Fire in the Belly

Any time I hear scripture about dancing, I start thinking about my abdomen and how many figures of speech there are about that portion of the anatomy.  Middle age spread, battle of the bulge come to mind for me easily enough, but there’s even more:

I had a good belly laugh about that; no guts no glory; that was stomach-churning; let’s belly up to the bar; and that was gut-wrenching.

The most important phrase I was taught as a teen was “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” which is dreadful advice for surgeons.  I heard that comment so often, I actually wondered if it was in the Bible.  It’s not.  My grandmother had me convinced that men could be manipulated into anything from a new fridge to a marriage proposal with some careful application of a roast beef dinner followed by a generous slab of pie.  Food was a way to get power through manipulation for her.

And if you look at the oldest known works of Christian art, you might wonder if that’s the same religion as we practise today.  There were plenty of pictures of fish, grapes, wine, bread and suppers but no crosses.  Abundance is mentioned or hinted at throughout the gospels, water into wine, the feeding of the five thousand, the parable of the banquet to which everyone is invited.  And several times, Jesus, a carpenter, has the audacity to teach fishermen how to fish.  When they follow his instructions, as usual there is tremendous abundance.  Enough Food for all, freely shared, no strings attached.

One of Saul’s first indications that the Christian community was radically different than anything he had ever known before is that they fed him.  He was a dangerous man; he had a fire in his belly to persecute these blasphemous people, and he breathed out murderous thoughts against them.  He was happy to be famous for hunting them down, and was so notorious that the good folks of Damascus could not believe he meant what he said.  How could someone go from one extreme to another so fast?

It would be like some local businessman who makes his or her reputation on being anti gay, anti muslim, racist and calling organizations like Good Samaritan or the Youth Emergency shelter a bunch of bleeding heart Communist propaganda showing up here and wanting to get baptised.  My jaw would certainly drop and I certainly wouldn’t be the only one to have my stomach in a knot if that happened.

Surprisingly, that flip flop is exactly what happened.  Both Peter and Saul struggled with pride; they thought they knew what was best for the people of God.  They arrogantly assumed they could do anything they liked.  But like a punch to the gut, they came face to face with their vulnerabilities.  Peter betrayed Jesus in the temple while warming himself by a charcoal fire and Saul became blind and completely dependant upon others for his survival where before he had been a healthy and energetic youth.

Life is like that; we get the horrible diagnosis or our life takes an unexpected turn or something happens that we just don’t know how to cope with and suddenly we find ourselves crying tears of gut-wrenching sadness as the very future we dreamed of unravels completely.

Peter was ashamed, Saul was helpless and confused.  Both took risks and opened themselves to a different way of seeing the world.  Peter found not just forgiveness at the charcoal fire on the beach, but a commission to step into the desperately needed role of leadership.  Saul changed his name to Paul and found a community so loving, forgiving, generous and healing that he did his best to set up other communities of generous abundance from Greece to Turkey and back, pouring his restored energy into loving people instead of executing them.

We still have people who would rather live in fear of their neighbor than live with hopeful love.  We still have people here in Canada who think it’s okay to discriminate against people of color because they can get away with it.  There are still people who encourage each other to live lives of suspicion, anger and even hate because of the remote possibility that they will lose all they have to ‘those people’ who are different than them.

But we are also in this story.  We are the Ananias folks who say, ‘really, God? You want me to have a conversation with that person? That angry neighbor, that teenager who spray-painted my garage, that fellow who yells at everyone in the grocery store or on Facebook?’  We are the ones who might just one day be called out of our safe community to feed someone who is hurt and lost and sick.  Someone different than ourselves who is hungry and empty inside and reaches out, as unbelievable as it may seem, to someone like us for help.

Ultimately everyone needs to eat, everyone is hungry.  But everyone, even the stubbornly fearful and angry racists, can find new life in the story of abundant blessing through Jesus who feeds us and shapes us into a radical thing.  A community that believes in the transformative power of love.  May that love that rescued Peter and Paul from lives of fear continue to transform us into friends of Ananias, brave followers of Christ!  May we be gifted with a bellyful of bravery that inspires us to dance that love to all who meet us.  Amen, halleluiah!

Wonderful witnesses

I’ve been thinking about witnesses recently.  The news has been full of them, from interviews in Brussels, to the women who testified against Jian Gomeshi in Toronto.  We have the Reverend Gretta Vosper declaring that the sooner the United Church starts to be a church of atheists, the better off we will all be, because a faith in God only produces fanatics who use violence to get their ways.  

And again we have witnesses referred to in our scriptures this morning.  Luke’s gospel has the women going to the tomb, and their story discounted by the disciples.  It seemed ‘an idle tale’, to be dismissed and disbelieved.  Paul wrote that without our hope in something beyond our own limited lives we are indeed quite foolish.  Our time is wasted and we have nothing that gives meaning to our lives.  Who should we believe?  How do we know we can trust the witnesses we hear from?

I found a few interesting witnesses this week who talked about atheism in surprising ways.  There was an ancient historian named Celsus who denounced Christianity as a new form of atheism.  He disliked it not because of the miracles or the virgin birth or even the resurrection, as gods coming back from the dead were quite common, like Orpheus, Hercules and Osiris.  No, Celsus’ biggest problem with Christianity was that Christians weren’t snobbishly elitist and would socialize with anyone.  And they were atheists because they challenged the idea that the Gods existed.  It wasn’t just that they didn’t like Jupiter or Apollo or Athena, they had the crazy idea that only one god existed and that one God, even though God was a Three in One, was the only one to be worshiped.  In Celsus’ books, that was atheism, and it was a stupid fad that would never last!  Boy was he wrong.

Then there was Frank Schaeffer, who wrote a book with the title, “Why I am an Atheist Who Believes in GOD”. 

You can imagine that as a recovering, former atheist myself, I found that very intriguing!  Another thing that I read was that most atheists fall into one of two camps.  They either see life as a gift or a burden.  If they see it as a gift, they try to pack as much as possible into it, as life is short and one never knows when their number will come up.  This can lead to a hectic lifestyle packed with exhausting activities, endless shopping trips and vacations in search of one thrilling experience after another. If they see it as a burden, they will sigh and say, “What’s the point of doing anything?”  Both groups are struggling with death.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that death forces those who place their faith in the grave to either ‘frantically affirm’ life or to hold life in ‘indifferent contempt’.  Their lives witness to the sense of helpless hopelessness that so many modern families find themselves trapped in.

The Easter story is witness to a mysterious way of living, a mystery of purposefulness, a mystery of joy and hope and courage and peace.  I trust these witnesses, not because they have all their details exactly the same, for that smacks of collusion and conspiracy, but because they have details a little different from each other, like each witness saw some part of the story from their unique point of view and remembered that bit instead of the other bit.  Like a family get together when we reminisce about the time we went fishing.  But the biggest reason I trust these witnesses is because of the way it impacted their lives.

Peter went from shamefully denying Jesus to becoming an outstanding leader, willing to face everything the Roman Empire could throw at him.  Paul had his life completely changed from an arrogant status-quo type, to someone who preached love with great humbleness. Francis of Assisi went from being a spoiled rich playboy like Paris Hilton to a beloved saint who inspired the establishment of animal shelters.  And there’s so many more that it would take months on Wikipedia to research them all.

In some mysterious way this crazy story that Romans hated, atheists scoff at, scientists challenge, and philosophers question, is still inspiring witnesses today to talk about how their lives are being changed.

That deep sense of mystery is still at work right here, right now. Every Sunday I see people who are being transformed by that Mystery, that Someone or Something, from fearful, depressed, helpless individuals into energetic, compassionate folks who love their neighbors no matter what. I see 'God' in joyful, free lives of compassion all around me. I watch grandmas and babies alike being marinated in a grace that gives the older folks courage to face down discrimination and injustice, and bathes the babies in love and trust. I see grandpas and five year olds being inspired to make a difference in the world. I see people energized by a Healing Spirit finding the courage and the patience to face cancer or family dysfunction with honesty. I see women walking away from abusive relationships because they finally get it in their bones that they are loved. I see hungry children being fed and angry men learning to be peaceful.

 I've been an atheist and those were some of the saddest, depressing years of my life. However, Jesus made a difference in my life and continues to transform me, thanks to people who witnessed to me. We make a difference when we articulate what we believe, why we believe and how we act because of our beliefs. Remember the witness of Christians over the centuries who heard that still small voice encouraging them to make a difference; their inspired witness reminds me to confidently say, "Halleluiah, the tomb is empty, Christ is risen, Christ is risen indeed!"

Preaching pushy good news, Ewwww!!!

Today’s readings are quite the dichotomy, aren’t they?  On the one hand, we’ve got “All you need is Love” but on the other hand we’ve got death threats and a complex story that leaves us shaking our heads and asking, “what was that all about?”  [1 Corinthians 13 - Love is Patient and Kind and so on, and Luke 4:21 where Jesus preaches at home and they almost throw him off a cliff in response]

Part of what might help is if we hear the words Paul wrote not as a scripture for weddings or funerals, but an angry rant. “Love is patient, you blockheads! Don’t you get it?  Love is Kind, for goodness sake.” You get the picture.  Both Paul and Jesus therefore are preaching news at their community that they don’t want to hear.  They are being pushy about the Good news.

We dislike pushy preachers in the United Church.  We very seldom ask a preacher to leave unless there is very grievous stuff going on involving either money or sex.  It makes us squirm.  In fact, I think that is why many people in the last 50 years dropped out.  The preachers made them squirm and rather than lean into the discomfort, they left.  And preachers got the message.  Can’t preach about money, people might leave.  Can’t preach about oil or the environment because no matter which way I look at it, someone might get offended.  Can’t preach about social justice, because it might be seen as being political and heaven help us if our religion influences our vote.

Neither Jesus nor Paul give a flip about that.  They cause their congregations to squirm.  Jesus was doing fine for the first bit, the people loved the way he read the scripture, and kept his sermon short and sweet.  Just what we want, a sermon that only lasts one sentence and doesn’t rock the boat.

But imagine that this is Justin Bieber and he’s doing a benefit concert in his home town to raise money for homeless shelters.  Imagine that he invites the CEO of his town’s shelter to the stage at the end of the show and says “here’s a check for2.5 million dollars, but while you do great work with your run-down facility that sleeps 10 people if they are all under 5, I’m going to give it to the next town over.  You already have what you need.”  I think that CEO would probably want to throw Justin off a cliff if she heard that.

Jesus is telling his people that God’s realm is something that is already here, already fulfilled.  Instead of griping about the Roman occupation or the price of lamb in the grocery store, or how the neighbor’s bratty kid broke their favorite pottery, they need to recognize the abundance they live in already.  There are people in Capernaum who don’t know God, who don’t know how to worship together in peace, and that’s the folks who need Jesus.  Not the hometown crowd.  Ouch!

And Paul is reminding people that we just don’t know everything and we can’t be everything.  Love is something that is impossible for me as a mortal human to do.  Perfect love only has one source, and it’s hard to see that source now, because we are dim humans.  But if we let love move us rather than us move as if we have love, things change.  What is it that we have as our core understanding or our core experience? If it’s bragging or hogging conversations or acting all pompous or trying to be the richest person, that will eventually peter out and fade.  Love cares and figures out when to be patient and kind and hopeful and when to act.

I heard several stories of how seeing through love changes lives.  One I heard last week in Victoria.  It was the story from the daughter of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who worked with Nelson Mandela in breaking the apartheid system in South America.  Nontombi Naomi Tutu is just starting on the path to becoming a priest in the Anglican Church, despite her many reservations about doing so.  Someone asked, “why did you go into the priesthood?” and she told of the time she was working in a group home for children in the system; these were kids that were too challenging to have a foster family.  She was assigned a seven-year old boy who had already attempted suicide five times.  Yes, a seven year old boy.  He told her that he knew he did bad things, but he wanted to kill himself before he did something so bad that he would burn in hell.  By killing himself, he figured that he would prevent both a great evil and eternal damnation.  At that moment, Naomi decided that she would become a priest and teach children that the heart of Christianity is love, not hell. 

Wow.  That pushes me.  How do I make sure that little ones know the core value of Christianity is love not fear or hate? How do I encourage us all to root out even the most vestigial remnant of a damaging story that Christianity is about hating those who are not Christian to the point that they gleefully tell them they will burn in Hell if they don’t have the same thoughts as Christians?  I start with myself, and I start with God.  My vision of God is dim and small and unclear, but if I remember to set my compass to love, especially when I am caught up in the struggles of day to day living in our little version of Nazareth, then I will realize as hopefully some of Jesus childhood friends did when they chose not to throw him off the cliff, that God’s realm is indeed among us here and now.  

Living in abundance

Sometimes John’s gospel pops up in the lectionary when we least expect it.  Here we are in Luke, following along in what seems a logical progression, then Heere’s Johnny! And like a crazy dream that we don’t quite know what to do with, we are trying to sort out a variety of images and reactions to a passage that is hard for modern minds to understand.

We could wrestle with the sheer volume involved in turning six stone jars of 20 to 30 gallons each into wine.  Cornell University has done an analysis of wine and says:

“A standard bottle of wine is 750 milliliters (ml), meaning a case of 12 bottles contains 9 liters, or 2.378 gallons. 2.6 pounds of grapes yields one bottle of wine. At 150 gallons per ton, a ton of grapes becomes 150/2.378 gallons per case, or a little more than 63 cases of wine. With 12 bottles per case, we have 756 bottles in total.”
     Conversion Factors: From Vineyard to Bottle from Cornell University

We could focus on the symbolism of Jesus turning water for purification rites into wine for celebrating new life in a community, from what we might assume was dry and empty ritual into the life of the party.

We could look at the fact that John does not have a last supper story with the institution of our communion service.

We could even dissect and puzzle over Jesus’ rather snippy remark to his mother, in what sounds very much like a Boxing Day conversation after a long Christmas day with the family, “Mother, I’m 35, can’t you start treating me like an adult instead of telling me what to do?”

Or we could dig into allegory and metaphor.  But I’d rather talk about pianos.  Or at least one piano in particular.

This piano was sitting rather sadly in a snowbank about three weeks ago.  Its family had moved out, leaving it in the back alley rather than take it to wherever they were going.  It had accumulated a new wardrobe of a snow hat and snow coat to keep it warm, but its wood didn’t like that very much.  And it was lonely and sad, feeling like a burden, I would guess, since its family had decided it was too much hassle and expense to keep it with them.

Someone came along who knew a little about pianos but had only ever played a keyboard.  She was not what you would call a musician, but she dabbled with different instruments and had sung in choirs since she was old enough to sing in the children’s choir at her church.

The abandoned piano got stuck in her head, and New Year’s Day things fell into place.  She was having coffee with a relative and telling him about the piano.  She had told her brother and parents about the piano, and they called a few friends to come and check it out.  One of the people had lots of reasons why the piano should be left where it was.  Stealing is stealing, even when the house is empty, people have been consulted and two inches of snow was covering it.  Snow would have permanently damaged it.  Pianos should only be moved by professionals.  The piano would damage the movers.  Even if we did get it out of the snowbank, there was no way we could drag it the block and a half to the house. And what about the steps? And where would we put it? And so on and so on.

The rest of us, curiously enough, were willing to give it a try because we loved the girl and also because we were all deeply committed to walking in the Christian path.  If Christians can put their hopes in a story as crazy as water into wine, a piano is easy.

However, dragging a small studio upright along an unshovelled sidewalk for what was more like three blocks not two was no cake walk. 

It was fun and encouraging.  We took plenty of breaks, talked about different ways to lever the piano up the front steps, how to deal with the chipping varnish and how to get it dry, and wiped snow off the wood at every break.  We did hit a bump where one of the beautifully carved front legs cracked, but the girl was sure that she could fix it in her woodworking shop with the help of a friend who knows how to restore furniture.

And we managed the stairs and put cardboard under it to catch any drips, tickled the ivories and checked all the strings and hammers.

The nay sayer pushed along with the rest of us, bad knee and all.  It felt like he wanted to say something else that would prove his point that this was a foolish endeavor, but he was at a loss for words.  The rest of us knew that we had accomplished something beyond the scope of one person, quite unexpectedly, and it cheered us immensely to know that we could work together to make a young lady’s dream come true.

The piano is now nestled in a dry, warm and hopefully musical environment, waiting to become acclimatized enough to get tuned.  It sounds a little like a honkytonk piano right now, and I’m sure it is as eager as the dreamer is to get back to making music.

When we gather with Jesus at the heart of our understanding of life, abundance pours out in unexpected ways.  Not just a little bit of abundance but abundance large enough to move pianos, turn a disastrous wedding into the event of the century in a little town that no one had ever heard of before.  No one knew Cana or cared much about it before John’s Gospel, and now it’s visited by tourists who want to see the place where John’s Gospel has Jesus start his ministry of abundant love and grace.

May we too find love and grace flowing abundantly in this community to help us find the faith that can move pianos, move mountains, and yes, maybe even turn water into wine in celebration of God’s amazing gift of Jesus to our scared world. 

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1050823421605184&set=a.677694515584745.1073741827.100000326096943&type=3

Who Are You?

A trailer for a movie that is currently in the theatre starts with the question, “who are you?” and it begs other questions like, “where did you come from, why are you here, and where will you go from here?”

All good storytelling begins with those kinds of questions and every author or writer, if they want to really connect with their audience, needs to wrestle with those questions.  Every teenager wishing to be an adult, every person struggling with addiction, everyone filling out forms for employment insurance, everyone facing life after losing a significant life companion, everyone facing a job transition have to revisit these questions again and again.

Who are you? Where did you come from? Why are you here? Where will you go from here?  It is the human quest and it is the hero’s quest.  We all want to be heros, and these questions remind us of the fact that we are not as heroic as we wish, but we are all human.

The gospel writers were human too, and telling the story of where they found answers for their questions.  Whether they saw themselves as heroic or as human, they clearly found the answers in Jesus of Nazareth, to the point that they all saw him as Jesus the Messiah, the Christ.

The Christmas stories point to who they saw Jesus.  Matthew saw Jesus as the new Moses, planning to lead his people Israel to a new promised land despite terrible hardship.  Matthew included Moses-like incidents, the transfiguration on the mountaintop where Jesus talked to God, the wilderness wandering, the massacre of infant boys, royalty that recognizes the child, a stepfather confused with the identity of his son, and the refugee journey into Egypt, land of Joseph and Moses.

Luke saw Jesus as the new Adam, connecting all humanity, Jews and Gentiles alike, yet rooted and grounded in his Jewish heritage.  So we have shepherds, people that practised their trade around the world but seen as outsiders, we have prophets and prophetesses in the temple, we have infants in wombs leaping in joyful recognition of their master approaching, and a woman who ponders things deep in her heart.  We have a census to show his family struggling with Roman oppression, like many people in the ancient world.

Mark started his gospel off not with Bethlehem or angels or wise men or parents or stars.  He started it off with a man emerging from the Jordan River after being baptised by a well-known preacher.  And from that humble beginning, with feet planted firmly in the mud beside the Jordan River, Mark shows us a man with healing and teaching skills that bewilder and encourage the people around him.

John also neglects Christmas nativity and Bethlehem beginnings.  John doesn’t care about placing Jesus into a family context.  John, the last of the Gospel writers to put pen to ink, goes all the way back to Genesis.  “In the beginning was the Word”, he said, and the Genesis editors started with “in the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.  Then God said, “Let there be light” and there was light.

John equates Jesus with the very start of creation, the ‘once upon a time’ of the story.  John is metaphorical, striving to figure out just who this character is.  Jesus is the Word, the light of the world, the bread from heaven, the Lamb of God, the living water, the good shepherd, and the resurrection and the life.  John piles metaphor upon metaphor in a desperate attempt to really communicate who this person is to us his listeners.

Personally, I find John to be a little too poetical and heavy handed.  Enough, already, I hear you, and it’s overwhelming.  And sometimes I find his metaphors being used in ways that can be cruel and judgemental.  “I am the Way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”, he has Jesus say, and many contemporary Christians use that phrase to condemn their neighbors for not being holy enough or religious enough or faithful enough and so we have people who would rather be atheists than come to church and be treated as shameful lesser beings because they can’t be as poetical as John in their hearts.

But it’s good to be reminded every so often to re-examine that basic question.  Who are you Jesus? Where did you come from? Where are you pointing us to next?

Jesus came out of a tradition of prophets like Jeremiah who wanted us to take care of the most vulnerable even in the midst of personal tragedy.  Jeremiah, who wrote to a defeated and traumatized rag-tag group of exiles and refugees who were forced to march into slavery.  Even in those dark times, in the midst of that suffering, Jeremiah said, remember who you are and whose you are.  Remember not to be afraid to sing for joy in the midst of your despair, and take care of laboring women while you are slaves.  Don’t afraid to be dignified followers of your God who will sustain you.  Don’t be afraid to search for meaning during your worst sufferings.

Jesus knew his Jeremiah.  He knew that challenging the system was his purpose, to challenge a culture of indifference, cruelty and egotistical survival where no one mattered except oneself.  He knew that it would not be easy, and he knew that his chances of survival were bleak.  Prophets get stoned, get ridiculed, get executed.  But his word would not be silenced, his message would not be lost.

C. S. Lewis once wrote that we still struggle with who Jesus is.  Either he is a madman, at the level of someone who says he is a scrambled egg, or he is something more.  Whether we believe that more is on the level of a prophet, a Moses, an Adam or a God, we can all learn to stretch our story by following in the footsteps of the man from Galilee.  May it be so for us all.

John’s Opportunity for You

I was listening to car horns honking yesterday.  There were a whole lot of them, and I figured that meant that there was a wedding going on, and sure enough, I watched out the window and caught a glimpse of a car covered with pompoms driving down the hill and honking merrily as it went.

That’s not a custom I’m used to hearing in December, probably because I tend to think that it’s just too cold to have much fun getting married with snow on the ground.  Yet I have family members who did just that, and I bet that their horns honked merrily too.

Can you imagine if your life right now amidst all the bustle and hustle of Christmas preparations would have you so filled with joy that you just had to honk your horn?  Imagine driving all the way back from Edmonton or Westlock or Fort MacMurray honking as you went to celebrate getting that last Christmas present or jumping into your car to drive around the block to let your neighbors know that the Christmas Cake was done, or the tree was trimmed.  No?

All too often we live timid lives that are afraid to let go, bust loose, shake a bell, bang on a pot or pan.  And I can’t say that John’s speech to his people is one that I would feel happy to hear.  I can just imagine the complaint if I stood here, shook my finger and called you a bunch of dirty rattlesnakes. Somehow, I can’t imagine it going down well.  Good thing it’s not my style!

John pulled no punches and yet his teaching was described as ‘good news’.  Go figure!  I think it was because he recognized that everyone had a feeling that something was not quite right with their lives.  That they were living with secret shames or guilts or burdens that weighed them down.  They knew that they were not living honest healthy lives, they had difficult relationships with others, and that they were caught up in the fear that they would go hungry if they didn’t hoard what they could at every opportunity.

John told them that there was no need to fear.  There was only the need to reconnect with God.  The sense of shame or brokenness was what they saw as sin, a word we find challenging in today’s society of positive thinking.  Yet hear what our Song of Faith says around sin:

Made in the image of God,

we yearn for the fulfillment that is life in God.

Yet we choose to turn away from God.

We surrender ourselves to sin,

    a disposition revealed in selfishness, cowardice, or apathy.

Becoming bound and complacent

    in a web of false desires and wrong choices,

    we bring harm to ourselves and others.

This brokenness in human life and community

    is an outcome of sin.

 

Yet evil does not—cannot—

    undermine or overcome the love of God.

We are all imperfect humans.  The good news as John saw it, was that there was an opportunity for us all to reconnect with God, to let go of our guilt and shame, and come into a dance with our creator.  The good news is that John saw it as an easy situation to remedy, and something that everyone could do.  Everyone, not just the religious people who know all the right answers and have memorized a bible verse for every occasion, or the people who are always doing great things for the world, like Mother Theresa or Ghandi.  The average people.  The people that no one expected.  The greedy misers who were accumulating stuff.  The hated collaborators who were seen as despicable traitors to their own people, and even the soldiers who were not part of the community, but part of the system that was oppressing people in daily annoyances and bullying.  The outsiders, the poor, the ones who had given up hope that they could ever measure up. 

The solution was simple:  Share what extra you have, even when it may seem insignificant.  Even if you only have two coats, that is something to rejoice about, and something you can be generous with.  Share that you need extra if you don’t have any coat at all.  If you don’t tell someone you need a coat, how will they know who to share that coat with?  Sharing who you are, what you need and what you have extra of.  Simple.  Don’t share if you don’t have abundance.  The person with one coat is not told to give it away.

Care.  Care about what your neighbor is going through.  Listen to their challenges, and don’t shame them for not having the ‘right’ faith or the ‘right’ solution to their problems.  Give them a prayer shawl, perhaps, or at least pray for them, but shovel their walks and bring them soup if that’s a need.  Be the shoulder they can cry on without judgement or advice.

Last but not least, be fair.  Don’t cheat your neighbor, your friend, or your community.  This seems easy at first but what about those of us who cheat on our income tax, for example, or the speed limit?  Maybe we aren’t all employees at Money Mart, but it could very well be that some of those extra rolls of tape follow us home from the office on a regular basis.  Or if someone undercharges us for groceries, we pocket the extra and sneer at the person who miscalculated.

Rejoice and be glad, for it is a very simple thing to let go of our shame and recognize God loves us even with our flaws.  That is certainly news worth honking our horns for!

How to Pet A Porcupine

Phillipians 1: 3-11 I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now. I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.

It is right for me to think this way about all of you, because you hold me in your heart, for all of you share in God's grace with me, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. For God is my witness, how I long for all of you with the compassion of Christ Jesus.

And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.

One of my friends posted a video on Facebook the other day that I found just fascinating.  It was a woman petting a porcupine.  A real live porcupine, the prickly kind that we usually see as road kill in the spring and that if we do happen to meet up with them on a hike, we will back away from slowly and carefully.  The kind of animal that if your dog ever met, you would end up taking a trip to the vet to get a muzzle full of quills removed from your poor pooch.

I thought about porcupines being all prickly, and how they are a good animal to reflect on for Peace Sunday.  Truth be told, I bet on any one given day, people will meet up with someone who will make them feel like they’ve been hit with a facefull of quills.  A neighbor, a friend, a co-worker, who throws out barbed comments, or takes a swack at you emotionally, or takes the simplest comment and see it as an attack.  They are prickly.  And we wish we could avoid them or de-barb them or do something, anything, to keep them from hurting us.

Such is the stuff of warfare.  Whenever we take another human being and assume that we know they are less than us, less friendly, less righteous, less blameless or pure than us, whenever we label them as a porcupine or a terrorist or a, well, you fill in the blank, somehow that dehumanizes them enough that it is okay to discriminate against them.  “He’s a bully, she’s a communist, that’s a porcupine” and we use the label to determine how we will treat them.  Take the Syrians in France and Lebanon and Greece and Turkey.  Are they refugees or are they terrorists?  The political pundits are busy trying to convince us to label human beings that will help determine our policies, our politics and our personal reactions to the newcomers who will be coming to Athabasca.

I know what it’s like to be labelled.  In 1981, I went to the University of Alberta to learn how to become an engineer.  While I was there, people would react in several different ways to my course of study.  Sometimes they would assume that I was a butch tomboy, someone that Robin Williams in “Good Morning Vietnam” referred to as ‘women in comfortable shoes’.  Sometimes they would assume that I was just looking for my ‘MRS’ degree, only there to catch a husband.  But generally when people found out that I was in that faculty, they talked to me like I actually had intelligence, and really saw me for a human being and not just a cute young female.  Although people scoff that I had experienced such labelling, it was only eight years later that a man walked into a Canadian school for engineers, separated the men from the women, and executed 14 women for their audacity.  The label he applied to all the women he found was ‘feminist’, and he used that label to scapegoat and kill them.

The latest shooting in the states is only one of many.  According to one newspaper, there have been over 12 thousand deaths in 2015 in the US to date due to gun violence, 309 were from mass shootings like the one this week. 2 ½%.  In 2012, the most recent report on gun violence, Stats Can reported that our rate of gun murders was 7 times lower than that of Americans and had been steadily dropping over all since 1972. 

When we label others, it gives us permission to think that they are less than human.  Oh, those violent Americans who can’t control their guns.  Oh those terrorists or those mentally ill people or whatever label we use.  Those who we don’t like, those bullies, those immigrants, those other people that look or sound or smell different than us. Oh those porcupines

This is not the way to peace.  Labels and blaming don’t work.  Martin Luther King, Jr., a champion for Christian non-violence, wrote,

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.

Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

Paul met the Philippians with love.  He remembered them with love.  He encouraged them with love, and he hoped they would do the same with the people they met.  They were different than him, but that didn’t stop him sharing the good news that there is an alternative to the cycle of violence.  “It is right for me to think of you in this way, because you reflect back the love to me.” If you get a chance to see the video of someone petting the porcupine, you will see that they do it with love.  Protection, so they won’t get the point the hard way, but love.  Even porcupines can respond to love.  The reality is that we all have moments when we are anything but pure and blameless, without offence.  We are all porcupines.

I’ll never forget the day that a young man said to me, “did you know that once a month, we have a fight and it coincides with your hormonal cycle?” I instantly transformed into a vicious porcupine, spewing angry denials. It takes a lot of patience and honesty to learn to function without spewing blame as fast as porcupines spread quills when feeling scared or angry.  And interestingly, the word Paul uses for ‘blameless’ can be translated as ‘without bumps’.  Without quills, perhaps.  And what if we rethought blameless to not be the picture of innocence and perfection but instead thought of it as someone who chooses not to blame others.  How do you pet a porcupine? By treating them with love, by being trustworthy and patient, and by being well-protected with thick leather clothing just in case.  When we do that, porcupines tend to react to being petted like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5I5H7EeC8k

 

Don’t take their barbs personally, remember that some porcupines need professional handling, and be honest with yourself when you are feeling prickly to remember that none of us will be perfect, at least not until the Day of Christ comes and will make all blameless.  Thanks be to God that the Day of Christ will be a day of great love, and that Christ will love us regardless of how much like a porcupine we might be.  Then we too will dance like a happy, petted and loved porcupine!