Knox United Church Nepean

The Core Miracle

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

The Core Miracle

Scriptures: Isaiah 55:1-5 Matthew 14:13-21

I was fascinated to discover that the miracle of the loaves and the fishes is the only miracle of Jesus included in all four gospels. Obviously, the resurrection of Jesus is included in each gospel, but that is a miracle attributed to God. NO ONE claims that Jesus raised himself.

So the miracle of the loaves and fishes is important enough that it is core to the story of Jesus in a way that no other sign or portent is.

We have four gospels because each of the writers had a particular perspective they wanted to bring, a message they were determined to share, possibly with a particular audience.

Mark’s is the oldest, and it is written in clumsy Greek. It bubbles with urgency and enthusiasm: the phrase kai euqus “and immediately” is very common. Mark seems to be in a hurry to tell his readers about another way to live as revealed by Jesus.

Matthew and Luke both had copies of Mark’s gospel and they both had copies of a collection of the sayings of Jesus. Maybe they felt that Mark had missed something important. We know they had different audiences: Matthew was writing in Syria for Jewish Christians and wanted to address the question of Jesus’ relationship with the law of Moses; Luke was writing in Egypt for Gentile Christians. He was prepared to talk about Jesus in terms they could accept, such as the virgin birth and Jesus being the Son of God in literal rather than symbolic terms, something blasphemous to Jews, but accepted by Pagans.

John’s gospel came last. He was writing theology: trying to give people a way to understand Jesus that painted him in very divine terms. John doesn’t talk about miracles at all, he talks about seven signs. The sign of the loaves and fishes is #4, dead centre. He also gives Jesus seven “I AM” monologues. Biblically, seven is a divine number and “I AM” is the closest translation we can manage to the name of God as revealed at the burning bush.

So in the midst of these four different agendas and perspectives, it is remarkable that this miracle is so important that all four evangelists give it a prominent place in their narrative.

At its core, this miracle is about impossible generosity: “You feed them” says Jesus with five loaves and two fish for over 5000 people. Note the divine number of seven again: 5+2. Jesus breaks up the bread and shares it around and the broken pieces at the end fill 12 baskets. Note: 12 is another symbolic number – the number of the tribes of Israel and the number of disciples. It represents the totality of the people of God and it suggests the message that, when we get together God provides more than what we need.

One favourite interpretation of this event is that the people of the crowd, seeing the example of Jesus and the disciples sharing the small amount of food they had, decided to share whatever they had brought. It became a miracle of the changing of hearts: instead of people expecting to be served, they start to share and serve each other, with generous and unexpected results.

One of the persistent messages of Jesus is that we can trust God to care for our needs and this incident gives us a sense that it works when the whole church pulls together and shares instead of hoarding or thinking selfishly.

God works through the people of God, through sharing and helping, and the results are nothing short of miraculous. Clearly, each of the evangelists understood that this idea of shared resources, of getting together and helping each other, was at the core of Christianity.

They understood that a major part of Jesus’ teaching was aimed at changing people’s hearts; to stop looking out for “number one” and start helping out the community with a generous spirit.

In fact, it’s not just about giving; it is about accepting help as well, having the grace to receive as well as give. Sometimes our pride gets in the way; we don’t want to be seen taking charity.

But what Jesus shows us is that we are called to create community and sharing back and forth isn’t “charity”. Actually, our culture has corrupted the word “charity” which comes from the Greek word xaritas which is a kind of generous love. We’ve associated it with a corrupt version of giving to the poor, where someone wealthy or powerful demonstrates their moral superiority, or their value in society, by giving to the “less fortunate”. They may end up feeling good about themselves, but too often the recipient feels put down, even worthless.

What Jesus was demonstrating was sharing, with everyone being equal in the community and God’s good gifts becoming available to all, no social inequality. Rather, with the first becoming last and the last, first, all should end up in the same space, sharing freely.

Unequal sharing was so shocking that when one church started treating communion as a kind of selfish potluck where you ate what you brought, the rich were getting overfed and drunk and others were going hungry, Paul reamed them out in one of his letters and condemned this as receiving communion “in an unworthy manner”. This phrase has worried people who care about rules ever since: “am I worthy?” But the example we see of unworthy behaviour is all about selfishness.

The earliest church took this sharing model quite literally. The Jerusalem church gathered people together to live in common. They sold what they had and shared everything until Rome destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE.

The ancient church developed another model of this that still exists today: the monastic community where no one has private property and all work for the common good.

We associate this with same-gender communities of entirely monks or nuns but early Celtic monasteries had mixed groups with monks and nuns often married to each other. Some young Christians today are experimenting with what they call “intentional communities” sharing a place to live, cooking, eating & studying together.

It’s not what our society has trained us to expect. The sharing community we know best is the family and in the 20^th century we were encouraged to narrow that down to the nuclear family instead of the multi-generational arrangements we had known for centuries.

Jesus imagined something much bigger, more inclusive, connected not by blood but by shared values, where people can gather in a community that works and shares together so that no one has to go without. The Mennonites started living this way 500 years ago and practise various forms in their own communities.

This vision of community and sharing is so foundational to Christianity that all four gospels, despite their differences, saw fit to give this miracle a prime place in their narratives.

As we live through turbulent economic times we would do well to remember this vision and imagine how we could make it work today.

This vision is core to Jesus’ teachings. As we try to find inspiration for our future at Knox and for the wider church, rediscovering this vision may inspire in us a new and creative way forward.

Amen.

Simple Love

Simple Love

Scripture: Matthew 6:25-26 New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?”

Jesus taught a lot of lessons about God from nature, either through elements of farming or through direct reference to familiar animals like today’s lesson about the birds of the air and its extension to the lilies of the field in the next verses.

Contrast what Jesus said with these words from medieval Dominican friar and mystic Meister Eckhart:

Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things. Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God. Every creature is a word of God. If I spent enough time with the tiniest creature—even a caterpillar—I would never have to prepare a sermon. So full of God is every creature.

Those are wonderful words! I will come back to them but they are abstract, inviting us to examine the animals as isolated examples of God at work in the world.

What Jesus said contains some jarring economic elements: “Are you not of more value than they?” and again, in chapter 10 of Matthew’s gospel where Jesus talks about God seeing the little sparrow fall, he mentions that two are sold for a penny in the market. Jesus insists on coming back to the very human frame of reference of economics.

I noticed that as a child and it bothered me although I’m not sure I could have put it into words. But it brings to mind a story my mother’s mother used to tell us about her own childhood in Denmark where she grew up in a farmhouse with a thatched roof.

Thatched roofs make great nesting places for birds and at one point the local government put a bounty on the large number of sparrows that were on every property. So, my grandmother and her sisters were given the job of hunting sparrows. They would turn in the wings for the bounty and the family would eat the very small breast meat because to do anything else would be wasteful.

I heard that story with horror as a child in the 1960s, but she would have been hunting sparrows as a child just around 1920 and I have no right to judge her for the circumstances of her life so long ago.

Things change and while our society’s relationship to animals still involves eating them sometimes, we have made it all more invisible. We have saved ourselves the bloody reality as it would have been known to farm people for thousands of years.

Owners of cats and some dogs will sometimes come face to face with the results of hunting in the back yard or the cellar; a reminder of the realities of our own ancestors’ lives not so many years ago.

As a child I wondered why those sparrows were being sold in the markets of Nazareth. I hoped they were to become pets, maybe entertainment for people with no Televisions or Radios, or even companions of a sort, or maybe they were an escape, like the Birdman of Alcatraz: a way to dream about flying above the clouds for people with really restricted earth-bound lives?

Or were they sacrifices so the poorest of the poor could take care of their religious obligations? Or were they food: a bit of luxury; tiny meat for the poorest soup-pots?

Jesus included that jarring statement about value so we could see the contrast he was making in the way God values creation. God values the birds we treat as so worthless. God values the grass of the field, here today and gone tomorrow. God sees beyond questions of legacy and reputation and even “what am I going to eat tomorrow?”, to the deeper value of each life in creation.

Some lives are shorter: but if it’s a bird, that short life gets to soar above the clouds, something the people of Jesus’ day could only do in dreams and visions. God has created value in each and every life and it is our blind adherence to an economic view of life that prevents us from taking a deeper look.

I have never starved. I didn’t experience the great depression the way my grandparents and parents did, so I can only imagine what it is like to be that uncertain about the future, about where your next meal is coming from.

But a lot of the people who listened to Jesus DID know real hunger. They might have needed to eat grasshoppers sometimes, or enjoy a sparrow for dinner. That kind of extreme situation is not something I can judge.

But Jesus made a point of startling his audience with this contrast of values, and we can do the same.

What Meister Eckhart said seven hundred years ago has been proven true in the 20^th and 21^st centuries as we continue to learn more and more about the wonders of the animals that live around us: the marvels of the senses they have that exceed our own in so many ways; the sense of smell the dogs have; the remarkable hearing and eyesight of cats; the fact that butterflies can see into the ultraviolet spectrum so that what looks plain to us is a beautiful and intricate pattern to them.

There is so much to see and so much to value.

And possibly one of the greatest lessons is one we have from our own pets, namely the kind of love they bring us: uncritical, forgiving, trusting, deep; it sometimes feels like a more unconditional love than we ever find in people; it gives us a taste of the love of God and the love God wants to create in us.

The Bible talks about perfect love casting out fear and we start to get an image of what perfect love looks like as we interact with our pets.

They’re not all angels and they will get demanding if their supper is very late; but in their love, they’re not afraid and they still trust us to provide for them.

Their love is simple, and we can learn from it. It is a good place for us to start as we plumb the depths of the love of God and learn what it means to share that love with others.

Amen.

Hospitality

Hospitality

Scriptures: Genesis 18:1-15 Romans 5:1-8

I have to admit that I titled this sermon with a bit of a wink towards our visioning process. We had a lot of conversation about “Hospitality”: an idea we appreciated for its principles, but we felt that the word “Hospitality” had been taken over by the Hospitality Industry, so we chose other words to carry the same values in our new statement of purpose.

I’m happy with that outcome but today’s reading from Genesis gives us an example of hospitality so profound that I couldn’t resist trotting out the word again.

It’s a remarkable story: Abraham sees these three strangers approaching and he offers them hospitality by his tent. He suggests they stop and rest, washing their dusty and sore feet in some cool water and then rest in the shade of the oak trees while he made arrangements to give them some bread to eat.

Bread and water were minimum levels of hospitality to be expected in that culture. It wasn’t exactly a place overflowing with streams, so water was very valuable and foot-washing was a social custom that was a basic part of hospitality that continued into Jesus’ time centuries later. Bread was a universal part of the local diet; it was probably like our modern pita bread.

Abraham went on to deliver much more than the minimum. He told Sarah to use a generous supply of the best flour. He said: let them eat cake! Not just bread! and then he personally selected a fatted calf and got his servants to butcher it and cook it.

This was a huge amount of effort. Think how much planning went into today’s picnic – all the setup of the BBQs, tables, chairs and other elements of the meal. Abraham could never have pulled off such a meal without help, but he got the whole community moving to produce a feast for these three strangers.

What was his motivation? We are given clues to indicate that this might be some kind of divine visitation. In the Bible, the number three is often a sign that something divine is happening.

Did Abraham suspect this? Was he being so generous because he guessed that he might be entertaining angels unawares? That’s a big gamble to take for three random strangers, especially people who were going to walk on by. He had to run out to them, bow down in great respect and invite them to stop and stay.

We don’t have any indication that Abraham suspected this. We don’t know if he treated every rare stranger this way and that this encounter is retold because it is the one where God rewards his hospitality.

Abraham and his family were nomads, always visitors in whatever land they were in. There was always some local king around who could choose to tolerate this wandering family or drive them away from the water and grazing land.

Perhaps his hospitality was a respectful land acknowledgement, showing thanks for being allowed to stay on someone else’s unceded territory, or maybe just demonstrating what good neighbours he and his family could be.

There were commonly held rules and expectations of hospitality throughout the middle east in those days but Abraham made a point of exceeding them and we have no indication that this was motivated by any self-interest or cynical calculation. We are simply shown that he was a hospitable man and a generous host.

What did it take to be so hospitable? Abraham needed to know what the expectations were and he needed to be determined to go beyond them without bragging about what he would serve. He only promised the basics.

He needed to be able to put himself in the sandals of his guests. He needed to be aware that they might be shy, or cautious. They wouldn’t put themselves forward – they had to be invited to pause in their journey, to take a break. He needed to imagine the impact of offering that invitation with the greatest respect, how they would feel about being treated like visiting royalty, no matter how much the road had stained them. Abraham needed to know about foot-sore travel weariness, and just how refreshing some cool water would be for hot, dusty feet.

He needed to know that after the dangers of the roads a safe, secure, quiet time in the shade would be calming and restful. He needed to be sympathetic to the empty stomachs – there were certainly no drive-through restaurants on those roads – and while a skin of water might replace a cup-holder, in those climates you have to be careful with water. Any chance to re-fill your supply would be welcome and possibly a life-saver. Beyond that Abraham needed to be able to imagine the delightful surprise of wonderful food when even the simple joys of fresh bread would have been welcome.

Abraham’s generosity was an example of deep empathy respectfully offered to complete strangers.

Anyone with an eye on the finances will point out that we can’t go overboard for every stranger who passes by. This level of hospitality looks deeply impractical. Abraham didn’t have strangers walking by every day, and we do.

That’s true enough and I have no doubt that Abraham was aware of his resources and his limitations when he went out to choose that calf. In part, the story shows that he was prosperous. But the attitude he brought went beyond relative prosperity. He offered a welcome that was respectful and met the needs of the people walking by and was within his means. He shared what he had generously with an eye to making them comfortable, to making them feel at home. He did not over-promise but he did deliver more than he promised.

It is nice that he and Sarah were rewarded for their hospitality. They were given their dream-come-true: a child when they thought that was no longer possible. That’s a lovely, happy ending but it is not the point of the story.

The hospitality is the point of the story. Abraham’s attitude is the point: he reached out beyond his comfortable camp and touched the lives of complete strangers by offering them what they really needed and then providing much more.

In our life as a congregation we have focused inwardly: we worry about finances; we worry about attendance. This is normal for many churches today of many denominations.

But it means that we are missing the point. Being a church isn’t about keeping the doors open; it isn’t even about meeting our own spiritual needs; it is about being God’s people in this place.

And to be God’s people here, or anywhere, we have to look outside of ourselves. We have to see those strangers walking by and consider what would welcome them, what would ease their journeys.

We have start thinking about what it would look like today in the 21^st century to run out to the road and with the greatest respect invite those strangers to share our hospitality without over-promising, but at the same time showing generosity, doing more than the minimum, more than what is commonly expected.

Will we benefit from this? That is entirely the wrong question. Will we be demonstrating the presence of God in this place? Yes we will, and that is what will make a difference.

Amen.

Women and Girls and Jesus

Women and Girls and Jesus

Scripture: Matthew 9:18-26

Today’s lesson is a sandwich made out of two incidents: the healing (or raising) of a little girl with the healing of a woman inserted into the middle.

This is an invitation from the gospel writer for us to wonder about the connections between the two events.

One of the most obvious connections is that both of the healings happen to females. Men had more status and rights than women. It was almost impossible for women to inherit property, and girls and women were generally considered under the authority of the men in their lives: fathers, brothers, husbands, even sons of widows. The sort of thing we hear about now with horror from some countries of the world is a modern reflection of a very sexist shared history.

Children were loved and valued, of course, but boys were given extra status and everyone took that for granted.

The healings of a girl and a woman should tell us that Jesus made a point of welcoming and reaching out to women and that his followers knew it should be recorded. Jesus was deliberately treating women much more even-handedly than any Mediterranean cultures permitted.

A second cultural connection is that in both cases these second-class citizens reached out for help in a way that would have been shocking. The woman was having “women’s issues” and she was supposed to suffer in silence at home, with only other trusted women knowing of her situation. To reach out to a man for healing was highly improper.

Obviously, the dead girl couldn’t reach out herself but her father reached out for her. That might have been expected for a son, but this man insisted that Jesus drop whatever he was doing and come running to save his daughter AND JESUS DID IT without hesitation!

There was a religious and legal connection too: both of the people Jesus helped that day would make him ritually unclean just by virtue of touching or being touched by either one. The law of Moses declared that women who were menstruating were ritually unclean until after their period was over and after a ritual bath and being declared clean by the priest. It is pretty obvious that the laws of ritual cleanliness were written by uncomfortable men.

In a similar way, touching a dead body also made a person unclean with similar rituals being needed to become purified again.

Of course, there are fiddly legalistic points that could be made: Does touching the fringe of Jesus’ robe really count?; If the girl really was just sleeping there’s no issue, right? Although that doesn’t explain the mourners . . .

Together, all these facts tell us that Jesus was prepared to go the extra mile for these people who were on the fringes. Ignoring the ritual purity laws was a big deal, practically blasphemy, but Jesus did it. Dropping everything to rush to the side of a dead girl was unheard of, but Jesus did it. Encouraging this pushy woman and this desperate father went against all social correctness but Jesus encouraged them to get past the social and legal niceties to seek the help they needed.

It is remarkable the way this single passage sums up so much of Jesus’ ministry. He reached out to women and girls, some of the most vulnerable people of his day, and he let his love for them carry him past all the rules and regulations that got in the way so that he could make a real difference.

Jesus made children and women an important part of his ministry, enough that the gospel writers make a point of mentioning it. The early church backed away from that position, so that while Jesus let women exercise leadership in his own ministry, Luke starts to claw that back in Acts, where he declares that women could not be apostles.

It has taken millennia for us to start ordaining women. Those gains were hard fought and hard won and we still have to make a point of encouraging girls to consider jobs, like ministry, like jobs in STEM, that have been traditionally closed to them.

The gains we have in the United Church are not reflected in some denominations yet and there are still countries where it is remarkable when women are simply given the right to drive. Jesus was so far ahead of his time that we are still catching up.

I think it’s important that we don’t take these advances for granted. It is possible to lose ground and it is foolish for any of us to rest on our laurels. We need to encourage our women and girls to claim their space to become leaders, to get past the social barriers that still exist and to tear those barriers down.

We are encouraging that same kind of progress for members of the LGBTQ+ community and this Pride month is an important reminder of that. Back in the early 1990s I was a minister of the Presbyterian Church. It was was debating (and rejecting) the ordination of gays, although it has recently reversed that decision. In those days, I heard a rather conservative female colleague point out that the struggle women had gone through for ordination was exactly the same struggle that the gay community was facing then. I was surprised, and impressed.

Her words stuck in my memory and are reminding me today of just how recent are the gains women have made and how easily we could back-slide.

I believe that Jesus, in his ministry, set us an example of going out of his way to lift marginalized people up.

If we follow his example, we, too will defy social and legal obstacles and work to ensure that anyone: women, the queer community, anyone should be regarded as equals and treated with love and respect.

Amen.

Ask Andrew: How Do We Come to Terms with the Bloody Hands of the Church?

“Ask Andrew” is an annual opportunity for Knox folks to ask for their spiritual or religious questions to be addressed in a sermon.

Ask Andrew:

How Do We Come to Terms with the Bloody Hands of the Church?

“How do we come to terms with the fact that the Christian church as an institution has hurt and even killed so many people? How can we keep supporting an institution like that?”

The writer of this question had been reading the book Sapiens in which Yuval Noah Harari noted that despite Christianity’s oft-repeated memories of Roman persecutions, like throwing Christians to lions, in actual fact history demonstrates that Christians have killed many, many more people than the Romans martyred of ours.

Even when we have been aware of some of this history, we have found ways to distance ourselves from it:

“I didn’t do that; I wasn’t even there” is common;

Witch burning, crusades, bloody wars between denominations are centuries ago, nothing to do with us, right?;

Well, except for the “troubles” between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland that still threaten to flare up again, but that’s over in Europe, right?;

So we Canadians can distance ourselves, right?;

It’s not like violence is ever directed towards religious minorities over here, right?

But then there are the Residential Schools. Our own church was part of a deadly system which kept some of those schools going until the 1990s. It’s tempting to keep trying to distance ourselves: “My congregation didn’t know! Someone in Toronto made those decisions”.

Narrowing the circle to distance ourselves doesn’t really work because it is fundamentally dishonest. What we really want to say is: “I’m a good person! I would never do those things! You can’t paint me with that horrible brush!”

But that’s the issue, isn’t it? As long as we are part of an institution that has done bad things, we have to acknowledge those bad things and sort out why we still support this flawed institution.

Since the 1970s, I remember “religion” being denounced as a source of conflict, often violence, for so long that some think that humans should abandon all religion as a destructive force.

The people who have stuck with their faiths have argued that approach is too extreme: “Throwing the baby out with the bathwater”.

Still, more and more people are abandoning organized religion. There is a whole adult generation alive today that surveys demonstrate simply don’t trust institutions of any sort: church, government, police, schools. They might be willing to participate in some activities, but they are very reluctant to officially join. They are not necessarily hostile, rather they are skeptical.

We should be trying to address that skepticism with honesty about our own struggles. The church is a human organization and subject to human failings.

Two readings today address situations in the bible where there is obvious corruption in the religious institution. In our 1 Samuel reading the sons of the high priest are cynically abusing their priestly authority. Not only are they stealing the tastiest bits of the offerings for themselves [understand: they were guaranteed a portion already but God was supposed to get the best bits], they were also forcing some of the attractive women who came to make sacrifices to have sex with them. This not only broke many of the laws of Moses but also resembled the practices of Canaanite fertility cults, like Ba’al worship.

The solution in that story was that God would curse them: they would lose their positions and even their lives. Samuel’s main job was to denounce them, to make public their abuse of power and position, to remind everyone that what the priests were doing was against what their beliefs represented.

Jesus did his own version of publicly denouncing religious corruption. The money-changers and sacrifice sellers he displaced had paid the priests for their booth spots in the temple. Obviously it made it hard to worship in an atmosphere that felt like a street market, but the temple’s restoration project had been huge and thirty years later the mortgage still had to be serviced. If you came in and made a donation an official promoter would announce in a loud voice just how much you had donated as a way of encouraging generosity.

That’s why Jesus taught us to be private about our generosity: the process had become a source of shame and abuse in the religious institution of his day.

Neither Jesus nor Samuel advocated giving up on their religion. Their focus was on cleaning things up, on reminding people of the difference between the baby and the bathwater.

That is the core message: God has given us something good here, with values that are worth supporting, with principles that can transform the world in really positive ways. Let’s not let corruption spoil it for everyone. Let’s reclaim the good and save it from the bad.

The author of Sapiens is not actually taking an anti-religious position. He makes the point that some of the greatest advances of human society happen when people have to struggle with the gap between their principles and their history.

In other words: it is in times like our own, when we look at religious violence and the history of residential schools and the other appalling things that happen when people sell out their principles for power and position; it is in times when we confront these issues that we have the chance to make real progress.

Yes, we are becoming witness to shocking things that make us feel sick as the truth is revealed. If we can get past the temptation to pretend we’re not involved perhaps our revulsion can give us motivation to make sure that things improve.

Yes, institutions carry inherent risks. People can rise to positions of power and then abuse them, if we let them. But institutions can also carry the testimony of time, the faith stories of generations of people who have learned some hard lessons over history and who have passed on their wisdom to us.

Institutions will change. The priests of Samuel’s day were killed and eventually replaced. The temple of Jesus’ day and its administration was destroyed forty years later. It is still in ruins 2000 years later and both Judaism and Christianity had to adapt to life without it.

I cannot predict whether the Christian church in Canada will still exist in 40 years. I suspect that will depend on the choices we make now. Today, when someone asks if I would call myself a Christian I say “yes” and then I talk about what “Christian” means, so that I don’t get identified with those people who preach intolerance and hatred in the name of God. We can no longer assume that anyone knows what we stand for. Our reputation has been badly damaged and we have to put in the work necessary to regain the respect we have squandered.

I believe that the principles and teachings of Jesus are worth saving and sharing. They point us towards the love of God and neighbour. As long as we can bring our institutions back to those principles, so the structure never again crushes the people it is supposed to serve, then it is worth the effort it takes to acknowledge our flaws and bloody history and take the lessons of our past and the principles passed down to us from Jesus to create a future that will benefit everyone. If people can see that we are trying to make things right, to make things better, then maybe, just maybe they will consider joining us on the journey. Amen.

Amen.

Garden and Wilderness

This sermon was originally for the service to bless Gardens and Bicycles at Knox.

Garden and Wilderness

Scriptures: Genesis 1:28-31Genesis 3:17-19

The story of the Garden of Eden is very familiar but our modern understanding of the age of the earth and evolution of species had led us to turn it into a children’s story, something that adults mostly ignore or maybe consider cute, or harmless.

The story of paradise contains many rich images that have influenced us in ways we don’t think about, ways we take for granted.

The whole idea is that Eden was God’s garden, a place where God could walk and enjoy the cool shade and the wonderful scents and tastes of nature. Humans were created as company, innocent creatures, without knowledge of good and evil and they were given the job of gardener, to tend Eden and care for it.

Eden was set up as a vegetarian paradise where every creature was given the plants for food. Bloodshed of any sort was not expected. It was like that song from Porgy and Bess: “Summertime, and the livin’ is easy”. There was perpetual good weather. The heavy lifting of creating the garden has been done and the humans have the job of looking after it for God.

The contrast when the humans are cast out of the garden is striking: they are cast into the wilderness; they have to cover themselves, partly for modesty and partly because of the thorns, because of the heavy labour needed to convert the wilderness into another garden, a farm, ideally a place of beauty and refuge safe from the suddenly hungry predators but still requiring a lot more work.

It’s remarkable that this is the image of paradise embraced by the Hebrew people because they were not a settled people for much of their history. They self-identify by saying “A wandering Aramean was my father”.

If you read through Genesis, you see the truth of this. Until the time of slavery in Egypt, the Hebrew people were nomadic. Their vision of paradise was settled land, ploughed fields, neatly planted orchards. There were sheep and goats, yes, but hopefully you don’t have to go too far from home to find grazing and water for them. They wanted to be settlers, wanted to tame the land.

And at the Exodus and invasion of Canaan they got their wish. They conquered an already settled land and they had to acknowledge in their worship that the first harvest they collected was the result of Canaanite hands. Like Eden, they were walking into a garden planted by someone else and even if God didn’t plant it personally, they still considered it a gift from God.

As nomads, the Hebrews were people on the margins. Their experience of the wilderness was tough. It’s hard to find water in the wilderness, to find good plants for your animals to eat. It takes a lot of wandering. If it was easy to live off that land, someone would have settled it already and would defend the land against these wandering shepherds.

It’s an ancient story going well back past the stories of the ranchers in the wild west hating the farmers who put up fences. It goes well past the European invasion of North America and the settling of nomadic lands and the taking of already settled lands by force. Different nations here had different cultures and some had farms that Europeans could easily recognize. The Wendat (Huron) were known for that: living around the great lakes, they were displaced to Eastern Quebec.

There are versions of this all through history including every continent (except Antarctica) and continuing to this day as the nomadic Masai cattle herders come into increasing conflict with the farmers who have settled their former grazing lands and as climate change forces them to find new pastures.

It strikes me as important to identify the biases we have cooked into our own origin stories and the assumptions we still make. We are starting to learn how important wilderness areas are and that they need to be preserved for a whole host of reasons just to keep our planet healthy.

There’s a story about the city person who visited a farm in the interior of British Columbia. The farmer was a child when his parents first settled that land and the visitor from the city was waxing rhapsodic over the lush fields and delicious fruit growing in the orchards. “Isn’t it wonderful what nature can do?” he asked, to which the farmer replied: “You should’ve seen it when nature was running it alone!”.

Farm = good; wilderness = bad: it’s a bias that has its roots in scripture and even before that, in our early struggle to survive.

We have new struggles now. We are not just a clever kind of ape, learning that cultivation can give us a steady food supply. We are the dominant species of the earth and it seems like we are intent on developing every green space we have.

Humans need to experience the touch and smell of the soil. We need to have a personal understanding of how things grow, of the rhythm of the seasons and what it means for food to be “in season”… or not. We need to understand that pollinators are bugs and that they are good and that some kinds of plants help other kinds of plants.

Gardens are our bridge from the cities we have built back to Eden: that wonderful image of a beautiful place where divinity and humanity can walk together and enjoy the beauty of living, growing things; where people can be active participants in God’s ongoing project of creation, giving new life to a world that has gone out of balance: where we have a hard time valuing any kind of life that doesn’t lead to profit or convenience.

We are here to bless our gardens and our bicycles too. Bikes can carry us to places of growth and life without burning fossil fuels and choking out anything that needs air to survive. We are here to bless these things but we should recognize them for what they are: they are blessings by their very nature and our involvement with them blesses us and brings us closer to God’s world.

Let us consider the blessing we have in the wilderness too. It’s not just a place of thorns and hard-scrabble soil that needs to conquered and settled but a place where bears can wander – hopefully without being shot by police or t-boned by overly-enthusiastic off-road cyclists – a place where bio-diversity can thrive and endangered species can be preserved. It’s a place where the uncultivated, unsettled parts of God’s garden can exist with all of their wonder and complexity and without too much human interference.

This Earth really is a kind of Eden, a paradise that feeds and sustains us. We can do things to live with a gentle foot-print: travelling with as little harm and pollution as possible at a speed that allows us to experience the living world; participating in the work of creation itself through planting, tending and harvesting gardens without poisons and in cooperation with natural pollinators.

These things that reduce our footprint also bring us into closer contact with the hand of God, who made this Earth, this Eden, and declared it very good, and who wants us to love it and to share the joy that God experiences walking in this garden.

Amen.

Ask Andrew: What’s With the Blue-Eyed Jesus?

“Ask Andrew” is an annual opportunity for Knox folks to ask for their spiritual or religious questions to be addressed in a sermon.

Ask Andrew:

What’s With the Blue-Eyed Jesus?

Does Jesus have blue eyes and fair skin in all Christian churches?

When did Jesus first appear with Northern European complexions?

Scriptures: Revelations 7:9-10 Acts 8:26-40

I would like to start this with the question: Why does anyone paint a picture of Jesus at all?

There are no clues about how Jesus looked from his own lifetime. Jesus took no selfies. So, every portrayal is a work of imagination. The artist is making an artistic statement of some sort. Each picture tells a story about Jesus and represents what the artist or their sponsor believed.

My favourite description of Jesus came from the author Parke Godwin who said in his 1988 novel Waiting for the Galactic Bus, that Jesus looked like an Arab taxi driver.

More recently, people have used Computer Generated Imaging to produce a face of Jesus that would fit a Mediterranean Jewish man: brown eyes, black, curly hair, dark skin. Not far off the Arab taxi driver image, really.

Most people paint Jesus to tell a story, not for historical accuracy, and the oldest Christian story is that Jesus is like us. That’s the theological point most important to early Christians. Jesus bridged the gap between humanity and divinity, between people and God.

Early Christians wanted to reassure others that God’s love is universal. As it is expressed in our Revelations reading, countless people were welcomed from every land and nation. That was the message for centuries, even after religious symbolism added details that only trained people could decipher,

One of the earliest portrayals of Jesus would have happened in Ethiopia when the Ethiopian eunuch went home and established the oldest Christian community outside of the Roman Empire. That painting, (or mosaic, or icon or whatever) would have shown Jesus with Ethiopian features, saying: “See, Jesus was like us. He understands our lives. We can approach God through Jesus.”

Artists who painted Jesus used local models, sometimes wearing familiar local clothing. You could say a lot if you chose to paint Jesus in the clothes of a rich person or a street person.

The blue-eyed Jesus paintings would have started about 1000 years ago when missionaries took their lives into their hands and reached out to the Germanic and Scandinavian nations. Those missionaries, who were probably small and dark, would have wanted to convince the tall, blue-eyed people that Jesus loved and understood them too.

It was a mix of theology and marketing, and the goal was both honest and loving: to show people that Jesus was worth trusting; to give people a way of imagining Jesus that fit their lives, that didn’t have history and geography and genetics as obstacles.

The problem came when various European countries, who had all benefited from the industrial revolution, decided that they were civilized and that other lands were savage. (I know that “savage” is an offensive word today, and I am using it deliberately to underscore the attitudes that existed not that many decades ago).

When they went to other lands, it wasn’t to tell people that Jesus could empathize with their lives, it was to tell people that Jesus was like the Europeans and that the Europeans were coming as white saviours (and empire builders).

Europeans had confused culture with religion. How could Jesus really love people who dressed like that (or worse, ran around naked)?

In Europe for centuries paleness had been equated with privilege. The rulers tended to be whiter than the poor folks because peasants were tanned by the sun while the rich folk could stay in the shade and be pale. It even got into tales of King Arthur: When you “rescue a maiden fair,” she’s fair-skinned because she’s a princess; she’s rich and has never worked in the sun in her life.

By the time of the great European empires, the ruling classes were convinced that their own poor, who were darker because of tanning and dirt, were in desperate need of salvation and were more or less savages themselves. The whole society, rich and poor alike, classified the people of the places they were invading as even more savage.

It does make it easier to take land and gold and beaver skins if you don’t consider the people you are taking it from really human, if you don’t consider the people you are kidnapping and forcing to labour for free forever, as really people. After all, real people have proper clothing; they know how to set a table properly, with all the different spoons in their rightful places. What kind of good Christian can’t set a proper table?

That’s why the lands that have the blue-eyed Jesus pictures are the places who have been colonized by blue-eyed people.

One dimension of this is that the church turned Biblical imagery, which addressed natural human fear of the night and comfort of the day, into a dichotomy of black and white; darkness vs. light, where white represents purity and black represents sin. Still today, across the world in former colonies, cosmetic companies make a fortune on skin-lightening products for all the people who are still convinced that whiter is better.

One sad reality is that a lot of the white supremacists of today are descended from the poor white Europeans who were abused by their rich, entitled “betters”. They used to have the comfort of thinking that while they might be inferior to the rich and powerful, they were superior to anyone darker than themselves. The principle of equality takes that small comfort away from them and they are reacting with violence. A good Marxist would take that fury and aim it at the ruling classes. That’s not happening.

Where Christians have approached a new culture with love and honesty, you can find art that shows Jesus as Asian, African, Slavic, Peruvian, short, tall, and every colour of skin that humans have. Some of it has existed from centuries before any blue-eyed Jesus paintings ever existed.

And new art is being created. I saw a wonderful one where Jesus is clearly first-nations: dressed in traditional plains garb and welcoming three indigenous children, two of whom are dressed in the clothing of a residential school.

And there are the crucifixes, one at Emmanuel College in Toronto, that portrays Jesus as a woman. People are often upset at the gender challenge. Some are upset that the women are portrayed as topless, (as crucifixes always are) or sometimes completely nude (as real crucifixions always were).

One artist, making this feminist Christian point, painted a crucified female Jesus who was so white and even blond that I started to wonder what artistic point was being made.

The blue-eyed Jesus image started off as a way to persuade my violent ancestors to embrace a more loving way. Then the church made the mistake of thinking that our culture was the same as our faith. So, the blue-eyed Jesus became a symbol of oppression, racism, ignorance and hatred.

This is one of the saddest realities of modern Christianity. We have to accept that it has had terrible consequences and we must work to understand how we should really present Jesus to other people. We still confuse our culture and our identity with our faith. The only way we can show someone different that God loves them is to express it in terms and images they understand.

Amen.

(Stay tuned for my next Ask Andrew sermon in a couple of weeks: How do we reconcile being members of an institution with so much blood on its hands?)

The Impact of Faith

The Impact of Faith

Scripture: Hebrews 11:1-3, 23-28

The coronation of King Charles III has put the word “faith” into the news, keeping the title “Defender of the faith”, but putting it into the context of a multi-faith society as happened in the UK, or removing the title by an act of parliament in the belief that we are a secular society, as happened in Canada.

Used this way, “faith” can refer to a set of beliefs: a collection of doctrines we are called to believe. Many people treat the words “faith” and “belief” as interchangeable.

The letter of James shows us the futility of equating “faith” and “belief”:

“You believe that God is one; you do well.

Even the demons believe—and shudder.”

Belief is an intellectual exercise; James equated the two and then went on to say: “Faith without works is dead.”

Clearly, faith is more than belief. So then, what is faith? What does it do? The letter to the Hebrews sums it up in this famous line:

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for,

the conviction of things not seen.

The same Greek words could be translated even more concretely:

Now faith is the reality of things hoped for,

the evidence of things not seen.

That’s really strong language. This is a powerful claim about the power of faith. Chapter 11 of Hebrews goes on to list Biblical people of faith and what became of them. It wasn’t always good. Some faced terrible trials and tribulations and died without personal reward, although their trust in God was still justified. Others were triumphant over impossible odds, seeing results they never could have accomplished on their own.

The message is that faith gave people power; sometimes to endure through incredibly hard times and sometimes to overcome against impossible odds.

Hebrews suggests that faith and works are inextricable – that you can’t have one without the other: What you really believe will work itself out in your actions; What you do will expose what you believe in your heart; and what you do will always demonstrate the reliability of what you say.

The author of Hebrews gives us examples of faith that demonstrate trust, beyond the idea of individualized, personal trust. In the passage we read about Moses, he was set adrift in the bullrushes through the faith of his family, as he was too young for faith himself.

There can be an inter-generational component to faith, which is why we baptize infants and children: because we believe that the effects of faith can go beyond any individual and become part of a wider community, whether that be a human family or a family of faith.

The part of all this that people get hung up on in this modern, skeptical, secular age is that bold claim I mentioned earlier: Now faith is the reality of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

It sounds mystical. And the examples we are given stretch our credulity, with Abraham and Sarah believing that a baby will come when they are in their 90s.

This becomes a stumbling block of faith, with some people asserting that we have to believe literally in such things to be good Christians and others who toss the stories out as irrelevant.

The problem with those extremes is that one demands that we suspend our intelligence and the other demands that we become so rational that we lose any sense of connection with something mystical or divine.

Faith is the reality of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.

There are a lot of things we hope for, a lot of unseen things that we bring into existence as acts of faith.

What is justice? What is mercy? What is love? Can we find these things on the periodic table of elements? Can we measure them with the metric system or take their temperature on the Kelvin scale?

Of course not. They are not concrete things. We hope for them, but they remain unseen until we bring them into existence.

It is faith that makes these unseen concepts into reality. It is faith that lifts us and our society above the material world of measurable things into a realm where so much more is possible.

Faith is an ability we humans have, and we can choose to develop it or not. We can put our faith in God, in each other, or in an idea and it will work because any faith we put into action is a powerful thing. It carries us along with it and channels our energies into creating something greater than ourselves.

Our Hebrews lesson is trying to demonstrate the specific value of faith in God; faith in the God who promised generation after generation that good things would happen, that the world would get better, that things like justice would be created and grow, that love would motivate more and more of life and that hope could carry us even when the results of our faith might not be seen until future generations were born.

That author was saying: “See, it worked! Even though those faithful people didn’t all live to see it themselves, God came through in the end.”

The thing about having faith in God is that God provides us with the ultimate overview. God brings the super-meta perspective that is not dependent on a four year election cycle or a five-year plan or a promise that we will have peace within our lifetime. Faith in God allows us a glimpse beyond seven generations, to eternity itself.

That perspective is something we need right now as we face challenges like climate change or world leaders that believe that might makes right. Those challenges took centuries to create and they will take generations to unravel.

To take on monumental problems like that, we need something bigger than ourselves. We need faith: the kind of faith that can help us endure terrible things; the kind of faith that drives us to act and motivates positive change; the kind of faith that overcomes cynicism and despair, that pushes aside selfishness and empowers us to share, even when we think we have nothing; the kind of faith that visualizes the good we want to see and energizes us to make it real.

God gives us the gift of faith and shows us which intangible things are worth bringing into existence. Faith is how God gives us the power to create a better world.

Amen.

Protestant Saints and Pilgrimage?

“Ask Andrew” is an annual opportunity for Knox folks to ask for their spiritual or religious questions to be addressed in a sermon.

Ask Andrew 2 (2023):

Protestant Saints and Pilgrimage?

Scriptures: Acts7:55-60 2 Corinthians 9:1-5

What Protestant denominations have saints?

Are they the same ones as the Catholics?

Are Protestant churches still bestowing sainthoods today?

What is in the scriptures about pilgrimage and what does it mean to the protestant version of Christianity today?

I have combined two sets of questions today because the practice of Pilgrimage in Christianity has often been closely tied to particular saints.

I’m going to answer this collection of questions from the perspective of the Reformed Tradition. “Protestant” encompasses a number of traditions, including Lutherans, Anglicans, Mennonites, Baptists, Pentecostals etc., so I will address this from the direction I know best. Not every denomination will agree with what I say.

The word “saint” means “holy person”. Reformed Theology is based on scripture and as we can see from our 2 Cor. reading today, Paul uses the word “saint” to refer to the Christians at Jerusalem – all the Christians – the whole church, not just the apostles and certainly not the dead ones, like Stephen.

So, in our theology, everyone in this building is a saint. We are all blessed by God, made holy by God. Whether we deserve it or not, God has made us holy and so we are all saints.

Protestant churches don’t name new saints because we don’t believe in that kind of hierarchy. We believe that in Christ we have each been given direct access to God. We can pray straight to God in Jesus’ name and we don’t need some other person to intervene for us whether that be a saint, some admirable dead Christian, or a priest: someone in a church hierarchy with a special status between the people and God.

My ordination does not give me special spiritual status. God doesn’t listen to me more than anyone else. I am given special duties and responsibilities to ensure that the church functions well, like making sure that the sacraments are done properly, but I am not spiritually elevated. We don’t believe in that sort of thing.

It is the same with saints. We believe that we are each equal in the sight of God. We know that there are admirable people out there, people whose lives we take as examples of the best ways to live, but that’s as far as it goes. We resist the idea of putting their relics on display (although there is a Martin Luther museum in Germany) and we NEVER pray to them.

If you wanted to visit the grave of John Knox, you would discover that he is buried at St. Giles’ Presbyterian Church in Edinburgh under spot #23 in the parking lot. There is usually a car sitting on his final resting spot.

Protestant churches that are named after saints tend to fit a handful of categories: some are simply tradition – old ones were were named before the Reformation and later churches named after them; others are named for saints that are recorded in the Bible (and even that is pushing it, theologically but it’s hard to argue with someone whose name is at the top of a gospel); and saints that have political implications.

As a political example: St. Andrew is the patron saint of Scotland. You should Google how he got that position; it is fascinating, and complicated. He wasn’t the only candidate: St. Columba was popular on Scotland’s west coast where many Irish Celts had settled, while St. Andrew’s support was based in Fife. St. Giles was popular in other areas so there was an internal striving for dominance and St. Andrew won. It was, literally, political back in the days before political parties existed. That sort of thing can create deep loyalty, especially when a saint is associated with nationalism like St. Andrew, St. Patrick, St. George, and of course St. Jean Baptiste.

So there are no new Protestant saints. We don’t have a process to elevate someone to sainthood and we don’t consider it to be an elevation anyway because we are all saints!

In the Roman Catholic tradition there is a complex system to name new saints. It involves years of investigation. The person has to be associated with proven miracles and there is a trial with supporters of the candidate trying to prove that their person is worthy of sainthood facing off against someone called the Devil’s Advocate whose job it is to cast doubt on that worthiness, to disprove the miracles or challenge their mighty deeds.

Some version of this has been going on for centuries and each land was keen to have someone local named to sainthood. Not only was their local pride involved but it was usually a tourism opportunity.

People were encouraged to come on pilgrimages to visit sites considered to be holy, often where relics of the saints were kept, and the hope of miracles only built the anticipation.

These relics were typically bones of the Saint in question – although if you go to St. Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal, the relic you will find is the preserved heart of Brother André, now Saint Brother André. That same relic was stolen and held for ransom in 1973 and recovered in 1974.

My very Protestant parents took me so see the Oratory once and had some rather snide things to say about the claims of miracles, mostly to the effect that while they could accept miraculous healings in theory, seeing entire wooden legs hanging on the walls stretched their credulity to the breaking point. But the Oratory is a modern example of a place of pilgrimage.

In principle, a pilgrimage should take a person to a special place for spiritual contemplation. But an awful lot of people go on pilgrimage because they want something: a blessing from God, a healing, a change in their lives; and they believe that going to a special place, a holy place or being near a saint, a holy person, helps that process.

Protestants don’t object to the idea of going somewhere for spiritual reasons. Think of the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock. They were Anglican Puritans very much like Congregationalists and Presbyterians. If you believe that all people are equally holy and all places are equally holy it is hard to support the traditional idea of pilgrimage. But THOSE pilgrims wanted to come to the New World and build a New Jerusalem (as in Revelations).

Biblically, there is not much guidance. The Hebrews were told to go to the high places, like Bethel and later to the Temple, for sacrifices. But most worship happened in the home, on the Sabbath. By Jesus’ day a tradition of pilgrimage existed which is why there were such crowds for Passover when he rode into Jerusalem. For Jews who lived in other places, there was a real sense that Judea was the holy land.

Christianity spread the idea that holiness could be found in all lands, that God would embrace every nation and all peoples.

I can give you an example of a Protestant place of pilgrimage: the Iona community in Scotland, formed in 1938 to bring together the Church of Scotland and unemployed workers to rebuild the ruined medieval abbey and develop a spiritual and practical life together.

People who visit today are encouraged to share the daily liturgy and reflect on, as they put it, “issues of importance: the environment, poverty, migration, equality”. It has loosened its ties with the Church of Scotland so it can be ecumenical but that very Reformed emphasis of spirituality combined with practical effort remains: no saints, no holy sites, but a place where spirituality can roll up its sleeves and get something done. They are also prepared to have fun – we use Iona’s musical arrangement for “Halle halle hallelujah” at the end of the service.

In theory, this practical spirituality could, and should, happen at home, or at church, but it is a fact of human nature that sometimes we need a change in order to see things with new eyes.

So while our tradition does not hold with saints and relics, and while it is wise to be aware that communities have commercialized pilgrimages for over a thousand years, there can be value in having our eyes opened by an unfamiliar place or a new experience of spiritual practise.

So if you decide to make a pilgrimage somewhere, that’s fine, but I hope you will be seeking enlightenment rather than miracles. And don’t go looking for saints, because you are already a saint by the grace of God, and God is always ready to show us new things whether we are far away or right at home.

Amen.

In Deed and Word

In Deed and Word

Scripture: Luke 24:13-35

The story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus is one I have enjoyed since childhood.

Part of me wondered deeply why they couldn’t recognize Jesus; were they stupid? I mean, even if they joined the disciples late in the game and never got to see Jesus up close, why didn’t they recognize his voice?

Had the resurrection changed Jesus? Could he morph his new form into other identities either physically or by the power of illusion? [I was a Star Trek fan; I had no trouble imagining this!]

Eventually, I came to realize that the question here is not what concealed Jesus, but what revealed him. The obvious answer is that Jesus was revealed in the breaking of the bread.

People have used this passage to underscore the value of the sacrament of communion as well as the value of gathering as a community to share a common meal.

That’s fine as far as it goes, but I think it’s too narrow an answer. I like language, and it niggled at me that the disciples as they were describing the ministry of Jesus to Jesus himself, described him as a prophet: “Mighty in deed and word”.

The usual expression is “in word and deed” and we can’t dismiss this as a translation anomaly because the familiar phrasing is older than English and it follows the normal logic of Western society: the idea comes first, and then the action. The word happens before the deed.

What the disciples were declaring is that the impact of Jesus came from what he did; His words came second.

As a preacher, someone who deals in words all the time, I might find that message a bit discouraging. But I can’t deny it: the message is underscored by the action of the story itself. Jesus talked to the disciples. They said their hearts burned as they listened but they didn’t recognize him as he spoke. Only when he acted – as soon as he broke the bread – they saw him for who he was.

This morning we at Knox are going to step into the second stage of our process to discover our future as a community of faith. We will be trying to answer the question: “Where is God calling us to go?”

I recommend that we keep in mind the message of today’s gospel lesson.

If part of our calling is to show Christ to others, then we cannot forget the message that Christ is seen in what we do, so much more than in what we say.

We will be choosing words, of course, and those words will try to express the shape of the future to which we are being called. But we must keep in mind that to have a real ministry as God’s people, what we do makes all the difference.

Do we believe that the teachings of Jesus matter? Then how can we live them out in practical ways? When we figure that out, then people will recognize Christ at work in us, then they will see Jesus still active in the world today

Amen.