Respecting the Community

Some Sundays the scripture reading is as exciting as a Marvel Movie!  Can you imagine if Jesus was Doctor Strange and John the Baptist was Tony Stark, what an intense meeting it would have been?  Two powerful men with powerful missions coming together to do powerful work for the Glory of God.  This story is describing the same incident that we read last week, John and Jesus meeting at the banks of the Jordan River.  John is baptising people who are confessing their brokenness and looking for a new way to be in relationship with God.  It could have been a civil war between John and Jesus, maybe Captain America instead of Dr. Strange. it could have been a below-the-line power struggle between the two, it could have been a competition to see who was more right than the other, who was the angriest, who was the loudest person in the room.  Instead, it became a time to witness to the power of following Jesus.  John told his followers to join Team Jesus, and they did.  They even brought in new members, and pretty soon Jesus had gone from no followers to a dedicated team of twelve disciples eager to share their excitement with everyone they met.

Talking about our faith and trying to bring in new people is something many churches do.  They train their members in how to recruit people, they give them pamphlets and workshops and roll play exercises and demonstrations.  That’s not something the United Church is particularly comfortable with or used to. We didn’t do that because we were the biggest denomination other than the Roman Catholic Church.  We had at one time more churches across Canada than Tim Hortons.  We gave more to Haiti earthquake emergency relief than all the customers getting their double-doubles.  This was happening even though church attendance was already dropping.  This was happening even when it seemed like the mega churches were growing faster than Starbucks into Canada. This was happening when more and more independent bookstores were closing because they couldn’t compete with Amazon even before Covid made so many things go online.  We didn’t know how to invite our neighbors, but we had all experienced the knock on the door from missionaries in suits or gotten the pamphlet in the mail describing the joys of Heaven and the dangers of Hell.  We also were being bombarded with people wanting us to believe in crop circles or aliens building the pyramids or satanists running daycares in Saskatchewan towns.  Televangelists seemed to end up with private jets or universities, then get in the news for abuse.  That builds distrust for all Christian institutions. Religion gets a bad rap for wars, colonialism, you name it, but condemning all religion is like saying we won’t use fire because of the evacuation of Fort McMurray.  How do we heat our houses?  How do we cook if we have gas stoves?  Condemning all religion fails to remember that it inspires great art, great music, great social movements like civil rights, public education and affordable healthcare.  People who attend church regularly are less lonely, their anxiety levels drop, their sense of resilience is increased, and they feel empowered to work together towards positive social good. Women wouldn’t have gotten the vote in Canada without church ladies getting together in Alberta who cared about poverty and family violence.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to invite people to church.  We have to know our big Why. Bums in pews is honest but not healthy or trustworthy. It's not good news for our neighbors, it's based on our scarcity not God's abundance. It exploits newcomers' innocence.  Someone said, “bringing people to church so that they can be busier and poorer is not Christian, but often it’s really why we want newcomers.” Some call it vampire evangelism, bring them in and suck them dry.  On the flip side, when we remember how much we have been transformed by coming to church regularly, it’s rude not to tell people about it.  One minister in the US wrote this week that “When we lose religious and spiritual community, we lose a lot of our power to make collective change. Research suggests that religious behavior and belonging are associated with greater civic and political participation, financial giving, and volunteering. It also indicates that while solitary meditation is good for the soul, it is small group participation that correlates most strongly with social impact. Weekly worship attendance is also strongly associated with increased civic activity…” She added that service clubs and other organisations don’t offer transformation, resiliency and morals the way church does, and it’s part of why her country is in so much turmoil.

Our Northern Spirit Growth Animator, Jordan Cantwell told us to remember that it’s scary for people to come to church.  Every church says it welcomes all but often the reality is different.  Cantwell said, “We assume everyone knows who we are, what we do and that they are welcome. We are welcome to walk into a mosque but don't feel comfortable.” She said gentle humble openness, listening to their questions and concerns, sharing your story of transformation honestly and prayfully is key.  People won’t have a transformative experience if they are going to be told they should go to church, they should be ashamed if they don’t go to church or they are to blame for all the bad things in their lives if they don’t go to church.  Instead, try RESPECT:

R: Recognize - Acknowledge the worth of others.  We are all God’s Children

E: Empathize - Understand and care about the feelings of others.  Jesus came to listen and heal and we are called to do the same.

S: Support - Offer help and encouragement.  Our creed says that God works in us and others by the Spirit.  Support is a team sport and God is part of our team!

P: Promote - Advocate for the rights and dignity of others. The United Church calls this “Daring Justice” we are to seek justice and resist evil.

E: Engage - Involve others in meaningful ways.  We are to love and serve others as part of our healing journey.

C: Communicate - Share thoughts and feelings openly.  Proclaim Jesus crucified and risen, our judge and our hope.

T: Trust - Build and maintain trust in relationships.  This takes deep spirituality and more teamwork. 

Jesus and John trusted and respected each other like Tony Stark and the other Avengers eventually did.  John’s disciples trusted and respected John when he told them to follow Jesus.  Simon Peter trusted his brother when the brother shared his excitement about finding the Messiah.  When we build relationships based on trust and respect, relationships with each other, our neighbors and our God, the invitations will come naturally and from a place of inspiration, encouragement, resilience and healing.  Who wouldn’t want an invitation to that?

Humble and Faithful

Ever get stuck in a situation where you felt something called “Imposter Syndrome?” It’s when someone is being asked to do something outside their comfort zone that they are not sure they can handle.  They’ve been asked for an interview by the paper, or a boss wants them to take on new responsibilities, or they volunteer for a charitable organization, and they are not sure they can.  Sometimes panic ensues and people start feeling like imposters, they lose their self-confidence, they try to back down from their responsibilities and commitments.

It almost sounds like that was what John was feeling when he came face to face with Jesus.  He had been preaching that people needed to take a really good look at themselves with honesty and vulnerability.  And folks flocked to be baptised in the Jordan River.  It became a moment of epiphany for many people and a symbol of freedom.

John baptised them when they came ready to be honest about their flaws and failings.  Often times people might think that confession is meant to make us feel guilty or ashamed of who we are.  Certainly some churches do seem to preach shame and guilt when they talk about confession.  But it was more like if you go through your week gathering stones in your backpack, stones of broken promises, hurt feelings, maybe a little conflict here and there, and what people call trauma incidents.  You know, where the boss complains about an e-mail misspelling you made and you go home and yell at your cat kind of thing.  Or you watch the news and see stories of invasions, shootings and global warming. The more stones we carry of mistakes, hurts, problems, worries, anxieties, fear and anger, the heavier we feel and we don’t even know it.  The more rocks in our backpack, the more likely we are to yell, cry, panic or run away.  In modern coaching and leadership training, it’s called “going below the line”.  Simply put, the line is fear; when we go below the line, as Brene Brown puts it, we let fear take control.  Fear is in the driver seat of our car.  When we are above the line, we may feel fear, but it’s not driving us.  We are still in control of where we are going.  Sometimes our fear manifests as anger, part of the fight-flight response.  The more likely we feel like we can control a situation, the more likely we are to throw our weight around, yell, or ‘know” that we’re right and everyone else is stupid.  We see this in what’s happening around us today.  People who are angry about immigrants taking jobs or Toronto being uppity or Ottawa cheating us out of what we think we are entitled to, may be acting that way because they are afraid of losing their jobs or not having enough money when they retire.  So, they fight. Sometimes our fear makes us avoid conflict.  Sometimes our fear makes us freeze up.  We don’t know what to say or do, and it’s only until after the conversation is over that we think of what we could have said.  There’s also fawn.  That’s where we look for someone who is strong, powerful and clear in what he or she thinks is right.  We cozy up to that person and hope that they will keep us safe.  History shows that a culture where fear and anger towards the other is encouraged, ordinary people elect dangerous dictators like Hitler and the violence spirals out of control.  Fight, flight, freeze, fawn, are all biological responses to when we feel threatened, and they are how our ancestors survived encounters with sabre-toothed tigers.  They are normal.

That’s how John could have reacted when Jesus showed up.  He was starting to slide into fear.  “I’m an imposter.  I’m not good enough.  You are going to take away my job.  You are going to take away my audience.”  It’s a natural fear-based response to a sense of scarcity.  Jesus didn’t go there.  He didn’t say, “John, you worthless second-rate has-been, I’m moving into the neighborhood, and taking over from you, go find a new crowd elsewhere.  I’m the real boss and you can either kiss my feet or move on.”  No, he reminded John of why he and John were there, to honor God.  He went back to their mission.  “Let’s do what’s proper to fulfill God’s Justice.”  It was all about his big why, and John’s big why.  Bringing people out of the fight, flight, freeze and faun responses into abundant life.  Helping people let go of their backpacks of anger and fear, the shame, blame, broken promises, hurt feelings, conflict and trauma responses.  Lightening their loads.

Two wrongs never make a right. Two people using force to get their way never make peace. Two sides arguing that the other is a villain without redemption doesn't build respect. Two actions based in greed doesn't build trust. Two decisions based in fear doesn't establish love.  Jesus and John built two understandings, two mutual feelings of respect, two views of generosity, two experiences of teamwork.  They found they could respect each other, trust each other and do the work God called them to do.  When they did that, God showed up in dramatic fashion and said, “well done, you are my beloved servant”.

Humble confidence is the goal.  Staying above the line is the goal.  Not letting fear fill our backpacks.  Not letting us get so filled up with anger, judgement, resentments, hurts and guilt that we can’t move.  Facing ourselves with compassion so that we can be gentler with ourselves and others.  AA calls it taking a fearless inventory.  We in the Christian Church call it confession.  It’s all about learning to internalize the idea that God reconciles and makes us new.  That we are healed by God’s healing waters so we can love and serve others like Jesus and John did, together with trust and respect.  And when we do, God shows up and says, “these are my beloved children with whom I am well pleased.”  May it be so for us all. Amen.

Rise and Shine!

One of the joys of having adult children is that we don’t have wriggly little bodies jumping on the bed at 5 a.m. on Christmas morning, full of excitement about Santa arriving and let’s go open the presents RIGHT NOW!

They have such enthusiasm and joy and it’s so early in the morning!  Rise and Shine with a vengeance.  Whereas the rest of us who are older love to sleep in on a holiday morning.  Rising and Shining is something that we tend to resist the older we get.

Isaiah, which we’ve been reading since the start of Advent, was writing in a time of political turmoil, and the audacity of him, telling people to rise and shine when all around them were wars, poverty, and political shenanigans.  People must have wondered why he was so hopeful when the world seemed so bleak.  Today’s passage is from what Scholars call 3^rd Isaiah. This particular writer was preaching to the people who had returned from the Babylonian Empire, and the first part of Isaiah was writing to people who hadn’t yet been conquered by Babylon.  There’s about 100 years between the two events.  Third Isaiah was writing to the refugees rebuilding the Temple and the city.  They had come with high hopes fueled by the stories of their parents and grandparents of the ‘good old days’ of the glorious temple.  They were living with the legacy dream of rebuilding and restoring those glory days.  When they arrived, they faced the awful reality of a city that had been left to crumble for a hundred years.  The countryside was sparsely populated by the descendants of survivors who had struggled to survive without infrastructure or community.  A hundred years means shifts in language and accent, so probably those that stayed had a hard time understanding the newcomers.  Like a young person who goes away to school at university and comes back home with new ideas and new language, the ones who stayed must have felt overwhelmed by all the plans and idealism of this large group that arrived.  And the folks who were returning with their heads full of dreams, were staggered by the immensity of what had been lost and what needed to be rebuilt.  When faced with rubble and weeds, even the best dreams seem daunting.  Isaiah 60 talks to these people, the discouraged idealists, the frustrated dreamers, the refugees and the survivors who struggled to find common ground and a new hope for the future.  “Arise, your light has come!”  Join together to work for your dream of a city so filled with light and peace and wisdom that nations will flock to learn together about God’s people.  Isaiah wanted to remind everyone to work together no matter where they were born, in captivity or in hardship on native land, and in that cooperation, despite language barriers and cultural differences, they would remember what they had in common, the heritage of a faith in a loving God who would sustain them in a better way that would benefit the world.

We see the same coming together in our Gospel reading with scholars coming to a poor family in an obscure town in Israel.  Now, Matthew doesn’t mention shepherds or a census or a stable.  That’s all Luke.  And we have to be careful to remind ourselves that both Gospel writers were not primarily historians, but theologians.  Josephus was a Jewish historian writing about the same time as Matthew and Luke, and he makes no mention of massacres although Herod the Great had a reputation of being ruthless and murderous in other situations.  Matthew is writing theology to his community of Jewish Christians, the ones who were first converted to following the teachings of Jesus.  He’s also writing to the whole Jewish community because he sees himself as part of the long story of the people of Israel.  So his focus is on Joseph, more than Mary.  And Joseph, like the technicolor dream coat Joseph in the book of Genesis, has dreams and respects what those dreams teach him.  And Joseph takes the mom and the baby to Egypt after a dream of danger.  Just like Moses was saved from a massacre by a powerful monarch, so too Jesus was saved from a massacre.  And just like Moses grew up in Egypt to be a savior for all the people living in oppression and slavery, so too Jesus would grow up in Egypt to free his people.  The parallels were an important reminder that Jesus was rooted and grounded in the traditions and stories of his Jewish heritage.  And just like King Solomon of old, Jesus attracted special scholars from outside the country to come and pay their respects.  This contrasts again with Luke’s theology which talks about Jesus being presented in the Temple as a young infant according to the customs of the time, or staying behind in the temple to debate the scholars when he was only 12, showing that he was a student of Torah, again according to the traditions of the time.  No mention of Egypt because Luke’s theology is a little different.

Both Christmas stories, Luke and Matthew, are not writing a theology of escape. Nor is Isaiah writing a theology of escape.  Theirs is a theology of imagination and courage. It asks us to envision a world ordered not by fear or scarcity, but by building community, compassion and commitment.  Scholars and carpenters, farmers and city dwellers from another land, peasants and rich magi alike come together to rise and shine as one community of hope.

The United Church is at a crossroads.  If we don’t rise and shine, our grandchildren won’t have churches to come to to find hope and healing for the future.  If we don’t build community, compassion and commitment, our country might fragment into small territories that lack infrastructure for all.  If we don’t dream of a better future, our schools and hospitals will become privatized and the rich Herods will continue to hoard trillions of dollars.  If we don’t find ways to work together, our lights will struggle to shine.  We too have hard work ahead of us, both as a church and as individuals.  Do we buy into a theology of Herods accumulating power and wealth and not caring who we hurt as we do so, or do we buy into the theology of Isaiah, Matthew and Luke that cares for each other and helps each other shine?  As Isaiah proclaimed, “Though chaos still covers the earth and conflicts cloud the people, upon you God now dawns, and God's glory will be seen among you!  The nations will come to your light and the leaders to your bright dawn!”  God, help us to see your glory, help us to rise together to be the light of hope to your struggling world this year.  Amen.

Love over Hate

If you ever want to know how a town or a village or a city is doing, ask a hairdresser or a cashier or a school bus driver.  They have their fingers on the pulse of the community in a way that others might not.  They are the ones who see us at our worst.  Bus drivers see our kids when they are sleepy or after a hard day’s work at school.  Grocery store clerks find one more turkey for the foodbank, or one more toy for Santa’s Anonymous.  They are the innkeepers of the Bethlehem story, the ones who make room for people who show up at inconvenient times.  They are not the star of the show, no one is going to write carols about them, or have saints’ days named after them or give them Nobel prizes or medals of bravery.  They are quiet people who show up, day after day, enduring long shifts, aching feet, and impossible customer requests while on minimum wage. The innkeeper barely gets mentioned in the Christmas story, and yet in some ways, he or she was the first person to respond with generosity and creativity to the Christmas Story.  Welcoming the stranger becomes the first act of the world responding to the good news of Jesus being with us.  Before the shepherds, before the three kings, there is the humble innkeeper, trying to come up with a creative solution to an impossible situation. 

Even though Mary and Joseph ended up in a barn, it was a shelter from the woes of the world that were pressing down on them.  According to Luke’s gospel, they faced a government that made unreasonable demands on ordinary people, ordering a census based on place of birth without regard for where they lived.  They had to travel in a time when the roads were not safe from wild animals or wilder bandits.  They had to travel through a country run by a foreign army speaking a foreign language.  They travelled to a town where there were no hospitals or ambulances if there was an accident, and no police to intervene in cases of violence.  Justice and healthcare came for the wealthy and influential, not for a poor family forced to relocate unexpectedly because of politics.

Today, we live in a world that glorifies powerful people.  We live in a world that promotes fear of anyone that doesn’t look like us or talk like us or live like us.  We live in a world where rumors spread faster than ever before, and stories that teach us to be scared multiply like snowflakes in a blizzard.  This year, we have heard political figures insulting Canadians and threatening our independence.  We’ve seen the return of measles causing many children to become sick.  We’ve seen the notwithstanding clause used to limit people’s fundamental human rights and pitch the public sector against the private sector.  We’ve also seen people responding with elbows up to rally behind our economy.  We’ve worked together to shop Canadian, and to keep Alberta in Canada.  We’ve spent tourist dollars in Canada, learning how beautiful our parks and cities are.  It hasn’t been easy.  It hasn’t been peaceful.  But it has been inspiring to see how we all, working together, do make a difference.

The story of the birth of a baby in a stinky barn with straw and dirt all around, is a reminder that God comes when we least expect it, into the messiness of our lives.  Whether our homes look pretty, and the tinsel and lights are just perfect, or whether there is clutter and wrapping paper everywhere, God shows up.  Or maybe we are struggling to keep the lights on and the heating bills paid.  Even in the direst of situations, God shows up in love. God shows up despite the messages of fear or anger, despite war and violence. God shows up at your door with an unexpected turkey, or at the post office, with a package you didn’t know was coming.  God shows up with a hug or a small box of chocolates.  God shows up in a phone call from someone you hadn’t heard from in a while.  Or God shows up by saying, hey, send a card to Auntie, it’s been ages. Go deliver Meals on Wheels. Help put on a Christmas dinner for folks who may be alone.  Call your family member, not to get into a big debate over vaccines, but just to say, I love you.  Or shovel your neighbor’s walk if they’ve been sick. We’ve seen what hatred and fear can do to a country, but we’ve also seen what love can do.  Even when we feel like we live in a barn, surrounded by animals, God still shows up in love to make a difference.  We can too!  Just like the innkeepers, the hairdressers, the bus drivers, the cashiers, let’s all do our part in 2026 by standing for love, compassion and empathy for all.  Spread the good news that Love is stronger than Hate, and be the love that someone else desperately needs to see.  

What's Your Sign?

 Have you ever asked God for a sign?  Did you ever receive a sign?  Both of these are not questions we ask easily in the United Church.  We are logical, rational human beings not given to flights of fancy. Some of us refuse to ask for signs, some of us ask for signs too often. It’s hard to get a handle on, and it can feels like getting our tea leaves read or staring into a crystal ball.  Maybe it’s more like driving down the highway in a snowstorm, unsure whether to keep our high beams on or not.  Those times when the snow is blowing so thickly that we can’t see ahead no matter how fast or slow we go.  We look with anxiousness for the next sign for our turn off or to get a sense of where we are or how much further we need to go.  I often feel like I’m getting close to Athabasca when I see the moose crossing sign on the highway.  I look for that sign, and when I see it, I know where I am.  I also know that when I see it, I need to take extra care and be alert for unexpected hazards.

Our Isaiah reading has an unexpected hazard in it.  If we cherry-pick how we read Isaiah, the longest book of all the prophets, we can indirectly feed into antisemitic attitudes.  The attitude that the Hebrew scriptures are useless or full of an angry God or only valuable when they predict the arrival of Jesus is a way of diminishing the influence of Jewish theologians on the world and on Jesus.  The verses we heard this morning were once translated as ‘behold, the virgin is with child and will bear a son” but that is based on a Greek mistranslation.  Now scholars have restored the ancient and accurate meaning to us.  When we put it into context, we see that Isaiah was preaching to King Ahaz who was facing a civil war with two other kings.  The two kings planned to attack Jerusalem, kill Ahaz and put a puppet ruler in his place so they could attack the Assyrian Empire.  Ahaz was unsure what to do.  Isaiah challenged him not to put his faith in politics but in God.  Ahaz couldn’t ask for a sign because he didn’t have confidence in his faith.  It’s hard to trust in God when there are two armies making a beeline for your front gate.  Isaiah heard Ahaz’s excuses and said, “See this pregnant lady here? Her child will not starve to death because of two armies but will eat healthily before he is very old.”  Isaiah was saying to Ahaz that hope even for the pregnant mom was so close she could name her baby, “God is With Us”.  She became a tangible sign of hope for their people and their king.    Even in the midst of doom, she became a sign that violence would not have the final word.  And it became something to remember in other times of danger, that helped people trust in God.

Trust in God came to Joseph too, in our gospel reading this morning.  Joseph found that all his ‘happily ever after’ hopes and dreams, were turned upside down.  As a carpenter, he might have been building a house or renovating the kitchen for the day when he and Mary would start their wedded life.  As often happens, his best laid plans were thrown into a tailspin.  He knew that he wasn’t the father, and as many men have, he decided he didn’t want to be involved.  If he married her when she was already pregnant, people would assume that he was somehow lacking as a man since his young fiancé had strayed.  But as always in a world that has a double standard for the behaviors of men and women, it would have been Mary that would have taken the brunt of abuse from the other villagers for not honoring her commitment to Joseph.  Joseph wanted to do the honorable thing according to the culture of his time.  Break the engagement privately and send her away.  The double standard for women back then would have meant that she would have been on her own, a single mom with no extended family to support her, no income support, no family allowance.  Most young women in such a situation would end up prostituting themselves to survive.  Putting her away quietly would have only kept Joseph’s and Mary’s families honorable standing.  It would not have protected Mary or her baby from the worst abuses the Roman occupied world could throw at vulnerable young girls.

Then Joseph got a sign.  Signs make us question our assumptions about the world.  Joseph’s dream had him question his assumptions about how to deal with Mary.  Just as Isaiah, pointing at a young woman in a land threatened with invasion, questioned his king’s assumptions about God.

Some signs that question our assumptions about the world that I saw this week, were the heroic intervention of a Syrian Muslim refugee in the shooting of unarmed Jewish people in Sydney, Australia.  His bravery disrupts the racist stories that brown immigrants are violent and evil.  Some conspiracists tried to pretend that he was Christian, not Muslim, or tried to erase him from the story altogether.  The other thing that disrupted our assumptions was Skate Canada cancelling all interprovincial figure skating competitions from being held in Alberta, in order to protect young girls from double standards here.  Double standards and fear-based disinformation are hard to see until we look for the signs that God sends us.  God wants us to look for signs that build hope, peace, love and joy.  This Advent season, like Joseph and Isaiah, let us see signs of hope and love to change our assumptions about the world.  So if you feel like you are driving in a blizzard, slow down and look for signs of God’s love.  Chances are, you will find them.  Thanks be to God! Amen.

It’s the End of the World as we know it and I feel fine!

Ever notice how things can get twisted and changed as people share stories over time?  We used to play a game where one person would whisper a secret message to the person next to them who would then repeat it to the person beside them until it went all around the circle.  No matter how carefully we listened, the message that was received at the end had very little to do with the message that was started.  For some reason human communication can get bent and twisted out of the original intent.  So we shouldn’t be too surprised that scripture gets twisted into hurtful interpretations that are unrecognizable to the original authors.  How do we deal with scripture like this that have been used to distort and damage what Christianity is about?

Jesse Zink, in his book Faithful, Creative, Hopeful shares the story of a congregation that is preparing a Good Friday joint service that would rather go to a big sale than attend their special worship.  Zink says it’s not that the minister is a failure, but that the Christian faith has been defeated by today’s culture.  Bill McKibben wrote an article in last week’s Guardian, describing how progressive protestant Christian has been distorted by mainstream culture to the point that US politicians use scripture abusively to support their oppressive laws, and I quote:

“relatively obscure passage in a relatively obscure Old Testament story is a good example of what is known as prooftexting – the citing of some verse somewhere to support your predetermined beliefs…[which] is like a restaurant critic who has visited a steakhouse, noted that it has creamed spinach on the menu, and declared confidently that it is a vegetarian eatery.”

Scripture gets twisted like this and Christianity gets twisted like this  into an excuse to bully people who care for others, who are compassionate for outsiders, for the vulnerable and for the powerless.  How many times have we heard people say, “I can’t stand organized religion” because they have experienced twisted uses of scriptures to justify toxic abuses of power.  Power over how people lead their lives, power over legislation that appears on the surface of it to be harmless but isn’t.  All supposedly justified in the name of Christianity but without the compassion and empathy that Jesus taught his disciples to show towards folks less fortunate than themselves.

A case of scripture that often gets twisted beyond recognition is this passage in Matthew.  It refers back to the Noah Story.  You know, the one that has generated all kinds of songs and art like the Irish Rovers singing about ‘green alligators and long-necked geese’ and completely ignoring the tragedy and destruction the Flood story implies.  This is not a cutesy story about animals on an overcrowded floating barn with the chaos of keeping the lions fed and the rabbits from taking over.  This is about heartbreaking tragedy where people are swept up off in a tidal wave of destruction.  Once we see a painting of the people left off the ark, it’s hard to think of Noah as cute.  And here’s the thing.  The Matthew passage doesn’t sound like the persons taken up are raptured into Heaven, it sounds ambiguous.  The ones that are taken, are they taken by the flood waters, sparing the ones left behind? It’s hard to tell.  Yet there has spawned a multimillion-dollar industry of books and movies taking this single passage out of context into a bizarre faith that has people sure they are entitled to special treatment from God.  They proudly put bumper stickers on their car saying, “In case of the Rapture, this vehicle will be driverless” because they know how the end times are going to work in their favor.  It’s nasty and cynical and snobbish.  The opposite of what Jesus taught.

Our Song of Faith, a document in the form of poetry that tries to put into words our best understanding of the United Church’s ideas says that “Scripture is our song for the journey, the living word passed on from generation to generation to guide and inspire, that we might wrestle a holy revelation for our time and place from the human experiences and cultural assumptions of another era. God calls us to be doers of the word and not hearers only... The Spirit judges us critically when we abuse scripture by interpreting it narrow-mindedly, using it as a tool of oppression, exclusion, or hatred.”

All too often it may feel like we have been defeated by toxic Christian teachings that drown out our understandings of following the teachings of Jesus.  All too often it seems like the only Christians we hear about get into the news because they own palaces or private jets or are condemning immigrants or abortion or inflicting the Lord’s Prayer on every school-aged child regardless of what faith they may have.  But when we look at the scriptures as a whole, it seems certain that we are being called not to twist them to allow us to judge our neighbors!  It does not give us permission to oppress others with laws that lock people up.  Scripture instead invites us to live decent lives, sober lives, empathetic and dare I say woke lives.  Lives that recognize God at work in our neighbors, God at work in us to see and call out hatred while inviting God to heal our hearts and minds so we can focus on what is truly important.

Not when or where the end times will come but why and how we love ourselves and love our neighbors and love God.  That way, whenever God shows up in our lives, to take us or to leave us behind, we will be ready. Now is the hour for us to wake up and live honorable lives.  That way, whenever the end times come, we will be ready for God who comes in love. May it be so for us all.