Summoned

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.

Summoned

Scriptures:

Amos 5:18-24

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

For many people alive today, remembrance is something that happens at a bit of a distance. Apart from the war in Afghanistan, most of us have never experienced war, have never had to serve in a battle whether on land, sea or air.

We’ve heard the stories of what it was like on the “home front”: the rationing, the drills, the blackouts, the constant reminder that “loose lips sink ships”, the encouragement to look out for spies and to report them.

The first time I ever saw armed soldiers on the streets was in Montreal during the October crisis in 1970. I was 11 and it was a total shock; like something on the news – but it was real life.

I don’t know what it was like to have a loved on overseas and to worry that the knock might come at the door to announce that they were wounded or killed. But I did grow up near the veterans’ hospital in Ste. Anne de Bellevue and I saw the scars, physical and mental, on some of the permanent patients there who were able to leave the hospital and visit town.

People have remarked that this COVID pandemic is the modern equivalent: the time to rally us together to resist a common foe, to sacrifice things, to endure things for the benefit of our whole society.

I don’t have a problem with that idea if it really does get people to cooperate and be careful. There is real sacrifice happening; people really are suffering isolation and becoming very fearful in some cases.

But I can also see how people are struggling against the rules, resisting the limitations imposed and how that is resulting in more infections. I wonder how much of that also went on during the great wars of the 20th century when the sacrifices dragged on for years.

What we are experiencing is real, and hard, and it still doesn’t compare to the war experiences I have heard about and what some among us remember themselves, having lived through those times.

I can barely imagine what it must have been like at the end of WWI when the world had to deal with a world war and the pandemic of the Spanish Flu at exactly the same time.

We have much greater understanding of things like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder now and have seen how some individual lives have been torn apart by specific tragedies. In the 1960s I saw soldiers who suffered from “Shell Shock”, survivors of WWII, but my imagination is staggered at the thought of what the trauma of so many years of war and tragedy must have done to our whole society.

Maybe our experience right now can give us a small taste and we can use our imaginations to fill in the gaps; to try to remember in a way that goes beyond facts and figures and reaches towards a real empathy for what people went through. And as I remind us each year –

we do have people among us who can tell us what it was like. Our new experiences might help us listen to their stories differently, and remember better.

Our scripture lessons are not special ones set aside for Remembrance, they just happened to be in the lectionary for this day; but they are so fitting!

Our Amos lesson feels dark. It is a warning to faithful people that empty rituals are not what God wants and that if we live unjust lives God will not be pleased with us.

The second world war became a massive struggle for justice and the atrocities of the Nazis were hard for people to believe even when they saw the evidence with their own eyes. We can trace the rise of the Nazis to the unjust terms of the Treaty of Versailles after WWI which placed an unsustainable burden on the losing powers of that war.

Historically we see injustices leading to worse injustices, which led to very dark days indeed. In Amos we have a passage from thousands of years earlier where we are called to prevent this very kind of thing; where we are told that God wants us to let justice flow freely. That’s a challenging call, especially when making peace after a war: to imagine what justice looks like when we’ve just been at each other’s throats; when we’ve pumped out propaganda with nasty names and built up a climate of distrust and paranoia.

But that is our call and has been for centuries. Think of all we could have avoided if we had truly made this happen.

Our lesson from 1 Thessalonians is also very relevant: Paul is comforting the Thessalonian church about people who have died. They expected Jesus to return and bring in the kingdom of God and yet faithful people who waited in that hope had passed away.

This passage is the one used to justify the idea of the Rapture where some believe that a bunch of believers will be whisked off Earth to Heaven in the end times. But as Brandon Scott told us a number of years ago when he preached here at Knox, this passage is actually quite different than that. It is almost a military scenario: Christ giving a command; the trumpet of God sounding.

What’s happening is like the arrival of a liberating army. Those who have died will be gathered up first, which is an important understanding because it reassures people both then and now that those who have died are not truly gone; they have not vanished from existence, but will share in the resurrection life of Jesus.

Then the faithful still alive are pulled up into the clouds, not to depart but to greet the new king and welcome him and his liberating army into this world that has been ruled by injustice and terror for too long, and set up the perfect creation which is God’s vision for the world.

Obviously, our expectations about the second coming have changed.

We are not living in breathless anticipation as people were then, but some principles from this teaching still apply today.

The expectation that those who die will share in the resurrection life of Jesus is still with us. Paul saw this in terms that he called “a spiritual body”; a new form of living that is as advanced from these bodies as a full-grown oak tree is from an acorn. He even uses the seed and grown plant image to give us a way to think about what is to come. (I Corinthians, ch. 15)

And the expectation that this world is where our job is, is very much alive today. The idea of creating justice has never gone away, even in the vision of a dramatic second coming. It wasn’t to leave a damaged shell of a sinful world behind; it was to create a just and righteous place here, just as has been our calling from the beginning: to establish God’s realm of peace and justice in this, God’s own creation.

This adds some important dimensions to our service of remembrance. Our Thessalonians passage reassures us that those who died, whose names are on memorials, whose lives we are to remember: they are not gone forever, but only for a time. We can mourn their passing and reflect on what they sacrificed, but we can also hold onto the hope and the assurance that God has more in store for them and for everyone who dies from this world.

Both passages remind us of our call to create a just and righteous world: one where we don’t need to raise up armies to defeat the kind of horror fascism created; one where we no longer have to call on people to make these sacrifices.

If we stay alert, if we pay attention, then we can make the quest for justice and righteousness a daily task that encompasses all people and we can save future generations from having to make these same sacrifices ever again.

Amen.

Unexpected Blessings

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.

Unexpected Blessings

Scriptures:

Revelation 7:9-1

Matthew 5:1-12

Today’s lesson from Matthew’s gospel is the opening of the Sermon on the Mount. It appears only in Matthew’s gospel although in Luke’s gospel there is a parallel, often called the sermon on the plain.

This passage stands out because it contains the Beatitudes: a list of blessings that turn the world on its head.

It is significant that the beatitudes come first because they set the stage for everything else that follows; they lay the groundwork for all of Jesus’ other teachings.

It’s a really good way to start a sermon. What Jesus says would be startling to his hearers. “Blessed are” sounds familiar to us; it is now a phrase with centuries of religious overtones.

But in Jesus’ day, it had a much more secular connotation: wealth, fortune, like being born with a silver spoon in your mouth, being well-off. That kind of thing will get people listening!

Lucky you! if you are poor in spirit

if you feel lost and alone; if you recognize you need help and guidance.

Lucky you! if you mourn

if you’ve had someone or something you love taken away from you; if you feel deep loss.

Lucky you! if you are meek

if you don’t step on others on your way up the ladder; if you don’t put yourself forward.

Lucky you! if you hunger and thirst for righteousness

if you know what it’s like to be cheated and abused; if you have a passion to set things right because in your life you have seen so much wrong.

Lucky you! if you are merciful

if you don’t harden your heart to give people what they deserve but show mercy, and recognize the humanity in others; even those who are wrong.

Lucky you! if you are pure in heart

if you haven’t given in to the cynicism of the world; if you won’t accept that corruption is all around and it’s the only way to get ahead.

Lucky you! if you are a peacemaker

if you want to bridge the gap between the extremes; if you won’t buy into the “us vs. them” mentality and really want to see people live and let live.

Lucky you! if you are persecuted

either for righteousness or for following Jesus; how lucky you are to be picked on, called names, put in jail, beaten and tortured, maybe killed. You are so fortunate.

No wonder people would stop and listen! Jesus wasn’t being ironic. He must have sounded crazy! All the people he describes as “lucky” or well off are the people who regularly got ground underfoot, not just by the powers in Rome and other rulers but by many business practices and day-to-day attitudes.

These people would look weak, pathetic to anyone on their way up in the world. And here is Jesus announcing that in God’s world these people are the lucky ones.

This is the foundation for Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom of Heaven, which means the way God wants the world to be. These values are the ones that matter to God.

And people listened; people gathered in greater and greater numbers. This message was attractive across all kinds of boundaries until we find it expressed in that vision in our Revelations reading of the uncountable multitude of people from every nation on the earth in the presence of God, having come through dreadful persecutions.

You could call it the ultimate grassroots movement because the people who were inspired were often the people who were trodden on as much as the grass.

No one would expect these people to be blessed. No one would expect them to be considered wealthy, or fortunate, or lucky.

And sadly, we’ve often taken that word “blessed” as an excuse. “God’s going to bless them, Jesus said so”; and then we feel freed from any responsibility to actually engage with all those people whom Jesus describes as being the heart and soul of God’s world.

The dissonance is just as powerful today as it was 2000 years ago. The people Jesus calls favoured are not the ones we envy. Which means that the struggle between the basic values Jesus taught

and the values everyone assumes are real in the world is still very much alive.

Some of these Beatitudes may apply to us. During these past months we have had to learn some lessons in mourning the loss of many things, sometimes even loved ones. And we are denied our traditional ways of mourning which makes it all even harder.

During this time our sense of direction, our sense of our place in the order of the universe has been seriously challenged, even to the point of re-evaluating what really matters in life.

Those are just the first two beatitudes; other examples can be found. If any of that applies to us, we should take heart. Jesus was serious when he said that God favours such people because as we work together as God’s people we find ways to support each other. We discover that we don’t have to do this alone; that God provides us with unexpected ways to grow and overcome these challenges.

But there will be others that we don’t relate to so easily and these present us with a challenge:

  • how will we start to see these people differently?
  • how will we begin to see what Jesus saw in those people who look like victims, who appear naive, or unrealistic or maybe just not forceful enough to survive?
  • how do we look at the people who are being accused of things; being persecuted?
  • how do we stop assuming they deserve what they are getting?
  • do we have the courage to pause, and wonder, and listen to them to discover if there is a righteousness that they are trying to bring to life?
  • how do we step aside from the dominant narrative of the world and see things as they truly are?

This message of Jesus is a great place to start, and we should let it lead us to that vision of countless people from every land under the sun who have been brought together by these teachings and who wanted to create a new way to live life.

Maybe that vision can keep us going whenever the voices of those who wish to put others down make us question Jesus’ vision.

Amen.

The Greatest Commandments

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.

The Greatest Commandments

Scriptures:

Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18

Matthew 22:34-46

Our lessons from the lectionary these past weeks include a series of challenging questions posed to Jesus.

Matthew presents today’s as the last one, not only because it can be called the most significant, but because Jesus ends it by posing a return question which his challengers can’t answer, so they stop challenging him.

In 2018, after the bombing of a Synagogue in Philadelphia, Lori and I went to a Sabbath service at Beit Tikvah, an orthodox synagogue in this neighbourhood. After the service we chatted with the man who had been our guide and we got into a discussion about this very passage.

He became excited as he identified the first part as the Shema Yisrael, a prayer that is to be recited twice a day by adults and at bedtime for children. There are records of people who have died with these as their last words, going back to the time of Roman persecution to this century when an Israeli soldier shouted out these words as he threw himself on a live hand grenade, saving his companions at the cost of his own life.

This is something that would have been part of Jesus’ upbringing as a daily embodiment of a commandment that defined what it meant to be Jewish:

“Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is one” — Deuteronomy 6:4

And Jesus continued with the next verse:

“and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart

and mind and soul and strength”

[There’s a little bit of First Century Greek translation there: the Hebrew original didn’t have a separate word for mind, heart and soul; but the Greeks believed there was a distinction, so in Greek “mind” is added.]

So Jesus took the Shema and stated explicitly what was often understood implicitly: he included the meaning of what followed.

What Jesus did there would have satisfied his hearers very well. There would be no one who would object to his statement that this was the most important commandment: after all, it’s so central that they were instructed to pray it twice a day for their whole adult lives —

write it on the doorposts, bind it to their hands and foreheads.

The second commandment, though, sets Jesus apart. We read where he got it: in the book of Leviticus.

It is the last phrase in a longer passage that deals with how we are to treat each other; a passage that calls for unbiased justice, that emphasizes a peaceable and loving relationship. The commandment to love our neighbours as ourselves looks like it is supposed to be a summary of all the parts that come before.

When our guide at the synagogue heard that Jesus had said that this was the second most important commandment, it didn’t make any sense to him.

He understood this passage to be amongst the commandments that were, for lack of a better word, aspirational: something to try for, of course; part of the ideal to which God calls us, but not a central commandment; less important than the 10 commandments and

certainly not as vital as the Shema.

I have no doubt our guide’s interpretation would have been shared by the majority of Jesus’ hearers. Jesus was declaring a particular position here that set him apart from other teachers. He was declaring that his understanding of Judaism would focus in this manner: the law of love as the Apostle Paul would later name it.

It’s a challenging position to take. Of course, with a traditional understanding of commandments, it is possible to have different interpretations. Seminaries would be very boring places if it weren’t possible to argue about fine points and possible interpretations.
But at base, commandments are rules; it should be possible to measure them and to know if you have broken them or not.

But love: well, love is a living thing; it can’t be measured by a set of rules but rather by the well-being of another. It is about relationship, not about legalities.

What Jesus did here was to establish himself as a teacher who was pointing to a new interpretation of the law; embracing a way of fulfilling the law that demanded a personal relationship, first with God and then with those around us, but in all cases drawing us beyond our own needs and wants, requiring us to look outside ourselves.

It’s almost like a definition of the opposite of narcissism. Jesus is telling us that God wants us to live for God and for others, not by adherence to rules but by paying attention, by caring, by noticing what is needed even when that includes setting boundaries, as we can see from our Leviticus reading.

It’s complex. It’s a call to develop people skills ahead of legal skills.

We haven’t always gotten it right. The church has created elaborate rules about our faith; creeds you have to embrace or be burned at the stake; days when you have to do this or avoid doing that; things you have to wear to church or NEVER wear to church.

Some of those things we’ve relaxed over time and some of those we’ve overturned violently. And as these things were happening it might be fair to ask: Where was the love when people were being oppressed, even burned at the stake? And where was the love when they were being violently liberated?

The way Jesus has called us to be with God is based in the laws of Moses and shaped by Jesus’ particular interpretation: and it’s challenging.

Rules seem easy; we like checklists and reference charts and even as the rules get more complex they can still seem safer than the uncharted waters of love.

But it is love to which we are called: To love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength and to love our neighbours as ourselves. Lists won’t work. Rules can point us to the basics but we can’t stop there. To truly follow our calling we have to truly love.

What Jesus has done is to free us from the law by giving us the most challenging calling of all: to love.

May God, whose perfect love casts out all fear, show us how to be the loving people we are called to become.

Amen.

Pragmatic Spirituality

As we are all staying at home during COVID-19, 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.

— (Rev) Andrew Jensen

Pragmatic Spirituality

Scriptures:

Isaiah 45:1-7

Matthew 22:15-22

The lesson of Jesus answering the trick question about taxes has often been used to demonstrate Jesus’ wisdom and insight as he avoids the trap and transforms a trick question into a spiritual truth.

It has also been used to show how Jesus is able to take a materialistic, political question and derive a deep, spiritual meaning from it. In doing so, He reminds everyone that their focus should always be on God rather than earthly powers.

But let’s look at this historically, because I think this obviously political question was theological in nature right from the start. Religion and politics were much harder to separate in those days and frankly, most people wouldn’t understand how we could separate them.

Israel, right from the time of the Exodus and the giving of the law on Mt. Sinai, was designed to be a theocracy. In other words, God was seen as the ultimate ruler; day to day stuff was mediated through the priests and the patriarchal leaders of each of the tribes.

When something was necessary that went beyond a single tribe, one of the Judges became involved:

      • if a ruling on a dispute between tribes was needed;
      • if multiple tribes needed to rally for mutual defence;
      • if guidance from God was needed for a new problem or to challenge a particular injustice, or to provide an interpretation,

one of the prophets became involved.

Kings were not part of the plan. And when the nation demanded one, the prophet Samuel created a wonderful list of the problems that come with a king, or any government.

God was supposed to be the only ruler Israel needed but they felt more secure against other nations with a king, especially since their last Judge, Sampson, was such a dramatic failure.

The whole Mediterranean world believed that each nation had a different god or set of gods. When one nation conquered another it was presumed that the losing nation’s god had been defeated too. The treasures and idols of the losing nation’s temples were hauled back to the conqueror’s main temple and put at the feet of their gods. That’s how the Ark of the Covenant went missing during one of the conquests of Israel.

Our lesson from Isaiah gives a new perspective on that understanding as the prophet declares that the God of Israel is giving success to Cyrus the Persian to restore justice.

It’s a radical notion that this pagan king might be an instrument of God. It provides a more nuanced understanding than the idea that all foreign rulers are evil and to be resisted. It also raises the question that is revisited by Paul: Can someone rise to such power without God permitting it? And if God permits it, does God have a plan to use them?

Isaiah was working out what it meant to be a nation in exile in a foreign land surrounded by foreign gods but still believing in only one God. Back during the Exodus it was remarkable that God could reach from the promised land into Egypt to draw the Israelites into Canaan. There was still a sense of Divinity being tied to geography.

But Isaiah was dealing with a nation who could not go back to the place associated with God. So, he shows us God exalting an emperor from Persia to get things done. It’s a radical idea because it challenges the traditional thinking about religion and politics.

Fast forward to Jesus’ situation where he is asked about paying taxes to Caesar Augustus who had set up a statue to himself in the temple in Jerusalem. Abomination of desolation! You don’t get a worse blasphemy than that!

So for Jesus to allow payment of the tax is more than just a question of loyalty to Israel. It is a question of allowing a human ruler to get in the way of God. It is a religious question with deep roots and a lot of implications.

The answer Jesus gives is suitably subtle and takes into account the long history of this question. It not only gives the spiritual statement that God is at the centre, it invites people to consider what belongs to God and what belongs to the emperor.

It is pragmatic: the emperor exists; his face is even on the money! We have to deal with him and deal with the reality imposed by this ruler. But Jesus makes sure that it all must be considered in the light of God and what belongs to God.

So what belongs to God? The biblical answer has always been: everything! God is the creator; there is nothing that does not come from God. Everything belongs to God.

So Jesus invites his hearers to judge between the emperor and God and give each what belongs to them. Clearly, the coin with the emperor’s face on it belongs to the emperor, at some level. So go ahead, pay the tax if you must, but don’t forget that the coin, and the land and the people, and even the emperor himself all belong to God, whether they know it or not. And we are to give to God what belongs to God: everything.

This is not a call to divide the material from the spiritual. It is a reminder that in the eyes of centuries of Jewish tradition there is no division. All that is, spiritual and material, are part of God’s world and cannot be separated.

The Greeks divided Spiritual and Physical as part of their philosophy, which is why we have often interpreted this passage that way. After all, the New Testament is written in Greek.

But Jesus was not Greek: he was Jewish and the Jewish understanding of the integrity and indivisibility of the spiritual and material elements of the world was behind his answer. That’s why it was so effective at shutting up his challengers: they understood that he had put God at the top and then turned their own question back on them.

It’s a good lesson to remember: everything in life has a spiritual dimension. In every part of life, God is involved and if we listen to Jesus’ teachings we will understand that God is more than “involved”.

God is to be the one who shapes our understanding and our values and every decision we make. Everything should be seen from the perspective that God gives us, even someone like an emperor, Cyrus the Persian, who didn’t know God but did God’s bidding and Augustine the Roman, who claimed to be a god.

Let’s try to develop that perspective where our spirituality permeates every part of our lives.

Amen.

Thankful Enough?

As we are all staying at home during COVID-19, 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.

— (Rev) Andrew Jensen

Thankful Enough?

Scriptures:

Deuteronomy 26:1-11

Philippians 4:4-9

Thanksgiving used to be simple: you’d surround yourself with as many loved ones as possible, there’d be decorations like pumpkins, gourds and colourful leaves, you’d play games and then feast together.

In a pandemic a lot of that is harder and the restrictions on our lives may test our ability to be thankful.

This situation can also push us to re-evaluate what really matters in life and remind us of some of those things we have taken for granted, like bountiful food and safe travel over long distances; things that our ancestors could only have dreamed of.

When my grandparents came to Canada from Denmark they were cut off from family except by mail. Letters had to travel by steamship at first and they only saw some loved ones decades later when air travel became affordable.

Countless generations of people knew food insecurity very personally. That’s why we have that lesson from Deuteronomy in which people are enjoined to thank God for a safe harvest. Our modern Thanksgiving holiday was about that too, as our opening hymn reminds us:

♫ All is safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin ♪

Having enough food for the winter is so basic: we need a reminder of how important that is in this world where we can go to the grocery store in January and buy a bag of salad from California.

Our lesson from Philippians sets a great tone: we are to be thankful all the time. Even when we ask God for what we need, we are to remember what we have already been given and how we are constantly blessed.

That’s a challenging calling and when we feel stressed, it’s even harder.

That’s the recurring value of this holiday: it is a reminder that even in hard times we are blessed. When we stop and remember what previous generations faced we start to realize how true that is.

Our thankfulness should not only be a general attitude nor only directed to God. Obviously, we remember to thank God at this time

but do we remember to thank each other? Do we thank the people who have helped us, contributed to our lives?

In reading our Deuteronomy lesson, I was suddenly struck by the realization that there’s a group we neglect to thank. That lesson talks about the land the Israelites were to inherit: the promised land.

There’s a lot of controversy about that these days, as the conflict in Israel and Palestine drags on. Who has the right to go in and take land from others, and has God really promised this? And does a 3500-year-old promise still apply in the 21st century?

It struck me that here, in North America, we have treated this land much the same way, as if this is our promised land, our inheritance.

We have thanked God for this place and its bounty for centuries, but what have we done to thank the peoples who were already here? The indigenous peoples?

What would truth and reconciliation look like if we approached our First Nations neighbours in a spirit of thanksgiving?

It seems to me that it would go a long way to overcoming those feelings that we often bring: fear and distrust; a suspicion that they’re looking for a handout; a sense that they and their cultures are inferior. Realizing that they deserve our thanks might make it harder for us to carry all those prejudices

As a child I remember hearing those traditional stories about the first Thanksgiving: settlers who had no idea how to survive an extreme winter in this climate being helped by the first nations peoples who lived nearby and who didn’t want to see these unprepared people starve to death. They brought food, introduced the settlers to this new creature we call a “turkey” and taught them how to survive.

Of course those stories were full of stereotypes: the noble savages helping the Europeans: how sad they’re no longer among us! But the truth behind it is that those first peoples were generous, helpful, tolerant, fantastic neighbours.

I don’t know if those stories are still told in some form, but I don’t recall hearing them lately. For all their stereotypes and other flaws, they carried the message that we owe thanks to the first peoples of this place.

This story could be updated to carry the message that this isn’t just something from the mists of history. We still reap the harvests of this land; we still eat the plants and animals that grow here; we still have a way to survive the cold winters. This sharing is a gift that has never stopped giving, has never stopped enriching our lives.

As we know, our relationship moved from sharing to taking, and lots of other abusive things. It’s hard to feel thankful when we’re trying to justify the unjust things we’ve done as a society. Thankfulness and self-justification don’t exist well together.

At Knox we have a Right Relations committee to guide us as we try to work out how to develop better relations with Indigenous peoples. We now have a turtle garden that I hope you’ll visit. It’s an attempt to acknowledge that we are on unceded Anishinaabe land, that goes beyond traditional statements.

Perhaps the turtle triggered this train of thought this week. It seems to me that as we do things like acknowledging the land and the first peoples, we would do well to go forward in a spirit of thanksgiving, ready to express our thanks to others and to express our understanding of the value of the land itself and all that it represents.

The land is a good place to start as we reach out to build a new relationship. It’s also a good place to be as we end the season of Creation Time: recalling the value of this land. Not the cost, not the money, not thinking about it as real estate; but as a place to live, a source of life, a gift from God to be protected and nurtured, as it protects and nurtures us.

The First Nations have never forgotten that relationship and as we face new climate challenges, the rest of us are forcibly reminded.

Let’s try to do better. Let’s start from a place of Thanksgiving as we build new relations with the First Nations and as we build a new relationship with the land itself.

If we start off feeling thankful, and can hold on to that feeling, we will surely do better than we have so far.

Thanks be to God.

Worry, Fuss and Fume

As we are all staying at home during COVID-19, 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.

— (Rev) Andrew Jensen

Worry, Fuss and Fume

Scripture: Matthew 6:25-34

A few years ago I used this passage for the opening worship at a Presbytery Executive meeting. I talked about the call to stop worrying in the context of the changing church. I included a comment about not worrying about things like pensions, as we try to do what we believe is right, and one of the other ministers asked “yes, but how do you do that?”.

It’s a very practical question. It cuts to the core of this teaching of Jesus.

Religion is dismissed by some as unrealistic; as idealism that isn’t grounded, not part of the “real world” and suggesting that as soon as you experience the “real world” you can’t take teachings like this very seriously.

The thing is, Jesus was very grounded in real life. In his day, pensions didn’t exist; no one had ever heard of them. Your old age security came from accumulating wealth – if you were very successful or fortunate, or more commonly from having children and grandchildren to look after you if you actually made it to old age. If you had no money or kids you would literally lose years off your life.

Jesus was being very practical in his words. His comment about Solomon being under-dressed compared to the wildflowers was kind of funny but it was really dealing with people who didn’t worry about fashion as much as they worried about freezing to death at night.

There are some undeniable truths in Jesus’ words here that even the most cynical can’t deny: Not only will worry not add a single hour to your life but modern medicine has proven that worry and stress are harmful to our health, literally shortening our lives. This pandemic is providing more and more evidence of that every single day.

No, Jesus was not being idealistic or naïve. He was talking about his vision of The Kingdom of God.

That was an important phrase for him and it carried a lot of meaning when he uttered it. Yes, there are modern concerns about the use of the word “kingdom” both in terms of its sense of imperialism and in terms of ascribing a masculine identity to God. But let’s put that concern about wording aside for now as we consider what Jesus was trying to convey.

In his vision of the kind of place God wants to create in the world, Jesus was very aware of the people on the margins; the ones who had no family support, no pension. In other words, the ones who are listed in the beatitudes: the meek, the poor in spirit, the ones who suffer, the merciful, the people who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Many of these people are not in the driver’s seat in any society.

His vision, which he taught carefully and repeatedly, would have people working together, sharing what they have, developing a community of love where there is room for each person and each person is loved and respected.

The first Christian community in Jerusalem tried to follow this pattern. It wasn’t simple and there were bumps in the road, but it would still be going if the Romans hadn’t torn down the walls of the city and slaughtered all the occupants in 70 AD.

Those first Christians understood that when Jesus told us not to worry about the future it wasn’t some idealistic vision based on miracles. It was a way to be a community of faith, that made sure that no one is left behind.

Christian monastic communities have tried to achieve the same thing although the addition of a number of disciplines has made that pretty exclusive. There were old Celtic monasteries that had monks and nuns married to each other. The system of shared life was encouraged without the demand to disconnect from family life.

Our modern situation is rather different than the one faced by Jesus. We’ve tried to create economic systems that allow us to be independent of others, to avoid community.

That’s not working out so well, is it? Our modern pandemic has just underscored how much we need each other, how visceral a problem that becomes when we are forbidden to gather, to see loved ones.

So let’s learn from this day, and from these ancient teachings. Jesus knew what he was talking about: the more we worry, fuss and fume, the less we accomplish.

Let’s focus on doing God’s work in this world: on building community, on loving each other in practical ways, on reaching out across boundaries. Today that will involve virtual connection, more and more, but we mustn’t stop, because as we connect with others, as we work to build others up we ourselves will also be built up and the support and care we offer will come back to us.

It’s not because we’re in control of some pyramid scheme but because God has given us the chance to build something better than the dog-eat-dog world that people claim is “the real world”.

The real world is what we make it. God calls us to make it a world where we work together for everyone’s benefit.

Yes, a step of faith is required. Jesus invites us to believe that this is possible and that God will inspire others to share and to help, and to love.

This is no naïve belief. It is real, it has worked before, and it will work again. And I can’t think of a better way of relieving stress and worry than by helping others.

Amen.

Not Locked-In

As we are all staying at home during COVID-19, 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.

— (Rev) Andrew Jensen

Not Locked In

Scriptures:

Ezekiel 18:1-4, 25-32

Matthew 21:23-32

When I was a kid, there was a silly TV show called “Laugh-In”. Occasionally they awarded a prize they called the “Flying Fickle Finger of Fate”. I don’t remember much about it, I was pretty young, but I have the sense it was awarded to anyone who had got their comeuppance – what we might now describe as karma, as in: “they deserved that!”

Of course, that’s a gross over-simplification of the idea of Karma or fate, for that matter, but then, it was a comedy show.

The idea of fate often gets tied to the idea of vengeance. It certainly was for the first readers of Ezekiel’s message. There was a well-established proverb about the children paying the price for their parent’s faults and there are other biblical passages warning about this.

We rebel against this idea; it’s so patently unfair. And so did Ezekiel, as we can see. Ezekiel says that God rejects this way of doing things and we cheer as we hear these words.

At the same time, there are parts of our society that subtly buy into the idea of fate, or predestination or the idea that one generation pays for the sins of the past.

An obvious example of that is the climate crisis we are seeing. Our children and grandchildren will be living in a world that we and previous generations helped damage. We can’t deny that kind of reality but we can work to undo the damage as much as possible. I would call this a consequence, not a judgment.

And we also accept that some flaws are socially transmitted:

certain groups will behave in ways we might not like. We may even expect the children of those people to cause trouble in school with no evidence from the individual child. How is that different than what Ezekiel is preaching against?

But we still do it! Current protests about racism against black and indigenous peoples make it clear that there are statistics to demonstrate that we do this very thing: condemn children because of who their parents are or the neighbourhood they come from or some other factors that we justify to ourselves.

It’s amazing how much of this stuff sneaks into our lives quietly, as we grow up. So, we don’t question it; we often don’t even look at it until we are confronted by an open challenge.

In Ezekiel’s day, people blamed God. The logic isn’t hard to understand: if God is all powerful then how can we resist the life fated for us? If we have no control over things, then God must be throwing us into this bad situation and judging us for something we didn’t do.

And any time we talk about fate, or destiny, we are borrowing from this attitude.

It’s fair to notice that there are things outside of our control, lots of things in fact. The world is a big place and the illusion that we are in charge is eroding right now as we struggle with a pandemic that circles the world. Good! Our arrogance needed correcting.

But that doesn’t mean that God is judging us and punishing us and it doesn’t support the prejudices that we’ve let slip in that pre-judge individuals.

We love the idea of a second chance; the idea that God will look at us for what we do and give us the chance to make mistakes and start again. It’s central to the Methodist roots of the United Church and it’s a core message for us still.

The challenge comes when we have to apply this principle to others. In theory we agree, sure, but we stumble in church, and in other parts of life. Especially when we buy into the assumptions made by the crowd, or the institution; when we buy into any presumption that lets us look at someone as part of a category instead of as a person.

This is a risky time. We feel locked in by this disease. We feel helpless and fearful and when we feel this way we become more susceptible to messages that cast blame onto others; that make it easier to push whole groups away.

We are tired, and it is harder to look at each person as an individual. Love and respect take effort and right now we hope the love and respect flows our way instead having to work to offer it to others.

But we don’t believe that God is out to get us. We don’t believe that we are fated or destined in some way, however tempting that interpretation might be in hard times. We really don’t believe that God punishes us for things others have done.

Yes, there are consequences we have to deal with; like climate change. But that’s not God punishing us – that’s God letting us deal with the results of our short-sighted behaviour as a society, as a human race.

Hopefully, we will learn from these consequences and do better in the future. But it’s not punishment. God loves us, and the idea that we are in this together matters deeply. It is central to our message as Christians.

When we see that poor people suffer more from COVID or bear the brunt of climate change; that’s not God punishing the poor. That is God calling us to do things differently; to share in the recovery and deal with the challenge; to work together to make things better.

Do we feel like everything is out of our control? It’s actually not. We can control our attitudes and we can demand better approaches from our leaders. We can insist that all people really are of equal value in God’s eyes and that the built-in favouritism we have in society needs to be fixed so that people are lifted up; so that no individual or group has to unfairly bear the burden of whatever problem we face.

The pandemic isn’t a judgment, it’s a crisis. And the front-line workers have carried an extra burden for us.

The climate crisis isn’t a judgment. It is a consequence of our behaviour and we need to learn to do better and to work to lift the burden that is being passed on to future generations.

Systemic racism, and other kinds of prejudice are our society’s judgment on innocent people in direct defiance of today’s lesson from Ezekiel and so many other scriptures, all of which call for justice.

These are not fate, or destiny, or God’s judgment on the children for the sins of the parents and we must not treat them as somehow justified.

God wants us to see each other as people, loved by God and worthy of love by us; worthy of the chance to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes; just as much as we are worthy of forgiveness, of hope, of respect as people. Worthy of love as God’s children.

As this difficult time challenges us right where we live, let’s rise to the challenge and re-think our assumptions.

God isn’t judging us. God is giving us an opportunity to learn, to grow, to change. Let’s make sure we seize that opportunity.

Amen.

The Cost of Living

As we are all staying at home during COVID-19, 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.

— (Rev) Andrew Jensen

The Cost of Living

Scriptures:

Philippians 1:21-30

Matthew 20:1-16

UCC Universal Basic Income Program and the Moderator’s Letter

Poor old Paul! Actually, he never had the chance to get old, did he? Paul was so avid to spread the teachings of Jesus that when arrested for disturbing the peace by upsetting the crowd, instead of being set free, when offered the chance, he used his Roman Citizenship as a lever to appeal his case to the emperor with the hope of persuading Caesar Augustus of the truth of Jesus’ teachings. He got his chance after a long time under arrest and ultimately was executed by Caesar.

Paul had a lot of time to think about his situation and he was allowed to write letters while under house arrest, many of which we have in our Bible,

Today we see him at an emotionally tough place: he is weighing life and death in the balance. It looks like he is expecting to die and he sees great release and joy in that prospect. He anticipates being at the side of Jesus in the next life.

But look at what he concludes: to live is absolutely worth it no matter what is going on and he encourages the people of Philippi to live lives that are worthy of the gospel, even as they face suffering.

I realized something this week that Paul clearly understood. Our society talks about optimism as being “glass half full”.

Our scriptures set a more enthusiastic standard: talking about “my cup overflowing,” in Psalm 23, that also talks about walking through the valley of the shadow of death, we are called to a faith that isn’t merely optimistic but can find a way to make things better even in the midst of hard times.

We may sympathize with the emotionally fragile Paul right now as we deal with the changes and uncertainties of COVID as we wonder when we might be able to meet again. If we follow Paul’s example through to the end, we won’t give up, we won’t let these challenges discourage us for long and we will look for opportunities to live lives “worthy of the gospel”.

Our Gospel lesson about the workers in the vineyard and the generosity of the vineyard owner is a really challenging example of the teachings of Jesus that we are called to live out.

Sadly, we often dismiss it as a teaching that tells us about God but has little practical application. Obviously God is the vineyard owner and we are the workers and God rewards everyone equally regardless of when they enter the vineyard.

One interpretation has been that this is a lesson in God’s generosity and an explanation for why God blesses the just and the unjust, providing sun and rain for all people regardless of whether they have worked hard or not.

Fair enough, except that if we stop at that level of interpretation, it’s only about what God does. It doesn’t demand anything of us except for a vague example that Generosity is Godly.

But our current situation can be a spur to look at this story as a call to do something really practical.

In the social structure of Jesus’ day, there was no social safety net. The closest you got to an employment office was the local square: if you wanted daily work you went there to be hired and if you looked sturdy, or reliable, or tall enough to reach high vines, or whatever the boss wanted you’d be hired.

The longer the day went on without being hired the less hope you had and the less pay you could earn; which was pretty tough, especially if you were trying to support a family: spouse, children, elderly parents, sick cousin. A day without work meant hunger. It didn’t mean you were lazy, or dishonest or trying to scam the system. It often had nothing to do with you at all! Maybe you were standing in the wrong place or you looked extra tired that morning – coffee certainly wasn’t an option.

And at the end of the parable: the people who worked hardest felt cheated because they had laboured all day and received the usual pay for that work while these other people who only worked an hour got a full day’s wage. Where’s the justice in that? Well, if you chalk it all up to God’s generosity you don’t have to think about justice.

Our current conversation about a basic living wage for all challenges that limit and frankly, for many Christians, that conversation arises from this very lesson and from the vision of justice it presents.

The vineyard owner sees justice as providing a living wage for everyone, regardless of their circumstances. They have to eat, have to feed others, have to have shelter and it wasn’t their fault that they weren’t hired earlier in the day.

I asked Andrea to circulate an e-mail from the national office of the United Church of Canada which talks about the Moderator’s letter calling for a universal living wage as a matter of justice in Canada. (see link above).

As the message points out: this pandemic crisis shows us that people can become unemployed for many reasons, often outside of their control. It challenges the idea that unemployment or even poverty are signs of some kind of laziness, dishonesty or other moral failing. That kind of thinking is poison to really addressing our problems but it has been with us for years.

When I worked on the Church and Society committee in London Conference in the Mike Harris years, a crackdown on so-called “welfare cheats” was happening. Single mothers who were pinching pennies would buy the cheapest disposable razors available: which are the blue ones. Like so many consumer items, make it pink and the price goes up.

If inspectors found a blue razor in a single woman’s medicine cabinet, they would use it as evidence that a man also lived there and would cut off her welfare funds. The injustice of that is so obvious, and so painful! It’s high time we grew up and moved beyond that kind of desire to judge and control others.

The movement to provide a universal living wage is an attempt to do this in a just and humane way. It takes this parable and puts us, as a society in the role of the vineyard owner.

It calls us to follow the example that God sets, not only of generosity, which is good, but of the kind of justice that scripture has called for from Genesis onwards. It calls us to be our brother’s and sister’s keeper: to care for each other; to see that God’s justice calls for us to give everyone the chance to work, to eat, to live with dignity, without moral condemnation, with a desire to make sure that no one is left behind.

It’s not a simple discussion and there is a great deal to work out. But this is a unique opportunity to get the conversation beyond theory and look at ways to make it work.

So I invite you to see what the Moderator is calling for and see whether you feel called to participate in this process. We may be stuck at home but that doesn’t mean we can’t live lives worthy of the gospel.

This parable cuts to the core of the gospel. What are we going to do about it?

Amen.

“A New Earth” or a Renewal of the Earth?

As we are all staying at home during COVID-19, 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.

— (Rev) Andrew Jensen

“A New Earth” or a Renewal of the Earth?

Scriptures:

Isaiah 55:12 – 56:2

Revelation 22:1-5

We begin this season of Creation Time with some challenging lessons. The Isaiah lesson is really quite cheerful; I always liked the song that quotes this passage:

♪♪ “You shall go out with joy

and be led forth with peace

the mountains and the hills will break forth before you

There will be shouts of joy

and all the trees of the field will clap, will clap their hands:

And all [the trees of the fields will clap their hands (3x clap)

As you go out with joy.” ♫

I always like the image of the trees clapping their hands. It is a wonderful image of the renewal of the land: thorns replaced with more productive plants.

The thorns are a clue to an ancient image: the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. One of the curses against them was the curse of hard labour and the way that the ground would produce thorns instead of the plants the humans would need to survive.

I have remarked before on the way that the Christian bible gives us a grand sweep: running from Paradise, the garden of innocence, to the second of our readings – the New Jerusalem, the ultimate city which manages to combine urban living with the tree of life, previously locked up in Eden and forbidden to humans.

The tension between rural and urban is a major theme of scripture, although not stated explicitly.

The Hebrew people were originally nomadic, travelling around with their flocks, taking advantage of the best water holes in a dry land. When they invaded Canaan, the promised land, they were warned about cities. They destroyed Jericho and were told that whoever worked to rebuild the walls of that city would be cursed. Then the Bible shows us how that curse was fulfilled.

Generations later Jerusalem was conquered by king David and that’s the first really positive mention of a city we find. It becomes the holy city.

There’s a lot of praise for Zion, for Jerusalem, and it grows over the centuries as the nation slowly shifted from an Agrarian base to a more urban life. Even Jesus, who grew up as a carpenter in Nazareth, a city, regularly used agricultural references in his lessons.

By the time you get to the book of Revelation the idea of the city has become quite polarized. The city of Rome (code named Babylon) is reviled as the source of all evil. It serves to contrast with God’s perfect city, the new Jerusalem, brought to Earth from Heaven with the tree of life at the centre. There, God is the only source of light anyone needs and a river flows through the centre of the city.

It’s still an urban image but the vibrant, growing trees keep the people connected to the soil.

I wonder how the people of that age would react to what has happened over the intervening centuries: people living in cities paved from pillar to post and really unaware of where their food comes from. When I started out in ministry I was concerned about urban kids who had no clue about the connection between milk and cows and now I learn that a lot of them have grown up without learning a thing about that reality.

In many ways, it is worse than what they imagined 2000 years ago.

You can understand how they developed the theology we find in the Apocalypse, the Book of Revelation. By the time that was written a full-on persecution of Christians was happening and it appeared that the only solution was for God to step in, overcome the power of the Roman Empire with worse plagues than had been used on Egypt and re-start the world with a New Heaven, a New Earth with all the bad stuff swept away and the people God has rescued living in God’s presence in the New Jerusalem.

They were desperate and they were counting on God to overcome this great evil in the best way they could imagine.

Sadly, this theology has influenced the Christian attitude to the Earth for the hundreds of years that have followed. We have had a sense that everything will be wiped out and then restored by God.

In recent decades we’ve moved away from that understanding, but it has been hard. Biblical Literalists will still insist on this being a prediction of the future. But even for those of us who reject that understanding, the attitude that has been part of this package has never released its hold on us and we can still imagine the “end of the world” and hope for something good to come out the other side.

This didn’t fit the original vision of scripture, like our vision of a renewed earth shared by Isaiah or what was taught by Jesus or what Paul shared with the first churches outside of Judea.

Jesus always talked about the Kingdom of God breaking into the existing world, not wiping it out and replacing it. Paul imagined Jesus arriving in the air like a conquering hero, bringing in God’s reality to the existing world.

The resurrection was always to happen on the earth because humans didn’t belong in heaven. This world was the place for us; why would we want to abandon it?

The good thing our Revelation passage adds to the image is the idea that God dwells with us; that the distinction between Heaven and Earth is removed.

But we would do well to remember that this last book of the bible was written for a desperate people facing horrible persecution. The image of a destroyed planet would be welcomed by those who had suffered so much if they had the promise of a new world.

We live in a reality that isn’t like that. We are coming to terms with the fact that this Earth is the one we’ve got, which fits with the message that is consistent through all the other books of the Bible.

This season of Creation Time is an ideal opportunity to remember that in Genesis God said that Creation was very good; an attitude that was never revoked, and to work towards a renewal of the earth we have, instead of hoping for God to give us a new planet after this one has fallen apart.

We have centuries of misinterpretation to overcome and a lot of bad theology still at work in the 21st century. Our world may look fallen because of the dumb decisions we’ve been making for a long time. But the image of renewal, of restoration, new life, new growth has been a constant message of scripture since before the time of Jesus.

We don’t need a New Earth: the one God created is amazing already. But we do need to work to renew this Earth that is our home, to rediscover the good that God saw in it and to bring it back to vibrant life and health.

May we use this season of Creation Time and that newly renewed love of gardening that so many have discovered because of the pandemic to inspire us to work for a renewed Earth with fresh energy.

Amen.

From Death to Life

As we are all staying at home during COVID-19, 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.

— (Rev) Andrew Jensen

From Death to Life

Scriptures:

Exodus 12:1-14

Romans 13:8-14

A modern Passover meal doesn’t copy the outline in our lesson from Exodus today. People don’t eat in their travelling clothes, standing and gulping their food, and there’s certainly no blood smeared on doorposts or lintels.

The modern celebration was re-imagined centuries ago and incorporated a Greek meal tradition where people could gather, recline, and contemplate

the meaning and significance of the meal itself. There were a variety of symbols brought into the celebration to remind every one of significant parts of the holiday and its importance.

What we see in our scripture lesson is stark: it is bloody, literally. It is urgent, it is hurried, rushed. It brings to mind exactly what was going on: people fleeing from an abusive situation, leaving behind everything they couldn’t carry, to dash out the door to safety; even the questionable safety of an unknown journey through dangerous circumstances. You’ve got to run because you don’t know if you’ll ever get the chance again.

It took ten plagues to beat the king of Egypt into submission; to decide to let God’s people go. And the passing over of the angel of death was the way to spare the Hebrews the effects of the final plague; the universal killing of the first-born.

This is a horror: people and animals dying. I know of people who think we should abandon the Hebrew scriptures because of stories like this that depict God being so callous with innocent life.

But the symbolism that we find here is important. If you are really worried about God doing this, it might comfort you to know that most scholars question whether this literally happened.

The oldest book of the Bible, Deuteronomy, mentions the “diseases of Egypt” as something the Israelites suffered; not as plagues. Psalms 78 and 105 list only 7 or 8 plagues, in differing orders.

Seven is a divine number, eight is nothing special and 10, the final number, is symbolic of human order. So the final version, in Exodus, makes it symbolically clear that this is an attack on the government of Egypt.

The king and his people didn’t like having the Hebrews living there. They fussed about them taking over with their high birth rate. They confined them to certain neighbourhoods and made them do the jobs no Egyptian wanted. But they couldn’t afford to have them leave, either. There was indeed a pharaoh of that day who had an ambitious infrastructure program, building a new city and a new temple for a new monotheistic religion, to overcome the power of the Egyptian priests. And the Hebrews were the forced labour.

It’s not hard to recognize the demagoguery at work here. The political agendas and the fear-mongering, the excuses to abuse ethnically different people and squeeze them dry.

We should also recognize the reality of the refugees here, fleeing from a country where their lives are intolerable into the unknown, in hopes they will be able to live in freedom.

The only thing missing in the modern context is the word “slavery,” and that’s because we claim we’ve eliminated it instead of creating economic systems that do exactly the same thing.

There’s more symbolism in this lesson: killing the first-born was an attack on the very vitality of Egypt itself. First born children, especially boys, were often understood to possess an extra portion of the vitality, the life-force, of the parents. They were rewarded with a double inheritance in Israel and had similar benefits in many middle-Eastern cultures. There’s a good chance that many of the men in charge (since it was typically men put in charge then) of the government, the priesthood, the army itself were first-born, given the chance since childhood to boss around their siblings.

This shouldn’t surprise us: we still produce articles and books talking about the effects of birth-order on a child’s development. It’s an idea that is deeply ingrained in us. So imagine the psychological effect of an entire nation waking up and finding their first-born children dead, and their neighbours’ and the next street over and the next village.

Sure! Let the slaves go! Keeping them has just cost us our favourite children. Good riddance!

This whole lesson is a reminder of how messy real life is, how something as profound as freeing a whole nation can be a blood-stained process.

The Hebrews smeared blood on the door posts and the lintel, they ate their food while standing, ready to flee. And when the word came, out the door they went, carrying all they could, fleeing the land of oppression, and now the land of death, to seek out a risky new life where they would be free.

What’s incredible is that after a time, before they could get too far on foot, Pharaoh realized how much labour he was losing and sent his army out to capture them again. Despite this deadly plague, this epidemic of deaths of eldest children, economics won out in the mind of the King. No change in human nature there.

Our history of freeing enslaved people in more modern times still has echoes of the injustices we’ve allowed to continue. Even while proclaiming how progressive we are, there’d be no energy for Black Lives Matter protests if we really had learned the lesson Pharaoh failed to learn, which is to stop trying to squeeze people dry while explaining how generous we are to them.

Slavery was built on death and blood; the more subtle replacements we have developed are too; as we are reminded whenever we hear of people dying in overcrowded clothing sweat-shops with inadequate exits; or we are reminded that our immigrant population faces a higher rate of COVID infection because they end up doing the front-line care jobs in extra risky settings.

When we live lives as protected and prosperous as we have here since the second world war, we have the luxury of forgetting the blood, the cost. We can try not to see that some of our prosperity still comes with oppression of people, often (but not always) far away.

And our image of a loving, life-giving God will be hollow if we don’t share that path from death to life with everyone.

I’ve never been enslaved. I’ve never had to flee an abusive situation with just the clothes on my back, neither at home nor in my homeland. Growing up in Canada has been wonderful. I can’t relate to this out of my own experience but the image of this meal as narrated in Exodus gives me a glimpse of what it must have been like, and what it is still like, for people who are trapped, and bled dry; who live in our modern situations of blood and death.

This passage reminds us of what people have known for centuries: that things like freedom, respect, dignity and even the chance to live can demand a cost, a high cost.

In this passage, God is calling us to never forget. And if we take this to heart then we will work to ensure that we never become the oppressors; and that we work to lift people out of our modern versions of slavery.

Amen.