Our Best Foot Forward

This will be my last post on the KnoxTalks Blog. I am leaving Knox, Nepean and moving to New Brunswick. I have enjoyed having the opportunity to share my thoughts with you.

I would like to thank Shelley Rose, who has faithfully transcribed my notes into full text each week since the beginning of COVID, despite being a member of another congregation! Your work has been greatly appreciated, Shelley.

Our Best Foot Forward

Scripture: 2 Corinthians 6:1-13

As I’ve mentioned in the past, Canada Day brings mixed feelings. I remember the unbridled pride and joy from Expo 67, Centennial year, when I was too young to be aware of politics or social issues, and as proud as I am to be Canadian, we are all aware of our ongoing issues with Indigenous peoples and the things in our history we cannot ignore, which make us anything but proud.

Remember the 1997 movie Air Force 1? Harrison Ford played the US president, who was also a skilled pilot. Terrorists tried to kidnap him on the presidential airplane: it was all very exciting and unapologetically nationalistic. The director was Wolfgang Petersen, a German, who said that he couldn’t make this movie about Germany because of its troubling history but he felt he could about America, so he revelled in unrestrained patriotism.

At this point I think most of us have become very skeptical about unrestrained patriotism; we may even associate it with sinister groups.

But I also recognize that we miss it; the feeling that we can embrace something we belong to as unreservedly good, whether that be our nation or our church.

The fact remains that within the nations of the world, Canada has done some remarkable things and has set an example for other nations of how to try to build a diverse and inclusive society; while offering people space on territory we have taken, often in unscrupulous ways.

In many ways Canada is being more successful at embodying what I would identify as Christian values than most other places in the world, which is good, but we must acknowledge that there is a dark side.

Similarly, the United Church, which once operated many of those problematic Residential Schools, has tried to become a leader in reconciliation. This is interesting, because if you are directly involved in the process, it becomes easy to see how far we still have to go. But at the same time, we can see how we are ahead of the crowd and I’m hopeful that our creation of an autonomous indigenous church within the United Church will show us what real progress can look like.

Or more specifically, we can look at Knox, where we have always wanted to be warm and welcoming and where we have discovered that we have some serious work to do in order to grow into that vision. It’s not only about Indigenous issues: all our relationships need reconciliation and redemption. Our Indigenous partners are helping us realize that face, and learn what it means to make it real.

So what do we do? How do we go forward with this mix of feelings: this history where we’ve tried to live up to high ideals and yet where we have to acknowledge that we’ve fallen short?

The lesson from 2 Corinthians is helpful. Written almost 2000 years ago (so the missionaries who settled here certainly had access to it, as have all ages of the Christian church) Paul presents an attitude to others that he, as a missionary, used to inform the way he approached people: he came as a servant, respectfully, willing to endure all kinds of hardships and false accusations as people reacted negatively to his message.

His attitude exists in stark contrast to so much of our history, both for our nation and our church. Our historical attitude was sometimes so arrogant that other people simply didn’t count as real and could be consigned to slavery or organized attempts to wipe out their culture and replace it with a sad imitation our own cultural practises. The very opposite of Paul’s example to all Christians of every age.

Respect, honesty, integrity, and love are the values we are given on which to base all our relationships. I am very grateful that so many of the values taught in the scriptures are being supported in the ideals our society now promotes, although, sadly, many of these are now being challenged and trolled as being “weak” or “unfair”.

I believe that our only way forward is to address our past (and present) honestly and work for reconciliation so we can have a balance of celebrating our accomplishments and acknowledging how we still have to make progress to live up to our ideals.

This may be uncomfortable for us and it will require us to be really honest with ourselves. Another deeply important Christian teaching involves repentance and forgiveness. We haven’t always been effective with this idea: sometimes we’ve let people off the hook, saying they can confess to God and just be forgiven.

The examples we have in scripture aren’t so simple. They fit the model of reconciliation better: we are encouraged to make peace with each other; acknowledge how we have wronged each other; and seek forgiveness, not just from God, but from the other person we’ve hurt.

It’s not easy. But it is important because it is the only way to build a family, a group, even a nation that truly reflects God’s love and the other values Paul showed us.

I chose the sermon title “Our Best Foot Forward” deliberately because it tends to make us think about presenting the shiniest aspect of ourselves to others, making ourselves look most attractive. But, a better understanding would be that our “best foot” includes our willingness to deal with the less attractive parts of our existence and our refusal to buy into a society that not only divides people into armed camps of “us and them”, but also denies any criticism that might be made, no matter how legitimate it might be.

We should celebrate the good that we are doing and at the same time we should work to do better. We should put our best foot forward as we go into the future, which will include coming to terms with our misdeeds, reconciling with the people we have harmed and the people who have harmed us, as much as we are able, since reconciliation can only succeed when all parties work to make it happen.

And from the particular perspective of Christianity, I think it should involve embracing those values Paul talked about where we present ourselves honestly, respectfully, without arrogance or presumption; where we go forward in a way that truly welcomes and deals with people as they are rather than as we want to force them to be.

We can only imagine how things might have been different if we had embodied those values in each of our relationships in the distant or recent past, but it’s never too late to start. The future is stretching out ahead of us and it’s in our power to make our nation, our denomination and our home congregation even better, as we put our best foot forward into the future.

Amen.

Rebooting Creation

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.

This particular message was written for our annual Blessing of the Animals service.

Rebooting Creation

Scripture: Genesis 6:11-22

Noah and the Ark is one of the best known stories of the bible: all the animals coming in, two by two, riding out the great flood, only to come out after 40 days and nights to re-populate the earth.

People forget certain details, like the fact that the “clean” animals and birds came in 14 by 14; seven pairs, a symbolic number, and actually the total time on the ark was almost a full year – the 40 days and nights was just how long it rained.

Then, 150 days for the waters to subside, then another 40 days for Noah to dare to open the windows, then more waiting until it was actually dry enough to get out. As we know from Ottawa spring floods a few years ago, it takes a lot longer for the high waters to subside than it takes for them to appear in the first place.

This story is a wonderful and important lesson for modern humanity because when you read the whole thing, you realize that in this story humanity has put all the Earth at risk because of heedless human behaviour. If we look beyond the language of sin and judgement, we see parallels to modern concerns about climate change: annual wildfires and smoke, increasing tornadoes and hurricanes and, much closer to Noah’s situation, rising sea levels; all those human things that threaten much more than human life.

Frankly, I can understand speaking in judgmental language about short-sighted and selfish decisions that threaten not only future generations but also the very life around us. But I particularly like the way that this story emphasizes the fact that despite the human core of the problem, this is not a story only about humans and about human needs.

Human needs are specially addressed, it is true. That’s the purpose of the “clean” animals that get group rates: there were no “clean” animals until the law was written, but the audience for this story knew the law, so this language is a storyteller’s short-hand. The clean animals were going to be lunch, the “unclean” animals were all the ones it was not safe or wise to eat, so they brought extra clean animals so they could eat some and breed others.

Notice, though: the overriding command from God, the creator was to bring everything, not just the clean stuff. Bugs: creeping, crawling, swarming creatures, they were included. This was a very early recognition of the inter-connectedness of all life – the web of life, where diversity is needed to have a successful eco-system.

The first version of this story came from the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Noah figure – Utnapishtim – saves a bunch of baby animals and birds as well as the village craftspeople, a very limited picture of “everything” compared to the Noah story, and frankly focused on saving “civilization” rather than the world.

Whoever re-wrote this story had the Jewish understanding of God as Creator and also had a clear sense that you need more than farm animals for the world to work; that even bugs have a place, even when we don’t understand why.

Thousands of years ago it was clearly understood that God, as creator put everything here for a reason and loved it all. In the Noah story, God is basically re-booting creation, wiping out this humanity that had become like an incurable virus on the planet and restoring things to the original settings, like the garden of Eden all over again, with just a small number of animals to re-populate the world; eight humans and more “clean” animals to support farming but nothing else left out. Humans are not permitted to destroy any other creatures when this reboot happens.

This is an important principle for us to grasp because it doesn’t put humans at the centre of things which is what we do all the time: “Hey, these bugs keep eating the crops and I’ve found a chemical that is really good at killing them; let’s make a bunch and sell it; we’ll save lots of people from starving, make a bunch of money too, and we’ll call it DDT!”

And you thought I was going to say Neo-Nicotinoids, those chemicals killing all of our bees.

We’re really not very good at waiting long enough to discover the side effects of our wonderful new inventions. We’re not patient; we want results fast and we don’t count the cost to other creatures, other life, until there’s a crisis.

The problem is that we can’t re-boot creation. The Noah solution is a wonderful warning to us about how badly we might manage things and some of the potential consequences. We are reminded in this story that God loves every part of creation, even those bits we find inconvenient, or incomprehensible. Like Noah, we are tasked with preventing their destruction, with saving them from the consequences of human misbehaviour.

The costs of our mistakes have taken on a world-wide scale, so let’s take that love that we shower on our dogs and cats and the other animals that share our homes and extend a loving hand to the rest of creation: the cute creatures, and the slimy ones, the birds and the bugs, the safe ones and the dangerous ones.

They are all part of God’s complex creation, lovingly made and inter-related and all worth saving.

Amen.

Seeking Reconciliation

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.

Seeking Reconciliation

Scripture: Matthew 5:1-12

Later in the service we will be having a formal dedication for our Stone Turtle: the permanent, three-dimensional land acknowledgement built by our Right Relations committee with guidance and help from a local Algonquin artist, Mike Strickland.

Acknowledging the land is a practise we are learning from indigenous people here in North America. It amounts to someone saying “I come in peace”, with the added dimension of recognizing that someone else already lives here and we are not planning to displace them.

The obvious irony of our acknowledgement is that we have, indeed, displaced the people of this land and have not yet made a treaty that allows us to stay here in our city, with our massive infrastructure and even our friendly additions, like gardens. A land acknowledgement, under these circumstances, should challenge us, should make us think deeply about what we are really saying.

When the Hebrew people invaded the Promised Land of Canaan after being toughened up by forty years in the wilderness, scripture records them as being encouraged by God to be ruthless in killing the residents, in some cases including women and children, tearing down places of worship and making every effort to wipe out the local culture because it was Pagan: the Canaanites didn’t worship the God of Israel.

I’m not going to get into a theological critique of this history except to say that this understanding contributes to what is going on in Israel and Palestine today. There are many people who still take it literally, who believe that this ancient promise is still to be fulfilled in literal, geographic terms, in the present.

Instead, I’m going to point out that when Europeans figured out that the American continents existed, they took this same theology and applied it to themselves.

That was impressive theological sleight-of-hand. To do this they had to:

1: explain how European Christians had inherited the promise made to the Hebrews; and

2: explain how the Americas had somehow become the “promised land”.

Once they had done this, both Protestants and Catholics alike, it became very easy to justify doing the same violent invasion and cultural suppression described in the early books of the Bible.

This is what we carry with us when we come to the table for reconciliation, with all of the historical ripples like residential schools, the 60’s scoop, missing and murdered indigenous women and two spirit people and the failure of our governments to honour treaties, either to the letter or in the original spirit.

That’s a lot to reconcile.

Jesus gave us wisdom that should have prevented all those past wrongs and should guide us today: “The meek shall inherit the earth”.

Jesus came out of that culture that believed in the promised land and all of that history of conquest and then later conquest by empire after empire. They didn’t care about inheriting the planet, “the earth”; so another very legitimate translation of this passage is: “The meek shall inherit the land”.

Jesus is giving a radically different theological spin on things. It’s not the armies and empires that God will bless, it’s the meek: the people who come in a gentle spirit, who do not come in arrogance, who do not feel entitled, who do not insist that they deserve something.

Jesus calls us to approach each other gently and lovingly, acknowledging and grappling with the bad things that have been done. That’s what reconciliation is all about: if nothing bad has happened, there’s nothing to reconcile.

This is true in every level of life. We are called to reconciliation in our personal lives, in our churches, our schools, our jobs. The Bible talks about Jesus reconciling us to God and calling us to be reconciled to each other.

“Reconciliation” is ancient Christian language at the core of our faith and it makes us very uncomfortable. Why? Because it calls us to confront the ways we have made life harder for other people; it calls us to struggle with the log in our own eyes instead of the speck in someone else’s eye and to do it face to face with someone we may be very angry with or who may be very angry with us or, more likely, both at the same time.

Real reconciliation takes an effort. It pushes us out of our comfort zones; it challenges us to see life through the eyes of someone we may not like very much or someone who seems incomprehensible to us. It calls us to abandon stock phrases like: “That’s in the past, get over it”, or “They deserved it because of (pick your excuse)”, or “They should have known better”.

Not because we are abandoning the idea of accountability but because we are being called to stop putting our own perspective between ourselves and our understanding of the other, we are called to the level of love that allows us to love our enemies.

That’s hard to do; it’s even hard to understand.

I recently heard someone talking about our new Holy Manners. Their interpretation seemed to be that this approach prevented us from calling someone else to account for what they were doing.

That’s far from the intent: the point is that we do, indeed, hold each other accountable for what we do and say but when we do it, we are to be respectful and kind. We do not attack, but we do speak clearly, never forgetting the call to love, no matter how upset we might be in the moment.

That is a high calling that is hard to make real in life. It is at the core of reconciliation. It’s much easier to imagine when we are speaking of the church trying to reconcile with indigenous people but we understand it best when we consider the very personal situations we find ourselves in where we have to deal with people who have really upset us.

The way to go forward is to take it all seriously: our own experience and feelings; the experience and feelings of the other people with whom we disagree; and then we try to reconcile those different perspectives and find a way to come together, despite our differences.

It is easy to give up, to quit, or get frustrated and walk away or to dismiss the experiences of someone else as somehow less worthy than our own.

But we are not called to quit.

Jesus was willing to take reconciliation all the way to the cross to bring people together and to connect us with God. That says to me that reconciliation is worth whatever effort we can bring and when we find it challenging us deeply, then we should understand that God is giving us room to grow.

Amen.

Vision

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.

Vision

Scriptures: Proverbs 29:18 Galatians 3:26-29

If we are to be a visionary people, our King James Version reading from Proverbs is great. It’s not the most accurate translation of the lesson – it’s really about needing prophesy to call us back to God’s paths – but you can make a good case for that version: “Without a vision, the people perish”.

Sometimes we need those prophetic reminders, of course, but to have a vision to hold in our hearts and minds every day, to give us a picture of what God wants the world to be so we can shape our lives to create that world – that’s one of the amazing benefits of being the church.

We gather and we do all the human things that make us the church: we share; we laugh and cry together; we help and support each other; we learn together.

And in the midst of all of this, we remind each other and ourselves about what it means to be God’s people, to be followers of Jesus. We refresh and renew our vision so we don’t lose sight of it, so we can live into it during the week.

The young people of the Sunday School that we have just celebrated today represent different stages on the journey of faith. Some are just beginning to learn and others have recently become confirmed members who have promised to live out their faith and to try to live into that vision of the world God wants us to create. We have promised to help and support them, to be that loving, safe community that is both a shelter from the hard parts of life and a place where we develop the skills to live out our vision.

So how do we describe that vision? What is the best summary?

On numerous occasions I have mentioned that part of scripture where Jesus summarizes his own teachings by identifying the most important laws:

First: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, strength

Second: Love your neighbour as yourself

But in Galatians, Paul gives us a very practical application of this law:

Neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female.

Jesus spent his ministry demonstrating to outcasts that God has not given up on them and that they are very much part of God’s people and Paul is saying: “Jesus tore down these barriers; we must keep them torn down!”

He was advocating equality across all kinds of lines: cultural, gender, social status. We are all of equal value in God’s eyes and we are to welcome each other and treat each other in exactly that way and, more than that, we are to be a community that seeks the good in all these people, cooperating and sharing for the common good, not trying to climb above each other but trying to lift each other up as we go forward together.

Now there’s a vision we can hang on to for the 21st century: a vision of a loving, welcoming, sharing community, modelled on the teachings of Christ and lifting up all people as being loved by God and worthy of our respect and love.

Our historical track record hasn’t been the best. We haven’t always been willing to challenge what passes for “common sense” or social norms, and we’ve lost the vision.

That passage of Paul’s has been around almost 2000 years so far. It took us over 1700 years to abolish slavery; gender equality is something we are still struggling for in so many ways and yet we’ve had this reading for centuries!

We are making progress now but it’s not going to be easy to maintain this vision. Society is developing an attitude that supports privilege and creates division. We need to gather and remember the ideal world God wants. We need each other to work towards this just and equal world, to create this loving, sharing community that overcomes the barriers that seem to go up so easily these days.

It’s not just about remembering that vision, it’s about making this place, this community, a living illustration of that vision. It’s about having God’s kingdom, God’s vision of an ideal world, alive here, among us and growing through us as we carry that vision, that way of life, that practical expression of loving God and our neighbours wherever we go.

That is what we are teaching our children. Our latest confirmation class members have committed themselves to this vision and that is the vision we ALL have committed ourselves to embody.

May God guide us and bless us as we travel together into the future, bringing God’s vision to life in this world.

Amen.

Ask Andrew 4 (2024): Should the 10 Commandments Evolve?

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.

“Ask Andrew” is an annual opportunity for Knox members to ask question that might make for good sermons. Here’s the fourth and final one in the series.

Ask Andrew 4: Should the Ten Commandments Evolve?

“There are 3 versions of the Ten Commandments in the Bible; Exod. 20, Exod. 34 & Deut. 5.  In keeping with the final part of our (draft) Vision Statement, “Evolving to be relevant in the changing world around us, while still honouring past traditions,” do you think it is time for the original laws to continue evolving into relevant (meaningful) Christian practices today?”

Scriptures: Deuteronomy 5:12-15

This question starts with information that many people don’t know: the Bible has three versions of the Decalogue – the Ten Commandments. Two of them are almost identical: Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5; while the Exodus 34 commandments have some overlap but contain lots of ritual rules and warnings against fraternizing with the people whose land they were taking.

One can argue that elements of Exodus 34 really amount to detailed expansions of other commandments: like having no other gods; making no idols. This list is sometimes called the Ritual Decalogue and no one was ever made to memorize this list in Sunday School. It is not practical for our own everyday lives and omits sins like murder, adultery and theft, so it has never been given the same attention or reverence as the Ten Commandments we know better (which, by contrast, are sometimes called the Ethical Decalogue).

Was this Ritual Decalogue part of an evolution of the Ten Commandments? Scholarly arguments suggest that this version represents a division amongst early Jewish religious leaders, with both versions being included in Exodus in different places.

We don’t know if one was adapted from the other or whether the two developed in parallel. I would like to draw attention, though, to the difference between our reading today from Deuteronomy 5 and the more familiar version from Exodus 20.

Deuteronomy is probably the oldest written book of the bible and in the commandment that makes the Sabbath day holy, the reason for this commandment is different. The older version, which we just read, says that we should have a day of rest because God rescued Israel from slavery and so everyone, including every family member, every servant and slave, even every animal should have a day of rest.

This is a call to empathy, a call to decent behaviour, a call to basic justice, a call to remember the history that shaped a people and to treat others well as a result.

The one in Exodus 20, which we know better, says that the Sabbath is holy because God rested on the seventh day of creation. That’s a call to holiness, to follow God’s example, and it still applies to all people and all beasts of burden.

To my mind, a call to holiness is more abstract than a call to remember past oppression and injustice so we can avoid future oppression and injustice. So, is that an evolution of the ten commandments? Yes, from a theological perspective at least. It changes the emphasis without changing the law itself.

The Ritual Decalogue changes the very laws themselves. So, if you want an example of a more radical evolution, there you have it, but is it an improvement? It seems to be preparation and justification for a genocide because it describes the steps taken to destroy the local religion completely. This version supports the political sensibilities of the day, and that’s the risk we take whenever we discuss updating scripture.

My previous congregation in Chatham had a number of people who wanted to see the Hebrew scripture section of the Bible completely removed. They would have preferred if I only preached from the New Testament. They saw the older books as being too judgmental, too violent.

Of course, I immediately saw it as my duty to introduce them to the wonders of the stories we find in those books and what they can tell us about today. It’s a knee-jerk preacher thing; I reacted with similar difficulty when members of our last study group wanted to try writing their own parables.

Of course, parables are a very human form of communication. They are not divine by nature but I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of penning any myself and I think that those who tried discovered just how difficult it can be to put deep meaning into a short, even pithy, story and to avoid accidentally putting in unintended meanings. You never know how someone is going to interpret what you’ve written.

A central part of my job as a minister is to be an interpreter of ancient texts, to take things like the Ten Commandments and demonstrate how they speak to us today. To my mind, that is precisely what the question asks for: an evolution of the ancient words into a modern meaning, for today’s context.

But that’s probably not the form the questioner was imagining. It’s not hard to visualize a poster with re-worded or updated commandments and really, is that much different than what we have already done by adopting the Holy Manners document?

I believe that there is a constant evolution in our interpretation and application of scripture but I would resist very strongly having the original words changed in the texts we read.

Can you imagine what the Bible would look like today if the Victorians had re-written it to suit their worldview? The original words of scripture have helped us overcome so much Victorian Imperialism and those helpful words would have been deleted.

I am also very cautious about adding to the scriptures. Some churches have done this, such as the Mormons, but many Christians don’t take those additions seriously and at this point, their words feel dated; they don’t feel fresh or modern anymore.

Maybe my training is too strong but I feel best about taking the original scriptures we have and examining them for their original meaning, first, and then imagining how they might apply in the 21st century.

That really is a central pillar of the Reformed Tradition: we don’t want to be stuck in the past; or simply re-hashing old interpretations; we feel the call to keep updating our understanding of what God is doing in the world. That’s why there’s a new sermon every Sunday: there’s always something new to discover in these old words.

Should the commandments and other scriptures evolve? Yes, in terms of our understanding and application of their principles, but we need to keep the original words intact because those words keep us honest; they keep us from playing fast and loose as we try to meet the political agendas of our age.

As much as we like to challenge the interpretations of the past, we will only grow if we let the ancient words challenge us and influence how we go into the future.

Amen.

Trinity Sunday

Scripture: Isaiah 6:1-8

Within Christianity there are conflicting images of God. I’m not talking about pictures or icons, but the ways we imagine God to be: our understanding of God’s nature.

In the United Church we tend to emphasize God’s love, God’s justice, God’s desire to transform the world into a better place and us into better people.

But there is a large part of Christianity that emphasizes God as a judge, often a harsh judge; with numerous rules and a tendency to send people to Hell. As much as we tend to blame the Evangelical movement for so many things, this judgmental God can be found in most denominations and has deep roots in the histories and traditions of both Eastern and Western branches of Christianity.

What’s that all about? Where does that come from?

I believe that today’s lesson helps us understand. Look at Isaiah’s situation: he has a vision in which he finds himself in the very presence of God. There are Seraphim with multiple wings and voices that shake the foundations. And they’re just God’s servants!

Isaiah is freaked out! God’s holiness is loudly declared three times over by this scary 6-winged angel, and all Isaiah can think about is the way he and his people fall short of God’s perfection. It’s like he’s saying “I don’t belong here: I can’t survive here!” He’s so desperate that he’s willing to kiss a live coal to avoid being consumed by God’s holiness.

It has been a long time since we have tended to talk about The Fear of God, but here we see it in a very raw, literal form.

It shouldn’t be hard to understand: if you are faced with overwhelming power, fear is a natural reaction. It’s even healthy: if you are facing a tornado, you should be scared, and look for cover!

We see it over and over in scripture: anytime an angel shows up the first thing they have to say is “fear not”. Jesus uses these words himself, and these are mere representatives of God! Poor Isaiah: his vision took him into the very presence of the Creator.

The whole idea of Heaven in the Hebrew Scriptures is of a place for God to dwell: humans don’t belong, and wouldn’t survive. The Hebrew Scriptures only record two humans going there: Enoch and Elijah. It’s like we’re just not designed to experience God without serious filters. Direct experience of the Divine is overwhelming.

This understanding is what leads to the idea that we need to worship and praise God. God is seen as so powerful as to be unapproachable; the idea of a family relationship with God is revolutionary every time it appears in the Bible.

Jesus emphasized this loving, family kind of relationship, which is why Jesus and his message are so important to our faith. We have needed the loving image of God we find in Jesus to get past our sense of fear.

That has been vital for us. God doesn’t want us to be afraid. As Paul puts it, perfect love casts out fear.

But you know, a sense of awe is still appropriate. Loving God, and believing that God loves us, shouldn’t take away from the sense of wonder that we experience as we contemplate the Infinite.

One of my favourite modern takes on this is found in Bruce Cockburn’s song: “Lord of the Starfields” which, he says, is the closest he has come to writing a hymn:

Lord of the starfields / Ancient of Days
Universe Maker / Here’s a song in your praise

Wings of the storm cloud / Beginning and end
You make my heart leap / Like a banner in the wind

O love that fires the sun / Keep me burning.


Lord of the starfields / Sower of life,
Heaven and earth are / Full of your light

Voice of the nova / Smile of the dew
All of our yearning / Only comes home to you

O love that fires the sun / Keep me burning

Cockburn has done a clever job of balancing ancient phrases with modern understandings of the universe. He has worked hard to insert that sense of wonder at God’s obvious power:

“voice of the nova, lord of the starfields, wings of the stormcloud”

with the message that God is loving, even gentle:

“sower of life, smile of the dew”

The contrast is remarkable but it captures well the situation we find ourselves in: we are called to believe in a creator God who is responsible for, and therefore greater than every wonder of the universe, great and small, and we are called to believe that this amazing creator loves us; wants what is best for us; calls us to move forward in life; to participate in making the world a loving place.

If the only thing we see is the power then it’s not surprising that we would be filled with fear and expect judgment and want to be on the right side of such a stern God. It’s not surprising that we might become quick to condemn anyone we think God might not like. It’s not surprising, but it is sad.

We are called to a more complex understanding, and we are called by Jesus himself, who set the tone for the relationship with God that we celebrate.

And as we see in our reading the story is not supposed to end with the awe, or the fear, or the wonder. The story ends with the person who encountered God being inspired to take up God’s ways, and carry God’s message.

That’s the message: when we encounter God and are overwhelmed by the vision of God’s power and wonder, we have have a choice:

we can fall to our knees and stay there, fearing God and wondering how to pacify such a powerful being;

or we can believe in God’s love, get up from our knees, and start to live our lives in a way that demonstrates how God’s love matters.

We can do what Isaiah did: we can get past our fear, and guilt, and that feeling of being overwhelmed by holiness. We can be inspired, and respond to God’s call by wanting to share what we’ve found with others.

What we’ve found is clearest in the teachings of Jesus: he shows us a God of love, who wants to reconcile everyone, overcoming all boundaries and transforming every unjust relationship: creating a world where the first shall be last and the last shall be first.

Jesus showed us that this all-powerful God, creator of the universe, was prepared to use weakness, even the weakness of dying on the cross, to shake the greatest empire of the world to its very roots.

It’s a marvellous irony, that this Being who can create all the wonders of the universe and inspire such awe and devotion, can transform the world through weakness and ordinary people. And it’s a wonderful gift, to be able to follow Isaiah and move beyond our own weakness to the place where we can share God.

From Garden to City and Back Again

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.

Today’s meditation comes from the annual Knox service to bless gardens and bicycles.

From Garden to City and Back Again

Scriptures: Genesis 2:4-9, 15-17 Revelation 21:22 to 22:5

One of my professors once remarked on the arc of the Christian Bible: the story of humanity starts in a garden and then ends in a city.

Our readings reflect that today and of course, there’s a lot of symbolism built in to this whole arc.

The Garden of Eden represents humanity as an innocent part of nature, living in a lush garden amongst the animals, naked and unashamed, basically just another creature on the earth (interestingly, vegetarian, too) free to eat of all the fruit in the garden with that well known exception of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

One tree that the humans were free to eat from, but obviously didn’t, was the tree of life, the tree whose fruit lets you live forever. Part of the punishment for disobedience was to be barred from eating from this tree by an angel with a flaming sword.

So, having learned about good and evil, humanity stopped being a simple animal and was expelled from Paradise. You don’t have to take this literally to see all the possibilities here; the commentary on humanity’s connection to nature: once we get cast out we have to cultivate our plants, work hard to break up the soil, pull weeds, fight thorns; growing food becomes hard work.

This was a powerful story for the Hebrews who, for a lot of their history, were agriculturally based. It doesn’t matter to us that in paleolithic times real life would have been nasty, brutish and short. We can understand that, intellectually and still yearn for an idealized past, a garden of Eden that lives in our imaginations.

And look how far we’ve moved from that ideal garden! Even in Biblical times it was clear that we were moving off farms. The city is a most human invention, concentrated humanity which requires the support of surrounding food producers – what we now call our consumption “footprint”.

The farm is already disconnected from the wild side of nature: we protect our livestock from predators; we try to keep the wild plants we can’t eat from taking over our fields. But the city is even more disconnected from nature, both wild and domesticated. Even in Jesus’ lifetime people could work in a city and never have to grow their own gardens or be involved in any kind of planting, and that was 2000 years ago!

Symbolically, people understood that a city could represent total disconnection from God and God’s good creation. This disconnection didn’t mean that cities were necessarily evil – Jerusalem was hailed as a holy city starting with King David – but by the time the Revelation was written Rome had destroyed Jerusalem and Rome was seen as an evil city. Of course, you couldn’t write that down without getting arrested so the author referred to an older evil city – Babylon – and planted clues, like the Whore of Babylon sitting on 7 hills (Whoops! Wasn’t Rome built on 7 hills?); okay, it wasn’t super subtle.

But clearly, cities could be problematic by their very nature and that’s not surprising, is it? When you pack people in together, sure, you might be safe from invaders beyond your walls but within those walls diseases can spread in ways not possible in rural areas and if your hygiene wasn’t great, things would stink as they were making you sick.

Most cities were seen as bad: Jericho was cursed, Babylon was evil, Rome was evil, and don’t even talk about Sodom and Gomorrah: only Jerusalem was a good city and it had been destroyed.

So, John shows us an image of a New Jerusalem in our second lesson and look what he does: not only is it built of precious metals and stones with streets paved of gold, but it has a river flowing from the middle of it with crystal clear water and trees of life growing on either side of this river. What is he showing us?

We have a hybrid: the holy city of Jerusalem is cleaned up and combined with the garden of Eden; the walls of the city protect us; while the natural creation of God is brought into that city so that people may live fully, enjoying the idealized life they lost at the beginning of time.

It’s quite the story. We’ve moved from Paradise Lost to Paradise Regained and one of the most important symbols of that is the garden growing in the city.

This ancient story still speaks to us as we are gathering to bless the gardens we have planted in our city. We have lots of our own reasons: we want unpolluted food without having to transport it across country; we want to experience the joy and spiritual satisfaction of getting our hands dirty and nurturing life from the soil; we want to step back from the urban experience and re-connect with that dimly remembered paradise.

There’s something in us that wants the New Jerusalem to come true. We are in the process of creating for ourselves a version of this perfect place described by John in the last book of the Bible. And there’s nothing wrong with that at all. For thousands of years we have known the dangers of becoming disconnected from creation. We have felt the need to be part of the life of the planet, not just by walking around and breathing, but by nurturing living things.

If our New Jerusalem isn’t encrusted with rich and shiny things I won’t worry because what we are doing is planting that garden in the city. We are taking our human space and re-connecting it with the nature that gives us life every day. We are attempting to heal that unnatural divide and I think this is a good first step as we start to build a 21st century version of the New Jerusalem.

Amen.

Ask Andrew 3: Believers Behaving Badly

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.

“Ask Andrew” is an annual opportunity for Knox members to ask question that might make for good sermons. Here’s the third one for 2024.

Ask Andrew 3: Believers Behaving Badly

Scriptures: 2 Samuel 12:1-7aMatthew 18:15-22

How do you keep your faith when you are not seeing Jesus in the eyes and actions of others?

This question came with a story from another congregation featuring an elderly man, a big contributor, threatening a young female church staff member with his cane in the church parking lot.

A clear power imbalance there: the old guy was rich, which gave him influence as it had for many years in that church, but I bet he was very aware of his age and his frailty and so threatening physical violence with a cane somehow felt justified as he tried to get what he wanted.

It doesn’t help that we have that cartoon meme of the old man waving his cane at someone, a symbol of impotence and decline that we have turned into a joke. But it’s no joke when you are the one about to be struck. Obviously inappropriate behaviour for a follower of Jesus and the question poses this as a faith challenge: How do you keep your faith when someone who should be a good example behaves so badly?

While someone’s bad behaviour may be upsetting, disappointing, I hope it doesn’t become a stumbling block. I believe that our faith is something we work out with God; that’s a theology the Reformed church has held for over 500 years now, and one reason we don’t venerate saints.

It’s great when you find someone you can admire because they are such a good example of the teachings of Jesus being lived out, but if we make the behaviour of others the foundation of what we believe, we will find ourselves disappointed over and over again.

We need to ground our faith in Jesus himself and the principles he taught, not in how well the people who follow Jesus succeed in living up to those principles.

That’s not to let everyone off the hook. How we behave is a major part of our faith: loving our neighbours as ourselves; doing unto others as we would have others do unto us; treating each other with respect and dignity; this is all at the core of what Jesus taught and this is what breaks down when we behave badly.

We can generally justify our own bad behaviour easily: “That person deserved it because of what they did”, reminiscent of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”, something Jesus explicitly rejected and puts us into the role of judge, jury and executioner; or “I was afraid of what they were going to do next” which often speaks to something inside of us: we are trying to protect, or to defend someone (perhaps a person we love) which can trigger the most extreme behaviour; or perhaps ourselves when we feel we are losing something; or when things are moving in a new direction we don’t like and we want someone to be held responsible; or when we feel we’ve been embarrassed; or when we feel our influence is waning.

Nathan had the prophetic job of calling the king to account for his bad behaviour. This job was often very dangerous, prophets often died, and on those rare occasions when we see Jesus using harsh words, he is being a prophet. He is always challenging people in positions of authority to stop abusing vulnerable people.

Nathan was brilliant, very indirect: he told a story that got past David’s self-justification that allowed David, the powerful king, to experience the other side of his bad behaviour; to feel what the other family felt when he stole a man’s wife and then ordered that he be left to die in battle to cover up David’s adultery. I’m most impressed that Nathan was able to get David to experience true empathy, to really learn to love his neighbour as himself, to put himself in their shoes and recognize the consequences of his behaviour with no way for his self-justification to kick in.

In the church, we have ways of dealing with conflicts. The lesson from Matthew gives us an early example which starts with personal, one-on-one conversation, moves to expanding the circle with a couple of witnesses and then expands it to the whole church only when necessary.

We see elements of confidentiality, showing enough respect for the other person that you deal with them face to face (which makes it a lot harder to treat them badly, but not impossible of course).

It’s all about relationships and that’s why the final, most extreme outcome is removing the person from the church, what we traditionally call “excommunication” because it speaks to a fully broken relationship. And yet, the very next lesson is about forgiveness, the seventy-seven times or seventy times seven in some versions. It’s a symbolic number telling us not to give up on someone. We have to leave the door open to reconciliation, no matter how difficult it seems.

I have mentioned before that this passage has been used to persuade abused people to stay in abusive relationships. That is not the message. Reconciliation does not mean you go back to the same-old-same-old. Reconciliation only works if there is change, and people have to be safe.

We have also learned about the benefit to the person doing the forgiving. They don’t have to carry the burden of their hurt; they can leave it at the feet of the person who abused them without giving that person the power to hurt them again.

Jesus is calling us to a high ideal of forgiveness, but Jesus was very practical. He had strong and angry words for leaders who led people astray but he also accepted into his group leaders who were trying to change, who were prepared to embrace his principles and learn to be better.

And those instructions on how to resolve a conflict within the community of faith are evidence that bad behaviour has been with us from the beginning and that we are called to deal with it, not sweep it under the carpet. We are called to honestly, lovingly deal with the people who make us most angry and to be open to discover that maybe their eye has a speck, while our eye has a log.

In United Church congregations we have something called a Ministry and Personnel (M&P) committee whose specific job is to deal with conflicts between church members and staff and also between volunteers as well. Committee members are the ones you go to when you have a concern about someone behaving badly in the church. It will be dealt with in confidence, but you have to do it in writing and identify yourself because, as we have seen, this is about relationships and you can’t reconcile a relationship anonymously.

We need to be respectful of each other, and loving. We need to recognize power dynamics, just like going to the king with his sins, or confronting the rich old guy with his cane. One of our biggest duties is to protect the vulnerable and throughout it all we need to deal honestly and with a sincere desire to make things right rather than seeking retribution or simply lashing out in pain or anger.

We also need to expect change as part of reconciliation: things can’t go back to the way they were, but they can be better than they are now if we can all learn from our bad choices.

Holding onto that vision is what helps me keep my faith secure when believers behave badly. I hope it helps you too.

Amen.

Surprise!

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.

Surprise!

Scripture: Acts 10:44-48

We are familiar with the thought that controversy is part of church life in modern times. What we don’t always remember is that it has been there since the very beginning.

The first big controversy of the Christian church was about whether non-Jews (Gentiles) could join the church, become followers of Jesus and full participants in the community of faith and particularly whether they could join without converting to Judaism.

This hadn’t been a problem in Jesus’ own ministry. He mostly stuck to Jewish or sometimes Samaritan areas, although we know about him helping the Roman Centurion, the Syrophonecian woman, and the Gerasene demoniac (remember casting demons into a herd of pigs? Pigs were a serious clue that this wasn’t a Jewish area).

These Pagan people were helped by Jesus: they were not Jewish, which set the precedent that they were welcome, but they were also exceptional. Jesus made no effort to go outside of Jewish areas to preach and heal.

When preachers in the early days of the church started to go to synagogues out in the Turkish, Greek and Roman regions, they encountered Gentiles who hung out with the Jews, impressed by Jewish life, ethics, honesty and devotion but who were not prepared to convert.

There were several reasons for that: conversion was not encouraged; it really helped to have Abraham as an ancestor – converts were made to go through years of study; men would have to be circumcised – painful; so instead they could be on the edges of the community as people trying to be “righteous Gentiles”.

Jews themselves understood they had a special relationship with God – the Chosen People – a kind of privilege, I suppose, but not an easy relationship. The idea was that as the people of God, God expects more of you: to live a better life, a life that sets an example for everyone you meet and that often involves a lot of suffering.

With the teachings of Jesus about the first being last, the weak being strong, God being loving and accepting rather than fierce and judgmental, these Gentiles saw the chance to be in a good relationship with God without having to convert to Judaism first; and they were keen!

Jesus’ own disciples didn’t know what to do. This challenge was totally new to them and as Jews themselves, the thought that Gentiles could be welcomed by God without conversion was just baffling. It totally challenged the idea of a chosen people.

And as we can see in this lesson, it took a miracle, an actual sign from God in the gift of the Holy Spirit to unbaptized gentiles, right in front of the disciples to make them accept that this was alright.

Paul tells another version of this where he had to travel to Jerusalem and argue with James (brother of Jesus, head of the Jerusalem church) and Peter and the others to get them to change their policy. There is another incident in Acts where Peter is described as having a vision which was a clear message from God that Gentiles were acceptable.

Three different versions are recorded in our Bible which just shows how controversial this was. It took more than one dramatic event for the people to shift from their lifetime of assumptions.

As a descendant of the Heathen Danes I’m grateful that the church changed and that this new realization made its way through the community of faith. But this behaviour strikes me as typical of people; we grow up with ideas, with assumptions and it’s very hard to shift them. We like to talk about God being unchanging, which can justify our own refusal to change, but what we fail to remember is that God is unchangingly creative. God is always doing new things and challenging us in new ways.

Think about the changes we’ve had to understand over my lifetime:

to stop thinking about humans as the pinnacle of creation; to stop thinking that we have the right to abuse and destroy the world around us. That’s a change that we haven’t finished with yet.

Consider the relationship between God and LGBTQ+ people – another one we are still fighting about within Christianity. That’s a really good modern parallel to what happened with the Gentiles: where a group everyone assumed was rejected by God is actually welcome if we follow through on the principles of Jesus’ teachings.

We’re still working through the idea that women are equal to men. This is explicitly stated in one of Paul’s letters but how many churches still won’t ordain women? Let alone all the legal changes south of the border to take away women’s reproductive choice. We can’t think we’re safe in Canada. There are those who want to do the same thing here. It’s incredible that we have been struggling with basic gender equity for 2000 years!

Christianity has always been important to me for the way that our teachings challenge us to see other people as real people, just as valuable to God as we are, no matter how different they may be.

Trouble is, we end up having to wrestle with our assumptions, with teachings we grew up with, and it’s not always easy. But it is a vital part of our faith to face these challenges, to wrestle with them and particularly, to figure out how to take them seriously and apply our new learning to real life.

As we can see, this is not new. The very first disciples had to face it and that hasn’t changed since. When we learn the lessons it is most visible in the way we welcome people and even in the way we treat the environment. That’s where we can see new teachings taking life.

I wonder what’s next?

Ask Andrew 2: How, When and Why Should a Christian Pray in Public?

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.

“Ask Andrew” is an annual opportunity for Knox members to ask question that might make for good sermons. Here’s the second one for 2024.

Ask Andrew (2024) 2:

How, When and Why Should a Christian Pray in Public?

Scriptures: Romans 8:26-27 Matthew 6:5-15

How, when, and why should a Christian pray? (With sub-questions: Are only trained clergy qualified to lead prayer? Do we only pray in church? Can kids pray?)

This is the third Ask Andrew to deal with prayer: others were in 2011 and 2017; each question had a different emphasis.

This one came with a long explanatory note. One of the main concerns raised was that people were often uncomfortable leading prayer at church events such as meetings, meals and other gatherings. In many cases people were happy to ask the minister to pray but uncomfortable to be called on to pray themselves.

I’ll start with the sub-questions in reverse order, since some of them are pretty basic.

Can kids pray? Absolutely! Even if it’s only a “now I lay me down to sleep” sort of prayer, I encourage having children learn to pray. Prayer is communicating with the greatest power in existence, and that doesn’t just happen. We have to learn to open ourselves up to that kind of communication, to that relationship. And as always, it’s easiest to learn if we start as children. It’s like learning a language. That’s why I try to model prayer at the end of each children’s time in worship, so the kids can practise. I’m really glad that the grown-ups are now joining in!

Do we only pray in church? I hope not, although church is a good place for prayer. We can pray anywhere, anytime. I discovered this on a patch of black ice in my Dad’s old Pontiac Acadian on the Trans-Canada highway in Quebec. Prayer has no boundaries.

Personal prayer and group prayer share some things in common:

  • All prayer invites us to reach beyond ourselves and focus our thoughts and feelings on a power beyond ourselves that we traditionally call God;
  • All prayer invites us to express our needs and also to consider the difference between what we need and what we want. Prayer is not a chance to state a Christmas list, it is not an invitation to be selfish although, sadly, it is used that way sometimes;
  • All prayer is an invitation to consider the needs of others, to pray for “us” and not just “me” and also to pray for “them” and to seriously consider the needs of someone different. It is an invitation to real empathy; to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes.

Praying alone, by yourself, can be very meditative, intensely personal, where the Spirit has to intercede, with groans too deep for words as Paul gives us that wonderful expression. And it can feel very much like a conversation, with spaces of silence left for God to fill in our blanks and for us to listen for that still, small voice of God that can whisper clearly only when we make space for it.

Leading prayer for a group, or any kind of public prayer makes us nervous. The warning from Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount just before the Lord’s Prayer, warning us NOT to pray in public, has helped us to the conclusion that public prayer is best avoided.

Context matters, though: Jesus was speaking to a culture where most worship happened at home and you can be sure that a family member led those prayers, not some priest or Levite. In Jesus’ day blatant public prayer on a street corner was a way for people to show off their piety, to demonstrate how holy they were.

In other words, it wasn’t about prayer, really or about connecting with God; it was a kind of bragging: very selfish.

In the Reformed Tradition of the church we have believed for 5 centuries that every Christian gets to pray, to connect directly to God without some official Christian acting as an intermediary. We have declared that Christ is the only intermediary we need.

Our worship often happens in groups and is supposed to include prayer or some other worship focus, to prepare us for the work we do together. Ideally, any person in the church should be able to do this, but people are very timid about it so I will share some pointers:

Leading prayer for a group isn’t about personal issues; that can feel like an abuse of a leadership position, like the public prayers Jesus warned against. So, if you are in the position of leading prayer for a meeting, or a meal, or other activity, it is important to remember the situation and the needs of the whole group.

If you find yourself called on to lead prayer and are at a loss, sharing in the Lord’s Prayer is always a good option or one of those shared graces taught at church camp works well for a meal.

But for a deeper experience it is best to try and pray by asking yourself first: Why are we gathered? What do we hope to accomplish?

The Lord’s Prayer is a great template for any prayer: it starts by acknowledging our relationship with God, God’s higher perspective and our vision of making God’s plan actually happen in this human world; not bad things to remember and it might make us think twice about pushing our own perspective; it might make us more able to listen to others and try to hear if God is speaking through them.

It might also lead us to ask for wisdom, or inspiration, or insight or guidance; all good things for the church as it gathers.

Asking for daily bread is a request that our needs be met, which might help us consider what our needs truly are, rather than our wishes.

Forgiving trespasses is a reminder that we don’t always get it right; not a bad reminder as our society gets more and more polarized and people become accustomed to the language of trolls. It’s also a reminder that we need to forgive each other; another good reminder of our purpose as we try to bring people together.

Leading us not into the time of testing is a reminder that we aren’t in control of the world, that there really is a higher power and that’s who we are talking to in the prayer. So what’s wrong with asking for help?

Look at all those elements:

  • acknowledgement of God and God’s purpose for us which could include saying thanks for things we appreciate;
  • acknowledging our own limitations and our need to be patient with others, accepting of them;
  • asking for what we really need, including material necessities and spiritual gifts; and
  • asking for help for others and ourselves.

These are all great options to include.

Not every prayer has to include every bit. Saying grace at a meal should focus on thankfulness for the food itself, and for the sharing and fellowship. Praying to open a meeting should focus on why we meet including our overall purpose to be faithful people and specific purposes of the group or committee meeting.

The very act of praying is a reminder that God is here. It can bring us back to our purpose and draw us closer to each other.

The language should be plain and direct. Jesus specifically warns us against heaping up empty words. So, forget about “thees” and “thous”. Just speak as if you were talking to someone you respect and love and remember that you are connecting with God for the good of all who are gathered.

You can do it. Anyone can.

Amen.