Towards Sunday, May 3, 2015

Reading:  Acts 8:26-40 and John 15:1-8

When Jesus says, "I am the true vine" he is not talking to Christians trying to identify themselves in relation to other world religious.  Nor is he talking to Christians as opposed to Jews.

Jesus is talking to disciples who see themselves as Jews following the traditions and rites of Judaism in the ways Jesus is showing them, and like Jesus trying to sort out what their inherited tradition is really about.  Imagine Jesus born today into a Christian community, living it out in a particular way and with a particular understanding of God -- both like and unlike different contemporary versions of Christianity, then saying to his followers, "In the midst of all the different ways of being Christian and of understanding Christian life and faith, remember always to come back to me as closely as you can, to be connected to the truth of it all.  I am the central vine -- the heart of this tradition, and you will be fruitful branches of it as long as you remain closely connected with me in whatever circumstances you find yourself."

Which is what Philip discovers and lives out in his encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch.  This is a story of the early disciples of Jesus being led to rethink and redefine their own practice of faithful community because of their commitment to Jesus as the "true vine" whose life and spirit are their guiding light in all situations.

This eunuch is a male who has been sexually neutered to make him "safe" to work in the royal court in intimate proximity to the queen, princesses, and the king's concubines.  He is also a Jewish believer, and knows (because of passages like Isaiah 11:11 and Deuteronomy 23:1) that he is not acceptable to participate fully in the assembly of Israel because of his sexual un-wholeness.  Hence his interest in Isaiah 53:7-8 and the reference there to God's servant being "shorn" and "cut off."  This is a new image for a servant of God, and he wants to know who this "servant" is whom he can identify with, and who surely can identify with and understand him.

The eunuch's pain-filled and hopeful wondering is an open door that Philip enters boldly, telling the eunuch that the servant of God he is reading about has proven to be Jesus, and together Philip and the eunuch go on to discover something that neither saw quite that way before -- that in and through Jesus, the old laws excluding "sexually abnormal" persons from full participation in the life in the assembly are done away with, and people "of that sort" are now welcomed in and able to participate fully just as they are.

As Karen Baker-Fletcher of the Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University (Dallas) so eloquently puts it:

"Philip does not tell the eunuch that if he only confesses Jesus Christ, receives water baptism, and prays hard, then God will give him gonads and a desire for women.  Philip simply teaches that the prophecies in Israel [about the inclusion of all in God's blessing and in the assembly] have been revealed and fulfilled in Jesus."
 
The implications for us as the church of Christ today are for us to work out, remembering the fundamental principle that it's always by connecting as closely as possible to the life and spirit of Jesus that we are able to share in the true growth of the Christian tradition.

Sermon from Sunday, April 26, 2015

Readings:  Psalm 23 and John 10:11-18

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a real live shepherd. 

I’m familiar with the image.  Pastors are called shepherds of their flock, and as parents – as well as grandparents, aunts and uncles and god-parents, we are a kind of shepherd for our family and children.  But I wonder what we know about sheep and shepherds and shepherding beyond romanticized and sanitized images. 
 

 

 

So I did some reading this week to learn what Jesus and the early church would have taken for granted – for instance, that “the life of a shepherd was anything but picturesque.  It was dangerous, risky and menial.  Shepherds were rough around the edges, spending time in the fields rather than in polite society.  For Jesus to say, ‘I am the good shepherd,’ would have been an affront to the religious elite and educated…A modern-day equivalent might be for Jesus to say, ‘I am the good migrant worker.’”

Like the migrant workers in the background of Niagara society, or the 800 who drowned last week trying to make it across the Mediterranean from northern Africa to Italy.  How often parents and pastors feel like that – that they’re toiling away in the background, doing work no one else will, maybe sometimes in over their heads and drowning.

Something else Jesus and his followers would have known is that a shepherd leads – and must always lead, the sheep.  I read this week about sheep not behaving like cows.  Cows are herded from the rear by shouting cowboys, but if you stand behind a herd of sheep and try shouting at them, they just run around behind you.  They prefer to be led, and will not go anywhere unless someone – their trusted shepherd, goes first, and shows them everything is all right.  They see the shepherd as part of their family; they come to know and trust their shepherd’s voice; and as long as the shepherd is willing to go somewhere, they will follow. 

When I read stuff like that that I start wondering what kind of shepherd I am as parent and as pastor.  

Going ahead of the sheep and leading is not the same as having all the answers, always being right, and being the expert on everything your children or your parishioners need to know.  But how often do I act as though that were the case – or at least that I need others to see me that way, to feel like I am being a good parent and pastor? 

Or, instead of leading, how often have I pushed, sometimes more and harder than was needed?  Or just stood to the side and withdrew, letting the sheep sort it out for themselves – which sometimes is a way of encouraging others’ gifts, but sometimes a way of abdicating leadership.  And how often have I led in a wrong or unhealthy direction – away from what Psalm 23 calls “paths of righteousness and right relations” – into more selfish or ethical ways?

I know I’m not alone in worrying about stuff like this.  I was surprised in my 40’s when I had a good heart-to-heart with my dad and he talked about the ways he felt weak and like a failure as a father.  When Japhia and I get together with friends and siblings we often share questions we have about ourselves and our behaviours as parents.  If ministers were more honest with one another I’m sure our clergy gatherings would include a lot more talk about our self-doubts and anxieties about our own work.

And yet … we still are good parents and pastors – good shepherds, as others often assure us.  I know my dad’s weaknesses and mistakes, but he was a good father.  Some of my friends are the best parents I can imagine.  And the minister I have most admired and loved in my life once confessed in a sermon to a feeling he had one sleepless Saturday night at 3 or 4 in the morning of just wanting to throw his colicky infant daughter against a wall to make her be quiet so maybe he could finish the next-morning’s sermon he was still struggling with, and get some rest before he had to preach it.

I love that minister for a lot of reasons, and the brutal honesty of that one sermon alone would have been sufficient.  It makes me wonder how one can be both bad and a good parent, bad and a good pastor, bad in some ways and a very good shepherd at one and the same time? 

And I wonder if it has to do with remembering we are sheep ourselves in need of a shepherd – that we are sheep in need of being guided, healed and led to new life ourselves. 

Do you remember the shepherds in the Gospel of Luke – the ones watching over their flocks by night when an angel comes down, tells them God’s good news for the world, and they go off right away to Bethlehem to be part of it.  

The Gospel doesn’t seem at all concerned with whether they’re good or bad shepherds.  No attention at all is paid to their moral character, how they are with the sheep, with one another, or with other people.  Chances are they’re quite ordinary – a mixture like all of us of good and bad, weakness and strength, good common sense morality and a healthy dose of moral compromise and sin.

But there they are, front and centre every Christmas -- in the carols we sing, on the front of Christmas cards, in nativity sets, in every Christmas pageant ever staged.  They’re role models, we’re encouraged to be like them and to walk in their footsteps. 

And it’s not because of how good or bad they are as people.  It’s because when they have a chance to be part of the story of God’s good work in the world, and part of the appearing of God’s kingdom in their time, they drop what they are doing and happily go to be part of it.  They are shepherds themselves but they humbly go to stand in spiritual community with others at the cradle of the One who they need to be, and who is their shepherd. 

And the very name of this shepherd – the one who they go to see, also leads us in this direction.  Have you ever wondered about the name of Jesus, just what it means?  What it says about Jesus, and maybe what it doesn’t? 

Names – especially in the ancient world, often describe a person, and say something about them and what they are like – what’s special about them.  “Peter” for instance – the leader of the disciples and of the early church, means “the rock” and that’s what he was, and how everyone saw him every time they spoke his name.  “Matthew” means “gift of Yahweh” – a glorious thing to have said of you.  “Andrew” means “man” – a little more common, but still it says something about the bearer of the name. 

"Jesus,” though, is the Greek form of the Hebrew “Yeshua” or which in turn is a shortened form of “Yehoshua” which is a compound of two words that mean “God saves” or “God delivers or rescues.”  So it’s not even about Jesus himself; it’s a name that points away from Jesus towards God, towards someone and something bigger than himself, and towards trust in God to save and rescue us – to save even him, from wherever we sometimes find ourselves.

I think of the minister who confessed his murderous thought towards his daughter – a horrible thing to feel and confess to the church.  He did all he could to be a good and loving father, and he was.  But he also knew he could think terrible things, act unkindly at times, do and say things he later regretted, and not always be right or sure or certain. 

And in all that – despite all that, and because of all that, he knew how to place himself in the presence and in the hands of One who promises to be, and is, his shepherd – who takes him as he is, brings him back when he wanders, heals him of his opened wounds and disclosed diseases, and leads him through to a new and better way of being.   

That he was able to do this – and share it with us – able to find ways, and times and places, and groups of people with whom to be honest and open for the sake of being led through the valleys of life, is exactly what made him the minister I have most loved and respected, and who has been one of the best shepherds I have known in my life. 

He led the way– not by knowing all the answers, or by fixing everything for everyone, or by being always good and upright – but by being able to bring both the good and bad of his behaviour, the strong and weak of his character, the certainties and questions of his life out into the open, into the community of faith, and into his dialogue with God and with others.  He showed us it’s possible to do that, that it is the way – the only real way to new and good life, and that we need not be afraid of going there ourselves.  

Do we not want our children to know that too?   And how will they know, if not by seeing it in us – showing them the way by walking it ourselves ahead of them, letting them know it really is all right to go there? 

 

Towards Sunday, April 26, 2015

Scripture: Acts 4:5-12 and John 10:10-18
Sermon working title:  Peter wasn't always a very good Christian..(or: Ba-a-a-a-a-a-ah-d Sheep)

When I read Jesus' sayings in the Gospel about "the good shepherd" and his depiction of bad shepherds, I wonder and worry about the kind of shepherd I am.  Both pastors and parents are shepherds of a sort, and I am very aware of ways and times I have not been a good shepherd either as pastor to the congregation or as parent to my son and step-children.

That thrust of judgement is certainly one way this image was used in the Jewish faith tradition.  The prophets especially spoke of true and false shepherds as a way of critiquing and judging leaders of the people who did not exercise their role properly and who mis-led and hurt, rather than led and nurtured the people.

But am I alone in this? 

A sermon I will never forget hearing in my last years in my childhood church tells me I am not.  The sermon was about anger, and in it the minister told the story of one Saturday night he spent with a colicky infant, an exhausted wife, and an unfinished sermon.  The baby would not sleep, and it was already 3 or 4 am.  His wife was exhausted and could do no more; she needed sleep.  The minister, still struggling with the sermon for the next morning, took the child and tried to help her sleep.  But after an hour of walking and rocking and tentatively placing the child in the crib -- all to no avail, what the minister said he finally felt like doing when he bent down one more time to pick up his crying daughter from her crib, was simply to throw her against a wall, if only that would make her stop crying.

I have loved that minister for many reasons, and that sermon alone would have been sufficient. 

It makes me wonder about the deep mystery of how one can be a bad shepherd and good shepherd at one and the same time -- bad pastor and good, bad parent and good.

Maybe it has to do with how we handle the ways we are bad, and where we turn for help.

When I read Peter's sermon to the leaders of Jerusalem about "the stone that was rejected, that has been made the cornerstone," it's good to remember Peter is speaking as one who himself a number of times rejected that stone that God lays in the world. (Recall the famous triple denial, the running away, even the earlier "satanic" attempt to turn Jesus into a different kind of messiah than he really is?) 

Without these humanizing and honest touches added to the portrait of Peter, his words sound only harsh and judgemental of others.  But with them, something emerges about the amazing gift of finding ourselves (sometimes-bad shepherds, all of us?) redeemed and growing into goodness as we find our place in the flock gathered and fed by the one Truly Good Shepherd. 

None of us is truly and always good in and of ourselves; but is it maybe that we grow into goodness and come to participate in a goodness greater than ourselves, as we find and take our place in the community of those who follow Jesus, or at least in some sort of truly spiritual community?

Sermon from Sunday, April 19, 2015

Scripture:  Acts 3:12-19 and Luke 24:36b-49

Sermon:  "What's for lunch?"

 

You gotta love the story.

The disciples are huddled behind locked doors in Jerusalem, trying to make sense of what’s happening around them.  It’s the third day after the death of Jesus and they are in shock and grief.  Some of the women have told them Jesus’ tomb is now empty and that some angels told them Jesus is alive.  Two disciples who left earlier that day for Emmaus have come back and say they met Jesus along the way, and knew him in the breaking of bread.  

Really!!??  

It’s more than they can take in and understand.  Resurrection is not familiar territory.  Death and grief we know and can handle, but resurrection and new life seem to draw us beyond this world into some other realm.

Then Jesus himself appears among them, and they’re really undone and afraid.  Is it a ghost – the spirit of Jesus come back from the other side to haunt them for their failure to follow him to the end?  Or is this appearance of the apparently back-from-the-dead messiah maybe something even more – maybe the absolute melting of the world as we know it, the final breaking down of this world to make way for the kingdom of God – a prospect both comforting and terrifying for imperfect, all-too-human beings.

Jesus looks at them terrified and silent, sees and knows what they are thinking and feeling, and says two things.  First, he says, “Peace!  God’s peace, be with you.”  And then he says, “Do you have anything for lunch?”

Well – not really lunch.  According to the story it’s already night.  So it’s a late supper or an evening snack that Jesus is looking for.  They have some broiled fish and they share it with him.  

It was the early church’s way of saying that resurrection is of body and spirit, not just spirit.  Also, bread and fish was probably the first memorial meal the early Christians celebrated, and only later changed it to bread and wine.  It was what they always ate with Jesus when he was with them.  Plus it was what he used – just a few loaves and fishes, to feed thousands on the hillside.  It made sense that bread and fish were special. 

But really: “Do you have anything for lunch?”  

The resurrection of Jesus is about ordinary life as we live it every day in this world.  It’s not just about life after death.  It’s about the healing and rebuilding of life before death, in the midst of death, against the powers of death in this world.  It’s about life in this world coming to be the way it would be if Jesus were here, because Jesus is here.

You know I like to bring The Spectator into the pulpit from time to time.  Karl Barth said we should preach and live the Christian life with the Bible in one hand and the daily paper in the other.  Beyond that, it’s fun to see if what the Bible tells us about life actually jibes with what we see every day.  It’s an act of faith – not faith in The Spec, but faith in God – that what we believe about life and the emergence of new life in the world because of God, is actually borne out in the news of the day. 

So … witness to the risen Jesus in The Spec?  On Easter weekend they ran a front-page story about the Christian celebration of Easter, with an eye-catching picture of the cross-topped roofline of the convent of the Sisters of St. Joseph.   

That’s not what I mean, though.  

I mean something like the story last Thursday about a young man who spent 10 or 15 years of his life trafficking cocaine and Oxycintin, spending time in and out of jail, who now has moved back to help his mom run the family farm, and whose life and spirit are being turned around by giving himself to caring for the land and the animals.  Is that a story of resurrection?  Of what Jesus made happen for people in Galilee, still happening?  

With that story in mind, I brought along Friday’s paper.  On the front page, “Community: crowd lifts vehicle off pinned teen.”  What do you think?  Might that be a story of unexpected, spontaneous life-saving community equal to the time when four people got together to cut a hole in a roof of a house to lower a lame man down to Jesus for healing?

Farther on there’s a story about a used-bookstore owner overwhelmed by dozens of people from the neighbourhood – aged 6 to 72,who simply showed up to help her pack her inventory of 13,000 books into boxes so she – and they, could then paint and refurbish her store.  

“Brandon Clark still not awake after gunshot surgery” isn’t a story yet of the healing people want, but it’s one of people coming together across all kinds of lines and divisions to offer support and care for someone in distress.  

A few pages on, a story about a group of men at a half-way house for federal offenders and a McMaster University student working on a project to chronicle the kinds of hope that helps turn around the lives of men once they leave prison.  Another about a young man named Randy Kay – whose wedding I officiated at maybe 20 years ago, who for several years has been organizing tree-planting projects in some of the poorer and bleaker parts of the city.  Another about the Mayor and City Council wanting to maintain the practice of prayer or some sort of spiritual focusing before Council meetings, regardless of what the Supreme Court says about it.  An op ed peace reprinted from The Miami Herald supporting the new openness between the United States and Cuba.  And a story about a Seattle CEO cutting his own $1 million salary to $70,000, to help finance the raising of all salaries in the company to the same level of $70,000 over the next three years.

I don’t know.  Are those stories of the kinds of things Jesus would be making to happen if he were here today?  If he were walking through our time as he walked through Galilee?  Are those stories a witness to the resurrection – of Jesus not being defeated, and still gathering communities of new life that in the midst of all the bad news still help to shape and re-shape the world according to God’s good will. 

Which brings us to the second reading.  I almost didn’t include it in our worship.  In the shadow of the Holocaust, Peter’s speech to the leaders and people of Jerusalem sounds like a first recorded Christian judgement of the Jews, and the beginning of two thousand years of anti-semitic rhetoric.

But that’s not what Peter’s speech is really about.  What’s happened is that having come to know the risen Jesus, the disciples start to live in his spirit and strength.  They move out from their hidden and fear-filled room to take the life and spirit of Jesus and his trust in God’s kingdom to the streets.  Peter, on his way in to the Temple one day, is met by a lame man who asks for help and in response, Peter reaches out and helps him be healed.

People start thinking Peter is the new wonder-worker in town.  But Peter knows he’s no celebrity miracle-man.  He’s only too aware of how only a few weeks before he was among those who denied even knowing Jesus, and others know it too.  Before that it was Peter who tried to remake Jesus into a different kind of messiah than he was, and was rebuked by Jesus as a voice of Satan.  Peter knows he is no different and no better than anyone else – no less complicit in Jesus’ death than those who arrested him, made accusations against him, and had him put to death. 

So what Peter is saying to the leaders and people of Jerusalem – and to us, is that it’s ordinary, sinful, imperfect people like him and like them and like us – who often don’t get it right, who don’t act as followers of Jesus at critical moments, who even act against God’s ways and God’s good will at times in their relations, to whom God reaches out with forgiveness and healing, and invites to be the agents and vehicles of God’s kingdom in the world.  That’s how Jesus worked in Galilee, and it’ still the way it’s done  – because he is risen and still living and moving in the world that God loves.

Which brings me to one last story in Friday’s Spec: “Hamilton’s amazing Women of Distinction.”  It’s about eleven women honoured by the YWCA Hamilton for their contributions to the community.  It’s good they’re honoured.  They deserve it, and we need to know such people still exist.

 

But it’s not just those eleven, is it?  

The people of distinction in our community are also seated right here in this sanctuary.  The wall of distinction is the church family bulletin board in the Lower Hall and the framed picture there of all the families in our church directory – which needs to be up-dated, by the way.  Because what the resurrection of Jesus is about, is that ordinary people like you and me are still being touched, healed and taught by him, as people were in Galilee, and still being stirred in our spirit and sent out by him, as they were, to help love, heal, forgive, feed, care for, and re-shape the world around us in his name. 

You just gotta love the story.  Resurrection sounds like unfamiliar territory.  But really it’s about the ordinary landscape of all our lives, lived in openness to the risen Jesus. 

“Do you have anything for lunch?”  It’s about ordinary life being lived by ordinary people in such a way that life in this world comes to be the way it would be if Jesus were here, because Jesus is here among us.

Towards Sunday, April 19, 2015

Scripture: Luke 24:36b-48 and Acts 3:12-19

In the Gospel story, the disciples of Jesus are trying to figure out the resurrection.  Suddenly they are startled to see Jesus right there among them.  They think he's a ghost; they don't know what to do; they wonder (as we read in Acts 1, the sequel to this Gospel) if God is about the bring the world as they have known it to an end.  And in response to all this, Jesus just looks at them and says, "What's for lunch?"

I love it. What better way to affirm that God's will remains and is maybe even more than ever the redemption of this world -- that the good news of the risen Jesus is not about an escape or advancement to some other realm, but about the fulfilment of God's desire for Earth as we know it?

And the Acts story (which we too easily and mistakenly read as a udgement on Judaism and Jews) is a wonderful affirmation by a fallen and imperfect believer that it's exactly us fallen, imperfect, mistaken, often-unfaithful believers who God still (and always) invites to be the agents of Earth's redemption.  Only weeks before, Peter himself publicly denied and betrayed Jesus and his way, and the people Peter is talking to, probably know this.  So what he is saying is, "You know I screwed up myself -- that I turned my back on Jesus when he was crucified.  I'm no better than you.  But look at me ... guess what, God forgives my weakness and mistakes, and welcomes me into the work of the kingdom.  And God does the same for you; so why not come and also be part of the revealing of God's kingdom in our time?"

Wanted: fallen, imperfect, sometimes-mistaken, sometimes-unfaithful believers, to be part of the revealing of God's kingdom in their ordinary, daily life.

Sounds like a perfect job for any of us.

Sermon for Easter Sunday, April 5, 2015

Scripture:  Mark 16:1-8
Sermon:  Waiting for us in Galilee

 

Have you ever played the game, “Best vacation”?  You think of a category, like summer vacation, and you try to remember and talk about the best ever that you had. 

It could be Best Vacation, or Best Birthday Party – maybe Best School Dance, Best Hallowe’en Costume, Best Family Dinner, Best Christmas.   

How about Best Easter?  The best Easter you’ve had, and what made it that way? 

For me, for Japhia and I, it was last year.  We weren’t back at Fifty yet.  But I was back home.  I had been away for three months learning to deal with some personal issues and be able to handle them differently, and I came home the Tuesday of Holy Week.  It was good to be back and reconnected – even better to be together with the hope of things being different and getting better than they had been before.  

On the Thursday we and Jack – our dog, left to spend Easter weekend at a lakeside cottage, and when we arrived there was still ice on the water – not enough to walk on, it was more slush than ice in some spots, but all through the rest of that week the lake held its wintery look – still and cold and hard, closed in and constricted.   

Then Sunday morning – Easter morning, we got up just a bit before sunrise, went down to the shore with some bread and wine we had brought for the occasion, and a Bible to read one of the resurrection stories, and as we got to the water’s edge, we saw that overnight the lake had cleared.  The slush and ice were gone.  The water was clear.  It rippled with the touch of the morning breeze, seemingly glad to free.  It brightly reflected the glint of a new day’s sun rising on the horizon. 

It was the best Easter ever.  Not that everything was suddenly all solved and resolved and instantly better.  But it was a sign and a promise of what we knew inside – that there was a way forward, that old patterns could melt and flow away, that hearts could be freed and lives healed, and that right where we were in the midst of the home and the world we share, life in the days and weeks and years to come could be different than it had been.

 

In Mark’s story of the resurrection of Jesus from defeat and death, the message the women are given by the young man in white – presumably an angel, is to not be alarmed, that Jesus is not there but has been raised, and that they are to “go tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee.”   

Galilee? 

What did Galilee mean for the disciples? 

Galilee was where they first met Jesus.  It was a fringe area, a bit of a hinterland.  But it was their home.  It was the place of their daily, ordinary life and it was in the midst of that daily, ordinary life that they first met and began to follow Jesus – that they first were touched by and began to believe in the good news of God’s kingdom in their midst – in the casting out of evil spirits, the healing of the sick, the forgiveness of the sinful, the creation of truly human community and communities of new life right where they were.   

It was a wonderful thing – a wonderful memory of how things had been before they came with Jesus to Jerusalem to have the dream undone.  And on the morning after the death and burial of Jesus, I have no doubt that’s how it felt as they awoke – that the time they had known with Jesus in Galilee really was just a dream now undone and vanished and over.   

Until … the women found the tomb empty, no dead body there, a message that Jesus was raised and alive and at work in the world again, and that he was going ahead of them back to Galilee. 

Easter is a day with some measure of heavenly rapture.  It’s a day that feeds our longing for assurance of release from this world and of resurrection to life after death at the end.  But it is also even more – when we think of Jesus going ahead of the disciples back to Galilee – a day that calls and sends us back to the world that we live in every day, back to this life as we know it, and back to the people and life of all the world as it is with an assurance that the dreams we have of things being able to be new and different and better are not just empty dreams.  Because it’s there, in the midst of daily, ordinary life in the world as we know it, that Jesus is waiting to meet us.   

 

When I first saw the video of The Deer’s Cry that we saw together after the Scripture reading (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGHWiAGpIP0), I was especially struck by the images at the end of poor, weak and lonely people, of people deeply hurt and imprisoned.  And it made me wonder, who Jesus is raised for?  Is it just for the disciples – for the believers who followed him to Jerusalem, who at least did their best to declare him their Lord and Master?  Or does Jesus go back to Galilee – back to the place of daily, ordinary life, for other people too?

This week I saw a note from Wesley Urban Ministries about the death of a man named Henry – a frequent visitor to the Wesley Day Centre.  Henry was 60 years old when he passed away in December and for most of his life he struggled with mental illness and addictions.  

To the people around him he revealed “a sensitive, gentle spirit, a humble heart, and genuine concern for others.”  But he was distant from his mother, brother, sister and their families.  He didn’t have a personal phone.  He would often phone from the Wesley Day Centre, though, to arrange family visits that they all cherished when they happened.

After his death the family contacted Wesley to thank them for helping Henry keep in touch with them in this way.  And I wonder, was each call and each visit an occasion of resurrection for all of them – a time of new and renewed life, of deepened relationship and love, maybe just when they were starting to think it might be all over? 

 

On Wednesday The Hamilton Spectator ran a story about a Muslim imam known for his ministry as a chaplain in Ontario’s prisons.  In the article he tells a story of one inmate he came to know – a “lifer” who had come to accept Islam while in prison.  The crime he had committed many years before was “quite horrific” and he was remorseful.  He was a model prisoner and had gone from a maximum security facility to one with minimal supervision.  He was granted a temporary absence to visit family, and asked the chaplain to go with him. 

On the two-hour drive from Kingston into the GTA the two talked at a depth they had not before.  When it was time for afternoon prayers the chaplain pulled into a mosque, pre-approved for them to visit.  The inmate hesitated to go inside because he had never been in a mosque, but the chaplain showed him inside and showed him what to do.   

And then, when they went upstairs to pray, in the words of the chaplain, “a very beautiful thing happened.  Side by side we offered prayers, and he began to weep.  We completed our prayers and I didn’t say anything.  We walked back to the car and I asked him, ‘What were the tears about, brother?’  He said they were tears of joy and sorrow.  He was thankful for where he was in life and for the journey that brought him there.  But he was also reminded of what he had done and the pain of remembering where he was in life at the time of his crime.  I said to him, ‘That’s very good … I hope those tears come again.'" 

And I wonder – is that what resurrection is, the breaking open of hardened and scarred hearts, and the freedom not known before to move into a new, better, and more hopeful way of living?

 

Jesus – the One who helps us believe in the casting out of evil spirits, the healing of the sick, the forgiveness of the sinful, and the creation of truly human community and communities of new life right we are – is not dead, is raised to be among us again and again, and he is going ahead of us to Galilee. 

Whatever Galilee is for you, I wish you the best Easter yet.  And I wish you the opportunity to help others also know the promise and the hope of resurrection in their lives.

 

 

Towards Easter Sunday, April 5, 2015

Scripture:  Mark 16:1-8
Sermon:  Risen Jesus - a step ahead of us

Why don’t we go Easter carolling this year? 

OK … I know we don’t even do Christmas carolling anymore.  But still, why don’t we go Easter carolling?   

At Christmas, we’re happy to let all the world know that in a child born in Bethlehem, God has come to dwell among us – that in Jesus we are given the gift of seeing how life is to be lived, and what kind of world Earth is meant to be.   

          Joy to the world!  The Lord is come:

          let earth receive her king!

          Let every heart prepare him room,

          and heaven and nature sing. 

So why at Easter do we not take to the streets with songs that this One – the One who heals the sick, lifts up the poor, forgives the sinful, welcomes the rejected, challenges the powerful, and overturns injustice, is alive and still kicking? 

Why is it we don’t go out some night this week or next – or maybe Easter morning, to sing songs that the One who shows us real-human-living and Earth-set-right, is still here … is not dead and gone … is not defeated by powers of evil, ignorance and greed … is still alive, present and at work in the world in more ways and places than any can imagine? 

How about this for a starter? 

          Joy to the world!  The Lord’s still here:
          Let earth embrace her king!
          Let every heart rise up and cheer, 
          and heaven and nature sing.

          No more let sins and sorrows grow,
          nor greed pollute the ground;
          he's raised to make God's blessings flow
          far as the curse is found.

          He loves the Earth with truth and grace,
          and makes the nations prove
          the glories of God's righteousness
          and wonders of God's love.        
Easter caroling, anyone?