Flip Flop Followers

Summertime and the footwear is easy.  Flip flops are standard issue for beach days and city sidewalks alike.  They are everywhere.

In our gospel reading today (Matthew 16:21–28 for those of you reading my blog), Peter is again front and centre.  Three weeks ago, he sank like a stone in front of Jesus and all his friends.  Last week he became the foundational rock for building a new community of love.  This week he becomes a boulder attempting to trip Jesus up.  What a major flip flop Peter does.  Will the real Peter stand up?  Is he a leader in training, or is he a theological disaster?  Is he a great follower or a great temptation? Is he a good guy or a serious threat to the mission Jesus is on? 

What gives, Peter?  What’s with all the flip flopping?

Just like flip flops allow sand to irritate our feet, Peter’s comment seems to irritate Jesus to the point of name-calling.  Just like flip flops are not good for Alberta winters, Peter’s comments leave Jesus cold.  Just like flip flops are not great for ballerinas trying to swirl like tops, Peter has put his foot in his mouth and doesn’t know which way to turn.

The response, “Get behind me, Satan!” has often been interpreted as a shaming in front of the rest of the disciples.  What if it was different?  What if it is not ‘get out of my way’?  What if it is, “fall in line behind me and listen.”  That puts a completely different spin on what Jesus says, less heated annoyance and more reflection, more thoughtfulness, more invitation to self-examination and self-reflection.  Maybe even a touch of ‘mind your own business’.

The teachings that follow challenge self-centeredness and replaces it with mission.  The world is full of people who know they are right, who are the rule police for a community, a faith group, a family, a town, a culture, a whole country.  We are good at knowing who is wrong and it’s never us.  We fixate on scarcity and hoarding.  We fixate on me first.  Leadership gurus call this “Below the Line” attitudes.  Below the line thinking can be inflexible, certain, and often about controlling others.  It can a form of bullying, where one person wants to have power over others.  It can unconsciously look for ways to be the smartest person in the room.  It is natural, it’s how we survived saber-toothed tigers and stampeding bison.  In the long run, it can leave people cynical, selfish and lonely.  It is an addiction that is just as destructive in its way as illegal drugs.

All addictions are harmful, whether it’s a craving to be the leader like Peter, or gambling or drugs or shopping apps, or food or the determination to be right, or to save for a rainy day that will never come.  I think the addiction to below the line attitudes and thoughts is what Jesus is calling out.  People who put themselves first rather than God get into all kinds of troubles.  That’s why the beginning of 12 step recovery programs is to admit that we are powerless.

Would it surprise you to learn that admitting powerlessness is also the starting point for finding solutions to the world drug problem?  Drug addiction rates are terrible right now, and vary from half a percent of the population in countries like Slovakia and Portugal to 4% of the United States, the worst in the world.  Canada is sitting at about 2%.

The United Nations decided to look at the situation in ways that are above the line.  It researches constantly, does not assume it has the perfect answer for every country, and looks for tangible, measurable results that are showing repeatable significant reduction.  In other words, it keeps an open mind and asks questions.  Some of the things the UN has found is that countries like Portugal who have low addiction rates, focus on harm reduction.  Cold turkey does not work.  Abstinence, while a great goal, is not the starting point, harm reduction is.  The UN found that every individual has had a different path into addiction and will have a different path out.  It recognizes that countries that are most successful look at drug addiction as a healthcare problem.  Countries that start prevention programs in schools around the age of 12, which is when most users start, show significant impact on the number of kids staying clean, succeeding in school and having positive mental health. Family supports are crucial.  Countries that decriminalize the use of drugs and provide healthier, cheaper supplies, disrupt the profit level of organized crime and also noticeably reduce the rate of petty crimes.  That’s why countries like Portugal have had such a drop in addiction rates. The expensive constant medical emergencies and policing actions and court caseloads also drop dramatically with harm reduction programs.

The Un says that the illicit drug trade generates hundreds of billions of dollars per year, though estimates vary.  Drug cultivation, trafficking, and use also impact the environment through deforestation and other land-use change as well as air, land and water pollution.  The cost of failing to tackle drug use disorders is steep – over half a million deaths and 28 million healthy years of life lost due to disability and premature deaths in 2021. Just one in 12 people with drug use disorders received any treatment in 2023.  Our provincial government’s push to have involuntary treatment centres goes directly against the UN’s research because the number one factor for success is for the addict to choose it voluntarily and honestly.  One person told me that treatment only works if it focuses on physical, mental, spiritual and emotional recovery.  Another person said that even after 10 years of sobriety, there isn’t an hour or a day where they do not feel the temptation of escaping the hardships of their life through a needle.

Jesus points to another way.  An above-the-line way.  A way that takes seriously that we can’t escape our painful crosses in life, but neither do we have to bear them alone. Paul‘s words, don’t repay evil with evil, don’t be condescending, don’t seek revenge, are also calls to live above the line.  Feed and love our enemies. Tall order.

How does that look in real life?  I am reminded of a certain 80 year old millionaire who told her neighborhood 12-year-olds that she would give them $500 each if they and their teammate graduated from Grade 12 together.  In that school, the drop-out rate went from 33% to 6%! She gave millions of dollars of books to preschoolers.  She donated money to fund research into the Moderna Covid vaccine.  She spoke out against hatred of the 2sLGTBQIA+ community, saying “it ain’t Christian to hate, we all gotta start loving more instead of all this judging.”  Unlike some millionaire 80 year olds, she didn’t flip flop between love and hate, she didn’t pretend to be a Christian one moment while locking up children the next.  You know who I’m talking about.  She lived a very humble and loving Christian life, above the line, brave and committed and curious, open to learning what she could to help build a more resilient world.  She lived out these values that we read in our scriptures, and she did her best to live one day at a time, caring for her neighbors, and following Jesus.  We can’t have a much better role model for leaving the world a better place than Dolly. May we remember and honor her by doing the same. May we learn to follow Jesus rather than ourselves.  May we remember to ask questions, and may we learn not to flip flop over who is in control.  But to consistently remember the God of Love is the bedrock of our faith.

Curiosity over Criticism

This past week people have been going through a rollercoaster of emotions as we process what happened in a different country.  This is probably the only time where someone else’s politics have led me to the brink of preaching a sermon that is peppered with F- bombs!  For those people who believe that women deserve to be treated with respect and equality, for those who believe that no ethnic group deserves to be called garbage or accused of stealing and eating pets, for those who believe that joking about putting women in front of a firing squad because of a difference of opinion, for those who believe that immigrants are humans not problems to be returned en-masse to countries that may abuse them, for those who know that 2sLGTBQIA+ people are not choosing an alternative lifestyle, Tuesday was a day of fear for many.  It felt that all our work towards a society based on human rights for all, for respect and dignity, had been wasted.  And many people worry that the same political tactics that worked in the states will work here in Canada as it already has in Alberta.  Tactics of focusing on fear and scarcity and how things aren’t the way we think they should be.  Tactics of talking about how hard done by we are, how the future is uncertain, inflation is scary, jobs are threatened, and let’s target the most vulnerable people for our fear and wrath.  Those unnamed and unknown others, you know, ‘those people’, them, they, that we tell stories about to prove that the world is in danger and they are the ones at fault.

It deflects people’s attention away from harder conversations that some politicians are uncomfortable with.  Harder conversations because they are complex and address issues that have no clear solutions. Why talk about the war in Ukraine or climate change when I worry about paying my rent?  Why talk about gender equality or racism when it’s easier to talk about how dangerous the homeless are?  Why talk about the state of education when I can’t go buy a bag of groceries for under $100 the way I used to?

And then there’s healthcare. Last week we had 591 cases of Covid reported in Alberta, 313 of them taking up valuable hospital beds and doctor and nurse time. 15 patients are in ICU, and 4 people died last week from Covid.  Since August we have had 4,462 covid cases, and 119 people died. Athabasca Hospital declared a Covid outbreak on one unit on Oct. 17, 2024.  Four days later, Northern Lights Regional Hospital in Fort McMurray also had an outbreak.  On the bright side, both outbreaks have cleared, and about 20% of Albertans have gotten their Covid booster shots this month.  But it was hard to find these stats.  It was hard to find out how many hospital beds were being used for Covid patients when they could have been used for other medical situations. The statistics were buried in the Alberta HealthCare website.  Shouldn’t this be something we know about and hear in the news?

We talk about politics the day before Remembrance Day because it was fear and scarcity and inflation that Hitler used to get elected in Germany.  It was that kind of rhetoric of “Us vs Them” that he used to set up his internment camps where millions of Jews, thousands of LGBTQ individuals, the physically and mentally disabled, Roma (gypsies), Poles and other Slavic peoples, Jehovah’s Witnesses, priests, clergy and members of political opposition groups were experimented on and murdered.  Nazis first practiced involuntary euthanasia on hospital patients with mental and physical disabilities, people that they decided did not make a valuable contribution to society.  This was ‘us vs them’ rhetoric and justified for a variety of reasons.  When we say, “Lest we forget” tomorrow, let us not say it glibly.  Let us remember why Canadians and allies went overseas to kill other human beings.  They went to fight totalitarian governments.  They went to fight racists.  They went to fight people who believed in dehumanizing those who didn’t have the same ethnic roots as they did.  They went to stop a power-hungry megalomaniac who thought his ideas of racial purity could justify brainwashing and euthanasia.  They went to stop this kind of thinking and this kind of politics.  This “us vs them” thinking.

Jesus rejected “us vs them” thinking.  Jesus rejected racism and assumptions of superiority.  Jesus rejected snobbish attitudes that suggested some people should have the privilege of power over other people.  But Jesus didn’t just point his fingers at the religious and political elites of his day. Jesus was preaching to us!  We think “Us vs them” too!  Them republicans, them Americans, them racists, them homophobes.  Jesus rejected it all.  Jesus challenged our tendency to think that we are right and people who think differently than us are wrong.  Jesus rejected our own addiction to power and control. Jesus rejected our tendency to shame, blame and judge others.  We find it easy to go about fixing, saving, advising and correcting others.  Jesus rejected that too.

“You have heard it said, 'Love your neighbor-but hate your enemy.'  But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for your persecutors.  This will prove that you are children of God.  If you remember that your sister or brother has a grudge against you, leave church at once and go to reconciled with them.”

How do we love our enemies?  How do we reconcile with people we have a grudge against? By being humble!  We have got to stop thinking “we” know all the answers, and “they” are wrong, stupid or evil.  That’s hard, I know.  Building trust starts by being curious first and foremost.  By wondering why they have the opinions they do.  By learning how to not overreact to their anger, which for many of us takes time, practice and counselling from professionals.  By listening to them without judgement, which I know is hard.  By taking care of yourself when it’s too hard and do your own humble healing.

Tomorrow we will hear lots of speeches about “Lest we forget”, a reminder that people died so we can live in peace.  But Peace doesn’t come easily.  And it doesn’t come if we instinctively react with fear and anger.  Curiosity and humbleness will help us understand why the politics of our time seem so ugly.  Curiosity and compassion and empathy are the tools to help us prevent future totalitarian states in our country.  Some of us are able to roll up our sleeves and listen deeply to those who have opinions different than our own.  Some of us need to take care of ourselves and heal our own deep wounds.  Some of us can step up and speak up.  But first and foremost, let us never forget that Jesus, the prince of peace, calls us to choose the way of curious compassion above fear.  Every day!    Amen.

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.