Christmas gifts

When Cam brought me the story of “Baseball Bats for Christmas” this year, I found it fascinating. How much we take for granted, in Canada.  Standing ups! Interesting word for pine trees.  Who knew that they can also be for baseball bats? And rather than using them for a week or two, the trees gave enjoyment and exercise for a whole year for a lot of kids.  How creative is that?

The boys looked at those trees with innocent and creative eyes, coming up with ideas that the adults didn’t expect.  Children can do that because they don’t know that there’s a right or proper way of doing things.

Christmas is like that.  We celebrate a baby who grew up to see the world in unexpected ways.  We remember and honor the people who first experienced him, who told stories of how inspiring, how different he was.  We tell tales of how his teachings still inspire us to see the world in different ways.  And it is not something that only happens on December 25^th.  Like the baseball games the kids could have for months afterward, remembering Jesus can last throughout the year.

That’s not easy.  It has been a chaotic year for many of us.  “The people who walked in chaos have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep destruction — on them light has shined.”  We have seen chaos and destruction on the news.  We have experienced earthquakes and snowstorms, political turmoil and fears about supply chains and inflation.  In Alberta we are not living in a land of deep destruction, but we have met refugees fleeing that destruction.  It is real for them whether they are from Peru, Columbia, Ukraine, or Iran.  Some of us have experienced trauma or what I call family drama that can feel chaotic and destructive too.  Trauma is defined as how we react to a painful experience.   It’s how we feel when there’s an event that is unexpected, that we were unprepared for, and that we could not have prevented. 

Trauma can leave us feeling helpless, in search of a new light, new hope in our lives.  What if we reminded ourselves to look for that new hope as part of our everyday rituals?  What if every night as we brush our teeth, we look for hidden baseball bats inside the unexpected trees we found that day?  What if every morning we opened our eyes like the Gospel writers who saw the life of Jesus as so exciting that they couldn’t wait to tell their stories?  What if we had the ears of shepherds who when confronted with something they couldn’t quite explain, hear the message “Don’t be afraid” and go charging off to see something new.  What if we had the hands of Mary and Joseph, cradling new possibilities for a fresh life with gentleness and kindness?

What if we found a way in our busy days to take a moment to just breathe?  And to think about hope, peace, love and joy?  And not just about how we want life to dump them into our laps but how we can intentionally dump them into other people’s laps?  What if, while we are eating breakfast each morning, we took a moment to ask ourselves, who needs more hope in their life today?  Where can I bring more peace to the world?  How can I be loving to my neighbor?  And when can I do something for the sheer joy of it?

For refugees coming here, Canada’s warm welcome has indeed been a great light shining in their lives.  For the Homeless shelter in town, our donations of socks, mitts, sleeping bags and period products have been a great light that they are able to pass on to people sleeping rough.  For the people coming to our Spaghetti supper every year, for the participants in this year’s blanket exercise, for the community members who turn to us when they are struggling to make ends meet, for the lonely and stressed who need to see a friendly face and share their story over a coffee, we are a great light.  When people come here, they find gifts beyond measure, gifts of hope, peace, love and joy. As one famous person put it this week, “The light of our faith in ourselves and God will never be put out.”

Faith is in our control and doesn’t cost us a cent.  Stronger than any baseball bat, it helps us in chaotic times.  Faith is how we practice batting with hope, peace, love and joy, and when we do so, we will hit home runs.  We will be more resilient no matter what life throws at us.  We will live our lives remembering the message the angels send us, even today.  Be not afraid for there are tidings of great joy, that God is with us, and has sent us news of a child who will turn our world upside down, inspire us to look at our lives in new and joyful ways, and help us nurture peace, hope and good will to all the people of the world. May it be so for us all!

"Baseball Bats for Christmas" was written by Michael Kusugak and based on his experience growing up in 1955 in the far north.  Published by Annick Press.

The Right Stuff

I learned about pomegranates because a Russian ballerina became beloved by enthusiastic Australians.  “Hold on there, Monica, that’s quite a jump between Aussies and pomegranates, how do you figure that?”

It does sound like chaos theory, the whole “butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and a storm ravages half of Europe” thing, except both a ballerina and a pomegranate are bigger than a butterfly.  Although the ballerina was supposed to be as light on her feet as a butterfly.  Anna Pavlova was the first Russian prima ballerina to travel around the world a hundred years ago, bringing her dance to people in many countries who had never seen ballet before,
including Australia and New Zealand.  Despite her problems with high arches and gangly legs, she inspired chefs to whip up a meringue dessert that is the proud feature of many Christmas dinners down under.  One benefit is that they don’t have to cook it at a high temperature in the middle of the summer, another is that it is great with fruit, especially pomegranates.  Pavlova is to Australia and New Zealand what pancakes with maple syrup is to Canadians, served up with bacon on the side.  Alberta’s equivalent would be a barbecue with Grade A beef, beans and baked potatoes. Slavic countries would have their piroshky and halopchi, scots would have their haggis and champit tatties, and Newfoundlanders would have their Jiggs dinners.

Great food takes time and tradition to get right.  It’s hard to cook up a great pavlova in Canada, our sugar and flour is a little different than the Aussie stuff. Canadian recipes for dressing or Christmas fruitcake are handed down from generation to generation, with edits and fine tuning according to taste.  Learning how to make a Jiggs Dinner with its all-important garnish of pease pudding has been a real learning curve for us Albertans more familiar with Bannock or perogies.

We like cooking up meals for those we love and care for, but no one recipe will work with every family.  Our tastes and traditions are almost chaotic in the variety we show.  Not unlike love, in a way.  Joseph showed love by planning not to make a public example of Mary, shaming her in front of her friends and family for not showing fidelity to him throughout their engagement.  Sparing her this embarrassment was his way of loving her.  And it was solely his decision.  He was the only authority to decide her fate.  If he had been an angry, vengeful man, he could have had her executed for her infidelity.  There’s no Cousin Elizabeth in the Matthew passage for her to run to.  In fact, about the only thing Matthew and Luke agree on about the Christmas story is that Jesus was born in Bethlehem.  Matthew has no shepherds or angel choirs or censuses or inns, Luke has no wise visitors or trips to Egypt.  They both share long genealogies, Luke focusing on Mary’s lineage, and Matthew has Joseph’s family tree.

That family tree is fascinating, because with the scandal of Mary’s pregnancy, Matthew mentions several other scandalous women.  Bathsheba, whose pregnancy almost destroyed David’s rule over Israel and caused chaos in his family.  Tamar, whose pregnancy was also seen also as a betrayal of her marriage oaths and punishable by death until she revealed who the father was.  Women who were at the mercy of a man’s decision and who had no choice in what would happen to her in that rigid patriarchal system that valued women solely by the offspring they could produce for their tribe.  Joseph was fully shaped by that patriarchy, that cultural expectation of what it meant to be a man and a father in ancient Israel. 

And yet, and yet.  Just as God messed with Abraham and Sarah’s comfortable life, just as God called Moses and Miriam to challenge slavery, God threw chaos into the patriarchal system.  God sent Joseph a dream.

Joseph’s dream wasn’t just about breaking his personal expectations, it was a culture-shaking moment, a major paradigm shift in how women were to be honored and respected.  It was a dream of radical inclusion, a challenge of the status quo, and an inspiration for the future.  Love was not going to be boxed up in a one-size fits all rule for all time.  His dream was a chaotic disruption of a long-standing tradition.  Which is what Advent is all about.  Recognizing when God’s chaos shakes us out of the traditions we may be taking for granted, the traditions that may not be loving or life-giving for everyone in our culture.  The traditions of making shortbread when we’re called to invent pavlova.

One expert put it this way

"Christianity is, at root, an Advent religion. That is, our [faith puts us in a place] where promise and fulfillment don’t quite meet. Our experiences [put] us there, too, as people keenly aware that our [dreams are not our reality] …. We never stop expecting new life to break onto the scene. We have work to do, but we recognize it as God’s work done on God’s terms." - Matt Skinner

Like a Russian dancer God sometimes tiptoes into our lives and ends up helping us shape new cultures, new ideas, new passions, new loyalties.  Sometimes God whirls into our lives with pirouette after pirouette, inspiring dreams and new possibilities.  Our world needs some new recipes for love and compassion. New creations and inventions that help us dance into a paradigm shift of acceptance of diversity, like the Respect for Marriage Act in the states. New taste experiments as we try new things like pomegranates that we never experienced as children. We wait and work in hope that love will dance into even the most cynical hearts, that hope will inspire life-changing dreams, that peace will break into the world, and joy will be in every home.  God, we pray, bring love to us all.  Amen.

And here's my attempt at my first pavlova, with pomegranate and kiwi fruit.  For some strange reason, it evaporated very fast even though it wasn't the most beautiful of things compared to how some folks mix it so beautifully!

Will the real John Wesley please stand up?

Well, it’s been quite the week.  Many of my colleagues were saying to each other, “how do we preach to our people after what has happened on Wednesday?” Some of them had already written their sermons so that they could be recorded for Sunday days ahead of time.  Others decided that they would set the alarm clock for 4:30 am today. 

When such disturbing images flood our news feed, how do we find words, how do we find sense, how do we figure out what’s next after this?

When the world gets chaotic, we can respond in many ways.  The ancient biological responses kick in and we can find ourselves going into fight mode, like an alligator, flight mode, like a deer, or freeze mode like a rabbit.  But let’s face it, our rabbit or deer or alligator brain reactions will only complicate things more. How does our faith help us to come up with a better alternative than fight, flight or freeze?

John the Baptiser knew that ritual makes a huge difference to folks who are feeling embattled or discouraged or depressed.  In the chaotic and dangerous society he lived in, the people didn’t have a lot they could control, but they could enter into a river to show that they were ready to commit to a different way of living in relationship with each other.  A ritual of commitment that was both deeply personal and deeply public. A commitment that was about that most nebulous thing, faith.

When Jesus approached John, he made both a private commitment and a public statement that he was committed to the community and committed to God’s vision of empowering, encouraging and healing.  The ancient Greek translation of that moment suggests that God’s power broke open into the world and came into Jesus and the community at that moment.  A powerful symbol that change was coming, and the world would be turned upside down.

Peter’s writing tells us of the consequences of joining this upside-down community.  Instead of flight, fight or freezing, we instead find ourselves filled with God’s goodness.  Peter called us to take our faith and nurture it so that we add to our faith with goodness, and our goodness with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with endurance, and endurance with godliness, and godliness with mutual affection, and mutual affection with truly unselfish love.

Truly unselfish love then, is something that we grow with God’s grace.  It is both gift and practise, something we have and something we work on.  It is unselfish love that will lead us into a different kind of community and even society.  Selfish love leads to chaos and destruction but love that cares for all others regardless of their appearance, their DNA or their orientation leads to strengthening community and a society that cares for the vulnerable, the grieving, the powerless and the sick.

This scripture encourages us to exercise our faith muscle, and it has had a remarkable impact on our world.  A young man some 300 years ago heard these words and it changed his life.  He was an Oxford student, who became ordained so that he could get a job tutoring undergraduates.  He followed the usual career path, but one day he got a letter asking if he would go to the colonies and start a new church.  He travelled to the newest colony, barely two years old at the time.  He thought he would be spreading Christianity to the indigenous people but instead served the colonists who were building farms there.  At that time, the colony was committed to developing sustainably without any plantations or slave labor, unlike its biggest neighbors, but solely by small-scale agricultural practises, similar to English and Scottish farms back home.  That state was Georgia, surprisingly.  Can you imagine if Georgia had stayed committed to being a slave-free state, what history might have been like?

Anyway, that young man didn’t do too well at his first congregation, and two years later he was on a boat heading back for Oxford.  Many churches wanted him to preach about his experiences in the colony, but became disillusioned with him, banning him from preaching.  He became so discouraged that he decided to give up being a minister, and then he read the 2 Peter passage.  He heard its message of encouragement and empowerment.  With those words, he went to a prayer meeting that evening and found his heart ‘strangely moved’.  He found his resilience deepened, his faith strengthened, his message inspired, and his words heard by simple people hungry for hope.  He got his brother to help him with songs and preaching and before they realized it, their method for teaching the bible, for helping develop faith and deepen commitments had become more popular than the two of them could manage.  They were taunted as ‘Methodists’ because of the methodical way they taught about faith, and eventually these two devout Anglicans laid the groundwork for the Methodist Church, one of the founding denominations of our United Church of Canada, and the inspiration for the construction of this very building I have the honor of preaching in today.

John talked about using all our brains for our faith journey, our passion, our intellect, but also our sense of the historic journey we are on, and our exploration of our sacred heritage.  Some call it the Wesleyan quadrilateral, logic, emotion, tradition and scripture, as a way of discerning where God calls us on our faith journey.  It is a way of making sober, sensible, loving and faithful decisions in difficult times.  Such thoughtful methods are needed now more than ever so that we chose our paths as adopted children of God, not as alligators, deer and rabbits.  Let us remember that we are called to use all our best selves and especially unselfish love as a foundation of how we live our lives, and may our lives be an inspiration to all who follow in our footsteps as we are inspired to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, our Christ.  Amen.