“Am I My Brother’s Keeper?”

How many of us remember the question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”  Despite being a bit of a bible geek, I did not remember where it was found in the bible and did a google search to figure it out.  Much to my surprise, it wasn’t a trigger that inspired a parable by Jesus, nor was it a question asked by the Pharisees, or even a phrase that Paul had coined in one of his letters.  It was, however, in Genesis 4.

The last time I read that story was as a kid in my illustrated story bible.  ‘Cain and Abel’ is a tale of common humanity.  Jealousy of a sibling is something many people are familiar with although not many will admit it.  Even more common is making an excuse when caught red-handed.  Cain defensively and angrily tried to deflect God’s question. 

God told Cain to let go of his anger and jealousy, but Cain hung onto it, and nursed it, according to the scriptures.  As James wrote in his letter, “let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; for your anger does not produce God’s justice.”  Cain’s anger did indeed not produce God’s justice.  Cain fed his anger until it boiled over into violence.  And then he refused to take responsibility by deflecting God’s question.

We’re not murderers, as far as I know, but the question of “Am I my brother’s or sister’s keeper?”, feels central to the tension we are now seeing in many conversations.  It is a difficult ethical question to ask of ourselves.  The people who are covid deniers or anti-vaxxers are ready to accuse us of being sheeple and worse at the slightest opportunity.  They promote medications that are proscribed for livestock, as if that is safer than a vaccine developed by some of the most educated and dedicated medical experts in the world.  Their anger does not lead to justice, which at this time would be vaccinations distributed to more than just 2% of the world’s population.  Nor does it build up love and community in this country.

“Am I my brother’s keeper?” is a justification for not taking care of one another, not taking responsibility for how our actions impact others.  Remember the first Star Wars movie when Han Solo delivered R2D2 and Princess Leia to the Rebel Camp after escaping Darth Vader and the Death Star?  She says to him, “It’s not over yet”, and Han says defiantly, “It is for me, sister. Look, I ain't in this for your revolution, and I'm not in it for you, Princess. I'm in it for the money.”

That is where a lot of people are right now.  They are in it for themselves, and no one else.  They struggle to deal with change or with being asked to do something like wear a mask or get a vaccine that doesn’t benefit them or their bank accounts.  They are coming from a place of defensiveness that says “I don’t want to do anything someone else tells me I should do” or “I don’t need to care about others getting sick”.  They are coming from a place of entitlement, or anger or shame or fear or denial.  Ultimately, they don’t want to have to change for someone else.  They fear being controlled by someone else.  And their fear of being controlled is so strong that they do irrational things.

It’s always easy to see when it’s them out there that are stuck in the question of “Am I my brother’s keeper?’  But what about us who want to follow Jesus?

Christians are not called to judge our neighbors, as tempting as that might seem.  Or as widespread as that might appear – judging those who have vaccines, those who don’t, those who are staying home, those who went to the Calgary Stampede, those who have Covid, those who don’t believe in Covid, those who sanitize their hands, those who hug everyone they meet, those who know who they will vote for, those who don’t know if it will make a difference whether they vote or not.

As Jesus said, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

We are to look within, noticing the times we resort to anger or respond with greed or jealousy or pride or denial or resentment.  The times we lie, or say nasty things about people behind their backs, the times we don’t listen to someone with a different point of view.  The times we lash out or the times we fail to speak up.  Especially now, the times we need make changes and accommodations that we feel are unnecessary or unimportant.  More now than ever, change will be hard and resented and rebelled against.  Clinging to human traditions when they no longer help us connect with the holy can lead to the exact kind of Pharisee thinking Jesus was condemning.

It’s not how our church is set up, or how we feel about wearing masks in church, or being asked if we are double-vaccinated or where we sit that makes us unclean.  It is the anger and resentment, or stubborn clinging to what we think is the right way of doing things that can break down our relationship with God.

Ultimately, we are called to be more than our brother’s keeper.  We are not to enable or abandon them, but to love them.  Jesus taught that we are to love our God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength, and with all our mind; and love our neighbor as much as we show compassion to ourselves.  That is what is truly important.  Loving God, loving neighbor, loving self.  We can do this, and when we do, we are following the way Christ calls us to be, turning back on what makes us unclean and worshiping God in ways that make a difference in the world.  May it be so for us all.

Step Away from the Whip!

Lent is a good time for confession and self-reflection.  Stories like our scriptures today remind us to stop a moment and take a good deep look at what we are doing in our lives.  Is it Christian?  Is it Faithful?  Is it Holy?

Jesus comes storming into the Temple on one of the most holy holidays of the year, Passover. He picks up his whip and gets going.  He threatens to destroy the Temple. What a public relations disaster!  Can you imagine what would happen if I waltzed into a basilica or the legislature and tried to do something similar?  Jesus got off pretty easy, he didn’t get tazered or tackled or even arrested. 

I felt a similar surge of anger, or what I imagine was a similar anger last week when someone quoted C. S. Lewis to bolster their message that masks and curfews and vaccines are destroying their right to a turkey dinner in a restaurant with 30 of their closest friends and family.  I felt anger not because their message has changed or that they are completely disregarding the science or dismissing human suffering.  The straw that broke my camel back was that they dared quote C. S. Lewis to justify all this conspiracy spreading!

So naturally, I dived into my collection of Lewis, looking for the passage where he talks about doing what’s best for the neighbor, so if a Catholic and a Protestant worship together, the Catholic would not make the sign of the cross out of respect and consideration for the Protestant, and the Protestant would make the sign of the cross out of respect and consideration for the Catholic.

I didn’t find it.  But I did find a lot about what Lewis says is the deadliest, most tempting sin of all, Pride.  If I go out to do righteous battle with folks who are carrying tiki torches, and I feel a sense of pride in my skill at arguing, or I feel good about how smart I am or even more subtly, I feel happy in how right I am, I am slipping into the sin of Pride.  Who am I to think I can charge in like Jesus did, whip in hand and change the world with my passionate facts thrown at their heads, hoping they will flee like the money changers and make the Internet safe for logic and common sense?  Sure Jesus did that, but I’m no Jesus!

When we set ourselves up as the experts, as the ones with the right answers, and even worse, we pick up our whips made up of facts and opinions and research and set off to beat people over the head in hopes of purifying them, we set ourselves up for the temptation of becoming Proud and Arrogant.  That sounds distinctly unChristlike.  But it’s so tempting to prove that I’m right and you’re wrong.  That I have the right to whip and beat you until you agree that you are bad.

Some of us use big whips, we argue and bluster when there is a crowd listening to us, we have a microphone and a DJ music system to make sure everyone knows what we are saying.  Some of us use small whips, little digs, little criticisms, little put-downs, little complaints and we do it more often.  Someone called it ‘nibbled to death by ducks’, another called it the 5 emotional cancers that can destroy a community slowly from the inside out: 

Criticizing, Complaining, Comparing, Competing, and Contending.

These whips come from a sense of my own inadequacies, my own lack of confidence and are not what God wants for me.  That is what Paul would call the wisdom of the world.  The world believes that we live in a dog-eat-dog society, that we have to be the wisest, smartest, richest, toughest people in order to survive and criticizing others, complaining about them, comparing our possessions or our children’s accomplishments somehow makes us better than our neighbors, that’s the wisdom of the world and Paul says it’s the kind of wisdom that leads to ruin, it destroys lives and even civilizations.

The foolish wisdom of the cross is the real power of God, that God’s wisdom is not in competing to be the best or the smartest person in the room but to be found in small acts of kindness, love and sacrifice.  We are called, in fact, to put down our whips lest we also lose our way.

Sure, Jesus whipped the Temple clean, but it didn’t last long.  There was a system in place that had evolved out of the people’s need to find a guaranteed connection to God.  Pure sacrifices, safe coins without blasphemic images of Caesar on them, anything that would help people feel connected to God.  That system snapped back as soon as he left the building.  

Jesus picked up the whip because he truly loved his community and he loved God and he loved his disciples, but it wasn’t enough.  It would take something more dramatic than the whip to shake up people’s addictions to purity and encourage them to rethink their relationship with God.  It would take the cross.

We are called to reflect very carefully before we pick up a whip.  As Jesus said later in this same gospel, “you who are without sin may throw the first stone.” Too often we think we have the right to change our churches but while the passion may be appropriate, the whip wielding can lead to spreading the cancer, not healing the congregation.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer said it this way, “Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial.” 

Jesus transformed the community through the cross, not the whip.  We too, are called to lay down our whips and our pride, and open ourselves humbly to the power of God working in us in love.  Love in the end, is the only power to clean the temples of our lives.  

Help us God as we build a community of thriving, loving and courageous people of faith, filled with your foolish wisdom.  Amen.

You turns - Jacob Part 5

I was travelling down a dirt road last Thursday in a rush to get to the Woodbury farm.  Some of you folks know where that is, a mere 20 minute drive away, across the river past the golf course.  Well, it’s been a few years since I had been there last and Tim was the one who drove out more often.  Anyway, I miscalculated and found the road to be muddy and slick from snow or frost or maybe a combination of both.  And I was not comfortable in driving my tiny car 80 klicks an hour.  The slower I went, the later I got and the more nervous I felt.

Just when I thought my turn-off was close, a pick-up truck whose driver was much more used to country roads than me, came barrelling down the middle, charging straight at me, scattering mud as they approached.  I was so busy trying to make sure I wouldn’t hit the truck or the ditch that I completely missed my turnoff and the next thing I knew, I was at an intersection I had never seen before, and the road ahead was marked with the ominous sign, ‘dead end!

Well, the only sensible thing to do was to pull a u-turn and retrace my steps.  It was closer than I thought and I soon was greeting old friends that I hadn’t seen in far too long!

Sometimes the only way forward is to turn around and go back the way you came.  Jacob was in that exact situation.  He had come to an impasse with Laban; after dashing away with his sheep and his wives, Laban chased him down and accused him of theft and cowardice.  The two men decided that good fences make good neighbours, to erect a stone to remind them on whose side of the border they were on and that the trickery and scams would stop between them.

That still left Jacob with the difficult quandary; where to go from here.  His uncle had scammed him repeatedly and he discovered how much that hurt.  So it was time to make a u-turn and go back to where he had come from.  That was a problem, because while Laban had scammed Jacob of wages, Jacob had scammed Esau of his rights!  Now Jacob could have tried a con, but instead he chose to be honest.  He chose to recognize that he was afraid of Esau and what his brother might do.  And that night he couldn’t sleep.

Tossing and turning about what he might face in the morning.  I imagine there are some lucky folks who never experienced that, but I have never met them.  If you are one of those lucky folks, please come teach me how!  There he was, facing every incident, every conversation he had with his brother, and coming to the realization that only the truth would set him free.  Our scriptures talk about the fruit of the Spirit being love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.  One could call that being grown-up, but it is not easy to be all those things when feeling so afraid.

Jacob did what any alcoholic would do who knows their twelve steps.  Confess his life was out of control, ask God for help, then a small but not insignificant step of doing what they call an inventory of themselves, a searching exploration of all the wrongs and hurts they had dealt other people, a deep confession of their failings and shortcomings.  A vigorous wrestling with their conscious, their ego, their need to be right no matter what.  That step, which we practise in part every time we join in saying a confession on a Sunday morning, is the kind of reality check that can leave a man limping for life.  It is a constant reminder that maybe just maybe we could do better by our fellow human beings.  That maybe just maybe the con game when we pretend that we are always in the right and everyone else is wrong is just that, and the only ones we are conning are ourselves.

One psychologist says that there are two kinds of people, wise people and foolish people.  When wise people encounter something difficult, they learn from it.  They hear a truth about the world or themselves and they change because of it.  Foolish people hear a truth and ignore it or pretend it doesn’t apply to them and they don’t learn anything.  They deny, blame, or make excuses for their behaviour.  Of course the reality is that there is only one kind of person.  We are all Jacobs stuck with nights of wrestling with angels of truths.  Sometimes we listen to the angels and grow, and sometimes we ignore the angels and don’t.

I made excuses for being late.  Did you hear them?  I underestimated the time it would take to arrive, I blamed the muddy roads and the speeding truck.  All that could have been avoided if I had made an accurate assessment of the time and the weather.  Sometimes the road is bad, sometimes it’s not.  Will I learn from it, sure hope so.  But the good news is there was love and forgiveness at the end of the journey.  That was what Jacob so dearly needed from the angel.  But he didn’t just get that, he got a whole new identity, wrestling God.  No more heel grabber.  Wrestling God.  Powerful.  Sometimes wrestling with God, sometimes wrestling for God.  And it’s his name that came down the ages and still exists today in a country of independence.  Now that’s change!

Enough Excuses!

Ever wish you had the power to blast a village to smithereens?  One minute everything is peaceful and quiet, the next, boom, There goes Athabasca, or whoops that was Smith, or kablam Boyle, whomp so much for Colinton, and maybe if it’s been a particularly rough day, what the heck, let’s do away with Edmonton altogether.  Who needs them, right?  Or maybe set our sights really high and boom! Toronto is no more.  Good riddance, right?  Who needs them?

There certainly is biblical precedence for such things – Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed in fire, according to the Genesis story because their citizens were angry at the thought of having foreigners in their midst.  Elijah destroyed the messengers of a king he didn’t like, and slaughtered the prophets of Baal when he won a prayer showdown.  So it wasn’t like Jesus and his disciples didn’t know about holy smiting, dare I even say holy hand grenades, but Jesus rebuked his disciples and hurried on.

There are enough stories of Jesus encountering the Samaritans that ended more positively that I wonder why this time had such a negative reaction.  Remember the Woman at the Well?  Some bible scholars think it was Jesus focusing on getting to Jerusalem, and it was this urgency that led to the Samarians rejecting him.  They too worshipped using the Torah, and the teachings of Moses were very important to them.  However, they disagreed vigorously on where to worship.  Jews worshipped at Jerusalem, while Samaritans worshipped at Mount Gerizim, where Joshua was reported to have crossed into the Promised Land with the followers of Moses after their escape from Egypt.  So it could be that the Samaritans were open to Jesus teaching until he turned his face to the Holy City.  Then their gloves came off.

And the disciples, used to warmer welcomes or maybe feeling resentful and scared at having to go ahead of him to a Samaritan village, lost their tempers.  Were they afraid of the Samaritans?  Were they frustrated that their preparations were wasted?  Were they mad that Jesus spoiled it by talking about Jerusalem?  Were they feeling snubbed by not being treated with dignity worthy of rabbinical disciples?

Whatever they were feeling, they certainly weren’t feeling loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, generous, faithful, gentle or self-controlled.  And they certainly didn’t feel like loving their neighbours.  ‘If we hate them, God must hate them too’.  They were feeling quite human!

Haven’t we all been there?  Had those moments of thinking, ‘darn I wish I had something witty to say that would have put him or her right in their place’, or ‘I’ll show them!  Don’t know how, but I will.”  And in a small town, it’s really tricky.  As I only half-jokingly said to Tim when we first drove up to Athabasca, ‘be nice to everyone you meet, they might be related to someone at the grocery store who is packing your eggs for you.  Last thing you want is to find your egg carton under a sack of flour because you were rude to a waitress the night before.”

Small towns are challenging when you are angry at someone.  If you passionately love the River Rats Festival, for example, but can’t stand someone on the board, what do you do when their family works at BuyLow?  Often in towns, people don’t try to work things out, they just quietly stop going to the club or the committee.  They might grumble behind peoples’ backs to their friends but they won’t try to work things out.  They drop out of the Bowling league or the Golf tournament, and never say why.  And sometimes the resentment builds.

It’s a very human reaction.  Unfortunately, it can have some terrible results.  Toronto’s Gay Pride celebration was marred when some people decided to attack others because they felt they had the right to do so, wearing t-shirts with slogans like “read the Bible, repent and be born again”.  And in Hamilton too, there was a deliberate intent to inflict harm during the Pride event.  How people can bring a baseball bat to a parade in the name of Christ who taught us to love our neighbour, forgive our enemy, and pray for those who hate us, is a mystery I am bewildered by.  But it happens.

There have been surveys and studies done suggesting that the average high school student is less empathetic than they were a few decades ago.  That there is a sense among immigrants and minorities that they are less safe in Canada and the USA than they once thought they were.  There are children and infants living separated from their parents in appalling conditions in the US. 

One black pastor wrote that if there was even the slightest whiff that he had approached someone in a sexually inappropriate way, he would lose his job, yet the President of the United States is on record as saying horrible sexist things, has court cases pending against him and still has a high enough approval rating from his voter base that he might get a second term in office.

It boggles the mind.  So many excuses are given as to why we let such bad behaviour go.  It’s especially heartbreaking when it is done by Christians.  Jesus wasn’t calling us to insult our neighbours, judge our neighbours or even attack them.  Yet all too often we fall into an us vs them attitude and have a ready excuse to blow our tempers, get angry, yell or sulk or pout.  These are not gifts of the Spirit.  They are not what we are being called to.

We are called to be transformed into the likeness of Jesus.  We are called to be open to the Spirit’s transforming power that builds love, joy, peace and gentleness and generosity and kindness and self control in our lives.  I don’t know about you, but I’m still working on it, and I humbly pray that it will grow in me and in each of you as well.  Athabasca, Boyle, Smith and even Toronto need us now more than ever before.