Ask Andrew: Lent

“Ask Andrew” is an annual opportunity for members of Knox to ask questions of faith and religion. Andrew answers them in the Sunday morning service, and now in this blog. Enjoy!

Ask Andrew: Lent

Why do United Church members not give up something important for Lent?

The short answer to this question is: some do!

Okay, there is a tradition of giving up chocolate for Lent. That suggests we’re treating it like a New Years Resolution with less commitment (40 days instead of a year or a lifetime). Actually, we treat this as a very individual thing, and some people do consider carefully what they are giving up and try to give up something that is significant for some reason.

Originally, Lent was not this individualistic at all. It was the main Christian season of fasting. It was not like the Muslims, where they don’t eat between sunrise & sunset. Rather, it was a time of reduced rations of all sorts for everyone: typically no meat, no fresh baking, and people who lived in Northern Europe lived on root vegetables for the seasons (and this was before potatoes were brought in from the New World.)

To be fair, you are never supposed to fast on a Sunday. Sunday is always a little Easter, a feast day, just like Friday is always a little Good Friday, a fast day (I am old enough to remember when most of Quebec ate fish on Fridays because of this). So the 40 days of Lent don’t include Sundays.

Historically, this was partly practical. Lent happens at the time of year when supplies started to run out. Everyone needed to make sure the food supplies survived until the first crops were in. Rich and poor alike were in much the same boat.

Lenten fasting was a communal activity. The whole community was supposed to reflect on their spiritual condition, on their need for salvation. The church used the time to get everyone really primed for Easter and the gift of hope and new life.

The church discovered a nice parallel with the 40 years that Israel wandered in the wilderness before entering the promised land. Those years really shaped the community. The time transformed them from runaway slaves into a community able to move in and occupy a country. Since the 1980s the church has really liked that parallel. Lots of Exodus readings are recommended for this season so we can make that parallel with the spiritual journey of our modern community.

More commonly, though we’ve turned it into a kind of individual, personal spiritual test. “Can I make it another day without chocolate?” “Yes, I can be strong!” It is like we use Lent to gauge our own personal moral character.

Really, the inspiration for the 40 days comes from Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness. That was certainly a personal time for him, and in the wilderness he certainly went without most kinds of food (raw lizard, anyone?) and other necessities.

Before people get too literalistic, we should remember that 40 days, like 40 years, is an important symbolic number in scripture. 40 anything means a very long time.

The first chapter of Mark’s gospel gives us the oldest version of this story. Mark doesn’t mention details about temptations, just that he was tempted. This reading gives us a much clearer sense that Jesus was driven into the wilderness by God’s Spirit, and that he did what religious leaders do in such a time: he struggled with his calling. He assessed his life and how it needed to change if he was going to be able to live out that call he received at his baptism. How tempting might it have been to simply go back to carpentry and avoid this dangerous ministry ahead?

What better place to listen for God’s voice or inspiration than in the wilderness? Imagine being there, surrounded by creation, seeing the naked, star-strewn sky at night, with nothing between you and infinity. You would face a lack of food and water, the predators that lived in the wilderness, and you would face a pressing need to trust God to get you out of this alive.

Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness was his time to come face to face with his existence; to meet his creator where there were no other voices to distract. He took stock of his life in a place where lying to yourself will get you killed, and he re-shaped himself for the time ahead.

If we are going to be individual about Lent then let’s stop worrying about the self-denial test that it has become. Let’s make it what it can be: an opportunity to examine our lives; a time to consider the value of what we do; a time to evaluate what’s important & what’s not; what parts of our lives deserve more time and attention & and what needs to be jettisoned.

Maybe this time before Good Friday and Easter is the best time to ask the question: “if my life is so important that Jesus died for me, what am I doing with my life to make God pleased with me?”

That kind of reflection doesn’t have to be merely personal. We can ask it as a congregation, as a community of faith.

What are we doing that will make our Creator happy?

Ask Andrew: Cults

“Ask Andrew” is an annual opportunity for members of Knox to ask questions of faith and religion. Andrew answers them in the Sunday morning service, and now in this blog. Enjoy!

Ask Andrew: Cults

Please talk about the “Freemen on the Land” (also called “Sovereign Citizen”) movement. This is not faith, but its followers believe it is. If this is unfamiliar, see the Wikipedia entry for either name. I have a family member caught up in this. It is cult-like. It uses random bits of scripture to support harmful practices. I guess my question out of this would be: “Is there false or unhealthy faith and how can someone who is in it see it?” This “movement” seems to be viewed as a problem for police and courts. But it is a huge mental health problem.

I would like to start with a comment on the word “cult”. Popular usage for many years now has been to talk of unhealthy faiths as “cults”. Actually, the word is neutral in religious & academic circles. For example, the “Cult of the Virgin Mary” refers to the veneration of Mary in the Roman Catholic church. For most, this is not something where you have to stage an intervention & bring in a deprogrammer.

Having said that, modern usage interprets “cult” as a false or unhealthy religion, and I will use it that way for the rest of this post for simplicity.

It can be said that the main purpose of religion is to re-define the world of the believer. We try to provide a perspective on life that challenges and re-defines the common understanding of the meaning of life in all its aspects. Every religion tries to do this to some degree, which is one reason extreme atheists distrust all religious faith.

For the purpose of addressing this question, I would suggest that a cult goes beyond this common religious purpose in a variety of ways. A cult likely includes elements that take a person, often a vulnerable person, and isolates them from their community. It replaces that community with the cult itself, calling itself the brothers and sisters at a spiritual level.

We recognize that as clearly religious language from Christianity, from the Bible itself, which is one aspect of this that can be so scary.

A cult also frequently includes a charismatic leader who becomes elevated to almost divine status in the eyes of most participants.

Cults are often damaging to a member’s financial health, demanding large contributions. The participant’s spiritual, emotional and mental health may also suffer. Some cults will encourage people with mental health issues to get off their meds, for example. Cults may also threaten a person’s physical health, not just through dramatic examples like poison Kool-Aid, but through diets designed to break down a person’s sense of identity combined with schedules that involve sleep deprivation and extreme work hours.

As for the question of how someone inside the cult can see it for what it truly is: that is one of the biggest problems. Cults typically discourage the kinds of questions that will create dissatisfaction in the ranks, and the people who ask them can be isolated and rejected by the cult community (while still controlled), or punished in other ways until they conform again.

I had never heard of the Freemen on the Land movement nor the Sovereign Citizen movement. The Wikipedia pages on these two groups were indeed helpful.

They appear to be related but not exactly the same. They share some features: both try to deny the authority of the established government, at least at the Federal level, of whatever country they are in. The Freemen on the Land use a creative interpretation of the International Law of the Sea, while the Sovereign Citizens use an equally creative interpretation of Contract Law, sometimes linked to the idea of federal bankruptcy based on the abandonment of the Gold standard.

The movements share a common resistance to paying taxes. They tend to take the view that the landowner should be the ruler of their own land, basically. They are not keen on environmental laws, expropriation, pipelines, roads, or anything that stops them from doing what they want on their own land. They typically refuse to recognize the authority of the courts, and often the police as well.

They also have charismatic leaders. Sadly for them, when their members face real courts they always lose, whether in the USA, Canada, UK or New Zealand. One Canadian judge handed down an extensive ruling on the legal arguments raised in court. The judge basically trashed the legal foundation of the arguments and suggested that the logic was cult-like: designed to impress the charismatic leader of the group more than the court.

So far, this hasn’t involved a lot of what we would call traditional religion. That is not a problem for me: I could imagine a political, economic or philosophical movement becoming essentially a cult if it develops enough of a hold on its members.

But these groups also have been known to use our scriptures to support their positions which doesn’t make them a religion, necessarily, but does try to use Christianity to bring God’s authority to their arguments.

This is not hard to do. The ancient Biblical position is that God should be our ultimate ruler and source of authority. The Bible presents a clear understanding that human governments are flawed and tend to try to elevate their wishes above God’s.

When Israel wanted a king instead of prophets and judges, the prophet Samuel warned them of the ways a King would abuse them (taxes, servants and armies). The clear message? God is your king! A human king is a poor second and not to be trusted.

At the same time all around the world kings of various countries were claiming that they were related to some god or other. It was a usual way for a ruler to claim that he had the right to boss everyone else around, and it continued for centuries.

So Biblically, with the exception of a handful of verses, there are lots of passages you can quote that support opposing whoever is in charge.

Add that to the prevalent American mythology which includes rebellion against British rule as they way they came to exist, plus the image of the Pilgrim Fathers landing at Plymouth Rock. Remember them? They were fleeing religious oppression in England and planning to set up their own religious states in the New World. In fact, the language of the New World and the New Jerusalem from Revelation got blended together, so that part of the Christian story in America is that America is to be the salvation of the world.

Really. I discovered this an ecumenical preaching seminar in Union Seminary, Virginia, some years ago. I asked the other participants if my understanding was true, and they looked at me as if I were an idiot for not knowing already.

American identity is tied up in both politics and religion. That’s why any movement that starts in the USA has a tendency to quote scripture to support whatever their values are. That doesn’t fly as well here in Canada (we have a different national image of ourselves), but it still happens.

One of the best solutions to the problem of scripture being used to claim God’s support for questionable ideas is to have a good understanding of the Bible. Not necessarily to have quotes to fight with, but to understand the principles being taught. That way we can’t be taken in by someone playing fast and loose with scripture, especially when what they are teaching goes directly against those principles.

Remember though, when dealing with someone caught up in a cult (religious or political) is

that arguing doesn’t accomplish much.

The attraction of a cult is not rational. Unless the person you are trying to persuade is normally someone who really wants to emulate Mr. Spock from Star Trek, logic and reason will not be very effective ways of getting through to them. They have joined up because something in this irrational group attracted them. It may well be that they felt isolated already, and the cult promised a community that accepted them and welcomed them, valued them, and gave their life meaning. The most effective measure against that is to offer love and acceptance and meaning that is better. Deprogrammers often try to remind them of the values they grew up with, but that is iffy: if those values have failed them once, they may be reluctant to trust them again.

This is not easy. I remember how aggressive were some of the cults I encountered in University, both in Montreal and Toronto. I remember how sneaky some were, disguising themselves as other types of study groups or health groups. It is much easier to stay out in the first place than to get out after joining.

The good news is that people do get out. As far as the groups mentioned above, it sounds like they aren’t likely to hold someone captive in an armed Texas compound (okay, maybe I’ve watched too many police dramas).

The issue remains that the person has bought into the thinking of the cult. They will have to realize that the thinking is a problem, but arguing won’t get them there. The best you can do is be available to them, to offer them love and acceptance, so they have someone to go to when they do leave the group.

That’s important because when they are ready to leave, their world will get turned upside down. They’re going to need someone who will love them and accept them.

Terrorism? Or Something Else?

This blog entry began as a sermon preached on October 26th. Just before I went into the service, I was forwarded an excellent article published in the Globe and Mail on October 24th. What I say below takes a particular perspective on the points made in that article.

How could this happen in Canada?

That was the feeling earlier this week. How could people, born and raised in Canada, do such terrible things: killing two members of the Canadian military, injuring and wounding others, both military and civilian; terrifying so many. How could they do that?

It is important so say first that this is not something to be blamed on Islam. On Wednesday, while we were still watching things unfold, I heard someone say: “we should round them all up and send them back where they came from.” That stunned me! I never thought I’d hear a real person utter those words and mean it.

I was much happier when I heard the outcome of the situation in Cold Lake, Alberta, a town with a large military presence. The local mosque was vandalized: windows were broken and “go home” was spray painted on walls. Non-Muslim people from the community went to help the Muslims clean up, and someone put up a sign saying: “You are home!”

The two men who targeted Canadian service personnel were relatively recent converts to Islam, and were both disconnected from any Muslim communities. One had even been asked to leave a mosque in Vancouver because he was criticizing them for not being radical enough.

The word “disconnected” is an important one here, since both of the men were disconnected from their families and their communities. They both struggled with mental health issues, had looked for relief in drugs, and had become involved in crime. Both had ended up looking for meaning on the internet, where they were hooked by the radical language of groups like ISIS. I strongly suspect that they had convinced themselves that they were doing something of value: that they were serving a higher purpose, without having an understanding of the underlying values of the religion they claimed.

They weren’t even connected to the terrorist group whose ideas they were following, although ISIS will be delighted to take credit for their crimes. I remember the 1970 October crisis, and the FLQ, with its disjointed cell groups: connected loosely, but tight internally. These men were not terrorists like that.

We have an absolute need to stay connected to other people. Is is an important way that we remain human in our dealings with others. Jesus understood that. That’s why, when he told us which commandment is most important, he actually gave us two.

In Matthew 22:34-40, we are first given the most important commandment: to love God with all our heart, soul and mind. The clear intent is that our love for God should engage every part of our lives. You might even say it should be all-consuming.

Now if you stopped there, you could use this commandment to justify terrorism. Really!

Left to ourselves, we can come up with some pretty funny ideas about what God wants. If the people around us bother us in some way, it is not hard to look at what they are doing and decide that they are somehow sinful, or evil, or simply opposed to God out of a kind of spiritual laziness. Once you start condemning people like that, it becomes a lot easier to justify doing something extreme that you think will shake them out of their complacency, or perhaps will scare them to God, or to see the truth.

The human capacity for self-delusion is amazing, and if we ever focus on God to the exclusion of all else, that focus can become one of the most dangerous delusions in our lives.

That is why Jesus insisted on adding in the second commandment: to love our neighbours as ourselves. We can be abstract about God all we want, and can avoid having our ideas challenged, but it is a lot harder to be abstract about our neighbours, those real people around us.

It is our constant interaction with others that keeps us grounded in reality. If we take this commandment seriously and actually try to love our neighbours, then that requires us to try and put ourselves in their shoes. We have to make a real effort to understand them, along with their needs and their issues.

It Is harder to delude ourselves when we deal with the people around us, because their lives will regularly intrude on our imaginations. Other people are visible, we bump elbows with them, we hear them and smell them: their reality keeps us real. God, on the other hand, is invisible. Looking for God in creation or in any scriptures requires interpretation, which opens the door to mis-interpretation.

It’s always easy to love an idea. One of my favourite Peanuts cartoons concludes with Linus saying: “I love mankind, it’s people I can’t stand.”

If we say we love God but can’t manage to love our neighbours, then we have to ask: do we really love God, or just our idea of God?

The people who have terrorized us this past week were disconnected. They were following an abstraction. We could label them as social outcasts, as wannabe terrorists. But these, like other labels, are not very helpful. We certainly don’t do anyone any favours if we elevate these men to the status of real terrorists by claiming that what they did is symbolically important, or anything close to a Canadian equivalent to 9/11.

What they have done is real. It is terrible that they have taken the lives of two innocent people, and have messed up the lives of so many others. We need to pray for the people killed and injured, their families, friends and loved ones. We certainly need to consider what policies need to be in place to keep people safe.

But symbolically, this is not so much about an assault on democracy, as it is about how we deal with troubled individuals in Canada. It is about the care we provide for people with mental health issues. It is about how we deal with people with serious addiction problems. It is about how we care for people so that they don’t become dangerously desperate.

We should view these killlings the way we viewed the Montreal Massacre. The women killed were targetted by Marc Lepine because they were studying engineering and other traditionally “male” subjects. It was a terrible thing. It was an attack on our people and our values, but we all knew right away that it was not an attack from outside.

This week’s pair of attacks came from inside our society too. They were rooted in alienation and isolation They came from people who (it appears) felt week and marginalized, and who want to prove they had power and worth by striking out at those they saw as powerful.

I doubt that it is any comfort to those in uniform to know that these delusional men saw them as powerful. The people of our armed forces have volunteered to serve Canada, and know that they may be putting their lives in danger for their country, for us. They would not expect that risk to be faced here in Canada: off duty and minding their own business, or standing guard at a national memorial. Now they may be targets, just because they are wearing our uniforms. That is, if other people decide to work out their issues in the same way these two disturbed men did.

These incidents should not be reduced to simple labels, as tempting as that may be. To choose between “ideology” and “pathology” is to miss the fact that this is about a complex combination of very human issues.

I would suggest that we owe it to Cpl. Nathan Cirillo and Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent, and to all those who serve us in uniform, to find a way to deal with the issues that produce the “wannabe terrorists”, or the “lone-wolf terrorists”, or whatever other names we may call them. We need to find a way to address people who are alienated and isolated; the disconnected people who end up looking for meaning on the internet; the people who try to solve their problems with drugs; the people on the streets suffering from serious mental illness and cannot find the treatment that they need.

As people of faith we can see the dangers of faith that is cut off from human reality; of faith that is abstract and heartless.

As people of faith we can offer up an alternate vision: a community where we create a space for everyone, even those who have the hardest time fitting in, where even the most outcast can belong. We can offer a community of healing and of reconciliation. We can offer a place where our passion for God is always informed by our love for the people around us.

We are even called to find a way to love the ones who scare us; the ones who want to terrorize us.

Since Jesus lived under the brutal terror of the Roman Empire, he knew exactly how tough it could be to follow this commandment to love our neighbours. But still he called us to that love, which suggests that he believed we could do it. Now it’s up to us to try.

Rocks R Good, Stones R Bad?

 I remember, as a kid, reading an old Peanuts comic strip from the 1950s. It showed Lucy being a good big sister and teaching Linus (who was much younger in those days) about the world.

Lucy showed Linus a pebble and said: “You see this pebble, Linus? Well, some pebbles grow up to be rocks, while others grow up to be stones. No one knows why. You just have to hope that this pebble will be good, and grow up to be a rock instead of a stone.”

As a kid I really liked the absurdity of this strip, but part of it struck me as really unfair. Who was Lucy to decide that stones were bad and rocks were good? Who decided she could play God? (alright, I have issues with Lucy, she is just too bossy).

But as I looked over the readings assigned in the lectionary for this past Sunday, it struck me that whoever had chosen them had a really sick sense of humour.

 Look at all the rock and stone imagery we are given:

 Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16: God as Rock and Refuge, Rock and Fortress

Acts 7:55-60: Stoning of Stephen

 1 Peter 2:2-10: Living Stones (Jesus and us); cornerstone (Jesus), and “A stone that makes them stumble, and a rock that makes them fall” (Jesus)

 These readings run from one extreme to the other: from the murderous stones as Stephen is martyred to the righteous Rock of God as our protector.

 I suddenly understood where Charles Shultz, whose Christian faith was very important in his life, got this idea for Lucy. In the Bible, Rocks are much more likely to be given a positive image than stones. So Rocks are good, and Stones are bad. Too bad it took me over 40 years to figure that out!

 This is not just biblical: the idea has made it into popular culture over the centuries. A name like Rocky Balboa suggests someone strong, tough, unbeatable. Duane Johnson called himself The Rock when he was a professional wrestler for exactly the same reason.

 If we use “stone” to describe someone it’s along the lines of a “stone cold killer”. (Stoner is another uncomplimentary one, it’s a drug term, but it still carries the idea that being stoned is a bad thing).

 Several people at Knox pointed out one great example I had missed: “So Rock music is good, but the Rolling Stones are bad?” Well, they have certainly cultivated the “bad boy” image for decades.

 Images are important in scripture. They get used over and over across the centuries of biblical writing, and they can develop and change.

 The Psalm lesson is the oldest one in our selection, and it is pretty simple: God is a rock, a foundation, a fortress; something big and strong, that we can rely on.

Stoning in the Bible was a punishment ordered by the law of Moses. Usually it was reserved for those whose behaviour was considered so unholy that they had to be permanently removed from the community of faith so they could no longer pollute the community. People were executed by stoning because everyone in the community had to participate, and the blood of the execution was on the hands of everyone: you weren’t allowed to refuse to throw a stone. Symbolically it was a way for the holy people of God to declare that they wanted nothing to do with this unholiness. In terms of persuasion, it made sure that everyone saw what happened to people who committed these sins: it was a horrible death and would make you think twice about doing it yourself.

Blasphemy was obviously unholy, and Stephen’s words sounded blasphemous to many of the traditional religious people who heard them. The crowd probably felt perfectly righteous in stoning Stephen to death, but the readers of Acts can see how wrong this is. The injustice is obvious as this supposedly holy judgement process is used to create the first Christian martyr. Our impression of this injustice is underlined by Stephen’s dying vision of the glory of God and Jesus standing at God’s right hand.

 [Interesting side note: This passage is only time we are shown Jesus standing at God’s right hand. Usually the image is of Jesus sitting: which ismuch more dignified and appropriate. The suggestion has been made that Jesus is standing here as a special honour to welcome Stephen into God’s presence.]

We know how Jesus dealt with the one instance of stoning he faced: “let the one who is without sin cast the first stone.” Jesus called into question the ability of the crowd to ever be truly just, to ever really proclaim that they are holy this way. He challenged the whole idea of stoning, and called into question whether it was ever really being God’s way of doing things.

 Back to the stone and rock imagery. The contrast so far is the same as the one Lucy makes: stones are bad while rocks are good. In the stoning of Stephen we see stones at their worst: a thing intended to be a holy but terrible judgement, being corrupted by human hands into a most unholy injustice. It is hard to imagine a more severe contrast with the image of God as a rock, a fortress, our secure protector; while these stones are used by a mob to murder a young man who dies physically isolated, exposed and vulnerable, but spiritually embraced by God.

 How much more of a contrast can be made between the holiness and reliability of God and the corruption and unreliability of people? God is the righteous rock and we are the unworthy stones.

 But look what happens in our lesson from 1 Peter: he takes the corrupted image of the stone and transforms it completely.

 The author calls Jesus a “living stone” and “the cornerstone”, and he calls the followers of Jesus “living stones” as well. It’s an image with a lot tied up in it. It shows us God as a builder, with us as the construction material. As living stones we are not to become a rigid structure, but “a living temple”, a place of worship created out of people, not stones.

 It is an image of us being taken from our potential for violence, our potential for injustice, and being transformed into something good, something constructive, something secure and ultimately safe from harm. In this image we become living stones building the kind of fortress that is associated with the Rock of God of the Psalms.

 [Another interesting note: the one time the word “rock” is used in this lesson it is treated as equal with “stone”. The transformation is complete.]

 This is all deliberate. Remember how Peter got his name? He started out as Simon, but Jesus nick-named him Peter, which literally means “the Rock”. Basically Jesus was calling him Rocky and said that he would be the foundation for the church.

 That was some kind of transformation, wasn’t it? Throughout the gospels Simon Peter is shown to be impulsive, erratic, a very poor planner: someone you’d hesitate to follow because of how often he screwed up. Yet over the years he became a leader admired by the whole church.

And here we are, in this letter bearing Peter’s name, being told with the same kind of word-play, the same rock and stone images, that God will do the same for us. God will take us as we are: imperfect, flawed, unreliable, mistaken, unjust; with all the problems of our lives, whatever they are . . . God will take all of that and change us, lead us to be better, transform us.

 We will not be changed from stones into rocks, but into be stones that are alive, and able to build up God’s work.

 Or, to drop the symbolic language:

We will not be changed from humans into angels, but into humans who do godly things: people who are loving, able to love even when we see the worst in someone; people who are creative, who can find ways to make good come out of bad; people who, like God, defend the weak and the helpless, who care for those who can’t care for themselves, who set captives free.

 Of course we will always be human. There will always be more for us to discover and learn; there will always be ways for us to improve. But the message here is that God makes all of that happen in us. God makes us better every day

 And like those “living stones”, God will never cast us aside. God never gives up on us.

 

Annual Mushroom Compost Sale is back by popular demand – Youth Group Will Help You!

Imagine your soil looking like this!
Imagine your soil looking like this!

The members of Youth Group will be selling compost at Knox United Church located at 25 Gibbard Avenue, Nepean, Saturday May 17 and 24 between 9 am and 1 pm. You will find the compost sale right beside the shed at the back of the parking  lot.

 

The rich compost will add nutrients and organic matter to your soil and help your garden grow!

Only $3 a bag or 4 bags for $10. All proceeds support the Youth Group and its charitable work.

Knox United Church & the Manordale/Woodvale Community Association – A Promising Partnership

Knox United Church has offered to participate in hosting programs of the Manordale/Woodvale Community Association.   In a meeting with the Association Executive, Knox indicated that it would be interested in exploring ways that the Association could run various programs at the church.

On April 21, the two groups reviewed the findings of the recent survey that was conducted by the Nepean Rideau Osgood Community Recreational Centre for the Manordale/Woodvale Community Association.  A strong focus coming out of that survey was on finding opportunities for youth programs.    As a result of that discussion, a first initiative will be to have an initial meeting for youth in the area at which they can gather for pizza and a discussion of possible activities.   As the Community Association building on Knoxdale is fully booked for every Friday evening in May and June, the initial meetings will be held at Knox.  There are more details on these meetings elsewhere on the website.

A number of possible programs for youth, adults and seniors have been raised, but at this time, nothing is set.

The Manordale/Woodvale Association Executive and representatives of Knox United Church will continue to get together to see what programs/plans are in the best interests of the two groups.

Please stand by for further developments.

Ask Andrew Part 6: Mediums and Spirits

Ask Andrew” is an annual opportunity for members of Knox to ask questions of faith and religion. Andrew answers them in the Sunday morning service, and now in this blog. This is the last in the 2014 series.  The previous five “Ask Andrews” are already posted.  Enjoy!

Ask Andrew Part 6: Mediums and Spirits

On the TV show “Long Island Medium”, Teresa communicates messages from dead relatives to grieving spouses, children or friends. They are always positive and usually indicate that the spirit is often with the living person, watching over them and sometimes ensuring their well being.

Much of what she says may very well be on Facebook, an intelligent guess or just luck. However, it is difficult to understand where she gets some data unless the (so called) grieving person is in on the scam.

What is the United Church’s position on communication with spirits?

What does Andrew think of messages from beyond via a medium?

1 Samuel 28:3-14 Acts 16:16-24

As far as I can tell, the United Church does not have any formal position on mediums. But that’s okay, because I have lots to say!!

For this question, the biblical witness is difficult for us. Our lesson from 1st Samuel shows a medium calling up the shadow of the prophet Samuel for king Saul, who had banned all mediums.

The ban was ordered by God through Samuel, basically because mediums or those who tried to use magic were competitors to God: they either served other gods or they tried to exercise powers that only belonged to God. There is nothing in the Bible that says they couldn’t do it, rather that doing it was wrong. That’s why the medium actually succeeded in calling up Samuel.

I think that the most entertaining part of this episode is what happens next, after our reading ends. The ghost of Samuel gets angry because of what Saul has done, and proceeds to tell him off; actually to prophesy against him. I think this is ironic and really funny. After all, Saul should have seen it coming.

Then in our Acts reading we have another example of this kind of thing. In this case it is a slave girl possessed by a spirit that gives her supernatural knowledge: a “spirit of divination”. Since she is a slave, her owners are making a pile of money from her talents. The apostle Paul & those with him find her annoying & disruptive, so Paul casts the spirit out of her.

Of course, the owners are mad because she’s lost her profitability. Since there is no law that allows them to sue for lost profits (note that I resisted the pun potential in “lost prophets”), they get Paul & Silas thrown into prison on trumped up charges.

Again, from the Biblical perspective, the idea of the existence of spirits or their summoning or exorcising is not in question. As I have mentioned previously in another blog, a lot of the medical understanding of those days was tied up with spirits. Most illness, physical or mental, was understood to be caused by possession. Therefore, if someone was healed, their evil spirit had obviously been cast out. We are not comfortable with this language in the 21st century, but back in the 1st century, it was the most natural thing in the world.

Since the Protestant reformation 500 years ago, our understanding of all of this has changed a lot. Most Protestant churches don’t formally believe in possession or exorcisms anymore, and those churches that do put severe limits on what constitutes a real possession.

The only time I ever did a house blessing was for a family that was afraid their house was haunted, and they were worried about their newborn daughter. I did not proceed because I believed in hauntings, but because I saw the need to perform a pastoral act. I knew that simple logic wouldn’t be enough to calm the anxious parents down, and I thought that the blessing would make them feel better afterwards. So I looked up a house blessing liturgy on the web, amended it so I could use it in good conscience, and proceeded to pray at the house for the family’s well being in it. The parents were very happy.

The United Church doesn’t have a policy because it doesn’t feel the need for one. We don’t believe that mediums are real.

We have a variety of ideas about how God takes care of life after death, and most of them tend to include some sense that God is too caring to allow a lot of dead spirits to wander around this world, able to interfere with this life after they have left it.

So what do we do with people who claim to be mediums? I will confess that I have never watched the show Long Island Medium (and don’t plan to), so I can’t comment specifically on what Teresa does there. Nevertheless, I do have some opinions.

Anyone who has watched the show The Mentalist will have a shortcut to my opinioin.

There are people in the world who are very sensitive: not to the spirits of the dead, but to the unspoken language that other people use all the time. Body language is a big part of it: those things we do that give away our moods whether we want them to or not. Beyond that, someone who knows what they are doing can read our choices of words, our silences, and even the way that we listen to other people’s words to discover a huge amount about us.

I know this because I am married to someone who can do this. Over the years it has really looked like mind-reading on occasion. Now, if Lori could only do this to me, I would conclude that’s just about being married for over 30 years. After all, each one of us has some capacity to learn to interpret other people’s unspoken communications. But Lori can do this with most of the people she meets, and has been able to do this as long as I have known her.

That’s what makes Lori such an exceptional counsellor. She has the ability to read all those things that people don’t know they are saying, and she combines that with a deep understanding of how people and relationships work. Lori does this so automatically that she has often expressed frustration at the fact that other people can’t see what seems obvious to her.

It is my opinion that the people who look like the most believable mediums have a large degree of this ability to read other people’s unspoken language, and that they combine it with other information, some of which may be common knowledge, or clever guesses. I strongly suspect that they have developed a skill at steering people away from noticing the wrong guesses they make, and get them excited by the right ones.

Naturally, they tell people what they want to hear: which is usually that their departed loved ones are at peace, or happy, or they have forgiven them, or that they love them. General and comforting things like that will make for happy customers, and are a lot easier to deliver than details like where Great Aunt Matilda hid the silver teapot before she died.

I mentioned The Mentalist earlier, where the hero, Patrick Jane, started as a carnival side-show psychic and eventually had his own television show doing the same thing. As he works with the police, he takes the position that all mediums are frauds.

I am inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt more than that. I can well imagine that someone who has grown up knowing how to understand people in the ways I have described above might well believe that their abilities are psychic, especially if friends or relatives have been telling them this for years. A lot of the reading of body language happens at a subconscious level so it can look really mysterious, even to the person doing it. Someone in this position may feel like they are just trying to help people, and have no fraudulent motives at all.

But by the time someone is in a carnival side-show, or fronting their own television show, I am inclined to view them with a great deal of skepticism, just as I am skeptical of the people who try to take Christianity to the masses on television in splashy ways, and coincidentally make themselves rich and famous along the way. I have to wonder what lines have to be crossed to achieve that sort of fame and publicity in an area that is founded on beliefs, that touches on people’s deepest hopes and fears. They may not have sold their souls to get there, but I suspect that their integrity has suffered a huge cost.

In short, I don’t believe in Mediums, or what they claim they can do. Some may honestly believe that they are in contact with something mystical but I suspect that the ones we hear about are simple frauds.

What they do can be explained in terms of human abilities, talents and skills that seem mysterious and mystical to those of us who aren’t as skilled. While they seem mystical, they are not. I can say this because I have a lot more ability to read people now than I used to. I have been observing Lori for over 30 years, and learning from her advice and wisdom. I will never be able to do what she can, but I have learned that it is not mystical or magical.

And even more importantly, I don’t believe that when we leave this life God intends for us to hang around as Spirit Guides or even as post-mortem life-coaches. What God has in store for us is beyond imagination, and will keep us plenty busy in the next life, so that we can leave this present life to those who still inhabit it.

Ask Andrew: Unequal Children

Ask Andrew” is an annual opportunity for members of Knox to ask questions of faith and religion. Andrew answers them in the Sunday morning service, and now in this blog. Enjoy!

Ask Andrew Part 5: Unequal Lives for the Children of the World

 Several weeks ago, during the Children’s prayer, thanks was given for the health, care and good enjoyed by our children. Around the world, not all children enjoy the same level of these benefits. Does the United Church have a rationale for why all children do not enjoy the same life style? Does God favour us more than others?

Matthew 18:1-5 Habakkuk 2:4-5

When we talk about our children we hit some really hot buttons, especially young children, whom we see as innocent. They can’t be blamed for what country they are born in or which parents they are born to. They start off as tiny, helpless, totally at the mercy of others in life. When you add to this that as Christians we are familiar with our Matthew passage, where Jesus uses a child as the example of what God looks for in humans to enter the kingdom of heaven. With all that in the mix, I could see how we might feel inspired to ask questions like the one above.

The feeling behind the question is obvious: if the minister can lead our children in a prayer of thanks for all the good things we enjoy here, what about all those children who don’t have the same good things, whose prayers might be really different? Why hasn’t God given those children the same benefits?

The practical problem is that children do not exist independently. All children are connected to their culture, their history and the place they live. We have to ask the question a different way, which is already contained in the question itself: Does God favour us more than others?

There are some churches today who would say “yes” to that. They preach something called a “prosperity gospel”, which takes a very superficial interpretation of scripture, and turns it into the idea that if you are doing well in life, in business, then it means that God is pleased with you and is blessing you with prosperity. There are lots of individual passages of the bible you can find to support this idea, and whole books you have to ignore at the same time, including most of the teachings of Jesus.

If we want to try to tie God’s blessing to a person’s individual prosperity, the closest we can realistically get is to talk about people being born into a land “flowing with milk and honey”; in other words, a land with lots of natural resources. Then we could raise the question of whether God prefers (for example) those who live in jungles to those who live in deserts.

As soon as we do that, though, we have to admit that some of the nations of this world with the most natural resources, such as arable land, water and minerals, are also some of the nations with the poorest and hungriest children. And if we look farther we discover that a lot of these nations were colonies of more powerful nations a century ago or less, and are now deeply in debt to those same wealthy nations. We find a complex web of debt, cash crops, restrictions on land use and water use, mining interests that profit those outside the nation more than those inside it and displace people, including children, as is going on right now in the Philippines.

What this actually represents is a profound difference between what God wants and what we humans have put into place over the years. It is a question of basic justice for all people, children included, and the United Church has a lot to say about that.

Does God favour us more than others? God doesn’t need to; we have learned to favour ourselves.

That may feel like an unfair statement. I personally don’t know many people who have personally gone and made colonies of other places, or deliberately worked to oppress other people. But we all benefit from these parts of our world. Maybe the banks we use hold debts from poor nations. Maybe our mutual funds or pension funds have investments in companies that are dealing unfairly with people in poor countries to increase their profits and our returns. We participate in structures that allow us to benefit from the poverty of others and at the same time remain blissfully unaware.

The simple fact that our immigration policy is set up to welcome the brightest and best of other lands, while putting as many barriers in the way of the poor and desparate, should give us pause. Not only is it a comment on how cautious we are about sharing what we have, it is also a good way to prevent those other countries from advancing as we cherry-pick the people that are best able to help them.

And that’s just Canada. There are other nations that are much more willing to take advantage of the relative weakness and poverty of a land to negotiate deals that make the rich richer.

There was a time when empire building was considered a natural and good thing. It was called “social darwinism”, where a nation’s success and ability to defeat others was a sign that it was socially and even morally superior. I have recently read Margaret Macmillan’s book The War that Ended Peace, about the lead-up to WWI. One of the fascinating aspects is that even then, just 100 yrs ago, it was considered normal and appropriate for Europe’s “Great Powers” to openly plan to conquer and colonize “inferior” nations, and use their colonial resources to build up their home countries.

That apalls us today. The Russian annexation of Crimea is typical of the kind of thing those countries did as part of extending their empires in those days. We see that happening now and we (quite rightly) become very anxious, because we do remember the lessons of history, and we would hate to see another huge military conflict erupt.

One of the ways we have avoided military conflicts through the days of the Cold War into the present is by building economic empires with contracts and trade agreements instead of guns. The attitude of taking from the poor and giving to the rich has not been expressed out loud very much, but it is a basic colonial attitude, and it has controlled a lot of the deals we have put in place.

God does not approve of this way of doing things. When we look at our reading from Habakkuk, we find we can recognize in our modern world people, companies and countries that fit that remarkable description of greed:

They open their throats wide as Sheol;
     like Death they never have enough.
They gather all nations for themselves,
     and collect all peoples as their own.

I am not saying that we are all bad. Canadians have, through the years, worked hard to develop many struggling nations. Canada used to have a really good reputation in Africa for helping out until the work of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) was cut way back a few years ago.

And I am not saying all of this so we can go around feeling guilty. Guilt doesn’t really accomplish anything very much.

I am saying this because it is true. It is the structure of the world we live in: a structure that we humans have put into place over the years. It is a structure that contributes to the reality of whose children are healthy and well fed and whose children can’t have enough food or clean water. It is a structure that allows us to have an adequate supply of HIV medications while countries in Africa have a whole generation of orphans growing up because their parents have died of HIV and AIDS; not only because of a shortage of medications but often because of a basic lack of clean needles and a lack of infrastructure to get people to where treatment is available.

God has given us the wonderful gift of free will. With that comes the truly scary consequence of responsibility.

The inequality of the children of the world is a situation that we humans have created. In part this has been by discovering all kinds of wonderful ways to live longer and healthier lives; to have more and better food and medicines. In part it is by creating a world where only a select group of people can really benefit from these advances.

We can’t blame God for these inequities, and we can’t expect God to solve them.

We can look at our investments and consider how ethical and just they are. We can push our banks and funds to behave in ways that do not hurt poorer nations. We can check out the UCC website to see what the church is doing with its investments to try and make changes that will help balance out the lives of the children of the world. We can consider our Canadian agencies and policies and work to become a nation that is once again at the forefront of helping others.

There is actually a lot we can do once we start looking at the situation and decide we’re not prepared to live with the injustice.

And we can thank God for children; because if we only had to consider adults it would be far too easy to dismiss their problems as somehow their own fault.

It is when we look at the lives of children that we really see the ways injustices have affected the lives of the people of the world. It is when we look at the children and their struggles that we find the motivation to make changes.

Ask Andrew Part 4: The Devil

Ask Andrew” is an annual opportunity for members of Knox to ask questions of faith and religion. Andrew answers them in the Sunday morning service, and now in this blog. Enjoy!

Ask Andrew Part 4: The Devil

Do we believe in the devil as an actual entity, opposing God, or do we consider the “devil” as a synonym for the evil that lives in our hearts?

Isaiah 14:12-15          Revelation 12:7-9

To be sure that this answer wasn’t all about my own opinions, (and because I was curious) I went through all the faith statements the United Church of Canada (UCC) has adopted over the years. Interestingly, I found NO reference to the devil at all! There was lots about Sin, some stuff about evil, but the only reference to “demonic” in the most recent statement:

Song of Faith (2006): He (Jesus) forgave sins and freed those held captive by all manner of demonic powers.

I was not surprised: the UCC a very modern church really: it was formed after modern critical examination of scripture was firmly established across denominations, and so church leaders felt free to question and challenge long-held doctrines right from the start.

The bible’s actual teachings about the devil are all over the map: for example, in the second creation story in Genesis (Ch. 2), sin enters the world because of the serpent. In the story, it seems to be taken literally as the animal: there is no mention of any spiritual agency, no devil discussed. Such a spiritual comparison is not odd (as we can see in our Revelation reading), but it is not made here.

In book of Job Satan is presented as one of God’s senior advisors. He has the job of testing and challenging God’s work to make sure it is functioning properly. Kings and potentates in the middle east who were wise made sure that they had someone like this in their courts as a kind of “loyal opposition”, or maybe an auditor.

The Isaiah lesson listed above is where we get the name “Lucifer”, (Latin for “morning-star”). This passage is actually a critique of the king of Babylon. The morning-star is actually the planet Venus, the brightest light aside from the sun that is seen at the morning & evening times, and it was a name used as a metaphor for important kings in ancient times: “rising stars” if you will, suggesting that their brightness was almost challenging the light of the sun (the PR spin of the day).

The original message of Isaiah is a familiar one: leaders who are too proud, who consider themselves so powerful as to be almost gods themselves, will be put in their place by the only real God. It is a warning against hubris, over-weening pride.

This lesson, as a metaphor, has been used to create a whole mythology about Satan, starting as an angel and then falling from heaven when cast out by God. Jesus seems to be quoting this image in Luke 10:18: He said to them, “I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning.” The author of Revelations uses this same image in the lesson listed at the start of this blog, to describe the spiritual struggle being worked out between good and evil in the lives of the Christians of that time. Clearly, the Romans were the evil ones and powerful in a way that must have felt superhuman. The idea that God still had double their forces to wipe them out must have been very reassuring in those days: it was a guarantee that however strong evil may seem, God is twice as strong.

By the time of the middle ages when education was in real trouble, most people took all this metaphorical stuff literally, and church leaders used it to terrify people into being good and faithful.

So what we have is a metaphorical warning to a presumptuous king of Babylon which is gradually re-imagined as the devil (or Satan, or Lucifer), a literal person (or maybe three, if you really get into demonology), with a pile of servant devils and demons, those rebel angels who had been cast out of heaven onto the earth and were now trying to tempt us and try to lead us away from God.

A number of scholars during the Protestant Reformation tried to throw out this idea as plain superstition, but not everyone was ready to let go of the literal idea of devils. For example, Martin Luther, in his hymn A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, makes reference to them in the line “and though this world, with devils filled, should threaten to undo us”. He was a bright, scholarly man, but he believed that devils were real and present. He even threw his inkwell at the devil one night when he was feeling tempted (I have heard that modern tourist guides occasionally throw more ink on the wall to refresh the spot for visitors to admire).

Modern theological thinking is not like that and the United Church was formed particularly by the influence of that kind of modern thought. After all, it had to be the kind of thinking that challenges old assumptions enough to join up denominations with traditionally dissonant theologies.

So I think it is safe to say that officially, the United Church does not believe that the devil is a real person. Beyond that, though, the complete omission of the devil in all the official faith statements says more: it suggests that even using the devil as a metaphor for the evil in us or in the world is problematic.

Actually, the idea of a devil, even as a metaphor, is a problem for monotheism.

We humans tend to be dualists. We think in pairs: left and right, right and wrong, male and female, good and evil, heaven and earth, God and the Devil.

Ancient religions in the Middle East had pantheons with both good and evil gods (sometimes called demons instead of gods). Faced with this, the Hebrew theologians said: NO, there isn’t any version of a pantheon, there is only God. As a result, when they struggled with the problem of evil in the world, their answers usually resulted in the idea that someone deserved it. Perhaps God was rendering a holy judgement (a frequent interpretation of droughts, plagues, etc.). It could also be that some human agency caused it (a good interpretation when a foreign army invaded). Typically, whenever something bad happened, the reason could either be traced to God or a human. Even in the book of Job,where Satan is involved, it is only with the permission of God.

The idea of a devil being opposed to God didn’t fit the idea of their being only one God, but we humans have a really hard time thinking that way. As Christianity developed, and particularly as we encompassed more and more former Pagans (who had no trouble thinking about multiple gods) we started to imagine that duality in divine terms: a devil to oppose God.

Since the understanding taht we believe in one all-powerful God was pretty well established, we defined God’sadversary as one of God’s own angels: a supernatural being who became prideful and rebelled, and who persuaded 1/3 of the angels of heaven to join the rebellion (Read Paradise Lost, it will give you all the details).

The United Church probably dismissed the idea of real devils out of hand. It undoubtedly also saw the dangers of devil metaphors:

1: Talking about the devil is a way of externalizing evil, of pushing it outside ourselves and even denying responsibility (remember the comedian Flip Wilson: “the Devil made me do it!”?). The UCC emphasizes Justice, which includes the need for people to take responsibility for their actions. Talking about the Devil can give those responsible a way to shift the blame for their evil.

2: Talking about the devil can make regular people who are trying to fight evil feel like they are up against superhuman powers. Even knowing that it is all metaphorical, the image can be persuasive, and depressing.

The main struggle would have been how to talk about all the exorcisms Jesus was reported to have done. This has been resolved by re-defining demon possession as being the language of that era; the way issues of physical and mental health were understood in that society. We do not understand these as cases of real demon possession, but as examples of Jesus bringing healing to people’s lives, while the people witnessing it understood it as demons being driven out. The understanding would be that the healing was real: the demons were symbolic.

It is significant to me that it is only in our latest statement of faith that we have talked about demonic powers. Clearly “demonic” is being used metaphorically, but it intrigues me that it has taken us since 1925 to become comfortable using such a word openly.  I think one reason is that our society is talking more and more about things like this.

Remember when Buffy the Vampire Slayer had been on for so many seasons that vampires got boring? The show introduced demons for her to fight. Very exciting!

Now have Supernatural in its 9th season, with the brothers Sam and Dean Winchester, All-American demon hunters. In the current season, God has gone AWOL, and demons are running rampant on the earth. All the angels have all been tossed out of heaven and are playing power politics with the lives of ordinary, unsuspecting people.

This is popular stuff and the makers of Supernatural have made a point of taking most of it, including the names and histories of angels and demons, from Christian myth and legend (their research has been pretty impressive, actually).

I think that this theme is popular now because so many people feel like their lives are in the control of malevolent forces these days. The dangerous powers beyond their control are not literal demons (most would agree) but metaphorical ones: maybe capitalist market forces, or international terrorism, or collapsing banks, or security agencies that make up their own rules, or powerful criminals who seem to be above the law, or people like Vladimir Putin who can annex part of the Ukraine and look like they are going to get away with it ( or worse, who might not get away with it but are so arrogant that don’t care if they start WWIII as they try).

The king of Babylon was that arrogant. Isaiah called him “Lucifer” and warned of his downfall. With this kind of example in our modern world, maybe it is time to bring talk of the Devil back as a metaphor for powerful evil forces in the world.

At the same time we remember that warning expression: “Speak of the Devil and he’s sure to appear”? I would suggest that we need to be careful if we speak of the devil not because we are afraid that some literal devil or demon will show up to torment us, but because of the dangers I identified earlier:

— the tendency of people to deny their own responsibility for things that go wrong

— and the possibility that people will become resigned to the idea that there are evil powers in the world that are so great that we cannot combat them.

We don’t believe in either of those things. We don’t believe that anyone gets to blame “the system” for the choices we make, so say it was okay because “everyone else was doing it.”

We don’t believe that there is any system, or power, or group, or individual that is so overwhelmingly powerful that God’s people, working faithfully, cannot overcome it. God works through us, and God is greater than any evil, concrete or metaphorical.

And in the end, that is my personal answer. I don’t believe that the devil is real. Evil is certainly real, and we can talk of the devil as a metaphor for evil. But perhaps it is best if we don’t. We don’t want to make evil seem stronger than it is.

rocking in Montreal

trip to Union United Church in Montreal

My daughter Jane and I and Erin Norman and her three daughters braved the snow to travel to Montreal to see the Union United Church men’s gospel choir perform in their home environment on the morning of Sunday March 30th. The choir was superb radiating energy, with the congregation clapping along and swaying in their seats.

I heartily recommend a trip to Montreal to see the men’s gospel choir (combined with perhaps a little shopping) to anyone that is interested. You won’t disappointed.

We were made to feel very welcome and we got to know more members of the church and the chorus.