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.

Bragging Rights and Power Trips

Have you ever read an autobiography of a famous person simply because it promises to deliver all kinds of dirty little secrets about other people?  Some of them almost delight in bragging about their crazy stunts and bizarre, outrageous behaviors.  They go from one scandal to the next.  You can read all about Prince Harry’s life and resentments of his family, the media, his school and anyone else in too much detail.  His oversharing has not been appreciated by royal watchers who have been watching him live in royal splendor since he was born.  There’s not a lot of sympathy for someone you’ve watched all their life who decides to tell you how rough life really is.

Maybe that’s why Jesus had such a tough reception in Nazareth. The hometown crowd was too cynical.  Here he was back again, after a long absence where he disappeared into the wilderness for a long while, and when he came back, he brought strangers, city folk, tax collectors and stinking fishermen, as his best buddies.  It was obvious he had gotten too big for his britches and needed to be taken down a peg. There are many tales of the young city slicker coming back home after an education and being snubbed for their highfaluting ways.

This was surprising to Jesus, and his efforts to heal people fell flat in front of people who could tell stories of when he was in diapers.  And they snidely insulted him, “Is this Mary’s son, coming here thinking he can impress us?” Calling Jesus “Mary’s son” instead of “Joseph’s son” hinted at him being illegitimate without directly coming out and insulting him to his face.  Being called a carpenter wasn’t much better. The Greek word used here for "carpenter" was a handyman that could be called on to do the typical tiny jobs around a household, replace the hinges, get the hair clog out of the sink drain, that kind of thing.  Not the kind of person who would carefully craft a beautiful piece of mahogany into a one-of-a-kind coffee table for a wealthy patron and post the time-lapse video on TicToc to drum up likes.  There’s a different Greek word for that kind of carpenter.

The fact that this story doesn’t show Jesus in a good light after building him up as doing amazing things, is one of those signposts that Jesus was a living, breathing human being, and that the disciples around him often were as confused by what he taught as we are.  The trip to Nazareth has all the hallmarks of a failed trip.  Not quite as bad as a disastrous political debate broadcast around the world, but close.  The astounding thing was that Jesus didn’t let it shake his confidence.  He didn’t come up with a new marketing plan, a better advertising campaign, a new strategic vision. Instead, he sent his disciples out to go and practice what he had shown them.  He gave them authority to care for the people they met on their travels.  That authority was not shaken by Nazareth.  It wasn’t disrupted.  Jesus just carried on and said to his followers to remember to focus on the loving and healing part of the message.

The message Jesus was sharing wasn’t to get him elected to take over the Roman Empire and free the Hebrew people from their oppressors. Or how he was hard done by his family growing up.  It was to proclaim that God was in their midst, bringing new hope and new healing to their broken culture.

Paul also was clear that his preaching was not about him either. He wasn’t trying to impress people with his superpowers as a great disciple.  He wasn’t bragging about his debating skills or his mental sharpness.  He was writing to remind them about the teachings Jesus shared.  The teachings of caring for one’s neighbors, of being a community of equals, of working together, of looking after people whom the culture regarded as worthless and unimportant.

Our world today still struggles with these teachings.  We like to focus on people who are glamorous and powerful.  We idolize characters like Ironman, set aside as special, showing off how important they are for the survival of the world.  They are the only ones who can stand between the average joe and the powers of corruption.  Paul rejected that kind of hero worship.  He would have been the last person to build a Crystal Palace kind of church and plunk himself in the middle of it and bask in the power and adoration he felt entitled to.  Instead, Paul chose humbleness and caring, just as Jesus had.

We too have choices. Do we talk about ourselves and how great we are, or do we talk about how God shows up in our lives despite our weaknesses and challenges?  When Christianity is at its best when it remembers to be a channel of God’s love.  When it’s at it’s worst, selling $60 bibles to promote a political party or inflicting the 10 commandments in every classroom, or controlling women’s bodies or setting up cult-like mega churches with charismatic personalities, it degrades the message that God loves us all.  We think that we can’t talk about our faith unless we are smooth and practiced like a great political debater, but Paul and Jesus remind us that we can share that God is stronger than our weaknesses, and shines through our imperfections.  When we focus on caring for our neighbors, reaching out to those who are seen as insignificant, when we volunteer on Canada Day to serve our community, we are, like the disciples, living into God’s plan in amazing and beautiful ways.  The disciples never thought that they would teach millions of people about Christ, Paul never thought his humble words of compassion would topple an empire and last for centuries.  We never know when our simple small acts of kindness might do the same.  May we be inspired as Paul and the 12 were, to live our lives bragging about God’s love for us all. Amen.

Raging against the Machine

Anger is a dangerous tool.  It’s intoxicating when we feel we have a legitimate reason to let it all out and pull out our whips, rant at people present in the room and knock over tables.  It feels good.  Or at least for the first 10 or 20 minutes.  Then remorse sets in and we start second-guessing ourselves.  Did we do it for the right reasons?  Was that the only way we could get our point across?  Did it have the results we hoped for?  And when we ask those kinds of questions, often the answer is a resounding ‘no’.

Anger often lowers the trust we have in the angry person.  It can also emphasize our own vulnerability.  The news recently of a shooter invading Edmonton City Hall is a good example of this.  The beautiful glass pyramid was the location of celebrations, heated debates and controversial presentations, but it was open to everyone, adults, children, new Canadians, First Nations, rich and poor alike.  Now because of one man’s anger, that has gone from City Hall.

It's easy to imagine that being the response of the temple authorities to Jesus having his little hissy fit.  Whether we read the Mark version or the John version, the leaders were not happy. They wanted to know why Jesus thought he had the right to pull such a stunt.  It was upsetting enough that his disciples all remembered it a little differently.  Mark’s story has Jesus quoting scripture, John’s has Jesus predicting his death and resurrection.  Mark remembered it happening just before Jesus was crucified, and John told it as happening as the start of Jesus’ ministry.  Either way it was so memorable that it got into all 4 gospels.  Even Christmas doesn’t get into them all.  So, this is right up there with Palm Sunday, Good Friday and Easter.  This is an important story.

It is easy to point a finger at the scribes and Pharisees and say, “boy did they ever get it wrong! At least we don’t worship like that!”  This is problematic on two counts.  One is that it assumes that they were bad, and that assumption has sometimes slipped into anti Semitism.  The other assumption is that we aren’t like them, and that too is not helpful.  It says that the way we do things in our church or our denomination is perfect, and so are we so we don’t have to change.

Worship isn’t perfect.  And maybe it should never strive to be perfect.  Oh sure, there are the churches who have teams of technicians, multitudes of musicians, a preponderance of polished preachers, and a horde of happy hosts clamoring to greet you at the door.  There’s a church near Halifax that went from 20 people to a congregation of over 500 people in the space of three years, whose preacher got on the cover of a magazine!  The church even put out souvenir dvds of that day’s service that they sold to folks as they left the sanctuary.  They were pressing those dvds as fast as others were pouring coffee in the fellowship hall.  It was quite the entertaining event.  For many, it was a powerful spiritual experience, complete with laying on of hands, speaking in tongues and spiritual warfare.  Heaven and Hell were mentioned as both bribe and threat.  The lighting was superb and the slide show was flawless.  Is that what worship is supposed to be?

It’s easy for us to look down our noses or be jealous of that kind of worship, but worship is supposed to be a time when we come together to support each other on our faith journey.  It’s a time when we look and listen for signs of God at work in our our world.  It’s a time when we open ourselves to learning something new, something we hadn’t thought of before, something that may spark new ideas and new insights.  It’s a time where, as one theology writer said, “we are to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”.  So those of us who are in a good space support those of us who are struggling.  And those of us who are struggling will pay it forward to the next person when we can.  All this is happening in worship.  We hope. 

The ancient Latin word for worship was ‘liturgia’ which translates to literally public service or may also be work of the people.  Something we all do together.  Something that helps us all serve each other together and serve the world.  It’s not something one person does to others.  It’s not a stand-up comedy routine or a dramatic monologue. It’s work of the people by the people for the people to serve and love God.

When we read the scripture of Jesus knocking tables over in the temple, it’s a time to ask ourselves how we are doing?  Are there things getting in the way of our worship?  Are there things that we can be adding or taking off?  This is a constant process.  Pews weren’t introduced into churches until the 1200s and there are Alberta churches that had no pews until the 1930’s or later in the Ukrainian tradition.  There was a church in New York that split in the 1880’s when a newfangled organ was put in, others rebelled at the 'honky-tonk pianos or the Methodists that belong only in bars' or even singing.  We substituted grape juice because of the temperance union movement, and I’m sure that annoys some folks, and comforts others.  But however we worship, whatever way we worship, Jesus calls us to focus on God.  Not on our performance of worship.

The temple leaders were shocked at Jesus.  If he came here today, we might be shocked too.  But as we worship, as we wrestle with the scriptures in this place with our community of faith, we are also wrestling with Jesus, who continues to call us to look at why we worship and how we worship.  We are called to celebrate God’s presence here among us. May it all be to the glory of God and to loving our world.  Amen.