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!