30th Anniversary of the United Church Apology to Indiginous peoples

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What barriers need to be removed?

What question is in your heart related to forgiveness?

Where do you see yourself in this? 

Where do you find hope?

Hope does not disappoint us

Romans 5:1-5

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.  And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,  and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

I have many questions arising from our scriptures today. The psalmist asks “Who are we that God is so good to us?” “What did Jesus mean when he said “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”  What did Paul mean when he talked about justification by faith? How are we supposed to know what the Spirit of Truth is?  And the biggie, “why are we supposed to rejoice in our sufferings?”

Sometimes it seems like scripture raises more questions than it answers, and some may wonder why we bother at all.  The complicated game we call life means that we are constantly curious about all knids of things, from the number of stars in the universe to the reason why mosquitos exist.  But none is as perplexing to me as why is there suffering?

Why do children get cancer, why do young people get involved in situations that lead to shootings, why does someone’s whole house burn down but the cross for her dead nephew stays standing? Why does a prominent member of Athabasca die in a motorcycle collision?

These kinds of questions are a part of being human, they are part of our struggle to find meaning in a world that all too often feels like the atheists have got it right; life is a meaningless piece of chaos that is one long experience of struggle and suffering.  Or life is what you make of it, get off your chair and get working.  Or buy this miracle pill or try this wonder diet or go to hear this fabulous guru who will answer all your questions, or get your horoscope done now and you will know your future.  We often want the instant remedy that will solve all our problems and eliminate all our suffering.

And there’s always someone with an answer, “If God closes a door, he’ll open a window”, or “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger”, or “Everything happens for a reason”, or ‘no pain, no gain’.  The platitudes that we all know seem to work for everyone else but us.

Jesus was speaking to his disciples on the last day of his life, and he didn’t have easy answers for them.  He didn’t tell them that life was going to be rosy, with glorious times ahead.  He didn’t make promises that they were all going to end up rich, powerful and surrounded by friends.  He left them with a mystery. 

He left them with a promise.  He left them with the sense that they would find support.  He left them with an understanding that there was more to come, and that they would grow into that ‘more’.  He left them with guidance, not answers.  But he did promise them truth and peace.

Paul also talked about peace coming from a deep connection with God.  It grieves me when I hear about folks who look for peace elsewhere than God.  The people who put all their hopes in another person, ‘if only I had a boyfriend or girlfriend, that will solve all my problems’, or the folks that turn to suicide or expensive non-medical plastic surgery.  The folks that horde up money but live in run-down housing with less than healthy conditions.  The people addicted to their household items that fill up their homes until their family and friends call a television show to stage an intervention.  The grandparents who dote on their children and grandchildren, only to see those childrens lives destroyed by drugs. So much pain.

So when we hear about ‘boasting in our suffering’, we need to be very careful.  It’s not that we are to go on some massive pity party, seeing who can brag about who has the biggest scars or the longest chemo treatment.  No, we need to look at the culture of the time.  Paul was writing to folks who believed that the stars were the lights coming from holes poked in the big bowl of the sky that let God’s light in to the world below.  There was some basic understanding of some people that the world was more curved than flat, but many sailors still believed that if they sailed too far from land, they would fall off the earth.  The gods of Zeus, Apollo, Hera and Athena quarrelled like humans, took lovers amongst themselves and played with humans like they were toys.  If disaster hit, it was because the humans had done something terrible to deserve that.  So misfortune was a sign of shame and disgrace in the community.  It was something to be hidden and shunned and not talked about.

Paul is not saying we should brag obnoxiously about our health problems or family squabbles.  What he is saying is don’t be ashamed of our faith when we have difficult times.  Don’t hide our pain or our frustration or our anger.  But speak our truth with love and sensitivity.  When we find safe places to talk about our hurt and confusion, our frustration and our fear, we can become transformed.

I have seen several folks this week find a deep sense of inner peace from finding someone safe to talk to about what they are really going through.  It is amazing to watch that transformation and healing that occurs.  It may not be big dramatic healings, but it may be as simple as cutting out a prayer from the bulletin or a quote from the bible and putting it on your fridge.  It may be a little reminder, a thank you note or a pressed flower that you keep in a special place.  It can be a walk in the rain where we are reminded of the amazing mystery of life going on around us, the renewal in the spring when we thought nothing would grow again in our lives.

God still speaks, words that encourage us and help us find peace in the midst of our suffering.  Let us hang onto the promise that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. 

Spirit of Freedom

Anniversaries are joyful but what about the anniversaries we don’t talk about, the anniversaries of fear or grief?  Not only is this the 103^rd celebration of Pentecost in this building, it’s the 5^th anniversary of the Slave Lake Fire.

I’ll never forget my first Yellowhead Presbytery meeting as the ministry rep from Athabasca.  Presbytery is where United church folks gather from churches in the neighborhood to socialize and work together for the Kingdom of God.  Yellowhead Presbytery gathers people from over 40 churches from Lamont and Fort McMurray to Jasper and Hinton.  That’s over 80!

I was nervous about meeting that many new people, and wondering if I would recognize anyone.  Of course I did, especially one dear lovely lady who was as excited to see me as I was to see her.  I knew her from our days at the University of Alberta where we sang together in the choir, and she must have been around 18 when we first met. 

I kept running into her at Naramata Center where for one week a year in the summer, she loved and inspired my children, helping them to grow in their faith and self-confidence.  I was thrilled and not surprised to hear that she had gone into ministry, and very excited that she got posted back to Alberta from Saskatchewan.  So seeing her in Surprise Lake Camp was wonderful.

As we entered the main room where the meeting was going to be held, I wanted to sit up front near the big fireplace where a cozy fire was warming the building on a blustery October day.  It was very surprising to hear her ask if we could sit at the back near the door where all the cold air was coming from.

The friend I was sitting with was Reverend Leigh Sinclair, and some of you may remember her from my covenanting service which she preached in this very spot. 

At the time she was the President of Alberta North West Conference (which is over 200 congregations from Cypress Hills to Whitehorse), and she was a bundle of enthusiastic energy, brave, smart and deeply Christian.  She also had been evacuated from Slave Lake.

The mere smell of campfire smoke was enough to trigger her memories of fearful evacuation and even though it had been six months since the fire, Leigh had not gone camping once over the summer.  She was too busy providing pastoral care, working with Conference staff to provide emotional and spiritual support for the townspeople and dealing with her own needs.  One thing she hadn’t needed to worry about was her church, which was left standing and became a center for much of the healing ministry she undertook.  Another thing she hadn’t needed to worry about was her salary.  Across the conference, people had donated funds which supported her for a short time and the surplus funded art therapy professionals to offer wrkshops for both children and adults.  So Presbytery became the first time she encountered that smell, and the sight of flames.

She could have run away from the meeting.  She could have gotten angry at the insensitivity of the organizers to put a fire in the meeting space.  She could have pretended that she wasn’t afraid and spent all her energy trying to repress anxieties, and not concentrate on the business at hand.

Instead, she confided in a few folks that she trusted, and sat in that room at a safe distance while taking deep breaths and praying to find calmness and healing.  She would not allow herself to be enslaved to her fears, but reminded herself that she was a child of God.

Fast forward 5 years.  Today Leigh is in Quebec, and has been communicating almost daily with myself and Reverend Donalee from Fort McMurray.  She has become a pillar of strength and a supplier of calm support for us both. 

She has been praying for all the folks in Fort McMurray, but also wanted to send her love to you again.  She still remembers the wonderful ways that Athabasca supported her and is grateful for that time of love and care.  As she told us when she preached here 4 years ago, Athabasca folks were a beacon of hope for many.  It is not easy to do.  We can get compassion fatigue and volunteer burn out.  We can find ourselves replaying old griefs from our pasts or having emotional outbursts.  We can feel resentful at all the publicity or free stuff or the perceived profit-mongering of businesses in town.  We can feel guilty that we have not done more.  We can become slaves to the ‘woulda coulda shoulda’ fears of unrealistic expectations.  We surround ourselves with stuff or busy activities. 

Or we can remind ourselves that life is a marathon.  That as Christians we are called to be real, and that we have an ally to support us through the good times and the bad.  We know that suffering cannot always be avoided.  Not to say that we should stay in abusive relationships or stick to addictions in order to suffer, but to recognize that they may be unhealthy coping mechanisms and the pain of sobriety or loneliness may be the suffering that we deeply fear.  Does that kind of suffering lead to a better world for all? Of course not.

In the long run, in the marathon of life, if we truly call ourselves Christian, we need to face suffering as Paul or Mary and Martha or Peter, or Mary and Joseph, or even Jesus.  Jesus faced his own fears of losing his life – “take this cup from me”, he prayed on his last night.  He also told his people of the comforting Spirit of truth.  Not the spirit of lies or pretending or fear, but the Spirit of Truth which has always and will continue always to set us free from the slavery of fear.  May we all know that spirit of truth and freedom.  Amen.

Open to the Spirit

Did you hear the story of the hairdresser from Halifax?  Her car broke down in New Glasgow and she had to wait an extra day to get it fixed, so in order to try to shake her bad day, she went to the movie theatre and bought a ticket to sit on the main floor. 

The manager discovered that she was sitting on the main floor and told her she had to sit in the balcony.  She refused as she didn’t want to climb the stairs.  They called the cops, threw her out of the movie theatre, she got arrested and spent a day in jail on top of everything else.

This really happened!  Her name was Viola Desmond, the year was 1946, and she was thrown in jail for wanting to sit on the main floor of the movie theatre.  What had she done wrong?  She had sat in the ‘all white’ main floor of the theatre.  She was charged with tax evasion because the ticket to sit on the main floor was 1 cent more than it was for the balcony, and by buying the cheaper ticket, she supposedly defrauded the province of their tax.  She was fined $26 and given a police record.

What happened next was just as startling as our scripture reading for today.  We’ve heard about Jesus promising The Spirit who will come as companion, and guiding Paul and his friends in a convoluted journey through Turkey into Greece.  What is this Spirit who closes doors to going in one direction, then starts churches through co-incidental meetings at rivers when people least expected it?  And does it still happen?

And the real big question, how do we know if this is the Spirit leading us or if it’s just a figment of our imaginations?

I think that there’s something inherently scary for us intelligent types of folks when it comes to the Spirit.  When I was a child, we heard it called ‘the Holy Ghost’ which meant it was right up there with Frankenstein and Dracula, something that came out on Midnight on Halloween.  And as a young adult, I saw examples of people rolling around on the floor, speaking in tongues, going to faith healers, being slain in the Spirit, you name it.  That was not something I wanted to experience, no thank you!

But this church was built by people who trusted that there was something deeply true and meaningful in the stories we hear in the book of Acts.  The Methodists built this building 103 years ago, and the symbol of Methodism is the Dove.  If you look around, you can see more than one image of the Dove on our walls, and if you look at our new crest, the Dove is still incorporated in it.  Methodists were founded after John and Charles Wesley went to a Moravian prayer meeting and found their hearts ‘strangely warmed’.  This warmth inspired them to take the book learning they had gathered and bring it to places like the riverside.  They went to where they found people, and they made the message of Jesus, the message of hope and companionship come alive for those folks.  The Wesleys found a need for guidelines for telling if our thoughts were from the Spirit or from ourselves.   Some of their followers had taken the idea of the Spirit to mean that since they had been ‘saved’, they could do no wrong, even if they participated in drunkenness and debauchery.  John and his brother, being graduates of Oxford University and ordained Anglican priests, were not at all happy with the turn of events. 

John developed a few simple questions that help us even today: Is it scriptural?  Is it logical? Does it fit with our experience? Does it fit with our tradition?

Scripture would say, pay attention to those little nags and hints and dreams.  Peter and Paul listened to their dreams and what a change it made for them and us.  Our intellect would say, is this logical? Is it safe to follow my impulse to go for a run past a drug house in the middle of the night in Mississippi? Probably not, unless I’m 6 foot 6 and run in a bulletproof vest.

Experience is also important.  Does this impulse seem like it’s coming from God or coming from my own ego?  Is it really God telling me to eat that chocolate bar? Or is it my own lust for chocolate?  That is a trivial example, but I have seen people rationalize everything from their addictions to staying in an abusive relationship. It takes practise to hear that voice of peace.

Lastly there’s tradition.  For me that’s the United Church, but it could be the Anglican Church or the Baptists, or wherever you find God.  Our traditions say we should care for the poor and the hungry, the oppressed and the discriminated.  When that little voice connects with my tradition and my congregation feels empowered by it, then that’s the Spirit calling.  Synergy.

Viola Desmond went back home to her congregation.  She talked to them and together they helped figure out what the Spirit was calling them to do.  They hired a lawyer to fight the criminal charges.  She was still found to be guilty, but embarrassed the lawyers, the government and the movie theatre.  Her lawyer refused to charge her and donated the funds to a new organization for equality. One person said

 ... this meant something to our people. Neither before or since has there been such an aggressive effort to obtain rights. The people arose as one and with one voice.

This happened nine years before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus down in Alabama that kick started the Civil Rights Movement.  It was an act of Spirit moving in the heart of a brave hairdresser that still provides encouragement for us all to fight any kind of oppression of one human by another.  And if you happen to be in Halifax someday, take a ride on the Viola Desmond ferry, donate a few dollars to Cape Breton University’s Viola Desmond scholarship, and check out her portrait in Government House while reading about her pardon that was given in 2010.   And keep listening for that small voice of the Spirit who moves us to work for peace and justice for all.

Enough with the Love Already!

We are inundated with the L word these days.  The Beatles sang about it non-stop, artists paint about it, poets wax rhapsodic on it, our scriptures are full of it and even Tom Jackson started his presentation on Friday night with the words “I love you” to the whole crowd.

Seriously?  He loves 500 Athabascans he has never met before? Riiight! That statement was enough to make a few people’s eyes roll, and those who didn’t may have been thinking, “Easy for you to say, but I could never do that.  That’s too hard.”  Or, “I tried that once, but I got hurt,” or “let me tell you about my bosom friend who betrayed me.  That taught me a huge lesson about loving people.”

But somehow he had us all in the palm of his hand.  You could have heard a pin drop when he was talking that night about how he had found his purpose in life, that he learned that one person can make a huge difference in the world.  He learned that he was addicted to helping people get out of their destructive mindsets and look for the positives as a way of battling poverty, depression and suicide.

He was living out Jesus’ command to love one another.  I don’t know if he is Christian or not, but he was living out the gospel in a positive way, sharing his fortune of a Creator-given beautiful voice to Canadians wherever he went.  He was turning what had been a nightmare life into a dream to inspire and heal others.

Sometimes I think we get caught in the ruts of our nightmare lives and we need something to push us out of those ruts.  Sometimes we get stuck in our pity parties, our resentments, our grudges and our fears and can’t see beyond our noses.  Sometimes we are like a heart patient that needs an electrifying jolt to get our hearts started up again.

 “Clear” someone yells, and the emergency staff bring down the paddles and our bodies leap up from the stretcher in the intense energy needed to get our hearts pumping again.

That’s what Peter’s dream is about, I think.  He had watched Jesus eat with all kinds of people, Samaritans, Syrophonecians, tax collectors, prostitutes, drunks, lepers, the works.  He had seen Jesus heal the servants and children even of Roman soldiers, the dreaded enemies.  And yet Peter was stuck in a dangerous rut.  In fact the whole Jesus movement was caught up in the concept that their faith was one more interpretation of Jewish faith.  Jesus was Jewish, followed Jewish laws, quoted Jewish scriptures, followed Jewish traditions, and like all good Jewish men, went to temple to have arguments around Jewish interpretations.  So were Peter, Paul, Mary, Martha and all the other disciples.  Good Jewish people. 

God didn’t want them falling into the same old rut.  Hence the dream Peter has, or more precisely the nightmare.  I can just picture the horror and disgust Peter felt at looking at that banquet spread on the sheet.  Calamari, chocolate-covered ants, lobster, wichety grubs, probably still raw rather than deep-fried and coated in bread crumbs to disguise their appearance.  Just because John the Baptist ate locusts, doesn’t mean that Peter was looking forward to grasshopper pie!

So Peter endures what for him must be a shockingly stomach-churning picture of a heavenly picnic and realizes that this means that he’s going to have to rethink who or what he hobnobs with and since Christianity has so many mentions of heavenly banquets and feeding of 500, socializing with those folks, their kind, was going to take a huge act of, well, guts!

 

This was a deep act of selfless love and acceptance, when you come to think of it, and is actually one of the reasons Christianity spread so far so fast in the early days.  Thomas had to eat Butter Chicken and curry in India, two romans named Cyril and Methodius had to figure out holopchi and perehe, goodness knows what they thought of escargots when they first arrived in France, or even dim sum for that matter.

Somewhere along the way, though, we lost sight of the love part of that heavenly banquet, and instead of enjoying pemmican and bannock, we imposed carrots and Brussel sprouts.  We forgot that Christianity is sitting down with our neighbors and eating what they put out in front of us.  We forgot to watch the Holy Spirit saying, “Shut up Peter, you’ve talked enough, let me get to work in these folks before you mess it up with too many words.”

Imagine what it would be like if Peter hadn’t listened to his dream.  I would probably be a high priestess performing human sacrifice on the solstice while wearing little more than mistletoe.  We wouldn’t have roads or democracy unless we lived on the land of the Iroquois Confederacy.  There would probably be no public schools, health care, employment insurance or shelters for battered women.  But if we had kept the love of Jesus’ example firmly at the forefront of our thoughts, we would have never implemented Residential Schools, we would not use violence as a core tool for disciplining children or spouses, and our environment would probably be a lot healthier.  Peter was shown that God made all the creatures of the world and they were not to be considered unclean.  Would we be in such a position as we are today if we saw polar bears as God’s precious creation?  When we have pictures of turtles who got caught in pop bottle holders and grew around them with a figure eight waist before it killed them, would we see them as God’s precious creation?

Jesus wanted his followers to set love as the core of how they chose to interact with each other and those that they would meet in the future.  He wanted compassion as the core value to drive all our choices.  He wanted love to be the compass that we use to guide all our interactions.  Love, not an emotion, but an action.  In the end, it’s not the what’s that are important, the what I do, the what I drive, the what I own, the what I have in the bank account.  It’s the why’s and how’s.  Why I support the Food for Thought, the M&S fund, the prayer shawl ministry, the PRAAC organisation, the AA folks, the people struggling with inadequate housing or poor parenting or suicide or depression.  Why? Because we are creatures of love, made by the Great Love at the center of the universe.  And when we remember that why, our how’s become simple and straightforward, we do it in love.  To everyone, Jew and Greek, Status and immigrant and refugee, gay and straight and alphabet people, rich and poor alike.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.  They will know we are Christians, after all, if our why and how are about love.

 

Fire in the Belly

Any time I hear scripture about dancing, I start thinking about my abdomen and how many figures of speech there are about that portion of the anatomy.  Middle age spread, battle of the bulge come to mind for me easily enough, but there’s even more:

I had a good belly laugh about that; no guts no glory; that was stomach-churning; let’s belly up to the bar; and that was gut-wrenching.

The most important phrase I was taught as a teen was “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” which is dreadful advice for surgeons.  I heard that comment so often, I actually wondered if it was in the Bible.  It’s not.  My grandmother had me convinced that men could be manipulated into anything from a new fridge to a marriage proposal with some careful application of a roast beef dinner followed by a generous slab of pie.  Food was a way to get power through manipulation for her.

And if you look at the oldest known works of Christian art, you might wonder if that’s the same religion as we practise today.  There were plenty of pictures of fish, grapes, wine, bread and suppers but no crosses.  Abundance is mentioned or hinted at throughout the gospels, water into wine, the feeding of the five thousand, the parable of the banquet to which everyone is invited.  And several times, Jesus, a carpenter, has the audacity to teach fishermen how to fish.  When they follow his instructions, as usual there is tremendous abundance.  Enough Food for all, freely shared, no strings attached.

One of Saul’s first indications that the Christian community was radically different than anything he had ever known before is that they fed him.  He was a dangerous man; he had a fire in his belly to persecute these blasphemous people, and he breathed out murderous thoughts against them.  He was happy to be famous for hunting them down, and was so notorious that the good folks of Damascus could not believe he meant what he said.  How could someone go from one extreme to another so fast?

It would be like some local businessman who makes his or her reputation on being anti gay, anti muslim, racist and calling organizations like Good Samaritan or the Youth Emergency shelter a bunch of bleeding heart Communist propaganda showing up here and wanting to get baptised.  My jaw would certainly drop and I certainly wouldn’t be the only one to have my stomach in a knot if that happened.

Surprisingly, that flip flop is exactly what happened.  Both Peter and Saul struggled with pride; they thought they knew what was best for the people of God.  They arrogantly assumed they could do anything they liked.  But like a punch to the gut, they came face to face with their vulnerabilities.  Peter betrayed Jesus in the temple while warming himself by a charcoal fire and Saul became blind and completely dependant upon others for his survival where before he had been a healthy and energetic youth.

Life is like that; we get the horrible diagnosis or our life takes an unexpected turn or something happens that we just don’t know how to cope with and suddenly we find ourselves crying tears of gut-wrenching sadness as the very future we dreamed of unravels completely.

Peter was ashamed, Saul was helpless and confused.  Both took risks and opened themselves to a different way of seeing the world.  Peter found not just forgiveness at the charcoal fire on the beach, but a commission to step into the desperately needed role of leadership.  Saul changed his name to Paul and found a community so loving, forgiving, generous and healing that he did his best to set up other communities of generous abundance from Greece to Turkey and back, pouring his restored energy into loving people instead of executing them.

We still have people who would rather live in fear of their neighbor than live with hopeful love.  We still have people here in Canada who think it’s okay to discriminate against people of color because they can get away with it.  There are still people who encourage each other to live lives of suspicion, anger and even hate because of the remote possibility that they will lose all they have to ‘those people’ who are different than them.

But we are also in this story.  We are the Ananias folks who say, ‘really, God? You want me to have a conversation with that person? That angry neighbor, that teenager who spray-painted my garage, that fellow who yells at everyone in the grocery store or on Facebook?’  We are the ones who might just one day be called out of our safe community to feed someone who is hurt and lost and sick.  Someone different than ourselves who is hungry and empty inside and reaches out, as unbelievable as it may seem, to someone like us for help.

Ultimately everyone needs to eat, everyone is hungry.  But everyone, even the stubbornly fearful and angry racists, can find new life in the story of abundant blessing through Jesus who feeds us and shapes us into a radical thing.  A community that believes in the transformative power of love.  May that love that rescued Peter and Paul from lives of fear continue to transform us into friends of Ananias, brave followers of Christ!  May we be gifted with a bellyful of bravery that inspires us to dance that love to all who meet us.  Amen, halleluiah!

Wonderful witnesses

I’ve been thinking about witnesses recently.  The news has been full of them, from interviews in Brussels, to the women who testified against Jian Gomeshi in Toronto.  We have the Reverend Gretta Vosper declaring that the sooner the United Church starts to be a church of atheists, the better off we will all be, because a faith in God only produces fanatics who use violence to get their ways.  

And again we have witnesses referred to in our scriptures this morning.  Luke’s gospel has the women going to the tomb, and their story discounted by the disciples.  It seemed ‘an idle tale’, to be dismissed and disbelieved.  Paul wrote that without our hope in something beyond our own limited lives we are indeed quite foolish.  Our time is wasted and we have nothing that gives meaning to our lives.  Who should we believe?  How do we know we can trust the witnesses we hear from?

I found a few interesting witnesses this week who talked about atheism in surprising ways.  There was an ancient historian named Celsus who denounced Christianity as a new form of atheism.  He disliked it not because of the miracles or the virgin birth or even the resurrection, as gods coming back from the dead were quite common, like Orpheus, Hercules and Osiris.  No, Celsus’ biggest problem with Christianity was that Christians weren’t snobbishly elitist and would socialize with anyone.  And they were atheists because they challenged the idea that the Gods existed.  It wasn’t just that they didn’t like Jupiter or Apollo or Athena, they had the crazy idea that only one god existed and that one God, even though God was a Three in One, was the only one to be worshiped.  In Celsus’ books, that was atheism, and it was a stupid fad that would never last!  Boy was he wrong.

Then there was Frank Schaeffer, who wrote a book with the title, “Why I am an Atheist Who Believes in GOD”. 

You can imagine that as a recovering, former atheist myself, I found that very intriguing!  Another thing that I read was that most atheists fall into one of two camps.  They either see life as a gift or a burden.  If they see it as a gift, they try to pack as much as possible into it, as life is short and one never knows when their number will come up.  This can lead to a hectic lifestyle packed with exhausting activities, endless shopping trips and vacations in search of one thrilling experience after another. If they see it as a burden, they will sigh and say, “What’s the point of doing anything?”  Both groups are struggling with death.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that death forces those who place their faith in the grave to either ‘frantically affirm’ life or to hold life in ‘indifferent contempt’.  Their lives witness to the sense of helpless hopelessness that so many modern families find themselves trapped in.

The Easter story is witness to a mysterious way of living, a mystery of purposefulness, a mystery of joy and hope and courage and peace.  I trust these witnesses, not because they have all their details exactly the same, for that smacks of collusion and conspiracy, but because they have details a little different from each other, like each witness saw some part of the story from their unique point of view and remembered that bit instead of the other bit.  Like a family get together when we reminisce about the time we went fishing.  But the biggest reason I trust these witnesses is because of the way it impacted their lives.

Peter went from shamefully denying Jesus to becoming an outstanding leader, willing to face everything the Roman Empire could throw at him.  Paul had his life completely changed from an arrogant status-quo type, to someone who preached love with great humbleness. Francis of Assisi went from being a spoiled rich playboy like Paris Hilton to a beloved saint who inspired the establishment of animal shelters.  And there’s so many more that it would take months on Wikipedia to research them all.

In some mysterious way this crazy story that Romans hated, atheists scoff at, scientists challenge, and philosophers question, is still inspiring witnesses today to talk about how their lives are being changed.

That deep sense of mystery is still at work right here, right now. Every Sunday I see people who are being transformed by that Mystery, that Someone or Something, from fearful, depressed, helpless individuals into energetic, compassionate folks who love their neighbors no matter what. I see 'God' in joyful, free lives of compassion all around me. I watch grandmas and babies alike being marinated in a grace that gives the older folks courage to face down discrimination and injustice, and bathes the babies in love and trust. I see grandpas and five year olds being inspired to make a difference in the world. I see people energized by a Healing Spirit finding the courage and the patience to face cancer or family dysfunction with honesty. I see women walking away from abusive relationships because they finally get it in their bones that they are loved. I see hungry children being fed and angry men learning to be peaceful.

 I've been an atheist and those were some of the saddest, depressing years of my life. However, Jesus made a difference in my life and continues to transform me, thanks to people who witnessed to me. We make a difference when we articulate what we believe, why we believe and how we act because of our beliefs. Remember the witness of Christians over the centuries who heard that still small voice encouraging them to make a difference; their inspired witness reminds me to confidently say, "Halleluiah, the tomb is empty, Christ is risen, Christ is risen indeed!"