Knox United Church Nepean

Deep and Twisted Roots

Deep and Twisted Roots

Scriptures: Isaiah 25:1-9& Philippians 4:1-9

The violence happening in Israel and Palestine for the past two weeks has been dreadful. The news has shown us details of the atrocities committed and the ongoing struggles of two communities as violence is inflicted on ordinary people trying to live their ordinary lives.

For all the politics involved, there is an undeniable religious dimension to all this and of the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. None of us have clean hands. This conflict has deep and twisted roots and I hope that by getting a sense of these we can get a sense of how to move forward and support work that creates both peace and justice for all the people involved.

You have my apologies in advance that the history I am about to share doesn’t have room for all the subtlety and detail it deserves.

An important part of the understanding of the Jewish faith is that they are an extended family: they are called by God because they are the descendants of people who were called by God.

They have lived under oppression for most of their history. At first they were wandering nomads, slaves in Egypt after that, briefly tribes living in a conquered land with religious rulers called judges, then for a few generations, a kingdom mostly divided into two kingdoms. Eventually they would be conquered and oppressed by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and Romans with a brief stint of independence under the Maccabees and the illusion of independence under king Herod.

The Romans were replaced by the Byzantines, then the early Muslim rulers, then generations of European crusader kingdoms and then the later Muslim rulers, including the Ottoman Turks who were replaced after WWI by the British.

Our lesson from Isaiah, written during the Babylonian years, expresses a vision where the powerful oppressor is defeated and the great city, Babylon, is laid to waste and all the peoples of the world will celebrate in God’s holy place because God has helped everyone: all the poor, all the oppressed of all nations. Even death will be eliminated.

It’s an expression of hope that crosses borders. “There’s been enough of the killing and the armies, enough of the brutality of a ruling power.” It is a vision that captures the common experience of minorities around the world.

This kind of vision struggles within the Hebrew scriptures with a competing vision of purity: faithful people who keep themselves apart from strangers to follow God’s law as closely as possible because the law is seen as the expression of how God wants to bring holiness to the world. It was this vision of purity that led to the genocide that came with the Exodus occupation of the promised land; killing anyone who might steer the hearts of the Hebrews towards any other locally established gods.

Jesus, who was born under King Herod and lived under Roman occupation, grew up within the Jewish tradition as visions of purity were being examined and re-interpreted. Matthew shows us a Jesus who wanted to minister exclusively to the Jewish people and who expanded his vision when faced with a bold Syrian woman who was desperate to heal her daughter.

Christianity, under the leadership of people like Paul, grew amazingly by reaching out beyond the borders of Judaism, which led to increasing friction with the more traditional Jewish community who opted for purity and threw out the Christians from the Synagogues. This really rankled with early Christians who felt that the Jewish leaders were questioning the legitimacy of Christianity (which, of course, they were).

Those Christians declared that Jesus’ version of Judaism was the only correct interpretation and some even argued that Christians had replaced Jews as God’s chosen people. We find early evidence of this in our own scriptures and there are still people today who use these passages as justification for their own modern antisemitism.

Eventually Christianity made the fatal mistake of converting the Emperor of Rome, Constantine, who made Christianity the state religion. It looked like a great short-cut to spreading the faith but it was really a betrayal of the roots of the faith where Jesus embraced the people who weren’t in power and saw in their weakness a kind of truth that the powerful have a hard time understanding.

So, Christianity took power and was still resentful about being thrown out of Synagogues. We developed antisemitism into an accepted part of our faith: blaming the Jews for killing Jesus and calling the Romans innocent despite the obvious fact that only the Romans ever crucified anyone.

This kind of religious and racial hatred has been distilled over the centuries with Jewish communities facing atrocities across Europe at the hands of different denominations of Christians who worked hand in glove with one empire after another. In the 20^th century, all of this was taken as justification for the hideous work of the Nazis.

We know how the holocaust inspired the creation of the modern state of Israel, to provide a place in the Biblical promised land where Jewish people could live free from the genocide and oppression they had encountered around the world.

While Christianity was cooperating with empires, Islam arose out of a re-interpretation of the laws of Judaism and the evangelism of Christianity. Christianity responded with its own vision of purity, denounced the Muslims as heretics and launched centuries of warfare through the crusades.

The common challenge that I see here afflicting each of our faiths is that whenever we give in to the temptation to use force to promote our agenda, we fail. Whenever we become the oppressor, no matter which faith we represent, and we lose sight of the vision Isaiah presents (a passage of scripture that is common to all our faiths), we fail.

Paul points the way in our second lesson where he encourages the whole Philippian church to come together and encourage two faithful women, leaders in the church, to overcome their differences and work together again.

As Christians, we have not been unbiased in this modern conflict and some Christians have been actively unhelpful in declaring the modern state of Israel to be the fulfillment of Biblical prophesy and a sign of the second coming of Christ. I completely disagree with this interpretation but a full discussion won’t fit into this sermon.

So, we can’t call for peace as if we were a neutral party but we can promote the position that as peoples of faith which arise out of common roots and shared values we can work on a way of engaging with each other that puts aside the need to dominate and control. We can bring into place that vision from Isaiah of a shared world where oppression is put away. And, we can recognize in each other the traumas we have suffered and find the forgiveness we need for the harm we have caused to find the healing that we cannot find alone – the healing that will only be complete if we work together to discover the common position we share as children of God.

The centuries of conflict in the Middle East will not be solved overnight: the roots are too deep. If the conflict is to be solved at all, it will be because we find a way to work together across lines of faith, ethnicity, and other traditional barriers; it will be because we find a way to acknowledge and remove the latest version of oppression and prevent any new oppressors from coming to power.

May we pray and work for this outcome in this land that is so important to all three of our faiths. Amen.

A Cheerful Giver

A Cheerful Giver

Scriptures: Deuteronomy 8:7-18

2 Corinthians 9:6-15

In our very cynical society, the expression “God loves a cheerful giver” elicits a negative response: “Right, the church is trying to get money from me, again”; and to be fair, some religious leaders have been just as cynical in using this scripture in exactly that way, to the point now that we almost never hear it. It became a meme before memes existed and for years it has pushed people’s buttons to do exactly the opposite of what Paul was saying. It makes people feel angry, or guilty, or resentful; certainly not cheerful.

That just means we are missing the point. Paul was describing a way of living faithfully: “faithfully” because giving is an expression of our spirituality – having faith in God.

Paul describes an understanding that our whole existence is predicated on the generosity of God. God gives us what we need, and so much more. So, when we give cheerfully, it is a sign that we recognize this: that we trust God to keep supplying our needs; that we don’t feel the need to hoard what we get; but we share it happily so that others may also have enough.

Paul is giving us an image of a gospel of plenty. Not that nonsense called the “Prosperity Gospel” preached in some American churches where God will make the faithful rich as a reward for their faith. That’s a perversion of the gospel.

Rather, it involves recognizing that we are already rich. God has given us good things already and has called us to be just as generous with others.

We have trouble with this. Our society has developed a culture of dissatisfaction. We are encouraged to want the newest, the best; that we should be “keeping up with the Joneses”.

If you follow that CBC radio show “Under the Influence” (which tells very entertaining stories about advertising) you have a clear sense of just how deliberately we are inundated with messages to make us covetous – wanting what someone else has – and how this spills over into some really damaging effects, like body-image issues, across generations. It starts with us as children so that by the time we are adults we don’t question it; we think it’s normal. I would call that spiritual harm to all of us.

Every year at Thanksgiving we make a point to be thankful and we are reminded to consider the daily blessings that we take for granted and truly consider how blessed we are. We’re not used to thinking that way. We take good things for granted, considering them our rights instead of gifts from God and sometimes it takes getting a good look at someone else’s suffering to really appreciate how good we have it.

Seeing the challenges Ukrainian people are facing reminds us that peace and stability are blessings. Not having weaponized drones flying over is a gift from God. The steady stream of refugees from lands ruled by criminal gangs should remind us how blessed we are not to have to dodge gang wars in our neighbourhoods. Even just living in housing that we can afford is a blessing that we have taken for granted. And at this time of family feasts having fresh, nutritious, abundant food is a blessing. Having friends and family around to celebrate with is a blessing not everyone can enjoy

The idea of counting our blessings is not popular. It’s seen as old-fashioned, Victorian, even oppressive: a way for those with plenty to tell the poor to be satisfied in their poverty and again, people have certainly used it that way.

But what Jesus was teaching and what Paul was reflecting on was the idea that God gives plenty not so that selfish people can keep it to themselves, but so that we can all share freely and cheerfully so that everyone has enough.

It is a vision of community; a vision of creation itself that is based on God’s bounty and our willingness to share: a vision of generosity at every level. We will have to practice this way of thinking and behaving because it really does go against the grain of all the messaging we receive.

We practised it at the potluck on September 13^thwhere we were challenged to consider the resources we already have rather than the things we lack, and to imagine what we can do with those existing resources. The creativity and excitement started to flow as people imagined new possibilities based on our existing blessings.

That was an exercise in a fresh kind of spiritual thinking, not new – our scripture lesson is almost 2000 years old – but it is fresh because we have lost so much of that understanding since the end of the second world war and we need to be reminded that God blesses us even in difficult or challenging times.

This isn’t a call to Pollyanna-type optimism – Paul was about as realistic as it gets – rather, it is a call to appreciate the good things we have, to be less acquisitive, less demanding, more willing to work together and celebrate together, to take the attitude that even when hard times come God has provided enough for us. If we work together no one needs to suffer.

We will have another opportunity to practise this as a congregation on October 22^nd, at that New Directions gathering. And we have the opportunity to practice this as families, friends and individuals right now, on this Thanksgiving weekend. Let’s make a point of counting our blessings and appreciating what God has done for us. Let’s appreciate all those things, all those people we take for granted every day. And beyond appreciation, let’s practice trusting; trusting God to really supply what we need and trusting each other.

Our society isolates us, teaching us to be self-sufficient and to avoid vulnerability, so we need to practise practical faith again as a part of our thanks, and to discover the confidence that comes as working together with God and each other produces results we can see.

Paul knew this was a challenge back in the first century. That’s why he had to write what he did. The challenge has become harder in the 21^st century. We have the massed ranks of broadcast and social media pushing a very different message.

But this is the Thanksgiving weekend and people are more open right now to think about this spiritual truth: God has blessed us and has given us what we need to bless others and God is calling us to share, with joy, knowing that we are partners in the work of God.

That’s why God loves a cheerful giver: because the cheerful giver is spiritually in tune with God; not motivated by guilt or duty but motivated by love and confident in faith.

May we all discover this kind of good cheer this Thanksgiving season.

Amen.

Diverse Visions

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. Diverse Visions Scriptures: 2 Corinthians 5:17-20 Acts 8:26-40 Reconciliation is a basic Christian value. We can see this from the words of Paul in our lesson from the second letter to Corinth. It is an idea that we have to work on when you consider the depths of divisions that have plagued Christianity over the years, sometimes even resulting in religious wars and horrible persecutions. The very existence of the United Church speaks to reconciliation: the bringing together of denominations and learning to live with differences in the process. This Sunday is another example of a gesture towards reconciliation. World Communion Sunday is an important symbol because the first thing churches do when they schism is to ex-communicate each other. Ex-communication is literally the statement that we are no longer in communion with each other; we are no longer one community. World Communion Sunday is an attempt to move in the right direction: although we may have very different ideas about what the sacrament means, or who has authority to preside at it, at least we can share in the timing of it. We are making steps towards reconciliation with a world of divided churches. Today is also the day after the national day of Truth and Reconciliation – Orange Shirt Day – when we are called to consider what it means to be reconciled with our Indigenous neighbours. The Truth part of that has been increasingly revealed over several decades and the role of the United Church, and other churches, has led, first, to apologies for what we did in the Residential Schools and more than that, has led to a commitment to Indigenous members of the United Church to follow their lead as we seek to heal our relationship and as they work out what it means to be indigenous Christians in Canada. This is where World Communion Sunday and the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation converge. I did mention that World Communion Sunday was about reconciling churches that have split from each other, but that’s not the whole story. Over 2000 years, many Christian churches have taken on characteristics that come from the cultures they were planted in; they grew into indigenous churches around the world. A wonderful example arises from our Acts lesson today with the baptizing of the Ethiopian eunuch. That influential man went back to his country and laid the foundations of the oldest Christian church outside the Roman Empire. They still have practices you never find in other churches such as having young people work in isolation for years to memorize the Orthodox bible, or carving huge, elaborate churches out of a single stone – literally monoliths. Each land had a culture in place when Christianity arrived and elements of that culture were adopted into the expression of that faith locally. I have a small reproduction in my office of a baptismal font from Denmark. The original has inscriptions in Viking runes all around it (too small to see on the reproduction) and one of the members of the confirmation class pointed out that there were Viking warrior faces carved around the base. The church encouraged these kinds of local adaptations because it made the faith truly part of the local culture. We didn’t do that in Canada. The closest we get is with the Wendat Carol written by Jean de Brébeuf after decades of living with the Wendat people and learning their language and culture. Mostly we insisted that the indigenous people adopt the words, clothing and practices of British and French religious expressions. The United Church at Kanesatake (Oka) has tried to correct that. Rick Balson described the banners created there to identify the family clans associated with the church: raven, bear, turtle, and others. That struck me as unusual at first, until I realized that it’s not really all that different from the stained glass windows I saw in the church at Fitzroy Harbour showing the coats of arms of founding Scottish families. Other indigenous United Church congregations are undoubtedly figuring out their own ways to do the same kind of thing – express their Christian faith in terms that make sense with their own cultures – but it is hard: they have limited resources and very few ordained indigenous clergy to participate. And frankly, it is hard work to make up for hundreds of years of being squeezed into ways that fit our European traditions. One of the things I wonder is: what has the church lost? What has the Christian church in the world not seen because the folks here were not given the same freedoms that my ancestors had in Denmark or that the Ethiopians had, or the Persians, or the Chinese, or the Syrians? What kinds of expressions of faith might have arisen if we had not been so oppressive in the ways we brought Christ to the people here? The indigenous congregations of the United Church of Canada have proposed a new relationship as part of our journey to reconciliation. They have asked to be given the organizational freedom to develop their own practices, their own expressions of faith, their own structures and rules around ordination, in other words: their own ability to describe and define Christianity in Indigenous terms while still remaining within the United Church. They don’t want to schism away with a new denomination. They don’t want to break the relationship we have. They want to transform that relationship in ways that put into their hands the opportunity to define themselves as Indigenous Christians within a United Church, giving them a distinctive voice within the larger church. I believe that this is a daring idea whose time has come. The United Church has always embodied diverse visions of faith right from its earliest days and this fits well with our concept of ourselves as a denomination. But it won’t happen by itself. Since it requires a number of changes to the Manual of the United Church of Canada, basically equivalent to constitutional changes, we have to vote on it across the country. Knox will be having a congregational meeting on the last Sunday in November to vote on a Remit, asking whether we agree that this change should be permitted. I hope and pray that we vote in favour because I see this as a foundational step in the right direction, giving back to Indigenous Christians the voice that we should never have taken from them and that our own ancestors enjoyed right from the beginning. There are already debates about whether this is organizationally sound or theologically appropriate and I have opinions about how to address those issues should they arise. At base, I see this as being a question about trust and control. The indigenous congregations are asking us to trust them as they work out their own spirituality and theology within the United Church and they are asking us to give them the freedom to control their future within the United Church without having to come back for permission as they make a series of changes that might require one remit after another. This initiative has come from the Indigenous churches themselves and I am impressed that they have the courage and the vision to take this step into the future, to re-define their Christian spirituality in indigenous terms and work to discover what could have been discovered hundreds of years ago if only we had not prevented it. The United Church is proud of including diverse visions of faith under our big tent. I think we should celebrate and make room for this one. Amen.

Not What You’d Expect

Not What You’d Expect

Scriptures: Exodus 16:2-15

Matthew 20:1-16

The parable of the vineyard, like all of Jesus’ parables, can challenge us deeply.

For the people that Jesus first spoke to, some things were familiar. The Denarius, a single Roman silver coin, was the standard pay rate for a casual labourer who would be expected to work a 10 or 11 hour day in the sun, roughly corresponding to working from sunrise to sunset. There were no unions in those days.

The behaviour of the vineyard owner is unusual. He keeps going to the market for new labourers. Maybe there’s a labour shortage, or he has a lot of ripe grapes to be picked that day. None of that is explained, but to be hiring someone with just an hour before the day ends is pretty exceptional.

And then the truly outrageous thing happens: he pays each worker a full day’s wages no matter how long they laboured in the sun.

The injustice is obvious: the workers are not being rewarded equally for their time or effort. The vineyard owner, when challenged, basically says “Quit whining, I didn’t break the contract. It’s my money and I can do what I want.”

And Jesus tells us that this exemplifies the kingdom of God – that new order we are asking for whenever we pray “Thy kingdom come”.

You could try explaining it in terms similar to a universal minimum salary: the vineyard owner, representing God, is providing enough so that each labourer has enough not to starve.

That message corresponds with the idea that God loves all people and wants everyone to have enough. But Jesus is also saying that our concepts of Justice are just not enough; that God operates on a level beyond us. God is the vineyard owner of the universe. God can do anything and is not subject to our outrage when we feel like an injustice has happened.

There is lots of Biblical precedent for this message. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us to love our enemies because God provides sun and rain to both the evil and the good. God does not use the basic gifts of life to reward justice and punish injustice.

The whole book of Job challenges us the same way. Faithful Job is tested by Satan, stripped of all his blessings and made to suffer. Job remains faithful, and is eventually rewarded by God but when Job demands that God explain this injustice, God basically says: You can’t understand; my reasons are way above your pay grade”.

The second season of the show Good Omens re-frames this answer in a delightful way: “Come back and ask again when you can make a whale”.

We find that kind of answer offensive. It feels patronizing. It puts us in our place. We don’t like to be treated like children: sent away from the table when grown-up things are being discussed.

The idea that we don’t get to judge God is not the whole point that Jesus is making. At the very least we are reminded that God is changing the definition of “fair”: everyone is getting enough to live on; no one is getting rich; of course the day-labourer’s wage isn’t much but it is enough and everyone gets enough.

Jesus is reminding us that God is still providing for us whether we feel like we are getting our fair share or not. Changing the whole notion of “fair share” is at the core of this parable. After all, it’s not that far off from coveting, is it? Looking at your neighbour and feeling like you deserve what they have too? Jesus is calling us to re-imagine our expectations. Not to measure our situation in contrast to the people around us but to ask, instead, whether we have what we need rather than what we want.

In social terms, thinking this way has been seen as a way to support injustice. It lets the 1% exploit everyone else. It’s why Karl Marx called religion “the opiate of the masses”. And that’s a fair criticism if we compare the rights of the vineyard owner with the rights of human landowners and other powerful people.

The church has done that in the past: “It’s my money; I can spend it as I see fit” has been granted as a right to those in power and peasants have been told not to question their social betters.

But that’s absurd. Jesus would lump human landowners in with the workers in this parable. None of us get to claim that superior position.

And frankly, using this parable, anyone with a position of power would be called to follow God’s generous example and make sure that everyone has what they need. The whole system that pits owners and bosses against workers, so that it’s okay for those who own the business to want to “extract the maximum milk with the minimum moo”, are completely violating the principle Jesus is teaching here.

Our sense of justice needs to go beyond concepts like dollars per hour or “did this person produce more than that person” however basic that kind of justice may appear.

In this parable, Jesus puts God’s logic above ours, not to make us feel belittled or inadequate, but to challenge us to think greater thoughts, to go beyond jealousy or covetousness, certainly, but even to go beyond human ideas of justice that pit us against each other.

God’s justice never stops reaching out into the market place, inviting even the latest of latecomers to the task at hand. And God’s justice provides enough for everyone no matter what we feel like others deserve, or what we feel like we deserve.

Jesus challenges us to think beyond these traditional ideas of justice, that have been in position since before the Roman Empire, to a set of values that is more worthy of the word “divine”.

How will we make this work in a world where we are told that resources are scarce? How will we live out the message that God provides enough, when we are taught to be jealous of anyone who looks better off than we are?

History has taught us that it is not enough to teach the poorer majority this lesson, the CEOs have to buy into it as well.

It won’t be a simple process. We are trying to refine human nature. As long as we ignore this lesson of Jesus, as long as we buy into the traditional, competitive model where we fight over the resources God provides instead of sharing them, we will not achieve the vision Jesus offers us.

Let’s try and get our minds around this higher concept of justice and shape our world to reflect the generosity of God that is already in place if only we learn how to see it.

Amen.

Welcoming Difference

Welcoming Difference

Scriptures: Genesis 50:15-21

Romans 14:1-12

Religions promote eating disorders!

Okay, that’s an overstatement, but we do have food issues. In each of the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, there are food challenges that need to be addressed; and questions of what to eat and when to eat it which can be found in other religions as well.

For the Abrahamic faiths it all starts with the Kosher laws we find in the laws of Moses. There are a lot of food rules. Many modern folk explain these away as being practical for a wandering culture in a hot country with no refrigeration. Most of the rules deal with meat of one sort or another and with milk products, all things that can spoil easily and, in the case of meat, carry parasites.

That doesn’t explain everything. There is a lot of symbolism in the rules and deeper meaning: the banning of mixing dairy and meat together is a generalization of the law that prohibits the cooking of a lamb in its mother’s milk. That is a law that arises out of a sense of relationship. Cooking a lamb in its own mother’s milk was an offensive idea which was seen as a profound violation of a sacred bond between parent and child. It was something that had much greater implications than mere food rules.

Even today, I was told by our friends over at Temple Israel that Jewish people who find themselves in non-Jewish settings will eat a vegetarian diet if they want to keep Kosher. It is a simple and safe way to avoid breaking the rules and it’s even Biblical: it’s what was taught in the book of Daniel as a way to live faithfully in a foreign culture. When we shared a meal at Temple Israel with Jews, Christians and Muslims together, the food served was not only delicious but it was entirely vegetarian and met both Kosher and Halal rules.

You might think that Christianity has no food rules but I remember growing up in Quebec in the 60s how many of my Catholic neighbours used to eat fish on Fridays because every Friday was a reflection of Good Friday, a fast day, where you should eat neither flesh nor fowl.

If that sounds Medieval, you’re right. It’s a ritual understanding of the days of the week that some Protestants move back to during Lent when they give up something as a sign of devotion. And of course, there are the Seventh Day Adventists who, for the most part practise vegetarianism as a statement of faith. They take the perspective that our bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit and we should keep them as pure as possible.

Meat was obviously an issue in Paul’s situation as he was writing to the Romans. In those days, they didn’t have McDonald’s. Yes, there’d be stall-keepers flogging sticks of souvlaki but there was a major industry in cooked meat from the Pagan temples. People would bring in animals for sacrifice, more than the priests and their families could eat, so they cooked them and sold them as convenience foods. A quick and handy meal for the Roman on the go!

The theological question was: if you eat food offered to a Pagan god, are you being unfaithful to our own God? Are you honouring Jupiter or Mars or Venus and thus being a heretic or religious back-slider?

Paul’s logic was straightforward, and befit his training as a Pharisee: There is only one real God, he reasoned. All others are idols: false gods that don’t exist, so meat sacrificed to them is meaningless in Christian terms. There is no Zeus or Mars or Venus in real life, so eating meat sacrificed to them does not make you a worshipper of those non-existent beings.

Easy logic for him because he had never believed in those gods but much harder for many new Christians who had converted from Paganism and who used to be convinced that those gods were very real indeed. Eating that meat would feel like back-sliding to them, returning to old, Pagan habits. It might feel like serving wine to an alcoholic.

That’s why Paul described vegetarianism as being for the weak of faith. He wasn’t making a judgment on the food choices, just on the reasoning of faith that led to the choice.

You’ll notice that Paul extends the argument into another sphere altogether: holy days. He says that all days may be celebrated as holy, or specific days may be celebrated as holy, and neither approach is better than the other as long as they come from a sincere desire to be faithful to God.

Paul is promoting a very individualistic approach to faith here. It lands on each of our shoulders to work through what we believe and how we choose to live our lives in reflection of God’s values. It reminds us that we are not God ourselves; we have no right to judge others for the ways they choose to honour God even if we disagree deeply with their perspective.

This passage helped define the United Church when it was formed. We chose to welcome each other across denominations, despite our differences. We didn’t go for uniformity. We chose to celebrate what we had in common and to allow for a great range of diversity in worship, in understanding and interpretation.

You’ll notice that Paul’s teaching didn’t stop the church from developing some very specific rules about food and indeed, about holy days over the centuries. Many of those conversations still go on today and divide denominations even now.

And within the United Church there are still passionate arguments about who is right in which interpretation, not often about food anymore, but about the many ways we try to be faithful to God.

The principle Paul taught us is a good one even if it is hard to back off when we are convinced we are right. As Paul says, no one of us is God; we are not in the position of Christ; each faithful person has to answer to God for how they live out their faith and follow the calls of their conscience.

Paul was not the first person to take this point of view. We saw Joseph say this in our Genesis lesson when his brothers were afraid of him seeking vengeance and lied about their father’s final wishes. Joseph’s reply was: I’m not God. Who am I to judge you? God is doing a greater thing here!

As we go forward and try to discover what Christianity will look like in a very different sort of future, we have to find it in ourselves to welcome difference, even where we have strong opinions about what is the right way forward. We must leave room for all those people who have a different understanding and are just as committed to God as we are.

Differences will always exist because our life experiences will give us different perspectives, but they don’t have to divide us. We don’t have to follow the old path of schism and splitting off.

In fact, we will be stronger, more creative; we will be wiser if we can find room in our hearts and our gatherings for expression of the sincere differences that make us individuals.

Paul held this up as an ideal in the 1^st century; let’s see if we can make it come alive in this 21^st century.

Amen.

Owing Love

Owing Love

Scripture: Romans 13:8-14

The idea of loving our neighbours as ourselves is one of the main teachings of Jesus that the apostle Paul emphasizes in his letters. In more than one passage, he describes it as the “law of love” and repeats the teaching we find here: If we love our neighbours as much as we love ourselves then we have obeyed all the laws that matter.

You could call it an antidote to narcissism, where we deliberately don’t put ourselves first. We’re not putting ourselves last, either. Rather, we are treating other people the way we would like to be treated ourselves.

In modern terms you could call it a recipe for respectful living: actually listening to others, paying attention to them as we live in community. But, love is more than just respect.

This is a serious concept of how to live, not just some idealistic fuzzy dream. This is at the core of Christianity, at the heart of what Jesus taught: “Love God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength and love your neighbour as yourself”.

We can’t forget the loving God part for that is what puts everything into perspective. Loving God is what gives us the set of values that teaches us that loving our neighbours is good. Loving God is what reminds us that God’s creation is good and needs to be protected from climate change and other problems caused by selfish living. Loving God allows us to set our priorities.

Loving our neighbours is probably the part that challenges us most from day to day. After all, it’s other people that we argue with. It’s our neighbours who let their dog bark after bedtime. It’s our relatives who can be so frustrating over decades. It’s other people at church who just don’t seem to understand the important point we’re trying to make.

We’re going to have a really good opportunity to practise loving our neighbours as we try to develop a practical vision for the future of Knox.

Later this fall you will hear about something called “holy manners”. It’s a way for us to talk about things together that is based on this idea of loving each other, where we let other people finish what they are saying and actually pay attention, instead of spending their talking time preparing our own words.

The whole point of the upcoming stage of our visioning process – not just this coming Wednesday’s potluck, but the weeks to follow, as we unpack the ideas we generate on Wednesday – the point is to imagine the future of our Knox community and to do that, we want the creativity flowing. There’s a good chance we will come up with thoughts that don’t all work together. We may hear visions of the church that are really upsetting and others that are really attractive.

I sincerely hope we get both because if we do, it means that we’re not stuck in a rut. Our creativity can startle us into new ways of thinking. It also means that we have to have a way of hearing each other’s ideas and discussing them that doesn’t blow someone out of the water or worse, ignore them entirely.

When John Wesley developed his Wesleyan Quadrilateral – a theology for moving into the future with fresh understanding, the same theology that allowed the church to reject and work against slavery – Wesley integrated that same call to love our neighbours and he explicitly pointed out that often God’s Holy Spirit speaks most clearly through the people who are most marginalized and that we have to make a point of inviting and including the people who feel left out.

Maybe the ones who are most uncomfortable talking, the ones who expect to be ignored or overlooked, are the very ones whose voices we need to hear

That reveals a dimension of loving our neighbour that we don’t always consider: we can’t expect others to step up to the microphone the way we would; we can’t just say “they had their chance to speak” and shrug them off; we have to take that step of imagining what it is like for them to say anything at all in a meeting; and then consider how to encourage them to speak, to hear and respond to their words, opinions, and stories.

Loving our neighbours can be real work, especially if we’re not used to it.

It calls us to look beyond our desire to get what we deserve. It calls us never to look down on someone else or treat someone as an inferior. More importantly, it calls us to love each other, to respect each other as people beloved by God and to want what is best for that other person.

That doesn’t mean we can’t disagree. Disagreements are healthy in any community. They are a sign of diversity at work and they are an opportunity for us to broaden our minds and re-imagine our world.

We can do this as long as we remember what Paul says: we owe each other love; it is a debt that we can never stop paying because it is a reflection of the way God’s love for us is never-ending.

May God’s love guide us into the future and may we happily pay that love forward as we join together to imagine the future.

Amen.

The Name of God

The Name of God

Scriptures: Exodus 3:1-15 Romans 12:9-21

Consider Moses: we met him last week as his frantic mother set him adrift in the Nile in a basket covered in pitch in a desperate attempt to save his life.

The Hebrews were being subjected to a kind of genocide. Traditional genocide in the Middle East meant the men were all killed and the women kept as slaves, except that just the baby boys were being killed: the men were enslaved and put to work

As we know, Moses was rescued by an Egyptian princess and raised as her own son. A modern Canadian equivalent would be a 60s Scoop child. Moses had some sense of his language and culture – his own mother had been hired as his wet-nurse but that relationship would have ended once he was weaned. He was raised as an Egyptian royal prince in much more luxury than his own people. Even his name reflects this: Moses is not a Hebrew name; the Hebrew version is Moishe.

So Moses grows up with mixed feelings: he knows a bit about his origins, and in a burst of youthful activism he attacks a slave-driver who was beating a Hebrew and murders the man. But instead of being hailed as a hero, his own people were afraid of his temper and feared that he might kill them.

So, he fled for his life from Egypt into exile in Midian. He married a local woman and went to work for her father as a shepherd, watching the sheep and goats, which is where we meet him again, in today’s lesson.

Moses had quite the roller-coaster ride: from slave baby condemned to death; to adopted royal prince; to murderer and fugitive from justice; to a shepherd, working for his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian.

So this young man takes the sheep and goats far from their usual feeding grounds and ends up in front of the burning bush experiencing a Theophany: a direct experience of God. This is all very impressive and cool until God tells him to confront Pharaoh and demand that he release all the Hebrew slaves.

You can understand Moses’ reluctance. The Egyptian King was either his adopted grandfather or his adopted uncle by then, and Moses was supposed to order him to dismantle the economic system of slave labour that helped make Egypt rich? More than that, Moses was already wanted for murder and Pharaoh was not likely to be very forgiving. Besides, he hadn’t been married all that long; Moses wouldn’t want to leave his wife behind and can you imagine having to explain all this to his father-in-law? Sure, Jethro was a priest, but of the gods of Midian, not the God of Israel.

So Moses’ objection: “What? Why me? You’ve got the wrong guy!” is entirely reasonable. And God’s answer: “Don’t worry, I’ll be with you” probably didn’t reassure him much. People believed, in those days, that gods were pretty local, so God was basically saying to Moses that the one and only God of the Hebrews was going to waltz into Egypt, with its dozens of gods and it would all work out just fine.

Moses was standing in front of an active miracle, so whatever doubts he may have had about God’s plan he didn’t express out loud. Instead, he expressed doubts about himself: he didn’t know what to tell his own people about this God who wanted to liberate them; Moses had almost no cultural training; he hadn’t heard all the stories; and he had no confidence in his own identity as a Hebrew.

So he asked a very practical question: “What is your name?” And the result is wonderful: when God’s name is revealed, it is so much more than just a name – it is a revelation of the nature of God.

In Hebrew, God’s name probably sounds like “Yahweh” and it is related to the verb: “to be”. “I AM WHO I AM” is the way we translate it and a fascinating thing about the Hebrew language is that the same name also means “I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE” – Present and Future tenses all rolled into one.

It’s amazing: God is identified as the source of all being. God is the creator, obviously, but also the living source of life; the “ground of being” to quote the theologian Paul Tillich; more than just a supreme being, but the actual source of being, the basis of existence itself.

The other dimension to this is that future tense part of the name: the sense that God is not unchanging but moving forward and that God draws us and all creation into the future, into the “will be”.

It’s all pretty mind-blowing. That’s a lot of philosophy to impart to a young man whose life has been very difficult and who has made some bad decisions, but Moses clearly was moved by all of this because he believed God’s promise and he went back to Egypt to tell ol’ Pharaoh “Let my people go”.

Moses was a troubled young man, not the sort you would consider an ideal leader, but God chose him, and worked through him with spectacular results. God’s promise was truer than Moses ever expected. God was with Moses and led the people into a future none of them could foresee.

As we resume our activities this fall we will soon have our third step in our visioning process where we try to paint a picture of our future. And a lot of the concerns expressed in Moses’ experience will come to the surface: “Who am I to say anything?” people will wonder; or maybe: “I don’t want anything to change!”; which is a very familiar cry in every church and was a complaint that Moses had to hear from the Hebrews over and over during the Exodus; or maybe, more honestly, it could be expressed as “I’m scared, I can’t see a good outcome, I’m not ready!”.

Moses wasn’t ready. He kept making excuses well beyond today’s lesson and God kept making Moses move past those excuses.

The Hebrews weren’t ready: they wanted to be free from oppression, sure, but they didn’t want to face a mass evacuation; their entire population being forced to move and give up their familiar surroundings, this place where they had all grown up; bringing their seniors and their babies out into the wilderness in hopes of some “promised land” they had never seen; but God brought them through despite some very hard times.

Of course we’re not ready for the future. No one ever is, but we can go forward with hope because we have seen that God is trustworthy and can take unprepared, unworthy, confused and just plain normal people and lead them into a very worthwhile future.

So when we gather on the 13^th, let’s look for God’s presence in our gathering and open ourselves to God’s inspiration. God is the source of our very existence and God is unfolding the future before us.

May we have the courage to overcome our fears and objections, our past and our shortcomings, and follow God’s leading into a hopeful future.

Amen.

Above the Law

Above the Law

Lesson: Exodus 1:8 to 2:10

I was raised near Montreal in a culturally Danish household with a strong pietist Lutheran influence, and I attended a Presbyterian church.

So I grew up with a combined cultural and religious sense that following the rules, obeying the laws, and above all being honest, even when it hurt you personally, was what God expected of every Christian.

I grew up with the understanding that the police were my friends, a view not shared by some of my rougher friends who, as Anglo kids getting into trouble, had some unfriendly encounters with the mostly Francophone QPP (now called the SQ: Sûreté du Québec).

It was all presented to me as part of what God wanted; that the laws of the land represented an extension of the laws of God, at least in a democracy where the government was supposed to have the best interests of the people in mind.

And besides, telling the truth was part of the ten commandments: “Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness Against Thy Neighbour”!

So, reading about the oppression of the Hebrews by the Egyptians and then Moses going into the bulrushes of the Nile was baffling to me. Here were the Hebrew midwives disobeying the law and lying to the king. And God was pleased! God rewarded them!

Obviously, I wasn’t thinking in very subtle ways, but others had the same challenge: one teacher even suggested that their lies were permissible because the 10 commandments weren’t written yet, so they weren’t breaking any laws. But, the teacher pointed out, that option wasn’t open to us anymore. No lying!

There’s a lot of subtle thinking going on in this story: Moses being put into the Nile in a reed basked, waterproofed so it wouldn’t sink too quickly and hopefully would smell bad to crocodiles, is very subtle. It makes it look like someone obeyed the letter of the law, casting this Hebrew boy baby into the Nile and yet trying to give him the best chance of survival. There was a very subtle, very feminine scheme going on: his older sister keeping watch to protect him, making sure he was somewhere he would be found by some powerful women who might take pity on him. Besides, you can bet that wherever the princess was bathing, someone had gone ahead to chase off the crocodiles.

And it all worked perfectly, even to the point that Moses’ own mother was hired as his wet nurse, so he would get to know his birth family and feel kinship to his people even though he was raised in a palace and they had become forced labourers.

A series of untruths and deceptions combined with outright disobedience and lies all play out with God’s blessing!

The Bible carries a long history and for most of it, God’s people are a minority: first just a nomadic family; then a growing and feared minority in Egypt; then an enslaved people; and then a nomadic nation in the wilderness.

For a time they were conquerors and they were not subtle or gentle about it. But then they were broken up and displaced by the Assyrians, then the Babylonians and even when they were restored to their land they were under a series of other empires. By the time the Christians start writing, the empire was Roman. Even into the second century of the Christian Era, Christians and Jews were minorities and both were often under persecution.

So it is not surprising that there is a clear Biblical understanding that laws can be unjust; that it can be very much the will of God that an unjust law be subverted.

Open opposition can get you beaten or killed, which is why the Hebrew midwives were sneaky and came up with that ridiculous story about Hebrew women popping out babies in the field. Obviously Pharaoh had nothing to do with childbirth or he would have dismissed that in an instant.

But the midwives didn’t want to become baby murderers; they didn’t want to participate in genocide on their own people or be participants in this Government plan to make it look like all the Hebrew boys were stillborn. But they didn’t dare to oppose the king openly, so they found ways to disobey the law that were risky, and required courage and even required creativity which, in turn, inspired the king to create a law that was openly murderous: throw the boy babies into the river.

We, as Christians, have had a privileged position. We have been rulers since Emperor Constantine. We have been the majority, and if oppression was going to happen, we have been the ones to do it.

In terms of our attitude to laws, it means that we have emphasized the parts of the Bible that encourage obedience which is fine, as long as we also maintain that core of understanding that Paul called the Law of Love, where you love your neighbour as yourself and don’t enforce laws against them that you would not want to be subject to yourself.

For a time, most Christians didn’t question the laws of the various expanding European empires. As a result of this, we were complicit in a lot of really inappropriate actions against indigenous communities and the church became part of a process that regulated everything to the point that one sex position is called “missionary” because the missionaries taught that it was the only position that God approved of.

That is totally cultural. There is no valid religious basis for it. Frankly, it was a symbolic way to keep women in a submissive position and it was most enthusiastically promoted in Matriarchal cultures that had been colonized.

Later today there will be a Pride parade: one of our culture’s current spaces where laws are being challenged and moral and cultural assumptions are openly debated.

The most blatant prejudices being expressed today, too often by people who claim to represent the views of God, are against the Trans part of the community. It would not take much to tip that self-righteous hostility again into open expressions of hate against gays and lesbians. I would suggest that there is a “divide and conquer” approach being used against the whole community.

To my mind, this is another area where blind obedience to human law is a mistake and the biblical examples we are given about how to live with and subvert legal oppression should come back into our consciousness.

The idea of a pride parade would never have occurred to the Hebrews. The Egyptians would have sent out the army and suppressed them with brutality. So we have definitely made progress.

But the fact that so many people are afraid to be who they are in any kind of public way, even after so much progress, is a reminder that majorities still fear minorities and majorities have the power, through laws, or simple force of numbers, to make the lives of minorities hell on earth.

There are times when God calls us to be above the law. Not in an arrogant way, which is what “above the law” often suggests, but in a way that carefully and prayerfully looks at the real people in the real situation and asks: “Following God’s Law of Love – what is the right thing to do here?”. It might be as blatant as marching in a parade, or it might be subtle and underground for safety concerns.

But it always involves going beyond unquestioning obedience and looking with eyes of love to see who is at risk and to see what we can do to help them.

Amen.

Painful Reconciliation

Painful Reconciliation

Scriptures: Genesis 45:1-15

Matthew 15:21-28

Reconciliation is a hot topic right now, mostly in terms of our relationship with Indigenous people. One of the challenges we face is that we have a hard time understanding what reconciliation looks like.

Reconciliation between groups is complicated, so looking at reconciliation within families might help. It’s where we have the most experience and a sense of what can work and what can go wrong.

Reconciliation of an estranged couple can be complex. We have a sense that wrongs need to be forgiven and that a new partnership needs to be developed. We don’t just want to see someone who has been abused go back into an abusive situation to be treated badly again. We know that’s not reconciliation: that’s surrender and a profound injustice.

So we understand that reconciliation is about change, necessary change, to make a relationship work. If you want things to go back to the way they were, reconciliation is impossible.

Reconciling other family members can also be very difficult. Siblings, for example, can remember injustices going back decades, even into childhood, and the feelings can run really deep, even though one of the siblings feels that the other is being unreasonable for bringing up old stuff and the first feels like the other is being uncaring and refusing to take their feelings seriously.

All of this messy stuff is part of reconciliation and we will never get it sorted out if we become impatient or refuse to listen to each other.

A brilliant example of family reconciliation is in today’s Genesis lesson where Joseph reveals himself to his brothers as the one ten of them had sold into slavery many years before. Only the youngest brother, Benjamin, who had the same mother as Joseph, was innocent of that crime and knew nothing about it.

Joseph’s feelings ran so deep that he threw all his officials out of the room while he made peace with his brothers. It could have gone badly: he had them in his power at that moment. Yet he understood their feelings enough that he forgave them and offered to help the whole family, using his new position of power. He could have gone for bitter revenge but he chose forgiveness and love.

It was a painful process. Joseph’s own wailing was loud enough that his officials heard him through the doors. He wept with his betrayers and with Benjamin, who had been a mere child when Joseph had been sold into slavery. After his brothers got over their disbelief and shock and had a chance to deal with their guilt, it was a noisy reunion with the sharing of many stories.

It was a painful process, but worth it and it saved a family that would become a nation.

Taking this experience of family reconciliation and translating it into a group process can be done. There are some good clues in this story.

But even more, we find that the gospel lesson actually shows us a reconciliation between two individuals who represent two estranged peoples: the Jews and the Canaanites. Remember, when the Hebrews entered the Promised Land they practised genocide on the Canaanites as a way of creating religious purity.

A Canaanite woman wanted her daughter healed and Jesus was maintaining the traditional separation between the people of Israel and everyone else. He even expressed some of the popular prejudice of his people, calling the woman and her daughter “dogs” which is a deep insult in the Middle East, even today.

It’s an unequal relationship: Jesus was part of a people that isolated itself on purpose, but he was also the one with the power to heal. He was a man, she was a woman, so he automatically had a lot more standing than she did. She was coming to him from a position of weakness.

She didn’t want the same old relationship to continue. Her daughter would never be healed that way. It’s amazing what courage people can find when they are defending their children.

She couldn’t use any kind of power to persuade Jesus, so she was clever, taking his own insulting words and turning them around against him. It caught Jesus off guard and impressed him. He was forced to see her has a person, not just as a foreigner, a Canaanite. He saw her as a real person, as real as anyone he had helped from his own nation. As soon as he looked at her that way, he could appreciate her feelings, her desire to help her daughter, and he healed the girl.

This is the first step in reconciliation that Jesus made with the Canaanite people that his ancestors had conquered.

Jesus had been limiting his ministry to the people who had invaded the land and it was only because of the initiative of this Canaanite woman – her willingness to live with the pain of begging for help from a man of the nation that had conquered hers hundreds of years before – that this reconciliation began.

Clearly, that reconciliation is not complete. I’m not aware of any people who identify as Canaanites today, but the fight between the state of Israel and the people of Palestine demonstrates that a lot of work is still to be done.

The followers of Jesus figured out quickly that they could reach across ancient barriers and try to reconcile with people who were generational enemies. That’s part of how the church grew so explosively: this willingness to forgive and share together in building a future that addresses everyone’s needs.

The example Jesus set is a good one for us to follow:

to acknowledge and drop his own prejudices;
to see the person in front of him rather than the stranger;
to take her feelings and her experiences to heart;
to not make any grand statements about the Hebrew past with the Canaanites; and
to address the immediate issue that she was presenting and heal her daughter

How much progress could we make if we issued fewer statements and fixed more inadequate water systems to get rid of boil water advisories?

We can get tied up in theories and abstractions. We manage to continue to treat indigenous people as “others”, who are unreasonable, demanding. We cast them as those bratty little siblings who bring up conflicts from the past: “Why can’t you just get over it?”.

As long as we think that way, reconciliation will never happen, not the least because that kind of thinking keeps “them” separate from “us” in our hearts and minds.

Both Jesus and Joseph were successful in their reconciliations, painful as they obviously were, because they made a point to empathize with the people in front of them. They listened, welcomed, loved and took part in a heart-felt conversation that led to new and transformed relationships.

As we seek reconciliation, let’s keep these biblical examples in mind. They teach us what we need to make reconciliation work: a willingness to acknowledge injustices; a commitment to deal with the challenges that exist today; a determination to listen and be empathetic; a willingness to forgive and be forgiven and; at the core of it all, a recognition that those “others” really are people worthy of as much love and respect as we are.

Amen.

Joseph and Jesus: Parallels

Joseph and Jesus: Parallels

Scripture: Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28

The Bible contains stories that carry striking parallels. This isn’t some kind of inter-generational plagiarism, it’s because some human behaviours repeat themselves and people recognize familiar stories playing themselves out again.

The story of Joseph and his coat of many colours was foundational to Israel. Joseph was the one who got them to Egypt and saved them from the famine. Today’s scripture lesson reminds us of how he got there.

It is a story of bad parenting, sibling rivalry, secret plotting, betrayal, almost murder, and a sale to foreigners into slavery.

The bad parenting was all on Jacob, also named Israel. He played favourites with his children and his ten older sons were bitterly jealous of how much he doted on Joseph. To make matters worse, in the verses we skipped we hear how Joseph had visions about how his father and brothers would one day bow down and serve him. This is NOT how you endear yourself to your older brothers and it even sounds disrespectful of your father, who gave you that amazing, expensive coat.

This jealousy between brothers reminds us of their father, Jacob and his brother Esau. Jacob cheated Esau out of his birthright and blessing, Jacob only escaped bloodshed by fleeing the country and staying away for years.

And even farther back, it reminds us of Cain and Abel where God favoured Abel and a jealous Cain murdered his own brother.

The lesson of that basic sin clearly didn’t sink in for everyone; but Reuben, Joseph’s oldest brother, maybe he remembered that his uncle Esau had learned forbearance and welcomed Jacob back eventually. Reuben was wise enough not to repeat Cain’s error and saved his obnoxious younger brother from death and his nine other brothers from becoming murderers.

The whole “jealous brother” theme gets repeated by Jesus in his parable of the two brothers, sometimes called the parable of the Prodigal Son, but there’s no direct application to Jesus’ own life that we know of. His brothers, at their mother’s direction, did try to stop Jesus from preaching. They decided that he had gone crazy but nothing violent happened and they went away peacefully when Jesus refused to stop. Indeed, after the crucifixion, Jesus’ brother James became the head of the Jerusalem church. So whatever differences there had been were ironed out by then.

But when we talk about the crucifixion we can see some powerful parallels that the Christian Church certainly noticed: Joseph was sold for 20 pieces of silver; Jesus was sold for 30 pieces.

In each instance it was a profound betrayal. Joseph was sold by his own brothers to the foreign traders. Jesus was sold by his own disciple to the religious authorities and then passed on by them, his own people, to the Romans – the brutal foreigners who killed him.

In both cases, it was a personal betrayal of the deepest sort and as the early Christians would have understood, they were both occasions of profound injustice that God would transform into salvation.

People who want life to be predetermined or fated sometimes talk like God engineered each situation; like God made sure that evil would happen so that good would triumph.

I don’t believe that. Joseph’s family history and his father’s favouritism combined with his own bragging don’t make it hard to predict that his brothers would have some dark thoughts. But the brothers chose to plot to murder him and the eldest brother, who had learned some self-control and who knew how upset their father would be, was wise enough to persuade his brothers to back off a bit.

And as for Jesus, he was being remarkably public in his teaching and he was doing the usual prophet thing in upsetting the people in charge by pointing out how they were corrupt. Again, it was not surprising that they would attempt to silence him.

All of the bad behaviour in both stories can be recognized as the kind of human behaviour that appears in every generation.

What’s wonderful is the way that these horrible, impossible situations could be transformed by God into unexpected good news in ways that no one could predict.

A Jewish slave becoming the second most important ruler in Egypt? Who would have believed that? But it put him in the perfect position to save his extended family from starvation.

A crucified carpenter dying a weak and shameful death inspiring a movement of outcasts, women and poor people and slaves that would replace the mighty Roman Empire? Inconceivable!

Yet Jesus gave people a vision of life in this world and beyond: life with a profound spiritual and eternal dimension that gave people an alternative to the lives they were living; lives that locked most of them into pre-determined boxes with no real hope for anything better. They were so inspired that an astonishing number of them were prepared to die for their beliefs.

In the lives of both Joseph and Jesus we are shown people behaving badly: jealous, fearful, angry, petty people who wanted to protect their own positions and were prepared to betray and murder to do it.

And we are shown God transforming these situations from potential bad endings into new beginnings; into situations where people were not only saved but whole new nations were shaped and developed: the children of Israel in Egypt – that extended family that became a whole nation; and the people Jesus called sisters and brothers – that family, not of blood but of faith, which grew to extend around the world.

It is remarkable what God can do with flawed people and terrible circumstances. Even the worst motivations can become the jumping-off point for profound change.

So as we navigate this fractious world with its internet trolls, hostile divisions and poisonous opinions, with its ongoing betrayals and people who do unethical things to defend their positions; as we deal with all the bad stuff that is still there after 2000 years, let’s not be discouraged. God has been able to transform awful stuff in the past into wonderful new hope.

If we keep ourselves open to possibilities, even when things seem to be going terribly wrong, we will find that God is there, in the crisis with us, showing us where to find a new direction and discover unexpected new hope.

Joseph learned that through faith and experience and saved his family, giving them a place to grow into a nation. Jesus counted on God doing that and through his faith began the transformation of the world.

That transformation continues with us. So no matter how bad things may look in life let’s never forget: God is still here, and God can still turn the worst circumstances into unexpected blessings.

Amen.