Fifty Shades of Rainbow

Some days I feel like there are two kinds of people, those who see the world in black and white, and those who don’t.  Some might see the world as divided into 50 shades of grey, but what if it’s more 50 shades of rainbow?  When a bus crashes in Ontario, when people preach hatred of immigrants from positions of power, it’s easy to reduce the world to black and white.  But that ignores the brilliant variations in color and tone that make up this big beautiful world of ours.  The kindness of strangers at the ATM machine on a chilly January morning, the choir that sings for the folks at Extendicare, the time when we go to pay for our coffee at the Tim Horton’s to find that someone has already footed the bill.  The glorious blue sky, the clear sharp sparkle of stars in a night sky, the glimpse of the aurora borealis are reminders that our world is much more than black and white.

John the Baptist saw things in stark terms, those who were hypocrites and those who were humbly repentant.  Most mentions of him in the Gospels has him shaking his fist at someone who doesn’t meet John’s standards.  They don’t measure up, especially those judgemental pharisees.  They get blasted and scolded by both John and Jesus and can’t seem to get the holiness thing right.

But lest we think that pharisees are a thing of the past, a recent poll did a survey of Christians in the United States and discovered something odd.  They asked questions like “I find it hard to be friends with people who consistently do the wrong thing, or it’s not my responsibility to help people who won’t help themselves, or If only people followed the rules, they would have a better life, or I prefer to serve people who attend my church rather than people outside my church, and I tell others the most important thing in my life is following rules.”  51% of Christians agreed with these statements.  The researchers based the questions on what Jesus and John said pharisees believed in.  Statements that were based on what Jesus did, eat with sinners, party with prostitutes and so on, didn’t go down so well.  That means that 51% of Christians are more like the Pharisees than we might like to think.  That’s pretty stark.  And the number one reason, that people give for avoiding church? They are afraid, survey says, of people judging them.  If most unchurched people are afraid of being judged and most church goers are likely to judge others, we have a serious communication problem!

Jesus had a different view of humanity than John did.  He didn’t see the world as either Pharisee hypocrites or saintly followers.  He saw them all as flawed human beings.  He could have looked down on all the folks he saw as inferior or lazy or silly or what have you.  Instead, his gaze was one of compassion that saw what fearful lives they lived.  But just like the words from Isaiah, Jesus wanted to help everyone raise above that fear.  Do not fear for I have redeemed you, I have called you by your name, you are mine.  When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you!

God loves us just as we are even though we are fearful and anything but perfect, even when we are most like the Pharisees.  We may try to impress God with how well we follow the rules, but God sees us with different ways of knowing.  We may build up false images of ourselves or be stylish or busy with too many things, but in the end it’s not what we do or how we think that impresses God.  We really can’t earn God’s love.  God loves us just as we are.

How do we know that?  Actions speak louder than words.  Jesus didn’t have to get baptised.  He could have started his teaching and healing on dry land, which would have been the sensible and appropriate thing to do and would have impressed the Pharisees.  He could have stayed in the Temple, debating with scholars and pouring over scriptures.  In fact he could have joined the Pharisees.

But no, Jesus saw the folks in the muddy, dirty Jordan river, who were hurting or afraid or broken or guilty or tired or any number of 50 grey shades of reactions to the challenges of being alive.  When he saw all those folks hoping and praying and dreaming of a fresh start, a new beginning, a freedom and a healing, a rainbow of possibilities, well, Jesus went down to that muddy cold river and got right in just like the others.  He was there with them in all their hopes and fears.  He humbled himself in the mud and damp to be with the people.  And when he got down into the waters, Luke wrote, the skies opened up and the world changed.  No longer did people have to hide their bits of shame and fear, but they could experience that through Jesus the word made flesh, God went into the muddy waters with them.  God still reaches down to be with us in all our messy muddy lives.  That’s what we testify to here, it’s what we hope and pray, the ultimate scandal of Christianity, we are not alone, we live in God’s rainbow world, in life, in death in life beyond death, God is with us, thanks be to God.  Amen.

Entitlement or Epiphany?

28 years ago to this very day, I lumbered into church, feeling like a beached whale.  Our sanctuary didn’t have wooden pews but soft backed chairs, so I was able to get through the service in some comfort.  Then my brother in law invited us to Costco, a real treat as we didn’t have a membership.  But the big warehouse and cement floor had me stopping at every chair I could find for a rest.  Back in the car, with minus 25 temperatures, I was not impressed when my brother in law’s little hyundi refused to start.  I’m going to have this baby here if you don’t get the car started, I sulked.  Somehow the three Rosborough men got the car going, I went home and 12 hours later, I had a baby.

So my Epiphany Sunday started in a sulky mood of entitlement.  I was not in a good space.  I felt entitled to kid-glove handling and a certain level of sympathy as I waddled around church and store.  But when that baby was finally put into my arms, all the sulks disappeared in the sheer wonder of the miracle of holding a beautiful child.

It took the hard work and pain of labor to shake me out of my entitlement mind set.  But Herod did not have that pain and agony.  He stayed stuck in his entitlement and was so threatened by the visit of the magi that he turned violent.  The suggestion that there was a new and different kind of leadership out there, an alternative king to him, was so threatening, Matthew says, that Herod resorted to the worst crime against humanity; he targeted small children for slaughter.  All because of three wandering philosophers who asked too many questions in the wrong place.

It was a natural mistake for the Magi to make, assuming that the palace would be where an infant king would be born, and natural to assume that Herod would be the father, or perhaps even the grandfather. 

After all, that’s where kings and rulers are born, not in an insignificant town full of dirt poor people.

And this story would have resonated with Matthew’s audience who all knew the tale of their greatest leader, Moses, who also survived a tyrant targeting small defenseless children. 

What is it about children that leave us shaking when they are attacked?  Whether it is a drug addict in Edmonton attacking his girlfriend’s children, or a Syrian toddler drowned on a beach as his family tried desperately to flee war, or children held in detention centres for illegal immigrants dying needlessly, these stories cut to the heart of what it means to be human.  All too often children are the victims of willful, entitled people grasping for power and control.

We don’t need to look too far back in Canadian history to see the damage done when we as a society were so threatened by children that we put them into schools to teach them what we thought would make them most like us.  And the TRC calls us to become educated about how that has impacted generations of families.  But we also see children at the Mount Cashel orphanage, or the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children, and even here in Athabasca where a coach is alleged to have targeted his young athletes.  For whatever reason, some people feel like they are entitled to take out their negative emotions and lust for power or control on humans least likely to be able to stand up for themselves.

Matthew placed Jesus firmly in the camp of folks who knew what it was like to be threatened by powerful people.  He shaped his understanding of Jesus from Matthew background in the stories of Moses.  He showed Jesus not as a powerful king and leader, but as someone so threatening that his parents became refugees just to save their child’s life, to protect Jesus when he was most vulnerable.

But Jesus never stopped being vulnerable.  He never stopped identifying with the poor, the powerless, the folks who had little to no say in what happened in their lives.

The ones who knew pain and suffering.  The ones who struggled to live by higher principles than just power, control and accumulation.  The ones who look elsewhere than palaces for direction.  The ones who recognized when they were in a place where self-aggrandization is more important than doing what’s right.  And even the wise philosophers who recognized that maybe where they think they will find answers in glorious places of pomp and circumstance, turned out to be places of greed and selfishness.

We are called by Matthew to turn from the palaces and the powerful, as the Magi did, and search again by a star of wisdom and wonder.  To humble ourselves enough to go into a stable where the hope of the world should never be found.  We are called to ward against our own attitudes of entitlement and instead choose the surprise of finding epiphany in strange places.

In the end, the Magi chose a humble path, and that humbleness was what led them to what they were truly seeking.  But, as I found out 28 years ago, it’s when we are most humble, most honest with ourselves, and most prepared to face the pain of being truly vulnerable, that we can find the deep joy of an encounter with a God that so loves us, that pain and vulnerability is worth the risk to reach us.

The scandal of the Gospel message, and the scandal of the Magi’s search for meaning is that the Divine is not found only in lofty places, but also in the lowliest times, the earthiest and most humble of places.  And that divine reach right down into our deepest pain and suffering is a reach of love that brings healing and joy.  May we all be transformed by such joy as we follow our Epiphany stars.

Truth is a two-edged sword

How many of you had to carve the turkey last week?  What kind of knife did you need?  A sharp one.  A heavy one?  What would have happened if you had used a double-edged knife?  I was very surprised when I looked up the word sword in the New Testament, which is Machaira, which is the root of machete, to discover that it was not the Gladius used by Roman Soldiers and Gladiators, but more of a general word that could mean a weapon but also a butcher knife.  I’ve never seen a butcher’s knife with two edges, but I can imagine that it would hurt the person using it if they weren’t careful.

Our faith is like that.  If we use it as a weapon, we are likely to get hurt.  Or to hurt ourselves if we use it incorrectly.  On one hand, it is a great comfort to believe in a God who loves us.  On the other hand, there are times when our belief leads us to throw up our hands and cry, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”

The young man found this out the hard way.  He wanted a quick trick, an easy list from Jesus, a tweet or maybe one of those websites that promise 5 easy steps to erase stretch marks or 7 ways to pay off your mortgage faster, something he could do that would guarantee God was on his side. 

Jesus looked at him and carved him up from the inside out, saw the truth of him for what the young man was looking for, and rather than answer him with something easy straight out of an Oprah magazine, he went straight to the heart of the matter.  Obey the laws about loving your neighbor.

The young man wasn’t happy with that, he wanted more.  Maybe he was struggling with a sense of something missing in his life, maybe he was dealing with a string of bad luck that left him struggling with his faith.  We don’t know.  But for whatever reason, being a good person wasn’t enough to fill an emptiness he felt in his soul.

I think we often get caught up in being good people with good intentions and friendly and nice to everyone we meet, but there are times when being good is not enough and we need to have someone who can look past the surface of our good lives to the real issues that are at the bottom of our discontent.  Maybe there are times when we think we’ve got it all together and can serenely go through life with a sense of satisfaction until we hit a bump that bewilders us.  When we realize that our goodness is only skin deep.

Jesus challenged the young man with that very question.  “Why call me good?  Only God is good.”  To be human is to be aware that we are not as good as we might like to think.  That’s what confession is about.  We do our best to be real, honest and truthful to who we are underneath all the surface stuff.  We’re not afraid in church to say, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”

As C. S. Lewis once wrote, “Many things—such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly—are done worst when we try hardest to do them.” Sometimes we have to stop focussing on what we are doing and look at how and why we are doing them.

The young man wanted a checklist of what to do.  Instead, Jesus gave him an idea of how to be.  Be wise with your possessions and let what you own benefit others and not only yourself.  Don’t be a slave to your stuff or your bank account or your status or your Rsps or your Freedom 55 plan.  Be intentional about all you have and do in terms of God’s vision for the world.

That’s not the most important thing about this story, though.  The most important thing is that Jesus, our high priest, our two-edged sword, who can cut to the deepest soul sicknesses we have and carve them out of our lives like a piece of gristle on a turkey bone, looked this young man squarely in the eye and loved him.  Just as he was.  How many times have we spoken truth without love.  How many times have we thought we knew all the truth but found out later we only had a piece of the truth and the people we were arguing with also had a piece of the truth.  We do not own the truth, and we need to be humble when we think we know the truth.  That kind of attitude too easily falls into arrogance and pride.

The truth is that life can hurt.  Jesus also knew what it was like to suffer doubts and fears.  The reason that the first few words of Psalm 22 sound so familiar is that we read them on Good Friday.  They are among the last words Jesus spoke, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”  Or as the writer of Hebrews puts it, “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses.”

Jesus said that all things are possible with God, even a rich man can enter into the realm of God.  I don’t know, but I like to think that the young man found his way.  I wonder, because Paul, when he talked about himself, would sometimes say, “I know a certain man who had visions” when he wanted to talk about himself without appearing to brag.  Who knows, maybe that certain young man was Mark himself! I like to think so, for them it means that even he, who thought it would be impossible to find faith by following Jesus, managed to do exactly that.  May we all find our way into the realm of God by opening ourselves to the Loving Word who loves us no matter what.