Living Lives that Matter (July 24 2011)

Homily:  Yr A Proper 17, July 24 2011, St. Albans

Readings:  Gen 29:15-28; Ps 105:1-11; Rom 8:26-39; Mt 13:31-33,44-52

Those of you who were here last week might recall that we took two of our readings, the story of Jacob, and Jesus’ parable of the wheat and weeds, and we put them together and found that we needed both of them to tell the story of how God responds to our human situation.  So I thought we’d try the same thing again this week, this time with the reading from Romans and with the gospel from Matthew.  Two very different texts.  Two very different agendas.  

In the epistle to the Romans, Paul’s intent is to provide us with a bedrock of security.  His words are meant to be profoundly orienting and stabilizing.  Jesus’ parables about the kingdom of heaven, on the other hand, are intended to have just the opposite effect.  They are meant to be profoundly disorienting and destabilizing.  Think about it for a moment.  When is the last time any of you went out and sold everything you own, so that you could spend it all on a pearl, whatever that pearl might represent for you.  Can you even imagine doing such a thing?

But let’s start with Paul.  Paul’s readers lived in a world where there were great concerns about security.  We can relate to that.  Certainly people in Norway are concerned about security in the wake of the tragic events of the last few days.  Certainly people in the horn of Africa are worried about security, in their case, food security, as a result of the drought and famine in that part of the world.  Security has been big news for us too over the last 10 years, especially since the events of 9/11.  We as a society spend billions of dollars on security every year.  We spend those dollars to protect ourselves against terrorism, against crime, to fight wars, to patrol our borders, to make air travel safe – I could go on and on.

Why do we do it?  Well, we do it because there are threats and we have fears, and whether our fears are justified or unjustified isn’t my concern at the moment.  But as a society, we do have fears, and we try to beef up our security because we don’t want to feel afraid, we don’t want to feel insecure.  Why?  Well one reason is that when we feel insecure, life changes.  We stop doing things.  We travel less, we stay home.  We avoid risk, we play it safe.  We become prone to anxiety. We cling to our jobs.  We become suspicious of others.  In a whole variety of different ways, we are constrained, one could even say, diminished.  We need to feel secure in order to flourish, both as a society and as individuals.

For me, some of the best illustrations of the effects of security and insecurity come from the world of sports.  If you’ve ever coached sports, you will know that one of the most important roles of a coach is to build up the confidence of your athletes.  To give them a sense of security in their own and the team’s ability, whether it’s through repeated practice or positive reinforcement.  Of course, at the elite levels, it’s not just the coaches who do this.  Elite athletes have whole retinues of sports psychologists whose role is to deal with the insecurities and anxieties that the athletes may have, and in their place to build up confidence and give the athlete a strong sense of security. 

Why is this so important?  Well it’s important because you can’t perform at your highest level without being confident and secure.  An athlete who lacks these qualities will be afraid of making a mistake, will worry too much about the competition, will be tense and anxious, will make excuses, and just won’t be able to play his or her game at the highest level.

But security isn’t just important for athletes.  For all of us, for all of us to live boldly, to live lives that matter, to be the people that we were created to be, we all need a rock-solid foundation of security.

Psychologists will tell us that in order for humans to flourish, we need to feel that we are both loved and lovable, and we need to feel that we belong, that we are connected to something bigger than ourselves.

There are many things in our lives that can challenge these, the foundations of our security.  Family problems, loss of loved ones, criticism, abandonment, failure, guilt, conflict, and we could go on.  Our primal fear, far greater than our fears at the societal level, is that somehow we will be separated from those who love us.  And when that fear translates into insecurity, how do we live?

We play it safe.  We worry about what others think.  We’re afraid of making a mistake.  We expend energy in self-justification.  We seek security in the wrong places.

Paul knows all this.  He knows it, because he’s experienced it.  Paul had his own crisis, the moment when he became aware of his guilt, lost his sight and felt totally abandoned and unworthy of love.  And yet, in that moment of weakness, in that moment when he knew he needed something, but probably didn’t know or couldn’t articulate what it was, he became aware of the Spirit of God, the Spirit that helps us in our weakness, the Spirit that in those moments when we don’t even know what to ask for, intercedes for us, and assures us that we are loved, and that nothing, nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God.

This is the untouchable, unshakeable, absolute, rock-solid foundation of security that we need, and Paul wants to communicate this first to his readers in Rome and by extension to us.

Who or what will separate us from the love of God?  Nothing.  No one. Nada.  For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor divorce, nor loss, nor addiction, nor abandonment, nor the judgement of others, nor our own guilt, nor anything we do or don’t do, nor illness, nor failure, nor any power, nor height nor depth nor anything else in all of creation will be able to separate us from the love of God, which was shown to us in Christ Jesus our Lord.

This is our rock-solid foundation of security, the foundation that allows us to go out and to flourish, to live boldly, to live passionately, to be at the top of our game, to live lives that matter.

We need this rock-solid foundation to be the people that God created us to be and to do the things that God is calling us to do.

That’s the message of our reading from Romans. 

Now let’s put that into conversation with our gospel readings, with all these images and parables of the kingdom of heaven that Jesus gives us.

When I put them together, I find that there is a kind of irony.  And the irony is this:  one of the reasons we need the rock solid foundation of God’s love that Paul writes about in Romans is precisely because the encounter with God can be profoundly disorienting, something that pushes us beyond our usual way of doing things.

Did it ever occur to you that the people in these kingdom of heaven parables are acting a little strange?

Mustard.  Mustard in Jesus part of the world was basically a weed.  It was one of those invasive plants that keeps spreading and spreading, and is hard to eradicate, a bit like dandelions or mint.  You’d have to be crazy to plant it in your field, most farmers were trying to eradicate it – but that’s what someone does, and eventually it becomes a place where birds can make their nest.

Yeast.  Yeast was undesirable in Jesus world, a corrupting influence, something you had to cleanse your house of each year at the passover.  Yeast is a fungus, and the yeast that the woman took was not from a nice clean jar in the fridge, but was likely a lump of rotting bread or fruit.  What does she do?  She hides it.  Our translation says she mixes it, but the original greek actually says she hides it.  She tries to hide this small rotting lump in three measures of flour, a huge amount of flour.  What happens?  She ends up with enough bread to feed a hundred people.

The one who finds the treasure, the merchant who finds the pearl of great value.  Both end up selling everything they had to buy that one thing.  Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket.  Imagine the reaction from their spouses when they got home that night and explained that they were going to have to leave their house because they had just sold it.

None of the people that we encounter in these kingdom of heaven parables seem to be acting in accordance with the usual rules, the conventional wisdom.  They’re pushing the boundaries, taking chances, acting boldly.  It’s all a bit absurd – though not as absurd as marching into the capital city, defying the authorities and ending up nailed to a cross.

There’s lots that could be said about these parables.  But one thing that we can perhaps say is that the encounter with God, life lived in relationship with God, can be profoundly disorienting.  It can call us to live in ways that are surprising, in ways that go beyond our comfort zone, in ways that risk failure, in ways that may be looked down upon.

  

That’s not easy.  But no matter where our journey with God takes us, no matter how absurd life gets, no matter the surprises that the kingdom of heaven may have in store for us, we have that rock-solid foundation that gives us our security.  Nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God. 

So go for it.  Act boldly.  Live lives that matter.  Be the people that God created you to be.

Amen.

A Story of Grace (Pentecost 5, July 17 2011)

Homily:  Yr A Proper 16, July 17 2011, St. Albans

Readings:  Gen 28:10-19a; Ps 139:1-11, 22-23;Rom 8:12-25; Mt 13:24-30, 36-43

You’ve heard the question before.  If God is a good God, and this same God is the creator of the universe, and more specifically of this earth and of humanity, then how is it that there is not only good in our world, but also a lot of bad mixed in?

It’s not a new question.  It’s an old, old question. It’s a question that was on the minds of the crowds that followed Jesus, people who lived in an occupied state, oppressed by military rulers.  It’s also a question that preoccupied Jesus disciples, as they became aware of the growing, threatening opposition that was building towards Jesus and themselves as his followers.  Evil, and the presence of evildoers was no mere academic question.

And so Jesus tells them the parable of the wheat and the weeds, how someone had sowed good seed in his field, but while everyone was asleep an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and so when the plants came up the wheat and the weeds were all mixed up together.  The slaves of the householder ask if they should remove the weeds, but they are told no; all will be looked after at the time of harvest, when the weeds will be gathered and burned and the wheat brought into the barn.

You’ve got to admit, it’s a neat little story, a parable which together with its allegorical interpretation first explains the existence and persistence of evil in our world, and then provides an ultimate resolution with the destruction of evil in the end.

So why does this little parable bug me so much?

Ok, there’s the bit about the devil, which I always have a hard time wrapping my 21^st century head around.  But, if I prefer to think in terms of free will, and the bad choices that humans make and how these bad choices have throughout history created systemic structures of sin and oppression that are passed down through the generations and generate evil in the world, and how we can personify all this and call it the devil if we like, well then I’m ok with that bit.

I don’t like to see justice delayed, but I can understand the lesson in the parable that it’s not our job to eliminate those who do evil, that we are in no position to do so and that our attempt to do so would cause harm.

The bit about gathering the weeds and throwing them into the furnace of fire also makes me a bit uneasy.  Nothing wrong with that, I think it’s meant to make us feel a bit uneasy.  I won’t try to deal with the notion of “hell” today, but I will on another occasion, and for those of you that are curious, I’ve posted my “hell” sermon on my blog and you can go there and take a look.

The dualism of the parable bugs me a bit too, the notion that there are “good” people and “bad” people.  But, it doesn’t take too many readings to realize that the parable can also be symbolic of the entanglement that takes place within particular individuals, that is, within me are found both wheat and weeds, all tangled up.

No, it’s not anything that’s in it that bugs me about this parable.  It’s what’s not in it.  There seems to be something missing.

Fortunately, for me at least, the piece that seems to be missing from the parable of the wheat and the weeds in our gospel reading this morning shows up for us in our Old Testament lesson.

You see, Jacob is a weed.  Maybe you remember his story.  Jacob is the younger of the twin brothers born to Isaac and Rebekah and he is a swindling, lying, ambitious, greedy manipulator who by the time today’s story begins is in deep conflict with his father and brother.  Jacob is a weed.  He swindled his brother Esau out of his birthright by trading it for a bowl of stew, and he tricked his elderly and blind father into giving him the blessing which was due to the older brother Esau.  Jacob is a weed, and Esau has vowed to take justice into his own hands and uproot the weed, to murder his brother Jacob.

Tipped off by his mother, Jacob runs for his life.  He leaves home, for the first time, and heads off on a long, dangerous journey across the desert.  He is a fugitive in exile, with nowhere to lay his head.  And so when the sun goes down, Jacob simply stops for the night where he is, and lies on the ground, taking a stone for his pillow.

  

And as he sleeps he has a dream in which he sees a stairway resting on the earth with its top reaching to heaven, and angels ascending and descending.  And Yahweh himself appears, and he speaks to Jacob.  He repeats for Jacob the three great promises made to his forebears, Abraham and Isaac:  the promise that he will give the land, the promise of a multitude of offspring, and the promise that all the peoples of the earth will be blessed through Jacob and his offspring.  And then Yahweh makes two more promises that are specific to Jacob and his particular situation at that very moment.  To the one who is alone and endangered, Yahweh says “I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go”.  And to the same one who is going into exile, Yahweh promises “I will bring you back to this land.”

You see, access to the divine is not something that is reserved for the wheat.  God saw something in Jacob that Isaac and Esau could not see.  Despite Jacob’s apparent weediness, God sees the person that he created him to be.  In Jacob, in that lying, manipulating, swindler, God saw someone who could be a blessing to all the peoples of the world.  The story of Jacob is a story of grace.

How do we respond to an experience of the divine?  How do we respond when God sees through our weediness and calls us to be the person God created us to be?  How do we respond to an encounter with grace?  Jacob’s response is perhaps instructive for us.

The first thing that Jacob does when he awakes from his sleep is that he recognizes and names his experience.  He doesn’t say “Wow I just had a weird dream.”  No, he says “the Lord is in this place.”

The second thing that Jacob does is to feel and honour and express his sense of awe and wonder.  “How awesome is this place,” he says.  Wonder is perhaps the most sacred of emotions.  It is the emotion that alerts us that we are in the presence of God.  Allow yourself to experience and cherish and respond to those encounters that inspire you with awe and wonder.

The third thing that Jacob does is to mark the significance of his experience of God.  This is a transformative moment in his life, and it is deserving of a marker.  Jacob takes the stone, his ebenezer, and sets it up as a pillar and pours oil on top of it.  It becomes a visible mark of an interior transformation.

And finally, Jacob makes a commitment.  Jacob engages with his experience by vowing a vow, that Yahweh will be his God, and that Jacob will honour him.

All of us are on a journey.  There are times when we, like Jacob, may feel vulnerable, or alone, or in exile.  Perhaps we feel a bit more like a weed than wheat.  But as in Jacob’s case, access to the divine is not reserved for the wheat, nor is it even reserved for those who are seeking God.  God is near and like Jacob, we too need to be awakened to God’s surprising presence.  And when we are, it is helpful to recognize and name our experience, to cherish the awe and wonder of it, to mark it and to engage with it.  For if we can do these things, we too will be transformed by the encounter with grace.

Jacob’s story is story of grace.

Now, back to the parable of the wheat and the weeds.

That piece that seemed to be missing for me in the parable of the wheat and the weeds is grace.  The amazing notion that our God is the God of wheat and weeds, and that in his love he can reach out to the weeds, and actually transform them into wheat. 

Let me finish with a few words from the song ‘Grace’ by U2.

What once was hurt 
What once was friction 
What left a mark 
No longer stings... 
Because Grace makes beauty 
Out of ugly things 

Grace finds beauty in everything.

Amen. 

No Condemnation (Pentecost 4, July 10 2011)

Homily:  Yr A Proper 15, July 10 2011, St. Albans

Readings:  Gen 25.19-34; Ps 119.105-112; Rom 8:1-11; Mat 13:1-9, 18-23

Out in Carp, I think it was on the sixth line, there’s a farm which straddles both sides of the road.  And earlier this year, in late May, a bit later than usual because of all the rain, I was watching as the farmer was doing his seeding.  He was riding a big tractor with a seeder on the back, going up and down his field on the left hand side of the road.  When that side was done, he drove up onto a dirt path which led onto the sixth line, crossed the paved road and began seeding on the other side.  And I noticed that as he drove up onto the road, he must have flipped some sort of control switch, because the seeder stopped sowing the seed as the tractor crossed the road.

Nothing surprising about that.  Why would any farmer want to waste valuable seed on a paved road?  In fact, if you did see a farmer driving his tractor along a paved road and seeding it, you just might think that was the craziest farmer you’d ever seen!  What a waste we’d think to ourselves.  There’d probably be a few whispers around Carp about how poor old Farmer Jones is playing a few cards short of a full deck.

Rebekah, in our first reading this morning, would have known exactly what it was like to have people whispering all around her.  There’s an important detail in the story of Isaac and Rebekah and the birth of their children, Esau and Jacob, that’s easy to miss, a tiny detail that alerts us to years and years of failure, shame and frustration. 

Did anyone catch it?  How old was Isaac when he and Rebekah married?  Right, 40 years old.  And how old was he when Esau and Jacob were born?  He was 60 years old.  And in-between, during those twenty long years, Rebekah was barren.  Infertile, unable to bear children. 

Now, a little cultural context here.  Barrenness in the time of Rebekah and Isaac was about the worst thing that could happen to a woman.  It was a source of great shame.  It was a sentence of death, for only through the birth of the next generation could life continue.  It was the principle reason why women were cast aside in favour of new wives or concubines.  The one who was barren was believed to have been cursed by God.  Every month for twenty years when her period came, more than two hundred times, Rebekah would feel in a physical, visceral way that she had failed, that she stood condemned, and that she had disappointed her husband Isaac.  For twenty years.

We have a different cultural context.  We no longer see infertility as something visited upon us by God.  And for all we know it may have been Isaac who had a low sperm count.

But we can still relate to Rebekah’s sense of shame and embarrassment and failure.  None of us wants to be condemned, whether justly for something we have done or failed to do, or injustly for something we may have had no control over.  And yet this is something we all have to deal with.  Think of all the talk in our own society about self-worth and self-improvement  In the year 2006, in the United States alone, the market for self-improvement, that is books, cd’s, twelve-step programs and the like, was worth over $9 billion.  Much of this speaks, I think to some sort of underlying anxiety.  We too are dealing with stuff.

Back in Paul’s day, the self-help business had a particular name.  It was called the Law.  The psalm that we read together this morning celebrates the law.  God’s law, the psalmist says, is a lantern to my feet and a light upon my path.  It provides us with a structure and a sense of direction to guide us through the daily activities and moral pitfalls of our lives.

And yet Paul, the pharisee, the scholar and practitioner of the Law par excellence, Paul has realized that the law is not enough to save him from condemnation.  Paul, who wanted nothing more than to follow God’s law, found that his zeal for the law actually resulted in him persecuting Jesus, the one sent by God to fulfill the law.  Paul knew what it was to experience shame.  In our reading from Romans last Sunday Paul tells us  that even when he knows what is right, even when he knows what he should do, what he wants to do, he isn’t able to do it.  And so the law actually becomes for him a source of shame and failure and frustration.

Many of us, perhaps all of us, have to deal with these things in our lives.  Many of us feel condemned, perhaps by God, perhaps by others, perhaps by ourselves.  Sure we put on a brave face most of the time.  Of course we manage to push it aside.  Sure we’ve heard it said over and over again at church that we’re forgiven.  But perhaps the 19^th century American poet Henry David Thoreau was right when he observed that most people lead lives of quiet desperation.  Perhaps it’s regret over some missed opportunity, or a disappointment that we can’t seem to let go of.  Maybe it’s a sadness that comes from brokenness in our relationships.  Maybe it’s guilt from a past wrong done to another, or a difficulty getting over a wrong done to us.  Maybe it’s frustration with something that’s happened to us that was outside of our control.

Who knows?  After all, we don’t talk much about those things that are hurtful to us, often we don’t even admit them to ourselves.  But these things do manifest themselves, in behaviours, in relationships, in our self-justifications, in our masks and in a vague sense of dis-ease about our own self worth.

This is what we deal with.  This is what Rebekah had to deal with.  This what the Romans who received Paul’s letter were dealing with.  And this is what Paul had to deal with, and he wrestled with it more than most, and he experienced his own sense of shame acutely, and he has spent seven chapters writing about this the human condition and his own frustration with it, all in an attempt to bring us to today’s reading, to the climax of Paul’s thinking and faith, to the most important sentence he ever wrote:

Romans Chapter 8 Verse 1.  “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.  All of that stuff that we deal with, or push down inside and don’t deal with, none of that matters to God.  There is no condemnation, all is overcome.  Why?  Because God loves us, because God holds nothing against us, because God loves us enough to forgive us, to celebrate us as we are, to restore us and welcome us into God’s embrace the way a parent embraces a child.

How do we know?  Because God sent his Son.  Jesus came to show us this.  To show us through the cross just how much God already loves us, and to show us through his resurrection how powerful that love is, more powerful than heights or depths or anything else in all of creation, more powerful than the human condemnation which put Jesus on the cross, more powerful even than our own sense of shame, or failure, or self-condemnation.  The limitations, the shame, the contradictions, the despair of our human condition is overcome by the love of God, and God sent his Son so that we would know it, now, today.

  

This is easy to say, but it’s hard to really take in.  Sometimes I'm told that when I start talking about God’s love in my sermons, people have all heard it so many times before that they all they hear is blah blah blah blah.

Perhaps it’s like the seed that falls on the asphalt road, a seed that just bounces a few times before the birds come to eat it.

So I want to try something this morning.  I have something that I’d like you to do. I’d like each of you to take a piece of paper and a pencil.  Our greeters will bring some around for you if you don’t have pencil and paper already.

On that piece of paper, I want you to write down the one thing that you feel worst about.  The one regret, or misdeed or misfortune that causes you feelings of embarrassment or pain.  The one part of your life that threatens condemnation.  I want you to write it down, in private.  No one else will read it.  And then I want each of you to come up to the front, put your piece of paper into this paper shredder, and as you do so, say to yourself,

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”.

[People write something on their piece of paper, then come forward and put it in the shredder]

Now you are free.  Whatever was written on that piece of paper is gone, gone in the eyes of God.  Any power over you that that thing had is also gone, shredded by God’s love. 

For me the parable of the sower tells us that God sows his love in the most unlikely places, not just on the good soil, but on the rocks, amongst the thorns, on the path. On the good stuff in our lives and on the stuff that’s not so good.  And God’s love is what sets us free, free from the fear of failure, free from fear of regret, free from fear of condemnation, free to be the people that God created us to be.

The complete quotation from Thoreau which I referred to previously, goes like this:

“Most people lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”

Our desperation is no more.  May we go out from this place today, singing our song.

Amen.

In God's Image (Trinity Sunday, June 19 2011)

Homily:  Yr A Trinity Sunday, June 19 2011, Huntley

Readings:  Gen 1:1-2:4a; Ps 8; 2 Cor 13:11-13; Mt 28:16-20

Once upon a time, perhaps some 3000 years ago, there was a poet who wandered out to look at the night skies.  And that poet saw the brightness of the moon, and the stars that were too many to count, and he was struck with awe and wonder at the beauty and the immensity of the heavens above.  When morning came, there was a dazzling sunrise, and he gazed out over the sea, sparkling blue as far as he could see, and he marveled at the variety of animal and plant life in the seas and on land, and the birds in the sky above him. 

And as he marveled at the vast beauty and variety of the universe, he couldn’t help feeling a bit small and insignificant.   And yet, he was aware that there does seem to be something special about humanity.  Our consciousness, our love of beauty, our desire for justice, our yearning for God.  Is there any significance to these traits?  His thoughts were drawn to the Creator who had brought everything into being, the one that his people called Yahweh and he asked the question that so many people have asked both in the centuries before him and in the ones that followed:  Could it be that God really cares about us?  Or, in the language of the psalm that the Hebrew poet wrote all those years ago, “What is man, that you should be mindful of him?”

The passage of time has, if anything, made the poet’s question even more pertinent.  We now know that the universe is orders of magnitude bigger than the poet ever imagined.  The variety of life on this planet that has since been discovered would have dwarfed the poet’s comprehension.  The awe and wonder that we rightly feel when we consider the universe prompts us to ask if there is a power or intelligence or spirit, one that we usually call God, who brought this universe into being.  And if our response is yes, as it is for those of us gathered here, that there is Creator, then sooner or later, there is another question that we ask:  Does that Creator care about me?

The creation story from Genesis was first spoken and eventually written down to try to address this question.  Often we make the mistake of thinking that the primary purpose of the Genesis story that we heard in our first reading is to tell us about how God created the world, and as a result we get ourselves in a muddle.  We try to resolve Genesis with what we understand from science, and we worry about whether we can reconcile the biblical account with the theories of the Big Bang and of evolution.

But the primary purpose of the Genesis story is not to tell us how the world was created.  Its primary purpose is to tell us about God and God’s relationship to humanity.  Does God, the Creator who made the universe and all that is in it, in all its beauty and wonder and immensity, does God care about us?  Do our lives matter in God’s sight or are our joys and sorrows simply fleeting and trivial?  Is there a purpose to our existence or are we just random blips of chemistry and evolution?  What is our relationship to the source of all life in the universe?

The Genesis story teaches us about that relationship and its importance.  It teaches that God the Creator made adam, literally, the earth-creature, in the image of God and gave the human a special role and purpose as the steward of all creation.  It teaches that God the Creator wanted to be in relationship with the human, and that in order to do so, he first made the human as male and female, so that they could be in relationship with each other.  In fact it seems that in order to make humanity in the image of God, humanity had to be made in more than one person.

As the scripture tells us,

So God created humanity in his image,

in the image of God he created them;

male and female he created them.

God created us in his image, but in order to do so he had to create not just one human, but two, because to be in the image of God means to be in relationship.  To love, to forgive, to be intimate, to be vulnerable, to be in communion.  The Genesis story tells us that the Creator of the universe made us as relational beings, capable of all these relational qualities, so that we could be in relationship with each other and with God.  That is what makes us human, that is what makes us the image of God.

But if that’s what it means to say that humanity is created in the image of God, wouldn’t that mean that God is, fundamentally, a relationship?

Welcome to Trinity Sunday, the day of the year when we celebrate the idea that the best way we can picture God is not as an individual, but as a relationship,.  Ever since the early days of the Christian Church we have imagined God as one God in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  One in three.  Three in one.  And ever since the early days of the church, people have found this a bit confusing.  But the key I think to sorting out the idea of the Trinity is simply to remember that it’s all about relationship.

Jesus kind of nudged us in this direction, didn’t he.  Jesus was of course an individual human being, just like you and me.  But when people around Jesus encountered him and were amazed by him and asked the question “Who is this man?”, what sort of answers were given?

They said, he is a prophet, that is one who speaks the word of God.  They said he is the Messiah, the one who is chosen and sent by God.  They said he is the Son of God.  They said he is the Word of God made flesh.  They said he is the one who calls God Father, Abba.

To those around him, it became quite apparent that it was near impossible to talk about who Jesus was without talking about his relationship with God.  The essence of who Jesus was as a person flowed out of his relationship with God the Father.  Jesus himself talks this way, saying things like “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.”  It’s all about relationship.  One in three and three in one, Father, Son and Spirit.  God is a relationship and we are created in God’s image.  We are created to love and to give and to receive and to share in each other’s joys and sorrows, to understand ourselves as relationships, as relational beings.

Now I’m well aware that understanding ourselves in this way, and also understanding God in this way, can be a bit difficult for us.

Part of our difficulty is that in this world of ours, we tend to view ourselves as autonomous individuals, competing and surviving and striving for success in a world of scarce resources and limited opportunities.  We value our independence. 

In part, this way of seeing things comes from our modern individualized sense of identity: what makes me me is that I’m not you.

But suppose we change our vision.  Suppose we listen closely to the Genesis story.  Suppose we listen closely to the Jesus story.  Suppose I was to realize that what makes me me is my relationship with you.  Suppose I was to realize that my very identity, my meaning and purpose in life is to be found in my relationships, in my community. 

Would that make a difference?  Would it make a difference in how we live?  I think that it would.  And I think that God would see it as very good.

This is my last Sunday in the Parish of Huntley and so I would like to thank all of you for the love and support you have shown me over the last three years.  You have made me who I am, especially in my vocation in ordained ministry, and for that I am grateful.  It has been my relationship with you that has given meaning and purpose to my journey over the past three years, and I will miss you.  Later this morning, the wardens and I will be telling you who your new minister will be.  I have one request of you:  please welcome her the same way that you welcomed me.  In the years to come, what her ministry will become will flow out of the relationships she will have with each one of you.  Knowing you as I do, knowing what a wonderful parish this is, I’m sure it will be very good.

Amen.

Heaven (Easter 7, June 5 2011)

Homily:  Yr A Easter 7, June 5 2011, Huntley

Readings:  Acts 1:6-14; Ps 68:1-10,33-36; 1Pet 4:12-14;5:6-11; Jn 17:1-11

Jesus was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of the disciples’ sight.  And they were gazing up toward heaven.

And suddenly there were two men in white robes, who said to them, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”

One of the great dangers of being a religious person is that we can spend too much time looking up toward heaven.  How often in the history of our Christian faith have we spent way too much time and energy worrying about getting to heaven?

And what does that even mean anyways?  What is heaven?

I’d like you to think about that for a moment.  When you hear the word heaven, what does that mean to you?  What are your images of “heaven”?

Often we think of heaven as "the place we go after we die".  Or perhaps heaven is "where God is".  Perhaps we picture God in heaven as a benevolent old man with a white beard sitting up on a cloud in the sky.

We tend to use geographic terms to talk about heaven.  And that tendency to think of heaven as a place has a long history.  In ancient times, people used to think of the universe as having three layers.  There was the earth where we lived.  There was the underworld which was beneath us, into which we buried the dead.  And there were the heavens above us, that open-ended, never-ending, unchanging space through which traveled the sun and the moon and the stars.  Heaven was a vast domain at which we could only gaze.  And so you can understand why ancient peoples would come to think of this vast spatial realm which was beyond them as the home of the God who is beyond us and transcends us.  Our psalm this morning, written some 3000 years ago, is a reflection of this ancient conception of heaven.  In it, God is pictured as the one who rides upon the heavens, and from the heavens sends forth his powerful voice down upon the earth. 

By the middle ages, we had grown to understand that the earth was a sphere, and so this whole geographic scheme of the universe was converted from flat layers to a set of concentric spheres, with the earth at the centre, and the sphere of heaven, where the throne of God could be found, as the outermost of these spheres.  Heaven was above us and beyond us in the sky, hell was beneath us and below us underground, and humanity was poised in the middle, on the surface of the earth.  The goal of the spiritual life was to live in such a way that when we die we would go up to heaven rather than down into hell.  And this whole conception of heaven and hell was codified and popularized in classic works of literature such as Dante’s Divine Comedy in the 13^th century.  It was a neat package, a simple and coherent view of a spiritual and geographic universe which helped people make sense of their lives for centuries.

However this geography of heaven, this neat package, all started to unravel in modern times.  First there was Copernicus.  You remember Copernicus?  He’s the astronomer who took the earth out of its apparently logical, and comfortable position in the centre of the universe, and put it out into the heavens, away from the centre.  It took his contemporaries and it took the church about two centuries to get over the shock of having Copernicus mess with their nice coherent world view.  But of course there were more shocks to come.

In 1961, 50 years ago, Yuri Gagarin, the Russian cosmonaut became the first human to travel in space and to orbit the earth.  And during his flight, Gagarin was famously quoted as saying “I looked and I looked; but there is no god up here.”

And so we as modern people have had to give up on the notion that heaven is the place where God lives and to which we hope to go when we die, at least in its literal, geographic sense. 

But in many ways we haven’t changed our thinking, have we?  We may have given up on the geography and astronomy of heaven.  But we still think of it as the place we go to be with God after we die.  For many, there is still a strong link between our idea of heaven and the after-life.

Does this matter?  Well, I think that it does.  Because the way we perceive of heaven and the after-life has a strong impact on how we regard this life, how we live the life that we have on earth here and now.

If we believe that the main goal of this life is to make sure that when we die we go to heaven instead of hell, what does that say about our present, earthly lives? 

Some Christians believe that this life is some sort of test, that somewhere in the course of this life something needs to happen to insure that we get to heaven.  Some might think we need to be baptized.  Some talk about accepting Jesus as their personal Lord and Saviour.  Some think that we need to be good, to live lives that are good enough.

Other people think that this life must be some sort of training ground for the after-life, a time when we learn the lessons needed to be with God in heaven.  Others, aware of the challenges and suffering that we go through, look at this life as a trial to be endured, the sort of fiery ordeal that Peter talked about in his letter that we read today, an ordeal that, perhaps, builds character or strengthens us along the way.

Does Jesus have anything to say about any of this?

Well surprisingly enough, Jesus has very little to say about heaven.  He does speak clearly about God the Father who transcends the limitations of this physical world.  He does teach us about life:  new life, abundant life, which transcends the limitations of death.  Perhaps surprisingly, he never uses But again, perhaps surprisingly,the term “after-life”.  He does have a lot to say about “eternal life”.  And did you notice that whenever Jesus talks about eternal life, he always speaks in the present tense?  Eternal life is something that is offered to us now.  We don’t have to wait for death to have eternal life.  Eternal life is something that is promised to us here.  We don’t have to go to some place called heaven to have eternal life.

And what is this eternal life?  In today’s gospel, which is taken from the words of Jesus on the night before he died, Jesus tells us simply and clearly what eternal life is.

This is eternal life:  that we may know God.

Are you living eternal life?  Do you know God?  Are you in the intimate sort of relationship with God that Jesus describes by saying “I am in the Father, and the Father is in me”, a loving relationship of knowing and being known?

Perhaps that’s not an easy question to answer.  Perhaps your answer to the question “do you know God?” may range anywhere from “I have no idea what you’re talking about” to “I think so, sort of, sometimes”

And that’s not surprising.  After all, John the author of today’s gospel said himself in the introduction that “no one has seen God”.  So how can we be expected to know God if we’ve never seen God?  It is a bit of a conundrum for us.  But John goes on.  “No one has ever seen God,” he writes.  “It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made God known.”

We can know God because Jesus has made God known to us.  In Jesus we get as close as we’re going to come in this earthly life to seeing God.  Jesus has revealed God to us through his birth, his life, his teachings, his healings, his deeds of power, his offering of compassion and forgiveness, by eating at table with the outcast and marginalized, by showing us his love in so many ways and ultimately on the cross.  And through what has been revealed to us, we too can come to know God and have eternal life, here and now.  Heaven becomes any place that God is present and we are in relationship with him.

And so there is no need for us to simply stand here, gazing up toward heaven, hoping that someday we’ll get there.  Nor is there any need to regard this life as some sort of test, hoping that if we pass the test there’ll be a prize for us at the end.  God is here with us now.  He has made himself known to us through Jesus.  So how are we to respond?

The messengers tell the disciples that instead of standing there looking towards heaven they are to go out and be witnesses.  Jesus has been taken out of their sight, but they and we are called to continue his work of making God known, not just in the one hour we spend together on Sunday mornings, but in all of our lives, at home, at school, and at work, with our families and friends and with strangers.

Two weeks ago, I traveled to Minneapolis for the Festival of Homiletics, a preaching conference.  On the way home, I was at the airport in Minneapolis, in the check-in line.  It was a long line.  It wasn’t moving.  The airport was hot and stuffy.  And in the line-up just ahead of me there was a young couple, and the mother had a baby in her arms.  And the baby started to cry.  And the mom and dad started to get a bit agitated. 

Now I used to travel a lot with my work and spend a lot of time in airports, and I always feel a bit of compassion for young parents who travel with infants, because it’s not easy.  And so I took a step sideways so that I could catch the baby’s eye, and when she looked up, just as she was taking a big breath in order to let out another loud wail, I caught her eye and smiled the biggest smile I could.  And instead of crying, she caught my eye and locked onto my face, you know the way babies can stare, and she too smiled the most beautiful smile.  In that moment, though neither of us could have articulated it in the moment, I think that both of us knew that God loved us, and was smiling at us, and we were smiling back in return.

Knowing God and being known.  This is eternal life.  Who would have thought that I could find heaven at the airport in Minneapolis?  One day I’ll have to tell Yuri Gagarin.

Amen.

Have you seen the Spirit? (Easter 6, May 29 2011)

Homily:  Yr A Easter 6, May 29 2011, Huntley

Readings:  Acts 17:22-31; Ps 66:7-18; 1 Pet 3:13-22; Jn 14:15-21                       

“Have you seen the Spirit?”

One of the most both wonderful and sorrowful parts of my job is ministry at the time of death.  It is sorrowful for obvious reasons.  But it can also be a wonderful time.  It is a privilege to be present with those who are dying and with family and friends who gather with them when that is possible.  Because in those final gatherings, words are said and gestures exchanged in a way that just doesn’t always happen in our day to day lives.  Death, or impending death, has a way of stripping away the superficialities of our lives, a way of allowing us to set aside our masks and concerns and to really be with each other, whispering words of love and gratitude, exchanging small gestures of warmth and compassion.  It is of course a time of sorrow, a time when tears are shed.  But often, it is also a time of reconciliation, a time when relationships are deepened among both the living and the dying, a time of closure, a time of faith, a time when questions are asked, a time of grappling with the deepest mysteries of life.

The gospel that we just heard takes place at one of these times.  Jesus and his closest friends, men and women, have gathered together in the upper room knowing that Jesus will be put to death the following morning.  Jesus has told them plainly that he is to be arrested and put to death, Judas has already scurried out into the night to betray Jesus, and Peter has been told that over the course of that night he will deny Jesus three times.  Their last meal together has ended.  This group of friends who have lived and traveled and experienced the most amazing things together for the last few years, this group who had known the presence of the living God in their midst, is gathered for the final time.

Those of you who have experienced gatherings at the time of death of a loved one can imagine what that the atmosphere was like in that room.  I’m sure there were tears, I’m sure there were expressions of love.  And there were questions.

“Jesus, what are we to do when you’re gone?” 

“If you love me, you will continue to do as I’ve taught you.  Love one another as I have loved you.”

“But we’re worried, we don’t know what we’ll do without you.”

“Don’t be troubled.  Put your trust in God the Father”

“But we don’t know God.  Show us the Father so that we can trust him.”

“Don’t you know that whoever has seen me has seen the Father?”

“Yes but you’re leaving us!  How will we know God once you’re gone?”

And Jesus tells them, “I will ask the Father and he will give you another Advocate to be with you forever.  This is the Spirit.  You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.”

This is Jesus’ final promise, the solemn promise that he makes to his disciples, and to us, on the night before he dies, the promise he makes in response to their fears and concerns.

Did Jesus keep his promise?

Jesus of Nazareth is the one who made the presence of the living God known to his contemporaries, his friends and disciples. But how is the presence of the living God made known to the disciples after the resurrection appearances were over, to those who came later, to us today?  Jesus’ promise is that God would send his Holy Spirit to be with us always, to abide with us, to be in us, so that our faith would not simply be a relationship with a memory, but rather a relationship with a real, present, living being.

Did Jesus keep his promise?  Do you know the Spirit?

How many of you have seen the Spirit?

At first that may seem like a tough question to answer.  After all, you might say, we don’t know what the Spirit looks like!  Sure, there are some images in the Bible, images of a dove, or of rushing wind, or flames of fire, but surely those images are metaphorical.  How can we know the Spirit if we don’t know what the Spirit looks like?

Actually, today’s gospel reading gives us two incredibly helpful clues as to what the Spirit looks like.

The first clue is this:  the Spirit is an Advocate.  An Advocate.  You know what an advocate is.  An advocate is the one who stands up for you when you need it;  the one who speaks on your behalf; the one who lends you a helping hand, takes your hand and won’t leave you when you’re down.

You know what an advocate looks like.  In fact at some point in your lives, you’ve been an advocate for someone.  And at some point in your life, someone has been your advocate.  Parents often act as advocates for their children, in the school system, on the sports team, in the playground.  But it’s not just children who need advocates.  Think of a time that you or someone else was sick, and had to go to the hospital or got tangled up in our health care system.  Think of how important it was for the person in need to have an advocate, to speak on their behalf to doctors and nurses, to make sure that they were fed and washed and cared for, to ask questions, to make sure they got the right treatment and medication.  That’s what advocates do.

That’s the first clue in today’s reading.  The Spirit looks like an advocate.

But there’s more.  Here’s the second clue.  Jesus says that the Father will send another Advocate.  Not a first advocate.  Another advocate.  Because the first advocate sent by the Father was Jesus.  Jesus is the one who reached out to those in need, who sat at table with the poor and marginalized, who stood by the side of those who were oppressed, who loved them without judging them, who served and helped others even at great cost to himself. 

And so when we put these two clues together, we get the following:  The Holy Spirit is an advocate who looks a whole lot like Jesus.

Now, let me ask again.  Have you ever seen the Holy Spirit?  Have you ever seen an advocate who looks a whole lot like Jesus?

  

Some of you may have heard recently that Centre 454, the day program for the homeless which is a community ministry of our Diocese, intends to move back into the basement of St. Alban’s church on King Edward Avenue downtown.  As part of that process there has been a series of meetings with neighbours and people in the community, during which people have been given an opportunity to express their concerns.  During those meetings some legitimate concerns have been expressed, but there have also been some very hurtful and degrading things said about the folk who use the services of Centre 454.  And at those meetings, Mary-Martha Hale the director of Centre 454, has had to stand in front of all those angry people, listen to all that is said, and calmly and patiently advocate for the poor and homeless and marginalized.  I know that this has been tremendously stressful for her.  But this is what she does.  She has been an advocate who looks a lot like the Jesus.  And when I see her, I know that I have seen the Holy Spirit.

Have you seen the Spirit?  Think about it for a moment.  I want you to take a moment and think of the times that you’ve seen the Spirit, up close and personal.

Have you seen the Spirit?

Yes you have.  Whenever you see an advocate who looks a lot like Jesus, whenever someone has taken your hand and walked you through the maze of our health care system, or spoken out on your behalf, or offered you a helping hand when you needed one, the Spirit has been with you.  If you want to see the Spirit, look around you.

And whenever you have been the advocate for another, loving another as Jesus has loved you, going the extra mile, reaching out to one who has been marginalized, then once more you have known the Spirit, for the Spirit has been in you, working through you.  Do you want to see the Spirit?  Have a look in the mirror.

You know the Spirit, the Advocate who is with you, the Advocate who works through you, the one who reveals the presence of the living God in our midst, the one who will be with us always.

Did Jesus keep his final promise?

You bet he did.      Amen.