Whose Birth Are We Celebrating? (Christmas 2012)

Homily:  Christmas Eve 2012, St. Albans

Readings:  Isaiah 52:7-10; Ps 98; Heb 1:1-4; Jn 1:1-18

There is nothing more joyful, nothing that makes for celebration like the birth of a child.  The pictures, the phone calls, the tweets and posts and emails.  This is good news, good news worth sharing. 

Tonight, we celebrate a birth.  But whose birth are we celebrating?

Well, you might say that we’re celebrating the birth of Jesus.  And I suppose you’d be right.  But did you notice that in the gospel reading that we just heard, that’s not the answer that John gives us.  John is definitely writing about birth; but it’s not Jesus birth, it’s ours.

“But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood, or the will of the flesh, or the will of man, but of God.”

The birth we celebrate tonight is our own birth, our own birth as sons and daughters of God.  The good news we share tonight isn’t just the story of a baby born to a peasant woman in Bethlehem two thousand years ago.  No, it’s much more personal than that.

Christmas is the story of who I am.  It is a story of identity for each one of us.  If I was ask you the question, “who are you?”, how would you answer?  Often the answers we give to the question of identity are quite limited.  We tend to see ourselves as autonomous individuals.  We have a name, we have a physical body that is distinct and separate from other physical bodies.  We may identify with our job or other things that we do.  Perhaps we identify with our personal histories, perhaps we identify with our thoughts and beliefs.

But I think that we start to get a much richer answer to the question of identity when we leave behind the notion of ourselves as distinct and separate individuals and instead embrace a vision of ourselves as relational beings.  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 and through my relationships.

And suppose, just suppose that the one who was in the beginning, the one through whom all things came into being, the one who is the very source of life and light and the universe itself, suppose that this one that we call God wanted to be in relationship with me.  I think that if such a relationship was possible, its impact on us would be so dramatic, so life altering that the best image we could find for it would be that of a new birth.

But is it possible?  As I expect you know, the basis of any relationship is good communication.  Any decent marriage counselor can tell you that.  And that’s where the unfolding story that we’re part of hadn’t been going so well.  You see, as the author of the letter to the Hebrews tells us, for thousands of years, God had been trying to communicate with our ancestors in many and various ways, apparently with limited success.   You see, none of us have ever seen God, and as a result, communication with God has been a challenge.

So God decided to speak with us in a radically new and different way.  God has spoken to us through a Son.  The Word which was in the beginning, the Word which was with God, which was God, that Word has become flesh and lived among us and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a Father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

The Incarnation that we celebrate at Christmas is the ultimate act of divine-human communication.  In Jesus, we get to see what God is like.  We get to ask our questions.  We get answers, in words we can understand and actions that we can relate to.  No one has ever seen God.  But it is God’s only Son, Jesus Christ, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

And this opens up for us a remarkable possibility, the possibility of entering into relationship with God himself.  Because if the message of Jesus birth, if the message of Jesus’ words and deeds, can be summed up and distilled, it would be, it continues to be, quite simply, that God loves us and wants to be in relationship with us.

God has gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure we get that message.

And now the ball is in our court.  Christmas is an act of communication.  The message has been sent.  Do we receive it?  The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.  Do we believe it?  Our response matters, because as John tells us, to all who receive him, to all who believe in his name he gives the power to become children of God, born not of flesh and blood, but of God. 

There is a sort symmetry here, isn’t there.  God became the child of human parents, so that we could become children of God.  The good news of Christmas for us is that God, by becoming human and living among us has announced the truth about who we were created to be:  children of God, loved by God. 

And this is the life which is offered to us at Christmas.  John tells us that it’s the Word that gives life.  And he’s not talking about mere physical or biological life, but rather life in all its abundance, life that is plugged into the truth of who we were created to be. 

All of us received our biological life by being born of our parents, but the life that John is talking about comes not from being born of human parents but from being born of God.  It is the life that is hinted at in the joy we experience at the birth of a child and in the ecstasy of falling in love, the life that is glimpsed when we feel ourselves lifted up by our Christmas celebration or any other celebration.  It is life that is more than just daily existence, it is the life that is the light of the world, life that overcomes darkness, the life that we long for.

The good news of Christmas is that through the mystery of the incarnation God is telling us that he loves us and wants us as his children.  Does this make a difference?  I think that it does.

In our time and place, here in the twenty-first century, there are two narratives about life which are offered to us.  One is the narrative of biological life.  This first story tells us that our lives are the product of chance, that our bodies are collections of atoms, and that compared to the vast expanse of time and space in the universe, we are small, insignificant, and meaningless.  The immense force and energy of the world in which we live are indifferent towards us.  Our choices and our actions are either physical reactions to chemical changes within us or arbitrary decisions that have no intrinsic value or universal meaning.  We’re born, we live, we die.  End of story.

And then there is a second narrative, one that tells us that we are more than material bodies, more than the product of chance.  We are created beings, created for a purpose with lives that overflow with value and meaning.  We have the inherent dignity of being made in the image of our Creator.   We were made to love one another and to enter into relationship.  Behind the immense physical forces of our world is a sustaining presence which is even greater, a divine presence which is not indifferent to us, but rather cares for us and reaches out to us.   The source of life, the creator of all things, loves us and wants to draw us into a relationship which will endure beyond our biological lives.

The good news of Christmas is that this second narrative is our story.  The joy we feel this night is no delusion but rather a taste of what we were created for.  The birth of the child that we celebrate this night is indeed good news for us.

May it fill your hearts with peace and joy.

Amen.

Making the Connection (Advent 4 Dec 23 2012)

Homily:  Yr C Advent 4, December 23 2012, St. Albans

Readings:  Micah 5.2-5a; 1 Sam 2.1b-10; Heb 10:5-10; Luke 1:39-55

When I was in Grade 8, one of the kids in my class was a girl named Liz.  She lived not too far away from where I did, and we knew each other, not close friends, but friends nonetheless.  One day she didn’t show up for school.  And she didn’t come back.  I wondered about that.  I heard later that Liz had left town because she was pregnant.  For me, 13 years old at the time, it was a surprise.  I expect that for Liz and her family it was quite a shock, and a source of shame.  I guess that’s why she left town.  I don’t know for sure, I never saw her again.

Liz, of course, isn’t the first 13 year old girl who had to run away from town because she got pregnant.  Our gospel reading this morning tells the story of another unmarried, 13 year old girl who had to run away from town because she got pregnant.  As Luke tells it, “in those days, Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country.”  There, she took refuge in the house of a relative, her cousin Elizabeth.  And for Mary, in her day, it was probably even worse than for Liz.  An unmarried girl who got pregnant would be “put away” in the words of Matthew’s gospel, that is, if she was lucky and she wasn’t stoned to death for committing adultery.  She would bring great shame on her family, and would be unmarriable, destined for a life of solitude and poverty.  No wonder Mary had to run out of town.

Now perhaps some of you are thinking, yes, it’s true that everyone in Mary’s village would be talking in terms of shame and disgrace, and, yes, that’s why Mary had to get away, but at least Mary knew what was going on.  After all, she’d had a visit from an angel!

Well, let me address a few misunderstandings about angels in the Bible.  The Greek word angelos, which we usually translate as “angel”, is actually the word for a messenger.  In the Bible, an “angel” is someone sent with a message from God.  No wings, no halo, no trumpets, no glowing white clothes.  Just someone with a message.  A messenger.  And just because a stranger shows up with a message doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily going to believe him.  In the first chapter of Luke, an angel tells Zechariah that his old wife is going to have a child.  You know what Zechariah’s response was?  Yeah, right!  And Zechariah was a priest.  You’d think if anyone could figure out that they were being given a message from God, it would be the priest, right?  Well, apparently not.

But Mary gets it.  She’s able to see the presence of God in the person of the messenger.  She’s able to hear the voice of God in the messenger’s strange story.  She’s able to see her own experience as part of a bigger picture.  She makes the connection between what she hears from the messenger and the promises that God made to Abraham thousands of years ago.  She has a vision of God’s trajectory, a vision of where the story that she’s being invited to become a part of is going.  And when she accepts that invitation, she joins in by singing.  She sings with unadulterated, celebratory joy.

“My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my saviour”

Now, I want you to notice the choice that Mary makes here, in response to the angel’s announcement.  Mary could just as easily have uttered the following words:

“My soul curses the Lord and I am in despair because God has ruined my life and condemned me to suffering.”

Because Mary’s life has been irrevocably changed by God’s intervention.  She will endure insults and shame in her village.  She will raise a rebellious child.  She will see that child grow into an adult who appears to have severe psychiatric problems, who will wander around homeless, who will routinely be called demon-possessed.  She will see her son clash with the authorities and be put to death before her eyes, perhaps the worst fate any mother can imagine.  On that day when she arrives on Elizabeth’s doorstep, Mary could just as easily utter a lament rather than a song as a consequence of her encounter with the divine.

But she doesn’t.  She sees what’s going on in her experience as part of a bigger picture, and she sings the song we call the Magnificat, a song of joy, a rebel song.

“my soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour. 

For he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant. 

Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; 

for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.

He has brought down the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly,

he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.”

I think that, like Mary, you and I also have experiences of the divine.  I believe that God is present and active in our midst.  But I also think that much of the time, we just miss it.  Or, like Zechariah, we dismiss it.  Or, even when we do seem to notice something, we aren’t able to make the connection between what’s going on in our experience and the bigger picture, and as a result, we fail to grasp what’s really going on.

I think we all have a lot to learn from Mary, and from the song she sings.  Here’s what Mary does.

The first thing that she does is she names her experience of God.  “He has looked upon me with favour.  The Mighty One has done great things for me.”  Mary sees with the eyes of faith, she names what’s going on, she articulates it and she tells someone, in this case her cousin Elizabeth.

Then, she makes the connection with the bigger picture.  She situates what’s happening in her life in the bigger story of God.  She moves from the personal to the communal.  She recognizes God’s promise to Abraham that he would work world changing history, and she sees that world changing activity taking place in and through her own life.

Then she situates her experience not just in God’s past promises, but in God’s trajectory towards the future.  She has a vision of where God is headed.  She declares that God will consider, care for and act on behalf of the poor, the hungry and the oppressed, and she sees what is happening to herself as part of that trajectory.

And finally she accepts the invitation.  She chooses to become part of the story, not just a mere observer, not simply collateral damage.  She enters into God’s promise to lift up the lonely, those who mourn, those who weep, and she sings. 

Isn’t it remarkable that an uneducated, 13 year old girl, scared and on the run, has so much to teach us.

Learn to connect your life to the bigger picture by:

Naming your experience of God.

Situating it in God’s story

Seeing the trajectory

And choosing to become a part.

Now I know it’s not always going to be simple.  I know life can get messy.  I know that it’s tricky discerning what God is doing in the midst of it all.  And even for Mary, at the time it was probably a bit messier than the 30 verse summary that Luke gives us.  But give it a try.  Learn the story.  Get ready for the one who is coming into your life.  And don’t forget to sing.

Amen.

Good News? (Advent 3, Dec 16 2012)

Homily:  Yr C Advent 3, Dec 16 2012, St. Albans

Readings:  Zephaniah 3:14-20; Isaiah 12:2-6; Phil 4:4-7; Luke 3:7-20

Good News?

Every Sunday here at St. Albans we have a couple of people who volunteer to be our greeters.  This week it was Rob and Julie.  And their job, as you know, is to welcome you when you arrive, to make you feel comfortable and at home, and to provide you with our booklet and any other information you might need.  I imagine they might say things like “welcome” or “good morning” or “good to see you”.

They probably didn’t say to anybody “You brood of vipers!  Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”

You see, as much as we try to uphold the ideals of inclusiveness and participation of everyone here at St. Albans, the things that Jonathan spoke to us about last week, I think that if John the Baptist offered to be the greeter at our door on a Sunday morning, we’d probably suggest that there might be other ways for him to be involved.

John the Baptist doesn’t exactly make people feel comfortable does he?  He’s got a bit of an edge to him.  He is after all, a prophet, and prophets are sent to stir things up, to shake people out of their complacency.  I think that John manages to do that pretty well in today’s gospel.  Listen to what he says:

        “you brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come”

 “the ax is even now lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire”

Then, he tells people they have to change their lives.  And then he warns them that someone even more powerful than he is coming, and that for those who don’t shape up, this more powerful one will “burn the chaff with unquenchable fire”.

Then, after all that, Luke, the gospel writer, the narrator, adds this little note:

“So, with many other exhortations, John proclaimed the good news to the people”

Umm.  Did Luke just say “good news”?  Maybe he missed the part about snakes and wrath and axes and unquenchable fire?  No he couldn’t have, he’s the one that wrote that down.  Maybe it was a typo.  Did anyone else catch the good news in what John had to say?  Obviously Herod didn’t.  He took John and threw him into prison, and not long after, had him killed.  Not much good news there.

Where is the good news in today’s gospel?

Some time ago, a friend of mine was told, quite suddenly, that she had a serious illness, and that it would require major surgery, and that she might not survive.  We spent some time talking, and during the course of our conversation I asked her if she was afraid.  She told me that she wasn’t afraid of dying, but that one of her fears was that in 50 years, no one would even know that she had ever existed.  It would be as if she had never been.  And that got me thinking.  It got me thinking first of all about her courage in the face of death.  But also got me thinking about how one of our greatest fears is insignificance.  The thought that we don’t matter, that we’re not worth anything.  That what we do is of no consequence, that are lives are fundamentally irrelevant.  That fifty or a hundred years from now, when the memories of people around us are no more, it will be as if we never were.  In this vast cosmos, perhaps we’re less important even than a grain of sand which will at least continue to be around long after we’re gone.

But the message of John the Baptist is that our lives do matter.  That there is a God who cares so much about us and our individual lives that he will judge us and hold us to account.  That there is a God who cares enough about human suffering that when he sees it, he gets angry.  In stark contrast to the Greek and Roman religion of 2000 years ago, in stark contrast to the materialist worldview of our own day, each of which in their own way proclaim that human beings are ultimately insignificant and irrelevant, the proclamation of John the Baptist is that each one of us is significant in God’s eyes, that the God who created the heavens and the earth is moved by our pain, and that we will be held to account for the way in which we live and the way in which we treat each other. 

I think that this is good news.  But it is good news with an edge to it, isn’t it?  It’s good news that’s meant to shake us out of complacency, to get past our excuses.  John’s listeners get that, and they ask the question that each one of us should be asking.

What then should we do?

And here, you might expect John to call for something radical, something heroic.  You might expect him to tell them to abandon the world they live in and to come and live with him in the wilderness.  You might expect him to tell the soldiers to become pacifists, or the tax collectors to quit their jobs. 

But he doesn’t.  Instead, he’s surprisingly pragmatic.  To the poor, John tells them that if they have food they should share it, or if they have two coats, they should give one to the person who has none.  To the tax collectors, notorious for overcharging and skimming off the top, he tells them to collect no more than the prescribed amount.  To the soldiers, he tells them to stop abusing their power by extorting money through threats and false accusations.

This is all within reach.  It’s doable.  Faith doesn’t have to be heroic.  John responds to each individual in the crowd in front of him by urging him or her to do justice in her daily life, wherever she is, whatever his circumstance.  That’s what it looks like to bear fruit worthy of repentance.

And this too is good news.  The things that God is calling us to, the way of life that matters to God, is within our reach.  We are being invited to participate in the work of God in a meaningful way, in our ordinary lives, in our homes, in our streets, in our families, in our jobs.  We don’t have to be heroes.  We don’t have to study theology.  We don’t need to become monks or nuns or firefighters or politicians.  We simply need to do justice in our daily lives.

But I don’t want to let you get too comfortable.   John the Baptist never lets us get too comfortable.  His double-barrelled good news that our lives matter and that the way of life we’re being called to is within our reach is delivered as an ultimatum.  Enter into this new way of life, or face the consequences.  And there are consequences to the way we live, to the choices we make, for us and for those around us, in this life, and beyond.  Having lives that matter is a double-edged sword.

Just ask Steve.  Did any of you see the article in the Ottawa Citizen yesterday about Steve Emmons?  Steve was one of the volunteers from The Ottawa Mission’s Food Services Training Program that came and cooked for us at our student BBQ in September.  He’s just graduated from that program and will be going to Algonquin College next year.  A former member of the armed forces, he became an alcoholic and then a crack cocaine addict.  Bad choices, bad circumstances, whatever.  His life fell apart.  His marriage broke up.  He lost contact with his children.  His money was consumed by crack.  He hit bottom.  He lost his will to live.  I think that when John the Baptist talks about the chaff burning in the fire, Steve would know exactly what he was talking about.

The good news that John the Baptist delivers leaves us with a dilemma.  Despite the fact that the way of life he holds out for us is within reach, we know that often we fail to reach it.  In a world with more than enough food, people still go hungry.  Like a crack addict that reaches for cocaine, most of us will spend more on unnecessary things this Christmas than we will give to those in need.  And the word of divine judgement that John the Baptist speaks to us in today’s gospel, would, if we really believed him and if we were honest with ourselves, it would scare the shit out of us.

John’s word is a word of God; but thankfully for us, it is not God’s final word.  One who is mightier than John is coming, one who will be powerful enough to burst through our dilemma in a way that not even John ever imagined or dared to dream of.  There is one coming into our world, into our midst who will proclaim the good news, the good news of our redemption.

Steve Emmons knows a thing or two about redemption.  He crashed and found himself in the Mission’s Lifehouse Rehabilitation program.  He spent five months there, he got help, he was stabilized, got off drugs.  Then he spent five months in the Food Services Training Program, from which he just graduated.  When Steve was asked about the most valuable thing he had learned during his time at the Mission, his reply was simple: “I learned that I’m worth something.”  Reminds me a bit about a story Jesus told about a father and a prodigal son – but we’ll get to that later.

Today’s gospel kind of leaves us hanging, it leaves us waiting in expectation of more.  It is Advent after all, and there is more to come.

John the Baptist proclaims good news.  And it’s going to get better.

Amen.

A Place to Meet (Nov 18 2012)

Homily:   Yr B Proper 33, Nov 18 2012, St. Albans

Readings:  1 Sam 1.4-20, 1 Sam 2:1-10; Hebrews 10:11-25; Mark 13:1-8

To those of you who are visiting with us here today as we celebrate the completion of our renovations, may I say thank you.

And to those of us who have been here throughout the construction of the last year, I think that most of us simply want to say, at last!  At last we’re done with the dust.  At last, we’re ready to open up our church building seven days a week.  At last, we’re ready to welcome Centre 454 as they move in downstairs this week.

Is it just me, or does anyone else find it ironic that on the day that we’re celebrating the renovation of this building of St. Albans, we get a gospel reading where Jesus predicts the destruction of the Temple.  That on a day when I’m encouraging you to appreciate the beauty and architecture of this building, we read about Jesus’ disciples marveling at the beauty and architecture of the Temple buildings in Jerusalem – and then Jesus responds that not one stone of those great buildings will be left standing.

People love big stones.  I did a quick search this week for the world’s top tourist sites, and the lists that Google came up with were dominated by big stone monuments.  The Pyramids in Egypt.  The Great Wall of China.  The Taj Mahal.  The Roman Colisseum.  The Acropolis. Machu Picchu.  There’s something about looking at these massive monuments, monuments to human ingenuity and achievement that appeals to us.  It fills us with awe, and perhaps with a sense of reflected glory. 

In today’s gospel, it appears that the disciples of Jesus are having just that sort of experience.  Remember that they are young folk, from the distant rural area of Galilee.  Here they are in Jerusalem, the capital city, for the first time, and they’re looking at the great Temple built by King Herod.  The stones used for the temple walls were massive, eleven metres by five metres by four metres, and they were precisely shaped to fit together.  And the disciples look at them in amazement and they turn to Jesus and say, “Look, what large stones and what large buildings!”  And Jesus responds, “Do you see these great buildings?  Not one stone will be left, all will be thrown down.”

Now, the disciples immediately ask when?  When will this happen?  And that makes sense.  For those present on that day, the timing mattered, in fact it was a matter of life and death.  But our question isn’t “when?”  We know the answer to that question.  The Temple was destroyed by the Roman army in 70AD, just as Jesus had predicted, the final destructive act of a Jewish – Roman war. 

No, our question this morning isn’t when, but rather why?  Why was it that Jesus told his disciples that the temple would be destroyed.  It’s a question that has many answers, or perhaps it would be better to say an answer with many different layers.

Perhaps it’s simply that Jesus was able to see the hatred with which his own people regarded the Roman enemy, and he could foresee the inevitable consequences for a people who would choose the way of violent rebellion rather than the way of peace.

Or maybe Jesus is intending to make a statement about human achievement, to put it in context.  Despite the Temple’s appearance of permanence and solidity that so impressed the disciples, it was indeed destroyed within a generation as Jesus predicted.  The Temple construction began in 20 BC.  It was completed in 63AD.  It was destroyed seven years later.  Perhaps there is a lesson here for us about the fragility of human accomplishment and about the monuments we build in our own lives.

But the Temple was not just any monument or great building.  In the Jewish understanding, it was much, much more.  It was the place of God’s presence.  It was the centre of the world, the place where heaven and earth meet.  It was  where God and his people came together, the place where forgiveness, atonement and reconciliation happen.  And, as we heard in last week’s readings from the prophet Micah, the Temple was to be the place where all the nations of the earth would stream to receive instruction from the Lord and to learn the ways of peace.

In our Old Testament reading from Samuel this morning we get a glimpse of how the Temple was intended to function.  We hear the story of Hannah, a young woman who is unable to bear children.  In her world that meant insecurity.  It meant vulnerability.  It meant shame.  Hannah is depressed, anxious.  She weeps, she goes to the Temple.  There, she encounters God and pours out her soul to God in prayer.  She is blessed and she leaves Temple at peace.  The Temple, as a place and as a means of facilitating that transformative encounter between Hannah and God, was a good thing.

But by the day of Jesus, the Temple was a good thing which had gone bad.  Instead of serving as a means of reconciliation and a symbol of the relationship between God and the people, it had become a symbol of political power, a symbol of a hierarchical class system of insiders and outsiders, and a means of enriching the elite at the expense of the poor.  It was no longer envisioned as the mountain of peace to which all the nations would stream, but rather had become a symbol of violent national resistance.  Those great stones which Herod had used to build the Temple were intended to be a sign of Herod’s power, not of a restored relationship between God and his people.  And so Jesus prophesies its destruction, not simply as a prediction of future events but as a pronouncement of God’s judgement.  The temple has gone bad, it no longer serves as a means of reconciling God and humanity and so it must be destroyed and replaced by something new.  Again, there is perhaps a lesson for us here about our religious practices and our structures, about how they are constantly in need of renewal to bring them back to their intended purpose of helping to bring us into relationship with God and with each other.

Jesus however wasn’t talking about a program of reform.  The Temple will not be rebuilt – to this day it still hasn’t.  With the destruction of the Temple, the old world was coming to an end and a new world was being born.  In this new world, God and humanity meet not at the place of the Temple, but in the person of Jesus.  Or we might say, as we read in the gospel of John, the word which was God became flesh and dwelt among us.

Our relationship with God, our encounters with the divine are not restricted to any particular places or buildings.

Does that mean we should be tearing down our buildings?

Well, sometimes, yes!  If our church buildings become places of exclusion and oppression, if they become symbols of political power or violence, well then yes, maybe it would be best if they were torn down!

But the Hannah’s of this world need a safe place where they can go.  A sanctuary where they can come in as they are, in anxiety and despair, to be welcomed, to encounter God, to pour out their souls, to be blessed and then to go in peace.  That’s the sort of thing that has been happening within these walls for 145 years.  Not just on Sundays, but throughout the week.  Upstairs and downstairs.

It’s true that we can meet God anywhere.  But we do need a place to meet each other.  The author of the epistle to the Hebrews, reflecting on the new and living way of encountering God that has been provided in Jesus, still has the following advice for us:  Don’t forget to meet together!  And when you meet together, encourage one another and provoke one another to love and good deeds.  Since 1867, people have not only come to this place to meet God, but also to meet together, to encourage one another and to provoke one another to love and good deeds.  Not just on Sundays, but throughout the week.  Upstairs and downstairs. 

So would you do something for me.

I’d like you to turn to the people beside you, perhaps to people you don’t know, and to meet them.  And as you meet, perhaps you can encourage one another and provoke, inspire, encourage, one another to love and good deeds. 

(a time to meet)

We’ll have time for more of this later on.  But for now, thank you for getting our newly renovated building off to a good start.

Amen.

Why Do We Worry? (Thanksgiving, Oct 7 2012)

Homily:  Thanksgiving Sunday, Oct 7 2012, St. Albans

Rdgs:  Joel 2:21-27;Ps 126;1 Tim 2:1-7;Mt 6:25-33

Why do we worry?

I have a confession to make.  Sometimes I find it a challenge to take our Sunday readings and figure out how they are relevant for us today.  Jesus was after all, speaking to people of a different era, living in a different culture some 2000 years ago. 

But not today.  In today’s gospel it is as if Jesus is speaking directly to us, to our time and place.  “Do not worry,” Jesus says.  And he’s speaking to us.  There’s a lot of worrying going on in our world, in our community, in our homes.  So much so that one in nine of us will be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder at some point in our lives.  It is the most common of all mental illnesses in Canada.  We worry a lot, to the point where our worrying can overcome us.  Not only, as our gospel reminds us, can worrying not add a single hour to our lives, but it actually has the opposite effect.  Excessive worrying is a risk factor for heart disease, suppression of the immune system, digestive problems and short term memory loss.

What’s going on here?  Why do we worry so much?  It’s not because we’re bad people.  In fact if anything it’s the opposite.  We want good things in our lives, we want good things for those that we love, for our families and friends.  Parents worry about their children not because they’re bad parents, but because they’re good parents.  But somehow, we’re afraid that we may not get all these good things that we want in our lives and the lives of those around us, and so we worry.  

Is there a solution?

What if some pharmaceutical company developed a medication that if taken daily would reduce your risk of anxiety disorders, enable you to sleep better and have more energy within three weeks?  What if that same drug would also reduce your risk of depression and eating disorders?  And what if it would help you to better manage stress, reduce your risk of substance abuse, boost your immune system and increase your overall health?  In addition, it would increase your usual level of happiness by 25% and increase your overall vitality and life-satisfaction?  And best of all, what if this little pill had absolutely no negative side effects and was available free of charge?

I think we would call that a wonder drug wouldn’t we?  And I’ll bet that there would be a big line-up to get it.

Well I have some good news for you.  It’s available for you right now, right here in this church this morning.  Only it’s not a pill, it’s something much better.  It is the practice of thanksgiving.  Major scientific studies conducted in the past five years at places like the Virginia Institute for Psychiatry and the University of California have empirically verified each one of the claims that I have just made for the practice of thanksgiving.  If you want to check it out for yourself, there is a book called Thanks! by Robert Emmons published a few years ago that summarizes the thankfulness research.  The conclusions are quite clear:  Giving thanks and practicing gratitude is one of the best things that you can do for your health and well-being.  If it were a pill, we would call it a miracle drug.

Now, those of us who are people of faith shouldn’t be so surprised, should we?  After all, medical scientists and researchers are really only playing catch-up with what our Christian tradition has been teaching us for thousands of years.  Our worship is filled with thanksgiving to God.  This morning our celebration is called the eucharist, which is in fact the Greek word for giving thanks.  The first words we sang together this morning were “Give thanks to the Lord, our God and King, his love endures forever.”   Our scriptures are constantly reminding us that it is good and right for us to give thanks to God, and not just to give thanks with our voices but also to show it in our lives.

True gratefulness is the recognition that all that we have, our lives, our wealth, our abilities, all of this is a gift from God which has been entrusted to us for a purpose.  The concrete expression of our thankfulness is to be generous and to share what we have with others.  Generosity is how we walk the talk of thanksgiving.  And not surprisingly, 21^st century scientific research has confirmed this as well:  people who practice thankfulness have been shown to provide more support to others.

So if giving thanks is so good for us, so good for those around us, and is something that our scriptures and Christian tradition urge us to do, then why don’t we do it more often?  And if worrying is so bad for us, and something that Jesus tells us not to do in today’s gospel, why do we spend so much time worrying?

There’s probably much that could be said here, but I’m going to boil it down to two things this morning:  Priorities and Trust.

What are your priorities in life?  What things do you put first, where do you spend your time and energy?  Where do your priorities come from?

There are many forces in our world that try to set our priorities for us.  You don’t have to watch television for very long to figure out that there are people out there trying to convince us that it’s important to have cleaner clothes, or fancy cars, or another credit card or to consume a whole range of products and services that people are trying to sell us.  All these ads are designed to create a desire in us for things that we don’t have.  And it works.  We buy stuff.  We borrow money to buy stuff.  We even buy lottery tickets.  Did you know that in Canada we spend over $7 billion a year on lottery tickets.  That’s roughly the same as the total amount of all charitable donations each year in Canada.  It works out to over $200 per person.  And why do we buy lottery tickets?  Well, you’ve seen the ads on TV.  It’s because if we get lucky and win, we can have all those good things that we want.

And when our priority in life becomes getting all those things that we want for ourselves that we don’t have, guess what happens?  We spend a lot more time worrying than we do giving thanks.

In today’s gospel, Jesus calls on us to change our priorities.  In fact the gospel that we read today is part of a much larger teaching that we usually call the Sermon on the Mount, and in it   Jesus is calling for a radical re-orientation of how we set priorities and live our lives.  And his teaching is summed up in one of the verses that we heard today.

“Strive first for the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

We need to change our priorities.  Instead of being concerned with the things we want, or even the things we need, our priority must be what Jesus calls the kingdom of God:  living in relationship with God and practicing justice towards each other.

I am confident that if we were to make this our priority, we would spend a lot more time practicing thanksgiving and a lot less time worrying.  Because the practice of thanksgiving is at its foundation relational.  The most common way to express thanksgiving is to use two simple words:  “Thank you”.  And by living in relationship with God, we become aware of the “you” on whom our lives depend.  We start to give up any illusions we may have about self-sufficiency and instead become aware of our relationship with God and of all the good things that we have been given in our lives.  And we say thank you.

But we still need stuff, you say.  We still need to eat and we still need clothes, and we still worry about the future of our children and we’re still afraid of illness or losing our jobs.

All of that is true.  God knows that we have needs, food and clothing, health, relationships, a sense of security and so on.  And I think that’s why, in the very same sentence that Jesus uses to re-orient our priorities, he also makes us a promise.

“Seek ye first the kingdom of God and God’s justice, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

This is the promise that Jesus gives us in today’s gospel, an amazing promise, a promise that promises to put an end to all of our worrying.

There’s only one problem.  We don’t believe it.  We find it hard to put our trust in Jesus’ promise.

Make your priority the kingdom of God, put your trust in God, act justly and the rest will be taken care of.

Hard to believe?  Don’t think it’s realistic?

Then, here’s the challenge I’m giving you this week.  Give it a try.  For this one week, starting today, make the things of God your priority.  Put your trust in God, seek to know him, enter into relationship with him, in prayer and in action, striving to act justly in your daily life.  And see how it goes.  See whether you can learn to have faith in God and worry less.  See whether you get more or less of the good things of life by seeking God first.  See whether your understanding of what the good things are changes over the course of the week.  See whether you say thank you more often.

It is the greatest promise that we’ve ever been given.  Can we trust it?

You’ll never know until you give it a try.

Amen.

Hell (Sept 30, 2012)

Homily Yr B Proper 26 Sept 30 2012

Readings:  Esther 7:1-6,9-10;9:20-22; Psalm 124; James 5:13-20; Mark 9:38-50

Hell

The response to our psalm this morning, which we repeated several times together, was  “We have escaped like a bird from the snare of the fowler.”  Now, when that psalm was written, the way a fowler, or bird-hunter would catch a bird would be to set up a trap or snare, so that when the bird landed in a particular place, it would trigger the snare and a net would fall on the bird.  And as the bird would try to get away, flapping its wings and running with its feet, it would get all tangled up in the net.  And the more it would struggle and flap and kick, the more tangled it would get, caught up in the cords of the net and unable to get away. 

It is, I think, a good image of our human situation.  Often enough, we seem to get all tangled up in a net, and the harder we try to break free, the more we seem to get stuck.  Sometimes we end up dragging other people into the net, and they become tangled as well. 

In our scriptures, the net that tangles us and prevents us from being free is called sin, or sometimes evil.  Sometimes we are the ones who are responsible for the net, sometimes its others who throw the net on us, but often it’s just a tangle of cords that seem to be all around us and our communities, something in the system that is of our own making, but no one seems to be able to get rid of it.  And that is tragic.

Do you remember the incident of Korean Air Line 007 which was shot down over Soviet Airspace in 1983, amidst allegations that it was a spy plane?  269 people died in this tragic event, and the world was brought to the brink of nuclear war.  Now over twenty years later, now that the Cold War has ended and we have access to classified documents and the transcripts of the plane’s flight recorder we have a clearer idea of what happened.  It seems that a sleepy crew of the passenger plane with an imperfectly calibrated auto-pilot system made the mistake of leaving the plane on auto-pilot as they left Alaska heading towards Japan.  They drifted into Soviet airspace.  The Soviet air force scrambled two MIG fighters to intercept flight 007.  The pilot of one of those planes was a Colonel named Gennadi Osipovich.  He wasn’t even supposed to be on duty, but he had switched shifts with another pilot so that he could volunteer at his son’s school the next day. 

When Osipovich flew his MIG jet alongside the flight 007, he recognized it as a Boeing civilian plane.  His superiors insisted that it was a spy plane and ordered him to shoot it down.  Osipovich tried to make radio contact.  Nothing.  He flashed his lights.  He waggled his wings.  Still no response.  He fired warning shots.  He was told six times by his ground controller to fire on the plane.  And under the pressure of time, just as the Boeing was about to leave Soviet airspace to re-enter international airspace, he fired his missiles and brought down flight 007, sending 269 people to their deaths, an act that will haunt him for the rest of his life.

Gennadi Osipovich was caught in a net.  He was caught in a net of suspicion, of hostility between East and West, of Cold War military procedures, of a history of spying and airspace violations.  He was caught in a net of sin and evil that was so tangled that he found no way out.  Gennady Osipovich is a tragic figure.

God wants to free us from the net that has us all tangled up, the net that turns us into tragic figures like Gennady Osipovich.  God has promised to put the entire world right, showing up evil for what it is and judging it so that it no longer has the power to infect his good creation.

Which is why in our Gospel reading today, Jesus talks to his disciples about hell.

“If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire.”

What do you think of when you hear the word “hell”?

  

Hell is something we don’t talk about much in the church, at least in the Anglican church.  In part that is because our common notion of hell is grounded in the picture that arose in the middle ages, in the writings of Dante and others.  The most common idea about hell in our culture is that it has something to do with the after-life, that when people die, that God will sort them into two lots, and the good people will go to heaven and the bad people will go to hell, a place of damnation and eternal punishment.  And that sort of picture makes many of us really uncomfortable, uncomfortable with the notion that a loving God would let some people end up in that sort of hell.

So I think that it’s important to go back to our scriptures, to go back to the teaching of Jesus to try to understand what he meant when he used the word “gehenna”, the Greek word that we translate as hell.

It’s a word that Jesus doesn’t use very often, recorded just a dozen times in the New Testament, and three of those are in today’s gospel reading.  So let’s look at today’s reading.

Notice, first of all, that in Jesus teaching, the opposite of hell is not heaven, but life.  If you look at Jesus’ sayings, they say that it is better to enter life than to go to hell.  The emphasis is not on life after death, but on life, now and in the future.  Notice as well that in the third saying, Jesus switches from saying “enter life” to “enter the kingdom of God”, something that in other places, Jesus will say “has come near” or “is in your midst”.  Again, this isn’t just about an afterlife, he seems to be talking about something that is both present and future.

And the word that we translate as hell is also revealing.  Gehenna, the word Jesus uses, is actually a place name.  It is the Hebrew name for the Valley of Hinnom which is found on the south west side of Jerusalem.  It is the garbage dump of the city of Jerusalem, the place where garbage from the city is dumped and burned, with a fire that burns day and night.  Not only is garbage dumped there, but sewage from the city also ends up in the Valley of Hinnom.  To make matters worse, child sacrifice used to be practiced there, because of this the valley had been condemned as an evil place by prophets such as Jeremiah. 

This is the word that Jesus uses in today’s gospel.  Gehenna is the valley where evil, filth and garbage are sent to be destroyed in a fire that burns day and night.  Gehenna then, is a real place, a real garbage dump, which becomes the image of what God will do to destroy all that is evil and filthy, the eternal fire which burns all the garbage that has polluted God’s good creation.

This is the New Testament image of hell.  Hell is the place of fire which burns everything that opposes what God wants for the life of his people and his good creation.

Are people oppressed by war and violence?  To hell with war and violence.

Does a little child suffer from abuse?  To hell with child abuse.

Does someone you know suffer from addiction?  To hell with it.

To hell with all these things that oppress us and prevent us from living life as God intended us to live.  Let them burn and be destroyed.

And Jesus, using the exaggeration typical of his culture, tells his disciples, even if it’s your foot that’s the preventing you from living life as God intended, well to hell with it - but don’t you go with it.  Better for you to enter life, to enter the Kingdom of God with only one foot.

Of course, it’s not our foot that’s the problem.  But remember the net that we were talking about?  The net of sin and evil and garbage that we so often get all tangled up in?  It’s that net that God will judge and send to hell for destruction, so that we can be free to enter life, to enter the kingdom of God without being all tangled up in it, without being caught in it.

  

That is good news.  But that doesn’t mean that everything is easy.  Because it’s hard to get ourselves untangled from the net.  In fact, we may have gotten so used to being stuck in the net that it starts to feel comfortable, a bit like home in a perverse sort of way.  We can’t get untangled by ourselves.  We need to be saved, like the bird who is set free from the snare of the fowler and enabled to fly once more.

Jesus says to us, turn and follow me and I will set you free.

We all get tangled up in the net of sin and evil.  Some of it’s our own fault, much of it is out of our control.  But if we turn to God, God has promised to forgive our sins and to set us free.  The net will go to hell, to be destroyed in the fire, so that all God’s creatures can live as God intended them to live, now and for all eternity.

Amen.

With acknowledgement and thanks to Dr. Thomas Long, who told us the story of Gennadi Osipovich in Ottawa at a 2009 clergy conference.

The Journey of Faith (Sept 16 2012)

Homily:  Yr B Proper 24, Sept 16  2012, St. Albans

Readings:  Prov 1:20-33; Wisdom 7:26-8:1; James 3:1-12; Mk 8:27-38

The Journey of Faith

This morning we baptize Isaac.  It’s a time for celebration, and we will celebrate.  But baptism isn’t just a celebration.  It’s serious stuff.  As Jesus himself reminds us in today’s gospel, being a follower of Jesus isn’t trivial. It’s serious. 

The baptism we will celebrate is a rich sacrament , a symbol which incorporates many different images and meanings.  One of these meanings is the one that I talked about with the children earlier.  Baptism is a sign of the new life that we have in Christ, it is a symbol of new birth, of being born as a child of God and adopted into God’s family, into the family that we call the church.

But we are also baptized, and Isaac too will be baptized, into the death and resurrection of Jesus.   Baptism is a sign that we have become followers of Jesus, the one who said that “if any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

It’s not always easy to follow Jesus.  Have you ever noticed that in the gospel of Mark, Jesus is always on the move?  Always going somewhere, always on a journey.  Today’s gospel reading is a turning point in that journey, quite literally.  Jesus and his followers start out by heading north, and then they turn around 180 degrees and travel in the opposite direction towards the south.  Why did Jesus go to Caesarea Philippi?

Some of us here are old enough to remember the Cold War, the period of conflict and confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States and its allies.  The height of the Cold War was in the early 60’s.  In 1962 there was the Cuban Missile Crisis.  In 1961 the Berlin Wall was built. In the early 60’s the atmosphere in West Berlin was tense, there was the constant threat of invasion.

In 1963, John F. Kennedy went to Berlin, to the farthest frontier of Western Europe.  And standing in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, with a million people gathered in the streets, he made his famous statement “Ich bin ein Berliner”.  I am a Berliner.  And with those words he pledged the full might of the American military to protect the people of West Berlin against the aggression of the Soviet Union.  And the crowds cheered, because Kennedy had said what they hoped he would say, what they expected him to say, what they had been longing to hear.

In the year 33 AD, Jesus went to Caesarea Philippi.  Caesarea Philippi was at the very northern frontier of the land of Israel.  It was a Roman city, built in honour of the Roman Emperor.  It had a gleaming white marble temple dedicated to Augustus Caesar, Son of God, Saviour of the World.  For a Jew in the year 33 AD, Caesarea Philippi was the symbol of everything that was wrong, everything that was evil in the world.  The Jewish people had been under Roman occupation since 63 BC. The last hundred years had been a time of festering resentment, violent protests, humiliation and shame.  Every Jew dreamed of the day that the Romans would be overthrown and defeated.

Jesus led his disciples and the crowds that followed him on a long journey from Galilee to Caesarea Philippi, with its blasphemous temple dedicated to Augustus Caesar, and its threatening military barracks housing the Roman Legion.  In the crowd that followed Jesus were people whose mothers and fathers had been killed by Roman soldiers in the Galilean rebellions of the year 6 AD.  The crowd must have been nervous; they must have wondered why he was leading them to Caesarea Philippi.

And as they come within sight of the city walls, Jesus pulls his closest followers aside and asks them, “Who do people say that I am?”

And they answered him, “some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, and still others, one of the prophets.”

And then Jesus asks them, “But you, who do you say I am?”

And I can imagine Peter, looking at Jesus, and then looking at the Roman city with its temple and soldiers.  I can imagine the events of the past few months running through Peter’s mind, the huge crowds that gathered wherever Jesus went, they way they follow him and hang on his every word, Jesus acts of power, the growing conflict with the authorities.

And all of a sudden he gets it.  Jesus is the one, the one sent by God, the one that all of Israel has been hoping for and dreaming of for hundreds of years, the one who will save his people. 

“You are the Messiah.”

The Messiah.  The one the prophets had promised that God would send.  The one who would purify Israel, re-establish its supremacy among the nations, defeat the Romans and usher in a new era of peace.

I’m sure Peter expected that at any moment Jesus would address the crowd in the fashion of JFK, or of a great military leader and announce his mission, declaring that anyone who wanted to join with him to overthrow Rome must be ready “to deny themselves, take up their sword, and follow me.”   And with that they would begin the long march to Jerusalem, gathering strength along the way.

But Jesus doesn’t do that.  Instead, Jesus begins to teach them that he must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the authorities, and be killed, and after three days rise again.

And when Jesus addresses the crowd, there is no talk of taking up the sword.  Instead they are told to take up their cross.  The instrument of Roman terror and torture.  The cross, that burden, which as a final act of humiliation, the Romans would make a convicted rebel carry to his own execution. 

There were no cheers from the crowd.

At first Peter tries to convince Jesus that he’s got it wrong.  He takes Jesus aside and rebukes him.  But Jesus in turn lets Peter have it, right in front of all the others.  There is to be no misunderstanding on this.  Jesus will not be the Messiah they are expecting. 

And with this, Peter’s hopes and dreams, his expectations are crushed.  He is angry, he is embarrassed, he doesn’t understand, but most of all he is profoundly disappointed.

Like Peter, sometimes we don’t get the God we want.  What do you do when God doesn’t meet your expectations?  When God disappoints us?

I was told a story of a small rural congregation in which one of the woman became very ill. 

This congregation rallied together.  They held prayer vigils for the woman who was ill, they visited and provided support, and they had a tremendous faith that God would heal the woman.  They expected God to restore her to health.

Sadly, after some time, after many prayer services, the woman died.  And the congregation was devastated.  They experienced doubt.  The God they had hoped for, that they had expected, didn’t show up.  And they were profoundly disappointed.

Somewhere along our journey, something of the same sort will happen to us.  There will be times in life when things are hard, when we are lonely, when there is sadness or illness or brokenness.  There will be times when the God we want and expect doesn’t show up. 

You know, when I read today’s Gospel earlier this week, I came at it with the assumption that Jesus is my role model.  That this Jesus who teaches that he will suffer and be put to death, that this Jesus who teaches us to deny ourselves and take up the cross like he did, that’s what I’m supposed to be like. 

But that’s hard.  I don’t know if I can be like that.  Honestly, I don’t think I can ever live up to that standard.  I don’t know if I even understand what it means for me in my culture to take up my cross and follow Jesus.  This gospel became more and more disconcerting to me.  I started to have doubts. 

It’s not that I don’t accept Jesus teaching.  I do.  When I read about people like Oscar Romero or Mahatma Ghandi or Mother Teresa, I am awestruck and full of admiration.  It’s just that I’m not sure that I’m up to that sort of thing, in fact I’m pretty sure I’m not.

And that’s when I discovered that there’s another role model for me in today’s gospel.    And that’s Peter.  Peter.  The one who gets it wrong.  The one who gets chewed out.  The one who doesn’t understand, the one who is profoundly disappointed.  Because you know what Peter does?  He continues to follow Jesus.  He doesn’t know why Jesus is doing what he’s doing.  He is full of doubts and fears.  He doesn’t understand.  But somehow, in spite of all that, he has faith. 

Somehow Peter realizes that even though Jesus may not be what he wants, and Jesus may not be what he expects, Jesus is the one in whom he can put his trust.  And so at a time when many in the crowd turn away from Jesus, Peter follows.  Peter walks the journey of faith, dogged by doubt and fear and misunderstanding and missteps along the way.  It won’t be until Easter morning, three days after Jesus prediction of his own death has come true, that Peter will finally get to look into an empty tomb, and start, just start, to understand.

Our journey is like that.  Isaac’s journey will be like that.  We don’t have to have it altogether.  We don’t need to understand everything.  We will be disappointed, we will have doubts along the way.  We will be tempted to turn back.  But all these things are part of the journey of faith, the journey that each one of us embarked on at our own baptism.  Just ask Peter.  

Amen.