Meaning and Intent

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

Meaning and Intent

Scriptures:

Exodus 3:1-15

Romans 12:9-21

The burning bush episode is wonderful. It is so rich with information I could preach on it for weeks. I could follow up on Jethro, the Priest of Midian. What kind of priest? Not Hebrew, but Midianite! So the God of Israel was working through the priest of another religion!

At the core of this passage, as I’ve said before, is the revelation of God’s name:

God’s name is NOT Jehovah. That came about as a mistaken transliteration from the Hebrew. The original pronunciation has been lost for centuries, as the Jewish people avoided taking God’s name in vain by never uttering it out loud.

God’s name probably sounds like Yahweh and is related to the Hebrew verb for being. God’s name means “I Am who I Am” and also means “I Will Be who I Will Be.” That’s a linguistic feature of Hebrew: the verb form can mean both depending on the context, and in this context, either is possible. In fact, both are likely.

God is claiming to be the ground of being, to borrow a phrase from theologian Paul Tillich: the source and definition of existence itself. Ironic, since Tillich meant this as a definition of God as an impersonal force, while this passage is full of personality. God is also claiming the future and the option of self-redefinition. In other words, God claims the freedom to change.

That is uncomfortable for a lot of traditional theologians; the idea of God changing is scary. We even write into our hymns that God is “unchanging”.

What we really want out of that is the promise that God is reliable and we struggle with the idea that God is perfect. So what kind of change could be possible? How can you improve on perfection?

This just proves that our minds can’t encompass perfection, so we want to limit God to make ourselves feel better.

We were warned in other passages of the Bible: in Isaiah 43 God says “See, I am doing a new thing”. I hear a tone of delight in those words. God is creative, and delights in doing new things.

But for all the possible deep meanings we could dig out of God’s name as revealed at the Burning Bush, “meaning” is not the core of the event. This is all about God doing something!

God had heard the cry of the oppressed people of Israel and intended to save them. God planned to reach into the world, to intervene in history and rescue a nation from slavery.

That should tell us more about God than any abstract debates about the meaning of God’s name. God’s name is about “being,” yes, but God is about “doing”.

God’s name is revealed as a detail in the plans to save Israel. A significant detail, of course, and one that deserves the centuries of study it has received. But we are told God’s name in the context of God’s work.

Everything that follows the Burning Bush is remarkable: persuading Moses to actually be a prophet and a leader; sending him and his brother Aaron to confront Pharaoh; the plagues; the very first Passover;

the flight from Egypt through the Red Sea; the giving of the law on Mt. Sinai; the failed attempt to enter the promised land; 40 years in the wilderness; and ultimately the (mostly) successful invasion of Canaan.

Two generations of the people of Israel seeing God at work; not just “being,” not remote or abstract but right there: a column of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night; the clouds and mysterious lights on the mountaintop where Moses came out with the tablets, his face glowing with divine light; the manna in the wilderness . . .

This is no passive God! All this freaky, miraculous stuff shows us a God who wants to be active.

We can certainly debate the reality of particular events and miracles; scholars have done a lot of this in the past century or so. Questions have been raised about the Red Sea vs. the Reed Sea. I don’t propose to get into that right now because it’s not the point of the lesson.

God called Moses over to the Burning Bush because God intended to act and wanted to involve this man who didn’t want to be a leader; who was wanted for murder back in Egypt after he killed an Egyptian slave driver who was beating a fellow Hebrew.

Moses wasn’t an obvious choice to speak on God’s behalf; he even had a speech impediment and was prepared to argue with God to get out of this job.

Still today God wants to act and God is able to see possibilities in us that we can’t imagine in ourselves. Revealing the name of God was a fascinating digression but even with Moses, God didn’t allow it to become a topic: God immediately brought Moses back to the job at hand.

The situation facing us today is obviously different. We’re not enslaved but we may feel as helpless as the Hebrews did. We should remember that God has never stopped being an active God. We may not be faced with pillars of cloud and fire, or divided seas or other obvious miracles, but we do know what it is like when God chooses to work through reluctant people to make things change.

Because that has never stopped happening.

Somehow, God’s people are reluctant time after time. We never feel good enough; we don’t feel like we have the skills, or we have an impediment in life that stops us. And if we don’t have those issues then we can think up some excuses or demand more information before we proceed: “just one more thing, God, what was your name again? And what does that mean? Very interesting. I’ll have to contemplate that for awhile. . .”

God wants to do something now, to help us. We don’t know what it is. Maybe we can’t even imagine anything working. We certainly don’t feel very prepared and it’s so tempting to distract ourselves with fascinating discussions of theory . . .

So let’s resolve, in this challenging time, to be willing to respond to God’s call without demanding all the answers to our questions; without feeling like we know what we’re doing; without feeling like we’re good enough.

Let’s be willing to take that step of faith into the future and allow God to do things through us that may surprise us.

Let’s try to calm our fears so that we can work beyond all the ways we have to say “no”, and find the place where we can say “yes” to God’s leading. And if we can’t say “yes, I can do that” we can at least say “yes, I’m willing to try.”

God led the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt through 40 years in the wilderness, through all kinds of dangers and difficulties. I believe that we can trust God to lead us through this time and out into a future where God will do new things through us.

Amen.

Adrift and Helpless

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

Adrift and Helpless

Scripture: Exodus 8:1-2:10

My sermon title this week is Adrift and Helpless. I chose it partly because it’s the way a lot of people are feeling these days, during the pandemic. We are cut off from familiar things and people. We feel alone, isolated, like we’ve lost control over our lives.

But the main reason I chose it is because of the baby Moses. What could be more adrift and helpless than an infant floating in a wicker basket in the Nile?

Think about all that could go wrong:

His basket could spring a leak – wicker isn’t the most naturally watertight building material and even pitch can miss some gaps.

Then there are the crocodiles – probably the princess’ guards had already checked out that stretch of the riverbank, but their job was to protect her, not some random baby the king had ordered thrown into the river. They might even feel some duty to carry out the king’s orders and make sure the baby drowned, although no soldier or guard would relish that kind of duty.

And there’s Moses himself. He was three months old, just old enough that he couldn’t be hidden anymore. Why? Because a baby that age is getting bigger and more active. What if he simply moved too much and tipped the basket over? He’d drown before anyone could get to him, even his watchful sister on the bank.

How desperate do you have to be to set your child adrift this way, surrounded by so much danger?

Yes, this was risky. Moses was so much more adrift and helpless than we are. He was caught between certain death and a risky ride in a basket in the Nile. He was too young to realize his precarious position, but not too young to feel alone. We don’t know how long his journey was but he would certainly notice that there were no familiar faces around him, no loving arms to hold him.

Of course, he was not totally alone. His sister was indeed watching from the shore. There wouldn’t be much she could do about a crocodile, but if he started to sink, she could have fished him out and if he flipped she sure would have tried to rescue him in time. She watched over him as best she could.

And look how it turned out. Pharaoh’s daughter immediately figured out that this was a Hebrew child and she took pity on him. She wasn’t dumb; she knew she was protecting this baby in defiance of her father and she was certainly experienced enough in palace intrigues to know that when a floating Hebrew baby shows up and a little Hebrew girl is mysteriously and conveniently right there, that this is no accident: it’s a plot.

She joins this very feminine conspiracy without needing to be told about it. She even provides wages for Moses’ own mother to raise him at home until he’s old enough to join her at the palace as her adopted son.

Numerically, this wasn’t a big deal. One baby saved out of a generational slaughter is hardly a solution to the crisis, but these women did what they could, which was to save one child.

And look what God was able to do with that child!

The Hebrew scriptures are very clear in their historical understanding that women were rarely in power. They had to find ways to work outside the official system to resist abuses of power.

This story gives us multiple examples:

Even before Moses’ family and Pharaoh’s daughter got involved we see the Hebrew midwives providing passive resistance. They wouldn’t obey Pharaoh’s orders, but they couldn’t defy him openly or they’d be killed. So they got creative and cooked up a story about Hebrew women giving birth remarkably quickly out in the fields.

Pharaoh probably got really squirmy when he heard that sort of detail and didn’t want to ask about those “women’s issues.” He might have suspected something, but he was reluctant to push it.

In other scriptures we have example after example of women using unconventional means to create justice where justice was denied, or to protect people who were otherwise helpless (sometimes that was themselves).

They broke small rules to protect big principles, while the men in power got hung up on the small rules and often missed the very important issues that were really at the heart of the matter.

Matthew saw this as important enough that he put several of those women into his Genealogy for Jesus’ family tree. And he included last week’s story about the woman nagging Jesus and his disciples into recognizing the justice of providing healing across barriers of creed, nationality and race.

Matthew didn’t include any of the women from today’s story in that list, but he didn’t have to. This event was so well known to his readers, so foundational to the story of the nation of Israel that no one could forget it.

These Hebrew and Egyptian women got together to defy a king who was prepared to drown babies; to enact a policy of genocide, effectively because he planned that the Hebrew women, with no Hebrew men, would be taken by the Egyptian men and would be assimilated. Their language and society would be destroyed and the perceived threat to his land would be eliminated.

This is an age-old injustice; one we still see rearing its ugly head today. We can learn something from the fact that this founding nation of our faith got its freedom through a man saved by a clever conspiracy of women, working underground to thwart the king.

We are reminded over and over in the Hebrew scriptures that as important as The Law is, laws themselves can be vehicles of injustice:

so we have to be prepared to work around them, cleverly, carefully, especially when we face risks; to find creative ways to do what God has shown us to be right.

And what is the message we get when we feel like little Moses: adrift and helpless? It is that we are not really alone no matter how it may seem.

And we can remember that God has ways to change a situation that we can’t even imagine and that can involve us, if we are open to God’s guidance and prompting. Little faithful actions, risks taken just to save one person can have unexpected outcomes as God works in the background of our lives.

Moses never could have imagined becoming a leader to his people; he even resisted it, but in the end he saw the wisdom of God’s plan and went along with it.

He had help every step of the way; he couldn’t have done it alone. With that help, he became a leader, remembered and revered down through the centuries in three world religions. Not a bad outcome for someone who started off adrift and helpless.

I wonder what God has in store for us? What small acts of kindness, acts of justice we can do, to make a difference, even if only for one person?

I wonder how all that will turn out? Let’s keep our minds and hearts open to find out.

Amen.

Challenging Love with Justice

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

Challenging Love with Justice

Scriptures: Matthew 15:21-28

Our reading from Matthew today is challenging. It looks like Jesus is behaving badly, out of character: the gospels typically portray him as open and welcoming.

Mark’s gospel calls this woman Syro-Phonecian; Matthew calls her Canaanite. Either way, we know she is not Jewish; not “one of the lost sheep of Israel”, as Jesus puts it.

Essentially we see Jesus and his disciples on vacation. They have left Galilee, and gone into Syria near Tyre and Sidon, on the Mediterranean coast. It wasn’t a Jewish area, so it’s surprising that this woman had heard of Jesus and knew he was a healer.

Mark tells us this happened in a house, where Jesus was hiding from the crowds. It sounds like he is exhausted, and wants a break.

Matthew tells us it happened in the street where the woman kept shouting at Jesus and the disciples, drawing unwanted attention.

It’s not hard to sympathize with Jesus: it is clear from the gospels that he was overworked. Was it too much to ask for a bit of a break?

Jesus’ message has been a consistent one: God is love; God welcomes outcasts; God helps the helpless. In Matthew’s gospel we have the Sermon on the Mount, which summarizes this really well.

At the same time it is clear that Jesus ministered pretty exclusively in Israel. Matthew has already shown us two exceptions: the Centurion with the dying slave boy was the second, but he was stationed in Israel.

The first was the Gerasene demoniac. Jesus and his disciples had left Israel briefly for a break. Jesus was confronted by the possessed man

and Jesus cast his demons out into the nearby herd of pigs (proof that he wasn’t in a Jewish area at all!)

So when this woman shows up, Matthew has already shown us two occasions where Jesus has healed non-Jews; which makes this event even more striking.

It’s almost like Jesus is exasperated: “Leave me alone! This isn’t in my job description! Can’t I get a break anywhere?”

This lesson is a challenge to people who embrace the idea of Jesus as flawless. His treatment of the woman seems cold and harsh: first he ignores her and lets his underlings handle her, something we recognize and dislike in this government town. Then he describes her in very disrespectful language: dogs get no respect in the Middle East.

In Mark’s version, he calls her a dog to her face. In Matthew’s version, Jesus ignores her and says it to the disciples instead. For someone who preaches love and acceptance, this is stunningly disrespectful.

The people who want to see Jesus as flawless have argued that this is all a test; he is making the woman prove her faith before he heals her daughter.

She certainly proves her faith; more than that, she demonstrates her love for her daughter. She advocates for her child, calling and shouting, refusing to be ignored, demanding that this healer pay attention, no matter how he feels about her.

For this woman it’s about justice: healing her daughter is important regardless of her race or creed. She is challenging the whole idea of exclusivity; not the idea of a chosen people, necessarily. She doesn’t say the people of Israel don’t have a special status, but she challenges the idea that God will only deal with one nation. She demands justice for her daughter, even if it involves interrupting Jesus’ vacation.

Her passion for justice is so clear that a 3rd century Christian author declared her name to be Justa and her daughter, Berenice.

I like to think of Jesus in very human terms: I don’t expect him to be flawless, so I favour the interpretation given by some scholars in the late 20th century that this event was a challenge to Jesus’ own attitudes; that he had to re-consider the assumptions he had grown up with; that he had to expand his ministry because of the challenge of this remarkable woman.

It’s hard for us to face our own prejudices, especially if we’ve heard them since birth. We may just assume that that’s the way life works, until someone demands our attention and makes us look at it from another perspective.

Jesus was impressed by this woman’s faith, maybe even surprised by her tenacity and her conviction that the God of Israel would help her, a Canaanite woman.

Jesus never did expand his personal ministry into other regions. It wasn’t long after this meeting that he went to Jerusalem and was crucified.

But it is clear that the early church figured out that their calling was to look beyond the chosen people of Israel and include everyone in their ministry.

That was hard. It still is! We have a built-in prejudice for familiar people and situations and a natural distrust, maybe even fear, of what we don’t know.

But if we believe in that message of God’s love and care, then we cannot ignore the call of God’s justice which says that God’s love isn’t reserved for just a few, but must be shared.

I like the idea that Jesus could be challenged this way and learn a lesson from this woman. It’s an example to us of the need to listen to the marginal and unexpected voices in our lives: the people we may not want to know, but who have something to teach us.

It is also important to learn from this woman herself: she didn’t permit the bureaucracy to shut her out. She refused to be meek, or polite. She wasn’t disrespectful, but she was loud. She demanded to be heard and she wasn’t prepared to give up until her daughter had a chance at healing.

Her call for justice also came out of love. It’s not unusual for someone to be more courageous in advocating for their children than they ever would be in defending themselves. It’s tempting to call her a momma bear, defending her cub; but the problem with that is it puts what she did into the realm of the feral, the instinctual, the ferocious. Instead, what we should hear is that what she did is totally reasonable and appropriate, and powerful enough to influence Jesus himself. And the shape of the whole church.

So let’s follow the example of Jesus. This woman’s call for justice can influence our ministry of love by challenging us to open our eyes and ears to the people we don’t normally notice. It challenges us to open our hearts to love even those who feel most challenging; to stop before we dismiss out of hand, those insistent demands we don’t understand.

God’s love and justice cannot be separated. May we have the courage to remember this always and to make it real in our lives.

Amen.

Out of the Cave, Out of the Boat

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

Out of the Cave, Out of the Boat

Scriptures:

1 Kings 19:9-18

Matthew 14:22-33

I was delighted when I saw the two primary readings that the lectionary suggested for today.

In the first, we have that familiar story of Elijah, hiding in a cave in fear for his life, terrified that he’s going to be killed by the king. God summons him out of the cave and we see that very familiar story as the prophet faces all these noisy, terrifying, impressive events only to learn that God is not to be found in them: instead he had to learn to listen for God in a still, small voice.

It’s a massive shift in perspective for Elijah, teaching him to look deeper; not to assume that God does things in ways that meet human expectations of power and grandeur.

In Matthew’s gospel we have that familiar lesson of Jesus walking on the water. Peter tries to do the same, and briefly succeeds until he is overwhelmed by the size of the waves and his fear causes him to start sinking.

That story catches the imagination and causes all kinds of hang-ups for people. In the more educated parts of the church we are tempted to dismiss this story as something physically impossible and therefore an addition tacked on by the early church rather than something Jesus actually did. We treat it as a story for the children – a great comic book type of event.

Even outside the church it stimulates the imagination. I remember a news article in the 1970s showing a man wearing a suit, carrying a briefcase, surrounded by cameras and boats walking on the water in oversized Styrofoam shoes that looked really awkward and impractical.

The point is, we don’t take this seriously as adults in a rational age. Too bad, because we can learn a lot of spiritual truth from this lesson.

The two events have parallels: in both cases, the men involved had to get out of their comfort zones to learn anything. Elijah had to get out of the cave in order to experience what God was showing him. Peter had to get out of the boat to discover how it felt to walk on water and then how it felt to start sinking and be rescued.

In both cases, stepping out required courage. Facing the threatening conditions outside was an issue for each of them. In both cases, their vision of what was possible was expanded. Their understanding of the world, of God, was changed profoundly.

But there is a contrast too: Elijah was hiding out of fear. God had to summon Elijah with a clear call or he would have stayed in the cave, trembling. Peter was in a safe place too: in a boat on the water. As someone who fished for a living, this was like home. He wasn’t hiding and Jesus didn’t summon him out of the boat. Peter saw what was possible, got excited, and volunteered. So, Jesus invited him to step out on the water – to take that leap of faith.

I don’t want to over-generalize and use this contrast to distinguish between God’s approach in the Hebrew scriptures versus the new approach Jesus shows in the gospels. That would be too simplistic, too stereotyped.

I’d rather consider this a good example of the way that God can deal with different circumstances, different people and personalities to great effect and accomplish what needs to happen.

This is a good thing to keep in mind right now because our situation during this pandemic has created a lot of Elijahs and Peters.

Some of us are hiding in our safe caves for good reason. Elijah, remember, had a good reason too. He wasn’t being paranoid: people really were out to get him. Caves aren’t the most comfortable of places but they are good shelters and leaving them can be dangerous.

Others of us are like Peter, staying in the boat because it is familiar. Maybe it’s the only option we can imagine: working hard to make headway against the wind, but bursting with enthusiasm to get out to try something new, to test the limits and see what is possible. Maybe even to leap before looking, because the vision of walking on water is compelling and details like the size of the waves can wait for later.

Different personalities, similar circumstances. What does God want us to do?

This week a committee of Knox will be talking about the possibility of re-starting some of our activities: such as gathering for worship, or meetings or groups, or having events like meals. We have already heard from people who want to wait, who are concerned about a second wave of pandemic infections after schools re-open in September.

And we have heard from other people who acknowledge the dangers but who feel strongly about the need to be together, to find a way to let people be less isolated somehow.

To me, this speaks of Elijahs and Peters at Knox; faithful people with different personalities and approaches. Our committee will have to consider how to go forward, taking all our people into consideration. Please keep us in your prayers.

And let me be clear, I see nothing in these scriptures that is a call to be reckless or stupid. God has given us an understanding of this disease and we have things we can do to reduce its spread. The image of stepping over the edge of the boat to walk on water may look like a call to throw all caution to the winds, but it is not. After all, Peter could see what Jesus was doing. He could see it was possible but he just hadn’t yet figured out how it worked.

And let us also consider that both Elijah and Peter were called to step out of their comfort zones: which is a reminder that sometimes our comfort zones can become traps. It’s a reminder that we can’t make progress when we huddle and hide.

The balance to the fear we face as we consider stepping out is the message that is consistent in both stories: we are not alone as we face our situation. Peter had Jesus to lend him a hand, to pull him to safety when things became overwhelming. And Elijah not only learned that God was there, but that thousands of other faithful Israelites were in it together with him.

We can be forced out of our comfort zones in some terrible ways: the current disaster in Beirut, Lebanon, comes to mind as they try to deal with an awful explosion, closed hospitals and destroyed food, while the pandemic rages on.

What a privilege and opportunity we have now to take the time to do it deliberately; to consider what’s best, to examine our options, to use the wisdom that is being shared and updated each week as we make choices about how to move forward.

Whether this feels like the summons to the threatened Elijah or the invitation to an over-exuberant Peter, either way we must step out of our comfort zones if we want to be part of what God is doing.

May God grant us wisdom and courage as we make choices about how to step out.

And may we never forget that as we face the future, God has promised that we are not alone.

Every Living Thing

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

Every Living Thing

Scripture: Isaiah 43:19-21

When I attended the General Council in Wolfville, NS the local worship committee made a point of highlighting Celtic Christianity in our worship services.

For the United church, the link is back through the Presbyterian roots of the church; but Celtic Christianity is much older. It is an ancient form of Christianity that came to the British Isles as the Roman empire chased the Celtic people north and then was separated from most of the European church with the fall of Rome.

A core characteristic of Celtic Christian spirituality is the idea that we can discover truth about God in creation: in the sea and sky, in the rocks and trees, in the plants and animals. The understanding was that since God created the world and declared it good, then much of the nature of God could be found in the fabric of God’s creation.

This idea was not confined to Celtic Christianity. In other parts of Europe, particularly in the Middle Ages, it took some bizarre turns.

The doctrine of signatures, for example, came along in medicine with the idea that God had given clues to the medicinal value of plants in the shape they took. For example, kidney beans would be good medicine for the kidneys. We think it’s pretty simplistic and wrong-headed now but at the time it was cutting-edge scientific theory,

Bestiaries are another good example. Popular medieval books written as an early kind of scientific text would give a description of an animal, artwork, from familiar local animals to exotic foreign animals including some that never existed: like the phoenix, the cockatrice, the griffon and the dragon. With each description there was included some kind of moral lesson often referring to the behaviour of the animal and sometimes to their physical nature, including total nonsense – what they said about weasels should have caused a defamation lawsuit!

The idea was that each of these animals had a moral lesson from God built in, so we could learn to be better Christians. There was such a powerful following that the symbolism connected with the animals is still built into animals on coats of arms – not just ancient ones, but new ones created today!

The Protestant reformation in Britain worked very hard to downplay this understanding, this search for God in nature. Europe was entering a more rational age. It didn’t help that some of the stuff I have described above was so obviously wrong, so completely absurd.

The result has been that our Western World, both the protestant Christian part and the firmly scientific part, have for years held strongly that nature in general and animals in particular, are nothing more than tools for our use and resources for our exploitation.

That is a position that really doesn’t have good support in the roots of either camp. Reformers in the church always pointed to the scriptures as our core of belief and as we have seen in our readings today the idea of nature, of even the wild animals, being connected to God and honouring God is firmly present.

Similarly, Charles Darwin, in the Origin of Species, remarks on the basis of his observations that the differences between humans and other animals are differences more of degree than of type. In other words, we humans share every aspect of what we are with other animals to one degree or another.

It doesn’t matter which source of authority you seek out; the message is the same: we humans are not as set apart as we like to think we are.

We have found animals that use tools, mammals and birds alike. We find a whole range of feelings, of qualities like loyalty and love, and abilities to communicate that require no speech at all. We find social structures and family relationships and indications of intelligence that can be startling and even alien as ants, bugs with a hive structure, farm aphids and milk them every day. This kind of thing has been great fodder for science fiction writers for years.

I am probably preaching to the converted here. People who care for pets already know most of this from personal experience. Our love for our own animals gives us a way to be concerned for other animals that are mistreated, whether they are in homes, in the wild, in factory farms or testing labs or puppy mills, or wherever.

We are already aware that it is human arrogance that lets people behave so badly, that lets people treat living creatures as if they were “things”. And we know that God loves all these creatures and that God hopes we will learn to love them as well.

Of course, none of this is totally simple. We humans can be pretty messed up. We often don’t know how to treat other humans well, let alone other species. And yet we have seen, over and over again through prison programs and drug rehabilitation programs that one of the things that has consistently managed to make real change in people are the programs where participants have to look after animals.

Maybe they are working with farm animals, caring for them every day or maybe they are working with dogs or cats from a shelter, caring for their basic needs and preparing them for a home.

But it works, over and over again. People in these programs have managed to make emotional connections with animals that have helped them care more, understand themselves and others better, become less self-destructive or less anti-social and learn to see the value in themselves and others.

It’s a kind of everyday miracle and it’s a shame we don’t see more of it because this is one of the lessons nature has for us about God.

Maybe we are starting to remember. There is a new term I’ve heard recently: COVID puppies. This refers to pets newly brought into homes to help with the stresses of the pandemic: the loneliness, the isolation. And I hope and pray that in doing this, people are really connecting and loving these animals and not just using them as emotional tools to address a temporary crisis only to be neglected later.

But no matter what motivation brings an animal into human care, situations can grow, and develop and real connection can form.

Animals consistently show us that God can work in unexpected ways, teaching us profound lessons through creatures that we often call inferior.

They remind us that we are connected to the rest of creation in ways that we may not be aware of all the time, but that are so deeply part of us that we can’t help it.

And they remind us that we are not alone, either as individuals or as a species. They remind us that God has given us companions on this journey of life and that we need them.

When we stop and reflect on these truths it seems to me that there are two appropriate responses:

One is to open ourselves up to God’s voice as it comes to us through the animals in our lives and the many voices of God’s creation that surround & touch us. God is busy doing things all around us and it might be a good idea if we paid attention.

The other response is to be thankful; thankful to God for all these relationships and connections we are given and thankful to the animals in our lives for the ways they touch us, teach us, and help us be more profoundly human every day.

Amen.

Go Out

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

Go Out

Scriptures:

Exodus 19:2-8

Matthew 9:35 to 10:23

Some people have called this passage of Matthew the “Little Commission,” in contrast with the Great Commission we looked at last week.

In it, Jesus sent his 12 disciples out into Israel to teach the same message he had been teaching; to do the same healing and transformative work he was doing. Here is where the 12 are first called “Apostles,” which is a word meaning that they were sent out.

There are scholarly voices that question parts of this passage, especially the bits that warn of future persecutions, and ask whether Jesus actually said these things, or whether they were read back into his instructions by a community that had experienced such things.

It’s a fair question, but in the end, not as important as the overall question about whether Jesus did this at all. Did he send his disciples out in pairs to spread his message that God was breaking into the world with a new order, a new Kingdom, as he called it?

Matthew’s gospel, as I’ve pointed out, is the gospel from a Jewish Christian perspective and the focus of this is on sending the disciples out into a familiar setting to the people they knew, speaking a language they knew, sharing a background they understood.

In other words, this would have been a fantastic first step in training leaders in the church: like when a seminary places student ministers

into an actual church. It forces them out of the classroom, with all its theory, and into the real world to deal with real people.

In Jesus’ day there were a lot of messiahs; a lot of people who claimed to be bringing the truth; who promised to restore Israel to its past glory, or at least to kick out the Romans.

And the Romans, or their client kings like Herod and his sons, dealt with them following a long-established Roman policy: “cut off the head and the serpent will die”. It generally worked.

Most of these leaders were pretty charismatic and powerful speakers: persuasive leaders who could not be replaced with any success.

Look at what happened when John the Baptist was beheaded by the younger Herod. His disciples scattered; some followed Jesus, others went elsewhere, but his movement died. That was usually what happened.

But not so with Christianity. That’s because Jesus really believed what he taught. He expected the last to take their place at the front and so he trained these uneducated labourers, these outcast tax-collectors, these radical zealots who wanted to blow up the world order and die in glorious battle against impossible odds. He took them and trained them to go out, to stand up and be heard, to teach, heal, help, and bless in exactly the way his message suggested: with the last stepping up to be leaders, to make a difference.

In this passage we get a glimpse of how it worked. He taught them intensively. They lived together, he told them parables and invited them to understand deeply. And then he sent them out in pairs to try it for themselves.

Today we would call this succession planning. Jesus didn’t let his ego get in the way, so when he wasn’t there to personally lead the church anymore, his students were able to step up and apply what he taught them to keep things going: indeed, to spread it farther and wider than anyone ever expected.

There are some important elements to this that we can’t ignore:

First, the disciples were sent out in pairs. They never had to be alone; they had support in this scary job. And they also had someone who was there for accountability if they went too far off message. The other person would balance that.

This is a very effective model. That’s why the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons still use it today and why they are able to grow as churches. Even when the logic of their message is challenging to so many people, their blend of a supportive community and a focused message is really compelling.

Another element is the fact of the backgrounds of the people sent out. They were not the established leaders of the society that produced them. They were from the edges: Jesus took them and shaped them so they were immersed in his message and then he taught them to lead.

It was quite the experience when they came back. We are told that they were positively giddy: “It worked! It worked!” was their report.

Obviously they had gone out with fear and trepidation and they had been very well received.

Luke’s gospel tells us he did it again, sending 70 people out that time with much the same results. There’s lots of symbolism in the numbers we see here, of course:

12 being related to the 12 tribes of Israel;

70 being a mix of human and divine, with:

7 being the number of perfection; and

10 symbolizing the works of human hands.

And again, scholars raise the question of whether this literally happened.

I believe that regardless of the specific numbers, this method of training is one Jesus used because he expected his followers to get out and do stuff. Not just to absorb his teachings like sponges, but to make those principles a real part of their lives and to pass them on to others.

To stretch the sponge analogy, we are called to get out and clean things up; something we all can relate to these days.

That’s what it all comes down to for me: we’re all in this Christianity thing together, no matter our background or status, ministers and lay people. We are all equal in God’s eyes and we are all given a voice and an opportunity to make a difference. We are all given a chance to show others that the message of Jesus matters; that in God’s economy we get to share, and help each other and lift each other up so no one is left behind and no one is ever really left alone.

In Jesus time, people were hungry for that message and right now, in this time of enforced isolation they are hungry again.

Let’s take our role seriously. Let’s reach out and touch other lives. It’s something we can all do. And when we try, we too, like those first disciples, may discover to our giddy delight that it works and that we have made a difference for someone.

Amen.

Terrible Choices (Father’s Day, Indigenous Sunday 2020)

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

Terrible Choices

Scripture: Genesis 21:8-21

There is a remarkable irony that our lesson today falls on Father’s Day.

It’s hard to imagine how difficult it must have been for Abraham to choose between his two sons.

It happened this way: God promised Abraham a child with Sarah. She didn’t believe it could happen because she was too old. She gave Abraham her slave girl Hagar to make pregnant so there would be a child that might qualify.

Lo and behold, some time afterwards Sarah became pregnant herself and bore Isaac. And that’s where this lesson starts; when Isaac is weaned and Sarah insists that Hagar and her son be cast out so Sarah’s son will have no competition from an older brother, the son of a slave.

There are so many issues here: Hagar was a slave and so basically Abraham raped her: she had no choice in the matter. She might have been willing, with the chance of her child being the heir of such a powerful man. But there’s no way this would meet modern standards of consensual sex.

The way this is told, the blame for all of this falls on Sarah while Abraham, the Patriarch, the powerful man with many slaves and flocks and herds, simply has to obey whatever his wife tells him to do.

The situation is not unthinkable. In households of the world, many of which still exist today where there is polygamy, the intrigues between the different women are legendary. Their power comes from manipulating the men who have the legal power. Senior wives can be quite nasty to junior wives if they see them as a threat. And of course, slaves have no protection at all. You notice that Abraham was upset about what would happen to his son Ishmael, not about Hagar, the mother.

Wow, talk about playing favourites! There were ancient rules in place: the eldest son would inherit twice what his younger brothers would; and Sarah wanted Isaac to get everything.

Her strategy worked, and then again, it didn’t. Ishmael inherited nothing, although he became father to the nation of the Arabs and is central to the Muslim religion, as the link to Abraham for that faith.

But after Sarah died, Abraham re-married and in the end had a total of seven sons. But she succeeded in getting Isaac the double inheritance, taking the place of Ishmael as the first born.

Wow, what a situation!

Happy Father’s Day: you get to choose which of your children goes out into the desert to die and which one will inherit everything.

Abraham had the authority to make another choice. He could have kept Hagar and Ishmael alive at home, although that would have come at the cost of years of domestic turmoil and strife. We are told that God reassured Abraham that Ishmael would be fine. So Abraham sent them out into the wilderness with only a small supply of bread and water.

It’s not hard to see why Hagar despaired; and it took an angel to open her eyes to see what was right before her: a source of water. That became the way they survived, and even prospered.

Hagar must have been a remarkable woman, to turn a well in the wilderness into a life for her and her son and to get to the place where she could get a wife for him from her homeland of Egypt, far away. Someone should write her story someday.

But Abraham doesn’t have a lot of my sympathy right now. He seems to be too willing to make terrible choices about which of his children should live or die, when he didn’t really have to.

Playing favourites is an ancient human pastime. As parents we know we aren’t supposed to favour one child over another, but we are flawed and biased people. And the kids know that our domestic relationships aren’t perfectly balanced or fair.

But in Abraham, here we have the extreme example – and the consequences are terrifying! Thousands of years after this story was first told, the relationship between Arabs and Jews – the descendant nations of Ishmael and Isaac – remains mired in resentment, distrust and injustice.

This is not only a problem of the past; we can’t even claim it is exclusive to the Middle East. Today isn’t just Father’s Day, it is also the Indigenous Day of Prayer. And as we consider our history, we can see some disturbing Canadian parallels with the Abraham story.

If we consider all people to be God’s children, which is a basic understanding that we Christians have, then we cannot miss the fact that historically we have chosen one child over another.

In Canada, the Indigenous peoples could be called the first-born, like Ishmael, and entitled to a greater inheritance simply by being here first. And the Abrahams, the patriarchs, the people in power have consistently chosen to give the inheritance to the favourite children; whether that’s people, or corporations or someone else who can see a profit, regardless of the demands of justice or God’s sense of what is right and good; without regard to the idea that every person matters.

It’s like we have continued to believe the idea that the children of slaves don’t get to inherit. Even though we don’t believe in slavery anymore, we want to defend the idea that our favourite children get to be the ones who inherit everything.

It is so basic: my bloodline gets my best energy and others get pushed aside. This is a basic human pattern: we prefer the people who most resemble us; the children who remind us of ourselves or what we wish we could be.

God calls us to be better than that. In this story, we could cast God as Abraham at his best: the one who loves all the children equally, and who has to deal with the prejudice that leads one part of the family to oppress the other.

God has always let us make decisions (free will) and we can only imagine how painful some of those decisions have been in the eyes of God; the God who loves all children, all people, equally. Those times where we have failed to be our brother’s keepers, where we have failed to love each other as ourselves, where we have played favourites. And more than that, where we have taken the inheritance of the first child and stolen it for our own.

Historically we’ve been clever, we’ve been cunning, we’ve benefitted from the past actions of others without every looking too closely at what those actions were or what injustices were part of it.

Over recent years we have been considering our past. We are facing up to the way we have inherited lands and resources that were unjustly taken. And more than that, we are facing up to the way that our brothers and sisters were cast into the wilderness of tiny reserves on untenable land; of residential schools and the 60’s scoop and other attempts to erase these peoples from the landscape.

Even though we didn’t make these choices ourselves, we have inherited the benefits.

It is not very comforting to know that these human dramas are ancient. We have been doing these unjust things to each other for millennia, but that doesn’t justify it. The call of this whole story is that we should do better at every level in our personal lives, as we treat our own children fairly and in our dealings with others: the indigenous peoples, and people of colour. We are called to love each person as much as the other, to overcome our very selfish, human inclination to love most what is familiar.

God loves us all equally and that is our calling: our challenge to strive for that level of love, to create that level of justice, that level of welcome, that level of humanity where all belong, and all can share together.

The Great Commission in a Time of Turmoil

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 Great Commission in a Time of Turmoil

Scriptures: 2 Corinthians 13:11-13

Matthew 28:16-20

Today is Trinity Sunday and today’s Lectionary readings are chosen to emphasize the doctrine of the Trinity. Our passage from Matthew’s gospel is almost always part of that emphasis.

I propose to look at this scripture from a different perspective today: from a place of 21st century turmoil, where our social order is being challenged.

This passage is a challenge to the social order of Matthew’s time. We call it the Great Commission, where Jesus sent his disciples out into the world to make people his students and to baptize them, essentially welcoming them into God’s family.

This is a remarkable reading, firstly because it comes in Matthew’s gospel. Matthew is the most Jewish of the evangelists. He is clear that Jesus came to minister to the Hebrew people. And while there is an acknowledgement in this gospel that God works with gentiles, the emphasis on the law and the fulfillment of the law makes it clear that Jesus is working from a solid foundation in the covenant made at the time of Moses, between God and the people of Israel.

Yet here, right at the end of the gospel we have this remarkable instruction to take Jesus’ message and go share it with everyone –

EVERYONE, without hesitation; without bias against background, language, race or any of the other things that divide people.

This is a major change in understanding. Previously, Jewish thought certainly recognized that God worked with other people. There are many examples in the Hebrew scriptures, but it was always sort of incidental; the focus was always on the relationship between God and the chosen people.

Here, the commission is to go out to where these strangers live, meet them in their own circumstances and cultures and share with them the good news that in Jesus, we have a direct connection to our Creator.

In Jesus we have a message of transformation that levels the injustices of the world, turns the first into the last and the last into the first, finds strength in weakness and makes us all into family; sisters and brothers, in defiance of social status; even overcoming powerful barriers like the difference between slaves and their owners.

If only we had taken that commission seriously and understood its implications fully!

When our society was empire building, Christian missionaries went out to all the nations, yes. But the message included a lot of extra baggage. Particularly: that there was a world order that had to be respected with those on the top staying firmly there and those from “uncivilized” cultures staying firmly at the bottom. There was no question that race got tied firmly into this, and at the time this attitude supported the slave trade and the taking of lands either by force, or by unjust trade. The attitudes of this approach echo still today in powerful and destructive ways.

We can’t miss this fact. The protests against racism in the United States this week have been powerful, and have scared many people in power.

Those protests have spilled over into Canada, and we don’t like that.

We would like to say: “That doesn’t apply to us! We’re a kinder, gentler nation! We’re not racist!”

Except that recent events in several parts of Canada underline the fact that black people and indigenous people are very much more at risk from institutional violence than would be most members of this congregation.

It’s real, and we can’t deny it however well-intentioned we are.

The first Christians did a remarkable job of sharing their faith with a broad variety of people. The ancient Ethiopian church is evidence of the way that culture took their message and made it their own. I would encourage you to do some research: it is very different from what we know, and still very Christian.

We have to find a way to re-capture that original attitude; the one that says: “We have something to share,” not: “We know best, let me tell you what to do.”

And if we can re-capture that attitude, we will discover that we are working with a tainted environment. There is a history, and a lot of baggage to overcome. Modern jargon calls this institutional racism and colonialism.

Those words are accurate as far as they go, but they should also be reminders to us of what happens when we try to be Christian using short cuts; where we tie our message to the powers that be; whether that be Constantine and the Roman Empire or the British Empire or other historical powers.

That includes the self-serving leaders of the world today who would tie religion to patriotism and use the Bible as an excuse to use violence to keep the first in first place and suppress the last, or even kill them.

What a breathtaking perversion of the message of Jesus!

None of this is simple. And when violence erupts at a protest, we who are comfortable lose our sympathy really quickly, without acknowledging the violence that has been going on all along.

Yes, there are groups that try to take advantage of legitimate, peaceful protests to do nasty things. But we have to be careful that we do not hold our oppressed people to a higher standard than we hold ourselves or our structures. When we do, we are failing again in our Great Commission. We are not going out to where others are; we are insisting they come to us; that they meet our demands before we will share our good news of welcome, freedom, and reconciliation with God. Such demands are NOT our calling.

In a few minutes, we will be joining together in Communion: “the Family Feast of the People of God.” This sacrament reminds us of our connection across time and space with all other followers of Christ, regardless of who they are and where they come from. It reminds us, indeed, of our shared connection with Jesus himself and through Jesus, with our Creator.

As we approach the table, let us consider how welcome we really consider other people. Consider what barriers we put up without even thinking about it. And let us also consider how we can tear down these barriers:

  • the ones in our hearts and minds;
  • the ones in our social structures and powerful institutions;

all the barriers that separate us from each other, and put stumbling blocks on the path to God

We have stumbled enough. And we have contributed to enough stumbling in others that it’s high time we sorted this out and worked to really live out our Great Commission.

Only when we do that will our communion approach that intended full fellowship that Jesus proclaimed for ALL of us.

Amen.

Passion for God

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

Passion for God

Scriptures: Numbers 11:24-30

1 Corinthians 12:3-13

The day of Pentecost is sometimes called the birthday of the church. It’s when we, the church, stopped hanging around in Jerusalem and became able to go beyond our comfortable boundaries to encounter the world.

To celebrate this, we generally read the Acts version of the event, complete with blowing wind and tongues of flame. Not to mention different languages being spoken by people who didn’t know them.

But that certainly wasn’t the first time God’s Spirit burst into the world in several people at once. In fact, it wasn’t even the biggest time.

Our lesson from Numbers shows an ancient precursor when the 70 elders of Israel were (mostly) on the mountain, and they began to prophesy: a sure sign that the Spirit of God had inspired them.

The potential trouble for the two men who stayed in camp was brushed aside by Moses, who said that we should wish that everyone would be touched this way.

The message of Pentecost is that everyone in the church has been inspired by God’s Spirit. No one is left out.

That’s an important part of Paul’s message to the church at Corinth: that people shouldn’t feel left out. Because there are many gifts of the Spirit and we each have one: each gift is unique.

The list of gifts Paul makes isn’t exhaustive, but it makes a deliberate point: that we are all linked by the same Spirit and that Spirit makes us into the Body of Christ, with each part having a different job.

That vision of our connected nature through God’s Spirit is important to the United Church. Not just now, as we deal with COVID-19, but right from our earliest days we have understood that we are all touched by God’s Spirit.

We take this inspiration from John Wesley, founder of Methodism, a great opponent of slavery who found that simply referring to scripture wasn’t enough for his fight. Slavery is all through the Bible; not always rejected, either.

Wesley was clear that slavery was appalling, so something beyond scripture alone was needed. So, he developed a theology of four pillars for faith decisions.

One is scripture itself, another is tradition, which must be re-examined continually, a third is reason, which must be informed by the Holy Spirit, and the fourth pillar is our own experience as people of faith.

Functionally, Wesley saw this working when people gathered together to wrestle with a problem: in the gathering & sharing, he encouraged people of faith particularly to listen to the voices from the margins; the people on the edges of life, with the greatest challenges. And some of the Holy Spirit’s most important work in this process is to let the voices of the marginalized inspire the discussions, the debates, the reasoning of the church, so that the decisions we make really are led by God.

That’s why absentee ballots are never allowed in church meetings: such a thing means our minds are made up ahead of time and we are not open to change; not open to the leading of the Holy Spirit; not open to listening to the voices of others and possibly being moved to change.

These principles work fine for electronic meetings like Zoom, or Skype, or tele-conferences which all give us the chance to do what was always intended: to listen, to participate with each other and to be open to the Spirit’s moving.

But there are limitations, especially when people have no access to these high-tech connections, and I would invite you to wonder what the voices from the margins would say as we figure out how to be the church during this pandemic.

What are the challenges for people with autism, whose schedules have been terribly disrupted and who can’t return to the order that comforts them?

What about the people who simply cannot use technology to connect, to place orders, to avoid being alone?

What about the people with mental health issues? COVID restrictions feel like imprisonment to many people and we all have extra stress and new worries. But what about the people who feel like that all the time and are now being pushed even further?

We heard some of the stories earlier in the pandemic, as journalists interviewed single parents stuck in tiny apartments with multiple children & no parks or outdoor spaces to visit. One comedian in Vancouver even quipped that there’s a new way to classify Canadian “haves” and “have-nots”: those who have a back yard, and those who do not.

We know the challenges of poverty are always harder when something like this comes along and it’s truly dreadful for those who are homeless. But that’s not the only reality. Statistics show us that immigrant populations and people of colour are being infected at higher rates, often because the jobs they have put them at higher risk.

Some voices are finally getting heard after too much silence. Sadly, in some cases it is taking the army working in long-term-care homes to get the word out. It’s not part of our traditional thinking to consider the Holy Spirit working through the army, but there’s the evidence, right there, and one of the reasons that our traditions need re-examining.

But the Holy Spirit isn’t just an amplifier of marginalized voices. God’s Spirit is a live wire, a powerful connector linking us to our creator and each other.

And when we hear these marginal voices, we’re not supposed to shake our heads and remark on how bad things are for those poor folks. We are supposed to be inspired to work for change, we are supposed to become passionate: passionate for God’s work in God’s world; passionate for God’s justice becoming real; passionate for living in a way that reflects God’s values.

As we care for each other and as we find creative ways to help the people who have the most challenges, theirs are the voices we hear, if we really listen and if we let the Spirit move us.

We are called to do this together: connecting with others, calling or writing or Zooming as needed because God never intended for us to be alone, isolated in our faith. We are at our most faithful when we can put our heads together and consider what the scriptures say, what we’ve done before, what human experience is calling for and how we can figure out a good way forward. And it is the Holy Spirit that ties all this together.

I will confess that this is a lesson we all need to re-learn regularly. Because of my own background, I am cautious of the approaches Evangelical churches take. But there was an open letter in May 30th’s Ottawa Citizen from a group of Christian leaders in Ottawa, a group that is dominated by Evangelicals. It’s a great letter: very encouraging and practical, and it leads people to a web site listing churches who offer online services and study groups.

I’ve asked them how we can add Knox to this list. The United Church is a large church and sometimes we can feel self-sufficient, become a bit insular. We can navel-gaze a bit too much and lose track of other perspectives that may challenge us, but may also bring fresh ideas that are well worth considering.

That’s why Paul describes us as the Body of Christ: we fill in each other’s gaps. No one of us has all the gifts the church needs, but together we have gifts in abundance.

And if we are the Body of Christ then the Holy Spirit is our nervous system, connecting us with energy, with inspiration; coordinating us so we can work together and accomplish so much more than we ever could apart.

Amen.

Looking Up

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

Looking Up

Scripture: Acts 1:1-11

Ascension Sunday has been the cause of many snide remarks about Christian faith. The idea of Jesus literally going up to heaven has been mocked with the suggestion that, depending on his speed, he would only be nearing the edges of the solar system after 2000 years of travel.

Our knowledge of the universe has changed over the centuries. The idea of Heaven as Up and we as Down doesn’t work on a globe, and we know it.

Does that mean we should throw out the story of the Ascension? No. There’s a lot of symbolism built into that story and we should read it with some understanding:

First we are told that Jesus was around for 40 days before ascending. As always in the Bible, 40 is a mystic number: like the 40 days and 40 nights of temptation, the 40 years Israel wandered in the wilderness, the 40 days and nights of rain for Noah’s flood; and Moses staying on the mountain top for 40 days to receive the law.

Forty represents an uncertain large number, like “umpteen”, but more than that. It combines the very human number 10 (consider your fingers) with 4, a divine number associated with the four-letter name of God in Hebrew (in English represented as JHWH) and all kinds of other associations where God interacts with humans. 40 is a number where God meets people

That makes it distinct from three or seven: holy numbers that are reserved for God or the idea of perfection.

So the message here is that Jesus was on Earth, bringing God to humanity for a symbolically important time between his resurrection and his departure, when he left to join God with the promise that he’d come again.

A second part of the message is that Jesus went to be with God for our benefit. God is divine: so very different from us. We can’t help but wonder how an infinite and all-powerful God can really relate to a bunch of intelligent animals trying to run the world.

If our personal experience tells us anything, even other humans who get into high places have a hard time relating to ordinary folk. So it’s natural to worry about God being close, being really connected.

But Jesus? Born in a stable? Working as a carpenter? Called illegitimate by the people of his hometown? Pushed around by the Roman oppressors?

Oh yes, Jesus can relate to the poorest, the most desperate, the weakest and the saddest.

And that’s the message. With Jesus at God’s right hand, we don’t have to worry about being left behind or ignored or falling through the cracks because we’re unimportant. Jesus brings into the equation the very human experience that makes God’s love something we can trust.

For myself, I don’t believe that God needed that. An all powerful and all wise God could take that infinite love that Jesus proclaimed and make it work for anyone. But we need the reassurance. The idea of Jesus there at God’s side reassures us that our prayers will be heard and that God’s love won’t overlook us.

The third lesson here is what happens at the end, where everyone is standing, looking up to where Jesus has vanished into the clouds. Kind of like waiting around until someone announces that Elvis has left the building, ’cause we’re hoping for another glimpse.

And the men who show up say: Why are you standing around, looking up?

Does this sound familiar? Isn’t this just like the empty tomb where the angels have to prompt the disciples to stop standing around and staring – but to get back to living?

That’s a real human tendency, isn’t it? When something amazing happens, we try to hold on to it; we don’t want it to stop. We want to live on in that wonderful moment.

But the message is always the same: Get on with it; don’t be so heavenly-minded; you’re of no Earthly good. In this instance, the people were told that Jesus was with God and that one day he’d return.

And that in the mean time, we have work to do. So rather than standing, looking up, we should look around and see what needs doing.

In those days, “up” clearly represented God and now in the Ascension, Jesus had gone “up” to be with God. Effectively, the disciples were called to trust God and Jesus to be reliable. They were called to trust, and stop staring up, as if there’s a danger of being forgotten.

Sure, it was a radical idea. Not new: it was clearly there already in the Hebrew scriptures. But Jesus gave it new depth and meaning by emphasizing over and over that every one of us matters to God. That God cares for us and makes us able to contribute no matter how limited we fear we might be.

So this Ascension call to the disciples happens: “get on with it; look around instead of up; take what Jesus taught and make it real in this life.”

There’s a lot of meaning tied up in celebrating the Ascension:

We are reminded that Jesus himself was a bridge between God and humanity, connecting us to our creator by his very life.

We are reminded of the fact that God cares for us, not in some remote, chilly, infinitely powerful way, but in a human way that can empathize with the deepest human suffering. And that God cares for every person regardless of their status. And even if we ever doubted that God would care so deeply, we have the reassurance that Jesus will bring that perspective to God.

And finally, we have the message to not worry about that stuff anymore, but to get on with our lives, taking the message of love, of justice, of hope, of all the things Jesus taught, and bring them to the real world in which we live.

Of course, we need to think about God to consider what ultimate meaning life has. But we can’t stop there, with our heads in the clouds.

If we find value in what Jesus has taught then we are to take that and apply it; to spend less time standing still and looking up, and more time looking around to see what good we can do.

Amen.