Glory (Lent 2 March 1 2015)

Homily.  Yr B Lent 2.  March 1 2015, St. Albans Church

Readings:  Gen 17.1-7, 15-16; Ps 22.22-30; Rom 4.13-25; Mk 8.31-38

Glory

“For those who want to save their life will lose it; and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”

That’s a hard statement.  But there’s no avoiding it.  It is central to our faith, it is too central to our faith to avoid or ignore.  It is at the core of who we are, or who we’re called to be, as followers of Jesus, as disciples.  It’s there, right at the turning point of the gospel, right after Peter declares Jesus as Messiah, right at the moment when Jesus sets his face towards Jerusalem.  There is no avoiding it.

“For those who want to save their life will lose it; and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”

This is a hard teaching.  It’s hard in two ways.  First, it’s hard to understand.  It is, at least on the surface, a paradox, something that we have to wrestle with in order to get a grip on it.  Second, the more we begin to understand, the more we glimpse its meaning, the more we do get a grip on it, the more we realize that this is so hard to do.  Because it goes beyond our normal human ways.  It calls us into the divine, into something greater than ourselves.

Last Sunday evening, I watched the Oscars on TV.  I was more interested this year than I am most years, because I had managed to watch a good number of the nominated movies.  And so, I watched the awards show, as I imagine many of you did, hoping for a moment of inspiration.  I was for the most part disappointed.  The show was, overall, pretty boring.  But there was one moment that inspired me, one moment that lifted me up during the Oscars.

But this was not that moment:

[Everything is Awesome video 

From start to 1:07]

That’s enough of that.  Now, my apologies to those of you who might like the Lego Movie, or Tegan and Sara, but that was not awesome.  That was taking a silly little song, and then adding more and more fluff to it in a futile attempt to make it awesome.  Add more dancers.  Add more colour, more lights, a rainbow.  Spin on your head.  Spin again, throw in an awesome possum and some lego statues.

There was nothing inspiring there.  Sure maybe it was fun, and that’s ok once in a while, but it was superficial, all style with no substance, no meaning, no purpose.  That’s not the life I want.  There’s got to be more to life than that.  Forget “Awesome”.  I want a life that means something.  I want to be lifted up.  I want to be inspired by a purpose so great that I’m willing to put my life at its service.  I want a glimpse of Glory.

[GloryVideo.   

From start – 1.47.  Pause with image of the bridge on the screen.]

That’s what Jesus was talking about.  Glory.  The march across the bridge in Selma in 1965.  “If any want to be my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”  Self-giving for the sake of others.  Sacrificial love.  Denying ourselves for a good greater than ourselves.  For glory.  God’s glory.

Martin Luther King Jr. and many other courageous black Americans marched across that bridge in Selma in order to obtain the civil rights for black Americans that many of us take for granted.  The first time they tried to get across the bridge they were brutally attacked by state troopers.  One black man, Jimmie Lee Jackson was murdered as he tried to protect his mother from a beating.  But the marchers persevered, at great risk to themselves.  People of all colours and races flooded into Selma to support the marchers, and a few days later, 25,000 people marched from Selma to the Alabama state capital of Montgomery and they forced the US government to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

It was a time of great fear and suffering.  It was also a moment, a foretaste, of glory.

“For those who want to save their life will lose it; and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”

You want to know what Jesus is talking about?  Well, it doesn’t look like the clip we saw from “Everything is Awesome”.  It doesn’t look like playing it safe, it doesn’t look like getting more and more stuff.  It doesn’t look like being entertained, prosperous, happy or successful.  I mean, “what will it profit you to gain the whole world and forfeit your life.”  No, the life God is calling us to looks a lot more like this bridge, a lot more like the sacrificial love demonstrated by the people who walked across this bridge at great personal cost and risk.  That’s how you save your life.  That’s how to really live, to live the abundant life that God is calling us to.

Every time we set aside a want of our own in order to satisfy the genuine need of someone else, we experience a moment of glory.

We know that to be true.  We do it naturally as parents when our baby cries in the middle of the night.  We find glory in those moments when we give up our claims to power and strength and even a good night’s sleep in order to serve others.  Sometimes it comes naturally; much of the time it is hard, and requires a God-given strength.

For each of us, our Selma will look different.  Sacrificial love and service to others, take many shapes and forms, some of which will indeed require great courage.

But make no mistake about it.  This is the core of our faith.  This is what we are all about.

“For those who want to save their life will lose it; and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”

We are called to Glory.

[Play remainder of Glory video:  1.47 to 3.52]

Amen.

Songs of Lament (Feb 22, St. Al's@5)

Homily:  St. Al’s@5 Feb 22 2015.  Songs of Lament

Psalm 35

This evening we begin a new phase in our series on the psalms.  This evening, and for the rest of Lent, we will be looking at psalms of lament.  Wednesday this past week, Ash Wednesday was the beginning of the season of Lent, and Lent will continue until Easter.  It is a time to get ready for Easter; that is done through study, through prayer, through reflection and through self-examination.  For some that means certain practices, or sometimes giving up certain things. 

I like to look at Lent as a season of honesty, a time of the year when we focus on the truth about ourselves and the world around us, and the truth about God.  You may recall that Jesus, when he was on trial, said that “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world:  to testify to the truth.”  During Lent we take time to look at the truth about ourselves and our world, and the truth isn’t always pretty.

But we might not have realized that based on the psalms and songs that we’ve been singing since we started our series on the psalms in January.  So far we’ve been focusing on what Walter Brueggemann calls “songs of orientation”.  These are songs that focus on the goodness of the world that God created:  the order, the peace and the equilibrium that characterize our lives in God’s good world.  We sang about the beauty and majesty of creation.  We sang about God’s law and teaching, the Torah, which provides order in our lives and peace in our society.  We sang about God’s moral order, how we live in a world in which actions have consequences: the good are blessed and the evil are punished.  We sang about God’s wisdom which can be found in creation and in the ordinary stuff of our lives.  We sang about being still and knowing God.

Q.  When we sing these songs of praise in response to the goodness of God and of God’s creation (and in churches we sing this sort of song a lot), how do you feel?  What sort of emotions correspond to these songs?

Joy. Gratitude. Peace. Awe. Wonder.  Stability. Calm.

Ps 1:  Happy are they who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked. . . . They are like trees planted by streams of water.

Ps 104:  O Lord how manifold are your works.  In wisdom you have made them all, the earth is full of your creatures.

Ps 37:  Take delight in the Lord and he shall give you your heart’s desire.

Q.  But today’s psalm is not like that.  Psalm 35 is a psalm of lament.  Have a look at psalm 35, maybe even speak it to yourself and tell me what emotions are being expressed.

(anger, vengeance, despair, pain, distress)

“fight those who fight me O Lord”

“my soul is full of despair”

“O Lord how long will you look on?  Rescue me from the roaring beasts”

“You saw it Lord; do not be silent”

Q.  What happened?  What is it that moves us from songs of orientation to songs of disorientation, songs of lament?  What is it that moves us from gratitude, wonder and praise to anger, despair and a desire for vengeance?

Life happens!  The world is not always well oriented and well ordered.  Terrible things can happen to us and to those we love.  There is injustice, evil and violence.  The good are not always rewarded, the evil often prosper.

 There is a movement that takes us from songs of orientation to songs of lament.  Something rocks our world, and takes us from a naïve understanding of the world around us to a more honest assessment.  At it’s most extreme, it is a movement from life to death. 

“For they have secretly spread a net for me without a cause; without a cause they have dug a pit to take me alive”

And we will all experience this at some point in our lives.  Some of us are there right now.

Q.  What happens when the church goes on singing songs of orientation, happy songs, in a world experienced as disoriented and messed up?

Perhaps singing happy songs can be an act of defiance, a statement that despite what you are seeing and experiencing, nevertheless God reigns.

But more often, it can be a denial or a deception, a cover-up.  According to Brueggemann, “a church that goes on singing “happy songs” in the face of raw reality is doing something very different from what the Bible does.”

Q:  When we use psalms of darkness, when we sing songs like psalm 35 that call for God to attack our enemies, that openly acknowledge our blood-thirsty anger, that chastise God for doing nothing in the face of our suffering, that accuse God of remaining silent, that call on God to wake up and act, is this an act of unfaith and failure, or is this an act of bold faith?

An act of bold faith!

Nothing is off-limits in our relationship with God.

What we are saying is raw and scandalous – but we still bring it to God.

And we bring it to God in the hope and confidence that God cares and that God will act.

And so what looks like it could be an act of unfaithfulness is actually an act of bold faith.  But even more, lament is a bold act that transforms our faith.  Remember how I said that Lent is a season of honesty, of learning the truth about ourselves and God.

Lament enables us to speak the truth about the darkness of our lives.  It pierces through our denial and our complacency.  But it also teaches us that darkness is not failure.  Our lives will pass through darkness.  But this is where we will meet God and it is in darkness and even death that God will give us new life.

And our faith in God is also transformed.  No longer do we imagine God as omnipotent and unchanging, watching from above.  Instead, we call on God to act, to change his mind, to end his waiting, to do something different in response to our pain.  The most important thing about God to us becomes our faith that God will be faithful to his promises, and that God is capable of entering into our darkness and saving us.  For faith becomes not so much the belief that God has created a good and well-ordered world, but rather that God will hear our cry, enter into our darkness and redeem us.  That it is in death that we receive new life.

New life has not yet happened for the author of psalm 35, but he is calling on God for redemption:  “say to my soul, I am your salvation.”  And when that happens, when he emerges from death to new life, then his song of lament will turn to a song of praise.

“Then I will be joyful in the LORD, I will glory in his victory.  My very bones will say, “Lord who is like you?  You deliver the poor from those who are too strong for them.”

So during this season of Lent, we will be singing songs of lament.  It is an act of courage, it is an act of honesty.  And as we sing, we may even enter into a new understanding, an understanding not just in our heads but in our very bones of who God is, who we are, and why it is that at the very core of our faith is the movement through death into new life.

Amen.

Fooled by the Dove (Lent 1, Feb 22 2015)

Homily:  Yr B Lent 1, Feb 22 2015, St. Albans

Readings:  Gen 9:8-17; Ps 91; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mk 1:9-15

Creative Commons:  Photo by David Campbell

The last time we read this text from gospel of Mark, we were fooled by the dove. 

We read the part about the dove just six weeks ago when we celebrated Jesus baptism.  “And just as Jesus was coming up from the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.  And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

And if you’re like me, you were fooled by the dove.  I had this beautiful picture of a lovely white bird gently fluttering above Jesus.  It was a peaceful scene, after all the dove is the bird of peace, isn’t it?  And I imagined the voice to be a gentle voice, a kind voice.  If we had been making a video of this passage, we would have flooded it with soft lighting, and played some sort of heavenly music in the background, maybe even a choir of angels with a harp in the background for good measure.

And that’s because we were completely fooled by the dove.

Because the beginning of Jesus ministry in the gospel of Mark is anything but peaceful.  It is, rather, violent and harsh.  No sooner has Jesus emerged from the waters of his baptism, than the heavens are torn apart and the Spirit descends upon Jesus and immediately throws him out into the wilderness. 

The wilderness of Judea is a violent and threatening place, void of human habitation.   It is a hard, rocky desert, oppressively hot during the day and bone-chilling at night.  Food and water are scarce and in Jesus’ time it was the habitat of aggressive animals, snakes, lions and bears.  Forty days was a long time to be in the wilderness.  Forty days is a long time to be without human contact.  For the wilderness is not just a harsh place; it is also a lonely place.

  

The wilderness is part of our experience too.  We may not pass through an actual desert, but we do pass through places in our life that are harsh, that are threatening, that are lonely.  If you’re not there right now, you know someone who is.  And when we’re in the wilderness, often one of the first things that we do is cry out, “Why me?”

One of the things I like about today’s gospel is that some of the answers we might be tempted to give to the “Why me?” question are ruled out.

When we’re in the wilderness we’re not there because we are unloved by God.  When life is hard, when you feel lonely, it is not because God does not love you.  God’s voice tells Jesus in no uncertain terms that he is loved, and yet Jesus too enters the wilderness. 

And neither are we sent to the wilderness as some sort of punishment.  Again, we know that Jesus has done no wrong, yet he spends 40 days in the wilderness.  It’s hard.  But it’s not a punishment.

Why do we end up in the wilderness?  We end up in the wilderness because stuff happens.  In Jesus case, it was the stuff of God, the Spirit of God who drove him into the wilderness.   For most of us, most of the time, it will just be the stuff of life that puts us in the wilderness.  Life can be hard.  Life can make us feel alone.  But even when we’re in the wilderness, we’re not alone.  God knows what it’s like.  God’s been there.  God is there with us.

And God has this amazing ability to transform the stuff of life into the stuff of God.  Even in the wilderness, even when life is harsh and difficult, God can work for good.  With God’s help, our time in the wilderness can be transformative.  For Jesus, those forty days of trial in the wilderness were a time to learn to trust God.

Where do you put your trust?  In whom or in what do you trust? 

Take a look around.  It’s not hard to figure out some of the places that people put their trust.  We put our trust in our friends and families, in our jobs, in our bank accounts, in our homes, in our pensions, in our possessions, in our entertainment, in our health, in our abilities, and the list goes on.  But in the wilderness, when all of these are stripped away, where then will you put your trust?

Our psalm today is about trust.  In Psalm 91, the psalmist urges us to place our trust in God, and offers us what is perhaps the greatest promise of our faith:  that if we do put our trust in God, if we make God our stronghold and our refuge, we will be made safe.  If we trust in God, we will be rescued from our troubles and protected from evil.  We will be held in the hands of angels, lest we dash our foot against a stone.

I find myself drawn instinctively to the promise of the psalm.  It seems to resonate with our deepest longings for assurance and well-being, for a solid place in which we can put our trust.

When I hear psalm 91, my gut says yes.  But at the same time, my head tells me that all is not well.  Evil and pain and sorrow are a part of our lives, sometimes the largest part.  Those who trust in the Lord do dash their feet against stones.  So how do we reconcile the promises of the psalmist with the very present reality of pain and suffering in our midst?  Maybe it seems possible to trust in God when times are good.  But what happens when we enter the wilderness?  Where then do we put our trust?

The journey into the wilderness is one of the central motifs of our Christian faith.  The most famous journey into the wilderness in our scriptures is the story of the Exodus.  You remember the story.  The people of Israel were slaves in Egypt.  But in the Exodus, God brings them out of Egypt, ending their oppression.  He makes them pass through the waters of the sea, declares that they are his people and leads them into the wilderness. 

The wilderness is meant to be the place where the people come to know God and learn to trust him.  But it doesn’t turn out that way.  Instead, they complain about the lack of food.  They fashion idols, the golden calf, and they turn to false gods.  They put God to the test, telling Moses that they’ll head back to oppression in Egypt if God doesn’t start doing things their way.  Faced with the reality of the wilderness, they put their trust in the wrong things.

The story of Jesus journey into the wilderness that we read in our gospel today is a deliberate re-telling of the Exodus story but with a difference, a different ending.  Jesus passes through the waters, the waters of baptism.  The voice declares him to be the Son of God.  The Spirit drives him into the wilderness.  In the wilderness he experiences the same hunger and the same trials that the people of Israel experienced.  The promise that he heard at his baptism, the promise that he was God’s beloved Son was put into direct conflict with the harsh reality of life.  But in response, Jesus does what had proved so difficult for the slaves escaping Egypt.  He puts his trust in God.

There is a way of reconciling the tensions of this world with the promises of God.  It is the way of faith, the way that puts its trust in God.  Our human journey will take us to difficult places.  Our journey will take us into the wilderness, to desert places where our experience of suffering will cause us to doubt God’s promises.  And at those times we will remember the story of Jesus own journey, the story of one like us who fulfilled his purpose in life not by avoiding pain and sorrow but by confronting them and overcoming them, bringing compassion and healing to those who suffer, light to those in darkness and reassurance to those who place their trust in God.

Why was Jesus driven into the wilderness at the very beginning of his journey?  Maybe it’s because that’s where we need him the most.  Maybe it’s because we need to know that when we hit those challenging places on our journey, the places where worries and doubt creep in, where trust seems hard, where hope is fragile, that’s when we need to know that Jesus has been there before us and meets us there, walking with us on our journey, easing our burdens and helping us to learn to place our trust in God.

Amen.

Living on the Periphery of Ourselves (February 8, 2015)

Homily:  Yr B P5, Feb 8 2015, St. Albans

Readings:  Isaiah 40.21-31; Ps 147.1-11,20c; 1 Cor 9.16-23; Mk 1.29-39

“Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once.  Jesus came and took her by the hand and lifted her up.  Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.”

Shame on you Simon!  Don’t you think you could have let your mother-in-law rest a bit after having been in bed with a fever?  Couldn’t you have offered to do the serving that day?

For a 21^st century feminist like me, it always strikes me as a bit outrageous when I read about the patriarchy of past cultures, the gendered roles in the public and private spheres, and the obligations of women to serve men.  It’s even more outrageous when I see the same things continue to be perpetuated in our own, supposedly more enlightened, era.  For those of you who find scripture texts like this disturbing, I acknowledge your annoyance.

But now I’m going to ask you to set it aside.  Because if we’re going to get anywhere with this text we also have to acknowledge something else.  And that is that in the gospel of Mark, to be recognized as one who serves is the highest possible praise.  Simon’s mother-in-law, and yes I do wish we had been given her name, she is being held up as a model not just for women but for all of us.  Just a few verses previously in this chapter, when Jesus is in the wilderness being tempted by Satan, we are told that it is the angels who serve Jesus.  Simon’s mother-in-law is being put in this category, she is being put in the company of angels who served Jesus.  But that’s not all.  Later on, when Jesus is trying to explain his mission to the disciples, he tells them that “whoever wishes to be great among you must be the servant of all . . . for the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.”

As it turns out, the twelve, the men don’t really get it.  By the time Jesus is being nailed to the cross, his male disciples have all fled.  But there were women who remained with Jesus until the end.  Mark tells us that there were also women looking on, those who used to follow Jesus and serve Jesus when he was in Galilee.  We’re not given many of the names but I expect that Simon’s mother-in-law was one of those women who served and remained with Jesus until the cross, and who were held up as model followers of Jesus.

The highest praise that can be given of anyone, male or female, in the gospel of Mark is to say of them that they serve.  The Greek word used in all these instances is diakonei, from which we get our word “deacon”.   It is a word that is so important in our faith tradition that the church has used it as a title for ordained ministers, calling them Deacons since the first century.  Which of course makes me think of Peter, who is our Deacon, ordained in 2013 as a Deacon of the Anglican Church of Canada.  Peter is on leave from us for six months writing his thesis for his graduate studies, so that gives me the opportunity to talk about him a bit!

Peter joined our initial visioning and planning team for the new St. Albans in the spring of 2011, when we were meeting at the Royal Oak pub, getting ready for our first service that summer.  When we moved into this church, it was a mess, especially the grounds outside.  Part of the garden was being used as a storage area for the construction company building the condos next door.  People were sleeping overnight, doing drugs and leaving their needles scattered on the ground.  The grass looked like it hadn’t been cut for months.

Peter took one look at the situation, and he turned to me and said, “We need to do something about this.  I’ll look after the cleaning of the church and the maintenance of the grounds.  Now, out of the members of our visioning team, Peter was the senior person in our group, with the most experience in leading music and the highest level of theological education.   He could have offered to do any number of things in our community.  But out of all of us, he was the one who volunteered to do the cleaning and grass cutting.  He went out and got training on how to dispose of contaminated needles safely.  He got out the lawn mower and crunched his way through the needles, the weeds and the little bit of grass that had survived in the garden.  He took out the garbage for the first two years that we existed as a new congregation. He became the chaplain for Centre 454.  He served.  He was a deacon long before the church ordained him.  He and Simon’s mother-in-law, I think that they would have got along just fine.

I believe that God has created each of us for a unique purpose, a purpose which will be our unique way of serving God and serving our community.  That service can take many forms, from cutting grass, to providing a meal, to running a hospital.

But there are many things that can get in the way of living out that life of purpose and service.  Last week during our Open Space we talked about the things that can challenge us and possess us and enslave us, forces that prevent us from being the people we were meant to be, burdens that can stop us from living fully the lives we were meant to live.

In today’s gospel story, Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever.  Illness can be one of those things that stops us from living as we would like, and is also symbolic of all the other forces we talked about.  Not only did a fever in the age before antibiotics carry a significant risk of death, but it was also isolating.  When we are sick, in body or in mind, it can be extremely isolating.  Simon’s mother-in-law is apart, in her bed, removed from community.  We too set people apart, in hospitals, in nursing homes, in their rooms.  For many the most difficult part of being ill is the isolation, because we are meant to live in community.

When Jesus hears that she is in bed, he goes straight to her, he takes her by the hand and he raises her up.  And just as diakonei, serve, is a loaded word in the gospel of Mark, one that we need to pay attention to, so is egerei, to raise up.  It is what God did for Jesus when he lay dead in the tomb.  Jesus was raised up.  It is the word of resurrection.

Jesus raises up Simon’s mother-in-law, not just so that she can feel better, but so that she can be restored to community and serve within that community, living out the purpose to which God has called her, raised up to be the person that she was created to be.

What about you and me?  One of the theologians that I was reading this week as I studied these texts said the following thing which has stuck with me:

“I think a lot of us spend a good part of our lives living on the periphery of ourselves.”[i] 

For whatever reasons, for reasons of sickness, of expectations, of time pressure, for reasons of all the forces and problems we talked about last week, we either don’t know, or have trouble being who we really are.  We are, symbolically at least, lying in bed with a fever, unable to live into and live out the things which God created us for.

Thankfully, God is in the business of raising us up.  God is in the business of restoring us to who we really are.  Jesus went to Simon’s mother-in-law, took her by the hand and raised her up.  Then the fever left her and she began to serve.

God will come to you, take you by the hand and raise you up, enabling and empowering you to do the things that you were meant to do.  To serve.  To minister.  To deacon.  There all the same word.  Here’s another translation too, one that we’ve used already this morning:  To wait, as a waiter waits on tables.

Have you not seen?  Have you not heard?

They that wait on the Lord will renew their strength.  Run and not get weary, walk and not fade.

He raised her up, and she began to serve.

Amen.

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[i] Karoline Lewis.  https://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=3520