Bent Over Woman

Luke 13:10 Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. 11 And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years...

Whoever came up with the idea of having the story of the Bent over woman in August must have been a gardener over the age of 50! It’s easy to sympathise with her in these hot days when the weeds are high and thick, and the carrots need pulling, the potatoes need digging, the beans need snapping and the zucchinis need to be pulled before they become the size of a major league baseball bat.  If you need a zucchini, please let me know.  Seriously!

One of the things I noticed while pulling weeds this week is how limited our view becomes.  The focus narrows down to the chickweeds and the petunias.  There is no looking at the blue sky or a rose-colored sunset or the far horizon of a lake shore or the high peak of a mountain.  There’s just the dirt at your toes, and maybe the feet of people around you.  It’s an unpredictable world too, being bent over.  Rain storms may be overhead, or a forest fire on the horizon, but staring down means that these kinds of things can not be anticipated or planned for.  They just happen.

I’ve met a few bent over women; one was my husband’s grandmother who had debilitating osteoporosis and was quite debilitated at the end of her days.  Another was a lady struggling with muscular dystrophy.  She is a few years older than me, and her spine is quite curved.  I thought at first she was having a difficult time in her wheelchair as she sat far forward on it, but then I realized that her spine was so bent that she looked like she was maybe 5 feet, but was probably closer to six feet tall.  It took a team of 5 people to get her down into the lake to go for a swim.  And I often think of the woman whose husband reroofed the manse last July.  She was camping with her kids and saved them from a falling tree.  Our roofer had to leave several times to help out with the kids and to be there when she woke up from the medically induced coma to the news that she has lost the use of her legs for the rest of her life. 

But the woman I remember the most, who actually didn’t have a bent over back, but taught me a lot about disabilities, was a lady who I met in first year university.  She lived in a dorm room two doors down from me and was a year or two older than me.  She was a thalidomide baby.  In her case, she had arms that were maybe a foot long, complete with elbows and hands, but only about 4 fingers each.  It meant that she couldn’t do buttons but she could do zippers.  Winter coats had to be adjusted to shorten the sleeves, and mittens were awkward, to say the least.  She could hold spoons and pencils, loved skiing and swimming, but had no way to tie shoe laces.  Things that I took for granted, bike riding for example, or typing, were challenges that had to be figured out in a way that would work for her.  But one thing stuck in my memory of her.  She once told me that she didn’t mind looking different than others and having challenges.  She figured that everyone had some kind of disability, but some people’s disabilities were on the outside for the world to see.  Other’s disabilities were inside, and invisible even to themselves.  They are bent over, seeing only what is at their feet. They can’t see straight.

Jesus straightened up two people that day in the synagogue. He brought health and new horizons to the bent over woman, but also to the synagogue leader.  The leader had forgotten the reason for the Sabbath.  It wasn’t just about not working, a reminder that we are not slaves any longer, but it was about remembering to take time to be in relationship with God.  And the leader was narrow-minded in his assumptions.  In his eyes, the woman was crippled because she somehow had done something to deserve it.  That’s still a common thread I often hear, “everything happens for a reason,” or even, “I must have some really bad karma.”  He was also feeling threatened.

 I can imagine that he was going about leading his regular service in his regular way, and this Jesus fellow stole the show, made the worship service a little chaotic with his actions, and the people must have been full of excitement about what they had just witnessed.  Rather than leading the congregation in joining the woman to praise God, he carped about technicalities.  Things weren’t fitting into his comfortable, predictable box.  Jesus stepped outside the bounds by noticing the woman and empathizing with her.  He touched her in compassion, wishing to free her from her feelings of shame and isolation.  She didn’t ask for the healing, she was used to it after 18 years.  But maybe she wasn’t so used to being seen as someone worthy of the same respect and kindness as others who could stand up straight and tall.  Jesus didn’t just straighten her out, but reminded the leader that it’s about the bigger picture of God’s compassionate love for those who we would most like to dismiss and ignore.

There are so many people who are struggling, bent over with sorrows that cripple their relationships, their families and their very souls.  Some are too angry to come to church; sometimes it is the church where they experienced a sense of shame from a leader with too narrow a point of view.  They struggle from day to day, not hearing a kind word, a gentle touch, a moment of empathy.  We may not be able to cure their pain, but we can remember that they too are children of God.  And there are times we too are crippled up in pain both physical and emotional.  Part of my vacation was struggling with the pain of self-doubt and fear.  But when we gather together in a faith community, whether it’s here in Athabasca, at a church camp, or in a congregation hundreds of miles from home, we gather to hear the hope in Jesus’ words of love, “you are set free from that which cripples you.” May we remember that love and that hope.

Juggling our Lives

Luke 10:40-42  New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.”  But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things;  there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”

 

If we measure our worth by how much we can juggle in our days, how many meetings and appointments we can cram into our lives, then Martha is going straight to heaven! She’s a capable woman, able to quickly put together a dinner party for Jesus and his twelve disciples at a moment's notice, and is seen as not only the head of the household, but also as a deacon, one who serves.

She knows that Jesus talks about taking care of others, especially our neighbors.  The Good Samaritan was a story she had just heard and she knows that our actions are important.  She knows that our faith without actions is empty.  She is determined to show that she has figured it out, that she understands what Jesus is getting at.  Hospitality to those less fortunate.  Well Martha knows how to do hospitality.

Or she would if her sister would pitch in and do her fair share.  And as Martha juggles getting the side of lamb out of the oven at the same time as the vegetables are done, with the setting of the table and making sure that everyone has a chair, she reaches the breaking point.  Can’t you just hear the things she’s telling herself? “If that Mary wasn’t wandering around with her head in the clouds, she’d have the flowers in the vase by now.  She can’t even remember that the salad fork goes before the dinner fork.  And if I’ve told her once, I’ve told her a thousand times, the blue napkins go with the best dishes, not the green napkins!  How that girl will ever survive this world without me I’ll never know.  Honestly!”

There are a lot of Marthas out there, juggling the wine menu with the meat and the Prada shoes with the Gucci handbag.  I knew a lady at city hall who spent $500 on a pair of blue jeans, and always bought matching toenail polish whenever she bought a new pair of sandals. 

I met a mom who has spent her life so filled with driving her kids to hockey and soccer practises that she gets panic attacks when she wonders what she will do now that they are leaving home.  I saw a dad barking lessons at his son while the little boy ran in the children’s triathlon yesterday, like he was an Olympic coach determined to have the boy win the race and who would slack off if he didn’t hear dad’s push to ignore his body and push through to the end.  We have to constantly teach our children to juggle more and more things so that they don’t become, well quite bluntly, thugs and addicts.  Heaven knows what they might do if they have too much time on their hands.

So Martha explodes at Jesus, and uses some of the nastiest tricks of female bullies in every century, triangulation, pressure cooking and shaming.  Triangulation is when we complain about someone’s behavior behind their backs.  It’s gossip and slander, and can be very destructive to family and church.  There’s pressure cooking where you collect tiny grievances into a pot and simmer it until it explodes and rather than deal with the issues when they are tiny, you dump them all over the victim in a hot mess.  And there’s my personal bugbear, public shaming.  Nothing can beat it for making someone feel terrible.  So, Mr. Jesus, my rabbi, what do you think of my lazy sister here who isn’t helping set the table?  Teacher, tell her to be a proper female, and get back to her place in the kitchen with me.  Why should she get all the attention? I need help with my juggling and she should help.  Look at how hard I am working for the kingdom, sacrificing my time and my energy to serve you, and she should be more like me, shouldn’t she?

I cringe when I remember times when a family member would recount my personal shortcomings at a party in public.  I also realize how incredibly sexist it is.  Rabbis at the time of Jesus were having heated debates about the propriety of having female rabbinical students who could one day preach or lead a synagogue. 

It still goes on today, popping up when I least expect it.  At the Strawberry tea this month, a lady stopped me and said, “that handsome man there waiting tables, is he the minister here, dearie?”  “No,” I said, “He’s the minister’s husband.”

It’s not just me.  I’ve seen grown men cry when they recount their parents bullying them to be more, do more, run faster, and shaming them in public.  I got a letter this week from our president of Alberta Northwest Conference saying he was told that he speaks English real good for someone of his race, and another who said aloud in his presence, “the church needs to put that fat black boy in his place.”

Enough! Our best man at our wedding was what some people call ‘pakki’, and an elegant, beautiful soul; he does not drive a taxi in Mill Woods, but has a PhD in Pharmacy and lives in Ottawa.  The racism is here in this building, this town, this country.  It leads to so much anger and resentment and rage that people shoot police, murder 5 year olds or drives trucks into families out to watch fireworks.

We need to stop all the juggling and pretence.  Our works are not going to help us get into heaven when we die.  Shaming others will not save their souls! Jesus told Martha, you are full of worries.  Stop it.  Come and sit with Mary and let me help you get your priorities straight.  Stop juggling. Rest. Breathe.  Remember it’s about loving.  Loving yourself as much as you are loving others.  Love God.  The Samaritan was able to do what he did because he first loved God.  Put that first before all the doing.  Love, Martha.  Love. 

Circumcision and nudists?

Some days there is a word that jumps out from the scriptures and grabs my imagination. Rather reluctantly, I admit that this time it’s the word, wait for it, circumcision.  Sigh. It’s one of those squirmy words, right up there with money, to get people, including me, feeling rather uncomfortable. 

And how do I talk about something so personal, so intimate, and so outside of my own experience as a woman?  I can think of several men whom I know who, no, not the right time and place for that story.  And then there’s, nope, not my story.  So although I am going to preach to the scriptures, just take a deep breath and relax.  No surgery stories coming from this pulpit today.

Instead, I’m going to talk about some people in Vancouver.  They are part of an organization that has been around since the 60’s and that’s a pretty good track record for any group.  They are having a problem though.  They need to recruit new members, and they tried to have open houses, once a year, for that’s a tradition of theirs.  They went on CBC television, to lament that they are getting older and feeling that they can’t keep up with all the work.  They want some younger folks to join up and take over.  They really don’t understand why people aren’t flocking to their open houses.  Any guess as to what this group is?

Yup, it’s a nudist colony! That would be one group that wouldn’t be squeamish about discussing circumcision.  And I would have thought that it would be the last group to struggle to have new members.  I mean, surely their children and grandchildren would join?  I can understand why people aren’t joining churches, but a nudist colony? Wow.  Let’s face it, bowling leagues, The Legion, Lion’s Club, even the Chamber of Commerce are all hoping that some day the young people will come and get to work, keeping up the traditions that have kept those groups going.

Frankly, I remember coming to church as a 20something, and I wasn’t seeing myself as the person to take over all the work of the church.  I can’t imagine anyone saying to me ‘come to church so you can organize cleaning bees and roofing fundraisers, start a children’s choir’ and so on.  No, a friend of mine said to me, ‘I can see you are hurting, why don’t you try going to church?’  I thought he was crazy, but I was in a lot of pain, and thought that if it worked for him, maybe it would work for me, atheist though I was.

People are struggling.  They are in pain.  I see articles such as ‘sleep deprivation is a major crisis in North America,’ or ‘we are seeing an epidemic of the dis-ease of busyness which is causing all kinds of emotional and psychological trauma and we are inflicting this dis-ease on our children’, or the headline in last month’s United Church Observer, “All the Lonely People”, something like 6 million people live isolated, lonely lives. 

This epidemic affects 20 somethings and senior citizens, male and female, circumcised and uncircumcised alike.  It’s also an ancient epidemic.  Unlike the Nudist Colony, we’ve been building community for a long time.  2000 years or so of sending out folks to stay with people they don’t know, sharing hope and healing with whomever will listen.  But we often get it wrong.

Paul’s letter to the Galatians is a stark example of that.  Rather than being a perfect little community since it was founded by people very close to Jesus, it has debates and conflicts tearing it apart.  One person is arrogantly sure he or she is right about what the rules are; after all, aren’t Christians really Jews? So shouldn’t all Christians look the same as Jews? The rest of the community are unsure how to address the situation; do they yell at the circumciser? Do they kick him or her out?

Do they pull out their extra nice manners in hopes that they will either get the person to change their mind or drop out? Or do they write to Paul for advice?

And Paul reminds them that Jesus didn’t come to tell everyone to get circumcised.  Jesus didn’t come to set up a bunch of rules and regulations on how to worship.  The Law was to be a finger pointing to God, not God alone.  When we start to worship our law, our tradition and forget that it is to be a pointer to God, we lose the focus of our Christian identity. 

Jesus wanted Christian identity to be about having a mission in their lives beyond the day to day struggles to eat, drink, and pay the bills.  He wanted them to know that there was more to life than an endless round of appointments and busy days, over scheduled tasks, meetings and social gatherings to keep to.  He wanted them to know that there was hope.  Like African Americans struggling with slavery, they gathered together to share stories and songs of hope.  They knew when they did their ring shouts that they were not alone in their suffering and that they found God’s healing love in the midst of the brutality they were forced to endure.  The promise of Paul and of Jesus that all people, regardless of what they looked like, were human beings worthy of respect, kept them singing about freedom and hope and following the Drinking Gourd to Canada where they would find a better life.  And if they couldn’t find Canada, they would remember that there was a better day coming, that on the other side of Jordan, they would be free once again.

Jesus said that if we want to build our community, if we want to reach out to others, we have to do it with vulnerability, humbleness and respect, and going out to where they are.  Last weekend I was with a group of new age people, the ‘spiritual but not religious’. 

They shared stories of their church childhood, and two came with memories of being United.  They were turned off from bullying, power struggles, and cliques that weren’t interested in hospitality.  But hearing my stories of the congregations that fed me and helped me and healed me got them curious. 

They felt surprise that we weren’t as stuffy and rule bound as they remembered, and felt curious that religion might still have something to offer them.  I hope that one day, they may find a thriving congregation who are not just a nudist colony searching for new workers, but a fellowship helping each other along the way as we follow in the footsteps of the 70, going out into the world to listen, to share, to give hope and to build God-centered communities.  May it be so for us all.

Rocks in His head?

Luke 8:26-39

Jesus must have had rocks in his head.  I can just imagine that his disciples thinking that when they set out from Galilea by boat to the Gerasene countryside.  What was he doing over there?  From all accounts, he ended up in a scary place.   Tombstones, graveyards, and a person who sounded like he was right off his rocker.  And Jesus was caught between a rock and a hard place. Should he help the man and risk being shunned by his good, faithful Jewish followers, or should he ignore the man in all his suffering, but let the legion have its way with the man?

Legion is an interesting name, by the way.  It’s a military word, a word with Latin origins, not Greek.  It is a unit of the Roman army, and refers to between three and six thousand soldiers.  That is a lot of tormenting voices to have in one’s head.  It must have been terrifying to witness the man’s ravings and violence.

It’s a fascinating thing that there is a variation on this scripture in all three gospels.  It came right after the story of Jesus sleeping in a storm while the disciples are trying to sail across the sea of Galilea, which, by the way, is only 8 miles wide by 13 miles long.  They may not have wanted to rock the boat, but the storm certainly was.  And Jesus quieted the storm, allowing them to get to the other side of the sea.  The Gentile side.  The non-Jewish side.  Perhaps even the side where Romans were completely in charge, unlike the Jewish side where an uneasy truce of sorts was trying to keep the tensions at bay.  But it was not a place where a nice Jewish rabbi and his followers should spend time, especially when it was a stone’s throw from where a herd of pigs were.  Pigs, as you may know were unclean animals according to the law of Moses, and if gentiles who wanted to make friends with Jews happened to accidently serve pork chops, well let’s just say that relationship would be off to a rocky start, and probably the Jews would greet that dish with a stony silence.

So you don’t have to be stone cold sober to guess that the poor fellow with all the demons was quite likely not Jewish.  Jesus as a good rabbi, would probably never have left the Galilea neighborhood.  Jesus as an excellent rabbi would remember the stories of Elijah and the teachings of prophets like Isaiah that would extol the virtues of taking care of foreigners, and even living with them day by day.  But Jesus, if we can trust our gospels, and I find more and more that they are something I do trust to grow my faith, did more than an excellent rabbi.  He reached out and did the unthinkable.  He healed the man!

We all know how easy it is to feel intimidated by people who today have hit rock bottom.  Whether it is from addictions, mental illness, abuse and scam artists, or betrayal by family members, we would rather stay on our side of the lake and not have to deal with such situations.  We don’t want to go near the folks who seem out of control, who are violent, and who are desperately looking for ways to ease their pain.  Yet on this 1^st anniversary of the shootings in a Methodist church in Charleston South Carolina, or 5 days after our own beloved church was broken into, we know that there are times when we don’t have to cross the sea to meet people that scare us.  Sometimes they come to us.  Sometimes they live only a stone’s throw from our homes.  Sometimes their rocky roads through life intersect ours in devastating ways.

Jesus was not afraid to meet them where they were.  Jesus reached out in love and understanding.  He asked the man what his name was.  He listened to the man’s voices, not trying to deny or ignore or pretend they weren’t there.  He acted decisively and compassionately.

 On this Father’s day, I would invite us all to wonder what it would be like to have the demonic voices that encourage us to see violence as an option to be silenced.  To have those addictive and seductive negative thoughts be brought out of our secret places and plunged into a public place like the demons ending up in a raging stampede of sows and piglets.  To chose to practise radical hospitality to everyone we meet, for we just don’t know when Jesus might show up on their doorstep and heal their minds.

Paul’s reminder that we are all one in Christ, is hard to swallow.  Some might say it is crazy. But it was that commitment to seeing everyone as a child of God that was at the heart of Jesus’ healing ministry.  We don’t know what Jesus did to cause such a dramatic healing, but it left a deep impression on his disciples.  Jesus didn’t divide people into those worthy of socializing with and those who should be shunned.  He didn’t judge that some were to be worthy of his time and others not.  He went where he was needed, and responded to their hurts with compassion.

We need more men like Jesus, men who chose not to shoot up men in a club in Orlando just because they are attracted to other men.  We need men like the young fellow who wandered into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest black church in the South, a few weeks after the shooting, to sit and listen about why people kept coming back for bible study on Wednesday nights despite the deaths that occurred.  He keeps coming back.  That bible study has more than doubled its attendance and now attracts both black and white folks to learn about the bible.  And this last Wednesday, there were 150 people in attendance.  I pray that they continue to testify to their faith with such brave boldness, and that we too may follow in their footsteps, with Jesus the rock beneath our feet.

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.