What Is Pride?

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.

What Is Pride?

Scripture: Sirach 10:12-18 Luke 14:1, 7-14

I should begin by pointing out that I almost never preach from the Apocrypha. The book of Sirach is not considered scriptural in the Reformed Tradition although it is canonical for the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and most Oriental Orthodox churches.

It came up in the Revised Common Lectionary for today as an alternate reading for Anglicans and Lutherans and the fact that the Capital Pride Parade is today just made it too tempting to resist. The Sirach reading summarizes well what the Christian church has felt for centuries about the idea of pride.

Anyone who has read Paradise Lost knows that pride was considered the sin that caused Satan to rebel and fall. It was the most original sin and our Sirach lesson describes the reasoning: pride is said to be the sin by which we replace God with ourselves, so we see ourselves as the centre of the universe.

The medieval church declared Pride to be the first and worst of the Seven Deadly Sins; the one which caused a person to go directly to Hell: do not pass GO, do not collect $200.

Jesus even addresses pride a bit with his advice about not taking the best seat at a celebration. Jesus’ words are in the tradition of Wisdom Literature, like the kind of advice we read in Proverbs. Jesus spins it differently, making this into another lesson on one of his favourite themes: about the first being last and the last being first.

He tells us not to assume we are better than others. The lesson even reminds us that in God’s economy helping others is more important than trading meals back and forth with friends.

But Jesus doesn’t go as far as the Church would in later years. Yes, there are Biblical injunctions against pride: typically they are aimed at rulers. After all, people with great wealth and power are at much greater risk of needing to keep their egos in check than average people are. The Romans even had a special staff position for this: the auriga was a slave whose job was to whisper “remember, you are mortal” in the ear of any leader who was being cheered as he celebrated a victory.

Sadly, for centuries in the west these biblical teachings on pride were used to keep people in line. Society accepted that kings were allowed to be proud while the rest of us had to be good, humble Christians and not challenge the social order.

One practical reason for this acceptance of royal pride is demonstrated over and over in the Bible and in other history: prophets who were sent by God to challenge the pride of rulers were tortured or killed for their words.

Can you imagine how well you would be treated if you were to go up to Vladimir Putin and denounce him for his overweening pride? Or to go up to Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, and suggest he looks like Winnie the Pooh? I wouldn’t recommend it.

This long and troubled history has given the word “pride” a deeply negative meaning for many people in our society and particularly for many religious people.

The Pride Parade and related Pride celebrations approach the idea of pride from a very different perspective: pride is presented as the opposite of shame; it’s about people not having to hide who they really are.

That approach raises some issues which are important to our faith: human dignity, truth, identity and the value of a person. It should make us ask whether our faith demands that we conform to cultural expectations that don’t reflect the values that Jesus taught.

This approach to pride didn’t start with the LGBTQ community. I remember it being used years ago by other groups that have been similarly oppressed. In the early 80s I went to a multi-media presentation (remember those in the days before PowerPoint?); a friend of mine in an Evangelical communications group was putting it on in a university auditorium near Toronto.

One of the things the show did was to play a piece of popular music that sang of pride while they projected images that clearly criticized the idea of pride. The point the very white, Canadian university crowd missed was that the song was about being black in America and the black youth who were the intended audience for this song were being encouraged to be proud of their heritage, their skin colour; to be proud of who they were.

The problem here is one of language: we are trying to make one word do a new job without giving it the chance to lose its centuries of baggage.

People have always known that too much individual pride can be a problem. The pagan Greeks didn’t care about the Bible’s perspective and they wrote about it. They called it Hubris, the kind of pride that leads to the destruction of someone great.

Nowadays many people call it Malignant Narcissism where people consider that their own needs are much more important than anyone else’s.

At the same time, we know we need to value ourselves. If you don’t love yourself, then loving your neighbour as yourself can be destructive.

And that’s where we can identify the core of the problem: pride is destructive when it causes us to think that other people don’t matter as much as we do, or when we believe that because someone is different we can ignore their concerns.

God gives us a focus for our faith that requires us to look beyond ourselves. That is at the very core of what Jesus taught every day.

If we are fortunate enough to fit the expectations of society, we can become very comfortable and we may not want to be unsettled; we may not want to be reminded of how difficult others may have it.

One of the things a Pride parade is supposed to do is to challenge us to consider what life is like for a community that was illegal until the 1970s and which is still considered by some to be a legitimate target of hatred and violence.

I would suggest that an important part of our faith is our call to love and support people who have been pushed to the margins, people who have been told they are worthless, people who have been told they are wrong just because of who they are,

We are not called to this because they are poor or pathetic or because we’ve been moved by a sad story, but because God loves them for who they are and we should too.

That can be challenging.

But if we assume that everyone should be like us, or that everyone should conform to the expectations that our culture has held for years, that is when we become guilty of the kind of pride that is condemned in scripture, the kind that drives a wedge between us and God as we fail to love our neighbours as ourselves.

Jesus calls us to look beyond ourselves and to love others as much as God does. Today is a good day to challenge our assumptions and push our comfort zones to see who that love should include.

Amen.

Guarding God

Guarding God

Scriptures: Jeremiah 1:4-10Luke 13:10-17

When we read about Jesus healing the woman on the Sabbath, two important issues stick out:

One is the healing itself. Modern society is uncomfortable with the idea of miracles and this story is centred on a miraculous healing. I don’t plan to go down that rabbit hole today; the reading simply reflects what was commonly understood: health and illness were considered spiritual issues, so any kind of healing could be explained as some kind of exorcism: as a removal of the evil spirit that had caused the illness.

Our modern understanding, that there is a deep split between physical health and spiritual well-being, has been so strongly developed that many people are pushing back, urging us to re-discover the spiritual dimension of our health.

The trouble is that if we focus only on the miracle – did it happen or didn’t it? – we will lose the true focus of the lesson: the issue of healing on the Sabbath.

This may feel like a rather archaic concern in the 21^st century. It has been a long time since the Lord’s Day Act kept nearly everything but religion and sports locked tightly down on Sundays. Growing up in Quebec, I can remember what a big deal it was when they started to allow drug stores to open on Sundays. They had to rope off any aisles that didn’t deal with prescriptions or similar medical supplies.

Things are wide open now. All kinds of stores are open and Sunday is treated like any other day. Of course, the Sabbath Jesus violated was Saturday but either way, it feels irrelevant now: we don’t legislate shut- downs on many holy days, the exceptions now being Christmas and Easter.

The commandment to observe the sabbath day is one of the 10 commandments, which is why it has hung on so successfully even when the early Christians dropped Kosher food laws and other commandments. We changed the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday to honour the day of resurrection, but we kept the strict rules in place.

Lessons like this one in Luke only caused small exceptions which tended to be medical in nature or hospitality based, like rooms and meals for travellers.

What Jesus was doing was pointing out the hypocrisy of the way the rule was being used. Healing a woman of 18 years of illness could probably have waited a day, yes, but why should it? The healing clearly showed the hand of God at work and Jesus was frustrated that as people were being so careful not to break the laws, other people were suffering as a result.

Notice, by the way, that the synagogue leader was telling the crowds to go away and come back for healing the next day, as if they were breaking the law by seeking healing, instead of Jesus, who did the work. He was obviously concerned about offending a powerful prophet.

You might be able to justify the position of the leader based on the version of the commandments in Exodus. The sabbath law is laid out so we follow God’s example of resting on the 7^th day of creation. It’s good theology: it makes God the focus and sets us the task of following God closely.

The main difficulty is that it limits the ways we can help others and puts following a rule ahead of doing something loving. Frankly, an awful lot of problems in our faith history have come from exactly this process: when we have put rules first and not looked to the needs of people and found a loving way to address them.

This is less of a problem if you look at the version of the 10 commandments found in Deuteronomy. The commandment to honour the Sabbath is the same, but the reason for it is different. Deuteronomy is considered by scholars to most likely be the oldest book of the bible.

The Deuteronomy reason for the Sabbath Commandment is that God had rescued the Hebrew people from slavery and the Sabbath rules were established so that everyone could get a rest, especially the slaves.

This was a law based in social justice: “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and cried out because you had no rest. I rescued you, so treat your own slaves well and let them take the same rest day you take”.

What a difference! This isn’t about following God’s example; this is about making sure that everyone gets a break, everyone is spared from endless toil and drudgery. Even if your boss is a workaholic and never takes a break, he still has to give one to the workers.

When Jesus healed this woman on the Sabbath, he rescued her from 18 years of suffering. It’s perfect! This healing fulfills the spirit of the law.

We humans get lazy. We try to find a simple way to deal with complex things and create rules to help us simplify things. Rules can be very helpful if they are created with solid principles in mind and if they have room for flexibility when an important exception arises.

Sometimes we get very rigid, even very passionate, about religious rules. The United Church was formed as a deliberate challenge to this idea. It was necessary for the founding denominations to look at their differing doctrines and accept that they could be Christians together in one church without letting doctrines drive us apart.

But we can’t rest on those laurels. We can’t be smug about how diverse and accepting we are. We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t have moments where we were so convinced that somebody else is wrong that we have to do something about it.

Some outrageous things have been said in the name of Christianity. During the pandemic, for example, and during the occupation by the truck convoy not to mention some new statements in the news on Friday where a standoff is developing in a church in Lowertown. It has been tempting to dismiss the people making those statements as less than Christian, or simply crazy.

But as offensive as we might find some religious declarations, we don’t need to guard God. It is not our job to police others, whether they are doing something on the sabbath or saying things that misrepresent our faith.

God is safe, no matter what we do. That’s one of the nice features of being all-powerful.

We do have a responsibility to speak the truth, to present our understanding of our faith so others can see the differences and experience a loving expression of Christianity.

Our truth needs to come from a thoughtful and prayerful consideration of what really matters; of what the issues are at their core and what we believe God wants us to do.

Jesus spent a lot of time teaching us to go beyond the rigid laws of history and to embrace the law of love which is no less demanding but which replaces rules of law with the love of people.

He was calling everyone back to basics and as we see in today’s lesson, even the ten commandments themselves demonstrate that God wants us to think about others, to care for others.

Even in times of conflict when we find our beliefs questioned and challenged, it is still our calling to base our response on love and to set an example of love.

Love is the example God has set for us which goes way beyond simply taking a day off. Jesus emphasized that for us in today’s lesson.

Let’s try to keep love at the centre of our lives.

Amen.

Rumble in the Vineyard

Rumble in the Vineyard

Scriptures: Psalm: 80:1-2, 8-19 Isaiah 5:1-7 Mark 12:1-12

The Bible wasn’t written all at once and today’s readings give us a wonderful glimpse into a conversation that happened in scripture over hundreds of years and multiple generations.

There are some basic things to understand. In the Bible, wine is a symbol for joy, for celebration. So, a vineyard is where the joy grows, the place where joy is generated and shared with others. Keep that in mind as we peek into this ancient conversation.

Our oldest lesson is the Psalm, where the Psalmist is complaining that this vineyard, which represents Israel – God’s people – has been overrun by wild animals. The walls protecting the vineyard have been torn down and strangers are stealing the grapes.

There is a clear complaint that God has been negligent and a call to God to pay attention to what is going on. With this vineyard, this nation, God previously showed them favour and should rescue and defend them once again.

Historically, this was most likely written when Assyria invaded and basically destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and the people could not defend themselves, so their cry is: “Why have you forsaken us, O Lord?”.

Isaiah, 240 years later, gives an answer to this question. He says:

“Because you have been unjust, you deserved to have your walls torn down. You weren’t producing the grapes of joy and celebration; you were producing the rotten grapes of suffering and oppression. You’ve become a bad vineyard and I will restore you when you smarten up and you produce the grapes of righteousness again”

The history here is that after Isaiah wrote this the Babylonians took the southern kingdom of Judah into its 70 year captivity after which they were restored to their land and permitted to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem and the second temple. That would have felt like the restoration of the vineyard, Isaiah’s prophesy coming true, in the hopes that a righteous nation would prosper.

Eight centuries later we have these words in Mark’s gospel in which the vineyard itself is fine but the tenant farmers are greedy, murderous parasites who are prepared to kill the landowner’s son in hopes of stealing the vineyard. The judgement is that the landowner – God – will destroy the tenants and share the land with more worthy tenants.

In this parable, the tenants represent the leaders of God’s people. The various slaves who were beaten or killed represent the prophets who were rejected by the nation, and the son of the landowner represents Jesus himself.

Modern scholars believe that the original parable of Jesus was the stripped-down version found in the gospel of Thomas, with a single servant being beaten and the beloved son being murdered and without the details that match Isaiah and certainly without the judgement, punishment and replacement.

The original was a comment on the injustice of absentee landlords, common in Jesus’ day, and portrayed a violent rebellion of the tenant farmers. It left the hearer to wonder about the moral of the parable.

Scholars suggest that these parallels to Isaiah and the judgments were added by the early Christian church to claim a position as the legitimate successors of the faith tradition against the established Jewish leadership,

This identifies a serious issue in biblical interpretation: some bad things happened in biblical times that we need to consider critically, especially if we are tempted to claim them ourselves.

It is a fact that people were dispossessed by the Hebrews: Canaanites driven off the land in a kind of genocide. Today’s readings refer to the nations driven out so the vineyard could be planted, like it was the “good old days”. And then the Mark reading suggests that the existing tenants – the nation of Israel – would be driven out and replaced with new tenants. From the Christian perspective, that would include the many Gentiles who converted and joined the new faith, outnumbering the Jewish Christians by the time the gospels were written.

We, in Canada, ought to be particularly sensitive right now to any thinking that justifies driving people off their land and replacing them with new people. Historically we have done this with our indigenous people, declaring them to be morally unfit because they were not Christian, a clear nod to the taking of the Promised Land and this passage about clearing out the bad tenants.

More recently I’ve heard justifications from people in Canada who say the land wasn’t being used to its full potential, often from farmers critical of a native nomadic lifestyle, suggesting that they are much better stewards of the land. They are proud of the kinds of yields they produce and the number of people they feed. That kind of argument is still being used to justify the clearing of the Brazilian rainforest.

A superficial reading of this progression through the lessons could cause us to miss the core message. In the complaint in the Psalms, the people of God are unhappy because they are being invaded and they want God to fix it.

In the answer from Isaiah, we hear a typical prophetic spin on the situation: Something going wrong? Look at yourselves! Why should God rescue you if you are enjoying God’s land but not sharing the goodness with those who are weak?

At this point in our faith lives we don’t like the cause-and-effect approach that says that invasions happen because of a lack of faith. We know it’s a lot more complex than that and it would really stretch our own credulity to suggest that God sent Russia into Ukraine to teach the Ukrainians a faith lesson.

But we can’t just dismiss all of these Biblical lessons as old fashioned or irrelevant.

Isaiah’s message still resonates: with great privilege comes great responsibility.

If God has blessed us with a wonderful land, why should God help us keep that land when we hoard it and its resources selfishly, when we push others to the margins and treat them as if they are inferiors, unworthy of our care and attention?

Why should God help us keep our privileges if we start to think of them as rights, as things we deserve?

The life we have here, like the peaceful life of Judah before the Babylonian invasion is a blessing we enjoy and, like all God’s gifts, is to be shared as generously as God shares, not hoarded for the privileged few.

The prophets of the bible hammered this message home over and over.

What good is it, they would wonder, to escape slavery in Egypt just to be treated like slaves by your fellow citizens?

That vision of a just society, a place where no one is oppressed, is central to the vision of the Bible itself, not just with the exodus but all the way back to the beginning where God tells Cain that he is indeed his brother’s keeper, that he must care because the relationship of care is what God set into place right from the beginning. And the more blessings we enjoy, the more responsible we become for making sure this just society happens.

This should never be about who we can displace, whose position or resources we can exploit. This should always be about who we can help and about keeping ourselves honest as we face the challenges of life.

And more than that: we’re not just gloomy Gusses thinking about responsibilities. We are called to be the vineyard, the source of joy for everyone, even bringing joy to God. I can’t imagine a better way to do that than to share God’s generosity with those who need it most.

Amen.

Brass Tacks

Brass Tacks

Scriptures: Isaiah 1:1, 10-20 Luke 12:32-40

Isaiah 1:18 (NRSVUE) Come now, let us argue it out,
    says the Lord:
If your sins are like scarlet,
    will they become like snow?
If they are red like crimson,
    will they become like wool?

Isaiah 1:18 (NRSV) Come now, let us argue it out,
    says the Lord:
though your sins are like scarlet,
    they shall be like snow;
though they are red like crimson,
    they shall become like wool.

I’m quite excited! They’ve come out with a new, more accurate version of the Bible: the New Revised Standard Version (Updated Edition) that does a much better job of taking into account the cultural context behind biblical passages, which can make a profound difference in how we read and interpret passages of the Bible.

When I was in first year seminary, I briefly took Classical Hebrew, a non-credit course that was as heavy as my five credit courses combined. I only lasted a few weeks before I dropped it.

But during that time I remember the Rabbi teaching the course doing an interpretation of Isaiah 1:18 where he said that it should be posed as a question:

If your sins are like scarlet, will they become like snow?

As opposed to the version that had held since King James:

Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow.

I associated this passage with the promise of forgiveness: the idea of sins being washed away completely. The Rabbi’s translation changed it from a promise to an ironic question.

So, I took this back to my Old Testament professor at Knox College who listened to me, and then pooh-poohed the Rabbi’s version, saying that it was simply an ironic reading of the words and should be disregarded.

That was in the fall of 1981. I had just moved to Toronto from Montreal where I had Jewish friends in school – my sister’s fiancé was Jewish – and I had met many Jewish business contacts of my mother’s and grandfather’s downtown.

I remember what the Rabbi said because his words fit what I knew of Jewish culture and because my Neo-Orthodox professor sounded so very defensive about the traditional translation.

And this week I discovered that this newest version, created by an international and inter-faith scholarly committee, has corrected this text to agree with what the Rabbi told our class 41 years ago. When I read this version now, the text flows better and it makes more sense. It feels like Christmas and I have a new toy!

What doesn’t change is that this feels like one of the most Protestant parts of the Bible.

Isaiah is preaching to the legendary cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. They were already legendary in his own day so they clearly represent someone else. One interpretation is that they stand in for Babylon, the city and empire that would soon invade and conquer Judah, tear down the walls of Jerusalem and take its people into a 70 year captivity.

But I don’t think so. I see this as a warning to God’s own people not to put their faith in empty rituals to keep them in God’s good books. It is more of a warning that they will be punished if they don’t start turning their faith into something outward looking and practical:

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
remove your evil deeds from before my eyes;
cease to do evil; learn to do good; seek justice;
rescue the oppressed; defend the orphan;
plead for the widow.

It’s getting down to brass tacks. The very opposite of a misuse of power, the opposite of corruption or selfishness, it’s a focus on helping the weakest in society instead of taking advantage of them. It combines a call to obedience to God with the interpretation that God’s will is for us to create a world of justice and generosity.

Jesus’ words at the beginning of our Luke lesson take it even further, with a radical call to invest in spiritual values and use our material wealth to that end so that we demonstrate with our lives that loving God really is what we value most. And we are to do that by loving our neighbour in practical ways that don’t leave us with a secure bank account but do have us invest in people.

I use the word “radical” on purpose. Despite the fact that Jesus spoke 2000 years ago and Isaiah wrote 800 years before him, it does not change the fact that their teachings still stand as a stark contrast to the way people expect things to work.

The way of the world is to use whatever you can to your own advantage: strength, skill, resources, whatever; to take what you want. A blatant example of this is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Empire building used to be a normal and acceptable thing where a powerful country could take over a weaker country and extract its resources for the benefit of the homeland and the creation of a lot of personal fortunes.

I think we had convinced ourselves after WWII that we had discouraged nations from doing this again, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union.

But we were fooling ourselves. We really had not stopped behaving this way but we had made it more “respectable” by turning it into business instead of warfare.

We were allowing the rich to get richer by whatever means they could invent, without really considering the plight of the widows and orphans as Isaiah would put it; the poor and the vulnerable, as we would say now.

At the same time we were using the resources of creation, recklessly burning fossil fuels, paving farmland, stripping the oceans of fish and other life, using clever chemicals that we hadn’t tested properly, so that we could have a more convenient life with more luxuries, more food out of season, cheap, disposable fashion and creating piles of waste that have now formed islands in the Pacific Ocean.

It is exactly the same thing Isaiah complained about: turning a blind eye to what is right and just and simply pursuing our selfish wishes and clinging to our comforts while words of faith are used to justify what we have always done.

It is painful and ironic that it took something as evil as the invasion of Ukraine to drive us to speed up our rate of change away from fossil fuels to renewables. It wasn’t a love of creation that put the heat on to do something about climate change, it was a war-induced fuel shortage that sent our society scrambling to find electric cars.

These powerful messages from ancient times are more important than ever these days. They are calls to re-examine the way we live our lives; to see whether our actions match our fine words; to discover whether we live up to the principles we express.

And now it’s more than just widows and orphans calling for justice; it is young people who don’t see any hope for the future and are angry with the “same old same old” approach; it is working families forced to use food banks; it is all the people who can’t find affordable housing.

This could turn into a political sermon really easily, but that’s not what I intend.

Because what Jesus said transcends politics: Go, make a difference! That whole idea of treasure in heaven is about reaching out to others to make things better without a thought to politics, or other dividing human factors. When we help, people won’t see a brand at work, they will see love at work, the love God calls us to share.

It could be love for others, love for creation, love for justice, love for building a society that works for everyone. People will see whichever kind of love inspires them most and all of these are reflections of God’s love. Each one is a kind of treasure in heaven, putting our money where our mouth is, stepping away from empty ritual and words and getting down to brass tacks with our faith.

I can’t think of an age that needs this message more than we do right now.

Amen.

Three Lessons from Thomas

While COVID-19 makes our in-person services challenging, Knox is providing podcast services. Not everyone can access these, though, so we are also posting my sermons on our Knox Talks blog. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

These posts will be on hold while I am on Sabbatical from May 1^st to July 31^st. They will resume in August. — Andrew Jensen

Three Lessons from Thomas

Scripture: John 20:19-31

Today I am going to break one the first rules I learned in seminary: I am going to preach a three-point sermon. Don’t worry, it won’t be the kind from a hundred years ago where each point took 15 minutes! But today’s assigned reading from John about Thomas has three major points that intertwine, braid together, and I don’t want to leave any of them out.

Number One

I will begin with the end of the reading: the purpose of the book. This was the original ending of John’s gospel. Other chapters got added on for clarification. Remember; John’s gospel is structured to deliver a theological message with seven signs spaced out to reveal important things John believed about Jesus. Here the author makes it clear – people are supposed to read it and believe, and through believing, gain eternal life.

This ties in with the main part of this lesson we usually remember: poor old Thomas being branded “doubting Thomas” because he expresses a very modern desire – to see evidence. John’s gospel was the last one to be written and it was in an age when few apostles were still alive; few eye-witnesses left. So, all the telling of the story of Jesus was being done by a younger generation, by people who heard it from someone else. Therefore, John is trying to address this issue by giving an example of an early uncertain disciple who not only gets the evidence he needs but is also told about how blessed are the people who are able to believe without that evidence. It’s an acknowledgement that belief in an age without evidence is really hard and it’s an encouragement to embrace that belief anyway.

This focus on belief as a means to salvation has made John’s gospel very popular in the Protestant tradition.

Number Two

The second lesson here is tied right in to John’s purpose from the start: John was writing to oppose the Gnostics, a group that said that all flesh is sinful and that only spirit can be holy. I’ve mentioned this before. It gets quite complex and involves rejecting nearly everything from the Hebrew scriptures.

John’s depiction of the resurrected Jesus gives us a complex image. On the one hand, Jesus is able to appear in a locked room and then disappear again, as if he had Scotty at the transporter controls. We also know from this and other bits of the gospel that Jesus wasn’t instantly recognized by his followers; he had to reveal himself somehow before they recognized him. At the same time he is solid, not just spirit. How else could Thomas touch his wounds?

So there is a reaffirmation of the physical nature of Jesus, that the Word become Flesh has not abandoned the flesh but that there is more to it than a simple resuscitation. This resurrected body is something special, something greater, perhaps more in line with the ideas Paul expresses in 1 Corinthians 15 about the Spiritual body except that Paul really does step far away from the idea of a resurrection of the bodies we leave behind when we die.

Clearly, there was a debate in the early church about how all this worked and John is clear that he wants us to avoid embracing the Spiritual life at the expense of the Physical. He would agree that God made creation and that it is very good, so we shouldn’t turn our backs on it for some poorly defined future spiritual existence. John would support what we call today an “embodied” faith; a spiritual life made real in the flesh but which also bringing benefits that go beyond mere physical reality.

Number Three

This brings us to our third point: the gift of the Holy Spirit.

This is an alternate version of how the Holy Spirit came to the church,

different from the one Luke offers us about Pentecost. This has contributed to the biggest split in Christianity as the Western church added the phrase “and from the Son” to the Nicene creed 1000 years ago when talking about the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father. The Orthodox part of the church couldn’t accept that change and so East and West have been divided ever since.

But John’s point is clear: he is claiming the authority and power of God

for Jesus. John is making a statement of what he understood the phrase “son of God” to mean and he carried that further in this reading by having Jesus give the church the power to forgive sins.

That’s one the Protestant church has challenged. It was an early bone of contention for the Reformers against traditional Roman Catholic theology and it remains one of the parts of this gospel that makes Protestants very uncomfortable.

It’s complicated: not only does it reflect a very high Christology with an emphasis on Jesus being divine, it also underscores the divine nature of the Holy Spirit in John’s theology. It is the Holy Spirit that makes the church real, bringing the spirit of God into human lives.

I would suggest that a modern take on this would accept God’s divine presence amongst the people of faith but would be more uncomfortable with the judgmental aspects suggested here, just as the Reformers were uncomfortable with the institutional interpretation that had been adopted over the centuries by the Catholic church where this reading supported the idea of the keys of heaven and hell being given to St. Peter and his successors.

We have seen the damage done by judgmental Christians speaking in the name of nearly every branch of the church. So this kind of pronouncement about sins forgiven and retained needs to be examined closely before it is embraced.

These three lessons can all speak to us today. We live in an age that demands evidence and we examine the scriptures with a critical eye

as I’ve been doing in this sermon. At the same time we acknowledge that there is more to life than what can be seen and measured. We recognize the need for spiritual engagement with our creator and the rest of the world.

We can see the wisdom of John’s assertion against the Gnostics; the refusal to separate human life into the extremes of the base material world and the lofty spiritual realm. We haven’t figured out how our humanity balances these two but we know that each is incomplete

without the other: we are physical beings with a spirituality informed by our forms, by the diverse shapes we have. While what happens in the next life remains a mystery, we are told once again that it will be shaped by the lives we live now.

And while we may not care about theological niceties, like whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone or also from the Son and while we may not even have a clear agreement on what we believe about the divinity of Jesus, we do have a sense that not only was God’s Spirit at work in Jesus and his ministry but that God’s Spirit is still at work in the community of faith.

That is not because we want to claim God’s authority: we don’t want the power to decide how someone else will spend eternity. No, it’s because we have seen God’s inspiration at work, God’s spirit moving in and through the lives of people who have quietly made a difference, who have demonstrated God’s love in very practical ways.

God’s work begun in Jesus still manages to get past locked doors, to transform frightened followers into courageous leaders and confused and aimless people into miracle workers; still gives insight to those dismissed as foolish and hope to those who have lost everything.

That’s what we can take from Thomas and the other disciples: the understanding that no matter how much we have had to hide behind our locked doors in the past, no matter how much uncertainty we may feel, God can and will do amazing things with us as we go forward if we learn to make room for the kind of inspiration that can come from God’s creative spirit.

Amen.

A Fresh Start

A Fresh Start

Scriptures: Acts 10:34-43; Luke 24:1-12

It always struck me as amazing how easily Easter could have gone wrong. Last week we had a glimpse of the kinds of expectations that surrounded Jesus: the high hopes of the Triumphal Entry. So, when Jesus was arrested, tried and crucified, it must have looked like the end.

By Easter Sunday the disciples were in hiding and very discouraged, bitter enough that when the women came from the tomb saying that Jesus was risen, the men didn’t believe them. They dismissed it as an “idle tale” except for impulsive Peter who had to run and see for himself. And even when he saw the empty tomb, he went home to think about it.

No one expected a resurrection. No one expected that Jesus could defeat the power of Rome by dying on the cross. It was absurd!

Or, from another perspective, it was an unexpected way to see the world: it was a twist; the ultimate way to turn expectations on their head, just as Jesus had always done.

How do you defeat the mightiest empire the world has seen? You let it kill you; you overcome power with weakness; you don’t let any of the conventional understandings slow you down; you take that principle of the first shall be last and the meek shall inherit the earth and you follow it to its extreme conclusion.

The disciples had been living with Jesus, absorbing his teachings, trying to make sense of his parables but they didn’t expect him to go this far.

The women were open-minded enough to understand it first, because they’d never bought into the male power dynamics of the world. Women have always known that there are other ways to get things done; that subtlety and imagination and sideways thinking are more powerful than anyone ever expects.

The male disciples had to overcome a lifetime of assumptions and basic prejudices to accept that the women might be right and they had to do it quickly. Otherwise, what was left for them?

If they had expected Jesus to claim the throne of King David followed by a full-on confrontation with power facing power, then they knew that they had lost and the only casualty was their leader. The disciples were discouraged and disillusioned and their best option was to go home and start fishing again.

Instead, the women brought them a new interpretation of what Jesus had done; that he had overcome the power of Rome by dying, and by being raised by God to a new kind of life.

The effect was amazing: just when disaster had taken everything away, the disciples found a fresh start, a deeper understanding of what Jesus had always taught and the exciting idea that no matter what structures society puts in place, God provides a way to work around those structures to create something of lasting value.

This wasn’t just a startling lesson for Easter day, it continued to be a deep understanding for the early church. Look at today’s lesson from Acts where Peter preaches to the Gentiles.

This message represents a radical departure from the traditional idea of a covenant people based on blood ties. The message is that everyone gets a fresh start, that all people are loved and embraced by God, even those hated Romans.

Easter represents the most amazing turn-around we can imagine. It represents hope coming out of disaster, joy coming out of the deepest mourning, life arising out of death.

In order for the Easter message to sink in that first Easter day the disciples had to forget what they thought they knew; they had to put aside their assumptions and prejudices and realize that beyond what seems obvious can be found God’s unexpected truth.

We struggle today with disasters: the endless COVID pandemic and all of the stresses and isolation that brings; the horrors of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the flood of refugees adding to the many other refugees who are just trying to keep their families alive; social challenges at home, like how hard it is for young people to afford a home and how much harder it is for so many people just to get food and clothing; and the challenges to churches, many of whom have not been able to stay open during the last two years; and our own challenge at Knox to meet our financial needs going forward.

These are all real concerns, big disruptions. They aren’t about to vanish with the wave of a magic wand.

But what the church faced at Good Friday and Easter was the deepest existential crisis possible and they made it through by opening their eyes and hearts, to discover the unexpected thing God was doing.

They found a new way to live, a fresh application for the ideals they had learned but not fully grasped.

So what fresh start God is offering us today? What new vision of the church,

what new vision of the world, is God offering us this Easter?

The only way we will find out is if we put aside our assumptions and prejudices, open our hearts and minds, look beyond our fears and bleak thoughts to discover God still bringing new life to the most challenging parts of our lives.

Amen.

Making Assumptions

While COVID-19 makes our in-person services challenging, Knox is providing podcast services. Not everyone can access these, though, so we are also posting my sermons on our Knox Talks blog. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

Making Assumptions

Scriptures: Isaiah 43:16-21 Philippians 3:4b-14

As Christians, we have a long-standing hang-up with the idea of personal salvation. Centuries of teaching about Jesus dying for our sins, coupled with the exciting prospect of eternal life or conversely, eternal punishment have been at the heart of a lot of church teachings.

Even in the Reformation, when the various Protestant churches rejected practises like formal confession, acts of penance, and ideas like Purgatory, the idea of personal salvation was still addressed:

The Lutherans embraced the idea of salvation by faith alone, rejecting what is called “works righteousness” for the idea of believing the right things and having a strong faith;

The Reformed Church, including the Presbyterians, took this farther and settled on Double Predestination where God decided in advance who was saved and who was damned. It was supposed to be reassuring: if you were part of the church and living a righteous life, then you were obviously saved. There was nothing you could do to earn salvation because God gave it as a gift;

The Methodists had a very different approach, with personal salvation being something offered as a gift but not applied until you embraced it. There was a serious outreach program to get as many people as possible to gather in tent meetings, be baptized and embrace both salvation and the righteous lifestyle that it demanded.

In all these situations, there was a determination to understand how it worked: How can I be saved?; What’s the system?; Or perhaps more directly, How can I be sure I’m not going to Hell?

That’s a very individualistic approach to faith. You could even call it selfish because it makes the central questions of religion all about “me” and what I need to know or do be right with God to be able to assume that I will be safe for all eternity.

That is NOT the approach we find in most of the Bible when we examine the relationship between God and humans.

In our Isaiah lesson, we find the people of Israel in exile in Babylon. The prophet reminds them of their exodus from Egypt and promises a new wilderness trek with water provided in the desert to the chosen people to such a degree that even the wild animals will celebrate!

That’s their promise of salvation: these people are God’s chosen ones and they will be rescued from their Babylonian captivity.

That’s the kind of relationship with God Paul is talking about when he goes on his rant in our Philippians lesson. Like so many people, Paul likes to know what the rules are and he likes to get them right to the full extent of his abilities.

So Paul points out his credentials: He was born into this same chosen nation and he was circumcised on the 8^th day under the law as the confirmation of the covenant given through Moses.

Paul describes himself as a Pharisee which means he was meticulous about obeying the law, going well beyond the literal demands to follow extra rules that would prevent him from ever accidentally breaking a law. This practise, called Fencing the Torah, is still alive and well today.

Paul was not just legalistic. He was passionate about obeying God so that he persecuted the church when he believed that Christians were perverting Judaism.

Paul finally declared that under the law he was righteous. He clearly had never heard of the doctrine of “original sin”; he believed that he was sinless. If the issue were personal salvation, Paul was convinced he had it made. He was in good with God and he worked exceptionally hard to keep it that way.

And look, he goes on to say, I am prepared to trash all of that rule-bound assurance for the sake of the gospel, for the privilege of knowing Christ.

You might think: okay, he’s exchanged one reassurance for another; not salvation under the law, but salvation through faith, which is a very traditional Protestant way to read this.

But Paul makes no assumptions. He doesn’t feel like he can rest on his laurels because of knowing the freedom of Christ any more than he could under the law.

Paul is an obvious Type A personality, so he strives even harder, he even says he doesn’t consider that he has achieved the resurrection yet but that he must keep striving, keep pushing “upward”, because that phrase “the heavenly call of God” literally says “the upward call of God”.

Paul uses athletic language here, like “faster, higher, stronger”. We can blame passages like this for all the times Jesus gets invoked in football games.

Some of what we are seeing reflects Paul’s personality, even when he considered himself perfect under the law. He kept trying harder and harder so too, when he is given freedom from the law and is connected to God through faith in Christ, he still feels compelled to try harder.

But for all his striving, Paul isn’t struggling to become saved. That’s not his issue. Paul has never lost his sense of community; that God is dealing with a chosen people. Paul just sees God’s choice opening up

to welcome those who were excluded before.

From Paul’s perspective, this has nothing to do with personal salvation

or anything that self-centred. Paul says righteousness is a gift that comes through knowing Christ. It can’t be earned; it’s not a question of believing the right things; it’s about a relationship. It has always been about a relationship.

Which is why Paul ends up striving like someone trying to win Gold at the Olympics. So he feels compelled to share that relationship with as many people as he can.

In this passage, Paul does what Jesus did all the time: he demonstrates that we have been preoccupied with the wrong questions for centuries: the gospel is not about personal salvation; it was never about Heaven or Hell. Those are selfish concerns, foolish assumptions that blind us to the real message. It has never been about “me”; it has always been about “us” in relationship with God.

Paul understood that God’s love is all about us looking beyond ourselves and our own narrow concerns, to help others as Jesus did.

Knowing that, Paul took his formidable energies, tossed his concerns about his own righteousness on the garbage heap and put those energies into making a difference for others. In doing so he touched countless lives and still does through his writings, centuries later.

We may not be as driven as Paul was but there are so many more of us. What do you suppose we could achieve if we followed his example, abandoned our self-centred fears about salvation and put our energies into reaching out to others?

Just imagine what we could achieve; how many lives we could touch.

Better yet, instead of imagining, let’s follow Paul’s example and actually do it.

Amen.

Repentance, Resentment and Reconciliation

Repentance, Resentment and Reconciliation

Scriptures: Luke 15:1-32

Today’s lesson a very long one consisting of three parables Jesus told in response to one challenge. They are usually read with the first two connected and the parable of the Prodigal and his Brother set aside to stand on its own.

Doing that saves us some reading time but it breaks up what Luke presents together; it deprives us of context, especially for the final parable, because we often forget that it was told to answer a complaint about Jesus eating with sinners.

We all know what social rejection is like: tax collectors and sinners were the target here; they weren’t considered good, religious people; they weren’t considered good enough or righteous enough to be embraced by God.

It was more than just social. The sinners were the people who didn’t

live acceptable lives and may well have been actual criminals. The tax collectors were traitors, working for the hated Romans and often over-charging ordinary people. They were considered corrupt at the very least.

Didn’t Jesus, supposedly a prophet, know what sort of people he was associating with?

Jesus turned things on their head, as usual, telling these three parables, each of which addresses the problem from a different perspective:

The good shepherd leaves the 99 sheep alone and goes to collect the single missing sheep. As usual, the main character represents God and the sheep represent ordinary people. We are forced to look at things from God’s perspective: the shepherd feels responsible for the lives of the sheep; it is good shepherding to leave the flock together and go retrieve the missing one. The kind of shepherd who is prepared to do that is the kind of shepherd who will bring back the whole flock, safe and sound;
The woman and the coin parable is next. This time God is the woman and the theme is not “responsibility.” The lost coin is not going to get eaten by wolves. It’s a question of value: God, the woman, values the coin and is prepared to work hard to find it when it goes missing; the lost coin, which represents sinners and tax collectors, shows us that these lost people have value to God, despite what their social “betters” may think;
Then we come to the story of the family with the father and the two sons. It brings us a picture of the complexity of the relationships between everyone in the family. First, there is the father who, once again, represents God. No mother is mentioned and some scholars have pointed out that Jesus deliberately portrays the father with a mix of traditional masculine and feminine characteristics, both in behaviours and in language used, which fits right in with the two previous parables in which God is a male shepherd and a female homeowner. God is the father, but he is no macho man. He is prepared to let his son make mistakes and runs in a most undignified manner to greet him and shower him with hugs and kisses and make the most absurd fuss over him.

The prodigal himself is pretty clear-cut as the sinful, tax-collector sort. He’s selfish, greedy, wasteful, and immature. He wants to live an easy life with no effort and party, party, party. He’s a real jerk who doesn’t care about his family’s feelings when he makes his unreasonable demands and runs off to squander his future. It’s like the addiction groups say: he had to hit rock bottom before he would admit that he needed to change. And being envious of the pigs he was working to feed is pretty rock-bottom for a good Jewish boy. So, he had his reality check and he decided to go home and beg to become a slave, because he knew his father treated his slaves a lot better than this son was managing by himself.

The big brother represents the people who feel like they know how things work and are comfortable with the system; they define themselves as good people. He presents the standard big brother image: hard- working, responsible, self-righteous, resentful of the way his brat of a brother is indulged, maybe also resentful of the father more widely and thinks he’s too generous with his resources (which are now entirely that son’s future inheritance); he wouldn’t do things the same way as his dad and he certainly wouldn’t welcome that good-for-nothing waste-of-space of a brother after what he did! Hrrmmph! “Father always liked you best, didn’t he?”

The family dynamics are painfully realistic, aren’t they? Jesus knew exactly what he was talking about. We can all relate. We’ve all been one of these characters at some time or another, or we’ve seen them up close and personal.

And a really vital question is left hanging at the end of this third parable: Is there going to be reconciliation? Will the family get back together?

The first two parables had happy endings: the sheep was rescued; the coin was found and the celebration was held, with God as the host in each case.

But in the third one, the happy ending is left incomplete. God is delighted at the rescue of the one lost, and then found, and it is the resentful older brother who is left standing outside the party, welcome to come in but unable, so far, to bring himself to do it.

We see all kinds of versions of this brother’s complaint: “Those people should pull themselves up by their boot straps the way I did”; “Those people should get over things like residential schools and stop complaining — look at all the government money they get out of my taxes. Is that justice?”

I could go on. There are a lot of ways to deny structural bias, racism and historical injustice and every one of them misses the point of this trio of parables: That God loves and values the people that others despise – the lost, the damaged, the hopeless, the foolish, the meek, those who hunger and thirst, those who are persecuted.

In the first two parables, God goes the extra mile to rescue the lost, revealing how much value God puts on those who are outside.

In the final one, God loves both sons enough not to treat them like sheep or coins. God lets them make their own choices, and mistakes.

God makes a special effort for each of them: running like a fool to greet the prodigal half-way, then leaving the celebration to try to reconcile his resentful son. The story is left on a cliff-hanger because it is up to US to decide whether the final reconciliation happens.

Our challenge is to recognize when we are behaving like one or the other of the brothers and learn to stop being so selfish and jerky (adjectives that apply equally to both, by the way).

And through it all is the example that God sets for us to emulate: generous, loving, ready to go the extra mile to find the one who is lost and needs help; ready to try to get past unreasonable behaviour to restore relationships and create reconciliation; not worried about rules, or rigid interpretations of justice; not even worried about his own dignity but motivated by love above all else.

It’s a breath-taking example God sets for us here: Let’s aspire to get beyond being the squabbling siblings and learn to be like the loving parent.

Amen.

When Bad Things Happen

When Bad Things Happen

Scriptures: 1 Corinthians 10:1-13 Luke 13:1-9

We want the world to make sense, don’t we? When something bad happens to someone bad it’s not hard to imagine thinking: “Well, he had it coming”. When something bad happens to someone good, or someone innocent, like a baby, we react to the unfairness of it all. The injustice is overwhelming sometimes.

This seems to be hard-wired into us. Evidence of this kind of reaction goes back into ancient times. Even in the Bible you sometimes see assumptions such as that anyone who is rich has been blessed by God and must be a righteous person, when real life tells us that some rich people got rich by being very bad.

We have struggled with this across the years and across cultures. Today, a popular word is “Karma” that we’ve borrowed from Hinduism, possibly because it suggests a universal law where the very universe balances out life. Traditionally, Christian cultures talked instead about the judgment of God, either in terms of problems of life: plagues, famines, invasions, fires; or in terms of some kind of settlement in the next life: rewards in Heaven, punishment in Hell; so much so that the Catholic church had to invent Purgatory, limbo and similar ideas to address what happened to people who weren’t totally evil but not pristine and holy, either.

Look at what Jesus does with this question: Pilate killed some Galileans as they brought their sacrifices to the temple, which could have brought all kinds of symbolic messages into his answer if he had wanted. Then he mentions people who died in the collapse of the Tower of Siloam just outside of Jerusalem.

What would we do about these kinds of incidents? We might protest police brutality and the injustice of the governor in using deadly force with these visitors who were, at worst, somewhat rowdy. We don’t know why this incident happened, but Galileans were renowned

for being both unsophisticated and rebellious. Who knows? Maybe they brought their transportation and had a camel convoy or donkey demonstration.

And as for the tower of Siloam, we would demand a public inquiry looking to see if the developer cut corners: maybe the engineer was someone’s incompetent brother-in-law, or the materials were sub-par. We would want to know if there’d been kick-backs and government corruption.

Some of us would want someone to blame. Some of us would want an explanation, maybe to prevent it from happening again, or maybe just so the world felt less irrational, less random and uncaring.

I heard someone on CBC earlier this week saying that the people of Ukraine were suffering and dying as sacrifices for Western democracies who were afraid to confront Russia directly, who were afraid of WWIII, and of nuclear weapons being unleashed.

And I was outraged; partly because there is truth behind it and the Christian imagery of someone dying for someone else’s benefit is a powerful one. It’s a truly unjust situation and I wanted to get hold of Putin and smack some sense into him! This was the other part: I didn’t want to feel guilty about their sacrifice; I wanted the president of Russia to take the rightful blame.

Jesus is brilliant, really. He takes all these natural inclinations and impulses and throws them out the window: Don’t look for “why” he says; let these tragedies motivate us to examine our own lives; instead of looking “out there” for explanations, let’s look inside to see if we are prepared in ourselves for the unexpected things that might happen.

We get hung up on the language in this reading. We hear “repent” and we think of sin and guilt. The title for this reading in many versions of the bible is “Repent or perish” which is appalling and imposes an interpretation before we even start reading.

That’s not what Jesus is talking about. “Repent” literally means to “turn around”; to “change direction”.

This isn’t about considering whether we are ready to die; ready to “meet our maker”; ready for judgement day. It is about stopping to consider the direction of our lives. Are we living the kind of life we would want to see in an obituary or a news report?

More to the point of Jesus’ lesson, are we living lives that reflect God’s values? Or as the parable says: fruitful lives?

We know what Jesus meant by that: the first being last and the last, first; the meek inheriting the earth; the weak being strong. All those things that lift people up, those things that create justice and make a difference for real people.

That’s what Jesus is really pointing out here: when bad things happen

we tend to complain about the injustice; instead we should be looking at ourselves and what we are doing to create the justice God is calling us to achieve.

That’s a hard lesson. We want the comfort of blaming someone else. Instead, we are called to accept the responsibility of creating the justice we are looking for, of being the change we want to see.

But then, Jesus was good at being a prophet, even when that meant revealing uncomfortable truths. If we want comfort, we should look to our other lesson, where Paul reassures us that God will never give us

more than we can cope with and that the troubles we face are common to all humanity.

That’s not completely comforting. Humanity has endured some appalling abuses over time, as we are being reminded these days, and people can struggle through suffering that we would prefer never to have to imagine, let alone endure.

The comfort is not that we will escape suffering and tragedy. Rather, it is that God will be with us every step of the way, no matter how bad things get. We are not alone. God will get us through, even if it is ultimately through death into the next life.

Until that time, Jesus is clear: tragedy and suffering are not punishments from God; they are not payback for something; they are not Karma. But, we can learn from them: to re-focus our lives on what really matters; on living lives that create the kind of justice we cry out for when tragedy strikes.

We want a just and balanced world and our Creator calls us to share

in creating this just world. So, when bad things happen let’s pause, and ask ourselves: “What am I doing to make this a better place?”

Amen.

A Complicated Covenant

A Complicated Covenant

Scriptures: Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18 Luke 13:31-35

Our Genesis lesson is fascinating for many reasons. It goes back to the very origins of Israel; to the roots of the formation of a people of faith; back to when Abraham was still called Abram.

The name “Abram” is a pretty good one. It means “exalted father”, which would have felt pretty ironic at the time because Abram was elderly and had no children.

But “Abraham” is like “Abram” on steroids and means “Father of a Multitude”. This fits very well with the image we see of Abram and God looking at the stars and God promising that Abram’s descendants would be just as numerous, just as uncountable as the stars of the night sky.

To really understand this you have to get out of the city in the summer at night and look up to see all the tiny points of light that are hidden by light pollution. It’s a wonderful, overwhelming number. If we get technical, astronomers tell us that the maximum number of stars we could see with the naked eye in any hemisphere of the Earth is a bit over 5000.

But that’s not what it feels like! It feels closer to the estimate of the number of stars that exist which is 2 sextillion, or 2 followed by 23 zeros – a mind-blowing number – especially if it is a promise for your descendants, when you really wanted some and thought you’d never have any.

All of that number stuff feels like a bit of a spoiler; it’s too technical. But people often treat Biblical covenants like they were legal documents. They are even explained as a kind of contract between unequal parties. The end of our Genesis lesson actually gives us the ritual for such a contract: with the animals sacrificed and cut in half; with the torch and incense pot carried between the halves as symbolic of how closely the two parties of the covenant were to be bound together; like two halves of a body.

And if you were to be technical and legalistic, then the number of descendants has been more than achieved. God’s promise to Abram has been kept, with well over 5000 Jewish descendants and counting – many more if you take it in spiritual terms – and include all Christians and Muslims as spiritual descendants; an interpretation that goes all the way back to the Apostle Paul.

Abram wouldn’t have counted things that way; Eliezer of Damascus was part of his extended household and might well be called a spiritual descendent, but Abram really didn’t want to count him.

So, the “numerous descendants” clause of the covenant was fulfilled but there is another part that never was: the giving of all the land between the Nile and the Euphrates to the descendants of Abram. In other words, from central Egypt to central Iraq.

The Hebrew people have certainly travelled over all this land. Their origin stories include starting in Ur near the Euphrates and multiplying as slaves in Goshen near the Nile in Egypt (or, as we would say now, workers in the Gig Economy). But they have never ruled the whole Fertile Crescent, not even in the days of Solomon when the kingdom of Israel was at its largest.

People have gotten tied into knots over this kind of thing: What do you do with a covenant that is unfulfilled? Does it mean that the fulfillment is still to come?

There are some who hold to this notion, who would really like to see the boundaries of modern Israel expanded with this kind of promise in mind. On the other hand, does it mean that God is unreliable? That God doesn’t keep promises? Traditionally, that idea is considered blasphemous, which is why we don’t hear about these unfulfilled bits very often in traditional sermons.

The basic challenge here is that covenants and contracts are words, while relationships are living things. We refer to marriage as a covenant because it is one of the best Biblical analogies we can find. Sure, there are marriage contracts but that is legal language, not faith language.

The covenant you make at the beginning of a relationship is vital. But it is also the starting point and the relationship will change and grow. So, the original covenant may not reflect the ultimate reality.

Look at the state of the covenant by the time Jesus was speaking. He referred to Jerusalem as the city that killed the prophets. The prophets were messengers sent by God to the people of God and they were stoned. Stoning, as a means of execution, was symbolically important because everyone in the community was required to throw at least one stone so the responsibility for the death was shared by the whole community.

No wonder we had to invent the phrase “don’t kill the messenger”. We have been killing messengers in real life for thousands of years.

King Herod was supposed to be ruling as God’s representative over the Galilean population of God’s people; someone who had a particular responsibility for the covenant; both to God and to the people.

Jesus describes him as a fox, which might just suggest Herod is wily, until Jesus talks about the people of God as chicks that he wants to gather under his wings: a powerful image of a mother hen preparing to defend her brood against the fox that will destroy them.

Jesus is speaking as a prophet here, the words coming as God’s own voice, giving us a wonderful, fiercely protective, motherly image for God to balance some of that “beard in the sky” stuff we know so well.

And we also see the disappointment when the chicks refuse to shelter under God’s wings.

The covenant has clearly moved way beyond questions of descendants or issues of territory. There is a long-standing relationship being worked out and it is like a marriage in need of counselling, with Jesus trying to bring the parties together.

And the part of the covenant that is clearest is that it is permanent: divorce is not an option. God and God’s people are together for the long haul and as we travel down the road of Lent, towards Good Friday and the cross, we are given a glimpse of how far God will go to bring us back into a good relationship.

As Christians, we believe that Jesus expanded the original covenant

beyond the physical descendants of Abraham, to include us in that complicated relationship between humans and God.

I would suggest that our best way forward is not to become legalistic about this covenant or others; not to demand strict adherence to the letter of the law; but to recognize the way relationships always work: with love, and compromise, and dreaming together, and differences, squabbles, and sometimes, long stretches of silence.

At the core of the message Jesus gave us is that God’s approach to us is one of love; of wanting what is best for us; wanting to guide us and protect us, even when we think we know better and we put our trust in someone like King Herod.

We have entered a complicated covenant with God and God is not going to give up on us. So, let’s see what we can do to make this relationship work. Amen.