Who’s Right, Who’s Wrong?

Isn’t it great that we have United Church neighbors? And good ones at that.  Not the kind of neighbors where we have to build good fences in order to have respect.  But good neighbors, the kind that care and support each other. When we gathered to worship with the Moderator in May, it was wonderful to see representatives from First United, and to hear that some of you had started driving in the wee hours of the morning to get to church for 10:00 am.  I think poor Isabelle left at 6!  Talk about a caring neighbour, joining in on a joyous occasion.  It was wonderful to see so many come to hear The Right Reverend Doctor Carmen Lansdowne speak about the state of the church and the challenges we face.  She, like Paul, wanted to encourage us to continue to live in faith, hope and love.

That’s at the heart of the good Samaritan teaching too.  Jesus was being tested by a scholar who thought he knew everything about the Bible.  The scholar figured he had all the answers and he was right on everything he wanted to talk about.  He could quote scripture at the drop of a hat and might have sounded a little smug as he did so.  Maybe he figured he would put this country bumpkin from Nazareth in his place.  He knew how to play the debate game to win.

Jesus didn’t want to play the game of “who’s right, and who’s wrong”.  Instead of saying, “I’m a smart person too, and I know the answers better than you, here’s the answer,”, he switched to asking questions.  “What does the Bible say?”  Of course that was something that the lawyer was good at.  Without hesitation, he replied immediately with the Sunday School lesson he had been taught.  Just as one of the first prayers we teach children is often The Lord’s Prayer, the lawyer and Jesus both grew up learning the Shema to start and end every day, “Hear o Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might” from Deuteronomy 6 vs 4 and 5.  For good measure, the Lawyer also threw in a verse from Leviticus about loving one’s neighbor.  Maybe he heard Jesus preach about it before.   Or maybe he agreed with Jesus that loving one’s neighbor was also important. But like a good lawyer, he wanted a dictionary definition, a list of who was in, who was out?  Who was right and who was wrong?

Jesus didn’t want to give a list.  And so, as he often did, he decided to shock the lawyer out of his complacency.  He started with a tale that could have come out of the local newspaper if they had ones back then.  Innocent traveler mugged and robbed and left for dead.  Probably not unusual enough to even make the front page.  Even the people walking by the victim and ignoring him would not have been the story.  The lawyer, and anyone else listening in, would have understood that the priest had more important priorities than to stop for what appeared to be a dead body.  The same went for the Levite, who might have been a scholar of scriptures, like the lawyer.  Priests and Levites knew very well what would make them unclean.  They knew what their priority was, preserving their relationship with God through maintaining the rituals and purity codes that allowed them to go into the Temple, the holy of holies, with obedience to the Law as the way to show obedience to God.  Just like the lawyer, they knew what was right and what was good.  Nothing shocking here, nothing to see, move along.

Then Jesus did it, knocked the socks off, okay the sandals off of everyone listening.  Enter the hero.  Like most fairy tales, it’s the third time that’s the charm, the third little pig that builds a house that resists the wolf, the third brother whom everyone thinks is a fool that kills the giant, saves the day and rescues the princess from the dragon.  Who is this hero we expect, the Arnold Schwarzenegger or the Tom Cruise or the Harrison Ford who wanders in at the nick of time to save our poor fellow lying in the ditch?

I wish I had been there to see the look on the lawyer’s face, or the rest of the followers faces when Jesus named the hero as a Samaritan!  Nowadays whenever we hear the word Samaritan, we immediately add “Good” in front of it and gloss over the Samaritan.  The lawyer would never have thought that.  Samaritans were a break away group of Hebrew people.  For complicated reasons, they worshipped the same God, and read the same scriptures.  The main difference is that they only read the first five books, Genesis to Deuteronomy, and they didn’t go down to the Temple in.  The lawyer would have thought of Samaritans as wrong!  Wrong in how they worshiped, where they lived, and how they talked about God.

It must have been really frustrating for the lawyer to answer that last question, “Who acted neighborly?” because he didn’t say, “The Samaritan”, and he certainly didn’t say, “The Good Samaritan.”  “The one who was kind.”  The one who showed love.  The one who acted not from a rule book but from compassion.

We are living in a world where compassion is seen as silly, where kindness to the ‘wrong people’ is seen as sinful, where being loving is labeled as soft, or woke.  We are seeing outbreaks of childhood diseases like Measles that are easily preventable, or people banning books for children, sure that they are right about censorship and vaccinations.  As one minister in the states wrote this week, “To remain tender in a world like this is an act of spiritual resistance. This is how we will survive this time: not by toughening up, but by staying soft enough to care. By becoming the kind of people who others can turn to. The kind of people who, even in fear, choose to become refuge.”  In other words, we need to double down on being kind to our neighbors, especially when we think we are right and they are wrong.  We are called to choose not being right but being loving.  Love over hate is not easy and it is not weak.  It takes real courage and determination, and it takes faith, hope and love in God who is with us even in the tough times.  We are never alone when we love God with all our heart and soul and strength and mind and love our neighbor as ourselves.  May God give us the courage to stay true to God’s call for compassion.  Amen.

(Re)Generate: Visions and Dreams

 Disclaimer:  This is from the transcript of the video of my fellow participants from Moderator Carmen Lansdowne's (Re)Generate program found on YouTube - just google (Re)Generate : Visions and Dreams or copy and paste this into your browser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byz5dEHDBnk

Rev. Frances Kitson, Minister at Whitehorse United Church: I want so badly for  this church to have hope not because I'm a PollyAnna and not because it's like a pie in the sky possibility. But I want this church to have hope because that is our God-given gift, that is what God offers us. You know so many people give what they can and have raised their children in the church and are watching the church, the specific congregation they've been in for decades dwindle. They remember the people who used to be in those pews, they have children who live in town who are not in those pews, and they ask themselves "What have they done wrong?" And the truth is they have done nothing wrong, they have been good and faithful servants in a world that has changed around them and the fundamental story of our faith is that death is not the end, that impossible ridiculous and scandalous new life arises from the ruins and the rubble of broken hearts and dreams and futures and if I can make a magic wand and give us all the sense like in our viscera in our blood and in our bones that the God who raised Jesus Christ from the grave is not done with us. That is what I want, that is my vision, that is my hope, that is my passion, that is my dream and that is my prayer for the church.Rev. Wonder Chimvinga, Pine River United Church, Ripley, Ontario: my vision is to create a vibrant inclusive and spiritually enriching community where individuals everyone from diverse backgrounds feel welcomed supported and inspired to grow in their faith and I dream of leading with innovation, empowering new leaders in my church in the wider community and addressing unique needs of my congregation and the community at large.

Rev. Katie Aven, Minister of Bedford United Church: My bold vision is that the United Church of Canada will have this incredible invitation to anyone who is seeking, that we will have the warmest of welcomes, that people who come to our churches will feel transformed whether it's a Sunday worship, a community meal, a youth group, a pickup badminton game, a spaghetti dinner, whatever it is, that experience in the community will be transformative and we know that the transformation of the human heart is the most important change that can happen in the world and so I think that's what my bold vision is, that the United Church of Canada is going to be this agent of change for the human heart.

Rev. Catherine Stuart, Minister of Children, Youth and Young Adults for the Atlantic Regions: I think one of one of the dreams that I have for the church is that we would come to understand that just because things aren't the way they have been that we're not dying, that part of it might need to change but that there's something good that's going to come from all of this.  I think a lot about what happened in 1925 and the excitement that was in that arena the excitement and yet the nerves of “ will this thing work?” but they had vision and they had dreams. You know our history hasn't been perfect, it's caused some harm, it's done some hard things but I think I want for the church that same excitement, that same sense of “we're in this together and God's going to do something through us”. We might not always know what that is .

Rev. Hoeun Lee, Minister of First United Church, Waterloo, Ontario: when I just started taking Regenerate program with the moderator and I drafted the capstone project, and one congregant responded to that with “this is just a dream” and after one year, there is real progress like turning things around. We witness the change, the progress that we are making and so now the dream is not just a dream, it's a vision to guide us to move forward. Out of bold dreaming, there can be a clear vision.

Rev. Tori Mullen, Growth Animator of Eastern Ontario: I really hope that for my that when she's at a place in her life where she wants to dig deeply into spiritual questions and find community and find an affirmation of her gifts, that there is a church that might not look like the churches we have today, but that there is a presence of spiritual community committed to deep spirituality, bold discipleship, and daring justice that she gets to call her spiritual home.

Rev. Lindsay Mohn, Youth and Young Adult Minister, Living Skies Regional Council: my vision and dream for the future of the United Church is that when someone feels like life is hard and they're lonely and they need to feel an experience of being loved by God and by God's people, that they would know they could find that at any United Church across Canada. This life can just be so hard at times and we need each other and we need God and I hope that my dream and my vision would be that people would just know they could find that here.

Rev. Rick Gunn, Minister of St. Luke’s United Church, Upper Tantalion, Nova Scotia: my vision and dream for the future of the church involves becoming really confident in being Christian. I think we are in this postChristendom world but I'm almost getting tired of saying and thinking that because I do sense the Spirit through people coming through my church's doors and conversations out in the community that Christians who are inclusive and welcoming and affirming and really embracing mutuality and diversity.  We’ve got to get stronger at being that voice in the world.

Rev. Sarah Chapman, Minister of Eglinton St George’s United Church, Toronto, Ontario: my vision and dream for the United Church of Canada is to be at the tables of spirituality, to be a an option for people to engage with a deep faith, with community where they can find belonging and then also play within their spirituality, opportunities for people to engage their spiritual health or wellness are on the rise.  People are longing for those spaces and they're looking everywhere and so I long for the United Church of Canada to be really bold in showing up to the tables where people are looking for that type of care to their spirituality and then being a potential option or fit for them.

Rev. Mitchell Anderson, Lead Minister at St. Paul’s United Church, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: my dream for the future of the United Church is that we would be a church that is a place for all Canadians from every walk of life, of every background and especially as we see the future of what Canada is, becoming a younger and more diverse country enriched by people coming from all over the world, drawn in by a country that is welcoming and inclusive of all, where different types of people can live well together, where we speak different languages, where we eat different foods, practice different cultures and are all one.  That is what God is calling the United Church to be, a church that is younger and more diverse, a church that practices that inclusion and a church that speaks to the hopes of Canadians of future generations in the way we have for the generations past.

Rev. Anna Constantin, Senior Minister, St. Paul’s United Church, Edmonton, Alberta: my call, my passion for church is the multigenerational aspect of the church where everybody is welcome at the table. I really hope and pray and I believe this is God's dream of how do we have abundance at this beautiful table because everybody is there and if they're not there, let's talk about why, let's figure out how we're inviting them, let's listen to their prophetic voices to see what is happening there, because I guarantee that there God's voice is working there too and that we'll all be transformed.

Rev. Erin McIntyre, Minister of Knox St. Paul’s United Church, Cornwall Ontario: my vision and dream for the future of this United Church is to have a vibrant denomination that meets folks where they're at and inspires them to be bold disciples with deep spirituality and who are not afraid to stand up on matters of justice. I envision a denomination that seeks to serve the communities of faith and the regions to ensure that they are healthy and growing and doing the work that they love to do that meets the needs of their communities, that helps to grow disciples and grow faith and inspire folks and just be a presence in the world.

What is your Vision and Dream for the United Church?

Called to Freedom

Galatians 5:1, 13–25 When Christ freed us, we were meant to remain free. Stand firm, therefore, and don't submit to the yoke of slavery a second time! (Photo credit: M. Rosborough, (Re)Generate workshop at 5 Oaks Retreat Centre in Ontario, June 2025)

What a stirring scripture!  We are called to freedom when we take seriously today’s scripture.  Freedom from fear, freedom from jealousy, freedom from greed and scarcity and power struggles.  It sounds so idyllic and maybe a tad idealistic in a world where bombs drop on children and fires fill the skies with toxic smoke.  It could be dismissed as pie in the sky except that these stories are so deeply honest and real.

Paul and Jesus were not imagining out of thin air a philosophy of faith that would never work.  They were real people dealing with real issues in real ways.  They knew what it was like to be in community with humans that could be messy and complicated and hurting and scared.  They also knew how to describe what they saw in realistic ways and offer alternatives.  They acknowledged the challenges of being a God-centered community.

God-centered communities are not easy.  As Paul said, it’s easy to get caught up in biting and devouring each other, struggling against each other instead of working together as a team. It’s easy to get caught up in negative emotions, and to nurse our senses of outrage and injustice. We all want to be filled with love, joy, peace, and self-control.  We all want good times for ourselves.  We want Heaven on Earth, and we want it right now. We hear the call to freedom; but often slip into the dangers Paul diagnosed as self-indulgence.

There are many examples of healthy, God-centered, intentional communities. Last week was the final gathering of the (Re)Generate program of United Church clergy from across Canada.  33 people lived in community under blistering 34 C heat with such a high humidity index that there were weather warnings put out.  There was no air conditioning in the dormitories, so fans were being used in every little bedroom.  It was too hot to even sit outside during mealtimes.  The main gathering room was air conditioned and became a haven.  It was hard to sleep, staying hydrated became important, and people were tired and missing their families.  Some had come from as far away as Whitehorse or British Columbia which had a time difference of three hours.  That meant that they were waking up at 3 a.m., eating breakfast at 4 a.m. and in class at 5 a.m.  Not easy to do.

And yet they managed to work together, to share joys and sorrows, and to learn new ways of being in Christian community.  They heard about the epidemic of burn-out with clergy, the warning signs and what clergy and congregations can do together to prevent it.  Some individual factors are holding unrealistically high expectations, worrying about what other people think, struggling to say no, and being competitive or controlling.  And some of the community factors could have come straight from Paul’s scripture today, unresolved conflict, lack of support, poor communication, cynicism and hostility sound very much like “biting and devouring each other.”  Could the Galatians have been struggling with burn out? Were they forgetting the good news that they were no longer slaves to fear and hurt?  Were they struggling with what it meant to live out the teachings of Jesus?  Paul’s letter was to remind everyone that even though we call ourselves Christian, that doesn’t give us permission to let loose our feelings in ways that hurt others.  We are to remember that we are called to abundance: abundant love, abundant compassion, abundant life.

Abundant life can be lived in many ways.  Jesus showed his disciples that abundant life isn’t dependent on having a roof over one’s head, or food in the fridge.  When an enthusiastic listener declared that he would follow Jesus anywhere, Jesus pushed back and said that his life was a nomadic one, and if the follower was more interested in three square meals a day and a dry bed every night, all pleasure and no self-discipline, it was not going to work out.  Jesus invited others to join him, and they told stories of why they couldn’t come.  “I have to follow the customs of my people and take care of family responsibilities”, said one.  Another wanted to go back home first.  They had more important things to do than to follow Jesus and learn his ways of love, peace and joy.

Both Jesus and Paul wanted us to be more intentional about how we do community.  They wanted us to focus on loving our neighbors and ourselves.  Jesus challenged our stories of fear and scarcity.  “Come and follow,” he said. Skeptics will grumble  that it’s impossible, that humans can’t live in community and love.

The (Re)Generate program showed that it is possible.  We can remember to let go of the slavery attitudes that so fill our world.  A frequent remark is how the participants felt like everyone left their egos back home.  They were at 5 Oaks to learn and to share and to be inspired.  They were there to fill up on joy, love, faith, hope, kindness, generosity and self-control, even in the midst of a heat wave.  They had a leader they could trust, and that listened to them and inspired them to go deeper.  Together, they were more than the sum of their parts, and many felt healed and held in love.

They put Paul’s command into practice: “Serve one another in works of love, since the whole of the Law is summarized in a single command: "Love your neighbor as yourself."”  Paul and Jesus both agreed on the vital importance of this one commandment, and Moderator Carmen Lansdowne did too.  The number one antidote to burn out, whether you ask Carmen, Paul, Jesus, or a good therapist, is to prioritize self-care.  We cannot love one another until we love ourselves.  Until we love ourselves, and chose to follow Jesus away from a lifetime of thinking and acting like a slave to expectation, a slave to fear, a slave to scarcity, we will be in risk of burn out.  God doesn’t want that, the church doesn’t want that, and our families and friends don’t want that either.  The world needs healthy Christians full of the fruit of the spirit.  The world needs more love.  Love of self starts by hearing Jesus challenging the stories we tell ourselves.  Do we really need to check with others, do we really need to keep doing what we’ve always done, do we really need to see others as enemies, or can we learn to tell loving stories to ourselves and others as we seek the deeper spirituality that leads to God’s fruit of love, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self control?  May we have the courage and the support of our community to one day be truly free as God intends.  Amen.