Diverse Visions

Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog. Diverse Visions Scriptures: 2 Corinthians 5:17-20 Acts 8:26-40 Reconciliation is a basic Christian value. We can see this from the words of Paul in our lesson from the second letter to Corinth. It is an idea that we have to work on when you consider the depths of divisions that have plagued Christianity over the years, sometimes even resulting in religious wars and horrible persecutions. The very existence of the United Church speaks to reconciliation: the bringing together of denominations and learning to live with differences in the process. This Sunday is another example of a gesture towards reconciliation. World Communion Sunday is an important symbol because the first thing churches do when they schism is to ex-communicate each other. Ex-communication is literally the statement that we are no longer in communion with each other; we are no longer one community. World Communion Sunday is an attempt to move in the right direction: although we may have very different ideas about what the sacrament means, or who has authority to preside at it, at least we can share in the timing of it. We are making steps towards reconciliation with a world of divided churches. Today is also the day after the national day of Truth and Reconciliation – Orange Shirt Day – when we are called to consider what it means to be reconciled with our Indigenous neighbours. The Truth part of that has been increasingly revealed over several decades and the role of the United Church, and other churches, has led, first, to apologies for what we did in the Residential Schools and more than that, has led to a commitment to Indigenous members of the United Church to follow their lead as we seek to heal our relationship and as they work out what it means to be indigenous Christians in Canada. This is where World Communion Sunday and the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation converge. I did mention that World Communion Sunday was about reconciling churches that have split from each other, but that’s not the whole story. Over 2000 years, many Christian churches have taken on characteristics that come from the cultures they were planted in; they grew into indigenous churches around the world. A wonderful example arises from our Acts lesson today with the baptizing of the Ethiopian eunuch. That influential man went back to his country and laid the foundations of the oldest Christian church outside the Roman Empire. They still have practices you never find in other churches such as having young people work in isolation for years to memorize the Orthodox bible, or carving huge, elaborate churches out of a single stone – literally monoliths. Each land had a culture in place when Christianity arrived and elements of that culture were adopted into the expression of that faith locally. I have a small reproduction in my office of a baptismal font from Denmark. The original has inscriptions in Viking runes all around it (too small to see on the reproduction) and one of the members of the confirmation class pointed out that there were Viking warrior faces carved around the base. The church encouraged these kinds of local adaptations because it made the faith truly part of the local culture. We didn’t do that in Canada. The closest we get is with the Wendat Carol written by Jean de Brébeuf after decades of living with the Wendat people and learning their language and culture. Mostly we insisted that the indigenous people adopt the words, clothing and practices of British and French religious expressions. The United Church at Kanesatake (Oka) has tried to correct that. Rick Balson described the banners created there to identify the family clans associated with the church: raven, bear, turtle, and others. That struck me as unusual at first, until I realized that it’s not really all that different from the stained glass windows I saw in the church at Fitzroy Harbour showing the coats of arms of founding Scottish families. Other indigenous United Church congregations are undoubtedly figuring out their own ways to do the same kind of thing – express their Christian faith in terms that make sense with their own cultures – but it is hard: they have limited resources and very few ordained indigenous clergy to participate. And frankly, it is hard work to make up for hundreds of years of being squeezed into ways that fit our European traditions. One of the things I wonder is: what has the church lost? What has the Christian church in the world not seen because the folks here were not given the same freedoms that my ancestors had in Denmark or that the Ethiopians had, or the Persians, or the Chinese, or the Syrians? What kinds of expressions of faith might have arisen if we had not been so oppressive in the ways we brought Christ to the people here? The indigenous congregations of the United Church of Canada have proposed a new relationship as part of our journey to reconciliation. They have asked to be given the organizational freedom to develop their own practices, their own expressions of faith, their own structures and rules around ordination, in other words: their own ability to describe and define Christianity in Indigenous terms while still remaining within the United Church. They don’t want to schism away with a new denomination. They don’t want to break the relationship we have. They want to transform that relationship in ways that put into their hands the opportunity to define themselves as Indigenous Christians within a United Church, giving them a distinctive voice within the larger church. I believe that this is a daring idea whose time has come. The United Church has always embodied diverse visions of faith right from its earliest days and this fits well with our concept of ourselves as a denomination. But it won’t happen by itself. Since it requires a number of changes to the Manual of the United Church of Canada, basically equivalent to constitutional changes, we have to vote on it across the country. Knox will be having a congregational meeting on the last Sunday in November to vote on a Remit, asking whether we agree that this change should be permitted. I hope and pray that we vote in favour because I see this as a foundational step in the right direction, giving back to Indigenous Christians the voice that we should never have taken from them and that our own ancestors enjoyed right from the beginning. There are already debates about whether this is organizationally sound or theologically appropriate and I have opinions about how to address those issues should they arise. At base, I see this as being a question about trust and control. The indigenous congregations are asking us to trust them as they work out their own spirituality and theology within the United Church and they are asking us to give them the freedom to control their future within the United Church without having to come back for permission as they make a series of changes that might require one remit after another. This initiative has come from the Indigenous churches themselves and I am impressed that they have the courage and the vision to take this step into the future, to re-define their Christian spirituality in indigenous terms and work to discover what could have been discovered hundreds of years ago if only we had not prevented it. The United Church is proud of including diverse visions of faith under our big tent. I think we should celebrate and make room for this one. Amen.