Tuesday, December 24, 2013

A Time for Pondering (Christmas Eve 2013)

Homily Christmas Eve 2013 St. Albans
Luke 2.1-20

A Time for Pondering

One of my favourite verses in the Christmas story that we just heard from the gospel of Luke is the one that says “Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.”

Christmas is a time for pondering.  Of course you might never realize that with all the rushing around that we do, the shopping, the meal preparation, the traveling and the rest of it, but Christmas is a time for pondering.  Because at the centre of Christmas is this strange proclamation we make that the God who created the heavens and the earth became flesh and lived among us, and appeared to us not in the form of a powerful king or a mighty warrior, but as a newborn baby, born in humble circumstance, vulnerable and totally dependent as all babies are on others to nourish and look after him.  It’s a surprising story that we tell, and so it’s only fitting that we do some pondering.

Mary gets that right.  Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. And maybe it helped that she had just given birth to a child.  I think that childbirth puts us in the mood for pondering.  Mary was exhausted of course, but there was no way she was going to sleep with all the excitement and commotion swirling around her.  The birth of a child has a way of opening us up, opening us up to new dimensions of life, opening us up to a heightened awareness of the world around us, opening us up to a renewed sense of what really matters.  For many of us, it’s the closest we’ll ever get to a miracle.  For many of us, the love we have for that newborn child is the closest we’ll ever get to pure, unconditional, sacrificial love.  And so Mary treasured all that was happening around her, and pondered these things in her heart.

And surely one of the things that she must have pondered was, “Where did all these shepherds come from?”

 She wouldn’t have been expecting shepherds.  Shepherding was an occupation that was filled by the bottom rung of the social ladder, by people who were unable to find what was considered to be decent work.  Shepherds in Mary’s society were stereotyped as liars, degenerates and thieves. Religious leaders took a dim view of them because their work prevented them from observing the religious laws and practices, and so they were regarded as sinners.  Their testimony was not admissible in courts and many towns, perhaps even Bethlehem, had bylaws which barred shepherds from entering within the city limits. 

So Mary would have been surprised when the shepherds showed up.   And she was amazed at what they had to say, the angels, the birth announcement, the multitude of the heavenly host.  And as she pondered these things, perhaps she marveled at the fact that the first people that God chose to send his messengers to were the ones that society considered to be last.  The outsiders, the poor, the marginalized.  And many years later, when Jesus launched his ministry to the poor and marginalized, I’m sure that Mary remembered the shepherds.

But when God sends angels to the shepherds it is even more than simply reaching out to the marginalized.  The shepherds were marginalized alright, but after years of living in the fields, years of being shunned by decent and religious folks, years of disappointment, the shepherds were also people who had given up on God.  Maybe even given up on life.  Life can be hard, life can be unfair.  Disappointments add up.  At a certain point we let go of the dreams we once had, we give up hope, give up on God.

But even when we give up on God, God does not give up on us.  God sends his angels to the shepherds, and they are terrified, after all, how would you react to God sending angels to you if you’d given up on God?  But the angel says,

“Do not be afraid, for see I am bringing you good news of great joy for all people:  to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.  This shall be a sign for you:  you shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.”

And so they ran.  It was all too good to be true, but they ran anyways.  They went with haste and they found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in a manger, just as the angels had told them.   

That night, the shepherds were touched by the divine.  They experienced God’s presence, and though they were terrified at first, when they saw the child their fear melted away, because who can be afraid of a God who chooses to enter our world with all the fragility and vulnerability of a newborn child.

And Mary treasured these things and pondered them in her heart.

My hope is that you too will be touched by the divine tonight.  That as we listen and ponder and pray and sing and gather round the table, we will experience God’s presence in our midst, and we will know, as surely as the shepherds did, that God is with us.

But that’s just the beginning.  Because there are many people in our world who, like the shepherds, have given up on God. They’ve had too much hardship, or too many losses, or endured too many insults.  They’re in the fields, they’re in shelters, they’re in hospitals;  they’re in our neighbourhoods, they are in our homes.  And so my further hope this evening is that those of us who have experienced God’s presence here tonight, those of us who have encountered Emmanuel, God with us, we will bring glad tidings of great joy to all who need to hear.  Go to them, tell the story, offer a hug or a smile or a meal, provide a listening ear or a shoulder to cry on, proclaim the good news that the God who made the heavens and the earth cares so much for us that he was born as a child in Bethlehem.

Because tonight, we are God’s angels.  May we who have been touched by God this evening go out and touch others with God’s grace and love, so that they too will know that God is with us.


Amen.

Friday, December 20, 2013

God's Promises (Advent 4, Dec 22 2013)

Homily:  Yr A Advent 4, Dec 22 2013, St. Albans
Readings:  Isaiah 7.10-16; Ps 80.1-7,16-18; Rom 1.1-7; Mt 1.18-25

God’s Promises

Today in our gospel reading we get Matthew’s version of the birth of Jesus, told from Joseph’s perspective.  It’s quite different from the story we’ll get from Luke’s gospel on Christmas Eve just two days from now.  No angels,  no shepherds, no Bethlehem, no manger, no swaddling clothes, no singing.  There is absolutely no sentimentality in Matthew’s account of Jesus birth, no sense of awe and wonder, nothing you could put on the cover of a Christmas card. Matthew’s version of the actual birth compared with Luke’s is stunningly brief and spare:

“Now the birth of Jesus took place in this way . . .  Joseph had no marital relations with Mary until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.”

One of the commentators that I was reading this week, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, said that this recounting of the birth of a child must have been written by a man, because the only thing that seems to be worth saying is that he didn’t get to have any sex until after the baby was born.

So why did Matthew write about the birth of Jesus this way?  If he isn’t trying to inspire us with a sense of awe and wonder about the birth itself, and clearly he isn’t, what is he trying to do?

For Matthew it’s all about promises.  God’s promises.  Matthew wants to tell us that the birth of Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s promises which had been made to the people of Israel through the ages by the prophets.

We don’t usually read the beginning of Matthew’s gospel because it consists of a long genealogy, in which we read, in the old King James Version, that Abraham begat Isaac, and Isaac begat Jacob and so on.  But Matthew puts that genealogy there for a purpose, or maybe several purposes.  One of the purposes of the genealogy is to establish that Jesus the Messiah is the Son of David.  And that is reinforced in the gospel text we heard today, where the angel addresses Joseph as “Son of David”.  And why does that matter?  It matters because in the book of Samuel we read that God through the prophet Nathan made a promise to David.  And that promise made to David was that God would raise up a son of David, through whom he would establish his kingdom forever, and to whom God says “I will never take my love away from you.  I will be a father to you and you shall be a son to me.”  This is the first promise that Matthew is pointing us towards.

The second promise that Matthew points to is the one made through the prophet Isaiah found in our first reading today.  In the book of Isaiah in the 8th century BC, King Ahaz of Judah is worried because Assyria and Samaria are laying siege to Jerusalem.  But God sends the prophet Isaiah to King Ahaz and tells him not to worry, that Assyria and Samaria will not prevail, and that God will give Ahaz a sign:  “Look the young woman is with child and shall bear a son and shall name him Immanuel, ‘God is with you.’

And so if we put these two Old Testament references together, here is the promise:

God will always love us, and God is with us.  The birth of Jesus is both the sign and the fulfilment of God’s promise to always love us and always be with us.

But who is this promise for?  When God says “I will always love you and I am with you” who is God talking to?

In the Old Testament, in the passages that Matthew is pointing to, the prophets Nathan and Isaiah were speaking to King David and King Ahaz when they proclaimed these promises.

Are God’s promises just for kings, for the rich and powerful?

No!  At Christmas, in Luke’s gospel we’ll read that the first ones called to the birth of Jesus are the poor, poor shepherds.

Are God’s promises just for one particular ethnic group, the people of Israel?

No!  At Epiphany we’ll read that wise men, foreigners from the east, travel from afar to worship Jesus.

God’s promise to always love and to always be with his people is for all:  All nations, all races, for rich and poor, for the powerful and the lowly.

I think we get that.

But I also think that many of us have another question about God’s promises.  The question is this:  Are God’s promises active, are they relevant today, or are we simply remembering things that happened 2000 years ago?

During this season of Advent, we have been preparing for the coming of Christ.  Are we simply remembering the coming of Christ as a babe some 2000 years ago?  Or, are we looking forward to Christ’s return at some point in the future?  Or, are we preparing for something that happens in our time and our place, the encounter with God that happens now, in our lives today?

Let me tell you a story about something that happened while I was in my previous parish of Huntley.  It was almost exactly three years ago.

There was a woman in that parish named Ellen, whose mother Frances lived with her.  I used to visit them fairly regularly because Frances was in her 90s and couldn’t get out.  At a certain point, Frances' health began to fail, and her illness was assessed to be terminal, but it was a slow process and she had a nurse that came to visit and provide palliative care.  There was some thought that maybe she should be moved to the Maycourt Hospice, but for now she was being looked after at home.  All things considered, this was good for Frances, but it was all quite hard on Ellen who was very close to her mother.

So one day about two weeks before Christmas, I finished up some work at my office and was gathering up my things and looking forward to going home, when I had this thought come into my head.  “You should go and visit Ellen and Frances.”

So I picked up the phone, because I was always in the habit of calling before visiting, and I called, and there was no answer.  Maybe Ellen's gone out I thought, I’ll try again tomorrow.  But then I thought, maybe I’ll just drop by anyways on my way home.

So I drove over to Ellen's house and I saw that there was a car in the driveway.  A friend maybe, or perhaps the nurse that came by to look after Frances was there.  So once again, I figured that it was best not to disturb them, and that I’d try again tomorrow.  But just as I was about to back out of the driveway, another pesky thought, “maybe you should just go in and see what’s up”.

So I did.  And it was indeed the nurse who was there, and as it turns out, she was there by accident as well, she’d been scheduled to visit in the evening, but for some reason had decided to come in the afternoon instead.

While the nurse and I were there that afternoon, Frances died, peacefully, in her sleep.  And Ellen, who was profoundly affected by her mother’s death, was also immensely comforted to have with her at that moment her nurse and her priest.

That afternoon, I saw God having compassion on one of his people in need.  The God that promises to always love us, to always be with us was there with Ellen, acting to make good on those promises in a very concrete way.

God has promised to always love us and to always be with us.  That promise is as alive today as it ever has been.  And when God asks us to help, it is our privilege to be able to respond and share with God in the fulfilment of God’s promises in our time and place.

And this shall be the sign:  “the virgin shall conceive and bear a son.”  “And you shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.”


Amen.

Friday, December 6, 2013

An Exercise in Repentance (Advent 2, Dec 8 2013)

Homily:  Yr A Advent 2, Dec 8 2013, St. Albans
Readings:  Isaiah 11.1-10; Ps 72.1-7,18-19; Rom 15.4-13; Mt 3.1-12

An Exercise in Repentance

“In those days, John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’”

Each year during the season of Advent, we hear about John the Baptist.  Who is this John the Baptist?  Why do all four of the gospels, including Matthew in the reading we heard today, why do the gospels begin their account of Jesus’ ministry with something about John the Baptist before launching into the story of Jesus himself?  One reason is surely because the gospel writers believed that the coming of Jesus is so important, so earth shattering, that it requires preparation.  We need to get ready.  And so John is seen as the one who gets us ready, the one who prepares the way of the Lord, as was foretold long ago by the prophet Isaiah.

And what’s with the camel hair clothing and the leather belt and the diet of locusts and wild honey?  Is Matthew just trying to let us know that John’s a bit, let’s say, different?  Perhaps, but he’s also giving us this description and these details to let us know that he sees John as the return of the prophet Elijah, one of, if not the greatest of the Old Testament prophets.  Elijah is a hairy man with a leather belt, and at his earthly end the Hebrew scriptures tell us that he was taken up into heaven in a whirlwind of chariots and fire.  And why does that matter to Matthew and his first century Jewish contemporaries?  It matters because in the very last verse, the closing words of the Hebrew scriptures, our Old Testament, the prophet Malachi prophesies that before the coming of the Messiah, before the coming of the day of the LORD, God will send Elijah back to the people of Israel, to prepare the way for the Messiah and to get people ready for his coming by turning their hearts.

And so Matthew is claiming here that in John the Baptist, Elijah has indeed returned, and that the one for whom he is preparing the way, Jesus, will indeed be the Messiah long-promised by God, and that in order for us to get ready for his coming, we need to turn our hearts.

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

We read these scriptures in Advent because Advent is for us a time of repentance, a time to get ready for the coming of the Messiah.

But repentance is a misunderstood word.  Too often it has the connotation of looking back at our lives and expressing remorse for the wrong things that we have done, and then perhaps doing some sort of penance to make up for these things.  But the actual word used for repentance, metanoia in the Greek, doesn’t really mean this at all.  Repentance is rather a turning around, a turning of the heart and of the mind, a re-orientation, a change in perspective.  For those of you who have studied philosophy, it is the word that Plato uses in his allegory of the Cave to describe the moment when the prisoners physically turn from looking at the shadows on the wall of the cave to looking at the actual objects creating the shadows, and the light shining through the cave entrance.  Repentance is a turning around, a reversal, a change in direction.

And to help us get the point, Matthew has filled this short text on John the Baptist with images of reversals.

At the time of John the Baptist, Jews from all over Israel and beyond would regularly journey from the countryside up to Jerusalem for the major religious festivals.   Four times a year, a great stream of people would flow into Jerusalem.  But in today’s reading we hear that all of Jerusalem streams out to the wilderness to be baptized by John.  The wilderness itself is transformed, from a place of loneliness and desolation to a place that is full of people. This is an image of repentance, a reversal, a complete turning about and change of direction that leads to transformation. 

Similarly, faithful Jews knew that if you wanted to confess your sins and receive forgiveness, the correct procedure was to go to the Temple in Jerusalem and to offer the proper sacrifice.  But here we have John in the wilderness, about as far as you could get from the Temple, proclaiming not a sacrifice but a baptism for the forgiveness of sin.

And John’s use of baptism itself was unique.  In those days, baptism was normally a ritual performed for non-Jews who wanted to convert to Judaism.  But in today’s gospel John is baptising Jewish people.  His action declares that it’s his own people who need to be baptised and converted.  Even those people who were comfortable, who thought they were the people of God by virtue of their ancestry, they are pushed out of their comfort zones and told to change the direction of their lives and experience the baptism of repentance.

Repentance is about reversals, changes in direction, re-orientation and transformation.  And it’s not just theoretical, it’s about the way we live.  As John says, we don’t just need to repent, but we also need to “bear fruit worthy of repentance.”

And because all of this is intended to be practical, not just theoretical, I thought we’d do a little exercise together here today, as part of our Advent preparation.

So here is the first step.  We now have 2 ½ weeks to go before Christmas, and I know that this makes it a busy time of year for many people.  So let’s get organized!  I want you to take one of these file cards and a pencil, and at the top write “To-Do” and then make a list of all of the things that you need to do to get ready for Christmas. 

(allow time for people to prepare a list)

Okay, are you ready for step 2 of our exercise?  This time I want you to take another card, and on this second card, I want you to write down your hopes and dreams for this Christmas and beyond.  You’ll need to give this a little thought.  And I want you to allow yourself to think big, to get in touch with your deepest hopes and dreams.  By all means you may want to write down things like Christmas dinner with family.  But don’t be afraid to go beyond this.  Allow yourself to be inspired by some of the visions of hope that we’ve heard already this Advent season.  By Isaiah’s vision of peace in which the wolf and the lamb can lie down together.  By Paul’s vision of all nations, Gentile and Jew, praising God together.  By Martin Luther King’s vision of a nation in which people would not be judged by the colour of their skin.  By Jody Williams vision of a world free from landmines, so that children can play safely in the fields.  By Nelson Mandela’s vision of “a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.”

So think for a moment and then write down on that card your hopes and dreams, the ones that are specific to you and your situation, for this Christmas and beyond.

(give people time to think and write)

And now for part 3 of our exercise.  You’ve written down your hopes and dreams.  Read them again.  Then go back to your to do list.  And put the two together.  Which of the things on that to do list will actually contribute to your hopes for Christmas and beyond?

Circle those that will.
You may want to cross out those that won’t.
And then you may want to add a few new things to your list.

(give people a little time to reflect on the list)

I know that when I do this exercise my list changes, and perhaps surprisingly, the one thing that I’ve forgotten that always seems to make it back to the top of my Advent to do list is prayer. 

Now, I don’t know how much your list changed, but if it did, and if those changes actually translate into a change in how you live out your life for the next 2 ½ weeks and beyond, that’s repentance.

Repentance is a re-orientation, a change in perspective, a commitment to turn and live differently, a turn towards God.

Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.


Amen.

(With thanks to David Lose for his suggestion for the exercise found on www.workingpreacher.org)

Friday, November 29, 2013

Can You See It? (Advent 1, Dec 1 2013)

Yr A Advent 1, Dec 1 2013, St. Albans
Readings:  Isaiah 2.1-5; Ps 122; Rom 13.11-14; Mt 24.35-44

“Can you see it?”

The last couple of Thursdays our St. Albans @ uOttawa club has been kind enough to let me hang out with them.  They meet each week at the TAN coffee shop a few blocks from here.  The club has a topic jar.  The students write down discussion topics on a slip of paper, throw them in the jar and each week one of the topics is pulled out for discussion.  Well, as it happened the last two weeks, the topics pulled out of the jar were about evolution and dinosaurs.  And we had a lively discussion about what physicists, biologists and geologists understand about the beginnings of the universe and the origin of life and evolution and we talked about how we reconcile all that with our faith and with biblical texts such as Genesis which tell us that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

And after a couple of weeks of lively discussions and going off on many, many tangents, I think that what I managed to take away from our explorations is this:  it’s not really about dinosaurs!  The reason that we’re interested in beginnings is because of what our understanding of beginnings means for us in the present, here and now, as we deal with the big questions of life.  Who am I?  Why am I here?  How am I going to live my life?

The readings that we just heard, that were selected for us on this the first Sunday of Advent aren’t about beginnings.  They are, rather, about endings.  The future.  The end times, the day of the LORD when God will set things right with creation, the day when the Son of Man will come again.  Isaiah, in the midst of a time of war, has a vision of all the nations streaming to the mountain of the LORD to learn the ways of peace and to beat their swords into ploughshares.  Jesus has a vision of God breaking into creation unexpectedly like a thief in the night and pronouncing judgment, taking one away and leaving the other.  Sound scary?  Yup, it’s meant to be.  It’s not the last word on judgment, however, we’ll get that on Good Friday.  But for now, hear the promise of judgment, which is that what we do with our lives matters.

Like our stories of beginnings, our stories of endings aren’t intended to promote speculation or enable us to make predictions.  They are instead intended to give shape and meaning to our present tense.   We are on a trajectory.  We come from somewhere and we’re going somewhere and therefore where we are and what we do now matters.  On this, Isaiah, Jesus and Paul are in agreement.  All of them speak of the days to come, but for each one of them the conclusion is firmly rooted in the present tense:  “Now is the moment for you to wake,” says Paul.  “Let us walk in the light of the Lord!”, exhorts Isaiah.  “You must be ready,” says Jesus.  Here.  Now.

Beginnings and endings matter because of how they shape the present.  Take as a counter-example a purely materialistic, scientific understanding of the universe.  If we were to believe that the universe began as a random accident, and that life itself simply happened because a cluster of molecules in a super concentrated pool of water got a jolt from a random lightning bolt, and that one day in the future, life on this planet will end because the sun will run out of fuel in about 5 billion years or because before that happens our planet earth gets obliterated by an asteroid, what shape would that give to our present situation?

I’d venture to say that if that’s all we had to say about beginnings and endings, life might seem to be devoid of meaning and pointless.  And a quick glance around the world, with its violence and wars and disease and injustice could easily lead us to despair, knowing that all we can expect is more of the same until we get obliterated by that random asteroid.

But our story is different and says much more.  We believe that we were created for a purpose by the one who created the entire universe.  We were created in God’s image and we were created for relationship, with God and with each other.  And though we too can look around, as Isaiah did, as Jesus did, and see all that is wrong in the world, we believe that the days are surely coming when God will set things right.  And we have been called to participate in the work of setting things right in the world.  And as a result our lives matter, and how we live matters, because we’re heading somewhere, even though we may not fully arrive in our earthly lifetime.

This is a vision with the power to shape the days in which we’re living.  There is more to the human story, there is more to God’s story than what we’ve experienced to date.  Can you see it?

Isaiah can see it.  The reading from Isaiah that we heard this morning starts out with a curious phrase.  It says “the word that Isaiah saw”.  Not that he heard, but that he saw.  Because what we see makes all the difference.

When Isaiah looked at the world around him he saw terrible things.  He saw an invading army doing violence to his people, cities burning with fire.  He saw people in positions of power acting corruptly and oppressing the poor.  He saw injured and sick people receiving no treatment.  And yet he refused to believe that that’s all there is.  His vision wasn’t limited to the devastation that was staring him in the face.  He could see more.

Can you see it?

Can you see all the nations streaming to the mountain of God to learn the ways of peace?  Martin Luther King Jr. could see it when he confronted the injustice of racial discrimination in the United States in the 1960’s.  It’s no accident that he adopted the biblical language of the prophets in his speeches.

“We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream” he said in Washington in 1963

“I have been to the mountain top . . . And I have seen the promised land” he said in Memphis in 1968.

He too had a vision of the end times, of God setting this world right.  He could see it.  And when we see it, despite all the evidence to the contrary, this eschatological vision exercises a tension upon our present tense.  It generates both judgment and promise and it creates the possibility of ethical action in the world, action which is sustained by hope.[1]  Can you see it?

Isaiah had a vision of swords being beat into plowshares.  Can you see it?

Jody Williams could see it when she first started advocating for an international ban on land-mines in 1992 after seeing first-hand the devastation they caused in Nicaragua.  At first people thought she was crazy.  Armies would never agree to give up any of their weapons.  But she could see it, and she had hope and today the Ottawa treaty banning land mines has been adopted by 161 nations, and through extensive demining operations, by 2010, Nicaragua was declared free of land-mines and safe once more for its children to play in the fields.

Can you see it?

We begin our Christian year, we begin this season of Advent with a vision of the end times, when all the nations will come to the mountain of the Lord to learn the ways of peace, when swords will be beat into plowshares, when the Son of Man will break into our creation like a thief in the night to set things right, we begin Advent this way because in this season of preparation for the coming of Jesus into the world, we need to know that our lives matter, and that when we work to set things right we are not just hammering futilely on a wall that will never come down, rather we are participating in God’s work and we are creating glimpses of what will be so that others can see it too.  We are a people of hope, not despair, and that hope enables us both to act and to see what others may not, that God is indeed breaking into our world and will one day set things right.

This morning we lit a candle for hope.  Can you see it?

Amen.



[1] Thomas Long, Preaching from Memory to Hope, p123.

Friday, November 1, 2013

Who are the saints? (All Saints, Nov 3 2013)

Yr C All Saints and Baptism, Nov 3 2013, St. Albans
Readings:  Dan 7:1-3,15-18; Ps 149; Eph 1:11-23; Lk 6:20-31

Today is the day in the church year when we honour all the saints.  It is one of the great festivals of our liturgical year.  We have special prayers and readings, and we put out our best white linens and we remember the saints.

So, who exactly is it that we’re honouring today.  Who is a saint?  Seems like a simple question but it tends to generate a lot of confusion. To be officially canonized as a Saint by the Catholic Church, for example, you don’t need a perfect track record, but you do need to have either led an exemplary life worthy of imitation or to have been martyred for the faith, and there needs to be evidence of two miracles through your intercession after your death.  That sets the bar pretty high doesn’t it!

St. Paul, on the other hand, routinely addresses his letters to all the saints, in Corinth, or in Philippi, or, as in today’s reading, in Ephesus.  Presumably, the people who read his letters were still alive.  And we know from some of the other things that Paul wrote to them that they weren’t all leading exemplary lives.

In our text from Daniel, the saints are referred to as “the holy ones”.  And in Daniel’s apocalyptic vision of the end times, the holy ones are those who stand with God and receive God’s kingdom at the end time, after evil has been defeated.  This is the understanding of saints that we sing about when we sing “When the Saints Go Marching In”.

In our Psalm however, here the saints are referred to as “the faithful”, and the faithful are the people of God, the ones who gather in the assembly to praise God.  No reference to any future end-time, the saints are the ones who gather here and now, just as all of us are doing in church here today. According to the psalmist, all of us who are here praising God today are saints.

In the early church, at first the term saints was indeed used the way that St. Paul uses it in his letter to the Ephesians.  The saints were all the members of the Christian community.  But in the years and centuries that followed, Christian communities were faced with wave after wave of persecution.  Many Christians were martyred for their faith, and there arose a real human need within those communities to honour those who had died.  The church started observing All Saints Day as a way of honouring Christian martyrs.  The saints became those who had died for their faith.

But by the fourth century AD, persecution of Christians had greatly declined, and so the honouring of saints was expanded to include not just those who had died, but also those who had lived exemplary lives.  And you can imagine, as with any change, this was very controversial at the time!  But this notion stuck, and has been preserved in the way that the church names “official” saints today.

So who are the Saints?  Martyrs or models?  The living or those who have died?  All of us or just a select few?

The word ‘saints’ in Greek is “hagioi”, or literally “the holy ones”.  The saints are the ones whom God has made holy, the ones he has chosen and set apart, the ones whom God blesses.

To answer the question “who are the saints?” then is to consider who it is that God chooses, and what it means to be blessed by God. These ideas have deep roots in our scriptures and tradition and especially in the Hebrew Old Testament writings.  They involve what theologians like to call the ‘Theology of Election’ and the ‘Theology of Blessing’.

Simply put, these ideas about God are as follows:

The theology of election is the idea that God takes the initiative to choose or ‘elect’ individuals or groups to be his chosen people.

The theology of blessing is the idea that God will bless those whom he has chosen and will look with favour upon those who obey his commandments and lead good lives.

In the Old Testament, the concrete understanding of the idea of election is that God chose the 12 tribes of Israel, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to be his chosen people.  The concrete understanding of the idea of blessing is that God gave his law to his chosen people, and if they keep the law they will be blessed.

There is however a problem here.  It is not that these are necessarily bad or incorrect ideas about God.  God may choose and God may bless. The problem is that in the hands of human beings the theologies of election and blessing can be very dangerous.

Because it is very easy and convenient for us to come to the conclusion that God chooses only a select group to be his people, and if that group is chosen then the rest are unchosen, inferior in some way.  If, as was the case in Israel, that selection is understood to be on the basis of race and tribe, then the foreigner, the Gentile, the person who is of a different race becomes inferior, hated, the enemy.  And if we think that this sort of exclusionary behaviour is ancient history and no longer happens today, then we are certainly fooling ourselves.

And in human hands the theology of blessing also becomes a dangerous tool, because we are quick to turn it on its head and use it as a means of judgement.  The idea that God blesses his people is quickly turned into a diagnostic tool for figuring out who is in and who is out, who is a good person and who is a sinner.  Are you ‘blessed’ with wealth, or health or children or any other of the good things of life?  Then you must be a good person.  Are you afflicted with poverty or disease?  Then you must be a sinner.  And once more, if we think that this sort of judgmental, self-justifying behaviour was limited to the Israel of the Old Testament, we are certainly fooling ourselves.

Ideas of blessing and election are often turned into tools of self-justification and exclusion.  They become the underlying assumptions that enable us to treat the one we regard as the other differently from the way we would treat someone who is, well, like us.

This is the situation which Jesus encountered in today’s gospel.  The culture he lived in drew sharp distinctions between Jew and Gentile, between the clean and the sinners.  The social practices were judgmental and exclusionary, and they were supported by the prevailing religious understandings of the theologies of election and blessing. 

In today’s gospel there is a great crowd that has come to Jesus, a great multitude from all Judea and Jerusalem, the Jewish lands, and from the coast of Tyre and Sidon, the Gentile lands.  They were gathered in the countryside of Galilee, that part of Israel that was looked upon with disdain by the Jewish authorities because it was a mixture of Jews and Gentiles.  Those who came to hear Jesus and to be healed by him came from all walks of life, and included the poor, the sick and those who had unclean spirits, people who were labeled as sinners because of their infirmities and endured various degrees of exclusion from the community.

And Luke tells us that Jesus stood with the crowds on a level place, a place where where everyone was on the same level.  And he looks at all these people, and his message to them is clear:

“Your whole life people have been telling you that you are cursed.  But I am telling you that you are blessed by God.”

You who are poor, you who are hungry, you who weep, you who are excluded:  you are blessed by God.

And if anyone tells you otherwise, if anyone tells you that it is only the rich, the well-fed, and the well-regarded who are blessed by God, if anyone tries to exclude you, or denigrate you or make you feel that you are not one of God’s people, then woe to them.

If you have contempt for those you exclude or hatred for those who exclude you, if you persist in dividing people into friends and enemies, then I tell you, Love your enemy.

If you think that they way we treat people should be based on whether they are Jews or foreigners, members of our group or outsiders, good people or bad people, if you think that you are allowed to act differently towards these people that we consider “others”, then I tell you “do unto others as you would have them do to you.”

Today’s gospel is the most revolutionary teaching that the world has ever known, for it calls into question all the assumptions, all the biases that underlie the way we organize ourselves socially and the way we behave in our cultural and economic structures.  The biases of our time and place, the structures of our time and place, are not the same as those that Jesus faced 2000 years ago, but his call to us is the same.  It is a call to overthrow self-justifying and exclusionary practices wherever we find them in our world. 

Who are the saints?  We are all, all of us, every human being, called to be a saint.  In a few minutes Sean will be baptized, and his call to sainthood will be made visible for us in the symbols and sacrament of baptism.  Sean has been chosen by God to be his beloved son, his holy one, chosen and blessed.  Baptism is a calling.  But baptism is not just a call but it is also a response.  It is God’s initiative, but like any relationship, it cannot remain a one way street.  Some sort of mutuality is called for.

The difficult question is not “Who is a saint?”  We are all called to be saints, every one of us.  The difficult question, which is the question addressed to each of us, the question that was addressed to each one of us in our baptism, is “How will you respond?”


Amen.

Friday, October 25, 2013

Where is God? (Oct 27 2013)

Homily:  Yr C Proper 30, Oct 27 2013, St. Albans
Readings:  Joel 2.23-32; Ps 65; 2 Tim 4.6-8,16-18; Luke 18.9-14

Where is God?

Two men who went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.  They went to where God was, to the holy place on the top of the mountain.  At the centre of the temple was the place called the holy of holies, which was filled with the presence of God.  If you were a holy man, a righteous man, you were allowed to come near to that central place where God was.  The Pharisee was a holy man, because he kept the law that God had given the people.  Not only did he keep the law, but he did more than was required.  The law said that he had to fast on the Sabbath day, but he fasted twice a week throughout the year.  The law said that he had to give a tenth portion of certain possessions like wine and grain, but he gave a tenth of all his income.  Surely this was a man who was entitled to come near God.  And so he did come near, moving into the centre of the temple courtyard and standing in a place of prominence where everyone could see and hear him.

But the second man, the tax collector, didn’t follow the Pharisee to the centre of the courtyard.  He stopped and stood far off.  His head was bowed, his eyes were on the ground.  His hunched shoulders and rounded back told of the immense shame that he bore like a lead cloak thrown over his body.  His tear-filled eyes couldn’t see the Pharisee, though he may have heard the words of contempt that drifted down towards him.  But he didn’t need to hear them.  He knew what he was.  He was a tax collector, a collaborator with the hated Roman authorities who extorted money from his own people to finance their oppression.  It was only the protection of the Roman soldier posted at the temple door that made it safe for him to stand among his own people.  He was despised, and he despised himself.  He was an outcast, unfit to stand in the presence of God, and so he stood far off with his eyes cast down.

And there was nothing that the tax collector could do to change his situation.  He was stuck.  To stop collecting taxes meant that he would continue to be just as despised, still regarded with contempt, but without any income to feed his family and without any Roman soldiers to protect him from rocks and abuse.  There was no witness protection program for a tax collector that wanted a new start.  He would always be a tax collector, even if he stopped collecting taxes.  His shame had already permanently stained his family – his children would likely end up as tax collectors too, marginalized and outcast.  The Jewish law required him to repay those he had defrauded but that was impossible – overcollecting to feed his family, fraud in the eyes of the Jewish law, was his sole source of income.  He was stuck in a hopeless situation with no way out and no one to turn to.  Even if he wanted to there was nothing he could do to make things right.  He was the scum of the earth and he knew it as he pounded his breast.  His mumbled prayer was “God be merciful to me, a sinner.”


The crowd of righteous people who listened to the outsider from Galilee telling the story nodded apprehensively.  They knew that it was only right that the tax collector should feel such shame.  Of course the Pharisee was nearer to God than the sinner.  But where was Jesus going with all this? 

Then in a few words, Jesus turned the world of his listeners upside down.  “I tell you,” Jesus said, “it was the tax collector who went home justified, not the Pharisee.  It wasn’t the one who kept the law that was in right relationship with God, but rather the sinner who begged for mercy, for compassion.  Don’t look for God in the temple, in the holy of holies, but rather if you want to find God, look for him with the poor and the marginalized, the outcast and the sinners.  That is where you will find God.”

With those few words, Jesus reversed the conventional wisdom:  the one who is near God turns out to be far, and the one who is far is near to God.  Where is God?  God is with the person who is standing far off, the one regarded with contempt, head hanging down, eyes on the ground, shamed and marginalized.  In the world of Palestine two thousand years ago, God was to be found with the tax collectors, the prostitutes, and the lepers, those who were pushed to the margins of Jewish society.  Where is God to be found in Ottawa this morning?  If we take Jesus parable seriously, God is to be found with those that we have pushed to the margins, those who live with shame, those who live without hope.  In shelters.  In prisons.  With addicts.  With those who suffer from mental illness.  With the elderly in chronic care facilities. 

Blessed are you, tax collector, when people hate you and when they exclude you, revile you and defame you.  Rejoice in that day and leap for joy.  But woe to you, Pharisee, when all speak well of you.   For all who exalt themselves will be humbled but all who humble themselves will be exalted.

It may go against the conventional wisdom, it may not even make sense, but this is the fundamental message that we get in the gospel of Luke.  Jesus came to seek out those who are lost and to show them compassion and mercy.  That is the message we get in Jesus’ teaching, it is the message we get in the parables, but above all it is the message we get in Jesus life, a life which culminates in crucifixion and resurrection.

And make no mistake, with the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, Luke is deliberately pointing us forward to Jesus’ death and resurrection.  Today’s parable is addressed to those who regard others with contempt.  The word used for contempt shows up in only one other place in the gospel of Luke, and that is at the trial of Jesus before Herod, the trial that led to Jesus condemnation, humiliation and death on a cross.  Within a few short weeks of challenging the status quo with the parable we heard today, it is Jesus himself who is shunned, humiliated, regarded with contempt and executed as an outcast outside the city walls.  Death however is not the end of the story, and on the third day he who was humbled on the cross is exalted in the resurrection.  

For those of us that know the shame and despair of the tax collector, the message of today’s gospel is that God is with us, suffering with us in the depths of our humiliation.  He knows what it is to be held in contempt, he’s been there.  God is merciful and compassionate and longs to be with you.  Even though that may be hard to believe in the face of life’s challenges, Jesus wanted so much for us to experience God’s mercy that he died a criminal’s death in order to convince us that God is merciful and that even death can be transformed into life.

For those of us who identify with the Pharisee in today’s story, the good news is that God doesn’t regard us with contempt, and that he still reaches out to us even when we turn away and trust in ourselves, like the father in the story of the prodigal son, who pleads with the elder son to come to the banquet.  The Pharisee too is stuck, stuck in a pattern of self-reliance and in a bad habit of comforting himself by judging others.  But for those of us who get stuck like that, those of us who have knowledge, wealth, power or social position, there are two paths laid before us.  The first is the path of contempt, the path we choose each time we look on someone else with judgment or indifference.  The path of contempt leads away from God.  The second path is the path of compassion, the path that Jesus took when he voluntarily humbled himself in solidarity with the sinner and the outcast, a path that eventually led to his own death at the hands of others.  Humility for Jesus was not just a mental attitude; it was a lived social reality.  We are called to encounter God not at the centre of the temple, but at the margins of our society.  Look for the one that is hunched over, eyes to the ground, beating her breast.  Look closely, for that’s where you’ll find God.

Amen.

Saturday, September 28, 2013

A Health Risk (Sept 29 2013)

Homily:  Yr C P26, Sept 29 2013, St. Albans
Readings:  Jer 32:1-3a,6-15; Ps 91:1-6,14-16; 1 Tim 6:6-19; Lk 16:19-31

And so it continues.  Jesus in the Gospel of Luke just won’t let us off the hook when it comes to money.  Last week’s parable, about a rich man and his manager, was disturbing because it was ambiguous and confusing.  This week’s parable about the rich man and Lazarus is even more disturbing because it is so darn clear.  Jesus tells us a story which is a stinging indictment of the dramatic inequality between rich and poor that we perpetuate in our economy and our society, and he makes a promise that in the end, God will not allow this to stand.


Two years ago today, parks and public spaces around the world were flooded with supporters of the Occupy Movement which started on Wall Street in New York.  The Occupy movement drew world-wide attention to the inequality between the rich and the poor.  The numbers are quite staggering.  In Canada, the top 1% receive 11% of total income.  But it’s not just doctors and executives and pro hockey players who are wealthy. By global standards, many of us are wealthy.  We live in a wealthy country.  If your income is $21,000 or more, you are in the top 10% of income earners in the world.

What’s more, as we started to talk about last week, all of us are participants in economic and social systems that are oppressive and unjust towards the poor.  In fact, most of us actually benefit from these unjust systems.  I happen to like chocolate.  And I can buy chocolate for a lower price because in the Ivory Coast, the workers on cocoa plantations are held in slave-like conditions.  My taxes in Ontario are lower than they would be otherwise because the Ontario government promotes gambling, and has a plan to increase gambling in this city and throughout the province in order to extract more money from people, many of them lower-income people, who have a weakness for gambling.  My pension plan is funded in part from the profits of the Canadian financial system which promotes the use of credit cards, which boost the price of everything in the stores by several per cent and then the banks charge interest rates of 24% a year on people who can’t afford to pay their debts on time.  I expect that you can think of other examples.

So we need to be concerned about wealth.  Not because simply having wealth is wrong, but rather because having wealth puts us at risk.  There is a health risk, a tremendous risk to our spiritual health in having wealth.  If you like, think of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus as akin to the health warnings written on a pack of cigarettes.

So what is the risk?  One of the risks is the danger that Paul identifies in our second reading as being haughty:  the risk of thinking that we are better than other people, the risk of thinking that we are deserving of our wealth, the risk of forgetting that all that we have belongs to God and that we are mere managers who will one day be asked to account for what we have done with that which was entrusted to us.

In the story of the rich man and Lazarus, the rich man has fallen into this trap.  I mean think about.  Even after he’s died in the story, even after he notices that Lazarus is by Abraham’s side while he, the rich man, is in agony, even then, he still has the gall to think he can ignore Lazarus and instead call out to Abraham who will send Lazarus to him as his personal servant, to cool his tongue and to warn his brothers.  I mean who does he think he is?  I tell you who he thinks he is.  He thinks he’s the rich man, and that he’s better than the poor beggar and that as a result he has the right to speak right past Lazarus as if he’s not even there and to demand to be served by him.  The rich man’s sense of identity has been so warped by his wealth that he is blind to seeing Lazarus as a brother, as one who is a fellow child of God.

But that’s not the only thing that has gone wrong for the rich man.  Think about it.  Day after day, Lazarus lies at the gate of the rich man.  And day after day, as the rich man leaves his home and as he returns, he has to step over or around Lazarus.  I imagine that at first, the rich man feels some compassion for Lazarus, after all, it’s only human to feel compassion.  He doesn’t chase him away.  He has his servants give him scraps from the table.  But day after day, as the rich man steps over Lazarus, his sense of compassion must dwindle.  He becomes more and more immune to Lazarus’ suffering.  He sees Lazarus less and less.  Perhaps his own sense of entitlement grows.  And his ability to be compassionate shrinks and shrinks until it is completely stunted and he can’t feel it anymore.  And when the rich man, or any of us, lose the ability to be compassionate, we have lost something which is deeply and genuinely human, and we are lost.

Oh and one more thing – why does the rich man have a gate?  Is it because he feels the need to keep Lazarus and any other beggars at a distance?  Is it because he’s afraid that he might be a target for thieves because of his wealth?  Is he tired of having people knocking on his door and asking him to donate money to their charitable causes?  Whatever the reasons, and I’m not saying that they’re necessarily bad reasons, whatever they are, notice that the rich man’s wealth has caused him to separate himself from other people.  The chasm in the afterlife which separates the rich man from Abraham and Lazarus is not the only chasm in this story.

There is another risk to our spiritual health illustrated in the parable, and that is the trust that we put in our financial security.  The rich man in this story thought that he was going to be okay.  He built a gate to protect himself from thieves and beggars.  Even when he arrives in Hades, he thinks he can use his status as a rich man to coax some special favours from Abraham.  When we are wealthy, it’s very tempting to trust in our wealth.  After all, it’s our wealth that buys us food and clothing and houses and security systems for our houses.  It’s our wealth that marks us out as successful, as intelligent, as well-educated, as hard-working, as deserving of respect, as powerful. 

But as children of God we are called to place our trust in God, not in wealth.  We are to be the crazy ones who like Jeremiah actually hand over our wealth, all seventeen shekels of silver, to buy a piece of land in enemy-occupied territory simply because Jeremiah trusts God, and God wants him to do this in order to provide his people with a symbolic gesture of hope.

When I was studying economics at university, I learned about a concept called “crowding out”.  The idea goes something like this.  If the government starts to invest a large amount of money in a particular sector of the economy, the automotive sector for example, eventually private businesses and individuals will stop investing in that sector, because of the competition from the government investments for resources and good investment opportunities.  Economists like to say that the government investment “crowds out” the private investments.

Well, I don’t care much what you think about this particular economic theory, but I do think this concept of “crowding out” applies to the things that we invest ourselves in.  Where do you place your trust?  In what do you have faith?  What is the source of your hope?

If we place our trust in our riches and possessions, then sooner or later, these will start to crowd out our trust in God.  There just won’t be room for it in our lives.  Like a muscle that doesn’t get used, it will waste away until it just isn’t there anymore.  When we set our hope in our wealth, we stop living by faith. 

And that would be tragic.  Because living by faith is what makes us fully alive, able to live in a way that is bold and beautiful and bigger than it otherwise would be.  Living by faith both enriches us and enables us to be open to the lives of others and to live justly and generously in response to their needs.

So let this story of the rich man and Lazarus be a warning to you about the spiritual risks associated with wealth.  And not just a warning, but also a spur to action.  Because it seems to me that there are two things we can do to stay healthy.

The first is to follow Paul’s advice that he gives to young Timothy in our second reading:

“As for those who in the present age are rich, command them not to be haughty, or to set their hopes in the uncertainty of riches, but rather on God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.  They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous and ready to share.”

And the second thing that I think all of us need to do, whether we’re rich or poor, is what I’ll call “chasm work”.  There are chasms which separate people in our society, deep divides.  And we are called to do our part to bridge them, and to bridge them before it’s too late.  How can we do that?  I think that’s where I’ll stop for this morning and let you continue as we move now into our Open Space.


Amen.