Power over Creation

While COVID-19 makes our in-person services challenging, Knox is providing podcast services. Not everyone can access these, though, so we are also posting my sermons on our Knox Talks blog. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

Power over Creation

Scriptures: Job 38:1-11, Mark 4:35-41

In our recent studies on the symbolic meanings of miracles and wonders in the Bible, we discussed Jonah.

There’s a stunning parallel between Jonah and our story from Mark’s gospel today:

Before Jonah met the whale, he was fleeing from God. He was in a boat, asleep while the sailors battled a terrible storm and they woke the prophet up to ask for his help. The best he could come up with

was to tell them to throw him overboard because it was obvious God was causing the storm to stop Jonah from fleeing and he’d rather die than turn back.

So they threw him overboard. That’s when he met the whale, which saved him from drowning and took him back to the shores of Israel.

The similarities and differences with Jesus are obvious and early Christianity made a lot of fuss over it. Not only the story of the boat but particularly comparing the three days in the belly of the whale with Jesus’ three days in the tomb.

But even deeper than that is the message we hear from Job.

This part of Job always seemed unfair to me: Job has been flawless in his faith and he has been punished as a test, not because of being bad. The book of Job is an ancient approach to the question of why bad things happen to good people.

This part of it shows God demanding that Job “man up”; that he confront God instead of sitting and whining. And then God overwhelms Job with the sheer power of creation itself. The entire section of God’s teachings to Job is long: full of images of nature. Our reading is only part of it but it cuts to the core of Creation itself:

In the Bible, creation is imagined as a bubble surrounded by an endless, chaotic sea. The “firmament” is the star-studded bowl

placed over the world to keep the upper waters out. The land keeps most of the lower waters out and the word of God keeps the other lower waters – rivers, lakes and seas – from repeating what happened to Noah.

Originally the job was perfect: the firmament was perfectly sealed and then it was cracked during Noah’s flood to let the waters in to destroy creation. That’s when rain first started to fall and the rainbow was finally added as a promise that although the firmament might be cracked, God would never destroy all creation that way again.

How could Job possibly stand up to that wonder and power? He is faced with the understanding that no human could do what God has done: to place limits on the chaotic waters of the universe.

That’s where the real meaning of our gospel lesson comes in: Jesus is doing something that only God could do; controlling the powers of creation with a word; holding back the chaotic waters when even the damaged firmament could not.

Job, who was a perfect servant of God was shown that he couldn’t do this. Jonah, who was far from perfect, didn’t even try.

And yet we see Jesus doing something that has already been determined to be beyond human ability. The early church presented this story as a demonstration of God’s presence in the person of Jesus, in a way never seen before.

One of the challenges we face as a society is that we have always wanted to be able to do that. We have worked not only to predict the weather but to control it as much as possible and we keep striving to impose our will on the natural processes of creation.

Seeding clouds to cause rain is an old technique now. And we are realizing with some trepidation that many of our forms of pollution

have caused unexpected consequences so that now we have to deal with climate change and extreme weather events, without being able to push a button to solve the problem.

That image of Jesus calming the storm in the boat has inspired us to think about what it would be like for humans to claim the power of God. I do not believe that it was ever intended that way. Early Christians were identifying the uniqueness of Jesus, but we have changed that to: if He can do it, why can’t we? But instead of relying on divine miracles, we have decided to invoke the wonders of science and technology.

Today is Indigenous Sunday, coming, as it does, so close to the Summer Solstice. We would do well to let our indigenous peoples remind us about our relationship with the rest of creation.

In scripture, there is an understanding that we have forgotten: that we should stand in awe of the universe God has made; that we should never take equality with our Creator as something to be grasped; that while we have a privileged position with intelligence that gives us the ability to do things other animals cannot, we are also part of creation

not separate from it, not in command of it. Just ask Job.

In our culture, in our pride, our arrogance, our hubris, we have forgotten that.

So maybe it will take the culture of our First Peoples to remind us of that reality. They haven’t forgotten it. It is woven into their culture, their stories.

It is also woven into our stories, but our culture has managed to twist those stories so that they ended up meaning something very different

than what was intended.

When the disciples asked: ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’ it was to consider the nature of Jesus as the Creator at work in a particular person; it was not to challenge us to try to match those miracles.

As much as I have admired the achievements of people of science, as much as I will always be a fan of Science Fiction, which imagines the impossible every day, which hopes to spur us to leaps and bounds of possibility, I also believe that perspective is an important thing for us to learn. When we forget that we are not Lords of Creation, we will reap the whirlwind, to use the metaphor from our Job lesson.

Just as God spoke out of that whirlwind in the story, so we should be reminded that, as much as we can do, we should never forget that when we reach for great powers, when we try for the powers of creation itself, we will also need to develop the wisdom of the creator. We will need to learn the balances that keep things working, the self-imposed limits that will allow our world to continue to work in a way

that is respectful of the life we share with everything around us.

We have this lesson in our own teachings, but we have forgotten it

and if it takes another culture to remind us, to bring us back to a place of respect in creation, then so be it because the lesson is essential.

And we need to remember right away: that we never do well when we try to play God.

Amen.

How Relevant Are We?

While COVID-19 makes our in-person services challenging, Knox is providing podcast services. Not everyone can access these, though, so we are also posting my sermons on our Knox Talks blog. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

How Relevant Are We?

Scriptures:

2 Cor. 6:1-13

Matthew 5:38-48

Recent weeks have given our Canadian self-esteem a serious kicking. We like to see ourselves as Canada the Good; welcoming, inclusive, multi-cultural, diverse.

Then the discovery of the graves of 215 children at the Kamloops Indian Residential School was made public, so we have had to confront our historical and ongoing mistreatment of our aboriginal people.

And then one of our young men in London, Ontario acted out his hatred and Islamophobia by running his truck into a Muslim family on the street, murdering four people across three generations and leaving a child in hospital with serious injuries.

And we want to cry out “This isn’t us, we’re better than this!” but the reality stares us in the face: “who we are” includes this abuse and hatred and has for a long time. We want to be better than this but pretending this ugly side of our identity doesn’t exist won’t make it go away.

We live in an increasingly polarized world where we can have conversations in virtual echo-chambers, hearing only voices that agree with our views. Calling for moderation has become passé and listening to voices that disagree seems like a lost art.

Humans have always distrusted anything unfamiliar: different faces, customs, perspectives. We have always made it possible to label someone as “other” and “other” has always been a potential threat: someone to be feared, possibly an enemy.

Of course, real enemies do exist: people or groups that have wished harm to someone, some going as far as to attempt genocide.

But now it seems so easy to create new enemies of people we don’t really know: people who make us uncomfortable because of their language, skin colour, sexuality, mental health, disability; or because they want something we have, or we want something they have, or maybe because we don’t like what they stand for.

In this polarized world it has become more acceptable to act on these hatreds. People feel more free to lash out; to do terrible things.

Then again, terrible things have been happening for generations,

so maybe people feel more free to admit what they’ve done. They are more honest with their violent wishes to destroy their enemies, whoever they are.

That’s where the teachings of Christ can help us. In today’s lesson from the Sermon on the Mount we have one of Jesus’ toughest teachings: the call to love our enemies; not just to love our neighbours as ourselves which is hard enough, but to actually love our enemies.

This is not a teaching we can dismiss. Anything this challenging and controversial was definitely something Jesus said.

The call to be perfect, even as God is perfect seems impossible, like a hill just too steep to climb. So for years we have quietly pushed this teaching aside as if it’s too impractical, too idealistic to really attempt

when, in fact, it scares us.

To love our enemies would force us to treat them as real people, to wish what is best for them, even while being in an opposing position. These days we seem to have a really hard time remembering how to disagree constructively, how to let someone have an opposing view

and still love and respect them.

To take this teaching seriously would have far-reaching repercussions: we’d have to take the idea of restorative justice seriously, finding ways to restore relationships instead of punishing; we would have to have actual dialogue instead of shouting at the people we don’t like; we would have to find a way to challenge the injustices we see without seeing the people who inflict those injustices as monsters.

This isn’t about being politically correct and it isn’t about being prevented from asking hard questions about another person’s or culture’s practices. Jesus gave us a way to think about that too:

removing the log from our own eye before removing the speck from another’s.

It’s possible, but it’s hard work. It demands honesty, including honestly seeing ourselves as others see us. And it demands respect; the kind of respect best described as love; the kind of respect that is more than a regard for an equal but also a feeling of connection that wants the best; that seeks to share and be helpful.

Loving our enemies is a calling that leaves no room for dismissing anyone as unworthy, or less than equal, no room for being paternalistic or condescending, no room for seeing anyone as less than human or less than ourselves.

It does not call us to pretend that differences don’t exist or that they don’t matter, but it does call us to stop ourselves from the kind of knee-jerk reaction that automatically pushes people away for being different. More than that: it calls us to love, which is where differences can exist without becoming barriers.

Sometimes in recent years it has been tempting to wonder if Christianity is relevant anymore. Many people would say that we’ve developed ways to live in a just society without the need for religion

and that in Canada, where we are respectful, and welcoming and kind and decent, that in such a place our faith becomes so personal that it has little purpose beyond comforting us or giving us a view of the world that matters mostly to the person who holds it. Besides: as a good person in Canada I don’t have any enemies! Right? So I don’t need to worry about loving them.

But then we are challenged with the flood of recent images: the old graves, and the new graves from the recent murders.

And I am reminded of the power of our faith, the power of the principles that Jesus brought us.

We aren’t just taught to love our neighbours, or our friends or our relatives no matter how challenging those teachings may be. We are taught, no, we are CALLED to love our enemies, a call so powerful

that we have struggled with it and hidden from it for centuries

If we can love our enemies and our friends, and everyone in-between; if we can call other Canadians to love just as much then we will leave no room for the kind of extreme divisions that seem to be so common now. It will deny us the comfort of the echo chambers that only say what we want to hear. That call to love will insist on respect for everyone.

I can’t think of anything more relevant, more needed, right now.

Is that too hard? Can we be perfect, as God is perfect?

I know I’m not; but I also know that this isn’t a call for instant perfection. This is a call to change, to improve, to learn from our mistakes. This is a call to love as much as we can and then to learn to love more. With God’s help, I believe we can do this.

Amen.

Echoes of Ramah

While COVID-19 makes our in-person services challenging, Knox is providing podcast services. Not everyone can access these, though, so we are also posting my sermons on our Knox Talks blog. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

Echoes of Ramah

Scriptures: Jeremiah 31:15-17

Matthew 2:16-18

The discovery of the remains of at least 215 children on the grounds of the Kamloops Residential School has shocked Canadians. We feel deep sorrow, outrage, pain; but as many people have pointed out, we should not be surprised.

This has all the form and emotion of the discoveries made when war crimes are being investigated. With that in mind, a group of 15 Canadian lawyers have petitioned the International Criminal Court to investigate this discovery.

All sorts of things run through our hearts and minds: the shock of the sheer numbers, the image of the tiny bones and the grim fact that many of the other children were made to dig the graves to bury their friends while the adults lied to the rest of the world about what was happening.

We may feel compelled to go through mental gymnastics to try to distance ourselves: “I’m a good person, I didn’t do this, I didn’t even know it was going on”; “That was a Catholic school; the United Church ones weren’t as bad as that”; “children’s mortality rates were high everywhere in those days”; “That was then, and this is now, we can’t wallow in the past”.

Claims of ignorance, trying to avoid guilt, pointing the finger at others, trying to put it all behind us; these are all ways to get away from the reality, not only of the past but of the present.

This discovery shines a spotlight on some of the living trauma caused by these past behaviours and the inter-generational issues that followed. But if that’s where we focus the discussion, then we are treating our indigenous peoples as victims and making them shoulder the weight of history, while we feel sympathetic.

We also have to recognize and address the ways in which we continue to benefit from all those past and present systems that continue to keep the original people of this land controlled in a way that pushes them to the side while the rest of society benefits from the land and the natural resources that build our cars and homes, heat our buildings and provide profitable investments for our pension plans.

In my first pastoral charge there was a young historian. He took exception to something I had said by remarking: “we can’t judge the people of the past by our modern standards.”

Not a bad principle for historical studies, but I would make an exception: as Christians, we have a set of standards that are very ancient and that should have been applied in the last two centuries, particularly in the things the churches did.

In the story of Herod and the slaughter of the innocents we have a clear and obvious crime. We have been appalled for almost 2000 years at this abuse of power and particularly at the inhumanity of the king and his soldiers who tore children from their parents and then killed them.

That lesson quoted an even earlier lesson which we read in Jeremiah

in which the same expression of pain and outrage is made but which ends differently: in hope, when the children are restored to their parents and the families are allowed to go back to their land.

When Kelly Running-Wolf came to Knox the first time to speak of his Residential School experience I selected this same Jeremiah lesson

and asked him two weeks early if I could use it. Kelly gave me the green light and even so, it moved him so deeply that he had a hard time talking to our children. Those words stirred up such deep feelings for him.

Kelly’s reaction shows how this passage of scripture and many others

express the fundamental understanding of the importance of the bond between parents and children. We should have known not to do this.

We did know! We didn’t create residential schools for rural and remote settler children: we set up one room schoolhouses and sent out individual teachers to do their best.

That kind of system for indigenous children would have probably saved money too, because they wouldn’t need to build huge buildings; they might have even used tents with groups that moved around. We knew how to do that: the Methodists knew all about riding to remote communities and holding tent meetings.

We didn’t want to tear our own children away from their families but we did it to aboriginal children because we had decided they were uncivilized and we would use this new structure to teach them our ways. We arrogantly decided that we knew best; that their parents were probably unfit anyway.

Yes there were people who really tried to be good teachers; there were people who wanted to be loving but the institution itself was designed to break a child’s spirit and replace it with conformity to the majority rules. And in too many cases it opened the door to people who practised petty tyrannies; who acted out their own demons on the children in their care.

It wasn’t only bad individuals; we have clear evidence that organized medical experiments were being conducted “for the good of society”. For example: groups of children were systematically deprived of adequate nutrition so they could be studied as they suffered the effects of malnutrition.

These kinds of eugenics experiments remind me of what the Nazis did. We “gentle” Canadians had similar Eugenics policies: we conducted forced sterilization of native people as well as people with mental disabilities or social disadvantages. It was justified as being a “kindness” so these adults, and society, wouldn’t be burdened with children the parents couldn’t support. I have heard these justifications expressed by Canadian medical professionals less than 20 years ago.

We are very close to a young single mother who, about 10 years ago, was expecting her first child. Her doctor was planning to have social services seize her child at birth. This mother had a lot more family support than many other single mothers in the same city but she is obviously First Nations so the doctor assumed she couldn’t raise the child. If the socially established white members of her family

hadn’t fought for her, the baby would have been taken away and adopted out. Again: this was only 10 years ago.

What lesson should we take from that horrible Kamloops discovery? That our shock and outrage should be applied to what is going on today. The same kinds of attitudes still exist; the same kinds of decisions are being made now. It’s not all in the past. It is very present.

There is a danger here: that we will agonize and wring our hands over the lost lives of these children and that we will focus on the atrocities of the past in a way that keeps them comfortably distant, in a way that protects our own sense that we are good people.

The fuss over Kamloops will settle down; at least until the next discovery (and there will be more discoveries because there are so many burial sites to find at these schools).

If we find ourselves forgetting, well, that’s human nature, isn’t it? It’s hard to remain outraged for too long; it can burn a person out. But forgetting is a privilege, reserved for those who have not lived this experience, who don’t face today’s versions of this same arrogant treatment that brought us the Residential schools.

In order to address our compromised Canadian heritage, in order to confront and eliminate the prejudices which are built into our structures which we now call systemic racism, we Christians have to go back to first principles, just as we always should.

If we always remember to do unto others as we would have them to do unto us, then we will build relationships built on respect instead of power.

Jesus taught us this first principle 2000 years ago; isn’t it time we applied it to everyone?

Amen.

Driven Outdoors

While COVID-19 makes our in-person services challenging, Knox is providing podcast services. Not everyone can access these, though, so we are also posting my sermons on our Knox Talks blog. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

This particular sermon was part of our service to bless our gardens and bicycles.

Driven Outdoors

Scriptures:

Genesis 2:4b-9, 15-17

Nahum 2:1, 3b-4

A year ago, pandemic restrictions had driven us indoors. People were only able to go through parks quickly and were ticketed if they stopped even briefly. Cyclists and joggers were watched carefully and pedestrians were suspected of malicious lurking. With COVID aforethought, playgrounds were closed off with emergency tape and parents became desperate to keep their kids busy, especially those in apartments with no backyards to enjoy.

Our community garden, like all the other ones in the province, was shut down and our garden committee was instrumental in persuading the Ottawa Public Health committee to push to have guidelines created that would allow the gardens to re-open on the grounds that gardens are essential, providing local organic food and a way to develop and maintain good spiritual and mental health.

Their leadership bore fruit (to coin a phrase); the gardens re-opened across the province and since that time there has grown an understanding that outside activities are good, with much less transmission of the virus and much more room for activity and mental health than any number of Zoom meetings or online activities, as long as people are sensible and take the precautions we are now used to.

Do you remember in those early days, the way people talked about how much cleaner the air was, with the reduction in air travel and with fewer cars and trucks on the road? Air quality was distinctly improved

and I remember people remarking on the irony of how it took a pandemic to help us make progress towards our climate goals.

The new understandings about how safe it is to be outside and how many benefits for our bodies and minds exist has flipped things around since last year. Instead of being driven inside, we’ve been driven outside. People who would normally travel to other countries

or even other provinces have had to find places to go closer to home, as have all those people who might have gotten together in someone’s living room or in a restaurant.

From a selfish perspective I find myself grumbling about how crowded

the Conservation Areas have become. There are two not far from where we live and we have had them as wonderful dog-walking places with very little competition for years. Now there are so many more people there on the weekends, the parking lots are packed

and there are dozens of people enjoying the mosquitoes (I mean, enjoying nature). There’s no way to pretend anymore that we have the place to ourselves!

But actually, that’s great news. People have been driven outdoors to re-discover creation, to re-connect with the earth, from which we come and to which we will return. It has become almost impossible to live in an abstract, Ivory Tower and I think we are all better for it.

The image of the Garden of Eden we are given in our Genesis reading

is an ancient vision of paradise. It gives us a picture of what could have been: humans in harmony with nature.

Of course, we know the story: the vision gets broken; the humans are driven from paradise and we end up in conflict with nature. But that vision of what could have been has never gone away and still informs our hopes for the future.

Every window box of tomatoes or balcony herb garden; every backyard vegetable or flower garden; every community garden speaks to this vision and reminds us of our deep rooted connection to this world.

Our cyclists understand this as well. The experience of travelling without using fossil fuels, of zipping through the fresh air feeling the wind (okay, I admit it, I like to ride fast) is so much more satisfying than driving a car.

It concerns me that the conversation about reducing our footprint has become quieter over this past year. More people are shouting about economic impact, about getting all the transportation industries up and running again. Instead, we should be reminding ourselves of how much healthier people are.

Our lesson from Nahum is a bit of a joke. Originally it was a threat against the city of Nineveh, but that image of chariots racing through the streets should be familiar to anyone who rides a bicycle in the city. Flashing chariot wheels and barely-controlled horses are a picnic compared to some of our drivers!

Having a reduced number of cars competing for space during commute times makes everyone safer, not only from collisions, but by reducing the nasty stuff coming out of exhaust pipes – something else you notice up close and personally on a bicycle.

Our concern about the pandemic should not push our concern about our environment to the side. Instead, the fact that we have been driven outdoors could be exactly the kind of trigger we need, as a whole society, to remember the beauty of God’s creation: to remember our connection to the air, the water, the plants and animals; to keep us from the kind of disconnected, abstract rabbit hole that is always a risk in a world that spends so much time in a virtual reality.

Actual reality is good. It is very good.

One of the unexpected blessings of this pandemic may be our re-discovery of this knowledge. Being driven outside may give us the kind of experience that will allow us to change; to carry the healthier behaviours we are learning into the post-COVID world we are hoping for.

So as we bless our gardens and our bicycles in this service, let us be thankful that in the midst of an international disaster God is able to give us these kinds of reminders. God is able to plant these seeds of wisdom, these seeds of hope, these experiences of a better way of living that will inspire us in the future.

Amen.

Life out of Death

While COVID-19 makes our in-person services challenging, Knox is providing podcast services. Not everyone can access these, though, so we are also posting my sermons on our Knox Talks blog. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

Life out of Death

Scripture: Ezekiel 37:1-14, Romans 8:22-27

Every year at Pentecost we are given the same scripture reading: the Acts lesson that talks about the gift of God’s Spirit to the disciples; the rushing wind, the tongues of flame, the sudden ability to speak in untaught languages.

But sometimes it’s good to change things up, like this year’s readings where we are given some other perspectives on the work of the Holy Spirit. Change can jar us out of complacency, can make us ask deep questions instead of doing the “same old same old”, which is a good thing and very appropriate when you consider how jarring Pentecost day must have been.

Our first lesson is that famous one about the valley of the dry bones where the prophet Ezekiel watches with disbelief and possibly some horror, as scattered, dry bones re-assemble themselves and then get coated in layers of muscle and flesh like a really fast reverse episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. And it is all topped off when God breathes the Spirit into all these bodies and they live again.

This is an incredible scene. What the Prophet saw would have raised some questions: how do you get a valley of dry bones? Why weren’t these people buried?

You’d have to conclude it was long after a great battle; a horrible defeat, or maybe a genocide, where no one was left to bury the dead. They were eaten by ravens and vultures and their bones left for years to dry out, unloved, dishonoured by their enemies, forgotten, as dead as dead can be.

And then we’re told that this is a metaphor; that these bones represent the nation of Israel; a people so discouraged and depressed that they feel like they might as well be dead; not only dead but in the tomb, mere dry bones, unable to live or do anything.

This vision makes the promise of the gift of God’s own spirit. There is a play on words going on here. The word for breath is also the word for Spirit. God is promising to breathe into this discouraged nation and give them new life to pull them out of death and bring them home.

The clear message is that this lively, life giving force; this miraculous spark that marks the difference between a lump of flesh and a living soul will be lively and at work among the people, just when they thought it would be impossible.

A little over a year ago I replaced the fence at the back of our property. The new fence panels were two feet higher then the old ones which meant I needed to trim some tree branches. Some of the trees were starting to bud, so I figured that the bare ones were probably dead, especially on one tree where much of the wood was cracked and dry and the bark was flaking off in many places.

I warned Lori that I planned to cut a lot of branches from this tree, maybe even cut down the tree itself because I’ve learned to give warning before getting enthusiastic with the chain saw. And Lori informed me in no uncertain terms that no matter how dead that old tree looked, it was healthy and very much alive and more to the point was her favourite honeysuckle rose, so I should trim off only what was absolutely necessary to accommodate the new fence panels.

I just looked at that tree yesterday, over a year later and it is covered in leaves and the pink blossoms are everywhere and yes, the wood still looks dried out and cracked.

Life surprises us. It hides, and springs up in unexpected places. God’s gift of life is much tougher than we give credit for.

We are facing a time right now where a lot of churches feel like they are on their last legs with struggles over the years to hang on to young people and keep membership numbers up, not to mention financial numbers. And then this pandemic hits, incomes go down, some churches find they can’t get a minister at all, some can’t afford to keep the ones they had and the people get discouraged, especially after months of isolation with no clear end in sight, no clear opportunities to see the church as a living thing, no recent experience of that community that gets together, that shares, and celebrates and eats too much dessert at pot-lucks.

When we’re denied all of this for long enough, we start to feel like those dried up bones and we worry that resurrection is impossible. It’s a good thing that the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs deeper than words, because we’ve run out of words to describe how all this feels; how badly we need to be together again.

I would invite you to consider the promise of this Ezekiel lesson. God wasn’t just saying that the people would endure, that they’d struggle and gasp through a tough time. God was saying that the people would be filled with new life, that there would be a breath of fresh air animating the people of God.

What kind of promise is that to give to suffering people? It’s a promise that knows what makes us tick and knows our true nature.

Think of the people you admire. How many of them have come through hard times, through challenges that looked unbearable?

Think of someone like Nelson Mandela, who spent most of his life in prison and who managed to emerge to unite his country, overcome Apartheid and create an atmosphere where truth and reconciliation could start the healing of a divided land.

It’s not just that suffering builds character or some other platitude like that. It is that in adversity we are pushed hard; our circumstances demand that we develop a new perspective as the world we’ve take for granted changes. We have the chance to learn about ourselves and others in ways we’d probably never wish on anyone but that still reveal truths that we’d never otherwise see.

Every time something is stripped away from us, even temporarily,

we are challenged with the question: “what really matters in our lives?”. We have the opportunity to discover what values lie deepest within us, discover truths that the busyness of normal life would otherwise keep hidden.

And so we are given the chance to learn, and to grow, and to do something with this hard-won understanding.

Those people we admire came through adversity and blossomed;

we can too!

I believe that God’s Spirit is always available to us so that we don’t have to face trouble alone. If we let God really work in our lives then we, too, will come out of this pandemic and the other challenges of our lives with a gift of wisdom and insight and with a revived sense of life that leads us to the core of what matters and gives us new ways to revitalize our selves and our community.

We may feel like dried bones right now, but once God’s Spirit has done with us, our future will be full of unexpected new life.

Amen.

 

Counter Culture

While COVID-19 makes our in-person services challenging, Knox is providing podcast services. Not everyone can access these, though, so we are also posting my sermons on our Knox Talks blog. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

Counter Culture

Scriptures: 1 John 5:9-13

John 17:6-19

The “Church of God” congregation in Aylmer Ontario has had its doors padlocked by the Ontario Superior court for the congregation’s repeated refusal to follow COVID restrictions.

This put me in mind of some research I did on congregations near Bradford, Ontario. In the late 1800s one Presbyterian church was divided over whether to become Free Church or to remain Church of Scotland. The Session disagreed with the minister, so the Session padlocked the church doors. The Minister broke the lock on Sunday morning and went in and conducted a service. There is no record of how many attended.

So this is hardly the first time this sort of thing has happened here but I’m not aware of any other occasion where it was because of a court order.

I find myself with very mixed feelings about all of this. The behaviour of the “Church of God” and its leaders has been embarrassing for responsible churches. Here at Knox we have taken as our principle that God wants us to love one another and that includes keeping each other safe. That’s why we have been so cautious about live services; we are aware of the health concerns and we take them seriously.

At the same time, having a court of the land lock down a church is a disturbing precedent; and I’m not comfortable with that.

This week’s lectionary readings are popular in the Evangelical tradition, as are all the writings attributed to John: John’s gospel, the three letters of John, and Revelations. Scholars agree that they are not the work of the same author but they are the work of a connected community, a school of thought in early Christianity.

These writings are theological statements. John’s gospel doesn’t seek to tell us history but it expresses what the Johannine community truly believed was Jesus’ role and intent.

John’s writings frequently describe a situation in which Christianity is at a disadvantage: an underclass, a counter-culture, under persecution, where it is necessary to stand up for what is right and true against some powerful forces and foes.

When John’s gospel was written, Christians had been expelled from most synagogues by the Jewish leadership. Judaism was re-defining itself after the destruction of Jerusalem and a conscious choice was being made that the teachings of this radical rabbi, Jesus, no longer fit within the Jewish faith.

John’s is one of the gospels that sounds the most anti-Jewish because there was real strife between the communities and the Christians were feeling excluded and threatened.

Decades later the book of Revelations was written. The threat had become the Roman persecution of the church although the roots of that were sown much earlier.

John’s gospel explicitly called Jesus the Son of God over and over, which was a direct slap at Caesar Augustus. The Emperor was declared the son of the gods and hailed as the prince of peace for creating the Pax Romana, the peace created by the terror of the Roman legions.

The Christians, especially those who followed John’s teachings were declaring that the authorities of the world, like the emperor, were false, corrupt, and to be ignored while the teachings of God, which were true and holy, were embodied in Jesus the Christ who was the only true Son of God.

In the eyes of the Romans this was obvious treason: religious extremism to be put down because of the threat it posed to the peace and stability of society.

Is any of this sounding familiar? Extremist Christians defying authority by making claims that society knows can’t be true.

Christianity arose out of the poorest and most disadvantaged people. It was attractive in large part because Jesus challenged the claims of religious leaders and declared God’s love and welcome for society’s outcasts.

It grew in popularity in the Roman world where many admired the teachings of the Jews but couldn’t easily convert. Under Paul’s leadership, these folks were welcomed into Christianity without the strict Jewish requirements. Additionally, a high percentage of early Christians were slaves.

Christianity was founded as a counter-culture; a community that was defined by radical acceptance. A more hostile tone, the “us vs them” language in our lesson developed out of the conflict between the Christian message and the powers of the day opposing that message.

When Revelations was written there was bloodshed and martyrdom – a violent split between the truth of Christianity and the truth of those in power.

John’s call to separation and distinctiveness, that trumpet fanfare to defend the truth at all costs, is a strong part of John’s message. These words were an important comfort to a community under threat, an encouraging message to people who were poor, helpless, and abused. They will always be attractive to people who feel powerless as well as those who feel like they are losing privilege.

Out of this we have inherited the language and the understanding that our faith belongs to those who are oppressed and we should not casually surrender authority to the powers of the world, even in a democracy, because that allows oppression to happen.

2000 years of history have seriously complicated this. Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire and as a result the church became the oppressor.

During the Reformation many Reformers took up John’s language to resist the Roman Catholic church, quoting Revelations against the Vatican, but then many protestant churches became state churches and started to oppress anyone who disagreed once again.

None of us can claim purity in this.

In the last century or so the Evangelical movement has used this same language against Science, against modern Biblical criticism and, in the United States particularly, Evangelicals have used it against teaching evolution, against vaccines, wearing masks and social distancing; sometimes against anyone who tells them what to do.

Frankly, what started as a support and strength for oppressed people

has become a knee-jerk expression of the theme: “you’re not the boss of me”.

As much as we want to separate ourselves from this irresponsible behaviour happening in Jesus’ name, we have to acknowledge that the principle here is an important part of our tradition and we can’t just toss it out.

We are working hard to overcome our oppressive past; we have re-discovered the idea of a message of radical welcome and we wish to reject the hostility we keep seeing, which is good because so much of it is directed at vulnerable people. But at the same time we have to ask what would have been different if we had challenged authority and stubbornly held to the principles Jesus taught when the Residential schools were being set up and we welcomed the authority they gave us over young, vulnerable lives?

It does happen, of course; the social justice ministries of the United Church often make a point of speaking truth to power.

The “Church of God” in Aylmer and similar congregations are behaving offensively; they are not using the brains God gave them to evaluate the real issues we are facing.

But their offensive behaviours should challenge us to re-examine and re-discover our responsibility to question what we are told by those in power before simply accepting it.

The point they make about religion not being answerable to the civil authorities comes from an ancient and formative part of our history. There will come times when an authority makes demands on us that are oppressive. Churches that have decided to offer sanctuary to people threatened with deportation have had to struggle with a modern version of this question already.

We have to evaluate everything by the principles Jesus taught us: God has first claim on our loyalty, no one else, and it’s important to remember this.

It’s too bad so many Christians today are making that point in such a foolish and irresponsible way, but maybe we can learn something from them and be ready to take a stand when a just cause comes along.

Amen.

Ask Andrew #2 (2021): Making the Sign of the Cross

While COVID-19 makes our in-person services challenging, Knox is providing podcast services. Not everyone can access these, though, so we are also posting my sermons on our Knox Talks blog. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

Ask Andrew #2 (2021): Making the Sign of the Cross

Scriptures: 2nd Timothy 3:14-17

John 15:9-17

Question:

Why don’t Protestants cross themselves (make the sign of the cross)? Why do Catholics touch the left shoulder first and Orthodox the right?

I would like to start this off with a comment about my own perspective:

I grew up in Quebec in the 1960s and 70s. It was a strongly sectarian society with school boards separated between Catholics and Protestants (Protestants included anyone who wasn’t Roman Catholic). I remember the feeling of being a religious minority with the constant sense that we might be overwhelmed if we didn’t maintain our own sense of identity.

The fact of the Quiet Revolution didn’t help. We knew people were leaving the Protestant churches in droves. We didn’t think about what was happening to the Catholics; we just felt increasingly endangered.

It is my hope & prayer that none of the prejudices I learned back then resurface in this sermon; but the trouble with unconscious bias is that it is just that: unconscious. So, if they do resurface, please feel free to call me out.

Our question today has two parts, so lets look at them separately:

Why don’t Protestants cross themselves?

The question came with an anecdote that will help with the answer:

I have a good anecdote about people crossing themselves:

When I was in Greece in the 80’s, some of my older relatives would cross themselves when they got in a car instead of putting on their seatbelts. Now if they had crossed themselves and put on their seatbelts that would have made sense to me, but this seemed to be some sort of alternative to putting on a seatbelt.

The Protestant Reformation marked the end of the Middle Ages: the printing press had been invented and the reformers were determined

to apply the principles of Reason to the question of faith.

They were quite fierce about this. They also were unhappy with the authority that had developed in the Vatican which they felt was being used to keep people ignorant. This was around the same time that the teachings of Galileo were being suppressed by the church and it may well be that the church was harder on Galileo because its authority was being challenged by the Reformation up north.

Many priests in those days were illiterate; they learned the Latin services and rituals by rote.

The reformers wanted to raise everyone’s level of education, particularly because they rejected the authority of Rome and demanded that scripture be the sole authority as the most reliable testament to the life and teachings of Jesus. And for that to work, people had to learn to read and have the scriptures in their common languages.

That deliberate focus on the supreme authority of scripture meant that a lot was thrown out. Teachings adopted by Church Tradition were thrown out, venerating the saints, praying to Mary, saying the rosary; it was all rejected.

If something hadn’t been specifically mentioned in scripture, it was thrown out or at least considered with deep suspicion.

That’s why Reformed Protestants only have two sacraments: Baptism and Communion: because Jesus is shown in the Bible as commanding them.

You’ll notice I said “Reformed Protestants”. There are branches of Protestantism that are not so extreme. The Anglicans, for example, recognize four sacraments and there are many Anglicans who cross themselves, too. Parts of the Lutheran communion are moving in that direction, too.

But Calvin, Melancthon, Karlstadt and others were determined that most practices and teachings that came after the Bible should be stripped of authority and viewed as a kind of superstition or even blasphemy. Those same Reformers would view the anecdote the same way. Once they got their minds around cars and seatbelts, they would reject the ritual of making the sign of the cross as a kind of magical invocation, as a way of avoiding personal responsibility by making God responsible for our safety.

That’s the kind of thing the Reformers said they were fighting when they got rid of crucifixes and sometimes crosses; when they broke icons and painted over murals on the walls of churches and even when they banned hymns from worship, in the most extreme cases.

The ban on making the sign of the cross carries on to this day although I should point out an exception: in our current baptismal liturgy I make the sign of the cross with my thumb on the forehead of the person being baptized.

For the second part of the question, let me briefly get into the more general question of making the sign of the cross. It has always had several forms, often and most anciently over the heart or forehead as a very small cross. The bigger sign of the cross grew over time, firstly as the priest or bishop would say a blessing and make the sign of the cross over the people, then as the people responded by crossing themselves.

For 1000 years the Orthodox method was the only method: using the right hand, and starting at the right side of the body. This carries a lot of symbolic meaning; with apologies to all the lefties out there, it goes back to the old ideas of Dexterity vs. Sinisterism. The sheep on the right and the goats on the left acknowledges a bias in symbolism that the “right” side is more “right” with God. Obviously this bias is built “right” into our English language.

Orthodox priests are instructed to cross themselves right to left but to cross the people left to right – so the people will experience it as right to left – it allows the people to mirror what the priest is doing and so learn to cross themselves correctly.

Many Catholics do cross themselves right to left: certainly all the Eastern Rite Catholics as they consciously do things the Orthodox way, but a number of other older orders do too. The change for the others started about 1000 years ago, coincidentally around the time of the great schism when the Eastern and Western churches excommunicated each other over a variety of issues.

That really was a coincidence because the reason for the change in the crossing is not clear and was not part of the schism. A number of explanations are offered:

Some have suggested that the priests were crossing the people right to left from their own perspective which led the people to mirror them from left to right;

Others have suggested that it was a result of the symbolism of the hand movement being adapted to the Latin phrase used “In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti” (in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit). In the original Greek it reads: εἰς τό ὄνομα τοῦ Πατρὸς καί τοῦ Υἱοῦ καί τοῦ Ἁγίου Πνεύματος.

The difference is that the last word in Greek means Spirit and the last word in Latin means Holy, so if you want to touch your right shoulder when you say “holy” to emphasize that the right side represents holiness the order is opposite in the different languages.

These are the two main theories of how the Roman Catholic church

started to incorporate the large sign of the cross going left to right instead of right to left. I’m not sure we will ever know the definitive answer.

Symbolism plays a major role in the many rites and rituals of the Christian church. The Protestant Reformation tried to wipe the slate clean and start fresh using only symbolism that could be justified by a quote from the Bible.

I am glad that we are living in an age when the old hostilities between denominations are reduced. This gives us the chance to learn more about each other in this age when information flows so freely. I don’t know if those old Reformers would have approved, but they wanted us to be educated and take a reasoned approach to our faith.

This is a good opportunity to grow in understanding and to express our love for each other instead of our divisions.

Amen.

What Is to Prevent Me?

While COVID-19 makes our in-person services challenging, Knox is providing podcast services. Not everyone can access these, though, so we are also posting my sermons on our Knox Talks blog. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

What Is to Prevent Me?

Scriptures: Acts 8:26-40

1 John 4:7-21

The Ethiopian Eunuch is a fascinating character, and Philip’s meeting with him is one of our earliest lessons in how we are to relate to others.

I use the term “others” here in a very modern way. We talk about “othering”, about pushing people apart from us, talking about them as if their differences are the most important aspect of their existence. To make someone “other” is dehumanizing; it makes it easier to treat them as things instead of people.

An example of this is the fact that this story doesn’t give us a name: the man is the Eunuch, nameless. He was a powerful court official, the queen of Ethiopia’s Chief Financial Officer, so he certainly had a name

and it might have even been slightly famous, but the focus is on his difference: the fact that he was a eunuch.

There would have been other differences: he would have had much darker skin than Philip and other features associated with Ethiopia, although that would not have been the kind of big deal then that it has become in our society today.

He would have been much richer and more powerful than Philip: the man had his own chariot; he certainly had a driver and probably bodyguards. You don’t travel as a court official from Ethiopia without official protection and Philip, like most of Jesus’ first followers, was an ordinary working guy, certainly not wearing fancy clothes. It’s remarkable that the man invited him in.

And in Jewish terms, the man was considered less than a man: he would have been castrated as a boy, so his voice would have been high; being so high up in officialdom, he would have been well fed; he would have been the stereotype of a eunuch: large and soft-looking, with a treble voice and no facial hair.

When he went to worship at the temple he would have been restricted to the women’s court, prevented from entering with the men. In any gathering for worship he would not have been counted as one of the 10 men required for the Minyan, the quorum for worship in Orthodox Judaism.

Further, in traditional Judaism at the time, the main concept of eternal life had nothing to do with a personal consciousness existing into eternity: it had to do with having children. Your future was in your offspring – that’s why it was considered to be a curse to be childless.

That makes the passage he was reading from Isaiah 53 all the more significant: it is part of the Suffering Servant writings, interpreted in Judaism to refer to the sufferings of the nation of Israel and re-interpreted by Christians to refer to the sufferings of Christ.

Part of what he was reading says “who can describe his generation?” which is also translated as “who can imagine his future?”. This would obviously be a matter of concern for a man who knows that he will not generate any offspring; that his line has no future.

It is actually a hopeful passage in Isaiah and concludes with a promise of many generations to come and a bright future. And Philip showed the man the Christian interpretation of how one moves from the suffering and hopelessness to the bright future and a time of hope.

The man got very excited at this new interpretation and the other teachings Philip shared, so that when they passed a body of water

he asked that famous question: “What is to prevent me from being baptized?”

“Nothing” was the answer; and now we can look to the Christian church in Ethiopia as one of the most ancient branches of our faith.

“What is to prevent me?”

In these times of division and hatred, in these days when it is so easy to form camps, in these days of extremism when people won’t even converse with someone who disagrees with them, in these days where hatred and trolling are common and accusations fly without restraint, in these days when it is so easy to identify enemies and the commandment to love our enemies is laughed off, there are many things to prevent connections from being made.

What if Philip had held back because this man was of a different social class? What if Philip had been afraid of his skin colour? What if he’d been disgusted by the man’s sexuality? What if he hadn’t wanted to make the effort to get past the man’s foreign accent? What if Philip had lacked the imagination, or the empathy, to interpret the Eunuch’s concern about the Isaiah reading and the way it affected his own situation?

Any one of these could have prevented him from being accepted, from being baptized. What a loss that would have been!

This is a story for the 21st century!

It addresses dealing with foreigners; it addresses racism; it addresses issues of non-traditional sexuality; it addresses differences in social class and it casts it all in terms of who is acceptable to God and who we should welcome as part of our family of faith.

“What is to prevent me?” asks the Ethiopian Eunuch. “What is to prevent me?” is the question for so many today.

And the answer is: Me. I can prevent you if I look at you and reject you as unacceptable in some way; if I consider you less than me; if I give myself an excuse for rejecting you, putting you down.

Not just me as an individual, although it is good to start there, but we as a church, together, have the same power to exclude.

We can prevent; we can be the obstacle; we can be the ones who push people away if we think too narrowly; if we don’t make an effort to heal when other church people hurt others in the name of Christ.

One of the great complaints of the last 50 years within the mainline church is that people aren’t joining us; people are staying away. What is preventing them? Is it us? Our attitudes? Our silence? Our failure to follow Philip’s example and take the first step to cross the barriers that divide us?

What is preventing them?

People look at us and see the Establishment and they feel like they don’t belong. How can we persuade them that they do?

How can we welcome them – not just shake hands and offer coffee

when they come in our doors (whenever that’s possible again) but to the point where coming in our doors is something they will consider at all?

We know the theory. We sing “all are welcome” with enthusiasm and put it on our signs; we celebrate communion in which we re-affirm our connection with God’s people across all boundaries, despite all divisions; we proclaim that we want to be “warm and welcoming”. But how do we make all that real?

That’s our challenge now: to get past social differences; to overcome linguistic and cultural barriers, get past issues of race and sexuality to open our hearts and minds so that all are truly welcome and no one is prevented. Amen.

From Judge to Shepherd

While COVID-19 makes our in-person services challenging, Knox is providing podcast services. Not everyone can access these, though, so we are also posting my sermons on our Knox Talks blog. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

From Judge to Shepherd

Scriptures:

1 John 3:16-24

John 10:11-18

There is a lot of talk these days about how we relate to our universe. That’s not exactly how it gets expressed but that is what it’s all about: Is our society optimistic, hopeful? Are we creating a generation of people who are angry, caught in a world where they feel like they have no future?

How did we go from the post war times, when the future looked bright and we thought we could solve anything, to this era of Populist politics where we are so overwhelmed by challenges that instead of solving them we blame and demonize others, finding people to turn into monsters and enemies; to this era where we want to retreat into our little clans and tribes and keep all strangers away?

Christianity lost its dominant position in the decades after World War II, which is fair. We had sold out a lot of our principles over the years: buying into the status quo hurt us badly. So, science took over – it claimed that it had the truth, that it had the answers to how the world really works. And now, with climate change, and a pandemic and no magic bullet for either, people aren’t sure what to believe in, so they start to look for easy answers.

Some of those answers look like anti-science rants, anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers; some look like hostile forms of fundamentalist religions spreading hate, ignorance and oppression in the name of God and claiming that it’s a return to original values.

That last one disturbs me deeply as a minister, because while different religions all have a version of this, the one closest to home is the one that most painfully challenges my own faith.

Religions are always about how people look at the world; how people fit into the universe. What we preach and proclaim and sing is less about the names we use for reality and more about the way we fit into reality.

People have talked about God for thousands of years and God has been given a lot of different names but in our tradition the basic name is “I AM”. We inherited this from the Jewish faith; this understanding of one God as the ultimate reality, as the source of all existence, of all being, which is just the starting place. In that original tradition, the expression of God’s nature became that of a law-giver, the one who set rules so we could relate to God and others in a just and orderly way.

It wasn’t always like that. With Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, God was a friend; a powerful, intimidating friend, but someone with whom you could relate. The laws formalized the relationship but at the core was the idea that relationship was possible; that the Creator wanted to connect with us mere creatures.

Being human, though, we became obsessive with the law part of things and we ended up with a vision of God as Judge. That is not a blanket statement about the Jewish faith. Christians are so attached to a judging God that we have no right to point fingers at anyone else and the Jewish people themselves are clear that their relationship with God is exactly that: a relationship; complex, personal, and often difficult.

In early Christianity we were given the gift of the vision of God being the Good Shepherd. It wasn’t a new vision; Psalm 23 was written centuries before Jesus was born and that image of a caring, protective, supportive God was well established before Jesus took it up.

It’s a wonderful idea: God is the source of all life and being and God is our shepherd; one who cares for us, helps us in the hardest of times, even through death. This is a powerful, hopeful image of our relationship with the ultimate reality.

John’s gospel represents the perspective of a deeply spiritual part of early Christianity and we see that reflected over again in the letters of John.

In our lesson today from 1 John, we see that the idea of the loving, caring God gets carried to its necessary conclusion: the idea that this love that we claim for ourselves, this relationship we want from our shepherd is one we have to extend to others. We can’t be selfish about it, or hoard it to ourselves; we have to share with others, helping them, even to the point of self-sacrifice which is the ultimate expression of love.

If we can stop from panicking for a while, we can learn from our Pandemic situation. One lesson we should have learned by now is that we are not self-sufficient; we are not islands, we need connection, we need relationship.

These lessons today express the most basic, most fundamental, most powerful understanding of relationship in Christianity: our connection to all of reality arises from love and is to be based on love; not on fear, not on hate, which comes from fear; not on isolation and self-defence, which also arise from fear.

On Thursday evening I heard the CBC Ideas program with theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli explaining his controversial idea that Time Does Not Exist. Putting aside the time question, what fascinated me was the way this extreme scientist defined the universe itself as existing

only in terms of relationships. He pointed out the way that we defined atoms in terms of how they are distinct from other forms of existence and how they relate to other atoms, sometimes forming molecules; how they are formed from sub-atomic particles, which in turn are defined in those same relational ways.

To him, nothing makes sense, nothing can be described, without relationship, without a way to refer to something else.

Whether that is an accurate description of the universe or a description of the ways we can talk about the universe, it is a fascinating understanding of the fact that we humans are built to be connected; that we don’t make sense without each other.

On Friday morning there was an interview with a doctor describing the crisis in hospitals right now. One story involved a senior who asked for Medical Assistance In Dying (MAID) during COVID, not because they were ill, but because they didn’t want to live alone anymore.

As much as our society might like the image of the rugged individualist, we are made to connect to each other, to the universe, to God. And no matter what relationships we have experienced, including those really bad ones that convince you that isolation is the only good option, even with all of that, we are made to be connected.

And our connections are called to be loving and so we are called to try to be as loving as the Good Shepherd of scripture .

That’s hard right now: basic safety issues divide us and denying the need for those is wrong. Being loving includes protecting each other. But the vision of reality we are given, the expression of God, of love made flesh is at the core of who we are as Christians.

And so, our calling is to keep trying to be loving, even in the face of obstacles, of death itself, and to realize that this same love is flowing to us, each day to help us, and to overflow enough to share, so that we may spread it to others even in these trying times.

Amen.

Ask Andrew #1, 2021 Why Do We Have a Psalm Every Sunday?

While COVID-19 makes our in-person services challenging, Knox is providing podcast services. Not everyone can access these, though, so we are also posting my sermons on our Knox Talks blog. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

Ask Andrew 1 (2021): Why Do We Have a Psalm Every Sunday?

Scriptures: 1 Samuel 16:14-23

Ephesians 5:15-20

This isn’t the first time I’ve been asked why we have Psalms each week but it’s the first time it’s been formal as an “Ask Andrew” question.

I thought it would be a simple one to address: not so! I’ve learned something researching this one and parts of it became a bit of a rabbit hole down which I disappeared.

One reason for having a Psalm each week is historical: we follow the Revised Common Lectionary a lot of the time and it contains a Psalm reading, sometimes two, for each week of the year.

Lectionaries have been around since the time of the Babylonian Exile, before the building of the Second Temple. It was a plan to read all of the Torah in one year and over time that grew to include readings from the Prophets. Today, Jewish practise still has a one-year lectionary and a three-year version although, interestingly, it still only lists the Law and Prophets. None of the Writings, which include the Psalms, are part of those lectionaries.

The early Christian church followed this tradition and eventually added in readings from the Gospels and Epistles. Psalms were added too. The original idea was to have the Gospel lesson control everything, so lessons from the Hebrew scriptures, including the Psalms, were chosen to support that lesson.

Most churches eventually switched from a one-year lectionary to a three-year lectionary, following the Jewish pattern, which allows for a lot more readings: you don’t leave out as much of the Bible that way.

For many denominations, lectionary readings are required. You have to read whatever is listed for that Sunday. The United Church is part of the Reformed Tradition. 500 years ago, when John Calvin, John Knox and others re-formed a branch of the church they also allowed for a lot more local decision-making. So, while a kind of lectionary existed, particularly for the followers of the Heidelberg Catechism, there was no requirement to use it and preachers were free to choose whatever scripture text seemed wise for that week.

You might think that the Psalms would become less frequently used as a result but the opposite was true. Admittedly, people rarely preach from the Psalms but the Reformation was all about the centrality of Scripture.

Our Ephesians lesson talks about Christians singing “Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs” when they gather but some of the Reformers were very suspicious of anything that put Biblical interpretation to something as powerful as music. So, many of them banned the singing of anything

except the Psalms themselves: “Can’t go wrong by singing scripture itself,” was the thinking.

I do understand the problem: some of our most powerful images of Christmas come from music. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to explain that no kings visited Jesus at all at the manger and we don’t know how many Magi came later, all because We Three Kings caught people’s imaginations.

So the Psalter was created with sung versions of the Psalms and a collection of tunes that would do for most of them. Even as I was growing up in the Presbyterian church the first hymns in the hymn book were always the Psalms, following the order: Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs.

So that’s the history part of it but I still haven’t answered the “why” part .

The Psalms have always been understood to be the part of scripture that is in the voice of the people. Other readings have traditionally just one voice reading, but the Psalms are inclusive, either sung, or read responsively.

We have a long history of calling the Bible the Word of God but the Psalms are exceptional in that they are clearly in the voice of human beings expressing a whole range of deep and profound emotions: all connected to God in some way.

In today’s service the Call to Worship is part of a Psalm, as often happens, and the opening Prayer is a prayer from a Psalm. The only change I made to it was to change “I” to “We” at the beginning; it had switched itself by the end.

Psalms are often songs of praise. Sometimes they are calls for help, prayers. They are expressions of deep sorrow or despair; they give voice to outrage and sometimes lead us from one feeling to another, rather like giving voice to the stages of grief.

In the Reformed tradition young people were encouraged to memorize Psalms so that they would have something to give them hope and strength, even in a situation like a difficult exam or a deeper, more personal crisis. The hope was that this would last for their lives.

This is part of an ancient tradition that would allow someone to simply utter the first line of a Psalm and the hearer would be able to understand the greater message of the whole Psalm.

Today I could do that by saying: “The Lord’s My Shepherd” (Ps. 23). Most church-goers would have a fair idea of the comfort intended, even at a time of death. I’m not sure which other Psalms would work anymore yet that’s exactly what Jesus is shown doing on the cross when he said the opening words of the 22nd Psalm: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”. That line alone is a cry of despair but the whole Psalm leads the hearer on a journey that ends in hope and trust in God for the future.

As you study the New Testament it is remarkable how often the Psalms are quoted or referenced. The Law and the Prophets are certainly there but the early Christians found in the Psalms a great deal of wisdom that shaped their understanding of Jesus and his ministry: they often treated the Psalms as prophetic works foretelling and interpreting Jesus so that the confusing stuff he did made more sense.

But beyond even that foundational inspiration, beyond the way the Psalms have shaped Christian theology is a deep, human, personal response to them.

Many Psalms are attributed to David who was famous for his skill with music. He is shown in our 1 Samuel lesson when he was recruited to play music for King Saul who was recorded as being tormented by an evil spirit. We might call that depression or something similar today and Saul found the music soothing, calming.

Music has a power to slip by our intellectual walls; it reaches deep into our emotional selves and changes us.

The Psalms are, first and foremost, musical. Some of them even have directions for the choir leader in the Bible even though we no longer have the original music to accompany them. As music they open our hearts to our faith in ways that words cannot match.

In the Reformed Tradition we have emphasized the intellectual pursuit of truth, the educated analysis of scripture, and other aspects of faith. Within our tradition, if we had abandoned the Psalms we would have left ourselves emotionally stunted as people of faith. Some would argue that we’ve done that anyway but without the Psalms it would be worse and simply adding hymns and spiritual songs to our repertoire cannot replace the power of these words.

The Psalms link us in deep ways with people of faith going back well before the time of Christ. It’s remarkable how some of these resonate when we read them especially during challenging times. And when we include them in our worship each week we remain familiar with them and they are more accessible when we really need them.

To remove the Psalms would be to remove a part of worship that has always belonged to the people in the pews. The Psalms are a part of the Word of God where the voice of humans is most clearly and expressively heard, even in the 21st century.

To lose them would not only be a loss of our connection through time; it would be a loss of part of our souls. I could not bear that.

Amen