Are You Out of Your Freakin' Minds? (Easter 2013)

Homily:  Easter Sunday, Yr C, March 31 2013, St. Albans

Readings:  Isaiah 65.17-25; Ps 118.1-2,14-24; Acts 10.34-43; Luke 24.1-12

“You’re freakin’ out of your minds!”

Now that’s a better translation of what the men said to the women on that first Easter morning.  Our reading this morning says “these words seemed to them an idle tale.”  But believe me, at that very moment when the women returned from the tomb and blurted out their story, the men thought they were delirious.

You see, some things are hard to believe.  If you tell someone that a dead body didn’t stay dead, chances are they’re not going to believe you.  Because it’s hard to believe things that go against our usual way of thinking.  Give me the facts.  I want to see it with my own eyes.  I want proof.

Faith means believing, trusting in things for which we don’t have proof.  It might seem hard.  It might go against the wisdom of our age.  It might go hand in hand with doubts and questions.  But it is essential.  Faith is essential to life.

Now I’m not talking specifically about Christian faith or even religious faith more broadly.  I’m talking about the faith that underpins the life of pretty much everyone on this planet.  For all of us, from the most fervent believer to the most hardened skeptic, most of the important things in life we take on faith.

I believe that my wife Guylaine loves me.  Now, I can’t prove it beyond doubt.  I certainly wouldn’t ask her to prove it to me, that would only get me in trouble.  But I believe it.  I have faith.  And I base my life on it. Now some might argue that love is an illusion, that it’s simply a trick our brain plays on us based on electrical signals and chemical reactions, and they say I can’t prove otherwise.  And the truth is, they’re right, I can’t.  But I believe it.  I believe it not because I can prove it, but because I experience it to be true and it helps me make sense of my life – no, it doesn’t just help me make sense of my life, it actually enriches my life, makes my life better.

We have faith in a lot of important things.  We believe that there is good and bad, right and wrong, and that at some fundamental level these things aren’t just preferences or social conventions.  We believe, or at least we long to believe, that our lives matter in some sort of ultimate way, that our lives have meaning and purpose.  For the philosophers among us, you know that we humans believe that we have free will, though we can’t actually prove it.  For fans of the Matrix movies and quantum physicists, you know that each one of us believes that there is actually a world out there that corresponds to our experience of it.

None of these things can be proved.  All are taken on faith.  And we believe them because we experience them as true, because they enable us to make sense of our lives and most importantly because they enrich our lives.

Of course, after a while, we tend to get into a comfortable pattern, where these things we believe in kind of all hang together and make sense, and eventually we take them for granted and even forget that our lives are based on faith.

But what about when something new happens?  When an event takes us by surprise, when someone makes a claim that we find hard to believe?  Well, often we respond as follows:

“You’re freakin’ out of your mind!”

After all, if the dead won’t even stay dead, what can we count on in this universe?

Today we report once more the claim made by those first witnesses that on that first Easter, the tomb was found empty, and that by evening, risen from the dead, Jesus had appeared to a small number of witnesses, to Peter, to the women, to the eleven apostles.

And when we make that claim, don’t be surprised when some people tell us we’re freakin’ out of our minds.  Some won’t want to hear another word.  Some will ask for proof.  Others will want to see for themselves.

But some of us will believe.   Why will we believe?  Not because we don’t have doubts and questions, we do.  But we will come to believe for the same reasons that we believe other things that underpin our lives.  We will believe because we experience God as alive and real and present with us and active in our lives.  We will believe because our faith in the resurrection helps us make sense of our lives.  And perhaps most importantly, we will believe because we find that our lives are greatly enriched as a result.

Faith changes everything.

My marriage is hugely enriched because I have faith that my wife loves me.

My life is so much more awesome because I believe that I matter and that what I do has meaning and purpose.

Easter changes everything.  Go and see for yourself the way Peter did and be amazed.

Easter will enrich our lives beyond our imagination.  It will let us dream dreams the way that Isaiah did, dreams of a day when there will be no more weeping, when everyone will live out a lifetime, when there will be no more violence or war, when the wolf and the lamb will lie down together.

Easter will let us do the unthinkable the way Peter did when he walked boldly into the home of Cornelius, the Roman soldier, his sworn enemy, and proclaimed to him the Easter story and welcomed him as a brother, in total violation of the rules and conventions of his day.

On the first day of the week, at early dawn, the women came to the tomb.  They found the stone rolled away and Jesus’ body missing.  They were perplexed.  But suddenly they had a vision of angels who told them that Jesus is alive.  And the women remembered what Jesus himself had said and they ran to tell the apostles.

The apostles responded, “Are you out of your freakin’ minds?”

But what if the women’s testimony was true?

Easter is coming.

(Easter is Coming, text by David Lose).

May your lives be enriched beyond imagination and may the joy of Easter be yours, today and always.

Amen.

Good Friday (March 29 2013)

Homily:  Good Friday, March 29 2013, St. Albans

Readings:  Isaiah 52:13-53:12/ Ps 22 / Hebrews 10:16-25 / John 18.1-19.42

It seems to me that every year as we gather together on Good Friday, as we hear the gospel account of Jesus trial and death on the cross, as we meditate before the cross, it seems to me that one of the things that we’re trying to do is to draw meaning out of this story and these events in a way that resonates in our own time and place, in our own lives.  In that sense we’re no different from Jesus followers in the early church.  Jesus’ friends, those who actually witnessed the events, had to do the same thing.

Now on one level, the question of why Jesus died on the cross is relatively easy to answer.  Jesus of Nazareth was an outsider who had marched into Jerusalem and challenged the political and religious authorities of the day.  In those days of Roman military occupation, Jesus was but one of many accused rebels to die on a cross. 

But Jesus himself had hinted that there was more to his death than this.  He himself had spoken of his coming death as a divine mission, as a service to others, as a means by which people would be drawn into a new relationship with God.  And so the early church had to wrestle with what Jesus meant by this.  They looked into the Hebrew scriptures and rediscovered Isaiah’s astonishing poems about the suffering servant, one of which we heard in our first reading.  “Who can believe what we have heard?” wrote Isaiah.  “The one who was despised and rejected by others, who was crushed for our transgressions, by his punishment we were made whole, and by his bruises we are healed.  Who can believe it?”  The words of Isaiah written hundreds of years earlier somehow seemed to fit, somehow seemed to hint at the meaning of what had just taken place.

The first disciples also looked to their religious tradition, and in particular to the practice of being restored into right relationship with God through the offering of sacrifices by the priest.  The Jewish understanding was that when someone sinned, their relationship with God was impaired.  In order to restore that relationship, a sacrificial animal would be provided, and the priest would take the animal, enter the sanctuary of the Temple, and offer the sacrifice of atonement. Again, as the early Christians wrestled with the meaning of Jesus death, they saw that they could make an analogy between what the priests were doing with their sacrifices year after year, and what Jesus had done once and for all upon the cross.

 And so in our second reading, in the letter to the Hebrews, the author tries to draw out the meaning of the cross by writing in terms of the Jewish priesthood with its sacrificial system, the goal of which was to restore humanity to right relationship with God.

We in our time and place are inheritors of these traditions, of the attempts of earlier generations to understand the meaning of the cross in terms of redemptive suffering and sacrificial atonement.  But we’re also called to do our own wrestling and our own meditation on the meaning of the trial and execution of Jesus.  And for that this morning, I want to return to the narrative which we heard from the gospel of John.

In John’s account of the trial, Jesus himself points to what this is all about.  When Pilate, in response to the accusations that have been made against Jesus, asks him, “So you are a king?”  Jesus responds, “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.”  In response to a question of identity, Jesus responds that his whole purpose in life has been to reveal the truth.  The narrative of Jesus trial and crucifixion is all about stripping away false pretences and revealing the truth, the truth about who we are, and the truth about who God is.

Let’s start with humanity. 

Consider the Jewish authorities.  The Jewish authorities see themselves as the ones upholding the law, as those who are morally superior, or in their own terms, the righteous.  When they take Jesus to Pilate’s headquarters, they stay outside and won’t enter, because that is what the law requires.  The charge that they level against Jesus is that according to the law he must die because he has committed blasphemy by claiming to be the Son of God.  But when Pilate tries to release Jesus against their wishes, their pretensions of upholding the law and of moral superiority start to crumble.  They call for the release of the criminal Barabbas. They threaten Pilate by saying that he is no friend of the emperor, a charge that could lead to Pilate’s dismissal and even execution. And finally, the Jewish authorities themselves commit the ultimate disobedience against their own law:  they deny God in violation of the first commandment by proclaiming “we have no king but the emperor”.  No longer are these the righteous upholders of the law.  Their true identity is revealed as scheming manipulators who subvert the law to get their own way.

Let’s take Pilate as another example.  Pilate is the one who boasts that he is the strong man, the powerful one.  He tells Jesus, “Do you not know that I have the power to release you, and the power to crucify you?”  But as the events play out we realize that Pilate doesn’t have the power he thinks he does.  He realizes that Jesus is innocent and tries to release him, but he fails.  Pilate isn’t strong enough to do it.  His power is an illusion – by trial’s end, Pilate is a picture of weakness, captive to his own fears, powerless in the face of the events that unravel his illusion of control.

And what about Peter?  At the start of the trial, Peter is the model disciple.  He is the one who pledges to stay with Jesus to the end, the one who pledges to defend him and be faithful to him.  The one who said “Even if everyone else deserts you, I will not desert you.”  I don’t doubt that Peter was sincere, that he thought he was being truthful when he said this.  But as the events of Jesus arrest and trial unfold, Peter’s pretensions too are stripped away, and he is revealed to be a coward, who when confronted, not by soldiers but by a woman and a slave, denies Jesus three times before the cock crows.  Peter is faced with the crushing realization that he is not the man he thought he was.  The truth must have been a bitter, shameful pill for him to swallow.

And I ask you, if any one of us was to insert him or herself into the story, would we have been any different?  At the time of trial, which of your pretensions and illusions would be stripped away?

Because if you think about it you realize that in this trial scene, it is not really Jesus who is on trial.  It is, rather, humanity that is on trial.  And these three vignettes we get of the Jewish authorities, of Pilate and of Peter are meant to reveal to us that during the time of trial, it is the truth about humanity that is revealed as our illusions and pretences are stripped away.  And that truth is not pretty.  We see a downward spiral at work, in the Jewish authorities, in Pilate and in Peter.  That downward spiral is what we call sin.  It is the dynamic of sin at work in human relationships.  And if any one of us had been placed into these events, I suspect that the same dynamic would have been at work.  Jesus came to bear witness to the truth, and despite our best efforts to portray ourselves as faithful, as law-abiding, or as strong, the truth that is revealed is that humanity is broken. 

And what happens when God, in the person of Jesus Christ, enters into relationship with these broken human beings?  We’ve heard the account.  Jesus is rejected.  He is abandoned.  He is condemned to crucifixion.

And it is at this point, on the cross, that Jesus is able once more to bear witness to the truth, but this time not the truth about humanity, but the truth about God.  How does God respond in the face of rejection and abandonment, how does God respond to the pain and suffering that humanity is able to inflict on him?

One could imagine a number of different responses.  The first might be the response of anger, of judgment, of punishment. But the story of Good Friday tells us that God does not respond in this way.  Jesus on the cross utters no words of anger or judgment.

Another response might be simply to abandon humanity.  To cut off the relationship, to leave humanity to its own devices.  But again, Jesus response in the events of Good Friday gives no indication of disengagement.  God does not respond to our sinfulness and brokenness by abandoning us.

The story of Good Friday tells us rather that Jesus accepts the cross.  He allows himself to be crucified, not judging but forgiving, not lashing out in anger, but accepting the pain.  Jesus, despite our brokenness, keeps on loving us.  The story of Jesus on the cross is the story of one who accepts the pain of a broken relationship in order to remain in that relationship, and to stand by us despite our brokenness.

Not only does the Good Friday narrative reveal the truth about who we are, but it reveals the truth about who God is.  God is the one who loves us from the cross, who endures the pain and suffering caused by our brokenness so that by his love we might be healed.  This is the supreme accomplishment which is proclaimed in Jesus final words from the cross, “It is finished.”

In the case of Peter, we get to see how this plays out.  In the days to come, Peter, broken, ashamed and fearful, is once more embraced by Jesus, reconciled to him, forgiven, loved and entrusted to carry out Jesus mission on earth.  The pain and alienation caused by Peter’s denial are overcome by the love of God.

“For this I was born, for this I came into the world, to bear witness to the truth.”

The truth is this:  that God overcomes the power of human sinfulness by taking the pain and suffering it causes upon himself and by giving us love and forgiveness in return.  By his wounds we are healed.

This is the truth that Jesus Christ bears witness to on Good Friday.

Amen.

We Are Family (Maundy Thursday, March 28 2013)

Homily:  Maundy Thursday, Mar 28 2013, St. Albans

Readings:  Exodus 12:1-4,11-14;Ps 116:1,10-17/ 1 Cor 11.23-26/ Jn 13.1-7,31b-35

We Are Family

Tonight, we remember the last supper that Jesus shared with his disciples in Jerusalem, on the eve of his death.  And we will once more share together this evening the Lord’s Supper, sometimes called the Eucharist, sometimes Communion, always in remembrance of Jesus, just as Christians have done throughout the ages.

In our second reading this evening, St. Paul writes to one such group of Christians in the first century, the church in Corinth.  And he tells them,

“For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”

So what is it exactly that we are proclaiming?

Paul says that we’re proclaiming Christ’s death.  But we’re not simply proclaiming the fact that Jesus died.  All humans die, the fact of death is hardly worth proclaiming.  No, what Paul means is that we’re proclaiming something about the significance, about the meaning and purpose of Christ’s death through our celebration of this meal together. 

So what is it that we’re proclaiming?  And how do we proclaim it by the simple act of gathering around this table and sharing in the bread and wine together?

When I was a university student in Kingston, the priest at my church was a man named Bob Brow.  And Bob used to have a number of expressions that he used to repeat on a regular basis.  And one of them was this:

“The definition of a family is people who gather at a table and share meals together.”

So what is it that we’re proclaiming when we eat this bread and drink this cup?

It’s this:  We are family.

Jesus lived and died as one of us so that we might become children of God.  And if we’re all children of God, that makes us family.

But what sort of a family are we?  What, if you like, are the family rules?  Can we be any sort of family we want?

Well, no.  It’s clear from Paul’s letter that the Corinthians were getting it wrong.  When they gathered to celebrate the Lord’s Supper they were proclaiming the wrong things about family.  In the Corinthian church, some people were getting more food and drink than others.  They were separating people according to the social divisions of the day, and as a result some would go hungry and others would get drunk.

That’s not the sort of family that Jesus was trying to create.   Those were the old rules.  That was the old way of doing things.  But Jesus was doing something new.  And as he often did, rather than simply tell his disciples what sort of family we are to be, he acted it out for them.  Right in the middle of supper, right where the new family was being born, Jesus got up from the table, stripped off his outer clothing and tied a towel around his waist.  Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with a towel.

And only after his example had been acted out before them, did Jesus address them with words.

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

This is our family rule.  This is our family identity.  We are a family called to love and serve each other.  This is what we proclaim when we eat this bread and drink this cup.  This is how we proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

Now as many of us know from experience, it’s not easy being family!  And this new family created for us by Jesus, and this new way of being family poses certain challenges.

First of all, it goes contrary to our social conventions and our usual way of doing things.  Anyone who has watched Downton Abbey will be very familiar with how society can dictate roles within a family, who’s the boss, who serves, who is eligible to be brought into the family and so on.  The family we proclaim will have none of that.  In our family, all of us are foot-washers.  Social distinctions are left behind when we gather at table.  That can be a challenge.  It was a challenge for the church in Corinth.  It has been a challenge for churches throughout the ages, including our own, churches which practice segregation and exclusion on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, the list goes on. 

Have no doubt that the Lord’s Supper is a revolutionary act.  Many years ago I had a South African friend who told me that in his opinion, one of the things that caused apartheid in South Africa to crumble was when blacks and whites started sharing the Lord’s Supper together.  As South African theologian Denise Ackermann wrote, “When racist laws kept people apart in my country, the Eucharist rite of sharing one cup took on revolutionary significance.”

A second challenge posed by this new way of being family is that it calls us into a mutual intimacy and vulnerability that may feel uncomfortable or even frightening.  When Jesus kneels to wash Peter’s feet, Peter gets the heebie-jeebies.  “Are you going to wash my feet?  You will never wash my feet!”  I get Peter’s reluctance.  Moving into relationships of intimacy and vulnerability is hard.  And yet that is what families are made of.  I remember when I was an intern at the one of the hospitals in town, there was a long-term patient who was very ill.  He had a faithful friend who used to visit each week.  And each week when the friend would visit, the two men would strip down and go into the shower together, and the friend would wash the man who was too sick to wash himself.  I once asked the friend why he did it, after all there were nurses who were paid to help patients with their washing.  And the man looked at me and said, “All our lives we have been friends.  But in these past months we have become brothers.”

There is a third challenge in entering into the family that Jesus calls us into.  You know the story of Judas, the one who betrays Jesus.  You know that on that last Thursday evening, Jesus announces that one of them will betray him, and as a result Judas leaves the gathering.  But did you ever notice the sequence of events?  Jesus could have forced the issue with Judas early in the evening, causing him to leave before supper.  But he doesn’t.  Jesus chooses the timing so that Judas his betrayer is included both in the supper and in the washing of feet.  Jesus washes Judas’ feet.  Even enemies are included in this family.

And so this is what we will proclaim tonight when we gather together around the table.  We will proclaim that we are family, that by Jesus life and death, we have been made children of God and hence brothers and sisters.  We will proclaim that we are a family with a new way of being, the new commandment that we love one another as Jesus has loved us.  And in so doing, every time we eat this bread and drink this cup, we will proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

Amen.

The Second Criminal (Palm/Passion Sunday March 24 2013

Homily:  Yr C Palm/Passion Sunday, March 24 2013, St. Albans

Readings:  Luke 19:28-40; Is 50:4-9a; Ps 31. 1-16; Phil 2:5-11; Luke 22:14-23.56

Today we enter the drama of Holy Week.  The sweep of the drama that we’ve engaged with this morning, stretching from the entry into Jerusalem to the cross is really too much to take in on a single Sunday morning, which I suppose is why we have the whole week to work our way through it.  This morning, I want to focus on one little vignette from the passion gospel that we heard, the story of the second criminal, one of the parts read by Ros.

He has no name in Luke’s gospel, nor in any of the others.  I’ll call him Number Two.  Luke calls him the other criminal; Mark calls him a bandit, someone who might wait in ambush on a lonely road in the wilderness and assault a solitary traveler, stealing his goods.  Perhaps he did it to feed his family; perhaps he was part of an insurrection against the Romans; maybe he was just a bad apple.  We don’t know any of those details.  All we know is that he got caught, and today is his last day.  He’s about to enter the hour of darkness.

That’s what Jesus called it in the garden when he was arrested.  The hour of darkness.  The moment when powers of violence, betrayal, injustice, suffering and death draw near.  Number Two will be crucified today, a public method of execution devised by the Roman Empire to be sufficiently cruel and painful that other would-be thieves and rebels would think twice before they acted.  As he’s hammered to the cross and the cross is raised, Number Two sees that two others are being crucified with him.  Not surprising, as crosses regularly dotted the landscape of the Roman Empire. It was a violent time.  One of the convicts he knows, another thief like himself.  But the other he knows only by reputation, the one called Jesus, the one the crowd was shouting for only a few days ago, the one that some people thought was a prophet or even the Messiah.

As the three men hang from the cross, the first criminal joins in with the soldiers and the crowd and begins to mock Jesus.  Can’t blame him really, can you?  Might as well have a last laugh at someone’s expense, they’re both going to be dead in a few hours.  It was now about noon, and a darkness came over the whole land.

But Number Two refuses to give in to the darkness.  It’s as if he’s heard that line in the Bruce Cockburn song, so he takes one last kick at the darkness.  In the midst of his despair, of his isolation, of his guilt, of his suffering, Number Two rebukes the first criminal.

“Stop it.  This man has done nothing wrong.”  He knows Jesus is innocent.  Pilate himself said so three times.  There is no reason for Jesus to be on the cross, but here he is, suffering alongside Number Two, with him in the midst of the darkness, looking at him with compassion.

Then he says, “Jesus remember me when you come into your kingdom.”  And Jesus replies, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” 

Luke doesn’t give us any more detail, but I think Number Two’s life changed in that moment.  Not because the pain went away, it didn’t.  Not because death was averted, it wasn’t.  But because in that moment, Number Two’s hope was restored.  He was able to place his trust in something greater than himself.  He became at peace.

Even in the midst of darkness, Jesus brings healing and compassion.  Salvation.  Redemption. Hope.

Sometimes people talk about the cross as if the only thing that matters is the fact that Jesus dies.  But perhaps what’s important here is not the fact that Jesus dies, but rather who Jesus is, even in the face of death, and what this reveals to us about God.

This little vignette of the second criminal gives us a glimpse of what it means for the light to come into the darkness.  Jesus enters into the very darkest corners of our world with healing and forgiveness.  Compassion and love prevail.  Lives are transformed.  Hope is restored.

Even from the cross, Jesus continues the mission that he embarked on in Nazareth.  You remember the first words of his public ministry:  “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives.”  Even on the cross, Jesus still brings good news, still proclaims release. 

“Father, forgive them; for they don’t know what they’re doing.”

“Today you will be with me in Paradise.”

I share this little vignette of Number Two with you this morning for one simple reason.  And that is because the story of Number Two is your story and it’s my story too.  Not because we’re criminals.  Not because we’re facing execution.  But simply because at some point in each one of our lives, we will enter an hour of darkness.  A time of pain, in our own lives or in the lives of those that we love, a time when hope fades and life becomes hard to bear.  And when you find yourself in that hour of darkness, I want you to know and I want you to remember, that Jesus will be there with you, just as he was for Number Two, right beside you, sharing in whatever it is you suffer.  He will bring healing and forgiveness and compassion and hope.  He will say to you, “today you will be with me and I will be with you”.  And your life will be transformed.  Because God’s love wins.  Every time.  Always.

Amen.

YOLO: Seizing the Opportunity (Lent 3, March 3 2013)

Homily:  Yr C Lent 3, March 7 2010, Huntley

Readings: Exodus 3:1-15; Is 55:1-9; Ps 63:1-8; Luke 13:1-9

‘YOLO:  Seizing the opportunity’

Tragedy has a way of getting our attention. 

Earthquakes.  Plane crashes.  Terrorist attacks.  The shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, just this past December.  This is perhaps the most recent tragedy to get our attention. And when tragedy strikes, when we are faced with calamities, questions are raised.  Why did this happen?  Where is God in this?  And perhaps the unstated question, could this happen to me?

 

Today’s gospel begins with the report of two calamities that strike close to home for Jesus and his Galilean listeners.  Every Galilean at some point in his or her life would make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to offer sacrifice at the Temple.  For many this was an annual trip.  And so when the report came back from Jerusalem that Pilate, the Roman governor, had murdered the most recent group of Galileans to travel to the Temple, their friends and relatives back home must have been shocked and saddened, outraged and fearful. 

And they would have asked the same question that we asked in the aftermath of Newtown.  Why did this happen?  It seems that no matter which century we’re talking about, or on which continent, humans have a need to reassure themselves in the face of tragedy by coming up with answers to the question of why.  I suppose it’s something of a coping strategy, an attempt to reassert some kind of control in the face of events that are clearly beyond our control. It’s also an expression of hope, the hope that if we can understand what just happened perhaps we can prevent similar occurrences in the future.

In our time and place we tend to come up with political, psychological and scientific answers.  We talk about gun control and mental illness.  We talk about a culture of violence.  We look for psychological explanations and legal solutions.  In Jesus time and place, however, it was common to give theological answers.  And the prevalent theological explanation of Jesus day in the wake of massacre in Jerusalem was that those who had died in these calamities must have been sinners, and that somehow in these events God was punishing them for their sins.  

But Jesus rejects this explanation outright.  The victims of Pilate’s evil acts did nothing wrong.  Neither did those who died when the tower of Siloam fell on them.  The reality of our human existence is that life is a gift, a fragile gift that can be taken away at any time.  There is no sense reassuring ourselves that it couldn’t happen to us.  It can and it will.  It is only a matter of time and circumstance.

And so in the wake of tragedy, Jesus changes the question.  His question becomes not “why did this happen to them?” but rather, “What about you?  How are you going to live this fragile life that you’ve been given?”

The fragility of life reminds us that there is a certain urgency to how we live.  We may have 100 years left, or 1 year, or 1 day.  Each one of us was created for a purpose, each one of us is meant to live lives that are fruitful.  And because of the very fragility of life itself, the question of how I am to live the life that I have been given demands an answer not tomorrow, but today.

Jesus demands an answer, not once, but twice with these words:  “Unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”

Ya think he’s trying to get our attention?  I think so.  But what is this repentance that Jesus is talking about, this urgent action that he is calling us to?

Often, we think of repentance in quite a narrow way.  We think of it as expressing regret for our mistakes, or changing from bad behavior to good behavior.  But repentance is much more than that.  Repentance literally means to turn around.  It’s a turning aside from the path that we’re on in order to see things in a new way. It is the adoption of a different perspective.  It is a complete reorientation of who we are as people and how we see and act in the world.  And as a result, repentance can be sufficiently disruptive in our lives that it’s easier to put it off until tomorrow than to do it today.

Which is why calamities, which remind us of the fragility of our lives and the importance of living in the present, can serve as catalysts for repentance.

Or as my teen daughter might say, YOLO!

Do you remember the Vancouver Olympics from 2010.  I watched a lot of the Vancouver Olympics on TV.  And though I was impressed by the athletic excellence and competition, and though I celebrated the medals like everyone else, what I remember most about those Olympic games now, three years later, is the story of the Bilodeau family.  Do you remember them?  Alexandre of course was the hero, the first Canadian gold medallist on Canadian soil, in moguls skiing.  But that was only a small part of the story. 

The real story is how the Bilodeau family responded to the tragedy of discovering that their eldest son Frederic had cerebral palsy.  Now Frederic’s illness is a terrible thing, and not to be wished on anyone.  But it does seem to have given the Bilodeau family a new way of seeing things, a different perspective on the world.  That perspective inspired the family to switch Alex at the age of 8 from hockey to skiing so that the five of them could share an activity that they could all do together.  And as for his skiing, Alex credits his brother with being his inspiration.  “When I look at my Frederic,” says Alexandre, “it puts everything back in perspective.”  The limits that cerebral palsy places on his brother help Alexandre see his own health, and his own ability to ski in a new way, and that inspires him to keep going even when he is tired or when training gets difficult. 

This is a story of repentance.  It is the story of people who have been opened up to new ways of seeing, people who have re-oriented their lives and have adopted a different perspective.  And that re-orientation, that new way of seeing has produced all sorts of fruit, both in their own lives and in the lives of the millions of people who have been inspired by their story.

Our first reading from Exodus is another story of repentance.  Here we meet Moses.  Now we’re used to thinking of Moses as a great prophet and leader, but here at the beginning of the story in the third chapter of Exodus, Moses is a lost soul.  He is in the midst of an identity crisis.  He is a fugitive, having fled from Egypt after killing a man.  He was a prince in Egypt, now he’s tending his father-in-law’s sheep.  As we begin today’s story, Moses is, quite literally and figuratively, in the wilderness.  In fact not only is he in the wilderness, but we’re told that he’s gone beyond the wilderness!

Which is where he sees the burning bush.  The bush, it seems is off to the side.  Definitely not on the path that he’s following with his sheep.  When Moses sees it he says, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight.”  Moses didn’t have to do that.  He could have kept right on walking on his path, driving his sheep forward, maybe thinking to himself, “Oh isn’t it pretty the way the light is playing on that bush” as he walked right past.  Or maybe he could have thought to himself, “I’ll stop on the way back when I have more time.  But then he would never have been Moses.  Because what makes Moses Moses is his willingness to park his sheep, get off his path and turn aside to take a closer look.  And when he did that, God noticed.  When the LORD saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses”.

Would you have turned aside to go and look at the bush?  Or would you have been in too much of a hurry because you had places to go, people to see, things to do?

Jesus calls his listeners to turn aside and take a new look.  Jesus calls us to repentance.  Moses turned aside, and became the great leader that led the people out of slavery in Egypt.

Jesus calls us to repent so that we too can live lives that are fruitful.  But that doesn’t mean that it’s easy. There are times when our lives just don’t seem to be bearing fruit.   And so Jesus tells his listeners another story, a story about a fig tree.  It’s a fig tree that isn’t producing any figs, and so not surprisingly, the owner of the vineyard where it is planted wants to cut it down.  Nothing surprising in the story so far.  It was taking up space, consuming valuable water.  But then something curious happens.  The gardener, who works for the landowner, is told to cut down the tree.  And instead of simply following instructions as he should, instead, the gardener intervenes on behalf of the unfruitful fig tree.  “Give the tree another year,” he pleads, “and I’ll dig the soil around it and fertilize it, and maybe then it will bear fruit.”  And that is all we’re told.  We don’t know how the story ends, we don’t know how the future will unfold.  The parable leaves us in suspense:  will the tree become fruitful or will it be cut down?  That we don’t know.

But what we do know is this.  There is a crazy gardener who cares enough for that unfruitful tree that he is willing to risk his job by arguing with his boss, and willing to put time and effort into caring for the fig tree.

The call to repent, to turn aside and see in new ways, is universal, and important, and urgent.  But it is not something that we have to undertake all on our own.  Our God is like that gardener, patient and caring and compassionate, and he wants to give us everything we need to bear fruit in our lives.

What will that look like?  What sort of fruit are we being asked to produce?  For most of us, it won’t look like an Olympic gold medal, nor will it look like the parting of the Red Sea. The new vision and perspectives that we adopt, the reorientation of ourselves as people will play out in a unique way for each one of us.  But as followers of Jesus we can expect to see some common threads:  a deepening of our relationship with God, a love of neighbor, a thirsting for justice, a life of compassion and forgiveness.

God wants us to be the people that he created us to be, people who live abundant lives that bear fruit.  And he is committed to giving us everything we need along the way. 

And so today’s question is not “why did this happen to them?”  Rather, it is this: “are you willing to seize the opportunity you’ve been given and start today?”

Amen.

Where Do You Put Your Trust? (Lent 1 Feb 17 2013)

Homily:  Yr C Lent 1, Feb 17 2013, St. Albans

Readings:  Deut 26:1-11; Ps 91:1-2,9-16; Rom10:8b-13; Lk:4:1-13

Where do you place your trust?

You who dwell in the shelter of the Lord, who abide in his shadow for life,

Say to the Lord ‘my refuge, My God in whom I trust.’

Today’s readings are about trust.  In whom, or in what, do you place your trust?

The psalmist urges us to place our trust in God.  In the beautiful words of psalm 91, which we sang in our opening hymn, we are given what is perhaps the greatest promise of our Christian faith:  that if we 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, raised up on eagle’s wings and protected from evil.  We will, as it were, be held in the hands of the angels, lest we dash our foot against a stone.

It is one of my favourite hymns.  Often when I sing it, I feel a depth of emotion well up within me, a feeling that seems to be a gut response to the beauty of the promise that is on offer, a promise that resonates with our deepest longings for assurance and well-being, for a solid place in which we can put our trust.

That’s what my gut is telling me.  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.  It is easy to think of examples.  So how do we reconcile the promises of the psalmist with the very present reality of pain and suffering in our midst?

The psalmist knows the tension that exists between the promises of God and our present reality.  In psalm 91 he speaks of the plagues and pestilence that threaten human existence.  He knows that there are times of trouble, times of oppression when we call out for help.  He knows that despite the promise that all will be well, we live our lives in the wilderness.

And yet, he is able to put his trust in God.

Where do you put your trust?  When times are good, it is perhaps easy to say that we place our trust in God.  But what happens when you enter the wilderness?  When life gets rough, when obstacles get in the way.  Where then do you put your trust?

Or let me put it another way.  Suppose there was an alien from another planet who arrived on this planet earth, right here in Ottawa, and as part of her reconnaissance mission, she was given the assignment of reporting back to her superiors on where we as human beings place our trust, based on her observations of our behaviour.  What do you think that report would say?

It might say that some of us humans trust in ourselves, in our own power and abilities.  That we strive to be self-reliant people, people who put their energies into education and self-development, finding ways to increase their power so that they can be in control of their own lives.

It might say that some of us place our trust in our possessions, in our houses and our bank accounts, in our good jobs and our pensions.

It might say that some of us place our trust in our health, in daily exercise and good nutrition, in our access to good medical care.

It might say that some of us place our trust in powerful people or institutions that we can align ourselves with, trusting that in return for that allegiance, they will look after us.

It might say that some of us place our trust in drugs or alcohol, or in pleasure and distractions, allowing these things to comfort us or to numb us as we make our way through the wilderness of human life.

That’s probably what the report would say.  

But there is another way through the wilderness.

Our Gospel today tells us that Jesus was led by God’s Spirit into the wilderness where he was tempted by the devil.  In that wilderness, Jesus had no possessions.  He had no companions.  He had no power, no fame, no glory, no food.  The promise that he had received at his baptism, that he was God’s son, his beloved must have started to seem a bit ironic.  Was this any way to treat a beloved son?  And so the devil, the personification of the forces of evil and chaos and pain in this life, puts Jesus to the test.  He starts by sowing the seed of doubt.  “If you are the Son of God . . .”  Notice the “if”?  The voice at Jesus baptism had said “you are my Son”.  Jesus had been given an identity.  But the devil puts that identity in doubt.  “If you are the Son of God . . .”  Are you sure? And having sown the seeds of doubt, now he puts Jesus to the test.  Why trust God?  Why don’t you place your trust in your own power?  Change this stone to bread, not only can you satisfy your own needs, but those of others too.  Or align yourself with me, and you can achieve political power and glory.  Or if you still insist on trusting God, then put God to the test, force his hand and make him save you now in a display of power.

The journey into the wilderness is one of the central images of our Christian faith.  In our first reading today from Deuteronomy, we are reminded that the foundational story of the people of Israel is the story of the Exodus.  This is the story that gave them their sense of identity as the people of God.  In the story of the Exodus, God brings the people out of Egypt, ending their oppression as slaves. 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 place their trust in him.  But the temptation to place their trust elsewhere is too strong.  The people complain about the lack of food, they put their trust in idols and false gods, and they put the Lord their God to the test, telling Moses that they’ll head back to oppression in Egypt unless God starts doing things their way.  In the wilderness, there is a great temptation to place one’s trust in the wrong things. Or to put it another way, when we fail to trust in God, when we forget who we are and whose we are, that is when we’re vulnerable to temptation.

The story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness that we read in our gospel is a deliberate re-telling of the Exodus story.  Jesus passes through the waters of baptism and the voice of God declares him to be Son of God.  He is led by the Spirit into the wilderness.  In the wilderness he experiences the same hunger and the same temptations that the people of Israel experienced.  But in response to each temptation, Jesus re-affirms his trust in God.  And ironically, he does so by quoting the words of Moses from the book of Deuteronomy, the very words that the people of Israel failed to heed during their time in the desert.

Jesus was led into the wilderness by the Spirit to show us another way, to show us that 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.  We pass through the waters of baptism and we enter into the wilderness.  Our journey will take us to desert places where our experience of evil and suffering will cause us to doubt the promises of God.  It will cause us to question our identity as children of God.  There are times when we will wonder whether there is indeed a happy ending to our story.  And at those times we will remember the story of Jesus’ own journey, the story of a man like us who fulfilled his purpose in life not by avoiding pain and evil, but by confronting 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.

Especially in this season of Lent, we too are called to journey through the wilderness, bringing light into the darkness, experiencing hunger and sorrow and temptation along the way, yet placing our trust in God, knowing that in him we are safe.  Jesus trusted in God and came through his time in the wilderness, and so will we.

“You who dwell in the shelter of the Lord, who abide in his shadow for life,

Say to the Lord ‘My refuge, my rock in whom I trust’

And he will bear you up on eagles’ wings, and hold you in the palm of his hand.”

Amen.

The Long Night of Empty Nets (Feb 10 2013)

Homily:  Yr C Proper 5, Feb 10 2013, St. Albans

Readings:  Isaiah 6:1-8; Ps 138; 1 Cor 15:1-11; Luke 5:1-11

Many years ago I used to be a summer camp counselor.  I used to teach canoeing, and I remember one day I was out in the canoe with three small boys, a four year-old, a six-year old and a seven year old.  We were out on the lake and, as you can imagine with three small boys in the boat, we weren’t going very fast.  All of a sudden, out of nowhere, this huge gust of wind came up behind us.  It felt like someone had put a motor on the back of the boat and we were just flying across the water.  The three boys started screaming, and I was suddenly fully alert as I steadied the boat with my paddle, double-checked that the boys had life jackets on and tried to make sure we weren’t going to flip the canoe.

It seemed like that gust of wind lasted a long time, but it was probably only a few seconds.  Our canoe traveled farther in those few seconds than it had by our own paddling over the previous ten minutes!  And during those few seconds, I had a taste of what it is like to encounter and be overwhelmed by a sudden force of great power.

Today in our readings we have the stories of two people who encounter and are overwhelmed by a sudden force of great power.  Last week in our readings we heard the stories of what happened when the prophet Jeremiah and the people in the Nazareth synagogue encountered the word of God.  This week it’s the turn of both Isaiah and Simon Peter.  And as we discussed last Sunday, the encounter with the word of God isn’t just an exchange of information.  Rather, it is a dynamic encounter that is active and charged with power.  The word of God is the power that brought forth creation and it’s a power which seizes the hearer, transforms his or her self-understanding and demands a response.

The story of the encounter between humans and the word of God can be told in many different ways.  In our Old Testament reading, Isaiah tells us of his experience of the encounter with God.  Isaiah has a vision of the power and glory of God on his throne, filling the temple, surrounded by angels singing his praises.  He experiences the word of God as a burning coal that touches his lips and transforms him by taking away his guilt and sin.  When God asks “Whom shall I send?” Isaiah’s response is “Here I am; send me!”

In today’s gospel, Luke tells us the story of Simon Peter’s encounter with the word of God.  In the gospels of Mark and Matthew, we’re told that Jesus saw Simon the fisherman casting a net into the sea, said to him “Follow me”, and that Simon left his net and followed Jesus.  Luke, however, tells the story very differently.  He doesn’t just want to give us the facts about what happened.  He wants to give us a much deeper insight into the transformation that occurs when humans encounter the word of God.

 And so he tells us the story of the fishermen.  Fishing in the Sea of Galilee was normally done with long drag nets which were set out at night in deep water and then hauled into the boats around daybreak.  It was hard, back-breaking work.  There were no electric winches.  Simon and the others had been up all night, setting and pulling in their nets but had nothing to show for their efforts.  It had been a long night of empty nets.  And the work wasn’t finished.  They still had to wash and dry the nets, and put them away so that they would be ready for the next night.  After the nets were put away, the fisherman would return home, hungry and smelling of fish, but with no fish in hand, knowing they would have to face the disappointment of their families.

You can imagine that these fishermen probably weren’t in a very good mood when Jesus showed up early that morning.  And they probably grumbled even more when the crowds arrived, trampling on the nets that were laid out to dry, as people pressed closer to Jesus to hear the word of God.  The crowds were hungry for the word of God – the fishermen were just plain hungry.  Simon must have been surprised and maybe just a little annoyed when Jesus asked him if he could use his boat to address the crowd from the shallow waters!

When Jesus finished teaching, he turned to Simon, told him to put out into the deep water and to let down the nets for a catch.  Now, Simon was tired and hungry; he’d worked hard to wash and put away his nets so that he could go home.  He knew that there were no fish around, especially now in the middle of the day.  Letting down his nets again right now meant more work for nothing.  But there was something about Jesus and the things which he’d been saying that convinced Simon to do it anyways.

And when the nets were in the water, the fishermen must have seen the water ripple and darken as the fish surged into them.  Excitement raced through the boat.  The men laughed and shouted as they started to pull in the biggest catch of their lives.  The nets were heavy, heavier than they had ever been, and they started to burst as they came through the surface.  Fear now seized the fishermen as their small boat started to take on water and the nets began to break.  They called out for help to the other boat, and soon both boats were loaded so full of fish that they began to sink.  It was a chaotic scene, fish flapping, men shouting, boats sinking.  I’m sure that in that moment the fishermen’s hearts were racing, their adrenaline was pumping and that they felt fully alive.  And even after the boats had been brought to shore and the monster catch unloaded, feelings of awe and amazement remained.

Why does Luke tell us this story?  Well this story isn’t about fish, and it’s not just about Simon Peter.  It’s about what happens to you and me when we encounter the transforming power of the word of God, the dynamic presence of the living God in our midst.

All of us have known the night of empty nets.  Times when we’ve worked hard, and gotten nothing for our efforts, nothing but a feeling of emptiness.  Some of us have experienced it in our jobs.  Others may have experienced their empty nets in a difficult family situation, at times of illness or after the loss of a loved one.  We experience it in suffering, and we experience it in everyday life.  But today’s gospel is telling us that even in the midst of these empty net situations, God is inviting us to let down our nets and he will fill them, fill them to bursting with love, and with meaning, and with a sense of purpose that may not remove all our difficulties but can allow us to transform and transcend them.

The story of the empty nets which are filled to bursting is the story of the transformation which happens in our own lives when we encounter the word of God.

What lessons can we draw from Luke’s story about this encounter?

First, the story tells us that the encounter with God can happen anywhere.  God is encountered in the ordinary stuff of human existence, in the daily activities of human life.  Simon Peter didn’t have to go to the temple or the synagogue to encounter the word of God.  He went fishing.

Second, even though clearly the encounter is God’s initiative, we have a role to play.  We have to be willing to let down our nets, even when it may not make any sense from a human perspective to do so.  It didn’t make any sense for Peter to keep fishing, but he was willing to do so in response to Jesus’ words. 

The third insight that we gain from the story, a profound insight, is that the transforming power of the word of God creates community.  The nets of the first boat were filled with so many fish that they had to call the second boat to help them.  If the second boat hadn’t come to help, the first boat may well have sunk.  The love of God is so great that it overwhelms us and obliges us to share it in community and to build relationships with each other.

My hope is that here at St. Albans we are a community that is constantly being transformed by our encounter with the word of God.  That we are a community that is letting down its nets, welcoming new people every week, building the supports needed for our community through our GIFT and financial campaign, starting new initiatives in support of our neighbours.  And in all of this we will have to support each other, because when our nets are filled, if the second boat doesn’t show up, we may not be able to bring in all the fish.

Because the story of the nets tells us that we may get more than we bargained for.  This story tells us that God is not a God of scarce resources.  He’s a God of abundant love, and he wants us to live fully.  Simon Peter is overwhelmed and amazed, and is overcome by a sense of his own unworthiness.  What is Jesus’ response?  He says, “Do not be afraid.” 

  

When we experience the long night of empty nets it is easy to despair.  When we encounter the word of God, it is easy to feel that we aren’t able to do the things that we’re called to do.  But don’t be afraid.  We are an Easter people, and more than anything else, today’s story is a story of the resurrection.  In fact, check out chapter 21 of John’s gospel, and you will see that John uses a very similar incident to describe the transformation of Peter and the disciples when they meet the risen Jesus.

If we as individuals and as a community are ready and willing to let down our nets and be transformed by the encounter with the living, dynamic, word of God, then amazing things will happen.

Just ask Isaiah and Simon Peter.

Amen.