Razzle Dazzle them?

I had a chance to see “The Greatest Showman”, a movie based loosely on the life of PT Barnum, who happily exploits humans that people will pay money to stare at, bearded ladies, conjoined twins, little people and the like, all so Barnum can make a quick buck.  The feeling he gets when he stands in the spotlight, a lovely sense of his own importance as he drinks in the applause of the audience is also a huge motivation.  He’d rather be in glittery circus outfits than at home watching his beautiful young daughters grow up.  He loves anything he can do to get attention and doesn’t even mind snobbish reviews as they are free publicity that help sell tickets to his events.

Contrast his extravagant behaviour with today’s scriptures.  Jesus is on a mountaintop with his three special students when something amazing happens and Peter, James and John catch a glimpse of who Jesus really is.  They don’t know what to do next.  Let’s set up some tents, and under the big top, our main attraction, Glow in the Dark Jesus! Did they plan to charge admission or to live in tents with him, or were they trying to keep Jesus from lighting up the neighborhood and blinding them in the process?  Or even, outlandish as it might sound, were they trying to start a new religious holiday like the Festival of Booths that celebrates the harvest and even now has devout Jewish people build tents and temporary shelters to remember their history of escaping Egypt and living in tents while they wandered the wilderness?

We will never know.  But it’s striking to compare Jesus or even Paul to PT Barnum.  Paul repeatedly says that he’s not in the business of being a Ring Master or a carnival hawker.  There’s no glib, “step right up, get your tickets here folks and put your hands together for the one, the only Apostle Paul, all the way from Jerusalem with Good News for all!” 

No, quite the contrary, Paul insists that he is not the star attraction, only Jesus is, and only because Jesus is an image of God, and gives us a glorious idea of what God is like.

Transfiguration Sunday celebrates that we, like the disciples, get glimpses of God when we have Jesus as the lens in which we see God, our lives and the world, sometimes in surprising ways.

One such moment was last fall when I stood on the hill in the Amber Valley graveyard overlooking the fields and farmland that stretched for miles as far as I could see.  With me were black ministers here to learn about the story of freedom and bravery of early settlers escaping racist oppression in the United States.  One lady wrote about it for this year’s Black history month worship resource and said,

It is hard to imagine how anyone, Black or White, would take their families on such a treacherous trip from Oklahoma to northern Alberta, and especially in the days of little to no infrastructure. What a gruelling experience that must have been—to come to settle in the Great North with minus 50 weather. According to the National Post, Canadian Whites weren’t at all crazy about the idea of a bunch of “coloured folk” coming to settle in Alberta, but they took no action against talks of the migration because they strongly doubted that Black people (even those dodging Jim Crow laws) would want to or be able to survive the northern Alberta winters.

That little field trip we assisted with, which had folks coming from as far away as Detroit and London England, was more than just a glimpse into the past; it was a clarion call for action in the present.

Someone said to me that when they heard scriptures say, “his clothes became dazzling white such as no one on earth could bleach them,” or “the light shone in the darkness and the darkness knew it not,”
they felt like the Bible has institutionalized ‘whiteness’ as good and pure and ‘darkness’ as evil to be fought against and as justification for racism.  Given the fact that some United Churches in Alberta had connections with the Klu Klux Clan back in the 1920’s, these scriptures could have been misused in just that way.  We must never allow that to happen again, but always remember that Jesus called us to love our neighbor, and that Paul reminded us that there is no male or female, neither slave nor free, but all are one in Christ Jesus.

Transfiguration, the light of God breaking into the world, happens in the oddest ways and at the oddest times.  P. T. Barnum retired from the spotlight, became a politician and became a member of the new anti-slavery Republican Party. In one of Barnum’s speeches, he said, "A human soul, ‘that God has created and Christ died for,’ is not to be trifled with. It may tenant the body of a Chinaman, a Turk, an Arab or a Hottentot – it is still an immortal spirit."  Lest you think that our work is done, and our world is perfect, even though the antislavery law was passed in the US in 1850, Mississippi did not ratify it until 2013.

God is still breaking into our world, shining a spotlight on the challenges, inhumanities and injustices that people are suffering under.  God is still speaking to us, reminding us to love our neighbors no matter what, and to rise above and challenge discrimination and racism wherever we may find it.  And may we all remember that God’s grace is still with us when we work for justice and love in amazing ways.  Our work here in this little church impacts congregations across Canada just as their work helps support us on our journey.  May we all be transfigured into people ready to speak good news of amazing grace to everyone we meet.  Amen.

Remembering our story

Isaiah 40:21-31, Mark 1:29-39

I was thinking how cynical we have become in this world.  Between news stories and family drama, political speeches and outrageous tweets, the levels of cynicism are depressingly high.  It is a vicious trap that many people are caught up in, and I hear it often in the lives of people around me who have given up in despair because they can’t see a way out.

But there is a strong message that was intended for people in that situation.

Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning?

These urgent questions are passionately spoken to an audience who has forgotten their story.  And our gospel today also has a feel of urgency.  Today’s translation starts with ‘as soon as they left the synagogue’, but a better translation is ‘immediately they left’, and that word is used repetitively throughout the first chapter of Mark.  Immediately they left the synagogue, where he had just cast out a demon (who had immediately left the interrupting man, by the way), he goes to a house where he then quickly heals a sick woman and she immediately gets up and becomes the first deacon of this new church. And right after that the house is surrounded with folks wanting to be cured of all their problems.  That’s a hectic schedule for one day’s work, and we haven’t even finished Chapter One!

One common thread in these readings is the number of lost and hurting people who do not know who they are and who created them.

Isaiah is writing to exiled Jews in slavery in Babylon to remind them of who they are. 

Come on, he seems to be saying, you don’t remember that your family ancestors were enslaved once before in Egypt? God was with our ancestors back then and God is with us right now here in Babylon.  Remember who God is, so that you can turn to God when we are living through tough times.  But you have forgotten your stories of who God is.

I think Isaiah realized that when we forget our stories, we lose a piece of hope for the future and we get bogged down in soul-crushing demons.

Demons such as depression, anxiety, narcissism and addiction.  Demons who live off cynicism, resentment, apathy, racism, entitlement and pity parties.  Demons that want us to believe we are slaves with no hope of rescue. No wonder people flocked to Jesus to be cured of all that.  No wonder Jesus needed to get away from it all and wander off into the desert.

Can you picture it, a starry black night with the Milky Way painted overhead like a tiara of diamonds too numerous to count?  The flashing streak of a meteor or two.  The deep stillness with maybe a wolf howling in the far distance, and crickets and frogs the only other sound.  The stillness that filled his soul as he waited, remembering the words of Isaiah ‘those who wait for God shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

Contrast that with Simon, filled with excitement who wants to have Jesus in his house first.  He wants Jesus to fix his mother in law, his neighbors, his relatives and even his whole town.  Does he want to be able to say, “look at how significant I am, I brought Jesus to you all, and if it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t be fixed.”  Jesus has a bigger vision.  He’s not willing to become the neighborhood guru setting up a shop of miracles and healing potions.  His vision is bigger than just one family, one town.

Have you not known? Have you not heard? Do you not remember the story? Often we don’t remember, we don’t know who we are.  Simon doesn’t know he is Peter yet, the rock on whom the new church will be built.  The slaves in Babylon don’t know they will return, rebuild their culture and renew their faith in ways that will endure for centuries.  They don’t know that their story will survive kings, wars, and genocides, or provide hope to many who follow after.  We too lose track of who God is calling us to be.  But ours is a powerful, transforming story.

If you think about it, this story speaks to each generation in surprising new ways that outlast many stories.  My grandmother was a Fraser, but I never had a haggis until I was 18.  I never went to a Robbie Burns dinner until I was in my late forties.  My grandmother did not pass on that part of her story, because her family had been in Canada for four generations and intermingled with a lot of other ethnic groups along the way.  They lost the story of their culture and customs, they lost their scots accents, but they kept their faith in God and in the church community, their new clan and culture.  That gave them faith to weather the storms of world wars, revolutions, economic depressions and personal tragedies.  It gave my grandmother a passionate commitment to the Women’s Vote as well as the temperance movement that strived to free people from the slavery of abusive relationships, family violence and addictions.  It helped her have the courage and strength to cope with her British husband’s loss of sight and career.  Her faith story is one that inspires and encourages me to this day.

Life can be a chaotic series of challenging circumstances.  We may feel like a pebble tossed into Niagra Falls, wondering if we’ll ever surface again.  When life is like that, we need to remember our stories of Jesus, Isaiah, and the exiles in Babylon, to do as they did and remember the stories of God’s love so that God may renew our strength once again.  May it be so for us all!

Repent, believe, follow and fish

The other day someone came up to me and started a conversation that asked the question, “do men ever change?”  Well, that brought up visions of Red Green saying “I’m a man and I can change, if I have to, I guess.”  Which is a stereotypical assumption that men are shamefully inadequate and needing something to fix them.  An old idea, by the way, that Jane Austen even knew, when she started writing her novel, Pride and Prejudice with the opening line “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

Poor men!  Everyone knows what’s best for them, better than they do, and that’s hardly fair.  Stereotypes about men being incompetent or women being micromanaging don’t help anyone change and do things differently.  Nagging about someone else’s problem just seems, well, not Christian or loving.  The bible does not say nag your neighbor as you nag yourself.

Let’s face it, it is always easier to see the changes someone else needs to make than it is to see the changes I should make for myself.  Self knowledge is not something we like to have.  Which is why these two scriptures are so surprising.

Jonah is the world’s briefest preacher.  He doesn’t even want to go to Ninevah.  We don’t know if he walked in to the city and mumbled his sermon under his breath, “in forty days, your city will be destroyed” so that no one would hear and his people’s enemies would be toast, or if he went in wildly laughing and cackling, “you’re gonna get it in forty days, you are so going to be sorry”.  Either way, he was effective in turning around a whole culture, or at least so the story goes.

Our gospel lesson seems like a big fish tale too.  Jesus walks over and with another short sermon, “come follow me,” that’s it.  Peter, or Simon as he was known then, his brother Andrew, and their buddies James and John left their families behind.  Peter had a wife, James and John had a father and mother, and they walked away.  I can imagine their families weren’t impressed at all!

What could have motivated them to drop everything like that?  One clue could be in this boat.  [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_of_Galilee_Boat ]Archaeologists found it when the waters of the Galilea sea receded, and it dates back to the time of the disciples.  They discovered 10 different kinds of wood used, not to build it, but to patch it.  27 feet long and 7 feet wide, it was finally sunk into the water when it could no longer serve its purpose.  So it was a beater of a boat, the ‘fix or repair daily’ kind of thing.

You see Simon Peter, Andrew and the rest were in trouble.  The Romans were building cities along the sea of Galilee and fishing it with new technologies that the peasants couldn’t compete with.  The over-fishing and large-scale operations made it harder and harder for fishermen to make a living.  Family traditions were eroding, and meanwhile back in Rome, emperors were amassing so much money that Nero, not long after Jesus was gone, was making a private race course for his parties.  That would be like Darrel Katz making himself a private hockey rink in his back yard so that he could hold a party for his friends, inviting the Oilers to have a rematch with the Vancouver Canucks on a last-minute whim.  The differences between the lives of the fishermen and the Emperor were staggering.

So these rough and tough men, hanging out on the beach and darning their nets, didn’t have a lot of hope in the future.  They didn’t feel important, they weren’t successful businessmen, or well-trained people with PhDs on social change or micro economics. 

They knew that they felt trapped by a system that did not care about people like them.  Yet Jesus saw them for what they were, human beings capable of great things.  And they heard that in his voice when he spoke.  Repent, believe, follow and fish.  They were ready for the challenge, and they did just that.  They also made a difference in the world, just like we are doing right here in this town of ours.  Giving hope to people like the folks we sing with at the Extendicare.  Or the men and women who are doing their best to learn how to not hit each other in violent relationships because of men like our Kelly Johnston and Bruce Jackson getting PRAAC started here.  Or the folks that meet here safely on Thursday nights to talk honestly and openly about the addictions they are learning to overcome.  Or the fellow who knocked on the office door this week, looking for hope in a desperate situation.  People like Vern who was so transformed by your loving healing ways that he named you in his will.  Or Alfred, who has found himself a safe place to rent with meals and supportive professionals to help him plan for the future, and a daily opportunity to smudge but also with the freedom if he needs to leave.  No locked doors, no feeling of shame. 

People change all the time.  Sometimes it’s because of marches in the streets and people brave enough to speak out against those who would shame them into silence.  And it’s always about community.  Jesus didn’t topple the Roman oppression by himself, he did it with a group of men and women who heard his call to a different way of life.  We can help the people around us hear that same call and help them change with love, support, a safe space to be themselves, and with faith in the one who calls us all even today to fish for those awho need our love and our shining example.  Repent, believe, follow and fish.  We’re still doing it, and it still works.  Thanks be to God!

Star words to steer by

Mark 1:10-11 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.  And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.  And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

The biggest lie that I was ever told was given to me when I was a child by both parents and teachers.  It went like this: "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me".  Try as I might, I could never find a way not to let words hurt, especially those I heard on the playground, words like ‘four eyes, sucker up to bat, or train-track mouth’.  Back in the 60’s and 70’s, no one seemed to think much about bullying except that it was a fact of life and you either got tough or earned the even worse label ‘crybaby’.

Words never hurting was the idea that it wasn’t what others thought of us that counted, but what we thought of ourselves that mattered.  True enough.  But sensitive children don’t know how to distance themselves from the painful words that others throw at them.  In Grade 7 and Grade 10, bullying was so much a part of the culture that it had a whole week dedicated to it, called Initiation Week.  This was supposedly a time of light-hearted high jinks where the oldest kids in the school had the right to treat the younger ones any way they wanted.  I got to clean out a locker, lucky me, but other kids had their hair washed with shaving cream or were told to swallow raw eggs or dress in drag.  Even the teachers had a form of initiation as it was always the unaware first year teachers who got assigned lunchroom duty that week.

Luckily, that has disappeared from the school system for many years, but it still shows the power of words.  There’s a huge difference between labelling something ‘initiation week’ versus ‘institutionalized hazing’.  Words do matter.  We now know that many children struggle with depression and suicidal thoughts even as young as 6 or 7.  Often it is because of the words that are used on them. 

“You are so slow, why are you so stupid”, and my personal challenge, “you’re not good enough.”  These kinds of words haunt us long after we can remember who first said them to us or why.

That’s one of the reasons why the Hebrew scriptures and the Christian writings are so dear.  They recognize the importance of words, so much that our bible starts with God speaking, “let there be light” – the idea that words can be so powerful when spoken by the right person that great things like light and life can be created from chaos.

Mark’s gospel starts with such a great creation.  No Bethlehem, shepherds or wise magi here.  Two men meeting in the wilderness in a profoundly personal initiation ritual.  Not hazing, but a simple and symbolic act of drowning in the Jordan River, the historical boundary for the Hebrew people between the wilderness of Moses and the promised land of King David.  A moment of connection between two men recognizing the importance of God in their lives and their common bond of connection to the Mission of God.  John the Baptizer meets Jesus the Messiah in an encounter so profound that it will change the course of history forever.

And when John and Jesus meet in that ritual, something amazing happens.  God tears the sky apart and Jesus hears “This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.”  It is one of the few events that is written about in all four of our Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.  It is right up there with the overturning of the Temple, the Crucifixion, and the Easter resurrection.  It was words that the disciples thought worth repeating, and core to the teachings Jesus handed down to his disciples.  God loves us.

That’s bigger than we might think, and certainly something that Christians might take too much for granted. 

The concept of God for most people was something to be afraid of, that would judge and punish and condemn.  Even now I hear that when people say, “oh, I could never come to church, if I did, I would burst into flames,” and they are only half joking.

That’s not the God we see here, and not the God that Jesus and John saw when they read scripture.  God choses special messengers to comfort the poor and help the children of the needy, as it said in our psalm today.  That’s a loving God, not a punishing one.  Yet all too often we still act and think like God is a punisher who speaks angry words to condemn us.

If we believe that God is a bully only interested in punishing us, we will give up on our lives, ourselves and the people around us.  We will justify acting like a bully because we’re just being like God.  And we will struggle with the words that we speak about ourselves deep in our private hearts.  We can be our own worst bullies.

The Globe and Mail this year published a series of articles about mental health and the tremendous toll this puts on Canadians.  One of the things they wrote about was mental health hygiene.  We are great at brushing our teeth and washing our hands, but lousy at cleaning our minds of negative words.

As Christians, we are called on by our scriptures to practise mental hygiene by remembering the generous and loving acts of our God that led us out of slavery into freedom, into relationship with the loving Divine.  Just as Jesus heard the sky tear, this good news should turn our lives upside down.  When we put star words, God’s words, at the center of our minds, we join in that joyful community of saints that know the profound good news, that we are beloved children of God.  May it be so for us all!

Keep Your eye on Jesus.

A few years ago, I was struggling with my faith. I went and talked to a friend who was a chaplain and asked him if it was silly to have faith in these ancient stories that seem far too much like fairy tales to be helpful in this modern scientific world.  He said to me very seriously and straight-faced that there are no atheists in foxholes.  Despite all our technology and know-how, when it gets scary and dangerous, everyone he knew, even tough guys who were prepared for violent stuff in the name of keeping us safe, turned to prayer in hopes that someone or something would hear them.

Joseph was in a foxhole of his own making.  His father Jacob was passing on the family history of bad choices, of playing favorites, and of the twelve brothers, he was the favorite.  It didn’t help that he had three step moms who had all competed for their husband’s affections, and that competition had been passed on to the sons.  If you read the whole story of Jacob and his children, even the boys’ names were reflective of the squabbles and fights between the women.  Sterility was a real issue of faith for Jacob’s wives, like Abraham and Sarah, and Isaac and Rebecca.  Having a baby was a sign of God’s favor so the children were named things like “surely my husband will love me now”, or “God comforts me because I am hated” or “I have wrestled with my sister and have won”.  Can you imagine growing up in such a family?  Talk about ugly dynamics!

So, Joseph, which by the way means either “God has taken away my shame” or “May God give me another son” has grown up in a family of competitiveness and anger.  It must have been ugly and embarrassing .  His mother died giving birth to his full brother, so he had no mother to take care of him.  And Jacob, not remembering, or maybe not thinking of the damage done by his father and mother’s playing favorites with him and Esau, plays favorites again.

How many times do we fall into the unhealthy patterns of our families, saying things that we swore we would never say, hearing ourselves talking like the people who parented us.  Children copy what they see their parents doing.  We know that people who grew up in addicted or violent homes or who are bounced through the foster care system have a much higher chance of being addicted or in jail because of the childhood trauma of a toxic family experience. 

Dr. Gabor Mate, when he gave his talk at the Nancy Applebee theatre last fall, talked about being born during the Second World War to a Jewish mother.  Even though neither of them ended up in a concentration camp, the trauma of having a mother living in a constant state of fear caused Mate to live with a high degree of anxiety that led to some strongly addictive behaviours that while they didn’t revolve around drugs, affected his professionalism and his finances.  Childhood stress like Joseph and his brothers experienced led them into angry confrontations.

Joseph was a bragger and a tattle tale.  He paraded around in his long robe and would tell them of his dreams of glory when the older ones would no longer have the power to bully him.  The brothers had no ‘shalom’ for him and so decided that murder was a perfect solution to the arrogant brat.  That’s chilling to say the least.  They sold him off to become a slave in Egypt.  I wonder what he was thinking when he realized that his spying and tattling had made them that hostile to him.  There’s no record of him being repentant or afraid or ashamed or anything.  But he is in a foxhole and there is no one who will help rescue him from going into slavery in a foreign land.

Peter, in his way, is also in a foxhole.  The sea of Galilee is not terribly wide, but it is chaotic.  Storms come up without warning, and back then there was no such thing as a swimming lesson at the pool in the summer.  Drowning for all the disciples is a real possibility. 

I remember someone in the Maritimes telling me that some sailors deliberately decided not to learn to swim so that if they did get caught in a storm, they would drown more quickly and peacefully.  Fishing was a dreadful job, and water was the most chaotic and dangerous place to be.  This story points to Jesus as the one who can still the chaos and make it possible to get through the most difficult things.  But when Peter takes his eyes off Jesus, he begins to drown.

I meet a lot of people who are in foxholes.  Some of those foxholes are of their own making, some are full of the family toxic stories and experiences that they had witnessed as children.  What is interesting are the folks who are climbing out of the foxholes.  I am starting to see patterns that suggest the ones who will make it out, and the ones who will stay stuck or get even deeper into their foxholes.

The number one factor is humbleness.  Peter doesn’t say, “If you can walk on water, I can too just watch me”.  There’s also a level of trust, “If you tell me to walk to you, I will do what you tell me.” And when he keeps his eyes on Jesus, he can make it.  He needs to remember to trust and watch Jesus.  When tragedy strikes, how many of us think we will go it alone, tough it out, pull ourselves out by our own bootstraps? But again and again, we find that its when we reach out for help, asking Jesus to be present in the midst of our foxholes, that we find new hope, new beginnings and a more godly, more shalom-filled way of life that fills, sustains and supports us on this journey we call life.

Patience of a Saint

Ever hear the phrase, ‘you must have the patience of a saint’?  I often hear it when I knit in public.  Now I confess, I like knitting in public.  One never knows when I might get to teach a child how to knit or crochet, or encourage a mom or dad to learn something new.  Yesterday, I had a great chat with some people who wanted to learn, some who used to knit, or who stated out loud that they were too stupid to learn.  Or even saying, “it must take so much patience in order to knit.”

There are times when knitting takes patience.  When dealing with a new pattern or learning a new technique, when using super fine or super slippery yarn, when on the last few rows of a big prayer shawl that is almost done, but the worst is when there is a knot.  There are the simple knots, but then there are the big huge tangled knots that look like they’ve been in the bottom of a drawer too long and gotten stubbornly convoluted out of sheer stubbornness.  If you don’t knit or sew, just imagine a pile of coathangers that have been in a box and travelled from one province to another.  Or fishing line that has come unwound.  Or remember cassette tapes when they got eaten by the tape player and you had to fish them out and you wondered if this was the last straw for that Oakridge Boys or Boney M tape?  That last one really dates us, doesn’t it?

We want things neat and tidy, we want to have a tangle-free life.  But all too often, we get knotted up and feel like we don’t know why the rest of the world is so messy.  Or we get tangled up in a pile of mistakes or even lies that leave us in an emotional mess.

That’s what happened to Jacob.  He was a dreadful con artist, the worst kind.  Last week we heard the story of how he cheated his older brother out of his brother’s potential inheritance.  Jacob didn’t stop at that. 

He stooped so low that he conned and cheated his own father as the poor man lay dying.  Now I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty disgusting.  It’s one thing to phone up total strangers like what’s been happening frequently at my house and being told that I’m going to go to jail for not paying Canada Revenue Agency enough taxes.  Or pretending to be a boyfriend who always needs money but never has any to help me out, or any of the numerous other scams that are out there.  But cheating your dad on the last day you will ever see him alive, that’s pretty low.  That’s nasty and mean and downright despicable. 

And so he runs for his life to get away from his brother who is more than a little steamed at him.  And when we least expect it, and certainly when Jacob least expects it, Jacob has a dream of God’s ladder and hears a promise for the future not just for him, but for his children and his children’s children.  Why Jacob?  Why not his father Isaac or his older brother Esau?  There’s no explaining God’s choice.

I think it’s a perfect counterpoint to the wheat and the weeds parable that Jesus told.  For those of us who grew up on the King James bible, this was the wheat and the tares.  And ‘tares’ is an old name for the bearded darnel that looks very much like wheat.  It’s a nasty weed.  Its roots will surround the roots of real wheat, stealing their moisture and nutrients.  Its seeds even look like wheat too, but can cause hallucinations and even death.  It’s one poisonous plant.

So Jesus told a story of why there are evil, nasty and cheating people like Jacob in the world.  But then he throws a caution into the story.  While the servants see the weeds and want to pull them to prevent them from ruining thecrop, the landowner, in this case God, says to be patient and wait until everything is ready to harvest.  That’s when the sorting will take place.

Not by the servants, but by the harvest experts, the angels going up and down the ladder who see humans from above, from a bigger perspective than we do.

It’s very tempting and human to decide which people are the weeds and which aren’t, to sort people into the bad guys and the good guys.  There’s something very primeval and satisfactory in doing so.  All we have to do is look at the debate around Omar Kadr, or the fear-mongering about Syrian refugees.  People wave the ‘terrorist’ label around and they feel good that they aren’t the bad guys, not like those blankety blank people who are different.  And yet, God doesn’t work that way.

God doesn’t jump to conclusions.  God has patience, the patience even stronger than that of a saint.  God can see the goodness in a con man who cheats his dying father, who lies to his brother and sides with his mother who seems determined to treat her own husband with terrible disrespect, and doesn’t care how hurtful or destructive this will be to the whole family.

God picks this man to inherit Abraham’s promise?  Not the eldest who has been cheated and stolen from?  God has patience, and sees from up high what we can’t see.  God sees the potential in human hearts that we can’t see ourselves.  God is ready to work miracles that we can’t imagine, and God is willing to be patient enough to unravel our twisted, complex knotty lives until we see how God has been with us even when we thought we were all alone in our tangled mess.  Thanks be to God for that wonderful love and grace that has such patience!

Flip Flop Flip Flop

Sharon and Bram sang a song called “Ham and Eggs” when they were in Athabasca last week, and when I was struggling with my usual, “What am I going to preach on” pre-sermon writing session, I prayerfully asked God for help, and I got their song stuck in my head.

It’s a pretty straightforward song, “Ham and Eggs, Ham and Eggs, I like mine nice and brown, you like yours upside down, ham and eggs, ham and eggs, flip flop flip flop ham and eggs.”

Now when a song like that gets stuck in my head, and I have a lot of songs I have heard over the years that can get stuck in my head, I usually wonder, why that song and not something like Frank Sinatra’s “I did it my way” or even some hymn like “Amazing Grace”.  Especially a hymn, when I’m trying to come up with a sermon.  But no, I get ‘flip flop flip flop’ instead.  Hardly gratifying or useful.

Except that Jesus is talking about flip-flopping and so is Paul.  The flip-flopping of folks who want to hear God’s word as all fun and games or as all serious business.  The flip-flopping of souls who want to do what is right and follow all the rules that they think are important.  Even the flip-flopping of what we think God wants compared to what God actually wants.

We want easy answers that we can stick to and follow through on that are efficient, effective, simple and straightforward.  We want quick results.  We want a recipe that will help us connect with God that won’t require any painful work or change on our parts.  We want all this and when it is a convenient time for us.  “Not right now, God, can you come back later when I’m not so busy?”  Or “we don’t want to be bothered with this whole God stuff at all, too hard, too complicated, too much like work, I’m just a simple person, and I don’t want to deal with anything too intellectual.”

Paul got that.  He knew what it was like to search for the secret recipe, and he thought he had it down pat.  Follow the law, obey the commandments, do the sacrifices, listen to the temple authorities, and you will be in God’s good books.  He was part of the system that Jesus criticized.  Paul was a Pharisee, one of the children, in Jesus’ words, that was flip flopping about Jesus and John.  He would have been focussed on following all the purity laws to be holy, to be reconciled to God.  Follow the rules, be a good boy, and God will look after the rest.

His writing today then is about his attempt to lead that perfect life, and how inadequate it is to try to live by such rules.  He even went as far as to challenge the system, he says that the law is impossible to follow, it keeps tripping him up.  And it’s easy for the law to become more important than God.  I think that when he had his conversion experience, Paul experienced God in a powerful, personal and private moment that made his search, his striving for perfection unnecessary.  He figured out that he had been aiming the wrong way.  He had been aiming at the Law, not at God.  It goes back to the idea of scripture being a pointer to God, but if we get fixated on the pointer instead of what it is pointing to, we have lost the whole point of the scripture in the first place.

The Pharisees thought it was more about criticizing other people’s failures and scolding them than it was about God.  They got caught up in the shame and blame game, dismissing John, Paul and Jesus’ message.  They were more interested in looking smug and perfect than in letting God transform their lives.  They were more concerned about appearances than about transformations.

Not too different than today, when you think about it.  We live in a small town where everyone knows everybody.  Where people like to tell stories of their neighbors and make judgements about them.  Where we like to know who we can trust and who we can avoid.  We see each other behaving in all kinds of different places.  I know how my neighbor treats the waitress in the Green Spot, or how the store clerk treats new employees.  We know how the town council treats each other and how the teen center is going.  We like to feel like we’re better than the church up the hill or down the road or across the river.  We like to feel better than others and compare ourselves to those who are struggling to deal with issues of marital conflict or addictions or employability.  We like to feel that we have power and influence over others.  But Paul and Jesus would caution us.

It’s not about feeling superior to others, having better recycling practises or healthier lifestyles or fatter bank accounts.  It’s about whether we’re open to God’s grace in our lives.  About letting go of the tiring flip flop between feeling superior or feeling inferior to others as we compare ourselves to them.  Why do we do that?  Jesus says that such judgementalness gets in the way of the simple truth that God loves us all.  Paul reminds us that Jesus makes all things possible, even the healing of my contradictory, flip-flopping willpower.

It’s so simple that even a child can figure it out.  Rest and relax from the burden of being judged and judgemental, of attempting perfection and demanding it of others.  Instead, ask humbly for God to deal with the things that wear us down.  When we do that, we do find that the burden is light for we carry it with the love, the grace and the strength that God gives us when we humbly ask for the gentle sustaining help that Jesus has promised us.  Thanks be that God never flip flops but loves us, supports us, encourages us, and grows us as we follow in the footsteps of Jesus and Paul.