Love over Hate

If you ever want to know how a town or a village or a city is doing, ask a hairdresser or a cashier or a school bus driver.  They have their fingers on the pulse of the community in a way that others might not.  They are the ones who see us at our worst.  Bus drivers see our kids when they are sleepy or after a hard day’s work at school.  Grocery store clerks find one more turkey for the foodbank, or one more toy for Santa’s Anonymous.  They are the innkeepers of the Bethlehem story, the ones who make room for people who show up at inconvenient times.  They are not the star of the show, no one is going to write carols about them, or have saints’ days named after them or give them Nobel prizes or medals of bravery.  They are quiet people who show up, day after day, enduring long shifts, aching feet, and impossible customer requests while on minimum wage. The innkeeper barely gets mentioned in the Christmas story, and yet in some ways, he or she was the first person to respond with generosity and creativity to the Christmas Story.  Welcoming the stranger becomes the first act of the world responding to the good news of Jesus being with us.  Before the shepherds, before the three kings, there is the humble innkeeper, trying to come up with a creative solution to an impossible situation. 

Even though Mary and Joseph ended up in a barn, it was a shelter from the woes of the world that were pressing down on them.  According to Luke’s gospel, they faced a government that made unreasonable demands on ordinary people, ordering a census based on place of birth without regard for where they lived.  They had to travel in a time when the roads were not safe from wild animals or wilder bandits.  They had to travel through a country run by a foreign army speaking a foreign language.  They travelled to a town where there were no hospitals or ambulances if there was an accident, and no police to intervene in cases of violence.  Justice and healthcare came for the wealthy and influential, not for a poor family forced to relocate unexpectedly because of politics.

Today, we live in a world that glorifies powerful people.  We live in a world that promotes fear of anyone that doesn’t look like us or talk like us or live like us.  We live in a world where rumors spread faster than ever before, and stories that teach us to be scared multiply like snowflakes in a blizzard.  This year, we have heard political figures insulting Canadians and threatening our independence.  We’ve seen the return of measles causing many children to become sick.  We’ve seen the notwithstanding clause used to limit people’s fundamental human rights and pitch the public sector against the private sector.  We’ve also seen people responding with elbows up to rally behind our economy.  We’ve worked together to shop Canadian, and to keep Alberta in Canada.  We’ve spent tourist dollars in Canada, learning how beautiful our parks and cities are.  It hasn’t been easy.  It hasn’t been peaceful.  But it has been inspiring to see how we all, working together, do make a difference.

The story of the birth of a baby in a stinky barn with straw and dirt all around, is a reminder that God comes when we least expect it, into the messiness of our lives.  Whether our homes look pretty, and the tinsel and lights are just perfect, or whether there is clutter and wrapping paper everywhere, God shows up.  Or maybe we are struggling to keep the lights on and the heating bills paid.  Even in the direst of situations, God shows up in love. God shows up despite the messages of fear or anger, despite war and violence. God shows up at your door with an unexpected turkey, or at the post office, with a package you didn’t know was coming.  God shows up with a hug or a small box of chocolates.  God shows up in a phone call from someone you hadn’t heard from in a while.  Or God shows up by saying, hey, send a card to Auntie, it’s been ages. Go deliver Meals on Wheels. Help put on a Christmas dinner for folks who may be alone.  Call your family member, not to get into a big debate over vaccines, but just to say, I love you.  Or shovel your neighbor’s walk if they’ve been sick. We’ve seen what hatred and fear can do to a country, but we’ve also seen what love can do.  Even when we feel like we live in a barn, surrounded by animals, God still shows up in love to make a difference.  We can too!  Just like the innkeepers, the hairdressers, the bus drivers, the cashiers, let’s all do our part in 2026 by standing for love, compassion and empathy for all.  Spread the good news that Love is stronger than Hate, and be the love that someone else desperately needs to see.  

What's Your Sign?

 Have you ever asked God for a sign?  Did you ever receive a sign?  Both of these are not questions we ask easily in the United Church.  We are logical, rational human beings not given to flights of fancy. Some of us refuse to ask for signs, some of us ask for signs too often. It’s hard to get a handle on, and it can feels like getting our tea leaves read or staring into a crystal ball.  Maybe it’s more like driving down the highway in a snowstorm, unsure whether to keep our high beams on or not.  Those times when the snow is blowing so thickly that we can’t see ahead no matter how fast or slow we go.  We look with anxiousness for the next sign for our turn off or to get a sense of where we are or how much further we need to go.  I often feel like I’m getting close to Athabasca when I see the moose crossing sign on the highway.  I look for that sign, and when I see it, I know where I am.  I also know that when I see it, I need to take extra care and be alert for unexpected hazards.

Our Isaiah reading has an unexpected hazard in it.  If we cherry-pick how we read Isaiah, the longest book of all the prophets, we can indirectly feed into antisemitic attitudes.  The attitude that the Hebrew scriptures are useless or full of an angry God or only valuable when they predict the arrival of Jesus is a way of diminishing the influence of Jewish theologians on the world and on Jesus.  The verses we heard this morning were once translated as ‘behold, the virgin is with child and will bear a son” but that is based on a Greek mistranslation.  Now scholars have restored the ancient and accurate meaning to us.  When we put it into context, we see that Isaiah was preaching to King Ahaz who was facing a civil war with two other kings.  The two kings planned to attack Jerusalem, kill Ahaz and put a puppet ruler in his place so they could attack the Assyrian Empire.  Ahaz was unsure what to do.  Isaiah challenged him not to put his faith in politics but in God.  Ahaz couldn’t ask for a sign because he didn’t have confidence in his faith.  It’s hard to trust in God when there are two armies making a beeline for your front gate.  Isaiah heard Ahaz’s excuses and said, “See this pregnant lady here? Her child will not starve to death because of two armies but will eat healthily before he is very old.”  Isaiah was saying to Ahaz that hope even for the pregnant mom was so close she could name her baby, “God is With Us”.  She became a tangible sign of hope for their people and their king.    Even in the midst of doom, she became a sign that violence would not have the final word.  And it became something to remember in other times of danger, that helped people trust in God.

Trust in God came to Joseph too, in our gospel reading this morning.  Joseph found that all his ‘happily ever after’ hopes and dreams, were turned upside down.  As a carpenter, he might have been building a house or renovating the kitchen for the day when he and Mary would start their wedded life.  As often happens, his best laid plans were thrown into a tailspin.  He knew that he wasn’t the father, and as many men have, he decided he didn’t want to be involved.  If he married her when she was already pregnant, people would assume that he was somehow lacking as a man since his young fiancé had strayed.  But as always in a world that has a double standard for the behaviors of men and women, it would have been Mary that would have taken the brunt of abuse from the other villagers for not honoring her commitment to Joseph.  Joseph wanted to do the honorable thing according to the culture of his time.  Break the engagement privately and send her away.  The double standard for women back then would have meant that she would have been on her own, a single mom with no extended family to support her, no income support, no family allowance.  Most young women in such a situation would end up prostituting themselves to survive.  Putting her away quietly would have only kept Joseph’s and Mary’s families honorable standing.  It would not have protected Mary or her baby from the worst abuses the Roman occupied world could throw at vulnerable young girls.

Then Joseph got a sign.  Signs make us question our assumptions about the world.  Joseph’s dream had him question his assumptions about how to deal with Mary.  Just as Isaiah, pointing at a young woman in a land threatened with invasion, questioned his king’s assumptions about God.

Some signs that question our assumptions about the world that I saw this week, were the heroic intervention of a Syrian Muslim refugee in the shooting of unarmed Jewish people in Sydney, Australia.  His bravery disrupts the racist stories that brown immigrants are violent and evil.  Some conspiracists tried to pretend that he was Christian, not Muslim, or tried to erase him from the story altogether.  The other thing that disrupted our assumptions was Skate Canada cancelling all interprovincial figure skating competitions from being held in Alberta, in order to protect young girls from double standards here.  Double standards and fear-based disinformation are hard to see until we look for the signs that God sends us.  God wants us to look for signs that build hope, peace, love and joy.  This Advent season, like Joseph and Isaiah, let us see signs of hope and love to change our assumptions about the world.  So if you feel like you are driving in a blizzard, slow down and look for signs of God’s love.  Chances are, you will find them.  Thanks be to God! Amen.

It’s the End of the World as we know it and I feel fine!

Ever notice how things can get twisted and changed as people share stories over time?  We used to play a game where one person would whisper a secret message to the person next to them who would then repeat it to the person beside them until it went all around the circle.  No matter how carefully we listened, the message that was received at the end had very little to do with the message that was started.  For some reason human communication can get bent and twisted out of the original intent.  So we shouldn’t be too surprised that scripture gets twisted into hurtful interpretations that are unrecognizable to the original authors.  How do we deal with scripture like this that have been used to distort and damage what Christianity is about?

Jesse Zink, in his book Faithful, Creative, Hopeful shares the story of a congregation that is preparing a Good Friday joint service that would rather go to a big sale than attend their special worship.  Zink says it’s not that the minister is a failure, but that the Christian faith has been defeated by today’s culture.  Bill McKibben wrote an article in last week’s Guardian, describing how progressive protestant Christian has been distorted by mainstream culture to the point that US politicians use scripture abusively to support their oppressive laws, and I quote:

“relatively obscure passage in a relatively obscure Old Testament story is a good example of what is known as prooftexting – the citing of some verse somewhere to support your predetermined beliefs…[which] is like a restaurant critic who has visited a steakhouse, noted that it has creamed spinach on the menu, and declared confidently that it is a vegetarian eatery.”

Scripture gets twisted like this and Christianity gets twisted like this  into an excuse to bully people who care for others, who are compassionate for outsiders, for the vulnerable and for the powerless.  How many times have we heard people say, “I can’t stand organized religion” because they have experienced twisted uses of scriptures to justify toxic abuses of power.  Power over how people lead their lives, power over legislation that appears on the surface of it to be harmless but isn’t.  All supposedly justified in the name of Christianity but without the compassion and empathy that Jesus taught his disciples to show towards folks less fortunate than themselves.

A case of scripture that often gets twisted beyond recognition is this passage in Matthew.  It refers back to the Noah Story.  You know, the one that has generated all kinds of songs and art like the Irish Rovers singing about ‘green alligators and long-necked geese’ and completely ignoring the tragedy and destruction the Flood story implies.  This is not a cutesy story about animals on an overcrowded floating barn with the chaos of keeping the lions fed and the rabbits from taking over.  This is about heartbreaking tragedy where people are swept up off in a tidal wave of destruction.  Once we see a painting of the people left off the ark, it’s hard to think of Noah as cute.  And here’s the thing.  The Matthew passage doesn’t sound like the persons taken up are raptured into Heaven, it sounds ambiguous.  The ones that are taken, are they taken by the flood waters, sparing the ones left behind? It’s hard to tell.  Yet there has spawned a multimillion-dollar industry of books and movies taking this single passage out of context into a bizarre faith that has people sure they are entitled to special treatment from God.  They proudly put bumper stickers on their car saying, “In case of the Rapture, this vehicle will be driverless” because they know how the end times are going to work in their favor.  It’s nasty and cynical and snobbish.  The opposite of what Jesus taught.

Our Song of Faith, a document in the form of poetry that tries to put into words our best understanding of the United Church’s ideas says that “Scripture is our song for the journey, the living word passed on from generation to generation to guide and inspire, that we might wrestle a holy revelation for our time and place from the human experiences and cultural assumptions of another era. God calls us to be doers of the word and not hearers only... The Spirit judges us critically when we abuse scripture by interpreting it narrow-mindedly, using it as a tool of oppression, exclusion, or hatred.”

All too often it may feel like we have been defeated by toxic Christian teachings that drown out our understandings of following the teachings of Jesus.  All too often it seems like the only Christians we hear about get into the news because they own palaces or private jets or are condemning immigrants or abortion or inflicting the Lord’s Prayer on every school-aged child regardless of what faith they may have.  But when we look at the scriptures as a whole, it seems certain that we are being called not to twist them to allow us to judge our neighbors!  It does not give us permission to oppress others with laws that lock people up.  Scripture instead invites us to live decent lives, sober lives, empathetic and dare I say woke lives.  Lives that recognize God at work in our neighbors, God at work in us to see and call out hatred while inviting God to heal our hearts and minds so we can focus on what is truly important.

Not when or where the end times will come but why and how we love ourselves and love our neighbors and love God.  That way, whenever God shows up in our lives, to take us or to leave us behind, we will be ready. Now is the hour for us to wake up and live honorable lives.  That way, whenever the end times come, we will be ready for God who comes in love. May it be so for us all.