The Good Shepherd

Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

The Good Shepherd

Scripture: 1 Samuel 17:32-37 John 10:11-18

Our lesson today about Jesus the Good Shepherd is one that people know, even when they haven’t heard it, and at the very least, from all the Victorian artwork inspired by it.

We’re careful with it in the 21st century for a variety of reasons: we’re not agricultural anymore; people in Ottawa have more appreciation for well-trained sheep herding dogs than they have for the life of a traditional shepherd; and Biblical scholarship teaches us to be careful of John’s gospel.

As I mentioned to the last Bible study class, in Lori’s class at the Toronto School of Theology, a famous scholar, German Theologian Heinz Gunther said to Lori’s first year New Testament Class: “And there may even be authentic sayings of Jesus in John’s gospel”, which caused many of her classmates from Knox to walk out of the lecture in protest. That was a fairly Evangelical class.

This perhaps outlines the problem: lessons from John are popular with the Evangelical movement; they are often seen as sentimental and they are challenged by liberal scholars.

The thing is, John’s gospel is more of a theological treatise than a history. A Gospel was never supposed to be history. As we understand it in the 21st century, the point of a gospel is to share good news, develop understanding and to encourage people to be inspired by the teachings of Jesus.

John’s is the last gospel written and it comes from a particular perspective. It is a spiritual statement about who Jesus was and is. It is a statement of faith and it gives us a profound insight into what we call the Johannine community, a branch of early Christianity that was seeking a “higher way”, a path of spiritual enlightenment and truth.

One of the things it does is to draw on human realities to point out divine truths.

The Good Shepherd is a great case in point. Think about the number of stories we hear, here in Ottawa, about people who end up going through the ice trying to save their dogs. The ice has been so bad this past year that we roll our eyes at the foolishness. Isn’t a human life worth more than a dog’s? But some people even die to save their pets. It makes no logical sense.

But emotionally, it makes a lot of sense. You are responsible for this animal. You let it get out too far on thin ice and you have to save this loving creature that trusts you. There may not even be any logic involved: you just do what has to be done and chide yourself afterwards for being stupid; if there is an afterwards.

This lesson about the Good Shepherd is all about a deep personal relationship. The hired hand is rejected outright. He’s in an economic relationship; that stupid sheep isn’t worth the minimum wage he’s getting, he’s not going to chase that wolf, he’ll just fill in the triplicate form for Wolf Depredation losses. But the good shepherd actually cares, has a relationship, and will risk his life to save the sheep.

The first hearers of this probably had David, the Shepherd Boy, in mind when this example was used. The lesson today is David bragging to King Saul about his prowess as a shepherd, in saving lambs from the jaws of lions and bears.

I have a very mixed feeling as I read this. We have no evidence that David was missing any fingers – grabbing the jaw of a lion or bear is very risky behaviour, even when the animal’s mouth is full of struggling lamb – this young man was trying to impress the king with his ability to take on Goliath. He was probably angry because his older brother had just accused him of abandoning the sheep so he could visit the battlefield, where things were more exciting.

So, part of me thinks that David was exaggerating, just a bit. He was obviously good with his sling and his staff, so he could pick on the predators from a safer distance, but I also recognize that someone small in size can be quite intimidating when outraged and a lion or bear might very well back off if David came at him with enough fury, some well thrown stones and a big stick. A lamb dinner isn’t worth a broken nose.

And of course, David eventually proved himself to be a capable warrior and a good general. He was declared to be beloved of God, despite all his faults, and Jesus was called the Son of David on Palm Sunday during the triumphal entry, not only with the aim of claiming royalty but also with the aim of attaching some of those other attributes: David, who was so close to God, who knew the heart of God so well as to write most of the Psalms and Jesus, who was even closer to God according to John.

And in that way, we know that John agrees with the other gospels. Jesus claimed a very close, loving relationship with God, the creator. He wasn’t being exclusive about it in the other three gospels, the way he seems to be in John’s, but he was indeed claiming that God loves us.

That was as radical a statement in the first Century as it is in the 21st century.

In those days, the Pagans believed in many gods, most of whom ignored humans most of the time, or treated them like toys when they noticed. Getting the attention of a god or goddess was hard – it took expensive sacrifices – and you didn’t always get the result you were praying for.

In the Jewish culture, which firmly believed in only one God, many considered God to be just as distant and uninterested, except to the degree that the Chosen People had a special relationship as a nation which was often expressed as responsibility or even suffering, rather than favour, while others considered God to be alert and attentive but highly judgmental, in constant need of appeasement: an angry God who needed to be satisfied with a strict life and lots of sacrifices.

Today isn’t much different: there aren’t so many Pagans around; there are lots of people who don’t think that God exists at all; and for those who are willing to consider that maybe there is a God, their image could be quite remote and disconnected, or more of an impersonal spiritual force; creative, yes, but not necessarily involved. Like an old girlfriend of mine who imagined God as a chemist who wandered off and left the test tube of life boiling by itself. And of course, there are still many people who see God as judgmental and harsh; they are good at getting publicity.

The image of the Good Shepherd, ready to die for his flock, is still a radical one: it speaks of a loving God, a creator who cares about each of us.

And as much as John’s gospel is theology rather than history, he’s got the measure of Jesus’ message very well: Jesus is telling us that God is not distant or angry; God is loving, and cares for us at least as much as a dog owner willing to go out on the ice to save Fido.

I’ll admit, that’s not as poetic as the image of the Good Shepherd but for Ottawa in 2024 where we have more dogs than sheep, it makes more sense for us and maybe we’ll remember it.

Amen.

“Christ Died for Our Sins”: What does that mean?

Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

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

Ask Andrew: “Christ Died for Our Sins.” What does that mean?

Scriptures: Leviticus 4:13-21 Romans 5:6-11

Original question: “How do I explain to my non-believing neighbour what it means when the church says ‘Christ died for our sins’?”

This isn’t the first Ask Andrew question that came in this year but it fits well into the Easter Season, so I’m taking it on first. Thank you for your willingness to discuss matters of faith with people outside the church!

I’m afraid I’m not going to produce a pithy answer, nothing that’ll fit in a sound bite or go on a t-shirt, because this phrase has been around since the very beginning, while the world around it has changed profoundly.

There are three approaches that are common in churches these days. In more Progressive churches this is a topic that doesn’t get discussed much because it comes with so much theological baggage which is a bit cowardly, I’m sorry to say.

Another approach is in the Roman Catholic church today and others with similar theologies. This expression has become fraught with feelings of guilt. There is an emphasis on the suffering of Jesus and a sense that the crucifixion is all our fault; that every time we do something wrong, we add to the sufferings of Christ. I know one Anglican priest who, cynically, calls this “making Baby Jesus cry”.

This is a widely held understanding that should be confronted because I believe it is a twisting of what it all originally meant.

The third approach tends to happen in Evangelical churches which focus on trying to save souls: “All have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God” and in their theology the death of Jesus on the Cross is the action of grace that we need to personally accept so it can be applied to the debt of sin we owe to God in order to have that debt wiped out.

Both of these theologies assume that God is very rigid, that the laws handed down in the books of Moses are inexorable and that the only way to get right with the perfect Creator is to have someone sinless, someone perfect, intervene for us.

And more to the point, since those laws demanded blood sacrifices, Jesus dying on the cross became the ultimate blood sacrifice, satisfying once and for all the demands of the law.

Our Leviticus reading gives an example of that law and it is particular to the sacrifice of atonement where the whole nation has done something against God, maybe even something unintentional, and the sacrifice was made to lead the people to forgiveness.

That offering was called a Holocaust offering: a burnt offering where the whole animal was consumed by fire; most offerings of animals involved burning the fatty bits with the priests eating the meat.

The thinking behind this was common to the whole Mediterranean. In Pagan places, like Greece and Rome, the idea was that you shared a meal with the gods. The god got the bit that went up in smoke and the people got the rest. This is the “meat offered to idols” that Paul referred to. The Pagans considered this a kind of communion, a divine sharing, and almost all meat meals were eaten as sacrifices so that the divine spark of life in the animal killed was not wasted. Fish and other seafood didn’t count: they didn’t breathe air, so their spark of life wasn’t divine.

The holocaust style of offering, which Pagans also did, was very costly. No humans got to benefit from the meat and it was a way of giving the god in question absolutely everything in the sacrifice. It was a way of demonstrating how serious you were. Jewish sacrifices didn’t believe in eating with God but they did believe in letting the Priests and their families eat most of the meat.

When it came to atonement for sins (those behaviours that broke the relationship with the divine) they took the same approach and offered up every last scrap to God.

Traditional theologies have managed to hold onto that rigid vision of God where God has to be appeased by blood sacrifice and a lot of world cultures have bought into this. My own Heathen ancestors offered a lot of blood sacrifices to Odin and other gods, including sacrificing humans, either slaves or chosen by lot.

But if you really read what Paul and others are saying when they say “Christ died for our sins”, they mean totally the opposite: they are telling us that God doesn’t want this kind of bloody, rigid and judgmental relationship. This is a message of liberation – freedom from that endless cycle of unreachable standards of perfection, of constant guilt and the threat of Hell.

Jesus wasn’t the first one to preach this kind of new relationship. Our call to worship is a small section of Psalm 51 that rejects blood sacrifices in favour of a good relationship between us and God where we acknowledge that our creator has a divine perspective that is worth following.

It bothers me that so many people have taken this message of love and freedom and turned it into a bludgeon which can be used to guilt people into obedience, or terrify people into believing a particular theology.

And our modern culture is more and more open to a very bloody understanding of justice. “Someone must pay for this” is a popular sentiment which goes directly against the message of Christianity. The message of Jesus is not about irresponsibility; obviously our understanding that Jesus died for our sins, or as we express it symbolically in baptism where we die with Christ, and are raised with Christ; none of that is intended to let us be irresponsible.

Jesus was all about us learning to love each other and the motivation of love should be more powerful than any law or set of rules or threat of punishments.

“Christ died for our sins” is an expression that tells us that we are free to love God and each other without a rigid structure of laws that can become a barrier to a real relationship.

That whole social structure of 2000 years ago, in which blood sacrifices were a part of life that everyone took for granted without question, ended as Christianity became dominant. The idea that “Christ died for our sins” was at the core of that transformation and it literally changed the world.

Like I said, that explanation won’t fit on a t-shirt, at least not in a font size that anyone could read politely, but I hope it gives you some words to share with your unbelieving neighbour to make it clear that it’s NOT about guilt; it’s NOT about an altar call to save your soul.

It’s about a relationship with God that breaks us out of the strictures of laws and gives us the freedom to love God and each other as the basis for our life of faith.

Amen.

Sharing Life

Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

Sharing Life

Scriptures: Acts 4:32-34 1 John 1:1-5

Our Acts lesson gives us a fascinating vision of the first reaction of the church to being on its own after the resurrection. Everybody got together, sold their stuff, and made sure that all the followers of Jesus had enough to live on.

It followed the model that Jesus had lived with his disciples. They had travelled around together, sharing everything, living simply, trusting God to provide for them. In those days, some of their major support had come from some women who joined them who had financial resources and paid for their needs.

Now, in Jerusalem, they were a rapidly growing community, and they shared whatever they had. The desire to share equally to supply the needs of the poor and the rich fit very well with Jesus’ teachings about the first being last and the last being first.

You can even mutter about communism or socialism if you wish, but the fatal flaw in this early Christian system is not the sharing but the expectation that Jesus was going to return at any time and provoke a general resurrection and a new Kingdom of God.

In other words, it wasn’t sustainable. It wasn’t expected to have to be. Selling assets and living off the proceeds can only last so long; eventually this kind of planning led to the Apostle Paul having to ask for donations from the churches in Asia Minor for the “Saints at Jerusalem”.

It’s rather sad. As an experiment in living an ideal Christian communal life, we can only wonder how it would have changed over time. In reality, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem about 40 years later and the first Christian community with it.

Many Christian monastic communities have tried to create a sustainable version of this early system, with a lot of extra rules added so that spirituality would be the focus. Frequently this included celibacy and the separation of men and women. But not always: monastic communities in the early Celtic Christian church often contained both men and women who were allowed to be married and have children. When the church of Rome gained power in the British Isles, these were dismantled and re-created with all the celibacy and separation rules in place.

That first Jerusalem community was trying hard and they wanted to live up to the ideals of Jesus; but they were also human

Shortly after this lesson we read about Ananias and Sapphira, a married couple who wanted to look like they were doing the right thing but also wanted to hold on to some of their wealth. They sold a property, gave part of it to the church community and declared that they had given everything. They got in trouble, not for withholding – it was clearly their property and they didn’t have to give it at all – this sharing everything was not a rule; it was an option. People were allowed to keep personal wealth (see? It was not Communism) but if you know the story, you know that next they were struck dead by the Holy Spirit for lying to God.

I’m not going to go into that. A lot of preachers have gotten a lot of mileage out of this story over the centuries and I’m not going to expand on that right now. I don’t think that God needs to strike us down when our own dishonesty has ways of doing that already, whether we are dishonest with ourselves or each other.

The point I want to address is that this is typical church stuff: we have an ideal, a principle that we want to live by, but we don’t want to give up everything. We also don’t want to look like we’re doing less than the others, so we cut corners and in doing so we miss the point of what God is trying to do with us:

  • God wants to transform our way of being;
  • God is not trying to do it with rules or coercion;
  • Everything about what God offers us as a community of faith is voluntary;
  • It only really works if it is voluntary.

It’s not about looking good, or right, or righteous: it is about responding to God’s love with love of our own. It may well involve pushing our boundaries and doing more than we thought we’d ever be comfortable with, but we have to get there by choice or by coming to the understanding that it’s needed.

There were other stumbles on the way. The Jerusalem church tried to organize everything with the 12 disciples in charge of all the sharing. Then, people started complaining because the widows, who were basically the most vulnerable church members, were not being treated equally. The local Jewish widows were getting better fed than the Jewish widows who were from Greek-speaking regions.

The disciples threw up their hands, declared they were overworked and asked the church to elect seven Deacons to help them take care of the needs of the people.

They were inventing something quite new at the time and it was a very human process, with the humans seeking God’s wisdom and inspiration every time they hit a problem.

What it came down to is that the church is about the followers of Jesus trying to find a way forward together. Sharing and helping is at the core of what it means to be the church. These were the very first people to hear the words of Jesus and try to live them out. Their first efforts were all about a shared life together, like the opening words of our United Church New Creed: “We Are Not Alone”. Not only do we live in a universe created and pervaded by God, but we have each other.

And in working out what it means to share life as God’s people we have to make mistakes, and discover new ideas, and figure out which principles and ideals we take literally and which ones need to be developed.

Look at those first lessons the church learned: sharing our resources and challenges is good; expecting the end of the world tomorrow is not: we’re still figuring out that sustainability is important, aren’t we? That seems to be a really tough one to get through our heads.

But those early efforts should still inform and inspire us as we take the teachings of Jesus and make them real today. Some new Christian communities are trying that shared living thing in a 21st century way: intentional communities, most often young people, buying up old houses, apartment buildings or hotels, fixing them up and sharing resources and accommodations as an expression of faith and a practical effort to re-capture the spirit of Jesus’ teachings.

Yes, the affordability of housing is forcing people to consider these options, but the vision is strong: some even predict that this will shape the future of Christianity in our post-Christian culture. Who knows? We have to work out for ourselves what it means to share life as Christians; as people of faith; as followers of Jesus.

That is our task: to discover the way forward and I am hopeful about that because I believe that with all our very human limitations and challenges (and sometimes, perhaps, because of them) we can discover wonderful things within ourselves and each other.

I believe that God’s Spirit is there to guide us, and help us as we go forward together, living our shared life of faith.

Amen.

Looking Ahead and Going Home

Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

Looking Ahead and Going Home

Scriptures: Isaiah 25:6-9 Mark 16:1-8

Two thousand years ago the Gospel was a brand new literary form. It wasn’t a familiar poem or an epic, not a history or a philosophical treatise, nor was it a speech or a report.

The gospel was invented as a way to tell people good news. That’s literally what the word “gospel” means: a way to tell people whatever the gospel writer considered most vital about Jesus; about his work and his teachings, his life and his death. The entire purpose of the work is to challenge people with a new vision for life and to excite them to the possibilities for their own lives.

Mark is the inventor of this form and his gospel is the first of its kind. Matthew and Luke literally copied Mark, often word for word and John copied the idea, although all three shared the understanding that Mark hadn’t said enough.

The end of the gospel is the part that has bothered people the most over the years: the image of the empty tomb; the promise of Jesus to be seen in the future; it’s like ending on a cliff-hanger, albeit a hopeful one. People hated that.

Matthew and Luke fixed it by writing new and improved gospels with lots of stuff about Jesus appearing to people. John changed nearly everything, adding lots about Jesus wandering around after the resurrection. Later people would even tinker with Mark’s gospel itself, inventing two new endings, the longer of which ended up in the old King James version.

So what’s the deal? Why did Mark bring us to the resurrection and refuse to show us the risen Christ?

Well, remember what I said: the purpose of a gospel is to tell people what is most important; to challenge them and to inspire them; Mark is doing exactly that.

He starts with the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. Jesus makes the trip from his home in Galilee to the Jordan river, is baptized, goes into the wilderness for a time and then returns to Galilee to begin his ministry. Mark considered the birth of Jesus to be unimportant.

The vast majority of what Mark then shows us is Jesus going around his home province: healing, helping, teaching, feeding; gathering his disciples and training them; challenging people to understand God in a different way; offering people a vision of a world where our creator doesn’t favour the rich and powerful but actively loves and blesses the poor and the weak.

That is most of the gospel.

As the end of the gospel approaches, we have the journey from Galilee to Jerusalem and then that really intense week in which Jesus arrives with the fanfare of Palm Sunday, gets up the nose of the rich and powerful by clearing the temple and by publicly teaching things that the Roman and Jewish authorities considered subversive. He establishes Communion as a new kind of Passover meal, is betrayed, arrested, denied, given two mock trials and ultimately crucified, killed, and buried.

It is a powerful week, a pivotal week, a defining time in which the new church has its founder snatched away, teeters on the brink of elimination and then is snatched back from that brink by the discovery that Jesus is alive again and is given such inspiration by that discovery that we are still going 2000 years later.

It’s wonderful, it’s exciting but it is still only a week, a short time out of Jesus’ ministry. And that is the point Mark is making. Listen to the words spoken by the young man in the tomb: “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”

The message is clear: go home! Jesus will meet you at home, where most of his ministry took place.

It’s as if all of that excitement of the week in Jerusalem is like being on top of Mt. Everest: you strive for it, you sacrifice so much to get there but you can’t live there; the air is too rarefied. It may be the most amazing view in the world; it may be that while you are there you are literally on top of the world; but you can’t live there.

You have to go home. Certainly, you go home profoundly changed. You take your experience with you, but to live you have to go home.

If you look at the other gospels you get a mixed report of what the disciples actually did. Luke has them staying in Jerusalem for ages, even years, while John has some of them return to their fishing boats and Matthew has them start to spread out, first through the Jewish lands and then out into the rest of the world.

But all of that is beside the point because the message is for the readers of the gospel, people who were hearing about it 35 years later and beyond. The message is for us: we can’t get stuck at the pinnacle no matter how exciting or wonderful it is. We have to experience Easter and then go back into the real world as transformed people, and keep on making those changes Jesus showed us.

The most powerful empire of the world had done the worst it could do. Rome was administratively efficient; it made running an empire into a smooth machine which appeared to take up Jesus, only to grind him up and spit him out.

All those things Jesus had been saying all along about God lifting up the weak, the poor, and the marginalized happened in the person of Jesus on the cross, in the resurrection: we can see life overcoming death; brute force being defeated by love; human and divine love combining to overcome the faceless brutality of an uncaring system.

Mark tells us to take that revelation, that proof of the truth of Jesus’ teachings and to bring them down from the mountain and back home again.

Who can we think of in our world that are people being pushed aside, being treated indifferently by uncaring systems? People with no influence, with few resources?

Jesus reached out to people like these and taught us to do the same. In the resurrection we are shown not only eternal life in the next world but a transformed and renewed life in this one.

The way of love looks weak compared to the ways of force and power and yet God’s way of love was enough to take Jesus through the cross and grave and back out through the empty tomb. And from there God calls us to bring that way of love back home, to transform the way life happens, to lift up the people who cannot lift themselves up and to create a just world where all are equally loved and blessed.

That’s the message Mark wanted us to get from the resurrection and it is good news indeed.

Amen.

So Many Dimensions

Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

So Many Dimensions

Scriptures: Mark 11:1-11 John 12:12-16

One of my earliest introductions to Biblical Criticism had to do with Palm Sunday: someone sneering at the Biblical record for inaccuracies because we talk and sing about waving palm branches and palms don’t grow around Jerusalem.

I was young and this was really challenging at the time. Since then I’ve learned a lot more and that there are things to discover in the inconsistencies and disagreements we find in scripture.

Our readings are the oldest and the newest Biblical accounts of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem:

Mark’s is the oldest gospel and doesn’t talk about palm branches at all – non-specific tree branches and coats were laid down for Jesus like a red carpet;

Matthew and Luke’s gospels were written next, and they both copied Mark’s version except that one adds the donkey’s colt for good measure to better match the Old Testament prophesy that Jesus was acting out. It’s all very impressive and we get a sense of something quite big that the authorities couldn’t fail to notice;

Then we find our second reading – John’s gospel, written decades after the others. John’s gospel differs in so many ways from the others that it’s an open debate within the scholarly community as to whether the early Christian community that produced it had ever seen any of the three existing gospels when this one was written.

The emphasis was profoundly different – highly spiritual and mystical with a completely different narrative. For Mark and the others, this is the first entry of Jesus into Jerusalem outside of his childhood. For John, he’d come and gone many times before this event; for John, the Triumphal Entry is a really short passage. In addition to adding the troublesome detail about Palm branches (which suggests the author didn’t know the area very well) he treats it like an almost irrelevant detail: something the followers of Jesus forgot and only remembered and understood later after the resurrection.

To be fair, John says that about a lot of things in Jesus’ ministry. In his presentation, the disciples are a fairly clueless lot until the resurrection opens their eyes and everything suddenly makes sense.

A second struggle with the interpretation of this passage in my life came when someone pointed out that we shouldn’t celebrate this as a “triumph”. They remarked on the misunderstanding of the crowd and the misinterpretation of prophesy: the descendant of King David enters Jerusalem, signaling the overthrow of the pagan armies of Rome and the liberation of God’s people from Pagan idols, when in fact Jesus was planning all along to face the cross and win by losing; live by dying; show his strength by becoming utterly vulnerable.

We always have trouble talking about irony: the conflict between what appears on the surface and what may be understood at deeper levels. Once you start that conversation it’s hard to know where to stop. There can be so many dimensions of interpretation: Which one is true? Could it be that several are true at the same time?

In the days when we believed in something called “Christendom” – that international collection of nations and empires that called themselves Christian in one form or another – it was easy to consider Palm Sunday to be a triumph. After all, we could point to a world where Christ was King, where even the rulers would bow their knee to a higher power, and that power was Jesus.

It seemed like what Jesus had done by riding into Jerusalem was to signal a day when Rome would not only no longer rule the world but where Rome itself would be ruled by Christ and so many farther flung countries would be included.

Of course, there were some convenient lapses of memory. In those days, one violent empire or kingdom regularly succeeded another and it was accepted that Christ’s love could be spread at the point of a sword.

The idea of Jesus triumphing on the cross was certainly present but it was explained away as something unique, not an example for us to consider, let alone follow but a necessary way for God to forgive our sins and save us from Hell.

For the rest of life, the old ways of conquest and traditional strength were seen as Christian virtues, especially when used against non-Christians or people we identified as heretics.

I have recently been re-reading the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis that were such a favourite of mine in childhood and it has been disturbing to see how many of these old values of Christian conquest and military strength were a central part of these books, especially towards the end of the series.

I find it disturbing that in recent decades, as our society has worked hard to shake off the influence of Christianity, it has actually embraced a lot of what Jesus taught every day and acted out as a prophetic drama on Palm Sunday, but has embraced them instead as secular values:

  • sharing, cooperation, equality, freedom, respect, listening;
  • engaging everybody and not just the elite;
  • seeing the strength in vulnerability, instead of disdaining it;
  • acknowledging that we gain when we lose, not only when we win;
  • really believing that there is ability where many only see disability.

These are all Christian values found throughout Jesus’ teachings. But to many secular people the church had come to represent the opposite: privilege and power; abuse and contempt; the idea that when Jesus rode in on that donkey, he was claiming the world as a conqueror.

How ironic.

I am concerned that we are losing our grip on those values within the Christian faith. We have a root for them – the example of Jesus as to why we should embrace such upside-down teachings. Without the faith base, I’m not so sure why people don’t just go back to the old ideas of violence, force, imperialism and oppression: “Might makes right”.

In fact, I look at the leaders we are seeing making the most headlines on the international stage today. So many are old-school “strong man” types showing off their strength, threatening and actually creating violence in ways we hoped had vanished into history as uncivilized.

What we need is for people to actually look at what we have been taught for 2000 years. On Palm Sunday Jesus set the example for leadership: not boastful or bragging; not threatening; completely unarmed, in fact; challenging the naked power of the greatest empire in the world with vulnerability, with strength of character, with faith.

The cynical response to that is: but look, within a week that same empire had done what it always did to challengers. It humiliated him, tortured him, put him to a public death to terrorize all who witnessed it. That’s the cynical approach these strong leaders embrace.

It’s up to us to look beyond that complicated triumphal entry and to see the deepest dimension of all: the transformation of the world brought about by Jesus’ followers proclaiming his resurrection, demonstrating how the smallest and weakest in the world could turn even the Roman Empire upside-down in the end.

It’s up to us to realize that what Jesus showed and did is there for all of us to embrace and to bring to the world to challenge the strong rulers with weakness, to share our disabilities that mask how able we are, to build a society where these values don’t get lost or buried by a return to brutality.

Jesus lived a life to show that love, the gentlest motivation of all, is also the most powerful force there is.

It’s up to us to keep that teaching alive.

Amen.

Written on our Hearts

Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

Written on our Hearts

Scriptures: Jeremiah 31:31-34

As a young person I could be very literal-minded and I had issues whenever something looked inconsistent. I clearly remember reading our lesson from Jeremiah and being confused by the reference to God as Israel’s husband and similar things, like our closing hymn later, where the church is referred to as female – an echo of imagery in the book of Revelations.

That one was more straightforward, but I knew that Israel was simply the new name for the patriarch Jacob – a big ol’ bearded guy – and this in the days before same sex marriage was taken seriously; so the idea of a husband had to be accompanied by the idea of a wife.

I have learned to think more inclusively since those days and I have also learned that although same-sex relationships were condemned in Jeremiah’s time, the idea of “husband” was a lot less about gender and a lot more about a role in a relationship. So, while the first hearers of Jeremiah’s message might have had a twinge of gender identity crisis at this choice of words, the main effect would have been to get their attention and make them think deeply about what God was saying.

God taking on the role of husband is a profound statement: it is close, even intimate but it particularly carried a responsibility of protection, even oversight. In that culture, the father and husband was the arbiter of the law and the final authority. The husband had the job of caring for everyone but also expected to be respected and obeyed.

If you think about the word “patriarchy” then that is literally what you will get in this picture. Although it is significant that Jeremiah did not say “father” – because the role of father carried more authority – there was an understanding back then that there was a partnership between the parents and, in fact, the women were given a lot of responsibility. They had organizational and financial charge of the household which, if the patriarch was successful, could be a huge operation with dozens of staff, large quantities of food to prepare – not only for individual meals, but to store and plan after harvest for the needs of the household through the season ahead – handling the household accounts, dealing with all the merchants, and haggling for the best deals in the marketplace.

The women were expected to be good managers. There’s a whole section of the book of Proverbs dedicated to this. So, while it was not a balanced partnership in that the Husband could lay down the law, there was also an understanding that the woman had a lot of autonomy within her sphere of authority. It wasn’t all one sided – the 5th commandment explicitly tells us to honour our father and our mother – so, it wasn’t all about the fathers.

The language here reminds us that Israel should not have been disobedient; that in doing so Israel was violating the relationship. But it is also saying that the relationship is not simple: the covenant between God and the people is like a covenant of marriage with all the complexities of such a relationship.

Remember also, that in those days most marriages were arranged marriages: the couples sometimes met for the first time on their wedding day if they came from a distance.

I can just imagine that this would be the kind of relationship that would start off rather stiff and formal as the partners got to know each other and worked out how they would be together. That was one reason for the rules about the roles of husband and wife: so that people went into marriage knowing what society expected of them, whether or not they were happy about it.

Eventually, love might come; eventually they might even get to the place where they could finish each other’s sentences, but it wouldn’t start out that way.

This Jeremiah reading gives us a vision of the relationship between God and Israel as developing, growing, becoming deeper and more personal as they grow to know each other better, with the final state being the one described: where God’s law doesn’t have to be taught anymore because the people have fully internalized it; they have caught God’s vision so completely that they live it out naturally, every day.

The marriage analogy stumbles a bit here because in our society today we declare that partners are equal regardless of their gender, even if we don’t fully live out that equality yet.

And it offends me, theologically, if we try to claim equality with the creator of the universe. I have lost a fair bit of the arrogance I used to have and even as a young person who thought he had all the answers, I never thought that I could match the infinite wisdom of our creator.

But it is a wonderful and encouraging thought that our creator could care for us enough to claim this ancient role of husband; inviting us to be so close, to grow in love so much that we could begin to know in our very hearts what is in the mind and heart of God.

When we do get to the place where we don’t need to teach each other about God’s love I will be out of a job forever, but I do hope for that day and I hope we can draw closer to it all the time.

That’s part of what we are striving for when we discuss our vision statement. We are trying to express our heart-felt understanding of God’s love as expressed in our community of faith and to put into words what that looks like going forward. Our goal should be to reflect in the statement what is written in our hearts, so that when people read the words and look at us there will be no dissonance but a real reflection of God’s love as it is lived out in this place.

May we do well at crafting these words and living out their truth.

Amen.

Lifted Up

Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

Lifted Up

Scriptures: Numbers 21:4-9; John 3:14-21

I would like to begin by acknowledging the help I received from Lori in considering how to interpret this week’s readings. The more inspired bits are all hers.

When I first looked at the readings for today I was struck by the way John used the image of the bronze serpent on the pole to compare it to Jesus and I grumbled to myself that if I were marking this as a student paper in an English class, I would have given John a low mark for such a superficial comparison.

Sure, the “raising up” to save people is comparable, but the rest of it is really problematic: comparing Jesus to a poisonous serpent? Sorry, that image really doesn’t work. By the way, this serpent image has nothing to do with the modern medical image of serpents twined on the staff of Aesculapius. This is a fascinating example of parallel imagery developing across very different cultures but it’s not anything very profound. That’s the kind of stuff I planned to talk about.

Then, the next day we were all told of the dreadful murders of almost a whole family in Barrhaven and I realized that these passages would have to speak to this terrifying situation.

The first thing I would like to address is the way that some Christians take John’s passage about the way “God so loved the world” and try to turn it into something exclusive, suggesting that if you don’t have some kind of explicit faith in Jesus, you won’t have eternal life.

The fact that this family was Buddhist may be concerning some Christians and this kind of exclusive theology might be causing folks real pain and sorrow.

Let me be clear: I don’t believe John meant that exclusive interpretation when he wrote this gospel.

John was emphasizing the love of God for the world and demonstrating how easy it is for people to be rescued from the evils of the world. The way to live after being bitten by the poisonous snakes was as simple as looking at the snake raised up on a pole. The way to live after experiencing the darkness of the world is as simple as looking at Jesus raised up on the cross.

It’s intended as a message of hope, a welcoming and inviting statement based in and wrapped up by God’s love for the world. John even goes on to clarify what he means and it’s not about what someone believes. It is about how someone lives: John points out that what we do demonstrates whether we are drawn to the truth of God’s love; whether we live lives of truth and light or deceit and darkness. To use this passage to narrowly define belief as a way to salvation is to condemn the world – exactly the opposite of what John says God intended.

This family was doing their best. Working hard. They were making their way in a new country. They were sharing their house with someone from their homeland and by all reports they were good people. They did not deserve what happened to them and it’s hard to see any kind of justice here, or even to imagine what justice might look like.

It feels a lot like being in a space you thought was safe and discovering you are surrounded by poisonous serpents. People are dying for no good reason and the phrase “stranger danger” just isn’t enough to describe the fear of bringing someone into your home who then murders you and your children.

We see this image of good people living good lives who are repaid with violence and death and it is tempting to huddle in fear, to cut ourselves off and protect ourselves, to avoid the risk of showing God’s love to strangers because something horrible has happened.

Some parts of this will take time to be revealed or may never be known to us. Is this man evil? Did he have some kind of psychotic break? Were there any kinds of extremist politics or religion involved in this?

We can’t say. I’m not sure that knowing would make it feel any better, although putting labels on problems can help us feel like there is still some sense in the world. Placing labels, all by itself, is something we have to avoid: labelling this as a problem with immigration; blaming the foreigners or new immigrants; identifying this as something that doesn’t normally happen here but has been brought here from the outside. We must avoid all the fear-based prejudice that can emerge when a tragedy like this happens.

The serpent raised up on a pole became a symbol of healing for those who had been bitten. John shows us the image of Jesus raised up on the cross as a symbol of love, of hope, a declaration that violence and power can be overcome by love and vulnerability. His raising up is a symbol of healing for the world and a declaration of love by God.

Jesus on the cross reminds us of his teachings and challenges us. Jesus still tells us to welcome strangers; to show love to others; even to go so far as loving our enemies. Jesus would not want this murder to build fear in us and cause us to turn our backs on his teachings, his example of love, of welcome, the way his life represented God’s love for all the people of the world.

The hope of eternal life is something we cling to when young lives are cut short by tragedy. No kind of justice or vengeance can restore the lives taken or give them the chance to grow up, go to school, realize their potential in this life.

The hope of eternal life, offered out of the depths of God’s love for the world isn’t about justice, or vengeance, or trying to undo the violent wrongs that have happened here.

The hope of eternal life is what gives us the sense that God’s love carries us beyond the evils of this world and keeps us safe, even after someone has done their worst.

In this sad time when we feel outrage and shock, when we hang on the edge of fear, when it would feel natural to turn away from the extravagant demands of God’s love; in this sad time let us remember what John said about the meaning of Jesus on the cross: he was lifted up to demonstrate God’s love; a violent death turned into a symbol of love and grace.

Let us cling to God’s love and grace with all our might and refuse to give in to fear.

Amen.

Paradoxical Proclamation

Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

Paradoxical Proclamation

Scriptures: 1 Corinthians 1:18-25

Despite the fact that the Apostle Paul lived 2000 years ago, his world should look pretty familiar once we get past the unfamiliar language.

Paul was a Jew who lived in a thoroughly Greek culture and so his observations are made as someone who was at the same time an insider and an outsider to both cultures, something that any immigrant family to Canada could understand after a couple of decades.

Paul said that the Jews asked for signs, which is something we see in the gospels when people demanded miracles from Jesus, especially healings. We should recognize a modern equivalent: a demand for evidence like the inhabitants of Missouri – the “show me” state and home of Mark Twain. People there pride themselves on being hard to bamboozle. “Show me” is supposed to demonstrate that they are open to change if you can prove what you are saying.

Paul said that the Greeks desired wisdom and we should recognize this in our society’s quest for academic rigour and logical consistency: Does what you are saying make sense? Does your theology hang together well? Are you contradicting yourself?

What Paul says in our lesson today challenges both approaches and this has become a point of contention within the Christian church because some branches of the church use this passage to insist that in order to have faith we must defy both evidence and logic to believe in a seven-day creation, in specific prophesies of the end of the world and the miraculous ability to move mountains,

Paul is not calling for us to be gullible. He is not demanding that we believe six impossible things before breakfast like the White Queen in Alice through the Looking Glass. Paul is actually being quite sophisticated. Instead of creating a conflict between faith and reason, he is inviting us to embrace a paradox: to accept that in the crucifixion and resurrection there is something going on that doesn’t fit our usual ways of understanding. God’s foolishness is greater than our wisdom. God’s weakness is greater than our strength.

This fits with Paul’s own experience: he is clear that he met the risen Jesus in a vision on the road to Damascus; Paul understood all of this in spiritual terms. An empty tomb isn’t evidence and he couldn’t bring Jesus out to his listeners to demonstrate the nail holes in his hands like Doubting Thomas demanded.

And the wisdom, the logic of the day, with the might of Rome at the core of the world simply laughed at the thought of an utterly vulnerable man with no weapons, no soldiers, naked, dying on the cross being able to overcome the power of an empire through weakness. That was unthinkable for most people and certainly for powerful people.

We still have trouble with it: Jesus’ teachings keep pointing to that same vision of God and the Beatitudes are a wonderful summary of that central paradox of our faith; but we have a hard time believing that this approach of love and vulnerability will work because hostility seems to win so often, especially in ways that grab the headlines.

Paul’s words here are intended to be reassuring. I’m sure he was aware of the push-back his friends were getting: Christians had not yet been expelled from Synagogues, so the traditional Jewish scholars would have argued with these upstart followers of Jesus. The Greek philosophers in Corinth who loved public debates in the marketplace and who were trained debaters were likely making the Christians feel very foolish, maybe even humiliated before their neighbours

So Paul is calling his friends to consider that they are being informed by a higher standard: that if this business about Jesus was foolish and weak, then we should remember that it’s God’s foolishness and God’s weakness; that God sets a higher, better standard than these “experts” have grasped.

Paul isn’t calling for some kind of blind faith that questions nothing. He is calling for something sophisticated and actually rather difficult: the acceptance of principles that will not make obvious sense and that will require us to seek a deep truth; a truth that demands that we look past the obvious, to see what happens under the surface.

Some of this we actually know. Do you win people over by invading their land, sending drones and bombs and tanks to demolish their buildings and destroy their morale? Of course not; but that’s how empires and tyrants think. The most they can achieve is stolen land, dead civilians and generations of hatred as people call either for justice or vengeance.

What Jesus achieved by dying on the cross was to demonstrate how weakness and love can overcome even powerful empires, outlasting them by centuries.

Jesus talked about the last being first, about the visibility of one tiny light in the darkness, about loving others, even enemies. Jesus talked about the meek inheriting the earth and the subtle ways that God’s kingdom infiltrates people’s lives.

He talked about all of this and then he went on to prove it by dying on the cross.

If you take the evidence at face value, he was a victim of the greatest power on earth but in reality he was fully committed to demonstrating the truth of his teachings, even at the cost of a painful and humiliating death.

He gave us another paradox: living out faith by dying. Paul isn’t calling for us to die for our faith; early Christians made that foolish assumption and we were mass-producing martyrs for years.

No, we should be taking what Paul says and using this paradox of faith to examine how we approach the challenges of life.

Do we go for the obvious answers? Do we go for quick fixes or easy solutions? Do we demand signs or traditional wisdom?

Or do we dig deep and let the paradoxical teachings of Jesus guide us and shape our priorities?

I hope we can manage to follow Jesus’ teachings however paradoxical they may be. We are called to go forward in weakness, not afraid to be vulnerable or to look foolish. It’s the example Jesus set for us.

Amen.

To Gain the World and Forfeit Life

Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

To Gain the World and Forfeit Life

Mark 8:34-37 New Revised Standard Version updated edition (NRSVUE)

He called the crowd with his disciples and said to them, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?

It’s important that in our reading, the word “life” in Greek is ψυχὴ which gives us the word “Psyche” and can also be translated “soul”. It’s hard to translate the full meaning of this idea into English, but to forfeit one’s “life” here does not mean to die, at least, not physically.

Professor Laurie Santos teaches the most popular course in Yale University’s history. She is an evolutionary anthropologist who hosts the podcast “The Happiness Lab” and the Coursera course “The Science of Well-Being”. Her course “Psychology and the Good Life” at Yale was instituted because of the overwhelming number of stress related mental health issues among the students: Yale students are high-achievers; people who want perfect grades; want to get high-paying jobs; be socially successful.

Apart from the academic requirements to pass the course (the typical mid-term paper and a final exam about the psychology itself) the special homework assigned is the big draw. It is called “Hack Yo’Self”, intended to re-wire the brains of participants by actually practising the things that make people happy:

1. Spend time and energy in the right way

Overscheduled, distracted and glued to our screens, we’re missing out on things that do make us happy: real-life, face-to-face social connections with people you can see blush, smile and wink; and “time affluence” — just having free time, with nothing on the calendar to get in the way of your leisure;

2. Take time to express gratitude

Pausing for 10 minutes a day to think about five things you’re grateful for;

3. Do something nice for somebody else and talk with others

People who engage in random acts of kindness boost their well-being.

A simple act of connecting with a stranger — talking to somebody on a train or a plane, for example — can boost your mood;

4. Find some time to be mindful

Meditate for five or 10 minutes a day. Santos likes to do a loving kindness meditation. She thinks about the people in her life she cares about and silently sends them wishes such as, “I want you to be happy, I want you to live well;

5. Get plenty of exercise and sleep

6. Practice these happiness behaviours every day

It’s like exercise: Just doing a couple of squats here and there won’t work. You have to keep working out to see results.

It really struck me how much of this was stuff Christianity has been saying for centuries. We encourage people to get together, not to focus on selfish goals, but to think about others, do things for others, to give thanks every day, to pray, meditate, take time to be mindful, to focus on what is important. Christianity is not always great at the sleep and exercise part, but we’ve covered all the other bases exceptionally well.

These are all old-fashioned religious practices that we’ve neglected and suddenly, scientific studies show that they are good for us.

It is very counter-intuitive to look at religion for what we get out of it – it seems way too self-serving to be a valid approach to religion – but maybe we should pause and consider that this tradition of ours has always had benefits that we’ve never really understood but that have enriched our lives.

This Professor has studies to demonstrate that it’s not the good grades, high-paying jobs or winning the lottery that make people happy, even though we often convince ourselves that they will. She joked on-line that she might try to underline that point by giving everyone in the class an automatic D but she started getting calls from angry parents, which just underscores the point that they’re not really getting it. It’s fine to say that these things don’t make us happy but we won’t give up the high grades and I end up wondering how much the students can really internalize over a semester or two; how much they can make it part of their lives

Jesus put it well:

“For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?”

This is the 2000 year old wisdom of our founder and it cuts to the core of what it means to be human, what is actually means to have a life:

  • Connection to something bigger than ourselves, a way to turn from being self-centred;
  • Connection to others, and learning to care for them and help them, including complete strangers, even enemies;
  • Taking time to nurture our spirits, to meditate and pray to learn to value the things in life you can’t put a price on; and
  • To be thankful.

This is what we have to offer the world. This is why it matters that we create and sustain a community of faith. This is the very human reason the world needs us and why we need to share what we have, and what we know.

It’s nice of science to remind us.

Amen.

A History of Endurance

Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

A History of Endurance

Scriptures: Isaiah 40:21-31

My previous charge was in Chatham, Ontario which is very proud of being one end of the Underground Railroad, that network of volunteers who ferried people fleeing slavery in the Southern United States to the relative safety of Canada

Chatham has a better history of integration than many other parts of Canada and in my congregation we had several black families, which included the chair of the Executive Council and the chair of the Ministry & Personnel Committee. Yet, for all of that, there was a town up the road that had a law on the books until the 1960s requiring all black people to be outside of the town limits by sunset each day.

The underground railroad is something Canada is proud of. As good as that part of our history was, it might help us to forget our previous history when slaves escaped from owners in Eastern Canada to cross south into northern US States that were abolitionist well before Queen Victoria got around to it.

An often neglected element of this history is that in New France indigenous people were press-ganged and enslaved. But they could be rescued by their friends and if they escaped, they could survive in the wilds of Canada.

Colonial leaders advised farmers to buy their slaves from the markets that brought people in from Africa because they were cut off from home and family and had less hope of escape in this alien climate. It sounds like the intended effects of residential schools – a deliberate separation from language and culture.

White Canadians often get wrapped up in the issue of slavery when we think about Black History month, but I don’t want to dwell on that.

Remembering that our society used to do this and justified it by claiming that Africans were somehow inferior has made a huge difference to what has happened since.

Canada has not often been a welcoming place and over time our black communities have been treated badly in most of our provinces, despite their deep, historic roots going back before Confederation in some cases.

A case in point was Africville, a black settlement in Halifax. First records of it date back to 1848 and after 120 years of being under-serviced, without water or sewage services despite paying taxes, it was destroyed in the 1960s by the city of Halifax and notoriously, its church, the centre of the community, was bulldozed on November 20, 1967 in the middle of the night.

The church has often been an important part of the way these communities have managed to overcome racism, restrictions on employment, expropriation and expulsion, targeting by police and social services that in some forms continue to this day.

The gathering of people of faith remains a significant source of strength and hope and a wonderful place to celebrate community and culture. It’s amazing how much of the Bible deals with oppressed people seeking out God, like our lesson from Isaiah today, first delivered to a people being taken into captivity in Babylon.

And as inspirational as we may find it to sing about rising up on Eagles’ wings, just try to imagine what that promise must mean when every authority is raising its hand against you.

One of the original purposes of Black History Month was to ensure that Canadian history took note of the contributions of black citizens that we weren’t taught in High School history classes. And so, over the years, historical displays and TV specials have taught us about Black Canadians who have made a difference.

Lately, a number of people have raised the concern that learning history isn’t enough; we are in a changing world and we have to take seriously the present and future as well. Current attitudes our culture has towards people of African Descent may include good feelings about the Underground Railroad and certain athletes and famous musicians, but it also may feel challenged by Hip-Hop music and culture, art forms and clothing styles and even the ways people may speak.

In Canada, we are finally shaking off the idea that racism is an American issue that Canadians can ignore. We are realizing that assumptions of cultural superiority are just as real here as south of the border. We just haven’t confronted it as openly.

On top of that, we are becoming aware of the number of new people who are coming here from many African countries. The underground railroad was never part of their history and we have to be aware of our own tendency to generalize unfairly, making assumptions about how many people are refugees and whether they are bringing their fights from home to our shores and worse, assumptions about needing to be scared because their young people will all join gangs and start dealing drugs. Do we have the same fears about young people coming as refugees from Ukraine?

Black history in Canada has included slavery in the past and all of the inter-generational trauma that brought and that we have not addressed. It includes racism that was once open and acceptable and is still present, although we denounce it and express shock when, for example, racist graffiti was sprayed on Parkdale United Church. The present still includes racial profiling and other kinds of racism that are too slowly being weeded out of our systems.

And through all of these challenges the black community has generated hope, faith, and a vision for the future. They are an example of the strength of a community as they have supported each other and drawn on God for strength and hope in the face of serious opposition. They have endured some terrible wrongs and have celebrated some wonderful joys.

New opportunities and challenges will continue to arise: one example is of a new congregation being formed of people who speak Swahili who have come from countries all across Africa. The people themselves live across Ottawa and we may not be central enough to offer them the space they want and the public transit they need, but it’s wonderful to learn that a new congregation is being formed in the United church. I would be fascinated to discover what happens in their service of worship.

I have heard it said many times in recent years that in this age when so many of our traditional churches are facing decline, that the revitalization of Christianity will come from Africa and people of African descent.

It is high time that we make a point of learning about Black History, because we may find within it a glimpse of our own future as people of faith. Maybe more than a glimpse: maybe inspiration as we learn some valuable lessons from people who have managed to get through some very challenging times and have found new and creative ways to rise up on Eagle’s wings.

Amen.