Love Is Not A Victory March (Good Friday 2014)

Homily:  Good Friday.  April 18 2014.  St. Albans

Isaiah 52.13-53.12; Ps 22; Heb 10.16-25; Jn 18.1-19.42

Love Is Not a Victory March

Pilate understands power.  It’s the air he breathes, the water he swims in.  He knows its structures, he knows its relationships.  It’s the first criteria he uses when he’s sizing someone up, it’s his map as he navigates his way through life.   So far he’s been doing pretty well.  He is the fifth Governor of the Roman province of Judea under the Emperor Tiberias.  He has Roman soldiers under his direct command.  Now, as Roman Governors go, he is a big fish in a small pond, and he knows that better than anyone else.  Just as his own ruthlessness and maneuvering has brought him to his current position of power, he knows that if he fails to keep the control of the province and collect enough tax for the empire, those who have more power than he can have him removed in an instant.  Pilate understands power.

And so when Pilate addresses Jesus, the first question he asks is a power question. “Are you the King of the Jews?”  But Jesus sidesteps the power question.  Pilate persists.  He needs to know the power dynamics.  “Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me.  Why, what have you done?”  Jesus once again refuses to engage in the contest of power.  And Pilate doesn’t understand.  He’s perplexed by Jesus’ refusal to play by his rules.  “Do you not know that I have the power to release you and the power to crucify you?”

But Jesus won’t be drawn in.  “You say I’m a king.”  You’re concerned about power.  But I’m here for a different reason.  “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.”

Truth vs Power.  It is, I suppose, the classic confrontation.  “What is truth?” scoffs Pilate. 

Pilate has a lot invested in power.  So do we, if you think about it.  We spend most of our lives trying to become more powerful.  We grow up.  We educate ourselves.  We compete for jobs.  We increase our earning power.  We network, we make connections, we acquire things, we have credit cards in our wallets.  We strive for control of our lives, for independence.  We like to be in control of our relationships too.  We may not go as far as Pilate does, but we have a lot invested in power.

  

Do we make the same investment in truth?  In response to a question of identity, Jesus responds that his whole purpose in life has been to reveal the truth.  And just what is this truth for which Jesus was born, to which his life and now his death will be a testimony?

I suppose that we could use many formulations and write many words to describe that truth.  John, the gospel writer uses just three:

“God is Love”

I believe that God is love.  But I’m not sure that it helps much to just say it.  I think that if Jesus had simply told people that God is love, most of us would want that love to look like unicorns and rainbows[i], like one of the poems on the inside of a Hallmark Greeting Card.

I believe that God loves us.  But I’m reminded of the advice that my wife once gave me, that whenever I say ‘God loves you’ in a sermon, what most people hear is “blah blah blah blah blah”.

So it makes sense to me that God sent Jesus to show us what love is.  Jesus is the word made flesh, God in human form, the one who makes God known, who reveals God to us.  And it is on the cross where God’s love is revealed most fully.  Love is hard.  Love struggles.  Love is sacrificial.  Love suffers.  Love is vulnerable.  Love weeps, love cries out, love forgives.

Or in the words of one of Leonard Cohen’s songs, “Love is not a victory march, it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.”

God’s love is a refusal to exercise power, a refusal that for Jesus, results in death.

It seems to me that every year as we gather on Good Friday, as we hear the passion gospel, as we meditate before the cross, it seems to me that one of the things that we’re trying to do is to draw meaning out of that death.  One of the meanings that we as the church have drawn out of Jesus’ death from the very beginning is that through it our sins are forgiven and we are reconciled with God.  And, as might be expected, we want to know how that works.  And sometimes we put that into a bit of a formula that says that a just God needed to punish humanity for its sinfulness, and that Jesus offered to be punished in our place and so the rest of us escaped punishment yet are forgiven.

The problem I have when we put too much emphasis on speaking of the cross in this way is that we’re actually using a logic that Pilate would have understood very well.  We’re using the language of power and the logic of exchange to propose a mechanism for how God forgives us.

I believe that the cross is at once much simpler and much more profound than a language of exchange can ever convey.

God forgives us because God loves us.  Simple, yes, but also profound.  Because love isn’t rainbows and unicorns.  Love is not a victory march, it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.

Because in order for forgiveness to really happen, something has to die.  We know that from our own relationships, if only in our own limited way.  Whenever there is forgiveness, there is a death:

·        A dying of expectations

·        A letting go of your power over another

·        The death of your reason for feeling better than someone else

·        A breach in your wall of security which leaves you exposed and vulnerable

·        An embracing of something that hurts when it could have been kept at arm’s distance

We all know, each in our imperfect way, what it means to love.  We all know, each in our imperfect way, what it means to forgive.  And that means we all know or can imagine, at least in some measure, how painful it is to be rejected by the ones we love, and how much we suffer when we see the suffering of those that we love.  We can’t love without being hurt, without being open to pain and sorrow.  And we know how much it costs to forgive those that hurt us and others, to remain in relationship with them and to continue to love them.

This morning I watched the video of Douglas de Grood, the father of the young man who has been charged with the 1^st degree murder of five people at a university year end party in Calgary.  Douglas de Grood is a man who is clearly in pain and deeply saddened as he struggles with what has happened, offers condolences to the families of the victims and yet still speaks words of unconditional love and positive regard for his son Matthew.

How much more then must God, who is love, and created us out of love, suffer and endure pain as a result of what happens in our world.  In the course of human history, with its war and violence and genocides, in the course of our own personal histories, imagine how much pain and suffering a God who loves has had to endure.

God loves us.  God forgives us.  And every day God is dying.  Every day, God hears the cry of his people, and suffers with them.  Every day, God endures the pain and anguish that comes when the people you love turn against you, abandon you and reject you.  Every day, something in God dies so that God can forgive us and love us.

Now, we don’t get to see that every day.  God is, for the most part, invisible to us, a mystery to us.  So we don’t get to see it.  But perhaps God in his wisdom thought that we should see it at least once.  No one has ever seen God.  But it is God’s only Son who has made God known.  And Jesus, the Word who was God, the Word made flesh, he has made God known must fully on the cross.

Jesus died on the cross to testify to the truth that God loves us.  Because we needed to see that love with our own eyes, we needed to see what love looks like, and what it costs.  And once we’ve seen it, we’ll never be the same again.

“Love is not a victory march.  It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.” 

Amen. 

---

[i][i] Brene Brown, http://www.davidlose.net/2014/04/brene-brown-on-church-as-midwife/

Resurrection. (Lent 5, April 6 2014)

Homily:  Year A Lent 5, April 6 2014, St. Albans

Readings:  Ezek 37.1-14; Ps 130; Rom 8.6-11; John 11.1-45

Resurrection.

Last month at one of our St. Al’s @5 services, we talked about “Hell”.  We talked about our images of hell, and where they come from.  We talked about how when Jesus refers to hell, he uses the word Gehenna, which is the name of a real place.  Gehenna is a valley on the southwest side of Jerusalem which serves as the city dump, the place where garbage is burned.  Now when we talk about hell, we usually think of it as the opposite of heaven, don’t we.  If you’re good or saved or whatever, you go to heaven when you die, but if you’re not, you go to hell.  That tends to be the way we talk about it.  But we found it interesting at our St. Al’s @5 service to note that when Jesus talks about hell, the opposite of hell isn’t heaven, it’s life.  It’s better to enter life, Jesus says, than to go to hell.

So after we’d talked about this a bit, someone asked the following question:  If the image that Jesus uses for hell is the city garbage dump, and the opposite of hell for Jesus is life, then what does Jesus have to say about heaven?

And I thought for a moment, and then I answered, “Not much.” 

It’s not that Jesus never uses the word ‘heaven’.  He does sometimes, he uses it to contrast God’s place and context with ours, such as when we pray “Our Father in heaven”.  But when Jesus, and many of the Biblical writers, want to talk about what we usually refer to as the “after-life”, the main image used isn’t that of ‘heaven’, but rather, ‘resurrection’.

As a priest, I’m often asked about heaven, or whether I believe in life after death.  A few years ago I was the spiritual care person at West Carleton Secondary School.  I used to spend an hour every week at the school, hanging out and talking to staff and students, sometimes about spiritual questions, more often about whatever was going on in their lives.  Sadly, during my time there, one of the students, a well-known, popular, 18 year old was killed in a car crash.  I spent a lot of time at the school that week.  Students would come up and speak to me, many of them dealing with death in such an in-the-face way for the first time, and by far the number one question they asked was about what happens when you die.  Is there life after death?

And I would usually answer them by telling them that yes, I believe that there is life after death, and that even though I don’t know what that looks like or how it works exactly, I believe, as St. Paul did, that nothing, neither death nor life, nor height nor depth nor anything else in all of creation will be able to separate us from the love of God.

But this week as I was reading the scripture texts that we just heard together, it occurred to me that I could have said more.  That I do know more than I thought about what life after death looks like.  Because the primary way that the Bible talks about the life that endures beyond death is by using resurrection language, and today’s texts are full of images of what resurrection looks like.

Our culture speculates about heaven, and it asks about life after death and when it does so, most of the images used don’t actually come from the Bible.  Images are drawn various sources, whether it’s images from Greek or Norse mythology, or the Christian literature of the Middle Ages such as the image of St. Peter asking questions at the pearly Gates.

But Jesus doesn’t talk about “life after death”.  He talks about new life, or life in the kingdom of God, or ‘zoen aeonion’, literally, the “life of the ages” which we usually translate as eternal life.  And the way he talks about this new life that endures beyond the grave always has present as well as a future component, an aspect that is knowable and can be grasped now.

And when Jesus talks about this new life that endures beyond the grave, he doesn’t talk about heaven.  Instead he talks about resurrection.   And again, perhaps surprisingly, he does so in both the future and the present tense.  Resurrection has immediate implications, it is not just a future hope.

“Lord, if you had not been here, my brother would not have died,” Martha says to Jesus.  “But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.”

Jesus says to her, “Your brother will rise again.”

Martha replies, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”

Martha’s belief, her understanding is that resurrection is something that takes place in the future, something after death, something that will happen on the last day, beyond the confines of the time and space of the age we live in.

But what Jesus says next is emphatically in the present tense.  “I am the resurrection and the life.  Those who believe in me, even though they die will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”

And then Jesus performs the first of two acts of resurrection in our gospel today.  He calls for Mary, and when Mary hears that Jesus is calling, she is raised.  We translate it “she got up quickly”, but the word is actually egeiretei, the same word used for Jesus’ resurrection on Easter.  Mary’s despair is transformed into hope in Jesus’ presence and she rises, the first image in today’s gospel text of the power of resurrection.

The vision of Ezekiel in today’s Old Testament reading provides us with another powerful image of resurrection.

“The hand of the Lord came upon me, and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones, and they were very dry.”

What do you see when you imagine this valley of dry bones?

I recall three years ago when I read these words it was same week as the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, and my thoughts immediately went to the scenes of devastation I had witnessed on TV. Homes, buildings, entire communities flattened.  Dead bodies washing up on shore.  An interview with a 70 year old man whose home and business had been destroyed, who laments that it’s too late for him to rebuild.  People whose life had been sucked out of them, whose despair and sorrow had reduced them to bones, very dry bones.

Of course, you don’t have to go to Japan in the wake of a tsunami to find dry bones.  All around us are people whose lives have run dry.  So many things in this world can suck the life out of us.  Mental illness.  Grinding poverty.  Broken relationships.  Loss of jobs, loss of loved ones.  Disease, and disasters.  Loneliness.  Despair.

I’ve seen it.  You’ve seen it.  Most of us have experienced it, if not in our own lives then in the lives of those we love.  Dry bones.

Ezekiel knew exactly what he was looking at when he was taken to the valley of dry bones. Ezekiel had been forcibly removed from his home and taken into exile.  He had lost his prominent position as a priest of the Temple in Jerusalem.  His wife had died.  He and his people had endured siege warfare in Jerusalem and suffered through two years of famine and disease.  The Babylonian army had finally breached the city walls, destroyed the Temple, massacred thousands and destroyed the city.  A surviving remnant had been marched off through the desert to a foreign land, Ezekiel among them.  They were a traumatized, despairing people.  They were the walking dead, completely cut off, a people in exile.  They were dry bones.

And God says to Ezekiel, “I have a message, a prophecy that I want you to give to these dry bones.  Tell these bones, tell the exiled people of Israel, tell those who have suffered devastation in Japan, tell the depressed and the lonely and the broken and the suffering, tell those who are without hope and all those who have had the life sucked out of them, tell them this:

“O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.  Thus says the Lord God to these bones:  I will cause my spirit to enter you, and you shall live.”

And there was a noise, a rattling noise and the bones came together, bone to bone, and flesh came upon them and skin covered them.  And God’s ruach, his breath, his spirit came into them and they lived and stood on their feet.

This too is an image of resurrection.  Resurrection is when a people in exile return home.  Resurrection is when people who are cut off are reconnected.  Resurrection is when God’s spirit enters you and you live.

That’s what Paul says too in the reading from Romans.  You need to know that there is a new reality says Paul, and that new reality is that the Spirit of God dwells in you.  And if the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you then you have life.  New life.  Resurrection life, life that can never be taken away, not even by death.

And just in case we still haven’t gotten the message about resurrection, Jesus says to them, where have you laid him?  He goes to the tomb, commands them to remove the stone, and cries with a loud voice “Lazarus, come out!”  And the dead man comes out, raised to new life.

I don’t know what heaven looks like and I don’t know much about life after death.  But there is a power in our midst and I’ve had a glimpse of what it looks like.  It is a power that can transform despair into hope, that can bring home a people in exile, that can raise a dead man, that can breathe life into dry bones.  That power is the power of resurrection, and it is not something that we can only anticipate in some distant future.  It is with us, here in the present, with immediate implications.  It is our new reality and our new life.  

Amen.

"Surely We're Not Blind, Are We?" (Lent 4, March 30 2014)

Homily:  Yr A Lent 4.  March 30 2014.  St. Albans

Readings:  1 Sam 16.1-13; Ps 23; Eph 5.8-14; Jn 9.1-41

“Surely we’re not blind, are we?"  Tales of inconvenient truth and disorienting grace.

This week, the federal government released a report called “Invisible Women:  A Call to Action.  A report on missing and murdered Indigenous Women in Canada”.  In this document it was reported that Aboriginal women and girls are three times more likely to be the target of violent victimization than non-aboriginal woman and girls, and that the number of known cases of missing or murdered aboriginal women and girls in Canada is 668.  The report highlights “the silence that is part of the on-going trend of mainstream society with respect to aboriginal people” which has rendered these women “invisible”.

Surely we’re not blind, are we?

This week, on Monday, World Vision USA announced a change in its hiring policy to permit the hiring of Christians who are in same-sex marriages, as a symbol of Christian unity.  Within forty-eight hours, after relentless criticism from Christian groups and an organized campaign that caused 2000 child sponsorships to be withdrawn in 2 days, World Vision reversed its decision, apologized and asked for forgiveness from its supporters.

Surely we’re not blind, are we?

This week, thousands of people, including Fred Hiltz, the Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, are gathered in Edmonton for the final national Truth & Reconciliation Commission event.  The TRC was established in 2008 in the wake of the Canadian government apology to indigenous peoples on behalf of all Canadians for the Indian Residential School System.  The Residential Schools System operated in Canada for over a century beginning in the 1870s. The two principle objectives of the Residential Schools System were to remove and isolate children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures, and to assimilate them into the dominant culture.  

Surely we’re not blind, are we?

This week in our gospel reading, Jesus heals a man born blind.  When the man who was blind but now sees refuses to criticize Jesus for breaking the Sabbath law, the leaders of the community, the Pharisees, condemn him for being born entirely in sin and drive him out of the community.  Then they say to Jesus,

Surely we’re not blind, are we?

In John’s gospel, Jesus is the light which shines in the darkness, the light which has come into the world, the light that enlightens all people.  This is not in doubt.  What is in doubt is our response.  When we see the light do we turn towards it, or do we turn away and persist in our blindness?

John uses the story of the healing of a blind man as a dramatic parable of what happens when light comes into the world.  Jesus is the light which has come into the world, full of grace and truth.  But as we see in today’s gospel, the encounter with Jesus is a disorienting grace and an inconvenient truth.

Grace is revealed in the healing of a man who was blind from birth.  It’s a gift of God, an act of goodness.  You would expect the response to be joy, thanksgiving and wonder.  But apart from the man himself, no one in this drama seems to be happy about it.  There is no cry of “how wonderful” or “thank God”.  Rather, the response to grace is confusion, division and suspicion.  I’ve often thought that the confused responses and interrogations would make a good Monty Python skit, that is until, I get to the part where the parents are so afraid that they can’t even celebrate the restoration of sight to their son, and then I get to the part where the man who was formerly blind is driven out of the community by the angry leaders.

Truth is revealed when Jesus gives sight to the blind man.  This healing is a sign that Jesus is from God.  Sometimes it takes a while for the truth to sink in.  The man who is given his sight at first refers to Jesus as “the man called Jesus”, then a bit later as a prophet, then in the second interrogation as a “man from God”, and finally he acknowledges Jesus as the “Son of Man” and worships him.  His is a journey of recognition.  Of learning to see.

For the Pharisees the response is very different.  For them the truth signified by the healing is too inconvenient, too disruptive, because it involves a violation of the Sabbath law.  To truly see what this healing signifies they would have to let go of their understanding of the Law.  They would have to let go of their understanding of what it means to be a disciple of Moses.  That would be hard.  These are understandings which provide comfort and meaning and coherence to their lives, understandings which guarantee their positions of power and privilege.  And so faced with a truth which is too inconvenient, too painful, their reaction is both tragic and predictable.  First, they try to deny that the healing ever happened.  But when that doesn’t work, when it is clearly established that this man who can see is indeed the man who was blind from birth, they shoot the messenger.  The bearer of the inconvenient truth is discredited, demonized and expelled from the community.  The grace was too disorienting, the light that comes into the world is too painful to look at.

This story is after all not so much a story of the blindness of the man whose sight is restored.  It’s much more a story about the blindness of those around him, of the Pharisees, who are not able to see what is really going on. 

But it’s also our story, and that’s troubling.  Like the Pharisees, we have a great need for security, for comfort, for making sense of things, for certainty.  We need to impose order on a world that sometimes seems chaotic.  We need to make meaning out of events that sometimes seem random, we need to feel we have control of our lives.  And in order to meet all these very human needs, we and our communities and our culture wrap ourselves in strand after strand of understandings and assumptions and rules and conventions and philosophies and conveniences until, strand by strand, we’ve wrapped ourselves into a cocoon within which we think that we see very well, but really we’re blind to the greater reality which lies beyond the silk walls that surround us.

And just when we feel safe and secure, something or someone comes along and rattles our world.  It might be that moment that your spouse tells you she is thinking of leaving when you thought that you had a good marriage.  It might be the call from the school that our kid is doing drugs, when we thought we had everything under control as good parents.  It might be that first allegation of abuse at the residential school system that we thought we had set up for the benefit of aboriginal children.  It might be the scientific evidence that the economic system that we thought would lead us to prosperity is actually destroying the planet.

It might be the dawning realization of a man like John Newton, the captain of an 18^th century slave-trading ship, that the slave trade is an abomination. 

How often are we comfortably wrapped up in our cocoon when all of a sudden, someone pokes a hole in our covering and lets light shine into our darkness.  It’s disorienting.  The light hurts our eyes.  At first we may feel that we can’t see anymore because of the glare, and we may react by attacking the one who poked the hole in our cocoon and trying to patch up the hole as quickly as we can.

How do we respond to disorienting grace, to inconvenient truth, to light that reveals the darkness?

I think that the message of this gospel is that the most dangerous place to be spiritually is to live in the delusion that you can see, that you are fully-sighted.  We have a great need to feel that we can see, to make sense of the world, to impose order on chaos and to feel that we have a grasp on things and are in control.

But the problem for us as spiritual beings is that we are called to be in relationship with others and with the one we call God.  And when we are in relationship we’re never completely in control.  Our way of seeing is never the last word. 

Especially when we’re in relationship with God, who is ultimately a mystery to us.  To be in relationship with God is to live in a constant state of disequilibrium, to be a pilgrim on a journey, not someone who has finally arrived.  We don’t have everything figured out and under control.  If we think we do, we’re blind.

But if we can acknowledge our condition as journeyers, as people who are not fully-sighted, as seekers, not possessors of the truth, then we can journey towards the light, knowing that it can enlighten our path and provide guidance on our way.  When we encounter Jesus, when we encounter disorienting grace in our lives, we can receive it as a gift, even if that means we need to let go of other things to free up our hands.  When we encounter inconvenient truth, we can rejoice in the truth, even if that truth is cause for lament as well.

It took John Newton the slave trader five years after he first encountered Christ to give up the slave trade, and another twenty before he started to campaign against it.  He wrote of his encounter with grace in the hymn which we know well.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. 

I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see.

It took John Newton 30 years to write that hymn.  It has taken Canadian churches and Canadian society an even longer time to journey out of the blindness of the residential school system that we imposed on our aboriginal peoples.  Today in Edmonton is the final event of a process which was launched six years ago with the hope of healing the wounds and the blindness that were the consequence and cause of the residential schools system.  People will tell their stories.  It will be a time of inconvenient truth and disorienting grace.

Jesus says, “I am the light of the world.”   The light has come into the world, full of grace and truth.  May those of us who acknowledge that we are not fully-sighted turn towards that light and learn to see.

Amen.

Near Life Experiences (Lent 3, March 23 2014)

Homily:  Yr A Lent 3, March 23 2014, St. Albans

Readings:  Ex 17.1-7; Ps 95; Rom 5.1-11; John 4.3b-42

Near Life Experiences

It’s good to be back!  Last week, as many of you know I was away on holidays.  And for me it was a fascinating week.  Right around mid-February, like many of us, I was getting tired of this long, cold winter we’ve been having, and so I said to Guylaine, “I’d like to go somewhere warm for a week.”  And she told me, “I’ve got the perfect place.  There’s a yoga retreat right on the beach in the Bahamas, let’s go there.  Now, I’m not much of a yoga person, I don’t actually bend very much, but I’ve done a bit of yoga, so I figured, why not?  She booked the trip.

When we arrived, it turned out that not only was this a yoga place, it was a full-blown ashram, basically a Hindu monastery with a priest and monks and disciples and a couple of temples.  There was a strict discipline that we were expected to follow:  morning bell at 5:30, meditation and chanting at 6, morning yoga at 8, then finally we get to eat our first of two daily meals at 10am.  The diet was strictly vegetarian, no caffeine, no eggs, certainly no alcohol allowed.  A second session of yoga followed in the afternoon, then the evening meal, and finally evening meditation, chanting and lectures on various spiritual topics.

Now most of the people at the ashram were more interested in yoga than the Hindu religion.  You might describe many of the people there as seekers, and certainly most would fit into the ‘Spiritual but not Religious’ category.  And they were definitely into the spiritual.  There was a lot of talk about mystical experiences.  People would talk about their memories of past lives, of encounters with dead relatives, of their out of body experiences while in deep meditation, they’d talk about these things almost as easily as in this place we talk about the weather and the gas mileage of our cars.

And, I have to admit, for me some of it started to get a little weird.  When I’m told I can’t eat garlic or onions because they overstimulate the brain and prevent me from meditating, or when I’m told that my big toes have to touch each other in a particular yoga posture so that my prana or life-energy doesn’t drain out of my body, well sometimes for someone like me with a science background used to living in our practical, even skeptical world, sometimes it all started to sound, well, a bit “fluffy”.

I was ready to come home after a week.  And one of the first things I did when I got back on Monday was pick up my bible and have a look at last Sunday’s gospel, the one that I missed, and the gospel for this Sunday that we just heard together.  And you know what I get?  I get Jesus the mystic.  The guru.  The clairvoyant.  Saying fluffy stuff.

“No one can see the kingdom of God without being born again”

“What is born of Spirit is spirit”

“The water that I will give will become a spring of water gushing up to eternal life”

“God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit”

This is the Jesus who has visions, who takes Nicodemus up to the roof top to have a vision of the Spirit, who looks around and sees what his disciples can’t see, fields ripe for the harvest.

This is the Jesus the clairvoyant, who can tell a woman everything that she has ever done without ever having met her before.

This is the Jesus who is so in tune with the Spirit that he knows that he must go to Samaria to meet this woman even though Samaria isn’t on the direct route from Judea to Galilee.

This is the Jesus whose brief encounter with Nicodemus renders him speechless and awestruck,  the Jesus whose encounter with the woman at the well transforms her life, the Jesus who transcends centuries of division between Jews and Samaritans with a few words.

This is Jesus the mystic, who tries to open our eyes to a whole new way of seeing that goes beyond, way beyond, the limits of our physical and material understanding of this world.

As it happened, the week that I spent on the ashram they were holding a conference on near death experiences.  Perhaps you’ve heard of this sort of thing, where someone’s heart stops, or they are in a coma, but they recover and when they come to they talk about something that happened to them while they were apparently dead.  Often people will speak of being out of body, sometimes they’ll talk about a tunnel, or a bright light, of their life flashing before their eyes.  For this conference the ashram had assembled a number of experts on near death experiences, or NDEs as they call them.  There was a psychiatrist who has spent the last 40 years interviewing thousands of people who claim to have had these near death experiences.  There was a neurosurgeon who claimed to have had his own near death experience while in a coma induced by meningitis and he’s written extensively about it, including a best-selling book called Proof of Heaven.  There was a rabbi from the Jewish Kabbala tradition and academics from the Jain religion, all of whom had their own take on NDEs.

It was remarkable.  To be honest, I don’t know what to make of it all, not having had a near death experience myself, but it was fascinating to hear about other people’s experiences and how they interpreted them.

But, you know, to be honest I’m much more interested in Near Life Experiences than I am in Near Death Experiences.  Because I think a lot more of us, in fact maybe all of us, have had near life experiences.  And in our gospels, from last Sunday and this Sunday, I think both Nicodemus and the woman at the well have an NLE, a near life experience when they encounter Jesus.

Let me explain.  When I talk about life here, I don’t mean mere biological life, the fact that we’re breathing and our hearts are still beating.  No, I’m talking about much more than that.  I’m talking about real life.  Life as God intended it to be for us.  The life that Jesus calls ‘life in the Kingdom of God’, or sometimes he calls it Zoen Aionion, the ‘life of the ages’ which we usually translate as ‘eternal life’.  It’s the life that Jesus is talking about when he says “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly”.  It’s a life that’s available to us here and now, indeed as Jesus says, the ‘hour is coming and is now here’.

When I say that Nicodemus and the woman have a near-life experience when they encounter Jesus, that’s the sort of life I’m talking about.

Nicodemus is a teacher, a leader of the Jews.  But he’s looking for something, he’s a seeker, even if he is afraid to let anyone know it.  He comes to Jesus secretly, at night.  And I find it fascinating to watch Nicodemus’ progression as Jesus tries to open him up to the things of the spirit and tells him that he needs to be re-born.  Nicodemus goes from making a statement about Jesus, “we know that you’re a teacher”  to asking a specific question, “how can anyone be born after having grown old?”, to simply asking “how can these things be?” and finally to being rendered totally speechless in the presence of Jesus.  For Nicodemus, this movement from statement to question to speechless, this is actually progress!  This is a near-life experience.  But you also get the sense that something is holding Nicodemus back, something is preventing him from entering into this new life, from being born again.  Is it his need to be in control?  Is it his desire to be the teacher rather than the disciple.  Is it his fear of what will happen to him if his fellow leaders find out what he is doing?

When Jesus arrives in Samaria, he encounters the woman at the well.  Their’s is an unlikely, boundary-crossing, rule-breaking conversation.  Jews hated Samarians.  Men were not supposed to talk to women in public settings.  But Jesus has come all this way for this encounter and so he is the one who initiates.  She doesn’t initiate.  She’s something of an outcast, coming to the well in the noon heat of the day when she expects no one else to be around.  She is, in all likelihood, burdened with a deep sense of rejection and shame.  We don’t know why she’s had five husbands and now is dependent on a man who isn’t her husband, but surely her story, divorce, being left a widow, whatever the details are, surely her story is one of rejection and loss.

Their conversation dances around the subject of water.  And water is one of the strongest metaphors there is for life in the Bible.  This woman thirsts, but the well of her life has run dry.  Then she encounters one who reaches across boundaries to engage with her, who sees her, who knows her, and whose response to her life story is not the mocking and rejection that she has encountered in others but rather is compassion.  He knows her secrets but doesn’t turn away.  She recognizes him as a prophet.  She trusts him with the burning question about where to worship that has divided Jews and Samaritans for centuries and he transcends this division.

This woman too is having a near life experience.  Her thirst has suddenly and surprisingly been satisfied by a spring of water within her gushing up to eternal life.  And unlike Nicodemus who holds back, she crosses the threshhold into this new life, she leaves her water jar behind and runs and tells the people of her village “Come and see.” 

She leaves her water jar behind.  It is perhaps a symbol of whatever it was that was holding her back from life.  Was it her sense of shame?  Her isolation?  The drudgery of having to come and get water every day but never feeling that her thirst was satisfied?  Whatever it was that was holding her back, she left it behind.

My guess is that if you’re sitting here today, it’s because you too know what it is to have a near-life experience.  Maybe you’re having one right now.  Maybe as we read and reflect on these encounters with Jesus, we too hear the call to new life, to life in the kingdom of God, to abundant life, to life as God intended it to be.

So what’s your water jar?  What’s holding you back?  Are you going to hang onto it as it seems like Nicodemus did, or are you willing to take the risk of leaving it behind like the woman at the well?

We’re all having a near-life experience.  Jesus calls us into life.  What’s holding you back?

Amen.

A Life-Changing Event (The Transfiguration, March 2 2014)

Homily:  Yr A Epiphany Last, March 2 2014, St. Albans

Readings:  Ex 24.12-18, Ps 99, 2 Pet 1.16-21, Mt 17.1-9

“A Life-Changing Event”

“Jesus took with him Peter, John and James up the mountain.  And right before their very eyes he was transfigured, his face shining like the sun, his clothes becoming dazzling white and there appeared with him Moses and Elijah.”

Whatever it was that happened to Jesus on that mountain top, we know that for Peter, this was a life-changing event.  It was what we sometimes call a “mountain-top” or a “peak” experience, something that Peter would look back on as foundational for his life from that point on.  We know that it had this effect on Peter because in our reading from the letter of Peter, we hear the words that he spoke near the end of his life, a summing up of his experience for those who would carry on after him.  In those final words, Peter looks back to this event, to this moment when he heard the voice on the mountain, as the key, as the moment that transformed him, the moment he could look back on as the foundation for all that followed.

Have you ever had a moment like that?  How many of you have experienced a life changing event?  Perhaps it was what we might call a “mountain top experience”.  Perhaps it was more mundane, a joyful or a tragic event that shaped you into the person you are today.  Perhaps it was a simple moment of clarity.

About ten years ago, I was teaching a Sunday School class to a group of ten to twelve year olds.  In that Sunday School program we were using the Sunday readings each week, and this reading of the transfiguration from Matthew came up.  At first I didn’t know what to do with it.  Finally, as about 8 of us gathered together, I asked the youth the same question I just asked you.  Have you ever had a life changing event?  And then I was simply blown away as these young people, one after the other, shared the stories of their life changing moments.  There were tragic stories, stories of car accidents and family breakdown, and there were hopeful stories, stories of family gatherings and moments of joy.  But in each case the young people who spoke were able, like Peter, to remember particular moments that had transformed them into the people that they had become.

What were your life-changing moments?  How do you remember them?  How do you understand them?

There was a movie that came out in the 90’s called Pulp Fiction, about two mob hit men named Jules and Vincent.  It wasn’t a particularly uplifting film, not one I would normally use for sermon illustrations.  But near the end of the film, these two hit men are ambushed by one of their rivals, who shoots at them from point blank range.  Somehow all of the bullets miss them, and they survive.  That afternoon we find them in a diner, talking about what just happened.

Jules: Man, I just been sitting here thinking.

Vincent: About what?

Jules: About the miracle we just witnessed.

Vincent: The miracle you witnessed. I witnessed a freak occurrence.

Jules: What is a miracle, Vincent?

Vincent: An act of God.

Jules: And what's an act of God?

Vincent: When, um … God makes the impossible possible … but this morning I don't think it qualifies.

Jules: Hey, Vincent, don't you see? That stuff don't matter. You're judging this the wrong way. I mean, it could be that God stopped the bullets, or He changed Coke to Pepsi, or He found my car keys. You don't judge stuff like this based on merit. Now, whether or not what we experienced was an "according to Hoyle" miracle is insignificant. What is significant is that I felt the touch of God. God got involved.

Both Vincent and Jules witnessed the same event, but their response to it was very different.  As a result of that event, Jules goes straight.  He gives up the life of a mob hit man.  Why?  Because in that life changing moment, he felt the touch of God, he sensed somehow that God got involved and that he was being called to something new.

What about you?  When these moments, these freak occurrences, happen in your life, do you feel the touch of God?  Are there times in your life when you sense that God got involved?

There was a survey done in Canada by sociologist Reginald Bibby of the University of Lethbridge.  In that survey, people were asked if they believed that they have experienced God’s presence.  43% of Canadians replied yes, they believe they have experienced God’s presence.

When I read that statistic the first time, it surprised me.  After all, only 20% of us go to religious services regularly, so having 43% say they have had a direct experience of God seems like a lot.  I think that the figure also surprised me because most people don’t talk about these things.  We tend to keep our “religious experiences” to ourselves, perhaps because we don’t have the words to describe them, perhaps because we’re afraid of how others might react.  Perhaps it’s also because these experiences can be disorienting and it can be difficult and take years to figure out what just happened.

We get a sense of this by observing Peter in today’s gospel.  When he sees Jesus transfigured on the mountain top, the dazzling clothes and brilliant face, and when he sees Moses and Elijah appear, his first reaction is to try to do something.  He tries to stabilize the situation, to control it, to fit it into his belief system.  “Good thing I’m here,” he says.  “I’ll make three little shelters here, one for Jesus, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”  And while he is still speaking, while Peter is babbling on about what he’s going to do, all of a sudden he’s overshadowed by a bright cloud and a voice interrupts him, as if to say “Peter, enough already, stop babbling.”  The voice interrupts all of Peter’s plots and plans and announces that Jesus is none other than God’s Beloved Son and what Peter really needs to do is to be quiet and listen to him.

Peter, overwhelmed to be in the powerful presence of the living God, does stop talking.  In fact he immediately collapses to the ground in fear. 

And then Jesus comes and touches him.  He says to him “do not fear”, and he raises him up.

There are moments in each of our lives when we are taken by surprise, moments of joy and moments of sadness, moments that comfort and moments that disorient.  Our first impulse in these moments is often like Peter’s, an attempt to re-assert our control over what’s happening, and to reconcile what we’re experiencing with our usual way of doing and thinking.  But when our experiences are too powerful to be tamed in this way, we can be overwhelmed.  Perhaps we fall like Peter.  And sometimes it’s at that moment that we feel God’s touch, it’s at that moment that God gets involved, tells us not to be afraid, and raises us up to something new.

Let me tell you about one of my life-changing moments.  Eight years ago, I spent a summer as a student chaplain in the Royal Ottawa Psychiatric Hospital, trying to learn to provide spiritual care to patients with severe mental illness.  It was a challenging time in my life.  There were some serious health issues in the family.  I had just finished my first year of seminary and was trying to figure out if I should continue on the path towards ordination.   In the hospital I encountered despair and darkness like I’d never seen before in the lives of many men and women, and most of the time there wasn’t much if anything that I could do to help them.  It was a time of waiting, a time of waiting for test results, a time of waiting for patients to stop their slide into despair.  It was a time of questioning, a time when I wondered if I “had what it takes” to become an ordained minister, a time when I questioned whether I was going down the right path.

On the floor where I was working, there was a woman who spent virtually the whole day moaning in a near catatonic state.  I had yet to go into her room, afraid I guess, that I wouldn’t be able to do anything for her.  One afternoon, for whatever reason, I decided to go into her room and I sat beside her.  I tried talking to her but that didn’t get me too far. I tried just sitting in silence.  No apparent awareness that I was there.  I was just about to give up and leave when the idea came to me that I could try humming.  So I hummed a few bars of Amazing Grace.  And to my amazement, the woman stopped moaning, straightened a bit and started singing Amazing Grace in a beautiful clear voice.

A few moments later, I was walking down the hall past the room of another woman who screamed non-stop.  Again, it was someone I’d never summoned up the courage to visit.  As I walked past, the screaming was particularly loud and agitated.  One of the nurses stormed out of the room, looked at me, and said “Go in there and do something.”  So, I walked through the doorway, glanced at the name on the way in, squatted down in front of the woman and said “Hi Angie.”  And again to my amazement, she stopped screaming, looked up at me and started talking to me calmly.  We talked a bit, and then I left.

That afternoon was a life-changing moment for me.  It was a moment for me when God got involved, when I felt God’s touch, when I was told to get up and not be afraid.  It was the moment that I realized that I didn’t have to worry about whether I had what it takes to minister in difficult situations, because it is God who raises us up for ministry.

Have you ever had a life-changing event?  And did you get the sense that God was involved?  Let’s talk about that in our open space together.

Amen.

A Doorway to Life (Sermon on the Mount part 3, Feb 16 2014)

Homily:  Yr A Proper 6, Feb 16 2014, St. Albans

Readings:  Deut 30:15-20; Ps 119:1-8; 1 Cor 3:1-9; Mt 5:21-37

A Doorway to Life

Today I am setting before you life and death.  Which do you choose?  Now, like Moses in Deuteronomy, I’m not talking simply about biological life, about whether your heart continues to beat or not, or how many days you’ve got left.  No, I’m talking about really living.  Life lived to the fullest.  The life we were created to live.  Abundant life, life that demands more and promises more.  The new life that Jesus is calling us to in today’s gospel, in his sermon on the mount.  He calls it life in the kingdom of heaven.  We’ve had glimpses of it in the gospels these past few weeks.  A life which is based on compassion and mercy, peacemaking and justice.  Living as salt and light.  Life in right relationship with God and with others, life in the kingdom of heaven.

Two weeks ago, as we began this series of readings on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, we recognized Jesus words as a call to revolution, to a world in which the economy of exchange is replaced by the economy of grace.  Jesus begins by blessing people who have no claim on God’s blessing.  God offers us his grace, his blessing, his favour, his love, as pure gift.  Throughout history, and especially throughout the history of religion, many people have found this idea of grace to be disturbing.  Because if we don’t have to earn God’s favour, does it matter how we live?  What then is the point of all these ethical and religious rules and practices, what we usually refer to as “the Law”?  Is Jesus telling us to ignore the Law, that we can just get rid of it?

Not even close.  In last week’s gospel, Jesus told his disciples, “I have not come to abolish the law. I’ve come to fulfill it.”  In today’s gospel, he starts to show us what that means.  You see, the disciples that Jesus was talking to were concerned about the law, those rules and commandments that had been given to Moses and had been passed down to them by their ancestors.   The established teachers of Jesus’ day taught that the key to life was obeying the law.  And they had codified that law into a total of 613 rules which they followed, scrupulously. 

The problem is that living life by simply following the rules is not enough.  It may be good, but it’s not good enough.  It’s not life-giving, in fact if following the rules becomes a matter of simply going through the motions or taking pride in our ethical accomplishments, it can even become life-draining.  Rules are meant to be pointers, they’re meant to guide us.  They point us in the right direction, but they’re not meant to be ends in themselves.

Think about when you sent your children off to school for the first time.  Did you give them any rules?  Of course you did.  Stay on the school grounds, don’t fight, be quiet when the teacher is talking and so on and so on.  Now, think about why you gave those rules to your children.  Was the purpose so that they could learn to obey rules?  Not really.  Learning to obey rules might be a good thing, following the rules might be a good thing, but the real purpose was to teach them how to be in a good relationship with their classmates and their teachers.  You see, the primary function of rules is to act as pointers.  The rules are there to point to and guide us to the things that are really important, things beyond the rules themselves.

Jesus gives us some examples.  Let’s have a look at the first one.  “You have heard that it was said ‘You shall not murder.’  That’s one of the ten commandments, it’s one of the biggies.  Now, I’m pleased to tell you that I haven’t murdered anyone today.  So I’m in compliance with the rule.  But before I get too smug, Jesus says to us wait, there’s much more to it than that.  What’s the commandment pointing to?  Why is it that we shouldn’t murder? 

We shouldn’t murder another person because that other person is a human being created by God in God’s own image, someone who is loved by God and was brought into life for a reason, someone who is God’s own child and therefore my brother or sister.  And if that’s who the other is, not only should we not murder our brother or sister, but we shouldn’t diss him, and we shouldn’t bear grudges, and we shouldn’t be angry with her, or insult her or call him a fool or put him down in any way.  In fact if anything gets in the way of my relationship with another, my first priority should be reconciliation.  I need to go sort out whatever’s gone wrong and get our relationship back on track.

That’s what the commandment ‘you shall not murder’ is pointing towards.  It’s guiding us into a relationship with others, it’s pointing us towards a new way of living.  Sometimes we can make the mistake of thinking that all Jesus is doing here is extending the law by creating more rules.  It’s certainly true that Jesus is extending the law’s application.  But he’s not simply adding “you shall not insult your brother or sister” to the existing 613 rules.  He’s going way beyond this.  In Jesus’ teaching, the law becomes a doorway, a portal into something much bigger.  It becomes our entry point into a new life, to a way of living that’s not just focused on right behaviour but rather a life oriented toward love, to being in loving relationship with God and with others.

Let’s take Jesus’ second example.  “You have heard that it was said, ‘you shall not commit adultery.’”

Now every so often I get couples coming to me to talk about their marriage.  Imagine if you will that one day a couple comes in to see me, they sit down in my office, and the husband says to me, “You know, Rev. Mark, we have a wonderful marriage.”

“Oh, yes,” the wife agrees, “we’ve never committed adultery!”

Well I don’t know about you, but if I heard that, there would be red flags going up all over the place.  Because marriage is about a lot more than not committing adultery.  It’s about a relationship, about a relationship which was woven by God into the very fabric of creation when he created male and female and blessed their union.  It is about a life-long, committed, loving and faithful relationship which is much much bigger than not committing adultery, or filling out the right paperwork when you get divorced.  That’s what the law is pointing us to.  You see, the law is good, but the purpose of the law is to point towards the relationship, to guide us into a life which is oriented toward love.  

Jesus said, “I have come not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.”  And the fulfillment of the law is not more law, but something which is beyond law.  It’s life itself, it’s the life that God is calling us to, a life grounded in love, the life of the kingdom of heaven which is available for us right here, right now. 

Sometimes, like the people of Jesus own time, we get focused on the rules.  Sometimes we get focused on behaving the right way.  These aren’t bad things, they’re not to be abolished; but Jesus is calling us to much, much more than this.

This past week I had the opportunity to preach at the funeral of a friend.  He had been diagnosed with a terminal cancer a year before he died, and we had some really good conversations about what it means to choose life and not death in those difficult circumstances.  One of the things he learned was something I repeated in my homily:  to value relationships over accomplishments.  

That was a phrase that resonated with people.  So simple yet so easy to ignore. 

I’ve been watching the Olympics a lot this past week.  And I don’t know about you, but the Olympic moments that are going to stick with me are the ones that involve relationships:  a coach providing a ski to a competitor so that he could finish his race with dignity; two sisters holding hands while the third sister cheers; a speedskater giving up his spot so another could race in his place; Alex and Frederic Bilodeau arm in arm.

Some of you may have already heard the story of the Texan friend I met when I was on course preparing for an internship I did in the Seychelles seven years ago.  During that week long training program we would do bible studies and lecture sessions and site visits and group discussions and all sorts of things.  And after every session, no matter what it was about, or what was said, my Texan friend would lean back, look at the rest of us and say, “Well y’all know what?  It’s all about relationships”

Well y’all know what?  Today’s gospel is all about relationships.  It’s about choosing to live a life in relationship with God and with each other.  The law, all the rules that govern our behaviour, all our religious practices, even coming to church on a Sunday morning, all of this serves as a doorway that we can step through into the new life that Jesus models for us.

Later on in Mathew’s gospel, when Jesus is asked which of the 613 rules is the most important, he replies that it all comes down to this:  “Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself.”

It’s all about relationship.

Today I am setting before you life and death.  Jesus is not giving us more rules to follow.  He’s not urging us to behave better.  No, it’s way more important than that. Jesus is calling us today to new life. Life lived to its fullest, abundant life. 

The life of the kingdom of heaven.  Here, on earth.

Amen.