Knox United Church Nepean

Face to Face with God

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.

Face to Face with God

Scriptures: Deuteronomy 18:15-20, Mark 1:21-28

When I was a teenager we had a bible study discussing the Samaritan Woman at the Well who said she knew that another prophet would come, and she concluded Jesus was that prophet.

I had assumed that all the things that pointed to Jesus coming had come from Isaiah and other prophets. I also knew that the Samaritans didn’t have those books; they were said to share the first five books -the books of Moses

I asked my minister how the woman would have known this prophesy. He said he didn’t know, but he’d look into it, and he did. And so I learned about our Deuteronomy lesson today in which Moses promises another prophet like himself.

At the core of this is a very natural human issue: we can’t bear to look upon the face of God.

It’s not a rule, but a reflection of how overwhelming it must be for we limited humans to come face-to-face with infinity – with the power to create the universe. More than once the prophetic writings describe how people dealing with the Creator want to hide, want to die. It’s beyond scary: it’s mind-blowing!

We have a hard time dealing with getting to the moon, with all the challenges of getting safely out of our gravity well, out of Earth orbit, to circle around this smaller planet that circles us. What must it be like to encounter the Being who decided what the speed of light should be?

It’s not hard to imagine why the ancient prophets considered it to be a shattering experience: existential in nature. Wouldn’t it be preferable to live your life in peace, doing your job, raising your kids, not being disturbed by the deep questions of existence, not being challenged in a way that shakes you to your core?

The pairing of this Deuteronomy lesson with the lesson from Mark suggests the same thing the Woman at the Well said: Jesus must be that prophet, that person who comes with as much authority as Moses, which is great, from a Christian point of view. We consider Jesus to be pretty hot stuff, don’t we?

But the challenge we face is the same one faced by the people who asked Moses to stand between them and God. We are scared of dealing directly with our Creator.

And what did Jesus do in his ministry? He promised that God loves each of us. He talked about the fulfillment of those sayings in the prophetic books, about ordinary people seeing visions, dreaming dreams and being messengers from God. He said that we would be the ones to make that come true; that the gift of prophesy would be spread around and that we would deal with God face-to-face.

In our Reformed tradition, we have taken that seriously. It’s why we don’t have priests: we have ministers. My job is to interpret scripture and help people understand God, not to stand in between God and anyone else. We get to approach God directly without fear of being wiped out.

The Christian church has existed for 2000 years now and we have coped with our connection to God, sometimes poorly, sometimes well, but always most intensely when life has thrown challenges at us, when we’ve been shaken out of our comfortable ruts and called to consider deeply what it means to be a follower of Jesus in practical, life-changing ways.

Knox has existed for 61 years. This is something to celebrate, certainly, but quite a short portion of that 2000 year church history and right now we are feeling a bit like those early prophets. We wonder if we are facing an existential threat. We wonder what the future holds and how we can possibly do what Jesus teaches with fewer resources than we have ever had before. It’s a bit like meeting God face-to-face: we feel overwhelmed and we wonder if we can survive.

The good thing about a 2000 year history is that it gives you a perspective that calms you down; it shows just how many challenges churches have faced in the past, and not only survived but come out thriving, often with a fresh vision of why they exist at all.

In my first charge I had one congregation that survived a tornado that took a massive bite out of the church roof and destroyed the brick tower so that, in the words of one of my elders, it looked like a Polled Hereford. That happened in the 1950s and by the time I got there the group was small but mighty. Sometimes only three or four gathered in the summer but they were convinced of their value to the community and they are still going strong today. They even rebuilt the tower after I left.

Another Point had to endure a conflict that I can barely imagine: there was strong opposition to the first purchase of an organ, one of those little pedal ones that gave the organist exercise. Some called it the “instrument of the Devil” and wanted to stay with the centuries old ways of having a precentor with his tuning fork leading the singing of the Psalms without any instruments but human voices involved.

The new organ was brought in for the first choir practise on Saturday. On Sunday morning the congregation gathered to find that it had been carried out and dumped in the cemetery at the back – nobody locked churches in those days.

Did they get all excited and have a fuss about it? Did they call a board of inquiry and discover who did it? No, they picked up the organ, dusted it off, carried it in and began their first worship service with this new instrument. Very practical people!

Challenges happen: some are bigger than others; the financial challenges facing Knox right now are probably the most challenging this congregation has faced in its 61 years.

But if history has anything to teach us, it is that we can rise to the challenge. What feels like an existential crisis is actually a call to examine who we are, to re-discover what matters most, to find a new sense of direction and discover the new possibilities ahead of us.

After 61 years we are still a young congregation; we are still learning to walk and this experience will challenge us and shape us into the Knox that will be here in the future.

As we face our challenges let us remember that Jesus promised us that we could be face-to-face with God and not only survive, but also come out inspired, prophetic and able to see a new way of doing things.

Let’s prove Jesus right and step forward boldly to face our challenges like the prophets we are called to be.

Amen.

Go Where? Do What? Are You Crazy?

Go Where? Do What? Are You Crazy?

Scriptures: Jonah 3, Mark 1:14-20

I love the contrast displayed by our readings: Jesus calls Simon and Andrew, James and John who leave their boats and follow him; God calls Jonah and something dramatically different happens. You wouldn’t know it from today’s reading; all you can see is his success – the transformation of Nineveh.

But chapter one of the book of Jonah is where God calls Jonah, a man who didn’t normally have anything to do with boats, to go East and preach to Nineveh. Jonah promptly took off in the other direction – he booked passage on a boat West to Spain, at the far end of the Mediterranean, the other end of the world, as far as Jonah knew.

This is not someone obediently following the call of God. This is someone fleeing God’s call. To summarize the story: God makes a big storm, the sailors panic; Jonah is asleep in the boat, they wake him up, and throw the dice to figure out who to blame for the storm; Jonah confesses that he is fleeing from God; the sailors want to turn back to land; Jonah says, “No; throw me overboard”. He’s so desperate to avoid God’s call that he’d rather die by drowning! The sailors reluctantly pitch him into the sea and the water goes instantly calm; then the whale, or big fish, swallows Jonah to save him from drowning and three days later spits him up on the shores of Israel.

Has Jonah learned his lesson? Yes! In today’s reading we see that God called Jonah a second time and Jonah went East to Nineveh and preached as he was told. At the very least Jonah had learned that you can’t run away from God.

But he wasn’t happy with God. He didn’t like his assignment. He did like the message: Nineveh was the enemy; the capital city of the Assyrian empire which would one day destroy Israel and scatter 10 of the 12 tribes; he wanted to see them destroyed.

The final outcome is fascinating: the Ninevites listened to the warning and God repented: God changed direction and refused to destroy them. Chapter 4 is all about Jonah sulking because his prophesy worked and the people were saved.

I was thinking of Jonah when I wrote the sermon title: Go Where? Do What? Are You Crazy? His hatred for these enemies was so strong that he couldn’t face the idea that God might save them. He couldn’t handle God’s love for these people who were different. And their animals! In chapter 4 God specifically mentions being concerned for the animals.

God is forcing Jonah out of his comfort zone in making this reluctant prophet think about God possibly loving foreigners, even loving animals enough to save them from destruction. We should understand that reluctance because we still argue about the importance of animals today and we are seeing more and more examples of xenophobia (the hatred and fear of other people who are different) and violent acts used to hurt or terrorize folks, even in Canada, which we like to think of as so kind and welcoming.

It’s pretty black-and-white when we see this happening to Jonah and we can feel superior to him. We don’t share his parochial attitude.

The trick is, Jonah wasn’t dumb; he knew that following God’s call would challenge him. Simon and Andrew, James and John had very little idea of what they were in for. Their work with fish and nets didn’t prepare them for the profound changes they would experience. Jesus, in quite a short time, transformed them from people who caught fish to people who changed other people. If we read through the gospels we see how they stumbled, over and over when the lessons they faced seemed impossible or didn’t make sense to them and when Jesus’ teachings really challenged the way they understood the world.

Jonah was bright enough to know how God works and honest enough to act on it, even though running away didn’t work. Even there, Jonah had to change his understanding. Like most people of his age, he believed that gods were centred on geography and had a limited reach beyond their land and people. Boy was he wrong!

When God calls us, we’d better be prepared to discover that we’re wrong about some things, probably things we take for granted, things that have always seemed obvious, as they do to everyone, until God shows us a better way. We have to get past the old normal and learn to create a better, new normal.

Even this understanding is unsettling, in a way. The generation that came out of two world wars and a depression emphasized their desire for God to be dependable, steadfast, reliable, unchanging. You can see why. Psychologically, a traumatized world would want an unchanging God, but history shows us that God is very flexible and God calls us to change all the time.

We can rely on God to be unchanging in some ways: God’s love is constant; God’s care for us is never-ending. But part of God’s care for us includes encouraging us to grow and change; to become more mature and wise; to take that love that God gives us and to offer it more widely than we ever thought possible.

Parts of that will unsettle us; recognizing new truths will be uncomfortable at times and we may feel like arguing with God. It’s okay: God can handle it and so can we, if we remain open to God’s leading.

Jonah’s mistake was to try and run away. That never works. God doesn’t give up on us, another way that God is constant. So instead of trying to flee, let’s stay engaged, wrestle with God, and discover what new things are part of our calling. Amen.

Calling in the Night

Calling in the Night

Some Context: I shared this sermon a short time after I announced my plans to leave Knox this coming summer. My family and I will be moving to New Brunswick. Whether I will be in a congregation once there is still unknown.

Scriptures: 1 Samuel 3:1-10, John 1:43-51

Our two scripture lessons today are about being called. The call by Jesus is pretty straightforward: it’s a verbal invitation to Nathaniel, shared by Philip. Many sermons focus on how we can all potentially serve as the person who invites someone else to Jesus.

Nathaniel is skeptical at first and is persuaded by Jesus’ vision of him under the tree. That’s all stuff we can imagine: we know lots of skeptical people; maybe we are skeptical ourselves; and we have learned, even in a small way, that we stick with our faith because we see it work, maybe not with miracles or visions of angels, but with things that come together in ways we cannot fully explain.

When I was a child, it was normal to think of God in traditional terms: ”the big beard in the sky,” as some have said. As an adult trained in the sciences, taking biblical imagery and turning it into something literal doesn’t work for me, but neither does the idea of a mindless universe in a meaningless cycle of Big Bang and Big Crunch.

Some modern Christians have abandoned the idea of “God” for something much more nebulous, possibly a cosmic force that is completely impersonal, while others are prepared to consider the question of whether the great guiding force of reality has a personality and if so, what is it like? Does it make any sense that anything that powerful and complex, whether you call it God or not, would have any personal interest in me, a single human on a small planet orbiting a small yellow sun in an outer arm of a slightly smaller-than-average spiral galaxy?

I don’t think it’s a question of capacity. We can imagine an intelligence great enough to encompass an entire universe in functional detail. The question is really one of intent, or interest: if I were so great, so involved in ordering the orbitals of electrons and supervising the blinding power of supernovae, would I care? Would I bother with someone so insignificant?

And that’s a theological question to which our answers tend to be limited by our own attitudes and inclinations. The ways we imagine power are often the ways we imagine God, so we end up thinking that God is very human and not necessarily a very nice human, either.

Remember, the teachings of Jesus were all about overturning that tendency: correcting our thoughts about God to include the meek inheriting the earth, which makes us consider that something, someone so powerful and all encompassing has enough self-restraint not to snuff us out whenever we are annoying.

Actually, the story of Noah’s ark taught us that centuries before Jesus, as a kind of “been there, done that, bought the t-shirt” story. Jesus focused that understanding into something to hold up as a contrast to the Roman Empire, with its distant, powerful, uncaring, even murderous ruler, to suggest that God works in ways that are subtle, quiet, under the radar and often personal.

After all, it was Jesus who referred to God as Abba: “Daddy”, a very personal term that wasn’t a claim of divinity for himself. That was an example of the type of personal closeness that Jesus expected every person to seek with our creator.

This is where we come back to the call of Samuel, a child, certainly under the age of 12, hearing a voice in the night and not recognizing it as the call of God. He is advised by a corrupt old priest – Eli – who, despite all his faults and failings, was still able to recognize God at work and give Samuel enough guidance to actually listen for God’s call.

This story can serve as a template for us despite the fact that very few people can ever legitimately claim to hear God speaking in clear and discernible words. That mysterious, quiet urging we hear might be our creator trying to work through us or even just lead us in a particular direction.

But it’s usually not as obvious as a quiet call in the night and we may need advice about it, even advice from someone imperfect. I’m always impressed with the way the Bible shows God working through very flawed people, like Eli.

It is normal to feel unprepared, uncertain. This is God calling a little kid to become a prophet! It feels like an impossible task, profoundly dangerous too, because his first job was to denounce Eli and his sons who were abusing their priestly authority to enrich themselves and to force women who brought sacrifices to God to have sex with them. (Corruption and abuse of position are not modern inventions).

Think of it from Samuel’s perspective: Eli is his boss; he provides Samuel’s room and board. What’s to stop Eli or his sons from simply killing the child to silence this critical prophesy? That’s a big fear, and Samuel was called to step out in faith to do what he was called to do even though he faced terrible personal risk.

God’s calling to us may not be quite that dramatic but it often pushes us out of our comfort zones. It can call for courage; it can call us to trust that God will show us a way forward even though we can’t see it yet.

A modern comparison to Samuel would be whistle-blowers; people who speak out about abuses of power even though they are risking their jobs and maybe even their safety and freedom. We’re impressed by those people and we see how their lives change, sometimes dramatically and generally in ways that make them less comfortable.

Samuel had his life change as he moved from being a servant of the high priest to an itinerant prophet. His life wasn’t as comfortable or full of status but it was much more interesting.

I announced earlier that I would be leaving Knox. This feels to me like a step of faith, like my family and I are following God’s lead. Things are going to change and there are enough uncertain bits that parts of it are quite scary, but we are trusting God to provide us with a way forward.

Knox has been talking about its future for over a year now and this congregation has been going through a process in which we are trying to discern the voice of God calling this community of faith into the future.

It is inevitable that we feel overwhelmed at times like the child Samuel did and that we see potential dangers and risks. Those might be the biggest images in our minds, looming up like an iceberg in front of the Titanic! Okay, that sounds a bit dramatic, but fear and panic can do that to our perceptions.

What we need to look for here is that seed of faith that allows us to step forward, without knowing every detail of what is ahead, that allows us to believe that God will guide us into this uncertain future and provide a way forward that we can survive, maybe in a new form, like Samuel: a servant in a comfortable household, transformed into a prophet who is not always welcome.

I believe that God, who is beyond our imagining in scope and power, cares enough about the details of this creation to call us to be personally involved. I believe that we are called to be engaged in creating this world where vulnerability replaces power, where mystery is even more welcome than certainty, and where we are part of God’s unfolding work.

The end and outcome of God’s plan are beyond what we can see, but I believe it is worth listening, and following our call. Amen.

Improving Our Attitude

This particular sermon was never preached: I contracted COVID just two days before I was to present it. It appears for the first time here.

Improving our Attitude

Scriptures: Ecclesiastes 3:1-13; Revelation 21:1-6a

It is New Year’s Eve and the scriptures recommended for New Years are familiar ones: they are the same each year!

This is my 20^th New Year at Knox and you’d think I would have said all I have to say about these readings, but something really struck me this year that I think is worth mentioning.

There is a progression through the readings, not only a progression through time but also a progression of attitude that we should be alert to as Christians.

Our first lesson, Ecclesiastes, is very familiar. The Byrds even made it into a pop song in 1965: “to everything there is a season” and the words they added over and over were “turn, turn, turn”. This was very insightful because it reflected the way that Ecclesiastes was talking about a cycle through time: that patterns repeat themselves; and it describes humanity as being part of this greater cycle of life.

It’s a very philosophical perspective that doesn’t describe us as being in charge, or at the top of creation but rather as a part of something greater than we are and it encourages us to accept that fact.

Ecclesiastes is attributed to King Solomon, whose wisdom is renowned through history, although some clues suggest it may be later, even centuries later.

It may be a way of re-considering the attitudes we find in Psalm 8 which scholars agree was written by King David, Solomon’s father, on the one hand acknowledged as “a man after God’s own heart” for his passionate faith in God but also acknowledged as a flawed king because of his sometimes impulsive behaviour.

Psalm 8 talks about God being divine over all creation but then it adds a section about the status of people. It reflects those parts of the creation stories in Genesis where human beings are given authority over animals and other parts of creation. The traditional Rabbinic interpretation of Psalm 8 is that the great status given to humans comes at a price: our first and last thoughts each day must be of God who puts all things into perspective, just as the first and last lines of the Psalm reflect the glory of God.

The Psalm is less passive than Ecclesiastes. It gives us a sense of responsibility, which is something we need after decades of feeling like we could strip the value out of every bit of the world and dump the waste into the air, soil and water. We are tempted to focus on the human authority part and forget the context: that God is the higher power. We like the bits of the bible that tell us we are in charge and we resist the bits that make us accountable.

Then, finally, we come to the reading from the Book of Revelations, the last book written for the Bible, and it talks about the end of the world!

Admittedly, it’s in positive terms with the end becoming a new beginning: an amazing new beginning with God actually living amongst us. It’s a remarkable vision of love and connection but it has also been interpreted as a huge elevation of humanity, with the rest of creation being destroyed. We seem to be able to turn almost anything into an excuse for claiming power.

This kind of thinking, the kind where the old gets thrown away and replaced by the new, has contributed hugely to our society’s attitude to how we use this planet: that it’s disposable! God will replace it anyway; so why not?

This was expressed publicly under Ronald Reagan when his secretary of the environment, James Watt, opened up national parks for strip-mining and coastal waters for oil and gas drilling because he believed that Jesus would return soon and judge us harshly if we hadn’t used up all the resources God had put at our disposal.

That’s an extreme example of the attitude but the underlying assumptions informed the industrial approach to life: it assumes that we are in charge of creation and we get to do whatever we want. For some it might have been an actual point of faith but for most it was a convenient way to justify what they were doing to get rich, with some handy bits of scripture taken out of context.

At long last we are questioning that attitude, those assumptions of superiority and control. Climate change is a big part of that as we evaluate the damage we have done by our reckless burning of fossil fuels and the other scars we have left on the planet.

Similar challenges came up in our culture in the 1960s and 1970s as the West started to pay attention to Buddhism and Hinduism with their visions of the cycle of life and as some people actually tried to learn from indigenous attitudes in North America. It was all considered pretty hippy-dippy at the time; anyone in charge rejected it as being unrealistic and uneconomic.

But now, as our approach to the planet is demonstrated to be unsustainable and destructive and as it is even labelled as colonial – the anathema of indigenous attitudes to creation – we realize we have to definitively reject this “end of the world” attitude.

After 2000 years without a second coming, with its images of the destruction of the old and the creation of the new, we find ourselves destroying the work of the creator we claim to adore.

All the bad stuff in Revelations was supposed to be a consequence of the Antichrist taking charge. If you want to get all symbolic about it, we have put ourselves into the place of the Antichrist, which is a very sobering thought.

The idea of the second coming was developed and refined in a time of persecution: Jesus and his followers lived under the tyranny of Rome; when Revelations was written, Christians were being actively martyred; so, you can see why a cataclysmic end of the world would look attractive.

But we don’t have that excuse anymore: we have been in charge for centuries; we have claimed authority over nature, at best paying lip service to God’s sovereignty; we have done whatever would bring us profit, without concern about final consequences and without accepting the accountability Psalm 8 tells us should come with this power.

The New Year is a good time to remind ourselves of that ancient Biblical wisdom: that the existence of creation is circular; that we are not in charge; we are not the final authority.

Let us acknowledge that creation has cycles we need to live within and that the things we do are being done to God’s world. We will have to answer to our creator as well as the future generations who are here now and will continue to follow us.

For God’s sake, for creation’s sake, and for the sake of uncounted future generations, as we enter this New Year let us resolve to do better.

Amen.

Joy in Challenging Times

Joy in Challenging Times

Scripture: Isaiah 61:1-4; Luke 1:46-55

Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights started recently and CBC reporters interviewed several Jewish leaders. A common theme to the interviews was whether it felt okay to be having a joyful celebration while so much violence was happening in Israel and Palestine.

I was uncomfortable with some elements of this. Depending on the reporter, it might seem that people were being encouraged to feel guilty about expressing joy while so many others were suffering.

We could ask the same question of any Canadian. Here we are safe in this country while Russia is invading Ukraine, while small but deadly conflicts happen in the middle East, in Africa, in Asia and local violence happens in the Caribbean, Central and South America.

What do we do with joyful celebrations like Hanukkah and Christmas while others are suffering?

Some version or other of this has been an issue for centuries. Just ask Charles Dickens and his characters in A Christmas Carol, where he asked the same basic justice question, not about violence, but about the uneven distribution of wealth and about poverty and starvation in the midst of the wealthiest city on Earth at the time.

He was treating it as a prophetic call to the wealthy, to share the wealth with those around them; an ancient call of both Judaism and Christianity, one that we’ve tried to address through taxation and social reforms, but still needs a lot more work.

This year the same basic question has been raised around other kinds of suffering: war, terrorism, a profound lack of peace in a season when peace is celebrated.

I would start to answer this question by looking back at scripture. Peace, war and violence are all ancient themes and frankly, the birth of Jesus addresses all of them.

Our Isaiah lesson promises a return home. People who had been taken from their land as prisoners of war, as a captive population, were promised a return after 70 years as refugees. The joy of this lesson is palpable. The people were still in captivity when this was written and first proclaimed but the joy it offered would have been all the sweeter in contrast to the suffering they were experiencing. This was a joy that would have come mingled with hope, and a vision of lasting peace in a safe homeland. In that very difficult situation there was lots of room for Joy.

Christians have always interpreted Isaiah’s words as bringing a vision of what Jesus would offer in his ministry: a hope beyond what was fulfilled in Isaiah’s own time; a reconciliation that went beyond Judah and Israel to become available to all oppressed people.

Mary’s Son of Praise, often called the Magnificat, reveals much the same thing. She is giving a prophetic utterance: in which the proud and powerful are brought down; the hungry are filled with good things; the lowly lifted up; and ancient promises to Israel are fulfilled.

(I am particularly impressed with the line “he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.” We have seen that the proud in modern times have pretty stubborn imaginations of themselves, and I like this image.)

Matthew’s gospel tells us that Jesus was born near the end of the reign of Herod the Great, 3 BCE, and makes it plain that Herod ruled by terror, if the massacre of the innocents is any measure. Luke tells us that Mary said these words before Jesus was born, but Luke wrote all this down many years later, after he had seen the Romans toss out Herod’s incompetent son from ruling in Jerusalem and replaced him with a Roman governor who ruled with standard Roman brutality, including mass crucifixions, crosses lining the highways after a rebellion and of course, the crucifixion of Jesus himself.

Luke would have expected his readers to remember all of that when hearing Mary’s words. Indeed, he would have expected them to remember the destruction of Jerusalem just a few years previously and the ongoing military occupation and violent suppression by the Romans.

So, Luke boldly presents Mary’s joyful message of God’s fulfillment of ancient promises in the middle of a terrible, violent time where peace was hard to find. Clearly, Luke believed that a message of Joy was important in a time of strife.

It makes sense, doesn’t it? When do people need a joyful message more deeply than when joy seems most elusive? That bizarre situation from World War 1 when Allied and German troops put down their guns and played soccer on the battlefield between the trenches at Christmas, 1914, in a number of places on both the Eastern and Western fronts, speaks to a shared and deeply felt need for joy, for hope, for celebration in the midst of our most difficult times.

A celebration of a holy day that you know you are sharing with other people in other parts of the world can remind us that we are linked through God in connections that transcend space and time. This can provide comfort to people who are in the midst of great suffering.

Even having a celebration with no special food, with the simplest of gifts or no gifts at all is like Mary’s words: it is a call of defiance; a cry out against what feels like an overwhelming and uncaring world; a way of saying that we still hold on to something bigger, not only bigger than us, but bigger than the troubles we face, bigger than the people who are trying to push us down, no matter how powerful they imagine they are.

The world needs joy in the midst of crisis. It is one of the powerful things that can see us through whatever is happening. And if we have guilty twinges about our own celebrations in the safety and prosperity we enjoy in this country, let’s not question whether Joy is appropriate, because it is. Let us, rather, try to imagine what we can do to change the lives of people who are not in safe places and how we can help to make their joy complete so they become able to celebrate as freely as we do.

Amen.

Preparing the Way

Preparing the Way

Scriptures: Isaiah 40:1-11; Mark 1:1-8

I find myself overwhelmed by music at this time of year. To prepare for writing this sermon I listened to two parts of Handel’s Messiah: “Every Valley” and “And the Glory of the Lord”, both quoted directly from our Isaiah lesson, as well as “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord” from Godspell.

I recommend all of these to anyone who doesn’t know them.

Mark’s is the oldest gospel we have and he says the good news of Jesus begins with John the Baptist preparing the way, giving us the classic Christian interpretation of this ancient prophesy.

Mark’s intent is clear. We need to think about Jesus in light of what Isaiah promised: representing the arrival of God in the world in the form of a good shepherd, someone who would bring a long-desired peace.

I have no doubt that part of what Mark had in mind is that the first Christians weren’t called “Christian” for years. They were followers of “the way” of Jesus. In the Bible this is written in Greek as tropos which is where we get the word “trope” and, interestingly, is the same meaning as “dao” which gives its name to Daoism

The first Christians were following the Way of Jesus: a new way of living; an alternative lifestyle.

It fits well with the imagery Isaiah gives us: the valleys being raised up; the mountains levelled out. It is a great image for the first being last and the last being first, the weak being strong and the poor being rich, and all those other calls to change that filled the teachings of Jesus.

And I find it significant, on this Sunday of Peace, that Jesus’ way of peace begins with John the Baptist’s call to righteousness: repentance, which literally means a “change of direction”.

John, a prophet in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, was concerned with justice and particularly with calling those in power to behave justly towards those who are in their power. Eventually, he was beheaded because King Herod Antipas considered him a threat.

Peace without justice can certainly exist but it is the peace of the graveyard. I have been in many graveyards and they are certainly peaceful places, but it is a peace where the voices of the living have been silenced. That is not the kind of peace you want going forward.

It is not the peace Isaiah pictures for us, where the people are restored to their homeland, where God is a good shepherd, where the powerless lambs are protected and allowed to thrive and no predators are allowed to do harm.

By following the way of Jesus, his disciples found this hopeful vision of peace, not the kind promoted by a strong-man dictator where peace comes after the army has finished stamping out all enemies.

Rather, they found the kind of peace Jesus preached: where a community of faith created space for those you would least expect to come forward and learn to be leaders; where the meek inherit the Earth.

In Jesus’ world this provided a powerful contrast with the ever-present image of Caesar Augustus whom the Romans called the Prince of Peace because his armies had subdued the nations around the Mediterranean Sea and enforced the Pax Romana through military might and regular crucifixions.

Augustus even had a kind of social media. Since he couldn’t get around through the whole empire, he had monuments put up in many cities, one of which, still standing today in Turkey, names him prince of peace, among other titles. And you thought posts on the internet last forever!

Being a bringer of peace through power was a central theme of Augustus Caesar’s propaganda. It is credited with helping establish the stability of his long rule.

The followers of Jesus disagreed with the whole concept. “We have a better Way, the Way of Jesus who is the true Prince of Peace” and as Mark’s gospel says, it all began with John the Baptist’s call to justice: that call to get right with God; to stop being self-centred and lording over others; to turn away from greed, corruption and abuse.

It can be breath-taking to recognize how little things have changed over 2000 years. The same principles are still at stake, the same call to prepare the Way is still valid, is still vital.

There are still dictators claiming to create peace through military might and terror. There are still powerful people in each place who take advantage of others for their own benefit. John’s call wasn’t just for king Herod and Jesus’ way was taught to everyone.

This is the kind of thinking to which we can apply that phrase “think globally, act locally” because the global crises are so blatant and the costs so high that they provide an unmistakable example of the damage of doing things the wrong way. That kind of example can inspire us to apply the alternate lifestyle of Jesus – his Way – to more local situations where we can turn things around in our ordinary lives.

We also have the benefit of living in a country where, in theory, our leaders are accountable to us, so we can call on our leaders to turn things around, too.

Where a tyrant is in power, this is the job of a prophet and the prophet often suffers or even dies after they deliver their message. For us, we have the great privilege of being able to call for change, call for justice, without getting our heads cut off.

We can be peace-makers in our own lives, in our land, in our world if we start preparing the Way of Jesus with that same vision of turning things around, creating a world where the powerful can’t run rough-shod over ordinary people and where we can build that true peace that Jesus showed us in his teachings.

Not the peace of the graveyard, but a peace full of life, a peace full of safety and growth, a peace that should be welcome in any age.

Amen.

Hope Without Apocalypse

Hope without Apocalypse

Scriptures: Isaiah 64:1-9;

Mark 13:32-37

Every Advent the same challenge comes up for preachers: we light candles for Hope, Peace, Joy and Love, but the lectionary recommends scriptures that are all about the end of the world!

Theologically, this is because the very word “Advent” is about the arrival of Christ in human history and we have to deal with the two contrasting ideas: of Jesus arriving two thousand years ago; and all those verses of the Bible that we lump together as describing the “Second Coming”, an Advent that hasn’t happened yet, for which we are supposed to be preparing.

The first Advent is easy: we really get into celebrating Jesus’ birth, but all that apocalyptic stuff makes us uncomfortable and we can be very critical of all those branches of the church that make the second coming the core of their preaching.

I propose that we try a bit of empathy and consider why, on this Sunday of Hope, the earth-shattering arrival of God, or the Son of Man as God’s representative, would seem hopeful to anyone.

Look at our reading from the Prophet Isaiah. It starts off with a real note of yearning:

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
    so that the mountains would quake at your presence—
as when fire kindles brushwood
    and the fire causes water to boil—
to make your name known to your adversaries,
    so that the nations might tremble at your presence!

This chapter was written after a kind of second exodus had happened and the Babylonian exiles had returned. They were working hard to restore Jerusalem and build the second temple. Life wasn’t easy: they were in conflict with the people who had never been taken into exile and who now owned all the property, many of whom were the Samaritans of the former kingdom of Israel.

The returnees were still under the Imperial thumb of Cyrus the Persian who had conquered Babylon and let the Jews go home (which was great: they named him the messiah for that great work). But the life these folks lived was very hard, with a lot of powerful people around them telling them what to do.

Naturally, they looked back to that first Exodus from Egypt with the plagues, the pillar of fire and smoke, the parting of the sea, the manna in the wilderness and water from a rock, all culminating in the conquest of Canaan, with powerful deeds like shaking down the walls of Jericho.

By contrast, this second Exodus was embarrassing! Where was the obvious glory of God? A foreign king feels merciful and lets them go, no plagues needed and no new Moses. Instead of conquering the inhabitants of the land with a wilderness-hardened army, they have to negotiate, work around land claims, argue with these cousins they haven’t seen in over 70 years and physically restore walls that had been lying in ruins for decades. It all probably felt humiliating.

If you read on, you discover more obvious signs that this writer felt powerless. All this work felt like judgement from God and although he wouldn’t dare suggest that he and his people were blameless or perfect, he points out in a couple of ways that God is all-powerful and that the people can’t resist the way God made them.

That’s coming as close as possible to blaming God for all the bad stuff that is happening as any prophet might dare to get. But it helps us to understand the mind of the person who wants to see the end of the world, the person who wants a vengeful God to come stomping in with judgment and wrath.

It’s often someone whose life is hard, very hard, someone who is being oppressed, who feels like hope is reserved for the powerful, someone who feels like their only hope is for the ultimate power – God – to create justice, because they have no hope for it any other way.

Jesus lived in a land under the rule of Rome and its brutal client kings. The kings paid lip service to the idea of God, but Rome cared nothing for the God of Israel and even less for the people it had conquered.

Talk of the Son of Man coming to rule from the throne of David was rife in Jesus’ day and he addressed it, to some degree, although most of what he said was intended to call people to a radical new way of thinking about how to live for God, not how to take up arms against the oppressor. Indeed, what he did on the cross can be seen as the ultimate victory of weakness over power, of the last becoming the first.

The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD happened because another group, the Essenes, started a literal revolution and marched out, men, women and children to fight the Roman army. They expected God and an army of angels to come to their aid and they were utterly destroyed. Jerusalem was torn down and the second temple destroyed, all as punishment for this rebellion.

I make this contrast because all the people of that area and time felt the same way: they wanted God to break into life; for the Son of Man to come and impose justice and peace, but some tried very different ways of making this happen.

Most Canadians have been spared this hard kind of life for decades, but the 21^st century has given us a new appreciation of how many people may feel this way: with the invasions and wars we have witnessed recently; in meeting some of the refugees fleeing oppressive lands; and with a deeper understanding of the ongoing experience of the indigenous people, their loss of land and their residential school experiences.

And then there are all those people who are not indigenous or recent arrivals, who have lived here for generations but who have no hope for higher education, no hope for a decent pension and who find themselves at food-banks or possibly even homeless because they can’t afford elevated rents. These are all people who might hope for an apocalypse.

Jesus’ words in our Mark lesson reassure us that there is no way to predict any kind of literal apocalypse. But it’s not enough for us to breathe a sigh of relief and decide we don’t need to worry about it. Jesus’ whole approach was to do something hopeful with the real people in front of him, who were often the lowest of the low.

I would suggest that Jesus’ approach right now would be to ask how we can give hope: create justice and peace day to day. It fits with the Mark lesson where the servants are left with their tasks and urged to stay awake, stay alert, so they are ready for the master’s return whenever it happens.

The original followers of Jesus, however much they longed for his return to overthrow the brutality of Rome, knew they were not called to the futile armed rebellion: the attempt of sincere but mistaken people to force God’s hand by marching out as an act of faith.

Instead, they recognized their call to wait patiently; not passively, not sitting on their hands, but doing their work, following the example of Jesus and bringing hope by changing people’s lives.

Two thousand years later, that is still our calling.

Amen.

Sheep and Goats

Sheep and Goats

Scripture: Matthew 25:31-46

On the liturgical calendar, today is “Reign of Christ” Sunday. The lesson of the Sheep and Goats is designed to show Christ in his position of Judge, choosing between the Sheep and the Goats in terms of who will receive an eternal reward or eternal punishment.

In my opinion, this use of this passage highlights the degree to which the Christian Church has lost the message of Jesus and accepted the very abuses of power that Jesus sought to overturn: the powerful ruler on his throne issuing judgments of life and death. Jesus might as well have been portrayed as just another king or emperor except that his judgment will be holy and perfect, unlike the flawed judgment of human rulers.

The traditional reading of this passage leads to all kinds of problems because it misses the point: this lesson is really about relationships, not judgment.

The image of the good shepherd recurs in scripture from the time of King David onward and that image is often applied to Jesus. Sheep and goats were often mixed together in the field along with the flocks of several shepherds. A good shepherd would have a relationship with the animals, calling them when it was time to separate from the rest. They would respond to that familiar voice and once you’ve separated your own animals from another flock, separating sheep and goats within your flock is easy-peasy: no judgment, no condemnation, no sense that the goats are bad.

The shepherd image is to establish how well the Son of Man knows us, and can tell us apart. Yes, the next step is all about judgment and a royal throne is mentioned. Daniel’s image of the Son of Man sitting on the throne of King David is almost certainly the source of this idea

But look at the criteria used for the judgment of the people separated on the right hand and on the left; (yes, this also reveals an ancient bias against lefties that no one questioned for centuries) but the judgement is all about relationships: how did the people treat others?

It’s not about what people believed, not about what positions they defended, not about what wonderful projects they accomplished. It was all about whether they had helped others in very basic, human ways: food, water, shelter, clothing, welcoming strangers, visiting prisoners. It was about addressing the most basic physical and emotional needs of people, particularly people on the margins: the ones most likely to be lacking the basics of life.

The image of the king in this story should not be to inspire fear of judgment but to inspire a sense of the importance of the people who need help, because we are told in plain language that when we help some marginalized person, we are actually helping Jesus himself. We should help that stranger in need as cheerfully as if they were the king, Jesus himself, the most celebrated, the most important person in the land.

So if we want to talk about the reign of Christ, let’s put aside all the imperial and royal assumptions that history has tacked onto our faith. Let’s remember that Jesus started and ended his teachings with relationships, the ways we love our neighbours, the ways we help everyone who needs it.

Putting the naked, thirsty, hungry, imprisoned stranger on the same level as the Son of Man coming in glory is as clear an example of “the first being last and the last being first” as I can imagine.

Let’s keep this powerful image in mind as we contemplate our ongoing relationships with others. Amen.

What About the Rapture?

What About the Rapture?

Scripture: 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

I owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Bernard Brandon Scott who first introduced this interpretation of this passage when he spoke here at Knox in 2008.

What do you do with a problematic piece of scripture? Our reading today absolutely counts as one of those because, to our very modern minds, it describes something impossible.

Do we dismiss it as the dreams of unsophisticated people who didn’t have the benefit of a scientific education? Do we take it literally and try to work out all the implications that follow? Dismissing it is a problem, if you consider scripture to have authority, but taking it literally has problems too. Both approaches are too simplistic.

There is a large branch of Evangelical Christianity that takes it literally. This is the passage that gives rise to the idea of the “rapture” where Jesus returns and sweeps faithful people up into the air, to be saved from the coming trials and tribulations of the Apocalypse.

My Dad had a bumper sticker in lime green that he put on the passenger-side dash-board of the family car. It read:

WARNING: Jesus is coming soon. Driver will disappear!

The youth group that Lori was part of joked about “rapture helmets” so you wouldn’t hurt your head as you were pulled into the air, through all the lumber and plaster of whatever building you happened to be in. Nobody really worried about head injuries; they assumed that Jesus would protect everyone, but they were clearly thinking about the literal application of this biblical image.

More seriously, it has entered popular culture. In 1995 the book Left Behind was published about the dramatic adventures of people who weren’t raptured, and who became believers when the miracle of millions of people being raptured proved the literal truth of the Bible.

This led to a whole series of books and in 2014 to the movie Left Behind starring Nicholas Cage. This year saw the release of a sequel – Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist, starring Kevin Sorbo (the former star of the Hercules and Andromeda TV shows).

There are millions of dollars tied up in this interpretation of scripture, which should give you a sense of how widespread this vision of the end of the world has become, at least where the more Evangelical versions of Christianity hold sway. It even contributes to US financial and military support for Israel because in this theology, the return of the Jewish people to the promised land is held to be a sign that the Son of Man will come within a generation.

This is a bit of a problem, since a biblical generation is 40 years and the state of Israel was formed in 1949. But, inconvenient mathematics aside, a lot of modern American apocalyptic thinking arises from the attempt to turn these various biblical passages into a coherent, literal narrative.

When the Apostle Paul wrote the first letter to the Thessalonians, he didn’t know about all the stuff in the Book of Revelations – that wouldn’t be written until decades after his death. He would have been astonished that his words were so tightly woven with that dark vision of the end of the world, because his vision was very hopeful and positive.

Paul followed the teachings of Jesus closely, which included a vision of the “Son of Man” as pictured in the book of Daniel. The Son of Man was a human who would descend from heaven to institute the Kingdom of God on Earth.

The early Christian interpretation was that the nameless Son of Man in Daniel was clearly Jesus and that was why they expected him to return, having been born on earth like every other human, then ascending to heaven and returning to bring God’s just kingdom into being as Daniel’s vision had proclaimed.

Paul, like others of his generation, expected Jesus to return right away, before that generation had died out. This left some serious questions when people started to die of accidents or disease or age and they were asking Paul: What about them?; What will happen to them?; Will they miss out on being part of the Kingdom of God?

There was no expectation that they would go to heaven. Earth was the place for humans; so, what would happen?

Paul answers that question in this passage. According to his best understanding of what Jesus had promised, he incorporated his understanding of the resurrection which was a spiritual resurrection into something he called a spiritual body – as we see in 1 Cor. 15 – and the idea of the Son of Man coming to be the Earthly ruler of the Kingdom of God.

So, why were the dead in Christ being raised up at that moment? And why were the faithful being caught up into the air? To welcome the arriving Son of Man, to welcome Jesus as he comes into his kingdom. It’s like crowds spilling out of the city gates to welcome the conquering hero and escort him to his throne except that, as Daniel said, he was coming from Heaven.

So, instead of spilling out onto the road, the faithful, those resurrected and those still living, had to greet him in the air. Frankly, Paul’s theology here presents an opposite vision of the return of Jesus to that presented in the book of Revelations. It’s not surprising: in Paul’s day the official persecutions had not started and things were quite hopeful. By the time of Revelations, the full might of Rome was murdering Christians. It was a much more violent time and produced much more dire visions about the return of Jesus.

Our circumstances don’t match the time of Paul or the time of Revelations.

I believe that each age must struggle with what it means to make real the Kingdom of God in our midst and discover how to bring Jesus into this world. As we do this, we should not forget the visions that have shaped our scriptures, but we should remember that they are just that: visions – images of what we hope for, not literal predictions of what will be.

How shall we, as Christians, try to make the teachings of Jesus come to life in this place, in this time? What does it mean to bring the Kingdom of God into being in the 21^st century?

I hope we have that question in mind as we set priorities with the new ideas we are considering as presented in the New Directions list.

We are God’s people: how do we do God’s work in this time and place and into the future? I hope we can show at least as much inspiration in answering this question, as the people of the Bible did.

Amen.

Remembering It All

Remembering It All

Scripture: Micah 3:5-12

I was surprised to find our challenging Micah lesson in the lectionary as a reading for today, and it led me to write this sermon:

Our memories are selective; that’s one of the reasons we have Remembrance Day. We like to put bad things away and forget them. Remembering sacrifice and loss is hard.

We also understand the truth of the George Santayana saying: “those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it”. You could argue that our entire culture has forgotten the value of caring for nature and we are going to repeat the hard lessons that remind us that we really aren’t as powerful as we think we are.

One of the things about Remembrance Day that was attractive as I was growing up was the knowledge that we had won. We had defeated Hitler and the world was safe from Fascism and organized antisemitism. I was aware that there had been a WWI before WWII and that we’d won, but I had no idea what the clash of empires meant in that conflict. I also didn’t understand until High School history, the lesson that the way the end of that war was handled (the treaty of Versailles) was directly responsible for the rise of Hitler, because of its harsh repayment schedules and a determination to punish an entire nation.

It took me years to realize that the fascists were still in power in Spain until 1975 and I heard with my own ears active antisemitism from fellow students in the suburbs of Montreal. It has become more open and violent ever since.

In recent Remembrance Days, we’ve had to remember the people we lost in Afghanistan. We don’t have the comfort of knowing that we won that war. We may have been building schools for girls, but now the Taliban is back in charge, the schools are in ruins, girls are facing appalling lives and many are wondering about the meaning of the sacrifice those folks made.

One of the reasons that WWII was a relative success was the effort made after the war to avoid the mistakes of WWI through the rebuilding of Germany and Japan, encouraging democracy and friendship, even during the tension of the cold war and the oppression of communism in East Germany. Our efforts managed to make a huge difference.

It was the lesson of treating our enemies as human beings and trying to transform them into friends – that very biblical lesson of loving our enemies – that made the sacrifices of WWII so successful.

Current events in the middle east are re-drawing, in stark terms, what happens when you try to win by main force and don’t try to humanize your enemies. When you don’t struggle with the questions of justice that arise with the people you have defeated and the lives they have to live, when they feel too oppressed, too hungry, too trapped, the conflict doesn’t end, it just changes form.

Our lesson from Micah reminds us of God’s perspective on this. The Hebrews had been given the Promised Land, but over and over in the prophetic books they are told that their corruption and injustice, their willingness to oppress others (sometimes their own poor, sometimes strangers) would lead to God taking the land away from them, foreign powers marching in and laying waste to this wonderful, prosperous land.

As Christians, as non-Jews, reading this lesson is tricky: we have no place declaring this kind of judgement on Israel either historically or as a modern nation. In terms of historical cause and effect I’d be reluctant to declare what Micah and other prophets did: that the Babylonians would have ceased their westward march if the kingdom of Judah had been a more just place.

Those prophets got to say that because it came from within Israel. They were Jewish voices raising calls for justice as part of an ancient justice tradition within Israel. These scriptures are the Jewish faith opening their collective soul to themselves and the world in public self-examination.

There are fresh voices today within the modern state of Israel warning the government of the need to treat the Palestinians with justice if they ever hope to achieve peace and security. I hope those modern prophetic voices are heard and heeded.

I remember the FLQ terrorism in Montreal in the 1970 October Crisis: living in fear of bombs in mailboxes; the news of kidnappings; the shock of seeing soldiers on the streets. And I am aware that the idea of Quebec Independence today is viewed by young generations of Quebecois as something quaint, old-school and impractical because they have achieved most of what they wanted, plus a fair bit of prosperity and security, without having to have a physical revolution.

Every generation changes the world and then leaves the results to the next generation to deal with. Today’s confirmation class represents that next generation. We are passing to them a complex world where many of the things we thought we had solved are rearing their ugly heads again.

Modern versions of terrorism, of fascism, of antisemitism, of other kinds of prejudice and hatred aimed at women, at people of colour, ethnic and religious groups, openly aimed at LGBTQ+ people are found online and in real life.

If we want Remembrance to matter, we need to remember it all and particularly the ways some solutions worked and others did not.

One of the most important parts of Remembrance Day is to honour the sacrifices made for our freedom. I believe that we can honour those people best if we remember all those bits of history that help us go beyond basic ideas of victory and defeat to a deeper understanding of the need to transform our enemies into friends. We need to find ways to live so that war – that horrible, life destroying means of resolving conflict – can become a last resort we don’t need anymore because we will have found a way to create the freedom, security and hope that all people, even enemies, need to survive.

Amen.