What's Your Sign?

 Have you ever asked God for a sign?  Did you ever receive a sign?  Both of these are not questions we ask easily in the United Church.  We are logical, rational human beings not given to flights of fancy. Some of us refuse to ask for signs, some of us ask for signs too often. It’s hard to get a handle on, and it can feels like getting our tea leaves read or staring into a crystal ball.  Maybe it’s more like driving down the highway in a snowstorm, unsure whether to keep our high beams on or not.  Those times when the snow is blowing so thickly that we can’t see ahead no matter how fast or slow we go.  We look with anxiousness for the next sign for our turn off or to get a sense of where we are or how much further we need to go.  I often feel like I’m getting close to Athabasca when I see the moose crossing sign on the highway.  I look for that sign, and when I see it, I know where I am.  I also know that when I see it, I need to take extra care and be alert for unexpected hazards.

Our Isaiah reading has an unexpected hazard in it.  If we cherry-pick how we read Isaiah, the longest book of all the prophets, we can indirectly feed into antisemitic attitudes.  The attitude that the Hebrew scriptures are useless or full of an angry God or only valuable when they predict the arrival of Jesus is a way of diminishing the influence of Jewish theologians on the world and on Jesus.  The verses we heard this morning were once translated as ‘behold, the virgin is with child and will bear a son” but that is based on a Greek mistranslation.  Now scholars have restored the ancient and accurate meaning to us.  When we put it into context, we see that Isaiah was preaching to King Ahaz who was facing a civil war with two other kings.  The two kings planned to attack Jerusalem, kill Ahaz and put a puppet ruler in his place so they could attack the Assyrian Empire.  Ahaz was unsure what to do.  Isaiah challenged him not to put his faith in politics but in God.  Ahaz couldn’t ask for a sign because he didn’t have confidence in his faith.  It’s hard to trust in God when there are two armies making a beeline for your front gate.  Isaiah heard Ahaz’s excuses and said, “See this pregnant lady here? Her child will not starve to death because of two armies but will eat healthily before he is very old.”  Isaiah was saying to Ahaz that hope even for the pregnant mom was so close she could name her baby, “God is With Us”.  She became a tangible sign of hope for their people and their king.    Even in the midst of doom, she became a sign that violence would not have the final word.  And it became something to remember in other times of danger, that helped people trust in God.

Trust in God came to Joseph too, in our gospel reading this morning.  Joseph found that all his ‘happily ever after’ hopes and dreams, were turned upside down.  As a carpenter, he might have been building a house or renovating the kitchen for the day when he and Mary would start their wedded life.  As often happens, his best laid plans were thrown into a tailspin.  He knew that he wasn’t the father, and as many men have, he decided he didn’t want to be involved.  If he married her when she was already pregnant, people would assume that he was somehow lacking as a man since his young fiancé had strayed.  But as always in a world that has a double standard for the behaviors of men and women, it would have been Mary that would have taken the brunt of abuse from the other villagers for not honoring her commitment to Joseph.  Joseph wanted to do the honorable thing according to the culture of his time.  Break the engagement privately and send her away.  The double standard for women back then would have meant that she would have been on her own, a single mom with no extended family to support her, no income support, no family allowance.  Most young women in such a situation would end up prostituting themselves to survive.  Putting her away quietly would have only kept Joseph’s and Mary’s families honorable standing.  It would not have protected Mary or her baby from the worst abuses the Roman occupied world could throw at vulnerable young girls.

Then Joseph got a sign.  Signs make us question our assumptions about the world.  Joseph’s dream had him question his assumptions about how to deal with Mary.  Just as Isaiah, pointing at a young woman in a land threatened with invasion, questioned his king’s assumptions about God.

Some signs that question our assumptions about the world that I saw this week, were the heroic intervention of a Syrian Muslim refugee in the shooting of unarmed Jewish people in Sydney, Australia.  His bravery disrupts the racist stories that brown immigrants are violent and evil.  Some conspiracists tried to pretend that he was Christian, not Muslim, or tried to erase him from the story altogether.  The other thing that disrupted our assumptions was Skate Canada cancelling all interprovincial figure skating competitions from being held in Alberta, in order to protect young girls from double standards here.  Double standards and fear-based disinformation are hard to see until we look for the signs that God sends us.  God wants us to look for signs that build hope, peace, love and joy.  This Advent season, like Joseph and Isaiah, let us see signs of hope and love to change our assumptions about the world.  So if you feel like you are driving in a blizzard, slow down and look for signs of God’s love.  Chances are, you will find them.  Thanks be to God! Amen.

Locking Horns

Can you imagine Joe Biden coming to Justin Trudeau to get baptized?  That’s an odd image, isn’t it, two leaders coming together and one, the leader of the bigger country, asking for a blessing ritual from the leader of the smaller country.  This is hard to imagine, but I think it’s close to what actually happened in this story.

When we remember the baptism of Jesus, it points to how Jesus leaded in ways that respected and honored the leadership of others.  

Many times when two powerful leaders get together, it becomes a battle over who has the most authority or skills or money or followers.  It can become a fight over who is the best.  Like two big horned sheep fighting over a ewe, they lock horns and butt heads and crash together. Two bulls in a pasture, two stallions in a wild herd of horses.  You just know that fireworks are going to ensue.  Leaders often lock horns.  Jesus and John didn’t lock horns, they didn’t do anything that suggested that a power struggle was going on.  Luke’s version omits John’s question to Jesus, “Why are you coming to me to be baptized?” which is in Matthew and Mark.  

Jesus didn’t come as someone wanting to take over from John and steal all his followers.  Jesus didn’t come to push John out of the river and start his own baptism show.  Jesus came with respect, honoring the leadership and ministry John had, and recognizing John’s God-given authority to baptize.  And John was clear with his followers, a better spiritual authority was just around the corner.  John didn’t claim to be a messiah, and he didn’t let anyone call him such.  He knew that Jesus was the one people had been waiting for, who would fulfill the promise that no one need live in fear.  Who would share the message that God claims us all and sees us all as precious. God created us for glory and not for locking horns in power struggles.  

Baptism is meant to be a sign that reminds us of this love.  It’s meant to remind us that God is with us, we are not alone.  All too often, baptism has been corrupted and turned into a ‘get out of hell free’ card.  Although that idea was started in medieval times, it has had a long history of being used abusively. The ticket out of hell idea was originally supposed to assure people, and lower their anxiety.  Instead it increased people’s shame and fear. It was abused to show who was an insider and who was not.

United Church Stewardship leaders say that “Baptism is about the affirmation that there is something sacred about life and that a piece of that sacred goodness is found deep within us. Baptism affirms the inherent worth of each of us and is a physical sign of a spiritual reality—that we belong to a loving God and that the goodness that comes from God is deep within us and serves as a communal symbol of God’s unconditional love.”

It’s easy to brush off this idea or pretend it doesn’t mean much in this world of discrimination, political turmoil, horrendous forest fires, and divisive conspiracy theories.  But the reality is that we need to be reminded of the love God has for us just as we are.  Baptism is not what we do for God, anyone looking at a newborn baby knows that they don’t need to be cleansed of any thoughts or deeds, they are too busy learning what the world looks like and what language sounds like and what food smells like.  They are truly innocent.  And we need regular cleansing of our need to be competitive, of our need to put ourselves down before others do, or our need to hide our flaws, or our need to be right.  And this is something we wrestle with, in community as a collection of flawed but beloved human beings.  Like God’s love, baptism isn’t something earned, or something bought or something won, it is a gift bestowed on us and recognized by a loving community as precious in God’s sight.  It helps us remember that we too are gifts of God to the world.  We are enough as we are.

So how do we respond to this astonishing claim that we are gifts of God to the world?  I think that Jesus and John also model a response to that knowledge.  Instead of locking horns, they looked each other in the eye, and treated each other’s gifts with deep respect.  John acknowledged Jesus and his ministry with profound awe.  “One is coming who will baptize you with fire”, he said, anticipating not just Pentecost, but the burning passion his disciples developed for sharing the healing and compassion that Jesus gave them.  The fire of compassion for one another that would send them around the world with their message of hope and healing and love.  And Jesus acknowledged John by coming and asking for baptism.  Jesus didn’t put on any airs, he didn’t say, “Thanks, John, it’s time to tie up my sandals now and be my personal butler,” he said, “baptize me like you have baptized all these other people.”  

What humbleness, what servant leadership that showed!  Instead of us locking horns with those around us, what if we too looked our neighbor in the eye and saw them as also a beloved child of God, one to cherish and support.  Just as if Biden came, looked Trudeau in the eye and said, “I want to become a Canadian citizen”, we can remind ourselves and each other that we are to see each other as a beloved child of God.  Let us honor and respect the leadership of each other the way Jesus and John honored each other, as God loves us, and as we are called to love one another.

Time for Hope?

Winter can be tough.  We know the cold and the snow is coming.  Which is why it feels so odd in November on a crisp yet sunny day to go outside and hear a flock of birds chirping like nobody’s business.  They sound like they are having a good chat about all the things in life they are going through.  Not something we expect at this time of year.  The noise can be surprising.  Don’t they know that they should be heading south?  Don’t they know what weather is coming their way?  Don’t they know that blizzards are just around the corner?  And yet these perky, chirpy birds flock to the frozen berries that other birds overlook and have a picnic on the frozen Mountain Ash bushes or whatever they find.  They are the epitome of optimists.  I could use a little of their spunk and cheer.         

Unlike some humans, they thrive even when times are challenging.  Unlike birds, we have the ability to imagine, and all too often we imagine that the world is so disastrous that God must be angry at us for some reason.  It’s easy to be discouraged and depressed.  It’s easy to feel like the world is coming to an end and even the sun will stop shining, the moon will cloud over and even the stars will fall out of the sky in a cosmic disaster of untold proportions. 

When we feel like we are surrounded by disasters, when we feel like God hates us, when we feel like we are careening from one disaster to the next, it’s easy to shut down.  It’s easy to over medicate on shopping, decorations, Christmas snacks, phone games, VLTs or mindless pursuits.  One interview on CBC’s The Current this Thursday said that for many people, 2023 is the year where we are languishing rather than thriving.  Languishing is when we feel blah and lackluster but not fully depressed, and when we feel like we don’t have a purpose in life.  We go through the motions with little motivation to try anything new.

Hope seems like a ridiculous pipe dream, something that other people can have but it’s too much work and energy for us.  And so we spiral down into negativity and cynicism.  We give up on life, and we give up on the future.  But that is not what these scriptures are about.  The Psalm finishes with a plea, ‘rest your hand gently upon us.’  And the Gospel has Mark telling of Jesus striding in like some Marvel superhero or Jedi warrior coming in with their superpowers to save the day.  God will come like a magical wizard and make everything right.  Except for one thing.  This was written 2000 years ago and the community, and Mark and even Jesus expected it to happen very soon.  We are still waiting.  What do we do when it still hasn’t happened?

We are to stay alert and ready.  We are to stay smart and aware.  We are to watch for the signs.

One sign that is troubling is the lack of snow after the hottest year on record.  We had dreadful levels of forest fire smoke this summer and without snow, the forest will be even more vulnerable next year.  We struggle to lower our emissions.  We struggle to let go of plastic straws and plastic bags even though they break down into smaller and smaller pieces and we end up with microplastics impacting our environment.  Forbes Magazine wrote a few years ago that there was “an estimated 270,000 tons of plastic floating through the world’s seas.  Plastic trash is found in the guts of more than 90% of the world’s sea birds (ref), in the stomachs of more than half of the world’s sea turtles (ref), and … even … whales.”  These are troubling signs too.

We are called to see the signs around us but as Christians we are not to give up hope.  One of the signposts of thriving congregations is optimism.  One church described it this way, “We trust that God is the author of our future and trust that God is good, we celebrate successes along the way and persevere through tough times.”  Trusting God is a form of deep spirituality, one of the three United Church mission goals.  Trusting God takes practice and patience and prayer.  One minister in the states wrote that she was giving up complaining for Advent.  Not completely, as complaining has its place from time to time, but daily habitual grumping and negativity.  Cynicism is part of languishing, it assumes that the world is never going to have anything positive come, and can be a defense against action.  It’s far easier to say, “that will never work” than to roll up our sleeves and do something.

Cynicism leaves us in an apathetic and negative space.  It allows us to be passive and complacent and helpless.  It gives us permission to be stuck.  It does not lead to solutions, only more problems.

Christians choose to look for the return of Jesus.  It’s not easy, and it takes courage and character.  It recognizes that we live in uncomfortable times.  It recognizes that we don’t have all the answers.  And it recognizes that we are called to be alert for signs and remember to dream of what a God-filled world can be like.  It is like being birds that don’t fly south for the winter but choose to hang around in a cold and snowy climate waiting for spring.  Like the sparrows who stay long after humming birds and geese have taken off, who survive blizzards and -40 wind chills. They sing and chirp and fly, brightening our days.  We can be like them by choosing to dream and hope and be alert to hope.  Let us pray:  God help us to be like the sparrows and choose hope.  Help us to look for signs of your presence, your arrival.  Help us choose optimism as an action plan and a character strength.  Help us to dream of your call to care for the earth and help us remember that you are with us, we are not alone.  Amen.

How about them apples?

 I’ll never forget the day that someone told me about the secret star inside every apple.  No way, I thought.  We had always cut our apples from stem to blossom end, and it never occurred to me to try any other way.  What a revelation to see that pretty, 5-pointed star smack dab in the middle of my fruit.  Like a little miracle of love, unseen under the delicious flesh, ignored by many, but there none-the-less.

Rather like the first time I realized my parents loved me.  Not something we ever said in my family, and whenever I got into trouble for doing something mischievous, I was sure my parents hated me.  There were times when I did wonder if they could love me when I dropped plates, spilled milk, made a mess in my bedroom and other such monstrous misdemeanors. My parents did love me in their quiet and undemonstrative way, and showed it when I least expected it.  Flying to Halifax to see me convocated or tying up my shoes for me when I was eight months pregnant or quilting a beautiful runner for my coffee table.  Signs of love hidden like the apple’s star, unseen until I looked at their actions in a different way. Many people are not so lucky – the Blanket Exercise reminded me of the disruption of love caused by residential schools and generational trauma.  Parental love is missing from many people’s lives.  God’s love is not, even when it’s hard to see.

Jeremiah knew that it was hard to see God’s love in the midst of tragedy.  He had been preaching bad news for so long, it was unexpected to preach something different to the people.  And preach the idea of God loving us not because we follow a rule book that God gave us.  No, because God was reminding Jeremiah of covenant, like a loving spouse married to a troublesome partner, but not holding it against them when the partner breaks promises and gets things mixed up.  A partnership that God would not end or abandon, and thriving would happen once more. 

Jesus was preaching on a similar vein.  God more loving than a nagged judge, more patient than a wronged widow, in it for the long haul, in it because that’s what the character of God is.  Hard to see that when we are in difficult times, when the world around us seems empty of any sign of God.  How do we keep going with the news from Ukraine, or a premier who insults people facing real discrimination for their race or gender identity or their physical or mental abilities by comparing them to folks who knowingly chose to ignore science and medical best advice?  How do we keep going when the price of an apple at the grocery store is now 1.50/lb or more?

Jesus was also preaching about prayer.  And how important it is.  How we need to persist like a nagging street person at the gates of MaraLago demanding justice from a billionaire who wants anything but justice.

How often do we pray for justice?  How often do we nag God for fair play?  It’s an interesting question.  And how often does it feel like our prayers are falling on a God who can’t hear us?  Probably more often than we think or like to admit to ourselves.  It would be so easy to give up, to assume that there is no one listening, that God doesn’t care, God judges harshly without any love whatsoever.  And yet, and yet.

This week I came across a story about Frederick Douglass.  He was born in 1818 and looked as dignified as Morgan Freeman.  He was brought up on a slave plantation by his grandmother as his mother was not allowed to stay with him, most mothers were taken away from their children when they were very young.  He had four or five masters before he was even 16, and managed to learn his alphabet and to read, mostly without any help from a teacher.  One woman taught him a little before her husband convinced her it was evil to teach a slave to read.  But Douglass persisted and eventually took the Underground Railway to freedom where he changed his name and married.  He became a Methodist preacher and travelled to England and Ireland where he preached against slavery.  He wrote impassioned essays on abolition. He convinced Abraham Lincoln to let blacks enlist in the Union Army to fight against the Confederates.  But just prior to the Civil War, he was feeling frustrated and discouraged.  All his attempts to end slavery had bogged down.  He was feeling depressed and his speech at one conference lacked fire and compassion.  He was tired of praying for freedom, for justice, for equality, for everyone’s the right to vote, including women.  At that moment, in that hall of crowded people hoping to be inspired, another famous lady, Sojourner Truth, also a powerful speaker for abolition, was in the audience.

She heard his lackluster speech and stood up in the middle of it.  She hollered a question so loudly everyone in the room heard her.  She said it over and over until Douglass answered her.  That question changed everything.  Douglass remembered his passion, his love for justice.  He became reenergized and his speech energized everyone who heard him.  And it got him back into remembering why he was there.  The question she yelled at him with so much passion?

“Is God Dead?  Is God Dead? Frederick Douglass, Is God Dead?” “No,” Douglas replied, and that was the answer they all needed to hear.

We need to hear it too.  God is not dead!  God loves us and will hear our prayers for justice.  It’s not easy, it’s not fast, but God will answer.  The world does change.  Slavery does end.  Women do vote.  Love does change everything, maybe especially when it is as tiny as a star hidden in an apple!  

Prove it!

 

Sounds like Jesus was having a bad day.  First, he was tested by the Pharisees, then by the lack of foresight by his disciples.  He was speaking about faith and using a metaphor to do so, and his disciples completely missed the point and took his words literally.  Not only that, but they were coming from a very defensive position, assuming that he was blaming them for their lack of preparation.

Nobody was getting it.  The Pharisees wanted signs, the king wanted absolutes, the disciples wanted their bellies full and no one wanted to think about God or mission or higher purpose.  Here they were in the presence of Jesus, and had seen and experienced marvelous things, but all they could do was stay fixated on their own perceived needs and their own sense of what was proper.

Like a mobile, the three groups were used to a certain way of living.  Herod was used to having uncontested power over the country and influence with the Roman Empire.  He was a figurehead and knew it.  He was also plagued with guilt over the death of John the Baptist and wondered if Jesus was John reincarnated.  He had been manipulated by his wife and stepdaughter into executing John, from which we get the phrase, “serve his head on a platter”.  He was a dangerous and volatile man, easily swayed, and a wily politician.  He was not afraid to kill people to keep his power.

The Pharisees were, as Robbie the Dragon said, the ‘status quo’.  The religious people who ran the temple.  They were used to being upper managers in the institution of religion, which was a big thing in Jerusalem.  They liked their systems, their debates, their logic and their many rules. 

They liked the superiority they had in knowing that they had the truth all wrapped up and that they were better than the rest of the people they saw.  They were sure they were right.  They ‘knew’ they were in God’s good books.

Then there were the disciples.  Fishermen, farmers, day laborers.  They knew their place in the society’s hierarchy.  It was at the bottom.  They knew the constant struggle to find enough food to eat every day.  They knew grinding poverty, and they knew that they were not good enough to deserve the best seat in the temple.  Like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, they only dreamed of one day having a seat of honor in their most sacred institution.  Survival was the best they could hope for.

Imagine that this society was like a mobile with the strings and sticks balancing the different people at each level.  You remember the kinds we made with our kids as school projects, or maybe hung a store-bought one over a baby’s crib.  I had one festooned with plastic butterflies that entertained my children, especially when they realized the butterflies moved when they kicked their feet on the crib mattress.

The mobile that was the society of the people was committed to being still, calm and static.  It hadn’t been that long ago that there had been two nasty sieges of Jerusalem that had led to wholesale massacres of people hiding in the Temple, less than 100 years earlier.  Power imbalances had led to civil wars and thousands of people dead. So status quo and peace was very precious to all.  It was a matter of life and death.  People didn’t want more war, more death, and more disaster.  They wanted stability.  They wanted safety.  They wanted security.

Jesus wanted equality.  He wanted people to share their abundance with people who didn’t have abundance.  He wanted fair play and justice, so that poor people wouldn’t be the oppressed and the marginalized.  He wanted healthy community, where all, young and old, were treated with compassion and respect.  Where status was not based on what one owned or who one controlled, but on how well one served, and loved the people who could least repay a kindness.

He wanted a community that laughed together, played together, worked together and experienced God together. A community freed from the fear of not having enough or being enough.  A community of love and joy.

To get there would take much change.  The mobile would have to move and bounce and whirl to get that change.  Herod and the Pharisees were not having it.  They wanted the mobile to stay still and peaceful for them.  They were prepared to sacrifice the people under them to maintain that peace.  They certainly weren’t going to let some upstart Galilean preach to them how to practice their faith and upset the peaceful mobile.

So they demanded signs, not because they wanted signs, but because they wanted to keep the mobile from moving.  And Jesus realized the game they were playing.  Jesus realized they kept moving the goal post and would keep moving the goal post as a way to discredit him in front of his followers.

When he tried to communicate this to the disciples, once again, they didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.  They were fixated on their assumptions that there wasn’t enough food around because they could only believe in that which they could touch or taste.  They didn’t trust in this new community, they only trusted in what they knew.  They needed bread, not just once in a while but daily, like the rich folk could afford.  And that need was enough to erase their memories of the loaves and fishes that were in abundance whenever they met in community in the presence of Jesus.

Where do you find yourself in this story?  Are you worried about your daily bread? Are you worried about upsetting the status quo?  Are you stressed out about what other people might think if you do something different than everyone else?  Have you forgotten the special moments in your lives when you had a sense of community, of support, of the divine awe that inspired you and connected you to something bigger than yourself?

I hope amidst the challenges and the shifts of our world, that we remember to hold to the vision of a community and a society where all are valued, where all have found a bigger purpose to hope in, where all are committed to spinning the mobile until all know the joy and the glory of being beloved children of God.