Against All Expectations

Easter was a disaster, at least according to the Gospel of Mark.  Three women came to a gloomy tomb to do a distasteful task by themselves.  There were no undertakers, no funeral homes, or no caskets.  If anyone was to take care of a corpse, especially one who was the product of a shameful torturous execution, it was family members who loved the deceased.  So the ladies, in this oldest of Gospels, made their way in the dark of the early morning, grieving and stumbling on the rough road to the outskirts of town where they expected to cry and hold their beloved rabbi one more time.  They knew what would happen next.  They knew that it was going to be stinky, stomach-churning business.  They knew they were alone in this distasteful task.

It's easy to gloss over this when we think of Easter.  Chocolate, colorful pysanka, flowers, fancy hats, it’s a bright colorful celebration of the return of spring.  And most people prefer the sugar rush of sweet chocolate to the heavy perfumes and ointments that the two Marys and Salome were carrying.  Let’s have fun after a long winter!

It's good to celebrate, but what are we celebrating?  The resurrection, of course, in all its illogical, implausible and unscientific glory.  Despite the Da Vinci Code and other conspiracy theories, some that are even debunked by Peter in our scriptures, something surprising and shocking happened that Easter Sunday.  It was such a news item that even a Jewish Historian named Josephus wrote about him some 50 years afterwards, saying:

Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man. For he was a doer of startling deeds, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. And he gained a following both among many Jews and many of Greek origin. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.

A Roman historian also mentioned Jesus in his records as well, Tacitus, as did several other writers.  What’s interesting is that they didn’t think Christianity would last, but it persevered despite all odds.  When Peter was executed in Rome, people must have thought it was the end.  Peter’s story had spread too far to let his death stop the message of Easter.  Peter spoke so often about the life and death and life after death of Jesus, his beloved rabbi that it spread everywhere.  Today’s scripture showed that at first he preached to people who only spoke his language.  Then he was summoned to another town to visit a powerful Roman commander and he didn’t know what to think. 

Roman army leaders didn’t ask people to show up for a visit without a very good reason.  I can imagine that Peter was nervous about the invitation.  Would the trip be a trap or a test?  Would he be arrested, thrown in jail, executed?  Instead, much to his surprise, he found himself welcomed, with the whole large household of Cornelius, soldiers, slaves and all, waiting on every word.  It was the last thing he expected.

Peter still thought that Jesus was the Messiah for his own people, for those who were faithful to the Torah, who went to the Temple, who prayed to the God of Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Leah and Rachel, Moses and Miriam and Aaron.  But Jesus had never turned down a conversation with Samaritans or Phoenicians or Romans.  And Peter had forgotten that.  Peter needed to relearn a lesson of hospitality and welcome, a lesson of courage and boldness, a lesson of inclusion and daring.  The experience of the first Easter shattered his understanding of who God was and how the world worked.

This shattering experience continued to have ripple effects to everyone who knew Jesus.  The women at the tomb broke their silence and shared their news to Peter.   He found the courage to spread his experiences of Jesus and that first Easter.  “Now I understand that this message is for everyone, the amazing message that Jesus lived and died and still lives.” This shattering experience that defied all logic would inspire new understandings and new courage.  Christianity continues to be impacted by the ripples of that first Easter.  It continues to inspire new bold and daring and deep acts of justice and compassion.

Josephus must have thought this tribe of Christians would soon be relegated to the history books as a small footnote.  In his four-volume history of the Jewish people, Josephus only writes a few sentences about Jesus, the doer of startling deeds.  But Jesus wasn’t stopped by even death, and his followers continued to do startling deeds.  They opened schools and hospitals for everyone regardless of any age, race, ethnicity, or ability.  They took care of the dead with tenderness and love regardless of whether they were rich or poor, jew or gentile, slave or free, something that was anathema to cultured Romans of the day. We as followers are to continue to recognize that God knows no partiality, and that we too are called to join this courageous tribe of Christians.  Easter is more than chocolates, it is an invitation to join Peter, Mary, Paul and the others in deep spirituality, bold discipleship and daring justice that the world so desperately needs right here and right now. 

They had Courage because they discovered that God transformed even the ugliness of death into life.  The deepest grief and fear can be transformed by God.  Nothing we can do can stop God.  We too can find ourselves doing startling deeds of inclusion, love and acceptance.  We can still inspire others by our loving example.  We can also do acts of daring courage.  We can chose to include others that seem as distasteful as Peter saw the centurion. May we be as bold, as deep and as daring as the tribe of Christians that the world has always seen as insignificant but that has through the centuries changed the course of history.  May it be so for us all!

Whose Fault is it Anyway?

 

1 Corinthians 10:1–14 Flee from idols

Luke 13:1–9 The parable of the barren fig tree.

Can you imagine hearing these scriptures from the pulpit in a  church in L'viv or Mariupol?  I don’t know if these readings are in the Eastern Orthodox Church’s list of what to read in Lent, but it would be heard very differently again in Moscow.  Two different ways of hearing the scripture, when there’s a war going on.  And how might Syrian Christians hear this passage?  Or the tiny group of Afghanistan Christians whose very existence is illegal in that country?

It is easy to look for a simple interpretation of these passages, like Robbie our river dragon did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Pn7aA0y_GM, but easy is not best.  Both passages struggle with one of the most difficult questions Humanity asks.  If God is so all powerful and good, why do bad things happen to good people?  There’s no easy answer to that question.  It assumes a duality of human nature, either a positive or a negative.  And while that might work with motivating soldiers and civilians, it does not work in the long run for the benefit of Humanity. 

Paul says in this scripture that worshiping false priorities brings disaster.  And I totally agree with him on that.  When we put our faith and trust in something other than God, whether it’s stocks or a union or big business or the shopping channel, our lives can get messy and our priorities mixed up.  We can lose the drive to care for each other, lose our ability to see another’s viewpoint, lose our courage, lose our commitment to building a better world, and be only focused on surviving as best as we can in the day-to-day struggle to pay our bills and have a little fun now and then.  We forget about old-fashioned values like kindness, respect, empathy, hope and so on.  But Paul goes on to say that God never gives us more than we can handle.  Tell that to the Ukrainians, the people in war-torn countries like Nigeria or Yemen who aren’t getting the media that Zelensky does.  Tell that to the Russians who woke up to find large ‘z’s painted on their doors to intimidate them into compliance.  Tell that to folks here who have lost a loved one.  This is not helpful, Paul, and despite it generating a lot of t-shirts and coffee mugs, when life gets messy, this scripture does not comfort and inspire those who are hurting and desperate.  They feel blamed and overwhelmed.

An easy interpretation that God hurts only the unfaithful causes more harm than good.  And it ignores something that we Canadian Christians have tended to ignore, even though it is also embedded in our scripture.  That is the fact that evil exists.  I’m not talking about a laughable cartoon character in red tights with horns, tail and pitchfork, or even a handsome bar owner who works with a detective when he’s not playing the piano and forcing confessions out of people.  Evil exists.  Putin’s hunger for power is evil.  Trump ‘s arrogant superiority complex is evil.  Black marketeers concocting chemicals that eat away people’s brains and leave them dying on Edmonton streets from overdoses is evil.  Angry djs’ plans to infect their community with outrage and devotion is evil.  Cyberhackers and scammers disruption of society, steal money from seniors and destroy banks and hospitals alike for their own gain is evil.  The actions of ultra right-wing conservatives challenging common sense protocols to protect people’s health, and people more interested in profit than caring for their neighbor, try to undermine our health and education.  Actions and attitudes like this are evil.

God may never give us more than we can handle, but evil can give us so much that we need to reach out to others for help.  And if we think that coming to church will spare us from the messiness of life and death, we are wrong.  I think Jesus was clever in his response.  He confronted that kind of easy thinking – ‘they died because they were bad’ or ‘they died because they weren’t religious enough’, by challenging the Galileans around him to mind their own spiritual business!  Rather than pointing fingers or claiming the lives lost were because of weak faith, he said, fertilize your own soul before you start judging the worth of other people’s devotion to God.

That is a helpful word in Lent.  We are called to fertilize our own souls, to add manure to our own faith journey, and let God sort out the rest.  Not as an insurance policy to protect us from messy deaths.  Jesus and Paul both, even Peter for that matter, had messy deaths, despite their devotion to God.  But as a motivation to build honorable, inspiring and trustworthy lives that can be a beacon for all to see.

An analogy can be seen in a simple electric plug.  It has two prongs, hot and neutral, and both must be used to turn on a light.  We need both the current and a place for the excess current to go, both positive and negative flowing through the two prongs to have light.  But when we add a grounding prong, we can handle a lot more.  We can be a bigger light, we can shine farther and stronger when that ground is plugged into the outlet.  It doesn’t mean we are protected from a lightening strike that hits the circuit, but it does mean that we will handle the normal fluctuations and challenges to come our way.  When  we are grounded in God’s love, we will light the world with hope.  Hope is not a simple solution or an easy fix, or an insurance policy.  Hope is doing the possible, leaving the impossible to God.  Hope is when we honestly see the world in its complexity, and trust that in the messiness, in the complexities and simplicities, in life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with us, we are not alone.  Thanks be to God!

When dreams are in ruins

Doomsday.  It’s like a car crash on the Anthony Henday freeway.  We slow down to watch the disaster or because the emergency response vehicles are flashing their lights, and it’s hard not to rubberneck as we crawl by.  Or it’s like hearing about a tornado and power outage in Vancouver.  I immediately texted my son only to find out he had not even known that the power was out for some of his coworkers.  Or like the time we were on our honeymoon in Queensland in 1987 and heard that Mill Woods, where our brothers lived and our wedding presents awaited our return, had been destroyed by a tornado!  Time stands still for a moment, disbelief is expressed, adrenalin kicks in and we do what we can to connect with our family and friends.  Our home in Mill Woods didn’t even lose a leaf off a tree that day.  But the anxiety that we endured while we scrambled to find out what had happened took a while to wear off, and we were lucky compared to some folks in the trailer park.

Now we are in times that have left many feeling anxious and isolated.  It feels like we are all holding our breaths waiting for things to go back to the way they were.  Yet so much has happened and is still happening that it is hard to picture what back to normal, or forward to new normal, will look like.

Mark was writing his gospel at a similar time of great change.  He remembered the ‘good old days’ when Jesus was teaching the disciples, inspiring, empowering and engaging them.  The times Jesus comforted them, the times Jesus provoked them.  When we hear Mark’s story, there is a lot of Jesus provoking and challenging everyone he met.  The scribes and Pharisees, the temple officials, the keepers of the status quo.  And he provoked his disciples too, much to their discomfort.  Imagine standing in a beautiful, awe-inspiring building that was the centre of the faith, and Jesus saying, eh, it’s not so great.  And Jesus was right to warn them not to worship the building.  Only 30 or so years later, it was destroyed so badly by the besieging Roman army that it would never be rebuilt and the western wall is all that’s left of what was once a glorious symbol of Herod’s ambitions.

The trauma of having the temple, with the holy of holies destroyed alongside much of the city, was devastating for the faithful.  They struggled to understand why God had allowed it to be destroyed.  Leading up to this, charismatic leaders were recruiting people to wage war on the Romans.  They had some success and wiped out 6000 Roman Centurions in one ambush.  But as the Romans started taking the insurrection more seriously, pushing the various groups into Jerusalem, the leaders started fighting amongst each other in a bloody civil war.  Jerusalem was destroyed, with a death toll of over a million, according to the Roman Historian Josephus.  So Jesus warning his people of the different leaders who would be vying for their loyalty was making an important point.  Jumping on a bandwagon because it’s led by a charismatic speaker is not what God is calling us to do.  It can lead to death and destruction.  The world is full of earthquakes and wars and famine, but we are not to be dismayed.  We are to stay focused on our purpose.

I am proud of this congregation.  We have been very steady in our focus.  When DJs urged us to protest public health legislation, we did not jump on that bandwagon.  When friends and family started sharing conspiracy theories or recommended veterinarian medication for Covid, we resisted.  When people thought it was okay to make racist comments in public and talk about making Alberta great again, we challenged those attitudes.  We wore orange feathers and orange t-shirts, we wrote letters to the editors, we started petitions to save parks, and other initiatives.  We started saying a land acknowledgement long before it was popular to do so.  I was surprised and impressed that the Remembrance Day ceremony this week started with a land acknowledgement.

Here are two stories from this week of how we  make a difference when we stick to our vision of God’s Community.  One was a family of four who came because the Friendship Centre thought we might have some winter coats to give them.  There was an eight-year-old, a mum, an auntie and a kookum, and they told me that Covid had been a real struggle for them.  They saw our basket of socks and their eyes opened wide and they were so happy to know that they could take some home.  They also took some of the food and clothes from our donation baskets.  Next time they come they will take our Jiggs Dinner that we froze for families in need.  There were other people who were treated to new socks and food this week.  People struggling with mental health or with developmental challenges.  But I will not forget the look on the RCMP officer’s face who came to collect socks for the Detachment.  I told him we had a lot, but I don’t think he believed me; he told me he’d take as many as we could spare.  Boy, was he surprised with the basket filled to overflowing!  He said that socks would go out in the squad cars so that if they had to deal with someone who was in the bush, they would have warm dry feet because of us.  And he wanted me to thank you for your generosity.

We may help prevent frostbite, gangrene, or even death amongst people who have lost hope that they deserve to be treated with care and respect.  Paul wrote, “provoke one another to love and good deeds”, and we have done just that.  Having a vision that stays the course, inspires generosity, empowers our community and engages the ones who are seen as least among us, is what we as Christians are called to do.  When we keep that vision in mind, walls are broken down, chains are thrown aside, and we all live in Christ’s vision of freedom and liberty for all.