Lost and found

I have a guilty secret! I love movies, and not just any movies, but kids’ movies, especially Disney movies.  These folks seem to have big hearts for the human condition, and they are brazen in their exploration of tough issues.  Want your 8-year-old to learn how to manage their feelings and talk about what bugs them, try Inside Out. Want them to be educated on techniques to combat racism? Sit them down to watch Zootopia.  All kinds of topics that we adults might hesitate to discuss because we’re feeling discomfort, they have worked on.  They even have worked on environmental commentary.  I was fascinated by the latest Pixar Disney movie, Finding Dory.  It tackles several topics, dealing with everything from physical disabilities, like Nemo’s fin to mental challenges, like Dory’s lack of short term memory, which causes her and her friends no end of problems.  Dory says, “nothing in my noggin” to explain her disability, which is quite untrue of course.  There is more than meets the eye in Dory, and more than meets the eye in the movie of a quest for family through the wide ocean from the Great Barrier Reef to the California coastline. 

This movie shows three fish on their adventure through the ocean stumbling repeatedly through a sea floor littered with cars, garbage, plastic and so on.  It’s subtly done, and the fish characters never make a big deal of it except when Dory gets tangled up in plastic and has to be rescued by a marine biologist.  It’s sad that we have known about the giant island of plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for years and no one has done anything about it.  It’s sad that Victoria still dumps raw sewage into the ocean, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia online.  CBC reported last year that Montreal dumps untreated sewage into the St. Lawrence, and that roughly 185-million litres of raw sewage have been dumped into Winnipeg's rivers since 2004. 

That’s about 74 Olympic sized swimming pools.  I don’t know how that compares to our town pool here across the street, but that’s a lot of water.  And when Toronto has a big storm or Halifax’s aging pipes break down, well, let’s just say that it’s not pretty.

Water is a part of us, and a part of our world.  It is changing faster than we realize, and it shouldn’t take a cruise ship sailing the North West Passage to get our attention, and to encourage us to encourage the politicians to do something.

We’ve lost our way.  We’ve forgotten that we are what we drink and that if we completely mess up our water systems, it’s going to make Jeremiah’s description of desolation come true.  The devastation of the fruitful earth is a desecration and a reversal of Genesis 1 when God’s breathe, Ruach, blew over the world and God saw that it was good.  Jeremiah reports God seeing what foolish humans have done, and it is definitely not good.   Is this what God wants for creation? Is this what we call good stewardship?

Jesus talked about going after and rescuing the insignificant, the least and the littlest.  Making an effort to hunt for that tiny coin, abandoning the herd of sheep to go looking for a lost lamb, the 1 percent.  The tiny insignificant things do matter.  When we monitor the quality of water in the Athabasca River, when we invest in a low-flow shower head or a dual flush toilet, when we change the way we brush our teeth to conserve the water more carefully, when we drink water straight from the tap to remind ourselves that water should be clean and potable and not controlled by multinational corporations, when we keep asking our politicians, when will first nations children in Canada all be guaranteed clean drinking water, when we remember to not take for granted what we pump up from our wells, when we remember to be careful when we clean up after an oil change or a painting project, it does make a difference.  It may be a drop in the bucket, but it matters, folks!  Those little actions, those attitudes and questions will add up over time.  A drop of water, millions of times over, can carve out the Drumheller river valley, or even the Grand Canyon.

We in the United Church like to preach about a God who loves us, and I do believe in that God.  But there were times when my children were small that I got exasperated with them.  Sometimes they wandered off in the store when I was trying to shop for something.  A few seconds later, I would be searching for them frantically until I would hear ‘would the mother of the little child please come to the jewelry counter’.  I would feel frustrated that they hadn’t listened, that I hadn’t watched closely enough over them, that it took only a moment for them to move so fast.  If God is the creator of this beautiful blue planet, surely there is a need to honor that creation by whatever little steps we can take to cherish it.  Because from all accounts, there isn’t a lot of water nearby and even if we harvested clean water on Mars and brought it back here, I’m not sure we could get it here fast enough to help the fish and the whales and other creatures in the ocean and rivers.  They don’t have a voice, unlike Dory and Nemo and Marlin, and we do.  May we do our best to keep doing our best to speak up for this beautiful world before it is lost into the vision Jeremiah painted so bleakly many centuries ago.  God help us find the vision, the words and the backbone to speak for the lost ones, confront the foolish ones and challenge the complacent ones, especially when we are the lost, foolish and complacent ones.  God have mercy on us all.  Amen.

Hospitality and entitlement and pokemon

With all the excitement in the news of Pokémon Go this summer, I was looking forward to coming back from holidays and interacting with kids in search of their elusive Pocket monster characters.  It has become quite the talking point; young folks are getting off the sofa, going outside and meeting people, especially the generation that has been seen as living lives similar to mushrooms, down in the dark basement playing endless video games.  Yes there have been some silly things associated with it, and some sad and tragic things from people who forgot their common sense, to kids getting lured into a trap and robbed at gunpoint!

I was hoping to provide hospitality to teens and young adults looking for their charmanders, pikachus and bulbasaurs here.   Unfortunately, or fortunately, we are not a Pokestop, but the old brick schoolhouse up the road from us is.  So I went up the road to the library to offer hospitality.  Pokémon were the number one requested by kids getting their faces painted at the summer library program at Alice B Donahue this week.  The motto, ‘gotta get them all’ is very familiar to them.  They appreciated the hospitality of meeting them where they were and respecting what they were interested in. 

Hospitality is one of the calling cards of Christian practise.  It’s a spiritual practise that was shocking when it first was taught by Jesus and Paul, and it still is shocking today.  Think about it a bit.  When was the last time you threw a dinner party and invited everyone to it regardless of whether they could give a dinner party back to you? Or fed people who would never have the ability or resources to bring a potluck dish to a gathering?  In Jesus’ time, banquets were business deals.  You knew how important you were in the community by where you sat at the table, and it was an opportunity to remind people of your power and wealth.  Unlike the free pancake breakfast at the Agricom yesterday, a dinner party was designed to show strength and curry favor.  Jesus suggesting that we have a dinner without political wheeling and dealing would today be more like the bank opening its doors to the vault and saying, “help yourself to whatever you find in here”.

Christian hospitality is a difficult ideal.  How do we manage it? I still struggle – is it safe to have this homeless person in my house for a night? Is that couple okay?  How do I know? When is it hospitality and when is it entitlement?  That’s the flip side of the banquet parable.  There are times we think we are entitled to the best customer service or the best deals at our favorite store.  We deserve to have a break today.  We deserve to know that we are saved and that we don’t need to do anything more to keep our souls as healthy as our bank accounts.  We download the app that says, “I have decided to accept Jesus as my savior” and we are done.  Nothing more needs to be said.

Jesus and Paul would have nothing to do with that kind of entitlement.  Much like Pokémon Go, it’s not enough to have the app on our phones, or the catch phrase on our lips, we are to get out into the big scary world and meet folks.  Talk to them, encounter them.  The game players who search for their characters know that it takes time, effort and training to become a competent Pokémon trainer.  Paul and Jesus too, want us to become not just people who made a commitment one day and figure that was all that was needed.  No, they want us to be people of the way, followers who see themselves as disciples, ever learning, ever experimenting with what it means to be a Christian.  Our church is a training gym for us to learn the skills and practises of being Christ followers.  Our sacraments of communion and baptism are visible signs of how we work together to provide hospitality as part of our Christian faith.  Baptism is a sign that we are choosing to be disciples and that we recognize it is a life-long path that goes best when it goes in community. 

Communion is that banquet where all are welcomed as part of Christ’s family to join together in joy and celebration that we are part of God’s beautiful world.  Both remind us that whether we are first timers, long timers, irregulars or still seekers, we are all welcome here.

Bent Over Woman

Luke 13:10 Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. 11 And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years...

Whoever came up with the idea of having the story of the Bent over woman in August must have been a gardener over the age of 50! It’s easy to sympathise with her in these hot days when the weeds are high and thick, and the carrots need pulling, the potatoes need digging, the beans need snapping and the zucchinis need to be pulled before they become the size of a major league baseball bat.  If you need a zucchini, please let me know.  Seriously!

One of the things I noticed while pulling weeds this week is how limited our view becomes.  The focus narrows down to the chickweeds and the petunias.  There is no looking at the blue sky or a rose-colored sunset or the far horizon of a lake shore or the high peak of a mountain.  There’s just the dirt at your toes, and maybe the feet of people around you.  It’s an unpredictable world too, being bent over.  Rain storms may be overhead, or a forest fire on the horizon, but staring down means that these kinds of things can not be anticipated or planned for.  They just happen.

I’ve met a few bent over women; one was my husband’s grandmother who had debilitating osteoporosis and was quite debilitated at the end of her days.  Another was a lady struggling with muscular dystrophy.  She is a few years older than me, and her spine is quite curved.  I thought at first she was having a difficult time in her wheelchair as she sat far forward on it, but then I realized that her spine was so bent that she looked like she was maybe 5 feet, but was probably closer to six feet tall.  It took a team of 5 people to get her down into the lake to go for a swim.  And I often think of the woman whose husband reroofed the manse last July.  She was camping with her kids and saved them from a falling tree.  Our roofer had to leave several times to help out with the kids and to be there when she woke up from the medically induced coma to the news that she has lost the use of her legs for the rest of her life. 

But the woman I remember the most, who actually didn’t have a bent over back, but taught me a lot about disabilities, was a lady who I met in first year university.  She lived in a dorm room two doors down from me and was a year or two older than me.  She was a thalidomide baby.  In her case, she had arms that were maybe a foot long, complete with elbows and hands, but only about 4 fingers each.  It meant that she couldn’t do buttons but she could do zippers.  Winter coats had to be adjusted to shorten the sleeves, and mittens were awkward, to say the least.  She could hold spoons and pencils, loved skiing and swimming, but had no way to tie shoe laces.  Things that I took for granted, bike riding for example, or typing, were challenges that had to be figured out in a way that would work for her.  But one thing stuck in my memory of her.  She once told me that she didn’t mind looking different than others and having challenges.  She figured that everyone had some kind of disability, but some people’s disabilities were on the outside for the world to see.  Other’s disabilities were inside, and invisible even to themselves.  They are bent over, seeing only what is at their feet. They can’t see straight.

Jesus straightened up two people that day in the synagogue. He brought health and new horizons to the bent over woman, but also to the synagogue leader.  The leader had forgotten the reason for the Sabbath.  It wasn’t just about not working, a reminder that we are not slaves any longer, but it was about remembering to take time to be in relationship with God.  And the leader was narrow-minded in his assumptions.  In his eyes, the woman was crippled because she somehow had done something to deserve it.  That’s still a common thread I often hear, “everything happens for a reason,” or even, “I must have some really bad karma.”  He was also feeling threatened.

 I can imagine that he was going about leading his regular service in his regular way, and this Jesus fellow stole the show, made the worship service a little chaotic with his actions, and the people must have been full of excitement about what they had just witnessed.  Rather than leading the congregation in joining the woman to praise God, he carped about technicalities.  Things weren’t fitting into his comfortable, predictable box.  Jesus stepped outside the bounds by noticing the woman and empathizing with her.  He touched her in compassion, wishing to free her from her feelings of shame and isolation.  She didn’t ask for the healing, she was used to it after 18 years.  But maybe she wasn’t so used to being seen as someone worthy of the same respect and kindness as others who could stand up straight and tall.  Jesus didn’t just straighten her out, but reminded the leader that it’s about the bigger picture of God’s compassionate love for those who we would most like to dismiss and ignore.

There are so many people who are struggling, bent over with sorrows that cripple their relationships, their families and their very souls.  Some are too angry to come to church; sometimes it is the church where they experienced a sense of shame from a leader with too narrow a point of view.  They struggle from day to day, not hearing a kind word, a gentle touch, a moment of empathy.  We may not be able to cure their pain, but we can remember that they too are children of God.  And there are times we too are crippled up in pain both physical and emotional.  Part of my vacation was struggling with the pain of self-doubt and fear.  But when we gather together in a faith community, whether it’s here in Athabasca, at a church camp, or in a congregation hundreds of miles from home, we gather to hear the hope in Jesus’ words of love, “you are set free from that which cripples you.” May we remember that love and that hope.

Juggling our Lives

Luke 10:40-42  New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.”  But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things;  there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”

 

If we measure our worth by how much we can juggle in our days, how many meetings and appointments we can cram into our lives, then Martha is going straight to heaven! She’s a capable woman, able to quickly put together a dinner party for Jesus and his twelve disciples at a moment's notice, and is seen as not only the head of the household, but also as a deacon, one who serves.

She knows that Jesus talks about taking care of others, especially our neighbors.  The Good Samaritan was a story she had just heard and she knows that our actions are important.  She knows that our faith without actions is empty.  She is determined to show that she has figured it out, that she understands what Jesus is getting at.  Hospitality to those less fortunate.  Well Martha knows how to do hospitality.

Or she would if her sister would pitch in and do her fair share.  And as Martha juggles getting the side of lamb out of the oven at the same time as the vegetables are done, with the setting of the table and making sure that everyone has a chair, she reaches the breaking point.  Can’t you just hear the things she’s telling herself? “If that Mary wasn’t wandering around with her head in the clouds, she’d have the flowers in the vase by now.  She can’t even remember that the salad fork goes before the dinner fork.  And if I’ve told her once, I’ve told her a thousand times, the blue napkins go with the best dishes, not the green napkins!  How that girl will ever survive this world without me I’ll never know.  Honestly!”

There are a lot of Marthas out there, juggling the wine menu with the meat and the Prada shoes with the Gucci handbag.  I knew a lady at city hall who spent $500 on a pair of blue jeans, and always bought matching toenail polish whenever she bought a new pair of sandals. 

I met a mom who has spent her life so filled with driving her kids to hockey and soccer practises that she gets panic attacks when she wonders what she will do now that they are leaving home.  I saw a dad barking lessons at his son while the little boy ran in the children’s triathlon yesterday, like he was an Olympic coach determined to have the boy win the race and who would slack off if he didn’t hear dad’s push to ignore his body and push through to the end.  We have to constantly teach our children to juggle more and more things so that they don’t become, well quite bluntly, thugs and addicts.  Heaven knows what they might do if they have too much time on their hands.

So Martha explodes at Jesus, and uses some of the nastiest tricks of female bullies in every century, triangulation, pressure cooking and shaming.  Triangulation is when we complain about someone’s behavior behind their backs.  It’s gossip and slander, and can be very destructive to family and church.  There’s pressure cooking where you collect tiny grievances into a pot and simmer it until it explodes and rather than deal with the issues when they are tiny, you dump them all over the victim in a hot mess.  And there’s my personal bugbear, public shaming.  Nothing can beat it for making someone feel terrible.  So, Mr. Jesus, my rabbi, what do you think of my lazy sister here who isn’t helping set the table?  Teacher, tell her to be a proper female, and get back to her place in the kitchen with me.  Why should she get all the attention? I need help with my juggling and she should help.  Look at how hard I am working for the kingdom, sacrificing my time and my energy to serve you, and she should be more like me, shouldn’t she?

I cringe when I remember times when a family member would recount my personal shortcomings at a party in public.  I also realize how incredibly sexist it is.  Rabbis at the time of Jesus were having heated debates about the propriety of having female rabbinical students who could one day preach or lead a synagogue. 

It still goes on today, popping up when I least expect it.  At the Strawberry tea this month, a lady stopped me and said, “that handsome man there waiting tables, is he the minister here, dearie?”  “No,” I said, “He’s the minister’s husband.”

It’s not just me.  I’ve seen grown men cry when they recount their parents bullying them to be more, do more, run faster, and shaming them in public.  I got a letter this week from our president of Alberta Northwest Conference saying he was told that he speaks English real good for someone of his race, and another who said aloud in his presence, “the church needs to put that fat black boy in his place.”

Enough! Our best man at our wedding was what some people call ‘pakki’, and an elegant, beautiful soul; he does not drive a taxi in Mill Woods, but has a PhD in Pharmacy and lives in Ottawa.  The racism is here in this building, this town, this country.  It leads to so much anger and resentment and rage that people shoot police, murder 5 year olds or drives trucks into families out to watch fireworks.

We need to stop all the juggling and pretence.  Our works are not going to help us get into heaven when we die.  Shaming others will not save their souls! Jesus told Martha, you are full of worries.  Stop it.  Come and sit with Mary and let me help you get your priorities straight.  Stop juggling. Rest. Breathe.  Remember it’s about loving.  Loving yourself as much as you are loving others.  Love God.  The Samaritan was able to do what he did because he first loved God.  Put that first before all the doing.  Love, Martha.  Love. 

Circumcision and nudists?

Some days there is a word that jumps out from the scriptures and grabs my imagination. Rather reluctantly, I admit that this time it’s the word, wait for it, circumcision.  Sigh. It’s one of those squirmy words, right up there with money, to get people, including me, feeling rather uncomfortable. 

And how do I talk about something so personal, so intimate, and so outside of my own experience as a woman?  I can think of several men whom I know who, no, not the right time and place for that story.  And then there’s, nope, not my story.  So although I am going to preach to the scriptures, just take a deep breath and relax.  No surgery stories coming from this pulpit today.

Instead, I’m going to talk about some people in Vancouver.  They are part of an organization that has been around since the 60’s and that’s a pretty good track record for any group.  They are having a problem though.  They need to recruit new members, and they tried to have open houses, once a year, for that’s a tradition of theirs.  They went on CBC television, to lament that they are getting older and feeling that they can’t keep up with all the work.  They want some younger folks to join up and take over.  They really don’t understand why people aren’t flocking to their open houses.  Any guess as to what this group is?

Yup, it’s a nudist colony! That would be one group that wouldn’t be squeamish about discussing circumcision.  And I would have thought that it would be the last group to struggle to have new members.  I mean, surely their children and grandchildren would join?  I can understand why people aren’t joining churches, but a nudist colony? Wow.  Let’s face it, bowling leagues, The Legion, Lion’s Club, even the Chamber of Commerce are all hoping that some day the young people will come and get to work, keeping up the traditions that have kept those groups going.

Frankly, I remember coming to church as a 20something, and I wasn’t seeing myself as the person to take over all the work of the church.  I can’t imagine anyone saying to me ‘come to church so you can organize cleaning bees and roofing fundraisers, start a children’s choir’ and so on.  No, a friend of mine said to me, ‘I can see you are hurting, why don’t you try going to church?’  I thought he was crazy, but I was in a lot of pain, and thought that if it worked for him, maybe it would work for me, atheist though I was.

People are struggling.  They are in pain.  I see articles such as ‘sleep deprivation is a major crisis in North America,’ or ‘we are seeing an epidemic of the dis-ease of busyness which is causing all kinds of emotional and psychological trauma and we are inflicting this dis-ease on our children’, or the headline in last month’s United Church Observer, “All the Lonely People”, something like 6 million people live isolated, lonely lives. 

This epidemic affects 20 somethings and senior citizens, male and female, circumcised and uncircumcised alike.  It’s also an ancient epidemic.  Unlike the Nudist Colony, we’ve been building community for a long time.  2000 years or so of sending out folks to stay with people they don’t know, sharing hope and healing with whomever will listen.  But we often get it wrong.

Paul’s letter to the Galatians is a stark example of that.  Rather than being a perfect little community since it was founded by people very close to Jesus, it has debates and conflicts tearing it apart.  One person is arrogantly sure he or she is right about what the rules are; after all, aren’t Christians really Jews? So shouldn’t all Christians look the same as Jews? The rest of the community are unsure how to address the situation; do they yell at the circumciser? Do they kick him or her out?

Do they pull out their extra nice manners in hopes that they will either get the person to change their mind or drop out? Or do they write to Paul for advice?

And Paul reminds them that Jesus didn’t come to tell everyone to get circumcised.  Jesus didn’t come to set up a bunch of rules and regulations on how to worship.  The Law was to be a finger pointing to God, not God alone.  When we start to worship our law, our tradition and forget that it is to be a pointer to God, we lose the focus of our Christian identity. 

Jesus wanted Christian identity to be about having a mission in their lives beyond the day to day struggles to eat, drink, and pay the bills.  He wanted them to know that there was more to life than an endless round of appointments and busy days, over scheduled tasks, meetings and social gatherings to keep to.  He wanted them to know that there was hope.  Like African Americans struggling with slavery, they gathered together to share stories and songs of hope.  They knew when they did their ring shouts that they were not alone in their suffering and that they found God’s healing love in the midst of the brutality they were forced to endure.  The promise of Paul and of Jesus that all people, regardless of what they looked like, were human beings worthy of respect, kept them singing about freedom and hope and following the Drinking Gourd to Canada where they would find a better life.  And if they couldn’t find Canada, they would remember that there was a better day coming, that on the other side of Jordan, they would be free once again.

Jesus said that if we want to build our community, if we want to reach out to others, we have to do it with vulnerability, humbleness and respect, and going out to where they are.  Last weekend I was with a group of new age people, the ‘spiritual but not religious’. 

They shared stories of their church childhood, and two came with memories of being United.  They were turned off from bullying, power struggles, and cliques that weren’t interested in hospitality.  But hearing my stories of the congregations that fed me and helped me and healed me got them curious. 

They felt surprise that we weren’t as stuffy and rule bound as they remembered, and felt curious that religion might still have something to offer them.  I hope that one day, they may find a thriving congregation who are not just a nudist colony searching for new workers, but a fellowship helping each other along the way as we follow in the footsteps of the 70, going out into the world to listen, to share, to give hope and to build God-centered communities.  May it be so for us all.

Rocks in His head?

Luke 8:26-39

Jesus must have had rocks in his head.  I can just imagine that his disciples thinking that when they set out from Galilea by boat to the Gerasene countryside.  What was he doing over there?  From all accounts, he ended up in a scary place.   Tombstones, graveyards, and a person who sounded like he was right off his rocker.  And Jesus was caught between a rock and a hard place. Should he help the man and risk being shunned by his good, faithful Jewish followers, or should he ignore the man in all his suffering, but let the legion have its way with the man?

Legion is an interesting name, by the way.  It’s a military word, a word with Latin origins, not Greek.  It is a unit of the Roman army, and refers to between three and six thousand soldiers.  That is a lot of tormenting voices to have in one’s head.  It must have been terrifying to witness the man’s ravings and violence.

It’s a fascinating thing that there is a variation on this scripture in all three gospels.  It came right after the story of Jesus sleeping in a storm while the disciples are trying to sail across the sea of Galilea, which, by the way, is only 8 miles wide by 13 miles long.  They may not have wanted to rock the boat, but the storm certainly was.  And Jesus quieted the storm, allowing them to get to the other side of the sea.  The Gentile side.  The non-Jewish side.  Perhaps even the side where Romans were completely in charge, unlike the Jewish side where an uneasy truce of sorts was trying to keep the tensions at bay.  But it was not a place where a nice Jewish rabbi and his followers should spend time, especially when it was a stone’s throw from where a herd of pigs were.  Pigs, as you may know were unclean animals according to the law of Moses, and if gentiles who wanted to make friends with Jews happened to accidently serve pork chops, well let’s just say that relationship would be off to a rocky start, and probably the Jews would greet that dish with a stony silence.

So you don’t have to be stone cold sober to guess that the poor fellow with all the demons was quite likely not Jewish.  Jesus as a good rabbi, would probably never have left the Galilea neighborhood.  Jesus as an excellent rabbi would remember the stories of Elijah and the teachings of prophets like Isaiah that would extol the virtues of taking care of foreigners, and even living with them day by day.  But Jesus, if we can trust our gospels, and I find more and more that they are something I do trust to grow my faith, did more than an excellent rabbi.  He reached out and did the unthinkable.  He healed the man!

We all know how easy it is to feel intimidated by people who today have hit rock bottom.  Whether it is from addictions, mental illness, abuse and scam artists, or betrayal by family members, we would rather stay on our side of the lake and not have to deal with such situations.  We don’t want to go near the folks who seem out of control, who are violent, and who are desperately looking for ways to ease their pain.  Yet on this 1^st anniversary of the shootings in a Methodist church in Charleston South Carolina, or 5 days after our own beloved church was broken into, we know that there are times when we don’t have to cross the sea to meet people that scare us.  Sometimes they come to us.  Sometimes they live only a stone’s throw from our homes.  Sometimes their rocky roads through life intersect ours in devastating ways.

Jesus was not afraid to meet them where they were.  Jesus reached out in love and understanding.  He asked the man what his name was.  He listened to the man’s voices, not trying to deny or ignore or pretend they weren’t there.  He acted decisively and compassionately.

 On this Father’s day, I would invite us all to wonder what it would be like to have the demonic voices that encourage us to see violence as an option to be silenced.  To have those addictive and seductive negative thoughts be brought out of our secret places and plunged into a public place like the demons ending up in a raging stampede of sows and piglets.  To chose to practise radical hospitality to everyone we meet, for we just don’t know when Jesus might show up on their doorstep and heal their minds.

Paul’s reminder that we are all one in Christ, is hard to swallow.  Some might say it is crazy. But it was that commitment to seeing everyone as a child of God that was at the heart of Jesus’ healing ministry.  We don’t know what Jesus did to cause such a dramatic healing, but it left a deep impression on his disciples.  Jesus didn’t divide people into those worthy of socializing with and those who should be shunned.  He didn’t judge that some were to be worthy of his time and others not.  He went where he was needed, and responded to their hurts with compassion.

We need more men like Jesus, men who chose not to shoot up men in a club in Orlando just because they are attracted to other men.  We need men like the young fellow who wandered into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest black church in the South, a few weeks after the shooting, to sit and listen about why people kept coming back for bible study on Wednesday nights despite the deaths that occurred.  He keeps coming back.  That bible study has more than doubled its attendance and now attracts both black and white folks to learn about the bible.  And this last Wednesday, there were 150 people in attendance.  I pray that they continue to testify to their faith with such brave boldness, and that we too may follow in their footsteps, with Jesus the rock beneath our feet.

30th Anniversary of the United Church Apology to Indiginous peoples

Thirty years! Wow, how time flies.  We’ve been working as a national church, to live into right relations since 1986.  Whether we call this land Turtle Island or North America, we have heard words spoken in 1986 and 1988 on our behalf.  Are we ready and willing to own them for ourselves?

I can only speak as a daughter of immigrants and settlers.  I am grateful for my forebearers coming to this country, some of whom came 80 years ago, and some who came more than 200 years ago.  But no matter when they came, they came for land and the promise of freedom.

Like Ahab, they faced a choice; would they respect the people who were already here and their ties to the land, or take what they thought they needed, regardless of the implications.  Jezebel’s evil advice, “Are you the King or not?” was a seductive call to see oneself as intrinsically superior to another, and that an individual can use his greed to justify violating not just another individual’s rights, but his spiritual and cultural ties to land.  The culture in the days of Ahab and Naboth was that land was not something that one could buy or sell, but was a gift from God that was to be nurtured and passed down to the next generation.  That understanding was not convenient for kings and governments. 

Ahab chose power over empathy, and manipulation over honesty.  He chose selfish convenience over the human rights and dignity of another person.

Jesus chose a different way.  He encountered the paralytic man, not with a spirit of convenience or power or greed, but one of empathy.  He could even have felt guilty that he himself was able to walk, he could have listened to the Pharisees and done what was politically expedient to avoid trouble.  Instead, he chose compassion and action.  Just as Elijah had, he named that God cared about those who seemed to be outside society.  The Pharisees may have believed that a man who is paralyzed has offended God and deserves his disability.  Instead Jesus saw the man as one to be treated with dignity and empathy.

So the question remains for us all.  How do we own the apology and live into right relations today in Athabasca?  How do we move out of our fears and disrespect for those who live here who are coming from a different culture?  We non-aboriginals might think it helps to feel guilty, but if that guilt leads to inaction, then we can become paralyzed into non-action.  And of course I can’t speak for indigenous folks, but I can choose to be more like Jesus and less like Ahab.

So I would ask you to take a few moments to ponder some questions:

What is the nature of the paralysis that First Nations communities may be experiencing? That the church may be experiencing?

Who are the persistent friends, determined that Indigenous peoples and the church find healing?

What barriers need to be removed?

What question is in your heart related to forgiveness?

Where do you see yourself in this? 

Where do you find hope?