Try it ... you'll like it?

Reading: Matthew 20:1-15
(Jesus says the kingdom of God is like a landowner who hires groups of people at different times of the day to work his farm.  Some work all day, some half a day, some just an hour in the early evening.  At the end of the day they line up to get their pay, and they each one finds that they get exactly what ... everyone else gets!  They all get the same!  "Not fair!" some of the all-day workers say.  To which the land-owner says, "But haven't I done what is right?  I have a feeling you are just jealous of my generosity.")

If Jesus of the Gospels were here today telling a story about the kingdom of God on Earth, I wonder if he might have told this one:

In 2004 a man named Dan Price, along with his brother Lucas built a company called Gravity Payments.  It was a financial service and credit-card processing company in Seattle, and it did well for the first few years.  Then in 2008 when the recession hit, Gravity suffered as many of its client companies either folded or suffered declines in their business.  Dan managed to rebuild, though, and within a few years Gravity was doing very well again in the post-recession economy.

In April 2011 Dan noticed, however, that one of his entry-level employees, a phone technician named Jason Hill, was fairly consistently in a sour mood.  One day he saw Jason on a smoke break and invited him for a walk in the woods.  On that walk Dan found out how difficult life was for Jason on his entry-level $35,000 salary.  And how angry Jason was at how Dan’s top-down policies of tight fiscal management made lower-level employees like him bear the cost of the company’s profitability.

Dan had always prided himself on treating his employees respectfully and well, and for giving them the tools to succeed in life.  He explored Jason’s frustrations, and found Jason was not alone in his struggles – especially having to live in Seattle and that whole area of Washington state.  He also realized that the more financially anxious and stressed his employees were, the less productive and creative they were in their work and the less committed to the company’s over-all well-being.

So in late 2011 Dan instituted a policy of 20% annual raises for every employee making less than $100,000.  This continued for 3 years, and Dan monitored the results.  Even this, he saw, was not enough to really give the lowest-level employees what they needed to be secure and able to work at the company with joy rather than constant financial anxiety.

So in April 2015 Dan made the decision to raise the entry-level salary of every employee to $70,000 – which his research told him was the level at which people in that part of the country were able to report freedom from financial stress and an ability to just enjoy doing well at their job.  And to help finance the change he cut his own salary from $1,000,000 to $70,000.

That’s when the news hit the fan, as they say.

Dan’s restructuring of Gravity’s pay schedule was front-page news across the country and in neighbouring countries for a few weeks.  The change was lauded by some – by the employees, by anti-poverty advocated, by social justice types.  It was questioned and criticized by others – especially by conservative and right-wing political leaders who called the move socialist and communistic.  It was laughed at, and scorned by other business leaders who said the decision was impractical and would surely lead to Gravity to fail in very short measure. 

But Dan Price stayed the course, even through the agony of a lawsuit brought against him by his brother charging Dan with impropriety in the way he was leading the company – a lawsuit in which Dan was vindicated by the courts and was awared all costs incurred as well.  And now, two years later, Gravity Payments is still doing well – very well, in fact – better than ever before.

What Dan Price did raises a lot of questions – as many as he sought to answer.  Maybe what he did creates as many problems as it seeks to solve.  It raises as much criticism and as many objections as it draws gratitude and praise.

And maybe it all depends on where you sit.  And where any of us are in the story, and in situations like this.

I doubt that Dan Price’s decision and the way he is running his company are a template that can be easily and simplistically applied to all situations.  Just like any parable of Jesus is not a simple, moral directive to be applied literally or simplistically to just any situation.

But the story reminds us that when the kingdom of God rears its beautiful head in the course of human affairs, it usually somehow overturns the way things usually work and the ways we normally behave.

At the very least, the story of Gravity Payments just like Jesus’s story of the generous land-owner who does “what is right,” raises questions about how people are treated in our society, and both how and even whether people –especially those who are at risk, are valued and cared for by the way we structure our organizations, and businesses, and communities.  Just how is people’s worth counted and calculated?  How is their dignity and equality remembered and upheld in our institutions – in our businesses, our companies, our communities, our families, our churches?

The up-to-date story of Dan Price, like the ancient and time-tested story of the generous landowner make us think about things.  They surprise us with the way things might be, and can be. 

And then the question is: what do we do about it?  Once we know God’s way of doing things, what do we try to do?  Once we know what God counts as important, what do we count as worthwhile fighting for or working for? 

God gives us stories to chew on like manna from heaven – a different kind of bread than we get from the world and its systems.  And we are what we eat, they say.  We become what we feed on.

And as Moses said to the people of Israel when it became clear that the bread from Egypt, which was all they’d ever known, would never get them to the Promised Land, and that God was wanting to give them something new to chew on, “Try it, you’ll like it.  How can you know you won’t like, if you’ve never tried it?” 

Try it, you'll like it? (First thoughts towards Sunday, Sept 24, 2017)

Reading:  Exodus 16:2-15

The people of Israel are on the way from slavery in Egypt, through the wilderness, to the Promised Land -- along the way, learning to be the people of God.  They have brought food with them from Egypt -- the food they were given, and that they were familiar with, as slaves of the Egyptian empire.  That food runs out, though.  It's not enough for the journey they need to make.  The food that will get them through, God provides.

Just a few question about, and from, this story:

Was it a tragedy and a mistake that the food from Egypt ran out?  How does it feel when what you have relied on all your life, just isn't enough? 

Was it a necessary and good thing that Israel had to learn to recognize something else than what the powers of the day fed them, as what they needed to feed on?  How were the quails and manna different from the meat and bread of Egypt?

Can the powers of the day, or any empire we live in (no matter whether we are masters or slaves, successes or failures, within it) ever give us what we need to live as fully as we want to, as God's people in the world?

What does the cartoon below say to you?

Liberations large and small: a sacrament of history (sermon from Sunday, Sept 17, 2017)

Reading:  Exodus 14:9-31

The people if Israel are fleeing Egypt.  After years of slavery and oppression God has heard their cried for help, has raised up Moses to lead them, and is leading them out in mass exodus.  The people follow a giant pillar of fire and cloud that they trust is the presence of God.  But the Egyptian army is pursuing them and when the people follow the pillar of fire and cloud to the edge of the Red Sea, with the sea before them and the Egyptian army behind them, there seems no way out.

Today’s reading is part of the foundational story of the people of Israel – the people who in The Bible are God’s chosen ones.  It’s a story of liberation – of escape from slavery and oppression, and I wonder if this story is telling us that liberation is what life is about, and that liberations – whether big or small, are one of the ways we see God at work in the life of the world.

A few weeks ago – the week before the new school year started, Japhia was on the phone with Amy, our daughter-in-law, talking about three-year-old Kayson starting Junior Kindergarten.  Kayson was excited about going to school and on the school bus with his older brother, and on the phone Amy was asking Japhia if she would be able to come over the next Tuesday to stay with their two younger ones while Amy went to school with Kayson for his first-day interview, at which Japhia says she heard Kayson’s little voice in the background quite insistently and even indignantly saying, “You’re not coming, Mommy!”

As a mother, how do you feel?  What do you say?

It reminded me of the first time I drove Aaron to summer camp up on Skeleton Lake near Lake Rosseau.  It was his first time away at camp so after finding the camp and parking the car, I helped him carry his sleeping bag and bag to the registrar’s office, found out what cabin he was in, helped him carry his stuff there and pick out a bunk, and then as he started talking to one of the other boys there I just looked around the camp a bit.  After five or ten minutes I went back to the cabin to find him to say goodbye, and as I walked in to do that, he looked up at me and said, “Oh!  Are you still here?”

As a father, how do you feel?  What do you say?

Maybe life really is about liberation.  And liberations – little or small, are one of the ways we see God at work.

Sometimes it’s on a bigger scale.  Here in Canada for generations we have prided ourselves on being an open, tolerant, multi-cultural society.  The Mosaic rather than the Melting-Pot is the way we expressed it back in the 60’s and 70’s, and we celebrated the ways in which in Canada people of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds were encouraged to maintain, rather than have to give up their culture.  An open border and a welcome to immigrants and refugees is the way we express it today, and we come up with slogans like “Diversity is Strength” that even our pro football teams wear on the sidelines.

But when voices are then raised against “Merry Christmas” being the only holiday sign to be appear on the Jolley Cut, and the Lord’s Prayer (a prayer of Jesus-followers) being the only prayer said in public schools by all students regardless of their religious identification and practice, and when Muslim women want to be veiled in all public settings and Sikh RCMP officers want to wear a turban – a dastar, and carry a traditional dagger – a kirpan, what as a country and as a society do we feel?  What do we say?  What do we do?

Is truly human life at heart about liberation, and are liberations – small or large, one of the ways we see God at work in the world?

And it can be even bigger and more complex than that.  For more than a generation now Canada has been learning about, and trying to learn to embrace the history of oppression and cultural genocide – both official and unofficial, both at-the-top political and on-the-ground personal that has been faced by the First Nations of this land.  We’re learning the story of the residential schools, and we’re learning also that that’s only one chapter in a very big book.  We’re learning about treaty rights, stolen land and broken promises, and so much more.  It’s something we feel bad about, and something we honestly want to correct and make better.

But when Mohawk warriors occupy land in Oka, members of the Stony Point First Nation occupy Ipperwash Park, and representatives of the Six Nations of the Grand River occupy disputed land in Caledonia and bring the life of a town to a crawl, and when First Nations traditional councils reject the authority of councils elected by Canadian government rules, and they say they want legal status as a nation within a nation, and the same rights of compensation as other nations would be able to demand, what do we as a dominant society feel?  What do we say?  What do we do?

Do we really believe that life is about liberation, and that liberations – small or large, simple or complex, are one of the ways we see God at work in the world?  And even if we do believe it, how on Earth do we act it out and honour the ways of God in human affairs?

Today’s reading is part of the foundational story of the people of Israel – the people who in The Bible are God’s chosen ones.  It’s a story of liberation – of escape from slavery and oppression, and in some ways it’s a very sad story. 

For the people of Israel – for the people whose cries God hears, to whom God sends a leader, and for whom God arranges a liberation from their oppressor, it’s a happy story – a story of escape from a bad situation, a story they will always tell and that will bring reassurance and hope of God’s saving and liberating presence any time in the future when they find themselves again hemmed in and oppressed by enemies.   

But for the people of Egypt – the people who would not let them go, who did not take seriously God’s hand in what was happening until it was too late, it’s a very sad story – sad for the Egyptians, for God, for anyone who really cares about the human race.

An old Jewish legend says that 40 years after this miraculous escape and 40 years in the wilderness, as the people of Israel finally stand on the bank of the Jordan about to enter the Promised Land, God tells Moses he will not be entering the land with them, and will not set foot in it.  After leading them all this time and all this way, he is to die and be buried just outside the Promised Land.  Moses, taken aback, asks why.  

In reply, God asks Moses if he remembers the day way back at the beginning when the people of Israel were led through the Red Sea, and they turned around to see the Egyptian army overwhelmed and drowned in the same sea they had just passed through.  Moses says yes, he remembers that day.  And God says, "Well, you smiled."

It makes me wonder how it might have been, and what might have happened if the Egyptians had only – even just at the last moment, chosen to let the people of Israel go?

If Egypt had only stopped at the edge of the sea, and finally taken seriously and accepted what they could see of the hand of God and of the clear direction that history was taking against them ... would all have been well?  If at that point, if Egypt had finally been able to "rejoice with those who rejoice" (to quote Paul from last week’s reading), had been able to sit down and smile at the people of Israel finally getting the freedom they had needed for so long (like shaking hands at the end of a hard-fought game with the team that beat you) ... and had been able to "bless those who cursed them" (to quote Jesus), had been able to wish Israel well on its journey-just-begun, even while knowing that Israel was probably only cursing them as they went on their way for all the time they had been enslaved, would all have been well?

God did all God could.  God showed Egypt sign after sign (1o plagues, for goodness sake!) of how this was going to turn out.  When Israel was finally on the run, God intervened personally and kept the two camps apart with that awe-ful pillar of fire and cloud, giving the Egyptian army time and even an excuse just to let Israel go ("Really, pharaoh, there was this big pillar of divine fire and cloud!  We tried, but there was no way we could get to them.").

Clearly, the way God opened through the sea and the way God managed for the oppressed to be free, was meant as a way for Israel, not Egypt, to follow, but Egypt insisted on everything being for them and about them ... and look where it got them.

It really does seem that the story of the Bible tells us that life is about liberation, and that the liberations all around us – big or little, simple or complex, are one of the ways we see God at work in the life of the world. 

                          

And I guess one question always is, how that makes us feel, what it makes us say, and what it leads us to do?

Thanks be to God.

We have seen the Egyptians, and they are ... ?

Reading:  Exodus 14:19-31

(The people of Israel are fleeing Egypt.  The Egyptian army is pursuing them.  The people get as far as the edge of the Red Sea.  They are trapped.  God, who has been going ahead of them as a guiding pillar of fire and cloud, moves around to a place behind them, to keep the two camps apart all night and keep the people of Israel safe.  The next day God opens a dry path through the Red Sea for Israel to cross over.  The Egyptians see this, begin to follow, get bogged down by the weight of their chariots in the mud, and then as they flounder, the waters of the Red Sea close on them and drown the whole army.)

What a sad story this is!  

How can we not, when we read it to the end, just cry over the fate of the Egyptians, even as we rejoice with the people of Israel?

A colleague in ministry has written, “told from the point of view of a people under constant stress from many external enemies, this story elicits a sense of security and trust.  But what of the Egyptians?  Did God not care about them too?”

Good question.  And another good question is, who am I (are we) in this story? 

If we are (like) Israel -- i.e. oppressed, enslaved, in need of a saviour-liberator (which in some ways, everyone always is), then this is a story that encourages a sense of security and trust in God who is able to be that, and do that for us.  And certainly the Christian community and the Western world have for centuries interpreted the story this way, reinforcing a sense of entitlement, divine protection of our interests, trust in God to be on our side, etc., etc.

But … if we are (like) Egypt -- i.e. oppressive, dominating, controlling, in need of a saviour from ourselves (which in some ways, maybe everyone also always is?), then this is a story that encourages submission to a higher power, acceptance of limits on our own power, and a willingness to live in peaceful and respectful (i.e. supportive but hands-off) relationship with others.

Because ... if Egypt had only stopped at the edge of the sea, and let the people of Israel go ... if they had only finally taken seriously and accepted what they could see of the hand of God and of the clear direction that history was taking against them ... all would have been well.

God did all God could ... showed Egypt sign after sign of how this was going to turn out (ten plagues, for goodness’ sake!!), even upping the ante each time to help them maybe finally get the point ... and then when Israel was finally on the run, God intervened personally and kept the two people apart with that awe-ful pillar of fire and cloud, giving the Egyptian army time and even an excuse just to let Israel go ("Really, pharaoh, there was this big pillar of divine fire and cloud!  We tried, but there was no way we could get to them.").

The way God opened through the sea was meant as a way for Israel, not Egypt, to follow, but Egypt insisted on everything being for them and about them ... and look where it got them.

A basic problem about Egypt, empires and emperors, is that they think they're the good guys, they think they're always right (even when they can see and have to admit that they “used to be wrong”), and they think they (need to) have (and to be) the answer for everyone else's problems ...

If at some point along the way – even as far as the very edge of the Red Sea, Egypt had finally been able to "rejoice with those who rejoice" (to quote Paul from last week’s reading) -- i.e.  sit down and be happy at last (even if somewhat ruefully) for the people of Israel getting the freedom they had needed for so long (like shaking hands at the end of a hard-fought game with the team that beat you) ... and had been able to "bless those who cursed them" (to quote Jesus) -- i.e. had been able to wish Israel well on its journey-just-begun, even while knowing that Israel was probably only cursing them as they went on their way, and would probably curse them for generations yet to come for what they had done to them while they were slaves in Egypt... then all would have been well.

So ... even though there are ways in which we are Israel, encouraged to a sense of security and trust in God to help free us from what enslaves us ... are there also ways we are Egypt, encouraged to step back, let go of control and power, recognize the evil we do (have done, and still do) in our dominance, and do what we can to live in respectful, supportive, hands-off, peaceful relationship with those we are tempted to control, whose separate journey is also a gift of God and part of the on-going flow of life?

An extra note:  There is an old Jewish legend that as the people of Israel, after 40 years in the wilderness, finally stood on the east bank of the Jordan and were preparing to enter the Promised Land, God told Moses he would not be entering the land with them, and would not set foot in it.  After leading them all this time and all this way, he was to die and be buried just outside the Promised Land.  Moses, taken aback, asked why.  

In reply, God asked Moses if he remembered the day way back at the beginning when the people of Israel were led through the Red Sea, and then they turned around and saw the Egyptian army overwhelmed and drowned in the same sea they had just passed through.  Moses said yes, he remembered that day.  And God said, "You smiled."

Freedom comes only with that first trusting step

Readings:  Exodus 12:1-14; Romans 13:8-14

The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt: This month shall mark for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year for you … [And] this day shall be a day of remembrance for you.  You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.

The people were commanded to remember. 

But I doubt any of us ever forget the time and the place when our life finally takes a turn for the healthy.  The day we finally are able to step out from the grip of something that always holds us back, and we start learning at last to live as the whole, free, and holy people that deep down we always long to be.  The day – the moment when, in the words of St. Paul, we “wake from sleep,” and instead of hiding in the darkness, start to live in the light of day.

About six years ago I was at Five Oaks in Paris, Ontario for five days with about twenty other people for a week-long introduction to the Jubilee Program – a two-year training program to train people as spiritual directors.   The week was designed to introduce us to the different themes and aspects of the program, and also to ourselves – to start putting us in better touch with our own spirits, our own hearts and minds, our own creativity and imagination, our own bodies. 

Each day included some input and group sharing, time for art and creative expression, private prayer and journaling.  And each day began with a full half-hour of rhythmic movement – a full half-hour of all twenty of us being in the common room, with different moods of music being played, and all of us simply moving our bodies in response to it, as a way of bodily expressing the different sides and different aspects of our spirit that were touched and brought to life by the music.

I knew this was part of the program.  And it was the one biggest thing I had to wrestle with, in deciding to go and be part of it. 

Basically it was dance – free-form, from-the-inside-out, letting-your-body-be-free, letting-other-people-see-you, showing-freely-on-the-outside-what-you-feel-deep-down-on-the-inside dance.  The very thing that has scared me for most of my life.  The thing that has ruined wedding receptions and nights out with my wife.  The thing was the tip that showed of a lifelong iceberg of repressed feelings – even at times, of oblivion to feelings, and separation from things bodily and physical – a little prison and enslavement all my own. 

But when the time came to dance, I did, because I wanted to be part of the program.  Spiritual direction was something that had called to me for years.  And when the time came to sign on and step into that room the first morning, and then the second and third and fourth and fifth mornings after, I trusted it would be okay.  That I could be free.  That it would not be the end of me, but really the beginning.

And in many ways it was.  Not all at once.  Not once and for all.  Not without further struggles and a lot of other hard learnings and growth along the way.  But it was the first step towards a new way of being me – one that’s more whole, free, healthy and holy than before.

And I’ll always remember that room and those mornings, and be grateful for that chance to step out, let go of what help me back, and do something I thought I never could, to live the kind of life I know God created me to live.

Like in the reading from Exodus today that reflects the people of Israel’s memory hundreds of years later of the time they first began to walk in the world as God’s people – the night they had to trust that they could be more than slaves to the power of the day, that they could walk away from what enslaved them and held them back, that they could over time learn to live in the world in the way God intends us all to.

As Paul says: 

you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep.  For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first began to believe; the night is far gone, the day is near.  Let us then lay aside the ways of darkness and put on the armour of light; let us … put on the ways of God as they are shown to us, and stop giving in to the lesser ways of this world.

One thing we need to remember about the escape of the people of Israel from slavery to Egypt.  It was not a flight to freedom just for the sake of being free, and being able to be their own people to do and to be whatever they wished.  It was, rather, a very focused flight, a purposeful escape, a journey with clear spiritual intent and direction.

Moses was upfront about it, with the pharaoh and with the people.  Time and again Moses said the people needed to leave Egypt to go and worship God in the wilderness, to meet almighty God as he had at Mount Sinai, and to hear there the Word of God about how they are to live in the world. 

And then (what he didn’t say quite so clearly, but which would be the next step), to be free to live it, to go on from there to the Promised Land and to grow through teaching, time and testing to be the kind of people God intends – to “lay aside the ways of darkness and put on … the ways of God as they are shown to us.”

It’s something that happens, I imagine, in every life.  And maybe not just once, but in different ways at different times.  Hopefully, though, not never at all.

A week-and-a-half ago I received an email – as some of you did, as well, from G (who is now a paramedic in Niagara) about a volunteer medical mission trip he is making with a team of other doctors, nurses, dentists and paramedics to Haiti next summer.  They will be staffing medical and dental clinics in remote parts of the country with the goal of providing free healthcare to up to 500 people a day, and training local healthcare providers for the necessary follow-up.

I wonder how long the lure of a trip like this sat in G’s heart, and what he had to struggle with – or not, to answer the call.  How hard, or how easy it was for him to step out and know he could do this.  And what effect it will have on the rest of his life.

It reminds me of R and E and their Medical Ministries trips to different places in South America – each of them for their own reasons, because of where they were in their life at that point, and both of them changed in deep ways by their willingness to trust the call – both of them whole and free and holy in ways that cannot now be undone.

And the D’s and their trips to the Dominican that have changed and deepened their life as a family. 

And a simple trip along with others from our church to the north end of Hamilton one year to tour the City Kidz facility at the time that changed B’s life. 

And the people from five congregations involved for the past two years with United to Help Syrians who are now being changed for the whole and the holy by their contact at last with the [family we have sponsored].

There are so many ways it happens – that the call to be more whole and more holy comes to us. 

And it’s not always just to go somewhere out there far away – to be engaged in, and made whole by mission to someone else in some strange place.  Sometimes the landscape of the journey we’re called to trust is more internal, more at home, more to do with relationships right at hand. 

Maybe to take on a task right at home, or here in the church, or in our own community that we just haven’t yet had the courage – or the trust, to say yes to. 

Maybe to learn something – even face something, about yourself that we never have been able to yet. 

Maybe to turn and be open to, or reach out to someone who for years and in so many ways you have been resisting, have been at odds with, who you never thought you could be a brother or sister to, or as a friend towards.

The call comes to us all at some point – or points, in our life. 

We all are enslaved and imprisoned – held back from being whole and holy, in many ways, by many things. 

And because God is God and we are God’s sons and daughters, created to live on Earth in God’s image and likeness, we are called – each of us, in our own way and time, to let go of what enslaves us, to step out from behind and away from what holds us back, and to trust the journey God calls us to make – to trust that beyond the death of what we leave behind,

there is new life that we long for, that the journey we make in faith will be not the end but the beginning of a life more whole and healthy and good than we ever used to think possible.

And the question is, are we ready?  Are our sandals on our feet, and our staff in our hand? 

Are we ready to wake from sleep, put aside the ways of darkness and half-life, and start living into the light of the ways of God as we know them?

When we are, and when we do, we never forget it.  We never can forget – or stop being grateful for the day our life takes a turn for the healthy, and we start learning to live as the whole, free, and holy people that deep down we always long to be.