Towards Dec. 1, 2013 (First of Advent)

Scripture:   Isaiah 2:1-5
                  Romans 13:11-14
                  Matthew 24:36-44

Last Sunday was Reign of Christ Sunday -- the last Sunday of the liturgical year and the end of our worship journey through the past year:

• last December we began with the birth of Jesus
• through Epiphany we looked at Jesus' life and work
• in Lent and Holy Week we suffered through his arrest, execution and burial
• through Easter we celebrated his resurrection
• at Pentecost and after we gave thanks for the gift of the Spirit and the growth of the community of faith through the world
• leading in the end to Reign of Christ Sunday when we look around at the world and rejoice that ... well ... we recognize, if we're honest, that Earth is not yet the kingdom of God, not yet fully the way God desires

So ... we begin the journey again with Advent -- to prepare ourselves and the world again for the coming of Christ to life on Earth.   Lord knows we need it ... again and again.

And as always, Advent begins with readings that are more about the second coming of Christ rather than the first.  They point us to days of judgement and transformation which many interpret as "end-of-the-world" scenarios.  So while the rest of the world is shopping, cooking, decorating and planning for a festive season, should we be party-pooping critics, preaching Doomsday and Gloomsday?

But the readings are not doom and gloom; they are visions of hope and reminders of God's promise to redeem life on Earth.  They are not about the-end-of-the-world and God's destruction of what is (as the fundamentalists would have us believe); they are about the end-by-transformation of the world's incompleteness, brokenness and darkness.

And isn't that what many people are trying to express and to create in their Christmas festivities?  That life need not be as dark and dreary as it often is?  That we can be better and do better -- be more joyful and generous and compassionate as individuals, families, communities and nations than is often the case through the rest of the year?

A questions is, can we be as effective as Walmart, de Boers, the LCBO, and Princess Cruise Line in touching and speaking to that deep longing people feel in their heart for life on Earth to be better?  Beginning with, and working out from our Advent worship, will we be re-lit for another year of witness to new and truly good life from God for Winona and all the world beyond?

From Sunday, Nov 24, 2013 (Guest preaching at St. Paul's, Dundas -- Consecration Sunday)

Scripture:  Hosea 11:1-9 and Jonah 1:1-4, 7-17
Sermon:  What a whale of a wayside chapel

It’s always such fun to preach here -- in part because I end up with the most interesting assignments from your minister.

When I was here in the spring for the Presbytery Pulpit Exchange, I was given one verse to preach from.  It was Easter season, Rev. Rick was working through the Gospel resurrection stories, and by the time I arrived in the schedule there was only one verse left he had not yet preached on – the very last verse of the Gospel of John, 21:25: 

 

"But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written

down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written."

 

He’s made up for it this time.  He told me this is your annual Consecration Sunday when you review what you have by the grace of God, and you commit yourself and consecrate a pledge to God for the coming year – what a glorious theme for worship and a sermon.  And then he also mentioned he has been leading you on a sermonic tour of the Hebrew Scriptures, and that what’s left to deal with this week is the twelve Minor Prophets.

 

I did a count.  The minor prophets are Hosea to Malachi.  That’s 12 books of the Bible … 56 pages in my Bible at home … 67 chapters … 1,050 verses in all.  I’m glad – I’m sure you are, too, that Lynn only read as much as she did.

 

Famine or feast, that’s the story.  And no matter which it is – whether only one little bit to work with, or more than we can count and manage, there is the expectation of something fitting and faithful being offered in praise of God, for the up-building of the body and life of Christ in this place, as a sign of the growing expression of holy spirit in me and in us all.

 

And that is what both Consecration Sunday and the Minor Prophets are about.

 

The minor prophets are the twelve books at the end of what we call the Old Testament.  They bear the names of twelve men revered as holy prophets.  Some of the books date from the sixth century before Christ when the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were on their last corrupted legs – about to be overthrown by the Assyrians and Babylonians, and the people taken into exile.  The rest of the books come from the time after that – the time of return from exile and of trying to rebuild what had been destroyed.  In other words, these are books of a matured faith – a faith tested and tried, a faith that has faced a deep dis-connect of people and God, a faith that has come through fire to see the true face and desire of God – a faith such as we need and desire for ourselves today in the struggles and challenges that we face.

 

These prophets were not necessarily wild men of the desert like John the Baptist in the time of Christ.  As we read through the books it seems they are more inside the system than outside.  They know how things work; they understand the inner springs of government and leadership; they speak the language of the day.  They live within the culture, and know what makes people tick.

 

But they see and speak about all this more honestly in relation to the desire of God than others of their time, and this is what makes what they say so compelling and unforgettable to people who have ears to hear something other than the party line or the cultural slogans and public chatter of the day.  In today’s terms these prophets are corporate whistle-blowers, free-thinking politicians, renegade caucus-members, investigative journalists, passionate preachers and activists, auditors-general who take seriously their job of watching the direction of government, cultural critics writing essays and books about where we are headed as a society.

 

Their message is hard, critical and uncompromising.  It cuts like a knife through the veneer of the court, the ritual of the temple, and the public discourse of the day to reveal the rot and misdirection that lie at the heart of the kingdom, and that cannot but result in its collapse.

Hosea puts it concisely in the passage read this morning.   As a people we started out well, he says.  We were God’s beloved child, brought forth from hardship into a land of plenty.  God taught us to walk and carried us along as we needed.  God healed us when we were hurt and made us strong.  God fed us and blessed us.

But the more God calls to us, the more we turn away.  The more God teaches us, the more we don’t listen.  The more God blesses us, the more we serve Baal – the god of prosperity, affluence, a strong economy, national security, home and hearth.  The more God gives us, the more we worship idols.  The more God calls us to be a holy people in the world, the more we become just like everyone else around us … and the more we are fated to suffer the same end other people come to.

And it’s not because we’re worse than others, he says.  We are not especially bad or evil.  It’s that we are exactly the same as all other peoples and nations of the world – just as misguided and corrupt, as short-sighted and self-centred, as closed and unloving, as resistant to the needs of others and of Earth – and as necessary to be brought to an end of ourselves for the sake of the good that God desires for Earth and all its creatures.  

And yet … in the words of Hosea, God then goes on to say: 

            [But] how can I give you up and hand you over?

         How can I make you come to a bitter end like just

            another corrupt kingdom and wayward child?
         My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows
           warm and tender…
        for I am God and no mortal…
        and I will not come in wrath. 

The prophet reveals a radical, fundamental tension within God.  On one hand, judgement is deserved and will come.  On the other hand, God’s choice of the people and compassion for them have no end, and beyond judgement there will be revival, renewal, return and resurrection. 

 

Which is part of the drama we see played out in the story of Jonah.   

 

The Book of Jonah is a story with a prophetic edge to it, about a character named Jonah who in some sense may be a cipher, or a symbol of the people of Israel themselves – of the people of God of any time and place.

 

In the story Jonah – a servant of God, one of the covenant people, is called by God to do something hard but good for God.  He is called to go to the city of Nineveh – the capital city of the Assyrians, his people’s sworn enemy, to preach there a word of judgement that most likely will cause the Ninevites to repent of the way they are, and be saved.  

 

Jonah doesn’t want to do it.  He’s content with the status quo.  He likes the way the cards have been dealt and how the world has lined up for him – with him and his people blessed by God, and others rightly scheduled for judgement.  Beyond his bubble, he doesn’t like the bigger picture of well-being for all that God calls him to be part of, and to help happen. 

He knows he has the power through what God has given him to help save others.  But he doesn’t want to offer it.  The world he enjoys living in is not as large and generous as God’s.  

So he tries to flee the presence of God.  Still claiming God as his God, he tries not to be in God’s presence – to not listen to what God is asking of him for the good of the world.

Like the people of Israel as Hosea describes them, he runs in the other direction.  He ducks out the side door without shaking hands.  As we often describe ourselves, he gets busy.  He fills up his calendar.  He creates important business somewhere else.  He takes a cruise.  He imagines a far-off goal.  Maybe a five-year plan.  Whatever will keep him from just sitting with God, and listening to the one clear thing God is asking of him in the present moment.

And his life goes from bad to worse.  His journey becomes a disaster.  Storms and turmoil overtake him in his heart and in his world.  He becomes a burden to others around him.  Even though he’s one of the covenant people he becomes a liability rather than an asset to the world.   In the end he is tossed overboard  … but not to his death – only to the death of his resistance.

As Jonah falls into the sea “the Lord provides a large fish to swallow up Jonah, and Jonah is in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.”

What a sanctuary.  What a whale of a wayside chapel.  What a wild place of spiritual retreat.  What a wide-bodied, multi-ribbed, mobile house of prayer.

Three days and three nights Jonah has there to sit in the presence of God, to let his heart really hear the one thing God is asking him to give – time to listen, let go, and let God direct.

Jonah was not going to choose to slow down to sit and listen to God, so God arranges an interruption of rest and silence for prayerful open-ness and listening, as God arranges for us all – on a fairly regular basis.  

And Jonah’s course is changed.  He accepts what God wants him to do, and agrees to offer what God wants him to offer.

Not once-for-all.  Jonah is like us.   Once out on dry land again, even as he does what God wants him to do he has questions and reservations, and he has to re-learn, re-commit and re-consecrate at different steps along the way.

But in the belly of the fish his life is decisively consecrated, and he becomes the servant God calls him to be for the good of the world – hero of a story we still read today.  Is there ever any such thing as a minor prophet?  Or a minor servant of God, whenever we commit to what God asks – as we are asked to do today.

After I finish speaking we will have some time in the wonderful space just to listen.  First, a duet will be offered.  Then we’ll share a time of prayerful silence, to reflect on God’s goodness to each of us.  We’ll end that silence with the Lord’s Prayer, after which I will invite you into a second time of prayerful silence – this time to listen to what God asks you this year to commit to God.  Whether we have only one little bit to work with, or more than we can manage, God calls us all to consecrate some part – some percentage of what we have in praise of God, for the up-building of the body and life of Christ, as a sign of the growing holiness of spirit in each of us.

If you have already filled out your commitment card, the silence can be a time to give thanks that you can consecrate what you have.  If you haven’t, perhaps God will speak to your heart in the silence.  No one has to fill out a card; you are simply invited to spend this time opened to the presence of God.

Then Frederick will lead us out of the belly of the fish, to sing the hymns listed in the bulletin as you come forward – past the baptismal font to help you remember your baptism, to the table where you can place your offering and commitment cards before returning to your pew for the final blessing and the Celebration Luncheon downstairs.

So let us allow ourselves to be swallowed up, and to listen to God.

from Sunday, Nov 17 (Anniversary Sunday)

Scripture Reading:  Isaiah 65:17-25; Luke 21:5-19
Sermon:  “Can Bits and Pieces a Good Thing Make?”

We have read that “some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God.” 

Sounds like it could be us … maybe with the exception of the beautiful stones … but speaking of a wonderful heritage building, well-maintained, carefully renovated … solid and secure … with dark, warm wood … full theatre organ … windows and steeple and … well … I wonder, what part or aspect of our church building most touches you … most speaks to you in some way of God, of God’s love, or God’s power, or anything else?

There is a lot wonderful about this building … 144 years old, and still kicking … or maybe, still standing and speaking and embracing.   A deep, deep sign to our souls of the eternal and unchanging love of God in our life and the life of the world.

And yet … how many changes, how many upheavals, how many shifts have we suffered as a church and as a congregation – both now and all through our history as a community of faith and as a body of Christ?

We’re aware of our time today as a time of great change and of seismic shifts in the world that none of us are spared or given immunity from.  The culture we live in, is not the culture of a generation ago, and all of us – from the youngest to the oldest, are having to learn all kinds of new things just to keep up and fit in, let alone to lead and have anything worth saying that people will actually be able to hear.

The community is changing.  Winona is not what it was even twenty years ago.  And it’s not yet what it will be twenty, or ten, or even five years from now.  We don’t really know what it will be.

The church is changing – the building in some ways – a projector and screen in the sanctuary now, a renewed Lower Hall, entrances and outside siding, a beautifully renovated Upper Room … and the congregation is changing in even greater ways.  About half of our active membership,  including our worshipping congregation some Sundays, is made up of people and families who weren’t even here ten years ago.  Our two-year-old church directory is already out of date – because of the members who have died, but also because of the number of people who have come in over that time.

All these changes make connecting difficult.  We don’t know one another in the church in the same way we used to – a generation ago.  We’re more scattered.  Busier apart from one another.  Community and understanding … and accepting and forgiving and counting on one another, is not as easy as it used to be.  Perhaps a congregation – any congregation, never is a united, single body … but we are less so now.  Sometimes we’re bits and pieces looking to become a body.  Or maybe we are a variety of bodies under one roof.

And in our lives … in our homes and in our hearts … do we often feel the same?  Busy and distracted, rushing from thing to thing?  Disconnected?  Sometimes knocked down and broken into pieces by things that happen, changes that come, losses that are suffered?  Searching for a place of rest, a sense of wholeness, a promise of healing and reconciliation?

We’re tempted to think this is a time like no other – that maybe the world is falling apart, and we are falling apart in ways that have not been known before.  And that may be.

Or it may be just our experience of the universal human condition – that maybe we were shielded from for a short while by the affluence we knew as a society a generation ago, but that now we are growing out of … as we grow into a more universally human shape.

Think of the first members of this church – the first European settlers on the banks of The Fifty.  They were United Empire Loyalists – which sounds great until we realize it means they were families on the losing side of a war who had to flee the wrath of neighbours and former friends in the States after the Revolution against Britain, who settled in the wilderness of Niagara, and who with the help of a Methodist circuit rider, one another, the local First Nations people, and God found and fashioned a new life for themselves here.

In 1796 they were regular enough in their gathering for worship and spiritual education that they were known as The Meeting at the Fifty.  By 1820 they were established enough to build a church – a fine, wooden structure.  They were settled and secure … until in 1869 their church building burned down.  Accident?  Act of God?  Who ever knows why or how some things happen that test and try us, and make us feel that all we’ve built up is for nought?

All that was left after almost 50 years in what they had built, was bits and pieces and charred remains … which they cleared away to erect the brick structure we are still in today.  But even then, have the last 144 years been free of upset?  Have there been no times of turmoil?  Has there ever been a time free of change and conflict and a need for growth, compromise and accommodation?  The building – as stable and secure as it seems, is no insulation against any of these kinds of things, and I’m sure these walls could tell all kinds of stories.

So what is the security of Fifty United Church?  What is the assurance we have?

Not the building, but God whom we remember and whom we worship when we gather in this building.

In the days of Isaiah 65, the people wonder how they will ever rebuild what lies in ruins and rubble around them, and Isaiah tells them it is God who will help them rebuild, who will take the bits and pieces of what is there and of what they will do, and from it create a new world that none of them can even as yet imagine.

In the days of the early church, Christian believers and Jews alike are dismayed in 70 CE when Rome sweeps into Jerusalem, puts down an insurrection, and destroys the Temple in the process.  They had thought God was going to redeem all the world by appearing in the Temple and working out from there.  The fact that Rome destroys it, that it is no more, and that God lets happen shakes them greatly … until they remember Jesus saying something about the important thing not being the Temple, and they include it in the Gospel.  

God doesn’t need the Temple to come into the world and redeem it, Jesus says.  His followers just need to be open to the word and wisdom of God in their hearts and lives, and that is how God will save both them and the world around them.  Temple-blessed or Temple-less makes no difference.  God will make of the bits and pieces of their living what is needed, and it will from them – in whatever shape and circumstance they find themselves, that God will make a new world.

It’s no different today.

It’s not this building – as much as we love it, that’s our strength; it’s God – the God whom we remember and worship when we gather here.  And it’s not our physical stability and material security that makes or breaks us as a church; it’s God who is able to take the bits and pieces of our life – whatever they are, and use them to make something good, to create the new world that needs to come.

And isn’t that what others around us need to see, and are longing to know in their own lives?  Not just a building that they may or may not find their way into – but a God who they can meet here or there or wherever they are, who can make of the bits and pieces of their life, something good?

Praise be to God – God who is known and worshipped by us in this place, God who was known and worshipped here by others before us, God who will be known and worshipped by others after us as well.

Towards Sunday, November 17, 2013 (Anniversary Sunday)

Reading:   Isaiah 65:17-25 and Luke 21:5-19
Sermon:   Can bits and pieces a kingdom make?

Interesting readings for an Anniversary Sunday!  Both of them featuring the temple of God in ruins!

In the time of Isaiah 65, the people of Israel -- back home after generations of exile, are wondering what to do with the rubble and ruin they have come back to.  Isaiah  speaks words of hope to them -- telling God will create great (and new!) things of them and their mess.

In the time when the Gospel of Luke was written (after 70 CE), the Temple in Jerusalem has been destroyed by the Romans (in 70 CE).  It was a deeply traumatic event for the people of Israel and for the believers in Jesus, because both communities had counted on the Jerusalem temple being the place from where God would begin the redeeming of all the world.  With the Temple destroyed and God not stopping the Romans from doing it, their faith is shaken.  In writing this chapter of the Gospel, the early church recalls words of Jesus that offer reassurance and hope.

What shape are we in today?  As a church?  As a community of faith? 

Has any part of what we used to be, been destroyed and ruined? 

Are we confident in the power of God to create new, great things here?  To grant us the wisdom to speak and act out God's love in whatever ways make sense today?

From Sunday, Nov 10, 2013

Scripture:    Haggai 1:15 - 2:9 and Psalm 145:2-5, 8-9 and 18-21
Sermon:       Faithful Remembrance, Faithful Hope

Up until I was 12 and I left Clifton School for General Wolfe Junior High, every year there was a Remembrance Day service at the school at 11 o’clock, and immediately after the service we all went home for the rest of the day, to remember.  

The service included a reading of the names of boys who had gone to Clifton and who had grown up – barely, to go and not come home from one of the Great Wars.  There was a Scripture reading, and a reading – maybe even a recitation of In Flanders Fields.  I think the service always began with the hymn “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.”  “The Last Post” was played from a scratchy record.  There was silence.  At the end we offered a fairly restrained rendition of “O Canada.”  We all wore poppies.  

Then we had the rest of the day off to go home and spend it doing our best to remember what we were supposed to remember.  A generation-and-a-half ago, Remembrance Day was a whole day filled for everyone with a sense of the sombre – a day of shared grief, sorrow and deep reverence.  It was a deep and silent day.

Now it’s not so silent, but it remains as deep, and it may be even broader and wider than it used to be.

I understand Remembrance Day services are still held in the schools.  Talking with Tina Farraway about the triplets in preparation for our worship today, I think she said that tomorrow as part of their school’s service, “In Flanders Fields” will be shared by a number of classes – each class either singing or saying a different part of the poem.  It sounds like a good way to make it a shared experience of remembrance.

There will also be services at cenotaphs across the country, with all kinds of people still taking time – maybe, if they’re working, an early lunch – to gather, to see the parade of vets and cadets and policemen, hear the names of those who gave their lives, hear a recitation of “In Flanders Fields,” listen to the bugler, observe silence for a minute, and sing “O Canada.”

They don’t get to go home after the service, though.  Schoolchildren and most people at work don’t have the day off.  As they leave the cenotaph they find their way back into life and daily routine.  

Yet even at that, in the midst of the unstoppable chatter and commerce of our culture, there is still a good bit of attention on the hard lessons and sombre realities of the Day – maybe more every year. 

The Spectator, for instance, on Friday carried stories about Bill Reid, a veteran who every year sells poppies and sings songs of the Second World War in the Appleby GO Station, and the folks of Ainslie Woods in West Hamilton who have written a book about the young men named on the cenotaph in their neighbourhood.  

Almost daily over the past few weeks there have been stories and notices in the paper about Holocaust Remembrance events, so even those who don’t attend still know about them and what needs to be remembered … as well as stories this year about the Holodomor – a Ukrainian word meaning “death or killing by hunger,” which refers to the Russian-directed starvation of 3-4 million Ukrainian peasants in 1932-33 … and about Kristallnacht, or the “Night of the Broken Glass” – when 75 years ago, Nov 9-1o, 1938, Nazi paramilitary groups and non-Jewish civilians went on a planned and co-ordinated rampage against Jewish homes, stores, synagogues, hospitals and schools through Nazi Germany and parts of Austria. 

Ever since the Great Wars of the twentieth century – especially the Second, we have been sensitized to a number of evils in human history that we now do not hesitate to call evil – things like genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic or racial cleansing.  The practice and the effect of these things in human history are among the deeper things we remember now on Remembrance Day, and our willingness to remember has had an effect.

It causes us to lift up the genocide in Rwanda as something we should not have allowed to happen, and from which we want to learn our hard lessons once again.  It affects the way we respond to actions apparently undertaken by the Syrian government against its own citizens.  

It also causes us also to look back at the past – even our own own past, with new eyes and new sensitivities ... at the way we treated First Nations and the kinds of racial cleansing and medical experimentation that were official government policy towards them, and at the way we treated Japanese Canadians, even the families of First-World-War veterans, during the Second World War.  The government has publicly apologized in both cases, naming our sin and mistakes.

So we know now that great evils are done in human history, and we know their names.  We study their causes, their ways of infecting a society, and their ways of being acted out. 

We also know there are no such things as “good” and “evil” nations in any simple sense.  Such language is usually just propaganda shorthand for “us” and “our enemies,” because we know no nation is all good or all evil, that there is good in each, evil in all, and people in all nations need to be empowered to speak and work for good, for justice and peace, for the protection of others, and for the protection of planet Earth where we work out our shared destiny.

All of that is now part of Remembrance Day – a remembering of more hard lessons than we can sometimes manage, and a remembering of the hope that we will learn from the past to make the future different and better for all.

Faith communities have a part in this.  We especially are called to be part of this global work of remembering and hoping.

In our reading this morning we’ve heard words of Haggai – a prophet to Israel five centuries before Christ, who also lived in a time of trying to move from remembered hard lessons of the past, towards the hope of a different and better future.  

Haggai lived in a time when the people were rebuilding their kingdom after its destruction in war – which came to them because of their sinfulness, and after exile in Babylon – where they had time to reflect on why such bad things had happened to them.

Back in their land now, they need to rebuild.  Homes and farms, towns and cities, even the royal palace and the temple of God in Jerusalem are in ruins when they return.  So for twenty years -- from 539 BCE to 520, the people begin putting their world back together.

And after twenty years, Haggai is disappointed, frustrated and anxious because in all that time they have not yet begun to rebuild the temple of God.  Their homes and farms are well-restored.  They have attended to their own needs, their comfort and leisure, as well as their commerce.  But Haggai can see that none of it will go very far, last very long, or amount to more than just short-lived personal comfort because God and God’s good will are not at the heart of what they are doing.  Not even just not at the heart – God and God’s good will – what they really are -- are not even on their radar.

And how then, Haggai says, do we expect to get beyond self and the old self-centredness?  How do we expect not to fall into the same sin and blindness as undid us before?  How do we expect to prosper, for the future to be different and better than the past, if we don’t begin with what we’ve learned through our history about God, God’s real desire for the world, and ourselves in relation to it?

So get to work on the temple, he says, and God will turn the world and its resources towards a different and better future.

Now … thinking of the rebuilding our world needs after the horrors of the last century, sometimes religion can be part of the problem … when religion remains sectarian and self-centred, when people think God wears only their name tag or secret ring, and intends to bless and save them instead of, and even against other people.

But as it says in Psalm 145, “The Lord is good to all, and his compassion is over all that he has made.”  It’s not just us instead of them, nor is it even humanity over and above other creatures and the whole of Earth.  God’s love and compassion are directed forever to all, and with this kind of faith that we have grown into in the last generation, the faith communities of the world have a place and a role to play in the building of a future for the world that is different and better than what we remember.

And it’s happening.  

Ten or so years ago the United Church established a mission initiative called “To Heal the World,” in which they invited co-operation among people of all faith traditions – and no faith tradition, to share their understandings of the good will of God and their gifts of God’s Spirit to help heal the world together.  

Separate from this, religious teachers are moving in this direction -- like Japhia’s brother Philip Newell who in the past decade has moved from studying and teaching traditional Celtic Christianity, to creating and sharing in interfaith dialogue and activity among Christians, Jews and Muslims towards peace and the healing of our relationships with one another and with Earth. 

Pope Francis has startled some – especially in his own church, with statements that all people, regardless of their faith or un-faith, should live to resist evil and support good as they see it … and that the church’s traditional dogmatic concern to make all people Christian is an unhealthy obsession we cannot afford anymore. 

And here at home, this afternoon from 3:30 – 4:30 people in Hamilton from all faith traditions as well as people who claim no faith tradition, will sit in peace and silence at First Unitarian Church to reflect on, pray for, and commit themselves to peace for all in the Middle East.

We remember what we have learned from the hard lessons of the past, for the sake of a different/better future God helps us envision.

As Psalm 145 says, 

You, God, are near to all who call to you,

to all who call to you in truth.

You fulfil the desire of those who revere you;

you hear their cry and you save them.

You watch over all who love you,

but the wicked you will destroy.

My mouth shall speak your praise, O God.

Let every creature bless your holy name forever.

 

And as Haggai says:

 

Remember what was, work for what will be …

because we know God’s desire that the world be healed  

remember what was, work for what will be …

                because it gives God something to work with

remember what was, work for what will be …

                because this is how we find our way into the world God is creating.

2nd Step towards Sun, Nov 10

Scripture:    Haggai 1:15b - 2:9 and Psalm 145: 1-5, 8-9, 17-22
Sermon:       Faithful Remembrance, Faithful Hope

Still the Haggai and Psalm readings ... just a little more focused thought about them ...

Haggai and his people are struggling with their failure to rebuild the temple after such high hopes and good intentions.  Haggai could lay on the guilt; he could also try to goad them into working harder.  Instead, he offers good news that things will happen when God shakes the world.  He reminds his people it's not just a matter of human effort and will; it's a matter of waiting for and then living in tune with whatever new thing God is doing.

Question: do we really want God to shake the world?  What if it also means a shaking up of us and what we believe?

Case in point might be Psalm 145.  Most of it sounds like a normal thank-you-for-saving-us-from-our-enemies kind of psalm, celebrating God's special love for the chosen people against any who would do them harm.  But then there's that bit in the middle (vv. 8-9) that suggests God's love is not just special for the chosen people, but universal for all people and all Earth ... so that the wicked who are done away with in v. 20 are no longer just enemies of the chosen people, but any people (chosen or not) who oppose and act against God's love for all people and for Earth. 

It seems "the old-time religion" of God-is-on-the-side-of-us-chosen-people is being shaken up a bit here, and a doorway is being opened to a new way of knowing God.

Question:  as we consider our own frustrations today at not being able to build or rebuild the church, the country and the world that we want after all the changes and losses of the last generation and the last century, what holy shaking-up are we seeing in our time?  And what new ways of knowing God are we being called to accept?

Towards Sunday, Nov 10, 2013 (Remembrance Sunday)

Scripture:    Haggai 1:15b - 2:9 and Psalm 145:1-5, 8-9, 17-22
Sermon:       Faithful Remembrance, Faithful Hope

"Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory?  How does it look to you now?  Is it not in your sight as nothing?"

Haggai doesn't beat about the bush. 

It's 520 BCE.  The kingdom was lost centuries before, victim of its own sin and corruption -- and the people have accepted that.  They have been in exile in Babylon -- and they survived that, learning along the way to see God in new and deeper ways.  Now God has brought them home to rebuild the temple and the kingdom -- but that was decades ago (539 BCE, to be precise) and the people have not yet accomplished anything of the rebuilding plan.

But Haggai neither makes them feel guilty, nor encourages them just to try harder.  He says the change will come when God again shakes up the world.

We too grieve the loss of "former glory" -- in our own lives, as a church, as a country and as a global community, and we seem unable so far to build "the new world" we long for.  This week especially we think of our failure to build a new world of peace after the wars and hard learnings of the last century.  And there are so many other things in ruins that we used to enjoy, feel pride in, and take for granted, without any "great new world" yet to take their place. 

How do we feel when Haggai says the great change will come when God shakes the world?  What kind of shaking might we be in store for?  What does it mean to live by that kind of faith?

Perhaps the psalmist lives with that kind of faith.  Psalm 145 is a typical psalm of praise, rejoicing in God's power to redeem the people.  Except there's a bit in the middle -- vv. 8-9, that seems somewhat in tension with the old faith in its suggestion that God's grace and good will are universal -- not just for the chosen people, but for all humanity.  So when we get to the usual conclusion (in v. 20) about God destroying the wicked, "the wicked" are not those who do evil against God's chosen people, but any who do evil against humanity and the Earth.

I wonder if that shakes up any part of the world.

From Sunday, Nov 3, 2013

Scripture: Luke 19:1-10

Sermon:  The A to Z of Zaccheus

 

What kind of people does Jesus recruit?  When Jesus wants people to join, what kind of people does he look for?

 

When Jesus enters Jericho he is not intending to stay long.  He is on his way to Jerusalem – 20 kilometres away, and he wants to be in Jerusalem in good time for the Passover.  He has a great, politically theatrical entry all planned, and then probably an appointment with a cross.  So he doesn’t want to be held up.

 

All the same, though, it’s 20 kilometres and a meal would be good, maybe even a place to stay the night, and – yes, there is that one person he’s heard of – no idea where he might be – but who he wants to be sure to invite to join him.  So as Jesus passes through Jericho, he is on the look-out for him. 

 

And there he is!  Up ahead!  In that tree!  No, not that tree!  The sycamore to the right of it!  That little man named …

 

“Zaccheus!  I see you up there!  Hurry and come down!  I must stay at your house today!”

 

And thus out of all the people of Jericho, Jesus recruits Zaccheus to join him on his way to redeeming all the world on the cross.

 

And who is Zaccheus, that Jesus specifically seeks him out?

 

One view of Zaccheus is that he is a little man – “short in stature.”  This is why he climbs the tree, because he can’t see or be seen in the midst of the crowd.  He is easily lost and often overlooked.

 

He is a high achiever in life – chief tax collector, no small feat.  But isn’t that how it often is – that the smaller we feel, the less significant or powerful, the more inferior, the more we compensate by acting big, by trying all the harder, by putting up the biggest numbers and putting on the biggest show we can?

 

There are all kinds of things that make us feel small – from physical smallness to even more debilitating psychological or emotional belittled-ness.  No end to the number of things that make us feel inferior or less than others, and we get really good at not letting it show, covering up, pretending, hiding.

 

I wonder … if Zaccheus had not gone up in the tree to see, and be seen by Jesus … would Jesus have found him anyways?  Or would he have missed his chance?  Would they have failed to meet – to do the one thing that day they both were looking forward to? 

Sometimes we have to come out and let our littleness be known … admit it to ourselves and let others see it … go out on a limb and say, “Here I am!  I feel really small and unimportant!  I need you to see me for how I feel!”

 

And Jesus says, “There you are!  I was hoping you’d come out!  So glad you let me see you as you feel … because I must stay at your house today.  It’s you I really want to be with!”

 

Another view of Zaccheus is that he is a sinner – and a terrible sinner at that!

 

He is tax collector for Jericho, meaning he is a Jew who has gone over to the other side.  He makes his living collaborating with Rome against his own people.  And he’s so good at squeezing money out of his own people that Rome has made him chief tax collector, so good at adding his own percentage on top of what Rome extracts that he has grown rich.

 

No wonder people don’t like him.  Don’t want to let him through to the front of the line to see Jesus.  Tell him if he wants to see he can go climb a tree.  People don’t see him as a good or likely candidate for Jesus’s company.  

 

And are we sometimes in that place as well – either judging someone else not good church-material, or afraid we’ll be judged that way ourselves?

 

There’s a myth abroad – hard to resist, that church and church membership is for good people – that being a church member means we know how to behave, not get into trouble, not do bad things, not hurt other people.  

 

So we tend to look for good people to join us, and maybe ignore people who don’t fit the mold of “good.”  We also tend to feel anxious when we find ourselves not being good, and we do what we can to not let anyone know.  We wouldn’t want to be kicked out of the club.

 

Also, any time the church as a whole acts badly – acts less than polite, less than loving, less than harmonious, we feel discouraged and disillusioned.  We pull away, confused by the human reality of what we’ve just witnessed.  We don’t know how to handle it, and some leave because of that. 

 

But then there’s Jesus, looking specifically for the one no one else wants in their company – the one who seems to know only how to act badly and hurtfully, and he says, “Zaccheus!  Whatcha doin’ there all by yourself?  Come on down and join the rest of us here.  We’re all in this together, and I want to be in your house this night.  

 

“And the rest of you?  If you want to be with me, come on and let’s eat together in the house of the sinner.  The place surely is big enough, given how rich this Zaccheus-sinner is.  And hey!  What a great name for a church.  I can see the sign board now: Jericho United Church – House of the sinner, home to all fellow sinners in the city.”  

 

To their credit, after first grumbling at Jesus’s idea of what the church is, a lot of people accept the invitation to be part of the party.

 

Which leads then to a third view – another way yet of looking at Zaccheus – as local hero. 

 

With Jesus’ openness to him Zaccheus tastes firsthand the kind of love and justice and healing community that Jesus brings into the world.  In response he climbs down from his perch and hurries home to get the place ready.  He needs to clean up the house, and now he wants to clean up his act as well.

 

He’s been a tax collector – a collaborator with Rome.  He knows – when he thinks about it, how wrong and unjust the system is.  But it’s a job, and it’s easy enough to rationalize.  You have to make a living somehow.  If he doesn’t do it, someone else will.  He’s just doing his job.

 

And how familiar are we with that phrase – I was just doing my job?  It became famous – infamous, as person after person offered it as their only defence after working as guards in Nazi prison camps.  And since that horrible time it’s become a way of describing the disconnect that often exists between what people find themselves doing for a living and what they really feel deep down in the holiest part of their heart and soul.

 

How many around us are caught in such a bind?  And how terribly soul-destroying can it be?

Whether it’s company practices or government policy, neighbourhood attitudes or cultural assumptions and prejudices, even when you know they’re wrong and unjust and you really don’t like them, even when we know it’s doing something wrong to the world, it’s hard to take a stand, to step outside whatever box we’re in, to blow the whistle, maybe bite the hand – or the system, that feeds us.

 

But Zaccheus does that.  Even though the system pays him well, when he comes to know Jesus he decides he can’t do it anymore – can’t continue to play a game so wrong, can’t stay inside a system so immoral.  It’s time, he says, for his behaviour and his life to change, to match what he sees in Jesus. 

 

Word of what he does starts to spread through the city.  Jericho buzzes with the story of how Jesus has changed the life of Zaccheus, and how Zaccheus is now spending his time giving back to his people instead of taking from them.  Can this be the kingdom of God, they wonder.  

 

And I wonder … did Jesus know Zaccheus was ready for this?  That Zaccheus was ready for a new kind of life for himself and for his city? 

 

Is this the kind of person Jesus looks for when he’s looking for people to join him – little and belittled people who are hungry to be accepted, sinners and wrong-doers who don’t pretend to be otherwise, people trapped in systems that are wrong who are ready to step outside and try a different way of living?

 

Is that the kind of people he’s found in us? 

 

And are those the kind of people we’re looking for, to join us?