This is who we are (October 2 2011)

Homily:  Yr A P27, October 2 2011, St. Albans

Readings:  Ex 20:1-4,7-9,12-20; Ps 19; Phil 3:4b-14; Mt 21:33-46

“This is who we are”

I love Psalm 19, the psalm that we read together today.

“The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handiwork;

One day tells its tale to another and one night imparts knowledge to another.”

I get that.  I’ve experienced the glory of God in creation.  I’ve looked up at the stars on a clear, dark night, and felt awe and wonder.  I’ve had those “wow” moments when I watched the sunset, or the wind blowing through the trees, and I’ve said to myself that there must be a God.

“Although they have no words or language, and their voices are not heard,

their sound has gone out into all lands, and their message to the ends of the world.”

I get the first half of Psalm 19.

But I don’t get the second half.  The first half is an ode to creation, to the glory of God expressed and revealed through creation.

The second half is an ode to the law.

“The law of the Lord is perfect and revives the soul.”

“It rejoices the heart, it gives light to the eyes.”

“It is more to be desired than gold, much more than fine gold,

sweeter far than honey, than honey in the comb.”

What’s that all about?

Think about it.  Our governments pass laws all the time.  When was the last time that you heard a poem or a love song being sung about a piece of legislation passed by the Canadian government?

Where does this psalmist’s love affair with the law come from?

In our first reading today from Exodus we heard what are usually called the Ten Commandments, or the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai. We usually think of these words as a moral code, as a set of laws given to the people of Israel by God to govern their behaviour.   That’s why we tend to call them Commandments”, though the Hebrew text actually calls them the “Ten Words” of God.  And certainly these words can and do serve as the basis for moral and legal codes.  Not only did they serve as the basis for the legal code of ancient Israel, but they still inform our justice system in Canada today.

But these words are not simply a legal code.

This fall I took my son Jonathan to Queen’s for the start of his university education, and in the process, I took a bit of a stroll down memory lane, remembering when I first went to Queen’s some 30 years ago.  And one memory in particular struck me.  I remember one evening as 17 year old, walking along the shores of Lake Ontario, having just left family and friends behind in Ottawa, in the process of making new friends, and starting on a new path in life.  And I distinctly remember thinking “I can be anybody I want to be”.  I was no longer defined by my past, I no longer had to live up to the expectations of my parents or my high school or my home town.  Nobody even knew my back story anymore, except what I wanted to tell them.  It was a moment of tremendous freedom.

The people of Israel were at that sort of a crossroads in today’s reading.  They had been for generations slaves in Egypts.  That was who they had been, that had been their identity, that’s what had defined them.  But that past was gone.  They had been brought out of slavery in Egypt.  They had crossed the Red Sea.  The waters had closed behind them and there was no going back.  They were no longer slaves, they were free, but who were they to be?  If we’re no longer captive to our past, what is to be our future?

And God speaks.  Just as God spoke in the beginning to create the heavens and the earth, in today’s text, God speaks in the wilderness of Sinai to create a people.  He offers the people of Israel a covenant, a deal, an agreement between God and Israel which would establish a new relationship between God and the people.  And in its simplest terms, the new relationship on offer boils down to this:  “I will be your God, and you will be my people.”

But what does it mean to be God’s people?  In order for the people to understand, something more had to be expressed.  And so what God spoke were the “Ten Words” that we heard this morning. 

Then God spoke all these words:  “I am the Lord your God, the one who brought you out of slavery in Egypt.”  And this is who you are, this what it means for you to be my people.  You are a people who shall have no other gods before me.  You shall not make for yourself idols.  You shall not make wrongful use of my name, you shall remember the sabbath and keep it holy.  You shall honour your parents, and you shall not murder, commit adultery, steal, bear false witness against your neighbour nor covet anything that is your neighbour’s.

These words of God certainly can be used and have been used to generate moral and legal codes, nothing wrong with that.  But their primary function is not ethical.  The primary function of the ten commandments is to answer the question of identity.  The question is who are we as a people, as a community?  And the answer?  We are God’s people, and this is how we express that in our lives.  We are a community of commitment to God and compassion to our neighbour.  That is who we are, that is who we are called to be, that is what we intend to be, that is what it means to be the people of God.

This is God’s proposal:  I will be your God and you will be my people.  The Ten Commandments are all about that relationship, and our response to the gift of that relationship.  Yes, we respond, you will be our God, and we will live into that by having no other gods, by not making idols, by not using your name wrongfully and by remembering the sabbath.  Yes, we respond, we will be your people, and we will live into that by honouring our parents, and by not murdering, committing adultery, stealing, lying or coveting.  And in so doing, we will be what you called us to be, a community that is a blessing to all peoples and a light to the world.

The covenant with God and the Torah which gave it expression established Israel as the people of God and gave them the gift of identity and purpose in their communal life.  It completed that transformation from being slaves in Egypt to being a new community living in freedom as the people of God, living in relationship with God.  And that’s why it was such a delight, that’s why the psalmist is able to sing in today’s psalm that the law of the Lord is more to be desired than fine gold, and sweeter far than honey.  It is a love song.

But it’s easy to forget who we are.  Sometimes we lose sight of our identity as the people of God, sometimes we forget that our purpose is to love God and to love our neighbour.  And when that happens, sometimes all we have left is the legal code.  I think that’s at least part of what Paul’s getting at in today’s reading from Philippians.

And how about today’s gospel, Jesus parable of the landowner who planted a vineyard and leased it to tenants?  It seems to me that the fundamental problem with the tenants in the parable that we heard today is that they’ve forgotten who they are.

The image of the vineyard and the one who planted it is used throughout the Old Testament as an image of the relationship between God and his people.  Hear for example this song from the book of Isaiah:

“Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard.  My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill.  He dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines.”

Isaiah’s image of the vineyard is set as a love song.  It is the image of a people in love with their God.

But in Jesus parable they’ve forgotten that this is a love song.  The relationship between tenant and landowner has been reduced to an economic arrangement, and a power struggle and competing interests.  The fundamental problem, underlying the greed and the beatings and the murder, is that the tenants have forgotten who they are.  They are the ones who are loved by the landowner and are to love the landowner in return.

You’ll notice that the landowner in Jesus parable hasn’t forgotten.  That landowner is so steadfast in his love for the tenants that he seems to have lost his senses.  Sending a second contingent of slaves after the first had been beaten doesn’t seem all that sensible to me.  And then sending his son after that seems to be nothing more than craziness on the landowner’s part.

But is that how far God is willing to go to remind us of who we are, to recall us to who we are.  Even when we seem to have lost our sense of identity, even when we’ve lost track of the meaning and purpose of our lives, even when we rebel and cause harm, God is willing to come to us and remind us of who we are and what we are for.

You are my precious vineyard.  You are my beloved, my chosen people, the ones that I have called to live lives of compassion, to be a blessing to others and to be a light to the world.

I will be your God, and you will be my people.

Amen.

"It's not fair" (Sept 18, 2011)

Homily:  Yr A Proper 25, Sept 18 2011, St. Albans

Readings:  Exodus 16:2-15; Ps 105:1-6, 37-45; Phil 1:21-30; Mt 20:1-16

“It’s not fair”

Humans, it seems, are born with an innate sense of fairness.  It never ceases to astonish me how quick children are to have a sense of what’s fair and what’s not.  In fact, after children have learned to say their first words, mama and dada and so on, sometimes it seems like the first sentence that comes out of their mouths is “it’s not fair.”  Especially if they have brothers or sisters. 

I have a younger brother.  And when we were kids, because he was younger, he had certain privileges.  I imagine I had privileges too, but I’ve forgotten what my privileges were.  But I sure remember his privileges.  Like if there were two pieces of cake, he used to get to pick first.  That’s not fair is it?  I knew it wasn’t fair, and so I came up with my own strategy.  If he was going to get to pick first, then I was going to do the dividing.  And believe me, I developed as a young child the rare talent of being able to take the most irregular piece of cake you could find, and cut it into two pieces so evenly that it was impossible to detect a difference in size with the naked eye.  Because that was the only way to make things fair.

And like so many things in our human nature, our innate sense of fairness can develop into something good, or it can develop into something which is not so good as we get older.  If, as we grow and mature, our sense of fairness can be directed towards the well-being of others, it becomes the foundation of justice, and striving after justice in our world is a very good thing.

However.  If our primary concern about fairness remains at the level of what I judge to be fair for me, if our drive for fairness remains captive to ego and self-concern, if we continue to be outraged if someone else’s piece of cake, or house, or salary or whatever is bigger than mine, then we have a problem. 

“The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire labourers for his vineyard.”

  

The first concern of the day labourers in Jesus parable is to get hired for the day.  If you were hired you could return home that night and feed your family.  If you weren’t hired, you couldn’t.  Being a labourer in Jesus day was tough.  It meant that you didn’t have land of your own to work.  There were more workers than there was work.  Some days you wouldn’t get hired.  So you can imagine the sense of relief and even of joy that those first labourers experienced when they went to the usual place in the market and were hired early in the morning by the land owner.

“The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire labourers for his vineyard”

 It turns out this landowner is a bit unusual.  Because he returns to the marketplace later in the day, and hires more workers, and he does it again, and finally, at five o’clock in the afternoon, with just one more hour left in the work day, he returns to the market one last time. Still waiting there is one last group of dejected, anxious, unemployed workers.  They’ve been waiting all day in the marketplace, hoping for work, even though they must have known by late afternoon that it was now too late.  But on this day it’s not too late.  The landowner hires them, every single last one of them, to work in his vineyard.

“The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who returns at 5 o’clock to hire labourers for his vineyard.”

At the end of the day, surely to their astonishment, those who were hired at 5 pm are paid a full day’s wage by the landowner.

And those who have worked a full day, and have yet to be paid, well, they’re watching pretty closely.  They start to do their calculations.  They should get paid more, after all, they’ve worked twelve times more hours than the latecomers.

The landowner calls them forward at last and he pays them the same wage, the usual daily wage.  And what do they do?  They grumble.  They complain.  They cry out “it’s not fair!”

And those of us who listen to the story, we get it, don’t we?  We can all put ourselves in the place of those labourers, we’ve all been in similar situations.  All of us at various times in our lives have cried out “it’s not fair”.

When I graduated from Engineering in 1984, it was the tail end of the recession.  There were 31 people in my graduating class, 29 men and 2 women.  The unemployment rate in Canada was over 12%, the highest level since the Great Depression of the 1930’s.  It was tough to get a job.  In fact of the 31 people in my class, only two graduates landed a job.  The two women.  “It’s not fair” cried out all the men.

And yet, wasn’t it great that Karen and Jennifer had found good jobs upon graduation?  And wasn’t it true that we were, all of us, a privileged bunch?  We had just received a wonderful education.  Many of us ended up going to grad school, and went on to interesting, well-paying jobs.  We had many, many things for which to be grateful.  And yet sometimes, instead of focusing on the good stuff and giving thanks to God for all the gifts that we’ve been given, our preoccupation with what’s fair for us can lead us to focus on what we don’t have, and we grumble, and we complain, and we are envious and we are resentful.

I want you to try something this morning.  I want each of you to take two of these small cards, and to get yourself a pencil.  If you don’t have the cards or pencils, you can get one from the people coming around.

Now I want you to do the following.

On one card, write “Gratitude” at the top.  On that card, I want you to write down some things that you are grateful for today, things in your life, or in the life of someone else.  Go ahead.

(pause)

Now on the other card, write “Resentment” on the top.  On this second card, I want you to write down things that you are resentful about, or that make you envious, or cause you to grumble.  Something that makes you want to say “it’s not fair”.  Don’t worry, nobody else is going to read this, it’s just for you, so be honest.  This one might be a bit harder for some of us, because sometimes we don’t like to admit our resentments to ourselves.

(give some time)

Ok, so now we each have two cards, a gratitude card and a resentment card.  Most of the time we carry both of these around with us.  If you take one in each hand, you’ll find that they weigh about the same, don’t they?  But that’s only their physical weight.  Because emotionally, socially, relationally, spiritually, their weight is completely different.

This one, resentment, is like having an anchor around your neck.  Like having your feet cast in concrete or a ball and chain around your ankle.  It will bring you down.  It will eat away at you.  It will make you blind.  It will screw up your sense of judgement.  If you suppress it, it will become depression.  If you indulge it, it will become anger.  That’s resentment.

This one, gratitude, on the other hand, is the very opposite.  It will lift you up.  It will give you wings.  You don’t have to take my word for it.  Major research studies over the past five years have shown that gratitude practiced daily can do the following:  it will enable you to sleep better and have more energy in just three weeks.  It can reduce your risk of depression, anxiety disorders and eating disorders.  It will help you better manage stress, boost your immune system and increase your overall health.  And, it will increase your usual level of happiness by 25% and increase your overall vitality and life-satisfaction!  That’s gratitude.

You have a choice to make.  You have a way of life to practice.  When you look at your life, do you count your blessings or your misfortunes?  Do we pay attention to the areas of plenty in our lives, or to those things that we lack?  You have two cards in your hands.  Don’t carry both of these cards around with you.  Someone will be coming back around with a garbage basket, and I want you to make a choice.  You have two cards in your hand, Gratitude and Resentment.  Choose to keep one of your cards, and let go of the other.

The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire labourers for his vineyard.  In Jesus’ parable, the landowner acts with a generosity that transcends, even offends, human standards of fairness.  May we respond not with resentment but with gratitude and thanksgiving.

Amen.

Forgiveness (Sept 11, 2011)

Homily:  Yr A Proper 23, Sept 11 2011, St. Albans

Readings:  Gen 50:15-21; Psalm 103:8-13; Rom 14:1-12; Mt 18:21-35

Forgiveness

I am remember once, back when I was in Sunday School, the Sunday School teacher, who happened to be my father, was going through the Lord’s Prayer with us.  When we got to the part which says “and forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us,” he paused, and asked to us, is that really what you want to pray for?  How good are you at forgiving others when they do something wrong to you?

We all had to admit that we weren’t really very good at forgiving others.  Forgiveness is hard.  So do we really want God to forgive us in the same way that we forgive others?  We decided that no, we wanted God to be much more forgiving towards us then we were towards others.  And so we decided that something must have been lost in the translation, that the Lord’s Prayer should really say “Forgive us our sins as we should forgive those who sin against us”. And later on during the service, when we were back in church, when it came time for the Lord’s Prayer, you could hear all the twelve year olds in the church insert the word “should”.

Many years later, after I’d been subjected to the rigours of studying Greek in my theology program, I went back to look and see if anything actually had been lost in translation.  And as you might expect, I discovered that the Bible translators did have it right – there is no “should” in the original Greek.  And to reinforce the point, to make sure that we don’t try to wiggle out of what he is trying to teach us about forgiveness, Jesus tells us the hard, challenging parable of the unforgiving slave that we heard in today’s gospel reading.

Forgiveness is hard.  Forgiveness is complicated.  In today’s Old Testament reading from Genesis we get the last episode in the story of Joseph and his brothers.  You might recall that Joseph’s brothers had beaten Joseph and thrown him into a pit, and then sold him into slavery.  Joseph was taken as a slave into Egypt, but eventually ended up as the Pharoah’s governor.  Many years later, because of a famine, the brothers come to Egypt looking for food, and they encounter Joseph, though they don’t recognize him.  Now, Joseph doesn’t forgive them right away.  He torments them for a little while.  He plants valuables in their bags and has them arrested for theft.  And so when Joseph finally does reveal himself to his brothers, they are terrified.  They are afraid that Joseph will seek revenge for the evil they had done to him.  But Joseph forgives them, and provides for them and their families.

You might think that would be the end of the story.  But forgiveness is complicated.  In today’s reading, we have the brothers coming back to ask Joseph for forgiveness again.  So what gives here?  Haven’t we already been through this? It seems that the first time around, even though they were forgiven by Joseph, they did not experience forgiveness.  Their guilt was still with them, their fears were still there.  Rather than the experience of forgiveness, their initial experience seems to have been more like a stay of execution, or a deal with strings attached, or a favour to their father who is now dead.  Sometimes, even when we are forgiven by another, or by God, we don’t believe it, we don’t experience it, and we find ourselves hanging on to the sin that our brother, or our spouse, or God has let go of.

What is forgiveness?  The Hebrew word used for forgiveness has the sense of “to lift up”.  To remove someone’s burden. Think of two hikers going on a long hiking trip together, call them Bill and John, each of them carrying 40 kilogram packs on their backs.  That’s a lot of weight.  It’s been a long day, a tough slog.  And at the end of the day, when Bill and John finally reach their camping spot, they stop, and Bill walks behind John and lifts that heavy pack off his back and sets it down.  Imagine how good that must feel.  If you’ve ever been on a long hiking trip, you know how good that would feel.  Well that’s what forgiveness feels like.  The lifting up of a heavy burden that weighs us down.  John at the end of the day hiking certainly knows how good that feels.

Then Bill, who’s still wearing his pack, turns to John and says, “Can you give me a hand getting my pack off?”  What do you think John will do?  Well of course he’s going to lift that pack right off of Bill’s back, won’t he?

Now let’s think about that a bit.  Why does he do it?  Why does he help Bill with his pack?  Is it a transactional thing, he helps Bill because Bill helped him?  No, I don’t think that’s it.  Is it an ethical thing, he helps Bill because he wants to be an ethical person and he owes Bill a duty of care?  No, if you were to ask him I don’t think he would say that either.

I think if you were to ask John why he lifted that burden off Bill’s back, he would say that it’s because he knows how good it is to be relieved of a heavy burden.  Once you know that, once you’ve experienced it, you just get it, it’s what you do, you just live that way.

I think that forgiveness is a bit like that.  Jesus’ teaching around forgiveness is not meant to be understood primarily as an ethical demand, something that you should do.  Jesus teaching on forgiveness is not meant to be understood as a transactional model, an “if this then that” equation.  I believe that Jesus’ teaching on forgiveness is an invitation to us to enter into a new way of living, a way of living marked not by calculation but by loving.  A way of living, a way of being, that Jesus calls the kingdom of God.

The slave in Jesus parable is offered the opportunity to be born into this new way of living when his debt is forgiven by the king.  But he misses the opportunity.  Even after his debt is gone, he’s still captive to a way of living in which debts are owed to one another, in which we keep score, in which we have to earn our way.  Forgiveness is different.  Forgiveness is not transactional, it is an interconnected experience of healing and relief from burdens.  It is a different way of living.  It is the way of living that Paul referred to in one of our readings a few weeks ago in Romans, when he said that the only debt we owe each other is to love one another.  All other debts are forgiven.  The slave in Jesus parable, even though the king has forgiven his debts, has not experienced forgiveness.  His failure to extend to others the mercy that he has received from God shows that he is trapped, doomed to a life of relentless calculations and emotional scarcity.

Jesus is inviting us into a better way of living than that.  The way of the kingdom of God.  If you want to understand why the seventh line of the Lord’s prayer says “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us”, go back and look at the third line:  “Your kingdom come on earth as in heaven.”

Jesus is inviting us into the life of the kingdom.  And the entry point into that life is forgiveness, it’s understanding, and feeling and experiencing and rejoicing in the mercy and compassion that God has extended to us.  God wants us to know that despite our brokenness and sinfulness, despite anything we have done or not done, we are forgiven and we have been reconciled with God.  He wants us to know that so badly that he sent his only Son to die for us on the cross, bearing the weight of all that sin and brokenness.  That weight has been lifted off our shoulders and we have been healed. 

When you think of God, if someone was to ask you what God was like, how would you respond?

Would it surprise you to learn that some surveys report that one of the most common images people have for God is that of a border-crossing guard?  Sounds kind of transactional and rule-based, doesn’t it?

What’s your image?

Would you, like today’s psalmist, be able to say from your own experience that God is full of compassion and mercy, slow to anger and of great kindness.  That as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our sins from us?

Know that you have been forgiven, and be born into the new life of the Kingdom of God, a life in which lifting burdens from others is what we do.

Amen.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name (September 4, 2011)

Homily:  Yr A Proper 23, Sept 4 2011, St. Albans

Readings:  Ex 12:1-14, Ps 149, Rom 13:8-14, Mt 18:15-20

I have to tell you that there are a few things that really bug me in today’s readings.  And yet, as this past week progressed, as I wrestled my way through the stuff that bugs me, I also realized that there’s a lot of great stuff too.  Often that’s my experience when I go through the Bible readings that are appointed for any particular week.  The bits that I have problems with jump right out at me, and it’s only after I’ve come to some sort of peace with these that I see the richness of what lies underneath.

Often, by the time we reach Sunday, those of us who preach on a Sunday morning will just skip right over the problem bits and go straight to the good stuff.  But sometimes, maybe it’s good to open the kimono a bit and talk about the problems.  Are you okay if I do that this morning?

Let’s take the Exodus reading.  It reminds me of the time I was invited as a guest to a Sunday School class of 12 year olds, and the teacher told the kids they could ask me any question they wanted about the Bible.

First question:  “Why would God give us the ten commandments and then proceed to break every single one of them?”

My response:  “what do you mean Johnny?”

“Well we’re told not to murder, but God went and murdered all the first-born Egyptians”

It’s a problem isn’t it.  It was problem for Johnny and it’s a problem for us.  I have a hard time believing that the God who was revealed in Jesus Christ would do such a thing.  But our text today says that’s what God did.

Marcus Borg has just written a new book called ‘Speaking Christian’ in which he makes the point that it is important to be able to say that in some places the authors of the biblical text may have got it wrong.  It may be that the ancient Israelites, who were much more familiar with “an eye for an eye” than “love your enemies”, got it wrong when they interpreted whatever happened back in Egypt as God striking down the Egyptian first-born.

People like me and Johnny need to have the space to wrestle with these difficult bits in order to get to the beauty and richness of the text.  Because once I’ve got past the problem I have with God striking down the first born, then I can open up to so much more of what this text has to say:  that God heard the cries of an oppressed people, and acted in history to rescue them and brought them out of slavery in Egypt.  And that God gave them a founding story, the Exodus, and a ritual event, the Passover, which would shape and mold this people into a community, perhaps the most cohesive and enduring community in the entire history of human civilization.

If there is a common theme in today’s readings, it is the theme of community.  It’s certainly present in Paul’s letter to the Romans.  In today’s reading, Paul exhorts the Christians in Rome to love one another, for love is the fulfilling of the law.  Communities may have rules and practices and even constitutions, but what makes a community really tick is love for one another.

And then there’s today’s gospel from Matthew, with its explicit instructions for how to deal with sin in the community.  And again, my first reaction is that this text bugs me.  Maybe it bugs me because sometimes in the church we seem only too eager to point out the faults in others.  Maybe it bugs me because the injunction to treat offenders as Gentiles and tax collectors has too often been misused to exclude people from our church communities and to make them feel unwanted.

But the main thing that bugs me about today’s gospel is that the short selection which we read has been taken out of context.  Let me put back some of that context for you. 

Immediately preceding today’s gospel, in verses 12-14, Jesus teaches about the shepherd who has a hundred sheep, and how if one of them goes astray, he will leave the 99 and go in search of the one who went astray, and rejoice over it when it is found.  The conclusion is that our Father in heaven does not want anyone to be lost or separated.

And immediately following today’s gospel, in verses 21-22, Peter asks Jesus just how many times he has to forgive his brother or sister.  Is seven times enough?  No, Jesus responds, but seven times seventy.

And finally, when Matthew writes that the one who refuses to listen to the church is to be treated as a Gentile or a tax-collector, we need to be reminded that Matthew himself is a tax-collector.  How was he treated?  Jesus is the one who went to Matthew’s home, Jesus is the one who reached out to Gentiles and tax-collectors, who entered their houses, who ate with them, who treated them with hospitality and compassion.

So when we put today’s gospel back in context, when we pull it all together, what do we get?

We get that community is tremendously important.   That Jesus cares about community.  That Matthew, the one who has gone from being an outcast to a member of the community of disciples has been moved by his experience.  That authentic, loving community is something that we all long for, something that indeed is a taste of the divine in our midst.

But, communities are made up of people, and people will have conflicts, will disagree, will hurt one another, will ignore one another, people will be, well, people.  So what do we do about this?  Communities don’t just happen by accident, and it takes work to develop and preserve them.  Jesus, in Matthew’s gospel, is telling us that community is so important that when something goes wrong, we need to do something about it.  Deal with it.  Talk to each other.  Be honest and loving and compassionate and forgiving.  And when two or three are gathered, whether it is to pray or whether it’s to air your disagreements, know that Jesus is present.

There is a longing for authentic community in our world.

[Play Cheers theme song]

Making your way in the world today takes everything you've got. 
Taking a break from all your worries, sure would help a lot. 

Wouldn't you like to get away? 

Sometimes you want to go 

Where everybody knows your name, 
and they're always glad you came. 
You wanna be where you can see, 
our troubles are all the same 
You wanna be where everybody knows 
Your name. 

You wanna go where people know, 
people are all the same, 
You wanna go where everybody knows 
your name. 

What sort of community do we want to be?

There are communities that are “affinity-groups”, communities where risk of conflict is minimized because the members are somewhat alike and the community is focused around a common interest.

There are communities that are social groups, that strive to be pleasant to one another and suppress and avoid conflicts because these might strain the social fabric of the community.

There are communities where “everybody knows your name”, where we know each other and are known by each other, where anyone is welcome, where there is a commitment to each other’s lives, where we love one another, where there is intimacy, where conflicts and disagreements arise and are engaged in creatively, communities which care about the one person who hasn’t been around for a while.

Here at St. Albans, we are a new community, a new congregation that is still in the process of forming.  There are many ways of being community.  Authentic community is hard to come by, it takes work, but it’s worth it.

Let’s talk about it:

What have been your experiences of community? 

And perhaps most importantly, what kind of community do we want to be?

Amen.

"Faith is a Full-Contact, Participation Sport" (August 28, 2011)

Homily: Yr A Proper 22, August 28 2011, St. Albans

Readings:  Ex 3:1-15; Ps105:1-6,23-26,45c; Rom 12:9-21; Mt 16:21-28

 “Faith is a full-contact, participation sport”

One of my favourite preachers, David Lose, likes to say that today’s readings illustrate that “faith is a full-contact, participation sport”.  One person who seems to have known that and lived it out is Jack Layton, a man whose commitment to service and to social justice was formed as a teenager in the United Church.  And so I think it is fitting that we pay tribute to him today, as so many Canadians have all this week, and remember the final words that he wrote, words that are at the heart of the gospel, that love is better than anger and hope is better than fear.

One of Jack’s teachers was an eminent philosopher and fellow NDPer from Montreal named Charles Taylor.  A few years ago I started reading one of Taylor’s books.  It’s a big, thick, heavy book called A Secular Age. In this book, Taylor analyzes the last five hundred years of Western civilization to see how it is that we went from a culture where Christian belief was the norm and seemed to happen almost by default, to today’s situation where there is a wide range of attitudes and beliefs that are held in our society.

Now I have to admit, I still haven’t finished reading the whole thing.  But there is one thing in his work that has struck me so far.   Suppose you were to ask people a big question like “Why are we here on this planet anyways?” or “What is the goal of human life?”  Taylor observes that people will give two very different sorts answers.

The first stance that many people would take is that the highest goal of life is what we might call human flourishing.  Our purpose is to make sure our needs are looked after, to stay healthy, to be happy, to live in good relationships with each other, to be able to do the things we want to do, to grow and to flourish.  And many people would say this not just in a self-interested way, not just about me, but in a mutual way, that each one of us should live our lives in such a way that not only I flourish, but others can flourish as well.

But there is a second way of answering the question of the purpose of human life which is quite different.  A second group of people would certainly agree that it’s good for humans to flourish, to be happy and do well, but they wouldn’t agree that we should focus on this as our highest goal in life.  Instead they look for something more.  This second stance says that we need to go beyond what is normally understood as human flourishing, and that this requires a transformation in the way we see things and the way we live.

I think that that is where Jesus is trying to take his disciples, and through them, each one of us in today’s gospel.  He’s inviting each of us to a transformation in our lives that is so profound that the image used for it is death and new life.  The new way that Jesus is proposing, the way of the cross, is a radical centring of our lives in God that involves dying to the way of life that is measured in terms of how well we are doing. 

You remember that I told you last week that we’d reached a turning point in Matthew’s gospel.  Up until chapter 15, it might have been possible to categorize Jesus simply as a great moral teacher and a great healer whose mission was to make things better, that is, someone who promotes what we normally understand as human flourishing.  But in today’s gospel, Jesus invites us to see something more, to go beyond the usual human point of view.   To set our mind, as Jesus tells Peter, on divine things, not on human things.

How do we set our mind on divine things?  Jesus himself serves as our example.  By centring his life in God, through his prayer life and his study of Scripture, by listening to God and discerning God’s will, by engaging with those he encounters, Jesus has come to understand that his calling and his purpose go beyond teaching and healing.  He has been called to proclaim the Kingdom of God, the presence and activity of God in our midst.  He does this both through his words and his actions, and that means that in today’s gospel, Jesus turns towards Jerusalem in the full knowledge that he risks rejection and death at the hands of the political and religious authorities.  Now Jesus was no masochist.  He had no desire to die on a cross, we know that from his prayer of agony in Gethsemane the night before his death.  But he was willing to give up the relative comforts of life in Galilee to risk death in Jerusalem in order to take up the mission that God was calling him to. 

Let’s have a look at another example of transformation, of going beyond normal human expectations of flourishing to living life in relationship with God.  In our first reading we heard the story of Moses.  If you remember, Moses had to flee Egypt because he had killed an Egyptian who was beating one of the Hebrew slaves.  But by the time of today’s reading, Moses has settled in the land of Midian east of Egypt.  He’s doing well:  he’s married his wife Zipporah, they’ve had a son and Moses is working as a shepherd. 

It’s been many years now since Moses left Egypt, and he has no intention of going back.  But one day when Moses is beyond the wilderness, literally in the middle of nowhere, he sees a strange sight, a bush which is burning but doesn’t get consumed.  And in a suggestive phrase the story tells us that Moses turns aside to look.  He was going down one path, but he turns aside and changes his path.  And seeing that Moses has turned aside, God calls his name, “Moses, Moses”.  Moses replies, “Here I am”

Then God gives him the message.  I want you to go back to Egypt and lead my people out of slavery.  You can imagine what Moses might have been thinking.  Go back to Egypt?  I’m wanted for murder back there.  It’s taken me twenty years to build a nice comfortable life for myself and my family here in Midian, and you want me to try to convince the Egyptians to give up the slaves that build their cities and pyramids for them.  And so Moses objects, in fact he objects four times to the mission God has given him.  Who am I to do such a thing?  Nobody will listen to me, I don’t even speak well?  But each time God has an answer, and in the end Moses agrees.  He gives up his life as a shepherd in Midian and risks death to return to Egypt in order to take up the new life that God has called him to.

This is an illustration of what Jesus means when he says in today’s gospel that if any want to become my  followers, let them deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me.  Deny yourself?  It means a willingness to let go of the things of ordinary human flourishing, our comforts, our security, even our hopes and dreams.  Take up the cross?  It means that if we are to accept God’s calling in our lives, we accept the risk that there may be pain and suffering along the way.  Peter doesn’t get this in today’s gospel.  He tries to separate Jesus’ calling as Messiah from the suffering that will result, but Jesus won’t let him.  Following Jesus means loving God and loving your neighbour, and to truly love is to open ourselves up to the risk of suffering along the way.

And so we have in today’s readings the invitation to set our mind on God and to follow Jesus, and the lives of Moses and Jesus himself to give us an idea of what that might look like.  It is a marked departure from the way many people live their lives.  It is a transformation.  If we live in relationship with God, we open ourselves up to the same sort of transformation that Moses experienced. 

We do have a choice to make.

There is the humanist option, the stance that the highest goal of human life is for humans to have what they need, to do well and to flourish, with no reference to God required.

Or there is the possibility of living life in relationship with God, and engaging in the difficult business of figuring out what God wants us to do with our lives.  Now I know that sometimes the notion of doing “what God wants us to do” can sound intimidating and that it turns some people off.  But I think we can trust that what the one who created us and loves us wants for us, is what we would want for ourselves if we knew ourselves as well as God knows us.  God’s calling for us should resonate with our own passions and desires.  But that doesn’t mean that it won’t be disruptive!

Faith is a full contact, participation sport.  Moses learns who God is by following the path which God has set out for him.  Jesus invites us to follow him in a way of life which begins with God and takes us way beyond normal human flourishing.  And by centring ourselves in God, we’ll find that we really do flourish, in ways that we never dreamed possible. 

Where is God calling you this morning?  What path are you being called to follow?

Amen.

Living Lives that Matter (July 24 2011)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the message of our reading from Romans. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

Amen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So why does this little parable bug me so much?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jacob’s story is story of grace.

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

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

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

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

Grace finds beauty in everything.

Amen.