Asking Questions

One of the hardest things a woman can do is ask questions when she doesn’t like the answers she’s hearing.  It’s even harder if she is from a different ethnic background than who she is talking too.  If she’s poor or desperate, or not fashionable or not pretty, it’s even worse.  Women are not supposed to be uppity, they are not supposed to be loud, and they are definitely not supposed to be demanding or insistent on their rights. 

The Syrophoenician woman was everything she was not supposed to be.  Wrong race, wrong gender.  Brazenly talking to a man without her husband present, which meant that she probably didn’t have one.  Advocating for a child who also was female.  Bold enough to not take Jesus’ refusal personally, and to keep asking for what she wanted. 

This is a hard scripture, and it is one that many people struggle with.  Why did Jesus sound so sexist and racist?  We don’t need that in our fragmented world.  We don’t need women’s voices being shut down, we don’t need women’s opinions being treated with disrespect, we don’t need women’s requests for health care being dismissed or disregarded.

Right now, in this world, women who are working in politics or who are environmental scientists, or who are elite athletes that don’t look stereotypically female are getting attacked through comments, social media posts, and even murdered as seen in the case of the doctor in India, the Olympic marathoner in Uganda or the Turkish-American woman shot by Israeli soldiers. Indigenous women are still disappearing in Canada. Teenagers are at risk of losing their access to sex education in Alberta while cases of sexually transmitted diseases are growing, not to mention what might happen if Covenant Health takes over all hospitals.

We could go on and on with examples, but where is the Good News for us in this scripture?  It does not appear to be supportive of a woman’s right to ask for help without getting push back.  Except that the Syrophoenician did, and she got results.  She challenged the status quo and got what she needed for herself and her daughter.  She got the attention that made for real change. 

Her story was unusual and no wonder it was recorded.  And maybe just maybe she knew Jesus’ story.  Somehow, despite not having an instagram account or a snap chat or facebook or tictoc, she knew about Jesus and even though he was hiding out in a city outside his home country, she reacted the same as some folks here might react if they found out Taylor Swift was visiting next door.  She barged in without permission.  Not to get an autograph, but to get a healing.  Maybe she knew the same scriptures that Jesus did.  His bible had many stories of the importance of taking care of widows and orphans and even foreign women.  Maybe she knew the stories about Elijah healing a foreign widow’s child, or Elisha who saved a widow’s children from being sold into slavery because of debts.  Maybe she had read the teachings of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Malachi and others about how the God of Israel taught that children and widows were to be protected and treated with respect and hospitality.

Jesus pushed back.  Why, we don’t know.  Was Jesus grumpy?  Was he tired and here was someone interrupting him on his holiday? Was he racist?  We don’t know his thinking.  Or maybe this was an opportunity to show his disciples how to go beyond racism.  This event became a lesson of radical inclusion that stuck, and the disciples changed and got over their stereotypical assumptions and chauvinist attitudes.  God was not just for the Jewish people, and God certainly was not just for men or priests or scholars.  God was for everyone!  Everyone deserved to hear the good news that God was ready to change the world for the better.

Our bible states right in the first book that God created all humankind, male and female both in God’s own image.  All humans are.  And there is a thread of women empowered by God to make a difference.  Eve chose knowledge over ignorance, Miriam lead worship with her brother Moses, Deborah was a Judge of the Israelites before there were kings.  There’s Ruth and Ester and Mary who were leaders that spoke out against the status quo.  Women have been speaking out ever since.

Who are the voices we are not hearing from?  Who are the people wanting to be included in God’s community?  There are many who feel isolated or depressed.  News articles abound about the epidemic of mental illness.  One of the prescriptions given is to find a community, but people are reluctant to look for one.  One woman said, “I’d come to church if I knew there was a church that wouldn’t mind me asking questions.  Another person said they didn’t dare come to a church because they knew they would be judged.  Someone else said they were badly hurt by a congregation’s power struggle, or a priest’s cruel remark.  They expect a church will judge them because they have had that experience in the past.  They have been hurt badly.

Our job, like Jesus with the Syrophoenician woman, is to listen and encourage.  When we understand where people are coming from, we can be an agent of healing for them.  It makes a difference.  It made a difference for the Syrophoenician woman.  Tyre developed a congregation that was strong and proud to associate with Paul and the other disciples, and in Acts was mentioned as one of the earliest churches founded by Jesus.

When we, like Jesus, listen with curiosity and let go of our prejudices, amazing acts of healing occur.  God is still healing the ones that are hurting, God is still loving those who are full of despair and God is still speaking to those who are questioning.  Thanks be for a God who loves questioners! Amen.

Enough Excuses!

Ever wish you had the power to blast a village to smithereens?  One minute everything is peaceful and quiet, the next, boom, There goes Athabasca, or whoops that was Smith, or kablam Boyle, whomp so much for Colinton, and maybe if it’s been a particularly rough day, what the heck, let’s do away with Edmonton altogether.  Who needs them, right?  Or maybe set our sights really high and boom! Toronto is no more.  Good riddance, right?  Who needs them?

There certainly is biblical precedence for such things – Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed in fire, according to the Genesis story because their citizens were angry at the thought of having foreigners in their midst.  Elijah destroyed the messengers of a king he didn’t like, and slaughtered the prophets of Baal when he won a prayer showdown.  So it wasn’t like Jesus and his disciples didn’t know about holy smiting, dare I even say holy hand grenades, but Jesus rebuked his disciples and hurried on.

There are enough stories of Jesus encountering the Samaritans that ended more positively that I wonder why this time had such a negative reaction.  Remember the Woman at the Well?  Some bible scholars think it was Jesus focusing on getting to Jerusalem, and it was this urgency that led to the Samarians rejecting him.  They too worshipped using the Torah, and the teachings of Moses were very important to them.  However, they disagreed vigorously on where to worship.  Jews worshipped at Jerusalem, while Samaritans worshipped at Mount Gerizim, where Joshua was reported to have crossed into the Promised Land with the followers of Moses after their escape from Egypt.  So it could be that the Samaritans were open to Jesus teaching until he turned his face to the Holy City.  Then their gloves came off.

And the disciples, used to warmer welcomes or maybe feeling resentful and scared at having to go ahead of him to a Samaritan village, lost their tempers.  Were they afraid of the Samaritans?  Were they frustrated that their preparations were wasted?  Were they mad that Jesus spoiled it by talking about Jerusalem?  Were they feeling snubbed by not being treated with dignity worthy of rabbinical disciples?

Whatever they were feeling, they certainly weren’t feeling loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, generous, faithful, gentle or self-controlled.  And they certainly didn’t feel like loving their neighbours.  ‘If we hate them, God must hate them too’.  They were feeling quite human!

Haven’t we all been there?  Had those moments of thinking, ‘darn I wish I had something witty to say that would have put him or her right in their place’, or ‘I’ll show them!  Don’t know how, but I will.”  And in a small town, it’s really tricky.  As I only half-jokingly said to Tim when we first drove up to Athabasca, ‘be nice to everyone you meet, they might be related to someone at the grocery store who is packing your eggs for you.  Last thing you want is to find your egg carton under a sack of flour because you were rude to a waitress the night before.”

Small towns are challenging when you are angry at someone.  If you passionately love the River Rats Festival, for example, but can’t stand someone on the board, what do you do when their family works at BuyLow?  Often in towns, people don’t try to work things out, they just quietly stop going to the club or the committee.  They might grumble behind peoples’ backs to their friends but they won’t try to work things out.  They drop out of the Bowling league or the Golf tournament, and never say why.  And sometimes the resentment builds.

It’s a very human reaction.  Unfortunately, it can have some terrible results.  Toronto’s Gay Pride celebration was marred when some people decided to attack others because they felt they had the right to do so, wearing t-shirts with slogans like “read the Bible, repent and be born again”.  And in Hamilton too, there was a deliberate intent to inflict harm during the Pride event.  How people can bring a baseball bat to a parade in the name of Christ who taught us to love our neighbour, forgive our enemy, and pray for those who hate us, is a mystery I am bewildered by.  But it happens.

There have been surveys and studies done suggesting that the average high school student is less empathetic than they were a few decades ago.  That there is a sense among immigrants and minorities that they are less safe in Canada and the USA than they once thought they were.  There are children and infants living separated from their parents in appalling conditions in the US. 

One black pastor wrote that if there was even the slightest whiff that he had approached someone in a sexually inappropriate way, he would lose his job, yet the President of the United States is on record as saying horrible sexist things, has court cases pending against him and still has a high enough approval rating from his voter base that he might get a second term in office.

It boggles the mind.  So many excuses are given as to why we let such bad behaviour go.  It’s especially heartbreaking when it is done by Christians.  Jesus wasn’t calling us to insult our neighbours, judge our neighbours or even attack them.  Yet all too often we fall into an us vs them attitude and have a ready excuse to blow our tempers, get angry, yell or sulk or pout.  These are not gifts of the Spirit.  They are not what we are being called to.

We are called to be transformed into the likeness of Jesus.  We are called to be open to the Spirit’s transforming power that builds love, joy, peace and gentleness and generosity and kindness and self control in our lives.  I don’t know about you, but I’m still working on it, and I humbly pray that it will grow in me and in each of you as well.  Athabasca, Boyle, Smith and even Toronto need us now more than ever before.

Easter Sunday Halleluiah

I’ve been glued to the news this week.  First there was the Notre Dame Cathedral, then there was the election.  Now there’s a flood in Ontario and an explosion in Sri Lanka at churches. I am so not going to talk about the election, so you can all take a big breath of relief.  We’re going to have a sanctuary time free from all the political debate this morning.

But then I heard some truly dreadful news yesterday morning.  On Thursday, as we were setting up for the Maundy Thursday meal with Allendria, Jean Keefe told me about a cousin of hers, a young man who was running for the Green Party in PEI.  The whole family was excited because it looked like he had a real chance to get in to the legislature, to be elected.  The news yesterday of a young politician with the last name of Underhay having drowned with his son was stark and tragic.  And yes, it was Jean’s relative whose story was in the news.  This gifted leader would never see his children grow up, to experience political leadership in the province he dearly loved, and his son would also never grow up. 

It’s times like these where we face the stark truth that life can be full of tragedy and hurt.  That the world is not like some giant Disney movie where the good team always win the big game, and the people who aren’t nice have their come-uppance.  Some days life is not fair.  Some days Good Friday and the cross weigh heavily on our hearts.  Some days Easter feels like a daydream that is too good to be true.  Some days our lives hurt.

The women coming to the tomb that first morning were hurting.  They had lost more than a man, they had lost their wise leader, their inspiration, their cheerleader, their healer.  They lost the one who had turned their lives upside down and gave them hope that they could make a difference in the world. 

They came in grief and despair, doubt and resignation.  They came feeling the weight of life on their shoulders, determined to do what was the tradition at the time, even though they were struggling with their grief. 

They came, just as you come, with all their fears and worries and anxieties.  They didn’t expect to have their lives turned upside down.  Maybe they were having a moment like John Lennon must have had when he wrote his song 'God'.  In it he lists everything that he doesn’t believe in anymore, he doesn’t believe in magic, he doesn’t believe in I Ching, the Bible, Tarot, Hitler, Jesus, Kennedy and so on.  It’s a long list of things he doesn’t believe in.  That pattern doesn’t stop until he gets to the only thing he can believe in, himself and Yoko Ono and their love for each other.

That’s not too far from what we do in our daily lives.  We live as if the only thing we believe in is ourselves and maybe a special family member or two.  We saw this most starkly in some of the on-line debates between neighbors about the election on Tuesday.  The name calling, the accusations, the glee in which people posted pictures of vandalism of NDP and UCP election posters was shocking.  It seemed like insults and name calling was the order of the day with people on all sides of the debate accusing each other of being blind, stupid, naive and listening to the wrong ‘false news’.  The conversation, as far as I can tell, has not gotten any politer.  There is hurt on both sides, because neither can understand how any rational human being could possibly have a different opinion than they do.  They don’t believe in anything except their own thoughts.  And they only believe in a world that is as angry or as threatened as they are.

 Easter is a time of stories that get turned upside down, of witnesses who claim that their fears have been transformed into joy, that life holds no terrors for them any more. 

They have gone from grief-stricken women who are stammering in their confusion and excitement, to eloquent speakers and workers of great deeds of compassion.  They have gone from rough and tumble fishermen who only knew how to work with their hands to men with a passion and a story to tell.  They have gone from arrogant intellectuals who thought they knew everything there was to know about scripture and God, and who would hunt down and persecute anyone who didn’t think like them, to writing impassioned speeches about how they were wrong, and this new radical community was changing the way the world worked.  They went from terrified peasants and timid religious scholars to bold challengers of injustice that wouldn’t let threats of death stop them proclaiming and witnessing to the crazy story that Christ had risen.

We are invited to share our stories, our witness, of how our lives have been turned upside down by the empty tomb and the good news of the resurrection.  It may seem crazy, it may seem unrealistic, but it still has a message we need to hear.  That all the cruelty that humans can throw at each other in the name of politics or control, is still no match for the transformation when we humbly approach the cross with open hearts and minds.

On this Easter Earth Day, let us boldly proclaim that Jesus Christ has conquered all fear, all hate, all prejudice and resentment.  Love conquers, and when we meet face to face with the Risen Christ, let us be so emboldened that we too will run to be witnesses to a vision of life that continues to turn the world upside down in glories and halleluiahs! Amen