Diverse and yet the same

So about six months ago, Mom and I were travelling around Cape Breton Island shortly after the big storm named Hurricane Fiona had gone through the Maritimes knocking down trees and damaging buildings right left and centre. Part of the tour included a Whisky distillery.  For those of you who are connoisseurs, that’s whisky without an ‘e’.  As the oldest single malt brewer on the island, it was one of those places that had some folks on the tour very excited.

Mom and I were not part of that excitement.  I can tell the difference between a smooth milk chocolate of high quality, a chocolate with a cheaper quality, and dark chocolate that should snap satisfyingly when it is broken, and know the importance of a good sheen when chocolate has been tempered well, but I don’t know how to do the same for whiskies, whether they have an e in them or not.  So we drifted around the grounds, admiring the fresh fall air, the beautiful location and the grand view of the region.  It was pretty splendid, with the fall colors!

Much to everyone’s surprise, Mom came back with not a three leaf clover or even a four leaf clover, but a five leaf clover she had found after casually looking at the ground and wondering if she could find a four-leaf clover.  None of us could ever remember seeing a five-leaf clover, but there it was, the genuine article, with all the leaves looking exactly the same size.  We took pictures of it because we figured no one would believe us.  And I think Mom still has it pressed somewhere.  She didn’t go out and win the lottery though, so I’m not sure how lucky it is.  We’re still waiting.

Diversity in nature is an amazing thing.  There’s so much we still do not know about nature. The odd discovery of a five-leaf clover when three is the norm.  And yet, it is still a clover even though it is not a typical clover.  And that’s a good analogy for the Christian life.  We are all human, and very diverse.  Different Christians may believe different things, but there is to be a core of similarity for us all.  We are called to follow Jesus, which is not easy.  We all fall short of the mark, we all haven’t quite become perfect yet, and we all make mistakes.  It’s a comfort to read that even great people like Paul had no illusions about humanity.  We like to keep secrets, we like to pretend we’re perfect, we like to show a public persona to the world that looks polished and professional and above reproach.  Paul says that it’s not about what we do in public or in private, but who we are becoming. 

We are becoming, hopefully, the image of Christ.  Our baptisms, our communions, our confirmations are all ways in which we remind ourselves and each other that Christ works within us and through the Spirit to become ever more Christ-like.  Every renewed and renewing, ever baptized and ever crucified.  Some days we know how sinful we are, how far from perfect we feel.  Other days we feel buoyed by grace in mysterious ways that we can’t quite explain. Or completely oblivious to how we may be acting in ways that are less than holy. 

One of the most inspiring things we hear about Jesus time and time again, is how he met people and saw them in all their messy mixed up ways.  The tax collector, the prostitute, the foreigner, the soldier, the stinky fishermen, you know the list.  And again and again he met them where they were, without judgement, without condemnation but with a deep compassion.  It was as if everyone Jesus met was completely transparent to him.  In our scriptures today, he talked about that transparency being inevitable.  That secrets we keep even from ourselves will come out in the end, and everything is known to God.  This idea of ultimate transparency becomes a fuel for bravery.  If we are no longer afraid of our secrets being used to attack or blame us, revile or shame us, then we can be bold disciples capable of daring acts of justice.

We need daring acts of justice.  The last three years we have seen the words of Jesus come true.  Families have become divided, parent from child, siblings from each other, first by Covid, then by our beliefs around covid.  People with attitudes of resentment towards the loss of power and control they felt with the imposition of mask mandates and vaccine passports became so enraged that their family members could not even invite them over for Thanksgiving and Christmas.  This is not new, of course.  How many of us grew up with the instructions not to talk about religion or politics at family dinners?  And how many of us found ourselves in conflict with family members on things like crop circles or whether or not the world is flat?  We are part of a protestant denomination because our ancestors or even our own minds became so disenchanted with the status quo that we got caught up in a little thing called the Reformation, led by Luther, John Knox and other theologians several hundred years ago.  30 years ago we had a major conflict over ordaining people who were not straight.  And while the United Church first ordained in 1936, she actually applied to be ordained in 1925.  It took 11 years of struggles and persistence, division and argument.  And now the Baptist Convention in the states is going through the same divisive conversation almost a hundred years later.  Daring acts of justice like painting rainbows on crosswalks, or bringing friends to a blanket exercise or raising supplies for Ukraine, hosting refugees, putting up campaign signs, speaking out against racist comments and homophobic slurs.  Standing up for people who are being bullied by extremists, or even challenging comments at the workplace with facts. 

Being brave Christians is not easy.  It can hurt us when we stand up for what is right.  I’ve been watching the conversation about the Westlock rainbow crosswalk very carefully.  There’s a bunch of activists planning to keep the crosswalk painting a safe and fun experience for the kids, and it’s been interesting watching the conversation evolve.  The group started out in a very angry place, wanting to hurt and attack the lobbyists trying to sabotage the crosswalk.  They are shifting into a more non-violent stance, focusing on keeping the kids safe from homophobic attacks, making it a fun event to the best of their ability, flooding the place with allies and caring adults.  The only time Jesus talks about coming to bring swords instead of peace was in this passage in Matthew.  The rest of the time he talked about turning the other cheek, and taking up our crosses.  He was prepared to die rather than start a war.  He told Peter not to use a sword when he was being arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane.  Non-violence is what he taught his disciples, even if it cost them their lives.

We don’t have to be Oscar Romeros or Martin Luther Kings.  But we are called to be open to the transformation that works in us and others by the Spirit.  Let us pray.  Dear God, help us celebrate and love the diversity of humans that is far more than four or five leaf clovers.  Help us to become transformed into the image of Jesus.  Let us become Bold Disciples willing to engage in Daring, Non-Violent Justice as courageously as Jesus did.  Amen

Measuring up?

 How big does faith have to be?  Jesus told his disciples that they didn’t need a big amount of faith.  Size didn’t matter to him, and neither does it matter to God.  Which, I’m sorry, is a hard pill to swallow some days. 

I wish I could throw bushes around with my faith, but that would not make me a Christian.  It might make me a hurricane, hopefully much smaller than Fiona, but certainly a blowhard and a destroyer of forests.  If I want to know I have faith enough to do what God is calling me to, how do I measure up my faith and know I have enough?

I may be looking around at other people and saying – “oh, look at what they are doing, they must have a lot of faith.  I can’t do that because I don’t have enough faith.”  It’s a perfect excuse to get out of doing anything that I might be nervous about. 

Maybe that is what the disciples were doing.  They were realizing how difficult it would be to live out these new ideas Jesus was teaching them.  Ideas that were scary, outrageous, challenging and culture changing.  Ideas that pushed against what ‘everybody knows’ or what common sense told them.  Ideas that challenged the belief that insignificant people like them could have a profound difference on the world they lived in.  It challenged the belief that might is right, or he who has the most toys wins, that the person with the most money must have the best life.  That it’s a dog-eat-dog world, kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, and might is right because only the strong will survive.

And those same fears and tensions that the disciples faced are the same fears and tensions we face.  Jeremiah too, struggled with fears and tensions from being a person of faith.  He was uncertain what was going to happen to him, or even that he had the ability to be a prophet to the people.  Certainly, his words of challenge and lament were not appreciated by his peers.  They got so angry at Jeremiah’s sermons that they threw him in the stocks to publicly humiliate him and to stop him preaching any more.  He continued to preach anyway.  He preached that the king’s actions were full of arrogance. He preached that the country’s leaders had lost touch with ordinary citizens.  He preached that the decisions being made by the politicians were trying to make them look more important and powerful than they really were.  And he preached that all these people and their choices would lead to disaster.  Their attempt to measure themselves in terms of wealth, power, and strength instead of measuring themselves by their faith would doom them.

So rather than support freedom of speech, they threw him in jail.  Not unlike the protesters in Russia who are being arrested and sent to jail or worse, Jeremiah’s arrest was designed to intimidate him and stop the unrest.  But it didn’t stop him, and it didn’t stop the Babylonian Army that circled the city. 

Jeremiah had the faith of more than a grain of mustard, then, when he bought a piece of land where the army was camped, not knowing if he would survive or if his family would once again grow crops on their land some day.  But he did it anyway, in a grand public gesture of faith and protest and hope.  In the face of war, in jail for being a dissident, on the brink of having the city invaded by foreign soldiers, he gave hope to everyone who witnessed to this ridiculous real estate deal.

We see similar acts of public faith.  Women in Iran burning their hijabs and cutting off their hair.  Russian men fleeing their homeland in droves.  Ukrainian refugees coming to Canada.  Other Ukrainian farmers and students, women and men doing their bit to protect their homeland.  Astronauts planning a return to the Moon.  Jesus dying on a cross, executed by the state.  We are not called to such outrageous, dramatic acts of faith.  Jesus said we didn’t need to do a huge song and dance to get our message across, to promote our faith, to counter the culture we see around us that hurts so many in the competition for success.  Instead, we can have the faith of a grain of mustard seed.  We may not be familiar with mustard seeds, but we all know sunflower seeds.  We know how they are not very big, but they are delicious when seasoned and cooked.  We know that it would take a lot of sunflower seeds to fill our stomachs, so they are too small to use as our only source of food.  But what a plant can grow from them!  They grow very easily in our climate – I have heard countless stories of people finding sunflowers growing under their bird feeders. 

Faith can be the size of a sunflower seed.  It is not something that needs to be big and strong, weighty and massive in order to grow something marvelous.  It can be as simple as deciding to ask questions at a forum on a proposed shelter for the Homeless in Athabasca or knitting a hat and mitts for the RCMP to give out to people in need.  It can be as small as helping write a grant that helps us sponsor the Blanket Exercise for the One Book One Community program.  It can be as simple as cooking hot dogs at a Pride picnic or being supportive of our new youth group and leaders.  It can be as quiet as cleaning the Lion’s Park up repeatedly after vandals. It can be as simple as coming forward to eat a small piece of bread and drink a small cup of juice in memory of Jesus.  Whatever the size of our acts of faith, Jesus says they are enough.  May we find the courage to live them in our daily lives.