Where to Sit?

 How many people remember playing musical chairs?  How did it go?  There would be a circle of chairs and there would always be one less chair than there were kids.  We would circle around the chairs until the music stopped then everyone would rush to sit on the nearest chair.  The person who was left standing was eliminated from the circle, another chair was removed and we would do it again until there was only one chair left.  How many of you remember winning?  How many of you remember having to wait a long time on the sideline until it was time to start again?  What did it feel like to win?  What did it feel like to be eliminated?

I don’t ever remember being the winner, although I think I made it to three chairs once.  Winning is not something that we humble Christians are supposed to intentionally go aggressively after.  And maybe that’s why the Christian message has fallen out of favor; it’s not about winning at life against all adversity, or being the best and lording it over all the other contestants.  I know I am a dreadful competitor, I really want to win. Last spring I was in several contests for Toastmasters, and finding my way into a humble mindset was really difficult.  I didn’t like how competative I became, or even entitled and selfish I felt.  In the end I reminded myself that I was doing it for fun. 

So much of life can become a competition.  Where we sit at a banquet can certainly be a part of that.  How close to the bridal party will we get to sit?  Where will our table be at the Rotary Dinner or the Chamber of Commerce awards night? What about the AU President’s Breakfast or the Mayor’s Lunch? Who will we sit beside at the Senior’s pancake breakfast?

They can be ways we measure our status and importance to other people.  That’s what Jesus saw when he was invited to dinner one evening.  He probably was remembering Proverbs 25:6-7, which says “Do not put yourself forward in the king’s presence or stand in the place of the great; for it is better to be told, “Come up here,” than to be put lower in the presence of a noble.”  Wise words from the scriptures that he saw in action that day.  Here he was, guest of a pharisee, invited for supper and the nerve he had, reminding them that scripture taught not to be pushy and aggressive.  Not to treat dinner like a game of musical chairs, where you try to win status and importance before everyone else.

I suspect some of you might be saying, “So what?  I’m not going out to dinner parties with famous movie stars or politicians.  I’m not dining with the rich and famous these days.  Even before Covid, I didn’t do that.”

We might not be dining or hobnobbing with important people, but I dare say we may still feel the itch to prove ourselves as worthy or important or influential.  We may feel like we are entitled to being treated as the special individuals that we hope we are.  When I talk to hairdressers, they tell me that the clients who can be demanding and finicky are even more demanding and finicky since Covid.  We hear stories of the ‘mass resignation’ of people in the restaurant and retail industries because they are fed up with being treated like servants to be ordered about.  Others are doing what they are calling a ‘silent resignation’ where they stop going above and beyond in doing their jobs.  No more overtime, no more working through lunchbreaks to prove that they are committed to the company, that’s not happening anymore.  About 24% of employees think that their bosses care for them, which means that most working people feel their bosses don’t care at all.  Getting to be at home for folks meant a break from the hustle, the harassment, the watercooler gossip sessions, the entitled customers.  And they don’t want to go back.

It sounds like they are tired of playing the adult version of musical chairs! Yet it’s easier said than done.  We may be thinking that we’re entitled to more respect than we actually are.  Like the average driver who thinks that they are above average in their driving skills, we may assume that we are better than others because we are us!

Jesus taught us that the game of musical chairs is not what God wants us to play.  This game assumes that there’s scarcity we must compete for, including scarcity of influence. Jesus said our seeking importance can become an idol.  In our craving for status, we can be actually embracing fear, fear of others, fear of the unknown, fear of our own ability to deal with life’s challenges. 

How do we let go of this game of musical chairs? Our reading from Hebrews suggest we do it through worship, community, ministry of hospitality.  We do it through sexual relationships that are not competitive or dominating, and through money decisions free from status seeking and influence peddling.  Perhaps donating to a charity instead of buying a vote. Remembering that God is with us, we shall not be afraid, what can mere humans do to us?  Nothing can separate us from God who loves us, not even our seating arrangement and we sit beside.

Someone wrote: If you are sitting in public and a stranger sits down beside you, simply stare straight ahead and say, “did you bring the money?” Christians have a reputation of saying to strangers, “that’s my pew” or “that’s my chair.” God calls us to say instead, “come sit with me and be welcome in this pew”.

The Kingdom of Heaven is like a game of musical chairs where the music never stops, the chairs face inward so we can see each other and there are always enough chairs for everyone. Thanks be to God for this blessing.

“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.

Pride and Prejudice

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a minister in possession of a sermon, must be in want of a congregation to preach to!

One of my mentors in PEI who loved helping us work on sermon topics before he retired, founded a Jane Austen book club in his congregation.  Not only did he get them reading Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey and the rest of the Austen books, but he had them reading other novels from the time period, The Count of Monte Cristo, Frankenstein and so on.  Rev. Dawson was also seen on several occasions in full dress that would have rivaled Mr. Darcy at the grandest of balls.  He’s not the only Canadian to be a fan, there is a yearly ball in Edmonton where ladies and gentlemen have been preparing for months by sewing and taking dance lessons.  Young people like my daughter are watching Pride and Prejudice and Zombies on YouTube for free, or the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a modern version where Liz is making a vlog on the internet.  That was so well done that it took me three episodes in to realize it was based on Pride and Prejudice and not just some young thing talking about life and the stresses of modern living.  It took a while to convince my daughter, who first showed it to me, that it was based on a real book, then she was hooked!  There’s many new versions and retellings, even one from the point of view of the servants slaving away in the Bennet kitchen.  What an eye-opener that was, back before unions pushed to reduce the work week below 58 hours!

One of the characters is the indomitable Lady Catherine De Bourgh.  She is domineering, elegant, refined, and quite frankly a nasty snob who discriminates against Lizzie Bennet when she fears that Liz might marry her nephew Darcy.  She knows the lineage of everyone worth knowing, and judges people based on how well they can follow the rules of proper etiquette.  Her way of living is not that dissimilar to what we saw in Downton Abbey.

That society Jane Austen described was the contemporary culture in 1813, a mere 206 years ago.  And it wasn’t much different than the time of Jesus, or dinners of high state at today’s G7 events or tea at Buckingham Palace.  Choosing who we sit next to based on our sense of status is a very natural human habit.

Things have changed tremendously since 1813, of course, and in Canada especially, there is less chance of someone being judged by who their parents are.  But there are still times where is a sense of class structure.  The epidemic of drug overdoses is occurring primarily in young men in blue collar industries between the ages of 20 and 29, a trend that is in both Canada and the US.  No one is sure why ?  In construction and mining, men are six times more likely to die of overdoses than all the men of their age together.

Wage disparities are still an issue, with Canadian women earning 84 cents for every dollar earned by men in 2017, in 2015 the average income for 90% of Canadians was $33 thousand dollars per year, and the average income for the top 10% was more than ten times that much, $500 thousand dollars, with over $2 million for the top .1% of the population. 

So as much as we might like to think we have become a democratized society of equals, there is still the same snobbery and discrimination that Jane Austen liked to take pot shots at.  The same sense of entitlement that Jesus challenged.  The same kind of misplaced loyalties that Jeremiah pointed out.  The same kind of arrogance that the psalmist described.

Today we still struggle with pride.  We think that modern society has all the answers, that science can solve all our problems, that independence will be the ultimate character trait that we should celebrate and honor.  That pride is not helping us. 

Everywhere we turn, we can see how our human arrogance is leading us into troubles.  Whether it’s shootings in Texas, protests in Hong Kong, melting glaciers in Greenland and Canada, we see where human arrogance and pride has led us.  But it’s not just in the Lady Catherines of the world that we can see pride and prejudice.  The Lizzie Bennets, the average Canadians can also be living egotistically without even knowing it.  We forget the people behind the scenes that help us have a good life, the ditch diggers, the garbage truck drivers, and yes, even the street people who want love and hope for something better.

When I feel overwhelmed by all the disasters we face, I remind myself that amazing things happen when I start with the only person I can change, myself.  Every Thursday, there are people in our church basement telling amazing stories of transformation when they chose to look hard at their attitudes and their pride.  The ones who are humble about their stories are the ones who inspire me the most.  They remind us to start one day at a time.  I started this summer with a metal straw from Paddymelon and a bamboo toothbrush that is completely plastic free.  I have a travel mug in the back seat of my car that I use for those impulse trips to Tim Hortons.  It is a baby step, but it’s also a way to remind myself that change starts here at home.  Liz Bennet has to re-examine her beliefs about herself and it’s only when she let go of her own pride, her own prejudice, that she could get help from Darcy and bring about the changes she and her family needed in their hour of shame.  

More than ever we need to recognize, repent and turn back to our God of mercy, who provides us living waters to drink from instead of polluted, plastic-filled waters that fail to heal.  God loves us and wants us to have abundant life.  I hope that we can all come to find the joy of true humbleness that turning to God can bring to our lives and even the whole world. 

Just as we no longer live in a world where marriage is the only status a female can have, and a world where most children quit school to go to work at the age of eleven, one day may we live in a world where we live with respect in creation, where we love and serve others, seeking justice and resisting evil, proclaiming that God is with us, we are not alone.  Thanks be to God.

Entitlement or Epiphany?

28 years ago to this very day, I lumbered into church, feeling like a beached whale.  Our sanctuary didn’t have wooden pews but soft backed chairs, so I was able to get through the service in some comfort.  Then my brother in law invited us to Costco, a real treat as we didn’t have a membership.  But the big warehouse and cement floor had me stopping at every chair I could find for a rest.  Back in the car, with minus 25 temperatures, I was not impressed when my brother in law’s little hyundi refused to start.  I’m going to have this baby here if you don’t get the car started, I sulked.  Somehow the three Rosborough men got the car going, I went home and 12 hours later, I had a baby.

So my Epiphany Sunday started in a sulky mood of entitlement.  I was not in a good space.  I felt entitled to kid-glove handling and a certain level of sympathy as I waddled around church and store.  But when that baby was finally put into my arms, all the sulks disappeared in the sheer wonder of the miracle of holding a beautiful child.

It took the hard work and pain of labor to shake me out of my entitlement mind set.  But Herod did not have that pain and agony.  He stayed stuck in his entitlement and was so threatened by the visit of the magi that he turned violent.  The suggestion that there was a new and different kind of leadership out there, an alternative king to him, was so threatening, Matthew says, that Herod resorted to the worst crime against humanity; he targeted small children for slaughter.  All because of three wandering philosophers who asked too many questions in the wrong place.

It was a natural mistake for the Magi to make, assuming that the palace would be where an infant king would be born, and natural to assume that Herod would be the father, or perhaps even the grandfather. 

After all, that’s where kings and rulers are born, not in an insignificant town full of dirt poor people.

And this story would have resonated with Matthew’s audience who all knew the tale of their greatest leader, Moses, who also survived a tyrant targeting small defenseless children. 

What is it about children that leave us shaking when they are attacked?  Whether it is a drug addict in Edmonton attacking his girlfriend’s children, or a Syrian toddler drowned on a beach as his family tried desperately to flee war, or children held in detention centres for illegal immigrants dying needlessly, these stories cut to the heart of what it means to be human.  All too often children are the victims of willful, entitled people grasping for power and control.

We don’t need to look too far back in Canadian history to see the damage done when we as a society were so threatened by children that we put them into schools to teach them what we thought would make them most like us.  And the TRC calls us to become educated about how that has impacted generations of families.  But we also see children at the Mount Cashel orphanage, or the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children, and even here in Athabasca where a coach is alleged to have targeted his young athletes.  For whatever reason, some people feel like they are entitled to take out their negative emotions and lust for power or control on humans least likely to be able to stand up for themselves.

Matthew placed Jesus firmly in the camp of folks who knew what it was like to be threatened by powerful people.  He shaped his understanding of Jesus from Matthew background in the stories of Moses.  He showed Jesus not as a powerful king and leader, but as someone so threatening that his parents became refugees just to save their child’s life, to protect Jesus when he was most vulnerable.

But Jesus never stopped being vulnerable.  He never stopped identifying with the poor, the powerless, the folks who had little to no say in what happened in their lives.

The ones who knew pain and suffering.  The ones who struggled to live by higher principles than just power, control and accumulation.  The ones who look elsewhere than palaces for direction.  The ones who recognized when they were in a place where self-aggrandization is more important than doing what’s right.  And even the wise philosophers who recognized that maybe where they think they will find answers in glorious places of pomp and circumstance, turned out to be places of greed and selfishness.

We are called by Matthew to turn from the palaces and the powerful, as the Magi did, and search again by a star of wisdom and wonder.  To humble ourselves enough to go into a stable where the hope of the world should never be found.  We are called to ward against our own attitudes of entitlement and instead choose the surprise of finding epiphany in strange places.

In the end, the Magi chose a humble path, and that humbleness was what led them to what they were truly seeking.  But, as I found out 28 years ago, it’s when we are most humble, most honest with ourselves, and most prepared to face the pain of being truly vulnerable, that we can find the deep joy of an encounter with a God that so loves us, that pain and vulnerability is worth the risk to reach us.

The scandal of the Gospel message, and the scandal of the Magi’s search for meaning is that the Divine is not found only in lofty places, but also in the lowliest times, the earthiest and most humble of places.  And that divine reach right down into our deepest pain and suffering is a reach of love that brings healing and joy.  May we all be transformed by such joy as we follow our Epiphany stars.