is that the laws can be suspended in order to save a life.  That the sacredness of the Sabbath is not as important as helping someone survive whatever ordeal they are facing. It’s a pragmatic and sensible boundary to the powers of temple regulations.  No high sticking allowed in your attempt to get control of the puck. 

Lastly, we have the person who is at the centre of this debate.  Poor guy must have felt like he was the puck about to be dropped into the face off.  I wouldn’t have envied him for the world.  Can you see it?  The Pharisees staring at him, Jesus looking at him too, and then all the spectators in the stands following the play, wondering where he will end up.

But here’s an interesting thing.  Jesus doesn’t touch the man or pray over him or forgive his sins or tell a parable.  Jesus simply invites the man to stretch out his hand.  The man has to make a choice of how to react to that invitation.  How will he keep the Sabbath?  Will he honor it in the narrow legalistic way that the Pharisees define it?  Or will he see it in the focus Jesus highlights? Not as a tool of oppression but a freedom from oppression, and an invitation to full and generous life.  He chooses life.

There are people who still feel oppressed by prejudice, discrimination, and hatred.  They feel crippled by fear and conspiracies.  They wither under the stated and unstated expectations that the world has of them.  There are people who will hate them in the abstract who might not hate them as long as they live their withered lives.  As long as they stay quiet.  As long as they follow the rules that they may be neither seen nor heard, as long as they hide their differences and pretend to be something they’re not.  But Jesus invites them to stretch out their withered hands to receive the love God has for them.  They are fearfully and wonderfully made.  Who are we to judge?  If we stick to rules for their own sake, we may block people from the healing they need.  If we, like the disciples, can wait to see what happens, we may see the miraculous happen right in front of us.  If we, like the Pharisees, find ourselves challenged, can we let go of what we know should happen to see what God is making happen?  And what is happening is as sweet and simple and beautiful as a team working smoothly to pass the puck and shoot a winning goal, or a rainbow shining in the sky after a storm, a sign that we are to make space for God’s healing love.  That is a great goal to have for our sabbath days together.  May we make space for all to experience God’s healing love!