Setting Our Minds on Divine Things

Poor Jesus!  He was wanting to be honest and open and transparent, and Peter wanted to play politics.  “None of that honesty, Jesus, let’s say whatever it takes to build influence, you know, friends in high places” Peter said, and Jesus was so committed to brave, bold talk that he got hot under the collar with Peter, and scolded him in public. Hardly a Christian thing to do.  But Jesus was making a point that they weren’t waging a popularity contest or a political campaign, they were building a new way of living in the world.  One of radical rejection of what the world thinks is success, money, influence, power, none of that could hold a candle to what Jesus intended.  We see this still happening in our world on a daily basis, people willing to say anything and promise anything for the sake of fame and fortune.  People willing to poison their political opponents or sabotage their planes, destroy hospitals with children in them for the sake of peace, willing to promise anything in order to get elected.  Or promote misinformation agendas that will hurt vulnerable minorities for the sake of power.  People wanting to eliminate crosswalks intended on showing support to bullied teens.  Jesus flatly rejected and denounced that when he scolded Peter.

Peter wanted Jesus to be as influential as the religious leaders.  Jesus rejected that.  It wasn’t about comparing himself and building up a reputation.  It was not about setting his mind on human things, but on divine things.  What does that look like today?

Last month I had an opportunity to set my mind on divine things with a wonderful group of ministers.  31 United Church clergy from BC to Newfoundland joined with our Moderator the Right Reverend Dr. Carmen Lansdowne in Five Oaks, Ontario, a retreat centre like Naramata Centre in the Okanagan.  Lansdowne is the first female indigenous leader to be elected Moderator, and only the second indigenous leader ever elected to that role.  She is also warm, funny, and passionate about the United Church.  Using her indigenous lens of looking at the world, she brings a fresh perspective to what it means to set our minds on divine things.  We spent a week wrestling with what it means to be a Christian leader focused on taking up our crosses and letting go of the need to be successful, or even worse, the need to be right.  We talked about and learned about leadership best practices, ideas like figuring out what our strengths are.  We talked about what we loved doing and what was not so lovable about our jobs.  We talked about how all of us felt intimidated by the other bright minds in the room and how we all came feeling like we were not good enough to be in such an important program.

We also talked about the world and how it has changed.  In the sixties, ladies wore hats and gloves and dresses to church.  Jellied salads with everything from canned peas, lettuce or marshmallows would show up at potlucks.  No one had microwave ovens and a trip on an airplane was a rare and special event where a complimentary meal was served by women who looked like models.  Today, we still have potlucks, but the hats and gloves are long gone.  And jellied salads might still show up, but they tend not to have vegetables any more. 

We talked about how hard it is to preach good news in this changed world.  It’s like we keep serving jellied vegetable salad and the world looks at it and goes yuck.  Another analogy was that of the goldfish swimming in their bowl.  Do we know what the water tastes like that we are swimming in?

We talked about how worship has become something that is done privately.  And how it’s become something that people spend money on, crystals, candles, and the like.  It’s often an individual focus – my faith in me is what makes me well.  And I don’t need to do it with other people, because that can lead to conflict.  We’ve lost faith in social organizations.  Guides and scouts, Canadian Legion, Rotary, Lions, even the armed forces and the RCMP struggle to recruit new people.  We’ve also lost our sense of the sacred and focus mostly on the practical, the measurable, the obvious. No wonder congregations are struggling in today’s culture!  We stand for values and community and public spirituality.  Everything that our society has moved away from.

Jesus would have said to us, even though Society has moved away from God, even though the world focuses only on the material, even though it’s only about the individual, that we are to set our minds on divine things, not on earthly concerns.  Our last day in Ontario, we heard that message from none other than Rev. Michael Blair, who is the United Church’s General Secretary.  He told us that we have become focused only on the decline of the church, something that has been happening since 1964.  And yet he is seeing new opportunities and new missions rising up.  The church is committed to planting 100 new communities of faith, one of which has already started in Edmonton, a first-nations led group that meets in the old Beverly United Church.  Other projects and groups are doing exciting things in the name of Jesus in our denomination. He said that we are too focused on the cross, and not on divine things.  It’s easy to only believe in death and it’s hard to believe in resurrection.  Even Jesus struggled with that.

Rev. Blair called us to keep focused on divine things through our faith communities because that's where we find Christ with us.  We are not alone in our spiritual journeys.  God is with us.  We easily forget that as we swim in our fishbowls or serve jellied salads or learn better recipes to serve.  But in the cross and the resurrection, in life, in death, in life beyond death, we are not alone.  Thanks be to God!

Looking for Answers

There are times when grief is in the air, and even more so as we approach Hallowe’en.  There are videos of partiers in Mexico dressed as Catrins and Catrinas, with skull-like make up.  People try on costumes like the Grim Reaper, or other folk characters from horror stories or scary movies.  Kids wear all kinds of outfits of their favorite fictional characters or super heros.  I keep meaning to make myself a Jedi costume one of these days but never quite get around to pulling it off. 

We don’t go all out with the skull facepaints like they do in Mexico, but it is becoming more prevalent even in Canada.  And that might not be a bad thing.  When we think about death rituals here compared to places like Europe or South America, or even New Orleans, they are very different.  We no longer wash or dressing the body at home.  And we’ve also tried to make it invisible. One time we were in the hospital where a family member had passed away, and the hospital staff came up to us and asked to remove the body before other patients started to wake up.  They didn’t want to upset the other patients.  Fair enough, but if it’s being done to hide the reality of death, is that healthy for our society?

A chaplain who served in Afghanistan with the Canadian Armed Forces came home to Edmonton to find that there was a new trend of roadside shrines.  Suddenly whenever a tragedy happened there would be a mound of teddy bears in front of a store or a street corner where strangers would congregate, overwhelmed with grief for someone they had never met.  It was almost like the news story had cracked open a bubble of unexpressed grief that needed to be poured out in a public way.  Dealing with death is not easy.

Ministers, even in the United Church, get called to do exorcisms and house purifications.  That’s not a part of our theology.  But it can be a way of giving voice to grief that doesn’t have any other way out.  We are not comfortable with that kind of ‘woo woo’.  Going to the other extreme is not healthy either.  That’s materialism, when people only believe in what they can touch. That mindset can lead to people competing for the most stuff, the most money, the most of whatever they can control.  It is not what we are called to as a people wanting to be Jesus followers.

Jesus was struggling to communicate a middle way.  He talked to the Sadducees about their beliefs of the afterlife and used scripture to defend his belief.  God is the God of the present, of the living, and still the God of past leaders of the Hebrew people.  He also challenged them to think outside their stereotyped assumptions that the dead live in identical ways to the living, with the same interests, concerns, entanglements and struggles.  Nothing further could be what Jesus thought life after death was.  It wasn’t a continuation of life on earth, but a transformation that was beyond description or definition or perfect knowledge.  And certainly, life after death could not be understood through a materialist viewpoint.

But rather than going into further detail, he then turned to the question that the Pharisees posed.  What is more important than whether the dead are gone forever or live on in eternity?  What is important is not the woo woo, or the stories of things that go bump in the night.  No, for Jesus, the debate on the afterlife is worth only a passing comment.  He recited the ancient prayer that all devout Jews are to recite, “Hear Oh Israel” and that the laws of their faith could be summed up in love.  This was not new knowledge for anyone.  There are over 600 commandments that observant Jews needed to follow, and there were many debates on how to do that.  If we hold the sabbath to be holy and that we are not to do any work or travel, we still need to milk our cows or they will suffer.  Love is the over-arching principle that governs how those commandments are put into practice.

It all comes down to relationship with the Holy, and with each other.  That can be hard, or seem like the ultimate in woo woo, and in our world where bombs are falling and people’s birth certificates are used as weapons against them, when shooters walk into bowling alleys, it is hard to remember to hold onto a relationship with something we can’t see, hear or touch.  Whether we believe like the Sadducees that we end when our lives end, or like the Pharisees that we continue on, Jesus wants us to focus on building a relationship with God.  That relationship is to be centered on love.  When we love God so deeply, it spills out onto our relationships with each other.

Some people are not ready for that.  Their grief is real and raw and all-consuming.  Their relationship with God, if they have one at all, may be one of resentment, of anger, of fear or even rage.  God can handle that anguish and negativity.  In fact many people find that expressing their anger to God is an important part of their grief journey.  It is still a relationship with the divine.  Like our psalm this morning, the scriptures are full of people pouring out their anger and suffering, their pain and fear to God. When we remember that even Jesus suffered and died, God must have grieved too.  But God pulled hope and love out of that tragic time, and we hear so many stories in this place of how God still pulls hope and love out of tragedy.  Grief is hard, but the good news is that God is with us, in life, in death and in life beyond death.  We are not alone, God is with us.  Thanks be to God!